In addition to its many scenic locales, Lovecraft Country contains a wide variety of objects that might figure into adventures. As the line between living and inanimate is merely scrawled upon the infinite variation of the true universe by limited human perceptions, we instead divide these into things that rarely move on their own and things that often move on their own.
Lovecraft Country is all about the ancient forbidden knowledge, and no matter what form humans find information is, they inevitably write it down.
The Necronomicon is undoubtedly the most famous book of Lovecraft Country; even mundanes are likely to have heard of it. The original of the Necronomicon, the Kitab al-Azif, was written in the 700s by The Man Himself, Abdul Al-Hazred, who later went on to be devoured by invisible demons in the middle of the street in broad daylight. It is the basic introductory text for many mad cultists, covering Cthulhu and the other Great Old Ones, their servitor creatures, methods of summoning them from their soggy alien lairs, the proper etiquette for blood sacrifices, how to pick up cute Shub-Niggurath worshippers, and many of the common spells of Lovecraft Country. Unfortunately, it does not contain any tips on how to avoid invisible demons.
Unaussprechlichen Kulten (Nameless Cults)
Book of Eibon (Liber Ivonis)
Protocols of the Elders of Dzyan
De Vermis Mysteriis
The King in Yellow
Pnakotic Manuscripts
The Voynich Manuscript is well known among students of antique curiosities, most of whom believe that the knowledge to translate it has been lost. What is less well-known is that the Voynich manuscript was translated by the Department of Cryptolinguistics at Miskatonic U in 1908, and the translation then ruthlessly surpressed lest the world be irretrievably damaged by its content. The only remaining copy of the translation is believed to be somewhere in the Cryptolinguistics department, but thorough searches of the library have turned up nothing. The original resides at Yale University, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
As the wise man should have said, "And if you gaze long into the Shining Trapezohedron, the Shining Trapezohedron gazes into you." But then, a wise man wouldn't get anywhere near the Trapezohedron. Although the many facets of this strangly-angled crystal show glimpses of other worlds and other times, the windows have a distressing tendency to work both ways. Like many things that cause random trouble, the Shining Trapezohedron is associated with Nyarlathotep (especially in his Haunter of the Dark form).
The lightning gun was invented by the Great Race of Yith to use in their war against the flying polyps. Fortunately or unfortunately, it works pretty well against other critters too. Since the standard-model lightning gun is designed for an elephant-sized Yithian cone-creature host-body, humans generally have to mount its camera-shaped bulk on a tripod to use it effectively.
The Mi-Go (described below) are notorious for their pseudo-living and no doubt highly marketable technology, some well-known examples of which are the mist projector, the Mi-Go braincase, reusable adhesive, and lobster hooch. A mist projector is a red organic-looking harness arrangment that projects streams or clouds of icy mist to freeze whatever they envelope. It powers itself by consuming a small amount of the user's blood and cerebrospinal fluid, which is alarming but not really dangerous except in the case of prolonged use. Even the visible lesions fade after a week or so.
A Mi-Go braincase is a cylinder of greenish alien metal, featureless except for three network ports conforming to no human standard, and varying in size and proportions according to the brain it contains (which is rarely a Mi-Go brain, despite the name). Alien devices approximating cameras, microphones, speakers, and so forth can be connected to the network ports, but this rarely protects the disembodied brain from complete insanity. A brain thus stored can be easily and conveniently transported through the void of space for the amusement of larval Mi-Go.
Resuable adhesive should need no further explanation; what did you think the "M" in "3M" stood for?
Lobster hooch is an odorless, clear liquid easily brewed (or perhaps "cultured" is a better term) from a fluorescent green semi-living feedstock using only common household equipment. It acts as a kind of super-oxidant, allowing fires to burn hotter while consuming less fuel, which is a great boon to drag-racers. If you drank it, it would raise your body temperature to the point where you could survive naked in Antarctice and keep going without oxygen for much longer than is really comfortable. Side effects of consumption by living organisms include agitation, euphoria, addiction, sterility, minor somatic mutations, and an unnatural affection for Mi-Go.
Dr Hammond's Nerve & Brain Elixir
Zanthu Tablets (bottle of 50)
Most people think the Yellow Sign looks something like a coathanger; to be specific, a three-dimensional projection of a five-dimensional coathanger of PURE EVIL. The Yellow Sign is associated with Hastur, and frequently used in the storage of ceremonial vestments used by his cultists.
Elder Sign
Cthulhu
Azathoth, the bling idiot nuclear fury that gibbers at the center of the universe, is normally kept sedated by a 27-piece orchestra of Outer Gods playing Lawrence Whelk tunes. Knowing any more than that is immensely dangerous, as Azathoth's cosmic power tends to leak out into minds that resonate too closely with its own. Here, have a monster.
Azathoth's messenger, Nyarlathotep, spends his off-hours (which are many, since Azathoth rarely issues press releases), revealing the secrets of nuclear fission, applied psychology, and six-sided pentacles to unsuspecting sapient races. Allegedly he has 999 different forms, including one that is almost indistinguishable from a human (possibly linked with the "Dark Man" of witchcraft lore), but this probably underestimates his dark, non-Euclidian creativity.
Shub-Niggurath
Yig
Yog-Sothoth
Cthuga
Tsathoggua is relatively Euclidian, looking somewhat like a gigantic furry toad, and pretty mellow as Great Old Ones go, having sometimes passed up devouring sufficiently interesting petitioners. For the most part, he lurks somnolently in his underground caverns, tended to by his formless spawn, and waits for the Serpent People to realize the error of their ways.
