Wherefore art thou, Shambler?

[Connectamabob]

Can anyone point me in the direction of the story or stories from which the Dimensional Shambler monster originates?

I tried Googling it, but the results were all either cribbings from the CoC manuals or Quake related. Is the Shambler a Lovecraft critter, a creation of a later author, or an original creation of the games industry?

[Plynkes]

The CoC rulebook quotes The Horror in the Museum by HPL and Hazel Heald in its description. Wikipedia backs that up, for what it is worth. I confess I have never read that one.

>>Link<<

I wonder if Lovecraft ever called it a Dimensional Shambler. Sounds much more like a monster manual name than something he would come up with. Makes me think someone at Chaosium had to cook up a name for a monster HPL never gave one.


"Wherefore?" I do not think that means what you think it means.  

[Connectamabob]

Thanks! I have the old Peterson's Guide, which opens each description with a little HPL quote, but doesn't cite what stories the quotes are from.

I actually meant "Wherefore" in the correct way, very broadly speaking... insofar as one can get existential about a fictional being. Didn't notice how the incorrect way is actually much more clearly implied by my question 'till you reminded me it existed, if you can believe that! I was thinking about sculpting one, but wanted to go back to the source to form my own impressions/interpretations. So more of a "what" than a "why", and a car or two away down the train of thought from the actual question at that... yeah, it was pretty spacey as attempted jokes go.

*edit* Just got done reading an e-copy of "The Horror in the Museum". Very interesting. The main monster of the story is a different beastie entirely. A creature the story's antagonist refers to as a "dimensional shambler" is incidentally established, but only a very vague and very debatable idea of its appearance is given, and its nature and behavior are not gone into at all. The name "dimensional shambler" is explicitly used, but may well just be a name coined by the madman on the spot, rather than an accepted term. It's also inferrable that he's the first and/or only person to have encountered one, so there may not be a proper term... in which case the name he uses would be as good as any, I guess.

[Plynkes]

I wondered about that, as that Wikipedia article refers to Rhan-Tegoth as the horrible big bad of the story, and makes no mention of dimensional shamblers.


I reckon a good deal of the "accepted" names for Mythos nasties are just offhand descriptions given to them once by a character in a story. It's not as if there is any reason for a horror from another dimension to even have an English name for itself. I'm not a fan of August Derleth and Chaosium's obsession with categorizing everything to death like demented unnatural philosophers anyway. I realise that Chaosium had no choice, as they were making a game that needs some clear boundaries, but Derleth never had that excuse. Lovecraft never had a 'Mythos', he just wrote a bunch of stories. It was Derleth who insisted on turning it into an ordered universe with rules and everything clear and spelled out, and encyclopedias available defining every last bit of mystery. It really ought to be called the Derleth Mythos. Good way to ruin all of the atmosphere of alienation and dread if you ask me.

But anyway, I'm rambling and ranting like a disturbed lunatic who has spent too much time reading forbidden books now, so I'll stop before the things that are coming to get me come to get me.  

[Connectamabob]

No worries. I actually agree with you on that stuff. I read "The Hounds of Tindalos" for the first time recently (for the same reasons as the above), and my main impressions were:
1) That is not what "science" means. Is this a failure of the author or just the character? It's hard to tell.
2) Good vs. evil? What?
3) I really have to question both the imagination and the reading comprehension skills of the person who started this business of making them look literally dog-like.

Mostly the dilemma I'm faced with is whether to reign myself in and sculpt something that incorporates some of the pop-conventions so that people will recognize it, or go balls-out and sculpt a version totally my own, and risk it being rejected despite being as accurate or more to the original stories/concepts.

[Alfrik]

Checked for fan based sites? When I was digging into Conan and his world I found fan sites were treasure troves, CoC would probably be the same?

Just an idea to toss in the pot.

[TheBlueShoggoth]

Whenever I think of Shamblers, I always think...

[isaanmini]

Alfrik
Remind me never to come round to yours for tea........

[Krysset80]

Had to look them up but also couldent find anything. Realy tought I found them when I remembered a story by Robert Bloch call Shambler from the stars but thats also some other monster.   

Still I got the RAFM Shamblers, worth it just for the extra added little figure(Brown Jenkins).

On another point I totaly agree on how August Derleth puts to much efort to explain things.. not very successfully ether. I meen he trys to claim for instance that Chuthulu is a water elemental.. even tho Lovecraft writes that the water traps him.

[Connectamabob]

The his credit, he does a good job replication the Lovecraft atmosphere. I really don't care for the good vs evil angle, and he does tend to geek out a bit & try pack a little to much into his stories (at least the few I've read), making his stuff a bit more baroque than Lovecraft's, if that makes any sense.

I read Dan Simmons's Summer of Night recently, which was pretty awesome, and would make a good mythos add-on IMO. I want to find a 1:48-ish 20s-40s era truck toy/kit so I can build the rendering truck .

I've also been playing the Penumbra trilogy on my PC, which has some cool mythos-ish aspects. Actually kinda reminds me of Steven King's Dreamcatcher, but without the suck.

I started sculpting a Quake style Shambler. I didn't nail down the musculature well enough before hand though (the super low poly, low res in game model leaves a lot to the imagination), and so now I'm starting to think I got the armature proportions a bit wrong.