The Surpising Ecology Of The Morlocks in My Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea Campaign

I've written extensively about my obsession with HG Well's The Time Machine's Eloi & The Morlocks over the years on this blog. But last night I shut down on social media & began to dig back into my extensive notes about Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea. What do the Time Machine & AS&SH  have to do with one another? Quite a bit actually, in my mind Hyperborea was a place that was once flourishing had its moments of incredible technology as the Hyperboreans inherited the forbidden ruins, legacies, & technologies of the Great Race of Yith & the Elder Things. They improved upon & refined these l in some respects. They had extensive colonies across the dimensions & planes making war with their former masters & overseers. By the time get to when the oceans drank Atlantis they were well into almost extinction. But these were not true Hyperboreans but hybrids who had settled down into the local respective societies.

"Meanwhile, the first of the Hyborian kingdoms has come onto existence, the rude and barbaric kingdom of Hyperborea, which had its beginnings in a crude fortress of boulders heaped to repel tribal attack. There are few more dramatic events in history than the rise of this fierce kingdom, whose people turned abruptly from nomadic life to rear dwellings of naked stone, surrounded by cyclopean walls." -- Robert E. Howard: "The Hyborian Age"

You get a sense of  legendary  about Hyperboreans or the mythical ones who lived "beyond the North Wind" This bit struck me from the Wiki entry;
"However, it is also possible that Hyperborea had no real physical location at all, for according to the classical Greek poet Pindar"

neither by ship nor on foot would you find

the marvellous road to the assembly of the Hyperboreans.

Pindar also described the otherworldly perfection of the Hyperboreans:

Never the Muse is absent

from their ways: lyres clash and flutes cry

and everywhere maiden choruses whirling.

Neither disease nor bitter old age is mixed

in their sacred blood; far from labor and battle they live"

Scientist philosopher kings who might have been messing with forbidden sciences far from the purview of the gods who began to fade into HP Lovecraft's Dreamlands as time went on.
I know that the Hyperboreans must worship Boreas as an important god in their former religion;"
Boreas (Βορέας, Boréas; also Βορρᾶς, Borrhás)^[6] was the Greek god of the cold north wind and the bringer of winter. Although normally taken as the north wind, the Roman writers Aulus Gellius and Pliny the Elder both took Boreas as a north-east wind, equivalent to the Roman Aquilo.^[7] Boreas is depicted as being very strong, with a violent temper to match. He was frequently shown as a winged old man with shaggy hair and beard, holding a conch shell and wearing a billowing cloak.^[1] Pausanias wrote that Boreas had snakes instead of feet, though in art he was usually depicted with winged human feet.
Boreas' two sons Calaïs and Zetes, known as Boreads, were in the crew of the Argo as Argonauts."

Wind god Boreas, Hadda, Afghanistan. Musee Guimet. Personal photograph 2005.

They began to fade from the pages of history & the realms of imagination or did the Hyperboreans actually fade because of a far more sinister reason. They had access to the Great Race's secrets & legacies because they were used by the Great Race as experimental fodder & slave labor. This has been implied from the pages of the Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea Referee Guide. The Great Race  is of course is  ;"The Great Race of Yith  a fictional race of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Introduced in Lovecraft's short story "The Shadow Out of Time," the Great Race was a prehistoric civilization that populated much of the Earth until their demise in the late Cretaceous era. Their great power derived from their mastery of precognition via time travel."  Suppose that the Hyperboreans began to mess the time travel & other dimensional machinery of the Great Race. Suppose that they began to look to other branches of time & alternative worlds of reality beyond The North Wind.

[T]he Great Race ... waxed well-nigh omniscient, and turned to the task of setting up exchanges with the minds of other planets, and of exploring their pasts and futures. It sought likewise to fathom the past years and origin of that black, aeon-dead orb in far space whence its own mental heritage had come – for the mind of the Great Race was older than its bodily form. . . The beings of a dying elder world, wise with the ultimate secrets, had looked ahead for a new world and species wherein they might have long life; and had sent their minds en masse into that future race best adapted to house them – the cone-shaped beings that peopled our earth a billion years ago.

— H. P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow Out of Time"

The Great Race is mostly gone from Hyperborea except for perhaps a few hundred gate keepers & key master scientists who look after the machinery & works. It would be quite easy for the Hyperboreans to overwhelm their former masters & assume control of the machinery. They might have by this time assumed a height of incredible social & technological mastery over time & space; opened up colonies on various worlds and other dimensional locations until they came to Earth with a London of the early 22nd century. This is not our world instead its another world entirely. This is the world of  HG Well's "A Story of the Days To Come" & "When the Sleeper Wakes" "A world of early 22nd century is over 30 million people in population, with the lower classes living in subterranean dwellings, and the middle and upper classes living in skyscrapers and largely communal accommodations. Moving walkways interconnect the city, with fast air-travel and superhighways available between cities. The countryside is largely abandoned."


In other words a perfect location for a highly technologically magically advanced people to invade & cause all kinds of havoc by sewing confusion with a war between the East & West. . They released artificially created bio weapons upon this world with each side blaming the other for starting the apocalypse. Resulting in the perfect conditions for others to artificially create the Eloi & The Morlock species respectively.

So what happened to the Hyperboreans? They reaped what they sewed as they had not counted on the ripples across the space time continuum something the Great Race of Yith was well aware of. They never experimented with physical time travel to alternative time lines. Almost overnight the Hyperboreans were engulfed in madness & paradoxical spasms that caused a third of the population to go extinct. Dimensional ripples cut off other worldly colonies, interstellar settlements, and other dimensional locations without mercy. The hyper morlocks are aware of the part that the Hyperboreans played in their timeline's destruction. And there has been racial warfare between the two ever since. Underborea has seen extensive wars between the two races for centuries. 

Virgil Finley Time Machine artwork copyright & trade mark to their respective holders.
Used without permission

The Morlocks  made their way to Hyperborea from the still working time tunnels of the Hyperboreans bringing with them their Eloi cattle to settle in isolated parts of the world. From time to time their colonies are are found on isolated island or underworld locations. They receive extensive competition from a wide variety of the Underborean races but have managed to carve out their own niche on Hyperborea.

This blog post is for educational and entertainment purposes only, any of the game company's mentioned here are not responsible for any opinions expressed here. This post is not an attempt to violate the trademarks of the holders of the 1960's Time Machine movie. This is the ramblings of a fanatical fan of  the film, HG Wells, and old school games. All ideas are copyrighted and trade marked to the author.

Astonishing Swordmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea is trade marked and copyrighted to North Wind Adventures.