The Reptile Cult

To finish off my work (until I'm actually ready to play) on CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER, I need to draw a new campaign specific map, and make up some character sheets for my pregen pseudo-PCs as well as for the iconics that I'm proposing to go along with that campaign. I haven't done either, but I'm going to set both of those tasks aside for a moment, and talk a little bit about my look ahead to the next campaign, CULT OF UNDEATH. I already came up with some draft columns. I wasn't quite sure exactly what to do with what I had as column #4; "reptile cultists and monsters in the Eltdown Fens." I mean, that's OK, I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with any of the columns right now, but for that one I had a kind of vague idea of it being like one of Lovecraft's better stories, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (here for text, here for audio) except with lizardmen and a swamp instead of fishmen (Deep Ones) and the ocean. A town on the edge of the Fens instead of on the coast works well. I also had the idea that maybe I'd borrow a bit (although not much, because it's not actually thematically or tonally appropriate) from the third Age of Worms adventure, which has lizardmen attacking a fortress. Of course, the lizardmen are misunderstood and need to be rescued from the Kyuss cultists as much as the actual people need to be rescued from the lizardmen. I hate this whole "the monsters are just misunderstood people who are obvious stand-ins for the freaks in our society who pretend like they're oppressed because they freak people out, even though that's the whole point of their attention-whoring pose is to freak people out." Blegh. 

It struck me, of course, that if I'm talking about a reptile cult, maybe I should look at the classic AD&D module N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God. It's got at least as much good info to borrow as the Age of Worms adventure, especially from the first half with the investigation in town. The second half, the "dungeon", I have little interest in, although the idea of the "reptile god" being a reptilian monster with a domination/hypnotization special ability is a pretty good Lovecraftian idea. I don't think a "spirit naga" really quite does the trick, but I can think of something else. Maybe a blinded medusa who—because she's blinded—has the hypnotization/dominate ability instead of the petrification. She can still see, because of all the snake heads which all have eyes on her head, she just has a visual uniqueness and a swapped out special attack, and she'd still be powerful enough to be sufficiently scary for 2nd/3rd level characters.

I should reprint that mini as a new image without the base, and call it "Reptile Goddess" (because the name from the module is not really very cool anymore, I'm afraid) and consider it part of the CULT OF UNDEATH folder. 

Another peculiarity of the Innsmouth populace is the bizarre "Innsmouth look" which is meant to indicate their horrific hybridization and gradual transformation into Deep Ones, the fish people of Lovecraftian infamy. As it happens, I already have a few "snake cultists" among my minis. After making a handful of additional "reptile cultists" I think I'm in pretty good shape to do this for them too. This works in other genres too, of course. Tolkien kept talking about sinister swarthy southerners who looked eerily orc-like, for instance, foreshadowing the Uruk-hai of Saruman.

I don't want to go all out and actually create the column now ahead of schedule, but this is coming together, and I want to document for myself what I've got in mind, so I can review it when it is time to do the actual column, and figure out how to draw the PCs to Eltdown, or whatever little town I end up using as a kind of Orlane stand-in.

As you can see, the "reptile cult" look is mostly just a kind of general sinisterness, a hunched look, lizard eyes, and some greenish tints to their color scheme. Only one of them is advanced enough to look almost like a lizardman, although he really looks more like Reptile from Mortal Kombat at this point.