Making a Monster

We’re back and we’re heading up to the laboratory to see what we can throw together. There are some leftover eyeballs in the fridge, and an assortment of horns, fangs and claws in those crates in the corner. We seem to be running short on hides, however. Maybe we can mix up a protoplasm cocktail instead. Admittedly, we still need to find a new lab assistant after the last time we tried that…

Main Topic: Making a Monster

This episode is a discussion of how we go about creating new monsters for Call of Cthulhu. Is it enough (or even safe) to reskin a Deep One or a shoggoth? How do you decide how deadly your monster should be? What kind of stats should you assign? What is the monster doing in your scenario in the first place? And why not just pick something out of the rulebook rather than going to all this trouble?

Handily enough, Mike Mason, the line editor for Call of Cthulhu, is on hand to help us with these deliberations. Mike is in the last stages of putting together the new Malleus Monstrorum, and has been giving a lot of thought to such matters. He offers sage advice and helps us brainstorm some new creations.

Sample artwork from the new *Malleus Monstrorum*

This is the first standard episode we’ve recorded during the lockdown. It’s taking us a little while to get used to doing everything remotely, but we hope the episode still sounds decent. In terms of sound quality, that is. Otherwise, we’ll have no truck with decency.

News

Convention Updates

In our last episode, we discussed upcoming conventions we were planning to attend. How quaint all that seems now! The best advice we can offer is to check the websites for Continuum and UK Games Expo to see if they will be postponed, cancelled or moved online.

Backer-Only Specials

During this lockdown period, we’re releasing extra episodes of The Good Friends of Jackson Elias to help you pass the time. These Patreon backer exclusives are going out on the weeks between normal episodes. At the time of posting, we’ve released two, discussing horror films and books we’ve enjoyed recently. If you want to access these and the upcoming episodes, simply back us on Patreon at any level.

News From Chaosium

Mike shares details of some exciting Call of Cthulhu publications and actual play recordings from Chaosium.

Harlem Unbound 2nd edition PDF (print coming soon)
Cthulhu Dark Ages 3rd edition PDF (print coming soon)
Malleus Monstrorum 2nd edition, coming soon
Chaosium’s Twitch channel
The Dead Within on Chaosium’s YouTube channel
A Cold Fire Within on Chaosium’s YouTube channel

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One comment on “Making a Monster”

staceyh44 May 5, 2022

Listening to these podcasts have kind of sparked some sense of my imagination. I actually thought of a couple potential scenarios.

1. A mob boss finds a deep one summoning stone, and strikes a deal with them somewhere in the mid-west. Some families of the Deep Ones from Innsmouth fled West to avoid being arrested (Shadow Over Innsmouth), and found new homes in some of those really deep lakes (like Crater Lake).

2. A future investigative agency (alien or human, or maybe those super intelligent spiders or beetles from Shadow Out of Time) strike an accord with the hounds of tindelos (sorry, spelling is not my strength). They send the hounds out to stop people in the past, present, and future from mucking about and changing history. Investigators in whichever time period are sent to deal with someone in their present time who’s found a way to change history, and they discover the hounds are on the same path, and instead of fighting, or fleeing, they actually work together with the hounds. A fun twist could be making one of the players a pc who’s mucking about with this time machine, and the other players are there to stop them.

staceyh44 May 5, 2022
Listening to these podcasts have kind of sparked some sense of my imagination. I actually thought of a couple potential scenarios.
1. A mob boss finds a deep one summoning stone, and strikes a deal with them somewhere in the mid-west. Some families of the Deep Ones from Innsmouth fled West to avoid being arrested (Shadow Over Innsmouth), and found new homes in some of those really deep lakes (like Crater Lake).
2. A future investigative agency (alien or human, or maybe those super intelligent spiders or beetles from Shadow Out of Time) strike an accord with the hounds of tindelos (sorry, spelling is not my strength). They send the hounds out to stop people in the past, present, and future from mucking about and changing history. Investigators in whichever time period are sent to deal with someone in their present time who’s found a way to change history, and they discover the hounds are on the same path, and instead of fighting, or fleeing, they actually work together with the hounds. A fun twist could be making one of the players a pc who’s mucking about with this time machine, and the other players are there to stop them.