Monster of the Week #8

A little different this time for the Monster of the Week. I have been making a Pulp Cthulhu space game after watching Love, Death and Robots and the episode Beyond the Aquila Rift became a massive influence for the story based on the GIF used above. Spoilers may lie below.

To summarise this episode of Love, Death and Robots featured crewmates who woke up after cryo sleep and discovered where they were. All is good, showing relationships between characters and giving use glimpse into their life. 

As the episode continues, we feel a twist happen as our main character wakes up in a dark, flesh-covered world, and seems to have aged. He was dreaming the whole time and is now trapped in a nightmare world that looks dangerous. Looking around he sees dead crewmates in their cryo chambers, and some of which have rotted away.

Beckoning our main character from the shadows sounds like the woman that we seen in the dream. She approaches the camera, only to have the rest of her form reveal something that is absolutely not human.

 

At this point we discover that this creature seems to have been psychically forcing our main character into a slumber, and the creatures come full into view before our main character screams and the episode (just about) ends.

The reveal of the nightmarish new world, and then the ultimate reveal of the creature were excellent, and this resulted in me immediately wanting to make a Cthulhu game in space based on this alien (who will be called Greta Alien as the human visage we seen in the dreams was called Greta). In particular, I wanted to have a monster reveal in my game similar to the one in the episode - it was such a creative and well executed reveal.

I spent some time going through monster stats to see how I could build a Greta Alien stat block before I stumbled on a blog post which had already done the work (and done it very well! The stats for the Greta Alien can be found at this users amazing blog post.

Mundo Tentacular built a well though-out representation of the Greta Alien, leaning towards its unique psychic abilities of illusion over sheer brute force from the beast. It also has some armour to help protect its from player assault which was a nice touch.

The stat block itself aims to incapacitate players, so may need modified to suit a Pulp game like my own, but the rest of the material is perfect for a Cthulhu game, where there are much more powerful beings out there than the average Investigator. With a 1D3/ 1D10 sanity loss on seeing the creature, it is a truly terrifying sight.

The Greta Alien is a great lovecraftian horror that bolsters using psychic and sanity assault - which is what had drawn it to me in the first place, but also because a monster like this could encourage players to participate in fun chase sequences, using brains over brawn to escape it - or be forced into a slumber once again.