NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 6761827" data-attributes="member: 17607">See, that's the point of providing that link from Extra Credits -- if you're providing the Far Realm as just another monster-generator, and that humanity can ultimately understand and even triumph over the Far Realm, then you're doing it wrong. Sure, you can say that it's more fun of a game to be able to beat up Cthulhu (or Zeus, or Odin), and if all you want is a nice, escapist game that doesn't have any bearing or connection on the greater issues of existence, that's fine.The whole point of Cthulhu or the Far Realm, from a philosophical perspective, is to remind us that humanity is a speck, a smear of chemicals that somehow managed to become self-aware but is constantly standing on the verge of extinction, either at the whims of powers it can never comprehend, or simply by venturing out into a universe that simply doesn't care that it exists and finding that it has no place there.The first paragraph of "The Call of Cthulhu" by Lovecraft himself puts it best, I think:"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."The only reason that the illithids haven't already put out the sun, or the aboleths haven't already flooded the world and made us all their jelly-covered slaves, is that those creatures exist in our stories, and we cast ourselves as the heroes in them. Most of us enjoy those stories, which is fine, but let's not confuse the ability to cast ourselves as the heroes in our own stories with the ability to actually overcome the unknowable and defeat the unthinkable. That way really does lie madness.--Pauper</blockquote>

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