When the stars were right.........

“When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live.”

― H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

Yeah, OK. But what is ‘right’? Many themes run through horror, especially the Cthulhu mythos flavor of horror, but one of the most prevalent is the idea of a celestial link to the evil at large. Angels sent from heaven, demons up from hell, or even the shape shifting terror from a distant world, things ‘not of this earth’ are a pretty common threat. Even in a good old-fashioned Zombie romp, sometimes that whole mess just starts because of something falling from the sky.

But while that is a fine original for many a tale, often the details are left out, or are just completely wrong. Nothing might take you out of the true dreadful feeling of a situation when the logic and science underneath it all just falls apart. For many a writer, and as in the opening quote especially for Lovecraft, the cleverest dodge is to just leave it vague. No one needs to know WHICH stars, it matters very little WHICH planet, just as long as we know that the story now happens because they are aligned. Well darn it all if we didn’t just wake up on the wrong side of the harmonic convergence.

But when we run a game, the players need to actually have some details about some of these origins. In fantasy games, which plane the extra dimensional being is very important, and you might just follow them back to whence they came. But in pure horror, or a horror themed fantasy tale, often it isn’t about fighting that being, but the actual sending of them back. Or in some of the very best tales, stopping them from getting here in the first place. In those cases, we need to know what alignment is about to happen, and what their foul cultist followers need to do when this occurs to summon their dread nanny, or gardener, or whatever form the evil might take. We need some detail.

As with anything, you know your game, and your players, better than some web article might. But I want to present some ideas on how you can flesh out some of those possible details. How you can give an extra level of accuracy (fake accuracy perhaps) to set up your module or story or campaign. Something with a bit ore thought than just saying ‘the stars are now aligned’. In doing so, often it gives you not just a great backdrop for the story, but an amazing pacing element. A clock your players have to racer against. A final goal that they can almost always check their progress against.

I want to be as system neutral as possible, but clearly a game like Call of Cthulhu RPG is really where something like this might shine. But adding a celestial element to any game world can add a lot of depth with as much, or as little, impact to your players lives as you desire.

To really break this down though, I want to look at three different types of celestial impact. Three different scales.

1- Interstellar – distant stars, planets and constellations

2- Interplanetary – dealing with the planets and moons of our solar system

3- Terran – dealing with how all outer elements are viewed from Earth, or impact Earth

Part 1 – Interstellar – Cosmic Horror Beyond Our Skies

Early man looked to the skies and saw sparkling little twinkles of light. Little beautiful dots of luminescence in seeming random patters twinkling in the distance. So of course, being humans, they tried to group them into easily labelled personifications of the gods and monsters they made up in their heads. While there were some remarkable leaps of insight very early on, in general, they said ‘that group looks like a dog’ and boom, you have a named constellation. They didn’t even name most of the stars they saw until much later. They only knew the constellation.

Once the star catalogs did begin, they didn’t name nearly as many stars as you might expect. Typically, just the most prominent ones, and often only those that already fell within their pre-selected constellations. Often, like the constellations, the stars were given names of religious significance to the peoples who named them. And because of this, each region had vastly different named for their stars and constellations. And this is exactly the type thing that we can build on in our games.

If you do a bit of online research, you will easily find star maps showing Perseus, and defining why the Perseid meteor shower is named what it is named. You can find all the signs of our western zodiac staring down at you. You can spot our North Star, and identify the Southern Cross if you are in the wilds of Australia. But once you delve deeper, you will find that the Chinese zodiac, and their Astronomy and Astrology both were very different before the modern age of shared communication. In china, their 28 smaller constellations are called Mansions. They have cool names like Legs and Ghost. And they are lumped into their four larger animals, the Dragon, Tortoise, Tiger and Bird. That is drastically different than typical western Astrology, and an amazing source of inspiration. Some of these do coincide very closely with the western version of some constellation, and some are wildly different.

The Mayans? Rattlesnake, bat, skeleton. How about an Ocelot? Let’s see investigators figure that one out.

But the real take away here is that we can really run with this when assigning constellations to a game culture or religion. We have two things to consider however. Is your game set on Earth? Or, even if your game is a fantasy world, do you still ant to use Earth as your reference and make your stars and planets the same as Earth? If your world isn’t Earth, and you want to make your own stars, then at this point just go crazy really. The sky’s the limits. Yeah, bad pun, but it is the truth. But using an ancient culture as a reference is a great start. Consider the animals of the area, the gods and monsters they believe in, or even know exist.

