My Life With Shub-Niggurath?

#1

I’m planning to run a one-shot of My Life With Master and I’d like to give it a Cthulhu Mythos vibe. So went with the idea that the master is Shub-Niggurath, but I’m struggling with two things right now:

  1. I REALLY want the Great Old One herself to feature during the game (maybe via visions that the minions have, but ideally in some physical form), BUT then I realised that the Master needs to come to a sticky end and I don’t think my players will buy Shub-Niggurath being destroyed.
  2. What does a Great Old One like that really want its little minions to do? Minions trying to perform these little (localised) tasks form a large part of the MLWM game.

So I’m just looking for some advice and ideas really.

Or, if you had committed yourself to running a one-shot called “My Life With Shub-Niggurath” how would you approach it? :slight_smile:

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#2

You could have it be the end of the current manifestation of the Great Old One on earth. People are often banishing eldritch beings in the Cthulhu games I’ve played. But I might choose a different Great Old One: I’ve often thought that Lovecraft designed the name “Shub-Niggurath” to include the n-word.

Weird idea: You could design the game such that you play a shoggoth, being ordered around by an Elder Thing. As you may know, shoggoths were engineered to be a race of slaves in servitude to the Elder Things, and their uprising is a key plot twist in At the Mountains of Madness.

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#3

Oh wow, I like that shoggoth idea (and I feel similarly slightly icky even typing Shub-Niggurath…).

Now, setting the whole thing in the Antarctic could make for an epic and unexpected twist of My Life With Master! I think it might be too hard a challenge though. Just reading through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_Madness to refresh my memory of the plot, I don’t think I could manage to represent this ancient struggle between the Elder Things’ shoggoths and Cthulhu’s Star-Spawn or Mi-Go. It might be a bridge too far, but fascinating to try and imagine!

#4

On the subject of choosing a different Great Old One, the reason I went for S-N is that I love the idea of the Dark Young (great tree-like creatures that loom out of the dark). I was even toying with the idea that one of the minions would be a Dark Young (I’m going to pre-gen the characters in the interests of time, which worked well last time I did this). In a previous on-shot (“My Life with Dracula”, set in Whitby) I had one of the minions be “a bedraggled crow” and the player in question loved it.

However, I also have my eye on Yog Sothoth. Since Old Yog “sees all of space and time” I was imaginng some fun request he could make that involved sending a minion back in time to perform a task. And of course, this would give the minion a chance to bump into someone from their past/family - cue pathos, love and possible self-loathing!

#5

I think MLwM is really made for human scale Masters, so it might be easier to have the Master be a cult leader who is worshipping your Great Old One. That way, they have petty human problems in town to deal with, and also they can be feasibly overthrown by the PCs.

If you still want a Lovecraftian monster present in the game, then you just have the cult leader harboring some great terrible monstrosity in their house, like Old Whately keeping the spawn of Yog-Sothoth in the attic in The Dunwich Horror. Then you can have the cult leader forcing PCs to gather sacrificial victims to feed to the creature, or gathering items or magical implements to keep it bound and slumbering (or to summon it and wake it up, if you prefer).

This also gives you the opportunity to have the final fight scene there, in the basement where the monstrosity is imprisoned, so the PCs can eventually shove the Master into the cage with the beast and watch the horror devour their Master, in a moment of genre-appropriate cruel irony.

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#6

That’s a nice idea. Well, not nice, but you know what I mean! :wink: