Wait, sorry, wrong link. My bad.
In D&D 3.5, skum were the piscine servitors of the
aboleths. They perform the same
role in Pathfinder’s Golarion, but there they have more agency—as the aberrant
fish lords have turned inward, they have left the skum more and more to their
own devices.
Of course, you don’t even need the aboleths to use skum in
your campaign; they’re good amphibious adversaries no matter what. And their need for human sexual
partners to reproduce automatically brings them into conflict with surface
civilizations. Which means what
starts out as an ordinary kidnapping scenario can take a very dark turn (and an
especially Lovecraftian one) once your PCs discover that skum are involved.
The skum of Glassmere
inherited the worship of the Dark Destroyers from their now-deposed aboleth
masters. The irony of subterranean
creatures that have never seen the stars worshipping Powers from beyond them is
not lost on the fish-men. To remedy
this, Glassmere skum make an annual pilgrimage to the surface to gaze upon the
blackness of space. Along the way
they raid human and svirfneblin settlements for masterwork weapons and breeding
stock.
A ceratioidi grande
dame of crime has found a new way to recruit heavies into her organization:
She implants the parasitic males under the skin of human “recruits”—typically
fascinated captives—before caging and lowering them into nutrient-rich
baths. The resultant skum provide compliant
muscle for the fishy crime family’s more valued ceratioidi members, who have
begun to spread their operations through the Bog Cities of Least Coast.
Despite the South
having won both the American Civil War in 1863 and the Couatl Rebellion of
1877, the Underground Railroad has endured, with gnome rebels smuggling human
and dwarven slaves North year after year.
Now though, the Railroad has broken down. Slaves and their conductors have started to go missing, and
the disappearances seem linked to the glum, watery-eyed inhabitants of a sleepy
Massachusetts town known as Innsmouth.
—Pathfinder Bestiary
253
Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’s Neonomicon is a decent cheat
sheet for a Lovecraftian skum adventure.
Be warned, though: He explicitly set out to put Lovecraft’s racism and
sexual discomfort on the surface, and he delivered.
Also: parasitic male anglerfish!
Finally: Can you find skum on plateaus? How about lakes of fire?
Lovecraftian Pathfinder Alternate History Civil War...
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