Headscratchers / Puffin Forest

• Why does Ben use an avatar that doesn't resemble him even remotely?
  • Comedic effect
• I've never played Call Of Cthulhu, so I have no way of knowing if the story Ben used in Creepy Horror RPG Story: Secrets Of The Skeleton Town was one he wrote himself or is an example of whatever Modules are called in that system, but why does the plot treat the various predatory aliens featured in it like they're eldritch abominations on the same tier as the gods and demigods of Lovecraft canon (yes I know that the lines between canon, Expanded Universe, and Fanon are rather blurry in this setting, but that's beside my point)? Sure a swarm of predatory "insects" capable of skeletonizing me in seconds sounds pretty freaking dangerous, but why am I being forced to make San checks just from looking at them? Because they have multiple sets of wings? I've seen mad scientists churn out Mix-and-Match Critters that looked magnitudes freakier than that! Even then, the cases of "sanity loss" actually shown in the video don't go beyond what's normal for cases of PTSD, which, btw, doctors have a regular habit of helping people recover from. Furthermore, there are plenty of bugs native to real-life Earth in rainforrests that will do stuff way more Nightmare Fuel-ey to you than just eat you, like implant eggs under your skin (granted they don't do this in big enough swarms to kill you, but still). I'm sure the first European explorers to encounter these had much the same reaction as the player characters in Ben's story, but I don't think anyone suggested sealing off South Africa. The scientific community would've probably been pretty pissed if they had, so I can only imagine the conniption fit that the biologists in Ben's story would have if word of the PC's deeds gets out, since they'd probably be able to produce the proper protective equipment needed to safely study these things, which need I remind you are FREAKING ALIENS.
  • The central theme of Lovecraftian Horror is that humans are pathetic and alone in the vast universe. Unlike most other sci-fi, the aliens aren't "humans that look slightly different", they are truly alien, in ways we can't even hope to comprehend. The thing that drives people crazy is usually either how impossible is it for them to understand these creatures, or the mind crushing revelation that humans aren't alone in the universe and that we aren't inherently exceptional. While you may still think it's weird, it's a thing with Lovecraft's stories in general, not just Ben's rendition of it.
    • You make humanity sound like it has an Inferiority Superiority Complex and thinks It's All About Me. Furthermore, nobody gets an existential crisis when playing Mass Effect and talking to the hanar or elcor, so why should I get an existential crisis form talking to any other Starfish Alien?
    • The central conceit of Lovecraft lore is that things aren't all about humanity. Humanity exists in a tiny bubble of reason and sanity we've created, but the truth of the matter is it's all based on lies. When faced with the cold truth of reality and how small humanity actually is, the mind breaks. The aliens we see in games are all creations of a human mind which obey human rules and human logic; a true alien violates all of those things.
    • A lot of that comes down to the author. Lovecraft really did have a crushing Inferiority Superiority Complex and was cartoonishly xenophobic and racist even by contemporary standards. There's a list of examples on the Values Dissonance page.
  • One of the common interpretations of eldritch abominations is that what we see isn't what the things actually looks like, it's just the closest thing that our human minds can interpret. Think of it this way: humans are three-dimensional beings that can interpret ideas and entities that are three-dimensional. We literally can't comprehend something that is 4th dimensional because the concept of a 4th dimension does not fit into how we as three-dimensional beings perceive the world around us. That shoggoth sitting in front of me isn't actually an amorphous mass of flesh, teeth, and eyes; it's an eldritch thing that my mind is tearing itself apart trying to rationalize into something that it can properly understand, and the "amorphous mass of flesh, teeth, and eyes" is basically just a placeholder image, the closest thing that my mind can come up with for what that thing actually is.