Old Ones Thread

Spooky Edition

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

I like them when they use most of their creation powers and become lazy. Their followers are quite devouted;willing to do anything for them and the Old gods are "meh" about it.

All three, I suppose. The cosmos originally had a pantheon of deities and semi-divine entities before one took over as the one true God, so in that respect, they're old gods. However, the conquering usurper took the throne and killed/imprisoned his siblings because that were being affected by a corrupting Blight, destroying their minds and warping their souls. Spirits and entities that maintain a semblance of rationality are still inherently malevolent and act as, are treated as, and are usually called demons. A good percentage of the really old and powerful gods--one that governed aspects like Sky, Time, Oceans, etc.--are simply gibbering shadows with enough power to qualify as cosmic horrors.

I like my old ones weird. I like it when they don't quite fit in the reality they are a part of but at the same time fit too well. The word demon comes from an old Greek word for entities as powerful as the gods, just not with them. Not evil, or negative, or even necessarily opposed to the gods, just different.

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this is dope

My setting's old ones were formed when primordial chaos came upon mortal form and inhabited in it, thereby realizing the outer world and discovering that it desired to return to primordial chaos.

A lich burried deep bellow the earth. So long infact all human life has since ended ages ago. But to the mice and other small creatures left he is a being of infinite power and age.

Basically a very grumpy mouse cuthulu

I like my Old Ones to be beings so ancient and powerful, that compared to them, that even things such as gods, are like single celled organisms, to the point that they are not actually malicious entities, just indifferent, not knowing that when they do something like change something important, such as a law governing the physics or metaphysics of one or multiple planes, that it can cause the death beings below them, just to make the place that they are at more comfortable to themselves. This is simply because they can't really perceive beings lesser to them, because as I mentioned, beings like gods and below, are single celled organisms, and do you see every single celled organism around you right now? More than likely, the answer will be no. That's how I like my Old Ones to be, indifferent, ancient, powerful beings, who don't know the harm they accidentally bring to lesser beings than them.

This is how I like them too. With the caveat that there's a hierarchy to these things, with creatures lower on the hierarchy more able to perceive lesser beings, though still basically indifferent to or beyond them.
Cthulhu, for example, is pretty close to the bottom of the totem pole. He is still an unfathomably ancient being, with an utterly alien conception of existence who could wipe out life on earth more or less incidentally. In his weak, semi-risen state he can still perceive humans as a threat to his returning to consciousness and attempt to kill them, but it's roughly on par conceptually with washing your hands after they get dirty.
Something higher up would basically blow people's minds just by being perceived, even indirectly.
In a fantasy setting with an active pantheon of gods, I would make the Old Ones things even *they* don't really understand and greatly fear.

I mean, all of reality is Azathoth's dream that it thankfully doesn't pay attention to.

There was a blurb in one of the books about modrons from D&D's Planescape. Modrons can only perceive the modrons directly above them, and two layers below them. So you have your monodrones, who can only percieve duodrones directly. they can sense something great and powerful above the duodrones, but they can't actually percieve or communicate with them. But a tridrone can see the duodrones and the monodrones. when they order a monodrone, the monodrone is compelled to obey, and has no explanation for why, only that it must do as must be done.
Except this carries all the way up the hierarchy, so you have a powerful septus, who can perceive the octus above it, and senses something vast and powerful above it. while it only percieves the sextus below it and the pentadrones below that. Many thing just happen around it, services being done,orders filled, and it cannot sense or understand the mechanical aspects of this, it only knows these things are done by it's command somehow, often at the request of the octus above it. It fears and respects the nameless, bodiless entities that the octus serves, but can never perceive them, only sometimes knowing that it's will is influenced by these beings.

Fallen servants, replaced for their misdeeds.

I'm fairly certain daemon just meant spirit, with no implication about power.

Never been a fan of modrons, but I'll admit that's an interesting dynamic.

In my setting, I like my old ones to be cobbled together incarnations of conflicting ideas. In the not!-Warp, ideas can become lively enough to gain sentience and power. Humans are mostly the ones who come up with these ideas, so most of them just take on the forms and powers of the gods human's worship (but without actually BEING those gods).

