Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos

I just finished reading this book, which I really didn't even intend to read (yet), and it ends up being an almost singular object lesson of how sometimes when you want something so much, and then you get it, you find out that you didn't actually want it after all.

By this I mean that combining explicit Yog-Sothothery, Cthulhu Mythos and Lovecraftian elements with D&D sounds like exactly what I want... but after reading this, I don't end up thinking it's all that compelling after all. To be fair, I said singular above, but it's not exactly true. The "Strange Aeons" adventure path, which I have only read half of (but will read as part of my Adventure Path trawl now) is also explicitly Lovecraftian D&D, and it's not that exciting either. And I also just finished Mike Mearls' Cthulhu by Torchlight supplement from D&D Beyond, but that one is oddly mechanical, so it feels even less like what I want than the SPCM book; it's just new subclasses, feats, spells, mechanics and monsters.

Part of that is that the D&D game isn't really meant to mesh well with these themes, at least not the modern, 5e D&D game. Although there are a lot of house rules in this book, like a dread mechanic that replaces Sanity checks, and works like an exhaustion ladder, and a few other things, but a few house rules on a complex system don't quite manage to change the feel of the system. Now, I'm not one of those guys who believes that D&D can't be modified to fit different themes and tones, but here they're specifically trying not to change the basic management of the game. You can play with regular characters who aren't really using any house rules to speak of. I'm a little skeptical on how well that will really work. And granted, you could integrate Lovecraftian elements without Lovecraftian themes, but they're not actually trying to do that here, they're trying to layer Lovecraft on top of D&D without changing D&D, and expecting them to both work alongside each other seamlessly. I don't think that's likely to be very satisfying. 

Secondly, I just don't think it works very well because too many of the Lovecraftian themes are too repetitive, and too many of the elements feel like rehashed warmed up leftovers. How many monsters that are made up of pseudopods and tentacles who are aliens and don't obey the normal laws of physics (or magic) do we really need before it starts to feel very tedious? Less than we got here, I'd venture to say. It also reiterated to me (even more than reading a bunch of Lovecraft himself) how trite the notion that Lovecraft promoted can often be. He famously said that the greatest fear is fear of the unknown, and then decided to pursue writing horror with stuff that made no sense, with only the "OoooOOO, aliens and unknowableness!" was supposed to stand in for actual horror. Stories like "Call of Cthulhu" are effective for reasons that have nothing to do with Cthulhu-'s gelatinous dismissal of physics and weird references to non-Euclidean geometry. The rather vulgar references to backwoods swampie cults, global conspiracies, and secret histories—long before The X-files made those two ideas mainstream—are what make the story compelling. The part about the brief exploration of R'lyeh and the confrontation with Cthulhu itself is actually in most respects, the weakest part of the story. 

In any case, that's what SPCM—Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos attempts to do; just stat up every obscure reference to anything that one of the Lovecraft Circle ever mentioned. It... well, it got old before I got done with it.

The best part of the book, I think, was the idea of using Mythos entities as a kind of Elder Evil campaign threat that didn't work exactly like a monster, but mostly so—frankly, I think any kind of darkish fantasy should use something similar. And archfiends and demon lords, etc. should be treated the exact same way. The stuff that I found least interesting, although I think it was a brave go, was the attempt to create Lovecrafian races, mostly cribbed from "The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath." In fact, like "Strange Aeons" there's altogether too much leaning into the Dreamlands, which is a concept that doesn't really fit with D&D very well. And playing as a cat-person is ridiculous enough in "regular" modern D&D, but playing as literally an actual housecat? It's really weird. 

That said, now that I'm done, I'm thinking that my trawl of the six Cthulhu Mythos Saga campaigns can proceed smoothly. I was concerned that without having read the SPCM book first, I'd find too many things in the Sagas that begged questions because it was supposed that I'd read the SPCM book first. I think, in retrospect, that that's probably not going to be true. I have, after all, read pretty much everything Lovecraft ever wrote, so I can refer to ideas directly from the source. I'm not interested in the mechanics of the adventure paths and camapigns I'm reading anyway, after all. If I actually use them at all, I'm not going to use them in the native mechanical system that any of them were written for.

As an aside; one unexpected side effect of reading the last few pages of the SPCM; the tcho-tcho monster entry is, I think, pretty much what I want my Nizrekhi population to be like. I had only given pretty vague thought to exactly what a Nizrekh population was like, but now if I can borrow any missing holes from the tcho-tcho—like Jurassic Park scientists borrowing missing genetic holes from frogs, maybe—they're suddenly much more fleshed out and ready to run than they were. So, I present—because lately I always do—a very old Nizrekh cultist Hero Forge model and next to that a very newly made tcho-tcho barbarian. Yeah, close enough, I think.

I also suspect that there are minor ethnic tcho-tcho enclaves in at least Port Liure, Simashki, and maybe some other of the Corsair Coast cities. Maybe Grozavest has them as well; the tcho-tcho would like the darkness, but not appreciate the competition from even better predators on humanity in the form of the vampires. I wonder if using the tcho-tcho kinda sorta in the role of the goblinoids from Freeport in Port Liure would work. Rivals to the orclings in the neighborhood of Bloodsalt or something? I dunno. I'll worry about that in the future.