What do people know about the Mythos? Part 2

Picking up from where we last left off.

Tlācayoh

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

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

n!Kai

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

The Slave Market at Dylath-Leen

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

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

The Venus of Boncuklu Tarla

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

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

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

Tablet 65

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

H.P. Lovecraft

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

Bigfoot (Austrolopithicus gigantus pattersoni)

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

History of the Kings of the Divs

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

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

Tape #53 (08-14-76)

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

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

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

The Pohnpeian Mermaid

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

Sagart & Carey Plastics

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

Aihoat

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

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

“The Majestic 12”

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

First and Last Dynasty of Mu

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

The Harvestman

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

Point Nemo Anomalous Exclusion Zone

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

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

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

The Cruel Empire of Tsan-Chan

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

The Navidson Tapes

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

Ixion

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

 

The Gollynack

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

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

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

 

Liao

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

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

Crom

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

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

Liber Ivonis

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

The Witch House of Keziah Mason

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

Remaking LotR With Only Public Domain Sources

Foot of Mt. Ashitaka, Takahashi Hiroaka

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

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

You know, normal thoughts.

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

Guidelines

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

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

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

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

Middle-Earth

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

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

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

The One Ring

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eru Illuvatar and the Valar

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

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

The potential shortlist is currently:

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

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

Mordor

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

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

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

The Nazgul

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

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

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

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

Orcs

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

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

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

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

Sauron

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

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

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

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

Mount Doom

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

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

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

Numenor 

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

The Keep on Candcor Hill

 

Top post of r/candcorhill (May 2025)

The Keep on Candcor Hill

"Nodens"; 1983~84? 
Self-published

B/X D&D

 

The Keep on Candcor Hill is a megadungeon in four spiral-bound booklets, written by an unknown author and printed in a single run of 25 numbered sets. The faded blue covers are graced only with the title, booklet number, author, and an ink drawing from a skilled amateur's hand: a knight on a horse, a shadowy figure peeking out from behind a stone arch, a weeping noblewoman, and a decagram.

 

The contents are a flash-grenade of text, information crammed on the page so tight that it looks symptomatic of schizophrenia. But the sentences in that explosion are lean, beautiful things. The richest words that can be afforded in a text that wastes none of them.

 

If the prospective reader doesn't immediately give up after the initial shock of a superficially-unreadable book, they'll soon run into the module's next hurdle: all those lean, beautiful sentences are fully dedicated to obscuring everything they can from the reader. It's a module where every animated skeleton has a name, history, and relationships - and it will tell you none of that directly.

 

At no point in the text does the author pull the camera back to provide a bird's-eye view or to introduce an omniscient narrator: all information besides mechanical statistics, including the DM guidance, is strictly limited to what the player characters can see, hear, smell, and touch. The closest it ever gets to breaking this kayfabe is the lone opening paragraph that explains the premise, but even that is put in quotation marks and framed as information presented to the PCs, rather than to the players. 

But all that information that would otherwise be put in the mouth of the dungeon master still exists in the world of the module, waiting to be pieced together; The Keep on Candcor Hill was setting out bait in front of the rabbit hole for the lore hounds a quarter-century before Demon Souls.The iceberg meme at the top of this page represents just a fraction of what has been found, theorized, and debated in discussion threads over the last decade. 

 

All of this would have been lost, were it not for someone cleaning out their father's attic and posting pictures of books 1 & 2 online in late 2015. The internet smelled a scavenger hunt, and the rest is history.

 

As of 2026, four manuscripts have been identified:

• #19 - Moderate wear and tear; books 3 and 4 are missing. (2015)
• #04 - Heavy wear and tear and water damage; first complete set found (2018)
• #11 - Full set in possession of a private collector in Austria: no scans provided, but confirmed the publishing date range (2018)
• #15 - Full set in good condition; emerged after a Vice article brought the module and its fandom to wider attention (2020)

So then: what remains? More mysteries, many of which are unlikely to ever be solved. An anonymous author who, at some point in the early 80s, ordered a set of 100 spiral-bound booklets from a local print shop and distributed their self-funded passion project to a handful of people, who through the entropy of time lost, threw out, passed on, or forgot The Keep on Candcor Hill. But by the grace of circumstance, KCH has dodged the fate of nearly all human art.

