Yog-Sothothery and AI

I've had fun doing the New Pantheon series of posts, although it's taken longer than I thought and I'm... ⅗s of the way through, I suppose. Two more posts to go to finish it. I've done a few things differently for those posts. I have a lot of AI generated images, which isn't new for me, and I generated most of them myself, but I did do some image searches of AI images that other people have generated and then uploaded somewhere. Not that I would feel bad about using images found online in any case, but I especially don't feel bad about using someone else's AI generated images, because... they're just AI generated images.

No, what is new is that I also used ChatGPT to generate drafts of some of the text. I didn't have detailed descriptions of any of the gods of the New Pantheon, but I knew more or less what I wanted them to be, so I threw a prompt in for each and asked it to whip up a little description, and for the most part, I liked my results well enough that it seemed easier to copy and paste and then do an editing pass (more for style than for content, but some of each) which I've never really done before. But I found it a useful shortcut. I suspect that as I did more of them, my editing got more radical, so that from a style perspective the later ones sound less like AI generated text. But, none of them are truly AI generated text, I used AI to generate a first draft, and because AI text usually reads like it was written by ... well, by AI, I had to edit those drafts anyway. I don't know that there's a reason to us this tool again in the near term, but I'm at least sufficiently happy with the results that I'll finish the next two New Pantheon posts that way, and keep the tool in my back pocket just in case I'm interested in using it for something else again. I'm curious if I use it to flesh out just a bit my rather high level and lacking in details 5x5 Fronts if the juice will be worth the squeeze. The important part of those is the high level outline; I don't expect the details to all be innovative and unique, so delegating some of that to ChatGPT is probably fine. We'll see what it does. 

I do get a bit annoyed with people who reflexively knee-jerk away from the word AI. Just because something is AI doesn't necessarily mean that it's useless slop. Just because something isn't AI doesn't mean that most of it isn't useless slop too. In general, my own personal experience is that AI mostly generates slop, but at least its slop of consistent quality, about the median in what is otherwise a sea of non-AI slop. And if you take AI as the baseline from which to improve upon, then you're already at least at the median of most of what is produced anyway. Not a bad place to start. Especially if you actually are capable of improving it and can use it to accelerate your output. And using AI to generate images for blog posts, YouTube videos and whatnot is now becoming pretty commonplace. AI is coming, no matter what you think of it. It's not going to live up to the hype of the boosters who claim it is a genius robot intelligence that can do everything better than you can, but it will 1) democratize certain tasks that are otherwise out of reach, like getting "good enough" art to make videos and blog posts more visually appealing (and eventually probably replace a lot of book covers and other applications, and 2) be a useful tool that can accelerate the productivity and output of people who find narrow opportunities to use it and can do so in a way that still gives them high quality output. I think it will really accelerate novel writing, for instance, turning details outlines into (admittedly, poor) first drafts. But that's still a major step and will cut a lot of time from people who are writing. I've also seen from Castalia Press, for example, that with a good editor, it can rapidly translate foreign works into English, for instance.

For instance, here's an AI rendering of my disco Sith Lord on Korriban from SWTOR, just for the heckuvit. 

I will also note that using AI this way is often kind of frustrating. I had to put in a few edits to the prompt and still didn't really get exactly what I wanted, but eh. It's close enough. It's a tool that gives interesting, yet not perfect results, obviously.

Anyway, I didn't mean to write a post about AI. I'm actually not sure what I intended to write a post about. Something vaguely Yog-Sothothery, I believe. So let's do that. 

I've been reading SPCM Sagas, i.e., adventure path or campaign-like products by Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos, a now defunct company that briefly made a bunch of 5e D&D products that brought Lovecraftian elements directly into D&D. Unlike other products he's worked on, such as Call of Cthulhu itself, which he created for Chaosium and which was published in 1981 (apparently, his first proposal was a Dreamlands supplement for RuneQuest, but they decided to go all in and just do a Cthulhu game whole hog. CoC also probably deserves a lot of the credit often given to Tracy Hickman for popularizing what later became known as the trad style of gaming in the earliest 80s. Don't get me wrong; it already existed prior to that, but because of CoC, Ravenloft, Dragonlance, and more, the style became one that publishers openly catered to and it basically became the mainstream style within the hobby from the earliest 80s to, arguably, still today.) Anyway, in the SPCM stuff, it's not really horror, it's really just straight up 5e D&D, which is pretty anti-horror, with Lovecraftian elements grafted on top of it, sometimes awkwardly, in my opinion.

And in fact that's what I want to get to. Sure, the Yig Snake Granddaddy campaign that I just read prominently features serpent-men, Yig (obviously), Elder Things and the Great Race of Yith. All of the SPCM Sagas prominently feature something from Lovecraft's Mythos; Ghoul Island was ghouls, Ghatanathoa, and Deep Ones, etc. The next one takes place on Yuggoth and prominently features mi-go. Etc. and etc. But the reality is that D&D always did have perfectly viable Lovecraftian entities that are unique, but just as good as anything Lovecraft himself wrote.

Mind flayers, for instance, first made their appearance in 1975 in The Strategic Review #1, the precursor magazine to Dragon Magazine. They became more official in 1976's publication of Eldritch Wizardry, the third supplement for D&D following Dave Arneson's Blackmoor and Gygax's own Greyhawk. Lots of other elements from the early game are vaguely Lovecraftian too; Juiblex and all of the oozes certainly had at least some nod to the shoggoths (also more immediately and obviously to the famous 1958 b-movie The Blob. The biggest problem wasn't that the elements weren't there, it was more that the assumed gameplay had little to do with Lovecraftian horror, and they were reconceived, as was everything in early D&D, as gameable challenges.

By the time we get around to thinking of doing something different, mindflayers, for instance, had been in D&D so long and were so familiar, as were other very strange "Lovecraft-like" monsters like the beholder, that they were familiar and didn't have that Lovecraftian feel to them anymore. Of course, the problem is that Lovecraft's own creations have taken on that same problem due to being heavily promoted in the gaming sphere. Call of Cthulhu is probably the most popular game (over time, at least) that isn't D&D or directly D&D derived), and Cthulhu himself, partly as a consequence of his saturation in nerd culture has become a bit of a joke or meme. The new minions movie in theaters right now for families heavily features Cthulhu, for instance. And a title that's clearly derivative of Dungeons & Dragons, for what it's worth.

So yeah, I don't think that Elder Things, the Great Race of Yith or mi-go are particularly compelling as Lovecraftian monsters honestly; if I'm going to do Lovecraftian, I'd just as soon see all new, all original monsters. And apparently, that's exactly what David "Zeb" Cook thought when he wrote "I1: Dwellers of the Forbidden City," one of his early products with TSR after being hired. This came out in 1981, and was specifically designed to be a Conan-esque jungle adventure mostly featuring yuan-ti, which it famously introduced. This is already Lovecraftian, or at least from the Lovecraft Circle, bearing more of a resemblance to Howard's creation from "The Shadow Kingdom" (alleged to be the first "proper" sword & sorcery story), but almost off-hand, as an aside, it introduced the aboleth. The aboleth was intentionally written as a nod to Lovecraft, but it's also a unique and new creature, not something like a D&D interpretation of a mi-go. Aboleth have kicked around in D&D ever since; they were added (like their co-module colleagues the yuan-ti) to AD&D explicitly in Monster Manual II, and have been in D&D ever since, getting pulled "forward" to the original Monster Manual for 3e and beyond. They also featured heavily in some 2e modules like Night Below, a big box-set module that's more like an entire campaign, where the aboleths are actually the end villains. They even featured in a novel trilogy during the 4e era. 

But clearly the best and most iconic aboleth product is the chapter on them in Lords of Madness, a late 3.5 era product that is considered by many to be one of the best products from the entire 3e era run (myself included.)

Now I'm not sure that aboleths have the same pop culture cache as some Lovecraftian entities, even within the D&D subculture. But they are just as good at being Lovecraftian as anything Lovecraft himself created, and actually, for my money, they're even better. They're not so alien as to come across as silly, but are sufficiently alien to come across as horrifying.

