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These strange creatures live in cities deep within the moon, and hold great influence throughout the cosmos. Do not let their froglike appearance fool you.
Far from the sunken city of R'yleh, there are some who would perform rites to awaken the Great Old One and bring endless madness to the world.
The dreaded spawn of Cthulhu, Ghatanothoa is so terrible that mearly the sight of it will shrivel mortal man into a mummified husk. Ghatanothoa is now imprisoned beneath a mountain, but his Lloigor servants still permeate the world, spreading the horrific influence of their master.
Hubby (Greatone) took this photo through the glass floor that has been added to the Calgary Tower since we'd last been there.
- Photo taken by 'Greatone'... my husband!
The Fungi from Yuggoth, the Whisperers In Darkness, Mi-Gos are some of the strangest non-elder god aliens in the Cthulhu Mythos.
Hailing from interstellar space, they are usually identified with Yuggoth (pluto), the furthest planet (and it IS a planet) in our system. Although they are technically fungi, they resemble insects, and are actually composed of a type of matter that does not exist on earth. Their wings help them fly through space, though they have some trouble in our atmosphere. These strange, faceless things like to extract human brains - they put the brains into jars, maintain their victims' consciousness, and then teach them the mysteries of the universe. Mi-Gos believe that this is charity.
(Unfortunately, the Mi-Go SHOULD be pinkish, but Arkham Horror wants them to be green, so a green light is what I used.)
The Dark Young of Shub Nig... Shub-Nigg.... Shub-ni... Shub.... GAAAAAH! Okay, 'll just say it.
Shub-Niggurath.
See? It's not spelled like the bad word! Don't LOOK at me like that! Yes, I know H. P. Lovecraft had some ethnicity issues, but really, he had issues with everybody (including his own white folks), and I don't think this one was a direct slur. It's just an unfortunate name.
Anyway, this is the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath. There are thousands of them. I'm going to quote Robert Bloch on this one:
"Something black in the road, something that wasn't a tree. Something big and black and ropy, just squatting there, waiting, with ropy arms squirming and reaching... It came crawling up the hillside... and it was the black thing of my dreams -- that black, ropy, slimy jelly tree-thing out of the woods. It crawled up and it flowed up on its hoofs and mouths and snaky arms."
-Robert Bloch, "Notebook Found in a Deserted House"
Here, enjoy three select readings from The Dunwich Horror:
***
There was a pandemonium of questioning, and only Henry Wheeler thought to rescue the fallen telescope and wipe it clean of mud. Curtis was past all coherence, and even isolated replies were almost too much for him.
'Bigger'n a barn... all made o' squirmin' ropes... hull thing sort o' shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything with dozens o' legs like hogs-heads that haff shut up when they step... nothin' solid abaout it - all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost together... great bulgin' eyes all over it... ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all a-tossin' an openin' an' shuttin'... all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings... an' Gawd it Heaven - that haff face on top...'
This final memory, whatever it was, proved too much for poor Curtis; and he collapsed completely before he could say more.
***
'The thing has gone for ever,' Armitage said. 'It has been split up into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was an impossibility in a normal world. Only the least fraction was really matter in any sense we know. It was like its father - and most of it has gone back to him in some vague realm or dimension outside our material universe; some vague abyss out of which only the most accursed rites of human blasphemy could ever have called him for a moment on the hills.'
There was a brief silence, and in that pause the scattered senses of poor Curtis Whateley began to knit back into a sort of continuity; so that he put his hands to his head with a moan. Memory seemed to pick itself up where it had left off, and the horror of the sight that had prostrated him burst in upon him again.
'Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face - that haff face on top of it... that face with the red eyes an' crinkly albino hair, an' no chin, like the Whateleys... It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing, but they was a haff-shaped man's face on top of it, an' it looked like Wizard Whateley's, only it was yards an' yards acrost....'
***
Armitage chose his words very carefully.
'It was - well, it was mostly a kind of force that doesn't belong in our part of space; a kind of force that acts and grows and shapes itself by other laws than those of our sort of Nature. We have no business calling in such things from outside, and only very wicked people and very wicked cults ever try to. There was some of it in Wilbur Whateley himself - enough to make a devil and a precocious monster of him, and to make his passing out a pretty terrible sight. I'm going to burn his accursed diary, and if you men are wise you'll dynamite that altar-stone up there, and pull down all the rings of standing stones on the other hills. Things like that brought down the beings those Whateleys were so fond of - the beings they were going to let in tangibly to wipe out the human race and drag the earth off to some nameless place for some nameless purpose.
'But as to this thing we've just sent back - the Whateleys raised it for a terrible part in the doings that were to come. It grew fast and big from the same reason that Wilbur grew fast and big - but it beat him because it had a greater share of the outsideness in it. You needn't ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He didn't call it out. It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did.'
The Nightgaunts attack from the shadows, using their barbed tails to "Tickle" victims into submission. And by tickle, I mean murder. And by submission, I mean death.
Dans un sanctuaire abandonné trône une multitude de cranes, symboles du culte malsain qui s'y est déroulé autrefois...
Although usually identified as a creation of August Derleth, the byakhees first appeared in Lovecraft's story, "The Festival," though they were unnamed. Freakish, semi-insectile gargoyles, they serve the Yellow King Hastur and can fly in space, often offering hapless travellers transport beyond the realms of sanity.
As much as people like to rag on H. P. Lovecraft for being racist, the only group he actually called "The Great Race" were these weirdos!
Kind of similar in concept to the Elder Things, the Great Race of Yith was a pre-human sentient species that ruled earth millions and millions of years ago.
So, what makes them so "great?" The Yithians are the only creatures to have mastered time travel, of a sort. They could transport their minds throughout history, swapping with the bodies of anything else with sufficient intelligence. In fact, when the time came for their species to finally go extinct (at the hands of the Flying Polyps), the Great Race of Yith simply projected themselves billions of years into the future, swapping with the bodies of the beetle-like Coleopterous race, which will dominate the earth after humanity is gone.
The Yithians appeared most prominently in The Shadow Out of Time, in which they swapped with a professor for a period of several years, simply to learn more about human culture. He, in turn, learned about the Great Race of Yith.
This piece is taken from Mansions of Madness, an Arkham Horror adaptation - and it represents a more surreal view of the Hounds of Tindalos. They are called "hounds" not because of their appearance, but instead due to their implacable, vicious nature. When one of these creatures springs from the Angles of Time, it means that it has your scent. You will never be safe.
Who knows what kind of creature they were trying to bring into the world...
A typical scene from anything based on H. P. Lovecraft's work, but not at all from anything he actually wrote.
Professor Albert N. Wilmarth once scoffed at the supernatural, especially when people began to panic about strange supposed alien sightings. But then one day, a local named Henry Akeley sent Wilmarth a letter, claiming to have absolute proof of the supernatural - and why Wilmarth should stop discussing it. When Wilmarth finds Akeley, the old man explains the ecistence of the Mi-Go, insectoid fungi creatures from the depths of space. The Mi-Go, he says, have been on earth since the beginning of time, and wish to take humans with them to explore the cosmos - preserving their lives by removing their brains and placing them into jars before the journey. Akeley even showed a jar meant for his brain, and his upcoming trip. He assured WIlmarth that not only was this real, but the Mi-Go were benevolent aliens.
That night, Akeley investigated further after hearing strange, strange whispers. And then he made a discovery that not only proved the existence of the Mi-Go, but also scared him enough to flee, run home, and never speak of it again - he found a mask and fake hands, resembling Akeley. By the time WIlmarth had arrived, Akeley had already been replaced by a Mi-Go!