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FMguru posted:I've always liked Alan Moore's suggestion that Lovecraft's horror was that of a mediocre white man realizing that he wasn't actually the center of the universe that he always believed himself to be. I dunno if Moore’s Providence really succeeds in all its goals but god drat is it a fully honest attempt to grapple with and interrogate the unsavory aspects of the work and its influence while also being a face-value “woooo spooky Mythos” tale. The Innsmouth section is kind of mind-blowingly ballsy.
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Jan 23, 2020 17:15
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https://twitter.com/TheSocietyDude/status/1220076332010233856?s=19
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Jan 23, 2020 17:20
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BattleMaster posted:Uh, like, just of the man?
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Jan 23, 2020 17:25
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Parkreiner posted:the real prize is the way it handles future knowledge becoming unreliable as you change the present, which is hard to explain succinctly without the book’s text and also relies on having a worked example campaign to build from (of which the book has several). Huh. That sounds pretty original. May have to read up on that if only so I can shamelessly copy it into my own houserule games.
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Jan 23, 2020 17:32
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90s Cringe Rock posted:"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that’s just peanuts to space." That would be the Total Perspective Vortex then.
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Jan 23, 2020 17:41
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Night10194 posted:Some of that is because it's very hard to do cosmic horror when you know everything about squid guy buddy and his fishman friends already. Things need to be at least a little unusual or unfamiliar for the genre to even work at the base level. Bloodborne was also a bit of a bait and switch, it pitched itself as purely Victorian werewolves and vampires and that kind of affair. It wasn't until you got halfway through the game (or got your insight up above 10) that you started to discover the horrible truth. Which is itself very effective for that style of storytelling. But hard to pull off with a product where you kinda want to tell the audience what the thing is about in order to get them to buy it. Also, some people may not have actually wanted Lovecraftiana in their Souls and may have been upset in the other direction.
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Jan 23, 2020 17:45
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if you don't want Lovecraftiana in your Souls I have bad news about literally every Souls game
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Jan 23, 2020 17:55
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:if you don't want Lovecraftiana in your Souls I have bad news about literally every Souls game Miura isn't Lovecraft.
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Jan 23, 2020 18:06
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Zaphod42 posted:Miura isn't Lovecraft. Miura literally put a giant The Shadow Over Innsmouth homage into Berserk and the Godhand are all named after anglophone science fiction and horror authors
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Jan 23, 2020 18:08
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Warthur posted:there's a reason why in several of Derleth's stories the characters buy a copy of Lovecraft's stories to read up on the Mythos, and Derleth always makes sure to note that they acquire The Outsider and Others for a very reasonable price via mail order from Arkham House.
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Jan 23, 2020 18:08
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Miura literally put a giant The Shadow Over Innsmouth homage into Berserk and the Godhand are all named after anglophone science fiction and horror authors Sure, but lots of things are influenced by other things. How much of that made it unaltered into souls though? I can't think of much. Maybe you could say some of the watery or zombie areas but I think that's a massive stretch. Bloodborne its not even a question, and the dlc is literally innsmouth. But Souls I don't remember anything feeling distinctly Lovecraftian. Souls pulls hard from Berserk but it doesn't have everything from Berserk. Unless you think Miura just copied Lovecraft and nothing else, there's plenty of his own original stuff and its possible to copy those elements and not pull from others. Set theory  But there could be some lovecraftian references in souls I'm overlooking.
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Jan 23, 2020 18:11
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Yeah, everyone knows that Dark Souls is mostly influenced by Runequest 
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Jan 23, 2020 18:16
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Halloween Jack posted:It really was shameless. What's really weird is that it wasn't the first time Derleth attempted to bust his way into someone else's fandom and then take over the entire shared universe. One of his other fictional outlets was Solar Pons, a completely shameless Sherlock Holmes rip-off. He wrote the stories after he wrote to Arthur Conan Doyle and said "Hey, since you're not writing Holmes stories any more, can I become the New Official Holmes Author?" and Doyle politely told him to gently caress off.
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Jan 23, 2020 18:18
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Bringing up how Dark Souls was more influenced by Berserk than Lovecraft in the context of a conversation about problematic themes in science fiction / fantasy isn't as good a point as you think it is
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Jan 23, 2020 18:21
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Haystack posted:Yeah, everyone knows that Dark Souls is mostly influenced by Runequest Don’t I wish.
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Jan 23, 2020 18:22
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Froghammer posted:Bringing up how Dark Souls was more influenced by Berserk than Lovecraft in the context of a conversation about problematic themes in science fiction / fantasy isn't as good a point as you think it is Can we just talk about things without having to treat every argument like its a sport and you're trying to win for your side? This is so weird and bizarre. Its a perfectly fine thing to point out that Berserk has issues too, but to make it like this is some kind of gotcha is lame. We're just talking about roleplaying games here, none of us has an investment.
