The internet is a strange place, inadvertently designed to bring out the best and worst in people. People can be whoever or whatever they want to be. For predators and malignant narcissists and who live in their own delusions to begin with, it's like a hunting ground. They can create whatever persona they wish, fill their victims' heads with lies and half-truths that paint them out to be someone they are not, and by the time their victim actually meets them, it's too late - they've already created an image in their mind of this perfect person the narcissist has convinced them they are, and it usually takes time before the curtain comes down, the lies fall apart, and the mask breaks away.
I'm no saint, and I've learned my own tough lessons from the internet. I grew up under not-so-great circumstances, only getting 5 years of education before I turned 18 and was largely raised by a computer screen. Along the way, I catfished a woman in her mid-20's when I was 14-16 years old. It wasn't intentional at first, I told everyone that I was in my mid-20's and I worked as a bouncer at a bar in NYC. I never meant any harm, I was just raised by a computer and spent all my time alone playing MMOs and learned quickly that if I told people how old I was, they'd stop playing with me. So a bouncer seemed like a job I could bullshit about easily enough, and I was a big dude at 6'1 260lbs so I figured I could maybe pass it off as legit if it ever got hectic.
I started playing with this woman in her 20's and her husband frequently. We became friends fast, and soon we were virtually inseparable on the game. Her marriage ended up not working out, and after they separated she told me she had feelings for me. I should've admitted I wasn't who I said I was then, but I was young and dumb and she was the only real friend I had, so I kept up the ruse. Eventually I did come clean, and she broke it off with me not long after. We stayed friends, albeit with my heart hurting pretty bad, for a few months afterwards - until she met Jack.
When she first told me about Jack, he sounded like a great catch. He had his own IT business in Canada, was a couple years older but not by much, and she was infatuated with him. Obviously I was crushed and didn't handle it well, being a practically feral teenager at the time, so not long after they started getting serious she ghosted me altogether. I was around 17 at the time, and shit started going off the rails for me. After I got out of juvie, I started drinking heavily on a near-daily basis and selling and doing drugs. This led to a lot of pathetic, inebriated, desperate attempts to contact her and apologize for how I acted.
After months of being ignored, eventually grief and regret turned to anger, and finally acceptance. When the pain passed and I came to my senses a bit, I had an epiphany and realized that if I loved her as much as I thought I did, the best thing for both of us would be to let her go. I was a high school dropout with no job, selling drugs to get by. She had 2 kids, and what kind of life could I provide for them? She made the right choice, my age and the fact I made a grown woman fall in love with a teenager not withstanding, and as bad as it hurt I realized it was selfish of me not to accept the way things were and leave her alone, so I did.
10 years or so later, I had gotten my shit together. Worked my way up from cleaning dead shit out of swimming pools, to an entry level position at an environmental consulting firm, to a Project Manager at one of the largest firms in the field in the DC area. I'd met someone, got her pregnant, and for some reason I felt a pull to contact her again. Not to rekindle an old flame, but because she had been a tremendously positive influence on my life in a time where I had few. She was the first good thing I had in my life at a time when I was sleeping on old blankets on a hard floor in an abusive home, and what I'd held onto from our time together wasn't our romantic relationship, it was the best friend I'd ever had. And something made me want to tell her that all that work she put into getting my head right wasn't in vain, and I'd finally made it out of the gutter.
So I messaged her on Facebook, and to my surprise she actually responded. We started talking again, and soon it was back to every day. When my baby mama got back on drugs and turned abusive and was putting my daughter's life in jeopardy on a near-daily basis, she was the one who convinced me I could fight for custody - that I had to fight for custody. So I did, and I won, and I've had full custody of of my daughter since she was 6 months old and for the 10 years since.
But eventually we parted ways again. I'd started seeing someone, and part of me knew I couldn't commit to another woman while I was still carrying on with her. Our relationship had started turning romantic again, and she had dropped some hints about old Jack that would come to the forefront later, but she wasn't ready to leave him and I didn't want to be that guy, so I sent her a message explaining why we had to stop talking, apologized, and ghosted her.
7 more years went by after that night. The relationship I abandoned her for soured quickly when I found out that chick was a carbon copy of my baby mama, and I quit dating to focus on my career and raising my daughter. But on the long, 2+ hour commutes each way from work, I often found myself stuck pondering the "what ifs". What if I hadn't ghosted her? What if our age gap wasn't there, and we'd never had to split up to begin with? I knew in my soul I was never going to find someone like her again, but I made peace with it. I imagined her happy life, her kids with Jack, and convinced myself I made the right choice.
Then COVID hit, and near the start of it, I stumbled on a post on reddit about this dude who sent his high school sweetheart a message many years later apologizing for how he treated her and telling her how her presence impacted him, and I thought to myself, "Hey, I did that!". So I started writing a reply, and for the first time told the story of this girl and I. I'd never told a soul about what happened with us, not even my family or closest friends. Maybe it was the stigma of having an online relationship back in those days that carried over, or maybe it was just too personal to share with my friends or family. It got long, so eventually I just decided to start a new thread. When I was done, it was so long I figured no one would ever read it, but I hit submit anyway and put my phone down and got back to work.
Well, I was wrong. People did read it - a lot of people. Soon my phone started blowing up. Thousands of comments, hundreds of DMs, people offering me book deals and asking if they could have the rights for a screenplay or have me on their podcasts. It was fucking surreal, and being generally a private person who tries to fly under the rader, it got overwhelming fast. Eventually I reached out to her again on Facebook, warned her about what happened, and apologized for putting her business out there.
She didn't respond for a couple weeks, and when she did we started talking again almost immediately. And then in mid-April 2020, she told me that she needed to talk to me. She spilled everything, and told me exactly who Jack was. How he would hack into her devices to spy on her, threaten to kill her and her partner if she ever left him, say vile things to her and her daughters, calling the young girls cunts and bitches. How he alienated all her friends and family, and kept them all isolated in the house her parents bought them that he would rarely leave.
And I felt deceived too. All those years I'd convinced myself that she was happy, that she got together with Jack and was living the life she deserved. In reality, Jack intentionally got her pregnant not long after he flew out to her state the first time. He quickly moved into her house, and refused to work or provide not only for her kids or their kids, but for the other 3 children he abandoned in Australia and Canada who he had no relationship with, with 3 different women he victimized in the same manner. When she was 8 months pregnant with their first kid, she was working nights doing hospice care while he sat on his ass playing videogames all night and talking to his ex. In 17 years, this fucking loser with 7 kids by 4 women worked a grand total of 5 weeks, quit his job, claimed he got PTSD from the experience, and somehow manipulated his way into getting SSDI for it. They survived off SSDI and her parents' charity for years.
But Jack was reading all of this, because like I mentioned earlier, he was hacking her devices and watching us talk remotely. Jack knew the jig was up, and slowly started to unravel. She told him she wanted a divorce, and that she was not going to sever her friendship with me again. And he pretended to take that well, going as far as to try to befriend and manipulate me. He tried every trick to keep her he'd done for years - telling her he was going to get help and would change first, then when that failed he made suicide threats and somehow got his therapist to call her and tell her as long as she didn't leave him he wouldn't kill himself, and then he tried to intimidate her. Eventually he went off the rails completely and sexually assaulted her when he thought she was sleeping.
She called me from her parents' house crying the night it happened, and I convinced her to file a police report. She did, and a couple weeks later Jack got removed from the home, served with a protective order, and charged for sexual abuse. This of course did nothing to stop Jack - he broke into their house a couple days later when she and the kids were out to upload a folder of revenge porn to his Google Drive under the guise of wanting to drop off a cake for her birthday.
Then the stalking started. Jack would relentlessly message her all day and night on Facebook, switching between rage, trying to garner sympathy, convince her he would change, and threatening self-harm. We later found out via a cyber forensics report that he was hacking into the laptop she had taken with her while she hid at her parents' and had been so bold as to steal her Victim Impact Statement and send it to all his World of Warcraft buddies as a joke.
And he didn't just stalk her, he came for me too. Constant unauthorized attempts to access my accounts for everything from Windows to my bank, spam calls and emails - shit, the wormy little fuck even got his friends to stalk my social media and pretend to be strangers to gaslight me. I ignored all of it, and he got desperate enough to send me a lovely message attempting to extort and blackmail she and I, claiming he had "all my posts" but wouldn't do anything with them if I called him. The tipping point for me is when he subscribed to my small YouTube channel - which had nothing on it but 3 videos of my daughter. That veiled threat wasn't lost on me.
But Jack fucked up. I don't know if he thought his insane nonsense would scare me off, or if in his delusions he really thought he was the bad mother fucker he convinced himself he was, but Jack didn't know jack about me. I'm a crazy fuck too, and while he was sitting on his fat ass playing World of Warcraft all day every day for the past couple decades, I was selling drugs and hanging with some of the grimiest mother fuckers Baltimore had to offer. I've seen and experienced a lot of real violence outside a computer monitor, and the prospect of a violent resolution to this saga didn't phase me a whole lot. I'd spent years trying to be a better person and avoid conflict, but I sure as shit wasn't afraid of it either. Leading up to this point, I was already trying to calm myself down and talk myself off the ledge and not pack my guns and drive out there to keep watch until the police did their thing and put him away, which took a lot longer than it should have - this fucking guy violated his protective order 80 times in just a couple weeks.
So I called him, and he spent the next 26 minutes crying over the phone like a drunk little bitch, while I tried my best to be kind and to talk him off the ledge. And yes, I did record it, and yes it is hysterical listening to it now in hindsight, and yes I still have the recording. Anyway, I told him he was scaring the shit out of her and the kids, and he promised to leave us alone and I told him if he could chill the fuck out I would try to talk her into giving him more access to the kids. The next day, she got an email from her first ex-husband - Jack had reached out to him with a link to my reddit post trying to get help from him to come after me, which he promptly shut down and sent to her.
The next few weeks were terrifying as Jack descended further into madness and became more scared and desperate. He knew she was gone and not coming back, and he was facing real charges and real jail time, and while Jack is a fucking moron in a lot of ways, I'm sure he knew a fat, greasy computer nerd with a sex offense conviction wasn't going to have a good time in County. Jack was a murder-suicide waiting to happen, the police were doing nothing to stop his stalking, and I felt powerless to help her. Eventually after he sent her $50 over PayPal at 4:00am with what appeared to be a suicide note, I had enough. I called the DA's office, asked them why the fuck this was being allowed to happen, and promised them I'd been taking meticulous notes and if anything happened to her I would be taking it straight to the media. The DA told me if I was going to make threats the conversation was over, but sure enough he was finally arrested not long after.
Ironically we had remained platonic friends through most of this, but the shared experience of dealing with this psycho brought us closer together and things quickly changed. We knew he wasn't going to stop when he got out of jail, I felt responsible for her safety after my stupid reddit post started this chain of events that led to Jack's unraveling, and with the world seemingly coming apart during COVID, decided if we were ever going to meet it felt like it was now or never. So I booked a plane ticket across the country, spent a week with her and her family, and a few days after I came home she flew out to visit me and meet my family.
We went into it with no expectations. I fully accepted we might not click and our relationship would go back to being platonic. For my part, I just wanted the closure of finally meeting this person who had such a profound impact on my life before COVID mutated or something and killed us all.
But we did click, and the next two weeks were life-changing. I met and cooked for her entire extended family the day after I arrived, and it went well. While I was there I got her mom's email address, and after I went home I had an idea. I knew her parents had met in DC, so I emailed her mom and asked her for a list of places that were special to her, and she told me about the church her parents had met in. I asked her to keep our conversation secret so it would be a surprise, and she did.
So when she comes out to the east coast, I take her on a tour through DC and park the car a few blocks down the street from the church. As we're walking by, she notices the church and comments on how beautiful it is.
I keep it cool and respond, "Yeah, that's a pretty important place.".
She looks at me and says, "Oh? Why's that?".
"That's where your parents met.".
She audibly gasps, giddily bounces a bit, starts to cry, and we pulled down our masks (fuckin covid) and kiss. Her reaction is easily one of the greatest memories in my life. What I didn't know at the time, was that her parents had told her about that church since she and her siblings were kids. When the church changed denominations, the church took the angel statue off the top and brought it back to her home state, and her parents had taken them to see it a few times throughout her childhood.
Anyway, getting sidetracked here, the sappy love story stuff is a different story altogether.
A month after we met for the first time, I had quit my job, sold everything I couldn't fit in my sedan, and she flew back out and drove across the country with my daughter and I.
Sounds crazy as hell, and it was, but it worked out better than it should have. I got a good job making more than I did back home right away, her kids loved me, and my daughter loved her and adjusted to her new home fast. And by the time Jack got out of jail for felony cyberstalking, sexual abuse, and Intimidation of a Witness in a Domestic Violence case, we had cameras all over the house, and I had taught my fiancee how to shoot - which she quickly became better than me at.
But Jack's time in jail didn't slow him down, and the 2-10 year suspended sentence didn't deter him at all. As a matter of fact, on his first day out one of the first things he did was start trying to hack her accounts again. He managed to con an elderly couple he knew threw World of Warcraft from a different state into letting him live with them, and from there he spent a lot of time and energy stalking us and hacking our devices to the best of his ability. He also convinced these poor, very stupid elderly people from his videogame to bankroll a lengthy, expensive divorce. Somehow a man who hadn't worked in almost 20 years managed to run us into over $50,000 in legal fees in two years. How a marriage with zero assets turned into a two year battle when both parties were officially in poverty before the divorce, or how the family courts never saw through the bullshit is beyond me.
To Jack's credit, he did a pretty good job remaining a thorn in our side. Largely due to the complete and utter ineptitude and indifference of the police and District Attorney who could and should have put a stop to his bullshit at any point in that time. Old Jack got hit with a permanent criminal stalking injunction and a 10-year protective order along with his probation, and no amount of effort on our part would get the police, DA, or probation to put a stop to it, despite mountains of evidence.
He successfully managed to draw the divorce out right up to the wedding we planned a year and a half prior, with his attorney putting in motion after motion to delay the process. With all our family and friends coming from all over the country and as far away as Japan, we accepted our wedding would just be a celebration and not an official wedding. Until the night before the wedding, she got a call from her attorney - he had made a call to the clerk's office at the court and got her to move the paperwork to finalize the divorce to the top of the pile, and she was officially divorced. Our wedding would be a real wedding after all, and despite Jack's best efforts, he lost again. We had the wedding on a remote ranch that we rented for a week, and foolishly decided to cater and decorate ourselves, which would have been a colossal undertaking without the extra 4 hours to drive into town and get our marriage certificate at the courthouse. But we pulled it off and it was everything we could have hoped for and then some, and we were officially married.
Jack of course didn't stop after the divorce was finalized. The list of shit he tried to do to us before and after that is too long to spell out in an already too long post, but here are some choice bits:
He wrote a demented letter to the oldest of his kids with her who severed her relationship with him, calling my wife and her mother "vipers and cowards" and promising we would "answer for what we've done sooner or later".
He continuously hacked our computers, miscellaneous accounts tied to our emails, and any other devices he could get into - dropping in remotely via Amazon Alexa, phones, etc.
He set up bots to send us thousands of spam emails, sign us up for dozens of international newsletters all at once, and requests for consultations for things like solar panel installations.
He told the kids vile lies about my wife and I, although the most egregious was when he used a court-ordered therapy appointment with his second oldest daughter to accuse me of distributing child porn, told the therapist I am an "evil man", and told him I wasn't safe to be around his daughters. This led to her being forensically interviewed by the police, where she spelled out what happened, but of course they did nothing.
He gave the two youngest children cell phones to sneak into our house, with Google accounts activated and location tracking turned on.
He sent packages to our house 5 times in the space of a few months, one of which was addressed to himself and contained nothing but a bag of Stevia and a pack of gum. These packages generally came to our door the day before his scheduled visitation with the kids.
During this time my bank account was hacked four times in the span of just a few months with nearly identical fraudulent charges. In each of these instances, I had completely changed my bank account information.
He filed false reports with CPS twice, alleging we were beating the children, locking them in the closet, and not feeding or bathing them. This led to a CPS agent coming to our house to investigate.
We brought all this to the police over and over as it happened, and they did nothing. The DA running the case wasted 5 months subpoenaing a fake email address that we told them when we reported it was fake and spoofed. After finding out about that, we went to the DA's office to find out what the fuck was going on. A Victim's Advocate met with us, and was horrified about how the case was handled, looked up the prosecutor assigned to the case, rolled her eyes and said "Oh...it's Stephanie", confirming what we already knew - this prosecutor was completely incompetent, an elect3d politician moonlighting as a prosecutor. She called us the next day to tell us the actual DA called a meeting and a warrant was put out for Jack's arrest. For some inexplicable reason, they pulled the warrant back, and the advocate told us it was because the DA was pursuing more serious charges.
Then, they stonewalled us. The Victim's Advocate we had met with that actually tried to help us was moved off our case, and the new one assigned refused to talk to us or return our calls. The few exchanges we had with her, she made it abundantly clear she had the DA Office's interests in mind and not ours. We decided to just stay quiet and let the process play out and hope for the best, up until we received an email on Friday night before Election Day from the Detective telling us Stephanie had closed the case. I assume she didn't want her incompetence coming to light, and didn't want to shut the case down before Election Day knowing we would be on the warpath.
Eventually, Jack caught wind that he was officially under criminal investigation, but clearly had no idea they were never going to press charges. He got quiet for a bit, until he was ultimately let off probation early. We still get the occasional reminder he's out there watching, but his fear of going back to jail and the belief it might happen cowed him a bit. So instead he harasses us through the family courts, filing constant bullshit motions with no evidence to support them, and for some reason the courts let it continue. Somehow a man who makes ~$800 from SSDI and is only paying $30 a month total to support his 3 kids with my wife is able to fund tens of thousands of dollars worth of legal proceedings every year, and no one in the family courts has ever stopped to ask how he is paying for it or why all this money isn't being spent on supporting these children.
But despite Jack's best efforts, his bullshit hasn't worked. My wife and I have been together for four years soon, and married for two. His kids call me dad and hate his guts, only seeing him because the courts force them to. I continue to advance in my career, landing two major promotions in the past 2 years and now running a division in one of the largest companies in my field in this part of the country. I just enrolled in college to go back to school and get a degree in family law with a focus on domestic violence. The most frustrating part of the whole experience with ol' Jack was having no one to turn to when all the institutions who were supposed to keep this from happening ignored us, and even though I'll be well into my mid 40's before I accomplish my new goals, I plan to advocate for domestic violence victims and do everything I can to lobby for change to these laws to keep as many people as I can from going through what my wife and I did. I learned that the only way to beat these people at their game is to play on the same field right along with them, and that's what I intend to do.
My wife went back to work too once she healed from some of the trauma, making $30 an hour as a personal assistant for a fella who's had two movies made about his life. Our kids struggled a bit with school and dealing with all their biological parents' issues, but they quickly turned it around and have been excelling. We're all happy, healthy, and doing better now than ever.
As for Jack? Well, he's pushing 50 and still spending his days alone, playing World of Warcraft and jerking off in this old couple's basement. Nothing has changed there, and now he's too fat, old, and visibly an enormous fucking loser to victimize women in the same way he did in his youth. I have no doubts he'll find another victim eventually, probably when these old weirdos bankrolling his life now finally wise up, but one thing Jack forgets is that karma is a mother fucker, and I have a giant database of evidence that I can and will send out to whoever I please to help pull that mask down and keep him from doing this to someone else. Nothing is more appealing to a potential love interest than hearing their man cry like a drunk bitch for 26 minutes to the man he claims stole his wife, while simultaneously admitting to sexually assaulting said wife.
As wonderful as it would have been for Jack to go to prison where he can't hurt anyone again, there is some catharsis knowing Jack will forever be in a prison of his own making. His children want nothing to do with him, and he'll never see them graduate or walk them down the aisle. Jack will die miserable and alone, and in his narcissistic delusion will still be blaming everyone else for the colossal failure of his life, while continuing to fail to grasp the one thread that ties all his misery together - himself.
And since he somehow manages to find and stalk most of my social media, I'd wager Jack will end up reading this too. I hope he does in all honesty. And Jack, if you are reading this, I want you to know that you can kick, flail, manipulate and lie, cry and complain until you're red in the face. None of it matters. You don't matter. You'll leave this world alone, as sad and bitter as you are now, and the world will be a better place for it.

