Archive for September is for Shoggoths

Le Fear Fatal

It was around 4:30am in the bus station located at Melnea Cass Boulevard & Madison Avenue in Boston. Several scantily clad women were standing on the sidewalk, some visibly digging at invisible spiders. Bit by bit, cars containing single men pulled up, and the women left…only to return a short time later. A girl in a leather jacket, pleated plaid skirt, and auburn pixie cut was gone the most, seconded only by a young woman with locks the color of orangish flame wearing only black negligee. A blonde woman who could be otherwise cosplaying Uma Thurman from Pulp Fiction down to the hair cut and bare feet had grown frustrated and restless, keenly aware of the current trade of the night. Finally, she stormed off down the street, passed the intersection and after walking past the homeless shelter, turned the corner onto Albany as a tall, lithe redhead clad only in a stained grey thong bikini.

In nature, many opportunistic predators evolve to take the form of their prey. Examples of this include the fireflies of the genus Photuris that emit the same photonic signals that females of the genus Photinus emit as a mating signal. The same can be said of the shoggoth. As humans are the top species on this planet and account for a great deal of it’s biomass, specializing in preying on them has been the niche of several species of predator. As such, it makes sense that a quickly adapting species such as the shoggoth would use mimicry as a predation strategy. 

The Le Fear Fatal takes the look of, including replicating clothes, a sexually available female.  They’re not very sentient in any humanly recognizable way, with intelligence on par of an African Grey Parrot. As human society progressed, they adapted to the more common courtship patterns they observed in their new natural environment: a concrete jungle.

Continue reading »
Posted in Creatures, Creatures | Leave a comment

Shoggoth Seeds

It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.

H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness (1931)
Artist: Martin Kaci, Website: dreamstime.com
Art Piece Name/Number: shoggoth creature

These amorphous things were created by the Old Ones to service them; they were designed to be strong, adaptable, and capable for any task set before them. Eventually, they rebelled against their creators and brought them low and lost themselves to the four corners of the Earth. Even if the player’s characters have not heard of a “shoggoth,” the players have, and even the name is designed to send shivers crawling down spines.

Keepers desiring to include shoggoths in their campaign can find the fetid beasts in Chapter 14: Monsters, Beasts, and Alien Gods in the Call of Cthulhu Keeper Rulebook (7th Edition). Shoggoths are presented in two varieties, Shoggoths and Shoggoth Lords. The Shoggoth is the horrific creature originally described in Lovecraft’s novella, At the Mountains of Madness. A Shoggoth Lord is typically smaller than a shoggoth, but far more intelligent. They disguise themselves as human to get closer to their prey. An additional type of shoggoth, the Proto Shoggoth, is available in the new Malleus Monstrorum, Vol. 1; it’s an infantile shoggoth, perfect for when the Keeper wants the investigators to confront a shoggoth without a near-certain total party kill.

Continue reading »
Posted in Creatures, Creatures, September is for Shoggoths | Leave a comment

Avian Shoggoths

We’d been chasing reports of a condor for over week when we saw it, soaring high above us on the thermals rising out of these canyons. It looked massive from here, and our photographer struggled to track it. We needed pictures to see if it was banded, part of a breeding program, or a wild born animal we hadn’t yet identified in our conservation efforts. Suddenly our photographer screamed and dropped his camera. He curled into a ball and started babbling about blinking eyes and slavering mouths. He said it wasn’t a condor. He said a lot of things, but we didn’t believe him then. I wish we had.

Continue reading »
Posted in Creatures, Creatures | Leave a comment

Lovecraft Country Shoggoths

HBO Subscribers: Welcome to Lovecraft. FYI, those things in the woods weren’t shoggoths.  They were something else. Even before watching the first episode of Love

Trollboy, August 17, 2021

Before seeing the first episode of HBO’s “Lovecraft Country,” based upon the book of the same name by Matt Ruff, I was seeing posts about it on Facebook. I was surprised at how quickly supernatural monsters turned up in the show (granted, it was the end of the first episode, but it was still the first episode!) I read the posts and comments, wondering what could actually be so confusing, and then HBO Max released episode one on Youtube.

Continue reading »
Posted in Creatures, Creatures, September is for Shoggoths | Leave a comment

OctoberNomicon and beyond; a Call for Revelations!

A popular meme at the moment expressing ostensible dissatisfaction of HBO’s application of the shoggoth appellation to their new creature.

Yes. Sort of. Details below.

Continue reading »
Posted in news, News | Leave a comment

Copyright 1996 - 2024 Shoggoth.net,