Oh sorry. What General Zodd said.

With Dunwhich and Carcosa it was pretty clear what the cycle was about. The forgotten Age is referred to the great race of yith as it turned out. But with the newly announced cycle i am keen on knowing more about the circle that is made undone as i can't think of any lovecraftian reference.

Witches come in circles. And there's plenty of witches and sorcerers in Lovecraft.

Doesn't have to be Lovecraft, though. A lot of the Arkham Files universe is not based on Lovecraft at all.

A circle can also mean a group of people, so this whole campaign may be undoing the Silver Twilight, that particular circle of people.

I don't know too much about the Silver Twilight (I heard they are from the RPG originally?), but I assume they are witches and sorcerers, being undone.

I just made a lot of research, and nothing specific to levecraft come to me. The only thing is that the group of author aound the work of lovecraft and whocomplete it, as Derleth and Smith, all these people is called the circle of lovecraft. So perhaps a link to this. Another thing which would be possible,that would mean to stop a circle of event who repeat, close events we already meet ... Like if we face the same great old one and ennemy as in our introduction to the circle of adept of the game .... Do you have it ?? After all, if you look at the color of the arcane who fly out at the cover of the deluxe, this is not like the blue of ... Umordhôth ?? And after all, that was the only one to not go outside of Arkham. This great old one is linked to the death, and has a lot of high persons of Arkham in the cult, they would have be part of the silver twilight. And we never know what Lita does for angered the bad tentacle one. Lita is a witch, because she use Hex. So Why not ?? I think we would see a complex story wo take us to the end of what introduce the first campaign.

And if we look to the cryptic tweets of FFG before the annoucement. "be reborn" as our ennemy, and ourself if we died in the core box playthrough ?? " you shall be called to account for your action " as if our choices in first campaign would have some impact here ?? then the tweet with the dreamcatcher, with " one end is another beggining " would mean follow the great old one in his realm, the dreamlands, is the abyssal underworld full of ghoul and revenants. Just because after my research Umordhoth is in real Mordiggian, the god of ghoul in the dreamlands. The all would just cross the road of others older ones, as Cthugha or Azathoth ... And all this link to the core box scenarios could explain to the secret around the antagonist, the scenarios of the deluxe, and the specific mechanics of this one, so as the time the take for annouce it, because more near of the release you announce, less you are in risq to let spoilers go one, by announcements of packs or others ...

From The Order of the Silver Twilight production page :

Quote

The Order of the Silver Twilight is an organization that maintains the facade of a high society club for politicians and businessmen. However, hidden underneath this veil, the true motivations of the Order lie in an obsession with gathering power, learning arcane magics, and gaining dominance over the world.

The Order of the Silver Twilight expansion introduces the Order of the Silver Twilight as the 8th faction into Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game . This expansion contains 55 new cards, 40 of which are from this new faction. There are also two cards for each of the other factions – The Agency, Cthulhu, Hastur, Miskatonic University, Shub-Niggurath, The Syndicate, and Yog-Sothoth – as well as a neutral card. There are three copies of each card in this expansion.

The announcement page has some additional information, although you have to sift through the gameplay mechanics to find any tidbits. I can't tell if they made an appearance in the original CCG, which did not have them as a playable faction.

• The Silver Twilight Lodge (and membership cards) were in Arkham Horror 2e. Their leader, Carl Sanford, makes an appearance in there.
• Gates of Arkham for Elder Sign introduced the Silver Twilight, along with Silver Twilight Membership Cards.
• Silver Twilight Ritual was an asset in the EH core game, with Silver Twilight Host as an asset in the Cities in Ruin expansion.

Both of Mansions of Madness's most recent expansion, Sanctum of Twilight, 2 scenarios are about the Silver Twilight Lodge. The Twilight Diadem & Behind Closed Doors. You can download the app for free and listen to both of those scenarios' intros.

5 hours ago, Eldan985 said:

I don't know too much about the Silver Twilight (I heard they are from the RPG originally?), but I assume they are witches and sorcerers, being undone.

