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Tulip posted:Why is Lovecraft the author who gets to be the voice of his generation? Why him over Langston Hughes or John Steinbeck or Agatha Christie or Zora Neale Hurston, who were all more popular at the time? They do have the factor of indirect influence, which is harder to gauge. For instance, Lovecraft was a big influence on Stephen King, who it seems hard to say is not an important American writer of, at least, the 1980s. But how much of that is the old racist and how much is King (who has his own problems but is, uh, not in the same league as either of the '20s guys)? whydirt posted:Maybe a useful exercise would be to recommend authors who similar to Howard and Lovecraft but are less racist or are even minorities themselves?
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May 22, 2021 01:06
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Tulip posted:Why is Lovecraft the author who gets to be the voice of his generation? Why him over Langston Hughes or John Steinbeck or Agatha Christie or Zora Neale Hurston, who were all more popular at the time? You've brought these names up twice now, but I would say that Christie probably was the best representation of the generation in that she generally neglected race in her works and poo poo the bed when she provided fleeting glances into her assumptions. She wasn't as offensively racist as Howard or Lovecraft, but thats because her audience filled in the blanks for her. She wasn't as radical as Harlem Renaissance or left wing authors, either. She kinda trod the median, but I would argue that the median (which was very, very white), when actually investigated, would likely hew closer to Lovecraft than Hughes.
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May 22, 2021 02:08
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whydirt posted:Maybe a useful exercise would be to recommend authors who similar to Howard and Lovecraft but are less racist or are even minorities themselves? Laird Barron writes like Lovecraft except instead of a universe of Cosmic Horror it is a universe of Carnivorous Horror. Barron has also made the point of writing gay and lesbian main characters and in my view did a very good job in one of these two stories. Mysterium Tremendum is just a gobsmackingly fantastic slow burn. Instead of relying on traditional tropes to generate isolation and fear, Barron presents the isolation and hate caused by some parts of American society on the queer community to ratchet up the tension and generate a situation where the main character, his partner and their buddies are truly alone; cosmically, personally and from a society standpoint. It's chilling and real good. I've read it about four times and each time I get more insight on how deftly he crafted the story. Here is an analysis and review (read the story first please) of Mysterium Tremendum's queer themes: https://www.thepunkwriter.com/article/strange-flesh-the-use-of-lovecraftian-archetypes-in-queer-fiction-mysterium-tremendum So I am a Barron fan (obviously) but the story he wrote about the lesbian protagonist and her partner...well I personally think you can skip it. Not because the story is bad or the main characters are written poorly, but because it telegraphs the story theme too much (maybe that makes it "bad"?). I don't even remember the story's name but you can totally tell (Major Spoilers) its a werewolf story. In my view it doesn't quite deliver as a gothic horror either but maybe I'm being too harsh on it. I will add one criticism of Barron's stories. If it feels like Jack London protagonists have somehow stumbled into a Mythos story you are not wrong. Most of his protagonists (including the above to some extent) are two fisted, hard drinking, wilderness capable human beings. But I like that because it is different than Lovecraft. Your mileage may vary. Helical Nightmares fucked around with this message at 02:28 on May 22, 2021 |
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May 22, 2021 02:18
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Yeah if you broaden the scope to just American Fiction: 1920s-30s that's a vastly larger scope, and not nearly as relevant to the problems we've been discussing in RPGs. If you want to just go through the influences on Dungeons and Dragons, you need to include all SF and Fantasy (and probably some history) through the early 1970s, and again that's a much much larger bucket of stuff. I think it's fair to say that "modern" fantasy was in its infancy still in the 1930s, and so there's fewer total influential/important authors to even discuss. If on the other hand you're just interested in finding good cosmic horror/swords & sorcery fiction that isn't racist, I feel like that's a very tangential discussion, albeit a worthwhile one.
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May 22, 2021 02:21
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Agatha Christie has one great example of how things get cleaned up over the years, making the period look a lot more palatable. I'd strongly recommend MR James if you want ethically-sourced weird arcane investigative horror, though.
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May 22, 2021 02:42
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No Miura (RIP) on the list of influential guys? There wouldn't be Dark Souls and a lot of modern dark fantasy without him.
