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[personal profile] ecosophia
Cthulhu at the beachThe 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.) 

Re: Genius Loci?

Date: 2019-02-28 03:53 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] zarvoc
Much obliged! I'm on a serious C.A.S. kick right now and just re-read this one a few days ago.
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