I’ve been noodling with the monster creation rules, and decided to stat up some Lovecraftian beasties for fun.

16 thoughts on “I’ve been noodling with the monster creation rules, and decided to stat up some Lovecraftian beasties for fun.”

1. Beauty! 

   God, I can’t even imagine what you’d have to do to qualify for a Hack & Slash against a Shoggoth.

2. Rocket launcher? I really didn’t intend to make the Shoggoth that horrific, but matching my interpretation of the fiction against the monster creation rules, that’s how it came out.

3. Shoggoth are terrifying!  I think it’s perfectly appropriate.  In fact, many of Lovecraft’s monstrosities require special fictional circumstances to justify attacks.

4. Exactly that – the Big Mythos Baddies aren’t something your party defeats on the first try. It’s something they survive and then have to approach with a plan.

   E.G. If they lure it into an abandoned dwarven mine and detonate the runes they’ve inscribed on the walls to hold it in place… while they pour burning lamp oil and molten steel down through the rubble (to hopefully finish the job) then they might deserve to brag about it at the tavern later. 

5. Oh man, these are gonna be perfect when I run my ‘mythos in hyboria’ arc in DW 😀

6. Shawn McCarthy the best part about being a 1st level D&D character is the same thrill you get from “cheating” and defeating a monster you’d never win against in open combat.

7. Shawn McCarthy That’s why I chose to focus on the “lesser” Mythos creatures. But even there, the Shoggoth turned out to be far beefier than I thought.

   My presumption is that any of the actual Great Old Ones would be the equivalent of the Tarrasque, more a force of nature than anything that could be reasonably dealt with by a PC.

8. This was more of a mental exercise than anything, but I’m glad to see that people like them! Suggestions are welcome!

9. The smaller mythos entities are monsters.  The big ones are Fronts.  Look at Nyarlathotep, that dude is a Campaign Front for sure.

10. Last Breath

    When you’re dying you comprehend just a little of the Great Old Ones purpose (the GM will stare at you quietly).  Then roll (just roll, +nothing – yeah, the great old ones don’t care about you at all).  On a 10+, you’re dead and it doesn’t matter.  On a 7-9, you’re dead and it doesn’t matter. 

11. The only criticism I’d offer is that some of these moves look a bit weak. I think a move should suggest some sort of outcome or at least an action.

    “Resemble a tree” isn’t a move. It’s a special quality.

    “Escape notice by resembling a tree” is a move, so is “Ambush an unsuspecting victim in a forest.”

    Similarly, “Execute a prodigious leap” is kind of a crappy move. If I made a leaping monster, it would be “executing a prodigious leap” all the time! The monster move would be for the kind of leap that impacts a PC in a way that I can’t just make without a move. Something like “Close range with staggering speed” or “vault over defenses” or “pounce on someone, knocking them to the ground.”

    You don’t want to have to wait until someone flubs a roll just to make the thing jump…

    Now, some of those moves are AWESOME though.

    “Drag a victim back to its underworld city”, “Extract and encase a living brain”, “Engulf and consume”? Holy crap! Those are scary moves!

12. Dylan Boates Thanks for the feedback! I don’t have enough experience with DW yet to fully appreciate what is and isn’t a good move. I was concerned about getting too specific with them.

    In my head “Execute a prodigious leap” was roughly equivalent to the Blink Dog’s “Move with amazing speed.” I thought that the use of “prodigious” signaled that it was something extraordinary, like leaping halfway across the room. Perhaps that should be more explicit. 

    “Resemble” was probably the wrong verb. I intended it to be, as you suggest, more of a deliberate attempt at disguise. (Though the Dark Young presumably resemble a tree anytime they’re not moving around trying to eat/trample things.)

13. Don’t worry about being too specific. Monster moves are just more specific and evocative reskins of the existing GM moves. If you want to do something not covered by your specific monster moves, you can always just make a more general GM move.

    The purpose of monster moves (as I understand it) is to express the REALLY EVOCATIVE signature moves of a monster in a concise and easy way (so you remember the cool things that the monster is supposed to do) and to establish just how dangerous a monster is.

    That’s what makes a move like “consume whole” great. Technically it’s just a more specific version of “put someone in a spot”. (The spot is the monster’s guts.) The specific move just exists to remind us “Holy shit! This monster is scary and awesome because it just swallows your ass whole!”

    Edit: I find a good guideline would be “Does this move have immediate consequences or require the target to respond to it?”

    Honestly, I’d say “Move with amazing speed” is kind of a crap move too, but I’m willing to forgive Adam and Sage for one kind of crap move since there’s a bajillion amazing things in the book and it’s not really a huge problem.

    Which isn’t to say that movement related moves can’t be cool. I’ve got a lot of mileage out of monster moves involving the words “appear” or “disappear”. More than just implying that the monster is somewhere else, it implies that they’re somewhere else that changes the tactical situation in a way that forces the PCs to respond.

14. Cthulhu comes around the corner — WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO. ^^

15. tremulus does a good job of super simple (yet distinctive) lovecraftian monsters too.  🙂

16. Oh boy ! Drooling, gooey gargling beasties ! I’m sooooo excited !

    As a CoC player, Hounds of Tindalos made me s..t in my pants !

    Good job !

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