Casting Shadows

This is the seventeenth day of #RPGaDAY2025 and our prompt today is renew. Let’s look at this prompt from the point of view of the characters. There are a lot of things to say about this prompt from the perspective of the players or the player who takes on the role of GM – especially in terms of sustainability, however, we can get a better grip on the meat of our nascent campaign idea if we choose to place our focus inside the imagined situation of our characters’ world.

Day 17: Renew

As we have explored in the first half of this year’s RPGaDAY event, the underlying conflict within this proposed campaign for Leagues of Cthulhu is with the Cult of the Sleeper in its many guises and layers. If run with a heavy emphasis on investigation, the characters will be proactive agents seeking out who is responsible for certain crimes and atrocities. The answers gleaned from those questions might reveal that the perpetrators were acting on the orders of others. Seeking out those shadowy shot-callers might in turn reveal that there is more to this than at first met the eye. There is an entrenched and circumspect cadre of patrons who are using their influence to reshape society. If they get so far, as we hinted at yesterday with the 16th prompt, overcome, dragging those shadowy figures into the light or foiling their plans, might bring with it a sense of accomplishment and closure. We might consider the campaign done, and feel that pressing on to deeper layers of mystery and madness is too much – or might be too much of the same.

Today’s prompt opens our minds to this feeling from the characters’ point of view. What would make the characters, tired, horrified, and possibly mourning lost friends and moral certainty dig in to carry this battle forward? What would make them press on when it seems like all that they have faced already is just a facade of human ambition and greed smeared over alien madness? What would renew their dedication to the fight against the corrupting darkness of the Sleeper’s Dreams and the insinuating seduction of the cult’s texts?

Until we know the characters and the realities of their struggle versus the Sleeper, we cannot know for certain what direct motivations might come into play, and if we consider such things too much we may stray too far (for this stage of development) into premature imagination of what is to come. It’s a fine line we walk between preparation for improvisation (being ready to respond naturally, quickly, consistently, and appropriately) to what happens in play, and imagining what could happen in play. Also, there is a steep slope from simply imagining what could happen, and imagining what we want to have happen. It’s steep enough to make climbing up out of it a drain on our creative and emotional reserves, keeping us in place.

What we can know is the nature of the antagonist and his scattered minions and self-deluding priests, and in this particular case, that gives us a natural fit for this prompt of renew. It might even be this prompt which led me to choose the Sleeper as the cosmic horror for this campaign pitch in the first place. On the grand scale of Tsathoggua’s unending cycle of life, we see great periods of slumber, where the Sleeper slips from all but the most ardent worshippers’ understanding and is forgotten. When it begins to awaken, however, that sleep is fitful, interrupted, and spreads its corrupting influence out in dreams and acts of indoctrination and reclamation that expand out from the deep darkness of N’Kai into the upper caverns of the forgotten civilizations far below the surface of the world before then oozing out into the light.

When do the characters come into contact with the cult of the Sleeper? How often to the fitful surges and pulses of near-wakefulness goad the cultists, their minions, and their hidden leaders into action? When is the next retreat and regrouping and where does that contraction of forces lead? When is the next cycle of active expansion and into what territory will it force its way?

How is this wave different from the last?

What new act of villainy will the cultists be willing to perform? Which new taboo will they break? How have their minds and forms been reshaped in the darkness? How far are they now from the humans they once were?

With this ebb and flow of action, retraction, regrouping, reforming, and new expansion, the scope of the campaign shifts away from a classic pattern of missions, single-serve mysteries, and singular enemies to defeat, and better presents itself as a layered problem that needs tenacity and adaptability to pierce through to the heart.

Even so, that kind of play needs a measure of progress, failure, and success. We can discuss some of that tomorrow…

See you tomorrow for Day 18: Sign