More Lovecraft Villains

The people who run the British Museum are evil. Where other cults sacrifice children, they gain power through the imprisonment and ritual degradation of entire cultures. Their agents are always hunting for more artefacts to put on display, deliberately mislabeled and stripped of context in a way that implies the people who made it were talentless savages, or just to leave in a drawer somewhere gathering dust. Wherever possible, they promote the treatment of foreigners with mockery and contempt and encourage all good Englishmen to approach the outside world with an attitude of smug and self-satisfied incuriosity. To steal something from them is always an act of liberation, and an effective way to strike back against the toad-faced, incestuous gentry who are their patrons.

Anyway, let's talk about Lovecraft.

1. Cauchemas, le Roi du Crime. The terror of the Parisian underworld is rarely seen in person, and never spoken of above a whisper. His gang of hyperviolent Apaches stalks the streets of Montmartre and Pigalle, breaking tourists' heads against the cobblestones for no more reward than the handful of centimes in their pockets. It is said that he operates several hell-themed nightclubs, that half the police have sworn fealty to him and that every member of his operation is freakishly strong, even the old woman who reigns over his clan of urchin pickpockets.

But he is most famed, and most feared, for his impossible crimes. A baroness who mocked him at a party was swallowed alive by a gigantic python while her husband, on the other side of the bathroom door, heard not a sound. An inspector of the Sûreté was found, suffocated to death, in his own office, which had been completely filled with sand. A coal-shoveller aboard a steamship heard a terrible banging sound coming from inside his furnace, and opened it up to discover a police informant who had disappeared from his jail cell several hours earlier. Nothing Cauchemas does is technically against the laws of nature, but all defies simple and rational explanation. As long as Paris is too scared to move against him, he holds the city in his grasp.

2. Diego Mandragora, poet. Madrid's most beloved man of letters has published four volumes of a verse epic, modelled on the Icelandic sagas, which tells in painstaking detail the history of an alternate Earth. It is a world of heresiarchs, stone mirrors, metal pyramids, invisible tigers and towers of blood, whose inhabitants speak a nounless language and believe that all things in nature are essentially indivisible. Those who investigate the young artists and philosophers who make up his inner circle, or probe too deeply into their curious belief that when the poem is complete the world we know will be swept away and remade as Mandragora's, are sometimes found mauled to death, as if by a wild beast who they were for some reason helpless to defend themselves against.

3. The Batrachi family. One of Venice's longest-established aristocratic bloodlines, their ancestors lived in the lagoon long before there was a city there. One son is a Fascist colonel. Another is a cardinal in Rome. The older members wear black mantillas or carnival masks, claiming leprosy or disfiguring wounds received in the great war. They all come home to visit Nonna Nero, who dwells beneath the crumbling ancestral manor in a moon-pool that opens onto the filthy canals, her fat neck ringed with a ruff of lacelike whiskers and her great body swollen with thousands of unfertilised eggs.

4. Emil Kaltenberg, atomic physicist. Thought a kook by the scientific mainstream, Kaltenberg and the alternate system of physics he propounds as the Doctrine of Inevitable Winter have achieved a cult following among the leadership of the newly ascendant Nazi party. They provide him with the funding he needs to build his cloud chambers, where subjects are imprisoned in a glass cage full of freezing mist and exposed to intense radiation in the hopes of stimulating visions of the future and confirming Kaltenberg's theory that Ice is the primal substance of all reality. His aim, it seems, is to communicate with the dark quasi-human sorcerers that reign over the Hyperborean wasteland which Earth will become once the Sun goes out, and wield their sinister powers in aid of the Third Reich. Rumor, as yet unfounded, suggests that he has a secret basement beneath a Berlin cabaret where he feeds people to a degenerate crab-thing from the future.

5. Max Hochstapler, alienist. The troubled and traumatised journey from across the globe to visit the Vienna office of Hochstapler, specialist in the analysis of dreams. He will listen to your dreams, note them down in his leatherbound journal and tell you exactly what they mean. Then, once you're gone, he will add your information to the huge chart he is drawing up of the Dreamlands, the mystical realm that all of us enter when we pass beyond the veil of sleep. Hochstapler knows more of that world than anyone before in human history. By instructing his patients to perform certain actions in their dreams, he can subtly influence the politics of that complex and ancient world, tilting the balance between cats and nightgaunts or moonbeasts and Men of Leng. He is yet to discover how this benefits him, be he is sure he can find a way. It is of little interest to him if some of his unwitting agents never wake up.

