WilloftheWest

It’s a difficult one to rule, as suddenly being meticulous about positioning and line of sight telegraphs that the players should suddenly be focused on these things. I usually just have them roll luck or try to perceive the threat before they accidentally trigger its ability. If they fail, they get a Medusa blast

I really want to see how lemmy.ml would spin this, but it seems that the post has been deleted. I suppose that is also a response.

Through the Gates of the Silver Key is the final story in the Dream Cycle and the final story of Randolph Carter. In the continuity, it takes place four years after the events of The Silver Key which we have previously covered in this book club.

Four years after the 1928 disappearance of fifty-four year old Randolph Carter, a small group meets at the mansion of an occultist Atienne de Marigny to settle the estate of Carter. Also in attendance are the Carter’s long time friend Harley Warren, dreamer and pulp horror writer Ward Phillips (another self-insert of Lovecraft), and attorney Ernest Aspinwall who is Carter’s cousin.

Carter was declared missing shortly after the events of The Silver Key. Detectives from Boston had followed Carter’s trail to his childhood home in the rural hills near Arkham. There they found Carter’s car, along with the oddly carved box once containing the Silver Key and a parchment with an indecipherable script. The Detectives searched the old cave called the “Snake Den” where Carter played as a child, but could not find him.

Ernest Aspinwall is apparently ignorant of the occult and is hoping to settle Carter’s estate quickly for personal gain. The friends of Carter, who are all familiar with the occult, object to settling the estate based on a conjecture that Carter is alive and trapped in some tangential spacetime.

The friends of Carter have been in contact with a Hindu Swami, known as Chandraputra. The Swami has been invited to offer evidence that Carter still lives. Chandraputra claims that Carter experimented with the Silver Key following a peculiar hallucination of being propelled back to his childhood. He believed this experience was linked to the Silver Key and the Snake Den, so he returned there to perform a ritual using the Key.

In the recitation of this ritual, Carter has inadvertently opened a gate leading from our local spacetime to some alien higher dimensional spacetime containing our own. Following the teachings of the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon, Carter makes a deal with an ancient and terrible guide Umr At-Tawil. The entity guides Carter deeper into the strange cosmos, to the Ultimate Gate through which a traveler may pass to the final void. Carter passes through the Ultimate Gate and is greeted by the All-in-One and One-in-All, Yog-Sothoth, who reveals the truth of our existence to Carter through godly pulses of information.

Living creatures in our world are in fact three-dimensional “slices” of higher dimensional Beings (much like how a three-dimensional cube can be understood as a shape with many two-dimensional square faces). Our concept of time is a misconception based on a lack of information. What we perceive as the passage of time is in fact a consequence of an ever-altering view of the higher dimensional being; to focus on a new “slice” of the being creates the illusion of change and time.

Carter looks upon the Being that contains his entire life, and he sees new lives contained within the same being and therefore linked to Randolph Carter. Returning to our example of the cube, The life of Randolph Carter is merely one facet of the higher dimensional Being; rotating the Being much like rotating the cube will reveal a new facet corresponding to a different life. Carter inspects these facets of the Being and finds an interesting creature: an alien wizard who lived eons before Carter on a planet thousands of light-years from Earth. Carter has often dreamed of this creature and thus wishes to experience the facet. Yog-Sothoth warns that Carter must be mindful of the rites of returning, should he wish to return here and then back to his former life. The arrogant Carter believes that the Silver Key itself is sufficient to return to this place.

Carter finds himself an unwelcome guest in the mind of Zkauba, the alien wizard from the planet Yaddith. Understanding that the two beings both in fact are pieces of the same super Being, Carter understands that he is essentially the same as Zkauba, and uses this to wrestle control of Zkauba’s body from Zkauba. Finding himself in fact trapped on Yaddith, Carter uses Zkauba’s vast knowledge of advanced science-magic to concoct a drug that can suppress the portion of his mind inhabited by Zkauba. Over the course of centuries, Carter uses his own knowledge of astronomy relative to Earth and Zkauba’s superior analytical skills to plan a journey that will deposit him on Earth at the time and place of his 1928 disappearance. This journey involves orbiting Yaddith in suspended animation for a few eons and then slingshotting himself on a collision course with Earth. He also crafts himself a mask and disguise which he can use until he regains his human form, and he stashes a small fortune of gold on his spacecraft.

