"The sharp horn of the Gnoph-keh, the hairy myth-thing of the Greenland ice, that walked sometimes on two legs, sometimes on four, and sometimes on six." - "The Horror in the Museum," by H.P. Lovecraft and H. Heald, which SEE. SEE also Call of Cthulhu, 5th edition, p. 105.

An Unorthodox Reinterpretation of the Gnoph-Keh Folk

Gnoph-keh

SEE also the closely related gnyph beasts and Gnyph Folk, cousins to the space-faring civilized Gnoph-Keh. Some Gnoph-keh may have Gnoph followers, possibly as a "servitor race" or in a cult-like fashion.

The Gnoph-keh look something like a hybrid of rhinoceros and polar bear, swathed in thick white fur. Their civilization dominated Hyperborea in ages long predating the rise of Human civilization. The Gnoph-key are superbly adapted to the frigid extremes of arctic climes; while they are sometimes said to descend in to the warmer lowlands when driven by harsh weather, it is more likely that they create the harsh weather to make the lowlands chill enough for their comfort. The Gnoph-keh have been described as solitary and nomadic; this is only because those lesser Folk encountering Gnoph-keh in larger numbers or entering a Gnoph-keh settlement or city-analog have not returned to tell of it.

The physical attack of Gnoph-Keh is influenced by its culture. All Gnoph-keh may attack by a powerful charge, lancing with its goring horn, used by all sorts of Gnoph-Keh as an honorable weapon, keeps foes at a distance. Likewise, any Gnoph-Keh may rend with savage claws or crush with a deadly, multi-limbed "bear hug" as part of their wrestling tradition. While civilized Gnoph-Keh are more likely to use such natural armaments when facing members of their own species in honorable combat or poorly armed members of lesser races, they are quick to use high-tech weaponry when facing well armed foes of any species, sentient or beast.

Civilized Gnoph-Keh are as unlikely to employ a bite attack as civilized Humans would be. Savage or degenerate Gnoph-Keh, on the other hand, delight in the visceral sensation of oral rending, finding a basic satisfaction of battle-lust in biting. Given their wide-gaping maws, armed with triple ranks of tushes, the bite of a Gnoph-keh is a formidable weapon, whether in a lunging charge or as a delicate nibbling of hug-imprisoned prey.

Formidable as their direct physical attacks may be, there is often no need to employ such direct contact at all; the Gnoph-Keh are famed for their psychic abilities. In some worlds (or universes), this may be expressed as innate magic, while in others it is evidently a native psychic ability enhanced through otherworldly technology. Gnoph-Key psychic (or innate magic) control of cold is a universal species trait; even the least can direct a chilling at close quarters, effecting a vitality-draining deadly cold to those in their grip. (The chilling is evidenced by a reduction by 20o F. in a 100 yard radius, increasing by touch to double effect in an embracing hug.) Most Gnoph-keh can also create a "personal blizzard." This region of cold and wind and snow extends roughly 100 yards in all directions from the Gnoph-keh. The blizzard can be more or less focused, both in size, direction, and balance of effects (cold / wind / snow.) The personal blizzard obscures vision to any creature less well adapted to such conditions than the Gnoph-keh itself to about three yards.

Abilities more diverse as well as more powerful are concentrated in specialist shaman, priests, and demigods. Individual Gnoph-Keh have a wide range of specific abilities and degrees of power, but almost all have at least some cold control. Their abilities are multiplies when used in concert, the lesser lending their strength to their leaders. Lack of such prevalent and powerful psychic abilities is a distinguishing characteristic separating the Gnyph Folk (which SEE) from the Gnoph-Keh; Gnyph Folk have only average chances of having psychic abilities.

The more potent shaman control cold and wind, summoning snow and ice for both combat and construction purposes. The "personal blizzard" of a shaman is a small but concentrated fierce volume of wind under fine control (like a poltergeist), with intense cold and snow or cutting ice crystals, obscuring vision to under a yard, possibly tearing at exposed flesh. A shaman's blizzard leeches heat and vitality, driving the sane to seek shelter. A coven of Gnoph-keh may summon great storms such as can bury an entire town.

