I have a hard time appreciating cosmic horror. It comes up in certain tabletop RPGs, everywhere from the Cthulhusphere to some depictions of aberrations in D&D and Pathfinder, such as the daelkyr and Xoriat in Eberron.What really makes me lose my interest is whenever cosmic horror writing overuses explicit mentions of mad[dening/ness], [sane/sanity/insane/insanity], [ineffable/indescribable], some variation of "understanding of [the world/reality]," and so on. It feels stilted to me. It feels like more telling than showing. It feels like the author desperately trying to tell me how cool and scary something is. I cannot pinpoint precisely why, but I cannot appreciate this brand of writing.Worst of all is when "Well, their goals are inscrutable" is used to justify a seeming lack of motives.Is there a variety of cosmic horror, particularly in tabletop RPGs, that is less in-your-face about this subject?
I think cosmic horror doesnt work anymore because we know too much.Other dimensions, wormholes, weird science? Sure, why not?Alien with abilities and forms beyond our comprehension? Obviously they exist in the vast infinite of spaceWe are insignifican in the great scheme of existence and the universe doesnt care about us? No doubtI think only ultra religious and closed minded people can suffer of cosmic horror.
>>96640817I don't think that you can do cosmic horror in an rpg without your players rioting. True cosmic horror is like "a horrible thing happened, and not only do we not understand it, but we can never understand it, and in understanding that, we know fear." I don't feel like that is entirely comparable with ttrpg, and most "cosmic horror" is just pulp horror with a specific set of window dressing.
Doesn't really solve OP's question but my personal take on the matter is that the people writing cosmic horror are very often too fixated on the superficial details, rather than the abstract fundamental concepts behind them: it seems like (nearly) every fucking "Lovecraftian" story just puts all his works into a blender and comes up with yet another story about tentacle monsters and fish people, because nothing says unknown or unknowable like the same thing we've already been introduced to and read about hundreds of times already.Gamifying it with sanity points and the like is probably of no help either, because when everything has to be quantified and reduced into numbers, it immediately becomes comprehensible and navigable with only basic math.>>96640848>ultra religiousWasn't Lovecraft an atheist? Considering how much of his writing can be reduced to seeking meaning in an uncaring universe, I'd argue that it's a pretty big influence on the genre.
>>96641272Oh yeah, coming back to this, another major issue in making a cosmic horror game is that a game revolves around player agency: if the players can stop whatever's going on then the whole "uncaring universe" thing doesn't really work, but if they can't then it just makes the entire game kinda pointless (and the middle ground of "well you stopped them, but it is only a temporary setback" is just a lame cop-out that isn't really satisfying either way)
>>96641272>tentaclesI am not a fan of "ineffable tentacles"-core, either.
>>96640817Modernity is turning literally every setting into some surface-level derivative trash for the masses.
>>96640817You sound like somebody who learned about "cosmic horror" and the Cthulhu mythos prior to reading it directly from Lovecraft's work without knowing anything about it.The nerdification/fandomification of Lovecraft has destroyed his work. I'm a gigantic fan of his writing, but I know virtually nothing about any of the beings he describes. I'm something of an anti-lorefag.His best stories are those where they don't prominently feature anyway.
I think the Annihilation series does a pretty decent job with an alternative take on unknowable, strange cosmic horror besides ookyspooky tentacles and fish men, especially the first book.