Abhoth
Ithaqua
Hastur
Alan Greenspan
Bast
byakhee
The Great Race of Yith are so called for their mastery
of space and time. When Yith was nearing destruction, they transferred
their minds en masse to the bodies of a semisapient race of conelike
creatures that lived on Earth sixty million years ago and rebuilt their
civilization, driving the flying polyps (see below) into hiding
underground, and when the flying polyps finally burst forth to destroy the
Yithians, they bailed for the bodies of the mighty race of beetles that
will rule Earth after the fall of humanity. Although the main
body part of their civilization remains together to better
support their advanced technology (imagine trying to get tech support
across a time gap of 60 million years!), they dispatch many individual
minds to explore other eras and other worlds. As an added bonus, the mind
swapped into the Yithian explorer's body can be debriefed, before being
memory-wiped and swapped back to the present. (Yes, this does mean the
minds of the cone creatures were extinguished with Yith, and the beetles
wiped out by the flying polyps. They're not the Nice Race of
Yith.)
The flying polyps, archenemies of the Yithians and the eventual destroyers of their abandoned host bodies, are if anything even more alien, and possibly not even native to this universe. Physically, a flying polyp is an ox-sized mass of pulpy flesh with randomly-placed gibbering maws and short tentacles, which changes shape in a horrible oozing fashion and suffers monstrous lapses of visibility, but is always detectable by an unearthly piping. As you might have guessed, they normally fly, but when they do walk they leave distinctive tracks of five circular indentations. Flying polyps have great and peculiar power over winds, and often hunt with winds that suck their prey upwind directly into the polyp's slimy clutches. Even after defeating the abandoned bodies of the Yithians, the flying polyps prefer to live in vaults deep beneath the earth; what they do there is not known.
A billion years ago, the pentaradially symmetric Elder Things came to Earth, bringing with them the huge, amorphous creatures called shoggoths to serve as heavy construction machinery. Unfortunately for the Elder Things, their shoggoth slaves grew distressingly intelligent with the passing aeons, and finally formed labor unions. Now all that remains of the great Elder Thing civilization is a small collection of ruined cities in the mountains of Antarctica, haunted by the remaining shoggoths who still bear placards and lie in wait for scabs.
deep ones
Humanoid and yet obviously abhuman in a rubbery, dog-like, necrophiliac way, ghouls are nevertheless the race of monsters most closely related to humans. In fact, many reputable scholars believe that ghouls are just humans with forebrain rationality completely subordinated to animalistic hindbrain drives; in support of this view they offer the well-known fact that humans of particularly depraved habits can become ghouls. Other reputable scholars hold that ghouls are a separate species that interbreeds with humans, producing hybrids who initially appear human but reveal their true nature at some point after full adulthood, as with Deep One hybrids. Whatever the case, ghouls are certainly icky: cannibalistic, carrion-eating, smelly, long-muzzled and fanged, rubbery-skinned, and generally icky. However, although they are at least smart enough to use language, they don't use tools, build anything except hand-dug tunnels, or otherwise display symptoms of civilization.
The colour out of space is an immaterial entity, possibly sentient, possibly not, which fell to Earth in a meteor. In its larval stage, it drained life energy from the surrounding county, causing living creatures to wither and crumble while still living and the whole region to glow faintly with a color not of any sane spectrum. When it reached the next stage of its development, it coalesced into a gaseous cloud of that same color and departed starwards, hopefully never to return.
hounds of Tindalos
Sometimes called "fungi from Yuggoth", Mi-Go are actually completely alien creatures not native to Pluto; it's just their forward staging point in Sol system. In appearance, a Mi-Go is rather like a man-sized space lobster with a round, spiky head that changes colors and optionally a large pair of wings more useful in space than in atmosphere. The Mi-Go keep their mining operations on Earth (and presumably other planets) out of sight of the natives because wiping them out would be a pain, and anyway, without primitive local lifeforms available, they would be reduced to performing biological experiments on each other, which is the Mi-Go equivalent of kissing your sister.
Chthonians are subterranean creatures like giant tentacle-headed worms or greatly-enlongated squid. They burrow deep beneath the surface and even into the mantle, immune to the searing heat and pressure. In addition to the usual earth-monster powers of causing earthquakes and opening up sinkholes under people who offend them, chthonians have psychic powers of unknown but probably terrifying extent. Not much is known about the chthonian lifestyle, except that they are very protective of their relatively fragile eggs and larvae and young, and are ruled by the monstrously huge Shudde M'ell. And they don't bathe much.
fire vampires
The Serpent People have, since the time of the dinosaurs, ruled the entire world on two or three separate occasions, but keep losing it to climatic changes, shrew-like protomammals eating their eggs, and the like. Their last empire fell thousands of years ago, and most of the Serpent People died with it, but a few survive into the modern day. Some, devolved by time and pollution of their bloodline, have withdrawn underground and have little to do with the surface world beyond luring cultists down for orgiastic rites. Others, magically disguised as humans, work within human society toward their own scaly ends. The third, and most dangerous group, is those who have hibernated since the days of the third empire and are now beginning to awakan. They have socery and technology of an extremely high order, and have not had their attitude ruined by millenia of defeat.
dark young of Shub-Niggurath
The star-spawn of Cthulhu look approximately like their lord and master, but are smaller and redistribute their body mass from part to part as needed: enlarging their wings and shrinking their bodies to fly, or bulking up arms and talons to fight.
The formless spawn of Tsathoggua are, well, formless. At rest they look like innocuous pools of tarry black liquid; in motion they look like animated blobs of tarry black liquid that form nice sharp strings when they pull away from surfaces (think killer bubblegum). In addition to ministering to Tsathoggua personally, they help out his cultists with any little problems they might run into.
star vampires
This file was last modified at 1222 on 06Aug01 by trip@idiom.com.