Gnoph-Keh priests often have additional abilities, partly due to their own superior qualities and partly due to great experience in studying obscure magics or partly due to technological enhancement of their native abilities. Such enhancement is often focused through items of religious regalia, which may also serve as conduits for gathering power from other Gnoph-keh of their group. The blizzards summoned by a priest may create a "wall-of-wind" or frigid kamakazi, lifting and expelling trespassers like a poltergeists' telekinetic wind, or it may create massively increased cold, instantly casting living beings into a corpsicle-like stasis, or bury targets in snow. Winds laden with abrasive ice crystals, equivalent to sand-blasting guns, may be used as a weapon or as fine sculpting tools. Some priests can condense ice-arrows from thin air, hurling them with telekinetic powers, or causing cages or solid walls or other sculpted forms of ice to grow from cold surfaces, as if they were some bizarre organic ice life forms. Those priests with the greatest power, whether innate psychic ability or ability most enhanced, by technology or centuries of experience, are often worshiped by their lesser kin as demigods; Folk of other species often form auxiliaries of such cults. Naturally, those worshiped as gods develop divine qualities, whether or not they had them before.

With such supernatural abilities, Gnoph-keh can act at great distance, whether constructively or destructively. Those wishing to remain obscure can bury foes with "unlucky" but natural-seeming blizzards or create avalanches, cause glaciers to advance or retreat at will, or freezing waters to lock up arctic-sailing ships or melting icepacks under the feet of travelers. Thus, the Gnoph-keh can easily decimating enemies or mere trespassers without ever revealing themselves, or use cold and cutting ice to wear down a target they wish to weaken before dealing with directly.

The Gnoph-keh can use their powers to create as well as destroy. Common perception is warped because the more familiar tales refer to the destructive perversity of the degenerate Gnoph-keh who remained in exile in the ruins of their Hyperborean colonies. Civilized Gnoph-keh may seem as perverse to Human sensitivities, but they may use their powers, greatly enhanced by high technologies, in constructive ways. Communities focusing their talents can create architectural features, from natural-seeming ice bridges or slippery sled-ways (as facilitate ice-schooner traffic) to fabulous ice palaces or enchanting fairy-forests sculpted of ice and snow.

Abandoned Gnoph-keh colonies leave few recognizable ruins. Where they do persist, their ruins are easily mistaken for natural features of the icy landscape or ice caverns. Even when it is not weathered away, or outright melted, their trans-mechanistic "subtle ice" artifacts often cease to function when not being actively manipulated by a Gnoph-keh. This is because their physical technology relies on of layers and interpenetrations of alchemically different types of ice, held and manipulated, by the Gnoph-kehs' innate chill control, at different temperatures, so as to orchestrate differences in chemical composition, conductive qualities, electro-magnetic and other, more subtle energy potentials. When not subject to subtle, internally varied chill control, such ice-items cease to function. Any mineral or metallic parts remaining are useless once the subtly composed ices sheathing them are gone, as the ices served as analog of housing and wiring, shielding and connections. While relics of Gnoph-keh technology may be used as psychic foci, especially useful for cultists seeking to contact Gnoph-keh, subtle ice technology can only regain their original functionality when their complexly composed ice sheathing is regenerated.

Subtle ice can be used to create any technological item imaginable, from a visi-phone far-seeing "mirror" to a spaceship. What may seem to be crude and simple cyclopean ice-architecture may actually be "dead" "smart houses," once streaming with active qualities.

Some high-tech Gnyph Folk (which SEE) also use subtle ice technology; this points to the intertwined relations of the two species.

