Tentative occult connection between "Blood" and "Cultist Simulator"

(this is a long and rambling article of no interest to anybody but myself).

I grew up with early FPS games – "Doom" and "Heretic" most prominently, but also later "Hexen I" and "Hexen II", "Blood", "Quake", "Duke Nukem", "Shadow Warrior" and a few others, and while I don't remember if I ever played "Chasm" or "Redneck Rampage" it is possible I did as well (I certainly didn't play "Rise of Triad" or "Unreal", though). I rarely reference these games as TTRPGs inspirations because these games are almost entirely about the joy of combat – there is little to none of "Planescape The Torment" role-playing complexity, "World of Darkness: Redemption" worldbuilding, or even suspenseful atmosphere of "Thief". Slower shooters such as "Clive Barker's Undying", and, arguably, "Half- Life 2" came to me much later to build upon that earlier, simpler foundation.

I will always maintain (until proven otherwise) that TTRPG cannot fully compete with video games in combat fluidity. Even if combat procedures are usually the biggest part of the rules manual in most of  TTRPGs, they cannot compare or compete to action-oriented games such as abovementioned FPSs or something like "Devil May Cry". Some TTRPGs employ additional mechanics to emulate the flow of moving/shooting/slashing of video games (to a various degrees of success, or, more often, un-success) but not only computer can calculate an immeasurable amount of data much faster, the decision-per-minute ratios for the player are incredibly bigger in video games comparatively to table-top RPG rounds. Add to it real-time feedback from their actions through real-time controls, environmental awareness which is almost never possible to convey in words, visuals and music enhancing the action, and reliance on player's actual skills instead of interacting with the world largely through the shell of their character and their stats, and it doesn't seem to be applicable to connect those FPS games with table-top RPGs which get their strength from other sources. 

These FPS games do have incredible vistas and often a good atmosphere, but to me it is a different kind of appreciation when you run past by these vistas at approximately 70 km/h instead of carefully moving from a cupboard to a cupboard as in "Thief". These early FPS in particular are mostly unsophisticated in premise – you are a guy (very occasionally a gal), you have lotsa guns/magic guns, you run as fast as a car and there are alien/demons/alien demons/robots/demon-aliens-robots invasion to deal with, so here you go, to un-invade the world.

Yet, the game manual for "Heretic II" ("Journal of Siernan") was, from a certain perspective, the first setting book I actually owned, way before I ever heard of "World of Darkness" or "Planescape". "Dragon Warriors: The Ways of Wizardry" was my first official rulebook but it didn't have much about the setting, being part 2 of the series and mostly conveying the world through two adventures – while "Heretic II" manual spoke, even if briefly, about Ssithra, and Ogles, and Seraphs even before it explained what key shoots which magical gun.

What it is all about?

 

"Team up" by Ardat Lilitu

So I have this weird project of sort: the idea that all these early FPS games* happen to be in the same universe. The setting is nicknamed 'Caleb is lazy', the premise is mostly just "Blood 2: The Chosen", where it goes a little like that:
(*) the ones I've played and liked

~1871: Tchernobog, dark god, 'The Dreaming One', 'The One that Binds', sixteenth of that title, gets a brilliant idea on how to get ultimate power by betraying and murdering his Chosen, and then burying alive one of them (namely, Caleb) to set him on a path of revenge and then kill him as an ultimate sacrifice to Himself once Caleb accumulates enough on said power on a path of said revenge.
(in a weirdest sense it is similar to "Dark Souls" metaphysics: Caleb is a Chosen Undead accumulating souls of those he kills for power, and Tchernobog is god-sort-of-like-inverse-Gwyn hoping to defeat and eat him at Hall of the Epiphany playing the role of the Kiln of the First Flame.)

~ 1928 to about 1940s: Caleb wakes up, gets revenge on Tchernobog and inherits his place as The One that Binds, seventeenth to carry this title and powers.

~ next hundred years or so: Caleb, being lazy and/or ignorant, does nothing to actually bind any kind of anything. 