The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight is one of my specialist subjects, so here's a short history (spoilers ahead for a 35-year-old RPG campaign):

They were originally in the Call of Cthulhu RPG campaign Shadows of Yog-Sothoth (credited as the first large-scale CoC campaign, it led the way for other globetrotting, investigative campaigns instead of the existing haunted house and spooky cave antics that had been the norm before then and ultimately has had a massive influence on RPG gaming as a whole). In this campaign, players join the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight (HOST), which is outwardly a kind of Masonic social club, with a name based on the real-life Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, for high society, promising vague arcane mysteries, a fun time socialising with high society, and lots of contacts for its members. Secretly, the HOST is a mythos cult who induct members into its higher orders where they basically become evil and insane mythos cultists and wizards, with the ultimate goal being essentially to Destroy The World (tm). By the end of the campaign, the players are opposing the HOST in its attempts to raise R'lyeh from the ocean and free Cthulhu. Despite this being their end-goal, they are also connected to Nyarlathotep and Yog-Sothoth. The campaign may have been groundbreaking but it really has not stood the test of time - it consists of unconnected adventures in various places and the plot structure is pretty illogical, and the enemies are a grab-bag of random mythos nasties. So, in their first incarnation, the HOST were straightforwardly horrible evil people, albeit with a positive public-facing persona and lots of political clout.

Then Arkham Horror came, and in it, the HOST became a slightly more unusual organisation (at least in second edition, I've never played the 1987 original but I gather the Silver Twilight Lodge is a location in it). In second edition, you can go to the Silver Twilight Lodge, where you have encounters about rubbing shoulders with rich people, overhearing spooky conspiracies, and so on, but you can also get inducted into the lodge and instead have encounters in the Inner Sanctum, where you can participate in magic rituals, steal from the Lodge library and so on. The Silver Twilight lodge are kind of bad guys, insofar as Diana Stanley thinks they are doing horrible things and they definitely are led by evil people who are willing to beat you up and do horrible rituals, but they also are a force for good in the world - one event has them clearing up the surrounding streets of monsters, and the rituals in the Inner Sanctum often do good things like closing gates and defeating monsters.

The Call of Cthulhu Card Game, which at least in its LCG incarnation has a significant amount of influence on the Arkham Horror LCG, started as a CCG with a strong influence from the Call of Cthulhu RPG, but was even more pulpy than the Arkham Horror board game. For the unaware, it originally had 7 factions - 3 human factions (the Guardian-like Agency with detectives, cops, church and government, the criminal Syndicate with hired guns, dirty tricks and the occasional underworld magician, much like the Rogue class, and the Miskatonic University, much like the Seeker faction, concentrating on investigation and expendable students) and 4 monster factions (Yog-Sothoth, all the magic and cosmic power; Cthulhu, massive amounts of combat and destruction power; Hastur, with loads of control and insanity powers; Shub-Niggurath with hordes of horrible monsters). In its original incarnation, the Card Game referenced the Silver Twilight but only as villains aligned with the Cthulhu faction - Carl Stanford ( Deathless fanatic ), the head of the cult in the RPG, and the Lord of the Silver Twilight and Silver Twilight Temptress as evil cultists. However, the game was reimagined as an LCG. Initially they just had the same Silver Twilight villain cards, but later on they released the Order of the Silver Twilight deluxe box which contained the HOST as a new faction - followed by a cycle called Rituals of the Order, which told a story of an ignorant socialite getting way out of her depth as she got tangled up in the Hermetic Order. This incarnation of the Order of the Silver Twilight was even more morally ambiguous than the one in the Arkham Horror board game - they were secretive and ruthless (indeed most of their card mechanics were about sacrificing your characters and cards for temporary gain) but they were on the side of humanity...unless they weren't. The Card Game allowed you to mix factions together, and the Silver Twilight worked extremely well together with the Miskatonic University (mysterious backers of occult research), the Syndicate (political corruption and lofty ambitions) and Yog Sothoth (playing with forces they couldn't possibly understand). This new faction had characters whose names have been referenced by the release article for The Circle Undone - such as Senator Nathaniel Rhodes , and its new morally ambiguous character was cemented by the release of a new version of Carl Stanford - with the subtitle of " Sinister, not necessarily evil ".

I've been trying to find the short story from the story inserts with the Rituals of the Order cycle, but I can't seem to find them anywhere.

Also, with this announcement, I've finally abandoned my boy Ashcan Pete as my forum avatar and have started repping the HOST again (with the avatar taken from Protector of Secrets )

1 hour ago, Allonym said:

...

