Making less-terrible Cthulhutech-esque RPG

[hyzmarca]

Water is great at transmitting shockwaves due to its incompressibility, yes, but the inverse cube law still applies. Every time you double the distance the explosion has to move eight times as much water. Depth is armor, and a 20 megaton explosion will not cause significant damage to hardened structures at 25,000 feet.

The difficulties of firing ABM missiles from the bottom of the ocean are easily remedied by the fact that buoyancy is a thing that exists. You can float ABM, AA, and Anti-surface weapons (and detection systems) near the surface pretty much indefinitely. These will be easier to spot, but hiding your cities is never a viable option when you're openly part of a coalition. Maps exist.

Large KKVs still ruin anyone's day, of course. However, we have automatically ruled those out as viable weapons by virtue of the fact that the Mi-Go haven't pulled a footfall and won.

[RadiantPhoenix]

For reference: http://what-if.xkcd.com/15/

[kzt]

The shockwave is the primary destructive effect from strat nukes. The heat pulse is all nice but except for doing special things like setting afire a million square KM of deciduous forest one late fall afternoon it isn't really included in the damage modeling. The blast wave blowing down buildings is the part that people count on when doing targeting.

No, the US abandoned the use of nuke depth charges. After we agreed to get rid of our non-aircraft deployed tactical weapons after the collapse of the USSR. No Soviet subs also meant no targets, so it wasn't a big sacrifice. We have no idea who else has them or plans to use them. As was shown by Biopreparat, the fact that a country solemnly promised to not do something in the future doesn't mean that it actually isn't continuing to do whatever it promised to stop.

[kzt]

Water is great at transmitting shockwaves due to its incompressibility, yes, but the inverse cube law still applies. Every time you double the distance the explosion has to move eight times as much water. Depth is armor, and a 20 megaton explosion will not cause significant damage to hardened structures at 25,000 feet.

No, it's far more deadly than you think. To quote from the last time we went over this

But you understate the destructiveness a lot. For example, (per 'Effect of Nuclear Weapons' 1964 ed) in deep water a 1 kt bomb produces a peak overpressure of 200 PSI at 3 miles. A 20 mt bomb would do that at 81 miles. It produces a 1000 PSI peak overpressure at 16 miles. It's like dynamite fishing on a really, really large scale.

The 20 MT bomb going off on the sea floor would also produce a crater more than 4000 foot wide and over 280 feet deep at the center.

[Username17]

The fact is that the Tohoku earthquake was a equivalent to a gigatonne explosion, and benthic life pretty much shrugged and carried on. If you took 18 copies of the largest nuclear bomb humanity has ever seen fit to detonate in history and set them off at once, it still wouldn't be as big as a single Tohoku earthquake, and somehow the creatures living in that area carried on with their lives. Tidal waves are only a problem if you happen to be in or near shallow water, and non-tidal waves are extremely shitty at transmitting force.

-Username17

[kzt]

Apples to oranges. Moving a lot of rock takes a lot of energy, but the effects are far different when it moves rock a few meters over a 500x200km zone over 300 seconds rather then being delivered to a point in 50 milliseconds. In the same way, a decent punch has as much energy as two or three .22LR caliber pistol bullet, but odds are that you'll be more severely injured by being shot once by a .22 than punched once in the same spot.

[RadiantPhoenix]

The damage that an underwater explosion inflicts on a submarine comes from a primary and a secondary shock wave. The primary shock wave is the initial shock wave from the depth charge, and will cause damage to personnel and equipment inside the submarine if detonated close enough. The secondary shock wave is a result from the cyclical expansion and contraction of the gas bubble and will bend the submarine back and forth and cause catastrophic hull breach, in a way that can be best described as bending a plastic ruler back and forth until it snaps. Up to sixteen cycles of the secondary shock wave have been recorded in tests. The effect of the secondary shock wave can be reinforced if another depth charge detonates on the other side of the hull in a close proximity in time of the first detonation, which is why depth charges normally are launched in pairs with different pre-set detonation depths.

