What do people know about the Mythos? Part 3

Part 1, Part 2

Last installment for a while, since as you'll see shortly I am really stretching what qualifies as the Mythos. But I suppose that is part of the point. Anyway, fun series, definitely will return to the format in the future (probably for public domain goodie roundups). 

Nodens

1) An obscure Celtic god, about whom next to nothing is known besides associations with healing, dogs, and syncretization with Mars. Ruins of a single dedicated temple survive at Lydbey Park in Gloucestershire. Potential connection with the mythological figure of Nuada Airgetlám.
 
2) One of the central deities of the Temple of Three Corners.
 

The Temple of Three Corners

Welsh neopagan group active 1963-1972, then resurrected June-November of 1995. Occasional splinter groups have claimed to practice a direct continuation or reformed version of the religion, but rarely grow beyond a dozen members or last more than a few years.
 
The Temple’s belief system is founded on the premise that human sapience is both an evolutionary and spiritual dead end; sapience cuts humans off from awareness of and participation in greater spiritual reality through the Three Impediments of symbol, speech, and self. Each Impediment is thought of as standing between the initiate and a god of the greater Greco-Roman world representing freedom from that Impediment.

• Hypnos exists beyond symbol; consciousness fills the mind with fictions and desires, which impede the ability to understand true reality through our dreams.
• Bast exists beyond speech; consciousness is a transmissible disease and its vector is language, which alienates man from its animal nature.
• Nodens exists beyond the Self; consciousness prevents the spirit from returning to the Abyss from which it was violently torn by the Great Division that formed the base and corrupt physical world.

The Temple’s exoteric ideology was deeply misogynist (sapience was the fault of women providing care for infants, women ought to be wholly controlled by men as property, etc) fascist-primitivist (post-agricultural societies have been a losing war against the forces of femininity and sapience, necessitating a return to hunter-gatherer bands consisting of a clutch of dominant men and their enslaved harem), and anti-natalist (new human life should not be brought into the world unless steps are taken to loosen the hold of the Three Impediments on them).
 
Surprising absolutely no one, they were just as bad as they sound.

‘Axhloo-Dhol Languages

Disputed linguistic theory positing a direct relationship between the extinct language isolates ‘Axhloo (spoken in British Columbia until 1824) and Dhol (spoken in eastern Tibet until 1846). The two languages are poorly documented, with only a single grammar compiled for each shortly before the deaths of the last native speakers. It wasn’t until the 1990s that a link was proposed, based on apparent lexical correspeondences in common root words too high for random chance.
 
If the languages are indeed genetically linked, they would represent the furthest time-depth ever reconstructed for historical linguistics; archaeological evidence from Dhol-speaking sites, though sparse, has been dated to 25,000 years before present. The leading hypothesis (beyond a hoax, misinterpreted data, or any number of conspiratorial rabbit holes) is that the ‘Akhloo and Dhol are highly conservative descendents of a potentially artificial ritual language, though without any further data this cannot be confirmed or ruled out.

Special Cross-Agency Investigation Program

An extremely boring-sounding program by which various agencies and departments of the United States federal government may cooperatively investigate an assortment of vaguely-defined incidents in the name of national security.

Dunwich

Farming community in central Massachusetts, historically associated with witchcraft due to repeated ergotism outbreaks in the late 17th/ early 18th century. The village was disincorporated on April 28th, 1938 as part of preparations for construction of the Quabbin Reservoir; the 16 remaining inhabitants were relocated to the nearby town of New Salem.
 
A 1928 Miskatonic University investigation of supposed supernatural cattle mutilations and other livestock loss around the farm of Zechariah Whateley (at that time owned by his grandson Wilbur) was adapted into the 1970 horror movie The Dunwich Horror.

Lavinia Whateley

Official documentation of Lavinia Whateley’s life is limited to a 1878 baptismal registry with the Dunwich Methodist Church, four appearances in the US census from 1880 to 1920, and a death certificate in absentia from 1933.
 
Interviews collected by Misk. U. professors Henry Armitage, Francis Morgan, and Warren Rice during their 1928 investigation provided little additional information: Lavinia was albino, unschooled, did not attend church past the age of 12, was only rarely seen in town, and had a reputation for promiscuity due the out-of-wedlock birth of her son Wilbur in 1913.
 
“Lavinia’s Stone”, a glacial erratic boulder found off the Quabbin Park hiking trail, was featured on Atlas Obscura in 2011. It was engraved by an unknown hand as follows:
 

LAVINIA WHATELEY
Lived and died near this stone
In the village of Dunwich
1878 - 1926
She deserved better.

Wilbur Whateley

While the discrepancies in accounts of Wilbur’s age have long been explained as a clerical error, the identity of Wilbur Whateley’s father has puzzled historians for decades. The Miskatonic investigation claimed external supernatural influence had greatly accelerated Wilbur’s early childhood development and deformed his body, but this has remained a fringe position since its inception. The interviewed inhabitants of Dunwich favored offhand explanations that Wilbur’s father was a passing tramp, and early academic study of Dunwich tended to favor the theory that Wilbur was a brother, cousin, or other relative of Lavinia’s instead of her son; the modern scholarly consensus from the 1970s onward claims that Wilbur was  Zechariah’s son by incest.

“Mom”

A figure supposedly appearing in the dreams of individuals from around the world. Descriptions generally align with that provided in the initial 2004 Livejournal post: a dark-skinned woman in her mid-to-late 50s with a robust build and black hair, dressed in hide clothing and shell-bead jewelry. Encounters, if remembered, are nearly always in the midst of an outdoors environment with no other signs of human presence.
 
A 2022 survey by the University of Kentucky polled nearly a thousand self-described contactees and split purported encounters into three broad categories:

1. Positive - the woman expresses sympathy, encouragement, support or guidance to the contactee; common in those who had been the subject of traumatic events, severe long-term stress, addiction, chronic illness, and sudden loss.
2. Scared Straight - the woman expresses disapproval, disdain, or disgust with the contactee’s actions; most commonly regards mistreatment of partners, children, or marginalized populations.
3. Nonverbal - the woman appears but does not speak; facial expression and body language may be positive or negative.

