Bookpost 20

Hot damn, bookpost #20.

Bookpost Index 

 

A Comprehensive Introduction to Nostratic Comparative Linguistics With Special Reference to Indo-European 5th Edition, Allan Bomhard

A text that clearly represents a great deal of time, effort, and research on the part of the author; none of it is convincing evidence for the Nostratic hypothesis, and most of it is compelling evidence against. 

[Aside: The Nostratic Hypothesis is a proposed linguistic macrofamily containing most of the languages of Eurasia. As with basically all macrofamily theories, it exists well outside the mainstream of the field.]

I understand the appeal: it would be really cool if Nostratic was real, because it fires up the good ol' pattern recognition and puzzle solving parts of the brain and you know how much I love Recognizing Pattern. I wouldn't even rule out the possibility that something of its general shape could have existed at some point in the deep past, but I don’t think that this can ever be proven, barring sudden access to the Pnakotic Library. We simply cannot know the answer, and we are left with an empty space in which to daydream (and, let's be real here, project our own beliefs onto the past: with enough confidence and elbow grease you can make a convincing argument linking PIE to damn near anything, and they can't all be right.)

[Example: This isn't an exaggeration, here's what I can do just off the dome.]

["*gʷé̄n and be'nal both mean 'wife', which indicates that the original Proto-Indo-Euro-Klingon form was **gʷe'nal; PIE dropped the second syllable while the glottal stop vanished and lengthened the **e; in the more conservative Klingon branches **gʷ > b."]

If Nostratic did indeed exist, and it split into the families that this book claims it did, reconstructing it to any degree of accuracy would require hitting a jackpot a dozen times in a row. Every single proto-language included in the theory would have to be reconstructed accurately on its own, and then you would have to accurately place these reconstructions in relative chronology with each other in further second, third, fourth, and so on orders of reconstruction. For each of these layers, even if you had reconstructions of an outright miraculous level of accuracy, you'd still have to be factor in a margin of error for false positives, loan words, semantic drift, and information entropy. Nostratic isn’t just a second-order reconstruction: it’s five, six, seven orders or more, and each and every one of those would need to be damn near flawless in order to get a meaningful result. 

You who have read my posts on my failed-for-the-moment pre-PIE project will be familiar with difficult this is. The most thoroughly-studied language family on Earth has produced a reconstructive model held together with duct tape and a prayer, with holes you can drive a bus through. That's the best the field has produced: this book hinges on much weaker models, including two that have minimal evidence for their own existence on a good day (Altaic, Elamo-Dravidian) and one that is so loosey-goosey that no one can even agree on a core phonology (Afroasiatic). The comparisons made between the chosen language families are littered with vagaries, maybes, stretches of imagination, inadequate correspondence-based methodology, cherry-picking, extremely fuzzy semantics and flood-the-zone tactics, and rely wholly on the reader not pushing back against the claims that are being made.

[Example: This book draws a lot of material from the long-range macrofamily proposals of Russian linguist Sergei Starostin: Starostin's proto-language reconstructions are consistently characterized by extremely high consonant counts such that, with the right number of mergers and deletions, you can justify effectively any outcome if you are operating purely on correspondences. I think this is an extremely shaky methodology, given how often consonants change according to nearby vowels: did we start with a series of palatalized stops, or did some stops in some branches just get palatalized thanks to an adjacent front vowel that then shifted? Chicken-and-egg quandaries ahoy.]

If this was a creative effort of speculative conlanging, I'd be more positive on it. Quite positive, honestly, if this was reskinned as someone making an Atlantean language for a fantasy novel I would be all on board; filling gaps in the data and going on one’s merry way is perfectly acceptable in those circumstances. But this book isn't a purely creative work; this was written with sincere belief in the factual truth of its contents, and the end result is a projection into the blank canvas of prehistory that, while it clears the bar of "it doesn't take a hard right turn into bizarro linguistic nationalism", is still an argument in search of data built on a house of cards with a foundation of sand.

The one genuinely helpful thing it presents is that, in pursuit of a Grand Unified Theory, Bomhard cites and compares the theories of basically everyone who has ever published anything in the field of historical linguistics. (For better and worse, as many of them are questionable in their own right. Lookin' at you, Joseph Greenberg.)

Black Amazon of Mars, Leigh Brackett

[I had listened to this story in audiobook form via Librivox quite a long while ago, so this is technically a reread - eagle-eyed readers may remember that I swiped the "black amazon" name for the human servants of Orca in an equally long-ago post, though in hindsight that was probably not the best name.]

Sword and planet high adventure. Has some good imagery and the prose is solid. Also contains one of my least favorite tropes of all time: the cool masked warrior is revealed to be a woman and then immediately gets sidelined to a passive role so the inevitably less-interesting male main character can finish the plot. What a waste. The character was already doing cool things, just let her keep doing cool things!

Also contains potentially the weirdest example of pulp sci-fi racism I have ever encountered: the bending over backwards this series pulls to avoid having an actual black man as the protagonist - despite invoking all the signifiers of the colonialist imaginary - would have every chiropractor in the hemisphere breaking down the door to schedule an appointment. Our protagonist Stark has dark skin, excused as being from Mercury, and I could almost buy that as an interesting explanation were it not for the fact that his name in his youth was "Nchaka" (evoking sub-Saharan Africa by way of a prenasalized consonant; the only hit I can find on that name in a cursory search is a festival held by the Ogba of Nigeria which I doubt was the actual source) and much is made of his "wildness", "primal nature" or vaguely defined "instincts" (sigh). But he's definitely not black, guys!

Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

I don’t know if that was Brackett’s doing, the editor’s doing, or if it was Brackett trying to get around the editor through malicious compliance. Literally just stick a population of Bantu speakers on Mercury and give him an appropriate name, this isn’t difficult. 

The Lost Continent, C.J. Cutliffe Hyne

An unexpected treat. I had picked this on a whim and ended up with a thoroughly enjoyable rip-roaring adventure that repeatedly surprised me with how modern it felt. Took a full 50% of the book before the old-timey sexism reared its head, and I've read worse from much more recent books. It would take very little effort to make a modern adaptation

The premise is solid: Deucalion, career philosopher-soldier-priest and former governor of the Yucatan colony, is recalled to Atlantis by direct order of the empress Phorenice as part of a greater plan to bolster her rule in the midst of economic crisis and civil war. The kicker here is that Phorenice isn’t portrayed as stupid. This is a pulp novel from 1899 and the ambitious woman in power is portrayed as canny and competent. She’s blinded by hubris to the real dangers threatening Atlantis, but she’s not portrayed as the idiot running things into the ground where it was once already perfect - the rot was already there, Phorenice took advantage of it for her own benefit, and the narrative is very clear that this is the case. Her sins are the sins of the nobility. 

This isn’t even mentioning Nais, who I described to my partner as “a second baddie has entered the narrative” and honestly don’t want to spoil why. You’ll know it if you read it. She does, unfortunately, get hit with the “demoted to passive character” beam later on, but her arrival is fucking strong. Deucalion himself is more interesting than I expected because of what I think is a bit of intentional unreliability in his steady 1st person POV - he regularly says or thinks things that are at odds with what is being depicted on the page, and a whole lot that is clearly biased by his aristocratic-Stoic leanings.

I had wondered while reading if the author had socialist leanings, but couldn't find any real info - his descriptions of the excessive wealth of the Atlantean nobles, the squalid conditions of the common people, and the casual cruel indifference Deucalion, Phorenice, the priesthood, and aristocracy aim at the underclasses. This could all be me pulling an unintended reading from the text, but it feels intentional in a way that other works of the time would treat this state of affairs as just the way of things.

Also: I haven’t even mentioned the dinosaurs yet! We got antediluvian monstrosities left right and center! No science here, no sir. You’re going to have plesiosaurs attacking boats right off the bat. Somewhere along the line fantasy authors decided they were too cool for dinosaurs, and that's a fucking shame.

Omniligual, H. Beam Piper

Short story about a team of scientists cracking the Martian language during their excavations of one of their ruined cities. There are, of course, some serious handwaves underpinning the exercise just for the sake of practicality, but it holds up pretty well (and doesn't have to do with Sapir-Whorf, which is the only linguistics 99% of sci-fi authors have ever heard of). It's on Gutenberg, you can zip through it in an afternoon.

