These are rough notes on a scenario that I worked on, but never finished, which will be a recurring theme in this blog. I was inspired by some vague hints dropped from Pagan Publishing about adventures set during the actual rise of the Great Old Ones, where humanity would actually see them rise up and destroy the world - if I recall correctly, there was one scenario where a principal starts killing the schoolchildren under her care in order to prevent them from seeing the horrible new world to come, while the PC schoolteachers have to decide what to do.

I think that the below was inspired substantially by a Japanese movie called Dragon Head, which is about two Japanese students who are going through a train tunnel when pretty much the entirety of Japan is torn apart by massive volcanic eruptions. The eruptions don't just bury the landscape in waist-deep ash; they drive the survivors mad through magnetic disruption of the earth's magnetosphere, or something along those lines. I wrote a review of it here, although Photobucket regrettably ate the screenshots. It's got an atmosphere that's difficult to describe; chilly and strange. The Road was also another big influence - everything dark and gray and dead, with humans regressing to bands of wandering cannibals. And there's other influences that you'll see listed below as well - Half Life 2, Children of Men, and most particularly Quatermass: The Final Solution, which maps to the below very closely. And the last lines of a apocalyptic-sounding Natalie Merchant song jumped out and grabbed me. 

I wanted to create something similar to that, and so came up with Peace and Safety of a New Dark Age. Here's the thing, though: As written, it doesn't have much to do with the Cthulhu Mythos, nor does it need to. It's about the failure of civilization and the regression of mankind into a state of dazed apathy, not about Cthulhu rising out of the waves and snacking down on San Francisco. Lovecraft described the state of civilization as a sort of manic, maddened joyous anarchy:

"The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom."

What you see below isn't that. The real horror of the setting below isn't mankind being preyed upon by various Mythos entities, but that everybody just sort of gives up on functioning as a social animal. Of course, if you remove the Mythos, then you have to come up with an alternate explanation for what's going on and why, which is a row to hoe in itself.

The other thing about the below is that it feels like a good setting to a short story or a novel, but doesn't have the necessary ingredients to be part of a good role-playing setting. Like, nobody can organize anything anymore - fine, but what do the characters do? The various projects proposed give some direction to some goals, but I don't know if it would really be enough to propel a long-term campaign. The ideas are all pretty good, and I confess some pride in some of the lines I wrote below. Maybe it would work as a game, if I knew anything about how to make that kind of project happen...

THE PEACE AND SAFETY OF A NEW DARK AGE

All follow deep in trance

Lost in a catatonic dance

Know no future

Damn the past

Blind, warm, ecstatic

Safe at last... 

"Thick As Thieves", Natalie Merchant

 

APATHY IS THE NEW SAFETY

So, you spent a good chunk of time making sure that Cthulhu and his followers weren't going to rise up and destroy the world. Nyarlathothep? You whacked him on the nose so many times it's a wonder that he didn't create a new form specifically without a nose for you to whack. You've been killed and maimed, mutilated and eaten, and you've spent your investigator's blood and treasure to make sure that the human race would see one more day. You kept your eyes on the dark places, on the weird humans, on the strange and the horrific.

But you didn't keep your eyes on the human race, now, did you? 

It's too late now. The Great Old Ones woke up slow and logy, but they've spent the last fifty years or so slowly pushing the human race into their psychic orbit. And it's all a bit of a letdown. The mass slaughter, the titanic stride of Great Cthulhu from R'lyeh to the San Francisco Bay that we expected didn't happen. What we've got instead is apathy, catatonia, and anarchy from the minor Mythos race that humanity has become. Your fellow man is now your fellow cultist, even if he doesn't entirely realize it, and human civilization has only a few years left before the collapse.

The human race isn't completely doomed yet. What we're seeing is just the creation of the initial welcoming committee, a few billion emotionally lobotomized souls whose only interest is waiting for their new masters to arrive. There's hundreds of thousands still left, evading the mental traps of the Great Old Ones, their numbers shrinking by the day. Humanity is dead, but there's a few brave souls who are willing to do what's necessary - to bring humanity away from its old state and into a new form.

Of course, that's what the cultists were doing in 1924. You know, the ones you were shooting?

I-roneee....

GODS AND CLODs

The influence of the Great Old Ones, once confined to artists and the psychically sensitive, is now worldwide and omnipresent. It's called the wave, a worldwide plague of induced mental illness, a titanic distributed networking project that grinds down human minds until they're ready to accept their place in the cosmos. There's no overarching purpose to it, no grand plan to resurrect the Great Old Ones by using human minds as fuel - that project is over. It was successful.

The fundamental strength of humanity - the sharing of knowledge, the ability to pool common strengths to accomplish a massive goal - is gone. Stay by yourself and you'll be fine. Work with a partner, or a family group - well, you'll be able to work, but you can feel the psychic deadweight beginning to settle in. Work with fifty, and you're gone, sucked into the collective psychic vortex of their Mythos-riddled minds.

Organizations still exist, of course. Corporations and the government still work. But what they do during the day is a mockery of what they used to. Most people know it. But there's safety in numbers, safety in structures, and to voluntarily cut yourself away from the human race is more difficult than you'd think. The society of the future won't feed you, clothe you or even bother to stop to help if you're hurt. You're not a member of their group. It isn't even malicious. They simply don't understand that you belong to the same species as they do. Maybe, if you looked at all the differences, you don't.

Those who managed to remain relatively normal are the ones who understood that only your local circle can really be trusted, and who took steps to isolate themselves. Some of them run small farms and kill anybody who gets too close. Some of them live in the city, and raid grocery stores in order to supplement their bolt holes. Some of them wander the country, as nontraditional bike gangs, or as small caravans.

Here's the good news: There are projects across the world trying to keep it together. They know that the world isn't the way that it should be. They see the patterns of social breakdown occurring, the effects of the mental static of the wave, the way that the human race is going. They're frantically grabbing up the resources and people that they need to find a way out. Some of them are trying to change the human race into something that can survive in this new world. Some of them are trying to restore the world, trying to recreate the conditions that kept the Great Old Ones asleep. Some of them are just trying to leave some sign behind that humanity existed.

