The Cthulhu Mythos and D&D homebrews

[rounser]

An idea which surely has been done before - there are no gods as such, the only source of divine magic on the world are the Great Old Ones, and the faiths of the world are all vying to summon their own Horror From Beyond The Stars to the world first...and thwart the attempts of the others while they're at it.

Each Great Old One would have a facade fabricated by their church - maybe Shub-Niggurath could be masquerading under the guise of a humanoid, benevolent "earthmother" type of goddess with cloven feet with a thousand daughters, for instance, and could be revered by druids and rangers alike. Azathoth could be depicted a gluttonous and chaotic King of a god, forever dancing to his piper and devouring the bounty of his sprawling lands. Only by stripping back the mosaics and finding older artifacts and books would the truth begin to become known.

A problem I can see with this is that the domains would clearly steer towards destruction, chaos, insanity and weirdness, although perhaps that would be a clue to savvy players that all was not what it seemed. "That's funny, no Healing or Good domains in the whole pantheon..."

 

[DiamondB]

I've never outright mentioned their existance but in the distant past of my world there is mention of beings known only as the Ancient Ones. The beings are of immense power and are not of this world. I've often implied the Cthulhu Mythos connection, but I've generally let my parties flee in terror at any hint of a relic from this era.

 

[mistergone]

Eh. The Mythos are okay. I've used aspects of them in a lot of my games. But always, it was just really the whole part about something alien and evil. I personally don't like the "life is hopeless and you're a victim of unspeakable cosmic forces" in my games. I mean, that's too close to how real life seems to me anyways. I like some of the ideas of Cuthulhu et. al., but just not the "you stand no chance make your time" aspect. To me, the heroes ALWAYS have to have a chance, however slim, of triumphing over evil. There has to be hope. Even in a game of scrambling for your life against ravenous mindless hoardes of zombies, I like to think that at least one hero is gonna get out alive (albeit, forever scarred). Of course, this isn't always true in my games, and characters can fail, lose, and sometimes die. But they have a chance.

Why gamers seem to like the Mythos so much? I think there's a couple reasons. One, it appeals to that common feeling in a lot of people who game that it is a shared in-joke about something the "normals" don't know about. "Tee-hee when the stars are right!". All this "Ia! Ia!" stuff and similar, which I must admit, I don't get, is a funny in-joke that is shared amongst a subculture. (but not me, i really don't know what it means)

Another reason is, if you want evil in your games, the Mythos is pretty much the Ultimate Evil. Again, a lot of gamers really like that whole "tee-hee I am SO evil!". And if anyone knows anything about the Mythos, they know that it's about something unspeakably evil. So you pop in that element, everyone involved knows something bad is afoot.

Lastly, the Mythos was ingrained in the psyche of everyone who has played D&D since the early days, when Cthulhu and company appeared in the first edition of Deities & Demigods. I sure wish I had a copy of that. They first appeared to gamers there and then got "taken away" in the second printing. The Mythos was a collector's item AND some really uber-powerful superevil monsters. So way back then, they entered D&D mythology, and have sort of been passed down from one genration of gamer to the newer one. Now they're "back" in a sense with CoC D20. Of course, there was always the Chaosium game, but you had to be hardcore to be into that, back then.

I personally like the imagery. Cthulhu is a big freaky octopus headed godzilla thing with wings! It's really 70's heavy metal album cover and Dio lyrics, man. \m/

I've seen parts of the Mythos show up in everything from the World of Darkness (where it made sense) to Star Wars (where it made no sense). As someone said, it's portable. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Personally, I just take the parts I like from the Mythos, and pepper them in if it seems like they'd add something to the game.

As always, it may be different for other people, I wouldn't know.

 

[rounser]

I forgot the other reason gamers like Call of Cthulhu:

Fragile PCs + Uberpowerful Baddies = GM power trip...

Might be one of the subconcious aversions to the D&D that makes CoC Keepers bag it...the game hands a lot of control back to players.

 

[Erebus Red]

I mentioned on another thread that i am currently running a campaign in Tekumel. This campaign setting has quite Lovecraftian themes that I intend to bring to the fore.

In summary, the world was once colonised by humans, but that technology was lost - so now it exists at a pretty standard D&D tech level. People don't even remember that the world was once colonised and humans think of themselves as natives.

But what of the actual 'native' races and, even more frighteningly the native deities? These, at least in my campaign, exist in hatred and opposition to mankind.

Like CoC this setting has the potential for 'layers of truth' about the world and universe to be uncovered.

A link is here if you are interested:

http://www.tekumel.com/

 

[barsoomcore]

Barsoom has a certain Cthulhu-y goodness to it.

I think Lovecraft is usually either overrated or underrated. When Skade says:

I could almost belive that he meant it.

