Luna Uber Alles

NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

I am a big fan of the modern Cthulhu investigative game Delta Green. In fact, that is why I made this blog. 

For some years now, I have been researching an idea for a game where Delta Green and other Mythos investigation agencies encounter each other on the Moon and decide to unite against the Unnatural or battle it out for national interests.  I call this near future setting Luna Uber Alles. 

This ‘hard’ science fiction setting would ask several questions.  How would the other Mythos fighting agencies like GRU-SV8, M-EPIC, PISCES and others, compromise their agenda and agents if national interests were on the line in a space-land rush scenario? In the Great Dark of Space when we are competing with orbital mechanics, confronted with the choice of cybernetic augmentation, assisted by some form of artificial intelligence, and dealing with a national mandate to exploit space before our competitors do; would we still be human?  What will individuals be willing to sacrifice to stave off humanity’s eventual apocalypse by mind warping forces we will never be able to understand?  Will we even want to? 

Above all, hangs our grey satellite as a harbinger of our uncertain future. Luna Uber Alles. 

Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

News Reports and Papers

I’ve been fired up with these questions for some time. Over a few years I’ve been researching a few selected sources to create a background for this setting.  I’ll detail a few of these sources here, mostly news reports and scientific papers, with a summary of my thoughts under them. 

1) Demand Drivers of the Lunar and Cislunar Economy by T.J. Colvin et al. April 2020. From the Institute of Defense Analyses (IDA). 

In order for the USA and other nations to go to the moon and want to establish bases there, there should be more of an incentive than colonizing the moon purely for defense or scientific reasons.  Colvin et al., have created an interesting paper describing possible commercial interests that could drive people to invest in lunar and cislunar projects in the near future. 

Specifically, they mention that they have “identified goods and services that might generate sufficient non-government revenue [so that lunar investment could] to be commercially viable.”

Apart from space tourism, which I personally don’t think is economically sustainable to consistently fund long term lunar settlements, the paper describes that households on Earth may want moon rocks or lunar memorials (ie sending ashes of the deceased to the moon) from the lunar economy.  I think those economic drivers are a little anemic. However lunar advertising, mining precious metals from the Moon, extracting Helium-3 for sale on the Earth, disposing of hazardous Earth waste on the Moon, manufacturing in the lunar vacuum, and supercomputing and data storage as driven by corporations might be more feasible.  I’m taking this data from Table 1, page 8 of the pdf. 

Anyway, there are a lot of ideas to mine in this reference that would be useful for the Luna Uber Alles setting. 

2) Manufacturing In Space: An Inside Look At A Seemingly Crazy Idea by Ethan Karp. September 2024. From Forbes.com.

So, are space factories true and feasible? 

Pharmaceutical companies are interested in the lunar space for manufacturing chemicals in a no-gravity or microgravity environment.  Specifically, this relates to slowing the kinetics of crystal formation which is a useful method for identifying the mechanism of pharmaceutical function. Merck is doing this right now evidently. 

Heavy industry and polluting industries might also be considering operations in the lunar and cislunar space. 

3) In exchange for a lunar rover, Japan will get seats on Moon-landing missions by Stephen Clark. April 2024. From arstechnica.com.

Japan is partnering with the USA to have a Japanese astronaut join a USA team under the NASA-led Artemis program. Also, UAE, Canada and the European Space Agency are involved as well. 

In Luna Uber Alles, Mythos exploiting and Mythos suppressing organizations could have a presence on the Moon in future.  In the case of Canda, Delta Green lore already describes M-EPIC as a counter-Mythos agency. 

What Mythos organization should I look at including in Luna Uber Alles that could have an interest in Japanese lunar operations? In Delta Green (pages 34-37 of the Delta Green Handler’s Guide) the Black Ocean Society is directly described as being in Japan and other countries. That may have potential. 

4) Mining helium-3 on the Moon has been talked about forever—now a company will try by Eric Berger. March 2024. From arstechnica.com.

News report describing interest in and feasibility of harvesting helium-3 from the lunar regolith and selling it on Earth. Helium-3 does not occur naturally on Earth and “it exists in only very limited quantities from nuclear weapons tests, nuclear reactors, and radioactive decay”.  May be an important component in the quantum computing and medical imaging sectors. 

The news article specifically describes the company Interlune. 

5) Soldiers, Spies and the Moon: Secret US and Soviet Plans from the 1950s and 1960s edited by Jeffrey T. Richelson. Posted July 2014. From The National Security Archive. 

A series of declassified USA documents about potential miliary applications of lunar occupation. Deals with the Cold War, and US and Soviet interests in the Moon. Project Horizon is mentioned, which includes technical details from the US Airforce and Army about building a military Moon base. 

There is a section in the article A Study of Lunar Research Flights that talks about the feasibility of detonating a nuclear device on the Moon. 

Both of these articles would be useful for developing the setting Luna Uber Alles, particularly on the US side, and Project Horizon has details for military personnel on a theoretical militarized Moon base. One of the questions I must address in future is, “Are all nationally and corporate funded moon bases in Luna Uber Alles built with the military in mind, or instead do they consist of quasi-militarized or dual-use architectures?”

Books

I have several additional news references for Luna Uber Alles, but that’s enough for now. 

In terms of books that may have information I want for the setting, I’m looking at On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin Rees. Specifically, Chapters 2.1-2.2, biotech and cybernetics, and Chapter 3, which deals with the solar system/space exploration, may be of use.

For historical reference I picked up Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon by the Mercury Seven astronauts Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton. I wanted a rough timeline of lunar exploration and mission objectives. 

Games

Now the question is, has anyone published a ttrpg similar to the setting I’m working on? There are a few Cthulhu in Space games, but one of the more recent ones that is closest to my ideas for Luna Uber Alles is Eldritch Horizon. 

Eldritch Horizon is a game set in the “early star-faring future of the human race” where humans are exploiting the outer horizon of Earth’s Solar System to support civilization back on Earth.  Add to this the alien and ancient things that already occupied the Solar System from the Cthulhu Mythos, and you have Eldritch Horizon.  

The setting is somewhere between the scope of Eclipse Phase (without the transhuman tech and themes of that setting) and Orbital Cold War (which I discuss below).

I skimmed Eldritch Horizon and found some elements that could be interesting in a Luna Uber Alles setting. Specifically, I like how Eldritch Horizon deals with Artificial Intelligence, and how AI would react to exposure to the madness of the Cthulhu Mythos. 

There are Sanity rules for Artificial Intelligences.  AIs are treated as being based on AIs of the modern day, just refined and moderately competent.  At least for mundane jobs. AIs are also prone to hallucinations when they encounter data or situations that are outside their training data baseline.  Also, the United Nations has mandated a kill-switch for higher level AI functions (like mining or attacking or so forth) while maintaining life-support and power generations.  This kill-switch is called the Skynet Protocol.  

So how and when do AIs take Sanity Damage? AIs are rather mentally fragile. If they encounter an observation or data outside of their training data, they accumulate Sanity Damage that cannot be removed. Eldritch Horizon calls AI Sanity Damage “Paradox.”  Whenever an AI would take a Sanity Check from the Unnatural/Cthulhu Mythos, they take maximum Sanity Damage equal to “the maximum human loss from a successful SAN test” or 1 Sanity Damage, whichever is higher. AI’s do not take San Damage from Helplessness or Violence sources, unless the GM decides the AI has an empathy prototype and wants to make that call.  

