Positively Unhinged Elden Ring Theoryposting: Part 4

Previous posts: (Part 1, part 2, part 3). 

We are nearing the end. The driving fire fades. Good thing, too, long posts like this nuke my productivity.

PART 8: DAN HAS A BREAKTHROUGH

Per Fire Knight Helm:

"Each and every knight hailed from a renowned family of the Erdtree's upper echelons, but were shunned and chased from their homes after pledging allegiance to Messmer as their master."

This tells us up front that Messmer was known to and hated by the Leyndell nobility and that he recruited his elite forces from that same aristocracy. Those noble families disowned and ostracized anyone who pledged allegiance to him (and so the people who followed him were probably not the people who held authority in those families. I get the feeling he attracted a lot of disaffected second and third sons), but we don’t get specifics as to why. It seems that the fire and serpents were known to his fire knights and very few others, so my bet is on good old “this guy is clearly unhinged and is putting together personal death squads, this is going to end with heads on pikes.”

This leads to a couple of second-order questions:

1. Did the general populace know about the Crusade? (I’m going to say yes, asterisk, hold on a tic)
2. Did Messmer’s followers join him because of the Crusade, or did the Crusade come after he started gaining support? (Both? Both. Both is good)
3. What drew Messmer’s followers to him, and why did they stay? (Charisma, ideology, and reward, probably.)
4. Was the Land of Shadow already separated at this point, or did Marika close the door behind the crusaders? (The million dollar question)
   

That leaves us with Marika. We know she orders the crusade to genocide the Hornsent, and we know she abandons Messmer and his forces in the Land of Shadow. Marika is nothing if not a pragmatist, so my gut is saying it might be a two birds with one stone scenario. She can get rid of an old enemy by tossing the demigod who poses the greatest threat to her continued rule at them, locking the door, and letting them kill each other.

Aside: I love Marika as an antagonist. She’s one of the rare examples of one of the ambitious hypercompetent chessmaster that works for me; her fatal flaw is that she overextends her plate-spinning abilities and burns through her resources because she treats her allies as tools to be used and discarded. Once things start breaking bad, she’s scrambling to keep it all afloat and things breaking cause other things to break. I find it extremely engaging.

Now, there has to be some reason why Messmer keeps gathering support despite being hated so intensely by Leyndell society at large. He must be offering something that his followers aren’t getting anywhere else in the Golden Order.

Theory: I think that there was anticipation that Messmer could / would stage a coup

Natural assumption for people to make, right? Let’s think about it from a random civilian’s perspective. Here’s this elder son of Marika, a bastard from some relationship prior to her marriage to Godfrey. He’s been passed over for any sort of inheritance within the Golden Order in favor of Godwyn. He’s got no real role in the administration of the state besides showing up and committing some extreme violence (definitely against the Giants, probably against Liurnia). He’s clearly a bit unhinged in the head, and he is clearly not buying into the Golden Order. He’s attracting all these sons of noble families to form his personal cadre of knights through a combination of charisma and being the guy whose existence is a challenge to the dominance of the social order.

Or to stop beating around the bush; Messmer gives me “captain of the Brownshirts” vibes so big you can see them from fucking space.

From Marika’s perspective, he’s got both Erdtree-killing fire and the abyssal serpent inside him, and he is not safely contained in / on a mountain at the ass end of nowhere like the Forge and Eiglay. Making matters worse, this is most likely the period where Radagon is off fucking around in Liurnia and Godfrey is fighting the last few brushfire wars on the Liurnian and Caelid frontiers. If Messmer decides to cross the Rubicon, Marika’s entire plate-spinning routine collapses.

Aside: Now, I really like Tarnished Archaeologist’s “First Burning of the Erdtree” Theory. I like it a whole lot better than most of what we got in the DLC. But given what I’ve established so far with Messmer, I don’t actually think he did it. I think there was the threat of him doing it, but I don’t think he actually did. Melina, though? She absolutely torched it.

But Marika has one very potent piece of kompromat in her back pocket: Messmer suffers from a third curse, more terrible than either the flame or the abyssal serpent.

Mommy Issues™.

Per Messmer’s Armor:

“On his mother’s wishes, Messmer made himself a symbol of fear, undertaking the cleansing crusade she desired.”

Messmer is fucking desperate for Marika’s approval and love. Dude sits brooding alone in his room in front of a statue of Marika holding him as a baby. She holds that over him like a carrot on a string, because Marika does not see anyone as a person; They are a tool to be used and then discarded when they are no longer of use.

