One of the splashier entries among the Darklords of Ravenloft: Horrors Within is Cthulhu, the most iconic of eldritch abominations from the Lovecraft mythos, whose most famous story (maybe aside from The Shadow Over Innsmouth) is The Call of Cthulhu.
This isn't the first time Big Green from R'lyeh has shown up in D&D. Way back in 1980, the sourcebook Deities & Demigods added stat blocks for many gods from real-world mythologies, as well as figures from the works of Michael Moorcock and HP Lovecraft - the latter of whom had been licensed from Arkham House publishers, only for there to be a snafu because Arkham House had already licensed the Cthulhu mythos characters to Chaosium (which makes the stories Call of Cthulhu RPG), which TSR (D&D's then-publisher) thought was legitimate but evidently broke the terms of the deal between Arkham House and Chaosium.
I don't know what licensing tricks they pulled off this time - maybe the license changed, or maybe Cthulhu is in the public domain now - but anyway, we've got the quintessential aberration with 5E stats.
Now, Cthulhu has a CR of 25, which means that he'll be a challenge even to high-level characters. But this is also not remotely a monster you want to just show up without warning for a quick fight (unless you're aiming for comedic absurdity).
Frankly, I think that Ravenloft in general is going to work better as a setting if things really don't go past level 10, which will keep mid-teen-CR monsters like Strahd, Harkon Lukas, Ebonbane scary. And I think that actually encountering Cthulhu should be a hopeless fight unless you have some massive advantage.
In Call of Cthulhu, the most direct account of the monster (the only character who actually reports seeing the monster itself. Himself? I doubt that Cthulhu cares much about human gender identities, but Lovecraft was regressive even for a guy in the 1920s, so we can probably assume that he'd have just presumed that Cthulhu was male) is from a ship captain whose crew stumbles across a risen R'lyeh in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and must flee the massive monster, splitting its head in half with the keel of their boat, only for Cthulhu's flesh to knit itself back together as the ship speeds away.
But also, we should bear in mind that Cthulhu's fame has built him up as a more formidable monster than he's actually meant to be. He's not a god (even as much as actual gods really exist in Lovecraft) but more a kind of ancient priest-emperor. That said, he should remain utterly alien in motivation and nature.
Ravenloft's "Innsmouth" setting is a bizarre mix of the bleak and barren landscapes far from human civilization that are more akin to R'lyeh or the "Mountains of Madness" in Antarctica, but also with living mortals in rotting, decrepit settlements that are more akin to the actual coastal Massachusetts town of the same name.
Horrors Within presents Innsmouth as being a land of rival cults - specifically those to Olhydra (the lord of evil water, among the cults of Elemental Evil), Dagon (the ancient demon lord who has the same name as the actual central figure of worship from Shadow Over Innsmouth,) and Zhudun the Corpse Star, one of the Elder Evil stars (like Hadar). You can actually gain renown with various cults in your adventures there.
I... frankly don't think that's what I'd do with it.
While the rival cult factions are not actually that out-of-place in an adventure inspired by Lovecraft's works, the greater formula is an ordinary (and boy did Lovecraft have some narrow definitions of ordinary) person encounters something strange and disturbing, and the more they uncover, the worse it gets, until they either narrowly avoid calamity or are driven insane.
For example, the Call of Cthulhu is about a man who inherits his uncle's (I think) notes on research about a global cult dedicated to this monstrous creature. The uncle has just died, and the narrator tells the reader about the various stories his uncle had found, including an artist who, like many other creatives he talked to, dreamed of Cthulhu and felt compelled to create a likeness of them, or some police officers who broke up a strange cult ritual in the tropics worshipping Cthulhu, or a sea captain who actually saw the thing himself. Everyone aware of Cthulhu seems to be dropping dead, evidently murdered by the cult, and we find out that our narrator, penned in by paranoia, has also died.
Dangerous knowledge is at the forefront of the terror of Cthulhu - either knowledge that just breaks your sense of meaning in the world or that becomes a lethal liability as people who find out what you know come after you. Only one of the characters in the story ever actually sees the monster, but the rippling terror radiates out and hits everyone.
