Casting Shadows

This is the fifth day of #RPGaDAY2025 and the prompt today is ancient. At this point in the development of the pitch, there has been a lot of emphasis on the new. It’s a world of strange science, and uncovered secrets. It is a world of invention and innovation which is pulling itself out of the darkness which has held humanity back. It is a time of action where a manifesto has been cast like a rival’s gauntlet into our faces, launching a new challenge to overcome and a new threat to put down. This, however, is not Leagues of Adventure, and it goes further than Leagues of Gothic Horror. This is Leagues of Cthulhu. The darkness has not yet begun to fight.

In Leagues of Cthulhu, the entities which comprise the chaotic and scattered pantheon of the mythos are beyond conception and so are beyond game statistics – barring one. If in communion with them or worse, in their presence, there is not a question of what can the character do to the being, there is only the question of how long their mind can withstand the strain before they are turned to a new and inhuman understanding of the universe.

These are beings dimly perceived, vaguely described by maddened cultists and grasping mystics, and indifferently inimical to all life as we understand it. They lend a theme, tone, and horrifying momentum to a campaign. They color and provide shifting shape to the horrors which wait to be uncovered by the prying investigations of the globetrotters wittingly and unwittingly working against the twisted cults who have learned just enough to scream the right rites through madly gritted teeth.

For this campaign, like many I run, I have selected one being from the Mythos to be the centerpiece of its horrors, and the world has been reimagined as if it could contain such a being. It has been put into motion with the idea that down through time, some small groups have gleaned some secrets and brought things into being which have in turn spawned new horrors, on many different scales.

Day 5: Ancient

As some might glean from the references to darkness, the ancient source of vile and eternal horror filtering up to the surface of the gaslit world of the 1890s to enable and ensure villainy in mortals grasping and groping for things in the moral and mental darkness of their selfish minds is beyond our understanding in all of the worst ways. So alien are its hungers and dreams that few cults of the mad have long survived on the surface or in the subterranean caverns and civilizations which have attempted to serve it. Even its own supposed spawn are driven beyond expression and beyond shape into formlessness and darkness even blacker than the lightless hole in which their progenitor fitfully sleeps.

Do you know of what I speak, Dear Reader?

You should not, for this is among the things we were never meant to know.

But, of course, knowledge – especially the dangerous and corrupting kind – finds a way into the hearts and minds of those willing to act upon it and who inevitably seek to turn it to their own benefit. And so, here and there in the Empire and without. In cities and in quieter places, a cult is growing. Like the formless spawn they are beginning to learn how to attract from below and bind, they are probing in humanity’s darkness for things of use, for things which can be turned and twisted into use, of things which can be corrupted into service… of things which can be animated and turned into a mockery of life and light.

A new threat with an ancient and inimical force behind it.

See you tomorrow for Day 6: Motive!