Cthulhu vs PCs: Anyone tried this?

[Celebrim]

So, I've been thinking about this:

Problem #1: D&D isn't based on the Lovecraftian mythos, even when it shares some heritage (through for example Conan). The primary inspirations are heroic fantasy, and in my opinion almost heroic fantasy characters draw their inspiration from the heroes of myth and legend. So high level D&D characters are themselves equivalent to demigods like Heracles. Treading at a level just below that of Gods, it's not unreasonably to imagine high level characters taking on being of divine or near divine stature. But such figures as humans arising in power to contend with the gods on equal footing inherently means you aren't remotely Lovecraftian any more. Mortal heroes can temporarily thwart mythos foes, but they can't deal with them on equal terms and if they try to acquire power themselves, are turned into mythos beings in their own right - insane incomprehensible wizards. But in D&D you can accumulate power equivalent to supernatural figures without losing your humanity.

Problem #2: D&D's scale is all wrong for the Lovecraftian mythos. Lovecraft's mythos is inspired by the vast vistas of time and space that became apparent by the end of the 19th century. The mythos powers have cosmic scope and scale. Cthulhu is clearly of lesser stature within it, because he's confinable to a planet, and yet in his conception he's clearly able to claim any planet he wills as his own and evict the current tenets however advanced and puissant they may be. The Great Race of Yith and the Elder Things are clearly far more magically and technically advanced (sufficiently advanced... is indistinguishable from...) than humanity, and yet present no real challenge to Cthulhu's domination of the planet when the stars are right. D&D's heroes of are generally of a planetary and not cosmic scale, and yet would clearly have difficulty dealing with modern weaponry. So even Heracles is conceived at a profoundly smaller scale than most mythos bad guys. Within their own universe Odin and Thor are vastly more potent and important than Cthulhu is within the Lovecraftian universe - but the Lovecraftian universe is vastly out of scale with the universe of Odin and Thor at least as Odin and Thor are commonly conceived (in comics, modern fiction, and Viking epics). It's almost impossible to rank Odin in stature compare to Cthulhu. What is a great old one compared to a god? And yet, what is a god as limited as Odin compared to the star faring billions year old monstrosities? And arguably, the D&D universe at a particular gaming table is at yet a third scale. If Odin is CR 60 in his own universe, is he but CR 20 in the Lovecrafian universe? And vica versa? Really the problem is non-comparable quantities.

Problem #3: The narrators of Lovecraftian stories are unreliable and uninformed. For all their education and intelligence, the narrators of Lovecraftian stories are in way over their heads. They can't be relied on to understand what they experience and correctly relate it. So, for example, I'm not at all convinced that in 'The Call of Cthulhu' what they actually experienced was Cthulhu directly and not, for example, merely a noisome bubble of evil dreams bursting up from the slumbering Cthulhu below. After all, the stars weren't really right. In D&D terms, they encountered an aspect or avatar of Cthulhu, not Cthulhu himself. This might well be the difference between a CR 12, CR 24, and CR 48 encounter. If Cthulhu and his kind are to be any actual threat to an advanced human civilization, they can't be vanquished by cruise missiles - much less a steam yacht. If Cthulhu can be coped with even to that degree, then there is nothing sanity destroying about awareness of him - that's just something else you could learn to cope with. It makes a big difference whether you think a low level mortal expert triumphed over dread Cthulhu himself, or just an inadvertent phantasm - the merest zephyr of the star spawn's trouble sleep.

I've never really considered a Cthulhu vs. Swords setting. If I did, presumably it would lack clerics in the normal D&D sense, as there would not be (in my conception) Derleth style advocates for humanity. There is no force for good, else I don't think you really have Cthulhu as Lovecraft conceived him. In such a setting, Cthulhu would be roughly as potent as say Ssendam in the write up in my link. And sense I generally don't have PC's beyond about 15th level in my games, such a being would be effectively beyond mortal control.

 

[pemerton]

Fundamentally, Lovecraftian Horror is the horror of modern physics, relativity, quantum mechanics, and the vast spaces of the atom.

I agree with this. Other expressions of emotional responses to those facts (at least, modern physics in general if not quantum mechanics in particular) are Bertrand Russell's "A Free Man's Worship" and Max Weber's "Science as a Vocation".

