Beyond The Mountains Of Madness
- Welcome to the homepage of our Beyond the Mountains of Madness campaign, played beginning in late January, 2009 and ending in early April, 2010. We used the most up to date rules for Call of Cthulhu and played on an irregular schedule. Although the game is over, I would welcome any questions or comments on it.
- These pages detail the nearly year-long campaign 'Beyond the Mountains of Madness'. If you read this, be warned that you learn much that will completely ruin your experience of it as a player. The team that played it had little experience of Call of Cthulhu, except for a few one-offs, and so it was a novel experience for us.
Electronic Text. Read At the Mountains of Madness.; Discussion Archives. Read “The Shadow Over Usenet” Posts via Google Groups. Brown University holds the typed manuscript of At the Mountains of Madness and has scans of the entire manuscript as well as scans of Lovecraft’s plot notes on the Brown Digital Repository. Publication History.
Dedicated to the works of H.P. Lovecraft, this is your stop for all of his outstanding works and weird fiction in general!Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!Rules.Keep discussion civil.No lighter fare such as: memes, jokes, book covers, tattoos, apparel, etc.Submissions must be clearly related to Lovecraft in some way.Credit all creative work with the name of the piece and artist in the title.Do not post asking where to start with Lovecraft,.All self-promotion must be disclosed and kept within reasonable limitsUse spoiler tags where appropriate.Spoiler formatting!Spoiler! I know this is a pretty common topic, and I've gone back and read some of the great comments here. I read it a couple times and have come up with a different way of looking at the story. Here's a couple things I think people don't consider about the story.1-'All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a mirage'.This is my jumping off point, so it wasn't a typically 'Seeing' but something else, a different kind of experience than just looking at something terrible.2- Danforth was more knowledgeable about what was going on. Here's some quotes about that.' Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material, and had talked a good deal of Poe'Danforth, indeed, is known to be among the few who have ever dared go completely through that worm-riddled copy of the Necronomicon kept under lock and key in the college library.'
He knows much more than the narrator. On the first read, Danforth seems like a nervous young man, (especially because we keep bringing up his breakdown), but he is strong, has better vision and hearing and is much more aware of what's going on. Danforth isn't a especially weak character, but much more aware of the dangers they face.3- Here's that famous lovecraft quoteThe most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.I think Danforth lost that mercy, and while I don't think Danforth 'saw' anything terrible I think that danforth understood something terrible. His studies of the necronomicon gave him the context to get what was going on in a much more terrible way than just seeing a beast.Taking these points into consideration, Danforth didn't see some physical thing but had some kind of 5th dimensional experience. He mentions 'the windowless solids with five dimensions' and other thing which i think exist beyond normal human understanding. So I don't think we could know what Danforth saw anymore than a 2d square could understand a cube.I think if we had to choose a name, I would go with yog-sothoth.
Danforth courted yog-sothoth, and was rewarded with understanding of him. It makes sense to me that truely seeing yog-sothoth would be indescribable.That's my take at least. Happy to hear others.:)Edit- Thanks for the compliments. If anyone has any lovecraft questions or wants to hear opinions on anything else I have read most all of it and would love to talk about any stories. It helps to remember that the narrator lied in his first report about the incident, so we have an imperfect narrator. You'll also notice that the narrator often trashes Danforth and brings up his breakdown, but danforth is very often moving the story along, interpreting the glyphs, fixing the plane ect. It might be that the narrator is jealous, they both studied the necronomicon but only Danforth was chosen.
In many ways the narrator is like a jealous Watson to Danforths Sherlock. I think the story of Danforth begins long before the mountains of madness. He is pretty aware what is going on, and doesn't say much but in a typical story he'd be the protagonist. So between his studies of the occult before he got there and what he saw there must have come together. Reading even just a piece of the necronomicon invites trouble, and he read the whole thing and then signed up for this trip.The narrator doesn't explain why they could read the wall carvings so well, i have a feeling danforth was prepared to read them long before he got there.