So she gives him a task. Go over there to the lands of the Hornsent and commit the genocide that she didn’t do earlier in her reign. Maybe she promises him that he’ll get to be regent of the new territory. The description is pretty clear that Messmer didn’t exactly want this, but all his trailer and game lines about barbecuing everyone without Grace contradict that. Best rationale I can think of is that he started as a “so long as they know their place” fascist and then got further radicalized into a “murder them all” fascist when the Hornsent fought back.

Which ties right into the description of Shadow Realm Rune 4:

“The soldiers who joined the crusade were rewarded with grace aplenty.”

Marika is straight up offering enormous cash rewards to anyone willing to follow Messmer in the Crusade, which is an excellent way of rounding up all of his followers (and anyone who might have followed him but needed some extra incentive) and making sure they go with him.

Aside: I have seen it asserted in reddit and youtube comments that Marika pulled grace from Godfrey and his warriors to give to Messmer and the Crusade, Maybe. That still doesn’t feel satisfying for reasons I can’t quite place. Grace being a limited / non-fungible resource like that doesn’t sit right with me. Still might be the case, though.

Then she cuts off the Land of Shadow (if it hadn’t already been split - more of that bullshit, sigh) and locks the door behind him. Two problems solved. The last of the Hornsent are dead, and her biggest threat is gone.

And in splitting the land of shadow away, she does her little CK Reality Restructuring Event and creates her more perfect iteration of the Golden Order. There is a new history, with no hornsent, no Messmer, no crusading army, no potential coup. She's successfully written the biggest threat to her rule (at the moment) out of reality.

Whatever else this triggers, I can't say. But certainly it would be a very convenient place for...wait.

Wait wait wait HOLD UP

HOLD THE FUCK UP

What if Marika orders the crusade specifically with the aim of sacking Enir-Ilim and entering the Gate of Divinity.

What if she's got the Tree and its blessings, she's got Grace to hand out via the Fingers, she's got Godfrey, but she doesn't have the Ring? What if she's in a much more precarious situation than the official history tells us?

What if she was going through all the things we know she's done - fighting the giants, fighting the Liurnians, splitting off Radagon and courting Renalla and siring the Heretical 3 - but without the Golden Order? All the events we know, but worse. Higher cost. More losses to attrition. More instability.

The kind of instability that would provide a brownshirt with mommy issues all the underlings he could possibly want.

BUT ALSO: a society that's building private death squads has already entered a death spiral. What if the people also hate Marika.

It just makes sense, doesn't it? Leyndell's history is mostly just a successive string of wars of decreasing effectiveness. The war against the fire giants goes well enough (as far as we can tell), but the war against the ancient dragons goes worse - Leyndell is attacked directly and things are bad enough that the Order sues for peace (A bit of reading between the lines here, but I feel pretty confident that if Granssax has broken through your defenses you are not negotiating from a position of power. Godwyn brokering peace is definitely the only thing that kept them from total annihilation)

And then, we get the Liurnian Wars. Plural. Two wars.

The Golden Order lost. They definitely lost the first war, and the second war they either won and forced the alliance or ended up stalemating and cutting a deal. Pre-Crusade, they would have been fighting both Rellana and Rennala at their peak, so Option 2 is definitely on the table

Aside: One of the lodestone theories that I have not even mentioned in all this rambling is "Marika split off Radagon from herself to oversee the Liurnian Wars, and Radagon gradually went further rogue after the unplanned but permitted marriage to Rennala"

So the Golden Order, which is not the Golden Order yet but I am calling the Golden Order for convenience's sake, has been in a state of constant war since its founding and we know how those shake out on the wheel of history. They rot, and then they die. The people are exhausted. The empire can no longer sustain its core imbalance of power and wealth. Disenfranchised bourgeoisie are flocking to Messmer .

And Marika starts another fucking war. 

It's no wonder they disown everyone who follows Messmer! It's no wonder that Marika has to hand out enormous Grace payments to get people on board with her personal vendetta. Her empire is in shambles and crumbling around her, her regime has no legitimacy, her bastard son is threatening a coup, she's exiled Godfrey and his armies and started another fucking war...

Aside: The attitude of "if Godfrey came back he would fix all this" was probably endemic during this period. Marika / Radagon definitely did a lot of time squashing that out.

With the powers of a god - with possession of the Elden Ring - all of those problems can just go away. Marika can remake the world as she sees fit. So she betrays the Hornsent, puts all the resources of her dying empire into the crusade, seizes Enir-Ilim, opens the Gate of Divinity, and rewrites history so that the course of history goes more according to her liking and all those embarrassing failures get swept under the rug or tossed into the Land of Shadow.