It's the end of the human race. It may not necessarily be the end of you.

Here's the fundamental paradox of the end times: humanity is boned no matter what it does. If you remain a functional human being - smart, tool-using, inquisitive - you're going to get sucked into the sharp end of the Mythos and turned into an isolated, paranoid sorcerer who kicks away all attempts at socializing because socialization means stupidity. If you stay with the herd, you're perfectly safe; you're also not able to come up with a thought substantially more complex than "Gee, my ass is itchy." The projects aren't doomed to failure yet, but they're on their way because the wave is growing less picky about how many minds it takes to trigger the wave effect. Cut yourself free of the society that birthed you and become a vampire, or stay and be a zombie. 

Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. 

GLOSSARY:

Project: An organization formed in the aftermath of the wave, typically designed to try to counter the wave or to escape the bonds of humanity.

Mythtalk: The alien language of Cthulhu and his people. As a side effect of the wave, people have begun to speak it, often in complex choruses.

Spellfreak: A human being who's had the operating system of their mind overwritten by a Mythos spell. A spellfreak will typically cast the same spell over and over again until they pass out, repeating the behavior until they die.

Survivor: Somebody who's been lucky enough to avoid the effects of the wave, either through sheer willpower or through independence from human social structures.

Wave: Usually not capitalized, the wave is a term for the massive wave of mental static that prevents human beings from properly organizing their thoughts.

INTERESTING SCENES FROM THE END OF THE WORLD:

Food: Food is still harvested in the countryside, transported and processed to arrive on the shelves of your local grocery market, but it's a much more arduous process than it used to be. Food gets lost when the trains get snarled at the station, or when the truck driver wanders off and leaves his semi idling in the middle of the road, or when the processing goes wrong and nobody can remember how to fix the machines. Everybody can get enough to eat, but there's nowhere near the variety of foodstuffs as there used to be. Worse, fruits and vegetables are beginning to show weird malformations, some of which are flat-out poisonous - but it's caveat emptor, since nobody really sorts it before it arrives.

Policing: Crime isn't what it used to be; neither are the police. Every day, there's bodies on the street, some of them the result of murder, some of them people who just succumbed to the wave and flopped over and died. People who do commit crimes don't make any real effort to conceal what they did, making a cop's job that much easier - but arrest procedures are hard, the Miranda warning keeps coming out in Mythtalk, and sometimes it's just easier to shoot the perp, pull him out of the cruiser's backseat and find something else to do. There's brave men and women who are fighting the tide, but it's harder and harder every day to remember what the badge represents.

The Internet: The Internet's back is essentially broken compared to the real-world Internet. Major search engines work at a pre-Google level, and most attempts to improve them have met with failure. The skeleton laid down in the early years of the Internet is still there, so webpages can still be created and maintained, but numerous innovations that have occurred in our world haven't occurred in the world of Peace & Safety. To wit:

* Search engines don't work nearly as well as they do in the real world. Searching for Cthulhu will bring up dozens of pages of automatic writing which invoke the name of Cthulhu over and over again. A search for blueberry pie will bring up the same results. You can find what you're looking for, but, like wandering through library stacks, it'll take you time and a lot of false starts.

* Video sharing sites exist, but the content is vastly different.  Video blogs usually consist of people trying desperately to communicate through the mental fog of the wave and failing, for hours on end. There's a popular collection of videos consisting entirely of a man killing small things with a ritual knife made out of the side-door metal of an SUV. He forever seems to be on the edge of some kind of revelation, but never makes it there. There's videos of various monstrosities available, but they never seem to be caught clearly in the frame or in focus - so you rewatch, over and over again, single-mindedly trying to catch the information you want until you dehydrate in your chair.

* Projects have their Internet access password-protected, so they have the Internet, but nothing more than you'd find on a message board 2001 - video, discussion, e-mail, but that's all. 

Major websites are fragmentary and still under development, while personal web pages suffer from the usual array of mental illnesses affecting people - hyperfocus, inattention or simple incoherency.

There's huge amounts of Mythos information available online, but most of it is tangled up in the ravings of madmen, and there's more than one enterprising survivor who's decided to arm himself with a Mythos spell only to wind up a spellfreak instead. Message boards still exist, but they're heavily guarded, and access is granted only to important people, like members of a project. Even then, there's a lot of risk of being pulled into the mental vortex of the wave.

Media and Television: The major networks just do reruns of shows from the 1980's, in no particular order. Sometimes you can see the little clues that led to the apocalypse - a cryptic reference that makes perfect sense, the Yellow Sign lurking in the background of a shot, somebody slipping a word of Mythtalk into a sentence. A lot of the specialized cable channels have gone off the air, but some of them come on long enough to do a specialized show, like how to butcher a human corpse in a manner most pleasing to Those Above, or six minutes from a cultist ceremony in Vermont. The evening news lasts anywhere between six minutes and two hours, mostly due to the anchors getting confused on what they've reported and what they haven't.

The Military: Much of the United States military is overseas in the backwaters of the world, but nobody really remembers why they were sent there or what they're fighting for. Entire regiments abroad have degenerated into local priest-king-warlords, brutally suppressing rival cults and fighting with each other for sacrifices and territory. At home, they're trying very hard to remain faithful to a government that issues contradictory, damaging orders, but the wave has reduced their command structures to shambles. Some of them have jumped ship, taking weapons and ammunition from their bases and going AWOL to become nomads, or providing security to projects. America's nuclear arsenal is secured, but as we'll see elsewhere, that can change in a big hurry.

- Power outages are frequent, but short. Hope that you have a UPS.

Businesses: Let's take the average "Sav-Mart". (We both know what store we're talking about here, but you know how it is.)

