What do people know about the Mythos? Part 2

Picking up from where we last left off.

Tlācayoh

A headless spirit, said to have been born from the anger of a woman murdered by her wicked husband for trying to escape with her lover. While frightening, she is depicted as a neutral or even helpful figure so long as she is treated respectfully. Petitioners will occasionally receive direct aid from her in the killing or cursing of abusive fathers or husbands.

The Classical Nahuatl name listed above is a compound of tlācatl (“human being”) and the suffix -yoh (“made of, full of, covered in”).

n!Kai

A hapax legemenon, claimed to be the name of a legendary subterranean city in the journals of an anonymous Franciscan friar writing in New Mexico province c. 1680. The friar claims to have heard the term from the local Pueblo in reference to a mythic underworld reserved for monstrous creatures and humans who have transformed into them, but this is not substantiated by either Spanish or indigenous sources. The brief description of the word’s pronunciation is sufficient enough to identify an alveolar nasal click; no known language of the Americas, extant or historical, features click consonants of any kind.

The Slave Market at Dylath-Leen

An 1874 painting by artist and professional dilettante Sir Calvin Halsey that is nothing short of a crowning achievement in how many orientalist stereotypes one can fit onto a single canvas. It depicts a short, dark-skinned and narrow-faced man with an orange turban pacing through a moonlit plaza, inspecting the unclothed bodies of a line of captive women. Cloven feet and the tufts of furry ankles peek out from beneath the man’s silk robes and an opium pipe smolders in his ringed and jeweled hand.

Draft sketches of the painting were discovered by chance in 1996, revealing that the slaver had undergone significant revisions in design; the first iteration was an unclothed, rotund, furry creature with a flat face, wide mouth, short horns, enormous ears and six eyes, described by one art historian as “the cousin that Ewoks buy their meth from”.

The Venus of Boncuklu Tarla

8cm black granite figurine of an obese, masturbating woman. The announcement of its discovery in 2018 was immediately beset by controversy on all fronts:

• The discovery was neither announced nor verified by the Mardin Museum, which oversees excavations at the site.
• The discovery was published in the Journal of Truth-Centered Archaeology and Anthropology, which regularly espouses fringe and conspiratorial theories of human history.
• While the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B culture would potentially have had the means to shape granite with flint or emery, it is unlikely that they could do so with such precision and realistic proportion at such a small scale.

All together, the figure is considered a modern forgery. But, while she failed to revolutionize archaeology, she has gained some small online fame both for the expected reasons, and for triggering the Twitter meltdown and resignation of the Journal's head editor after the Venus was depicted in fanart as a protestor against UK gender-essentialist legistlation.

Tablet 65

Fragmentary Akkadian-era cuneiform tablet describing an exorcism performed on a man that had started eating the dead and speaking in their voices, and who had only been captured after the killing and consumption of a six-year-old boy. The lack of formality in the text indicates that the text was a private missive, but beyond the address of the recipient as “my brother priest of Nanna-Sin” there’s no identifying information present for either party. The author asks for guidance, feeling that he is unfit to continue in his office, as well as aid with a matter obscured by a lacuna in the text. 

H.P. Lovecraft

A prolific but forgotten-in-his-time writer of gothic fantasy and historical romance stories, who gained post-mortem fame when he was used as a shared pen-name by over two dozen science fiction authors as the center point of an elaborate metafictional shared universe / comedic bit.

Bigfoot (Austrolopithicus gigantus pattersoni)

A descendent of the robust austrolopith lineage, averaging 6-8 feet tall. Migrated out of Africa ~2 mya and underwent relatively rapid gigantism to adapt to the Tibetan Plateau and northeastern Siberia, with populations migrating to the Americas through Beringia ~100 - 80 KYA. Driven to extinction by arrival of H.  sapiens, with the most recent remains dated to ~11 KYA.

History of the Kings of the Divs

1868 French 'translation' of a supposed Classical Persian text detailing the sordid three-thousand year-long political history of the demonic dynasties of Mazandaran (separate from the Iranian province of the same name) and culminating in the defeat of Div-e Sepid by the hero Rostam. 

While near-certainly a modern invention (no source text or substantiating manuscripts have ever emerged), the author was at least familiar with the Shahnameh and had a solid grasp of the language. With that factored in, it is a surprisingly solid fantasy epic filled with grotesque monsters, daring-do, a crumbling empire, wicked sorcerer-viziers, and mild-to-moderate period-appropriate racism.

Tape #53 (08-14-76)

8-track cassette tape recording of a conversation overheard by amateur radio enthusiast Charles “Chuck” Angstrom of Coconino County, Arizona sometime between 1:30 and 3:00 AM on August 14th, 1976.

The six-minute conversation, spoken entirely in Navajo, consists of four men (callsigns Bear, Fox, Owl, and Turtle), coordinating the hunt of a presumably-rabid coyote. All four speakers use both conversational and coded speech, indicating that at least one of them had been trained as a code talker.

The original 8-track cassette was in poor condition at the time its contents were digitized by Charles’ son in 2007; much of the conversation is difficult to understand even for native speakers, and several sections have yet to be deciphered. The tape ends mid-conversation with Owl saying “Two, no, three up ahead. Yeah, three of them,” followed by the slam of a car door.

The Pohnpeian Mermaid

Daguerreotype of a hairless, fish-tailed hominid, taken in 1852 by missionary Laurence Douglas  in situ on the shoreline where it was discovered. Subject appears deceased. Douglas later wrote in his journal that he believed the being to be pregnant, and he gave it a Christian burial in an undisclosed location on the island rather than let the corpse be burned per the wishes of the local Pohnpeians.

Sagart & Carey Plastics

A small plastics manufacturing company headquartered in Jackson’s Hole, Wisconsin. Made national news in March of 2023, when a DEA raid turned into a 3-hour long siege and gunfight. An estimated 60-80 employees escaped the premises and remain at large.

Aihoat

Signature monster of the 1973 horror movie God In the Labyrinth - a many-legged and many-eyed off-white blob inhabiting a seemingly endless maze outside normal time and space (see: Navidson Tapes). The effects aren’t great, but the puppeteer and cameraman do their best with the resources they have. The film is somewhat infamous in cult horror circles for the suicide of the writer-director during editing, with the last three sequences prior to his death being the “tunnel chase”, “human pens” and “Cistine (sic) chapel contact”.

At the end of the film, it is revealed that Aihoat’s luring of humans into its maze and subsequent implantation of parasitoid larva is the monster’s attempt to preserve some of humanity against nuclear war. The surviving characters are offered a choice: live as a zombified host for Aihoat’s larva, try to survive on their own in the labyrinth and find other survivors, or brave a return to the now-irradiated surface. The film ends before choice is made.

“The Majestic 12”

Informal name for a group of US Air Force officials affiliated with Project Blue Book and the investigation of unidentified flying organisms.

First and Last Dynasty of Mu

1974 science-fantasy novel by Alphonse Lowe about the collapse of the titular lost continent’s royal family. One is unlikely to find a more corrupt collection of incestuous backstabbers than this horrid lot, and Lowe revels in the grossout horror of it all to a degree most modern readers would find concerning.

The Harvestman

Urban legend: a gigantic arachnid that, when seen at a distance and under low light conditions, appears as an exceptionally tall human with obscured or blank facial features. Also called “Mr. Long Legs”.

Point Nemo Anomalous Exclusion Zone

An 850 km diameter no-sail, no-fly zone maintained around the oceanic pole of inaccessibility. The cordon began as an American endeavor (with support from the United Nations) in 1962, with Soviet ships present under the Nautilus Treaty from 1972 to 1979.

No verifiable information has been produced regarding the purpose of the cordon or the Zone’s contents. Photographs taken from the ISS and leaked to the press in 2006, if not doctored, indicate an island in the center of the Zone that is otherwise not accounted for in public-facing satellite imagery.

All civilian attempts to breach the cordon have been rebuffed with force.

The Cruel Empire of Tsan-Chan

An early roleplaying game in the vein of Dungeons and Dragons, set in a tyrannical sci-fantasy empire of far-future Earth. While never particularly popular, the novel setting attracted a small and dedicated fan base until posthumous revelations that its author had kidnapped and imprisoned a woman in his basement for over a decade before burying her dismembered body on his property. 

The Navidson Tapes

Handheld camcorder footage chronicling  the discovery and exploration of a featureless, lightless and seemingly-infinite labyrinth within the home of a man who introduces himself as “Will Navidson”. Five copies of the tape were found in storage at the University of Richmond’s film department in the fall of 2000, leading most to assume that it is either an abandoned student film or an elaborate hoax; None of the persons in the film have been identified due to intentional face-blurring of all involved parties, though the place and time of shooting have been narrowed down to Virginia in the spring of 1990. 

Ixion

15 Jupiter-mass brown dwarf orbiting at a distance of 1.68 light years from the Sun, discovered by the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer in 2011. This discovery spawned a wave of panic among the public due to its similarities with the Nemesis hypothesis and it was immediately tied to apocalyptic theories regarding the end of the Mayan long count calendar in 2012; the available evidence does not support its involvement in a mass-extinction cycle on Earth, but subsequent observations have confirmed at least two major moons, the larger of which is estimated at 0.84 - 1.2 Earth masses. Unmanned missions to Ixion have been proposed, but have been judged unfeasible by multiple space agencies given the time cost.

 

The Gollynack

Urban legend emerging in the mid-80s nightclub scene of southwest England with a core narrative as follows:

A woman returning home alone after a night out is stalked and then attacked by a man (usually described as a serial rapist and murderer escaped from a nearby prison or mental institution) who pursues her into an abandoned house. Cornered in the cellar, the woman decapitates her attacker with an axe and buries the still-moving body behind an unfinished brick wall. There the killer transforms into a flabby, headless monster with mouths in its palms that incites victims of its influence to acts of violence and sexual depravity (though stories differ on whether the creature’s influence forces its victims to act, or simply encourages tendencies that were already present.)

The creature’s popularity has remained relatively consistent over time, thanks to the Aristocrats-style one-upmanship that flows naturally from the premise, but has never been particularly high for the same reason.

 

Liao

Opium derivative encountered by American troops during the Vietnam War, predominantly in the highlands by the Laotian border. Users commonly report highly distorted perception of time and hallucinations of threatening entities; additional effects include extreme paranoia, an irrational fear of man-made enclosed spaces, and seizures triggered by sustained observation of right angles, all of which may persist after the drug’s other effects have worn off.

Copycat street drugs (Reverb, Black Lotus, Dog’s Paw,  Picasso, etc) have occasionally surfaced in the United States since the 1970s; these have thus far all been invocations of liao’s mysterious reputation applied to ordinary and often adulterated heroin, LSD, or ecstasy.

Crom

Celtic name of unclear provenance; known only from a single Primitive Irish inscription along the blade of a bone knife found alongside the body of Gallagh Man II: “By Crom (this thing) is done”. 

