PDA

View Full Version : Can you keep up an Eldritch Horror theme for a full campaign?



Yora
2013-08-19, 11:24 AM
I really like the lovecraftian style of stories where the heroes encounter and only barely defeat some horrible abominations from another world. The big problem is, especially in a game, that such things really only work well the first time you run into them, which probably is part of the reason that lovecrafts stories usually deal with only a single encounter happening to each protagonist, instead of having any reoccuring heroes that face the eldritch abominations several times.
To appear unnatural, something also has to defy the expectations of the audience, or in an RPG, the players.

Now for my campaign setting, which I'll be using for a new mini-campaign the first time since the very early concept phase, I would like to have the aberrations of the underworld to play an important role. Like the daelkyrr and quori in Eberron, the Reapers from Mass Effect, or the Borg from Star Trek. Not the big thing where everything that's happening is connected to, but a reoccuring theme

Can such a thing really be done well without the abominations simply becomming another type of monsters? With aboleths and illithids in D&D you can see that eldritch horror aspect in their basic concept, but in the end they are no weirder than a medusa or an evil nymph, or anything like that.

I assume one thing to start with it keeping the stated facts murky and not having them appear in the flesh too often. If you can explain it and anticipate its behavior (and therefore prepare effective protections and offenses), it's never really frightening or unsettling.

Running the game in Pathfinder, I consider scrapping the "Knowledge (the Planes)" skill for "Knowledge (Forbidden Lore)" from an early D&D 5th playtest version. (There are no angels, just slimy things in the underworld and weird spirits from the Dark Void. Nature spirits are part of the natural world.) But I'm not sure if that might already make things to predictable and "part of what's normal".

obryn
2013-08-19, 12:19 PM
My Call of Cthulhu games inevitably veer in a "pulp" direction sooner or later. (Even moreso when using a pulp-centric system like Savage Worlds.)

I consider 70% pulp, 30% cosmic horror and futility a good mix.

-O

Grinner
2013-08-19, 03:16 PM
I think you need to think in terms of layers. If the big secret is only one layer deep, then it takes very little effort to uncover it. But if you stack layer upon layer upon layer (coherently, mind you), then the players would need to uncover a vast web of information.

Another point. Did you ever watch The X-Files? One of the fun parts of the series was extrapolating what the whole conspiracy looked like. Create more than one bizarre race and toss the players a few curveballs about their allegiances.

Lastly, I'm not sure how great of an idea a Forbidden Lore skill is...3rd edition D&D and its derivatives are known for how easily bonus stacking can be abused. Actually, D&D seems like a bad idea altogether.

Roguenewb
2013-08-19, 03:35 PM
You can*.

*If you are clever about it.

You can't have an entire campaign of delving into ichor filled ruins of temples to things-that-should-not-be. The human mind runs into tension fatigue and will just stop worrying about it, and get used to the tension. What you *can* do is slowly reveal what's going on, and have a growing sense of eldritch horror behind the workings of the world. For example:

Level 1: Dwarves have started raiding a nearby elven settlement. The players reach the small dwarven castle, fight the dwarves you refuse to back down because "they deserve it". You get to the small office of the dwarf wizard in charge after clearing out the dozen dwarven raiders. You open the door and discover the corpse of the dwarven wizard, eyes gouged up, room slick with offal and horrible runes in blood and feces writ on the wall, calling out "Slay the star-children, for they bring the darkness". And that's it. They get paid, no explanation, no elaboration besides a single book on divinations of the future open on the dwarf's desk.

Level 3: The party is hired to escort a caravan through the woods to a distant trading outpost. Along the way, they get raided by a particularly tenacious set of wolves, who seem to display a resistance to divine magic (SR only against spells) no known templates or variants should allow this (Know:nature/religion fails to provide the know information). The last night before the party should get clear, they are attacked by the pack leader, a Horrid Wolf (super-dire wolf, Eberron Campaign Setting) who seems to understand their tactics completely, and attacks in an incredibly clever way. After he's dead, he begins to putrefy and corrupt incredibly quickly, within an hour he's melted away, and all the plants near where he died die and never grow back. When the players share this story in town, they here rumors of similiar things becoming known recently.

