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[Solarius Scorch]

I'm pretty sure I've seen a Lovecraftian mod for DF somewhere.

[NW_Kohaku]

Just thought I'd reply to a bunch of stuff at once.

I'm not really suggesting changing the look of the forgotten beasts, more their interactions with others. I think a bit more mystery and horror before you discover the beasts. More creatures, dwarves, elves, people, etc... worshiping the beasts as a god.

Realizing all the awesome lovecraftian things already in DF has made me realize how little I've actually seen of the game.

"Lovecraftian" in terms of changes of setting and tone is a dubious request.  FBs, in particular, are unavoidable aspects of the game, and are hard-coded, so modders can't really do anything with them aside from zero them out. 

The problem is that you can't really have Lovecraft Lite without undermining the whole thing. 

Extra Credits did a show on the topic of doing Cthulhu wrong, in fact...

And DF absolutely is in the mold of the empowered and the enlightened as a whole.  Certainly not if you haven't climbed that learning cliff, but realistically, the people in these forums find ways to weaponize things like minecarts before they're even implemented in the game.  We are not a "scared of the unknown" bunch, we are a "what HAVEN'T we fully mapped to the furthest extent yet?" bunch.  And that mindset fundamentally cripples Cthulhu.  I mean, elder gods aside, there's an active thread on how people want to add Heaven into the game for the explicit purpose letting players murder the gods, and rape and pillage through Heaven.  That's about as fundamentally opposed to the concept of Lovecraftian horror as one can possibly get.

If you take away the fear of the unknown, and make Cthulhu a giant one-eyed cricket with tentacles and poison gas which dwarves prize for the 400 meat stack they get from butchering it, you're not "adding Lovecraft into the game", you're on the side of making The King In Yellow a 12-year-old girly-looking gay boy whose main terror is making the main character question his sexuality.

[NJW2000]

That thread involved heaven as a possibility, but yeah, broadly, lovecraftian stuff is a bit too rich for ASCII and RNG, in my opinion.

[angelious]

Just thought I'd reply to a bunch of stuff at once.

I'm not really suggesting changing the look of the forgotten beasts, more their interactions with others. I think a bit more mystery and horror before you discover the beasts. More creatures, dwarves, elves, people, etc... worshiping the beasts as a god.

Realizing all the awesome lovecraftian things already in DF has made me realize how little I've actually seen of the game.

"Lovecraftian" in terms of changes of setting and tone is a dubious request.  FBs, in particular, are unavoidable aspects of the game, and are hard-coded, so modders can't really do anything with them aside from zero them out. 

The problem is that you can't really have Lovecraft Lite without undermining the whole thing. 

Extra Credits did a show on the topic of doing Cthulhu wrong, in fact...

And DF absolutely is in the mold of the empowered and the enlightened as a whole.  Certainly not if you haven't climbed that learning cliff, but realistically, the people in these forums find ways to weaponize things like minecarts before they're even implemented in the game.  We are not a "scared of the unknown" bunch, we are a "what HAVEN'T we fully mapped to the furthest extent yet?" bunch.  And that mindset fundamentally cripples Cthulhu.  I mean, elder gods aside, there's an active thread on how people want to add Heaven into the game for the explicit purpose letting players murder the gods, and rape and pillage through Heaven.  That's about as fundamentally opposed to the concept of Lovecraftian horror as one can possibly get.

If you take away the fear of the unknown, and make Cthulhu a giant one-eyed cricket with tentacles and poison gas which dwarves prize for the 400 meat stack they get from butchering it, you're not "adding Lovecraft into the game", you're on the side of making The King In Yellow a 12-year-old girly-looking gay boy whose main terror is making the main character question his sexuality.

god that japanese cartoon is a bane of my existence...

and yeah outside of the settings kinda stopping lovecraftian monsters from being a thing in the world(outside of lovecraft lite) they are wayy too difficult to write in. most of lovecrafts monsters were essentially "indescripable beings that make you go mad if you look at them" but he wrote them so well that you got a vivid picture of what it was,while still keeping that unknown factor in.


also i sorta disagree on this statement as well. df has always been about the inevitability of losing and dying. so in that way it does somewhat go into lovecraftian territory.



and as a final note: we are the elder things of the df universe. once dorfs are gone. our megaprojects will be the shoggoths that the humans find buried deep in the antartic

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

tekelili mates.

