Open Mythos

In his fiction, H.P. Lovecraft began to build a complex intermeshed web of weird-sounding extra-dimensional, alien, and otherwise weird beings. He also invented obscure tomes of forbidden lore and nefarious cults of misguided worshippers. He also encouraged fellow horror writers to borrow his strange creations and add them into their own stories; in return, Lovecraft baked some of his friends’ alien names into his later stories.

In the century since this vast game of collective myth-building began, the so called “Cthulhu Mythos” — a name coined long after Lovecraft’s death in 1937 — has grown to become a patchwork of creations that is both expansive and problematic from an Intellectual Property perspective. While there are undeniably some parts of this Mythos that are firmly in the Public Domain, other parts have been added by more recent writers (some still alive) who retain IP rights to their creations.

When building a cool game scenario or campaign, the last thing anyone wants to be thinking about is whether the inclusion of this or that alien name might trigger a nasty email from lawyers representing a fiction author or the estate of a dead author. To make things easier for creators, the German Lovecraft Society invested an enormous amount of time and effort to isolate the “open” parts of the Mythos — effectively the elements invented by Lovecraft himself for stories that have now fallen into the Public Domain. They also built game statistics for those creations.

If you’re looking for familiar Lovecraftian horrors to add to your game or scenario … and you DON’T want to get bogged down in the legalities of which author/estate to contact about which odd-sounding god, creature, or tome … these are your go-to Mythos elements. We have taken the work by our esteemed German colleagues and partnered with them to translate them to English and tweak the statistics so they work with our Cthulhu Eternal and APOCTHULHU RPGs.

The Open Mythos is divided into Rituals, Artifacts, Tomes, Cults, and Unnatural Entities.

Rituals

The descriptions of the following rituals are, for the most part, directly based on rituals described by Lovecraft himself. They should serve as inspiration and orientation for the Game Moderator to design his or her own rituals.

This format for ritual description is as follows:

Study: study duration; SAN loss.

Activation: duration; WP cost; SAN Loss.

Description: The summary of the effect, necessary actions and prerequisites of a ritual. Sometimes the successful performance of a ritual also requires certain skill values. Sometimes the effect causes an increase in unnatural knowledge.

Summary of Rituals

GM Resource: Designing New Rituals

Artifacts

Summary of Artifacts

GM Resource: Designing New Artifacts

Tomes

Books that contain knowledge about the Unnatural knowledge are mostly old, extremely rare, very dangerous, and always unique. Just tracking down or getting hold of such a book should never be a trivial exercise. Studying such a tome painstakingly is the only way to gain benefits from its secrets, but such study will always have consequences for the reader. In addition to a loss of SAN from reading, some books have other special effects that apply when studying them. In particular, some tomes can affect the scholar to such a degree that it causes changes to the character’s motivations (e.g., making them fixate on something they learned).

Summary of Tomes

Cults

Knowledge of the Unnatural promises vast power, wealth and privilege. Thus it is not surprising that all around the world, groups of humans – cults – toil secretly in the worship of the Great Old Ones, hungry to share in their terrible power and wisdom. But not all cults are made up purely of misguided people willingly supplicating themselves before invisible gods – some coalesce around non-human creatures present on the earth, and some are groups where individuals become a member unwillingly.

Summary of Cults

Unnatural Entities

The descriptions of the following unnatural entities (races of creatures and unique beings) are, for the most part, directly based on horrors described by Lovecraft himself.

Two different formats are used to describe these entities — one for ultra-powerful “god-like” powers like Great Cthulhu or others of the Great Old Ones, and another for less powerful races of alien beings.

Entries for God-like powers described a minimum set of game parameters, since most encounters with such potent beings should be resolved in a narrative way rather than dictated by the whimsy of dice. To support a GM in weaving a compelling description of such a mind-blasting experience, a number of details are helpful:

The format for describing less powerful entities and races is more fully-featured in terms of game mechanics. It includes:

GM Resource: Designing New Entities