Unknown motives

So I have a theory that relates to Lovecraftian entities. They're supposed to be above our understanding and alien because of that, but more often than not they're just sort of aimless and vaguely hostile. I feel like this is mostly because people don't really know how to portray "Unknowable alien" because of that "unknowable" part.

My theory, that I want to Test out on my players is that any motivation, even very simple ones, can be alien and incomprehensible if you only see bits and pieces of it, and even more so if there are other competing actions muddying the water. Here's what I want to do: I'm going to create a pantheon of elder ones, each with a specific motivation and have them all acting at once.

So, can you guys suggest me some motivations for my alien gods? Anything will work really.

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To be fair, you can bring the notion of the Outer's and the GOO's beign ammoral above thou, "can complete justify genociding you because too smart" shit to question by the notion that Nyarlathotep is literally the Makuta from Bionicle in Reverse.

And Tsthogga, and the Elephant vampire- nothing about those fucks is remotely "good".

As far as I'm concerened, they're the first organisms to come to be, and Nyarlathotep is actually playing everyone for a trick because nothing can really contest it, and it's literally just Demiurging around for when it act's out it's purpose as a waking hormone on mass scale that it is and triggers the end- which is actually just an implosion so it literally just suicides everyone and ruins almost everything, and then things pick up in the Doctor who universe where Yog-Sothoth is no longer the cosmic definition of cock as is just floating knowledgable testicles, Hastur is furry, but alive, and Cthulhu suicide bombed, and shubby is dead, but her progeny lives on.

I just started reading up on the Elder Scrolls lore, and apparently Thalmore, High Elves are fighting to destroy some artifacts so that they can stop Time from being linear. That's a very cool motivation.

egregori:

a higher ecosystem made entirely of psychic energy compressed into tangible matter. egregori come in all shapes and sizes but are basically just like carbon-based life, operating on a different level of reality.

dagon is an egregore, while the deep ones are organic servants. likewise yig is egregore, serpent people are organic. all the outer gods and great old ones are egregori.

just like organic life, an egregore's main impetus is to reproduce. they do that by 'impregnating' conglomerations of psychic energy produced by organic life. the most fertile psychic vortices are produced by extreme and traumatic emotions. egregori tend to cluster in localized areas (haunted houses, graveyards, arkham, etc.) because their presence creates positive feedback loops. egregori cause mayhem wherever they go and use it to reproduce, which causes more mayhem, and so on

the bigger the egregore, the bigger a vortex it needs, and the bigger its ambitions. egregori like dagon need to cause havoc on a mass scale to reproduce. The greatest egregori plan for millennia to make breeding grounds of entire worlds

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That's a good one

This is good because the elder gods don't necessarily need to kill your players so it could lead to some very interesting situations where it may seem like the players are a threat to some kind of "plan" but are instead small tools for the god to use.

Well there's that age old question with nyarla that Dreams in the Witch-House raises: What the fuck does Nyarly need a child sacrifice for?

One god could want to simply wipe out terrestrial sapient life because they see it as unsightly and disruptive to "pleasant little garden worlds". Another god might want to preserve said terrestrial sapients because it finds them "cute" or amusing. How the latter goes about this could be horrific in it's self as it might come in the form of "tough love" and aggressively teaching terrestrial sapients to defend them selves by steadily bombarding them with things that are just dangerous enough to be a more serious threat than the last but still something they will probably beat or at least mostly survive.

There's some shit that Yog-sothoth likes with it's sacrifices- barring the light-speed sex, is that it get's to watch what happens to a victim that you can't see.

An offering to him is like putting a coin in one of those charit donation wheels that spins the coin into the middle- it's a joy to watch- except instead of spinning dome, it's multiversal parralelicak cosmic infinity. Also, you're effectively just returning them to Yog- because all are one in him and all that- so It's also that shit you hear and see on your first LSD trip made a reality- It's like how some people who get in too deep with the outer gods get all disturbingly slave-morality and comfy going all "I want to be with them". They're all going to a presumably- better place- maybe.