Level 5: The players find out about a treasure filled dungeon. They enter the dungeon, and fight their way through a succession of Elementals with the Spell Stowaway special ability, and every time they hit, they get a weak dispel magic effect. As they proceed deeper, and deeper into the dungeon, magic begins to get wierder and wierder, perhaps more and more Wild Magic zones. In the heart of the dungeon, they find the desired object on a pedestal, but the stone floor all over the base of the room is broken up and sitting uneasily, like leaves on the forest floor. A large one of the spell-warping elemental fights them in the chamber, and smashes pieces of the floor/walls away as it fights/dies. In the end, the whole incredibly ancient dungeon is revealed to have been built over the top a strange inhuman tower top, that reaches down into a lightless abyss. The desired object is knocked down into this tunnel in the fight. The players descend into this obviously alien geometery until they reach a strange chamber that looks out over a huge underground city filling with disqueting lights and strange sounds in the darkness. Magic has become so erratic as to barely function. A terrible abberation (something the party has never seen before, I recommend one of the constructs from Lords of Madness) strikes from out of the darkness with the maguffin embeded in its head. Gravity goes totally wonky, and the players have a uneasy, strange fight with this single, super hard to kill monstrosity. When they kill it and take the maguffin, the distortions get even worse, and they hear a huge hoard of things approaching in the distance. Do whatever narration it takes to get them to flee. They return to the wizard who hired them to get the item. he's gone, never to be seen again, but someone else buys the item. Research reveals the chamber they entered to be totally unknown to anyone anywhere.

Level 9: The party is arrested by the law enforcement of the town they are in, for no discernable logical reason. As they try to figure out whats wrong, they discover that the queen and has started acting very differently (assuming they can easily escape from prison, which should be possible at level 9). As they keep delving into the cause, they find out that shes taken to eating huge quantities of food and liquor, and has taken a large number of lovers in the recent period. They also discover that her servants have all dissappeared and no one has entered her chambers in weeks. They enter the chambers and find that the walls and furniture are being incorporated into some sort of organic structures that seem to radiate psionic energy and magic warping effects. When they find her inside, she is constantly babbling about endless hungers, and suddenly, she attacks them. She lashes out with strange magic and wierd attacks (find everything unique you can in Tome of Magic and Magic of Incarnum to really wierd this fight up). When she drops, a vomit-inducing spider/fetus thing drops out of the cieling, lops her head off, and slips back into its lair in the blink of an eye carrying the still babbling head. The room fills with poison. As soon as the players escape the queen's tower (where teleportation is totally nonfunctional), the whole tower twists and is gone.

Level 13: A single powerful wizard contacts the players because of their involvement in so many strange things in the last year or so (or however long the campaign has taken). The wizard informs them that he thinks something is harvesting the very essence from the mortal lifeforms of the world. The players are sent to the ruins of an ancient city where magic is really screwed up, and taint comes out of the ground and told to retrieve a staff and sphere from inside the heart of the place. Run a crazy endurance dungeon here. Run them to the limits of everything. Introduce the taint rules, and push them to the edges of total corruption and depravity. Push the players to the absolute limit of their own focus. Raise the tension to incredible levels. And do it all with totally normal animals, vermin, and magical beasts. When the players absolutely can't take it anymore, let them get the treasures, and make a seal break/mystical alignment/eclipse, and raid your books for the strangest and most offputting undead and aberrations you can throw at them. The escape isn't about grinding them down like before, its about killing them. Getting out should only be two or three very difficult encounters. Enough to show your hand as to the horrible monsters you are going to be using, but not enough to make them routine. Make it as hard and fast and nasty as possible, all while keeping the taint and time pressure up. When they finally escape, hopefully weeks later in game, they find the outside world warping and changing into some sort of cthulhu-tastic alternate dimension.

Level 17: They/their wizard friend has tracked the heart of the changes and incursion to a massive cerebrotic blot (Dragon...some number, can't remember) and they need to take the two items to the core of that, and use the spell disjunction on the two items and the blot core to force the overlay to stop and the planes to go back to normal, saving their world. Run your standard Eldritch Horror dungeon here. They get the ichor, the alien geometries, the horrible things-that-should-not-be, all the tropes, and in the end save the world (or not :smallcool: )

Mix in normal adventures between the Eldritch Horror arc ones.

And that's how you make eldritch horror last a whole campaign. Little glimpses that grow stronger and stronger, but never overly common. If you do it well, each of those adventures has a "horrible snapshot" moment that will jolt your players.

