| “ | The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. | ” |
– H.P. Lovecraft | ||
Story
The Lovecraftian Mythos, also known as the Cthulhu Mythos is a shared fictional universe, originating in the works of American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. It was H.P. Lovecraft’s greatest contribution to supernatural literature: a series of stories that evoked cosmic awe and terror through their accounts of incomprehensibly alien monsters and deities, and their horrifying incursions into our world.
An ongoing theme in Lovecraft's work is the complete and total irrelevance of mankind in the face of the cosmic horrors. For example, Lovecraft made frequent references to the "Great Old Ones", a loose pantheon of ancient, powerful deities from space who once ruled the Earth and have since fallen into a "deathlike sleep". While these monstrous deities have been present in many of Lovecraft's published work, the first story to really expand the pantheon of Great Old Ones and its themes is "The Call of Cthulhu," which was published in 1928 and because of it, Cthulhu also became the most well known entity from the mythos.
Lovecraft broke with other pulp writers of the time by having his main characters' minds deteriorate when afforded just a mere glimpse of what exists outside their perceived reality. He emphasized the point by stating in the opening sentence of the story that "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
Power
The Lovecraftian Mythos is widely considered as one of the most powerful fictional franchises of all time, because of its enormous cosmology which is embodied as well as transcended at the same time by a virtual omnipotent, Yog-Sothoth, who in turn happens to be just a mere part of the all-powerful Azathoth's dream along with everything else.
As for powers and abilities, even the entities who are infinitely inferior to the Outer Gods posses various notable powers such as Conceptual Manipulation, Acausality, Higher Dimensional Manipulation, Higher Dimensional Existence, Reality Warping, and so on.
- Check out the Lovecraftian Mythos Respect Thread for the detailed analysis of the cosmology and powers of the Outer Gods, Elder Gods, Great Old Ones, and many other races.
Character Profiles
Outer Gods
Elder Gods
Great Old Ones
Other Races
