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Starry Wisdom #3: The Children of YigChaosium Inc. 25 Years of Chaos!

The Children of Yig
by Shannon Appel
The following is a study of the Serpent People. They are natives of Earth,
among its most ancient residents.
HISTORY
Reptiles first appeared on Earth some 300 million years ago, in the
Carboniferous period. Through the rigors of evolution, some became larger, more
intelligent, and eventually walked erect. Approximately 275 million years ago,
in the Permian period, the first serpent people appeared. The Great Old One,
Yig, is said to be the Father of all Serpents, and so the serpent people
worshiped him from the first.
Legends say that these early serpent people formed their First Empire in
Valusia, a fertile land near the center of the super-continent of Pangaea. This
empire was based on sorcery and alchemy, and at its height it must have ruled
much of the Paleozoic world. How many of these legends are true can not be said.
Records of the Elder Things and Yithians who inhabited the Earth at the time say
little of these early serpent people. In any case, when dinosaurs began to rise
from their Eosuchian ancestors 225 million years ago, the First Empire
collapsed.
Although the ancient civilization of Valusia was destroyed, many serpent people
survived. They fled underground, hiding until the world became more hospitable
once more. The greatest of the serpent people's underground civilizations was
Yoth, located deep below what is now North America. For over two hundred million
years, serpent people dwelled there. Their civilization rose and fell a hundred
times.
Five million years ago, Yothic civilization was at its greatest height ever. The
serpent people had become prodigious scientists, able to create other life forms
at whim. Life was luxury, joyfully lived.
Then, Yoth's doom was uncovered, when curious explorers discovered the path to
blackly litten N'kai. There they found great altars to Tsathoggua. The toad-god
possessed tremendous power and wisdom and many serpent people turned away from
Yig to worship him. Yig did not look kindly on his people abandoning him, and so
he cursed them. The serpent people of Yoth devolved, losing their speech, their
limbs, and their intelligence. They became the serpents that they had once been
millennia before.
Only the faithful escaped Yig's curse. The high priest Sss'haa led Yig's true
worshipers out of Yoth. They traveled to Hyperborea, a land in the north, where
they dwelled deep below Mount Voormithadreth.
Under Voormithadreth, the serpent people's greatest scientific civilization
continued to prosper. By this time, they had become pitiless creatures of near
pure intellect. They had no morals, and their only law was that curiosity must
always be satisfied. The serpent people of Hyperborea's greatest achievements
continued to be in genetic engineering. It is believed that the voormis who
ruled the surface of Hyperborea from approximately 3 million years ago were
their creation. However, the voormis' special affiliation with Tsathoggua shows
that even among the supposedly faithful, the taint of the toad-god remained.
The exact fate of the serpent people of Hyperborea is unknown. 1.7 million years
ago, their voormis were swept aside by the cold of Ithaqua. The human