Deep One

Right.

And, you know, it made me think, like, what an interesting way to use deep ones, for example, deep one hybrids are always evil scheming cultists who are plotting to kill everybody.

And it's like, you know, what if it's somebody who's like, help me? I'm I'm I'm changing.

Help me.

Can you help me? And then you try to help that person as much as you can.

But inevitably this change is happening and this change isn't, it doesn't feel like it's evil, but when it happens, everyone around this person is in, is in big trouble.

One of my favorite Call of Cthulhu scenarios does exactly that with Deep Ones.

Oh, great.

It was hurt but not destroyed.

The deep ones could never be destroyed.

even though the Palaegean magic of the forgotten old ones might sometimes check them.

For the present they would rest, but some day, if they remembered, they would rise again for the tribute great Cthulhu craved.

I shall plan my cousin's escape from that Canton madhouse, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth.

We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea.

and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Yahe Nintli, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.

And

Alan Moore also, he gives two hypothetical links where he says either the creature from the Black Lagoon could be related to the Deep Ones or he could have swum downstream from Maple Whiteland from the Lost World.

either or that's the beauty of that's the beauty of league of extraordinary gentlemen is even when it's completely nonsensical as it gets later on in its run um it's still really fun to catch those references

yeah uh but anyway anybody who hasn't read that comic by the way the second volume has this huge almanac at the back of it which just documents everything in that universe and it's there's so many references there's even a bailed reference to the big lebowski

We're all a little weird.

You fought against Bartholomew, a Deep One vampire.

It seemed like your regular attacks weren't doing much of anything.

When Lapin put a ring of garlic around its neck, it bit the garlic and threw it away.

Let's go over to our main screen here for a moment.

You found an NPC by walking in through this door.

The bones look humanoid and also of fish folk, of deep ones.

I'm going to draw a card.

The beings first appeared in Lovecraft's novella, The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

This would be the Deep Ones.

Maybe I shouldn't have.

This may have been a mistake.

It's just, like, I guess the Hydra's in the lake.

I don't know.

well the likeness monster isn't mythological is it but then neither of the deep ones

yeah well that was well that's only because i i need to pull guys who literally looked like the bad one the bad the baddies and i didn't want to do because it was too obvious so i'm sorry i'm sorry

Like recollecting the story has brought me to this point of like realizing I'm just a cultist.

Um, like I'm pretty sure that's how the shadow over Innsmouth kind of ends is like the guys like retelling his, his excursion out to, to Innsmouth dealing with all the fish people and like all the, the weird stuff there, but then realizing he has a connection to that, that town and its people and like the whole like deep one thing.

And then has started having dreams of his grandmother who was from Innsmouth, like telling it, like beckoning him to go, go into the sea with her and join her in the, at the, In the ancient Deep One city.

And that's where the story ends.

Basically, him just got, like, going nuts.

And embracing his Deep One heritage.

But in this story, like, I don't know, like, it is sort of being, like, we do sort of, like, realize by the end that, like, this entire story was told by a madman recollecting this.

But I kind of wanted more of the journey of that madness through the recollection.

And when I say Arkham, you know what I'm talking about.

Cthulhu, all the Forbidden Ones, the Deep Ones, the Slithering, the things.

That's what this is all about.

And you know I love the Cthulhu world.

It was impossible to tell if they were male or female or if the distinction held any meaning for them.

If they were children, they were children of the damned, spawned here where the canopy obscured even the view of God." So ultimately, the characterization of them is different, but the web children immediately evoke for me the sense of the Deep Ones from H.P.

Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, and this is just based mostly on appearance because they are definitely framed and characterized differently in this book.

In this book, Czajkowski uses the web children to explore the what if of convergent evolution and accelerated evolution.

Um, so just drawing out these existing sources and building on it.

Um, I mean, a lot of Delta Green scenarios are like taking ideas and then like adding a lot of new material or a new interpretation of a, like look at Ex Oblivione, you know, where, oh yeah, the, we know what Deep Ones do and we know what the Innsmouth folks can do.

It's like, well, not really.

[laughs]