How do i do eldritch monsters?

The root of eldritch horror is this: in the grand scheme of things, the qualities that make a human special are nothing but lies we tell ourselves so that we can hide our biological nature. On a cosmic scale the idea that life has inherent worth is a joke. Your memories, your hopes, your dreams, they all mean nothing. You're just a blob of meat with delusions of grandeur. Most likely humanity was the evolutionary result of the shit and garbage of some being so great and powerful it thinks in ways that would drive you mad to consider. Humanity is to the Great Old Ones what a mite on an ant might be to a human. Thinking beings exist only because the Gods haven't accidentally stepped on them so far, and if they did they would hardly notice unless they had done so on purpose. If the Great Old Ones decided to destroy Earth you would comprehend their reasons about as much as the bug you splattered against your windshield.

As to how to translate that into tabletop horror, use vivid but limited sketches of what the creatures are. Give enough detail to plant a seed of disgust but leave enough that they can fill in the rest mentally. It will turn out better and scarier than anything you could come up with.

One trick you could try is to make room full of monsters that seem like they might attack any moment, but never do. For example, a circular room where dessicated corpses stand around the perimeter, facing the center. In the center is a podium whwre the players have to accomplish their objective. They're going to start sweating it as they try to accomplish their goal while keeping an eye on the monsters lining the walls, monsters that will never attack them. As they stand guard they might see movement out of the corners of their eyes, but when they turn to look they see nothing has changed.

I love shit like this, I wish I could come up with shit like this on the fly.

The SCP Foundation has some great ones. Stuff that has intelligence but no comphrehensible motivations, for example.

Jesus H. Christ. Got any moar like this?

>I'm running a game where eldritch energy
Eldritch means old spooky shit relating to Fae.
>is seeping through cracks and portals
In what?
>and transforming people and other wildlife into eldritch abominations.
MUH MAGICAL NUCLEAR FALLOUT
>so far I've had three incidents where
noice blerg
>people changed into horrors.
Doesn't sound to horrifying.
>and on the third event one of my players commented saying i don't know how to do abominations and horrors.
It's more "you don't now how to do horror".
It's a tone. If you hold it everything else falls into place naturally.
>Ive just been taking normal humans, then mutating them, extra arms/eyes/mouths in various places, tentacles, merging limbs, contorting body,
"Just" is right, you aren't doing shit. They can play Resident Evil any time they want.
>ignoring laws of human physics when it comes to bone structure. and lastly some psychic powers on a few.
I'm sure you're nebulous (or mechanical?) descriptions lead no one to visualize that in an interesting way.
>I've never been huge into the scene of the eldritch but i thought that was the gist (jist?) of it when a human comes into contact with it.
youtu.be/nxXEPk3dzFg
>What should i do differently? what should i add?
Tone.
>how do i keep from re-hashing the same effects i guess?
To set the atmosphere you need to know what atmosphere you're trying to set. Have you ever read a horror story?

Go read horror stories. Try and figure out what's scary.
H.P. Lovercraft is a decent place to start, not a great place though.
The "madness" stories tend to be the worse ones, *especially* for RPG inspiration.

There aren't too may good horror video games to recommend.
The medium doesn't lend itself to the genre. It's mostly just jump scares.
Off hand, Silent Hill is OK. Make sure you play it with bad graphics.
Leaves more to the imagination. Good graphics are one of the reasons recent horror games are shit.

This.

When you run a CoC campaign, you'll want the gods and old ones to be portrayed as beyond comprehension.

Think of it like this:

How do you think a tiny ant regards us humans?
What does it think of our motives, our functions, our even our basic sense of time?
About our colossal creations that supersede the very scope of their primitive minds?

And what about our vast power?
What does it think of our ability to destroy their entire world out of pure absent-mindedness?

I'll tell you:
It doesn't.

It carries on its functions, unknowing but content in its tiny primitive colony in a meaningless section of my driveway.

