Hyperparabolic Macrologies

I wanted to write more about Yog, but before I can do that, I have to explain about these guys first.

A Story

Imagine that your world was dying.  Your sun was fading,  Ice and starvation begin to chew your civilizations apart.

And so you set out in a bizarre ship, it's design purchased at great cost from the greatest and farthest of the demons of the upper air.  It the wealth and time of an entire generation, but you set out.  You travel farther than the margins of your maps, farther than the light from your farthest stars, and beyond the trappings of conventional physics.

Finally, beyond the margins of the possible universe, you find an impossible one.  A place of slow time and unimaginable gulfs of space.  You find an entity that lives in that place.  It is colossal beyond imagining-a million miles long, itself more diverse than all of the ecosystems of your homeworld.

At first, your only contact is with the people that live upon it.  Whole civilizations nurture and instruct upon the entity's body, subsisting in secret among its detritus.  Many of your people choose this life, and leave your arcology forever. 

But certain members of your society wish to speak with the entity.  And so you do, though it takes many lifetimes to learn how to speak with it.  Your ship is of a comparable size--it is possible.  It takes a year to speak a couple of sentences to it, another year to hear the response, another year to decipher it.

Over the generations, you learn of the shapes and limits of this outer world.  You meet other entities, and although some of their thoughts and motivations are utterly inscrutable, you are still able to find common ground.  They, too, need to eat every few millenia.  Like you, they have children, some of which are shameful to them, others that are their pride.

These people are similar to bacteria.  We are the entities that they interact with, on an multi-generational timescale.  The hyperbolic macrologies are their arcology ships, which exist uncomfortably in our space.  It is uncertain whether they sprang from the same source, or if they all arrived independently.

People also call them cosmogores.

Walking Arcologies

Having to deal with gravity, limbs, and "walking" is pretty alien to the worldview of bacteria.  About as strange as hyperspace would be to us.  Perhaps that's the closest analogy--a flying arcology that enters hyperspace and never leaves.

The macrologies exist in a variety of shapes, but the most common one is a sphere that walks on a series of articulated, metal limbs.  It's central sphere is almost indistinguishable beneath arrays of bulbous sensory apparatus, and its manipulator arms reflect a short-sighted series of past needs.  (For example, they build a page-turning hand, but it is too fine to be used for any other purpose.  They couldn't afford a better one--the act of building that simple manipulator nearly bankrupted them, and caused riots that lasted for generations.)

Sometimes they just hire someone to carry them around--a pitted metal pearl with a thousand subtle seams and apertures.  This is risky, though, and even these macrologies must be able to sprout legs when the need arises.  The importance of self-sufficiency is not lost of them.

Older, successful macrologies will have bodies attached to themselves, usually necromantic.  (The analogy breaks down a little bit here, but it would be equivalent to an ark ship attaching itself to the corpse of a space-god in order to better interact with an alien world.)

They can offer a few superlative services.  Playing chess!  Generating vast amounts of mediocre music and poetry!  The construction and repair of ultra-fine structures!  (They can pluck the flaws out of gemstones.)  Many of them become wizards.

The civilizations that exist inside the macrologies tend to be fundamentalist, autocratic regimes.  The true nature of the macrology is almost always hidden from the inhabitants--something that they've learned over many revolutions and purges.  By most accounts, they tend to be pretty brutal and uncompromising.

A macrology piloting the corpse of an ogre.
(Actually concept art from Bioshock Infinite.)

Interacting with Macrologies

Because of the sheer number of minds at work within macrology, you might think that they would be extremely intelligent.  And this is true--most of the time.  Although they have a billion minds thinking much faster than we could, they are prone to disruptions and errors of memory.  

"Why should I broadcast the answer to a problem that my great grandfather tasked me with?  There are no such things as Ancient Ones.  There is nothing out there but stars."

One of their "years" goes by approximately every 30 seconds.  Any task that lasts more than a few minutes requires a extremely stable power structure with immaculate record keeping.  

They have deep, synthetic voices.  They tend to talk fast.  They usually hate being told to speak slower--every second you delay costs them precious time.

Macrologies tend to be difficult to wake up in the morning--a thousand years pass every night, and the inheritor civilizations must follow the orders inscribed on their pyramids.  How do you get someone to carry out an instruction a thousand years in the future?  How do you ensure that type of consistency?

They are also prone to sudden bouts of torpor and inactivity, as their worlds are ravaged by civil wars and plagues.  Sometimes they simply destroy themselves unexpectedly, simply destroying themselves though pollution, genocide, or exposure to the outside air.  Dead macrologies can be sold to other macrologies for a hefty sum (a new world-ship!  a second chance!) unless the macrology is uninhabitable for some reason (radioactivity, billions of microscopic undead).

Working with them is also frustrating, because they are sometimes mildly contagious.  It is no uncommon for a (microscopic) ship to leave the macrology every hundred years or so, which is to say, roughly every hour.  If this tiny ark lands on you, you can expect to enjoy a skin rash called "gripworm".  This is the tiny descendants of the macrology attempting to subsist on you.

But within a few days (within a few thousand years) your immune system will fully mobilize to the site and the infection will clear up.  There has never been a recorded case of these tiny people living successfully outside of a macrology--our world is hostile to them in a way that is difficult to explain.

If you scrape out the inside of the blister, you will find the same thing that you will find inside a macrology: very complex dirt.

This post is inspired by a Scrap Princess post about a time bomb, that I cannot find for the life of me.  EDIT: This one.

Stats

HD 6  Armor plate  Ragged Claw 1d20+effect
Move dwarf  Int 14

Immune fire, ice, lightning, poison

Weakness sonic

Spells As level 3 wizard.
Sample Spells reverse gravity, emergency exit, transpose

Claw Effects [d3]
1 - Blind (until Con save).
2 - Cast all of your spells at once.  Save to choose target; otherwise random.
3 - Poison 1d6 (until Con save).

When a macrology succeeds on an Int roll, it succeeds in the way that a hypergenius would.  When a macrology fails an Int roll, it fails horrendously, as if it has forgotten something that happened a few minutes ago, or as if it were ignorant of some basic fact.

Outsiders: Memes, Prions, and Dreadful Comprehension

Demons are not "outsiders".  How can they be, when they are part and parcel of the natural ecology of our souls?  The whole concept is stupid.  If anything, demons and angels are insiders--they can see us better than we can, in many ways.

