The revised 2024 edition of the D&D 5E Player’s Handbook includes a Rules Glossary at the back of the book. This glossary is integral to the organization of the rulebook, as described in a sidebar on page 7:

RULES GLOSSARY

If you read a rules term in this book and want to know its definition, consult the rules glossary, which is appendix C. This chapter provides an overview of how to play D&D and focuses on the big picture. Many places in this chapter reference that glossary.

So, for example, the rules will mention that a spell can have a Cone area of effect, but what this means will never be explained in the text: It will only be defined in the “Cone [Area of Effect]” section of the Rules Glossary.

There is also, of course, an Index where you can look up various topics. This is, thankfully, MUCH improved over the 2014 version of the Index, which suffered from a multitude of sins. (The most frustrating, in my experience, was that you’d look something up in the Index and it would tell you to go look at a different Index entry. And sometimes when you looked up that entry, it would tell you to go look at another entry. And then, when you finally followed the daisy chain to its end, there would only be a single page reference which could have just as easily been included at every single entry along the daisy chain! This is completely absent from the 2024 Index.)

Splitting the rules for a game into an explanatory text and a “definitive” rules glossary isn’t a new technique. It’s a format that’s been used by a number of board games over the last couple decades. (For example, Fantasy Flight Games was a big fan of this for a while, and even D&D 3^rd Edition published a separate Rules Compendium that used a similar approach in an effort to “simplify” and “clarify” the rules with a “definitive” reference.)

And, to be blunt, my experience with these glossary-based rulebooks, as I’ll call them, has pretty consistently sucked. They have a pretty easy fail-state in which the rules glossary ISN’T actually authoritative, so you end up with rules split up across multiple locations, which means that

• you’re forced to flip back and forth between different pages trying to piece together the full set of rules you actually need; and
• even when the glossary IS authoritative, there’s no way that you can be sure that’s true, so you end up flipping back and forth anyway.

This fail-state is generally made worse because you need to play Guess What We Named This Entry, which can be capricious at best. Furthermore, these failures seem to be endemic because, in my experience, game rules are inherently procedural (if A, then B, then C), whereas a glossary is organized by topic.

Note: None of this applies to a rulebook which simply includes a Glossary. A normal glossary can be a useful resource for quickly understanding key terminology, and can be even more useful if it includes page references pointing you to the full and primary discussion of the topic. You could remove such a glossary and the game would still be complete.

A glossary-based rulebook, on the other hand, has rules which are ONLY found in the Rules Glossary. This glossary is not merely a reference tool; it’s integral to the presentation of the game. Removing this glossary would change the game.

With all that being said, I tried to go into the 2024 Player’s Handbook with an open mind. At first glance, in fact, it seemed that the Rules Glossary would be a useful reference tool (although it was immediately obvious that its utility would be greatly enhanced if it had page references).

After using it for a little bit, unfortunately, I’m forced to conclude that…

IT SUCKS

To demonstrate, let’s consider a spell’s Range and Target.

“Range” is not, as far as I can tell, covered in the Rules Glossary. (I can’t be 100% sure of this because sometimes you have to guess how the term is being alphabetized — i.e., “Range” vs. “Spell Range”. But the Index doesn’t have a Rules Glossary page reference for it, so I’m fairly confident.) This means that all of the rules for a spell’s Range are located on page 236 in Chapter 7: Spells.

That’s simple enough.

What about a spell’s Target?

Well, that does have a Rules Glossary entry, on page 376, which is:

TARGET

A target is the creature or object targeted by an attack roll, forced to make a saving throw by an effect, or selected to receive the effects of a spell or another phenomenon.

Great! At first glance, we’ve found the rules for Targets!

… except, of course, I have a certain degree of system mastery, and I know this cannot, in fact, be the totality of the Target rules.

Okay, so let’s hit up the Index:

target, 376

Huh. Only one page reference and it’s pointing to the Rules Glossary entry. Maybe the 2024 revision massively streamlined the Target rules and those are the only rules for targets.

Let’s double-check by looking up “spells” and “spell target” in the Index and see if there’s anything there.

Nope.

The reality is that the Index, although much improved, has actually failed here. The rules for a spell’s Target are located on page 237-8. These rules are fairly bulky and, at first glance, seem complete.

