[OT] H.P. Lovecraft died today!

[Kaptain_Kantrip]

H.P. Lovecraft, creator of the Cthulhu Mythos and distinguished Weird Tales contributor, passed away 65 years ago today, on March 15, 1937.

"For that which is not dead can eternal lie,
and with strange aeons even death may die."

Too bad WoTC couldn't have released the damn CoC d20 book today to commemorate HPL's passing...

 

[Kamard]

That would make sense.

See, this is all a Mythos plot... the days between today and the release of Cthulhu d20 shall be filled with hordes of gibbering cultists calling their gaming stores, slavering for their dark tome!!!

Yeah.

 

[frankthedm]

I hope the don't slaver to heavily, with wotc's reliabillity with release dates they'll probally die of dehydration

 

[Maudlin]

And unless I'm mistaken, March 15th is also when the Battle of the Pelennor Fields took place, where the Wtch-King of Angmar died.

COINCIDENCE?!?!

 

[Duncan Idaho]

And unless I'm mistaken, March 15th is also when the Battle of the Pelennor Fields took place, where the Wtch-King of Angmar died.

COINCIDENCE?!?!

Also that Julius Caesar guy died in 44 bce

 

[Eben]

"Beware the ides of march!"

 

[Riekhan]

For that which is not dead can eternal lie,
and with strange aeons even death may die."

hmm, I seen this quote before but I've (sadly) never read the book. What does it mean?

 

[Kaptain_Kantrip]

hmm, I seen this quote before but I've (sadly) never read the book. What does it mean?

I think it's from "Strange Aeons" by Lovecraft disciple Robert Bloch (author of "Psycho"). Never read it either, though I do heartily recommend Bloch's collection of his Cthulhu Mythos tales, "Mysteries of the Worm." Also get "The Early Fears," another collection of his early horror and Mythos tales.

 

[Wormwood]

hmm, I seen this quote before but I've (sadly) never read the book. What does it mean?

It's from Lovecraft's short story The Nameless City, written and published in 1921.

Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed of the night before he sang his unexplained couplet:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

Lovecraft later refers to the couplet in his 1926 story, The Call of Cthulhu . This time he hints that the poem could be an oblique reference to the Great Cthulhu himself.

Iä.

 

[Aaron L]

That quote, from the Lovecraft story The Call of Cthulhu, is:

That is not dead which may eternal lie;
and with strange eons even death may die

It is the defining statement of the Cthulhu Mythos. That great and dread things lie trapped, imprisoned, or sleeping all over this world (and many others), waiting for the chance to come back to reclaim their world. Their universe.

The point of these stories is that man is a small, insignificant aberration in the great scope of reality, to the dominant lifeforms of the universe we are like unto ameoba, and that the normal laws with which we see our reality governed are but quirks of the universe.

The small few who realize the true workings of reality invariably end up mad, sometimes worshipping the very things they struggled against. Magic is alien superscience.

Sorry, I am running a Call of Cthulhu game tonight, and I just had to say something