Outsiders are things from beyond the universe.  They might occupy matter, but they are not made of matter.  Like light refracting through a prism.

There are many types of outsiders.  This is one of them.

The Unspeakables

They must not be spoken of, nor described in any way.

A picture of an Unspeakable is just as dangerous as one of the Unspeakables themselves.  The same is true of an appropriately accurate description.

This is because they are not creatures of flesh and blood.  They are concepts--lattices of convergent memes.  Although they sometimes occupy a body, they are not that body.  Though they are sentient, they are not alive in any sense of the word.  Even someone who conceives of them--without ever having seen one--is subject to this peril.

Skip This Section If You Already Know About Prions

There are proteins called prions.  Prions are not alive.  They are even less alive than viruses are (which are, at a minimum, just a string of DNA).  Prions are just a single, lumpen molecule.

Prions are misfolded proteins.  In your body, there is a certain type of protein.  This protein floats around, doing protein stuff, and no one has to worry about it.  

But occasionally this protein misfolds.  It gets jammed into the wrong configuration--some hinge is bent backwards, some spiral is spinning the wrong way.  The protein doesn't do the job it was built to do.  Instead, it bumps into other healthy proteins (of the exact same type) and causes them to misfold, too.

It's a little bit like packing a cubic apple in a crate with other apples, so that the neighboring apples come out with flat sides.  Except we need to extend the apple metaphor, so that when you unpack the crate of apples, they're all cubic.  One bad apple has bent the whole bunch.

So this isn't contagion in any sense that we know it.  It's a contagion of form, caused by blunt collision.  

The funny thing is, the misfolded protein is more stable than the original protein, not less.  Good proteins get bent into this hell-pretzel and they don't untwist.  They just float around, tempting other good Catholic proteins into temptation.  

This progresses.

The body notices that it is running out of healthy proteins, and so it makes some more to counter the deficit.  

This progresses more.

Eventually, there are so many of these misfolded proteins that they form crystals.  These crystals are so big that they start punching holes in important cellular machinery.  It makes so many holes in tissue that we call it spongiform.

This all takes place in your brain, by the way.

Or a cow's brain.  This is mad cow disease.

This is also Creutzfeldt-Jakobs, in humans.  (The two diseases are linked.)  Symptoms: memory loss, personality changes, progressive dementia, hallucinations, psychosis.

Pretty good damage for something that's not even alive.

The Unspeakables, Continued

All of this is a roundabout way of explaining that an Unspeakable is simply a mimetic prion.  All Unspeakables cause insanity (usually 1 point each).

The Appearance of an Unspeakable [d6]

All Unspeakables resemble the creature that they once were.  An Unspeakable that degenerated from a human (and most do) will resemble a human from a distance.  They appear in groups of 1d2.

1. Papery layers of flesh, like a hornet's nest.  Regenerates HP to full each round.
2. Eyes like inverted needles, impossibly deep.  Piercing.  Gaze attack causes you to see the world from their point of view (no save).  Whenever you make an attack, there is a 25% chance that you instead attack a random target.
3. Balloon-like stomach spasms and roils, changes size and shape.  Violently and constantly, like hundreds of blobs fighting to escape a rubber balloon.  When killed, splits into two smaller versions with half HD.  When these are killed, splits into two smaller versions with quarter HD.  When those are killed, they split into things that resemble tarry fetuses (these are harmless).  If killed, they continue splitting indefinitely, each time becoming less and less like their original creature.
4. Head floats through body.  The face's path through the skin leaves a trail of scar tissue like a ship's wake.  Acid blood shoots out whenever they take slashing or piercing damage (1d6 damage per round until you spend a round washing it off, or 1d4 rounds scraping it off.  Stacks.)
5. Eyes and mouth glow like a furnace.  Smoke billows from wounds.  Shrieks like a tea kettle when injured.  Explodes when killed for half original HP damage.
6. Unfolds body like origami into layers and layers of asymmetrical wings.  Looks like blackened fruit on the inside.  Can fly.  Teleport 3/day.

The "Mundane" Attacks of the Unspeakable [1d6]

1. None.  It attacks as an unarmed human, grunting softly.  Whoever kills this creature must face them again the next night, in a dream.  It is a repeat of this combat, except they are alone with their foe (1v1).  If they lose this fight, they gain a permanent insanity.  If they win, the XP is not shared with other players.
2. Ragged claws (1d6/1d6) and rasping tongue (1d4).
3. Extensible neck + bite.  Is actually a hydrada.
4. Invisible sword that hisses like a powerline.  (Counts as a +1 weapon, can be looted.)
5. Wounds open wherever it gazes.  Save or take 2d6 damage.  Can target 3 creatures at a time.  If it stares at an object (armor, building, door) long enough, it will decay and fall apart.
6. IOUN morningstar. 

The Special Attacks of the Unspeakable, Usable Every 1d4 Rounds [1d6]

1. Vorpal Howl.  Like a cone of cold, except slashing damage.  Has a 5% chance of cutting your fucking head off.
2. Doom Caller.  Pronounces doom on someone.  That person hears the voice of Fate counting down.  If the Unspeakable is still alive in 3 rounds, that person dies, no save.
3. Half-Life.  As a free action, all creatures within 10' must save or take X damage, where X = half of their remaining HP.  Save for half.
4. Death touch.  This one is usable every turn.  If they touch you, one of your teeth wriggles free of your jaw and begins to burrow into your heart.  (Treat it as a rot grub.)
5. Vomit a swarm of [d3] locusts, crabs, or biting worms.
6. Fragility.  All creatures in a cone must save or be reduced to 1 HP.  1d4 rounds later, they regain any HP that they lost. 

The Real Danger

But these are just the dangers of the meme-hosts.  The real Unspeakables do not exist except as concepts.  (And as something that can only prey on sentient creatures, they should probably be added to the Book of Tigers.)

The Unspeakable that can be described is not the real Unspeakable.

Anyway, for an Unspeakable, consciousness is their ecosystem.  Comprehension is what shapes them and gives them form.  (So a picture of an Unspeakable, buried in a vault, harms no one.  It is not the falling tree that harms someone, but hearing that tree fall.)

And at the table, there is only one way to know if a character is thinking about an Unspeakable: if the players talk about them.