I've been trying to find the short story from the story inserts with the Rituals of the Order  cycle, but I can't seem to find them anywhere.

That's weird. The 3 cycles before it are the only ones that have their fiction included on the LCG's main page.

A precedent for the inversion of "Golden Dawn" as "Silver Twilight" was in Fritz Leiber's novel Our Lady of Darkness , where the San Francisco-based society of magicians is called "The Hermetic Order of the Onyx Dusk." If the game designers have taken any further inspiration from that book, I will be very pleased. It coined the term megapolisomancy for magick arising from urban configurations of materials and using psychogeographic factors. De Castries (the founder of the Onyx Dusk and author of the tome Megapolisomancy ) called the autonomous entities that would result paramentals .

21 hours ago, Carthoris said:

A precedent for the inversion of "Golden Dawn" as "Silver Twilight" was in Fritz Leiber's novel Our Lady of Darkness , where the San Francisco-based society of magicians is called "The Hermetic Order of the Onyx Dusk." If the game designers have taken any further inspiration from that book, I will be very pleased. It coined the term megapolisomancy for magick arising from urban configurations of materials and using psychogeographic factors. De Castries (the founder of the Onyx Dusk and author of the tome Megapolisomancy ) called the autonomous entities that would result paramentals .

Wow, that's really interesting. I'd never heard of that novel. I'll have to see if the local library has a copy...!

I really don't have any evidence that the designers are hip to Our Lady of Darkness, and I'm pretty sure that the old CoC/AH Silver Twilight lore was founded in a simple allusion to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. But Leiber's book is a great read for those who like occult conspiracy-based horror.

We can be pretty confident that The Circle Undone will pick up ideas from HPL's "The Dreams in the Witch-House." But beyond that, what's the background reading? Lovecraft's "The Festival" has a nice secret witch-cult.

As speculated elsewhere, the Witch-House might lead in to serious Dreamlands territory, eventuating in a confrontation with Nyarlathotep (who is already identified with the Black Man in "Witch-House"). A very different possibility would be for the conspiracy atmosphere to link up with HPL's most deliciously paranoid "The Whisperer in Darkness," and thus have Mi-Go at the back of a cabal of cultists. The fungi from Yuggoth in turn are somehow connected with Shub-Niggurath, according to the literature. Such a development would be the sort of left turn that we got when the Yithians cropped up in The Forgotten Age.

I was thinking about The Festival, but that is definitely centred around Kingsport, which in the wider RPG and board game mythos has been expanded to be about the cult of Tulzscha - it doesn't seem that likely that the HOST would be connected to Kingsport, as there's already the Hermetic order, Arkham's history of witch cults and the Witch House/Keziah Mason in particular as definite themes for this campaign, and Kingsport is its own expansion to the old Arkham Horror boardgame so I think we're likely to see a Kingsport campaign of its very own (or Kingsport as a jumping-off point to the Dreamlands, which again I think is likely to be a cycle unto itself).

We are perhaps more likely to see Edward Derby and Asenath Waite namechecked, as she's connected to a different set of cults in Arkham and the evolving mythos (at least in the RPG) does indicate a kind of cold war between the Arkham Witch Cult connected to Nyarlathotep in the avatar of the Black Man and Asenath Waite's coven of Shub Niggurath worshippers. I doubt it'll be explored as a core theme because we already have the two cults of the HOST and Keziah Mason's Witch Cult - and Asenath Waite has a connection to Innsmouth, which is likely to have its own cycle. In addition, the Dunwich Legacy campaign takes place "several months after" the events of The Dunwich Horror, which themselves take place in 1928 according to Lovecraft's story, while the final events of The Thing on the Doorstep take place in 1933, so around the time of The Dunwich Legacy, Asenath is very much still alive and doing lots of evil cult stuff.

Really, I think Arkham's occult history of witches and the machinations of the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight and associated political intrigue is enough Arkham Horror and Mythos material for a campaign all on its own - and I am also not sure we'll see a full-on cult war, as that was already a theme of The Forgotten Age (though it would be cool to have the players pick a side in some kind of secret political cult shadow-war, and have the campaign evolve differently along those lines).

Having said all that, nothing would really surprise me at this point!

