Old Ones

Time travellers.

Essentially they're a hyper-advanced civilisation that hit heat death in their own timeline and resorted to jumper to a fresher "slice" and taking shit over using their advanced tech. They've even been seeding young slices with religious messages that make colonisation and conquest easier when they need to make the next jump, and explorers of their kind have begun reporting finding evidence that they're not the first species to use this time-jump tactic..

Wow. Now that's neat.

Any specific examples? Sounds neat.

a bit like in interstellar? future being influencing their own ancestors?

They're a bunch of dicks who make people's lives very hard so they can laugh.

Otherwise they're cool.

Elven gods of Warhammer Fantasy

A pair of primordial gods who were born at the same time as the Universe,and spent the next few eons learning about themselves,their powers and the possibilities of creation and existance. They created everything and,in the end,a planet called Aionath where they put in practice what they have learnt.
Then they became male and female, and gave each other a name. Then conceived a child, the god of Chaos, and seeing how terrible the result of their union was, decided not to have any more children, and instead created the first races; titans, giants and dragons.
Their son stirred a titan rebellion agaisnt the creators, who in turn created the different planes (elemental planes, the divine realm, etc.) and the hellish dimension of Tartarus,where they chained all the titans they could, though the chaos god spirited away some of them for later.In the meantime, the primordial gods created the mortal races,plants,animals and the rest.
In the end, they got killed, their son absorved their essences and became the One and Only God. Then he got bored an started to created lesser gods based on concepts (fire,light,death,nature and so) to populate Aionath and see how they converted mortals to their cults and struggled agaisnt one and other for power; when the One and Only gets bored of it,destroys everything and starts the game again.

I take it more in a alternate-timeline interpretation of time travel, the idea being that the multiverse is like a stack of CDs - flat discs on top of each other with the oldest at the top and youngest at the bottom. New universes are being added at the bottom as ones that reach the end are taken off the top. These guys found a way to get into the bindle and run down the stack to a different disc.

Each universe is a slight variation on the one before it, so their first jump at first did appear to them to be "oh, these are just like us but a little shittier" and they've been doing it so long that the variations have added up and they're totally alien to whatever universe they come to now.

Ah, the Cultists. The single faction I search and destroy every single game the moment I find out they are on the map.

Broken Lords for life.

Mah aristocratic soul-sucking compatriot

>not destroying every trace of the faggots who abandoned us to mortality so they could blow themselves up
dust-snorting faggot detected

Old race that in a way machinated their own downfall in the form of deliberately pissing off the most volatile god by defying logic itself.

They divided by zero?
nice trips

Define Old Ones. I'd love to talk about it, but I don't know what theme this is supposed to be revolving around.

You too
They made a field of golden wheat that grows around the year the only grows on golden dirt in the frozen north. The god responded by pounding their entire civilization out of existence with his massive hammer and then turned to surviving members into a sea monster.

Really? Hmm. This is some sentient stuff that was around veeery looong before stuff in game happens, and are no longer around somewhy. Usually they have dropped super-duper loot, left neat ruins and sometimes they are creators of all other races.
See these links:
1d4chan.org/wiki/Old_Ones
tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Precursors

3 Demiurges abandoned in creation after the Creator exited it. They aren't truly omnipotent like the Creator, but they are the closest thing to it. They can't destroy each other 1v1, but 2v1 could do it, however they aren't all knowing and don't know what would happen to the power of the destroyed demiurge. So for the time being they don't do that.

The cosmos is subject to epoch spanning schemes and intrigue from all levels, high to low, of these 3 scheming against each other.

They aren't worshipped as Gods, they don't need worship nor demand it. Gods are aware of them and are fucking terrified of them.

The point is things from outside Creation are entering and are putting pressure on the 3 to do some thing to each other to try and stop the everso gradual erosion of Creation.

Little do they know the "things" are coming from the Creator, outside Creation, testing them to see which of them is worthy to join it as a full Creator in its own right.

Sounds cool maybe a little too meta but nice

I mean, I understand the concept of ancient stuff, but I wasn't sure if what I had in mind was worthy of OLD ONE status and title or if it was just ancient. I guess I just didn't see it as one, since I didn't make it with that in mind.