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May 22, 2021 02:43
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Leperflesh posted:If on the other hand you're just interested in finding good cosmic horror/swords & sorcery fiction that isn't racist, I feel like that's a very tangential discussion, albeit a worthwhile one. Yeah I have another recommendation. Mike Minnis. The exceptional Lovecraftian writer whom time forgot. Sometime in the late 90s, a German gentleman by the name of Mike Minnis took pen to paper. What flowed was a heady distillate of cosmic horror in the architecture of a fictional craftsman. He published 40-odd short stories hither and yon about the burgeoning internet, mostly at small congregations of weird fiction devotees with names like “thousandyoung.net”, “netherreal.de” and “nightscapes”. However, thanks to the Internet Wayback Machine I was able to recover the full text of ten of his stories. I have copied them to pdf, and for the sake of convenience I have posted them to a file sharing service for download. As a disclaimer, I am not benefiting financially from this in any way. I have simply consolidated the pdfs so that more fans of weird fiction can discover and enjoy this great author’s work. https://www.mediafire.com/folder/t6792v35951vg/Mike_Minnis_Wayback_Machine_Archive If you like his work, just give the man $3 for the kindle edition of Your Poisoned Dreams, a collection of ten Mythos short stories. At that price it is an absurd steal. https://www.amazon.com/Your-Poisoned-Dreams-Horror-Stories-ebook/dp/B00JPBN0DO To start, I highly recommend I Walk the World's Black Rim which is a mix of Beowulf and the Mythos.
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May 22, 2021 02:44
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Plutonis posted:No Miura (RIP) on the list of influential guys? There wouldn't be Dark Souls and a lot of modern dark fantasy without him. Never heard of the gentleman. Expound please.
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May 22, 2021 02:45
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Helical Nightmares posted:Never heard of the gentleman. Expound please. Kentaro Miura, author of Berserk, one of the most sold and praised Manga series in history, that ran for almost 30 years. Tragically passed away earlier this month.
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May 22, 2021 02:49
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Plutonis posted:Kentaro Miura, author of Berserk, one of the most sold and praised Manga series in history, that ran for almost 30 years. Tragically passed away earlier this month. Didn't know the author but I had heard of Berserk (in relation to Dark Souls). Too many people have recommended it, I'll have to put it on my list. Thank you.
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May 22, 2021 02:55
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Berserk is good but it's also basically an exhaustive list of content warnings in manga form, so keep that in mind going in.
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May 22, 2021 03:47
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Berserk is good but it's also basically an exhaustive list of content warnings in manga form, so keep that in mind going in. A few years ago I tried to start watching the anime with my wife and we had to turn it off almost instantly. I wish someone had given us those content warnings! Comparing it to dark souls is not really fair. I don't think Dark Souls has a bunch of sexual violence. Berserk does.
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May 22, 2021 21:03
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Jimbozig posted:A few years ago I tried to start watching the anime with my wife and we had to turn it off almost instantly. The comparison to Dark Souls is because it takes a lot of its visual style directly from Berserk. https://twitter.com/docsquiddy/status/1395523494578901003?s=20
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May 23, 2021 00:19
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Octavo posted:The comparison to Dark Souls is because it takes a lot of its visual style directly from Berserk. There's also a ton of stuff that has sexual and body horror stuff in dark souls and bloodborne, it's just less fetishy about it and goes with evocative imagery and half gleened elements you can fill to be unsettling, rather than "here's a ton of rape" Gaping dragon is supposed to give off some vagina dentata vibes. One reborn is literally birthed from the sky, and we don't see what happens with Arianna and her offspring, but she's very clearly knocked up by a cosmic horror birthing it drives her mad. Hell the final boss from bloodborne's expansion literally claws its way out of its dead mother's innards and tries to beat you to death with its placentia. That's on par with at least the second half of Berserk's trolls.
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May 23, 2021 05:46
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Coolness Averted posted:There's also a ton of stuff that has sexual and body horror stuff in dark souls and bloodborne, it's just less fetishy about it and goes with evocative imagery and half gleened elements you can fill to be unsettling, rather than "here's a ton of rape" i really, really wouldn't claim that the eclipse monsters (including the horse) are fetishistic, but rather just portrayed as horrifying...
