What do you guys think of eldritch abominations?

...Hang on a minute, that's the amerimutt face

Aye, I'll tell ya what I think o' 'em. Bastards naed ta return ma wee li'l men!

I love me some cosmic horror but most people who utilize EA's don't do it right. The point of Lovecraft's short stories was not the squid monsters themselves. What mattered was the existential implication of such things existing, effectively nullifying any significance we have in the universe. Aside from Thomas Ligotti, people always forget to include the philosophically dour undercurrent present in the original cosmic horror literature.

Too many of them are just evil monsters that can drive you insane. Not enough of them are truly unknowable beings that work in ways our minds simply don't.

They should be more like spooky space fae.

This, I don't understand the appeal of eldritch abominations, being vastly OP, causing insanity casually and can do this and that... it's a clusterfuck of laziness and boredom.

It's way hard to pull off a simple creature that is limited in term of power but highly destructive due smart use.

Good job, user.

I prefer them to enigmatic, interstellar beings that may as well be gods, but work in a different way. A good analogy can be found in eyes. Eyes existed in a rudimentary form for hundreds of millions of years, but only became what we know them to be a long time after. But cephalopods diverged from the evolutionary tree that would develop complex eyes long before this change occurred. And yet they have independently developed a complex eye that has most of the abilities our own do, but it is done in a unique and alien way.

This is how I view the eldritch gods in any of my settings. They may range from actively malevolent to even protective of their own worshipers, but have attained godly power in a way wholly separate from the gods of earth and wield it in ways they, and we, do not understand. Convergent spiritual evolution.

Interestingly, the existence of these beings disturbs the gods of earth even more than they do the mortal races. Perhaps this is why the religions of the world so ardently condemn the cults that worship the Other Pantheons.

Not much.

>Perhaps this is why the religions of the world so ardently condemn the cults that worship the Other Pantheons.

Oh well and like, a lot of them do blood sacrifice/cannibalism and such too so that probably has something to do with it as well. Or perhaps that's just a convenient excuse to go to town on them when the real motive is something more intriguing. My players certainly don't know.

You can only call so many things “indescribably horrible” before it loses any effectiveness; this happened sometime around 1930.

They fit into some settings, but are needlessly shoe-horned into too many others. Starfinder, a goofy sci-fi adventure... with elder gods. What the fuck?

Did Howie actually refer to something as "indescribable" at any point in his books?

2 spooky.

They really only work if you make up your mind as to how you want them to work. Either they’re unfathomable beings of horror which render everything we strive to achieve moot, or they’re particularly ugly monsters which serve as a good capstone to an adventure. Pick one and stick with it, and don’t try to write them as cosmic horror and then stat them out.

Oh, and fuck the very concept of sanity points. It’s the game design equivalent of a movie narrator telling you how scared you are.

Unnamable for sure and several characters have said something to the same effect as whatever they were seeing/had seen was indescribable.

Closest I could find

"It was everywhere — a gelatin — a slime — yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes — and a blemish. It was the pit — the maelstrom — the ultimate abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable!"

Rarely. Most of the Eldritch descriptions are more a combination of vague details and impressions, to indicate this was the best we could really grasp.

nope

Even in the games made for lovecraft stuff i've found x-files shit is scarier and more fun. A midnight car chase in the middle of Nowhere, Massachusetts with a protomatter construct in a police car. You manage to wreck him (oh god did you just kill people to get away from this guy?) and as you pull away you see him skitter out the window on all fours. An hour later there's another car flooring it behind you.

Stuff like that is much more immediately exciting than trying to copy the very unique magic of a very dead author from a hundred years ago.

If you can do it, then by all means do it, but you can't.

He did, but even he knew it was shit writing

"The Carter of this story also seems to be a reflection of Lovecraft himself, as shown when: "he added, my constant talk about 'unnamable' and 'unmentionable' things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with sights or sounds which paralysed my heroes’ faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced." This is quite in standing with Lovecraft's work up to this point in his career, much of which uses similar plot devices to those described, such as entities beyond comprehension and protagonists driven mad by their experiences."

Love me some good Lovecraftian Horrors

>I've merged them with demons.

I do this too, it always seemed to me that they are only "alien" in the most idiotic and obtuse sense of "they live outside the planet so they are aliens" and a lot of D&D demon lords like Juiblex and Pale Night are already eldritch abominations.

Yig, the father of serpents, is probably my favorite. Mostly because in this world of freakish squid monsters and crazy unknowable vapors he's just this angery lizardman going around fucking shit up.

