Shades of Gray identifies fell intent immediately. Its opening lines from H.P. Lovecraft condemn. The following is direct from that dark master:
"Certain areas or sometimes the whole body would be uncannily shriveled or compressed, and atrocious collapses or disintegration were common. In the last stages - and death was always the result - there would be a graying and turning brittle…"
-H.P. Lovecraft: The Colour Out of Space
And this pronouncement unleashes the DM. The clinical and curdling recount orients a DM to the first hand, to the what is pivotal in the campaign. The effect is both multi-faceted and penetrating. On the one hand the reality of a peculiar and gruesomely wretched, extended death is portrayed in detailed examination. On the other the semantics of the source are layered. The words are gifts from a larger work whose title gives Out of Space as in, arriving from Space. But Out of Space also means cramped or crowded as in, "I personally am out of room and this for me given the current situation is both pernicious and terrible." This latter intonation reveals the quivering viewer or even a listener. His or her response remains unrehearsed regards such abhorrence. Thus through all senses one must face the gray. The sensual reeks Shades of Gray. The core evil is in fact summoned from Outside. Nauseating grips again at a burgeoning and ghastly hell. The sallow die. The collected heaps are of cadaverous dead. And later the agonizingly putrid, incubating mobs of the wan and undead hunt and hunger. All of these drive the action forward. They pit the party. They short the clock. There is no quarter. All of these punish hope.
