The entities of The Beyond are infinitely varied, but draw on the traditionally nightmarish: eldritch horrors, demonic beings, tentacled monstrosities, horrifically assembled flesh golems, spectral maidens with bleeding eye sockets, faceless statues, the greys…
THE UPSIDE-DOWN:
Make it weird by turning the lights out and switching to Cthulhu Dark...
- Pariah Volume 1, Page 50
Synchronicity
Is there any more dangerous seduction than to renounce one's faith in the gods of Epicurus, those carefree and unknown ones, and to believe instead in some petty deity who is full of worries and personally knows every little hair on our heads and finds nothing nauseating in the most miserable small service? Well—I mean in spite of it all!—we should leave the gods alone as well as the genies at our service and be content with the assumption that our own practical and theoretical skill in interpreting and arranging events has now reached its apex. Nor should we think too highly of this dexterity of our wisdom when at times the wonderful harmony created by the playing of our instrument surprises us all too much— a harmony that sounds too good for us to dare to give credit to ourselves. Indeed, now and then someone plays with us - good old chance; occasionally chance guides our hand, and the wisest providence could not invent music more beautiful than what our foolish hand then produces.
- Nietzche, The Gay Science (Book IV: St Januarius )
Recently, some aspect of my imaginative attention has resided in The Beyond. I've wandered around, touched and tasted it, in two manifestations: the salt-ice plains of Polaris... and the sweet-sour ichor of the mutagenic hive swarm... and I will return to those places, but there's so much more to explore!
If there is a central theme to Pariah, it is "turtles all the way down", and my own perverse fantasy of a nested series of "campaigns", dreams-within-dreams, like a recursive psychedelic fractal spiralling up or down or through the 7th dimension infinitely. One door opens, three more appear. Reality is a dungeon crawl.
So yes, the mind alights upon eldritch horrors creeping liminal betwixt parallel planes and in doing so perches in places where unlikely connections are made. Good old confirmation bias kicks in: open a barely-used social network app and get a message about a three-year-old non-Euclidean dungeon; log on elsewhere and again and again see... Cthulhu Dark?
Games-within-games
Pariah vol. 1, in each of the 7 entries on the "realms", suggests an “upside down”. Reader’s will recall this cute though already outmoded 2019 Stranger Things reference pertains to actions the GM can perform to instil a sense of “otherness” in the extra-planar environment the pariahs explore. The act of dislocation —or perhaps even some Joycean dislocution (there's an aphasia to psychedelia, right?)—embodied by a changing of codes.
I tend to think of the character as a puppet for the player, at least when I play. maybe something more sinister, like a skin-suit. Let's dial that back... a mech? It's a drone that you pilot around another world: you look out onto that world with your eyes and have your thoughts, but the world responds to the flesh-puppet you're piloting, not to you directly.
I tend to think of the character as a puppet for the player, at least when I play. maybe something more sinister, like a skin-suit. Let's dial that back... a mech? It's a drone that you pilot around another world: you look out onto that world with your eyes and have your thoughts, but the world responds to the flesh-puppet you're piloting, not to you directly.
Take off your skin... and dance around in your bones.
The mechanics are the mecha, strip the armour away and feel the world rub up against the flesh. Sometimes this can be thematic: in a play-by-post game, the Realm of Sun and Heavens stripped the characters down to a name, an item and an ability score. In the Realm of the Dead they were left with their constitution and charisma only.
[aside: I made a post last week where I ran through Our Big Show of Worth as a pre-amble to an upcoming post about exploring the Sun and Heavens, but don't expect that any time soon!]
Your portal into the world of Cthulhu Dark is represented by three dice. That's not true, of course: the conversation you have with the GM and (if playing something like a Cthulhu mystery) your own genre-awareness are the window and the world. But maybe those three dice are the helm that steers the conversation when it reaches awkward or uncertain points. They work like a pool, though: you only use the highest one, and you don't get to use all three every time.
- 1 is the worst possible outcome, 6 is the best
- Roll one die if it's humanly possible (the "human die")
- Roll another die if it's within your expertise (the "occupation die")
- Roll a die if you will "risk your mind to succeed" ("insight" die: "insanity" in earlier editions)
The highest result is always used. If the insight die comes up highest, then the player must test their character's insight: if they roll higher than their current insight, they add one to that score, dropping out the game when it reaches 6.
When your Insight reaches 6, you understand the full horror behind the Universe and leave everyday life behind. To the outside world, you appear insane. This is a special moment: everyone focusses on your Investigator’s last moments of lucidity. Go out however you want: fight, scream, run, collapse or go eerily silent. Afterwards, either make a new Investigator or continue playing, but retire your old Investigator as soon as you can.
Not everyone likes "insanity" rules and I full understand, however at their heart there's an acknowledgment that this character-vehicle picks up all sorts of dinks as it pootles along the nightmare highway: the player makes choices about the extent to which the character engages with the environment, and at some point point the character breaks and the player loses their ability to traverse the world. There is of course an issue with how mental illness is depicted in these silly little games, and this is usually overcome at least by replacing insanity with "stress" or "pressure" (or in this instance, "insight"). We don't challenge this when thinking in terms of physical trauma and hit points, so keeping track of psychological HP has some justification, especially when navigating a literal dimension of nightmares
On the subject of physical trauma, characters ("investigators") in Cthulhu Dark automatically fail when they attempt to fight Eldritch Entities: there are no combat rules, you cannot punch Cthulhu on the nose. This seems entirely appropriate for the Realm of the Beyond.
