Citizen Third Rider Notes: Fill & Download for Free

I've got an idea on tap that I need to sit down and write one of these days...it's actually an idea that my fiancee Sabrina Hoyt dreamed up, but she let me have when I started filling in more background details about the world and the supporting characters. It's a fantasy novel, with six characters who are actually all siblings (though they don't know it, having been magically separated in the past), that discover that they are all the children of great heroes who saved the world from a great evil, and now must join together to stop the son of that great evil from prevailing. The six children (the protagonists) are a female dragon cavalry rider, a paladin, a female town magistrate, a woodsman, a female druid, and a roguish thief.I've got a copy of Scrivener, and I've loaded a workspace up with all the notes I made on the world, the characters, and the complete plot outline...I just need to put the actual text in there.Here is the prologue I came up with to give you an idea:"And it came to pass that, in the third year of Castor III, the foul Ciaran, son of Erebus Worldsbane, began to seek out the joinings of the races of Elves and Men, bringing them to his fell dwelling of Doomvale, where he slew them without pity or remorse. For he knew of the prophecy that, just as the Heroes Gideon and Maetharanel had defeated mighty Erebus and scattered his armies of the undead to the four winds, so too would their children one day rise up to bring down his Heir. Though Ciaran searched far and wide with his baleful eye, he found no sign of the Children of the Heroes, even as his power built. But all do know that prophecy is a fickle master; we citizens of Ravenn's land can only pray for its fulfillment."- From the Histories of Dylan the Scribe, Volume III

Cosmic Horror StoryIs the tone of the work deeply pessimistic about the possibility of the antagonist being defeated completely? If it isn't, the work is more likely to be Lovecraft Lite. Usually the best option to defeat the Big Bad in a standard cosmic horror story is to prevent its human worshipers and servants from opening the door or getting its attention. It can still be a cosmic horror story if the antagonist can be defeated completely (or so thoroughly that it will cease to be an issue by any reasonable standard), but will result in a Pyrrhic Victory. If the cost of a complete defeat is insurmountable, its defeat opens the door for even worse things, or its influence continues to fester and pollute the world in its absence, it's probably not Lovecraft Lite.Some examples from tvtropes.orgIsaac Asimov's "Nightfall" invokes this premise not with a paranormal deity, but with a natural and real phenomenon. On the planet Lagash, the night sky is only visible every two thousand years, during an eclipse. The concept of "darkness" is so foreign to them that one of the characters needs the concept explained, and torches are an experimental new technology. These eclipses have seemed to coincide with the collapse of past civilizations. A new scientific theory postulates that the night sky, in all its awesome, terrible wonder, has driven every previous civilization mad. On the eve of the next eclipse, the citizens of Lagash are about to find out whether this theory is correct.Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows" takes place in an Eldritch Location where the boundaries between our reality and another reality have worn thin. It's very eerie and otherworldly and places a lot of emphasis on incomprehensible reality and human insignificance.Robert W. Chambers's book The King in Yellow, which was an influence on Lovecraft himself, and he made references to it that are now better known than the original source. Filled with Mind Screw and Take Our Word for It.William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land and The House on the Borderlandare also notable forerunners.H. P. "Grandpa Cthulhu" Lovecraft and his Weird Tales colleagues - Clark Ashton "Klarkash-ton" Smith, Robert E. "Two-Gun Bob" Howard, etc. - who started the whole Cthulhu Mythos thing (although it wasn't actually named, nor any kind of cohesive whole, until August Derleth laid hands on it) as a collective attempt to lend their works an air of authenticity, by sharing common elements and references as if the stories were actually based on Real Life sources. And it worked - there are now people who genuinely believe the Necronomicon is a real existing book and that Cthulhu was worshiped by ancient Sumerians.The works of Arthur Machen were a huge influence on Lovecraft, particularly his 1894 novella The Great God Pan, which gives us the eponymous Eldritch Abomination and was the basis for Lovecraft's own story "The Dunwich Horror". Machen wrote other works of this kind, though The Great God Pan stands out as the most significant.Guy de Maupassant's short story "The Horla" is another influence on Lovecraft, with its motifs of a cosmos harbouring unknown terrors and, closer to home, a malevolent, intangible organism capable not only of possessing humans but of one day replacing them as a species. Unless, that is, it's just the narrator gradually going mad.Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, of which Lovecraft's own seminal At the Mountains of Madness is a Spiritual Successor if not outright sequel.J.H. Rosnys Les Xipéhuz is one of the oldest examples, from 1888, but already dips into Lovecraft Lite. The eponymous Xipéhuz seem all powerful and indestrictible at first and treaten to wipe out humanity. Later, they are wiped out by the humans.Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger is an early example, taking a nihilistic and maltheistic perspective on Christian theology.H. G. Wells: The War of the Worlds, in which a race of Martians arrives on Earth in cylinders containing hundreds of them each. They build gigantic fighting machines capable of leveling cities and killing enormous groups of people very quickly. The military uses just about everything that would have been available at the time, ranging from canons to the ironclad Thunder Child (the ironclad is even replaced by an atomic bomb in the 1953 film), and the best they can do is occasionally stallthe Martians before being incinerated. By the second half of the book England is a deserted wasteland with barely anyone left alive. The narrator himself refers to the invasion as "the beginning of the rout of civilization". The only thing that saves humanity is the Martians' bodies being vulnerable to unfamiliar bacteria.The Time Machine has some shades of cosmic horror as well, so far as it emphasizes mankind's insignificance—the protagonist travels thousands of years into the future only to discover that rather than advance, mankind has devolved into two primitive species, the Eloi and the Morlocks (though the 1960 film version was slightly more optimistic, and suggested that it may be possible to rebuild civillization). After that whole adventure he travels further into the future to a point where Earth is implied to be dying and humanity is heavily implied to be gone completely.Many stories by Clive Barker, Skins Of The Fathers particularly. They have all the themes: Artifacts of Doom, Eldritch Abominations, Eldritch Locations, and a general sense of dread and fear caused by contact with higher beings that just might not have humanity's best intentions in mind.Jorge Luis Borges wrote the short story There Are More Things in Lovecraft's memory. The story tells the encounter the narrator has with a monstrous extraterrestrial inhabiting an equally monstrous house.Ramsey Campbell, like fellow brits Brian Lumley and Graham Masterton, is one of the most influential latter-day contributors to the Cthulhu Mythos, especially in his earlier works; there's a reason he's Trope Namer for Campbell Country, after all.Fiona van Dahl's Eden Green has the title character explore an abandoned alien world, including the mountain fortress of an extinct but advanced race, in search of the origin of an alien needle parasite currently threatening her home city. Her nightmares before and after hint that she (like Earth) is a tiny speck in the larger picture.Mark Z. Danielewski's debut novel House of Leaves. As a book about a book about a film about a blue: House that is a maze (or, in short, a book that is a maze), it layers its Mind Screw into several overlapping narratives, all commenting on each other note , accompanied by some seriously screwed-up typography, all to give the reader the sense of disorientation one would feel inside the ever-shifting, enigmatic house. It's made particularly explicit when the protagonist of the A-story says that the eponymous house actually is God.Neil Gaiman:"How to Talk to Girls at Parties." The narrator ends up at the wrong party with his friend, flirts with girls who turn out to be Anthropomorphic Personifications of planets, and is almost consumed by hearing a song from one of them. His friend tries to make out with a sun and inadvertently pisses her off, and the narrator never hears from him again."A Study in Emerald" is a Sherlock Holmes homage set in a late 19th century where the Great Old Ones took over centuries ago. While the world superficially is much like ours and the God-Monsters themselves seem as if they've gone native, one doesn't need to scratch the surface much to find exceedingly unpleasant facts and goings-on which may soon lead to the apocalypse. Imagine the first half of the 20th century if all world leaders were even worse monsters.John Hodgman's That Is All has a day by day summary of Ragnarok in 2012. 