How do you like your Old Ones? Are they the Old Gods, powerful demons, cosmic horrors? All three?

How do you like your Old Ones? Are they the Old Gods, powerful demons, cosmic horrors? All three?

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Old Ones are what was left after God the Creator killed all of his kin and tore out their hearts with which to build creation, and stole their ribs to build a cage, with which to shield creation from what remained of them when he was done.

Hateful, decaying, gibbering corpse gods with empty, swirling darkness where their hearts should be, gnashing teeth and lashing tongues in place of ribs, they whisper through the bars that ward them, speaking of madness, of twisted flesh and intoxicating power, if only somebody would turn the key.

Every star in the night sky is the eye of an old and thrice-cursed god, and every single one would devour Creation in an instant, just to satisfy the void within itself for a fraction of a moment.

Now this. I like this a lot. A lot.

...

Bumping with another "Monstress" old one.

source?

Gods exist on two levels:

You have the mortal gods, which are the gods that most people tend to typically know and prey to. In a way they are like the Deva from Hindu mythology although their powers are vastly toned down and most mortals can reincarnate as a god or become very powerful spirits akin to these gods

Then you have the Outer Gods. These gods do not communicate typically with mortals and are more like the embodiment of aspects with some being more animal like then others. Only very few actually take interest with mortals and mortal gods and typically only react when called upon. Think like U-DO from Xenosaga that doesn't directly communicate with beings but can affect changes depending upon circumstanc

Google "Monstress Comic"

Not only is google image search your best friend, but I also already said its name. It's a comic called "Monstress." That being said, its a pretty nice read, and you should check it out.

Damn, beat me to it.

...

extreamly powerfull but at the same time not all that interested with reality, they just are, and always will be. Probobly is a bad idea to even talk about them because they might just take notice. More or less forgoten gods

This guy with the serial number filed off

They are what happens when the children of creator gods surpassed and took control of creation.

Imagine if Lucifer and his kin succeeded at their rebellion, and rewrote the Book in their image.

Picture all existence like an infinitely long sheet of music, with as many separate bars and lines as it is long.

The First Ones were able to change notes and manipulate the music of the universe in any which way, but in doing so there was chaos. Eventually the Last of the First changed the music in such a way that now the First Ones listen enraptured to the music he created.

With this steadying of the music of the universe, creation itself became finally possible, at least until the First Ones either leave their stupor or get bored and start fiddling with the fabric of reality for the fuck of it.

They're super batteries.

readcomiconline.to/Comic/Monstress

thank you

There is only one Cosmic Horror in my setting

It started with children. They began escaping from their homes and families, gathering at night,lighting torches and looking at up the sky,then returning to their houses when dawn came like nothing happened, only to do the same thing next evening.
Some of the parents have locked their children in fright,but most of them either didn't knew of this or thought it was mostly harmless

Eventually the children grew up,their late escapades have stopped.
Yet few of them remained, making a bizzare cult around a being they call "starman"

They gather at night and listen to the sounds of the sky. They claim it's singing to them, a tune they cannot understand yet adore it so much.

Some of the most devoted followers believe they understand the language of their patron. They say he promises them absolute enlightenment that would almost "blow their minds"


I hope somebody on Veeky Forums will get this

The strongest of them you don't get to see under any circumstance. The lesser ones are following an agenda of some sort. Typically high politics i.e. "Tul'go, you're a day behind on that report and it's pushing the third moon out of orbit. What's going on there?". There can be outliers but they have to be either insignificant or notably more powerful than everything else.

>I hope somebody on Veeky Forums will get this
Well, he'd like to come and meet us, but he think he'll blow our minds. Understandable precaution.

There are no gods, humanity is the result of leftover waste that were a result of the old ones inscrutable actions. The old ones are cosmic horrors that exist in ways and places the human mind cannot grasp.

Foolish cult members attempt to vie for the attentions of uncaring entities who view them as pests at best, the same way we view insects. We ignore them until they irritate us. What they think as communion with their dark gods is only their minds desperate attempt to hold some semblance of perception of time and reality or their consciousness will tear itself apart. Their constant attempts to appease and summon these extradimensional entities is unspeakably contemptuous. What insignificant powers they are able to glean are perverse beyond their understanding.