The article is intended primarily for Game Masters who play games in systems inspired by Lovecraft’s works, such as Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green. However, I hope that other fans of cosmic horror will also find something for themselves here. The interesting facts presented here may also be entertaining for people who do not know the work of The Loner of Providence, but some of the references may be unclear to them. The article contains several anecdotes – either from real history or from beliefs that exist in the real world, and suggestions on how they can be related to the Cthulhu mythology. So read about:

• Sea Peoples, bane of ancient civilizations,
• a forgotten Eldritch abomination from Greek mythology,
• Jan Twardowski, the first man on the Moon,
• mathematicians and physicists who wanted to know the structure of reality and lost their minds,
• one of the most mysterious characters from the Bible and a dark, occult ritual that underlies monotheism.

Invasion of the Sea Peoples
Ancient, super-advanced, fallen civilizations are one of the favorite motifs of fantasy. And truth be told, something similar happened in real history. Of course, in reality, the fallen civilizations did not have sci-fi supertechnology at their disposal, but their collapse still led to great destabilization. We are talking about the invasion of the so-called Sea Peoples, which took place at the turn of the 13th and 12th centuries BC. The Sea Peoples are mobile and warlike groups of people of unknown origin. They caused the collapse of several advanced cultures, including: Mycenaean and Hittite. Only the Egyptians managed to defeat them in a great battle. Well, the material for Lovecraftian inspiration is obvious. A mysterious army, coming out of nowhere, called the „Sea Peoples”, leading to the fall of the most powerful human civilizations at that time? Let us add that, according to some historians, the descendants of the Sea Peoples destroyed by the Egyptians were the Philistines. Yes, the same Philistines, one of whose main deities was the well-known Dagon to Lovecraftomaniacs… Deep Ones say hello. Let us also add that, according to Egyptian records, the tribes of the Sea Peoples had names such as Ekvesh, Teresh, Lucki, Sherden, Shekelesh, Tekel and Peleset. Sounds suitably dark, blasphemous and filthy? If we want to dig deeper, one of the pharaohs who ruled Egypt was Akhenaten – yes, that heretic who tried to replace the worship of traditional Egyptian gods with the religion of the Aten and who is very much liked by conspiracy theorists. Let’s add to the mix that Middle Eastern cultures had quite a negative attitude towards the sea as such. Babylonian Marduk had to defeat the giant monsters of Chaos – Apsu and Tiamat, personifications of fresh and salt waters, respectively. The Bible also contains traces of the myth about the fight between Yahweh and Leviathan, and the Book of Revelation, describing the new, ideal world, emphasizes that „I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.” Let’s assume that the players are researchers of an antiquity – historians, archaeologists, etc. They conduct research on the Sea Peoples. Of course, as common sense dictates, they assume that these were human warriors. However, as time goes on, more and more evidence appears that they were not completely human again, and the evidence of their monstrosity becomes increasingly difficult to put down to the demonization that Egyptian chroniclers used against their enemies… It becomes clear that an onslaught of inhuman and semi-human monsters came from the sea. , trying to conquer the world of that time. Moreover, after their defeat at the hands of the Egyptians, this species did not become extinct, but instead of open conquest it switched to cautious infiltration. Perhaps the Deep Ones have spies in academia who are tasked with eliminating historians who find the trail of truth…
Oh, one more interesting fact connecting the history of the Sea Peoples with Lovecraft. Well, as we know, HPL liked to use the term „Cyclopean” for huge, monumental buildings. At least he didn’t come up with it himself. Well, when the later (and at first more primitive) inhabitants, the Dorians, saw the ruins of destroyed castles left by the Mycenaean culture, they came to the conclusion that such huge buildings could not have been built by human hands, so they were probably the work of mythical giants – cyclopes.
Typhon – a classic but forgotten abomination
Modern works drawing on Greek mythology usually make Hades (completely senseless) or Kronos (a little more) the Big Bad, but they forget about Zeus’s greatest enemy – Typhon. After defeating the titans and then the gigants, the Olympian gods had to face the main boss on the way to dominating the world – Typhon. Here is an example of its description: It was larger than the largest mountains, its head touched the stars. When he stretched out his hands, one reached the eastern ends of the world and the other reached the western ends. Instead of fingers, he had a hundred dragon heads. From the waist down he had a tangle of vipers (yay, tentacles!) and wings at his shoulders. His eyes were shooting out flames. In other versions of the myth, Typhon was a flying, hundred-headed dragon. In any case – appearance and stature worthy of the Great Old One. Typhon attacked Olympus, and all the gods except Zeus fled in panic. The supreme god took up the fight… and lost it. Only in the second duel did he manage to defeat Typhon, but not kill him – he only imprisoned him, hitting him with Etna. In the sense of a mountain. A volcano – and volcanic activity is the result of Typhon’s anger, trying to break free. Typhon equaled the lord of heaven not only in strength, but in fertility. His wife was Echidna, about whom Hesiod wrote: „She also gave birth to another creature, invincible, huge, unlike neither men nor immortal gods, in a hollow cave – the divine violent Echidna, half a sharp-eyed young girl, with beautiful cheeks, half a huge snake, a great and powerful, spotted, cruel – in the depths of the holy land. This pair spawned many, if not most, of the monsters found in Greek mythology. Their offspring were very diverse and strange, as befits the spawn of enemies of the divine order, including: – Ladon, the hundred-headed dragon who never slept and guarded the apples that gave immortality, – Cerberus – we all know the dog guarding the gates of hell… but not all of us know that, according to some accounts, it had not three heads, but as many as 50, it was also covered with scales, and it had a snake by its tail… so what does this have to do with a dog? – Scylla – this lady inherited the most from the human, beautiful part of Echidna… at least initially, but eventually, as a result of various perturbations, she turned from a beautiful nymph to her siblings, becoming a six-headed sea beast, so hideous, according to Homer, that even the gods could not stand sight of her – she dwelt in a cave, from where she opened her mouth to devour the crews of ships, – Gorgons – I mean, those ladies with snake hair, not monstrous bulls. Medusa was one of them – the story that Athena turned her priestess into a monster as punishment for being raped by Poseidon is an invention of later poets, – Lernaean Hydra – a multi-headed monster with many reptilian or human heads. In place of each severed head, two others grew, and in addition, the main head was completely immortal – therefore, after chopping off the mortal heads, Heracles had to burn the stumps and bury the immortal, still hissing head underground. Hydra’s breath was poisonous. – various other creatures, such as the Sphinx, the dog Ortus, the Nemean Lion or the Chimera. Each of these descendants has the potential to be portrayed as an Eldritch abomination in its own right. To be precise – according to some accounts, the father of these creatures (and Echidna herself) was Typhon, but a monstrous, ancient (older than Poseidon) sea god, Phorcys. How to use Typhon? Well, Typhon clearly has the potential to be a Great Old One, imprisoned by… Nodens? Some other Elder God? Weak gods of humanity? Maybe his cult is trying to free him from Etna? What if he succeeds? What might distinguish Typhon from many other Great Old Ones? I would recommend focusing on his monster progenitor aspect – if he manages to reunite with Echidna, they will immediately start spawning various blasphemous beasts in series.
Jan Twardowski – the first man on the Moon
Jan (John) Twardowski, the hero of the legend, a Polish nobleman who allegedly sold his soul to the devil and became a sorcerer. Probably a historical figure, according to legend he lived in the 16th century and became famous for summoning the spirit of the deceased queen for King Sigismund Augustus. The ghost allegedly appeared in the mirror. This mirror is still kept in the church in Węgrów. According to legend, when the terms of the pact were fulfilled, devils came to kidnap Twardowski to hell. Interestingly, instead of taking the sorcerer’s soul after death, the most material demons appeared and grabbed Twardowski in order to kidnap him bodily, alive… and instead of heading towards the underground, which in legends is considered the traditional place of residence of demons and damned souls, they began to carry away up with him. At some point, Twardowski started singing religious songs, which caused the demons to escape, leaving him on the Moon, where he is said to have stayed ever since. Could the “demons” actually be extraterrestrials? Maybe mi-go? Maybe Twardowski was their agent and obtained secret knowledge and technology from them that gave him the fame of a sorcerer? As part of his studies, did he acquire knowledge of a system of sounds („religious songs”) that was able to drive away his masters when they decided that his usefulness on Earth had ended and it was time to transport him to a space base where he would be transformed into a brain in jar? Or was transportation to the Moon part of the deal from the beginning? Oh, one more interesting fact – according to legends, Twardowski used to use a rooster as a horse, which he enlarged with his magic. It’s easy to imagine an abomination that, in the eyes of laymen, might have resembled a large rooster… Examples of scenario hooks: – Twardowski’s secret mirror is still in the church in Węgrów. The local priest thinks it is just other „pagan” superstitions, but in fact it is a tool enabling contact with cosmic beings and higher realities. It may prove useful to players if they convince the priest to give it back or simply steal it. – Players are looking for Twardowski’s notes to gain knowledge about the „song” thanks to which he drove away mi-go (or other creatures that became the prototype of the „devils” from the legend). The so-called Twardowski’s „School” or „Cathedral” was located in a quarry near Kraków. In fact, at the end of the 19th century, during the construction of the church of St. Józef, a cave showing traces of alchemical experiments was discovered… And it was destroyed. But perhaps there is a second, secret laboratory under the cave that escaped destruction? And there lie Twardowski’s secrets… And again, potential obstacles may be placed by the local parish priest. But not only him. Maybe Twardowski’s legendary „rooster” lies dormant in the laboratory and was left by the sorcerer as a guard? – players are astronauts on the Moon. However, it turns out that someone lives here, someone who was not detected by previous expeditions and probes. Will Twardowski prove to be an ally in the fight against cosmic horrors? Or maybe their agent, or an independent villain? If he survived this long on the Moon thanks to blasphemous secrets, it’s possible that he had little humanity left…
The rest of the text is avalaible (of course, for free) here: https://adeptusrpg.wordpress.com/2024/05/13/some-lovecraftian-inspiration-form-real-life-and-beliefs/