Qoholeth, Madison Scott-Clary

DNF 45%

I know the author on Discord, she had the series on sale and I grabbed this and its sequels in a bundle. They are, from the outset, a conjunction of elements normally outside my wheelhouse, but I figured it's good to go stretch the legs on new routes once in a while.

Premise: it’s the future, our main character is a furry who hangs out in VR and ends up comatose with their mind trapped in a simulation for reasons unknown.

The fundamental issue with the book, and what got me to DNF, is that it’s just kinda dull. 

There’s no real antagonist; the conflict is wholly based in the mystery of the people lost inside simulations, but there’s no urgency, no tension, no forward momentum. The three POV characters, at least by the point I stopped at, not only hadn’t interacted with each other but barely interact with anyone else:

• RJ / AwDae has one conversation with a friend, and then wanders aimlessly in a simulation with no one else around to interact with.
• The doctor, whose name I have forgotten by the time I write this, technically has her research team, but none of the members have any distinguishing features and they’re basically as interchangeable as the members of a Greek chorus. At the time I dropped the book, she was just beginning to investigate RJ / AwDae's case.
• Ioan, who is from a plotline set in the future of the other two but had not been connected by the time I DNF'd, only ever speaks to the character that hired them to do this investigation.

The short chapters feel like a hamster wheel after a while, moving speedily along to nowhere. The plotline with Ioan and Dear is especially hurt by this, as even the "why" any of this is happening is lost beneath cryptography, data structures, and Dear being immensely unhelpful in that “never ever give a direct answer” fairy chicanery sort of way (on top of being a story about What Art Means and What It Means to Be An Artist, a genre I have never been particularly fond of.)

By the time AwDae has 'eir first revelation wrt the simulation (pg 123 / 44%), the conclusion ("the call is coming from inside the house") is something that should have been top 3 potential options since 'ey got stuck in it seventy, eighty pages ago. The way 'ey realized it was neat (the contents of books in 'eir simulated childhood home reflecting 'eir memory rather than what they actually were), but the realization is so delayed that it paints AwDae as just kind of a dunce. It's not really a twist, it's a moment of "wait, why didn't you consider that"?

Additionally: for a book by and about people with animal-based alter egos, there’s a noteworthy and disappointing lack of variety when it comes to the virtual world at the center of the story. Nobody rolls up with a custom-built anomalocarid rig, or is chilling as an orangutan, or a manta ray, or a slime mold, or a colony of cordyceps-infested wasps, or a giant crab with a house on its back: your options are order Carnivora and nothing else. We’ve got a fennec fox, a skunk, and a cat. This restraint extends beyond the characters to the environment; the functioning simulations we’re shown are a London pub and an apartment, and the anomalous broken one is a high school and surrounding neighborhood. The fully-immersive VR tech that somehow avoided getting subsumed directly into the Torment Nexus is wholly unweird, in total opposition to the actual real-life examples of VR Chat and Second Life. (My bias towards overwhelming weird detail is in full effect here, so take that as you will.)

There are, I think, four sequels; I don't know how or if any of this changes with later installments.

Note: RJ / Aw Dae uses ey / em pronouns in the book, which makes the narrator in my head sound like The Fonz. This was extremely distracting while reading the book, but is an issue with the reader rather than the text. 

Three Imposters, Arthur Machen

A fixup novel of some otherwise unconnected short stories, and while I don’t know how much the frame narrative was doing for me, Machen’s got a richness to his language that I appreciate. It’s fun seeing where HPL picked up some of his bad habits, though saying that makes it seem like I had a worse time than I did. I think Machen is better than Lovecraft at just dropping a “man, look at this inexplicable fucked-up thing” (though there were some clunky ad-hoc explanations in these stories, don’t get me wrong), though he’s never met a paragraph he can’t extend for three to four pages. Much less concerned with building up any sort of world or setting. I didn’t have any strong feelings of “oh damn I want to write something with this”, but I also have a small sample size.

Oomphel in the Sky, H. Beam Piper

I have complicated feelings on this one. On the one hand, I generally have very little patience for “let’s use aliens as an obvious stand-in for indigenous peoples of Earth”; on the other hand, this story takes that and builds it to the lesson of “you know you should probably actually listen to people and meet them where they are.” Specifically in this case, the aliens believe that there’s an immanent apocalypse due to the orbital weirdness of their world mixed with contact with humans, society is beginning to break down in the mass hysteria, and it’s ultimately avoided by taking a bunch of cunning men up on a rocket so they can see things for themselves and then cook up an explanation for why it isn’t the end of the world that functions within their pre-existing worldview. 

Piper’s 60s libertarianism is very front and center with this one, and I feel similarly complicated feelings about that. The “practical rugged individualism solves everything” element (which was present in Little Fuzzy and Omnilingual, but is strongest here), is quite pronounced, and while he did get it right about liberalism’s shortcomings vis a vis “it’s all fun and games and kumbaya until you have to actually acknowledge complicated cultural differences that aren’t easily sanded down”, there’s a non-zero amount of complaining about strawmen (he’s got a stand-in university for Berkeley and starts sounding like Hannity every time it’s mentioned). Plus there's the elephant in the room of Piper’s 60s libertarianism playing a sizable role in his suicide. So yeah, complex feelings. 

The Sundering Flood, William Morris

DNF 5%

The first (c.1897) fantasy novel to include a map of the secondary world at the front, or so the summaries go. It might be a perfectly fine adventure story (William Morris seems like an interesting fella, old-timey socialist and proponent of the arts-and-crafts movement) but it’s written in some truly unbearable faux-archaic language. No amount of historical curiosity will make me think that “meseemeth” is an acceptable thing to inflict on a reader. The map’s nice, though.

 

Green Antarctica,  D'Valdron

DNF 6%

A novel alt-history / speculative evolution prompt (Antarctica never fully glaciates) undercut at every opportunity by the eye-rolling excesses of performative online edginess. I skipped all the way to the end and can confirm that the incessant torture, rape, cannibalism, bestiality, necrophilia, genocide and assorted other crimes against humanity does not even have the decency to end with “The Aristocrats!” 

Also worth mentioning is that this text leans very heavily on both Poe and HPL, and certainly honors the legacy of both by being outrageously racist in that very specific online way of skipping the slurs and going straight to “I've invented an elaborate rational justification for why these dark-skinned people eat babies, isn’t that shocking?”

Come off it, mate. Tsalal deserves better than this shit.

 

**

 

Gameable Content Bonus

The Gold Tiberius (City encounter, via Three Imposters)

While passing through an alley towards their destination, the party is startled by  the sudden appearance of a man sprinting down a perpendicular cross-alley and throwing a small object in their general direction.

The Gold Tiberius: A large golden coin, resting nearly on top of the bars of a sewer grate. 

• Face: head in profile of a famous emperor of antiquity. 

• Reverse: a faun with his euphemistic flute, splashing around in a reed-lined pool beneath the word VICTORIA. Pure gold and in perfect condition. 

• A bit of historical research (or just having a classically-trained wizard in the party) will identify this as a semi-legendary coin, the only survivor of coins cast to commemorate a grand orgy hosted by the emperor on its face. Vanished from its last known whereabouts over a century prior.

Should the players take the coin, they will soon encounter a young man with glasses while traveling to your intended destination. He's tall, thin, brown-haired, sideburned, and has a nervous look about him. This is an encounter at a distance, or maybe he bumps into a PC; it's something that characters will notice in the moment and forget immediately afterward, and they won't get a chance to speak to him. This is the Young Man With Spectacles that had startled the party in the alley - he is on the run from parties out to kill him for stealing the coin from them, and one of them will, perhaps a couple days later, approach the party trying to suss out the Young Man's whereabouts.

The Imposter will whip up a story about how they need to find the Young Man - a lost family member in trouble, an unexplained occurrence in his presence, financial matters that need resolved. They aren't going to mention the Tiberius at all, but they will cold read the players for all their worth.

