Thursday, November 17, 2011

More Unfocused Thoughts on the Hell-Caverns

  • One of the entrances to the caverns will be an archway in the dungeons of the local castle.  The castellan's ancestor who built the edifice stole a number of stones from the ruins nearby and even some inside the caves.  At certain times of day, the doorway -- which is made entirely out of stones from the caverns -- turns into a portal to some deeper level.
  • I picture the monster list as a mixture of lost world fare, mythos booglies, more traditional looking demons (with extradimensional origins), and radioactive mutants.  Those last guys look like this:
  • The rules would definitely be LotFP, but I'd draw from Realms of Crawling Chaos and the Dismal Depths as well.  The Black City is also a big inspiration.
  • I'm refining the elevator pitch to '"The Black God's Kiss" meets the Shaver Mystery.'
  • I might be able to cannibalize some of my Uz material, particularly deros.
  • In case it isn't obvious yet, the Hell-Caverns aren't entirely made out of caverns. Depending on whether or not I use Dave's Mapper this could mean that theres an even mix of caves and dungeon or it could mean that the various Saturday Night Specials are manufactured complexes and are connected by natural caves and tunnels.
  • The magic items and dungeon specials are as likely to be technological as they are magical.  Since the characters are High Medieval knights, clerics, and magicians I don't think this will matter all that much to them.  It's all deviltry.
  • Mole people.  There will definitely be mole people.
  • You will find few more staunch opponents of Erich von Daniken than I, but his fantastical bullshit makes good fodder for D&D.
  • I bet I'll be using the Random Esoteric Creature yadda yadda quite a bit.
  • Despite the name of the dungeon, I'll be taking a slightly more atheistic attitude towards the metaphysics of the setting.  I'm not sure where clerics get their powers from yet.  The Malleus Monstrorum for CoC -- an awesome book btw -- I think says Jesus might be an avatar of Yog-Sothoth.  While that offends me on some small level, I suppose it's kinda neat if I'm also throwing von Daniken in the mix.
  • When I settle on a specific location I'll change the name of the dungeon to The Hell-Caverns of X.
  • I think the Hell-Caverns of Narbonne sounds good, but the Hell-Caverns of Conques could explain where the vivid depictions of demons on the Cathedral of St Foy come from.

1 comment:

  1. The Malleus Monstrorum for CoC -- an awesome book btw -- I think says Jesus might be an avatar of Yog-Sothoth.

    Lovecraft's descriptions of Yog-Sothoth definitely resemble the more abstract medieval mystical conceptions of God (cf. the Zohar, which was included in TCoCDW). And then Beyond the Gate of the Silver Key was co-written by a Theosophist, so there's blatant cribbing. So it could be easily understood that Abd Al-Azrad's 'Aion (or Yuga) of Set-Thoth' (which is to say, the universe of the Logos which speaks from storms and the desert) derives from the same source.

    And then there's the Salomé/King in Yellow connection...

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