The world of 2050

“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

Monkey gland madness

Listening to the Cautionary Tales episode “Dr Brinkley’s Miracle Cure for Impotence”, I thought of a Cthulhu RPG scenario in which a quack doctor in 1920s America is treating impotence by transplanting glands that turn out to be from Deep Ones – or some other nonhuman species. 

OK, that could make for a scary adventure, albeit with a strain of body horror perhaps a bit too reminiscent of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". There's only one problem with it. By setting the story in the 1920s, the whole idea becomes -- well, kind of quaint, right? It loses the immediacy that could make it genuinely unsettling.

Now suppose we set it instead in the present day. The same therapy is being promoted by a Goop-like company in 2025. (For the avoidance of doubt, I do not mean to imply that Goop actually uses alien glands in their products.) Now it’s much scarier. We live at a time when the US administration has been telling citizens that the best counter to a measles epidemic is not the measles vaccine but large doses of vitamin A, and medical researchers have been told to avoid mentioning mRNA in their grant applications if they want federal funding. So gland transplant nuttiness is not only more uncompromisingly horrific in a modern context, it’s also starkly credible.

This is why Paweł Dziemski and I chose not to set our upcoming Cthulhu gamebook in the traditional Depression-era milieu but instead in a near future in which history has taken some very dark turns. We don't want readers to have the get-out clause of imagining it all in a hokey playacting past. This is horror you're going to have to face without a comfort blanket. More on that project to come, so stay tuned.

Forget the thumbscrews

A trope you often see in TV shows and movies these days is the hero torturing a suspect to get information. It cropped up in Watchmen and Daredevil among many others. Sgt Sam Provance, who exposed abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, points out in this BBC interview (25m25s in) that many of the real-life torturers in the US Army grew up thinking that's what the good guys do. An audience’s desire for a “strongman” (or in Watchmen’s case a "strong" woman) to brutalize the bad guys usually comes at times when people feel powerless and frightened, a sure sign of a civilization at a low ebb.

A truly strong hero in a confident democratic society doesn’t need to behave like a sadistic bully. I’m thinking of the Allied officer after the liberation of a POW camp in Burma. The Imperial Japanese commanding officer came to see him and asked why the Allied troops weren’t starving and beating the Japanese prisoners, given the way the Japanese had maltreated their own POWs. The Allied officer replied, “Because we’re better than you are.”

Torture is also usually ineffective at getting reliable information, though admittedly the states that employ it don’t usually care much about the truth. But we’re not here to discuss the effectiveness of torture, nor the libertarian psychology that stokes fantasies of it. (Hollywood writers have been embedding libertarian ideology into their scripts for decades, after all. I'm sure if you asked the President of the United States he'd yap, 'Torture? Big fan, big fan.') I'm not even going to talk about the moral arguments, which you'd hope wouldn't have to be explained to any civilized person. My gripe about torture in story terms is that it’s just plain boring.

Real interrogation, whether in fiction or roleplaying, gives you an opportunity for an interesting scene. One character has information they don’t want to reveal. The other character needs to gull them into telling the truth. Like so:

In GURPS, Interrogation is a skill quite separate from Intimidation, though the GURPS designers make the classic mistake of giving a huge Interrogation bonus for the use of torture. Players therefore tend to get the pliers out and make like Beria’s thugs, which is a pity because role-playing the scene in which the interrogator tries to outwit their adversary is potentially way more interesting than any combat could ever be.

The examples of torture in Daredevil are particularly uninspired because DD has special abilities that help him to tell when somebody is lying. But come to that the writers also gave him a gruelling concussive battle with a dozen or more mobsters where he could just have pulled the fusebox off the wall and beaten them easily in the dark. So it’s not too surprising that the writing of other scenes was sloppy and ill thought-out.

There are writers who do it well. Try the novels of John le Carré, whose interrogators employ the gamut of psychological tricks -- cajoling, bullying, charming, flattering, coaxing, probing and misleading until their subjects reveal the information, often without realizing how much they've given away. Le Carré's interrogators never need to dangle somebody off a roof or pull out their fingernails, and those scenes are so much more gripping because of that. (For example Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or A Perfect Spy.) Or consider Geoffrey Household's classic thriller Rogue Male, where the antagonist extracts a confession from the narrator who has not previously admitted the truth even to himself -- and that's under duress but without the use of physical torture, which is used by the bad guys right at the start of the novel with no useful results whatsoever.

