Yuggoth Resolves

Yuggoth

"There are mighty cities on Yuggoth [Pluto]—great tiers of terraced towers built of black stone like the specimen I tried to send you. That came from Yuggoth. The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They have other, subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples. Light even hurts and hampers and confuses them, for it does not exist at all in the black cosmos outside time and space where they came from originally. To visit Yuggoth would drive any weak man mad—yet I am going there. The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious Cyclopean bridges—things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the things came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids—ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen.

But remember—that dark world of fungoid gardens and windowless cities isn’t really terrible. It is only to us that it would seem so. Probably this world seemed just as terrible to the beings when they first explored it in the primal age. You know they were here long before the fabulous epoch of Cthulhu was over, and remember all about sunken R’lyeh when it was above the waters. They’ve been inside the earth, too—there are openings which human beings know nothing of—some of them in these very Vermont hills—and great worlds of unknown life down there; blue-litten K’n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black, lightless N’kai. It’s from N’kai that frightful Tsathoggua came—you know, the amorphous, toad-like god-creature mentioned in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon and the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton."

- H.P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer in Darkness (1931, Weird Tales; Pluto was discovered in 1930 while Lovecraft was writing this story).

"Dave's Paladin had incurred the enmity of one of my sorceresses. She held him responsible, with some justification, for the death of her husband and swore unholy revenge. She sought out a particularly dangerous book of magic and successfully summoned the Mi-Go, the Fungi from Yuggoth, some of H.P. Lovecraft's more hideous interstellar demons. It was a moonlit night. The paladin and his friends were busily engaged in fighting a tribe of gremlins in another part of the forest. The awful Fungi swooped down on the unsuspecting knight, snatched him into the air, and vanished into the night sky before his companions had time to react.

The paladin came to in a bare stone cell. A tiny window showed him a black starlit cyclopean city. His weapons and armor had been removed. Yuggoth is modeled on the planet Pluto in the outermost reaches of our solar system. The poor paladin tried forcing his way out of his prison and tried several spells, without result. The window showed his cell to be thousands of feet up the sheer side of a black stone building. The door opened and three of the Mi-Go entered. Although Dave has never read Lovecraft, he knew he was in big trouble, confronting a fate that is really worse than death"

-J. Eric Holmes, Confessions of a Dungeon Master (1980, Psychology Today)

Find out what happened to Dave's paladin in the full "Confessions" article, which will appear in the forthcoming Holmes collection Tales of Peril. 

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And "Cthulhu" has entered the list of names proposed for surface features on Yuggoth.