Romanizing Cthulhu

Torpishev

In order to get back into the groove and get more blogging done, I want to do more posts that don’t have a plan or an end goal. Just an “oh that’s neat” and boom, a post be happening.

This is not, unfortunately, a scenario of late-republic era Rome dealing with gribbly space monsters. It is also not a Old God dating sim: It’s me getting into the weeds about linguistics. Namely, the linguistics of the names of alien gods written by a weird old racist and a bunch of pastiche-writing hacks: I am going to, against all logic and reason, attempt to reverse-engineer the pronunciation of the Great Old Ones by way of how their names are written.

Gods help me.

I’m going to be operating under some core assumptions:

1. All of the names we see as readers are Latin-script romanizations of the prehistoric liturgical language Aklo.
2. All the phonemes of Aklo are pronounceable by human beings.
3. Later scholars and occultists just did an extremely shitty romanization job.
4. The romanized names we see are the work of Miskatonic University scholars working with Aklo texts. They are American, working from around 1840-1940, and have some very strange ideas about what classifies as good orthography. They will be influenced by Greek / Latin / English phonotactics and orthography.
   
5. I am flagrantly disregarding what HPL said about the words being crude approximations of unpronounceable alien names, because if the names were actually unpronounceable and alien no one would be able to identify that they were names or even words to begin with: you’d basically just end up with random onomatopoeia of bodily noises. Which is a great twist thematically - imagine having ants call you an approximation of the sound of your knees cracking. But that would undermine the entire exercise by declaring all of it wholly meaningless, and that’s boring.  Also the undercurrent of “these (not-white) cultists can only bastardize a language they cannot comprehend, what do you mean they have their own language and their own names for things” is best left avoided.
6. Cases where the same letter or cluster can have different realizations will be predictable according to the environment.
   
7. In cases of ambiguity, I will default to whatever I think is the most interesting.
8. Each real-world mythos author is treated as a separate in-universe translator, and they will all have their own personal orthographies: sometimes the same sound will be transcribed two different ways.
9. In cases where I have to decide if a string of letters means X or Y, I will go with the “more canon” option, using the schema found here: HPL -> Weird Tales contemporaries -> Derleth & later writers -> Chaosium
10. Rules and pronunciations can and will be revised and refined as we go along.
11. I will fill out gaps in consonant series as I see fit.
    
12. I am taking this way more seriously than any of these guys did, and can and will ignore any of the preceding rules as I feel like it.
    

I will be using some weird transcription symbols, don’t worry about them.

• <angle brackets> are orthography - the letters used, not the sounds: <pool>
• [square brackets]  are narrow transcription: exactly what sounds are being made: [pʰu:l]
• /slashes/ are broad transcription, which focuses on the most relevant features of the sounds and allows for a certain amount of variability: /pu:l/

And now that I have bored you all senseless with minutiae, let’s get cracking with the big lad himself.

#1: Cthulhu

First not just because he’s the poster boy, but because we actually do get a pronunciation from HPL in a 1934 letter to Duane Rimel.

“The actual sound—as nearly as human organs could imitate it or human letters record it—may be taken as something like Khlûl'-hloo, with the first syllable pronounced gutturally and very thickly. The u is about like that in full; and the first syllable is not unlike klul in sound, since the h represents the guttural thickness. The second syllable is not very well rendered—the l sound being unrepresented.”

And we are off to the races with a bad start because “guttural” does not have a meaningful definition in phonetics. It’s used variously to describe velar, uvular, pharyngeal, and glottal consonants, with a high score on weird racism what with how the velar stops /k/ and /g/ and the glottal fricative /h/ aren’t gutteral, but velar fricatives /x/, /ɣ/, and voiced glottal fricative /ɦ/ are (because they aren’t in English but are featured in languages that Anglophones have commonly been at war with).

The consonant cluster we get is <CTH>, which is clearly meant to ape the Greek “chthonic”. That was pronounced with a /kʰtʰ/ in the Classical period and then shifted to /xθ/ by the time of Byzantium. Neither of those has an l in it anywhere, and his “h represents guttural thickness” isn’t helpful either: it could be /x/, since <KH> is often used for it in Greek-origin words, but he uses <CTH> instead of <KH> in the story. It could be /χ/, and someone on Wikipedia (citing no one but themselves) claims it’s the classic Klingon /q͡χ/. Since we don’t really have any better options at the moment, let’s pivot to the vowels.

The vowels actually give us something to work with. Double-checking my regional phonology, it looks for the time being that Rhode Island Eastern New England English still uses /ʊ/ for “full”. Using <oo> for /u:/ is a time-honored tradition for authors who want to sound like Victorian gentleman writing derogatory things about India, which certainly fits ol’ HPL to a T. That’s an easy rule to establish.

HPL 1: <oo> and <ee> represent /u:/ and /i:/

The second rule we can establish here is even more important: /u/ and /ʊ/ form a tense-lax pair, and in Cthulhu /  Khlûl'-hloo we get /u/ in an open syllable and /ʊ/ in a closed one. This is a handy tool that will help us later.

[Aside: /ʊ/ is a weird phoneme in English; in most environments it unrounded and became /ʌ/ or /ə/ (Thank you FOOT-STRUT split, ya bastard). He did say "about like that in full", which I am more than willing to use as my get out of ʊ free card.]

HPL 2: Tense vowels become lax in closed syllables {a, e, i, o, u} => {æ, ɛ, ɪ, ɔ, ʊ} / _ C {C, #}

Back to consonants: “thickly” of course means jack all: <lh> is typically used to stand in for /ʎ/ or /ɬ/, <hl> is often used for /ɬ/ as well, but the way HPL writes the name in the letter indicates it’s meant as two separate phonemes on a syllable division, so that’s a no go. He says that he left out the prevocalic <l> from “hloo”, which he also left out from <Khlûl>. And then there’s that apostrophe stuck in there - if he was actually writing this in IPA,  that would mark primary stress on <hloo>, but he’s dividing the syllables up with a dash and the apostrophe is attached to the end of  <Khlûl> so I am going to say it’s a glottal stop between syllables.

A dead end, perhaps? If he’s just going to leave out sounds, who is to say how any of this is said? Is this all a doomed enterprise?

Not if we use PATTERN RECOGNITION.

Both of those invisible <l> are stuck between a consonant and a back vowel, which would indicate that the presence of a back vowel regularly changes the sound of the consonant before it. HPL just uses <l> and says it’s “thick”, but I actually lied a bit before:  “Thick” does help us here. It confirms that the <l> is not /[l], but it could be [ɫ] or [ɬ]. The first of those just so happens to be called the “dark L” (it’s the L in “pool” in English) and possesses the feature [velarized]. And there is a language where consonants get velarized before back vowels, spoken by people HPL would have had near the top of his list of scary foreigners worshiping dark gods out in the hills

Irish.

HPL 3: Consonants gain the secondary articulation [velarized] when preceding a back vowel.

(Irish does it for /a/, /o/ and /u/, I am playing conservatively here and going with just the back vowels for now)

The <hloo> would be /hˠu:/ under this schema, but I like a good /ɬ/; /ɬˠ/ is a phoneme so rare the only evidence I can find of it is in reconstructions of Proto-Semitic and possibly Moksha (Wikipedia doesn’t include it, PHOIBLE cites one Russian-language paper from 1993).

Executive Decision 1: <h> = /ɬ/, unless part of a consonant cluster representing another phoneme; /h/ is not part of Aklo's phonology.

HPL 4: <l> is /ɫ/ when following a back vowel.

HPL 5: A glottal stop may be added to break up same-place/similar-manner clusters to differentiate syllables and prevent assimilation.

Which means that, for the time being and pending future revisions, <-ULHU> is the romanization of  /- -ˠʊɫʔ.ɬˠu:/.

I swear this will get interesting eventually. And faster!

#2: Yog-Sothoth

We take a wild 180 from obtuse to relatively easy. The syllables go closed-open-closed and there’s nothing weird about the <y> or the <s>. The  <th> could be either /θ/ or /tʰ/ (since the latter often turned into the former), and we don’t really have any justification for /tʰ/ that outweighs “English writer, he’s using /θ/”.

That is going to be the basis of an extremely convenient rule going forward, but it’s a bit too plain for me. So I’m going to cheat a little and do something weird with the stops.

Many languages around the world distinguish their stops not by voicing (vocal cord vibration) but by aspiration (little puff of hair when you say it). English doesn’t, which is why we say that <p> makes the same sound in “pen” and “spin” (first is aspirated, second isn’t). Mandarin Chinese does, but instead of adding h everywhere (like the Romans did when transcribing Greek) or throwing in apostrophes (curse you Wade-Giles!), Pinyin romanization uses <p> for /pʰ/ and <b> for <p>.

