#a cosmology of monsters

[aimlesspoet]

analyzing Sylvia Plath poems within hours of reading most of A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill was maybe not the best idea for my mental health

[tenrose]

I finished A cosmology of monsters and I absolutely devoured the whole book.

It's kinda ironic how the beginning really scared me in a way no other book has ever done, when it took in fact a complete different direction to what I thought.

What scared me was that I thought we were gonna see characters slowly becoming mad and paranoid and maybe violent and we'll have trouble separating what's real and what is not.

But in the end it's not a story about monsters. The monsters are real. But the scariest monsters are the ones the characters are facing in their real lives.

It's a story about a family falling apart because of secrets, grief, depression and precarity. These are the real monsters. And in a way it's way scarier that what's scared me in the first place, because nobody can't escape real life problems (I try but hey they're still here). So my fear was replaced by sadness and the heavy weight lies and unsaid things let on a family.

I have to admit I am always found of stories about dysfunctional families and their intergenerational trauma and how intricate and hard it is to find a way out of all this. I do enjoyed that the story does not let the reader with this in the end with no sense of hope. But I guess the moral of the story, or the moral I choose to believe in is to share your emotions with your loved ones. If only I knew how to that IRL, but that's not the topic here.

Some moment were really gut-wrenching, I particularly appreciated how depression was being written.

[freewayshark]

day four - a cosmology of monsters (2019) by Shaun Hamill

Haunted house attractions, wolf creatures, and family drama collide in an unforgettable novel. The Turners are a family that sees things others do not. They all deal with this in different ways, some by building haunted house attractions, some by pretending none of it is real, and some by embracing it.

Scare-O-Meter: 🎃🎃🎃/5

[lynorlane]

April reads

Apparently April is the month where I catch up on horror. It’s such a weird genre for me. I am fascinated by horror but also easily annoyed by it. I dislike people being cruel to each other for no reason. I dislike people suffering for no reason. And I really dislike nihilistic downer endings. It’s one of the things that turned me off of Supernatural—Sam and Dean had made everywhere hostile to…

[thecreaturecodex]

The Great Game

The galaxy is sick, and has been for so long that even most of the gods have forgotten what it was like when it was healthy. If a cosmology is like an ecosystem, Golarion and its surrounding worlds have too many predators, not enough prey, too much competition, not enough mutualism. The Material Plane is a little too similar to a chaotic, evil world—like the Abyss specifically. On Golarion, it’s kill or be killed.

The reason is Lamashtu. In ages past, the Mother of Monsters ambushed Curchanus, stripping from him the portfolio of Animals and leaving him for dead. He survived long enough to pass his domain of Travel to his protégé, Desna, but Lamashtu was able to use that surge of power to claim divinity for herself and become the Queen of Demons. Since then, Lamashtu has done as she willed, fighting and fucking her way across reality and leaving thousands of new species of horrors in her wake.

But Lamashtu is a neglectful mother. Because of her influence, animals in the Material Plane are overly hostile, too aggressive, liable to pick fights that they can’t win. Animals are liable to view humanoids as prey, which leads to savage reprisals and environmental catastrophe. The species created by Lamashtu and her followers, both demonic and mortal, are born without a niche, and their shoving into the world around them leads to disruption and devastation. It’s not a coincidence that crazed wizards and misguided druids have brought so many new monsters into existence, and that one-off horrors are liable to mutate and become entire species.

But this has not gone unnoticed.

Deep within the First World lives a goddess. A Goddess of Predators, although she is only quasi-divine. For now. Mormo, the First Medusa, Goddess of Predators, has been alive since before the Age of Serpents, since before the birth of mammals. She is a primordial entity, a Great Old One, although more benevolent than most. She and Yig call each other Brother and Sister, although this may or may not represent a genetic linkage. She retreated from the Material Plane as humanity became a growing power, disgusted by the callousness of the Azlanti and the machinations of the aboleths.

But now she has chanced to gaze upon the Material again. And is horrified to see how much things have gotten worse in her absence. Mormo wants to help. And to help the best way she knows how. By killing and eating something. Someone. Lamashtu.

Mormo’s ultimate goal is to do to Lamashtu what Lamashtu did to Curchanus. Weaken her to the point where she can be fought, strip the domain of Animals from her, and ideally kill her for good. Leave the demons without a Queen, so they can go back to clawing at each other’s throats for a while. Restore the ecological balance of Golarion and allow the biological exuberance of the First World back onto the Material Plane.

But she needs help. And Lamashtu may be confident, but she’s not complacent. She knows that Mormo is gunning for her. And is bringing together allies of her own.

