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View Full Version : What did the Eldritch Horrors ever do to us?



Yora
2015-01-12, 09:57 AM
I am having a bit of a problem with making aberrations, Old Ones, and eldritch abominations actually appear terrifying. What would actually be the worst thing that could happen? Getting eaten? Tigers and crocodiles do that too, there is nothing supernaturally horrific to it.
Demons usually would drag people to a hell where they are going to suffer endless torment, as part of the way the universe is build.
And fey creatures often kidnap people to take them back to their realms and presumedly turn them into one of them or some kind of beast to serve them.

But what about "cosmic horror" creatures? Once you got over the fact that they exist, what's the worst they could do to you other than just kill you? Without an interest to collect souls, they are not really much different from normal wild animals with some tentacles and extra eyes.

Kaveman26
2015-01-12, 10:16 AM
Perhaps it's the unknown. Yes a tiger may eat you. A demon may torture you. What if a cosmic horror touches you with that tentacle and you spend millennia in twisted insanity never knowing reality from phantasm? You spend countless lives remembering every gasping last breath only to be returned to your still living body with the memory of a thousand agonizing deaths and the creature was just curious what the color blue smelled like? They are so utterly alien that we may never understand purpose or motive. As people we want to know the why of things. Eldritch horrors don't function with a reason we can discern.

Feddlefew
2015-01-12, 10:20 AM
What everyone does wrong is they try to make all the cosmic horrors actively malevolent. Some ideas:

Did you ever make an ant farm when you were a kid? Or make one of those bug jars where you throw some leaves and sticks in an old pickle jar and poke some holes in the lid? I tried the latter a few times, but all the grasshoppers would be dead by morning for some reason.

What if there was a creature that only knew how to communicate by fusing its nervous system to another's? What if it happened to be made out of fire?

There's a thing in the mountain that it eats stories. Nobody's seen it, but everyone knows it's there.

A group of entities who don't understand a concept of fiction discover an old theater, and proceed to reenact the plays they find within using their (very much solid) shadows as stage hands and the city as their stage and cast.

mikeejimbo
2015-01-12, 10:46 AM
It's funny that you should mention fey. In many ways they are the prototype for cosmic horror. Depending on the tale, they're not necessarily malevolent. But they are alien, and their logic is different from ours. When you say "what can Eldritch horrors do that fey can't? " the answer could be "Nothing." By all means, use fey as the alien mind/unknown horror.

Red Fel
2015-01-12, 11:02 AM
The thing about classic Lovecraftian cosmic horror wasn't just the terror of these hideous horrifying monsters. Yes, they gobble us up like snacky-cakes, but that's incidental. It's why they do it that's truly terrifying - it's that we are so beneath their notice that they barely even process the genocide.

Part of the core of cosmic horror was the existential element. The notion that humans are so pitifully insignificant in the grand scale of things; that we are little more than cosmic dust, and that there are beings who are aware of that; that we ourselves, upon becoming aware of these beings, become aware of our infinitesimal nature.

Another part of cosmic horror is the idea of things which should not be. Yes, there were bizarre monstrous star-shaped creatures in distant cosmos where the land was violet and the skies were fuschia, but that's just aesthetic. It's when things take on unearthly and unnatural properties. When large things fit within smaller ones; when houses are built with geometries that cause you headaches when you stare at them for long enough; when tastes sound like green and textures look loud and colors smell like opera; when the very presence of a life so bold and strange actually causes life around it to decay, not because it's dying, but simply because it ceases to be what it once was; when standing in their presence for more than a few moments takes those precious strands of identity labeled "human" and shreds them, rips them to pieces, and then sews them together into a bizarre quilt of nightmares, madness and despair. That's what happens when things should not be.

In terms of combat, though? The Old Ones are just monsters. Terrifying, unkillable monsters which should not be and which remind us constantly to despair of our insignificance.

Zalphon
2015-01-12, 11:37 AM
The horror of the Eldritch Horrors isn't that they can kill you. It's that you're powerless. The only hope of survival is it not noticing you, because you're so insignificant.

DoomHat
2015-01-12, 12:24 PM
Oh the possibilities are uncounted for what damage a "cosmic horror" can do.

-Over the course of the day before you meet the thing, you and the other members of the party keep having horrifying visions. You turn and for a moment one of the party's heads has been severed, hideous gurgling sounds coming from the neck stump. Then they're fine. It begins raining blood. Then is never was.

You meet the thing in a castle. The walls are constantly changing when you aren't looking directly at them. The place has become a labyrinth and it is an aberrant scuttling Minotaur. The longer you stay here the more you find familiar rooms. You realize these are places from your childhood. As the chase goes on your memories become indistinct, or perhaps they are getting clearer.

You and everyone else come to realize that you never entered the labyrinth. You've always been here. Being hunted. Being killed. Every time you die you forget, and find yourself walking toward the castle, under some fresh delusion of a goal inside. Then you'll be hunted, and realize that you've been there your whole life. It will catch you and kill you. Then you'll forget and find yourself walking toward the castle...

Or!
How about some simple grey goo.
Someone summons a shuggoth! Good for them. They get eaten first. The shuggoth grows larger from adding their biomass to its own. It eats more things. Gets bigger. At some point, in order to expedite the process, it divides its mass.

Hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of these things are wiggling around, eating every living thing they touch. Adventures and armies step in to stop them, but shuggoths are shapeshifters which can assume the qualities and abilities of anything they've ever eaten. Little can stand against hoards of huge 14th lvl barbarian dire owlbears with fire-proof troll regeneration who cast 7th level spells while raging.

OR!
There's an imaginary creature that's eating peoples identities. Only children, the insane, and those effected by a hallucinogen can see or interact with it. You can also find it in your dreams if you go to sleep near it. If it bites you it tears a way something that was true about you.

It can eat your family with a bite. Your parents, bothers and sisters and so on will still exist somewhere, but you've forgotten who they are and they've forgotten you.

It can eat your favorite things. You can no longer remember having enjoyed any kind of food or song or place or season, and you'll never find one. Everything is "okay" but you've never encountered anything "Great".

It can eat your face. You still have a mouth and nose and eyes and all that, and they still have shapes and colors and everything, but no one can ever recognize you by your face. Everyone will always need to be reminded who you are every time they look at you. They always have and always will.

The only way to kill it is to convince everyone to stop thinking about it at once. If even one person is imagining it, it can't be killed.

BeerMug Paladin
2015-01-12, 12:49 PM
Not sure what game or what type of setting you're planning on using, but it seems that the thing most essential for an eldritch horror is something that violates the accepted understanding of what is normal for the setting. Which can vary a lot according to the setting.

If you want to put them alongside demons, fey and other magical/supernatural things, I don't really know what to suggest. Those creatures already have magical properties that aren't 'natural' for most creatures. Probably the best you could do is to give them unique properties that the other creatures do not have.

Yora
2015-01-12, 01:01 PM
It's funny that you should mention fey. In many ways they are the prototype for cosmic horror. Depending on the tale, they're not necessarily malevolent. But they are alien, and their logic is different from ours. When you say "what can Eldritch horrors do that fey can't? " the answer could be "Nothing." By all means, use fey as the alien mind/unknown horror.

When it comes to natural spirits, there is one really big advantage you can have: A shaman.
Shamans are professional experts who are able to interprete what has the spirits upset and what can be done to avoid upsetting them or to appease their anger. A shaman can perform a ritual that makes a harmful spirit leave your house or give you an amulet that allows you to travel through a spirits lair without being attacked. You may not have the slightest idea how a pinch of salt makes a spirit go away or why a spirit might be perfectly okay with people stomping through its home if they carry an iron key on a string around their neck, but the shaman knows that it works and with his help you're able to live your life without getting too much bothered by the spirits.
They are completely alien, but they can be dealt with in an orderly manner.

Now assuming there is a different type of spirits that are a total mystery to shamans, it would get a lot more complicated and scarier.

I think ultimately, the root of all fear is the doubt that a certain action could either save you, or make the situation even worse. Run or hide? Fight or flight? One might save you, the other kill you.
When you know what approach has the best chance, a situation is only dangerous, but not frightening. You might still die, but you are free of doubt that you get killed because you should have done something else. When dealing with animals and people, we at least believe we have a pretty good understanding of how to read their mood, what they want, and what makes them angry; in what way their bodies would enable them to hurt you, and what things would injure and kill them. And I think the fear of fey (as well as clowns) comes from not being sure you are reading their mood correctly. If they ask you a question, will a yes or a no make them happy or angry? You can never know.

Kaveman and DoomHat have some good ideas there: In the presence of eldritch horrors, things do not appear to happen in causal ways. Things simply happen and you can't figure out how they are happening or what kind of purpose they might have. In such situations, you can't make any kind of plan or calculated response, because apparently the rules by which everything works keep changing all the time. Maybe the thing can climb or fly. Maybe it can see in total darkness, and even if it needs eyes, you might not even be sure where its eyes are.
Against fey, you might have a good chance to save yourself by doing what your grandmother told you. Against a truly alien being, there really isn't anything but hoping that it doesn't care. You can't even try to "not be noticed", because anything you do or even not do might actually cause it to take notice.
That seems like a pretty decent approach.


The thing about classic Lovecraftian cosmic horror wasn't just the terror of these hideous horrifying monsters. Yes, they gobble us up like snacky-cakes, but that's incidental. It's why they do it that's truly terrifying - it's that we are so beneath their notice that they barely even process the genocide.

Part of the core of cosmic horror was the existential element. The notion that humans are so pitifully insignificant in the grand scale of things; that we are little more than cosmic dust, and that there are beings who are aware of that; that we ourselves, upon becoming aware of these beings, become aware of our infinitesimal nature.
While that works in Lovecraft land, I don't think it can be applied to Fantasy. (Though admitedly, I did not limit the question to fantasy.) In a fantasy world, people already know about spirits, demons, and personal gods. They are already accustomed to be utterly helples against powerful beings with abilities and intelects beyond imagining. In the context of Lovecrafts stories, the idea that humans might be insignificant is horrifying. In an average fantasy world, everyone is fully aware of that and proabably never considered it could be any other way.

Broken Twin
2015-01-12, 01:51 PM
Eldritch Horror and Heroic Fantasy don't really work well together, especially in a standard fantasy world.

With true eldritch horror, there's no winning. At the very best, you can hope for Pyrrhic victory. But even that is, in the long run, only temporary. The things of the Far Realm corrupt and destroy everything they touch. Not out of malice, but because mortals are literally like mindless insects to them. They don't want to eat us, they don't want our souls. We're just in their way, or they're bored, or we're just going insane because of proximity.

Yora
2015-01-12, 03:16 PM
Not sure what game or what type of setting you're planning on using, but it seems that the thing most essential for an eldritch horror is something that violates the accepted understanding of what is normal for the setting. Which can vary a lot according to the setting.

If you want to put them alongside demons, fey and other magical/supernatural things, I don't really know what to suggest. Those creatures already have magical properties that aren't 'natural' for most creatures. Probably the best you could do is to give them unique properties that the other creatures do not have.

Splitting the arberrations and asigning them to either fey or demons might actually work best for me. I think the main reason I originally wanted to include them in the first place was because I love aboleths. And I think I can work them into a sub-group of fey, similar to an aquatic version of this guy:
http://new4.fjcdn.com/comments/+yeah+_709c5960a3e8cfc4f8b96dd9d5c207ca.jpg
Just spirits from the very darkest and nasties corners of nature.
Like Deva and Asura, Aedra and Daedra, Seelie and Unseelie, Gods and Primordials, and so on. All the really freaky reality warping stuff would be demons from a completely different realm of existance.

Segev
2015-01-12, 04:01 PM
Aboleths, in particular, are "horrors" of the type that is older than old, has forgotten more than even dragonkind has ever learned (and remembered still more), and to a degree attack the concept of identity because they are born with the memories of their ancestors and, if they did not have physical evidence of one being physically immature, parent and offspring would not be able to tell which was "really" the parent.

They are understandable monsters, to humans, to the extent that they are selfish and predatory. They enjoy having slaves to worship them and lavish them with attention. This is not alien to human thought. They are terrifying because of their ability not just to enslave the mind, but to render the body unable to survive outside of their watery embrace. They make you dependent on their mucous to breathe in the water they have made your skin unable to survive without, and that same mucous makes you unable to survive without the water...which you will need to go back to the Aboleth to continue to be able to breathe.

They're horrific because they are older than memory, they are hard to wrap your head around (without having to go into non-euclidean geometries or the like), and they're terrifying in how thoroughly they enslave their victims. They combine body horror with a minor bit of existential horror. They have a longer view than even most immortal beings.

goto124
2015-01-12, 08:19 PM
You could have a variation of eternity- everything repeats itself over and over, your wife is eternally pregnant, your plants are eternally budding but never flowering, nothing ever changes...

And what happens if someone tries to go off the rails? Perhaps they die. Or reality warps just enough to put them back on the rails. Or they never have the urge to go oht of routine in the first place.

Also, this could be related:


My worst DM was also my first, and my longest DM (I have almost exclusively DM'd games since, though not by choice - we are the only two DM's on-island who have ever held long-running campaigns. There is a dearth of DMs on this island). Since the game was over a year long, and it's late, I won't go into a long-winded exposition of the entire campaign and its dissolution, or even everything that this DM did wrong, but instead focus on the most damning element of it.

I want to preface this by saying that there were actually elements of this game that were quite fun, and remained so for quite awhile, which is why my involvement in this campaign lasted for over a year. One of the biggest positives that kept me in the game was my total immersion in the detail of the world: the world had an exquisitely detailed, feature-filled overworld map available to all of us, complete with basically every civilization larger than a hamlet or thorpe mapped out. Our village of origin was comprised of about 300 people, and every last one of them had names, genealogies, and noted relationships with at least a few other people in the town - and we even got to help build our own families as part of this town. You see, this campaign was to be set in the same world as previous campaigns run by this DM for other players, so much of the world was already made and quite exquisitely detailed. Not everything would have this level of detail (though the published adventures that made up a lot of our low-level adventuring did have a lot of detail), but things like this had me hyped for the campaign early on, and kept me going for quite awhile.

Everyone was part of the same group of friends, more or less, which allowed me to put up with a lot when things started going south.

Each of us was required to be a Good-aligned human in our late teens, and our initial group consisted of:
A Wizard, played by myself;
A Scout, played by a longtime friend of the DM, who was the party's leader as appointed by the DM;
A Druid, played by the girlfriend of the Scout and also longtime friend of the DM;
A Fighter, who was principally friends with the Scout; and
A Cleric, who was principally friends with the Fighter.
Later, we would be joined by:
A Bardbarian, played by my childhood bully, and at the time my college bully;
A Sorceress, played by my girlfriend; and
A Bard, played by the girlfriend of the Fighter.
Of these players, only the Bardbarian would stick around for long.

Our very first session involved us stumbling out of the woods behind the village, down a hill, and into a clearing, where we see a mysterious cloaked man open a secret door and disappear into it. The secret door was in the side of a mountain which, as the fates would have it, was part of an as-yet-unexplained catastrophe which our village had experienced ten years ago. Inside, we faced a flood of rats trying to escape the new light that had been forged out; to our right, a chest guarded by a triggered trap in a room with two bats; to our left, a statue which, upon closer inspection, has a cursed head that detaches and flies around the room, attacking the party with eye beams; and finally, further ahead, a sarcophagus, presumably belonging to the owner of this tomb, which is missing a crucial item atop the sarcophagus (noted by missing dust lines) and contains an orc's skeleton, which bursts out and begins attacking. The hooded man has already disappeared.

The game started off pretty well, and stayed pretty well for awhile. It was *very* railroady, but I didn't know any better at the time; this was my first game ever (and the same was true for everyone but the Scout and Druid, who had only played with this DM before). For most of us, this campaign was a totally unique experience, and we were super excited to be a part of it.

For most of us.

After awhile, I began to notice a few odd things that kept happening throughout the game. The Scout and Druid would refer to events that hadn't happened yet, sometimes in the past tense. The two of them, in addition to the DM, would talk about something called a "beta campaign" from time to time. Additionally, the DM would get angry and begin introducing fiat solutions to stop cold any progress happening in a direction that wasn't on the rails, which the Scout (who, I must remind you, was the party leader) would hurriedly strongly back up, which would eventually get the group back in line and on the rails.

This culminated, for me, in an event with a startling realization. We were set to clear out an orc hideout that was becoming a problem for the nearby village because reasons. As soon as we cleared out the above-ground enemies and entered the hideout, the Druid player turned to the DM and exclaimed, "is this where we get Thog?!" to which the DM nodded and said yes. This left the Scout and the Druid overjoyed, and the rest of us very puzzled. Regardless, we pressed on. Two rooms and a hallway later down the right path, and we found ourselves surprise attacking a room with a few particular orcs. The pixie, an NPC character friendly to the druid, immediately began firing off sleep arrows while the rest of the group charged in, weapons waving. In the middle of the combat, the pixie fired a sleep arrow at one of the orcs, then said "oops" in-character, and then combat continued without any other mention of it, because we were in combat. After the combat, we found out that the pixie had run out of sleep arrows mid-combat and accidentally fired a memory loss arrow at the orc spellcaster, who was still knocked out regardless. Coincidentally, this orc came to immediately after, wondering who he was and what he was doing here. After a moment, the Druid spoke up: "you're Thog, and you're our friend!"

