Interview: James Edward Raggi IV (Part I)

I think it's fair to say that James Edward Raggi IV needs no introduction. He's been publishing old school fantasy roleplaying game materials since 2008, many of which are not only foundational to the OSR but also take inspiration from the works and ideas of H.P. Lovecraft. I asked James a few question relating to LotFP, HPL, and other matters and he very kindly provided with some lengthy answers that will appear over the course of the next two days.

1. Let’s start with the obvious: Lamentations of the Flame Princess has always been described as a “weird fantasy roleplaying game.” What does “weird” mean to you and what role does Lovecraft play in shaping that definition?

Formally it's taken straight from Lovecraft's definition of “weird” from his Supernatural Horror in Literature essay:

“The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”

Basically what Lovecraft called “cosmicism.”

I think the best example of this sort of “weird” in fiction wasn't even made by Lovecraft, but by Algernon Blackwood in The Willows. I put some quotes of this in the old Grindhouse box for LotFP that I thought served as the best short examples:

“We had strayed into some region or some set of conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peep-hole whence they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn a little thin.” 

“You think it is the spirit of the elements, and I thought perhaps it was the old gods. But I tell you now it is neither. These would be comprehensible entities, for they have relations with men, depending upon them for worship or sacrifice, whereas these beings who are now about us have absolutely nothing to do with mankind, and it is mere chance that their space happens just at this spot to touch our own.”

“There are forces close here that could kill a herd of elephants in a second as easily as you or I could squash a fly. Our only chance is to keep perfectly still. Our insignificance perhaps may save us.”

That's my ideal of what the “weird” should be, but in practical terms it isn't always so. It's sometimes just a slush word to signify some sort of genre crossing, such as mixing fantasy with horror or sci-fi.

2. Lovecraft's tales often revolve around the epistemological dread of human beings confronting truths they were never meant to know. Do you see LotFP as engaging with a similar kind of cosmic pessimism? Or is the horror in LotFP more grounded, more human?

I don't know that it's cosmic pessimism so much as realism. We already have an approximate date on the destruction of our solar system. A random solar flare could fry all our modern technology at any time. Some space rock can do to us what an earlier rock did to the dinosaurs. Not to mention any of the possible manmade apocalypses, or how the trajectory of man changes forever with technological tools such as agriculture, literacy, automobiles, television, or social media.

One thing about man, though, is whatever doesn't kill him, he adapts to and gets used to.

And that “things that man was never meant to know” themes is only from a certain point of view. Notice that everybody, everybody, that Lovecraft labels as degenerate: backwoods New Englanders, non-white people, whatever, they all seem to have a better handle on how Lovecraft's literary universe works just fine. They adapt and work with; a lot of the stories seem to feature human agents of whatever the current story's horror is. It's Lovecraft's protagonists, often bookish people like him, who have a hard time accepting these revelations. Lovecraft's horror comes from attacking his own worldview.

But people like Dr. Muñoz, Ephraim Waite, Richard Pickman, Keziah Mason are all to my recollection people who Lovecraft would otherwise approve of genealogically, and they're working with the horrific elements of Lovecraft's world. Herbert West and Erich Zann could be on that list if they were a bit more competent, but they weren't so they got overwhelmed by what they were playing at.

Lovecraft's view of this I think is wrapped up in a bow in The Call of Cthulhu:

“The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.”

I mean what's next after that, equal rights and girls wearing short skirts in public?

I'm being a bit facetious here, but for all we're told that there are great powers at work that can snuff out humanity if it ever bothered to notice them, the Dunwich Horror is banished, Cthulhu is sent back to sleep, and Thing on the Doorstep indicates that humans are either cooperating with or have imprisoned a shoggoth (the story isn't so clear on that point, but the point is they're not some species-ending threat). The US government wiped out Innmouth's Deep One colony. No matter how often his stories might assert it in the author's voice, I don't think they actually demonstrate cosmicism through what happens. No, the universe isn't humanocentric, but humanity has its place in the universe and can defend it.

In the real world, humans can split the atom and create viruses that can sweep the planet and we're on the cusp of real machine intelligence and we've already taken our first baby steps on the journey to traveling to the stars.

As far as how LotFP approaches all this, yeah, we've got some adventures that are simply some alien/outside threat causing problems that must be somehow solved. But the best LotFP stuff involves humans messing with these powers for their own benefit, and the adventure premises are simply the fallout of this human curiosity/greed.

And if the NPCs can mess around with and harness this power... well why shouldn't the PCs be able to as well? Don't traditional RPGs teach us that characters are entitled to more power as the game goes on?

Humans are just another mythos creature. We're just used to how we are so we don't notice it.

3. How consciously have you drawn on Lovecraft’s themes, structures, or even prose style when writing LotFP material, especially in your adventures, like Death Frost Doom or The God that Crawls?

