Lovecraftian Horrors as a race

Me and koose discussed this idea of having Lovecraftian horrors as a faction (not a playable race of course), we played around with the idea of them and have come up with the following:

You can't see them, they are beyond mortal understanding
And so where one would normally stand either a distortion occurs (using some kind of shader) or you just simply don't see them and all action occurs off-screen
A sanity-like feature is implemented as a way to gain favour with the gods as you would with other races
A 'victory condition' is to ascend one of your people into god-like form, again to reiterate PP was concluded to never have a 'true ending' or a 'victory' but rather have goal posts that can be achieved as pseudo end conditions to give a feeling of a goal and accomplishment

What do you guys think?

Just to note, the concept of a "lovecraftian horror" can be achieved in a more Sci-Fi appropriate fashion with such things as creatures that exist in more than the standard 3+1 space+time dimensions.

Yep, that is central to the idea

I really should take some time to join you guys at discord but its quite hard.... So my "thoughts" or rather questions:

How do they influence the game? Do the send meteors to destroy my base if angered and repair a broken buildings if pleased or how should it work?
If there is some kind of benifit-system - are there different Sub-Factions to "worship" to specialize - e.g. have some Technology / Warrior / Trader / Builder guy?
Whats the "god-like" form? My character just vanishes or do I get some kind of benefit to play further - like getting a giant statue of this character with with some kind of positive aura or an overall boost to the stat the upgraded character was best at?
If the Ascension has some benefit for me - can I ascend more than 1 of my people?

As lover of (usually fantasy) fiction I really like the idea of having some magical / god (or whatever the Sci-Fi term would be) element.

When I was a child I loved the game Pharao which is bascially a city-builder in ancient egypt. Depending on the map / scenario you have to please 1 or more of 5 gods which each has special gifts and punishments for you. So you usually have to please them at least enough to not destroy you and pleasing them was quite rewarding (like giving you an army as defenders for one fight or double your raw materials in all your storages).

Well, my thoughts were they weren't a massive influence since they are just a faction. They may send raids or other events such as other factions depending on your favour with them and these may include stuff like meteors or repairing.
Sub factions could be a thing, but the problem is always making sure something isn't too complicated, though an array of positives/rewards is definately something that has been talked about and these could take place as belonging to a god.
The god form was just a thought I had, I was thinking it as literally a majoratively neutral action, it is just like 'you did this goodjob' most likely giving you tons of favour with that factions (while not effecting favour with other factions), a statue system was talked about though that was purely cosmetic in its discussion, I'm more 'against' the idea of it giving you too much direct buffs, but rather stuff that changes how you play, as perhaps a way to include an end game like system, though this needs tons more discussion and your suggestion is equally valid.
I would say 'no', because ascension really should hold a significant value, since you are creating a god, and I'm always fearful of it becoming a 'factory of gods' which removes the whole cosmic beyond your mortal understanding feeling when you can just create endless gods, it should really be a commitment.

I loved Pharao too actually xD, and most of these ideas came from my early childhood love of 'Lovecraftian Horror', which is pretty freak'n amazing tbh.

Note: this only reflects my own personal point of view, not any official stance.

Faction might be a bit of a misnomer, at least relative to mechanics of the game. It's not the sort of thing you make alliances with, it's not meant to be a comprehensible sort of thing. To take it down a step (to make it easier to discuss) think of something like the center of a blackhole or even Quantum Mechanics (particularly from a non-physicist standpoint), we can understand the effects of it, how it interacts with our familiar world, though in many cases our predictions are just educated guesses, we don't know the deeper "why"s, why does perceiving a subatomic particle affect it? We know that it does, but only because "that's the way it works". Now take this a step further, instead of having all the math to simulate it, we're trying to work out how these things work, but effectively not having higher mathematics, trying to work it out with only addition and multiplication level maths. And further, not only is this a natural process which we don't fully understand, but a sentience that is not only alien to us in environment and evolution, but operates on a similar higher order.

These are the sci-fi equivalent of lovecraftian horrors, not things you worship (at least not the sane), at best you study them, and hope you learn something useful. Mechanically I would see this as a source of "weird science" i.e. we have some set of "science and technology" that is the baseline of our setting, probably things that are commonly accepted at scientifically feasible (or things that are so common to sci-fi and/or so needed for a certain type of setting, such as FTL travel), things that border on the line between magic and technology (it would be feasible for such hyperadvanced tech to seem magical, but I feel it is important for the feel of the setting for the player to be able to recognize this as tech that borderlines), your transporters, your matter converters, and that sort of thing.

I see the "Ascension" as an end goal (not necessarily a win or lose condition, that will come from the player's intentions), something akin to building a spaceship and launching in Rimworld, it doesn't give you any advantages, it is what you are attempting to do (maybe), but also functioning as a limiter, if you aren't aiming for "ascending" then it works as a mechanic to prevent too much progress in "alien tech", the further a researcher gets down that line, the more they risk the breaking of their mental model of reality being broken due to being exposed to things that go against our accepted laws of physics and being driven mad, or alternatively/additionally coming to understand and accept the "new physics" and transcending our 3 dimensions.

