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Jiminimonka
December 29th, 2020, 01:00
This should be made into an adventure for FantasyGrounds! Secure the rights and I will start immediately!

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6905686/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovecraft_Country_(novel)

Very good - deals with racism as well as Cthulhu mythos.

Jiminimonka
December 30th, 2020, 19:58
I'm gonna expand on this without giving spoilers.

It has got characters that all have different skill sets, including a soldier and a journalist and I suppose Letitia could be a dilettante. One of these characters gets a letter that needs investigating and some other people tag along on the journey to investigate.

There are chases (several including a car chase and running from something that would overwhelm a human. Then more investigating and unravelling the plot leads to more chases and enounters, sneaking around etc.

The author of the book must be a huge Lovecraft fan and possibly plays the game too.

vegaserik
December 31st, 2020, 09:01
Also trying to be light on spoilers, but those things the teen daughter started seeing?? Holy crap they freaked me out!

Jiminimonka
December 31st, 2020, 10:35
Yes its great isn't it. I bought the book now.

NickT
February 2nd, 2021, 22:12
:cry::cry::cry:

damned
February 2nd, 2021, 22:41
Cthulhu Mythos is not "all about racism".
There is a lot of racist content by HPLovecraft but the majority of it does not reference race in any way.
Much of the Cthulhu Mythos was also written by other people.
To the best of my knowledge no Cthulhu Mythos within the official Call of Cthulhu products contains racist material.
If it does please point it out and we will discuss with Chaosium and have it removed.

Trenloe
February 2nd, 2021, 22:51
Cthulhu Mythos is all about racism.
I strongly disagree. Yes the author had racist views, especially when viewed from nearly a century later. But saying "Cthulhu Mythos is all about racism" is completely untrue. In fact, your very next sentence blew that out of the water " all those stories about degenerate Polynesian tribes, and inbred white trash in Innsmouth" - in this case HPL treated both Polynesians and Caucasians the same - all in the interest of great horror storytelling with the protagonists feeling up against it wherever they went.


I haven't written this to shock or offend and I apologise if it has done either.
It makes me think why did you write this at all? You've tagged onto someone else's thread about Lovecraft County TV and started with an only vaguely related inflammatory, and inaccurate, statement.

Jiminimonka
February 3rd, 2021, 11:13
H.P. Lovecraft may have been racist (and I don't know, nor does anyone else here because we never met him) doesn't make the mythos racist. It does of course makes squids out to be very evil, so maybe it's squidist.

Also, saying no offense meant does excuse the offense.

NickT
February 3rd, 2021, 16:57
OK, I should have been more precise with my wording. At no point did I mean to imply that Call of Cthulhu as portrayed in Chaosiums books or FG shows any racist leanings, if I gave that impression, I apologise. The point I was trying to make was that HPL was a product of his times, and as you read his books there is an element of incidental racism in them, in reading those books we need to be aware of this.

Jiminimonka, I did not mean to cause offense, it was only when I re-read what I had written that I realised that it was open to misinterpretation. What I hoped to do was start a thread that talked about the historical environment that HPL lived in when he wrote his books.

In the circumstances most likely it is best to delete this thread, and forget I ever spoke ;>)

Jiminimonka
February 3rd, 2021, 18:40
OK, I should have been more precise with my wording. At no point did I mean to imply that Call of Cthulhu as portrayed in Chaosiums books or FG shows any racist leanings, if I gave that impression, I apologise. The point I was trying to make was that HPL was a product of his times, and as you read his books there is an element of incidental racism in them, in reading those books we need to be aware of this.

Jiminimonka, I did not mean to cause offense, it was only when I re-read what I had written that I realised that it was open to misinterpretation. What I hoped to do was start a thread that talked about the historical environment that HPL lived in when he wrote his books.

In the circumstances most likely it is best to delete this thread, and forget I ever spoke ;>)

No need to delete anything. Only thing that should be deleted from forums is dodgy spam messages and real abusive stuff.

i3ullseye
February 7th, 2021, 17:48
On a deeper note, and one that rarely gets discussed without devolving into argument..... we do in fact know Lovecraft's personal views from his letters of correspondence. He was certainly racist, but not necessarily a bigot, at least early on in his career. And we do see it in his earliest works. It does diminish over time however, and there is some anecdotal evidence that this changed over time and he softened. But man, the Horror at Red Hook could not be more direct.

With all that said, the point I think is worth discussing, rather than simply trying to negate or diminish his history and his works, is how that world view likely helped shaped how well he wrote about the 'other'. The strange and different from us (and from himself), which he feared and loathed and couldn't fully understand. Without his own personal biases being what they were, I am not so sure he would have explored and presented these feeling as well as he did in his writings. The silver lining of it all I suppose.

NickT
February 9th, 2021, 12:13
Thank you that is exactly the conversation I wished to engenger in this thread. Nearly any book written 60+ years ago had a racist element "baked in", I reread a book from my childhood "The Microbe Hunters" about the development of vaccines, written in 1955 it hit the best seller lists, and I read it and thoroughly enjoyed it, When I reread it recently I was shocked by the casual racism, in a chapter detailing the fight against yellow fever, the author refers to one native tribe as "Fuzzy-Wuzzies"! This was in a book that was a best seller, and not because it shocked, but for its ability to make scientific methodology understandable to the general public. Nowadays it would be pilloried for that one line, (and rightly so!), but at the time it was considered acceptable. Attitudes have changed, and in the vast majority of cases for the better. Older authors will very often display attitudes we find repugnant, but there still can be something worthwhile, once you take out those elements. As i3ullseye says we should be cautious about "Throwing the baby out with the bathwater".

I must admit I find the concept of Lovecraft's social background enhancing his ability to convey the atmosphere of his works interesting. I am afraid, I tended to assume that it was his mental health that allowed him to tap into that feeling of dread that so typifies his work.