Moscow

The banks of the Moskva river have collapsed and flooded, creating new wetlands. Much of the subway system is also flooded, but some are known to have survived in sealed sections. In summer, Moscow swarms with the activity a new ecosystem, and dozens of species of stinging insects. In winter the river freezes, and the survivors emerge to scavenge and hunt hibernating beasts.

The USSR will not abandon its former capital without a fight. There have been numerous attempts at reclamation over the years, all of which have failed, and many of which have left behind pockets of soldiers. Most die, some are assimilated by bands of survivors, passing on their skills.

Manhattan

South of central park, all of Manhattan is enclosed in glass, a carefully maintained habitable environment, spring 365 days a year. A glass roof is supported by the tops of smaller buildings and fills the gaps between taller ones. Cars are forbidden with the enclosure, as air pollution has nowhere to go, and much of the subway system is flooded. There is an electric bus service, bicycling is encouraged, and many streets have been converted to pedestrian only walkways and "open-air" markets.

Outside of the enclosure, things are dicier. The giant squatter cities of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Survivors focused on getting through the day, and preparing for increasingly difficult winters. Although they hate it, much of their economy is based on the Manhattan Enclosure, either in service positions or making hand-crafted goods to sell there on weekends.

London

An airtanker arrives, every day, to dump white powder over the city. The drops focus on Hyde Park, ground zero for the infection. 25 tons of powder per day adds up, blowing about the city and piling into drifts. When it rains the mixture foams and bubbles, and bleaches the stone as it drains towards the Thames. The river is as dead as the city, but with the population of Great Britain dead or evacuated, no one complains. Nature has grown strong enough and weird enough to look after itself anyway.

Magic

Science is the best way to understand a world ruled by unintelligent, perfectly predictable forces. What is the best way to understand a world that is alive and filled with life, in which everything has its own will, and in which reality is a constraint imposed by beings of infinite power? In such a world you must be both a shepherd and a parasite, taking nourishment from the weak, stealing power from the strong, and devising new tricks to use against competitors.

Controlling the weak, attracting the patronage of the strong, and competing always with rivals? These are the behaviors of witches and wizards.

CIA

The CIA is a mystery cult. Not explicitly, of course, but its organization of successive inner circles possessing increasingly more important secrets mimics the form perfectly. There are even "initiation rites", designed to test candidates for their ability to keep secrets, commonly including gaslighting, imprisonment, interrogations, and even false executions.

The uninitiated maintain mundane intelligence analysis duties. This is the public face of the agency, doing the sorts of work an intelligence agency is expected to do. Their primary concern is suppressing dissidents at home while supporting them abroad, especially in the USSR.

Members of the agency-within-the-agency are self-selected. Especially talented analysts, who, noticing the ways in which official narratives are insufficient, go hunting for their own explanations, and, crucially, find them. These people must be either initiated or killed. This inner circle is concerned with the secret war against the deep ones, know of the Elder Things held by the USSR, and have suspicions about the existence of the Mi-go. They have transcripts of Soviet/Elder Thing interviews, shoggoth samples, and numerous uncategorized anomalies.

The agency goes one level deeper. Inside the inner circle are the true masters, a group of transplants, seeking a Yithian archive, from which they can learn the true and secret history of the world.

Flourishing

It is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks and become one with all the people.

Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Ethics for Tomorrow"

Prior to commencement, growth rates were well below replacement. We estimate deployment of 1,000,000 units would be necessary to bring birth rates back up to 2.5. Re-investment of suitable units from each batch can negate need for acquiring "wild" units, but will take 10 years at minimum. Enough variety is present that a genetic bottleneck is not expected to become a problem.

The savings on support costs from the removal of extraneous material, combined with the value of trace elements recovered from said material has reduced upkeep and maintenance costs by 17%. Transplantation of extraneous material also offsets costs. Life support equipment remains our most significant cost.

The most successful hormone treatment sped development by an average of 4 weeks, but increased failure rates by 32%, representing an overall reduction in per-year production and is therefore not recommended. Improvements in nutrition and preventative treatments have reduced overall failure rates to 14%.

At this point, our primary problem is the assimilation of batches into the population. Adoption rates are not sufficient to handle more than 1% of each batch. State-run communal care and education is cost-prohibitive. A massive influx of youth will cause demographic instability and the exposure of our project will become inevitable.

