Scenario Background
- At November 11, 2025
- By Great Quail
- In Call of Cthulhu
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To shake off the maddening and wearying limitations of time and space and natural law—to be linked with the vast outside—to come close to the nighted and abysmal secrets of the infinite and the ultimate—surely such a thing was worth the risk of one’s life, soul, and sanity!
—H.P. Lovecraft, “The Whisperer In Darkness”
Introduction
The Keeper is encouraged to read the original 1992 scenario, “The Music of the Spheres.” The background of Bible Black is similar to the original, and involves the approach of Ghroth and the Mi-Go’s attempts to stop the Harbinger. However, Bible Black offers a deeper background history and a more complicated plot than the original scenario. It’s also more apocalyptic in scope, and unfolds in a world that will forever be altered by the player characters’ actions or inactions.
Ghroth
First imagined by Ramsey Campbell in “The Tugging,” Ghroth the Harbinger is a planet-sized Outer God possessing a single, titanic eye. Tasked with preparing worlds for the coming of the Old Ones, Ghroth emanates a “Song” that affects the sentient life of a nearby star system, driving its inhabitants to increasingly deranged extremes of madness and adoration. According to Chaosium’s Malleus Monstrorum, Ghroth has the ability to raise dead gods and reshape time and space itself.
All of this is true in Bible Black; however, there are innumerable “incidents” of Ghroth. The Harbinger exists in many locations across the multiverse, avatars of a central being coiled within the nuclear chaos of Azathoth. Imagine Ghroth as a multi-dimensional worm threading through time and space, taking spherical form wherever it intersects three-dimensional spacetime. In certain incarnations, Ghroth is a destroyer; as when it annihilated the worlds of Yelithka, Mormol, and Shaggai. At other times Ghroth resurrects dead things; as when it brought the Void Chorus back to life on Tond. Sometimes the Harbinger reconditions time and space itself; as when it collapsed the Andromeda Horocycle, trapping ten billion Mi-Go in a two-dimensional prison of timeless agony.
And in some incarnations, Ghroth culls a system of emerging sentience.
Nemesis
An avatar of Ghroth has accompanied Sol since the formation of the Solar System. Adopting the form of a brown dwarf, Ghroth orbits the Sun beyond the Oort cloud around 95,000 AU (1.5 light years away)—making it the “Nemesis” star first hypothesized in 1983 by Richard A. Muller, Marc Davis, Piet Hut, and Gerald Neal. Because of its effects on the comets in the Oort cloud, every 26 million years Nemesis redirects swarms of deadly missiles towards the Earth. (See “Background—The Nemesis Theory.”)
Function
The function of Ghroth/Nemesis is to monitor the Sol system for signs that sentient life has been developing technology capable of propelling them into interstellar space. These technologies include faster than light travel, interdimensional engineering, teleportation, and artificial intelligence. Once such signs are detected, Ghroth provokes catastrophic events and mass apocalypse. This “Culling” is intended to eliminate threats to the Old Ones, returning the system to a more atavistic state. It’s also designed to preserve more enlightened specimens of troublemakers. These “Elected Ones” will be reprogrammed/groomed as heralds of a New Age, equipped with proper deference to the Old Ones and elevated above the huddled preterite masses.
Crisis
In the history of the Earth, Ghroth has only been activated once before—when the Great Race of Yith became too powerful, and began researching ways to neutralize the Harbinger. The cone-beings were destroyed and their cities ruined by a catastrophe that freed the polyps and eliminated the dinosaurs. The Yithians fled their ravaged eon by leaping forward in time and possessing the beetle race destined to succeed humanity.
For the last 300,000 years, Ghroth has been content to merely monitor human beings. They posed little threat, and their nuclear bombs were hardly worse than slings and arrows. Nor did humans seem likely to discover interdimensional travel—in fact, the presence of Mi-Go in the Solar System ensured the Apeirogon remained closed to all but the greatest sorcerers and dreamers. Nor was it the stirrings of faster-than-light travel that attracted the Harbinger’s attention.