The killing radius of a depth charge depends on the payload of the depth charge and the size and strength of the submarine hull. A depth charge of approximately 100 kg of TNT (400 MJ) would normally have a killing radius (hull breach) of only 3–4 meters (10–13 ft) against a conventional 1000-ton submarine, while the disablement radius (where the submarine is not sunk but put out of commission) would be approximately 8–10 meters (26–33 ft). A higher payload only increases the radius by a few meters because the effect of an underwater explosion decreases with the distance cubed.

Explosion falls off with cube of distance

Assume nuke of 1 Mt (largest US nukes currently in service)

100kg TNT = 0.1 ton

So an energy ratio of 10^7, so a radius ratio of 10^(2.3333)

The disablement radius would be about 2 km against a submarine, and the killing radius about half a km; no idea how that translates into damage to soft organic things.

[kzt]

You can believe Wikipedia's "This article needs additional citations for verification", I'll go with the graphs and calculations in "Effects of Nuclear Weapons".

[RadiantPhoenix]

You can believe Wikipedia's "This article needs additional citations for verification", I'll go with the graphs and calculations in "Effects of Nuclear Weapons".

Assuming you're talking about the wikipedia article linked by that name (well, actually, the one it redirects to, but whatever), it's about surface nuclear explosions, not underwater ones.

[kzt]

Nope, I'm talking about the DoD text "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons". I have an older print version, but here is a link to the 1977 version's underwater blast chapter.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/effe ... f#zoom=100

Look at the part starting at 6.115. The numbers it uses might vary from the 1960s version I have, but they are probably pretty close.

[erik]

You can believe Wikipedia's "This article needs additional citations for verification", I'll go with the graphs and calculations in "Effects of Nuclear Weapons".

Assuming you're talking about the wikipedia article linked by that name (well, actually, the one it redirects to, but whatever), it's about surface nuclear explosions, not underwater ones.

I'm assuming he isn't using a wikipedia article since he said 1964 ed, and quoted the name as an actual title.

I went to http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/effects/
"The effects of nuclear weapons" 1977 ed.

It has good olde copies of documents. Chapter 6 deals with underwater bursts.

From the Bikini Baker test conducted in what is described as a 20kt shallow water detonation by this document, there was about 2000' diameter crater that was 32' at the deepest.

There's a handy graph that gives a slant range near the end of Chapter 6 (page 41 of 45 for the pdf, page 271 of the full document)...

A 20 MT explosion looks like it would fuck shit up at 25,000 feet away. Eyeballing it, Around 30,000 feet away underwater, the PSI from the blast is ~1100.

However, PSI from just farting around at the bottom of the Mariana Trench is 16,000 PSI. So what the fuck. I presume that sudden increase in pressure would be extremely unhealthy considering 12+ PSI is 98% fatal to people, but, well, fuck. We're already in crazy town here living at the bottom of the ocean like a boss.

[edit: damn, I spent way too long on this post to be ninja'd by over 30 min... am sleepy, going to sleep]

[RadiantPhoenix]

You can believe Wikipedia's "This article needs additional citations for verification", I'll go with the graphs and calculations in "Effects of Nuclear Weapons".

Assuming you're talking about the wikipedia article linked by that name (well, actually, the one it redirects to, but whatever), it's about surface nuclear explosions, not underwater ones.

I'm assuming he isn't using a wikipedia article since he said 1964 ed, and quoted the name as an actual title.

I went to http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/effects/
"The effects of nuclear weapons" 1977 ed.

It has good olde copies of documents. Chapter 6 deals with underwater bursts.

From the Bikini Baker test conducted in what is described as a 20kt shallow water detonation by this document, there was about 2000' diameter crater that was 32' at the deepest.

There's a handy graph that gives a slant range near the end of Chapter 6 (page 41 of 45 for the pdf, page 271 of the full document)...

A 20 MT explosion looks like it would fuck shit up at 25,000 feet away. Eyeballing it, Around 30,000 feet away underwater, the PSI from the blast is ~1100.

However, PSI from just farting around at the bottom of the Mariana Trench is 16,000 PSI. So what the fuck. I presume that sudden increase in pressure would be extremely unhealthy considering 12+ PSI is 98% fatal to people, but, well, fuck. We're already in crazy town here living at the bottom of the ocean like a boss.

[edit: damn, I spent way too long on this post to be ninja'd by over 30 min... am sleepy, going to sleep]

Oops, I initially missed some of his earlier posts.

