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[MetalSlimeHunt]

My favorite Lovecraft stories are some that nobody ever seems to select, The Nameless City, The Shunned House and The Music of Erich Zann.

I'm curious: does the Lovecraft universe have anything like 40k's blanks or untouchables? People who are basically immune to all the crazy shit Elder Gods and whatnot are capable of doing to the average human.

Meet one of the best homebrew concepts I've seen, the Eldritch Savants.

Maybe he thought that Yog-Sothoth is God?

Lovecraft himself referred to the collective works as the Yog-Sothoth Cycle rather than the Cthulhu Mythos, so this holds some weight. On the other hand, Azathoth is the most powerful being whom created reality, but has no mind. Conversely, Yog-Sothoth has some agency but the most powerful being who is intelligent in a way that humans can understand at all is Nyarlathotep.

[Xantalos]

Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth seem to be polar opposites in a way - Azathoth has all the power in the universe to the point where creation ends if he awakes, but is a blind babbling idiot. Yog Sothoth knows and is everything in every possible universe, but is severed from them so he can't ever interact with them. Pure omnipotence versus pure omniscience.
also that's a pretty damn cool homebrew

[Spehss _]

My favorite Lovecraft stories are some that nobody ever seems to select, The Nameless City, The Shunned House and The Music of Erich Zann.

The Shunned House was great. Different enough from the typical haunted house story to be memorable but at the same time not full of Lovecrafty tropes to be written off as another tale of fishmen and cyclopean architecture.

I know I've read the Nameless City but I don't remember it well enough to really comment on it. Last time I read it was probably 5 years ago at least.

[wierd]

My favorite Lovecraft stories are some that nobody ever seems to select, The Nameless City, The Shunned House and The Music of Erich Zann.

I'm curious: does the Lovecraft universe have anything like 40k's blanks or untouchables? People who are basically immune to all the crazy shit Elder Gods and whatnot are capable of doing to the average human.

Meet one of the best homebrew concepts I've seen, the Eldritch Savants.

Maybe he thought that Yog-Sothoth is God?

Lovecraft himself referred to the collective works as the Yog-Sothoth Cycle rather than the Cthulhu Mythos, so this holds some weight. On the other hand, Azathoth is the most powerful being whom created reality, but has no mind. Conversely, Yog-Sothoth has some agency but the most powerful being who is intelligent in a way that humans can understand at all is Nyarlathotep.

There's that story about the evil sorcerer who learns how to preserve himself as inanimate salts-- Not quite the same, but has similar themes to being immortal.

Yog-Sothoth is possibly the most powerful of the eldritch horrors, and also one of the least scruitable.  He/it is infinitely patient, and is (one of?) the agency(ies) through which the other Great Old Ones move about extradimensionally.  It exists outside space and time altogether, while Azathoth is the mad center of our spacetime universe. As seen in Lights in the Witch House, it is possible to use the secret mysteries of Azathoth to move around INSIDE spacetime WITHOUT entering into a contract with him, but doing so will attract attention, and you will probably be captured and forced into it by his more sentient/sane servitors, such as Nyarlathotep. Yog-Sothoth? Seems just as willing to be invoked to save the earth as to destroy it.  I give him a true neutral alignment; Unconcerned with humans, but amused at their invocations. (He gets invoked a LOT apparently; Him and Shub Nigguroth for some reason.)

[scrdest]

Lovecraft himself referred to the collective works as the Yog-Sothoth Cycle rather than the Cthulhu Mythos, so this holds some weight. On the other hand, Azathoth is the most powerful being whom created reality, but has no mind. Conversely, Yog-Sothoth has some agency but the most powerful being who is intelligent in a way that humans can understand at all is Nyarlathotep.

More jocular - 'Yog-Sothothery' - usually. But that was primarily by sheer frequency of being used as a major figure - Cthulhu gets just one big scene then gets foiled in a hilariously Hendersonian manner - whereas Yog shows up in various places.

I've yet to read all the stories, but so far, he seems to come up where sorcerers pop up, like some amalgamation of the traditional portrayals of God and Satan - with all the extra-dimensionalness and bizzareness of the former and the power-at-a-price themes of the latter.

Tangentially, anybody has any idea what was the deal with the mark on Curwen's chest? In-story, it's invoked in the context of witchcraft lore of the devil's kiss, but that doesn't really seem to be a Yog-Sothoth thing.

[Criptfeind]

My favorite Lovecraft stories are some that nobody ever seems to select, The Nameless City, The Shunned House and The Music of Erich Zann.