But wait, there’s more!

In the Target section, for example, there are rules for areas of effect:

Areas of Effect. Some spells, such as Thunderwave, cover an area called an area of effect, which is defined in the rules glossary. The area determines what the spell targets. The description of a spell specifies whether it has an area of effect, which is typically one of these shapes: Cone, Cube, Cylinder, Emanation, Line, or Sphere.

Okay, so then we go to the Area of Effect entry in the Rules Glossary. This includes essential rules about the area’s point of origin, how to determine if certain parts of the area of effect are blocked, etc. and then it cross-references Rules Glossary entries for each individual shape. (So you might then flip to Cube to figure out the specific rules for how a Cube area of effect works.)

But what if you were coming to this from a different direction? For example, let’s say you were looking at the Thunderwave spell, where it says:

Each creature in a 15-foot Cube originating from you makes a Constitution saving throw.

You don’t know what that means, but “Cube” is capitalized, which indicates a term that’s located in the Rules Glossary. Here you get the specific rules about Cubes which, at first glance, seem complete… but don’t actually include the stuff about how certain parts of the area might be blocked. This is probably okay-ish, though, because even though “area of effect” isn’t capitalized, the entry is titled “Cube [Area of Effect]” and the square brackets indicate that there’s another glossary entry. Yes, you now have multiple pages open and are cross-referencing them to figure out how the rules work, but at least you were able to find everything by following the breadcrumb trail!

But let’s go back to the rules for Targets on page 238 and look at this section of the rules:

A Clear Path to the Target. To target something with a spell, a caster must have a clear path to it, so it can’t be behind Total Cover.

Well, that seems complete and, unlike the “Areas of Effect” section of the same rules, there’s no reference to an entry in the Rules Glossary, so we must be good to go!

… except I know that in the 2014 version of the rulebook, this section reads:

A CLEAR PATH TO THE TARGET

To target something, you must have a clear path to it, so it can’t be behind total cover.

If you place an area of effect at a point you can’t see and an obstruction, such as a wall, is between you and that point, the point of origin comes into being on the near side of that obstruction.

Hmm. What happened to that whole second paragraph?

Well, once again, maybe they removed it from the rules. It did, after all, give rise to the endless debates about whether or not you could target someone standing behind a window. (And, if so, what would happen.)

But by this point I’ve gotten suspicious, and so I go digging a bit and discover that this part of the rule can, in fact, be found hidden in the Rules Glossary! (Although, obviously, not in the entry about Targets!)

Finally, all of this is made much, much worse because Wizards of the Coast is allergic to page references, and so even when they do tell you where you can find more rules, this takes the form of, “See also chapter 1,” and you’re left flipping through a thirty-page chapter trying to figure out what where you’re supposed to look.

CONCLUSION

On the one hand, you can argue that all of the rules are, in fact, in the rulebook, and can eventually be found if you just look in the right place. So what’s the problem?

On the other hand, I want you to think about how many times during this relatively simple rules look up:

• You could falsely conclude that you had all the relevant rules and, therefore, never go looking for the rules hidden away in a different part of the book.
• You needed to have multiple pages open at the same time in order to have all the relevant rules for a single topic. (Then add to this, for example, the spell listing that prompted you to go looking for these rules in the first place.)
• You’re re-reading the same text in multiple places because each entry is partially redundant.

But, also, once you’ve lost trust that either the Rules Glossary or the main text can be trusted to give you a full set of rules, how much time do you waste fruitlessly double-checking to make sure you’re not missing something that’s been hidden from you? (Remember how in one case the partial rules were in the Rules Glossary and the full rules were in the main text, but in the other case the opposite was true?)

Think about the impact all of that has in the middle of a session.

Ignore the broken Index entry and assume we successfully navigated our way through the blind turns: We nevertheless went to page 376, then page 237, then page 364, and then page 361. (And then probably back and forth between them.)

Meanwhile in the 2014 Player’s Handbook, all of these rules were located in a single place on page 204. Look it up and you’re done.

