How To Do Eldritch Abominations Right

I need any and all advice involving this.

I'm planning on doing a session in D&D 5e (it's the system everyone is most comfortable with), and I want it to have elements like the ones in John Carpenters Apocalypse Trilogy since that was the main inspiration for wanting to do this.

How do I make the atmosphere of the game creepy and tense? Is there any way to capture some of the more grotesque aspects of these elder gods leaking into our world given I can't exactly present the practical effects they used in those movies?

Would anybody recommend against having other elder beings try and stop the main antagonist of the campaign? The way I set them up, these beings were created as ensigns for an even higher power, and ended up infighting, trapping bbeg in the essence of nightmares. Should I nix this aspect and have it just be end of days horror show?

Could starting off as a plain slow campaign but then ramping it up into a siege game where they're trying to not have the town break down work?

Anything helps, guys. Thanks.

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regardibg the aesthetic i'd say that presenting the entirety of their appearance too casually would harm the theme of horror.
make it so that they will be hidden by shadows and merely give implications to their physique.
and at this point, "zombie alien blob monster" becomes a bit generic. "the thing" however cultivated the use of a single kind of horror monster with amorphous shape pretty well. if you plan on putting in different eldritch things, think about different design philosophies

>bbeg
Uhg.

Shitposting aside, verbage is a huge deal. Blood isn't red, it's carmine. The bone didn't break, it splintered. The flesh wasn't cut it was rent.

The more descriptive and bold your language is, the greater sense of importance you can impart upon a creature or situation. Nonvisual horror is all about letting the viewer fill in the blanks with their own worst fears, because the human mind is a scary place. Be descriptive, but not TOO descriptive. Describe sensory input, and allow the mental image to form in their mind independently. You guide them into spooking themselves

Well first of all, try to keep the presence of the actual abominations to a minimum. There's no need to have them on screen as the stakes should be high eough with just the abominations about.

Also, as media like Eternal Darkness, Hellboy and At The Mountains Of Madness have thought us, they can be in conflict and that will work fine but that doesn't mean they are sympathetic to the heroes. They can use them as pawns or disregard them but they should never be allies, you know? And just make sure they don't come across as human either.

Also, having the abominations affect the world/landscape/minds/laws of physics differently will make it more interesting.

So would presenting it something like this serve to let them fill in the blanks?

As you walk into the cathedral, you notice the place is bereft of dust, as if its been completely polished to the last inch, leaving a strange greasy sheen to all of the objects. The further you go down between the rows of pews, the smell of the wax on the floor starts to become especially abrasive. A priest at the front of the altar is obscured, swallowed by an unearthly shadow, but his hand toys with the contents of a small golden bowl. Upon closer inspection, the light shining through the windows has detailed his fingers. Laying in the bowl is a mess of sanguine, dark substance that appears to have been laying out for weeks given the maggots falling off of it. As it leaks onto the floor with a fidget, the small puddle that forms causes the hard wood beneath it to undulate. Very faintly, it was like seeing fingers starting to push through, but this stops once the priest begins. He slowly speaks from the shadows, his voice warbling like that of a drowning man, a constant sound of regurgitated food hitting the ground with every word he says. "More. Paritioners. Recieve the communion. It promises. To fill you."

head kinda looks like a demented chicken

Bump

here is an old copypasta of mine not totally fit to your description but I hoe you will din helpful OP
>A crucial element of such horror is being "trapped", having all your options cut off to escape from the antagonistic threat that is endangering you. It is important to make the players feel that they are utterly alone and their options are cut off, in space or in a distant planet which is a hostile environment this is pretty much a given. But make sure you put emphasis on this, illustrate or at least make it clear to have the characters internalize that they are trapped.

>Most logical options to solve problems need to be cut off, basic example: there is a monster stalking you, what do you do? Basic solutions get help by phone, stay together, barricade yourself, hoard weapons and survival tools etc. In order to have tension you must, I repeat, you simply must remove these options or make them ineffective. They have to be feeling helpless or at least unsafe at all times as if the "evil" is following them somehow maybe it comes in through the windows, maybe the water system, maybe the electric wires etc. the point is that they shouldn't just be able make a bunker and wait for the enemy to come to them.