Funnily enough though one of Lovecraft's characters states in his story "Out of the Aeons" that when it came to conflict in the Elder God's pantheon, Yig would actually help humanity. Maybe.

Conceptually cool but need to go beyond tentacles and madness

I think giving things a bunch of tentacles doesn't make something a "lovecraftian horror" and most people who use the terms "eldritch horror" or "lovecraftian" have no idea what they're talking about.

cough bloodborne
cough eldrazi

I'd argue that Bloodborne did okay since one of Lovecraft's big things was how cosmic horror lurks just below the thin veil of our reality, which was shown with how Insight worked.

And yet you walk up to unfathomable cosmic horrors and swing a sword at them until they die.

Bloodborne did eldritch horrors very well.

They're pretty lame, a good villain has a personality and motivations and isn't just a mindless force of destruction.

Lovecraftian =/= literally lovecraft

I Don't think that an eldritch monstrosity has to be unkillable to fit the type. They just have to be some or all of the following:

1. FuUuUuUucked up, which Bloodborne's are ( they impregnate human women with their genes, and recieve power and nourishment from what is implied to be menstrual blood)
2. They must lurk within plain sight for any enlightened enough to see them and go mad while the "sane" masses churn along in ignorance (represented through Insight, which is ALSO A STAT THAT TRACKS LITERAL EYEBALLS GROWING INSIDE YOUR BRAIN, WHAT THE FUCK)
3. Their goals, should they even be decipherable in the first place, must be so startlingly off-putting in their means as they are their ends The slow shifting from dusk to night in Bloodborne shows the world's descent into madness along with the player.
4. Doesn't hurt if they're ugly. Also, they should all at least feel unique even if they don't look unique. Which, in my opinion is accomplished suitably enough.

This user gets it

These weren't literal eldritch gods though. These were the result of people reaching into the eldritch world. The few we do kill are cast offs and hybrids which couldnt make it in the great beyond. So I'd say the menace of the Outer Gods was kept pretty much intact.

Always been partial to Shub, since she's the shepard/mother to sentient life and comparable to a nature deity. Kind of presumptuous to think she'd help us though. Nug and Yeb are her children, so the whole family is kinda friendly? Wait no, Cthulu is offspring of Nug so maybe not.

I think they are kinda eldritch and abominable.

>Always been partial to Shub, since she's the shepard/mother to sentient life and comparable to a nature deity. Kind of presumptuous to think she'd help us though.

I kind of see her as a mother grizzly on roids. Sure she's a horrific interstellar predator but god forbid you come between her and her cubs (worshipers in this case). T'yog was also one of her priests so that may have played a part in his logic.

Also in the end he actually does get the help he needs, no strings attached, only to be foiled by agents of Ghatanothoa. So that's something to think about.

>not being able to figure it's purpose =/= mindless

OPs sure are fucking lazy these days

>A STAT THAT TRACKS LITERAL EYEBALLS GROWING INSIDE YOUR BRAIN
That's conjecture based on what could very well be a metaphor.
Some dudes got eyes in their brains through efforts of their own. That doesn't mean the player character did too.

What do you think of a particular black ant currently crawling in the jungles of south america?
That's what they think of you.

Then why should I think of them?

wow lol xD that's so fuckin edgy man whoooo

daaamn that shit dark son xD

>merged them with demons

But angels are benign and inspire hope, they are not edgy "you get instantly fucked, you existence is meaningless" types, generally speaking.

>DUDE THEYRE LIKE UNKNOWABLE BEINGS TOTALLY BEYOND HUMAN UNDERSTANDING
>Nyarlathotep is literally the scariest thing Lovecraft could imagine, a Black Guy.

Hard to pull off properly in RPGs

But they, like Eldritch Abominations, tell people something b merely existing that they don't want to know;

You have never seen the sun because you sit deep in the shadow of something incomprehensibly greater than yourself. Also the only reason you and the rock you stand on survive is the indifference of anything remotely of worth, and you will be stepped on at some point with equal apathy.

Of course it still works on the principle that people will go mad if they realize that we sit on a pale blue dot of no significance amidst a sea of nothingness with no purpose or reason. In Lovecrafts day this was a hard truth to swallow with man being the pinnacle of creation with the universe as it knew at it's finger tips and he world to be shaped on the whim of the rich mans hand.

Today we typically come to terms with the whole pointlessness of it all and our non-place in the fathomless universe at about age 11.

Not just a black guy, but a Kang also.

I honestly feel that in RPGs, black guys need to get +5 to their STR and +3 to their charisma, but -10 to their INT.

Maybe the charisma should be higher because of their BBCs and all.

As stupid as it is, it's literally mental HP, yet it doesn't work for that very reason you mentioned, but if a good player can roleplay being hurt I guess he can do it with being scared/going insane.

t_d /pol/luter, that's wrong. If you're going to waste the mod's time and piss everyone off with /pol/bait, at least have the courtesy to do it right.

> African American, Choice of one
> +2 Str, +2 Dex, +4 Con, -2 Int, -4 Wis, +4 Cha
> +4 Str, +0 Dex, +4 Con, -2 Int, -4 Wis, +4 Cha

> Native African, Choice of one
> +0 Str, +4 Dex, +2 Con, -4 Int, +2 Wis, +2 Cha
> +0 Str, +2 Dex, +0 Con, +0 Int, -2 Wis, +4 Cha

There, that's how you offend people in an RPG context, not your low effort, off-topic horse-shit.

Actually I spend hours upon hours reading about various species from journals and watching documentaries about them.

la abominacion

yes, it's much less boring when impossibly powerful things have the same psychology as humans, and aren't unknowably indifferent to ants like us

Stupid unless they're angels

holy words very GOOD

sexy god YEAH

what does this have to do with anything

I mean, it's a reasonable conjecture considering how many puns Bloodborne employs in its design (Bloodborne contagion, Born of Blood, Born out of blood, etc.) Having insight be a combination of "your insight into the world" and "your literal internal sight as eyeballs line your brain" is something I wouldn't put past the writers and developers.

Whoops, meant to reply to

>Oh, and fuck the very concept of sanity points. It’s the game design equivalent of a movie narrator telling you how scared you are.

It's all well and good to say this, but what would you propose as a better mechanic for damage to one's sanity?

Not scaredness (players should be invested enough in their own character / the setting that they should appropriately fear consequences), which is often inappropriately mingled with sanity systems (the sort of "you are now terrified" directives you mentioned), but not being able to trust one's own mind?

E.g. with the sanity points system, you can say "player has lost 30% of his sanity points so he gets X penalty to perception checks, and might hallucinate something" - what would be a better replacement that still generates tension and allows the DM to employ interesting effects (e.g. one player perceiving things the others don't)?

devil god UNCOMMENTATION

Christian demons are just rebel angels, there is no original reference that states they are any more abominable than how they already were as angels.

I'm not sure whether I love or am terrified by what this meme has become. It started off as just ugly americans, went to orcs, now suddenly we're dealing with otherworldy abominations.

>What do you guys think of eldritch abominations?
I find that they're at their most interesting when the writers keep in mind that they have their own internal logic. Some people use the concept as a simple hand-wave, saying that the creature is too alien to comprehend as an excuse for it to look like a collection of random body parts and perform nonsensical actions. They're not insanity elementals. They're supposed to be creatures that are so alien to humanity that they lie completely outside the human frame of reference, but the underlying point is how small the human frame of reference is in such a vast universe. They exist comfortably within their own frame of reference, it's just very different from what humans find relatable.

Similarly, I prefer it when their actions do have an underlying alien logic of some sort. You can say it's beyond our comprehension, but the audience knows that it really just hasn't been written and there's actually nothing there; it's more interesting when you can actually get a sense of why they do what they do, even if it's obscure, strange, or otherwise difficult to fully grasp.

Sin corrupts the form and rebellion against God is a heavy sin.

>you're just trying to not drown in the ripples of their passage.
I actually played something like a Disaster movie or Cloverfield styled game, where it wasn't the PCs trying to actively stop the thing, they were just trying to not die while it was there. My players were more freaked by it than the actual CoC games I've ran, partially because I put a lot of work into it, but also because they legitimately were powerless civilians and were just making rolls to survive.

I love it, personally. The massive amount of mutthurt it generated is just the icing on the cake.

Temporary or permanent quirks, immediate consequences of seeing something spooky, rolled vs whatever stat sanity would normally be derived from in your system, ranging in severity based on the level of sucess or failure, with a very small possibility of permanently affecting said stat.

Basically give characters phobias and personality quirks based on what they've seen, tailored directly to their experience. Immediate consequences are things like vomiting, passing out, panicking or just being stunned. These all add weight and consequences to the encounter without abstractly saying someone has 30% of their sanity left, which isn't even a thing in real life.

This is pretty much the reason why it fails. You have to remember that Lovecraft himself was basically a guy who grew up more 19th century (to the point that his style, by the time he was writing mythos things, was some 50 years dead) dealing with all the implications that physics was bringing up.

