This will be the last post on the blog.
Eternal Lies has been completed. It took 23 sessions and I rate it as possibly the best campaign I've ever ran. If you're looking for a campaign with a lot of depth, and have a group of players who are more interested in playing a role rather than rolling dice, I strongly advise you to look into this.
Many thanks to the writers of this campaign, but I'd like to than Justin Alexander even more.
This campaign might be really good, what he did with his Alexandrian Remix, has lifted it to the next level for me, with its plethora of handouts, extra scenarios and little add-ons left and right.
Massive thanks to the players as well, Frank and Chris, who were there from the start (yes, we started the campaign with just two players), and Ben and Dan, who joined us after the Yucatan expedition.
Looking forward to the next campaign!
Sven
Marcus' Note
Carter found this note in the pocket of the coat he wore on top of Mount Kailash.
My darling Wife,
I know this was not a life that you ever wanted to see me fall back into.
If I should not return, know that you are the light of my life, more than any Gods, beliefs or souls.
you brought light to a life full of darkness. May the Lord bring to you and our darling Chloe all the happiness and joy possible in this life.
I know I will see you again, in this life, or in the Kingdom of Our Lord.
Your Husband,
Forever yours
Marcus Black
THE GAZE OF AZATHOTH
Eternal Lies - The Gaze of Azathoth
Bound in black, brain-tanned leather, this book tells the tale of a nameless man (who is also sometimes described as “faceless”) who lives amidst the “dying lights” of the end of days. Blessed with the “thrice-cursed immortality” this man nevertheless feels as if a creeping doom has crept into his bones. His dreams are slowly filled by the recurring image of a great and terrible Eye which “gazes down upon the world”, and he is disturbed to find that many others among his friends and acquaintances have begun to share these dreams.
At last this “gnawing Eye” – belonging to the “dread amorphity of Azathoth” – manifests itself and its horrible gaze is “turned upon the last, burning days of his twilit world”.
Rather than embracing or accepting the doom of his world, however, the man seeks an escape. He finds it in the “flesh of Yog-Sothoth”, creating a gate which allows him to escape to another world.
Unfortunately, the “gaze of Azathoth” had become “locked upon him” through the “barbs which bear the runes of Nyarlathotep”, and the Eye follows him to the new world and turns its destructive force upon it. The man escapes again, using the same gate as before. And, once again, the Eye pursues him.
The man skips from one world to the next, watching as the stars he had doomed wink out one by one from the many skies above him until his nights are marked only by a “haze of unseen red”. But still he runs, carrying with him the curse of Azathoth’s gaze.
At the end of the story he makes the decision to stop running and throws himself prostrate upon the ground. But as he does so, he finds that he has landed “at the feet of the Herald”, who reveals to him a great truth: That the worlds he has left in his wake have not been burdened with destruction, for as long as Azathoth’s gaze is fixed upon the man, he will carry that destruction away with him and spare the worlds behind.
The Herald’s words, however, come too late, for the mind of the man has been consumed by his “gibbering madness”. And neither he nor any of the worlds he has saved will ever know his sacrifice.
AZATHOTH AND OTHER HORRORS
Eternal Lies - Azathoth and Other Horrors
Published in 1909, this collection of Edward Pickman Derby’s nightmare-lyrics was printed by the Miskatonic University Press when he was a youth of only 18 years. The forward describes Mr. Derby as “the most phenomenal child scholar I have ever known. At seven he was writing verse of a somber, fantastic, almost morbid cast which astonished the tutors surrounding him. In the scant few years which have passed since those early gropings, he has flourished into a sensational talent.”
Included in this collection are the poems “Azathoth” (which occupies fully half the book), “Nemesis Rising”, “Charnel House”, “Dead But Not Gone”, and “Medusa’s Kiss”, among others. These works draw heavily upon the local legendry of Arkham, Massachusetts, and combine startling insights with verse of surprising power.
This particular copy has been annotated with extensive marginalia in a cramped hand. These notes draw copious comparisons between Derby’s work and Justin Geoffrey’s The People of the Monolith, alleging that there was a close correspondence between Derby and that notorious Baudelairean poet. The scholarship seems half-crazed, but through a composite of the two poets’ imagery it creates a strong correlation between the omni-present “gaze of the blind idiot” from Derby’s “Azathoth”, the “skipping ebon stones” that “dance across the skim-skein haze” of reality, and the “mastodonic horror” of Geoffrey. One facet of the “compound gaze” is fixed upon the “land beyond the stone” and some solace could be taken from that “plenipotent distance” if a “ladder of faith” had not been built between that land and this.