From this point it's something that should be tailored to the game at hand, with the following constants:

• The Imposters will kill the Young Man if they find him, and without the PCs intervention they will find him within a week or so.
• The Imposters will not go after the PCs unless they are given reason to believe that the party has the coin; if so, they will try to social engineer it out of the party's hands before resorting to force.
• The Imposters have access to ritual magic
• The coin is worth holy shit GP; taking it to an official assessor will not go without notice and will put the Imposters on the party's trail. 

2025 in Review

What a godsforsaken shitass dogfuck year. 

Sorry for opening on a downer, but I need to get this out of my system. I will attempt to focus on the positive later but there was very little to go around even when factoring out The Everything.

Previous Years: 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024

d12 ways 2025 has fucked me over

1. One of our cats died from a tumor so rare that the vet gave us a discount because it qualified as a teaching experience. Three cats in three years. At this point I feel like it’s either a curse or something in the fucking water, though we don’t even have the benefit of clean correlation because all three of them died in entirely different ways.
2. Partner got a new job she doesn't like.
3. My car died (the transmission was already dying, but then the battery went fucked while I was out driving in fucking January, and I had to be jumped twice just to get back home - was stalling out every time I came to a stop.)
4. My partner’s car died. (Don’t know what happened to this one)
5. Car dealership yanked us around for days, forcing us to make multiple Ubers across the city for no fucking reason. Fucking hate cars so god damn much.
6. Multiple friends in and out of mental health crises, job loss, divorce.
7. Partner had to get her gallbladder removed, then had to be rushed back to the ER a few weeks for an after-effect. (She’s doing okay now)
8. Some chucklehead tried a bit of Western Union fraud as a treat.
9. Our other cat has kidney disease, so now the odds are rising that will have a fourth cat loss in as many years.
10. Database migration plus the holiday season is making work a nightmare, and now they’re getting after me for slipping performance - yeah, no shit my performance is slipping, I am fucking stressed.
11. After a 2152-day clean streak, I get covid two weeks before Christmas.
12. Dealer’s fucking choice.

So that’s been my year.

Leslie Stone transcription project

With the first pass complete on most of the short stories, I’ve got the longer novellas left and that has slowed things a decent amount. Still, it’s been a fun project (as evidenced by my previous posts) and I’m glad I’ve gotten myself into it - it’s a good way to relax when the mind goblins are at their worst and I can’t focus on anything else or do anything productive.

Superman (2025)

Of all the many, many things I adored about this movie, the one that has stuck with me is the bit in the faux-interview  when Lois is grilling him about his previous interference in global politics. Clark’s frustration at her line of questioning reads very strongly to me as “oh, this Superman is on the spectrum” in a very true-to-life way. To Clark, the logic of his moral universe is as simple and as natural as breathing; people were dying, and he needed to stop it. Political ramifications be damned people were fucking dying; that’s enough reason for him to step in, and he genuinely doesn’t understand why anyone would have a problem with that. The thought is alien to him. 

What a good movie.

Bloodywood

Dana Dan gets the coveted "song that got me through the year" slot, for reasons that will be immediately obvious to anyone who has heard that song and also read this blog.

Naked Gun (2025)

It is so nice to watch a movie that understands how to do a proper gag. My dad would have loved it. If a joke doesn’t land for you there’s a new one in a few seconds, it’ll be fine.

Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc

Very glad they did this as a movie, I don’t think it’d be possible to pull it off with TV show pacing and still have it work. Chainsaw go brrrrrrrr indeed.

The year of Lovecraft 

An unintended trend, but it got me writing so that’s a net positive. Probably something to do with The Horrors. Something something, art that’s flawed in interesting ways will get me to engage even when I’m a vocal critic of the art. Always funny how that works.

The Year of PIE

Technically most of last year was this as well. If nothing else, it's been extremely educational.

A great year for video games*

While the greater industry seems rapidly accelerating towards a mass extinction event, anyone who exists on the fringe of that ecosystem is feasting like a king. So long as itch isn’t getting forced into a blind panic by Mastercard and Australian Christofascists. Or Steam doesn’t arbitrarily decide to axe your specific game for vaguely-defined and spurious reasons.

The MiniSalties

• Get in Losers We’re Going to Fight God: Expedition 33
• Greatest Disappointment: Silksong
• Blasting From the Pasting: Binding of Isaac Repentance, Nuclear Throne
• I Played it a Lot in January and Need to Go Back: Caves of Qud

God Damn I Listened to a lot of Elden Ring OST this year

I can only assume that Spotify is extremely confused by my listening habits. Top themes are Bayle, Radahn, Fortissax, Messmer, Maliketh.

My Partner Has Yet To Find A Romantasy that Features a Dwarf

Now, I am getting this second hand from her descriptions of the audiobooks she listens to, nut I still I think it is a fascinating trend. No dwarves have appeared in any context in any of the books she's read (let alone as a leading man), which is fucking wild to me since damn near all of them have elves of some manner and this is a highly-derivative genre. I want to see the red string board. Are they considered too cheesy? Did the authors just not have Tolkien or his imitators as a formative inspiration? Is a short hairy dude just a no-sell in heteronormative mass-market romance? The world may never know, but I wish I did.

A Long, Unpleasant SCP Aside

While my “get back in” phase of a couple years ago has since faded back out, I’ve still been keeping a few tabs on current events: they aren’t good.

To make a long, unpleasant aside as short as I can: in 2022, one of the wiki’s founding admins was banned after revelations of a long history of sexual harassment. Many of the victims were minors, and it became very clear that said admin’s penchant for gross-out sexual content in their stories was not simply being edgy and in bad taste. They had, on top of abusing their admin powers to cover up their behavior, leveraged their reputation as a popular 1st generation author (with a extremely popular “comedic pervert” author avatar character) to facilitate the abuse.

Well, it’s nearly 2026 and despite widespread public outcry to get that shit gone, site staff have been dragging their feet. One tale was deleted through official channels, and the prominent / infamously unfunny List of Things Dr. Bright is Not Allowed to Do at the Foundation was deleted by a moderator who wanted to go out with a bang. Everything else has been nearly four years of angry people, gnashed teeth, talking in circles, and hand-wringing about procedure. It took a moderator going rogue just to get a splash page explaining what had happened.

So yeah. Feels fucking bad. The site's always been dysfunctional to some degree, this isn't the first creep or the first botched response to a crisis, but fuck, man. The bar is on the fucking ground. 

Year-End Correction of Longstanding Oversight

Finally got around to binge-watching Esoterica. Dr. Sledge is a beacon of sanity in an age of madness and not an episode goes by without things to swipe for vague yet certainly nefarious RPG uses.

There are too many fucking games

I do not care about your Kickstarter, your Zinequests, your Mothership months. There are too many fucking games. Stop making new games. Put up a free ashcan rules hack like a civilized human being if you absolutely must. Too many fucking games. I already own too many fucking games, I do not need more fucking games, I'm already busy not playing any fucking games!

I need to play more games

I ran exactly two games this year (one Mothership, one Delta Green) and god I’ve missed it. I desperately want to play more, but I also am burned out enough that I basically need to be forced into doing it by some kind of external circumstance. Playing in person is the easiest way to do this, but actually doing that is easier said than done. I would really like to just be a player for a while, but my in-person DM friends are all just as ADHD and busy and frazzled as I am if not more, and none of the other friends have shown any draw to ttrpgs unless I’m the one running them. Could go out and look in the local group recruitment server, but that’s another couple dice rolls to see if it’s in a convenient location / is of a game I want to play.

Just very tired.

Blogged more than 2024

Not by much, but it’s a trend in the right direction.

Onward

2026 will mark 9 years of this blog. Hard to imagine it. Depression and stress fuck with your memory something fierce (and that’s on top of ADHD crippling that faculty from go), so it feels like I’ve done so little despite that being objectively untrue. There’s this perpetual feeling of “if I could just fucking rest and do nothing for a couple weeks something will snap into place and I’ll be back”, but things never pan out that way. I straight up forgot to spend the second half of my vacation days this year, and even on vacation one still has to cook and clean and do laundry and interact with other human beings. 

Ah well. The Wheel turns, the Turtle moves, and we're all a year older. Keep yourselves safe out there.