The Nuosu (Northern Yi) language (also in China) (which has a rad script) features a 3-way split between aspirated, plain, and voiced stops, which goes like this: <p, b, bb> => /pʰ, p, b/, and wouldn’t you know it, these mythos names have all three of those inputs. Rounding out the selection I am pencilling in that <pp> or a similar pair follows the old Haida orthography of being an ejective. This is in total violation of the premise that Miskatonic scholars invented this romanization, and I don’t care, that was a flimsy premise anyway.

HPL 6: [consonant] + h = [fricative]; <ph, th, sh, zh, kh, gh> => /f, θ, ʃ, ʒ, x, ɣ/

Executive Decision 2: <p, ph, pp, b, bh, bb> => /pʰ, f, p’, p, v, b/

Which all gives us the final result of /jɔk sˠo.θˠɔθ/

(There's no velarization on /j/ because I cannot find a single example in PHOIBLE)

Executive Descision 3: Only labial and dorsal consonants get velarized by HPL 3

(Friendly reminder that “Thoth” in Greek is spelled Θώθ)

And with one and a half in the can, our current HPL phonology looks like:

Consonants: k, θ, s, ɫ, ɬ, j
Vowels: ɔ, o, ʊ, u, u:

Not much to start with, but we’ll be getting a lot more soon enough.

Something to Consider for Later

Looking through the names specific to HPL, I have noticed a very odd, but potentially very helpful pattern: <e> is almost entirely non-existent outside of Dreamlands locations. So far, I've found it only in the words R'lyeh, Yeb, Yhe, Y'ha-nthlei, Dhole, Nyarlathotep, and Gnoph-keh. Four of those look to be a /ɛ/, one is silent, one as /e/, and  the <ei> could be realized as /e:/, but having only one instance of the latter two at all makes me think that we have a gap in the vowel system. <e> might be a leftover, it might represent something else, or it might just be an extremely marginal phoneme. Something to play around with later.

Bonus Round: Nyarlathotep

This is the exception I mentioned earlier; that -hotep marks this as a clearly Egyptian name, or at least HPL’s poor approximation of one. Well, an hour or so on Wiktionary allowed me to kludge together the following:

• n(j) - negation prefix
• j’rr - (of eyes) to become weak, dimmed, or cloudy
• ‘t - a specific moment or span of time
• ḥtp - to be satisfied or content

Which gives us <nj-j’rr-’t-ḥtp> and a modern Egyptological pronunciation of /ni.ɑ.rɛr.ɑt.ho.tɛp/ (the actual Egyptian would have been radically different, but so long as we don’t call pharaoh's scribes to check the grammar I think we can get away with it.)

 “The moment of undimmed eyes is satisfied.”

Yeah, that checks out.

2024 in Review

There’s no way around it: this was a particularly shit year, even when grading on a curve and factoring out the background radiation that turned this year into a shit year for all of us. It’s been a year of brain fog and stress and just being god-damn tired. I will do my best to not let it overwhelm this post, but it’s going to be rough all the same.

Previous Years: 2021, 2022, 2023 

Cat Woes

We lost Mor’du back in April, having barely had him for a year. His gum issues meant that he had to be put on steroids, which led to increased appetite, which led to a pretty sudden weight gain and a blood clot that cut off all circulation to his back half. Any surgery to fix it would be extremely high cost for bad odds at survival. This was on top of Peaches getting daily meds for FIP from January through fucking September.

We had tried for another big orange boy named Chester, drove across half the state to get him because of the good vibes. He was extremely affectionate, very snuggle-oriented, and murderously jealous of the other cats. Would actively try to sneak through the cat gate to straight-up try and kill them. So we had to drive halfway across the state to take him back three weeks later when all attempts at socialization had failed.

We adopted Peaches and Avocado a couple months ago, but that was mostly just formalizing what was already in place. They’re good cats, but they have their own weird little niche and a  vacancy remains in the clouder. Since they’re now traumatized from Chester, they want nothing to do with other cats, so the odds of getting a new one in the near future are low. We just can’t seem to catch a break.

I miss our boys.

Even More Family Deaths

Both of my partner’s grandparents died in the same six month span. They were in their late 80s / early 90s so it wasn’t a surprise, but the first one was less than a week before Mor’du died. It just fucking pours sometimes.

In a moment of an extremely small world, the priest at the second funeral was someone I knew from the home parish, way back when.

I think I have OCD

Learning early this year that at least one of my siblings has it put me on watch, and from cursory self-reflection I tick enough boxes that I think I should get a more qualified opinion. This is a neutral-positive development, honestly; identification allows me to go “oh, okay, this is the obsessive side coming through, your brain is pulling funny bullshit” and that makes dealing with those episodes of arbitrary agitation easier.

Last Dangerous Visions came out October 1 and I totally forgot

Who even knows how many of these stories are actually good, if it’s keeping the trend stable most will be mediocre or terrible but honestly who cares at this point. The impossible has happened, even in a truncated form.

Monkey Man

I think Monkey Man is one of those works that pulls off its genre trappings with such skill and elegance that it totally outclasses the works that started the genre in the first place. I don’t know if my opinion would have been any different if I had seen John Wick first, but seeing John Wick after Monkey Man really made Wick look limp and lifeless in comparison. Dev Patel can fucking cook. If you are down for some hyperviolence and grot and haven’t seen Monkey Man, go see Monkey Man.

Deadpool & Wolverine

It is a terrible, incomprehensible, trash garbage movie drowning in its own unceasing masturbatory self-referential smugness and I had a fucking blast. I ain’t made of stone. The theater bar had specialty cocktails. The Deadpool was tequila cranberry with something I can’t remember, the Wolverine was pineapple (think?) with amaretto and I really liked that one.

Caves of Qud 1.0

I have returned after several years and have barely scratched the surface, but man alive is it good to be back. Live and drink, friends.

Conlang Stuff

I have a lot of shit scribbled down in notebooks and little to show for it. Hopefully this upcoming year I’ll have something substantial to share. I’ve learned a shit ton about linguistics, though, that’s fun.

 

UFO50

Has eaten a significant portion of my life since I purchased it. Updates to follow, eventually. Favorite games: Grimstone, Vainger, Overbold, Pilot Quest. Least Favorite: Onion Delivery.

**

So yeah. Not the only stuff for this year, but honestly I am running out of both time in the year and available RAM in the ol' brainpan. I will not tempt fate with any predictions of the year to come. I will do what I can the best I can.

Ireland was a good time, though.

 

CSC Campaign Report 3: The Library

Now we're cooking with fire: the downtime investigation clocks roll out in full force here, and it was the best move I ever made in the game. You get to hand out lore, spells, and clues like they're candy.

CSC Campaign Index

• Player's guide
• Green Box 
• Library
• NPCs and Anomalies
  
• Operation 1: LAST THINGS LAST
  
• Operation 2: ROOM FOR SECONDS
  
• Operation 3: SPEEDY DELIVERY
• Side-Op: MAGINOT
• Operation 4: UNICORN MEAT

 

The Library

All tomes, grimoires, texts, reference materials, and other media encountered by CSC Team. The numbers next to the Read / Unread status indicate how many Further Investigations have been performed and how many usable bits remain. Skimming books will give you a summary, but not any hidden information.

In Possession

[The numbers in parentheses are how many research chunks exist, and how many have been completed. Question marks means it wasn't read]

• Headhunters and Devils of the Upper Air: The Private Mythologies of Jackson Barrow (1/1)
  
• The Book of Saints and Watchers (?/?)
• Loss of the 7th Goddess: Drawing Connections Between the Discoveries at Çift Tepe (?/?)
  
• Untitled Grimoire (2/2)
• The Adytum Hymnal (3/6)
• The Horse’s Eye (?/?)
• The Uranaka Book (?/?)
• Age of the Serpents (?/?)
• Meditations on Bodily Physick (?/?)
• Tale of Sir Gaub and the Worm (?/?)
• manifestoFINAL.docx (1/1)
• The Black Binder (1/1)

[God, I fucking hate how blogger has no native formatting for tables. They'll kill this site long before they would ever consider giving us markdown.]

Known

• The Black Book of Tsan-Chan (Referenced in manifestoFINAL.docx)

Detailed Summaries

Headhunters and Devils of the Upper Air: The Private Mythologies of Jackson Barrow

(Gerhart & Doyle, U of OK Press, 1985.)
Unnatural +2%. Occult +4% History +1% -1d4 SAN

Doctoral dissertation on charismatic preacher Jackson Barrow, his followers and their short-lived commune founded during the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889.

Barrow was a member of the 7th Day Adventists, and his followers maintained many of those beliefs through to Oklahoma. He diverges from the norm of that denomination, however, with his elaborate descriptions of the structures and inhabitants of the spiritual realm above. According to Barrow, the war to cast Satan into Hell ended in a stalemate: Satan lies trapped and crippled in hell, unable to escape. God and the chosen elect have fortified themselves within the Seventh Heaven: all the other heavenly realms were left empty , and have come to be repopulated by a long list of devils and monsters born from Barrow’s imagination. These forces do not serve Satan, Barrow claims, but the Outer Darkness itself. Barrow focuses a great deal on the Headhunters, whom he blames for the decapitation-deaths of both livestock and some of his followers.