As I mentioned, the 2014 Player’s Handbook is not without its own flaws and shortcomings. My point here isn’t that perfection hasn’t been achieved. My point is that glossary-based rulebooks are systemically flawed, and the 2024 Player’s Handbook is just one example of a fundamental problem, which means that the impact on you and your game will also be systemic and pervasive, affecting it in every part.

Go to Part 1

Mythos fiction tends to be well-stocked with mysterious tomes filled with enigmatic lore. When running a good Mythos adventure, you’ll often want to drop similar tomes into the hands of the players.

Broadly speaking, there are two structural functions these tomes can fulfill.

First, they can deliver a specific clue — i.e., you read the book and discover that athathan panthers can only be harmed in moonlight.

Second, they can provide a research resource. These are books like the Necronomicon, Nameless Cults, Tobin’s Spirit Guide, or The Revelations of Glaaki that are an arcane repository for a great mass of Mythos lore. Characters can refer to them time and time again across disparate investigations, and often find useful references.

TOME AS CLUE

If you want the tome to impart a specific clue (or clues), you might simply cut to the chase and give them the clue: “After staying up late into the night poring over the strange, bloodstained book you found on the altar, you unravel a ritual for summoning athathan panthers in exchange for human sacrifices. The victims must be sleeping and the ritual must be performed in moonlight, because that’s when the athathan are weakened.”

But this is also exactly what lore book props are designed for. That link will take you to a full description of how lore books work, but the short version is that they’re a kind of executive summary of fictional books. The experience of “reading” a lore book prop is more immersive for the players, particularly because you can embed the clues you want them to find in the description of the book, so that they can actually extract them from the text for themselves.

The trick with lore books is that, by their nature, they tend to deliver a lot of information in a single package. As a result, it can be easy for them to tip over into the neatly organized summary of what’s going on that we specifically want to avoid when designing Mythos scenarios. So you want to make sure, when writing Mythos lore books, that they remain a confusing and contradictory source text: A mythological understanding of mythology as transcribed by madmen. The longer text doesn’t necessarily bring more truth; it just gives a more dizzying array of mythological angles all looking at the same truth.

Another technique I’ve found useful is to identify one specific slice of the Mythos entity in question (i.e., the clue you’re trying to deliver), focus entirely on that one slice, and then build out a micro-story around it that’s largely or entirely unrelated to the rest of the Mythos entity. (For example, to convey some information about L’rignak’s strange matter, you could create a story found only in the unredacted, original manuscript of Sir Richard Burton’s Arabian Nights that deals with some orphan boys in Persia who find the strange matter in a cave and bring it home to the ruination of all who interact with it. The name L’rignak might not even be mentioned in this text.)

This technique can be quite effective at evoking the scope of the Mythos entity: The suggestion that it is not some new manifestation, but has rather always been entwined with human destiny. A great, strange mass which has made its presence felt throughout the world and history, but whose true immensity has never been glimpsed… until now.

TOME AS RESOURCE

The basic idea behind a tome that serves as a research resource, on the other hand, is that, if the PCs can rifle through the text, then it can help them to both “know” things and also figure things out. The exact mechanical representation of this will depend on the system you’re running (and possibly the tome in question), but a fairly typical structure looks like this:

Studying. Before the tome can be utilized as a resource, the PC must spend some time familiarizing themselves with it (e.g., a day, a week, a month, or until they succeed on a skill check of some sort).

Mechanical Benefit. Once the PC has studied the text, they gain a mechanical benefit when using it as part of a knowledge-type check. For example:

• They gain advantage on relevant checks.
• They gain a pool of points they can spend to enhance relevant checks. (Either once per scenario or a set pool that, when expired, suggests that the book’s usefulness has come to an end / the character has completely learned its contents.)
• The PC gains a permanent bonus to a knowledge-type skill or similar ability.

Usually a list of topics covered by the book determines which knowledge-based checks the book can be used to enhance. (For example, Tobin’s Spirit Guide might grant bonuses to checks related to the afterlife, undead, strange gods, and transdimensional travel.)

Cost. Books that reveal things man was not meant to know can be inherently dangerous, and it’s not unusual for studying a Mythos tome to inflict a cost (usually along the lines of lost Sanity or attracting the attention of powers who can sense those who know the Truth).