She establishes a new golden order for the world, reigning as its god. In violation of the Greater Will, Marika plucks the Rune of Death out from the Ring and grants it to a splinter of herself, who is actually her old self. The GEQ is all the stuff left over and abandoned after she remakes herself. 

Aside: I agree fully with Kyana's observation that Miquella's path to godhood plotline is a thematic mirror of Marika's, and that the casting aside of St. Trina parallels the casting aside of the GEQ.

Aside: I am not sure yet how this lines up with the Eternal Cities and whatever Marika's connection is with them, or what connection it has with the attempted killing of Metyr and the arrival of Astel.

Maliketh, under his standing orders from the Greater Will, tries to take her out. Marika is wounded (a wound that, appropriate to the mechanical effects of destined death weapons, grows over time) and her Gloam-Eyed-Fragment is "defeated", whatever that means. Paralleling Blaidd, Maliketh's loyalty will prove his undoing, as he tries his damnedest to resist the Will and Marika survives the attack. She also gets what she wants anyway by shackling him with the Rune of Death and sequestering him outside of time in Farum Azula.

I like where this is going, which is the signal for me to throw up the giant neon CANON IS FAKE sign specifically to remind myself that future developments are not reason for disappointment, and frankly I might be taking this all too seriously.

Next time, get ready for the big finale.

Bookpost 18

Bookpost Index

 

Books of the South, Glen Cook

DNF / on hold

I return to the Black Company for the first time in a decade, and find myself in a similar place as I was then. When Cook is in his groove, and when you’re able to match yourself to that groove, it’s a great read. If you’re not in the groove, or if you lose the groove, it’s a tough sell. 

Cook’s greatest strength remains his depiction of warfare as messy and uncertain and anticlimactic and senselessly violent. Bad shit just happens for no reason as often if not more so than things go your way. That part is as good as ever.

I find things faltering when he starts moving beyond that into the bigger picture, especially when it comes to antagonists: the Shadowmasters, appropriate to their name, may as well be cartoon characters. Elements of the first trilogy come back around in a pretty unimpressive way. The depiction of fantasy!India is…it could certainly be a lot better. I am beginning to think that trying to read all three in a row (because I have the omnibus version) was a mistake, and that I only have enough in me for one Cook book at a time.

Maybe I will come back to it in the future, though if I look at my track record with this review series I very rarely ever do that.

Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction, Joseph Dan

It’s a very honest title. Does a solid job for its length of going through the stages of thought that kabbalah has passed through over the last 500 years.

Echoes of Mist-Land, Aubertine Woodward Moore

DNF 5%

A book which I list here purely to say that, even when grading on the curve of “the book is from the 1880s”, I think the Nibelungenlied might be one of the most tedious works of literature ever devised. Whoop dee fucking doo, Siegfried is just so special and perfect. He is the most perfect and special boy. Heaven forbid a character trait emerge.

Little Fuzzy, H. Beam Piper

A short, punchy novel that, through mechanisms I have yet to determine, resides blessedly within the public domain. Worth your time. It’s aged better than a lot of sci-fi from the era - not a shining example of progressivism by any means, but certainly a winner of the “not as bad as you could have been” award. The pacing is swift, it’s an easy read, there are some good turns of phrase and sci-fi concepts scattered throughout, and it’s free. I’ve had a much worse time with books I’ve paid for.

House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds

I was not a fan of Revelation Space when I read it…seven or eight years ago? But I saw this at Half Price and thought “why not give Reynolds another shot? This one’s a standalone.”

And I am fucking glad I did. This book is solid gold. I haven’t had one that keeps the beat-to-beat plot going this fast and this smooth since Some Desperate Glory. It might take 100 pages for the inciting incident to kickoff, but that doesn’t matter because every single chapter is going to introduce something new and interesting; some new element of the setting, or a revelation about a character, or a complicating event. And not in the way that some stories will take where they keep introducing things and then never deliver, either: threads get tied off or woven back into each other as new secrets are revealed. Characters’ motivations are obscured just enough for you to keep wondering about what their actual goal is, and when those motivations are revealed it always makes sense as the source of their previous actions.

Enormous additional accolades go to the book’s emphasis on the unimaginable enormity of space and time. No FTL here. Our POV characters are effectively immortal and have technology to mitigate a lot of the downtime, which leads to something I have never seen before in my life: a story that can maintain its tension and stakes even when anywhere from a few dozen to tens of thousands of years are being elided. It’s got some incredible sci-fi concepts to chew on, and several that will definitely be working their way into my standard repertoire (friendship ended with cryosleep, now abeyance is my best friend)

Go read it. 