It was artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Strangely enough, not all advanced civilizations create synthetic life; but those that pursue this path sometimes open a floodgate of “forbidden” knowledge. Higher mathematics, life extension, wormhole technology, interstellar travel—all take a quantum leap forward when AI is merged with advanced computational machines. And while most timelines showed humans defeated by their own creations and being replaced by the Yith-doomed beetle race, a few troubling scenarios predicted humanity surging rapidly from Sol, their AI minions flooding the Orion Arm as they evolved into a true interstellar civilization.
And just like that, Ghroth was activated.
Still rousing itself from slumber, the Harbinger has begun drifting towards the heliopause, emanating its deadly Song. Soon a chorus of deranged minds will be singing in unison, and Ghroth will cross interplanetary space at the speed of prayer. As the Harbinger blots out the Sun, the Great Eye shall open and the Culling begin.
Immanentizing the Eschaton
If no humans had responded to the Song of Ghroth, the Harbinger would take decades to reach Earth. But what a boring scenario that would be! No, Bible Black represents the literal worst-case scenario. Not only has Ghroth been discovered by astronomers at the Great Plains Cruciform Array, they’ve become obsessed with amplifying, developing, and refining the Song. Their reckless actions are transforming the GPCA into an “anchor point,” a place where Ghroth can tether itself to Earth and accelerate its approach. (In classic Mythos terms, they’re unwittingly opening a Gate for a malevolent god.) If these scientists are not stopped from spreading the Song of Ghroth, the Culling will arrive in months rather than decades! (See “Song of Ghroth” for details and game mechanics.)
The Mi-Go
Ghroth is not the only alien entity the players face in Bible Black. The GPCA is also under the watchful eyes of the Mi-Go.
The Arrival
The Mi-Go arrived in the solar system by traveling through the extra-dimensional Apeirogon from their closest hub in the Orion Arm, Kappa Tauri in the Hyades Cluster. They settled on Yuggoth—the dwarf planet humans would eventually call Pluto—then filtered through the Solar System and colonized Earth during the Jurassic period. Because of the precise size of the Moon and the radius of its orbit, Earth is a rare terrestrial planet that experiences exact solar eclipses. This provides the “coronal emanations” required for the isotopic tempering of tok’l, the aluminum-based alloy the Mi-Go use for their precious brain cylinders. (See “Faction—Mi-Go Technology” for details about the Apeirogon, tok’l, and brain cylinders.)
Yuggoth
The Hidden
The population of terrestrial Mi-Go has been declining for the last few millennia. The explosive growth of humanity has forced them into increasingly remote locations. By the turn of the twenty-first century, only a few thousand Outer Ones were left on the planet, and their once-great cities in Spain and the Himalayas have been largely abandoned. The remaining Mi-Go are divided into three castes: the Miners, who continue to process tok’l, the Librarians, who preserve the Great Library of terrestrial brain cylinders, and the Watchers, who monitor the advancement of human technology. As humans have evolved towards interplanetary travel, this latter caste has become more important. Once humans develop the ability to reach Yuggoth, some hard decisions will have to be made!
Close Encounters
Most military bases and major technological sites are monitored by Watchers, including nuclear weapon facilities and power plants, space centers, research laboratories, particle accelerators, and of course, radio telescopes. The Outer Ones observe and occasionally intervene in human activities using a wide range of technologies often interpreted as UAP-related phenomena—floating orbs, UFOs, alien abduction, implantation, and so on. Up until recently, this system worked reasonably well. But then humanity woke up Ghroth.
The Ghroth Crisis
The Mi-Go are terrified of Ghroth. Not only has the Harbinger annihilated several of their intergalactic colonies, it once collapsed a major horocycle in the Andromeda Galaxy, a catastrophe that trapped ten billion Mi-Go in a two-dimensional prison. Even some 250 million years later, the Apeirogon resonates with their screams. The Mi-Go have long feared that humanity’s unchecked progress would awaken Ghroth, and now that fear has become a reality. Yuggoth is in immediate danger—it’s probable the Harbinger will simply devour the dwarf planet!—and the Earth will be changed beyond recognition. Indeed, it’s likely the Moon itself will be deleted, making the Earth virtually useless to the Mi-Go.
