So, I recently raided my mums cupboard under the stairs on a trip home and came away with half of my old Cthulhu rpg books. Party ! Cracking the spine on the well thumbed 3rd edition rules, I noticed that only 2 ancient ones have yet to have official entries in AH, Cyaegha and Zoth Ommog. Who has taken a go at them with SE? And I also noted we dont have any sand dwellers, or lesser gods, and not much shantak either. Anyone come up with versions for these monsters?

Tell us more about these mysterious Ancient Ones

Ive just been searching the forums and found a version of Zoth Ommog by kroen that uses aquatic movement, but Cyaegha seems untouched (though I recall versions on the old forums I think).

Zoth Ommog: This is a Great Old One about the size of a gug, with a conical body (similar to the Yithians) but topped by four starfish like tentacles (very handy for grappling and squeezing the life out of you or just holding you still) and a lizard like head. Its physically resistant being able to regenerate from damage inflicted and being coated in thick blubbery skin. It is possibly related to Cthulhu because it can contact people through dreams (although its power is limited to doing so only through its statues) and dwells in a section of R'lyeh just off of Ponape, its primary centre of worship. Zoth Ommog is also served by the yuggya (single, yugg), huge white wormish things capable of shooting organic darts that pass on their genetic information. Zoth Ommog is a creation of Lin Carter (see "Out of the Ages" for first appearance, also "Zoth Ommog" both by Carter and "The Transition of Titus Crow" by Brian Lumley).

Cyaegha: This was always one of my favourites. It looks like the Beholder from the world of AD&D: an enormous black mass of tentacles surrounding a huge spherical green or red eye. Its HUGE - just a bit less sizable then Cthulhu, and it flies. It resides in dark places underground, possibly beneath Freihausgarten in remote western Germany (although more likely in some underground otherworld connected to Earth there), and sleeps for centuries on end before awakening with terrible wrath. According to the lore, the people of Freihausgarten have brought sacrifices to Cyaegha on the Dark Hill since the 17th century. The cult was supposedly broken up in 1860 by a young priest whio gave his life, but it emerges that the cult was actually keeping Cyaegha appeased and bound, effectively imprisoned, and did so using 5 entities bound in statues....It possibly exerts some kind of hypnotic control over people as even after the cult was disbanded the folk of Freihausgarten descended from the cult members still unerringly come to the rites every full moon but forget everything afterwards. Cyaegha has some degree of physical resistance, but only to impaling weapons. The tentacles are the main concern here - they are massive and they are everywhere. See "Darkness, My Name Is" by Eddy Bertin.

Edit: found them!

img176.imageshack.us/img176/9941/cyaegha.jpg

I also made an Ubbo Sathla:

img230.imageshack.us/img230/8200/ubbosathla.jpg

And an Eihort:

img41.imageshack.us/img41/9789/eihort.jpg

I know, compared to some of the newer ones, these guys aren't extremely hard in final combat. But I made this just after Dunwich came out, and thought that they were at least on par.

Wow, cool, thanks! Yeah, they arent on par with the way things have scaled, but thats beside the point and those things can be reworked. I like the mechanic that brings injury and madness to the table more in the final battle with Cyaegha. The slumber ability is pretty rough actually! It means that you must give up 0-13 or average 7 items, trophies or clues for each investigator before it wakes (assuming you dont remove any doom! - nice pressure on that little trick!), and the net effect if you fail to seal or close makes start of battle even more punishing than it looks. I would have given him physical resistance instead of immunity as by then any weapon you have held onto should be worth something. I think I would also put some kind of darkness effect in play. And I would probably boost monsters too, not only to make them harder to trophy, but also because battering the investigators forces them to choose more often between drawing injuries or madness, or discarding half their items...so I might add something like "Stygian Darkness: Ignore the effect of environments and discard them after monster movement. Whenever an environment card is discarded, increase the horror damage and combat damage of all monsters by 1."

Originally, Cyaegha made you discard EACH time a doom was added, no roll! Maybe it should be on a roll of 1 or 2? The original version also had -5 Physical Immunity, and you made checks during his attack at the loss of sanity and stamina. Too cliché.

I don't remember why I assigned particular immunities and resistances, but it was more about the theme.

Cyaegha effectively attacks twice each turn. Once for Injury and once for Madness. THIS IS MADNESS!

Knuckles Eki said:

Madness? This! Is!! ARKHAM!!!

Tibs said:

no roll!!

Have you tried these out? I think maybe adjusting it to 33% might be more balanced (in terms of IH AOs), but only if you added something else as well like giving monsters bigger teeth as I suggested, there will be quite a few games where little impact occurs otherwise.

Tibs said:

Actually, out of the three AOs, I think Cyaegha holds up the best. I'm not sure if the discard ability is so overpowered, just think of it compared to Glaaki. Of course this is only true on average, there will be some games when he's pitifully easy, and others where he strips players naked before devouring them (perhaps you should rename him Wall Street). His start of battle ability is kindof a joke though (Oh no, I have to discard a clue! Oh wait... I can discard a monster trophy instead).

No, but I don't play custom AOs. I can't enter those stats into the stats site!

I made a version of Zoth Ommog a little while ago and posted it on the Custom AO thread (it's probably a few pages back by now). It basically handed out cursed idols (the dreaded Ponape Figurines from whatever the story was called). I also did an Ubbo-Sathla which was one of the best AOs I think I ever came up with - it had a few 'Protoplasm' spawn monsters on it, and they appeared instead of normal monsters. Basically the board was crawling in giant amoebae, and they only shapeshifted into proper monsters when you got into combat with them, so you didn't know what you were going to fight until you were fighting it. I'll see if I can find the SE files for those two, they were good fun and I might re-visit them to see if they can be improved.

cool, great idea! that reminds me of a monster variant I came up with in my second game - hidden monsters. Monsters are drawn from cup and move as normal, but when encountered, are returned to the cup and the actual monster is drawn, which then moves in its normal fashion. Hidden monsters were indicated by being face down. Ended up with DY moving in the streets way before BGotW made it official. Had to exclude hidden flyers though, as hidden flyers could turn out to be gugs, or zombies, or cthonians! Flyers were thus grounded until discovered.