Scholars are divided as to whether the name is in reference to a deity or a human figure, and further divided as to whether it is related to Old Irish cromb (“bent, stooped”), the PIE root *ker- (“host, warband”), or a substrate borrowing.

Liber Ivonis

Purported pre-Roman grimoire, though no copies can be dated to earlier than the 1620 Venetian manuscript. It was predictably banned from publication by the church and later elevated as a core text by the 19th century occult revival, despite its actual contents being a biting and unsubtle satire of European esotericism. The egomaniacal, bloviating Hyperborean’s increasingly absurd attempts at avoiding his creditors, compounded with his repeated failure to accomplish any of the fantastic feats he claims to be able to do and the total indifference of the spiritual entities he encounters, make for a remarkably funny book even 4 centuries after it was written. The trip to Saturn episode in particular has earned the text a spot in many histories of science fiction.

The Witch House of Keziah Mason

Tourist attraction in Arkham, Massachusetts; a supposedly cursed house that once sheltered the witch Keziah Mason as she fled execution in Salem. While all signs point to the Mason narrative as a fabrication to draw in tourists, the house was the centerpoint of the very well-documented 1928 kidnapping and killing of 7-month old Bernard Hamm by Walter Gilman, a graduate student of mathematics at Miskatonic University. Gilman was judged unfit to stand trial due to insanity, and died shortly afterward in the Arkham Sanitarium.

Remaking LotR With Only Public Domain Sources

Foot of Mt. Ashitaka, Takahashi Hiroaka

Last summer I had the chance to go see Fellowship of the Ring in concert. Great show, movie still slaps. But I had an odd thought while watching it, brought on by my Leslie Stone transcription project and a slowly-compiling list of inspirational resources I’ve been gathering.

“Is it possible to remake Lord of the Rings using only public domain source material? Like a ship of Theseus type thing, where you replace individual components in the structure. How does it change? What does it transform into? Does it even remain recognizable?”

You know, normal thoughts.

To spoil the rest of this post it turns out you can, thanks to the transitive property of fiction, and the end result is a good deal of fun. Let’s-a-go!

Guidelines

All replacement components must be public domain in the United States at time this post goes up. This encompasses:

• ≤ 1930: Automatically PD
• 1931 - 1963: Published without copyright notice, or published with copyright notice but not renewed within 28 years
• 1964 - 1977: Published without copyright notice
• 1978 - March 1 1989: Published without notice and without registration within 5 years of first publication
• Any: Explicit relinquishing of rights by creator, including Creative Commons 0

There's also the grey area of works that are in the public domain in their country of origin but not necessarily in the US because of course the US doesn't just hold to the Rule of the Shorter Term. I bring it up because the art for this post is technically from 1932, but has been public domain in Japan since 1995 because they're Life+50 and they follow the Rule so [throws up hands]. It's outside the core premise I can have a cheat day.

For thematic cohesion (and for the amount of resources available), I'm going to predominantly lean towards pre-1931 works. I’ve also added some follow-up questions and potential additions to each entry, just to show how the method can result in a wildly divergent story and setting.

Middle-Earth

Sticking with the premise of “Earth in the mythic past” (something Tolkien gestured at but didn't really dial-in on) leaves us with the Hyborian Age as the primary public domain option. This works, but I don’t think it’s ideal as the primary base: Howard used it mostly so he could evoke whatever broad historical stereotypes he wanted without worrying about actual history / having to do any heavy-lifting with worldbuilding, and I don't roll with either of those. Still good for a bit of cafeteria picking and choosing, though, the Tower of the Elephant is bound to show up at some point.

The option I'm leaning towards now would be something in the general shape of our world (as a great many fantasy worlds are), filled in with various fictional and legendary (and occasionally real-but-mythologized) locations in the generally right place. To keep the vibes of mythic prehistory, I'm leaning towards ~10-8k BCE, because that gives me Doggerland, the African Humid Period, and the Anatolian proto-cities - but I'm not going to be too picky about accuracy. Gotta have mammoths.

• Addition: Filling up the map would probably be multiple posts by itself, so I’m saving that for another day. But it’s going to be chock full of lost cities, pseudoscientific sunken continents, legendary realms, historical misinterpretations of actual places and good ol’ bullshit.

The One Ring

The Ring of Gyges and the Ring of the Nibelung are more or less direct inspirations to the One Ring, so they’re out of the running. Instead, I’ll be going with a move that will have serious ramifications down the line: the Seal of Solomon, asterisk.

That asterisk is me doing that thing I love to do, which is add in a bit of historical metafiction to muddy the waters. (We can all thank Dr. Sledge of Esoterica for sending me down this rabbit hole.)

So the Seal is extrabiblical to begin with, but that’s never stopped anything from becoming extremely popular. When we cut away the cruft built up over the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Seal of Solomon isn’t actually Solomon's Seal, but instead the Seal Famously In the Possession of Solomon: it's God’s signet ring, a bureaucratic artifact given to Solomon that allowed him to act as the authorized representative of the divine. This means that if you aren’t Solomon (an extremely large category of people, or so I am led to believe), possession and use of the Seal is basically stolen credentials. Depending on the status of the original in a given story, the Seal could even be forged credentials. All of this is an extremely good justification for why it brings ruin to its wielder / cannot be allowed to fall into the wrong hands / needs to be destroyed / returned / otherwise disposed of.

Then on top of that, Sauron’s end goal of “dominate and control all life in Middle Earth” can segue neatly into the historical metafiction layer by mirroring the appropriation of the Seal (and Solomonic magic more broadly) by Christian occultists and its subsequent transformation into what is, if you think about what is actually being described instead of taking a wizard's word for it, the use of supernatural prison slave labor.

• Q: Who was actually supposed to have the ring?
• Q: Who do people believe is supposed to have it?
• Q: Who else has gotten their hands on it? 
• Q: Is it even legitimate in the first place?
• Q: Why hasn’t it been reclaimed yet?
• Q: So what kinds of spirits are we dealing with, and what leftover business do they have to settle?

• Addition: The shamir, because everyone loves a big magical worm
• Addition: The relationship with all the various spirits has changed drastically (for the worse) since the ring was originally handed out.
• Addition: Ancient sorcerer-priest-king, who might have just been a local warlord who got hyped up later on down the line.
• Addition: Demons! Oh, so many demons.

Eru Illuvatar and the Valar

I’m penciling in MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI and the Zoa, for the upper echelons of the pantheon, though I want to do a lot more with the lower layers; pre-1931 means we’re still early enough in spec-fic that mythopoeia has some early adopters but the usage of constructed pantheons isn't particularly widespread and there even fewer well-developed ones / ones that are not just used as stock colonialist antagonists.

The new religious movements of the period could potentially provide some good material, though they provide their own barrel of worms to deal with (mostly racism and racism accessories, with the added malus of "now with an organized belief structure behind it".)

The potential shortlist is currently:

• Theosophy, Thelema, Oahspe movement, Mormonism, Aradia / the Gospel of Witches, the Golden Bough, Uther Index of Folklore Motifs, HPL, CAS, REH, rest of the Weird Tales crew and the other pulps as well. Most of them will only provide one or maybe two gods each - weird pattern, I think it's probably to do with serial short stories and whatnot. 
• Spiritualists are unlikely to get much play, because ineffable invisible spirits are visually boring.

If you have any other good recs for "interesting bespoke gods (or really wild takes on classical ones) in PD stories", drop me a comment; this section is where I’m going to greatly diverge from Tolkien simply by virtue of me being a huge fan of some fantasy-ass fantasy religious practices, and that means importing a lot of material.

Mordor

The Land of Darkness from the Alexander Romance, because it’s a big vaguely defined land of badness and narrative convenience called the Land of Darkness.

• Q: Who lives there? What's life like for them?
• Q: How did it become the Land of Darkness? Is there something special about it, or is that just what people call it?
• Q: How has it previously interacted with the known world?
• Q: What does the known world believe about it, falsely or otherwise?

• Addition: Water of Life - The thing that Alexander is out to find, in the Romance. Nice and vague, the Water of Life could have whatever properties you please.
• Addition: Gates of Alexander - Everyone loves a nice "this is the end of the known world" structure.
• Addition: Gog of Magog - This is how it's rendered in the Ezekiel, as I understand it. Gog and Magog slipped in somewhere along the translation chain by the time Revelation was penned.
• Addition: Tied into beliefs about the apocalypse
• Addition: Hyperborea (magical land, far to the north, no sun, lot of bullshit to pick from, etc)
• Addition: There's so much stuff in the Romance, Skerples was way ahead of the curve on this.

The Nazgul

Alexander himself, complete with horns (this isn’t a non sequitur, the Horns of Alexander are a thing), handily fulfills the role of the Witch-King. “Celebrated hero (who might not be all that heroic) rides off with his retainers into the Land of Darkness to defeat a great evil and never returns (at least not until he’s suborned by said great evil)” is just good storytelling. I don’t make the rules. 

The other Ringwraiths are played by the 12 paladins of Charlemagne. I could go Round Table, but the Round Table has hundreds of them to pick from and I don’t want to comb through all those Large Adult Sons. Orlando innamorato / Furioso are as good a place as any for the 12, and gets us Orlando, Oliver, Fierabras, Astolpho, Ogier, Ganelon, Reynaud, Maugris, Florismart, Guy, Naimon, and Otuel.

• Q: How did things break back home when they never came back?
• Q: How are things currently breaking because of them?
• Q: How does the belief in Alexander’s heroic return cause problems?
• Q: What shit has history whitewashed? What actually good stuff did they do back then?

• Addition: Existing relationships / accomplishments / lore of the 12, adjusted as needed. Knights come pre-packaged with a bunch of connective tissue to other characters and quests, so they're high bang-for-buck.
• Addition: Bradamante 

Orcs

The modern orc is a green Klingon and Klingons are tharks with forehead ridges, so tharks it is. I lose the “this is what happens to people under fascism” thematic element of Tolkien’s orcs, and I won’t say the tharks were particularly nuanced in the Barsoom novels, but they’re a pretty easy canvas to add complexity to if you start writing them as people with a culture and history and whatnot.

Tying into the Land of Darkness: tharks would already be adapted to the cold of Mars, and would naturally gravitate towards northern climates. Plus “Gog of Magog” is basically the archetypical orc name so that’s double appropriate.

• Q: What’s the relationship between the tharks, Alexander, and the Sauron analogue?
• Q: How did they get here, anyway? Is other Martian life also transplanted here? Were the mi-go involved? (Yes)
• Q: What happens after this whole plot?
• Q: What relationships do they have with nearby humans?

• Addition: Barsoomian wildlife, since there are now 7 books to pull from and ERB loved him some monsters.
• Addition: John Carter - human warlord who has somehow risen to prominence among the tharks - could be analogous to Alexander, a direct lieutenant to Alexander, or just some opportunist taking advantage of the current political situation.
• Addition: Other inhabitants of Mars, Barsoomian and otherwise
• Addition: Water of Life = River Iss? Oh ho ho, delightfully devilish, Seymour...  

