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Browsing through Websnark.
There are moments when someone else has managed to articulate *exactly* what you'd say if you were going to say it, and there's a weird shock that's more like recognition than revelation. Eric Burns has a great long post mostly about pulp heroes, and stuffed into the middle of a paragraph where he's explaining what's so cool about the Shadow is the line
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Miskatonic University seems like it's turning out okay. It starts out with the author addressing a few considerations about running games in the Mythos universe; how strictly you'll adhere to canon, how to handle players who've read the stories, things you want to keep players from doing, how to handle the sacred cows--
--and this is about when it hit me.
This is fanfic. Fanfic in a slightly stretched and weird way, that isn't telling stories in the traditional sense, but is certainly telling stories.
*Anything* with the Mythos is fanfic, or fanfic piled on fanfic. "The Watchers Out of Time." "Cold Print." "A Colder War". "'The King', in Yellow". "A Study in Emerald." Some of Lovecraft's stuff was fanfic to begin with--he didn't invent Carcosa, or The King in Yellow, or Nodens.
Hell, outside of Lovecraft's work, the *Necronomicon* is fanfic.
I must think on this.
There are moments when someone else has managed to articulate *exactly* what you'd say if you were going to say it, and there's a weird shock that's more like recognition than revelation. Eric Burns has a great long post mostly about pulp heroes, and stuffed into the middle of a paragraph where he's explaining what's so cool about the Shadow is the line
I need horror turned against evil instead of for evil.Oh, damn, *yes*. That's it exactly.
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Miskatonic University seems like it's turning out okay. It starts out with the author addressing a few considerations about running games in the Mythos universe; how strictly you'll adhere to canon, how to handle players who've read the stories, things you want to keep players from doing, how to handle the sacred cows--
--and this is about when it hit me.
This is fanfic. Fanfic in a slightly stretched and weird way, that isn't telling stories in the traditional sense, but is certainly telling stories.
*Anything* with the Mythos is fanfic, or fanfic piled on fanfic. "The Watchers Out of Time." "Cold Print." "A Colder War". "'The King', in Yellow". "A Study in Emerald." Some of Lovecraft's stuff was fanfic to begin with--he didn't invent Carcosa, or The King in Yellow, or Nodens.
Hell, outside of Lovecraft's work, the *Necronomicon* is fanfic.
I must think on this.