That was when it hit me:

This is the beta campaign.

Not the exact campaign, mind you. Beta campaign had happened previously: the Scout and the Druid had played this exact campaign, with this exact same set of adventures and mishaps which happened in this exact sequence. In fact, this campaign wasn't being played; it was being replayed, in the same order it had been before, by the players picked by the DM to make sure it happened just so. The only thing that was ever different were in-combat die rolls, but the results were exactly the same, largely because the DM was fudging to keep every member of the party alive.

Later on, this group would come to meet an otherworldly spirit, which was a prophet of things to come. She would be the one to tell us that we [the five in the core group] were the Chosen Ones, and that we would be the only ones capable of wielding the five legendary weapons (two of which we found before I quit) and stopping the ultimate evil from taking over the world. She also gave us two specific prophecies, one of which was that, in one month's time, the queen of our kingdom/country was going to be assassinated. I immediately proclaimed that we need to travel to the capital (which was two weeks' travel to the north) and try to save her!

...Unfortunately, the DM had other ideas, and before we could even finish the conversation, told us (out of character) that it can't happen.

I told him that of course it could, and by the way, we wouldn't know until we try. It was well within our reach, and if we traveled there, alerted the queen well in advance, and combined our (somewhat limited, but heroic) forces with the queen's own guard to create a dedicated watch, we could possibly thwart the assassin.

He told me, once again, that no, it won't happen.

I became sort of annoyed and defeated by this "you simply cannot" approach, so I asked why, to which his response was that another group of players in a campaign run ~1-2 years ago, set in this same world, tried to protect the queen and failed. Therefore, it is canon in our world.

"Oh, well," the Scout (who was both the DM's appointed party leader and beta campaigner), "I guess we should just head to Kingsbridge." (Kingsbridge was two weeks' travel south, in the opposite direction.)

"Why in the Hell would we head south?!" I exclaimed, both in- and out-of-character.

"Well, we have a promissory note from [that guy we rescued months ago] we should probably cash."

I was livid. Between this and the "beta campaign" revelation, I was beginning to feel like I had absolutely no player agency: everything that we were supposed to do was pre-ordained and set in stone by the DM and rigidly enforced by the party's leader, and everything that we weren't explicitly supposed to do was either set in stone by a past campaign, or just fiat rejected or defeated by the DM otherwise.

Outside of these two revelations, other patterns of behavior were starting to crop up with this DM, which I had only now begun to notice (as well as in retrospect) because I had found other friends who played D&D, found these boards, had many discussions on the matter, and even played a few one-offs and short campaigns with other DMs. Some of these were fairly standard "bad DM" pitfalls, such as the unavoidable, unwinnable encounters solved only by the arrival of a Mary Sue/Marty Stu NPC, the throttling of wealth, the complete lack of a sense of balance and the erratic bans and restrictions placed therein, and the much-dreaded line, "that's not what your character would do", all of which became somewhat common occurrences. Other, more alarming behaviors, became apparent, such as his abusive behavior towards the Druid's player, and later, my girlfriend, which led to him (and also the Bardbarian) teasing and even sometimes openly berating them for saying something they didn't agree with or think was smart (my girlfriend would leave the game in tears whilst I argued with the Bardbarian about his behavior one day, never to return). He would also begin yelling and making violent displays (slamming the table, throwing things down, etc) if he did not get his way in attempt to intimidate people, which usually worked, because he weighed more than any two of us combined (he weighed about as much as myself and any two of the women, or the combined weight of the three women) and stood taller than everyone but the Cleric. I would leave the game in the midst of one such display of violence after which I simply refused to back down, which resulted in a shouting match between myself and the DM, in the midst of which even the Bardbarian player, who had literally been my bully for more than half my life at this point, slumped into his chair and dared not speak up. After that, I simply left, and never returned to the table. The group dissolved almost immediately thereafter.

Two years passed. Bad blood had been washed away, and although my perceptions of this DM's style and behavior had not changed, I had only been able to DM past that point, and DM fatigue was setting in extremely hard. I wanted to play again, and I knew that he was the only other DM I could reach out to in order to find a group. As it so happened, I ran into one of that group's members (the Scout) at an event I was volunteering for. We got to talking about D&D, and he caught me up on the last two years--what had happened since I left, what happened with the rest of the group's members, and so on. We got to talking about current games, and he said that they were going to be running their very first session of a new campaign the very next day. He said that I was welcome to show up, and so I did. While I was there, I talked it out with the DM (who was, of course, the same DM as before), and he said that I could roll up a character sheet and join next week while the rest of the group ran their very first session.

Our very first session involved us stumbling out of the woods behind the village, down a hill, and into a clearing, where we see a mysterious cloaked man open a secret door and disappear into it. The secret door was in the side of a mountain which, as the fates would have it, was part of an as-yet-unexplained catastrophe which our village had experienced ten years ago. Inside, we faced a flood of rats trying to escape the new light that had been forged out; to our right, a chest guarded by a triggered trap in a room with two bats; to our left, a statue which, upon closer inspection, has a cursed head that detaches and flies around the room, attacking the party with eye beams; and finally, further ahead, a sarcophagus, presumably belonging to the owner of this tomb, which is missing a crucial item atop the sarcophagus (noted by missing dust lines) and contains an orc's skeleton, which bursts out and begins attacking. The hooded man has already disappeared.

This was their fifth time running this exact campaign.

I left the table at the end of the session and never looked back.

Naanomi
2015-01-12, 09:29 PM
Eldritch Horrors come across as good 'out of context' villains. Even if you are pathetic compared to the Demon Lord Grazzt, he is a Demon. One could find lore about him, have some understanding of how Demons operate or at least what they are, look into reasoning with him or finding some way to make him lose interest. Same with the Evil God and a whole host of 'way stronger than you' villainous archetypes. Archfey and shamanistic spirits are in this boat as well... powerful, mysterious, confusing to a mortal perspective; but at least conceptually understandable.

The Eldritch Horror, while there may be some lore about it; the Lore should be more about 'this is what we have observed, but really have no idea'. Reasoning with it may be possible to some degree, but never on terms you are really confident in. It could be a one-of-a-kind thing, it's motives may be literally inscrutable (if it even has motives). It serves a similar role as the 'can't deal with it by force' obstacle as the previous examples, but with an added layer of 'unknown and unknowable'. In some ways, they operate less like a 'character' and more like a volcano or meteor (a deeply confusing and inscrutable natural disaster); something that needs to be dealt with by a group of heroes but not truly an antagonist.

An Eldritch Horror (or at least the cult dedicated to it) served as the main villain of a very long ran campaign of mine, a being that didn't understand the concept of 'existence' as we did; and in an attempt to gain 'existence' slowly 'unnamed' things in the Planes until the very concept of that thing disappeared; extending backwards and forward in time. A character used a specific type of pole-arm (a guisarme-voulge) and attacked the thing's hand as it came through a portal once. By the next morning, he knew how to use a halberd instead; because the very concept of a guisarme-voulge had faded from all existence in the past as well as the present, and the idea could never exist in the future either. No one was sure what kind of things it had 'unnamed' in the times it had touched the multi-verse before, since even conceptualizing the things it had touched was impossible.

In a great bit of 'out of the box' thinking, the party ultimately joined the cult in worshiping it and spread it's worship; calling it a God of Destruction... giving it a 'name' in the cosmic sense and turning it from the unknowable thing it was into the horrible and evil; but understandable and at least conceptually resistible; Greater God instead. Also, ironically, giving it an understanding of 'existence' that it wanted to begin with.

LudicSavant
2015-01-12, 10:03 PM
I am having a bit of a problem with making aberrations, Old Ones, and eldritch abominations actually appear terrifying. What would actually be the worst thing that could happen? Getting eaten? Tigers and crocodiles do that too, there is nothing supernaturally horrific to it.
Demons usually would drag people to a hell where they are going to suffer endless torment, as part of the way the universe is build.
And fey creatures often kidnap people to take them back to their realms and presumedly turn them into one of them or some kind of beast to serve them.

But what about "cosmic horror" creatures? Once you got over the fact that they exist, what's the worst they could do to you other than just kill you? Without an interest to collect souls, they are not really much different from normal wild animals with some tentacles and extra eyes.

Try making the audience feel helpless, insignificant, and ignorant in the midst of a grand machine over which they have little control or understanding, challenging their comfortable preconceptions in fundamental ways. The thing about, say, "Seven Geases" isn't that the snake people exist or that there's a giant frog in a cave... it's that it gives you a tour of worlds that are sweeping in scope yet defy human control, exist independently of fundamental human political ideas and worldviews, and simultaneously strips the protagonist of both his power and illusions... and the truth is profound, disturbing, and isolating.

Nobody gets eaten or goes insane. Honestly, as much as people joke about that happening in the Call of Cthulhu RPG, I haven't actually seen too much of it in the better cosmic horror literature I've read. Not sure where that apparent disconnect started.

To me, if a "cosmic horror" story is about a monster that will eat you, torture you, or spontaneously give you a mental disorder... that's a failure to achieve cosmic horror. Cosmic horrors shouldn't care that much about your human lives any more than you'd expect such views from bacteria, monsoons, trees, or swirling galactic dust clouds. That's less cosmic horror and more religious fables about demons and devils.

Spare me your tentacle monsters, give me that culture of telepathic rock aliens that can't conceive of life experienced through any of our five senses. Spare me your sanity damage and give me the creature that sees all of time as a static multidimensional object and explains it to the protagonist in a way that destroys all of his hopes. Spare me the toothy maw and give me the talk about how if we were born in another time, due to the acceleration of the galaxies of the universe away from each other, we would never have been able to even discover that other galaxies existed... then speculate on similar such cosmic horizons that we may already be missing. Or maybe the bit about how if intelligent aliens were to visit earth, they would probably conclude that no intelligent life exists here, citing that they will likely have a greater intelligence difference between them and us than we have between ourselves and apes with our miniscule genetic differences.

That's the good stuff. That's the stuff that gives you that nice, rich sense of existential dread, intellectual inadequacy, or profound futility. The idea that perhaps the world ultimately can't be known, that you are hopelessly ignorant and powerless before the greater, impersonal forces of nature that just plain don't care about you in any human-like way because they are not human (or forehead aliens, or humans in funny suits, or any of those other common media tropes in sci-fi with aliens that are honestly more like modern American humans than Americans in movies from 50 years ago) and do not think in anything resembling a human thought pattern... that is scary in a way that a simple predator isn't.

Heck, just take the advice of the tvtropes page on cosmic horror. "This type of fiction doesn't scare you with big, ugly monsters—though it can certainly have them—it depresses you with the fatalistic implication of being insignificantly powerless before such vast, unknowable and fundamentally alien entities. On the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism, it sometimes lies near the cynical Despair Event Horizon." You can have things that want to eat you in a cosmic horror story, but it's not ultimately about that. It's about planting new and terrible ideas in the reader's head about just how much they suck.

Edit note: to those suggesting that these tropes work in Lovecraftland but not in Fantasyland, note that the short story I referenced, Seven Geases, takes place in a medieval fantasyland (in fact. it's about an adventurer who goes on a trip through the underdark). It's short and available for free online, so you can totally go, read it, and come back to reply. Here's a link: http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/192/the-seven-geases

Solaris
2015-01-12, 11:23 PM
...It's about planting new and terrible ideas in the reader's head about just how much they suck.

This is what Eldritch Horror is. It's why Lovecraft's life was short and miserable. It's why... in all honesty, Eldritch Horror, when done 'right', is a bad idea for a long-running campaign, and questionable for a short one. Players don't need a game to tell them they're utterly insignificant and without worth. Their soul-grinding jobs under inhumanly stupid and mercilessly cruel bosses does that for them.

Lovecraft's works not only included the soul-shattering insignificance of everything humanity ever dreamt of achieving but also a very distinct fear of science and technology (that man learning too much would doom him), and a fear of the uncivilized barbarians destroying civilization.

You want Eldritch Horror? Put Wal-Mart into the campaign setting.

Yora
2015-01-13, 07:16 AM
That's the good stuff. That's the stuff that gives you that nice, rich sense of existential dread, intellectual inadequacy, or profound futility. The idea that perhaps the world ultimately can't be known, that you are hopelessly ignorant and powerless before the greater, impersonal forces of nature that just plain don't care about you in any human-like way because they are not human (or forehead aliens, or humans in funny suits, or any of those other common media tropes in sci-fi with aliens that are honestly more like modern American humans than Americans in movies from 50 years ago) and do not think in anything resembling a human thought pattern... that is scary in a way that a simple predator isn't.
The problem with that is that in a common fantasy setting, this is what pretty much already assumed to be the case. It's not a revalation or in any way challenging their idea of existance. The one exception would be the evil sorcerer, and a great part of his evil comes from the fact that he doesn't accept his insignificance as a mortal and wants to elevate himself to the power of these greater beings.

Red Fel
2015-01-13, 09:57 AM
The problem with that is that in a common fantasy setting, this is what pretty much already assumed to be the case. It's not a revalation or in any way challenging their idea of existance. The one exception would be the evil sorcerer, and a great part of his evil comes from the fact that he doesn't accept his insignificance as a mortal and wants to elevate himself to the power of these greater beings.

That's not exactly true. It's not just about facing mortality. It's about facing insignificance. The idea of cosmic horror is that things exist that are so beyond our experience, so beyond our perspective and comprehension, that we realize we are little more than tiny gnats on the cosmic scale. Whether it's beings that speak through purely mental faculties; creatures who see past, present and future the way we see left, right, up, and down; creatures who see the vast reaches of space as a quick swim across the pool in the backyard; horrific abominations constantly spawning more horrofic abominations, who find us revolting; it's about facing a perspective so bizarre and yet so advanced and powerful that you cannot help but feel that you are wrong, that you are backwards and loathsome, that you not only lack worth, but in fact reduce the worth of the cosmos simply by continuing to exist. There's no comparison between that and the evil sorcerer who wants to cheat death.

The standard assumption in high fantasy isn't that there are incomprehensible powers that make us look insignificant and question our very nature. It's that there are gods, heroes, demons and mortals. And, by default, the PCs tend to fall into one of the first two categories. And if there are incomprehensibly potent beings, it is destined that the protagonists/PCs will become alike unto them. Cosmic horror is about feeling small and without value. High fantasy is about feeling potent and world-changingly epic. The two don't blend well.

xroads
2015-01-13, 10:19 AM
One example of an Eldritch Horror that you may want to model your abominations after would be the Hounds of Tindalos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hounds_of_Tindalos).

The hound is an alien creature with unknowable motives and bizarre powers. They can ambush a party in seemingly impossible locations and track them to the ends of the realm.

Braininthejar2
2015-01-13, 10:35 AM
Mass Effect 2 pulls that to great effect.

At one point the team examines the hull of a long dead reaper and finds the usual doomed expedition logs of an archeological team who went there for research and went insane one by until they worshipped the thing and willingly transformed themselves into monstrous thralls. The reaper himself... is dead. He has been through millenia.
But just his presence there is enough. As one of the archeologists noted in his records, "even dead gods can dream'.

LudicSavant
2015-01-13, 10:55 AM
I always thought that the Call of Cthulhu RPG never really captured Cosmic Horror well. To quote an author friend of mine:

"The thing that happens in cosmic horror, and that I don't think the game (Call of Cthulhu) accomplishes, is that humans become something inhuman if they survive. It's not that they go crazy, it's that they go crazy from a HUMAN perspective, which they no longer possess. They become something greater, and in so doing lose humanity, but alternatively aspire to something stronger and greater, or something more terrifying. Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and At the Mountains of Madness are the best."

In other words, many classic cosmic horror protagonists cast off their illusions or connection with their cultural norms... not their sanity.

Also, here are links to read At The Mountains of Madness (http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mm.aspx) and
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/dq.aspx)

Good ol' public domain classics :smallsmile:


The problem with that is that in a common fantasy setting, this is what pretty much already assumed to be the case. It's not a revalation or in any way challenging their idea of existance.

No, it isn't. Much of D&D fiction does not have truly alien creatures in it (or any of those other things I mentioned, such as realization of cosmic horizons establishing profound limits for our potential knowledge), let alone ones that operate on a scale orders of magnitude beyond humanity... it has animals with magic powers or humanoid-like intelligences that largely conform to human intuitions. Demons, fey, aberrations, gods, you name it, all psychologically act pretty much like humans (or at least things humans are psychologically well-equipped to grok) in most (but not all!) D&D fiction. Mind, you could change this for any of those categories, but to say that it is the default is just not true. The majority of D&D stories has you essentially dealing with Humans In Funny Suits (even if those funny suits are colossal, breathe fire, etc) or big toothy monsters that are basically like more familiar types of terrestrial animals (tigers and the like).

Heck, much of fantasy/sci-fi in general is like this. Most of the aliens you'll see in a modern sci-fi show are less truly alien to modern American psychology than humans from movies made more than 50 years ago. They understand all of modern America's short-form philosophical rhetoric and everything. This is a far cry from the level of deviation we'd expect to find if we encountered actual aliens.