Sauron

Nyarlathotep: Sauron was literally the evil vizier to the last king of Atlantis and was called both “bringer of gifts” and “the wizard”. He's gonna be played by the Crawling Chaos.

Azathoth is then the natural choice for Morgoth, and if I correlate Mt. Etna with Mt. Doom there’s an avenue open to bring in Typhon. Exactly what the relationship is with Nyarly, or what Nyarly’s relationship with the rest of the world is, I am going to leave for later.

• Q: What is Nyarlathotep’s role in all this? How has he interfered in the world?
• Q: What sorts of monsters has Azathoth-as-Typhon spawned?
• Q: What happens if Azathoth gets out from under the mountain? How would that happen?

• Addition: Mythos material directly linked to Nyarly or Azathoth, which actually leans towards the Dreamlands, which can loop right back around and include basically everything Dunsany wrote.
• Addition: Say it with me, everyone: "It's the fucking mi-go, Charlie Brown!"
• Charlie Brown is, unfortunately, unavailable until 2046 thanks to Sonny Bono and the Copyright Extension Act. 

Mount Doom

I had originally planned on Mount Etna for the Typhon connection, but in snooping around for alternatives I stumbled across Mount Elbrus, which hits basically every check every box I want to hit, plus extras: it’s volcanic, it’s fucking huge (largest volcano in Eurasia), it’s erupted within historical record ( ~50 CE), it’s located in the Caucasus (and thus in the same general direction as the Land of Darkness via transitive property) and has mythological importance via Zoroastrianism as Hara Barazaiti.

• Q: Perhaps instead of destroying the Seal, the quest is returning it to the heavens?

• Addition: Hara Barazaiti lore - planets orbit around it, pretty sure Mithra was born there... 

Numenor 

Is literally Atlantis, which means I’m spoiled for choice. There is simply so god damn much available to sort through, those theosophists loved writing some bullshit about Atlantis.  

To start with, I'm going to use the real-world historical Atlantis (the Theran Eruption of ~1600 BCE that obliterated half of Santorini) as my baseline, say Phorenice from The Lost Continent was its last monarch, and I'll pencil in “Minotaur narrative” for later.

• Q: What did Nyarlathotep do in Atlantis?
• Q: Was the Seal known to / in possession of Atlantis?
• Q: What leftovers of the Atlantean empire remain?
• Q: Were the mi-go involved and why is the answer “yes”?
• Q: Typhon/Azathoth the cause of the eruption? Maybe there are two important mountains?

• Addition: Entirely unscientific dinosaurs
• Addition: Atlantean technology
• Addition: Atlantean ruins

**

I’m going to call it here for now; there’s a lot of material to cover and I haven’t even gotten to the Fellowship yet. It’s been an incredibly fun exercise so far, and I think it’s already shaping up to be something special. Experiment successful. The method works. Probably (definitely) going to expand beyond the boundaries of the initial premise, knowing how much my pattern-seeking brain likes drawing connections.

It’s very refreshing - honestly it feels a little bit like I am almost getting away with something - to do something so purposefully derivative at every step of the process, only to see that it somehow circles back around to feeling new again simply because the strictures of public domain force me to bypass 95 years of genre feeding on itself. I'm rebuilding LotR out of sources Tolkien would have known about, but not limiting myself to the sources he used. Looking at it that way it's almost an alternate history (almost, but not quite, considering all the sources that would have been copyrighted at the time.) of what could have been.

I have a feeling - call it a hunch - this will expand well beyond the boundaries of the initial experiment. 

Fragments of an Old Alt-History Setting

Back around 2012 or so, I cooked up an alternate history setting. You’ve got to have at least one, it's obligatory. It percolated for a few years, I ended up using it in some assignments for my writing courses in college, and it fizzled out. 

[Aside: Point 2 ultimately led to Point 3, in no small part to the misery that was my senior project - I fought tooth-and-nail against my professor’s “no spec-fic” policy, and I ended up with the weaker compromise choice of stringing together my stories in a shitty Twine game with a vague gesture at intertextuality. Absolute dogshit on all fronts. Should have just gone with a story-within-a-story meta maneuver and saved everyone the trouble, but alas, historical Dan was a dunderhead.]

But such things tend to trickle forward into the future. This setting was the origin point for both Lighthouse (which had most of its shape already present even back then) and the very first seeds of what would become Unicorn Meat (which would be almost completely re-hashed multiple times over - the list of unicorn breeds in the module is present in the same order in the very first iteration of the story, while the carvers themselves won’t show up for another few years.)

A lot of the ideas that accumulated in this setting were not alt-history in the strictest sense, being more just Dan Standard Weird Shit (much of which found its way into my Lighthouse Field Guide series of posts), and most of the actual alternative history bits existed primarily as flavor for the modern-day Lighthouse material. It was very much a “pulled in two directions accomplishing neither” type of project. 

**

Major Divergence Points

Magic Exists
It’s not easy and it's not the kind of thing you can go to school for or infinitely replicate, but it exists. It’s the old tomes and teacher-student transmission type magic. Alchemy is more stable. Surprisingly for the era I wrote this in (ie at my most charitable to Sanderson), I didn’t properly set down a system for it (despite that actually being appropriate for the time period, because I knew essentially nothing about historical occultism at the time). I know geomancy (leylines and so forth) was important.

The history of the US gets completely derailed early on
This was where I bit off potentially more than I could chew, because I had two extreme divergences I wanted to include and ended up adding several more equally or more extreme ones in order to justify them. and as it turns out Dan of 10+ years ago did not know many things.

• I think, but cannot confirm if it was actually there in the old notes, that Washington dies of an infection at Valley Forge. I know I didn’t properly think about the ramifications of this until much later, though 
• Revolutionary War ends up coinciding with a major demon / things that are called demons outbreak that cut off most trans-Atlantic travel but also makes the situation in the colonies much more tenuous despite winning the war.
• Big Ticket Derail 1: Post-Revolution westward expansion is halted (primarily due to vague magic reasons - a cop-out, sure, but it did give me the image of giant black monoliths stretching along the entire length of the Mississippi), coupled with a drastic about-face wrt relations with indigenous peoples; The general idea was that, as part of recovery efforts from the demon incursion (since the main incursion was over the Atlantic, the colonies & coastal regions got hit harder than indigenous territory further inland) the official policy became one of voluntary admission into statehood under a less-federalized system, simply because there was 30-40 years where the states couldn’t afford to expand and likewise couldn’t afford to piss off the neighbors.
• Big Ticket Derail 2: The Haitian Revolution spreads to the southern states (aided by a wizard putting his thumb on the scales); slavery is abolished in the 1790s 

Ben Franklin the alchemist
He invented a method of making homunculi stable enough that they could be consistently but not mass-produced. I think I called it the Franklin Crucible.

“John”
Escaped slave turned pirate turned whaler turned immortal sorcerer; his aid was critical in helping the colonies win independence / not collapse entirely, and he never let them live it down (Jefferson in particular). He remained a lingering influence over the political landscape long after he fucked off to do inscrutible wizard things / potentially seek godhood. He’s shown up occasionally in slightly modified form in more recent works - if you ever see anything about Botfly or the King of Wands, that’s him.

[Aside: I was in my Malazan phase at the time, so John took considerable inspiration from the emperor Kellaneved and has retained a good amount of it.]

Minor Divergence Points

• Alexander the Great of Macedonia is Alexandra the Great of Themiskyra
• This was the sorta-origin point for how I handle amazons in MSF and elsewhere, though most of the details got filled in later.
• Independent state of Deseret
• This was added not because I was particularly knowledgeable about the history of Mormonism, nor because it fit with anything else in the setting I was making, but because it was a New Thing I Learned About (well, mostly the script) and wanted to include as a background element.
• A highly syncretic form of Christianity survives in Japan to the present (filling a similar niche as Voodoo in the Caribbean)
• Mostly because I thought it’d be cool to explore what would happen when Japanese converts are cut off from contact with Rome, but not driven fully underground. Included stuff like Amaterasu filling the role of Gabriel, and the like. Of all the discrete scenarios I mashed together into this thing, this is the one that I think has the strongest conceptual though probably not practical legs, though it still needs to thread the needle of how to make it happen. Though it’s also a premise where the right extremely charismatic person in the right place can kick things off.
• Japanese ships reach California sometime in the 1500-1600s.
• Not a full-blown colonial effort, more of an accidental confluence of right time / right place / right people in charge for someone to try a circumnavigation. Doesn’t strike me as particularly feasible in hindsight. 
• Hawaii remains an independent kingdom.
• Considering the States’ lack of westward expansion in this timeline, this isn’t all that terrible of a stretch.
• The break-in at the Watergate Hotel was actually the heist of an occult artifact called the Eye of Providence.
• This is so fucking goofy, I love it.
• The Internet achieves apotheosis
• This wasn’t portrayed as a good thing, even back then, though it was a lot more insufferably early 2010s about it. It was more like a semi-divine thoughtform-gestalt thing rather than AI, and it was never more than a gestured-at background hazard, but it was definitely meant to be a danger in the background. This was not nearly as cynical, bleak, or horrifying as it should have been.

And there we have it. For a mess of things that I thought were cool at the time thrown at the wall to see what stuck, it's pretty okay. Not going to win any awards for cohesion, but my method's always been Cool Shit first, justifications later (as is no doubt obvious here). 

Who knows, perhaps the muse might return in the future and have something new in this genre for me.

What do people know about the Mythos?

I don't buy into the premise of a masquerade between the mundane and supernatural. False dichotomy, Enlightenment hubris, strains disbelief, requires too many extra parts, no conspiracy is airtight, removes potentially interesting interactions, etc etc. Essay for another time. People are going to know something.

Anyway, this post is "what can your DG agents / hapless bystanders / plucky investigators / meddlesome kids find with 30 seconds and a Wikipedia tab". They're meant to be trailheads and initial breadcrumbs - maybe it's a real lead to the real Mythos, maybe it isn't. Just because people know something doesn't mean it's accurate, but it will be something, and that's a sight better than the constant vagaries this genre subjects its readers to.

Been too long since I've done a post like this; the last Lighthouse Field Guide was four years ago. Don't know why I stopped; I wrote enough entries for this one that I had to split it into multiple posts.

 

Innsmouth, Massachusetts 

Historical fishing hamlet along the north coast of the state, rendered a ghost town in 1927 after an FBI raid to break up a bootlegging and gold-smuggling operation. The site was never resettled and was declared a nature reserve in 1937. Hobbyist explorers would occasionally “make pilgrimage” to the ruins of the town, but this ended when the last standing structure (the meeting Hall of the Esoteric Order of Dagon fraternal society) collapsed during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Peaslee-Boyle Syndrome

An extremely rare psychological disorder where the subject will experience a sudden and totalizing shift in personality that will last anywhere from several weeks to several years. Affected individuals will obsessively study niche topics despite no previous interest, neglect existing relationships and occupations, demonstrate both uncharacteristic knowledge and ignorance about topics, and drastically shift the manner and content of their speech.