This is the Great Game, the cosmological underpinnings of the Age of Monsters. Gods, demigods and other entities are picking sides, or choosing to remain neutral, or remaining neutral on the surface but shoring up their favorites in secret. The teams are not defined by alignment. There are those of all alignments, of all of the planar power groups, who support Team Lamashtu or Team Mormo, in large ways or small. Any conflict where Desna and Pazuzu both have the same enemy is bound to get complicated, after all. Further articles will be posted throughout the year, tagged with The Great Game, discussing who is on who’s side, and why.

Full statistics for Mormo are forthcoming—those are likely going to be the capstone of Monster Girl Summer, posted in August. Mormo is a N great old one, with the portfolio of reptiles, terror and ecology. Her domains are Knowledge, Scalykind, Strength and Trickery, and her subdomains are Competition, Fear (modifying Trickery), Thought and Venom.

[alltingfinns]

Also technically he was taken to The Empty. Supposedly where angels and demons go when dead and basically just a quiet darkness.

just had to take a fucking second and close my eyes because i remembered that on the night of november 5th tumblr had convinced me, an outsider, that this was an actual gif of Castiel Supernatural being sent to mega fruit hell

[whatcha-reading-today]

A Cosmology of Monsters Shaun Hamill

Weird and creepy, high recommend the audiobook--the narration is great and the sound effects create an excellent atmosphere. Some of the weird just doesn't align with my interpretation of weird.

Format: Audiobook

Read in: Feb 2024

[tathracynart]

The Perennial Nightmare

Born of the dark and the wild unknown, the Perennial Nightmare is an embodiment of the campers’ fears melded with the living forest. It was once a forest spirit, but some malicious machination twisted and corrupted its purpose. Now, it embodies the nightmares of mankind. 

The Perennial Nightmare is the main monster from the MotW game I'm currently running! It's stalking the edges of Camp Perenell, waiting to slaughter anyone who treads outside the camp's grounds. It's killed three NPCs and one PC, although the PC has the ability to come back so that doesn't count

[of-gods-and-gamemasters]

An Alternate Ecology of the Slaadi.

Today's Blog Post: Where do they really come from originally? Why are there so many frog monsters? What are their sources in real world lore? DO they have a plan? Do they know it, if they do?

[grunckle]

On stars, guardians, and Rain World’s cosmology.

One aspect of Rain World lore that’s asked about quite a lot but normally never gets satisfying answers is the topic or Rain World’s space/universe/cosmology. Despite first impressions though, there’s a lot more it than meets the eye, so I thought I would compile most everything we know about it.

For one, to get it out of the way, Rain World isn’t on a planet, and its universe is fundamentally different from our own. This is something Joar has talked about on occasion.

He also said on an earlier dev log how Rain World functions more like a fantasy world where it doesn’t hold much relevance than a real sci-fi like planet.

“Oh, another thing - Rain World isn't a planet lol Cheesy Or I guess it might probably be on a planet, just as Lord of The Rings, Sex And The City, Zelda and Frankenstein's Monster are probably technically on a planet, but just as in those examples the planet aspect isn't really relevant at all. Rain World is more of a fantasy world or a dream world, not somewhere you can go in a space ship ~”

But even if it’s not incredibly relevant, it’s clear a lot of thought was put into Rain Worlds fictional cosmology, this was even mentioned by James.

So, that being said here's what we know about Rain World's cosmology in game.

The biggest indicator of Rain World's unique cosmology is that the Farm Arrays deep pink pearl just mentions celestial spheres, which are aspects of older cosmological models.

"This one is just plain text. I will read it to you. "On regards of the (by spiritual splendor eternally graced) people of the Congregation of Never Dwindling Righteousness, we Wish to congratulate (o so thankfully) this Facility on its Loyal and Relished services, and to Offer our Hopes and Aspirations that the Fruitful and Mutually Satisfactory Cooperation may continue, for as long as the Stars stay fixed on their Celestial Spheres and/or the Cooperation continues to be Fruitful and Mutually Satisfactory." ...May Not as long as the Stars stay fixed on their Celestial Spheres Grey Hand, Impure Blood, Inheritable Corruption, Parasites, or malfunction settle in Your establishment."

More subtly, there's also a mention of the ground colliding with the sky.

"If you leave a stone on the ground, and come back some time later, it's covered in dust. This happens everywhere, and over several lifetimes of creatures such as you, the ground slowly builds upwards. So why doesn't the ground collide with the sky? Because far down, under the very very old layers of the earth, the rock is being dissolved or removed. The entity which does this is known as the Void Sea."