6. Antheia Manolakis, maenad. The newly-established Hellenic Republic demands a rebirth of true Hellenic religion, unsullied by the influence of Abrahamic upstarts. Antheia is using her late husband's money to resurrect the ancient mystery cults, leading her all-female followers into subterranean temples to consume hallucinogenic mead and perform ecstatic rites in veneration of the gods beneath the earth. No-one has yet found out what happens to the young men who try to spy on them.

7. Nikolai Zarubin, mad monk. A consort to princes under the Tsar, Zarubin was apparently assassinated during the revolution, only to show up later in Leningrad at the head of a sect of mystically-minded Bolsheviks who call themselves the God Builders. True comprehension of communism, they claim, enables one not only to liberate the mind but to travel between the stars and resurrect the dead. Those who question this doctrine are pointed to the bullet wounds still in Zarubin's forehead as evidence. His agents are active throughout Europe, sabotaging industry and seeking ancient knowledge in an attempt to bring about the full emancipation of all mankind.

8. Haakon Svendsen, explorer. Since the whaling ship found him off the coast of Greenland, clinging to a piece of debris that was all which remained of the airship supposed to take him across the Pole, Svendsen has become increasingly reclusive and paranoid. He kept his return to Oslo quiet, ducking the parade that the king had arranged in his honour, and now spends most of his time at his family estate on the lichen-encrusted Hardangervidda plateau. He is seeking a way to defend himself from the tupilaq, avenging spirits sent to pursue him by the shaman-kings of the lost city he was sent by the British Museum to invade and desecrate. The ring of blood he has drawn around his sod-roofed cabin is keeping them away for now, but the local villagers are beginning to wonder what happened to the child he's keeping in his basement.

Lovecraft Villains

Why would anyone even bother to worship Cthulhu, though? This has never made sense to me. Isn't the whole thing that he's so utterly horrible all human minds instinctively recoil from his presence? I guess it's basically the same thing as selling your soul to the Devil and people are constantly doing that. It presents a challenge, though. A Lovecraft-type story needs a human villain for anything to actually happen, otherwise the only sensible thing for a protagonist to do is get as far away from the action as possible and stay there. So you need to find a guy that has more coherent motivations for teaming up with the literal Worst Thing then "just a fuckwit, I guess". Here are some.

1. Algernon Blackthorne, master magician. Implicit villain of that generator I made earlier. An Aleister Crowley type, leader of an occult society, pretentious and profoundly insecure. Really wants you to think that he knows a lot of ancient secrets and is constantly having interesting sex. Knows some ancient secrets and has some interesting sex, but is rapidly running out of money and unable to find a publisher for his book about how misunderstood he is. Dark moustache, eyes that could plausibly be described as "burning". Whole aesthetic almost works but not quite. Worships the Elder Gods almost solely because he wants to be perceived as the kind of person who would worship an Elder God. Would happily destroy the world for pretty much the same reason. Real name Fred Stuggs.

2. Lena Sitspur, star of the silver screen. Notorious for femme fatale roles, risque costumes and constant flouting of the Hays code. The studio has made a huge deal out of her purportedly exotic origins, spreading rumours that she's the daughter of an Arab sheik and an exiled Chinese princess. They have also spread rumours that the first set of rumours were a hoax and actually she's just a farmgirl from Des Moines. This will prove, upon further research, to also be false. Lena is surrounded at all times by a bevy of lovers, ex-lovers, suitors, sycophants, studio people, screenwriters, stuntmen, starlets, fans and mere hangers-on, all of whom are obsessed with her to a degree that is unusual even for Hollywood and will, if pushed, happily die for her. She suffers from crippling depression, having found that no amount of sex or cocaine will fill the gaping void that has haunted her soul for as long as she can remember. None of the three fetuses she has aborted have been quite human. She has recently begun to wonder what would happen if she carried a child to term.

3. Sir Thomas Dinsdale, armchair anthropologist. Has never been quite the same since his wife died. Recently returned to fieldwork after a decade spent expounding his increasingly bizarre theories to a series of perplexed undergraduates, from who he has acquired a small handful of committed followers. Currently excavating an untouched Neolithic tomb in Orkney (or anywhere else you want to set an adventure). Intends to prove that all great revolutions in history, from the agricultural to the industrial, are a result of contact with Outside Forces, and that the next step up the ladder of civilisation will allow us to conquer Death Itself and make contact with those who have been taken beyond the veil. Absent-minded and lazy, leaving most of the actual digging to his students on the basis that they're better at it than he is. Stubborn. Dangerously optimistic. Hard to legally stop, no matter how many villagers go missing.