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Jan 23, 2020 18:25
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Dark Souls is a pretty close match to the cosmology of the Dreamlands, honestly. You've got undead being ostracized from polite society, but forming a kind of kinship of their own in its place. (Ghouls!) You've got a hierarchy of human beings, to younger gods who resemble and interact with humanity and are driven by an insatiable nostalgia, to elder gods driven by unknowable forces and whose mere presence in the world is apocalyptic. You have a narrative about humanity existing in a brief window between savagery and decadence, and where our heritage is secretly tainted by an incomprehensible, alien force. (Humanity, the Abyss, Manus.) You have a Nyarlathotep expy loving with you and trying to get you to play with cosmic powers and get in over your head for his amusement and benefit. (Kaathe) You have a sickly, effeminate prince (with tentacles peaking out from under his robe) in an abandoned city on a plateau, where he maintains the illusion of a bustling society to hide an unspeakable truth. (Gwyndolin).
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Jan 23, 2020 18:25
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none of what i'm saying about Dark Souls is particularly bad by the way, the best thing about the series is the way it takes superficially Western aesthetics and strains them through a Shinto-inspired filter i'd probably peg the lineage there as something like Arthurian legend -> Lord Dunsany -> H. P. Lovecraft -> Kentaro Miura -> Dark Souls except with a bunch more arrows connecting basically every step in that chain to every future one as well Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Jan 23, 2020 |
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Jan 23, 2020 18:30
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if you picked any name off the list of Lord Dunsany's Gods of Pegana and claimed they were a Dark Souls boss fight from an upcoming game it'd be completely plausible Trogool, Neither God Nor Beast
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Jan 23, 2020 18:36
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:You have a sickly, effeminate prince (with tentacles peaking out from under his robe). Warthur posted:"Shameless" seems to have been Derleth's middle name in terms of his approach to the Mythos. Not only did he oust Lovecraft's preferred literary executor (R.H. Barlow), not only did he do that poo poo in his Mythos stories, not only did he try to violently shoehorn everything into his own perspective which had no real textual support in Lovecraft, but he even put out stories of his own under Lovecraft's name in what can only be described as massive, sustained literary fraud. CoC unfortunately reflects too much of Derleth's take, because it was easy. He gave Lovecraft's creations the Deities & Demigods treatment, organizing them into a pantheon with most gods having a "servitor race," decades before D&D was a thing. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Jan 23, 2020 |
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Jan 23, 2020 18:46
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Listen, I think we all know who the real bad guy here is, the one who is manipulating things to assure that Lovecraft's works are repeated ad nauseum and without sufficient reflection. The name of that villain is capitalism.
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Jan 23, 2020 18:56
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Zaphod42 posted:Can we just talk about things without having to treat every argument like its a sport and you're trying to win for your side? This is so weird and bizarre. Do you have some kind of fatal allergy to self-reflection? You can enjoy a thing and still discuss it critically. These are not opposed in any way.
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Jan 23, 2020 19:58
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Xiahou Dun posted:Do you have some kind of fatal allergy to self-reflection? Zaphod42 posted:Its a perfectly fine thing to point out that Berserk has issues too Do you have some kind of fatal allergy to reading a whole post?
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Jan 23, 2020 20:08
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And someone did just that??????? What.
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Jan 23, 2020 20:20
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Zaphod42 posted:Can we just talk about things without having to treat every argument like its a sport and you're trying to win for your side? This is so weird and bizarre. You're switching between, "drat, why is everyone here so aggressive in these arguments?" and... well, you yourself being weirdly aggressive in arguments.
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Jan 23, 2020 21:10
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There’s a greater impulse to be emotional when the stakes involve matters of social equity. Too many nerds forms purely capitalistic attachments to the media that they consume, wherein their fandom is turned into a consumerist hunger by the deliberate strokes of the companies creating these media. This particular sort of emotional reaction sucks and is bad and is why fandoms are so insufferable. However, the sort of emotional reaction garnered by media endorsing “problematic” ethics is a much more genuine and important one. The idea that the media we consume does not impact our way of thinking is, I believe, flawed. Indeed, the way we view media comes to impact the way that we view the world, and being fed a diet of media that is sexist, racist, cisheteronormative, classist, etc. can lead a person to develop unhealthy views of the world and indeed feeds into and reinforce real world policies and systems of oppression. So yeah, people can feel aggressive sometimes when this kind of content comes up.
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Jan 23, 2020 21:47
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This may be a bad time to ask, but what's the word on Modiphius Entertainment and specifically their Conan and Star Trek games? Cause apparently the designer of those is doing a Dishonored RPG and I really want that to be good.
