Starting a new THS game saturday...

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by Nelson Cunnington

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Exactly. Cthulhu himself, played straight, should be pretty scary. After one two many artistic representations and one too many casual discussions of CoC games, though, you're down to jokes about a guy with a squid on his head. And even Chaosium, whose best commercial interests involve people taking the "Mythos" seriously, indulge in this.

You might claim it's a defense mechanism used by people who do actually find the material scary... But mostly I think it's just because it's easy.

[Jürgen Hubert]

Originally Posted by Nelson Cunnington

Familiarity breeds contempt. The first time it's scary, the second time it's boring, the third time you make fun of it.

I couldn't use the Cthulu mythos straight in a THS game; I'd have to fiddle with it, distill it down to its essentials, then rebuild it.

For this, I recommend getting Delta Green and Delta Green:Countdown, which very effectively rebuild the Cthulhu Mythos for the modern age. It should certainly help you rebuild it for the Transhuman Space era.

It also emphasizes the point that the scary thing about the Mythos is not some people-eating monster - ultimately, that's not much scarier than a combat cybershell trying to kill you. It's the corrupting effect of the Mythos on people.

"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 reveling in joy."

To get the players into the proper mood, don't start with obvious Mythos monsters or arcane tomes like the Necronomicon. Instead, show them the depravity humanity can sink to. All the new technological advances of the last 100 years, turned to slaking mankinds ever-burning thirst for new perversions. Make the player characters feel dirty for even knowing such things.

Then you can introduce the Mythos. But, and this is important, not all depravities should have direct Mythos causes! They should realize that mankind is becoming more like the Mythos out of its own free will...

[carllarson]

After all, this is a system that builds little bioroid people for you to eat, and designs slaves with enhanced pain reception and your ex-wives' faces.

Carl Stanford is probably alive and not even noticed.

[Jürgen Hubert]

Originally Posted by carllarson

After all, this is a system that builds little bioroid people for you to eat, and designs slaves with enhanced pain reception and your ex-wives' faces.

That's what I'm talking about.

There are plenty of people in the setting who are looking for "the next kick" - something even more extreme than the last thing, whether it is sheer adrenaline (remember, "extreme sports" have become much more common than today) or new ways of being depraved. These are the people who are the most willing to look for the Mythos - the ultimate kick.

[Nelson Cunnington]

Originally Posted by Jürgen Hubert

For this, I recommend getting Delta Green and Delta Green:Countdown, which very effectively rebuild the Cthulhu Mythos for the modern age. It should certainly help you rebuild it for the Transhuman Space era.

It also emphasizes the point that the scary thing about the Mythos is not some people-eating monster - ultimately, that's not much scarier than a combat cybershell trying to kill you. It's the corrupting effect of the Mythos on people.

Two non-Mythos non-gaming sources I'd use are Charles Stross' The Atrocity Archives and (if you can find it) Grant Morrison & Steve Yeowell's Zenith. In the former, the things-man-was-not-meant-to-know are given an information theory gloss and linked with space nazis. Substitute Thai war criminal ghost uploads for space-nazis and it should give you a pretty good feel for how to run the game. And Zenith starts out as a super-hero comic myth updated to the Eighties then drifts into things-from-another-dimension territory, littering the path with corrupted humans and superhumans. Substitute trans- for super- and I think you'd get an interesting game out of it.