I am a big fan of Robert W. Chambers seminal collection of short horror stories known as the King in Yellow. HP Lovecraft also drew some inspiration from that source and has come to greatly eclipse Chambers work. The King in Yellow is more a collection of strange tales with tints of cosmic horror that would later be greatly expanded upon by the likes of Lovecraft, Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, etc. However, the whole idea and unifying concept of the King in Yellow and the dreamy city of Carcosa have had a strong pull for me. One of the concepts presented is the yellow sign, a mysterious glyph that has links to the King in Yellow and the city of Carcosa. It isn't really fully described - Chambers left much of the descriptive work up to the reader's imagination. In my opinion, a highly effective tool indeed. Anyway, many years ago, Kevin Ross drew the fabled sigil for Chaosium, the game company behind the Call of Cthulhu Table Top Roleplaying Game. It is indeed quite a striking symbol and has come to be seen as THE depiction of the yellow sign.
Though I am quite a big fan, the IP itself is property of Chaosium. That can be problematic for folks like me who like to make their own roleplaying supplements. Know I know the Ross Yellow Sign is rather ubiquitous, but I didn't want to run afoul of any legal issues. Since The story the King in Yellow is long in the public domain, I figured I'd make my own version. I based my depiction upon the cross between a mathematically descriptive model of nonEuclidean geometry and the artistic depiction of a rotating black hole.
I decided that those two images would be a good basis to describe a symbol that defines cosmic horror and madness. So I came up with a new version of the Yellow Sign. This time, I've released it under creative commons share and share alike attribution license so if anyone wants to have a depiction of the Yellow Sign in their own projects without wanting the IP entanglements of the Chaosium version, then fill your boots. Cheers and Happy gaming!!
