Tribal people gather at the sacred meeting space to trade, learn, & bolster their faith. One band has been infected by horrible creatures from beyond the stars.
What do you get when you have a GM obsessed with hunter-gatherer society, ancient spirituality, and RPGs? Cthulhu 10,000 BC. The characters travel to Göbekli Tepe, some of the oldest and largest neolithic megaliths ever discovered. Can their own spirit allies help them against the Mythos? If you’re a fan of Gordon White’s Star.Ships, this event is for you.
From the author:
Like the Call Of Cthulhu event I wrote for last year, The Gutter Bible, Cthulhu 10,000 BC tries to meld together both my deep and abiding love of RPGs and being a practicing ceremonial magician. Yeah, you heard that right, I claim to be a real life wizard, just like Alan Moore.
Hopefully I will succeed in piquing the interest of those who are interested in magick, and those who just want to play CoC. I wanted to create a story where the characters have a completely magical world view. The people of 10,000 BC truly believe that the universe is controlled by spirits. They follow the first religion—animism—and do not doubt that rocks, trees, and the stars, have their own conscioussness. Conversely, they are technologically limited. They have no agriculture, no writing, and extremely small-scale metallurgy. This is before the domestication of the horse and bows and arrows are new-fangled machines.
Yet, they were able to build massive, complex monuments. Göbekli Tepe is 8,000 years older than Stonehenge. The discovery of this little known archaeological marvel blows away history as we know it. Even now in universities people are taught first comes agriculture, then comes settlements, then people build monuments. Yet, Göbekli Tepe was built by bands of hunter-gatherers, before humans populated any city. It begs the question, what did our pre-historic ancestors really know? And also, how did they learn it?
This is roleplaying of the highest order. Most RPG geeks I know tend to be extremely logical. It’s hard for them to wrap their brains around people who are highly intelligent, yet firmly believe in what most people in the West would consider bunk. These characters actually talk to the spirits and the spirits talk back. They see them as friends, allies, and kin—totally real by all measures. This will stretch your limits as a player.
I also wrote this to stretch people’s minds. To make them consider that maybe not is all as we think it is. This story is heavily influenced by my respect and admiration of the anthropologist Wade Davis. In his own words:
“We have this extraordinary conceit in the West that while we’ve been hard at work in the creation of technological wizardry and innovation, somehow the other cultures of the world have been intellectually idle. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nor is this difference due to some sort of inherent Western superiority. We now know to be true biologically what we’ve always dreamed to be true philosophically, and that is that we are all brothers and sisters. We are all, by definition, cut from the same genetic cloth. That means every single human society and culture, by definition, shares the same raw mental activity, the same intellectual capacity. And whether that raw genius is placed in service of technological wizardry or unraveling the complex thread of memory inherent in a myth is simply a matter of choice and cultural orientation.”
You may also be asking, who the hell is Gordon White, and what the hell is Star.Ships? Gordon does one of the best podcasts on magick to be found. He’s also an author, his magnum opus being the book, Star.Ships. The book puts forth this simple premise, what if the spirits are real? If humans can, and did, communicate with intelligences that are beyond human, how did that effect history? The people who built Göbekli Tepe never wrote a word, but they could plan massive feats of engineering. They could read the movements of the stars. Where did they get the math? Where did they get the idea to even do such a thing? And why did they make all the effort not only to build it but to bury it and rebuild it several times over?
And, of course, what if some of those entities they communicated with were of the Mythos?
Keep watching this page for more updates as we get closer to the con.
James L. Wilber
