Mythos don’t need no continuity

I decided to read Ubbo-Sathla by Clark Ashton Smith, whose one of those authors I feel like always need to read more of.   I know the story has been co-opted into the Cthulhu Mythos because Smith was part of the Lovecraft circle and why not? The short story certainly deals with cosmic horror and nightmarish secrets man will always regret poking at.

So I then decided to look at how Ubbo-Sathla, the primordial slime that spawned all life and guards the tablets of dark gods, has been jury-rigged into the greater Mythos. The phrase proto-shoggoth came up more than once, with the idea of the Elder Things harvesting samples of Ubbo-Sathla to create those teddy bears of the Mythos, the shoggoth. 

That seemed a little odd with Smith’s story having Ubbo-Sathla kick off life on this fragile globe in a more wild and natural fashion. (Not that I think Smith had any desire to have the story fit neatly into a carefully organized cosmology)

That’s when I realized that I was going about the whole matter all wrong. A key element of Lovecraft’s flavor of cosmic horror is that the universe, in addition to being 100% uncaring, is inexplicable, beyond the comprehension of the soft, squishy human mind. Trying to categorize and organize it just isn’t playing the game, by Jeeves. 

(No offense to you, Mr. August Derleth. You know I still love you. Okay, mostly for Solar Pons but you did keep the Mythos alive)

Yes, there is value and justification in having some kind of cosmology and taxonomy for the Mythos if you’re going to have a game like Call of Cthulhu. A game like that does get a lot of help from a system and I do love me some Call of Cthulhu. 

However, that madman Clark Ashton Smith has reminded me that you can’t cling to that structure too much. Sometimes, you have to remember that the continuity of the Mythos has a lot in common with the continuity of Red Dwarf. It doesn’t make sense and that’s just fine.

Can’t get enough Cthulhu and Holmes

My two favorite forms of pastiches are Sherlock Holmes and Cthulhu Mythos. Both are public domain so plenty of folks try their hand at either creating new Sherlock Holmes stories, sometimes with fanatic elements and sometimes just ‘lost’ stories, or opening up the can of worms that was Lovecraft’s cosmic horror. And while there is some complete garbage out there, a surprisingly amount is fun reading or even actually good.

Part of the reason why I think both subjects work so well as pastiches is because there’s a lot of room to work with. Which is obvious with the Cthulhu mythos. Compare The Strange High House in the Mist with At the Mountains of Madness. Just in Lovecraft alone, there was a wide spectrum of stories and tones. Even in his own life, his circle of friends like Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E Howard worked with elements of his ideas.

It seems a little stranger with Sherlock Holmes can inspire such a wide variety of work that, well, isn’t a train wreck. I mean, the character inspired a genre but all the stories are about two guys, Holmes and Watson. That’s a lot more limited.

I think the secret to Sherlock Holmes being open such a wide variety of interpretations and still being ‘true’ and entertaining is that the character in the original stories is pretty flat and distant. Which isn’t a dig because the original stories were driven by plot and some really good plots at that.

In comparison, Hercule Poirot has a much more defined personality and would be much harder to write about good pastiches about. Holmes is enough of a cypher that Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, Robert Downey Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch all play very different Holmes that all still work.

The author who straddled both pastiches was, of course, August Derleth. While I appreciate that he kept Lovecraft in print enough to become a part of culture, he really didn’t capture the cosmic despair of Lovecraft. On the other hand, his Solar Pons stories, openly pastiches of Holmes, are a lot of fun and frankly much better written.

These pastiches are almost a guilty pleasure for me except that I don’t think there’s anything to feel guilty about.

The Colour of Lovecraft's aliens

Rereading the Colour Out of Space for the upteenth time, I am struck by how profoundly alien Lovecraft's extraterrestrials are.

A key part of Lovecraft's work is that the universe is _not_ centered around the human race. In his cosmology, we are small and insignificant and the unverse does not care about us. Get outside of our tiny bubble of ignorance and we will be overwhelmed to the point of madness.

