#lovecraft
Lesbian sex has historically also been called a “nameless” or “unspeakable” thing, so my headcanon for all Lovecraft’s horrors is that every unspeakable, indescribable thing (a whole lot) is just lesbian sex.
Concept: an otome dating sim where the player character is a bizarre Lovecraftian monstrosity - except none of the boys notice, and they all treat you like you’re a perfectly ordinary teenage girl.
All of your dialogue options are incomprehensible hissing and gurgling, or cryptic gestures with unearthly appendages; you’re never 100% certain what - if anything - you’re communicating, though the boys seem to understand you.
Rather than “Athletics” or “Charm”, your stats have strange names like “Viscosity”, “Amplitude” and “Bulk”. Figuring out what they actually do is as much as part of the challenge as figuring out how to raise them.
At the end of the game, you devour whichever boy you have the strongest bond with whole; this act of consumption determines the final form you evolve into, as well as the nature of the resulting global apocalypse.
Yes. I would play this.
I’m up to the third issue, but I just have to blabber on about the protagonist’s second dream, the one in which he’s on a train. All the hints and hooks and seemingly minor incidents in the story up to now feature in the dream, but at the same time, some of these allusions are obviously “premonitions”. I put “premonitions” in quotes because in Providence, time is kind of a permanent, motionless thing where every thing that happens sets up echoes in the past and the future. (It makes more sense in the actual graphic novel than in my words.)
The premonitions are unmistakably of the Holocaust, still twenty or so years into the protagonist’s future. Stating it flat out like that doesn’t begin to convey the growing atmosphere of dread, of foreboding. It’s still just disturbing little hints, but it chills me to the bone! It’s almost as if the premonitions reflect something approaching him that’s even worse, if possible, than the Nazi genocides.
I originally started reading the novel due to Gordon White’s praise of it. He described it as having a genuine magician’s understanding of time, and that each event thus sends echoes down through the past and the future. I’m beginning to see what he meant.
Read The Dream-Realms: Sybil’s Epic :: Prologue Page 8 | Tapas Comics
New page is up of The Dream-Realms Webcomic is up!
Read The Dream-Realms: Sybil’s Epic :: Prologue Page 7 | Tapas Comics
New page of The Dream-Realms is up!
Image from The Godzilla Power Hour Episode 12: The Sub-Zero Terror, accessed at the Non-Alien Creatures Wiki here
[Commissioned by @glarnboudin, who’s got a real Hanna-Barbera theme going. Given the watchuki’s weird technology and propensity for disguising themselves as humans in the episode, I can’t help but wonder if they were inspired by Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness”, which posits that the explanation for the Abominable Snowman are in fact hyper-intelligent alien fungi. So I looped around, and made these the creations of the mi-go.
I ran into a bit of a frustrating hiccup, with what @prokopetz refers to as the “Sim-Dungeon” vibe of D&D 3.x and its descendant, Pathfinder RPG. The ability to do 3d6 cold damage as a ranged touch attack is not an overpowered ability for a CR 3 creature, but I wanted to make the cold beams come from an item, like they do in the source material. And the costs of a magic item with this capacity would be way outside the normal treasure for a CR 3 encounter. If this cheat bothers you, make the “watchuki wand” a supernatural ability of these creatures rather than an item.]
Watchuka
CR 3 LE Monstrous Humanoid
This stocky humanoid has white fur over gray skin. Its face is mostly obscured by a beard and moustache, with piercing red eyes. It is naked save for a harness, off of which hang various strange tools and devices.The watchuki (watchuka is singular) are an offshoot of the yeti. Although their forebears are strong yet peaceful creatures, watchuki are smaller and weaker but more cruel minded. They are in fact an artificial race—created through a selective breeding program by the mi-go, who were attempting to create a servitor race to handle the grunt work of creating technological items for them while the mi-go engaged in more intellectually satisfying endeavors. Thus, even the dimmest watchuka has an inherent talent for combining magic and technology, using this primarily to forge weapons of war. Many watchuki enclaves now exist separately from their mi-go creators, and some watchuki have forgotten their alien legacy.
Perhaps due to this engineered heritage, watchuki are prone to mutation. About one in three watchuki are born with the giant simple template—these are frequently mistaken for ordinary yeti. Very rarely a Great Watchuka will be born—these creatures are of animal intelligence but are grow to incredible strength and size. A Great Watchuka is a megaprimatus with the magical beast type and the fear gaze and cold resistance of a watchuka.
Watchuka Wand
Price4,000 gp; Aurafaint evocation; CL3rd;Weight1 pound
This thin silvery rod is favored by watchuka as a weapon. Three times a day as a standard action, a watchuka wand can fire a ray of cold; treat this as a ranged touch attack with a range of 120 ft and no range increment. A creature struck takes 3d6 cold damage and must succeed a DC 13 Fortitude save or take 1d6 points of Dexterity damage. These items are typically made using watchuka item crafting: the construction requirements below are for non-watchuka crafters.
Construction Requirements
Cost2,000 gp
Craft Wondrous Item, ray of enfeeblement, snowball
Accidental Junji Ito style Dalek Sec Hybrid. When drawing it, it definitely wasn’t the look I was going for, but I put far too much effort into it to not post it somewhere in the end!
New Lovecrafts for the library! UK paperbacks, 1985, cover art by Tim White