# Day 12: Elder Mythos, Hastur tags: #articles/CharacterCreationChallenge/2026 #game/rpg/elder-mythos > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2026]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] ## Game of Choice We change gears more often than a Formula One racer, and today is no different. It's about to get a little weird in here, and the basis of that weirdness is a game that I've seen advertised to me on Facebook and through multiple other outlets for reasons I can only theorize about, but which I suspect are related to the fact I am generally an aficionado of Lovecraftian horror, indie RPG designs, and nightmarish situations in which I get to be as fully villainous as I desire. What happens if you slam all of those things together? ![[Elder Mythos (cover).jpg|400]] Well, you get *[[Elder Mythos]]*, at least as far as I can tell. You also throw on a certain level of tactical conflict rather than personal character development, which is a strange trade-off in this space, but here we are. > *Elder Mythos* is a role-playing game in which you incarnate frightening entities that aim to destroy the balance of the world by instilling cosmic horror into the hearts of humanity. > > You play to find out which of these Entities will succeed in fulfilling their unspeakable design, achieve their own rebirth or reveal their ultimate manifestation That's the setup straight from the front of the book. It'll be nice to be on the side of the cosmic horrors for once. I mean, not that there ever was a time I wasn't on the side of the cosmic horrors, but you know what I mean. This is a D6 dice pool system in which it is suggested that you need nine D6 for the Eldritch Master and for each playing entity. Now, I don't know if you've noticed, but that is a lot of D6 to be throwing at once. I know the Warhammer guys are over there laughing in their shoes, but for most of us, that's a lot of dice. I'm amused by it. Do I have that many D6 in the same color? Oh, absolutely. Do I have multiple sets of nine D6 in matching colors? That's where things start getting a little more iffy. And yes, I did mention the Eldritch Master, which is the GM for all intents and purposes. But there is another booklet that comes with this game, or at least is available for this game, which provides flowchart mechanics for masterless play as well as tools for solo play with one or more other entities automated by the flowchart. It's kind of interesting, but I think that's for another day. While we're talking about things that you need to play, I probably ought to bring up the fact that initiative is not handled through die rolling, but standard playing cards. No, I don't get it either, but here you go. A mix of resolution systems at the most elemental level. This is a game in which each scenario will have a winner at the end. The players are simultaneously cooperating to create a story together and in competition to win that scenario. With the right group, this can be amazing. With the wrong group, they can't get out of their own way enough and turn down the competitiveness just enough to keep things coherent. Any RPG can have those players at the table who only care about the mechanical resolution and nothing about the fiction, and so everything begins becoming disjointed, disconnected, and nonsensical because all they care about is big number go up. Win, win, win. There is a certain kind of competitive game in which that attitude, weirdly enough, makes the game less fun for everybody—and this is one of them. You know right now if the people that you normally play with are like that. If so, you might want to think about the solo rules. It's about to get weird, so let's get stuck in. ## Acts of Creation It may sound odd to say, but the design of the character sheets for Mythos entity is pretty sharp. Nice and open, good font choice, very readable, a little bit tight on the entries for things like manifestations and design, but overall quite clean. Weird thing to drop in your lap first off, but when you're going through an RPG a day and staring at a lot of character sheets, a good one jumps out at you. Now, I'm not thrilled about the fact that it's three pages, but we'll get back to that, I'm sure. ### Choose Your Entity First up, we have to choose our entity. At first blush, that sounds like we're stuck playing one of about 12 characters available. Selecting your entity is more like choosing a playbook from a *[[Powered by the Apocalypse]]* game. We are picking a specific entity, but we then go on to allocate our attributes and build our resources specific to this play. It's an interesting approach to the problem of staying within the mythos context, but also allowing freedom of player expression. Interestingly enough, I am not going to pick anything related to necromancy, in part because none of the entities really have much to do with necromancy. Simple matters of life and death are generally beneath their notice. Instead, I'm going to play total flashback mode here and be **Hastur the Unspeakable**, which, if you know, you know. ![[12 - Elder Mythos - Hastur the Unspeakable (illo).webp|400]] *(I should make this my avatar, frankly. I just look terrible in yellow.)