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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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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The Horizon Shepherd

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Observer-horizon megafauna dossier HS-25, with Cthulhu Eternal statistics

They relayed Daniel’s coin-flip to his wife through six people, an optical cable, and a handwritten note carried down the central corridor. Every path came back with the same bit: zero. Daniel had chosen one. Whatever was moving through the noise behind his voice followed the exact line between the signals she could still receive and the ones that would never reach her again.

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The Gagnon Lights

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Two lights in the woods north of Arkham, moving side by side, as though holding hands.

Bargained he with Fowler strong, A witch of furious mood, That she should take these children young, And slaye them in a wood.

The Children In The Wood, folk song, Arkham variant

Sometimes called the Gagnon Lights or Jack Lights, these entities are flashing fiery spirits usually seen in May in the woods north of Arkham.

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Causal Parasites

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A channel-infesting organism dossier for Cthulhu Eternal

The brake pedal did everything it was supposed to. Pressure dropped, the cylinders extended, the pads closed on every wheel, and the current poured into the resistor bank. The wheels stayed cold and the speedometer held at 71. The cause had happened. The effect was somewhere else.

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The Eigenmother

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A reproductive caste and adaptive-selection dossier for Cthulhu Eternal

Three instruments looked at the animal and disagreed completely about what was inside the shell. They agreed only on its mass, its temperature, and its pulse. When labor began at 02:14, four shadows separated around the shell, and every one of them called Dr. Lin by the nickname her mother had used when she was a child.

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Boltzmann Flies

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A spontaneous-organism and memory-contamination dossier for Cthulhu Eternal

The specimen lived for forty-three seconds. Its wings, beating in a hard vacuum, reproduced Araceli Ward’s own voice telling someone to close a north valve because Isaac was still inside. The laboratory had no north valve, and nobody on site was named Isaac. Ward remembered his funeral anyway, down to the rain on his husband’s green umbrella.

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Sages of Dread

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Master of Dark Knowledge

Similar to Scholars of Dread, this variant is thought to either evolve from that creature after it causes enough death, chaos, and madness, or, as others theorize, to be created when the Sanity loss required to make a Scholar of Dread exceeds fifty points in a single Sanity check. Either way, they share the same appearance, abilities, immunities, and vulnerabilities as a Scholar of Dread (see Scholar of Dread).

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The Eraser

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An ontological predator dossier for Cthulhu Eternal

The video showed the security officer following someone the camera had never once recorded. For nine seconds after that, the whole world had exactly one surviving reason left to include Dr. Mara Venn, and it was a phone call from a child asking why her middle name was Mara.

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