The Cthulhu Campaigns

by Mark Latham

  It is from the Elder Tribes that the ‘skinchangers’ hailed, for many centuries ago, it is said, the early Germani made dark pacts with the ‘god in the woods’, becoming as much beasts as men. Few skinchangers survived to meet the Romans in battle, for their hereditary blessing – or curse, depending on one’s viewpoint – was difficult to pass on through the generations. When a new skinchanger was born, there was much rejoicing, and fresh human sacrifices were taken to the forests and offered to the witches of Shub-Niggurath.

  The Wulfkind

  Of the skinchangers, the most blessed by far were the Wulfkind, the great black wolves of the forests. By day, a true Wulfkind warrior was not hard to identify; they were almost always male, prodigious of size, with wicked white teeth and piercing blue eyes. Their hair grew in shaggy black manes, often styled in outlandish tousles to add to their ferocious appearance, and they adorned their bodies with golden torques fashioned in the forms of the old gods. Around their necks, the Wulfkind wore talismans prepared by the most powerful witches, which afforded them moderate control over their bestial urges. When the time came for war, the Wulfkind gathered together in small warrior cadres or packs, taking the role of berserkers, though rarely did they carry sword or axe to battle.

  Their ancestral powers were governed by the lunar cycles, and when the moon was full, their strength reached its peak. At such times the battlefield echoed with the howling of wolves. The Wulfkind circled the enemy, always looking for an opportune moment to strike; when they did, they tore off their warding charms and, with them, their very skins, revealing the true nature of the beast within.

  Stories of the Wulfkind were popular in Rome, but were thought to be just that: stories. Germanic gladiators wore wolf’s-head helmets in the arena, and small children were scared to sleep by their parents with tales of hairy barbarians with wolfish grins and great claws. The mythical status of the Wulfkind was a testament to their strength, for few witnessed their battle-frenzy and lived to tell the tale.

  Shub-Niggurath

  The image of the black goat was adopted throughout Germania by the druids and shamans of the old tribes. Donning animal pelts and horns, the druids maintained a fearsome appearance, and offered many sacrifices to their gods, chief amongst which was the Dark Mother, the Black Goat in the Woods, or Shub-Niggurath.

  Venerated under many names and guises across Germania, Shub-Niggurath’s power was formidable. Hidden from the priesthood’s augurs for centuries due to the ancestral power of the druids, Shub-Niggurath’s magic clung to the fetid earth like mist, fomenting in the darkest woods and sacred groves, where it gave form to nightmares, and confronted intruders with sanity-shattering foes.

  In the deepest forests, the frumentarii found hidden shrines of great size, formed from the polished skulls of a thousand foes and protected by naked, mud-smeared witches, who writhed and cavorted in nocturnal ceremonies, giving birth to twisted, peat-black monsters of maddening appearance. Few witnessed the blasphemous birth of the Dark Young, and those scrawled accounts that reached Rome were widely discounted as the ravings of madmen.

  In the vaults of the quindecimviri sacris, however, these scribbled testimonies were lent somewhat more credence. Tales abounded of relics stored in the vaults, brought back to Rome from the Teutoburg Forest. Among them, allegedly, sat the head of a frumentarius that whispered in an unintelligible tongue even though long-dead and continually dripped black blood from its severed neck. Members of the priesthood guarded such heresies closely, for they had all heard the stories from the Sibylline texts of the dark things in the woods of Germania, which wore the skins of men to hide their true forms.

  A shaman of the Angrivarii. Though closely related to the druids, the fearsome-looking forest shamans drew their power from shrines of Shub-Niggurath, the Horned Mother.

  Battle of the Teutoburg Forest

  In 9 AD the Germanic chieftain Arminius, who held Roman citizenship and had received a Roman military education, plotted a great uprising against the occupation of his native lands. Arminius dispatched shamans far and wide, who put the fear of the gods into those tribes loyal to Rome, and one by one secured their part in a conspiracy against the legions.