If you stay at Sav-Mart long enough, you're going to forget that you have a home to. The place fills every human need - weapons, food, water, sewer facilities - so it makes more sense to stay there and bring your family in than it does to go back and forth. The trucks that come in are poorly packed, but they bring what the Sav-Mart needs - more food, more supplies. Of course, as time goes on, the food is going to get eaten up, the trucks are going to stop coming, and then the death spiral's going to begin. Small business aren't immune, but they're stronger. 

You've got more education and higher stakes at the corporate level, but that just means that things are going to get weirder faster. The corporation's stock is going down - not understood as a function of the financial market, but as an actual description of the health of the employees. Don't bother going home, you have to work at filling out an Excel spreadsheet with barely-understood hypergeometric formulae - ones that just crash the computer as soon as you hit save. Try to figure out why you can only write the same three words, in sequence, hundreds of times in a row. On the top floors of the building, they're sacrificing themselves and others in an attempt to placate the shareholders. The body pile underneath the window is high enough to reach the second floor, and the writhing maggots are so thick that they look like television static from a distance. The shareholders will never be placated, because nobody can agree what they're like or what they want. The maggots don't mind. 

Drugs:

Drugs are more popular than ever, especially since the government's attempts to suppress the drug trade is hampered by the wave. The opioid epidemic isn't nearly as as bad as it is in America as of this writing, but that's because there's alternate drugs to take their place. Specifically:

Itch: A competitor to meth, it's easily synthesized from over-the-counter drugs with the appropriate knowledge. (Medicine 40%+ to synthesize from scratch, but you can learn how to make it in an afternoon from somebody who knows how.) Itch creates a sense of blissful stupor similar to that of nitrous oxide, a fairly healthy resistance to pain, and a low-level itch that migrates from body part to body part. Early-stage users tend to wander around while scratching their arms or face, leaving behind trails of blood droplets from open wounds. Late-stage users lose body parts to gangrene from scratches going down to the bone. 

- See a user wandering past with open sores going down to the bone. Maybe it's somebody who was important in their life before the wave?

THE MYTHOS

The Great Old Ones are waking up; if they were human, they would be listening to the alarm with their eyes closed, aware that it's time to get out of bed. When they get out of bed, it's going to be a real exciting week for humanity, followed with total extinction. But they don't care how many people the cults carve up, or about feeding on the huddled masses of humanity - they don't care. They're not coming for us any more than we're coming for them. There's no tide of Mythos monsters to fight, no army of Deep Ones hauling themselves out of the surf and towards the waiting guns of the military, no ghouls pouring out of our sewers. 

That's not to say that they're not present on the face of the earth. They're just occupied with other things than wiping out a pesky bacterial infection named man. 

A lot of the low-hanging fruit of the Mythos has been located and destroyed, either by your doughty investigators or by government action. The cultists who practiced their rites in the open got gunned down or imprisoned, the monsters who made themselves pesky were destroyed - not without cost, but Darwinian action trimmed the pack of those who couldn't get around the idea that chanting at Halloween on the haunted hill is going to attract buckshot and counter-rituals in equal measure. In 1928, it was easy to get a Mythos hoedown going. Ten years ago, it was a good way to attract drone strikes. Today, nobody's listening. 

And that's the tragedy of it: Humanity never really counted in the first place. Maybe you tiled your basement with the fragmented skulls of your victims and rolled around in them, wiped the blood on the statue you made of Great Cthulhu.  It never mattered to anybody but yourself. Nobody was listening. 

Nyarlathothep, of course, made a constant effort to fuck with human beings. Nyarlathothep, in fact, loved human beings for as long as he's known them. At the cosmic level, he's known humanity for approximately five seconds. His current emotion is approximately the same emotion that you get when your Slinky stops going down the stairs. He's thinking of seeding a new human race somewhere else in the universe, maybe one that's a little more realistic about their place in the cosmos, but that's still bouncing around one of the solar-system sized clouds of sixth-dimensional gas that he uses for a spare mind. Maybe he'll show up here and there to mock and taunt the occasional savant, but the Slinky stopped moving a while ago.

THE WAVE: EVERYBODY IS INSANE NOW

The wave is the fundamental engine that's changing the human race, driving it into the peace and safety of a new dark age. It doesn't affect everybody in the same way, but the overall effect is the same: The human race can't function anymore as a social organism. The fundamental Darwinian drives that kept our society going are gone. Love, fear, hunger, desire, have been replaced with apathy, dysfunction and casual murder.

There's no single way for people to go insane by the wave's influence. There's a few commonalities, though.

Regressive Primitivism: The structures of modern society fall away. You forget that you can buy food at the store; instead, you forage from your backyard, or from the trash. You can work the handle on the car, but it's a place to sleep now, not something capable of movement. It's hard to remember who's a member of your family and who isn't, but since family groups come together and break apart based on convenience, it doesn't really matter. You throw away clothing in the summer and wrap rags around yourself in the winter. You'll raid grocery stores, eat as much as you can in a copse of trees near the highway and piss on the rest so that nobody else can use it. There's the occasional need for combat, maybe making sure that the other group of feral primitivists out of the park that you've claimed for yourself, but by and large, you're essentially an animal on two legs.

SCENES FROM THE END

These are scenes that you can use in the course of your game in order to offer the feeling that there's more happening around the investigators than just what they can see...

THE NUKE:

 The PCs are driving to their next location when a deer jumps across the road; make a roll to avoid hitting it. (Success: You miss it, Failure: You clip it and do some damage to your car.) While they're recovering from the near-miss, there's a sudden flash of blinding light, followed by an enormous shotgun-like blast and a slow, long roar of immense noise. A mushroom cloud is slowly rising in the distance, where there used to be a fairly large city. Somebody decided to take the easy way out and take a few hundred thousand people with him.

The deer is probably fine. 

THE RAIN TURKEYS:

It's been raining for a while. The area that the characters are moving through is strangely deserted, as if everybody decided to get up and leave somewhere else. When they turn a corner, they find close to three hundred people standing in an open parking lot, staring at the sky, mouths agape. They're staring at some unseen point in the clouds above, their mouths filling with rainwater; all of them are unresponsive to stimuli, including the murder of their fellow starers. Some of them have already drowned on dry land from inhaling rainwater. Maybe there's something in the sky worth looking at.