A good idea might be to list out the effect of said motivation first, then reverse engineer it into a higher motivation. That way you'll get good hook points to involve the players with each alien god, and tying the basic effect to a proper motivation can let you refine the details.

For example you want the basic effect to be a monster horde passing through a particular area once a year. The horde's goal would be to get through to a particular spot where a bigger thing absorbs their life before moving elsewhere. At the same time a new horde is borne elsewhere unknown. Turns out the horde functions a lot like blood cells, and the place they go to are like the lungs or the heart of the alien god. Now that we know the motivation, we can refine the horde itself, such as maybe they're soul eaters or something.

A key point for amy lovecraftian god though is that humans are basically non-existant. There can be exceptions like Nyarla for example, but they should all be mostly going about their day without paying specific interest to human beings.

In all my settings that feature that sort of being, they come in two classes.

Oblivious powers, and Eldritch Powers.

Oblivious powers simply exist, they don't think thoughts or feel feelings, they have no specific agenda, and the only 'cause' they advance is their unthinking minions responding to telepathy that oblivious powers beam out of themselves at all times (which is why they don't think thoughts or feel feelings, they beam every thought & feeling out like telepathy).

Eldritch powers do sorta-kinda have an agenda, which they pursue with something that might be thoughts and feelings, and Eldritch powers' minions are capable of thoughts and feelings, and pursue their parents pseudo-agenda with thought out actions.

Powers/magic wise, the main difference between them is that Oblivious Powers affect every possible universe in a steady-state slow background way, while Eldritch Powers affect most possible universes in a more waxing/waning way, moving in cycles between deeds and sleep.

Some additional data I missed at first.

Oblivious powers cause insanity because their forms are insanity-inducingly complex, as OP's live in billions of universes at once.

Eldritch Powers cause insanity because their forms are the more usual terrifying mind-warping tentacle hentai monster of lunacy and destruction shapes, though they also live in a large number of dimensions at once.

Neither is truly evil, Oblivious Powers are more like forces of nature, "evil" only in the way a disaster that killed a gigafuckload of people is, and Eldritch Powers pseudoagenda is only sometimes hostile towards lower level beings, and even then, it's mostly incidental.

Given that HPL once described himself as a cosmic indifferentialist, I would say that Nyarly doesn't need the sacrifice, it simply responds because it choses to respond at that moment to that particular summons.

This might however mean that all the magic summoning is simply theater, and that summoners have no control, none, over the things they summon.

>Nyarlathotep is literally the Makuta from Bionicle in Reverse
Go on...

You know... I always felt the whole insanity inducing trope was a bit over played. The risk of gazing into vast, utterly incomprehensible eldritch bullshit should really mostly be a risk of seizure in epileptics unless it somehow physically damages the brain or the gazer was already prone to or suffering from some sort of psychosis already. To induce mental issues through psychological trauma typically requires prolonged stress or very personal factors, not some glimpse into some swirly colors that gives you some horrible revelation; this is ignoring the paradox that people some how glean this revelation from something that is supposed to be incomprehensible.

I see your point medically speaking, but heres the thing; how does a human being's brain and senses respond to being able to see something that exists in 20 dimensions at once, or looks like a conglomeration of 50 different types of B movie alien and is the size of Godzilla?

For the oblivious powers however I believe I can justify the insanity, since it's highly likely that a small amount of 'signal leak' might actually go into a human's brain and do actual mental/chemical damage to the brain.

none of that shit means anything, saying a human goes insane from seeing in four dimensions is like saying a human goes plerm from bloabing in twelve dimensions.

it's also dumb as hell

A human might go insane from an outer being making some form of telepathic contact, though.

>To induce mental issues through psychological trauma typically requires prolonged stress
What if the experience is traumatic enough that it permanently stresses the person out, leading into insanity?

It doesn't, but Nyarlathotep seems to 'get' humans more than the other entities do so being willing to stab a baby for it is a nice show of devotion that it can understand.