And one of the way that Lovecraft expressed that idea was by making his aliens fundamentally different than humans. His alien races aren't human beings with a few cosmetic differences but creatures that are so inhuman they sometimes don't even follow the same laws of physics.

Lovecraft's elder things actually helped inspire the term starfish alien to describe an alien that is intrinsically different than us. A combination of plant and animal qualities and pentagram symmetry, the elder things' heads and feet actually look like starfish. 

And the elder things are one the aliens that can most closely relate to the human race! You have the fungi mi-go that don't exist entirely in regular dimensions. Cthulhu and his fellow great old ones are actually aliens, but so different and on such a different scale they are like gods to people.

But the Colour Out of Space takes the cake. Whatever is going on in the story is so different that you could even argue that there might not even be an alien in the story. No one even interacts with the strange force, they just observe it and are affected by it.

The plot itself is simple. A meteorite lands near an isolated farm and a mysterious force from it twists and absorbs the life of everything around until it's strong enough to go back to the stars. The story may have helped make that a stock plot. 

For most of the story, the meteorite could as easily have caused groundwater contamination instead of brought an alien life. Animal and plant life grows wild but deformed, followed by serious degradation. It could easily be seen as radiation poisoning. Not until a strange aura of a color outside the normal spectrum rises out of the well and to the stars do we really get a good argument that the story is dealing with alien life.

In addition to being utterly unearthly, the life form in the Colour Out of Space also stays mysterious because Lovecraft doesn't explain anything. He just shows us the results of its activity or existence. 

With this story, Lovecraft didn't just create a fun yearn. He created an example of how to show an alien life form being truly and profoundly alien.

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Colour_Out_of_Space

How Call of Cthulhu helped shape my life... okay, my tastes and gaming

I am a big fan of both H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos in general. I've read most of Lovecraft's original works and a lot of work inspired by him. I've played a number of board games inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos and there are a lot of role playing games inspired by the Mythos as well.

Okay, it really helps that the original works are public domain now :D

But no game based on the works of Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos have had a bigger impact on me and my gaming life than Call of Cthulhu. To be fair, Call of Cthulhu has had a huge impact on Mythos games, horror games and even role playing games in general.

Everyone knows the old joke about how every character in Call of Cthulhu ends up dead, insane or both. Which, to be fair, if you play like it was D&D set in the 1920s, is pretty much how things will end. If you try to hack and slash your way through, you'll go through a lot of characters.

Call of Cthulhu came out way back in 1981, which makes it one of an old, hoary game. At the time, it broke a lot of paradigms about role-playing. It was set in the 1920s, not really a prime time for adventures. Most of the monsters were vastly more powerful than the characters, meaning any direct confrontation would end in >squish<

And, of course, Call of Cthulhu introduced sanity as a stat. You didn't just have to worry about getting squished. You have to worry about going insane, complete with phobias and difficult recuperation. It both brings home the inherent theme and gives you one more way to feel fragile.

Mind you, I don't think anyone who's going to be reading this blog isn't going to be familiar with Call of Cthulhu and its influence. If you are interested in role-playing games and have heard anything outside of Dungeons & Dragons or Vampire, you're going to know about Call of Cthulhu.

So let me ruminate about how the game has affected me on a personal level.

First of all, it got me interested in Lovecraft. I doubt I am the first person who was interested in the game first and then got into the literature. To be honest, I have spent a lot more time and certainly more years reading various Mythos stories than I have spent playing Call of Cthulhu.

Oh, I am sure that I would have ended up reading Lovecraft even if I hadn't discovered Call of Cthulhu. But it definitely got me reading his works years earlier than I would have. Not a year goes by without me rereading some of his stories and looking for more mythos work to read.

Second, Call of Cthulhu pretty huge part in teaching me to role-play a character as opposed to having a character be a mobile Orc slaying machine. Seriously, when even the lesser Mythos monsters can pretty much take out a character without a problem (and even fighting cultists can be tough work), spending time with character development (and, of course, looking for clues) just became a good idea.

