Casting Shadows

This is the tenth day of #RPGaDAY2025 and the prompt today is origin. Leading up to this prompt we have examined what our villainous cult of villains is doing with their villainy, and we have looked at their motivations in being so vile. What we have not yet brought out for consideration are why on Earth, and particularly on Earth as compared to Yuggoth, such a cult would form in the first place. Let’s do that today, shall we?

Day 10: Origin

In Leagues of Cthulhu, the Sleeper is presented as having had an active cult in ancient days in the caverns of K’n-yan. Further, it is intimated that that once-mighty nation had torn down the temples to Tsathoggua once they learned more about the other beings who offered the Sleeper worship.

In the ghost-written story, The Mound, we learn that as a nation, those of K’n-yan were ideally-suited to the worship of Tsathoggua and they embodied many traits exemplified by his formless spawn. What fierce secret horror could they have learned which would cause them to reject their former reverence for this oft-dreaming being?

As a nation their hungers and hobbies seem perverse by the standards of those who dwell on the surface and included extreme body modification far beyond their natural forms – even to the point of physical discorporation – and the raising of the dead, what subject might be too taboo for them?

The paths between the surface and the cavern civilizations below ground are guarded. Those who seek them from the surface are turned away, and those who seek the surface from below are punished if captured. How then does a forbidden and forsaken cult leak out of the darkness and ruins far below the surface to bubble and roil into the lives of surface dwellers?

Dreams.

Dreams that reform and deform the mind.

Dreams that awaken alien hungers and seep through barriers of sanity and propriety.

Dreams that portend the awakening of the Sleeper.

What is the origin of the cult? How does it spread from one lost civilization to another, to another, to ages of seeming inactivity, to finally find one more on the brink of rot and self-destruction?

The sleep of Tsathoggua is drawing to a close, and he has his needs.

Dreams.

Dreams are powerful.

Dreams alone are enough to carve furrows of change into those whose slumber they invade, but not sufficient to give birth to and shape a cult and turn it into a useful tool and organized pawn of the Sleeper. For that, the recorded madness of mortals given a physical form for its invasive ideas is needed.

On the surface, society is bound and formed by words. Religion, politics, poetry, myth, and tradition have been dragged from the ephemera of dreams and given potency, durability, and an imposed consistency of sense and logic by words. Words which in the fullness of time are elevated from the mere words of one speaker or one author, to being The Word. The Truth.

As the 19th century depletes itself and pools at the as yet unrealized darkness of the twentieth, post-Gutenberg and Luther, the world is remade in the printed word.

In other words, beyond the catalyst of Dreams invading from the slumber of the Sleeper, a book is required – a portal to ideas where pages are keys and words and images are teacher, advisor, seducer, and corruptor.

Which book?

Versions of the Cthonic Manuscript, by that and other titles, speak a delusional sense to dream-wracked readers. Versions of the Cthonic Manuscript, by that and other titles, form the basis of sermons given in dark holds underground recast in half-dreamt, half-imagined likeness of the ruined temples far below the surface. Versions of the Cthonic Manuscript, by that and other titles, ooze with science that is magic and magic that is science to break the chains of death, of distance, and of form, inspiring corruption, dark innovation and derivation fit to undo what has been done, and remake what has been made of civilization above and below the surface.

In sleep or in study, the will of Tsathoggua is made clear while its hunger and darker purpose is concealed behind lesser revelations and dark gifts.

See you tomorrow for Day 11: Flavor