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May 23, 2021 13:28
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In the absence of a dedicated Traveller thread (at least in the past six months) and to satisfy my own curiosity... Has anyone here played/run Across the Bright Face or any of the other "split" adventures? I see them get recommended constantly as alternatives to running a full campaign like Drinax, but - maybe this is 40 years of game design drift talking - they feel pretty antithetical to Traveller's design with how hard of a railroad they're bound to. Just trying to understand why a completely inflexible railroad of a randomized, more combat focused than usual hexcrawl is in or near the top spot for recommended modules for a wide-open space faring game that disincentivizes combat with lethality. The split adventures were tournament adventures, which probably does some of it... but we aren't talking tournament play for these recommendations.
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May 23, 2021 14:31
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Coolness Averted posted:There's also a ton of stuff that has sexual and body horror stuff in dark souls and bloodborne, it's just less fetishy about it and goes with evocative imagery and half gleened elements you can fill to be unsettling, rather than "here's a ton of rape" Some people have specific triggers. Having a monster claw its way out of their body is something that has not happened to many women. Sexual assault is unfortunately something that has. So mundane sexual violence is much more likely to require a content warning than over-the-top fantasy horror gore.
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May 23, 2021 18:27
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Jimbozig posted:Having a monster claw its way out of their body is something that has not happened to many women. 
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May 23, 2021 19:10
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I mean not literally so, no, but it's about as straightforward a metaphor to invoke fear of childbirth as you can draw.
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May 23, 2021 19:29
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My Lovely Horse posted:I mean not literally so, no, but it's about as straightforward a metaphor to invoke fear of childbirth as you can draw. Yeah, for the record I'm not saying "heh dummies, why are you okay with this abstracted thing that very clearly evokes the imagery of a concept, but not okay with another thing that shows graphic rape as a part of nearly every major character's backstory and routinely uses sexual peril?" I totally get why Berserk wouldn't be someone's cup of tea, and yeah it's also weird that someone would suggest it without at least the heads up it's got a lot of rape, gore, and people being lovely. I still can see the fingerprints and common themes the souls games and bloodborne have.
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May 23, 2021 20:10
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SkyeAuroline posted:In the absence of a dedicated Traveller thread (at least in the past six months) and to satisfy my own curiosity... Has anyone here played/run Across the Bright Face or any of the other "split" adventures? I see them get recommended constantly as alternatives to running a full campaign like Drinax, but - maybe this is 40 years of game design drift talking - they feel pretty antithetical to Traveller's design with how hard of a railroad they're bound to. Just trying to understand why a completely inflexible railroad of a randomized, more combat focused than usual hexcrawl is in or near the top spot for recommended modules for a wide-open space faring game that disincentivizes combat with lethality. The split adventures were tournament adventures, which probably does some of it... but we aren't talking tournament play for these recommendations. I have run Across the Bright Face ! It's a pretty solid hexcrawl with a clear objective. I fleshed out the opposition team that was after your late boss' briefcase, so there was a personal connection with the pursuit (my players captured the leader of the gang, so I sent his wife after them). It's as railroad-y as it is because it's designed to showcase Traveller at it's best (actual travel, alien environment, etc.) and be played in a convention time slot. What I'm going to do the next time I run it, is to start play sooner. As written, the players have already botched the bodyguard job by GM fiat. I'd like to start the players off when they arrive on-planet, and spend some time on the inspection tour. That adds even more meaty Traveller stuff and give the GM a chance to showcase both the hot and cold environmental dangers. The big thing to play up, is to give the players a chance to side with the worker's revolt. There's a lot of good, pro-labor- RP to do with that and lets the PCs be proper good guys, instead of corporate stooges on the run. As it was, my PCs made the trip and ended up rescuing a bunch of management's families from a besieged compound. They were one of the first ships with the new to arrive back in Regina, so they got a lot of attention from the wealthy and powerful, which gave me as many patrons as I could want for whichever other classic adventures - or brand new shenanigans - they found interesting. Naturally the group promptly changed structure and we played something else next.
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May 23, 2021 20:56
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Is there a thread about Sleeping Gods?
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May 23, 2021 22:24
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Nessus posted:They do have the factor of indirect influence, which is harder to gauge. For instance, Lovecraft was a big influence on Stephen King, who it seems hard to say is not an important American writer of, at least, the 1980s. But how much of that is the old racist and how much is King (who has his own problems but is, uh, not in the same league as either of the '20s guys)? In particular Kennedy's work has the big gods be benign or loving in their attentions to humanity, but their attention is weird, warping or harmful, which is a bad look in light of what came up about him. Bloodborne is the most pessimistic take on it - the old gods, though weird, are pretty hype and willing to enlighten humanity. So humanity decides to enslave or exploit them to try and get their sweet powers.