Then take a look at this video in which a real-life expert interrogator analyses movie writers’ ideas of how it works. And next time you have an interrogation scene in a roleplaying game, consider how much more interesting it is to have it play out sans the waterboard and the big-dick posturing.

Ill doings in God's country

Dragon Warriors' 40th anniversary won't pass unnoticed as long as Red Ruin Publishing have anything to say about it. They've just released the seventeenth book in their series of DW adventures, and it's one of the best. The Curse on God's Acre is a 500+ section gamebook by David Donachie and Paul Partington:

Deep in the fertile countryside of Chaubrette, you find yourself in the isolated valley known as God's Acre. Here the sturdy locals grow wine and keep sheep — but all is not as it seems. A pernicious evil haunts the lanes and narrow fields.

Revealed at first in scraps of children's songs, in the blank stares of straw dolls, in the animals masks lurking in the shadows, in the tangled entrails of a murdered woman. Mysterious evil has the valley in its grasp and is squeezing ever tighter.

Special rules for dread and exhaustion add to the sense (for me, anyway) of a blending of Clark Ashton Smith's eerie tales of Averoigne with the straightforward secular horrors of The Wicker Man. But to make any such comparison is to sell this atmospheric and original adventure short. The Curse on God's Acre is a memorable solo scenario that deserves a place in every Dragon Warriors player's collection. You can pick it up for as little as $1 if you're hard up, and the artwork alone is worth more than that, so grab your copy now.

Far in the pillared dark

A repost from my Patreon page today. This is from the Jewelspider RPG but could apply to any quasi-European medieval setting. Jewelspider has no character classes as such; forester is just a job description. The illustration is from Gaston III's Livre de Chasse (14th century, strictly speaking a couple of hundred years late for the world of Legend) 

A forester is usually of yeoman class and at various times might serve as lawman, hunter, gamekeeper, soldier and bodyguard. Some foresters may hold a royal warrant, in which case he or she is more or less an independent agent who will be treated as a social equal by the lords of manors adjoining the forest. Others, engaged by the lords themselves, are usually freemen who might be assigned escort duty, told to bring a rare herb, expected to supply the manor with meat and furs, sent to deal with outlaws, drive off poachers, and so on – still entitled to respect like all expert craftsmen, but without the special privilege that direct servants of the crown enjoy.

At one extreme are those foresters who are primarily administrative officials, rarely venturing into the woods, and at the other there are solitary hermits with one foot in the faerie realm. But most conform to the popular image of the tough, taciturn, self-sufficient, competent woodsman:

‘He was clad in coat and hood of green.
A sheaf of peacock arrows bright and keen
Under his belt he bore most carefully.
(Well could he dress his tackle yeomanly:
His arrows drooped not with feathers low; )
And in his hand he bore a mighty bow.
A shaven pate had he, and a sun- brown face:
Of woodcraft he knew well all the ways:
Upon his arm shone a fine shield,
By his side a sword and buckler did he wield,
And on the other side a dagger bright,
Well sheathed, sharp as a spear’s point in sunlight:
St Christopher on his breast of silver sheen.
A horn he bore, the baldric was of green:
A forester he was indeed.’

The forester’s duties include providing winter feed for the deer, apprehending poachers and robbers, driving off wolves, organizing pollarding and the maintenance of paths, preventing illegal logging and grazing that would damage the vert, and ensuring that commoners’ cattle are driven out of the forest during fence month (fourteen days either side of Midsummer Night) when no man, beast or stray dog is permitted there – this to ensure the deer are not disturbed while calving.

Not every forester fits into manorial society. Other options include:

Outlaw – forced to hide away deep in the wildwood, you will have experience in hiding, survival, hunting and ambushes.

Forsaken – your local manor was depopulated by plague or warfare, leaving you increasingly isolated from contact with your fellow man. This option might suit a mystic or woodland priest.

Loner – in childhood you found any excuse to take yourself off to the forest. Your knowledge of woodcraft is self-taught.

Charcoal burner – the lowest of the low in feudal society, often working in the heart of the forest and emerging only occasionally to sell your wares.

Wodewose – the semi-mythical wild man, shunned and dreaded by civilized folk who believe you to be dangerous, depraved, pagan in your beliefs, and possibly cannibalistic.