We are doomed to reel through the void of space for as long as humanity exists. There is no hope.

really? then i've got a bunch of notebooks that belonged to sixth-graders you'll love

sounds terrible

awful

they're humans

It did, now it doesn't.

nah it's shit

I appreciate the bumping, samefag, but do you really need to be here?

what are you doing to do about it, bitch?

Ask you kindly to leave or lurk and hope for the best, since anything more than this is just feeding you.

I don't have anything creative or new, apart from the fact that they're cosmic horrors that happen to be vulnerable to being killed, even if doing so is nearly impossible.

Instead of making them alien squidmonsters, I decided to take a more angular approach, inspired by impossible geometry. i.e. refracting light at angles that shouldn't occur and the classic colors that don't actually exist.

I guess similar to big daddy Kozilek from Magic?

lmao get fucked faggot i ain't goin' anywhere

"Old ones", as in, powerful entities driving men mad, are actually fairly young Godlike entities in the grand scheme of the universe, being humans having reached Apotheosis. They took the place of now-dead, older deities in watching over the inner workings of the universe. Some of them, those tasked with overseeing the process of death, eventually went mad with sorrow and grief at the sheer torment the souls of the dead endured while being "processed" by the universe, and now seek to undo it all. So now, they are actively trying to sabotage Reality, using the full extent of their godhood and their knowledge of the laws of the cosmos to do so.

Closest thing to eldritch Old Ones in my setting are the Dark Elementals. But most of them lack a lot of the things that would make them really "Lovecraftian".

Sure, some may be writhing masses of things that aren't really tentacles but aren't comparable to much else, or otherwise have an odd number of eyes or mouths, but most Dark Elementals were crafted by human mages and their imaginations.

Really, only the natural Elementals come very close to Lovecraft. They're not really sapient things; they're moving confluxes of raw Darkness; that is, History, Culture, Belief, Lies, Trickery, Imagination, Creativity, stuff like that (And of course, absorb Light, which is representative of the opposite of all those things; Basically, everywhere the Dark is Romantic, the Light is Rationalist). So they don't really care about Humans or Orcs or Elves because there's nothing there to care... from? They're far more comparable to hurricanes and tornadoes than dragons or Gobbo raids.

That said, there really isn't anything much more frightening than a natural Dark Elemental. Most of them fold through the fourth dimension, and so you'd need to understand non-elucidian geometry to really grasp their form. It's not insanity inducing, unless you're really weak-willed, but it's definitely headache inducing if you're not MENSA-level or too stupid to understand why that would be wrong otherwise. The only things that hunt Elementals are sapient species (if one is encroaching on a large city) and Giants, who simply need that massive amount of meat to fuel the magic that lets them grow to be twelve stories tall.


There is a unique species of Dark Elemental, however, that is quite creepy and nobody has quite figured out what they're up to. The Observers don't have mouths, don't eat, don't sleep, and are only rarely even seen moving beyond turning their head to look at you. They have a single, giant eye in place of a face, and really don't do anything but blink and stare at people.

I took the "all three" approach. The setting itself is a relatively contained safe sphere of reality that was hidden away and allowed to start fresh with mindwhiped gods, because the rest of reality had become a swirling cosmic hell caught in a state of pure unending war. There are creatures that could easily destroy the sanctum of this pocket universe with a thought but are either unaware of it, apathetic towards it's existence, too insane or stupid to do it, or enjoy the thought more than the execution. Some are old deities, some are just living mortals, some exist as conceptualized creatures that still somehow hold sway in a very real, physical way.

Smaller fry old ones have slipped through the cracks though into the pocket reality, including a massive black "dragon" that was obsessed with causing suffering and claiming the throne as a god of death, one of the settings gods has been hollowed out and made into the puppet of one of them, a few smaller fry tried to rule not-japan before the not-japanese exploded themselves to contain them, one of them is essentially the Ur-Vampire, and the first human was a very powerful witch from this outer hell who spontaneously birthed twins to seed their new world. Humans are the tyrranids.

They were once masters of their own plane, one full of impossible colors and life that behaved contrary to any known laws of nature. Yet, despite the realms chaotic appearance, there was a strange sort of order to it, and the Old Ones ruled over the universe, and all that resided in it for longer than you or I can possibly comprehend.
And it was good.
And, as with all good things, it came to an end. The entire universe began to stretch, filling what was once a warm and bright and loud universe with more and more nothing until the something in the universe was like a single grain of sand against an endless black ocean. The Old Ones waited in the darkness, the only living things left. They grew bitter, and cold, and spiteful. They sat in that darkness and they waited.
And, in their endless battle against the encroaching nothing, one of them managed to tear a hole into our universe.

