Walking Backward In The OSR - - Using OSR & Dungeons erm Boot Hill & Horror Fantasy Resources For John Carpenter's Thing From Another World One Shot

 'The town of Brimstone Arizona has gone silent over the last two weeks & its only now that you've been called in. The Foundation has reason to believe that something from outside has invaded the town. You've been called in to handle it.' 



Time to do a one shot Con style adventure  tonight of the  Veterans of the Supernatural Wars rpg & after I stumbled into blog post by Jason Vey for doing Pulps or  super heroes in the game. This is when we decided to go ahead & run with it. The reason is simple two of our usual players are not making it because of work scheduling issues. So the legacy of horror of Brimstone continues tonight with a modern update to the town of Brimstone. From the "Taming of Brimstone " for the Boot Hill Rpg  from The Dragon issue # 71 now an isolated  modern tourist trap. A place where you can get away from the modern age of the internet, the smart phone, & settle down for a 'real West' experience. Brimstone has quite the history at my table top.  But a plane crash interrupts the peaceful goings on as assimilations begin. The Party (from the Party science fiction/super hero books ) is  a quisi secret military origanization has sent in its operatives to neutralize the alien horrors before they spread. 

This time the PC's are in for the fight of their lives as a 'Thing' has been busy on a small ranch just outside of town. Thanks to David Baymiller's OSR libary all of the heavy lifting has been done for me with some fantastic John Carpenter's Thing From Another World OSR stats right here. 

Basically we're going back to basics here using some of the ideas from the old Dark Horse Thing From Another World comicbooks.  The isolation & dangerous proto Lovecraftian atmopshere of the location will add to tonight's event. 

Strange lights have been seen over Brimstone as certain officials who are a part of 'the Party's' psychic division have been having strange vistions & dreams about the tourist trap town. There are a couple of reasons to go in this direction:

1. Super fast set up & run time for this mini adventure. 
2. The PC's are entirely expendable any living will be rotated into another adventure. 
3. Perfect excuse to use Tim Brannan's Witch links
4. Speed of execution 
5. Changing nature of the monster.
6. Another excuse to abuse Brimstone as a location of terror. 

Hidden Lovecraftian Connections Within C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan By Harold Johnson & Jeff R. Leason

So last night I was watching John Carpenter's The Thing with my dad for the thirteenth billionth time. I'm a 'Thing head' one of those fans obsessed by the film in all of its aspects. But especially its connection with The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. Say what?! Which was the reaction of a friend of mine on the phone when we were talking about the adventure. 
 

"The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan was originally printed for the 1979 Origins International Game Expo,^[2] the module was made available to the general public in 1980. The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan is an adventure module for the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy role-playing game, set in the World of Greyhawk campaign setting for use with the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules. It is the first in the C-series of modules, a set of unrelated adventures originally designed for competitive play, with the C representing the first letter in the word competition"  It was originally written by Harold Johnson,  &  Jeff R. Leason. 

The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan is one of those module that I've used in the past with great effect, it introduced the ancient Olman people of Greyhawk, based on the Aztec, Mayan, and Toltec peoples of Earth. Yeah except I didn't place module on Greyhawk at all. Last year I ran the module for Steve & his players with Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea first edition on Mars or more specifically my version of 'Old Mars' as part of a hidden jungle oasis near the poles. Why? Because the hidden shrine and its contents are a part of a space craft that crashed on Mars a hundred thousand years ago. There's a room within the adventure that explains this, the following commentary comes from the official Wizards of the Coast entry;"There's also a peculiar connection in C1 to a later Greyhawk adventure. Room 19 of "Shrine" contains a figurine of a spaceship called the "II-Nedraw." Since the ship that crashed in S3: "Expedition to Barrier Peaks" (1980) was based on the Warden from Metamorphosis Alpha (1976), this could suggest a connection between that spaceship and the Tamoachan ruins. But it's probably just a fun easter egg." Remember just a few days ago I talked about Dave Arneson's City of the Gods & Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.


