What Are Shoggoths?

Shoggoths are massive, protoplasmic creatures, described by the witnesses as shifting masses of bubbling cells able to put out whatever organ or limb a task requires. The Archive files them as an engineered bioform: they were bred as living tools and beasts of burden by the Elder Things, the species that built the Antarctic city beyond the Mountains of Madness. They are filed with an extreme threat level, localized to the ground they were bred on.

How they came to be filed as dangerous

The bas-reliefs in the Elder Things' City tell the history. A servant that could be shaped to any purpose eventually developed a will of its own, and its line rebelled against its makers. The account of the Miskatonic expedition of 1930–31 is the only chronicle on file in which one is met in person. It is also one of very few in which a creature of this sort is shown actively hunting the humans who stumble across it: Dyer and Danforth were pursued through the tunnels of the buried city by one, and the cry attributed to the creature in that account is a single phrase repeated, Tekeli-li.

Why the Elder Things matter to the file

The Elder Things have a dossier of their own, and it is worth reading beside this one, because the relationship is not that of a master and a monster. The expedition's own evidence is that the Elder Things had lived with their creation for a very long time, and that the end of the city came out of the falling-out between them. A shoggoth that attacks a stranger is doing to the stranger what its line did to its makers.

The Field Survey marks the city's coordinates on record, and the Dispatch on the Mountains of Madness gives them.