"The Scroll" is an original contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos.   geschrieben. Although he never used the term himself, the Mythos (a Greek word meaning "legend") is based around the work of a man who was the father of the modern horror story - Howard Philipp Lovecraft.

For someone whose work has had so much influence, the amazing thing is that Lovecraft was ever published at all. His childhood and upbringing were bizarre. When he was two and a half his father became violently insane, probably as a result of advanced syphilis, and was confined in an asylum until his death. His mother's mental health began a slow cleterioration as a result of this and their resulting poverty, and she also was eventually to die in an asylum. Mother and son moved to live with her family, and Lovecraft was to live with his aunts for most of the rest of his life. Allowed to eat what he liked, sleep when he liked, and missing much of his schooling through health problems, he was largely self-educated from his grandfather's library.

The result was a bookish and largely nocturnal Anglophile recluse, who affected the language and mannerisms of eighteenth cenetury England. His personality was a mass of contradictions. He despised humaity in the abstract, but was a warm and generous friend. He expressed vitriolic prejudice against all foreigners and ethnic groups different to his own, but seemed unaffected by it when actually dealing with people, and eventually married a Jewish woman. He began as a political ultraconservative, and ended as an enthusiastic Roosevelt supporter. He was a prolific writer throughout his life, and could be corresponding with up to a hundred people at a time, but he was thirty-two before he was first published professionally.

Considering himself a gentleman who wrote for the sake of art, despite living in grinding poverty, he would only submit stories to magazine editors when pestered to do so by his friends, and then sent them as closely written manuscrips, rather then double spaced typescrips. If they were rejected, he made no effort to send them to other magazines, or resubmit them. His own writing displayed all the faults he quite rightly advised others to avoid. Despite all this, he eventually began writing for Weird Tales, a pulp horror magazine which was to become a legend.

As more of his stories were published, readers, friends and other writers began to recognize recurring names and themes. Central to thesse was the idea that ancient being of enormous power, the Great Old Ones, had once ruled the earth, but lost their hold on it through the practice of dark arts.Knowledge of these beings, and of their secrets, was preserved in books of forbiden knowledge like the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, and their demented worshippers plotted to bring about their return.

In 1926, he wrote the story from which the Mythos takes his name, "The Call of Cthulhu". Like all his best work, he relies on the theme that the human race can only remain sane because it is ignorant of the horrors that surround it, and of its own utter insignificance. The horror in Lovecraft is cosmic. The forces that threaten humanity do so not out of malice, but with as little thought as a man treading on an ant. Those who catch a glimpse of the true picture, through piecing together apparently unrelated facts and events, or through studying books like the Necronomicon, pay for that knowledge with their sanity.It was this that made Lovecraft so influential, and the father of the modern horror story. In his lifetime, other writers used the Mythos in their stories, and added elements to it which Lovecraft then borrowed. Among these writers were Robert E. Howard, author of the Conan stories, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Frank Blknap Long, and August Derleth. At the time of his death, however, only a few hundred copies of two of his works had been privately printed, and he was virtualy unknown outside the circle of his friends and the readership of Weird Tales. That he is remembered at all is almost entirely due to August Derleth, who founded the publishers Arkham House, and brought Lovecraft's work to a wider audience.

Since Lovecraft's death, a new generation of writers have continoued to add to the Mythos, and this game continous that tradition. Various attempts have been made to impose some of logical structure on the Mythos, bit it stubbornly resists them, and Lovecraft himself never sought to bring his work the sort of organisation that someone like Tolkien did. Despite this, in making this contribution I have tried to add new elements without contradicting anything in his stories. I hope he would have liked the result.

Source: Manual of "Daughter of Serpents"