Despair
The character sheets are removed and the world is reduced to one that can be interacted with through a single D6... but characters aren't investigators in 1920s Arkham of 1890s Whitechapel: they're exiled psychonauts from a fantasy proto-neolithic. The broad goals of PARIAH are re-stated: survival, exploration...and a third one, because that's how chords work and I've watched enough Bastionland videos to know the power of three bullet points. The third one is of course drugs but for the sake of my little tiny children I'm going to lie and say it's something like edification or evolution.
In any case, we don't like hiding things behind dice rolls, do we? Certainly not things like clues and investigations: we're puppeteers, not actors! But the dice are useful for tension, randomness and.. fairness (?), and we are going to call the extra-special third one "despair".
Because if one is navigating a nightmarish hellscape, and everything is dependent on a roll of the dice, then it really is a case of pinning one's hopes on the outcome. And when despair sets in, when all hope is lost, that's when we cut the strings and leave the little creepy marionette in this nightmare world.
Plus I mentioned Joyce before and if I learned anything from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it is that despair is the only unforgiveable sin.
In any case, we don't like hiding things behind dice rolls, do we? Certainly not things like clues and investigations: we're puppeteers, not actors! But the dice are useful for tension, randomness and.. fairness (?), and we are going to call the extra-special third one "despair".
Because if one is navigating a nightmarish hellscape, and everything is dependent on a roll of the dice, then it really is a case of pinning one's hopes on the outcome. And when despair sets in, when all hope is lost, that's when we cut the strings and leave the little creepy marionette in this nightmare world.
Plus I mentioned Joyce before and if I learned anything from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it is that despair is the only unforgiveable sin.
Realms of Beyond
In Sketches for My Sweetheart, The Beyond I list seven different experiences of the Beyond, each a crude inversion of one of the other six realms:
- The Not Here Never
- The Indigo Depths
- The Hive Swarm
- The Phantom Watchers
- The Yellow Moon of Beyond
- Polaris
- ...and the Beyond Beyond Beyond, or sometimes Death Beyond Death, or possibly just the crushing cosmic void...
I've recently shared a mini-game of Mutagenic Hive Swarm which provides a framework for navigating and exploring that place (we've also played around in that space a little bit), and also have plans for Polaris to work almost as an OD&D style hexcrawl, in the style of Carcosa. Both of these will have free/pwyw zini editions and I have plans to work those up into full length adventure/mini-settings. The Indigo Depths exists as a sketch depth-crawl and I'm setting aside uh... gamifying the uhh... void beyond all reality until I have greater insight into what that feels like (one for the next life, I expect).
So where does this Cthulhu Dark stuff stick? We're left with the following, in easily digestible three bullets, with a film/video reference after:
- Not Here Never (Hellraiser)
- Yellow Moon of Beyond (David Bowie's Black Star video, but also The Yellow King)
- The Phantom Watchers (Dark Skies but also nightmare Fey, the Sidhe, incubus/succubus from folk tales and legends)
I especially like the idea of these far-out concepts being explored by characters with a strong resistance to sedentary living.
It's late, I'm going to sleep... hopefully not to dream about any of this.
Links
Our Big Show of Worth, quick solo play-through
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2023/07/our-big-show-of-worth.html
Cthulhu Dark at DTRPG
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/341997/Cthulhu-Dark
Sketches for My Sweetheart, The Beyond:
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2020/12/sketches-for-my-sweetheart-beyond.html
Cthulhu Dark at DTRPG
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/341997/Cthulhu-Dark
Sketches for My Sweetheart, The Beyond:
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2020/12/sketches-for-my-sweetheart-beyond.html
MUTAGENIC HIVE SWARM: pwyw zini game:
https://atelier-hwei.itch.io/mutagenic-hive-swarm
Play report: MUTANGENI HIVE SWARM
Still on vacation, may need to come back to this post later, but this is awesome. So many things here that I'm loving.
ReplyDelete> If there is a central theme to Pariah, it is "turtles all the way down", and my own perverse fantasy of a nested series of "campaigns", dreams-within-dreams, like a recursive psychedelic fractal spiralling up or down or through the 7th dimension infinitely. One door opens, three more appear. Reality is a dungeon crawl.
ReplyDeleteI should just call it a day, you've just said like basically everything I came here to say all these years lol.
> I tend to think of the character as a puppet for the player, at least when I play. maybe something more sinister, like a skin-suit. Let's dial that back... a mech? It's a drone that you pilot around another world: you look out onto that world with your eyes and have your thoughts, but the world responds to the flesh-puppet you're piloting, not to you directly.
> Take off your skin... and dance around in your bones.
> The mechanics are the mecha, strip the armour away and feel the world rub up against the flesh. Sometimes this can be thematic: in a play-by-post game, the Realm of Sun and Heavens stripped the characters down to a name, an item and an ability score. In the Realm of the Dead they were left with their constitution and charisma only."
If I ever do properly clean up MRD Vol. 2 I will really need to take that meta-fiction mecha idea to heart. Brilliantly put as well.