CthulhuTech Stargate

[Prince Charon]

(The movie didn't happen, Ra is still out there.)

In 2085, in a warehouse belonging to the NEG (or the Ashcroft Foundation, whichever is more likely to set up an SGC, rather than bury the 'Gate), a large crate begins to rumble, ominously, in a manner which leads the justifiably paranoid guards to call for backup. Shortly thereafter, a 'Ka-Woosh' sound is heard, and the face of the box is mostly disintegrated, leaving an opening through which several humanoids in red armour, with horned helms, step. Thus begins the first contact between Earth and Sokar in millenia. He will never know that its all Nyarlathotep's fault.

So, what effect do CthulhuTech humans have on the galaxy at large, and what effect does the tech they gain have on the war with the Mi-Go, and the other enemies of humanity?

If this gets written, would you be likely to read it?

EDIT: There's another version of this thread, on Spacebattles.

 

[grant]

A. Yes I would read it, CthulhuTech would merge well with Stargate IMO.

B. If humans have access to the advanced tech that even the Mi-go didn't have in CthulhuTech (forget it's name now) then they would be on a very different setting with the Goa'uld. Instead of a single lowly planet up against a galaxy of superpowers they would be probably the equivalent of Apophis (this is assuming that humans have been united by this point). In contrast, I can't see the tech they could acquire from the Asgard, Tok'ra, and Goa'uld to be of much use against the Mi-go. Maybe the interstellar technology, but in I'm assuming that the Stargates would be the greatest advantage of all as they allow for non-Earth system resources and allies without the dangers of an enemy that already has an advanced fleet to use. Of course if the Mi-go get their hands of them and start experimenting with the 'gates you have a new problem.

C. Even though they don't show up often I'd say the Deep Ones should play just as large a role. They are actively searching for Cthulhu, and if he ever showed up it's game over for every other faction.

 

[Carandol]

You also need to think about how the mythos fits in with stargate galactic history. The Mi-go, the Elder Things, and Cthulhu's race all originate outside the solar system.

Only the Mi-go are currently active, but the others will have played a role in the deep past of the galaxy, long before the Asgard developed civilisation, or even language, and while they are gone, they are not truly dead. Evidence of their presence will be scattered across the stars, not just confined to earth. Indeed, there may have been some mythos-type races that never reached Earth. Cthulhu may not be unique either - he's the most powerful fo his race on earth, by a large margin, but there may have be a handful of others who could rival him in mind-shattering power, now sleeping beneath the oceans of distant worlds.

Thus, none of the stargate aliens should be completely naive about mythos elements. Odds are, for example, that at least one Go'uld has stumbled on a city of the Elder Things. They may have ransacked it for useful technologies, ot they may have got eaten by shoggoths, but there will be records.

They may well know only enough to be scared, both by the amount of mythos stuff on earth, and by the human use of similar technologies, but they shouldn't be completely in the dark.

Meshing the two backstories together this way, not just the current day bits, helps make the fusion convincing.

 

[SotF]

There was a fan made sourcebook a while back that used a SG-1 inspired CoC Delta Green campaign with bits from the Ash Williams stuff thrown in. Mainly utilizing Necronomicon Passages to transport teams through time and space in order to explore.

Then if you want to look it up, there is the Basement campaign setting on RPG.net which takes a lot of the elements and the DnD dungeon crawl idea and creates a glorious setting

 

[Oni_kawaii]

I wonder how the Ancients and the Ori are dealing with all of this.

It also gives a frightning new twist for the wraith,
and what Anubis did that was so horrific that the system lords tried to kill him so long ago.

 

[grant]

The Wraith seem to be your basic cosmic evil race by Lovecraft standards. As for Anubis, maybe he broke a Goa'uld taboo by trying to access Nyarlathotep or a Great Old One for help and got caught.
It might be best to either leave the Ascended out of it or make them impotent compared to the Outer Gods. They're a bit too good for Cthulhuverse.

 

[Oni_kawaii]

It might be best to either leave the Ascended out of it or make them impotent compared to the Outer Gods.á They're a bit too good for Cthulhuverse.

The Ancients seem content to stand aside and let things be, unable or unwilling to get involved.
The Ori are busy playing god in their own galaxy ignorant of the events taking place in the milky way.

The Asgard are busy fighting their war against the replicators.
The Nox are hidden away doing whatever it is the Nox do.
As for the Furlings, no one wants talk or even think about what happend to them.

