I got the HorrorBabble audio of "The Black Stone" and listened to it on the commute this morning. Turning the speed to x1.5, I had just enough time to finish it before getting to work. "The Black Stone" is, perhaps ironically, one of the absolute best Lovecraft stories, and yet it wasn't written by Lovecraft, but by Robert E. Howard. It has none, or at least very little of Howards' typical masculine "fight instead of flight" reaction that often makes his stories contrast with Lovecraft's, and could be one of HP's himself in many respects... but it isn't. If you haven't ever read it, you absolutely should. I have several copies of it in several different books, but the audio version I just listened to is free on YouTube (and I believe Spotify too), and quite well done. My favorite print version is in The Cthulhu Stories of Robert E. Howard, another book I strongly recommend to any fan of Yog-Sothothery.
Gemini may have hallucinated into giving me answers about "The Black Stone" but I utilized its Nano Banana 2 image generator (since both Grok and ChatGPT were waiting on the reset) to give me this illustration of the story. It's missing a few details; I didn't think the naked sacrificial girl would make the cut of the built-in AI censors, so I didn't even ask for it, and it over-exaggerated the snake-like features of the cultists, a nod I was trying to make to Howard's other excellent (yet more sword & sorcery-like) Lovecraftian story "Worms of the Earth." It's often believed among fans that the titular Worms and the cultists of this story are supposed to be the same sub-human beings. I'll take the exaggeration. I have snake cultists going on in my Eltdown Fens already anyway.
In any case, I haven't done a lot of work on my supercut; I may have to finish it on Saturday if I haven't already by then, or even Sunday morning before church, but I'll get it done this weekend. I promise! I'll also finish in the next day or two the game book I'm reading (the 3e version of Oriental Adventures) and hopefully this week I can push to finish up Prisoner of the Horned Helmet, the novel I've been reading (except I haven't picked it up in three weeks or more). And, with any luck, Princes of the Apocalypse too, which I'm getting reasonably close to finishing. But I especially want to finish that supercut post and have the Cult of Undeath all finished up. Again. Now in new and revised under new management status.
I'm still trying to think a little bit about the Strangers, though. How do you do classic X-files style UFO mythos stuff in a fantasy setting? I think that the Strangers aren't from outer space, obviously, but from some place very much like the Plane of Shadow, or Shadowfell for all you youngsters who only know it from 4e or 5e. When the Strangers shift into the Plane of Shadows, they can travel very quickly, and it creates a "light echo" that bounces around in the air or even in the sky in the normal world, very much like the fast-moving lights associated with UFOs. Except, of course, that nothing is physically there... it's just an echo in the real world of movement in a coterminous dimension. They also have cysts that are like little sections of the Underdark, but in the Shadow Plane, which are their lairs where they take abductees for experimentation.
I wonder if I need to actually figure out what the Strangers are up to? I mean, UFO folklore is still a fascinating subject even without any real answers as to what it's all supposed to mean. The X-Files itself never really completely answered what was up either, partly because Chris Carter thought he could keep making bank forever, so he declined to actually end any story elements, unfortunately. (The show would have been dramatically better if it lasted half as long, and was always intended to wrap up satisfactorily. That's one thing that streaming shows have finally brought to our TV watching in America; shows that aren't mean to be open ended and keep going until they stop making money at which point they get abruptly canceled.) But I'll keep thinking about that the next few days before I actually post my supercut. I'd like to have at least some idea of what's going on, even if I don't explain literally everything.
The bandit/Grendling threat is otherwise the least developed leg of this many-legged stool, so I need to think on that too. Maybe it doesn't have to be something that's deep, though. While people are either carrying or chasing the periapt, it stirs up all kinds of supernatural, which in turn stirs up the Grendlings, and they attack anyone passing through. I can make that pretty creepy with drums coming out of the forest, and finding remnants of cannibal attacks where people have been "gnawed upon" to use Antonio Banderas' character's line from The 13th Warrior. Ambushes and chases through the woods, until the players (well, their characters) either fight them off or successfully run away; it may well be sufficient without having to add anything else to that. But I'll continue to think on that and see if there's anything I want to add or not. Having the Wendaks be related to the people of the Black Stone, and therefore related to Otto von Szell's activities after all. I do like tying more of this stuff together, which probably makes it feel more like a campaign and less like just disconnected adventures that happen to be interwoven by fiat.
Anyway, this post ended up being a bit of me brainstorming with myself, but that works well for me, so cool. Now I have a record of what I want to do before I get to my big supercut post, which will overwrite and supersede any previous stuff I may have said about Cult of Undeath.
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