I think works in this general space have some trouble surviving the test of time, because people adapt (though I personally am a big fan of the Weber piece). I may be projecting too readily from my own case and the case of those I know, but I find I have to work very hard to feel horror or dread at the gulfs of intergalactic space and the implications that that has for the significance of human beings.

Russell's later work The Analysis of Matter has a treatment of Quantum Mechanics that presents it as this radical and world-shattering new thing, and then goes on to describe what I learned in high school physics. (At the same time he presents an axiomatised version of General Relativity and chides those philosopher who skipped high school maths and so won't be able to follow him: I took high school maths and did well, but tenser calculus without a teacher is still somewhat beyond my abilities!) Emotional responses to scientific knowledge, like emotional responses to other cultural artefacts, are apt to change with time.

D&D's scale is all wrong for the Lovecraftian mythos. Lovecraft's mythos is inspired by the vast vistas of time and space that became apparent by the end of the 19th century. The mythos powers have cosmic scope and scale.

<snip>

even Heracles is conceived at a profoundly smaller scale than most mythos bad guys. Within their own universe Odin and Thor are vastly more potent and important than Cthulhu is within the Lovecraftian universe - but the Lovecraftian universe is vastly out of scale with the universe of Odin and Thor at least as Odin and Thor are commonly conceived

I agree with this. I actually think even core D&D sometimes has problems in respect of scale - for instance, many D&D worlds involve maps done on the scale of actual Earth geography. But classic fantasy stories, even ones with mythic or legendary overtones, often do not require a large geographic area, or at least not an area that exists in any sort of actual detail (there can be journeying for many days and nights, but there is no actual concrete reality to those lands journeyed through).

This also brings up another difficulty in my personal ability to really be moved by Lovecraft - I don't understand the aesthetics of asserting the impersonality and inhumanity (or perhaps non-humanity) of the cosmos, but then personifying it via all these beings who are in many cases quite anthropomorphic. I think you are right about Odin and Thor, but I think any personification in an anthropomorphic fashion produces that sort of outcome, if only by confining the sphere of perception and the sphere of causal influence. (In other words, for me Cthulhu can have the same problem Odin and Thor have, whom I agree with you are at odds with the Lovecraftian project.)

in D&D you can accumulate power equivalent to supernatural figures without losing your humanity.

This also, I think, makes D&D tricky not only for Lovecraftian fantasy but a whole lot of other fantasy too (eg I don't think this feature of D&D fits into Tolkienian fantasy all that comfortably either).

The narrators of Lovecraftian stories are unreliable and uninformed.

<snip>

So, for example, I'm not at all convinced that in 'The Call of Cthulhu' what they actually experienced was Cthulhu directly and not, for example, merely a noisome bubble of evil dreams bursting up from the slumbering Cthulhu below.

<snip>

It makes a big difference whether you think a low level mortal expert triumphed over dread Cthulhu himself, or just an inadvertent phantasm - the merest zephyr of the star spawn's trouble sleep.

Because I don't really grasp the move to personification, I don't have a strong intuition about the nature of the personifications, nor about their vulnerability to being struck by boats.

Also, if Cthulhu is just back under the water dreaming, then in what sense was their a triumph? Presumably no amount of human life free of Cthulhu's direct influence is meaningful within the cosmic times and distances that Lovecraft is trying to evoke.

I've never really considered a Cthulhu vs. Swords setting. If I did, presumably it would lack clerics in the normal D&D sense, as there would not be (in my conception) Derleth style advocates for humanity. There is no force for good, else I don't think you really have Cthulhu as Lovecraft conceived him.

From memory, this is more-or-less how the option is presented in the "play this with D&D" notes for d20 CoC.

 

[Desdichado]

I agree with this. I actually think even core D&D sometimes has problems in respect of scale - for instance, many D&D worlds involve maps done on the scale of actual Earth geography. But classic fantasy stories, even ones with mythic or legendary overtones, often do not require a large geographic area, or at least not an area that exists in any sort of actual detail (there can be journeying for many days and nights, but there is no actual concrete reality to those lands journeyed through).

I've been tinkering with a setting for years. Although I sketched out in very vague terms a global geography, I've really only detailed an area about the size and scope of the circum-Mediterranean. There's enough variety and geography there to keep me busy indefinately.