In suspended animation, Carter perceives eons of history of Yaddith pass by in an instant. He sees how the alien race is overrun by the monstrous dholes (an enemy Carter escapes in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. Carter yeets himself in the direction of Earth moments before a monstrous dhole yanks him from orbit.

This little hiccup is responsible for a gross error in Carter’s calculations, and he arrives on Earth an entire TWO YEARS late. In a passable human disguise but not a good Carter disguise, Carter exchanges his horded gold for money and embarks on a research mission to return to his old body. During his two years of study he contacts many mystics for help in his research.

This is where Chandraputra enters the scene. He began lodging with Carter to help with research and to be an advocate for Carter in matters where Carter himself could not personally appear.

Around this time, the selfish Aspinwall is done with Chandraputra’s story. Clearly this is some fabrication designed to dupe Carter’s occultist friends. Carter’s friends object to Aspinwall’s objections and state that Chandraputra has in fact been keeping them informed on his research. Chandraputra offers the Silver Key, last seen with Carter four years ago, as evidence. Aspinwall throws some racial slurs at Chandraputra, asserting that Chandraputra had stolen the Key from Carter. Chandraputra offers as further evidence to answer any questions that only Carter could answer.

Aspinwall has been suspicious of Chandraputra and his seemingly expressionless face all night. Suspecting a masked criminal attempting the rob the company, he grabs Chandraputra’s face and pulls.

Carter’s friends do not see what is uncovered, but it is sufficient to frighten Aspinwall to death. From Chandraputra they here an odd buzzing. Chandraputra then confirms their suspicions that he is in fact the changed Carter, and that he needs them to keep his estate open for just a few more months. He then uses the Silver Key an odd antique grandfather clock in the parlor and enters it. When de Martigny opens the front of the clock, the creature is nowhere to be seen.

Having not seen Carter and never actually having the opportunity to ask personal questions, the three friends are left to wonder if the creature was actually Carter, or some manner of would-be thief.

Narratively, this story is a bit of a mess, which can be in part blamed on the collaboration. Reportedly E. Hoffmann Price approached Lovecraft with a draft for a sequel to The Silver Key. The manuscript was essentially the tale of Chandraputra, up to the point of the higher-dimensional Being, and was essentially theosophical raving and crappy maths wrapped in the veneer of a Lovecraft story. Lovecraft kept as much of his collaborator’s ideas as possible, and added the ideas of Zkauba and the pretense of settling a will.

I think the story itself didn’t need to be told and Randolph Carter didn’t need this odd send-off. The karma and reincarnation with extra steps both over-explains and obfuscates.

The Dreams in the Witch House follows Walter Gilman, a student of both Mathematics and Folklore at the infamous Miskatonic University. Being interested in colonial history, especially the history of the witch trials of the late 17th Century, Gilman takes the opportunity to rent an attic room belonging to a legendary Arkham witch, Keziah Mason. Keziah Mason is well known for two things in particular: in 1692 she was imprisoned after being found guilty of being a witch, and managed to disappear without a trace; She also kept a familiar called Brown Jenkin, an oversized brown rat with disturbingly human features.

Gilman accesses the extensive occult library of the Miskatonic university to learn more about Keziah Mason. Other than the standard reading of the Necronomicon which we've come to associate with every Miskatonic student, he reads records of Mason's trial in which she confesses that, through the use of particular curves and angles one could pass into a space beyond our own.

