Child of the Sphinx
The Children of the Sphinx are from H.P. Lovecraft and Harry Houdini's "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs", developed by Larry DiTillio.
Description
I would not look at the marching things. That I desperately resolved as I heard their creaking joints and nitrous wheezing above the dead music and the dead tramping. It was merciful that they did not speak... but God! their crazy torches began to cast shadows on the surface of those stupendous columns. Hippopotami should not have human hands and carry torches... men should not have the heads of crocodiles.
— H.P. Lovecraft and Harry Houdini, "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs"
Children of the Sphinx are the mummified remains of cultists from Ancient Khem - what is today known as Egypt - who have been stitched together with parts of animals or otherwise surgically altered to into such forms connected to their cult, reanimated with lost arts of alchemy and rites from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to rise up in the form of the ghastly animal/human hybrid mummies which forever haunt the underworld below the Sphinx in service to their nameless gods: ibixes, hippopotami, crocodiles, typhonians, jackals, cats, bulls, serpents, falcons, lions, even scarabs. The Children of the Sphinx might also be encountered in the Dreamlands, and sometimes in other places influenced by the cults of Ancient Khem, which may have spread throughout the world, wherever the signs of the Sphinx or pyramids might be found might contain long-buried passages into the darkness of the Hollow Earth where the Children of the Sphinx still celebrate their weird and hellish rites, just as they have for thousands of years undisturbed by the outer world. The Children of the Sphinx are not unusually encountered with Ghouls, and are very similar to the Reanimated of Herbert West.
Associated Mythos Elements
- tome: Egyptian Book of the Dead
- deity: Nyarlathotep
- location: Ancient Khem
- location: Hollow Earth
- cult: Cult of the Sphinx
- race: Ghouls
- race: Reanimates
References
- fiction: H.P. Lovecraft and Harry Houdini's "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs"
- sourcebook: Malleus Monstrorum