AI Sanity Damage (Paradox) matters because that value subtracts from the AI’s ability to make skill checks.  So, if you have 20 Paradox and your AI’s Mining skill is 65%, it’s effective Mining skill becomes 45%.  Essentially, exposure to the Unnatural/Mythos will degrade an AI’s ability to carry out actions until it is destroyed.  However, if an AI attempts to use a skill where the modified success score is zero or below, roll d100.  On a failure it just shuts down. On a roll of doubles, it develops an aggressive psychotic response.  

I like the AI rules from Eldritch Horizon because they are appropriate for Artificial Intelligences (AI) that are marginally better than we have today. I think these rules work well for the Luna Uber Alles setting.

I am not going to include Artificial General Intelligences (AGI) in Luna Uber Alles because frankly I don’t think AGI will be developed in the timeline I foresee Luna Uber Alles taking place in.  So, AGI is out in my setting, and I don’t have to worry about rules for it. 

Eldritch Horizon is currently available as a 73-page free quickstart pdf.  They advertise that the full game will come out in 2026 sometime. 

The other question I had was, is there any near future space game that I could use as a backbone to build Luna Uber Alles on? The answer is “yes” and that game is Orbital Cold War.

Orbital Cold War is an alternate timeline near-future setting where the Space Race between the USA and the Soviet Union never stopped and continued through the early 1990s.  Player characters are astronauts, scientists or possibly soldiers, with the objective to maintain or have adventures in space stations in orbit or on the Moon. 

The geopolitical tensions in this setting between the USA-European alliance and the Soviet Union is exactly the type of drama I want to replicate in Luna Uber Alles.  However, in my setting I want more factions vying for space and the Moon. I am envisioning the following nations/agencies as having stakes in the lunar surface: USA, Canada, UAE, Russia, UK, European Space Agency, Japan, China, and the corporation Intuitive Machines (USA). 

Some of these nations/agencies have organizations aware of the Mythos according to the Delta Green lore; namely: USA (Delta Green), Canada (M-EPIC), Russia (GRU-SV8), and UK (PISCES).  In addition, Japan is mentioned as having the Black Ocean Society embedded in their territory, and that organization may have Lunar ambitions.  

So, what does Orbital Cold War provide as a backbone for my setting? It has a great deal of excellent information about spaceflight with historical examples of space vehicles, information for human survival in space stations and on space walks, and detailed diagrams on Moon bases and space stations.  I’ll be using all of that information to inform the development of Luna Uber Alles. 

Conclusion

Looking back on the past few pages, I think I have a decent rough sketch of some of my ideas for the Luna Uber Alles setting.  The idea of mankind colonizing the Moon, and the Mythos’ response to our first halting steps to get off our singular planet, is very exciting to me.  I have at least 15 news sources or scientific papers that are relevant for research for the setting, and I have broadly detailed five here.  I’ve found two books and two ttrpgs that would be relevant for Luna Uber Alles; and I think that is a solid enough foundation to build upon to move forwards with this Delta Green-spinoff without succumbing to research inflation. 

Adapting Delta Green Shotgun Scenarios to Call of Cthulhu, The (Un)Natural Man

 

Example sovereign citizen licence plate
 by Merrrittt - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

Delta Green (DG) has a wealth of quality fan created adventures and material. The shotgun scenario contest, which has been run annually for 20 years, alone has generated approximately one thousand adventures. 

The problem is my home game yearns for the simpler gangster era of the 1920s, rather than the messy spycraft of the late 90s.  So, what is a Handler to do?  Adapt, evolve, and change. The adventure that is. 

First of all, my players are all veteran Call of Cthulhu (CoC) investigators and wanted that era. I am more comfortable with Delta Green’s systems, so I pitched a CoC game with DG mechanics and they agreed to that.  DG and CoC are both based on Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying d100 system, so the transition mechanically was not hard. 

The next issue is that I wanted to run some of the DG adventure gems I was familiar with in the world of 1920’s Prohibition era.  Specifically, I had a four-hour session coming up and I wanted to run the award-winning (2020’s contest) DG shotgun scenario The (Un)Natural Man by Bird Bailey.  GMs, please read the scenario before continuing. It is short. 

** Players please avert your eyes. Spoilers for The (Un)Natural Man will follow. **

Here was the trouble. As awesome and compact as this adventure was, the adventure hinges on the main character, Elroy McIntyre, being a sovereign citizen. 

The sovereign citizen movement believes, generally, that all government statues do not apply to them unless they consent. The way you access sovereign citizen powers is through pseudo-legal mumbo-jumbo which includes writing down certain statements on legal documents.  Also, importantly for the adventure, sovereign citizens hate taxes and do not believe the government can legally take money from them. 

Sovereign citizens show up in the US around the 1970s. My players wanted a Prohibition era 1920s game.  

The (Un)Natural Man scenario summary

First, I will explain the plot of the scenario. 

In The (Un)Natural Man, Elroy McIntyre wants to avoid paying taxes, divorce payments, etc. and thus purchased a pamphlet filled with instructions and a ritual for separating his real self (Elroy original) from his legal self (Elroy fictional) by giving his True Name to a God.   Unfortunately for Elroy original, the ritual purchased was real and summoned Nyarlathotep, in the guise of The Black Man, whom Elroy original struck an infernal bargain with.  As a result of putting his True Name in The Black Man’s book, Elroy original got his wish of being immune from taxes and alimony.  However, since Elroy original sacrificed his True Name, Nyarlathotep created Elroy fictional, a perfect copy of Elroy original except a Hunting Horror in disguise, designed to kill Elroy original and take his place in the real world. The reason for Nyarlathotep’s creation of Elroy fictional is uncertain and done for inscrutable cosmic reasons, but I suggest Nyarlathotep did it because He thought it would be funny.  

The completion of the ritual leads to Elroy original getting blackout drunk from the horror of the ritual, waking up to Elroy fictional being present, being physically assaulted by Elroy fictional, attempting to fight back and kill Elroy fictional, both Elroys being arrested by the police for a domestic disturbance, and now both Elroys accusing the other of being an imposter while nursing an epic hangover in a police holding cell. 

One story that inspired Liam Myrkr. Available here

Adding a new character: Liam Myrkr, cultist-lawyer

Ok. Having said all that, I asked the author of the scenario if they had any ideas about converting the game from the modern era to the 1920s, given that there were no sovereign citizens in the 1920s.  

The author suggested that Elroy McIntyre may have fallen for a bad legal advice scam and now he was crazy. 

I turned the idea that Elroy had been suckered by bad legal advice into a character. A Nyarlathotep cultist-lawyer, to be specific, who arrived at a discovery of the Mythos from delving into the law, religion, and accounting.  This cultist-lawyer was responsible for drafting and selling the ritual to Elroy. Since one of my players chose the Swedish language at 40%, I made the cultist-lawyer Swedish and named him Liam Myrkr. The name was an Easter egg meaning literally “Light Darkness” as a Haunter in the Dark reference.

