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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6398805" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not here to persuade you, just to reply in the unfolding conversation.I think that there are noticeable thematic differences between FR and GH, although my description of them isn't neutral: FR is essentially polyanna-ish, whereas GH aspires either to a modest degree of seriousness (at least to the level of REH Conan and Kull) or else is just outright silly (Isle of the Ape, Zagyg etc).As for CoC, I think the mythos is all about theme and trope. Monte Cook and John Tynes do a reasonable job of identifying the tropes in d20 CoC. (I don't have a Chaosium CoC rulebook - they might do this too.) The tropes include cursed families, mysterious books and relics, etc.And Trail of Cthulhu does a good job, I think, of identifying theme. For example, here is its take on Cthulhu (pp 9):* The Great Old One Cthulhu dwells in the sunken basalt necropolis of R’lyeh, miles deep at the bottom of the South Pacific. He sleeps eternally while there, sending horrifying dreams to mortal men, tipping some into madness and others into his fanatical worship. Someday R’lyeh will rise again and Cthulhu will wake, freed once more to raven and slay, freed to rule the world. * Cthulhu is the titanic high priest and ruler of a species of octopoid beings from the star Xoth, who seeped down to earth during the Permian Era and battled the crinoid Elder Things to a standstill. Their civilization on Yhe fell to a cataclysm when the continent sank. Cthulhu cast the spell that preserved his and their life in suspended animation. In this long sleep, he telepathically recruits human cultists to raise his island again by means of unimaginably advanced alien science, which superstitious humans consider magic. * Varying texts hold that R’lyeh and Yhe may have sunk around 250 million years ago, or with Mu and Lemuria during the first lost age of human sorcery around 200,000 BC. Some of Cthulhu’s powers (or genes) may have survived in the lineage of Kathulos, the skull-faced sorcerer of Atlantis. * Cthulhu is the chief god of the Deep Ones. He is their “soul-symbol,” and their eons of telepathic worship and biotechnical experimentation have created Him in the flesh. They seek to spread His seed by selectively breeding with humanity. * Cthulhu is the chief of the Great Old Ones associated with the element of Water, and the fervent rival of his half-brother Hastur, the chief elemental of the Air. His agenda not only includes his own liberation from his prison in R’lyeh but the defeat and diminution of Hastur’s earthly cult. Contrary to the maundering of some cultists, Cthulhu’s telepathic sendings are masked not by the Pacific Ocean, but by the seal carven on R’lyeh’s portals by the Elder Gods. * Cthulhu is an Outer God, the incarnation of (or a sentient facet of) gravity, one of the four fundamental forces within our space-time. * Cthulhu is a titanic entity created by the Old Ones for some unguessable purpose. As the Necronomicon says, “Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly.” Their creation draws his energy from long-lensing cosmic alignments vigintillions of years apart, and remains semi-conscious during his dormant phase. They created matrices and other hyper-geometries to limit his activities until their return, and he seeks to evade these restrictions. * Cthulhu is an infra-dimensional entity that has only a conceptual existence within the human “R-complex,” the brain stem and limbic system left over from our primordial reptilian ancestors. This is why he appears only in dreams, high-stress encounters (such as shipwrecks), and artistic impulses. He is attempting to create a critical mass of believers so that he may “emerge from R’lyeh” and open the eyes of all. * Cthulhu is a protoplasmic mass of squirming tentacles with an amorphous single-eyed head. An Outer God who has entirely filled his native dimension, R’lyeh, Cthulhu is shapeless and indistinct in our dimension. R’lyeh is tangent to our dimension at a number of hyper-geometric coordinates corresponding to locations on Earth, including Ponape and elsewhere beneath the South Pacific, Peru, Arabia, and off the coast of Massachusetts. The differential in energy between our continuum and R’lyeh creates discontinuities and madness in sentient life, even warping it into morphogenetic “fishlike” or “froglike” forms near the tangent points. This differential also creates unstable vortices at the tangent points, where human sorcerers can tap psychic or magical power.The rulebook (p 87)expressly states that it providesas many contradictory explanations and alternate versions for the Mythos heavyweights as possible. Some of these versions come directly from Lovecraft, others from lesser Mythos authors, and still others from the Call of Cthulhu rules or the perfervid imagination of the present writer. You, the Keeper, can pick and choose among them.I think this is consistent with an understanding of setting as being concerned with trope and theme rather than canon details.</blockquote>

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