Book of Imaginary Beings, Jorge Luis Borges

A bestiary in the classical sense; a work wholly unconcerned with ecological realism, historical accuracy, consistency, or internal logic. This isn’t a negative. It flows dreamlike, one entry to the next like a lazy river in book form. Some of the entries are undercooked, and I do find myself getting a bit irritated by the “which of these sources are even real”, but on the whole it’s a great read and you’re bound to get something out of it. Even if he does use the Wade-Giles romanization of Chinese. And does that horrible Orientalist thing of literally translating Japanese names instead of just writing the names.

The Marigold, Andrew F. Sullivan

DNF 55 / 349

The vibes should have been my thing (mold-based near future dystopic weirdness), and the writing is overall strong (character department in particular, from the part that I read), but upon realizing that there wasn’t really an overarching plot and that we were jumping to an entirely new character and an entirely new scenario every 6 pages or so, it lost me. I love me a cobbled together frame narrative out of fragments, but there’s gotta be something bigger underneath to provide scaffolding.

Gods of the North, Robert E. Howard

Had a long-languishing collection of his short stories on my kindle, and quickly realized why it is long-languishing: I fucking hate Howard’s writing. I hate it in that extremely unhelpful way where I want to rewrite it just to make a point, despite it being practically guaranteed as a waste of effort better put towards original works. I have a chronic case of “I can fix it” for the literary works of old dead racists.

This is an extremely short story, it doesn’t have Conan in it, and it is an absolute nothing of a story. A plotless exercise in psychopathic violence, plus a sexual assault. There’s no other content to be had.
HPL can potentially give you an interesting idea to chew on, hidden somewhere in the neurotic racism; REH doesn’t even bother with interesting ideas.

The Door To Saturn, Clark Ashton Smith

Changing gears drastically, I then read this story immediately after Gods of the North and had a blast. It fucking slaps. Smith, in a wild departure from his Weird Tales contemporaries, actually knows how to do setup and payoff. There are jokes in this story that are still funny, on top of just not letting up on the weird and evocative imagery. Definitely going to read the rest of his stuff now, this left an excellent first impression.

The Unspoken Name, A. K. Larkwood

DNF 4%

The opening, as far as I read, is Tombs of Atuan with balsa wood prose. Few things are more damning than hitting "I wish I was reading a better, different book" when you have barely moved past the prologue. If you're going to do trope-dominated genre fic, it needs prose to back it up. The one interesting thing it has going for it is the fact that the main characters have tusks, which I presume is to imply that they are orcs. As an aside, I think tusks on orcs is usually pretty silly - they're an aesthetic leftover from old school pig-headed orcs that are only there for repetition's sake and no one except the occasional absolute madman bothers to explore the ramifications of what happens to a human jaw when it has tusks.

 

Positively Unhinged Elden Ring Theoryposting: Part 3

Following up from my previous posts (Part 1, part 2) , I'm headed back into the realm of my own observations.

 

PART 5: GET THIS SHIT OUT OF MY DRAFT DOC

**

Observation: Wraiths, Vengeful Spirits, and Hexes

This is just one of those weird minor things where the pieces have fit together somewhat nicely (how about that for a change?)

“Wraith” is used only three times in the corpus, in the descriptions of the Omen Bairn, Regal Omen Bairn, and the Wraith Calling Bell. It’s the last of these that provides us with a definition:

Wraith Calling Bell: “Wraiths are said to be the vengeful spirits of those who died when cursed.”

Which tracks so far, with the other two items summoning the spirits of Omen infants.

If I search the corpus for “vengeful spirits”, we get a few additional hits:

• The Rancorcall and Ancient Death Rancor spells
• The Rancor Slash, Familial Rancor and Rancor Shot weapon arts
• The Rancor Pots
• The Horned Bairn

Extra note, the Braided Cord Rope item draws a comparison / contrast between “vengeful spirits” and “watchful spirits”. Watchful spirits are only elsewhere mentioned in the spell “Watchful Spirit”, which is also called a “guardian spirit”, a title shared with the Horned Warrior Ashes. 

“Rancor” shows up in two additional odd contexts, the spell Rykard’s Rancor, and the item Innard Meat.

Rykard’s Rancor: “These spirits manifest from the rancor of heroes who met a violent end. The lord granted them an audience, whereupon they were welcomed by the maw of the great serpent—and within the serpent's bowels, they became the lord's kin.”