700 Ancient and Unspeakable Ones destroy the world over the course of the year, killing humanity and any chance of civilization rebuilding in horrific and sometimes darkly humorous ways.Stephen King likes tropes associated with this genre, particularly Eldritch Abominations, although most often they're limited in how much they can affect the world. He also uses Lovecraft Country a lot (many of his works are set in New England, most often rural Maine).In IT, the eponymous monster is perceived as a Giant Spider by the protagonists, because this was the closest analogue that their rational minds could find for Its appearance. Attempting to fight It can result one's mind being flung beyond the edge of the universe, then being driven mad by the Deadlights (which It is merely an appendage of). After the protagonists succeed in killing It, they magically forget about the entire incident; apparently this was the only way they could have lived a normal life afterward."The Mist" describes what happens when ordinary folk are confronted with an encroaching alternate reality that gradually enshrouds everything in an unnatural fog filled with predatory Eldritch Abominations. (Although as the novella explicitly states, they aren't truly "Lovecraftian" horrors, in that they can bleed and die, particularly if they are set on fire.)In The Dark Tower several hints are dropped regarding entities and realities of this magnitude, especially in regards to "Todash Darkness and the unspeakable things that dwell there in the black never between realities". The scenes in Book Seven regarding Roland, Susannah, and Oy fleeing through Castle Discordia from one of these things that somehow got OUT of Todash are laced with suggestive themes about what would happen when the Tower falls and Todash sets these critters loose on all the many universes. Revival is revealed to be this in its closing chapters, when we're shown a glimpse of the afterlife: it consists of everyone who dies being herded naked across a barren landscape by cruel, ant-like monsters to "serve the Great Ones in Null", where there will be "No death, no light, no rest." Ruling over this hellscape is "Mother", an enormous creature made of human faces that will, if anyone voices the slightest bit of resistance, tear the sky open and drive everyone it can touch to murder, suicide, insanity, or all three. Under the Dome: The titular dome is the creation of alien children at play. It's only lifted when the protagonists momentarily induce a sense of pity in one of the children.C. S. Lewis's: Perelandra, after Weston returns to his body which had heretofore been possessed by a bent eldil, the picture he paints of the afterlife suggests a Cosmic Horror universe: Reality as we know it is just a thin shell surrounding an endless abyss of nothingness, and ultimately nothing humanity does matters. However, this being a novel by C.S. Lewis, he's wrong about the universe; and it's suggested that this wasn't even Weston talking, but an eldil impersonating Weston in hopes of discouraging Ransom.Mere Christianity: In this apologetic work, Lewis addresses the criticism that Christianity is (or should be) believed simply because it is comforting; in response he writes that without the possibility of redemption offered by Christ's Passion, the prospect of an all-good God and a universe full of sinful humanity is anything but comforting:"This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again....God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from."Thomas Ligotti is a practitioner of cosmic horror, in works such as "Nethescurial": "See, there is no shape in the fireplace. The smoke is gone, gone up the chimney and out into the sky. And there is nothing in the sky, nothing I can see through the window. There is the moon, of course, high and round. But no shadow falls across the moon, no churning chaos of smoke that chokes the frail order of the earth, no shifting cloud of nightmares enveloping moons and suns and stars. It is not a squirming, creeping, smearing shape I see upon the moon, not the shape of a great deformed crab scuttling out of the black oceans of infinity and invading the island of the moon, crawling with its innumerable bodies upon all the spinning islands of inky space. That shape is not the cancerous totality of all creatures, not the oozing ichor that flows within all things. Nethescurial is not the secret name of the creation. It is not in the rooms of houses and beyond their walls... beneath dark waters and across moonlit skies... below earth mound and above mountain peak... in northern leaf and southern flower... inside each star and the voids between them... within blood and bone, through all souls and spirits... among the watchful winds of this and the several worlds... behind the faces of the living and the dead."Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, starting from The Three-Body Problem, is a big example of sci-fi Cosmic Horror. Humanity made First Contact with an alien civilization, the Trisolarians, who intend to colonize Earth to flee from their uninhabitable home world. They are magnitudes beyond Earth in technology and had locked down Earth's scientific development before their invasion even begins, and when they finally arrive, a single probe obliterates the entirety of Earth Fleet in minutes, before the audience is revealed to that the entire universe is under a principle that made annihilation of all other civilizations mandatory, plunging the entire story into hopelessness as everyone in the universe is hostile to each other by nature, and way beyond anything the humans and the Trisolarians could manage. By the third book, a third civilization casually obliterates the entirety of Solar System by flattening it into 2D, and all everyone can do is to preserve whatever traces of humanity that were left, since the universe is completely hopeless.Sarah Monette's The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth stories take place in a Cosmic Horror Story universe — unsurprisingly, as she openly acknowledges Lovecraft as a major influence.Michael Moorcock: The Elric Saga's world has many, many ancient evils that used to rule the world and now lie around decaying and waiting to destroy any traveler they meet. Elric himself rules over the remnants of one of these evil empires, and his patron god is an Eldritch Abomination (as are virtually all the other gods; Warhammer's Order Versus Chaos theme was clearly inspired by Moorcock's work, at least until they decided to get rid of the Order part). The final book involves the world being completely remade by the Eldritch Abominations, and the "good" ending to the story accepts this as Inevitable Solutions Private Limited - Compete Green Sourcing Solutions! the Corum series the title character fights against Elric's Lords of Chaos in the first series, and in the second series against a group of Eldritch Abominations who are based on the elemental forces of cold and death. An interesting variation is The Dancers at the End of Time: Humanity itself is the source of the horror. Having reached omnipotence through enormously energetically costly technology, they dramatically sped up the heat death of the universe, and the few surviving races still coexisting with humanity are witnessing the stars dying at a frightening rate. Also, since this is a Moorcock story, there is also the implication that some of the Abominations who are wreaking havoc in Elric's universe - including Elric's own Patron God - are in fact Dancers who decided to take part in wars between gods to stave off their boredom.Sean O'Hara's My Dark And Fearsome Queen: Plato was right — except we're the shadows on the wall. And sometimes people from outside enter the cave and alter our existence by their mere presence. Even the nominal good guys don't much care how this affects us. And too much alteration of our "reality" causes distortions, which manifest through Eldritch Abominations.W.H. Pugmire writes this genre from an unusual angle. Some of his stories are from inhuman perspectives, while many of his human protagonists actively seek fates like dissolution in the cosmic ether.Cthulhu's Reign, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, is an anthology of short stories on what life - well, existence anyway - on Earth would be like when the Old Ones return.Charles Stross's The Laundry Files take place in a world where bureaucratic top secret government agencies even more covert and shadowy than MI-5and the CIA battle Eldritch Abominations attracted to reality after Alan Turing discovered a theory that allowed the user to warp reality with computers and the Nazis attempted to summon the Great Old Ones using the souls of those slaughtered in the Holocaust to win the Second World War. CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, where the Elder Gods devour the world, is definitely going to happen; the only question is how long we've got, and the best estimates have it as a matter of a few years ... if we're lucky.Peter Watts's Blindsight is essentially Cosmic Horror Story made realistic and scientifically hard. The novel deals with characters that display psychopathic or sociopathic traits, and is set in a future in which the basic human sense of worth is undermined by the social implications of new technologies. However the true cosmic horror is revealed near the end; the aliens are actually all impossible-to-understand beings that are non-sapient. Sentience itself is an aberration and perceived by the aliens as a blight on the galaxy. In fact things like art cause them pain, making them want to kill anything that displays emotion or empathy. The sequel, Echopraxia, goes even further, examining the theory of a holographic universe; namely that the universe could just be one big simulation, with the laws of physics being the programming and God being the virus that breaks them.In Jack Williamson's short story "Born of the Sun", the planets of the Solar system are actually eggs of space-dwelling dragon-like monsters that start hatching. Pluto first.The Adversary Cycle by F. Paul Wilson depicts a struggle between two forces over Earth — the Otherness and the Ally. Neither of them care about humanity — it's just a counter in a galaxy-spanning conflict for an unknown goal, and implied to be a relatively