This record intrigues Gilman, and he rents the eastern attic room in the old Witch House, which is known to have been used as an arcane laboratory by Mason. The room features walls and ceiling all meeting at odd angles, and peeling wallpaper revealing these arcane curves underneath.

Not long after renting the room, Gilman suffers a brain-fever and disturbing dreams, which he rationalises as being due to his intense study of mathematics and Mason's testimony of odd geometries which guide the way to alien spaces. In his dreams he plunges through a space of "inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered sound". His motion through this space seems partially voluntary, though he finds that his arms, legs, and torso are missing or perhaps obscured by some odd trick of angles.

In his half-waking dreams before drifting into deep slumber Gilman often dreams of struggling to keep awake, his room being illuminated by a ghastly purple light, and that old familiar Brown Jenkin appearing from a rat hole. Gilman often nails tin over that rat hole the next day only to find that rats have apparently gnawed through the tin the following night.

Soon Gilman's dreams are haunted by the witch Keziah Mason, who speaks often on his need to meet the Black Man and go with them to the throne of Azathoth. Gilman recalls while awake that Azathoth is mentioned in the Necronomicon, and that the Black Man is one of the many preferred appearances of Nyarlathotep. In a following dream he witnesses "a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles" as well as a sentient polyhedron.

Gilman's downstairs neighbour notices the sounds of shod footsteps coming from the attic room late at night. Gilman begins to believe that he may be sleep walking, though his shoes are never disturbed. One night his neighbour enters the room to ask about a maths question, only to find Gilman gone. Gilman, having placed flour to track the presence of unwanted night visitors, finds evidence of no other visitors than his neighbour.

One night Gilman is transported to a cyclopean city of barrel-shaped creatures which we know from our previous reading as the Elder Things. In his dream he snaps a figurine of one of these creatures from a railing. The next day, the wife of his landlord comes across the same figure in his bed while cleaning. The following night he dreams of Brown Jenkin feasting on his blood, and awakes to a wound and dried blood on his wrist.

Gilman is now thoroughly convinced that he is being haunted. A concerned housemate offers to host him for a few nights. Gilman has a brief respite before the dreams start again. He dreams of accompanying Mason, Nyarlathotep, and Brown Jenkin in kidnapping a child for a dark ritual. A notable memory from his dream is walking barefoot through mud. He wakes the next morning in his old room, with caked mud on his feet. He is horrified to hear news of the kidnapping of a two year old the previous night, and descriptions of suspicious individuals matching himself, Keziah Mason, and Nyarlathotep.

Gilman and his housemate Elwood are deeply disturbed and do not sleep the following night. Finally we reach 30th April, Walpurgisnacht. In Arkham, Walpurgisnacht is observed and even feared by many residents. Gilman finds himself falling asleep through the day. That night, when he falls asleep once again, he dreams of hearing Mason chanting a dark rite.

Gilman follows the sound and finds himself suddenly in a room that must lie above his own attic room. Keziah Mason stands with sacrificial knife and bowl in front of an infant on a table. He launches himself at her, wrestles the knife from her hand, and leaves her unconscious on the floor. While this fight occurred Brown Jenkin has managed to spill the infant's blood, completing the ritual.

An alien chanting is suddenly heard, and Gilman knows that he must escape. He falls through the abyss and is guided back to reality by the prayers of his neighbour. He is found dishevelled and unconscious in his attic room.

The following night, he sleeps again on Elwood's couch. Elwood is awoken by the sound of scurrying rats and a disturbing sound coming from Gilman. Elwood is horrified to see a large bloodstain appearing on Gilman's blanket. Upon inspection, it appears that a rat-like creature had burrowed through Gilman's chest and eaten his heart.

The residents abandon the house and the landlord resolves to tear it down. One day in the attic room, workers knock down the ceiling to make a horrifying discovery. They find the bones of Keziah Mason and a child, as well as sacrifical dagger and offering bowl. Also among the debris they find the body of a giant rat with human features.

