Diplomatic relations between certain Mythos races

[AgentConradGray]

What do the Mi-Go think about the Great Race of Yith, who are very similar to themselves except far more powerful and somewhat less malevolent towards humans? Well, less malevolent in that they are perhaps less interested in us and so would have less cause to engage in horrific experimentation.

What do the Mi-Go in Delta Green think about the Shan, who are portrayed in that game as maybe the second-most interventionist extraterrestrial species on Earth?

What do the ghouls know of/think about any other sentient/intelligent Mythos races? Maybe they just don't care and others don't care about them, seeing as how they're kind of doing their own thing. Same thing with the Deep Ones, really.

And what of cats?

[Evans]

The Shan are extremely dedicated to there own sadistic pleasures. It seems the exact oposite of the Mi-Gos cool logical minds. I would guess they find Shan far far far more differant from them than humans.

Ghouls are rather like humans in there thought patterns so I would think they would be rather simaler.

Serpent Men. It depends on what kind you've got; Yig worshipping fully faithful serpentmen are zenophobic and hate others species. Degenerate versions are like primitive apes. Indapendant Sorcers hate most species - espcialy other serpent men (Rivals!)

[ElijahWhateley]

I'll respond in order of ease.

Deep Ones serve Cthulhu and Dagon. Dagon is really more of a god of the Earth with Mythos leanings, not a Great Old One. Cthulhu seems to be a bit on the pugnacious side, so Deep Ones would combat the Mi-Go and the Elder Race.

Cats like humans - the right humans, mind you, and especially those of the Dreamlands, but humans all the same. Of course, given their abilities to leap between Earth and moon and cross through the Dreamlands, one might wonder who was the protector and who the protected. Cats probably would like ghouls as well, although maybe not, since ghouls have certain canine features. Cats are nothing if not capricious, so I think they would probably make individual judgements whether or not they liked a certain person, sorcerer, or Mythos monster/deity (Can't wait to see a Deep One cat). Crimes against felinity might cause military retribution, though.

Ghouls are a bit like Mythosized humans - not unlike really hardcore Mythos fans. They'll do whatever gives them the most graveyard glee. They worship Nodens, who I always interpreted as sort of a god of lesser horrors, but it is open to interpretation. I imagine ghouls would have no qualms about falling in with Mythos entities of any kind, and I'm sure one or two are in Mi-Go brain cylinders.

Now the Great Race and the Mi-Go - that's a difficult call. It could be possible, though unlikely, that the two had never met (possible scenario idea?). I expect that they might treat each other like two nations - making treaties sometimes, but fighting over important resources. both Yith and Mi-Go try to preserve and collect minds from across time and space, so I can see some common grounds, either for alliance, friendly competition (Hey, I bet I can collect a hundred human minds before you can! Let's race!), or battle.

In general, though, I think that Mythos races probably view war and politics very differently from humans. They are probably less serious about it. I can see a Star Spawn justifying a war with the Mi-Go with "Because its there" or "Just for the fun of it."

[Mr_Lin]

Plenty of inter species scraps mentioned in At the Mountains of Madness with some subsequent diplomacy. Yithians don't much like Flying Polyps and no doubt vice versa.

[Dr_Locrian]

Now I'm intrigued. In the canonical Mythos, were the Yithians and the Mi-Go ever in direct competition over the Earth? I can't remember my Mountains of Madness timeline well enough to picture the relationship between the Elder Things, Mi-Go, and Yithians.

[AgentConradGray]

The Yithians, Mi-Go, and Elder Things all are similar (completely non-humanoid science-oriented thingies), probably because Lovecraft imagined that is what advanced alien races would be like. Come to think of it, that applies to other media as well- Vulcans and so on. However, the Great Race of Yith and Mi-Go really seem similar personality-wise in some ways.

Ghouls worship Nodens? Mind. Blown.

[cjearkham]

What do the ghouls know of/think about any other sentient/intelligent Mythos races?

I happened to be listening to FNH's Cthulhu Podcast (http://cthulhupodcast.blogspot.com/) this morning, and the reading from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath mentioned a treaty between the ghouls of the Dreamlands and the night-gaunts. I see no reason why that wouldn't carry over to the waking world, or why they wouldn't have other such arrangements with other intelligent Mythosian species.

I'm not sure where the notion that ghouls worship Nodens comes from. Lin Carter said they were the servitors of Nyogtha. (Assuming one buys Carter's premise that each GOO has a particular servitor, and each species for the most part worships a single GOO. I like it as a conceit of a Mythos tome, perhaps Monstres and Their Kynde -- the way Carter ascribed Derleth's elemental-based GOO schema to the Comte d'Erlette and Cultes des Goules -- but I'm not ready to accept it unvarying Truth.) DQ, of course, says the night-gaunts serve Nodens, and since the ghouls and gaunts are allied there, perhaps someone confounded the two.

And what of cats?

Cats are a different case. DQ treats them as intelligent, with a language human dreamers could learn, but that's the Dreamlands. It's pretty hard to make an argument that cats of the waking world are similarly intelligent (and, yes, I know the joke about how they've trained us to feed them in exchange for nothing in particular). I'd hand-wave my way around it, saying cats are only intelligent in the Dreamlands, the same way we can do things in dreams we couldn't do in real life. So Dreamland cats might have treaties, as they do with the Zoogs, but in the waking world, they'd know nothing of them.

[ElijahWhateley]

Nodens is introduced (in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath") as the god of the ghouls, as part of the longest treatment he ever received from Lovecraft. What else did you think Nodens was?

Timeline-wise, I think that the Yithians showed up, and then departed for the future, before the Elder Race arrived, but I'm not sure.

[Evans]

What do the ghouls know of/think about any other sentient/intelligent Mythos races?

I happened to be listening to FNH's Cthulhu Podcast (http://cthulhupodcast.blogspot.com/) this morning, and the reading from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath mentioned a treaty between the ghouls of the Dreamlands and the night-gaunts. I see no reason why that wouldn't carry over to the waking world, or why they wouldn't have other such arrangements with other intelligent Mythosian species.

I'm not sure where the notion that ghouls worship Nodens comes from. Lin Carter said they were the servitors of Nyogtha. (Assuming one buys Carter's premise that each GOO has a particular servitor, and each species for the most part worships a single GOO. I like it as a conceit of a Mythos tome, perhaps Monstres and Their Kynde -- the way Carter ascribed Derleth's elemental-based GOO schema to the Comte d'Erlette and Cultes des Goules -- but I'm not ready to accept it unvarying Truth.) DQ, of course, says the night-gaunts serve Nodens, and since the ghouls and gaunts are allied there, perhaps someone confounded the two.

And what of cats?

Cats are a different case. DQ treats them as intelligent, with a language human dreamers could learn, but that's the Dreamlands. It's pretty hard to make an argument that cats of the waking world are similarly intelligent (and, yes, I know the joke about how they've trained us to feed them in exchange for nothing in particular). I'd hand-wave my way around it, saying cats are only intelligent in the Dreamlands, the same way we can do things in dreams we couldn't do in real life. So Dreamland cats might have treaties, as they do with the Zoogs, but in the waking world, they'd know nothing of them.

I would go with the idea that Nyogtha has a number of cults and worshippers amoung ghouls. The same way some ghouls revere Mordiggan.

I've allways liked to think of Dreamland ghouls as slightly differant from earth ghouls. Perphaps the ghoulish rituals of eating their own dead is conected to a belief that it will send the spirit to the next world (Dreamlands)

[AgentConradGray]

Nodens is introduced (in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath") as the god of the ghouls, as part of the longest treatment he ever received from Lovecraft. What else did you think Nodens was?

The guy who saved the one guy in the witch-house?

[ElijahWhateley]

Now he knew that the likeness was more than a chance one, for in these pictures were shewn their fearsome denizens; and those bat-wings, curving horns, barbed tails, prehensile paws and rubbery bodies were not strange to him. He had met those silent, flitting and clutching creatures before; those mindless guardians of the Great Abyss whom even the Great Ones fear, and who own not Nyarlathotep but hoary Nodens as their lord. For they were the dreaded night-gaunts, who never laugh or smile because they have no faces, and who flop unendingly in the dark betwixt the Vale of Pnath and the passes to the outer world.

And with his hideous escort he had half hoped to defy even the Other Gods if need were, knowing as he did that ghouls have no masters, and that night-gaunts own not Nyarlathotep but only archaic Nodens for their lord.

I was wrong; Nodens is the god of the Night-gaunts, not the ghouls. And this is probably the source of the confusion, because the passages above are easily misread and the Night-gaunts are allies of the ghouls.

Nodens saves Randolph Carter at the end of "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath", not Gilman in "Dreams in the Witch-House". Which is a big difference, since Gilman is just an innocent kid but Carter strikes me as the type who is one spell away from being a Mythos creature himself.

Which reminds me - my sense, especially from the aerial attack scene in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath", is that Night-gaunts aren't sentient in normal understanding. They always seem more like living machines that the ghouls use.

So - ghouls might serve Nodens for the heck of it, since they know guys who know him. But if they "have no masters", then that says it all. I can't imagine the ghouls doing too much politicking. They live beneath the Dreamlands, obey Ghoul-King Pickman, and go to other worlds through secret tunnels to eat corpses. In the end, ghouls just want to have fun.

[squashua]

Now he knew that the likeness was more than a chance one, for in these pictures were shewn their fearsome denizens; and those bat-wings, curving horns, barbed tails, prehensile paws and rubbery bodies were not strange to him. He had met those silent, flitting and clutching creatures before; those mindless guardians of the Great Abyss whom even the Great Ones fear, and who own not Nyarlathotep but hoary Nodens as their lord. For they were the dreaded night-gaunts, who never laugh or smile because they have no faces, and who flop unendingly in the dark betwixt the Vale of Pnath and the passes to the outer world.

And with his hideous escort he had half hoped to defy even the Other Gods if need were, knowing as he did that ghouls have no masters, and that night-gaunts own not Nyarlathotep but only archaic Nodens for their lord.

I was wrong; Nodens is the god of the Night-gaunts, not the ghouls. And this is probably the source of the confusion, because the passages above are easily misread and the Night-gaunts are allies of the ghouls.

Nodens saves Randolph Carter at the end of "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath", not Gilman in "Dreams in the Witch-House". Which is a big difference, since Gilman is just an innocent kid but...

Gilman isn't innocent. He shouldn't have been touching that science; plus, he probably has "the Innsmouth Look".

[DoubleYuggoth]

I agree that night-gaunts aren't really sentient, but I thought of them more like hunting dogs or a falconer's trained hawk.

Re Carter: His advantages seem to be more mental than physical. I always thought he just had a superlatively strong will, Out of all of humanity, there's got to be a few people who aren't fazed by horrors from beyond space and time. (I know some people who probably wouldn't be). I can see it as evidence of corruption, too, though. (Even if it is, though, he's fighting it well: sharing an alien body with its original occupant, he could still overpower it, even when his drug to do so ran out.)

Ghouls probably don't have the power to fight anybody major - there are quite a few of them, but they're not really superior to humans. (Nastier in close combat, but otherwise not much more powerful.)

The Deep Ones supposedly have the power to wipe out humanity (according to The Shadow over Innsmouth, and the narrator's dreams in Dagon kind of imply it too), but I'm not sure how they'd do that. They don't seem to have high-tech weaponry. The idea might have been that they outnumber us, since the seas are bigger than land, but there don't seem to be *that* many Deep One cities. (Also, depth-charges didn't kill Y'ha-nthlei, but did do damage; a nuke might take it out. The advances in technology since Lovecraft's time might have given us a leg up.)

[YunusWesley]

I tend to think the mythos species have toys off-stage in HPL's stories. Individual deep ones were tens of thousands of years old; they are connected with the interstellar-intertemporal Xothians; You can bet they'll have nasty, nasty magic or devices humans interpret as technology.

Like the angelesque aliens in _The Abyss_ they could send watery tentacles to do their bidding; they could also set off oceanic earthquakes and tidal waves; they could use their undersea telepathy to talk to the fish; or, you know, they might just turn Los Angeles into orange slime. They're a Mythos species; they can do anything the Keeper wants.

Navy depth-charges the Innsmouth outpost? Okay, so the air breathers got a little uppity. It's like a rabid dog attack; makes the undersea telepathy peer-to-peer back pages, but doesn't fundamentally alarm anyone. The "dog catcher" is performing the H'rrrkalkaBlh'aaB ceremony for another 7 octals of circumstellar orbits but will be back to deal with the matter thereafter.

On another note, I have no use for ghouls in my games. Elder things, mi-go, chthonians, and serpent folk are all much more interesting; ghouls are just sort of... ghoulish... bone-gnawing kind of guys. If I ever run anything in the dream lands, we might have ghouls there.

[Nescio]

Y'ha-Nthlei also has shoggoth allies or servants.