But aside from that there's the risk of attracting the attention of these beings... it's not a risk of angering them, we can't really understand what would anger them or make them happy, and making them happy may not even be a good thing for us. Imagine a fly landing next to you. Does it make you angry? Some people it might, some it might not, at times we can't even understand each other well enough to know why it will or won't or if it will. But we may still swat it anyways angry or not. Perhaps you just ignore it. Maybe you're even a lover of insects, and decide to keep it as a pet, and you oh so gingerly pick it up, and place it into a special container for it to live out its life. Or perhaps you just take it outside. And what if it happened to land right by your nostrils, making you sneeze. and send it flying. These examples run a fairly wide range of reactions from angry to pleased, and none of them end up that great for the fly, angry (or maybe even indifferent) end up with a dead fly, and pleased (or again indifferent) and even just a natural response of the body displaces it.

And we are much closer to the fly than we are to these beings, you had better hope the one you happen to interact with has at least a rough idea of what environment you require to live in if it displaces you, and for added measure, as higher dimensional beings, we're being moved in a direction we can't even perceive, so it would be that much more jarring, and you'd better hope it puts you back in the same "layer".

I would argue that for a faction system to be meaningful it should have an impact on the world, I view it as this way, you live in a universe that is expansive and contains many various characters all interacting and living their lives (either 3-Dimensionally or otherwise), just because one could not understand 'how' certain beings exist or why they do certain things doesn't mean that they 1, don't have an impact, and 2 that impact can't be observed and extrapolated on (also all of the science is educated guesses kind of the name of the game there but I get your point of our lack of even a degree of understanding). Like a dog will learn through repetition and so will other animals (to parallel your animal analogy), so the idea of alliances I think still can exist and should.

But not every alliance is the same, your 'alliance' to a Lovecraftian-ish faction would be more of 'worship' or 'study' (which often borders on occultist like study which is a branch of worship) then your connection with a bug race (pulled that one out of nowhere) or your relationship with quill corp (more 'business'). Just because alliances are different doesn't make them non-existent I would argue. And I completely agree with your point on ascension, and the idea of it leading into an endgame was mainly around the idea that it would gain you a lot of favour and thus that leads to more options that are unique and perhaps even the ability to at some level 'ask' for things rather than just receive.

Though again, this is my opinion on the matter.

I agree that in general factions should have interaction (both with the player and each other, both off-screen and on-screen. But I think these beings will need to be so far different from other factions that contorting it to work for them would vastly over complicate the system for things that would only be used for a single faction. Plus, functioning as a faction would set certain expectations that we would either have to break (breaking the meaningfulness of them being a faction), or follow (making them too predictable).

And yes a dog will learn through repetition (relative to interaction with humans), but that learning is often false. Take for example a dog that is horribly mistreated, they will often apply that to other humans, and either cower or react aggressively, but that interaction isn't appropriate for all humans, and similarly for a dog who is kindly treated by every human it meets, until it isn't and its reaction isn't appropriate. Of course in less extremes the dog can learn to apply it to certain humans, but it's ability to reliably predict how interactions will go (based on how it responds) is flawed more than human to human interaction, and of course since we're talking several orders of magnitude of difference between Crew and Unknowables, I would assume those flaws would be magnified, and a dog is even closer to us than an insect such as a fly (if for no other reason than having lived alongside us for so long).

If it's truly a creature that in its very essence is so vastly different from us (and not just its technological capabilities) the idea of alliance is meaningless, the difference between worship and alliance is worship is one sided (unless we are talking about your more standard fantasy god, which has a more vested interest), and just as in lovecraftian horror, while research into these things may provide benefits, just as often as not the benefits aren't direct things given by the object of study/worship, but side-effects, and those who study/worship are often those most negatively affected... at least until such time as they actually manage to awaken a horror and it destroys all of reality (or in our sci-fi setting, somehow punches a hole in the direction of this 4th+ dimension, attracting their attention to the entirety of our universe... also probably destroying it.

For a reasonably good (in my opinion) version of a 4th dimensional being of this sort interacting with our universe, see Star Control II (Ur-quan Masters for the open source release) and the Orz, though you could "ally" with them, it was easy to "anger" them, for very nonobvious reasons. Of course in SCII having a somewhat comical bent, they weren't played to their full dark effect, there was some darkness hidden in the background (an entire species who was researching hyperdimensional things completely disappearing, possibly eaten or perhaps just taken to an unknown elsewhere), and apparently an intention of them becoming the villain in the next sequel (had the original developers been involved in it), as a result from the player in SCII allying with them, and making them aware of all the sentient beings in our area. Also the interesting side note that these extra dimensional beings may have either been a hive-mind or all one creature just putting different parts of itself into our universe (remember, they are more than 3 spatial dimensions), but it's not really clear since the player is only told they are fingers which is marked as a translator approximation, so it could have been the literal idea of parts of the creature, or a reference to them all being connected, or something else entirely.

OrderOfThePorcupine / ProjectPorcupine

Lovecraftian Horrors as a race #85