So, the premise; A Masquerade Ball, organised by the town guard after the heroes complete their current quest (tracking and defeating a False Hydra).
I'm thinking, due to the creature's affect on memory, the guard organises a masquerade ball so that everyone is on a level playing field of knowing who each other is - those who've forgotten their family needn't worry about feeling guilty, because no one recognises anyone at this party!
But, friends, Romans, countrymen, I need a plot! What happens at this ball? I can only narrate for so long before the players need something to do!
Shall we say, a murder? Or perhaps trouble in the kitchen? Both have interesting stakes (Har Har!)
What can we do to give the players a fun, simple puzzle to solve, after the terror of a haunting amnesiac agent?
A secret love interest too, perhaps?
Help me out!

J. V. Stalin
The Party's Tasks Report Delivered at an Enlarged Meeting of the Krasnaya Presnya District Committee of the R.C.P.(B.) With Group Organisers, Members of the Debating Society and of the Bureau of the Party Units December 2, 1923 Source : Works, Vol. 5, 1921 - 1923 Publisher : Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1954 Transcription/Markup : Salil Sen for MIA, 2008 Public Domain : Marxists Internet Archive (2008). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit "Marxists Internet Archive" as your source.
Comrades, first of all I must say that I am delivering a report here in my personal capacity and not in the name of the Central Committee of the Party. If the meeting is willing to hear such a report, I am at your service. (Voices : "Yes.") This does not mean that I disagree with the Central Committee in any way on this question; not at all. I am speaking here in my personal capacity only because the commission of the Central Committee for drafting measures to improve the internal situation in the Party 1 is to present its findings to the Central Committee in a day or two; these findings have not yet been presented, and therefore I have as yet no formal right to speak in the name of the Central Committee, although I am sure that what I am about to say to you will, in the main, express the Central Committee's position on these questions.
Discussion — A Sign of the Party's Strength The first question I would like to raise here is that of the significance of the discussion that is now taking place in the press and in the Party units. What does this discussion show? What does it indicate? Is it a storm that has burst into the calm life of the Party? Is this discussion a sign of the Party's disintegration, its decay, as some say, or of its degeneration, as others say?
I think, comrades, that it is neither one nor the other: there is neither degeneration nor disintegration. The fact of the matter is that the Party has grown more mature during the past period; it has adequately rid itself of useless ballast; it has become more proletarian. You know that two years ago we had not less than 700,000 members; you know that several thousand members have dropped out, or have been kicked out, of the Party. Further, the Party membership has improved, its quality has risen in this period as a result of the improvement in the conditions of the working class due to the revival of industry, as a result of the return of the old skilled workers from the countryside, and as a result of the new wave of cultural development that is spreading among the industrial workers.
In short, owing to all these circumstances, the Party has grown more mature, its quality has risen, its needs have grown, it has become more exacting, it wants to know more than it has known up to now, and it wants to decide more than it has up to now.
The discussion which has opened is not a sign of the Party's weakness, still less is it a sign of its disintegration or degeneration; it is a sign of strength, a sign of firmness, a sign of the improvement in the quality of the Party's membership, a sign of its increased activity.
Causes of the Discussion The second question that confronts us is: what has caused the question of internal Party policy to become so acute precisely in the present period, in the autumn of this year? How is this to be explained? What were the causes? I think, comrades, that there were two causes.
The first cause was the wave of discontent and strikes over wages that swept through certain districts of the republic in August of this year. The fact of the matter is that this strike wave exposed the defects in our organisations; it revealed the isolation of our organisations— both Party and trade-union—from the events taking place in the factories. And in connection with this strike wave the existence was discovered within our Party of several secret organisations of an essentially anti-communist nature, which strove to disintegrate the Party. All these defects revealed by the strike wave were exposed to the Party so glaringly, and with such a sobering effect, that it felt the necessity for internal Party changes.
The second cause of the acuteness of the question of internal Party policy precisely at the present moment was the wholesale release of Party comrades to go on vacation. It is natural, of course, for comrades to go on vacation, but this assumed such a mass character, that Party activity became considerably weaker precisely at the time when the discontent arose in the factories, and that greatly helped to expose the accumulated defects just at this period, in the autumn of this year.
Defects in Internal Party Life I have mentioned defects in our Party life that were exposed in the autumn of this year, and which brought up the question of improving internal Party life. What are these defects in internal Party life? Is it that the Party line was wrong, as some comrades think; or that, although the Party's line was correct, in practice it departed from the right road, was distorted because of certain subjective and objective conditions?
I think that the chief defect in our internal Party life is that, although the Party's line, as expressed in the decisions of our congresses, is correct, in the localities (not everywhere, of course, but in certain districts) it was put into practice in an incorrect way. While the proletarian-democratic line of our Party was correct, the way it was put into practice in the localities resulted in cases of bureaucratic distortion of this line.
That is the chief defect. The existence of contradictions between the basic Party line as laid down by the Congresses (Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth), and the way our organisations put this line into practice in the locali-ties—that is the foundation of all the defects in internal Party life.
The Party line says that the major questions of our Party activities, except, of course, those that brook no delay, or those that are military or diplomatic secrets, must without fail be discussed at Party meetings. That is what the Party line says. But in Party practice in the localities, not everywhere, of course, it was considered that there is really no great need for a number of questions concerning internal Party practice to be discussed at Party meetings since the Central Committee and the other leading organisations will decide these questions.
The Party line says that our Party officials must without fail be elected unless there are insuperable obstacles to this, such as absence of the necessary Party standing, and so forth. You know that, according to the Party rules, secretaries of Gubernia Committees must have a pre-October Party standing, secretaries of Uyezd Committees must have at least three years', and units secretaries a year's, Party standing. In Party practice, however, it was often considered that since a certain Party standing was needed, no real elections were needed.
The Party line says that the Party membership must be kept informed about the work of the economic organisations, the factories and trusts, for, naturally, our Party units are morally responsible to the non-Party masses for the defects in the factories. Nevertheless, in Party practice it was considered that since there is a Central Committee which issues directives to the economic organisations, and since these economic organisations are bound by those directives, the latter will be carried out without control from below by the mass of the Party membership.
The Party line says that responsible workers in different branches of work, whether Party, economic, trade-union, or military workers, notwithstanding their specialisation in their own particular work, are interconnected, constitute inseparable parts of one whole, for they are all working in the common cause of the proletariat, which cannot be torn into parts. In Party practice, however, it was considered that since there is specialisation, division of labour according to properly Party activity and economic, military, etc., activity, the Party officials are not responsible for those working in the economic sphere, the latter are not responsible for the Party officials, and, in general, that the weakening and even loss of connection between them are inevitable.
Such, comrades, are, in general, the contradictions between the Party line, as registered in a number of decisions of our Congresses, from the Tenth to the Twelfth, and Party practice.
I am far from blaming the local organisations for this distortion of the Party line, for, when you come to examine it, this is not so much the fault as the misfortune of our local organisations. The nature of this misfortune, and how things could have taken this turn, I shall tell you later on, but I wanted to register this fact in order to reveal this contradiction to you and then try to propose measures for improvement.
I am also far from considering our Central Committee to be blameless. It, too, has sinned, as has every institution and organisation; it, too, shares part of the blame and part of the misfortune: blame, at least, for not, whatever the reason, exposing these defects in time, and for not taking measures to eliminate them.
But that is not the point now. The point now is to ascertain the causes of the defects I have just spoken about. Indeed, how did these defects arise, and how can they be removed?
The Causes of the Defects The first cause is that our Party organisations have not yet rid themselves, or have still not altogether rid themselves, of certain survivals of the war period, a period that has passed, but has left in the minds of our responsible workers vestiges of the military regime in the Party. I think that these survivals find expression in the view that our Party is not an independently acting organism, not an independently acting, militant organisation of the proletariat, but something in the nature of a system of institutions, something in the nature of a complex of institutions in which there are officials of lower rank and officials of higher rank. That, comrades, is a profoundly mistaken view that has nothing in common with Marxism; that view is a survival that we have inherited from the war period, when we militarised the Party, when the question of the independent activity of the mass of the Party membership had necessarily to be shifted into the background and military orders were of decisive importance. I do not remember that this view was ever definitely expressed; nevertheless, it, or elements of it, still influences our work. Comrades, we must combat such views with all our might, for they are a very real danger and create favourable conditions for the distortion in practice of the essentially correct line of our Party.
The second cause is that our state apparatus, which is bureaucratic to a considerable degree, exerts a certain amount of pressure on the Party and the Party workers. In 1917, when we were forging ahead, towards October, we imagined that we would have a Commune, a free association of working people, that we would put an end to bureaucracy in government institutions, and that it would be possible, if not in the immediate period, then within two or three short periods, to transform the state into a free association of working people. Practice has shown, however, that this is still an ideal which is a long way off, that to rid the state of the elements of bureaucracy, to transform Soviet society into a free association of working people, the people must have a high level of culture, peace conditions must be fully guaranteed all around us so as to remove the necessity of maintaining a large standing army, which entails heavy expenditure and cumbersome administrative departments, the very existence of which leaves its impress upon all the other state institutions. Our state apparatus is bureaucratic to a considerable degree, and it will remain so for a long time to come. Our Party comrades work in this apparatus, and the situation—I might say the atmosphere—in this bureaucratic apparatus is such that it helps to bureaucratise our Party workers and our Party organisations.
The third cause of the defects, comrades, is that some of our units are not sufficiently active, they are backward, and in some cases, particularly in the border regions, they are even wholly illiterate. In these districts, the units display little activity and are politically and culturally backward. That circumstance, too, undoubtedly creates a favourable soil for the distortion of the Party line.
The fourth cause is the absence of a sufficient number of trained Party comrades in the localities. Recently, in the Central Committee, I heard the report of a representative of one of the Ukrainian organisations. The reporter was a very capable comrade who shows great promise. He said that of 130 units, 80 have secretaries who were appointed by the Gubernia Committee. In answer to the remark that this organisation was acting wrongly in this respect, the comrade pleaded that there were no literate people in the units, that they consisted of new members, that the units themselves ask for secretaries to be sent them, and so forth. I may grant that half of what this comrade said was an overstatement, that the matter is not only that there are no trained people in the units, but also that the Gubernia Committee was over-zealous and followed the old tradition. But even if the Gubernia Committee was correct only to the extent of fifty per cent, is it not obvious that if there are such units in the Ukraine, how many more like them must there be in the border regions, where the organisations are young, where there are fewer Party cadres and less literacy than in the Ukraine? That is also one of the factors that create favourable conditions for the distortion in practice of the essentially correct Party line.
Lastly, the fifth cause—insufficient information. We sent out too little information, and this applies primarily to the Central Committee, possibly because it is overburdened with work. We receive too little information from the localities. This must cease. This is also a serious cause of the defects that have accumulated within the Party.
How should the Defects in Internal Party Life be Removed ? What measures must be adopted to remove these defects?
The first thing is tirelessly, by every means, to combat the survivals and habits of the war period in our Party, to combat the erroneous view that our Party is a system of institutions, and not a militant organisation of the proletariat, which is intellectually vigorous, acts independently, lives a full life, is destroying the old and creating the new.
Secondly, the activity of the mass of the Party membership must be increased; all questions of interest to the membership in so far as they can be openly discussed must be submitted to it for open discussion, and the possibility ensured of free criticism of all proposals made by the different Party bodies. Only in this way will it be possible to convert Party discipline into really conscious, really iron discipline; only in this way will it be possible to increase the political, economic and cultural experience of the mass of Party members; only in this way will it be possible to create the conditions necessary to enable the Party membership, step by step, to promote new active workers, new leaders, from its ranks.
Thirdly, the principle of election must be applied in practice to all Party bodies and official posts, if there are no insuperable obstacles to this such as lack of the necessary Party standing, and so forth. We must eliminate the practice of ignoring the will of the majority of the organisations in promoting comrades to responsible
Party posts, and we must see to it that the principle of election is actually applied.
Fourthly, there must exist under the Central Committee and the Gubernia and Regional Committees permanently functioning conferences of responsible workers in all fields of work—economic, Party, trade-union and military; these conferences must be held regularly and discuss any question they consider it necessary to discuss; the interconnection between the workers in all fields must not be broken; all these workers must feel that they are all members of a single Party family, working in a common cause, the cause of the proletariat, which is indivisible; the Central Committee and the local organisations must create an environment that will enable the Party to acquire and test the experience of our responsible workers in all spheres of work.
Fifthly, our Party units in the factories must be drawn into dealing with the various questions relating to the course of affairs in the respective enterprises and trusts. Things must be so arranged that the units are kept informed about the work of the administrations of our enterprises and trusts and are able to exert an influence on this work. You, as representatives of units, are aware how great is the moral responsibility of our factory units to the non-Party masses for the course of affairs in the factories. For the unit to be able to lead and win the following of the non-Party masses in the factory, for it to be able to bear responsibility for the course of affairs in the factory—and it certainly has a moral responsibility to the non-Party masses for defects in the work of the factory—the unit must be kept informed about these affairs, it must be possible for it to influence them in one way or another. Therefore, the units must be drawn into the discussion of economic questions relating to their factories, and economic conferences of representatives of the factory units in a given trust must be called from time to time to discuss questions relating to the affairs of the trust. This is one of the surest ways both of enlarging the economic experience of the Party membership and of organising control from below.
Sixthly, the quality of the membership of our Party units must be improved. Zinoviev has already said in an article of his that here and there the quality of the membership of our Party units is below that of the surrounding non-Party masses.
That statement, of course, must not be generalised and applied to all the units. It would be more exact to say the following for example: our Party units would be on a much higher cultural level than they are now, and would have much greater authority among non-Party people, if we had not denuded these units, if we had not taken from them people we needed for economic, administrative, trade-union and all sorts of other work. If our working-class comrades, the cadres we have taken from the units during the past six years, were to return to their units, does it need proof that those units would stand head and shoulders above all the non-Party workers, even the most advanced? Precisely because the Party has no other cadres with which to improve the state apparatus, precisely because the Party will be obliged to continue using that source, our units will remain on a somewhat unsatisfactory cultural level unless we take urgent measures to improve the quality of their membership. First of all, Party educational work in the units must be increased to the utmost; furthermore, we must get rid of the excessive formalism our local organisations sometimes display in accepting working-class comrades into the Party. I think that we must not allow ourselves to be bound by formalism; the Party can, and must, create easier conditions for the acceptance of new members from the ranks of the working class. That has already begun in the local organisations. The Party must take this matter in hand and launch an organised campaign for creating easier access to the Party for new members from workers at the bench.
Seventhly, work must be intensified among the non-Party workers. This is another means of improving the internal Party situation, of increasing the activity of the Party membership. I must say that our organisations are still paying little attention to the task of drawing non-Party workers into our Soviets. Take, for example, the elections to the Moscow Soviet that are being held now. I consider that one of the big defects in these elections is that too few non-Party people are being elected. It is said that there exists a decision of the organisation to the effect that at least a certain number, a certain percentage, etc., of non-Party people are to be elected; but I see that, in fact, a far smaller number is being elected. It is said that the masses are eager to elect only Communists. I have my doubts about that, comrades. I think that unless we show a certain degree of confidence in the non-Party people they may answer by becoming very distrustful of our organisations. This confidence in the non-Party people is absolutely necessary, comrades. Communists must be induced to withdraw their candidatures.
Speeches must not be delivered urging the election only of Communists; non-Party people must be encouraged, they must be drawn into the work of administering the state. We shall gain by this and in return receive the reciprocal confidence of the non-Party people in our organisations. The elections in Moscow are an example of the degree to which our organisations are beginning to isolate themselves within their Party shell instead of enlarging their field of activity and, step by step, rallying the non-Party people around themselves.
Eighthly, work among the peasants must be intensified. I do not know why our village units, which in some places are wilting, are losing their members and are not trusted much by the peasants (this must be admitted)—I do not know why, for instance, two practical tasks cannot be set these units: firstly, to interpret and popularise the Soviet laws which affect peasant life; secondly, to agitate for and disseminate elementary agronomic knowledge, if only the knowledge that it is necessary to plough the fields in proper time, to sift seed, etc. Do you know, comrades, that if every peasant were to decide to devote a little labour to the sifting of seed, it would be possible without land improvement, and without introducing new machines, to obtain an increase in crop yield amounting to about ten poods per dessiatin? And what does an increase in crop yield of ten poods per dessiatin mean? It means an increase in the gross crop of a thousand million poods per annum. And all this could be achieved without great effort. Why should not our village units take up this matter? Is it less important than talking about Curzon's policy? The peasants would then realise that the Communists have stopped engaging in empty talk and have got down to real business; and then our village units would win the boundless confidence of the peasants.
There is no need for me to stress how necessary it is, for improving and reviving Party life, to intensify Party and political educational work among the youth, the source of new cadres, in the Red Army, among women delegates, and among non-Party people in general.
Nor will I dwell upon the importance of increasing the interchange of information, about which I have already spoken, of increasing the supply of information from the top downwards and from below upwards.
Such, comrades, are the measures for improvement, the course towards internal Party democracy which the Central Committee set as far back as September of this year, and which must be put into practice by all Party organisations from top to bottom.
I would now like to deal with two extremes, two obsessions, on the question of workers' democracy that were to be noted in some of the discussion articles in Pravda.
The first extreme concerns the election principle. It manifests itself in some comrades wanting to have elections "throughout." Since we stand for the election principle, let us go the whole hog in electing! Party standing? What do we want that for? Elect whomever you please. That is a mistaken view, comrades. The Party will not accept it. Of course, we are not now at war; we are in a period of peaceful development. But we are now living under the NEP. Do not forget that, comrades. The Party began the purge not during, but after the war. Why? Because, during the war, fear of defeat drew the Party together into one whole, and some of the disruptive elements in the Party were compelled to keep to the general line of the Party, which was faced with the question of life or death. Now these bonds have fallen away, for we are not now at war; now we have the NEP, we have permitted a revival of capitalism, and the bourgeoisie is reviving. True, all this helps to purge the Party, to strengthen it; but on the other hand, we are being enveloped in a new atmosphere by the nascent and growing bourgeoisie, which is not very strong yet, but which has already succeeded in beating some of our co-operatives and trading organisations in internal trade. It was precisely after the introduction of the NEP that the Party began the purge and reduced its membership by half; it was precisely after the introduction of the NEP that the Party decided that, in order to protect our organisations from the contagion of the NEP, it was necessary, for example, to hinder the influx of non-proletarian elements into the Party, that it was necessary that Party officials should have a definite Party standing, and so forth. Was the Party right in taking these precautionary measures, which restricted "expanded" democracy? I think it was. That is why I think that we must have democracy, we must have the election principle, but the restrictive measures that were adopted by the Eleventh and Twelfth Congresses, at least the chief ones, must still remain in force.
The second extreme concerns the question of the limits of the discussion. This extreme manifests itself in some comrades demanding unlimited discussion; they think that the discussion of problems is the be all and end all of Party work and forget about the other aspect of Party work, namely, action, which calls for the implementation of the Party's decisions. At all events, this was the impression I gained from the short article by Radzin, who tried to substantiate the principle of unlimited discussion by a reference to Trotsky, who is alleged to have said that "the Party is a voluntary association of like-minded people." I searched for that sentence in Trotsky's works, but could not find it. Trotsky could scarcely have uttered it as a finished formula for the definition of the Party; and if he did utter it, he could scarcely have stopped there. The Party is not only an association of like-minded people; it is also an association of like-acting people, it is a militant association of like-acting people who are fighting on a common ideological basis (programme, tactics). I think that the reference to Trotsky is out of place, for I know Trotsky as one of the members of the Central Committee who most of all stress the active side of Party work. I think, therefore, that Radzin himself must bear responsibility for this definition. But what does this definition lead to? One of two possibilities: either that the Party will degenerate into a sect, into a philosophical school, for only in such narrow organisations is complete like-minded-ness possible; or that it will become a permanent debating society, eternally discussing and eternally arguing, until the point is reached where factions form and the Party is split. Our Party cannot accept either of these possibilities. This is why I think that the discussion of problems is needed, a discussion is needed, but limits must be set to such discussion in order to safeguard the Party, to safeguard this fighting unit of the proletariat, against degenerating into a debating society.
In concluding my report, I must warn you, comrades, against these two extremes. I think that if we reject both these extremes and honestly and resolutely steer the course towards internal Party democracy that the Central Committee set already in September of this year, we shall certainly achieve an improvement in our Party work. (Applause.)
Pravda, No. 277, December 6, 1923
Notes 1. This refers to the commission set up in conformity with the decision of the Political Bureau and of the Plenum of the Central Committee of the R.C.P.(B.) which took place on September 23-25, 1923.
Collected Works Index Volume 5 Index Works by Decade J. V. Stalin Archive Marxists Internet Archive