Reading

I finished the last part of Yig Snake Granddaddy by SPCM, a four-part 5e D&D campaign that goes with the SPCM book. While I didn't really like the first campaign that much, Ghoul Island, this one I thought was a much more compelling concept, and it really kind of made me more in the mood to focus on snakes, snakemen, reptilian enemies, alien enemies, etc. The concept is that there's some serpentman dude who's slowly enacting a phased ritual which is "prehistoricizing" an area, bringing back dinosaurs, and, because it's Lovecraft, also bringing back Yithians and Elder Things, and their cities, which were there back in the Mesozoic. The campaign had a few different subthemes, or aesthetics, maybe—part of it was a kind of Lost World or King Kong like exploration of a wilderness full of dinosaurs and other exotic wildlife hazards, part of it was a kind of "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks" with the Yithians in their city, that had very science-fictiony elements. In fact, kind of prosaic science fiction elements, honestly; should have been more alien! But still; not a lot of D&D campaigns tread that particular water, so it was interesting. And there was the "invasions" of the Elder Things city which was more overtly Lovecraftian horror, with their shoggoth break-out going on and all kinds of things like that, as well as the invasion of the city that the serpent-folk were attempting to conquer. 

This isn't really how I imagined it, but hey, a quick Grok prompt, and it's something for some visual interest.

Anyway, while I obviously didn't love every detail, because I never do of anyone else's campaign, this was still one that I found relatively appealing and interesting, and I had more fun reading it than not. This is Saga two of six; I'm not going to start the next one for a little while because I want to read at least another full Paizo Adventure Path (maybe two) and a 5e campaign (maybe two) before I turn back to this again, but the next one is called Dark World and involves getting the characters sent to Yuggoth to be in exile and try and find their way home, I believe. In fact, I can confirm that. I just did a google search (which these days is really usually a Gemini query) and got this AI summary of all of the campaigns in the series, all of which I'll eventually read and discuss briefly here.

The Cthulhu Mythos Sagas by Petersen Games are structured as 4-act massive adventure paths. They are listed below in their chronological release order:

    1. Ghoul Island (Late 2019)

• Core Entities: Ghatanothoa (The First-Born of Cthulhu) and Deep Ones.
• Themes: Apocalyptic dread, isolation, decay, and local cult infiltration.
• Topics: The story starts with a shipwrecked party arriving on the remote, tropical island of Farzeen. It begins as a localized island survival mystery but escalates into a frantic battle against an ancient undead threat. Players must stop a apocalyptic cult attempting to wake an entity slumbering deep beneath the ocean floor.

    2. Yig Snake Granddaddy (2020)

• Core Entities: Yig (The Father of Serpents) and Serpentfolk.
• Themes: Prehistoric survival, lost worlds, and biological devolution.
• Topics: This campaign plunges players into a primordial landscape dominated by dinosaurs, pterodactyls, and ancient reptilian masterminds. The plot focuses on a fanatical serpentfolk cult trying to revert the modern world back into its prehistoric state. Players must navigate primal wildernesses while fighting to maintain their humanity against ophidian corruption.

    3. Dark Worlds (2020)

• Core Entities: The Mi-Go (Fungi from Yuggoth) and the Zepzeg.
• Themes: Cosmic isolation, planar displacement, and techno-organic horror.
• Topics: Triggered by a mad ruler's catastrophic arcane ritual, the adventurers are violently ripped from their home plane. They find themselves cast across the cosmos and marooned on the nightmare alien world of Yuggoth. The saga handles themes of survival in a physically hostile environment under the unsettling observation of the insectoid Mi-Go.

    4. The Big Sleep (Early 2021)

• Core Entities: Tsathoggua (The Sleeper of N'kai).
• Themes: Political instability, global doom, and pervasive lethargy.
• Topics: Cultists threaten to unleash a worldwide curse that plunges civilization into a supernatural, un-awakening slumber. Players must navigate the fracturing political landscapes of kingdoms and empires to assemble an army. It culminates in an active, macro-level war to prevent the ravenous Great Old One from consuming all living things on Earth.

    5. Have You Found It? (Mid 2021)

• Core Entities: The King in Yellow (Hastur).
• Themes: Paranoia, political intrigue, and infectious madness.
• Topics: Confined almost entirely within the massive metropolitan city of Tiarazan, this campaign leans heavily into social investigation and urban mystery. After a series of minor local disturbances, the glowing Yellow Sign appears upon the moon, spreading madness through the populace. Players navigate high-society political treachery and dimensions-warping architecture to stop a young aristocrat's nihilistic plot.

    6. Skin Deep (Early 2022)

• Core Entities: Deep Ones and shifting eldritch infiltrators.
• Themes: Psychological espionage, murder mystery, and hidden rot.
• Topics: The campaign starts as a tense murder investigation tracking a legendary serial killer who seemingly vanished eighty years prior. As clues unfurl, players discover that a shapeshifting race of monsters has deeply infiltrated the governments of rival human kingdoms. The plot shifts into a gritty gauntlet of war mitigation, political maneuvering, and weeding out invisible monsters hiding in plain sight.

Anyway, of that batch, the next one is actually the one that I'm least excited to read, but we'll see. I didn't expect to necessarily like Yig Snake Granddaddy, but that may partly be based on the incredibly stupid name the campaign had. And yet, I found it rather charming when all was said and done, and although I couldn't help but think about how I'd change it, the fact is that while reading it, my mind was often fired up thinking about how to use some of that material that I was reading, so that's exactly what I want to read these things for in the first place, right? It's also interesting to read someone else's take on elements that were very prominent in the Freeport material (serpentmen, Yig, etc.) yet done somewhat differently.

I still believe that, contrary to first, immediate ideas, it's better to do Lovecraftian themes without really borrowing specific Lovecraftian stuff. Yithians and Elder Things in the jungle felt kind of hoaky and fan servicey rather than anything else, honestly. But if they'd been, say, mind flayers and aboleths, done suitably creepy, it could have been just as good if not better, in spite of their prominent nature in D&D. Of course, it's no secret that D&D has always borrowed a lot of elements from the Lovecraft circle... just as it's no secret that it essentially divorced them from their context and just made them monsters. The refrain is that it was up to the DM to make them creepy, if that's what you wanted them to be, but the reality is that hardly anyone ever really thought of them that way.

And these SPCM Sagas, while overtly and heavily Lovecraft Circle influenced, don't really do the themes very well either. It's D&D. You're meant to be, to borrow the TV Tropes expression, "Big damn heroes" saving the day heroically, and at relatively high level, for that matter. The Lovecraftian stuff is more superficial aesthetics than anything else; these are just D&D campaigns. The Dread mechanics are mentioned off-hand several times, but that is just window-dressing too, honestly.

Anyway, so yeah! Paizo Adventure Path (Second Darkness) coming up next, and WotC campaign Princes of the Apocalypse. Then we'll see. I don't want to overcommit on adventure reading. I have other trawls that aren't adventures too that I'll be working in there while I'm doing it.

Snakes, Deep Ones and undead and stuff

I've read half of the Sandy Petersen Cthulhu Mythos Saga #2: Yig Snake Granddaddy. In spite of it's stupid name, and other problems, I like it better than Ghoul Island so far, and it's made me feel more "friendly" towards the concept of snakemen than normal. I've always liked the idea of snakemen, of course, but I was reluctant to do too much with them for a long time, only adding them to the monster list after reading several years ago the Paizo adventure path Serpent's Skull. I'll read that again (once I get to it on the trawl, so not anytime too soon), but even reading what I did of the SPCM made me jones for a bit more snakemen. I pulled out my old Dragon Magazine #305 from way back in 2003 which had a Robin Laws penned Ecology of the Yuan-ti article in it. I've always liked Sertrous at least as much, if not more, than any of the other Elder Evils in the book Elder Evils. I've been as anxious to read the Serpent Kingdoms book in my FR trawl as pretty much anything else on the trawl, honestly. And, of course, "serpentfolk" feature prominently in the Freeport material, which I'm finally getting close to wrapping up on. 