My favourite part of the story is that Gilman's odd room is immediately recognisable as a standard student room, at least to British students. No walls meeting at right angles, paint/wallpaper peeling, which was just hastily slapped over older wall furnishings by the landlord.

The congeries of iridescent spheres is often associated with Yog-Sothoth by Lovecraft readers. In fact, in most media adapting Lovecraft's work, a bubbling mass of spheres is frequently used to represent Yog-Sothoth. The sentient polyhedron is a creature that only appears in this story, and there is some really janky art for it.

Other than the spheres which I associate to Yog-Sothoth, we see a lot of returning creatures in this story: Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, Elder Things, and Shub-Niggurath.

Wikipedia only considers this related to the Dream Cycle and not an actual Dream Cycle tale, probably due to it not featuring pieces of the Dream Cycle continuity such as geography and books. I'm inclined to personally consider it a Dream Cycle story, as the primary plot is largely delivered via dreams.

Generally, this story was poorly received by Lovecraft's contemporaries, and so Lovecraft never submitted the story for publication. August Derleth had to submit it on Lovecraft's Behalf to Weird Tales, where it was published. Some scholars consider the story incredibly linear, at various points both too abstract and too explicit, and many rate it among the worst of Lovecraft's stories.

That’s because mathematicians use log for the natural logarithm. Log base 10 would be log_10

The thing I’d be more concerned with is establishing unreal expectations around sex based on overproduced porn. Like, it’s not a normal expectation to fold someone into a pretzel and jackhammer their ass for 30 minutes.

Hand them 4 pre-gens and run them through the Haunting for Call of Cthulhu. It’s made to be a pick up and play introductory scenario.

Do you keep restarting or wiping on fights? There simply isn’t 120 hours of content in a single playthrough of act I.

In Chapter XII Dyer and Danforth escape the Plateau of Leng.

The duo eventually reach the surface and make a mad dash through the city to their plane. They have one last glimpse of the city, and finally spy the colossal peaks of Kadath of the Cold Wastes, burning purple in the midnight Antarctic sun.

Danforth is the trained pilot but his nerves are so shot that Dyer, with no training, proves the more competent pilot in the moment. As they fly over the mountain pass of the Mountains of Madness, the scientists are audibly assaulted by haunting sounds, which makes Dyer wish for wax plugs for his ears. Relieved of his piloting duties, Danforth glances back towards Unknown Kadath and begins shrieking anew. Of the horror he saw, Danforth will reveal very little to Dyer. He speaks only of a second mirage over the peaks of Kadath. In later ramblings he will make mention to various entities including "Yog-Sothoth" and "The Colour Out of Space".

Again to me this parallels Unknown Kadath where Carter escapes the trap of Nyarlathotep while being hypnotised by the unearthly piping of the Other Gods.

The two main references in this section, other than Unknown Kadath, are to Yog-Sothoth, first introduced in Charles Dexter Ward, and the eponymous Colour Out of Space from the short story of the same name. While we haven't covered the latter story in this book club, I highly recommend reading it.

In Chapter XI Dyer and Danforth are confronted with a horror in the depths.

The lifeless obstructions in the hallway are in fact the bodies of four of the eight Elder Things, clearly dispatched recently. Green ichor pours from the stumped where their heads should be. Inspecting the bodies further, the pair realise that each body has had its head torn off, and that a pungent black ooze surrounds the stump.

Both recognise this method of killing as the method employed by the Shoggoths in the war of re-subjugation. Danforth is so shocked that he screams; the nightmarish Shoggoths are "known" to not exist on this world. A response comes from deep within the cavern. The sound was noted by Lake in his radio transmissions; Danforth and Dyer were subconsciously aware of the sound while travelling the city; and Dyer is aware of the inspiration for an odd utterance described in Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym.

From the abyss comes the repeated cry "Tekeli-li!" which the pair associates with the Elder Things. They believe that they see a wounded Elder Thing approaching and they immediately flee. The two run with only dim torchlight in hopes of losing the Elder Thing in the vast honeycombed network of tunnels.