You could chalk this line up to flowery language, but considering the presentation of the rest of the dialogue, it sounds more like an actual aspect of this world.

We know from the Chimney Canopy echo that the sun rises.

"From within my vessel of flesh, I would perch upon this spot to observe the rising of the sun."

And from the top of The Wall we can see the moon and stars (confirmed to be stars by Joar in the previous screenshot, instead of satellites or something else) , which are green!

So, what does this all mean? I think we can entail a few things with what they've given us.

For one, the mention of the ground colliding with the sky implies some sort of firmament, which isn't an unusual concept in the general realm of celestial spheres.

But on the topic of celestial spheres, the pearl actually isn't the only place we see the concept. Guardian halos are very similar to depictions of celestial spheres, and also astrological clocks.

You can make of this as you will, perhaps the astrological references being tied to guardians could hint at the nature of karma, but there isn't much to really delve into that idea.

For what it's worth, celestial spheres are also core concepts in Gnosticism, which Rain World is heavily inspired by. I explain it more in this post about Void Worms, but for a quick synopsis in Gnosticism there are seven planetary spheres, and an eighth above them; the planets and stars are fixed to their spheres. These things just further cement the fact that celestial spheres seem to be a key aspect of Rain World's cosmology, and it would also likely imply it's universe follows a geocentric model.

For a bit of a more out-there theory, people have pointed out how the view atop the wall stretches really far, going far beyond what we could see on a spherical planet like Earth, which has led some to theorize that the world is also flat.

But what is probably the most important aspect of Rain World's cosmology is the nature of dust. Dust builds up, and the bedrock of the world is eaten away at by the Void Sea. Civilizations rise and fall into the sea as new ones are built above it. Many, including myself, believe that the world exists in a sort of state of equilibrium. The world is dissolved from the bottom, then that falls back on the world as dust; even in the final moments of the game we see dust suspended in the void sea depths.

And hey, even void worms are described as being star-like.

"Oh, interesting. This is a diary entry of a pre-Iterator era laborer during the construction of the subterranean transit system south of here. In it they describe restless nights filled with disturbing dreams, where millions glowing stars move menacingly in the distance."

Cyclical, recursive, something else entirely? We can never really pin down the true nature of Rain World's cosmology, but the things we do get hint at something strange and unique. It's such an interesting aspect of the lore, and it seems like Videocult will continue to make mysterious cosmologies in their future projects...

[ckret2]

(I said earlier I had a fic excerpt about DEATH LAWYER AXOLOTL, here it is.)

The god hopefully turned to the time giant—

She shook her head, expression flat. "Nope. I'm a civil engineer, not a hostage negotiator."

—and then turned to the Axolotl. "You. You know how to talk to mortals like this triangle that's taken over Dimension Zero, don't you? Isn't he like the omnicidal monsters you represent every day?"

The Axolotl looked nervously at the wormhole into Dimension Zero. He could see blue fire and hear wails of pain on the other side. "Ah," he said.

####

Biologically there was really no such thing as a god, in the same way that botanically there is really no such thing as a vegetable. Tomatoes are fruits; spinach is a leaf; carrots are roots; broccoli is an unfinished flower. The word "vegetable" just indicates the cultural role a plant performs in the kitchen.

The word "god" indicated the cultural role an entity performed in cosmology: a god was anything that exerted enough power that mortals felt driven to worship it.

Different beings so honored with the title "god" handled it in different ways. For the Axolotl's part, he thought it was a useful designation to help with networking, but mostly it was a pain that meant he was put up on a pedestal for doing his job.

The Axolotl was a god of justice. Not the god of justice, but one. He held dominion over an abstract concept; over millions and billions of years, his words and decisions slowly, inexorably altered the idea of "justice" on a multiversal scale. Mercy, retribution, punishment, rehabilitation, equity, equality, fairness, and righteousness were like multicolored clays he could twist, squish, sculpt, and blend at his leisure, permanently altering what those ideas meant to the mortals they affected.

Which was to say: he was a lawyer.

He was also known as a god of rebirth. Which was to say: he specialized in afterlife law. Before going into law he'd only been a psychopomp, but after having to escort too many despairing souls to afterlives he felt were too severe for their sins, he'd decided he wanted a say in where he took his souls. Now he helped clients get their charges reduced so they were eligible for a higher-tier reincarnation, or got their purgatorial sentences reduced, or—on rare occasions—even helped them avoid damnation. (Although he didn't take many damnation cases. He didn't always win—and those ones were too depressing to lose.)

And lately, he'd been developing a reputation.