Old ones occur when conflicting or just plain different ideas come into contact with each other, and are not so much malevolent beings as they are gibbering, mad echoes of what could have been.

My "Old Ones" would be the Gruesome gods.

Each of the Gruesome Gods is actually a "curse" or more specifically an Event set in Motion by a long dead God as a final act of spite towards the world when all their worshippers died a long ass time ago.

They tend to be very specific about it.
One of the Gruesome Gods for example "hunts" mortals, in the sense that this specific god set the stage for the death of every single living thing in the world.

Those that acknowledge its existance see life as a constant struggle to outwit the god. They become realy good at it.

Theres a few of them and mostly they dont realy have any names, they also arent real gods as they arent sentient or powerfull, they are simply a chain of events that has been set off a gorillion years ago.

Extracausal, multilinear god-like entities. They are indifferent or unobservant and rarely interact directly with anyhing. When they do, the "natural" world doesn't bound them, however they exist in some senses as a set of their own rules. Their intersection with our experiencial space is where symbols, patterns, and spacial allignments have effects on them similar to our functions or heat or gravity. Weird is the most important description.

As a person might be allergic to a bee sting, an Old One may have a violent reaction to a word, or a rythm. They might be harmed by a shape while blade or fire may mean nothing to them.

In the same regard, physical spaces may be different for them, and time is often not a part of their considerations. They may exist in the same space as themselves at different points in their experience, but only one in ours. Many are fractured portions of larger entities. Some of these fractures are more normal than others, and most of the time these are the only ones people ever directly interact with.

bump

> Cosmic Horrors
because they are Old Ones, all very non-aligned with reality
> powerful demons
able to interact with the Old Ones with less personal risk, due to them being creatures accustomed to suffering and pain which is what usually happens when reality is disrupted
> Old Gods
I prefer old gods being gods that spawned from a universe, so maybe an Old One could be forged inner-verse that spawned at some point in the big bang or in a black hole?

Thats how I like it, between the 3... a symbiotic amalgamation might exist. But the cosmic horror means cults of demons could etc

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It's sort of cribbed from some of the hindu/buddhist cosmologies, where heaven, hell and this earth are all the same place, but a mortal person can only see the animals and the asuras (basically one level up the karmic ladder and one level down) while animals could see only people and the damned (who were on a rung below animals), and asuras could see only people and the devas (who were on the rung above them).

Got the idea for a similar sort of dynamic for devils/angels that I'll use at some point in a homebrew - humans can see angels and devils and interact with them, but angels and devils can't see each or interact with each other. So they can't directly war against each other and have to rely on human intercessionaries and mercenaries.

They range from a shifting patch of pitch black nothingness in an otherwise colorful nebula to a raging vortex made of dinosaurs in the center of the Earth being held back by an order of immortal knights.

Conquerors from another planet.

If you can categorise an Old One it is more or less by definition not well done. The only acceptable categorisation is when it is clearly just what peoplehave told themselves, and so is inconsistent and often wrong.

That should only apply to in-universe people trying to define them.

We on the other hand, by definition have to categorize them in some manner just to come up with them, their powers, and some of the details about them. You can't just go and say "yeah, we don't know jack-shit about them other than they're mean and scary" to the reader. Where's the fun in that?

3spooky5me TL6 machine race in my work in progress SWN game.
Mostly dead and sleeping but but the prior encounters with them fucked up the entire sector, teraformed most of the worlds, caused most of the other alien races to straight up mutate or wipe themselves out.
Less Mass Effect Reapers and more of what the Vex from Destiny would be if you ignored the shitty game and went with the actually awesome lore. Causality manipulation, memetic weaponry, other assorted space wizardry.

Hopefully it'll be cool if the party ever encounters them.

As horrid monsters that actually are benevolent beings who want to help humanity ascend like them.
But as one could expect, they aren't too good at conveying stuff like that without driving people insane.
When they do actually manage to talk to people proper, it usually results in a cult.

Overall they mean well.

what ever happened to that lovecraft animated movie?

I like them as they originally were portrayed by Lovecraft, the horrifying logical endpoint to Nietzsche's philosophy of a nihilistic uncaring universe.