In the original The (Un)Natural Man scenario there was an NPC lawyer Al Silverstein. The purpose of that lawyer NPC was to be a vehicle to inform the players about crank sovereign citizen theory necessary to the plot, and convey that Elroy McIntyre original got into a scuffle behind a local diner in his past, thus establishing that Elroy is pugilistic curmudgeon. I decided to move those clues from the character of Al Silverstein into the notes and files of Liam Myrkr. 

Importantly I made the decision to have Liam Myrkr not reachable as an interrogatable character. I took a page from Dreams in the Witch House and had Myrkr disappear to unnatural parts unknown by carving the Gate spell into the corner of the bedroom of his apartment.   This allowed the players to gradually discover Myrkr through his writings and annotations found in his law office and home. 

Specifically, I added three clues at Liam’s law office to illuminate the purpose and nature of the ritual sold to Elroy original. 

The first clue was information about making pacts with God through the law (in a bizarre interpretation of the Magna Carta) and pacts with otherworldly Beings through trade or an exchange of one’s life/soul/True Name.  I put these details as annotations in the book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) by Margaret Murray which was discoverable in Myrkr’s office library. 

The second clue I added was contained in a French Bible (one of my players chose French as a language) as more annotations.  These annotations stated, that the Catholic God was not the real God, and cross references between God and the US and Swedish law. Also, there were musings about the fundamentals of the law based on Catholicism, pacts, trade, and Gods.

The third clue was in Liam’s accounting notes. It discussed people owing money to the state, odd mathematical gibberish about taxes, the soul, blood, what “one owes to God,” one’s True Name, and separation from worldly legal taxes or financial responsibilities to the government.  

The purpose of these clues was to lead the players to a scenario resolution where they could get rid of Elroy fictional by having Elroy original reclaim his True Name from Nyarlathotep by signing a contract with the US government or the Catholic God.  More on that in the resolution section. 

Adding a new character: Wilma McIntyre, estranged wife

In addition to Liam Myrkr, I added Elroy’s estranged wife, Wilma McIntyre as a character. I added her to tell the players that Elroy did not have any twins, brothers or cousins that looked like him.  This was to remove the possibility in the player’s minds that Elroy fictional was a natural human and have them consider unnatural possibilities. 

Also, an important clue Wilma conveyed was that she had been pressing her claim for community property in California (California had community property laws back in the 1920s) for 5 months since the divorce, and then mysteriously dropped the claim and did a complete reversal saying that she no longer wanted her half of Elroy’s property and money. 

The reason for Wilma dropping the case was that Elroy successfully executed the ritual giving away his True Name and obtaining his wish of immunity from alimony from Nyarlathotep. Wilma was now under the magical influence of Elroy’s ritual, and her sudden reversal made the players very suspicious of what Elroy original had done in the days prior to Elroy fictional showing up. 

I also positioned Wilma “off camera” by having her in Florida with her mother and only reachable by phone.  This limited the party’s interaction with her and allowed me to suggest that Wilma only had two clues and otherwise was an investigative dead end.  

Additional changes and 1920s Tax Law 

One important change was that I made Elroy a landowner (small plot of land with a two-story house) in Castaic in outskirts of LA county.  I did this so that it was clear Elroy had the resources for legal recourse incase players got frustrated and tried to use physical methods to get to the truth of who was the real Elroy.  Which would not have worked anyway because Elroy original was the real one, and Elroy fictional had access to all of Elroy original’s memories and motivations. 

Another change I made was to change Tony Linetti into Elroy’s gardener rather than Elroy’s landlord. Tony Linetti’s clue about there being no breaking and entering to the Elroy house remained the same. Also, he served as another source of the information that the party could receive from Wilma McIntyre, namely that Elroy had no twins, brother or cousins that looked like him.

So how did I deal with the main issue that sovereign citizens do not show up in the USA until the 1970s? Well, I decided to sidestep the issue. By looking into taxes. 

I leaned into the idea that Elroy was a drunk who has gotten increasingly crazy over the years and hated the high taxes that had been issued post WWI. 

Let’s talk about tax law in California in the 1920s.

 For reference, individuals and businesses in California were subject to the federal income tax, which saw significant rate reductions during that decade. In 1920-1921, the top marginal rate was 73% (on income over $1,000,000).  In 1922-1923, the top marginal rate on that same level of income was reduced to 58%.  Lower income brackets also saw reductions, with the lowest marginal rates falling from 4-11% in 1921 to 1.5-5% from 1925-1931.

Now I’ll be honest, I got this information from the google AI summary. I like my readers but my mind slides right off things like tax law so I didn’t do a deep dive and verify any of this. 

Even though the tax rate was dropping, Elroy was still a hoary chestnut and wanted to weasel out of his taxes. The high tax rate and the community property Wilma was demanding from his divorce were the two main motivations for Elroy to find Liam Myrkr and execute the ritual that summoned Nyarlathotep.

By Iohn Wright, Public Domain

Resolution and After-Action Report

One of the ways to resolve the scenario is to get Elroy original to reclaim his True Name by willingly signing himself over to some form of government authority. 

I modified this resolution end point by allowing Elroy original to also reclaim his True Name if he willingly signed a document rejoining himself to another God, specifically the Catholic God. 

In the Liam Myrkr section, I had introduced three clues that suggestively pointed to the idea that one could reclaim one’s True Name (or do the reverse) by making pacts/contracts with Gods or the government. 

I thought all three clues would help make it clear that Elroy would need to reclaim his Name legally by signing a contract with the US government or the Catholic God in order to get out of the previous ritual contract with Nyarlathotep.  

This was not obvious to the players at the penultimate portion of the game and I had to prompt them a bit. I was reading the Three Clue Rule by The Alexandrian again recently and realized I violated the Corollary: Proactive Clues A.K.A Bash Them On the Head With It. I should have been clearer and more direct. 

In retrospect, the players and I were pressed for time at the end and I accepted Elroy signing a contract with “God” in general as breaking the previous Mythos contract. When Elroy original signed the contract, Elroy fictional disappeared in a crack of unseasonable thunder and a scream from a room on the other side of the cell block.  

Honestly, I have some misgivings with this conclusion because the Catholic God has no power in Lovecraft’s Mythos, but I did not really specify which God Elroy was making a new contract with either.  Lesson learned for next time.

The following are my post-game musings. 

I think putting Liam Myrkr and Wilma McIntyre off camera this focused the attention of the party back on Elroy once they realized there was no cultist to intimidate, which was a good thing! One player was trying to get a reaction out of Elroy saying that the OTHER Elroy was going to remarry Wilma because he wasn’t a drunk and was a better Elroy than him.  This led to both Elroys breaking down into blubbering messes, because Elroy fictional was part of the original Elroy’s Jungian Shadow and I played them both as sad and regretful drunk assholes. 

Another gem by the players as they tried to get to the truth, was threatening the Elroys with “being put at the bottom of the LA reservoir if you don’t tell us what’s going on.”  It was a darkly comical opening move and I think inspired by the film L.A. Confidential. Naturally, it made the Elroys more frightened and belligerent.  

After the game I explained the original plot of The (Un)Natural Man to the players.  One player found the premise of the Elroys and the sovereign citizen elements interesting and different from most CoC games.  My other player keyed into the idea of the scenario being inspired by Doctor Faustus once the Elroy was discussing signing a contract with “Someone” or “some God.”

