What moves the wind, brings the rain, boils the clouds into the sky and freezes them into snow?
Not the Storm God. He is rather the one who takes what the weather gods have wrought and imbues it with his malice, his pride, his might, and his indignation. His task is to bring low, to strip away, to break down, and to shatter, splinter, smash. He waits in a brooding simmer, and at moments when his umbrage at the sheer gall of the living grows too great, he summons the power of his rage to remind them that their lot is to suffer.
He sits as a tempestuous mass of wondrous colour deep in the great ocean of rainbow dream-scape that is drawn into the sky of all possible worlds. But he does not sit there alone. Around him he has flung his children - ninety-five of them he has sired - as a man casts a great fistful of salt into the air around him. Each a world in its own right, hanging imprisoned and transfixed before the vastness of his bulk and the greatness of his outraged splendour; they are the closest to the power of his anger, and bear it at its most frequent and savage.
But the peoples who inhabit them, near as they are to him, also know a secret - that when a storm abates, in its wake is revealed a world transformed in its freshness and clarity, such indeed that it never fails to be shown as it really is, with all that is shrouding, or misleading, or veiling, or deceitful, swept aside and gone forever. It is in such moments, these peoples know, that opportunity takes its moment to presence in creation - and the Storm God is unwittingly displayed to be the agent not only of sorrow, but also of hope.
(A Moons of Jupiter planetcrawl to put the new Spelljammer in WotC's pipe and make them smoke it. 'Nuff said?)
Theres this little recorded snippet of Theodore Strugeon's speech as guest of honor at the Minneapolis Sci Fi convention in 1979. Nearly right at the start he tells about the photographs that he was invited to see coming through the Voyager-1 Jupiter Flyby in that same year. Its rambling and somewhat drunk, but fits the mood you're going for here: "We looked upon Ganymede. And callisto. And Amalthea, wich is kind of a baked potato that goes arround on the way inside near Jupiter, always with one point toward the planet. Its not big enough to be round. And Callisto...And on Callisto is the mark of a cloven hoof." Now go check the crater marks on Callisto and tell me if you can picture them as anything other than the stomping hooves of a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath.
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