The Shoggoth

The previous session of Strange Aeons ended with us encountering a shoggoth outside the library in Bohlvarai. We had pretty much decided that we wanted to run rather than fight it. We knew it was CR18, which was tough, but given that we’re level 16 it shouldn’t have been that hard to fight. But everyone wanted to run, so we began this session running for the library.

The Archive building was a small five sided pyramid, with probably room for two levels inside and about 90ft across. It has some windows in the upper level, and a single door at the front. It stood in the centre of a large plaza, providing us plenty of clear space to race towards the door as the jumbled mess of eyes, mouths and tentacles which was the shoggoth shuffled across the ground towards us.

Ray got to the door, and tried to figure out the locking mechanism, but Catiana just dived through the door, leaving a thin ectoplasmic residue on the surface of the door. Inside was a short corridor, which split left and right towards walls lined with countless books and scrolls. Next to the door was what appeared to be an ‘open’ button, so she pressed it as Ray figured out how to open it from outside.

The rest of us piled into the building, quickly closing the door behind us as the shoggoth thudded against the outside. Inside was indeed a library, with a scale diorama of what the city used to look like before it was brought to Carcosa and many books and scrolls.

Taking a look at the shelves, they mostly seemed to be filled with arcane texts so I quickly lost interest, though Ray seemed to what to spend all day here. Catiana had found a ramp which went up, and had wandered in that direction to see what was upstairs so I followed some way behind.

The upper floor was smaller, as to be expected given the pyramid shape, and the windows seemed to be covered by the eyes of the shoggoth which had climb the pyramid and was now engulfing its top.

There were two strange crystal cylinders here, seemingly frosted over with some sort of hinged lid mechanism. Catiana uncharacteristically decided to tap on one. Both cylinders opened up, with a gust of cold air escaping from them. Two creatures – a mix of wings, legs and tentacles.

This strange creature has a star-shaped head and numerous writhing appendages arranged radially around its barrel-shaped body.

At first our assumption was that these were things that would try to kill us – since pretty much every strange thing we’d met so far had tried to do so. Instead they were both very chatty, and wanted to get to know us. They have been in stasis for a long time, since their servitors – the shoggoth – ran amok.

Originally they used their servitors to help them make life easy, but decided that they wanted to give them more capabilities in order to make them more useful. They came across the Star Stelae and a creature they called the Mutate, which is like a servitor but different.

They performed great experiments to improve their servitors, and things went too well. The servitors revolted and many of their people were killed. The Star Stelae is in the Experimental Centre where they harnessed its psychic power, along with the Mutate, which is sealed away safely.

They are willing to help us since by breaking the curse on the city things may be able to return back to how they were, but it’s dangerous and we could do more harm than good. In order to get to the Stelae and the Mutate, we will need to get past a lot of Shoggoth servitors, so they provided us some aid in fighting them.

We decided that fighting the lone one on top of the library would be good practice, so we bundled outside to try and take it down. With a combination of etheric shards and an extopplasmic eruption from me (which slowed it down), arrows from Gregor and rays of light from Erasmus it was quickly defeated.