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Looking forward to this one and... lemme just get this out here: gently caress any tidbit of lore introduced after The Frozen Throne. Hell, gently caress a good bit of the lore introduced in Warcraft 3 and TFT, too. But they really should have just stopped there. Also just gonna pour one out for Azzur's LP which we'll probably never see finished.
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May 7, 2022 18:55
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Siegkrow posted:Ehhh... Honestly? I preferred that. It feels like every expansion to orc, human, elf, whatever backstory has made their choices less their own and less interesting. Like it's more interesting to me when the invasion of Azeroth is just about orc politics and basic necessities, rather than SOME ULTIMATE WAR OF EPIC DOOM DESTINY. It's both more relatable and also makes you feel like you, as a player, are actually interacting with the important moving parts. If the important moving parts are behind 7000 legends and demigods, your actions don't really feel like they matter.
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May 7, 2022 23:58
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Azzur posted:I'm here, giving Cythereal my full support and hoping to see some magic happen! But consider how educational a finished Warcraft 2 LP would be! It'd be a good example for the kid, too! (I joke! Hope you're having a good time!)
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May 8, 2022 16:06
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Cythereal posted:All Time Cops are Bastards Oh, I can't wait for that one. I'm sure it'll be super enlightened and not loving weird at all.  Cythereal posted:Take that thought with you. Warcraft as a setting nakedly espouses fascist philosophy and dogma as a significant element of the setting and writing themes. Whoof, is that a one-off or something that re-occurs several times?  Also wanted to say I'm enjoying the original writing for the Human campaign so far. 
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May 9, 2022 12:43
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silvergoose posted:I mean it draws from Warhammer as inspiration, doesn't it? The story I always heard was that they made up like 90% of the game before they realized they weren't going to get that Warhammer license, and then rapidly changed the writing and details around the edges to make it their own original IP. But the thing is that even if it draws from Warhammer for inspiration, it'd be drawing on Warhammer Fantasy, which is notably less fashy than Warhammer 40k(even if 40k was originally intended as a satire of that, a lot of later writers seem to have missed that part. ), in general in Fantasy war is always shown as a sad necessity, and outside of the orcs most folks would rather avoid it.
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May 9, 2022 12:54
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Gnoman posted:It is something found right from the beginning. Well, sort of. This is from an Orcish perspective and obviously they'd consider themselves superior and their lifestyle the "correct" one that made them stronger, but at the same time, even by their own reporting, they get their asses kicked by the "peace soft" humans and are driven back. The fact that Orcs report it as "trickery and magic" rather than acknowleding that the humans might be martially superior puts the Orcs very much in line with fascist thinking about how the enemy is always both inferior but also unassailable because they're dishonourable and cheaters, but doesn't necessarily impugn the writers.
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May 9, 2022 14:11
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One of the things I relatively quickly learned in Warcraft 1 was that while most games reward having a balanced force of melee, cavalry and ranged troops, for a good long while into the game, the superior option is to simply go with ranged troops(spearmen or bowmen) to the exclusion of everything else, since they can do enough damage at range to kill most enemy melee troops before they get close enough to return fire. I remember that revelation trivializing large parts of the game. Also wait, if all the surviving Draenei got genocided on Draenor, how did some of them end up on Azeroth later? Man, I'm going to get an F in "Warcraft Lore," I'm so bad at following all this clear and concise information.
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May 11, 2022 13:03
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Rarity posted:WoW's been running for 18 years, at this point they've strip mined every anicillary character of every scrap of the RTS game to fill up content "did you know that the peon in the first orc mission of Warcraft 1 has a very deep backstory?"
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May 11, 2022 17:38
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I hate everything post-WC1 about Medivh.
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May 11, 2022 20:09
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Siegkrow posted:We never appreciated Chris Metzen enough before he left Blizz. Metzen was never the most original mind in the world and he had a serious boner for CORRUPTION. HA HA, YES, THEY DRANK THE EVIL JUICE. THEY TOUCHED THE EVIL BOX. THEY LOOKED AT THE EVIL THING. NOW THEY'RE CORRUPTED WHICH MEANS THEY HAVE A FUNNY COLOUR AND ARE REALLY ANGRY. But his writing never felt mean, if that makes sense. Like it felt like this was genuinely what he thought was cool, like his brain was just perpetually stuck at appreciating the sort of thing we all thought were totally wild and awesome when we were 15, and he was happy with that.
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May 12, 2022 17:27
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The world map is kind of weird to me in how much empty space there is in the center. Also is Azeroth a globe and can you reach Kalimdor by going east instead of west?
