OSR Commentary - The Law Vs Chaos War In The Hyperborea rpg Campaign

 “Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph”
― Robert E. Howard

Chaos on Hyperborea has always been a very weird area for me as a dungeon master. There are lots of indications that sometime in the past of the passing of Old Earth and The Green Death something rather nasty took place on the flat plateau world of Hyperborea. And there are indicators that it might have been some form of the conflict between Law & Chaos. 

Given the influence of Clark Ashton Smith I think that such a conflict would look vastly different. More akin to the author's Weird Tales leanings. And less in the vein of DC comics or Michael Moorcock even though Moorcock is a huge influence on the Hyperborea rpg. 
And through reading about the Lovecraftian and demonic monsters of Hyperborea a hypthosis forms in my mind. Hyperborea was a battle front in the war between Chaos and Law but only a minor dust up. To the Earth however this might have been a major world  end event. Law won but there was a cost. Chaos's soldiers & monsters have been left behind having slinked off to the four corners of Hyperborea with thier purpose over. But is it?! There a sense of circular purpose to Hyperborea like the fact that Ice Worm will devour the artificial planet. The Chaos forces are slinked into the forgotten places of Hyperborea. 

If the Chaos vs Law war happened it was long time ago and the believers have long since turned to dust. Thier cults however continue on even after the war ended eons ago. The proof of this is in the fact that only Appollo, Artemis, and Boetzu are the only gods of Law still in any capacity of power on Hyperborea. These cults continue to struggle for power in any real solid form on our version of Hyperborea. Really there are actually still a ton of artifacts of Law waiting to be discovered in the lost dungeons and fortresses of Hyperborea.  And without the influence of Law the civilization of humanity could be sliding into the Abyss of barbarism and Chaos. 
The gods of Chaos stroke humanity's ego and power by influencing the tribes of warriors and worshipers to cleave towards violence. Don't believe me? Take a look at the nine axiom alignment system that the Hyperborea rpg uses. This is all a part of the natural Lovecraftian cycle that happens to worlds. Seldom does civilization rise from the morass of Chaos to embrace advancement. 
In Clark Aston Smith's Lovecraftian gods patheon's placement these alien gods seem to be there to end an epoch of mankind. As if Chaos and entropy itself are a part of the natural cycle as an age declines they come in and clean the slate for another era. And yet they guard the ruins until the natural order swallows up these lost dungeons & ruins. We see this in CAS's The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan. We see this on CAS's Hyperborea and I hard to guess we also see it on the Hyperborea rpg campaign setting as well. 

OSR Campaign Ho Down & Clark Ashton Smith Campaign Commentary

 Cha'alt/Godbound rpg campaign that I've got going on centered around California, Nevada, & Arizona on a doomed Seventies or early Eighties  style Earth. The Cha'alt wave comes along through space & hits the Earth. It awakens the Lovecraftian forces that have been biding the eons away in places like the kingdom of K’nyan & the Hyperboreans who have been asleep deep within the Earth.
Things have not been going well as parts of Cha'alt including the Black Pyramid & the wastelands have been merging across the Earth. For some of the back bone gaming system & setting I've been using Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea.



This game campaign basically takes place during the Hyperborean beginning events from Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea. The PC's were summoned to this Earth as 'heroes' from a standard Dungeons & Dragons old school fantasy realm. They've been made into Godbound by the gods because they've been losing. The Hyperboreans come out in full military force from within the Hollow Earth. Across the world mega dungeons have appeared such as Dwimmermount because of the wave.

 

The Hyperboreans are very dangerous & their military relics are pretty well outlined in Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea. But its really the Black Pyramid  & its weird ass in workings that have been churning out some of the most dangerous cults in the game. But the real factor for the humans has been the appearance of other entities from Dungeons & Dragon's Blackmoor modules like the Egg of Coot.  The appearance of the Egg has really been keeping my players  completely off balance. 



For this leg of the campaign I've been going back to the original Clark Ashton Smith source material especially his  Hyperborea cycle:

• Coming of the White Worm, The (1941)
• Door to Saturn, The (1932)
• House of Haon-Dor, The (1989)
• Ice-Demon, The (1933)
• Lament for Vixeela (1953)
• Muse of Hyperborea, The (1929)
• Seven Geases, The (1934)
• Tale of Satampra Zeiros, The (1931)
• Testament of Athammaus, The (1932)
• Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles, The (1958)
• Ubbo-Sathla (1933)
• Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan, The (1932)
• White Sybil, The (1932)

Here's the thing that I've found with these tales there is always an inevitability with the CAS's tales. There are seasons to the epochs of mankind & the 'Great Old Ones' are there to see the cosmic destruction done. This happens again & again. But how does this match up with Cha'alt?
 Cha'alt's played for science fantasy gonzo. I've been using the Cha'alt source book as both serious & totally as a cosmic joke. In other words I've been using it like an issue of Seventies Heavy Metal magazines that I grew up with.