If the players are talking "Yeah, remember that fucked up guy who unfolded his body into wings and cut off heads with his yells?  That was awesome." they have just referenced the Unspeakable.  The Unspeakable that they were thinking of immediately pops back into existence.  They usually emerge from a closet (that has already been searched), crawl from under a bed, or simply punch through a nearby door.

1. If the players talk about an Unspeakable, it reforms.
2. If the players step out of the room and talk about an Unspeakable, it reforms.
3. If the players talk about it after the game has concluded, and you're all drinking beer and arguing about time travel paradoxes, it doesn't reform (because you aren't playing the game anymore).
4. If the players allude, very gently, to the Unspeakable ("the time that Jimmy got his head shouted off") it has a 4-in-6 chance of reforming.
5. If the players talk about events surrounding the Unspeakable ("the time that we went in the moon dungeon") it has a 2-in-6 chance of reforming.
6. If a wizard reads the players minds, and comprehends the memory of the Unspeakable, it immediately reforms.  (Actually, it's possible that the wizard has seen other Unspeakables, and that this has just reminded him of them.  It's possible that multiple Unspeakables reform.)

When an Unspeakable forms, they aren't necessarily hostile immediately.  But since each Unspeakable concept is a single creature, they will remember what has happened to their other forms, albeit vaguely.

When roleplaying with an Unspeakable, remember that they are all utterly mad.  They babble about poisoned angles and rotten stars.  They whimper as they recollect the heat death of the universe.  They struggle to realize that the PCs exist only as meat.

Only meat?  Where is the rest of you?

Only meat.

Azathoth the Microbiologist

So, the big reason that I haven't been posting is that I've gotten a new job as a wine microbiologist (during the busiest season) and have been moving.  A new location = no regular D&D group = less time spent thinking about D&D = fewer things to blog about = cosmic, ineffable sadness.

So, while I do have many things to blog about (a small backlog exists) I think it's appropriate to start with the one that is closest to microbiology.

this bacterial art by Eshel Ben-Jacob

We grow bacteria in Petri dishes.  We do this to study them, but more often we do it to (a) see if they were present in an original sample, (b) because they produce some chemical that we want more of, or (c) they're transgenic and we want more copies of their edited DNA.

One of the most striking things about the whole process is how inefficient and indirect the whole thing is.  Want to know if there's E. coli in this jar of cat vomit?  You can throw it under a microscope, and yes, E. coli does show up as cute little spheroids. . . but half the shit that you'll see inside cat vomit is going to show up as cute little spheroids, which makes certain identification pretty impossible.

So then you usually take the cat vomit, put it in a selective media that only E. coli can grow in, and then see if any cute little spheroids grow in that.  The problem is that selective media isn't perfectly selective (you'll get some things growing in it that aren't E. coli) and besides, there's lots of variants of E. coli that probably won't grow in it anyway, so you get false positives and false negatives.

You can also melt all the bacteria in acid (or at least, lytic enzymes) and look at the DNA you find in there, but that's getting away from the fun realm of historic microbiology and into the modern fold of molecular biology.

Inefficient and inexact.

It's a little bit like being a park ranger and trying to manage a park from a space station.

Park Manager: "You there!  Telescope monkey!  Are there any beavers in the park that we are managing?"

Park Ranger: [peers in telescope] "Well, I see some brown blobs that are moving around and are approximately beaver-sized.  So, it's possible.  But they could also be coyotes or komodo dragons."

Park Manager: "We need to know for certain, dammit!"

Park Ranger: "Okay.  I'll just use the tractor beam to pick up a cubic kilometer of the park and drop it on an island that I sterilized just this morning.  Then we'll drop anti-canine bombs and gas it with a plague that will kill all lizards.  We'll look at it again in 5 years and if we see more brown spots moving around, then we know for sure that it's beavers."

Senior Park Ranger: "You rookie.  Just pick up a cubic kilometer of the park and centrifuge it.  If there are any beavers in the park, there will be gnawed trees, and gnawed trees sediment in a different layer than un-gnawed trees."

You can probably see where I'm going with this.

What if our world (or a fantasy world) was merely the petri dish of some vast, unsympathetic alien intelligence?  What if humanity has been seeded (or at least cultured) for some ineffable purpose?

For shorthand, I'll refer to this vast, cool, and unsympathetic intelligence as Azathoth.  He's our nine-dimensional alien researcher.

What is Azathoth like?

He is Very Very Big.  He is also Singular, in the opposite way that we are plentiful.  If he has peers, they are outside our scope.  He operates on a different scale.  His experiment might take a billion years.

He can see things we cannot see.  He knows things that we cannot comprehend. He has no way of communicating any of this, and no inclination.

He has very bad vision.  He has a hard time telling us apart from other animals.  Hell, he has a hard time telling us apart from our environment sometimes.  He identifies us indirectly; if he wants to check for our presence, he might use sterilization methods that eliminate all non-human life.  Or he might dye us--black rain that makes all humans begin astral-vomiting up black stuff.

He is immensely powerful.  Killing all life in the universe is the work of a moment.

His twin weaknesses are precision and perception.

He has anticipated our escape attempts.  We have countermeasures against the best that microbes have to offer (durable endospores, dispersive spores) and Azathoth has a similar relationship to us.  We cannot build anything that can resist his sterilizations.  We cannot escape the boundary that he has defined for us.  (In a sci-fi setting, perhaps something prevents us from leaving our planet or galactic cluster.  In a fantasy setting, perhaps something prevents us from leaving our plane or local set of planes.)

He is fallible.  Despite being powerful enough to kill a dozen universes before coffee, he still fucks up.  Laboratory contamination happens all the fucking time due to imperfect technique and shitty equipment.  Bacteria ends up where it isn't supposed to.

His first tool is isolation.  He cuts us off from environments where other humans live.  He keeps us away from environments where we can thrive.

His second tool is sterilization.  When things go to shit, Azathoth sighs, throws the whole thing in the autoclave, and starts growing a new batch of colonies from frozen stock.

Most of his tools are crude, indirect, and inefficient.  Most of them are going to result in a lot of people dying.  He might grow up a billion humans across a thousand years, and then figure out if there was sentient life on the planet by boiling our oceans and measuring the aggregate suffering it causes.

He depends on us to thrive.  He depends on us to die.  If a microbiologist introduces some yeast into a new, rich soup of nutrients where they can grow without interference, I can imagine those yeast being grateful.  I can imagine those yeast worshiping the microbiologist for his benevolence.  Those prayers will turn to curses and lamentations when it's time for flame sterilization, though.