[NW_Kohaku]

and as a final note: we are the elder things of the df universe. once dorfs are gone. our megaprojects will be the shoggoths that the humans find buried deep in the antartic

THAT, right there, is what undermines the DF-Lovecraft comparison, however.

Again, as the Extra Credits video really tries to drill into, the main problem with Cthulhu in games is that to make Lovecraft work, the player must be powerless, ignorant, and inconsequential.  In DF, none of those things are true. 

This is one of those problems of people losing the forest for the trees. 

The monsters (trees) are not important in Lovecraft, which is why they're usually undescribed, as any description would merely detract from their purpose. As the tabletop RPG mantra goes, "If it has stats, you can kill it." To combat this, games like Vampire: The Masquerade made the characters that are supposed to be larger and more powerful than your characters simply not have stats so they couldn't be killed.  (Some characters had a description of their combat abilities simply saying "If the players fight him, they lose".)

The terror in Lovecraft always came from the fact that the viewpoint characters were completely powerless (which was the forest).  The monsters merely existed to create some sense of urgency about this.  It's not that they are inevitably going to die.  (EVERYONE inevitably dies...) It's that their life and death was absolutely inconsequential. 

By contrast, one of the core purposes of DF is in creating the chance for the world to build around the changes that you make in it.  DF is fundamentally an empowering game, and that goes against the fundamental tenet of Lovecraftian horror.

As I said in the Extra Credits forums in response to that video at the time, Cthulhu, like all horror monsters, is a metaphor, and Cthulhu is a more modern monster than a vampire, and represents more modern fears. 

Past the Industrial Revolution, people were forcibly moved out of their rural village lives where they not only knew everyone, but were likely extended family with everyone.  In those villages, their place and their importance in life were always tangibly knowable through their social relations.  In the modern cities that were springing up, however, the individual very likely did not have a familial relation to the powers that ran that city.  (And those that did were often jealously guarding and exploiting that advantage.) You were anonymous to the city as a whole.  Before unions, there was no workplace safety, and an injured worker was simply fired and a new schmuck was hired to replace him.  They hired children to work the machines because they had smaller hands to reach into the machines with, and you could pay them less, and they were easier to find in abundance when you inevitably "fed the machine" one more child corpse. 

Cthulhu is not some alien from the outside, Cthulhu is the personification of industrialization, and the inherent dehumanization and anonymization that went along with it. Cthulhu is The Great War or World War 2 where villagers of small towns suddenly found world powers with giant metal monstrosities of war fighting over their village's land for reasons they didn't understand. Cthulhu is the bureaucracy that does not care about the lives of the people it is supposed to serve, so long as they fulfill their own arcane internal quotas and performance standards.  Cthulhu is a corporation buying the local governmental elections such that they no longer care about the wellbeing of the community, but only the corporation's bottom line.  Cthulhu is the world's economy collapsing in the blink of an eye because of some computer programs that some bankers set up made all the money disappear in some algorithm so complex, even they don't understand what they're doing.

Cthulhu is, in its most basic form, human society becoming inhuman, and the rules of human society being driven by forces humans can't compete with or even comprehend.  It's the fear that the one thing we depend upon for all our power as a species, our capacity to organize into complex societies and pool our individual strengths to accomplish more together than we could alone, into a weapon against ourselves.

This isn't divorced from DF by any means, however.  DF largely borrows from Lord of the Rings, which borrows from The Ring of Nibelung, which itself is about the social strife generated by the Industrial Revolution.  Hence, it has the same roots.  DF, however, is derived from the far more heroic traditions of combatting these fears head-on in giant good-versus-evil conflicts where The Common Man (say, a simple country hobbit or at least a noble hero like Siegfried) can stand up to The Gods.