>I see your point medically speaking, but heres the thing; how does a human being's brain and senses respond to being able to see something that exists in 20 dimensions at once, or looks like a conglomeration of 50 different types of B movie alien and is the size of Godzilla?
I would think it would just seem like a bunch of meaningless sensory "noise" like static on an old TV screen with no signal. It would take the thinking parts of the brain to go "wtf is that?!" hit the panic button and send the person running from the danger.

it's the lazy shitter's response to horror. using non-euclidean bullshit is basically like saying 'okay you're scared now'

The noise might be so intense it causes brain damage.

That sort of constant stress in it's self is a mental issue that wouldn't be easily induced. Atleast to the degrees of stress to make some one go cultist level crazy. More "normal" constant stress level would just be an anxiety disorder which is typically treatable and pretty disappointingly mundane compared a "screaming till the end of his days lunatic".

The amount of input going to the brain is limited by the sensory organs. Hear a sound too loud? Damages your eardrums and really hurts. Look at the sun? Burns your retinas and really hurts. Do people go crazy from such things?

No but if your ears exploded and spewed blood or your eyes scalded out of your head instantly, it would definitely have a significant psychological impact on you.

a loud enough noise can make you puke if it rattles your inner ear fluid, but if you're trying to figure out how to drive people crazy with noises you're scraping the bottom of the barrel

give up

if you want a horror tabletop make something actually frightening instead of trying to bullshit your way through it

Okay so mister horror expert, why don't YOU tell us how to make it better?

Instead of just saying 'give up' like you yourself have already done because you hate this shit and you're a fucking troll.

So goddamn tired of these defeatist everything is pointless shills.

I like the idea that the thing you're looking at is so goddamn weird that your brain breaks itself trying to process its image. Humans are physiologically not equipped to handle or perceive such images, and the fact that it is "visible" to you at all is a sign that something somewhere is very very wrong.

True, and that would really suck but it's hardly the classic "instant insanity, just look here" thing. I think to really make it work you have to assume some magic/psionic stuff going on that is directly effecting the brain.

Would telepathic signal so intense you can see it with your eyes and it makes a 'woosh woosh' sound that's faintly audible necessarily cause insanity? I don't think a human skull is capable of keeping it out.

Yeah, but just saying "it makes you afraid" or "it makes you insane" is a bit lazy and heavy handed. I think a more subtle and effective way to go about it that better holds verisimilitude it to have looking at them causes things like dizziness, nausea, vertigo or in some cases epileptic seizures. Actually in starting a horror campaign if players have to or can take negative traits putting one option in that seems to have no effect till seeing one of the horrors causes such a seizure would be interesting. And just having implacable things that are some how a hazard just being around in some sort of subtle logical way is far creepier than just saying "make a check to avoid fear/insanity".

>Nyarlathotep is literally the Makuta from Bionicle in Reverse

Show your working please

Another idea: I forget what it's called, but you're only really perceiving or remembering a few things accurately while your brain fills in the gaps for you. This is how things like memory confabulation happen. What if, upon seeing a lovecraftian entity, your brain can't make sense of the image and so fills in the gaps with nonsense trying to compensate? This would be exacerbated every time you try to remember what you saw, as it has to justify the illogical shit it makes up as more associations are formed, pushing you further and further away from reality. This is all a billion times worse if the memory is traumatic and won't leave you, like with PTSD.

He doesn't. He's actively sadistic towards humanity so he enjoys making them miserable.

Well, you wouldn't say "it makes you insane". You'd describe the malfunction as the character perceives it. "All the photosensitive cells in your eyes are trying to fire at once, for the next 1d6 rounds you see blinding colorful light that won't go away even if you close your eyes". Or "The only language you can think of to describe this thing is 'piscine'. For the next six turns, you'll be angling for a better way to think of it, but it's fishy how it's slippery as an eel. Until that time is up, your character can only communicate in fish puns or else try to behave like a fish in order to make sense of their new, expanded perspective."