He cannot hear us, and even if he could, he probably wouldn't care.

We slip through the cracks.  If there are dimensions and planets and planes where we are supposed to be, there are also going to be places where we end up, but aren't supposed to be.  These are facultative environments.  These are the bacteria that grow on the lab coat's coffee stain (at least until it goes to the cleaners).  Humans in these places are escapees, who might have a better grasp of what is going on, but they are also probably going to be places that are very hostile to our life.  They might have competing organisms (motherfuckin' displacer beasts and shit) or simply not have much air or something.

We cannot hurt him (unless he fucks up).  But its an interesting idea.  What if human sentience is pathogenic?  What if we're a disease state in the interdimensional milieu?

Everything we do helps him.  Microbiologists depend on yeast acting like yeast.  Pretty much anything humans do is going to be "acting like a human".  But this is more ambiguous. . . unlike yeast, we can self-sterilize.  The only effective act of defiance might be to kill ourselves entirely.  Spit in the eye of god.

We are the center of the universe again (and this is the big difference with the standard Lovecraftian worldview).  Like in the Christian worldview, the universe was literally created for us, except where Jesus loves us and wants us to be happy, Azathoth sees us merely as a tool.  (This doesn't mean Azathoth is evil.  He might just have a higher concept of happiness than we do.  Perhaps his satisfaction is as elevated above our happiness as our happiness is above a yeast cell's metabolic contentment.)

What Does Azathoth Want From Us?

He might just be checking for proof of our existence.  Maybe he created a whole bunch of universes (or planets) and will return later to see which ones support intelligent life.  He'll take some notes and then implode our stars.  Or maybe he'll return after all the suns have gone out, and sift through the ashes of our civilizations, looking for traces.  (Perhaps his return will flash-carbonize everything in the universe, rendering direct observation impossible.  Best to give your colonies time to grow up and leave lots of remains.)

He might be interested in something that we produce.  We've engineered yeast and bacteria to produce all sorts of fun chemicals.  But what would sentient creatures produce?  Thoughts?  Emotions?  Souls?  Perhaps the end result is sentience itself.  Perhaps Azathoth returns after the apocalypse with a crude soul-ladle the size of a galaxy, which he dips through the various afterlifes until he harvests about half of all the souls there, who were looking forward to spending eternity in their afterlife of deposition.  (He only harvests half, because his methods is shitty and inefficient.  Some of the souls spill out into the void between worlds.  Other souls remain stuck to the ladle.)

He might just be cultivating us.  We could be a stock planet.  Culture a sentient life form on a planet for 4.3 billion years (or however long the incubation takes) then return and parcel all of the humans into 100 different microdimensions.  Some of these microdimensions full of humans will be put into storage, some will be sent to colleagues, some will be sacrificed for analysis.

What Environments Can We Explore?

There's going to be a lot of portals.  This is the end of the pipette tip--this is how Azathoth transfers us to a new dimension (where we might thrive, or might die horribly, depending).

Mass Kidnapping Via Portal - These aren't passive portals that sit there waiting for you to go through it.  These are huge things that slurp down oceans, rip up kingdoms.  These are mega-tornadoes that suck a million humans through at once.  They might appear simultaneously over all the major cities.

Lots of people will die, true, but this is to be expected of Azathoth's crude methods.  After all, he only needs a breeding pair of humans to establish a new colony in whatever dimension he deposits us in.

This might actually be a good starting point for a campaign.  Or, the starting point of a setting's calendar.  (Dibs.)

Pleasant Environments - When Azathoth wants us to thrive, he will introduce us into environments guaranteed it.  Expect heaven.  Rivers of milk and honey are not out of the question.

Horrible Environments - These are places where Azathoth is trying to kill things off.  He might be trying to kill all non-humans (sorry elves), or kill all humans.  This selection can be environmental (temperature, nutrition) or biological (organisms that specialize in killing humans).

Expect environments where there is literally nothing to eat that isn't horribly poisonous.  Poison planet?  There might even be a place where all the amino acids are chirally reversed, so although it looks like a normal place with normal food, you'll starve to death stuffing your face with their bread.

Worshippers of Azathoth - He put us in a land of milk and honey after we were sucked through a wormhole by a nine-tentacled super-tornado.  He must be a nice guy.  Let's all count down until the next portal opens.

Cryo Storage - Some cells are stable pretty much indefinitely when you keep them at -200 degrees Celsius.  These could be ice planets (with no nearby sun), flash frozen in the heyday of their civilization.  They could ice planets that froze slowly, apocalyptically, with a few viable humans locked away in their cryovaults.

(It's possible that Azathoth may grow civilizations up simple to ensure that they have some method of surviving his storage methods.  When you store civilizations by freezing them, it helps if your civilization is advanced enough to develop cryo-banks, vaults warmed by nuclear power, or magic-derived stasis.)

Or you can get away from that boring snow and start thinking about the much more interesting concept of temporostasis.  People locked in time like a void monk, who will thaw as soon as a haste spell is cast on them.

Axenic Cultures - Sometimes you want to culture something in isolation, without any other species' interference.  These are places where the only animal life is human.

Just mull that over for a little while.  These are people who have never seen a dog or been bitten by a mosquito.  Their oceans are algae-choked mats.

It could even be a truly axenic culture, where there aren't even any plants or microbes.  These humans probably lick the saccharine dew off the rocks and have never had a cold in their lives.  They wear the skins of the ancestors, with a bundle of knotted face-skins around their neck like a ghoulish scarf.

Megaxenic Cultures - It's also possible that we're in a semi-xenic culture already (maybe Azathoth wanted to isolate us carbon-based life forms from the silicon-based ones).  And once we leave our little petri dish, we are going to start meeting some really weird people.  Like, weirder than xorn.  Like, Kill Six Billion Demons weird.

Slipped Through the Cracks - This is microbial contamination.  Sometimes you think you have a sterile, unused petri dish but then discover furry mold growing on it anyway.  Sometimes humans end up in places they aren't supposed to be.  Sometimes Azathoth has shitty portal technique, and ends up depositing us on his clothing, in his hair, on the door knob, or inside one of his machines.

Remember that you don't need to have a high level of technology to colonize a new land.  Sometimes all you need is a bag of seeds and a shovel. It might even be interesting to have a campaign that included a completely virgin planet.  Just volcanoes and clean dirt.