Both Paizo and Green Ronin had to go back to the original Robert E. Howard well for serpentfolk, because Wizards of the Coast neglected to put yuan-ti in the SRDs for either 3e or 5e. I thought this was curious and kind of petty, given that yuan-ti were clearly themselves just remixes of Howard's serpentfolk from stories like "The Shadow Kingdom" and probably degenerate forms in "Worms of the Earth" and also mentioned prominently in the ghost-written Lovecraft story "The Mound".

Anyway, I really like the idea of these prehistoric snake people lurking in the shadows, and I've got them integrated into my own Cult of Undeath campaign, where they take the place of Deep Ones (fish people) on my Innsmouth alternative. Instead of fish people in the ocean near a coastal town, I have snake people in a swamp near a town that's on the edge of the swamp, but otherwise, they play a very similar role. I actually prefer to make the majority of them more like yuan-ti purebloods, i.e., mostly human with only a few reptilian features, like funky snake eyes and a slight greenish tint to their skin or something like that. But there has to be actual, original snake-people too, and I've generated these few images of one of their cities deep in a tropical or at least subtropical forest. 

 Although I'm doing snakemen to replace my Innsmouth, Deep Ones are still important to me. Here's some images. I can't take too much credit for them, even for generating the prompt that made ChatGPT create the image, but I'm using them shamelessly nonetheless.

And undead, of course, are always one of my favorites. Here's a few images. Again, I didn't create these. AI did, but someone else created the prompt. I screen-capped them from a YouTube video just to have a few undead images.

There's a pretty good lore video that just went up recently on Tar-Baphon, the Whispering Tyrant, the great necromancer of the Golarion (Paizo Pathfinder) setting. It also made me want to read some of my Nagash lore, the great necromancer of the Warhammer Old World setting, but I can't find a decent YouTube video of it. I'll probably have to dig around in my boxes to find my old copy of White Dwarf 173, which reproduced most of the lore text from the Warhammer Undead Army book, which came out about that same time (mid-1994.)

Which makes me perhaps want to propose Cult of Undead rather than Curse of the Corsair Coast to my gaming group as an alternative when the flaky ones aren't there. Whatever. All of my campaigns interest me, so I can run any of them. But right now, the snakes and the undead in particular are catching my eye. 

What is "dark fantasy?"

First off, I'm actually having a little bit better luck reading than I thought. Not nearly as much as I'd like, but slightly better than I thought. I'll likely be able to finish Buccaneers of Freeport today, and hopefully finish "Skeletons of Scarwall" before heading back home at the end of the weekend. Not a bad showing for having to travel for a very specific and very busy task that has occupied my free time a lot. I feel like the Freeport Trawl is actually getting close to finishing, although I still have some big chunks to swallow coming up. After I finish Buccaneers, I've got the companions to read. In theory, they should all be more or less the same, as they are about adapting the systemless Freeport setting book to various systems. I'll read the d20 one in detail, but probably skim all of the rest to ensure that I'm not missing anything. They also come with an included small adventure, but again, I believe it's the same for all companions. 

Then I've got I think three small Adamant Press third party adventures, the extremely thick Pathfinder update to the Freeport setting book, and the Pathfinder 1e adventure path. I've not read any of those before, but of course, much of the text of the big setting book should be lifted from the Pirates' Guide, which I've read many times. And once I finish the adventure path, I'm kinda done. Weird to think about.

I might well remove the page that marks the Freeport Trawl once I finish the trawl, since tracking progress will be moot once I'm done. There's a few other products here and there that I think are largely repeats updated to different systems, but I'll skim them to make sure. But that's about it. I have a pdf of the Pathfinder book and I always thought that it was just the Pirates' Guide plus the d20 Companion updated to Pathfinder 1e and mashed together into a single book, but I'm not sure that that's the case. I think the timeline was updated at least, as well as a few other changes that that made, such as a new Sea Lord. I don't know that that justifies me spending quite a bit of money to get a hardcover copy, but maybe it does. I can order one from the Green Ronin store, although it's $75. Quite a lot for a book that no doubt mostly reiterates stuff that I already own in hardcopy. But we'll see. If I really enjoy it and find it to be sufficiently updated to make it worthwhile, maybe I'll order up a copy for future use.

After I finish the Freeport Trawl, maybe I'll try and concentrate a bit harder on the 3e Eberron Trawl to get that one done too, since it's relatively short and finishable. Stuff like the Pathfinder Adventure Paths trawl is not; it's huge and will no doubt take me many years to finish. But I'll continue to at least finish the Adventure Path that I'm in before I turn away from it. 

<  †  >

One thing that Freeport always brings to mind, however, is the inevitable questions on tone, theme, mood and horror. While I like Freeport, and kind of always have, it also isn't really exactly what I want it to be. Nothing that I don't create myself is ever going to be exactly what I want it to be, but Freeport has some relatively big misses, and it's in the form of the words I just used. Chris Pramas, the creator of Freeport, used to work on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying, and it shows. He clearly was trying to recreate in a Dungeons & Dragons milieu the same tone and themes as WHFRP, more or less. But even that wasn't always perfect. I never can tell, with either of them, if they're a darker, edgier fantasy that I'm supposed to take more or less straight, or if it's all a big in-joke full of bad puns and silly pop culture references. It's easier with the Warhammer stuff, as the Brits seem to be better at straddling the line between serious and parody and making something that kind of sort of works as both at once, depending on what aspects of it you're actually looking at. Pramas was much less subtle, and his editorial hand is all over the place, not to mention the specific products that he himself wrote. Sometimes, especially the Rob Schwalb pieces, are pretty straight at being horror-themed fantasy with a dark edginess that's pretty straightforward. Other stuff is so silly that I can't imagine it being present in any game that isn't selling itself as an overt parody a la Epic Movie or the Scary Movie series. The other problem Freeport specifically has in terms of tone is that it's so overtly D&D. In spite of the twist of adding pirates and some Lovecraft, it feels much more overtly D&D in every particular than explicitly D&D settings like Dark Sun or Eberron, or Planescape, etc. even though many of those have that same problem; i.e., they feel like D&D first, and their twist is often a distant second. And finally, of course, is the problem that all Lovecraft interpretations have, in that it usually tends to feel like a Disneyland ride through a Lovecraft country greatest hits rather than an actual horror story. Most of the Lovecraft-themed gaming material feels like this because its trying to too faithfully reproduce elements from the actual stories rather than creating new ideas, new monsters, new entities, etc. like Lovecraft and his circle actually did. Using well-known entities makes them feel like pop culture references more than anything else, and it doesn't work very well. Warhammer, perhaps ironically, does Lovecraftian fantasy better than actual Lovecraftian fantasy because while nothing is overtly Lovecraftian, it has much greater fidelity to the the tone and themes of Lovecraftian horror stories. Albeit, admittedly, without the sciencey angle that often undercuts Lovecrafts' own purposes. 

And maybe that's where I need to take a step back too and talk about what I mean by "dark fantasy"; exactly what themes and tone I want to look into and what I don't, how dark do I mean, how does this relate to the fad of grimdark (which from my perspective seems to be a spent force coasting on inertia, which I predicted would happen soon years ago already anyway.) Let me start by quoting a few of my past posts, in reverse order.

From June 2023: 

I've given plenty of thought to my own embrace—or lack thereof—of grimdark, and I've come to believe that while I like dark fantasy; what I call an equal parts hybrid of fantasy and horror, and I like low fantasy; the grubbier, sword & sorcery or even more "normal" aspect of fantasy rather than larger than life superheroes saving the world, and I like other aesthetic subgenres that are near to grimdark, that grimdark itself is a bridge too far. Two quotes from the Infogalactic article on grimdark highlight why:

Adam Roberts described it as fiction "where nobody is honourable and Might is Right", and as "the standard way of referring to fantasies that turn their backs on the more uplifting, Pre-Raphaelite visions of idealized medievaliana, and instead stress how nasty, brutish, short and, er, dark life back then 'really' was". But he noted that grimdark has little to do with re-imagining an actual historic reality and more with conveying the sense that our own world is a "cynical, disillusioned, ultraviolent place".

Roberts, Adam (2014). Get Started in: Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Hachette UK. p. 42. ISBN 9781444795660.