Well 'The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan' also was the first appearance of the gibbering mouther & just this morning I was looking through my table top copy of Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea and look what I read on their version of the gibbering mouther. Its now a degenerate form of shoggoth. Yeah that doesn't prove jack?!

Well the shoggoths were created by HP Lovecraft in his only science fiction novella At The Mountains of Madness. Well stealy eyed editor and sci fi guru John W. Campbell created not only the Thing From Another World with its shape shifting alien but predecessor story called 'The Brain Stealers from Mars.' “The Brain-Stealers of Mars” (1936) by science fiction editor John W. Campbell Jr. &  illustrated by pulp artist Alex Schomburg.I became aware of the story in its reprinted form from the 1952 issue of Wonder Story Annual magazine. I begged my adopted uncle for a copy of it & on my 14th birthday I got it.So after the adventurers  in 'the Brain stealers of Mars' finish off their proto shaggoth enemies & recover the technologies left behind by the Stealers creators.  By placing the shrine on Mars the three angle connection between Earth,Mars, & the Mountains of Madness made things very interesting. The players immediately started talking about Aztec style dimensional gate ways & quoting John Carpenter's Thing.


There's more connections when we bring in Clark Ashton Smith whose god Ubbo-Sathla was used by the Elder Things as the basis for all life on Earth either as a joke or as mere fodder.


'There, in the grey beginning of Earth, the formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla reposed amid the slime and the vapors. Headless, without organs or members, it sloughed from its oozy sides, in a slow, ceaseless wave, the amoebic forms that were the archetypes of earthly life. Horrible it was, if there had been aught to apprehend the horror; and loathsome, if there had been any to feel loathing. About it, prone or tilted in the mire, there lay the mighty tablets of star-quarried stone that were writ with the inconceivable wisdom of the pre-mundane gods.
—Clark Ashton Smith, Ubbo-Sathla'
The connections don't stop there. The adventurers noted a map from the city Igarth from Mar's old  quarter & a statue of the alien Martian Old One Vulthoom within the temple complex. All of this connects back to 'Old Earth' where the Hyperboreans & Mount Voormithadreth once again looms on the horizon of the old planet. Could the same thing be happening below the red sands where the dweller lying in wait on Mars in the underground city of Ravormos is only bidding its time.  There could be far more menaces waiting in the various hidden rooms of  'The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan' to be fleshed out by the dungeon master then the players have a clue of!

OSR Campaign Commentary - Reel II - The Tracks Across The Sands of Mars - A Free OSR Download “The Brain-Stealers of Mars” By John W. Campbell Jr.

“Penton and Blake find Mars a pleasant place to be— 
until they run afoul of the thushol, which can imitate anything!”
“The Brain-Stealers of Mars” (1936) by science fiction editor John W. Campbell Jr. &  illustrated by pulp artist Alex Schomburg. This is the precursor to the Campbell's Who Goes There! & has many of the fantastic elements of that novella plus more. I became aware of the story in its reprinted form from the 1952 issue of Wonder Story Annual magazine. I begged my adopted uncle for a copy of it & on my 14th birthday I got it. I've been a pulp head even before owning this piece of pulp history but this is a great space ripper of an issue as my uncle used to say. Alright this a great story for DM's who want to use a solid  old school adventure encounter for their science fantasy campaigns. A quick note John W.Campbell Jr. was a crack science fiction editor but a lightning rod of controversy.


This is the first of the Planeteers series of stories which is perfect fodder for a dungeon master looking for a template of a pulp space crew of adventurers. According to the TV trope website the Planeteers series was:

"Series of five science-fiction short stories by John W. Campbell, published in Thrilling Wonder Stories between 1936 and 1938, and collected in book form in 1966 as The Planeteers.