Death - If you want to play in this sort of campaign, you need to adjust you sense of scope, especially when dealing with mass death.  The death of a billion might be the price you need to open the next portal.

What Happens When Cthulhu Is Released

The word "lovecraftian" doesn't mean tentacles and cultists and insanity.  It means that mankind is utterly inconsequential.  The universe isn't just weird and hostile, it is incomprehensible and unaffectable.

Humanity is worthless, our souls are worthless.  All of our religions put humanity on a pedestal--we can imagine anything, we can advance until we can do anything, we can eventually understand everything, we were created special, this world was created specially for us. . . and these are part of a human-centric worldview.  The lovecraftian worldview is that humanity is incidental and meaningless.  Comparing humanity to elder gods is not like comparing ants to humans, it is comparing colonies trapped inside a petri dish to duelling, four-dimensional suns.

The elder gods don't want anything from us, because we don't have anything they want, or could ever want.  We cannot threaten them or affect them in any way, because we are scum on the inside of a petri dish.  We could, conceivably, draw the slightest iota of their attention, but that would be it.

Cthulhu is trapped in the dungeon-crust of Centerra's planet.  Cthulhu is not an elder god, but it is several order of magnitude more powerful than anything else on the planet.  He has, like, a million HP and immunity to magic.  This is what happens if you wake him up.

What Happens When Cthulhu Is Released

Every sentient creature on the planet must save or go permanently insane as the Cthulhu's supersentience rips through their own, like a cruise ship powering through a narrow canal.

Over the next 24 hours, Cthulhu devours the sun, in order to gain enough energy for a long flight home.  Then he flies home, never to be seen again.  A wish spell might delay him, briefly.  Then the planet has no sun.  It's just a rock hurtling through space.  The surface temperature plummets, all surface water freezes, and 99.99% of all life on the surface dies.

Suddenly the underdark is looking pretty good.

The campaign changes to survival.  The PCs must travel through the interior of the planet's crust (which is all dungeons and subterranean oceans and literal hells) to get to the interior of the hollow planet, where the interior sun provides a modicum of ghastly light and warmth.  If the PCs want their species to survive, they had better bring along enough humans/hobbits/whatevers to form a breeding colony on the inside of the planet.

Over time, the helpless-insane will be killed and eaten by the murderous-insane, who will form roving packs of cannibals.  The psychic weave around the planet is completely changed when the cold tonnage of Cthulhu's brain ripped through it.  Psychic powers begin to emerge, and the people who were best poised to take advantage of this change (the Cthulhu cultists, who were not so much crazy as they were desperate) come out on top, and many of them become powerful, immortal god-kings.

Everything freezes.  There is no food.

The campaign changes to building a settlement on the interior of the planet.  It's like zombie survival, except with morlocks, demons, and neothelids (worms of the third madness).  Or maybe a bit like +Gus L's Underdark, 

If the players get ahold of a morlock drill city, they'll be able to make journeys to the frozen wasteland that is the surface, and search for valuable stuff in the ice-clad cities.  They'll skate across frozen oceans, their ice-sleds pulled by kites.  They'll move from volcano to volcano, the only points of life on a dead surface.  Each volcano is a desperate stronghold, a feeble source of food in a dead world.

If this campaign has an end goal--and it doesn't have to--it is to slightly change the trajectory of the planet.

Hurtling through space, the dead planet is doomed to a wretched infinity of cold vastness.  Humanity exists, if it exists at all, as a pathetic race living in the most meager of conditions, in those tiny niches of the planet that are still capable of sustaining their hot-blooded, gluttonous lives.  And that's where they'll stay while the planet inevitably cools and dies.

But with a small change, the planet could be redirected.  It could be recaptured by another star, and it could eventually orbit that star and flourish once more.  It will require a volcanic eruption of inconceivable energy, precise mass, and precise trajectory.  The planet needs to jettison a chunk of itself in order to life.  And not just amputate it--it needs to fling those oceans and continents as hard as it can.

People (and PCs) who are Nikal can survive being frozen, and might be revived when the surface thaws, far into the future.

And the rewards of this ridiculous maneuver will not be felt by the party.  Nor by their children or their grandchildren.  Nor their great, great, great grandchildren.  But eventually, the planet will be inhabitable once again, and the suffering will not have been infinite, and there will be green fields again, and children will run on them and laugh and speak in alien tongues, long after you've died.

And that is victory, perhaps, in a lovecraftian sense.

The Inexorable Beast

Some people call it the Questing Beast.  It quests for you.

The fools have opened the Book of the Beast and its curse has fallen upon them.  There is nothing that they can do.  Though the Inexorable Beast can be killed, it will always return, stronger and more horrible than before.  It will pursue the cursed individuals to the edges of the universe and beyond.

Basically, the beast is an intractable guardian of some arcane secret.  Once the PCs have become victims of its wrath, it will continue to hunt them until they are all dead.  The first time the PC's open the forbidden door, or read the black runes, or pass through the halls of the dead, the beast will appear for the first time.

Starting Form
HD    high enough to shake up your PCs
AC    14
Atk    bite (1d6+1 damage)
Int      animal
Mov   a little slower than the average dude
Save  15 - HD

After it is killed or evaded, the beast vanishes, leaving behind nothing except a bit of blood on the PCs' weapons.  1d20+4 hours later, the beast will reappear in the worst possible place.  (If this seems too harsh, slow it down.)  If they flee from it into a cave, they will find it waiting.  If they fill a bathtub with water, the Beast will come leaping out.  If they check under their bed for monsters, the Beast will crawl out ten minutes later.

If the PCs escape, that counts as ending combat (it doesn't track them, it just reappears later).  If the beast kills a PC, it will likewise disappear with a triumphant roar into a cloud of acidic ash and sulphur.  If the PCs trap it somewhere, it will eat itself and disappear with a frustrated mewl.  If the PCs split up, the beast will go after whichever group seems more vulnerable based on how each PC fought in the last encounter.

Each time the beast reappears, it gains new mutations that make it bigger and more horrible.  It gains three of these each time: a size increase, deadlier attacks, and another horrible ability.  (If this seems too steep, slow it down.)

1. Size Increase.  The Beast gains 1 HD.  After gaining +3 HD the beast is big enough to hold people in its mouth with a successful bite attack, doing automatic damage on subsequent rounds but making other attacks at a -3.  After a gaining a total of +5 HD the beast is big enough to swallow people whole instead.