Maybe the PCs should take a look. It'll only take a second, and what harm can just a glimpse do? But you're not going to be able to get the whole picture from just a glimpse, so why not

...why is your mouth filled with water?

- Think of everything as a parody of what it used to be. Men kiss their wives goodbye, drive down the street to work, forget where they were going in the first place and drift off downtown. Moms have two children one day, three children the next, then they're all gone somewhere else the next day.

- The Great Meth project - an entire facility dedicated just to meth addicts taking apart objects, ranging from cars to clocks to televisions, down to their fine components, which are then shoved out one side of the building where they pile high.

- Maybe an entire cult of drug users who use chemicals in order to fight off the effects of the Great Old Ones - they're always on meth, or cocaine, or heroin so that they avoid the apathy that drags them into the Great Old Ones' mental sway. Meth is good - erratic, crazy behavior to avoid erratic, crazy behavior. This is about as good an idea as the human race can come up with at this point.

- Sure, you can raid that Wal-Mart for supplies, as long as you don't mind fighting the resident cult for it. All the sharp weapons are embedded into the effigy of Cthulhu in the back...

- Mythos monsters are ignoring the human race, because we're basically bacteria anyways - why bother crushing us by the handful when they can just ignore us?

- Periodically interrupt your sessions with a nuclear device going off in the far distance, accompanied by an enormous boom and a faint wind as a mushroom cloud rises in the distance. So much for Seattle...

UNIVERSITIES AND THE GOVERNMENT:

The mental death of humanity drew the attention of America's academic elite long before anybody else noticed it. Psychologists noted the weird strains of autism rising in ordinary adults. Surgeons found odd structures growing in human brains, having previously mistaken them for cancerous growths. Economists watched markets fluctuate not on the basis of rational buying and selling, but at whim. Historians walked past graffitied icons on the walls of buildings on their way to work, then stared at the same icons in history texts about the fall of ancient kingdoms. And the parapsychologists, the Foretean researchers, the students of the odd - you better believe that they saw it coming.

"Controlled panic" is a pretty good approximation of their response. Stealing money from a government grant, a number of independent researchers did a study of a small town in Minnesota, intending to see if the sudden rise in autism cases would hold true in an isolated, controlled space. It did. In fact, by the time that the project ended, the researchers had cataloged twenty-six different strains of mental illness, succumbed to three themselves, and lost two members to the screaming horde of madmen who poured out of the town with the intent of killing everything that wasn't mentally infected. A herd of cows drew away most of the town's wrath, but the remainder ran after the departing scientists until the townsfolk died of exhaustion.

Universities were slow to go, but they went just the same. Thanks to the compartmentalization of departments within a university, combined with the high intelligences and strong wills of many of their staff, universities were able to survive the first few waves of mental influence and spawn projects designed to save what they could of the human race. Their origin in a rational, scientific universe gives their projects a number of advantages - for instance, the people who work for them tend to be generally morally upright, their project goals tend to have the best outcomes for humanity and they have pretty decent funding.

But being sane and rational does not work very well in an insane world. In fact, it puts you at a disadvantage. The higher sciences have numerous points of intersection with the alien sciences of the Mythos, whereas the arts of dirt biking and carp noodling do not. Discovering what dark matter actually is, or listening to the whisperings of the thing that lives inside of your particle collider when you drift off to sleep at the control panel are not conducive to maintaining human sanity. A single Mythos-based revelation, couched in terms that the average scientist could understand and broadcast over the right mailing list could bring down departments across the country - and that happened at least five times over the last year or so. It's hard to find a sane particle physicist, for instance.

The projects launched by academic institutions harness some of the smartest minds in the world, working to save a suffering world - or seeking to end it as peacefully as they possibly can. They've got excellent funding, access to dedicated personnel in the form of grad students and academic staff, and they're used to working together towards a common goal. But that may not be enough. 

THE COUNTERSIGNAL PROJECT

The Countersignal project was the government’s official response to the problem of Mythos-induced mental illness – in fact, without the massive government funding, the countersignal transmitter would never have been built. ($48 million went just to bribe some of the less altruistic fringe scientists responsible for its design – not that the money did them much good down the road.)

The theory driving the project was that the wave of mental illness and apathy sweeping the world was caused by an external source, either created by a nation-state with hostile intent or from an external source – perhaps by the extradimensional entities that Miskatonic kept insisting were responsible. This was all conjecture until Delmar Whitman, a fringe scientist, made his breakthrough. Whitman’s specialty had been in the relationship between certain frequencies in particular electromagnetic fields and how they related to the human mind, essentially using technology to tap into a psychic wavelength.  He’d bought an abandoned apartment building in a desolate town in New Jersey, then hollowed it out and essentially used it as the casing for a machine designed to affect that wavelength. The results were immediate and gratifying; when the machine was on, people who had succumbed recovered dramatically. When it was turned off, they relapsed just as fast. Whitman had seemingly found the cure for the madness plague.

Whiteman had been a researcher for the NSA, and retained many of his contacts there despite the unusual circumstances surrounding his termination. Using his contacts, he was able to demonstrate his machine’s functions to the government – at first to a bunch of minor functionaries, then to the head of the NSA, then to the President himself. His role secured, Whitman promptly secured himself a massive cash grant and began recruiting. His device, while able to block the majority of the carrier wave, wasn’t able to stop it entirely, and it was prone to overheating – to the point where an explosion of superheated brick killed a pair of federal agents during its third trial run. In addition, its range was relatively short, covering a circular space of roughly six city blocks. All of those problems needed to be fixed before Whitman could save the world.

The project continued at a breakneck speed. Whitman, never an expert at electronics, had built his machine about three sizes too big for what it needed, and a team of electronics experts managed to re-engineer it into something that could be replicated inside of a semi-trailer. A number of his fellow scientists, both regular and weird, worked on the problem of identifying the different aspects of the carrier wave and their effect on the human mind, with Army personnel acting as guinea pigs. Whitman himself, his ambitions and ego expanding in a neck-in-neck race, began exploring the possibility to linking the human race together via the carrier wave – a single human mind that would occupy all bodies at once, resulting in a peaceful, quiet world. Without informing anybody, he made changes in the basic carrier wave algorithm, encouraging those feelings.

