I just popped open issue 349 to see that the Demonicon of Iggwilv's entry this month is Dagon, Prince of the Darkened Depths. My sanity points are jumping up and down and doing back-flips! The plush Cthulhu on my monitor is swinging his plush little footies with excitment! (After all, in the original Call of Cthulhu game, deep ones drove my first investigator around the bend and ultimately sacrificed him -- such fond memories!)
I strongly favor importing elements of Lovecraft's mythology, beasties and all, into D&D's vibrant worlds. Matthew Hope's adventure "And Madness Followed" (Dungeon 134) showed how sweetly the two can mesh.
At the same time, however, the Cthulhu purist in me hesitates, putting only one wary toe into the D&D Dagon's Darkened Depths. I've great faith in James Jacobs, but I don't want Dagon or any of the Cthulhu brood to morph into pedestrian monsters (pedestrian demon princes?) devoid of the eldrich horror they held in the stories of my misguided youth. The original Call of Cthulhu game, of course, successfully invoked their horror by keeping investigators weak and using sanity-loss, mechanisms not available in D&D. My hope is that, despite this, D&D embraces these paragons of horror with the full fear and reverence they deserve!
You might want to check out the excellent Fiendish Codex 1: Hordes of the Abyss book for more info on Dagon. He's a piscene monstrosity to be sure, and one of the oldest and most alien of the demon princes, which kind of fits with the Lovecraft inspiration.
The original Call of Cthulhu game, of course, successfully invoked their horror by keeping investigators weak and using sanity-loss, mechanisms not available in D&D.
Actually, "Unearthed Arcana" contains rules for incorporating sanity/insanity into the game, in the form of Sanity points. And wouldn't you know it? According to a sidebar in Unearthed Arcana, the sanity point system came straight out of the Call of Cthulhu RPG. Even though I have yet to introduce any Cthulhu-style creatures in my game, I am making use of (a slightly modified version of) the rules presented in Unearthed Arcana, if only because I play in a relatively low magic campaign and want the PCs to experience the gradual loss of sanity that comes from exposure to extreme violence (and death), mind bending magic, and increasingly supernatural horrors they face. Of course, my players were willing to go along with this idea.
EDIT: the Ravenloft setting also has decent rules for invoking horror, fear, and madness. Yet that setting is also primarily designed for lower level and lower magic game play, so may not work well if you are playing/DMing in a "standard" D&D campaign.
Father Dagon is only as pedestrian as you, the GM makes him. The power and impact of such a near-deity is in your grasp, but so is the ability to trivialize him. Use sparingly and Father Dagon will serve to terrorize your players as only an obyrith prince can (or Great Old One, if that's your thing).
I, for one, welcome our new obyrith overlord.
Ia! Ia!
Good points all! Time to go grab Unearthed Arcana.
Mr. Jacobs did a luscious job with the article. His emphasis on the antiquity of the the obyrith prince, on his nature as one who has brooded and schemed behind the scenes as the abyss and the rest of the multiverse was born, grew, and changed around him evokes the feel of Lovecraft's malevolent but uncaring gods from before time.
I'll just have to add my own Deep Ones to replace the Kuo-toan cultists. Kuo-toans have never been my favorite monsters. As a kid, I thought they were the weakest part of the whole Lolth series. I want a race that starts out human but transforms into Deep Ones; turning into a Kuo-toa? That inspires humor, not fear and loathing.
I'm curious about WotC's choice of Dagon as the big bad to import from Lovecraft. Perhaps his relative obscurity, as compared to Cthulhu himself, or Nyarlathotep or Shub-Niggurath, allowed for a more-free reinvention as a demon prince. Perhaps they wanted to avoid inflexible folk like me who would have complained about "demoting" a Great Old One or an Outer God to the stature of demon prince.
But I'm done complaining! I'm delighted to see my beloved Lovecraft elements folding into my favorite game.
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Good points all! Time to go grab Unearthed Arcana.
Mr. Jacobs did a luscious job with the article. His emphasis on the antiquity of the the obyrith prince, on his nature as one who has brooded and schemed behind the scenes as the abyss and the rest of the multiverse was born, grew, and changed around him evokes the feel of Lovecraft's malevolent but uncaring gods from before time.