A good time was had by all in about 4-5 hours of gameplay. Thanks to Bird Bailey for writing The (Un)Natural Man.

Choir of Flesh, Useful Tables

 Choir of Flesh has many evocative descriptions in its tables. I wanted to add to them. On pages 100 and 101 of the core book there are d20 tables for Ruined Landmark and Natural Feature descriptions, respectively.  Here are my 10 additions for each table, with day and night variations for each entry.

Environmental Storytelling

There are stories behind a handful of the entries. I hope my intent of what has happened in the locations comes across in the descriptions. 

Ruined Chimney - A family was immolated in their house by Purifiers here 

Chalk Mound - The Choir turned a parent protecting his two children into chalk statues. Now they erode into dust when the wind blows. 

Chapel of the Dancing Plague – The Dancing Plague was a real event! Most famously it occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace (modern France) in 1518. However, I got my hands on a paper in the Lancet (medical journal) called “A forgotten plague: making sense of dancing mania” by John Waller.

Waller’s article describes the dancing mania as being recorded as early as Christmas Eve in 1021. Since the twin apocalypses of Choir of Flesh occur in 1001 AD, I thought I could include a nod to this odd event in medieval history as the dates are close enough.  

Lancet article on the dancing plague found here.

Abandoned Suit of Armor- This references the biblical story of Lot’s wife being turned into a pillar of salt. Lay the blame at the feet of the Choir for turning the Norman warrior into salt.  

Eerie Farmstead- The peasants were assumed into heaven in a Rapture. 

Copse of the Watchful Squirrels - I attempted to make squirrels scary without making them homicidal flesh eaters.

Ring of Burning Toadstools – This references the Burning Bush that Moses encountered in the Old Testament story. 

Additional Thoughts

I would like some advice from you, the reader, about software or techniques to improve the layout of my tables. Currently I make them in word or excel and frankly I would like to present them in a more aesthetically pleasing manner.  Please post ideas in the comments below. 

In the core Choir of Flesh book, the brutal Purifiers are described on page 98 in a single dramatic paragraph and in the NPC stat block on page 198.  But what we know about them is limited.  

Frankly, I want more. It is stated that they act as general antagonists; fighting the Choir, the Flesh and anyone else they feel like. There has got to be more detail and interesting nuance BlackOath Entertainment has in store for us. 

Also, we know that the Purifiers have taken over the city of Tours and use it as home base. What does the city look like after the twin apocalypses?  Are there conflicts in the city between factions in the Purifiers?  Are citizens huddled inside locked doors praying for salvation, or is there trade between neighborhoods and some semblance of civilization continuing?  The Choir and the Flesh are omnipresent.  Do they subtly influence encounters and terrain inside the city?  

What would that look like, for example, in a random table? 

These are some of the questions that go through my mind when reading and playing this game of medieval and cosmic horror.  

Choir of Flesh, Apocrypha Early Access

 The medieval post-apocalypse horror rpg Choir of Flesh has been released after a successful kickstarter. It can now be found on DriveThruRPG here and itch.io here!  Full disclosure, the DTRPG link is the affiliate link for my blog. 

I have written a partial review of Choir of Flesh and completed character creation for a solo game here.

The kickstarter for Choir of Flesh also had a number of stretch goals.  These stretch goals for additional mechanics, backstory and tables are coming in the form of a zine called Apocrypha.  I have had the opportunity to read a beta version of Apocrypha that contains some of the art, and I can say with full conviction that it is really good with more Choir of Flesh eye-popping art, and equally top-tier writing.  

My book review of the 33 pages of Apocrypha will follow. You can get your hands on Apocrypha if you are a kickstarter backer likely next month, once it is fully complete, according to Blackoath Entertainment.  Public release is expected to come in January 2026.  At that point Apocrypha will be available for purchase via DTRPG, itch.io and Amazon.

Onward to the book review!

The Nephilim

Apocrypha opens with the last stretch goal: The Nephilim’s Arrival. Now what is a Nephilim? In the Hebrew Bible Nephilim are supposedly beings of great size and strength or possibly great power and authority which some sources claim are offspring of rebellious angels and humans.  

Apocrypha has a unique really interesting take on Nephilim that further builds out the world of Choir of Flesh.  Nephilim are alchemical amalgams of a Choir’s Angel stripped down and fused with human body parts and elements of the Flesh so that the giant monstrosity functions as one unit from disparate parts. This giant, Frankensteinian creature was made as a weapon against both the Choir and the Flesh by gnostics with alchemical techniques. As the book says, with a chilling line, “This [Nephilim] was a weapon of war. It did not need to stay sane.” 

This is great worldbuilding. We already know that members of the Roman Catholic Church are terrorized by the Choir in Italy and pagans are competing or just trying to survive the Flesh when it has been summoned in their lands. Now we know what a new group of people, the gnostics, are doing in the twin apocalypse of 1001 AD.  

Frankly this is exactly what I wanted from an expansion of Choir of Flesh. It provides more information about what other peoples are doing in this blasted post-apocalyptic medieval world and how they are coping, or seizing on the opportunity for change. 

The chapter continues, describing how the Nephilim are a threat to the settlement you have built in the base game. Ultimately the Nephilim will be inexorably drawn to your lands to wreak havoc unless you and your party charge into a new Incursion written for Apocrypha, find the Nephilim’s spoor, and destroy it. 

One of the many things I like about this chapter is the use of color symbolism in the Omens that herald the Nephilim’s coming; and the same symbolism is sprinkled throughout the encounters in the new Incursion.  The Choir and Flesh are well defined in the core book, so how is the Nephilim, this amalgam between the two, made distinct?

The author uses the colors red and crimson in natural and unnatural phenomena to signify the Nephilim’s encroaching violence.  One quote I can give from the book is “Grasshoppers and butterflies turn bright crimson in the fields and die midflight.”  There are other Omens that describe red ants pouring forth from the ground and swarming in the air; and crimson clovers releasing choking pollen.  In addition, in the Incursion an exploration is described that progresses through a ruined gnostic laboratory. During this delve, the color red is featured in various descriptions and progressively as the player’s reaches the Incursion’s dark climax. 

This style of writing is literary and not often seen in tabletop rpgs. As I said before, the writing in this book it top-notch. 

In addition, there are elements of the design of the new Incursion to find the Nephilim’s spoor that stand out to me as being well crafted.  In the core book, an Incursion is randomly generated from a table of 100 points of interest.  These points of interest are all thematic, graphic, and dangerous; but they are mostly self-contained.  The points of interest in the new Nephilim Incursion are steps in a journey the lead to the climax of a story.  

There is foreshadowing in the early points of interest.  Features of the Flesh and the Choir are seen in the same setting; casually side by side as seams of meat in the earth along with wildflowers that sing the Choir’s song when wind passes them by.  Or more grotesquely in a stone circle where one hemisphere has been infested by the Flesh and the other half is consecrated to the Choir. In that supernaturally charged locale the players are forced to make a choice between the two sides or navigate a third more dangerous middle path.  

