Hideous Creatures: Dark Young

Hideous Creatures: Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath

“Worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream – Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!” Are they nameless horrors or numbered servitors, Druidic nightmares or ab-natural abominations? Where do they grow, and on what loathsome food do they thrive? Follow them to Hell and Hydra, or to Mormo and Monsanto.

Dark young are enormous writhing masses, formed out of ropy black tentacles. Here and there over their surface, ragged, puckered mouths drool green sap. Beneath them, tentacles end in black hooves. Dark young roughly resemble trees in silhouette — the trunks being the short legs, and the tops of the trees represented by the ropy, branching bodies – but smell like open graves.

Hideous Creatures: Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath includes,

• Two unique scenario seeds, Carnivorous Plantings, and Into the Woods
• Keeper clues for every Trail of Cthulhu Investigative ability
• Six mythic echoes from across the world
• Twelve Dark Young variations
• Statistics for Gof’nn Hupadgh and Milk-Spawn
• Rules for drinking the Milk of Shub-Niggurath (Why?! Why?!!)
• And new powers, like Corrupt Fertility and Spit Thorns, with GUMSHOE statistics.

In this series, Kenneth Hite looks at the creatures, species, and monsters of the Cthulhu Mythos from every non-Euclidean angle. Alternate versions and new explanations provide the same jolt of mythic bisociation that the gods and titans receive in the TRAIL OF CTHULHU corebook. Hite traces these foul things through their legendary history, and provides further clues for any Investigator to follow. Horrific scenario seeds burst and bloom, story spines protrude and deform, in a blasphemous garden any Keeper can harvest.

Praise for Hideous Creatures,

“a brief injection of Hite-ian awesome … they’re just about the right length to digest in a single sitting, and full of amazing ideas that will make anyone’s game into a flavourful occult gumbo.” – High Trust, High Drama Blog

“I consider this series a wake-up call to the lacklustre, to remind them tales of the Mythos, using whatever system, should instill uneasiness, upset and fear. Grasp the potential of the unearthly and inhuman…” – Paul Baldowski

Hideous Creatures: Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath is the first installment of the second Ken Writes About Stuff subscription.