Cult of Undeath

Here's my list of "proto-fronts"; a quick and dirty brainstorm.

• Front #1: Murder of Alpon von Lechfeld, etc. Already done.
• The swamp snake cult, centered around the blinded medusa who instead of petrifying her victims, she hypnotizes them and gradually starts turning them into snake cultists. She's not truly blind, because all of the snakes have eyes too, but you get my drift. Heavily based on Cult of the Reptile God combined with some of the early Age of Worms adventures and the Lovecraft's story The Shadow Over Innsmouth except with lizards and snakes in a swamp instead of fish on the coast.
• Ghouls and other "savage" proto-vampires are also coming out of the swamp in the other direction, westwards into the Bitterwood, and are attacking villages, hamlets, and even hunting lodges frequented by wealthy and powerful. This will replace the werewolf and/or swamp witch idea that I had previously, which was loosely based on one of the adventures of the old Carrion Crown adventure path. Y'know, who whole reason Cult of Undeath was originally created.  This may replace the vampire threat, since I'm going to be treating ghouls as savage proto-vampires, probably ruled by vampires or at least near vampires, not unlike Age of Sigmar's Flesh Courts vampires.
• The Frankenstein monster stuff in Mittermarkt. This is the sad and tragic fate of one of Alpon von Lechfeld's academic correspondents, and important clues to the murder need to be found here... while also dealing with the obvious problems of a rampaging yet cunning monster.
• A mundane threat of highwaymen and bandits making travel between the Copper Hills and Mittermarkt (via Eltdown) dangerous; not to mention all of the crap going on in Eltdown mentioned above. Maybe this one can get up into the Sabertooth Mountains itself, and at least have a different environmental theme too.

Many of these, especially the fifth one is also extremely anemic, but maybe that's OK at this stage; I can come up with more as I develop it.

One thing that I thought of, and I don't know if it's a separate front, or something that I maybe combine in some way with the highwaymen and bandits, is literal The X-files. I often compare my gaming tastes to that show, but I'm talking more about theme and tone and the whole shadowy conspiracies and the PCs being like Mulder and Scully in the sense that they either have a loose roving commission from the Ranger Corps Shadow Division, or they are actually supernatural bounty hunters. But I mean more specifically The X-files; my wife, in a maybe somewhat uncharacteristic move, saw an episode or two of the Netflix documentary Investigation Alien and thought I'd enjoy watching it with her. Neither one of us "wants to believe," to paraphrase Mulder, nor did we find the documentary super compelling in terms of convincing us of anything we didn't already believe. It was interesting rather than convincing, but that's all I wanted it to be. However, a strange thought kept occurring to me as I was watching it; what if my Old Night game incorporated the spookier less hoaky parts of the UFO mythos as a front? I mean stuff like cattle mutilations, missing time, abductions, etc. How can I incorporate this kind of stuff into a low fantasy, dark fantasy game, that approaches but doesn't actually reach grimdark?

One thing for sure is that it won't be aliens. But do I need to actually construct an alternative mythology that mirrors the alien mythology but in a Lovecraftian (I suppose?) fantasy context? Something like mindflayers, but new, unique and less D&D? I'm not sure. It clearly bears some more thought and pondering for me to come up with something that works for me, but which is clearly and obviously based on the UFO mythos; clearly and obviously enough so that no player seeing it will miss the obvious reference, even without it feeling like it's simply UFOs brought in exactly as is to fantasy. No flying saucers, etc. and if there are grays, they'll be "fantasied up" rather than "science fictioned" up.

One alternative is something a la the Shaver Mysteries; underground deros (or derros) or something else even more alien and strange, but acting more overtly like the UFO mythos than like D&D derros, which have become pretty mainstreamed by now, and have somewhat lost their connection to whatever inspirational root first caused them to be created. This seems a little too obvious to me, perhaps, but then again, it is also probably the best way to "fantasy up" the UFO mythos. Or maybe gray-like aliens come out of my own version of the Plane of Shadow, or ShadowFell, or Underground (from Stranger Things) all of which are essentially the exact same concept. Then again, this isn't too dissimilar to Lovecraft's own take on underground horrors, as in his "The Mound" and "The Nameless City" stories already.

One thing that is both Lovecraftian and hinted at in the documentary we watched was the possibility of an underwater rather than underground source for the "aliens." Another one was that they were evolved post-human descendants of us traveling in time. That one kind of blew my mind; not because it isn't ridiculous, but because it's quite an interesting science fiction concept. But how I can adapt it to fantasy is probably ... honestly, I probably can't. But I'll keep thinking, pondering and noodling on this stuff for a little while before I go hard on a solution.