Once again you have prevailed against the servitor races and proven yourself
a slipgater to be reckoned with.
While the library-world of Fodrian holds many more secrets awaiting discovery
the trail you have blazed across its more remote locations now empowers you
with arcana that will attest its worth as you forge onwards into deeper regions
of the cosmos.
Though survival itself is the greatest prize any mortal being can claim, yours also
are the less tangible rewards that rest in the mind. Here, then, is your treasure...

These are some extra elements buried in the chapters pak file. Make of them what you will.

wormtest1 and wormtest2
Two maps built to playtest the Vermis.

droletest and shamblertest
Two maps built to test and demonstrate the difference between droles and shamblers in open combat.

vondur.dem
Demo of Vondur revealing all of the secrets in his lost chapter.

These are the cheat codes added to the chapters progs.

The Shalrathae are one of the most enlightened, adebt, ambitious and horrifically ruthless races amongst the Known Worlds. Their intelligence, though similar to humanity's capacity for abstract concious thought, is capable of piercing insights and confoundingly elaborate schemes made possible by their multiple-threaded minds. And all this unhindered by a system of morality bearing any resemblance to the existential angst that besets the human race.
Their vaulting visions of expansion and domination are rooted in an, ironically, single-minded biological urge to compete, to kill and to feed. It is from this character that is derived their more common name amongst the superstitious populace - vore. And it is strikingly borne out in the process by which vores develop and mature to adulthood.
Juvenille vores - or vorelings - patently lack the intelligence of the adult form. It is uncertain if they even have any kind of self awareness, given their unsophisticated approach to almost everything that isn't themsleves. They are vicious and wholly antagonistic, not only to other species but to others of their own kind, though it is probable that some sort of familial bond redirects their aggression away from siblings as long as other prey is available. Not surprisingly, it has never been possible to observe their behaviour under such circumstances to test this belief, but the incestuous warmongering of the adults suggests that vorelings will attack rivals with at least as much vigour - vores are cannibals.

Infants are born in groups or 'clutches' and are immediately aggressive. It is not known how much responsibility the progenitors take for their offspring - voreling behaviour seems to be as much about eliminating competitors, of other species as well as their own, as it is about simple hunger. They are highly autonomous creatures that attack without provocation or influence from the rest of their species. Very few ever survive infancy because of this, but those that do will almost certainly be experienced killers even before reaching maturity.

Voreling development is a crucible of lethal efficiency, pitching the newborn into a life of violence and bloodshed as their principal experience and preventing all but the most murderous from reaching adulthood, where indomitable intellect and arcane power await.

"According to these scraps of information, the basis of the fear was a horrible elder race of half-polypous, utterly alien entities which had come through space from immeasurably distant universes and had dominated the earth and three other solar planets about six hundred million years ago.
They were only partly material - as we understand matter - and their type of conciousness and media of perception differed widely from those of terrestrial organisms. For example, their senses did not include that of sight; their mental world being a strange, nonvisual pattern of impressions.
They were, however, sufficiently material to use implements of normal matter when in cosmic areas containing it; and they required housing - albeit of a peculiar kind. Though their senses could penetrate all material barriers, their substance could not; and certain forms of electrical energy could wholly destroy them. They had the power of aerial motion, despite the absence of wings or any other visible means of levitation. Their minds were of such texture that no exchange with them could be effected by the Great Race.
When these things had come to the Earth they had built mighty basalt cities of windowless towers, and had preyed horribly upon the beings they found. Thus it was when the minds of the Great Race sped across the void from that obscure, transgalactic world known in the disturbing and debatable Eltdown Shards as Yith.

The irruptions of the elder things must have been shocking beyond all description, since they had permanently colored the psychology of the Great Race. Such was the fixed mood of horror that the very aspect of the creatures was left unmentioned. At no time was I able to gain a clear hint of what they looked like.
There were veiled suggestions of a monstrous plasticity, and of temporary lapses of visibility, while other fragmentary whispers referred to their control and military use of great winds. Singular whistling noises, and colossal footprints made up of five circular toe marks, seemed also to be associated with them.

Meanwhile, the Great Race maintained its cautious vigilance, with potent weapons ceaselessly ready despite the horrified banishing of the subject from common speech and visible records. And always the shadow of nameless fear hung about the sealed trapdoors and the dark, windowless towers."