These tomes can also be presented as lore books, and, in fact, it’s ideal if they are. In addition to the list of topics covered by the book, you want to understand the nature of the book well enough that it can serve as a convenient vector for improvising where the knowledge came from. (Nameless Cults, for example, is primarily a study of cults by Friedrich von Junzt written in the 19^th century. So if, for example, the PCs pull information about werewolves out of it, then the GM might relate the information via a lycanthropic cult in Prussia.)

CREATING TOMES

Of course, some tomes might be both: They provide an initial clue relevant to the scenario where they’re first encountered, but can also serve as a general resource for future research. (In other words, the initial clue is built into whatever the fictional frame of the book is.)

As you’re creating your own tomes, I generally recommend not making any single tome so vast in its contents that it becomes universally useful. Unless you want one specific tome to be the pillar around which the campaign is built, it’s generally better to break information up and spread it across a multitude of sources: First, it motivates the players to continue seeking new knowledge. Second, the disparate sources given you a multitude of vectors for coloring and contextualizing information as it flows into your campaign. Third, this diversity in sources also makes it to improvise interesting angles for presenting the information. The more generic and all-encompassing a source becomes; the more it becomes a bland encyclopedia, it follows that referencing the work becomes more and more like a blank slate.

If you’d like to see copious examples of what Mythos lore books look like, the Alexandrian Remix of Eternal Lies contains literally dozens of them, including:

• Books of the Los Angeles Cult (both the UCLA Lot and Echavarria’s Library)
• Savitree’s Research
• Revelations of Glaaki (found in the Severn Valley props packet)

This vast number of tomes, however, should not be mistaken as model for how many lore books you need in your own campaign. The Alexandrian Remix is a special beast, and in practice a little can go a long way. In fact, it can be preferable for such lore dumps to be rare, making each lore book the PCs get their hands on a rare and precious prize.

On the other hand, for a truly hypertrophic of how far lore tomes can be pushed, consider the examples of The Dracula Dossier and The Armitage Files. The latter, designed for Trail of Cthulhu, is an entire campaign built around the players being given dozens of pages from “real” in-world documents and then puzzling their way through them to identify leads to pursue in their investigations. The former, designed for Night’s Black Agents, pushes the technique even further, “unredacting” the entire epistolary novel of Dracula and recharacterizing it as an ops file from British intelligence complete with marginalia and, once again, inviting the players to pore through the text to identify a multitude of leads.

I suppose, in the grand scheme of things, this is not so surprising.

After all, everyone knows that reading a Mythos tome can drive one mad.

(click for PDF)

Mothership is a sci-fi horror RPG. Think Alien, The Thing, Pitch Black, or Annihilation.

Its calling card is an old school approach wedded to red hot innovation:

• Blazing fast character creation.
• Brutal systems for Combat and Stress.
• Tons of sandbox support and tools in the Warden’s Operation Manual (the GM book).
• An overwhelming amount of adventure support, including both first party books and a deluge of third-party support.

This last point, in particular, is driving Mothership to my table as my next open campaign. Not only is there a ton of adventure support, a lot of it is designed so that you can spend 15 minutes reading through it and — presto! — you’re ready to go. My expectation is that I’ll be able to rapidly build a stable of adventures that will easily let me run the game with minimal or no prep.

I’ll likely be writing up a full review of Mothership after I’ve had a chance to run it a few more times, but for now I’d like to share the system cheat sheet I’ve developed for the game.

WHAT’S NOT INCLUDED

These cheat sheets are not designed to be a quick start packet: They’re designed to be a comprehensive reference for someone who has read the rulebook and will probably prove woefully inadequate if you try to learn the game from them. (On the other hand, they can definitely assist experienced players who are teaching the game to new players.)

The Mothership cheat sheet, in particular, works very well in conjunction with the GM screen(s) for the game, which are excellent. (There’s both a standard screen and a larger deluxe screen, which each come with the respective boxed sets.)

The cheat sheets also don’t include what I refer to as “character option chunks” (for reasons discussed here). In other words, you won’t find the rules for character creation here.