>>96640817>>96640848>>96641551The important thing to remember is that "Oh I saw a fishman, -20 insanity I'm a gibbering retard now" has always been a fundamental misunderstanding of Lovecraft's work. Thats not how madness and lovecraftian horror actually works in Lovecraft's own work.You can still very much do Cosmic Horror in a game, but you need to understand what it is first. Its about a malign paradigm shift, about realizing that not only are you in great danger but you were ALWAYS in great danger, you just didn't know about it until now. But, also, that not only can you not make the problem really go away, you can't expect most people to ever believe you.That guy in his apartment using spackle to make everything round and get rid of all of the angles? He isn't insane. What he is doing is perfectly logical. He just knows what the Hounds of Tindalos are, and this is a very reasonable precaution. It seems insane to you because you haven't seen what he has seen. That guy who refuses to go underground, even into basements, for any reason? Yeah, he has a phobia. But that phobia is born of the very real fact that he knows that there are man-eating monsters underground, living in sewers and secret tunnels and shit, and he doesn't know where all of their entrances and exits are and he doesn't want to be a snack for Pickman's Model. He could maybe be handling this information better, but the fear is very much justified. In both cases these are people who have learned something awful, and its not just dealing with the existence of monsters that drives them to seem crazy. Its the fact that they know that if they try to tell other people what they know to be true, they would be called mad. They are being forced to not only navigate a dangerous, life-threatening monster problem but deal with the isolation of the fact that they can't even tell people about it or seek help.
>>96642962first book was great. didnt want to read on past that because I’ve seen a lot of good stories ruined needless exposition and I was satisfied where it left off
I read call of cthulu. did the eldritch god get solo’d by a boat propeller or am I just retarded
>>96642962Blindsight is good cosmic horror, too, because the idea of life that is smarter than us but not self aware is pretty repulsive.
>>96642964>Thats not how madness and lovecraftian horror actually works in Lovecraft's own work.Most of the madness Lovecraft depicts is PTSD, full blown psychotic breaks aren't common and usually demonstrated by people who were already unstable.
>>96643123Considering C'thulu immediately reformed afterwards, like an illusion disturbed by a real space object, yes, you are.C'thulu left of it's own accord because he was woken from his nap before his Appointed Time. There was no 'victory', there was 'good God, we survived!'.
>>96643067I haven't read the fourth one yet, but the whole trilogy is pretty great. It expands the story without feeling the need to explain every single thing, I would recommend it.
it's a fairly boring and monotone genre on its own so it most prominently gets used as a palette swap for other fantasy, there's not really much to it
>>96640817In the 1920's people though they were living in the future. The economy was good. The tech was awesome(grandpa fought in the Civil War but you have electricity, a radio, a car, etc). There are medical breakthroughs like penicillin and insulin saving tons of lives. Lovecraft's horror revolves around contemplating your meaninglessness in the grand scheme of things. I think that sort of existential dread bounces off most modern people in our age of diminished expectations. Everyone is fine just collecting funkos, scrolling Instagram, or whatever else keeps them distracted. So as far as gaming goes? I think of it like putting on a fun stage play. You probably won't terrify your players but everyone will have fun solving the mystery and pretending to go insane. Horror Comedy is a great genre, you probably won't actually be scared while watching Hocus Pocus, Return of the Living Dead, The Lost Boys etc but they're still fun to watch. Kinda similarly, even in Lovecraft's work itself you could argue that the cosmic horror is like a flavoring for other types of horror. EG you have some folk horror in that people in rural areas are marrying monsters and carrying out sacrifices. The Secret World did this really well with a good combo of traditional monsters like vampires and ghosts with eldritch beasties.
>>96640817>I don't get the horror part of cosmic horror>posts waifus No shit.
>>96644597They are not mutually exclusive.
>>96643407It's unlikely the boat even hit Cthulhu, considering the whole vibe Howard was going with in that story was malevolent psychic projection and visual data being 100% wrong and getting you killed when you took it for granted.
