How it started

 Two in one week?  I must be crazy. To start with any project is to find a good point to build your base upon. Mine was built on the Lovecraftian gods, which, at first, I thought would be easy. When I started this project a year ago I thought there were ten, maybe twenty gods total. That would have been the case if I had stuck with Lovecraft's original plan. Mr. Lovecraft allowed other writers to contribute to his universe which ballooned into a pantheon of nearly a hundred gods and goddesses. Even the gods can be categorized into four parts: Elder gods, Outer gods, Dream gods (the Great Ones), and the Great Old Ones. 

You can probably see how this would be confusing. Why would somone name gods as Great Ones and Great Old Ones? Whatever Lovecraft's categorization may have been is somewhat redundante now as the world has taken a life of it's own. One of the things I've noticed is that very few people contribute to the Elder gods or the Dream gods. Instead, most of the new contributers make up Outer and Great Old Ones. The differences can be explained as Outer gods are the promorial forces. Think of them like the Titans from Greek mythology. Great Old Ones are a mixture of demigods and smaller gods. Dream gods are relegated to the dream cycle of stories and Elder gods are...difficult to categorize. It seems Lovecraft took inspiration from the world's pantheons. August Dereleth, Lovecraft's friend and one of the reasons that Lovecraft exists today, made them appears as the "good guys" of the pantheon. The problem is that Lovecraft rarely made his gods or monsters good or evil. Just because they do something horrible doesn't make them evil. If a man steps on an ant on his way to work, does that make him evil? How does one see evil in a cosmic sense? In the same way, the gods see humans as a curiosity and little more. Who can imagine the thoughts or whims of creatures older than the sun? One of the biggest debates in the community is how the gods saw humanity. Whatever answers Lovecraft may have come up with disappeared with his death and has been overlooked by the writers that came after him.

That's one of the issues I came up while researching this project is this disinterest in gods other than Outer and Great Old Ones. They are the source of many of the nightmare creatures in Lovecrafts world but to focus only on them is to ignore the rest of the pantheon. It feels imbalanced in a way, I wish to address some of that in my own works at a later time.

For me, and this is a view shared by many, it seems that the Great Old Ones are at war with the Elder gods over who will rule the universe and all dimensions. Whatever happened between now and thousands of years ago has ended with many of the Outer gods and Great Old Ones dead, banished, or put to sleep. In my opinion, it looks like the war cost many of the Elder gods their own pantheons. Bast, Nodens, Hypnos, all gods from different pantheons but their constituents remain missing. Perhaps Lovecraft would have added more if he had lived long enough. Perhaps not. For now, this leads me to believe that the pantheons have also disappeared or been destroyed. I'll post more on my thoughts later.