#onyx path

This isn't fully fleshed out, more of a ramble, but I was captivated by the overlap between the spoken attempts to rationalize the Backrooms by Clark and the later explorer and the conception of both the Underworld and God Machine "infrastructure" in the Chronicles of Darkness setting.

The Underworld is described in various game lines, especially Mage and Geist, as having a loose relationship with physical geography on the surface level but only insofar as its a kind of archeological layering of the ephemeral remnants of things that no longer exist in the living world. People, objects, and even knowledge all pass into the Underworld, adding "deposits" as they are lost in the mortal world. Which is an important distinction from the Astral where presumably, once an idea no longer is known by anyone in living reality, it is lost from the collective unconsciousness as well (which is how CofD presents the Astral.)

This actually does lean more towards The Backrooms being a kind of Astral Plane in the sense that its presented as a place that collects and attempts to reconstruct memory. Memory being a thing that anyone who has spent more than five minutes dwelling on it realizes is hardly an immutable and perfect recording. Aside from things we've made a concerted effort to remember with precision, a lot of our memories are just clutter that is compressed down to lower resolution impressions our minds decompress on command with plausible inventions where needed.

Why I lean more towards the Underworld though is both the subterranean, labyrinthine feel to it and the mix of insensate and "hungry" entities dwelling within the Backrooms. In CofD, ghosts are hungry. The Underworld acts on them to cause them to surrender their identity which in the Underworld is their "physical" existence. They are being dragged downwards to a point of no return, in the bleak cosmology of CofD, this is a cthonic ocean that absorbs Memory and Identity - essentially forcing the dead to become one with everything whether they like it or not. This being a personal horror setting, its worth pondering there is a sort of bias towards terror and dread, so if there is anything after that final plunge, any experience past that its fundamentally unknowable to the characters the player is intended to play: Wizards, Sin Eaters and other beings who have an interest in exploring the depths of the Underworld for fun, profit, or, rarely - this is a personal horror game after all, for nobler intentions like carefully managing and trying to minimize the suffering in this "ecosystem."

My own personal interpretation of the interactions between Clark and Pirate Clark is that on the surface level, Pirate Clark is a distillation of all of Clark's memories that have been distorted by his perpetual stewing, the cycle of remembering, of getting angry, of blaming someone else, feeling embittered etc. has created this putrid creature that is simultaneously pitifully moaning, perhaps even sobbing but whose actions are relentlessly violent.

At the same time, I like reading Pirate Clark as having a more primal, instinctual core that is perhaps related to the nature of The Backrooms as a container for warped memories: that is to say that Pirate Clark on an instinctive level yearns to be more alive. He is perhaps fighting against the same sort of decay and corrosion that the more docile, less sensate entities seem to have been afflicted by. On some level I do wonder if Pirate Clark is trying to add more substance to himself, to make himself more resilient, in the way that CofD ghosts use Memory as currency in more civilized areas of the Underworld or will hunt one another and try to devour one another to stave off their decay.

Again, this is all existing on a symbolic level, not a level of conscious thought. Pirate Clark is not a reliable actor, he's a crude Egregore so his actions are only rational according to how he perceives the world, which definitely seems to be through a blinding haze of anger and fear. Like I said, I mostly just got caught up on the idea of a being of Memory ultimately consuming its progenitor, and in a fundamental way: itself.

As for the God Machine, the short version if you're not familiar with the setting is that there is a kind of arcane "machine" that is woven throughout reality acting according to long term and inscrutable plans. There are many, many suggestions that aspects of it may be breaking down and working at cross purposes or no longer fulfilling their original functions. Its a kind of inscrutable cosmic horror take on the concept of the demiurge where the archetypal being is using nonsensical "technology" to shape reality. The setting hems and haws about whether or not its actually technology in the way we would understand it, but tends to lean more towards its magic that is using technology as a set of symbols of intent rather than actual, honest to god Clarketech: but then of course, if it were Clarketech that appeared to be magic then we puny mortals wouldn't know the difference.....

The relationship to The Backrooms is less metaphorical here than with the Underworld, its mostly that many story seeds using the God Machine involve accidentally stumbling upon impossible spaces, literal warehouses, staging areas, machine rooms, and other aesthetically industrial but probably occult in nature places.

These are described as infrastructure. Places and systems that have been set up to serve the God Machine's Lovecraftian agenda. Places that suggest that our world is actually more of a showroom floor or stage and there is an invisible realm that exists all around where we play out our mortal dramas where work vital to existence as we understand it takes place but we are not meant to experience or tinker with and are poorly equipped to comprehend or survive it. The metaphysical equivalent of not understanding any of the hazard symbols on the access hatches to the uranium fuel rods of a nuclear reactor and wandering in like Mr. Magoo.

Which is just another way of saying that the God Machine Chronicle leaned heavily on the idea of liminal spaces with a "techgnostic" aesthetic layered onto it. Probably mining some of the same inspirations as The Backrooms draws from or at least an earlier form of the subculture and set of ideas, circa 2013.

On a more whimsical note, we can perhaps also interpret The Backrooms as serving a similar function to The Void at the End of Time in Marvel. A garbage dump of sorts for abandoned timelines, ideas, objects etc. Mary and Clark exist in a kind of "Sacred Timeline" although perhaps in the universe of the Backrooms, what it actually is is a bit like the cosmological equivalent of our planet Earth. Our universe is the one where everything is "just right" to have given rise to beings that could label a universe "just right" whereas the Backrooms contains the realities that are "close enough" to be marginally habitable but are still quite "wrong."

Of course as I write this, I realize I'm laundering more Chronicles of Darkness into The Backrooms because what I've just described is essentially the Abyss of Mage the Awakening, the irrational antimony realm that cuts Humanity off from Source thanks to the hubris of ancient and overly ambitious Mages and makes drawing down "true magic" from the Source rather perilous even for people connected to it.