Yaqqothl Meets Averoigne

Map of Averoigne

You know I'm busily working on my Yaqqothl setting, and I don't have problems coming up with interesting encounters (even though they're pretty high in number). Anyway, I feel like Yaqqothl is lacking what I would call a seed. With seed I mean something to glue the sandbox together, like Cthulhu Mythos for Carcosa or the Middle Earth for the Wilderlands of High Fantasy.

I have only a mundane knowledge of the works of C. A. Smith, since the only italian publications of his masterpieces (Hyperborea, Xiccarph, Zothique and Averoigne) are dated 1988 and pretty much impossible to find (someone is selling Hyperborea on ebay at 40€, too much for me). So the only thing I've had the chance to read are some of the novels over at the great The Eldritch Dark site. I think that Yaqqothl as I envisage it is more similar to Zothique and the Dying Earth, but what if it turned out to be something more similar to Averoigne? In the last few days I have read through one of my latest acquisitions (X2: Castle Amber), and I've found it incredibly awesome. Also, I have printed out and carefully read through the original B3: Palace of the Silver Princess, and I was pretty shocked to find that it holds so much weirdism in its 32 pages, even without including the fairy folks (so much the better, it's the inclusion of fairy idyll that makes the whole module so awesome). So I was just musing on bringing some of that stuff to Yaqqothl.

I'm not saying I want to turn Yaqqothl into Averoigne (I don't have the necessary knowledge to do that, as I have previously mentioned I only have a mundane knowledge of the works of C. A. S.), but that Averoign could really be the seed I'm looking for to make all this work coherently and be interesting enough. So, instead of Yet Another Mutation Table you should get:

1. A likely medieval world, where magic is real and everyone worship the One and Lonely God;
2. A largely expanded pantheon of otherworldly, powerful demons;
3. Even more paganism;
4. A very restricted pool of monsters, most of which are depraved humans;
5. Alien beings and laser weapons – enough.

I like to think of this in terms of Dying World meets Yog-Sothothery meets Averoigne, a little less Dreamland-ish and a little more medieval. What do you think about this possible change of course?