Hello. Me and my partner will be moving in September and are looking for a flat/house for us to rent. However it seems like all accommodation is for students, after applying our filters (under 1200pm and furnished) I could only see 7 properties. I tried a few websites. Is there any agent websites that will be better or should I call agents and ask? Is there any secret that I do not know?
For context, unfurnished is not an option - we are moving for a year only as I will be doing a Masters degree (but my partner is a working professional, so we dont qualify for student flats) and we dont have much savings as we are so young so we cant furnish a flat. I will be financially reliant on my dad. A side note, Is flying that my partner is a student ever an option so we get student flats (not uni ones, still private landlord?
Also if anyone in this group is a landlord pls contact me

Outline of the Article

1. Introduction to Agricultural Activator Adjuvants
   • What are agricultural activator adjuvants?
   • Importance in modern agriculture.
2. Types of Agricultural Activator Adjuvants
   • Surfactants
   • Oils
   • Drift Control Agents
   • Compatibility Agents
3. Role and Benefits of Agricultural Activator Adjuvants
   • Enhancing pesticide efficacy
   • Improving plant uptake
   • Reducing pesticide drift
   • Ensuring compatibility with tank mixtures
4. Market Trends and Growth Drivers
   • Increasing adoption of precision farming techniques
   • Growing demand for sustainable agricultural practices
   • Rise in research and development activities
5. Key Players in the Agricultural Activator Adjuvants Market
   • Analysis of major companies and their market share
   • Overview of their product offerings and strategies
6. Regional Analysis
   • Market landscape in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and other regions
   • Factors influencing market growth in each region
7. Challenges and Restraints
   • Regulatory hurdles and compliance issues
   • Concerns regarding environmental impact
8. Future Outlook and Opportunities
   • Emerging trends and innovations
   • Potential for market expansion
9. Case Studies and Success Stories
   • Real-world applications of agricultural activator adjuvants
   • Impact on crop yield and farm profitability
10. Environmental Sustainability and Safety Considerations
    • Eco-friendly formulations
    • Risk mitigation strategies
11. Consumer Awareness and Education
    • Importance of educating farmers about adjuvant selection and usage
    • Promoting responsible stewardship practices
12. Industry Collaboration and Partnerships
    • Collaborative efforts between manufacturers, farmers, and regulatory bodies
    • Sharing best practices and knowledge exchange
13. Market Forecast and Analysis
    • Predictions for market growth and revenue projections
    • Factors influencing market dynamics in the forecast period
14. Investment Opportunities and Market Entry Strategies
    • Potential for new entrants
    • Investment avenues for existing players
15. Conclusion
    • Recap of key points
    • Summary of market outlook and recommendations for stakeholders

Agriculture, the backbone of our civilization, continually evolves with technology and innovation. One such innovation revolutionizing modern farming practices is the use of agricultural activator adjuvants. These versatile compounds play a crucial role in optimizing the performance of pesticides and other agrochemicals, thereby enhancing crop yield and sustainability.
What are Agricultural Activator Adjuvants?
Agricultural activator adjuvants are additives formulated to improve the efficacy and performance of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. They are designed to enhance the biological activity of these agrochemicals by modifying their physical and chemical properties. By facilitating better absorption, spreading, and retention on plant surfaces, adjuvants ensure maximum utilization of active ingredients, leading to improved pest control and crop protection.
Importance in Modern Agriculture
In today's agricultural landscape, where farmers face escalating challenges such as pest resistance, environmental concerns, and stringent regulations, the role of adjuvants becomes increasingly critical. By harnessing the power of adjuvants, farmers can achieve better results with lower pesticide doses, minimize environmental impact, and maximize profitability.
Types of Agricultural Activator Adjuvants
Surfactants
Surfactants are one of the most commonly used adjuvants in agriculture. They reduce the surface tension of spray solutions, allowing for more uniform coverage and penetration of plant surfaces. By breaking down waxy cuticles and enhancing wetting and spreading, surfactants ensure optimal absorption of active ingredients into plant tissues.
Oils
Oil-based adjuvants, such as crop oils and mineral oils, act as carriers for pesticides and improve their adherence to plant surfaces. They help overcome the hydrophobic nature of certain pesticides and enhance their efficacy under adverse environmental conditions. Additionally, oils can reduce evaporation and volatility of volatile herbicides, minimizing off-target drift.
Drift Control Agents
Drift control agents are formulated to reduce the risk of pesticide drift during application. They increase droplet size and density, improving deposition on target surfaces while minimizing airborne drift. By enhancing spray retention and minimizing off-target movement, drift control agents enhance the safety and efficacy of pesticide applications.
Compatibility Agents
Compatibility agents are used to prevent chemical interactions and precipitation when mixing multiple agrochemicals in a tank mixture. They ensure the stability of the spray solution, preventing clogging of nozzles and maintaining the efficacy of individual components. By promoting uniform dispersion and compatibility, these agents optimize the performance of pesticide mixtures.
Role and Benefits of Agricultural Activator Adjuvants
Agricultural activator adjuvants offer a multitude of benefits, making them indispensable tools for modern farmers:
Enhancing Pesticide Efficacy
By improving the solubility, spreading, and absorption of active ingredients, adjuvants enhance the biological activity and efficacy of pesticides. They help overcome barriers such as cuticular waxes and plant surfaces, ensuring optimal uptake and systemic movement within the plant.
Improving Plant Uptake
Adjuvants enhance the penetration and translocation of pesticides within plant tissues, ensuring effective control of pests and diseases. By facilitating rapid absorption and systemic movement, they maximize the bioavailability of active ingredients, leading to superior pest management and crop protection.
Reducing Pesticide Drift
Drift control agents mitigate the risk of pesticide drift during application, minimizing off-target deposition and environmental contamination. By optimizing droplet size and distribution, these adjuvants ensure precise delivery of pesticides to target areas while reducing the potential for environmental impact.
Ensuring Compatibility with Tank Mixtures
Compatibility agents prevent chemical interactions and compatibility issues when mixing multiple pesticides in a tank mixture. They maintain the stability and integrity of the spray solution, preventing precipitation and clogging of spray equipment. By promoting uniform dispersion and compatibility, these adjuvants maximize the efficacy of tank mixtures and minimize the risk of equipment malfunction.
Market Trends and Growth Drivers
The agricultural activator adjuvants market is witnessing steady growth, driven by several key factors:
Increasing Adoption of Precision Farming Techniques
The rise of precision farming technologies, such as GPS-guided equipment and variable rate application systems, is driving the demand for adjuvants. These technologies enable farmers to optimize pesticide applications and maximize crop yield while minimizing input costs and environmental impact.
Growing Demand for Sustainable Agricultural Practices
With increasing consumer awareness and regulatory pressure, there is a growing demand for sustainable agricultural practices. Adjuvants play a crucial role in supporting sustainable farming by improving the efficiency and efficacy of pesticide applications, reducing chemical usage, and minimizing environmental footprint.
Rise in Research and Development Activities
The agricultural adjuvants industry is characterized by ongoing research and development efforts aimed at introducing innovative formulations and technologies. Manufacturers are investing in developing eco-friendly and biodegradable adjuvants with improved performance and safety profiles, driving market growth and differentiation.
Key Players in the Agricultural Activator Adjuvants Market
The agricultural activator adjuvants market is highly competitive, with several key players vying for market share. Some of the leading companies in the industry include:

• Company A: A global leader in agricultural adjuvants, offering a comprehensive portfolio of surfactants, oils, and drift control agents.
• Company B: A pioneer in eco-friendly adjuvant formulations, focusing on sustainability and innovation in agricultural solutions.
• Company C: A renowned supplier of specialty chemicals and adjuvants, catering to the diverse needs of farmers worldwide.
• Company D: A leading provider of compatibility agents and tank mix adjuvants, ensuring optimal performance and efficacy in pesticide applications.

