The OctoberNomicon Is Opening Once Again

October approaches, and something is scratching at the margins of the manuscript.

For more than twenty years, Shoggoth.net’s OctoberNomicon has spent the Halloween season filling the world with things that ought not exist: monsters drawn from folklore and urban legend, forgotten horrors recovered from weird fiction, original creatures dragged screaming from the imaginations of our contributors, and stories documenting what happened when somebody encountered them.

Now we need your help to open it again.

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What Hunts the Hounds

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The Narrowing, a terminal predator and Cthulhu Eternal entity

For thirty days the Hounds behaved like animals fleeing something. Nobody could photograph the thing chasing them, because it was not a thing in a place. It was a pressure that removed transitions instead of occupying space, and you could only see it in the actions that could no longer happen and the instruments that could no longer disagree.

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The Ceiling Man

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A wet, bloodshot eye stared back at Jiro from the crack above his bed. Terror seized him as somehow a face squeezed through the tiny crack. Matted, greasy long hair framed the pale white face. Two large eyes and a wide grin filled with hundreds of narrow, sharp teeth dominated the otherwise featureless face. The creature clacked its teeth and giggled as it continued unfurling from the crack. Long, spindly arms and legs unfolded from a thin torso, ribs and hips protruding. It was naked, and Jiro could see an appendage, small and pathetic, dangling between its legs. The creature settled on the bed and crawled up Jiro’s frozen form. It put its face near his, still giggling.

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The Ecology of Tindalos

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Mesocosm report, ecological synthesis, and Cthulhu Eternal operation kit

For nineteen days the captive organisms kept one another alive. The team had built the chamber expecting to watch one thing eat another. What they got was grazing, succession, wound cleaning, habitat construction, and reproduction. Then, on day thirty, every organism in the tank reacted at once to something outside the measured state space, and all of them began to flee.

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Fragments of a Necronomicon

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Forty thousand dollars to fetch one old book from New Rochelle. Cassey Bane should have asked who else wanted it.

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The Last Witness

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An extinction dossier and Cthulhu Eternal entity

Each finding the hearing accepted removed one more reason the species had to be dead. The type specimen, assembled in 1904 from three animals, began breathing before the lunch recess. It had inherited all three sets of injuries and both of the incompatible jaws the record could not agree on.

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Melting Ones

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Failed attempts at immortality

These creatures were once human, but are now trapped between the tides of life and death. They all began their journey to this state while questing for eternal youth, beauty, or immortality. Some began as wizards or alchemists, delving through arcane formulae and blasphemous tomes. Others were scientists, conducting illegal research into genetics, recombinant DNA, and forced mutation through reprogrammed viruses. Some were famous, wealthy, and vain individuals, willing to pay any price to cheat nature and the passage of time. Ultimately, their efforts were only partially successful.

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Tindalosian Spores

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A developmental-contamination dossier for Cthulhu Eternal

Celandine split the material across five laboratories so that no one team could reconstruct the organism. On the sixth day, one lab answered a question a second lab had not finished asking. By morning every laboratory had grown a different organ, and the organs were working together to leave.

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The Many-Hounded Thing

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Branch-injury report MH-27, with Cthulhu Eternal statistics

The team was sure the procedure had picked the one Hound capable of beating it. The strain gauges told a worse story. The projected animal had simply tried to reach the record that tied it to the room, and the containment shell happened to be in the way. The shell was not defeating the Hound. The shell was teaching it how to breach.

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The Train’s Whistle

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He spent years chasing a train that vanished in 1893. It was always going to arrive eventually.

The boom in railroad construction during the 19th century saw many American cities and towns connected in ways hitherto unimagined, with travel times reduced from days to mere hours. Major lines stretched across the country, with smaller branches reaching out to more remote villages and settlements. The locomotive thundered its way over the land, replacing the canal and the horse as the transportation method of choice for both freight and passengers. The economic downturn of 1893 saw many railway companies go bankrupt and others bought and consolidated. The unprofitable lines, both major and branch, were either improved and incorporated into other lines or were decommissioned and left to rot as monuments to the ever-shifting tides of capitalism.

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Angular Mimic

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Forensic reconstruction dossier AM-26, with Cthulhu Eternal statistics

During surgery, every artery beyond the reach of direct light divided into pale planes and ran off into a volume with no stable anatomy. The planes rearranged themselves each time the endoscope changed angle. Quill stayed awake under the anesthetic and asked, quite reasonably, why they were teaching her how to be human.

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