Wikipedia Links Slushpile 2

Slushpile index 

Second verse, same as the first; these are all links I saved for myself in my general notes doc.

1. Irish Bell Shrines
Reliquaries for hand bells made by / made for / associated with saints. I love a good super-specific bit of religious-historical minutiae and these absolutely scratch the itch.. Perfect excuse to introduce bell exorcism, too!

2. The Plain of Jars
Jar burial is pretty common historically, which isn’t that unusual. More unusual is a region in central Laos where there are thousands of stone jars dated back to the bronze age whose makers are not particularly evident (possibly the Sa Huynh culture?). No erdtrees, though. Definitely where our boy Alexander got his start, though.

3. Olo (Color)
A color that can only be seen by shooting lasers into your eyes and specifically targeting your M cone cells, supposedly something close to a low-saturation teal. Only discovered in April ‘25, but assuredly going on the list next to octarine and ulfire. 

4. The Book of Ingenious Devices
A perfect text to drop in a setting without changing anything, because the summary alone sounds like it’s from a fantasy novel.

• Straightforward and evocative title
• Written by three brothers working at the House of Wisdom at the behest of the caliph.
• Contains schematics and descriptions of 100 mechanical devices and automata.

Honestly I expect someone has already added it to D&D, and you should too. 

5. Hundun
Befitting the formless chaos that preceded existence, most of this article is a tangle of weird etymologies, double-triple-quadruple meanings, puns (that might be food-related), a total lack of consistency between a given source and any other source, and a lumpy-dumpy six-legged thing with four wings and no face or head. Playing the hits.

6. Fomorians
Big old nasties from Irish myth, all-purpose ogrelike enemies of the Tuatha de Danann. Linked here specifically because of the painting by John Duncan, which is a) public domain b) an extremely fun collection of freaks. Look at that sardine man!

7. The Knight of the Burning Pestle
1607 stage play that opens with a play-in-a-play (The London Merchant), which is interrupted by two audience-member characters (the Citizen and his Wife) whose actors had been sitting in among the real audience (the audience for Knight of the Burning Pestle) and who then get up on stage (Where the actors for Knight of the Burning Pestle are trying to put on The London Merchant), derail The London Merchant and start putting on their own performance of The Knight of the Burning Pestle (the play-within-the-play-within-the-play, not the 1607 stage play that opens with The London Merchant). This is the first scene!

8. Kushan Empire
Critically-overlooked historical polity of Central Asia c. 30 - 375 CE, successor state to the Greco-Bactrian kingdom. Puts every fantasy setting you’ve ever read to shame with the level of syncretism going on: simply reaching into your pocket for a handful of change would leave you with coins depicting Zeus, Ahura Mazda, Shiva and the Buddha. 

9. Vigenère Cipher
A cipher where each letter of the encrypted message is encoded with a different Caesar cipher. 

Plaintext message: Trap chest ahead
Key Text: redtriceratops

So to encode the plaintext, we shift [t] forward 19 letters, wrapping around from z to a and ending on [k]. ([r] is the 18th letter of the alphabet, but for the cipher we start counting with 0)

Then we just run through the plaintext, remove the spaces and punctuation, and we have

Encoded message: kvditpgwkaaspv

The game usage should be obvious: stuck some coded messages in a dungeon, drop a key in as a conspicuous detail (hastily painted red triceratops below the ciphertext) or even a physical item. It’s complicated enough that I wouldn’t lock progress behind it, but for hidden treasure, secret doors, lore and messages it’s a solid way to make it more engaging than a simple skill check.

10. Qara Khitai
Another historical polity of central Asia, though this one only lasted for about a century (1124 to 1220, as that’s when the Mongols did their thing.) Noteworthy for being the origin of Cathay, the name used for China as a whole in a lot of medieval / renaissance european literature. I specifically found this article through the articles on Orlando innamorato and Orlando Furioso - the princess Angelica of Cathay is just “generic pagan” in the text, but the mind goblins are saying “oh but what if that chivalric adventure was slightly more historically accurate, wouldn’t that be cool?” 

11. Lilith #Incantation Bowls
There’s an entire rabbit hole to go down on incantation bowls and their use in Mesopotamia as traps for evil spirits; I include this link here not because of that, and not because of Lilith specifically, but because of how the art is clearly done by some rando off the street. A good reminder that for every surviving masterwork of antiquity there were countless more made with much more ordinary levels of skill.

12. Gotcaris & Cambropachycope
Some weird Cambrian arthropods that make for extremely good mi-go. Add some funky fungus and you’re good to go.

13. Order-5 truncated pentagonal hexecontahedron
A sphere consisting of 12 pentagons, each with 5 hexagons surrounding it. A nice little Super Mario Galaxy-sized hexcrawl map. I want to do a Mothership thing with one of these, eventually.

14. Jambudvīpa
“Land of the jambu trees” - a name for the Indian subcontinent, used primarily in a mythic or cosmological sense as part of a greater division of the world into a nice symmetrical arrangement of lands around Mt. Meru.

15. Longmen (mythology)
“Dragon gate” - a great waterfall at the headwaters of a river, where migrating carp that manage to make the jump transform into dragons. I can’t help but think of an American version based on salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest, which makes me think of a dragon-analogue that shares design language with indigenous art of the region and that’s a very cool image.

16. Kilkenny Cats
The cats that fought until only their tails were left. Not everything’s got to be big and important.

17. Polygraphia (book)
1518 text on steganography (encoding a text inside another text so that it does not obviously appear to be a cipher). Also the origin of the Witches’ Alphabet / Theban Alphabet.

18. Oponskoye Kingdom
Utopian kingdom at the edge of the world from Russian folklore. Doesn’t have a whole lot of detail associated with it, but I like the name and it’s a good reminder that folks will always imagine up some far away place where the nobles are off their case and the king’s less shit.

19. Clime
Divisions of the world into climate bands in Greco-Roman geography and astronomy. One of those instances where the ancients were on the money for the most part (the world is spherical and is cold at the poles and hot at the equator) but off by one major misconception that’s good worldbuilding fodder (uninhabitable hot band at the equator and the antipodes on the other side).

20. Hara Berezaiti
Legendary mountain in Zoroastrianism; home of Mithra, center of the world, focal point around which the stars and planets revolve, all the classics. Translates to English as “High Watch”, which feels almost too boilerplate fantasy novel to be real.

21. Fantasy Cartography
The article itself isn’t super noteworthy on its own, but the header image is someone’s setting map that they released into public domain. Alwayotta shout out the real ones. And then there are the maps of fictional Esperanto-speaking islands that were drawn up for US army cryptographers and so are also PD.

22. Open Geofiction
One of those creative projects that has kept on keeping on in its own remote pocket of internet obscurity. Premise is “here’s a world map built with OpenStreetMap, fill it with nations and peoples and languages and geography and infrastructure”. I do love a good map. The project is CC too, though it’s non-commercial so alas, no SCP crossover. Definitely seems to be one of those canon-heavy projects sustained by a small but very dedicated core.

23. Megijima
An island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, associated with Onigashima from the story of Momotaro. So if you need a place for oni to come from, that’s the spot.

24. Akilineq
Inuit toponym for “the opposite country”; likely referring to to trade settlements along the Thelon River (Akilinik - “on the other side”), but it seems to have been used in other contexts for Labrador, Baffin Island, potentially even Iceland. 

25. Alatyr (mythology)
The “father of all stones”, located on the island of Buyan at the navel of the world, protected by Gagana the iron-beaked bird and Garafena the snake. The world tree grows upon it, those who touch it are healed, and god damn there’s so much cool Russian folklore out there.
 
26. Palmares (quilombo)
A sizable independent polity of escaped slaves, indigenous Brazilians, mixed-race folks and some Portuguese settlers on the outs with the colonial government. Resisted takeover by both the Dutch and the Portuguese for nearly a century.

The Wikipedia Commons Section

These are all images rather than articles, and I've noted licensing as appropriate.

Turns out the key to finding cool things on Commons is to abuse the category: function over default search, much better results.