I'll just have to add my own Deep Ones to replace the Kuo-toan cultists. Kuo-toans have never been my favorite monsters. As a kid, I thought they were the weakest part of the whole Lolth series. I want a race that starts out human but transforms into Deep Ones; turning into a Kuo-toa? That inspires humor, not fear and loathing.
I'm curious about WotC's choice of Dagon as the big bad to import from Lovecraft. Perhaps his relative obscurity, as compared to Cthulhu himself, or Nyarlathotep or Shub-Niggurath, allowed for a more-free reinvention as a demon prince. Perhaps they wanted to avoid inflexible folk like me who would have complained about "demoting" a Great Old One or an Outer God to the stature of demon prince.
But I'm done complaining! I'm delighted to see my beloved Lovecraft elements folding into my favorite game.
If you want humans that turn into deep ones you should really look again at the Thrall of Dagon prestige class. It has 3 invocations to Dagon that mutate the thrall and ultimately make him/her able to survive in the ocean and have tentacles etc. The way in which James Jacobs wrote Dagon up for this article is pure sweetness top to bottom. I absolutely love the idea of Dagon as the ancient schemer that has forgotten more secrets about the abyss than the other Demon princes know combined. Definately the best Demonomicon article to date.
I believe the rule in CoC games is: "If the investigators are winning, you're not running the game correctly." ;)
I'm not sure how well that kind of philosophy meshes with D&D, where players expect to win pretty much every encounter, but I think starting with the Lord of the Deep and moving up to the Goat with a Thousand Young and then to Inconceivable Congeries of Brain-Melting Geometries is the way to go. So when can we expect a Demonomicon entry on Ha-...Has-...that other guy?
If you want humans that turn into deep ones you should really look again at the Thrall of Dagon prestige class. It has 3 invocations to Dagon that mutate the thrall and ultimately make him/her able to survive in the ocean and have tentacles etc. The way in which James Jacobs wrote Dagon up for this article is pure sweetness top to bottom. I absolutely love the idea of Dagon as the ancient schemer that has forgotten more secrets about the abyss than the other Demon princes know combined. Definately the best Demonomicon article to date.
Gotta agree. My love of the subject matter likely undermines my objectivity, but I whole-heartedly concur that this is the best Demonomicon article ever! (Which seems fitting, given the likely origin of the title "Demonomicon.")
And Brent, you're right, the thrall's fantastic, and thralls could serve well as Deep Ones. If memory serves, Lovecraft's Innsmouth denizens all turned aquatic voluntarily, so the thrall fits the bill. It was other authors who suggested becoming a Deep One could be an inherited trait that affects the uninitiated like a curse. (I'll have to dig a box full of old, musty paperbacks out of the basement to run that to ground.)
For me, the best part is Mr. Jacob's portrayal of Dagon as an entity predating the gods themselves, mysterious, unknowable, and so ageless that he's unconcerned with the rise and fall of other worlds or the passage of time itself. Mr. Jacobs captures the essence of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones, but enrichens Dagon as he brings him into the D&D world. (I know, I know, I sound like I'm fawning, but this is just great stuff!)
Here's hoping (as other threads suggest) that we see more of Dagon, or other Lovecraftian horrors, appearing in adventures in Dungeon again soon!
Yippee, ia-ia!!
I haven't gotten a chance to read it yet (Dagon forgive me), but I've paged through it (it will be the first article I read from this issue when I get home). I love Hou's (I think that's right, but I don't have it with me) artwork and have for a while most notably in Dungeon. Simply stunning, with the caveat that I really don't like the visual design of Dagon (same as from Fiendish Codex I). Hou has done as good a job with that design as anyone could I think, but the shark-like nature just rubs me the wrong way somehow. Was that a deep one and a Mr. Marsh I glimpsed a few pages along? Excellent! That new beasty at the end looks incredible also.
I'm only sorry that I havn't gotten to actually READ the article yet. I have no doubt though that Mr. Jacobs has done a bang-up job.