worthless one at that. The Ally protects Earth simply because the Otherness wants it, and the protagonists serve the Ally only because the consequences of the Otherness taking over Earth are far, far worse.David Wong's John Dies at the End and its sequel This Book is Full of Spiders are Cosmic Horror masquerading as Lovecraft Lite. The antagonists are Eldritch Abominations from parallel realities or stranger places intent on entering our reality and shaping it to suit them. It's strongly implied by the end of the second book that the only reason they haven't been successful so far is that there are so many of these things trying to invade our reality that their various plans and agents keep interfering with each other.Chris Wooding's The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray has the standard deluded-fools-summoning-eldritch-abominations plot.''Cthulhu Armageddon zig-zags between this and Lovecraft Lite. Humankind has survived the Great Old Ones rising and become a New Old West and Weird West combination. However, humankind is gradually dying out and their greatest champion is a humanoid abomination. Then it goes From Bad to Worse.The Sister Verse and the Talons of Ruin is about an eldritch god that torments people by trapping them in a sadistic cycle of reincarnation until they are completely broken inside.The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign: The main premise is that the White Queen, the Top God of the setting who is seen as an incarnation of benevolence, is actually an Eldritch Abomination who doesn't care for humanity as a whole. She does love one person, the main character Kyousuke... in an extremely inhuman fashion, as she sees no problem with making his life a living hell. Kyousuke does manage to defeat her and thwart her plans repeatedly, but only because she doesn't mind losing and so never uses her full power.Worm has quite a few elements of cosmic horror, particularly in the Endbringers, horrifically powerful monsters that regularly obliterate major population centers. Despite the efforts of all the heroes and villains working together, the Endbringers are whittling away the human population. The only being able to really stop them is Scion, the first and most powerful parahuman, but he apparently lacks the mental capacity to decisively defeat them. And then it's revealed that Scion is actually the avatar of an Entity, one of a race of Eldritch Abominations that devour entire planets to reproduce. All superpowers in the setting are due to shards of these Entities attaching to people, as part of their reproductive cycle. The final arc is about what happens when Scion learns that Evil Feels Good. However, the setting ultimately tilts towards Lovecraft Lite. Through their combined efforts, the parahumans of multiple dimensions are able to destroy the true body of Scion. And although the casualties are immense, humanity is able to gradually recover.

If you are in Thailand, even if you look like a Thai, dress like a Thai, and you manage to speak like a Thai, people still recognize that you are a TOURIST:-When you have a date in a fine dining restaurant and you order *pad Thai… You are a tourist (Keeping in mind that any Thai food for dinner must have a basic combination of dishes as follows:-1) Spicy Curry 2) Eggs 3) Meats 4) Seafood 5) Vegetable 6) Soup… Dessert is a must!)( Photo) Pad Thai, a noodle dish available mostly at Street food, is popular among the tourists.When you take a ride from a motorcycle taxi, you wear a skirt but you sit in the same manner as a man … You are a tourist( See below)( photos) Thai ladies will sit on a sideways when riding as a pillion and it’s not against the law in Thailand.When you hail a taxi, you open the taxi’s car door without asking the driver first whether he wants to go your way…You are a tourist ( it’s a practice to ask before you get in the taxi as the drivers have a bad habit of refusing passengers who go different ways from their preferences)( Photo) Bangkok taxis’ driver are known to be fussy, picky and choosy.Thais will ask before getting in—avoid wasting time having to get out of a cab when drivers don’t go.When you are really disappointed when the taxi driver tells you that the restaurant you are going to is closed today… You are a tourist (Taxi’s drivers are known to take passengers to the restaurants where the driver has a cut)When you arrive at the destination, you flip a 500 Baht note to pay for a 150 Baht taxi fare and expect to get a change of 350 Baht… You are a tourist.