Also, even in the cases where alien psychologies and grand powers are the norm, it's not necessarily cosmic horror, nor does it preclude cosmic horror from occurring. This is because pretty much every story will still have people with cultures and cultural norms to be challenged or trampled into insignificance. In other words, pretty much no matter what world your characters live in, you will be able to plant new and terrible ideas in their (and their players') heads about how much they suck, and thus you will have accomplished cosmic horror.


It's about planting new and terrible ideas in the reader's head about just how much they suck.

This is what Eldritch Horror is.

Ceiling_Squid
2015-01-13, 12:06 PM
Lovecraft's works not only included the soul-shattering insignificance of everything humanity ever dreamt of achieving but also a very distinct fear of science and technology (that man learning too much would doom him), and a fear of the uncivilized barbarians destroying civilization.



Of course, there are subtleties to that "fear of science and technology" that the OP might want to take to heart. Lovecraft's protagonists (and those most able to fight the horrors) are generally intellectuals, and it's less of a fear of science itself and more a fear of what science will reveal to us about the true nature of the universe. It's a small distinction to make, but essential for those trying to work with cosmic horror. Curiosity is a gateway to realizing your own hopeless and precarious position in the whole of existence - ignorance is a small comfort.

It's notably different from the (rather lazy) tendency to use science in horror tropes as an admonishment against "playing god". Lovecraft doesn't make a pointless moral judgement about ethical scientific practices, not in the same way people have been lazily attempting to copy Frankenstein for years (looking at you, "Splice").

Granted, the closest Lovecraft ever gets to that is probably "Herbert West - Reanimator", though that's an oddly conventional horror story in his body of work. Still a good one, but very much at odds with his usual approach.

Back on subject, however. To best underscore Solaris' point, you may want to keep in mind this particular famous passage from The Call of Cthulhu:

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."


That is Lovecraft and cosmic horror in a nutshell. It's perhaps the best way he could possibly solidify the genre in a single, brief paragraph.

Ultimately, this is at odds with our understanding of the universe in a heroic fantasy setting like DnD. Think about it, how long have we been retreading the same ground? How much is clearly specified about each planar location, every god, every faction, every agenda, every extraplanar entity? The fact that you can't find a good way to fit in cosmic horror reveals that the universe in most heroic fantasy settings are far too familiar and "mapped out", so to speak. With every splatbook, we lose a lot of mystery, and the things revealed about reality are actually rather mundane and easy-to-grasp.

You need to create entities that are alien to even the Gods, and even the worst of Demons don't understand them. Since you're apparently working with a setting that uses a fairly standard mythological milieu, the various planar entitites at least seem to operate via motives we can recognize and perhaps predict. We can placate or attempt to communicate with most bog-standard DnD immortals.

When it comes right down to it, the characters in DnD generally know what each god is about. They're aware that mortals are usually insignificant, sure, but they can at least comprehend what their deities are all about, and how they tend to behave. There's a reason you don't find insignificance frightening - you're working with predictable gods. You aren't at the mercy of the creature playing with an ant farm, you're, at worst, dealing with an all-powerful tyrant. A god can at least hear the pleas of his supplicants, and recognizes your sentience.

A being of cosmic horror cannot comprehend your thought patterns, or even recognize you as a creature with agency. It is so alien that there can be no empathic connection or comprehension unless - and here's the bad implication - one of you changes at the fundamental level. You become "insane" to observers, because you are required to think like the alien in order to understand it. You cease to be human, you obliterate whatever "self" would be recognizable to your own kind.

Cosmic horror is difficult to do well, because it's extremely out-of-place in typical heroic fantasy.

xroads
2015-01-13, 12:24 PM
You need to create entities that are alien to even the Gods, and even the worst of Demons don't understand them. Since you're apparently working with a setting that uses a fairly standard mythological milieu, the various planar entitites at least seem to operate via motives we can recognize and perhaps predict. We can placate or attempt to communicate with most bog-standard DnD immortals.

In addition, you may want to have abominations ignore many of the laws of science and magic in your realm.

Using the example creature I mention above, what if the hound ignores typical magical attempts to foil teleportation and tracking? They completely ignore spells like Dimensional Anchor or illusionary spells without any explanation.

1337 b4k4
2015-01-13, 12:44 PM
A way to bring your eldritch horrors to a heroic fantasy campaign is the "bigger fish" philosophy. Yes, in D&D (or other heroic fantasy settings) there are gods and demons and devils and fey, all of which could be eldritch horrors on their own, but which have become so common (or so common to the adventurers) that it's less "we're insignificant" and more "how do we obtain the power to defeat it". If you want to bring in an eldritch horror to heroic fantasy and you don't mind running the risk of destroying the campaign and world, you make a monster to do just that. Sure things are easy when you're a cleric of Pelor ... until Pelor is snuffed out of existence. If one day you wake up and your god is gone, but not just him, all the gods are gone. Not just unresponsive, you literally can not feel their presence. Something horrible this way comes. Perhaps the next day you wake up and the demons which have been harassing the city for months are just gone. The portals to hell are still open, but nothing comes forth. Where there were camps, nothing more than sand. Something horrible this way comes. The next day, perhaps your wizard finds no power in his spells. Oh they're in the book and they can be read, but the power isn't there. The words are meaningless gibberish. Something horrible this way comes. The next day, wild and twisted plants begin to sprout, coming through the walls and floors themselves. The water becomes stagnant, and birds fall from the sky. Nothing rapid, no sudden bamboo spikes through your feet, just a slow encroachment of your living area. Until you have no home, no tavern, no rest. The next day doesn't come. The sun is gone, as are the stars. The world is plunged into blackness, and the temperature falls. Children die in the streets, and animals simply lay down in surrender. Towns break apart, and survival becomes top priority and civility, the thin veneer that holds society together is scraped away like a scab, revealing the infection beneath. Something horrible this way comes. Finally one night, deep in the woods, having run for their lives from villagers who would gladly have slaughtered your party for food, your players look up into the sky and see them. Hundreds of thousands of swarming ... things ... that are wrong. Every sense in your body tells you they just can't be. They exists and then don't. They have massive size, but seem infinitesimally small. They glow with a colorless light that gives no shadows around you. And they consume. And are consuming. The very air itself is being swallowed. The trees and plants whither and dissolve. Darkness is coming, a dark darker than the sunless night that exists before you. There is no reasoning, no pleading. They do not understand your cries. They don't even acknowledge your calls. Something horrible has come, and it doesn't even care you exist.

Essentially, the fear of the eldritch horror is less what they do to you, and what they can do to mankind, and do without meaning, malice or intent.

Edit
-------
Or perhaps to sum it up better: It gets worse. Modern horror is predicated on things getting very bad, but getting better. Zombie movies end with the breakout contained. Vampire films with Dracula destroyed. Slasher films with the slasher captured or killed. At worst, we get the reveal that it isn't over. A zombie survived or got out, someone was bitten before it was all over, the slasher didn't die. But even then, the end result is things are back to the way they were when the movie started. Eldritch horror doesn't work that way. You go insane and there's no coming back. People die and the horror grows. The sun is gone. The moon is consumed by the great wolf. Nothing will ever be the same again. Perhaps worst of all, nothing can be done to prevent it from getting worse. When the thing comes back, and it will, there's still no defense. It wasn't chased away, it chose to leave and even if you survive, it's only until it comes back for more.

Segev
2015-01-13, 01:26 PM
Spoiler for Cabin in the Woods:This one doesn't end with it "getting better" at all...

Unrelated to that, there's a not-so-fine-line between horror and despair. Horror gives hope, because it is with hope that you have tension, a reason to keep trying and to get more and more desparate. Despair, despite sharing a root with "desparate," is a point where desperation fails. You have no more tension; you've given up.

Everything just stopping, with nothing you can do to even create the illusion of figuring it out and resolving it, with no hope even in concept that you might be able to prevent the end...it isn't horror anymore. It's just depression-fic.


Cosmic Horror has elements of surreality to it because the surreal breaks the rules in which we have faith while still, on some level, not feeling impossible. Our perceptions of the world, before we knew better through scientific analysis, told us that the world was flat, that the sky is a blue dome, and that things in the distance are smaller than things up close.

Surreal events play on our perception of the world, the illusions that we know are illusions become real. Something can appear that wasn't there before if we look away and back. Or something can disappear the same way. The tiny object right next to you might actually be a giant miles away, or the huge monster looming right in front of you might be something much smaller when you back away from it.

We know that the sky is diffracted light bouncing off the atmosphere, and that the starscape of night is actually an infinite expanse with those pinpricks of light actually being alien suns burning many light years away, and not all the same distance. Which makes the fact that something is opening a crack in the sky just out of reach of our best ability to fly up and examine it all the more terrifying.

Is it a rift? Can we fly up to it and fly around behind it and see it? If we fly up, and find that it's not getting any bigger/closer, that we still can't reach it... how unimaginably HUGE must it be to be BEHIND the stars, and visible to our naked eye? What is cracking? We know there's no shell around the universe...don't we? We can rest assured that something that far away must surely be unable to travel faster than light and thus won't ever reach us. Right?

There's no monster under the bed. We looked. So why do we hear it breathing?


Horror isn't about the bad thing that is happening. When the bad thing happens, it's almost a relief, because it's over. Horror is about the anticipation. The tension and the hope that you can prevent the bad thing from happening. It is, to some extent, not even knowing WHAT the bad thing is, because at least if you knew, you could prepare for it.

Horror is our fear of the unknown magnified to a phobia, to an omnipresent pressure. The reason horror is satisfying is because it builds that itch, that hunger of curiosity, and builds it to a fever pitch with a combination of teasing and sense of urgency. It is the dark side of the coin that is our insatiable thirst for knowledge. It's the black mirror to waiting to open your birthday present: you're waiting to see your doom. But it is horrifying in part because you aren't positive your doom is really nigh. It could be nothing, or you could have a way out, if only you knew.

It is a combination of our need to know with our survival instinct and our sense of identity. Build the first, threaten the second, and undermine the third, and you have a good horror story.

LudicSavant
2015-01-13, 02:43 PM
Spoiler for Cabin in the Woods:This one doesn't end with it "getting better" at all...

Unrelated to that, there's a not-so-fine-line between horror and despair. Horror gives hope, because it is with hope that you have tension, a reason to keep trying and to get more and more desparate. Despair, despite sharing a root with "desparate," is a point where desperation fails. You have no more tension; you've given up.

Everything just stopping, with nothing you can do to even create the illusion of figuring it out and resolving it, with no hope even in concept that you might be able to prevent the end...it isn't horror anymore. It's just depression-fic.


Cosmic Horror has elements of surreality to it because the surreal breaks the rules in which we have faith while still, on some level, not feeling impossible. Our perceptions of the world, before we knew better through scientific analysis, told us that the world was flat, that the sky is a blue dome, and that things in the distance are smaller than things up close.

Surreal events play on our perception of the world, the illusions that we know are illusions become real. Something can appear that wasn't there before if we look away and back. Or something can disappear the same way. The tiny object right next to you might actually be a giant miles away, or the huge monster looming right in front of you might be something much smaller when you back away from it.

We know that the sky is diffracted light bouncing off the atmosphere, and that the starscape of night is actually an infinite expanse with those pinpricks of light actually being alien suns burning many light years away, and not all the same distance. Which makes the fact that something is opening a crack in the sky just out of reach of our best ability to fly up and examine it all the more terrifying.

Is it a rift? Can we fly up to it and fly around behind it and see it? If we fly up, and find that it's not getting any bigger/closer, that we still can't reach it... how unimaginably HUGE must it be to be BEHIND the stars, and visible to our naked eye? What is cracking? We know there's no shell around the universe...don't we? We can rest assured that something that far away must surely be unable to travel faster than light and thus won't ever reach us. Right?

There's no monster under the bed. We looked. So why do we hear it breathing?


Horror isn't about the bad thing that is happening. When the bad thing happens, it's almost a relief, because it's over. Horror is about the anticipation. The tension and the hope that you can prevent the bad thing from happening. It is, to some extent, not even knowing WHAT the bad thing is, because at least if you knew, you could prepare for it.

Horror is our fear of the unknown magnified to a phobia, to an omnipresent pressure. The reason horror is satisfying is because it builds that itch, that hunger of curiosity, and builds it to a fever pitch with a combination of teasing and sense of urgency. It is the dark side of the coin that is our insatiable thirst for knowledge. It's the black mirror to waiting to open your birthday present: you're waiting to see your doom. But it is horrifying in part because you aren't positive your doom is really nigh. It could be nothing, or you could have a way out, if only you knew.

It is a combination of our need to know with our survival instinct and our sense of identity. Build the first, threaten the second, and undermine the third, and you have a good horror story.

^-- Good post.


Our perceptions of the world, before we knew better through scientific analysis, told us that the world was flat, that the sky is a blue dome, and that things in the distance are smaller than things up close. And of course, science continues to tell us more and more every day that our prior knowledge was pitifully limited, and every new discovery we make only seems to raise even more questions and further expose the expanse of our ignorance.

Science has, over and over again, discovered vast expanses and dimensions of the universe that were just out of bounds of our perceptions, yet ultimately a major part of our everyday world, such as the range of the light spectrum (of which we experience only the tiniest portion) or the nature of the tiniest building blocks of our world. Every culture in recorded history has thought that it knew most of what there was to know about the world, and was wildly incorrect. There is no reason to suspect that our culture is an exception to this pattern. What vast worlds of understanding lie just beyond our senses?

But there is another side to this. In fact, you don't even really need fiction to experience cosmic horror. For instance, you can get a decent dose by watching astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson's "The Inexplicable Universe" and hearing him talk about the implications the discovery of an accelerating universe raises for him.

Segev
2015-01-13, 03:50 PM
Science has, over and over again, discovered vast expanses and dimensions of the universe that were just out of bounds of our perceptions, yet ultimately a major part of our everyday world, such as the range of the light spectrum (of which we experience only the tiniest portion) or the nature of the tiniest building blocks of our world. Every culture in recorded history has thought that it knew most of what there was to know about the world, and was wildly incorrect. There is no reason to suspect that our culture is an exception to this pattern. What vast worlds of understanding lie just beyond our senses?

As a general rule, this tends to fill us with wonder. To build the horror, you have to create a cognitive dissonance between what is known and what is perceived. It's easiest, in our "we know things that are not quite what our senses tell us" society, to have our senses tell us things we blatantly know are not true and yet cannot explain. We know, for example, that there is nobody in the house with us, and that things do not move on their own. That's why it's so utterly disturbing to turn around and see a glass of water we had just washed and dried sitting, full, on the counter.

Another way to turn wonder to horror is to hint that there is a danger lurking in that wonderous thing we cannot yet perceive. Give us a hint of that danger, and tell us we cannot sense it, and we become paranoid. Paranoia is kin to horror.

That sense of other things we do not know being potentially dangerous is what makes us leery if we suddenly realize we are not alone. We eagerly seek to know our guests and companions, both for altruistic and pleasant purposes (being good neighbors, making friends), and to assess them as potential dangers.

Because coming out of the shadows and introducing oneself is a good way to become known and reduce the danger you pose to somebody else, we tend to be much more relaxed after introductions.

But give that sense that one is not alone...and refuse to let one meet the...presence...sharing their locale... that's frightening. We get nervous, because not meeting this Other means we question if they're really there. Doubt their benevolence if they are. Distrust our senses, which are telling us contradictory things.

That undermines both what we know and, to a degree, our sense of identity. Who are we if we cannot trust ourselves?

LudicSavant
2015-01-13, 06:07 PM
As a general rule, this tends to fill us with wonder. To build the horror, you have to create a cognitive dissonance between what is known and what is perceived. It's easiest, in our "we know things that are not quite what our senses tell us" society, to have our senses tell us things we blatantly know are not true and yet cannot explain. We know, for example, that there is nobody in the house with us, and that things do not move on their own. That's why it's so utterly disturbing to turn around and see a glass of water we had just washed and dried sitting, full, on the counter.

Another way to turn wonder to horror is to hint that there is a danger lurking in that wonderous thing we cannot yet perceive. Give us a hint of that danger, and tell us we cannot sense it, and we become paranoid. Paranoia is kin to horror.

That sense of other things we do not know being potentially dangerous is what makes us leery if we suddenly realize we are not alone. We eagerly seek to know our guests and companions, both for altruistic and pleasant purposes (being good neighbors, making friends), and to assess them as potential dangers.

Because coming out of the shadows and introducing oneself is a good way to become known and reduce the danger you pose to somebody else, we tend to be much more relaxed after introductions.

But give that sense that one is not alone...and refuse to let one meet the...presence...sharing their locale... that's frightening. We get nervous, because not meeting this Other means we question if they're really there. Doubt their benevolence if they are. Distrust our senses, which are telling us contradictory things.

That undermines both what we know and, to a degree, our sense of identity. Who are we if we cannot trust ourselves?

I think you're confusing what I'm talking about with the profound promise of future discovery, which does indeed inspire wonder for many (though I wouldn't call it a general rule, honestly. Curiosity is not a universal virtue, and indeed it is vilified by many creeds. Those guys are jerks though). This is probably my fault; I shouldn't have expected you to look up the works of Neil DeGrasse Tyson before responding, and I didn't actually mention the concept I was referencing besides pointing you there. Lazy of me. The part you quoted is of a very different character from what I was referencing at the end.

