Hex Crawl 23 #58: Ruined Za-El

 Four hexes northeast of Alakran.

 

This is a small herding and farming village, some 30 houses nestled around a well in a hollow in the low hills of the Dhuga range. At this point in time, early 7020 of the ancient Urig calendar, it has lain empty for a few months, the denizens scattering to join family elsewhere. The only clues to unusual happenings are nonhuman footprints in the dust leading north, and on the walls of more than one house, among the usual drawings that parents indulge their children to create, the recurring motif of a seven-legged spider.

Find one of these scattered denizens, and they will tell you that the village's name is Za-El; that it was already an unpleasant place to live for it gave children nightmares of oddly colored and proportioned spiders. The tales gave the Za-Elians the reputation of fantasists, so when real, bipedal inhuman creatures started preying on the fllocks and even carrying off lone villagers, there was little sympathy or response from the Governors of Wahattu. Eventually they had no choice but to flee.

These monsters came from the cave in the hex to the north, which will be detailed later; if you are running the Pod-Caverns of the Sinister Shroom out of that location, they are, of course, the marauding pod-men seeking biomass for their fungal creator.  But the earlier spiders, which some say could be glimpsed running about on a moonlit night, as big as a sheep, are phase spiders that have blinked up from a secret tunnel under the floor of the well leading to an Underdark lair inhabited by the ox-sized, naturally seven-legged Leng spider who had journeyed there across dimensions to harvest eldritch crystals.

It may be worth posting the account of the adventure, which I wrote up for my players after the session, the second part as a pastiche of a relevant and instantly imitable prose style. They were called to the aid of new settlers in the village, the family and retinue of a man from far away called Yul, who will be described in good time.

Cast the Eldritch Filler Out Of Your Writing

Reviewing a description I wrote this morning, I had an insight that applies just as much to my own work as to others'. It is very common in adventure writing to see a sentence like this:

"There is a strange / eerie / eldritch / curious / peculiar / etc. green porcelain urn in the middle of the room."

Leaning on synonyms of "weird" is an understandable residue of the pulp era, although Lovecraft's beloved "queer" is definitively out of play nowadays, at least in that context. But all of these words are crutches for lazy writing. I even suspect that Lovecraft's reliance on them is a strong reason why critics often judge him as a distinctive rather than good prose stylist. Consider this rewrite, which tells more and forces less on the reader:

IMPROVEMENT: "A green porcelain urn is in the middle of the room. It is lopsided, but in a spiralling way that has a certain logic to it, if not symmetry."

Much better. The description creates a vivid image, which the reader instinctively compares with the image of a normal urn. We come by the sense of weirdness through honest imagery rather than a storebought adjective.

These lazy words drive loopholes through a couple of well-known rules in writing. It's widely known by now that a writer should "show, not  tell." This is the principle behind the more specific caveat against "mental invasion" text to describe emotional or aesthetic effects in the second person (for example, "A feeling of peace comes over you as you see the unicorn cropping grass in the tranquil glade.")

But "weirdness" words belong to a class of adjectives that essentially lie. They present a subjective reaction of a human being as an objective trait of the world. There are a lot of these words in the emotion lexicon: "disgusting," "creepy," "maddening," "adorable." I think the less a writer uses them, the better. The prose becomes more alive, more muscular, more detached.

Let's see how a sample paragraph from Lovecraft would read with these terms removed or altered. From "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (which uses 25 "queers" alone, and who knows how many other synonyms...), here's a paragraph which could also stand in for a wordy description of a treasure object, with the disposable weirdness-adjectives in red...

It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp at the strange, unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that rested there on a purple velvet cushion. Even now I can hardly describe what I saw, though it was clearly enough a sort of tiara, as the description had said. It was tall in front, and with a very large and curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for a head of almost freakishly elliptical outline. The material seemed to be predominantly gold, though a weird lighter lustrousness hinted at some strange alloy with an equally beautiful and scarcely identifiable metal. Its condition was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in studying the striking and puzzlingly untraditional designs - some simply geometrical, and some plainly marine - chased or moulded in high relief on its surface with a craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.

In the first-person narration, of course, these terms are more excusable, because they can pass as the honest reaction of the narrator. But it's also striking how little they matter, except in conveying the impression of a highly excitable and creep-prone person through their nearly incantatory use -- and even then I'd say that the "literal gasp" and the "hardly describe" at the beginning are just enough to do that job, while the descriptions of the "elliptical outline" and the "scarcely identifiable metal" continue the sense of weirdness, but through description rather than authorial fiat.

"Azathoth"

Pick the description that suits you:

1. The potentially greatest as yet unsampled hip-hop beat in existence (according to whosampled.com).
2. Play this for your PCs as they enter a small village church during a snowstorm. The organist, the pastor singing in his cracked, off-key voice, around six parishioners kneeling, heads bowed. See how long it takes for them to realize something is wrong ...
3. The potentially greatest easy listening death metal lyrics in existence.
4. The soundtrack for your swinging 60's "Carnaby to Carcosa" Call of Cthulhu session.
5. The potentially ugliest, most acid-warped attempt to copy this picture in existence.

Mythos Kids

Kids draw the cutest shoggoths - when egged on by David Milano.

(Note: There are some who take the Cthulhu Mythos highly seriously and recoil at the numerous attempts to make it comically cute and familiar. I'm not one of those. I'd rather people get upset about how Gojira did a face turn from terrifying apocalyptic Hiroshima allegory to campy rubber-suit monster fighting giant frankensteins.)