Again, if you can in any way hurt Cthulhu with a legendary fork thrower, you're talking Nyarlko, not Lovecraft.  Because Nyarlko is about kids with superpowers having an impact on the world, while Lovecraft is about how you're a completely expendable ant in an antfarm.  Yes, that may be how players MIGHT treat an individual dwarf in fort mode, but the players aren't those individual dwarves, and when they play Adventurer Mode, they're Heroes (TM) that can single-handedly raid goblin towers, slay demons, steal the secrets of life and death, raise an army of undead to fight for them, or murder a whole vault full of angels and steal their stuff. 

If the player has the capacity to become Cthulhu, you're not playing Lovecraft, you're playing Nyarlko.

[angelious]

and as a final note: we are the elder things of the df universe. once dorfs are gone. our megaprojects will be the shoggoths that the humans find buried deep in the antartic

THAT, right there, is what undermines the DF-Lovecraft comparison, however.

Again, as the Extra Credits video really tries to drill into, the main problem with Cthulhu in games is that to make Lovecraft work, the player must be powerless, ignorant, and inconsequential.  In DF, none of those things are true. 

This is one of those problems of people losing the forest for the trees. 

The monsters (trees) are not important in Lovecraft, which is why they're usually undescribed, as any description would merely detract from their purpose. As the tabletop RPG mantra goes, "If it has stats, you can kill it." To combat this, games like Vampire: The Masquerade made the characters that are supposed to be larger and more powerful than your characters simply not have stats so they couldn't be killed.  (Some characters had a description of their combat abilities simply saying "If the players fight him, they lose".)

The terror in Lovecraft always came from the fact that the viewpoint characters were completely powerless (which was the forest).  The monsters merely existed to create some sense of urgency about this.  It's not that they are inevitably going to die.  (EVERYONE inevitably dies...) It's that their life and death was absolutely inconsequential. 

By contrast, one of the core purposes of DF is in creating the chance for the world to build around the changes that you make in it.  DF is fundamentally an empowering game, and that goes against the fundamental tenet of Lovecraftian horror.

As I said in the Extra Credits forums in response to that video at the time, Cthulhu, like all horror monsters, is a metaphor, and Cthulhu is a more modern monster than a vampire, and represents more modern fears. 

Past the Industrial Revolution, people were forcibly moved out of their rural village lives where they not only knew everyone, but were likely extended family with everyone.  In those villages, their place and their importance in life were always tangibly knowable through their social relations.  In the modern cities that were springing up, however, the individual very likely did not have a familial relation to the powers that ran that city.  (And those that did were often jealously guarding and exploiting that advantage.) You were anonymous to the city as a whole.  Before unions, there was no workplace safety, and an injured worker was simply fired and a new schmuck was hired to replace him.  They hired children to work the machines because they had smaller hands to reach into the machines with, and you could pay them less, and they were easier to find in abundance when you inevitably "fed the machine" one more child corpse. 

Cthulhu is not some alien from the outside, Cthulhu is the personification of industrialization, and the inherent dehumanization and anonymization that went along with it. Cthulhu is The Great War or World War 2 where villagers of small towns suddenly found world powers with giant metal monstrosities of war fighting over their village's land for reasons they didn't understand. Cthulhu is the bureaucracy that does not care about the lives of the people it is supposed to serve, so long as they fulfill their own arcane internal quotas and performance standards.  Cthulhu is a corporation buying the local governmental elections such that they no longer care about the wellbeing of the community, but only the corporation's bottom line.  Cthulhu is the world's economy collapsing in the blink of an eye because of some computer programs that some bankers set up made all the money disappear in some algorithm so complex, even they don't understand what they're doing.

Cthulhu is, in its most basic form, human society becoming inhuman, and the rules of human society being driven by forces humans can't compete with or even comprehend.  It's the fear that the one thing we depend upon for all our power as a species, our capacity to organize into complex societies and pool our individual strengths to accomplish more together than we could alone, into a weapon against ourselves.

This isn't divorced from DF by any means, however.  DF largely borrows from Lord of the Rings, which borrows from The Ring of Nibelung, which itself is about the social strife generated by the Industrial Revolution.  Hence, it has the same roots.  DF, however, is derived from the far more heroic traditions of combatting these fears head-on in giant good-versus-evil conflicts where The Common Man (say, a simple country hobbit or at least a noble hero like Siegfried) can stand up to The Gods.