Ted Penton and Rod Blake have fled Earth in their nuclear-powered spaceship, the Ion, after a mishap involving their illegal research on atomic power (it involved destroying 300 square miles of Europe in an atomic explosion). Since nobody else on Earth is willing to use atomic power, nobody can catch up with them; and so while their lawyers try to sort things out on Earth, Penton and Blake bide their time exploring the Solar System and having adventures.We first meet up with our heroes on Mars, where they encounter centaurs and parasitic shapeshifters. Penton learns telepathy from the centaurs, which will prove useful in future dealings with intelligent aliens. After Mars, the pair proceed towards the outer system, where they start a revolution, fight blob monsters, learn alien languages, encounter high gravity and extreme cold, solve problems with the power of chemistry, etc."

This is an interesting story because not only do you get a great background piece for pulp adventurers but you also get a symbiotic relationship between two species. The proto shoggoth thushol are incredibly dangerous  but also the fact that their alien centaur neighbors have a strange relationship with them. Its almost as if the species were engineered that way.



You Can Download “The Brain-Stealers of Mars” Here


Also note that the centaur like race teaches one of the heroes a few levels of Mentalist ala Warriors of the Red Planet. There are some really unique things about the thushol, the monster doesn't seem done somehow as if its a monster that's a prototype creature although it reminds me a lot in some ways as a Gibbering Mouther. Another shoggoth variation if there ever was one. The monster that appears in 'The Brain Stealers of Mars' is most definitely a protoshoggoth creature. I think that the central Martian location described in the story is an elder thing spawning lab and research facility. A very dangerous adventure location that is clearly in some hidden valley around the Martian poles.



Just as the characters in “The Brain-Stealers of Mars” liberate a number of alien technologies. The characters in Who Goes There do something very similar when they go to finish the Blair thing.
"
Afterwards the trio discover that the Thing was dangerously close to finishing construction of an atomic-powered anti-gravity device that would have allowed it to escape to the outside world.

"No, by the grace of God, who evidently does hear very well, even down here, and the margin of half an hour, we keep our world, and the planets of the system too. Anti-gravity, you know, and atomic power. Because They came from another sun, a star beyond the stars. They came from a world with a bluer sun.""

There was another shape shifting dimensional jumping alien inspired by Who Goes There by Canadian-American writer A. E. van Vogt called The Vault of the Beast. A treasure vault on Mars (once again there's that classic pulp Mars connection);"Beings from another dimension have sent a living plastic "robot" to Earth to find the "greatest mathematical mind in the Solar System," and get that person to open a vault on Mars, containing one of the race of its creators. It is able to imitate any form of matter, and to tap the thoughts of the being it duplicates. The creature kills its way to one man, Jim Brender, who it believes is the man. The creature, in the form of another man, reveals that the Martian vault was built by the Ancient Martians, made up of an 'ultimate metal'. The vault is known as the "Tower of the Beast", located in a buried Martian city. It says that the key to opening it is 'factoring the ultimate prime number'."


You can Read Vault of the Beast Right Here

Vault of the Beast is a perfect set up for an old school adventure with some very strange roots in Mathematics & science fantasy. The other dimensional elder thing or Yithians who control the shapeshifting shaggoth menace are memorable & make excellent NPC's.

 So is this the only connection with the pulpy roots of the alien from John Carpenter's The Thing or John W. Campbell Jr.'s Who Goes There? Umm not exactly. " In 2006 Dark Horse Comics released a pre-painted snap together model kit of the alien as described in the original short story. It was sculpted and painted by Andrea Von Sholly. The model was unlicensed and was simply titled 'The Space Thing'"
A better description appears on the Entertainment Earth website;"The Space Thing Figure. Pleased to meet you earthling, I do not come in peace. This pre-painted figure stands 4 1/2-inches tall and is easy to pop together with a great-looking, Aurora-inspired display box.

Designed by Pete Von Sholly, this monster is his conception of John W. Campbell's famous shape-changing alien from the legendary story called Who Goes There?. He designed the creature during a fact-finding research junket to Alpha Centauri, and, thanks to his new 4-D camera, was able to incorporate details not found in our solar system. Pete's talented wife, Andrea, sculpted and painted the mode."