Liz Bourke considered grimdark's defining characteristic to be "a retreat into the valorisation of darkness for darkness's sake, into a kind of nihilism that portrays right action ... as either impossible or futile". This, according to her, has the effect of absolving the protagonists as well as the reader from moral responsibility.

Bourke, Liz (17 April 2015). "The Dark Defiles by Richard Morgan". Strange Horizons.

I've written before about how much I dislike the George Rape Rape Martin style of storytelling, and how much I disliked my one novel of Joe Abercrombie's that I read. (Although I do like Glen Cook's Black Company. Maybe that's not quite all the way to grimdark, though—just a neighbor of it.)

From two separate posts just a couple of days apart in July 2014:

For much of its existence, the setting has been, to borrow an overly trite term from TV Tropes, basically a crapsack world. I've gradually lost my enthusiasm for that mode of thinking. I guess I've read a little too much of it, and now find the intellectual underpinnings of the notion unappealing. Or maybe I've just hit a few too many who are a few too free with their crapsackiness. When Glen Cook pioneered the notion in The Black Company, and with a bit of Lovecraftian flair to it, it sounded attractive. After reading a bit too much George Martin and Joe Abercrombie (and it's not actually like I read that much of either) I find the crapsack world nihilistic, dreary, and frankly... kinda whiny.

Now granted, horror fiction is still a major influence on [Old Night] and I suspect always will be. But the notion that being heroic, of doing what's right is always the wrong choice... I can't support that kind of paradigm anymore. Not sure that I ever really could, without playing it off for laughs eventually.

[,,,] 

[I]f this bleak, nihilistic, "crapsack" world fantasy is in opposition to "real" fantasy as we have known it, as we grew up on, and as we think of the genre, why is it relatively prevalent?  And why is (at least some of) it relatively popular?  

I think it's perceived by some to be more sophisticated, more mature, etc.  I think this perception is false, however.  Bleakness, nihilism, hopelessness, despair—these are not mature emotions.  This is not the perspective of an adult, it's the perspective of a whiny, angsty, bratty adolescent.  It's not sophisticated and deep, it's merely empty and soul-less.  [Besides,] is it really that popular?  Sure, GRRM is a pretty big deal, and guys like Joe Abercrombie and a few others.  But how much room for more is there?  Is there any nihilistic work that is still read 100 years after being written?  And how much of it can you stand, even if you can stand it, without needing to break for something more light, anyway?

Keep in mind, I'm referring specifically to nihilism, not tragedy.  Although they may resemble each other superficially in many respects, they are not the same.  There's no catharsis at the end of a nihilistic work.  The same is also true of most works of horror fiction—they're not nihilistic (well, some of them are) although certainly they are dark and the end is not usually happy for the protagonists.

[Old Night] is fantasy and horror, not nihilism.  The world is bleak, there are certainly issues that resemble that of a horror fiction story, but characters meet them like horror fiction protagonists. They may not triumph, they certainly don't "win" in a traditional sense, but their heroism can be seen and it has meaning.  Like the bleak fatalism of the Norse sagas, which Tolkien reflected in many ways, it's not purposeless.  It's not senseless.  It's not nihilistic.  This is part of the reason why fantasy is so fundamentally rooted in a romanticized Medievalism.  My own setting has looked in many ways to other romanticized adventurous periods; pirates and Westerns, in particular, but the end result is the same—without that romanticized adventure story baseline, the horror is just bleak nihilism.  It doesn't ring as profound as that of Norse sagas, Shakespearean tragedies, or even more modern works like Dracula or Lord of the Rings.  It would just feel like a tawdry snuff piece.

Old Night should basically have the exact same tone and feel and themes of shows like The X-files and Supernatural, or movies like The Mummy (1999) or Van Helsing. It's sword & sorcery in a kind of old-fashioned way, except modified slightly so that the protagonists aren't such superlative swashbuckling heroes and are a bit more investigative, like the Winchester brothers and Mulder and Scully. Just... set in a fantasy setting rather than the real world of the 90s (X-files) or the 00s/10s (Supernatural). Maybe my labels aren't really the right labels. Grimdark it clearly isn't, although it mingles with some of the same acquaintances. Dark Fantasy is often more or less synonymous with grimdark, but I've used it to refer to something more specifically horror-leaning but without the specific themes of grimdark. But the heroes are, in fact, heroic. They're not superheroes, and it's not a given that they'll win, or that they're better than anyone else in the setting, but they are at least heroic in their attitude, and they're doing the right things for the right reasons, even as it costs them. It's not bright, polite, overly fantastical or overly magical, and never really very whimsical. The differences to modern ideas of high fantasy are going to be pretty obvious, although the differences to older high fantasy like Lord of the Rings will be more subtle. Similarly, the differences to good old fashioned sword & sorcery are more subtle and more a case of how superlative the main characters are in their abilities, as well as more leaning into the tenseness and horror elements rather than gratuitous adventure. 

Ironically, it's more like what the OSR claims to want to be, but since it doesn't focus on dungeon-crawling and I do usually have characters who are meant to be likeable and relatable rather than narcissistic sociopaths it gets there in a way that's quite a bit different. I also think that it's much closer to what Call of Cthulhu games actually are, especially campaigns as opposed to one-shots. Honestly, the idea that many people have of PCs flaming out dying or going insane doesn't really happen all that much in campaign form CoC. It's just an investigative adventure game with some mystery and horror elements bolted in and made integral to the experience. Is "dark fantasy" the correct label for this kind of thing?

I'm honestly not sure anymore. Labels tend to be rather plastic things, especially for concepts that go viral or turn faddish, like dark fantasy and grimdark did. Maybe trying to tie my star to a faddish label was never the right approach, since I was never really completely aligned with it anyway. That's especially true now. Now that the zeitgeist is turning against dark fantasy, maybe you are saying, which would make me look like a bandwaggoner. David Sylvian, the lead singer for the UK 70s and 80s band Japan once said of the New Romantic movement, "There's a period going past at the moment that may make us look as though we're in fashion." Implying that it was just a coincidence that they were trendy in the earliest 80s. Kinda suss, as the kids say. So yeah, I could point to my posts from twelve years ago predicting the decline of grimdark because it went way too far, and reports of grimdark's death are, of course, premature and exaggerated. What can I say? I may be doing the same thing; jumping ship as a faddish label seems to be losing its steam. Then again, regardless of label or my association with or without one, I'm still doing basically the same thing that I've been doing since about 2001 or so in terms of my gaming and fantasy tastes. I've honed in more clearly on what exactly that looks like, but from a higher level, it's always been the same.

Horror in a D&D-like system

I finished two products last night, kind of surprisingly given how busy I was yesterday, although to be fair, I'd been reading them for a little while. Since there is a similar thematic element to them, horror in D&D, it makes sense to bundle this discussion about them. The first was "The Voyage to Farzeen" the first part of the first Cthulhu Saga campaign, Ghoul Island. This, and the other five campaigns, purport to be adventure path-like products. The first five are published in four parts, and the last one is a single volume. The entire campaign says it takes you from level 1 to 15. However, I was shocked that this product claims to take you to level 5. It has about as much content, fluffed up a bit due to art, layout and description, of an old 32-page module that I would barely—at best—expect to take you from level 1 to maybe level 2. If even that much. I know fast leveling is a thing in 5e, but this is absurd. There's no way that this is a five level module in any reasonable context. You don't level up after just one or two minor combats and a few hazards or skill checks. I can see the entire module taking you from level one to level two, although even that would be too fast for me.

There are other things that I didn't love about this module. Like much of the third act of Savage Tide, which I recently reviewed, the authors' idea of "roleplaying" is having to suck up to angry, capricious girl-bosses who will screw you over if you don't bend over backwards to make them feel special. In this case, not only that but the girl-bosses are Haitian voodoo savages, at least according to the illustration. Or it's a "Mythos ghoul" which is really kind of like a dirtier version of a gnoll who eats old bodies. Sigh. And yet the authors of one of these two products, and probably both, have said before that they recognize that one of the reasons people play D&D is to feel powerful... and yet they supplicate to unattractive and unlikeable girl-bosses reflexively? Truly, the scourge of gamma and even delta writers in the industry, while related to the scourge of wokeness and rabid liberal animals is, in fact, truly a scourge.