1 hour ago, Allonym said:

I was thinking about The Festival, but that is definitely centred around Kingsport, which in the wider RPG and board game mythos has been expanded to be about the cult of Tulzscha - it doesn't seem that likely that the HOST would be connected to Kingsport, as there's already the Hermetic order, Arkham's history of witch cults and the Witch House/Keziah Mason in particular as definite themes for this campaign, and Kingsport is its own expansion to the old Arkham Horror boardgame so I think we're likely to see a Kingsport campaign of its very own (or Kingsport as a jumping-off point to the Dreamlands, which again I think is likely to be a cycle unto itself).

We are perhaps more likely to see Edward Derby and Asenath Waite namechecked, as she's connected to a different set of cults in Arkham and the evolving mythos (at least in the RPG) does indicate a kind of cold war between the Arkham Witch Cult connected to Nyarlathotep in the avatar of the Black Man and Asenath Waite's coven of Shub Niggurath worshippers. I doubt it'll be explored as a core theme because we already have the two cults of the HOST and Keziah Mason's Witch Cult - and Asenath Waite has a connection to Innsmouth, which is likely to have its own cycle. In addition, the Dunwich Legacy campaign takes place "several months after" the events of The Dunwich Horror, which themselves take place in 1928 according to Lovecraft's story, while the final events of The Thing on the Doorstep take place in 1933, so around the time of The Dunwich Legacy, Asenath is very much still alive and doing lots of evil cult stuff.

Really, I think Arkham's occult history of witches and the machinations of the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight and associated political intrigue is enough Arkham Horror and Mythos material for a campaign all on its own - and I am also not sure we'll see a full-on cult war, as that was already a theme of The Forgotten Age (though it would be cool to have the players pick a side in some kind of secret political cult shadow-war, and have the campaign evolve differently along those lines).

Having said all that, nothing would really surprise me at this point!

There is actually a cult dealing with The Green Man in the Jenny Barnes promo book. But I don't believe it takes place in/around Arkham, and has no direct mention of the Silver Twilight Lodge, but that could be interesting too. The book was left with a rather unresolved ending.

Silver Twilight always makes me think of the Church of Starry Wisdom from "The Haunter of the Dark". But there don't seem to be any similarities.

1 hour ago, CSerpent said:

Silver Twilight always makes me think of the Church of Starry Wisdom from "The Haunter of the Dark". But there don't seem to be any similarities.

Church of Starry Wisdom is Nyarlathotep - that might be the starting point for a campaign about Nyarlathotep (here's hoping it's based on Masks of Nyarlathotep), but probably not this one.

On 10/16/2018 at 9:22 PM, Soakman said:

There is actually a cult dealing with The Green Man in the Jenny Barnes promo book. But I don't believe it takes place in/around Arkham, and has no direct mention of the Silver Twilight Lodge, but that could be interesting too. The book was left with a rather unresolved ending.

No, that one is in Arkham, too.

@Allonym loved your write up of Silver Twilight, and have fond memories of playing them in CoC. Would you mind me mentioning your post on Drawn to the Flame if we do a Silver Twilight episode? Thank you!

I started re-reading Diana's story from The Investigators of Arkham Horror last night before dropping off. The sacrifice she's remembering took place underneath French Hill. In Arkham Horror 2e, French Hill was the neighborhood containing the Silver Twilight Lodge, Inner Sanctum (which you encounter instead if you are at the Lodge & have a Silver Twilight Lodge membership card), and The Witch House. I expect to go through all of it in The Circle Undone.

4 hours ago, zooeyglass said:

@Allonym loved your write up of Silver Twilight, and have fond memories of playing them in CoC. Would you mind me mentioning your post on Drawn to the Flame if we do a Silver Twilight episode? Thank you!

Please feel free to do so. I can offer more in-depth information about some aspects if you'd like, as well.

14 minutes ago, Allonym said:

Please feel free to do so. I can offer more in-depth information about some aspects if you'd like, as well.

Thank you. Yeah, we will discuss what we want to do and definitely ask more if we think of things!

This cycle will be a breaking point for me and many others. I always bought the next episode but only play it when the full cycle is published.

So I will wait and see how good the game development will be in this expansion. I realise that with each new expansion the number of people actively following an LCG drops a bit, but in solo LCG’s that is not the problem. It is the quality of game play that counts for me and the added value.

I never thought the content was SO good in replayability so I will wait what players think about it after experiencing the content. I am in no rush. with dozens of replayable adventures both in LotR and AH.