2. Deadlier Attacks.  Flip a coin.  On a heads, the DM chooses an attack mode of the Beast to incease in potency and do +1 damage forevermore (or +1d6 damage, if you have a high level party).  On a tails, the Beast grows a new attack mode.  The DM should choose this new attack based on whatever would erode the most of the players' advantages based on their tactics in the last fight.

Like, if the PCs killed it from range last fight, then it will grow a spike shooter.  If they surrounded it and killed it in melee, then it will grow the acid spit so it can catch more of them in the cone.

Here are six options: 1 claw, 2 bite, 3 spike shooter (50' range), 4 spit acid (15' cone), 5 horn/spike, 6 tail/flagella (50% chance of grabbing/disarming).  If you can't decide, roll a die.

3. Other Horrible Abilities.  Lastly, the beast grows a new ability.  The DM should pick whichever one would be the most horrible for the PCs, based on their tactics in the last fight.  Like if they escaped it by flying away last combat, there is a 100% chance that the beast will grow wings the next time they see it. Subsequent enhancements to the same ability are indicated with /slash marks.

1. More legs.  The beast becomes as fast as a man.  /faster than a man. /faster than a horse.
2. Discerning tongue.  By licking the air, the beast can smell hiding or invisible creatures with 40% success.  /80% success.
3. Freakish agility.  The beast now has 16 AC.  /17 AC.  /18 AC.
4. Jellied flesh.  The beast now takes half damage from bludgeoning weapons and +50% damage from slashing weapons.  /no damage from bludgeoning and +100% from slashing.
5. Thick hide.  The beast now takes half damage from slashing weapons and +50% damage from piercing weaopns.  /no damage from slashing and +100% from piercing.
6. Armored scales.  The beast now takes half damage from piercing weapons and +50% damage from bludgeoning weapons.  /no damage from slashing and +100% from bludgeoning.
7. Spiderlike Limbs.  Its arms become as long as pikes, allowing it to attack as if with a reach weapon.
8. Anti-magic properties.  Its skin becomes polished and nacreous, and all magic has a 2-in-6 chance of failing when used against it.  /4-in-6
9. Wings.  The beast can fly.
10. Amphibious.  The beast can swim and breathe underwater.
11. Bludgeoning head.  The beast can knock down doors in a single action with a 3-in-6 chance of success.  /5-in-6 chance of success.
12. Giant brain.  The beast's features become more human-like.  It gains near-human intelligence, the ability to speak a few words, and the ability to cast a 1st-level spell (choose the most effective one).  /human intelligence, fluent speaking, and a 2nd-level spell.  /genius intelligence, mastery of language and all the noises of hatred, and a 3rd-level spell.
13. Gaseous Form.  The beast can now slither under doors and creep in windowsills.
14. Explodes upon death.  Does damage = half HP, save for half.
15. Poison.  Save or take half of your HP as damage.  /save or die.
16. Mimicry.  Can imitate noises, shapes, and colors.  (Like a mimic, but sans glue.)
17. Burrowing.  Moves about as fast as a crawling man.  /as fast as a running man.
18. Invisibility.  It's fucking invisible.  /if you actually look at it via see invisibility or something, its new horrible form will drive you temporarily insane unless you succeed on a save.
19. Elemental.  Takes half damage to an element (fire, ice, lightning, acid) and +50% damage from its inverse (ice, fire, acid, lightning, respectively).  /immune to damage from an element but takes double damage to its inverse.
20. Thrashing, bladed tentacles.  All creatures within 5' automatically take 1d4 damage each round.  /2d4 damage each round.

Again, if you can't think of what horrible ability to give it, roll a d20.  But if you roll for an ability that wouldn't give it an advantage, based on what the beast knows from the previous battle.  It is an incarnation of Lamarckian evolution after all.  Like, don't give it water breathing unless it's an ability that the beast "wished that it had" in the last fight.

The beast adapts.  The beast doesn't anticipate.

The beast doesn't speak, although if it could, it would probably be frustrated by it's attempts to convey the ineffable depths of its hatred.  Like, humans can love in ways that salamanders can't imagine, and the Inexorable Beast can hate in ways that we cannot conceive of.

You'll notice that some of the damage types (slashing, bludgeoning, piercing) and the elemental types (fire, ice, lightning, acid) give the creature weaknesses.  This is intentional, since one tactic that the PCs could use is to intentionally use a lot of clubs on the beast one fight in order to be able to slaughter it with spears on the next fight, after it grows its Jellied Flesh. (This is the sort of information that they could find out by consulting a sage, or learning about previous people who have been hunted by the Inexorable Beast).

Describing the Beast

Honestly, just go wild.  Don't go too wild, too fast, since the beast needs to get bigger and presumably more complex each time it comes back, but just keep adding limbs and jaws, and faces.

Especially add faces.  More faces.

I imagine its starting form looking like a cross between a hairless wolf, a pug with a skin condition, and a human.  But it could be anything, really.

Winning the Beast

You probably should give your PCs a way to kill it.  Maybe after traveling to a nearby city/castle and browsing the library (and giving the beast a chance to wreck the library) they learn of a method.  Suggestions:

1. Kill the beast according to a very specific recipe (a damage password).  E.g. two stabs from silver daggers and then a fireball spell.  The fireball spell must be the attack that delivers lethal damage, and nothing else can damage it between the two dagger thrusts and the fireball.

2. Kill it in consecrated ground.  A church, or holy site.  (Of course, you've also got to convince the people in the church that letting you in is better than just locking  you outside and letting the beast kill you.

3. Collecting samples of its blood and creating an Anti-evolution toxin, that will make the beast devolve.  Losing 1 HD per round until it is just a harmless little zygote.  After it petrifies, you can put it on a chain and wear it around your neck, granting you the powers of whichever mutation the PCs hated the most.

4. Getting it to evolve into a specific state and then imprisoning it.  E.g. killing it with acid twice, so that it turns into a beast of sloughing, corrosive stone, and then burying it beneath holy dirt (made the same way holy water is).

5. Passing off the curse onto someone else.  Get them to accept the book.  The ole switcheroo.  This may involve going back tot he exact place where you got the book.

After His Burial And Before His Death

At first, Professor Bradley Quatermain thought he was talking to the Lord.

