fulfilling Cthulhu: Death May Die

[Maledrakh]

I got my shipment yesterday. The minis are high quality (for board game plastic), relatively little mould lines or bendy bits (and I find the feel of the plastic to be very similar to Bones Black).

The details are crisp and clear,  the sculpting great.

However, like all CMON minis, they are scaled slightly too small for my tastes. I find myself thinking how much better this would have been if only they were scaled more like Reaper minis. i.e. slightly larger, slightly deeper details and therefore easier to paint.

 

The designs on some of the mythos monsters are a bit different from what one might expect, most are still recognizable (but Dagon = Nessie?) but I like them. New takes and variants are a good thing.

At the same time, I can't really shake the feeling that CMON does not really get the subject matter...but that might be the marketers... "Investigators fthagn!" yeah. that right there is a bit of a giveway.

 

Also, I did get all hyped and got the big Cthulhu. And I do have a slight case of buyers remorse as it really is far too big. I  mean, it is nice and all, but where to put it?

Edited November 28, 2019 by Maledrakh

[Beagle]

5 hours ago, Maledrakh said:

 

Also, I did get all hyped and got the big Cthulhu. And I do have a slight case of buyers remorse as it really is far too big. I  mean, it is nice and all, but where to put it?

That's easy. In my house 

[CashWiley]

I take all "Lovecraftian" design with a grain of salt. Very little of it is.

That said, it's typical decent cmon plastic, with all the plusses and minuses.

[Talae]

I just noticed when pricing my box for shipping that the original invoice was listed at 7.0lbs when it is 15.0lbs. That is quite the difference...and about triple the cost for me to ship.

[warlordgarou]

I got mine the other day (before Thanksgiving), but haven't actually looked at it yet.  I did go get the big Cthulhu out of storage though.  I plan on unboxing it at an all-night charity event this weekend. . . . because 3 am is the perfect time to learn how to play a game, right?

[pcktlnt]

Mine arrived and loving the box art. They said I have a second portion shipping? Is that right?

[Inarah]

1 hour ago, pcktlnt said:

Mine arrived and loving the box art. They said I have a second portion shipping? Is that right?

 

What did you order?  I got my core box and the Unspeakable box packed together.  The giant Cthulhu shipped months ago. 

 

 

[mvincent]

On 11/27/2019 at 11:27 PM, Maledrakh said:

I did get all hyped and got the big Cthulhu. And I do have a slight case of buyers remorse as it really is far too big. I  mean, it is nice and all, but where to put it?

 

I thought I might have buyers remorse (after all: Sandy Peterson has stated that at 28mm scale, a real person could serve as Cthulhu). But now I'm very glad to have purchased it; it's easily the most epic of all the miniatures I own!

 

My condolences to those without a garage or attic for storage. Maybe just put it on the exercycle that's gathering dust?

[odinsgrandson]

On 12/13/2019 at 4:13 PM, mvincent said:

 

I thought I might have buyers remorse (after all: Sandy Peterson has stated that at 28mm scale, a real person could serve as Cthulhu). But now I'm very glad to have purchased it; it's easily the most epic of all the miniatures I own!

 

My condolences to those without a garage or attic for storage. Maybe just put it on the exercycle that's gathering dust?

 

 

My R'lyeh Rising has a prominent place in our living room- with candles on either side of him.


On the size- Sandy Peterson is wrong. 

There's a thing about constantly making big monsters even bigger, and then even bigger and bigger and it gets really silly.  Why do Kaiju of today need to be an order of magnitude larger than they were in the '60s?  Peterson says NOW that Cthulhu would be six foot tall, but give him a few years and he'll claim Cthulhu should be played by your house.

 

 

 

The scale on Cthulhu that is given in the Lovecraft is mostly just "vaguely large" (Lovecraft is vague first and foremost).   The closest thing to a specific size that is given is the fact that- a yacht is able to split his head apart.  I have a gaming scale yacht, and it seems about right.  If he were six feet tall, I rather think that the image only gets more comical (maybe Cthulhu's head is like a big balloon).

It should also be noted that the two foot Cthulhu already dwarfs every living creature that we know about.  It is a lot bigger than even the lagest of dinosaurs, the biggest estimates for Megalodon and the blue whale (whose length is between two thirds and three quarters of Cthulhu's height).

[mvincent]

3 hours ago, odinsgrandson said:

On the size- Sandy Peterson is wrong. 

 

Heh: that's kinda like saying Gygax was wrong about the size of the Tarrasque. Sandy Peterson is the source material material for CoC (which inspired most of the Cthulhu craze). He might've been inspired by certain sources, but I don't really read this Lovecraft guy you speak of ;) (who was sorta imprecise anyway when describing Cthulhu as "miles high").

 

 

[ced1106]

Reddit, as usual. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Lovecraft/comments/329emb/how_tall_is_cthulhu/

 

Quote

Regardless, rather than relying on descriptions by terrified and unreliable witnesses, a better approach might be to compare Cthulhu's height relative to things we can more accurately guess the dimensions of. When Cthulhu slides into the water in order to pursue the Alert, we are told that: "The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht".

