Also, I had one other question: one of the coolest purported features of That Which Sleeps was the ability to play as different kinds of cosmic evil - a planetary parasite that controls the minds of men, a trapped titan that can see the future, or an omnicidal deity whose shattered body forms the very planet. This kind of customization seemed cool, something akin to the different nations in Civ, with each giving a different way to play the game. I don't know how viable something like this would be to implement, but it'd seem cool. For instance, maybe one Ancient Evil has the power to create a unique kind of Thrall, with special abilities, or perhaps a certain other gets a new spell to call up a volcano or something. At the least, I reckon it's worth considering.
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Q1: I wanted to include that as a stretch goal, and since there's demand I will. The technical side should be easy enough, and the existing code has been written in a way to make that feature easy to implement in the future. Not entirely sure how I'll describe it lore-wise, but that's a minor concern at this point. I'll get some stuff added to the google doc in time for the kickstarter, and put it in the kickstarter's list of stretch goals.
Q2: Honestly I'm terrible at marketing. My main avenues for telling people about it are the Something Awful forums, the That Which Sleeps subreddit, itch.io itself, and hoping someone posts about it on the That Which Sleeps kickstarter (I didn't actually back because I didn't hear about it until only about a year ago).
I'll do my bit in mentioning it to my friends. I've already introduced three people, here's hoping for the best. As for the lore, well, I don't see a reason why you couldn't just start the game with a "select your Ancient Evil" screen, which changes what particular nasty is imprisoned beneath the ground/exists only as a shadowy wraith/etc? If you need ideas, well, you could always look into the Cthulhu Mythos, or if you want to take the short route, you could take a quick look at Arkham Horror (which draws so heavily from Lovecraft that it actually uses lots of his characters directly). One thing you might leverage is the fact that fishmen have a long and storied history in cosmic horror, since in Lovecraft they were basically Cthulhu's parahuman cultist "children". Just a few ideas:
*A sea deity/spirit/giant cosmic squid that gets a bonus to spawning and using Fishmen.
*A necromantic being that draws strength from death - perhaps stronger plagues/undead?
*A sort of Primal Entity that has influence over natural forces, like volcanoes and earthquakes.
*A Planetary Parasite that spreads a unique type of terrain that is useful only to itself and its minions, while being hostile to all other life.
All of this is just spitballing, of course. No guarantee that any of these are suitable for the actual game.
Hey, thanks for sharing it around. Certainly makes my marketing job easier.
Lore-wise my only issue, and it wasn't much of an issue, was that I wasn't thinking of "the darkness" as a living thinking being, but as an essential part of nature, far beyond even the Gods of the world. It's not set in stone or anything, and I'll change it if I think it's necessary.
As to your ideas those do sound like the sorts of things I was going for. I actually already had a card-based God I wanted to try, based on how the game was originally set up, way back in January in its first week. You don't have set powers, but are given cards at semi-random (you can choose what deck to draw from) and so have to adapt your strategy to fit the cards you have available. I didn't like it as it was, but it would work well if combined with the existing mechanics, I think.