The merry little song of the Gou'ald, Tokra and Jaffa will soon have a new beat as the Tau'ri step through the Stargate.

Hidden in the dark places on a thousand worlds
and in the black void between galaxies beings old beyond imagination begin to stir.

The Universe will never be the same again.

 

[Carandol]

The Asgard are sitting on fragmentary archives recovered from a myriad dead worlds, the lost knowledge of the Elder Things and other stranger races. Even incomplete, those archives are rich in apocalyptic potential. Using information gleaned from one dead race to fill in the gaps left in the archives of another, the Asgard could master the secrets of arcanotech, and sweep the replicators from the galaxy, but they dare not walk that tainted path, for fear of what they might become.

The starspawn were not always abominations. Once, billions of years past, they were a mortal race like any other, but they reshaped themselves with forbidden technologies older than time, becoming creatures more terrible than nightmare, and Nyarlothotep smiled. No sane Asgard wants to walk that path to its end, better to die than to become another Cthulhu, and they know full well that if they should start down that path, there will be no going back.

Still, the Asgard are losing their war. When the Replicators finally overrun them, and suck dry their databanks, they will not scruple to use arcanotech, for their cold logic allows no fear. What horrors might follow, the Asgard dare not guess. Destroying the dark archives is not an options - like all Asgard archiuves, they would be restored from backups by security precautions devised in happier times, when the possibility of them falling into enemy hands was unthinkable, and those precautions can't be disabled without destroying the archives, which would cripple the Asgard - so now the radicals among them are beginning to whisper of a darker option.

Why not use the archives themselves? If they don't, the replicators surely will, and if they are very careful, perhaps they can avoid becoming abominations. Better a slim chance than certain defeat, such is the poison Nyarlothotep whispers into willing ears.

For now, everyone is ignoring the Asgard, locked in their death-struggle, but when their final hour comes, and the dark archives are unlocked, by one side or another, they will be left wishing they had helped the Asgard with all their might.

Nor are the Asgard the only race on the brink of the abyss. Every major galactic power is similarly poised on the edge of horror, and even if they should all manage to resist their individual temptations, the elder powers are waking, their time come again.

It is, of course, no coincidence that Earth should enter the galactic scene when the doomsday clock stand at one second to midnight. It's just another pawn on the board, in Nyarlothotep and Yog-Soggoth''s friendly little game. -
and before anyone comments that pawns can become Queens, what do you think happened to Cthulhu?

 

[Prince Charon]

:jawdrop: :hail: Carandol. Very nice. Of course, given the condition that the Asgard were in during the series, Loki might have already started using the Dark Archives.

I wonder, how would the NEG react to the ATA gene? Would those who possess it be considered non-human, or just people with an interesting and useful genetic quirk. For purposes of this thread, let's say that the ATA gene appears as frequently in the Nazzadi as in the Earth-humans.

On another note, I'm thinking that the Mi-Go don't generally compete with the Goa'uld for worlds, as I seem to recall that they didn't invade Earth until the Earthers had been delving to deep for to long into Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. Thus, they and the Goa'uld rarely encounter each other. The Mi-Go might not even have FTL, if the game doesn't say.

 

[grant]

NEG would see it as probably another possible tool. If they don't mind the possibility that their mecha drive the pilots crazy they probably wouldn't care too much about this.

For the Mi-go, prior to discovery of the supertech (I think its called Aeon or something) they didn't really care what humans did as long as it didn't get in their way. The change was when humans discovered something that the Mi-go didn't find first.
They probably do know of the Goa'uld from the time when the snakes ruled Earth, but if they haven't left the solar system since then both sides may consider the other to be a distant memory.

 

[randombugger]

Something to consider. In Lovecraft's works the Great Old Ones are to awaken "when the stars are right". We on Earth are only ONE planet. Whose to say the stars are not right elsewhere.

 

[Kibbles]

Something to consider. In Lovecraft's works the Great Old Ones are to awaken "when the stars are right". We on Earth are only ONE planet. Whose to say the stars are not right elsewhere.

This is Stargate we're talking about. They can make the stars not right. Find the right stars and toss a stargate into them.

Then again, maybe destroying stars is one of the conditions for the stars actually being right? :wacko:

 

[Carandol]

Randombugger, I fear you are thinking on too small a scale.