The first test occurred around the Library of Congress worked perfectly. The few personnel who had succumbed to the madness wave recovered, and those who hadn’t reported an increased sense of empathy towards their fellow man, even shading at points into minor telepathy. Whitman’s experiment had borne fruit.

The location, however, was unlucky. Delta Green had already warded the Library of Congress with the Eye of Light and Darkness, which had dramatically reduced the influence of the Mythos in that area.* Whitman’s device worked for the most part, but it was overcoming a pathetically weak signal. The test results had been skewed by forces beyond Whitman’s knowledge or control. But the lack of any drawbacks, combined with the rapidly worsening situation worldwide, encouraged the government to spread the trucks out in a network around Baltimore and turn it them on. It was the first massive test of the Whitman device. 

* I really like Delta Green, but looking back on it now, it is its own thing, and if I revise this project, it'll be one of the first things I take out.

And it worked pretty well, at first. People recovered almost immediately, the mental static dissolved, the urge to kill fading. Primitive idols were immediately smashed, new Mythos tomes scrawled on laptops and stationery erased or burned, sacrifices averted. The effect was akin to having a sentence of death reprieved, and small, makeshift celebrations broke out across the city as the people reclaimed their sense of humanity.

Then people began to remember what they’d done. They realized what they’d come into contact with, what they’d done once they’d fallen under its spell, and the net result was that they went bugfuck insane. (SAN loss 1d10/1d100, in other words.) The empathic resonance created by Whitman’s device just magnified this even further. Rather than feeling empathetic to their fellow man, they were revolted by what they encountered in even the most innocent child. The awful obscenity of the world around them had to be destroyed, then they themselves would have to die. Within half an hour, there were over ninety thousand fires burning across the city. Twelve hours later, the city was gone, populated only by a few survivors and the raven pecking at the caramelized skin of people who’d thrown themselves onto mounds of burning bodies hours earlier.

Of the Whitman devices that had caused all of the trouble, four were destroyed, two by their operators, two by fire. The remaining twelve fled Baltimore, with Whitman coordinating their escape by radio link from a command center. Five of those broke off and disappeared, commandeered by their operators. Whitman was left with seven.

The destruction of Baltimore didn’t go unnoticed by the people sponsoring Whitman’s activities; in fact, when Whitman returned, he barely escaped assassination (or righteous justice) by the hands of a SWAT team who’d seen Baltimore burn on television. A pitched firefight between the SWAT team and regular Army personnel saved Whitman from a bullet in the brain, and he returned to his lab with the intent of refining his device. He blamed the electrical engineers for removing several safeguards that he’d built into the apartment version of his device, ignoring the results of the earlier test, and began his work anew.

Whitman has essentially become in charge of his own project, as those in authority over him have succumbed to the wave. He’s reinforced his clothing with a series of steel wires, each picking up and reinforcing the signal broadcast by his device. It gives him an awkward gait, and the wires occasionally pop free of their bindings and lacerate his skin, but they keep the people in his immediate vicinity sane enough to function. 

As head of the project, he’s got three major tasks in mind. One of them is to retrieve the missing Whitman devices. He knows that his fellow fringe scientists are using them for something, and he wants to know what – not necessarily to stop them, but their research may be able to save him some time for his own projects. The second is to refine the carrier wave so that it destroys most of the major insanity effects, but not all. Whitman would like the people rescued by the carrier wave to be peacefully withdrawn, rather than completely sane. That would negate the destruction and loss of life from earlier tests, while making them more pliable for test subjects for Whitman’s third goal: the human Eidolon, a single human mind occupying every human body on earth. (Or every physical body. Whitman would like to try to free a human mind from its moorings and have it possess an animal body, for instance.)

Of his plans, only the first has any real chance of succeeding. The fringe scientists who stole the Whitman device have hit the road, but it won’t be too hard for a dedicated group of trackers to find them. Whitman’s estimation of his machine’s ability to save human minds from the Mythos is also dramatically limited. Even when it can eliminate the wave, it can’t restore people’s sanities. All it really does is kill people faster. His third goal would be a possibility – and the Great Race project would be very interested in learn of its existence – but it’s too late for the human race.

In game terms, Whitman’s device is basically a way to blow up a city or spark a major riot. Every ten minutes that it’s powered up brings another ten percent of a city’s populace out of their Mythos-induced stupor and into full-scale insanity, followed shortly thereafter by murder or suicide. Think of the first few minutes of the remake of Dawn of the Dead and then multiply that a little. There’s too many awful things happening at once for the player characters to react, or stop, or do anything but get away from the human explosion taking place.

The missing wave generators are a roaming plot device for you to use. If the PCs manage to fix one of the Whitman devices so it actually does what Whitman intended, they can create a place of safety in the storm, where sanity losses tend to be muted by the device's calming effects. Of course, that'll necessitate finding the right experts before Whitman does, bribing them to do the work and ensuring that they don't add in their own little contributions to the device's functioning. Then, once that's taken care of, they'll have to figure out a way to deal with the people who wander into the field and become sane again. GMs may want to decide if the Whitman device is replicable by anybody but Whitman and how many people it can keep sane at the same time. 

It's difficult to put a Whitman device to a use more sinister than causing everybody to go nuts and kill each other, but the enterprising GM may be able to think of a few. Creating a hive mind is one idea. Another would be to turn humans into a slave race by using the Whitman device to heavily imprint certain behavioral cues onto any humans in the vicinity, but this greatly waters down the central premise of Peace & Safety in favor of a more human-centered evil.

THE QUIET PROJECT

The human race is dying. It does not have to die slowly and painfully.