Again, if you can in any way hurt Cthulhu with a legendary fork thrower, you're talking Nyarlko, not Lovecraft.  Because Nyarlko is about kids with superpowers having an impact on the world, while Lovecraft is about how you're a completely expendable ant in an antfarm.  Yes, that may be how players MIGHT treat an individual dwarf in fort mode, but the players aren't those individual dwarves, and when they play Adventurer Mode, they're Heroes (TM) that can single-handedly raid goblin towers, slay demons, steal the secrets of life and death, raise an army of undead to fight for them, or murder a whole vault full of angels and steal their stuff. 

If the player has the capacity to become Cthulhu, you're not playing Lovecraft, you're playing Nyarlko.

that last part is what we folks like to call a joke.

also chtulhu was created before ww1 and 2. if i dont have the years wrong.

and as for rest of the rant: search the curtains were blue

[MDFification]

"Lovecraftian" in terms of changes of setting and tone is a dubious request.  FBs, in particular, are unavoidable aspects of the game, and are hard-coded, so modders can't really do anything with them aside from zero them out. 

The problem is that you can't really have Lovecraft Lite without undermining the whole thing. 

Extra Credits did a show on the topic of doing Cthulhu wrong, in fact...

I think adding Lovecraftian elements to DF is possible to do well. I'd rather not see it implemented myself, because it'd almost all have to be hardcoded in all likelihood and, as you've pointed out, is a rather jarring move away from what DF has already been trying to do.

That being said, you could have legitimately Lovecraftian gameplay elements. However, they shouldn't be creatures, more like haunting presences; the player can't actually kill them or contain them, just try to work around them. They should be utterly unpredictable (with a giant amount of potential actions) and RNG driven to prevent the player from ever feeling comfortable with the monster sharing their map.
I'd have them spawn in procedurally-generated structures the player isn't aware of (in fact, they can't seek them out at all without DFhack) until they dig into them, and ensure that these structures are in weird locations far from civilization. The idea behind this is to give the player the feeling of intrusion; they've accidentally stumbled upon something they shouldn't have. The effects of sharing your map with such a horrifying presence should have already started to occur before detection, but they should be subtle so the player probably won't notice them. Following detection, it becomes a lot more noticeable.

What should the entity do? Here's a list of some possibilities;

Lovecraft Stress Cascade
- Basically any sighting of the creature (it can randomly appear and disappear, like a ghost phasing through walls except invisible to the player) causes a great deal of stress.
- A lot (read; almost all) of other observable 'actions' of the entity also cause stress and specific negative thoughts. Loads of negative thoughts for everyone!
- Even more bad thoughts randomly come to sleeping dwarves in dreams.

Bizarrtifacts
- Structures the entities spawn in are full of weird engravings and bizarre items. Gazing upon these means stress.
- Also, these items can be composed of/coating in otherwise unknown syndrome-bearing materials.
- Artifacts your dwarves make will henceforth be detailed in weird Lovecraftian imagery. Upon completion of the work, the artifact creator goes insane. All who gaze upon the work gain stress.

Minions
- Procedurally generated creatures associated with the entity can be spawned in any unobserved tile. Even if they're not hostile, gazing upon them generates stress, and they may bear unpleasant syndromes.
- Instead of going mad, dwarves may become cultists to the entity and go around causing crimes, digging hidden tunnels the player can't see to host their meeting places, etc. Then they go mad too.
- Random ghost-like possessions, except these possessed individuals might just go and commit random sabotage or cult-like behaviour then either go back to normal with no knowledge of what they did or go mad.

More Mutational Weirdness
- Personalities of the fort citizens start to drift away from their normal ranges; can result in truly alien personalities.
- Newborn citizens may have weird appearances.
- Cultists, if you have them, give birth to actual monstrosities and don't tell you about it.