If you wish to take the plunge yourself, the pinned comment of the Candcor Hill subreddit has links to the collated scans of manuscripts 04, 15, and 19, as well as the Candcor Plaintext Community Edition and The Commentaries. 

 

 

Fragments of an Old Alt-History Setting

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

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

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

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

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Major Divergence Points

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

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

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

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

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

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

Minor Divergence Points

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

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

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

Burgeoning Blogs 2

 Let's keep this ball rolling.

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26. How could I go about acquiring a gryphon mount? 
Either raise one from an egg (not easy) or impress one with a feat of valor (also not easy, but typically faster) - the latter will usually involve killing a specific griffin's enemy or rival (often a manticore, as they fill similar predatory niches)

27. How difficult is it to be brought back from the dead? Is such a thing even possible? 
Impossible: attempts to maintain the soul’s cohesion after bodily death is the territory of mad wizards. Shades can be summoned up pretty easily, but that’s because they’re one component of the soul and aren’t conscious entities. 

28. How do you deal with any jitters or nerves before running a game? 
I’m usually chomping at the bit before a game, rather than jittery. The difficulty is getting me into the starting position.

29. How do you determine if a character can successfully swim in your games? 
I just presume that they can, unless given reason to believe otherwise (they’re a dwarf, they’re made of stone, they’re from a desert, the player arbitrarily decides their character can’t swim), in which case I will ask the player.

30. How do you determine the weather for the day or season in your game? 
I have never actually done this, so probably with a hex flower or random table or just like, a Farmer’s Almanac from the 1800s or something.

31. How do you feel about writing directly in RPG books? Forbidden or useful? 
I don’t do it for the same reason I don’t write in the margins of normal books - I rewrite or correct things often enough that it will just turn into a mess of crossouts and eraser burns.

32. How do you handle a shy/quiet player? What about a spotlight hungry one? 
Both of these are tied up in the same general idea, which is making sure to cycle through my players with some leading questions re: what their character is doing or feeling. 

33. How do you make particularly efficient weapons stand out from inefficient ones?
Low-quality weapons have a higher chance of breaking & doing less damage; high quality ones will have a higher minimum damage or better chance to hit.

34. How do you roll dice? In the open, behind a screen, let the players roll? 
In the open, players make their own rolls. I do a lot of DMing while standing so a screen is usually of limited use to me.

35. How do your players deal with losing a character? How do you get ’em back in play? 
If they die early enough in the game that they’d be sitting around for a while, I’ll hand them a hireling, already-introduced NPC, or just a rando who would make even a bit of sense for the party to run into. They can then decide if they want to keep playing as that character or roll up a new one for the next session. If I really need to keep them in, they can be the ghost of their PC.

36. How has access to magic influenced technology in your setting? 
I tend to say that the existence of magic allows for anachronistic jumps forward in scientific fields, with sanitation, medicine, food production and astronomy being the big ticket items. Like instead of turning magic into a sub-field of science, magic is a tool to help you do science. An advantage to this is that I can keep exactly what the magic is vague for ease-of-use and narrative convenience while still keeping the societal effects. Some examples:

• Field-specific craft-magic means that everything's just a bit higher quality than it would be in reality. Items last longer and work better, and craftsmen are able to do more with less.
• Ex. If I give glassmakers are bit of vaguely-defined trade magic, I can say that made the development of lenses just a touch easier which allows me to say that microscopes and telescopes show up earlier (in-universe equivalent of the Classical period, for ease of player reference) and I can skip right over geocentrism and humorism.
• If demons exist, people will have to develop a reliable means of diagnosing possessions, which I can lead to a earlier conceptualization of mental illness.

This is, if I think about it for any time at all, a very idiosyncratic approach to magic (or at least one I don't recall seeing anywhere besides like, the occasional tumblr post) and I don’t actually think it’s based on any specific influence. I just think real-life space science is cool and want to have characters know about it.