Tower of the Elephants

The primary residence of Andalusian alchemist and philosopher Ibrahim ibn al-Yara, gaining its name from the dual bas-reliefs that flanked the main entrance. The tower was torn down during the siege and capture of Toledo in 1085, though by that time it had been empty for nearly 90 years.
 
Among his many scientific and scholarly pursuits, al-Yara sought to make contact with entities of the upper heavens and exploit their greater knowledge of the cosmos; he claims to have succeeded in doing so and been gifted the “heart” of an entity he calls Y-G-K-SH. No elaboration has yet been found, due both to the fragmentary nature of the text and al-Yara’s subsequent death.

The Hound of Cimmeria

Scythian-Cimmerian mercenary who fought for both the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the Medo-Babylonian alliance during the latter’s conquest of the former. Records from both sides portray him as an exceptionally skilled swordsman of few words, melancholic disposition, and unflinchingly direct problem-solving. A considerable folk tradition built up around his purported adventures, with stories surviving into the Greco-Roman period and beyond: the last known pre-modern portrayal of the Hound (in the form of the wandering swordsman MacAoinne) is found in the anonymous 12th-century Middle Irish romance The Sword and the Phoenix, which was not rediscovered until 1932.

The Craighten House

A supposedly cursed manor near the village of Craighten in County Galway, Ireland. Said to have been owned by a reclusive and elderly madman before it was destroyed by a sinkhole sometime in the 1830s. Local folklore associates the house with a variety of paranormal occurrences: inexplicable lights and sounds in the sky, deaths by seemingly unique fungal infection, the Craighten pig-men, and an incident where the sun appeared to turn green.

Hildred Castaigne

New York man who made national headlines in 1920 for the brutal murder of a recluse named Hobart Wilde. When arrested, Castaigne claimed to have also killed his psychiatrist Dr. Geoffrey Archer, his cousin Louis Castaigne, and Louis’ fiancee Constance Hawberk; none of these additional claims were true, though all three supposed victims told police that Castaigne had been acting more erratic and aggressive than usual in the days leading up to the murder.
 
Castigaine was declared unfit for trial, as he had suffered permanent brain damage while falling from horseback four years earlier.
 
During police questioning, Castaigne accused his targets of conspiring with Wilde to steal his birthright as the scion of the “Imperial Dynasty of America”. Dr. Archer corroborated that these delusions were the result of brain damage Castaigne had suffered four years prior after falling off his horse. Castaigne was declared unfit for trial on grounds of insanity, but escaped from police custody and committed suicide in a nearby phone booth via home-made cyanide pill before he could be moved to an asylum.

Kuangyuan (狂元)

The “crazy essense”; an oncoming historical epoch hypothesized by Chinese sociologist ███ █████ in 1996; characterized by global economic, ecological, and psychological collapse. Civilization would survive only through the efforts of a cadre of transhuman scientist-occultists imposing a new social structure on humanity, merging methods of esoteric Taoist cultivation with the principles of communism.

da_libre_liber.7zip

Collection of 153 (as of present) esoteric and occult works in plaintext format, including Kitab al-Layl, Liber Ivonis,  Cultes des Gouls, De Vermis Mysteriis, Dhol Chants 1-16, The Revelations of Galagi, The Black Book, On Healing the Sick, The Stellar Almanac, A Preliminary Grammar of the Aklo Language, A World Without Doors, The Testaments of Carnamagos and The Dyzan Dissection.
 
First iteration posted online in 2010: individual text files of the current collection were hosted on github until the maintainer pulled it down in response to widespread LLM-scraping of the site’s contents, stating “I’m not gonna be the guy who let Copilot learn how to turn people inside out”.

The Seven Cryptic Books of Xi’an

A series of seven jiǎndú texts dated to the late Western Zhou dynasty (800s BCE), each consisting of seven poems written as 49-by-49 grids of large seal script characters. Each poem is reversible and readable along multiple axes, and may be further subdivided into smaller component grids, giving each poem thousands of potential readings (See also the Star Gauge of Su Hui).
 
Complicating matters further, a 2010 study determined that poems may be formed with characters from different grids interlaced with each other at multiple levels of complexity and with different inter-textual patterns. An attempt to calculate all possible readings through AI analysis was started in 2025 by graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University, but the project was shuttered shortly after inception for unclear reasons.
 
The books were previously known as the Books of Hsan in the West due to an erroneous transcription of Xi’an (capital of Shaanxi and site of the books’ discovery): [ɕan] (rendered Hsan in Wade-Giles and Xan in Pinyin) is not a valid syllable in Mandarin.
 

Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten

1839 German text by Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt, based in large part on the 1610 witch-hunting manual of Solomon Kane. Concerned primarily with the methods of detecting, tracking, identifying, capturing, torturing and killing followers of “The Black Goat”. This entity has been conflated with Éliphas Lévi’s interpretation of Baphomet by later occultists, despite Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie being published in 1856.

The Alexis

Bulk carrier ship sailing under a Taiwanese flag of convenience found adrift in the southern Indian Ocean with all hands missing in 2018. No signs of violence or disturbance of the crew’s belongings, save that one of the cargo containers had been opened and its contents removed. Images of the large metal statue of a half-melted mass of wailing human figures quickly spread across social media, with amateur sleuths and conspiracy theories alike attempting to find some explanation or source for “The Screaming”. None, as of present, has been found.

The Red One

Purported encounter with a UFO (Close encounter, second kind) in the central highlands of Guadalcanal. Account written in 1916 and published in 1918, likely describes events a decade or more prior.
 
The entity or object is described as a large, deep red sphere without apparent marking or variation, that induced a violent mania in the local inhabitants wherein they would offer “the Red One” the severed heads of sacrificial victims.
 