This also brings up another difficulty in my personal ability to really be moved by Lovecraft - I don't understand the aesthetics of asserting the impersonality and inhumanity (or perhaps non-humanity) of the cosmos, but then personifying it via all these beings who are in many cases quite anthropomorphic. I think you are right about Odin and Thor, but I think any personification in an anthropomorphic fashion produces that sort of outcome, if only by confining the sphere of perception and the sphere of causal influence. (In other words, for me Cthulhu can have the same problem Odin and Thor have, whom I agree with you are at odds with the Lovecraftian project.)

Well, keep in mind that the so-called "cosmic horror" being strongly attached to Lovecraft was a posthumous development; a work of interpretation by his fans and later scholars. Clearly Lovecraft himself didn't continuously and consistently use it. Although there are common threads through most of his stories, even then he used those same threads to weave all kinds of themes and tones, including Dunsanian fantasy, ("The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath", for instance), more traditional horror/witchcraft stories ("The Haunter in the Dark" and its sequels, "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," even "The Dunwich Horror," etc.), localized monster stories ("The Shadow Over Innsmouth", "The Colour Out of Space." etc.) and straight up science fiction with only a thin veneer of horror ("At The Mountains of Madness", etc.)

And in most cases, Lovecraft was writing openly imitative works--"Kadath" can almost be considered a pastiche of Vathek, "The Dunwich Horror" can almost be considered a pastiche of "The Great God Pan," etc. So while the notion of cosmic horror crystalized under Lovecraft's watch, and he's rightly given credit for clearly articulating the notion first, not every story that has a mi-go, a Deep One, a vague reference to The Necronomicon, Cthulhu, or the Plateau of Leng is a story of cosmic horror. This is clearly true for even the body of work of Lovecraft himself, and as [MENTION=51930]fireinthedust[/MENTION] pointed out, once you step into fellow writers of the Mythos circle, that is true even more strongly.

From memory, this is more-or-less how the option is presented in the "play this with D&D" notes for d20 CoC.

More or less, but the d20 CoC book strongly buys into the concept of the cosmic horror and bleakness side of Lovecraft's writings, and de-emphasises (or even completely ignores) the many other times when Lovecraft referred to "Yog-Sothothery" as little more than a somewhat whimsical in-joke and reference tagging between him and his friends in the Weird Tales writers circuit. That gives the book a much better sense of thematic unity, and I'm sure it would have been a mistake to do otherwise, but at the same time, it kinda misses the point that to Lovecraft and his friends would have been much more obvious.

 

[Celebrim]

I agree with this. Other expressions of emotional responses to those facts (at least, modern physics in general if not quantum mechanics in particular) are Bertrand Russell's "A Free Man's Worship" and Max Weber's "Science as a Vocation".

I think works in this general space have some trouble surviving the test of time, because people adapt (though I personally am a big fan of the Weber piece). I may be projecting too readily from my own case and the case of those I know, but I find I have to work very hard to feel horror or dread at the gulfs of intergalactic space and the implications that that has for the significance of human beings.

I think we are largely on the same page, but I have trouble understanding what you are saying here. The reference to Bertrand Russell I think I get, because I have elsewhere cited Russell as giving voice to Lovecraft's horrors in some of the fullest and powerful ways possible: "Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness." Lovecraft was himself a big admirer of Russell, and you can see in Russell attempts to cope - in a way that Lovecraft's heroes try to cope - with the fantastic universe.

As for not seeing what Russell and Lovecraft saw, and not being able to sympathize with it, I have a hard time thinking anything is at fault but a failure of imagination. I don't think that the works lose power with time. I remember encountering Lovecraft as a young adolescent, and contemplating the vast distances between the proton and the electron and the enormous spaces within my own body - things which I already intellectually knew but had never contemplated in an emotional context - and thinking what a thin wisp I was, hardly to have any substance at all, and immensely empty beyond all scope of my imagination and I felt as if I myself were dissolving, for there was a vast gulf opened up between what I knew myself to be on the basis of science, and the way I treated myself in my dysfunctional simian pride.

That vista remains available to any monkey that looks over the rim of the cosmos and sees what it actually is, and it will never stop being there and never I think be any less powerful as long as we remain human.

This also brings up another difficulty in my personal ability to really be moved by Lovecraft - I don't understand the aesthetics of asserting the impersonality and inhumanity (or perhaps non-humanity) of the cosmos, but then personifying it via all these beings who are in many cases quite anthropomorphic. I think you are right about Odin and Thor, but I think any personification in an anthropomorphic fashion produces that sort of outcome, if only by confining the sphere of perception and the sphere of causal influence. (In other words, for me Cthulhu can have the same problem Odin and Thor have, whom I agree with you are at odds with the Lovecraftian project.)

