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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mistergone" data-source="post: 764665" data-attributes="member: 9647">Eh. The Mythos are okay. I've used aspects of them in a lot of my games. But always, it was just really the whole part about something alien and evil. I personally don't like the "life is hopeless and you're a victim of unspeakable cosmic forces" in my games. I mean, that's too close to how real life seems to me anyways. I like some of the ideas of Cuthulhu et. al., but just not the "you stand no chance make your time" aspect. To me, the heroes ALWAYS have to have a chance, however slim, of triumphing over evil. There has to be hope. Even in a game of scrambling for your life against ravenous mindless hoardes of zombies, I like to think that at least one hero is gonna get out alive (albeit, forever scarred). Of course, this isn't always true in my games, and characters can fail, lose, and sometimes die. But they have a chance.Why gamers seem to like the Mythos so much? I think there's a couple reasons. One, it appeals to that common feeling in a lot of people who game that it is a shared in-joke about something the "normals" don't know about. "Tee-hee when the stars are right!". All this "Ia! Ia!" stuff and similar, which I must admit, I don't get, is a funny in-joke that is shared amongst a subculture. (but not me, i really don't know what it means)Another reason is, if you want evil in your games, the Mythos is pretty much the Ultimate Evil. Again, a lot of gamers really like that whole "tee-hee I am SO evil!". And if anyone knows anything about the Mythos, they know that it's about something unspeakably evil. So you pop in that element, everyone involved knows something bad is afoot.Lastly, the Mythos was ingrained in the psyche of everyone who has played D&D since the early days, when Cthulhu and company appeared in the first edition of Deities & Demigods. I sure wish I had a copy of that. They first appeared to gamers there and then got "taken away" in the second printing. The Mythos was a collector's item AND some really uber-powerful superevil monsters. So way back then, they entered D&D mythology, and have sort of been passed down from one genration of gamer to the newer one. Now they're "back" in a sense with CoC D20. Of course, there was always the Chaosium game, but you had to be hardcore to be into that, back then.I personally like the imagery. Cthulhu is a big freaky octopus headed godzilla thing with wings! It's really 70's heavy metal album cover and Dio lyrics, man. \m/I've seen parts of the Mythos show up in everything from the World of Darkness (where it made sense) to Star Wars (where it made no sense). As someone said, it's portable. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Personally, I just  take the parts I like from the Mythos, and pepper them in if it seems like they'd add something to the game.As always, it may be different for other people, I wouldn't know.</blockquote>

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