What I was bringing up was the notion that there is the possibility of permanently unresolvable circumstances limiting our understanding (not just personally, but as a species) in profound, fundamental ways. For example, in the future it is predicted that the acceleration of the universe will cause foreign galaxies to be unobservable. What if we lived in that time? Without the ability to perceive other galaxies, we would have no way of knowing that other galaxies even existed. Moreover, given that most of our understanding of our own galaxy comes largely from observing other ones in every stage of galactic development and extrapolating from there, most of our understanding of astrophysics would be beggared... simply by living in a different time, when the heavens would be invisible, undetectable, and unknowable to us by any modern means. If we can never travel faster than light or some other such thing, then this barrier will be permanently unresolvable, and any life in those times would be unable to find any evidence of a greater universe. In pondering this future, many have wondered whether we already have crossed similar horizons.

And let me tell you, there are a lot of people who don't regard that as a happy ending.

BeerMug Paladin
2015-01-14, 02:37 AM
Because of the awful DM thread, a thought occurred to me. There is a great cosmic horror taking place within most fantasy worlds, it's just not something that is implitly acknowledged by the people actually living within it.

Medieval stasis (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MedievalStasis). Some force in the world makes whole societies repeat the same events, keep the same borders and resources, fight the same wars, over and over, without deviation.

Individuals have specific roles to fill, making small changes here or there, sometimes to avert catastrophes that always threaten to come true but never do. But they aren't heroes so much as they are the latest person to fit into the mold of a hero that has been filled countless times by countless others in ageless eternities.

But the society at large is a completely static society. The world changes in an individual sense, but not in a historical sense. So your life may be nice enough, but your life can't possibly leave any lasting impact.

Those things that do threaten to change history are only brief and an anomaly, it will change back over time. Maybe even the influence of this force will manifest in some way to bring the world back into alignment if the deviation is large enough. This cosmic force is known as bad writing or bad DMing to us, but to residents of the world, it would be the thing that shall not be named. Just pretend it isn't there, keep your head down and live your mundane life.

If you notice it, you risk drawing its attention to you as one of those unstable elements risking the historical stasis that the universe must always adhere to.

Nagash
2015-01-14, 03:20 AM
Oh the possibilities are uncounted for what damage a "cosmic horror" can do.

-Over the course of the day before you meet the thing, you and the other members of the party keep having horrifying visions. You turn and for a moment one of the party's heads has been severed, hideous gurgling sounds coming from the neck stump. Then they're fine. It begins raining blood. Then is never was.

You meet the thing in a castle. The walls are constantly changing when you aren't looking directly at them. The place has become a labyrinth and it is an aberrant scuttling Minotaur. The longer you stay here the more you find familiar rooms. You realize these are places from your childhood. As the chase goes on your memories become indistinct, or perhaps they are getting clearer.

You and everyone else come to realize that you never entered the labyrinth. You've always been here. Being hunted. Being killed. Every time you die you forget, and find yourself walking toward the castle, under some fresh delusion of a goal inside. Then you'll be hunted, and realize that you've been there your whole life. It will catch you and kill you. Then you'll forget and find yourself walking toward the castle...

Or!
How about some simple grey goo.
Someone summons a shuggoth! Good for them. They get eaten first. The shuggoth grows larger from adding their biomass to its own. It eats more things. Gets bigger. At some point, in order to expedite the process, it divides its mass.

Hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of these things are wiggling around, eating every living thing they touch. Adventures and armies step in to stop them, but shuggoths are shapeshifters which can assume the qualities and abilities of anything they've ever eaten. Little can stand against hoards of huge 14th lvl barbarian dire owlbears with fire-proof troll regeneration who cast 7th level spells while raging.

OR!
There's an imaginary creature that's eating peoples identities. Only children, the insane, and those effected by a hallucinogen can see or interact with it. You can also find it in your dreams if you go to sleep near it. If it bites you it tears a way something that was true about you.

It can eat your family with a bite. Your parents, bothers and sisters and so on will still exist somewhere, but you've forgotten who they are and they've forgotten you.

It can eat your favorite things. You can no longer remember having enjoyed any kind of food or song or place or season, and you'll never find one. Everything is "okay" but you've never encountered anything "Great".

It can eat your face. You still have a mouth and nose and eyes and all that, and they still have shapes and colors and everything, but no one can ever recognize you by your face. Everyone will always need to be reminded who you are every time they look at you. They always have and always will.

The only way to kill it is to convince everyone to stop thinking about it at once. If even one person is imagining it, it can't be killed.

awesome, stealing some of that.

Nagash
2015-01-14, 04:03 AM
If your going to focus your campaign on eldritch horrors I would ditch the entire great wheel, yadda yadda, concept.

The outer planes, death and rebirth, all virtually unknown.

The gods themselves ARE eldritch horrors. They are so far above us and our understanding that they are unknowable.

All religions are simply based off of very old stories of those gods deeds on the mortal world and humans assumptions of why they did those deeds. Those humans could very well be wrong.

We call good gods good because we have observed them acting or supporting what we think of as good, and evil gods evil because we have observed them supporting and acting in ways we think of as evil.

But much of what is good or evil is cultural. Not hard and fast. And we are dealing here with beings who are from the dawn of time. They predate humanity by billions of years and unlike us never evolved in a society, or a religion. They never were taught rules about right and wrong. They were all powerful gods with the ability to create and destroy at a whim and with no one to teach them even the basics of right or wrong.

Imagine a toddler with the powers of creation, life, death, worlds live and die at this toddlers whim and there are no parents, never were. This toddler is immune to consequences, has no enemies and no one to tell him no and infinitesimal power.

That is our gods.

Perhaps they have grown and matured since then, its been billions of years after all. But what would such a creature grow into?

And could a mortal human mind even begin to understand it, much less judge its actions and motivations?

And how many of them are there? Were there wars of the gods and some lost only to come back? maybe some never fought, they were too busy playing, but now they want to get in the game.

What can such creatures really create?

Those are eldritch horrors. They are alien yes, but they are also so vast, so knowledgeable, ancient and powerful that even if they had started as anything remotely resembling human they would have lost that long ago.

** this also involves ditching the traditional alignment mechanics, but i believe thats for the best for most campaigns anyway.

Segev
2015-01-14, 10:02 AM
I think you're confusing what I'm talking about with the profound promise of future discovery... The part you quoted is of a very different character from what I was referencing at the end.Ah, my mistake.


What I was bringing up was the notion that there is the possibility of permanently unresolvable circumstances limiting our understanding (not just personally, but as a species) in profound, fundamental ways.Perhaps it is just my outlook as both a scientist and a fan of science-fiction, but I simply don't accept that possibility.

To me, "we can't ever know that" translates to, "We haven't yet found the right way to exploit the rules as they are to get around this."


For example, in the future it is predicted that the acceleration of the universe will cause foreign galaxies to be unobservable.As debating this point would be pulling us off-topic, I will accept it for argument's sake here. I will state that the research I've seen more points to the magical medium wherein the mass of the universe is such that expansion will asymptotically approach stasis...without ever QUITE reaching it. But again, debating whether that's true or not is off-topic.


What if we lived in that time?

... simply by living in a different time, when the heavens would be invisible, undetectable, and unknowable to us by any modern means. If we can never travel faster than light or some other such thing, then this barrier will be permanently unresolvable, and any life in those times would be unable to find any evidence of a greater universe. In pondering this future, many have wondered whether we already have crossed similar horizons.

And let me tell you, there are a lot of people who don't regard that as a happy ending.

Nor would I. But I do not believe we would never breach those barriers. We have too much of a history of finding that what was once insurmountable is actually theoretically possible. Then a breakthrough makes theory reality.

We're witnessing one right now: warp drive is being developed. The once-insurmountable light-speed barrier had several possible loopholes. One was found which was interesting but impractical (requiring more energy than there is in the known universe). And further breakthroughs have reduced this to merely astronomical (literally: about as much energy as exists in the solar system). We're working to bring this down to "something we could conceivably build and power." I actually have high hopes of seeing the first test flights within my lifetime.

In short, I'm kind-of the anti-Lovecraft when it comes to my conception of possibility. I see the vast, awe-inspiring, unknowable frontiers, and I gibber excitedly at the prospect of conquering them. Never doubting that mankind will do so, eventually. Far from the explorer's nightmare of worrying about frontiers to explore running out, the prospect that we may have already passed a threshold such as the hypothetical "galaxies move away so fast we never would have discovered they existed" paradox excites me.

It tells me that, as we exhaust our known frontiers, we will develop technologies which will reveal new ones we had never even thought of. As warp drive would have revealed the concept of other galaxies to those who lived in the hypothetical time where simple observation from our reference frame would have failed.

Yora
2015-01-14, 10:35 AM
I think the kind of mindset in which Lovecraft work was really a historic oddity, that existed just for a pretty short amount of time in a quite limited region of the earth. For perhaps just a few generations, there was this notion that human learning had reached a point where the believe in the mysterious work of unseen spirits had been overcome and all the processes we see in the world around us can be easily predicted and calculated with a simple equation. And just a bit later those physicists and astronomers shared with the world that actually the "processess we see in the world around us" are really just the tiniest tip of the iceberg.
First we knew nothing.
Then in the environment that created Lovecrafts mind, we knew everything.
And then we knew that we know nothing.

Lovecraftian horror aims directly at the point where people became aware that the universe is much bigger than what we can see. But probably less than a generation later, we rolled up our sleves, got our old explorer boots and hat out from the basement, and went back to work.
It's a kind of horror based on the initial shock, but now we all grow up taking this larger universe for granted.

If you would want to replicate that innitial shock, the best you probably could do today is to create a universe that isn't actually indifferent and ignorant of our existance, but one that isn't content with leaving us alone and actively trying to cause us harm.
Azathoth wouldn't be scrary. If hyperspace were hell, with real demons and torture, that would be scary!

Segev
2015-01-14, 10:54 AM
It's a kind of horror based on the initial shock, but now we all grow up taking this larger universe for granted.

If you would want to replicate that innitial shock, the best you probably could do today is to create a universe that isn't actually indifferent and ignorant of our existance, but one that isn't content with leaving us alone and actively trying to cause us harm.
Azathoth wouldn't be scrary. If hyperspace were hell, with real demons and torture, that would be scary!

You should look up an anime called "Scrapped Princess."

hamishspence
2015-01-14, 10:55 AM
There's also 40K. Which has quite a few aliens that seem somewhat "Lovecraftian" as well as the aforesaid hyperspace full of demons.

LudicSavant
2015-01-14, 11:08 AM
Perhaps it is just my outlook as both a scientist and a fan of science-fiction, but I simply don't accept that possibility.
I see that your reaction to that possibility is not wonder, but rather to resort to assertions of faith. :smallwink:

The universe has no obligation to make itself completely knowable to mankind. Scientist or not, your refusal to accept the possibility is merely a wishful assertion and a flimsy appeal to authority.


To me, "we can't ever know that" translates to, "We haven't yet found the right way to exploit the rules as they are to get around this." The laws of the universe have no obligation to be exploitable in the way you desire, and indeed the very principle that the universe has rules constrains possibility (e.g. if the universe has rules, not literally everything can be possible; that would be a paradox). The only way to know if an exploit exists is to go out there and find it.


As debating this point would be pulling us off-topic, I will accept it for argument's sake here. I will state that the research I've seen more points to the magical medium wherein the mass of the universe is such that expansion will asymptotically approach stasis...without ever QUITE reaching it. But again, debating whether that's true or not is off-topic. Yes.


I see the vast, awe-inspiring, unknowable frontiers, and I gibber excitedly at the prospect of conquering them. I feel the same way.
Never doubting that mankind will do so, eventually. Never doubting, on the other hand, is not a very a scientific point of view. The conscientious engineer builds fail-safes, even when she expects her machine will never break down. It would be imprudent of me, for instance, to never doubt that humanity will eventually accomplish everything, particularly when there is currently a very real and present danger of extinction.

Lord Raziere
2015-01-14, 11:14 AM
I am having a bit of a problem with making aberrations, Old Ones, and eldritch abominations actually appear terrifying. What would actually be the worst thing that could happen? Getting eaten? Tigers and crocodiles do that too, there is nothing supernaturally horrific to it.
Demons usually would drag people to a hell where they are going to suffer endless torment, as part of the way the universe is build.
And fey creatures often kidnap people to take them back to their realms and presumedly turn them into one of them or some kind of beast to serve them.

But what about "cosmic horror" creatures? Once you got over the fact that they exist, what's the worst they could do to you other than just kill you? Without an interest to collect souls, they are not really much different from normal wild animals with some tentacles and extra eyes.

The difference, at least to me, is the unraveling of all that you know and love, of all of reality, into something unrecognizable and foreign in every sense of the word. To eldritch abominations is fighting not just for the right to breathe, for but for the word "breath" to even have meaning. To fight them, is to fight for the most basic concepts of our universe that we take for granted to have value at all. even basic, vague things like "and" or "it" are things that are anathema to these creatures, and the wreck such concepts with their very presence, and they don't even care because they don't know what those are.

Your not fighting tentacle things and whatnot. those are just what you see of them, the filters that protect from seeing the truth: they do not have a form, because the concept of form or formlessness is foreign to them. form is purely a thing we place upon them with our perceptions so that they may be fought and killed at all. an animal can at least be tamed with offerings of food or scared off with certain sounds, but the outer things do not understand what sound is, nor know enough about matter to even begin to figure out what the purpose of food is. to speak words is itself, a thing that is alien to them not for the words you speak but the action of vibrations leaving your lips in a controlled manner. The basic act of taking a single step is incomprehensible to them.

and in turn, we cannot possibly understand anything about the other things. to go into their realm would not be going to a realm with completely different senses and ways of communication, or different geometries, no it would be going into a realm where "senses" "communication" and "geometries" have no meaning at all, because what is there cannot even be called something basic as an "It." because the concept of "It." is completely unrelated to anything an eldritch abomination is, you understand? It would be indescribable, if you could apply the concepts of describability or indescribability to anything there, but you cannot.

That is why you fight cosmic horror creatures. because otherwise all that you know has no meaning, no logic, no sense to it as the cosmic horrors unravel the universe from the way it makes sense, into something we will never be able to comprehend. demons at least make sense in their selfishness. animals at least are hungry. the fey do it all because they care for no one but their own desires. the eldritch horrors? we don't know what they're doing or why they are doing it, only that whatever is being done is bad for reality, because they're trying to apply concepts that are fundamentally incompatible with our own, if such things can even be said to be concepts at all.

its because they don't make sense that you fight them. otherwise, nothing will.

Segev
2015-01-14, 11:23 AM
I see that your reaction to that possibility is not wonder, but rather to resort to assertions of faith. :smallwink:Oh, sure. Though to hear myself described as expressing faith is a little weird, because I don't consider myself to be NEARLY as faithful as I would like to be. Still, religion need not enter into this.

Think of it more as confidence in mankind than as faith in the nature of the universe.


The universe has no obligation to make itself completely knowable to mankind. Scientist or not, your refusal to accept the possibility is merely a wishful assertion and a flimsy appeal to authority.Quite the contrary. It is an assertion of hope and declaration that I refuse to give in to despair. If we haven't found the knowledge yet, that doesn't mean we can't, and it certainly doesn't mean we should stop trying.

Lovecraft's despair and horror is that it is unknowable and therefore at best fruitless to try. At worst, madness-inducing and likely to get you eaten by Things.

If I lived in Lovecraft's works, I would be the hubristic sorcerer-savant who accumulated knowledge at the risk of madness, and likely would be a mad destroyer if I lived long enough before my inevitable and tragic demise. But I don't live in Lovecraft's works, and the universe is not actively malevolent by all analysis we have. It may not be actively WELCOMING, but it's not unknowable in the sense that our minds will break and reality shatter if we try. At least, not so far as we've been able to discern thus far.


The laws of the universe have no obligation to be exploitable in the way you desire, and indeed the very principle that the universe has rules constrains possibility (e.g. if the universe has rules, not literally everything can be possible; that would be a paradox). The only way to know if an exploit exists is to go out there and find it.Er, that would be the point. Discover the rules and how to exploit them. I am confident that the rules exist (i.e. that the universe has them, and is not inherently a place of "anything can happen") from the observations I and others have made upon it. I also know from my own experiences as a gamer that any rules which exist can be exploited as long as they aren't changing to deliberately prevent that exploitation. You just have to figure out HOW.


I feel the same way. Never doubting, on the other hand, is not a very a scientific point of view. The conscientious engineer builds fail-safes, even when she expects her machine will never break down.Eh, I may be being a little poetic. My apologies. I don't mean "oh, it'll work, so pull the switch!" I mean that I do not doubt that, eventually, every frontier we encounter will be explored, and every problem we find will be solved.

The thing is, there will always be new frontiers revealed by that exploration, and new problems to be solved. So it's not a statement that we'll know everything, but rather an assertion that we will, eventually, know the answers to any question currently asked. It may take a while, and we'll certainly screw up along the way. Safety measures are important, and failsafes to protect us from error are critical.

