“The ‘gods’ in [Lovecraft’s] tales are symbols of all that lies unknown in the boundless cosmos, and the randomness with which they can intrude violently into our own realm is a poignant reflection of the tenuousness of our fleeting and inconsequential existence.”
– S T Joshi, I Am Providence
When Paweł Dziemski and I began talking about collaborating on a Cthulhu mythos gamebook, our first thought was when to set it. Roleplaying games like Call of Cthulhu and Tremulus tend to be set in the 1920s and ‘30s, the time that H.P. Lovecraft was writing the original stories. But HPL wanted his horrors to feel real and immediate. They were set in his present day. Locating Cthulhu roleplaying adventures during the Great Depression is the cosy option. Paweł and I (and Lovecraft) aren’t interested in cosy.
Our first thought was to make the story contemporary, but the risk there is it might date too quickly. Suppose we were to mention the war in Ukraine. By the time the gamebook comes out, America might have given Putin carte blanche to bomb it into submission. Alongside Trump's monarchical power-grab, the rise of the populist far-right in Britain and Europe, and the trend towards opportunist "presidents for life" like Erdoğan and Maduro, uncomplicated nonhuman horrors from outer space start to look a little tame.
So then we got to thinking about Robert W Chambers’ book The King in Yellow (1895), which is often assumed to have been an influence on Lovecraft’s development of the Cthulhu mythos. (Incorrectly, in fact; Lovecraft admired Chambers’ early weird stories, but he only came across them in 1927.) “The Repairer of Reputations”, one of the stories in The King in Yellow, is set in a satirically imagined 1920.
Taking our cue from Chambers, twenty-five years in the future is sufficiently far ahead that nothing Paweł and I come up with can be proved wrong. In Cthulhu 2050: Whispers Beyond The Stars we imagine a world in which there are three major powers: the Union (a coalition of Canada and the current US coastal states), the Federation (Russia and the Eastern European countries it has reconquered), and the Republic (China). The heartland of America comprises the so-called Free States.
Personal robots, or "Fridays," have become indispensable, serving as pets, assistants, carers, and/or companions. Friday was a brand name of the Faraday Corporation, formerly the market leader but now defunct. So Friday is now used as a generic term for any personal robot. Once a luxury item, Fridays are now ubiquitous, coming in a variety of forms—from supertoys to android helpers to sleek animal-like bodyguards. Despite the utility of Fridays, there is an underlying class divide just as with slave ownership in Ancient Rome: only the employed elite have high-quality Fridays; the rest must make do with cheap basic models.
The upper echelons of society have embraced neural interfaces, enhancing their cognitive abilities by connecting directly to superhuman AI. This technology promises unparalleled productivity and even hints at immortality for the wealthy, but it also sparks ethical debates and fervent opposition from religious and activist groups.
For most people, life is a mix of moderate comfort and soft constraint. Automation dominates the menial economy, providing unemployed citizens with a stipend to fund a lifestyle of low-grade leisure and consumption. However, this has widened the gap between the elite and the average citizen, creating a world that is simultaneously wealthier and more unequal.
There are lunar colonies too, privately funded by corporations involved in research, low-gravity manufacturing, and mining helium-3 for fusion.
In Whispers Beyond The Stars, you play Alex Dragan. At the start of the game you’re just leaving prison after serving a ten-year sentence, which accounts for why you’re a little behind the times concerning the details of daily life. That set-up allowed me and Paweł to indulge in a little exposition where necessary. You are met at the prison gates by your antiquated Friday, Perine, and a reporter who you may or may not choose to talk to. Either way, you’ll soon be pulled into a dark conspiracy involving numbers stations and world-changing signals from another world. But more of that in an upcoming post.
"I have tried to weave [...] a kind of shadowy phantasmagoria which may have the same sort of vague coherence as a cycle of traditional myth or legend -- with nebulous backgrounds of elder forces and transgalactic entities which lurk about this infinitesimal planet (and of course about others as well), establishing outposts thereon, and occasionally brushing aside other accidental forces of life (like human beings) in order to take up full habitation." -- H P Lovecraft