The very fact that I don't care enough about them to bother them is their sole claim to survival.

thanks

These aren't the best of videos and they're more for video games designers, but they explain the jist of horror.

youtube.com/watch?v=vSKtTBjSBg0

youtube.com/watch?v=OyiAR2BXtKU

youtube.com/watch?v=7DyRxlvM9VM

youtube.com/watch?v=weTznlEkzfk

Don't think of it as transforming the human/animals, think of it as reshaping it to the purpose of the THING FROM BEYOND. The THING FROM BEYOND is your horror. What the players have encountered is the THING FROM BEYOND pressing its digits into the skein of the world, and finding the pliable and soft things.

your player was right, you don't understand

here you go friend drabblecast.org/2014/08/21/drabblecast-336-mouth-god/

>The medium doesn't lend itself to the genre

Your advice is good, but i don't agree with you there.

shut the fuck up

haha right? i was running an abandoned ship thing, and realized that my simple description of what was going to be a non-combat investigation encounter was spooking the players out. So i put a tanky monster in the hold, described the most sensitive one hearing it move around beneath, etc

For what it's worth, there's nothing inherently wrong with playing eldritch creatures from beyond the stars as just another variety of thing to kill for treasure/story points.

It certainly rubs me the wrong way to make such a creature into just another "mob", like skeleton warriors or goblins. But you can do it. The kind of dread and vulnerability that you'd get in a horror game just doesn't jive that well with a game where big guns and grit always win the day.

My other thought is that if you can't get that spooky horror quality, quantity might suffice... at some point, a horde of cronenberg beasts could get large enough that the only suitable response is to run and hide.

"lol so what do I roll to hit it"

Reshaping implies that there's a deliberate purpose and intention. If something has a deliberate purpose and intention towards you, it's probably not incomprehensibly alien.

Cthulhu doesn't send out psychic messages to the world. It's just that he's such a horrifyingly powerful entity that him rolling over in his sleep causes a planet-wide pandemic of nightmares and migranes.

The novelisation of Crysis 2 (by Peter Watts, check it out) kind of plays off this in a harder sci-fi sense. The alien race that's "invading" is using human tactics and human-style weaponry. The agreed upon most likely explanation for this is that the invaders are just autonomous biosphere monitoring drones, planitary gardeners. The aliens themselves dropped some equipment down millions of years ago and let it run, and a side effect of its operations is the genocide by liquefaction of the human race.

The author likens it to building an ATM on top of an anthill. How would an ant understand what an ATM is, or banks, or currency? All the ants see is "giant metal animals are waging war on my anthill". When the job's done, the builders don't stop to think "but did any of the ants survive?"

The builders don't care. The ants were entirely inconsequential and the builders might not have even noticed they were there while the earth was being leveled and concrete laid.

The essence of cosmic horror is that we are not alone in the universe.

I remember Crysis 2 likening us to "mold you find on stuff in your fridge when you get back from a vacation"

>If something has a deliberate purpose and intention towards you, it's probably not incomprehensibly alien.

Yes and no. A monster hunting humans to eat them is very different from a monster hunting humans to stitch their limbs together in preparation for some unknown future event. To the players, however, both monsters will appear to be the same.

>The medium doesn't lend itself to the genre. It's mostly just jump scares.
Bro do you even P.T.

awesome

Yeah true in a sense.

I'm meaning more that our mutual friend Chzo might want to blurplewhack its flibbeyabbers before hurgleburgle and popijabbit hrugiz it to bepis.

The result WE SEE is "monster chases dude" but really it's just that the blurplewhacking process sometimes has that happen along the way.

The same way that sometimes when you're sewing you might stitch your sleeve to the fabric?

Or if you're cooking you might forget to preheat the oven?

So, the plot of Uzumaki.

Ok, I was actually about to ask this question, like, right now. Then I saw this on page one. Spooky.

Also, if you want to do Lovecraft horrors as humanoid just copy pic related

Or that game Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, sort of

Good point
> This monster is literally a sentient colour that consumes life force
> Super Lovecraftian!
Ok, how can we fight it
> uhhhhhhh....

