It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.
from H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness
Basic Information
Originating in the Cthulhu mythos a shoggoth is an amorphous, protoplasmic creature from a species apparently created by the Elder things as a servitor … possibly a form of bioroid.
Initially aquatic, the shoggoths also appear to have developed the ability to live on land and, perhaps inevitably, became (more) conscious, breaking away from the control of their masters and taking a hand in their eventual destruction. Abdul Alhazred fearfully insisted that no shoggoths remained on Earth, but was either lying or mistaken, unless those encountered by the 1930 Dyer expedition to Antarctica had either been born or created since or had been … somewhere else … in Alhazared's time1. The examples the Dyer expedition did encounter appeared uncontrolled and either hungry, territorial or aggressive for some other reason. Other sources suggest that the Deep Ones may have some examples under their control.
The exact capabilities of shoggoths are not established canonically, but they seem capable of applying huge amounts of force with extraordinary precision, capable of dismembering an Elder Thing with very little effort, following the dismemberment with a drill like attack to what is assumedly its brain. Other sources credit the shoggoth with the ability to shape its form into a wide range of tools and manipulators down to the nano-molecular level. Their actual level of intelligence and ability to communicate are disputed - they are recorded as uttering a range of piping and whistling noises and a signature cry of "Tekili-li" … which may be from their creator's language, but whether these are used with any intelligence or not is not known.
Killing a shoggoth is presumably not easy either - given their amorphous nature they are probably resilient to most forms of kinetic damage - flame attacks are probably recommended, chemical agents and similar things may or may not help.
Less canonical - and perhaps more worrying - is the possible existence of "shoggoth lords" - smaller, highly intelligent examples capable of passing as human to some degree or the other.
Sources
Game and Story Use
- A controlled shoggoth - described as an amorphous, multi-functional bioroid servitor system - could appear in all sorts of settings. The nannite based "liquid metal" robot may be the direct sci-fi equivalent.
- Where controlled, these things are potentially very useful - Brian Lumley's Return of the Deep Ones includes one performing prodigies of construction work on behalf of a deep-one cult - or at least some very impressive excavations.
- Perhaps something gains control of one or more shoggoths and begins using them for civil engineering work - all goes well until the shoggoth(s) get bored and break free.
- The existing mythos literature is unclear as to whether the shoggoth can build and assemble as well has cut and haul … possibly there are a range of types (or any given shoggoth can be (re)programmed) to take on other roles and some may be able to pump liquids, assemble structures, possibly at a molecular level and potentially synthesise a wide range of chemicals. It is entirely possible that physical containment of a shoggoth is impossible over any length of time as it can dissolve, dismantle or otherwise disassemble anything you put it in.
- The Laundryverse also hints at humans receiving shoggoth tissue grafts - in some cases as an "ultimate stem cell graft" used to treat traumatic injuries … perhaps in other cases it could provide an appropriately talented user with an inherent multifunctional toolkit at the cost of a disgusting and possibly dangerous symbiot.
- "that RPG" has included shoggoths in several editions - once briefly due to copyright issues, and later, in an off-label version as servitors of the aboleth (a sort of fish-adjacent ancient evil that Lovecraft would surely have approved of).
- In some Mythos-adjacent works, the shoggoths are the progenitors of all terrestrial life - explicitly including humanity.
"Tekeli-li"
(random Shoggoth)