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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 6256440" data-attributes="member: 2205">Actually, I think I'll find that I already know that, and in fact inferred that very fact myself in the part of my post that immediately follows what you quoted, but which you snipped.  No, he was sent packing, quite clearly.  Otherwise, the narrator of the story wouldn't be around to narrate it, as is also abundantly made clear if you read the entire story instead of just cherry-picking quotes out of it.  If I wanted to do that, I could find all kinds of quotes about Cthulhu actually being dead, or this quote from the very last paragraph of the story: "He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? "Or the ones I already quoted in my previous post, which I won't repeat again.  And this one, too.  "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn: 'In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming'."And all that's beside the point anyway.  Your initial flawed claim was that any system that didn't have the PCs simply die from facing Cthulhu was flawed, or at least non-Lovecraftian.  That's obviously false, since if you happen to have read the only story in which Cthulhu appears, you'll know that Johansson was murdered by a cultist long after he sent Cthulhu packing (emphasis mine.)  All this talk about whether or not Cthulhu is "dead" or not--which is obviously a meaningless term to being like him (or to plenty of critters in the Monster Manual, for that matter) is superfluous.  You (and pickin_grinnin) made an obviously false and falsifiable claim.  I proved it wrong by referring to the actual primary source, the story "Call of Cthulhu."  You have, curiously, now quoted exactly the portion of the story that disproves your original point, but since you've totally moved the goalposts to the more nebulous concept of whether or not Cthulhu is "dead", I'm not even sure what your point is anymore.  Which normally I wouldn't get too bent about, but holy cow: a guys asks for some advice on how to run something, and you guys pounce on him and discourage him from even doing it at all because it's "not Lovecraftian?"  Well, assuming for a moment that that's even something he cares about, you're completely wrong.  It's totally Lovecraftian.  Defeating the horrors of the Mythos happens very frequently in Lovecraft's writings, and in fact, it happens specifically to Cthulhu in the only story in which he actually makes an appearance. [MENTION=51930]fireinthedust[/MENTION]; I haven't ever had my PCs fight Cthulhu, no.  I don't really play high level D&D very often.  There's no reason not to do it, though.  Despite what the naysayers here in this very thread have proposed, there's no reason to think that even in Lovecraft's own writing that the notion of defeating Cthulhu is impossible.  I can't fathom why anyone would discourage you from attempting it based on what appears to be nothing more than misplaced loyalty to an obviously flawed secondary and later interpretation of Cthulhu's supposed invicincibility.  In the stats themselves as presented, Cthulhu (and the rest of the Great Old Ones) are more or less comparable to the Demonicon of Iggwilv stats for demon-lords.  IIRC, Cthulhu had a CR in the low to mid-thirties in the d20 book, exactly the same range as the demon lords.  Although given the age of the Cthulhu stats, whether or not they truly are comparable is debatable.  For what it's worth, in Paizo's Bestiary 4 Cthulhu is CR 30; exactly the same as Pazuzu.</blockquote>

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