4. Dr. Quan Haodeng, the Yellow Terror of California. A name that the press persist in applying to him, despite all his attempts to shake it off. Yes, he runs the finest opium dens in San Francisco, but if the peddling of delightful dreams is to be a crime it can only be a victimless one, and he has nothing against Westerners. Happens to be married to one, and she gets on perfectly well with the rest of his wives. Dr. Quan is beloved in the Chinese community and has several close friends in the city's government. The chief of police would love to see him brought down. The newspapers dwell with barely-concealed glee on stories of young white women brought low by Oriental decadence, very few of which are true. They are silent on the source of Quan's product, the fields of black poppies that grow, tended by blind monks, on what rumour describes as a Himalayan plateau called Long or Lung.  And only the most elite dream-connoisseurs have felt themselves transported to a spectrum of possible worlds, worlds where the Germans won the Great War or the Qing dynasty never fell. Worlds where America is ruled by a race of serpents, or the continents are deserts and the oceans stir with foul bacterial life.

Of course, these are but dreams. There can be no truth at all to the story that one of Quan's sons has brought something back.

5. Inspector Strathclyde of the Yard. Ruthlessly rational. Always gets his man, usually sees him hanged. Absolute faith in the logical purity of his convictions. Flatly refused to believe in the existence of sorcery until presented with irrefutable evidence of it, then re-evaluated his entire life appropriately. Determined that, since all available sources suggest that the world is doomed to be consumed by the Elder Gods within his lifetime, and since the only way to minimise one's suffering during this unfortunate event is to win the Elder Gods' favour through pagan ritual and sacrifice, he is necessarily compelled to join a cult. Promptly made contact with the nearest appropriate organisation and, within six months, rose to the top of it. Responsible for the disappearance of several dozen vagabonds, whose mutilation and murder he handles with cold efficiency, as well as the quashing of all investigation into same. Beginning to branch out into more esoteric crimes, such as a series of simultaneous bookshop burnings whose map locations form a seven-pointed star. Some of the police force is with him, but by no means all.

6. Mildred Strook, daredevil. Will do anything for a laugh. Flew across the Pacific in under three days, an impossible time. Won't tell anybody how she did it or what happened to her co-pilot. Wears a shark-tooth talisman around her neck and speaks, nonsensically, of taking "short-cuts". Constantly attempting to break height records, pushing her plane beyond its limits, openly fantasising about breaking free from the atmosphere and travelling the void between worlds. Her husband, who is also her publicist, is deeply worried about her. He would like some way to ground her before she hurts herself, but he can't convince her not to fly and he knows it would cripple her career. Neither of them will talk about the wind that comes howling round their windows in the night, the one that nobody but her seems to hear.

The Triplets of Leng. They come to all the other six. Sometimes in dreams, sometimes not in dreams. If you kill any of the other six, they will begin to come to you.

(You could put all these people together in Britain or California if you wanted to run some sort of Lovecraft sandbox. Algernon would fit neatly into LA. Lena could plausibly be on holiday, or have recently married an Englishman. Dinsdale could be digging in Arizona or northern Mexico. Strathclyde probably loses something if he's not British, but the San Francisco police do play a role in Quan's story. Mildred can live anywhere, she owns a plane.)

Cult Generator

This is a Lovecraft cult generator I made in Twine. Here are my thoughts on it, and on random generation more generally.

1. Twine is okay for doing mockups of stuff if you don't have any other skills but, at least on my computer, it begins to massively slow down once you have a whole bunch of code on a single page. Which is not a good attribute for something that you're ostensibly supposed to make games in!
2. The part of this that generates names works super well. The part that generates adventures works pretty well but not necessarily better than the other way of generating adventures, which is to pick a location, go to Wikipedia and find some piece of local history that could concievably involve a spookens ghost. Name generators are good because names are basically randmo anywhere. Adventure generators are harder because adventures need to be governed by coherent internal logic . Like, you need to establish what the overall narrative conceit is, then use that as a framework to decide on individual story components. Generators pick from a list of individual story components and ask you to reverse-engineer a narrative conceit from them. Not every set of components works as well as every other set, so it's often not totally fluid.
3. This took me a few days. I probably could have written a single proper story in that time. One of the big limitations on generation is that you have to come up with a hundred different good ideas instead of just one. Though this can be appealing if, like me, you're better at having ideas at fleshing them out.