Casting Shadows

This is the seventh day of #RPGaDAY2025 and the prompt today is journey. It is this sort of prompt which fills me with hope that some day, love will find you and break the chains that bind you. While we are waiting for that happy moment, however, let’s consider how the prompt for today can inform and improve our campaign pitch for Leagues of Cthulhu.

One of the aspects that I enjoy about setting games within a few decades of the turn of the 20th Century is the rapid change in transportation technologies. In a horror game, particularly a cosmic horror game, the spirit of innovation and the ability to explore in new ways twists from a hopeful smile into the twinned visage of Janus, but that edge of thrill is still there – albeit darkly.

In a campaign such as this one, with is slumbering subterranean deity and its attendant horrors and misled cult of adherents, what types of journeys should we prepare to describe, to where, and to what ends?

Will there be any returns?

Day 7: Journey

Created by Clark Ashton Smith and first published by a ghostwriting Lovecraft, references to Tsathoggua have grown over time to place that being underground in a form of mythic underworld of fallen civilizations and gates to other worlds and other places. We can imagine Tsathoggua, the Sleeper, dreaming fitfully in the ruins of N’Kai, deep below the caverns, twisting tunnels, and carved chambers closer to the surface where ancient temples in his honor still remain, guarded by the Formless Spawn, neglect, and darkness. Some of course, are being rededicated in his worship by his newly-roused and growing cult.

It would be wise to expect a group of characters to be able to glean the information needed to mount an expedition to uncover the underground refuges to which their quarry bolts when pressed.

What are the mundane routes below the surface like and what are the access points?

To answer that set of questions, I will do research on mining methods from the 16th and 17th centuries as well as refresh myself with past research on caves.

What are the portals and gates created by alien science and mystic rites like? How are they operated? What effects do they have on those who pass through them? Do they allow travel in both directions? What is required to open them? Do the different ranks of cultists have different access to the world below and its denizens? Do connections to Saturn and Pluto remain to be found? What might it take to restore them and what might that mean for Earth?

To answer this set of questions will take some time imagining and reimagining the ruins of N’Kai and the underlying themes a cult of the Sleeper would feel compelled to build their temples around. I will also see how the descriptions of cult activity actually manifest in play so that I can heighten the elements that I particularly want to build on. I will not got to mythos source material for this, however. I have read those stories many times. The details are deep in my memory and will come out in their own way in play – helping this campaign to be familiar but also fresh in its own right.

At the start of the campaign, I am thinking I would like to propose that the campaign itself be a journey, not just of travel across terrestrial and cosmic distances, but of discovery as well. As Neslinger and the characters learn more and more about the activities of the shadowy organization trying to make its re-animation process acceptable to the British people and their government, that organization and the cult which controls it are simultaneously learning more and more in dreams and transmissions from their deity.

Can the characters be in time to prevent tragedies and the revelations of forbidden lore, or will they always be steps behind the cult – forced to destroy what it summons up?

See you tomorrow for Day 8: Explore!