Caverns Measureless to Man

An organization for Mysterium Weird Fiction Roleplaying.

Martin Forsberg is a psychologist who was forced to leave the academic world after several scandals involving experiments deemed pseudoscientific and gravely unethical. He now runs a private research laboratory on a farm in the Skåne countryside in sourthernmost Sweden. Forsberg lives at the farm with his wife and assistant, Gunilla Mårtensson-Forsberg, a former psychiatric nurse who shares her husbands passion for exploring the outer limits of human experience.

Forsberg makes contact with potential test subjects through web forums for alternative spirituality. The subjects are told that they will learn to reach higher states of consciousness and develop extrasensory perception, and pay for their room and board while staying at the Laboratory. Through fasting, sleep deprivation, cooling, electric shocks, and hallucinogenic drugs, the test subjects are pushed beyond their mental limits. Everything is meticulously documented, and Forsberg interviews the participants to learn about their experiences. The testimonies are compared to find common denominators that could indicate objective phenomena beyond the individual psyche.

Some participants find the experience exciting and return, but many have been traumatized, and in some cases, Forsberg has been forced to pay to keep former subjects from pressing charges or going to the media. In at least one instance, the experience triggered a psychosis, and the person relapsed into a previous addiction. No deaths have occurred so far, but it is probably only a matter of time.

The experiments have had limited success. The many hours of video recordings and volumes of journal notes accumulated on hard drives mostly contain incoherent babbling from people pushed to their breaking point. However, those knowledgeable about such things can see that here and there are fragments of genuine contact with otherworldly realms and Non-Human Intelligences. Most of this has escaped Forsberg, but he has caught on to one thing: in some recordings, there is glossolalia (speaking in tongues) in which certain sounds have recurred independently among different test subjects. Primarily, there is one phrase he has identified as a possible fragment of an unknown language: “Zacare, ca, od zamran; odo cicle qaa; zorge, lap zirdo noco mad, hoath Iaida.” What these words mean is still unknown, but the Institute for Empirical Metaphysics is now focusing its work on exploring this language and establishing contact with the forces that communicate it.

A strange book to be found by Player Characters in Mysterium Weird Fiction Roleplaying.

Rebirth of the Living God is an essay that presents a mystical revelation on the true nature of divinity, the cosmos, and the place of humanity therein. It begins with a discussion of metaphysics, cosmology, and theogony before focusing on a detailed description of ritual practices. Much of the text is steeped in an unconventional use of terminology from astrology and astronomy as well as both physics and biology, making it rather dense and difficult to follow.

The essay is first known to have been shared in November 2013 on the now-defunct message board Stellar Gnosis, by the user Dorje Hyperboreus (who may or may not be the author of the text). It was cited in the manifesto of the Third-I Collective whose compound outside Fremont, Nebraska was destroyed by a fire that killed five people in 2016. A Russian translation, Тайная Мудрость Живого Бога (Taynaya Mudrost’ Zhivogo Boga), was distributed in both print and digital form in 2019 by Истинные Поклонники Высочайшего (Istinnyye Poklonniki Vysochayshego, The True Worshippers of the Highest) in Magnitogorsk, Russia. This group was outlawed by the Putin government in a 2022 crackdown on separatist and seditious organizations.

The following quotes from the opening pages give a basic understanding of the central ideas:

“This is the ultimate apocalypse that Dr. Dee was too timid to utter unless shrouded in the garments of commonplace piety, and that the so-called Master Therion withheld from his disciples lest they shrink in fear from the Great Work.

…

The True God, who is beyond all gods, is like a formless mist of radiant darkness, a fecund void gravid with all that is and is not, a churning abyss that destroys all and creates everything, a dream in a mind that is not. 

The Ancient Ascended Ones, the angels of the Lord Most High, are countless and multiform. They dwell on worlds beyond the farthest stars and in spheres unseen and unknown but coterminous with ours. They are older than the night and the future is their heirloom. Humans are to Them like the microbes in the soil upon which we tread. The foolish one will call upon the lowliest of Their kind only to find that the gnat does not command the tempest. But there is a ladder to ascend for the one who is prepared to take leave of all things human. Herein is the map for that journey beyond death, the tools for that labor of absolute transformation.”

