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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8806017" data-attributes="member: 4937">My worry is you'd end up with something that feels like 'Rick and Morty' or recent volumes of Charles Stross's Laundry series.This might should be forked, but the secret to Lovecraftian horror is that it was written by a highly neurotic, emotionally fragile intellectual who was aware that his entire world view was crumbling around him.  HPL literally felt he was waking up into the world of his horror stories.  This is a guy who had bought into the rock-solid comfortable world of the Victorian intellectual - an eternal unchanging universe, man as the pinnacle of evolution, white Anglo-Saxons as the pinnacle of human evolution, science the vehicle for man's eventual godhood, and so forth only to see the very science he put his faith into undermine all his beliefs.  Godel's incompleteness theorem.  The Big Bang.  Quantum Mechanics.  The insanity of industrialized war in Europe.  When this is a guy saying one day science is going to open up vistas that will drive people insane, he's a man who is experiencing that as he speaks.This creates a feel that is very hard for rational people to understand for two reasons.  First, because thankfully most of us are not crazed sensitive neurotics like HPL, and secondly because we really do not correlate the contents of the mind and seriously consider them.  Questions like, "If the sun is going to burn out in a billion years, why do I bother to do my homework?" sound silly to us and don't actually produce the existential dread they were producing in HPL.My first experience of HPL was actually the uncanny emotional realization of just how small and far apart the atoms in my body really were, so that I realized that I am in fact an insubstantial mist through which the neutrinos blow basically unimpeded, an electron ghost barely even there in the grand scheme of things.  Actually, feeling the emotional impact of that is what I would love a CoC roleplaying game to actually produce.   But most of the time, CoC satisfies itself with just going for squick instead of horror, triggering feelings of revulsion rather than existential dread.  We're missing what actually frightened HPL underneath the obvious animal survival things.And it's not clear to me how you actually transcend that problem.  You see, we aren't HPL.  If you read something like:"Corresponding to any given consistent axiomatization of number theory, one can explicitly construct a Diophantine equation which has no solutions, but such that this fact cannot be proved within the given axiomatization."You are not going to start freaking out and screaming like Luke in the gas refinery: "No, that's not true!!! That can't be possible!!!"  I very much feel HPL would have.  We live in the universe post all of these revelations about how weird the universe is and we just shrug.   But a really good HPL adventure somehow would undermine our confidence in reality just as much as early 20th century science destroyed HPL's belief in the worth of mankind so that even if the investigators kill the monster, it doesn't matter, because it's the existence of the monster that is problematic in the first place.However, that problem goes way outside the topic at hand.</blockquote>

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