For the past few centuries, he'd been working on a damnation case. He was defending a supervillain who'd built a weapon that could slice open the fabric of spacetime—a crime against reality—and bisect planets in its wake. He'd died inside the jurisdiction of an afterlife that had legalized eternal damnation. Case law had long since established that the dead had to be sent either to the afterlife system of their native jurisdiction or an alternate afterlife system of their choice in order to be judged, provided that the proper afterlife accepted their transfer request.

But if this villain had been extradited to his home world, the heaviest sentence he could have faced was a thousand years purgatory, with an option for early reincarnation for good behavior after a hundred years. So the jurisdiction he'd died in had summoned up some bureaucratic red tape to dismiss his native afterlife's extradition request, and he'd been sentenced where he'd died. They'd wanted to establish via case law that the dead who had committed crimes against reality could be damned in whichever jurisdiction they happened to die in, and hoped they could get away with it just for lack of anyone protesting the move. After all, everyone involved much preferred that a mortal wicked enough to obliterate multiple populated planets and trillions of lives receive eternal punishment.

Everyone involved except the Axolotl. 

Taking this case hadn't made him many friends. He didn't care; he had his principles. Let an interplanetary supervillain be dragged away to a foreign afterlife just so that he can be forced into damnation, and next it'll be a planetary dictator; let a dictator be dragged away, and next it'll be a murderer; and next it'll be a burglar; and next it'll be a jaywalker that a psychopomp has a personal grudge against. If the Axolotl could establish that even the most undeserving mortal imaginable, a criminal against reality, still deserved the right to be sentenced in the afterlife of his choice, then he could establish that everyone less evil deserved the same right.

If he had anything to say about it, in two or three trillion years he'd see eternal punishment outlawed completely; but untilthen, he was not going to sit idly by and let this flagrant abuse of interdimensional law become the new meaning of justice! He would get that supervillain out of eternal damnation, personally escort him to his native afterlife, and see him reincarnated on his own home world—and mark his words, he would rain so much bureaucratic hell on the judges and psychopomps that had let this abuse of justice take place that no god would dare keep a soul from its rightful afterlife ever again, or he wasn't the Axolotl!

All of which was to say:

Yes, unfortunately. This triangle was like the omnicidal monsters he represented every day.

And so he was appointed hostage negotiator.

####

(And that's why a trillion years later he's the guy helping Bill submit an insanity plea so that he can go to Theraprism rather than get the permadeath penalty.)

[tenrose]

A Cosmology of monsters was only scary the first part because I thought I was gonna deal with characters getting more and more paranoid but it took a completely different direction.

However I'm not sure it's for the better because it's about dealing with grief, loneliness and depression and it's honestly to well written... I felt properly scared at the beginning but now I feel the heavy sadness and unsaid things and it's terrible...

I've barely put down the book...

[hello-dear-listener]

Why do I actually want to expand on this now. My lore centers of the brain going brrr.

Grouchy rant/Audio roleplay pet peeve: I lose it when a character's description based on exposotion/backstory doesn't actually align with their actual on-screen actions. This is especially bad with Listener characters because a lot of VAs/writers just don't know how to write Listener action, or neglect to let Listener characters interact with anyone other than their love interest.

It's so aggravating. A character will be like "This is my fiance, Demon-Stomper 9000 (but I call her Pookie). She's stomped a hundred demons and she's gonna stomp a hundred more. Sometimes I've gotta be like 'woah Pookie, you've gotta stop stomping so many demons, you might hurt yourself'."

Then when a demon is actually on screen Pookie is just like 🧍‍♀️

On my soul, give the Listener some *flavor* and let them DO SOMETHING. On screen! It doesn't even have to be in action scenes, like just for fucks sake show don't tell for once. It's very much possible within the realm of audio roleplay, it just takes a little bit of thinking and a couple of sound effects. Trust me, you'll accomplish more characterization with five minutes of them actually doing something than you would with a hundred hours of expositional backstory.

This happens with speaker characters too, and it's awful. The title of the series will be like "Mafia Boss: Criminal Chronicle [Strangers to Lovers]" then in the actual audios the mafia boss never actually commits any crimes or involves himself in anything illegal and doesn't even talk about crime. He just wears expensive suits and has a really deep voice.

Quick rule: if the audience could listen to the full length of a mafia audio and not be able to tell that the character was in a criminal organization, you didn't make a mafia audio. You just didn't, idgaf what the title says. Image watching a whole episode of the Sopranos without crime being mentioned even once. It would suck. Same with werewolves, vampires, or whatever other trope is getting abused this week.

