How do I make a good Old God / Eldritch Horror without following the typical clichés of tons of tentacles / eyes and...

How do I make a good Old God / Eldritch Horror without following the typical clichés of tons of tentacles / eyes and mouths all over?

Hard mode: Making them young girls in any way shape or form is not an option

Create it from the bottom up, not top down.

Do not worry about cosmic relevance and instead design a player experience. Whatever it is, it is inscrutable and endlessly powerful. No need to Derleth it up with a hierarchy of the unknowable.

Beginners believe the key is to make it overly powerful. But that is just the implication not the game challenge. The trick to the Mythos is that its creatures aren't evil or malicious. Their threat to mankind is purely coincidental and the end to our world would give them no satisfaction. We're ants to them.

Another crucial element is that the Mythos is no canon. Introducing a Shoggoth does not imply that Cthulhu sleeps at R'lyeh. It just implies that there are terrible things out there that we do not know about. The situation is all that matters, and everything behind the scenes bends to that necessity. The entirety of stories conceived in that context are mere inspiration, never "the truth". There is no absolute certainty. The unreliable narrator is a central trope and ancient lore is only as reliable as rumor.

Give it tons of legs with ears and noses all over

Three eldritch horrors I have made up for one shot games of CoC:

A fungal infection that spans dimensions and turns sentient beings into its servants, sort of like cordyceps. It's not malevolent, it just wants to survive and propagate.

Devangari, the black star, a physical incarnation of the destructive hunger that drives all life. Where living beings exist they unknowingly call out to her, inviting her to consume their worlds and bring them back to their source.

Sumaash, a kind of storm that drops heavy black rain over planets and seeds them with strange lifeforms.

As the poster above me said, the best eldritch horror is one that isn't hateful, it just considers humans insignificant. It's unknowable and doesn't seem to follow the known rules of biology.

If you want some excellent designs, check out a webcomic called mare internum.

Combine body parts and materials that should not be able to exist together: chunks of a black hole with fungus plus burning ice + wet rainbow gel.

I don't think an Eldritch Horror game can be done realistically. Looking at the premise of Lovecraft's work, his descriptions are abstract and he tells the story in ways that the audience cannot or can barely understand. The goal is to create the sense of infinity and meaninglessness of the human presence in the cosmos. This is done by creating knowledge that we as humans cannot or were not meant to comprehend. Games are made to be played, and we cannot play a game we barely or do not understand at all. In my opinion, all Lovecraftian games are way off from the original eldritch stories and sort of create misconceptions and an unnecessary focus on the deep sea but not the mystery and grandeur of the cosmos. In my opinion it cannot be replicated as anything else but stories without getting rid of Lovecraft's message.

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I actually like these

I agree that HPL's techniques of immersion are hard to recreate in a game. And his contemporary references have become quaint or entirely misunderstood. To do his ideal justice in a game one would have to make it modern, use actual threats and uncertainties of the modern subconscious as slightly twisted themes, and utilize all channels of communication, from semantics over dramaturgy all the way to GM acting and table lighting. Lovecraft as a GM would arrange for a friend to call or come over and mess with the players in character, just to sow some doubt what is real and what is the game.

CoC's tradition is more one of playing savvy investigators who come in after Lovecraft's story has ended to connect the dots and mop up any remaining horrors. It is not made to create a Lovecraft story as a game. This would be impossible. All you can use are his tropes, his narrative intentions, and his genre.

I disagree. The issue is the form of story telling is a difficult one for amatures. In role playing we tend to focus on grand heroics and overcoming insurmountable odds. Which is easy. The key to an eldritch horror game is that you must change the tone entirely. It's about caution and survival. You cannot deafeat the shoggoth, all you can do is struggle hard enough to escape for a time.

They're great!

Some user translated them from the edition sans detour a few years back.

Make them a guy.

OP here, thank you all for the suggestions.

I am very aware that Old ones are pretty much the end game, since there is realistically nothing mortals could do to stop them. What I'm planning on doing is having the big bad try to summon one before it's time, and even then only a splinter of it would show up before ultimately being defeated.

>Old ones are pretty much the end game
No, they are the ever looming threat of an end to all games. This can never be actualized as it would end the story. At the most you can fit it in the epilogue.

>This can never be actualized as it would end the story.

You misunderstood me, that's exactly what I meant by end game.

Not end game as in "last thing you fight"
End game as in "You and everyone else are now completely fucked"

>End game as in "You and everyone else are now completely fucked"

I think that's kind of a problem because the ultimate "the stars are going out one by one" outcome and players ultimately want to feel like they've accomplished something.

Make them young girls.

If you make it a tangible creature that they can see and try to engage (even worse if they can defeat even part of it in some kind of direct combat) then you've gotten rid of the most powerful tool in your eldrich god-creation arsenal.
It's never going to feel like a truly terrifyingly transcendent being if it shows up and gets its ass handed to it.

What if it keeps showing up?

A thing you can see and touch is not as terrible as a thing that you can't, but which can do those things to you.

Minions of it can definitely show up (and having one that won't stop coming is pretty neat) but if the master being itself shows up physically and you can punch it in the face then it's never going to be as terrifying as if it doesn't.

If you can't even imagine a way to defeat it then you're going to think of it as undefeatable. And that's a big part of making it a frightening prospect to be up against it.