Temporal Tomfoolery/Haunting
- Unobserved creatures can vanish, and reappear a random number of ticks later in the same spot or a different spot.
- Suddenly everything in a designated room rapidly ages (withers, wears, or in the case of an unfortuante lifeform dies of old age).
- Wounds suddenly heal when they shouldn't have, or open long after they've been 'healed'.
- A citizen of the fort suddenly gets the relationship status of a long-dead member of their species.
- Machinery just up and breaks, and you don't find out until you next try to use it.

Essentially I think it is possible, just a massive waste of Toady's time to do correctly.

[NJW2000]

I agree. There's nothing THAT lovecraftian about DF in the first place, in my opinion. It's more of middle ages, LOTR, blood and metal.

[angelious]

I agree. There's nothing THAT lovecraftian about DF in the first place, in my opinion. It's more of middle ages, LOTR, blood and metal.

df is not that much of lotr.

id claim its more of lovecraft lite or dark fantasy.

[NW_Kohaku]

that last part is what we folks like to call a joke.

also chtulhu was created before ww1 and 2. if i dont have the years wrong.

and as for rest of the rant: search the curtains were blue

Cthulhu, the individual creature was before the individual wars, (and if you want to talk about modern events, you skip over the reference to modern computer-run stock markets?,) but I'm not talking about isolated events.  I'm talking about the broad social movements that affected the world of the arts, literature included, that any first-year Art History class would teach you.  It is about the purpose and symbolism of the creature.  Look up anything on the Xenomorph from Aliens, and you'll see it was deliberately created to look like penises and vaginas, because Xenomorphs are rape.

It's called Death of the Author, (or if you prefer more pop-centric sources,) and simply because you don't want to think about symbolism or abstract concepts, doesn't mean they don't exist. 

In fact, it's this same lack of comprehension of the actual working mechanics behind Lovecraft that make so many attempts at just adding squids as enemies into games fail as Lovecraft Games.

[angelious]

that last part is what we folks like to call a joke.

also chtulhu was created before ww1 and 2. if i dont have the years wrong.

and as for rest of the rant: search the curtains were blue

Cthulhu, the individual creature was before the individual wars, (and if you want to talk about modern events, you skip over the reference to modern computer-run stock markets?,) but I'm not talking about isolated events.  I'm talking about the broad social movements that affected the world of the arts, literature included, that any first-year Art History class would teach you.  It is about the purpose and symbolism of the creature.  Look up anything on the Xenomorph from Aliens, and you'll see it was deliberately created to look like penises and vaginas, because Xenomorphs are rape.

It's called Death of the Author, (or if you prefer more pop-centric sources,) and simply because you don't want to think about symbolism or abstract concepts, doesn't mean they don't exist. 

In fact, it's this same lack of comprehension of the actual working mechanics behind Lovecraft that make so many attempts at just adding squids as enemies into games fail as Lovecraft Games.

which is why i told you to search the curtains is blue. and aliens was inspired by lovecraft mythos. a lot of famous horror was.and still is. a lot of games have it too. most notably bloodborne of the recent years.

lovecrafts creation of chtulhu was inspired by many things. his anti semitism and hate of migrants, his fear of the sea,his fear of the unknown and his overal screwiness caused by his isolated youth.

also if you truly think lovecrafts works were only about big scary monsters that could not be beaten then you seriously need to go pick up a book.

[NJW2000]

  Hate to interrupt, but I think you two are in agreement, as far as I can tell.

Lovecraftian mods would be cool, if they made it abstract/unchallengeable enough, which would take quite a bit of imagination with both the raws and the concepts, but I think vanilla DF should focus on the metal stuuf for now e.g. bar brawls, kingdoms, civil wars, etc.

And I guess the OP's original statement still stands, as it's a personal thing, though good arguments have been put forward on both sides, while I think what we're coming down to is that it wouldn't be worth doing unless the whole DF gestalt was changed, which may not be likeable.

[angelious]

Hate to interrupt, but I think you two are in agreement, as far as I can tell.

Lovecraftian mods would be cool, if they made it abstract/unchallengeable enough, which would take quite a bit of imagination with both the raws and the concepts, but I think vanilla DF should focus on the metal stuuf for now e.g. bar brawls, kingdoms, civil wars, etc.