Oddly enough, the scent of the Elder Thing does not grow stronger as it must surely be catching up to them. Instead, that second foetid odour becomes unbearably strong. The two look around out of morbid curiosity and nearly succumb to madness. They are being chased by a black ooze that squeezes through the incredibly vast hall, wider than a subway car. It screams "Tekeli-li!" in a mocking tone.

The Shoggoths, only given intelligence to serve the Elder Things and having no language of their own, could only imitate the language of their masters.

I find it odd but not uncharacteristic of Lovecraft that he has sympathy for the Elder Thing slavers in this chapter. The "poor Old Ones" who built their empire off the backs of engineered slaves had their final city usurped by their former slaves. I definitely fall on the side of the Shoggoths who are so engineered that they can't even devise their own language and must resort to a half-intelligent mockery of their masters' language.

In Chapter X Dyer and Danforth finally begin their descent into the abyss.

The pair are pulled from their shocked stupor by a familiar sound, altogether disconcerting in this location. Despite being hundreds of kilometres inland, the pair hears the squawking of penguins. Dyer and Danforth follow the squawking and find a previously undiscovered species of penguin, gigantic in proportion, albino, and eyeless. They briefly recall images of penguins dotting the murals. The penguins stand outside an entrance to a subterranean vault, from which vapour billows.

The pair descend into the depths, which grow warmer and warmer until the two are forced to remove their outerwear. They eventually enter a vast entrance hall. They turn on their torches to inspect the halls and its art, only to discover that the craftwork of the Elder Things has sharply decayed. Stalactites hang from the ceiling. Carvings appear more crude. While the geometric patterns are clearly inspired by earlier art, there is something clumsy and careless to the carvings.

A new odour begins to assault their nostrils, an odour which overpowers the foul stench of the Elder Things. Ahead, the two see apparently lifeless obstructions in the hallway. They continue.

We saw in a previous chapter that the Elder Things experimented with intelligent Shoggoths for the construction of the new city. Could these crude new carvings be the product of these new Shoggoths, acting upon instruction of the Elder Things but without direct supervision?

In Chapter IX Dyer and Danforth seek out an entrance to the abyss which houses the "new" city.

Using the bed of the ancient river to orient themselves, Dyer and Danforth use the murals to sketch a map to some of the closest entrances to the abyss. They have spent much of their battery power in studying the murals, and so they can only safely check two entrances.

The two head out towards the closest entrance to the abyss, hoping that the passageway has not collapsed or been blocked by debris. Unfortunately, the passageway is blocked, but they recognise some disturbing scents. The first scent is a disgusting and unnerving scent, similar to that of the dissected specimen which the two unearthed from a snow coffin. The other scent is that of gasoline.

Following the scent of gasoline, the pair find odd swaths through the ancient debris, hinting at recent disturbance. They soon find a puddle of spilled gasoline and remnants of some gear taken from the camp, including some crumpled papers and food cans that have been opened in an odd manner.

Dyer smooths out some paper to inspect its contents. He finds that whoever passed by previously had also drawn a hasty map for navigating the city. This map depicts another entrance by the ruins of a circular tower that Dyer and Danforth spotted from the air. The detail of this map is disconcerting; there is a level of detail to the maps such that, though the maps were hastily drafted, appear superior to the depictions of the city on the murals. Evidently these maps were not simply copied from murals. Also on the paper is the odd dotted script found throughout the buildings.

The duo follow this new map to the circular tower which is surprisingly well preserved, considering its long exposure to the weather. Searching the interior, they find three missing sleds from the camp. They are drawn to a conspicuous pile covered by a tarp. Underneath the tarp they find the frozen remains of the missing scientist Gedney and the final sled dog.

I loved this chapter and found it rather chilling. There's a surprising amount of tension packed into following the trail of the Elder Things, hoping against hope that at the end of the trail they will find Gedney, only to have their worst fears realised.