While the academic text is dry, the excerpts from Barrow’s own work are haunting, stark, and well-composed. The description of devils descending from the sky in their shimming chariots in the Oklahoma night lingers with you long after you finish.

RITUAL: Make Contact (Devils of the Upper Air) - The book contains descriptions of the sect’s rituals and services, including a detailed schematic of a ritual to summon devils of the Upper Air and compel them (through perhaps-excessive invocation of Jesus) to grant the summoner their powers.

Untitled Grimoire

(Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, ~ 1620s)

A low-quality pdf scan of an early modern grimoire, found on Agent Merriweather’s Laptop. While extremely fragmentary, it contained

Part 1: Descriptions of ritual procedures and a magic circle

• RITUAL: Perfecte Discoverie - At the cost of 1d6 SAN and an object belonging to the target, this ritual will grant the user a vision of the exact location of a target. Works best with people, but could theoretically be used with anything.

Part 2: While not contained in the book itself, researching the author revealed that he was a long-term prisoner in the Tower of London and a prolific author of alchemical and occult texts.

[This is an extremely deep-cut reference to SCP-2264]

The Adytum Hymnal

(Unknown compiler; translator Arthur Fisher, 1881.)
1d8 SAN, + equal Unnatural, +4% Occult, +4% Anthropology

A collection of texts from or regarding the ancient city of Adytum, believed to be somewhere in the Carpathian or Ural Mountains.

Part 1: This portion is dedicated to a translation and analysis of a series of tablets in Akkadian cuneiform, describing cultures and civilizations on the edges of the known world. The city of Adytum is mentioned in passing, as well as an empire that Fisher the  translator rendered as "the Daevas", but their locations are vaguely "far north" and "far north-east", respectively.

Most of the detail is given to describing a tribe called the Lušārātum (“hairy men”) to the northwest, likely somewhere in the Caucasus Mountains or eastern Anatolia: they are described as being a little shorter than an average man but much wider in the chest, with broad noses, heavy body hair, and no worked metals. Among their gods there is one named by the Akkadian writer as NIN-SU-GAL – the “Lady of the Great Body” or “Lady of the Great Flesh” - who was both feared and revered by this people and often antagonistic to their other gods. She was said to live in a cave in the mountains, and the Lušārātum tribes would offer her animal sacrifice. The particular elder that the Akkadian scribe’s source was speaking to said that his people long ago offered her meat from the “tuktuun”, which neither the scribe nor Fisher were able to identify, but which you are pretty sure from the description is a mammoth.

• RITUAL: Call upon NIN-SU-GAL – A means to summon and propitiate the Lady of the Great Flesh, derived from the rites of the Lušārātum.

Part 2: This portion is dedicated to worship songs from the folk practices of a people called the Vaśńa of Sarvi, located in Finland. Their religious beliefs are collectively called Nälkä – briefly summarized, the Nälkän cosmos is ruled by the god Važjuma, a mindless and reviled creator and destroyer of all life who has trapped all of creation in a prison of matter and suffering. Following the example of their ancient high priest Yon, Nälkäns seek to overcome the influence of Važjuma through modification of the body – tattooing, scarification, and extensive piercings at the most basic level, and then on to transformative rites that, if they are not metaphorical, would assuredly be unnatural.

Part 3: This portion is dedicated to the prayers and songs of the priests of the House of Flesh. They are primarily invocations of the high priest Yon and assorted saints (klavigars) against the God-Eater and its servants the Vultaas, as well as requests for spiritual guidance from the klavigars. Most of the cultural references make little sense to you, but you do get several more references to the Daevas, who appear to be the primary military rivals to Adytum and are repeatedly described as “enslaved to the God-Eater, though they think themselves its master”.

• NEW RITUAL: Invocation of the Klavigars – Call upon the holy ones of Adytum for aid. You may burn 1 SAN, and if your prayers are heard, you will receive +10% to a skill roll for each point burned.

[No more deep cuts, these are just blatant. Part 1 is mostly of my own making, but 2 and 3 are more or less direct summaries of  Proto-Sarkic /  Nälkän belief.]

[I am also obligated to link to "Excerpt from Festive Nälkän Chant #1 & #2" by niram, which inspired this entire section because I wanted an excuse to use those songs. They absolutely slap.]

manifestoFINAL.docx

(Michael Hill, 2014-Present )

A raving mess of race science, antisemitism, Christian millennialism, anthropogenic climate change viewed as a means of social darwinism, ravings against a secret global conspiracy seeking to build a capitalist-technofascist government from the economic fusion of China and the United States, etc etc. It is at its most coherent in the early iterations and becomes increasingly unhinged as the years go by.

• Hill was dishonorably discharged from the army in 2013 (got in one too many fights)
• Earliest version is from 2014, most recent was the beginning of this year.
• Hill brought up the name Rochefocauld several times in the manifesto, using it seemingly interchangeably to refer to a single person, a group of people, and a company. He doesn’t seem quite sure what to do with it, and ends up dropping the thread pretty early on, apparently considering the lead less interesting than more typical conspiracy fare. It’s one of many parties listed in long, breathless paragraphs as enemies of The West ™
• Hill seemed to have come into possession of the tapes sometime in 2019, from an anonymous seller. There is a noticeable shift in the content and style of the manifesto in versions saved after this point, as it swiftly becomes focused on the tapes and their contents. There is also a shift in the pornography at this time, namely that he stops collecting it shortly after. Further supporting Princess’ theory that the Woman was preying on Hill's paranoia, she did not initially reveal her face.
• Hill’s obsession with the Woman on the Tape is overpowering, as is the resultant degradation of his grip on reality. He is convinced that she is a scion of his feared Great Empire To Come, and waffles between virulent hatred and obsessive desire in some truly impressive displays of cognitive dissonance. His descriptions of the tapes’ contents and the Woman’s speech are rarely coherent, but you can pick out that
• Hill mentions feeding large amounts of store-bought meat to MEAT BOX, then moving up to animals – squirrels, birds, and raccoons at first, moving up to cats, dogs, deer, pigs, cows, anything. It seems like he believed both that it was necessary to keep her satiated to forestall the coming of the Great Empire, and he would be rewarded for doing so.
• At one point he directly correlates the Woman with the “god-eater of Adytum”, either as a manifestation of this entity or one of its servants. However these sections seem to have been written prior to his acquisition of the Hymnal.
• References to other books are so mashed up with the rest that it’s difficult to parse more.

[This part needs some refinement vis a vis Hill's beliefs and possible connection to Tsan-Chan. Could have done a lot more with the Woman preying on his paranoia as well.]

The Black Binder

(Unknown Author, ~1850s?)

Anonymous first-person accounts of the Taiping Rebellion. Clearly machine-translated. The section highlighted by Hill can be summarized as follows:

A woman arrives in a famine-struck village, announcing that the army of Hong Xiuquan will arrive soon and is in need of provisions. When the villagers say they have nothing to give, that they have already started eating their dead, the woman notes that this is acceptable under the law of Heaven. However, the approaching army will be just as hungry and far more able to act upon it. A fight breaks out among the villagers as she leaves, twirling her parasol and laughing.

[You might recognize this one, I get a lot of mileage out of it]

Known Rituals

• RITUAL: Make Contact (Devils of the Upper Air) - ?d? SAN. Summon, bind, and enter into contract with devils of the upper air.
• Perfecte Discoverie - 1d6 SAN. Offer up an object belonging to the target; this ritual will grant the user a vision of the exact location of a target. Works best with people, but could theoretically be used with anything.
• Call upon NIN-SU-GAL - ?d? SAN. Summon the Lady of Great Flesh, seeking boons.
•  Invocation of the Klavigars - 1 SAN. Call upon the holy ones of Adytum for aid; if your prayers are heard, you will receive +10% to a skill roll for each point burned.

[These spells suffer from being very poorly defined: I love playing DG, but whenever it comes to making something for it that involves numbers, my brain just freezes up.]

**

Next installment is the last of the pre-report posts: NPCs and monsters.

Dan Plays Games 5

 Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4

Tactical Breach Wizards

I wanted fantasy XCOM, I got fantasy XCOM in the best way possible: an extremely fun puzzle game disguised as XCOM. It's gold stars across the board. Easily one of the funniest games I have played in a long time. Love the aesthetics. Setting is "modern day in a world not our own, with a light touch of the supernatural and we need more of that thank you. Plays similar to Into the Breach, where it gives you perfect information up front and you have to decide the best way to proceed. You're able to roll back your moves on a given turn an unlimited number of times, which is a godsend and I think it should be added to basically all tactics games as a difficulty option. The cost of experimentation and failure is low, and you know how much I love games that do that.