As cruel it sounds to really increase tension you have to make characters suffer and break down a bit, you have to slowly take/destroy something what is precious to them while forcing them to press on with their task. If there is character who has an all important possession, it could be something with just sentimental value, you have to destroy it or make the evil affect it, like a phone that is constantly ringing. And if the player just goes "eh whatever don' need it" then he is just not roleplaying. This further scares them and makes the evil mysterious.

>cont

>How To Do Eldritch Abominations Right
you wear an enchanted condom. Or a cursed one, either way - use protection.

Don't do eldritch abominations.

The whole point is for them to be mind shatteringly alien beings. Attempting to portray them just fails.

>cont
Second thing is irrational things, have confusing and mysterious shit happen. This is very important, simple but irrational things can mess with the mind of people well. Remember humans often fear the most of what they do not know/understand. You can have things happen, you can show the effects but rarely give hints of the cause. Just make sure the effects are significant enough enough tobe disturbing.

Basic example: They are in a sealed space station but some people disappeared, there is no way that they could have gone anywhere. They just went *poof* and disappeared without anyone seeing/knowing how it happened. That is much more irrational than just have them killed by a Xenomorph like monster. If their bodies are found dead and mutilated that is much more rational than just having them vanish without a trace, they don’t know how or why it happened but one thing they know is that it could happen to THEM too. The minds of the players will then be forced to fill in the gaps on what actually happened if you do not tell them. But you have make them internalize the importance of loosing those people whose presence might be vital at their survival at the space station this compounds the threat.

You can also set things up by leaving some clues at the disappeared people's place, like a weird smell or some common material substance like kitchen salt crystals on the walls. Then you can put the same clues into the living quarters of some players to frighten them when they go there, because the only thing they can know is that this event is somehow connected to the disappearance of people. They still do not understand what is happening or how it is happening they are in the dark but they know that something is amiss and this is very unnerving. Then the clues can slowly start to follow them, if you are using a smell for the “evil clue” you can have that suddenly one person’s clothes start to smell the same way and then more and more things.

>How do I make the atmosphere of the game creepy and tense?
If you want to use psychological horror in your game, remember this adage. Long stretches of terror, ending in short moments of horror.

>Is there any way to capture some of the more grotesque aspects of these elder gods leaking into our world given I can't exactly present the practical effects they used in those movies?
Just describe it man. If you have the imagination for it, you can even do more than John Carpenter's team achieved.
>Would anybody recommend against having other elder beings try and stop the main antagonist of the campaign? The way I set them up, these beings were created as ensigns for an even higher power, and ended up infighting, trapping bbeg in the essence of nightmares.
Don't bother putting wants and desires onto Lovecraftian monsters. These entities work best if you just use them like a natural disaster. Think of them like walking, flying, talking, swimming, tornados and volcanoes. The horrors in the campaign are just normal daily events in the universe, that the players and humanity are blissfully unaware of up to that point. To the players, that veil of ignorance will be brutally disrupted in the upcoming event, and their characters will never be the same again, they will never feel safe again, because they have seen the true face of reality.
t.b.c.

>Should I nix this aspect and have it just be end of days horror show?
Nix it. But making it an end of days horror show will diminish the effect of the campaign. Just think of The Thing. If The Thing infects the world, that's it. Game over for mankind. End of the story. END OF THE HORROR.
Now imagine the world of The Thing where word gets out about The Thing. The UN plonks down a prison over the still-living remains of The Thing, our frozen and dead heroes get a statue for their heroics. And now, the world knows there are things out there in space, horrible things. Things powerful enough that even a single individual can mean the COMPLETE EXTINCTION of the Terran DNA-based ecosystem. And no one knows how many other lifeforms there are in the universe, and no one knows where they're coming from. All they know they are out there.
THAT, THAT is the TRUE face of Lovecraftian cosmic horror. The terrible uncertainty combined with the inability to defend oneself from the sheer amounts of horrors out there.

>Could starting off as a plain slow campaign but then ramping it up into a siege game where they're trying to not have the town break down work?
It can only work as painfully slow.
Like I said before, Long stretches of terrror, ending in short moments of horror.

To be plain and simple with you, don't have an eldritch abomination as your BBEG. You can have it as a presence and even the reason behind everyting, but don't make him be a "BOSS" or an encounter. Instead, have something be his link to the material world, and THAT is your target. The monster itself should not even have numbers.