  The head of a Roman auxiliary force, Arminius went before the governor, Publius Quinctilius Varus, with false reports of insurrection along the Rhine, beyond the Teutoburg Forest. Persuaded to divert his army south to quell the rebellion, Varus rounded up three full legions, three cavalry detachments, and six auxiliary cohorts, and took them on the long forest march north, through the Teutoburg.

  Much of that ancient woodland was virgin forest, and the Romans were forced to send pioneers ahead to clear a path. Many times, the legions got turned about as the newly forged roads appeared to twist and even vanish, as though some enchantment were over them. Each night the Romans camped beneath the forbidding canopies of the forest, and each morning they woke to find men missing – perhaps deserted, perhaps dead.

  Eventually, near Kalkriese Hill, the trap was sprung. The Romans were spread thin over a long column of march, with non-combatants mixed among their ranks freely. They were ill-prepared for battle. Five tribes of Germanic warriors fired torrents of arrows and javelins into the Roman ranks before descending into the wooded pass and slaughtering all before them. A few suppressed reports spoke of monstrous half-men of hulking size, who fought with claws and teeth. They spoke, too, of slithering, tentacled things, black as a starless sky, slipping between the shadows of the forest, devouring any Roman who fled the battle with hideous, wet, snapping sounds that drowned out even the screams of the dying.

  When Varus realized that his army was doomed, he took out his charms of Mithras, Cthulhu, and Mars, and offered prayers that his soul might be protected. From the madness that crossed his features, it is certain that he received an answer, but from what source it is impossible to imagine. In the next breath, he fell on his own sword rather than suffer the fate of his men.

  Over 20,000 Romans died on that fateful day, the greatest defeat in Roman history. So complete was the Germanic victory that the Romans were driven from the country, and nevermore were able to hold the lands beyond the Rhine.

  The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, 9 AD. Often called the ‘Varian Disaster’, 20,000 Roman soldiers under Varus were slain in a bloody day of fighting. Terrified survivors claimed that the forest itself had come to life to aid the barbarians, and that the Germans fought alongside slithering monsters, maddening of form and redolent with horror.

  The Lightning Miracle

  From 166 to 180 AD, the Romans were embroiled in the Marcomannic Wars, fought against a number of Germanic and Sarmatian tribes along almost the entire length of the Danube. This contest over what Rome perceived to be its northeastern border was bitterly contested, and was something of an obsession for the Emperor Marcus Aurelius.

  Aurelius had been advised by the priesthood that the restless barbarians along the Danube were ready to strike south and challenge Rome’s might, aided by their dark gods. Aurelius was uncertain whether to wage war at first until he was shown into one of the priesthood’s vaults, where he bore witness to things so hideous that he declared the Marcomanni shamans and their allies abominationes, and dispatched the legions at once.

  In 173 AD, the Romans extended their campaign and pressed the war against the Quadi peoples, former Roman allies who had broken their oaths and assisted their kinfolk against the Romans. During a series of fierce battles, the Legio XII Fulminata (the ‘Thunderbolt’ Twelfth Legion) found itself hemmed in on all sides by the rampaging Quadi and beset by thirst and exhaustion from a severe drought. The slave-priests who had been pressed into service by the legion offered up sacrifices to their foreign gods: at least one of their entreaties was surely heard, for a great rainstorm began almost immediately, which refreshed the Romans and lifted their spirits. Even as they prepared to engage, the legion saw with wonder their enemies struck by lightning – a sure sign that the ‘Thunderbolt Legion’ was doubly ble
ssed.

  When news of this great miracle reached the populace of Rome, the story had already been altered so that it was a brave Roman commander who had beseeched Mercury for aid. What no one ever learned was that the priests who had so devoutly served the legion that day were Egyptian, and that the god who had heard their prayers was no ally to Cthulhu. On the night of the ‘lightning miracle’, and for 40 nights thereafter, the streets of Rome were stalked by a robed figure all dressed in black, wearing the mask of the Pharaohs of Egypt. The toll he exacted for his assistance was a terrible one, but one that the priesthood ensured was paid in full.