Tchernobog was many things: a dark god, a power-obsessed psychopath, a really, really bad boss – but to his benefit there was one thing he did really well and responsibly, and it was to Bind, i.e. to repair inter-dimensional barriers that separate the worlds from each other. Caleb, being lazy, did nothing of that and – slowly at first, and faster and faster as the time went by – the barriers between dimensions, initially well-maintained by Tchernobog, started to unravel.
(As a side effect it explains why SCPs started to ramp up in frequency since after 1960s)

So many of these early FPS deal with strange invasions, often literally from other planes or dimensions: Demons of Hell in "Doom", Serpent Riders in "Heretic/Hexen", Eldritch Abominations and then Strogg in "Quake", aliens in "Duke Nukem", evil witch Illwhyrin in "Witchhaven" and so on; even if it isn't directly demons, it is somebody who summons demons like Zilla in "Shadow Warrior" to pretty much the same effect. Heretic/Hexen are happening in fantasyland, unlike modern or futuristic, but it is also possible that this is just the way these words developed and their Serpent Rider invasions happen when it is 2020s on Earth.

So why not to make it official and blame it on a that one gunslinger who – canonically – was very bad at his divine job of making sure that this won't happen?

Hence, 'Caleb is lazy.' 

Now about the tentative occult connection part

"Blood" was always a little distinct to me from other shooters of the age. Not only the protagonist was definitely un-heroic and just barely more human than evils he fought against, not only it didn't have An Invasion (rather, Caleb was confronting Tchernobog on his own) but another thing that was always a bit odd to me about "Blood" was its keys. Instead of red-blue-green keycards, gold-sapphire-emerald seals or somewhat logical castle-swamp-cave keys, "Blood" has Skull, Fire, Eye, Moon, Dagger and Spider keys, and this sequence was strange, just a little too odd as a combination of symbols.

So when I started to think about Key powers for the abovementioned 'Caleb is Lazy' setting (trying to create a kind of powers to counterbalance slower but more powerful Runes and faster but weaker Casts) I happened upon the description of Mansus from "Cultist Simulator" (which is, otherwise, as far a game removed from FPS as it can be without being a pure dating sim). Mansus mentions Doors that the occultists needs to pass on their way to immortality and/or ascension, and these Doors can be tangentially correlated to the keys in "Blood":

White door, called Bone Door and the Gate of Ivory: Skull key, human ivory. 

Peacock's Door: Eye key, as peacock carriers eyes on its tail.

Spider Door: Spider key, obviously.

Tricuspid Gate, is tricky but as it might be shifting between Summit Gate, Savage Door and Kingskin Gate depending on who and how tries to open it, it therefore might be opened with Moon key (as related to House of Moon near Summit Gate), Fire key (as related to the Forge related to Savage Door) and Dagger key (in a role of Flaying key) respectively.

Stag Door (Horn Gate, obviously as reference to Gates of  Horn and Ivory) is a bit more difficult to connect mostly because in this correlation we already run out of keys from Blood (even if "Hexen 2" does have Horn Key), but it might be again Skull key, just used in a some different way.

What is the most intriguing in continued parallels is that 1) "Blood" starts in about 1928, while Caleb travels  through quite a few places, and "Cultist Simulator" also takes place in 1920s all over the world, with both intersecting in Paris 2) Using these keys Caleb, technically, ascends to a status of god, just as occultists in "Cultist Simulator" aim to and 3) In the game most of Caleb's opponents are esoteric cult called Cabal, and even if Caleb doesn't use Secret Histories or forbidden knowledge or Desires to fight them (but dynamite and guns) it is still – very tentatively defined – occult war.

 

Genuinely, it is a bit like this meme; picture from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia

Initially I thought maybe a unnamed Monolith developer and writer for "Cultist Simulator" went to the same source – some kind of poem or time-obscured knowledge – but it doesn't seem to be a case, but merely a strange coincidence.