Call of Cthulhu wasn't the only game that taught me to do that. Heck, Dungeons and Dragons did that too. But it became the best choice in Call of Cthulhu  After all, in any game of Call of Cthulhu, you always had to ask yourself why your character is even staying involved. You have to actually explore why someone would go through with this kind of adventure.

Third, I spent a couple years in college playing in a regular campaign. We had a lot of fun and I've hold that it is one of my great role-playing experiences. I got a lot of lasting friendships from that campaign and it is still one of my touchtone experiences in role-playing in general.

I will admit, that if I was going to be in a traditional, investigation based Mythos game, I'd go for Trail of Cthulhu. I have been in games where bad rolls have lost clues and thrown the story completely out of wack. The Gumshoe system helps keep the story moving. Mind you, Call of Cthulhu came out more than twenty-five years before Trail of Cthulhu. There's a lot of time and development to reach Trail. And I'd cheerfully use Call of Cthulhu for a Delta Green game.

Call of Cthulhu keeps on casting a long, unspeakable, shambling shadow.

Looking forward to someday getting lost in The House of Unusual Size

The House of Unusual Size is not my favorite entry in the Free RPG's Harder Than Granite contest from back in 2013. (That's a toss up between Keeton's Journey and A Flask Full of Gasoline) It is, however, the game I think I'm most likely to play.

The game is set in the ancient mansion of Ezra Keeton that was built atop a mountain and undoubtably built into the mountain. In a twist that feels like it's straight out of Lovecraft's Lurking Fear, the Keeton family vanished long ago, perhaps into the mansion.

The players wake up alone and without any memory in the mansion. As the game progresses, they must explore not only the mansion but who they really are. In the end, they must find each other and escape from the tangled labyrinth that is the mansion of Ezra Keeton.

The players start off with a blank character sheet. As the game progresses, the story will let them define a positive quality, a flaw and their connection to the Keeton family.

The House of Unusual Size is a GM-Free system, something that I have come to really enjoy. The player to the left of the active player serves as the GM for that player. They flip a coin, with heads being a positive scene and tails being a negative scene. The scenes can include self-discovery and challenges and fantastic encounters. The other players help fill in details and play other characters or creatures who might be in the scene. You just flip a coin if you have to figure out if a character fails or not at doing something.

After everyone is figured out who they are and what they have to do with the Keeton family, there will be a climactic scene where everyone escapes from the mansion together. There is really no mechanic for everyone dying or catastrophic failure but, if the group wants to play a game like this, they should have no problem filling in those details.

Oh, make no mistake. The House of Unusual Size is far from a perfect system. The rules and the structure are so vague that I don't think it's new player friendly at all. I think it would would only work with a crew of players who are experienced with narrative games.

Frankly, the rules being so vague and requiring interpretation would normally be a game breaker for me. However, the sheer ease of pick-up-and-play and the degree that the theme lends itself to easy story telling makes the game appealing to me anyway.

If I am going to have a role-playing game that I can print out on one page, fold up, and put my pocket, I wanted to be one that can be pulled out and played at the drop of a hat. A House of Unusual Size pulls off the trick. 

After all, all you need are the rules, a coin, and a way to write things down. Spooky houses are a genre that is easy to run with. Heck, in a pinch, you could use rock paper scissors instead of the coin and memory if you don't have anything to write things down with.

I can see it being an easy game to play during a road trip, at a cafe, or Skype. I can even see playing it via conference call, although probably just to prove that you can. It would be easy to hack to make shorter, like having every scene add an element to the character sheet with the last round of play being the escape.

The House of Unusual Size definitely needs a group that's prepared for a strong narrative focus and one that can handle minimal rules. Despite that, I can see myself packing this tiny little RPG in my convention bag, just in case. It makes a great use of its theme, strong enough to carry the minimal rules.

http://www.1km1kt.net/rpg/house-of-unusual-size

http://www.thefreerpgblog.com