Things That Should Not Be

Friday, April 3, 2015

We love H. P. Lovecraft. The old gentleman not only wrote some of the most chilling and flat-out awesome horror stories of the Twentieth Century, but he also knew how to get his monster on. Fantasy author China Miéville, one of my personal favorite modern writers, was one of the first to point out to me that fantasy fiction monsters could basically be divided into pre-Lovecraft and post-Lovecraft, and my own obsession with reading early Twentieth Century genre stuff suggests he has a point. Before Lovecraft, monsters in fiction were usually giant animals, human-animal hybrids, or basically animals with multiple limbs. A few writers, like Edgar Rice Burroughs, mixed things up enough to invent awesome stuff like plant men with mouths on the palms of their hands, but for the most part you were looking at a field of giant animals.

Lovecraft changed all of that with an assortment of alien, eldritch beings designed to scare the crap out of his protagonists—and his readers. Many of those monsters have gone on to inspire tabletop games and the gamers who make them, and we here at Paizo are very much in thrall of Lovecraft's creations. Judging by the response to our past dabbling with his themes and creatures, such as the now-classic Greg A. Vaughan Carrion Crown adventure "Wake of the Watcher" and the monster article that accompanied it, Pathfinder players also love his creations.

So it seemed like a good idea to get some of them out in prepainted plastic.

Here then are three Lovecraftian monsters from June's Dungeons Deep set of Pathfinder Battles prepainted fantasy miniatures.

One of Lovecraft's most famous monsters is the brain-stealing Mi-Go, a flying alien creature that just loves to experiment on mankind. We've featured Mi-Go in a few Pathfinder adventures to date (notably in James Jacobs's Emerald Spire Superdungeon level), and in the Iron Gods Adventure Path's awesomely named "Valley of the Brain Collectors". The Mi-Go in Dungeons Deep is a Medium, uncommon creature.

The Elder Thing, or Old One, is one of the foremost stars of Lovecraft's famous novella "At the Mountains of Madness," one of our favorite of his tales. It was thus a certainty that we'd get to them as prepainted miniatures. The Elder Thing, like the Mi-Go, appears in Bestiary 4, where we learn that in addition to having the ability to fly around in outer space, Elder Things "possess a boundless capacity for war and egotism." The Elder Thing is a Medium, uncommon creature.

The Yithians starred in Lovecraft's tale "The Shadow out of Time," where they play the role of a prehistoric time-traveling race responsible for populating much of the Earth. Bestiary 3 describes them as planetary explorers eager to discover new worlds, where they fancy swapping minds with natives to experience strange planets from a local perspective. The Yithian, from my perspective, is one of the most impressive-looking figures in the set, a true "WTF" alien to drop on your unsuspecting player characters. The Yithian is a Large, uncommon figure.

That's it for this week! Tune in next Friday for another glimpse at the horrors and wonders yet to come in the Dungeons Deep set!

Erik Mona
Publisher