u/BBS3FTW

The car always knew exactly how far out I was.

In my driveway, charging was almost free.

Twenty minutes out, a warning. The rate had doubled.

The dash claimed it was "load balancing." But it was 3am and every charger I passed was empty.

Nothing to balance.

I worked it out, at a charging station off the highway while watching a new message scroll across the dash.

"Upgrade subscription to premium for preferred pricing."

The price wasn't tracking demand, time or load.

It was tracking distance.

From my home.

The further I went, the more each mile cost to replace. Like the car was paying out slack on a leash...and billing me for the length.

I watched the rate fall on the drive home. Cheapest in my driveway.

I understand the arrangement now.

I can go anywhere I want. The battery just empties faster, and costs more to fill the further I get from where it can find me.

So I take short trips now.

Top up at home.

Stay in range.

I am being followed by a number.

Small at first. "Six-figures is joining the call," my manager said, and everyone nodded at my square.

They sat up straighter.

My daughter's new teacher welcomed us to the classroom, first day at private school. "You must be the primary earner."

Not her dad.

At dinner my wife asked about its day.

The next morning, in a new, expensive suit I checked the mirror. Where my face had been there was a figure. Clean, black, comma in the right place...hovering at eye level, twitching when the markets moved.

I got promoted again last week. The number went up.

I went down.

Soon there'll be nothing here but a figure in good clothes, and everyone will say how well I've done.

I'm tired. I'm not even sure what I do at work anymore.

I'm being consumed by a number.

Outside, the temperature kept dropping.

-4°. -9°. -16°.

Each time I refreshed the company's app, the tank ran lower, and the quote crept higher, tracking my bank balance like it could see the number.

Tonight it read $312.47. To the cent, what was left after food and power. It knew.

I understand it now. It never charged me for the oil. The oil is bait. It charges me for the cold. For how much I'll surrender not to freeze. And the cold has no bottom, so neither does the price.

The colder it gets, the higher the price.

I clicked order now.

The driver showed up with a smile.

The house is warm.

My banking app reads zeros.

The tank runs lower.

I'm being hunted by a number.

Hello, fellow Keepers and investigators.

I've lurked in the shadows for a long time, today I step into your feed.

I am a Keeper with over 10 years of experience running the kind of homebrew cosmic horror campaigns that kept my investigators up at night. The kind of tales are still discussed years later.

I don't recall when I fell in love with cosmic horror, but I know I explored it through CoC. Building campaigns around my favorite books (Like Peter Clines ' 14 or H.P Lovecraft's The Rats In The Walls) or using real-world events to underpin plans of cultists and eldritch nightmares. I love making my investigators feel small and insignificant, watching their flashes of bravery give way to crushing despair as sanity drains bit by bit from their character sheet.

My first campaign was The Haunting by Sandy Petersen, while the last was a few months ago. A custom game developed around The Rats In The Walls. I called it Exham Priory: The Cursed Door, and it was a brilliant descent into madness.

So all that said, why the post?

I'm promoting my debut novel, written as a sort of CoC Campaign, where the MC's are the investigators. Replete with bouts of madness, creeping dread and draining sanity. Early on, I saw the predator as an eldritch parasite with an endless hunger for growth.

Now I see it for what it is. A market.

Question: My biggest challenge was giving something with no face, claws or teeth a presence that readers could feel. My monster is conceptual, an idea, perhaps a system. How do you, as a Keeper make it so your players feel the 'monster' in the room with them? When, by all means, it is invisible and, in many ways, unknowable.

Let me know in the comments.

//

The Conceptual Predator

You are tired because you are being hunted.
A forensic audit of humanity's predator economy.

When an alien forensic investigator arrives at the edge of our solar system, she expects to find a developing civilization. Instead, she finds a species drenched in the chemistry of fear.

Hearts racing. Hormones spiking. Bodies breaking. A world under siege, with no threat in sight.

As Auditor Zyd and her crew trace the source of humanity's terror through silent commuter trains, hospital lobbies, and hyper-active trading floors, they uncover something worse than any extinction-level event on record. It is an invisible predator, systemic, conceptual, and woven into every transaction, every screen, and every sleepless night.

It doesn't hunt with teeth. It hunts with debt, dopamine, and the promise that the line must always go up.

But when her crew's priorities begin to shift, Zyd realizes the predator doesn't just consume civilizations. It evolves through them.

And it has already noticed her.

For readers of There Is No Anti-memetics Division and Blindsight.