The Distress Call
On 6 February 2023 the Mi-Go issued a distress call to their base in the Hyades Cluster, an artificial planet orbiting the twin stars of Kappa Tauri. This required a tremendous expenditure of energy to induce a momentary wormhole, and was the event that triggered the devastating Syria-Turkey earthquake. (Yuggoth is unsuitable for such transmissions because of its small mass.) On 14 February 2023 they received an answer. The transmission contained instructions for the Mi-Go to depart the Solar System immediately, leaving behind a small fraction of Watchers and Librarians to collapse the Solar Horocycle. This action would remove the “contaminated” region from the Apeirogon, sealing off a bubble of space some 33 light years around the Sun and containing the “local incident” of Ghroth. The Mi-Go would have to act quickly, abandoning their facilities on Earth, Triton, and Yuggoth.
The Hyades Cluster
The Sacrifice
Closing a horocycle is no easy task! It requires that eighty-one Mi-Go link their minds to the Great Library and trigger an interdimensional feedback loop. This won’t just destroy the Great Library, it will permanently trap the involved minds in the collapsed horocycle. Such imprisonment becomes a living death, an endless state of inchoate awareness with no hope of escape, rescue, or self-termination. Fortunately for the Mi-Go, a group of Librarians volunteered to make the sacrifice. After all, if the Great Library was to be destroyed, what purpose would they have remaining?
The Heresy
Once the majority of Mi-Go were evacuated from the Solar System, less than 200 remained on Earth, approximately three-quarters being Librarians. Unbeknownst to their departed comrades, the majority of these volunteers—Librarians and Watchers alike—had no intention of following their orders. On 8 November 2023 these “Heretics” turned on their trusting companions and purged their ranks. Forty-two Outer Ones were imprisoned that day, their bodies dissolved in acid and their core minds imprisoned in cylinders. The Heretics were free to enact their own solution to the Ghroth Crisis.
The Plan
The Heretics believe they can force Ghroth back into dormancy by eliminating the reason it was activated in the first place—human progress. This means destroying humanity’s capacity to advance along the frontiers of artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and interdimensional mathematics. An ambitious project indeed; but the Heretics reason that once they deactivate Ghroth, their evacuated comrades will return and offer their assistance. And if that means the Mi-Go must wage war against humanity, so be it. This upstart race has developed far too quickly, and the Earth is too valuable to leave to monkeys! Before this campaign can truly begin, however, the Heretics must obstruct the Harbinger. They must stop humans from hearing—and spreading!—the Song of Ghroth.
| Mi-Go Politics The Mi-Go are a very practical race. Despite their tendency to produce specialized castes and divide into ideological factions, the Outer Ones rarely wage war against themselves. The Heretics believe they’ll be absolved once they present their comrades with a successful fait accompli. Those forty-two imprisoned minds can be given new bodies, after all. The real controversy will be the inevitable war against humanity. Should it be a gradual campaign of subterfuge, sabotage, and assassination; or a merciless pogrom of annihilation and enslavement? |
The Hyades Valentine
On 14 February 2023 a GPCA array operator named Leo Sawyer was gathering data on stellar tidal tails for a visiting astronomer named Dr. William Snow. Possessed by a mysterious flash of intuition, Leo directed the array to a point near Kappa-1 Tauri at precisely 9:12 PM. To his astonishment, he received a strange signal that lasted for 21 seconds, then repeated for 12 more seconds until fading out. It could not be reacquired. Logging the signal and printing a hard copy, Leo jokingly referred to it as the “Hyades Valentine.” Both Leo and Dr. Snow agreed the signal was a possible SETI candidate, but as excited as they were, they continued the scheduled research. The next day Leo reported the transmission to Director Gerald Neal, who immediately understood this could be another “Wow!” signal. Unfortunately, so did the two Mi-Go Watchers assigned to monitor the GPCA, hereafter referred to as Watcher One and Watcher Two.
