Has Lovecraft become required reading?

[Kafen]

Has it come to the point that to truly appreciate D&D and gaming in general, a person has to read Lovecraft?

Yes and No

Yes, GMs should read his work to get at least a passing understanding to many of the "cult" icons you see appearing in the works.

Not so much with players, they can get away with just riding a good narrative. The GM can introduce most of the elements from his story into the campaign without the player having to know Lovecraft.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I think anything you read can improve your game, but nothing is truly "required."

Lovecraft is important, to be sure, but no more so than Moorcock, Howard, Tolkien, Vance, Lieber and others for D&D...

And when you venture away from D&D, or away from FRPGS in general, those guys influence may still be felt, but other writer's influences become more important.

 

[Anton85]

I herd a similar story from a friend who had gamed with this other guy. It seemed that this gamer also started to notice Lovecraftian influence in RPGs. First he noticed the Mindflayers, Beholders, etc..

Then he started noticing the influence of Lovecraft other places. He found out the if you rearrange the letters in the title of any "Murders She Wrote" episode, it spells out "The Old Ones Are". The more he looked for these influences, the more he found.

Soon it got so bad, that he tried to stop spotting the influences. but he was seeing antediluvian architecture in the newest lego structures and archaic cryptology in Gieco commercials.

Poor guy went completely mad.

In short, no you dont have to read any Lovecraft, unless the old ones want you to............

 

[ArghMark]

Lovecraft style 'outer horrors' have come through the real fantasy fiction that got D+D going - Conan.

Generally I find horror adds to games, non-euclidean or not. Cosmic supernatural horror goes with many of the themes of fantasy quite well; ancient malignant things from beyond the known world is 'fantastical', perhaps more so than Bobby the Elf.

 

[Desdichado]

Lovecraft arguably isn't a horror writer. He never had the knack of making anything scary.

That said, his influence was pretty substantial right from day 1. Along with the rest of the pulp writers who Gygax obviously preferred to Tolkien, whom he only raided for superficial similarities.

 

[MarkB]

I'd hardly call it "required reading". I've not read so much as a page of Lovecraft, and don't generally read the horror genre either, but that does nothing to stop me enjoying and employing Lovecraftian tropes in my games, whether it's including a little bit of weirdness in a D&D campaign, or playing full-out wibbliness in Call of Cthulhu.

These are themes that have pervaded our hobby for decades, and everything I need to know about them, I learned from that hobby. I may miss the odd specific reference, but in general I'm as well-equipped for a venture into Lovecraftian madness as any other player. Lovecraft is no more required reading for me when playing Call of Cthulhu than the Drizzt trilogies are in order to play in the Forgotten Realms.

 

[malraux]

Lovecraft arguably isn't a horror writer. He never had the knack of making anything scary.

Cosmic horror isn't really about scariness.

 

[SSquirrel]

Cosmic horror isn't really about scariness.

That's a good thing, b/c none of it was scary in the least. The scariest thing about Lovecraft was how many paragraphs he would devote to describing the gables of a house. I think he was the strongest influence on Robert Jordan really. I mean, he spent whole chapters devoted to Elayne getting dressed.

I sat down once and read a couple of hundred pages of Lovecraft and can't force myself to read anything else "UNSPEAKABLE!!", which is basically the punchline of every story. Amusingly enough, I enjoy playing the Call of Cthulhu RPG quite a lot.

EDIT:Speaking of Jordan, a friend of mine recently shared his method for reading Jordan. Read the first and last sentence of any paragraph he writes. I stopped at Winter's Heart and I'm just fine with hiting web synopses at this point.

 

[Betote]

I wish it were. It helps a lot for building atmospheres and describing creatures.

 

[Anton85]

Lovecraft does not "shock" scare you. Its more about the uneasy feeling you get when you go to sleep after reading his work. I find the things he writes about much more scary then any other author.

I understand that he is not everyone's cup of tea, but I also will defend the point that he is a great author.