Research:Shadow Valley

Warning: This page concerns archaic world setting information from the I.C.E. Age of GemStone III. It is not canon in contemporary GemStone IV, nor is it canonical for Shadow World as the details may be specific to GemStone III. It is only historical context for certain very old parts of the game and these things should not be mixed.

This is a research page for systematically decrypting the hidden meaning and references in Shadow Valley. The story of Shadow Valley is still treated as official documentation, but its original context is the archaic Shadow World historical setting. This is seemingly of minimal importance in the case of Shadow Valley. Its original parts seem to have been released in 1995, and the release of its expanded areas occurred after the De-ICE in 1996. There were in-game storyline events, such as Muylari speaking, which are poorly recorded now. This includes the shadow steeds fighting the demon.

Similar to The Graveyard there seems to be a hidden layer of meaning that is a combination of H.P. Lovecraft and comparative mythology pertaining to the Underworld. The Broken Lands seems to have similar themes and subtexts. The relative importance of the Purgatory death mechanics, Shadow World, mythology, and Lovecraft varies between them. It is unclear if any relationship to the mythological subtexts in the Vvrael Quest is intentional.

Related Projects:

The following research pages are interrelated with the subject of this one:

• Research:The Broken Lands
• Research:The Graveyard
• Research:The Vvrael Quest

Major Sub-Texts

Mythology

The theory of this research page is that the Shadow Valley story is a GemStone III specific variation of the Chaoskampf mythology. This is a struggle between a storm god and a sea god. In the Indo-European traditions it is a heroic god of thunder who slays a world serpent associated with the seas, often with a lightning themed weapon such as the hammer of Thor or the mace of Indra. There are similar myths in Middle Eastern religions, including the Hebrew Bible with Yahweh striking down Leviathan, and more broadly includes Underworld stories such as the Osiris myth with the battle between Horus and Set.

The basic premise is that the demon of Shadow Valley was a "wyrm", which is a sea serpent, and that the valley is dead with drought with its rivers blocked with sentient black ichor. The shouting that cracked the earth and the return of the shadow steeds to battle the wyrm were instead associated with lightning and thunder. The specific argument is this myth in the Rigveda and the "water horses" of Celtic myth.

Lovecraft

The Mound

The story that seems to have the most relevance to Shadow Valley is "The Mound", a relatively obscure novella ghost-written by H.P. Lovecraft for Zealia Bishop. It was only published in highly abridged forms until 1989, when the full text was given in "The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions" anthology. In the novella there is an "Indian mound" in Oklahoma, where "Indian" means Native American, which is the gateway to a subterranean valley with an underground kingdom. The narrator is an ethnologist investigating it over ghost stories he has pieced together from locals involving a headless woman.

He finds a scroll written by a Spanish Conquistador from several centuries ago who had wandered down there searching for gold. There are numerous motifs in common between this story and Shadow Valley, which is located under the burial mound of the Graveyard. In the case of Silver Valley it was silver instead of gold. If this novella was used as a subtext, it is able to explain a number of specific details.

(1) Spectral Sky Horses

"I had gone into Oklahoma to track down and correlate one of the many ghost tales which were current among the white settlers, but which had strong Indian corroboration, and—I felt sure—an ultimate Indian source. They were very curious, these open-air ghost tales; and though they sounded flat and prosaic in the mouths of the white people, they had earmarks of linkage with some of the richest and obscurest phases of native mythology. All of them were woven around the vast, lonely, artificial-looking mounds in the western part of the state, and all of them involved apparitions of exceedingly strange aspect and equipment.
     The commonest, and among the oldest, became quite famous in 1892, when a government marshal named John Willis went into the mound region after horse-thieves and came out with a wild yarn of nocturnal cavalry horses in the air between great armies of invisible spectres—battles that involved the rush of hooves and feet, the thud of blows, the clank of metal on metal, the muffled cries of warriors, and the fall of human and equine bodies. These things happened by moonlight, and frightened his horse as well as himself. The sounds persisted an hour at a time; vivid, but subdued as if brought from a distance by a wind, and unaccompanied by any glimpse of the armies themselves. Later on Willis learned that the seat of the sounds was a notoriously haunted spot, shunned by settlers and Indians alike. Many had seen, or half seen, the warring horsemen in the sky, and had furnished dim, ambiguous descriptions. The settlers described the ghostly fighters as Indians, though of no familiar tribe, and having the most singular costumes and weapons. They even went so far as to say that they could not be sure the horses were really horses.
     The Indians, on the other hand, did not seem to claim the spectres as kinsfolk. They referred to them as “those people”, “the old people”, or “they who dwell below”, and appeared to hold them in too great a frightened veneration to talk much about them. No ethnologist had been able to pin any tale-teller down to a specific description of the beings, and apparently nobody had ever had a very clear look at them. The Indians had one or two old proverbs about these phenomena, saying that “men very old, make very big spirit; not so old, not so big; older than all time, then spirit he so big he near flesh; those old people and spirits they mix up—get all the same”."