The themes of alchemy are slowly revealed in the nine points of interest.  A terrible implied alchemical accident has created a morbid watchtower that may test the player’s humanity.  A dormitory is found before the ruined gnostic workshop that birthed the horrid Nephilim is encountered.  Abhorrent alchemical experiments can be found in both locations and the subsequent one in which there is a particular flower. I will not discuss the final area. It is for you to discover. 

New Notable Citizens

Moving along in Apocrypha, we come to the new Notable Citizens chapter.  All the new Notable Citizens are great and would be vibrant characters to interact with, but four stand out to me as having deeper roleplay potential.  Brother Gregor the Anatomist, Bastian the Reeve, Luc the Lookout, and Isolier the Sin Eater are characters that frankly I want to plop down in a multiplayer game and have my players interact with them. 

Take Bastian the Reeve for example. A reeve is an administrative official serving a king or lesser lord in a variety of roles in Anglo-Saxon England. In Apocrypha, Bastian can act as your settlement’s judge, jury and enforcer of the law.  And Bastian clings to the “Old Law” as fervently as your Unbroken character clings to their Sin to keep them going through the horrors of the apocalypse.  In a multiplayer game, you could spend a couple hours with this character debating the morality of Old World Law, if it even applies in this post-apocalyptic world, if it should be revised, or even based on a more religious or humanistic world view. Isolier the Sin Eater has similar interaction potential on the themes of Sin and redemption.

New Settlement Options

Next up, we have the new settlement options chapter. This is full of random tables to flesh out your settlement, including tables for the surrounding environment, weather, the central structure of the settlement, quirks for your population as a whole with mechanical effects, downtime events, and the notorious Celebration and Carousing table. Someone had a fun time writing this because entries such as It Is Vital That We Go Into The Fields And Knock Over The Cows and Absolute Blowout are quite fun.  This re-centers the idea in Choir of Flesh that the player is trying to maintain their humanity in this grim-dark horrific apocalypse. 

New Character Options

In the new character options chapter, there are 16 new Feats and 8 new Drawbacks. I'll have to spend some time theory crafting to really have an opinion on those.  The new Drive and Revelation mechanics look good. Drive is a new resource for player to spend to enhance their rolls to be heroic or survive by just squeaking by. It does make players more powerful or resilient but I do not think it makes them overpowered, since Choir of Flesh’s encounters can be punishing.  I do think that Drive is more useful for a game master than it is in solo play because the Drive resource is replenished by roleplaying their Passions (Sin, Doom or Anchor), their Drawbacks and just by participating in a session.  That is not to say that one cannot use Drive in solo play. Far from it, the mechanics are there and simple to fulfill. I just think that giving points of Drive is a nice reward that is not experience, treasure or settlement resource related that encourages players to explore their Passions in the Choir of Flesh world with a game master present. 

Final Thoughts

Apocrypha is 33 pages with no space wasted. Either there is excellent art, interesting new mechanics, or compelling story present.  Having said that, what more would I like to see in the future? Well, there is a line on page 7 that has fired my imagination. "The pagans who summoned the Flesh were immediately subsumed into its ranks, becoming undifferentiated gristle at the heart of something ancient."

What is going on with the pagans? Which pagans? How are they coping with members of their population turning to the Flesh or the Choir?  Is it possible that a fraction of a pagan tribe got trapped inland and now may interact with your settlement because they were on a boat when the Seas turned to Flesh and they are displaced? 

There is a lot of fertile history to be mined in the vibrant world of Choir of Flesh and I want to see more of it. 

Additional Delta Green Scenario Thoughts

Found two relatively new science articles that inspired some Delta Green ideas.  I am also including a declassified article from the Department of Defense from October 1966 on the subject of hypnosis, along with my thoughts on a recent review (2024) on the possible mechanisms of hypnosis, because why not.

A mind-reading brain implant that comes with password protection

The subheading reads, “A brain–computer interface decodes in near-real time the imagined speech of people who have difficulty enunciating words.”  

But is that really what the research news shows?  What defines “imagined speech” and how is it measured? Is it really thoughts that are being read by the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI)?

To drill down and answer some of these questions I investigated the original research paper in Cell that the science news story is based off of. The title of the research paper is Inner speech in motor cortex and implications for speech neuroprostheses by Kunz et al.

In the paper, four people with specific BCIs called "BrainGate2" who also had trouble speaking, one because of a stroke and three because of motor neuron disease, had microelectrodes placed in their brain's motor cortex. The BrainGate2 implant was able to pick up words and numbers thought, by the patients, during "inner speech", as well as during perceived speech and silent reading.

In addition, the researchers used AI "...to recognize phonemes, the smallest units of speech, in the neural recordings. The team used language models to stitch these phonemes together to form words and sentences in real time, drawn from a vocabulary of 125,000 words." 

The researchers stated the following about decoding sentences thought by participants with the real-time inner-speech decoder when describing data in Figure S5:

“To further investigate scenarios in which decoding private inner speech may be possible, participants were prompted to reflect on verbal or autobiographical details (e.g., “think about your favorite quote from a movie” versus “think about your favorite food”) or to “clear your mind.” Neural activity during thinking was decoded offline using the real-time inner-speech decoder from the same day. Significantly more words were decoded during verbal thought prompt responses than when prompted to “clear your mind” (Figure S5). Although most decoded sentences were largely gibberish with occasional plausible phrases, we refrain from reporting the specific outputs given the uncertainty about their representativeness of the participants’ actual thoughts.”

So, if the AI is trained correctly and the implant is in the right place (motor cortex) then inner speech of the subject can be translated into sentences in real time. Mind reading. At least of surface thoughts.

In the Delta Green world, one can imagine this technology, or its next iteration, would be great when paired with enhanced interrogation techniques on a recalcitrant human subject. 

I can imagine two Delta Green scenarios featuring the mind-reading BrainGate 2 implant.  In the first scenario, some shadowy DoD project is being implemented overseas in a warzone or black site, using terrorists or enemy combatants as test subjects for improving the device by forcible implantation.   Perhaps the researchers unwittingly unleash the undiscovered Pineal gland in one of the unwilling subjects and he makes a deal with the Entities he can now perceive. Blood and chaos ensue in the overseas black site and Delta Green needs to clean up the area now haunted by extradimensional invisible creatures (see the HPL short story From Beyond) and figure out what happened.

In the second scenario, I am taking a page from Cyberpunk Red or Shadowrun corporate wars. One could imagine March Tech already has competing brain-to-speech technology from Mi-go braincase physical examples and research. Perhaps March Tech was waiting to introduce mind reading implants to secure lucrative DoD government contracts but the researchers behind the BrainGate 2 implant formed a corporation and just gained first mover advantage. Perhaps March Tech taps Delta Green agents in The Program to go investigate the BrainGate 2 implant research corporation.  

Or perhaps on the other side of the equation, March Tech sent out security from the paramilitary group the Breckenridge Corporation (see Handler’s Guide page 98) to suppress or destroy their mundane competitor's research. In this case Delta Green could be brought in to investigate the mundane competitor’s mind-reading research to see if there is any Mythos taint, and then backtrack on the Breckenridge raid to find March Tech is up to the real Mythos research. 