An attempt to corroborate the account in 1953 resulted in nothing: the supposed landing site could not be located, and interviews with locals were split between no one living in that area of the island at all, or that a few very small villages died of an epidemic in the 1920s.

l'Ultimo Ridotto

A self-sustaining arcology, designed by the Italian futurist Alfonso Schiavio as humanity’s defense against the eventual cooling of the sun. Had it been completed (an act even admitted by Schiavio to be wholly impossible due to the sheer cost in resources, time, and sustained political will) it would have been a black pyramid nearly eight miles high and extending further underground capable of supporting 3 million inhabitants.
 
Construction of a four-person test model, three stories tall and designed for a ten-year experimental period, began in 1924 but was not completed until 1935: this bankrupted Schiavio and his associates (as support from the Fascists was predominantly verbal rather than material, and performative even then).
 
The site was bombed during the Allied invasion and buried beneath the resultant landslide: it has not been excavated.

The Skin Bibles

Legendary occult tomes bound in cured human skin. Four are dedicated to the “Old Gods” of prehistoric Europe (creation, destruction, the Earth and the Moon), while a later fifth book entailed the “forebearer to the Christ-myth” in the form of a figure called “All Mer”. A sixth text, Pavor et Famēs, was purportedly found and subsequently lost or destroyed by Soviet troops in Bohemia in 1945.
 
All currently known copies of the books are 19th century forgeries; the earliest mention of the texts is dated 1568, however.

Chthulus

“The earth-eater”: A minor demon from the occult works of John Dee with a reasonably sound but not entirely airtight etymological history.

Yog-Sothoth

A divine or semi-divine figure in the Latin and Greek Necronomicon, credited with producing the ordered cosmos from primordial chaos. The name does not appear in the fragments of the earliest known Greek recension, however: there it is rendered as the widely-known gnostic demiurge of Ialdabaoth. A cramped or sloppy hand, read in low light or from a deteriorating manuscript, might easily turn Ιαλδαβαώθ into Ιογζοθοώθ, and this would be well within the precedent of occult names and their notoriously unstable spelling.
 
Al-Hadrat uses neither term in the Arabic version of the text, either calling it Bāb al-Lanhaya (the Gate of Infinity) or using one of his signature asemic monograms.

Order of the Golden Bough

English occult fraternal society and new religious movement based on the mythic framework put forth by James Frazer. Two men affiliated with the group were convicted in the kidnapping and murder of lawyer Harvey Gates in the spring of 1918; the assailants believed Gates to be the unrecognized bastard son of Prince Albert Victor and sought to use regnal sacrifice of the true heir of England to bring an end to the Great War.

Horsehead and the Blind Girl

A pair of cryptids consisting of a horned, horse-headed giant and a blind albino teenager; supposedly first sighted in the backwoods of North Carolina during the summer of 2020. The initial photograph was quickly identified as a still from the Kickstarter trailer for the independent horror film Carvers; the producers of the film had ghosted their backers midway through the failed campaign, and weren’t able to be contacted despite concerted efforts by lost media enthusiasts. The campaign page was taken down in February of 2021.
 
In July of 2026, a candid video of the Blind Girl’s actress was posted to Threads by user @█████ (claiming to have shot the footage at the Richmond KY Buc-ee’s on July 16.); when asked “Hey, hey, I’m sorry, but were you in Carvers?”, the woman responds “Dunno. Maybe I dreamt I was a unicorn.” before walking off. A second woman (dark hair, Meshuggah t-shirt) flips off the camera before the two exit the aisle. @█████  does not follow them.

Sunny Smiles Farm

Defunct health food company (previously part of the Rochefoucauld Group business syndicate) specializing in free-range, cruelty-free meats. The former CEO was found murdered in his home in October 2019, having been stabbed over twenty times and then hung by a belt from the foyer banister. Police investigation found signs of four separate break-ins around the house and a three-minute gap in the house’s security system coinciding with the attack, but were unable to meaningfully identify the assailants; gallons of livestock blood mixed with barbershop hair refuse were dumped throughout the house to obscure any genetic material.

Shubbsy-Bubbles

Twitch streamer and v-tuber personality; self-described “world’s greatest big-titty goth mommy girlfriend”. Suspended five times for violation of Twitch’s Terms of Service (subsequently re-instated in all cases.)
 
SWATted mid-broadcast in December of 2022; the VOD was swiftly taken down by Twitch, which didn’t stop the relevant clip from appearing on social media hours later. The clip is limited to the mostly-incoherent sound, of the  SWAT team’s entry into the home office. Internet sleuths were able to extract a few fragments of Shubby’s response from the audio, though the only thing that could be reconstructed with any meaningful success is the streamer nonchalantly saying:
 
“Gentlemen, gen[tlemen] [...] [four?] at a [time?]”
 
Shubby was released from police custody hours later, with no charges filed. Police have consistently declined to comment about the incident. Damages were, according to Shubbsy in her first return stream, handled out of court.

Mu

A fictitious lost continent of the Pacific invented by Augustus Le Plongeon and further developed by James Churchward, Ignatius Donnelly, and other such luminaries of imagining shit that isn’t there. Despite its obvious nonexistence and second-fiddle position to Atlantis, Mu keeps attracting those who like their ancient pasts vague and pale skinned; one such group, the Holy Shaker Way gained significant notoriety for the mass suicide of the group’s 23 members on the uninhabited Samin Island, believing that in doing so their spirits would be  shepherded by the Muian god Kalanatoa and returned to the stars.

Eschatology and Genesis

Incomplete script of 2-act play performed across the American west during the 1870s by the pseudonymous patent medicine seller Dr. Talos. Highly controversial and thoroughly demonized in its day for its scandalous use of nude actors, inclusion of blasphemous religious content, and propensity to start riots.

The Claw

A 102.54 carat sapphire named for its distinctive shape. Purported by one hagiographical source to be a relic of 5th-century martyr St. Severian of Scythopolis, who received it during an angelic visitation and later used it to perform healing miracles. Currently held by the Pelerine Order of Our Lady of Concilliation at their mother-house in Buenos Aires.
 