Ten Ways To Use The Brain Stealers Of Mars For Your Old School Campaigns 

1. The locations detailed in the story are not the only Martian adventure  locations where
   the proto shoggoth thushol might be located there could me more facilities scattered throughout the solar system & beyond. 
2. There is an echoing use of alien telepathy throughout the science fantasy series the Planeteers. This makes the mentalist class an essential thing when dealing with these types of aliens and seems to be a design conceit. This is something very similar to Larry Niven's Slaver race which has connections to the Elder Things and the Cthulhu mythos in his Known Space series. Could there be a Hyperborea connection? I think so.
3.  The proto shoggoth thushol might appear in other forms in the Outer Worlds such as Jupiter's moons or near Saturn. They seem right at home in these worlds that Clark Ashton Smith talked about. 
4. Some of the super science artifacts described in The Brain Stealers of Mars seem like their straight out of Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea. Could there be more of these connections in your campaigns? 
5. The proto shoggoth thushol make perfect guardians for science fantasy ruins & facilities and might hold certain super science treasure vaults hostage. 
6. Are there other powers holding sway over the places where the
   thushol were developed? Ancient curses similar to some of the alien weirdness we've seen in C.L. Moore's North West Smith series? An adventure hook if there ever was one! 
7. There are a number of transcosmic alien presences in the Planeteer stories. Could these actually be The Great Race of Yith in disguise keeping tabs on a wide variety of eras? 
8. The proto shoggoth thushol seem almost a not fully developed weapons system or defense could these monsters be some of the cannon fodder used in the wars of the Elder Things against their enemies? I think so. 
9. There seems to be a sense of pure menace that hovers over these stories & a sense of the forbidden. Are there other far more hostile lifeforms waiting for PCs to discover? 
10. The Brain Stealers has quite a bit to offer if a DM is willing to look into its weirdness and danger. Remember man is the warmest place to hide.

OSR Commentary- Patterns In The Snow The Horrors of The Shoggoth Legacy In Old School Campaigns

"The steady trend down the ages was from water to land; a movement encouraged by the rise of new land masses, though the ocean was never wholly deserted. Another cause of the landward movement was the new difficulty in breeding and managing the shoggoths upon which successful sea-life depended. With the march of time, as the sculptures sadly confessed, the art of creating new life from inorganic matter had been lost; so that the Old Ones had to depend on the moulding of forms already in existence. On land the great reptiles proved highly tractable; but the shoggoths of the sea, reproducing by fission and acquiring a dangerous degree of accidental intelligence, presented for a time a formidable problem.
They had always been controlled through the hypnotic suggestion of the Old Ones, and had modelled their tough plasticity into various useful temporary limbs and organs; but now their self-modelling powers were sometimes exercised independently, and in various imitative forms implanted by past suggestion. They had, it seems, developed a semi-stable brain whose separate and occasionally stubborn volition echoed the will of the Old Ones without always obeying it. Sculptured images of these shoggoths filled Danforth and me with horror and loathing. They were normally shapeless entities composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles; and each averaged about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. They had, however, a constantly shifting shape and volume; throwing out temporary developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing, and speech in imitation of their masters, either spontaneously or according to suggestion.
They seem to have become peculiarly intractable toward the middle of the Permian age, perhaps 150 million years ago, when a veritable war of re-subjugation was waged upon them by the marine Old Ones. Pictures of this war, and of the headless, slime-coated fashion in which the shoggoths typically left their slain victims, held a marvellously fearsome quality despite the intervening abyss of untold ages. The Old Ones had used curious weapons of molecular disturbance against the rebel entities, and in the end had achieved a complete victory. Thereafter the sculptures shewed a period in which shoggoths were tamed and broken by armed Old Ones as the wild horses of the American west were tamed by cowboys. Though during the rebellion the shoggoths had shewn an ability to live out of water, this transition was not encouraged; since their usefulness on land would hardly have been commensurate with the trouble of their management."
HP Lovecraft At The Mountains of Madness

Looking back through the annals of Weird Tales & pulp science fiction its not hard to see the connection between John Carpenter's The Thing & HP Lovecraft's novella  At The Mountains of Madness. But there are far deeper connections here then at first meets the eye.