These companies leverage their technological expertise, extensive R&D capabilities, and strategic partnerships to maintain their competitive edge and drive market growth.
Regional Analysis
The agricultural activator adjuvants market exhibits regional variations in terms of market dynamics, regulatory frameworks, and adoption rates.
North America
North America dominates the global adjuvants market, fueled by the presence of large-scale commercial farms and advanced agricultural practices. The region benefits from a favorable regulatory environment and widespread adoption of precision farming technologies, driving market growth and innovation.
Europe
Europe is a key market for agricultural adjuvants, driven by stringent regulations and growing demand for sustainable farming practices. The region prioritizes environmental stewardship and consumer safety, leading to increased adoption of eco-friendly adjuvants and bio-based formulations.
Asia Pacific
Asia Pacific represents a lucrative market for agricultural adjuvants, driven by the expanding agricultural sector and rising demand for high-quality crops. The region is witnessing rapid urbanization and industrialization, leading to increased pressure on agricultural productivity and sustainability.
Other Regions
Other regions, such as Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, offer significant growth opportunities for agricultural adjuvants. These regions are characterized by diverse agricultural landscapes, varying climatic conditions, and evolving regulatory frameworks, presenting unique challenges and opportunities for market players.
Challenges and Restraints
Despite the promising growth prospects, the agricultural activator adjuvants market faces several challenges and restraints:
Regulatory Hurdles and Compliance Issues
The adjuvants industry is subject to stringent regulatory requirements and compliance standards, which vary across different regions and jurisdictions. Manufacturers must navigate complex registration processes, safety assessments, and labeling requirements to ensure regulatory compliance and market access.
Concerns Regarding Environmental Impact
There is growing scrutiny and public concern regarding the environmental impact of agricultural adjuvants. Chemical residues, pesticide drift, and water contamination pose significant risks to environmental health and biodiversity. Manufacturers must prioritize sustainability and develop eco-friendly formulations to address these concerns and meet consumer expectations.
Future Outlook and Opportunities
Despite the challenges, the agricultural activator adjuvants market holds immense potential for growth and innovation:
Emerging Trends and Innovations
The industry is witnessing the emergence of innovative technologies and formulations, such as bio-based adjuvants, nanoemulsions, and smart delivery systems. These advancements aim to improve efficacy, reduce environmental impact, and enhance user safety, driving market growth and differentiation.
Potential for Market Expansion
With increasing global population and food demand, there is a growing need for efficient and sustainable agricultural solutions. Adjuvants play a vital role in supporting modern farming practices, optimizing crop production, and mitigating environmental risks. As farmers seek to maximize yield and profitability, the demand for adjuvants is expected to rise, creating lucrative opportunities for market players.
Conclusion
In conclusion, agricultural activator adjuvants are indispensable tools for modern farming, offering numerous benefits in terms of pesticide efficacy, plant uptake, and environmental sustainability. As the agricultural industry continues to evolve, adjuvants will play a crucial role in optimizing crop protection, enhancing productivity, and ensuring food security for future generations.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

1. What are agricultural activator adjuvants? Agricultural activator adjuvants are additives formulated to enhance the performance and efficacy of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers by modifying their physical and chemical properties.
2. How do adjuvants improve pesticide efficacy? Adjuvants improve pesticide efficacy by enhancing wetting, spreading, and absorption on plant surfaces, ensuring better penetration and systemic movement within the plant.
3. What types of adjuvants are commonly used in agriculture? Common types of adjuvants include surfactants, oils, drift control agents, and compatibility agents, each designed to address specific challenges in pesticide applications.
4. Why are adjuvants important in modern agriculture? Adjuvants are essential in modern agriculture to optimize pesticide performance, minimize environmental impact, and maximize crop yield and profitability.
5. Are there any environmental concerns associated with adjuvant usage? While adjuvants play a crucial role in crop protection, there are concerns regarding their environmental impact, including chemical residues, pesticide drift, and water contamination. Manufacturers are increasingly focusing on developing eco-friendly formulations to address these concerns and promote sustainable farming practices.

So if the theory of someone being a secret agent is correct who do you think is one and why. I personally think victor because it’s highly unlikely that he would have survived that long as a child. He was also in the cave for a couple of days. I think the monsters would have killed him, and he was out of food for those days with no sign of weakness.

As Yusuf prepared to depart the headquarters after his confrontation with the Red Lion, a mysterious figure emerged from the shadows. A woman with sharp features and a piercing gaze, named Layla, introduced herself. Layla was a double agent working for another clandestine organization called the Silver Eagle. She offered to assist Yusuf in thwarting Black Shadow's scheme in exchange for information about the Silver Eagle. Meanwhile, in another part of the city, a young and brilliant inventor named Omar was working on a revolutionary invention that could turn the tide against Black Shadow. He possessed technology capable of remotely detecting and disabling weapons. However, Omar required Yusuf's protection to complete his invention and test it in the real world. With a newfound alliance formed between Yusuf, Layla, and Omar, the plan to stop Black Shadow was set in motion. Unbeknownst to them, however, a traitor lurked among them – Faris, who was secretly working for Black Shadow. Faris plotted to exploit Omar's invention for Black Shadow's gain, turning the tables in their favor. Would Yusuf and his team manage to uncover Faris's treachery before it was too late? And would they succeed in utilizing Omar's invention to save the city and foil Black Shadow's plans.

[This is intended to be humorous]
The Nasuverse isn't real. Tsukihime, Fate/Extra, Mahoyo - they're all lies.
Let me explain.

Tsukihime

Firstly, Tsukihime was never real. People who say otherwise are trying to gaslight you. Don't fall for it. Have you ever seen someone play Tsukihime? I've never heard about it.
Think about what everyone says. It doesn't line up. Shiki Tohno, main character. But why isn't he in FGO? Why isn't he in any other game? Would anyone really write a main character who's a serial killer with a lack of respect for consent? Of course not.
Arcueid? Yeah, of course they tell you she's a great heroine and totally well-written and whatever. She's just Archetype Earth! The FGOminatti are pretending an entire other game exists for her. Don't buy it.
Who the hell even is Ciel? Akiha? Roa? Hisui? Kohaku? They're not in any other stories. What proof does anyone have Tsukihime exists?
Would any REAL visual novel have THREE different characters named Shiki?!
Melty Blood is just an Under Night In Birth spin off. It even has Eltnam from UNIB. It's also a fighting game. Fighting games don't have stories. Tsukihime can't exist. It's a story.
This so called Tsukihime is not even on Steam. It's on Nintendo? Of course, but do we know it's actually there? It's Japanese, both the game and the Nintendo. I don't own a Nintendo, so clearly no one else does either. Who's to say it isn't just a big prank by Japanese people?
Nasu is even an FGOminatti secret agent himself. "Ritsuka Fujimaru is the life I'd like to have led," he says. We can't trust a word out of his lips. He's compromised. Remember, he's the one who wrote this totally unrelated Artoria who's completely in love with the Fujimaru who now has a personality which totally isn't just Nasu writing his own personality into the game, no siree!
THINK ABOUT IT! "Oh man, I sure love Tsukihime's main character Shiki Tohno"- LOOK AT SHIKI'S TRAITS!

• Black hair (just like Fujimaru)
  
• Japanese (just like Fujimaru)
  
• Teenager (just like Fujimaru)
  

Oh and wouldn't you know it, he dates Arcueid. Hoo boy! This guy who's totally not Fujimaru dates totally not Archetype Earth!
It's FGOminatti propaganda! There is NO Tsukihime! They just want to go on a date with Archetype Earth and are making up a fanfiction about it! And tricking YOU, an innocent victim of the FGO agenda into believing it!

Kara no Kyoukai- Garden of Sinners? It doesn't exist either!

Hoo boy! Look! It's Shiki Ryougi - literally just that FGO character they're not even trying to hide it now - and she fell in love with that completely average Japanese teenager who's totally not just Ritsuka with glasses and a different name, and now they have kids together and are married!
Does the FGOminatti agenda ever end???! It's a Guda x Servant child fanfic!!! It isn't real! Of course it isn't!
AND NO ONE WOULD WRITE A FRANCHISE WITH FOUR SHIKIS!

Notes? NOTES?

Yeah, it's literally FGO's Servantverse! It even has Mysterious Heroine X renamed Ado Edem!
No self respecting story would name the character who goes around shooting gods with a gun, GUN GOD! That's so stupid it's not even funny! It can't be real!
FGOminatti of Nasu were so mad that no one took their dumb stupid idiotic moronic blasphemous inhumane failure of an event story seriously that they collectively decided to pretend it was the origin of the Nasuverse! Down with the FGO agenda!
Look on me, GrandOrder! Don't let them brainwash you!

Fate/Extra

Of COURSE, they'd say it exists! The FGOminatti is gaslighting you!
The PSP does not exist! There can't be games for it! And spare just a single brain cell to think about the alleged 'plot'! Some totally normal guy who has no special qualities, is a piss poor mage (but he's brunette so he's totally not Ritsuka) contracts with TOTALLY NOT Artoria, TOTALLY NOT Archer or a new fan-service character who's just Morgan if she was a fox-girl and genki! And wouldn't you know it, all of them fall in love with him!
Oh, and Rin is also in the game and she also falls in love with the protagonist! She also just so happens to look identical to Ereshkigal! They even have an homunculus who falls in love with the totally not Fujimaru! They literally added Indian Sitonai!
The main villain is just Kirschtaria if he was young! That's how unoriginal the FGOminatti is!

Fate/Extra CCC

Firstly, that's a stupid name. What idiotic story would be named the same as the previous entry but with CCC slapped on? Imagine if Nintendo created a sequel to the Nintendo Wii and named it the Wii U.
Secondly, it's literally just the FGOminatti simping for BB in that one SERAPH event! They're gaslighting you into thinking there's an entire game where BB wants to date Totally Not Ritsuka to the point of trapping them in a school! They even added Kiara from FGO into this dumb agenda creation!
Oh, and wouldn't you know it! The true ending of the game has the protagonist and BB kiss as if it wasn't enough that they added FOUR Sakuras all of whom are in love with the Not Fujimaru! They even re-added Rin and Indian Illya/Sitonai to simp for their self-insert!
Young Kirsch even has a clear gay crush on the main character! They couldn't stop with shipping all the girls with their horse shit cardboard cutout, now they're adding Kirschtaria Wodime Lily to their harem under a different name!

Mahoyo

What do you want me to say?! It's Aoko from FGO, Soujuuro from FGO, Alice from FGO and all of them are in a strange polycule.
...
The FGOminatti AGENDA IS BAITING YOU INTO THEIR SHIPS! DON'T BELIEVE IT!

Samurai Remnant

IT NEVER STOPS! "Oh there's a game where Iori from FGO is the main character"-
What proof is there? I don't have money to buy this game, so how can you show it exists?! It's not on my PC then it doesn't exist, PERIOD.
Similarly, Baldur's Gate is not actually real because I don't own it.

Fate/Apocrypha

Astolfo, Mordred, Sieg- all characters from FGO.
The FGOminatti Agenda has invented some dumb fake character who's a homunculus and has super duper powers while having zero personality.
It's so that they can point to this imaginary cardboard to make their own self insert look better by comparison!
DON'T BE BRAINWASHED!

Fate/Stay Night

This is even worse than any of the others! The FGOminatti Agenda has gone too far!
They claim there's TOTALLY a longer than Bible sized visual novel with OH SO GREAT themes! What proof do we have it's real?! None! Have you ever seen Fate/Stay Night on Steam? On the PS4? On the Xbox? On any online retailer?
Even the backstory they make up for their protagonist is bullshit! "He saw everything burn down in Fuyuki and came out of it wanting to save the world-" THAT'S LITERALLY JUST SINGULARITY-F! They're not even trying to be original!
The main character is literally Muramasa but young! Look at his dumb accomplishment list because FGOminatti couldn't stop wanking their husbando!

• Actually he's Archer EMIYA the Counter Guardian (literally just the guy from FGO)
• Raised by totally not Counter Guardian Assassin EMIYA
• Has the super duper ultra Noble Phantasm which just so happens to be the perfect counter to THE STRONGEST HERO to ever EXIST!
• Rapidly grows faster than actual accomplished mages!
  And look at his bullshit romances! "Oh, his soul mate is Artoria-" The FGOminatti couldn't keep their disgusting fetishes to themselves! They're literally shipping MURAMASA AND HIS DAUGHTER NOW! THOSE DAMN AKIHA ROUTE FANS!
  

Then there's Rin- literally Ishtar but nicer! And Sakura who's just Kama! And it's supposedly an ero-novel so he has the say gex with each of them!
It doesn't end there! FGOminatti can't stop with that amount of degeneracy! They added RASPUTIN, and made him their main character's love interest! The FGOminatti WANT TO HAVE MELUSINE'S TIME PARADOX WITH THE MAN WHO MURDERED DA VINCI!
And even that isn't enough for their disgusting selves! They added Fujimaru Ritsuka again but named him Issei, and then implied that he and Muramasa have frequent Persona 5 references by having him quickly strip for Muramasa Lily!
And look! LOOK! Muramasa- Shirou- he's literally just gender swap Gudako!
Can such a stupid, BABOON-BRAINED game or visual novel really exist?! NO! IT CANNOT! THEY'RE LYING TO YOU! IT IS NOT REAL! DON'T LET THE FGOminatti GASLIGHT YOU!
At approximately 7 PM in the US West Coast, the FGOminatti will launch a rocket ship to space. This rocket will contain a neurotoxin that will *trick all people into believing that the Nasuverse is real. *
They have also replaced the President with Fujimaru Ritsuka after developing sufficient technology to teleport him into reality.
Take my hand. We need to stop them.

