Animiculi

The Animiculi are from the campaign, Beyond the Mountains of Madness.

Description

It was dark, pitch black, almost painful to watch. More a shape than a volume, it looked like a hole, cut in the very fabric of space itself. And it was moving, growing and absorbing new arms and other appendices as it shifted between walking, crawling and oozing and god knows what else!

Sometimes, the shapes were almost animal: rat, dog, penguin... as if it collectively remembered its previous victims and tried to imitate them.

And it was cold, so cold..."
— Excerpt from the "Beyond the Mountains of Madness" Call of Cthulhu (RPG) campaign

Animiculi are heat-seeking, biomechanical automatons with no shapes of their own that are sloughed off in the form of spores by a nameless, idiot Great Old One imprisoned beneath the ice of Antarctica, for the purpose of absorbing heat energy from the outside world to bring back down to the Great Old One to revive and reanimate it. Animiculi are capable of imperfectly imitating natural creatures of a similar mass or size, and larger animiculi are even capable of a sort of limited alien cunning and even intelligence, but smaller Animiculi are relatively primitive and amorphous black blobs.

Associated Mythos Elements

• race: Elder Things
• race: Shoggoths, Blind Penguins of Leng
• location: Polar City of the Old Ones, and the Hollow Earth beneath it

References

• scenario: "Beyond the Mountains of Madness" Call of Cthulhu (RPG) campaign
• sourcebook: Malleus Monstrorum