There have been suggestions that 'The Thing' is in fact an advanced form of shoggoth. The Thing has some similarities to the shoggoths from At the Mountains of Madness, which Lovecraft  described as "Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes". Another thing about the shoggoths is the fact that they have been growing more intelligent as time has gone on. So could the thing actually be an advanced weaponized shoggoth that was simply returning home over 100,000 years ago? I think so. John Carpenter's The Thing was a pretty faithful adaptation  to John W. Campbell Jr.'s Who Goes There?. The Thing seems to have had an agenda having crashed the saucer in the opening credits. Could it have been reacting to a homing instinct built into its design by its creators? I think so but 1982 wasn't the only brush that the Earth had with a shape shifting alien species.

In 1958 in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, a protoplasmic alien blob landed in a meteor and began a reign of terror happens again in 1972 in a different part of the United States. But what exactly is the Blob? Well there is fan speculation that the blob is in fact a form of a proto shoggoth. A prototype of  Elder Thing weapons system that has come back from deep orbit. Although it lacks the intelligence of the Thing, the blob is a different subspecies of shoggoth.The blob is an absorber where in the 'the thing is a copycat or imitator organism. In other words the blob is a proto shoggoth or a completely different configuration of the shoggoth organism.
"He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things about “the black pit”, “the carven rim”, “the proto-shoggoths”, “the windowless solids with five dimensions”, “the nameless cylinder”, “the elder pharos”, “Yog-Sothoth”, “the primal white jelly”, “the colour out of space”, “the wings”, “the eyes in darkness”, “the moon-ladder”, “the original, the eternal, the undying”, and other bizarre conceptions"
HP Lovecraft At The Mountains of Madness.

In 1951  a United States Air Force crew is dispatched from Anchorage, Alaska at the request of Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite), the chief scientist of a North Pole scientific outpost.


At first Howard Hawks The Thing From Another World doesn't seem like a likely candidate to include here. But the alien carrot as its described in the film has many of the characteristics of the Elder Things. The alien of this film has many of the same same features as the Elder Things in humanoid form:

1. The alien is humanoid but bears many of the characteristics of mankind. Its biology is vastly different then our own having many of the characteristics of plants. This is very similar to the Elder Thing's make up.
2. Its an incredibly patient organism & spends its time picking off crew members. Also its an organism that seems to be yet another variation of the profile we've seen before.
    

Its concerned with food, shelter, and reproduction. Also its another alien organism with a grasp of advanced alien technologies & a tremendous agenda for Earth. So what does this mean? The Howard Hawk's alien monster could be another product of Elder Thing radical biological genetic engineering. Surely, this radical fan theory violates the shoggoth/At The Mountains of Madness. Not at all this alien might be an advanced shoggoth entity prototype.


So what does this all have to do Dungeons & Dragons & Swords & Sorcery? The fact is that in Deities & Demigods Shoggoth's entry there's a clue about the D&D connection. It is stated that Shoggoths are often found in out deserted ruins &  areas often helping other Mythos races. The Elder Things prints are still found in a wide variety of places where their technologies are still in place. This goes back all the way to the ancient marshes of Mars as told in John W. Campbell's Brain Stealers of Mars.


In D&D terms the Elder Thing's bio- technological legacy using Shoggoth tissues are evident all around certain dungeon & ruin locations. 


These shoggoth based monsters  include the gelatinous cube, doppelganger, mimics, trappers, lurker above,  a wide variety of oozes, jellies, including the infamous Green Slime, and many more. All of which are simply minor applications of the advanced biological mastery of the elder thing race. The spread of these creatures comes from certain cults & monsters as well as the preprogrammed behavior of the shoggoths themselves. Adventurers should be ware of the lower levels of certain dungeon locations.

"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.

— H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness"

Ultimately the source of all of this is of course  Clark Ashton Smith's ' Ubbo-Sathla. Ubbo-Sathla ("The Unbegotten Source", "The Demiurge") or he who dwells in Y'quaa from which the dire arts of the Elder Things created the shoggoths themselves. This Old One is directly connected to  Abhoth ("The Source of Uncleanliness") for they are one in the same.