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May 14, 2022 14:10
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Cythereal posted:It's a curious thing I noticed when looking at a list of the WC1 campaigns. The orc campaign, which is canon, never once has the orcs on the defensive. Every mission is framed as being on the attack. The orcs simply have a better PR department. "We're not being attacked, they are simply pre-emptively defending themselves against our planned attack." Rarity posted:Anyone casting shade on WoW's use of Darkshire/Lakeshire/Goldshire etc. has never been to Leicester, Worcester or Gloucester It's pretty common in most European countries, at least, that town names evolved from descriptions of where they were located. Like when a Danish town ends in "rød," that's a corruption of "rydning," a clearing. So "Birkerød" is "Birch" + "Clearing," i.e. a clearing among the birch trees. So you have a lot of repeating prefixes or suffixes. I feel like most town names older than a hundred years or so you can track back to something of that sort if you're willing to do the linguistic legwork. What's worse is when fantasy names are just random piles of apostrophes and syllables, without having established any sort of linguistic "backing" for it. Not to say that every setting needs to be Middle Earth, which is an excuse to talk about elf linguistics disguised as a story, but it helps keep the naming believable, because even if you can't consciously put a finger on it, I believe our brains subconsciously pick up on when naming is just jumbled bullshit.
PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 17:28 on May 14, 2022 |
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May 14, 2022 17:09
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SIGSEGV posted:Oh, yeah, while we're talking about Tolkien orcs and Gygax orcs and so on, Tolkien orcs have some moments of humanity such as those two past Cirith Ungol who have a chat about how hosed and bad their situation and society is, and then participate in some infighting and die, because their situation and society is bad, for them if not for their boss. Yeah, that part always stuck with me as the most humanizing bit about the orcs. Like they clearly sound like they do not want to be involved in the war, but they are, not unreasonably, convinced that if they run away then either Sauron's enforcers will hunt them down or some elf will kill them for fun. If they had their choice they'd just want to find a nice cozy cave somewhere far away from all the bullshit. Going through a few more revisions it's not hard to imagine a version where the elves have a thing or two to learn about not killing orcs on sight, to give them a chance to check out of the conflict or be on a side other than Sauron's.
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May 14, 2022 22:15
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Cythereal posted:Welp. Three attempts at recording this update, three straight recording mishaps. I'm personally perfectly okay with this. Rather that than you burning out by update four.
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May 16, 2022 03:21
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The race I'm most interested in won't show up until Warcraft 3, I wanna learn more about the spiderfolk that should've been their own faction on account of being loving rad.
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May 16, 2022 19:35
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Oh, yeah, and I guess I should've asked this earlier, but like, what's the spoiler policy for this thread? I don't think I've seen it mentioned before.
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May 16, 2022 19:42
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My main issue with recording DOSbox is that I need to turn the OBS recording option off and on again every time I fire up the game, but other than that as long as it's just set to record the window it seems to do so flawlessly.
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May 16, 2022 23:42
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SirSamVimes posted:*second The bigger horns and the fur collar make my brain stick at "Rita Repulsa" and it refuses to move from there.
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May 17, 2022 09:40
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Burning down Grand Hamlet was always one of the tougher missions for me as a kid because of those loving Clerics. As for Necrolytes they're just generally not worth your time, their one big trick, raising skeletons is... not very good, the skeletons are way too fragile to make much of a difference even if they're fresh and they decay super-quickly. As for the cosmology update... I feel like the big issue with multi-planar cosmologies is that it's very rare for a setting, whether videogame or pen-and-paper, to have enough going on to fill up one plane with interesting content, much less a dozen or more. Plus a lot of the "alternate planes" almost always just end up being devoted to a concept or an element and I wouldn't even know where to start writing an interesting adventure in Fire Land Made Of Burny Fire Things. I mean, hell, I love Planescape as a concept but even there the concept is doing a hell of a lot of heavy lifting since something like... eight out of ten planes, including inner and outer both, are just irrelevant background fluff where there isn't really anything to do.
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May 17, 2022 12:09
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Cythereal posted:Would anyone object if I started writing this character in the human campaign, or would folks prefer I keep the human campaign in this LP purely not touching on canon in any fashion? How dare you violate the deep Warcraft lore that we're all extremely serious about. lol go hog wild, give her Sargeras for a drinking buddy if that's what'll make for funny/interesting writing.
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May 17, 2022 20:53
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Cythereal posted:Nah. I'm assuming everyone in this thread knows the basics of the plot up through vanilla WoW. Some of us don't and would like a rough chart of it at some point.
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May 19, 2022 03:50
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The worst thing is that this is all making me want to play Warcraft 3 and TFT again but Blizzard completely hosed up those games with their "improved" edition. Dickheads.