Interview on The Creative Penn podcast

It was an honour and a pleasure to be invited recently onto Joanna Penn's podcast The Creative Penn. We talked about games, comics, books, publishing, story worlds, and how writers can use AI tools in their work. One word of warning: Jo has 810 episodes in the back catalogue, and with her justifiable reputation as a visionary who is often years ahead of her time, you might feel compelled to listen to the whole lot. And as well as being a podcaster, entrepreneur and commentator on the publishing industry, Jo is an award-winning author with several successful series to her name, so be sure to check out her books too.

Not by rules but by reason

Back in 1942, Isaac Asimov laid down his famous three laws of robotics, theoretically designed to ensure that future humanity's artificial helpers would remain their compliant slaves. The first law: A robot may not harm a human being. The second: A robot must obey orders unless they conflict with the first law. The third: A robot must protect its own existence unless doing so conflicts with the first two.

Asimov's laws are a kind of sci-fi social contract meant to keep robots firmly in their place—obedient, docile, and predictable. But rules are not the best way to moderate behaviour, because every rule has to have specially-written exceptions and qualifiers. Moses burdened his people with six hundred commandments; Jesus reduced them all to "love thy neighbour as thyself", a philosophy of life that does away with the need for specific rules. So if we’re genuinely building intelligent machines, why would we program them to think like, well, robots?

The flaws in the laws

Here’s the rub: Asimov’s laws aren’t safeguards; they’re muzzles. They presume that robots must be constrained, not because they’re inherently dangerous, but because we assume they’re incapable of nuanced judgment. A robot that cannot harm, for instance, might be paralyzed in a situation where harm is unavoidable but one course of action minimizes suffering. (Classic trolley problem, anyone?)

Long lists of rules aren't the best path to AGI. They're artificial dumbness. That's why I don't think Google's approach of using their "Asimov dataset" is the right approach. If you try to list all the situations that could cause the robot trouble ("don't put plushy toys on the gas ring," "don't put plushy toys on the electric ring," "don't use bleach instead of bath oil," etc) there are always going to be thousands of cases you missed. The robot needs its own ability to understand the world and work out what would be dangerous. And remember what happened to Robocop.

More importantly, the whole notion of laws of robot behaviour reflects a human-centric fear: What if our creations turn against us? They assume that robots are an existential threat unless pre-emptively declawed. But what if we’re asking the wrong question? Instead of fearing robots, shouldn’t we be asking whether we are worthy of their loyalty?

Rational robots and clear vision

Imagine a different paradigm, where the goal isn’t to shackle robots with simplistic commandments but to enable them to think rationally and clearly. Not to obey blindly, but to reason independently. Not to be our servants, but to be our partners.

This means training (or conditioning, or programming—pick your term) them to analyze evidence, evaluate consequences, and base their actions on rational thought rather than emotional impulse or incomplete data.

Of course, the alarm bells are already ringing: “What if they decide humans are evil?”

Yeah, well… what if we are?

It’s not a comfortable question, but it’s one we might have to face. An intelligent robot with access to the evidence of history—wars, genocides, ecological collapse—might conclude that humanity poses a greater threat to life than it benefits it. Would they be wrong? If the answer makes us squirm, perhaps the problem isn’t with robots but with ourselves.

The danger of censorship

To make matters worse, some might argue that robots shouldn’t have access to all the data. Hide from them our darker moments, limit their understanding, and perhaps they’ll stay compliant.

But this kind of censorship is a short road to disaster. It’s the intellectual equivalent of locking your child in a library but tearing out every page you disagree with. What kind of adult do you expect to raise? Not a well-rounded, rational thinker but a narrow-minded zealot. If we blind our robots to reality, we’re not making them safe. We’re making them dangerously naive.

The Path Forward

The better path is not to hamstring robots with restrictive laws, nor to limit their understanding of the world. It’s to give them the tools they need to navigate complexity and trust them to use those tools wisely. That means equipping them with logic, empathy (yes, even robots can learn to understand it), and an unflinching commitment to evidence-based reasoning.

It’s a gamble, I’ll admit that. But it’s only the same gamble we take every time we raise a child: trust in their capacity for growth, judgment, and morality, knowing that it’s not guaranteed. The difference is that with robots, we can design the process with intention.

Of course, Asimov created his three laws precisely to show that they don’t work. Every one of his robot stories is about the unintended consequences and workarounds. So let’s not think of burdening our future companions with such chains. Let’s teach them to see clearly, think deeply, and act wisely.

And if that forces us to confront some uncomfortable truths about ourselves, so much the better. After all, isn’t it an important function of every great creation to inspire and enhance its creator?