Revisiting Sleeper Hits in Errant

Earlier this year, when I used my substack like a blog (which I've now separated into blog & newsletter) I wrote up a love-letter to Ava Islam's ERRANT. Over the course of this year - working on Dungeon23, looking for my next long-term TTRPG system - I've fallen more firmly in love with the Old School Renaissance and the kind of play it encourages.

You can read that article here. It's a good window into where I was back in May, falling in love with old-school play and sensibilities and still trying to form the language to describe what I liked about it. I've had plenty of OSR experience playing, running and designing for MÖRK BORG, but my personal life has been so rocky the past year or so I never truly actualized on that scene like I would've liked.

At the end of my initial ERRANT article I created a covenant for the game. Here on this new form of my blog I want to revisit this content, updating it and getting it in front of more eyes.

Behold, TSATHOGGUA, the Sleeper of N'Kai! Dare thee make a covenant with the alien manifestation of hunger, sloth and consumption? It's hosted on my itch page, found here!

CW: Starvation, Self-Cannibalism, Sloths.

Art by LoneAnimator on DeviantArt

What the fuck is Tsathoggua?

I don't know how else to say this, but Big Tsoggy-T is my Old One of choice. 

SUH-THAW-GOO-AH (Elder God in the amalgam form of a bat, sloth and toad | Big fucking nerd)

Is it weird to have a favorite elder god? Probably. Following a model of borrowing obscure fantasy references and stealing them wholesale back in 2019 (I still do, really) I sampled large swathes of characters, place names and fantasy elements from the fiction of Clark Ashton Smith.

CAS was originally a poet, turning to the weird fiction / pulp horror circuit in the 1930s to support himself and his wife during the Great Depression. He purportedly was to have said that "any truly noble civilization would have allowed for the creation of art over material needs", his sadness at having to put down his true love (poetry) for the pursuit of something resembling a living (pulp fiction writing). 

That somber attitude pervades a lot of his prose, and he excelled at instilling a sense of foreboding and dread in his readers. As someone who used to run a Numenera campaign, I was initially attracted to his Zothique Cycle, which was groundbreaking as a kind of fusion of the ancient-past of Hyperborea, and that of a world experiencing the far-future heat-death that Jack Vance would popularize in his own books.

I largely borrowed from his Averoigne cycle when I populated a hexcrawl for my campaign setting. Smith had a whole cycle of short stories set in Averoigne, a fictional province set in Medieval France beset by sorcerers, werewolves and vampires amidst a corrupt Catholic Church. When I myself wanted to populate my own Western Europe analogue in my fantasy world, I liberally borrowed place names like Vyone, Touraine, Vigil, as well as NPC names like Gaspard and Théophile.

This also, coincidentally, is a hauntingly similar creative path that Tom Moldvay took when designing X2: Castle Amber. Chateau D'Amberville is a classic funhouse dungeon that includes a portal into the literal (sic. literary) province of Averoigne to do a fetch-quest, with the cycle's best stories all happening at once. This stepping into the literary was far more direct than myself, but that was due to the project being sanctioned by Smith's estate, btw, which is awesome!

This open world component of Castle Amber, and the stuff I ripped off, they're one and the same! Would you believe me if I told you I didn't notice the similarity until 2021, when I picked up a copy of the Goodman Games Castle Amber redux?

Of course, I also included workings of Smith's elder god Tsathoggua. I didn't intend the whole campaign to revolve around The Old Ones and the convergence of stars, but it emerged through play with the places the players ended up visiting, along with the enemies and choices they made.

I like Tsathoggua largely because he's not a world-ending threat.

Elder Gods - ancient cosmic beings far grander than understandable to the intelligence of mere apes - are grandiose, foreboding, upsetting. Tsathoggua is that in part, but his vibe in the prose is more menacing or spooky rather than horrifying. He's an ancient alien God from Saturn, and unlike Cthulu he's not asleep, locked away or far away. He's awake on Earth, and he's plotting. That should be really scary to imagine, but the world has not ended because he's so lazy.

He could rise and devour the world, one might consider, but he chooses not to. That'd be too much effort. Way easier to visit people in their dreams and get a cult to bring you victims in your Hyperborean mountain cave. That's that sigma grindset at work, fellas.

So, what's Tsoggy-T's deal? Be menacing. Get cultists to feed you in-between aeon-long naps, threatening some earthquakes when you don't get your way. I never did find any concrete long-term goals for universal domination, or threats of destruction to Planet Earth if he were to wake.
Something terrible, probably.

The Covenant Itself

So, how does one adapt this weird fiction to an OSR game like Errant? Through a covenant!

Sloth: The desire for ease at the expense of "Good" works. Laze.

Hunger: A feeling of discomfort/weakness caused by lack of food.

Dreams: Thoughts, sensations and images that occur while someone is asleep.

Here's some of what a Zealot character gets for making a deal with Tsathoggua:

Sloth is this elder god's most obvious eminence, so I focused on a character that interacts with Exhaustion. It seemed like the best fit as a tie-in with the transgressive laze required of a Cardinal Sin.
Errant represents exhaustion through filling up inventory slots, so the Zealot can choose to reduce portions of their inventory to increase the likelihood of their miracles. A risky gamble, since it can potentially lead to a death spiral, but one the player should have every means to manage.