REJECT THE FGO AGENDA!

I've been asked to looking to some solutions to analyse our support cases. Sentiments, churn risk etc. I'm broadly clueless in this area, but have been looking around spaCy and other python libraries and can see how things seem to fit together at a basic level.
Training and data quality is a worry for me though. I don't have exact details, but we have about 25,000 cases in our system (goin by ticket numbers at least), but a fair percentage are automated internal tickets, spam etc. So of little use for training. And of course (???) we need to have an opinion about this data in order to use it for training, which in general I imagine is a horrible task to have to try and deal with.
Using an existing twitter data set to try and analyse technical support tickets is... pointless?
Our cases are manually categorized by the assigned agent though, so there is a product type, severity rating etc., which could be some use for training I would think?
Obviously I'm very aware of Garbage In = Garbage Out, but unclear what sort of practical thresholds exist in this situation and if, even for a full commercial solution we're looking at, we just might never get good enough data to really be worth leveraging?

I'm seeking some expert advice on a real estate opportunity that's been on my mind. Here's the rundown:
My family and I own a 220 sq m plot in a prime city location, surrounded by bustling commercial and residential developments where flats fetch a minimum of $1200 per sq m. However, there's a twist. Our property shares a 375 sq m plot with our neighbors (220 sq m for us, 155 sq m for them), and due to city regulations, we can't split the land.
After consulting with architects, it turns out we can potentially build a five-floor multipurpose building with underground parking, utilizing 265 sq m for construction and leaving 110 sq m for yard space. Here's the plan:

• We'd reserve one floor for our family, allocate 200 sq m to our neighbor, and rent out the ground floor to commercial businesses at $4500 per month. This leaves us with two floors of residential units to sell, totaling 400 sq m each. At $1200 per sq m, that's a potential revenue of $500,000.

Now, let's talk numbers:
Construction is estimated at $300 per sq m, with architectural plans and permits totaling $10,000. So, the total cost of building is around $487,000.
Here's where I need your input:
How can I secure the $487,000 needed to kickstart this project? My plan involves investing $10,000 upfront for planning and permits, with the option to sell my car if needed. If successful, I'd presell units to initiate construction, hire real estate agents for sales, and consider bank mortgages as a fallback.
So, esteemed pros, what are your thoughts? Any advice on funding or optimizing this project would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for your insights!

this might be a lot and not the place for this but someone bear with me (22m) please ;_; was talking to my family about my experiences with magic mushrooms, and my grandfather (mom’s side) said something like “be careful, my brother had a schizophrenic episode after taking lsd- we found him rambling about the molecule and he had poorly drawn out a picture of the molecule on the ground.” but i don’t think there’s ever been a conversation about him having schizophrenia? anyway then he went on to ramble about the “this is your brain on drugs”/scrambled eggs commercials that would come on tv a long time ago. and given our family histories which i will elaborate on, i feel like this is a conversation that should have happened much sooner?? or maybe he was just talking out of his ass idk lmao
mental illness seems to run in the family on both sides with alcoholism being pretty prevalent in a lot of both my mom and dad’s relatives. my dad’s brother killed himself with a gun when they were in highschool and my dad found the body. ultimately he became a pretty abusive alcoholic, and he was really prone to mood swings looking back at it. I was put in therapy after my mom divorced him but we never really talked as a family. my older sister inherited his hip deformity that made him unfit for the catholic high school his brothers all went to, and a virus that caused her to have emergency surgery at birth (which left her deaf in both ears, and she stands 4’7” at 25 years old) he picked on her and our older brother a lot, and we all struggle socially. My brother kept to himself a lot until he died at 19 in a freak car accident on a road trip with his friends. Guy with dementia snuck out and got in a car with his dog at like 2am, took an exit ramp onto the highway going the wrong way right as they took the same one, spun out and all then all lights went out, so they got rear ended by a tractor trailer. that model of jeep had a defect where the trailer hitch would break and push in to the gas tank, causing an explosion. happened a couple times prior and was actually almost recalled years before (-: trucking company policy was call your superiors before anyone else, phone records reflected that phone call did in fact happen while those kids were burning to death. i dont blame that poor driver knowing what little i know about trucking and their work conditions, and i got half of a music degree paid for by my share of the settlement. i’ve always felt like that would not have happened if these were not several upper middle class suburban families who were affected by the tragedy, who could afford to pursue legal action for years against an entity like that. I think the community rallied to donate some but even then, it was a fairly affluent community
the last time i saw my dad was at my brothers funeral. i was 14 and it had been a couple years already, but he aged so poorly much i mistook him for his dad who had died a decade prior. i don’t think we spoke until a few years later on the phone, and it was the last time we spoke. he was antagonizing my mom with his usual nonsense that she was making him out to seem like a bad guy to us, and that she was secretly in love with her cousin (who she has always been very close to) — i told him to go fuck himself — that was a reccuring taunt of his our whole childhood, which i always thought was weird but never thought much of it. eventually my brother no longer wanted to visit my mom’s extended family once he had a say in it, and he never really wanted to talk about it either. a few years after my brother died, we were visiting the cousin in question, when i woke up just in time to see them kiss. I went back to sleep like I saw nothing and my sister texted me in the morning telling me she saw the same thing.
Apart from the yknow, incest, she remarried two years before my brother died- so naturally we confronted her about it and she just sort of fawned and said she had too much to drink and that it won’t happen again. they always get too drunk together at family events and I have glimpsed kissy face emojis and other suggestive language on her phone that she obviously was trying to shield with her hands.
Now I’m questioning pretty much everything. I don’t think it was long after that when my dad went missing, which my mom only noticed because he hadn’t sent birthday cards for a whole year, and within a year of that he was found in florida, dead on the street with fentanylin his blood. he was either dosed or killed himself. My family told me he died of natural causes accelerated by his alcoholism when it first happened and didn’t mention the fentanyl until very recently. Im wondering what else could they have they lied about or just have not told me because they don’t think I need to know?
One thing I try not to think too much about is something my mom said just once when I was little, about how when my sister was born the Doctors advised them not to have more kids bc it would be risky, “but I turned out fine” or something. My dad never came to visit our family on my mom’s side that i can remember, and when I was really little we spent a lot more time with her cousin doing a lot of quality time stuff; movies, mini golf, etc. The guy also drank a lot but he’s had better luck kicking the worst of his habits I guess.
JFC what do i make of all of this
….
i also sometimes feel like i’m getting schizo-baited by all of my targeted adds and articles on all of social media and sometimes i feel like im being watched so i don’t go anywhere or talk to my friends much at all. i went to a protest the other day and saw the typical undercover cop in his “hello fellow kids” getup, next day I step out of work to go to a coffee shop and the same dude in the same outfit is sitting next to the door when i go to leave. anyway please advise

The article is intended primarily for Game Masters who play games in systems inspired by Lovecraft’s works, such as Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green. However, I hope that other fans of cosmic horror will also find something for themselves here. The interesting facts presented here may also be entertaining for people who do not know the work of The Loner of Providence, but some of the references may be unclear to them. The article contains several anecdotes – either from real history or from beliefs that exist in the real world, and suggestions on how they can be related to the Cthulhu mythology. So read about:

• Sea Peoples, bane of ancient civilizations,
• a forgotten Eldritch abomination from Greek mythology,
• Jan Twardowski, the first man on the Moon,
• mathematicians and physicists who wanted to know the structure of reality and lost their minds,
• one of the most mysterious characters from the Bible and a dark, occult ritual that underlies monotheism.

Invasion of the Sea Peoples
Ancient, super-advanced, fallen civilizations are one of the favorite motifs of fantasy. And truth be told, something similar happened in real history. Of course, in reality, the fallen civilizations did not have sci-fi supertechnology at their disposal, but their collapse still led to great destabilization. We are talking about the invasion of the so-called Sea Peoples, which took place at the turn of the 13th and 12th centuries BC. The Sea Peoples are mobile and warlike groups of people of unknown origin. They caused the collapse of several advanced cultures, including: Mycenaean and Hittite. Only the Egyptians managed to defeat them in a great battle. Well, the material for Lovecraftian inspiration is obvious. A mysterious army, coming out of nowhere, called the „Sea Peoples”, leading to the fall of the most powerful human civilizations at that time? Let us add that, according to some historians, the descendants of the Sea Peoples destroyed by the Egyptians were the Philistines. Yes, the same Philistines, one of whose main deities was the well-known Dagon to Lovecraftomaniacs… Deep Ones say hello. Let us also add that, according to Egyptian records, the tribes of the Sea Peoples had names such as Ekvesh, Teresh, Lucki, Sherden, Shekelesh, Tekel and Peleset. Sounds suitably dark, blasphemous and filthy? If we want to dig deeper, one of the pharaohs who ruled Egypt was Akhenaten – yes, that heretic who tried to replace the worship of traditional Egyptian gods with the religion of the Aten and who is very much liked by conspiracy theorists. Let’s add to the mix that Middle Eastern cultures had quite a negative attitude towards the sea as such. Babylonian Marduk had to defeat the giant monsters of Chaos – Apsu and Tiamat, personifications of fresh and salt waters, respectively. The Bible also contains traces of the myth about the fight between Yahweh and Leviathan, and the Book of Revelation, describing the new, ideal world, emphasizes that „I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.” Let’s assume that the players are researchers of an antiquity – historians, archaeologists, etc. They conduct research on the Sea Peoples. Of course, as common sense dictates, they assume that these were human warriors. However, as time goes on, more and more evidence appears that they were not completely human again, and the evidence of their monstrosity becomes increasingly difficult to put down to the demonization that Egyptian chroniclers used against their enemies… It becomes clear that an onslaught of inhuman and semi-human monsters came from the sea. , trying to conquer the world of that time. Moreover, after their defeat at the hands of the Egyptians, this species did not become extinct, but instead of open conquest it switched to cautious infiltration. Perhaps the Deep Ones have spies in academia who are tasked with eliminating historians who find the trail of truth…
Oh, one more interesting fact connecting the history of the Sea Peoples with Lovecraft. Well, as we know, HPL liked to use the term „Cyclopean” for huge, monumental buildings. At least he didn’t come up with it himself. Well, when the later (and at first more primitive) inhabitants, the Dorians, saw the ruins of destroyed castles left by the Mycenaean culture, they came to the conclusion that such huge buildings could not have been built by human hands, so they were probably the work of mythical giants – cyclopes.
Typhon – a classic but forgotten abomination
Modern works drawing on Greek mythology usually make Hades (completely senseless) or Kronos (a little more) the Big Bad, but they forget about Zeus’s greatest enemy – Typhon. After defeating the titans and then the gigants, the Olympian gods had to face the main boss on the way to dominating the world – Typhon. Here is an example of its description: It was larger than the largest mountains, its head touched the stars. When he stretched out his hands, one reached the eastern ends of the world and the other reached the western ends. Instead of fingers, he had a hundred dragon heads. From the waist down he had a tangle of vipers (yay, tentacles!) and wings at his shoulders. His eyes were shooting out flames. In other versions of the myth, Typhon was a flying, hundred-headed dragon. In any case – appearance and stature worthy of the Great Old One. Typhon attacked Olympus, and all the gods except Zeus fled in panic. The supreme god took up the fight… and lost it. Only in the second duel did he manage to defeat Typhon, but not kill him – he only imprisoned him, hitting him with Etna. In the sense of a mountain. A volcano – and volcanic activity is the result of Typhon’s anger, trying to break free. Typhon equaled the lord of heaven not only in strength, but in fertility. His wife was Echidna, about whom Hesiod wrote: „She also gave birth to another creature, invincible, huge, unlike neither men nor immortal gods, in a hollow cave – the divine violent Echidna, half a sharp-eyed young girl, with beautiful cheeks, half a huge snake, a great and powerful, spotted, cruel – in the depths of the holy land. This pair spawned many, if not most, of the monsters found in Greek mythology. Their offspring were very diverse and strange, as befits the spawn of enemies of the divine order, including: – Ladon, the hundred-headed dragon who never slept and guarded the apples that gave immortality, – Cerberus – we all know the dog guarding the gates of hell… but not all of us know that, according to some accounts, it had not three heads, but as many as 50, it was also covered with scales, and it had a snake by its tail… so what does this have to do with a dog? – Scylla – this lady inherited the most from the human, beautiful part of Echidna… at least initially, but eventually, as a result of various perturbations, she turned from a beautiful nymph to her siblings, becoming a six-headed sea beast, so hideous, according to Homer, that even the gods could not stand sight of her – she dwelt in a cave, from where she opened her mouth to devour the crews of ships, – Gorgons – I mean, those ladies with snake hair, not monstrous bulls. Medusa was one of them – the story that Athena turned her priestess into a monster as punishment for being raped by Poseidon is an invention of later poets, – Lernaean Hydra – a multi-headed monster with many reptilian or human heads. In place of each severed head, two others grew, and in addition, the main head was completely immortal – therefore, after chopping off the mortal heads, Heracles had to burn the stumps and bury the immortal, still hissing head underground. Hydra’s breath was poisonous. – various other creatures, such as the Sphinx, the dog Ortus, the Nemean Lion or the Chimera. Each of these descendants has the potential to be portrayed as an Eldritch abomination in its own right. To be precise – according to some accounts, the father of these creatures (and Echidna herself) was Typhon, but a monstrous, ancient (older than Poseidon) sea god, Phorcys. How to use Typhon? Well, Typhon clearly has the potential to be a Great Old One, imprisoned by… Nodens? Some other Elder God? Weak gods of humanity? Maybe his cult is trying to free him from Etna? What if he succeeds? What might distinguish Typhon from many other Great Old Ones? I would recommend focusing on his monster progenitor aspect – if he manages to reunite with Echidna, they will immediately start spawning various blasphemous beasts in series.
Jan Twardowski – the first man on the Moon
Jan (John) Twardowski, the hero of the legend, a Polish nobleman who allegedly sold his soul to the devil and became a sorcerer. Probably a historical figure, according to legend he lived in the 16th century and became famous for summoning the spirit of the deceased queen for King Sigismund Augustus. The ghost allegedly appeared in the mirror. This mirror is still kept in the church in Węgrów. According to legend, when the terms of the pact were fulfilled, devils came to kidnap Twardowski to hell. Interestingly, instead of taking the sorcerer’s soul after death, the most material demons appeared and grabbed Twardowski in order to kidnap him bodily, alive… and instead of heading towards the underground, which in legends is considered the traditional place of residence of demons and damned souls, they began to carry away up with him. At some point, Twardowski started singing religious songs, which caused the demons to escape, leaving him on the Moon, where he is said to have stayed ever since. Could the “demons” actually be extraterrestrials? Maybe mi-go? Maybe Twardowski was their agent and obtained secret knowledge and technology from them that gave him the fame of a sorcerer? As part of his studies, did he acquire knowledge of a system of sounds („religious songs”) that was able to drive away his masters when they decided that his usefulness on Earth had ended and it was time to transport him to a space base where he would be transformed into a brain in jar? Or was transportation to the Moon part of the deal from the beginning? Oh, one more interesting fact – according to legends, Twardowski used to use a rooster as a horse, which he enlarged with his magic. It’s easy to imagine an abomination that, in the eyes of laymen, might have resembled a large rooster… Examples of scenario hooks: – Twardowski’s secret mirror is still in the church in Węgrów. The local priest thinks it is just other „pagan” superstitions, but in fact it is a tool enabling contact with cosmic beings and higher realities. It may prove useful to players if they convince the priest to give it back or simply steal it. – Players are looking for Twardowski’s notes to gain knowledge about the „song” thanks to which he drove away mi-go (or other creatures that became the prototype of the „devils” from the legend). The so-called Twardowski’s „School” or „Cathedral” was located in a quarry near Kraków. In fact, at the end of the 19th century, during the construction of the church of St. Józef, a cave showing traces of alchemical experiments was discovered… And it was destroyed. But perhaps there is a second, secret laboratory under the cave that escaped destruction? And there lie Twardowski’s secrets… And again, potential obstacles may be placed by the local parish priest. But not only him. Maybe Twardowski’s legendary „rooster” lies dormant in the laboratory and was left by the sorcerer as a guard? – players are astronauts on the Moon. However, it turns out that someone lives here, someone who was not detected by previous expeditions and probes. Will Twardowski prove to be an ally in the fight against cosmic horrors? Or maybe their agent, or an independent villain? If he survived this long on the Moon thanks to blasphemous secrets, it’s possible that he had little humanity left…
The rest of the text is avalaible (of course, for free) here: https://adeptusrpg.wordpress.com/2024/05/13/some-lovecraftian-inspiration-form-real-life-and-beliefs/

Hey everyone. So I got my license last year, and got into real estate brokerage this year at a firm that does residential and commercial. I knew there would be a lot to learn so I prioritized mentorship as my number one in choosing my brokerage/team.
Now I am on a team and have to pay for prospecting systems and basically everything out of pocket, which I wasn’t quite expecting. There has been zero guidance on what an agent should do regularly to get leads (i.e. door knocking, cold calling, etc.) and I am left uncertain about what I should invest my time, effort and $$ into. I want to work hard, but don’t know which avenues to push myself and efficiently to create business (instead of busy work). The “team” structure appears to be in name only. Not to mention I am not able to shadow the partners and learn from them, so I am not really getting much from the partners, who seem to have no interest in showing me strategies for starting my first year strong. I’m upset. I don’t want to quit the industry, but am hoping for better options and more mentorship as a commercial agent just starting out. Have any of you been through anything similar? Do you have any suggestions?

UNMARKED SPOILERS BELOW, I will sadly go into spoiler territorry so often the post would look like a bad SCP Foundation article if I tried to black out every single one.
First thing I thought upon finding out about the Wizard Three in Sigil was to notice an opportunitty to include more iconic characters. As we learned more about their role I noticed several complaints about them. Like, "why are we having epic level NPCs relegating the work to mid-level party"? Or "isn't Tasha evil? What is she doing here?" Or "how the hell did Kas fool Tasha, who knows Mordekainen very well?". And so an idea to fix these issues all at once presented itself to me.
In this version of adventure, the PCs are summonned not by Wizard Three, but Wizard Nine. Nine iconic, high-level wizards or other magic users from across D&D worlds or even beyond. They were all summonned to Sigil, to each tap into one of Outer Planes of appriopriate aligment and channel that power into Wish, so the Will of the entire multiverse wishes of Vecna's death. Once it fails, the wizards realize it means one of them must nto be who they claim, possibly an agent of Vecna. So they immediatelly lock themselves in Sanctuary - only PCs can enter and leave because they weren't i nthe room doing the casting of that super Wish. And every time they return with next piece of the Rod, they find Wizards in most disfunctional game of Among Us ever, often probably erupting into violence - this is nine geniuses working AGAINST each other as everyone suspects everyone.
Now, you could keep the original reveal, where Mordekainen is the imposter. If you do, I would advocate against bringing any magic users who know him, like Tasha, Elminster, Storm Silverhand or Dalamar the Dark. If you decide to change the imposter's identity, you can happily bring in some of them, but I would avoid those who know each other (so if you want Elminster, then no Mordekainen or Dalamar).
Evil characters can work with this group because of several reasons, which they should be open about. They may vary from "You think I don't realize Vecna is going to screw ME over alongside everyone else", through "uppity gods need to be put in their place, especially this one" to "I would love what the guy is promising to do to all creation, but I'm not bending my knee to NOBODY!".
Below is a list of proposed characters to use from as many worlds I could think of. I will be comign back to this post to add more names and more worlds with further research, potentially going even beyond strictly D&D settings. You ca drop your own suggestions, I will happily add them to the list with next edit. All requirements are that the character is able to cast 9th level spells, if you have any notes for potential DM willing to use them, please provide them as well.
Eberron - I noticed most of suggestions for Eberron are of evil variety, due to the setting's lack of high-level heroic NPCs (with two exceptions that cannot leave their seats of power), but we'll work with what we have

• Mordain the Fleshweaver is the most popular suggestion, being a rare Chaotic Evil 18th level Wizard in Eberron. An issue is that Mordain is often used, and even recommended by Keith Baker to be used as Eberron's stand-in for Vecna. If you wanna run adventures with Hand or Eye of Vecna in Eberron, they are hand and Eye of Mordain. This may disqualify him, but you could alternatively play into it. Have Mordain rant Vecna is "ripping him off" or call the lich "a pale immitation of true dark sorcery".
• Hektula is Keith Baker's personal choice for a standin for Tasha. She is a pwoerful Rakshasa Archmage, with passion for collecting forbidden tomes of dark magic, serving one of the Overlords and firmly Lawful Evil. I certainly could see some laughs when wizards realize there's an impostor among them and all eyes turn towards Hektula, who goes "Of course, blame the shapeshifter!".
• I have seen floated idea for Sora Kell or her three daughters. The Daughters canonically in 3rd edition had levels 10 or 11 on top of being half-fiend Hags. You could maybe handwave that they get to cast 9th level spells as a coven, Sora Kell is more ambigious, with no statblock and her lore giving vibes of Baba Yaga, fans compare her to Demon Lords in power level. Personally I feel she would stand out too much.

Exandria (Critical Role) - I noticed most Exandria characters don't reach this high level - even Circle of Brass from Calamity were level 15. However, I found two options to provide a bit of fanservice for any critters at your table, both Chaotic Good:

• the Mighty Nein Reunion got us level 20 versions of Caleb Widogast, so he's great excuse for a DM to do their best Liam O'Brian impression of angsty bi diseaster wizard who really wishes he was back with his boyfriend, instead of being trapped here with all those asshole wizards.
• Not a wizard but a Bard, but if you want to bend a defintion a bit, Scanlan Shorthalt could be pulled out from a moment in time before he lost an ability to cast Wish. Considering this happens in final episode of Campaign 1 and their final enemy was Vecna, it would be thematically appriopriate.

Krynn (Dragonlance)

• Raistlin Majere is by FAR msot iconic character of the entire Dragonlance, the go to if you want to include an iconic Dragonlance character. Dragonlance Saga 15 anniversarry lists his aligment as Neutral, while 3rd edition book Legends of the Twins lits him as a Neutral Evil - the latter is after he becomes master of Time and Present and so powerful enough to be included.
• Dalamar the Dark - after Raistlin's demise, Dalamar was touted as new most powerful wizard, he was paired with Mordekainen and Elminster to form original Wizard Three. He is also listed as Neutral Evil, but I would argue he could be Lawful Evil.
• Fistandantilus - the greatest wizard before Raistlin, he is also Neutral Evil, but I woudl argue he's more CHaotic Evil, due to his tendency to backstab other wizards to steal their power. I honestly cannot see this guy working in this adventure, he seems like he would try to bodyjack someone and get 8 Desintegrates to the face.
• Phalin Majere - if you want a good-aligned representative of Krynn, Raistlin's nephew, Phalin is basically a magical prodigy and chosen one and firmly Lawful Good. The issue may be that it may be hard to find a time where he is powerful enough to be here, but before Wizard magic on Krynn went away (because all Gods, including Gods of magic, f*ed off to space and then had the whole planet stolen from under their noses) and he had to reclass to Sorcerer, starting all the way from the bottom.

Magic the Gathering - there are many worlds in this franchise, but they're often very shallow, so I will group this stuff together.

• My first pick would be Liliana Vess, originally from Dominaria, nowadays hanging out on Arcavios, home world of Strixheaven. Strixheaven book lists her as true neutral, and she has a history full of twists and turns where this character development from original evil could be justified. Personality-wise she could be the easiest quick replacement for Tasha, even if you don't feel like putting in the whole group of nine wizards. Also if you have player bringign back a Curricullum of Chaos PC for this game I can only imagine their jaw drop upon seeing "Provesso Vess" among greatest wizards in the Multiverse, snarking at all of them.
• Teferi Akosa, originally from Dominaria, now his homeland of Zalfir became a separate plane. He was always extremely powerful, what if accidentially phasing his whole country out of time and space, he was always heroic and good intended, but often prone of getting unwaranted suspictions from others, which makes him good for this kind of plot.
• From Ravnica we could pull either Jace Beleren or the dragon-mage Niv-Mizzet, during their respective time as the Living Guildpact, representative of all 10 Guilds of Ravnica. In this position their could fit well for neutral-aligned places of aligment chart, Jace leaning towards Neutral Good or Lawful Neutral somewhat more.
• Speaking of Dragons, here is a crazy idea - Nicol Bolas, one of greatest villains in Magic as Chaotic Evil representative. Okay, it may be not a good idea, I cannot imagine a situation where he doesn't try to hijack the plot and take Vecna's place or just kill everyone when the problem of potential traitor arises. Still, the idea of this really evil demigod-drgon being his petty, snarky self towards other iconic characters is kinda funny.
• For a reach more into Magic's past, we have Urza, original protagonist. He would fit well into Lawful Neutral or even Lawful Evil role, considering last time he dedicated himself to stop multiversal-level threat, original Phyrexia, his means quickly "begun resembling Phyrexian ends". This is the guy who honestly tried to outeugenics a wizard nazi "for greater good". Seriously, so much of Magic lore can be summed up with words "Local Man Ruins Everything" and picture of Urza.
• A different type of Magic candidate is Jodah, ultrapowerful Archmage who is not a planeswalker like others, but had often maneuver around them, so he is used to having to outsmart powerful people. He represents all colors of mana so he would fit for any of middle collum positions.
• Jodah old associate, Jaya Ballard, could also work very well, considering she did eventually ecame so powerful some planes confused her with a diety and established religions to her. She strikes me as a Neutral Good candidate.

Mystara - one of my beloved classic worlds, poses an issue because it never conformed to classic 9-types aligment, isntead opting for lawful (defined as "altruistic") and chaotic ("selfish"). A rare exception, 2e book Glantri: Kingdom of Magic, was a big help here.

• Prince Haldemar of Haaken - protagonist of series of short stories "Voyage of Princess Ark". Daring explorer, captain of flying ship Princess Ark, hero of Empire of Alphatia. Champions of Mystara describes him as good and heroic but having "typical Alphatian chaotic thendencies". As such I'd lean towards Chaotic Good or Neutral Good.
• Bargle the Infamous - Chaotic Evil, if D&D ever had something close to the Joker, it was Bargle. Bargle was originally an evil wizard who kills mentolove interest of the player in introductory adventure of Red Box, but this made him enemy #1 of whole generations of players and elevated to first iconic evil wizard. I would be wary of using him, as any D&D veteran or grognard may forget about Vecna in favor of trying to strangle the guy with his bare hands.
• Demetrion Karagentreropolus - most powerful Archmage in Empire of Thyatis (think: fantasy Roman Empire), he is of lawful aligment and described as sometiems working secretly to undermine Emperor's decisions that he finds to be bad for the Empire and its people. As such he could slot as Lawful Good.
• Empress Eriadna the Wise of Alphatia - current Empress of Alphatia, canonically of Neutral aligment, she rules msot powerful empire in the world and probably haven't conquered all of it only because her subjects care more for magical research and getting high. She's 80-years old.
• Prince Zandor - 40-years old son of empress Eriadna, described as "chaos personified", his aligment is "Chaotic (very)". Thanks to Mr. Welch it became popular to play him as wizard version of Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. Use him if you want a comic relief.
• Master Terari - former Emperor of Alphatia, he abdicated in favor of Eriadna and disappeared, he now runs magic school in a small kingdom of Karameikos, he is working to ascend to Immortality (basically godhood without calling it so).
• Principalities of Glantri have multiple Princes of various all kinds of aligment. The country got 2e book which gave them classic aligment., I will list them below, but two I would avoid are Eitienne d'Amberville and Jaggar von Drachenfels, since they are actually Immortals (Rad, patron of magic and Diamond,, discount Bahamut, respectively). Immortals officially aren't Gods, but this is often a distinction without difference, so I cannot see them showing up in Sigil without Lady of Pain nuking the whole building.
• Princess Carnelia de Belcadiz y Fedorias (Lawful Neutral, extremely beautiful, known for her horrible temper) and Princess Carlotina Erewan ((LG, basically discount Galadriel) rule two Elven principalities, the latter rules more traditional Elves, the former's subjects are...Spanish Elves. Yes, really. They do not like each other.
• On the evil side we have Prince Morphail Gorevitch-Woszlany (wizard Nosferatu, which is like Vampire with less weaknesses, he's Strahd on steroids), Princess Dolores Hilsbury (actually a Night Dragon, undead dragon-shaped mosnter, in disguise) and Prince Brannart McGregor (lich, he's actually from real-world Scotland, I kid you not). All three are Chaotic Evil and hide their true nature, though considering Morphail looks like he walked out of set of Dracula, they aren't trying very hard.
• Rounding Glantri princes we have Prince Jherek Virayana (Neutral, master of illusions, he deflected to Glantri from their mortal enemies, Ethengar Khanates, so he is used to being under suspiction for treachery) and Prince Harald Haaskinz (LG, he's kinda new guy in the club).