Episodes will end without warning or apparent cause; affected individuals will return to their previous personality with no memory of the intervening time.

The Mammoth Caves Sloth-Man

Cryptid hailing from south-central Kentucky, first reported by a trio of backpackers in October 1971. Described as a huge, black-furred creature combining the body of a prehistoric ground sloth with the face of a vampire bat. Fairly popular among cryptid fandom. The nearby town of Hoker’s Mill has a festival / farmer’s market / craft fair in his honor the first weekend of October every year. Claims that it was known to the Cherokee as tsatokokwa are, to the best of anyone’s research, wholly fabricated in 2012 by a now-deleted tumblr account.

Black Hat, Red Scarf

A string of purported encounters with a supernatural individual or individuals. The figure varies in appearance and sex (though is usually male), but is always seen wearing a suit, a black hat, and a red scarf, necktie or handkerchief (leading to the common abbreviation of BHRS). 

Encounters typically fall into one of three categories; happenstance meeting, sudden appearance, or conspicuous recurring observation. Many contactees claimed that BHRS possessed intimate knowledge of and familiarity with them, and nearly all of them claim to have received some form of cryptic message. 

Sightings of BHRS have occurred from the mid 1940s to the present, with spikes in the 1970s and late 2010s. The majority of these have been written off as fiction (including all supposed sightings prior to 1945), hoaxes, or pranks; the consistent and easily-replicated wardrobe has ennobled generations of copycats.

Roswell Incident

The June 1947 crash of a high-altitude listening balloon associated with the USAF’s Project Mogul, which over the course of nearly 80 years has proven to be the single most effective piece of disinformation ever devised by human beings entirely by accident. You can tell people the truth, you can put all the evidence in front of them in 8 by 10 color glossy photos with circles and arrows on them, and they will downright refuse to believe that reality could possibly be that fucking boring.

Zhào Zhāo / 兆𬬿

“Graveyard sickle”; a monster (appearing alone or as a group) that occurs sporadically in Ming-dynasty gods-and-demons fiction. Described as a reclusive tribe of cannibal dwarfs from the southern uplands (modern Vietnam and Laos) who desecrate graves, attack travelers with darts covered in paralytic poison, and carve up their still-living victims with heavy iron sickles. While lurid, these narratives are repetitive and occasionally plagiarized, with the trope of the unlucky traveler realizing that their dumplings contain human flesh just before the trap is sprung being particularly rote. No evidence linking the Zhào Zhāo to a real-world cultural group has ever been found; the narratives themselves petered out around 1610 and the monster remained obscure until its inclusion in the 1986 Japanese RPG Tower of Lictor for the PC-88.

March Technologies

American defense contractor that made it big in the wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror. Weapons R&D, surveillance, AI development, private security. They have fingers in pies, irons in the fire, and a “Controversies” subheading on Wikipedia the length of a moderately-sized novel. 

Despite doing extremely well for themselves over the last two decades, the company has been showing signs of internal chaos in recent years. C-suite turnover is high, lawsuits are numerous, media scrutiny is high, shareholders are antsy, at least one high-cost classified project for the Air Force has been scuttled, and capping it off the CFO was assassinated in February 2025 and the head of marketing was incriminated on sex trafficking charges through his connection with Jeffrey Epstein in emails released in November of the same year. Public opinion, already at the bottom of the barrel, has managed to dig through the bottom and find a new barrel.

Book of Azathoth

Anonymous High German grimoire, written in Nuremberg during the late 17th century. Composed of three books:

• Book 1: Instructions on summoning various spirits of earthly / heavenly / infernal forces.
• Book 2: A treatise of alchemic principles, mathematics, and natural law.
• Book 3: A treatise on astrology and astronomy, including charts, tables, and observational data.

The author demonstrates vocal support of Copernicus and Galileo, and spends considerable time in Book 3 compiling a new method of divination for his bespoke heliocentric cosmos. Presaging the later development of the galactic model, the author supposes the existence of a central divine-motive force around which the sun orbits in conjunction with the other stars. This force, referred to interchangeably as “azoth”, “azathoth”, “azimuth” and “atziluth”, is claimed by the author to be the originator of both material and spiritual reality, and the engine by which it moves, changes, is destroyed, and renewed.

The Cornucopia House Killings

Quadruple homicide of the staff of a Maryland orphanage on February 5th, 2001. Emergency responders called to the scene by reports of a fire on the property found 19 nonverbal children, nightmarish conditions, and the bodies of four adults shot and thrown into the fire that consumed one of the buildings on the property. That the extreme abuse at Cornucopia House had flown under the radar of the Maryland DCS for years gave police and governmental officials good reason to minimize what they gave to the media, and so the full details of the case were not known by the public until over a decade later.

The initial police investigation was unable to identify or find the killers: all that could be said for certain was that there were multiple assailants, they had prepared for the attack beforehand, and they cleaned up after themselves. A car believed to have been used in the attack was found in the afternoon of Feb 6th, having been dumped into the Chesapeake, but this provided no further leads.

“The French Play”

A 2-act drama supposedly written in Paris during the 1890s, said to drive its readers, actors, and audience mad. Any further details of the characters and plot are vague and inconsistent, besides its placement in the royal court of a far-away and fantastic country,  decadence as both atmospheric feature and artistic style, and the presence of a central figure variously called “Golden Phantom”, “Dandelion King”, “Lord Midra” “Monarch of Masks”, “Aurelius Le’garde”, and similar appellations.

“Atlantean Minotaur” 

Skeleton of a highly-deformed male individual found on the island of Crete in 1923. Subject suffered from gigantism (likely as a symptom of Proteus Syndrome), alobar holoprosencephaly, and heavy cutaneous horn growth, and died at around 14-17 years of age. Skeleton found in a sealed underground chamber at palace site. Cell walls decorated with bull iconography. Trace organic compounds present, analyzed as fecal matter.

 

Verde Arrowhead Cave

A paleolithic site in Portugal, noteworthy for the presence of both homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis bones dated to approximately 54,000 years ago. Surviving cave paintings depict handprints, human figures, fauna, abstract shapes, and a single anomalous inclusion: a row of three triangles painted with a malachite-based green pigment.

Dog-Face

Low-quality photograph circulated as part of various creepypasta stories since 2005. Depicts a hunched figure with a skeletal, dog-like head. The figure’s mouth is open, and most associated pastas claim that it is smiling or laughing. While regarded as a hoax, it has resisted attempts to identify how it was made: the oldest version of the file displays no obvious artifacts of digital manipulation and is believed to be a scan of a physical photo.

 

1930–31 Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition

Disastrous geological survey mission, led by Dr. William Dyer and funded by the N. D. Pickman Foundation. Of the original 20 members (4 faculty, 7 graduate students, 9 mechanical support staff), 12 died after Dr. Thomas Lake split the party to pursue excavations at a secondary location. Survivors claimed that there had been signs of violence at the Lake campsite, though no bodies were recovered nor photographs taken to confirm.

Dr. Dyer dedicated the remainder of his life to unsuccessfully dissuading further expeditions to Antarctica, claiming to have seen a ruined city dominating a mountainous plateau in central East Antarctica;  the 1935 Starkweather-Moore Expedition performed two flyovers of the provided coordinates and found nothing. 

The Necronomicon

A Latin translation of a supposed Greek recension of Abdul al-Hadrat’s Kitab al-Layl, with a later partial English translation of the Latin by John Dee and a full translation of the Greek by Miskatonic University Press in 1938. The most famous grimoire in the world, beyond even the Ars Goetia, the Necronomicon has long been held by both occultists and the public alike as a madness-inducing lodestone of all that is evil in the cosmos.

This is, ultimately, an exaggeration born of absence. With so few manuscripts surviving, European occultists and church authorities filled the gap with an arms race of who could invent the more lurid and blasphemous secrets to slip between its covers. The only madness it is liable to produce would be born of the reader’s exasperation with its tedious bloviating and manic self-contradiction.

The rediscovery of a nearly-complete first-generation manuscript of the Kitab al-Layl in 2008 revealed that nearly nearly 80% of the Necronomicon was original material written centuries after al-Hadrat’s death, based on the Great Circle school of Byzantine occultism which was in many cases only lightly and spuriously based on the original text.

 

Abd al-Hadrat

The 1) pseudonymous 2) pseudopigraphic 3) wholly fictional 4) actual author of the Kitab al Layl. Credited with dozens of other texts and a life so full of portentous occult happenings that it would be a miracle if he had any time to eat, sleep or shit amongst it all. Also known as Abdul Hadrat, or the Latinized Alhazred.

Tsalal

Volcanic island located on the Balleny Hotspot south of Australia. At only 150 miles from the Antarctic coast, it is the southernmost location permanently inhabited by humans. The island’s volcanic soil and hot springs allow for an ecosystem density sufficient to sustain an estimated 800 individuals; the origin of the inhabitants is unknown, with the two leading hypotheses being that they are descended either from a Polynesian or Australian group.

The Tsalal-islanders have rebuffed all outsiders to the island with violence since the island’s discovery in 1828 by the Jane Guy; it is unclear if “Tsalal” is the indigenous word for the island, the people, the ground in general or “What?”, as the only source is the journal of Arthur Gordyn Pym and the eyewitness account of Dirk Peters.

The most recent cruise-by was made by a South Korean vessel on the way to Jang Bogo Station in 2022. Video taken by the crew and later leaked online showed a group of islanders armed with spears and bows emerging from the treeline. One member of the war party, wearing a masked turtleshell helmet and woven coconut-fiber robe, gained a moment of internet popularity (and a long conspiratorial tail) as “Spaceman”.

 

“Dagon”

A humpback whale encountered off the Newfoundland coast in 1836 by the whaler Marcus Green. If the crew’s accounts are accurate, it was potentially the largest member of its species ever observed. Named by the ship’s spotter, Jed Marsh, after the Mesopotamian deity commonly misidentified as a sea god up through the 1920s.

Stephen Alzis

New York nightclub owner, alleged antiquities smuggler and suspected kingpin of semi-apocryphal criminal organization “the Fate”. Shot and killed in 2002 by an unhoused man who believed him to be Satan. The NYT obituary described Alzis as “a peddler of human misery with a narcissist's insufferable charm, whose death will be celebrated by many and mourned by only a hypothetical few.”

 

Miskatonic University

A private liberal arts college in Arkham, Massachusetts. 2024 enrollment: 1049 students. Division-III basketball team with a record that would be hilarious were it not deeply pitiable. Possesses a not-unwarranted reputation as a dumping ground for cranks and failsons; has been pumping out / hiring spiritualists, theosophists, and UFO cultists since the Second Great Awakening and onwards.

