A Torrent of Black Quicksilver

The formless spawn of Tsathoggua are yet another mythos horror, intelligent black oozes able to change form at will. They appear to be very similar to the much more powerful shoggoths.

The formless spawn are the creation of Clark Ashton Smith, first described in his short story “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” (1931).

When we approached and peered over the brim, we saw that the bowl was filled with a sort of viscous and semi-liquescent substance, quite opaque and of a sooty color. It was from this that the odor came—an odor which, though unsurpassably foul, was nevertheless not an odor of putrefaction, but resembled rather the smell of some vile and unclean creature of the marshes. The odor was almost beyond endurance, and we were about to turn away when we perceived a slight ebullition of the surface, as if the sooty liquid were being agitated from within by some submerged animal or other entity. This ebullition increased rapidly, the center swelled as if with the action of some powerful yeast, and we watched in utter horror, while an uncouth amorphous head with dull and bulging eyes arose gradually on an ever-lengthening neck, and stared us in the face with primordial malignity. Then two arms—if one could call them arms—likewise arose inch by inch, and we saw that the thing was not, as we had thought, a creature immersed in the liquid, but that the liquid itself had put forth this hideous neck and head, and was now forming these damnable arms, that groped toward us with tentacle-like appendages in lieu of claws or hands!

—Clark Ashton Smith, “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros”

As the name implies, the formless spawn are a servitor race of Tsathoggua, a Great Old One that was incorporated by H.P. Lovecraft into the Cthulhu mythos. Smith, in the “The Seven Geases” (1933), describes Tsathoggua as dwelling in a secret cave in the bowels of Voormithadreth: “You shall know Tsathoggua by his great girth and his batlike furriness and the look of a sleepy black toad which he has eternally. He will rise not from his place, even in the ravening of hunger, but will wait in divine slothfulness for the sacrifice.” The formless spawn, as shown in the Tale of Satampra Zeiros, are often often found in basins or pools in Tsathoggua’s temples, where they act as guardians.

The “Primal Horrors” pack for Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos for Pathfinder kickstarter contained not one, but four formless spawn miniatures. These are really great sculpts that were a lot of fun to paint up. I tried out a new technique for painting glowing red eyes that worked reasonably well: I did a base coat of red, followed by a highlight spot of yellow, followed by another highlight of white. Then I did some very thin glazes of transparent red over the eye and surrounding areas. The glaze blurs the highlights and as it spills outside the eye creates a glowing effect. I wasn’t fully satisfied with the results, but it seems like a very promising technique that I’ll be playing around with in the future.

The third adventure in Paizo’s Strange Aeons adventure path, Dreams of the Yellow King contains a CR 12 version of the formless spawn. The Petersen bestiary has a CR 10 version that is a bit more to my liking—I’ll do a conversion to 0e and 3.5e once the book is released.