* ### Attributes We have four lovely attributes: Fear, Madness, Dream, and Violence. Frankly, I would love to have these four attributes in every single RPG I play, but this is the world we live in. We need to allocate four points among those attributes, with a maximum of four and a minimum of zero in any of them. We then get modifiers based on our approach and methodology of action in the material world. (In this case, +1 Dream and +1 Madness.) | Attribute | Raw Value | Modified Value | | --------- | --------: | -------------: | | Fear | + | 1 | | Madness | + | 2 | | Dream | | 1 | | Violence | ++ | 2 | I decided to play slightly against type for Hastur and go double investment in violence, which means that perhaps we don't necessarily affect the dreams of the sleeping and the nightmares of man as much as the usual build, but what we lose there we make up in the hideous violence of our cultists, and that's what's important, right? Hastur, for some reason, also starts off with a beef with Cthulhu, which is doubly interesting, but we'll deal with that when we deal with that. ### Traits We have several traits which effectively inform who we are, what we're capable of, and what our narrative archetype is during the story. Effectively, we can call on them to add one die to a relevant pool in a relevant conflict. Of course, in order to do that, we have to zoom in and narrate a flashback of our immortal past in which a situation brought out that trait. | Trait | | ----------- | | Lurker | | Apocalyptic | | Imaginitive | Frankly, I think you can see how this could possibly turn out horrible for everyone else at the table. Those are some good traits. ### Power Every entity gets a power, which is given in the entity descriptions. Those familiar with the mythos in general will not be surprised by Hastur's power. | Power | Description | | --------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | The Yellow Sign | **Costs 2 plot points.**<br>At any time, even if it is not your turn, **select an opponent’s mortal resource or in your opponent’s mortal resource or one in your possession**. Then **zoom in** and describe how The Yellow Sign, your mark, blooms on its skin. Choose whether to increase the Resource Tier by 2 or decrease it by 2; in the latter case, **zoom in** and describe how that Resource withers in a terrifying way. If it’s an opponent’s Resource, its controller gains **1 plot point**. | Essentially, for the cost of two plot points, we can either boost our own resource or wither someone else's by two tiers simply by describing how the yellow sign manifests on them and what it does to them. I'm here for it. You're here for it. We're all here for it. ### Manifestations Manifestations are sort of like abstract actions that describe how we act in the world. Essentially a set of guides, prompts, and inspirations for when you zoom in on a scene that's triggered by an action, an interference, or a power. | Manifestation | | ----------------------------------------------- | | The Yellow Sign | | A yellow flicker out of the corner of their eye | | A gust of frosty, fetid wind | | The Unspeakable Silence of the Stars[^1] | | A figure cloaked in yellow | | A copy of a book entitled *The King in Yellow* | Pretty much all the things that you associate with Hastur, the Unspeakable, the King in Yellow, Master of the Yellow Sign. If you're not pulling these things in, you're not pulling on the mythos. Though the game is clear to note that you are free to make up more. I imagine that in campaign play over multiple scenarios, people will slowly and insidiously creep their manifestations into more habitual iconography that they've drawn into play. ### Unspeakable Resources For the record, I didn't name this section; they did, but I'm here for it. During a session, entities can **cultivate** and **acquire** resources to do things in the material world. Those are literal game actions which result in building up a mechanism to do things in the world of the flesh. There are three types of resources: Cults, Creatures, and Ministers. The term largely speaks for itself, though Ministers are more like individual agents, someone that you've given supernatural powers to. Some of them are mortal resources, which are humans or humanoids that other entities can also manipulate, but everyone playing decides whether a resource is mortal or not at the time. You can invent a resource relevant to your theme, or you can cultivate one of your unique resources, which have a fixed cost in terms of the number of dice that it takes to cultivate them. You can think of them as pre-built mythos agents. Some of them have unique rules. Of course, nothing keeps everyone from agreeing that an invented unspeakable resource that you come up with off the top of your head shouldn't have a unique special rule as long as everybody agrees. Once the resource has been acquired, it can be used in any roll made by the entity, but you can only use one unspeakable resource per roll. If you set your resource on someone else's, keep in mind that it's one-on-one in that fight. Neither you nor your target can bring another unspeakable resource into play in that struggle. You'll have to get your dice elsewhere. There are a couple of unique resources of Hastur, and they make sense if you know the setting at all. The Byakhee is a tier one creature, which is a sort of hideous bat-like thing that can fly through interstellar space. They do have a special rule which says that if one of your other resources is involved in a role, you can zoom in and describe how a Byakhee appears in the situation, and if the other resource is a minister, you can describe it riding a Byakhee, which is kind of cool. Yes, this breaks the rule that we were just talking about, but that's what special rules are for. Hastur also has a tier two mortal resource called *The Artist*, who's a minister. When you acquire it, his special rule allows you to write down three actions he's going to be involved in in the future. If he actually is, it gives you a +2D bonus. Then you get to describe how he's just there in the right place at the right time through the threads of fate. Once that third tick on the third action is done, he has a tragic end, as well he should. That's the kind of fun you can look forward to here, and I'm all about it. Other unnatural resources that it would make sense to acquire for Hastur off the top of my head involve traveling theater troupes, cursed stages, complex rituals of human sacrifice, and VTubers. I can absolutely imagine a Hastur-aligned VTuber. ### Design and Greater Design Effectively, your design and greater design are your personal objectives that you want to achieve in the world outside of whatever the scenario