The whole point of eldritch abominations is how different they are. And I mean different as in "existig in a whole other level" different. If you give it stats, the players will just try and kill it like any other monster. Give it sky-high AC, and now they can damage it on a 20 instead of doing nothing, and buffing now lowers the tension. Give it a +[alot] to attack and Xd6 damage, now its attacks' peril is quantified instead of psychological. If you stat it, it can be killed. This idea of "fighting Cthulhu" is flawed from the very beginning, as abominations aren't made to be fought at all.

Also, if you use this guy's advice
>Also, as media like Eternal Darkness, Hellboy and At The Mountains Of Madness have thought us, they can be in conflict and that will work fine but that doesn't mean they are sympathetic to the heroes. They can use them as pawns or disregard them but they should never be allies, you know? And just make sure they don't come across as human either.
The players don't need to know why Cosmic Horror # 1 hates Cosmic Horror # 2. They don't even need to know that Cosmic Horror # 1 hates Cosmic Horror # 2.

A good example is in a Lovecraft story where one of the protagonists accidentally breaks the spell bindings on the prison of some unknown invisible entity. The invisible entity is then implied to go around the planet and kill scores of sorcerers and necromancers. This helps the protagonists, in fact, without this entity, the protagonists would have died for sure, but it is never explained what the entity is, or why it is doing things. More importantly, we do not know anything about the morality of the entity.

For all we know, when it runs out of necromancers to kill, it will start killing regular people...

Well, there's that joke statline for Cthulhu in some RPG which name I forgot.

Something like "Cthulhu automatically kills 2D6 player characters and/or NPC's each round".

Focus less on what you know about them, and more on what you DON'T.
A plain appearance is just flavor, and it won't give the players the 'horrible abomination' feeling unless you build up the atmosphere correctly.

I remember running an adventure in 3.5, fairly high level already, were the party was mighty to the point it could easily take small armies on its own, but the players got scared shitless because of how things were happening nonetheless.
It was set in a sort of idyllic town where mostly good folk, people who fled from an evil empire, lived. Since it had a decent dwarven population, half of the city was underground as well.
I'll go ahead and spoil what was happening in that town - Thoon Mindflayers. More specifically, Thoon infiltrators, which basically wear humanoids as a skin, and later "infect" other people and make them into thralls. Thralls are still conscious but can't contradict the orders of infiltrators, and they get a curse and a boon - thralls have fast healing, which activates when the infiltrator wills it. But they can keep healing until they have as much as twice their total HP, at which point they inflate and explode as a gory bomb.
As enemies, they were hardly a worthy challenge for level 12-ish adventurers. But since they weren't attacked openly, could tell there was a conspiracy of sorts but couldn't tell friend from foe, and even then they had no idea what the hell was behind everything? Also, innocent, truly "good, as per alignment detection" people conspiring against them?
They got very paranoid and scared.

Aim for something like that, OP. That's how eldritch abominations operate - they twist nature, make things work backwards. Something that messes with everything they think they know.

Here is a reiteration of my suggestions on horror themed games.

Don't try and overwhelm them. UNDERwhelm them at first. You start off very slowly, in tiny doses of things going off, something not right. The slower the build, the better the effect, because you want them suspicious and ready to cope. You lead them on, using not just visual cues, but scent, sounds, textures, and you slowly draw them closer. When they discover the first desecrated - not merely dead, but desecrated, violated, mutilated - body, they should be relieved that's all it is. They continue on. More small signs, coppery smells, unpleasant hot breezes and smudges of viscous substances.

That's when they find the body of the person they were looking for. Clawed open, guts scattered, undeniably dead. But they were only LOOKING for one body, and the creature that killed it.

That's when the horrible thing of flesh, bone, organs, and terrible life whispers in the ear of the further party member back, "Please, please come," as it towers over them, a mockery of all living flesh write large and unwholesome, stinking of life and rasping breaths that echo with the mewling cries of just born creatures left to die.

I'm planning on having my players have a sort of brief encounter with some sort of Eldritch being in my standard high fantasy campaign.

The short of it is, someone uncovered some long buried symbol or icon dedicated to this god and took it to try and sell it or something. But obviously creepy stuff started happening and the players come in at this point and get caught up in trying to survive (not destroy or kill) some sort of eldritch being and escape from it.

