What Is R'lyeh?

R'lyeh is a sunken city in the South Pacific, and the dossier describes it as a corpse-city: built by the Great Old Ones in ages before terrestrial life existed, and lying drowned for all but the rare interval in which an upheaval lifts it back into the air. The Archive stamps it UNCHARTED, which means it has never been surveyed. It does have one position on record, and that position is the subject of its own Dispatch; this one is about what the place is.

What it is made of

The witness who landed there, the Norwegian mate Gustaf Johansen, wrote that the whole place was wrong in its angles. The slime-covered masonry was cyclopean, the carving was vast, and the geometry did not agree with itself, so that a surface which looked like a slope behaved like a wall. The Archive's dossier calls the architecture non-Euclidean, and notes that an ordinary traveller's sense of direction is the first thing to fail. The Archive has no instructions for visitors.

Who has been there

Only the one party. Johansen's schooner, the Emma, was sunk by the Alert, a yacht out of Dunedin, New Zealand, manned by cultists. The Emma's survivors seized the yacht and came on the island by accident, after an upheaval of the sea floor in 1925. They landed, found a huge door in a monolith, and opened it. Not all of them came back to the boat. The Alert was later found adrift with one man living and one dead aboard, and the position it was found in is on record as well.

What lies in it

Cthulhu, entombed behind the door and asleep. The dossier is explicit that he is alive; the city is his house, and the account has him waiting there until the stars come right. That alignment is also the reason the cults worship him from a distance. The sea has taken the city down again, and nobody has reported it risen since.

The Field Survey draws R'lyeh with its coordinates-on-record mark, the firmest pin the Survey gives a place of this kind.