The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young

Ever Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!

—H.P. Lovecraft, “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930)

This enormous Shub-Niggurath miniature, sculpted by Kevin Williams, was an add-on to the Reaper Miniatures Bones 3 Kickstarter from back in 2015. Around the same time I also pledged the Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game as well as the Sandy Peterson’s Cthulhu Mythos for Pathfinder Kickstarters, which demonstrates how deeply the Mythos was occupying my mind eight or so years ago. Yet despite my best (or perhaps worst?) intentions I still have yet to run a real Cthulhu campaign for any system. I have previously written about the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath, and even painted up a couple different models of those lesser monsters, but it took me a long time to finally try to tackle their foul mother.

Rob Kuntz and Dr. J. Eric Holmes might have been the first to write up Shub-Niggurath for fantasy roleplaying games. “The Lovecraftian Mythos in Dungeons and Dragons” appeared in The Dragon 12 (February 1978). Their description of her is certainly vivid:

[This] fountain of uncleanliness is a huge grey pool, 100 feet across, in the caverns beneath Mount Voormithadreth, constantly bubbling and putting forth mouths, limbs, pseudopods and whole creatures. 1-10 small monsters are created from the pool per melee round and go crawling, flopping and flying away up to the surface. Some fall back into the pool which then grows mouths and devours them. … Thus the god is the source of all the foul and unclean creatures of the earth. The growing little monsters usually ignore strangers, but they will attack on Shub-Niggurath’s command.

Similar language is included in the first printing of the AD&D Deities and Demigods book, which also includes this sanity-destroying Erol Otus illustration of Shub-Niggurath. In the lonely wilderlands of my own Great Dungeon of the North campaign, certain foul madmen are said to venerate this abomination. Her dark young stalk the most desolate places of the farthest North, and one of the deepest levels of the Great Dungeon is said to consist of living caverns out of nightmare, a vile place corrupted with the fecundity of Shub-Niggurath.

I struggled to formulate a plan of attack for the Shub-Niggurath model, which is large and complex with many different parts. I was torn between assembling everything first and then painting, or painting everything first and then assembling. In the end I compromised: I used poster tack to put the model together long enough to prime and lay down a base coat, then I disassembled the pieces to work on the small, hard-to-reach features. Even with lots of poster tack it was tricky to keep the various legs, tentacles, and whatnot hanging together: the process was a bit like working an abhorrent Jenga puzzle.

I primed the model using Army Painter Uniform Gray out of a rattlecan, then used my airbrush to put down a base coat of Army Painter Barbarian Flesh. If I were to do this over again, I probably would have skipped the gray primer and used zenithal priming instead. Although the airbrush saved a lot of time, the Barbarian Flesh didn’t provide great coverage and looked very orange; in retrospect a more pallid tone like Reaper MSP Fair Skin might have worked much better as a base coat. A bolder and more interesting choice might have been to use Reaper Ghoul Skin, which would have both suitably grotesque as well as thematically appropriate.

In any case, I then disassembled the model and began working on the smaller details on the individual components. Between eyes, mouths, teeth, horns, tumors, lacerations, and suppurations, the model has loads of gross detail that I steadily picked off. 

Once I had blocked out these smaller details, I reassembled everything with superglue. There were a few nasty gaps that I tried to fill using Vallejo Plastic Putty, which is a product I have admittedly never had much luck with. In retrospect I wish I had gone with Green Stuff, which requires more work but gives me better results, particularly with larger gaps.

I then began shading the model using a variety of Army Painter Quickshade washes followed by several rounds of drybrush highlighting. I then started on cleanup and lining, which took a long time to complete. I spent a lot of time watching videos on painting eyes, since these are one of the most prominent features of the model. I was nearly done and feeling fairly satisfied with how all the eyes were turning out when I realized, to my horror, that goats have very, very weird eyes with horizontal slits for pupils—and I had painted all the eyes with round pupils. Although I tried to convince myself that round pupils were fine, just fine, in the end I broke down and went back to try and add horizontal slits. The result was a little disappointing—just five minutes with some reference art earlier in the project would have saved a lot of headaches.

I sealed the miniature with a couple of coats of Testor Dullcote, and then went back over the eyes and mouths with Vallejo gloss varnish. I would have preferred a somewhat glossier finish for Shub-Niggurath’s flesh, but I still haven’t found a varnish or blend of varnishes that isn’t too glossy. 

Finally, I mounted this miniature on a Reaper Miniatures 160 mm round base, suitable for a Colossal size monster. The figure’s native base was a little too big and I ended up trimming it back with an x-acto knife to fit. 

This model was technically the most difficult and easily the most time-consuming I’ve yet worked on. Though there were many steps I would have done differently if I had to start over, but in general I am fairly happy with how this figure turned out. I don’t know when or if I will ever be able to drop this beast into a game, but it certainly makes for a conversation piece!