LotFP wouldn't look anything like it does without Lovecraft's direct influence. Our first publication in 2009, Death Frost Doom, had second-hand Lovecraft influence. It had a heavy Evil Dead inspiration, and the catalyst for the events in Evil Dead is the Necromonicon Ex-Mortis.

Tower of the Stargazer and Weird New World in 2010 had some Lovecraftian bits, but they weren't front and center at all.

We didn't hit Lovecraft directly until Carcosa in 2011 and that used the actual Lovecraftian entities. But 2012's The Monolith from beyond Space and Time was explicitly about being Lovecraftian, but without using all the Lovecraftian stuff ... sort of like how LotFP is like D&D without all the D&D stuff. For example our stand-in for the Necronomicon in Monolith was the head of Carter Holmes, and you get at the forbidden knowledge by eating his brains, which he begs you to do. The God that Crawls, released at the same time, has some Lovecraft-inspired bits, and then we were off to the races. So many things had explicitly Lovecraftian-inspired ideas from there.

Every so often we do use an actual Lovecraft beastie (most notably in Fish Fuckers – I am using that example just so people reading your blog have to see the words Fish Fuckers – where we did the usual “humans victimizing the Deep Ones” subversion), but the influence is mostly in general concepts more than yoinking specific things. I mean, we do the generic thing of “impossible extradimensional entities,” which is firmly Lovecraftian in that they're just entities and not “gods” in any religious sense of creating the universe or controlling any aspect of it. The universe in LotFP games is not assumed to have any objective morality or moral order. (Our use of the Law-Neutrality-Chaos alignment scheme is based on what magic, if any, someone wields and has nothing to do with being a good or bad person or what you do with that magic.)

I don't think I've used the work “squamous” anywhere yet. That's one box I should tick off in my next book.

But “Lovecraftian” is a squishy term, come to think of it. Basically any alien predator can be said to be “Lovecraftian” because it's demonstrating that the universe isn't all about us.

I guess the most pure Lovecraftian theme would be “pursuing forbidden knowledge gets you in trouble” but that would make Faust Lovecraftian (or Frankenstein, if we want to take The Devil and the moral implications thereof off the table) and the whole exercise of nailing “Lovecraftian” down exactly seems to be silly.

“The universe isn't about us” is just how reality actually is, and if “the discovery of knowledge that shatters your worldview and changes your mind irrevocably” qualifies as Lovecraftian, then just being a child who grows up would be Lovecraftian.

It's tricky just even nailing down “Lovecraftian” as a series of tropes. It's not the specific language. You can see it in all the pastiches that are just “Lovecraftian” remix Mad Libs and they fail, fail, fail, fail.

It's not just the ideas, it's not just the vocabulary; it's the attitude of the man himself that is the glue. He wasn't quite the reclusive weirdo that has somehow become the popular conception of him, but he didn't fit into his contemporary society at all. If you read Joshi's I Am Providence biography of the man (the unabridged version) and/or Houellebecq's Against the World, Against Life, you get the picture of a man that is in some ways a perfectly affable man socially but in other ways deeply disturbed and unable to participate in normal life. The authors that successfully work in the Lovecraftian mode seem to all have something very “off” with them as well ... Thomas Ligotti comes to mind and his Conspiracy Against the Human Race (which is a non-fiction book, for anyone who didn't know) makes it obvious how he's able to go into that mode and make it work. R.E. Howard was obviously not a well man. Edgar Allan Poe was one of Lovecraft's chief inspirations and he was all fucked up. I don't know as much about Clark Ashton Smith's life but everything I read about him indicates mental health issues and a lengthy health decline in his 20s.

I don't know exactly how my state of mind matches up with these people, but I have the stretches of being medicated and an entire lifetime of being at arm's length from what were supposed to be my peers to show that I'm not quite right. Hopefully more towards the CAS end of things than REH.

I'm probably way off topic here, but to wrap this question up I'd like to point out a good way to tell who is going to be complete shit at working in the Lovecraftian mode. People who judge Lovecraft as a person. People will publish entire books built entirely on Lovecraft's work and then in that same book point out what a piece of shit Lovecraft was as a human being.

Forget how tasteless that is, how ungrateful that is. If you're going to try to show off how much of an upstanding citizen you are and make moves to be a valued member of the community in this way ... I don't think you even have the capacity to understand what made Lovecraft tick and why his writing works. His work is built entirely on his neuroses, both those we'd consider benign, and those we'd consider malignant. You don't have to like it, you don't have to incorporate all or any of his neuroses into your work (use your own!), but if you can't tolerate or accept it, if you're distancing yourself from any of that, how in the bloody fuck can you possibly work in his milieu without it being the most surface-level clown show?

If you were actually better than Lovecraft in any way, morally or creatively, you wouldn't feel the need to be sucking at his teat almost 100 years later in order to pay for your supper.