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)
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.
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