HOW I USE THEM

I usually keep a copy of the cheat sheet behind my GM screen for quick reference and also provide copies for all of the players. I have two copies of the Mothership rulebook at the table, too, but my goal is to summarize all of the rules for the game. This consolidation of information eliminates book look-ups: Finding something in a dozen pages is a much faster process than paging through hundreds of pages in the rulebook.

The organization of information onto each page of the cheat sheet should, hopefully, be fairly intuitive.

PAGE 1: Basic Mechanics and Violent encounters. (Most of the core game play loops are covered here.)

PAGE 2: Survival. (Most of the miscellaneous rules in the game.)

PAGE 3: Ports & Medical Care. (Stuff to do in your downtime.)

PAGE 4: Contractors. (I debated whether to include this page, but I really want the idea of hiring Contractors to be front-and-center for new Mothership players. It’s such an excellent way of getting them more deeply invested in the campaign.)

Having run character creation for Mothership a couple of times, the sheer speed at which it happens turns the limited number of rulebooks at the table into a significant choke point. I’m going to continue experimenting with how that should be handled, and probably trying to figure out which pages from the PDF need to be printed out to help everyone zip through. (I’ll report back when I know more.)

CRUXES

The Mothership cheat sheet currently only covers the material in the Player’s Survival Guide. I’ll likely be expanding them at some point to include the rules from the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, but for the moment I’m going to be focusing on in media res scenarios where I’m dropping the troubleshooters into abandoned military bases, butchered research labs, and drifting derelicts.

There are a few interesting mechanical cruxes I’ve had to confront when putting together the cheat sheet.

Unarmed Damage: Unlisted in the core rulebook, this was immediately an issue in my first couple sessions. I’ve pulled the value of 1d5 from Pound of Flesh, an adventure module included in the Deluxe Edition of the game.

Androids & Oxygen: The rules state that androids don’t consume oxygen when life support systems fail, but there are separate rules for vacuums and toxic atmospheres (which require rebreathers or oxygen supplies). Should androids be affected by exposure to vacuum or toxic atmospheres? My ruling is No.

Combat: The transition from an explicitly turn-based initiative system in Mothership 0e to what seems to be a more freeform(?) resolution in Mothership 1e appears to have been pretty badly muffed. The rules and examples of play contradict each other, and support material (including stat blocks and adventures included in the core game box) don’t seem to be in sync with the mechanics. I’ll likely have more to say about this in the future, but for now I’ve simply included the combat rules as written on the cheat sheet.

I’m currently using a system of:

1. The GM threatens harm. (To use a term of art from Apocalypse World.)

2. Players declare action by going around the table.

3. GM makes rulings for how actions are resolved.

4. Players all roll dice (if necessary) at the same time. (Failures likely result in the threatened harm occurring.)

But although this is strongly suggested by the examples of play, I’m not yet convinced it’s actually working very well. (The system seems to detach from the game world, or vice versa, and every opponent kinda blurs into the same mechanical mush.) As I say, I’m going to continue experimenting with this.

MAKING A GM SCREEN

These cheat sheets can also be used in conjunction with a modular, landscape-oriented GM screen (like the ones you can buy here or here).

Personally, I use a four-panel screen and use reverse-duplex printing in order to create sheets that I can tape together and “flip up” to reveal additional information behind them. (This simple sheet, however, will simply fit directly into the four-panel screen.)

Mythos-style horror is a pervasive theme in RPGs. It’s tough to get it right.

On the one hand, you don’t want everything to fall into random weirdness. The essence of Lovecraftian horror is the slow discovery of a monstrous and palpable truth shrouded from human perceptions. Plus, it’s just not as much fun for the players when everything in a session is capricious. It’s difficult to have meaningful gameplay or player agency when the game world is incomprehensible noise.

On the other hand, the players also shouldn’t be able to achieve a perfect understanding of what’s happening, either. I’m usually a pretty big advocate of “prep stuff so that you can show it to your players” – if you’re making something cool, let the players in on it! – but the Mythos is an exception. Perfect understanding of the Mythos renders that which should be too vast for human comprehension into mundanity.

The Mythos is also not the only place such ineffability may be desirable. For example, Numenera takes place a billion years in the future, after eight mega-civilizations which mastered incomprehensible technology have risen and fallen on Earth. The default setting is a Renaissance of sorts, in which mankind searches through the numenera – the broken technological remains of these mega-civilizations – while being unable to truly understand it. In this, Numenera is a sort of inverted Mythos, possessing the same sense of enigma, but generally (although not always) filled with hope instead of horror.