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May 24, 2021 11:23
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So switching gears a little, I got around to reading "A Wizard" recently, and I remember folks here were pretty big on it. The concept is great, and it's decently put together for an indie. The actual adventure though feels like the worst poo poo a middleschool DM would put together. Like direct "the solution to a puzzle is to trust nearby signs, oh except if they trust signs in another section it murders them" with nothing in the setup that would give players a hint about that. Is there something I'm missing about OSR style? I know most OSR stuff is supposed to be more deadly/you don't get attached to specific characters, but I just think adventures like this could be handled much better with "Ask your players what they do. Flip a coin. Heads their character is intact. Tails, you roll on this random gruesome death table" than bolting on old d&d rules or a detailed 30 page adventure and tower map.
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May 24, 2021 22:07
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No you pretty much nailed it. OSR on the whole is very much "I have heard stories about Tomb of Horrors at cons in the 80s and have generalized these into an assertion that all TTRPGs should be like that."
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May 25, 2021 02:12
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Yawgmoth posted:No you pretty much nailed it. OSR on the whole is very much "I have heard stories about Tomb of Horrors at cons in the 80s and have generalized these into an assertion that all TTRPGs should be like that." Yeah, that's that major reason I was quite upset about Dungeon Crawl Classics, which in no way actually emulates classic dungeon crawls. It emulates stdh stories about Gygax modules and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay games. I was drawn in by some interesting class design but alarm bells started going off in my head when it had a six paragraph screed about why 'the funnel' is actually a cool thing that stops roll players in their tracks.
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May 25, 2021 02:28
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I also assume that a lot of those meatgrinder OSR modules are written primarily for reading and maybe for scavenging a few bits, with usability at the table a distant secondary goal. A Wizard is very clever, and I found it fun to read, but it doesn't seem like it'd be remotely fun to actually play.
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May 25, 2021 03:21
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This is probably not a revelation but back when people were playing original AD&D, nobody really knew the rules properly, everyone ignored big chunks of them, and the general culture around the game was to lean very very heavily on house rules, home brew, and being inconsistent. I suspect that this colored expectations about adventures, too; you're just supposed to decide off the cuff that you don't want the players to have a party wipe from this trap right now and like, have a wizard teleport into the scene to save them, or maybe a unicorn. Or kill everyone and then they'd spend 30 minutes making new characters named Bob The Wizard II and Grag Son of Grag son of Grag, and this time they'd just happen to avoid that trap, you know, for whatever reasons.
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May 25, 2021 03:30
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Antivehicular posted:I also assume that a lot of those meatgrinder OSR modules are written primarily for reading and maybe for scavenging a few bits, with usability at the table a distant secondary goal. A Wizard is very clever, and I found it fun to read, but it doesn't seem like it'd be remotely fun to actually play.
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May 25, 2021 03:35
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Yawgmoth posted:No you pretty much nailed it. OSR on the whole is very much "I have heard stories about Tomb of Horrors at cons in the 80s and have generalized these into an assertion that all TTRPGs should be like that." That is a vast and heavily inaccurate simplification of what the OSR is, though yeah that does happen
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May 25, 2021 03:41
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Most of A Wizard does actually flow together without being too bad with the exception of all the stuff in the Void if you decide to go exploring there instead of just floating yourself across the gap, it's just the expected damage that's probably a little bit too high. For example the first nasty trap most PCs will probably run into is some of them being pulled into the digestion room while the others have to save them, but the non-trapped characters finding a way to open that can happen pretty quickly. It's just the round-by-round damage that needs tuning.
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May 25, 2021 03:46
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You might get some different opinions in the Old School thread, and potentially some suggestions for better modules.
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May 25, 2021 03:47
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The "Old school" module that sticks in my memory (though sadly I can't remember the title) wasn't some epic dungeon dive but one that was basically a scooby-doo mystery at a haunted sea-side manor. It was an illusionist and smuggler crew trying to scare people away from their operation. And they would've gotten away with it too if not for those pesky adventurers!
