Tuesday, July 14, 2015

OSR Pluto For Your Old School Space Campaigns


So of course Pluto has been in the news every single night this week with some incredible and awesome images from the New Horizen's probe. According to NASA,
 "After a decade-long journey through our solar system, our New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto today, about 7,750 miles above the surface -- roughly the same distance from New York to Mumbai, India - making it the first-ever space mission to explore a world so far from Earth. For details and the high-res image, visit: http://go.nasa.gov/1L5MiF5"
Now everyone is jumping on the band wagon of using Pluto as a possible adventure location, now this Outer World has been appearing in Sci Fi going back to the Nineteen hundreds. And there already has been a ton of material written by HP Lovecraft regarding Yuggoth.
Yuggoth... is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system... There are mighty cities on Yuggoth—great tiers of terraced towers built of black stone... The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They have other subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples... The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridges—things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids—ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen...
—H. P. Lovecraft, "The Whisperer in Darkness"
According to Wiki:
Yuggoth is the planet where the extraterrestrial Mi-go have established a colony. The Mi-go's city sits at the edge of a pit wherein dwells an ancient and horrifying entity feared by the Mi-Go. They periodically abandon the city on those occasions when it rises from the pit and can be seen directly.
The being Cxaxukluth, along with Tsathoggua and his parents, migrated to Yuggoth from Xoth. A dysfunctional family in their own right, Cxaxukluth's progeny abandoned their patriarch and sought refuge deep in the bowels of Yuggoth, owing to Cxaxukluth's cannibalistic tendencies. Soon thereafter they fled Yuggoth, though Cxaxukluth still dwells there to this day. This also includes a very special metal,
On Yuggoth, the Mi-go mine a strange metal known as tok'l. Tok'l-metal is used in the manufacture of the Mi-go's notorious "brain cylinders", but it also has other ritual uses as well.Nithon is a cloud-laden moon of Yuggoth. It is covered by fungi and has luminescent clouds that block all sunlight
Thog and Thok are twin moons of Yuggoth. Very little is known about these moons, though Thog is said to be a pitch-black world. On the surface of Thog is the fabled Ghooric Zone—a green-litten subterranean cavern containing a putrid lake where "puffed shoggoths splash"
There already is a great OSR module that includes a  perfect adventure set up to have your PC's end up on the wrong side of a brain cylinder. This is a pay as you go module as well called YS1 The Outpost of the Outer Ones From Jeremy Reaban. Its available right over HERE 
An old school module with a very straight forward and yet complicated plot. There already is a review for it right over HERE

Now when it comes to using a ready made pop up Pluto for your old school space games or space opera, you might need a map and Captain Future by Robert Hamilton has you covered with a great old school retrofuture Pluto! Add in adventure locations and perhaps a Lovecraftian monster or two and your ready to go!

2 comments:

  1. IIRC the unpublished Pagan Publishing CoC scenario "End Times" (or pehraps it was "The Cult of Transcendence"?) included an episode wherein the investigators pass through a gate to Yuggoth. I'll have to go look now....

    Allan.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Allan!
    Triad Entertainment's End Of The World Book has an adventure called Think Tank by Scott Aniolowski that has a trip to Yuggoth built right into the belly of the adventure, its an old one but it's some nice bits and pieces.
    The Pagan Publishing CoC scenario "End Times" was CoC vaporware?!?
    According to the Hyperbear CoC pages -
    'In the early 1990s, Pagan Publishing began work on The End Times, a book set when the "stars are right", or at least mostly right. A lot of work was done on this project, but then it was cancelled. The preliminary work is now available for interested Keepers. Chaosium sells End Times as a 70 page monograph. Less than a full supplement but far more than just a collection of house rules, Chaosium may use sales of the monograph as gauge for producing a formal book. The same information, in a slightly less cohesive format, is available for download from Yog-sothoth.com. End Times takes place in 2147 C.E. Cthulhu has risen. Dark Young stalk the Earth. The Mythos has taken over. Earthbound Humanity has been enslaved, or is trying to scrape out an existence in the shattered remnants of civilization. Homo sapien's only real chance for survival is with the small colony on Mars made up of the descendants of the lucky few who escaped the Earth. Characters are Mars colonists dealing with mysteries on Mars itself, and trying to find out what happened to those poor souls on Earth. The monograph is quite extensive and well thought out, and there are three or four scenarios available for it.'

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.