Bear in mind that the "yacht" in this case is a large and heavily-armed commercial steam yacht, not a luxury yacht as we might think of when using the word today. And, of course, this doesn't mean that Cthulhu is shorter than a yacht; the majority of Cthulhu's flabby bulk would be underwater at this point, which is why Cthulhu's head isn't towering over the vessel.

In nautical measurements, the "Freeboard" is the distance from the waterline to the upper deck level. Looking at ship schematics from the time, a typical steam yacht in 1920 might have had a freeboard of roughly 5 metres. So, let's say for the sake of expedience that Cthulhu's head is about 5 metres tall.

Now, Lovecraft once sketched Cthulhu:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Cthulhu_sketch_by_Lovecraft.jpg

It's a bit difficult to gauge the proportions by looking at that sketch (particularly given that Cthulhu is in a crouching position) but I would guess that Cthulhu's body is about 8-10 Cthulhu heads in height when in a standing position.

So, in conclusion, Cthulhu is possibly (with a huge margin of error) somewhere between 130 to 160 feet tall.

And, yes, this is a completely meaningless exercise. The mere sight of Cthulhu would have driven Godzilla mad.

 

[CashWiley]

To be fair, I'm pretty sure Howard didn't care about any of that and would be sad about the fandom seeming to miss the point of his writing almost entirely.

I'm fascinated by the propensity for debating meaningless minutiae online.

[odinsgrandson]

16 hours ago, mvincent said:

 

Heh: that's kinda like saying Gygax was wrong about the size of the Tarrasque. Sandy Peterson is the source material material for CoC (which inspired most of the Cthulhu craze). He might've been inspired by certain sources, but I don't really read this Lovecraft guy you speak of ;) (who was sorta imprecise anyway when describing Cthulhu as "miles high").

 

 

 

 

- Gygax is wrong about the size of the Terrasque.  And its appearance and species (it was a dragon from French folklore, and there's a town named after it with a big statue of the Terrasque in the square).  Also, it was taken down by a single bard.


But if we're talking about Peterson in the creation role, I still find him to be an unreliable source.  Kind of like how George Lucas was wrong about MidiChlorians granting force powers.

 

- Lovecraft did describe Cthulhu as Miles High- the viewpoint character in this case was Wilcox who had encountered Cthulhu in a dream.  The Reddit thread uses Johan's journal entry instead, which should be considered a more reliable source (if anyone witnessing Cthulhu can be considered reliable for any facts)

 

16 hours ago, ced1106 said:

Reddit, as usual. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Lovecraft/comments/329emb/how_tall_is_cthulhu/

 

 

That's pretty cool.

To take that a step further, if we say that six feet is represented by thirty milimeters, then a miniature of Cthulhu should be 24-30 inches tall.

That's closer to CMON's 22 inch estimate than Peterson's 72 inch estimate.

Edited December 17, 2019 by odinsgrandson

[mvincent]

22 minutes ago, odinsgrandson said:

Gygax is wrong about the size of the Terrasque.  And its appearance

 

Exactly (mythological speaking). But when it's talked about on say, a gaming miniatures forum, the Gygaxian creation is the default assumption.

  

1 hour ago, CashWiley said:

I'm pretty sure Howard didn't care about any of that and would be sad about the fandom seeming to miss the point of his writing 

 

He'd likely be melancholy without needing a reason. But yeah: I like mythos stuff for the gaming and miniatures: I'm a Peterson fan rather than a Lovecraft one.

 

(..fwiw: I'm pretty sure Cthulhu can vary her size as desired though)

Edited December 17, 2019 by mvincent

[odinsgrandson]

1 hour ago, mvincent said:

 

Exactly (mythological speaking). But when it's talked about on say, a gaming miniatures forum, the Gygaxian creation is the default assumption.

  

 

He'd likely be melancholy without needing a reason. But yeah: I like mythos stuff for the gaming and miniatures: I'm a Peterson fan rather than a Lovecraft one.

 

(..fwiw: I'm pretty sure Cthulhu can vary her size as desired though)

 

 

I'm not certain that Cthulhu can vary in size as desired (not like Nyarlathotep).  But sightings of Cthulhu tend to be accompanied by incomprehensible geometry and a certain malleability of space itself.

The trap door that opens in Call of Cthulhu to let the Great Old One out is described as one of these- the sailors couldn't decide if it was sitting flat against the ground or at a 45 degree angle.

One viewer might see Cthulhu and reason him to be 120 feet tall, and another reason him to be 750 feet tall, and a third reason him to be a mere 20 feet tall and none of them necessarily be wrong.

 

 

 

As for Howard Lovecraft's opinion of us... he hated games.  I doubt he'd approve of us in any way.
Not that I mind, Lovecraft hated a lot of things that I don't (like non-white humans).

Edited December 17, 2019 by odinsgrandson