THAT'S Lovecraft being great. He DOES make you feel like he means it. And that's good writing, is what that is. The good stories, "The Color Out Of Space", "The Lurker At The Threshold" or "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" are truly creepy and I don't think anyone has ever written anything quite like them before or since.

Lovecraft and the Mythos are, in a way, a religious response to the Industrial Age. An age in which faith in God has been shaken, where Voltaire's questions in Candide ("Why does a good God allow good people to suffer?") still haven't been answered and the only rational response is to assume that God doesn't care.

The notion of a universe run not by a benevolent God who only wants what's best for us, and pays attention to the least actions of each and every one of us, but by a God who, if it should notice us, would only snuff us out by the mere power of its alien thoughts, is deeply troubling if you take it at all seriously.

When Lovecraft is great, he makes you feel like the universe we live in can only be explained that way. He shows you the world and defies any notion of a benevolent deity. "Surely," his great stories say, "this universe we live in is not here for OUR use. It is older and deeper and stranger than we can ever imagine. But perhaps it was made for SOMETHING." And that something, we can rest assured, in no way has the slightest concern for humanity.

I don't care for many of the later, non-Lovecraftian stories, because for the most part they veer away from the starkness of this idea and develop struggles between the powers over the fate of humanity and so on and that sort of defeats the very core of what makes the original stories so powerful.

This is why the ideas of the Mythos so appeal to gamers, particularly DMs. Not just for the reasons of power alluded to above, but because a universe that is structured in this fashion offers a massive challenge to the players. It's terrifying and imagination-stretching.

Barsoom has revealed itself to contain inhuman powers that cannot be described by mortal minds. There's no actual Mythos deities around, but the ideas, that beyond what we see lie dark and terrible powers far greater than ours, is prevalent.

 

[Desdichado]

Yeah, but Lovecraft's writing quality is pretty scattered as well -- I do find some of his stories pretty creepy; I think "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" is one of my favorites (although it's much more traditional and not as mythos-entrenched) for instance, and I've always liked "At the Mountains of Madness." (BTW, for any editors out there, should a novella be in quotes like a short story, or should it be italicized like a novel?) but others are just strange for the sake of strangeness, and others still are just plain poorly written.

I think the point made earlier is probably very valid -- only in the gaming industry is the whole "mythos vision" presented as something fairly coherent. I almost find that I enjoy reading the gamebooks more than some of the actual Lovecraft stories.

BTW, I've never actually read a non-Lovecraft "Cthulhu" story, although I've read similar stuff by Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth a long time ago. Does there work really build on the core concepts of the mythos, or does it kinda put a spin on it?

 

[WayneLigon]

BTW, I've never actually read a non-Lovecraft "Cthulhu" story, although I've read similar stuff by Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth a long time ago. Does there work really build on the core concepts of the mythos, or does it kinda put a spin on it?

There are several. A number of the 'core books' in the Mythos were introduced by others and then re-used by Lovecraft and others: Unaussprechlichen Kulten is a creation of Robert Howard, De Vermis MYsteries is (I think) Robert Bloch). Some might be out-and-out Mythos stories (ie, Trail of Cthulhu) while others might mention bits and parts (The Stand).

Some stories, like the early Bloch, are pretty close to the world Lovecraft created. Others, like Derleth, put their own spin on things (Derleth's 'controversial' association of the Great Old Ones with the four elements, and the concept of a 'war' between the GOO and the Elder Gods, are examples).

There are a number of modern tales both in the collections below and in various horror anthologies.

Chaosium sells several Mythos Story Collections and many have non-Lovecraft stories in them.

 

[Geoffrey]

Lastly, the Mythos was ingrained in the psyche of everyone who has played D&D since the early days, when Cthulhu and company appeared in the first edition of Deities & Demigods. I sure wish I had a copy of that. They first appeared to gamers there and then got "taken away" in the second printing. The Mythos was a collector's item AND some really uber-powerful superevil monsters. So way back then, they entered D&D mythology, and have sort of been passed down from one genration of gamer to the newer one. Now they're "back" in a sense with CoC D20.

Very good point. My first encounter with the Cthulhu Mythos was when I bought the brand new DDG back in 1980. Since then I've read all of Lovecraft and scores of Lovecraftian stories, but I have never been able to shake the feeling (derived from the DDG) that the best use of the Mythos is in D&D-type settings.

I would love to GM a dark fantasy-style d20 CoC campaign set 200,000 years ago in Mu.

 

[barsoomcore]

Yeah, but Lovecraft's writing quality is pretty scattered as well

Definitely. Sorry, I only talked about the underrated stuff. The overrated stuff (that is, 90% of the man's output) is just crappy early-20th-century pulp. It's not much worse than the majority of, say Edgar Rice Burroughs, just without the latter's energy and childish glee in narrative.

Most of Lovecraft's writing is just plain awful. He's a guy who got struck by lightning a couple of times but couldn't do it reliably.

Still, modern horror writing owes him as much as it owes Poe, I think.