Father Dagon, Mother Hydra

The deep ones are not worshipful, they acknowledge no gods. There are, however, those who they must respect. Mother Hydra, the great conglomeration, feeding tendrils groping upwards from Laurentian Abyss, grabbing some things and releasing others. Father Dagon, the giant, floating along the North Pacific Gyre, eating and growing and demanding more. Sister Echidna, which wanders the arctic, spitting monsters ashore. Brother Koshei, recently recovered from below Lake Baikal and held with caution and foolhardiness by the USSR. These are the subjects of deep one one art, the ones worthy of idolization.

Of course, words like "Father" and "Mother" are the result of a clumsy translation, as neither Dagon, Hydra, nor the deep ones have any sort of sex or gender. They are not family, but they are the closest thing.

The deep ones may have been human once. Ancient corpses, lost at sea, may have drifted into the clutches of an amorphous blob, a massively parallel genetic computer, and ancient meddler in natural history: a shoggoth. Once it had a sample of human DNA a shoggoth could have spent millenia "digesting" it, endlessly mixing and remixing it with all the sealife samples it had gathered before. If a viable combination were found, it would not be hard for the shoggoth to bud off an example of that creature, and release it into the sea.

But although the shoggoths made them, they are uncaring, and the deep ones have spent their whole lives immersed in the dream of Cthulhu.

COLD DIAMOND

PROPOSAL SUMMARY:

The planet is changing at too great a rate. Our choice is between extinctions. Extinction by plague and privation, or extinction by rapid adaptation: the transformation of humanity into an alien being suited for life on our alien planet. Previous experiments have already established the efficacy of progenitor methods of hypnosis in deep-brain modification. With progenitor assistance, the USSR can finally create a New Man.

PROPOSAL STATUS: ACCEPTED

PHASE 1 COMPLETE
REPORT SUMMARY:

Successful subjects display virtually unlimited pain-tolerance, perfect self-control, and an increase in empathy paired with a decrease in sympathy. Subjects typically experience a degree of dissociation from their pre-treatment lives, which can be advantageous in cementing new identities. 

~65% of subjects suffered a mental breakdown during the process, rendering them unfit as subjects and unable to carry out any other duty. The causes of these breakdowns remain unknown. No pattern has been established.

Loyalty is a problem. Successful subjects cooperate and obey only when incentivized to. In the next stage of the project we will be attempting to induce deference to authority.

Its Alive!

The guide brings the sacrament in a shot glass. It takes effect almost as soon as I down it. The scales fell from my eyes and I saw the hundreds of writhing things that were hiding underneath.

The stars a thousand cold uncaring eyes and the sky a single black eye in which the stars were mere flecks. Many-tongued trees lap at the sun and shove each other into the shade. In the darkness of the woods some small, scurrying thing is devoured by a larger, scurrying thing. In the darkness between the stars something larger is devoured by something larger still. On and throughout everything a thick veneer of bacteria, always and forever the exemplars of life.

"Behold" intoned the guide "Shub-Niggurath."

Dogs

Blind dogs lack both hair and eyes, but their senses of hearing and smell have both increased dramatically, allowing them to survive as skilled nocturnal hunters and scavengers. Not only do they breed true, but feral dogs will often give birth to blind dogs, ensuring their ubiquity. They can be found worldwide.

Hellhounds seem somehow to have gained traits from goats. Most noticeably, hooves and horns, as well as great dexterity on steep terrain and powerful jumps. Their primary prey are wild sheep and mountain goats. They are found in southern Europe and the middle east.

Carrion hounds have shriveled, hairless heads with with manes growing from their necks. Much like the vultures they resemble, they live by scavenging, although they will attack wounded or sick animals. They are found in the Americas, most often in mountainous regions.

Song dogs are similar to coyotes: small, cunning, and furtive. Their complex howling (from which they get their name) keeps them in constant contact with each other even over great distances, but they only meet to mate or hunt. They are found in northern Europe and Russia.

Once Human

Humanity, too, has been changed. The changes are widespread, and the causes have been difficult to determine and impossible to reverse. These changes have caused more dread and anxiety among humanity than all the other monsters combined.

Zombies (aka shadows, echoes, hollows, or blanks) are those whose conscious minds seem somehow to have “burnt out.” Zombies will maintain basic instincts, behaviors, and powerful habits, but nothing complex. They are often seen wandering in groups, moving away from danger, towards food and warmth. They do react with some intelligence towards their environment, for example, taking shelter from rain. In green zones, zombies usually survive about four months, or until winter, whichever comes first. What turns people into zombies remains a total mystery, but the phenomenon is global and constant.