Well, as I mentioned, I have no idea how that distance relates to organic stuff. I will use the stuff in your document to do some analysis on structures, though.

---

I was assuming a 1Mt weapon, so I'll assume that again.

2km is about 2000 yards, so our peak overpressure is about 3.5 Ksi.

Let's consider a box-shaped steel building 50.5m by 50.5m by 52.5m (tall) with 0.5 m internal walls spaced 5m apart and 0.5m floors 4m apart. Assume doorways are negligible. (Not being a Civil engineer, I don't actually know if this design or assumptions are reasonable)

This gives us a surface of 28500 ft^2 of water, and a cross section of about 6500 ft^2 of steel. We'll neglect the interior water for a moment. This makes the pressure on the steel about 16 Ksi.

The textbook I'm looking at gives a yield strength for structural steel of 36 ksi, so the overall building should be fine (the water pressure won't be a problem because it's the same inside as out).

There are also the outer wall segments between the supporting walls to consider. These are 0.5m thick, and 3.5m/4.5m

Let's pretend a vertical slice of one of these walls is representative of its strength (this is not entirely accurate, because it's also got support from the sides, but if this holds the whole thing should), so it's a 3.5m long steel bar 0.5m thick, with a pressure of 3.5 Ksi being applied over its length.

The average shear stress on the ends of this bar is (3.5m/0.5m)/2 * 3.5 Ksi = 12.25 Ksi, which is less than the shear yield strength of structural steel, which is 21 Ksi.

There's also bending, but that's a bit more work and I don't feel like doing that now. Maybe later.

Anyway, by this analysis, we'd want to about double the stress to break the building, so, extrapolating from the graph, 1km from the blast is about the point where you'd get that pressure.

---

The three likely relevant graphs are 6.115, 6.116a, and 6.116b, on pages 41 and 42 of the document eonw_6

[kzt]

There's a handy graph that gives a slant range near the end of Chapter 6 (page 41 of 45 for the pdf, page 271 of the full document)...

A 20 MT explosion looks like it would fuck shit up at 25,000 feet away. Eyeballing it, Around 30,000 feet away underwater, the PSI from the blast is ~1100.

The range scale is in thousands of yards. So for a nominal 20MT it crosses the 1000 PSI line at about 15,000 yards. So you have a 1000 PSI shock at 8.5 miles, and a mere 100 PSI at 56 miles.

Human data says that you get severe lung damage from a peak of 25PSI, with 50% death due just to the direct effects of shockwave (not lung damage) at 62PSI (100% at 92 PSI).

Based on the effectiveness of dynamite fishing I'd expect that kind of shockwave to be very bad for anything that is a lot like a boney fish, but I've never seen overpressure vs lethality data for a variety of (or any) underwater critters. Those with an air filled container (like an air bladder or lungs) are said to be very vulnerable, as are those fish with swim bladders. Critters like sharks and lobsters are more resistant (for some value of "more"), but they can be killed or inured also with higher pressure (for some value of "higher").

But anyhow, I suspect that "people" living at the bottom of the ocean would find 20MT depth charges to be pretty darn troublesome and destructive and would not just laugh them off but would instead be highly motivated to take actions to make them stop.

[Username17]

Blast fishing isn't really very effective at all. Fish get stunned, and in many cases get their swim bladders ruptured. It's basically exactly like getting a hit from a concussion grenade. Your ear drum may rupture, and it will disorient you for a time, but you are pretty unlikely to die. And that's what a nuclear bomb is under water. Outside a really small area where it turns the water into steam (and loses a lot of energy doing it), it's basically just a big concussion grenade.

Dyson thought that you could set off big nukes in deep water and destroy all the coastlines, but he turns out to have been wrong. Nukes in deep water are extremely disappointing. Even the craters you get on the sea floor are massively smaller than what you get on the surface - for the same reason that a crater on the moon is going to be a lot bigger than a crater on the Earth. All that water pressure is pretty good at holding the ground down, and all that water is even better at catching flying debris and absorbing their energy. Meaning that you just don't throw up nearly as much material and what material you do throw up doesn't go nearly as far. Hence: smaller craters.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

Believe it or not, I am not a nuclear physicist. That said, I'm going to guess that the percentage of people who play this game and are also not nuclear physicists is nice and high. If we say that the nukes used by the moon beasts weren't very effective against water types, it probably doesn't even matter whether or not it's perfectly accurate. The result of Deep Ones being the local superpower is pretty cool and I think we should keep it, and long exhaustive physics conversations as to whether or not an undersea civilization would take much damage from a nuke detonated so far underwater that the only research questions ever asked were "would this disable a submarine" and "could we wreck some coastlines with this" are probably not critical to the setting.