But we'll get there. And therefore we absolutely should keep trying!

To me, that IS wonder. To see the horizon and know that one day it will be within reach. To be the one reaching out for it, to be able to look back at all we've conquered, that is wondrous. Awe-inspiring.

Daunting, perhaps, at times, but never so horrible as to induce despair.

Yora
2015-01-14, 11:29 AM
The difference, at least to me, is the unraveling of all that you know and love, of all of reality, into something unrecognizable and foreign in every sense of the word. To eldritch abominations is fighting not just for the right to breathe, for but for the word "breath" to even have meaning. To fight them, is to fight for the most basic concepts of our universe that we take for granted to have value at all. even basic, vague things like "and" or "it" are things that are anathema to these creatures, and the wreck such concepts with their very presence, and they don't even care because they don't know what those are.
But how do you make a story with this? How would characters fight against it? All you could do is stand there and say "Well, ****..." and watch as the world implodes around you.

mephnick
2015-01-14, 12:03 PM
That's why I don't think it's something that can be tackled by RPG's. That kind of horror is a narrative style, not an interactive game. The Lovecraft video games were decent horror games, but it was mostly fear of scary things in the dark, not the fear of obsolescence. Call of Cthulhu TTRPG at it's best hits "survival-horror" not existential horror.

I just don't think it's a story you can tell while including game elements. Which sucks, because I love it.

Ceiling_Squid
2015-01-14, 02:00 PM
I think the kind of mindset in which Lovecraft work was really a historic oddity, that existed just for a pretty short amount of time in a quite limited region of the earth. For perhaps just a few generations, there was this notion that human learning had reached a point where the believe in the mysterious work of unseen spirits had been overcome and all the processes we see in the world around us can be easily predicted and calculated with a simple equation. And just a bit later those physicists and astronomers shared with the world that actually the "processess we see in the world around us" are really just the tiniest tip of the iceberg.
First we knew nothing.
Then in the environment that created Lovecrafts mind, we knew everything.
And then we knew that we know nothing.

Lovecraftian horror aims directly at the point where people became aware that the universe is much bigger than what we can see. But probably less than a generation later, we rolled up our sleves, got our old explorer boots and hat out from the basement, and went back to work.
It's a kind of horror based on the initial shock, but now we all grow up taking this larger universe for granted.


If this is true, why has there been a resurgence in interest with Lovecraft over the last decade? Why has he continued to influence horror authors for the better part of the century?

It's far more than an historic oddity, and I think it's a disservice to call it that, considering the fact that it is enduringly present in pop culture.

His work is an admission that the more we learn, the more vistas of unknown possibility open up to us. The totality of existence is utterly unknowable, because of it's impossibly vast nature. The universe does not care about us, as we are largely irrelevant, and human meaning and reason is merely an imperfect model, a mental and social construct without inherent objective value. The cosmic gods of Lovecraft are a cipher for the uncaring, unknowing universal truths that we barely understand.

We are constantly reminded of this simple fact the more we learn about our place in this universe The more we learn, the more we realize just how little we actually know, and how utterly small and fleeting this existence is.

The only reason most people don't draw general horror from this is that they don't think too hard about it, or find a positive coping mechanism. The human mind cannot contain the concept, or conceive of the true scale of reality all at once.

They, as you say, "take it for granted". That's just as true in Lovecraft's era as it is now. Lovecraft's mindset was a popular one in horror fiction, but keep in mind that it wasnt necessarily some reflection of a sweeping cultural attitude, especially not as far as scientiftic endeavor is concerned. The man was deeply disturbed, and some of that horror endures today because it resonates with a common fear many people posess. Obsolecence and futility. It's a fear that flares up in moments of weakness and existential crisis.

A century of learning has done so little to dispel the darkness of human ignorance, that it's almost laughable to think we, as a species, have outgrown the genre of cosmic horror.

Keep in mind, the average person is subjected daily to a vast system we call society, and the daily fears of insignificance and dehumanization have only grown worse as human civilization has expanded. Some of us suffer very little physically, but the existential horror of daily life fuels a myriad of illnesses, particularly widespread depression.

Lovecraft once said it well:

"It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude. I found it in the glare of mid-afternoon, in the clangour of a metropolis, and in the teeming midst of a shabby and commonplace rooming-house with a prosaic landlady and two stalwart men by my side."

If that's not a succinct depiction of a very modern horror setting, I don't know what is.

Sorry for the tangent, this is probably much better suited for a media discussion forum, and less relevant to the OP.

Yora
2015-01-14, 02:22 PM
I think Lovecraft still works because of willing suspension of disbelive. We are willing accept the shock experienced by the characters and keep reading the characters thoughts and action as if we would agree with his shock. Just as we are willing to keep reading about a character fighting against demons that want to drag him to hell, even though we don't believe there is an actual hell anyone could be taken to.
That being said, the same thing can also be applied to RPGs.

For my setting, I am demoting the tentacles and creepy crawlies to subterranean fey, I think they should be placed there very well.

Ceiling_Squid
2015-01-14, 03:19 PM
I think Lovecraft still works because of willing suspension of disbelive. We are willing accept the shock experienced by the characters and keep reading the characters thoughts and action as if we would agree with his shock. Just as we are willing to keep reading about a character fighting against demons that want to drag him to hell, even though we don't believe there is an actual hell anyone could be taken to.
That being said, the same thing can also be applied to RPGs.

To an extent, if we're playing with the trappings of Lovecraft rather than the deeper themes.

Your fallback to referencing demons and malevolent horror doesnt quite work as an analogy though, and here we get into the tentacles-and-toothy-maws-as-window-dressing issue. The players can suspend disbelief for conventional horror, and you can feel free to use Lovecraftian creatures as just strange monsters with bizarre properties. That works fine for a game. But it isn't cosmic horror to treat them like demons from hell. Those are conventional scares.

Cosmic horror comes into play not because these beings are out to get us, but because they represent a challenge to our comfortable mindset, and our misconceptions about our own place in the universe. They do not think like we do, and they do not generally think of humanity as sentient or significant, if they regard us at all. They are truly alien.

Without the implication that humanity is out of its depth, or if you cling the mistaken notion that we are dealing with a foe we can actually engage on the grounds of mutual aggression, you've just dressed our old demons up in strange outfits and called it a day.

That's a very hard theme to tackle in-game, and without completely rocking the cosmos of a fantasy setting and starting fresh, it's nearly impossible to hit that right note and still have a playable game.

If you must use such beings, try this:

Lovecraft prefers half-description. Sometimes it comes off a little hokey, but when he nails it, it works well. He gives you a suggestion of a creature's appearance and behavior based on a handful of disparate attributes or parts, and your mind has to do the rest to assemble the surreal image.

Let implication serve you well.

Yora
2015-01-14, 03:38 PM
For my setting, I am demoting the tentacles and creepy crawlies to subterranean fey, I think they should be placed there very well.

But since you guys have so many great ideas, maybe you might help me with my demons, for which I want to go full incomprehensibly alien.
There are no heavens or hell, only the primordial chaos, which is pure energy without either time or space. But there are also consciousnesses out there, which sometimes reply to mortal sorcerers trying to reach out beyond the borders of the physical world. I am thinking of something along the lines of Conan, Dragon Age, and Warhammer 40k, though perhaps even less personified. The primordial chaos is infinite and eternal, and there are possibly an infinite number of physical universes, so usually these demons don't take notice or pay any attention to anything relating to them. But sometimes something does catch their interest and then things get weird. And very dangerous.
Since the demons are pure energy and not part of the physical world, they can normally not enter in any way. But since sorcerers have been creating openings to the chaos both for exploration and free chaos energy to power their spells, demons are finding way to slip through, if they can find some kind of body. A living creature is best, but if need be some dead matter that has been warped by chaos energy used by sorcerers works too, basically creating some kind of elemental. Aside from those demons going on a rampage of destruction, they leave chaos essence everywhere, which causes the very laws of nature and physics to become undone. That's useful for sorcerers who can then create things that so far have been physically impossible, but if a demon spills chaos everywhere, the effect is devastating on the environment and all creatures in it. In theory, a world visited by enough demons for long enough might just implode into a spray of goo. Or a whale and a bowl of petunias.
Any idea how to play up the horrificness of the whole situation without giving the demons such plain motivations like "devour souls" and "let's undo all of creation". I would say the main drive for the demons would be the novelty of being inside a physical world, where there are such things as time and distance. And it's full of tiny moving things. This has the potential to become a nightmare, but so far I only have a tool but no real idea what to do with it.

It doesn't have to be existential horror at the true nature of the universe, I think the people are actually quite used to a cyclic nature of existance, with new universes appearing and disappearing all the time. But the entropy comming to our normal world at this point in it's existance is something that shouldn't be happening and completely violates the natural order of things.

Segev
2015-01-14, 03:38 PM
One of the more effective, in my opinion, tales out of Lovecraft is the story around The King In Yellow (which is not actually by Lovecraft, but is considered part of the mythos). While the surface reading is that it's a cover of The Masque of the Red Death cursed to drive people mad, the half-said elements, the presentation of its effects on the sanity of those around it, and even the implications of consequences more real (and certainly more surreal) than a mere curse are very effective and chilling.

Nothing Is Scarier (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NothingIsScarier) is a valuable trope for horror in general; its cousin of implication over detailed description contributes well to Lovecraftian cosmic horror.

I am not sure I entirely agree that it's the fact that these things are so alien that they do not conceive of us as "people" that inherently makes them cosmicly horrifying. Perhaps this isn't how those espousing that stance mean it, but to me that reduces too easily to "Man Vs. Nature" archetype. It's just that Nature gets to wear a squamus suit.

To me, I think what separates the feel of Lovecraftian horror (ignoring whether "cosmic" is even a good word for it or not, for a moment) from regular horror is that there's almost a sense of ineffable loss and separation. Of loneliness and sorrow to the beings that are also so horrible.

Not in the sense that you feel badly for them, but in the sense that you can't help but feel there's a terrible beauty that you're missing out on by not being ABLE to appreciate things in the way they see them.

No, obviously I'm not suggesting that the hideous fish-men are somehow beautiful. But the longing in the descriptions of "lost Carcosa," or the mysteries beyond desiring whispered of in "unknown Kaddath," and the way the empires of the Old Ones are described in majestic (even if horrific) terms...

This lends to, perhaps, that sense that "we are insignificant" in comparison, but it also leads to a feeling for why man, in his natural yearnings, may wish to explore these terrifying reaches.

Moreso than in traditional demon-horror, where the evil is bound and straining for freedom, Lovecraftian horror also tends to use gentler, more fragile terms. Sleep is a favorite. Sleep is all that keeps Cthulhu from rising, and it is a desperate, eternal struggle of other Elder Gods to keep Azathoth from waking.

Dreams and slumber also play a strong role, in general, in this kind of horror. Dreamlands are places you can find the monsters, as well as the wonders.



Again, the visceral fascination with the grandeur that may or may not be lost, and may or may not be "out there" to be found, coupled with the horrifying danger to mind, body, and soul that is inextricably twined with the potential discovery, gives Lovecraftian horror a sense that your own better nature may drive you to your doom, and that of others.

The Cabin In The Woods explores some of Horror as a genre's tendency towards horror-as-punishment-for-sin. Lovecraftian horror replaces "sin" with "curiosity." And in so doing, it twigs our own curiosity about it. "Standard" horror is in part cautionary tale, where we can all agree to some extent that they did something we at least would tell ourselves we wouldn't. Lovecraftian horror almost tempts us to try it anyway, even as it presents its cautionary warning. And its warning is vaguer, and somehow all the more surrealistically terrifying for the incompletion.

Qwertystop
2015-01-14, 06:55 PM
I've brought this up in similar threads, but hey - it's a good story. City of Angles (http://stefangagne.com/cityofangles/about.html) isn't quite cosmic horror, but it does hit a lot of similar notes - just from a fundamentally optimistic direction.

It's a world that doesn't make sense, that only pays lip service to conventional physics (and not even that, sometimes). It's a city that changes day-to-day, where a wrong turn could lead to an unknown shortcut or to a one-way hallway down an infinitely nested laundromat. It's a place where a person can become a twist in space, warping the world in horrifying ways, destroying without understanding that anything's wrong. And it's the hope that people can learn to work with it instead of against it, and make it a good thing.

"Eldritch" can be separated from "horror."

Lonely Tylenol
2015-01-14, 07:16 PM
I, for one, welcome our new Eldritch overlords.

Lord Raziere
2015-01-14, 10:45 PM
But how do you make a story with this? How would characters fight against it? All you could do is stand there and say "Well, ****..." and watch as the world implodes around you.

By picking up a sword and killing them. duh.

they don't understand our rules. by entering our reality, they are vulnerable to them. stab them silly. the realities are mutually alien and antithetical to one another.

Agrippa
2015-01-15, 12:49 AM
By picking up a sword and killing them. duh.

they don't understand our rules. by entering our reality, they are vulnerable to them. stab them silly. the realities are mutually alien and antithetical to one another.

Sounds like you're in the Robert E. Howard camp of dealing with hostile eldritch things. Though considering the fact that the Cthulhu Mythos/Yog Sothothery included R.E. Howard's original unedited Conan stories you could argue that as canon.

Envyus
2015-01-15, 02:36 AM
But how do you make a story with this? How would characters fight against it? All you could do is stand there and say "Well, ****..." and watch as the world implodes around you.

Well you don't have to use the outright big alien horrible things. Even Abberations like the the Mind Flayers can be pretty terrifying. I recall that in some settings some races teach that if it looks like your going to be captured by a Mind Flayer kill yourself. While the horrid things may eat brains they tend to wait until brain has outlived some of it's usefulness first. They flay the mind painfully, slowly and horribly breaking a person until none of their identity is left other then a slave to the Mind Flayers. Once their slave is not as useful as they would like they eat it's mind. The fact that they literally open up your head then poke and rip apart the areas of the brain and mind they find you won't need in your new life as a slave is a horrible thought to most creatures, losing one's sense of self is a pretty horrible thought.

Even when not doing that the fact that they can rewrite someones mind by their tentacles latching on to them and spending a few hours clamped on their head. Take one of the recent forgotten realms books. Qeunthel Baenre in order to be made more useful put under the tentacles of a Mind Flayer. She then went through several hours of horrible pain as the Mind Flayer edited her mind to give her the wisdom and experience of her dead mother, whose brain was fed to the Mind Flayer so he could edit her brain properly.

Envyus
2015-01-15, 02:41 AM
For my setting, I am demoting the tentacles and creepy crawlies to subterranean fey, I think they should be placed there very well.


Why they are very little like Fey.


Aberrations are utterly alien beings. Many of them
have innate magical abilities drawn from the creature's
alien mind rather than the mystical forces of the world.
The quintessential aberrations are aboleths, beholders,
mind fiayers, and slaadi.


Fey are magical creatures closely tied to the forces of
nature. They dwell in twilight groves and misty forests.
In some worlds, they are closely tied to the Feywild, also
called the Plane of Faerie. Some are also found in the
Outer Planes, particularly the planes of Arborea and the
Beastlands. Fey include dryads, pixies, and satyrs.

Nature versus Alien. Making them the same honestly upsets me a bit.

Milo v3
2015-01-15, 03:46 AM
Why they are very little like Fey.




Nature versus Alien. Making them the same honestly upsets me a bit.

Except that they way Fey are portrayed is alien. These aberrations would be things of nature, just not nature that the surface world is used to. It's alien in much the same way deep-sea animals are very alien, despite being completely natural beings.

Edit: hmm... wonder why it says Slaadi are aberrations.

SiuiS
2015-01-15, 04:16 AM
They are antithetical. That's why they're abominations. Because they so not exist within, but alongside, or in contradiction to, nature. Their presence and existence undoes the rocksteady reality around them, in ways that don't make sense. Time gets fuzzy. Events connected to them by sympathy decay. Mantorok? The dead god, unravels his rivals through time and space by playing the fates of mortals in several coterminous and mutually exclusive timelines based on a chance meeting with him once.

Cthulhu implants insanity, warped perspective (in all senses) and horror upon those who have been in some way touched by him when he stirs. Not horror in the modern sense of your brain registers fear for no reason, but in the more sinister sense of all reality actually, literally becoming more terrifying. Terror oozes out of the cracks in reality around you, as an almost tangible substance, because your great grand father once past a shrine and you once had a flashback style memory of your favorite train set that had a picture of great grampa in the frame.

Rot. Decay. Insanity. Wickedness. Perversion. Sickness. Mutation. Unraveling. The death of the mind and soul. The eternal torment of the mind and soul. The undying agony of a body forwever pulled into an event horizon composed of billions of hungry mouths, devouring, mind stretched outside of time so the relativity bending doesn't prevent you from experiencing it all forever and ever in repeat and stereo.


"Big monster" is neither Eldritch, a word denoting arcane, mystic, and potent in the old narrative sense of mystery = power; nor abomination, a thing that causes disgust or hatred and, genre wise, deservedly so.

The entire plot of the movie Event Horizon, where the ship becomes a living thing and the crew massacres itself in a murder-orgy? A shoggoth rolled over in it's eternal sleep.