It wasn't terrible to read, I suppose. It would be terrible to play. I'm very interested in seeing how they continue to develop, but there will probably be less for me to borrow from these campaigns than I hoped. Much like the Strange Aeons adventure path, which I read half of a few years ago, and which is overtly and explicitly based on Lovecraft for Pathfinder, it just didn't fly for me. I'm more and more convinced that the "correct" way to do Lovecraftian adventures is to mimic the themes and tone, and make maybe offhand references to actual Lovecraftian entities, if at all. Use your own monsters. You can do some great Lovecraftian D&D with aboleths or mind-flayers, although they've rarely been done that way, rather than with "Mythos ghouls" or Deep Ones. Overly overt references to Lovecraftian details, and a focus on them, makes them feel more like theme park attractions than anything else. 

But again, I find that I'm curious about the development of the line. I wonder if there's a kind of almost emergent setting related to all of these Cthulhu Mythos Sagas, or adventure paths as published by Sandy Petersen games. If so, sadly, the company went out of business, and the products are rather hard to get now. Good luck finding them at a decent price. Luckily for me, I was in a position to not worry over much about the price. Egh. RPGs are still a cheaper hobby than most even if I'm overpaying for esoteric titles, I suppose. Heckuva lot cheaper than golf or hunting, to name two hobbies that I could have had instead. Can you imagine how much I'd spend if restoring classic cars was my hobby?

There were a lot of allusions to content from the Sandy Petersen Cthulhu Mythos book in this adventure path episode, which isn't surprising, so I'm glad that I pulled that up to the front of the line a few weeks ago and read it first. That book has a dread check, and you add dread levels much like you add exhaustion levels. I'm not super familiar with the 5e rules, still having not read my 5e Player's Handbook, but I was able to parse this system well enough, and I find that it's yet another better alternative to the hoary old Call of Cthulhu Sanity system. 

The other book that I finished is one that I've been reading for at least a week, interrupted by other things, and that's the late 3e product Heroes of Horror. I've read this before, a long time ago, and have had vacillating opinions on it over time. My first impression was that it was only baby-steps into the material that it was supposed to provide an in-depth coverage of, which I think still is true for a large amount of the 3e product line, especially they were about a slightly different modes of play (Cityscape got an especially scathing review from me on this very problem—although I've since come around to appreciating it a little bit more for what it is rather than resenting it for what it isn't in the years since). The second time I read it, or maybe I was just skimming—I don't remember now—I liked it better. This third time I found it somewhere in between. There are still too many mechanics, which of course was a 3e problem overall, but especially so in the sourcebooks. Too many feats, too many new spells, too many new prestige classes, etc. And way too much focus on dreams and taint, neither of which are topics that I care about at all. Not sure why they went all in on thinking those two were "core" to horror gaming. However, one thing that I thought pretty good was an alternative to madness/Sanity that actually was pretty clever, made use of existing mechanics in an easy way, and could easily be ported over to Old Night. I already have a very abbreviated and simple sanity system, but I could make it even more simple, and I may yet, because I like this. I also like that it's less Sanity and more Fear, i.e., you get literally freaked out by stuff, and the reactions are more appropriate for that more appropriate way to treat it. 

If a character fails a Sanity check, you only need roll a d4 to determine the reaction:

1. Character is stunned for 1d4 rounds, and cannot do anything except stare in horrifying shock at what's happening around him. If this seems too punitive then a GM can, if he wishes, on each round after the first that the character is stunned, he can make another Sanity check and if he passes it, change his reaction to 2 below.
2. Character is shocked by what he perceives and is only able to react in a passive, stunned manner. All d20 checks are at -2, but through the haze of shock, he's at least able to attempt to react normally. He's just so shaken by what he's seen that he's not doing it as well or with as much focus as normal. This lasts for 1d6 rounds.
3. Same as 2, except slightly more severe; all d20 checks are at disadvantage for 1d6 rounds.
4. Character is so shocked that he drops what he is holding and attempts to flee in mindless terror as fast as he can, in whatever direction is opposite the source of his fear. This lasts also for 1d4 rounds. At GM's option, an additional sanity check can attempt to end it early after 1 round, at which point he reverts to option 3, but can act normally otherwise.

I also finished "The Vampyre" by John William Polidori, which I had thought was more of a novel, but really is much shorter; probably not even a novella. It is often considered the prototype on which Dracula was later built, in many ways. It's curious to me that it was written based on a fragment that Lord Byron wrote, and is, at least in some tongue-in-cheek way, "casting" him in the role of the vampire. Written the same summer that Polidori, Byron, the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont were hanging out in Switzerland debauching themselves as they were wont to do. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein that same summer. I don't know what Percy Shelley wrote, as he didn't get famous until after his death. Claire Clairmont just got pregnant with Lord Byron's kid. This isn't shocking; Mary Shelley's mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, the infamous proto-feminist and proponent of proto-hippy free love debauchery. Lord Byron is the source of the phrase "mad, bad and dangerous to know" as well as "famous for being famous."

I don't think a lot of these old "classics" are really that great. Some of it is cultural; "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." Older books are often slow, overwrought in some places, underwrought in others, and coy about certain things that need to be plain to have the proper impact. But no doubt they had impact to their contemporary readers. I don't think Frankenstein is that good. I didn't love "The Vampyre" and I'm glad is was shorter than I thought it was. Of course, the fact that the principles were arrogant, indolent profligates and deviants doesn't make me more inclined to give them a pass on the context in which they wrote; the books just aren't that great or interesting to modern readers, and I'm totally OK with saying that. Other authors from the same period (admittedly playing a little fast and loose with what I call the same period) I still like; Robert Louis Stevenson's The Black Arrow is a great novel, Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe is too. When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula a bit later, that's a work that still holds up well. 

That said, I don't have a region or clan in Timischburg called Ruthven, curiously, and I should. It's a much better name than Vyrko, and as good as Orlok, Dracul or Nosferatu for counties that have counts ruling them.

New Great Old Ones

With the help of ChatGPT and some very judicious editing of my own, here's some new Great Old Ones. I don't mind making offhand references to Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Tsathoggua, Gol-Goroth and The Necronomicon or The Book of Eibon, but I really want my own references that are unique. Not all of these will make the cut, and I've already modified them quite a bit. But it's still something from which to work...

• Kholgorath—The Beast Beyond the Mountains: primal earth-force, embodiment of strength, fertility, and slumbering hunger beneath mountains.
• Urzathon—The Devourer of Suns: vast cosmic fire that consumes light and creation; analog of destructive solar energy.
• Velkraith—Lord of the Red Obelisk: titan of war and stone; represents violence fossilized into monuments.
• Thunorak—Serpent of the Hollow Earth: wyrm of the deep earth and gold veins; symbol of buried greed and endless burrowing.
• Tulushoth—Wolf Without Shadow: predator-void of darkness; cycles of winter and death.
• Zaltharion—Black Crowned King: god of dominion and necrotic kingship; lord of rulership through decay.
• Mornath-Gul—Horned Flame: living fire of transformation, renewal through destruction.
• Orridathis—The Watcher Beneath the Clay: guardian of memory and death; buried awareness beneath soil.
• Elythagar—The Brine That Walks: cold inverse of solar fire; sea-born hunger and tidal rot.
• Voruzethis—The Feast in the Dust: endless consumption of decay and war’s remnants.
• Khaltheron—The Smoldering Veil: smoke-spirit of ruin; the ghost left behind after fire.
• Drovanyth—The Crooked Root: serpentine hunger turned vegetal; corruption within the soil.
• Seryvokath—The Ashen Host: the wolf’s breath dispersed into a swarm of moths; silent consumption.
• Ghorthalyx—The Carrion Crown: manifestation of death’s kingship; rot enthroned.
• Zhulgrithan—The Mire That Breathes: living bog, respiration of the earth.
• Throzkivar—The Ember-Womb: creation through destruction; new fire birthed from ashes.
• Vraggonith—The Horn in Hollow Hills: sound of petrified war echoing through caverns.
• Khar-Ghoryn—The Silt That Devours: devouring darkness of rivers and estuaries; light drowned.
• Vruz-Kathor—The Ashen Maw: subterranean hunger that persists after death of flesh.
• Zhar-Khuneth—The Mourning Mire: the sorrow of the earth; decay felt as grief.
• Thoryxith—The Maw Between Pulses: exists between instants of time; possibly voice or fragment of Kholgorath.
• Bran-Golath—The Horned Sun: found on the Altenburg Stelae and Brandberg charcoal figurine deep in the hills near Ubyr.
• Veyrholm Circle (collective)—The Echo Cult: human sorcerers serving as vessels for multiple Ashen entities.
• Iron Idols (collective)—The Seven That Sleep Beneath the Ash: term used in the Necronomicon for the original pre-human deities.
• De Idolis Ferris—Mentions the Seven Iron Kings; first reference to Kholgorath.
• Zycran Testament—Describes molten thrones of the Iron Idols.
• Annals of the Ashen Circle—Chronicles Vale of Veyrholm cult activity.
• Treatise of the Smoldering Veil—Early occult synthesis linking idol worship to alchemy.
• Veyrholm Catechism—Contains inverted prayers to the Ashen Circle.
• Codex Ferrum-Astrix—Jothan Mallory’s forbidden reconstruction of the cosmology.

Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos

I just finished reading this book, which I really didn't even intend to read (yet), and it ends up being an almost singular object lesson of how sometimes when you want something so much, and then you get it, you find out that you didn't actually want it after all.

By this I mean that combining explicit Yog-Sothothery, Cthulhu Mythos and Lovecraftian elements with D&D sounds like exactly what I want... but after reading this, I don't end up thinking it's all that compelling after all. To be fair, I said singular above, but it's not exactly true. The "Strange Aeons" adventure path, which I have only read half of (but will read as part of my Adventure Path trawl now) is also explicitly Lovecraftian D&D, and it's not that exciting either. And I also just finished Mike Mearls' Cthulhu by Torchlight supplement from D&D Beyond, but that one is oddly mechanical, so it feels even less like what I want than the SPCM book; it's just new subclasses, feats, spells, mechanics and monsters.

Part of that is that the D&D game isn't really meant to mesh well with these themes, at least not the modern, 5e D&D game. Although there are a lot of house rules in this book, like a dread mechanic that replaces Sanity checks, and works like an exhaustion ladder, and a few other things, but a few house rules on a complex system don't quite manage to change the feel of the system. Now, I'm not one of those guys who believes that D&D can't be modified to fit different themes and tones, but here they're specifically trying not to change the basic management of the game. You can play with regular characters who aren't really using any house rules to speak of. I'm a little skeptical on how well that will really work. And granted, you could integrate Lovecraftian elements without Lovecraftian themes, but they're not actually trying to do that here, they're trying to layer Lovecraft on top of D&D without changing D&D, and expecting them to both work alongside each other seamlessly. I don't think that's likely to be very satisfying. 

Secondly, I just don't think it works very well because too many of the Lovecraftian themes are too repetitive, and too many of the elements feel like rehashed warmed up leftovers. How many monsters that are made up of pseudopods and tentacles who are aliens and don't obey the normal laws of physics (or magic) do we really need before it starts to feel very tedious? Less than we got here, I'd venture to say. It also reiterated to me (even more than reading a bunch of Lovecraft himself) how trite the notion that Lovecraft promoted can often be. He famously said that the greatest fear is fear of the unknown, and then decided to pursue writing horror with stuff that made no sense, with only the "OoooOOO, aliens and unknowableness!" was supposed to stand in for actual horror. Stories like "Call of Cthulhu" are effective for reasons that have nothing to do with Cthulhu-'s gelatinous dismissal of physics and weird references to non-Euclidean geometry. The rather vulgar references to backwoods swampie cults, global conspiracies, and secret histories—long before The X-files made those two ideas mainstream—are what make the story compelling. The part about the brief exploration of R'lyeh and the confrontation with Cthulhu itself is actually in most respects, the weakest part of the story. 

In any case, that's what SPCM—Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos attempts to do; just stat up every obscure reference to anything that one of the Lovecraft Circle ever mentioned. It... well, it got old before I got done with it.

The best part of the book, I think, was the idea of using Mythos entities as a kind of Elder Evil campaign threat that didn't work exactly like a monster, but mostly so—frankly, I think any kind of darkish fantasy should use something similar. And archfiends and demon lords, etc. should be treated the exact same way. The stuff that I found least interesting, although I think it was a brave go, was the attempt to create Lovecrafian races, mostly cribbed from "The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath." In fact, like "Strange Aeons" there's altogether too much leaning into the Dreamlands, which is a concept that doesn't really fit with D&D very well. And playing as a cat-person is ridiculous enough in "regular" modern D&D, but playing as literally an actual housecat? It's really weird. 

That said, now that I'm done, I'm thinking that my trawl of the six Cthulhu Mythos Saga campaigns can proceed smoothly. I was concerned that without having read the SPCM book first, I'd find too many things in the Sagas that begged questions because it was supposed that I'd read the SPCM book first. I think, in retrospect, that that's probably not going to be true. I have, after all, read pretty much everything Lovecraft ever wrote, so I can refer to ideas directly from the source. I'm not interested in the mechanics of the adventure paths and camapigns I'm reading anyway, after all. If I actually use them at all, I'm not going to use them in the native mechanical system that any of them were written for.

As an aside; one unexpected side effect of reading the last few pages of the SPCM; the tcho-tcho monster entry is, I think, pretty much what I want my Nizrekhi population to be like. I had only given pretty vague thought to exactly what a Nizrekh population was like, but now if I can borrow any missing holes from the tcho-tcho—like Jurassic Park scientists borrowing missing genetic holes from frogs, maybe—they're suddenly much more fleshed out and ready to run than they were. So, I present—because lately I always do—a very old Nizrekh cultist Hero Forge model and next to that a very newly made tcho-tcho barbarian. Yeah, close enough, I think.

I also suspect that there are minor ethnic tcho-tcho enclaves in at least Port Liure, Simashki, and maybe some other of the Corsair Coast cities. Maybe Grozavest has them as well; the tcho-tcho would like the darkness, but not appreciate the competition from even better predators on humanity in the form of the vampires. I wonder if using the tcho-tcho kinda sorta in the role of the goblinoids from Freeport in Port Liure would work. Rivals to the orclings in the neighborhood of Bloodsalt or something? I dunno. I'll worry about that in the future. 

SPCM for 5e

I've been reading Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos for 5e book lately. It's a long book, fully 425+ pages. I'm almost on page 200, but I'm really through much of the content. By far the two last chapters are the longest, which include the Mythos entities, and then the Mythos monsters. I'm far enough along, even though I'm less than 50% through the page count, to comment, I think, since all that's left is the monster list to peruse. 

I find this a very interesting book-end, if you will, to the Call of Cthulhu book by Monte Cook and John Tynes published in 2001 for the d20 system. Whereas this new(er) book is clearly a D&D sourcebook, aiming to bring the tone and themes of the Cthulhu Mythos to D&D 5e specifically, the older book was meant to be specifically an interpretation of the "modern" Call of Cthulhu game into a system that was similar to that of D&D at the time. There really wasn't any intention that you use this Cthulhu stuff with your D&D game... although because the system was more or less the same, there wasn't any reason why you couldn't. And, of course, there was an appendix at the end where in a few short pages, they suggested ways in which that could be done. Both of them, however, strongly encourage players, even if only by implication, to blend D&D with Cthulhu.

Of course, Cthulhu was always part and parcel of D&D. One commentator on one podcast that I listened to a number of episodes of, suggests that Lovecraft was actually the most important influence on Gary Gygax of all of those he listed as influences, and notes that Appendix N also singles him out as one of about half dozen who are "especially" not to be missed. Plenty of monsters from the earliest days of the game are clearly Lovecraft-inspired, and the whole tone of the game in the earliest days was arguably much more of a dark, survival horror game in places where Man Was Not Meant to Go. That said, D&D always had lots of other influences too, and those others usually grew while the Lovecraftian often shrank, and hardly anyone would say that your "standard" game of D&D resembles Lovecraft very much today, which is why both of these two products are very interesting. 

