Creature Feature: Deep Ones

This is the first of what I hope to make a regular series on Shoggoth: the Creature Feature. In it, I'll take a closer look at the various beasties that inhabit the CoC Rulebook's 'Creatures of the Mythos' chapter. I'll talk a bit about the creature's history, it's possible uses in the game, and also about its physical appearance: sometimes it's hard to know just what a Thing That Ought Not To Be looks like. So without further ado, I give you:

The Deep One

Deep Ones are without a doubt one of the most iconic creatures of the Cthulhu Mythos. These evil fishmen have popped up all over the place since their initial appearance in 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' by HP Lovecraft in 1931. While Lovecraft seems to have had mixed feelings about the story, it does have the distinction of being the only one of HPL's works to be published as a book (rather than in a periodical) in his lifetime. The story and its monstrous cast of aquatic devils have gone on to spawn an incredible amount of third party sequels and merchandise, from video games to plush toys.

Also worth noting: I seem to live right around the corner from the spot where a policeman fired at one in 1972.

But just what are Deep Ones?

The simple answer is "fish men". Lovecraft describes them this way:
"I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked."

But that's not all there is to them. Reading through the 'Shadow Over Innsmouth' it becomes pretty clear that it wasn't just their fishiness that horrified HPL. Certainly, this was a man who found the sea and all things that lived in it deeply alien and unsettling. Lovecraft's aversion to seafood is well documented. But the deeper horror of the story is that people are turning into these things; that people have produced offspring with them. To HPL, proud xenophobic aryan that he was, the Deep Ones were a kind of shorthand for race mixing and devolving 'racial purity'. Fortunately, we can look past the unpleasant metaphor and work with the notion of a non-human race that is invading and assimilating our own. Deep Ones really are invaders who have Come For Our Women.

Deep Ones in Call of Cthulhu

In the CoC game, Deep Ones are a favorite adversary for investigators. It's not hard to see why.

1. They originate in one of the most iconic Lovecraft stories of all.
2. They're tough, but not too tough. You can use your tommy gun to great effect on these guys.
3. They work in groups. Populate your haunted house or slimy caverns with plenty of bad guys rather than just one Big Baddie.
4. They frequently work alongside human cultists, minions, and other poorer relations. Having low-powered mooks up to no good on behalf of their Inhuman Masters is always a great starting point for an investigation.
5. Deep One involvement is fun and easy to foreshadow. Just mention the cultist's bulging eyes or slightly webbed fingers and watch your players start sweating.

The downside of all this is that Deep Ones can get a bit cliche and predictable. I have some ideas on avoiding that, but I'll hold my thoughts until after I've discussed:



Depicting the Deep Ones

What do they look like? This is always a tricky question in CoC. Lovecraft got a lot of mileage out of describing things as little as possible and letting one's imagination do the rest. But in a gaming situation players often need a more concrete description of what they're dealing with. Literary vagueness can simply equal needless frustration. There's also a lot to be said for holding up a picture or plonking down a miniature during play to get everyone on the same page as they decide how to proceed against the Horrible Thing they've just encountered.

I've put a few images from my sketchbook throughout this article to give a sense of my own approach, but I have to say I'm far from settled on just what a Deep One ought to look like. The first image up at the top of the page was something I whipped out a year or so ago when I was doodling around. I thought it was a pretty credible Deep One until a friend pointed out that I'd subconsciously channeled World of Warcraft's Murlocs. ouch. As I re-examined that drawing recently, I decided that the face wasn't really 'fishy' enough to match up with Lovecraft's description anyway. I did like the smooth look of the thing, as this is something Lovecraft is quite clear about while many Deep One depictions have tended to make them rough and scaly, almost alligator-like in texture. Lovecraft only gives them scaly ridges on their backs. I also liked the usage of the elongated forelimbs in that image: the 'long paws' of HPL's description. Bearing these likes and dislikes in mind, I started looking at prehistoric fish for inspiration. Deep Ones are, after all, an extremely old and long-lived race. This led to the sketches above. While I still think this prehistoric model approach could be useful, I felt that things were starting to lose the distinct fish-look that was required. Most recently, I've arrived at this:

It's still not quite there, but I like where it's headed. It suggests the frog just a bit, without slipping into full-bore 'frogman'. It's got the smooth body with the scaly back ridge. I like the juxtaposition of the long thin arms with thick, stubby legs. We'll see where it goes from here. Maybe I'll nail this look down and make a painting of it soon.