Ghouls are habitual cannibals that have fallen prey to a mysterious disease, warping their features, and rendering them obligate carnivores. Their jaws lengthen, forming a short muzzle, their backs hunch, and their eyes become highly sensitive too light, forcing a nocturnal lifestyle. The disease is passed from mother to child, with affected children having all the associated changes at birth. Such children are perfectly healthy, but must suckle on blood to survive until they can handle solid food. The most popular hypothesis is that the changes are caused by prions, much like kuru, but gathering enough samples to test it has proven difficult and dangerous.

Transplants are intelligent, well-educated, and rarely with a previous history of mental illness. Every so often, these sorts of people become possessed with a powerful new drive, pushing them to abandon any previous responsibilities and delve deeply into historical, archeological, or paleontological mysteries. This lasts from five to ten years, at the end of which their old personality returns, with no memory of what had happened or why. Its cause is unknown: it is associated with a distinct pattern of neurological changes, but they seem caused by the illness instead of vice-versa.

Pharming Monsters

While many of the new creatures produced by the Mi-go mutagen are aggressive, and most are hazardous in at least some way, some are also useful. In particular, many produce useful biological compounds, including medicines. Humanity is not in any position to turn these down, however strange the source.

The parasite resembles a short centipede, with long stringy mandibles. It will latch itself to an appendage and then insert its mandibles, seeking major veins or arteries. While one mandible feeds on it's hosts blood supply, the other secretes a mixture of steroids. As a result host animals are stronger, more aggressive, and more fertile, but have shortened lifespans. The parasites have become sought after as sources of the steroids they secrete, as well as experimented with as a means of augmenting soldiers.

Ghost cows have moist, translucent, ghostly white skin. The moisture, which their skin continuously secrets, is actually an antiseptic and antibiotic. The skin is relatively weak, tearing easily, but the trade off is virtual immunity to infection, as well as resistance to many parasites and diseases. A collaboration of enterprising individuals across the world are attempting to capture, tame, and raise these cows as a source of antibiotics.

Numb worms are large, snakelike leeches. They hunt by sneaking up on a target if it is still, or, if desperate, leaping at it if it is moving. Once they bite into an animal, they inject it with an anticoagulant and an anesthetic while sucking out as much blood as possible. With the bitten area rapidly numbed, the animal with struggle less, lessening the risk of it injuring the worm. Unlike leeches, numb worms do not attach themselves for as long as possible, instead voluntarily detaching once full. The potential for numb worms to be farmed as a source of anesthetic is being explored.

USA

There are many parallels between the USA and the USSR. The United States were forced to abandon the west coast as the Rocky Mountains turned into one of the world's largest red zones. The federal government will not give up on reunification, but their control is spotty west of the Mississippi, and nonexistent west of the Rockies, with California now all but independent.

Much of the Midwest is also approaching red zone status. A new dust bowl, firestorms, and a seven year cycle of locust swarms all compete to destroy vital farmland. Well-to-do settlements in these regions are built underground, protecting them from these many disasters. Most of these are typical bunker complexes, but the most distinctive are the silo towns, built in decommissioned nuclear silos.

Most major cities contain white zones in the form of domes or arcologies, the most well known of which are the Manhattan Enclosure, the National Mall, the Chicago Towers, and the Orland Stilts. Aside from the Rockies, the largest red zones are the Louisiana bayou, the Florida everglades, and many sections of the Appalachian mountains.

America refuses to be defensive. No established politician will publicly give up on reunification. The less able they are to guarantee internal security, the more aggressively they advocate it.

USSR

The lands west of the Urals and east of the Vistula are now some of the least habitable on Earth, approximately 60% yellow zones and 20% red. Western Russia is an autonomous zone, a patchwork of communes, city-states, and simple chaos. Moscow itself is a red zone, where human life only continues underground. East of the Urals, however, the USSR persists.

Vladivostok is the new capital of the new USSR. Government officials, along with vital civilians, live in a large bunker complex beneath the city. The only remnants of communism are aesthetic: emblems on uniforms and statues. The USSR is spartan, a military state, devoted to and dominated by a military hierarchy.

The cyclical plagues, allergen storms, and toxic rains that render so much of the Earth uninhabitable have largely spared Siberia and central Asia. Mutant animals, however, are more common, especially the giants: gigantic, unique monsters which range across the land. Although the USSR retains a greater ability to wage conventional war than most nations, much of its military is therefore focused on monster hunting and defense.

The USSR has a major technological advantage in the form of live, friendly elder things, retrieved from Antarctica and revived. Deep below the rest of the Vladivostok bunkers, the progenitors tutor their accidental children in the arts of hypnosis, applied neurology, and artificial intelligence. All USSR soldiers are hypnotically fortified, and more and more of their vehicles are assisted or automated by brain-chips, making for a psychologically sturdy military.