37. How have video games/other media influenced the way you approach these games? 
Fear and Hunger’s tightly woven and multiple-solution dungeon/world design is a thing of beauty and very worth emulating, especially how open-ended and complex it manages to be without bogging down the player in verbs and tools. It’s something I had tried to do in Unicorn Meat, but of course I wrote that before I knew about or played Fear and Hunger. 

38. How long does it take to have a custom set of armor made? A weapon? 
1-4 downtimes, depending on what you’re asking for.

39. How long is your average session? Have they ever gone longer than expected? Why? 
Usually 2-3 hours. If they go longer it’s usually because there’s only a little left and it’s less hassle than scheduling a second session.

40. How much are lifestyle expenses for your PCs "between adventures?" 
I’ve never considered this a particularly interesting thing to track;  I greatly prefer Delta Green’s downtime actions.

41 How much time do you spend preparing between games? What's that look like? 
A lot of bullet points and boxes connected with arrows, doesn’t matter if it’s a premade module or something I made. Time spent is dependent on how much text I need to compile and how much compiling I need to do to make it usable.

42. How were you Introduced to these games? Share your history with them! 
I saw some 3e books at Borders in ye olden days, but didn’t really play them until I got to college and took up an offer from someone in the fantasy/sci-fi book club. I know I had been collecting the odd free pdf before then, but I didn’t get around to playing until later.

43. How would a player go about brewing their own potion or making a scroll? 
They’d need the recipe / magical formula they want to use, and then downtime action(s) to do it.

44. How would you describe a 60' x 60' square room with 4 cardinal doors to the players? 
Material, temperature, smell, contents, art on walls / ceiling / floor, sound (in-room and from adjacent rooms).

45. How would you handle a party wanting to start a business or enterprise? 
I background it to one of two rolls made during downtime: how is the business doing, and has anything noteworthy happened?

46. Is it possible to play as something unusual in your setting? A dragon, balrog, minotaur? 
I love me a Star Wars cantina, but I try to be cognizant of the fact that it’s extremely easy to make a setting dull and samey by going for quantity over quality. Part of my method for avoiding this is  just saying “there’s a lot of variety you can get from ‘humans only’ if you interpret monopods as humans”; the other part is to try and keep the special options rooted in place and context, instead of treating them like another variety of human.

Example: if you want to play a minotaur, cool! You’re going to be one of the White Bull’s thousand sons. You’re immortal, everyone in the world knows what happened to your mother, all your brothers hate you (feeling’s mutual), and your father is an eldritch abomination locked inside a maze at the bottom of some Atlantean ruins.

D&D has a habit of genericizing and sterilizing mythic monsters and that’s a large part of why using them as the quote unquote exotic player options always strikes me as a failure of imagination. Like you’re stripping out the core of the monster, there goes your main avenue of reinterpretation.

47. Is magic innate or something that can be learned by anyone? Why? 
I roll with “learned by anyone” as the default, with innate magic generally caused by external influences (you got too close to a Powerful Magical Thing, usually). It’s never going to be a strictly heritable feature, because I fucking hate the fantasy genre’s obsession with magic eugenics. Fuck right off the edge of my dick with that shit, how about you try ripping off someone who isn’t Queen Terf of Wet Island for a change, Jesus Christ. (Yes I know the trope is older than that but most modern fantasy authors aren't ripping off particularly far back sources, you know?)

48. Is there a particular system or game that you are excited to run or play? Tell me about it! 
Before life got in the way, there were plans for Layla to run Mythic Bastionland for myself and a couple other friends. Was really looking forward to that; was the first time Into the Odd mechanics really clicked for me - amazing what changing the wording from “hit points” to “guard” can do. I was going to be the Emerald Knight, the most normal of the band,

49. Is there some kind of banking system/safe storage of treasure in your setting? 
If you’re friends with the moldywarps (and you should be, they’re cute little mole-people), they’ll gladly hold on to your valuables for you. It’s not really a bank, though, more just a favor for a friend: you aren’t insured, you accrue no interest, and sometimes the moldywarps will exchange your item for something “just as good” (according to their own non- monetary standards)

50. Let me hear about your fave character/NPC from a game! What made 'em special? 
Gotta be Ayo my drunken BEEFSTRONK tiefling monk. Longest-running character I’ve ever had.