Nakimas, Elemental Spirit of the Hool Marshes
Date: Thu, August 16, 2007
Topic: Greyhawk Apocrypha


Nakimas, Elemental Spirit of the Hool Marshes is an AD&D Cthul-hool-ian interpretation of the foundational, yet until now undefined, creature from the canonically accepted module I7, Baltron’s Beacon.



Nakimas, Elemental Spirit of the Hool Marshes

FREQUENCY:  Unique
NO. APPEARING:  1
ARMOR CLASS:  -2 [1]
MOVE:  9”, See below
HIT DICE:  30 [1-20] 8 HP/HD
% IN LAIR:  100%
TREASURE TYPE:  Special
NO. OF ATTACKS:  2
DAMAGE/ATTACK:  5-50/5-50 [3-30/3-30]
SPECIAL ATTACKS:  See below
SPECIAL DEFENSE:  Immune to weakness, paralysis and charm
MAGIC RESISTANCE:  50%
INTELLIGENCE:  Average
ALIGNMENT:  CE (N)
SIZE:  L (20’ tall [15’ tall] and twice as wide)
PSIONIC ABILITY:  Nil
ATTACK/DEFENSE MODES:  Nil
LEVEL/X.P. VALUE:  Special

Why does a green light shine heavenward from the ruins of a forsaken Keoish border keep deep in the Hool Marshes?  What could have caused such a luminescent aberration whose essence would melt away the very years of your life?  Stories of demi-gods in bondage are not unfamiliar to scholars of the Flanaess, but few have heard this one.

Nakimas, the great elemental spirit of the Hool Marshes, is a somnolent (for now) uber-shoggoth and nascent demi-god.  Long before life as it is now known developed on Oerth, the Elder Elemental Gods descended from the stars and bred shoggoths as mindless beasts of burden in the oceanic depths.  Shoggoths are great protoplasmic masses; multi-cellular creatures, able to mold their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs, making them highly useful as slaves.  Over time, however, they developed the ability to think for themselves and eventually won their independence from their cruel overlords.   Of the shoggoths, it is known that Nakimas at least still exists, and it has grown ever more intelligent, massive and powerful over time.

Long ago, Nakimas crawled out of the depths of the oceans and made its home in the Hool Marshes.  Some even say it created the Hool Marshes for its own repose, and long has it rested.  But recently, over the last few centuries as powerful forces have invaded the Marshes, it has been aroused and taken a modicum of interest in its surroundings.  It is now worshipped by at least one tribe of bullywugs, and indirectly by thousands of lizardmen through its works; most particularly the green light shining eternally skyward known to humans as Baltron’s Beacon.

With that worship it has acquired the beginnings of divine power.  Its ethos is simple:  atonement with the marshes.  But it has taken pleasure in the notion that it is drawing worshipers away from the principal god of bullywugs, the great bloated, intoxicated, slumbering bullfrog demon-god Ramenos, as that being reminds Nakimas of one of its masters of old, the Elder Elemental God Tsathoggua, who appears somewhat as a sleepy black toad.  The recent appearance of the Cult of Wastri in the Hool Marshes at the Temple of the Gaping Maw, which now seeks to dominate the bullywugs of the Marshes, has complicated matters and threatens the arousal of further interest of, and action by, Nakimas.

In its true form, Nakimas appears as all shaggoths, a shapeless congerie of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light.  It resembles a giant amoeba, able to form almost any shape out of its near-transparent body, including all manner of appendages, or whatever is needed at the moment.  When a rare encounter takes place, it usually manifest but a small portion of itself arising from the Marshes as but a single eyestalk or a tentacle or two, as it has been well accustomed to keeping its great mass diffused throughout the thousands of square miles of its murky home, the entire Hool Marshes.

Nakimas may remain partially diffused and still appear as massive as a shoggoth [statistics presented in brackets], growing ever larger with pulsating bubbles to (or shrinking from) such size anywhere in the Marshes within as many rounds as it has hit dice, up to twenty.  It is not intelligent enough to manifest as more than one creature, yet.  Only once in recent centuries has it manifested in its full uber-strength, gathering itself fully from all reaches of the Marshes, when the Mage Baltron of Linth disastrously attempted to summon and enslave it once again.  In that form alone it is able to use a power to alter reality, with its now powerful and willful imagination, once per turn as the spell.  It is not capable of overly complex alterations, though any are certain appear nightmarish or insane.  In any form, at will it can telepathically command (1 round, no saving throw), telepathically comprehend and speak languages, detect alignment (no error and no concealment), geas, and have true seeing.  Occupying all portions of the Hool Marshes, it is capable of knowing all its secrets, and can claim any treasure lost or possessed therein, though it has no desire for possessions itself.

Nakimas is specifically mentioned in the Necronomicon of Al-'Uzzâ, and it may be that through that tome Baltron was able to discover its existence.  By those few who are aware of such horrors, it is thought that Nakimas, or perhaps another shoggoth, was the inspiration for the Olman creation of the slave race of gibbering mouther.  However, even the greatest of those creatures, the so called Eye God, Xuxeteanlahucuxolazapaminaco, while far more active, and thus destructive, pales in comparison to the horrific magnitude of Nakimas the Elemental Spirit of the Hool Marshes.

Note:  Some descriptive texts for shaggoths, because of their quality which would be lost with paraphrase, was taken directly from the first two sources.  Sources:  “At the Mountains of Madness” by H.P. Lovecraft; Cthulhu Mythos in Dieties & Demigods; http://www.netherreal.de/library/lex_entry/s1.htm#Shoggoth; I7, Baltron's Beacon; Living Greyhawk Journal 1, p.18, “The Kingdom of Keoland”; and Oerth Journal 12, discussing the Elder Elemental Gods; The History of The Necronomicon in the Flanaess (Part One), by grodog at www.canonfire.com; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsathoggua; Keoish Intelligence Report from the Hold of the Sea Princes by Osmund-Davizid at www.canonfire.com.






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