All my recent business travel has given me a lot of time to get caught up on RPG reading, but not as much time for blogging. I'll be able to put up more reviews coming in the next few weeks. One thing that's been strikingly clear re-reading pieces from the Chaosium back-catalog is that many writers suffer from "too much Nyarlathotep" syndrome.
Lovecraft's Mythos is indifferent to humanity - or at least, his most powerful tales express cosmic indifference. The frightening beings of the Mythos are either powerful aliens or totally monstrous gods that are oblivious to us. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, Nyarlathotep, the supposed Crawling Chaos and messenger and soul of the outer gods, morphed into the boogeyman. Nyarlathotep is the one that left the toilet seat up, let the air out of the tire, or drank the last of the milk and put an empty back in the fridge. Every oddball demon is an avatar of Nyarlathotep, and every cultist plot is being moved along by Nyarlathotep like a 4-color super villain. Muhaha.
And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling investigators.
It's convenient to have a personal adversary for humanity, if you're writing a pulp action campaign and/or supernatural horror. I happen to love Supernatural Horror; I've been digging the world of Innistrad, for instance, from the Magic the Gathering card game. It would make a fine D&D setting. The protector of the world, a powerful angel, was trapped in the selfsame prison she was using to exile demonkind. Humanity has been left alone to fend for itself in a nightmare world of vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and things that go bump in the night. Everyone is a victim. It's a great set up for all the gothic horror tropes, and the fall of the world's angelic guardian creates a sense of both loss and hope in the setting as humans cling to their lost faith. No matter how dark the setting appears, players could always hold out hope of learning how to restore the lost guardian and return light to the world. It would make a spectacular campaign arc for dark fantasy.
Yeah, but none of that belongs in a Lovecraft setting.
It's not particularly easy to run a bleak campaign built around themes of cosmic horror, I get it. Much easier to write something with two-fisted action and guns blazing, and this is the form of many of the larger Call of Cthulhu campaigns, like The Masks of Nyarlathotep. (Although I do think it would be super cool to convert Masks to a fantasy rules set and run it like a D&D game - brothers and sisters, can I get a "Huzzah" for a "Lamentations of Nyarlathotep" game?)
So yes, I blame Mythos adventure writers looking for a convenient way to string together their convoluted plots with a supernatural puppet-master pulling the strings and twirling his moustache. But Nyarlathotep-made-me-do-it is also a problem with trying to be inclusive with all of Lovecraft's writing - does the high fantasy of the Dreamlands really have anything to do with the author's later works, which express a scientific world view and the passage of geologic time? Nyarlathotep's speech at the end of "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" is the most exposure we get to the being, and he's downright chummy with Randolph Carter in a good-on-ya-chap-sort-of-way, in the final sequence.
Individual referees can apply their own interpretation to reconcile the Nyarlathotep-boogeyman with their perspective on cosmic horror in the campaign, so I realize there are apologists out there; in Trail of Cthulhu, Ken Hite offers a wide range of ideas to help sort the mess, from 'Nyarlathotep is human perception anthropomorphizing cosmic reality' to a telepathic construct of the Great Old Ones, the true form behind all the gods, or even just a powerful agent. And yes, he can even be The Boogeyman. If you must.
The concept of a supernatural puppet-master vitiates the sense of cosmic horror that HPL worked to create. If the investigators realise that there is no over-arching system to the horrors that they face, that the universe just is that way, the sense of bleakness and futility becomes that much higher. Give them a big bad to defeat (if they can) and they'll think that once this has been done, their work is over.
ReplyDelete"Huzzah!"
ReplyDeleteCertainly someone else has done a swords & sorcery Masks campaign - but it'll be fun to think about.
DeleteI also enjoyed the Innistrad flavor ... it was like The Dark expansion done well. I'm completely indifferent to the Ravnica flavor but I think this is my favorite Standard environment ever, and I've been playing since before there was a Standard.
ReplyDeleteSince we're just building our collection now (through limited) I don't expect us to dip too much into standard until the summer. Ideally we'd wait until rotation when all the Olivias and Huntmaster and Restoration Angels disappear, but the kiddo is dying to build decks, so I started getting cheap commons and uncommons to round out aggro. It does look like a really varied environment out there, with a lot of viable decks and some nuts infinite combos.
DeleteLimited formats are easily my favorite but this qualifier season is Standard and there are some cash tournaments within driving distance, so I probably won't start concentrating on Limited again until M14/"Friends" and the fall Sealed qualifier season. (I've always run bad at States, with my best finishes being 5th and 14th in about five tries, so I'd like to make a run at States this fall too.)
DeleteNot only is Nyarlathotep's status as dastardly supervillain due to trying to shoehorn in the Dreamlands material, but also I think the adventure writers latched onto Nyarlathotep as described in "Dream-Quest" because it's one of the only instances where a Lovecraftian deity has a human personality. In fact, I think only three deities mentioned by Lovecraft have a personality, the other two being Nodens (In "The Strange High House in the Mist") and Yog-Sothoth (as Umr at-Tawil in "Through the Gates of the Silver Key".) But that makes it even clearer that the Outer Gods only have personalities in the dreams of human beings.
ReplyDeleteBut that makes it even clearer that the Outer Gods only have personalities in the dreams of human beings.
DeleteWhen I dream, Yog-Sothoth is the security guard at the front desk with the lazy eye, and Azathoth is that big lady from church with the crazy hair.
Okay, I could get behind a nuts cultist that anthropomorhized the Outer Gods in his weird dreams.
There was a thread on the big purple several years ago where the idea of Nyarlathotep, Hastur, et al were titles and not individuals was floated. The idea was these entities, at least as known by humans, were roles fulfilled by humans. It could be possession by some sliver of the real being or something more like Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality (which started strong but failed pretty early).
DeleteThat works with the "human personality" idea and simply formalizes the idea behind "Mythos Knowledge" = Insanity in a way. It might be a fun fix.
I generally agree that N as a super-villain has been overused, but only with people who know the Mythos well and are used to that trope. I've found with new players that holding him more behind the scenes, and not giving the PCs an easy out for 'defeating' him still holds water.
ReplyDeleteWhat are the alternatives for N as a super villain? Ancient wizard? Just not to have someone behind the scenes? Graham talked about this in Stealing Cthulhu and his suggestions there are good. Just wondering what other thoughts are out there...
Yeah, I agree with that, I'd rather use various human agents (like an ancient wizard, perhaps) behind the scenes if a mastermind or manipulator is warranted - like The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight in Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, an old Chaosium campaign. I want to keep the Mythos deities horrible, unknowable, and inhuman, and keep the human motivations with the people.
ReplyDelete