I think I largely agree with this, though I think that you have to put it in context. Lovecraft personifies Cthulhu in the particular way he does because himself had a deep and profound phobia of sea life. Fish on a plate put him a state of horrors. If you are the sort that can eat calamari, then perhaps a squid headed, dragon beast man is not fantastical enough to invoke the terror that it did for the writer himself and you'll need to substitute something you really are afraid of to capture that numinous and yet (for Lovecraft literally) gut wrenching horror.

It's interesting though how well the concept of Ice Giants has been integrated into Lovecraftian horrors, by writers like say Stross, when as the embodiment of the heat death of the universe and writing them up to a far more cosmic scale than 'mere' fear of a long Winter (terrifying and relevant though that may be).

As for Tolkien, the word 'magic' in Tolkien means something rather different than in Lovecraft. It's possible in Tolkien to have a native power that doesn't originate from the 'The Enemy'. In Tolkien there is a power and force of good as well as evil. Tolkien's magic is also a form of 'sufficiently advanced technology' (witness how elves don't even understand the word 'magic', and correctly identify mankind's usage of it as labeling simply 'things I don't understand), but its not all inherently evil. When Aragorn undergoes a dream journey to rescue Merry, Eowen, and Faramir - he's not putting himself under the power of darkness, but bringing light into the domain of darkness and conquering it. Tolkien's heroes are often and can be superhuman, but their native power arises form their virtue and does not run entirely counter to being virtuous. Though obliviously, and you might say this was the point, as in the case of Melkor and Sauron and Galadriel, having native power represents a danger and temptation in and of itself, and the Hobbits therefore find a peculiar but essential strength in weakness.

Because I don't really grasp the move to personification, I don't have a strong intuition about the nature of the personifications, nor about their vulnerability to being struck by boats.

Also, if Cthulhu is just back under the water dreaming, then in what sense was their a triumph?

That is precisely my point. In no sense is it really a triumph, save in the sense that Bertrand Russell appeals to, that it is better to go bravely into the gate of night than cowardly - though the same result ultimately is obtained by the valorous and the coward both.

 

[pemerton]

Well, keep in mind that the so-called "cosmic horror" being strongly attached to Lovecraft was a posthumous development; a work of interpretation by his fans and later scholars.

<snip>

So while the notion of cosmic horror crystalized under Lovecraft's watch, and he's rightly given credit for clearly articulating the notion first, not every story that has a mi-go, a Deep One, a vague reference to The Necronomicon, Cthulhu, or the Plateau of Leng is a story of cosmic horror. This is clearly true for even the body of work of Lovecraft himself, and as [MENTION=51930]fireinthedust[/MENTION] pointed out, once you step into fellow writers of the Mythos circle, that is true even more strongly.

Of that circle of writers, the only two whose works I know are Lovecraft and REH.

I just reread the opening section of Call of Cthulhu, and it has a passage that reminded me of "Science as a Vocation" - "we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

Weber does not talk about madness - he is interested in what he calls "rationalisation" and "disenchantment", both of which are, in his useage, sociological terms for describing changes in the relationship between the scope and consequences of human action and the scope of human knowledge. But Weber does, towards the end of his essay, say

To the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man, one must say: may he rather return silently, without the usual publicity build-up of renegades, but simply and plainly.The arms of the old churches are opened widely and compassionately for him. After all, they do not make it hard for him. One way or another he has to bring his 'intellectual sacrifice' - that is inevitable. If he can really do it, we shall not rebuke him.​

There is the same idea of "a new dark age", a de-intellectualisation, as the way of coping with the knowledge that modernity brings.

I don't see REH as denying the bleakness so much as putting forward a different response, closer in some ways I think to Bertrand Russell's (and also, I would say moreso, Nietzsche's): that while the cosmos itself is valueless and empty, human self-creation - including moral self-creation - is a self-generating source of value. (I think there are also hints of vitalism in REH - down to his obsession with thews and sinews - so this moral self-creation is seen as part and parcel of the being of living creatures. This is another similarity to Nietzsche.)

