Six Horror Monsters for Underneath

 I love horror, as a genre with its own tropes and aesthetics and as a general vibe or atmosphere. While most of the stuff on this blog has been primarily "fantasy", I think it is probably apparent that my love of horror and spooky stuff generally suffuses my creative work. I actually honestly think that the stark genre divisions between fantasy, horror, science fiction, etc. that exist today are both unrepresentative of the realities of fantastical fiction and honestly bad to the kind of cross pollination and creative admixture that makes really interesting fiction, but that's beside the point. The point is, I finally got around to making and running a primarily horror tabletop game last year, and this post is gonna be all about one part of it.

I wrote the scenario for and ran the game with the ruleset Underneath, created by Martin O. over at the Goodberry Monthly blog. It's a fantastic, effective, and simple ruleset that really grabbed me the first time I read it at the suggestion of a friend of mine, and I knew right away that it was what I wanted to use as the foundation for my game scenario. Below are six monsters that I wrote for the scenario, which as an aside I've been calling More Than Regulation in my notes, all statted up + described using the format described in the original Underneath rules post. For a basic explanation, monsters in Underneath are primarily defined by their Hit Dice, which are both the number of successful hits from the players it takes to subdue them and also the number of d6s that the monster gets to roll to injure the players. Each die has a 3 in 6 chance of success, so the referee rolls all the d6s, counts how many successes the monster rolled, and then goes from there. Monsters also have an "Insight Threshold", which is the mechanic that really made me fall in love with the game. Rather than having a sanity counter that slowly spirals down and down a la Call of Cthulhu (which, as an aside, I really want to run sometime soon), Underneath has Insight, which steadily climbs higher and higher, revealing new realities when it hits certain thresholds. The insight threshold on a monster is the level of insight that the character has to have to see the uh... well, it might not be the "true" appearance, if you catch my drift. Etc, etc. I really love that mechanic, it's super cool, reminds me a lot of the similarly named insight mechanic from Bloodborne.

So anyway! More Than Regulation is a horror scenario set in the present day in the fictional town of Bone Lick, Wisconsin, situated between Milwaukee and the southern border of the state, on the other side of a foggy marshy wetland that definitely doesn't actually exist in that part of Wisconsin but yknow that's whatever. The town's biggest employer, the main factory of a certain Sweetie Jay's Peanut Butter Company, has recently been temporarily closed pending an investigation by health inspectors from Milwaukee after a few employees have come up dead under very mysterious circumstances. The health inspectors are gonna take a few days to get there, but everyone in town knows that nothing is really gonna come of it; the cops haven't said anything about the situation and have even left the spouses of the deceased in the dark, and the Sweetie Jay's company has its fingers in a lot of pots in the area. The goal of the scenario is for the players to find out as much as they can about what's going on before making their way into the Sweetie Jay's factory to take things into their own hands before the health inspectors get there and cover everything up.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to finish the scenario, though that may change at some point, some of my players expressed an interest in finishing the game over discord. I wanted it to just be a one shot but it ended up being like three or four sessions before scheduling problems caused it to stop continuing.

I described my inspirations for the scenario as being Karl Marx, Franz Kafka, David Lynch, and Junji Ito. I really want to release it sometime, though I should probably polish it up before then. Anyway, here's six monsters from the scenario! These aren't all of the monsters I wrote up for it, I just wanted to do six of them as a bit of a sample I guess.

All art in this post is by me

SHUDDERING BUG CLOT 

Hit Dice: 1

Insight Threshold: 3 

Low Insight Appearance: A very large cockroach. Sometimes encountered rolling around a mostly empty jar of peanut butter. 

Description: A shivering mass of chitinous limbs seemingly stuffed haphazardly into a congealed blob of wet peanut butter. Leaves a trail as it crawls on the ground. Smells much too clean for how it appears. 

Injuries 

(1 Hit): Scratch: The thing’s wretched claws dig into your flesh. -1 Body. 

CRAWLING FLAVOR TENDRIL 

Hit Dice: 1 

Insight Threshold: 1 

Low-Insight Appearance: A very large slug of a sickeningly orange hue. The smell of msg and steamy water. A mane of thick noodles. 

Description: Desperation against the teeth. A thick goop of powder and water combined into a clawing hand slinking along the ground. It doesn’t want to be eaten. 

Injuries

(1 Hit): The Flavor: It fills your nose. -1 Instinct. 

AQUEOUS SLUDGE NYMPH 

Hit Dice: 1 

Insight Threshold: 3 

Low-Insight Appearance: A tendril of rope or vine, caked completely in an oozing algal skin, moving about in the water with unusual purpose, but you can easily explain that away with the currents of the marsh. 

Description: A clump of something gooey and wet, presumably some other color before its time rotting in the swamp. It is a sickeningly slick blackness which cloys to any surface it touches, the void broken only by the myriad simple insectile limbs which claw at the air and water and the single plastic baby doll face peeking out from the sludge. 

Injuries 

(1 Hit): Half-Remembered Depths of Childhood: The sludge seeping into your pores draws forth the hazy recollections of childhood trauma. -1 Empathy. 

A SPOUSE POSSESSED 

Hit Dice: 1 

Insight Threshold: 4 

Low-Insight Appearance: A woman or a man, tears streaming down their face, their clothes tattered and their hair disheveled. They hold a knife in their hands. 

Description: A vague and shadowy thing looms over them. The memory of what they’ve lost, the hopeful memories of what could have been. All of it was stolen so that the woman in the factory could get some cash. The shadowy thing digs its claws into their shoulders. It could happen to you too. It could happen to anyone. 

Injuries 

(1 Hit): Nothing to Lose Anymore: While sobbing uncontrollably, the poor spouse lunges for you, trying to dig their blade into your flesh, your flesh that reminds them too much of the one that they love. -1 EMPATHY. 

KNOTTED RAT THING 

Hit Dice: 1 

Insight Threshold: 3 

Low-Insight Appearance: A very fat rat with a long worm-like tail. 

Description: A messy knot of long slimy hairs, slick with water, or is it spit? Small flecks of nail clippings poke out from between the nasty strands, as the thing bares its still all too rodent-like teeth, a full set of rat teeth in this alien environment. Its tail is a raw electrical wire, spitting sparks like mad. 

Injuries 

(1 Hit): Slimy Shock: The thing clambers onto you, its live wiring making contact with your skin, the disgusting spittle of its hair conducting the current into your flesh. -1 RESOLVE. 

WIDE EYED HOPPER 

Hit Dice: 1 

Insight Threshold: 3 

Low-Insight Appearance: A very large cricket, with a much too loud chirp. 

Description: Two gargantuan cricket legs that tower over the average person when outstretched whilst jumping. A pair of crazed and fearful eyes floating above, the iris drawn in leaving only the depths of the pupil void within. 

Injuries 

(1 Hit): The Deep Dark Depths: The thing stares into your eyes, ensnaring you for just a moment. As it hops around, you can do nothing but follow the blackness within its pupils. -1 INSTINCT. 

I just realized that all of these are 1 HD monsters, I swear I wrote up monsters with more than 1 it just so happened that the ones I wanted to share only have 1.