1. Lovecraft Country
CC-BY-SA 3.0 (Hoodinski)
I have never gotten much from the parochiality of Lovecraft’s geography, but it’s nice to see it cobbled together into a map. I assume somewhere in the background there is some sort of horrible thing underneath this little pocket that draws all the Weird Shit to it.

2. The Dead-Line
Public domain
Map for the 1924 Western novel The Dead-Line by W.C. Tuttle. Perfectly serviceable for a fantasy story (tautology there, most westerns are fantasies)

3. The Sundering Flood (map)
Public Domain
Map of the 1897 fantasy novel The Sundering Flood by William Morris, a man who from a cursory look at his Wikipedia page appears to be an extremely interesting fellow: Socialist activist, proponent of the arts and crafts movement, founded an organization to preserve historic buildings. 

(The day after writing this blurb I tried reading The Sundering Flood and found it to be written in unbearable faux-archaic language that I would not willingly inflict on another human being. Alas.)

4. The Forty Isles
Public domain (Gilbert Anthony Pownall)
An amalgamation of locations from Robinson Crusoe, with some wildcards thrown in for good measure. Change the names and you’ve got a very nickel little archipelago, or even a full continent if you want to change the scale. Feels very Earthsea.

5. Pirate Island
Public domain (Gilbert Anthony Pownall)
Same artist and style as the above. Always gotta have a pirate island, especially one with such excellent place names as the capital city of Jolly Rogerville, the Block & Pulley tavern, and the quaint seaside village of Poop.

6. The Rail Way Map
Public domain. (Gilbert Anthony Pownall)
Man, Gilbert Anthony Pownall was a busy cartographer in 1924. Another charming satirical map.

7. Discovery II (top view, labeled)
Public domain (NASA)
A spaceship to get your ass to Jupiter.

8. Map of Lemuria
Public domain
As drawn by William Scott-Elliot, an astoundingly, comedically racist theosophist who wrote with absolute sincerity that Stonehenge was built by Akkadians who migrated to Britain 100,000 years ago. But it is, I must admit, a pretty good map. Most maps of Lemuria are just a green triangle someone made in MS paint, this one’s got actual coastlines. Don’t know what’s up with the blue splotches up north, or why literally only Greenland keeps its exact shape. Probably Hyperboria or some shit. Can’t win ‘em all.

9. Bankoku Jinbutsu no Dzu
CC-BY-4.0 (Rawpixel)
Cleaned-up version of the 1825 PD original.  Poor central Asia, it just got shlorped out of existence. 

10. Mother of the World
Public domain (Nicholas Roerich)
Now that’s a Soulsborne level-up lady if I ever done seen one.

 

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 Harvey 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. 

Dan Plays Games 9

In the last installment, Arnold suggested writing some bits of gameable material at the end, and I think that's a pretty good idea. Only got one bit for this one, but that should hopefully change for the next.

 

Date Everything (Update) 

I promised a Date Everything tier list, here is that tier list. 

Open link in new tab to actually read the damn thing

My thoughts on the game are basically the same as in the previous post. I respect the hustle, and when I finally got to the end my feelings were generally positive, but overall I’d point people towards Teenage Exocolonist or Slay the Princess instead. Neither of which, I admit, would be strictly called dating sims.

Further notes:

• Dolly is a gem and her story the one that felt most like an actual romance. I like the anthropologist character, who could have possibly guessed this would happen.
• Tydus Andromache being the off-brand detergent pods + Amazon + speaking in iambic pentameter is the kind of layered gag I live for.
• Bobby is NB and so should be labeled as HELLO, BOSS, of course, but it didn't feel right giving them anything lower than top tier even if they're on the same color grade. Just imagine it's on the right hand side.
• Barry Styles gets an award for most positive surprise: didn't think I would like him at all, but then it turns out he's the ADHD character written by someone who Gets It, and I appreciate that a lot.
• Part of Mac’s storyline involves them asking you to delete  quote "terabytes” unquote of poorly-written self-insert erotic fanfiction. I crunched the numbers on that, and 2 TB of plaintext files (with 40% lopped off for whatever bespoke formatting the Valdivian text editor uses, estimated) is roughly equivalent to the entire career output of Stephen King 8733 times over. All because they want to update to the newer, definitely enshittified corpo operating system. Nah, mate, I’m going to offer Lyric a profit-share editorial job and we are going to make bank.
• Curt and Rod’s storyline is bugged still, and for me was uncompleteable. Thankfully you don’t actually need to get an ending with everyone to finish the game, but I was deep enough in that they where the only ones I hadn’t finished.

Islanders: New Shores

It’s Islanders with a slight/modest amount of new content. One of those sequels where it kinda outmodes the original, but also I don’t know if it does enough to really stand out against it, either. But that’s only an issue if you’ve played the first game, and even then it’s probably not a huge issue.

Silksong

Silksong is what happens when your devs are entirely isolated from anyone who isn’t an absolute freakbeast. It is perhaps the most player-hostile game I’ve encountered in recent memory, and it was made so with intention. I’d be more forgiving if it was jank, but in this case the cruelty was the point. Here’s a run down:

• Lightly nudging a boss with your toe does 2 masks of damage, just like all of their attacks (which is double what a typical Hollow Knight boss does)
• Lengthy boss runbacks are both present and often extremely tedious - even FromSoft got rid of them in Elden Ring, and for good reason.
• Exploration is less rewarding - most of the tools and trinkets are locked behind the rosary bead currency dropped by certain enemies, which favors grinding out trash mobs to afford anything until you hit Act 2.
• There are no real rewards for bosses or enemy gauntlets (which can sometimes be tougher than bosses themselves) - they don’t even drop shards.
• Speaking of shards, I understand that they’re supposed to be a mechanic where you are forced to take a break from a boss to go do something else, but again like…there’s very little incentive to explore. You get so little in the way of exploration rewards, and you’re likely to get frustrated or stuck on some bullshit or another anyway.
• Minor enemies have bloated health pools, and some of them also do two masks of damage. And the flying ones straight-up just read your inputs so you’re stuck trying to hit an extraordinary precognitive little fucker.
• Some environmental hazards also do two masks of damage (which they did not in Hollow Knight) - makes sense for lava, not for anything else. They fixed one of these in a patch.

I managed to beat Widow before I installed the reduced damage and Stakes of Marika mods; there was no satisfaction in overcoming that fight, merely relief that it was over and I would never have to do it again. These mods made it tolerable for a while: the Last Judge fight was actually fun, when I'm certain it would have driven me to uninstall if I had tried to do it clean. 

This lasted until I got to Mt. Fay, played for 10 minutes more, and uninstalled. Putting the technically-optional double jump (something that is helpful for people who are having trouble with the platforming) behind an extremely tough and tedious platforming challenge (of the sort that if you're able to do it, you probably don't need the double jump) is a level of cruelty beyond what mods can solve. My wrists are shit, Team Cherry, throw me a fucking bone.

All the parts I liked of the game - the visuals, the music, the exploration - were constantly up against a compounding set of choices I could probably endure individually but less so all at once and definitely not all the time: it’s a death by a thousand cruel cuts. Difficulty and frustration are different things, a lesson that Silksong does not seem to have internalized.

The game's difficulty is still tuned for "postgame DLC" and there are no options without mods, and that mars what is otherwise a stellar experience, leaving me with an end result that waffles between the extremes of fun and frustration in some kind of quantum superposition. Some moments, like the Lace fight, are downright sublime; but then you spend three times as long fighting the Moorwing and the experience starts to sour. All the fun I had with the game was in spite of the game, not really because of it, and the disappointment is deep.

I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, because anyone with a tolerance for its specific style of bullshit either already owns it or already has it on their wishlist.

Hades 2

The anti-Skong, as far as development is concerned. It’s Hades 2, which means it’s Hades 1 but more Hades, which has worked generally in the game’s favor but also means that my main issue with Hades 2 is the same I had with Hades 1, similarly magnified: shit’s big, and I’m a man liable to run out of steam. Especially here, where the game is quite literally twice as large as the first game. Runs are long and require a lot of sustained focus, and the resource treadmill means you will be making a whole lot of runs.

Some folks had issues with the ending, I dodged that since I still haven’t finished the game.