Innard Meat: “Scraps of flesh for filling great jars. Rancorous spirits cling to the pinkish-red, twitching meat.”

These aren’t related to curses necessarily, but seem to just be people who have died in horrible ways.

An “ancient death hex” is mentioned a few times:

Rancorcall: “Once thought lost, this ancient death hex was rediscovered by the necromancer Garris.”

Ancient Death Rancor:  “They are cinders of the ancient death hex, raked from the fires of ghostflame by Deathbirds.”

So at least this hex originates with the followers of the Deathbirds. Which makes sense if we look at the Branchsword Talismans.

Red-feathered Branchsword: "The heart sings when one draws close to death, and a glorious end awaits those who cling so tenaciously to life."

Blue-feathered Branchsword: "The heart sings when one draws close to death, and thus does one cling so tenaciously to life—to render up a death worth offering."

Which we can combine with

Rancor Pot: “In times of old, the dead were burned with ghostflame, and from those cinders arose vengeful spirits.”

And that says to me that these ancient hexes utilize the angry spirits of those killed in some sort of ritual sacrifice (to the Deathbirds?) during the Ghostflame Era.

This then overlaps with what we know of red glintstone sorcery, which is described as "similar to hex magic" in the Staff of the Guilty description and dependent on human sacrifices. Same with Rykard rediscovering Gelmir hex magic (human sacrifice to the Serpent).

A couple other hex mentions of note.

Hefty Furnace Pot:  “Imbued with a hex of the furnace[...]The furnace's flame burns away both body and soul. When impurity is thus expunged, one calls it cleansing.”

Bloodfiend Hexer’s Ashes: “This spirit conducts bloodboon rituals with a sacred spear, casts bloodflame hexes, and takes a singular pleasure in letting the blood of foes. Long ago, a subjugated tribe discovered a twisted deity amongst the ravages of war, and they were transformed into bloodfiends. The mother of truth was their savior.”

Inquisitor Ashes: "One of the inquisitors casts a tower hex to heal HP, while the hex of the other boosts her own attack power."

Bone Bow: "A medium for spirit-calling, and a product of the ancient hexing arts of the tower."

Not much on their own, but considering how frequent this sort of thing crops up across cultural and magical regimes it's looking like "magical power from death" is a universal of the setting.

 

**

 

Observation: Two Anchor Rings

Godrick and Morgott’s Great Runes are described as the central and lower anchor runes of the Elden Ring. Which would imply the existence of an upper anchor. Marika would be the natural assumption, as head of the entire thing, the Keter of our Great Rune sefirot.

**

Theory: Capital-N Night is the whole unity of the celestial bodies prior to development of glintstone sorcery

We know that a big part of the Caria-Academy rivalry is over whether the moon or the stars is more important to sorcery. The few references we get to capital-N Night, and the lightless void of the Greater Will, feel like older versions of the religion. The Carians and Academics are the people arguing over if Jesus is one substance or two, and to get to that stage of bullshit you have to have at least a little time to develop things away from first principles. Naturally, those principles began with the Astrologers, prior to calling down glintstone.

**

Observation: So Many Types of Fire

• Ghostflame: "burns death", whatever that means; generates spirit ashes
  
• Giantsflame: Capable of burning down the Erdtree
  
• Blackflame: Probably Giantsflame + Destined Death
  
• Flame of Frenzy: Can burn away everything, including spirits.
  
• Messmer’s Flame: Properties questionable, can definitely fuck up magical trees.
  

**

Speculation: The Stone Lords are connected to Rauh

• We know Alabaster and Onyx Lords were created from members of an ancient civilization that were transformed by close contact with a meteorite impact.
• The Meteoric Ore Blade is supposedly designed for use against “lifeforms born of falling stars” - which would be either Stone Lords, Fallingstar Beasts, or Astels.
• The priests of the Ancient Dynasty had meteorite-shard spears
• Ancient Meteoric Ore Greatsword was apparently an arrowhead in the “old gods’ arsenal”, and explains jack shit else what the fuck. Gotta be those Giant-Giants.
  
