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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jim Hague" data-source="post: 3315247" data-attributes="member: 17550">Well, those things exist in our universe, wholly and entirely.  As PC pointed out, neither one is some sort of extradimensional, impossible thing.This irks me, it really does - what is so damned difficult to grasp about the damage the Mythos causes being caused because it's fundamentally alien, not because it's 'non-Euclidean' or rugose or squamous or whatever?  People are rotunely driven to dysfunction by things that your average player character does on an almost daily basis - wtinessing bloody murder and battle, having a friend killed in front of their eyes, suffering badly at the hands of someone else while they're helpless.  And yet the same old tired 'the Mythos isn't scary' crud always comes out, usually with someone posting something by Escher or another optical illusion to 'prove' it.Look - the Mythos universe is fundamentally different from the world we exist in.  Lovecraft and many other writers are not psychologists, they're story tellers.  And in the context of the shared universe they write in, the Horrors From Outside drive you crazy.  Given that relatively mundane things like being mugged and seeing a mutilated corpse can cause serious emotional and mental trauma, I don't think it's too much of a stretch that something that rips away the fragile social and emotional fabric we all use to cover up the stresses of the world driving someone off the deep end is all that unbelieveable.  Psychologically unsound under current ideas of such, maybe, but not all that big a stretch in a fantastic universe.The Truth in a Mtyhos universe is that you are fundamentally helpless, and not just helpless, but utterly insignificant.  You, human, are a mistake, a dead-end experiment with delusions of grandeur.  And being exposed to that horrific truth, in the context of that world, can shatter you.</blockquote>

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