The dark young of Shub-Niggurath are Lovecraftian monsters, servitors of the dread Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. They are described as huge, black tree-like horrors made of tentacles and snapping maws. They walk upon great hooves.
It came crawling up the hillside to the alter and the sacrefice, and it was the black thing of my dreams—that black, ropy, slimy, jelly tree-thing out of the woods. It crawled up and it flowed up on its hoofs and mouths and snaky arms. And the men bowed and stood back and then it got to the alter where they was something squirming on top, squirming and screaming.
—Robert Bloch, “Notebook Found In a Deserted House.”
Both the Reaper Miniatures Bones 3 set and Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos for Pathfinder contained very cool miniatures of the dark young. The two sculpts are of similar size, though the Petersen version fits on a Large sized base, while the Reaper 3 version fits on a Huge one. I based both of them on Huge bases for consistency sake.
The Reaper dark young (right) has long, serpentine tentacles and a weird central maw in the top center of its trunk.
The Petersen dark young (left) is somewhat more alien, and its circular maws are filled with rows and rows of nasty teeth, a grotesque little detail that really adds to the creepy factor.
There were some annoying flash lines on both figures that I either missed or couldn’t quite eradicate. But all-in-all, I was pretty happy with how both of these models painted up.
Paizo included stats for the dark young in Pathfinder Adventure Path 46: Wake of the Watcher (2011), but I honestly found this take a bit pedestrian. Once the Petersen version is out I will probably do conversions to 0e, 3.5e, and 5e.
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