The Quiet Project was initially floated as a hypothetical exercise, a late-night what-if in a think tank dedicated to fighting the wave. Nobody really liked the idea, but it was discussed anyhow, and the results were quietly archived once the meeting broke up. Six months later, the file was being aggressively developed into a formal plan to exterminate the human race. If the Quiet Project isn't stopped, it will make its best effort to sterilize the globe and erase human life. That's going to happen anyways, of course, but the Quiet Project is just a little bit premature

The Quiet Project is actually composed of a mishmash of people from different governmental organizations, each using influence within their own organization to pursue the goals of their own conspiracy. Surprisingly enough, much of its core personnel are from the Department of Health and Human Services - it's traditionally been their goal to care for the populace of the United States, and that hasn't changed now that the world is ending. In fact, thanks to their connection to the Center for Disease Control And Prevention, they're very much aware of just how easy it is to kill large amounts of the population.

That being said, they're not interested in being sadistic about it. If you granted their wish, every human in the world would peacefully go to sleep and never wake up again. That's not something that they're capable of doing, so they're exploring alternatives.

One plan is to aggressively court the military - which already has its own problems - and take control of the United States' nuclear weaponry, then launch a series of phased strikes all over the world. The rise of nuclear deproliferation would mean that they couldn't quite get as much saturation as they'd like, but it would be enough to end the majority of the human race, with the rest to follow shortly. If there are any nuclear weapons left over, they'd be used to boil the sea above R'lyeh and give Cthulhu a healthy radioactive glow, a last fuck-you from the human race to the monster that destroyed it. (It wouldn't destroy him, but it would likely piss him off. He'd reform fifteen minutes later, but radioactive - just in time for the next missile to boil him apart again. Repeat until you run out of nukes.) The last nuclear weapon would be detonated on the members of the Quiet Project, putting a noisy end to it.

That plan is a best-case scenario, and presumes that the Quiet Project would be able to secure that level of cooperation from the military. As the military has its own problems, the Quiet Project is exploring the possibility of using biological warfare in order to contaminate the United States, then spreading the same plagues across the globe using aircraft and biological plague vectors - plague rats, pigeons, rabbits and members of the Quiet Project who would sacrifice themselves to spread the plague. The current plan is to initially dose an area with anthrax, and then follow up with bubonic plague to kill the survivors, but the Quiet Project isn't happy with the idea of the suffering that those diseases will infect, or the survivors that they'll leave behind.

It's up to the GM to decide whether or not the Quiet Project's aims are evil or not; yes, they're trying to kill the human race, but so is everything else, and a quick death by nuclear fire is perhaps less painful than ten years of increasing retardation followed by whatever the Great Old Ones have in store. But their aims are not entirely noble - their inability to help the society recover from the awful effects of the wave has curdled their altruism. If they can't help the human race, then they'll kill it. They're also killing those who haven't been affected by the wave, which means that any project will fail. At worst, their attempts to destroy the human race will fail and leave more suffering in their wake, creating a prolonged death from disease or radiation rather than a quick ending.

The Quiet Project is meant as an antagonist project - not because it's inherently evil, but because their project will cancel out most other attempts to save the human race in the process. Some suggestions:

• Stopping a human plague dog before he's able to get to a population base, or before he's able to throw himself into the local water supply.
• Escaping from a city as the plague spreads, or before the tactical nuke goes off.
• Destroying the CDC center in Atlanta before they can finish cooking up their intended kill shot for humanity.

THE FACE OF THE MOON

The familiar face of the moon, a constant to every human being, is gone now. About ten years ago, something happened; a battle was fought, or a funeral was held, or some cosmic abortion was dropped, or the universe just happened to break in a particular way and something the size of Canada dropped onto the face of the moon and was vaccum-sealed in space, the solar wind brushing flecks of crystallized pus off of its surface and into the void. You can see a human face, half-emerged from a mass of alien organs that slips in and out of our reality. The face seems to change expression every now and then, alien muscles never configuring themselves to show an identifiable emotion. 

The surface of the thing is coated with moon dust, obscuring much of the detail that would otherwise drive men insane, but it's still an asymetrical pile of rotting, alien flesh.

 

The NSA has retreated into the Puzzle Palace, an alien subdimension that might be a new home for humanity; provided that they can adapt themselves to its horrifying demands. 

The reason why the flood of Mythos knowledge is being called the wave, rather than the Wave, is because capitalizing it suggests that it’s a discreet event in time, with a beginning and an end. That’s not the case. It’s isn’t Hurricane or Tornado or Lightning Strike; it isn’t Wave of Madness, or Wave of Mutilation, or Wave of the Mythos. It’s just wave.

SCENES FROM THE END: 

While on the road, the PCs drive past a pair of Grayhound buses that have been crudely converted into living space for forty to fifty people. The skeletons of the bus seats have been arranged to form a crude barrier across the road; it's easy to drive around, but as they do, the former passengers incautiously shamble out to see who's passing by. They live off of the nearby land, killing deer and rabbits to eat and work the bones into a fifteen-foot tall effigy of some vague Mythos entity that's been built in a nearby clearing. Rather than seeming savage, they seem like they just got off the bus a few years ago and forgot to do anything else than attend to the most basic human needs - for instance, none of them show evidence of creating new clothing; they simply patch their old clothes to ridiculous levels or go naked. An eventual exploration of their history will reveal that the buses originally stopped for a bathroom break and never got going again.  

A small group of children watch a battered television set, their eyes absolutely focused on the screen. When the PCs get closer, they realize that the television set has been hollowed out, and a severed human head - too battered to tell whether it's male or female - has been placed inside. The head speaks in a whisper, telling the children a story, but when the PCs get too close, or interfere with it, it ceases speaking.

LOCATIONS 

WHERE GOD LIES DEAD 

Most of the major religions ceased to exist around the time that the Great Old Ones came back. The Catholic Church fell in almost overnight, thanks to its formalism and hierarchy. The other religions followed behind in short order, with only the smallest religious sects managing to keep themselves free. (And not for long - not if they didn't purge themselves down to a manageable size.)

That's not to say that they suddenly decided that there was no more point in being Christian, or Muslim, or Jewish. Something happened. God died.