How you breathe is like a fingerprint that can identify you

Great. From the Department of New and Interesting Ways to Surveil Everyone comes this science article about how your breath can also convey your physical and mental state. Like anxiety or depression.  The Nature news article was based on the paper in the journal Current Biology titled Humans have nasal respiratory fingerprints.

97 participants wore a nasal respiratory device and researchers tracked their breathing over 24 hours. After a machine-learning algorithm was trained on the breathing data, and a second measurement was taken and analyzed, the algorithm could identify people from their breath patterns with 96.8% accuracy.

Now how could this information be useful in the covert world of Delta Green?  Imagine a subsection of March Tech that functions like Q Division in the James Bond world and gives Delta Green agents of The Program experimental devices for surveillance/counter-surveillance.  Spy-tech if you will.  

Now imagine a contact lens generated by this Q Division that automatically calculates breathing patterns of people you focus on and provides a digital readout to the wearer. It could identify people the agent has already seen before, cutting through disguises, or perhaps give the agent a mechanical bonus to social checks because the agent is informed if the subject is depressed or anxious based on their nasal breathing patterns. I could see such a device being used by the CIA or cutting-edge Delta Green agents in good standing with the Program. 

When I bounced this science news story off of members of the Sci-Fi RPG Collective discord, a short scenario idea was suggested by Sammy J. 

Scenario Idea: Breathprint

What if, in the race to find the most secure biometrics to replace password logins, nasal respiratory breathprints were used by a startup company as the method to replace personal data identifiers.  The idea being that the raw data for these breathprints could be stored in such a way that it would be very difficult to match a breathprint with an individual without specific proprietary analytic software.  The startup company acquires investors and establishes itself in a US small city because they claim if there is a data breech of the breathprint data it would be almost impossible to doxx their users. 

Now what if the startup founders had found an ancient Mythos manuscript that described cultivation of the human soul through the study of breath.  The manuscript mentions Qigong and other breathing techniques and capturing the soul through knowing how someone breathes. 

The Mythos-minded startup company, with their breathprint data, develops or implements a ritual to steal soul energy (POW in Delta Green mechanics) subtly and gently from those members who use their own breathprint as a biometric password. Think of this as a penny rounding scheme done en mass to all individuals enrolled in the company’s breathprint database.  A penny rounding scheme is a popular urban legend (for example seen in the movies Office Space and Superman 3) in which a programmer alters a program at a bank so it diverts fractions of a cent from every transaction to another account so he can collect it later. 

Where the Mythos-minded company is storing the soul-energy or for what ends is left as an exercise for the reader.  However, Delta Green could detect something nefarious is going on in the city where the breathprints are being stored by the company by identifying a measured uptick in suicides and insanity incidents caused by the massive POW fractional drain on the population.  Enter your favorite group of Delta Green agents.  Perhaps the agents could diagnose the source of the widespread Mythos malaise by interviewing afflicted people and uncovering common images in dreams about maze-like office corridors, incense filled server rooms, a humming radio tower on top of the Mythos corporate building or other evocative images that point to the epicenter. 

Thanks to Sammy J, Mangoes and MobiusTrobius on the Sci-Fi RPG Collective discord for discussion and feedback for these ideas. 

Hypnosis in Intelligence

A declassified confidential report from October 1966 indicates that the Department of Defense (DoD), was researching hypnosis and how to use it to control human behavior in the context of warfare and intelligence work.  Their exploration had two goals: to identify if hypnosis could be used to strengthen the will of captives and if it could be used to “gain compliance from otherwise uncooperative persons.”

The document starts out with an exploration of the history of hypnosis that references Anton Mesmer’s work as “mesmerism” (Mesmer first explored animal magnetism in 1774), goes into the methods of inducing trance including waking hypnosis and a focus on the “Sensorimotor Method” attributed to the psychiatrist Harold Rosen, discusses posthypnotic suggestion, and autosuggestion. 

The document is 33 pages and I will leave mining all the details of hypnosis as an operational aide to readers in the audience.  I will mention, there is an interesting section on hypnosis and drugs as well as a few paragraphs on the “defensive uses of hypnosis” and one section on hypnosis to enhance recall. 

What’s important for the next paper I will discuss is that as early as 1966, it was recognized that a hypnotized subject under trance (called somnambulism in the DoD report) could respond positively to the following suggestions: catalepsy and rigidity, a positive hallucination (subject sees persons or objects who are not there), negative hallucinations (subject fails to see persons or objects present), analgesia (inability to feel pain), and amnesia for events in hypnosis. 

Since hypnosis is pretty outside my field, and I was curious as to what hypnosis researchers thought, I did some digging on pubmed as to the current mechanism theorized for how hypnosis functions. I found a free, recent (2024) review article on the subject with references back to 1959. It is titled How hypnotic suggestions work – A systematic review of prominent theories of hypnosis and it is quite fascinating. 

The review discusses hypnotic suggestions and presents current theories (at least 10 distinct theories including multicomponent theories) by which researchers hypothesize hypnosis works.

  

Several elements of hypnotic suggestion that have been researched in the literature since 2024 are discussed. I will describe just a few. The authors state that a hypnotic suggestion can be induced in a relaxed environment or during strenuous physical activity.  I was not aware of the idea that hypnosis could be carried out through strenuous physical activity. It made me wonder, if one is on a triathlon, or even leading a group of military men on an extreme march, could hypnotic suggestions be implanted?  

The review goes on to explain that there are three broad phases of hypnosis: an induction phase (orienting or disorienting), an intermediary phase consisting of suggestions (hypnotic or post-hypnotic suggestions), and a termination phase (de-induction). 

It was then discussed that the changes that the hypnosis procedure can induce in subjects are generally only well-learned or well-known responses. This is regardless of whether the suggestion is implanted in the hypnotic or posthypnotic manner. A classical example of this from research published in the 1940s suggest that when participants think of a movement or a well-known stimulus and its effects, then the result is participants usually execute that movement thought of. 

In the hypnosis nomenclature, changes in perception are commonly called “hallucinations.” Now, by examining the 1966 DoD report on hypnosis we went over the concept of positive and negative hallucinations.  So that is old news to hypnosis researchers. What is new in the review, however were documented examples of positive and negative hallucinations.  For example, a typical positive hallucination that can be induced is a color hallucination where subjects report seeing a grayscale in different colors when suggested to do so.  An example of a negative hallucination is “the hypnosis-induced elimination or reduction of pain inflicted by noxious stimuli.” 

In addition to positive and negative hallucinations, the review reports “hypnotic and posthypnotic suggestions can affect long-term memory.” Specifically posthypnotic suggestions can induce amnesia. This induced amnesia is very specific; about when, where, and how knowledge has been acquired.  To me this just codifies the classical example that hypnosis could be used to implant a suggestion in the subject and then wipe or muddle the hypnotist and the hypnotic situation from the subject’s memory. At least for a time. 

Hypnosis in the world of Delta Green

So, there is a lot here on hypnosis to use operationally for intelligence work or warfare in Delta Green or modern-day focused RPGs. 

One of the more immediate thoughts I had for the use of hypnotism in a Delta Green game is the inclusion of inducing positive or negative hallucinations or amnesia in NPCs.  A Delta Green trained hypnotist might be crucial for ensuring coverups of indemnifying evidence (that could lead back to the conspiracy) or attempting to have subjects ignore memories of traumatic supernatural events. DG hypnotists could achieve these goals by inducing negative hallucinations, in say police investigators, to coerce the subject to ignore an important name on a bit of paperwork or to suggest positive hallucinations where the subject is sure they saw a video tape even though DG teams absconded with it.