Any interesting stories of your PC's interacting with them?

They whisper into our universe, gathering followers, telling them of the darkness at the end of time, gathering power for the time that they will push their way through the tear and take their place as the lords of this universe.

If you're going to aim for cleverness and subtlety, try to avoid directly posting song lyrics with anachronistic slang.

Was this song about a cosmic horror the whole time?

Who created the pocket reality?

The left overs of an ancient eleven kingdom, twisted and consumed by their magics. There were 8 who ascended to godhood, creating soldiers as twisted and malignant as themselves to wage war on eachother and assert dominion over the world.

Now, eons have passed and one has awakened and hell follows with him, bubbling up from the bowls of the earth seeking to end life.

I enjoy Lovecraftian horror and themes and I like the idea of High elves being the bad guys for once.

My Old Ones are usually my players' characters from the previous campaign

One of the setting's... I guess, inner haven's (haven't really thought of a name for the pocket reality, but everything outside is called the "outer hell") deities sort of accidentally did it. As part of the deal, he drastically weakened himself to create it, blank all the gods within it to a state of childlike and early valar-like spirits, then lock the only gate out. He's a TN deity who's whole job is essentially now relegated to watching a door and quietly trying to clean up anything that slips through.

Technically the space was empty save for himself, the gate, the spirits, and a field of white flowers in a spectral realm until the material world "fell" into existence.

Not really; I haven't had an opportunity to drop much in the way of big stuff.

Elementals, especially Natural Elementals, of any type are extremely, extremely dangerous. And most of them are basically unkillable too.

Fire Elementals: Giant columns of fire anywhere from a meter wide and the height of a castle wall to over a kilometer wide and tall enough to plausibly be considered "in space". Usually "die" through dispersing into smaller Elementals and assorted wildfires.

Water Elementals: Formed out of water randomly forming runes on a molecular level that are stable. They're usually shapeshifters, but lack the intellect to really do much shapeshifting beyond really fast evolution. In water, usually form Giant Squid that hunt Blue Dragons. If they happen to form on land or in the shallows, they like to form more mammalian or reptilian attributes and basically become T-rexes or other megafauna. Water governs animal cells as a whole, so anything that isn't a plant, fungi or bacterium is fair game. Oozes can be considered Water Elementals, of a sort.

Earth Elementals: Probably the least threatening, unless you happen to hate giant fucking trees. Of course, megaflora does attract Green Dragons, which like to step on things like houses and people. Still, just kind of redwoods or Morrowind style mushrooms.

Air Elementals: Usually fuck off to space. If not, they're the mother of all tornadoes. Once managed to hurl a dwarven (surface) fortress so far south it ended up across the goddamn ocean it Kitan with the cat-folk. Obviously, the dwarves died.

Spirit Elementals: You know those Evil Mists in Dwarf Fortress that Husk people? Imagine that, but potentially as big around as New York City. Also likes to fuck off to space, though.

Light Elementals: The most humanoid of the bunch in form, not so much in mind. Think Eliezer Yudkowsky writing Kyuubey as a giant Dr. Manhattan. Alternatively, can form a sort of crystal out of photons, cuz fuck science, magic.

Now that sounds pretty damn friggin neat. I might steal a few of those.

It's worth noting that these are natural phenomena, not "races". They don't have any sort of intelligence. When I say an Air Elemental "Fucked off to space" it doesn't mean that it got the idea that stars were far out, man; it means that the random forces of nature and magic driving it's existence meant that the path of least resistance was up.

I try to make sure that not only does Physics keep a firm grasp on the mundane in my fantasies, Magic has a specific and curtailed effect too. Fire Magic, for example, controls temperature, rather than any sort of raw elemental fire. Ice Bolt and Fire Bolt are from the same school of magic, the major difference being whether casting too much burns your hand from the absorbed heat (Ice bolt) or gives you frostbite because you expended all the thermal energy in your fingers to use as seed energy for your firebolt.

Earth Magic deals with almost all solids, and thus can kinetically control ice. It's also associated with plant life, since magic has something of a memetic component to it as well (fuck that quantum physics shit I'm a writer not a God). Same with water; Mercury is Water's thing, but so are camels and horses and healing magic for people. Air Magic deals with any gas. So a skilled healer usually draws mostly from water, a good bit from Earth, and a little bit of air for Asthma and such.