Melds

"Melds" is a broad term, referring to a type of extreme aberration among ungulates. Every so often, a horse, deer, donkey, or similar, will have a baby so deformed the only thing it seems to have in common with its parents are its use of the same anatomical parts. The mothers have never survived the birth, even when under veterinary care. The melds themselves always seem unhealthy, often suffering from infections, old wounds that never quite heal, cysts, and boils. At the same time, they can be very difficult to kill.

This phenomena is not known to occur among any group other than ungulates, and does not happen to all ungulates. Each species gives birth to its own type of meld, so although the melds themselves seem sterile, they continue to survive as groups. The cause and mechanism of these changes are unknown.

Horse-melds are most easily identified by their large, frog-like legs. More typical horse legs sprout from their body at odd angles, only partially functional but able to help move food into their mouths, located in the center of their abdomens. Their mouths are flanked by extra jawbones, complete with teeth, apparently useless.

Donkey-melds are characterized first and foremost by bone. Their heads are bare skulls with cracked jaws spreading horizontally like mandibles; the only flesh visible is the eyes, tongue, and esophagus. They have a bone exoskeleton, almost insect-like, but with invariable fractures, infections, and growths. Each leg is split in two, so that it walks on eight bone spikes.

Deer-melds have a body plan similar to that of typical deer, but the devil is in the details. They are constantly trembling, although they are swift runners and rarely seen to fall. Their antlers curve down and forward, ending below and ahead of their mouths. Their hunting strategy is to impale small animals on their antlers, then allow them to rot, eating them once sufficiently softened. Flies can invariably be found following them, and they are always riddled with parasites.

Notes

Inspired by Pripyat Beast by Keith Thompson

UNSEC

The security council became the stability council, and now the sustained emergency council. Most of the rest of the UN has fallen away, but UNSEC remains. It servers as a meeting place for national governments and an avenue for mutual aid. The UNSEC can act directly when requested by a member state, in which case it does so through the OS, the Office of Stability. The UNSEC-OS, to give the full acronym, employers military, political, economic and scientific advisors, a rapid reaction force, an investigation arm, and, unofficially, an espionage arm.

UNSEC classifies the world according to politics and habitability. Politically, Earth can be divided into member states, non-member states, and "uncontrolled zones". Prominent member states include the US, USSR, European Union, New Columbia, Angola, Egypt and China. Prominent non-member states include Taiwan, Argentina, South Africa, and Nepal. Prominent uncontrolled zones include western North America between the Mississippi and the Rockies, eastern Europe between Warsaw and the Urals, the Amazon basin, the Indian subcontinent, the Congo, the Sahara desert, and Australia. Uncontrolled zones have no overarching organization, and can be composed of every type of small human society ever conceived, from cartels to cults.

The world is also divided into zones of habitability. "White" zones are controlled environments, such as domed cities, arcologies, and bunkers. "Green" zones are suitable for permanent habitation and agriculture. "Yellow" zones are suitable for long-term habitation, albeit with reduced life-spans and elevated risks of violent death. "Red" zones are suitable only for short-term habitation, and can be dangerous even to travel through. "Black" zones are fortunately rare, zones from which few have returned and which remain mysterious except for surveillance from a distance.

Notes

The default path for PCs is to be members of the OS, which gives them an excuse to get involved in just about anything.

The Year of Plague and Plenty

At first it seemed like some old testament blessing. Forests began rapidly reclaiming land, crops seemed to grow as fast as they could be planted, and every birth was twins. Any joy at what seemed good fortune was restrained by paranoia at the strangeness of events, a paranoia that would prove justified. The inexplicable fertility boost applied to life of all types and every scale, and soon crops were being devoured by pests as soon as they could be planted, fruit rotted on the vine, and every birth revealed a new type of birth defect. The year of plenty was the precursor to the "the terrible winter", when food stores proved inadequate, the triple flu burned the world, and half of humanity died.

Then changes began to appear in larger forms of life. Animals with birth defects began to survive, even interbreed, becoming new species. There are, for example, the blind dogs, eyeless but with incredible hearing and smell, which have largely supplanted coyotes and wild dogs. Earth's ecosystems now include carrion monkeys, horse-melds, gossamer spiderlings, and many, many others. Some breed true, others appear to be unique. Humans are not immune to these changes.

Food now is a source of continual paranoia. Crops are often lost to diseases or pests. When harvested, foods are immediately placed in sealed containers. They are not removed until necessary for processing, at which point they will be examined for infections, sterilized (typically by UV light), and repackaged for sale, typically in clear plastic containers. The only truly trusted food sources are the sterile vertical farms of the white zones, and even then, the most popular cooking technique is thorough boiling.