• “Starcallers” are those who search for and harvest meteor fragments
• Astel fell as a meteorite in Operation Fuck This Eternal City In Particular and hit Farum Azula on the way down.
• Stone-Sheathed Sword can turn into Sword of Light/Darkness at altars in the Ruins of Rauh. Black and white, alabaster and onyx.
• Demi-humans are more easily affected by lures and aggro pull items when humans are immune
• The Lords of Stone are the ones who know gravity and meteor magic specifically, so I have seen it theorized that they are responsible for calling down Astel to destroy the Eternal City.
• TA and his heavy impact theory: some manner of meteor impact liquified a large chunk of the surface and buried the “builder stratum” (probably rauh) and the Old Giants (titans, old gods)
• TA, cont.: Elden John as a noah+moses figure, knowing that the Flood was coming, building the stone coffin-ships (TA suggests only 3 survived, the rest died and rotted, became putrescense. But those 3 might be just artistic license)
• Probably Metyr what did it as the “first star to fall”, maybe the elden beast?

**

Observation: Passive Effect Associations

• Rune of Life / Erdtree / Golden Order / Marika: Passive HP regen 
• Destined Death / Rune of Death / GEQ: HP drain
  
• Dominula villagers : Extra rune gain
  
• Godrick's Great Rune: Increases all stats
• Radahn's Great Rune: Increases HP, FP, Stamina
• Rykard's Great Rune: Recover health on killing enemies
• Ranni's Great Rune: ????
  
• Malenia's Great Rune: Bloodborne-style health recovery
• Miquella's Great Rune: Resists influence of mental influence 
• Rune of the Unborn: ????
  
• Morgott's Great Rune:  Greatly increased HP
• Mohg's Great Rune: Recover health when a summon or enemy makes a kill

Using the power of PATTERN SEEKING BRAIN, I end up with this (asterisks mark reconstruction)

Nothing substantial enough to say "I think this is aligned with what they were aiming for", but an interesting series of coincidences all the same.

**

Observation: "Death of the Demigods"

Maliketh’s epithet “death of the demigods” is weird because he didn't kill any of them, and all of them presumably died after he was locked in Farum Azula. I am presuming it is a “if any of them are going to die, Maliketh is going to be the one to do it,” sort of thing, which makes sense and adds a fun bit of "even the ordinary people know that if shit pops off he's going to come out on top." Which would imply that he had the Rune of Death for a bit before he got sealed away. The other option would be that there were demigods before the current crop and he killed those ones and the title carried over.

But that's if it's an epithet. If it is a literal meaning of his name, then I can only assume that he was given it by the Fingers as a direct threat to Marika, which is definitely in line with the one other Shadowbound Beast we know of. Toe the party line, or Blaidd / Maliketh will kill you and all of your associates.

 

PART 6: TOTAL BULLSHIT

Everything below is extra true. No theories here, just straight facts. The basics were written prior to the Nightreign announcement, which as you will see later is evidence of some minor gift of prophecy.

**

Interpretive Lens: Principle of Transposition

FromSoft’s love of returning to the well is so strong that material - concepts, characters, places, events, connections and so on - may be transposed between games as one sees fit for purposes of theorizing, fanfiction, and all-around silliness. We might also call this the Patches Principle.

Interpretive Lens: The Adaptation Corollary

Elements transposed from one game to another will be adapted to fit the content of the host game; Transposition is one-way, and does not provide support for Grand Unified Theories.

Interpretive Lens: The Principle of Inaccuracy

The contents of the game are representative, not exact. Details not necessary to the story will be elided for it to function as a game.

**

Godfrey = Gwyn

Not literally, of course, but as they both fulfill the role of father of a godly dynasty they are our prime centerpiece for this rabbithole of Transposition. Any traits, qualities, and connections of Gwyn that would be interesting to port to Godfrey shall hereby be ported over to Godfrey.

**

The Golden Lineage demigods killed during the Night of the Black Knives and currently entombed in the wandering mausoleums are in fact Gwyn’s children, children-in-law, and grandchildren.

Specifically, this entails Gwynevere, Filianore, Oceiros, Lorian, Lothric, Ocelotte, and Rosaria.

Don't worry about the Nameless King and Gwyndolin, we'll get to them later.

**

Godfrey maintained the Roundtable Hold separate from the Crucible Knights, both because he preferred it as a model for an army, and as an insurance policy in case things went south. 

Their numbers included:

• Knight Artorius -Tried to fight the Lord of the Abyss. It did not go well for him.
  
• Lord’s Blade CIaran - Personal bodyguard to Godwyn in his youth.
• Dragonslayer Ornstein - A veteran of the First Defense of Leyndell and champion of the Ancient Dragon Cult.
• Hawkeye Gough - A troll who turned against the giants during the War. 
• Gehrman and Maria - Hunters of starfallen beasts from a distant land.
• Havel the Rock - One of Godfrey's original band. Dragon War veteran. Went rogue after the Liurnian Wars because he was wanted nothing to do with a state that incorporated sorcery.
  