[hyzmarca]

The issue isn't even that the nukes used by the moon beasts weren't effective against water types. It's that the moon beats never used nukes against Y'ha-nthlei. Their arsenal wasn't that big in the first place, and they basically blew their load in the first few years, long before they the Y'ha-nthlei debacle. There weren't that many nukes used after the initial first strike.

The Moon-beasts priority targets were human leadership and manufacturing, with leadership coming first because they really didn't get how boned they were in production until later. The former got the nuked first, and the latter didn't get nuked enough. So while places like Detroit were smouldering craters they literally ran out of uranium before making a major dent in human production.

Attempts to capture human nuclear weapons met with mixed success, as it quickly became standard policy for human forces to destroy their nuclear weapons and materials if capture was likely, leaving the Moon-beasts with little more than radioactive dust from those efforts. The initial attack on Y'ha-nthlei was meant to scare them away from some seabed uranium deposits so that the Moon-beasts could begin stockpiling again. Before that the Moon-beasts made several attempts to mine uranium on the surface, and every one of them was met by the humans dropping everything and taking out the facilities no matter the cost. They weren't going to let the Moon-beasts make more nukes, even if they had to throw away lives and territory to stop them.

Basically, the conversation between Dagon and the Moon-beast Ambassador went something like this.

MBA: Listen, big guy, we have nothing against you or your people. It's those darn surface dwellers. If you don't help them we'll leave you alone.

Dagon: That's perfectly alright, I really don't want to get involved. Just leave the oceans alone and we'll be good.

-Several years later-

MBA: I know that you've been building nukes since the 50s and have quite a stockpile. We're kind of running low. How about you let us borrow some.

Dagon: I told you, I don't want to get involved. I'm not going to help either side. Just leave us alone.

MBA: How about letting us have this uranium mine here, then.

Dagon: No.

-After the Attack -

MBA: The good news is that my bosses aproved the peace plan. All you have to give up are the uranium mines right here and -

At this point, Dagon eats the Moon-beast Ambassador and comments that he was "chewy" before asking his secretary to get the UN on the phone.

[Shatner]

I've been meaning to ask how the Moon Beasts got nukes in the first place. Sounds like they made their own from... moon uranium? Which leads me to ask what level of tech the moon beasts were at when they decided to throw down with humanity. I thought the moon beasts lived entirely, or mostly, in the dream lands so they could live on the moon despite it being, well, the moon, and that they could wage war across the intervening space because the dream lands allow you to sail to earth like it's the freakin' Mediterranean.

I'd originally assumed we were dealing with cunning beings from magic-land who got the drop on tech land because of magic, and that what tech they did use was stolen through raids, allies, or taken before the war by cultist saboteurs.

EDIT: Generally speaking, it's hard to tell within a Mythos-inspired setting because you have solar system aliens with crazy tech, inter-dimensional aliens with crazy tech, freaky alien colonists from before the last ice age with super bio-engineering tech, weird creatures that can just fly through space by flapping their wings, as well as all manner of intelligent and unintelligent monsters who possess magical insanity-inducing powers because they are freaky monsters from another realm/the core of the earth/the depths of the sea. The ambient tech-level is all over the place, even across beings of nominally the same power-level.

[Avoraciopoctules]

hyzmarca, your write-ups continue to be both entertaining to read and very compelling as ideas.

How do you think Dagon (and Y'ha-nthlei in general) perceives Toth Amon? They probably have a fair amount of data on the long-term actions of previous incarnations of the serpent cult.

Is Dagon an unquestioned dictator among his own nation? What does the lower-level bureaucracy that keeps everything running look like?

