Someone asked this on the Delta Green subreddit, and it was fun enough to answer that I've spun it out into a full post.
How Lovecraft is this Mythos? (1d12)
1) HPL existed, but wrote in an entirely different genre
- Romantic comedy (boilerplate)
- Historical adventure (orientalist)
- Traditional gothic horror (convoluted)
- Extremely weird transcendentalist poetry (????)
2) HPL existed, and was one of the Miskatonic University scholars who butchered the English translation of the Kitab al-Layl back in the '30s.
3) HPL existed and wrote the stories we know; the unnatural is just something else entirely.
4) It's irrelevant if HPL existed because weird fiction never got off the ground: Hugo Gernsbeck got hit by a melon truck in before he could start publishing pulp magazines.
5) HPL didn't exist; the "unknowable alien gods" niche was filled by some guy named Clarence Quincy Rogers.
6) HPL didn't exist, so the PCs finding books written by him should be extremely concerning.
7) HPL existed and wrote weird fiction, but it was mostly planetary romance and only occasionally brushed up against unknowable alien gods.
8) HPL didn’t technically exist; he was a character invented by a group of science fiction authors in the 60s as part of a collaborative writing project where new HPL stories were regularly "discovered" and published. Those guys definitely used enough LSD to give them better than coinflip odds of actually (if inaccurately) describing something real.
9) HPL existed, wrote the stories we know, but lived to the age of 86 and became a real aggro hardass about people using or even referencing his material. Especially if they did it “wrong”.
10) HPL existed, but mysteriously disappeared prior to publishing any of his Mythos works. Case was never solved and they never found a body
11) HPL existed, but only the Dream Cycle stories have any truth to them.
12) HPL doesn't exist, and his body of work was fabricated by the Program as a disinformation campaign.
Ken and Rob Talk About Stuff once tackled this exact subject.
ReplyDeleteI think it was Ken who said his DG games just had Randolph Carter (the protagonist of the Dreamlands stories) in his place (although his stuff is implied to have way less of a cultural impact than RL Lovecraft’s writings).
The Laundry RPG does some fun stuff with HPL existing in-verse. They even had an adventure where Lovecraft was cloned by the bad guys. (The roleplaying notes quoted his letters a lot and noted that he was a huge racist.) If the PCs talk to him about his work, the clone says he was writing fiction based on his night terrors (just like IRL), and a PC who makes a skill roll realises that he really was receiving muddled psychic visions of the Mythos. The main book flatly states that having your PC read his entire body of work (except for one banned/suppressed story that only exists in the Landry verse, IIRC) won’t gain you a single point of Cthulhu Mythos skill or cost you any SAN.
No san loss? I always figured that to Anglo-Americans the mere notion that man is not the peak of creation was already a san loss. Meanwhile across the Atlantic, Wells was like "oh, the war with the Martians is no more of a war than what happens when we remove an anthill where we want to build a house."
DeleteI like the idea of Lovecraft existing in my mysterious settings and getting _some_ things right but you never know which ones.
neat
ReplyDeleteNow I am wondering if you ever read Providence.
ReplyDeleteI have not, Watchmen is the only Moore's book I've read thus far.
DeleteProvidence is really interesting, even if the book that predates it, Necronomicon, is really bad and imo not worth reading (wayyyyyyy too much SA).
DeleteI recommend Providence to anyone who knows a lot about Lovecrafts life and works, because it does some pretty interesting things with both, even if it sometimes veers off heavily into Moore's particular brand of Chaos Magic.
In the Illuminatus! Trilogy, HPL was aware of the mythos and just thought it was bunk to write interesting stories about. In that continuity, he wrote all the same stories and they were mostly close to 'reality,' and he didn't even realize it!
ReplyDelete