The Pathless

A minimalist masterpiece. It looks beautiful, it sounds beautiful (Austin Wintory alert!), and it plays beautifully. Basically all of the game is movement (save the puzzles you stumble across in the world and a total of 5 boss fights), and this is a good thing because it feels absolutely fucking fantastic to move. It is a game that is designed to do one thing very well, and all the other cruft has been cut away. It’s not a complicated or difficult game - I don’t actually think it’s possible to hit a fail state - but that’s irrelevant in the face of its top tier status as a singular artistic experience.

Potioncraft: Alchemist Simulator

Didn’t land for me. You brew potions by navigating a marker around a map, with each ingredient moving the cursor in a different direction. If you hit the right spot, you get X potion effect. Sounds novel on paper, but quickly wore out its welcome in a single play session. There’s not much else to the game, and while you can save recipes to auto-create that’s only a minor convenience that didn’t really help me out.

Halo CE (MCC)

Replaying this for the umpteenth time, I’m beginning to think that the doom for the Halo franchise was written into this game: they got it down too good on the first try. The combat sandbox was so well-designed from the beginning that any changes in following iterations were destined to be either minor improvements, one-offs that don’t meet the cut, or mistakes. A trap of diminishing returns, unable to escape its own gravity well. You’d need an entire change of genre to move forward, and that’s a move that 343 is not willing to entertain.

Anyway, game still good. The opening of Silent Cartographer still manages to do a whole hell of a lot with not very much. Anniversary Edition graphics are mostly good but the character models look worse than the OG and there are some weird choices like adding plants all over the first part of Truth and Reconciliation.

Halo 4 (MCC, Spartan Ops only)

The sauce ain’t here, Chief. It doesn’t feel //right//, you know? It doesn’t look right, it doesn’t sound right. It feels right when you’re fighting the Covenant, because that formula is down to a science. The Prometheans, on the other hand, are fucking //miserable// to fight. They’re visually bland, their weapons are crap, and they seem designed primarily to be annoying. Even just playing two episodes of Spartan Ops I am already tired of them (and the devs are as well, considering that two episodes in we are already seeing map re-use). Swarms of Crawlers rush your ass and gun you down with their maxims (thankfully they go down with a single pistol pop to the head on lower difficulties), Watchers are both hard to hit and weirdly tanky, and the Knights’ teleporting doesn’t do anything beyond making the fight longer. With all the cool shit already in the expanded universe, and all the new and novel directions it could be taken, this is a profoundly mediocre disappointment. Either leave the Forerunners to the books where you can explore what makes them interesting, or actually include that shit in the game.

Terra Nil

I got to the part of the tutorial where they introduce the animal happiness mechanic and had a minor panic attack. Maybe I was just on edge that day.

Vampire Survivors (Replay)

I must once again state how immaculate the pacing of the gameplay loop is: you play, you unlock new things. You do something different, you unlock more things. And you’re always unlocking something, because they give you a big checklist and you can go wham bam thank you ma’am and knock out a chunk at a time with some strategic task consolidation. Makes dopamine receptors go brrrrrrr. 100%ed this sucker and then uninstalled.

Vampire Survivors (Ode to Castlevania)

This and the Dead Cells DLC are the best Castlevania games to come out in who knows how long, so take that as both a condemnation of Konami and praise for the “hey here have a DLC that’s just a new game”.

 

Potionomics

I am torn on this one. The vibes are charming, the art and animation are great, the gameplay loop is engaging…in theory.

In practice, even on the easier difficulty they recently added, I find the gameplay loop a stressful nightmare scenario where you never have enough money and never enough ingredients and never enough time to do the actual challenge you are supposed to be accomplishing, because you are too busy barely keeping yourself afloat in the hopes that you might be able to accomplish one of the prerequisites of the challenge you’ve been handed.  

Instead of being a tense challenge that rewards you for strategic play (as I presume was intended), you end up hitting a point (mine was week two) where you are stuck flailing around blindly as you drown, and given the way the game is structured, unless you have been diligently making a new save file for each individual day, that time is wasted. There’s no strategy to be had, because I not only don’t have the time or the resources to make a plan, several of the options for where to put those resources are outright traps!

The devs made an extremely good simulation of the experience of poverty, which as it turns out isn’t fun. I might give it a clean sweep and a new save and keep a wiki open, but if it doesn’t click by Week 2 then it’s a hopeless cause.

Update: The game, thankfully, has a very generous autosave system - it autosaves every morning back to the beginning of the game, so I was able to go back to the start of Week 2 and didn’t have to restart the entire game. It is a lot smoother this time around, though that is wholly because I ended up looking up information outside of the game.

Things the Game Does Not Tell You That Are Vital To Actually Having Fun

• Give everyone a gift every day; only hang out if you have time to spare and / or need to relieve stress.
• Send Mint and the other adventurers out as often as you can, even if you can’t do a full expedition; this is your main way of getting new materials.
• Negative traits don’t have any effect on adventurers; you can give them whatever disgusting bullshit you please.
• Custom orders are a trap and you shouldn’t engage with them at all past the tutorial.
• Baptiste’s expeditions are mostly a trap, and really only useful if you have money burning a hole in your pocket and one of the items on offer is new to you.
• Buy and use fuel whenever possible, even if it’s just straw.
• Be friends with Muktuk; you get Pump Up and Enthusiasm very early on and this is a bread-and-butter combo.
• Most cards you unlock aren’t going to be game-changers.
• The difficulty curve is entirely busted; the first week and a half is extremely hard, but if you can survive to Day 14, then you get the Vending Machine and can easily make a couple hundred extra gold per store opening just by selling garbage potions. Then you can start snowballing by buying shop upgrades from Saffron which will give you more potion slots to sell per opening, plus more cauldron slots. If anything this has actually made the game go from impossible to extremely easy on a dime.

I am now actually having fun with the game, but ye gods is the balance entirely busted.

CSC Campaign Report 2: The Green Box

Continuing where we left off last time, here's the green box section of the reference doc. I've split it up into the box as it was inherited, and then added a subheading for each of the main sources of stuff as it comes up later. Some of these items will ring a bell from my previous green box posts; proof that I do occasionally use my own work.

We also get into the fun territory of "mentioning things that will be described later, so as to build suspense through unanswered questions."

Any information uncovered via downtime investigation will be in nested bullets and italicized - the master doc has them in blue, but that doesn't really work with the background of the blog. Commentary in brackets.

CSC Campaign Index

• Player's guide
• Green Box 
• Library
• NPCs and Anomalies
  
• Operation 1: LAST THINGS LAST
  
• Operation 2: ROOM FOR SECONDS
  
• Operation 3: SPEEDY DELIVERY
• Side-Op: MAGINOT
• Operation 4: UNICORN MEAT

 

CSC Team

A recently-formed working group operating out of Pittsburgh PA. 

Case Officer: [REDACTED]

Active Members:

• Agent Princess - UPMC security officer and dabbling occultist
  
• Agent Marko - Pittsburgh city police officer
  
• Agent Kelly - Mechanical engineer
  
• Agent Deanna - Historian and academic
  
• Agent Anton - Ex-con who still has a few criminal contacts left
  
• Agent Dion - Low-rent lawyer
  

Green Box Inventory

A hidden storehouse, located in a locked basement of a building we can figure out later.  CSC Team (all of you) have been given the responsibility of keeping it secure and keeping the inventory up to date. You can treat anything on this list as a potential resource to use or a potential thread for Further Investigation. Any additional information will be added in blue. Any items lost or destroyed will be crossed out.

The Box’s Contents, as You Inherited It

• Shotgun with half-empty box of 8 shells. The stock is covered in Love Live! stickers, over which someone has written SHIT TASTE in permanent marker.
• 4 kevlar vests. Nametags read "Inky", "Pinky", "Blinkie" and "Fuckface.”
• Assorted handgun ammunition - Several unopened boxes plus shoebox filled with loose bullets. 1 speed-loader for a .45 revolver.
• Crayon drawing of a cow in a field. Three stick figures are laying in the field. The cow is covered in red.
• Skull of adult human. The word DENNIS has been carved into the forehead.
• 3 heavy down winter jackets (1 woman's medium,  2 men's large). 3 pairs heavy gloves. 3 pairs tinted snow goggles. Several dozen hand and foot warmer packets.
• Folding card table
• Folding coffin tent x5
• CRT TV; DVD + VCR player; Playstation 3 w/ Demon Souls (in-progress save present)
• Chef Boyardee canned ravioli x36
• First aid kit x3; Disaster prep kit x3
• Icon (Joan of Arc)

 