Of course, as I said a few posts ago, both also kinda sorta miss the point. In statting out and quantifying specific Mythos items and entities that have been mentioned in stories, they do little to encourage the spirit of the Mythos as it actually was, originally—wholly unique threats that were only loosely associated into some kind of greater dark tapestry by implication and off-hand reference. Delving deeply into the customs and personalities of Pickman-style ghouls or zoogs, or whatever, or quantifying exactly what Rhan-Tegoth can do to a character, makes it difficult to actually feel like Lovecraft would have wanted his stuff used, I think. D&D fundamentally isn't the right medium for Lovecraft... although D&D-like mechanics can do the job. Playing Lovecraft appropriately requires a focus on immersion, not mechanics and tactics, and it requires mystery and uncertainty, not super detailed stat blocks. Nor is the playstyle that modern versions of D&D have engendered appropriate for Cthulhu either. It's just that it lends itself to Lovecraft Tourism, where you amble by like you're on your DisneyWorld ride-car. Look! An animatronic of a Deep One! And there! A big animatronic of Azathoth! It just doesn't quite work.

As I said before, Warhammer Fantasy RPG actually does Lovecraftian better than this more overtly Lovecraftian homage, even though it lacks a single reference to any specifically Lovecraftian entity, book or idea (sadly.) It's not that fantasy adventure gaming and Lovecraft can't mix... it's just that I'm skeptical that this is the right approach.

Anyway, that said, I'm amused and gratified to see many of my own ideas reflected in some ways. One thing that I actually quite enjoy is the idea that Mythos entities supercede all kinds of other major threats. Demon Lords should be like Mythos entities, as done here. Much of what Gygax did needs to be, sadly, undone. And it helps if you have a much more grounded, humanocentric, non-superheroic lower magic grubby fantasy approach to add your Lovecraft-like entities to. That's been the biggest disconnect; high level bird-people wizards casting spells left and right feeling threatened by even Yog-Sothoth or Cthulhu just feels strange. 

That said, I've enjoyed reading this well enough. Like I said, it's a great book-end for my read-through of the d20 game earlier this year, and because I'm a fan of Lovecraftiana, I'm a fan of this book. But I'm actually interested in getting through it and then reading the SPCM Mythos Sagas. Adapting campaigns, adventures and modules is usually much more interesting to me than adapting mechanics. I don't know for sure how much of any of those I'll want to adapt; of course, but I'm excited to find out.

Cthulhu Mythos vs Dark Tapestry vs ChatGPT

My original prompt: The Cthulhu Mythos, or an analog to it, is called the Dark Tapestry in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. I like that better because it's more evocative than Cthulhu Mythos. Do you have alternatives that are similar?

ChatGPT said:

I see what you mean — “Dark Tapestry” has both mood and metaphor baked in, and it implies mystery, depth, and something woven through reality itself, rather than just being “the mythos of X.” If you want alternatives in that same evocative, indirect vein, here are some you might like:

Cosmic/Weaving/Patterned Imagery

• The Shattered Loom

• The Veil of Stars

• The Threaded Abyss 

• The Weeping Tapestry 

• The Loom of Silence 

• The Frayed Pattern 

• The Tangled Weave

Obscure/Whispered Knowledge

• The Black Lexicon 

• The Forbidden Gospel 

• The Silent Archive 

• The Veiled Scripture 

• The Hidden Canticle

Vast/Spatial/Otherworldly

• The Endless Night 

• The Hollow Expanse 

• The Ashen Vault 

• The Starless Sea 

• The Unseen Horizon

Organic/Corruption-Laced

• The Crawling Veil 

• The Blooming Rot 

• The Maw Unfurling 

• The Root of Nightmares 

• The Seeping Womb

Do you want me to lean more toward the cosmic and beautiful-but-terrible side (like “Dark Tapestry”), or the rotting, crawling horror side (closer to visceral Lovecraftian imagery)?

You said:

Can I get a selection of both? I'm not sure until I see a sample

ChatGPT said:

Perfect — let’s make two contrasting "flavors" of alternatives so you can feel the difference.

Cosmic, Mysterious, and Evocative (like Dark Tapestry)

These lean poetic, vast, and eerie-beautiful:

• The Silent Firmament 

• The Eclipsed Veil 

• The Woven Void 

• The Black Meridian 

• The Shattered Constellation 

• The Twilight Loom 

• The Forgotten Zodiac 

• The Veil of Midnight 

• The Starborn Silence 

• The Shadowed Vault 

• The Umbral Weave 

• The Chained Horizon 

• The Gloaming Tapestry 

• The Fractured Sky 

• The Astral Shroud 

• The Midnight Codex 

• The Endless Chart 

• The Obsidian Map 

• The Silent Atlas 

• The Star-Eaten Loom  

Crawling, Corrupted, and Visceral (more horror-heavy)

These lean grotesque, organic, and unsettling:

• The Howling Maw 

• The Rotting Gospel 

• The Weeping Abyss 

• The Crawling Silence 

• The Hungering Root 

• The Blighted Womb 

• The Oozing Covenant 

• The Gnawing Dark 

• The Crimson Lament 

• The Guttering Eye 

• The Thirsting Depths 

• The Stained Gospel 

• The Fungal Covenant 

• The Devouring Bloom 

• The Wormsong Choir 

• The Sallow Canticle 

• The Putrid Expanse 

• The Clotted Horizon 

• The Retching Firmament 

• The Fetid Loom

Want me to also generate a third set that blends the two — poetic but still corrupted — the way Clark Ashton Smith often did?

You said:

Yes

ChatGPT said:

Got it — here’s a third set that bridges the two extremes: strange, poetic, and evocative like Dark Tapestry, but with an undercurrent of corruption or dread woven in.

Blended — Beautiful but Corrupted

• The Withered Constellation 

• The Thorned Veil 

• The Ashen Loom 

• The Sanguine Horizon 

• The Fractured Zodiac 

• The Veil of Worms 

• The Stained Tapestry 

• The Hollow Canticle 

• The Bleeding Firmament 

• The Ebon Bloom 

• The Wilted Crown 

• The Gloaming Maw 

• The Mourning Stars 

• The Sepulchral Atlas 

• The Chained Constellation 

• The Broken Hymn 

• The Twilight Rot 

• The Shattered Gospel 

• The Blackened Loom 

• The Threnody of Ash

In spite of all that, I don't think I got anything that I can actually use. Sigh. By mixing and matching adjectives from this list and nouns from this list, I can probably get something useable. Maybe I just stick with Old Night. The cults of Old Night. The monster of Old Night. Etc.

SPCM

I've been reading (slowly) the SPCM book; Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos, a sourcebook for 5e D&D. It's pretty well-regarded, as near as I can tell, but so far only about ~75 pages (of ~425 or so) it's mostly character options; new races that are kinda weird, like Lovecraftian ghouls, zoogs, Dreamland cats, etc. new skills, new class options and subclasses, etc. I mean, I suppose that's what you kind of expect for a sourcebook for 5e, but I admit that it strikes me as a little strange. So far, not bad, just... strange. Not only are the races themselves strange (the class options make more sense to me; especially the Mythos tainted magic options) but the idea that they're adapting so closely Lovecraftian originals.

I've said it before, and no doubt I'll say it again, but that kind of misses the point of Yog-Sothothery. It isn't using the same elements as Lovecraft and his circle did, it's using the same themes and tone. In a lot of ways, the Warhammer Fantasy Old World setting of the RPG fame is better Yog-Sothothery than overt conversions of Lovecraft's monsters, races, or other details.