Spirit is the magic that deals with Sapience, Emotion, Death, and the other ephemeral things that don't technically exist but really do. Psychology magic. Also necromancy.

Light Magic is photons, electrons, and knowledge. The ancient ruins that dot the landscape and are filled with terminator robots and laser guns were made by people who would have been considered light mages in the modern lexicon.

Dark Magic gets a bad rap, but tends to be about summoning things, remembering things, Artifact making, and being plotty and tricksy. It can easily be used by goodly players without even becoming edgelords.

I personally don't want to get lumped in with this other guy.

Yeah, I got it once I saw the stars in the top right.

All supernatural beings are the result of meme magic, when the human group subconscious makes manifest what we're all thinking about.

So old ones are things like the feeling that something is watching you, or the fear of slow death by starvation, etc. They are largely unaware of individual humans

Three kinds of ancient shit: the Auld (primordial chaos beings--think Egyptian mythology), the Elder Ones (your more bread-and-butter Lovecraft deal), and the Elsethings (surreal, extradimensional entities which vary wildly from one to another, and no one really knows where they came from).

The Auld are ruled by beings that feebleminded mortals (humans) call “Chaos Lords”, since they can’t truly grasp their true existence. They predate the more conventional gods, and are actually quite pissed at said gods. Why? Because one day, the Lords and their creations were minding their own non-Euclidean business when the pantheon just sort of…began to exist. No explanation. And then, they had the gall to declare the Chaos Lords abominations, and hunted them and their creatures ruthlessly. The Lords now live in exile, constantly planning against the gods and the universe(s) they’ve created. The Auld themselves are thousands, maybe millions, of different races and species, from humanoids to single-celled organisms. Thing is, they have a universal hate-on for anything the gods (they call them “New Ones”, because they’re new to them) had a hand in making. So they torment the creations of the “New Ones” however they can.

The Elder Ones don’t need much introduction. Sanity-breaking entities from outside normal reality with various agendas that is almost always bad for civilization at large. They emphatically DO NOT play well with each other; part of why the setting is so mucked up is because the Elder Ones are constantly going at each other’s throats behind the scenes, and it spills over into the material world. The Elder Ones laugh at the so-called “Gods”, thinking of them as mere children that don’t understand divinity. That or they haven’t noticed them yet.

(continued)

The Elsethings are just plain fuckin’ weird. Each of them are different, and there’s no real pattern to their existences. Some humanoid Elsethings have been known to live passably “normal” lives, even intermarrying with regular races, but as a general rule of them, they fly in the face of the laws of magic and science combined. Their powers don’t correspond to known spells, they can defy physical laws on a whim, they sometimes have totally nonsensical and impossible anatomies…they’re like walking mindscrews. Some people theorize that they’re the “leftovers” from a previous universe, or some kind of castoff from the gods’ magic working in the material world—like space-time’s inflammatory response. Ultimately, though, the Elsethings are a mystery that has yet to be solved.

Dammit HP have you and tesla been messing with time travel again, go back to your century

I like it! Espescially this bit:
>What they think as communion with their dark gods is only their minds desperate attempt to hold some semblance of perception of time and reality or their consciousness will tear itself apart
Very UNromantic. Nice

From my point of view the Jedi are evil

Beyond human understanding, but not beyond comprehension.

The Infernal Gods, corrupt and insane, and the Abyssal Gods, their existence shattered and warped.

I like them to be enigmatic and unexplained. And when I say that, I mean actually fucking unexplained, not just unexplained to everyone bar the player-characters.

I look forward to storytimes about a that guy getting squished by a "dropped" branch for being a pyromaniac.

>humans are the tyranids

Holy shit. I love it.

buh, all these "cosmic horror" lovecraft(-lite) things, how is this for a change: the old ones are the lands on which you live, the cycles of nature since time immemorial. they take form sometimes, but most of the time they talk to wise men. they aren't unfathomable, they are just really, really old. they are actually rather nice, like your grandparents. there are some new ones that sprung up around cycles humans made, like harvest festivals and things, and large scale ancient structures.

"You're squashed by a massive boulder as you hack at the giant mushroom."

"The fuck, a boulder?!"

"Well, actually, on closer examination, it's a massive fungal spore. It turns out, you weren't just failing to hurt the Elemental, you were actually jacking it off. You just got killed by way of Mushroom Moneyshot."