I don't use Cha'alt as a fifth edition D&D anything. I've pulled & totally mutilated with Venger's blessing I might add the source book for my own game campaigns. But there's campaign elements that I've pulled from way back in my own tool box of campaign madness. In AS&SH most of the technological occult treasures were made by Atlanteans. This brings me back to some of my campaign notes regarding X1: "The Isle of Dread" (1981), by David "Zeb" Cook and Tom Moldvay. There was a planar conflict in my campaign between the Atlanteans & the monstrous, mind-bending creatures known as kopru.



Within the last five years or so the X1's Isle of Dread appeared off of the coast of California.The  Atlanteans have made contact with the party & things are heating up around the waters of California. The call of the Black Pyramid continues to echo across the cosmos. Things are going to get to the level of self sacrifice coming up! 

Thoughts On The Yugoloth in Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers Of Hyperborea

"There Charon stands, who rules the dreary coast –
A sordid god: down from his hairy chin
A length of beard descends, uncombed, unclean;
His eyes, like hollow furnaces on fire;
A girdle, foul with grease, binds his obscene attire."The Roman poet Virgil describes Charon, manning his rust-colored skiff, in the course of Aeneas's descent to the underworld(Aeneid, Book 6), after the Cumaean Sibyl has directed the hero to the golden bough that will allow him to return to the world of the living



Charon as depicted by Michelangelo in his fresco The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel

I've been putting a lot of thought into what DM Steve had put our party of adventurers through the other day in our weekend Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea game. I believe we in a Hell of a lot more danger then what was presented in the other day's AS&SH game! According to the wiki entry on Charon; "In the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, Charon is a powerful altraloth, a lord of the yugoloths, reportedly transformed into a more powerful creature by the night hags of the Gray Waste. Charon's role is to provide travel on the River Styx, but he always charges a steep price and kills those who cannot or will not pay. Charon commands a legion of marraenoloths who provide the same service.

Charon's name comes from Charon." 

The fact is that if Charon survived the events of Ragnork then the rest of  the yugoloths, might be a part of the underworld of Underborea. This doesn't sound like a big deal but its big if you think that the Mezzodeamons are also there as well. A roving pack of horrors that comes from the bottom & between the layers  of the Abyss there's the Mezzodeamons! Coming from the D3 Vault of the Drow by Gary Gygax , these deamonic bastards would later find their way into the Fiend Folio. Charon himself made it into the Monster Manual II.



According to the wiki entry on the Yugoloth;
"The mezzodaemon and the nycadaemon first appeared in first edition in the adventure module Vault of the Drow (1978),^[2] and reprinted in the original Fiend Folio (1981); the guardian daemon also debuted in this book.^[3] The arcanadaemon, Charon (The Boatman of the Lower Planes), the charonadaemon, the derghodaemon, the hydrodaemon, the Oinodaemon (Anthraxus), the piscodaemon, the ultrodaemon, and the yagnodaemon first appeared in the original Monster Manual II (1983)." The Yugoloth then a part of the underworld feeding on the corpses of the gods who feel in the far future events of Ragnarok in the underworld of Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea? 


DM Steve & I both came up back in the Eighties in my uncle's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons/ BECMI Dungeons & Dragons mythological hybrid campaign. The events of Ragnarok were on the table during that time but our PC's never got to experience them. I've used the back story of Ragnarok as a part of the far future history of my own AS&SH games many, many times. The gods die as a part of the future history. Their corpses are still in many of the cold hells of Hyperborea being tortured by  the Yugoloth. This was copied by my uncle from the mythologies of Jack Kirby and classic DC comics. Would DM Steve use this same background for his own games?! Sure he would after all turn around is far play.

What's the one group that we've not seen in the Don't Fix A Price saga
? The 'hags' of AS&SH whom I think might be behind the events of our game manipulating the god Charon. These horrors have a lot of power in the covens,huts, & back room tents of many different witches on Hyperborea. So what do they want with the Trident of Nodens? 