IDK why this is such a problem in the audio roleplay medium compared to every other medium ever. We've got mafia bosses that don't commit crimes, we've got werewolves who don't turn into wolves, we've got pirate captains who don't commit piracy, we've got vampires who don't drink blood, and we've got yanderes who don't, uh, yander. It's out of control. Just commit to the character type you said you would write in the first place.

This was way longer than I intended it to be so TL;DR: Show don't tell still applies in audios, Listener characters can and should take an active role in the story, and please PLEASE stop marketing your characters around tropes that you neglet to actually write into your audios.

[ryin-silverfish]

Ask/Writing Masterlist (irregularly updating)

Ryin(阿璎), 23. She/They. First Gen Chinese student. Ryin_Silverfish on AO3. Currently hyperfixating on old Chinese novels. casual Zhiguai tales and LMK enjoyer.

Investiture of the Gods/FSYY:

Why are the Daoist immortals fighting?

Did Yuanshi Tianzun manipulate Shen Gongbao?

Chan, Jie, and possible prejudice against yaoguai

Azure Lion and the other Bodhisattvas' steeds in FSYY

Daji's fox form in FSYY Pinghua

The historical Su Daji

Is Shen Gongbao a yaoguai?

Are all yaoguai irredeemable monsters in FSYY?

Ao Bing and the dragons Nezha fought

Does deification wipe your memory and personality?

Bi Gan and the Great Fox Massacre

More discussion about prejudice against yaoguai

How old was Su Daji the human when she died?

Differences between FSYY novel and Pinghua

Musing on FSYY's view of fate and its possible effects on Yang Jian

Master Yuding

The messy marriages of FSYY

Is Daji a goddess in the novel?

Names of immortal masters in FSYY

Just for fun: the FSYY drinking game

Nezha's age in FSYY

Nezha's death and resurrection in FSYY

What happened to the original Daji?

Lady Shiji aka the Rock Demoness

Chinese Fox Spirits:

Auspicious/Demonic Foxes

More on fox spirits

The inner core of foxes

Foxes and their association with Fire

Notable fox spirits

The foxes of 狐狸缘全传

Has Daji ever been worshipped as a goddess?

Fox masks

The foxes of Liaozhai

Weaknesses and abilities of fox spirits

Three resource collections on Chinese fox spirits: 1, 2, 3

Human-fox hybrids

Can foxes and their descendents magically know if someone's telling the truth?

The magical properties of fox saliva

Fox exams and Heavenly Foxes

Are male foxes more malicious?

More on fox exams

Offerings to fox spirits

The "Lady Fox Immortal"

Chinese Mythos in General:

The Precious Scroll of Erlang

Into the Erlang-verse: Li, Zhao, Yang

Can immortal masters romance their students?

Why we don't power-rank characters in God-Demon novels

A brief overview of Chang'e

On Chinese Religion and "Respect"

The 28 Lunar Mansions

Can the Heavenly Emperor be replaced + a primer on dynastic successions

A Guide to the Chinese Underworld (and what it isn't)

Is Nüwa JE's daughter?

Weaver Girl

Can yaoguais a/o their descendents enter the Celestial Bureaucracy?

Queen Mother of the West and her husband(s)

Bixia Yuanjun, Lady of Mt. Tai

Erlang's dad

The story that gives us the name "Yang Jian"

On the transformation of Erlang's image (and his relationship with JE in JTTW)

Erlang's mom, Lotus Lantern, and a neat little discovery

Erlang cameos in other stories and Zajus

Erlang's mom-saving story in Chinese operas

Child Manjushri, or: the absurdity of pinning a definitive age on gods

The strange modern ship of Mengpo/Yuelao, and Mengpo's myths

The half-beast form of QMoW

Does Erlang have a wife/love interest?

Nezha's mom

A overview of Gonggong and his mythos

Some introductory sources on the Chinese Underworld

A side-by-side comparison of Nezha's backstory in JTTW and FSYY

Mythos-inspired Worldbuilding:

Dragons of the Four Seas

LMK S5 and a possible "Celestial Council of Regents" AU

LMK S5 Fix-it: the Four Divine Beasts

Character/Story Analysis (JTTW + LMK)

Heart and Mind: Tripitaka

Local Lion Uncle enjoyer goes on a rant

On SWK and his fear of death

Why the Dead People Supreme Court?

No, seriously, why?

