Lovecraftian Horror - How to use it?

[Sareau]

Actually, the darklords would seem to be a gateway to Desire-all of them are consumed by what they want, and their frustrations at not getting it lead them to darkness deeper than they achieved before entering Ravenloft.

The idea the Dark Powers don't understand this clearly human concept and built the Demiplane to study it is intriguing, however.

And, of necessity, negates the fundamental truth of Lovecraft: the universe doesn't care and really isn't concerned in the slightest about humanity.

I suppose that's why I don't adventure in Ravenloft so much as in the Ravenloft style. Gothic horror and Lovecraftian horror are both concerned with ancient darkness rising again-in Lovecraft, it's the strange sentiences that existed in a world before Man, in the gothics, it's social mores and concepts that faded long ago-women as chattel, slavery, autocrats, etc.

Drakov is fearsome not because he's an all-too human horror, but because what he represents is the same tyrannical oppression one finds in twentieth century monsters like Mao Tse-tung, Adolf Hitler, and Josef Stalin-not an ancient evil rearing it's head once more, but a constant threat fully comfortable in current times.

Lovecraftian horror is more than Derleth's pastiches where you grab a few names off the bottom of an eyechart and have the good gods jump in to save humanity-as Call of Cthulhu shows, a proper Lovecraft campaign results in either madness or death.

I have no idea which is preferable...

[Rock of the Fraternity]

A 'proper' Lovecraftian campaign, perhaps. But not a good one. The one thing I really dislike about Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos is the pervading aura of despair choking it up. Though Brian Lumley and August Derleth may have partially deprived the Mythos of its power by providing easily accessible counterforces, they do at least have one thing going for them: people can fight back. They can keep it together, even if they're confronted with something horribly incomprehensible. They can cope. A game with no chance of being won is not a game, it is a depressing story.

What would scare an illithid savant more than one day waking up and realizing it sympathizes with its slaves?

The thought of other Illithid finding out.

Also add "Herbert West: Reanimator." The idea of a chemical elixir that can bring the dead back to life is the essence of the Gothic villain playing God and sowing the unholy results (the story is much better than the movies).

Granted the stories were better than the movies, but this is one occasion where I have to agree with what Lovecraft wrote: this wasn't his best work. Or so I feel, anyway ...

[Ail]

More like a Monroe Box.

Triva point to who gets that!

So......

afer a bit of googling, it seems to be something of a Simpson's episode ("Old Money") where someone invents a spoof of Skinner's box, with the additions that the floor can become electrified of chilly water can be dropped on the test subject.

I never liked the Simpsons, so I don't know if there is a regular Dr. Monroe there or if he was invented for this one.

[cure]

What if the Dark Powers weren't not so much independent beings engaged in experiements/entertainment, and instead were in some sense the very conscience and guilt of their victim 'personified.' Which is to say that they are not going to be attracted to the average psycopath, but will be infinitely interested in a figure like Strahd who knows well that he has sinned.

[Nathan of the FoS]

That's still a lot more interest in the human race, even if clinical and detached, than any of the shuddering tentacled monstrosities Lovecraft cooked up.

Very true. Of course, that's only one possible explanation. Perhaps the Dark Powers regard the darklords as something like an insect collection; they perceive the darklords in some way that makes them particularly striking and worthy of attention, but without any more understanding of what the darklords feel than I have of the subjective "state of mind" of the caterpillar I once put in a Mason jar in the hope I could watch it make a chrysalis and metamorphose into a moth.

On this reading the Dark Powers are just trying to keep their specimen alive by giving it a milieu that matches the specimen's internal expectations, which leads to amusing lines of thought like "Soth was too much trouble to keep alive, so they sent him back to the pet store."

In an extreme view, the Dark Powers might not even be conscious of what they're doing; the Demiplane of Dread might just be the side effect of some other unfathomable project (creation of a new reality?) that happens to have swept up the darklords, who are now creating "reality bubbles" based on their internal processes around the edge of the main project.

I don't know that any of these ideas are particularly productive in terms of organizing a Ravenloft campaign or introducing Lovecraftian horror into a Ravenloft game; to return to Roti's initial point, I think the humanity of the darklords and the crafting of their curses is a key element of Ravenloft. It's just fun to think of ways in which one might produce a system which is apparently based on a deep understanding of human psychology, but which is actually producing that "understanding" as the by-product of other processes.

[ewancummins]

A 'proper' Lovecraftian campaign, perhaps. But not a good one. The one thing I really dislike about Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos is the pervading aura of despair choking it up. Though Brian Lumley and August Derleth may have partially deprived the Mythos of its power by providing easily accessible counterforces, they do at least have one thing going for them: people can fight back. They can keep it together, even if they're confronted with something horribly incomprehensible. They can cope. A game with no chance of being won is not a game, it is a depressing story.

Won? Muwahahahaha! WON?


Don't play CoC with my old group, then. I'm all about the terrible, inexorable downward spiral into madness and death!

The more you know, the crazier you get. There can be no lasting victory over the cosmic foulness of the Mythos. The best one may hope for is to have a very brief career as an investigator, save your family/friends /community from some dreadful menace- and then purposefully end all inquiries into Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. Keep going down that road and you'll almost certainly end up insane, dead, or worse.... You cannot ever defeat the Great Old Ones. You may temporarily counter their raving cultists- but it matters not in the end. No matter what anyone does, the Stars Shall Come Right Again.