Or maybe not. While working through all these possible features and looks, I was struck with a thought that made me wonder if I was perhaps getting it all backwards: maybe there is no 'standard Deep One look'. Lovecraft's description suggests many common features, but the story also goes out of its way to suggest a bizarre mishmash of disjointed appearances and varying states of fishy de-evolution: it's that 'racial degeneration' thing again. We know that HPL was horrified by 'race-mixing' and the dilution of the 'pure' racial archetypes he admired so greatly. Much to HPL's dismay, humans come in all shapes, sizes, and colors: perhaps Deep Ones should take this variation even further. Maybe Deep Ones should range from small hopping frog-imps to hulking brutes that are almost shark-like. Perhaps their basic form and structure vary tremendously from group to group, or even from individual to individual, with every fish species imaginable appearing in some Deep One sub-species or other. I think this is where I'll take my doodles in the future. Watch this space.

Deep Ones in Call of Cthulhu (again)

With this idea of tremendous variation, we have a new angle for mixing up player expectations in Call of Cthulhu. The next time you throw some Deep Ones into your game, make it a variant your players have never encountered before. If your players are used to thinking of Deep Ones as lumbering and slow, make some that are small and quick. If they're used to Deep Ones lurking in seaside towns, put some in a lake or tropical swamp (would this make them 'Shallow Ones'? Discuss). If they're getting cocky about gunning Deep Ones down by the bushel-load, throw a prehistoric armored fishman at them who is virtually bullet-proof.

The point is that The Shadow Over Innsmouth depicted one particular Deep One colony: Y'ha-Nthlei, off the coast of Innsmouth, Massachusetts. If the Deep Ones really are a global race that has existed longer than man, who's to say what other forms they've taken in other regions? Let your investigators be the ones to find out.

Derleth Addendum

After glancing over my last post, I was struck by the feeling that I may have come across as just a tad more deeply in love with the work of August Derleth than I meant. To be clear: I'm not saying Derleth's mythos writing is of great literary value, nor am I saying that his works should be placed alongside Lovecraft's in the 'cannon' of Cthulhu lore. I am also not saying that his philosophy is an inherently better take on such tales.

All I meant to convey was that Derleth's tales did a great service for gamers who wished to delve into the Cthulhu mythos. His failings are very easy to see, but I feel his contributions are too often overlooked. His work, though essentially fan fiction, helped to solidify the idea of a universe where horrors from beyond the stars must be battled by brave investigators. Cthulhu gaming need not always follow this mold, but I think it would be much poorer without it.

By way of example: Arkham Horror. I've only played this game a handful of times due its demands on time and (more importantly) table space, but I've always enjoyed it tremendously. To judge by the number of expansions lavished on it by Fantasy Flight Games, I would have to think there are many, many other gamers out there who get a great deal of pleasure from the Arkham Horror experience. Yet it is unlikely that there would be an Arkham Horror without August Derleth. When AH was initially pitched to Chaosium back in 1987, it was as 'The Call of Cthulhu Boardgame'. It was meant as a sort of caricature of the CoC experience. Portals are opening, monsters are everywhere, and brave investigators must race against time to keep the Ultimate Evil from descending on our universe. It's the classic CoC premise that forms the backbone of a very large percentage of the game's most beloved adventures. And it's all classic Derleth. The abundance of magic, the fearless men of action, the Elder Sign (star-shaped, as conceived by Derleth) being flashed around like a super-crucifix, the ability to use holy water and even the blessings of the church to ward off evil monsters...the game really owes as much or more to Derleth's vision as Lovecraft's. And yet this vision makes for a great game.

An August Lineage

Wow.

For the last week, I've been working on a post about the lack of appreciation August Derleth gets among Call of Cthulhu gamers. I was going to point out his importance in putting together the Cthulhu mythos as it is understood today by most Lovecraft fans, but more importantly I was going to point out his importance in making the mythos actually gameable. Whereas Lovecraft occasionally toyed with letting the heroes win in his stories, he was far more likely to write endings that made the hero's struggle seem futile and pointless; not exactly the kind of adventure that would bring gamers back to the table again and again. Derleth was the man who really showed us how to structure mythos stories about brave investigators pushing back the darkness at terrible cost to buy humanity another brief respite from destruction. It's the Derleth vision of small victories won in a neverending battle against unearthly horrors that really forms the spine of most Call of Cthulhu games. It was going to be a magnificent post. And then today Grognardia beat me to it. James Maliszewski says almost exactly what I was trying to say, and he says it far better than I could.