- "The Mound"; H.P. Lovecraft


"Here is the legend as I have heard it told in various inns along the northern coast of Jontara. Considering its detail, I can only speculate that the original teller of this tale was a participant of the event..."

- "Tale of Silver Valley"; Selias Jodame

There used to be a log of the release event for the dark pasture and shaft expansions, where the ladder was replaced by a ramp and the shadow steeds were introduced. The following summary of it describes the scene, where a portal opens and the shadow horses battle the wyrm in the sky. These are "spectral" horses in the sense that they are not really corporeal, and they are also probably not really horses.

" "My master says, `No icons can save you from the destroyer. Only the protectors of Velaskar can save you now. It forms .... it awakens,’" the wolf growled. The awakening was that of a giant winged wyrm that formed in the sky above the band of adventurers. It was Lady Cheat and Lord Jorak who realized that the wolf wanted them to cast uncurse on three ghostly pookas. Free of their chains, the pookas transformed into a giant shadow steed. The steed launched itself into the sky, and the old ladder that once led to the safety of the ledge shattered into a thousand tiny particles. Seconds later, a vortex opened in the sky, pouring out thousands of shadow steeds and mares in a majestic ethereal display of lightning and thunder. The stampede trampled and destroyed the wyrm in a fiery battle. "

- "Shadow Valley", Lord Eythan Gwenywen; Elanthian Times Volume I Issue I, Ancient Annals

(2) Serpent Demon

The "great evil entity from another plane" of Shadow Valley was a "wyrm", and there is a mural in the mine tunnels depicting a dragon assaulting a world. In "The Mound" there is a Great Old One named Yig, Father of Snakes, who is the ur-daemon behind the mythical Central American snake gods such as Quetzalcoatl and Kukulcan. The advanced race that lived deep under the mound in the subterranean realm specifically worshipped Yig, Cthulhu, and at one point Tsathoggua until something happened. Yig and Cthulhu are referenced here repeatedly, and "The Call of Cthulhu" is probably in the mine shaft.

"Make no mistake—Oklahoma is a lot more than a mere pioneers’ and promoters’ frontier. There are old, old tribes with old, old memories there; and when the tom-toms beat ceaselessly over brooding plains in the autumn the spirits of men are brought dangerously close to primal, whispered things. I am white and Eastern enough myself, but anybody is welcome to know that the rites of Yig, Father of Snakes, can get a real shudder out of me any day. I have heard and seen too much to be “sophisticated” in such matters. And so it is with this incident of 1928. I’d like to laugh it off—but I can’t."

"Opening my handbag in the light of a single electric bulb, I again took out the cylinder and noted the instant magnetism which pulled the Indian talisman to its carven surface. The designs glimmered evilly on the richly lustrous and unknown metal, and I could not help shivering as I studied the abnormal and blasphemous forms that leered at me with such exquisite workmanship. I wish now that I had carefully photographed all these designs—though perhaps it is just as well that I did not. Of one thing I am really glad, and that is that I could not then identify the squatting octopus-headed thing which dominated most of the ornate cartouches, and which the manuscript called “Tulu”. Recently I have associated it, and the legends in the manuscript connected with it, with some new-found folklore of monstrous and unmentioned Cthulhu, a horror which seeped down from the stars while the young earth was still half-formed; and had I known of the connexion then, I could not have stayed in the same room with the thing. The secondary motif, a semi-anthropomorphic serpent, I did quite readily place as a prototype of the Yig, Quetzalcoatl, and Kukulcan conceptions. Before opening the cylinder I tested its magnetic powers on metals other than that of Grey Eagle’s disc, but found that no attraction existed. It was no common magnetism which pervaded this morbid fragment of unknown worlds and linked it to its kind."