Regardless of tone, the technique I use for Mythos-style revelations is to think of them as three layers.

LAYER 1: CANONICAL TRUTH

For each Mythos element, start by clearly and concisely summarizing the “definitive” truth of it. Because this is Mythos stuff, this will still be weird, supernatural, mind-bending, alien to human thought, and probably even self-contradictory, but it’s your personal canon.

For example:

L’rignak is a multidimensional creature that lives in the heart of neutron stars. It seeks to colonize other stars. It also creates Great Attractors, either to form new neutron stars or to create whatever the structure is in the Laniakea Supercluster. (Is this an even greater mass into which it hopes to seed its consciousness some day? Or perhaps it’s already its seat of consciousness and the neutron stars are merely nodes or perhaps incubators for its offspring?)

Given proper conditions, L’rignak can open microscopic portals to the heart of its neutron stars. Strange matter erupts from these and they usually affect local gravity in strange ways. In our local spacetime, its greatest goal is to alter the sun (possibly be seeding it) to become an attractor (or otherwise start its impossible path to becoming a neutron star).

L’rignak’s cultists often speak of a time “when the sun’s light is made right.”

This is your lodestone, and it will keep you oriented even when “reality” transcends into the incomprehensible. It’s a guide that you can refer to and extrapolate from when prepping and running your scenarios. It’s scripture that lets you ask, “What would L’rignak do?” It’s the bedrock that everything else will be built on.

But the players will NEVER discover this plain, definitive truth.

LAYER 2: THE LENS OF MYTHOLOGY

Instead, you’ll break your canonical truth into chunks – i.e., each definitive statement or fact about the Mythos element. Then you’ll want to mythologize each chunk.

What I mean is that, for every chunk, there should be multiple interpretations, and these interpretations should be arcane, alien, and ineffable. Think of yourself as the blind men trying to describe an elephant — one grasps its trunk and describes it as a snake; another the legs and says it’s a tree; a third its ear and think it’s a kind of fan. You are trying to express TRUTH, but you can only do so through an imperfect lens.

To approach this mythological quality in a more practical way, it may be useful to think in terms of:

Paradox. Describe Mythos elements in impossible dualities. A darkness that illuminates; a vast, bulking mass of solidity that seems to float and ooze over the rocks; a warm glow that inflicts hypothermia. The impossibility, of course, is the point. The paradox cannot be resolved. Or, more accurately, it cannot be resolved within the limits of our human senses and science.

Dialectic. Along similar lines, think in terms of a truth reached through the resolution or confrontation of contradiction. When pointing your double-slit spotlight at the strange matter of L’rignak, for example, don’t just give the PCs the notes of a scientist grappling with “elements unknown to human science.” Also give them the heretical Christian texts describing it as “the flesh of god”; the cultist’s mad ravings about “the apocalypse’s gift”; and the strange references in Nameless Cults to “manifestations of faerie circles.”

Ironic Specificity. You don’t need to reveal the totality of your Mythos element. (At least not now, and possibly not ever.) But, importantly, you want to do so in a way that hints at the whole which is never revealed.

For example, your L’rignak scenario might focus exclusively on the eruptions of strange matter in the Appalachian Mountains that are harvested, worshiped, and turned to gut-churning purpose by the ancient cults there. The star-born nature of L’rignak and its transgalactic agenda are never brought up, except that when the PCs first interact with the strange matter they have an immense, cosmic vision, the afterimage of which momentarily leaves the stars in the sky knit together in a kaleidoscopic quilt of lightless lasers; a darkness that illuminates and seems to sear their eyes before it breaks apart into dark globs and then fades into the small, black spots that always seem to float through your vision. (Invoking the cosmic dimensions of a Mythos entity, of which — like the tip of an iceberg — only a small part can actually be seen to manifest clearly in our local spacetime, is quite common with this technique.)

