Yog-Sothothery and D&D

Read this post here. I've tried to say some of the same things about how people misinterpret Lovecraft, but he did so quite eloquently, and with more of a focus on RPGs than I might have expected.

First let me quote a different dead fantasy writer of greater talent than I (in this case Terry Pratchett) and his famous thoughts on Tolkien (who published The Hobbit about 6 months after Lovecraft died):

J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.

I think this is an incredibly apt point about Tolkien's impact on modern fantasy authors. It is so omnipresent that it influences all future fantasy writing. C.S. Lewis was his famous contemporary, and you'll find a lot of comparisons of their two styles of worldbuilding (some thoughtful and some just pop-psych garbage). As a pair they have an immense impact on all modern fantasy literature.

I think it is appropriate to note that that Mt. Fuji metaphor could apply to Lovecraft in regards to the structures of roleplaying games. People often talk about a "Lovecraftian game" as being different than the structure Arneson and Gygax used for D&D, as one of bleak horror and a downward spiral. "Lovecraftian" tales are those of unprepared everyday people (or bookish academics) trying to stop the unstoppable.

That is horse[crap] added on after the fact being used to retroactively change the tenor of his stories. To continue the Tolkien metaphor, that is allowing the series "The Rings of Power" to alter your view about the events taking place in "The Lord of the Rings". It's [a] different author's interpretation and isn't part of the original works.

Some of my own past commentary

https://dark-fantasy-x.blogspot.com/2014/02/cthulhu-in-popular-culture.html

Who says that defeat of the Cosmic Horror is not in line with Lovecraft's writings?  This leads to some of the same inane problems that Cthulhu games inevitably have—unskilled or inexperienced Keepers (or whatever they call Cthulhu GMs) think that if they're not chewing through characters 2-3 or more per session, then they're somehow doing it wrong.  This means that, in my experience, Cthulhu is often viewed as a campy one-shot or convention type game, completely unsuitable for campaign style play.  What a sad state of affairs!  Cthulhu can and should provide some of the best campaigns you can get.  But not if the GM and players don't really "get it."  And part of "getting it" is 1) actually understanding Lovecraft's writings, and not going on a half-baked, second hand interpretation of them, and 2) recognizing the nature of Yog-Sothothery and what it is supposed to be.  Heck, Lovecraft himself expected that his Yog-Sothothery circle would do different things with the themes and memes of the Mythos.  Robert E. Howard wrote all kinds of Mythos stories in which the Mythos was rather heroically handed its rear end by a two-fisted, gung-ho type guy (like Solomon Kane, for instance.)  And Lovecraft thoroughly approved.

The idea that Lovecraft wrote only about shy, retiring characters who were doomed to failure is not supported by "the primary sources."  It's really an artifact of what's come after—long after, in many cases—Lovecraft himself had died.

https://dark-fantasy-x.blogspot.com/2010/12/stages-of-lovecraftiana.html

Lovecraft's stories frequently fall into three "camps" or classes, if you will—his Dream-lands fantasy stories, his cosmic horror stories, and his weird science fiction stories. Many later commentators, collectors, publishers (and gamers) blur these distinctions and don't recognize them at all, resulting in the unfortunate mix-up of science fiction elements and black magic occult elements in the same body of work when really they don't belong together very well at all.

In a way, Lovecraft enabled this somewhat, by utilizing a lot of familiar backdrop details. This is the so-called "Cthulhu Mythos." In reality, it wasn't anything like a Mythos at all; it was a bunch of evocative names that Lovecraft recycled frequently, but not in any way consistently—for example, is the dreaded Plateau of Leng in Tibet, Antarctica, or not even on this earth at all? Some have tried to reconcile these three locations via bizarre theories, but really best (and in fact only reasonable) solution is that Lovecraft didn't really care where it was; it was a recycleable element that could be wherever he needed it to be for any given story.

Later Mythos writers—at least some of them—exacerbated this problem by trying to create fixed categories, organization, and logic to the "mythos." August Derleth was the first to try this quixotic attempt, which arguably misses the whole point, and since Derleth was also the co-founder of Arkham House, the publishing arm that kept Lovecraft in print over the years, his view waxed and the point of view of other mythos writers, who gradually moved on to other things, was eclipsed. Lin Carter's additions to the Mythos via the Xothic legend cycle even further bastardized Lovecraft's original intention, creating bizarre familial relationships between Great Old Ones (Hastur and Cthulhu are brothers? What?!)

Sandy Petersen, much as I love the guy, inadvertently didn't help at all either with the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game which attempted to fit various entities that showed up in some of the mythos stories (confusingly, using anything that came along written by nearly anyone that mentioned a Great Old One or used the word blasphemous or eldritch too many times in its text, regardless of how tenuous its connection to actual Lovecraftiana sometimes was) into categories, like servitor races, Great Old Ones (which were opposed to Elder Gods, etc.)

Somewhere in this rush to categorize and systematize was lost the original vision of Lovecraft's Yog-Sothothery; that it was really just a bit of an in-joke to him; a chance to recycle and re-use names that he liked that gave his stories an air and tone that he was trying to cultivate. Not that it's necessarily lost; Stephen King certainly got it when he referred obliquely to the plateau of Leng, rats in the walls, and other bits of esoterica, Neil Gaiman and Mike Mignola certainly know how to play along in the original "Lovecraft circle" way of doing things. But for whatever reason, gamers have tended to do the opposite; to take August Derleth and Lin Carter's direction and magnify it, almost.