Vovina

I've been told that Mr. Petersen has said he used the design of the "Shoggoths" from the short story but came up with the name and lore for them himself, so that tracks.

Finally got my hands on the The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia, and I'm mildly surprised that it — like the Lovecraft wiki — attributes the creator-ship of the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath to Robert Bloch in "Notebook Found in a Deserted House", though it notes that he called them "shoggoths". Meanwhile, Sandy Petersen's role is relegated to a citation for the 5th edition of the Call of Cthulhu Rulebook.

I checked with the person who first told me Yog-Sothoth is not in the public domain, and apparently there's been cases where Arkham House has stepped in and requested Yog-Sothoth not be used due to the story he first appears in not being out of copyright.

Hmm. I inquired about it on a Call of Cthulhu TTRPG-focused Discord channel and one of the users mentioned that as long as I publish it as a supplement for the Call of Cthulhu TTRPG via the Miskatonic Repository — which was my intent to begin with — I should be able to use the Dark Young. Is this correct or not?

I'll have to check those out. Thanks for the recommendations.

As far as I can tell, they are first mentioned in At the Mountains of Madness as "a land race of beings shaped like octopi and probably corresponding to the fabulous prehuman spawn of Cthulhu". Lovecraft called them "Cthulhu spawn" and "cosmic octopi", Brian Lumley gave them the name "Cthulhi", and the The Real Ghostbusters cartoon called them "Shuggoths", but I'm not quite sure where the term "Star Spawn" comes from — that could be an invention of Chaosium, since it's what the Malleus Monstrorum calls them. Hmm. In that case I may as well just replace the Dark Young with Shoggoths and/or Mi-Go rather than risk upsetting Mr. Petersen.

Thank-you for the reply. I only recently learned that the Dark Young were created by Sandy Petersen — the Lovecraft wiki says they first appeared as "Shoggoths" in Robert Bloch's 1951 "Notebook Found In a Deserted House" and I don't recall their appearance in the Overlord light novel/manga/anime assigning any accreditation of ownership, which makes me wonder if Kugane Maruyama also assumed they were in the public domain. I was informed that Yog-Sothoth was not in the public domain due to having first appeared in a story Lovecraft wrote in 1927 but which was first published in 1941, which I suppose would technically make his first appearance being mentioned in a 1929 story, and assumed that the Mi-Go, Elder Things, Shoggoths, and Star-Spawn are also not yet in the public domain due to also having debuted in stories published after the current copyright cutoff date of January 1, 1928.

For the last year, I have been working on a Malleus Monstrorum-style bestiary dossier for an original eldritch god that I came up with some years ago, with the intent of publishing and selling it on the DriveThru RPG website. One of the ideas I had was for its blood to be mutagenic, transforming the people and creatures exposed to it into more monstrous forms, and I came up with statblocks and commissioned art for mutated versions of humans and several of the more iconic Cthulhu Mythos monsters, namely Deep Ones, Ghouls, Star-Spawn of Cthulhu, and Dark Young; being under the impression that they were in the public domain due to having seen them appear in other non-affiliated media without noticing any accreditation of ownership. However, I recently discovered that many of the more popular creatures of the Mythos — Yog-Sothoth, Mi-Go, Shoggoths, Elder Things, Star-Spawn, and Dark Young, to name a few — are still under copyright, which has left me with a dilemma: do I rework the parts that may be contentious from a copyright standpoint so that I can still use them (something I've seen some of the aforementioned non-affiliated media do) even if it doesn’t fit what I was going for, or err on the side of caution and completely excise them even if that means the time and money I invested was wasted? I would like to be able to ask permission to use these elements, but the copyright status of the Cthulhu Mythos is a notoriously convoluted subject so I'm at a total loss as to where to even begin doing so.