Is DD based on a specific Lovecraft story?

[Fiercest Tuna]

Or just in the Lovecraftian universe?

[Ichthyic]

more the latter. and plenty of other stuff tossed in there too.

[DasaKamov]

It doesn't have *any* connection to the actual Lovecraft mythos (nor that of Robert Chambers, who wrote similiar "eldritch horror" stories.) Rather, Darkest Dungeon is heavily inspired by that theme and genre - the enemies, monsters and environments are unique to the imaginations of the folks at Redhook Studios. :)

[Nakos]

mm... Mike Mignola's Hellboy had some influence too. Both in terms of art style and in terms of thematic content.

[Sir Francis]

The fish people are directly inspired by the fishfolk of "shadow over innsmouth"
The ghoul is a perfect visualisation of "the outsider"
Undead necromancers reviving the dead forever can be found in "Herbert West, Reanimator"
a "puzzling Trapezohedron" plays a key role in "the haunter in the Dark"
Pig people, in halls under an ancient mansion can be found in "the rats in the walls"
Eldrich, human consumin fungi are found in "the shunned house"
The swine king and wilbur are an obvious reference to the titular "Dunwich Horror"

[KnightwhosaysNi]

DD takes concepts and characters from all over the Lovecraft ouvre, it's moreso that like the commenter above said, it's individual things that are being directly taken from Lovecraft stories. The one significant exception is the The Color of Madness DLC which is more or less The Color Out of Space but with more action.
Besides that, there are numerous other inspirations for the lore and characters, the most obvious being the Collector as a reference to The King in Yellow.

[Determined Man]

Nah, just a hentai or two.

[Morphic]

Originally posted by 𝔉𝔯𝔞𝔫𝔠𝔦𝔰:

The fish people are directly inspired by the fishfolk of "shadow over innsmouth"
The ghoul is a perfect visualisation of "the outsider"
Undead necromancers reviving the dead forever can be found in "Herbert West, Reanimator"
a "puzzling Trapezohedron" plays a key role in "the haunter in the Dark"
Pig people, in halls under an ancient mansion can be found in "the rats in the walls"
Eldrich, human consumin fungi are found in "the shunned house"
The swine king and wilbur are an obvious reference to the titular "Dunwich Horror"

Recently reread most of Lovecraft's work during October for the spooky scaries and I have to agree with your assessment.

Pretty much a lot of stuff in DD is directly inspired by Lovecraft's stories. While not everything is a 1:1 comparison, there's a lot that is, IMO, a homage to his actual stories.

Anyone interested should definately think about picking up a book or two of his, just the other day I saw a "Best of Lovecraft" book that had most of his famous stories in 1 book for $20.

[Nakos]

The Color Out of Space is still one of the most chilling stories I've ever read.

[jonnin]

In the heyday of RPG and D&D there was a lovecraft game called call of cuthulu, think it was popular in the late 80s and is still alive. It was a lot like D&D but your heros slowly went crazy (like the stress mechanic here) and it had modern weapons (20s era modern, of course, so tommy guns and 1911s and such).

[Skinny Pete]

Originally posted by jonnin:

In the heyday of RPG and D&D there was a lovecraft game called call of cuthulu, think it was popular in the late 80s and is still alive. It was a lot like D&D but your heros slowly went crazy (like the stress mechanic here) and it had modern weapons (20s era modern, of course, so tommy guns and 1911s and such).

Usually, the kind of characters you played didn't have access to huge amounts of firepower, so avoidance and outsmarting enemies was more important. That said, it was occasionally fun to have something like mobsters vs. cultists and just have a huge bloodbath.

In general, though, if you went all Leeroy Jenkins on stuff like shoggoths you were going to have a really short game.

The stress mechanic was also a lot more fatal. There were very few ways (and in many campaigns none at all) to restore sanity and once it hit 0 you were an NPC.

There was some pretty powerful magic available to PCs but generally the more you dealt with the sources of it, usually books, the more your sanity went down the toilet. I've seen more than one campaign end because someone with the power to call down something like Azathoth lost his mind and actually did it.

[CrackerjackTiming]

Originally posted by Skinny Pete:

Originally posted by jonnin:

In the heyday of RPG and D&D there was a lovecraft game called call of cuthulu, think it was popular in the late 80s and is still alive. It was a lot like D&D but your heros slowly went crazy (like the stress mechanic here) and it had modern weapons (20s era modern, of course, so tommy guns and 1911s and such).

Usually, the kind of characters you played didn't have access to huge amounts of firepower, so avoidance and outsmarting enemies was more important. That said, it was occasionally fun to have something like mobsters vs. cultists and just have a huge bloodbath.

In general, though, if you went all Leeroy Jenkins on stuff like shoggoths you were going to have a really short game.

Whenever I ran Call of Cthulhu, the players tended to make hot dog-necked ex-soldier or mobster type characters so they could have guns and such, and this universally ended in disaster. A lot of the modules that I happened to use involved a monster with hypnotic or mind control powers, and it'd just mentally take control of the dumb guy toting the submachine gun and make him mow everyone else down before turning it on himself. Or else they'd confront the vampire or alien or whatever and immediately find that their earthly weapons are completely ineffective.

You're supposed to play pasty, bloodless scholars and academics who know a lot of esoterica but immediately have a fit of the vapors and pass out when anything remotely dangerous happens precisely for this reason. Most of the heroes in Darkest Dungeon would not fare well at all in Call of Cthulhu, besides the Antiquarian and Occultist obviously.

Originally posted by Nakos:

The Color Out of Space is still one of the most chilling stories I've ever read.

At the Mountains of Madness is the Lovecraft story I find creepiest. I don't really get why the internet seems to be continually trying to make shoggoths cute and cuddly or whatever, except that the internet is the internet.

I do really like the Color of Madness DLC as an homage to Colour Out of Space though, even if I'm not the biggest fan of the Sleeper as a boss.

[Morphic]

Huh, all this talk of Call of Cthulhu makes me want to check it out. Only thing I've played that sounds remotely like it is Mansions of Madness and Arkham Horror, played that a ton. Really fun playing Mansions with people who have no clue about Lovecraft.

[tuxdelux]

The HP Lovecraft Literary Society has a couple of audio dramas available at no-cost, at the moment. Their "Dark Adventure Radio Theater - Rats in the Wall" will remind you of the open animation to Darkest Dungeon. Lot of nice audio on their website, to give you something else to hear while grinding for trinkets.

[PsychoDino]

Originally posted by weskr:

Or just in the Lovecraftian universe?

no

[Brosef Iosif]

I think an important note is that the stress and affliction mechanic in DD has been build kinda specifically as an opposite as how usual Lovecraft stories devolves into madness.

In those, characters typically have a pretty firm sense of how reality operates, being doctors, university people and intellectuals in general. This is challenged but first resisted in the novel up until a dramatic breaking point where the character's own ideas suddenly collapse and the character is thus, left broken by a revelation which shatters his mind, showing him both how horrible reality truly is, but also how far wrong he was.

In DD, stress is meant to represent the weariness of battle, where the tension of the fight accumulates. The fight themselves aren't necessarily breaking points (though particularly tough ones can be), it's rather a slow momentum that adds up right up into a crisis. Yet even then, you may have to fight passed that. It's ultimately recoverable.

Of course, this is largely a matter of medium. Short novels with a strong reliance on narrative twists compared to a video game where of course the centrality of player's agency and the typical Health Points mechanic push two very different manner of approaching roughly the same topic, the human's mind pushed to the limits of its resistance.