In the first page or two of CoC, Lovecraft makes a passing reference to the vagaries of futurism and cubism. I think that the "cosmic horror/fantasy" of both Lovecraft and REH really is another expression of those sorts of modernist sensibilities that had been building up in the latter part of the nineteenth century but really peaked between the wars. [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] has suggested that I have a failure of imagination, and that may be so: intellectually I can understand what was going on, but I find it hard to be correspondingly shocked or otherwise moved. Though, as I said earlier, I am a great admirer of Weber and think his essay remains an excellent piece of socilogical analysis and explanation. (In his reply to me above Celebrim cited from "A Free Man's Worship", 1903. I think Russell's own views changed in a more sociological direction over time, especially as the influence of GE Moore on his metaethical views was reduced.)

One of the weirder features of D&D, for me, is its attempt to mix the modernism of REH and Lovecraft with the anti-modern romanticism of Tolkien. I think this mix is inherently unstable, and very prone to degenerating into sentimentality (which for me is the general tone of the Forgotten Realms and of Dragonlance).

 

[fireinthedust]

So while the notion of cosmic horror crystalized under Lovecraft's watch, and he's rightly given credit for clearly articulating the notion first, not every story that has a mi-go, a Deep One, a vague reference to The Necronomicon, Cthulhu, or the Plateau of Leng is a story of cosmic horror. This is clearly true for even the body of work of Lovecraft himself, and as @fireinthedust pointed out, once you step into fellow writers of the Mythos circle, that is true even more strongly.

Actually, what I was pointing out is that there are elements of Mythos horror in the fantasy writing of other creators. Howards stories have heroes in them. He doesn't do the frightened, frail intellectual that Lovecraft writes: he did a story for Lovecraft with such a character, but he was the companion of a cowboy-type who save the day.

That said, while Conan hacks the heck out of the Mythos, the way they're set in the story is as alien horrors. He clearly states how horrific these things are; it's just that, between the gut reactions of fight and flight, his heroes always pick Fight!

Keep in mind we're talking post-world war 1 fiction. What you folks are getting at here is NOT the horror of the cosmos or quantum physics. It's the horror of TRAUMA: something happens that you don't have the language for.

This is the horror of shell shock, of being failed by the institutions and leaders that you trusted. That's what the mythos represent.

Yes, the science is part of the imagery. Really, when you strip away the things that people find comforting, floating forever through a freezing vacuum and dying is kind of horrifying. it's the opposite of the environment we're built for. Maybe not for some folks, but go from white picket fences and suburbs, the comforting glow of TV/internet, burger joints... into hostile alien whatever, it's not who we are.

Granted, Lovecraft believed that the savage was wrong, that civilization was man's natural state. Howard thought the opposite: barbarism = natural, civilization is corrupting. What Howard was really writing about was how his beautiful Texan wilderness was being taken over by these oil rigs and towns. The language he knew for life was being destroyed.

That's Trauma and that's the stuff of the Mythos.

Whether D&D worres about that depends upon the narrative.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=51930]fireinthedust[/MENTION], I agree that the Great War is an important factor in the modernist outlook overall. For many, it kills romanticism dead. (Not all, obviously - eg Tolkien.)

But a lot of the key motifs in REH and Lovecraft aren't linked to the war. The vitalist strand in REH, for instance, has its origins in the second half of the 19th century. And both authors are full of racialised imagery which predates the war also. For instance, re-reading CoC this morning, clearly part of the horror of the ritual in Louisiana is meant to be conveyed by the description of the worshippers themselves - "this hybrid spawn . . . of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes . . . [d]egraded and ignorant . . ." Not to mention the death of the narrator's grand-uncle "after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro".

The effects of the war may have created an environment where this sort of stuff had more emotional purchase on people. But in my view it is not itself an expression of trauma resulting from the war.

 

[Desdichado]

Of that circle of writers, the only two whose works I know are Lovecraft and REH.

Which, sadly, I don't think are the best writers in the group. Although they are often more remembered because they articulated philosophies, which are often seen as as memorable as their stories. REH actually wrote a whole series of stories that were even more overtly Lovecraftian than his Conan stories (although for some reason, "The Black Stone" is the only one who's title I can think of off the top of my head.) Some writers like Henry Kuttner, E. Hoffmann Price, Frank Belknap Long or especially Robert Bloch went on to bigger and better things after they stopped dabbling in Lovecraftian style horror. August Derleth is nothing but derivative, although he added a number of new elements to the tone of the ouvre.

But the best writer of the group is almost certainly Clark Ashton Smith. He was already a successful and widely renowned poet before the market for his poetry kind of dried up and he turned to pulps to pay the bills. But he could write circles around Lovecraft or REH, easily.