The most obvious interpretation of 'when the stars are right' is a reference to precession, and other orbital phenomena - waiting until Algol rises over Ry'leh at midnight on the winter solstice - but that gives far too small a timescale, a few hundred thousand years at most. Cthulhu has been sleeping far longer than that.

More likely, it's a reference to the galactic year, the time taken for a full orbit of the galaxy, roughly 250 million years, the right kind of timescale. There's a bit of fudge room there, since the galaxy doesn't rotate rigidly, which is useful, but that puts the last time the stars were right conveniently close to the Great Dying, the end-Permian extinction, an order of magnitude worse than what killed off the dinosaurs. The current thinking is that it due to volcanoes covering half a continent in lava, setting the nascent coal beds on fire in the process, but that might have been collateral damage from a failed attack on Cthulhu - reducing half a continent to mile-deep molten slag is the kind of thing that happens when the big boys fight.

Anyway, if that's the right time scale, the key stars will be scattered across the galaxy, lost in a sea of 100 billion others, and the only clues to their identity will be buried deep in the ruins of long dead civilisations, some of them prowled by beasts that cannot die. The Asgard might have a clue, if they dare examines their dark archives, but SG-1 wouldn't know where to begin - unless, of course, one of the outer gods were to leave them a trail of breadcrumbs, but following their lures is seldom a good idea.

Before blowing the key stars up, consider this: what if they are keeping the great old ones at bay. They might be the markers in some grand spell, a ward against abominations covering the entire galaxy. Currently, it fails completely for a million years every quarter-billion, and suffers minor local lapses more often, thanks to some ancient sabotage, but if people start blowing the key stars up, it will fail completely, and Cthulhu willl never be bound in sleep again.

Perhaps it would be best to make sure you've got the right interpretation, before blowing any stars up.

 

[Lord Raa]

If the writer of this story was to include sufficient backstory for those who aren't familiar with the Cthulutech setting to understand what's going on, there is a good chance that I would enjoy it.


Of course, the characters who go through the gate would need to be interesting and/or entertaining, but that's a given, isn't it?

 

[Oni_kawaii]

Anyway, if that's the right time scale, the key stars will be scattered across the galaxy, lost in a sea of 100 billion others, and the only clues to their identity will be buried deep in the ruins of long dead civilisations, some of them prowled by beasts that cannot die. The Asgard might have a clue, if they dare examines their dark archives, but SG-1 wouldn't know where to begin - unless, of course, one of the outer gods were to leave them a trail of breadcrumbs, but following their lures is seldom a good idea.

SG-1 does get the information on which stars are part of the equation.
O'neil had the info dumped into his head with the rest of the collective knowledge of the Ancients.

Although the Asgard removed the repository from Jacks mind.
Other powers ensure that fragments of dark knowledge remain, subconsciously guiding him.

 

[Carandol]

But the so-called Ancients aren't. They rose and fell within the last ten million years. The Elder Things built their first cities billions of years ago, a time abyss that reveals how pathetically feeble the Ancients' claim to truly is, and yet they were not the first to travel between the stars.

The ancients, fortunate enough to live in an era when the stars were wrong, had no first hand experience with mythos horrors, not in this galaxy at least - though nameless terrors they found beyond the confines of the Milky Way we can only guess. At most, they had an equivalent of the Asgard's dark archives, but that is not enough to find the key stars.

For a start, having everything Ancients knew about the elder horrors crammed into your head has to be grounds for major sanity loss - it's going to be at least as much forbidden lore as in every earthly mythos text put together, probably far far more, and with moving pictures too. If Earth's best find a way to survive that, and search this treasure trove at will, they'll have another problem.

Most of the Ancient's knowledge will be from fragmentary records surviving from when last the stars were right, a quarter-billion years ago. The grand cycle is far older than that, perhaps as old as the galaxy itself. While the ancient knowledge may contain secrets of arcanotech potent enough to reshape a galaxy like potter's clay or to transform humanity into a godling race, all our teeming billions become as strong as Cthulhu, and as vile, that knowledge is too young to hold more than rumours about the key stars. It would be a good starting point, but no more.

Incidentally, one Galactic Year ago, we had the Great Dying, but there was a major cataclysm in our solar system two galactic years ago too, the resurfacing of Venus, when the planet's entire crust was melted. In a mythos universe, this could well be the result of enemy action, the last-but-one time the stars where right. Back then, the planet was earth-like, protected from the slowly warming sun by its inhabitants, but they tampered with forces beyond their control. In their final battle against the horors they had unleashed, the entire surface of the planet was melted, which decomposed all the carbonate rocks and flooded the atmosphere with CO2, transforming the planet into the hell-hole it is today.