Hmmm, Dagon and Savage Tide, hmmm. Any thoughts on this material's inclusion in Savage Tide? A kind of related side-track? That'd be gill-flapping, frog-waddling fun.
Hmmm, Dagon and Savage Tide, hmmm. Any thoughts on this material's inclusion in Savage Tide? A kind of related side-track? That'd be gill-flapping, frog-waddling fun.
Mr. Jacobs describes an alliance between Dagon and Demogorgon and notes that the Shadowsea, Dagon's realm, lies direclty under the Gaping Maw, Demogorgon's layer. I'd tell you more, but . . . I fear for your sanity.
Mr. Jacobs describes an alliance between Dagon and Demogorgon and notes that the Shadowsea, Dagon's realm, lies direclty under the Gaping Maw, Demogorgon's layer. I'd tell you more, but . . . I fear for your sanity.
OOOOOOOH! Ooh ooh ooh. No worries I'll be studying the tome soon.
Sanity? We don't need no steenking sanity. 8)
There are only two rules for confronting occult horrors from beyond this plane:
1. Don't read anything.
2. Don't look at anything.
:) (with thanks to 8-bit Theater)
And are you guys saying that by diving deep enough off the reef near Innsmouth I could eventually get to Greyhawk (Innsmouth --> Shadowsea --> Abyss ---> Greyhawk)? I'm so there.
Hmmm, Dagon and Savage Tide, hmmm. Any thoughts on this material's inclusion in Savage Tide? A kind of related side-track? That'd be gill-flapping, frog-waddling fun.
It tempts us lowely petitioners to beg for a Revelation on whether queries for such a side trek would be welcome . . . and the 1d20 points of Wisdom drain we'd suffer if the Dark Powers That Be respond would undoubtedly be a boon in pursuing such a query.
There are only two rules for confronting occult horrors from beyond this plane:
1. Don't read anything.
2. Don't look at anything.:) (with thanks to 8-bit Theater)
Ha! Those are good.
For a couple of hilarious lists of survival rules from the Call of Cthulhu setting, you've GOT to check out two posts, one by Gargoyle and the other by Jeremy McDonald, on the Campaign Journals thread James Jacobs Runs Call of Cthulhu. Click here for a link. They include gems like these three:
o Always kill the NPC who hired you as the first order of business. He's bound to be either A) A cultist, an Elder God or a Cthuloid monster who is playing the party as pawns before he kills them. B) Some well meaning fool who will go mad by the end of the scenario and bring about the destruction he was originally trying to stop.
o When the party's native guide runs past you shouting 'Big Wumbago!' don't stick around to find out what a Wumbago looks like.
o Painstakingly sealed refrigerators are probably painstakingly sealed for a reason.
Creative Director
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It's great to hear that people are enjoying the Dagon article. And yes... he's quite obviously very inspired by Lovecraft. In fact, all of the obyriths are pretty much my homage to Lovecraftian sensibilities, as demons that existed in the primal chaos of the Abyss before deities came to exist.
As for why I chose Dagon, well, that boils down to the 1st edition Monster Manual II, which had an awesome list of Demon Lord names at the start of the section about demons. Of the dozens of names listed, the game only provided details on about a dozen in all, leaving many, many more as little more than names to tempt the imagination. Some of these names were apparently made up (such as Obox-ob, which became the primary god of chaos and evil in my home campaign and eventually ended up in Fiendish Codex I), but others were drawn from real-world mythology. Such as Dagon.
Now, while Dagon himself originally comes from ancient mythology, his incarnation as a fish-monster-god is wholly Lovecraft. And in my opinion, that incarnation's more interesting. It's certainly the incarnation to which the name is most associated in modern day pop culture, so it just made sense to turn the Lovecraft up to 11 when I did up his Demonomicon entry.
As for Dagon's presence in the Savage Tide adventure path... it'll be subtle, but he'll be in there. In fact, there are Dagon cultists in the very second adventure in the campaign!
Thanks for the stunning article! Your description of how a costal town can fall to Innsmouth's fate is particularly delicious. It bears repeating: Best Demonomicon entry yet!
Hmmm. That old MMII list of demon rulers includes Astaroth. Sounds suspiciously like Azathoth . . .