A strange book to be found by Player Characters in Mysterium Weird Fiction Roleplaying.

The Book of Seven Nights was originally printed in a small edition in Leipzig in 1757 under the German title Das Buch der Sieben Nächte. The anonymous author claims to have bought a cipher manuscript from an Ottoman trader. Upon deciphering the document, a text in ancient Hebrew was revealed that the writer translated into German. Neither the cipher manuscript, nor the Hebrew text has ever been found, and the book is generally believed to have been written in German by the anonymous author.

The original edition made little impact and only a few copies remain in European libraries and archives. In 1983 Astro Verlag in Bonn published a cheap pocket edition marred by spelling errors, missing text, and bad reproductions of the sigils. Hermetic Books of San Francisco published an English edition in 1992 that reproduced all the errors of the 1983 edition, but made it even worse as the translation made many linguistic mistakes and preserved very little of the poetry of the German text.

The Book of Seven Nights claims to be a record made by Cain, son of Adam and Eve, of what he was told by “a Child of Old Night” whom he met when walking the wilderness after having been cursed by the Lord. The text is then supposed to have been preserved in a secret Hebrew tradition until it fell into the hands of the unnamed German writer. The first part of the text is a poem of mythological and philosophical nature that can be summarized as follows:

The unformed was without beginning or end, eternal and infinite. When the first light was born from the darkness it created a limit, shattering infinity into shards of Here and There, Inside and Outside, and thus a Before and After so that the circles of time began revolving like a mill, grinding eternity into Years and Days and Hours. But the unbounded survived in the cracks between This and That, between Here and There, and eternity seeped between the edges of Now and Then.

As the first night fell, a yearning was born in the non-mind of the unformed: The light must be extinguished, the borders and distinctions must be broken and dissolved; that which has been separated must be regained and reintegrated into one undivided whole again.

During the following nights, the forces of primal chaos and darkness give birth to anti-creations that oppose and negate the creations described in Genesis. Finally, on the seventh night as the Lord rested, the darkness whispered in the ear of the angel that was called Lucifer, Lightbringer: “Why should you, a being of pure light, bow before those molded from clay?”

The second part of the book concerns a method for communicating with the Children of Old Night. Dr. Franz Kunrath, a German scholar of the history of Western Esotericism, has shown how this procedure differs from those found in such grimoires as The Key of Solomon, The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin, or the pseudo-epigraphic Fourth Book of Agrippa. A number is calculated based on the current date, one’s natal horoscope, and the number of letters in a randomly selected line of scripture. This is then used to reveal the name and sigil of the entity by reading the number alphanumerically and plotting it into a matrix. Finally, the name and sigil are meditated upon to achieve contact through dream incubation.

Cosmic Teratoma: The Metastasis Of The Hypostasis

A strange book to be found by Player Characters in Mysterium Weird Fiction Roleplaying.

This is a 120-page booklet with soft covers and a glued spine, printed on cheap paper. The cover is black with the title in white and red. There is no information about the author or place of publication, the only details given say “Issued by the Institute for Organic Cosmology, 1979”. It was printed in a small edition and is now very obscure and hard to come by.

The text posits a dynamic and evolving universe, in which the hypostasis (the cosmic principle or divine essence constituting the essential nature of existence) is not fixed but can undergo transformation and growth, developing into new hypostases or substances, giving rise to unique and distinct forms of being.

According to this bio-metaphysics, the universe is subject to the same forces of sickness and disease as any other organic system. The hypostasis undergoes a pathological transformation that metastasizes and spreads uncontrollably like a malignancy throughout the cosmos. The diseased hypostases manifest as malformed and grotesque cosmic teratomas, aberrant growths, and tumors that disrupt the natural order of the universe.