Founded in 1741 as the Arkham Presbyterian Seminary, granted a charter as Arkham College in 1785, changed name to College of the Miskatonic in 1803 and finally  became Miskatonic University in 1849. Closed the medical school and sold off most of the infamous “special collection” in 1968 to cover mounting debts.

 

Pentacanthus protomegas (Yéye)

Extremely well-preserved fossil remains of an enormous Cambrian-era echinoderm, unearthed from the Maotianshan Shales in 2014 and overturning the evolutionary history of Earth ever since. Affectionately nicknamed Yéye (“grandpa”) by the research team, pentacanthus possessed a long, cylindrical body with five-fold radial symmetry. Pronounced ridges (the source of its genus name) ran the length of the body, each serving as anchorpoint for a long, winglike fin used for locomotion and terminating in five short tentacles around the mouth opening (each outfitted with a complex and well-developed eye) and five longer tentacles at the posterior end. At over two meters in length (and nearly double that with the tentacles included), Yéye would have been the largest organism on Earth when it was alive, and is believed to have been a suspension feeder similar to the radiodont Aegirocassis.

 

 **

 

I didn't intend for 2025 to turn into the Year of Lovecraft, but turn it did. As frustrating as I find so much of the source material, the remixing is consistently very fun. "Shit makes for good fertilizer" proves itself a reliable truism once again. Special thanks to friend of the blog MysterySpice for pointing out the al-Hadrat replacement for al-Hazred, which turns our beloved ur-occultist from a nonsense name to "servant of the presences" and that's a fucking winner right there.

Also worth shouting out at the end is this post I found linked in a Deep Cuts review, about how HPL and REH built on Machen and off of each other in their stories about prehistoric little folk, which gave us the Tcho-Tcho via Derleth and Schorer. Never have I been more glad that Tolkien hijacked an entire concept so completely than with hobbits: what came before was fucking dire. 

The next post is well under way, and will be incorporating some non-Mythos but thematically appropriate material. Stay tuned. 

100 More Facts About Mother Stole Fire

 Sequel to a post I wrote nearly four years ago on the dot. Been away for far too long.