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Jan 23, 2020 22:34
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My Lovely Horse posted:This may be a bad time to ask, but what's the word on Modiphius Entertainment and specifically their Conan and Star Trek games? Cause apparently the designer of those is doing a Dishonored RPG and I really want that to be good. There have been some problems, but nothing on the scale of e.g. the d&d rapist endorsement, and nothing that goes specifically to the game designer. Delays in delivering on kickstarter content is one (but everything is actually being delivered, just... late... in the case of some of the final conan supplements, years late) and they quietly employed (but credited under the pseudonym "Michael Brophy") that perennial joke Gareth "far west" Skarka to work on the star trek project because someone was friends with him. Apparently he did what he was asked for and was not a major contributor, but it was shady to try and sneak him a bone given a significant fraction of the customers would have boycotted the product if they'd known, on the reasonable basis that Skarka is a thief who shouldn't be given more chances and people who give him more chances are part of the problem of enabling thieves to operate in the TG industry. My take when I've asked about this earlier is that the SA TG community has not reached a point of outright cancellation of modiphius, but they have been issued a yellow card and need to be careful. They've handled some things badly, but have generally apologized afterward and are still turning out legitimately good products and mostly the company is good people. e. I feel like adding, apropos of the last few pages' discussion, that Modiphius also disclaimed Howard's racism and sexism in a fairly mature way and have made a game that extracts the good bits and explicitly leaves behind the awful stuff. Howard was way less of a racist than his pen-pal Lovecraft (with whom he carried out a long-time debate via correspondence mostly over the nature of humanity, civilization, and savagery, which is really interesting to read and talk about if people want) but he was still a white dude writing from rural oil-town Texas in the 1930s for a white male audience, so yeah there's a fair bit of bigotry baked into his stuff. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Jan 23, 2020 |
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Jan 23, 2020 23:07
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Meinberg posted:Listen, I think we all know who the real bad guy here is, the one who is manipulating things to assure that Lovecraft's works are repeated ad nauseum and without sufficient reflection.
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Jan 23, 2020 23:31
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Ilor posted:Oh, phew, for a second I thought you were gonna say it was Hastur. Hastur is the most capitalist Great Old One, you gotta pay to go to his dumb play
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Jan 23, 2020 23:54
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sexpig by night posted:Hastur is the most capitalist Great Old One, you gotta pay to go to his dumb play "Community theater groups protest overspending and high ticket prices for a big-budget production of The King in Yellow by launching their own free performances of it in public spaces, Problems Ensue" would be a decent adventure hook, tbh
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Jan 24, 2020 00:01
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I Imagine Hastur's play would end up like the play in Synechdoche where it consumes the lives of everybody involved for years and constructs plays within plays that are forever rehearsed but never actually performed
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Jan 24, 2020 00:27
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Meinberg posted:Listen, I think we all know who the real bad guy here is, the one who is manipulating things to assure that Lovecraft's works are repeated ad nauseum and without sufficient reflection. Corporations totally different to Great Old Ones. Great Old Ones are lumbering entities, sustained by but independent of human belief, wearing a persona that is at best an unconvincing facsimile of humanity, with entirely alien motivations and a complete disregard for the sanctity of human life, who would happily step upon us without even noticing our deaths if it brought them an inch further to their inscrutable, inhuman goals. And corporations are totally different to that.
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Jan 24, 2020 00:32
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Antivehicular posted:"Community theater groups protest overspending and high ticket prices for a big-budget production of The King in Yellow by launching their own free performances of it in public spaces, Problems Ensue" would be a decent adventure hook, tbh oh gently caress I actually may steal that
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Jan 24, 2020 00:40
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SCP-701 is very reminiscent of that.
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Jan 24, 2020 00:52
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Whybird posted:Corporations totally different to Great Old Ones. Great Old Ones are lumbering entities, sustained by but independent of human belief, wearing a persona that is at best an unconvincing facsimile of humanity, with entirely alien motivations and a complete disregard for the sanctity of human life, who would happily step upon us without even noticing our deaths if it brought them an inch further to their inscrutable, inhuman goals. And corporations are totally different to that. now you're thinking with material dialecticalism!
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Jan 24, 2020 01:40
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Whybird posted:And corporations are totally different to that. Not really!
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Jan 24, 2020 01:43
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Antivehicular posted:"Community theater groups protest overspending and high ticket prices for a big-budget production of The King in Yellow by launching their own free performances of it in public spaces, Problems Ensue" would be a decent adventure hook, tbh
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Jan 24, 2020 02:05
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I just want to second "if you want to do indie cosmic horror poo poo" please for the love of God just get Silent Legions and play with some random roll tables. It's great and you can interpret your rolls to see how they make sense and build a whole thing out of that.
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Jan 24, 2020 03:46
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Antivehicular posted:"Community theater groups protest overspending and high ticket prices for a big-budget production of The King in Yellow by launching their own free performances of it in public spaces, Problems Ensue" would be a decent adventure hook, tbh This'd work very well in The Yellow King RPG.
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Jan 24, 2020 06:34
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