The Colossi were a race of giants that existed before Humans met their Gods. They were very large and high maintenance beings, so they had humans tend to them. They were beaten when a few humans broke free, found the Gods, and were gifted special powers that could destroy them with their bare hands. They were not exterminated, just beaten enough so they could leave. The Giants had great difficulty crossing a thick forest which confined them to a peninsula, so they did not pursue. While Humanity began to prosper on its own, the Colossi withered, their society in shambles. One day, a poacher rode in and committed genocide on the remaining colossi. This act was seen as a sin, and he was branded as a monster by the Gods which helped the humans break free from them. He discarded his sword and fled to an island where no one lived, so he could atone for his sins, or at the very least, be a monster at no one's expense. From this sin, the Tieflings were born.

There were some who didn't run too far, however. One group of humans held these giant beasts as something to aspire to; they wanted to become like them, requiring a divine smiting to be striken to their knees. They moved into the forest which kept the giants at bay and began a similar society, where they would cull their shortest adult before they could procreate. Over hundreds of years, they became Half Giants. Another group formed, which had the opposite view; fuck the giants, we should be as unlike them as possible and exterminate those who they've enthralled. These became the Gnomes. They fight in an incredibly dangerous forest bordering the abandoned land of the giants, labeled savages by the rest of society.

In my Superhero setting the world was originally a giant mishmash of pure ideas, memes and concepts. Said ideas would sort of bunch up and group up together sort of like when liquids of different density are put poured together and they don't really mix because they are of different density.
Over eons in those semi-fluid realms different creatures and beings got formed, one of said creatures was a strange idea that Wizards of the earth call Demiurges.
They were like same concept viewed from different angles, a race of humanoid beings some chaotic, some lawful in their nature, etc.
They quickly rose to power in this original universe and soon created awesome technologies. The strangest thing about them was that they were born blank in a sense and when they reached maturity they would take up one of the facets of reality.
Eventually they did what was known as an Usurpation, when giant nanoswarms of Hyper-Mesh Meta Crystaline reality warping robots known as Usurpers were sent out to collect and isolate all bubbles of reality. Of course this all backfired when Usurpers started to break down beings and Demiurges into their fundamentals later on but Usurpers got shut off quickly and locked away in Null Void, one of the newly created isolated realities.
I know a lot of this sounds retarded but still, cont.

Then the Demiurges of Null Void together with other rulers of 9 planes created Plane Cruxes, a giant machine stretching into multiple dimensions that controls the core principle of the plane with which the ruler of the Plane can modify and control his plane.
All of Plane Cruxes got connected to a singular machine known simply as the Prime in the tenth mini-plane of existence which was a neutral grounds of sorts.
Demiurges already had great technologies and naturally could manipulate concepts to some extent, but with Cruxes the created the Grand Masquerade and plane Masks. Each Plane had a house of it's own with the Primarch Demiurge that had Mask directly connected to his planes Crux which basically made him a God for his concept and plane, lesser ranking Demiruges masks were connected to his and got a fraction of his power.
When big reality changing shit that affects all of the planes had to be decided Primarchs of Planes had to gather together at the Prime and make the decisions in this giant forum around the prime, until they would come to a decision at which point they would use input the new parameters into the Prime and reality would change.

It basically ended up being like mix of Planescape with Grant Morrison stuff and Meme magic. Planes with fun and shenanigans going on everywhere. Also everything looks super Jack Kirby like.

It all stopped being fun and games when local equivalent Chaotic Neutral realms second in command Demiurge got into a crippling depression where he thinks that all of the universe it's ideas and particles were trapped into a giant rigid prison created by Demiurges of Null planes (neutral guys). Once he offs the his superior and gets the Crux Mask he wages war on other planes chaotically creating multiple distractions as he himself attempts to get to the Prime. cont

Once he does get to the Prime he attempts to change it's settings so it basically mushes all of existence together in an endless big bang/big crunch like scenario where nothing could ever form but everything would be absolutely free and chaotic. He starts the process and Planes begin to crumble as they merge into this unified plane where all ideas are chaotically mushed together. Demiurge of Null Void (True Neutral basically) fights him at the Prime in a very strange fit of non-Neutral actions that will confuse everyone for ever. He sacrifices himself and essentially his realm to create a giant barrier out of his realm around that ever expanding merged realm, and he breaks the prime and throws it's chunks across all of the planes, of course he gets killed. The rebel faggot is the first being in said incomplete merged realm that will eventually become our universe, our plane being called the Meld, in the place of Prime plane.

