Following on to the introduction of the Prince of Crawling Shadows, let's look at how he weakens the icons around him. While all others involve icon on icon conflicts, the Chaos is their sinister emissary. We may never know how or when he replaced the former Prince of Shadows, but can see the poisonous ivy of his intentions undermining foundations.

Plot Cracks

Three ways the new Prince of Shadows weakens the other twelve icons[^2]:

New icons will be added if and when I write more.

The Elf Queen

Counter-icon: The Goat Mother

• A mysterious stranger sells magical seeds to a few Halfling farmers in Old Town. The vegetables grow overnight, as promised, but on the second day they look wrong. An infection spreads through the soil itself, toward the Queenswood.
• Political chaos breaks out in the Court of Stars. Private messages end up in the wrong hands. Scrolls detailing secret meetings arrive at participants’ doors, with blackmailing notes demanding actions or favors that make no sense.
• The Court of Stars relies on its constant motion to keep it safe and adapt to external dangers. Yet if one were to chart its most recent movements, one might get the impression it was being herded toward a particular place. But those were all random and unconnected causes—weren't they?

The High Druid

Counter-icon: The Elk Goddess

• The High Druid receives a letter in her own handwriting. The letter pleads with the Emperor and Archmage to send aid and begs forgiveness for her stubborn and independent ways. An accompanying note reads: “You may want to send this now.”
• A druid arrives with news from the south. Someone has smashed the wards on the edge of the Wild Wood which protect it against escaped demons from the southern Hellhole.
• Druids and rangers moving at night report the sky more frequently obscured by enormous clouds of bats. The bats never attack, but seem to arrive at critical moments, causing them to miss turns in the path or lose the track of a mysterious animal.

The Priestess

Counter-icon: The Enchantress

• A sacred item, used to hold the forces of so many gods in check, is stolen from the vaults of Santa Cora.
• Fog engulfs Santa Cora, closing its harbor and making road travel perilous. The Archmage sent no warning of this strange weather, nor can prayers and spells lift it. The only open path lies toward the Wild Wood. At night, when the fog is thickest, it seems to whisper in the ears of those abroad. Can the city get word back to the Archmage?
• It started with a cherubic child, speaking in tongues in the River District. From there, it spread like an infection, a torrent of tongues, speaking vaguely-demonic words for hours until they collapse exhausted and unable to speak or understand their native languages. Residents of Santa Cora consider speaking in tongues entirely natural, a phenomenon that comes upon worshipers for minutes or moments and then passes, leaving them unharmed. But this? And still the child prattles on.

Servitors and Creatures

They may not always serve the Prince, but when encountered in these games, they're definitely his creatures. Where to find them and where they might show up in an adventure:

Bat Swarm

Bestiary, p.13. Most often used by the Prince in unnatural swarms to darken the skies (either to provide his creatures cover or to prevent adventurers from noticing something else) or to create enough chaos for an escape.

Bugbear Schemer

Bestiary, p.25. Legends say the Prince originally created the bugbears (p. 26), whether or not that's true, he's especially fond of the Schemers, both for their wit and their ability to disappear from a bad fight.

Cambion Assassin

Bestiary, p.30. These cloaked assassins stalk those unwise enough to interfere with the Prince's plans. They sometimes work in teams, one as a distraction and another with the real mission. It's said that one of them killed the Priestess, but there's no proof that she's dead. The Prince always handles them through an intermediary (p.33) who may be easier to trace.

Dybbuk

Bestiary, p.63. Whether in the bodies of corpses, in friends suddenly turned evil, or in ghost forms, Dybbuks create the horror and chaos which tickle the Prince's twisted fancy.

Fungaloid

Bestiary, p.82. Loves darkness? Check. Lives (beneath) anywhere? Check. Whether as a vast network of spies or as an army ready to spring up from beneath any outdoor location, Fungaloids have an affinity with the Prince of Shadows, who embraces them as worthy servitors rather than disdaining them as most other icons (even though who employ them) do.

Gargoyle

Core book, p.224. Serve as his ears in the cities. May also be the source of strange whispers that seep into the consciousness of those who inhabit the same buildings.

Hungry star

Core book, p.235. Under normal conditions, one primarily finds hungry

Bestiary, p.30. These cloaked assassins stalk those unwise enough to interfere with the Prince's plans. They sometimes work in teams, one as a distraction and another with the real mission. It's said that one of them killed the Priestess, but there's no proof that she's dead. The Prince always handles them through an intermediary (p.33) who may be easier to trace.