If night hags are involved in this then our PC's could be in deep trouble & we may be looking at becoming a part of the underworld soon then later. The gods might be in far more trouble then we realize.
The last time that our party had visited Zothique some months ago there was a run in with a night hag & her mezzodaemon servant Zat. I don't relish dying on the claws of those things. The cult of Nodens is protected by several other much less savory & dangerous Lovecraftian gods. So are we being set up to cause a dire political situation between some of the cults of Hyperborea? I have no desire for my PC  to suffer the fate of Barzai the Wise from The Other Gods by H. P. Lovecraft if I should be so lucky; 

"The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth's gods . . . There is unknown magic on Hatheg-Kla, for the screams of the frightened gods have turned to laughter, and the slopes of ice shoot up endlessly into the black heavens whither I am plunging . . . Hei! Hei! At last! In the dim light I behold the gods of earth!"

And now Atal, slipping dizzily up over inconceivable steeps, heard in the dark a loathsome laughing, mixed with such a cry as no man else ever heard save in the Phlegethon of unrelatable nightmares; a cry wherein reverberated the horror and anguish of a haunted lifetime packed into one atrocious moment:

"The other gods! The other gods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of earth! . . . Look away . . . Go back . . . Do not see! Do not see! The vengeance of the infinite abysses . . . That cursed, that damnable pit . . . Merciful gods of earth, I am falling into the sky!"

In no way shape or form is Jeff Talinian responsible for this sort of speculation this is for a personal table top campaign of AS&SH. 

Further Explorations of Dungeon issue # 69 & Its Use In Old School Sword & Sorcery Game Campaigns

Way, way, back in the hoary days of Nineteen Ninety Eight Dungeon magazine was still a thing & there were some killer issues on the spinner racks. There was one issue that stood out & that was Dungeon issue #69. No its not for the issue number its for the adventure  Slave Vats of the Yuan-ti by Jason Kuhl, Illustrated by Terry Dykstra, Cartography by Diesel. p. 10-27. If you can find it then by all means grab this issue!
 

Forget the fantastic Easily cover its the  Jason Kuhl adventure that has it all. This is the perfect little mid point adventure for a Sword & Sorcery retroclone like Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea. Not only could this easily be inserted around   the dismal City-State of Khromarium but it could be used as a piggy back  middle jump adventure for the PC's to get them into some of the more dangerous AS&SH adventures. But this is all gonna have to take place after taking them through Rats In The Walls & Other Perils.  As well as the basic introductory adventure that takes place in the Town of Swampgate  from the main AS&SH rule book. 

On the whole the entire adventure cycle of the "Mere of Dead Men" takes the PC's into the heart of the corrupted serpent men ermm I mean Yuan-ti.Then drops them in to back end of a rather nasty problem. "This adventure is part 1 of the "Mere of Dead Men" series and involves an exploration of the Wolfhill House overlooking the Mere and encounters with the yuan-ti"
There area of 'Mere of the Dead Men' in the Forgotten Realms was created to evoke a dangerous historical event tied directly into the history of the realms; "The name "Mere of Dead Men" referred to the thousands of dwarves, elves, and humans of the Fallen Kingdom who were slain here during the invasion of an orc army." Now if we use this same area & do a bit of fiddling then it can be named in our home Hyperborea campaign game as the place where the armies of Hyperboreans, men of the West, & the Atlanteans fell by the thousands to an invading orc army. 
This is just one of the strengths of Dungeon magazine, the flexibility of the adventures & how they could be adapted for your own home games.
This brings me to something that I've been playing with the over the last couple of days the Cthulhu mythos of the Deities & Demigods of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Slave Vats of the Yuan-ti by Jason Kuhl, could easily be tied into the bubbling & burbling cult of  Shub niggurath that I spoke about in this blog entry. 


Given the totality of this style of adventure cycle the player's PC's could quite easily gain a couple of levels & then tackle the moat house of T1 The Village of Hommlet by Gary Gygax. This would to help explain the party being down on their luck & down to the last gold piece before the adventure begins.

Dragon Issue #138 (Oct ’88), Deities & Demigods, & The Religions of Shub-Niggurath

Its been a long while since the pages of Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea was cracked open. But last night I returned to my lair in the wee hours of the morning after a successful game night only to have a Dragon magazine slap me in the face. Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea often seems to me to be the perfect blend of B/X D&D and AD&D. The issue of Dragon Magazine in question is issue #138 (Oct ’88). In which we've got the Call of Cthlhu rpg article The Black Book and the Hunters by Craig Schaefer which introduces The Black Book of Shub-Niggurath & the Hunters of Shub-Niggurath (Greater Servitor Race). At four A.M. weird thoughts swirl in one's head & my copy of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons first edition's Deities & Demigods was open to the 'Cthulhu Mythos' section. My eyes happened to catch this entry on Shub-Niggurth. 