In 1896, the Professor was dynamiting bentonitic mudstone in Wyoming.  After the dust and noise had cleared, he tramped down the hillside to see what had been unearthed by the explosion.  He found ceratopsid tracks, a single fossilized tooth, and a message carved into 60-million year old stone.  The message addressed him by name, and described where he should dig next.

His wife, Minnie, declared the slab to be a hoax.  The professor declared it to be a sign of divine intervention, and gave thanks to the Lord, although he only half believed it himself.  Terrified and optimistic, they drank their only bottle of wine. They pushed their sleeping bags together, and ruined each other's sleep with happy conversation that lasted almost until dawn.

The second dig revealed another message.  And then a dozen more.  They were all a set of instructions.  The slabs instructed Professor Quatermain to take all 14 slabs with him back to the American Museum of Natural History.  The slabs mentioned where land might be found that had a large amount of oil beneath it.  The slabs also mentioned where to dig next year, in order to receive more messages.  The last slab mentioned the need for secrecy, in crude, scratched letters.

“Praise God,” said Professor Bradley, as he carted the slabs off to New York.

Stark Staring Mad

I like insanity rules.  I like that there's a psychological element to the game.  I've seen other sanity mechanics, but I wanted to make my own.  Here they are.

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1. Whenever you see something terrible, you gain 1 Insanity Point. 
2. Whenever you gain insanity points, roll d20 + Wisdom mod.  If you roll higher than your current amount of insanity points, nothing happens.  (But the points don't go away.)
3. If you roll equal-to-or-less than your Insanity Points, you have a breakdown.  This lasts until your friends can calm you down (a few rounds away from the stressful) or you cry yourself to sleep.
4. At the end of your breakdown (if you had one), make a save.  If you fail the save, reduce your insanity points to 0 and gain a permanent madness.  If you succeed on your save, reduce your sanity points by 1.

Breakdowns (d4)

1. Fainting.
2. Flee in terror.
3. Hide.
4. Stand there babbling/worshipping.

Permanent Madness (d20)

1. Phobia. (Must make Wis check to endure fear.)
2. Kleptomania. (Urge to steal things from vendors, Wis check to resist.)
3. Minor hallucinations. (Senses become unreliable, e.g. listening at doors)
4. Nightmares. (Con check to sleep unaided.)
5. Voluble Paranoia.  (Cannot talk without talking about conspiracies, penalty to social interaction.)
6. Substance Abuse.  (Wis check to pass up an opportunity, penalty if you go without it.  This includes sex addiction.)
7. Amnesia.  (Lose some XP, but it will return slowly, as memories are recovered.)
8. Alien Hand Syndrome.  (One arm basically becomes an NPC.  Roll a starting reaction roll for it to see how it feels about you, and then roll again during stressful situations.)
9. Nervous twitches.  (Penalty to fine tasks, picking locks, climbing walls, firing bows.)
10. Murderous psychosis.  (Wis check to avoid flying into a rage during combat, this gives no bonuses but it prevent you from retreating.
11. If you roll 11-20, it's the DM's choice of whatever's most appropriate.

You can get rid of insanity points by doing extremely normal stuff.  Getting drunk with your friends, working on a farm and milking cows, drinking wine while staring at the ocean, and taking long, introspective showers.  You can remove 1 insanity point per week if you are relaxing in peaceful, sane surroundings.

Obviously, it's more dangerous to keep adventuring once you've got Insanity Points on your character sheet, so after a PC picks up 1 or 2, they should maybe start thinking about going back to town.

A PC cannot normally get more than one Insanity Point from the same source.

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I like this method because it still links insanity to both Wisdom and saves, so people with low wisdom will suffer more breakdowns, while higher level characters will have a lower chance of permanent madness.  They probably got enough of that at lower levels anyway.  It also gives characters a reason to stay in town and just be normal people for a little while.  Read some books, tell stories in the tavern, bang the innkeeper's daughter, whatever.

If you do the math, the level 1 PC who sees five things that give him +1 insanity point each has got close to a 50% chance of being insane by now.  Math is funny like that.

I think that insanity points should be given out when a player knows and accepts the risk.  Less of "you open the door and see Cthulhu's penis so now you gain 5 insanity points" and more of "Are you sure you want to transcribe the spell out of the squidlord's tome?  The letters are literally crawling across the page."  Or better yet, "Are you sure you want to torture the prisoner to find out where the rebel base is?  That sort of thing can scar you for life."

I'm not saying the first kind is bad either.  Sometimes the party needs to be surprised with the cuttlefish of cthulhu (if you know what I mean).

Eldritch Americana

I have an idea for a new setting.

America is old enough and varied enough to be a campaign setting on its own.  The plots and the locations already exist, and many of them are flat-out awesome.  America already has civic undergrounds and witch crypts and Mammoth Cave and Sing Sing prison and Edison vs Tesla and presidents with shotguns.

Everyone else has a pet campaign setting; I want one, too.  It will be eldritch Americana.  Not modern fantasy or noir with wizards or dieselpunk or whatever.  It will be a roiling celebration of all that is American, with all the feverish exuberance of the 1920s, already 30 years after the apocalypse.  Gangsters and shoggoths.  Speakeasies and hagfish-men.

Non-Euclidean Architecture, Part 2

This is a sequel to my first essay on non-Euclidean architecture. If you haven’t read that one first, you should.

Non-euclidean spaces just mean that parallel lines don’t stay the same distance apart. They either bend together or splay apart. Four right angles don’t always make a square.

A lot of the ideas below are not technically non-Euclidean, but they’re close enough. They all play around with illogical spaces and angles in a way to make an environment illogical.

Non-Euclidean Architecture

Introduction

Non-Euclidean Architecture is how you build places using non-Euclidean geometry (Wikipedia's got a great article about it.)  Basically, the fun begins when you begin looking at a system where Euclid’s fifth postulate isn’t true.  When that happens, you are talking about a system where parallel lines don’t remain the same distance from each other.

Two basic ways of describing Non-Euclidean spaces: are elliptic and hyperbolic.

In elliptic geometry, two parallel lines will eventually curve towards each other (think of the outline of a football).  Space iscurved, and the degree of that curvature affects how long it takes the parallel lines to intersect, and what angle they make when they do.

In hyperbolic geometry, the opposite is true.  Space is curved the other way.  Parallel lines move further away and will never intersect, only grow farther apart.