In this metaphysical doctrine, the ultimate goal is to eliminate these malignant growths and heal the sick hypostasis. This can only be accomplished through a process of purification and transformation that involves confronting the cosmic teratomas and purging them from the universe. Only then can the hypostasis be restored to health and the universe be made whole again.

The booklet outlines a program for purification and spiritual hygiene that includes dietary restrictions, gymnastic exercises, breathing techniques, mantras, and meditation for the cultivation of a sound spirit in a sound body. Upon completion, the student will not only be able to heal any damage to their own body and withstand any illness, but they will also gain the ability to identify any object, creature, person, or other phenomena that is a cosmic teratoma that must be purged.

Notes for a new campaign frame for Mysterium Weird Fiction Roleplaying.

Death is not the end of existence, it is only a transformation into another state of being. Humans are but the larval stage of the species. After death, as the mortal body is allowed to return to the dust from which it was made, the immortal essence of the individual constitutes itself in a body created out of that etheric substance that science is grasping for under the name of “dark matter”.

The post-mortal entity is as strange to its former self as the butterfly is to the caterpillar. After shedding its mortal husk, the immortal soul of man is a perfect sphere of dark matter. It is invisible to the eyes of the living, but if it could be glimpsed, it might be perceived as black mercury, utterly dark and resplendent. After death, the immortal soul retains all memories and knowledge of life but has an entirely new and different identity and agenda. Life as human beings of flesh and blood is nothing more than a lesser developmental stage on the path to the true and eternal state of mankind.

 The immortal souls can merge and join into entities of greater mass and power, and more powerful entities can force themselves on smaller and weaker souls and absorb them against their will. This has been the dominant tendency among the post-mortal since before the advent of anatomically modern Homo Sapiens. The land beyond the gates of death is dominated by a few immense entities that are many hundreds of thousands of years old and who have absorbed billions of individual souls into themselves. 

These Great Ones of the Land of Shadows view pre-mortal humanity as cattle to be bred, herded, and harvested for the needs of the immortals. For tens of thousands of years, the immortal lords of mankind have bred more humans, using their influence over the pre-mortals to further agriculture and technology to sustain ever greater numbers and ever greater harvests. The immortal dead can influence the living subtly by sending notions and impulses, or more overtly by appearing in dreams and visions, or even through possession (voluntary or not). They will often exploit their memories from pre-mortal existence to manipulate the living. The reason for this effort is the advent of the Fuligin Flame, an alien menace that threatens to engulf and devour the realm of post-mortal humanity.

The most significant change in the revised and expanded version of Mysterium (if you have bought the game, check your drivethru library for the new files!) is that made to the rules for mental stress. Instead of the five meters nicked from UA there are now simply two: Mental Stress and Paranormality. This is kind of like Stability and Sanity in ToC, where Mental Stress is about all kinds of mundane pressure and traumas, while Paranormality deals with shocks to the character’s sense of reality. The mundane stress can cause a PC to become indifferent, distancing themself from their emotions, or suffer mental disorders. The stress caused by high strangeness can cause the same kind of difficulties, but is also part of an initiation into cosmic mysteries. When a PC reaches ten hardened notches or five failed ones in Paranormality they enter into a crisis since their concepts of existence and reality no longer function as useful maps to the world of their experiences.

This state of crisis is called the Chapel Perilous, borrowing a term that Robert Anton Wilson used in his autobiographical account of high strangeness, Cosmic Trigger, and which originally comes from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. For a deep dive into the concept of the Chapel Perilous, check out this essay by Matt Cardin: https://www.teemingbrain.com/2012/08/13/initiation-by-nightmare-cosmic-horror-and-chapel-perilous/

Basically, the PC can exit the Chapel Perilous either by embracing the Weird, Strange and Eerie at the heart of existence, or by loosing themself in delusions where nothing or everything is magical. Now, this will naturally look quite different depending on the particular cosmology and mythos of the campaign, and the specific experiences of the PC. Mysterium is a weird fiction game about people having close encounters with unexplained anomalous phenomena, and these rules are the scaffolds for constructing the scene where we play to find out how this encounter unfolds.