The shunned house is definitely one of my favorites as well. I feel like it's a bit more of a traditional horror story then a lot of lovecrafts things, which to be honest get a bit samey after a while, so I found the shunned house a breath of fresh air.

[scrdest]

My favorite Lovecraft stories are some that nobody ever seems to select, The Nameless City, The Shunned House and The Music of Erich Zann.

Music of Erich Zann is cool, but it's also very, very short.

[Criptfeind]

Most of lovecrafts stories are quite short actually, music seems about averageish to me.

[hops]

This thread (among a couple other things) made me seek out and read Lovecraft in English (read some stuff, mostly the various not strictly Mythos stories). I. Regret. Nothing.

On that note, I'm currently reading In The Mountains of Madness, though, and I noticed an interesting detail - pretty much all post-Lovecraft references to the Mythos treat reading the Necronomicon as a sanity risk, if not making you go mad instantly, but the ITMoM narrator, along with several other members of the science team have read it and remained perfectly fine.

Yeah, Lovecraft's idea of the Necronomicon portray it as a collection of "forbidden" knowledge, basically all the eldritch horror stuff. There's tons of Lovecraft's stories where the main character or a side character just so happens to have read it. Aside from knowing what horrible forces of nature they're up against, they're otherwise sane.

That being said, many of Lovecraft's characters who have read the book knew what they were getting into, or are "hard-boiled" or just weird enough to not be phased by such reading material. No idea how a normal passerby with no knowledge of any of the material might react to it. Probably would just think it's a work of fiction.

to be fair, that was the english translation of the necronomicon.

[Spehss _]

to be fair, that was the english translation of the necronomicon.

Yeah. But even the original Necronomicon in Lovecraft's works was written by a human - Abdul Alhazred - in a (presumably) human language. Probably some Arabian language due to Alhazred constantly being referred to as the "Mad Arab".

[hops]

Well, yeah, but one would assume that the translators are scholars who doesn't take Alhazred to face value and assume he's just insane and so masked the horrifying nature of what he wrote.

[Spehss _]

Reread "The Music of Erich Zann". Good story.

Found a song performed by the band Univers Zero based on the short story. According to Wikipedia the band members all read the short story together in the studio before improvising the piece on set.

[Bohandas]

In a lot of Lovecraft's stories even a lot of the people who actually wind up in the loony bin aren't actually insane, they've just seen some hard to believe things, or even when they occasionally are insane as in the cases of those with obsessions or personality disorders their actual disorder implicitly takes a back seat to their presumed psychosis.


In the "Necronomicon-produces-insanity-and/or-evil" camp's defense however it's worth noting that there are several real world books with a reputation - whether deserved or not - for turning people evil: The Prince, Atlas Shrugged, the Book of Leviticus, the Book of Deuteronomy, the Qur'an, The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, etc.

[wierd]

I've read quite a few of those...

Mostly, from what I understand, the Necronomicon contains magical knowledge, conveyed to Abdul through powerful psychic transference, which he then could not help but put down.

Similar to the cuthulu artwork by the "psychically sensitive artist" in the call of chtulu short.

But again-- remember, "Insanity" was diagnosed for basically EVERYTHING that wasn't "chaste Victorian self-censorship", and as such, talking about frightening demonic beings from outside the universe trying to get in and kill everyone in an orgy of blood, violence, and horrible freedom--- would probably get you locked up pretty quickly.

Also, you have to see this through the lens of someone who lives such a very culturally controlled life, with such a narrow worldview, suddenly being forced to come to terms with a reality that shows that everything they know and base their worldview on is just plain wrong.  You see this kind of thing with the radical self-destructive binges that children of strict religious households go through when they abandon the family faith later on.

What seems perfectly normal in our modern world, would have been abhorrent to Lovecraft, and his generation.

[Bohandas]

I've read quite a few of those...

Mostly, from what I understand, the Necronomicon contains magical knowledge, conveyed to Abdul through powerful psychic transference, which he then could not help but put down.

Similar to the cuthulu artwork by the "psychically sensitive artist" in the call of chtulu short.

But again-- remember, "Insanity" was diagnosed for basically EVERYTHING that wasn't "chaste Victorian self-censorship", and as such, talking about frightening demonic beings from outside the universe trying to get in and kill everyone in an orgy of blood, violence, and horrible freedom--- would probably get you locked up pretty quickly.

Unless in the context of a fire-and-brimstone sermon