Chinese Underworld =/= Christian Hell

LMK S4, Havoc in Heaven, and revolutions

Why I dislike the "class warfare" reading of Havoc in Heaven

In Defence of Li Jing...ha, as fucking if

On Yin-Yang, Chaos/Order, and the Harbringer

JTTW's view on the Three Religions

Disjointed S5 Reactions

"Chaos doesn't work that way in traditional Chinese Cosmology"

Xiangliu, the Nine-headed Bird, and Jiutou Chong

Lotus Lantern: The Summaries

Part 1: Precious Scroll of Chenxiang

Part 2: The Epic of Prince Chenxiang

Part 3: Lotus Lantern 1.0 + 2.0

Part 4: Chenxiang and the Male-Female Swords

My Fanfics:

Climbing the Sky

The Wild Son

Bodhicitta

The Serpent and the Deluge

South Seas Sojourn

Journey of the Gods AU sideblog

[dailyadventureprompts]

Hey Dapper! As an avid follower of- and equally avid inspiration-taker from your work, first of all, thank you for the work you've put into all this. It is a treasure-trove of knowledge and inspiration that has certainly made me very happy. Can I ask for your thoughts on Tharizdun? I've been trying to form a concept of it for in my own world, but I've had little success.

Monsters Reimagined: Tharizdun, the Whisperer in Darkness

Being the default "god of madness" Tharizdun brings together two of my enduring gripes with d&d: gods that no one would actually worship and the enduring legacy of depicting people with mental illness as dangerous lunatics devoid of empathy and reason.

As he currently exists in the DM's toolbox, the whole point of including Tharizdun in your campaign is to act as the powersource behind whichever final fantasy style endboss wants to start the apocalypse before unleashing a mass of offband lovecraftian tentacles. Derivative, trite, his singular desire to inspire others to end the world is MCU levels of failing to give villains proper motivations.

We can do better

TLDR: Far In the wildest depths of the astral sea the ur-god Tharizdun is formless and thoughtless, yet dreaming. Resembling nothing so much as a cosmic nebula of oily clouds, a vast and shapeless expanse of churning primordial chaos that pulses with synapses of psychic lighting containing a consciousness older than time itself. Like a sleeper beset with sleep paralysis the chained oblivion thrashes against a reality it can only barely perceive, sending shockwaves of destruction across the cosmos.

While scholars of all worlds debate the true origins and nature of Tharizdun they can agree on two things:

It is more powerful than all the pantheons of creation, and it is terrified.

Inspiration: I wasn't originally going to do a whole monsters reimagined on Tharizdun, instead simply gesturing on what Matt Mercer has done with the deity (using the roiling chaos as a throughline for much of his Exandrian worldbuilding) and leaving it at that.

Around the same time I got this ask though I was considering doing my own take on Azathoth, the so called "blind idiot god" of the lovecraft mythos, inspiration struck and I decided to alloy the two concepts into what I think is a stronger whole. There's a lot of overlap in the two formless horrors, partly due to Tharizdun being a d&d's attempt to dip its toe into eldritch horror, without quite understanding the thematic framework involved.

Like many other things ( Minorities, the sea, decay, air conditioning) Lovecraft was terrified of objective reality. This might sound like a joke, but fundamental to his mythos is the fear that earth and the white men that lived upon it were not the centre of the universe created by a loving god. Lovecraft lived in increasingly scientific times and the science supported the idea of a universe in which humanity's existence was the meaningless product of random chance. Azathoth was this anxiety embodied in its most extreme scale: the capital G god of the universe which sat in the middle of all creation that was not only uncaring towards humanity (as many of Lovecraft's creations were) but the embodiment of ultimate unthinking chaos.

Trying to port Azathoth (and most of the other lovecrafitan pantheon) doesn't work because the conceits of the genre fundamentally clash. D&D DOES propose a moral universe, and goes out of its way to simplify morality down to such a cartoonish level that it has objective answers. In Lovecraft the horror comes from the fact that the cultists and their fucked up alien gods exist, where as the moral christian god doesn't... in d&d there's no reason for the cultists to worship the fucked up alien gods because the regular gods are both existent and quite nice.

The default d&d cosmology has multiple infinite voids of chaos including limbo, the abyss, and the far realm. I've already given my take on one of these, but I wanted an alternative for the origins of the weird that wasn't specifically focused on entropic decay.

There's a fascinating (and very depressing) history over the term hysteria and the connotations of mental crisis with feminine fragility. The word itself comes from the greek word for womb and there's something about the idea of "primal birthing chaos" that's worth playing with insofar as it makes weird rightoids Jordan Peterson deeply afraid.

Taking these thoughts as well as my earlier gripes in mind, its going to take a bit of an overhaul to make Tharizdun/Azathoth as a credible antagonistic force for a campaign. Also, this might be my own bias as an author showing through here but I don't go in for the lovecrafitan "truths too terrible to be understood". I think the universe is a fundamentally knowable place and if things exist outside our means of perceiving them then we'll just bullrush through and work out a temporary explanation on our way.