Near the end of the book-He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things about “the black pit”, “the carven rim”, “the proto-shoggoths”, “the windowless solids with five dimensions”, “the nameless cylinder”, “the elder pharos”, “Yog-Sothoth”, “the primal white jelly”, “the colour out of space”, “the wings”, “the eyes in darkness”, “the moon-ladder”, “the original, the eternal, the undying”, and other bizarre conceptions; but when he is fully himself he repudiates all this and attributes it to his curious and macabre reading of earlier years. Sure, that was what I thought too. For whatever reason, the ancient ones were unable to keep a lot of technology, they lost their spacefaring ability too.It makes me wonder why exactly the ancient ones, with such long life-spans and detailed history carvings on the walls everywhere weren't able to keep or control technology. My best guess is that they used stolen technology, or copied technology. Kind of like the aliens in star trek that need to kidnap jordi because they couldn't fix the ship they stole. DNA modification technology must have had more power than they understood, ir as time went by they just weren't able to keep control because they didn't get what they were messing with.That's what makes this story so good, the ancient ones are in the middle of their own lovecraftian horror from messing with powers too strong, and we have that same story happening to humans.
Contents PlotA non sequitur mass-market paperback cover, and the current cover used for the Del Rey Books publication.The story is written in the first-person perspective by the geologist, a professor from. He writes to disclose hitherto unknown and closely kept secrets in the hope that he can deter a planned and much publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica. On a previous expedition there, a party of scholars from Miskatonic University, led by Dyer, discovered fantastic and horrific ruins and a dangerous secret beyond a range of mountains taller than the Himalaya.The group that discovered and crossed the mountains found the remains of fourteen ancient life forms, completely unknown to science and unidentifiable as either plants or animals, after discovering an underground cave while boring for ice cores.
Six of the specimens seem to be badly damaged, the others uncannily pristine. Their highly-evolved features are problematic: their stratum location puts them at a point on the geologic time scale much too early for such features to have naturally evolved yet. Because of their resemblance to creatures of myth mentioned in the, they are dubbed the 'Elder Ones'.Lovecraft's own draftWhen the main expedition loses contact with this party, Dyer and the rest of his colleagues travel to their camp to investigate. The camp is devastated and both the men and the dogs slaughtered, with only one of each missing. Near the camp, they find six star-shaped snow mounds, and a damaged Elder One buried under each.
They discover that the better-preserved life forms have vanished and that some form of experiment has been done, though they are only able to speculate on the subject and the possibility that it is the missing man and dog. Dyer elects, then, to close off the area from which they took their samples.Dyer and a student named fly an airplane over the mountains, which they soon realize are the outer wall of a huge, abandoned stone city of cubes and cones, utterly alien to any human architecture. By exploring these fantastic structures, the men are able to learn the history of the or, by interpreting their magnificent hieroglyphic murals: The Old Ones first came to Earth shortly after the Moon was pulled loose from the planet and were the creators of life. They built their cities with the help of ', organisms created to perform any task, assume any form, and reflect any thought. As more buildings are explored, a fantastic vista opens of the history of races beyond the scope of man's understanding, including the Old Ones' conflicts with the and the who arrived on Earth sometime after the Old Ones themselves. Uncannily, the images also reflect a degradation in the order of this civilization, as the Shoggoths gain independence. As more resources are applied to maintaining order, the etchings become haphazard and primitive.
The murals also allude to some unnamed evil in an even larger mountain range just past their city which even they fear greatly. Eventually, as Antarctica became uninhabitable even for the Old Ones, they migrated into a large, subterranean ocean.As the two progress further into the city, they are ultimately drawn to a massive, ominous entrance which is the opening of a tunnel which they believe leads into the subterranean region described in the murals. Compulsively they are drawn in, finding further horrors: evidence of dead Old Ones caught in a brutal struggle and wandering around placidly. They are confronted with an immense, ululating horror which they identify as a Shoggoth. They escape with their lives using luck and diversion. On the plane high above the plateau, Danforth looks back and sees something that causes him to lose his sanity. He refuses to tell anyone (even Dyer) what he saw, though it is implied that it has something to do with what lies beyond the larger mountain range that even the Old Ones feared.Professor Dyer concludes that the Old Ones and their civilization were destroyed by the Shoggoths they created and that this entity has sustained itself on the enormous penguins since eons past.
He begs the planners of the next proposed Antarctic expedition to stay away from things that should not be loosed on this Earth.Characters.: The narrator of At the Mountains of Madness, he is a professor of geology at Miskatonic University and a leader of the disastrous to Antarctica in 1930–31. Only his last name is mentioned in the text of Mountains, though he is fully identified in Lovecraft's, where he accompanies an expedition to Australia's Great Sandy Desert.: A graduate student at Miskatonic University. As part of the Pabodie Expedition, he accompanies Dyer on a survey flight over the ' and goes mad after seeing something. He is described as 'a great reader of bizarre material', and makes allusions to Edgar Allan Poe and the Necronomicon. According to Fritz Leiber's To Arkham and the Stars, he later recovered after being treated with experimental drugs developed by Professor, though he never recalled the horror he saw on the plateau.
Afterward, he became a professor of psychology at the university.: A member of Miskatonic's engineering department, Professor Pabodie invented a drill for the expedition that was 'unique and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity. To cope quickly with strata of varying hardness.' He also added 'fuel-warming and quick-starting devices' to the expedition's four aircraft. Lovecraft wrote of the name 'Pabodie', 'I chose it as a name typical of good old New England stock, yet not sufficiently common to sound conventional or hackneyed.' It's an alternative spelling of 'Peabody', a name Lovecraft was familiar with through the Peabody Museum in Salem. (: Selected Letters 5.830).: A professor of biology at Miskatonic University. It is he who first discovers the Mountains of Madness as a result of his 'strange and dogged insistence on a westward - or rather, northwestward - prospecting trip' based on his discovery of strange fossils.
He also discovers the ancient extraterrestrial specimens that he dubs 'Elder Ones' based on their resemblance to 'certain monsters of primal myth' found in the Necronomicon. He reports that his findings in Antarctica confirm his belief 'that earth has seen whole cycles of organic life before known one that begins with Archaeozoic cells,' and predicts that this 'will mean to biology what Einstein has meant to mathematics and physics.'
When eight of the Elder Ones turn out to be living creatures rather than fossils, they butcher Lake and the rest of his sub-expedition. For the rest of the story, he is referred to as 'poor Lake'.: A member of the Miskatonic University physics department, and also a meteorologist.
Beyond The Mountains Of Madness Call Of Cthulhu
He is part of the Lake sub-expedition and is also butchered by the Old Ones.InspirationLovecraft had a lifelong interest in Antarctic exploration; biographer S.T. Joshi wrote that 'Lovecraft had been fascinated with the Antarctic continent since he was at least 12 years old, when he had written several small treatises on early Antarctic explorers.' At about the age of nine, inspired by W. Clark Russell's 1887 book The Frozen Pirate, Lovecraft had written 'several yarns' set in Antarctica.By the 1920s, Joshi notes, Antarctica was 'one of the last unexplored regions of the earth, where large stretches of territory had never seen the tread of human feet.
Beyond The Mountains Of Madness Call Of Cthulhu
Contemporary maps of the continent show a number of provocative blanks, and Lovecraft could exercise his imagination in filling them in. With little fear of immediate contradiction.' . Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, p. Joshi, The Annotated Lovecraft, p.
175. Joshi and Schultz, p.
132. Joshi, p. Lovecraft, Selected Letters Vol.
144; cited in Joshi, p. 183; see also Joshi, p. 186. Lin Carter, Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos, p.
Joshi regards this suggestion as 'facile' - Annotated Lovecraft, pp. 17-18. William Fulwiler, 'E.R.B. , Black Forbidden Things, p.
64. Joshi and Schultz, pp. Lovecraft, ' The Nameless City', Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, pp. 104-105; cited in Joshi, pp. 264-265. Jason Colavito, The Cthulhu Comparison.
Guillermo Del Toro Films,. Anthony Pearsall, The Lovecraft Lexicon, p. 326.External links., Edgar Allan Poe; complete text., Edgar Rice Burroughs; complete text from litrix.com., A. Merritt; complete text from Horrormasters (pdf). If(window.mw)mw.config.set('wgCanonicalNamespace':','wgCanonicalSpecialPageName':false,'wgPageName':'AttheMountainsofMadness','wgTitle':'At the Mountains of Madness','wgCurRevisionId':20050,'wgArticleId':1858,'wgIsArticle':true,'wgAction':'view','wgUserName':null,'wgUserGroups':'.' ,'wgCategories':'Cthulhu Mythos works','Novels','H.
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