Methods of the Mi-go

The Mi-go lack most of what might be expected from interstellar travelers. They have no spaceships or spacesuits, nor do they use buildings or vehicles of any kind. Mi-go tools are custom grown appendages, ready to be re-absorbed and re-made at will. Their bodies can withstand the interstellar depths, and they grow massive, wing-like solar sails for propulsion. The Mi-go long ago became masters of practical biology, and have never stopped refining themselves.

The Mi-go focus on biology is the key to their interest in Earth. They are not seeking water, metals, or radioactive material, they are seeking life. Humans are of interest, but they are also a growing threat to Mi-go activity. The attempted American moon landing, although a tragic failure, was a turning point for the Mi-go. They could no longer remain hidden simply by keeping to the impenetrable mountains. The human problem would have to be solved.

Above every other goal in this war, above even victory, is the Mi-go determination to remain hidden. Second, again above victory, is the preservation of a diverse biosphere for future exploitation. The Mi-go wish to take humanity to the edge of extinction with a soft touch.

The Mi-go attack, like everything else of theirs, is biological. The introduction of a carefully engineered mutagen to Earth is turning animals into monsters. Every week there is a new disease, someone spots a strange new beast, or a strange new carcass washes up on the beach. From the bacteria up, Earth is swiftly becoming an alien planet.

Strange Aeon

...everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.

HP Lovecraft, Nyarlathotep

Strange Aeon

The galaxy has been, for billions of years and at all scales of power, perception, intelligence and activity, overrun with life. The geometry of reality gives spontaneous rise to minds and organisms, and they beget infinite variations of their kinds. Escaped experiments learn to breed, autonomous systems outgrow and abandon their creators, patterns self-select and iterate into extinction, ‘gods’ billions of years old delineate a living space in lesser minds, time and mutation turn every individual into an ecosystem, and always, new and ancient races build and fight and die.

Earth is no exception.

Timeline

after At the Mountains of Madness:

The Starkweather-Moore expedition recovers the Miskatonic antarctic expedition, and with them, the ancient city, its frozen inhabitants, and the secret origin of humankind. Despite attempts at secrecy, rumors, descriptions, and eventually images of the city make their way into the public eye. Still, skepticism rules, especially after the failures of subsequent expeditions.

What the public doesn't know is that a secret expedition was made, and eleven of the frozen "Elder Things" have been transported back to the USSR and carefully revived. With no other apparent options, the relatively genteel ancient beings resign themselves to tutoring their strange spinoffs. The USSR begins making strange jumps in the fields of cognitive science, hypnosis/subliminal messaging, AI, and biological enhancement.

after Shadow Over Innsmouth:

The raids on Innsmouth and Devil's Reef inspire a government conspiracy to investigate and counter the threat of the "Deep Ones". This conspiracy wages a secret war, and striking at the deep ones in their cities with underwater atomic "tests". The scattered survivors strike back against islands, coastlines, and ships. Coastlines must be either fortified or abandoned, and every sailor learns to keep weapons close to hand. The secret war continues.

all the while:

The "Mi-go", who for so long have secretly exploited the resources of Earth, are alarmed by the sudden acceleration in human science and technology. Unwilling to abandon even a backwater mining colony, they resolve, in a careful and peculiar manner, to engineer the extinction of the human race. Mi-go priorities are first, to eliminate the emerging threat of humanity, second, to remain hidden and unknown to their victims, third, to preserve Earth's resources for exploitation, and fourth, if possible, to preserve humanity for study and exploitation. Therefore they do not invade, assault, or bombard, but begin engineering Earth's biosphere into a hostile force.

now:

The year is 2001. The remnant nations of the 20th century maintain themselves with the aid of the United Nations Sustained Emergency Committee (UNSEC). The rest of humanity resides in collectives, city-states, cult towns, and anarchies both deliberate and desperate. Earth is an alien planet, we are stranded, and adaptation might be worse than extinction. It is the beginning of the Strange Aeon.

Notes

Strange Aeon is my take on a world where humanity spent the 20th century coming face-to-face with a Lovecraftian universe, and flounders in ever more social, scientific, and even metaphysical chaos. Every day there is a new cult, disease, or monster, and the world passes steadily beyond the human .

Think of it as CthulhuTech, with a re-imagined Lovecraftian mythos, but replacing the anime influences with, among others, Charles Stross' A Colder War, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic, and David Gerrold's The War Against the Chtorr.