Lord Raziere
2015-01-15, 05:24 AM
Sounds like you're in the Robert E. Howard camp of dealing with hostile eldritch things. Though considering the fact that the Cthulhu Mythos/Yog Sothothery included R.E. Howard's original unedited Conan stories you could argue that as canon.

keep in mind, this isn't working because the sword is actually making them bleed or whatever, its working because by stabbing the thing with the sword your applying the concept of death to something thats not meant to handle any concept from our world, and therefore experiences a critical glitch or whatever in its own little reality-whatsit that causes it to do the thing equivalent of not existing in their reality, like how they drive us insane or kill us with a random alien sound they make, its not because those things are MEANT to kill us, its because what they really doing has no way to be "coded" by our reality and therefore the system does the default thing when it encounters something it can't compute: it crashes.

Segev
2015-01-15, 08:58 AM
by stabbing the thing with the sword your applying the concept of death to something thats not meant to handle any concept from our world

Ah, the Exalted solution to things which death itself is not built to handle: kill them anyway and let entropy choke on it.

Yora
2015-01-15, 09:36 AM
Why they are very little like Fey.
In D&D. Which is really pretty bad at these things. It basically reduces them to pixies and nymphs. Once you go beyond English fairies and mainstream Greek creatures, there's some really bizare stuff throughout the world. I would list pretty much everything that is called "demon" but not native to some hell dimension as fey creatures.

Segev
2015-01-15, 10:23 AM
Eh. There remains some distinctions, though it's hard to articulate succinctly, between "demons" and "faeries," even when we get back to the root myths.

That said, many depictions of the Fair Folk do put them a lot closer to Cosmic Horror kinds of warped beings.

In the Exalted setting, in particular, the two are practically the same thing. The fanbase refers to them frequently as "cthulhoid elves" for good reason.

Frozen_Feet
2015-01-15, 10:25 AM
What did they do to us? What did they do, huh? Eldritch Horrors work best when they've not actually done anything, but their mere presence drives the player characters (and occasionally, the players) nuts.

I do not consider Aboleths or Mindflayers to be very good examples of Eldritch Horrors. They have the tentacles, weird societies and other trappings of the genre, but the actual horror they rely on is simply that of being eaten, of being hurt and preyed upon. In short, creatures like them care too much about humanity.

Same is true about most traditional fey creatures and deities too. They may be bizarre, they may be powerful enough to render mankind insignificant next to them, but on some level, they are defined by their relationship to mankind (as something meant to torment or benefit us), or mankind is defined in relationship to them (as prey, servants, worshippers etc.).

With the best eldritch horrors, such relationship is tenuous or doesn't exist at all. The cultists who worship these things? They're not insane because their object of worship is some disgusting beast inimical to all human life. They're insane because they think their worship, their rituals or reverence, actually sways these creatures one way or another.

Viewed thusly, an approaching Tsunami, an erupting volcano or a gamma ray burst moving faster than can be detected make for better cosmic horror, than any living being with tentacles. But if you want to use living things, something like the sea from Solaris is a good example, arguably better than most iconic eldritch horrors like Cthulhu. It only begins to notice the humans upon it when they poke it with a nuclear needle, and then uses its powers to unveil their deepest desires, fears and traumas... but in the end, nothing is gained from it, because the sea is simply too vast and too foreign for meaningful communication to happen. While events caused by it appear deeply meaningful on an emotional level to the humans, it's dubious whether the sea itself has any; as far as anyone can tell, to it everything was poking in the dark blindly to see what stung it a little.

Yora
2015-01-15, 10:51 AM
I think the best description is actually from a sci-fi monster: "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 gods mind is gone, but it still dreams."

Segev
2015-01-15, 11:24 AM
I do not consider Aboleths or Mindflayers to be very good examples of Eldritch Horrors. They have the tentacles, weird societies and other trappings of the genre, but the actual horror they rely on is simply that of being eaten, of being hurt and preyed upon.

Actually...like with many elements of horror, this is mostly about how it's depicted.

Aboleths, I've analyzed elsewhere. They are more on the scale of bhyakees or shoggoths than Great Old Ones or Elder Gods, but they have elements of "wrong" to them. Their truly ancient perspective and the nature of their own identity is alien and off-putting enough to be a good start, and the manner in which they enslave humans makes them a bit more horrific than normal. Again, their big things are how they undermine your identity-as-your-body, and how they are somehow just "bigger," historically, than you. They literally reach back to the dawn of time with their memories, and their identity branches repeatedly from a single ur-Aboleth.


Mind Flayers are, very often, just played as fear-of-being-eaten monsters. Sure, they can mind-slave you, and they have a scary mind blast that disables you and leaves you helpless in combat. They're dangerous; that's frightening (to a degree) to PCs because death is a threat when it's a TPK.

But think about them a little differently. It takes the DM stepping aside from the raw mechanics and instead looking at possible applications, narratively. But the horror of having the brain consumed is one that is more visceral than just being eaten (even eaten alive), because it plays into the same uncanny valley horror that corpses and zombies do. It emphasizes the nature of the empty shell you leave behind when you die, on some level.

Take it a step further. What if a mind flayer doesn't eat...everything? What if he just takes a bite, then leaves you with a somewhat-concealable hole in your head?

Brain damage does strange, unsettling things to humans. I saw a cartoon once of somebody who's head was open, and another person was spooning his brain like cereal. That was creepy enough, but a single word balloon made it infinitely worse: The victim had a look of terror on his face, and was screaming, "I can't remember my dog's name! I can't remember my dog's name!"

The Mind Flayer can play into the eldrich horror territory of undermining identity by taking...pieces. Nibbles of who you are, gone. Perhaps a dex penalty due to forgetting how to control your limbs quite right. Or you just lose the ability to associate the letter sequence "b-l-u-e" with a color. Maybe you feel okay, but don't recognize that village your party brings you to to recover. And, with horror dawning on their faces, they tell you it's where you grew up.

Imagine your family - perhaps one of whom you do still remember, surrounded by a few strangers - trying hard not to show how much your damaged state shows, and worries them. Especially hard, perhaps, if your last name is "Cratchett," and you don't know why that ownerless crutch on the wall evokes such sorrow in everybody else. Are you sure you WANT that memory back, if it would hurt you, too?

Oh, and if you're a wizard, you may not recognize some of the spells in your spellbook anymore. As a rogue, maybe you can't sneak attack humanoids. You just don't remember what's...vital. As a fighter, why would you use that Greatsword the party keeps trying to push on you? You're proficient with this hammer, but you aren't quite sure how to use a sword...even if they insist you used to be magnificent with it.

The Mind Flayer's horror comes from its name being used much more literally. It flays your mind, but could leave enough intact to miss the loss.

It gets worse if you consider that they're telepaths. Perhaps it deliberately removes specific pieces, so you can be manipulated in a way that serves its purpose. You are on a quest for vengeance against the murderer of your father, forgetting that you gave up that quest after discovering that the earl who did it was acting in self-defense after your father foolishly but desperately tried to steal from him in a highway robbery...and that you'd been engaged to said earl's daughter for half a year. A girl you no longer remember.

Envyus
2015-01-15, 05:39 PM
Actually...like with many elements of horror, this is mostly about how it's depicted.

Aboleths, I've analyzed elsewhere. They are more on the scale of bhyakees or shoggoths than Great Old Ones or Elder Gods, but they have elements of "wrong" to them. Their truly ancient perspective and the nature of their own identity is alien and off-putting enough to be a good start, and the manner in which they enslave humans makes them a bit more horrific than normal. Again, their big things are how they undermine your identity-as-your-body, and how they are somehow just "bigger," historically, than you. They literally reach back to the dawn of time with their memories, and their identity branches repeatedly from a single ur-Aboleth.


Mind Flayers are, very often, just played as fear-of-being-eaten monsters. Sure, they can mind-slave you, and they have a scary mind blast that disables you and leaves you helpless in combat. They're dangerous; that's frightening (to a degree) to PCs because death is a threat when it's a TPK.

But think about them a little differently. It takes the DM stepping aside from the raw mechanics and instead looking at possible applications, narratively. But the horror of having the brain consumed is one that is more visceral than just being eaten (even eaten alive), because it plays into the same uncanny valley horror that corpses and zombies do. It emphasizes the nature of the empty shell you leave behind when you die, on some level.

Take it a step further. What if a mind flayer doesn't eat...everything? What if he just takes a bite, then leaves you with a somewhat-concealable hole in your head?

Brain damage does strange, unsettling things to humans. I saw a cartoon once of somebody who's head was open, and another person was spooning his brain like cereal. That was creepy enough, but a single word balloon made it infinitely worse: The victim had a look of terror on his face, and was screaming, "I can't remember my dog's name! I can't remember my dog's name!"

The Mind Flayer can play into the eldrich horror territory of undermining identity by taking...pieces. Nibbles of who you are, gone. Perhaps a dex penalty due to forgetting how to control your limbs quite right. Or you just lose the ability to associate the letter sequence "b-l-u-e" with a color. Maybe you feel okay, but don't recognize that village your party brings you to to recover. And, with horror dawning on their faces, they tell you it's where you grew up.

Imagine your family - perhaps one of whom you do still remember, surrounded by a few strangers - trying hard not to show how much your damaged state shows, and worries them. Especially hard, perhaps, if your last name is "Cratchett," and you don't know why that ownerless crutch on the wall evokes such sorrow in everybody else. Are you sure you WANT that memory back, if it would hurt you, too?

Oh, and if you're a wizard, you may not recognize some of the spells in your spellbook anymore. As a rogue, maybe you can't sneak attack humanoids. You just don't remember what's...vital. As a fighter, why would you use that Greatsword the party keeps trying to push on you? You're proficient with this hammer, but you aren't quite sure how to use a sword...even if they insist you used to be magnificent with it.

The Mind Flayer's horror comes from its name being used much more literally. It flays your mind, but could leave enough intact to miss the loss.

It gets worse if you consider that they're telepaths. Perhaps it deliberately removes specific pieces, so you can be manipulated in a way that serves its purpose. You are on a quest for vengeance against the murderer of your father, forgetting that you gave up that quest after discovering that the earl who did it was acting in self-defense after your father foolishly but desperately tried to steal from him in a highway robbery...and that you'd been engaged to said earl's daughter for half a year. A girl you no longer remember.

You missed my post on the Mind Flayers. Earlier on the Page. After mentally dominating a slave for a while and the mindflayer making it preform the primary duties it will do for it. They latch on to their heads and while they don't eat the brain they fiddle around with, edit, and rip apart the parts of the brain and mind that won't be useful for their slaves in their new slave role. Once their Brain is rewritten and their sense of self is destoryed the Mindflayer no longer needs to mentally dominate the slave and can take some comfort in that the slave will simply preform the duties the Mindflayer wants it to do until it stops being useful.

Here is my old post


Well you don't have to use the outright big alien horrible things. Even Aberrations like the the Mind Flayers can be pretty terrifying. I recall that in some settings some races teach that if it looks like your going to be captured by a Mind Flayer kill yourself. While the horrid things may eat brains they tend to wait until brain has outlived some of it's usefulness first. They flay the mind painfully, slowly and horribly breaking a person until none of their identity is left other then a slave to the Mind Flayers. Once their slave is not as useful as they would like they eat it's mind. The fact that they literally open up your head then poke and rip apart the areas of the brain and mind they find you won't need in your new life as a slave is a horrible thought to most creatures, losing one's sense of self is a pretty horrible thought.

Even when not doing that the fact that they can rewrite someones mind by their tentacles latching on to them and spending a few hours clamped on their head. Take one of the recent forgotten realms books. Qeunthel Baenre in order to be made more useful put under the tentacles of a Mind Flayer. She then went through several hours of horrible pain as the Mind Flayer edited her mind to give her the wisdom and experience of her dead mother, whose brain was fed to the Mind Flayer so he could edit her brain properly.

Yora
2015-01-15, 05:49 PM
Since mindflayers have all their menial work and most fighting done by slaves, I think it's pretty well established that they don't need to actively psionically hold the leash of all their minions. Once they are done messing with their minds, they are nice obedient servants who do what they are told without complaint.

goto124
2015-01-15, 07:08 PM
Segev, I like your idea, though you might have to sort it out with the players first. Maybe even a way to reobtain the powers.

Would probably work better with already overpowered wizards, depending on setting.

JusticeZero
2015-01-15, 07:33 PM
If anyone is ever uncertain about what exactly the cosmic horror genre is or what the relationship between Eldritch Horrors and everyone else is, tell them to watch The LEGO Movie and contemplate what happens with LEGO sets over the years. Seriously the best Cosmic Horror movie I've seen in a long time.

SiuiS
2015-01-15, 08:39 PM
Ah, my mistake.

Perhaps it is just my outlook as both a scientist and a fan of science-fiction, but I simply don't accept that possibility.

To me, "we can't ever know that" translates to, "We haven't yet found the right way to exploit the rules as they are to get around this."

Exactly. Now imagine that some force, or knowledge, or concept is so alien in it's genesis that you must change to grasp it. On a fundamental level, this is true. Squirrels cannot get calculus. It's outside their wheelhouse. To a squirrel, the inner workings of a human are so bizarre and alien they cannot grok what we are and how we operate while remaining true to their Squirrel-ness.

Now imagine that this knowledge is itself so alien, so different, that it is also a force. Once a squirrel even thinks a primitive animal form of "what's with the biped anyway?" It can't stop that process. It begins to delve, to think, to mutate, until it understands.

That's the process. You see a thing! Well, what is the thing? It's a node! A node of what? What's it do? Where did it come from? Well? It's a node that reshaped time in it's vicinity. What? Preposterous! How? That's impossible!

And you study it. Evey step takes you farther from an understanding of your own dimension, closer to an understanding of theirs. You see that tipping point where thought and willpower are like physical forces you can exert, and once you know how it's like reading words when you see them. It's reflexive. You can't stop. You alter yourself. Some, the obsessed, go deeper. Their curiosity, their desire to know and master gets the best of hem. This fundamental scoffing leads you down the dark road to physical and spiritual mutation that gives you greater command and mastery of the lesser, limited "physics" known by mere mortals, but at the cost that you are no longer human yourself.

This is also fundamentally how magic (arcane) works in D&D, it's just underplayed. This is why the idea of a non-hubristic wizard is so ridiculous; the very act of beig a wizard separates you from society more and more. Some wad wants you to respect his meager temporal authority? These goons want your round disks of "precious" metal stamped with dead men's faces? Poppycock! You learned from the books of the great King Solomane, who treated with nightmares as equals and wrested their secrets from them height riddles and guile! You have deals with things normal people don't even recognizes as sentient, let alone amenable to bargaining! Why the Hel would I spend my good time and hard earned mystic knowledge to make you a teleportation circle, do you know what the astral plane even is? I'm not burrowing through the surface thoughts of the sleeping gods of dark desires manifest so you can turn a piddling mortal profit! I'm busy relearning the words that underpin all of what your fragile psyche understands to be "reality"!


I think the kind of mindset in which Lovecraft work was really a historic oddity, that existed just for a pretty short amount of time in a quite limited region of the earth.

No, it rears up all the time. The same fundamental fear of cognitive dissonance being demonized as reality coming undone shows itself all over the place; the whole "if people can change their sex then everything our society depends on collapses!' Fear is identical to the Lovecraftian 'if all of space is infinite and our anthropocentric view is wrong, everything collapses' fear, for example.


But how do you make a story with this? How would characters fight against it? All you could do is stand there and say "Well, ****..." and watch as the world implodes around you.

At great cost and with risk.

How far can you go becoming the monster to fight the monster before you reach the tipping point? You need to understand in order to combat, but understanding the beast is losing to it.

It's a point of this fiction that you DONT fight it as such. You fight it's symptoms and doing a really good job keeps it at bay, but no one ever walks up to the stars pawn and simply behind fisticuffs.


I think the best description is actually from a sci-fi monster: "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 gods mind is gone, but it still dreams."

The reapers were in my mind, aye, as both cosmic horror and cosmic horror done poorly. They were too mundane.

A horror of this sort is a verb indeed. They often fight each other. Not because ulyath and Xxelotath are active, angry rivals, sentiments who dislike each other, but because one cannot be runnig and standing still at once; one cannot be hot and cold. Often, the only way to combat one force of nature is with another. It's usually about choosing ignorance and living in fear, because peekig through that door to see if you really won will just let it back in, or choosing the devil you know over the devil you don't – or sometimes the reverse.

goto124
2015-01-15, 08:52 PM
...how is cosmic horror implemented in actual campaigns anyway?

DM: The next day, you're using a sword.
P1: What happened to my mace?
DM: It's gone. Maces have been erased from existance, as has your mace skills.
P1: What? Why?!
DM: You attacked the monster with a mace.
P1: What is this? My character uses a mace, that's part of his personality and you're not changing it!

SiuiS
2015-01-15, 08:55 PM
The original 3.5 duskblade writeup left out that they were at all proficient with simple weapons. I went on a twenty minute bender mocking our resident elfophile with a skit about how the nifty elven army was being undone because the other races had, like, sticks, and were doing things with them, but they weren't swords! They were non swords!