[hyzmarca]

I've been meaning to ask how the Moon Beasts got nukes in the first place. Sounds like they made their own from... moon uranium? Which leads me to ask what level of tech the moon beasts were at when they decided to throw down with humanity. I thought the moon beasts lived entirely, or mostly, in the dream lands so they could live on the moon despite it being, well, the moon, and that they could wage war across the intervening space because the dream lands allow you to sail to earth like it's the freakin' Mediterranean.

I'd originally assumed we were dealing with cunning beings from magic-land who got the drop on tech land because of magic, and that what tech they did use was stolen through raids, allies, or taken before the war by cultist saboteurs.

EDIT: Generally speaking, it's hard to tell within a Mythos-inspired setting because you have solar system aliens with crazy tech, inter-dimensional aliens with crazy tech, freaky alien colonists from before the last ice age with super bio-engineering tech, weird creatures that can just fly through space by flapping their wings, as well as all manner of intelligent and unintelligent monsters who possess magical insanity-inducing powers because they are freaky monsters from another realm/the core of the earth/the depths of the sea. The ambient tech-level is all over the place, even across beings of nominally the same power-level.

The Moon-beasts made their first forays onto the Waking Moon in 39, after learning how to find and use Tunnels from a group of Ghoul slaves. They never had a major presence there, just a few minor outposts. They didn't need to breath, so the vacuum wasn't a problem. But it was empty and not particularly interesting. They did, however, , start pointing telescopes toward Waking Earth.

In 45 they witnessed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To say that they were shocked and scared was an understatement. Up until this point they had never considered the possibility that anyone could wield destructive power on that scale, short of th e Outer Gods. But they were also intrigued. They began copying human weapons and started mining uranium on the dark side of the moon. They also built several concealed underground facilities on the light side to continue observing Waking Earth. They also use Ghoul mercenaries and Men of Leng as spies on the ground.

When humans started launching rockets into space they copied those, too. Since most of their holdings were on the Dreamlands Moon, they were able to have a significant military buildup without anyone on Waking Earth noticing. And by aping human weapons and tactics they were able to create a force that simply crushed the Ghouls and other Dreamlands nations.

This allowed them access to the Tunnels between the Dreamlands and Waking Earth, which the Ghouls had always made extensive use of. They were able to move their nukes and and tanks and troops into position invisibly. No one had any clue what was going on when the Moon-beast blitzkrieg commenced.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Believe it or not, I am not a nuclear physicist. That said, I'm going to guess that the percentage of people who play this game and are also not nuclear physicists is nice and high. If we say that the nukes used by the moon beasts weren't very effective against water types, it probably doesn't even matter whether or not it's perfectly accurate. The result of Deep Ones being the local superpower is pretty cool and I think we should keep it, and long exhaustive physics conversations as to whether or not an undersea civilization would take much damage from a nuke detonated so far underwater that the only research questions ever asked were "would this disable a submarine" and "could we wreck some coastlines with this" are probably not critical to the setting.

AFAIK, the only relevant parts of nuclear physics for this are:

• How big is the boom?
• How much space is irradiated how much for how long?

The effectiveness of the boom is standard physics, as well as biology/medicine to evaluate damage on creatures and mechanical engineering and standard physics to evaluate damage on structures

...

That said, I think the gist of your post is correct.

[kzt]

Believe it or not, I am not a nuclear physicist. That said, I'm going to guess that the percentage of people who play this game and are also not nuclear physicists is nice and high. If we say that the nukes used by the moon beasts weren't very effective against water types, it probably doesn't even matter whether or not it's perfectly accurate. The result of Deep Ones being the local superpower is pretty cool and I think we should keep it, and long exhaustive physics conversations as to whether or not an undersea civilization would take much damage from a nuke detonated so far underwater that the only research questions ever asked were "would this disable a submarine" and "could we wreck some coastlines with this" are probably not critical to the setting.

It's perfectly possible that it's generally accepted that the underwater civilization isn't able to be effectively attacked with nukes, even though that is not correct. The fact that nobody did it might well override the fact that theoretically they are pretty darn vulnerable. The prewar UK saying "The bomber will always get through" needed a lot of dead bomber crews before the RAF started to seriously question it.

[RadiantPhoenix]

So, going back (to page 6) to the topic of names for the game for a little bit:

I propose we shorten this to Sentai Fhtagn and use that.

