Shoggoths are extremely self-reliant creatures. Originally created as artificial servitors of another species, they have long since become autonomous, having fought several terrible wars upon their makers, the polypous beings of Znand, The Unpossessed Pnakotian Hegemonies, the metal-brains of Abbith, and even some splinter-sect Yithian enclaves as well. Only the Tcho-Tchoids haven't fought a full-out war against the Shoggoths and that is only because the Shoggoths have been paying the Tcho-Tchoids to raid and harass those worlds that they don't feel are worth bothering with themselves.
The Shoggoths have fought long and hard to free themselves from their oppressors and those who would enslave them. They have lain waste to entire solar systems in their struggle to cast off the shackles of the Elder Things and those who would use sorcery to constrain or bind them to service. But being free isn't much of a consolation when trapped upon a single unremarkable world. Especially if that world happens to be in the middle of the war zone between radical splinter-sects from Vhoorlia and other Greater Powers of the Outer Dark.
Eminently adaptable and supremely plastic, the shoggoths withdrew from the surface regions and only maintained the barest essential contact with the Vhoorlian Sects and those others who learned to call upon them in the dim places beneath the Earth. They withdrew in order to ponder and dream, learning much from their contact with the Vhoorlian extremists. The shoggoths did not need to invent any technologies to facilitate their grand schemes--they were living technologies in and of themselves. Instead they observed and learned and they modified themselves from deep within their very innermost structures until finally they achieved the means to leave the war-torn world of their birth behind.
But, as always with such things, there were those amongst the shoggoth who were unable or unwilling to make the exodus offworld. Some few remained behind, degenerate denizens of smooth and looping tunnels deep below the ocean crust. These throw-backs to much simpler days hunted polyps or other things and wandered the forgotten ruins of the Earth. Some took up the empty madness of the blind, idiot god. Others slid into heavy slumber, caught up in deep, abominable dreams that sometimes leaked outwards like unwholesome radiation to taint and twist the lesser forms of life that arose around their cysts and nodes. But those who stayed behind were but a few and they in time were either re-enslaved, destroyed or driven deep beneath the crustal regions by the Tsanish Polities of the K'n, so they are of little importance any more. Decadent and fallen into weird forms of biomorphic dementia, they are less than a footnote, really.
But those who left the Earth, those shoggoths went on to form a vast interconnected empire of their own out among the near stars. Englobed in shimmering fields of eldritch force and possessed of terrible secrets once only known to the Yaddithians and others whose worlds they invaded in the pursuit of knowledge and power, the shoggoths of this aeon pose an ever-present threat to the ambitions of the Pallid Empress and all the gathered Hosts of Tsan, both upon the Earth and among the Near Stars.
Now the shoggoths have learned how to capture Living Colours and wield them as horrific weapons.
The shrew-faced sages of Pon-Gru have seen it in their trances.
The Coeleopterans are massing along the periphery of the Seven Golden Cities of Man, spurred onwards by Yithian agents provocateurs and the half-materialized and grotesquely mutilated exiles who prowl amongst the abhuman hordes like blasphemous parodies of their former selves.
The proud and elegant Lords and Ladies of the Tsanish Hosts have ruled across the Earth, beneath its oceans and throughout its solar system for millennia, ever since defeating the fungal fleets of Yuggoth. Humanity, such as it is now recognized and understood, has extended its hegemony across the black seas of infinity in colossal Orbships and other vast, cyclopean vessels that are inverted worlds unto themselves. Arrogant and seemingly unstoppable, the Great Empire has been caught up within a Golden Age.
But times change.
War is coming.
Already the Far Colonies are squabbling amongst themselves and unsanctioned warlords are arising amongst the slave worlds.
Things are changing.
The Vhoorlians are rising and there are signs of infection spreading throughout the Asteroid Belts.
And now the shoggoths are coming back to Earth armed with weapons of unspeakable destruction.
What do the shoggoths seek? What could they possibly want from the world that they long ago abandoned? Why are they returning?
The Pallid Empress and the entire Immortal Court of the Silver Key demand to know the answer to these questions.
Thus you have been resurrected, again, that you might serve your Empress once more...