If you look at what Lovecraft, Howard, Smith, Bloch, etc. did, in every story they had a unique menace that didn't really ever get re-used. Not to say that names weren't recycled in an off-hand manner frequently; in fact, that's the biggest tell of a Lovecraftian story most of the time. There'll be a point where a number of Old Ones names or rattled off, and they'll look really familiar; Cthulhu, Azathoth, Shub-Niggurath, Yog-Sothoth (of course) Tsathoggua, etc. Or maybe it'll be references to books like the Necronomicon, or the Book of Eibon, or Nameless Cults, etc. Maybe there'll be an off-hand reference to Unknown Kadath or the Plateau of Leng or Yuggoth. But none of those really make an appearance in the story. They're just references. It's the themes and the tone and make a story Lovecraftian, not the presence of specifically Lovecraftian details, monsters, or terrible gods. It's in this sense that I think Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is more Lovecraftian, in some ways, than many games specifically designed for Lovecraft. It's got the themes and the tone down quite well... but everything in it is unique and original. Instead of serpentmen and Yig, you've got Skaven and the Great Horned Rat. Instead of Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep and the rest of those guys, you've got Khorne, Tzeentch, Slaanesh and Nurgle. Which, admittedly, aren't always the coolest names, but they're very cool concepts. Even more traditional Gothic horror is done well. Nagash and the Vampire Counts is much more interesting than most of the alternatives to it in fantasy. The Von Carsteins are more interesting to me than even Strahd. 

Now, would I like it if there were an overt nod or in-joke reference to the Mythos in Warhammer? Yeah, probably. It beats in-joke references to Duran Duran or Adam Ant, and yet we had very blatant ones of those. But still, that's just a reference and in-joke. What I don't want Warhammer to do is have zoogs or shoggoths—it's hardly like they need them with all the warped chaos stuff going on already. 

So, I'm a little ambivalent about SPCM so far. I mean, it's good at what it sets out to do; I'm just a little skeptical that what it's setting out to do is what it should be doing in the first place. 

That said, I'm mostly reading it for the cults and elder gods chapters, and then so that it can lay the groundwork for the campaigns that are coming; Ghoul Island, Dark Worlds, etc. Those are what I'm even more interested in reading. Although I fear that they'll be too Lovecraftian themselves, and in doing so, actually miss the point of the theme and tone. 

Although it's worth pointing out that Lovecraft himself was not immune to pastiche. "The Dunwich Horror" is usually considered to be a pastiche of "The Great God Pan" by Arthur Machen, and "Herbert West: Re-animator" was a pastiche or perhaps even a parody of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. "The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath" has even been called pastiche of The History of the Caliph Vathek by William Beckford before. 

ChatGPT generating names and concepts

I haven't been interested in using ChatGPT for gaming before, but on a whim, I asked it to generate some Lovecrafian entity names for me, just so I'd have more to choose from instead of having to use obscure names dropped by Smith, Lovecraft or Howard all the time. I'm actually not terribly unhappy with some of the stuff that it generated. I've also added an attempt to get another Revecca von Lechfeld image. I haven't been super happy with the images that I got before; this one is ... well, it's not perfect either, but it's another alternative.

Not sure yet what (if anything) I'm going to do with any of this, but it's interesting stuff nonetheless.

The Ashen Circle of Veyrholm Vale

(as pieced together from fragments of peasant lore, cult records, and forbidden monastic chronicles)

The Ashen Circle is not a true pantheon, but a cluster of presences bound to the land itself, each embodying a blight, silence, or hunger. Their names shift between villages: some remembered in single breath, others drawn out in hyphenated chants.

Core Figures (earlier “single-name” entities)

Orridathis, the Watcher Beneath Clay — feared in burial mounds.

Elythagar, the Brine That Walks — dwells in wells and tidal pools.

Voruzethis, the Feast in Dust — haunts famine fields.

Khaltheron, the Smoldering Veil — seen in curling smoke.

Drovanyth, the Crooked Root — marrow-drinking roots in caverns.

Seryvokath, the Ashen Host — the moth-cloud that whispers.

Later “Smithian-cluster” additions

Ghorthalyx, the Carrion Crown — crowns the dead with rot.

Zhulgrithan, the Mire That Breathes — suffocating bog-entity.

Throzkivar, the Ember-Womb — molten womb birthing stone eggs.

Vraggonith, the Horn in Hollow Hills — the echo no shepherd answers.

Xarkooneth, the Black Vellum — flesh-parchment that remembers.

Hyphenated Ones (the oldest names whispered in temple fragments)

Khar-Ghoryn, the Silt That Devours — river and ferry cults dread it.

Thol-Karesh, the Howl in Iron — invoked by miners before cave-ins.

Vruz-Kathor, the Ashen Maw — remembered in sacrifices at craters.

Grith-Ozael, the Crooked Flame — household warnings against firelight illusions.

Zhar-Khuneth, the Mourning Mire — a swamp phantom whose weeping is contagious.

Folkloric Pattern

Scholars believe the single names belong to more recent rural personifications of natural horrors (drought, famine, plague).

The consonant-heavy Smithian names may reflect older shrines and cults, tied to forgotten stonework.

The hyphenated names are thought to be fragments of the oldest language of the vale, their hyphens marking “breaks in utterance” during ritual recitation.

In local superstition, each village swears its own god is oldest and most terrible — but all agree that together they form the Ashen Circle, a wheel of misfortunes turning endlessly through their land.

The Ashen Circle: A Folkloric Map of Veyrholm Vale

The Vale is a shallow basin ringed by wooded hills and seamed with rivers, bogs, and abandoned mines. No modern map marks its villages, but in old chronicles one finds hints of the Ashen Circle, an arrangement of dread figures tied to particular landscapes.

Northern Reach (the Clay and the Hills)

Orridathis, the Watcher Beneath Clay — The Barrow-Fields

Barrows and tumuli rise here, scarred by grave-robbers. Pale hands are said to press upward after moonrise.

Vraggonith, the Horn in Hollow Hills — The Shepherd Hills

Lonely uplands where echoes sound sharper than voices; shepherds refuse to pasture their flocks after dusk.

Eastern Reach (the Forges and Ash-lands)

Khaltheron, the Smoldering Veil — The Ruined Kilns

Abandoned potteries smolder in ash even a century cold; smoke-shapes drift where no fire burns.

Thol-Karesh, the Howl in Iron — The Collapsed Mines

Rusted winches and caved shafts echo with a shriek like torn steel; miners’ families still leave offerings of bread crusts at the pit-mouth.

Throzkivar, the Ember-Womb — The Fire-Pits

Cracked earth glows with hidden embers; peasants say “stone eggs” sometimes surface, too hot to touch.

Southern Reach (the Marshes and Riverlands)

Elythagar, the Brine That Walks — The Well-Steads

Clusters of hamlets with ancient wells, salt-crusted; many doors bear chalk sigils to bar his dripping step.

Khar-Ghoryn, the Silt That Devours — The River Dregs

Barges vanish into sudden whirlpools; ferrymen never speak his name above the waterline.

Zhar-Khuneth, the Mourning Mire — The Wailing Marshes

Reeds grow in strange patterns; villagers hear sobbing where no one treads.

Western Reach (the Fields and Craters)

Voruzethis, the Feast in Dust — The Fallow Farms

Abandoned granaries creak with insectile clicks; husks of crops scatter across fields at night.

Vruz-Kathor, the Ashen Maw — The Crater-Shrine

A bowl-shaped hollow worshiped since forgotten ages; offerings cast into the ash-pit vanish without a trace.

Central Vale (the Dark Heart)

Drovanyth, the Crooked Root — The Bone Caverns

White roots slither through cavern walls; bones split clean as if drained of marrow.

Seryvokath, the Ashen Host — The Moth-Fane

A ruined abbey overgrown with moth swarms; locals speak of “moth-dust feasts” where voices echo wrong.

Ghorthalyx, the Carrion Crown — The Rot-Keep

A crumbling watchtower, its battlements covered with lichens that resemble crowns.

Xarkooneth, the Black Vellum — The Scriptorium Ruins

Monastic ruins where walls are ink-blackened, as if parchment itself had bled.

Folkloric Pattern

Travelers note the Circle forms a rough ring, as though each presence guards its own quarter of the vale, with the caverns and ruins at the center serving as a knot of power where their influence overlaps. The old priests whispered that the Circle is not six, nor twelve, nor twenty names — but a wheel that turns endlessly, its spokes always shifting.