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Incorporating sanity into players’ stats and pitting ordinary people against unknowable forces, the RPG is in many ways true to the spirit of Lovecraft’s fiction, but it also adopts (and further codifies) Derleth’s rigid pantheon of horrors.
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Although he is largely responsible for Lovecraft’s enduring fame, publishing the first posthumous anthology of Lovecraft’s fiction and assembling many complete stories from Lovecraft’s notes, Derleth’s writings rationalize and reduce Lovecraft’s Old Ones and other horrors, e.g. 1932-1971: August Derleth, a correspondent of Lovecraft’s, formalizes and expands Lovecraft’s mythos, giving it its popular name: the Cthulhu Mythos.Howard also participate informally in the mythos. Gradually, thematic links and a shared cosmology emerged, tying his stories together into a “mythos.” Contemporary writers such as Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Lovecraft publishes various short stories and novellas in pulp magazines, esp. But is what we’re getting really Lovecraftian? I touched a bit on its history in my reviews of Arkham Horror and Mansions of Madness, two other entries in Fantasy Flight Games’ “Arkham Horror Files” franchise. Lucky for me, then, that Lovecraftian horror is such a mainstay in tabletop gaming. I don’t, it should go without saying, like his politics, though they are often impossible to extricate from his fiction only a champion xenophobe could have produced “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” or “The Rats in the Walls.” I like his brand of cosmic horror (really just a scientific rationalization of existential horror), his bombastic style, and the suggestiveness of his supernatural encounters (seldom described except as “indescribable”). In general, though, I’m a fan of Lovecraft’s writing. Okay, that last one might not resonate with everybody. He knows where They have trod earth’s fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naïvely insipid idealism which deprecates the æsthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to “uplift” the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. How about this beautiful bit of self-justification, often unfairly truncated and de-contextualized? Say what you will about Lovecraft the man was quotable. 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. 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. Stories like “From Beyond” and “The Dreams in the Witch House” belong as much to the science fiction as to the horror genre “At the Mountains of Madness,” “The Shadow Out of Time,” “Herbert West: Re-Animator,” and “The Color Out of Space” are pure science fiction, and they all end badly. When he read about atomic theory, x-rays, and radio waves, he was not elated he was terrified. Howard Phillips Lovecraft held a dim view of progress. This month’s game is:Īrkham Horror: The Card Game by Nate French and Matthew Newman
Arkham horror lcg octgn image packs series#
Session Report is a monthly series that explores the intersection of narrative and broader themes of game design by focusing on a specific tabletop game each month.