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Originally Posted by antares
Well ok, maybe some Cthulu guys. I always wondered how somebody who is fascinated by transhumanism might at the same time be enthusiastic about some bogus demonology trash like Cthulu.
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You aren't reading the Cthulhu material very carefully. Here are Lovecraft's exact words about what happens when the stars are right and Cthulhu rises:
The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.
I think that can be read as a portrayal of transhuman existence—as seen by someone who dreads it, to be sure.
Lovecraft's underlying idea is not that superstition as such is true. It's that exact, accurate scientific knowledge of the world reveals horror and despair; that beings who could live and function with that knowledge would not be what we regard as "human" and would not care about anything that human beings value. The ancient tomes and necromantic spells are meant only as early glimpses of the true world, badly misunderstood by the people who saw them—as was inevitable, because of SAN loss.
I've been having good luck with a THS cosmic horror campaign, in which I've faced the PCs with everything from a genetically engineering memetics genius to a living metal cyberentity from another solar system.
Bill Stoddard