Wanted: Your Favorite Eldritch Monsters
Feb. 26th, 2019 04:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
The rulebook for Weird of Hali: The Roleplaying Game is coming along nicely at this point, and one of the remaining tasks is making sure it's well stocked with monsters. Now of course this is Weird of Hali, so the player characters are on the side of the monsters, dodging heavily armed Radiance negation teams and subtler dangers alike, but there still has to be a good collection of eldritch creatures. I've already included everything that appears in the seven novels of The Weird of Hali -- Deep Ones, voormis, shoggoths, the basement-dwelling and obligingly hungry formless spawn of Tsathoggua, and the hideous and not always visible Shambler from the Stars, among many others -- but a Lovecraftian adventure is like a wildlife park: the more critters, the merrier. So the question I'd like to toss to the tentacle fans among my readers is this: what hideous creatures out of old-fashioned weird fiction would you like to see in WoH: The RPG?
A few terms and restrictions apply:
a) if it's from movies, TV, anime, etc., I'm not really interested. The raw material for this project is pulp magazine fiction, above all the legacy of the between-the-wars golden age of the weird tale. I may at some point make an exception for kaiju -- that is, Japanese movie monsters of the Godzilla genre -- but that's really a separate project.
b) On the other hand, anything from the weird tales era is an option, even if it's not part of the Cthulhu mythos. I've already made the Thurian and Hyborian ages -- the parahistorical settings of Robert E. Howard's heroes Kull and Conan, respectively -- part of the backstory, so all of Howard's creations without exception are potential raw material. So are the critters conjured into being by the second- and third-string authors of the same period -- the Shambler from the Stars comes from one of Robert Bloch's very earliest and, um, least distinguished stories. (You have to start somewhere, even if you end up as good as Bloch.)
So trace the chalk circle, turn the unhallowed pages of the Necronomicon, and conjure up your favorite eldritch horrors from six whole weeks before the beginning of time itself...
(The image of Cthulhu at the beach? That's by cartoonist Patrick Dean, and may be found along with much more of the same kind on his blog Underwhelming Lovecraft Monsters.)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 01:12 am (UTC)Ubbo-Sathla? He doesn’t do much but lie there, but he could provide atmosphere.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 03:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 01:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 04:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 04:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 01:44 am (UTC)This is going to be fun!
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 04:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 02:52 am (UTC)The first two would be the undead witch Abagail Prinn and the unholy one she tries to summon, Nyogtha in The Salem Horror by Henry Kuttner.
The third isn't so much a monster, but the sorcerer Azedarac from The Holiness of Azedarac by CAS. A misunderstood guy from my point of view, just trying to do his thing in an unsympathetic world and help out the protagonist...
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 04:18 am (UTC)Azedarac -- hmm. Not sure if he's suited to inclusion in the rulebook, but we'll see. Certainly a relic of St. Azedarac with strange powers would be an absolutely perfect Macguffin, and his potions would also be useful!
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 03:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 04:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 05:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 08:35 pm (UTC)Stealth aircraft have lots of right angles, to summon Hounds-
Date: 2019-02-27 05:56 am (UTC)The Javanese flying cucumber was the basis for Otto Lilienthal's hang gliders and might be a gliding form for a Shoggoth.
Re: Stealth aircraft have lots of right angles, to summon Hounds-
Date: 2019-02-27 08:39 pm (UTC)Favorite Eldritch Monsters
Date: 2019-02-27 06:40 am (UTC)I haven't actually read your Hali books yet, but earlier tonight I ordered the first one in paperback. Please note that, as far as I can tell, there is some sort of HTML code error on the Founders' House web page to buy Kingsport in paperback. The PayPal "Add to Cart" button doesn't seem to do anything. I've tried it in two different browsers, Chrome and Firefox. I sent a message to Founders House, I guess I'll order Kingsport later when they fix it, as I'd rather give my money to them than Amazon.
Re: Favorite Eldritch Monsters
Date: 2019-02-27 08:44 pm (UTC)I've forwarded your comment about the website to Founders House -- with any luck it's a temporary glitch and will be fixed shortly.
Re: Favorite Eldritch Monsters
From:(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 10:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 08:45 pm (UTC)Robert E Howard
Date: 2019-02-27 11:17 am (UTC)Re: Robert E Howard
Date: 2019-02-27 08:49 pm (UTC)One thing I like about the Mythras rule system that I'm using as the basis for this game is that characters don't become omnipotent, the way they do in late-version D&D. A very experienced character with lots of skills at high levels can still be done in by a knife thrust if he's unlucky or careless. A carnivorous ape? If you don't have lots of firepower on hand, one of those is a real threat no matter how experienced your character gets.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 01:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 08:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 01:37 pm (UTC)-changeling
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 08:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:Genius Loci?
Date: 2019-02-27 03:48 pm (UTC)Re: Genius Loci?
Date: 2019-02-27 08:52 pm (UTC)Re: Genius Loci?
From:Zoogs
Date: 2019-02-27 05:19 pm (UTC)Justin Patrick Moore
Re: Zoogs
Date: 2019-02-27 08:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 05:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 08:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 05:39 pm (UTC)Consider Brown Jenkin seconded?
Also, has anyone mentioned Mi-go?