This may be another cliche, but have it constantly erase itself from people's memories. You're aware that you're taking damage, that something is attacking, that your detectors are going off, but all your perception checks and your invisibility purges show nothing.

You know I've thought about this and one of the biggest issue I've found is that there's a whole slew of definitions. I mean we got things like Yig and Ithaqua which seem to be pretty killable right, to things like Shub Niggurath and Yog Soggoth that don't seem very killable.

Then there's stuff like Y'Golonac and Eihort, both of which don't seem like world changers like the other four, but are pretty damn hard to kill.

Honestly, it seems kind of broad on what makes an old one/Eldritch Horror. Design seems to be whatever you like really.

>yog-sothoth doesn't seem very killable
yog-sothoth is the space-time continuum, you're damn right it isn't very killable

I like these things, especially Sumaash, it's a great explanation for why a planet or a whole solar system is infested with monsters

I usually pick three things which scare me, mesh them together, then exaggerate it until it's a cosmic level threat

I think the Angels of Eva make great lovecraftian abominations.

They don't have the lovecraftian aesthetic, but remain barely-understood, all powerful and terrifying.

Not all of them though.

An unseeable presence has beset the party with a legion of faceless, pale, and humanoid entities in silken dresses. They walk stiffly with their arms crossed in a serene gesture, kindly holding their own hands in a delicate embrace. They are unkillable, but can be mutilated into inaction. The part goes through the campaign, as per your own design, and finally finds the terrible God behind these monstrosities. A faceless corpse hanging by a rope, its lower half having already rotted away. This creature had nearly unimaginable psychic might, yet the vessel it dwelt in is nothing but a corpse. All of its might is directed towards keeping those creatures that served it alive, hence their immortality, and why it is no threat directly. Find a journal nearby by, preferably with foreshadowing beforehand, describing an ordinary man who lost his beloved fiance. Describe his desperation to see her smile once more, and of the rumors he caught wind of here and there. Describe the expeditions he went on, wasting his family fortune, to pursue these old fisherman's legends. Tell about him eventually finding his answer through necromancy, and the maddening realization that she had been gone for far to long at this point. Then, a realization. He would need some greater power to bring her back, so why not that of a God? And further more, if a mortal is destined to die, then why not the Gods? And what happens to the power of a god when it dies? Where does it go? Obviously it couldn't vanish, so he nearly had to wait for as many years as it took for the stars to align. He would call into the void, and power without a master would seek his call. Describe his excitement as he reveals in his journal that it worked, and that his sanity had remained intact. Then describe his failure to bring her back, and his realization that there is nothing to bring back. There are no souls, only minds.. No afterlife, only space. Those abominations were his imitations.

Make them user friendly.

Take a bloodborne approach. The old ones are uncaring of our situation or curious at best. Physically you are fighting the ones using their influence and curiousity for power, while mentally you are just trying to take everything in and block out that which is too much.

It's always been Wankershim

Thanks. For that one shot, I plan on having the PCs play as University students. On a day their friend goes missing, it has started to rain. As time goes on the rain gets heavier and darker, the streets begin to flood, and strange creatures begin to appear. The Entity causing this is a cosmic traveling storm that reforms planets and replaces their flora and fauna. It possibly does this in preparation for the arrival of an elder one or another alien being of greater power.

Top one's a potato, mate.

>Eldritch horror from Ireland

Try this thought experiment.

Draw a two dimensional object. Imagine a being who only exists in those two dimensions and how their must perceive the world.

Press a finger down into that. Imagine seeing that finger passing into that two-dimensional being's reality. Imagine every little fingerprint ridge having to be accounted for, all of the flesh and bone cross-sections passing through.

Imagine being that two-dimensional being suddenly becoming aware of every little fiber of the paper it is drawn on.

Now take it a step up. Imagine you in your room and something presses down from out of nowhere. It looks like it is something made of flesh or being forced into being flesh or else something beyond flesh - not sure, not the pressing matter here. Imagine your three-dimensional mind reconciling a series of three-dimensional objects/images in rapid succession, like it cannot process a greater whole at once.

Whatever you do with your eldritch horrors, keep that in mind and might I suggest that this is why Avatars are useful for greater beings?

You never get to see any "master". Maybe you get a hint of their existence through some ancient manuscript. But to meet them would involve so many san rolls, you might as well just turn your sheet over.

I always thought one of Veeky Forums's story times did it pretty well - try Britbongsteros. The Isle of Mann should be a good place to start.

>Those skeletons have been there so long they've started to fuse together createing a pathway.
I don't know whether to feel fear or wonder at such a sight.

Can Azathoth kill Yog-Sothoth? How about vice-versa?

Can gravity kill randomness?

All of that man's art is fantastic.

Azathoth can't kill anything, he can't do anything but create all of reality and then maybe wake up and destroy all of reality.

>I think I know a guy.

I like the idea of making their presence sort of indirect. They're not the big bad because they don't have human level motives, or any motives at all. If characters draw on their power or essence or whatever I like making their appearance entirely unnatural, like vast and complex intersecting geometries and kaleidoscopes. Tentacles and eyes are cool too though.

Better idea: make them young dudes.

>how to annoy your players: the post

Only Shub and Yog were actually lovecraft to my knowledge. The others are likely Derleth and Co.

I kind of like the idea of making them wholly indescribably strange. Like an elder God is not a physical thing, but an image that is projected on flat surfaces, or a very specific way that all the fabric in a room falls.