The Painted Pirates

An adventure for PCs based in London, possibly working for the Phantasmological Society.

Burning huts on Rathlin Island. Smouldering piles of kelp. Corpses. The aftermath of the first Viking raid in a thousand years.

Only a handful of survivors. Two old men and a young girl who saw her infant brother’s skull dashed against the rocks.

They describe Fomorians. 

Men with bulging eyes, one three times bigger than the other. Tusks. Sinewy elongated limbs. Skin tattooed with elaborate spiralling blue circuitry. Led by a hag with iron teeth who commanded storms of ice.

In the days before the raid - vanished fishing boats. Mutilated grey seals washed up on the rocks of Ushet Point. Sightings of a humped beast moving just below the ocean’s surface.

You keep hearing stories like this. They come from all along the Irish coast, and the Hebrides.

The next raid will be at Sheephaven Bay in three days’ time.

Around half a billion years from now, Azathoth shows up and starts to eat the Sun.

It’s almost game over by then anyway. The decadent end-stage civilisation of Zothique on Pangaea Ultima has come and gone. Unrecognisable forms of posthumanity have spread out among the stars, warred against the Serpent Men, made love to the Zeta Reticulans, ascended to destinies far beyond your comprehension.

Only a few scattered hominids linger on the barren, frigid Earth, scouring the fungal tundra, competing for the last scraps of nutrient with Wellsian crustaceans and lumbering vampire moths. 

The black towers of renegade time wizards stud the landscape, draining heat from the past. Promising young civilisations are robbed of all their energy through highly inefficient processes to keep one shrivelled, skull-capped warlock alive for a thousand years more.

The wizard Eibon, way back in the days of Hyperborea, attempted to communicate with these people.

He built a series of time gates across the Thulean Plateau. Powered by geothermal energy. He decided pretty quickly that the future was boring, and gave up. But the gates remain.

On the distant isle of Hirta, way out in the Atlantic, there’s a cave. Hewn into the granite. In that cave is a stone circle, and inside that stone circle is a pool of black ooze. 

The pool needs to be fed to keep it quiet. No more than a handful of sheep a year, at midwinter, and a few drops of human blood. Nobody knows who came to the islands first, who accidentally got it started up.

Hirta’s abandoned. Modernity exists and the young men don’t want to spend their lives on a barren rock, eating smoked puffin while their wives die of preventable diseases. They flee to the relative civilisation of Scotland, where they get work as stonemasons and cooks.

A humourless Presbyterian came to the island in 1865 and tried to totally stamp out the ancient pagan ways. The last old woman who remembered them has just died.

She leaves the island empty.

And slowly, the pool starts to bubble. Its tarry surface glistens with the light of unseen stars. A blue hand emerges from the slime.

Saint Columba, in the sixth century, brought Christianity to the lords of Dál Riata. He founded a grand abbey at Iona, where monks were trained to restore the light of Jesus to the benighted British isles.

North of Iona, in Fingal’s Cave on Staffa, there’s a Hyperborean shrine in which a gateway to the future can be found. Columba went into this cave and caught a glimpse of the ultimate destiny of man.

He established a secret Celtic order, a religion within a religion, devoted to the worship of Azathoth. The brothers of the Coiled Cross idolise predestination. Aidan of Lindisfarne, John Knox and the Venerable Bede were all among their number.

This tradition has been kept alive by the MacQuarrie clan. 

A crew of stalwart, red-bearded men in Highland finery, proud of their service to the church, rarely speaking of the inbred branch of cannibal cousins who dwell in the Ulva hills. James MacQuarrie, the clan patriarch, operates the Tobermory distillery. 

The Dòideag, the witch who repelled the Spanish Armada, was one of theirs. So was the Brahan Seer, who was burnt alive in a spiked tar barrel for the hideous accuracy of his prophecies.

You speak to them if you want to visit Staffa. Samuel Johnson, Queen Victoria, Keats and Mendelssohn have all paid homage to the shrine. Boatmen will take you in for a nominal fee. Obviously only special visitors get conducted through the hidden door.

They’ll defend the shrine with their lives. All who see it are given a choice to feed a bit of their souls to Azathoth, or die.

The Fomorians have converted Hirta into a pirate base. Taken over the huts of the old village. The Cailleach, their hag-queen, has established herself in the ruins of the church. She keeps a preacher on a leash to entertain her as she gnaws the flesh from bones.

They weave coracles from human skin and steal fishing boats to add to their growing fleet. Hooked swords. Improvised ogre clubs. Coilguns. A magnet ray, mounted on a hillside, that draws in ships which pass too close. 

Caged captives waiting to be thrown into the big communal fire pit, dug into the turf.

A sea serpent, commanded by bone whistles, lurking in the bay. A strange custom. The Fomorians shout poetry at any ship they intend to take. If you finish the couplet in a way they respect, they’re supposed to let you go free.

It’s not mercy. They come from a place without life, without mercy, without honour, without heat. Anyone who can create is like a god to them. Your world is paradise. They want to find more shrines, open more doors, so their brothers can come through.

Their pirate king is Balor. Ten feet tall. The gaze of his right eye ignites grass and envenoms the blood, but he needs three men and an intricate system of hooks to keep his eyelid open. Not too fond of mirrors of course.

On Rathlin Island there’s a cave, visited by Robert the Bruce, where a spider explained to him that he was destined to rule. Another relic of Hyperborea. Stripped bare by the ages, nothing left.

Raids will target these forgotten sites. The Book of Eibon names them. You can find a copy at Iona, guarded by mad monks. Another in the Wren Library at Trinity College, another in the secret black catalogue of the British Museum. Dig into the Viking sagas, the books of Irish myth, and you’ll see it mentioned.

After Sheephaven Bay, the isle of Canna will be sacked. Early texts know it as Hinba. Columba built a monastery here, and was visited by a burning angel with a glass book and a whip, who directed Saint Brendan to go a-voyaging through the seas of time.

 You are not the only person looking for Hyperborean relics.

The MacQuarrie Brothers, Jock and Abe, representing their clan, bristle-bearded twins, each one cavalier with his own safety and ruthlessly protective of the other’s. Want to preserve the flow of history and keep the time gates safe.

Hermann Voss of the Thule Society, a pale chinless Prussian with a creepy high-pitched laugh. Believes incorrectly that the Teutons are uniquely descended from an ancient master race. Wants Hyperborean technology to enable Nazi world domination.

Moss Twomey, chief of staff of the Irish Republican Army. Not himself a Communist but on commission from Proletkult, the Bolshevik occult research agency. Full complement of grim-faced Easter Rising veterans with machine guns from Yank supporters.

Mortimer and Tessa Wheeler, who work for the Royal Archaeological Institute, which is a front for the Black Pyramid Cult. Both quietly devoted to Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, living principle of competition, herald of Azathoth and master of the primal stew.

And anybody else cool who has shown up thus far. Crowley could be there.

The ideal endgame is a big gunfight on Hirta. Someone has to remain on the island as caretaker. If one of your PCs wants to dedicate themselves to Azathoth, now would be the time.

You can’t call in the Royal Navy because you are just some guy. The police are looking into the matter but are useless as always in the face of Mystery. It’s probably a Serpent Man plot.

In general I do think that the mind-control rays emanating from the rings of Saturn are the answer to the question of “why doesn’t everybody know that magic is real?” It’s also just a premise of the genre of course.

Aesthetically speaking this is just the Alien sequels. Blue forms scuttling over basalt Giger temples. You could probably go into the pools and end up in the future, but don’t. You won’t like it there.

first piece is by a guy called "bubba mak morn"