Casting Shadows

This is day thirteen of #RPGaDAY2025 and we have come now to darkness. We are creeping closer to the middle of the event, and through the preceding prompts several of the conceptual frames of the campaign pitch we are using the prompts to build have begun to coalesce. This year’s prompts were chosen and are arranged in the form of traditional elements in a journey or adventure and so in a very real sense represent one of the core ways the hobby is experienced at one time or another by many who embrace it: the scenario. We can look at them as, among other things, a sequence of experience for the characters, as a chain of plot points, or – as we are doing here – a list of considerations for a campaign pitch. Seen as a scenario they have a nice and logical flow, and that can be extended out to a campaign that one is envisioning as a beginning to a middle and on to an end. Seen as a collection of details which contribute to a starting point, however, they feel to me more like the shifting focus of that fever dream which is creation. Like flickers of light in the darkness of the not-yet-known.

Day 13: Darkness

For this campaign of Leagues of Cthulhu, the selection of the Sleeper as the cosmically horrific entity of import brings with it a strong theme of darkness and all the fears, forces, and friction that that entails and suggests. Further, for the GM, it also speaks to a rising and falling, slowly surging impulse to action among the factions in that darkness as the Sleeper gradually rouses itself, or is goaded into rising from its slumber.

From the player perspective, the darkness begins as figurative and is formed from ignorance, from being misdirected and lied to by those secretly in league with the Cult of the Sleeper and through whatever accidental misinformation dims their perception of events. Later on, as fragments of fear from that darkness could be compelled to move against them, or if they invite danger in the dark by making a descent down into lightless realms far below the surface that darkness will become very real.

All of this means, of course, that to make these two forms of darkness meaningful and palpable, there must be contrast. There must be light in its form as knowledge and in its form as acts of altruism and aid, eaten away by the encroachment of doubt, fear, distrust, and ultimately deadly force.

The timing of action – to move too soon and lose one’s way, to move to late and fall in the attempt, or to move at the right time to strike a telling blow against the dark for the light, is in the hands of the players as they peer into an imagined world drawn forth by us from the void, and like their characters, try to force focus and clarity out of what they perceive there~

See you tomorrow for Day 14: Mystery