Good luck with your campaign!

vasharanpaladin
2013-08-19, 03:40 PM
Lords of Madness provides a rough outline for this kind of game. Basically, if you have five major encounters throughout the campaign, the usual "heroic" route would have you start with the weakest at EL+0 and end with the strongest at EL+4.

What you'd want, instead, is to have the first key encounter at EL+5, then one with a lower EL, and then skip up to +3, +4 and +5 again.

hamlet
2013-08-19, 04:04 PM
There's some good advice above, so I'll just add a bit here:

1) Keep a light touch. Too heavy with the Eldritch Horror and it becomes old hat. It should be a recurring theme that gets just a little stronger now and then and then fades into the background where the players have hopefully comfortably relegated it.

2) Consider instituting a set of "sanity" rules. Nothing too heavy handed, but every time the characters brush up too hard against this kind of stuff, it should leave a mark on them. Maybe a corruption type mechanic? Just something to remind them that sanity/purity is a fragile thing. Though this is hardly a requirement, it helps a bit.

3) Most important, keep in mind the difference between "Horror" and "Fear." There's a subtle difference between the two. You're trying to play on the former, not the later. Any DM can frighten his players, but it takes a special sort to truly horrify them. Also keep in mind that horror is not equivalent to salaciousness or neccessarily smears of blood, ofal, and feces. Horror can be, as is the case with Lovecraft himself, as simple as the realization that Humanity's place in the universe is absolutely nothign special and that there are things out there grander and vaster than any single human can, or should, comprehend.

Yora
2013-08-19, 04:28 PM
I am thinking of going with a notion that deep below the ground there's another world (actually another layer of the material plane) inhabited by ancient aberrations of which many are incredibly powerful. They generally don't have any intention of comming up and devouring the world of mortals, but it's better to not be poking around in the deepest regions of the earth because something might come looking.
There's groups of cultists who are facinated by the Great Ancients because they appear to be eternal and unchanging over the eons, while in the world of humanoids things are constantly changing with civilizations disappearing and species becomming extinct, to be replaced by something else. But by seeking out the eternal ancients, they hope to become closer to immortality and perfection. Of course, anyone else thinks worshipping giant slugs and squids as glorious beings of ultimate perfection is completely crazy. Normally the aberrations are staying quietly on their side, but some people trying to invite them to come over is asking for really big trouble.

In that way, the aberrations are not a threat to the world as long as they are not disturbed. But there's also some nutcases who are trying their very best to get their attention.

The rough outline that I have in mind for the campaign so far is that in a remote and unremarkable valley, an elven hunter discovers are small overgrown cave where someone has hidden an ancient artifact. He opens the box, and its reality warping corruption turns him into a monster and nearby forest creatures into his ravenous thralls. He closes the box and makes his lair in a nearby ruined keep, from which he starts attacking outlying farms until eventually the PCs arrive and slay his thralls. Eventually they face and kill him, but nobody has any clue what he is, just that he possesses some belongings of the missing elf.
At a later point, the PCs will somehow also find the cave with the artifact, but get a very strong compulsion not to open it. (The elf was completely insane to do so.) What they eventually do with it depends on the players descision.
But once the artifact or at least word of its existance has returned to civilization, people will hear of it and some cultists in the region be interested in getting it. By making the leader of the cultists not obviously (and neither actually) evil, the PCs might even work together with them to deal with the strange events that occasionally happen since the box was opened. And at some point I want to introduce a group of derro, whose leader has been invited as a "consultant", but has her own agenda as well. However the cult leaders assistant is evil and doesn't want to study the artifact to learn more about the aberrations, but to claim its powers for herself and use it to create a horde of thralls. And if he still lives, she will eventually murder the leader, maybe even as a sacrifice for some ritual.
And then things really go downhill, possibly with the PCs allying with the remaining cultist to stop the horror.
The artifact itself is a small box made from a jade-like mineral on which no molds, lichens, or algae can crow, which is used by aboleths to build their underwater citadels. And inside the box is the actual artifact, a piece of flesh torn from the body of a Great Ancient in some battle in the ancient past. Having amazing regenerative abilities, it is still alive and trying to reattach itself to the body. And in permanent agony. It has no mind, but it still sends out mental waves of massive pain when the box is open. After some time it ran out of energy and went comatose, but when the elf opened the box, it was able to feed on his mental energies and those of the forest creatures, returning to more strength than the box can completely contain. Eventually, the assistant will try to make the piece grow into her body. In the meantime, the box still causes supernatural disturbances around it. And now that I think of it, at some point later during the storyline, dropping the box hard or hitting it accidentally with a weapon should make it start to crack. :smallbiggrin:

I love this line from Mass Effect 2:

"Chandana said the ship was dead. We trusted him. He was right. But even a dead god can dream. A god — a real god — is a verb. Not some old man with magic powers. It's a force. It warps reality just by being there. It doesn't have to want to. It doesn't have to think about it. It just does.
The god's mind is gone but it still dreams."

If the assistant does successfully merge with the artifact, even killing her does not destroy it. It will still regenerate and unsuccessfully try to merge with the main body. In the end, the PCs will have to bring it back to the underworld where it can do no more harm to the world of humans.

They key will be to create some strange occourances related to the artifacts presence without immediately giving away that they are connected to it. Not until much later they learn that it's all because that wretched green box they brought back from that cave and that's been sitting somewhere on a shelf for safekeeping.

JusticeZero
2013-08-20, 06:49 AM
Most people who want to do "Lovecraftian" do not understand Lovecraft.

They get caught up in "Sanity rules" and the like. The whole point of Lovecraftian is this: There are absurdly powerful beings in the universe. They are motivated to do various things. We have no idea what those things are, or why. Those absurdly powerful beings do not like us. However, they do not hate us, either. In fact, they do not even notice or care about us. Furthermore, they have good reason not to know or care about us, because we are, in fact, completely irrelevant. The entire body of Lovecraft's work is to try to examine the thoughts and feelings of, say, an ant living in a nest inside the wall of a house full of people. It's a squishy and slimy entry into the same realm as The Cold Equations.

The way you described things looks fine to me.

Yora
2013-08-20, 10:27 AM
Babylon 5 has that great scene in an early episode with the one guy who has a slight idea of what's really going on behind the scenes. http://youtu.be/ZLZW8Deq8vE?t=35s
They keep it low on the horror, since it's a TV show, but I think they did understand quite well how to make Great Old Ones work.

hamlet
2013-08-20, 10:48 AM
Yes, an excellent scene. And one that becomes more poignant later on when that particular gentleman starts to realize the true shape of things on a wider scale and his people's place in it.

Roguenewb
2013-08-20, 11:51 AM
Most people who want to do "Lovecraftian" do not understand Lovecraft.

They get caught up in "Sanity rules" and the like. The whole point of Lovecraftian is this: There are absurdly powerful beings in the universe. They are motivated to do various things. We have no idea what those things are, or why. Those absurdly powerful beings do not like us. However, they do not hate us, either. In fact, they do not even notice or care about us. Furthermore, they have good reason not to know or care about us, because we are, in fact, completely irrelevant. The entire body of Lovecraft's work is to try to examine the thoughts and feelings of, say, an ant living in a nest inside the wall of a house full of people. It's a squishy and slimy entry into the same realm as The Cold Equations.

The way you described things looks fine to me.

The problem with focusing on that in 3.5 is that God's have stats and wizards can match them...

On earth, gods are invisible and unknowable, lovecrafts innovation was to suggest that God might be inhuman. That doesn't work in 3.5 where I know God is fairly humanoid. If you say there are super gods in the far realm that are inhuman and unknowable.... Well, divine salient abilities make it a pretty moot point. Some things are knowable and avoiding Ao is pretty hard. It might work better in eberron or dark sun where the gods are remote.

Because of this, most 3.5 eldritch horror focuses on the trappings and allows the players to provide some of the punch and hope they don't notice the seams and illogic

Frozen_Feet
2013-08-20, 12:07 PM
The entire body of Lovecraft's work is to try to examine the thoughts and feelings of, say, an ant living in a nest inside the wall of a house full of people a clinically depressed person.

FYT. There is a subset of people who actually feel the world is hostile, meaningless place where nothing they do matters. They usually start down that path when a series of bad events shatters whatever faith and beliefs they had, and they usually end it by committing suicide, or attempting it and being put in asylum and on meds.

Cosmic horror is about nihilism winning. The tentacles, gods, aliens and surreal scenes and such are just trappings.