- "The Mound"; H.P. Lovecraft

Yig is known to make "Progeny of Yig" out of humans who harm his snake children. These are semi-anthropomorphic snakes with human faces. This happens to look almost exactly like the abyran demons. While the "History of the Faendryl" (2002) document has a couple of Lovecraft easter eggs in it, the Enchirdion Valentia (2003) document was probably written by a different GameMaster, and this is most likely coincidental. If it is not a coincidence it would imply that the missing Faendryl sorcerers were turned into abyran demons, and might explain Shieltine's Ward banning sorcerers from traveling to Lorae'tyr.

(3) Moaning Spirits

The moaning spirits are oddly described as having eagle claws for feet, but otherwise appear to be humanoid. The moaning spirits force their way into this plane, and also appear in Castle Anwyn.

"Intense hatred for those living drives the moaning spirit to traverse the bounds of space to attack its enemies. Crying out in constant pain, it marshals magic, claw and fist against its foes, destroying relentlessly to sate the desires of the forces that bind it, then returning whence it came to await the intrusion of another living creature. Its semi-transparent countenance is passably humanoid, save for the eagle-like claws replacing what would normally be the human's feet."

- Moaning Spirit creature description

This is a highly specific and unusual detail that can be effortlessly explained by a section of the novella where a man named Captain Lawton traveled down into the mound. He was later found with his feet cut off. He was rambling madly about Cthulhu, as well as Azathoth and Nyarlathotep, who are relevant to Research:The Graveyard and Research:The Broken Lands. In this scene there is an old Native American chieftain named "Grey Eagle" speaking, warning to not go down there because the old ones are no good. This easily accounts for the eagle claw feet on the moaning spirits guarding the entrance to the valley.

"The next trip was the solitary venture of old Capt. Lawton, a grizzled pioneer who had helped to open up the region in 1889, but who had never been there since. He had recalled the mound and its fascination all through the years; and being now in comfortable retirement, resolved to have a try at solving the ancient riddle. Long familiarity with Indian myth had given him ideas rather stranger than those of the simple villagers, and he had made preparations for some extensive delving. He ascended the mound on the morning of Thursday, May 11, 1916, watched through spy glasses by more than twenty people in the village and on the adjacent plain. His disappearance was very sudden, and occurred as he was hacking at the shrubbery with a brush-cutter. No one could say more than that he was there one moment and absent the next. For over a week no tidings of him reached Binger, and then—in the middle of the night—there dragged itself into the village the object about which dispute still rages.
     It said it was—or had been—Capt. Lawton, but it was definitely younger by as much as forty years than the old man who had climbed the mound. Its hair was jet black, and its face—now distorted with nameless fright—free from wrinkles. But it did remind Grandma Compton most uncannily of the captain as he had looked back in ’89. Its feet were cut off neatly at the ankles, and the stumps were smoothly healed to an extent almost incredible if the being really were the man who had walked upright a week before. It babbled of incomprehensible things, and kept repeating the name “George Lawton, George E. Lawton” as if trying to reassure itself of its own identity. The things it babbled of, Grandma Compton thought, were curiously like the hallucinations of poor young Heaton in ’91; though there were minor differences. “The blue light!—the blue light! . . .” muttered the object, “always down there, before there were any living things—older than the dinosaurs—always the same, only weaker—never death—brooding and brooding and brooding—the same people, half-man and half-gas—the dead that walk and work—oh, those beasts, those half-human unicorns—houses and cities of gold—old, old, old, older than time—came down from the stars—Great Tulu—Azathoth—Nyarlathotep—waiting, waiting. . . .” The object died before dawn.
     Of course there was an investigation, and the Indians at the reservation were grilled unmercifully. But they knew nothing, and had nothing to say. At least, none of them had anything to say except old Grey Eagle, a Wichita chieftain whose more than a century of age put him above common fears. He alone deigned to grunt some advice.
     “You let um ’lone, white man. No good—those people. All under here, all under there, them old ones. Yig, big father of snakes, he there. Yig is Yig. Tiráwa, big father of men, he there. Tiráwa is Tiráwa. No die. No get old. Just same like air. Just live and wait. One time they come out here, live and fight. Build um dirt tepee. Bring up gold—they got plenty. Go off and make new lodges. Me them. You them. Then big waters come. All change. Nobody come out, let nobody in. Get in, no get out. You let um ’lone, you have no bad medicine. Red man know, he no get catch. White man meddle, he no come back. Keep ’way little hills. No good. Grey Eagle say this.” "