The 1919 solar eclipse with κ1 and κ2 Tauri marked
On 16 February 2023, the Mi-Go abducted Gerald Neal, Leo Sawyer, and William Snow. They implanted them with colophons and wiped their memories clean. (See “Faction—Mi-Go Technology.”) Under the influence of the Mi-Go conditioning, Leo was compelled to destroy his hard copy and erase the Hyades Valentine from the GPCA databanks. Neal returned to work somewhat dazed, excusing the lost time as “too many glasses of Merlot.” Snow had a more severe reaction. He returned home to Kearney and fell deathly ill. After three miserable days sweating out bootleg whiskey and alien drugs, Snow emerged from an hallucinatory fever with the memories of his visit to Hayden completely purged. As far as the good doctor was concerned, he had spent the last week in bed with COVID! (See “Character Secrets and Development” for details on Snow’s selective amnesia.)
The Destabilization of Leo Sawyer
The Mi-Go made a critical error in their treatment of Leo Sawyer. The Watchers were unaware that Leo has an enlarged caudate-putamen, a pair of brain structures that help govern sensory perception, emotional balance, cognitive function, and motor control. Having been diagnosed with OCD and mild autism, Leo’s symptoms of irritability and depression were being treated by aripiprazole. The combination of Leo’s brain chemistry and his prescription medication made the colophon incompatible with his nervous system. As Leo developed strange urges to obey alien commands, he simply upped his dosage of Abilify. The operator was also fond of recreational drugs such as marijuana, ketamine, and psilocybin. Repressed memories began to reassemble in Leo’s brain—memories of a mysterious transmission, of being forcibly removed from his Jeep, of being strapped to a concave table. He also began hallucinating long sequences of data, especially when he was high. Something about a Hyades Valentine? He began scribbling the data in a pink Barbie notebook.
As Leo struggled with the demands of his conditioning, his behavior became more erratic. His work suffered, and his dreams were haunted by nightmares of flashing lights and long needles. He began to entertain the possibility that he wasn’t going “crazier,” that maybe these “alien commands” actually did originate from outside his neurodivergent brain. Leo’s body began rejecting the colophon, and he developed a bizarre disfigurement on the back of his neck, one that sprouted coarse fibers of an unnatural indigo color. Doctor Singer reluctantly diagnosed Leo with delusional parasitosis—Morgellons disease—and recommended him to a specialist in Kearney. Leo did not take Singer’s advice. Instead, he remained in Hayden and continued his downward spiral.
On 13 December 2023, Leo Sawyer locked himself in his dormitory room at the GPCA. He pounded a fifth of J&B, overdosed on aripiprazole, and dug the implant from of his neck using a box-knife and a pair of needle-nose pliers. Holding the defunct colophon in his hand, Leo had all the evidence he needed. He had been abducted by aliens! He vomited blood and whiskey all over his bed, had a seizure, and collapsed into unconsciousness. Two days later Leo showed his Barbie notebook and implant to Dr. Harlan Bennett at the GPCA holiday party. Bennett tried to calm the fevered operator, but Leo began screaming accusations at Director Neal—“You know we were abducted by aliens! You know this is real! Something happened to us!” The following day Leo Sawyer was fired. Barred from the facility grounds, he never saw his notebook again.
Dark Skies
Descending further into paranoia, Leo became convinced that aliens were hunting him. He holed up in room 207 of the Close Encounters Motor Lodge, the local motel operated by his on-and-off-again girlfriend Ruby Schooner. Now free from the Mi-Go implant, Leo began scratching the Hyades Valentine into the wall of his room. He also called Carrie Osbourne, the GPCA Facilities Manager.
Known as “Kooky Carrie,” Carrie Osbourne was an avid believer in astrology, Tarot, and UFOs. She and Leo had a brief affair in early 2023. Meeting downstairs in Room 108, Leo entrusted the inert implant to his former paramour. He begged Carrie to leave her boyfriend Stanley Arnold and run away with him, “somewhere safe.” Although Leo and Carrie had one final tryst—partly for old time’s sake, partly because Carrie pitied him—she left a few hours later, conflicted and confused.
