Quote:
Originally Posted by Flyndaran
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Something like CROATOAN, perhaps?
I can't help that it sounds Lovecraftian. As does Krakatoa, actually. And like they belong to the same antediluvian language.
Yes, I know that there was a Croatan tribe of Native Americans living near Roanoke,
but, as Ken Hite famously said, bad linguistics and archeology makes for the best gaming.
In any case, the Croatan tribe was literally renamed by law, as if someone feared that anyone speaking or knowing the very name itself might bring the attention of things from Beyond.
In any case, Croatan was allegedly the name of an island, as indeed is Roanoke, and it is far from clear to me whether the islands are named for the tribes who lived there
or vice versa.
Apparently, Croatan Island was
most likely modern Hatteras Island. That is the sort of ambigious statement you can drive a full-sized tractor trailer, a Great Old One or a whole campaign through. To begin with, if we're no longer assuming that geography in the area was immutable (because the Vile Vortices are areas where other worlds bleed into this one), who is to say that the island which the Roanoke colonists knew as 'Croatan' is even in Virginia? Or ever was?
Besides, the single word carved at Roanoke
wasn't "Croatan". It was "Croatoan".
Isn't it obvious that this is the True Name of the island/entity, perhaps kin to Krakatoa?
And, fortunately for my campaign, I discover that the cookiest crackpots on the Internet have found no difficulty in postulating a sufficiently large Bermuda Triangle to manage the feat of extending the northern terminus to a place south of Roanoke, where the island/entity of CROATOAN might exist in an adjecent reality to this one.
Indeed, on having obtained several Kindle books written by Ivan T. Sanderson, I discover that the man was, simultaneously and delightfully, a skeptical, rationalist scientist who utterly rejected ghosts and other supernatural phenomena... and the sort of chap who recounts page after page of anecdotal evidence before concluding that only a hopeless blockhead blinded by laboratory-bound, Ivory Tower confined scientific orthodoxy would bother to deny the existence of seamonsters, and, indeed freshwater longnecks like the Loch Ness Monster, there merely remains the challenge of scientifically classifying Nessie and her many evident kin.
He also, quite matter of factly and without ever asserting it as positive fact, but merely a reasonable conjecture from available evidence, advanced his hypothesis that the priestly class of pre-historic civilisations were the custodians of advanced technological knowledge, couched in religious symbolism of secretive mystery cults, and that knowledge of these wonders was probably passed down from a highly advanced trans-Atlantic, if not worldwide, civilization.
He never came out and
said that it was Atlantis, Mu and/or Lemuria, but I couldn't help but read between the lines the expectation that Mr. Sanderson would be prepared to entertain such notions. Oh, and by the last chapter, he explained rains of frogs and fish as the results of other dimensions impinging on ours. Which, he noted in passing (presumably before hopping on a unicycle and speeding away, monocle fixed, cackling madly while juggling Parthian batteries, Ancient Egyptian movie projectors and millenia old golden icons of Central American jet planes and power tools), would also neatly explain all the other unexplained phenomena he described.
Including, of course, the technologically advanced prehistoric human civilization which somehow flourished without literacy, as the Out Of Place artifacts were clearly obtained through contact with beings from other realities by the people who later became the elite priestly class, by which means they received technological devices (perhaps in trade or to help them keep the lower orders in line), but not the entire infrastructure and scientific worldview that would go with having devoloped this technology themselves.
So, not Ancient Astronauts. Better. Ancient Ultraterrestials. Or, in other words, faeries, spirits, titans, gods, demons or Great Old Ones.
Basically, Nyarlathotep as the Black Pharoah of Atlantis.