Casting Shadows

This is the twenty-second day of #RPGaDAY2025 and today the prompt is ally. There are only 9 days left in this year’s event, after today. For me, it has gone quite quickly and I have enjoyed a lot of the posts I have found out there in the wilds of the Internet every day. It is hard to complete a 31-day challenge, but lots of people are doing it this year, Dear Reader. More importantly, I have been very pleased with how much sharing of other people’s posts has been going on. That is fantastic and in a real sense makes each participant the ally of the others in the key point of RPGaDAY: spreading positivity about the games we play.

Day 22: Ally

For the bleak and cosmically horrific campaign from deep below the earth we have been concocting on this blog, as with other entries of this sort, we cannot look at the allies of the players without having those players and their characters established. It cannot hurt to consider people around Neslinger, the suggested Patron, who might be the sort to become allies later, but for now I find my preparation for improvisation time is more effective in considering the “forces of darkness”.

Tsathoggua has the Spawn or Formless Spawn as his allies. Where he spends ages in slumber, leaking fragments of dreams or occasionally rousing to send Dreams directly, they labor in the darkness in the depths of N’Kai and in the forgotten other places, closer to the surface maintaining, rebuilding, or building his temples.

While the obey Tsathoggua without question, and so could be seen as servants, for this campaign the feel I am getting when I imagine these aggressive beings, unmoored from normal physical concerns like shape, is that so in tune with the aims of the Sleeper, that they do his will unbidden as if it were their own. They posses no mind as we might conceive of it, yet they build great structures and keep the praises of Tsathoggua alive down through the unlit and echoing caverns of time. They guard and expand the deep places, and they explore and prepare places closer to the surface. When coerced into service by the thin magics of the surface dwellers, they test and temper them. Destroying the weak.

With these thoughts in mind, I will be trying to use the Formless Spawn in the Bruce Lee sense of having their alien intelligence make them like water, adapting to the metaphorical cup of whatever situation they are in. They independently serve the goals of Tsathoggua and protect his slumber for inscrutable reasons of their own.

What have they been doing in the eons since the Sleeper lost woke?

What are they doing now?

See you tomorrow for Day 23: Recent