Unfortunately only the cover could be photographed, but these very large series of D.o.E. reports seem to suggest a very intensive investigation into the feasibility of using nuclear weapons to kill the permian basin superorganism, and the conclusion seems to be a resounding “no”.
What's the eldritch conspiracy? Is this a new setting or is it Abhari adjacent?
I'm glad you asked!
Entirely different setting. Properly speaking it's just an extensive riff on/two degrees removes from Delta Green and other modern lovecraftian stuff. Human existence is a tiny soap bubble in a grand and terrible cosmos full of things which are to us as we are to gnats, exposure to Reality has terrible consequences both physical and mental, as technology and human understanding of its little sheltered cove of the universe has expanded, so has the degree to which we've bumped against the edges, and the strength with which the edges bump back, things get worse every day and only with constant vigilance and sacrifice is the masquerade preserved and the beginning of the apocalypse staved off, etc, etc.
The org chart without context (bold lines are command/authority, green is funding, blue is other support. Hexagons are parasitized/infiltrated but not controlled, diamonds are front-line tools/catspaws/deniable projects and all still need names, rounded shapes at the bottom are plot seeds before I ran out of objects in the free version)
So really the main thing that has my interest is figuring out conspiracies. Which are, basically, cliques of people In The Know who have each come to the conclusion that yes, in the long term this is unsustainable and humanity is fucked. To which there are a few responses.
1. The 'over my dead body' response. Basically the standard PCs in a Delta Green campaign - a network of military officers, federal agents, cops, spies, and friends in industry and academia willing to fight, die and kill to save the world for at least one more day. Between embezzlement, misuse of the national security state, and apocalyptic paranoia they do their very best to put out every fire before it can start to spread (helped by the fact that most of these things burn themselves out and need more of a cover-up than an intervention if you're pragmatic or slow enough). They're..often overzealous about this - this is a world with fewer Jonestowns and more Wacos, if you understand me.
2. "Humanity is doomed, but we can salvage what's important": Apocalyptic transhumanism is probably a workable term? An acceptance that the real conditions of the universe are incompatible with the existence of the human race, combined with a desperate conviction that humanity can create or transform into something for which that's not true. And so their efforts are split between trying to buy more time and efforts to engineer a successor species capable of meeting the mythos on its own terms while still retaining the pieces of human consciousness and culture they consider the worthwhile parts of its heritage. As might be expected, this is a very messy prospect and requires a lot of, ah, 'raw materials'. But it's easy to justify doing quite a lot to individual humans when you're already resigned to extinction and committed to building something better.
3. "Civilization is doomed, but we can save humanity". Or, as the previous two groups would put it, defeatists and traitors to humanity. They'd argue they're just trying to make the best of the inevitable. Essentially they're trying to curate the apocalypse, making it the gradual, gentle kind, easing humanity into awareness of its true conditions. The line about how "The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy"? That's their best case scenario, more or less, and they do what they can to engineer culture and nudge history in directions to make the transition as easy and subtle on humanity as possible. Better than burning from an instant of some mad god's attention or all the myriad of fates worse than either, after all.
4. The nihilists, or the real traitors, or the idealists, as you prefer. A small number of those who've been touched by the Outside and been remade, and are really quite happy with the result, or just are sufficiently disillusioned with the world that they're willing to give apocalypse and revelation a chance. Of course most aren't actively trying to die, or at least would prefer someone else was the suicide bomber if there's an option, so they do their best to find their way to promising nascent cults and arm and support them to meet their end in as dramatic and hard-to-hide a way as possible, and find potential converts more interested in Truth and enlightenment than their own obsessions.
(the org chart is for conspiracy number 2, for reference)
This painting was made for a contest organised by Globtopus (french streamer and video maker). Celebrating the release of the Delta Green RPG campaign ‘Perspectives Démentes’ on the Sombres Machinations youtube channel.
Proposed concepts for long-time nuclear waste warning messages for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, designed to universally warn far-future Human descendants of buried atomic waste
theartofmadeline
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