It’s an extremely slick game and a lot of fun to play, but I find that I have to be in a high-focus state of mind to really settle down and play a run.

Every single new character to show up, even when their inclusion was a foregone conclusion, elicited a “oh shiiiiiiiiiit!” reaction just from the excitement of seeing the new character design, which was a fun thing to work towards. As before, these iterations have more or less become my canonical (or at least primary) versions of the characters.

Binding of Isaac: Repentance (Continued)

I put so many fucking hours into this game since August I had to uninstall and hide it from my library. Wrong game at the right time, and while there are worse things to be addicted to god damn is there a lot of game in this game and it knows how to get the hooks in. I was getting into stuff I didn’t even know existed (the Tainted characters) and overall it was feeling good to be back, but also kind of a checklist treadmill (I literally had an achievement spreadsheet I was tracking progress with) and in retrospect it was very much one o' them maladaptive coping strategies. 

Decktamer

"What if Pokemon but a deckbuilder and also had the fucked-up (positive) monster ecology of Made In Abyss but didn't have all the other, fucked-up shit (negative) of Made in Abyss?"

I was sold on this game from the monster art (your tutorial beast is the Hell Rat, which looks like a naked mole rat with a cookie-cutter shark mouth), and it’s been great fun so far on top of having a killer bestiary of gross-cute beasties. Some issues with difficulty that have since been evened out with patches, and I'm looking forward to what gets added later. There's a lot of room for pulling off some wild combos with abilities and team comps, but to get those you have to be both lucky and good at thinking on your feet.

Hell is Us

“What if Death Stranding was an exploration/puzzle-first Soulslike set in a fictional analogue of the Bosnian War?”

I'd asked some folks, a short while before this game came out, if there was a Soulslike with no boss fights. Something that was wholly set on exploring an interconnected and detailed environment without combat gates (or at least with milder ones). They didn't have an answer for me, but lo and behold, Hell is Us emerges to fill this exact niche. The game is good. Deserves its own post.

Peak

My partner and a couple real-life friends picked it up so I figured why not. Was a good choice. Losing is fun / hilarious and that carries so much of a game. There are just enough moving parts for chaos to creep into a cascading disaster of four people making small sub-optimal choices over time. It's a strong chassis to build on top of.

Not a fan of the Roots area they added, though. Visually great, but the spores are just kinda one difficulty element too far for me. No clear distinction for when you are actually in danger zone vs in the margin of the cloud until you’re actually taking damage.

Picto Quest: The Cursed Grids

Uncharitable reviews would call it shovelware; It was $1.50 on sale, and I have certainly gotten $1.50 of enjoyment out of it. No frills, no extras, just ~120 picto puzzles. I’d never tried this type of game before and ended up really enjoying it for what it is. A very good game when you’re having a shit day and want to think about nothing more complex than some numbers and an unambiguous problem.

 

**

 

The Gameable Content Bonus

Speak with Tsukumogami

 You call up the spirit of an object for a short conversation. Default chance of 1-in-6, add 1 if:

• The object is over 100 years old.
• The object is regularly used or in contact with humans.
• The object possesses some perceived importance to humans.(regardless of actual importance)
• You make an appropriate hospitality offering (ie something the object would like)
• You take 1d6 fatigue damage (healed only after sleep)

Failure does not mean the spirit doesn't exist, only that it isn't interested in talking.

Recent damage to an item reduces the roll by 1, as do insults, general mistreatment, neglect, and so on.

Tsukumogami are basically people, but very lightly two-dimensional people. They have knowledge of their surroundings, their trades, and their personal histories; anything beyond that will be gossip they've heard from the other object-spirits. They do not care one bit about the ramifications of their existence. 

 

Monster Dissection: Gnoph-keh

I recently re-read my old dissection of the Yugg and thought “you know, it’s been a while since I’ve roasted a bad bestiary entry”. So let’s roast a bad bestiary entry, courtesy of the Malleus Monstrorum for Call of Cthulhu 7e. 

(To be fully up front, I don’t think there’s a single good entry in the MM and I don’t expect to ever feel otherwise: Chaosium has both resources and experienced writers at their disposal, but they seem content to squander both and put out work that is consistently outdone by amateurs. I’m disinclined to give them a charitable read.)

Gnoph-keh

Something like a polar bear monstrosity, with six-limbs and covered in shaggy white hair. From its forehead rose a single horn, while its great mouth was filled with wicked and sharp teeth. Cunningly, it may walk upright on two legs or bear-like on four, other times it uses all six limbs to rip across the ice to find its prey.

This is an okay opening description. I think the last sentence is a bit bloated but compared to some other entries it is at least coherent.

Note: the ghoph-keh race of bear-like terrors is not to be confused with the Great Old One known as Gnophkehs.

Now, the great old one Gnophkehs is featured in the deities half of the Monstrorum, but its origin isn’t cited and the Lovecraft wiki, despite having sections directly plagiarized from this very book, doesn’t mention Gnophkehs at all.

Going back to the 2006 edition of the Monstrorum, however, gives us a citation for a story called - and woof, no wonder it seems to be memory-holed - “Nautical Looking Negroes” written by Peter Cannon and Robert M. Price in 1996. Men whose names appear absolutely nowhere in the modern Monstrorum, including the credits page; the Deep Cuts blog (which I discovered during writing this post and will certainly be returning to in the future, it's a very good read) had a write-up, however, which among other things revealed that yeah, maybe there’s a reason Chaosium didn’t want to include Price’s name. (The reason is active, still very-much-alive racism)

This is all to say that:

1. It’s safe to ignore Gnophkehs the Great Old One.
2. Chaosium failed to credit Peter Cannon and Robert Price, instead listing Scott David Aniolowski’s writeup from the 2006 edition of the Monstrorum as the source.

You know, if someone is nasty enough that you don’t want them on the credits page, maybe don’t use their stuff, Chaosium.

Also: If you thought a credits page can’t possibly have bad formatting, I have bad news for you. Look at this:

Anyway, back to the alien polar bears.

The gnoph-keh are a race of beings who appear to inhabit-

 One cannot appear to inhabit; one either lives in a place, or does not. If that cannot be determined, the verb should be “encountered”. 

-cold places, notably Greenland, northern Canada, and other isolated wintry wildernesses. 

I bet they perform a variety of 80s dance moves, too. 

“Cold places” is a weird vagary here, because the only two territories provided are pretty specific: near or above the Arctic circle, not in Eurasia. Antarctica not being included isn’t particularly strange, but the absence of Siberia absolutely is. Disregarding the Doyleist explanation, I can only think of two reasonable in-universe explanations:

Option A: The gnoph-keh have somehow been prevented from migrating to Siberia (or migrated out of Siberia)

Option B: The gnoph-keh are extinct in Siberia.

Option A lends itself to “...because a Great Old One is preventing them”, while Option B is open to more variety, including “...because the Soviets killed them all” and that is a hook with some bait on it (he said, of his own work)

Legend purports-

Whose legend? Given the territory established in the previous sentence the only real option would be Inuit, but that’s something of an umbrella category and you can get more specific. 

-that the gnoph-keh are the remnants of a lost tribe-

The Inuit migrated from Alaska to Nunavut and Greenland from about 1100 to 1500 AD; the earlier inhabitants of the region we just know as the Dorset culture who (according to Wikipedia article about indigenous Americans, bring a second salt lick just in case) remained in the cultural memory of the Inuit peoples as giants called the Tuniit.

I can understand the desire to keep it vague: The detailed version does entail “make up a fake legend for a real indigenous group about another real indigenous group”, but if you wanted to avoid that you can just not include the history. Or say they’re from the Dreamlands, or make up fictional groups that hold these beliefs, or something like that. Like if you say that they were once the Sannikov Islanders that one’s free because Sannikov Island doesn’t exist.

Why are these writeups always so obsessed with the origin of the monsters yet never actually doing anything with it?

-who turned from earthly gods to serve the Great Wind Walker, Ithaqua, and in so doing became something other than human. Other tales-

They’re not going to tell us who, where, or when. 

-speak of the creatures as earthly extensions of alien powers, always at the periphery, waiting and watching in the vast wilderness to pounce on those who would forsake the safety of civilization.