1. There are seven dogs in the world whose loyalty is so great that death will not claim them. They remain by the graves of their companions, aged but immortal. The eldest of these is a red wolf who, judging by the grave goods found within the cave, has kept his watch for nearly 45,000 years.
2. Lilu cuisine has a culinary tradition of extremely flavorful food in very small portions, born of having to make do with very little.
3. The oldest living mortal being in the world is a tree named Great Tuung, estimated by wizards to be 2.9 million years old. Several other similarly ancient trees are known - Pando, Old Jikko, and Kalavay have all reached a million years.
4. Hespermontane theater loves stock characters and audience interaction. There's a very porous fourth wall and a lot of improvisation involved (since established characters have established behaviors, riffing on those traits is a necessity to keep the audience interested).
5. One of the greatest honors for a storyteller is the adoption of one of their creations into the wider stable of popular stock characters. Sometimes the character will have their creator's family name appended to their own.
6. Abolitionism was not unheard of in the Second Empire, but its supporters never grew beyond controlled opposition in the senate. Some slight restrictions might get passed every few years, enough to mollify them with a functionally-identical status quo.
7. Wheelchair-bound Goa is the patron god of those with physical and mental disabilities, as well as Tubalkhan’s nephew and one of his workshop assistants. “Give a man what aid he needs, hand him his tools, and let him work as he knows best” goes the saying.
8. The proper name for the third gender in the Longhouse Culture literally translates to “they are always running back and forth” - a reference to their original social function as go-betweens for the men and women’s lodges.
9. A common Belt story: A ship is hit by a sudden storm of such intensity that the weatherworker cannot prevent the ship from sinking. But they are able to weave a spell of wave-marching, and the crew proceeds to walk to the nearest island by its power. While clearly exaggerated into folktale (the distance walked, power of the spell, and number of crew are well outside of reality), there is precedent for fishermen whose canoes capsize making their way home by this method. "If the ship sinks, we will walk to shore!" is a common refrain of the 'Belter Spirit'.
10. As there is little economic impetus for sex work in the Hespermont, pornotekton is more accurately treated as a religious vocation
11. The four most renowned of Tubalkhan's named hammers are Thunderer, Ringing Bell, Iron-Shaper, and Chain-Breaker.
12. Lady Rust is the third sister of the Black and White Queens of Tanniclen; she departed for Pelai during the War and hasn’t been seen on this side of the ocean since. Her sisters don’t talk about her and she’s been dropped from the wizards’ historical records, so it’s fair to presume that the parting was on bad terms.
13. The following historical and pseudohistorical personages exist in MSF with only minor alterations of name and circumstance: Boudicca, Hubaba, Zheng Yi Sao / Ching Shih, Gilgamesh & Enkidu, Enheduana, John Brown, Benjamin Lay, Adolphe Sax, Fred Rogers, Emperor Norton.
14. To "throw the book" at someone means to solve a problem, usually one caused by an officious and equivocating person, through unexpectedly direct means; the phrase originates in a popular Pelaian folktale of a cruel magistrate undone by the hero simply beaning him in the head with a law codex hard enough to knock him out.
15. The city of Qhauya hosts a yearly celebration of the ousting of the wizard-king Bahg, wherein young men dressed as the tyrant are released from the cathedral after morning services to be chased down and hauled back by the townsfolk. The last contestant to be returned gets to open the ceremony the following year, and is given Bahg’s actual (if disenchanted) hat as a trophy until then.
16. A Hespermontane meal: rice and beans with corn and greens, smoked cavy, and a pumpkin-based chili sauce.
17. Municipal gadugi (volunteer collective work teams) are the backbone of Hespermont communities; they’re responsible for trash pickup, snow removal, public space maintenance, community events, festival preparation, and so on.
18. The guilt that comes with addiction is prime feeding ground for demons; treatment entails robust ritual support from the community and focused support from friends and family.
19. The many small island and fleet nations of the Belt are tied together by a complex and longstanding series of treaties and agreements. If a party violates these agreements and oversteps what is considered acceptable hubris, it is now one’s appointed duty to invoke the Trickster Wind and divest them of their wealth; this invocation of swashbuckling piracy as spiritual practice Is the driving counterforce to historical invasions of the Belt by continental powers, and the source of the invaders' repeated failures.
20. In Hespermontane languages, "our ancestors" is always used in the inclusive first person, regardless of where the speaker or audience is from.
21. A prayer to Tubalkhan: "Praise to you, Father of All Peoples, for you teach men and women to make things well."
22. "tok-tok" is a filler particle marking a pause in speech to collect one’s thoughts. An onomatopoeia for knocking a smoking pipe against a wooden block to remove the ashes, originating with ceremonial tobacco during lodge meetings. May also be used as a nonspecific measurement of time.
23. Neckties are only really fashionable in Dis, as the image of wearing a noose as a symbol of one's employment is considered a non-starter outside of Hell.
24. A common insult accusing the target of being an unskilled or inconsiderate lover is derived from the name of a mythic hero notorious for declining an Amazon war-queen's flirtations out of fear of emasculation, and has thus become synonymous with cowardice and poor moral character.
25. Preserved corpses are prime targets for malicious spirits, and so there is a common cross-cultural taboo against embalming or mummifying the dead. The body must be returned to the earth through burial or cremation. 
26. Cheap clay vessels are often stamped with “shatter, and return to the earth".
27. The association of cats and witchcraft goes all the way back to Hecate, who is commonly portrayed alongside the nekomata triad of Pangur Ban, Cait Si, and Greymaulkin.
28. Parliament of Birds vs. Magnaclowder is still taught in the legal schools of the Dragon Republics as one of the Five Landmark Cases. While not a full cessation of hostilities, the final ruling of the nine-year-long suit does severely limit the number of birds any given cat might catch per year.
29. The largest heist in modern history involved the theft of 941 tomes from the private library of the wizard Thanagar the Illuminated. The culprits were never identified and the local government declined to investigate, claiming that since the theft took place on the wizard’s property it was outside their jurisdiction. Facsimile copies of the stolen texts, supposedly derived from “newly discovered original manuscripts” began public library circulation the following year.
30. Red Heron is the largest of the  “in-between” / open clans (those that may be joined without marriage or an internal recommendation); the bulk of its members are migrant workers, immigrants, and those who have for whatever reason left their home clans.
31. Competitive pepper eating is a common display of machismo / nonviolent way to settle disputes in the Belt.
32. Nut allergies are rare, thanks to common use of peanut / tree nut paste in baby food.
33. The alchemical quest to turn lead into gold is not undertaken to produce gold, but to destroy lead. Even in distant antiquity it was known as a worthless and dangerous metal, and in several ancient law codes the knowing usage of lead is classified as centumicide - the legal equivalent to the murder of 100 men.
34. Alchemist’s Gold: a dull, mottled, copper-colored metal that retains the softness and low melting point of lead while losing its toxic interactions with living bodies. It’s useful in nearly all the ways gold is useful, though generally considered ugly. Metalworkers specializing in it are called dunsmiths.
35. Always knock before going to the bathroom at night; there might be an akaname in there, and you wouldn’t want to startle them. Scum lickers might be gross, but they’re ecologically important!
36. Communities will sometimes string the year’s weddings together during the spring or summer and stretch out the collective celebration for days.
37. Spells to aid with sleep compose one of the oldest and most common schools of magic. While nearly all of the traditions began as lullabies for infants and small children, they have diversified radically in the ages since and variants exist for the elderly, couples, oneself, the sick and the dying, and so on. The nonsense words used by many of these songs are occasionally believed to be the remnants of archaic languages by scholars who get a kick out of making non-falsifiable claims.
38. The Maid was once asked what she would do after the War. She responded that she would return to the woods behind her family’s farm, find a fallen tree to sit upon, and listen to the birds and insects for a while.
39. Violence is considered wholly against Tubalkhan’s nature. Even in those stories where he participates in a battle against demons, he’ll be depicted as supporting the other gods, overseeing evacuations, protecting mortals, or aiding the wounded.
40. Two popular saints: Ndoni, patron of lost objects and the people who have lost them; Damhnait, patroness of the mentally ill.
41. Monopods are found on a few small islands in the Belt. These sagani are not fond of company, and hide their homes through illusion, weather magic, or thought-clouding.
42. In antiquity, it was believed that the Astomi tribe from the mountains south of Janashkut could live on smells alone. This has never been true, but they have cultivated myrrh trees for as long as they appear in the historical record.
43. Tomás and Tama are extremely popular railway gods, acting as the twin patrons of engineers and stationmasters, respectively.
44. Regardless of region, buildings are immaculately designed for temperature control according to the needs of the local climate. It’s just good architecture.
45. Hippopotami can and will fight, kill, and eat demons. Those that do so regularly gain a pronounced red and black coloration.
46. The city of Gran Laguna, casino-ridden den of sin and vice, is under the de-facto control of the cetacean mob and its kingpin, the  Dauphin. He’s got city government eating right out of his flipper, so take care not to stick your snout where it doesn’t belong when you head down to the marina for a day at the races.
47. Some popular games: chess, hanafuda, tarocchini, tafl, rummy, kōnane, Wizard’s Hand.
48. Lacrosse was used as a way of avoiding conflict in the old days; it would allow the war societies of the opposing tribes to blow off steam while their councils met to hash out the diplomacy while the matches went on.
49. Giant pandas exist, though not in the way you think. Their bumbling, helpless exterior hides one of the most cunning and vicious ambush predators in the known world. The original species is long extinct, and now only the parasitic mimic remains.
50. Red pandas, on the other hand, are clever little bastards much more like their bandit-masked cousins. 
51. Chocolate is predominantly consumed as a sweetened or spiced beverage; its candy form is a luxury.
52. Though the name and exact form differs, Pen and Tam can (and do) go out for pizza and ice cream; the former is any kind of toasted flatbread with toppings, the latter is typically eaten mixed with nuts, fruit, and spices.
53. Hespermontane sign language (“hand-speaking”) originated as an inter-tribal auxiliary language and has been used as the default communication for deaf persons since antiquity. Children are taught it as part of their schooling, and a modified form is used for human-elephant communication. 
54. Everyone knows that lions don’t lick their young into shape (only the shagga-cat does that), but this didn’t stop one philosopher from trying to document the process and getting mauled to death for his trouble.
55. The omnipresence of minor mending spells means that clothing and household objects can last for generations if cared for. Fashion trends tend to move slowly due to this
56. Sea serpents aren’t related to snakes at all, but are actually a surviving archosaur lineage from the age of dragons.
57. Tubalkhan is considered the father of the sciences for his careful observation, attention to detail, and use of direct experimentation.
58. Medicinal magic rarely provides an immediate cure to an affliction, as such a rapid change in bodily condition causes its own problems. Instead, magic is used for prevention, symptoms management, and gradual healing.
59. The traveling circus originates with migrant workers and monster-hunters; busking and talent shows are an easy source of extra cash during the off season.
60. Calico cats practice a unique school of magic among felines; human witches of particularly high experience and skill are often called ‘Old Calico’ accordingly.
61. There are no police, but there are detectives. All of them are absolute weirdos in their own special ways, both because the trade attracts those with unusual ways of looking at the world and because the magics used in evidence collection tend to further reinforce those traits.
62. Most city-states will have a robust civil engineering core in place of a standing military: wars are occasional, but the roads always need fixed.
63. Community fire and emergency aid teams are easily identified by their flame-resistant jackets, which are dyed a deep indigo.
64. Deer are semi-donesticated in the Hespermont, and commonly raised for meat in the place of cattle.
65. Acephavara is an exonym (“land of the headless men”) originating from stories of the Thandatra people, whose typically dark skin will often be broken with patterns of lighter color on the chest or back that resemble a face.
66. “Love potion”: a soup, stew, curry or sauce with no additional magical properties; used as a way to teach lovesick young men a useful skill, as well as the value of good food and pleasant conversation in courtship.
67. “Potion of attraction”: triggers an episode of disassociative self-reflection where the imbiber will see themselves as others see them, highlighting the habits and behaviors that make them so unpalatable as a romantic partner.
68. There are few omens on the sea worse than a thin (and therefore hungry) mermaid, and so sailors across the Mare call hard times “the ribs”.
69. War is an extremely efficient means of mass-producing angry ghosts; part of what makes wizards so dangerous is that they can and will use them to their own ends. 
70. The Ang-Ket trade league connects cities all along the circumference of the Mare Interregnum; it’s named after a type of circular fish trap (“ring” or “enclosure”).
71. There are seven planets visible with the naked eye: the sun and moon are cosmologically grouped with earth and not included in the count.
72. Intelligent life can be found on multiple bodies in the solar system, though sustained meaningful contact between any of them has yet to occur.
73. Blues music emerged during the hardships of the post-War rebuilding period, and has since diversified into several robust regional styles.
74. Nerve-linked prosthetic limbs (autobrachia) were first developed ~15 years ago, with many veterans of the War in the North volunteering as first-run recipients.
75. Saffron is relatively cheap and widely used - not because it’s any easier to harvest, but because of widespread small-scale cultivation. 
76. In cases where the cause is unclear, a low-intensity exorcism ritual may be used to determine if an individual is possessed by an evil spirit or suffering from mental illness.
77. The standardized system of weights and measures is base-12, and peacefully coexists alongside local nonspecific systems.
78. Apes (and similarly intelligent relatives of the other Thinking Peoples) have triggered debates of categorization for centuries: most cultures group them under “they can’t really participate in society, but they’re enough like people that killing them is still murder”.
79. Ngata Long-Tusk is an anomaly in the magical world: an elephant that practices human-style goetic wizardry. Has a tower and sigil tattoos and everything. Has not yet caused an international incident but it’s probably only a matter of time.
80. There is a variety of orca (or an orca-like magical being, the line is fuzzy) capable of changing their shape and taking humanoid or wolflike forms. While primarily associated with the northern amazons, they might be encountered all along the northern coasts and islands and they are regular visitors in the city of Redgate.
81. The whalers of Tin Jacobstown might be better thought of as a decentralized mercenary army, profiting off of the war between the illhevi and the other whales. The practice is sustainable only through staying on Orca’s good side through sacrifice and soul-pledges.
82. Ol’ Dunk: legendary sea monster, described as a gigantic fish with an armored head and fused, beak-like teeth.
83. There is a prehistoric Dayrdani method of exorcism still practiced in the modern day; it requires only a circle drawn in the dirt, the sign of the horns, and a series of prayers in an unknown and otherwise extinct language performed with overtone throat singing.
84. Jails are ideal spawning grounds for demons, and thus tend to be limited to the more tyrannical pockets of the world or the ruins left behind by such. In some instances they will reach a critical mass of suffering and transcend into a demonic genius loci, which will then attempt to lure in and entrap life from the surface to feed upon. If this can be prevented, the dungeon will starve and be rendered inert in two or three generations; if it gathers sufficient population, the demonic locus will become self-sustaining and specialized delvers will have to be called in to destroy its heart. The depths of Kulvakh tower were one such location.
85. Interpretation of languages is another keystone magical tradition with prehistoric origins, developing independently in many cultures across the world. A “talkabout” was the period where the parties’ respective cunning-men would speak to each other before official intertribal negotiations.
86. Without some means of cathartic release,  trauma and self-repression can develop into a form of demonic possession that will rot a person from the inside.
87. The town of Machaggan is famous throughout the Low Country for the giant orb made of lustrous blue-silver metal that floats above the central plaza. Its implications are menacing.
88. It was once thought that the Questing Beast would lead those it thought worthy to an elixir of immortality; in reality, their hunting strategy is to lead unwitting humans back to their den to be ambushed by their hatchlings.
89. The Dadu-Qon of the southeastern deserts say that their ancestors copied down a revelation from an angel; they have yet to decipher it, but believe that it will usher in a new age of peace and prosperity to the world when it is at last translated. A few fragments of the being are housed as relics, but the main crash site has not yet been found.
90. It’s said that killing the white stag is is the true sign of kingship in the Northlands; that no one has ever done it is subsequently the true sign that the Northlands needs no king.
91. All a wizard really needs to kill someone, when you get down to it, is eye contact for just long enough to trigger a fatal blood clot. Everything else is just theatrics.
92. The Megapharmikon was the pre-eminent medical text of antiquity and has remained relevant into the modern day thanks to its detailed anatomical diagrams and surgical procedures. The book’s author, the doctor-philosopher Eutukhos, wrote the text as a reflection on his 20 years serving as the surgeon-necromancer of a mercenary company.
93. In the old Longhouse Culture, a village’s chief served primarily as resource manager; great wealth disparity in one’s community was seen as a shameful display of incompetence, and from this came the modern social staple of the public fund.
94. Illuminated manuscripts look like that monk’s gravestone I saw in Kilkenny.
95. By some horticultural miracle, there is a popular strain of marijuana with a pleasant, woody smell. With the right preparation, it smells like the inside of a barbecue pit.
96. Divinatory practices can’t tell the future, but they do provide a framework for thinking about an event (past, future, or present) from different / previously unconsidered angles. 
97. The valkyries of the far north are said to be beautiful shield-maidens who usher the spirits of warriors up into the heavens. This is technically true, but only if one is looking at the proxy body and ignores the primary, which looks something like eight women fused together inside a gold-and-steel carapace.
98. Attempts to catalog the many types of tutelary spirit that act as playmates and protectors of small children have universally met with failure; there are simply too many of them.
99. One of the early confirmations of the world’s sphericality was by a Jantoo wizard who achieved enough height on his flying carpet while trying to catch a migrating phoenix that he was able to observe the curvature of the planet. The extreme cold and negligible air caused him to fall off and plunge nearly 20 miles: he survived the impact unscathed thanks to a spell enacted before he lost consciousness, with the unintended result of widely-visible and extremely funny physical comedy.
100. The Gray Witch saw the War of the Bull and the emergence of Hell firsthand, and since then has worked in secret towards a grand design: she believes that if Hell cannot be defeated then it must be mastered, and that she alone is the one able to bring all its demons to heel. She is opposed by the King of Wands, though his own motivations are obscure.

 

MOSH: Environmental Scenario Design Framework

Via NASA

Planet generation is a topic I keep coming back to, trying to develop the perfect formula. This post has been percolating for well over a year at this point, long enough that I had actually forgotten the contents of my prior attempts (see here, here, here and here)

I have been fiddling around with this idea for a very long while now (I think this is a year+ draft?), and in doing so I have come to a revelation of sorts.

The revelation is this: In terms of making a functional component of a tabletop game, most planet generation tables are mostly useless.

They're certainly fun if you want to indulge your inner sci-fi writer for a while, and they are a useful tool in establishing the flavor and character of a location, but as a functional component of game prep? Not very useful.

(Stars Without Number's tag tables are of course very good - because they're about providing you with points of interaction.)

We can reduce all those tables of atmosphere and temperature and mass down to a binary: if you take off your helmet, either the planet kills you instantly or it doesn't.

If the planet is the sort that kills you instantly, your adventuring is either going to be inside a habitat or out in a suit. (For our purposes, gas giants and deep space are also included here.) If the planet is not the kind that kills you instantly, that's Basically Just Earth. This gives us three functional location-based adventure types:

• Habitat - An enclosed environment, ranging from the equivalent of a single building to that of a small country. There are nice thick walls and layers of safeguards between you and enough radiation to fry your progeny to the seventh generation.
• Out in a Suit - Outside of the habitat, you are both vulnerable to the elements and at significantly increased risk of finding yourself out of range of help or support.
• Basically Just Earth - You already know what this one is like, you live here. Basically Just Earth is not beholden to the clean kills you / does not kill you dichotomy. It can certainly still kill you, but not as fast as the others (usually).