But the "Lovecraftian" or "eldritch" feel does also contain body and surreal horror in addition to the cosmic flavor. If you want to hold a whole campaign, remember to vary these from session to session. One time, it's all "psionic squids burrow into your BRAIN", next, it's more "all the buildings and passages are wrong. You've been walking in circles for hours despire walking in a straight line". And occasionally it is "nothing you do matters. The world is a cold, harsh place that doesn't care about you", with no gods or monsters in sight. You can have cosmic horror with just humans as the villains.

One thing, though. If you're aiming for a true cosmic horror campaign, then you must internalize that your players can't really win. The best outcome is a Pyrrhic Victory somewhere down the road. More likely, it's an anti-climax, with everyone dead for stupid reasons. Remove that, and you severely undermine the horror.

You can have occasional hope spots spread throughout the campaign, though. In fact, they are vital to prevent your PCs from self-terminating too soon. But every hopeful moment should just be calm before the storm, with something worse always lurking behind a corner.

Brookshw
2013-08-20, 01:06 PM
If you're unfamiliar with it there was a 3.5 book "Elder Evils" that specifically addresses this type of campaign, I would highly recommend picking up a copy. As many here have said, its important for such encounters to be rare rather than a monster of the week. Foreshadowing the arrival of some great evil over the course of gradual discovery adds great depth and anticipation towards the eventual arrival. Cults and other build up are good. If you really wanted to do the insanity bit there are some rules for such in Heroes of Horror and Ravenloft I believe that would likely work.

But check out Elder Evils, very useful source.

Roguenewb
2013-08-20, 05:44 PM
Elder Evils has a ton of great campaign ideas and good stuff. However, it doesn't actually do eldritch horror all that well. Pretty much statted bad guys who just wanna wreck everything, they just have different ways to wreck stuff.

Brookshw
2013-08-20, 06:04 PM
Elder Evils has a ton of great campaign ideas and good stuff. However, it doesn't actually do eldritch horror all that well. Pretty much statted bad guys who just wanna wreck everything, they just have different ways to wreck stuff.

I can't completely disagree but the omen foreshadowing suggestions help and the semi-campaign layouts I found useful advise regarding pacing. You are correct that there can be a certain lack of "horror".

Thinking about it a bit further the psuedonatural template would probably help some, when the random guy suddenly morphs into some kinda tentacle monster it can set players back a bit.

Calmar
2013-08-20, 06:38 PM
You can*.

*If you are clever about it.

[snip]

Good luck with your campaign!

That's a really cool outline. I think you manage combining the feel of a Lovecraft story with the realities of playing D&D really well. :smallsmile:


Most people who want to do "Lovecraftian" do not understand Lovecraft.

They get caught up in "Sanity rules" and the like. The whole point of Lovecraftian is this: There are absurdly powerful beings in the universe. They are motivated to do various things. We have no idea what those things are, or why. Those absurdly powerful beings do not like us. However, they do not hate us, either. In fact, they do not even notice or care about us. Furthermore, they have good reason not to know or care about us, because we are, in fact, completely irrelevant. The entire body of Lovecraft's work is to try to examine the thoughts and feelings of, say, an ant living in a nest inside the wall of a house full of people. It's a squishy and slimy entry into the same realm as The Cold Equations.

The way you described things looks fine to me.

I agree. I would add that Lovecraft's stories, it appears, are driven by xenophobia. It's not about the horros being from space or having an alien physique of tentacles and horrible eyes, but their horridness stems from the simple fact that these things exist while they are incongruous and opposite to science, the Bible, and 'everything that is right and well in the world'. Sometimes the horror is things that appear mundane to modern gamers, like reptilians, or deformed people.

Roguenewb
2013-08-20, 08:41 PM
That's a really cool outline. I think you manage combining the feel of a Lovecraft story with the realities of playing D&D really well. :smallsmile:



I agree. I would add that Lovecraft's stories, it appears, are driven by xenophobia. It's not about the horros being from space or having an alien physique of tentacles and horrible eyes, but their horridness stems from the simple fact that these things exist while they are incongruous and opposite to science, the Bible, and 'everything that is right and well in the world'. Sometimes the horror is things that appear mundane to modern gamers, like reptilians, or deformed people.