"Fuck your magical realm bullshit, man."

"You're the one who was jacking off the giant mushroom."

I'm quite curious; what ideas do you have for Old Ones in a setting?

>Can you do better

This is not an argument.

The old ones are an idea, word, or virus. Nothing so compact as a single being.

The old ones are planes of being that ebb, flow, shred, and coalesce. That's their resilience.

Right, that was a question!

looking back on this post, it may just be completely incoherent. basically, they are a kind of animism based on cycles and locations, and a few new old ones have been made by people creating new cycles and places. the cycle ones are local, too. there isn't a big jack frost, there are a bunch of tiny winter guys that take care of one place each. they are pretty benevolent and actually care about humans. they also have a sort of trade magic that works mostly off of colors (i.e. you give me color A, I give you B colored magic). they aren't quite gods in the D&D sense. More like a more specific druid faith/warlock patron. pic related, M. Rosyrain, old one of spring in the starting village, he trades white for rose.

Remember that one Lovecraft story that basically implied that the North Star was some kind of Great Old One?

Yeah...

I like my Old Ones beatable.

I bet you still have less than 45% Cthulhu Mythos, lightweight.

Those ain't no Old Ones then, they're just daemons that got a little too full of themselves (and possible soul juice)

Cosmic horrors and fairies. Only one of them is a god so far.

If it has sourcebook stats, we can kill it.

...

Gaichu was mistaken.

If you can kill it, it's not a God. Just an unreliable source.

I like to go with things outside the settings reality
or for my personal setting some form of mortal that has attained a power above the gods while retaining physical form

Most Cosmic Entities have a form created to contain their power think Galactus normal guy gets remade into a being of pure energy that just looks like a huge dude with a big helmet. If you manage to attain that kind of power and retain your original form it is unable to contain the power and begins rapidly mutating which usually leaves the individual insane

Beatable and killable are not the same thing. As Cthulhu from his "Call of" series' stats do make killing quite impossible.

Best mortals should hope for in dealing with Old Ones is either relatively immediate death or maybe locking it back behind whatever cosmic door it was stuck behind before the party fucked with it.

That's why "The Dunwich Horror" always stood out to me. It's one of a scant few stories in which the heroes pretty much defeat (?) the Great Old One involved . I always imagined that story as a CoC game (with either very lucky players or a very unlucky Keeper).

The fun of Old One is that it would seem not even 'death' could defeat them. Or that death could actually be a means of accelerating their plan.

I like to think beings so far beyond our comprehension could be forever trying to die but be incapable of it. They're forced to exist and thus inflict atrocities upon other beings hoping for something to enact finality to their existence.

Only to be remanifested yet again because death is not something their existence may allow for.

>CoC
Path of exile has ruined this acronym for me... discussing cthulhu and seeing it, I think Cast on Crit. Playing PoE, I think Call of Cthulhu... My brain is fucking messed...

It helps that in the Dunwich Horror, the horror is a souped-up shoggoth, rather than something like a Mask of Narly.

I read that as "Mask of Gnarly" and all I can think of is Nyarlathotep as a beach bum.

>death is not something their existence may allow for.

This is the idea I can get behind. That something so frail and three dimensional as humans, even with infernal magics, help from so called "Gods", or the atomic bomb could even hope to do more than temporarily inconvenience an Old One is generally laughable.

Some worship them as gods because man has a tendency to want to worship anything bigger than him. Some despise them as demons because man has a tendency to hate what is different from him. Some fear them as horrors because man has a tendency to fear what he doesn't understand.

What they exactly are is up for debate. What isn't up for debate is that they are immense, powerful, incomprehensible, could accidentally wipe out the human race without even realizing it, and wouldn't care one way or they other if they did realize it.

Damn son

The Old Ones are the only "true deities" leftover from the death of the first reality. Modern deities are little more than powerful spirits by comparison. It is said that they destroyed the first creation in a war of spite and jealousy, for God withheld his name, a word of great power which it is said is hidden in the myriad mysteries of creation and that grants true enlightenment to its speaker, from them, his children, and waged war across the universe, spilling the blood of their brother-sister gods. It is unknown through what madness they rended the first creation into the twisting sea of the multiverse, but perhaps that is better than the knowing of it, but they are all that is left of the Old World. they are twisted corpse-gods, gibbering and rending and eating what they please and spreading madness by way of the sword. they will have their desire, for their want is the blade which shattered divine unity. Fear the Old Gods, for in their black ambition only madness and death lies.

dam son

This sounded much more profound in my head. Then again, I did cut it down a lot.