4 Roads to R'lyeh

ProfDyer

Some alternate takes on Cthulhu and its return 

1. The Plaquemines Raid and the All-Souls Massacre

November 1907: New Orleans is gripped with a three-day spate of racially-motivated violence after a headline story in the Times-Democrat reports a police raid on a “voodoo cult” blamed for multiple kidnappings in Plaquemines Parish. Ghoulish descriptions of human sacrifice stir the public into a frenzy and by the evening of November 2nd, white rioters aided by police storm the city prison and embrace new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves. 45 of the 47 men arrested during the raid are murdered, and the rioters disperse into the city in mobs to root out other members of the perceived conspiracy. By the time the Louisiana National Guard is deployed on November 5th a further 172 people are confirmed dead and over 500 are injured, with the overwhelming majority of casualties inflicted on the city’s minority population.

The following year, inspector John Legrasse of the New Orleans Police Department presents an artifact supposedly recovered from the raid to a meeting of the American Archaeological Society. The malachite sculpture depicts a hunchbacked, winged, octopus-headed figure sitting atop a base inscribed with unidentified hieroglyphs, and is accompanied by Legrasse’s story of a heretofore unknown yet expansive and well-organized cult working towards the destruction of the world order.

Legrasse fails to convince most of the AAS members, and the Society declines his donation. Despite this, he manages to sell it sometime before his death in 1910, with the purchaser then selling it to Miskatonic University’s antiquities department in 1925. There the statue is the subject of several papers of increasingly-dubious hypotheses before it is quietly moved to a dusty corner and forgotten until the liquidation of the special collection in 1968 when it is sold to UC Berkeley.

The agreed-upon account, after hindsight takes its cut, is that the Times-Democrat had latched on to the presence of vodou paraphernalia at the site over evidence that the kidnappings were part of mundane hostage-taking between rival smuggling operations; as with most instances of racial violence in the US, the All-Souls Massacre has fallen into obscurity in the mainstream public consciousness, and is referenced mostly as another example of the dangers of yellow journalism.

2. Xenoteuthis megadaemon

Cthulhu’s sire species, before they became the Star Spawn, were a clade of extremely territorial, extremely aggressive, extremely intelligent and highly adaptable solitary ambush predators. They weren’t at the apex of the oceanic food chain, but they were easily the smartest and the nastiest things in the warm seas of their homeworld. Casual Geographic would have a field day with them.

This state of affairs went on for millions of years with only minimal changes.  As non-obligate sapients, xenteuthis were not dependent on their self-awareness for survival;  their massive brains provided enough success to justify the caloric cost, but their lack of sociality prevented any way to pass knowledge on from one generation to the next.

But in a statistical anomaly (though not an impossibility) xenoteuthis could Dream, and in Dreaming, they possessed the means to sire a Great Old One. Time took care of the rest.

The psychic gestalt of the species shaped a god in their own image, and it grew old and potent in the collective subconscious until at last it gained critical mass and transitioned into the Real. The species was remade, suborned into semi-autonomous extensions of their living god, and they expanded their reach to the stars. In finding the empire of the Elder Things there they did what their forebearers had always done: fight for territory.

The crusade ended with a whimper, in orbit around a backwater colony world. Cthulhu was crippled and sank beneath the sea, and there it rested for 444 million years, until at last the stars were right.

Humanity had no shield against Cthulhu's influence; no Great Old One of our own, no novel brain architecture to dampen the psychic onslaught, no miracles of parascience, no means of escape. And so for just under two minutes, every single human being on Earth had their psychology overwritten by that of an organism that kills and cannibalizes its own species as a matter of course.

When it had all passed, when those hundred-odd seconds were over and Cthulhu departed to the distant stars, everyone left alive remembered exactly what they had done.

3. The R'yleh Expeditions

R’lyeh rose from the sea in March of 1925, though its master has yet to emerge from its ancient vaults. Perhaps he is still sleeping, if indeed he truly exists; perhaps the city and its lord are one and the same. It ultimately doesn’t matter.

The ruined city has expanded steadily with each passing year, growing over the course of a century from a single island to an archipelago to a microcontinent. The surrounding ocean teems with life not seen for hundreds of millions of years, and more bizarre life that had been evolving in isolation in the hidden city for all those epochs. 

Reality is breaking down. More people succumb to his influence with each year; trapped in alien dreams, devoured by the things that slip between the thin places, broken beneath the unbearable psychic weight of his presence. There are wars and rumors of wars, famines and slaughters and the mad gnawing of a species with its foot in the trap. Many deny the reality, circling their wagons and declaring that it is all a hoax, or that it isn’t as bad as reported, or that it’s always been like this, or that Jesus is coming tomorrow. Many try desperately to make contact with the silent god through worship, hoping to save themselves if they cannot save the world. Many are simply resigned to the weary world’s slow apocalypse, scheduling their suicides in advance.

And there are those few who believe that the Lord of R’lyeh might be stopped. Perhaps even killed. There were more in the early years, before the scope of the danger was fully understood. Their expeditions to the island-city have failed, one and all: the Americans, the Soviets, the Chinese, the UN, the EU, dozens of others, all failed. Those that pushed past the storms and teeming waters still had to survive landfall; those that managed to set foot on the black beaches were rebuffed. Those that returned home did so bloodied and broken, clutching scraps of insight so brief and tenuous that hardly anything could be learned.

The budgets thinned with the decades until they were an anorexic whisper, and then nothing. The public-private partnerships failed to be realized, as corporate powers found it more profitable to monetize the rot than to hunt a solution that wasn’t there. Most NGOs went belly-up as the cost of attrition outpaced donations. Only the true believers and the truly desperate remain now, scraping together ramshackle missions on shoestring budgets and aiming themselves with a hope and a prayer to spit in the eye of God.

4. What is to Come

We created R’lyeh. Not with intention, but that’s no consolation. As industrial modernity slouched through history towards Bethlehem and was born, so too was born in our Dreaming the scion of all our sublimated terrors. We could see the shape of the future, where men would learn new ways to kill and revel in killing, and we recoiled. We built a fortress of denial, projected all our own failings on a savage Other pounding at the gates, but the enemy has been inside all along and no walls can hold back the coming century. They cannot hold back the abyss of the future, and the monster we made to fill it.