Having scared off Carrie and actively “freaking out” Ruby, Leo Sawyer renewed his affections with a third flame, a stripper named Rhonda Petty. Exploiting her contacts in the criminal underworld—a rangy deejay named Tyler Nelson—Leo purchased a shotgun and arranged for a steady supply of illicit drugs. The psychedelics helped him remember the transmission, and he continued to refine the Hyades Valentine on Ruby’s wall.
At 3:15 am the morning of 18 January 2024, Leo Sawyer was visited by Watcher One. Alerted to the presence of the alien by the barking of the motel’s dog, Leo awoke to discover a terrible form at the threshold of his door. He blasted it with his shotgun and the Mi-Go scuttled away. Leo followed the first round with a second that shattered the window. (See “Location—Close Encounters Motor Lodge, Room 208.”) Having reached the end of his rope, Leo bid Ruby a frantic farewell and departed Hayden for good. After a few months of wandering, he holed up in a saucertown in the Toadstool badlands. Leo has spent the past year constructing a device be believes will decipher the Hyades Valentine. (See “Asynchronous Encounter 4—Finding Leo Sawyer.”)
The Nemesis Signal
On 8 January 2024 Leo Sawyer’s replacement arrived at the GPCA, a young array operator named Jay Osman. He was there only a week when he began detecting a faint radio signal from a brown dwarf transiting across the Ghost Nebula in the constellation of Cepheus. The object seemed shockingly close to the Solar System, and its signal exhibited a vague pattern of some kind—but natural or artificial? The discovery was intriguing enough to warrant a SETI expert, and Director Neal asked Ruth Swann to join the team.
The Ghost Nebula
As the GPCA continued to study CASS 21162066+68152480, Neal became increasingly convinced the brown dwarf was his infamous Nemesis star. Meanwhile, Swann believed the signal had an intelligent origin, the work of some long-vanished ETC capable of engineering celestial objects. Given the spectacular nature of either discovery, the team decided that further study was required before their data should be publicized.
| The Friendship of Ruth Swann & Carrie Osbourne Early in her tenure at the GPCA Swann struck up a friendship with fellow birdwatcher Carrie Osbourne. Although Swann didn’t subscribe to Carrie’s “woo-woo” beliefs, she defended “Kooky Carrie” when her colleagues made fun of her behind her back, and shared her own controversial thoughts on UFOs and ETCs. Swann was often a dinner guest at Carrie and Stanley’s house, even though the astronomer told Carrie she “could do much better” than the surly electrician. As their friendship deepened, Carrie became the only person Swann trusted at the GPCA. |
Containment
The Mi-Go understood exactly what the GPCA team had discovered—Ghroth. During the first week of February 2024, Watcher One and Watcher Two abducted and implanted every scientist and array operator at the GPCA: Carl Tecumseh Guest, Harlan Bennett, Ruth Swann, Freddie Pike, Sara Manning, Mason Dauterive, Jay Osman, and Jackie Bernard-Wu. Even Director Neal was re-abducted and his colophon “recharged.” All were programmed with the same conditioning: IGNORE CASS 21162066+68152480. DO NOT SHARE / DISSEMINATE / PUBLISH ANY RELATED DATA!
The Nemesis Effect
While this conditioning worked for a few weeks, the Mi-Go colophons were competing with a more powerful force than human curiosity: the Song of Ghroth. Nemesis wanted to be discovered, studied, developed, and shared. Soon the “Nemesis Team” was forced into a precarious balancing act between their Mi-Go conditioning and the Song of Ghroth. The Song pushed them to amplify and refine the signal; while their Mi-Go conditioning prevented them from sharing their discovery. Despite acquiring more-than-sufficient data to seek confirmation from outside observatories, the scientists grew increasingly paranoid and hostile to the idea of publication.
The only member of the Nemesis Team who successfully resisted her conditioning was Ruth Swann. The astronomer had been diagnosed with type one bipolar disorder when she was an undergrad, and had been taking Tegretol XR and Xanax to cope with her symptoms. As with Leo Sawyer, the combination of an enlarged caudate-putamen and a regimen of prescription meds made her a poor candidate for metal domination. In fact, Swann became alarmed by the personality changes she observed in her peers. The scientists and operators were growing more irritable and paranoid, and even the supporting staff seemed troubled by inexplicable episodes of erratic behavior.