• Sir Alonne - A warrior from the Land of Reeds.
  

**

Unsorted Bullshit

• Horah Loux’s uncle Lloyd was part of his original warband, and settled down as a prominent cleric of the Golden Order after the War with the Giants.
• Irithyll was a city of the ancient astrologers, though was barely inhabited by the time it was incorporated into the empire of the Eternal Cities. 
• Executioner Smough  was Marika’s chief executioner after the establishment of the Golden Order. Eventually joined the Fire Monks and became a Prelate, leaving the role of imperial carnifex to the lord of House Marais.
• High Lord Wolnir was the last of the primordial giants, and the only one to survive until Marika’s war.
• Nito ruled, though not as Elden Lord, in the days of the Deathbird rites.
• Seath the Scaleless was an advisor to Marika and Godfrey during the War with the Ancient Dragons. Godwyn acted against his council by extending friendship to Fortissax and ending the war peacefully.
• Seath later grew bored of Leyndell and commissioned a keep in Liurnia, devoting himself to study of the Crystalians.
• Storm Lord = Storm King, so Godfrey fought the Nameless King as his final enemy. (I FUCKING CALLED IT)
• Nameless King and Godwyn were twins
• Sen’s Fortress blocks the main way in to Gelmir from Leyndell: the siege was one of the bloodiest in the war. Snekmen!
• Gwyndolyn and Ranni have a complicated relationship - both devotees of the dark moon. Cooperation? Competition? Dual halves of an empyrean? A fosterage situation gone bad, which causes the Liurnian Wars?
• Gwyndolin survives the Night of Black Knives by either being conveniently outside Leyndell, in on the plot, or explicitly spared by Ranni.
• But then he gets eaten by Aldritch, a Golden Order Fundamentalist among Rykard's attendants who apostasized after reaching Gelmir and embraced the Black Flame cult, even managing to become a Godskin.
  
• The demihumans, long suffering under the oppression of Rauh, sought to make their own lord with the power of the Abyss: Manus was the result.
  
• Fillianore was married off to the Demihumans, rather than the pygmies.
•  All of the vague distant lands ever mentioned in the non-Sekiro souls games exist outside the Lands Between.
• The events of Sekiro, or events very similar to them, are occurring in the Land of Reeds
• Firekeepers are the old priestesses of the ghostflame, or perhaps the giantsflame, or maybe just the tree. TA's theory of Marika as emerging from an existing tree-worshiping priestess class obviously is connected here.
• The Noxians were in contact with the Moon Presence and had been used as hunters against its rivals. The Carians continued this agreement up through at least the Liurnian Wars.
• The Noxians created Rom the Vacuous Spider in a failed attempt to create the Lord of Night.
  
• Three great stars fell upon the earth: Metyr the Mother of Fingers, Ebrietas the Daughter of the Cosmos, and Kos called Kosm.  
• I don't actually need to do anything with the Blacksmith God and titanite demons, you could just throw those in a Rauh forge as-is.
• The Witch of Izalith was a priestess of the Old Dynasty who lived among and learned pyromancy from the fire giants. As the War neared its end, she fell into a despair great enough to call on the Flame of Frenzy, which created yet another fucking type of fire, and also a shit-ton of demons.
• Either that or demons are hornsent tutelary deities that have gone bad.
  
• Quelaag's nest is down at the bottom of the Leyndell catacombs, where she does exactly what she does in Dark Souls. Quelaana's there too.
• Micolash is everyone's least favorite faculty member at the Academy of Raya Lucaria but the bastard got tenure somehow and then tried to commune with Outer Gods.
  

 

PART 8: FANFICTION TIME

Scholar’s Letter

A thick envelope, sealed with stamped wax and a green ribbon. The documents stuffed within are all composed by the same hand.

Gurlos -

Bad news and more bad news, I’m afraid. Marika is laughing at us from the grave.

The team sent to Castle Marais returned yesterday, and it seems they've found another dead end. The central keep collapsed years ago thanks to the sinking foundation, and all we are left with is a pile of rubble in the middle of a poisonous swamp overgrown with squirts and miranda flowers. If House Marais kept any of their records at home, they're lost, and I’m not going to risk any of our colleagues for a handful of sodden parchment.

Our excavation in the capital seems similarly futile. We’ve had to relocate the main camp three times now due to instability of the dunes. The ash is a merciless invader; It gets on everything, it gets into everything, we can only spare a few hours each day excavating before we’re all crippled by coughing fits.