Here's my Fix/Pitch: Both Tharizdun and Azathoth are supposed to represent primordial chaos and formless madness. D&D's less than stellar history with mental health issues aside, we know that "madness" isn't evil and it isn't the antithetical opposite of order: It's flawed reason, it's an inability to comprehend, and it's deeply scary for those going through it.

THAT ended up reminding me of a famous quote from lovecraft himself; "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown".

What if we make THAT FEAR into the god? Imagine the panicked sensation of being woken from the deepest slumber by a sudden noise, the door opening or a loud bang going off somewhere on your street..... the phantom horror of something touching you, crawling over you in the middle of the night before you have any of your senses or reason or memory to tell you that it's just your partner or your pet or your own bed sheets. That's the stuff sleep paralysis is made of and it's been haunting us humans since the dawn of time. It's also the same horror of being born, of being a non-thing and then coming into existence in fits and starts without any understanding of the world that you're now

Now imagine there's something out there in the astral sea, the plane of dreams and thoughts... powerful beyond all imagining but created without the ability to ever fully wake up. It is stuck in that first moment of existence because it may well have been the first thing to ever exist and it's been trapped in the shapeless nightmare of an infant since the dawn of time

THAT is how you make a god about the horror of the unknown. A god that is antagonistic to us because it is sacred of us, and it is scared because it has no way of knowing us, knowing the reality it inhabits beyond its own fear.

Adventure Hooks:

The greatest threat Tharizdun presents to most beings in the universe is having a nightmare about them. Through the inexplicable paths of sleep an individual's mind may find themselves connected to the entity's own... receiving terrible visions as the thinking clouds of Tharizdun's body churn in a variable brainstorm. Some aspect of this communion will be twisted into something terrible, birthed into the cosmos with the same shrieking fear and confusion that inspired its creation. Some desperate few seek out this communion, thinking in their hubris that they can give shape to Tharizdun's creation, that the terror beyond time suffers collaborators or requests. (Yes, I'm yoinking the dream-spawning ability of beholders. They were already weird enough before they started getting involved with dream stuff)

Despite being a living entity, Tharizdun is also a place, a plane unto itself streaking through the multiverse like a collossal ameoba through the primordial soup. There are landscapes within the god, whole continents that form and erode through seasons of surreality as the paroxyc titan dreams them into being. One can create portals into these landscapes, even fly a jammership across them, but the act of doing so invites an even more chaotic backlash than visiting the chained oblivion in dreams, letting its terror leak out into the waking worlds.

The name "chained oblivion" dates back to an eon when forces of celestial order attempted to keep Tharizdun contained in the hopes of preventing the escape of its creations or its contact with other minds. This period of the multiverse oft refereed to as the "Time of Quiet" sadly came to an end when the entity's bindings were shattered by a collective of villains and horrors today refereed to as the "Court of Fools" or "Troupe of the Final Void". The Troupe are a motley bunch, unable to agree on a theology but all wanting to pick at the slumbering titan like it was a scab on the skin of heaven. Some serenade Tharzidun with cacophonous music, others hurl saints and sacrifices into its body, some worship or hunt the god's offspring while others stab it with cosmic pokers, just to get a reaction. They want to wake the chained oblivion and don't care how much of the multiverse they have to burn to do it.

Like a mollusc producing pearls as a means of containing an irritating bit of grit, Tharizdun's roiling cosmic body will occasionally spit out an entire world or strange demiplanes as a means of dislodging something it could not pallet. While this has been the genesis of many realms both beautiful and terrible throughout the astral timeline, of late all these worlds worth taking have been colonized by the Troupe. Woe and pity to any mortal who calls such a world home, ruled over by tyrants who care only for destruction, unaware of a cosmos not coloured by Tharizdun's wake.

Titles: The chained oblivion, the spiraling titan, sire of stars, the Paroxsmal god, Lord of all Hysterics.

Signs: Stormclouds that look oily and churn with otherworldly light, formless nightmares and pervasive sleep paralysis, mass delusion, darkness that echoes with the god's muttering and the sound of distant flutes.

Worshippers: Ad hoc worship of Tharizdun tends to congregate around those who have received unwanted visions of the chained oblivion, as the harrowing experiance often bestows those that suffer it with an otherworldy weight to their words, to say nothing of occasional psychic powers. Many abberations likewise pay heed to the chained oblivion, either for directly giving them life or for its great and insuppressable power. Among these include Grell who refer to Tharizdun as "storm mother", The nightmarish Quori follow in the wake of the god's psychic emanations and make up a large faction of the court of fools, and the Kaorti, terrifying mage-things remade by exposure to the spiralling titan's heart who claim to be heralds for the entity.