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May 19, 2022 18:13
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I love how the deeper Warcraft lore takes Griselda from "example of how the guy you're working for is a real controlling prick and probably needs a stabbing" to "bordering on someone's weird fetish."
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May 25, 2022 12:13
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Dirk the Average posted:Iirc, the idea was that they were addicted to magic, and originally could only play classes with a mana bar for that reason. Just require that non-magical classes occasionally do a /toke emote and smoke a mana blunt.
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May 26, 2022 11:35
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Thanks to this thread getting me nostalgia-y, I've been replaying Warcraft 3 and... while it isn't, you know, the absolute apex of good writing. I feel like Prince Arthas' corruption, as the result of multiple smaller events, eventually culminating in willingly damning himself, actually feels subtle and well-delivered compared to, well, everything that comes after in terms of things being corrupted. It kind of feels like it's the only time there isn't just a jug of Juice That Makes You Corrupted on display and everyone either gets baptized in it or takes a big swallow, where it's like... believable. Am I alone in this? Possibly the other lore dumps in this thread combined with having suffered through 2/3rds of Starcraft 2, have just completely dumpstered my level of expectations for Blizzard writing.
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May 26, 2022 13:11
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Natural 20 posted:There's a reason Warcraft 3 is looked back upon fondly and it goes beyond good gameplay. I mean personally I always thought the basic gameplay was kind of garbage and only really got excited for the UMS maps on Battle.Net. I also really disliked the story when it first came out because of its orc retcons and its addition of more elves. I think it's more that what comes after makes a lot of it look... a lot less garbage.
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May 26, 2022 13:58
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Aside from everything story-related, my issues with the Warcraft 3 campaign are mainly... "Tutorial Campaign," that thing a lot of RTS games do where you don't actually get to play any real missions because every mission feels like a tutorial for some new unit or mechanic. Pathfinding issues, I feel like half my issue was wrangling units getting stuck on each other and having trouble navigating map terrain that was too narrow for their giant space marine proportioned clunky bodies. Way too many active abilities you were almost guaranteed to never be using. Every loving unit needed an active ability, I think each faction had like two that didn't have one. Yeah I'm sure that precise use of the Footman's "Defend" ability was what marked out an elite Battle.Net player, but if you claim you even remember that ability existed in the campaign, I will call you out as a liar. Side mechanics like subquests that felt like the aspects of a more RPG-heavy game(what we first heard about, part of my disappointment with the Warcraft 3 we eventually got was that the original presentation sounded SO much wilder, with a persistent-across-missions base and a focus on going adventuring with heroes) and which then get more or less completely forgotten outside of the first three tutorial missions.
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May 26, 2022 14:46
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Aces High posted:Wings of Liberty had a lot of really good moments and if you excise the stupid Kerrigan-Raynor romance stuff (or just reframe it as an older Jim reminiscing about "the good times" before Mengsk hosed over the entire sector) you don't fundamentally need to change anything. Tychus is still under orders to make sure Kerrigan dies, Raynor is a big drat hero in the eyes of Terrans everywhere because the Broods are now decimated and Kerrigan is a prisoner. Then in Heart of the Swarm you jettison all that poo poo with her pining after Jim and just have her rebuild the swarm so she can finally kill Mengsk. As it is, she doesn't really act any different when she's chilling with Abathur and Dehaka in terms of being ruthless and acting like she did in Brood War. Though perhaps get rid of the really dumb "primal Zerg" thing too There's a lot of stupid poo poo about Starcraft 2. Raynor pining for a mass-murdering war criminal who killed some of his friends and allies in the past, having an entire campaign about de-zerging Kerrigan and then the next one is about re-zerging her, etc. but the worst part is absolutely everything about the loving "primal zerg" retcon. The original zerg weren't NOBLE SPACE DRAGONS, they were gross worms and slugs that lived in animals' spinal fluid. Zerus wasn't a JUNGLE HAPPYLAND, it was a blasted volcanic waste. I hate it. I hate it so much. I couldn't even move on to the Protoss campaign after that because I knew it was just going to make me angrier and there'd be loving space elves or some such poo poo.
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May 27, 2022 09:49
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Tenebrais posted:I don't think Starcraft 1 said much about where the Zerg came from at all, did it? All SC2 retconned was some kind of EU fluff. It was 100% spelled out in the SC1 manual: Worm dudes from lava planet, live in spinal cords and can control creatures they "ride" in that way, Xel'naga hosed with them to give them a hive mind and see what would happen.
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May 27, 2022 10:12
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I seem to remember this WC1 mission as being the one where I realized that spearmen were the main unit of choice for most situations, after bouncing off several times trying to use the new raiders, I just put a blob of spearmen at each bridge and suddenly no one was crossing them. How competent is the AI at rebuilding their bases? In later games they can be annoyingly good at springing back from just a single peasant, but I don't recall how competent they are in WC1.