Player makes a mace, player gets funny looks. Gaslight them. Any player who responds to a horror game with denial and detached sense f self-sovereignty missed the horror game memo.

Yora
2015-01-16, 06:31 AM
The reapers were in my mind, aye, as both cosmic horror and cosmic horror done poorly. They were too mundane.
Yes, everyone hates the reveal at the ending.

Seto
2015-01-16, 07:35 AM
I don't know if it's been said, but there's also the fact that Ctulhu and his friends were made to be alien and huge forces in a world where you're a basic impotent human. There're no demons or Tarrasques to serve as a point of reference and 95% of the world nevers encounters a lion outside a zoo.
It simply is harder to make it work in a high fantasy setting.

Segev
2015-01-16, 09:48 AM
Exactly. Now imagine that some force, or knowledge, or concept is so alien in it's genesis that you must change to grasp it. On a fundamental level, this is true.

...


Now imagine that this knowledge is itself so alien, so different, that it is also a force.

...

You see a thing! Well, what is the thing? It's a node! A node of what? What's it do? Where did it come from? Well? It's a node that reshaped time in it's vicinity. What? Preposterous! How? That's impossible!

And you study it. Evey step takes you farther from an understanding of your own dimension, closer to an understanding of theirs. ... You can't stop. You alter yourself. ... This fundamental scoffing leads you down the dark road to physical and spiritual mutation that gives you greater command and mastery of the lesser, limited "physics" known by mere mortals, but at the cost that you are no longer human yourself.See, I don't view this with horror. I view this as simply the process of learning.

Everybody on this board has probably experienced a version of it. Take your favorite RPG system. One you know inside and out. One you discuss and have fun nuances you bandy with your friends over. One you can make dance to any story you care to write.

Now, try to talk to a friend or family member who barely understands that RPGs exist about this game system. The language just isn't there. You can't express it to them in a way that makes sense, in part because they just don't care enough to listen to the detailed, lengthy explanations required.

To put it another context entirely: If you have to explain the joke, it loses its humor. This is because, if you have to explain it, there's just a fundamental difference in world experience that makes the humor untranslatable at this time. You and the person to whom you explain it are too alien too each other, at least in that respect.


Speaking as one with a very high level of education, topics on which I am well-educated often feel like I'm discussing "magic" with "the uninitiated," in the sense that trying to explain it is just...unrewarding. For both of us. My experience with the topic and my understanding of how to make it do what I want it to do is alien to their understanding of the world. (This is true of people with similarly high levels of education but wildly different specialties, too. And their discussions of their topics are equally baffling to me.)


This is also fundamentally how magic (arcane) works in D&D, it's just underplayed. This is why the idea of a non-hubristic wizard is so ridiculous; the very act of beig a wizard separates you from society more and more.To a degree, and this is true of scientists, and other sorts of experts, as well.


Some wad wants you to respect his meager temporal authority? These goons want your round disks of "precious" metal stamped with dead men's faces? Poppycock! You learned from the books of the great King Solomane, who treated with nightmares as equals and wrested their secrets from them height riddles and guile! You have deals with things normal people don't even recognizes as sentient, let alone amenable to bargaining! Why the Hel would I spend my good time and hard earned mystic knowledge to make you a teleportation circle, do you know what the astral plane even is? I'm not burrowing through the surface thoughts of the sleeping gods of dark desires manifest so you can turn a piddling mortal profit! I'm busy relearning the words that underpin all of what your fragile psyche understands to be "reality"!This...not so much. At least, not the way I tend to see it. Now, maybe magic is fundamentally different than science/technology, in some settings, and this is actually true. But it is not actually how it works in D&D's base assumptions, not any more than it does in reality for scientists and technologists who are really deep in their field.

We - and wizards - remain fundamentally human (or elven, or whatever.) Our wizards just are experts in an academic field with high practical application, and, like a martial artist who can do seemingly-impossible feats with his body, can do seemingly-impossible feats with his spells.

Still, their motivations remain relatable. Even if we don't know why THEY find that scrap of parchment so valuable, we understand their reaction to that perception of value. They value (or do not value) treasure as much as anybody else can and does. Those hoodlums who want his metal disks with nobles' faces printed on them could get a similar confused/arrogant reaction from a martial artist who also thought himself beyond paltry mortal desires. But the truth is, they remain (demi)human(oid), and probably do understand the value of it.

Just because you understand how to build a wormhole engine doesn't mean you're unable to fathom the use to which the general who asked you to build one could put it, nor the value it would have to him (and how much it might cost to build). The wizard building the teleportation circle has use for wealth, and may or may not choose to sell his services as any other very potent expert.


For magic to truly alienate its practitioners from "mundane" people, something more than mere power would have to separate them. To truly lose aspects of humanity would require a fundamental shift in desires, needs, and limitations. Settings where mages "go mad" just by learning more magic could be a result of the mages' PERCEIVED needs becoming divorced from those of a mortal body in the real world. Their madness is the manifestation of them being delusional about what they need to survive and how the world does work.

Other settings' magical taboos and cursed limitations - a witch who cannot cross running water, or a sorcerer who must never eat while facing East - could be either concessions made and conditions fulfilled to be able to use their powers (just as a electonics developer must wear "ritual" clothing in the form of anti-static outfits and grounding straps to successfully build circuit boards without damaging them), or literal alterations to their fundamental nature in ways that are truly alien to the world. Maybe "East" doesn't exist as a proper direction for them anymore (though what that might look like in practice is so alien a concept that I have trouble imagining it in practice).


This is not how D&D does it. Even the Wu Jen's taboos are more tacked-on than feeling fundamental. But a setting or system which actually incorporated distinctly different physical (and metaphysical) needs as one gained more powers, which added more inhumanity in fundamental (rather than cosmetic or "it's a curse: you pick a madness for each spell" sort of ways), could be interesting.

Heck, Unknown Armies kind-of does this: Adepts, their mages, are canonically mad, in that they're fixated on a twisted view of how reality works in one particular way that represents at least one break in their mind. They have specific themes to the kind of magic they can do, and their magic "charges" (spent to use magic) are gained through strange behaviors.

This fundamentally shapes aspects of their behavior, making them seem obsessive at the least. Entropomancers, for example, manipulate probability. They gain charges by putting themselves and their loved ones in danger with no magical "backup." The greater the danger, the greater the charge(s). This makes them extreme daredevils and stupid risk-takers. Half the time, it's genuinely foolhardy; the other half, reality is warping in their favor as probability and fate bend to their will.

UA is, needless to say, a cosmic horror sort of setting.

mikeejimbo
2015-01-16, 01:37 PM
You know, as I was thinking about and reading this thread, I realized the perfect defense against cosmic horrors: nihilism. "You are so insignificant that we don't notice you," implies the cosmic horror. "Nothing I didn't already know," responds the nihilist. "There is so much that you don't know that your very concepts are meaningless," says the cosmic horror. "Yes, they're all fictional anyway," responds the nihilist.

Of course, arguably that is also giving up one's humanity, just in a different way.

J-H
2015-01-16, 01:41 PM
I watched the 2014 Gozilla movie a couple of days ago. It actually fits the bill pretty well for Eldritch Horrors.
Sure, Gozilla's basically a boxer crossed with a T-Rex, but he's about 400' tall! The Mutos are creepy and don't resemble any known life form (except, possibly, bugs). They eat radioactivity for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Other than eating radioactives neither the Mutos nor Godzilla really care about anything the humans do. Every weapon we fire at them is merely an annoyance, and all the damage they cause is part of their Great Predator grudgematch or an attempt to get food. They're not malicious towards humans...they just Don't Care, and they wreck entire cities as a result.

BeerMug Paladin
2015-01-16, 02:12 PM
The divide between a normal person and a highly educated scientist/philosopher/engineer/literary critic/artist/etc... Is slight and ultimately not that different because the motivations of the person isn't really that different. Just the language and the general interests diverge slightly so individual areas of expertise make someone a bit hard to understand.

But what if there could be some perfect apotheosis of knowledge, distributed across all fields of human knowledge and study that leads to a form of transcendent madness that is indecipherable to a normal human vantage point? Every trivial variation adds almost no distortion on its own, but expert mastery in hundreds, thousands or millions of fields inevitably adds into some incomprehensible, alien whole.

I once heard it takes around 7 years of dedicated study to become an expert in a given field. You say liches are beings of pure evil and madness? Gee, I wonder how that happened.

Cosmic horror is more about concepts like this than it is about monsters, metaphysics, or anything else (the monsters are just a cool bonus). There's no holy grail of wondrous knowledge to attain, and ultimately, knowledge spells doom for what we consider to be our set of good human values.

The only safety is to recoil from truth and hide in the blanket of ignorance. Recently become immortal? Don't learn too much, or you may lose the person you think you want to be. Enjoy the trite existence of twitter and youtube and surrender to the cacophony of voices jibbering the latest pop cultural memes. That's how you stay human.

Now, that isn't necessarily the only way to approach cosmic horror. You can certainly do very similarly themed horror with heavy overtones of scientific discovery and curiosity. In fact, I think the ease with which the educated people in the stories go insane in a lot of the classic cosmic horror stories is a little silly.

But how to actually update some of the more interesting concepts to have curious people poking their fingers into dark holes without those people going insane? I don't really know how to do such a thing. I think the genre as a whole is maybe a tad unreal here, and it hurts the suspension of disbelief, but I don't really know how to fix it. I'd suggest maybe skip that part completely.

Lastly, this is part of why I think the setting matters a whole lot for cosmic horror. It depends a lot on what the people living within the universe know to be true about the universe. It depends on subverting an expectation people have about the setting that is so fundamental, that people just don't realize that they've been asserting that thing this whole time.

Setting matters for an audience because an audience has expectations for a setting. Cosmic horror can't really work in D&D-verse because D&D is largely a fantasy kitchen sink. Unless people really have a grounded understanding of the setting in the first place, cosmic horror is just another name for weird monsters.

Actually, there's nothing wrong with just having weird monsters and strange metaphysical monsters. That seems, more than anything else, to be the main thing people think of when they think of cosmic horror. And those things can definitely be in D&D. They're even pretty fun to fight and slaughter.

Frozen_Feet
2015-01-16, 04:06 PM
...how is cosmic horror implemented in actual campaigns anyway?

I typically aim for more visceral fears, even though I love trappings of the cosmic horror as a genre. But I think I can name two times I managed to pull it off right:

The first case involved a clerical PC, who started as a member of a local mainstream religion, that of the Great Rock, but then began finding more allure in an esoteric take on that religion's themes. He started worshipping what was called "The Dreamer", a supposed, benevolent primogenitor of all life in his world. Eventually, the character became powerful enough to cast the equivalent of Commune, and decided to consult his deity. The rules said that in order to do so, he'd have to journey to his religion's equivalent to Paradise - and should he fail a Saving Throw against magic due to impiety, he'd find himself in the equivalent of Hell instead.

I rolled the dice and told him where he landed. It was a great cavern, with its bottom filled with blue, glowing blood from the carcass of a great, silver beast. From the pool, various lifeforms were being generated, only to quickly return there and be dissolved. They were beckoning him to join them.

The cleric could not decide whether what he saw was Heaven or Hell.

He left without asking any questions.

Afterwards, he decided to believe only in himself.

The second case involved a mystery of an abandoned castle. The players found out the people there had embarked on an expedition to a set of caverns below the castle. In those caverns, the PCs found gates to the elemental planes of Fire and Ice, as well as black sea. They built a boat out of rotten planks to get across, which was a pretty harrowing endeavor, as the sea was formed from the now-formless spirits of the people from the castle. They were not malevolent, though, so they made it to the other shore and found a stone beacon, older than anything made by Men, as well as a closed gate with a date inscribed upon it, and a message telling that something would come through on the specified date.

The player characters decided to return on the specified date. At that time, they could open the gate and found it led to the moon, with strange, faceless and speechless phantoms inhabiting a city of black stone. Perplexed, they returned home.

As far as they could tell, nothing else ever made it through.

Afterwards, my players told me "Please stop using gods and supernatural creepy-crawlies to freak us out." :smalltongue:


See, I don't view this with horror. I view this as simply the process of learning.

I'd say that's because you're already in on the joke. I know a lot of people to whom the very prospect of learning causes anxiety, because they (quite rightly) fear that learning more about the world will prove their dearest preconceptions wrong or challenge their identity in some way. "Ignorance is a bliss" is a saying for a reason.

To grok the horror, you simply have to put yourself back in the boots of a 4-year-old learning how Santa Claus isn't real, and how that puts them in a different club than younger children.


[Scientist/martial artists/wizards/whatever] remain fundamentally human (or elven, or whatever.)

Do they? Were they so even at the start?

It's not as clear-cut as you'd think. I'll take martial artists and soldiers under closes scrutiny, specifically, because the lore surrounding them is so vast, though clergy and scientists would do as well.

Throughout history, those who do or can do violence against other people have been held separate of those who don't or can't. See, for example, how "nobility" has often been synonymous to "violent elite". In some traditions, where non-violence and vegetarianism were held as virtues, warriors were placed in a caste of their own, with special rules and allowances for them. Less positive cases include how murderers have been demonized and dehumanized; the superstitions surrounding them are many, including the well-known myths of werewolves and such.

You say it's "just training" that lets them do all the things that make "the uninitiated" gawk at what they do. But why did they choose to train in the first place? With modern science, we can actually demonstrate the most phenomenal warriors and the worst murderers were or are physically and mentally different from the norm, with many of such traits being genetic, inborn. I might agree they still fit within the rough category of "fundamentally human", but still, there's a chance they're fundamentally different on a finer level than species, different in a way that clearly sets them apart from those people who recoil at violence.

With species other than humans, the differences could be even more dramatic. You invoked the fictional example of elves, but we might as well be talking about ants. With several species of ants, the differences between workers and warriors are so dramatic, both on physical and genetic levels, that they could be mistaken for different species. What is the fundamental "antness" they share between them? Or we could talk of some butterflies which undergo complete metamorphosis as part of their lifecycle, with such trivial-sounding things as temperature and diet dictating whether they emerge from their cocoons as male or female, or what color and shape their wings are (etc.).

SiuiS
2015-01-16, 04:43 PM
Yes, everyone hates the reveal at the ending.

Oh I'm not doing a bash the ME3 thing. Just, from an outside point of view, it say halfway between "unknowable Conquerer who must be beaten conceptually, held back only by hope" and "big monster. Shoot it.", and that silly eyed both.


See, I don't view this with horror. I view this as simply the process of learning.[/wuote]

If you see becoming a literal soul-consuming demon whose synapses have morphed into live, ambulatory spiders as a natural learning process, then you live in nightvale. If not, then you missed the point.

The formula for cosmic horror is simple. Some malignancy exists. You fear it because it is active and unknown. That mystery is protected by Consequences; no one learns of it and survives. From here, it's easy to deal with. It's been rendered into an easy to digest format. The point of cosmic horror is tension though. The point is indigestion. Once you've rationalized it enough that there is no tension between the absurdity of the assault and the absurdity if the mystery, you're not doing horror anymore.

Just like any other similar set up it requires buy-in. If you don't buy in, it won't make sense.

[quote]Everybody on this board has probably experienced a version of it. Take your favorite RPG system. One you know inside and out. One you discuss and have fun nuances you bandy with your friends over. One you can make dance to any story you care to write.

Now, try to talk to a friend or family member who barely understands that RPGs exist about this game system. The language just isn't there. You can't express it to them in a way that makes sense, in part because they just don't care enough to listen to the detailed, lengthy explanations required.

I actually do phenomenally at this. Concepts transcend language. I can explain how many work without the words I would use to discuss them with you; just like I can explain in Spanish to someone concepts that I came up with in English.

Cosmic horror is about concepts you cannot explain to someone without replacing their brain with spiders. And trying to explain it causes their brain to become spiders. How? If you knew, your brain would be spiders and you wouldn't care to explain because the perspective that makes it novel to you has been replaced by spiders.



This...not so much. At least, not the way I tend to see it. Now, maybe magic is fundamentally different than science/technology, in some settings, and this is actually true. But it is not actually how it works in D&D's base assumptions, not any more than it does in reality for scientists and technologists who are really deep in their field.

I disagree. It's been relegated to fluff, and due to the conceits of 3e that means it's been dismissed, but this concept is the foundation of the arcane/divine/psychic divide, and has been with the game since the little brown books. It wasn't always discussed, because it wasn't where they wanted to focus – in fact, Gary Gygax actively chose Vancian casting over Arneson's preferred system specifically because he wanted to bypass the how's and whys of magic for results to focus on the battle or the delve.

But go back. Look into the histories. Read the fluff. Wizards have always been doing the dark sorcerer stuff, and the rules only focus on results so you get a heuristic only. But you should know a heuristic isn't the truth, it's a surface pattern that serves well enough for our purposes... Unless the purpose is to get at the truth.

It's actually really interesting, to me. I know the game doesn't play that way and that if you remove thirty years of history from the D&D system and present nothing but it's rules in a vacuum you won't see it (and thus don't need to play that way or even acknowledge it!), I bring it up mostly because I find the idea infectious and want it to spread.


We - and wizards - remain fundamentally human (or elven, or whatever.)