( It’s common that the driver will say— no change sir… Leaving you in a blank!)When you say to yourself ‘ It must be my lucky day’ when a stranger who offers to take you to watch ‘a saucy show’ for just a 150 Baht at the bar upstairs, without ‘cover charge’… You are a tourist ( Most touts will attract inexperienced ones with that offer but the bar will slam on the exorbitant price of any drinks ordered )When you realize that you have been pick-pocketed, you walk right into the police station to make a police report… You are a tourist (Thai Police are known to be overworked and underpaid, it will be a waste of time to make a report… most Thais will keep a distance from the police)When you are really impressed by the local police as you notice how friendly they are, to visit food vendors stall by stall every single day… You are a tourist (Police officers are known to receive daily donations from vendors)When you can’t keep your eyes off gorgeous looking transvestites… You are a tourist ( See below)-Thais are so used to seeing transvestites in Thailand, only a few bother to look, but the tourist will.When you decide to walk in the rain and walk in the flood on a rainy day while everyone is still standing in the shelter … You are a tourist (Heavy rain creates flood in the city, and is always filthy and Thais know the danger of walking in the rain. Thais will wait till the rain has stopped)When you approach a zebra crossing and walk right in, like what you used to in your home country… You are a tourist ( See below) -Thailand’s law enforcement is weak thus most motorists won’t immediately stop the cars at a zebra crossing.When you are very annoyed with a motorcycle rider who honks at you from behind while you are walking on a sidewalk… You are a tourist (It’s a common practice that motorcycles ride on sidewalks, as traffic congestion in the city is bad and law enforcement is rather weak in this offense)When you are very annoyed when seeing a couple of dogs roaming freely and you go tell the dogs’ owner to put leashes on the dogs…You are a tourist (There is no law that dogs must be on leashes in Thailand)(Photo) Thais love dogs and cats, let alone the stray dogs and they call them ‘ Nong’-younger Sister/ Brother. Most expats are so used to it and leave them alone.When you sit on a bus on a long journey and you are very annoyed when a stranger, a co-passenger right next to you asks if you are married with kids and what do you do for a living… You are a tourist (Thais in general are curious and take the liberty to ask personal questions as it seems that nothing is a secret… It’s an unwritten culture)When you curse and swear and tear your hair out in the taxi just after 60 minutes of the traffic jams… You are a tourist (Bad traffic and congestion are part of the city living in Bangkok daily, especially Monday morning and Friday evening,bad traffic jams can last 2–4 hours. The weekends are never really a better day… On rainy days, God helps, please!)When you bother to respond to what 7-Eleven salesgirl’s welcome message and a thank you message when you leave… You are a tourist (it is a custom to welcome customers and the salespersons will automatically greet every customers like robots all day—especially at all 11,000 stores of 7-Eleven. (See below)When you believe and follow what the first person on the sidewalk who tells you the direction upon asking… You are a tourist (Thais are helpful and seldom turn down or say- I don’t know, to strangers)When you flip out and read a map where you want to go… You are a tourist.(Thai people in general lack of knowledge of reading the map, let alone students)When you see the sign ‘ Admission ticket’ at Khao Yai National Park, you flip out 200 Bath and give it to the counter girl… You are a tourist (there is double pricing in the country with the intention is to help poorer Thais, Thai citizens will pay less, while the tourists will pay up to 10 times more at the National Park and many other places)When you continue walking at the crowded bazaar at 6.00 pm and you are wondering why the rest are not moving… You are a tourist ( Everyday at 8.00am & 18.00 it’s time for a National Anthem, all Thais will stop and pay respect)- See photo below(Top) At 18.00 at the bazaar in Bangkok or anywhere in Thailand, the time for a National Anthem, Thais will stop and pay respect and most foreigners would join in, although they are not obliged to do so.When you shout at a waitress who accidentally spilled a hot coffee on you until she cries, she ran out, and you still continue drinking and act ‘cool’, although, her co-worker tries telling you that she will go home tell her gangster father who lives at the next block… You are a tourist (Thais have their weaknesses such as losing face or face-saving and that creating more crimes and violences all the time. The expats know if a fight is taking place, foreigners will never come out at all because a fair fight, like one-to-one is only in the boxing ring. As such, please avoid getting into a fight with a Thai man)Thailand has arguably just emerged from a third world country status but the behaviors and traits of the people have always been the same even before WW2, despite the country name changing from SIAM twice to THAILAND in 1939 and 1949.Another good reason, Thais have not received any training nor bad influences from European colonial masters unlike their counterparts in SE Asian countries… Would I rather be happy or sad?