And he should be familiar to old-timey D&D players, since some of his work was specifically pastiched (if that's a verb) in the X2 - Castle Amber module.

There is the same idea of "a new dark age", a de-intellectualisation, as the way of coping with the knowledge that modernity brings.

Which you could arguably say has happened, although I think it's more fair to say that as our total knowledge base as humanity continues to grow, it just grows beyond the ability of any single person to really follow in all fields very well.

Although the notion that our knowledge of the scope of the cosmos will cause us to retreat in fear to anti-intellectualism seems... quaint, at best.

I don't see REH as denying the bleakness so much as putting forward a different response, closer in some ways I think to Bertrand Russell's (and also, I would say moreso, Nietzsche's): that while the cosmos itself is valueless and empty, human self-creation - including moral self-creation - is a self-generating source of value. (I think there are also hints of vitalism in REH - down to his obsession with thews and sinews - so this moral self-creation is seen as part and parcel of the being of living creatures. This is another similarity to Nietzsche.)

Here, I'm talking more about tone than theme. I'd agree that Lovecraftian themes are frequent in Conan stories, but the tone of the stories is totally different, which was really my point in bringing them up in the first place. Fighting Cthulhu as high level D&D characters isn't inherently anti-Lovecraftian, because the themes can certainly be there, if the monsters are. I've also argued that fighting them isn't necessarily anti-Lovecraftian in tone either, but it certainly isn't if you look at REH's Mythos stories, for example. As you say; that's exactly what REH's characters do to them!

In the first page or two of CoC, Lovecraft makes a passing reference to the vagaries of futurism and cubism. I think that the "cosmic horror/fantasy" of both Lovecraft and REH really is another expression of those sorts of modernist sensibilities that had been building up in the latter part of the nineteenth century but really peaked between the wars. [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] has suggested that I have a failure of imagination, and that may be so: intellectually I can understand what was going on, but I find it hard to be correspondingly shocked or otherwise moved.

Then I don't see how that could be a failure of imagination. I can imagine Lovecraft's point of view. I can understand it. But that doesn't I mean I don't think it's a load of rubbish. Being frightened of non-Euclidean geometry is complete rubbish, unless someone were to put some problems in front of me and demand that I show that I remember how to solve them. If anything, the scope of the cosmos as we now understand it is so much vaster and more complex than even Lovecraft could possibly have imagined.

In fact, it's not too out there to say that the notion of being afraid of the true knowledge of the cosmos is a highly traditionalist, and even unimaginitive point of view--the inability to imagine grappling with knowledge that now, after nearly a century of rapid scientific discovery, seems so routine.

Although that's not really fair to him, because it's much easier to say that with the benefit of decades of hindsight.

Actually, what I was pointing out is that there are elements of Mythos horror in the fantasy writing of other creators. Howards stories have heroes in them. He doesn't do the frightened, frail intellectual that Lovecraft writes: he did a story for Lovecraft with such a character, but he was the companion of a cowboy-type who save the day.

Right; didn't mean to inadvertenty seem to mischaracterize you. Rather, I meant that there are different approaches in tone to dealing with the Lovecraftian. Even within Lovecraft's own body of work. Once you add to that the other authors in the ouvre, you get significant differences. The approach of a character of REH's or Brian Lumley to a Lovecraftian monster is going to be very different than some fictional tweedy New England intellectual.

Keep in mind we're talking post-world war 1 fiction. What you folks are getting at here is NOT the horror of the cosmos or quantum physics. It's the horror of TRAUMA: something happens that you don't have the language for.

This is the horror of shell shock, of being failed by the institutions and leaders that you trusted. That's what the mythos represent.

Considering that neither REH nor Lovecraft served in the military, nor lived in an area that was occupied or otherwise directly influenced by the war, I'd find that interpretation a bit sketchy. If they were utilizing the concept of trauma, it was the kind of everyday exposure to change that has happened to everyone who's ever lived at any point of time in our world, more or less.

One could argue that both of them were ill-equipped personally to deal with trauma, and therefore "everyday" trauma affected them more than most, I suppose (actually, that argument would be quite easy to make for both of them. They both greatly feared and loathed the notion of change, in many ways.) But that interpretation of their writing requires building speculation on assumptions on a foundation of speciousness. It sounds logical, but it's ultimately completely undemonstrateable.