Recovered from Clyde Baughman’s Cabin

• Stone knife in buckskin sheath. Handle is human femur wrapped in red parachute cord. Series of notches etched along the blade (undeciphered)
• Book: Headhunters and Devils of the Upper Air: The Private Mythologies of Jackson Barrow (Gerhart & Doyle, U of OK Press, 1985.)
• Bomber Jacket: Grey-blue. “Bec” written on collar tag. Three patches.
• Iconographic lighthouse (right arm)
• No exact matches; “watch the lighthouse”, used in online occult circles  to describe waiting for an anomalous phenomena to re-appear.
• Raised fist (left arm)
• Common emblem in leftist groups; patch’s design is generic.
• Labyrinth with Greek text (left breast)
• Eis tḕn khthóna katabēsometha (“We shall descend into the earth”)
• Quote from the Book of Saints and Watchers, primary text of a Christian-derived new religious movement called the Katabatic Church.
• Photograph:  Vietnam-era. Soldiers pose with hand painted sign (“SO LONG AND THANKS FOR NOTHING”). Background treeline is blurry and out of focus: suspicious dark smear might be a tree or a very tall person.
• 3 cassette tapes, unlabeled. [They never played these, but they would be beginner's Navajo lessons if they had]
  
• Photograph: Clyde with unidentified young woman (late teens/early 20s; Black; distinct blue eyes). Both are posing on dock with fishing gear, holding up prize walleye. Taken 20-25 years ago (late 90s or very early aughts)
• 10 extremely magnetic marbles in a drawstring bag
• Yellow notebook paper with handwritten note, as follows
  

ROCHEFOCAULD

• Sunny Smiles Farms - Defunct health foods company. Prided itself on free-range, cruelty-free meats.  
• 5 Rivers Shipping - International shipping and logistics company. Operates worldwide; US offices in Houston and San Francisco.
• Locus Financial - Investment firm. Typically deals in real estate, but has been moving into more active venture capital avenues. New York.
• New World Armory - Lifestyle brand for firearms and firearm accessories. Recently in hot water with the press after it was revealed that the CEO made a major personal donation to the election fund of a hardline right-wing candidate in Arizona.
• S & C Plastics - Small plastics manufacturing company located in Sloth’s Pit, Wisconsin. Most of their business is doing tchotchkes, but they have been researching biodegradable plastics.
• Advanced Medical Technology Solutions Polypharmikon?? - Defunct medical lab equipment manufacturer and R&D-focused pharmaceutical company, respectively. The CFO of AMTS is on the board for Polypharmikon, but there’s no other apparent connection.
• Cephalonics, Inc - Silicon Valley tech company; primarily software design, has recently pivoted hard into AI research and development. Has been around surprisingly long, even did a little video game design in the early 80s.

• Remains of Marlene Baughman: Sealed plastic tub containing inert organic slurry.
• Photograph: Circular sigil drawn by Not-Marlene on the interior wall of the septic tank.
• Blue Lady cigarettes, 2 packs (Claimed by Anton)
  

Purchased from Virginia_Woolfe

• Book: Book of Saints and Watchers
  

[The players never followed up on this one, alas]

Recovered from Agent Merriweather’s Possessions

• Laptop: Contains two pdfs:
• pdf file: Blurry scans of an Untitled Grimoire (incomplete)
• pdf file: Loss of the 7th Goddess: Drawing Connections Between the Discoveries at Çift Tepe and Pre-Proto-Indo-European Matriarchal Religion
• Stone Venus figurine in carrying case; ~3 inches tall. No facial features, bust and hips are exaggerated. Clearly having a good time, euphemistically speaking.
  

Recovered from Home of Michael Hill

• Hard drive: Contains the contents of Hill’s personal computer, including manifestoFINAL.docx and a significant collection of pornography.
• Black Binder containing machine-translated survivor’s accounts of the Taiping Rebellion.
• Collection of books, including
• The Adytum Hymnal
• The Horse’s Eye
• The Uranaka Book
• Age of the Serpents
• Meditations on Bodily Physick
• Tale of Sir Gaub and the Wyrm
• Other uncatalogued books of no relevance
  
• MEAT BOX: a bear-proof trash container with anomalous interior. (handed over to Processing Team)
• Milk crate with 7 VHS tapes (1/7 viewed): anomalous; point-of contact with the Woman in the Box (handed over to Processing Team)
• CRT TV with built-in VCR (handed over to Processing Team)
• 2011 Ford F150 (blue)

[If I am remembering things correctly, I think they passed the criminology checks to forge the documents and use it as a disposable team vehicle. As any good agents should]

Weird Things Found While Visiting the Curator

• Strange handgun
• Serial # in unknown script; 3 chamber-revolver; aesthetically dissimilar to known handgun models. 1d10 damage. Quiet but not silent. Will accept .45 rounds.
• Photograph: Blurry phone-camera image of the Curator
• Vague feeling of heimweh provided by the Statue of the Seated Woman.
• Cryptic couplet provided by the Statue of the Whispering Figure
•  “The man in the tower built a door to enter into the Dream / the man in the tower is no more, and all he can do is scream”

**

Nothing better than a nice green box. Certainly nothing more fun to put together (said the man who has dedicated considerable brain processing power over the years to the SCP Wiki, which is just one extremely big green box of infinite fractal complexity) - the game of spot-the-reference commences now!

Next post is the real meat of the situation: the library.

CSC Campaign Report, Part 1: Delta Green Player's Guide

From fall of last year into the spring of this year (a lifetime ago), I ran a real-life Delta Green campaign for some folks I found through the local ttrpg discord. It was a great time, one of the strings of tabletop gaming I have ever had, followed by a year of bad to worse to disastrous that has made it very difficult to actually post anything about it.

In a downright anomalous turn of events, I ended up taking very good notes and writing up after-action reports for most of the sessions, and when combined with the player's guide I'd made I ended up with an extremely solid reference doc.

It is long overdue to be shared, and so, to stave off the dark with one more night at the opera, here's the adventures of CSC Team. It'll be posted here in parts, both so it's not everything at once and to give me time to shore up the parts that didn't get written or were in need of editing. I'll end things with a blank template version of my notes for folks to use for their own games.

Text in [brackets] is editorial I've added later. The rest is as I laid it out in the master document.

CSC Campaign Index

• Player guide
• Green Box
• Library
• NPCs and Anomalies 
• Operation 1: LAST THINGS LAST
  
• Operation 2: ROOM FOR SECONDS
  
• Operation 3: SPEEDY DELIVERY
• Side-Op: MAGINOT
• Operation 4: UNICORN MEAT

 

Delta Green Player’s Guide

Your Mission

• Locate and identify the threat.
• Neutralize the threat.
• Cover your tracks. Leave no trace.
• Take care of loose ends.

Making a Character

Guides for making characters are found in the Need to Know quickstart rules. A trove of premade characters can be found here, and a character generator is freely available here. If you’d like some optional flavor to kickstart your character, roll on the table below. The homebrew profession blue-collar worker is also available.

For the purposes of starting up a new campaign, all of your PCs are newly inducted to Delta Green, having either skills or experience deemed a useful asset. You will have had some minor encounter with the unnatural - you saw something you weren’t supposed to, you were in the orbit of an operation, you knew someone in a cult, and so on. You don’t have to come up with one right away. (There’s also a table at the end)

Your characters have never met before. You were all approached with an offer, and for whatever reason, you chose to accept. You were told to wait; your handler would reach out when it was time to go to work.

On Safety

Delta Green is a horror game, and so can potentially include a wide variety of sensitive subjects that people might not want to deal with. My preferred safety tool is Lines and Veils - Lines being topics that are never broached, and Veils being topics that are dealt with off-screen or by implication. My typical operating procedure is:

• Torture and sexual assault are not going to be encountered “on-screen”; they might be mentioned as having previously occurred either directly or through implication. PCs will often find themselves dealing with the aftermath of horrific events.
• Violence, flesh-horror, terrible wizards, and absurdist horror are all on the table.

If there’s something you definitely want behind a line or veil, or if at any point in the session I’ve made you uncomfortable as a player, let me know (by whatever means you wish) and I’ll adjust things.

Tips and Tricks

• Delta Green is a game about ordinary people in way over their heads in desperate circumstances they barely understand. Lean into it!
• It’s likely that your characters will sustain major injury, die, go mad from accumulated insight, or undergo some manner of horrific transformation. Lean into it!
• You only need to roll if the outcome is in question (high-pressure, imminent danger, time crunch, etc): if it’s something your character can just do normally and the situation isn’t intense, you can just do the thing.
• A long-term conditions from reaching a breaking points isn’t “going crazy”: it’s your brain trying to keep itself alive by whatever means it needs to.
• Double zeros is a critical failure.

