Introduction to the Mythos Bestiary The Fungi from Yuggoth (an adventure): The “In an instant every moving entity dread fungi have carried off every teenage girl from a was electrified; and forming at once village for some loathsome ceremony at the circle of into a ceremonial procession, the stones atop a haunted mountain This adventure takes nightmare horde slithered away in place in two parts First, most obviously, the players quest of the sound—goat, satyr, and must climb to the circle of stones and rescue the girls aegipan, incubus, succubae, and But then they must retreat back down the mountain, lemur, twisted toad and shapeless accompanied by the awkward and helpless girls, while elemental, dog-faced howler and being raided and harassed by the flying fungi and their silent strutter in darkness—all minions The second half of the adventure is even more led by the abominable naked challenging and exciting than the first half because the phosphorescent thing that had players must not only defeat their foes but protect the squatted on the carved golden throne.” girls, which is far more difficult than a simple seek and —H.P Lovecraft, The Horror at Red Hook destroy mission! And perhaps they arrived too late for some of the girls, who now owe more loyalty to the fungi than to humanity… Against the Gugs (a long-term enemy): Gugs are an intelligent species with organized plans Perhaps The entities of the Cthulhu Mythos are many and varied Some are powerful and lethal monstrosities from the distant past Others come from outer space or parallel dimensions beyond our own Still others are reflections of our own dark selves They share little in common beyond their terrifying nature and indifference to mortal life and reality The Elder Beings see us mortals in different ways Some see us only as prey while to others, we are pawns in their titanic clashes with their real enemies Others seek to exploit us and a few can even be exploited by us All such beings can be exciting additions to any roleplaying campaign They are easy to use as enemies for a single battle, an adventure, or even an entire campaign Consider the following hooks: a gug was in that room the players just cleared for a reason? It’s not hard to extrapolate that after the party slays a monstrous gug in a dungeon crawl for his loot his fellow gugs might find the corpse, and—thirsting for vengeance—track down the party All of a sudden, perhaps when hotly engaged in another fight, a group of gugs emerges silently from the darkness and joins in the fight against the players, then disappear just as quickly when the fight turns against them You’ve pursued the main course of your campaign but added a recurring antagonistic force with personality and story After all, even if the players manage to drive away or kill the pursuing party of gugs, this doesn’t mean they’re done with them—they might be hunted by increasingly mighty bands of gugs for the foreseeable future The only way to stop the horrors following them would be to fulfill the original gug’s nefarious purpose 293