Gug

“It was a paw, fully two feet and a half across, and equipped with formidable talons. After it came another paw, and after that a great black-furred arm to which both of the paws were attached by short forearms. Then two pink eyes shone, and the head of the awakened gug sentry, large as a barrel, wobbled into view. The eyes jutted two inches from each side, shaded by bony protuberances overgrown with coarse hairs. But the head was chiefly terrible because of the mouth. That mouth had great yellow fangs and ran from the top to the bottom of the head, opening vertically instead of horizontally.”
— HPL , The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

A Gug is a species of shaggy cannibal giant, restricted to life underground by a curse of the Great Ones. From each of its black-furred arms spout two forepaws, equipped with dreadful talons. Its legs and feet are bird- or dinosaur-like, and patches of greasy black fur cover its body. The face of a Gug is especially terrible, with bulging pink eyes set on bony swellings and a ghastly fanged mouth splitting the head vertically. Voiceless, the thing communicates by facial expressions and gesture.

Basic Information

Growth Rate & Stages

These giants superstitiously avoid Ghouls (who regularly visit Gug graveyards), feeding primarily on Ghasts which they hunt down in the lightless Vaults of Zin. Gugs have peculiar and despicable reproductive practices; see Treer (1984) for particulars. Most Gugs live in a horrible walled kingdom-city where Cyclopean round towers soar endlessly into the black air overhead. Each tower has a single black portal, thirty feet high. Rough stone paves the whole of the city (Carter, 1927). At the city's center is the sign of Koth, on a great central tower leading to the surface of the Dreamlands. No day or night exists in the twilight realm, and a Gug usually sleeps immediately after gorging on loathsome provender: just after general feast-time may be the bets time to penetrate this place. Ghast raiders, occasionally attacking them, may imperil researchers.