We need not worry about Cthulhu's rising: he is already here, and he is risen indeed.

Bookpost 22

Index

Diaspora, Greg Egan

Greg Egan loves Big Ideas and theoretical physics and wants to tell everyone about it. He’s very much off doing his own thing with this book, and your response will be according to how willing you are to listen to a man describe theoretical physics.

This is a positive, on the whole. Egan’s a solid prose stylist and very good with pacing; the book flows well and is an easy breezy read if you let the physics just kinda wash over you. Short chapters and frequent section breaks means you won’t be stuck with a single topic for long, which makes the frequent conversations devoted to discussing the Conundrum du Jour a lot easier to handle. Push through a few pages more and you’ll get a reset and some space to catch your breath, or at least move on to a different topic. Some of the character moments, especially early on, are very well crafted.

I felt like the plot was lost around the time they found Swift 2/3  or so through the book), and towards the end my response was just nodding along “all right, Greg, cool, I don’t understand it but I’m glad it’s working out for you” - one of the eternal hazards with Big Idea sci fi is the ideas can get too big for the audience to meaningfully care about them. Even so, “the author is really into theoretical physics” is hardly the worst flaw a book can have.

Bowling with Corpses and Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown, Mike Mignola

Mignola can do more in 4 pages than most authors can do in 400, and the decades he’s spent honing his craft are evident on each and every panel of this book. He’s tapping into the old magic with this one, and in doing so makes a series of hauntings, just-so stories, reversals of fortune and other folk motifs feel so much realer and stronger than any grand architecture can.

My favorite of the collection is a pair of stories about the creation of the world - one version provided by a saint, the other by the raven. Those pieces are familiar - a garden of paradise, a great dragon, the dark things of the world before, the spirits of the earth - but presented in such a way that if I close one eye I could see it existing as some forgotten lore of a real people somewhere in history. If I close the other eye it is clearly a construct, the pieces arranged to reflect the shape of the age of its making, but that makes it a construct in the same way the stories providing the pieces were constructed. Mignola is very deliberately in conversation with both old myths and the modern world when he writes that mankind did not start in paradise, but as one beast among many that the gods found when they went out into the world beyond the Garden.

It's just plain damn good.

Grunts, Mary Gentle

DNF pg. 1/4XX

Another 1-page DNF, this time for switching tenses between the first two sentences and following with a full page of clunky, stilted description. I could see it was going into straightforward Tolkienian/D&D parody right away, and that’s rarely a place I want to be.

Journey to the West, trans. Julia Lovell

At last: a text with the courage to ask “what if a monkey had a big stick?”

Not content with answering the most pressing comedic question of our age, the book includes not one but TWO other jokes:

1. “Bureaucracy is silly”
2. “Man this Tripitaka guy is a nerd and kind of a loser”

It’s a joy to read. Those jokes have survived across centuries and cultures because they work. What if a monkey had a big stick? Wouldn’t it be funny if so-and-so got their ass kicked by a monkey with a big stick? And wouldn’t it also be funny if someone could turn the tables on the monkey, just to shake things up?

I do it a disservice, but man does that monkey love hitting dudes with a big stick and I love reading about it.

Lovell’s translation is an abridged version of about 1/4 of the full work, which is just the right size for me. I do think I probably would have gotten bored if it ran longer and I didn’t break it up with something in the middle - even really good jokes will run out of steam eventually - but that’s minimally important. It’s the epitome of the episodic picaresque, you can come and go as you please and there’s plenty of things you can and should loot for ideas.

Other highlights include:

• Lovell translating titles of the heavenly bureaucracy as if they were modern corporate positions (Office of Immortal Resources, etc)
• The deft explanation of why a superpowered character can’t immediately solve the story (Monkey could finish the journey in an instant but Tripitaka’s the one who has to make it, and he not only has no powers but the others can’t help him cheat.)
• Granting the reader immunity to any discussion of if Goku can beat someone in a fight, because Sun Wukong’s power scaling is according to the law of comedy - the winner depends on how funny it is for the other guy to lose.
• The Buddha telling his disciples “I’ll be right back, make sure no one slacks on their yoga while I’m out”, which is possibly my favorite gag in the book.

Sight Tremendous and Abhorred, Ognyen Plamen

Found this one because I follow the cover artist Goran on bluesky and he’d been sharing it around. Thought “what the hell, it’s free”.

Good move. A perfectly-proportioned cyberpunk shoot-em-up that plays the hits at a breakneck pace. Mercenary takes job, job goes south, add a few hyperviolent complicating factors and you got a stew going. It’d make a solid movie, a kickass couple episodes of Stand Alone Complex, and is all around just a fun time.

Plague of Pythons, Frederick Pohl

You know how there’s a type of sci-fi that just takes one major world-state change and runs with it to the logical end? It’s one of those. For the last two years, the world has been stricken by an epidemic of demonic possessions; at any moment, anyone might fall under the sway of an external power and go on a rampage, and Pohl’s going to do a whole lot of exploring what that’s meant for the world.

There were multiple points in the story where I thought that maybe the plot would fall into a more predictable rhythm, and each time it got yanked in a different direction just to prove that genre expectations will not save anyone. It’s refreshingly misanthropic about it, and the rug pulls never felt like a cheap gotcha.

I will warn prospective readers that it does open with the main character Chandler on trial for the sexual assault of a teenager while under possession: that said, I thought Pohl handled it with a fairly even and matter-of-fact hand. I’ve read much much worse.

The book’s only 111 pages and is freely available on Standard Ebooks.

The Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith

DNF @ Nephi 1 Chap 2

I wanted to give it a fair(er) shot for public domain research purposes, but was handily defeated by the pseudo-Elizabethan word salad. Mark Twain wasn’t kidding when he said it was written chloroform, and I was reading the 1981 version with 150 years worth of edits.

It’s got that Ender’s Shadow smell about it from the beginning, desperately attempting to reassure the reader with “the main character was definitely there and he was super-important the entire time, you guys”. Knock it off, man, Vergil barely gets a pass on that and you definitely ain’t Vergil with this prose.