Please don't. I love Nyarko-san, but they have no place in a cosmic horror game, unless it's Derlethian, or the unbelievably super pulpy route.

I will be amenable if it's more like something from Saya no Uta though.

You don't.

You contain it.

Would anyone be able to help me with a scenario idea I'm writing up for Delta Green? I posted it on the other thread but it's not very active

You have some reading assignments, and you're going to want to go to master himself, HP Lovecraft. Read the following:

The Call of C'thulu
The Shadow over Innsmouth
The Dunwich Horror

Those are the big three that should give you an idea of Eldritch Horror, and how it works.

I'd toss in Shadow Out of Time, and At the Mountains of Madness. Color Out of Space for an honorable mention.

At the Mountains of Madness is basically Lovecraft's cosmic horror epic.

Add "The Colour From Space" to that list.

The colour was awesome in that it was about a corruption over an extended period of time, about how it effected people and the environment, and not so much about a monster.

CAPTCHA I KEEP CLICKING THE FUCKBALLING SIGNS! WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME! FUCK YOU CAPTCHA! FUCK!

USE LEGACY CAPTCHA

Sounds like that Junji Ito manga, uzumaki or spirals.

You can't contain it. Well you can, but you won't like the method. The only way to slow it down is to kill yourself

>Show as little as possible, leaving as much to the imagination that you can
If it's showing up, having it show up unexpectedly works well.

>in the grand scheme of things, the qualities that make a human special are nothing but lies we tell ourselves so that we can hide our biological nature
No, that was just lovecraft's version. Arguably, certain doom is counterproductive to horror. If failure is guaranteed, there's no suspense, but as lon as there is even a grain of hope that survival is possible, then there's something worth being scared about. Cosmic horror is about things being, from a human perspective, fucked beyond comprehensive. Not fucked as in bad, fucked as in strange. The world is not what we think it is. The rules we use are not iron-clad. It's easy for humans to be lame, just make the monster a huge dragon the size of a continent and have it be immune to all magic. A cosmic horror doesn't have to be strong, or even pose a direct threat to anyone. The horror is derived from the fact that the fucking thing exists in the first place, becase its existence means we don't understand a fucking thing about how the world really works.

Modern horror games are shit because most psople making horror games (that aren't really actiong games with gross monsters) think ou can pull it off with jumpscares alone.

>In what?

>implying there aren't other dimensions
>Implying every eldritch being exists on this plane
>Implying Great old ones energy isn't strong enough to cross planes

for a second i thought CoC meant 'Corruption of Champions' and now 'Call of Cthulhu.'

The entire horrific aspect to Eldritch horrors is that they're incomprehensible and unknown. Unfortunately thanks to desensitization it's hard to scare most players with any kind of creepy monster. If you don't go far enough it's just another thing to kill but if you go too far you enter edgelord silly territory.

Creating a sense of the unknown is as simple as limiting exposure to the horrors themselves so they remain mysterious but foreshadowing them like crazy. I do this in my campaign through having infected humans driven mad around them, having the infection be highly contagious so that the players are wary of going near any areas where horrors lurk and through dreams and visions.

When they do encounter them I add terrain effects like fog (think the mist) to keep them guessing as to what is out there then only reveal small details ' you hear a gibbering wail , the sounds of sobbing babies mixed with that of men screaming with hoarse throats.' 'You catch a glimpse of bubbling flesh with many blinking eyes protruding from its mass'

You can also reveal how horrifying they are through what they do rather than showing the creatures themselves. I stole this one from another TG post.

Players find a house deep within the 'eldritch' area. It looks intact and almost 'cosy' when they go inside they find a family eating a good meal at a dinner table.

However the family have bony protrusions all over their bodies , these shards of bone are literally grinding and ripping through their flesh and constantly growing and protruding from their body. The bones all appear as though they have been gnawed on...The family beg for the players to leave and if the party try to 'rescue'them they refuse as they are too terrified to go.