[cure]

A 'proper' Lovecraftian campaign, perhaps. But not a good one. The one thing I really dislike about Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos is the pervading aura of despair choking it up. Though Brian Lumley and August Derleth may have partially deprived the Mythos of its power by providing easily accessible counterforces, they do at least have one thing going for them: people can fight back. They can keep it together, even if they're confronted with something horribly incomprehensible. They can cope. A game with no chance of being won is not a game, it is a depressing story.

Won? Muwahahahaha! WON?


Don't play CoC with my old group, then. I'm all about the terrible, inexorable downward spiral into madness and death!

The more you know, the crazier you get. There can be no lasting victory over the cosmic foulness of the Mythos. The best one may hope for is to have a very brief career as an investigator, save your family/friends /community from some dreadful menace- and then purposefully end all inquiries into Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. Keep going down that road and you'll almost certainly end up insane, dead, or worse.... You cannot ever defeat the Great Old Ones. You may temporarily counter their raving cultists- but it matters not in the end. No matter what anyone does, the Stars Shall Come Right Again.

The very antithesis of what the 4e designers had in mind, n'est-ce pas?

[Rock of the Fraternity]

Won? Muwahahahaha! WON?


Don't play CoC with my old group, then. I'm all about the terrible, inexorable downward spiral into madness and death!

The more you know, the crazier you get. There can be no lasting victory over the cosmic foulness of the Mythos. The best one may hope for is to have a very brief career as an investigator, save your family/friends /community from some dreadful menace- and then purposefully end all inquiries into Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. Keep going down that road and you'll almost certainly end up insane, dead, or worse.... You cannot ever defeat the Great Old Ones. You may temporarily counter their raving cultists- but it matters not in the end. No matter what anyone does, the Stars Shall Come Right Again.

Even a smal, transitory victory is a victory.

[ewancummins]

Even a smal, transitory victory is a victory.

Yes, and grab those moments while you can.

[Sareau]

Just holding back the Mythos long enough for humanity to die of natural causes is a win.

[ewancummins]

Just holding back the Mythos long enough for humanity to die of natural causes is a win.

Humanity's best hope is to have nuked itself into extinction before the terrible return of the Great Old Ones comes to pass.

One cannot 'hold back' the stars coming right again.
Cthulhu rises by cosmic cycles, not the petty deeds of man. He didn't need a ritual to rouse him in the story [CoC], but seemed to wake for a time because of events beyond human control. When he comes back 'for good' he'll likely just drive all who see him mad, and maybe squish them like the insignificant insects that they are.

I doubt that human actions are needed to 'free' the other Great Old Ones, either.

[Isabella]

A lot of Lovecraft's works deal with the very human reactions from the protagonist in the face of hopelessness and horror, as well as the very Ravenlofty themes of madness, loss of control, alienation, helplessness, and facing down foes far beyond your power. The Rats in the Walls and The Shadow over Innsmouth are perfect examples of stories that could be plucked right out of Lovecraft and right into Ravenloft with a few place names changed. Likewise, Ravenloft has the Nightmare Lands and the Nightmare Lord Morpheus, whos theme is madness, utter chaos, and the laws of cause and effect breaking down. It's a strange little pocket of setting where a person's suffering means nothing and everything, but that's nightmare logic for you.

Just as a thought exercise, let's imagine a Ravenloft native got his hands on the entire compiled 2e D&D source books. This is 2e D&D, where a PC can find a magical violin that will summon an Italian gangster, so I think this is a reasonable scenario. We'll say he stumbled into Catman Jim's house or something. We'll also be fair and say he only finds the fluff, so he doesn't know he's a character in a pen and paper RPG. That's getting a little too meta.

How do you think he'd react to finding out there was an entire, boundless universe out there, full of strange and unknown creatures he'd never heard of - and which had never heard of him? That he existed inside the cosmological equivalent of a snowglobe? That the laws of his world were fake constructs that didn't apply anywhere else? That the gods didn't exist, and that good and evil were arbitrarily enforced by mysterious beings that he couldn't possibly comprehend? That nothing he did would affect anything but a tiny, meaningless little demiplane in the middle of nowhere? That his entire life amounted to absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things? That everything he believed about his own history was a lie? That he and his ancestors were created out of absolutely nothing to play a game with someone that mysterious powers decided to mess with for unfathomable reasons? That he only seemed to exist for their entertainment? That even if he set out to kill the Darklord and make the world a better place, the very best he could hope for was a temporary victory before the mysterious powers grabbed another pawn to shove in the gap - and at worst he might destroy his entire homeland as it collapsed into nothingness? That no one realizes he and his entire country appeared out of nowhere, and that he could be erased just as instantly, with no one even remembering he existed?

This is exactly what getting too high in Knowledge: Ravenloft gets you - some books are better left unread. And if he fell because of this terrible knowledge, because he feared more than anything that his life was meaningless and wanted to prove it worng, that's exactly how his fate would work itself out - amounting to absolutely nothing in an uncaring universe. Because that's how gothic justice would say it would have to go. Kind of hurts the head to think about.

Just some food for thought.

[RShini]

A lot of very interesting ideas.

Oh man, it's definitively a madness check if any character gets even an inkling of the whole realms business.

[ewancummins]

Now I want a violin that summons an Italian gangster.

Gangbusters/AD&D crossover?

[cure]

Shadow over [insert non-Darkonese coastal town] when combined with the memory effects of Darkon makes a lot of sense, at least if one's true past only returns to one slowly . . . .