This is what no sex drugs and rock & roll does to a motherfucker, which is a very interesting contrast with Crowley who was nothing but sex drugs and rock & roll. I don’t know if they’d balance out into homeostatic equilibrium or cause antimatter annihilation if you combined them.

Legacy, James Schmitz

This one’s a hidden gem, don’t let the generic name put you off. Space opera adventure with a female lead from 1962, freely available on Project Gutenberg (no renewal).

I was repeatedly impressed with how well the book treats its main character, Trigger Ardee. There’s still some early-60s misogynistic background radiation throughout the book (mostly in men calling her “doll” or “girl”, and one unfortunate scene that pulls the “no you see her rejecting him means she likes him” bullshit), but I gave the book a lot more grace than most of its contemporaries would get for all the times it made the right choice. More than plenty of modern books.

Trigger’s competent and driven, but she’s also 24. When her plans go awry or she messes up, it's because she got blindsided by something outside her awareness, rather than her inexplicably making stupid choices. She takes a step back to assess high-emotion situations before she snaps to an assumption. She’s allowed by the narrative to get overwhelmed, cry a bit in frustration, and then push on to do what needs to be done of her own volition. And we’re not going to dwell on it like it’s some fundamental component of her character she needs to overcome, she’s just having a shitty day.

Probably the most impressive to me was a scene where Trigger is headed to a swanky dinner party with the local contingent of zillionaire wackos. While she’s prepping she has a conversation with herself whether or not she should wear the plain dress (fancy by her standards, distractingly low-class by the host’s) or the extremely risque one (effectively a couple vines and some tactically-placed fig leaves), and has a moment of basically “There’s no way I could pull this off… wait, hold on… can I pull this off? I think I can pull this off.”

And then the narration doesn’t ogle her for making that choice. It’s quite matter-of-fact about the entire thing and the following scene is focused on intelligence gathering at the dinner, to the point that you could easily forget that she’s wearing a couple vines and a few tactically-placed fig leaves.

The main issue with the book is a structural one; a whole lot of the story is people expositing things that happened off screen. Some of this is to be expected, since we’re with Trigger as the POV the whole way through and the story doesn’t contrive ways for her to be present at every major event (which is appreciated). But the plot is also a good deal more complex than a normal space opera adventure, and several major events did happen to Trigger but have been wiped from her memory thanks to Psychic Chicanery, so it’s in a weird middle space where it’d probably need to be a lot longer or a lot more formally experimental to make it all gel together without the exposition dumps. And it does feel kinda bad that Trigger doesn’t have more to do, because things are great when she’s an active agent in the plot.

Setting-eise, it’s interesting (to me) how four years before Star Trek the only piece of the genre that’s really missing is the rubber forehead aliens: you’ve got the postwar liberal space federation that’s superficially pretty nice but has plenty of internal conflict and skeletons in the closet both present and potential (the use and abuse of psychic powers are all over this book).

Trigger also pilots a mech suit at one point and that’s sick as hell.
 

So You Want to Play 60 Years in Space

 

cover art by Rob Turpin

Congratulations! You are an absolute sicko. But so am I. This is a game for sickos (positive), and as such it is pretty daunting to get into even if you're the right kind of person for it.

Note, this is not a "how to play 60 Years in Space for absolute beginners" post: that would be way longer than I can do in a single writeup. I'm writing this generally with the presumption that you probably already know what 60 Years is and have some desire to at least read the game. 

[If you don't know what 60 Years is, it's an rpg by Andrew Doull, based on the High Frontier board game by Phil Eklund. It's an extremely crunchy maximal-simulationist space colonization game, which is also multiple other games in a trenchcoat, if we're being honest. You can find it here.]

[I have some older posts where I am fairly critical on the game: some of those critiques still stand (tables and headings should be numbered!), the updates the game has gotten since release have turned me around enough that I'd say it's so far and away my favorite RPG of 2026, warts and all.]

This guide is currently for running solo games using version 7b of the rules; if anything drastically changes in future updates, I’ll edit accordingly.

Picking the Books You Need

The first hurdle is figuring out what you need to play the game. It's intimidating (and pretty pricey if taken all together), but not as much as you'd think at first glance: the books have mostly settled into a series of mostly-modular rulesets by this point, so most of them are "include if you want to". The seven-games-in-a-trenchcoat design allows you to zoom in or out to a preferred level of simulationist granularity, and cobble together your own ruleset out of things you care about while eliding the rest.

I've split the book list into required (you need this to play the game), recommended (not technically required, but I consider them important enough that I wouldn't play without them), and optional (books that I either used very little or nothing from while playing). The abbreviations I use will be (in parentheses)

Required Books

• 60 Years in Space (SY)
• The core rules; this contains everything you need to play the game solo as a minimum-viable product (more on this below).

 

Recommended Books

• This Space Intentionally (TSI)
• The supplement that covers missions, trade, downtime, and colonies in more detail. Strictly speaking it's not mechanically necessary for the core game, but the colony builder tables are nice and crunchy and provide a lot of flavor for the places you visit.
• All Errors My Own (AE)
• This is where all the Trends (setting elements that progress and change as you play) are found, so it’s basically required if you want to really get into the sci-fi-sicko shit.
• The 7b version only covers Eras 1-3; Eras 4 & 5 got split off into a new book (All Terrors My Own, which is next on the release docket), so you’ll need v7a if you intend to play through those eras (which is still bundled in with 7b)

 