This specificity can also manifest in historical, arcane, or scientific sources the PCs pursue even when you’re intending for the PCs themselves to have a more holistic experience. You can imagine 19^th century scholars examining strange matter eruptions or Kepler’s secret notes documenting “strange novae,” with neither grasping that they’re only looking at an elephant’s trunk through a funhouse mirror.

Multiple Titles/Names. We label reality and give names to things because it gives us an illusion of control and understanding. We nail the winged thing to a bit of thick paper and label it a “dragonfly” and it’s no longer an enigmatic visitor from the realm of the fey, but rather something which has been fully compassed by our minds; classified, categorized, and neatly settled.

Defy this sense of understanding by invoking many names and titles for the same thing. L’rignak, for example, was known to the Aztecs as Tōnatiuh. They are also the Dark Star, the Psychopomp of Shapshu, and the Coming Night.

Parable, Allegory, Analogy. When the human mind struggles to grasp something, it will often try to find parallels within its experience to try to grapple with its meaning. This can easily give you a multitude of angles to approach the Mythos element from, but it’s also useful to think about useless and/or warped trying to apply an analogy of human experience to the fundamentally inhuman can be. (For example, don’t shy away from invoking paradoxical analogies.)

I find it can be particularly effective to think about how pre-Enlightenment science (or lack of science) might have attempted to grapple with these impossible truths. For example, modern science might talk about the “mutagenic effects” of some of L’rignak’s eruptions of strange matter, and how they rewrite mitochondrial DNA, creating a new structure that appears to enslave the host cell with chimeric properties. But older sources might describe them as a “fifth humour,” demonic possession, or the “font of godshead.” (Was the Oracle at Delphi a manifestation of strange matter?)

Confusion/Shaded Truth. The PCs are not the only ones incapable of understanding the Mythos element, so as they encounter other characters and sources attempting to describe it, it’s okay for a “truth” to be colored by falseness — apocrypha and flawed translations accumulating over centuries and corrupting the original statement.

This was the primary approach when the players in my In the Shadow of the Spire campaign wanted to research the name “Saggarintys,” which they had encountered in the Banewarrens. (SPOILER WARNING!) The true version of events was that Saggarintys the Silver King was a silver dragon who worked with the Banelord to construct the Banewarrens, a vast vault in which artifacts of great evil were to be sealed away from the world. The Banelord eventually became corrupted by one of the artifacts, betrayed Saggarintys, and imprisoned him in a cube of magical glass.

Saggarintys was not, therefore, an ineffable Mythos entity, but I knew that he had lived so long ago that any contemporary references they found would be fragmentary at best. So I could use a similar mythologizing process and when the PCs did their research, what they found was:

In the fragmentary remnants of the Marvellan Concordance there is a reference to “Saggarintys, the wanderer of the West” or “from forth the West” (depending on the translation). There is some speculation that this may indicate that Saggarintys is an archaic name for the Western Star.

(This is rooted in the fact that dragons came from the West in my campaign world. So Saggarintys was literally “from forth the West,” but this is then colored with the false conclusion that this is a reference to the Western Star.)

The name appears on Loremaster Gerris Hin’s list of “Allies of the Banelord.” A “Saggantas” is also referred to as the Secret Lord of the Banewarrens.

(Here the name has been corrupted into “Saggantas” and Saggarintys’ role as the Architect of the Banewarrens has caused his identity to become conflated with the Banelord. Note the multitude of names and titles.)

Saggarintys, the Silver King, is the name of a legendary sword said to be the Destroyer of Banes.

(The mythologization is heavy here: The seed of truth is that Saggarintys was opposed to the evil artifacts known as banes and may even have researched how to destroy them. I imagined chivalric tales interpreting “destroyer of evil” as obviously referring to some powerful weapon. Another influence here is the Sword of Truth, a holy artifact that was used in the construction of the Banewarrens and, thus, was another “enemy of the banes” that could have gotten mixed up with Saggarintys.)

A children’s rhyme from Isiltur describes Saggarintys (later shortened to Saggae or “Silver Saggae”) as a friendly spirit who lives in the Land of Mirrors and aids youngsters in need.

(Here the glass prison of Saggarintys is interpreted as a mirror and the context is shifted to a children’s story, naturally warping the nature of the narrative.)