Dybbuk

Bestiary, p.63. Whether in the bodies of corpses, in friends suddenly turned evil, or in ghost forms, Dybbuks create the horror and chaos which tickle the Prince's twisted fancy.

Fungaloid

Bestiary, p.82. Loves darkness? Check. Lives (beneath) anywhere? Check. Whether as a vast network of spies or as an army ready to spring up from beneath any outdoor location, Fungaloids have an affinity with the Prince of Shadows, who embraces them as worthy servitors rather than disdaining them as most other icons (even though who employ them) do.

Gargoyle

Core book, p.224. Serve as his ears in the cities. May also be the source of strange whispers that seep into the consciousness of those who inhabit the same buildings.

Hungry star

Core book, p.235. Under normal conditions, one primarily finds hungry stars in dungeon settings. Yet these sanity-gobbling monsters begin appears in local towns. Sometimes they target key persons. Others, their senseless and unexpected attacks leave villages unsettled for months after.

Intellect Devourer/Assassin

Bestiary, p.116/118. They're a perfect one-two punch of killers and spies (p.117).

Jorogumo

Bestiary, p.119. Masters, or mistresses, of disguise who take utter control over their victims? It's as effective at getting secrets as the Intellect Devourer but even more cruel fun to watch the Woven spill voluntarily and the pain it causes their friends and families. Used for the Prince's cruelest attacks. Often targets influential and wealthy.

Ogre Mages

Core book, p.240; Bestiary, p.151. They're everything a spellcaster shouldn't be and the Prince of Shadows loves it. It's possible he orchestrated the original quarrel with the dark elves just so he could have more influence over this group.

Phase spider

Core book, p.244. Pay no attention to the textbox, a teleporting spider is terrifying whether or not it steals your magical tools! When allied with the Prince of Shadows, however, they often use their teleporting powers to rearrange more mundane objects in a way that sows chaos among the owners. The Prince rewards them with the magical items they so desire.

Rakshasa

Core book, p.245. Not often allied, but they may fall under his influence while working in the shadows. The Prince appreciates their shapeshifting abilities and the inherent chaos they may cause. When serving as his emissaries, they're often repaying a debt.

Shadow Thief

Bestiary p.193. Like the phase spider, this psychic extension of a shadow dragon is a great way to cause chaos in the dark. More terrifyingly, someone classed it as a mook (are they all extensions of the same dragon? You decide!), which means *rolls* it's not just one, you're surrounded. Good luck with that.

End Game

The Prince's ultimate goal is to create chaos in an icon's area of influence and allow a challenger to take root. If adventurers make things to hot for him and his minions, he'll simply move on to the next target—he's got a dozen, after all.

Can adventurers act to stop what's happening?

Depends on what kind of game you want to run. If you're running a campaign to stop the events of the Eldritch Icons from ever occurring, you'll want to take a page from this, er, page and focus on pursuit of the Shadow Prince and solving his mischief. Restoring his victims leaves the icons in place too strong for challengers to even make the attempt.

But if you want to find yourselves fighting Blood Druids in the Wild Wood or Voormis under the Dwarf King's mountain, then you'll want to keep encounters with the Prince of Shadows to a minimum. Perhaps you stop one plan only to have another succeed elsewhere. Perhaps you only hear of some of these afterward. How depressed do you want your players? These Eldritch Icons can take things to full-on Cthulhu Apocalypse levels, if you want.

To mix a little hope with your fear, have players hear some of these as stories as they encounter the first few icons you want to handle. Once they're wise to his M.O., they turn the tables and begin collaborating with the remaining icons (or trying to) to stop the rest from even starting.

Footnotes

Also, apologies for having been gone so long, I was working on two scenarios and some setting material over the spring. While that didn't quite eat up all my time, it ate up all my creative brain.

This post is in the Eldritch Icons project which will weave a narrative to supplant the 13 Icons of the Dragon Empire with more sinister icons born of Weird Fiction.

When the Elf Queen departed, the heart of the Dragon Empire skipped a beat. When the blood druids took control of the Wild Wood, the Dragon Empire felt its veins turn cold. When the cathedral of Santa Cora shattered, millions flinched without knowing why. Yet the coming of the Crawling Chaos was more frightening in its silence. Not everyone agrees that the Prince of Shadows has changed; none of those who do can fix a date to it.

Nyarlathotep could not have commissioned a finer avatar than the Prince of Shadows. It's possible that one day he simply slid into the icon's shoes. But his enemies and rogues alike realize with growing horror that the Crawling Chaos is the Prince of Shadows…and has been for some time.