>>96642964>Its about a malign paradigm shift, about realizing that not only are you in great danger but you were ALWAYS in great danger, you just didn't know about it until now. What I find works well is to make the threat initially benign, something that could reasonably go under the radar, then show it's a lot more expansive than initially assume. People hear the word "cult" and it takes it a lot of the mystique out, but finding out that 3 separate organisations have a common signifier starts to get the gears moving. It also helps if people who are compromised by the threat are initially non-hostile or even sympathetic to the player perspectives. Essentially turning the players into outsiders by virtue of inside information. I find it's easier to play with player expectations when there's already an established scepticism towards establishment in real life. Make it seem like it's actually the players there's something wrong with, like everything is working like clockwork and they're just uncovering it and taking a moral position to it. As you say: a paradigm shift, where good is evil, and the obscene is normal, and so the normal must be inadequate. I often think about 'Into the Mouth of Madness' about the sane and insane switching places and emulate that. It has worked for me, and I think it works alright on jaded players. Once they feel that the enemy has the keys to their house, and you mix that up with normal PC paranoia, they start working themselves up.Otherwise I mirror the sentiment from others that "tentacles and fishmen and oh no I'm going mad" is the domain of pulp, not horror. Different genres entirely, despite liking both.
>>96644773Agreed. Player paranoia is your strongest tool, if you can use it.In a game I am currently running, cosmic horror isn't the focus of the game but it IS an element of the setting. And all I needed to get the player's gears spinning was to to have them, after quite a lot of work, find a hidden sanctum left behind by scholars who studied the stars... and built their meeting place as far under ground as they could manage because they realized that the stars were looking back at them. The fact that this group of people whose library they sought out specifically because they needed information believe that the night sky is a panopticon that is always watching what you do was enough to make the players move their own base of operations underground. You know, just in case.
>>96644683Name please?
>>96640817>feels more like telling that showingIt's called storyTELLING for a reason, you utter dolt.
>>96644871Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show. To be perfectly honest, its not great. But it is kinda fun. You know how, in lovecraft, you have people who get a touch of madness and go off and write a play that drives people insane or paint a picture that gives you weird dreams of other planets or something? That happens here, except its a software engineer that designs a VR game system that actually works... but also acts as a doorway for fragments of the outer gods to invade reality and the use it to possess people using the system (video game streamers that were part of the beta) and puppet them around to bring about the end times early by sowing fear and madness in the human population. The only thing that gives us a chance is that they are restricted by the medium of the video game system itself, so everything they do has to be game-ified.Nylarthotep is the host of this battle for the future of mankind, and frankly he's just having a blast with it because it lets him play referee and screw over both humans and the outer gods in equal measure, as long as its in the guise of enforcing "the rules".
>>96643511I’ll take a look at it then. I just finished reading electric sheep. It’s not cosmic horror by any means, maybe cosmic comedy. But there are a lot of strange, otherworldly elements in the story that scratch the same itch as cosmic horror. Seriously recommend the book to everyone, the movie doesn’t even come close to doing it justice and its only 200ish pages.
>>96644683Yes they are. If you're making it cute or fuckable its not cosmic horror anymore. The overall enshitificaton of all things via marketing has made cosmic horror into a soda stream flavour. Of course you don't get it.