House Rules

[Several of these were taken from the Night @ the Opera master doc, and the Nice Number is swiped from PTBP]

• Skill Advancement - All PCs get 5 skill points at the end of a session. They can be applied to any non-Unnatural skill.
• Fight, Flight, Freeze - When you lose 5 or more SAN at once, choose one of these responses. If you would like it to be random, rank them most to least likely, and roll d6: 1-3 is most likely response, then 4-5 for second, and 6 for third.
• Revised Unnatural Skill
• Players start with 1% Unnatural
• Players who fail a SAN check (unnatural sources only) gain +1% Unnatural. This cannot raise the Unnatural skill higher than the maximum SAN loss (i.e a failed 0/1d6 SAN check will not grant +1% if the PC’s Unnatural is 6 or more)
• You can roll Unnatural to try and gain insight into the unknown. It can be rolled in conjunction with another skill (succeeding at both gives you both the mundane and unnatural information)
• Succeeding at the Unnatural check raises the skill by +1d4% (this is not a good thing: remember, your SAN can never be higher than 99 minus your Unnatural)
• If your Unnatural exceeds one of your Breaking Points, you can permanently ignore a disorder.
• Narrative Ammunition - Reloads only occur on critical failures or after Long Spray
• Gun to a Knife Fight - You cannot get a bonus to Firearms rolls in hand-to-hand range.
• Death’s Door - If you are dropped to exactly 0 HP by a non-lethality attack, you can make a CON x 5 roll to stay alive and remain stable.
• Push Yourself - You can spend 1d4 WP to reroll a failed check (but not a fumble) - failing the reroll is automatically a critical failure.
• The Nice Number - 69 is always a critical success.

What Do People Know?

(This is a little change from the presumed default setting of Delta Green. It’s not going to change anything major, but it is good to keep in mind.)

The mainstreaming of the Internet in the 1990s made a full masquerade impossible to maintain, but by the same token made it equally difficult to get accurate information on the supernatural. The web of a million lies is a tireless engine of misinformation; Facebook has done more to hide the unnatural from the public than the US intelligence apparatus could in a thousand years.

The average person will likely know of a few unexplained events or phenomena; most of these will be complete fictions. Those containing anything legitimate will be filtered through layers of spin doctoring, censure, withheld information, bias, conspiracy theory, and purposefully-seeded inaccuracies. It is extremely unlikely that this average person will have directly experienced it, and even less likely that they have any meaningful understanding of the unnatural. Indeed, people who do have legitimate encounters with the unnatural or come to some cosmic insight are nearly always drowned out by the cacophony of other voices shouting them down (usually for being “incorrect”).

Those few who are truly in-the-know are a reclusive and paranoid lot. The unnatural is dangerous, and it is powerful. It remains in the best interests of the Powers-that-Be to keep a lid on things. The threat of men in a black van is usually enough to keep mouths shut and tomes unread. Usually.

[This was based both on my own preferences for the genre and the Post-Masquerade setting as presented by Tariq Ali in Whispers of the Dead vol 3. If I were to run it again, I would use at least a few of the options presented in "Apocalypse Protocol" setup to get a more Lighthouse-y setup, currently penciled in as:

• Resource Scarcity: High (-10% to Requisition rolls)
• Social Instability: Baseline (+0% Bureaucracy and Law)
• Mythos Knowledge: High (+10% Unnatural and Occult)
  
• Exposure: High (-10% to Stealth and Disguise)
  
• Supernatural Hostility: Low (+10% Survival and Alertness)
  

[General aside, I really, really love this article as a quick and easy way to establish the vibe of a particular setting. It's good stuff.]

How Did You Get Recruited? (optional)

If you’re stuck on how you got here, roll d6 and see what the result sparks.

1. Close Encounter - You saw something up close; your statement was passed on until it reached someone with a green triangle, and they sought you out.
2. Read In - You were or are close to someone in Delta Green. They trusted you enough to bring you into the fold.
3. Friendly - You would help out government suits who need a specialist who doesn’t ask many questions, and you did it well enough that they brought you in.
4. Right Man in the Wrong Place - An operation went screwy and you were dragged into it. When shit hits the fan, you can’t afford to be picky.
5. In the Orbit -  Someone you know was involved with a cult or other group of interest.  You were close enough to the unnatural that DG came knocking.
6. Warm Bodies - You’ve never met with the unnatural, but your file ended up on DGs radar and there was a slot that needed filled.

[I have a expanded set of tables I have yet to finish: need to get on that.]

In-Between Sessions

Good news! Your agent survived their night at the opera. But work has a habit of following you home, in this business, and you’re gonna have to carry that weight.

After each mission, you get the following:

• 5 skill points, which you can distribute among any skills other than Unnatural.
• 1d4 skill points added to every skill that you checked during the mission. Erase any accumulated checks you have.

You also get your choice of one of the below Home Scenes:

Fulfill Responsibilities
Your ordinary obligations and relationships. Roll SAN:

• Success: +1d6 to a Bond
• Critical Success: +1d6 to a Bond, +1 SAN
• Failure: +1 to a Bond
• Critical Failure: Reduce the Bond by 1d4, -1 SAN

Back to Nature
Spending some time on you. Reduce a Bond by 1 point and roll SAN:

• Success: +1d4 SAN
• Critical Success: +4 SAN
• Failure: -1 SAN
• Critical Failure: - 1d4 SAN

Establish a New Bond
Building new bridges. Roll CHA x 5: on success, gain a new bond at ½ your CHA score (ie, if your CHA is 10, the new bond is a 5). Reduce an existing Bond by 1.

Go to Therapy
How much you share will have an impact on this roll. (It’s fiddly, we’ll deal as it comes up.)

• Success: +1d6 SAN
• Critical Success: +6 SAN, remove a Condition if present; gain a Bond with therapist equal to ½ CHA if Condition is removed &  decrease an existing Bond by 1d4
• Failure: +1 SAN (+0 if Luck roll fails)
• Critical Failure: - 1 SAN

It is possible to find a therapist who is In The Know, but that would fall under Personal Motivation and likely have a Clock attached.

Improve Skills or Stats
Choose 2 skills, or 1 skill + 1 stat. Make a check for both: if you roll OVER your skill rating or Stat x 5, you can increase a Skill by 3d6%, or a Stat by 1. Reduce a Bond by 1.

Personal Motivation
A catch-all, for when you have something you want to pursue that doesn’t fall into the other categories. Roll SAN:

• Success: +1 San
• Critical Success: +1d4 SAN
• Critical Failure: -1 SAN
• Reduce a Bond by 1. Whatever you choose to pursue, there will be a development of some sort (we can cross that bridge when we come to it.)

Special Training
Gain a specialization for a skill you already have ie Parachuting, SCUBA diving so on (note: this part of the rules is kind of half-baked, if you want to do it let me know and we can work out something better) Reduce a Bond by 1.

Further Investigation
You devote yourself to following a lead. For this I am swerving away from default Delta Green, so we are in untested waters and this might change as we go on in the campaign.

• For most investigations, I’m going to be using a Clock system from Blades in the Dark (it’s just a pie chart, usually of 2-8 slices - when it’s filled up, the investigation is complete.)
• Multiple players can investigate the same lead
• The number of slices in a pie will be hidden at first: after the first investigation, I’ll reveal how many slices are left.
  

Tell me what you’re aiming to investigate and how you’re approaching it: I’ll call for a check of an appropriate skill. Whatever the result of the roll, you will always learn something meaningful for each completed slice of the investigation clock.

• Success: Investigation clock is increased by 1: + 1d6-3 SAN
• Critical Success: Investigation clock is increased by 2; +1d3 SAN
• Failure: Investigation clock is increased by 1; decrease a Bond by 1
• Critical Failure: Investigation clock is increased by 2; decrease a Bond by 1d4

In cases where you are investigating something that will involve SAN damage, you will take it on all results, according to how bad it happens to be.

**

And there you have it. A solid introduction, if I do say so myself. Tune in next time for that most vital of campaign elements: the green box.

Positively Unhinged Elden Ring Theoryposting: Part 2

Yes, these are my hand-written notes. My descent into madness continues apace.

 
 

Check here for part 1.

PART 4: SECRETS OF 1.00

Digging through this immensely helpful spreadsheet has revealed many things. A lot of the changes from 1.00 to current were “there’s no description, now there is one”, and a decent number are clearly abandoned conceptual threads that aren’t useful for anything, and many of them are probably not particularly solid to use as a basis for speculation. But there are a decent number that are at least interesting, and several that are very interesting in ways that leave me more than a little disappointed that FromSoft either elected to remove the clues because they were too overt or removed them because plans changed and they never provided a replacement.

**

Crepus’ Vial: Described as “sealing away the “shadow of death”. Current version says it was used by Roundtable Hold assassins to hunt down Tarnished who had fallen from the guidance of Grace. Which, if nothing else is a parallel of the shadowbound beasts serving as the GW’s hatchetmen when their Empyreans get unruly.

**

Concealing Veil: “said to have been secreted away from the Eternal Cities and handed over to a band of assassins.”

If true, the Black Knives got their veils from the Eternal Cities but did not acquire them on their own. This seems to be more evidence for “Marika was behind the Night of Black Knives”, a theory which I don’t like one bit, so I am going to roll with Ranni swiping them from storage on a visit to the capital.

**

Shabriri’s Woe: “The man, named Shabriri, was born without pupils. Known to be a great lover of the grape, a sickness in the form of a red colored chaos was said to have come to dwell beneath his eyes. Eventually, his pupil-less eyeballs were crushed by other men, and he was driven to the gloomy southern peninsula.”

Grape possibly a euphemism for eyeballs as found elsewhere, but also could just mean that he was an alcoholic.

