Disclaimer: I am a Lovecraft and disciples nut. I have read every tale Lovecraft ever wrote. I own all 30 volumes of Call of Cthulhu fiction put out by Chaosium (and have read more than half of them so far). I own and have read several other volumes of Lovecraftian tales. I own and enjoy both Chaosium's and WOTC's CoC games. I own De Profundis, the deluxe 20th-anniversary volume of Chaosium's game, Cthulhu Dark Ages, etc. My favorite D&D book is the original Deities & Demigods with the Cthulhu Mythos in it... You get the idea.
That said, there is something lacking in all that stuff, IMO. It's all great, but it's missing the starkness that is present in Lovecraft's best Mythos stories. I have made a list of his Mythos stories that are true to his mechanistic, deterministic, atheistic materialism. They are:
The Call of Cthulhu
The Whisperer in Darkness
At the Mountains of Madness
The Shadow over Innsmouth
The Shadow out of Time
There are indeed other stories of Lovecraft's that are part of the Mythos, but they contain supernaturalistic elements (such as the Dunwich Horror and The Thing on the Doorstep), or they are primarily just a bit of fun (The Haunter of the Dark, written in mock revenge against Robert Bloch for having killed Lovecraft in a story Bloch had written).
I am combing through the above five tales and am cobbling together a game based solely on the elements featured in them. No magic. No pantheons of deities. No elementals. No etc. I'm using old D&D mechanics as a rules base since it is simple and a character can be created in five minutes. This is important since characters couldn't last beyond a handful of game sessions. No levels. No advancement. Hit points equal constitution score. Combat will be radically de-emphasized almost to the point of exclusion. Instead, characters will focus on gathering information, on climbing through ruins, leaping chasms, fleeing, etc. In other words, the type of stuff Lovecraft's characters in the above five stories did.
Of course, most people wouldn't like this game I'm making. But I'm mostly making it just to please myself.
Game on!
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