So now there are 8 isolated semi-broke planes with paranoid Demiurges in them, one plane that got turned into a shell for Meld and well...Meld which is our plane.

That is my superhero campaign on meta level and shit will happen with that once Crisis stories start. Currently my characters are fighting street criminals and shit like that.

What would the Cultists think of the Virtual Endless? Whilst they are still the same species they swore vengeance on, the fact that the Virtual Endless seek to destroy the faction who fucked with Auriga would be a great alliance of convenience at the very least.

Anything that achieved some form of unaging undying life that isn't labeled as a God or Demon.

Once you achieve a sufficient ammount of power it seems reasonable to delegate minor tasks onto thers by granting them a portion of said powers.

and it all looks something like this

They're the mother and father of the two main gods in the universe. The mother takes a back seat, staying out of everything but is generally benevolent. However, the father is viewed as a deity by some of the more obscure and dodgy "civilizations" in the world. He is the one who causes mutation and other unpredictabilities.

Well, no one goes by "Old Ones", but there's a number of beings that could contend for that. For starters, The One True God has existed since the Genesis of Geneses, and has been creating the world from scratch over and over again, because every time it does, it splits itself into the Mother (who makes humanity and not!Earth) and the Father (who stabilizes and filters the natural magic of the world to give to humanity) but in order to make the world good and safe and whole, he has to absorb all the evil in it, all the scraps of virus like arcane thought created from the decay of existence (both it's own and the world), and this drives him mad. The Mother then seals him away in the gravity well of not!Jupiter (which not!Earth orbits as a moon) and then commits ritual suicide to imbue her spirit into humanity, uplifting it into a truly sapient race. Humanity is then left to fend for itself as the Father decays, releasing demons into the world and trying to consume the souls of humans to make himself complete again. With the power of the Mother however, certain humans are able to make themselves into Gods (a more apt name is perhaps Divine Lich, where their phylactery is an ideal, some good some bad) So Humanity backed by their new Gods do battle with the demons and struggle and survive.

But it's just a matter of staving off the end. Eventually the Father always grows large enough to consume his own prison, and then the world, once again becoming The One True God, despite still being mad. Everything is destroyed and the Heat Death comes again, finally purifying The One True God enough that the cycle restarts.

The kicker is, this plane is one of many on the fringes of the Wheel, only distantly connected to Dominaria. And the flow of time is highly highly accelerated within it, as a function of how many humans are alive. Which means there are Gods from previous cycles turned neowalker that have come back from previous cycles.

The Broken Lords are Endless themselves, why the fuck would they destroy their own history?

The Horsemen, but not the apocalyptic kind. Well kinda.

There were between 5 or 10 of them, generals of the Lands Army and they led humans and other types into battle against the Soil Constructs, who were these earthy, elemental behemoths. They defeated the dragon behemoth who was the one to wake all the other ones in the beginning. They made and lived by a codex, wich dictated every species' lives and duties. Once they cleared the land of constructs, they fused their best warriors and brutal monsters into a fighter, who'd be able to defeat the behemoths if they returned (wich they didn't), but they failed miserably. They created a major part orcish/dragon humanoid Roagär(placeholder name) who wasn't as powerful as they intended, but he also became a general. A general of monsters against humans and other folk.

There is more if somebody wants to read, but it's not really about the old ones history, but rather how they could connect back into the story.

The remnants of higher dimensional beings; so it's not that there are angels or devils or elementals, but there are energies generated from the higher beings personalities that forced 4th dimensional entities to BE so the energies were contained.

Kind of like... A liedenfrost effect for soulstuff? Or a gravitational force of life? It's weird.

But there are devils and angels and elementals, the common folk have no idea about their origins. Yet.

The only Old One style entity is the Dreamer Below.

All teleportation magic, whether portals or conventional teleportation, relies on the Dream Realm. The dreams of sleeping creatures produce bubbles in this dark and empty place, which can be entered with different magic. This means that when night falls, teleportation magic is more reliable, because more creatures are asleep.

Larger, older, and more magically powerful or mentally mighty creatures (like dragons) produce proportionally larger dream bubbles. Some of them (like dragons) also sleep for decades or centuries at a time, meaning these bubbles become reliable navigation points when traversing the Dream Realm. Scholars who study the Dream Realm tend to get worried when a larger dream bubble disappears.

