'Fhtagn!!' 'Why, bless you...' 28mm Innsmouth Deep One Hybrids

Since it's Halloween this month I decided to read 'The Book of Cthulhu', an anthology of short stories based on HP Lovecraft's horror mythos. I've been so entertained with it that I decided to get these Deep One hybrids done-up for future Pulp games using Strange Aeons. (And I'll shamelessly give a shout-out for Uncle Mike's 2nd edition of the game which is now up on Kickstarter.)

While I'm sure there are several who'll know what a Deep One hybrid is, I suspect there may be others who won't, so I'll give a little background to help set the stage.

'The shadow over Innsmouth' by Mushstone (deviantART)

In 1936 H.P. Lovecraft published 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth', a short novella that tells the story of a young traveller who comes across Innsmouth, a near-derelict fishing town set on the coast of Massachusetts. After several unsettling encounters with the locals, the traveller slowly uncovers the town's horrifying dark secret. The residents of Innsmouth, many years previous, had made a dark pact with a strange aquatic race, known as the 'Deep Ones', where the townspeole would receive gold and great bounties of fish in exchange for providing blood sacrifices to the Deep Ones' gods and to allow themselves to be interbred with the creatures. 

Yeah, sure, seems like a sweet deal, right?  

Yeesh...

Anyway, the progeny of this forced breeding first seemed like relatively normal humans, but as they aged they slowly began to change. By middle age  their eyes became large, bulging and lidless, their skin lost its hair, turning scaly and their hands and feet became clawed and webbed. 

For a bit of fun, I painted one of the figures a bit preppy, with a blue sweater with the Miskatonic University crest. :)

The change concludes near old age when the hybrid creature makes its last transformation into a fully fledged Deep One. All the while this physical transformation is 'percolating', the Deep One hybrid follows a similar change in character, becoming increasingly depraved and evil as time wears on. 

As a final 'gift', the newly transformed creature is taken back by the Deep Ones to their city on the sea floor to serve as immortal stewards to Father Dagon, Mother Hydra and the Great Cthulhu. 

So what you have is one of the first pulp eldritch horror classics and a great, wonderfully creepy little read.

Deep Ones from Strange Aeons

Except for the last trio of figures, which are from Uncle Mike's Strange Aeons' range, the above figures are all from Rattrap Productions, available through Brigade Games. While the castings required a lot of work to clean up properly, they proved to be wonderfully creepy and great fun to work on. They're not my best work, but I'm more than happy to have them as part of my collection (and as I write this I see I still need to go back over them to dirty them up a bit. No rest for the wicked...)

Next up: Some human pulp adventurers to act as counterpoint to these aquatic fiends.