Our world but the Great Old Ones, etc, exist and are widely worshipped.

Got the idea from a dream I had. Maybe a bit like Fallen London. Anyway, they don’t take a personal role in day-to-day life or anything, but the various sects devoted to them are collectively this world’s dominant religious movement, there are Deep One reservations, phrases like “thank Yog-Sothoth” are part of the general lexicon, maternity wards traditionally have chapels to Shub-Nigurath, and magic is an accepted field of study. The story wouldn’t treat this as a bad thing, just different. Apart from that I’m not really sure what the story would be about or anything.

it reminds me of The Silt Verses, which explore questions like "why do we worship these things?" and "how much is worship like self-destruction?" · i think a world like what you describe would be distressingly familiar.

Edited by nekomoon14 on May 19th 2022 at 8:55:45 AM

Well that’s an interesting way to see it.

Human Sacrifice would be so common and accepted that regulatory laws would arise, and there'd still be people staunchly opposed to even the most reasonable of them ; interspecies breeding would be treated similarly, to such an extent that there might be gamete donation programs for folks looking to have the equivalent to deep one children - history would have to be largely rewritten and after a while the changes would become uninteresting and irrelevant to most people, so there'd be questions about the lost civilizations of alien colonists on bad dating quizzes ~ parapsychology / magic would eventually be understood as a hard science and after a while it would become ordinary to use it for purposes of Mundane Utility *

On dating quizzes?

Or, we would discover that hard science is a lie, and even human reason nothing but a thin illusion over the brutal, despairing Truth.

What do the Elder Things have to do with dating quizzes?

He meant the information would become so commonly known it will even appear on dating quizzes (which are infamous for being pretty superficial).

Or rather that they are thing we cant just plain know no matter how much we can, after all lovecrafnian elder physic as I call it is a triumph of the irrational over the rational mind.

Is like.....physics exist and can be understood...by them, not us.

Kind of like how Einstein's theory of Relativity showed that Newton's understanding only applied in a specific case. Imagine that there's another layer of physics beyond Einstein and another layer beyond that.

No, that's not it at all. Another layer we could handle (in fact, physicists are trying diligently to find that additional layer, it's called the Universal Field Theory). No, it's more like Eisenstein discovered that gravity is actually flpltherdist'ng and was then drawn into the heavens screaming.

In a lovecraftian universe, there is knowledge that will drive you insane, and it is the Truth.