My hope is that the stars may at last be right for August Derleth to get a little recognition. CoC gamers in particular owe him a great deal. The specifics of his particular take on the mythos can be corny and ill-fitting at times, to be sure. His white-hatted Elder Gods and elemental Old Ones seem a poor fit for Lovecraft's vision. Derleth's more heroic take on humanity's role in a cosmic struggle of good and evil is also a far cry from the philosophy of HPL. But just as most gamers don't embrace Lovecraft's racism or xenophobia, they need not embrace his nihilism either. It's okay to leave a small light at the end of the dark and tentacled tunnel.

Theatrical Gaming As School Project

I picked up a sharply marked down copy of Cthulhu Live yesterday at the local game store. I've never played any sort of Live Action Roleplaying game in my life, and I can't say the idea would normally appeal to me greatly, as I tend to be more of the 'miniatures and graph paper' style of gamer...but this book's got me thinking.

What about LARPing in the classroom? I know it sounds like a terrible idea at first, but hear me out. My school has a very robust drama program, and a fairly high percentage of our student body are actively involved ins some sort of drama class. Not a majority of the students mind you, but a very significant percentage. As I look through this book, the attention to crafting period props and costumes starts to look like something that could be made into class projects. If you made the development and 'performance' of a LARP game into a lengthy series of class projects, culminating in some sort of 'dinner theater with dice' for students and parents to buy tickets to, you might even be able to recoup the expenses involved in putting it all together.

It's not like LARPing hasn't been used in education ever before; there's even a Danish secondary school that is entirely built around the things. Although my Danish isn't so good, here's a page from their website where I think they may be running 'Horror on the Orient Express', a classic CoC scenario, as a LARP. But then again maybe it's just 'Murder on the Orient Express' as a LARP. Whatever it is, the hooded guys lead me to think cultists are involved in this version.

It's just as likely that I'll never do anything with this book, but it's always good to dream of new possibilities.

Games That Sanitize the Past: A Cautionary Tale

I've been playing Call of Cthulhu for many years, but it's been quite a while since I sat down and actually read the rulebook more or less straight through. Like most reference manuals, I tend to use a few sections of the book very heavily and skip over most of the rest. Recently I've been reading the CoC rulebook (5.6 edition) straight through for the first time since I bought it a decade ago. Turns out there's some interesting bits I'd forgotten about.

One of these bits comes very early in the book on page 24. In discussion of time periods in which to set your game we find:

"Historical settings are as real as possible. The world and the United States were very different in the 1890s and 1920s from now, and behaviors most find repugnant today then were ordinary and acceptable. Racism, xenophobia, religious bias, and sexual discrimination as we now perceive them were normal parts of life, and often loudly espoused. Local, state, and federal laws systematically supported segregation and discrimination of every sort, and social forces of great power underwrote that legislation.
Scenario authors can choose to ignore social history as not germane, or decide to incorporate specific elements into their plots. Both sorts of approaches have been published. To preclude information about earlier eras (or about this one) dishonors the memory of those who prized freedom, fairness, and opportunity, perhaps long before we were born."

This attitude to historical gaming is, in my opinion, very healthy. It is also very unfashionable. Whenever I see online discussions about including sexism, racism, and discrimination of any sort in a game setting, there tends to be a very decisive chorus of cries to leave this stuff out of what is, in the end, a form of entertainment. There are always several strident voices that loudly proclaim that inclusion of any such subject matter is an absolute deal breaker for them, that they could never enjoy such a game. This viewpoint has been heard loud and clear by games writers, and publishers, and most historical or pseudo-historical games published nowadays go out of their way to point out that such matters of unpleasant social history are best left out of one's games.

Consider this bit from the newest edition of the Deadlands weird wild west game. It follows four paragraphs explaining how in this alternate time line, the Confederacy abolished slavery to gain the support of the British:

"By 1879, racism is becoming a thing of the past in the Weird West. Progress has been made, and more will come as peace returns and folks resume their normal lives. The prospect of further integration of Confederate society is aided by a greater sense of community and shared values than in actual history. Circumstances are similar in the North. Just as in the real West, folks are willing to overlook the color of a person's skin in favor of the content of his character."

I feel the need to point out that the Real West absolutely did not overlook the color of a person's skin, but I don't want to get hung up on that point. I am not suggesting that Deadlands has a nefarious political agenda. I'm sure Deadlands is just trying to find a quick way to get troubling social history out of the picture so we can get on with the good stuff as most gamers would prefer they do. Deadlands includes an even shorter section explaining that sexism too is all but forgotten in their alternate vision of 1879.