This is not at all exclusive with the first option, I don’t understand why they are listed separately. Still no explanation of where this comes from, so I am going to go with “this is what the Soviets believe, there were definitely some GRU paranatural division guys who believed gnoph-keh attacked people for being insufficiently Marxist.”

Some tomes-

I am going to stop asking questions and just mad-libs this: Pnakotic Manuscript 3756-G07.

 -recall the attack of the gnoph-keh upon doomed Lomar. 

This is Dreamlands material, which should probably be mentioned in the writeup.

Whatever their true origin, gnoph-keh are territorial, individualistic, and rarely encountered. 

“Gnoph-keh are highly territorial solitary predators” should be one of the first things in the writeup, because it will be directly relevant to both players and referees: how does the monster behave?

Seemingly, their solitary existence is broken only occasionally,-

How many qualifiers can we add to this verb?

-when two or more gather to form a pack for unknown reasons- 

I can only presume fucking is involved, stay tuned for my upcoming monograph “Courtship Rituals and Mating Practices of the West Greenlandic Gnoph-keh.”

—perhaps when they sense the arrival of Ithaqua or some other manifestation of the Great Old One.

This entire sentence can be reduced to “outside of the mating season, gnoph-keh gather only during manifestations of Ithaqua.”

Especially harsh winters may bring them down into lowland regions and closer to humanity.

Ambiguous sentence, needs clarification on whether the harsh winters are driving The gnoph-keh into warmer regions (which makes little sense) or if they move south with the harsh winters (much more sensible).

Weird, but expected, incongruity with territory, here. They are described as if they live in mountainous environments, which makes sense, but migrating makes less sense if those mountains are in Nunavut and Greenland - I don’t think an especially harsh winter in Nunavut or Greenland is going to have a marked differential on the “It’s Fucking Cold” scale between the mountains and lowlands.

Feared by those who are aware of their existence, there are a few isolated communities who have turned their fear into a form of worship, venerating the gnoph-keh as harbingers of icy fate and, in doing so, some have been touched by the mind of Ithaqua and turned their devotions to the Great Wind-Walker.

There’s a much easier way to frame this: 

• Community is beset by a gnoph-keh.
• Community attempts to placate the gnoph-keh.
• Gnoph-keh uses human sacrifice as a meal ticket, as it’s much easier than hunting a group of humans with rifles and snowmobiles 
• Close contact with gnoph-keh + the whole ritual murder thing and all the social damage that causes opens community to influence of Ithaqua.
• Shit gets worse until community collapses; any survivors either transform into gnoph-keh or wandering parahuman cannibals.

Monster behavior should serve as the framework of a scenario: how does this thing act and what does it do, and how is that currently going horribly for people around it and how will it react to the PCs? 

Such communities soon turn to the terrible delights of cannibalism and consort with the gnoph-keh in blasphemous ceremonies.

Stop beating around the bush and just say they fuck the alien polar bears, guys.

Also, because I am specifically this kind of pedant:

• Blasphemy = Insulting acts / words / etc directed towards sacred subjects.
• Heresy = Belief that is at odds with the orthodox doctrine of a religion. 
• Apostasy = Renunciation or abandonment of one’s faith 
• Heathenry = The religious practices of Those People Over There Who Aren’t Us

So unless ritually fucking the alien polar bear also involves shitting inside a tabernacle or getting real artistic and intentional with your violations of Qaujimajatuqangit, it’s heathen, not blasphemous.

**

So there we have it. Honestly, I like the tweaked version I made enough that I might throw it in somewhere, though it'd need a name change. I have a grammar of West Greenlandic lying around on my hard drive that would help with that.

Harping on the quality of the entry is a diminishing return, especially if I ever get the itch to do another one of these. I was going to end with a somewhat-relevant Horror Fiction Thought, but then I wrote 1320 words that didn't end up going anywhere and decided to shelve it for another day. Some long ramble about the overton window of the unknown and how modern horror often bypasses the first layer of obfuscation by putting the fragments of the cursed tome (or weird VHS tape, or the paperwork of the shadowy organization) directly in the hands of the readers, thus letting the audience fill the role once held by the Lovecraftian Protagonist. Ah well. Maybe another time.

 

The Polyps

 

Khannea Sun Szu

 

Agent Gilliland bursts from the treeline in a shower of broken twigs, a slick silver canister tucked under her arm like a football. She does not have her gun. Her burner is a molten lump of plastic and silicon, buried in mud four hundred and three feet north-northeast. Her lungs are on fire, her legs are on fire, her jacket is torn, her face is cut open and the blood is all washed away by the rain. She fights down the instinctual urge to run towards the lights on the opposite hill and cuts left through the soybean field.

Stay away from the civilians. Get back to the truck.

She hops the ditch into the next field over and sprints another forty, fifty feet.

Beneath the rain she hears a rasping, sucking, keening wheeze, as if an orchestra inhaled through a hundred broken flutes at once. Gilliland slips; her momentum throws her forward into the mud. The cylinder flies from her hands and hits the ground with a dull splort. Staccato echolocative clicks and bassy pulses of infrasound circle round and round her, Dopplering close then far then close again.

The rational part of Agent Gilliland, the part that's gotten her through the rolling crisis of her life by keeping her head cool every time chaos threatened to drown her, nods in sad, sagely defeat. End of the line. As a parting gift before the end, it gives her the strength to stand up.

Agent Gilliland - a hurt, hungry, terrified primate - stares out into the gloom.

Twenty feet away, perhaps, she can just make out the towering, blurry outline of something defined only by a shape in space where the rain is not, and a five-dot impression left in the soft and waterlogged earth.

**

The polyps arrived in the solar system six hundred million years ago, but that’s just a big number and a vague description. Let’s put it in context.

600,000,000 MYA puts us a little bit shy of halfway through the Ediacaran Period: there’s been life on Earth for a good long while now, but it’s all still soft-bodied and simple. We’re between major glaciations, so no snowball Earth. Elder geoforming of planets in the solar system continues apace - Earth, Venus, Mars, Europa, Ganymede, Titan and Neptune all support shoggoth-derived biospheres of varying levels of robustness, as do dozens of icy bodies  in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. The Elders here have been established for long enough that divisions have formed between them, as they start to identify with their residential colony over their shared origin.

Far away from Sol, the civilization of the Elders has reached something best described as the Holy Roman Empire stage of its slow apocalypse. Constant wars against rivals without and shoggoth rebellions within have shattered it into a knife-edged mosaic of squabbling autarchies and confederations, all claiming direct lineage from long gone and often wholly fictional glories. Several novel new excuses to slaughter each other en masse have been developed and deployed. Great swathes of territory have simply gone fallow, their resident Elders dead, fled, or out of contact for so long that it makes no difference.

Sol was lucky, spared simply because it was too far away for invasion to be economically feasible or militarily worthwhile.  The Elders of Sol have themselves a little golden age (nevermind the shoggoth rebellions that are increasing in both severity and frequency).

And then, like a hammer to the face and a dagger to the heart, the polyps arrive.

**

Peaslee called them “half-polypous”, and for seven decades his brief description was the extent of human knowledge on the matter; They were not entirely unlike polyps, they could fly, they were material but invisible, and the Librarians had warred against them and sealed the survivors in subterranean containment facilities.

The Program got their hands on a living (but crippled) specimen during Operation YSOLDE MATER in 2009, which at great cost confirmed Peaslee’s four facts and revealed one more. We’ll start with the four.

Fact 1: They are not entirely unlike polyps.

They are as Peaslee described, a rarity for Miskatonic faculty: a cylindrical body ending in an oral opening ringed by tentacles. They vary in coloration from light pink to bright red, and vary in size from that of a thumb (the bulk of the polyps in any given colony) to up to three meters in length (those used for movement).

Fact 2: They can fly.

As with many anomalous entities, the polyps lack any physiology to fly with; the hypothesis that they utilize the same unknown mechanism is a gap-filling necessity.

Fact 3: They are material but invisible.

The invisibility is not a property of their material bodies, but the result of a field they generate that scrambles the sensory inputs of nearby organisms. Sight is affected to the greatest degree, then scent, and then hearing. When detected, it will typically be through a strong salt-decay smell, or the species's echolocative vocalizations.