- "The Mound"; H.P. Lovecraft

This is referencing another man named Heaton who in 1891 went down into the mound, and came out later rambling in madness about Cthulhu and other Great Old Ones. The "white man" referenced here is implicitly the Spanish Conquistador, who is introduced later in the story. In the "Tale of Silver Valley" Selias Jodame has a Navigator guide named Tearhaut which is at least vaguely Native American.

"When Heaton made his own trip he resolved to get to the bottom of the mystery, and watchers from the village saw him hacking diligently at the shrubbery atop the mound. Then they saw his figure melt slowly into invisibility; not to reappear for long hours, till after the dusk drew on, and the torch of the headless squaw glimmered ghoulishly on the distant elevation. About two hours after nightfall he staggered into the village minus his spade and other belongings, and burst into a shrieking monologue of disconnected ravings. He howled of shocking abysses and monsters, of terrible carvings and statues, of inhuman captors and grotesque tortures, and of other fantastic abnormalities too complex and chimerical even to remember. “Old! Old! Old!” he would moan over and over again, “great God, they are older than the earth, and came here from somewhere else—they know what you think, and make you know what they think—they’re half-man, half-ghost—crossed the line—melt and take shape again—getting more and more so, yet we’re all descended from them in the beginning—children of Tulu—everything made of gold—monstrous animals, half-human—dead slaves—madness—Iä! Shub-Niggurath!—that white man—oh, my God, what they did to him! . ."

- "The Mound"; H.P. Lovecraft

(4) Conquistadors

The story of what happened to Shadow Valley involves miners coming to the local village in search of silver. They wipe the memories of the townsfolk with sorcery, and enslave the horses to be beasts of burden. In the Shadow World historical setting the northern region of this area had silver mines, and that is the implicit context for Silver Valley. The valley would have implicitly have been located to the north in the Seolfar Strake, which means something like "Journey to Strike Silver" in Seoltang, and was re-named the Lysierian Hills. What happened around its appearance under the Graveyard is not recorded.

"A group of men had arrived at the settlement of Velaskar claiming to be sightseers. As most travelers in the village were in fact sightseers there was little to be suspicious of but this was a large group of men, seven and twenty and more seemed to join them each day. It soon became apparent that they were more than watchers of horses and it was Jaron Galarn who discovered their true purpose. Taking them on a tour to the valley, as he was known to do, he observed them paying little attention to the equines and more attention to the grounds around the valley. That night, he snuck into their supply tent at the end of town and discovered it was full of mining equipment. The men intended to mine the cliffs of Silver Valley, no doubt expecting to find silver."

- "Tale of Silver Valley"; Selias Jodame

The corresponding detail in "The Mound" is the character who provides all the information on the subterranean world is a Spanish Conquistador who was searching for legendary cities of gold.

"I paused to reflect on the portentous significance of what I was reading. “The Narrative of Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez, gentleman, of Luarca in Asturias, Concerning the Subterranean World of Xinaián, A. D. 1545” . . . Here, surely, was too much for any mind to absorb all at once. A subterranean world—again that persistent idea which filtered through all the Indian tales and through all the utterances of those who had come back from the mound. And the date—1545—what could this mean? In 1540 Coronado and his men had gone north from Mexico into the wilderness, but had they not turned back in 1542! My eye ran questingly down the opened part of the scroll, and almost at once seized on the name Francisco Vásquez de Coronado. The writer of this thing, clearly, was one of Coronado’s men—but what had he been doing in this remote realm three years after his party had gone back? I must read further, for another glance told me that what was now unrolled was merely a summary of Coronado’s northward march, differing in no essential way from the account known to history."

- "The Mount"; H.P. Lovecraft

This is stated more explicitly in other parts of the story, such as this scene where Zamacona encounters an idol of Cthulhu.