Granted, Lovecraft believed that the savage was wrong, that civilization was man's natural state. Howard thought the opposite: barbarism = natural, civilization is corrupting. What Howard was really writing about was how his beautiful Texan wilderness was being taken over by these oil rigs and towns. The language he knew for life was being destroyed.

That's Trauma and that's the stuff of the Mythos.

Howard's approach to barbarism was more complicated than that, especially since the barbarians are probably best represented by exactly those rough and tumble oil field blue collar workers you're referencing. While the Picts are never presented as positive in any sense whatsoever, other barbarians such as the Cimmerians (obviously), the Aesir and the Vanir are portrayed as romanticized noble savages, not unlike the frequent 19th century romanticization of the Gauls, the Goths, and the other noble savages who brought down the corrupt and decadant Roman Empire.

In any case, I think the trauma of the oil business coming to town is a way too simplistic interpretation of Howard's approach to the Mythos horror. Besides, the oil boom started when he was just an extremely young boy. It's unlikely that he even had any significant memories of a way of life prior to the oil boom. If he'd lived even five years later, he'd have seen the end of the oil boom, and then he might have been able to write about the completely different trauma of work and livelihood drying up for people all around him. But that's neither here nor there.

And I've been to Cross Plains and other areas around Abilene. It ain't no beautiful wilderness! Even back then, it was more empty ranchland and farmland than wilderness anyway.

[MENTION=51930]fireinthedust[/MENTION], I agree that the Great War is an important factor in the modernist outlook overall. For many, it kills romanticism dead. (Not all, obviously - eg Tolkien.)

Nor REH, for that matter. There's a strong element of romanticism inherent in Howard's work too--especially if you look beyond the Conan stories. Even Lovecraft wasn't immune to it.

Not to mention the death of the narrator's grand-uncle "after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro".

That's a perfect example of the way in which Lovecraft's stories haven't necessarily aged well. While he thought that phrase might have been vaguely threatening or disquieting, "a nautical-looking negro" just makes me want to chuckle.

Lovecraft's philosophy might have been influential in its time, but I think it was more his approach to writing and his introduction of new themes that made him influential in literature. His philosophy is merely a window view into a very odd-sounding and short-lived approach to the world that can't possibly have much currency in a world in which secular humanism is relatively common--and which embraces almost the entirety of Lovecraft's philosophy without being afraid of it.

Rather, his approach to alien life as truly alien was a remarkable insight that has influenced horror and science fiction writers for decades (although it too has its predecessors like Arthur Machen or David Lindsay.) His approach of ancient secret histories of the world has been a lasting influence that has informed all kinds of work and can be seen as the foundation of stuff like The X-files and more. His influence was more about what he brought to the genre of horror writing in particular; taking it beyond the Gothic and into the modern, than it was about his philosophy.

 

[pemerton]

Although the notion that our knowledge of the scope of the cosmos will cause us to retreat in fear to anti-intellectualism seems... quaint, at best.

<snip>

I can imagine Lovecraft's point of view. I can understand it. But that doesn't I mean I don't think it's a load of rubbish. Being frightened of non-Euclidean geometry is complete rubbish, unless someone were to put some problems in front of me and demand that I show that I remember how to solve them. If anything, the scope of the cosmos as we now understand it is so much vaster and more complex than even Lovecraft could possibly have imagined.

In fact, it's not too out there to say that the notion of being afraid of the true knowledge of the cosmos is a highly traditionalist, and even unimaginitive point of view--the inability to imagine grappling with knowledge that now, after nearly a century of rapid scientific discovery, seems so routine.

Although that's not really fair to him, because it's much easier to say that with the benefit of decades of hindsight.

<snip>

Lovecraft's philosophy might have been influential in its time, but I think it was more his approach to writing and his introduction of new themes that made him influential in literature. His philosophy is merely a window view into a very odd-sounding and short-lived approach to the world that can't possibly have much currency in a world in which secular humanism is relatively common--and which embraces almost the entirety of Lovecraft's philosophy without being afraid of it.

I agree with this. It's what I had in mind when I said a bit upthread that this sort of work has some trouble surviving the test of time: the sensibilities on which it rested aren't there any more.

Your comments on the literary aspects are interesting too, thanks.

 

[ForeverSlayer]

I remember running a Mind Flayer game back in 3rd edition where my player's were playing Mind Flayers and worshipped Cthuhlu.