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May 25, 2021 04:02
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bewilderment posted:Most of A Wizard does actually flow together without being too bad with the exception of all the stuff in the Void if you decide to go exploring there instead of just floating yourself across the gap, it's just the expected damage that's probably a little bit too high. Or falling to their death before the digestion room, or auto-dying if you ever get separated from the group, or once again trusting signs you read -or not trusting them. No, raw it's a poo poo dungeon with a cool concept -unless arbitrary death and mutilation is your group's jam. Spending 30 pages on the abyss (roughly the same length as the entire adventure)is also an interesting design choice when the game does nothing to explain the nature of what's really going on -which is fine, except the game has a few things that mention the PCs can learn things about the true nature of the wizard. Yes, I could make that up myself, but I could probably also make up all the random damage the traps do too.
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May 25, 2021 04:25
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Galaga Galaxian posted:The "Old school" module that sticks in my memory (though sadly I can't remember the title) wasn't some epic dungeon dive but one that was basically a scooby-doo mystery at a haunted sea-side manor. Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh?
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May 25, 2021 04:28
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Antivehicular posted:I also assume that a lot of those meatgrinder OSR modules are written primarily for reading and maybe for scavenging a few bits, with usability at the table a distant secondary goal. A Wizard is very clever, and I found it fun to read, but it doesn't seem like it'd be remotely fun to actually play. Yeah, like stealing the broadest bits of general concept I can see working, but I just don't know who needs to crib clunky "your players take X damage if they go left" but then is 100% fine ad-libbing every npc's motivations or deep truths of cosmic horror. Nor do I like "here's a list of things that will make the wizard kill the party, oh and the 'good ending' requires them to have done one of them. Also no matter what the main antagonist of my gently caress you dungeon wins"
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May 25, 2021 04:32
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Nessus posted:I think most of them were convention modules - either derived from something Gygax or someone ran at Gencon, or possibly prepared in the interest of farming it out to DMs so you'd get massive parallelism. Unfortunately, most of the modules TSR published in the early days were these tournament meatgrinders and those were what people looked to as examples for how it should be done, which is how you end up with people 40 years later thinking that proper "old school" play meant arbitrary high lethality at all times. The other problem was Gygax's Tomb of Horrors, which was designed specifically to challenge his table of veteran high-level players who were used to all of Gary's quirks and tricks as a "can you beat this?" challenge, and again people read it and played it and assumed this is what a typical dungeon adventure should be like.
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May 25, 2021 06:02
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FMguru posted:Early convention modules were high-casualty meatgrinders because they were designed to whittle down (or eliminate) groups of players in a single session in a weekend. Eight tables sit down to play, five hours later half of them are TPKs, one group has made it to room 17, one made it to room 14, and two are stuck at the door puzzle in room 9, so you give the gold trophy to the group in room 17. They're deadly and have disposable characters and are very strict about what you can and can't do and the exact opposite of how Gygax played the game at his table (which was full of improv and houseruling) because a tournament environment is the exact opposite of a house campaign in many important ways. Terrible to actually play, yes, but I do appreciate that they exist as a sort of mythical age of superhumans who could actually play that poo poo and have genuine fun overcoming them. I still love the apocryphal story of some convention tourney running Tomb of Horrors and one of the players putting the cursed crown on Acererak and touching it with the wrong end of the scepter to insta-kill him, and the GM had to go consult Gygax himself to determine if that would actually work, with him ruling that the Tomb's death traps were so bullshit that even Acererak himself wasn't immune to them.
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May 25, 2021 06:12
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I ran A Wizard for my group over Roll20 during last year's lockdown, and IMO with the right attitude going in it's perfectly playable and fun in a "ha ha we're so hosed" kind of way. I used Old School Essentials and had my three players each make two party members, so the instant death elements of the module wouldn't completely knock a player out of the game. Even saying that, only 1 party member actually died, and the party managed to get the best 'ending' to the module without any handholding. Obviously, personal mileage varies massively with these types of things, but speaking as someone who isn't an OSR superfan, it gave us a fun afternoon's distraction.
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May 25, 2021 07:28
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If the module you're running isn't horseshit than assuming your players are reasonably smart/competent and they aren't too unlucky with their rolls than death doesn't actually happen quite as often in OSR conditions as you'd think it would
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May 25, 2021 08:23
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