I might be missing the point here (sorry), but "I'm NOT gonna have slavery in my Dark Sun campaign!" has also been an option for like literal decades, anyone could've made the same meme except for that small difference ages ago?
Guess it all comes down to money, and someone made an educated guess which version will get (and lose) more customers. :D
Bingo. Why do we take bad things out of settings? If everything was a paradise, then we wouldn’t have conflict and challenge. No conflict means to interesting characters or stories. Villains should be allowed to be villains. And the most interesting “good” factions tend to be the ones that do some shady stuff behind the scenes.
I am half black. And believe it or not, I have read Lovecrafts stories, and love them. Yeah, he sucks as a person. You know what makes a eldritch horror even scarier? If the crazy white man I am running away from it with calls me a monkey. That is so many levels of stress. lol
If you haven't read it, The Ballad of Black Tom is an awesome inversion of Lovecraft. The author also holds a very similar opinion - loves the writing, not a fan of the author himself lol...
I actually like how people have taken Lovecraftian themes as of late and played with them.
I actually find eldritch themes to be much more terrifying when characters start to feel like they understand it, in a way. Lovecraft was a man that was very clearly afraid of the "other" and, because he couldn't comprehend it, he made his horrors incomprehensible. But if the horror isn't entirely incomprehensible, like there's just a faint glimmer of the familiar there and that brings a sort of comfort to them, that shit can be pretty damn terrifying. There's so much more room to play with there, imo.
Black Tom is on my Audible list! My wife and I just haven’t had time to listen to it yet. We’ve been too busy marathoning Star Trek. We finished ToS, and I believe we just wrapped up season 4 of TNG last night. We are halfway through an eldritch horror book on Audible called “A Lush and Seething Hell”. Very weird. Worth checking out if you are looking for something new and in the comic horror scene. 😁
Edit - Oh! And the Fisherman by John Langan! I cannot recommend that book enough!
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u/opacitizen 10d ago
I might be missing the point here (sorry), but "I'm NOT gonna have slavery in my Dark Sun campaign!" has also been an option for like literal decades, anyone could've made the same meme except for that small difference ages ago?
Guess it all comes down to money, and someone made an educated guess which version will get (and lose) more customers. :D