- H. P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Out Of Time

"The thing was bent over at what I can only call its waist, occupied with some interest in the examination of my late comrade's remains. Despite its intense perusal, there was nothing in its manner to even hint at anything approaching compassion; instead, it seemed to regard the body as curiously stimulating. Within its tall and fleshy bulk the only quality that approximated a human being was the basic arrangement of form; a pair of upward-tapering legs were jointed to a torso of cartiliginous framework and an organ of some kind lolled and tilted from the top like a head, though it was longer and narrow like a gray, scabrous, handless arm. From where one might, in a naive grasp at familiarity, expect to see arms extend from the body, instead two pairs of sinuous, ropy tentacles grew like tree limbs or roots - up and down and out. They swayed, though not with the gentle bowing of a branch in the breeze, but like the feelers of a monstrously oversized slug or four angry snakes, and stirred the air constantly.
As the revolting creature hunched closer to the object of its attention, it brought the two of its lower tentacles to touch the corpse, caressing it in a way that sickened me and drove the panic to rise higher inside in a way I cannot even now explain. The open wounds that so distressingly marred the body of the man I'd called friend seemed especially fascinating to the creature, and as it stroked and probed with those awful boneless limbs, tears began to blur my sight. Then, without pause or ceremony, it slipped the tips of its trembling tentacles into the still vividly red openings and began to lap from them. Not into a mouth, for the head - if that is what it was - had no such opening or shape to accomadate one. But rather, it flicked and shoveled its tentacles into the broad, bone-caged orifice that covered the front of its body, first stained with blood and then tugging larger pieces from...No, for common decency and respect for my friend, I will not detail the vileness and utter degradation of that creature's molestation. Suffice to say that had I the benefit of objectivity and a more practical environment, the activity of the creature, even for a few seconds, would have warranted months of research and recording in the most prestigious scientific journals. That I now write with a twist of anger and a pit of sadness at the memory, though many miles and many years distant from it, is enough. For there that day, watching the atrocity commence from my place of concealment, I could stifle my feelings no more. I let out a cry - part human grief, part animal horror - so involuntary and raw that for a moment I thought I was not alone in the outhouse.
But if the sound was startling to me, it was more alerting to the thing. For its body tensioned in a moment, the bony arrangments closing in like loose armour while the tentacles whipped back and froze, blood flicking from their tips. And most awful of all, that long, narrow head-like organ that jutted forwards from the top swung round to point towards me so at last its purpose became apparent - gripped by a narrow ring of calloused flesh, a single, enormous, glistening eyeball was mounted on the end.
It stared directly towards me, though I am certain it could not see me then. The eyestalk swayed very slightly from side to side the way a cat will move its head when preparing to leap. And after only a few moments of rigoured uncertainty, the creature began to move.
Lifting its jointed legs faster and faster as it accelerated towards the wooden face of the outhouse and swirling its tentacles rhythmically, leaving a fine trail of blood in their path, it kept its eye fixed forwards steadily and bore down upon me.
I had so little space to run. Even though I backed as far as I could from the walI I could still see through the gap in the boards that horror was coming for me. And as it closed those last few yards it opened the undefineable maw on the front of its towering form to bellow, and a stench more putrid than ageing carrion, more agonizing to the senses than the burn of vitriol, engulfed me completely."

- Kell McDonald 2005

Droles are a race of only a few million years antiquity that originates from a planet near the galactic hub. In a very short timespan, compared to other emergent species, they have established dominion over a range of worlds, though almost always with the accompaniment of more sophisticated beings. They are predominantly predatory beings but despite their voracious and unnerving feeding habits, they are also conciously intelligent with something of a social culture and technology.
The daemon eminent Tephroth Adanna led an army of droles ( if a term like army can be ascribed to a two million massing of beings with such an unimpeded instinct to devour ) during his conquest of the Shalrathae held enclave of Olos-Khommor. The black-bricked fortress capital, with its two stargate temples that had stood since the world's suns had shone yellow, fell to ruin under the droles' inexorable onslaught in just six of the planet's diurnal cycles. A few droles still occupy the fortress, unwillingly to relinquish their prize despite the subsequent narrowing of the stargate tracts to almost nothing.

Droles are greedy creatures. Their reaction to most races they encounter is aggresive; though they usually undervalue the material benefits of victory, their undiluted and alien hunger makes them tenacious foes indeed.

Feared, loathed or admired by the illuminated, the species known as vermis necrosis in the language of scholars is one of the most destructive and truly threatening Greater Races to impose upon our cosmos. Native to the weird, insubstantial realm that exists between the spaces of corporeal reality they are essentially parasitic entities that prey on the numerous other lifeforms to be found there.
As with many of the denizens of that twilight reality, the vermii are capable of manifesting within our own universe, subject to the vagaries of time and place. Many magics are known and practiced by adepts to accomplish this feat, though the vermii themsleves are capable of such intrusions apparently of their own volition. What powers or opportunities they use to achieve this can merely be guessed.

Of terrestrial knowledge, several tomes barely known and often condemned clutch knowledge of the vermii between their covers. It is often by such things that the creatures are granted access to a world, and henceforth bring terrible devestation as they take what they will of it.
Only under the most carefully manipulated circumstances do other races interact with the vermii without danger. The creatures demonstrate an unwholesome interest in the worlds of our universe and seem to almost relish the chance to feed - to possess - in their own detestable way.

For strangely the vermii are discriminating in their lust, gathering in greater numbers the higher a world has risen in status. Even those elements to be found in such places, that by all accounts would not seem to provide any immediate sustenance as we understand it, are as coveted by the vermii as anything else. Destruction and loss soon follow. Many fear that the vermii therefore are capable of a wholly superior understanding of their victims and truly seek to defeat the races of intelligence, rendering their achievements down to the very basest matter. They do not explicitly communicate their intentions, but do at least appear to regard the cosmos with a mocking awareness of the motivations and obsessions of more acutely concious beings.

As organisms of raw instinctual hunger, death and - ultimately - decay, the giant vermii are revered or actively worshipped by a great many servitor races either in the form of mass-religion or more secretive and rarified gatherings. They are often considered to embody or actually contain ultimate truths of mortality, and their only partially corporeal flesh is rumoured by the unitiated to possess staggering properties of transmutation and vitality.

Woe unto any race who have not the regard nor the reckoning to cultivate a sorcerous relationship with these beings, for none have ever been known to drive off the vermii from a world once it has been infected. Many are the civilizations across time and space who fell to their loathsome and insidious attentions, leaving only a riddled corpse of falteringly mnemonic architecture as a morbid warning to others.

Thanks to:

Eric, Ionous, Vondur and Zwiffle for contributing their efforts to this project and suffering the delays.
Kinn, RPG and Vondur for playtesting, enthusing and getting gibbed on several occassions for us.
aguirRe for his superb compilers, which were a significant benefit in putting it all together.
metlslime for FitzQuake - Quake as it was meant to be seen.
Scampie for hosting Signs Of Koth on spawnpoint.
Diz for watercolors and true friendship

Thanks to you for playing.