How do I do a chase scene? At one point, they're going to have to flee from the mere presence of this thing that is incomprehensibly beyond them closing in on them and I'm not sure how to keep the players involved. Like how do I have them play the game like a combat except all they are doing is running?

So what if the BBEG was more like a herald? Like Dr Powell from The Void? Someone who is siphoning power?

It would make more sense that vast cosmic beings wouldn't have much use for frogmen or giant corpse beasts made out of viscera and undead life. Then those monsters that the PC's do face are a warped idea of what the villain thinks the power is. Instead of having the control of a sculptor molding clay like the old ones, he's flinging and slapping it at a premade statue, corrupting it instead and calling it his creation.

OP here. All I can think of is using the environment as a means of having them fight while on the run.

Have the thing start warping the place. The players might think they distinctly remember the passage ways, or see the marks they left on the walls, but those marks aren't going to do much when the passage itself is constricting like an accordion, and different ichors and gore start dripping down the whole place. Invert gravity so they have to climb out of certain places. Or tighten the hallways so that they have to narrowly escape being crushed by stone that feels a lot more like they're being smothered by flesh. Things can begin digging their way out of the walls and attacking them.

Now that's more like it. Yes, the "link to the material world" I mentioned can very well be a cultist-equivalent or someone that got ahold of a small portion of an abomination's warping abilities. He might believe he's a chosen one of said abomination, and might have some creations that mimic it.

>How do I do a chase scene? At one point, they're going to have to flee from the mere presence of this thing that is incomprehensibly beyond them closing in on them and I'm not sure how to keep the players involved. Like how do I have them play the game like a combat except all they are doing is running?

Mind you, this is a visual scenario I'm imagining. This isn't playtested on a group whatever, blablabla.

Imagine say a typical dungeon hall, or deep cavern. The players are expecting a boss fight. And now the Eldritch Horror smashes through the floor. And it keeps going and going and going and going, growing and growing, until it should smash through the ceiling. Now space begins to bend, the room grows along with the Horror. It loses shape as something that can be seen as a "boss monster". It begins looking more and more like a volcano made of eyes and snapping maws. It just keeps growing and growing, and the room keeps on growing too. The Horror begins belching energies and vapours, like a real volcano. Now it begins exploding itself, growing even larger, liquifying its outer skill, and flowing itself like it is lava. It begins covering the infinite room it is spawning under itself. Slowly changing the room into itself.

And have this happen really fucking fast. Like a real volcanic eruption.
youtube.com/watch?v=BUREX8aFbMs
youtube.com/watch?v=UK--hvgP2uY

That ought to convey visually that the players are up against something fucked up and weird. You might fight the shape of a man filled with eyes and snapping mouths.
But you don't fight the shape of a volcano filled with eyes and snapping mouths.

>liquifying its outer skill
*liquifying its outer skin

bump again i guess

here are a couple of my "ideas" OP, they aren't hugely original or well-drawn but at least they are contributions. I used these for a post-apocalyptic setting full of strange and creepy beasts, kinda like Zladislaw Bresinski paintings, I wanted that aesthetic of horror and mystery.

This one is like 12 feet tall and stalks the wasteland in packs trying to find people to eat. Mostly subsists on deer and small animals but won't hesitate to go after a group of 4 or 5 people with guns.

DM is this you.
Stahp with your Cthulu fetish I swear. Just because you got that one, ONE, guidebook does not mean Hounds of Tindalos have to be thrown at basic adventurers.

How do you go from curiosity to horror? This is both a plot point and a problem I am having getting spooked. I read the posts here and there are some interesting ideas but nothing really sets me off. I am having spookrectile dysfunction.

I don't see lovecratian monsters as terrifying, if I were attacked by one of the creatures from "mist" I would be more shocked by the pain than spooked. If I were a mad scientist looking through a portal I created at the noneuclidean architecture on the other side or whatever I'd just hink "neat fractal". How exactly would it drive me to madness. This scene in star trek seems kind of silly to me. Whoopdidoo, a door on one side of the room leads to the other side, not difficult to understand. Sorry if I am being ccynical, I want to be spooked, it just seems like an essential element is missing.

This could be a plot point, like a scientist gradually realizes what he is really working with.

another weird creature. This one gave a character a permanent injury in one of my games.

>gee why does the explanation on how to do horror not scare me

I think you might have autism. And retardation.

oops, this scene
youtube.com/watch?v=6v0E3D66tWw

Everyone here is analyzing how to create spooks abstractly so why don't you lay the same accusation on them?

But that's the exact problem. The mad scientist, or the doctor, or the pawn, anybody who is a link to them isn't scared of it. They fall in love with it, and try to harness the infinite and unknowable, which results in horrific shockwaves that make sea creature like monsters and zombie armies.

It's the actual adventurer not knowing or comprehending how or why the scientist has turned their world into a horrific landscape of their own design. Imagine walking into your brand new house and realizing you've just step foot into the same place you lived in as a kid. And then walk back out and you've landed in a hospital you were born in. What kind of reaction are you supposed to have knowing nothing makes sense anymore, knowing it'll never make sense?

It is not about the monsters. It's about the implication.

The scare is not so much in the moment of you opening the door and seeing a ghoul gnawing on the bloody remains of your roommate.

The scare is in coming home and hearing the soft sobbing and gurgling of your roommate as he/she slowly dies. Hearing the unseen ghoul gnawing through bone to gobble up the marrow. Those 6 meters to the door that seem to go by like 6 million years. Your mind running a million circles trying to convince you it must be a bear, or mountain cat that crawled inside your house. And then despair kicking in when you hear a gutteral but still human voice say "Mmm, tasty flesh, tasty tasty."

Read some motherfucking Lovecraft, you fucking retard.

This.
Don't leave a body, a small bloody smear.

Occasionally have npcs speak in riddles or gibberish, and not know what you're talking about when you ask them about it.

Have objects and locations lack permanence appearing or disappearing. After barricading themselves in they hear a knock at the door. The third door, no one had noticed before.

Ideally they need to be questioning everything about what is and what isn't really happening. Madness is the most important part of lovecraftian horror.

If I had to guess I'd say that the problem is that you're seeing everything as verifiable phenomena.

They ought to be things making you question what's real. That eviscerated man, that keeps begging you to kill him, no one else sees it.

The rest of the party is slowly dying to a flesh eating virus, but they don't seem to notice.

When you gaze through the portal at the "neat fractals" everyone else asks why you're staring at a blank wall.

The things that are happening aren't neat scientific curiosities you can measure and observe, they are literally beyond human comprehension. The sort of thing that makes you retreat into madness, because it's less frightening than thinking it might be real.

I suppose that is pretty spooky, that "what the fuck" moment when something that shouldn't happen happens right in front of you, when normality is being challenged, when you tell yourself "this can't be happening, it's not possible" and have to remind youself it is so you can try to deal with the situation.
I said I'm sorry for being cynical but I think it is important to get to the bottom of what makes a monster a Lovecraftian horror and not just some big furry ooga booga monster that leaps out of the cupboard. Though I see now how my comment may have seemed a bit obtuse.

>but I think it is important to get to the bottom of what makes a monster a Lovecraftian horror and not just some big furry ooga booga monster that leaps out of the cupboard.
Key here is terror before horror. Proper buildup. No jumpscares. Just let that terror sit there, let them quiver in fear waiting for a release that won't come for hours.

Lovecraft will let you read 20 pages of buildup, and then you'll get a four sentence climax.
>oh my god the horror! that horrid hand at the windowpane... oh my god, it's here! god in heaven save me!

hmm, I'm beginning to see

>The rest of the party is slowly dying to a flesh eating virus, but they don't seem to notice.
this especially, if the illusion is total it is easy to compartmentalize, someone being unaware that their face is beginning to peel off is very unusual and you can't shake it off, it is a constant reminder that something's not right here

I will reread sometime with that state of mind

I like to do them as a mockery of their surroundings. You find one in the forest, it will be a disguisting deer with bark skin and decaying limbs. In a roy factory, you find a massive doll with cracks in it with eyes of beasts unknown sticking out.