"There, in the grey beginning of Earth, the formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla reposed amid the slime and the vapors. Headless, without organs or members, it sloughed from its oozy sides, in a slow, ceaseless wave, the amoebic forms that were the archetypes of earthly life. Horrible it was, if there had been aught to apprehend the horror; and loathsome, if there had been any to feel loathing. About it, prone or tilted in the mire, there lay the mighty tablets of star-quarried stone that were writ with the inconceivable wisdom of the pre-mundane gods.
—Clark Ashton Smith, Ubbo-Sathla"

There is an indication among Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith fans that many of these shoggoth based life forms ultimately no matter how intelligent or advanced must return to the original source of their creation at some point in their life cycle. This might have been a built in biological instinctive safety feature or a preprogrammed behavior. Or simply a flaw in the design that not even  the elder things could remove. Regardless this life forms and its attendant side creatures are ultimately some of the most dangerous horrors adventurers will encounter both in the dungeons and in ruins!


Ten Ways To Use The Shoggoth Legacy In D&D & Retroclone Adventures

1. If all of these various traditional dungeon monsters have their basis in shoggoth tissues then it might indicate that there is a telepathic thread running through all of them enabling someone or something to use these monsters as a complex spy or communication network across time & space. 
2.  Ubbo-Sathla is an incredibly potent Lovecraftian entity with a myriad of worshipers and cults that might appear across the dimensions and planes. If ultimately it has its own agenda then entire planets could be in incredible danger. 
3. Shoggoth based life forms might appear in any epoch or era and might be a primary foe in a post apocalyptic or other planetary location such as a failed interstellar colony world. 
4. The monsters & life forms we've seen could only be the tip of the tendril DM's should create their own versions of these classics 
5. Could the elder things return to take charge of their renegade creations?  There have been rumblings among certain D&D Lovecraftian fans that PC could be in real trouble if this was to happen. 
6.  Could the blob simply be a worker proto-shoggoth run amok? What would the long term conditions be of such a world where this has happened?
7.  DM's shouldn't be afraid to create entire ecological systems in dungeons based around one shoggoth life form to give a base line to players as to how powerful one of these entities might become.
8.  Why are shoggoths helping cults of Mythos worshipers what's in it for them? Whose agenda are they really furthering? 
9. Powerful shoggoths might be worshiped or rule  as gods or demons in their own right. Could  Juiblex of  AD&D fame simply be a powerful primorial shoggoth that has become a demonlord countless eons ago? 
10. What is the ultimate goal of the shoggoths & what will happen to a campaign world when these things come from out of the snows?!  

The Miller Chronicles - 'Who Goes There?' By John Campell And Beyond For Your Old School Campaigns

David Bay Miller has been a friend of mine for a few years in the OSR community and last night adapted The John Carpenter Version of one of my all time favorite films, 'The Thing From Another World' as an OD&D style monster with all of the powers and insights into the classic monster. Right over HERE
But there are more permutations to this alien monster then we've simply seen.
According to Wiki : 

Who Goes There? is a science fiction novella by John W. Campbell, Jr., written under the pen name Don A. Stuart. It was first published in the August 1938 Astounding Science-Fiction.

In 1973 the story was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the finest science fiction novellas ever written. It was published with the other top vote-getters in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two.

The novella has been adapted three times as a motion picture: the first in 1951 as The Thing from Another World; the second in 1972 as Horror Express; the third in 1982 as The Thing directed by John Carpenter;^[1] and most recently as a prequel to the Carpenter version, also titled The Thing, released in 2011.

But the  John W. Campbell, Jr novella goes into even more detail and background on the 'Thing' itself. You can read that right over HERE.

 The PC's are going to have to be very,very, well prepared to deal with an entity of this magnitude. To get into the kind of scale and deal with the issues of this creature, we are going to have to look back into the 1976 issue of Starscream magazine. A classic sci fi comic series which really adapted all of the ins and outs of Campbell's story. 