Essentially the creatures are keeping the family safe and well fed in order to regularly farm them for their bones and the family are terrified to leave as without the monsters to eat their bones they fear the growths will tear apart their bodies.

I'd include Rats in the Walls personally

>for a second i thought CoC meant 'Corruption of Champions' and not 'Call of Cthulhu.'

Muh nigga.

Another way to think about this is that perhaps the creatures that chase the players are like mites or parasites carried by the elder god, just creatures along for the ride with no say or purpose in the elder god's plan.

A lot of Lovecraftian horror is existential in nature. It's scary that aliens exist, even if they don't threaten the protagonist, because it mocks the idea that humans are somehow unique or special.

This. Don't just go "OOGA-BOOGA, HORRIBLE TENTACLED THING! Roll initiative."

This sounds rather edgelord silly

Wellcome to eldritch horror where edgelordy and magical realms meet.

>anything related to lovecraft
>killing hordes of unnatural monsters

You're doing it wrong.

OP. The main thing with the Eldritch that it is supposed to be things that are "out there" instead of being in front of you. The real creepiness comes from human not being able to grasp what is going on the only thing they know that something is very wrong, something terrible is happening. But they don't know what it is, where is it, how it is happening and what can they do about it. Can they run? Can they fight it? Can they even see it? Can they even realize it is happening before it is already too late?

Take The Thing story, the classic. It is a story about people locked inside a scary place while someone in the group being a horrific monster that could kill them all. But nobody knows who it is because it can take the form of everyone. The monster is almost impossible to kill and always escapes them so they don't know if they killed it or not or if it comes back and who will it be. But it always comes back in the guise of someone else. The trues monster is inside the head of the people that look for it, when scared their imagination will do the job.

All the time the main element is the several layers of uncertainty, they are in danger and forced to make heavy decisions but they have no facts to base them on and almost every decision is wrong. They are mentally cornered, in a dead end. This horrible confusion and uncertainty under pressure and stress is what makes it scary, what breaks people down. It is hard for the human mind to deal with such a situation.

Also obligatory
youtube.com/watch?v=QAoONl2P8fw

First of all, you don't use a fucking thumbnail.

Look at me I'm rude! I'm unique! Look at me everyone! I don't contribute to this board in any way!

Go shitpost in a general thread not one where someone's asking for help. Or do big crowds scare your feeble ego?

Well... yeah it is a bit. Obviously in explaining it all I've removed the mystery as well.

It is a *fine* line. Hence it being the hardest thing to make come to life in an RPG.

That really wasn't the main aspect of the horror. Us not being special is far less scary than us having next to no clue as to how reality actually works.

Incidentally, we are unique in the Mythos. There are alien races that achieved incredible power. The Elder Thingts were literally nothing more than bizarre, increadiby inhuman aliens, and they fought a war aggainst Cthulhu over the Earth, managing to score a pyrrhic victory. Humanity, however, is canonically (as much as there is a canon) doomed to die out before it ever amounts to anything (comes from The Shadow Out of Time, which features the great race of Yith, which are also bizarre aliens with advanced toys).

>How do i do eldritch monsters?
Just keep pumping and let them steer.

You should check out (watch, even, if you can find a game recorded) Call of Cthulhu's classic adventure "The Haunted House". Least I think that's what it's called.

I ran it a few years ago. One of the most important things is pacing the game properly to create dread, even with something as "mundane" as a ghost house.

90% of that game was an empty house with slightly unsettling implications in a few places. Then I charmed a party member who went to a room on the second floor, sprung a trap that threw them out the window, and when one of the party members raced down the stairs to help him... well, he learned the hard way that the knife he picked up was possessed, barely avoiding getting his throat gouged as he fled from the house, screaming.

To do eldritch horror, even the mundane kind right, you need to understand the pacing and structure of a good horror game. With it, even a subpar story about wailing deformed people can be made thrilling.

While on this topic, does anyone have pdfs/scans of the new, official Delta Green scenarios like Lover in the Ice ect.? I know they're only 5 bucks off of DriveThru but money is really tight right now.

kek