Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 765742" data-attributes="member: 812">Barsoom has a certain Cthulhu-y goodness to it.I think Lovecraft is usually either overrated or underrated. When Skade says:THAT'S Lovecraft being great. He DOES make you feel like he means it. And that's good writing, is what that is. The good stories, "The Color Out Of Space", "The Lurker At The Threshold" or "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" are truly creepy and I don't think anyone has ever written anything quite like them before or since.Lovecraft and the Mythos are, in a way, a religious response to the Industrial Age. An age in which faith in God has been shaken, where Voltaire's questions in Candide ("Why does a good God allow good people to suffer?") still haven't been answered and the only rational response is to assume that God doesn't care.The notion of a universe run not by a benevolent God who only wants what's best for us, and pays attention to the least actions of each and every one of us, but by a God who, if it should notice us, would only snuff us out by the mere power of its alien thoughts, is deeply troubling if you take it at all seriously.When Lovecraft is great, he makes you feel like the universe we live in can only be explained that way. He shows you the world and defies any notion of a benevolent deity. "Surely," his great stories say, "this universe we live in is not here for OUR use. It is older and deeper and stranger than we can ever imagine. But perhaps it was made for SOMETHING." And that something, we can rest assured, in no way has the slightest concern for humanity.I don't care for many of the later, non-Lovecraftian stories, because for the most part they veer away from the starkness of this idea and develop struggles between the powers over the fate of humanity and so on and that sort of defeats the very core of what makes the original stories so powerful.This is why the ideas of the Mythos so appeal to gamers, particularly DMs. Not just for the reasons of power alluded to above, but because a universe that is structured in this fashion offers a massive challenge to the players. It's terrifying and imagination-stretching.Barsoom has revealed itself to contain inhuman powers that cannot be described by mortal minds. There's no actual Mythos deities around, but the ideas, that beyond what we see lie dark and terrible powers far greater than ours, is prevalent.</blockquote>

Verification