Now at first this looks like Clark Ashton Smith's Abhoth ("The Source of Uncleanliness") & perhaps it was originally going to be. But then I started to think that perhaps it actually is an avatar of Shub-Niggurth. Maybe there's a far deeper connection between the cynical Abhoth & the 'mother of a thousand young'. A quick scan of the HP Lovecraft wiki revealed;" Of all the mythos deities, Shub-Niggurath is probably the most extensively worshipped. Her worshippers include the Hyperboreans, the Muvians, T'yog of K'naa, and the people of Sarnath, as well as any number of druidic and barbaric cults. She is also worshipped by the non-human species of the mythos, such as the "Fungi from Yuggoth" (the Mi-Go) and the Nug-Soth of Yaddith.(EXP: The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana) With the proper occult paraphernalia, Shub-Niggurath can be summoned to any woodlands at the time of the new moon. However, the place from whence she comes is not known." In my AS&SH this puts a very different spin on what might be residing with the bowels of  caverns of Y'quaa beneath Mount Voormithadreth. Abhoth could be part & proxy of a greater network of 'mis' creation that connects with the both Shub-Niggurath & Ubbo-Sathla. Abhoth is one source of many of the abominations that one finds within my dungeons; 

"[H]e described a sort of pool with a margin of mud that was marled with obscene offal; and in the pool a grayish, horrid mass that nearly choked it from rim to rim... Here, it seemed, was the ultimate source of all miscreation and abomination. For the gray mass quobbed and quivered, and swelled perpetually; and from it, in manifold fission, were spawned the anatomies that crept away on every side through the grotto. There were things like bodiless legs or arms that flailed in the slime, or heads that rolled, or floundering bellies with fishes' fins; and all manner of things malformed and monstrous, that grew in size as they departed from the neighborhood of Abhoth. And those that swam not swiftly ashore when they fell into the pool from Abhoth, were devoured by mouths that gaped in the parent bulk. 

—Clark Ashton Smith, The Seven Geases

Abhoth ("The Source of Uncleanliness") resides in the cavern of Y'quaa beneath Mount Voormithadreth. It is a horrid, dark gray protean mass and is said to be the ultimate source of all miscreation and abomination."
All of this puts a very different spin on the cults, covens, witches, & human institutions within Hyperborea or at least my version of it. All of these deities & their cults are going to be very important to the respective fertility & production of crops especially on Hyperborea. The glaring red star in the sky is very unforgiving & villages are going to need all of the help they can get.


So let's  go back to Clark Ashton Smith's 'The Seven Geases' which gives us some of the best slices of Hyperborean royals, court life, & a complete tour of the underworld of Mount Voormithadreth. But this story is  also the source for Abhoth ("The Source of Uncleanliness"). These 'avatar  pools' spawn life, fertility, & uncleaness in equal measure but what if their all interconnected. What if these avatar pools are all part of some high dimensional 'Cthulhu Mythos' birthing bio occult birthing mechanism for life. These avatar pits might in fact be the source that were used by the Elder Things for the creation of both life on Earth & the Shoggoths.


Shoggoth artwork by Nottsuo - nottsuo.deviantart 
This puts a very different spin on the 'fertility rites' of the druids, shamans, & other human races of Hyperborea. I think its advised to not visit certain villages or towns at certain times of the year during the festivals. This is clearly the sort of a rite or invocation that we see in HP Lovecraft's 'The Festival'.


But there maybe much more going on here then we know, lately I've been rereading H. Rider Haggard, Ayesha, the Return of She  .
The novel is a  squeal to H.Rider Haggard's She in which the  character Ayesha, returns to life from the depths the afterlife. A mysterious occult force from the depths of the book's volcano known as the Pillar of Life which grants immortality. Now Ayesha is the inspiration for  "Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings – Ayesha's reflecting pool seems to be a direct precursor of Galadriel's mirror."  I 

Could these 'avatar pools' also grant a type of twisted immortality to their high priests & priestesses? I think so & in my version of Hyperborea this is only one more rung on the ladder of damnation that the Mythos gods inflict upon their charges. A twisted form of this style of immortality can be seen in Clark Ashton Smith's 'The White Sybil'. 

Christmas Appendix N Campaign Commentary - Algernon Henry Blackwood & The OSR Campaign Apocalyse

Adventurers are made not born into the life that we often find PC's & with the Christmas holidays approaching Algernon Henry Blackwood has been on my mind. Blackwood's is a world where one steps out the door into nature & you risk stepping into an alien world not of this Earth. The world of a fundamentally different reality whose rules are not those we know or can easily understand.