He is the author of the discord now overtaking the Dragon Empire. Through his agents, he weakened subtle points in each icon's realm. He tampered with reality, whether through forces magical or mundane. He watches his bride, Yhoundeh with special interest.

Long before the denizens of the Shadow Port realized the change, his thousand sable tendrils had infiltrated the city. The battle against this new Prince of Shadows will not take place anywhere near its foggy streets. Rather, his influence must be fought throughout the empire.

The Crawling Chaos

Unlike Yhoundeh or Moriamis, who were only mentioned in a story or two, Nyarlathotep's stories and avatars number in the dozens. After Cthulhu, he may be Lovecraft's best-known creation. He was first conceived in Lovecraft's short story of the same name and called the crawling chaos. He was not originally the “Black Pharaoh” of later imaginations but a “swarthy, slender, sinister” man of “old native blood” with the bearing of a Pharaoh.

Best known for his propensity to take on mysterious avatars or inhabit apparently inoffensive bodies, he even has a Table of Forms (Masks/Avatars) on Wikipedia which may be worth drawing on for campaign inspiration. Players may meet the Prince of Shadows in disguise and not realize until much later in the campaign.

He's found in many Lovecraft works:

• “Rats in the Walls” — early flute association but perhaps conflated a bit with Azathoth in madness.
• “Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” — as a major force and messenger of other gods, with a speaking part and either a priest or second avatar as a yellow-masked figure on the Plateau of Leng.
• Sonnet #21 of “Fungi from Yuggoth” — another version of “Nyarlathotep,” perhaps.
• “The Whisperer in Darkness” — in chants where we get descriptions of him again as a messenger, as having a waxen mask and a robe.
• “The Dreams in the Witch-House” — where he's named and revealed as also the “Black Man” of the witch-cult.
• “The Shadow Out of Time” — where an ancient Pharaoh has had dealings with him
• “The Haunter of the Dark” — in the final passage, Blake seems to indicate that Nyarlathotep is the Haunter or directly connected to it.

and in the work of many Lovecraftian writers, both of short-stories and RPGs. Robert Price put together the Nyarlathotep Cycle for Chaosium, which has some of the Lovecraft stories and those by other authors. As with all the cycle books, I'm not entirely sold on Price's assessment of the material's relevance, though I think the stories are more on point than the Shub Niggurath Cycle stories.

And a bonus—to pull from an additional piece of Lovecraftiana, consider introducing elements or effects from Lovecraft's story “The Crawling Chaos.” Published just a year after “Nyarlathotep,” the story is based on the co-author's dream and simply uses the descriptor because Lovecraft really liked that turn of phrase. That's not reason not to pretend it's part of the canon. Perhaps the players must fight the influence of a vision-inducing drug or have disturbing visions of a future only they can prevent.

Like Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep's cultural saturation might make him old hat to players if you call him by name:

What's this? Oh, another Avatar of Nyarlathotep. Oh look, there's a little cult too. It must be Tuesday…

Next time, I'll outline some of the angles by which he undermines original Icons, who he's working with, and what kind of beasties one might encounter when taking him on.

In part one, we saw the fall of Santa Cora. The Priestess has not left like the Elf Queen. She is not at war like the High Druid. She is simply—missing.

Possible ways the cathedral was destroyed:

• A spell of iconic magnitude shattered its crystal surface.
• A vital object which held the vast magical energies of so many gods in balance was stolen from within its sacred vaults.
• The Priestess herself was the key to balancing the abundance of religions. Without her, the cathedral dissolves, both symbolically and in dramatic physical dissolution.
• Deliberate architectural sabotage or a rite carried out by a splinter group within the cathedral.

The state of the city:

• Monks with ties to the cathedral join forces to defend the city, crossing religious and training backgrounds.
• Religious leaders with a bent for apocalyptic narrative sway the city's religious masses. Others seek to turn the situation to their deity's advantage. A few actually give an owlbear's ass for their congregants and can be found throughout the city helping the panicked and downtrodden.
• The faithful salvage precious objects from their shrines and wings of the temple. Of course, so does every unrepentant “art collector” in Santa Cora.

World Hooks

Something is Rotten Under Santa Cora: Since ages past, the faithful have sought burial in Santa Cora. Only in its serene graveyards and ornate charnal houses could they be safe from the influence of the Lich King. For Dragon Emperors, it's a matter of tradition. The poor in Axis, Horizon, Concord, and outlying villages, gather their pennies and hope that their family will be able to avoid the trip. The only larger necropolis in the Dragon Empire is, well, THE Necropolis.

