Hideous Creatures (2018)

From the back cover:

A BESTIARY OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS

H. P. Lovecraft created his various “shadowy congeners” because the stories of vampires, werewolves, and even ghosts had become too familiar and too formulaic to evoke true horror. Almost a century after he wrote, his own monstrous races have likewise begun to seem like comfortable story furniture rather than unnerving signals that the world is horrible and wrong.

In Hideous Creatures: A Bestiary of the Cthulhu Mythos, we present a comprehensive look at Lovecraft’s hideous creatures, from as many angles as we can. Our goal is contradiction, surprise, and most especially the uncanny: the recognition of something familiar as something weird. This book deliberately provides clashing perspectives and blurring boundaries to obliterate certainty. In your campaign, these variant truths might be misunderstandings, legends, heresies, or deliberate lies spread by the creatures to lull their foes into a false sense of familiarity.

The creatures in this book are not mere antagonists to fight or flee from, they are entire mysteries or adventures by themselves, leaving physical traces, occult clues and madness in their eldritch wake. Each entry contains a wealth of terrible revelations:

• Variant abilities and alternate interpretations of each entity ensures that even the more erudite players can never be sure what awaits them in the dark
• Mythic echoes embed these horrors deep in our collective unconscious, tying creatures to historical events, legends, and folk tales.
• Suggested clues give multiple avenues of investigation for each creature, a trail of evidence leading to the horror
• Adventure seeds suggest different ways to use each monster in your games
• Detailed handouts and documents in each entry darkly hint at past encounters with the entity.

Resurrected from the essential saltes of the essays by Mythos master Kenneth Hite, expanded and given unthinkable life by divers hands, Hideous Creatures is a sourcebook for your Trail of Cthulhu campaigns in the tradition of infamous Pelgrane tomes like The Book of Unremitting Horror or The 13th Age Bestiary.

User summary:

Expanded reprint of Ken Writes About Stuff's "Hideous Creatures" article series.