The Swann Report
Initially assigned the task of writing a preliminary report about the strange signals associated with CASS 21162066+68152480, Swann completed a rough draft in mid-February 2024. Much to her surprise, Swann’s colleagues revealed a puzzling unwillingness to help her complete the report. When she pressed Neal for his analysis of the Nemesis signal—a necessary component of the paper—the Director became angry. That night Swann observed a glowing green orb drifting through the server room. In the morning, her report had been purged from the facility’s computers.
Beginning to suspect that the Nemesis Team was operating under some malign outside influence, Swann copied the report from her personal Dropbox account onto a thumb drive. She made a printout and locked it in her dormitory room. Driving to North Platte on 11 March 2024, she opened a safe-deposit box and placed the drive inside.
A week later, Swann emailed the report from her personal computer to selected outside colleagues. None of her emails reached their intendend recipient. When she made another effort using a different email address, she found that her Dropbox had been nuked—the whole thing was just gone.
Only two copies of the Swann Report remained: the hard copy in her dorm room, and the thumb drive at the bank. Now panicking, Swann tried calling some of her colleagues outside the GPCA, but she simply couldn’t connect; whether using a landline, her cell phone, or even Carrie Osbourne’s phone! And even worse, she was beginning to see green orbs at the periphery of her vision…
On 26 March 2024 Swann decided to mail physical copies of the report to three outside colleagues—Jill Tarter, Jessica Lu, and William Snow. She used her personal printer to make duplicates of the hard copy and bundled everything into a Moe’s Books tote bag.
The last thing Swann remembered was driving down Route 97 to the North Platte post office. She awoke several hours later in her 2011 Mustang. She was pulled aside on Route 2 a few miles west of Whitman, some 43 miles northwest of Hayden. The tote bag was gone, and her face and arms were sunburnt. When Swann returned to the dormitory, her laptop computer and printer were missing.
The next day Swann asked Carrie Osbourne to drive her to North Platte. She purchased a new computer and visited the bank. The thumb drive was still in her safe-deposit box. She added a “memo” to the Swann Report, a letter explaining everything that had happened to her, along with her suspicions about alien interference. She entrusted the key to Carrie with the instructions, “If something happens to me, send the thumb drive to Dr. William Snow at UNK.” It was their last conversation.
The Swann Thing
On the evening of 28 March 2024 Ruth Swann gathered her personal belongings and attempted to escape Hayden. If she could just make it to Kearney, she could explain everything to William Snow. Stopping for what appeared to be a body in the road, she was captured by Watcher Two and taken to their facility below Devil’s Tower Amusement Park. The Mi-Go removed her brain and placed it in a tok’l cylinder for further study. Watcher Two’s core mind was inserted into her empty skull.
“Dr. Ruth Swann” returned to work on Monday, 1 April 2024. It didn’t take long for her colleagues to realize that something was wrong. She moved about in a daze, asked peculiar questions in a stilted voice, and seemed to have traded her personality for that of an automaton. Most of her co-workers chalked it up to one of Swann’s “episodes,” but even so, it was clear to Watcher Two the situation was untenable. It was time to eliminate Swann from the picture. After three days of this charade, “Swann” took a sudden vacation to view the upcoming solar eclipse.
On April 7 “Ruth Swann” left Hayden to secure a remote viewing of the eclipse. Driving the meat puppet to Alkali Lake, Watcher One pumped her body full of medications, removed Watcher Two’s core mind, and dropped the astronomer’s body off a cliff, deliberately smashing her skull on the rocks. Her remains were found by hikers on April 11.
April 2024 Solar Eclipse from Nebraska
Swann’s Brain
Ruth Swann is still “alive,” trapped in a brain cylinder in red-litten Yoth. Her connection to William Snow remains intact, and she’ll attempt to communicate with him as the scenario progresses. (See William Snow’s player character profile, “Player Character Secrets and Development,” and “Asynchronous Encounter 9—Devil’s Tower Amusement Park” for details.)
