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| The Elder Power - Shub by Me |
Happy Freaky Friday and welcome to another round of Dungeon Mastering by Candlelight. This is the blog where just about every single day I share some tidbit from my OSR fantasy campaign. Everything here is offered for you to import as a whole or in part into your home campaign.
As a frame of reference most everything here translates easily into Swords and Wizardry complete or AD&D but all of it is easily translated into Basic or 2nd Edition as well.
This is a fan site. Everything here is free and is not meant to be an infringement upon anybodies anything.
In freaky Friday tradition I have plunked open my stash of folders and picked something (mostly) at random and what could be more random than a god (goddess?) of chaos?
Today's Music to Create By: YES - Tales from Topographic Oceans (Favorite)
Note: Track One on this album has been a sort of creative theme for me for many years of fantasy campaign creation. It takes me straight to my world...kind of like soaring in out of the clouds and settling in within my imagination.
Candle Color for the Mood: Purple - in honor of VS's purple theme and love of all things Mythos
SHUB
Greater Elder Power
Armor Class: 0
Movement: Levitate 10, Burrow 6
Hit Points: 500
No. of Attacks: Special
Damage of Attacks: Tentacle - Smash 2d10, Tentacle Grab, Tentacle Crush after Grab 1d12+4, Tentacle Throw. Bite - 2d4, Spore Cloud, Bat Things, Disintegration Eye Beam.
Alignment: Chaos
Worshiper's Alignment: Any but anyone implanted with one of Shub's brain worm larvae immediately changes to an alignment of Chaos.
Symbol: A black eye shaped oval with a single octopus type eye in the center and a single tentacle curled beneath.
Other: Divine Spells - Nil, Arcane Spells - Nil Despite Shub's lack of personal spell casting ability her priests are able to learn spells as any Cleric or Priest of Chaos up to the fifth level of spell power.
Shub is sometimes called Shub the Explorer. She was the first of the elder beings to forge forth out of the elven portals accidentally opened into her home plane. Usually she dwells deep underground, somewhere within the Murklands of Shub far to the South. There the surface is covered in a jungle including many strange varieties of giant mushroom, the left overs of her passage through this region long, long ago. Shub lingers below ground in part because direct exposure to the sun of this world causes damage to her. For every hour of exposure to the sun, she suffers 1d10 points of damage. This damage can only be healed through the normal rate of 1 hit point per day, 2 hit points if she lingers below ground.
Shub is so behemoth (see the picture above and the small human figure at the bottom for scale) that she depends on the disintegration beam of her great eye to carve a path back into the ground to heal when she is on the move. Any time Shub is burrowing she causes the effects of an earthquake, per the arcane spell in an area one mile in radius of her tunneling efforts. Using her eye she will first tunnel at least one hundred feet below ground and then hollow out an egg shaped chamber in the bedrock as a resting place. She will then reseal most of the upper entrance of this cavern so as to make it secure.
Shub has no listed number of attacks because she begins with only one per combat round but for every combat round she is engaged while "on the move" she gains one additional attack or use of a power. This can be in the form of an additional tentacle that she grows, the attack of one of the bizarre "bat things" that circle and nest about the upper portion of her body (the crown), an attack by her disintegration ray, grabbing, hurling, bashing things with tentacle(s).
Shub can heal herself by grasping an intelligent target and successfully biting it to death and then consuming it. Consumption by Shub is worse than mortal death as she automatically consumes and destroys the soul of any being she eats. Shub immediately heals herself for 1d6 hit points for every 1 hit dice the target creature consumed had when at full HP.
When at rest, priests of Shub usually turn her chosen cavern into a secret temple. Below her beak they will bind a supplicant and shub will drip one of her worms onto the being. This worm will burrow into the supplicants skull changing it into one of her accepted cultists. All cultists of shub carry within their skull one of her worms. These worms provide a limited form of empathy and telepathic communication between all such cultists within a hundred miles. Shub can gather information from the minds of her cultists and use them as a sort of telepathic sensory net cast over a wide area. Her followers are feared for she sends them to infiltrate and spy on almost every corner of the civilized world.
When on the move Shub spurts forth occasional gaseous clouds of alien fungoid spores from a circle of horn like protrusions around her bottom. These gas clouds impregnate everything within the cloud with a thick layer of alien fungus spores. The gas clouds cover up to a fifty by fifty foot square area and are thick and difficult to see through. Victims caught in these clouds must save as if exposed to the fungus thrown up by the yellow mold monster. Over a period of weeks these spores will take over the landscape where they were sprayed transforming the terrain into the sort of strange, alien terrain native to Shub's own plane. When one of these horns blasts forth a cloud of fungus spores they make a sound like a large ship's horn. See the link below for an example of the sound.
So there are the basics. How -exactly- Shub works I leave in your hands. Make of her what you will. Remember her intelligence is malevolent and wholly alien. She does not often cooperate with the few other remaining Elder powers afoot in the campaign as these beings frequently "do not play well with others".
That is it for today's entry. Happy Gaming!
-Ed
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