Don't just do tentacles and teeth or just formless mass. Look up all the monsters and antagonists of Lovecrafts fiction. All of them, every last human, every last zombie, every last rat. See just how many are formless abominations and how many are just normal shit with our heroes having a bit of perspective and intelligence to see how it came to be.
Do more memetic shit or other non-direct. Start having players roll perception to notice that they've started writing down a mysterious symbol in their journals without having noticed or that its the same symbol they've been seeing carved into walls or cut out of crop fields. Don't even have a payoff for it until later campaigns. That whatever is causing it, possibly the symbol itself, is so far above giving a shit about the world they're on that its using them the same way we would a battery for flashlight.

One of the best examples of cosmic horror is one of Lovecraft's earliest stories. About that ape beast thing attacking the man in the cave.

The ending when the dying "ape beast" begs for help in English and its human face is shown in the light is just amazing. It creates so many questions...

youtube.com/watch?v=BpaRouocBes

>But you don't fight the shape of a volcano
your players aren't murderhobo enough.

That's a Old Call of Cthulhu box set where Cthulhu's stats are 'Devours 1d6 Investigators per round' and I think some massive SAN check

>purple prose

I'd think something like this.

The harder you look at it the less real it seems

Sauce on original gif?

>5 arms
i see 7

Wat a shit suggestion. This is not about telling the players that they should be scared. This is about making the players feel scared on their own accord.

Build something that the players feel that they can trust, and then suddenly show that they can't, while telling them that they still can. That makes it feels like reality is being warped.

You never show an eldritch abomination unless its a corrupted human host

>Bitter and sick and tired of existence.

>Maybe they want to return it all to nothing, maybe they just want to stop living in a universe where their cosmic ness doesn't fit, maybe they just want to die...

>Or maybe they don't even want to be a cosmic horror, I mean if the entire universe makes no sense because your entire existence is too bizarre to accept it, then there's little chance of ever fitting it.

>You're like a man in a heavy bulky diving suit walking along the bottom of the ocean powered by a leaky nuclear reactor, everything that gets too close to you dies, you can't interact with your surrounding properly, and you can't even swim back up to a place more favorable to you.

>You're forced to trudge along, possibly all powerful but in a world that isn't yours.

Holy shit is azathoth supposed to be a middle schooler going through their hot topic phase

Would a string of completely exsanguinated lower halves work as a hook?
PC's enter a town and slowly realize the whole place is clear and looks like everything had just been prepared that morning. Bread is still hot, milk in it's buckets.
But then there's a smell.
And surely enough, their search leads them to a blood free sight, a bunch of legs. Intact, unharmed, clean lopped off a body, not dripping any sort of liquid.

bump

>You find one in the forest, it will be a disgusting deer with bark skin and decaying limbs.

If an eldritch abomination has relatable and understandable needs, desires, and goals, you've failed right from the start.

Their whole shtick is supposed to be that they cannot be understood or reasoned with. Once the players have a relatively good grasp on what the eldritch abomination wants and can view it in human terms as just another NPC, all tension and apprehension evaporates in a puff of smoke.

Don't make the same mistake that Wildbow did with Worm.

>Reality bent, shifted tore. Space and time became fractal imagery, twisting and churning upon itself over and over and over. Fragments of unbeing flowed and shifted in the dark creases of the room, hungry, yearning, rippling with alien desire and need. The candle light flowed, and flickered. Sputtered and blazed, dieing over and over again, and yet always rekindling itself. The walls shifted and lengthened, pulsated and warbled constantly as if the very space of the room had become some form of macabre, semi-living hellflesh. The already eerie atmosphere of the room had become even more dire, as dark whispers took to the wind, hissing and crieing out in fear and agony. Shadows clutched to the walls, scraping along their length, peeling away the lies of the lowly material space known as 'reality'. A liturgy of a thousand screams could be heard, as innumerable fractal "eyes" peeled open like the pallid, rotting flesh of a carcass peeled open in the grotesque dismal light of a dying star. The adventurers screamed, but none could hear them, as they were rent down by the pure, cloying rot of Entropy untempered.

Use this as an example OP.

scared boner activate

Don't explain what they are too much
Don't show them, if you do , then show just parts

Leng spider
gug
Dark Young

I would suggest looking up some creepy atmosphere music aswell. The right type of music can help big time in creating the right atmo

Tiffany Towers running and swimming at the beach

>the less real it seems
Especially the tits, which are horrifying.