"For a moment he was quite stupefied by what he saw. It was not the all-covering dust and cobwebs of immemorial aeons, the fluttering winged things, the shriekingly loathsome sculptures on the walls, the bizarre form of the many basins and braziers, the sinister pyramidal altar with the hollow top, or the monstrous, octopus-headed abnormality in some strange, dark metal leering and squatting broodingly on its hieroglyphed pedestal, which robbed him of even the power to give a startled cry. It was nothing so unearthly as this—but merely the fact that, with the exception of the dust, the cobwebs, the winged things, and the gigantic emerald-eyed idol, every particle of substance in sight was composed of pure and evidently solid gold.
     Even the manuscript, written in retrospect after Zamacona knew that gold is the most common structural metal of a nether world containing limitless lodes and veins of it, reflects the frenzied excitement which the traveller felt upon suddenly finding the real source of all the Indian legends of golden cities. For a time the power of detailed observation left him, but in the end his faculties were recalled by a peculiar tugging sensation in the pocket of his doublet. Tracing the feeling, he realised that the disc of strange metal he had found in the abandoned road was being attracted strongly by the vast octopus-headed, emerald-eyed idol on the pedestal, which he now saw to be composed of the same unknown exotic metal. He was later to learn that this strange magnetic substance—as alien to the inner world as to the outer world of men—is the one precious metal of the blue-lighted abyss. None knows what it is or where it occurs in Nature, and the amount of it on this planet came down from the stars with the people when great Tulu, the octopus-headed god, brought them for the first time to this earth. Certainly, its only known source was a stock of pre-existing artifacts, including multitudes of Cyclopean idols. It could never be placed or analysed, and even its magnetism was exerted only on its own kind. It was the supreme ceremonial metal of the hidden people, its use being regulated by custom in such a way that its magnetic properties might cause no inconvenience. A very weakly magnetic alloy of it with such base metals as iron, gold, silver, copper, or zinc, had formed the sole monetary standard of the hidden people at one period of their history."

- "The Mound"; H.P. Lovecraft

Call of Cthulhu

There is a one-off allusion to "The Call of Cthulhu" in the original part of the mine shaft of the spectral miners. In the Shadow Valley story there is an otherworldly horror slumbering deep below ground until it is awakened and destroys its surroundings. Cthulhu is a Great Old One who is in a state of sleeping death at the bottom of the ocean in his city R'lyeh until the stars return to the right alignment. The Cthulhu cultists arond the world are unconnected to each other, except for what they receive in their minds from the dreaming Cthulhu. This is the "uninvited memories" of ritual chanting in the room painting.

[Mine Shaft]
Faint echoes of a strange singsong chant enter your mind without the courtesy of using your ears.  Disturbed, you can find no visible source of the uninvited memories.  The walls seem to grow closer as the tunnel continues upward to the east.
Obvious exits: east, west

In the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft he used the phrase "sing-song chant" twice, once in "Out of the Aeons" co-written with Hazel Heald, the other as an exact phrase in "The Call of Cthulhu". In "Out of the Aeons" it is strange foreigners coming to see a mummy with a scroll from Yuggoth, which turns out to have an image of Ghatanothoa with the power of mummifying those who look at it. This story notably has Randolph Carter in it in his Swami disguise, and mentions Yig, but otherwise seems irrelevant. In "The Call of Cthulhu" the phrase is immediately before the famous line of Cthulhu sleeping in R'lyeh.

"Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and the muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organised ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual:
     “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotised with horror."

- "The Call of Cthulhu"; H.P. Lovecraft

This is then translated later in the story when it is discovered a completely unrelated cult of Eskimos had knowledge of the exact same ritual chant.

This data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the Esquimau wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this—the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud:
     “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
     Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this:
     “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

- "The Call of Cthulhu"; H.P. Lovecraft

The "Tale of Silver Valley" does not specifically say the entity is unconscious, but there is a subtle dream theme to Shadow Valley, such as the night mares. The wyrm "awakened" when it fought the steeds.

"There were rumors and legends about them, scary tales of a great evil entity from another plane who once tried to gain entrance to our world by opening a great portal deep underground. The skies grew dark and the ground shook. The entity came through the portal and tore its way up through the ground, breaking the surface just inside Silver Valley. It is said that the equines met this invader with such ferocity that it was driven back into the crevice that it had opened and fell into a deep chasm never to be heard from again. Some say the horses still remain in the valley to protect us should the entity in the pit ever return."

- "Tale of Silver Valley"