 

For me Blackwood is one of the premiere weird tales writers because he embodies his own fiction so much;

"Throughout his adult life, he was an occasional essayist for various periodicals. In his late thirties, he moved back to England and started to write stories of the supernatural. He was successful, writing at least ten original collections of short stories and later telling them on radio and television. He also wrote fourteen novels, several children's books, and a number of plays, most of which were produced but not published. He was an avid lover of nature and the outdoors, and many of his stories reflect this. To satisfy his interest in the supernatural, he joined The Ghost Club. He never married; according to his friends he was a loner but also cheerful company.^[6]

Jack Sullivan stated that "Blackwood's life parallels his work more neatly than perhaps that of any other ghost story writer. Like his lonely but fundamentally optimistic protagonists, he was a combination of mystic and outdoorsman; when he wasn't steeping himself in occultism, including Rosicrucianism and Buddhism, he was likely to be skiing or mountain climbing."^[5] Blackwood was a member of one of the factions of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,^[7] as was his contemporary Arthur Machen.^[8] Cabalistic themes influence his novel The Human Chord.^[9]

His two best known stories are probably "The Willows" and "The Wendigo". He would also often write stories for newspapers at short notice, with the result that he was unsure exactly how many short stories he had written and there is no sure total. Though Blackwood wrote a number of horror stories, his most typical work seeks less to frighten than to induce a sense of awe. Good examples are the novels The Centaur, which climaxes with a traveler's sight of a herd of the mythical creatures; and Julius LeVallon and its sequel The Bright Messenger, which deal with reincarnation and the possibility of a new, mystical evolution of human consciousness."

For me the four horror pieces  of his that parallel Arthur Machen's deadly lost tribe of forbidden Fey are  "The Willows","The Human Chord", "The Wendigo",  & "The Centaur".

But what are these strange other worldly tribes of  Algernon Henry Blackwood? There is a very dangerous alien quality to Blackwood's supernatural world & one of a dangerous chaotic unnatural order. Some of his work seems to draw very deeply from the well of European mythological lore & his own experiences. It almost seems that used correctly the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Fiend Folio might make an excellent source for Blackwood & Arthur Machans material.



The humanoid races of the Fiend Folio are the unsanitized Fey races that the others don't talk about. These are the remains of perhaps another older reality that was replaced when mankind started walking upright. The Xvart & many of the dangerous humanoid horrors such as the Mites could be the very last tribes to leave Earth or Greyhawk. Ancient occult rites bring their alien reality over to such worlds. They cause all kinds of  untold misery & horror. But is there more to it? Castles & Crusades Codex Celtarum by Brian Young goes into the Celtic mythological deeply & dips its pen into the druids. I mentioned the Voor in the Machen entry. Perhaps the druids are the last of a human cult that remembers most of the devastating wars of extinction that banished these tribes of alien Fey?! But are they really gone? Reading through Algernon Henry Blackwood

has me convinced otherwise. The worlds of his fiction belong to the older & more dangerous alien occult order.


"Le Satyre", Jules Fontanez


But is Algernon Henry Blackwood alien nature & its monsters the past or perhaps an alien reality or far future time line overlapping our own? "Clark Ashton Smith's story "Genius Loci" (1933) was inspired by Blackwood's story "The Transfer"" & many of Smith's contemporaries including H.P. Lovecraft were inspired by Blackwood. So it stands to reason that perhaps thousands or millions of years in the future Blackwood's alien Fey perhaps are among the occult or alien forces that take back the Earth.

We know that at a certain point in mythology Ragnarok happens or happened. The Norse gods among many others were killed perhaps along with millions after Hyperborea left Earth . This kicks off the Zothique cycle of the Earth much later on & perhaps the world of Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea.In the centuries after Ragnarok but before the Zothique era these were the eons of the Hyperborean empire. They sailed the stars, conquered Death, & build vast works on alien shores, moved realities, & seemed all powerful but everything has its cycles.

AS&SH art by Mike Tenebrae


But time is circular & while the skyships of Hyperborea were seen trading in the ports of Mystara, Calidar, & Greyhawk along with Arduin. The energies released by Ragnarok worked their way across time & space causing untold devastation.



All of the events of Ragnarok are gone into by Troll Lord Games The Codex Germania & The Codex Nordica.

But these are only reflections & aspects of some of the events of the end mankind. The events of the actual  end of the gods are much worse. These echo off into the planes.

And you can bet on Mystara that the Immortals watched the events of this closely & did everything in their respective power to stave off any such events from happening on their world. The very fabric of their religions on Mystara is keyed to preventing such world shattering events. 

Algernon Henry Blackwood 

stories & novels are ones of horrific alien beauty & singularity. They speak volumes of an infinitely more alien & horrific reality that lurks just outside of our & our adventurers door. But these are merely the beach head into what's coming. We'll get into that next time. For now keep em rolling!