-Dudley Dawson
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-28 02:16 am (UTC)May I engage in a little evolutionary geekery here? The first time in my adult life I read "The Dreams in the Witch House" -- I'd read it back in my insufficiently misspent youth, but that's another matter -- my instant response to Brown Jenkin was that he belongs to a previously undocumented species of primate. You've got the flat, human-looking face, you've got the four paws like little hands, right? He's got to be a primate. So in The Weird of Hali, there's a species of New World prosimian -- distant relatives of the loris, the lemur, and the tarsier -- that plays a modest but significant role. They were originally native to the jungles of southern Atlantis, you see, were domesticated in Poseidonian times, and bred to have certain curious resonances with human nervous systems. If you can find a copy of De Rebus Praeternaturalibus by Johannes Aldrovandus, which of course you won't be able to do in this regrettably nonfictive world, you can read at length in the chapter De Familiaribus Maleficarum about their care and feeding...
As for the Mi-Go, definitely! A Lovecraftian universe lacking the fungi from Yuggoth would be insufficiently squamous and rugose indeed. ;-)
(no subject)
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2019-02-28 06:19 am (UTC) - ExpandAstral Travel / Dreaming / Pathworking / Remote Viewing skill
Date: 2019-02-27 07:13 pm (UTC)One creature that comes to mind from this would be an "astral barnacle" don't know what the technical name for it is, but the little things common in the lower astral that might cling to someones etheric body.
Just had these thoughts after my last comment.
Justin Patrick Moore
Re: Astral Travel / Dreaming / Pathworking / Remote Viewing skill
Date: 2019-02-28 02:18 am (UTC)Re: Astral Travel / Dreaming / Pathworking / Remote Viewing skill
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2019-03-02 11:09 am (UTC) - ExpandRe: Astral Travel / Dreaming / Pathworking / Remote Viewing skill
From:Radiance Base?
Date: 2019-02-27 07:32 pm (UTC)https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/one-ride-disney-world-never-210349211.html
Theme parks could make good Radiance bases or schemes for mass brainwashing (why do the people coming off that ride look so glazed?...)
Just a thought.
PS Got Chorazin in the mail the other day - I'll probably get to it this weekend!
Re: Radiance Base?
Date: 2019-02-28 02:19 am (UTC)Old Fangled Creatures
Date: 2019-02-27 08:48 pm (UTC)Ice Age Megafauna, cryptids, and ordinary animals and / or rules to create them.
My war mammoth stomps on the grey SUV.
Rusty
Re: Old Fangled Creatures
Date: 2019-02-28 02:30 am (UTC)Fortunately nobody's got a copyright on mammoths. What's more, in the form of the Bammat, it's already in the classic weird fiction canon, courtesy of Many Wade Wellman's spookiest Silver John story, The Desrick on Yandro. As for cryptids, well, I've got a copy of Bernard Heuvelmans' On the Track of Unknown Animals half finished on the end table right now and a copy of his In the Wake of the Sea Serpent on the stack of library books, so you can draw the logical conclusions...
Re: Old Fangled Creatures
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2019-02-28 03:09 pm (UTC) - ExpandRe: Old Fangled Creatures
From:Cordyceps
Date: 2019-02-27 09:45 pm (UTC)Might be treated more like a disease than as an entity you can really interact with, but maybe that will get your imagination started - I would think there are quite a few horrible wasting diseases or bodily conditions you might want to include in your sourcebook.
Re: Cordyceps
Date: 2019-02-28 02:33 am (UTC)Re: Cordyceps
From:Re: Cordyceps
From:lurker
Date: 2019-02-27 11:37 pm (UTC)Re: lurker
Date: 2019-02-28 02:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-27 11:57 pm (UTC)It occurs to me that during the same time period eldritch creatures were getting such a bad rap in the weird tales, Earth's native creatures weren't faring much better in the pulp adventures. Species ranging from gorillas to rats to ants to giant clams were constantly and invariably portrayed as bent on gratuitous homicide. There might not be any straightforward way to either follow or subvert that tradition in the WoH game, but stats on a range of terrestrial creatures, that can be summoned into play as allies or altered by Radiance science and fielded against the player characters, might be useful.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-28 02:40 am (UTC)As for the animals, oh, no argument there. Nyarlathotep is served by all wild things -- "the wild beasts followed him and licked his hands" -- and, well, let's just say Phauz the cat goddess was responsible for certain events in the town of Ulthar and has no compunction about doing the same thing as needed. Other animals? Yes, that can be done without too much difficulty. I don't see the Radiance altering animals -- they're way too much in love with machines, and would much rather build a robot -- but those sorcerers and mad scientists who so often end up living in isolated houses and conducting their experiments there? You bet...
Terror Birds !!
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2019-02-28 03:43 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-28 04:30 am (UTC)Also, in my jaded old age, I'm thinking the Radiance would be in league with the Arisians. I seem to recall that Earth in the Lensman universe becomes a technophilic hellscape bombarded with unceasing advertisements (not to mention the Lensman graduation ceremony has striking overtones of totalitarian precision).
-Cliff
(no subject)
Date: 2019-02-28 05:32 pm (UTC)As for the Lensman universe, yeah, that seems likely enough. I'm not enough of a Doc Smith fan to write something turning that universe on its head, but it could be done...
Cats of Ulthar
Date: 2019-02-28 08:23 am (UTC)Re: Cats of Ulthar
Date: 2019-02-28 05:35 pm (UTC)