The material of AS&SH implies in different places that the separation between Hyperborea and Old Earth occured quite a while ago and looking at the different peoples from different eras that ended up 'marooned' on the continent, we could also have an Old Earth that is well, very much like our own right now, or slightly before.
You could for instance link explicitly the Hyperborea described by this game with the Earth of the authors that inspired it, circa 1920ish. You either use the Dreamlands as a link between the two, or posit that Hyperborea is in fact a facet or part or region of the Dreamlands themselves, thus linking it even more strongly with the source material and the Mythos, in particular.
I've been toying with an idea for some time now. I built a cosmology (which I've named the Enrill from a previous world-building project) some time ago that helps consider all the games I run (whether we are talking OD&D, AD&D, AS&SH, CoC, Vampire the Masquerade, LA/Mythus, whatever the case may be) in the same multiverse, with parallels, connections between the settings and games the players don't even realize. This helps me visualize all the games as part of something greater. It triggers ideas, adds an element of depth nobody has to care about but myself, and so on.
In this particular case, this inspires me to run my mega-dungeon on one hand, and run a CoC campaign on the other hand, both using the same actual architecture, and both of them being linked in the background. I have this idea of a web of conspiracies in the 1920s that is partially made up of bizarre events linked to dreamers and other visionary individuals able to perceive events in the far past of the Earth and reshape them, consciously or not, in their imagination to create their own worlds-that-never-were floating in the Eidos, the plane of ideas and archetypes beyond the veil of consciousness and reality. (more on that below)
Meanwhile, the game running the mega-dungeon itself would proceed as a separate campaign, maybe with different players, or not. The idea here is that this campaign in the mega-dungeon the players are experiencing is, in fact, one of those worlds-that-never-were alluded to in the CoC campaign. The meta-structure of the mega-dungeon would be the same as the structure of the events and conspiracies taking place in the 1920s, and for good reason: because it would be a reflection in the Eidos of the web of people and places and conspiracies that exist in the Earth's material plane.
Both games would be their own thing and evolve completely separately, unless the players figure it out on their own (with a few means to do so but no 'plot' and 'story' bullnuts, since we'd be basically sandboxing in both cases). And then with the Dreamlands, Mi Go experiments, travels beyond the stars from the CoC side, and the planar travel, artefacts and sages' knowledge from the AS&SH side... who knows what might happen from there? It'd be interesting, most probably something that would just make me trip from my side of the screen without the players ever realizing what's going on, but still, in either case, it could be a blast to run, I think.
The parallels between the structure of dungeon building and a web of conspiracies is something that really fascinates me. I've been musing about this for some time.
Elaborating (quoting) from a previous post musing over the similarities between campaign structures elsewhere to provide context for this:The Dungeon relates to the Wilderness as a matter of scale and movement modes. The larger the scale of the environment being depicted on the map is, the more likely you are to default to the Wilderness mapping methodology, using hex maps to depict open, large environments the PCs can navigate by getting from one location or "hex" to the next however they want to. This is how you find an hex map in
D1-2 Descent Into the Depths of the Earth, because of the large scale being covered on the trip into the Underdark.
So the Dungeon and the Wilderness share a basic mentality and even methodology to run the game: they are a mean to visualize the environment and organize it into a playing format. It basically helps build a
space that the PCs will explore. It focuses on the gaming world as a concrete world and uses spatial representation to provide choices, obstacles, inhabitants which the PCs will use to experience their adventures and have fun interacting with the game environment.
The reality is that this format is extremely versatile, probably one of the most versatile RPG gaming formats there is in existence, which is part of what I think makes D&D's enduring success: because it provides a frame, a clear conceptualization of the gaming space with a set of tools and methodologies that help build this world to interact with.
If I know what it is that makes you tick in terms of role playing, I can build a dungeon and provide it to you. All I need to know is what it is you really want out of the experience, and I can provide it to you using dungeon and wilderness methodologies.
Conversely, I can use dungeon and wilderness methodologies and provide with a game experience that you will never think of as "a dungeon crawl." I can actually prove it to you right here and now:
Have a look at my advice to
build a mega-dungeon and a campaign around it. Let's take this mega-dungeon and redress it in such a fashion as to run a Call of Cthulhu game, in such a way that you will never even know I thought about it first as the mega-dungeon described in those posts, OK?
Let's say that the "levels" of my mega-dungeon are in fact Call of Cthulhu adventures or conspiracies the PCs can interact with. And then, let's say that the mega-dungeon itself is a web of conspiracies each linked to each other in one fashion or another.
Now let's look at a sample conspiracy in our CoC game:
Hm. That's the diagram of our Bandit Level right there. When we map the area using it as a spatial representation of the gaming environment we get that (the red area circled above being what you see mapped there):
(The actual layout grew in subsequent posts on the thread linked above)
Now let's think of this very same diagram here and use it for a Call of Cthulhu conspiracy. What you end up getting instead is something like this:
Instead of having spots where you enter the dungeon like a well or waterfalls, we have entry points where the PCs in Arkham might get to know about the conspiracy at work. For instance, on your diagram above, the waterfalls become abductions in town. There are people being taken from the streets in Arkham and the PCs might get to know about that.
This could lead them to know about cabs picking up some of these people ("stables" become "cabs"), whereas others have been picked up by people in uniform (leading to the "detention" renamed "Arkham Asylum" here, where the PCs might find some stuff to investigate). Dr. Wu works both at the Asylum and the Prison of Arkham. He is a cultists who practices dark rituals with the people abducted. He's been initiated and still has correspondence with the Brothers of Yuut, which is another conspiracy (another "level" or adventure) the PCs might get to know about that way. Some inmates of the Prison and Asylum are sent to the Sanatorium in the region, which has staff also linked to the Brothers of Yuut, but has developed its own cult and nefarious activities (The "Sanatorium conspiracy", another possible "level" or adventure in our CoC campaign the PCs might get to know about or not, depending on the way the go about their investigation from there).
That's the start of it. I guess I made my point clearly enough: if I was to run this as a CoC campaign, none of the players would know this actually came from my mega-dungeon design. The logic is basically redressed, the expression of it all is shifted from the spatial, mapped representation that is the dungeon to a web of relationships between factions and individuals in the 1920s.
In fact, from a purely logistical point of view, on my side of the screen, when the PCs investigate this Arkham of mine, they will be exploring my megadungeon, and in effect dungeon crawling, though they'll never know it. I could count "turns of investigation" like you count "turns of exploration" in a dungeon environment, make d6 rolls to see if there is a "wandering monster", i.e. some event or encounter with cultists, witnesses, or particular characters as the PCs investigate throughout Arkham in search for clues as to what's going on in town, prepare a random table accordingly, and so on.
It's an extreme example of course, but you get the idea.
