What Lovecraft inspired classes exist?

Question

Are there any classes that resemble an occultist of the Lovecraftian mythos, or have such a feeling, except the alienist and the flesh warper? The aberration blood feats are interesting but just give flavor; I am searching for something more solid, a base or prestige class.

Answer 1

The Lovecraftian feel is broader then most people think: You could easily have NPCs with the Dread Pirate PrC involved in your version of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. I also based this on what I could see appearing in Lovecraft's stories, rather then just Mythos type creatures (Thus degenerate humans and such are also fair game, as are charismatic cult leader types, etc). Howard, a good freind of Lovecraft's, also published sotries in the same vein, but a bit more hack and slash. I've denoted classes that would work well with his books.

The other idea is to take rules from a class, then rewrite the theme and feeling of it to be more lovecraftian: Example: Bear Warrior instead is embracing his Shoggoth heritage, and becomes more and more unatural as he goes up in levels.

However here are some which I could think would be useful or lend themselves to Lovecraftian work: Complete Adventurer: - Animal Lord (Sharklord, Apelord [Degenerate humans]) - Master of Many Forms (Change into Ooze and Abberations) - Ghostfaced Killer (More Howardian horror, but it goes well with Lovecraftian horror)

Complete Arcane:

• Acolyte of the Skin
• Alienist
• Blood Magus
• Effigy Master (With horrible enough effigies)
• Master Transmogrifist (Transformation is a running Lovecraftian theme)

Complete Divine

• Black Flame Zelot (With some retheming, but evil assasins would tie in well with say, The Red Hook Horror)
• Blighter
• Entropomancer
• Evangilist (For them evil priests)
• Geomancer (Drift mutates you in similar ways to The Innsmouth Look)

Complete Mage

• Nightmare Spinner
• Wild Soul (If given a darker slant, change the creatures to look more horrific, while using the same stats)

Complete Warrior

• Bear Warrior (Except replace bear with deep one, shoggoth, something)
• Eye Of Grumpsh (Cultist, replace Grumpsh with something mythos) [More Howard]
• Ravager [Howard]

Drow of the Underdark (Based only on names)

• Arachnomancer
• Demonbinder
• Insidious Corruptor

Heroes of Horror (names again), most of them

• Fiend-Blooded
• Tainted Scholar
• Dread Witch
• Corrupt Avenger

Libris Mortis: Pretty much all of them

Lords of Madness: Pretty much all of them

Magic of Incarnum: All of the ones that involve merging Incarum into yourself.

Tome of Magic: All of them, binding dead shades to serve you.

Eberron Campaign Setting - Master Inquisitive (for investigators)

Races of Eberron

• Quori Nightmare
• Anything with Quori really

Champions of Ruin

• Black Blood Cultist (Degenerate humans, common in Lovecraft)
• Night Mask Deathbringer (Unable to function in sun, evil killers? Fiddle with the falavour a bit and make them degenerate)

Player's Guide to Faerûn

• Slime Lord

Serpent Kingdoms: Pretty much all of them

Answer 2

Of course, the Alienist class from Complete Arcane is specifically designed to be Lovecraftian in nature. They summon pseudonatural creatures. The D&D 3.5e version isn't OGL but here's a Pathfinder conversion that gets the general idea across. There are similar ideas in Gates of Firestorm Peak and the 3.0 Manual of the Planes, and the 2.0 Illithiad.

Answer 3

I'm also currently at a loss for classes that are directly inspired, but there are some things that could work well with a little reflavoring.

• Pretty much any psionic class. The connection "Far Realm - Cthulhu Mythos" isn't that far fetched (*cough* Illithids *cough*) and many aberrations that originate from the Far Realm have psionic abilities. Especially wilders could work well with their limited but rather powerful and volatile abilities.
• The generic Spellcaster class. This one works best for NPCs, since the variant generic classes are a bit weaker than the normal PC classes. However, since the flavor of the spellcaster class is completely open it could easily be molded into a cult ritualist or somesuch, especially since the spellcaster can learn spells (like a sorcerer) from the cleric, druid and wizard lists.

Answer 4

I don't think there are any others to be honest. The closest you will get is the Lords of Madness supplemental book.