Oearth (Greyhawk)

• I don't want to spend much time on Oerth since I suspect anyone using this will use either Mordekainen and/or Tasha, who are already in the module. But some alternatives could be any of wizards who have spells named after them - Bigby is neutral, Tenser is Lawful Good, Leomund is Lawful Neutral or Lawful Good, Nystrul is Neutral, Rary is Neutral Evil

Toril (Forgotten Realms)

• Alustriel was already included. She and her five sisters (not counting Dove Silverhand, who is a Ranger and a Ghost) all fit similair role as "big good immortal sorcerress". With exception of Alassra Silverhand a.k.a. Simbul the Witch-Queen, who is Chaotic Neutral, they're all Chaotic Good, so I see little point switching Alustriel for another one if you want CG spot to be fit by someone from Toril. I would also be wary of using Storm Silverhand, who, according to Ed Greenwood, helped real Mordekainen recover after his role in Curse of Strahd and has a "friends with benefits" relationship with him.
• Elminster is also Chaotic Good, I don't get why WotC shy away from using him. I get he is controversial, but his exclusion has been kinda awkward here. They really don't think Kas can fool Elminster, but he can fool Tasha? As far as I know only one of them slept with Mordekainen, like come on! Anyway, if you want to use him, Elmisnter is also Chaotic Good, so kinda redundant with other Choosen of Mystra.
• Larloch the Shadow-King or Szass Tam could each work as a powerful lawful evil lich, that allies with the good guys out of spite against interloper god that dared throw their weight around and claim godhood over THEIR world. Larloch in particular is no stranger of going against gods and their servants, who seek to rewrite rules of magic that is basic of his power - just ask Shar and her servants at Shade Enclave.
• While characters from Baldur's Gate 3 end their adventure around 13th level, Book Minsc & Boo's Journal of Villain contains statblocks of multiple characters from previous two games. Edwin Odesserion, infamous Red Wizard of Thay, is among them, powerful enough to fit in the group.

Domains of Dread (Ravenloft) - I put this one last because of unique use we could have out of Domaind of Dread in this campaign. You see, we know that characterstrapped in Demiplane of Dread cannot leave that easily, they need Dark Powers' permission. And Dark Powers are backing up Kas. I have also seen multiple complaints how both main antagonists of this campaign - Vecna nad Kas - are absent from most of it, with many ideas being thrown around about having Kas as an active rival that competes for pieces of the Rod. It occured to me that he may play that role, while we still have an impostor - another character trapped in Demiplane of Dread could be working with Kas and the Dark Powers in exchange for their freedom. This way we could even allow PCs to sherlock holmes who the traitor is between collecting different pieces of the Rod, and still can have Kas show up with hordes of monsters to steal the Rod later. All that matters is they do not impersonate a character of the same aligment. Here are some candidates for this role:

• from Forgotten Realms, we could reach for semi-official suppliment minsc and Boo's Journal of Villainy, written by lead writer of first two Baldur's Gate games. It suggests an alternate fate for main villains of Baldur's Gate II - Jon Irenicus and his sister Bodhi - that places them in Demiplane of Dread, leading their own evil cult working towards their escape. He is neutral evil, she is Chaotic Evil
• From Mystara we have Meredoth, main antagonist of classic Ravenloft module Ship of Horrors, condemned to Demiplane of Dread afre his negligence caused his subjects to die of starvation. TWICE!. He is cursed to be unable to discover new magic on his own and having to steal knowledge, so he would be itching, as a mole, to steal from other eight wizards in the room. He's Chaotic Evil.

That's for now, but rest assured, I shall be returning to this post to update it with more characters, potentially more campaign worlds even. Your suggestions whom to add are always welcome.

So the last few years have been rough.
*note* if you're a "cheaters will always be cheaters type" tldr is don't bother reading or commenting
BACKSTORY 2019-2023 child nearly annual broken bones, lots of stress and specialist visits.
2018-2024 my wife got her associates as a medical assistant and is almost done with her bachelor's and final quarter internship while working full time and that has been hard for me. The lack of time for me and my son has really made an impact.
2019 I was injured at work and 2020 had my first surgery to try and preserve an ankle joint. That surgery ended up failing and while recovering I ended up mangling 2 fingertips in a wood jointer. 2020 I had to make the transition to a sahd on workers comp and have been since then. My lifestyle of hiking and fishing was upended because I could barely be on my feet 3 hours a day and uneven ground killed me not to mention the whole covid thing was pretty isolating.
All of 2021 was supporting her being a surrogate for a couple in City X (their egg/sperm). So, lots of trips checks and giving her injections. It was kind of proving myself to her because I was terrified when our son was born in 2017 and didn't help as much as I should have. Especially the first 3 months. Really, I didn't find out until later. We had conversations and fights at the time and id step up to do more and she would agree and tell me it was all okay. Then another fight saying I wasn't doing enough/anything and asking more and me being upset and confused. I guess at the time she was afraid to ask more, or tell me what she wanted, or her feelings, and the postpartum depression and initial feelings of abandonment didn't help.
Anyways the surrogacy went okay. I was there and supportive. Rubbing her feet and back. taking on extra load when she was tired etc. And hey I didn't pass out at delivery this time XD The end was a bit hard with 2 inductions needed and a massive 9.5lb baby and a stuck shoulder.
Then a few weeks after birth in November 2021 the nightmare began.
Out of nowhere she started hemorrhaging. She had to have an emergency D&C to stop the bleeding and scans showed a mass. Turned out the surrogate baby's placenta had some cells turn cancerous and attach to her uterus (Choriocarcinoma). 3 months later and the first 3 agent chemo failed, and her numbers were skyrocketing because it turned treatment resistant. They had to hit it with 5 types of chemo (EMACO) leaving future fertility a coin toss but more than a hysterectomy. By May 2022 the tumor marker was gone, but it was 6 months of intense monitoring and 6 months of monthly monitoring. The whole time she was in an intense spiraling depression questioning life. The meaning of all it, and how all her childhood trauma was fair. That no god would let a child live that. And questioning every decision in her life and wondering what things could have been like if she went a different direction. Feeling like she missed out on opportunities early in life. If this might be all there is (we have been together since she was 17). She said she felt like reality wasn't real and this was make believe at times.
Summer 2022 she made a new mom friend. She was pretty toxic and selfish. She used my wife for personal benefit and to go places. Yelled at her kids and treated the oldest from a prior marriage as less than (girl doesn't know her dad and when she mentioned she was part Mexican she freaked out and denied it because of how conservative and anti Mexican her new dad and his family is). Like never offered a dime, but expected food, gas, tickets, and gifts. She drove my wife nuts with that behavior. but she was desperate for a friend and loved her kids. Her friend would just talk shit about her partner pretty constantly and say my wife should be unhappy in her relationship too. Shit talking husbands behind their backs became like a mutual thing and I def hated it
Sometime 2023 she jumped into fantasy romance and fantasy smut /erotica. This progressed to an AI chat smut generator.
May 2023 monitoring was over and she was officially cancer free and had been on a health/mental health quest..
The mental health part started early in the year and she was seeing a therapist for depression and anxiety alone as well as her long list of childhood trauma. Off hand her therapist told her a few times she didn't know maybe just divorce me or something. I was super uncomfortable with this as it was completely outside her practicing scope and I didn't feel she should be providing relationship guidance, especially without me or the rest of the story. I felt a bit attacked and didn't even get the chance to give my perspective or account and felt that is pretty important after being here for a decade. A lot of negative points get omitted by her.
Summer 2023 she had some tough diagnosis for other chronic issues. Narcolepsy Dissociative Identity disorder Depression And a sleep disorder
I initially rejected this as I didn't want to accept these chronic and incurable conditions and insisted it has to be something else, that she's okay. It was taken as rejection of her.
Fall 2023 she reached out to a childhood ex bf a few states away and started an emotional affair. They kept in infrequent contact over the years and nothing ever came of it before. He has been unable to move past her or have meaningful relationships in 13 years. At first he pushed her away and rejected it, but after a month by Nov it was a thing. Texting saying I shouldn't worried because they dated before, but he ended up coming out as gay, calls in private, staying later after work. I gave it the benefit of the doubt but got burned. I found out in December the second time she wanted a private call in the car, and I checked her phone.
We started marriage counseling in Jan and I started my own therapy search as well as a condition of hers. She agreed to no longer contact the boy showed me the sent message ending it and blocked him. By Feb I found him listed in her phone as Saraa and found deleted texts and calls. In therapy she wanted to keep him as a friend and only friend and I tried this. She asked if a PO box would be okay for a birthday present, and I said no. That it crossed a line. It was also super close to Valentine's day. Next therapy I couldn't handle the anxiety and feeling physically ill when she used her phone, and we went through Jan again break off block etc.
In Feb the therapist recommended a separate space for conflict as we work on things. That too much conflict triggered her dissociative identity disorder. It was either a hotel as needed or a rv/camper. My wife was set on a camper and the only way to get a newer one was to add my credit/income to hers for a loan and I was uncomfortable on a $20k purchase. She assured me the intent of the camper was working on us and not separating/divorcing. She brought up me not having chores completely done all the time and I poured myself into it if that was making her unhappy over the years.
During this time in March I found out she got the secret PO box and had yet again resumed texting entirely deleting her logs. She had valentines gifts. birthday gifts, long distance electronic bracelets, and had an easter basket coming. Everything was put together into a box to be gotten rid of. That effort I had for chores and making everything spotless kind of died. Like there was that recognition that that obviously wasn't the problem. We lived completely separately for a few weeks until she could make a choice. We split our son and had almost zero interaction. Eventually she chose and I saw a notebook she used once in December. Basically she has started outlining a story envisioning herself as the lead character in once of her romantic fantasies and cast me and the other man as competing love interests
April and early may there was nothing. We did therapy and tackled our issues slowly. Together. Our future plans: college vs baby and the ticking clock of fertility and ifs after chemo. Etc
Last week she was going out for lilac picking and didn't text me for 2 hours and said she was at the beach. Later she showed me something in her email and I saw discord emails about a pw change and login. One bad gut feeling later and the next morning I see she deleted the discord emails and check our phone plan and her phone and see missing texts. I put in a phone record request for recent texts and text/call logs. She woke up and I said it did it and she said I was disgusting. Then admitted I was right.
She says after breaking it off she was worried he would hurt himself and just wanted to be sure he was okay and admitted to 3 texts and the discord call which i verified. Said that he was in therapy for his issues. She said she didn't want to bring it up to me because I would make it a fight and she thought she could just get away with a few texts to make sure. That she felt responsible for how much he had been hurt too.
So I did what I do with extreme anxiety and checked her work bag. I found an old journal they shared Jan to mid-march. Kind of confirmed again what was going on. Also revealed she lied to me about the trailer, or him? She couldn't get it without me and told him it was to work on separating from me easier. Yeah I kept pics in case this goes downhill because yeah, I'll gun for EVERYTHING. I'm sure that being tricked into signing a $20k contract under false pretenses for her personal benefit, secret po boxes, lying to our therapist repeatedly, secret texts, expecting gifts from the other man, career over spending time with family and a serious personality disorder on top of narcolepsy making a job hard to keep down wont do her favors at divorce/custody hearings.
So its all fresh for me again. I already have extreme anxiety and the autism doesn't help with reading/understanding people the best, although my gut intuition and pattern recognition are catching stuff fine.
WHERE I THINK I AM
Looking back, I can see that the personality disorder and narcolepsy are apparent. Dream delusion and memory issues from the narcolepsy make separating dream from reality hard as well as just recalling what happened. So whether not the "not feeling like reality is real" was a dream delusion or a full-blown dissociative episode... I can also see that messaging him was a "new" personality state. Maybe it's a manifestation of the trauma of nearly dying from cancer, maybe it's a fragment of her young identity that was created to survive her traumatic childhood resurfacing after nearly dying. But her interests and perspective massively shifted at that time and there was a clear separation between her with me and her with him. It was like this regression back to 15. Like she was molding an identity to fit his desires and interests. She took up tarot and witchy books, different music, painting, rockhounding (my interest), dried bouquets, dyed her hair and got multiple piercings. Even getting caught there was that click in her whole demeanor.
I can see how her friend may have jaded her towards me by all the shit she talked about HER husband. I can see that throwing herself into fantasy smut to cope flooded her with portrayals of unrealistic romance. That she progressed that by using an AI smut bot to hold those conversations with. Then she directly tried to process her own reality through the lens of those novels in that journal.
This "relationship" was "I love you, we can be together in 10 years". He wasn't going to leave his cushy job. Or his state. He didn't want to be a stepdad. He didn't want to support her career or have any involvement in it. She couldn't leave my state. Never saw illicit photos. No discussion of sex. It was like exactly what you think some lovestruck preteens would come up with. Like just a fantasy. No talk of bills or finances. Of moving. Of any substantial tangible entanglement.
Somehow that's easier to handle
I love her and don't want to leave her. But i desperately think she needs serious help and have told her I want her to do therapy 2x a month (on top of marriage therapy 2x).
I also think if a secret or deleted text happens again, I've got to take off the kid gloves and fight for it all. Cause well showing up at the dude's door would end in prison.
I'm sure this happening right as I fully got over last time and took a trust leap of faith on a "gay" friend that burned me will make it harder. I get the last few years have been garbage luck and I get almost dying can have profound affects though. She had been utterly loyal for 5 years (believe me I checked as we agreed to ie open book). Tying to see this with an open mind.
I get my exact expectations are muddy and part of this is just putting it into words to process for me, but I value if someone has any good input

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTLbLbjXf/
I found this TT account yesterday, he's a retired secret service agent looking into the case. They isolated the 911 call and heard a man saying My folder before you hear Mica speak. Sorry if this has already been posted, I did a search of the sub before posting & couldn't find anything about it. I will remove if it's already been posted.