Optional Books

• Crewed Rules (CR)
• This supplement is focused on individual PCs at a pretty high level of granularity, so it’s not really relevant if you’re playing a zoomed-out game. The nationality tables and extra colonist factions are nice but definitely not necessary. I was able to run my entire first campaign without it.
• (A) Base (D) Landing (AD)
• A base-building supplement for the early stages of an offworld colony. I think it’s a bit too complex and needs a few good editing passes at the moment, but there’s nothing in it that isn’t covered at the (much more) zoomed out level of the base game.
• If you still wanted to do a base-building exercise, I think you could probably port something over from Traveller / Cephus / Hostile.
• A Facility With Words (FW)
• You play as one of the minor factions that are living in the background of a normal game of 60 Years. There's some faction management stuff in here, but overall it's the closest to a traditional RPG with the presumption being that there’s a party of downtrodden ne’er-do-wells doing ethically-questionable things and exploring abandoned structures for loot. 
• It does have the details on how freighters / freighter fleets / mobile factories actually work, which is annoying (freighters are mentioned repeatedly in the core rules but don’t get a dedicated section in that book; hopefully this gets changed in a future update.)
• Colony: Sub/title (CS)
• Play the stock market, scope out some novel aquatic biospheres, irrevocably change the course of transhuman history.
• I like being able to see how all the wild high-concept ventures interact with each other to form potential Futures (this is a specific mechanic, basically it’s what happens to the setting after you hit 2100) but it’s definitely not necessary for the game.
• A Lot of Zeroes (LZ)
• The extreme-far-future supplement where you’re travelling the galaxy in a massive interstellar spaceship looking for the answers to Big Questions.
• Can act as a standalone game, though I'd now say 60 Versions is needed to supplement it if you want to deal with individual planets.
• 60 Virs10ns (SV)
• The supplement for playing as a pre-spaceflight alien species on their homeworld; contains the planet generation tables that used to be in A Lot of Zeroes and ecosystem generator from Colony: Subtitle.
• Still mostly unfinished / in ashcan.

Forthcoming Books

• All Terrors My Own
• Trends and Impacts for Eras 4&5
• RE:0Mi55ions
• Collection of extra material that couldn’t fit neatly into other games, if I understand it properly. Sounds like it'll mostly contain things that got shoved into and then cut from This Space Intentionally.

Other Supplies

• A fistful of d6s (I don’t think you’ll ever need more than 6)
• A campaign notebook or binder
• The High Frontier 4 All map
• Since I presume most of you don’t have a physical version of the game on-hand, you can go and bookmark hf4map.com and save yourself infinite hassle (and also save the image as a scalable webp on your phone)
• I have been slowly working on a simplified printer-friendly version, but as you might guess that’s fiendishly hard.

Setting up your notebook

There are printable sheets to keep track of all the moving parts in the game, but for my campaign I elected to rewrite the relevant parts so I could fit everything (or most of everything) onto a single page, shown below.

At the end of every era (15 turns) I did a roundup page of all the factories, colonies, infrastructure, etc.

There’s some components missing here (character stuff, primarily), so I might expand it to a 2-page spread per year for the second campaign.

It’s extremely helpful to have a reference for how developed a site is and by who: I copied the destination tables from 60Y and just notated faction color and development level every time it changed (ex: “Titan (G) 🞅 🞎 ⯊” indicates that Titan has gotten 3 space comms encounters and been developed into a permanent colony of < 100 people for Green faction)

You can also use the site folio on TIS 71, though that has a lot more sites than what you’ll normally need. 

Making Your Own Rules Reference

I’m working on putting one together for at-home printing, but until then you’ll have to make do on your own. Here’s the non-exhaustive but mostly-complete list of what I have in mine, plus page numbers:

• Order of Play (SY 74)
• Spacecraft Movement (SY 76-78) 
• Space Politics (SY 17)
• Space Program (SY 28)
• Space Agency Nationality (CR 49)
• Colonist Nationality (CR 50)
• Spacecraft Components (SY 56-60)
• Skill Checks & Control Points (SY 30-31)
• Yearly Events (Faction/Cycle) (SY 91-94)
• Technology Levels (SY 25)
• Space Comm Encounters (SY 82)
• Encounters (SY 82-87) 
• Mission Builder & Destinations (SY 53-57)
• Payloads (TIS 48) 
• Accidents and Hazards (SY 78-80)
• Exoinfrastructure (SY 206)
• Colonist Module Builder (SY 228)
• Personal Upgrades (CR 113) 
• Interception Builder (TIS 126)
• Factory and Colony Construction (TIS 65)
• Colony Builder (TIS 78)
• Trends & Impacts (AE 11, 14)
• Tables of Trends (AE 12-13, 15)
• I separated these by era rather than type in my notes, which I found useful enough to recommend.
• Encounter Table (AE 16-17) 

You'll also probably want to bookmark the Operations chapter on SY 110, and either print out these pages or make equivalents for yourself:

• Spacecraft folio (No blank version, but premade rockets are on SY 65)
• Fuel / mass tracker (Not in book, but included on premade rockets)
• Staff folio (SY 33)
• Crew folio (SY 34) 

This is of course how I do it, cut and adapt and ignore as works best for you. Order of Play, Spacecraft Movement, Skill Checks & Control Points, Yearly Events, Space Comms, & the Mission Builder are the most important to have on-hand.  

Hopefully I can get the printer-friendly guide formatted and done relatively soon.

Starting A Trial Run

The core book comes with a couple starter scenarios and the procedure for making your own; if you’re unsure about whether you’ll like the game but want to give it a try, running a single mission from Low Earth Orbit to your destination (like I did last year) will give you a good idea of the core gameplay loop. The AIDA and HOPE missions will give you a step-by-step tutorial on how to accomplish the mission, while Free Agency is fully player-driven.

If that works out and you’re the right kind of sicko for the game, then comes the rest. Let me know if I missed something or if things are unclear. 

Dan Plays Games 12

Index

Gravity Circuit

Some games, you just know from the bleeps and bloops on the main menu: Gravity Circuit has some immaculate bleeps and bloops, and it lives up to that promise in being the best damn Megaman clone it can be. 

Rather than a blaster you have fists and a grappling hook; on top of that you have four special move slots and three upgrade slots to plug in with everything you can unlock from beating bosses and rescuing civilians scattered in each level. I found a loadout that worked for me fairly early on and so didn’t do a whole lot of experimenting, but I can only imagine that the speedrun tech available with all these upgrades has got to be insane.

Not without some issues, the most prominent for me being how stingy the game is with health upgrades (good luck finding the fucking things) and an real bummer of an ice level.

