Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6256775" data-attributes="member: 42582">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.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.)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).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.From memory, this is more-or-less how the option is presented in the "play this with D&D" notes for d20 CoC.</blockquote>

Verification