All posts by trollboy

An applied field guide to contamination after Tindalosian contact

Mercer never saw the thing again.

He changed trains seven times. He paid cash, threw away his clothes, shaved his head, and would only sleep in rooms whose corners he could smother with pillows. He stopped using his own name and he never went home. Three weeks later a landlady in Prague found him folded into an angle far too small to hold a man.

Everyone assumed the Hound had followed him. But the trail worth studying did not end with Mercer at all. It ended with his sister, back home, who still had the letter he had written to explain why he ran.

A speculative physical model of angular time, observation, and the Hounds of Tindalos

There is an old, uncharitable way of reading “The Hounds of Tindalos”: a man drugs himself, peers somewhere he shouldn’t, attracts a predator, and gets eaten for his trouble. It reads the story as a cautionary tale about curiosity. I have never found it satisfying, because it leaves every interesting question on the table. Why plaster? Why corners? Why does being seen matter to a thing that can move through time?

Every year on Shoggoth.net we do a whole month, that’s 31 days, of abominations and disturbances! At least one new affront to sensibility every day! We need you!! We need writers! We need artists! We need you! What system? Dealers choice! Call of Cthulhu, Cthulhu Eternal, 5th Edition, we’re ambivalent.

Here’s some handy templates that you can use to get your started.

• Call of Cthulhu
• Cthulhu Eternal

Share your submissions to [email protected], if you’re an artist, reach out and we’ll share you the list of submissions needing art! We look forward to seeing what you can bring us!