LAYER 3: WHAT THE PLAYERS SEE

You’ve broken your canon into jagged, overlapping pieces and mythologized them, but this still isn’t what the players actually see at the table. Even if they conduct research at Miskatonic University, they won’t get a neatly organized fact sheet summarizing the mythology.

Instead, what they’ll find – through research, investigation, interrogation, or supernatural manifestation – are clues.

In fact, you can often think of all those jagged, mythologized pieces as a revelation list. Note that, even though these revelations are mythologized, they can still be practical and actionable (e.g., “go to a room without corners to avoid the Hounds of Tindalos”).

Like any revelation list, of course, you’ll want to respect the Three Clue Rule. However, as you’re crafting these clues, I recommend being a little more, let’s say, poetic than usual.

In the modern world we often think of poetry as just being “pretty words,” but the heart of poetry is the difference between comprehending something and apprehending something. Comprehension is when you rationally work your way to a conclusion, but apprehension is when you seize hold of a truth through a sort of instinctual sense. It’s the music that accompanies the lyric and a factor beyond the literal sense of the passage. It’s an intersection of ideas and also the transcendence of meaning.

The best clues often suggest a conclusion rather than spelling it out. What I’m suggesting here is that, for these Mythos revelations, you can consciously choose to evoke that suggestion instead of expecting logical inference. Perhaps moreso than with other revelations, I also recommend strongly differentiating the clues pointing to a single revelation, with each evoking the truth of that revelation in distinct ways. This will encourage the players to poetically synthesize the disparate imagery of those clues, creating “truths” that are grasped only in silhouette and which change and shift as each new clue is added to the picture.

This can also be extended to the revelations themselves. Sufficient mythological bifurcation might result in the same canonical concept becoming two “separate” revelations. (Such revelations might even contradict each other.) Maybe the players never realize the connection between these revelations, or maybe they can perform the intuitive dialectical leap and synthesize some common ground of “truth” for themselves (which may or may not resemble what you “know” to be the canonical truth those revelations were extrapolated from). Either way, mission accomplished.

As you can see from the examples above, it’s likely that the mythologization process itself will begin generating, or at least strongly indicating, some of these clues (e.g., there are references to L’rignak in Nameless Cults). In fact, as this suggests, the clues themselves will be formed from an additional cycle of mythologization. They should be indirect, arcane, and contradictory understandings of the revelations (which are, themselves, an indirect, arcane, and contradictory understanding of the “truth”).

The corollary to all of this is, once again, that the clues are the only thing the players will ever definitively learn. And so your players will ultimately be staring at a mythology (the obscured “truth” of Layer 2) through the lens of mythology (the clues of Layer 3). There are, therefore, multiple interpretations built atop multiple interpretations, which will naturally lead the players to begin creating their own interpretations, no two of which will perfectly align.

Perfect understanding becomes impossible, but it will also feel like it’s just out of reach. The players will feel as if they can surely come to grips with this forbidden knowledge… if only they stare into the Abyss a little longer.

And that, of course, is exactly what you’re looking for.

Go to Part 2: Mythos Tomes

I’m very pleased to announce that So You Want to Be a Game Master has won the 2024 Gold ENNIE Award for Best RPG Related Product.

I’d like to take a moment to repeat a few words of thanks from my acceptance speech:

First, thank you to Elliot Wren Phillips at Page Street Press. Without them, this book would not exist.

Thanks, also, to my wife and daughter. When I got COVID midway through writing the book and ended up staring down a nearly impossible deadline, they rallied to support me through some real literary crunch to make sure the book happened.

And thanks to everyone reading this! This award would not have been possible without the entire Alexandrian community.

Speaking of which…

The Alexandrian also won a 2024 Gold ENNIE for Best Online Content!

I think a testament to the true value of online content is the community which supports it and, hopefully, is supported by it. Whether you’re a website-reader, a Twitch stream chatter, a Youtube watcher, a mailing list subscriber, or a Discord member, thank you for being a part of this community. And a very large thank you to all of the patrons of the Alexandrian. This website really could not exist without your support.

I’m looking forward to creating even more amazing books, videos, articles, games, and adventures in the years to come!

But for now, here’s So You Want to Be a Game Master nestled among the other award-winners at the ENNIES Gen Con booth: