D&D General Gore in D&D

[Son of the Serpent]

I never claimed otherwise. I wanted to emphasize Lovecraft's difference to modern writers and their frequent focus on visceral horror. But Lovecraft's tone and many of his tropes are definitely in line with gothic and "gothic revival" styles, e.g. his fixation on creepy old houses, degenerate families, witchcraft, etc. Poe, of course, added a deeply psychological element to horror stories, as did other writers such as Dickens with his A Confession Found in a Prison.

Fair. But for the record. Poe created cosmic horror as an actual genre.

Also on a side note. Most of the time people say hp said something stupid (as seems to be fashionable to claim these days) really what hes saying is just flyong over their head.

Example: noneuclidian geometry

Know it all: that just means curved and not straight or angled

Actual understanding fan: have you ever seen a ceazily curved building that is at all functional? Hmmmmmmm. Rethink what very many things he might be trying to say about this strange object. There are a lot of them.

I love lovecraft.

 

[generic]

Fair. But for the record. Poe created cosmic horror as an actual genre.

Also on a side note. Most of the time people say hp said something stupid (as seems to be fashionable to claim these days) really what hes saying is just flyong over their head.

Example: noneuclidian geometry

Know it all: that just means curved and not straight or angled

Actual understanding fan: have you ever seen a ceazily curved building that is at all functional? Hmmmmmmm. Rethink what very many things he might be trying to say about this strange object. There are a lot of them.

I love lovecraft.

It is a tad off-topic for this thread, but I would argue that, while Poe was the originator of modern Cosmic Horror, the genre really stretches back into ancient myth as, perhaps, the purest and mos mythological type of horror.

Consider Beowulf: A monstrous, man-eating Giant stalks the night killing people in a town. Our hero slays the fell thing, whose ancestry stretches back into time immemorial, and discovers that its dark and evil mother lives at the bottom of a lake, waiting where the eyes of mortal men cannot see her.

 

[Ravenbrook]

Also on a side note. Most of the time people say hp said something stupid (as seems to be fashionable to claim these days) really what hes saying is just flyong over their head.

But I wish he didn't like to use the word "ululating" - it's such an ugly word! Here's a rather humorous look at Lovecraft's sometimes odd vocabulary:

Decoding H.P. Lovecraft

Author Jonathan Wood catalogs all those strange and eldritch Lovecraftian words ululating throughout the horror icon's stygian works.

geekdad.com

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[generic]

I would go with a different position.

In far back times, there was no cosmic horror, as the universe was essentially unknowable; life was cruel, short, and often arbitrary.

Cosmic horror can only truly exist post-enlightenment, and, arguably, with the industrial and scientific revolutions; you have to have a baseline of believing that the world is rational and "solvable" for the ineffable and irrational to be horrific and drive you mad.

I like this.

My position was also based on certain elements of myth which are inherent to cosmic horror, such as, when what is holy takes the place of what is scientific.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Son of the Serpent]

It is a tad off-topic for this thread, but I would argue that, while Poe was the originator of modern Cosmic Horror, the genre really stretches back into ancient myth as, perhaps, the purest and mos mythological type of horror.

Consider Beowulf: A monstrous, man-eating Giant stalks the night killing people in a town. Our hero slays the fell thing, whose ancestry stretches back into time immemorial, and discovers that its dark and evil mother lives at the bottom of a lake, waiting where the eyes of mortal men cannot see her.

I should clarify that im talking about the modern idea of the genre.

I completely agree with your post. Cosmic horror has some of the most ancient and thick root systems of any literary form if we are to consider myth from the mysts of time. Beowulf indeed. Consider also dusty elder gods like herms, whos origins stretch back all the way into the age of animism. One of the first "gods" to emerge from the nebulousness of animism possibly. A god of unfathomable mysteries and prophesy. Untouched nature, indifferent and uncaring to man yet sometimes playful with interlopers of our race who found themselves lost in the woods. Play that could kill. Play that could drive mad. Dreams that could show the future and prophesies of nature cataclysmically swallowing up a future nation you dont recognize as yet existing.

Or quite a bit later, stories of fey whisking you away only to release you in what feels like a day but the world you return to is one in which your family and all its descendants died out long ago and some of the events from your own lifetime seem not even to have happened the same way. (Fey are time travelors perhaps? Or fey are time?)

Lots of weird stuff in mythology of yore if you dig for it.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

But I wish he didn't like to use the word "ululating" - it's such an ugly word! Here's a rather humorous look at Lovecraft's sometimes odd vocabulary:

Decoding H.P. Lovecraft

Author Jonathan Wood catalogs all those strange and eldritch Lovecraftian words ululating throughout the horror icon's stygian works.

geekdad.com

tbh the term ululating makes my skin feel weird. It hits my ears the wrong way.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

I would go with a different position.

In far back times, there was no cosmic horror, as the universe was essentially unknowable; life was cruel, short, and often arbitrary.

Cosmic horror can only truly exist post-enlightenment, and, arguably, with the industrial and scientific revolutions; you have to have a baseline of believing that the world is rational and "solvable" for the ineffable and irrational to be horrific and drive you mad.

I disagree. I think that for as long as there has been myth humanity already recorded and contemplated the cosmos with what tools they could muster and more importantly with what reasoning skills they couls muster (which i dont think have been elevated much). I think cosmic horror's actual nethermost core is fear not of the unknown but fear of the recognized fact that something, even if percieved, can still be truly unknowable. Incomprehensible. Fear of the acknowledged fact that our senses could lie. As long as there have been halucinations, dreams, and delusions, fear of madness or that there is no way to know if sanity is really just overly consistant shared madness has always been a fear. Fear of the potential ineptitude of our perceptions and mind and that the world may not even care and that no one (the gods?) out there cares enough that we cant see its true self to correct us or know we are out there.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*