What are some creatures with ridiculously high CRs? The kind of things that eat tarrasques for breakfast...

For what purpose would one need these things?

Because why not.

Thought exercises are fun, but typically knowing the niche they need to fill is a big help in making them.

RIP players, I'm calling that it's a killer DM fed up with his players who are defensively minmaxing or munchinking.

Honestly just curiosity at this point.

We haven't actually started yet, but knowing the players, it's good to have options.

We're gonna want stories when this all goes down, Mr.OP.

But a tarrasque is a godzilla level threat capable of wrecking a fantasy nation or maybe world, given time. The purpose of encounters is to challenge the players because something is at stake. You can only raise the stakes so far before it gets out of a manageable scope; what falls within the range of being able to destroy a tarrasque but still can be fought by PCs? What could possibly be at stake that the PCs stand for which this creature is threatening? The narrative or system are bound to break when you keep inflating the scale it's on.

13th age has MASSIVE creatures that have cities on their backs, and one of the pictures of them shows a Tarrasque nipping at the ankle of one of these beasts.

You know the saying.

If it has stats, it's already dead.

A. Trips! OH BOY (I like that anime, but dangerous game ano.....you aren't an user anymore)
B. Huh? 13th age? Nevah heard of that!
C. I am not OP.

this guy's actually probably only as big as a Tarrasque, but I still love him

They don't necessarily have to fight it, maybe it's supposed to just be something so obviously out of the players' league that they won't be stupid enough to attack it on sight.

Who am I kidding, I know people who would attack a neutronium golem.

A very specific type of predator that is optimised towards eating tarrsaques but is otherwise rather vulnterable, especially outside of its home enviornment? (The main reason Tarrasques are commonly encountered rampaging is because they're usually suffocating on the incompatible atmosphere of wherever they were summoned and are doing the 10,000 ton equivilent of having a seizure.)

Cthulhu is in the pathfinder bestiary #4. He's only CR 30. They also describe him as the mightiest of the great old ones, which is... yeah.

Out of curiosity, what would a mindflayer lich be?

"Only CR 30"
Well yeah, Pathfinder minmaxers can shred him apart.
BUT
that is a higher CR than tarrasque, who is only CR 25.

how much your maximum strength do you get to use after a xthousand year nap?

Are you ready to start wrecking some assholes with glowy sticks right when out get out of bed?

Scary as shit, but murder-able.

sperm whales and squid are both at the top of their food chain, so they actually prey upon each other

it could always be something like that too

Have you actually read The Call of Cthulhu?

All it takes to put down the big C is to smack him in the head with a sailboat. Surely high-level adventurers can manage something similarly damaging.

CR 22 in 5e, which is probably a bit low.

How did you get that number?

I got chu senpai

There's a sidebar in Volo's Guide to Monsters describing them specifically.

Thanks!

And of course the actual handbook

It's silly how everything has stat bonuses in the hundreds yet the game uses d20 resolution mechanic rendered utterly irrelevant by the high numbers.

Every time someone mentions Cthulhlu's power level there's always some dumbfuck who says this. I can never tell if they're just pretending or are actually a complete ingoranus. Either way here's your (you) don't spend it all in once place.

He only went back down because the stars were not right. Also, the user that you replied to is also probably mad that they called Cthulhu an "old one," which he is not. Even worse is that he is stated to be the greatest of them, while like you pointed out he is a pussy in mythos scale.

It surprises me how seriously people take the boat thing. First of all, it was a steam ship, not a sail boat, and it was done by literally ramming it into Cthulhu at full speed. Second, it heals almost immediately after and it's not really specified why it doesn't take any further action. Third, the protagonist is psychologically scarred by the experience and then implied to be murdered by cultists

Also you shouldn't be condescendingly asking people if they've read a short story you clearly haven't read either.

Especially considering that nobody has actually read anything by Lovecraft, much less the fans of so-called cosmic horror.

Exalted is famous for these kinds of things. My favourite has got to be Ishiika, the Grass-Cutter Scythe in Exalted.

For some backstory, the world of Exalted started out as primordial chaos. Incredibly powerful beings pinned down a world's worth of stability, and that's what the game takes place in. There are Fae who want to bring it back tot hat state, but as they're made of unreality, reality is toxic to them and they cannot enter.

They decided to make things out of the chaos that surrounded them, things that they could send in to work for them, and in the places where the edges between worlds fray they often use mortals as playthings and pawns. But that's not enough. Sot hey decided to get serious, and design a single being, a super-badass monster, that could singlehandedly destroy the entire world.

They succeeded. It's a giant scorpion, whose touch unmakes earth and whose toxins unravel ideas, whose claws can crush the Pillars of Creation between them. There's only one problem:

The fucking idiots made it bigger than the world. And it's so impossible by reality's rules, it can never get close.

Don't wander too far out into the wyld, kids. It's bad for you.