But if you are on Earth, or at least Earth based, you have a lot more actual reference material to work from. Maybe you pick an ancient culture and review their constellations. Sumerians, Mayan, all of them offer different and interesting options. But the best might be to make up a new set of zodiac for the cult or group your players might be coming into contact with. Depending on game system, many skills and lots of research might go into this, or you can hand wave it all based on your players and your game style.

One detail that can add a lot is actually picking constellations that might be similar across cultures. Maybe one culture has a snake, and you want to make that the same, or similar, to your serpent god. Maybe an octopus constellation is viewed by your cult as Cthulhu. Grounding your new symbols on ones very similar allows for some real-world knowledge and research to feed into the game details. That can be very immersive. If your game is focused on a dozen Old Ones, you can align those. Maybe it is focused on just four representing the elements. Based on this, maybe you chart it out similar to this list.

Dagon – Water – Equals the Chinese Tortoise

Cthulhu – Air – Equals the Chinese Bird

Hastur – Earth – Equals the Chinese Tiger

Cthuga – Fire – Equals the Chinese Dragon

Another consideration when assigning your constellations might be to think about the stars and planets of origin for the source materials of some of your mythos creatures or gods. For example, the star Aldebaran is within the western constellation of Taurus, as it is the Bulls Eye (no relation?). However, in Chinese it resides in the Net constellation. The Net lives in the Tiger mansion. This is important to us because Aldebaran is the star where Hastur, the King in Yellow, hails from. Having this align with our placement in our own four symbol zodiac makes extra connections we can reference and drop clues to within our game.

One final note about cosmic details such as these. They rarely, if ever, change. A change to a constellation would be an epic scale event. A new star, or one just vanishing, would be a massive deal to those who look to the night sky for their guidance. But for millennia, other than a slight shift, nothing changes. This is a very static detail to use in your game, and can be a recurring backdrop that arises time and time again, linking your stories across a campaign. Maybe cults all over the globe, each with a different god they call to, a different creature type they summon, peaking in different languages. If all of them happen to be referencing a different component of a same constellation system of the Tiger, they may all be an extended part of a greater plan without even realizing it.

So this is the easiest of the scales to implement. You do some up front work, but then you are done. In the future, tie a few links to the main constellations you want, and voila, you now have credible links and a deeper back story for your cults.

2- Interplanetary. More than just little green men.

Moving in a bit closer to home, now we get to some things that might actually have an impact on our players. Namely, local planets where horrible things just might come from. Like the first section, you have to decide if you are on Earth, or at least going to use Earth as a reference. Some games do a wonderful job of making up entirely new systems for your players. In Dragonlance, the stars, the planets, even the number of moons, were all custom to that world. One of the best examples you might find.

And if your world isn’t earth based, then go ahead and make some up. Often planets are named for the local gods. As are moons. But one thing to consider, and to add flavor, is that not all planets were discovered or visible during all periods of human existence. Some are very recent discoveries. This is again a great source of inspiration. During his lifetime, Lovecraft was writing some of his best works during the age when Pluto was first discovered as a planet. This revealed a few things.

First, science was still finding new and exciting discoveries, and we have never stopped. Many people had opinions of this new planet, and it became a topic of discussion among many in the science fiction and horror community. Second, the fact that we named it Pluto showed that the strong convention of using a cultural set of gods for a name was a hard habit to break. And third, if RPGs existed in his time, Lovecraft probably would have been a pretty decent GM. After having written the story of the Fungi from Yuggoth, it seemed to call out a planet roughly in the area they had discovered Pluto in. So when asked about it, he basically rolled with it and kind of rolled it into his narrative. Yeah, sure, maybe they WERE from Pluto. That’s a GM thinking on their feet when the PCs find a new link or idea if I have ever seen one.

But the planets weren’t always named that, not by all peoples. And this is another way we can play with expectations and add a bit of detail. Regardless of those who believe the Earth is secretly run by lizards awaiting the return of Nibiru, the Babylonians and Sumerians only knew of five planets.