I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the Great Dying and Venus's resurfacing are spaced roughly a Galactic Year apart, but it's a useful coincidence if you want to fill the deep past with horror.

 

[grant]

Then there's the matter of RepliCarter. Someone as arrogant as her wouldn't hesitate for a nanosecond to use the mythos, which would make her inevitable psychotic breakdown that much more amusing. However I'd say that it would be a bad idea for O'Neill to have access to Mythos knowledge from the Ancient knowledge. The human child of Apophis could only handle the Goa'uld memories by locking them away, can you imagine what a cosmic scale device like Mythos knowledge could do to a human? Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy would be a vacation by comparison.

 

[Prince Charon]

OK, we need an SG1-equivalent.

A NEG SpecOps Soldier, an Occult Scholar (and/or Registered Sorcerer), an Arcanotech Engineer, and Ry'ac, who'd be about the age Teal'c was in SG1, as the ex-First Prime.

Since this is already an AU, we can justify Charlie O'Neill surviving and having children, so one of the team could be Charlie's grandchild - possibly the Scholar, for a bit of irony.

One of the important background characters could be the head psychotherapist, who will have to be vastly more competent than the twit they had in canon, who's name I can't recall.

EDIT: @Lord Raa: You're probably right. Just having read some Lovecraft books likely wouldn't be enough. Have you tried reading EarthScorpion's Aeon Natum Engel, and if so, do you think that level of background detail is sufficient, or should this fic have more?

 

[grant]

One of the important background characters could be the head psychotherapist, who will have to be vastly more competent than the twit they had in canon, who's name I can't recall.

They had a therapist? One thing I constantly criticized about the series was the lack of psychiatric treatment for people going through horrific circumstances (to say nothing of O'Neill's uncommented ability to go through days of torture and get over it by the next episode).

As for background, wiki does have some details though not all. Whoever's writing this could put in a prelude chapter using some of that and and Stargateverse to serve as a timeline.

 

[Prince Charon]

One of the important background characters could be the head psychotherapist, who will have to be vastly more competent than the twit they had in canon, who's name I can't recall.

They had a therapist? One thing I constantly criticized about the series was the lack of psychiatric treatment for people going through horrific circumstances (to say nothing of O'Neill's uncommented ability to go through days of torture and get over it by the next episode).

IIRC, he appeared in at least one episode, and badly misdiagnosed Dr. Jackson, making a bad situation worse.

As for background, wiki does have some details though not all. Whoever's writing this could put in a prelude chapter using some of that and and Stargateverse to serve as a timeline.

That sounds good. Would have to be a fairly catchy prelude, of course, but that's true for most fiction.

 

[grant]

I remember him now, as far as I can tell he was only brought into episodes so he could misdiagnose people or fail to break alien brain-washing and show how the crazier suggestion was actually the correct one.

 

[Prince Charon]

Remember the Ancient Gene Therapy from Atlantis? I think the NEG is ruthless enough to use that, to get the full archive out of the Ancient head-sucky teaching device, no matter how many volunteers it would cost them. In the situation they're in, there would be enough volunteers.

 

[grant]

The NEG might just hook up a constant stream of people to the device and interpret their psychotic babbling for clues.

Since I'm assuming that the characters will mostly OCs how about a really international outfit. This is supposed to be a post-nation state world. Admittedly you generally see soldiers sign up and serve with people from their homes, but an elite group for offworld reconnaissance would probably be taking the best from every different ethnic/racial/religious group available. You wouldn't have to worry about getting details right, this is set at the end of the 21st century and who's to say what old customs have disappeared and what new ones might come up?

Lastly on the Asgard, considering the timeline it might be best to either write them off or have them already struggling to handle the effects of the Mythos on their species. By the end of SG1 they had decided that it would be impossible to save themselves and they chose suicide over a long descent into extinction. In Cthulhuverse I would either see them as another dead civilization for humans to discover and search for their technology, or as a human-like race slightly more advanced in Mythos studies but being ravaged by it.

 

[WarmasterCain55]

If they haven't been destroyed by the replicators first.

 

[Oni_kawaii]

If they haven't been destroyed by the replicators first.

Or the Asgard used the forbidden knowledge and their minds are now joined with the replicators.