And I guess the OP's original statement still stands, as it's a personal thing, though good arguments have been put forward on both sides, while I think what we're coming down to is that it wouldn't be worth doing unless the whole DF gestalt was changed, which may not be likeable.

we are. i believe he argues because he failed to spot my joke. and im arguing because he thinks the essee he made for his fifth grade teacher is actually real interptation of lovecrafts work. and i think its undermining lovecrafts work by degrading it to working around a single trope. rather than the myriad of different styles of horror lovecraft used and created.


but all in all. an useless conversation.i agree.

[NW_Kohaku]

That being said, you could have legitimately Lovecraftian gameplay elements. However, they shouldn't be creatures, more like haunting presences; the player can't actually kill them or contain them, just try to work around them. They should be utterly unpredictable (with a giant amount of potential actions) and RNG driven to prevent the player from ever feeling comfortable with the monster sharing their map.

This, honestly, reminds me of much of the arguments that swirled around magic debates over the years. 

It's not as vociferous as it was before there were things like secrets, but there was (and is) a contingent of hardcore anti-magic players that hate all things remotely like D&D-style "program magic" that has quantifiable physics and a MP bar and such, where magic is just ammo in a bigger crossbow.  (I remember a thread with an image of a guy shooting fireballs out of a book of linux while sitting on the back of a giant knight with a shield that says "meat" on it to mock the whole concept, but can't find it in an easy search...  It used to be really popular to link to a few years ago...)

Whenever people tried to cater to these sorts of ideas, you often ended up with the concepts that magic should be some random dwarf is a wizard that, just because that one dwarf is a wizard, they are suddenly out of your control, and they will randomly cause your embark to explode or randomly summon demons you can't defeat or prepare for, or otherwise cause a game-over for no good reason.  (The typical response to this was "in that case, I kill any wizard on sight because nothing they do could possibly be worth randomly causing my fortress to explode for no good reason.")

In general, however, that's often the feel that people try to go for with the magic system.

Toady, meanwhile, clearly has entirely other ideas, and generated what we have now, and seems to be going more along the add-one-syndrome-at-a-time path. 

The thing is, they all tend to wind up having some sort of way of being oddly beneficial to the players.  I remember Loud Whispers uses a werecreature squad as combat shock troopers because they can heal from any injury and functionally can outlive even certain syndrome death, so he uses them against the HFS.  He also uses trapped necromancers as a source of infinite skeleton soldiers to fight the HFS.  People also use sealed-away vampires to create immortal fortresses, or even infect the whole fort to make them all super-powered. 

All of these things are exploited and turned around with humans sitting on top of Cthulhu like some sort of tamed pet.  Yes, sure, the collar can slip loose if one is not careful, but players clearly demonstrate the capacity to tame Cthulhu with alarming ease. 

The only real solution to this that anyone ever really comes up with is "MORE RANDOM NUMBERS!"  However, that, again, is generally something that can be exploited anyway, or at least mitigated if you simply create an ever-longer-and-longer list of things you have to do to stop every random thing from killing you, (like, say, walling off the caverns to keep the FBs out, which nullifies all THEIR random superpowers just fine,) or it's usually very gamey, and makes for very poor storytelling, so Toady tends to avoid it. 

Ultimately, the Lovecraftian ideas that might actually work are all ones that defeat the core reasons people even play DF in the first place, so I don't think anyone would like them.  You're talking about things that make people fear digging or building things, when a major reason people play this game is to be able to construct things.  You're talking about monsters you can't defeat with a military, when players like trying to defeat things with their military.  You're talking about making the game random and have things that make no rational story sense when the capacity to generate a story is the driving purpose behind the game.  To reiterate, DF is a game about empowerment and player expression and discovery and knowledge, which are all completely counter to the core tenets of Lovecraftian horror, where discovery is a terrible thing and individuality is a flaw to be eliminated.

[angelious]

That being said, you could have legitimately Lovecraftian gameplay elements. However, they shouldn't be creatures, more like haunting presences; the player can't actually kill them or contain them, just try to work around them. They should be utterly unpredictable (with a giant amount of potential actions) and RNG driven to prevent the player from ever feeling comfortable with the monster sharing their map.