Now personally I do not think that mechanically any Sanity roll in Delta Green should be mitigated by hypnosis, or exposure to the unnatural Mythos can be “healed” by methods devised by humans, including hypnosis.  The Mythos by its fundamental nature is corrosive, and humans are biologically not equipped to deal with entities from other dimensions, other parts of space, or other times.  I think the Mythos impacts humanity on a genetic, atomic, or even deeper level currently unknown to science, in a way that unravels or erodes the fundamental essence of what is humanity in a person.

Regaining points of Sanity in a meager manner by a Delta Green agent going to therapy and being honest in Downtime, I see as humans telling each other lies about themselves so they can function for a little bit longer in society; not as “healing” a psychic wound with human invented psychological tricks.   After all, the more in the Unnatural skill the player has mechanically, the less maximum Sanity they have; indicating that understanding the Mythos is utterly antithetical to human mental stability. 

Having said all that I would find it interesting if mechanically a DG Game Master ruled that, pre-hypnotized Delta Green (or Majestic-12) agents could delay the onset of Sanity damage taken by an encounter with the Mythos, because the agents were implanted with reinforced positive and/or negative hallucinations.  Your game, your rules.

In terms of using hypnosis antagonistically against a Delta Green team, I can think of two interesting examples from media.  The first is the X-files episode Pusher. Incidentally Vince Gilligan of Breaking Bad fame wrote this episode and it aired in 1996. In Pusher (spoilers follow), the antagonist is arrested by the police at the beginning of the show. Mysteriously, the antagonist repeatedly chants that “cerulean blue is a gentle breeze.”  This subsequently causes the police car to collide with the truck which allows the antagonist to escape.  The implication here is that the antagonist hypnotized the driver of the police car and his captor into a negative hallucination of not seeing a semi-trailer truck the color of “cerulean blue.” 

We learn later that a brain tumor may be responsible for enhancing the antagonists’ hypnosis ability to supernatural levels, which allows him to earn a living as a hit-man by inducing people to commit suicide or homicide through suggestion.   Granted this speculative use of hypnosis is not backed up by the real-life literature at all, but in the Delta Green world, fighting an antagonistic hypnotist may be an interesting change of pace for the agents. 

Secondly, there is the example of the use of hypnosis in Jeff VanderMeer’s book Annihilation.  Spoilers for that book follow.  I cannot say if the following discussion applies to the movie Annihilation (2018), because I have not seen it.  In the book, the main character the biologist increasingly becomes suspicious of her regimen of training under hypnosis that the mysterious Southern Reach organization has been subjecting her to before she started her mission into Area X.  After learning she is now resistant to hypnotic suggestion, she finds evidence that her perceptions were thoroughly compromised by hypnosis (i.e. not seeing the real truth of what a tower is made out of) and she finds that her psychologist “minder” had a series of post-hypnotic suggestion keywords on her to induce paralysis, induce acceptance, compel obedience or attempt to induce immediate suicidal actions in the biologists or any other member of the team.  Again, like the X-files show Pusher, we leave the world of real hypnosis research and jump into the realm of fantasy, but said fantasy is perfect for inspiration and fodder for Delta Green conspiracy-horror games. 

Choir of Flesh Part 1: Early Access and Character Creation

“And when the Lamb opened the seventh seal,/Silence covered the sky.” 

-Enigma, Rivers of Belief. A description of Revelation 8:1-5. 

It is the year of our Lord 1000.  There is a crack in Heaven.  Light and Song erupt from the spiritual wound in the sky.  Seven Trumpets sound, breaking the Seven Seals, which pour out the Seven Bowls of God's wrath.  The eschaton has come.

Revelation is at hand!

But not Salvation. Oh no.

The Celestial Choir descend from above and their Song reshapes the flesh of those who hear it. New mouths sprout from mortal flesh, gasping in eternal prayers and psalms. Bones resonate in synchrony with the Song and those humans who bow to the Will of their Celestial masters become remade into fleshy abominations called Penitents.

But that is not the worst. Oh no.

Something ancient, Evil and Silent climbs from the abyssal spaces of the Earth. Flooding from the once proud city of Toledo, now engulfed by the Earth; The Flesh That Feeds has come and it unmakes all, human, and Nature alike.  Forests are converted to flesh, mankind is respun into the Unmade; all touched with a terrible unstoppable hunger. 

These two unnatural eldritch forces clash and the survivors of the last civilization of humanity must eke out a meager existence, stuck between twin apocalyptic forces.  

This is the world of the Choir of Flesh, the latest brainchild of Alex T. from Blackoath Entertainment.

I am a Patreon member of Blackoath Entertainment (Order of the Black Oath) at the Evocatus level, and as lovely consequence I have obtained the Beta 1 release of the Choir of Flesh solo focused RPG game. As of the time of this writing, the Beta 1 of Choir of Flesh was released about 20 hours ago.  In addition, for full disclosure, I am a member of Alex T’s discord and have corresponded with him. 

At the moment, early access to the Choir of Flesh Beta is only available through Patreon membership to the Order of the Black Oath. The full public release of the game is expected to occur at the end of September 2025. 

The current Beta document is a hefty 221 pages. I have read the first 45 pages. And yes, I am starstruck. Along with the evocative introduction, the first section includes: a description of the Core Themes, Character Creation, base-building mechanics called Your Settlement (options are included for playing Lone Wolf, or without a community to protect), description of mechanics for the core d20 Checks, and rules for the Humanity stat and the Anguish stat.

I find it interested that each character has to balance Anguish (which increases upon significant physical mental or spiritual shock) and Humanity (which decreases as the character is subjected to otherworldly forces of the Choir or The Flesh).  It creates this sort of push-pull claustrophobic feeling to the mechanics.  As an old Call of Cthulhu Game Master (Keeper), I think this is better than just a Sanity score that erodes over time. I can’t wait to try it out in game.  

Inspired by History

Historical research is a wonderful rabbit hole to dive into. Doubly so when one can adapt fascinating historical events, ideas and characters for use in a fictional world like Choir of Flesh.

Since I do not know too much about world history, and specifically Western Europe, in the run up to 1000 AD, I found this lovely Oxford Reference Timeline of the 10th century. 

The following are some choice historical excerpts and my speculation on how they may fit into the world of the Choir of Flesh.

“911, The Vikings settle in France, as Normans, when Rollo the Ganger is granted feudal rights over the region round Rouen.

Circa 981, Eric Thorvaldsson, or Eric the Red, sails to Greenland when he is exiled from Iceland.

Circa 1000, Leif Ericsson claims to have made landfall at three places in north America, one of which he names Vinland - the land of wine”

Choir of Flesh is focused on Spain in the Middle Ages but with the above data, one has an excuse for including Norse explorers into the apocalyptic world as Player Characters or NPCs.  Yes I am angling for an excuse to shoehorn Vikings into this setting! In particular I see Norse explorers as working in Choir of Flesh because the very seas have been taken over by The Flesh That Feeds and perhaps, they are tirelessly traveling to the epicenter, Toledo, to fix the problem.

