Casting Shadows

This is the sixth day of #RPGaDAY2025 and the prompt today is motive. As we are building a pitch to launch play and let it go where decision and dice take it, playing for Story-as-Byproduct, with the players including the GM enjoying preparation for improvisation, the question of what the motivations are for the characters does not really enter into this as something I put into the pitch. All I need to consider are the motives and capabilities of the characters I wish to suggest as a source of initial challenge and possible conflict. There will be obvious motives and there will be more nuanced and ephemeral motives which arise from our working with the prompt and I see them as belonging to a point in time after the first pitch has been made and the group is deciding to accept it, modify it, or reject it. This works the same way in reverse, when we build characters first, and then enter into discussion about what sort of campaign they belong in.

So it is then, that for today’s look at motive we will be looking at the motives of the varied strata of the cult which suggested itself yesterday, and the alien horror to which they have pledged themselves. What looks on the surface as a misguided fraternity of weird scientists obsessed with Frankenstein’s blasphemous research, is so much worse.

Day 6: Motive

Specifics of the human cult will vary by region and era, but at this stage we can abstract the disparate groups drawn to this dark worship of and servitude to Tsathoggua into general stages of induction into the deeper mysteries of this esoteric practice. As the deity itself is said to be bound to no singular form and as his horrid spawn attest with their fluid bodies and mercurial temperaments, the cult itself is a process of transformation.

Novice: Basic instruction in trances and meditation helps adherents shake their faith in the singularity of reality and human experience. Teachings drive novices to recognize their impulses, repressed desires and thoughts, and most of all their human needs. Once recognized, they are encouraged to act on them. Society as they have known it is a shape imposed on it by fear, doubt, and rejection of our capacity to change.

Acolyte: Instruction begins in Dreaming for experienced Novices and if they cannot separate themselves from the bonds of the mundane world, they will never rise to the rank of Acolyte. Once set free of experience of a singular world, all of their old conceptions and misconceptions are challenged. Taboos are broken. Hungers are awakened. These practitioners rob graveyards, steal bodies from mortuaries, and kidnap forgotten people.

Initiate of the Form: Instruction begins for the hidden secrets of natural philosophy which allow practitioners to harness and share the secret energies coursing through the mutable fabric of reality (Channel Magic). The sanctity and supremacy of human life is demonstrated to be another falsehood of the uninitiated. There are higher forms to attain.

Initiate of Formlessness: Instruction begins for directing and redirecting the secret energies (Ritual Magic). Regular rites violate the most fundamental tenets of humanity. Practitioners are convinced they have moved beyond the limits of their birth form. These are the practical masterminds behind the cult’s activities to destabilize relations between nations and classes, to incite violence, and who find the means to compel their followers to kidnap, kill, and plunder from boneyards.

Master of Form and Formlessness: These practitioners are tasked with guiding the induction of novices and acolytes into the mysteries. This further untethers them from humanity and by this point their desires and ambitions begin to move in harmony with the being whose name they have finally learned. They seek mind-shattering vistas in the Dreamlands, they feed and pleasure themselves madly after long bouts of deprivation, and they begin to seek ways to permanently alter their forms in the waking world, leaving any pretense of being able to pass in normal society behind. It is they who raise the dead and choose who lives, who dies, and who marches into the maw of Tsathoggua.

Priests of the Dream, High Priests of the Dream, Grandmasters of Form and Formlessness, the Grandmaster of the Dream: These rarified positions only arise in an offshoot of a cult dedicated to Tsathoggua once the cult has begun to commune with their slumbering patron and his vicious spawn. Many are unrecognizable as having once been human, and few spend time above ground. They focus their attention on preparing deep temples to honor their deity. It is they who press for the progress of the plan to collapse the societies of the surface in war and chaos to create the fodder for their experiments, great rites, and to sacrifice to Tasthoggua.

Tsathoggua’s hunger drives the cult in dreams, his need pounding in their brains in the dead of night, and their purpose, unknown fully to any of them, is to feed all of humanity to their deity in a broken, marching line as the stars come right.

See you tomorrow for Day 7: Journey!