Thanks =)

On the second count, I would just bring up that Lovecraft seemed quite convinced that these things had something to do with science, and that science could bring them to us, so they might match science, but be against the bible/common wisdom, which Lovecraft tends to keep seperate from scientific knowledge. The parallel would be that of Arcane Prepared Magic. I love the idea of wizards going so tier 1 they ruin everything for everyone. Doesn't someone keep a quote in their sig around here that wizards can find whole new ways to suck waaaaay beyond fighters?

Palanan
2013-08-20, 08:57 PM
On that quote, it's Flickerdart who has it sigged, and JaronK who was evidently the author:


Originally Posted by JaronK
Frankly, a Wizard can suck even more than a Fighter could ever dream of sucking. A Fighter can stab himself to death, but only a Wizard could Plane Shift to some horrible far realm to be tortured for an eternity of insanity.

Also:


Originally Posted by RogueNewb
*horror campaign outline*

Consider this plundered.

:smalltongue:

.

Roguenewb
2013-08-21, 08:09 PM
On that quote, it's Flickerdart who has it sigged, and JaronK who was evidently the author:



Also:



Consider this plundered.

:smalltongue:

.

Thanks for finding the quote. Enjoy my 80 second campaign idea =p

Arkhosia
2013-08-22, 06:26 PM
I would make 6 different versions, all assigned a number, of the monster for each level he is encountered, and when he is encountered roll a d6. The stat from the version of that number is used.
And also, give him myriad abilities and have him only use a couple and no repetition.

GungHo
2013-08-23, 08:04 AM
Eldritch Horror works better on a slow burn where things are gradually revealed and there are plots within plots. You can't show all the cards in one session and expect that to have any impact.

To take a non-Lovecraft take on it... think about how the original Borg were revealed on Star Trek The Next Generation. At first it was a few tales of starbases/colonies on the edge of the Federation losing contact. Then the Enterprise went to investigate a colony that had more or less been carved away from a planet. They clashed with the Romulans at that point, but they never figured out what actually happened to the planet. It didn't come to a head until Q came along and showed them the Borg directly as an unstoppable force of nature and they had to run like hell, with the ominous warning "now they know you're out there, and they're coming". When the Borg actually showed up, one cube nearly destroyed the entire Federation fleet, with the promise that there could be thousands more of those things, floating out on the edge of the quadrant. Later on, by the time you got to the movies and Voyager, they became mooks... which is a cautionary tale about how Eldrich Evils can get away from you and become mundane.

Mass Effect was another non-Lovecraftian look at it that ultimately also failed because they tried to explain everything.

However, the lessons you can learn from that are simple:

Eldrich Evils can't really take the spotlight for too long.
It's important that there are other complications along the way to keep that spotlight moving.
Once the Evil or its agent is directly revealed, it needs to be worthy of fear.
You need to be careful about anything else being just as powerful as the Evil, or humanizing the Evil in anyway.
There is a point of no return past which the Evil is just another dragon/orc/lich and no one cares any more.

BayardSPSR
2013-08-23, 08:35 AM
Ideas.

I am also stealing some of that. :smallbiggrin:

Osafiny
2013-08-24, 03:36 AM
I'm a huge Lovecraft fan, and I have to say that this is a great thread. I generally run Call of Cthulhu for my friends with Chaosium's system, but I've been building up a d20 fantasy game on the side. The general advice I see in this thread (Slow burning, light touches, atmospheric horror > jump scares) is spot on with experience I have had with my group in various systems, and I wanted to throw my hat in and say that you are doing God's work here. (Which god is up for debate...)

Something I learned running CoC: Rule 0 can be a powerful atmospheric tool, but be very careful not overuse it. Chaosium's rules can be veeeery vauge at times, and I find myself home-brewing vast ammounts of rules and content to fill in major gaps even in pre-constructed modules. When I moved into Fantasy, Pathfinder specifically, I found that such a carefully balanced and structured system can't handle as much GM interference. However, the best way to get across the message that "Some of this stuff is way beyond us and resistance is hopeless" in a game with readily available magic and superhuman strength can be flipping the rules and structure they thought they were secure in around on them. The most important rule I keep for myself when venturing beyond RaW is to never inhibit or negate your player's strengths.