Not to mention, the Five Metal Shrike. It's an artifact flying machine which survived the First Age, when mankind was at its craziest and awesomest. It's smaller than any major weapon of the First Age, and more maneuverable than any flying machine in the current world. It's got Artificial Intelligence. There is only one. It can repair itself, it can regain its magic by itself, it can cross the world in a day, and it can become completely invulnerable to damage for a short time

In addition, its main weapon is the "Godspear". Listed statistics include: "infinite levels of lethal damage".

Unfortunately, only one exists, it's controlled by a machine, and it can only fire the Godspear once per day. Oh, and creating a new one takes over 100 years, assuming you're already got the required knowledge. And the infinite damage radius is only 25yds, with a secondary blast of "only" 50 damage in a 500yds radius (where most characters have health levels in the single digits). Oh yeah, and if the Shrike is destroyed, it explodes with double damage and more than triple the radius of the secondary blast from the Godspear.

It's currently out somewhere in the South of the world, following its own programming because nobody's brave enough to try to shut it down.

las cannon? Sounds like a ray to me! Physical shells, or not at all mate!

>10,000 ton equivilent of having a seizure.

Old one eye I bet

Any large nid creature really. A dominatrix would eat it alive and a hierophant would dakka it to death.

>What are some creatures with ridiculously high CRs?

The Dungeon Master.

>Any large nid creature really.

Huh, tyrannids can cast Wish or Miracle now? I did not know tyrannids could use magic.

Because the only way to permanently kill the tarrasque is to reduce to -10 hit points and then cast Wish or Miracle. Otherwise, it simply regenerates.

A tyrannid might be able to out-fight the Tarrasque for a time, but the Tarrasque can outlast any tyrannid. They don't have infinite stamina and regeneration; the Tarrasque does.

If we use 5th Edition rules, by the way, then the Tarrasque loses that whole "wish or miracle" spell, but picks up immunity to fire and poison, and immunity to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from nonmagical weapons. Also immune to being Charmed, Frightened, Poisoned, and Paralyzed.

Can Tyrannids use magic? I don't think they can use magic.

No, but I don't think it can come back from molecules after being dissolved and eaten alive by tiny nids that the nid guns shoot.

Zoanthropes and other psykers from the nids.

Then the tyrannids would love it, stick in the the belly of a ship and constantly devour it's constantly regenerating flesh

Can Tarrasques become Liches? I'm genuinely ignorant of these kinds of things.

Why not. Let it happen. Maybe a Lich soulswaps with one to become a skeleton t-rex deadgod.

Step it up even more. Have the first Tarrasque, a primordial giant, be an atropal because it was a failure prototype. So it's a mindless god of destruction that looks like a fetal abomination Tarrasque.

Time dragon has a CR of 100. Highest i know of is the star turtle. Its a planet sized intergalatic turtle. CR 64000.

If we use 4e rules, on the other hand, the tarrasque can't die as long as it's touching the ground, otherwise it regenerates. Seeing as the tyranids could just destroy the planet it's standing on, I think they'd stand a chance.

It absolutely can, actually, according to how D&D's regeneration rules work.

I'd love to see them try, since we're talking about one (1) Tyrannid of your choice fighting the Tarrasque, not the Tarrasque trying to take on an entire swarm.

Again, we're talking just one Tyrannid verses the Tarrasque. Of course the Tarrasque can't take on an uncounted multitude of creatures at once, that would be unreasonable.

The question is what's the entry level Tyrannid that can actually stand a chance of beating it?

Your choice of third edition rules - where it regenerates from anything unless extremely powerful magic is used to kill it (and also has resistance to damage that isn't coming from an "epic" source, i.e., something that's 21st level or higher in D&D, which of course no Tyrannid is) - or fifth edition rules, wherein it is just flat out immune to any kind of damage that isn't magic.

Hecatoncheires, it can shred a tarrasque in a single round since all of its 100 attacks are valid.

The great old ones in pathfinder are stated as higher CR than the tarrasque. Though the tarrasque has unnegatable regeneration so it might still beat them.

(Different person) I'm not super familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos- What is the correct classification? A casual Google indicates he's a Great Old One.

I'm pretty sure the Shrike was retconned to not exist in 3e, sadly.

Or knock it into a hole? Defeat doesn't necessarily mean kill.

...

For non-third-party stuff the epic dragons are pretty silly.

Thinking about it from an ecological perspective they also have spiky carapaces which usually indicates defence against being eaten, and they're very magic-reflective. So giant magical swallowing predators?

Considering how they hibernate and emerge just to eat they could be their world's equivalent of locusts.

Otachi from Pacific Rim?

At least in the forgotten realms there's actually an elder brain lich that is secretly an ancient wizard.

You think the Tarrasque can't climb out of a hole?

Can you not read?
>immunity to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from nonmagical weapons
That includes biting.