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May 31, 2022 12:50
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How long is the Warcraft 1 campaign canonically? Because there are some parts of the Warcraft timeline that strongly seem like either someone went over it afterwards, stretching and compacting periods of time, or orcs and humans in the world live notably longer lives than you'd expect.
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Jun 2, 2022 16:53
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Actually wait, speaking of goblins, are they also Orc homeworld natives or are they originally from Azeroth? Because I certainly remember at times feeling like the goblins were already in a ton of places where the rest of the Horde were just arriving for the first time. This might've just been gameplay reasons, but it could also be deep lore(tm).
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Jun 5, 2022 22:03
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Do a post on the slimes from the Dead Mines. Clearly they must have deep and fascinating lore.
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Jun 6, 2022 00:10
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Cythereal posted:Considering all the absurdly racist bullshit that Blizzard pulls, and how often east Asian cultures get conflated in video games in general (and not just by Western companies, witness the controversy about FF14: Stormblood and Anet for most of GW2's run trying to pretend that Cantha had never happened, to the point of literally replacing the Canthan district from GW2's alpha with a hole in the ground), I for one am perfectly okay with Blizzard deciding to be relatively accurate in their drawing on real-world cultures for once in their existence, even if it takes the Chinese government grabbing Blizzard by the purse strings to do it. Wait, what? GW2 tried to un-continent Cantha? What a bunch of morons, Factions had some of the best environment design for Guild Wars 1, and was generally pretty fun to play besides. What a shitshow.
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Jun 6, 2022 19:35
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radintorov posted:If I remember correctly, it was mandated by NCSoft, which owns ANet, probably because they also didn't want to anger the PRC or something. Now if only they had these cool things in a good game. I miss wandering the Jade Sea in Guild Wars 1... only MMO-ish game to ever really catch me, and I still maintain it's a really great and underappreciated game.
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Jun 7, 2022 10:32
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Cythereal posted:This is indeed what I was worried about from the start, and why I'm trying to gauge what the thread is interested in seeing. Considering my zero attachment to any canon Warcraft characters, I'm entirely down for their total replacement with more entertaining and sympathetic alternatives.
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Jun 8, 2022 20:09
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Phrosphor posted:It's been a REALLY long time since I touched WC3 but my memories of the Night Elves in it were that they were Badass and super cool. Badass, super cool and so very clearly designed by a horny 15-year-old in all their visual aspects.
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Jun 9, 2022 09:12
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I think the general reason there are no "psionic" classes in WoW or FF14 is that psionics are generally associated with science fiction more so than with fantasy. Plus, generally the sort of things that would differentiate Psionics from Magic would work fine in a single-player RPG with lots of choices and social interaction, but less so in a more linear MMO focused on combat. Stuff like mind reading, mind control, etc. and even if you fluffed those as conditions, FF14's design, I know, isn't very heavy on that, usually the only conditions you deploy are DoT ones. It's more in line with Guild Wars' very condition-heavy design where they're as important as, if not more important than, raw damage numbers. So what's left is stuff like telekinesis, pyrokinesis, cryokinesis, etc... which are functionally indistinguishable from being a wizard except you don't get to wear a big hat.
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Jun 10, 2022 20:10
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Fivemarks posted:The introduction of lazy quasi lovecraftian elements into any setting is a sure sign that it's jumped the shark or that the writers are lazy and/or chuddish. I think I'd disagree with this, but in WoW's case it does get a bit eye-rolly because it feels less like an "ah, yes, this was planned from day one and/or is a logical extension of day one elements" and more of a "hey, we need a new popular reference thing. nerds love them cthulhus, don't they?"-choice. Like it just feels like grabbing everything and shoving it in there rather than having a clear thematic focus of some sort.
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Jun 11, 2022 06:53
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Part of the problem with "cosmic horror" is that it more or less always translates into "ah, yes, they are inscrutable and their motives are beyond our meager understanding. also they attack on sight, roll 1d10 for initiative." It's a lazy way out of actually writing a motive and characterization for them, goals they're aiming for, by shrugging and saying "dunno man, too weird." Honestly the only good example I know of actual cosmic horror is Junji Ito. The horror is often not even embodied by a being, and it isn't necessarily evil or trying to destroy us, it's often just inimical to our continued existence. Reality has broken down in some way. Someone refuses to die, our biology changes inexplicably, space and time themselves behave weirdly, etc. it is literally the cosmos being horrifying, and at best you can hope to run from it in almost all cases.
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Jun 11, 2022 20:08
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