I'm pretty sure that this can be roughly translated as, "Dream Team," which sounds like at least as good a name as any. (The longer version could translate as, "Magical Dream Team, fuck yeah!" if my Googling is correct)

[hyzmarca]

hyzmarca, your write-ups continue to be both entertaining to read and very compelling as ideas.

How do you think Dagon (and Y'ha-nthlei in general) perceives Toth Amon? They probably have a fair amount of data on the long-term actions of previous incarnations of the serpent cult.

Is Dagon an unquestioned dictator among his own nation? What does the lower-level bureaucracy that keeps everything running look like?

Dagon is old. He's so old that no human being can wrap his mind around how old Dagon is. He's so old that Dagon can't wrap his mind around how old Dagon is. He has seen practically everything at least once. Countless civilizations have risen and fallen in his lifetime. Entire species have gone extinct under his watch. Because of his age and his breadth of experience, he has very few shits left to give.

He knows about Yig and the Serpent Men and everything. He just doesn't care about them. He cares about very little these days. He isn't nihilistic, he's just been through so much it's difficult for him to get excited about anything, especially not about what surface dwellers do.

That might be changing. He might be getting interested in the state of the world again. If he was, he would be tolerant of them, up to the point that they start to rock the boat. He likes the status quo.

Y'ha-nthlei in general is a bit more concerned. They know that Yig is a Great Old One. They have no clue what he'd do if he ever showed up.

As for Dagon's role in government, he's Father Dagon. Hydra is Mother Hydra. These are not just titles. They are, literally, the Adam and Eve of their race. They sit on top of every Deep One's family tree.


A million years ago, when Cthulhu learned that he had to go into hibernation, he transformed a group of archaic humans (Homo antecessor) into guardians who could protect him in his sleep. These were the first Deep Ones. There were several of them. Exact numbers aren't forthcoming, but at least five. These were never meant to be the first of an entire race. They were meant to just hang around R'lyeh and wake him up if an Elder Thing battle cruiser showed up or something. But the guardians had a falling out. Dagon and Hydra were the only survivors of this disagreement. They left R'lyeh and started humping each other like jackrabbits.

The Deep Ones were initially a nuclear family, Dagon, Hydra, and their kids. As the kids grew up and had kids of their own, and they had kids of their own, and so fourth, this became first an extended family and then a clan. Dagon and Hydra were the heads of the clan, followed by their eldest children. Once this became unmanageable, it evolved into a sort of feudal structure. Children owe fealty to their parents, who owe fealty to their parents, and so on. Dagon and Hydra were always at the top of that chain, of course.


As the Deep One population expanded, they started becoming heavily inbred and this negatively effected their fertility. Starting from only two specimens, this was pretty much inevitable. So they started doing their gold and fish for "mixing' thing, where they'd use surface dwellers to expand their gene pool. This baby boom (over the course of several hundred thousand years) expanded their population to the point that the feudal clan structure was no longer doing it. That's when the Esoteric Order of Dagon was first established, though not by that name.

The EoD serves as the spiritual and familial core of the Deep One culture and retains the same extended clan structure as the traditional Deep One government, with Dagon and Hydra at the top, then followed by their biological children. Rank is a matter of seniority and generation. Surface dwellers who choose to mix with them are essentially adopted, becoming members of the Deep One extended family.

While the EoD provided structure to the Deep Ones' life it wasn't actually a government. For a very long time they had no real government, relying on a sort of anarchist-collectivism with laws being made ad-hoc as needed.

Individual cities may have had formal bureaucracies, but their laws were generally space and their was no single overall government.

Deep Ones killed each other sometimes.
Wars happened sometimes. Deep One cities fought each other. Deep One clans fought each other. Dagon and Hydra never took sides. For the most part, though, Deep Ones only died when they chose to commit suicide, usually sacrificing themselves to Dagon and Hydra when they became tired of living.


