Sandy petersens cthulhu mythos (1) 11

You can make the story even more dangerous by
putting it right in the heart of the players’ stomping

etc.).

grounds. You could set up an adventure with a shoggoth

The fact is that Lovecraft’s monsters aren’t just

as a dangerous enemy under a distant glacier, but the

monsters. They have personalities. And as such, you

players will be more invested if you have that same

can use them for much more than just bags of hit

shoggoth patrolling the sewers under your campaign’s

points. Most obviously, they need not always be

capital city, sneaking up through openings and pulling

treated as enemies. Yes, these monsters can be malign,

victims down to feed. Knowing that shoggoths exist in

cannibalistic horrors, but they are most often intelligent

some distant place in the world is one thing. Knowing

horrors who are able to understand and sometimes

that there is a shoggoth in your home city eating folks

communicate with humans. They have purposes.

every night is another thing entirely.

Adding Horror to Adventures
Horror is a delicate topic. When Horror is combined
with another genre, the usual result is that the other
genre wins out. For example, most horror-comedies
are really just comedies with a horror element.
Many attempts have been made to mix horror and
superheroes, and, again, the end result is generally a
superhero story with a horror element. Most players
of Pathfinder understandably are focused on high
adventure, derring-do, and sword and sorcery. And of
course, when horror is added to the adventure theme,
just as with other genres, the adventure is what remains,
though now horror-tinged.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Consider the
difference between the films Alien and Aliens. The first
is a horror movie. The second is an adventure movie
with horror elements. Both are great films.
If you just want new enemies for your players to
battle and investigate, this book has everything you
need, with a variety of interesting creatures you can
pull out of your back pocket to surprise and intrigue
your players. Almost all of these entities have their

own little tricks and traps to spring on the players.
They range in power from the easily-defeated (zoogs,
ghouls, etc.) to the almost unstoppable (flying polyps,
starspawn, etc.) to truly awful impossibilities that will

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drive the hardiest adventurer mad (Hastur, Azathoth,

For example, on a lonely road, the player characters
arrive at an inn run by zoogs. This simple premise is
alight with possibilities. What would the zoogs want
as payment? What do they offer in exchange, beyond
sleeping quarters and a fine meal of moonberry wine
and rat-on-a-stick? The zoogs could have a gift shop,
consisting of goods taken from people foolish enough
to sleep alone and unguarded in the zoogs’ rooms.
(After all, they are still zoogs.)
Even more horrendous monsters may be able to
interact with an adventuring party outside of mere
combat. The fungi from Yuggoth maintain a secret
society of people who do the fungi’s will in return
for technological and biological wonders. The fungi
actively evangelize for this society, and the most useful
people for their purposes are, clearly, adventurers:
itinerant and well-traveled, generally individually
powerful, and highly experienced. For all these
reasons, they make excellent agents. While your own
group of adventurers are, no doubt, unwilling to serve
the terrible goals of the fungi, there can be no doubt

that another party might not be so high-minded, and
the players may therefore encounter these individuals.
That they serve the fungi would not be immediately
obvious, but perceptive adventurers will invariably
notice signs of Yuggoth’s control…