Non-Euclidean geometry is weird because it looks like normal space as we know it on the local level, but on the global level it is much different.

Here's an example of "locally normal, globally weird": The globe can be a non-Euclidean space if we assume that the surface of it is actually flat.  A man standing at the equator travels to the north pole.  He turns 90 degrees to the right and travels back to the equator.  He turns 90 degrees to the right again and travels back to where he began.  If you map it out, he has made a three-sided figure with three 90 degree angles.  He has made a three-sided square!  If the surface of the Earth were actually flat, the man would be in a non-Euclidean geometry, probably running from eldritch abominations that he discovered at the north pole.

Actually, most physicists believe that we already live in a non-Euclidean space.  Like how the surface of the Earth is 2-D locally (and squares are squares) but exists in a 3-D space (and three right angles make a triangle), the universe is probably 3-D locally (where cubes are cubes) but 4-D globally (and cubes are not cubes).

The Pillar Room

How to apply this to a tabletop game?  I like to introduce it with the Pillar Room.

Imagine you go into a normal room with a square pillar in the middle.  You walk 360 degrees around the pillar, noting that it has four sides with 90 degree angles for the corners, and you are back at where you started.  Sound good?  That's a normal room.

But what if it took more than 360 degrees to get back to where you started?  What if you had to go around it twice, and it took 720 degrees to get back to the door?  Picture this: the party enters the pillar room from the only door (on the S wall).  The rogue decides to walk around the pillar and look around, but when the rogue gets back to the S side of the room, the party is gone.  The rogue can still hear the party asking him why he's hiding behind the pillar (the sound is bouncing off of both of the N walls) but he can’t see them.  In fact, the door is gone too, even though he is on the S side of the room.  Of course, he has only to walk 360 degrees in either way around the pillar in order to get back to them.

With non-Euclidean architecture, a 10’x10’ room can hold 200 sq. ft.

You might notice that this looks a lot like hyperspace, having many things occupy the same space.  In fact, the room I just described could be duplicated by putting a discrete, two-way portal from the pillar to the middle of the north wall.  This portal would lead to an identical room (that doesn’t have a door or any party members in it).  By walking around the pillar, the rogue walked through the portal into the identical room and didn’t even notice it.  But another 360 degrees around the pillar and he’ll be home.

But that’s still simple stuff.

What if it was 270 degrees to go around the pillar to get back to the starting point?  The rogue would go ¾ of the way around the pillar before getting back to the party, even though the pillar has square corners.  In fact, the rogue could stand in the NW corner of the room (after leaving the party on the S wall) and see the party in two places.  And the party could see the rogue in two places.  Note that they aren’t seeing copies, they’re actually seeing the rogue from two directions because space is curved and parallel lines meet here.  This is an elliptic geometry, and the apparently square room has three corners.  This 10’x10’ room has an area of 75 sq. ft.

If it was 180 degrees around the pillar, the pillar would be a two-sided square, and the rogue could do weird things like shoot himself in the back as he peers around a corner.  Highly elliptical spaces get weird fast, and I'll cover them in the next sub.

What if space was highly hyperbolic?  What if you had to walk around the pillar 10 times before you got back to where you started?  A 10’x10’ room on your dungeon map suddenly has 1000 sq. ft. in it (and the square pillar has 40 sides).

What if you put two of these pillars in the same room and called it a maze?  Depending on how the party twisted and turned around the two pillars, they could get very lost, and end up very far away from the door that they entered.  A 10’x20’ with two pillars could be . . . hell, as big as you want it, with as many branches as you feel like mapping.  If you put a monster in a smallish 2-pillar maze, the party will probably be less than 20’ away from the monster at any given time.  It'll be roaring like a giant garbage disposal and the party will be screaming like cheerleaders, but neither the party nor the monster will know how to reach each other (since the noise is coming from all the different paths to the other party).  Spooky, huh?

Fun Tip: When trying to map simple hyperdimensional mazes, just think of each center of the room as a single location.  Then just figure out where each of the four directions takes you (each direction around each of the pillars) and which location it leads you to.  Just because it confuses the hell out of your players doesn’t mean it has to confuse you.

Time to think big.

Don’t be afraid to extrapolate the pillar room to the whole dungeon.  Maybe a spin around the pillar takes them to a very similar dungeon—the party might not realize that they’re in a different one for a while, nor will they realize that the pillar can take them back.

Or picture a main room between two pillars, as in the two-pillar maze.  Depending on where you are in the maze, the central room can have different themes or purposes.  With the price of real estate the way it is, you can fit a 20-room dungeon in a 50'x50' area.

The pillar doesn’t have to be a pillar, either.  It can be a square hallway, where the party must travel around it three times to get back to where they started.  (This hallway has 3 north halls, 3 east halls, 3 south halls, and 3 west halls.)  It can be a hole that party jumps down into a pool of water.  It can be an arch or a mousehole.  It can be a building where the windows lead somewhere the front door doesn't.  It can be a gazebo.

Lastly, you finally have some justification for making some truly nonsensical maps.  If five (90 degree) left turns equal a right turn, you are allowed to put two rooms in the same space and confound logical attempts at map-making.

Interfacing Non-Euclidean Spaces with Euclidean Ones

You can’t.  As soon as you start trying to put three-sided squares onto your battlemap, you’re going to run into problems.  Technically, you should be mapping those sorts of spaces with weird tessellations and not graph paper.

But Non-Euclidean spaces can work well in confined starships and dungeons, where there are a limited number of ways into and out of a room.  You can have a lot of fun mapping out a room with Non-Euclidean geometry.  The trick is to remember is that they are Euclidean locally (squares still look like squares), but not on a bigger scale (a big enough squares doesn't have 4 sides anymore).

Start simple.  Maybe one lap around the pillar room leads to a hallway that curves a different way than the hallway you you came from, and leads to a different area.  Maybe clockwise turns lead you into older and older iterations of the ship, until after four turns, it dead-ends, and you are left in a decrepit corpse of a starship (and maybe the turns took you back in time, if you want to get stupid).

And if your party starts hacking at the walls between non-Euclidean space and Euclidean space. . . well, breaking the things that keep an impossible object in our universe can’t be a good thing.  Options for the discriminating DM include (but are not limited to):  Explosions (hyperbolic spaces), Implosions (elliptical spaces), Sucking Vortexes, Sentient Itches, Cthulhu, etc.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.