Shaggoths? Shuggoths? Shoggoths!

How can a creature be both my favorite and my least favorite? I don’t know, but these guys come close. In their original incarnation - “At the Mountains of Madness” and other Lovecraft works - they were awesome. Ancient, shapeless amoeba-blob servitors created by the Elder Things and later used by the Deep Ones. Things created to serve, but rebellious nonetheless. In their creation may lie the origins of all earthly life.

So what’s the problem? Number one, the tendency to misspell the name (dating back to a typo as “shaggoths” in the magazine version of one of Lovecraft’s stories). Sure, that was confusing - but it was also well over 70 years ago, so I think we could get it right by now. I particularly hate “shaggoth” because it sounds like a monster made out of fur or shag carpet.

But the biggest problem is how role-playing game design has made them so powerful that it’s ludicrous for them to fulfill in-game the roles they filled in the original stories! And since many people get their exposure to the Cthulhu Mythos through gaming, shoggoths have become UBERSHOGGOTH! Which is just wrong.

A particularly egregious example is the d20 Call of Cthulhu game. In that game, shoggoths (with a challenge rating of 21) are ranked as more powerful than hunting horrors (CR 20), star-spawn of Cthulhu (CR 14), and even several frickin’ Great Old Ones - Dagon and Hydra (CR 14) and Glaaki (CR 17) - who are statted as, literally,demigods. When created servants are more powerful than demigods, you’ve got a problem.

It’s not unique to d20, though - that game just provides a convenient mechanism to measure relative power.

So where’s the actual story evidence that shoggoths are Teh Uberbeast? Well, in “Mountains of Madness” they rip the heads of Elder Things, who have been established to be super-tough; it’s hard even to cut the skin of Elder Thing corpses for dissection. So, they’re really strong. They also make people go nearly insane from fright at seeing them - but the characters were already disturbed from their previous experiences, and unarmed and thus unable to defend themselves. It’s also said that they were broken to the saddle by armed Elder Thing riders - probably unlikely given the stats, because under the rules shoggoths could kill ARMIES of Elder Things, largely because of their annoying immunity or high resistance to practically everything. Where is *that* from in the stories? And how can the Deep Ones keep them around (in “Shadow over Innsmouth’) if they’re really significantly more powerful than the progenitor/gods of their species?