  Dacia

  Hailing from the Carpathian Mountains, the Dacians were thought to be the descendants of Thracians, and were a hardy people from a harsh land. They had opposed Roman rule for as long as any could remember, and shied not from war with the expanding Roman Empire. There were many who feared to campaign in Dacia, for the shadow-haunted mountains and dark forests were said to be home to far worse things than barbarians.

  The tribes of old Dacia were strange indeed, said to both fear and hold in reverence rotting, ancient creatures that fed on human blood. The Romans believed these to be no more than stories told by mothers to frighten their children, but those legionaries who found themselves attacked in a mist-shrouded forest far from home would attest to the barbarians’ true power: a power that the priesthood wished to shackle for the glory of Rome.

  During Trajan’s war of conquest in Dacia (106 AD), hardened bands of legionary veterans were sent into the caves of the Carpathians to clear out nests of flesh-eating ghouls.

  The Strigoi

  The Strigoi were said to have been a coven of witches once, who spent too long at their meditations, journeying deep into the spiritual aether known as the Dreamlands. There, they lost all sense of their humanity, and attracted the predations of an Outer God of great power. Manifesting itself as ‘Lilith’, this alien deity infected the very souls of the witches with its preternatural lust for human blood, before banishing them from the Dreamlands forever.

  When they returned to their bodies the witches found that they had indeed dreamed too long. Nourished only by magical energy, their bodies had wasted away into shrivelled husks of hideous appearance. When their souls returned, the witches found their physical forms dying – but death could still be avoided. Animating their withered, creaking limbs, they crawled from the crypts where they had long before begun their secret dream-rituals, and found a village that had changed almost beyond recognition. Driven by an insatiable hunger, the creatures climbed into the hovels and feasted on the blood of the living – men, women, and children – glutting themselves many times over until Lilith’s dark magic had fully consumed them.

  The Strigoi found themselves whole again – young and beautiful beyond imagining, possessed of great physical strength and magical prowess. Each of them carried a fragment of Lilith’s manifest consciousness, which drove them to acts of increasing cruelty. Furthermore, the poor villagers upon whom they had feasted were not dead, but had instead become shrivelled, cadaverous ghouls, bestial and mindless, who had inherited a taste for human flesh. The Strigoi found that they could control these ghouls with but a thought and, finding that their powers waned as the sun rose, the nocturnal Strigoi employed the ghouls to guard their resting places as they slept.

  Over the centuries the Strigoi passed on their gift to others – men and women alike – and their cabal grew stronger. They shied away from large settlements, where they were reviled, and sometimes hunted by hardy Dacian knights, making their homes in the endless caves of the Carpathians. Fearful villagers from across Dacia, however, brought offerings of human sacrifice to the Strigoi, beseeching the aid of these powerful wampyr to protect them against invaders, to heal the sick, and to prolong the lives of the old and dying.

  When the Romans came to Dacia, even the most ardent noble was forced to entreat the aid of the Strigoi, who only sometimes listened. Many times over the course of their battles against the Roman legions, the Dacians marched to war alongside a powerful, pale-skinned sorcerer of fearsome aspect, able to darken the sky at their approach. When such creatures rode to war, the battlefield echoed to the guttural snarls of loping, gangrel half-men, hunting in great packs and gnawing upon the bones of the fallen. No prayer or sacrifice to the gods seemed able to check the power of the Strigoi, least of all an appeal to Cthulhu – for the Great Old One lay dreaming, and in the Dreamlands, Lilith was – and ever shall be – queen.

  EAST OF THE EMPIRE

  The easternmost part of the Roman Empire, and those nations that lay beyond Rome’s eastern frontier, held mysteries that the priesthood dearly coveted. Yet for all of their military posturing and the subtle efforts of the frumentarii, the eastern powers remained steadfast. Should they have fallen to the legions and their esoteric secrets been unlocked by the quindecimviri sacris, the time for Cthulhu to wake from his eternal slumber would surely have been nigh.