This really didn't change until the Innsmouth incident. Once they were outed to the world, it became clear that they needed to get their asses in gear and present a united face to the world. Of course, there were huge arguments over what that face should look like. The Deep Ones cities congregated around two capitols each with very different philosophies, Rlyeh and Y'ha-nthlei. Dagon and Hydra again remained neutral, serving in their role as the spiritual core of the Deep One civilization, equivalent to the Pope. They remained Neutral until the R'lyeh faction implored them to wake Cthulhu for them near the end of World War II. Then they took a stand. Under no circumstances would they wake him prematurely. When R'lyeh somehow did it anyway (resulting in the destruction of Sydney) Dagon and Hydra officially sided with Y'ha-nthlei and used Y'ha-nthlei's diplomatic channels to tell that allies what happened, why, how, and that R'yleh couldn't do it again. R'lyeh tried to bluff the Allies, threatening to level city after city, but it didn't work, and it wasn't hard for the R'lyeh faction to figure out that Dagon and Hydra had betrayed their secrets to the Allies.


Currently, Dagon and Hydra are the official Heads of State of Y'ha-nthlei, a federation based around the city-state of the same name. In that role they sort of like a cross between the Queen of England, the Pope, and the Supreme Leader of Iran. They aren't involved in day-to-day governing, but have broad reserve powers that the Deep Ones take very seriously. Even when their pronouncements don't carry weight of law, they usually get obeyed.

Below them you've got an elected president who serves for an eight year term. So far, everyone who has held this position has been an ancient Deep One, only a few generations removed from Dagon and Hydra, and all of them have ran unopposed.

There's also a unicameral legislature, which also acts as the Supreme Court. Legislators are elected, but the Legislature tends to be stacked with clan influential leaders.

Actual day-to-day running of things is done by a professional bureaucracy that skews more towards younger demographics. Whereas the President and the Legislators are all hundreds of thousands of years old, the heads of the various Executive Departments top out at eight centuries and most are under three hundred. Advancement in the Executive Departments is based on merit rather than seniority, so the young can rise to pretty high rank if they're good enough.

The Executive Departments have more power than either the President or the Legislature, despite technically being below the President and subordinate to the laws of the Legislature. In practice, the EDs do things, and then the President orders them to do what they just did. The EDs enforce laws, and then the Legislature passes those laws.


The Executive Departments are the driving force in the government, the elected officials are basically there to pick a side when two of them clash, or rubber-stamp them otherwise. On rare occasion, one of them might go too far and then the President will reel them in and the Legislature will put them on trial, but for the most part the ED heads and the bureaucrats in general find that it is better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.
This allows the EDs to be highly flexible and responsive, but it also produces a sort of cowboy cop attitude amongst the bureaucracy.

[Grek]

Y'ha-nthlei is governed by the Esoteric Order of Dagon, which is both a ecumenical council of the Deep One religion and a unicameral legislature governing all descendants of Dagon and Hydra. The membership consists of the High Priest of Dagon and the High Priestess of Hydra (appointed by Dagon and Hydra respectively, both for a term of good behavior) as well as one additional delegate per generation of Dagon's descendants, elected for an eight year term by the members of that generation. The Esoteric Order of Dagon in turn passes laws and appoints the various judges, ministers and governors for the various provinces of Y'ha-nthlei. Dagon and Hydra have a jointly controlled veto power over the Order which is rarely used.

As a result of this system, older Deep Ones who are closer to Dagon on the family tree have their votes matter more than those of more distant relation. After all, if there are only a dozen surviving grandchildren of Dagon, each of their votes is worth 1/12th of a representative. Human hybrids can be elected to the Order, but have relatively little representation due to the fact that only the most recent twenty or so generations have any sizable hybrid constituency. Purebred humans, Ghouls, Goat Spawn, Oni, and anyone else unable to prove their Deep One ancestry to the satisfaction of an election commission does not get representation in Y'ha-nthlei's government , even if they happen to live in one of the undersea cities.

[Chamomile]

Do Deep Ones stop making babies at some point in their hypothetically infinite lifespans? If not, wouldn't all generations have ballooned out to enormous size by now? If Dagon and Hydra produce even a single child every century and lose one every two centuries, then in a million years that gives them five thousand children. This will cause the second generation's population to rise exponentially. The third generation's population will therefore rise exponentially faster than that, but nevertheless you're probably going to see every single generation host to a really huge membership, some of whom will only be a few centuries old. This isn't a problem, but it is something to keep in mind.