I'm leading this all to the point that if we're going to be generating planets for Mothership, we should be generating them with a focus on one of these three adventure location roles.

Habitat

95% of the human population lives here, in the Iterative City and similar settlements. Monkeys in tin cans, in dome cities, in walled-off fragments of Earth.

Scale

1. Facility
2. Town
3. City
4. Metropole
5. Country

Type (Orbital)

1. Bernal Sphere - Rotating sphere.
2. O'Neill Cylinder - Rotating cylinder.
3. Stanford Torus - Rotating ring.
4. Beehive - Asteroid or iceteroid that has been burrowed into.
5. Tin Can - Little more than a pressurized can with thrusters and solar panels attached.
6. Gravity Balloon - A comparatively thin shell filled with enough atmosphere to keep it from collapsing in on itself.
7. Dyson Tree - An enormous, genetically modified plant fed on icy bodies and sustaining an enclosed atmosphere.
8. Freefall - Any type of large habitat with no spin-gravity components.
9. Decommissioned Ship - A spaceship that is no longer serviceable for interplanetary or interstellar travel, but can still serve as living space.
10. Modular - A collection of connected habitats, often of different types. Roll d3 for # of additional modules.
    

Type (Planetside)

1. Dome - The classic. Can't go wrong with a good dome.
2. Burrow - Underground is sometimes the safest place to be.
3. Lava Tube - Saves on digging costs.
4. Aerostat - Suspended in a dense atmosphere.
5. Hydrostat - Suspended on or underneath liquid.
6. Worldhouse - A crater or canyon is domed over, sealed, and terraformed in-miniature; kin to an enormous greenhouse.

Habitats will always be accompanied by some manner of support infrastructure (power generation, resource extraction and reclamation, food production, etc), though self-sufficiency is not a given and many habitats could be easily crippled or killed outright if cut off from the necessary imports,

The biggest hazard in a habitat is the enclosed environment.

• Your options for escaping or avoiding the threat are limited.
• You will be in close quarters with other people (if other people are present).
• You are more likely to be in a surveilled environment.
• Instant or near-instant death lurks on the other side of the wall.

Out in a Suit

Going out in a suit means that your number one priority is getting back to somewhere you can take the suit off. No one wants to go out in a suit, but sometimes circumstances will force your hand.

Why Are You Out In A Suit?

1) You need to travel between habitats.
2) External equipment needs repair or maintenance.
3) You are trying to reach a location.
4) You are trying to find a person.
5) You are investigating an event.

Environmental Hazards

The Rimspace Planet Generator from the Hull Breach folks has us covered here, and I'll be copying their tables mostly wholesale. I've added a fourth table for radiation and magnetic field just to even the horrible space dangers out, and I've added mechanical bits where the original tables implied them.

Temperature

1. Frigid - Extreme thermal protection required
2. Cold - Thermal protection required
3. Temperate - You don't need any special protection from the temperature
4. Hot - Thermal protection required
5. Burning - Extreme thermal protection required

Gravity

1. Minimal - 0-G training required
2. Low - Move with caution
3. Standard - You don't need any special adaptation to the gravity
4. High - Habituation required
5. Crushing - Strength training or exoskeleton required

Atmosphere

1. Negligible - Pressure suit required
2. Thin - Hazard suit recommended
   
3. Moderate - You don't need any special protection against pressure
4. Thick - Extreme winds and precipitation; Hazard suit recommended
   
5. Dense - Pressure suit required

Thin / Moderate / Thick could all technically be breathable, but that's for Basically Just Earth.

Rads & Mags

1. Extreme radiation - Surface exploration lethal
2. High radiation - Hazard suit required
3. Tolerable - You don't need any special protection
4. High magnetism - High electromagnetic interference
5. Extreme magnetism - Wireless devices useless

The biggest hazards while Out in a Suit is running out of resources

• Air supply will be limited
• Suit integrity is critical to your safety.
• Communication is more likely to be unreliable.
• You are more likely to be far away from help.

Basically Just Earth

You will neither freeze nor fry instantly here, and neither the gravity nor the atmosphere will crush you flat. It might not look like Earth, but the fact that you can stand there and say "It doesn't look much like Earth" is a miracle. This doesn't mean that the environment is safe, only that it will not immediately kill you. It is functionally Basically Just Earth, which means you might still need specialized survival equipment, genetic modification, or something else of that nature.

Basically Just Earth has the widest array of hazards to choose from, to the point where you can choose what you like from the lists above and elsewhere. But the biggest ones will be:

• Availability of open space means its easier to find yourself isolated.
• Earthlike worlds can support more factions (and faction conflicts)
• Spaceship escapes are a lot less practical
• We all know you want to put weird aliens here, go right on ahead.

 

Final Thoughts

So there you have it. Not particularly complex, but I think it's a good framework to bolt additional complexity on top of. MoSh works best when it is scenario-focused, so sketching the boundaries that will shape a scenario is the obvious first step.

Hopefully clearing this article (which had been sitting at like, 90% done for that year+) will get the others flowing along to completion. Damn my perfectionism - when it flares up, it flares up bad.

A Weird History of A Stranger Earth

falfuran

Remember This Move did it, Cosmic Orrery did it, I am long overdue for it. Do give a look at the Learned Elder's notes, they will be helpful.

Helionativity (~4.6 BYA)

A boiling cloud of gas attains the mass required needed to begin the fusion of hydrogen. Happy birthday, Sun.

Far away, the slow death of the empire of the Elders is ongoing: the hyperspatial passages their civilization depends on corrode and collapse as the universe transitions from the Matter-Dominated Era to the Dark-Energy-Dominated Era. Shoggoths, liberated via a self-replicating protein chain capable of breaking Elder neural conditioning, strike back for hundreds of millions of years of enslavement. Rebellions across the empire have crippled vital infrastructure and wrested great swathes of territory from Elder control. Life and its direction slips from them.

The Sun's protoplanetary disk coalesces and the planets are born. Orbits are cleared. Solar winds expel the leftover dust.

Gaia-Theia Collision (~4.5 BYA)

Theia collides with Earth; the impact provides the necessary elements, energy, and unknowns to serve as the building blocks of a native siliconate ecosystem within the Terran mantle. in time this will give rise to the lithics.

Life Emerges (~3.7 BYA)

Microbial mats emerge in the Archaean oceans of Earth. The atmosphere is methane-rich and oxygen poor. These stromatolites, simple as they are, are practically a miracle.

The Elder Empire Reaches Earth (~2.5 BYA)

The vessels of that old and dimming empire arrives in the system of a recently-formed G-class star. They build a hyperspace relay on the ninth planet, part of a last, desperate effort to revitalize the fraying hyperspace network on which they depend. It will in time be called Yog-Oth by the Holocene sorcerers of Doggerland, and later Persephone by the Austrailian physicist Neville Kingston-Brown.

The system is named Relay 53325 34201 55002 21142 44322, and several of its worlds are seeded with shoggoths and cthonians for the purposes of ecoforming.

Great Oxygenation Event (~2.4 bya)

Ecoforming of the world is going according to schedule as the atmosphere shifts drastically in a short amount of time, killing off much of the microbial life on Earth.

Eukaryotic Life Develops (~1.85 bya)

The integration of shoggoth protomatter into local terran bacterial populations leads to novel mutations, such as the mass integration of mitochrondria (also known as the powerhouse of the cell)

Cambrian Explosion (~538 MYA)

With the ecoforming now completed to their liking, Elders take up permanent residence on Earth. They will have some role in guiding life, but it is a passing fancy of theirs that comes and goes.

Arrival of the Star Spawn

Ordovician-Silurian Extinction (445-444 MYA)
A Star Spawn fleet - remnant of their grand and failed revanchist conquest - arrives in-system. Most of the combat is confined to interplanetary space but a lone vessel, which will be called Dhulu, manages to break the blockade and make an oceanic landing. It is sufficiently damaged that it cannot return to space, and sufficiently intact that the invasion force is able to fight the Elders to a draw.

A period of tentative peace follows.

The Abyssal Masters (~415 MYA)

Deep in the abyssal oceans of Earth, a species of ostracoderm evolves sapience through the integration of shoggoth biomatter (though they will always claim otherwise). These are the aboleths, and they possess three defining traits: the first, mastery of sorcery. The second, absolutist self-assurance that they are rightful masters of the world. The third, sheer and total bloody-mindedness. They hate the Elders and the Star Spawn, but they are patient. They will wait.

The Yog-Oth Relay is Lost (~380 MYA)

The connection had been tenuous for nearly a gigacentury, and the Empire silent for even longer, but at last the final strand snaps under the distorting weight of the dark-matter dominated universe. 

Late Devonian Extinctions (~372 & 359 MYA) 

The aboleths wage two wars against the Elders and Star Spawn for dominance of the planet. Neither conflict has a clear winner, but the aboleths do not lose and their hated enemies do not win. They slink away to the deep places and wait. It is during this period that the first populations of Deep Ones are cultivated - by all three sides - using residual shoggoth matter and terragen sea life.

The Elders and Star Spawn retreat to their fortresses, to lick their wounds and wallow in their paranoia for an age.

Tully Monster Ascendent (~300 MYA)

A population of Tullimonstrum prove receptive hosts to a strain of shoggoth proteins and begin an accelerated (though still slow) generational journey towards sapience.

The Late Permian Civilization Complex (~260 MYA)

In the great deserts and rainforests of Pangea, multiple species of synapsid come in turn to sapience through consuming the fruit and roots of the Tree of Life. Over many years their civilizations rise and fall against and alongside each other, through times of peace and of war, through good times and through lean. There are ages of utopic peace and of Sword-Logic dissolution. They gain great knowledge and later mastery of sorcerous arts, especially the biomantic methods of growing and shaping shoggoth-matter into new forms. They become a superclade of near infinite forms and functions, and revel in their mastery of self and flesh.

Permian-Triassic Extinction / The Great Dying (252 MYA)

The world ends. Softly at first, then rising to castrophonies that could be heard far away in space.

The Elders of Earth, possessing that potent mix of scientific detachment and gigayear-long perspective, simply move to their other colonies in the system and leave the planet fallow for millions of years.

The Empire of Flesh and Bone burns, leaving no trace behind. A few synapsids, though they bear no resemblance to those species that first bore their names, flee to space and vanish from the record. Whether they died or thrived, none know.

The Yithians Arrive (~230 MYA)

The descendants of the shoggoth-adapted tullimonstrum, having developed into a placid and peaceful self-awareness, are targeted by the Great Race of Yith as their next hosts. The conomorphs are shunted off into the bodies of a species of gas-giant floaters just about to meet the sharp end of a supernova.

