The similarities actually completely spooked me, and I thought it so DG that for this reason alone I felt compelled to post my 2 cents worth. So I thought maybe I could post some of my ideas here in the hope that a few of them might prove useful in a Future/Perfect campain. This will be a rather lengthy one, I hope that won't annoy anyone.

Due to similarities between F/P and what I call 'my' campaign, this may be a spoiler for those who want to play Future/Perfect, so be warned...

[Spoiler...]

1. Seeming similarities

Like in F/P...

• the puppet masters in 'Glomus' (that's what my campaign was to be called) are the Serpent People on one side and the Yithians on the other.

• time travel was to feature prominently in the campaign.

• the Yithians are drawn into it because the serpents machinations disturbed their abilities to time-travel.

• there is a huge and renowned hi-tec corporation (called 'Headway Industries') involved. They work on time travel and consider the Serpent People to be their enemies.

Strange, innit?

2. Differences (as far as I can judge from parts 1-3 of F/P)

The Serpent Master Plan

While the motive of the Serpents is the same as in F/P, in 'Glomus' they unwittingly created a massive series of gates in space/time in the antediluvian age while they were about to prepare an attack on mankind in order to rid earth of us and take over control to establish the prophesied third empire.

To this end, they used a semi-sentient, otherworldly entity manifest in our reality as a blueish-glowing crystal dubbed 'indigo' which was to play an important part in the 'Glomus' campaign.

That stuff has the ability to collect energy of nearly all sorts, convert it to magic power and store it, apparently growing larger in the process. The serpents embedded it in the earth's crust with the help of Cthonians who to this day consider themselves the nannies of the huge indigo veins running through the whole of earth's crust by now.

Their plan was to call upon the magic power accumulated through millenia to open a door to the outer horrors when the time would be right and thus vacuum humanity out. They themselves would wait in dream enclaves and reemerge after mankind would be near extinct.

They also planed on keeping a certain amount of humans in certain places in order to convert them to breeding machines for their stored eggs, thus reviving their race a lot faster than by breeding the normal way. The Serpents were unaware that the growing power of the indigo crystals created gates in multiple places and times and to multiple destinations. Then, one of them found out.

3. Time Travel and the yellow connection

The investigators were meant to time-travel frequently in the Glomus campaign. Now, How To Kill Your Granddad Before He Meets Your Gran And Getting Away With It? In Glomus - it wouldn't have been possible, although the characters wouldn't have noticed at first. As Heinlein wrote: 'You can't change the past because you haven't'. True. You can't change your past. If you change the past nonetheless, you create a completely new one. Branching time lines and universes, yadda yadda, you know the score. That's what I thought would have to happen every time (pardon me pun) the investigators time-travelled. It happens all the way anyway, if I recall my quantum correctly.

That alone wouldn't bother the Great Race much. They have no trouble at all crossing over from branching timeline to branching timeline and they know how to take all precautions necessary not to mess things up. But what happens, if, due to wildfire time gates, inexpert time travelling and the actions of both investigators and NPCs all the timelines get entangled, like a ball of wool? You'd get a clew, a tuft. That's what Glomus means in Latin. But what would that ball of timeline wool be like? Chaos. Entropy. Everything mixed up, including ages, histories, causality. For me, that sounds suspiciously like a certain place we all would like to have a summer home in: Carcosa. Not just a city eating cities, but an entropic reality munching away at all possible realities until it's the only one left. All roads lead to Carcosa.

During the campaign, that interpretation of Carcosa was meant to gradually corrupt the realities the investigators travel to, so certain yellowish motives were to apear in all scenarios, gaining more and more importance. On the whole business of time travel, I thought '12 Monkeys' rather than 'Back to the Future', it's a very taxing hobby for one's sanity, after all.

4. The Great Race

All timelines becoming Carcosa is what the Great Race fear. Their means of travelling through time and dimensions is rendered useless, even their own realms may eventually fall victim to Carcosas tempivore habit. That's their motive to take action. What the players were not meant to know or discover until near the campaigns conclusion is that

the characters themselves in fact have a yithian mind sitting in the backseat of their brains. Or is it the backseat? In the end, the characters were to find out that the human personality might have been nothing more than some sort of protective mental clothing.

5. Scenarios

I had planned several scenarios taking place in different eras, here's some examples:

• a modern day brush with (the) Fate (introducing the 'Lord of Truth') and a Defence contractor named Cebridge Technologies researching remote viewing,

• a stay in a lovely rural U.S. town that happens to be near an underground military facility where a container full of strange, bug-like creatures has been shipped to,

• a hunt for that containers origin leading to a Corporation called Headway Industries that researches time travel,

• a visit to a Karotechia-operated, underground Flying Disc manufacturing plant near Prague in 1941 (think 'Hauneburg', Coler-Converter, 'Vril'...) with maybe a facultative visit of Point103 in Neuschwabenland,

• several classic 1920ies CoC type scenarios (when I first came up with the campaign idea, DG hadn't seen publication yet, so there was to be quite a lot of these) like

• a convention on power generation in New York 1923 where the newly-invented 'Shepping Accumulator' really shakes the crowds,
  
• a visit to an infamous theatre ship (Grand Guignol Style) in the New York Harbour with a short trip to the local serpent dream enclave which is a very distorted Coney Island Amusement Park style thing,
  
• an expedition into the Namib Desert searching the remains of another expedition that discovered a deposit of strange blue crystals before dissappearing in 1916,
  
• a DG night at the opera, the opera being a series of Doors concerts in 1969 (or so, I hadn't got round to establishing the exact time yet) - just think of the celebration of the Lizard...,
  
• a modern-day trip to an oil drilling venture (?) in Antarctica,
  
• a near-future end times scenario involving a moon base (you really have a good view of the Palace Towers from the moon base, you know) and
  
• a Carcosan Showdown.