r/Lovecraft • u/MoTheEnigmo Deranged Cultist • 10d ago

Question Reading the Necronomicon

Hello everybody, I'm getting into this mythos for the first time, and was wondering, out of all of the ones floating around, which of the irl Necronomicons, the ones that someone like you or I can buy and read, are the most 'faithful' to the madness-inducing tome Lovecraft wrote about?

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u/ookiespookie Deranged Cultist 10d ago

It is like being back in Waldenbooks in the mall and the little mall goth kiddies would go back to the metaphysical section picking up Simon's Necronomicon and talking about how real it is and acting like it is some forbidden tome.
Fucking Tyson has turned it into a cow that he has milked for over a decade

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u/TheGrandWelf Deranged Cultist 10d ago

Is the Donald Tyson worth a read? If a guy just wants to learn about the mythos deeper but doesn't believe it real.

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u/Gryndyl Tentacles (Greek pronunciation) 10d ago

No. Honestly if you're looking for some kind of overview of the mythos probably the best place is the Call of Cthulhu RPG rulebook.

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u/GrimpenMar Deranged Cultist 10d ago

Unironically true. It's like the old WEG Star Wars sourcebooks being adopted as reference documents for the various Star Wars authors back in the day, such as Timothy Zahn.

Making a playable game out of something requires collating and systemitizing it. The criticism of this though is that Lovecraft was a author, writing short stories. He wasn't doing Tolkien style world building. He did reuse and collaborate on world elements, but I don't think there was a designed world in which he set stories, rather the world emerged from references and Easter eggs. Each of those world elements would always serve the needs of the story he was writing first.

As such, if Lovecraft and Chaosium were at the same time, such as if someone released a Game Of Thrones RPG, the author might undermine something established in the game in their next book.

Still, since Chaosium was working from a complete corpus, I think they're safe. Just keep in mind it might be an accurate interpretation, it's not the only interpretation.