Jupiter was Marduk

Venus was Ishtar

Saturn was Ninurta

Mercury was Nabu

Mars was Nergal

Importantly, in identifying planets as different than stars, they tracked their motion across the sky. Thus they set up returning cycles and noticed movement. Unlike the distant little specs of light, these ones actually changed position. And those positions sometimes aligned. This is what we call a convergence. Now this is even more fuel for story ideas.

First, if you want planet X circling back around, bringing all those big lizards back, then more power to you. There is a ton of referential data out there by people who actually believe that to build a pretty extensive campaign reference. Or maybe change your world view into thinking Men In Black maybe wasn’t a work a fiction.

More interesting to me is the idea of a Convergence. If we look in our recent history, and the much-touted Harmonic Convergence in 1987, we find that a straight line isn’t always a straight line I guess. If enough people want to follow someone, they will allow any shape to have some significance. The last actual convergence of all our solar bodies occurred in roughly 561 BC. But back then, they weren’t even aware of all the planets to see that they were aligned. Or were they?

A cult knowing of a planet well before it was ever scientifically discovered is a great plot device. Some suggest a Cuneiform tablet shows the sun and ten planets, thus the Nibiru theory was born. Maybe the cult has been setting plans during each alignment as they knew them to be, but with each new planet found, they realized their original calculations were off. But this time dammit, they are going to summon that giant leech god. Maybe all of the planets need not be aligned, just a few select ones. This is another area where you can do as much, or as little, linking to real world events to cement your story. Is Pluto even a planet anyway?

3- Terran…. Or, where the hell did the sun go?

By far the most fertile ground for story ideas is dealing with Terran issues. How all that is happening out there is viewed from down here. From comets and asteroids, eclipses and full moons, nothing has had a bigger impact on horror than this category. Werewolves, Vampires destroyed by sunlight, rituals under an eclipse Saturn is in Capricorn ascending so you should avoid shellfish on Tuesday…. This is the day to day stuff that impacts our world. And of these things, two are the most prominent, and the most useful for stories.

First is the alignment of planets and constellations with regard to use viewing them from Earth. If we have given our constellations our own dark names, and we then gave our planets equally ominous monikers, it only stands to reason when the planet Bloodred is in house Hastur, bad shit is certainly going to go down. Now you CAN track at this level of detail. But this may well lead to the insanity rules for your RPG of choice actually becoming a real-world reference for what you are going to do to your mind. It is going to be a LOT of work. And while that is fun, you have to consider just how much it is going to add for your players. Will they even see it? A they research, remember, these type events last a day or sometimes just an hour. Even a few perfect minutes. So how much work into a detail like this is worth the pay off?

But eclipses are another matter entirely.

Some of the very best stories have used eclipses. What many view as the single greatest work of RPG campaign writing ever created (Mask of Nyarlathotep) uses eclipses. Real world history references eclipses. Eclipses are cool. And lucky for us, they are also very easy to track and predict in our modern age. Just go do a web search and see what you find. Even solar and lunar eclipse for pretty much all of mankind’s short time on this dust ball can be found. Not only that, the day and the times, to the minute, with the areas of the globe where it would be visible is easily mapped out.

So why wouldn’t you want to use this? Now again, we need to know if we are on Earth, or at least using Earth like times for our sun and moon. Maybe there are multiple moons. Maybe a binary star system with two suns. You can actually pretty easily find the details you might need to calculate the likely occurrence of eclipses in those fabricated systems. That level of detail is pretty cool, and fun to work out. And you only have to do it once and make a quick chart for major events during your campaigns timeline and you are done. Instant reference for cool things to come as your characters investigate or explore their doomed little planet.

But if you are using our real-world systems, it is easier still. You can quickly get a chart of all relevant eclipses for the years your campaign might take place during. After that, you have a lot of options to play around with. Maybe the summoning ritual takes place during one of these celestial events. Now you can actually see the bands on the Earth where they may see totality of the eclipse. Track that path, and maybe one spot on the planet happens to align with being the longest point of view of the event, and also over a known land mass. Maybe it happens at midnight in one specific time zone.

This adds a ton of immersion to an adventure. And what if your players actually thwart this attempt? Well, the cult might just try again during the next eclipse. But a savvy group of investigators might actually figure out where and when that cult would have to try it and be ready for them. This amount of detail in a game with skill rolls and active investigation can be a real treat.

So the next time in your game you decide the stars need to be right, ask yourself…. Which stars? And what is right? Then come up with some damn answers.