StarStream was a very cool and interesting comic that cost .79 cents and was a square bound anthology of classic science fiction tales. I haven't got this comic anymore, it burned up in an apartment fire ages ago. But I do have the tale on tap for your  perusal thanks to the Diversions of the Groovy Kind Web blog.
Right over HERE

All of the classic Starstream issues were collected into the classic Questar Illustrated Science Fiction Classics now available on Amazon right HERE

Right away we notice the differences between Campbell's classic and the film adaptation of the story. The comic captures one of the differences right away, the 'Thing's slight telepathic or psychic ability to scan the minds of its prey. If you haven't read the Campbell novella go do so now,please because there's a major spoiler ahead
Even more the 'Thing' in the Campbell original novella has the ability to cobble high tech super science items from ordinary items. According to the original novella,according to wiki: 

When they reach Blair's cabin they discover he is a Thing. They realize that it has been left to its own devices for a week, coming and going as it pleased, able to squeeze under doors by transforming itself. With the creatures inside the base destroyed, McReady and two others enter the cabin to kill the Thing that was once Blair. McReady systematically forces it out into the snow and methodically destroys it with a blowtorch. Afterwards the trio discover that the Thing was dangerously close to finishing construction of an atomic-powered anti-gravity device that would have allowed it to escape to the outside world.

"No, by the grace of God, who evidently does hear very well, even down here, and the margin of half an hour, we keep our world, and the planets of the system too. Anti-gravity, you know, and atomic power. Because They came from another sun, a star beyond the stars. They came from a world with a bluer sun."

 But these are not the only 'things' that are here among us. There's a more highly evolved version of the species that was encountered by Professor Alexander Saxton (Christopher Lee), a renowned British anthropologist, from his expedition in Manchuria in 1906. This was chronicled in the wonderful PD movie, Horror Express a favorite film of mine. The film opens with the following narrative: 

"The following report to the Royal Geological Society by the undersigned Alexander Saxton is a true and faithful account of the events that befell the society's expedition in Manchuria. As the leader of the expedition, I must accept the responsibility for its ending in disaster. But I will leave, to the judgement of the honorable members, the decision as to where the blame for the catastrophe lies..."

You can watch the film for yourself, below. Basically Saxton finds what he thinks is a missing link in a cave in Manchuria and tries to bring it back with him to be examined. He believes it to be a fossil. 

The monster in Horror Express is a 'Thing' right out of Campbell's novella and its been among us since the beginning  of the dinosaurs as it explains to Saxton. The monster in D&D terms is in the body of a Yeti or a Voormis.

The thing is able to psychically assault and boil the minds of its victims as it steals their essence, it is able to do this numerous times a day. The victim must save vs death or die as their minds and souls are absorbed by the monster. It gains 3 points of their intelligence and wisdom from their essence. 

Three times per week this 'thing' may body jump as some of its alien material and soul stuff is passed onto its victim who must save vs death or have their souls obliterated as this alien horror possesses them. 

Once per week it may animate its victims as undead psychic puppet parodies of themselves. These monsters are merely shells filled with negative planar energies who can not see and only attack by the senses of smell and hearing. They're eyes and brains are boiled from the psychic attack of the monster.
As its intelligence is raised the monster will try and find a means off planet, as its ability to cobble together low tech items into higher technologies kicks in.
These horrors are partly of an alien life essence and cell material &  they are also very dangerous to encounter. These things have been moving among our societies since before the fall of Hyperborea and Atlantis.
Even eons before the extinction of the dinosaurs.




I personally think that these alien monsters were creations of the Elder Things from HP Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness from the god essence beneath the ice millions of years ago. By instinct and some alien drive they are drawn back to the former dwelling places of their alien masters for unknown purposes.




These alien horrors should not be used lightly on a party of adventurers but the the truth is that they may be encountered literally in any time period of Earth's history or even in the depths of space or time. They're obvious connection to the Mythos is a plus and their a very flexible monster to use with high level parties. David did an excellent job of adapting the John Carpenter film and the prequels.