Keepers Ruminations

Once again I have to apologise to any readers left for the delays but it's been a rather horrific couple of months which has put a bit of a kibosh on the gaming. Anyway the campaign isn't dead and we should be playing again within the week unless somebody gets eaten by a nameless being or something.

Getting back to the ruminations thing I have to admit I did something that I said I wouldn't do. Still relatively early in the campaign, and as my second monster, I mat have introduced a shoggoth. For anyone paying attention, or with an ability to scroll down, you'll note that I'm against the prevalence of shoggoths in Chaosium adventures and stated that I wouldn't introduce such a thing so early. These people would point and laugh but they've probably abandoned this blog as dead anyway. Even though I have a defense...

First off I'm not even sure it's an actual shoggoth even if some of my players think so. It's definitely shoggoth-like but I never declared anything and though I'm it may look and smell like a duck I'm not sure if it is one. Of course as the Keeper I'm expected to be decisive about these things but I feel the Armitage Files way of doing things gives me a pass. So what it seems may not be what it is.

Secondly the thing never actually did much. Granted the player involved went a wee bit nuts and an NPC got his head bit off in an uncomfortably familiar fashion  but it never indulged in the wholesale chaos which would be expected of such a creature. If it is a shoggoth why is it so compliant to what's going on? I'm very interested in the history of these things as changeable things and wonder if that plasticity could be passed on to other creatures that come from the same Old One source.

I'm not committed to a definite direction on the way the campaign's going but there's a definite theme of stuff being disemminated amongst people and it coming from a conspiracy of people with at least a certain amount of influence. Of course when I think about stuff I always think about The Stuff.

There's a comment asking more about the canning factory which is nice but I'm not sure what I can say about it. Both conspiracies unearthed so far seem to be about infecting the general populace with something but what it is isn't known.The canning factory is sending out tainted goods that are affecting those that eat them. There's a hint of class war as the cans of fish are aimed at the working classes, what do the conspirators hope to gain?