Cosmic/eldritch/Lovecraftian horror entities in D&D/Pathfinder

What is the point of shoving cosmic/eldritch/Lovecraftian horror entities into a D&D/Pathfinder-type high magic setting, already crawling with archmages, active gods, fiendish lords, world-ending monsters, and superpowered supermagical heroes who fight all of the above?

From what I know of cosmic/eldritch/Lovecraftian horror entities, they work best in relatively low-magic settings where these entities and their associated creatures (nightgaunts, shoggoths, elder things, etc.) are the "main antagonists," so to speak. The themes of the story are built around them. Look at Lovecraft's stories, Derleth's stories, some of the Conan crossover stories, or Bloodborne.

But when you shove in Azathoth, Hastur, Cthulhu, or fake expies into a setting already teeming with archmages, active gods, fiendish lords, world-ending monsters, and superpowered supermagical heroes who fight all of the above... what is the point? These mythos creatures blend in with every other wacky entity, except that they have more tentacles and make people go crazy, oh, so spooky!

And players and GMs prop them up on a pedestal for being "more uncaring," "more inscrutable," and "a lesson on how mankind is but a meaningless speck in the cosmos," never mind that none of that really fits in games about superpowered fantasy heroes saving the world.

Why bother shoehorning them into a genre where they never belonged?

I mean, there are ways to do it right. A setting can come up with creatures inspired by mythos entities and integrate them into the lore in a way that meshes with everything else in the setting. D&D/Pathfinder does this with the obyriths/qlippoths in the Abyss. But the "look guys, my setting has Cthulhu and shoggoths in it!" method is just stupid, and that is exactly what Pathfinder does.

Lovecraft's cosmic horror is all about the eurocentric perspective and scientific racism of the 19th trembling in anxious terror at 20th astronomical and biological discoveries, and social and philosophical changes, and translating it into a fictional dramatization of that uncomprehending terror.

The resemblance between the spiraling, incomprehensible tendrils of Azathoth and those of galaxies are not accidental, nor is the theme of horrible quasi-human half breeds, or individuals turned to strange perversion by books of pre-christian mythology. The fear of uncaring gods is the fear of uncaring cosmic phenomena, the fear of alien cohabitors of the earth is the fear of other races lovecraft saw as subhuman.

Also, in the original Ambrose Bierce story Carcosa seems like a nice place with decent citizens.

So I guess this is partially in response to the Petersens Cthulhu Pathfinder bestiary thing? Regardless of whether or not it really fits in pathfinder do any anons have it and is it any good as a bestiary in general?

PF's detting is kitchen sink - what doesn't it have?

I thought HP Lovecraft's stuff was mostly about him being afraid of girls.

Shoggoths are just a particularly strange-looking slave race. Nothing wrong with porting them into D&D or Pathfinder.

Aside from that, if you want Lovecraftian big-shots in your campaign, they really should be the biggest baddest motherfuckers in the setting. So big and bad the gods, demon lords, and archmages might as well be ants.

Call of cthulhu came from his fear of water

He shook with autistic terror over everything that wasn't HP Lovecraft

He was pretty terrified of the possibility of being descended from a nigger, though.

Shoggoths are also biological silly putty that fall just short of The Thing when it comes to shape shifting body horror. If you want a reason to be afraid of shoggoths it should be because they're disgusting to look upon and horrific to fight.

Also, its hard to make archmages look like ants, particularly when you're a lovecraftian horror. Archmages, at least the Veeky Forums deific punpun/god of fucking over psions style archmages, are closer to some sort of posthuman metamagician. They outstrip lovecraftian elder gods and great old ones for the same reason their players are no longer particularly frightened by the vastness of the galaxy. Archmages, and their players, would be too busy figuring out how to exploit their vast uncaring universe to fear the phenomena therein. An idiotic narcoleptic universal flutist is just another rube to a proper archmage, and much like the thought about cthulhu "it bled, we can kill it", if it thinks, we can trick it.

>A crimson king has lobotomized Azathoth and wears a crown that hijacks the mind of the creator.
Congratulations now you just created an even more horrible and terrible cosmic horror.

>Godlike intellectuals and scholars that rewrite the laws of the universe and even the laws of magic as they see fit
Azathoth is a dozy semi-sentient wormhole.
Wizards are the true terror.
That's my point.

Just invert it

Cosmic horrors thought they were the center of the universe but have gone mad and dangerous because it turns out they too are just a cosmic speck in the uncaring machine that is the neverending turmoil of reality.

Garland was pretty awful at rewriting the laws of the universe. Took him 5000 years to execute a multi-phase plan just to fuck with one world's souls

Actually, SJW memeing aside, he was just a decently intelligent pulp writer who deliberately scientified horror memes for fun and profit.

Because they are plushie memes beloved by mental 13 year old autismos everywhere, which coincidentally just happens to be the main D&D/Pathfinder player-base.

>lovecraft-senpai isn't autistic, d&d is austisic

I've always found Strange Aeon's plot of 'Hastur wants to eat planets to turn into an Outer God' to be really silly in that regard, as though an Outer God is some sort of divine rank anything can ascend to.

That's actually what Lovecraft is all about. In the end, even great Cthulhu doesn't matter in an uncaring, ammoral universe bigger than any one god can fill.

But Lovecraft loved Arabs. He even made his self-insert character an Arab and one of his few friends when he grew up was an Arab kid.

Honestly Archmages, or humans having magic in general, is a stupid concept and should never be played in any form of table top game.

>SJW memeing aside
Robert E. Howard was a SJW? That's news to me.

>fun and profit
Very very little profit, mind you.

Paizo has been putting Lovecraft monsters into Pathfinder from day one, no need to bring in any 3pp.

>I've always found Strange Aeon's plot of 'Hastur wants to eat planets to turn into an Outer God' to be really silly in that regard, as though an Outer God is some sort of divine rank anything can ascend to.

And what's wrong with that?

Firstly, the difference between a Great Old One and an Outer God is arbitrary power level wank, entirely Derlethian.

Secondly, for something like Hastur, 'Become a God' just seems so... Petty. It's a very human motivation you might expect of a megalomaniac evil wizard, not the King in Yellow.

So I guess most mythologies have stupid concepts?

Like which?

>Greek & Roman myth
>human have no magic
>magic comes from gods
>only gods and half gods can cast magic

>Egyptian mythology
>humans have no magic
>the magic comes from the gods
>the pharaoh is a half-god

>viking mythology
>gods have magic
>humans have no magic

etc etc etc etc

He had to establish a way to save his people, freeze his people, recreate his people's biology, set a plan for merging planets, find a planet, establish a way to connect to said planet, create usable avatars/meat puppets, establish a refining process to mine the planet, destablize an entire world, wait for critical mass, set that world on fire, and...

Literally failed at the last possible moment because a bad of plucky teenagers and children (w/ chaperones) introduced scrap code into meat puppet prime.

Yeah... no, Garland did pretty damn good.

>divine magic is okay

Well at least we've got that to our credit.

Because they're cool and fun. Thats literally it. That and they needed entities tied to the dark spaces between stars and stuff that was ultra creepy and Lovecraftian shit fits that perfectly.

All of these things have a place within the multiverse. Archmages are super low tier mortals who try at being god like entities and fail, affecting nothing more than local world conditions at best. God's run the various Outer planes, keeping the Multiverse running, and presiding over the peoples of the many worlds contained within the Material plane/universe. Fiendish lords are the things which oppose the gods and try to bring ruin to the many souls of the many worlds of the Universe. World ending monsters are for ruining individual worlds within the universe.

The Elder Mythos' place in this scheme is as the scary things from the dark spaces between worlds in the Universe. The Outer Gods are basically gods of spacetime and may be living intelligent personifications of the Material plane itself and the dark things that hide in the spaces between stars.

those three mythologies you listed all have (non-demigod) humans that use magic though. Are you just stupid?

Yes because it's not people making it (or even using it in ancient mythologies). The gods can use magic because they're supernatural beings, humans are not.


Like who?

>Heroic high fantasy
>Eldritch horror
Pick one and ONLY one. D&D trying to steal ideas from Call of Cthulhu is one of the main reasons why people nowdays associate CoC (not THAT CoC) with tentacles and squids, rather than unspeakable horrors impossible to describe.

I mean, they do...

>The Elder Mythos' place in this scheme is as the scary things from the dark spaces between worlds in the Universe.

But gods, fiendish lords, and world-ending monsters already live in all kinds of wacky places in the planes.

"THESE guys live in outer space, see?" is an academic difference at best.

Never mind that the mythos doesn't work if there are motherfucking archmages everywhere.

>But gods, fiendish lords, and world-ending monsters already live in all kinds of wacky places in the planes.
Yes, in the Planes that exist outside the Universe/Material Plane. They all have their specific and well defined places in the scheme of all things. The Elder Mythos reside in the Material, and more specifically the dark spaces between stars. Thats their place in the Multiverse. And it's not an academic difference, it actually plays to a bunch of varying lore and spells and abilities that affect some creatures but not others. They have a specific theme and practically no other creature impedes on this theme.

For instance, many of the Elder mythos creatures that can fought (and this is an important distinction), are aberrations and not outsiders or elementals or any other type of creature. They exhibit living but alien minds and bodies.

As to archmages, you vastly overestimate their power and ability to affect the setting. The greatest archmages in lore were only able to conquer specific regions of single worlds, and it took a cabal of several of them to conquer an entire large empire. You also vastly overestimate their numbers, thinking that all wizards in setting are going to be like the PCs, when PCs are exceptions and uniquely powerful individuals.

Honestly, you just across as intensely dumb, and possibly retarded, in your inability to actually understand or remember the distinctions of each thematic group.

Nah man he was scared of crowds, loud noises, and new things just like most autistic people are. Me being one of them, I can relate.
Lovecraft translated those fears into swarms of monsters, huge monsters, and monsters from before humanities existence.
Lovecraft is important to the horror genre because he marks the point when horror abandoned christian gothic values and started embracing cosmic science ideas. Gothic monsters were always fundamentally human but they had deviated and became monsters. Cosmic monsters were never human to begin with so it's much harder (but not impossible) to romanticize them.
As for him being misogynistic towards women, that was the product of his virginity and hatred toward his mother. She always called him hideous for some reason and prevented him from signing up to serve in WWI. The world war one thing everyone understood but all his biographers couldn't figure out the name calling part.

Greek myth has curses, invocation of minor spirits by human magicians, and plenty of human prophets and syblils

Egyptian myth has the invocation of gods and spirits by laypeople, curses and charms, and magical binding inscriptions and symbols all invoked by humans

Norse has magic inscriptions, witches and curses, visions, etc.

Now you'll say that because its not fireballs and vatican casting it doesn't count

>hatred toward his mother
I mean she kinda told him on her deathbed to go fuck himself and wrote him out of her will.
Its possible his mother is the reason for his reclusiveness and so the reason for his extreme xenophobia.

Now why he ate only heavy cream and white bread is probably on him.

According to his wife he had no problem engaging in sex (In fact, even felt it was his manly duty to pleasure his wife), but was extremely uncomfortable talking about sex due to his upbringing.

That's right, not only did Lovecraft have more sex than you, but he was actually better at it as well.

I'm great in bed, just ask your wife.

Jokes on you, I don't have a wife.

>The greatest archmages in lore were only able to conquer specific regions of single worlds, and it took a cabal of several of them to conquer an entire large empire. You also vastly overestimate their numbers, thinking that all wizards in setting are going to be like the PCs, when PCs are exceptions and uniquely powerful individuals.

Oh I'm sorry, I think you forgot about all the planar magic shenanigans.

>Garland
>evil
delete this

>And players and GMs prop them up on a pedestal for being "more uncaring," "more inscrutable,"
The problem with this is that they AREN'T inscrutable or unknown. Typically, things like Old Ones in games are described and characterized more definitely than some actual gods.

And this is a bad thing why?

Most anthropologically accurate magic works by propitiating more powerful beings or by sympathetic magic. A priest-god-king isn't initially powerful because he is a son of the gods but because he is the kingdom itself and any harm that comes to him will therefore come upon the kingdom (in the mythology.)

>what is making sacrifices to the gods?

He had a lot of Suddenly A Problem Now beliefs, like most people of his time who were even vaguely associated with science fiction.

>These mythos creatures blend in with every other wacky entity, except that they have more tentacles and make people go crazy, oh, so spooky!
Personally, this is exactly why I like to include them in my campaigns. It's a convenient way to expand the variety of monsters in a fantasy kitchen sink setting. Lovecraft's enemies really aren't any different from demons or their ilk in regular fantasy, or malevolent aliens in regular sci-fi; indeed, they're pretty much *exactly* that. So, why not incorporate them into your setting like you might monsters you find interesting from any other work of fiction? Just because you're not presenting them with the Lovecraftian spin of "this stuff is contrary to the fundamental assumptions of your worldview, how unspeakably monstrous!" doesn't mean they can't enrich your setting in other ways.

That's no way to talk about your mother

>Aside from that, if you want Lovecraftian big-shots in your campaign, they really should be the biggest baddest motherfuckers in the setting. So big and bad the gods, demon lords, and archmages might as well be ants.
The whole point of Lovecraft's big-shots is that they ARE the gods, demon lords, and archmages in a world where everyone's convinced early 20th-century science is the hottest shit in the cosmos and has all the answers.

In a world where magic and otherworldly supernatural beings are already assumed as a matter of course, Lovecraftian entities as portrayed in the original works are just another flavor of threat among many. Lovecraftian horror is just urban fantasy or first-contact sci-fi where the perspective characters are as scared of the threat the new, weird shit poses to their worldview as they are of the threat it poses to their actual life. It's not even like Lovecraftian baddies necessarily pose that much more of a threat than enemies in other genres; it's not at all uncommon for non-Lovecraftian fiction (even heroic shit, not just horror) to feature looming, cosmic-scale threats that have the potential to steamroll the world but simply don't give a shit or don't have the right circumstances yet.

If you really want to approximate the Lovecraftian tone, it's less important that the baddies are *bigger*, but more that they're *Other*. Get the players nice and accustomed to the way things work, then throw them the mother of all curveballs. Something totally outside the known scope of the setting, that even the gods (if they had any inkling of them at all) thought were just weird rumors and legends and don't know how to deal with. They should emphatically *not* be a known quantity at the start, *not* part of the established cosmology, *not* play by the usual rules. Not simply *bigger* (and really not even *necessarily* bigger), but more importantly *beyond*.

Joke's on you, my mom's dead.

Isn't there sort of an inverse holy trinity going on with Aztoth, Nyralhotep and Yog-Shoggoth?

>The Elder Mythos reside in the Material, and more specifically the dark spaces between stars.

Absolutely wrong. The default D&D assumption is a Prime Material Plane full of crystal spheres and colorful rainbow phlogiston.

That's even worse, user.

Not really.

>I'm an unimaginative hack who can't grasp the idea that people's settings aren't determined by the books setting
Those 'pointless monsters' kidnapped an actual god, tortured, mutilated and drove him insane, then sent him back to the universe as a broken shell of himself.

I'd say that's taking them far beyond the realms of mere gods and into something else entirely wouldn't you?

That happens in D&D shit all the time.

That's not how Pathfinder works. Pathfinder is not old D&D, and this thread is about Pathfinder. In pathfinder, each world is literally just that, a world located in the Universe. No crystal spheres, just giant suns with planets that orbit them that hang in the darkness of space unprotected. Heck with the right magic you can get to Earth.

And in fact that's not how D&D has worked either for several editions now either.

>this thread is about Pathfinder

>OP post
>D&D/Pathfinder

Horse cock.

Has there been any mention of any of that since 2e?

Also, Lovecraft did not believe that science could ever unravel the mysteries of the universe, and that's why he has learned men constantly go insane from cosmic truths, because in his eyes learned men refused to accept that the universe could not be understood.

You're in the wrong thread mate, this is Pathfinder.

Then the boastful Youkahainen
Spake again to Wainamoinen:
"Young or ancient, little matter,
Little consequence the age is;
He that higher stands in wisdom,
He whose knowledge is the greater,
He that is the sweeter singer,
He alone shall keep the highway,
And the other take the roadside.
Art thou ancient Wainamoinen,
Famous sorcerer and minstrel?
Let us then begin our singing,
Let us sing our ancient legends,
Let us chant our garnered wisdom,
That the one may hear the other,
That the one may judge the other,
In a war of wizard sayings."

I love Longfellow.