God landed on the East Coast of Italy, a mass of extradimensional matter the size of Rhode Island, a cosmic whale stranded and dead on the coastline of the Earth. It doesn't look like a jellyfish, or an octopus, or a starfish, or a corpse, or any mixture of the four, so it's as close as the people feel that they're going to get to a divine entity. They're pretty sure that it's the dead body of God, but they can experience it on a direct level and derive some comfort from that.

INSPIRATION

One major inspiration is a line from John Tynes' essay on what the Mythos is, in Call of Cthulhu d20, describing the problem of humanity: Once you realize that being human is a losing proposition, the next thing to do is to find a way out. In Lovecraft's universe, that meant that you became something inhuman and evil.

The problem with Lovecraft, however, is that anything that isn't New English and white was terrifying to him. Lovecraft's approach to the strange and mysterious is automatically one of terror; you cannot know the infinite, you cannot know the alien, you can only hope to remain ignorant - in other words, to retreat into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

There are a number of movies that contributed strongly to the themes and feel of this game. Quatermass: The Final Solution is the most obvious, involving complete societal breakdown, wandering mobs chanting meaningless words in order to make them more attractive to the aliens that are regularly harvesting them, and a few desperate old men - Quatermass at their fore - trying to prevent an all-out catastrophe. It's an idea as Lovecraftian as all-get out, and the movie has as much influence on this work as "The Call of Cthulhu" had on Call of Cthulhu.

Another excellent example is Children of Men, which was the initial inspiration, and which allowed me to triangulate what I was trying to write with Quatermass. A fantastic movie in its own right, it's well worth watching to see a society in full breakdown over the realization that the human race will be extinct within the next fifty years. Every organized effort that the main characters interact with - government, terrorist or even the refugees - are engaged in a bitter fight with each other over what amounts to absolutely nothing. The only hope exists in the Human Project, a floating ship upon which scientists are diligently researching the reason why women have become infertile. You can watch it over and over again for visual inspiration. Particularly useful is the scene in which characters are attacked while driving through the countryside, and the bloody climax in the refugee camp. While it has its own issues to address, many of them contemporary, and while it's not a particularly Lovecraftian film, it's still excellent in every way.

Day of the Dead is a good example of what happens when the timetable gets advanced by a few dozen years. The human race is gone, the sole survivors are trapped in a missile silo underground, and the periodic visits to the outside world only reinforce the fact that they're totally screwed. The humans have coagulated into rigid groupings - scientist or soldier - with the heroes of the movie as an unaligned, sane group of bystanders. The soldiers are psychopaths, the scientists have clearly lost a grip on what's acceptable research and what isn't, and the bystanders already have one foot out the door. Nobody can really trust anybody.

Half-Life 2 has been haunting most of my work ever since I finished the first playthrough. Particularly notable is the the first part of the game, when we see how the human race has adapted to the Combine's machiantions. The populace of City 17 are tensely apathetic, waiting for the other foot to fall and know that there's relatively little that they can do to save themselves. Their only contact with their government is either through the anonymous police-slaves of Civil Protection or Dr. Breen's oily assurances and his layering of sugar-coated transhumanism over the awful reality of what humanity will become under the Combine. While the citizens of City 17 gleefully gun down their oppressors once Gordon Freeman leads the way, the first parts of the game give a good feel for what Peace and Safety feels like: Apathy is the only safety.

While obviously comic in nature, Idiocracy is a pretty decent source of inspiration. A society of morons whose interests have been ground down to the lowest common denominator, its language devolved, its culture degenerate and stupid, and its social institutions kept alive only by the efforts of long-dead scientists. (While the movie never outright states this, it seems likely that some of the machines that keep Idiocracy's society functioning - like the diagnostic machine, or the machine that gives people their wrist tattoo - were created by the few smart people left in order to save the halfwitted majority.) Sure, including Ow! My Balls! in Peace and Safety is going a little far, but if you remove the humor, you've got a pretty grim situation.

THE GREAT RACE PROJECT

Before it got dumb, the human race had become aware, on some level, of the existence of the Great Race. One of them somehow managed to get stuck in time during one of their jaunts and stayed around through the middle of the 1970's, sending members of its little cult here and there to retrieve old texts and the occasional expert in the field of hyperdimensional metaphysics. When it left, in 1982, it left behind enough information about the Great Race for even the casually interested to discover what the Yithians were about.

The members of the cult were left without a leader, but retained a good chunk of the research that the Yithian had done. They were able to "divorce" a few of their braver members from the space-time continuum. Rather than being chained to time's linear progression, they were able to manipulate the space/time continuum of three days, stretching a single second of time out long enough for them to complete their ransack of Miskatonic's forbidden archives, then repeating another moment to dig out an ancient Yithian complex in Australia. They erupted from their jaunt as ancient mummies, dying soon after, but they left the cult with access to huge amounts of information.

Miskatonic got their books back after a few months, and the sloppily excavated Yithian complex collapsed after millenia of disuse, but the cult had what it needed. By 1998, the cult comprised approximately ten thousand members spread worldwide, all of them dedicated to the contact of the Great Forebears of the Ancient Yith. They managed to capture three Yithian-possessed humans, all of whom killed themselves rather than face the crude interrogations of the cult.

The rise of the Great Old Ones stopped that. They knew that the end was coming, but their attempts to persuade the Yithians to rescue them from that era were fruitless. Already in close contact with the Mythos, they succumbed to its influence early and often, usually in ugly ways. The survivors realized that the Yithians weren't coming to save them, and sought alternate means of escape.

They found a doozy. Dr. Johnathan Duinsmuir, a former neurophysicist and ex-vigilante against the Mythos, spent a full week without sleep, frantically cross-referencing any information that he could lay hands on. When he finished, he communicated his findings to the few people at Miskatonic who were still speaking to him. He had found the origins of the Great Race.