>The skies in days of old were a neverending torrent of light, day and night had no difference. Then the Old Ones came. They consumed whole worlds, the mass they had gained becoming unstable, and collapsing into a black nothingness. Their bodiless digestion of the sky and all the other worlds swept the universe, turning the night black. The remaining lights are the final dregs of the Old Ones' cosmic appetite. And they're disappearing, every year I see less and less.

they are called old BC they come from a previous world cycle.

they are the hungry ghosts of gods that fail the upward climb to transcendence

Man, I thought I was being really clever with the pantheon of ancient gods I was building for my campaign just because they weren't all "lol Cthulhu" knockoffs. Now I feel like a fucking tool, some of the ideas in this thread are fucking brilliant.

It's like if Lovecraft banged Kirkbride.

Goodnight Veeky Forums. This thread lasted much longer and did better than I expected. Stay awesome guys. I'll give my old ones in the morning when I can think straight.

>old ones are black holes
Kinda meh. Too easy, but could be portrayed in a compelling way. Part of the problem with ideas like this is that the player cast never actually interacts with the real situation.

How the cast learns about the nature of the universe, and how much they do actually learn, and how they piece together what they do learn is even more important than what is actually going on beyond their pathetic monkey brains.

>An Old One directly says to a Monkeigh, "I die"
>Monkey hero believes he's being told to die by some loud voice inside its head.
>Old One is pleading in the only way it can.
Understanding the context of words is as important as the words themselves. And players should never be able to understand the proper context of what's going on.

This provides an interesting point, how much self awareness do Old Ones have?

Can a being which effectively is its own micro-universe really understand itself as anything but "Everything"?

Ancient unthinking, ever hungry beasts doing their damnedest to consume all they can are neat, but part of the Otherness of the Old Ones is that either their very comprehension of existence is entirely different from our own, or at least different enough to be not just disconcerting but also fueled by desires entirely inhuman

An old one can be the quilt our universe is sown onto.

Our creator is the one with needle and thread, and the old one is the quilt upon which we're grafted.

So the old one is intrinsically closer to every living being within it, being our universe, then our Creator is. But we are to revere the creator and fear the Universe.

Perhaps the old one feels the creation upon its hide is akin to a puss filled boil and does everything an otherwise 2d dimensional blanket can do to excise it. Twisting, folding, bending, etc in order to encourage it to pop. And it's been doing that for a millenia or longer than anything that's currently in existance.

And what also, if the creator is in fact another old one that was undergoing the same problem and through its struggle, has contacted another old one or spewed its boil upon a neighbor.

What if our Creator is another's Old One and vice versa?

Feels kinda Disc Worldy when I write it out, but I was thinking of a series of blankets strung up flat as far as the eye can see on multiple racks. Or rather several rows of clothes lines, with cosmic animal hides being tanned all next to eachother.

Like a cosmic trickledown effect, this whole 'life' plague keeps spreading from one to another, mostly due to attempts to remove life kebab from themselves.

But then who was first kebab?

I had two old ones.

1 were from a setting based in earth where god flooded the world not because "Wow people suck" but because humans had great magical power, which is dandy until they discovered the spell "Enslave" which did exactly that, and had no run out timer.

So the free will so precious to good went to shit as humanity ended up being reduced to 8 lords of hedonistic vices and armys of slaves who no longer had a concious thought that wasnt to serve their masters.

The so called apocalypse truely only killed 7 people, Noah who was one of the lords who spammed the spell out of fear repented and was allowed to build his ark and spread humanity.

The reason hell is layered is because without a body malice is actual toxic to the soul, so when hell was created (at this point only to quarintine the dead souls from these monsters) they immediatly sunk deep into the foulest reaches into a toxic pit of hate that has warped their visages too horrible for people to understand.

Devils look the way they do soley because their bodies are warped by the presence of hate humans have.

No one would likely know, as these Old Ones might only barely have a concept of others like themselves existing, it's more they finally found a way to lose some of this really inconvenient life growing all over them and so they just sorta tossed it off, where 'off' is for something that is its own universe is a thought they've never cared about for each Old One is a multitude in and of itself.