The traditions of the Gnoph-keh of Earth hold that they learned the secrets of manipulating cold and wind From their main god, Ithaqua. It is likely that this Ithaqua association is the reason earth's Gnoph-keh are isolated from the interstellar civilization of their kin. Whether an occult and cryptic interstellar Ithaqua cult sought refuge on Earth or whether the Ithaqua cult developed after colonization of Earth is unclear; leading speculation suggests that the forbidden cryptic cult manipulated the colonization of Earth, disinterring Ithaqua is the living idol focus of their wider pantheon of banished dark deities. It seems likely that the Gnoph-keh also associate with the Windego. Some Gnoph-key worship Aphoom-Zhah, a being who came to Earth from the Formalhaut, or the vicinity of that star. Aphoom-Zhah is, or at least manifests as, a great grey flame, which freezes as normal flame heats; Aphoom-Zhah, before his imprisonment under the polar Mount Yarak, cause the glaciations which encased Hyperborea, Zobna, and Lomar, among other lands, in ice. While Aphoom-Zhah is refered to in the singular, it is quite possible that he (or it) is but one of a species of beings of or evidenced by the grey cold-flame. Aphoom-Zhah fathered or had a part in engendering or empowering to a greater status and new identity at least one of the greatest of Gnoph-keh.

In the original Lovecraftian sources ("The Horror in the Museum," by H.P. Lovecraft and H. Heald, which SEE), the Gnoph-keh civilization on Earth flushed, flourished, and fell in the frigid arctic wastes long before Human civilization began. Gnoph-keh civilization had already passed through its decadent phase and deteriorated, both as a collective collapse of civilization and as individual deterioration, during ice ages before the warm interstitial period some three million YBP during which the civilization of the hairy pre-Human Voormis rose in the lands later called Hyperborea.

I speculate that the actual core of Gnoph-keh civilization never did fall; only the remote backwater colonies in fringe areas, such as the region known later as Hyperborea and later yet as Greenland, disintegrated when interstitial periods of warmth between Ice Ages brought destructive warmth to their Arctic lands. Those Gnoph-keh city-analogs located north of Hyperborea, in the more stable and enduring cold within the curve of the North Polar Opening into Earth's hollow interior, have never been threatened by warming and yet persist, some upon the ice, some deep within it. Further, the true centers of Gnoph-keh civilization are not earthly at all, but are located on distant frigid "ice-words," (or in the permanently cold polar regions, where glaciers never melt, of other worlds with multiple climates, such as Earth has); there, the Gnoph-keh continue their cycles of civilization to this day.

Naturally, there were some Gnoph-Keh who would not leave Hyperborea. Whatever motives inspired them to set up the satellite sub-colony in the marginal habitat of Hyperborea kept them from retreating to the safer, trans-arctic regions. These were the most savage, and perhaps not the most intelligent, of their population. They persist today, isolated, half-savage specimens haunting the remotest ice.

Later, degenerate tribes, first of Voormis and then later of the Voormis' Human conquerors, took these relict specimens of the lost Gnoph-keh civilization as living totems and as gods. While the wild, degenerate Gnoph-keh, such as yet wander the sub-arctic and arctic ice, are rather smaller than their ancestors, those who were actively worshiped grew greater, physically and psychically, developing powers that easily justified their deification. Such worship even gave these deified Gnoph-keh a sort of immortality; the greatest of their number, specimens grown to unnatural size, are known to sleep entombed in the Greenland ice; degenerate native people yet worship them, and seem to be in dream-communication with them. Pray that none of these ice-gods thaw!

The Mugato may be related to the Gnoph-keh. The Mugato are white-furred creatures of vaguely anthropoid outline sporting a single, large forehead horn and a dorsal crest. They are found on Star Trek Federation Planet Zeta Bootis III. Their bite is poisonous. While portrayed as savage beasts, considering the highly biased source of our information on Mugato, it seems likely that they are disparaged Folk. There is speculation that the Mugato of descended of foul Human, Yeti, or Voormian cross breeding with Gnoph-keh.

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Last update Jun 28, 2006