Consider, also, an example from the excellent small-press game Colonial Gothic. CG is set in a Revolutionary America beset by secret conspiracies and occult powers. The game spends a lot of time trying to get the details of their setting right. They delve deeply into social customs, clothing, transportation, religion, and the political structures of the day. It's a wonderful game set in a criminally underused period of history for adventure gaming. But on page 45 we find this:

"Your hero's gender matters less than his name or even age, but it is still important. Colonial Gothic assumes that there is little to no discrimination based on gender. For example, it is just as likely that the head of a family is a woman as a man. That said, human beings being what they are, men and women relate to one another differently and there is little reason to assume a lack of discrimination will totally eliminate the recognition of gender differences. If you choose to make your hero a man or woman, you may encounter certain benefits or hindrances that you would not have if you were the opposite gender."

With a stroke, they turn an otherwise robust and accurate historical setting into an extreme vision of alternate history, and a very sexist vision at that.

'Sexist' may sound like a strong word, but I think it accurately describes such a setting. Please note that I am most certainly *not* implying any kind of bigotry on the part of the authors. I'm certain they were actually trying to create just the opposite in their setting. But when you create a historical setting that adheres to the history of our world in all ways except the inclusion of gender discrimination, you have made a world in which men hold all the positions of political, social, and religious power for some reason other than discrimination. This is now a world in which women have simply abdicated willingly from playing an equal role in society. One in which women can objectively be said to be men's inferiors because of such a willing abdication of power. By way of example: if discrimination doesn't exist is the world of CG, why don't the patriots have any Founding Mothers in their Continental Congress?

This is the sort of pitfall that awaits historical gaming which tries to do away with the uncomfortable elements of social history. We end up saying things through our games that we really didn't intend. Deadlands tries to sidestep this sort of problem by employing alternate history but this still doesn't get them completely off the hook of this dilemma. We must be aware that such alternate time lines do make certain passive suggestions about how history could have played out and that such thinking tends to massively underplay just how important the ugly parts of history were in shaping the culture of their times. When we can easily picture the past without its ugly side, we tend to forget about those who struggled so hard to give us the changed world we live in now.

Or as the Call of Cthulhu rulebook says: "To preclude information about earlier eras (or about this one) dishonors the memory of those who prized freedom, fairness, and opportunity, perhaps long before we were born." Certainly the CoC quote at the start of this post mentions that some games may not find such elements germane to a given scenario. There's no need to cram such material down player's throats in every game. But CoC insists that we are not free to simply edit the history as we like. We owe the past (and those who live there) a bit more recognition than that.


I'll save discussion of how to work with troubling social realities in classroom gaming for a future post. This one seems to have gotten a bit longer than I intended.

Cthulhu in the Classroom

I've used many roleplaying games over the years in my classroom. D&D, Savage Worlds, Pendragon, Usagi Yojimbo, Prince Valiant, Qin, Agon, and a few others I can't remember at the moment. But after building classes around gaming for the last four years, I think I've come to a firm decision:

There is no better classroom rpg than Call of Cthulhu. Except for maybe Pendragon. And since Pendragon, being a game of Arthurian literature and medieval culture, is kind of obvious in its 'educator-friendly' uses, I'm going to spend the rest of this post talking up CoC.

Some may question how a game of nihilistic horror and spooky pulp adventure could possibly be suitable for classroom usage. Surely in an era when the words 'roleplaying game' still have the power to conjure up images of satanism, suicide, and a crazed young Tom Hanks in certain minds, we don't need to bring in a game that spends a fair portion of the core rulebook exploring the actual history of human occultism. Right? Well, actually maybe we do. Consider the following:

1. The BRP rules system is extremely easy for newcomers to roleplaying to learn. I've taught a lot of kids how to play a lot of games and I can say with absolute certainty that the BRP rules get picked up the quickest and fade into the background of discussion and roleplaying just as fast. They don't take over class time with long discussions of game mechanics, and that's a major plus. If you understand percentages and have a character sheet in front of you, bam: you know 90% of the system.

2. Call of Cthulhu has printed more material for historical roleplaying than any other game on the market. And it's not just lightweight windowdressing for more or less bog-standard dungeon crawls. CoC books delve into social structures, legal codes, religious beliefs, scientific methods, timelines, in-depth regional geography and city maps, and other topics of actual educational substance. Get a kid to read a few essays from the 1920s Investigator's Companion and you've put a stunning amount of period information at their fingertips. Play a Cthulhu Invictus campaign and you're going to need to learn a lot about the social structures and daily life of people in ancient Rome. While CoC books aren't flawless in their historical credentials, they're done to a much higher standard of research than you are likely to find elsewhere in games publishing.