As we expected, the majority of the documents we have found are barely better than lumps of charcoal. Despite this, we have managed to find a few surviving caches in the manors of the upper city, where by accidents of positioning and storage the texts were spared from the pyroclastic flow. Unfortunately, these scrolls and books are predominantly personal writings, business records, religious texts, and the entertainments of the idle rich. Our colleagues will have a wonderful time analyzing the cultural significance of it all, but it's not particularly helpful to us in the here and now.

We gravely underestimated both the enthusiasm of Marika’s ministry of propaganda and the scope of their influence over the rest of the Lands. Every single non-private text we have found has been stamped with the approval of House Marais and the Office of Publications, marking them as parrots of the official imperial history and useful primarily as kindling and toilet paper. The private texts rarely delve into matters of history or statecraft, and we can assume a chilling effect from the censor's passing shadow. I won't entirely rule out the truth from emerging, but that will require miraculous luck that we thus far have not had in our possession.

The site that we have been assuming (with caution) to be Marika's private residence has offered up a few curiosities: we have pulled five stone tablets from the ash, but the text is unfamiliar. The most reasonable hypothesis would be that they belong to a pre-Order civilization, but until we find matching inscriptions we can't begin to identify them. I've included a rubbing of one of the tablets with this letter; perhaps you've found something similar in the Tower settlement.

To round out the failures of this expedition, the teams we've sent into Liurnia and Limgrave have started reporting back to us as well.

The libraries of Raya Lucaria and the Carian manor still contain thousands of books in good condition, but we have no means of reading or understanding the sorcerer's ciphers used to write them. The best and brightest minds of that last generation were reduced to mindless infantilism under the care of Rennala, and while Rennala herself was closest to the events in question she is in no state to answer them and likely never will be.

Nephali Loux, now an old woman, arrived with the remnants of Godfrey’s army at the end of the age. She has been helpful in establishing the timeline since the Tarnished returned, but knows very little of anything that came before. But she is a gracious host to our Limgrave teams and so we have little room to complain.

Bishop Miriel appears to be our best lead so far: he is cooperative, an excellent interview subject, and has assisted us in the interpretation of the more obtuse religious texts. While part of the religious hierarchy of the Golden Order, he was unofficially assigned in perpetuity to the Church of Vows in Liurnia (as an enormous tortoise is extremely difficult to transport to and from the capital) and so received all his news of Leyndell second-hand. But this allowed him to serve as a direct eyewitness to the Liurnian Wars, and it will be in comparing his story to the official record that we will find any clues as to the truth if we are going to find any at all.

Lady Tanith of Ranah is not a viable interview subject.

This is the situation as it stands on our end of the inner sea, and I will keep you informed of any developments. I hope that your own team's investigations have borne more fruit than ours.

- Máelruba

**

I think I have two more of these in the tank. For now anyways.

.

Romanizing Cthulhu

Torpishev

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

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

Gods help me.

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

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

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

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

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

#1: Cthulhu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not if we use PATTERN RECOGNITION.

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

Irish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I swear this will get interesting eventually. And faster!

#2: Yog-Sothoth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something to Consider for Later

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

Bonus Round: Nyarlathotep

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

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

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

 “The moment of undimmed eyes is satisfied.”

Yeah, that checks out.

2024 in Review

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

Previous Years: 2021, 2022, 2023 

Cat Woes

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

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

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

I miss our boys.

Even More Family Deaths

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

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

I think I have OCD

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

Last Dangerous Visions came out October 1 and I totally forgot

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

Monkey Man

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

Deadpool & Wolverine

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

Caves of Qud 1.0

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

Conlang Stuff

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

 

UFO50

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

**

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

Ireland was a good time, though.

 

CSC Campaign Report 3: The Library

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

CSC Campaign Index

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

 

The Library

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

In Possession

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

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

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

Known

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

Detailed Summaries

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

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

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

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

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

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

Untitled Grimoire

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

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

Part 1: Descriptions of ritual procedures and a magic circle

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

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

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

The Adytum Hymnal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

manifestoFINAL.docx

(Michael Hill, 2014-Present )

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

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

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

The Black Binder

(Unknown Author, ~1850s?)

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

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

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

Known Rituals

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

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

**

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

Dan Plays Games 5

 Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4

Tactical Breach Wizards

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

The Pathless

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

Potioncraft: Alchemist Simulator

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

Halo CE (MCC)

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

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

Halo 4 (MCC, Spartan Ops only)

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

Terra Nil

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

Vampire Survivors (Replay)

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

Vampire Survivors (Ode to Castlevania)

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

 

Potionomics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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