I know 40k is all about over the top power wank but we're talking about a magical creature with specific rules in a different setting here.

Pour in cement, bind it with magically reinforced adamantine chains, whatever. You can incapacitate the Tarrasque much earlier than you can kill it. Some settings even use it as a food source. I remember one where a town was built on top of it, powered by rituals that fed off of it while it was adamantine-nailed in a cage.

I actually happen to have a pic for this.

I can't remember if that was an actual setting or just something Veeky Forums bullshitted up while discussing the tarrasque but iirc that tactic hardly ended well and resulted in a bunch of mutated tarrasque-infected monsters and people causing chaos throughout the land.

Also pouring cement over it may be counter-productive as some versions and lore of the tarrasque associate it with the earth.

Oh, it was definitely Veeky Forums bullshit. I was just pointing out that the idea of trapping it isn't a new one. And tarrasque-infected? Since when can it infect things?

Found it

If I remember correctly it was a side effect of the tarrasque being constantly wounded and regenerating what with being stabbed through with stakes to keep it in place and people wounding it to keep it weak so the blood and gore was leeching out, and as you recalled they started using it for meat and spell components and stuff spreading it even more.

I have! (first post on this thread so I'm no one you've replied to yet)

I feel like, or at least in how I've always tried to keep a bit hands-off with the Mythos for its sake of menace and mystery, that the only real way to measure the 'scale' of these things is to slap Azathoth at the very top, shared nebulous by Nyarlathotep and Yog-Sothoth, and then under that there is no true clear measure save divinity of lineage and amassed power of science (as the Mythos defines it).

Sure, a Cthonian would 'lose' to Cthulhu, but it's too much like trying to stage a poorly edited youtube of "EARTHQUAKE FIGHTS THE RED EYE OF JUPITER WHO WILL WIIIIIIINNNN"

Me too.
I think rats in the walls and the colour out of space may be my favourites but pickman's model has a certain charm to it.

Categories are made by man to impose order on the chaotic world. They have no place in the greater scheme of things, just us our pitiful level of science can barely understand the higher dimensional science practised in the less anthropocentric regions of the universe.

But basically, the categories established by the Call of Cthulhu RPG have proven to be long lasting:
Great Old One: Powerful beings that seem godlike to us.
Elder Gods: Powerful beings that seem godlike to us that haven't squashed us and we've mistaken their lack of notice as benevolence.
Outer God: Beings that are godlike to Great Old Ones, often display control of some facet of existence like life, space, sound, etc. Really weird fuckers.
Great Ones: Gods worshipped in dreams, pitiful in the grand scheme of things, but still godlike compared to humans.
Greater/Lesser Servitor Race: A race which serves one of the aforementioned entities.
Greater/Lesser Independent Race: A race which doesn't serve one of the aforementioned entities. May still worship them occasionally though.
Old Ones: Term used to apply to just about everything.

I'm personally a fan of the Temple. And of course AtMoM is an absolute classic.

These are about right. They're still a little much, but they at least hold a feeling of older-style classification that's as much wrong as right in its assumptions. And there is genuine scale, when things like 'Cthulhu is the High Priest' implies this beastly worldfucker WORSHIPS SOMEONE.

You can go full modern cold science too, and come up with a classification that works around the scale and carnage of celestial events like gamma ray bursts or supermassive black holes.

what does CR stand for?

My favorites were Colour and Mountains. Colour was just such a unique concept that creeped out good, and Mountains got me with one of its closer lines.

Though for me, the quintessential Mythos horror example is still the The Mist short story. Read that in a dark basement while sick as hell on no sleep during a February blizzard. Left a goddamn mark. The Jaunt was a close second.

I don't claim to be an expert but I'm pretty sure azathoth is above everything while the other outer gods may have something like tiers below him but it's also very hard to judge something like "power levels" when you have some that are much more involved in the world like nyarlathotep although they could be considered "lower" than say yog-sothoth who is much more metaphysical and conceptual.

Crunchy Rape.

I feel it's easy to walk past all of that when you frame it as the truth that Azathoth is the All, existence and everything in it across every permutation is Its uneternal dream, and that Nyarlathotep is Its dreaming self experiencing it and trying to bring about its own end. The Dreamlands are more real than the material.

When Azathoth wakes, everything ends (save maybe the Dreamlands). All else we are and know is just the wild horror of dream logic through a blind idiot god resting in the void.

I also just really love colour for the historical context of predating modern understanding of radiation, which the colour seems so analogous to.

Exactly. It has just enough truth to it to make it feel eerily plausible. Didn't help I lived in the same area as the reservoir that filled the land that Colour took place in.

Well of course nyarlathotep is the dreaming self experiencing it as that could be said about everything but I'm not so sure if they're really THE main "dream avatar" so to speak.

>incompatible atmosphere
Citation needed

>which he is not
But, he is a Great Old One user