Monster Stats Missing the Point

paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/bestiary2/houndOfTindalos.html

>"""Time"""(space) traveling entity from beyond reality without mind or form

> 16 int, 21 Wis
> Not Incorporeal
> An actual fucking dog

Post times when people adapting monsters from fiction completely missed the point of the monster.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Hounds_of_Tindalos
twitter.com/AnonBabble

>not incorporeal

So it's corporeal?

Precisely, which a creature without form probably shouldn't be

Yeah, that's the problem: A "hound" of tindalos is supposed to be a predatory piece of math.

Where did you get this information though? It seems like you just made it up.

Not them, but a quick search got me this:
In Frank Belknap Long's original story, which deals with the main character experimenting time travel with the help of psychedelic drugs and esoteric artifacts. The Hounds are said to inhabit the angles of time, while other beings (such as humankind and all common life) descend from curves.

Though the Hounds are sometimes pictured as canine, probably because of the evocative name, their appearance is unknown, since neither Long nor Lovecraft describe them, arguing they are too foul to ever be described.[2] Long's story states that their name "veils their foulness". It is said that they have long, hollow tongues or proboscises to drain victims' body-fluids, and that they excrete a strange blue pus or ichor. They can materialize through any corner if it is fairly sharp—120° or less. When a Hound is about to manifest, it materializes first as smoke pouring from the corner, and finally the head emerges followed by the body. It is said that once a human becomes known to one of these creatures, a Hound of Tindalos will pursue the victim through anything to reach its quarry. A person risks attracting their attention by travelling through time.

>Now I am going back through strange curves and angles. Angles and curves multiply about me. I perceive great segments of time through curves. There is curved time, and angular time. The beings that exist in angular time cannot enter curved time. It is very strange.
>"Beyond life there are"—his face grew ashen with terror—"things that I cannot distinguish. They move slowly through angles. They have no bodies, and they move slowly through outrageous angles."
>The foul expresses itself through angles: the pure through curves. Man. the pure part of him, is descended from a curve. Do not laugh. I mean that literally.

The Hounds of Tindalos are evil math from before the origin of physical life, and possibly from before the big bang. In the story a guy does time-travel drugs, casts his mind back in time to when they were the dominant... species? thing?, and then they chase his mind back to the present and the cracks in his plaster walls behead him, converting his blood to enzymeless goop in the process.

This description includes a bunch of stuff from August Derleth's butchery, where the "elder gods" are systemized as elemental spirits and shit. Original story is more abstract.

I took them to be evil Boltzmann brains, though I'm not sure the author was aware of the concept when he wrote the story.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

That's some pretty vague shit my man, and I only see a single sentence from that that actually refers to them being corporeal (The part that mentions that they have no bodies).

Of course, one has to wonder how they were even observed in that case.

>that actually refers to them being corporeal
You mean INcorporeal.

>Of course, one has to wonder how they were even observed in that case.

Astral projection, during a drug-augmented meditation on higher-dimensional mathematics. Read the fucking story.

en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Hounds_of_Tindalos

Say "angles" one more time.

Actually, I meant it as "refers to them being corporeal or not"

As in, I wasn't saying that the sentence in question was saying that they were corporeal, I was saying that it was referring to their corporeality.

I once ran a battle against six Hounds of Tindalos in Pathfinder.

They were anime dogboys and doggirls.

> "All the evil in the universe was concentrated in their lean, hungry bodies. Or had they bodies? I saw them only for a moment; I cannot be certain."

Seems like the story doesn't actually specify.

Dammit Derleth

Amusingly, when Lovecraft himself vaguely systemized the elder gods, it was part of the Dream Cycle and even more abstract than the later stuff implying they might be aliens. They were "the other gods" who interposed themselves against anyone who wanted to meet the gods of mankind, generally read as an allegory about the proliferation of scientific mysteries rendering simple faith impossible.

Could be worse, could have the great god Pan problem.
>... or one instance I saw a Form, shaped in dimness before me, which I will not farther describe. But the symbol of this form may be seen in ancient sculptures, and in paintings which survived beneath the lava, too foul to be spoken of... as a horrible and unspeakable shape, neither man nor beast, was changed into human form, there came finally death.
>Paintings that survived beneath the lava
>Pompeii
>Pan
Pic related

>And then she turned into a massive, wobbly penis, fuck me it were awful guv.

There's one claim that they have no bodies, and one claim that they maybe have bodies. I conclude that they have no corporeal form but that the bit when he "saw" them was when he momentarily reached complete separation from the physical, which was what exposed him to them. This is the same story logic as in From Beyond.

Anyway, the point is that it's clearly laced with metaphor and the illustrator going "ah yes, Dog-Liches" is eyerollingly stupid.

My personal theory would be that they have corporeal bodies, we just can't percieve them properly due to their extradimensional nature. Either way though, the Pathfinder rendition is still terrible.

lol. Pretty sure it was supposed to mean "and then I saw the horrifying thing that those dopey-but-creepy horned masks were trying yet totally failing to capture"

Jeez, they didn't even bother to give them any kind of blood drain or poison or SOMETHING

They leave a man completely devoid of any blood and oozing weird substances, but Paizo is just like "what if we just have them the ability to stare cuts at someone, and also a bite attack"

I DRINK YOUR ENZYMES

you can't fight them when they're interdimensional or while they're mist pouring from an acute angle

once they coalesce thoughm, they are basically corporeal dogs and can be fought as such