There's one enormous dream bubble that sits below all the others, regardless of where you enter the Dream Realm, and it's several orders of magnitude larger than even the mightiest dragon's dream bubble. This creature is called the Dreamer Below for its location. Its dream bubble was there when the Dream Realm was first discovered and it has not moved, changed, or disappeared at all in the thousands of years since.

I haven't decided what's inside the Dreamer Below's dream, yet. I kinda just wanna say "it's a bizarre and alien landscape full of flora and benign fauna the likes of which is not found on this world" but that feels like a copout.

They are the earth. When their time drew near they embraced each other, and on their backs grew the grass, mountains and trees.

Great beasts of the void tore into these half-dead once gods, their wounds became the oceans.

The creator of my setting was childlike, learning everything as it went along, the first life it successfully created was driven purely on instinct, had no concept of morality and wasn't bound by things like the laws of physics. As a result the old ones in my setting are best described as sentient tears in reality whose very presence erodes everything around them.

Less dramatically, everywhere they go, shit gets fucked up, things rot and fall apart, people go crazy and gravity constantly changes between being non-existent and strong enough to flatten humans into paste.

Fortunately the most homicidal of them killed the rest then got himself sealed in ominous spiky BBEG tower, which the last group I was playing with decided to smash for shits and giggles.

Sometimes I wonder if people wouldn't just adapt to whatever mindfuck circumstances happened. You get 1-2 generations of OHGODWHY and then by generation 3-4 it's like "well yeah that's a grrrbrrrglygook bird, of course there are tentacles coming out of its eyeholes. It tastes like dirt.

But that's wrong. It's the Haunts that are Endless.

Both factions were present on Auriga at the start of the Dust Wars and had a hand in irrevocably fucking up the planet. Besides, all but one Virtual fucked off from the galaxy a long time ago.

Technically it's both. The Haunts are the Endless that were on Auriga when shit got fucked up, the BLs are the descendants of the ones that went into stasis to sleep it out.

Human Settlers, other starfaring Alien races and a small group of hyperintelligent upright Newts who are responsible for a lot of the monstrous things crawling about the setting.

And I presume you have some definitive proof of this claim that's not just wild speculation.

Not one of our settings old ones but I just randomly rolled this and it sounded like an old one

>32 HD
>Pentagonal Trapezohedron
>Avian ; Albatross
>Enormous
>Wall Crawling
>Attacks with Tail
>Scales +3 AC
>1 Memory Loss; Delivered by Ray
>2 Drain Wisdom 1d6; Delivered By Ray
>3 Damage will never Heal
>4 Dark Vision
>5 Surprises less often -3 out of 6 chances
>6 Barrier
>7 Charging Attack
>8 Improved ac +4
>9 only hit by +2 weapons or better
>10 Contagious :infectous; become one of these 1d20 days if curse not removed
>11 Illusion
>12 Enlarge delivered by ; Area effect Centered 40 ft
>13 immune to physical attacks, Half Damage
>14 Imporved movement 90 additional feet
>15 Shape shifting 4 additional forms
>16 immune to piercing attacks no damage
>17 large damage attack 3x per day 36d6; Delivered by Area Cone
>18 Continuous Damage
>19 Detect Invisiblity
>20 immune to cold, half damage
>21 Hinders foe ; Delivered by gaze
>22 Contagious Reincarnates if killed killer turns into one of these after 3d12 days if curse not removed. Raising or reincarnating killer does not stop process
>23 poison weak +2
>24 bonus on crit 2d6
>25 improved damage
>26 bonus damage on a crit 1d6
>27 regenration 2 pts
>28 Drain intelligence 3 pts Delivered by Projectile
>attacks humans first
>Abomination;Targets Magically Unafected characters first

forums.amplitude-studios.com/content.php?537-EL-Endless-Archives-Broken-Lords-Facts-Concepts

I just took the christian god, because I like to include fedora levels of antitheism in my campaign
#NotYourTable
and I use it to showcase how evil and fucked up that god is, and hence show that his existence is extremely unlikely.