This, honestly, reminds me of much of the arguments that swirled around magic debates over the years. 

It's not as vociferous as it was before there were things like secrets, but there was (and is) a contingent of hardcore anti-magic players that hate all things remotely like D&D-style "program magic" that has quantifiable physics and a MP bar and such, where magic is just ammo in a bigger crossbow.  (I remember a thread with an image of a guy shooting fireballs out of a book of linux while sitting on the back of a giant knight with a shield that says "meat" on it to mock the whole concept, but can't find it in an easy search...  It used to be really popular to link to a few years ago...)

Whenever people tried to cater to these sorts of ideas, you often ended up with the concepts that magic should be some random dwarf is a wizard that, just because that one dwarf is a wizard, they are suddenly out of your control, and they will randomly cause your embark to explode or randomly summon demons you can't defeat or prepare for, or otherwise cause a game-over for no good reason.  (The typical response to this was "in that case, I kill any wizard on sight because nothing they do could possibly be worth randomly causing my fortress to explode for no good reason.")

In general, however, that's often the feel that people try to go for with the magic system.

Toady, meanwhile, clearly has entirely other ideas, and generated what we have now, and seems to be going more along the add-one-syndrome-at-a-time path. 

The thing is, they all tend to wind up having some sort of way of being oddly beneficial to the players.  I remember Loud Whispers uses a werecreature squad as combat shock troopers because they can heal from any injury and functionally can outlive even certain syndrome death, so he uses them against the HFS.  He also uses trapped necromancers as a source of infinite skeleton soldiers to fight the HFS.  People also use sealed-away vampires to create immortal fortresses, or even infect the whole fort to make them all super-powered. 

All of these things are exploited and turned around with humans sitting on top of Cthulhu like some sort of tamed pet.  Yes, sure, the collar can slip loose if one is not careful, but players clearly demonstrate the capacity to tame Cthulhu with alarming ease. 

The only real solution to this that anyone ever really comes up with is "MORE RANDOM NUMBERS!"  However, that, again, is generally something that can be exploited anyway, or at least mitigated if you simply create an ever-longer-and-longer list of things you have to do to stop every random thing from killing you, (like, say, walling off the caverns to keep the FBs out, which nullifies all THEIR random superpowers just fine,) or it's usually very gamey, and makes for very poor storytelling, so Toady tends to avoid it. 

Ultimately, the Lovecraftian ideas that might actually work are all ones that defeat the core reasons people even play DF in the first place, so I don't think anyone would like them.  You're talking about things that make people fear digging or building things, when a major reason people play this game is to be able to construct things.  You're talking about monsters you can't defeat with a military, when players like trying to defeat things with their military.  You're talking about making the game random and have things that make no rational story sense when the capacity to generate a story is the driving purpose behind the game.  To reiterate, DF is a game about empowerment and player expression and discovery and knowledge, which are all completely counter to the core tenets of Lovecraftian horror, where discovery is a terrible thing and individuality is a flaw to be eliminated.

contrary to popular belief. while the whole insignificance thing was a central piece of lovecrafts work i must yet again repeat myself: its not his only trick. he wasnt just some guy who relied on cheap scares and a gimmick. his stories varied.

and for instance in many stories. the humans DID manage to kill or otherwise harm the creatures. while in the end this usually left them more or less dead,insane or backfired one way or another.

hell. lovecraft actually tried to write some sort of action scenes for the shadow over insmouth book.




and we also disagree about the fundamental core of dwarf fortress value. i believe the challenge and difficulty of the game are its biggest reasons of success. as the wikia itself places it. losing is fun. that is why. while i dont see lovecraftian monsters as a wise thing to add up. i would welcome the more difficult and grueling monsters, as nowadays i dont find much of a challenge in surviving outside of evil biomes. and while having lovecraftian monsters would add a great deal of flavor to the game: it would in the end be a project doomed to fail due to the fact we are missing a proper writer who could copy lovecrafts style well enough to make it work.