Lost Wiki Kozlovka

A one-sitting (I came in at just over 2 hours) database deduction game about a mystery in a small eastern European town. It's the shortest and simplest of this type of game I’ve played so far, and the way progress is gated makes it fairly easy to brute force solutions (you’re slotting words into blanks in an existing text, so there are a lot of context clues.), but it was enjoyable and it’s a prime example of one of the side-benefits of this type of game: basically anyone can make one on a budget of nothing. This one had one programmer, one other person helping out with the writing, and a bunch of stock assets. Love to see it. Worse ways to spend five bucks, a bag of peanut m&ms from the vending machine at work is fuckin’ three.

Look Outside

Another all-timer for the “RPG Maker Games For Freaks (Positive)” hall of fame. It’s a very different game from LISA or OFF or Fear and Hunger, but if you’ve enjoyed any of those - or just have an inner fucked up little guy who needs some enrichment - I can’t recommend it highly enough.

The premise is that an unknown entity just called “The Visitor” is passing through through the solar system and turning everyone who looks outside into a monster. You need to survive for 15 days. Maybe you find another way through, maybe you don’t. This undersells the experience, as the music and art are phenomenal all around. Especially the latter, it’s got easily some of the grottiest, grossest, and technically impressive pixel art I’ve ever seen. Nearly every monster you encounter is unique, every NPC is distinct in appearance and personality, there is always something new and horrible just around the next corner. You could convert this premise into a DG / CoC / Liminal Horror campaign easy breezy.

Thematically, Look Outside is a very post-Covid game, not just because of how you’re locked in a building and can’t go outside, but in how banding together with other residents and taking care of each other keeps you in better shape than if you try to tough it alone. Your primary form of health recovery is sharing a meal with your party members. Things like hygiene, sociability, calm and morale are hidden background stats. Brushing your teeth and taking showers are important for long-term success, and your party members are often recruited by making choices that go against the grain. Offering kindness to strangers helps you survive the apocalypse.

There are maybe some comparisons to be made to Undertale’s pacifist run, but I think Look Outside does a better job of accomplishing the same themes by treating the nonviolent encounter as the default when dealing with NPCs. There are still a lot of monsters that will just rush to kill you, but for everyone else you start with dialogue and it won’t turn into combat unless someone escalates the situation. An (Attack) option sits at the bottom of your list of dialogue choices for every NPC in the game, putting the onus on the player for acts of random violence. That sits a lot better for me than "this fish-woman recently attempted to murder you, a child who has been attempting to nonviolently go home, why don't you go over to her house for spaghetti dinner?"

The Message from Deep Space

June, 1973: you and three other scientists have been gathered in secret to decode the radio signals transmitted by a crashed alien probe. Naturally, this is pandering directly to me.

The basic structure is simple: probe sends a message, you send back the correct response, it sends the next message. This is another one of those “you are looking at a screen on your actual screen” games, so most of the gameplay is in your head / notebook.

You start just by repeating the Hydrogen Line back at the probe, then mirroring modifications it makes, then completing sequences, and before you know it you’re breaking out algebra.

The main challenge so far (I’ve completed ~170 puzzles out of over 800) is figuring out the syntax of the messages - a task made more challenging by also having to also format your clunky in-game computer display in a way to make it make sense visually (not helped by the aliens using two space functions as a line break and your in-game computer doesn’t split them into two different symbols with two different formatting options, though I eventually found a solution I liked). It can be a struggle sometimes, but there are enough people playing that you can usually just plug the puzzle # into the steam discussions and find a thread with some clues. Always nice to see a community considerate enough to default to a nudge in the right direction, rather than outright telling you.

Cursed Words

A game ostensibly about assembling words from a 5x5 grid of scrabble tiles, which swiftly proceeds to go entirely off the rails with multiple intersecting systems of wildcard tiles and perks to abuse the Balatro-style scoring system. Breaking the game is the intent, and it feels great when you’re able to pull it off, but there are a fairly constrained number of mechanics to make a build around and while you can cross-pollinate those strategies in some fun ways your strategy for a given character isn’t likely to change all that much as you progress through the difficulty levels: certain combos of stickers and stamps can just repeatedly wipe the floor with little trouble. But I’m not entirely sure that’s a bad thing, since it does allow you to breeze through a character’s unlocks in fairly short order once you get the hang of them and that gives you something of an achievable end goal. 

The other major complaint is that sometimes I really I can't figure out what the fuck is up with the dictionary it uses. I’ve scored points off a variant spelling of a Persian loanword (“qameez”), how is “Gaulish” not in the dictionary? 

Time Break Chronicles

“What if Final Fantasy VI was a roguelike?” is the name of the game, though I’ve stuck with the campaign and haven’t actually touched the roguelike mode yet.

It’s a simple setup: you run a team of 6 (out of ~100 potential party members) through FTL-style node maps, gradually recruiting new allies and gathering metaprogression gribblies to build up your home base. Most of the game is combat, which is fine because the combat is fun (and has a speed control: if I couldn’t bump it up to 4x or more I wouldn’t have stuck with it). The number of status effects a given character can have on them at one time can get overwhelming, but with a bit of smart playing you can power through fights and not have to worry too much about what exactly is affecting who. 

The game is still technically in early access and the campaign isn’t fully completed, but its one of those games where there’s more than enough content to keep you invested for a long while and get plenty of enjoyment out of it.

**

Gameable Material Section

The Apartment Complex

A high-end hotel at the turn of the last century, now an increasingly-decrepit apartment building. Four floors, (or three floors plus ground, for metric architects), plus basement and roof. Your apartment is on the top floor, and most of your avenues to anywhere else need to be unblocked (through means found elsewhere in the building - so as not to spoil the game, add your own)

• The 3rd floor main stairwell is locked.
• The west half of the 2nd floor hallway is blocked off
• 1st floor access is locked from the other side
• Ground floor access is locked behind puzzle items
• The west half of the ground floor is also blocked off 
• Basement access is locked and requires a key 
• The elevator is out of service and needs repaired

Figure out where the keys / secret passages are located and you have half the dungeon built already.