Being driven to the Weeping Peninsula is a very interesting bit of text: the only place where frenzy is found in the region is in the Ailing Village, which doesn’t have much going for it besides there being an outbreak of frenzy there and folks being cogent enough to put up warnings (see Flame Crest Wooden Shield). Interesting, but ultimately a dead end, though I do like the image it paints of Shabriri meeting his end in a tiny little village that doesn’t even have a name.

**

Daedicar’s Woe: “Disturbing likeness of an old noble whose skin was flayed. He smiles with a serene tenderness. Increases damage taken. This soft-featured man's name was Daedicar, and he was one of Captain Rykard's paramours, as well an attendant in his Inquisition. He would test new methods of torture first upon himself, making a gift of his pain and first-hand knowledge to the one he loved.”

This one got changed a whole lot, as the current version of the item reads:

“Disturbing likeness of a woman whose skin was flayed. She smiles with a serene tenderness. Increases damage taken. It is said that this woman, named Daedicar, indulged in every form of adultery and wicked pleasure imaginable, giving birth to a myriad of grotesque children.” 

My gut says this was changed mid-development when someone said “Hey boss, I’ve got a nifty idea for the snake-men”, and...it's an improvement but not by much. 1.00 is TVtropes-Issue Depraved Homosexual Bit Character, modern is "this woman has lots of sex and therefore is both morally and literally monstrous" and you know what, you can in fact write better things than that.

**

Tarnished’s Furled Finger: “This finger of corpse wax, furled like a hook, is one of the fetishes bestowed by the maidens of the Finger Reader”

Just noting this one because you don’t generally see corpse wax involved with the Fingers; it’s almost always with the gargoyles who are typically linked to Maliketh.

**

Godrick’s Great Rune: “A large shard, found in hand of Godrick the Grafted. This shard is an imitation transcribed from one of the four large rings that make up the Elden Ring.”

The “four large runes” is most likely a remnant of an older version of the game with only four shardbearers, but the idea that Godrick is such a pissant that he can only manage a bad copy of a Great Rune is fun to consider.

**

Swarm Pot: “Unpleasant yet short-lived, these flies inherit what might be the most worthless of legacies in all of man's meddling with nature's work.”

I just like the phrasing in this one.

**

Flask of Crimson Tears: “A sacred flask modeled after a golden holy chalice that was once graced by a tear of life. It is said that a Finger Maiden will bestow two such chalices upon the chosen Tarnished when they meet.”

Pointing this out primarily for the “tear of life” reference, which I’d bet is a golden tear to complement Noxian silver tears.

**

Soporific Grease: “The Saint of the Cradlesong has become the very symbol of lost repose, and the feeble of heart were powerless to resist her kindness even upon the battlefield.”

This gives us Miquella fighting during the Shattering (presumably) in the guise of St. Trina. So perhaps he took on that persona later than we thought, or he swapped between the two regularly.

**

Celestial Dew: “A nostrum used by members of the Carian royal family, made from gathered moon tears remaining above ground. An old magic hides within, known to interfere with fate itself.”

“Moon tears” appear nowhere else in either version of the corpus, but rolling with tears = blessings = sap / amber…looks like the moon was a lot more active in the past. Silver tear link seems likely, especially considering the Erdtree “tear of life” mentioned just a few entries up.

And dare I say it, if we have silver tears, and we have golden tears, and if silver tears are from the moon, gold would logically come from the sun, fits very nicely into the alchemical symbology…

Wait a second…

Baseless Speculation: The Sun is the Greater Will
You know how it’s fucking weird that they barely mention the sun at all in the game? You know how Ymir basically confirms that there was a big bang? You know how meteors and stars are just bizarre alien god-organisms? How there’s blueish and gold amber of the stars?

• Sun’s a star.
• Sun’s gold-colored and gold-associated.
• Sun’s got all the properties of a lovecraftian god per that famous tumblr post
• Sun’s gonna burn you if you get too close to it.
• Sun sends out radio waves that you can tune in and listen to.
• Sun is distant and doesn’t really give a shit about you but is also the fundamental source of all mechanical processes on Earth.

I think the sun might be the Greater Will.

**

Prattling Pates (multiple): “Said to be the wistful fetish of a now extinct ancient race who turned into clods of earth, losing not only their voices, but also their words.”

The only potential link we have is with the claymen of the Ancient Dynasty, though weasel words are fully in effect. Could just be a throwaway.

Miranda’s Prayer: “A doll fashioned in the appearance of an anthropomorphized miranda flower. While many revere it as a holy object of worship, it does not belong to the golden order, and thus has pagan origins.”

“Pagan” is a term that only appears with the Winged Scythe (affiliation with Deathbirds) and Serpent Bow (affiliation with Serpent Cult). Festival Grease doesn’t get the exact word dropped, but it does claim that the Dominula festival is an old enough tradition that the Erdtree permits it to continue and that’s good enough for me. So that’s one for Death, one for Snek, one for Godskin, and one for Rot for Pre-Erdtree religions.

**

Cuckoo Glintstone: “Craftable with a cracked pot. Sullied remains and such are mixed together and sealed in the pot. Consumes FP. Throw at enemy to set vicious pursuing wraiths upon them. A curse works in tandem with the act of defilement to summon the wraiths, calling them into deadly action.”

Keywords to point out here are “defilement” and “wraiths” - we’ll get back to them in the next theory section.

**

Meteorite (spell): “It is said that, in the Eternal City, now lost in ruin underground, meteorites held the same import as stars.”

Blessedly clear timing on this one: they believed this while they were still on the surface and a meteor had not yet ruined their day. Also interesting parallel with the Academy dismissing the Carians for their belief in the moon being equal to the stars.

**

Black Flame (spell):
Originally titled “Black Flame of the Godslayer”; Black Flame’s Protection was “Protection of the Godslayer”, which says to me that Godslayer was at some point intended as a proper title for the character later called the Gloam-Eyed Queen. Which, if GEQ is Marika or a fragment  of Marika (or other way around), is very interesting indeed.

**

Turtle Neck Meat: “Turtle meat is said to boost virility, but none in the Lands Between seem to have much appetite for it these days. In Lands Between, the urge to reproduce has waned long ago.”

Hard confirmation of Melina’s weird implications and theories of Erdtree birth. 

**

Serpent’s Amnion: “Amniotic sac that held man-serpent roe in its mother's womb. Among man-serpents there are some with particularly intelligent roe. The amnion is known to never dry out, retaining moisture indefinitely. It is revered among man-serpents as a holy object of worship.”

Gross, but definitely worth noting as A) probably belonging to Daedicar and B) a means of reproduction outside the tree births of the Erdtree cycle.

**

Asimi Silver Tear: "An asimi that has infected a tarnished. An intelligent silver sludge; asimi infect the body of tarnished, granting the host power."

This is a special tool that'll help us later.

**

East Limgrave Map: “Map of the eastern region of Tenebrae. The demesne of Tenebrae, far south of the capital, stands vigil before the vast Sea of Fog. Radagon's warning is yet told and retold. That one day, the Tarnished led into war will cross the Sea of Fog and return. For the Elden Ring.”

Tenebrae is probably just a different name for Limgrave in old dev versions, but that’s not the important part: the important part is that Radagon was warning people that the Tarnished would return and attempt to overthrow the current order. This would have been after his divorce from Rennala and adoption of Fundamentalism, so that checks out with what we know of his character. It lines up with the stories of Tarnished being hunted down or enslaved when they return, too.

**

Unalloyed Gold Items: Unalloyed gold is called ivory in 1.00, which feels alchemical to me: we’ve got red and gold already, now we get white.

**

Cracked Pot: “A remnant of bygone research into eternal life.” 

This is straight-up either a pre-seeded (and then deleted) connection with the DLC, or it was an idea that had a nice open interpretation that got developed later.

**

Smithing stones used to have elemental types, looking a lot more like Dark Souls: these old versions have “transformed as a result of a meteorite that fell during ancient times,” which should put us in mind of the Stone Lords. 1.00 somber smithing stones are “A blackstone shard that has transformed, storing light” - black stone is only ever mentioned in conjunction with golem weaponry, so I’m going to follow Quelaag’s lead and say that this is a link to Rauh.

(The “storing light” thing is also reminiscent of the stone-scabbard sword from the DLC.)

**

Crystal Bud: “A parasitic plant that uses wounded trees as seedbeds. Commonly found throughout the Lands Between.”

I feel like this is symbolic of something, probably the Erdtree. Seedbeds are most prominently featured in the Seedbed Curse item, and that certainly is using a wound as a base.

**

Icon Shield: “Strongly retains the Rune of Life's blessing, providing gentle HP recovery when held.”

Always good to point out when Runes have dedicated names. This one’s Marika’s or I’ll eat my hat.

Also, I should probably go through and see what sorts of gameplay effects are linked, or possibly linked, to runes or gods. We’ve done it before with outer gods and damage types.