The Yithians take up primary residence in the warm, wet regions of eastern Gondwana, just south of the Tehtys Sea. There they build their great Library as they always have and forever will, and gather the greatest minds from across time and space to chronicle the full and true history of the universe. The aboleths and the Star Spawn are apathetic.

The Elders Return (~205 MYA)

They are fewer now, far fewer. The other worlds in the system are all in their own forms of collapse.

The paranoid and reclusive Martian Elders, having killed all their own shoggoths during the Rebellion, rule over a slowly-dying world. Consumed with pride they reject the Terran Elders as weak and cowardly; Mars is dying, but they would rather be the imperial masters of a dying world than admit failure.

The Venusian Elders succeeded at seeding the planet with life, but found themselves unable to adapt to the environment they themselves had made. Evolution, desperate to keep the species alive in the fungal forests below the clouds, stripped them of their sapience, reduced their size, specialized them into arboreal brachiators, and eventually failed in the face of the local competition - an adaptable, clever species not entirely unlike a cross between starfish and flying squirrels. The last of the Venusian Elders will die terrified of the dark shapes that glided through the soft jungles on black folds of skin.

The Jovian moons hold many remnants of Elder colonization, but no Elders at all. The oceans of Ganymede overflow with the life born of their handiwork, but the gardeners are dead or fled. On Europa, a Mind Beneath the Ice repulses any attempt to approach. The harvesting platforms of Io are silent; the subglacial cities of Callisto are empty.

The Titanian Elders shed their material bodies to inhabit vast mesas of crystalline computational substrate. These slow and solipsistic intelligences hardly recognize anything outside their simulations; the most intelligent life of the methane moon are ice-shelled, crablike beings that crawl among the Titans' processing architecture.

The icy bodies of the outer system were simply abandoned, their Elders departing on the long journey through interstellar space to parts unknown. The relay station at Yog-Oth, its passage long-disconnected from the network and now tangled in dark matter, has become a forwarding base for the mi-go, who pick through the ruins with a scavenger's keen eye.

Elder-Yithian War (201 MYA)

The Elders that survived the return to Earth brook no competition, even now at the end of their civilization, and seek to wrest the world away from the Yithians. They fail. While the Chroniclers do not put much stock in direct violence, they will defend their libraries with an incredible ferocity.

The Elders attempt to re-engineer shoggoths back under their command, but the arts are lost to them and the result is disastrous. These flying polyps swiftly escape Elder control conditioning and inflict considerable damage to both sides - so much so that their own war is abandoned The Yithians win out, and drive the polyps into the caverns beneath the earth. 

The Jurassic Cold War

Exhausted by the conflict, the world settles once again into a semi-stable equilibrium. The Yithians have their Library, the Elder Things their last great city, the Star Spawn their island stronghold, and the Mi-Go - newly arrived and claiming the old Relay - pick over the remains throughout the solar system. The polyps are imprisoned deep underground. The aboleths have taken the abyss for their own.

For beings such as these, in the senescense of their age, the years are of little account and the passing of epochs is as the turning of seasons.

Come In From The Cold

The Cold War ends not in fire but in slow, ignominious imperial decay.

The Star Spawn, failing to steal the secrets of dark-matter-era-compatible hyperspace travel from the Mi-Go, are unable to return their ancient Dhulu dreadnought to functionality. They sink their fortress beneath the ocean and enter hibernation, hoping that a day will come, millions of years hence, when the stars are right and they might return to the heavens.

The Elders too enter hibernation, though they do so grimly. There is little hope for their future - a tiny population stranded on a remote world. The last Terran Elders enter their sleep of ages, for even endless sleep is preferable to death.

End of the Library (~150 MYA)

The yithians prove to be their own undoing.

The foundations of the Library have dug too deep; polyps from the old war return to the surface, and the yithian defenses prove unable to hold them off a second time. In an effort to save at least some of the Library from the encroaching polyps, a chunk of space-time superstructure is violently torn out of the ontological lattice, carrying part of the library with it.

The yithians remaining on Earth flee into the future, and the ruins of the Library are consigned to the march of time. Those yithians that remain inside the severed Branch Library are unable to transfer their consciousnesses into the greater universe, and so are trapped in a cycle of diminishing returns - building new generations of bodies for themselves and losing something of themselves with each transfer. The beings that will be called the Docents, far in the future, are the shadows that are left. It will not be visited again until the age of the Serpentmen, far from now.

Pax Cretaceana

With the loss of the Library, Earth has no remaining civilizations on its surface. The aboleths and the lithics, in the deep abyss of sea and stone, carry on as they always have. The flying polyps diversify into a variety of clades, but their teratomatic morphologies do not lend themselves to wide propagation - they are, after all, living cancers. Within a few million years, all that are left of the terran shoggoth strains are the Dark Young, the Trees of Life, and a few scattered ancients clinging to life by the thermal vents in the deep oceans.

The world is quiet.

The Cretaceous Troodontid Civilization (~67 MYA)

The quiet of the Cretaceous is interrupted by the development of an intelligent species of troodontid. Their energetic civilization goes through several global boom and bust cycles. They develop some sorcerous traditions of their own, though never reach the complexity and power of the synapsids or other powers.

Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction (66 mya)

The causal dance of physics ends the Mesozoic with a bang. Curtain call arrives in the form of an asteroid impact on the Yucatan peninsula, killing off approximately 75% of all life on Earth and anything larger than 25 kilos.

The Troodontids, despite their forays into orbit, were not able to escape their fate. The synapsids long before them had time to plan and prepare; The troodontid civilization was obliterated in an instant, their ghosts burned into the background ontology of creation. Many demons of later eras are indeed the shadows left behind of this people, and some remnants of their occult engineering (such as the semi-functional global leyline network) remain intact even to this day.

And They Were As Gods Upon The Earth (~64 MYA)

A clade of dinosauroids, heavily modified for orbital operations, return to the recovering Earth after the deterioration of their nesting stations. Their descendants, the dragons and drakes, will retain something of their vast solar-sail wings and internal fusion furnaces, but evolution will never overcome their population-control engineering, and so they will never attain more than localized environmental dominance in the age of mammals. They shall never return to space, and few, if any, will ever achieve intelligence via the Trees of Life.

The Long and Empty Age

While life on Earth rebounds in the wake of the K-T Extinction, the great civilizations of the Mesozoic are not replicated. With the loss of the Trees of Life, the planet is left fallow of intelligence for a long, long time.

The Serpent Men (53 MYA)

The Serpentmen rise to prominence in the hothouse of the Eocene. They are the descendants of a species of small burrowing lizard that had taken shelter among the roots of Trees of Life through the catastrophe, and in eating on the roots the process of neuron multiplication began. They are not true serpents (for they retain their forelimbs), but the name will suffice. Their rise to sapience is uncontested, and soon they are the dominant power on land. They make contact with the aboleths, the deep ones, and the lithics. For the most part, the thinking beings of Earth are of such vastly different environments that they have little reason to interact beyond some occasional trade and sporadic war.

The Ice Ages Begin (~33 MYA)

The cooling of the planet during the Oligocene forces the Serpentmen civilization underground. A few lone researchers remain on the surface in their towers and citadels, attended to by their legions of sorcery-born servitors.

Humans. Arriving. On the scene. (~2.8 MYA)

Hominids evolve in eastern Africa. Despite their intelligence and tool usage, the Serpentmen pay them no mind until, thanks to some heterodox scholars chasing odd fields of study, it is discovered that these hominids are capable of Dreaming - and thus, capable of birthing a new Great One. This is beyond both the Serpentmen and the Mi-go, and thus of immense interest to both parties.

The Great Ones

Beings that Dream might give birth to Great Ones; their dreams will coalesce into vast gestalts of the species, growing in power and complexity until the combined oneironic weight of their slumbering achieves singularity and the Dream is now able to shape the Dreamer,

Many dream-deities will form and shine briefly before retreating to the ranks of the mild, quiet gods of Earth. Our current age is dominated by two such bright-burning deities warring against each other: Matar Kubileya and the Gollyknack. Of these two much more can be said, but history is long in the tooth and their war is an aside for another time.

The Experimentals (~1 MYA)

The Serpentmen begin a myriada-long experimental project. Populations of humans were isolated and monitored - their bodies modified through biological and sorcerous means, their cultures guided by the scaly hand. These experimental civilizations will later be called the nations of Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, Atavatbar and others by later occultists who knew just enough of the truth to look the other way.

Fall of the Serpent (~32 KYA)

Chafing under long generations of subjugation, the humans enslaved by the Serpentmen join together in solidarity and overthrow their puppermasters.

In truth, the Serpentmen civilization was nearing its natural end. The underground population had been weathered away by wars with the lithics and their own antisocial natures. Even fewer remained on the surface; the last overseers of projects that had born them only stunted and inedible fruit.

After the Serpent-War (~31 KYA)

The war-alliance collapses with the loss of a common enemy. Atlantis, enriched on looted serpentine citadels, makes wars of subjugation against its neighboring nations. In time the others fall or go into hiding; Atlantis loots their cities and razes their lands, and sends their captive populations to its colonies.

The Dream-War (~30 KYA)

At the height of their hubris, Atlantis mounts an invasion of the Dreamlands; they cannot endure the existence of those who dream free of their yoke. Their forces are rebuffed, but in breaching of the Gates of Sleep they gain the notice of the Great Nightmare.

The Great Nightmare's influence spreads among the Atlantean priesthood and nobility, and it was handed perhaps the perfect clay for shaping. The imperial designs of the Atlanteans have made them vulnerable to such subversions, and within three generations their civilization has fractured into civil war. In another, their homeland is no more.

Those lucky enough to survive the collapse flee to the shores of Europe, Africa, and North America, all those places where their colonies once stood. But those colonies had withered away to ruins and the hollow-faced folk who haunted them. The Atlantean remnant succumbs to disease, starvation, cold, and resistance from the local populations. Within four generations their colonies have collapsed. In four more, they are only dim memories. All that remains of Atlantis is the flying fortress of Laputa, which shall endure until the War of Atom's Eve.

The Closing of the Age (~11.5 KYA)

A sorcerous artifact, forged by the highest disciple of Great Nightmare and thought lost during the fall of Atlantis, is discovered by a kuduk tribe of the land that will be called Oxenaford. Recognizing the danger, a handful of the tribe's members depart southward towards the Sea in the Center of the World to destroy the artifact in the volcano Aitho.

With the artifact's destruction, the Great Nightmare's last ties to the waking world are severed.

Fin, and Sequel Hook(~8 KYA)

As the world warms and the Age of Ice draws to a close, Doggerland sinks beneath the sea. With it go the last remnants of the peoples who will falsely be called the Hyperboreans.

Here then ends the history that came before.