“Circa 950, Medieval Europe's first institute of higher education is established, with the founding of the medical school at Salerno.”

Universities are filled with myth and legends.  Perhaps with 50 years of medieval medical research, where spirituality, religion, science and alchemy really did not have defined boundaries, some unspeakable cosmic secret was reveled at Salerno and caused either the opening of the Seals by the Choir or the quickening of The Flesh to plague the world.  

“Circa 900, With the end of iconoclasm, the screen between the nave and the altar sanctuary becomes covered in icons in Orthodox churches.

929, Wenceslas, a prince of the Premsylid family, is murdered on his way into church - and becomes Bohemia's patron saint.

Circa 960, Harald Bluetooth is baptized a Christian and unites the whole of Denmark as a single kingdom.

965, Mieszko, pagan chieftain of the Poles, marries a Christian Czech princess and brings all his people into the Roman Catholic fold.

975, The Hungarian king Gezá and his family are baptized as Roman Catholics, beginning a long link between Hungary and Rome.”

This is just a sampling of interesting historical religious changes and evolutions that occurred prior to 1000 AD.  For your Choir of Flesh game, your GM (or yourself if you are playing solo) could make any of these inciting incidents relevant for the development of the coming apocalypse. 

Alternatively, each of these events of religious significance could have revelations surrounding these events, that when pieced together, offer some sort of hope to defeat the Choir, The Flesh or seal the hole in Heaven.  Also, perhaps one has Unbroken who come from Hungary, Denmark, Poland, Bohemia or even from as far away as the Orthodox churches.

Character Creation

Without further ado, let’s make a character, called an Unbroken.  I rolled 4d6 for each Attribute (six times), dropped the lowest die and summed the remaining numbers on the three dice. Got the following numbers: 10,11, 9, 9, 14, 7.

I then assigned these numbers to my six Attributes, resulting in:

• STR 10
• DEX 9
• CON 11
• INT 14
• WIL 9
• PRE 7

So, this character has a +1 modifier to Intelligence rolls and a -1 modifier to Presence rolls.

With this Attribute profile a story begins to take shape. A mostly average gent who is sharper than normal uses his observational skills to stay one step ahead of the scourge of the Choir and The Flesh.  Shy by nature, this has only been exacerbated in the apocalypse where community ties and interpersonal communication are that much more important to survival. Will he learn how to navigate this new landscape or will he rot?

Next up this gent’s Defense Rating is +0 (currently), his Carrying Capacity is 10 and Initiative bonus is +0.

I am tired of calling him a gent at this point so I roll on the Random Name table on page 26 and get Malik.  Maybe Malik has a bit of an Arabic background.  I also settled on the idea that he came from a city (and wisely ran away when The Flesh came calling) and has an interest in medicine, but a bedside manner that leaves a lot to be desired.

Weapon and armor proficiencies are Spear and Gambeson. I figure his first spear was a makeshift thing that was his trusty dagger tied to a washerwoman’s pole. I’m getting the sense of a lucky survivor from this character.

Malik’s Feat is Lucky. It just has to be based on the story that is emerging from this character. Lucky allows one reroll of any check once per session.

Jumping ahead in the sequence of events for Character creation, I am choosing Malik’s Occupation as a Healer.  His skill from being a Healer is Healing (INT), gain +2 Mastery to checks related to healing, which makes sense. His Burden will tie into his shyness.  His craft as a Healer is now seen as witchcraft by the desperate.  A fact he does not correct because he is too embarrassed to admit he did not adequately pursue his medical studies before the apocalypse hit, and he is unsure about how effective he really is.  

Malik’s four other skills are: Brace (STR), once per combat, you can make a Hard STR check to ignore all damage from a single source; this is a Reaction. Perception (INT), gain +2 Mastery to checks related to general perception and awareness. Disease Resistance (CON), gain +2 Mastery to checks against disease. Quick Feet (DEX), Malik has two Move Actions each round.

Yes, Malik is shaping up to be a canny survivor.  I imagine him like a wary scavenger looting the outskirts of supernatural incursions…and the less lucky bodies of Unbroken who tried to be heroic. Perhaps he made some of those Unbroken into bodies himself. Time will tell.

For Malik’s Sin, or core of his character, I rolled randomly and came up with Wrath. This is fascinating given the somewhat scavenger, almost cowardly bone picker I was envisioning.  I imagine that Malik keeps this secret close to his core and is more of a silent calculating fuming monster than an explosive berserker.  As to the focus of his Wrath and the inciting incident that caused the deep insult that wounded him in this world of cosmic horror, I am going to leave that for another time.

The Shard of the Old World that Malik carries to remind himself of the world that was is A Shard of Stained Glass.  I’ll say this is a fragment of a golden saint’s halo and an edge of a cerulean blue sky. A reminder of better days when the world was not turned upside down by insanity.  Perhaps Malik keeps it to remind him that beauty was once labored over and possibly could be created again? Or perhaps Malik used this shard of glass as the blade for his first makeshift spear that was used to escape from a city in the grip of terror.  In any case, he has an almost totemic obsession with it.

Malik’s Doom is the hope that he holds close to keep from bowing to the Choir’s song or accepting dissolution in the Flesh’s embrace. Rolling randomly, I get 10, The Divine Conductor.  Malik is somewhat educated and experienced religious music.  He is smart enough to realize that a song requires organization or else it becomes nothing but a cacophony. He believes the Choir has some sort of conductor, physical or supernatural, or maybe some sort of written musical plan. If Malik can find that plan and destroy it, maybe, just maybe the Choir will dissolve. Hope springs Eternal. 

Afterword

I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it and exploring the development of the character Malik in this unique apocalyptic world of cosmic horror made by Alex T of Blackoath Entertainment.   I want to thank Clay TN on the Blackoath discord and link to their blog for inspiring me to write this.

God's Demon, Useful Tables

Wayne Barlowe is a prolific painter and illustrator who has worked as a concept artist and creature designer for the Hellboy series of films, as well as Pacific Rim and several others.  However, here I will discuss his dark fantasy work illustrating the landscape and denizens of Hell that was first published in his book Barlowe’s Inferno. Barlowe’s Inferno paints the diabolic underworld in a fantastic and grotesque fashion that strangely has a quiet sense of a still life, and is sympathetic to the damned creatures depicted therein. I have talked about Barlowe’s vision of Hell before, in my mini review of The Shrike, which is an OSR supplement point crawl in a unique vista of Hell.

As of 2007, Wayne Barlowe has become a dark fantasy writer, penning a tale of Hell called God’s Demon. Inspired by John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dr. John Dee’s Complete Enochian Dictionary, God’s Demon is filled with evocative descriptions of infernal scenes and characters.  Some of these are even supplemented by Barlowe’s paintings made for that work.

Inspired, I decided to adapt Barlowe’s words, or invent my own descriptions of Hell based on Barlowe’s work and turn them into two 1d10 random tables, suitable for hex/pointcrawling. The tables are for exterior and interior scenes of the infernal realm. Keep in mind these tables are only based on Barlowe’s first two pages of God’s Demon, so rich in vivid description that work is.

I hope you are motivated to read it yourself.