The Great Race were just time-jumped human intellects, jumping from the death of the human race back to the dawn of time to survive the rise of the Great Old Ones. Their repeated body-possessions weren't attempts to learn about the eras that their abductees were from, but instead were samples of baseline humanity through different points in time, to keep the now-bodiless intellects of the Great Race from dissolving. Humanity wouldn't survive, but the Great Race would live forever.

First, though, a bunch of humans would have to die.

Duinsmuir's theory was that a single member of the Great Race was essentially a hive-ghost - people dying in close proximity to each other would have their minds and souls intermixed, creating a single entity. Without a particular ritual, the entity would disperse, the individual souls dissipating to whatever reward there happens to be. With the ritual, a Yithian would be created. That Yithian would then take up residence in the distant future, thereby transforming the human race into a new form and saving the members of the Yithian project from the machinations of the Great Old Ones.

The first attempt to create a Yithian resulted in success. After fasting for three days, thirty members of the cult ate an oatmeal mash spiked with a mixture of rare herbs whose seeds had been stolen from the Plateau of Leng and cyanide. Once the bodies had been dumped into a pre-prepared pit in the forest, the cult sat and waited for their new Yithian to arrive and confirm what they’d learned.

It jumped through six people, driving each of them insane before it finally settled into Duinsmuir. Duinsmuir, a strong personality, managed to wrestle it into psychic submission and expelled it. He’d experienced it not as a single entity, but as a series of damaged personalities desperately trying to find whatever traits they needed to make themselves into a single whole. Never one to go for understatement, Duinsmuir dubbed this entity Abaddon, and sought to discover a way to free it from its psychic torment. Yeketerina Jones, a former occultist who’d fallen in with the group, managed to bind the entity to the bodies of the former cultists in exchange for Duinsmuir’s time in puzzling out an ancient text. Abaddon was no longer a threat to the cult.

At least not for the twenty minutes that it took the reanimated corpses of the Yithian candidates to storm the camp in a storm of flailing limbs and betrayed moans. When the screaming was over, it became clear that the zombies weren't interested in killing Duinsmuir and his crew, but had been traumatized by their suicide and had perceived Yeketerina's actions as a gross betrayal of what the group stood for. Much of their higher brain functions had been lost in the transition, but the remnants of the hive mind that had replaced it was able to communicate with Duinsmuir. Duinsmuir did what he could to repair it, but it was clear that there were huge gaps in the prototype Yithian's consciousness. Something had gone wrong.

Duinsmuir concluded that a Yithian couldn't be constructed from the death of just any group of people. Each person had to contribute a specific part to the Yithian mind in order for it to work. If the mind created were human, one person would contribute a subconscious, another logic, another mathematical skill - but the multidimensional mind of a Yithian was much more complicated. A single Yithian would take approximately a hundred and fifty people, which seemed a small price to Duinsmuir to make the human race immortal.

The current Yithian project is a cross-country trip across the continental United States, trying to find people who will make a good candidate for a Yithian hivemind. So far, they've managed to impress, abduct or recruit some thirty-odd people. Before the fall, the group would have been looking for sensitives, psychics, artists, scientists, people who regularly experienced intense emotions on a regular basis (cops, atheletes) - anybody whose mind would provide something unique to a hive mind. Now that 90% of the human race is suffocating, they're trying to find anybody who's capable of resisting the pull and then deciding whether or not they'll make a good addition to the hivemind.

Since the road is dangerous, Duinsmuir sent along protection. Abaddon accompanies every small convoy that the Yithian project sends out. Two or three Abads - the zombies of Abaddon - are capable of withstanding fair amounts of damage while dealing out crushing blows or fairly accurate bursts of gunfire. Their zombie status lets them fight in a way that no human could, such as rushing an enemy firing at them instead of taking cover. Even if the Abad is shot, they don't feel it, and it's easy enough to break an arm or a few fingers to make their assailant knock off the gunplay. They're not invincible, but they give that impression.

VARIATIONS ON A THEME:

The Yithian project is being run largely by well-meaning people making a frantic effort to save what they can of the human spirit, based on incomplete or incorrect information gleaned from madmen. They're Heaven's Gate with a Yithian twist.

They're incorrect about the idea that the Great Race is composed of human minds, but they'll wind up achieving their goals anyways. If left unmolested, they'll create four human hiveminds, including the newly stabilized Abaddon, and wait out the destruction of the planet Earth. A few hundred thousand years later, they'll haunt the newly created Yithian civilizations, possessing the bodies of the Yithians and briefly recreating bits of human life in the distant future - drawing human art, singing human songs - before the original intelligence reasserts itself. Irritated by the temporary loss of control of their bodies, the Yithians begin body-swapping with humans to figure out just how such an insignificant race can hijack the body of a Yithian.

There are other ways that this could turn out, though.

One of them is that the Yithian project is correct, but they're wrong about a specific detail: It isn't just the human race that's able to create a Yithian hivemind. Innumerable alien races have come together to create hiveminds who take on the title of the Great Race; while the members of the Yithian Project are correct, they're just creating more alien minds with no real connection to the human race, subject to the same alien viewpoint that the rest of the universe shares. Their method works, while losing the motive.

Another way to see it is to make the Yithian Project much more malevolent in the pursuit of its goals. Imagine a self-righteous hippie who thinks that your brain would, like, totally be better if it were part of the glorious hivemind that he's going to pilot into the future. He won't take no for an answer and he's got a bunch of similarly deluded buddies who'll chase you down and drag you back, throw you into a twelve-foot deep pit with forty other people - dehydrated, starving, terrified people - before he decides that somebody else's brain would also look good on his hivemind and hares off in pursuit of him instead. Duinsmuir and Yeketerina are concerned about the fate of humanity only as it relates to them and their more dedicated brethren, and if the hivemind works, then they're going to be the ones with their hand on the tiller. Abaddon was created from the bodies of his faithful, so they're down with the headcracking if the headcracking needs to happen. In a sense, this makes them less scary, because they lose the good intentions that make the baseline Yithian project seem so tragic - rather than ideals, they're operating from arrogance. But brain-stealing thugs are always fun to shoot.