Random Example: Don't make the insanity inducing monolith simply indestructible, just make it incredibly tough and have it blast out deadly psychic waves when damaged. There is an artifact that can neutralize the monolith's madness plague that the PCs can adventure for, but it can only last for as long as the artifact is undisturbed. Bingo bango, you have a looming threat that will trouble your players constantly. Eventually they'll be beefy level 15s that come back with mind shielding magic and an adamantine sledgehammer, but the monolith was just a plug on an ancient well of Eldritch Abominations! Now they have to find a replacement monolith and lug it back (all the while suffering its supernatural shenanigans) before the REALLY big monster at the bottom of the well wakes up and ends the world. Even when they fight off the last of the aberrations and get the monolith in place, there's still the monolith poisoning the countryside all over again! Result: Induced despair without neutering the players.

Rumpus
2013-08-24, 05:49 AM
Eldritch horror is really tough to pull off anymore. When Lovecraft was writing, Western civilization dominated the planet and reason supposedly prevailed in in Western society. Against that backdrop, the idea of aliens, ancient civilizations, and things from beyond the borders of reality seem downright horrific.

In our post-Star Trek, post-X-Files, post-WoD world, the idea that coming face-to-face with an alien or monster would inevitably shatter your mind seems... quaint. If reading Lovecraft sends chills up your spine, you probably don't consume much modern horror.

Also, D&D is a lousy system for running horror games unless you are running a very low-magic, low-level campaign. By the time he hits 5th level, a fighter can probably beat up a tiger bare-handed, and barring terrible build choices, he's probably the least powerful member of the party.

Finally, most gamer groups just aren't suited for horror play. If there's a single cut-up in the group (and there always is) it will be impossible to maintain a tense horror atmosphere with him cracking wise. I watched The Exorcist for the first time with a buddy who sat there laughing through the whole thing, and he made it pretty much impossible to get into.

So, if you still want to proceed, here's some suggestions:

Primarily non-magical classes. The unknown is a threat, and magic should definitely be an unknown. Statted up, most of Lovecraft's protagonists would be Experts.

Whatever the ultimat threat is, either create it from scratch or re-skin it to the point where your players won't know what it is. If you want to use illithids, that's fine, but reimagine them as just the heads, floating around like beholders. This may or may not freak out your players, but it will keep them guessing.

Yora
2013-08-24, 07:01 AM
It's a bit similar to what happened to cyberpunk in the late 90s.
In the 80s, it was all about how industry and technology turns the world into a toxic wasteland where everyone lives in the gutter and technology is a government tool of opression. Everything that was left was to fight the oppressive dictatorship until your last breath and go out with a bang. But then many of the proposed technologies became part of life and instead of making life miserable for everyone, standards of living actually improved significantly and environmental polution got reigned in. With the help of new technologies. People wanted technology. People loved technology.
So eventually writers shifted their visions to what's very unimaginatively called post-cyberpunk, where the world is squeaky clean and almost everyone reasonably well fed and cared for. Governments are still turning corrupt and use technology as tools of opression, but in a sneaky and quiet way. And the source of it isn't evil people in charge, but complacent people letting them do what they like. The protagonists usually don't fight the system, they try to manipulate the system for their own goals.

Like classic lovecraftian horror, classic cyberpunk doesn't work anymore. Western culture has faced the challenge of dealing with outer space and the origins of life on Earth, and the challenge of advanced electronics, and we've come to terms with them and made them part of our normal image of the world and life.
Like cyberpunk, if you want to have a classic lovecraftian story, everyone has to be on board that for now both the characters and the audience are assumed to have a different view of the world as we do. You have to pretend being scared instead of actually being scared, which with good fiction is still very good entertainment.

But I would say, you can still create things that work similar to what people did a century ago. You just have to use different methods. The fact that another dimension exist and that it is inhabited by ancient creatures is no longer an even midly disconcerning thing in itself. You have to do some additional work and put some effort into it why this particular creature from this particular dimension is such a horrifying menace to us now.
Prime example would be The Thing. When this movie was made, people already knew Star Trek, and Star Wars and even had Alien. Even 30 years ago, the idea of an intelligent creature from another planet wasn't something that would scare people, even if it had a bizzare biology. But that movie is still weird crazy as hell and one of the most disturbing mainstream movies. Not because it's an alien, but because it does very horrible things.

hamishspence
2013-08-24, 07:25 AM
I personally thought Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives did a good job when it came to "Lovecraftian themes in the computer era".