The Music of the Spheres
The death of Ruth Swann barely affected the Nemesis Team, who continued to function under the conflicting demands of two alien masters. Ruth Swann was replaced by Diane Mancini, and after the departure of Sara Manning, Jenny Hooper was brought onboard as an array operator. Both women were quickly abducted and implanted.
| Who Is Sara Manning? A former member of the Nemesis Team, Sara Manning was an array operator from New Mexico. When her husband landed a high-paying job in Silicon Valley, Sara departed Hayden for a new life in San Jose. Although she initially struggled against the First Stanza, she soon escaped the Song of Ghroth and found peace of mind. (The Mi-Go colophon certainly helped.) The only function Sara serves in Bible Black is one of logistics. In order to preserve a realistic work schedule, there needed to be an array operator before Jenny Hooper. |
Jenny’s Sonifications
Jenny Hooper’s arrival at the GPCA on 30 September 2024 fundamentally altered the dynamic between the Mi-Go conditioning and the Song of Ghroth. A brilliant musician, Jenny transformed the Nemesis signal into scored “sonifications.” As these compositions increased in complexity, the Nemesis Team began hearing additional Stanzas. The Mi-Go conditioning struggled to maintain control, but over the last few months Ghroth has been gaining the upper hand, and the scientists have become increasingly cultish and disordered. The entire region has been resonating more strongly with Ghroth—earthquakes, freakish weather, crazed animals, episodes of violence, and the “returning” of space probes and other artifacts symbolizing human encroachment into deep space. These consequences have begun to affect the broader world, initially disturbing Mythos-related sites such as G’harne, R’lyeh, and Pnakotus; but lately spreading across the whole planet.
The Mi-Go Response
As the Harbinger accelerates its approach, the Mi-Go have become convinced that more drastic measures are required to prevent Ghroth from forming an anchor point. On 14 February 2025, two years after the Hyades transmission, two additional Watchers arrived in Hayden to assist their beleaguered companions. Among the first of the solar Heretics, Watcher Three and Watcher Four regard humanity with less “compassion” than their two comrades. Equipped with a Mi-Go Ventla—the last remaining “flying saucer” on Earth—these Heretics have begun making preparations for more radical methods of containment than abduction and implantation.
The Last Star of Celestial Street
The scientists at the GPCA are not the only astronomers to have discovered Ghroth. A similar crisis has been escalating at the Miyun radio observatory outside of Beijing. Although these distant events are not central to the narrative of Bible Black, they offer a terrifying glimpse into the Mi-Go’s notions of “more radical methods of containment.”
The Scenario Begins
Bible Black begins the weekend of 15 March 2025. The scenario covers the last ten days of the Ghroth Crisis. After witnessing Carrie Osbourne’s brutal murder, the player characters have nine days to realize that something is seriously wrong at the GPCA, navigate two competing alien interests, and find a way to stop Ghroth before the Mi-Go take matters into their own claws. During this time they must infiltrate a deranged team of scientists, negotiate with a hostile alien faction, manage an invasion of UFO cultists, and survive a county losing its collective grip on reality. Some player characters will uncover their own dark secrets, such as William Snow’s amnesia and previous implantation, and Rose Rines’ connection to the Great Race of Yith and history with the Church of Invisible Frequencies. In the end, the player characters must realize that Earth can only be saved through tremendous personal sacrifice and/or mass murder; and if the player characters can’t handle it, the Mi-Go will purge the region with nuclear fire. Even if the player characters are successful, they leave behind a world forever changed, one fully awoken to the existential threat of the Old Ones.
Bible Black > Keeper’s Information
[Back to Period & Setting | Bible Black TOC | Forward to The Nemesis Theory]
Author: A. Buell Ruch (Based on work by Kevin A. Ross)
Banner Artwork: Phantom Object, by Toyen (Marie Čermínová, 1902-1980)
Last Modified: 2 December 2025
Email: quail (at) shipwrecklibrary (dot) com
Bible Black PDF: [TBD]