OSR, Stephen King, and giant cephalopods

Stephen King's 150 page novella "The Mist" truly evokes the "drugged thanatotic avidity" his characters experience as they confront the giant tentacled creatures lurking in the mist.

The OSE monster manual describes "Octopus, Giant" as "Giant, eight-armed cephalopods" that "lurk in coastal waters, close to settlements." A great scene in King's novella is when the story pulls you in, amidst them.

"A tentacled arm came over the far tip of the concrete loading platform and grabbed Norm around the calf. My mouth dropped wide open...The tentacle tapered from a thickness of a foot - the size of a grass snake - at the point where it had wrapped itself around Norm's lower leg to a thickness of maybe four or five feet where it disappeared into the mist...And there were rows of suckers on the underside, they were moving and writhing like hundreds of small puckered mouths."

It was a bad situation.

"Norm looked down. He saw what had him. His eyes bulged. 'Get it off me. Hey get it off me. Christ Jesus, get this fricking thing of me.'"

If you're like me - drugged, thanatotic, avid - you're compelled to see more.The scene continues:

"Norm grabbed the bottom edge of the loading dock door and yanked himself back in. The tentacle seemed to bulge, the way your arm will when you flex it. Norm was yanked back against the corrugated steel door-his head clanged against it. The tentacle bulged more...."

King's "The Mist" is a fun, easy read. It got me thinking about mist flowing over land, the OSE, 8 hit die giant octopus with 8 tentacles, each doing 1d3 damage and constricting for 1d3 more per round until severed. And that bite out there, in the forest of those writhing arms, somewhere.

Thanks for reading.



 

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