setup has you chasing. Design objectives are fairly straightforward. Complete that and you get a plot point. Greater design objectives are a little bit harder, but pull it off and you get two plot points. It's that simple. | Design | Greater Design | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Obtain **conflict** as a **catastrophic success**. | Win an **opposed roll** against Cthulhu. | | Win an opposed roll using **dream** or **madness**. | Fulfill the tragic fate of a Unique Resource, *The Artist*, two or more times. | | Using your Power, make The Yellow Sign appear on two or more opponents' Resources. | Use a Unique Resource *Byakhee* along with another resource in the same role three or more times. | | Using your Power, make The Yellow Sign appear on two or more Rresources in your possession. | | If you look at these as the way that playbooks define a way for the character to gain XP, it immediately makes sense. Pursuing these actions is how you get power points in order to be able to influence roles, win scenarios, and ultimately the campaign. It doesn't hurt that all of them help advance your goals and interests as well, of course. It's worth looking at what some of the implications here are. Obviously, you're going to want to make the yellow sign appear often, but remember, it costs a power point to do so. So you're spending power points to make power points in this case. You do start with five, but even so. You're also going to be trying to kill The Artist multiple times, which means you're going to want to acquire him multiple times. But since he's unique, you can only have him on the table in one instance at a given time. So you're going to have to raise him up, use him, and kill him twice, which is hilarious to contemplate. I'd feel sorry for him, but he is in the service of a mythos entity, so what do you do, right? I guess your best bet is to have him riding around on a Byakhee as often as you can. ## Exunt That's it. That is the character creation process. We are done, and we're ready to rock and roll, getting out there, corrupting humanity, sticking it in Cthulhu's face, and being a violent nightmare. ![[12 - Elder Mythos - Hastur.webp]] Is this a cool game? Yes, it's absolutely a cool game. It's intriguing. There are rules for coming up with scenarios at the table as a shared collaborative creative exercise. There are guidelines for creating new mythos entities and resources. As I mentioned before, there are mechanics for running it GM-less and solo. It's actually really interesting, and I would absolutely play it with people. The only problem is I'm never going to do business with this company again, or at least not until they change their business practices in a significant way. And no, it's not because they use AI or any other stupid thing. It's not because they have the wrong political views. It's nothing like that. It's because I don't agree with their business practices. One of the things that has become truly manifest in the last 20 years of RPG marketing is that the digital press is as important as the physical press, in that it is the digital distribution of files that has really made the indie RPG industry possible. I'm not sure that you can name an RPG publisher or distributor who doesn't include the digital files with the purchase of the physical book, especially if you get a collector's edition or a special physical edition of the text. It's become the norm. It's become so much the norm that most companies, if you provide them proof that you purchased a physical edition through another storefront than their own, will send you the digital version wholly complimentary. They know that you want to play their game, that you went through the trouble of giving them money for a physical artifact, often a fair and considerable amount of money. And since digital products require no warehouse space and are almost free to distribute, it's in their best interest to support the consumer who is going to play their game, talk about their game, bring their friends into it. Frankly, it's one of the most innovative parts of the marketplace as a whole. [Mana Project](https://manaprojectstudio.com/store/product/elder-mythos-unspeakable-box/) does not subscribe to this understanding. The reason that they now have a clear notation that the PDF is not included with the Unspeakable Box is because of me. When I purchased it, they did not have that notation. In fact, they didn't have it on any of their books. So I, expecting the behavior of most of the marketplace for the last couple of decades or more, figured that when I put in my order, I would be looking forward to grabbing the digital copies through a link on my receipt, just like everybody else. Nope, that's not what happened. And when I asked what was up, they were kind of an asshole about it. I suppose I should have expected this from the company that publishes *Eat the Reich*, but that one's on me. Luckily for all of us, I only make mistakes once. They won't be getting any more of my money. And if you want to pick up *Elder Mythos*, which I can absolutely understand wanting to, just keep that in mind. Do I like this game? I actually do, but I can't actually support you giving any more than the bare minimum possible amount to them in exchange for it. Get the digital edition and have it printed in coil bound by your local print shop. The art is all black and white anyway. Don't worry about it. Save your money for special editions and such for other companies who are more forthcoming. And that's it for today, considering I've ridden through a power outage here at the Satellite of Hate in order to finish this up for you. I feel like it's time for a break anyway. Tomorrow, we are going to step into a strange in-between world. Not in terms of setting, but in terms of design. Hopefully you'll join me for the privilege. Stay frosty. [^1]: Damn, that would make a really good ship name. I need to make a note of that for the future.