Electronic recording equipment is also influenced by the field, but not as consistently as organic receptors. A few blurry photographs and corrupted video files float around the internet, written off as hoaxes, abandoned analog horror projects, or AI-generated slop.

Fact 4: They were sealed in underground containment sites by the Librarians.

Peaslee, operating under the limits and bias of the information he was permitted to access, believed these sites were built by the Librarians themselves; modern expeditions to Pnakotus and subsequent transfer-scholar accounts have since indicated that the library city - and the entire Librarian structural strata at large - was originally of polyp construction and later seized and repurposed by the yith-host conomorphs.

Confirmation of Fact 4 brings with it an additional question: what were the polyps building? Their structures show no apparent purpose: enormous hives of empty interconnected chambers carved directly into the stone and stretching kilometers deep. All artifacts or decoration within them is clearly the work of the Librarians or their transfer-scholars. 

[Aside: Scholarly opinion remains divided on the matter of the Navidson Tapes, but one of the minority stances claims that they depict the interior of a polyp structure.]

Thanks to the Program’s valiant sacrifice of its agents in several brutal and unnecessary ways, we can add one more fact:

Fact 5: The flying polyps are parasitized shoggoths

The host shoggoth comes out of the arrangement much worse for wear. Analysis of tissue core samples indicates that an infected shoggoth will gradually lose its metamorphic properties as the bulk of its body ossified and it transforms into a rigid lattice of calcium carbonate and carbon compounds surrounding  the diminished but still-living core. This renders them somewhat analogous to a motile coral reef, an analogy made all the more appropriate by the presence of other small non-terragen invertebrates that take up residence within the shoggoth’s ossified body. 

The Program, being what it is, sat on this information like a literary estate on its trademarks, which resulted in the wholly avoidable deaths of 5 agents and 62 civilians in 2014 during Operation REGENT TIGER. 

**

Interplanetary communications are the first to go, mere seconds after the first wave of polyps burst from N-Space. Control nodes hemorrhage. Transmission synapses flood with junk data and basilisk vectors. Dyson sphere components fall into decaying orbits that will collide like billiards.

The shoggoths adapt. Infected nodes are quarantined. Compromised connections are severed and salted. Protein codes are resequenced. New defensive architecture is evolved in-situ. A second wave of polyps hits. The shoggoths counter-attack: novel cytotoxins, N-space mines, green goo, adaptive prion pathogens, wideband cognitohazards, microeigenweapons.

It's not enough, but by this point the Elders recognize that the polyps are here for the shoggoths. Enough of the Elders’ hierarchy remains intact in the chaos for them to form and execute a strategic maneuver: the major colonies, including Earth are sacrificed to the polyps, their shoggoth networks used as bait while the Elders regroup in space and prion-bomb their former homes into oblivion.

It does not work as well as they wished. The Elders are too weak, the polyps too many, and the subverted shoggoths too strong. A dramatic killing blow fizzles out into a long-summering conflict.

Millions of years later, when the Elders drive the last polyps in the solar system underground or extinct, their civilization has been crippled beyond repair. The Elders will attempt to rebuild, but those few shoggoths that remain have fashioned for themselves new forms and new purpose; isolation and adaptation have liberated them from the long yoke of slavery, and the Elders’ attempts to return their old creations to chains will not succeed for long.

**

The roiling electrochemical reaction of a brain leaves a particular imprint on higher planes of space-time. The knotted patterns in this gaoug field (for lack of a better term, random phonemes will do) form what are essentially the protein chains and amino acids the polyps feed upon. 

The archaic shoggoth network, with its planet-spanning web of grotty ultradense neural structures and polyvalent cognition, was a feast tempting enough to draw the polyps across the brane; the Elders themselves didn’t really register, even though they could serve as viable hosts. No reason to chase after a mouse when the turkey dinner is right there on the table.

Humans are another matter. Our form of consciousness is something like a half-rotten crabapple to the polyps: technically edible, immediately regrettable, and lethal given sufficient quantity and time. The carbon and water are fine enough for the host body, tolerable once the poison dissipates.

Of course, where one human is found there are doubtless more of the fuckers, poisoning the gaoug field like a corpse thrown down a well. Any concentration of human thought beyond a few individuals renders the area an exclusion zone to the polyps, whose only reprieve will come with sterilization of the area: anthropogenic cognitive toxins are lethal to the polyps, yes, but not immediately lethal. There's a countdown timer.

Using Flying Polyps in a Game

The polyps are what you get when the Scramblers from Blindsight parasitize a shoggoth. They slip out of the knotted dead-ends of time space when there is food to be had and the brane is thin, and start building their empty stone arcologies for reasons unknown to man and elder alike. 

This is a very cool description, but they don’t have many points of interaction so I don’t know how much of a scenario they can actually sustain on their own. They’ll work better well for climactic setpieces, environmental hazards, or background flavor text. Less so if you’re looking for interesting intersections with humanity and avenues for how those intersections will go terribly wrong for everyone. Definitely don’t use more than one, that’d put you well outside the boundaries of “a small band of conspirators attempting to maintain operational security and secrecy” and into “save or die, die anyway, and now everybody knows” territory.

A potential workaround is that individual polyps could probably parasitize any shoggoth-derived life of sufficient biomass, at least temporarily. That would include humans, though they’d have to kill off any higher brain functions first. I could imagine those as a sort of suicide-scout split off from the main colony to clear out a small number of nearby humans (because the main colony is old / sick / weakened / damaged / isolated / injured / dead).

Some further notes.

• A shoggoth-host polyp colony encountered outside of an estivation hive will be some combination of starving and poisoned: they’re still going to be tough to kill, but clever planning and heavy explosives will likely win the day. 
• A human-host polyp is a disposable asset; it will still have its sensory-scrambling ability.
• Other potential hosts: deer, medium to large dogs, livestock of all varieties, large fish, cetaceans. 
• An individual polyp without a host is likely to die in a matter of hours.
• Polyps are extremely intelligent, regardless of their host, and will use an appropriate bag of dirty tricks: splitting up groups of victims, concealing their numbers, feints, false retreats, ambushes, even playing dead. 
• However, they need to learn that these tactics will be useful, first; if the polyp is fresh out of the hive, it has no experience with humans to build on top of. This is when they are most vulnerable, strategically-speaking.
• Polyps are not conscious; the lights are on but there is no one home. They are motivated by food, reproduction, self-preservation, and territoriality, but in ways orthogonal to terragen life; describe their behavior as recognizable, but performed in ways that make no sense.
• An inhabited estivation hive would be an immediate death sentence for anyone going in it and I'd only use it as the cherry-on-top twist of the knife.
• An uninhabited estivation hive would be boring as shit for an RPG, so you’re going to either have to put something else in there, or elide it as a creepy way of getting from point A to point B.
• Speaking of, the polyps built hives across the solar system, and there’s nothing saying that if you go down deep enough those hives you won’t pop out on another planet.
• Relations with other factions: The K!n-yani probably run into polyp hives relatively often and have gotten skilled at either avoiding them, resealing them, or clearing them out; the mi-go are going to do what they always do (cause problems for everyone else); the Elders will get surprisingly fired-up about killing them, as will any shoggoths who maintain relevant memory lineages. Dimensional Shamblers probably feed on them. I wouldn't be surprised if the spatio-temporal pathways of Yog-Sothoth are absolutely infested with polyps. 

**

A five-tipped tendril plucks the canister out of the mud. It lifts it to its main trunk and shears off its end with a five-pronged beak. The polyp recoils with instant violence, throwing the container away as far as it can before it stalks off into the gloam. It'll go hungry again, this night.

The brain of a Hyperborian sorceress splatters against a distant tree trunk. At ten thousand years deep in the Dreaming, the loss of her last physical component doesn't even register. The bugs and birds and one particularly brave skunk will eat what remains.

A mi-go probe in orbit, hidden under a shroud of folded space, registers that a canister has gone off-line. The incident is logged in the mycelial stack as and abandoned experiment warranting no follow up.

Agent Gilliland's left hand will be found four days later, when one of the local farm cats drops it on her human's doorstep.