The horrors are supposed to be part of the setting, not a character or antagonist

I think they meant a better system as in avoiding telling the player their character's state

"You are now have a phobia of dark rooms" is basically the same thing as telling the player "you are afraid now" in that it takes agency away from the player.

The GM should be able to directly control characters perceptions, and the player should react accordingly. The problem is how to e.g. have four characters look out a window and only one them see something spooky, without resorting to note passing or other stuff that breaks game-flow / immersion.

Or to put it another way - players should not be aware that their senses are being tampered with (aside from unavoidable situations e.g. one player is isolated and winds up fighting a monster, only for another player to arrive and see that the first player is fighting a hallucination).

>"You are now have a phobia of dark rooms" is basically the same thing as telling the player "you are afraid now" in that it takes agency away from the player.
What's the difference between "you are injured now, you feet is hurt and you can only crawl" and "you are deeply scarred, absence of light stuns you or force you to keep screaming"?

In a horror story you can't force your player to be scarred, what you can do however is make him relate for the characters, and for that the player needs to care about his character, if you roleplay a child lost in a scary woods, you as an adult won't be affected much by the scary illusions, but if you think about it this experience can be horrifying.

I think fridge horror is the only way to handle this, mindfucking the players and showing them stuff that their characters don't can be scary, it's one of the few genre where metagaming is preferred.

Overused and misused to the point that just greentexting
>Lovecraftian
is a joke in itself

congratulations

Exactly. That's how they work. Most people don't give a shit and will never think about them or even visit them. Some people will visit the same place as them but still not give a shit and will only focus on stripping resources. There are even those who will just wipe out what they see as an "infestation", but they don't really give a shit about the ants, they just don't want them in the way any more.

But then there are the rare few who actively take interest. They go to their home, they study the ants, they even take a few samples for further research, for their own interests. Some tribes even go and catch ants, to use them for various rituals or even as sutures.

That's who Nyarlathotep is.

I guess. The one making fun of the Stranger Things kid just seems downright mean, though.

They probably don't think about you at all.

Or worse, you exist only because they think of you. You're a figment of their imagination.

For my taste I like them to be a devestating evil.

...

>What's the difference between "you are injured now, you feet is hurt and you can only crawl" and "you are deeply scarred, absence of light stuns you or force you to keep screaming"?

I guess it's because the character's body is interacting with the world of the GM's setting, and thus telling the player the consequences of damage is just a regular part of the GM simulating the world.

When you tell a player their character must act a certain way, you're crossing the border between the character's body (which is fair game) and their mind (which I feel should exclusively be the domain of the player). It's equivalent to railroading in the sense it removes their free will.

When a player says "I look out the window" and you describe something being there that isn't (or vice-versa), the player still has free agency to react. If they see a dragon flying around and decide to run screaming to the other players to get ready, but the dragon was just a figment, then consequences will naturally emerge - you haven't said "you are now panicking because you just saw a dragon".

Honestly you shouldn't.

>Basically give characters phobias and personality quirks based on what they've seen, tailored directly to their experience. Immediate consequences are things like vomiting, passing out, panicking or just being stunned.
That's what the sanity mechanic in Delta Green, and I believe CoC as well, do.

I personally love this meme because it encourages making fun of people because they are mixed race, which is a cultural shift I can totally get behind.

I try not to think of them lest I attract their attention.

>britfags jealous because they're not RAD AS FUCK

Overrated and overplayed, and Lovecraft was neither the first nor the best at it.

Cosmic monsters shouldn’t be malevolent. They should be neutral and like animals.

Nor should they be enormous or chaotic. I long for a subatomic cosmic monster that breeds across atoms, a virus for the smallest parts of matter. And I want humanity to realize that they are this on a larger scale to larger the throad universe level cosmic monsters, and that they fear humanity like we fear cancer.

Just please god no more tentacle monsters that the protagonists can’t defeat. Armitage BTFO Yog Sothoth.

in terms of tabletop they're just edgier tarrasques with insanity meme rules

>Cosmic monsters shouldn’t be malevolent. They should be neutral and like animals.

meh, even more boring

there is no way to do 'eldritch abominations' good in an RPG. they weren't even good in the books.

the fact that things like doki doki literature club pulls off cosmic horror better than most modern literature is pretty disheartening. and ddlc isnt even that good...

I think hes a testament to the complexity of life even on a minuscule level. and i love him

i try not to think of them.

helps you to keep your sanity.

and your skin.