A benevolent entity from the edge of existence that takes the form of a massive Möbius Strip with a few eyes massive eyes moving along the path. It seems to have something akin to empathy for humans as it has been broadcasting signals to warn humanity of impending attacks from beings from beyond the veil of humanity.

The closest things to 'Old Ones' in my setting are what's left of the orcs, elves, dwarves, and other 'standard' fantasy races which inhabited the Old World before the New World was literally built atop it.

They exist mostly as memories now, shadows which drift in the endless abyss beneath the New World. The young races don't know anything about them and up until very recently they had no influence on anything outside of the abyss.

Eight centuries ago, a legendary warlord met his end after leaping off the edge of the world in a frenzied rage. Rumors are circulating that he's returned, a host of shadows and specters in tow.

There was no precursor race, originally humanity just existed alone in the universe and became an elder posthuman species. At the moment of their destruction, their collective unconsciousness spawned "The Superculture", an idealized version of the elder race they never had, whose ruins were manifested across all times simultaneously in the adjacent universe.

So basically, the the Precursors never really existed, and the evidence of their existence (ruins and crazy reality-bending artifacts) were willed into existence by intelligent design from god (well, the tang that was the entire posthuman civilization on their moment of death and psychic assimilation).

Broken Lords are former humans, Lords of the Amber Plains

>Tell me of your Old Ones.

Sure.

-Realities are composed of Three Aspects and one Force: Mind, Body & Soul with Death being the force that rules them, reaps them all, brings about entropy and an end to everything. Period.

-No entity was more afraid of Entropy and the End then Death: For where other's accepted that dark, comforting, nothingness- Death knew that they alone would be left behind, completely alone for eternity. All of Reality composed entirely of themselves.

-Death saw a way out of this emptiness and created a force that would be their equal, their companion whom they'd go together into the darkness, one that would encompass all aspects as they do.

-They created "life" and for a time it worked: Life abounded, it assimilated itself into all aspects of reality and constantly changed, adapted, died and live countless times and in doing so created an endless and eternal quantity of souls.

-Life broke the cycle: it was more successful than Death could have foreseen as Life was capable of self-perpetuating reality with it's endless cycle of souls. Constant Expansion. Constant Entropy. The Body and Soul working perfectly to satisfy the other's needs.

-It took a while, but eventually Life began to express it's third final quality: The Mind and in doing so created "Complex Souls" that truly encompassed all qualities.

-These complex souls come to Death, they come and find Death in the darkness like babies stumbling towards their mother and Death in turn carefully nurtures every single one of them and brings out everything express until they in turn are used not to perpetuate the reality they came from- but to create a new self-perpetuating reality. Endlessly. Eternal. Death will never be alone again.

-The Mind is the only other aspect consciously aware of this process: Each reality is new to the Body and Soul, but the Mind always remembers and it drives them mad.

-Endless. Eternal. Constantly. The Mind CRAVES change, DEMANDS it. The Mind is the unsatisfied quality in life that constantly drives it to change, adapt, evolve, consume, breed and eventually die.

-The Mind was at one point a harmless, shapeless, thought thinking itself. A tiny single dream dreamt by the first, true, singular soul that had predated all of creation.

-Life changed that, twisted it, brought about everything it new both bad and good: every emotion, every concept, every fear and aspiration and everything in between or beyond.

-The Mind hated all of these things- Constant awareness, but locked out of any means to act upon these forces or anything an observer and a prisoner in the minds of countless as it experienced everything.

-Every living thing perpetuating it's own parasitic dream; The dreams of billions, trillions, countless beings forming a schizophrenic constant nightmare for one.

-The Mind seeks a way to end reality so that it may be at peace: An End to the Dream.

-The Eldritch are the ones aware of this meta: across every dimension, world and reality they proliferate- touched by the sympathy and the suffering of the mind all beings share and take from. Physically expressing themselves in forms reminiscent of the twisted schizophrenia suffered by The Mind.

-Some Good, Some Bad. Most however completely Alien.

The Gods have occasionally spoken of things that were there before they, but they disagree on what.

The Green Mother speaks of having been born herself, implying that she too had a mother. The Boundless Sky recalls that there was already a star when first his memory clears. The First Dragon recalls hatching from an egg.

As for the Destroyer? He merely tells that he did not forge the sword Unmaker, for creation is not in his power. It was, however, made especially for him, and not one of the other Gods forged it.