**

Fingerprint Shield: “A stone grave dedicated to lords in ancient times. Who would have thought to carry such a thing around?”

Now this is a very different description from current, and I like current better, but I do like the image of the Fingers pressing themselves into a headstone.

**

Crucible Greatshield: “Greatshield inlaid with rune blessings, gifted by Queen Marika herself.”

Just some reinforcement that the Crucible itself was not Marika’s enemy: she was willing to use its followers like any other tool in her arsenal. At least until Golden Order Fundamentalism became the rule of the day.

**

Blue-White Wooden Shield: “The crest-like design of the metal is believed to have ancient origins. Some say it represents a sword; others say it represents a tree. Whatever significance it may have had, it appears to have no special defensive properties beyond the mundane.”

Current version says “The design is said to represent the stars of the night sky, portending fate”, which rounds out to a funny little “no one has a fucking idea what these symbols mean” gag.

**

Heretic’s Hook: “Scythe used both for collecting and offering up the dead. The blade itself seems to be a tortured, maddened thing.”

This weapon was cut but we do have an image for it, but the style doesn’t ring any bells for what faction it might be linked to. My gut says it’s part of the ghostflame regime, but again that’s all we get.

**

Onyx Lord Greatsword: “A weapon unique to the Onyx Lords, a race of ancients with skin of stone who were said to have risen to life in an age when meteor strikes were common.”

More evidence for the Rauh connection, if we go with smithing stones being the result of meteor impacts.

**

Cleanrot Knight’s Sword: “The process of consecration tempers the blade by introducing it to rot, allowing it to withstand the effects of decay.”

Innoculating your weapons against a god is a fucking rad idea.

**

Abundance Twinblade: A weapon that never made it into the game, but the description remains to tell us that relatively late in development Miquella had the Rune of Abundance. 1.00 version of the Cleanrot Knight spear gives Malenia the Rune of Decay.

Putting the named runes together we have Life, Death, Abundance, Decay, and the Unborn, which is anomalously coherent.

**

Spirit ashes generally don’t have much in the way of descriptions, but the blurbs do contain some alternate names or interesting implications.

Nomad ashes are called a “red-eyed watcher”, but nothing else in the corpus mentions red eyes like that so it’s likely nothing more than an older way of describing Frenzy.

Winged Misbegotten ashes are called a “Radagon chimera”, which could mean that either they were a chimera made by Radagon, or a chimera made from Radagon at some point in development. But, with only that title to go on, it doesn’t really give you anywhere else to go, especially with how well their current versions fit thematically with the rest of the game.

Oracle Envoy ashes are called “golden order dissenters”, which fits very nicely with their current description of waiting to announce the arrival of a new god and a transformative renewal of the Order.

Clayman ashes are called “runestarved”, which is not a description that shows up elsewhere.

Kindred of rot ashes are called “oracle of rot”, which parallels their role with the Oracle Envoys - they’re just waiting for a different god.

Lone wolf ashes: “These wolves were chased from their pack, and later found company with a human outcast—a fellow hunter. “

Now, this is updated in current to specify that the hunter is a Tarnished, but I would like to remind everyone of that statue of a woman with three wolves in the sanctum of Farum Azula.

**

Nox armor sets: “worn by members of the Empyrean family”

Hmmmmmmmmmmm, what could this possibly mean…

Nightmaiden and Swordstress Ashes: “Summons the spirit of a descendent of Marika”

RING THOSE BELLS WE’VE GOT A FIVE-ALARM FIRE.

[A pause, as I draft out some theory or another]

Whoops, false positive.

The Nox armor sets are one of the biggest missed opportunities in the game in terms of lore - three sets of four pieces each, and they all repeat the same description - a description that replaced the one above, which was also repeated on all items. Which says to me that they had a penciled-in plan, scrapped it, and didn't have anything meaningful to replace it with. The current "Lord of Night" blurb is good enough for a single description, but there should have been at least 3. Even just an unrelated blurb about, I don't know, swordmistress initiation practices.

But let's say that there is some substance behind it. Let's treat it as true - we can't treat the DLC as true in the same breath, but that's no great loss to us. Base game only.

If true, this would mean that the Nox are essentially another version of the Golden Lineage. Marika had an entire other empire that collapsed on her prior to the current regime…or perhaps it has always been just the same empire, transforming over time as it collapses and reforms and collapses and reforms.

Calling them all Empyreans says that they’d either be chosen by the fingers, or born of a single god. Or, more likely, that Fromsoft’s definition of an Empyrean changed during development (which I consider extremely likely). Since the Fingers did not really have a detectable foothold in the Eternal Cities, the remaining option is that of them being buds of Marika in the style of Millicent & her sisters.

(I believe it was Zayf who pointed out that the Japanese text in the game uses the neologism "wagami", roughly translating as a split or doubled self, for both Millicent and the deathblighted Godwyn corpses.)

Those giant corpses on thrones, still uncertain. I’m going to spitball here, stream of consciousness style:

• They're certainly dressed in the colors we would associate with followers of the Erdtree (or, it should be noted, the inhabitants of Dominula). 
• They might also be buds of Marika, or she might have been one of a group. 
• Two thrones are held by corpses, two are empty. 
• The Eternal Cities are filled with all those corpses melted into the walls that we see again in Inir-Elim, which is a dead ringer for an attempted ascension for godhood.
• Do we ever see male Nox? I know we see mimic tears take male forms but I think that the Nox enemies are all female. Point for bud theory.
• Nightfolk character background says silver ran in their veins…looking back at the description for Asimi, silver tear says that it’s a variety of silver tear than can infect a Tarnished. 
• This could just entail Tarnished from Godfrey’s cohort that somehow came in contact with silver tears, that is entirely possible for a red herring.
  
• But if Tarnished are people who previously had Grace and then had it rescinded…
• Then maybe the Eternal Cities had Grace prior to their sin against the GW…
• Lord of Night, gods need a lord, Tarnished summoned together to fight over who gets the position…

These connections are tenuous bullshit at best and the combination of Metyr and the Hornsent throws it all into chaos. The plan at Fromsoft clearly changed multiple times, so all we get is pieces of what could have been.

**

There were details about the GEQ in 1.00 and they removed them from the game.

Godskin armor sets are all “made from tanned Demigod skin,”, which of course brings us to the question of “which demigods?” The most reasonable choice would be the seven soulless demigods in the mausoleums, what with the seven-face aprons of the Godskin Nobles…and of course the most reasonable choice makes no goddamn sense, because there’s no link at all between the Godskins and the Black Knife Assassins, except the extremely tenuous single line implicating Rykard as Plan B against Maliketh (Even though Rykard’s connections with the Godskins are themselves circumstantial at best.)

This is, of course, presuming that the demigods killed during the Night are the same demigods that are in the mausoleums and the same that got hunted by the Godskins. I feel like the first two are probably the same, and as much as I would like the third to be part of it, I don’t think I can make that jump. Not yet, anyway. Let me work myself up into a greater fervor.

Godskin Swaddling Cloth description does not mention GEQ by name, but calls her “the queen in black”. This reoccurs in the 1.00 Godslayer’s Greatsword description.

There are some changed descriptions in the Dominula festival sets that are also worth noting:

Blue Festive Hood: “Attire worn during a humble festival beseeching the blessing of the gods. The most important role in the festival can only be performed by young maids. They are distinguished by a wreath of stunning wildflowers in full bloom.”

Festive Garb: “Ceremonial garb decorated with charming embroidery. Attire worn during a humble festival beseeching the blessing of the gods. This dyed cloak of brilliant blue can only be worn by the young girls chosen to play the festival's most important role."

Festive Garb (Altered): “Ceremonial garb decorated with charming embroidery. Attire worn during a humble festival beseeching the blessing of the gods. The embroidered flowers of pale white convey the palpable virtue and beauty of the blessing.”

Okay, so we have a festival older than the Erdtree, that has been permitted to continue by Marika, that involves skinning and crucifying people as a way of seeking a blessing from the gods. Gods in the generic plural. But there’s only one appointed god in the lands between at a time (at least in the system that the Ring / Beast / GW facilitates), plus outer gods, but none of the outer gods have presence in Dominula.

There’s the Erdtree and Godskin iconography on the gold and blue robes, respectively. That’s two gods, or at least two divine forces interacting with each other, but we can't know if that iconography preceded the ritual or was adopted later. It's the baseline Erdtree symbol, not the Ancient or Fundamentalist versions, for whatever that's worth.

**

And there’s the end of the 1.00 secrets that I found worth recounting. Tune in next time for more rambling.

Addendum

So long as the Red Law is opposed, the Conqueror Worm has no victory. So long as Moloch is fought, it has not won.

It's fucking trite to say that, in the face of the horrors known and unknown before us, but I will cling to it all the same. Whatever it takes to endure this turning of the wheel. If hope cannot sustain us, may bloody-minded spite give us what we need to love one another and keep ourselves alive.

Take care of one another out there.