Art

[thydungeongal]

It is known that your favorite edition of D&D is B/X, but setting that one and its Basic ilk aside, what is something in each "mainline" edition that you think makes that one shine bright, something it does great like none of the others? Mainline here meaning the original, both AD&Ds, and the three WotC editions (counting 3rd as one edition).

There's a lot to love about each edition of D&D, yeah!

The original game, or 0D&D as a lot of people call it, is truly a weird little mess of rules that regardless laid the groundwork for a lot of things to come, but I think it should be seen as more than just a weird prototype of better things to come. It is ultimately the predecessor to both Basic and Advanced and while those games are very different in terms of play, looking at 0D&D it's easy to see where both games got their ideas and how they decided to iterate on them. But at the end of the day 0D&D still stands apart from the others in the sense that it was an exciting new frontier of play and as such the game's text is also very open to wild adventures. The game openly promotes the idea of adding robots and aliens into the list of monsters, because why not, there's no clear shape of what D&D as a game and genre even looks like yet, so why not let it be whatever you want? It also has lots of procedures in place for creating extremely cool emergent interactions which no other edition since has done! Like, orcs can be encountered with huge caravans of gold! Sometimes orcs are lead by a dragon or a Balrog or an ogre! It's weird and fun!

AD&D 1e is ultimately an evolution of 0D&D, and in many ways it's like 0D&D + its supplements + a bunch of neat tricks learned on the way. Ultimately what sets AD&D 1e apart from the other editions for me is the absolute wealth of procedures in the DMG for helping the DM create and run a world that feels like a living, breathing place! And there's so much guidance for how to start a campaign with small beginnings and then let it expand in scope!

AD&D 2e is actually my second favorite TSR edition in terms of rules text. There's a lot to be said about AD&D 2e being a clear step away from the original playstyle of the Dungeon Game, and it's most apparent in the way the game got rid of procedures for creating your own dungeons and stocking them with treasures, but the actual rules for playing and running the game are probably the clearest AD&D has ever been. I also feel 2e was the era when the greater shape of D&D as the game we know it as today started to form: while a lot of the stuff that we associate D&D with has been there since the beginning, I feel AD&D 2e is when things finally start to take on their ultimate D&Dness, if that makes sense?

D&D 3e I'm extremely fond of because it was actually my first edition of D&D, but beyond that, taken on its own terms, D&D 3e is unparalleled among the D&Ds in terms of how systemic its rules are. D&D 3e was kind of a mess when it came to the quality of its rules and what sorts of outcomes they produced, but I still love the dang thing because the underlying philosophy is extremely ambitious and cool! AD&D 1e is the edition with procedures to help the DM generate the world; AD&D 2e has lots of really cool rules and procedures that almost make the game run itself; D&D 3e has a physics engine that could make the act of play almost feel like an immersive sim! I understand why very few games have attempted to replicate that systemic design of D&D 3e, but I think there's a lot of cool stuff there.

D&D 4e is the most fun the combat minigame of D&D has ever been and it has unironically the coolest worldbuilding of all editions of D&D. I feel we've talked enough about how D&D 4e is actually extremely cool and for attractive people who like tactical combat, so let's focus on the worldbuilding: D&D 4e mixed up the cosmology of D&D in a way that made it feel like something from mythology instead of a neatly laid out world model. Being a B/X fan I of course love it when the implicit cosmic struggle is one of order versus chaos, and D&D 4e pretty much brought that back! All the major conflicts of D&D 4e's cosmology hinge on the conflict between order and chaos, and it actually adds nuance to what could otherwise be an extremely black and white cosmic struggle. The D&D 4e cosmology is messy and mythic and feels like it works on fantasy logic instead of the weird mystic science that ultimately powers the D&D cosmology of other editions.

And finally, D&D 5e. While I am a vocal 5e hater it has less to do with the game itself and more to do with its suffocating effect on the hobby, because as a game it's got a lot of cool design in places. Concentration is a really elegant fix to the game plan of just stacking all your buffs before combat and then wading in. Advantage/Disadvantage does away with the minutiae of adding together a bunch of different bonuses from various sources and does it in a way that is both mathematically satisfying but also really fun in play! Rolling more dice is fun!!! The way critical hits are handled, via just doubling the number of dice rolled and keeping the modifier the same, is great, because you get the "rolling more dice is fun" factor without the doubling of modifiers that had the potential to cause slowdown in D&D 3e. I like the addition of background as a character creation axis alongside class and species!