  The Magi of Parthia

  The Parthian Empire long endured hostilities with Rome, punctuated by uneasy truces. Although never conquered, with Rome at the door and civil war between feuding noble households never far away, the Empire was in decline. And it was in this dark hour that the Magi returned.

  The cult of elementalists known as the Magi served in what was then Parthia for generations, using their mastery of the dark arts and the favour of long-forbidden Mesopotamian gods to steer successive kings to glory. Roman incursions into Babylonian temples did not go unnoticed. Signs of coming catastrophe were rife, as slumbering gods opened cyclopean eyes and peered into the world of men once more. This catastrophe could only be averted if the Romans could be stopped in their desecration of the Magi’s secret temples: for hidden there, buried beneath the ruins of civilizations far older than any could guess, were secrets that Man was not meant to know; secrets that Rome longed to possess, and that the Magi would protect at all costs.

  The Magi possessed but a fragment of their former power. They had learned long ago that the Great Old Ones cared little for the world of men, and so they shied away from their veneration of alien gods, turning instead to Zoroastrianism. The old temples and tombs of Parthia became prisons in which the avatars of the gods themselves were shackled by the Magi’s powerful wards. As these temples were plundered by the Romans, so the essence of these gods escaped into the world, and the power of the Great Old Ones was increased.

  Of all the very wise remaining in the known world, it was perhaps the Magi who best understood just how dangerous Rome’s path was for all mankind. Had they had the power to stop the priesthood of Rome, they surely would have done so, but to challenge the legions openly would be to court disaster: should the sacred sites of Parthia be ransacked and the Magi slain, who then would stand in the way of the eagle of Rome? Thus, their war against the priesthood was always a covert one. Emissaries of the Magi travelled far and wide recruiting priests and warriors from across the world, from druids in Gaul to followers of Mithras within the higher echelons of the legions themselves. Slowly but surely, like the erosion of rock upon a riverbed, the Magi diminished Cthulhu’s reach across the Roman Empire, praying that their interference would go unnoticed long enough for their plans to succeed.

  A Parthian Magus, carrying a carved staff, a ‘Horn of Alû’, and the trappings of Yog-Sothoth. Masters of magic, the Magi trapped the essence of many old gods in thrice-warded chambers, and called upon their aid at will in the ongoing war against Cthulhu’s followers.

  The Rise of Dagon

  ‘… Next came one

  Who mourned in earnest, when the captive ark

  Maimed his brute image, head and hands lopt off,

  In his own temple, on the grunsel-edge,

  Where he fell flat and shamed his worshippers:

  Dagon his name, sea-monster, upward man

  And downward fish; yet had his temple high

  Reared in Azotus, dreaded through the coast

  Of Palestine, in Gath
and Ascalon,

  And Accaron and Gaza’s frontier bounds.’

  – John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book One

  Across the eastern frontier, clustered notably in those Scythian and Sarmatian settlements around the Pontus Euxinus – the Black Sea – the frumentarii came upon a series of strange temples, carved into the rocky cliffs overlooking the great body of water. Some of these temples had long been abandoned, cleared of all their treasures. Others were still in use, and actively defended by suspicious militiamen and fanatical, wild-haired priests.

  At first, these temples were thought to be little more than shrines to Nodens, in one of his many guises. The priesthood was initially relieved that most were in states of abandonment or disrepair, for surely that was a sign that Nodens had forsaken the eastern lands, and his power was waning.

  However, after more investigation, the frumentarii began to send disturbing reports back to Rome: reports of secretive cults that gathered for strange rites upon the shores of the Black Sea; of fishing villages entirely indoctrinated into the worship of a fish-tailed god quite unlike Nodens; of hideous, unnatural aberrations found amongst the populace of those villages, with bulging eyes, translucent flesh, webbed toes, and tentacle-like appendages in place of limbs. These villagers were elevated to the position of martyrs, and many flocked from leagues around to see these loathsome creatures so touched by their god.