Available on Amazon and Kindle, audio in the works.

https://a.co/d/04FTJiWP

Hello everyone,

I started this project six months ago and have quietly followed your posts, questions and announcements. Thank you for sharing your insights, victories and challenges.

Today I'd like to share my own, the release of my debut novel // The Conceptual Predator.

Born of my love for Cosmic Horror, inspired by a decade of running Call Of Cthulhu campaigns and spurred into motion by a chilling reflection.

You see I am a robotics engineer by trade, diversifying more and more into embedding AI into those robots. I have built robots to clean your floors, I have designed those which grow your food, and I have built machines designed to destroy one another for your entertainment.

My industry is changing faster and faster, and one night while walking my dog, I found myself reflecting on the acceleration.

Why are we putting everything into AI, why are we pushing so hard on humanoid robotics?

The answer, of course, is it's a race to the bottom dollar, just as it has always been. Humanity doesn't stand to benefit, not truly. The market, the economy....that is what benefits.

That is when the old habits of a Call Of Cthulhu Game Master kicked in, and suddenly our global economy, our network of interconnected systems and our inability to opt out became something dangerous. Something with mass.

An idea that would eat the world.

The Conceptual Predator is not a tale of malicious AI or evil robots; that is simply a symptom of predation.

---

The Conceptual Predator

You are tired because you are being hunted.
A forensic audit of humanity's predator economy.

When an alien forensic investigator arrives at the edge of our solar system, she expects to find a developing civilization. Instead, she finds a species drenched in the chemistry of fear.

Hearts racing. Hormones spiking. Bodies breaking. A world under siege, with no threat in sight.

As Auditor Zyd and her crew trace the source of humanity's terror through silent commuter trains, hospital lobbies, and hyper-active trading floors, they uncover something worse than any extinction-level event on record. It is an invisible predator, systemic, conceptual, and woven into every transaction, every screen, and every sleepless night.

It doesn't hunt with teeth. It hunts with debt, dopamine, and the promise that the line must always go up.

But when her crew's priorities begin to shift, Zyd realizes the predator doesn't just consume civilizations. It evolves through them.

And it has already noticed her.

For readers of There Is No Anti-memetics Division and Blindsight.

Available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.

https://a.co/d/04FTJiWP

Long time lurker, first time poster.

I fell in love with Cosmic Horror a long time ago, though I couldn't say exactly when. It was, however, fortified through novels like Peter Cline's Threshold Series and, of course, H.P. Lovecraft. Specifically, The Rats In The Walls.

Through Call Of Cthulhu TTRPG's I honed my craft, running game after game for over a decade. Home brews twisting real-world events into the type of cosmic horror that keeps you up at night.

I've come to you as a student of cosmic horror to promote my debut novel.

That is the background that gave birth to my debut novel, The Conceptual Predator.

I wrote this as a CoC investigation, including the slow descent into madness. If you're a fan of Cosmic Horror and unsettled about your rising grocery bill....this is for you. This is not a tale of malicious AI and evil robots, those are just the symptoms of an emergent eldritch nightmare parading itself as a Market.

The book reframes our economy as a cosmic force; it has no face, yet you know its shape. It has no mind, but you know its logic.

Infinite growth in a finite reality, the line must always go up.

//

The Conceptual Predator

You are tired because you are being hunted.
A forensic audit of humanity's predator economy.

When an alien forensic investigator arrives at the edge of our solar system, she expects to find a developing civilization. Instead, she finds a species drenched in the chemistry of fear.

Hearts racing. Hormones spiking. Bodies breaking. A world under siege, with no threat in sight.

As Auditor Zyd and her crew trace the source of humanity's terror through silent commuter trains, hospital lobbies, and hyper-active trading floors, they uncover something worse than any extinction-level event on record. It is an invisible predator, systemic, conceptual, and woven into every transaction, every screen, and every sleepless night.

It doesn't hunt with teeth. It hunts with debt, dopamine, and the promise that the line must always go up.

But when her crew's priorities begin to shift, Zyd realizes the predator doesn't just consume civilizations. It evolves through them.

And it has already noticed her.

For readers of There Is No Anti-memetics Division and Blindsight.

Available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.

https://a.co/d/02sMOjT7

//

One issue I kept coming back too was how to make the "monster" feel present. It has no body, face or claws. So using my CoC background I wrote it as an investigation where every log mimics an uncovered handout or investigative note, the dread grows from scene to scene. The moments of draining sanity had to feel earned and realistic.

I plan to expand on this series, where this issue will only compound.

If you play CoC, how do you approach such a subject?