>>96645135you say that but you seem to be exclusively triggered by waifus
the essence of cosmic horror is to suddenly realize you are known by something you cannot know in return. some element of [being known] must be a twist, which is why all good cosmic horror is a slow revelation. now that we as a culture all "know the secret" from cultural inundation, cosmic horror really only works as a surprise facet of a work rather than the main draw. in other words, and tragically, the storyteller must subvert your expectations to cosmically horrify you. i know, it sucks, but that's how it is.the simplest formula for cosmic horror is>write a gang stalking plot but the gang is god and the schizophrenia is contagiouscosmic horror is the feeling you get when you eat half a sandwich and then realize the bread is moldy. and then you see that everyone is eating moldy bread. and they're all laughing and smiling and you can't tell if they're blissfully unaware that they're eating moldy bread or if they are laughing at you for finally catching on. and then you see moldy bread everywhere you go. you've been eating mold your whole life. really, mold has been here longer than you have. and then you hear a voice urging you to eat more mold. surely you're just sick from eating so much mold and not thinking clearly. but what if you're not? what if the mold is something bigger? then you learn your community was founded by persecuted mold cultists. mold cultists? that's preposterous. and so on and so forth until you kill yourself to cleanse your body of mold and your great grand nephew moves into your water-damaged new england mansion, finds your scribbled journals and lights your house on fire when he realizes it's irrevocably mold-infesteddoes that make sense at all? cosmic horror is just creative writing to explain what it's like to be autistic or schizophrenic
>>96646213>cosmic horror is the feeling you get when you eat half a sandwich and then realize the bread is moldy.beautifully put, this is exactly why i can't take it seriously
>>96646239horror, much like comedy, is a product of context and must continually "up the ante" to keep up with the passage of time. shock is key, and things that would terrify an audience in the 1920s would leave a jaded 2020s audience completely unphased. kind of like how video games have gradually broken the fourth wall more and more often to get an emotional response from a playerbase that has already seen it all
>>96645849nou
>>96640817Probably the main thing to do would be to have the cosmic horror threat be something in the peripheral with the occasional "Hey, we're still here and a threat." but never expounded upon
>>96640817Back when I played more call of cthulhu, there were two things I used to try to beat this. I think "horror" in RPGs comes mostly from anticipation of badness, or realisation of how fucked the situation is or how poor your available options are.Using sanity points more like health damage. You can't make people fear the deep ones they've read about fifteen times, but you can make your players fear the inevitable loss of a precious resource that they know is coming. For this to work you need to make san loss unpredictable and san gain exceedingly rare so that they fear what might happen, but are (usually) relieved when it doesn't.Secondly, using moments of revelation to reveal a worsening of problems. My players spent one session dealing with an ancient evil amulet. The next session they went to a museum displaying an archaeological dig of about thirty of them. This got a nervous reaction as they realised there was some organisation behind what they had previously assumed to be a one-off and started theorising about what would be behind it. Later in the session (after destroying most of the amulets) they realised that the amulets were for sealing a worse ancient evil. This also got a good groan out of them as they realised how bad they'd made things.
>>96640817I don't want to spoil it for you, but Murder Drones has to do with a cosmic horror who fucks with the mental state of it's victims through manipulation, abuse and confusion. And the show has a WHOLE LOT of show-not-tell. You have to rewatch the episodes multiple times and pause often to really understand what is going on.https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHovnlOusNLiJz3sm0d5i2Evwa2LDLdrgThe pilot filters people. It gets better.
>>96640817Cosmic horror as Lovecraft envisioned it (and what basically everything in the genera is derived from) is obsolete. It worked in Lovecrafts time, but anyone that would consume any fiction that attempted to be cosmic horror would just see the same old tropes that have been wielded around for decades now. The mystery and unknowns that Lovcraftian horror relied on no longer exist.
>>96640817The problem is that cosmic horror doesn't work in RPG format, because it is built on all consuming dread that the world is a tissue thin artifice that is only just barely concealing horrors more complex than our minds can truly understand. However, in many uses of the Lovecraft mythos, this usually takes the form of a bunch of unlucky shclubs, detectives, and nerds picking up guns, shooting a bunch of cultists, and stopping the big bad thing from happening, while completely skirting the fact that if they know the big bad thing can happen, they already know far too much and their ability to go back to a normal, sane life is already compromised.It's like if a bunch of ants realized what humans were and risked their many tiny limbs to tip of the can of bug spray. They saved the day, they think, while also knowing full well that they haven't actually done jack shit and that the world as they know it is far larger and they are far smaller, weaker, and more insignificant than their advanced, highly organized society had previously led them to believe.That just doesn't make for a great game, unless you make the Great Old Ones and the various extra-dimensional entities far less of a threat and far less powerful. And yes, I know that Cthulhu's introduction involves him getting stunned by getting rammed by a boat, but that's kind of the point. A big sea monster that can just be smacked around or blown up isn't really "cosmic horror" is it? And when you amp up the cosmic horror, it becomes a thing that no game can properly grapple with.