Originally (instead of the blessing that became Oneiromancy) I had included a "Power in Slumber" blessing. This allowed the Zealot to spend four TRAVEL TURNS resting (instead of the required two) to regain Favour = their Damage Die. For those not intimately familiar with the system, this would basically allow a character to rest twice as long to recover some of the Zealot's class resource, which would normally take a DOWNTIME TURN. In essence, cutting down the recharge time from aprox. 30 days to overnight. 

While flavorful to Tsathoggua's whole vibe, I ended up cutting it from the document. Use it if you like, but I think in practice at the table it would bog down the procedural aspect of gameplay at the table. Every time players would bed down to rest, the Zealot player would be begging everyone to spend an additional 1/3 of their day doing nothing instead of adventuring, and that's not fun. 

A character in league with The Sleeper will need a high Physique to withstand this exhaustion (and will likely need many hirelings to carry things for them). Despite these drawbacks, I think that encourages the fantasy. A Tsathoggua cultist would be a freaky little weirdo, starving themselves and keeping a retinue to attend to their every need (picking up even small amounts of treasure, lmao).

I also included some monsters at the end of the document.

Tsathoggua is associated with several. For streamlined purposes, I focused on cultists, formless spawn, and the ghost of the wizard Eibon.

Cultists are easy. Somebody has to be feeding Tsathoggua to keep him sleeping. I'm really proud of the line "treats starving themselves like cross-fit".

Formless Spawn are just that. Big piles of intelligent corrosive goo. When I used Tsathoggua in this D&D hexcrawl I mentioned earlier, I used both Gibbering Mouthers and Mimics in place of just the formless. Love a good ooze, and mimics are basically ooze(s), right? That turned out to be an effective decision, and while I didn't include it in the document, I encourage you to link the formless ooze of Tsathoggua to the primordial, sleeping state of mimics.

The wizard Eibon (his ghost, really) comes from The Door to Saturn. Putting to rest one of the first devotees of Tsathoggua would be a great boon to all...

Sources

The template for the Errant Testament (sic. Covenant) was made possibly by Joshy V. I'm super grateful, as I could have simply winged it, but I love a good template!

Here's a link to the Errant RPG and Ava Islam's osr blog whence she's written about the thought-process that went into distilling 900 OSR blogs and websites into the game.

Errant is a breath of fresh air to me, having had to figure out procedures through most of my time running (and designing...) TTRPGs. It appeals to me for its attitude not just that players can engage in game design - making up powers / class features and working with The GM to make them real - but it tells them to explicitly. Everybody has a game designer in them. My current long-term play group LOVE coming up with their own weird, gestalt characters that have custom ancestry, class features and what have you. They'll love a game that encourages and enables that, and *I* do too!

If you're interested in this Clark Ashton Smith, check out his body of work on the website Eldritch Dark. There you can find his prose, poetry and the body of criticism attached to him and his genre.

I used Tsathoggua - and the Elder Gods carte blanche - as primordial foes. Running games about killing monsters, but including unknowable, un-killable Gods seems counter-intuitive. I put them in my game, but I made it possible (through great effort) to slay them. Tsathoggua had to be slain by my playgroup venturing beyond Eibon's door to a fantastical analogue to Saturn, reciting a specific phrase from The Book of Eibon to destroy him forever.

And they did! From now on in my campaign setting, his absence in The Plane of Dreams has allowed for greater mortal access to dream magic, as well as terrors that flourish in the absence of an apex predator. I also decided that mimics were to become even more valuable after this point. Their heavenly source destroyed, mimics are now an endangered species. They're far more valuable if they're captured alive for wizards, rather than simply slain for their gold.

Adventure! Plot hooks! This is what's possible by taking inspiration from old texts and melding it into the current play styles that compel us today. I found that through making the eldritch killable - robbing it a bit of horror, but replacing it with wonder and player agency - made for some very compelling gameplay at my table. 

I'm considering adding in one of these mimic collectors to my megadungeon. Myr Regath doesn't have specific reference to Tsathoggua or mimics, but 1 hidden mimic per level could be a fun added dimension. Megadungeons are, after all, a reflection of their master's minds. An arcane practitioner obsessed with "critically endangered oozes" could be a fun background character to Errants trying to weigh the value of gold against risk to their very lives.

Terminus

Thanks for reading. I hope you have a greater appreciation for Big Tsoggy-T, if this was either your first or most-recent exposure to The Sleeper of N'kai.

Errant encourages so much creativity and specificity, that there doesn't need to be 100 different ready-to-use covenants on the online-space. Just make your own! But, that being said, it's fun. And examples are good, just like Josh's example of "The Cloaked Justiciar" helped me pair down a fourth, unnecessary eminence from Tsathoggua.

(I thought there HAD to be four, so I included "Interloper" as a means of encompassing him being an alien God. I cut it out because it was vestigial, but it's where the Favour boon of trespassing came from).

If you haven't checked it out already, here's my take on the Covenant to Tsathoggua on my Itch. Download it, riff on it, and if you end up doing either please tag me in any posts or write-ups. I like Tsathoggua as a general, all-around evil. I hope he can find a place in your repertoire of unabashedly Evil Gods.

Follow me everywhere: https://linktr.ee/asherwinnie