Thread:Kefke Wren/@comment-7706473-20130402074410/@comment-4332975-20130403151133

I know what you mean about wanting to make a mod for Morrowind. A friend of mine still pesters me now and then to try to get the ball rolling on the City of Nerevar mod we were working on. Which, I admit, I would dearly like to see finished one day. Far too much work went into it to be abandoned. Sadly, a lot of planning was lost when the old Planet Elder Scrolls forums went away, but I still remember a great deal of it. I had the rather ambitious goal of making it a non-linear mystery, in which different actions would lead to an accumulation of "investigation points" on top of specific flags. So many paths would lead to learning enough to advance, but which you took would lead to different opportunities in the next "Act" of the quest. For instance, it would begin with you inheriting a house, ending that act when you contract a mysterious disease known as "Soul Poisoning". In the next Act you would be looking for information on the disease, but depending on how much you investigated before asking a specific group of individuals - present only in that Act - they would either refuse to tell you anything, try to warn you off, or attack you for "knowing too much".

At the end of the second act, you would find the house had been ransacked, and most of the clues you could have found there lost. Eventually, you would have had the choice to side with a Cthullu-esque cult, a ruthless secret society something like Dan Brown's version of the Templars, or standing alone against both sides - with at least one chance to change allegance, and slightly different quests if you were changing sides (working independantly would have required gathering more investigation points, due to not having allies that knew more of the situation). It was a quite ambitious concept, even without the sidequests and background setting of the city, needless to say, and I joke that Dawnguard stole a little bit from me...then again, I joke that Bethesda has gotten all their best ideas from mods from Oblivion onward.

As to favourite Lovecraft story, that's a bit hard. Like picking a favourite tooth. They're all good, and at their best when together. If I had to pick though...hmm. Honestly, I quite liked the story "The Shadow Out Of Time". There's something fascinating about the Yith and their mission to catalogue the history of everything. They're an incredibly active and powerful race, and what they do is frightening in itself, yet they don't come across as at all malevolent. They very much exemplify the "indifferent Others" that Lovecraft's works were all about. Then there are the true terrifying Others of the story, the ones that destroyed the Yith, who are most definitely menacing. Though, at the same time it's one of the more "explained" stories, and so probably has the least horror to it, save at the very last.

Then again, I also quite liked Reanimator, and for different reasons. While many of Lovecraft's stories dealt with horrors from without that man never sees, and indeed may live better for being in blissful ignorance of, Reanimator was all about the horror that man brings upon himself. I suppose you could argue that many of his protagonists did bring their fates upon themselves, by searching for knowledge that they ought not to have. Dr. West is a bit different, though, at least in my opinion. He doesn't just discover the agency of his undoing, he actively creates it, and the monsters that come for him are, ultimately, very human themselves. I think it makes for a very strong story of the evils that man visits upon himself and his fellows, which is an especially interesting contrast beside stories that deal so heavily with the fear of the Unknown - with incomprehensible beings, and familiar things twisted into that which is frightening and strange.