3. CoC provides strong drama without relying constantly on combat. Most roleplaying games have a tendency to wrap their mechanics closely around the assumption that combat will make up a major portion of game play. That can be a hard sell in a classroom environment. There are certainly games that have come up with innovative mechanics for social conflict, but these sorts of drama can prove boring, risky or awkward when trying to hold the focus of a classroom. Throw them a murder mystery and students will bite every time. Gathering clues, questioning witnesses, coming up with a hypothesis to explain What Really Happened: this kind of thing draws a class in and keeps them heavily engaged without having to use the easiest of dramatic crutches: violence.

4. CoC is an extremely moral game. Many traditional adventure games can easily slip into random murder and looting, or at least a great deal of killing and looting. When the goal of the game is in large measure to gain wealth and power it becomes very easy for players to slip into all sorts of ruthless behavior they would never consider in real life. Call it the Grand Theft Auto effect. If I give you a sandbox world to explore, and that sandbox contains both weapons and rewards for using them, it is very likely that Bad Things will happen. CoC takes an actively opposite approach. Your goal is not power and wealth. Indeed, it is usually made quite clear that whatever power and position you possess at character creation will likely be expended with little return over the course of your adventures. Violence is to be avoided whenever possible in CoC. The game makes no bones about the fact that violence is a last resort, and one which is Very Likely to Get You Killed. Many scenarios provide perfectly peaceful solutions for those willing to think things through, show some cleverness, and perhaps put their sanity in greater peril. The goal in a CoC adventure, the reason you risk both life and sanity, is almost always The Greater Good. You are not expecting to benefit personally from your actions. You are simply trying to protect the innocent, find a missing person, stop a villain from preying on the powerless, or gain knowledge that will help humanity better understand the universe in which it lives (however terrifying that understanding may prove to be). In short, the heroes in a CoC adventure are common folks who have decided to stand against the darkness, facing unimaginable danger for little thanks simply because they know it is right to do so. These are heroes deserving of the title.

5. Horror does not mean gore. Nor does it mean maddening despair. These elements can certainly be found in many tales of the Cthulhu Mythos but they need not be used at all. Many of the tales that originally shaped the mythos were told in a much more old-fashioned suspense tale format, leaving the grisly details tastefully out-of-scene. When designing adventures for younger players there is plenty of precedent for trimming down the more graphically horrifying elements while still retaining a very sleek and strong spooky story to enjoy. And make no mistake, kids and teenagers like scary stories. Whether it's Scooby Doo cartoons or young adult books like Harry Potter, Coraline, Twilight, or even Goosebumps; this is stuff they truly enjoy. Our popular culture is thick with spooky stories for younger audiences, and CoC provides a perfect framework for telling this sort of tale.

Shoggoth Explained

Shoggoths are strange things. As described by their creator, the author HP Lovecraft, they are giantic black amoeba like things covered in eyes, blobby tentacles, and possibly mouths. They inspire dread and awe because of their amorphous and horribly alien nature. They are always shifting, changing, and on the move.

None of that directly explains what this blog is all about but it does give a vague notion of where I'm headed. I've never kept a regular blog before, in part due to my suspicion that I'd have a hard time keeping on track with a given topic. Topical blogs interest me greatly (especially gaming blogs like James Maliszewski's Grognardia) but my own interests shift around quite a bit from month to month and year to year. So what would I blog about?

I think I've hit upon a solution. I've been recently prompted to create this blog because of the following realizations (not necessarily listed in order of importance):

1. Whatever my interests in games, movies, books and so forth happen to be at any given moment they always find their way back to the kind of weird monsters, mythology, and odd historical minutiae embodied by the Cthulhu Mythos.

2. I really like the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game and its many Basic Roleplaying system relatives. After witnessing the umpteenth round of Random Internet Persons on a Game Forum dismissing CoC for its 'clunky, dated rules' I began developing strong defensive feelings about the game. I'd like to do my bit to help promote it.

3. I like making pictures but I seldom show them to anyone. After burning out on the business of illustration many years ago I became pretty private with my doodles. Often when someone sees my work nowadays, they say that I really ought to put it out in front of people somehow. After becoming a fan of D&D Doodle, I'm a believer in the power of illustrated blogs to give a unique perspective on one's game of choice.

4. As a teacher I use games a lot in my classroom. I've made heavy use of the Basic Roleplaying rules, other roleplaying games, and more board and card games than you can shake a stick at. I believe strongly that gaming ought to play a bigger and bigger part in education in years to come, and I'd like to think that sharing my teaching experiences can hasten that process along in some small way. Also, I enjoy the cocked eyebrows that result when I explain that I use Call of Cthulhu with schoolkids to teach history.

So with these realizations in mind I've arrived at the decision to create Shoggoth: an amorphous blog of well-intended weirdness. I hope you enjoy the trip.