When the Cathedral shattered and the Priestess disappeared, her protection over those who lie beneath the city faltered. The living don't have time to think about it—yet—but the dead are now vulnerable. And it just so happens that there's a new ghoul in town, gathering power to take on the Lich King. The Great Ghoul Mordiggian and his hyena-headed, skull-masked priests (more on them in a later post!) are here for the harvest. Whether they're behind it or taking opportunistic advantage, they'll have to be dealt with before the city can be restored.

Iron and stone: The shining cathedral on its verdant grounds is an abomination before the Crusader's eldritch replacement (ugh, sorry I haven't settled on it 100% because this is an evolving series and I'm not entirely into Nodens for it, taking votes in the comments!) or even the Crusader himself (let's just call this person The Crusader for now). In its place, he intends to raise a building of iron and stone and bring these untamed masses to heel. When the crystal shards settle in the city, the residents find themselves ringed on land by the Crusader's forces.

The Priestess is his prisoner, separated from her source of power within the cathedral. If adventurers can find it before the Crusader's advance guard destroys it forever, and reunite the two, there may be a chance they can save the city.

Blood Tide: They came from the Wild Wood, Blood Druids of the Elk Goddess, moving ever-onward on their journey of forceful conversion. Whether jealous that the Priestess does not countenance their religion or zealous in stamping out all other faiths, they take on Santa Cora's religious diversity. How do they find an in? Either by breaking into the city and performing necessary rituals or by finding a disgruntled ally on the inside. They may feel a kinship with Santa Cora's stigmatics and offer an even greater honor to their blood-sign than the current Priestess has ever done.

A Thief in the Cathedral: How long has the Prince of Shadows actually been the Crawling Chaos? Much longer than any of this other business has been going on, that's for sure. It's possible that he's the instigator of the entire eldritch shift. Whether not content in waiting for matters to progress or as the next step in his master plan, he's instigated the theft of some item critical to holding the cathedral together.

How hard is it to steal The Priestess herself? You'll need an even better team than Nate Ford's, but it can be done. For a critical or sacred item, the DC's probably much lower…say DC 40 instead of 400. It's up to those seeking to put things right to track down this master thief and retrieve the item before it vanishes into the Prince's vaults.

Restoring the Priestess

Can the Priestess be restored? Should she? It's up to you to decide if she's what this new Age in the Dragon Empire really needs.

Moriamis knows this kind of world. Whether she becomes the new Priestess or a surrogate, she may begin offering her semi-iconic favor to those in need of help. She's dealt with bloodthirsty Druids. She lived in a land that knew the names Yog-Sothoth and Tsathoggua.

Or, in a campaign, perhaps recovering the Priestess could become an eventual plot point to restoring the world to a better age. Her light counterbalances the overwhelming darkness of these new icons.

How did Moriamis Get Here?

On the one hand, do any of the new Eldritch Icons really need an explanation? Most are goddesses or god-like figures in their own stories. But that's where Moriamis differs. She's presented as a mortal. Perhaps she has the enhanced lifespan of a sorceress, but she's a woman supposedly in a time and place (Druidic-era mythic France/Averoigne). How does she come from there to the dragon empire?

One could do this both ways.

1. She's a refugee from the Wild Wood. The Moriamis of Averoigne lived alongside Druids. She considered their practices unrefined, but didn't show hostility toward them as a group. She prevents a human sacrifice by cowing them with her already-known power, not challenging them to a fight or slaughtering them in turn. The Moriamis of the Wild Wood lives alongside the Druids and, depending on the pre-Yhoundeh situation, may not even even find them distasteful—if unrefined compared to her skill. But the incursion of Yhoundeh's Blood Druids either proved too much for her or destroyed the land she once held dear. She may have planned to stay in Santa Cora or to take a ship from there to quieter parts.
2. She's from Averoigne. One could play the Eldritch Icons as an infection, a planar shift, another world that blends into and corrupts the Dragon Empire. In that case, it's not only

Why not the White Sybil?

A few people asked why I chose Moriamis over the White Sybil. She's an option with potential—an enigmatic and quasi-religious figure. My biggest reason was that Moriamis is a character with lines and a personality. Her choice to work for the “welfare of men and not for their bale or bane” sealed it.

If you wanted to run with the White Sybil, the attack to Santa Cora comes from within. Whether it's the glaciers of Polarion or a chill in the hearts of the faithful that extinguishes their religious fervor, her presence mysteriously stops the religious pulse of the city.