dailyadventureprompts:Villain: Shub-Nuggurath, Outer God of fetid fertility ia! ia! Shub-Nuggurath,
dailyadventureprompts:Villain: Shub-Nuggurath, Outer God of fetid fertility ia! ia! Shub-Nuggurath, ia! the Black goat of the woods and her thousand young, bless our tongues with your tar-y milk and let new gardens bloom in our flesh! ia! ia!-A black goat cultist at the culmination of a grand ritualSetup: There are gods and powers friendly to mortal kind, reflecting and encouraging beliefs and ideologies coherent with the desires of their worshipers. Then there are the “outer” gods, entities who pursue ends heedless of their effect on the congregations they govern. A war god may encourage slaughter and cruelty in the pursuit of victory, but an Outer god of war may demand their followers poison their wells and salt their own fields so they have no option but to slaughter others for sustenance . Only the mad or short-sighted hitch their fortunes to such reckless entities, as they are actively shunned by most pantheons who jealously protect the fragile words that have come to worship them, and encourage the destruction of outer-god cults for fear of the destruction that follows in the wake of their calamitous rites. Often depicted as a black goat, a twisted tree, or as a faceless and gravid satyr, Shub-Nuggurath is patron over all things that grow and rot without concern for others. Invasive species, cancers, plagues, and poisonous creatures are her chosen heralds: the “thousand young” so often mentioned in her litanies. Her influence sees strange, alien gardens growing in unexpected places, as her toxic vitality suffuses her worshipers and the land they dwell upon, heralding new and unwelcome forms of growth. Adventure hooks: Desperate to defend his homeland and traditions from the slow encroachment of urbanizing empire, a druid breaks from his pacifistic circle to invoke Shub-Nuggurath, sowing her poisons through the forest and raising an army of blighted plants and rabid, mutant animals. Renowned for her miracle cures, a well connected doctor in service to the royal court secretly invokes the Black Goat in order to perform her medical miracles. When traditional skills and magics fail, she has the outergod grow new “improved organs”, implants squiggling symbiotes, or transfuses sickened flesh with alien humors. When it’s discovered that some of her follow up medicines contain poison ( necessary to curtail the mutagenic spread of her initial treatment) she’s forced to flee the capital, leaving her patients behind to “bloom” in the black goat’s care while she’s hunted as a would be assassin. Among their many other enticing attractions, a traveling circus boats an extensive menagerie of beasts from exotic lands. sadly the menagerie is closed to visitors at the moment, as one of the recent acquisitions seemed to be carrying some sort of sickness that’s spread to the other animals. It’s not a day or two into enjoying the circus’s other attractions before the party must leap into action and protect the revelers from tigers and elephants and a whole zoo of outer-god warped beasts. -- source link