In this sense, while Cthulhu feels right for a horror-themed game, you might want to bend the rules of Ravenloft. It feels like we ought not to even understand what the Dark Powers could do to torment Cthulhu, and perhaps he's not actually a Darklord, but maybe something else that the Domains of Dread need.
To preserve the horror of Cthulhu, I would use him more as a "background event." He's gargantuan, so we could see him doing terrifying things off in the distance. But for his kaiju-level power to land, making sure that characters would likely go down after a single round of attacks would sell the idea that this guy ought not to be engaged with.
With a +17 to hit and saving throw DCs of 25, there's a good chance that unless the party has some really insane armor, most of this stuff is going to land consistently. His standard attack pattern will probably do about 100 damage roughly, so he'll still be a real terror at level 10, when most characters still have less than 100 HP.
But you should definitely make use of Cthulhu before the party is even close enough to fight him. And here are the tools to do so:
Cthulhu can cast Dream and Geas both 3 times per day. He can also use Geas while visiting someone in their dreams.
With a DC of 25, barely anyone will ever succeed on their saves against these spells at low levels. Also, the damage from Geas could be lethal at very low levels.
Mystery is a big part of Cosmic Horror - the distinction is that while finding the truth brings relief and satisfaction in a mystery story, the truth in cosmic horror has far more disturbing implications and may very well make the investigators wish they had left things well enough alone.
Cthulhu is utterly alien but also incredibly intelligent, and while he's far more powerful than mortals and would not think of them in any empathetic way, he knows how to manipulate them. Thus, he could appear in a Dream spell as something much more familiar. If you want to foreshadow the reveal of who is manipulating the party, you could give this dream messenger a really uncanny feel to it, with unnatural speech patterns and maybe a strangely "off" face.
But I'd slow-play it. Don't even bust out Geas to start with. The dream messenger should point the party toward reasonable goals. Maybe the party is on an adventure searching for some criminal or villain, and the dream messenger gives them an important hint. The hint would push them toward something that is actually Cthulhu's agenda - moving some ancient stone that serves as a lock or something.
Cthulhu is an utter time abyss, probably billions of years old, so the ultimate utility of what he pushes them into doing might not even be clear by the end of the campaign.
Cthulhu is probably very indifferent to what mortals actually care about, and so the threat he presents might be less about his agenda than some misguided worshipper. Zealots raging against the falsehoods of their worlds or becoming nihilistic with despair at the meaninglessness of it all might seek out Cthulhu either to give them purpose or to free them from any moral fetters.
In fact, Cthulhu might not even want to be released from his "prison," but the people who have convinced themselves that he's trapped there engage in a plot to rouse him. Indeed, Cthulhu might actually be the figure that guides the party to stopping his own cult in order to get them to stop bothering him, and should they awaken him, he might just kill everything around him like a human swatting flies in their kitchen.
So yes, while I think that a climactic boss fight against Strahd or Harkon Lukas or Viktra Mordenheim is a great climax to their stories, I'd generally say not to try to prepare a fight with Cthulhu that the party stands any chance of actually winning - or rather, they shouldn't be able to win by dropping him to 0 HP. A "win" should be to just escape alive.
But that will be a challenge: Cthulhu's attacks will grapple targets, and then he has a tentacle attack that he can use on grappled creatures to suck HP out of them. He has various teleportation abilities (both for himself, grappled creatures, and one that can force-teleport others) and warps space around himself, creating difficult terrain that deals damage to creatures within it.
I actually think that against a party of late-tier-3 or tier 4 characters, it's a fairly straightforward combat to run. He's pretty beefy with 385 HP, so unless you have some insanely optimized players, he'll last a decent number of rounds, but I don't think his abilities are going to be insurmountable to a high-level group. That's why I think if you want his impact to land really well, you've got to make sure to use him at earlier levels.
No comments:
Post a Comment