Urban Fantasy: I Don't Use Lovecraft's Mythos

No, this is not some smarmy statement on Lovecraft's views which have been discussed by just about anyone smarter than me (which is a lot of people). I'm not here to apologize for the supposed sins of a dead man but rather here to put down my thoughts on Lovecraft's mythos as a whole in relation to my game setting.

It might seem a bit weird for someone who deliberately run an Urban Fantasy game which doesn't always take itself seriously and is basically the sinkiest of kitchen sinks to flat out say that nothing which Lovecraft wrote exist for real in his world. HPL's influence on horror, fantasy and science fiction is so utterly monumental that it seems weird. Its not that I don't draw inspiration from him, quite the contrary but rather that by not using his constructed mythos (not that it was ever intended to be one but it became that way) I choose to both honor his work and reinforce it in my own way.

Simply put? Lovecraft having his creations shoved into various works which exist out of his genre cheapen his work for two reasons:

• The first is that often it is inserted into a world/story whose ultimate tone and purpose is utterly removed from the bleak, depressing and alienating world that HPL created, where man is but a tiny insignificant spec of dust in the cosmos and where alien powers invariably drive the human mind to madness. Adding this to a world where you're expected to fight monsters and have cool action completely miss the point.
• Second and more importantly: everybody already knows HPL's work, which too diminish it. His world was one where a thousand horrible secret existed about the universe, where horrible sorcerer and alien entities lurked around every corner and you were supposed to be left wondering just how much existed out there. The bizarre, alien Gods and entities of his accidental mythos exist to reinforce this. They are not the being of our myths: at best our myths contain a tiny reflection of the truth.

Thus by treating Lovecraft as merely fiction it leave the stranger part of my invented cosmos as alien as I want them to be, returning it to the sense of dread and the great unknown. At the same time when I show a world where ultimately humanity still matter I also don't invalidate his work by forcing this conception of the cosmos to exist with his creation. I can draw inspiration from it as much as I want without ever feeling like I'm screwing with his already often-abused work which has been drained of all mystery by decades of over exposure.

Beside nobody find Cthulhu scary anymore. He's a fucking plushy now!