Tell me about shoggoths in your campaign

[Gothmog]

Well, I'm playing Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil with some Cthulhu flavour. Spoilers will follow.

Spoiler

I've switched the Elemental Temples to Cthulhu ones, giving them more flavour (except Fire) and more spooky fun. Earth is now Shub-Niggurath, and she is a harsh mistress. Anyway, I'm going to replace some of the Earth creatures - Elementals and Xorns - with Dark Young.

In the last portion of the module, the Elemental Prince of Fire gets released. At this point, I'm not sure if Fire will be successful in releasing its Prince first, or if that will fall to Water (Cthulhu), Earth (Shubby), or Air (Hastur). If Earth is successful in what it wants to do, I'll replace Prince Imix of Fire with a slightly-weakened Shoggoth. Even though Shoggoths aren't related to Shubby, they have the same sort of flavour, and the whole Mythos is meant to be mixed up and played with.

The big problem with the Shoggoth from the d20 book is that they are CR 21. You can't really use them very much. Although having all the PCs run in mad terror as a "nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence" oozes after them, screaming "TEKELI-LI!" the whole time, might be fun.

Very cool ideas LostSoul. However, if you want to tie the elemental fire to a Cthulhu mythos beastie, Cthuga and his star vampires couldn't be a better fit. I don't know if you were looking for a fire crossover, but I thought I'd offer it just in case.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Well, I'm playing Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil with some Cthulhu flavour. Spoilers will follow.

Damn, I WISH I'd thought of that when I wasn running ToEE!

 

[Sejs]

Gothmog said what I was going to say. Cthugha is a perfect fit for your empty fire niche. Ithoqua would make a good air fit too, if you don't already have one.

 

[LostSoul]

I'm using Cthuga, but haven't read any other literature (or pulp fiction ) about him/it. As far as I can tell, there isn't too much flavour there. If you have any pointers, that would be great!

I was going to use Ithoqua for Air, but Ithoqua doesn't really creep me out much. The King in Yellow is cooler, I think. Not really air-focused, but eh. I don't care too much.

 

[Desdichado]

I was going to use Ithoqua for Air, but Ithoqua doesn't really creep me out much. The King in Yellow is cooler, I think. Not really air-focused, but eh. I don't care too much.

Well, that whole elemental matching of the Cthulhu mythos that August Derleth was probably a bad idea to begin with. The correlations simply don't really exist. So if you don't care too much about that, then you're OK.

Personally, I think the vibe of the ToEE is very Lovecraftian, but elemental, featuring prominantly in the title like it does, is problematic. I'd probably simply not worry too much about trying to match elements to Mythos elements and run with it that way.

 

[Retro-Rocket]

I run a Call of Cthulhu game in which a Shoggoth Lord by the name of Mr. Big runs a speakeasy/brothel in the San Fransico. Many of the "ladies" of the said establishment had a certain "fishy" look about them. Needless to say one of the PC's in the game visits the place on a regular basis. In about nine months one of the "girls" is going to place a bundle of joy on his doorstep.

 

[snarfoogle]

My investigators have a hard enough time escaping blithering insanely from Deep Ones, I couldn't bring myself to throw a shoggoth at them.

 

[Wraith Form]

LostSoul -

Holy. CRAP. I am SO stealing that!

Yo-friggin-oink!

What he said.

 

[grodog]

In my Cthulhu-Hawk adaptation of N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God, I changed the module background a bit: Orlane was filled with worshippers of Nerull, and many had been secretly infiltrated by a cult of Cthulhu. So, they really weren't good townsfolk to begin with---much like the corrputed folks of Innsmouth in HPL's tales.

In place of the naga cult in the town and the Temple of Merrika, my version of the module is rife with Deep Ones, CE monks serving Cthulhu, a family of ghouls a la "Pickman's Model" and "The Outsider", carrion crawlers, and shoggoths, too, of course (although they were based on the version from the 1e D&DG, and were therefore a bit less powerful than the 3e version).

 

[Desdichado]

In my Cthulhu-Hawk adaptation of N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God, I changed the module background a bit: Orlane was filled with worshippers of Nerull, and many had been secretly infiltrated by a cult of Cthulhu. So, they really weren't good townsfolk to begin with---much like the corrputed folks of Innsmouth in HPL's tales.

I've never really tried to adapt an existing D&D module to have Cthulhu elements in it, but I have adapted Lovecraft stories into homebrew D&D modules. In the Dark•Heritage campaign, I had an analogue to Innsmouth. It was in the desert instead of on the water, and instead of deep ones it had weird blobbish homebrew creatures that used a Beholder Overseer illustration but custom stats. It was still pretty transparently Innsmouth to my players, though. They got really hosed there; one of them lost most of the little sanity he had left, they were all nearly killed, and they ended up hiding out in the desert from gangs of marauding half-caste freaks that wanted to kill them before they even started on the reason they were in the town in the first place.

Uh; yeah. Thread necromancy. Sorry!