You say of the academic branch interested in immortality through spiritual transmutation, the removal of the soul and moral center to evade death, the binding of contracts with beings so profound the contracts become fundamental, unalterable laws of your personal reality.

If you're discussing learned and unchanged individuals, you're not discussing the thing I am. Alchemy was about eternity as a perfected being – which humans are not. Shedding humanity for your higher goal. Hubris.

D&D does this, it just doesn't punish you for it because D&D looks at social ramifications and says "don't care.", and it looks at combat ramifications and says "let's fine tune this; results alone matter, not process!". :smallsmile:

Frozen_Feet
2015-01-16, 05:20 PM
Cosmic horror is about concepts you cannot explain to someone without replacing their brain with spiders.

There's a more down-to-earth, actually possible example: seeing ultraviolet light. Which is hilarious, because ultraviolet was the real-life inspiration behind the Color Out of Space. Normally, humans cannot see it, because the lense of they filters ultraviolet radiation. But if the lense gets damaged or is removed (due to cataract etc.), UV rays can get through and suddenly a person can see whole new colors and patterns where none were before.

Life must've sucked for people like that. Try explaining to others how what you're seeing is not just in your head, when they can't see it. But if they just let you poke their eyes with a needle...

Ceiling_Squid
2015-01-16, 07:22 PM
There's a more down-to-earth, actually possible example: seeing ultraviolet light. Which is hilarious, because ultraviolet was the real-life inspiration behind the Color Out of Space. Normally, humans cannot see it, because the lense of they filters ultraviolet radiation. But if the lense gets damaged or is removed (due to cataract etc.), UV rays can get through and suddenly a person can see whole new colors and patterns where none were before.

Life must've sucked for people like that. Try explaining to others how what you're seeing is not just in your head, when they can't see it. But if they just let you poke their eyes with a needle...

I've heard people with synesthesia speak in similar terms about their experiences, but at least they use describable, if bizarre, sense associations.

The key issue is, these experiences become a part of their accepted reality. To alter their senses to correct the crossed wires would obliterate a part of their perceived reality, and in some ways, make life seem duller, attenuated.

To change your perception is to alter your subjective reality, and, consequently, yourself. Certain concepts are difficult to grasp or even describe unless you, yourself, are first altered to perceive them. The act of knowing is dangerously transformative. That's a small motif in cosmic horror.

Beta Centauri
2015-01-16, 07:31 PM
I think the kind of mindset in which Lovecraft work was really a historic oddity, that existed just for a pretty short amount of time in a quite limited region of the earth. For perhaps just a few generations, there was this notion that human learning had reached a point where the believe in the mysterious work of unseen spirits had been overcome and all the processes we see in the world around us can be easily predicted and calculated with a simple equation. And just a bit later those physicists and astronomers shared with the world that actually the "processess we see in the world around us" are really just the tiniest tip of the iceberg.
First we knew nothing.
Then in the environment that created Lovecrafts mind, we knew everything.
And then we knew that we know nothing. I think you're right about this.

We had a pretty good bead on everything at the turn of the 20th Century. People felt that science would be completely figured out in just a few years. There were a few oddities left, like the blackbody problem, and photo electrons. But eventually they were forced to realize that these oddities were the result of major flaws in theory, and the corrections led to things like quantum mechanics and relativity.

For many people, that was just discovery and advancement, but Lovecraft was apparently very sensitive to all of this change, seemed to think that it hinted that even more of what we thought was true was not. A lot of his stories involve settled or assumed facts being upset, and people being unable to admit to themselves that the thing they're seeing isn't just an oddity, but actually has major implications.

We know the history of the natural world - oops, no, we didn't know about the numerous advanced and intelligent species that predated us by eons.
We know the colors of the visible spectrum - oops, no, there's a color we can't even describe and it does things to people.
We know what lives out in the woods and on mountains - oops, no we have no clue.
We understand geometry - oops, how about those acute-obtuse angles.

It's not that the Elder Things were tentacled, and they weren't even particularly evil. The horror of them is that their existence upends so much of what we thought we knew.

To evoke Lovecraftian horror in your game, then, you'd want to look at the boundaries of the game world. They're pretty vast, though, and oddities are often taken as a matter of course. But consider some of the established elements of D&D:

Alignment can be measured on two axes - oops, no there's a third and possibly even a fourth axis, and that thing in front of you just cast Protection From [an alignment you didn't even know you had].
Spells and effects target one of three aspects of a being or object - oops, you're being targeted in some fourth way.
There are eight schools of magic - oops, no, 17 actually, and the extra 9 are all prohibited to any specialist in one of the other 8.
Spells range from 0th to 9th level - oops, no, there are spells below 0th level which get cast automatically every time a spell is cast or dispelled, and something is using those spells as a carrier signal for a message.
Teleportation spells remove you from one location and return you to another - oops, no, the portion that supposedly returns you to the new location doesn't actually do anything, which means SOMETHING ELSE is responsible for that part of the spell.

goto124
2015-01-16, 09:54 PM
With all the 'oops no', we better inform players beforehand that even the mechanics are going to be twisted in wierd ways, and anyone who doesn't wish to deal with it should not join the game at all.

Beta Centauri
2015-01-16, 10:57 PM
With all the 'oops no', we better inform players beforehand that even the mechanics are going to be twisted in wierd ways, and anyone who doesn't wish to deal with it should not join the game at all. Of course. How else would you do it? Not informing the players is just asking for trouble.

But if anyone actually goes this route, I recommend not writing mechanics for these oddities. Having mechanics means they're understandable and manipulable and these oddities are not. Why does the creature who has going around digging out people's pineal glands register as lawful good? It just doesn't. Why do only non-specialist wizards have a chance of casting the spells from that book found in the square chamber with 5 walls? Good question.

SiuiS
2015-01-18, 12:48 AM
You don't want to not write out mechanics for it, you just don't want the mechanics to function as RAW. Leave them wibblywobbly like rules in other games. Room to maneuver.

Any weird inquiry you meet with "good question!" Shouldn't be rhetorical. It should be an actual question they players can investigate, and that means an answer they can learn, with cost and at risk. How far down the rabbit hole will they go? How much will they justify their descent? That's how these play out. :)

Beta Centauri
2015-01-18, 05:00 PM
You don't want to not write out mechanics for it, Yes I do not want to write out mechanics for it.


you just don't want the mechanics to function as RAW. Leave them wibblywobbly like rules in other games. Room to maneuver. I also just want to play, rather than figuring out any kind of mechanics. Not writing them down gives me both room to maneuver and Playing Right Now.


Any weird inquiry you meet with "good question!" Shouldn't be rhetorical. It should be an actual question they players can investigate, and that means an answer they can learn, with cost and at risk. How far down the rabbit hole will they go? How much will they justify their descent? That's how these play out. :) Not always. Depends on the point of the story. In a D&D game, the point would not be to investigate the oddness, but to put a stop to it, and putting a stop to it will probably involve just putting a sword through something. The oddness makes that harder in disturbing ways. Some episodes of X-Files were about figuring out what was really going on, some episodes never really explained it.

SiuiS
2015-01-19, 12:13 AM
I am confused why you would respond to a sentence fragment as if it were a self contained idea. That's akin to arguing my use of the word "of" in isolation.

If you are more interested in making something up without an idea of how it affects the rules, and just putting a sword into it and being done with it, then neither D&D not Eldritch horror sound like what you want – nor the DM chair.

Beta Centauri
2015-01-19, 12:24 AM
If you are more interested in making something up without an idea of how it affects the rules, and just putting a sword into it and being done with it, then neither D&D not Eldritch horror sound like what you want – nor the DM chair. That was an unnecessarily personal and unfriendly thing to say. No one is insulting your GMing skills, so leave mine out of it.

There are lots of different GMing styles and lots of different approaches to play? Conan didn't have to understand the abilities of Yag-kosha in order to have a cool adventure dealing with the Tower of the Elephant. Sometimes eldritch horrors are just a backdrop, to give a story an enduring mystery that can't just be figured out. A GM doesn't need rules for that, or even to know how what they're making up interacts with the rules. But they should understand what makes something "eldritch" in their particular setting.

Solaris
2015-01-19, 08:50 AM
Yes I do not want to write out mechanics for it.

I also just want to play, rather than figuring out any kind of mechanics. Not writing them down gives me both room to maneuver and Playing Right Now.

What's the difference between writing down a loose outline of how you expect it to work and winging it?
You're basically arguing that preparing ahead of time is worse than complete improvisation.

Segev
2015-01-19, 09:52 AM
When I referred to "elves," I was remaining well within the standard "svelt humans with pointy ears and longer lives" reference frame. If we want to really explore what it would take to make elves alien in the manner which any race having biological, spiritual, fundamental differences between "warriors" and "not-warriors" (as an example), we can, but that's opening an extra dimension to the discussion.

And, if we do that, I revoke my "remain human/elven/whatever" statement and simply assert it is so for humans.

Yes, we can identify traits - some genetic rather than memetic - which make people warriors. Cultures like to classify people, as well (it's part of specialization). There are people - humans - who have little trouble becoming masters of one field (violence, science, healing), and others who have difficulty with them (and ease with others). There are also humans who are just good at just about anything, and others who have many...problems...succeeding at anything.

But they all remain fundamentally relatable and understandable. They are not alien, they do not lose their humanity (assuming they aren't becoming truly damaged in the process; there are poisonous cultures which set out to destroy the fundamental humanity of their members. I would claim even those are only mostly-successful; most people are recoverable even from them). The biggest exception is the memetic part of our development: if we are poorly trained as children, we do not develop into functional human adults. Feral children are good, noncontroversial (in a cultural sense) examples. I would also assert that being brought up in a poisonous culture can ruin you for life, but that's far more controversial and probably not helpful to discuss, here.


As far as "there's a concept you never thought of in the setting, and it's alien enough to be weirding out your expectations," I think that making it explicitly not-defined makes it less cosmic horror and more "the DM's making things up again."

The thing about cosmic horror is that there's a sense to it that, if you could just wrap your head around picturing a 5-dimensional space (or a similarly hard-to-impossible thing for the human mind to conceive), you could GET it.

...actually, that's probably still too mundane. I can't picture anything higher than 3 dimensions, despite intellectually understanding the concepts and being able to work with math and physics that operates in higher dimensions. It's just really, really hard, because I can't picture it, so I have to trust my math and try to project it onto 3D.

goto124
2015-01-19, 09:54 AM
How do you make cosmic horror... well, horror... instead of surrealism?

Yora
2015-01-19, 10:00 AM
Looking at this thread: Nobody knows.

Urpriest
2015-01-19, 10:51 AM
For D&D specifically, keep in mind that while the world has plenty of beings more powerful than humans in it, they're still ultimately centered around human existence. Archons dress like knights, with armor and swords, Tanar'ri are derived from mortal sins, Dragons regularly mate with humans and teach them arcane lore, heck the whole Great Wheel is a wheel around the Material Plane. The gods themselves subsist, if not entirely than to a great extent, on mortal belief.

Then you add in the cosmic horror. Creatures like Obryiths, demons that somehow predated mortal souls. Aboleths, for whom the gods are latecomers to the cosmos. Mind Flayers, who represent what happens when we evolve past our own existence.

These guys don't need to be vast, powerful, and about to eat you. They just need to point out, by their very existence, that the story isn't really about you after all.

Beta Centauri
2015-01-19, 10:56 AM
What's the difference between writing down a loose outline of how you expect it to work and winging it? The time involved in writing it down. The collaboration at the table. The integration and reincorporation of things that have happened at that session.


You're basically arguing that preparing ahead of time is worse than complete improvisation. Okay.

Segev
2015-01-19, 11:11 AM
How do you make cosmic horror... well, horror... instead of surrealism?

I'm not entirely sure you need to do anything other than handle the tone right (as with any horror). Dada-esque surrealism comes off cartoonish rather than horrifying, but again, presentation is everything.

Take the first Matrix movie. I recently watched a review of it by a critic who does comedy as part of his reviews, regularly. There is a scene where Agent Smith is run over by a train, and then the train stops and he steps off, turning his head with that trademark mechanical precision to look right at the camera.

This is a scene that is somewhere between cool and chilling, and it plays with a surreal aspect that the man who was just killed is in an impossible place, unphased by the horrible accident. Even knowing the mechanism - that Agents possess people, so the dead body is some innocent victim and this Agent Smith is actually another puppet - doesn't change the disturbing chill of this incongruous-to-our-expectations-of-the-world visual.

The critic added a cartoonish noise and mentioned that it's like something the Road Runner or Animaniacs might do, and the context-shift made it humerous.


In point of fact, think about classic cartoons and their sight gags. They often run on a kind of logic that is eponymous. Yet, take the innate humor and the eye-rolling irritation with which the antagonists react to it out. Replace it with "antagonists" who are actually normal people who expect normal, 3D, causal reality. Darken the tones, remove the "he's alright!" humor that applies to the human members of the ensemble. (No flattening-like-pancake that gets up and needs to be pumped full of air...he's just crushed to death.)

Cartoons are kind-of horrifying when done hyper-realistically. You can see it in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, in a few places.

You can see it in the Animaniacs, when their behavior and antics really start to overwhelm some of the other characters. Mr. Director's breakdowns are played for laughs, but imagine being a man who has to deal with the Warner Brothers and the Warner Sister, and have them be...impossible. Not just badly behaved, but engaged in truly impossible behavior that is (not-so-)slowly dismantling your work and your life.


Surrealism, encountered and taken seriously, particularly in a manner which interferes with the normal function of one's life, becomes horrifying.

SiuiS
2015-01-19, 01:25 PM
That was an unnecessarily personal and unfriendly thing to say. No one is insulting your GMing skills, so leave mine out of it.

No it wasn't. D&D is a game of strict and clear rules with a lt of varied interactions with other rules. Cosmic horror involves buy in to the concepts and conceits of cosmic horror. Saying that if you want an improv Saturday morning cartoon game then D&D and cosmic horror aren't for you is far from insulting; it's simply true. There are better tools to do what you want that you would have more fun with.

Meanwhile, the implied sense of superiority because you make things up on the fly and don't want to dwell on implications so much as stab a monster are valid but don't contribute much to the discussion a rules based system wherein simply stabbing a monster is a guaranteed failure move.


Sometimes eldritch horrors are just a backdrop, to give a story an enduring mystery that can't just be figured out. A GM doesn't need rules for that, or even to know how what they're making up interacts with the rules. But they should understand what makes something "eldritch" in their particular setting.

This is true. This is about focus though.


How do you make cosmic horror... well, horror... instead of surrealism?

Buy-in. Although it's increasingly difficult given the level of media saturation. Tv tropes is a ready defense for example; many a lackadaisical player has deflected a nuanced situation by saying "oh so basically this is just [string of tropes]", which removes immersion.

Heroes of horror doesn't do a good job in my experience of removing the PC fatalism associated with gaming, but a lot of the ideas are sound for handling this sort of thing.

Beta Centauri
2015-01-19, 01:52 PM
D&D is a game of strict and clear rules with a lt of varied interactions with other rules. It has those, but it's not about those.


Cosmic horror involves buy in to the concepts and conceits of cosmic horror. Saying that if you want an improv Saturday morning cartoon game then D&D and cosmic horror aren't for you is far from insulting; it's simply true. There are better tools to do what you want that you would have more fun with. If I want an improv serious and dark game that involves eldritch horror, and dealing with it as much as possible from the standpoint of D&D adventurers then D&D is very much for me. I don't see why you care what tools I use.


make things up on the fly and don't want to dwell on implications so much as stab a monster I want to make things up on the fly so that my players can deal with it (or fail to) in terms of the game we're playing. Putting a sword into something (not necessarily a monster), delivering a spell, disabling a device.

In future, if you feel something I've said is not contributing much, feel free to ignore it.


Buy-in. Agreed. The players have to know what they're getting into and want to get into it. Lovecraft's stories make little enough sense as it is, but they make none at all if one isn't bought into the drive the characters feel to do what they're doing instead of leaving well enough alone.

Frozen_Feet
2015-01-21, 08:11 AM
How do you make cosmic horror... well, horror... instead of surrealism?

It's theoretically quite easy if you take surrealism as a starting point. Surreal means dream-like - focusing on those parts of dreams that don't make much sense in the context of the waking world. To get something that's surreal and horrifying, turn to dreams that are horrifying - nightmares, that is.

Of course, in practice, it can end up failing spectacularly, as many nightmares are very personal and might not be very terrifying to other people. This is a legitimate flaw in Lovecraftian horror, as many of the man's creepy-crawlies were inspired by his fear of mixed breeds and sea creatures.

But it's worth giving it a shot. Especially if you're like me and are intimately familiar with how sleep paralysis feels or have had nightmares of plants growing inside your head while feeling every second of it.

Segev
2015-01-21, 10:47 AM
I... have never had a nightmare that I remember. Not even "I just had a nightmare" type of remembering. I never wake up in a panic or the like.

Then again, I almost never remember my dreams, so that's not surprising.

But the core idea of starting with the surreality, and then applying the dream-logic in ways that make things bad for the intended audience is the way to go.

I used cartoon logic, because it's a bit more common point of reference, but dream-logic works, too.