Cruel Empire of Tsan Chan, The

The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

That time has come. Humans are a blasted, savage race, serving the evangelic Cthulhu. The Lord of Xoth holds sway over a race of dreamers, making vile sacrifices and hideous prayers to Gods they cannot understand. Even the powerful Mythos races serve.

Except for the Empire of Tsan Chan. In the year 5000, it remains the one place of human safety and freedom, although that comes at a horrifying place. Ruled over by an Empress and her Mighty Children, who have bred with outer forces, in collusion with the Deathless sorcerers, only appalling discipline keeps the small Empire safe behind the Forbidding on the Plateau of Leng, which was once a place called China.

With fragile alliances with Ghouls, the Serpent Folk and the Elders, who search for their lost colonists, the Empire survives. But its serfs grow ever madder, its politics ever more vicious and sooner or later, the Great Ones will grow weary of all defiance. Then, not even the technology and magic, or the arcanotech, which is both, of this new age will protect them.

From the necropolitan city of Yian-Ho to the Tcho-Tcho infested swamps of Vietnam, to the seething, god-stained Forbidden City to the foul Shoggothim, the living capital of the Shoggothim, the Empire struggles to survive just another year, now the Stars have long since Come Right.

Christian Read's (Mythos Magic) The Cruel Empire of Tsan Chan is a discussion of the events of the return of the Great Ones, the history of the Empire, it's culture and politics, the technologies and alliances it has made ensure its existence, a gazetteer of the terrible future-earth and a tool box for creating campaigns in the future from dark high fantasy to post-apocalyptic road war.