Failing that, there's this

>This would be exacerbated every time you try to remember what you saw, as it has to justify the illogical shit it makes up as more associations are formed, pushing you further and further away from reality.
What you are describing is more or less how conspiracy theorists think, so sure some people might fall into such a loop but many would just write it off as "weird shit that doesn't compute" and stay grounded in reality because the reality they are living in is constantly demonstrating its self to them and reinforcing their perception of it unlike that one weird event.

>"The only language you can think of to describe this thing is 'piscine'. For the next six turns, you'll be angling for a better way to think of it, but it's fishy how it's slippery as an eel. Until that time is up, your character can only communicate in fish puns or else try to behave like a fish in order to make sense of their new, expanded perspective."
Eh, something that specific with out explicit, direct and purposefully constructed magic fuckery is just as bad as or worse than insanity or fear. And it's not like players ever need encouragement to make puns.

Try writing it off as "weird shit that doesn't compute" when one of the Thousand Young rapes you. The difference between conspiracy nuts and a myth is encounter is that the latter is directly experienced, with other everyday things leading up to it and providing context. That someone is turning the frogs gay is all based on hearsay.

And what you're describing could still make an interesting story, especially if that same character runs afoul of more lovecraftian bullshit and has to reconcile their denial with the fact that there's incontrovertible evidence that their fiancée got eaten by a shoggoth.

things that make good horror
>people the players care about, preferably their characters, being at risk.
>motivating the players to care about what happens. >setting things up and then pulling the rug out from under them
>scenarios that feel risky but winnable. you may have to fudge, just never let them see it. if the players feel like they can't win or can't lose, all tension is lost.
>truncate or skip investigation shit unless you're very good at it.
>consider not making it eldritch or whatever dumb word you want to use. incomprehensible alien evils are extremely difficult to do right. even lovecraft is very hit or miss
>humans can be the scariest thing of all if you do them right

i think a great example of human horror is the whole sequence with the nazi gang in breaking bad, where you know they're coming but the cops don't. seeing those cars rolling silently up is pure dread.

imagine the investigators checking out an abandoned body shop on the outskirts of town, but they've been careless with their questioning. they hear tires crunching on gravel, look up and three or four beat up trucks are making a circle around the place. instead of dweebs in robes, leathery motherfuckers in flak vests and masks.

if you've properly made the players feel for their characters and for whatever's at stake, that's going to be a tense moment

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Okay so basically what you're saying is 'don't make it lovecraftian, at all'.

Yeah fuck that and fuck you.

did you miss literally everything but that last part.

or are you so bad you can't imagine a lovecraftian scenario where the players are engaged and feel like they can win, but only at great cost?

I'm giving suggestions. If you'd like, you could just say "Words fail you. How could they do anything else when faced with THAT? The only way to get these feelings out is through baby talk, grunts, and screams for the next few turns." Or "The language centers of your brain are overtaxed trying to find a lexical association for this monster. Your character is temporarily struck with aphasia"

It's up to you to determine what your players find creepy, and tailor the neural malfunctions to that.

It was a troll, I never intended to read it. You are stupid.

>imagine the investigators checking out an abandoned body shop on the outskirts of town, but they've been careless with their questioning. they hear tires crunching on gravel, look up and three or four beat up trucks are making a circle around the place. instead of dweebs in robes, leathery motherfuckers in flak vests and masks.
Butter yet and relating to a classic, have them be checking out a light house and have some "fishy" looking townies come trolling up in their boats with shotguns, hunting rifles and/or spearguns.

The "incomprehensible alien evils" are best expressed by the behavior of the people in contact with them. You can have a lovecraftian monster be the antagonist only due to how people respond to its existence. If it makes sense in the narrative for the cultists to be leathery gangster chads, then your suggestions don't really conflict with lovecraftian-inspired themes.

You could use the Excrucians from Nobilis as a good inspiration. One of their rank, the Deceivers, love humanity, but not for the reasons we can perceive, or understand, something within us that only they can see is what they truly love, and they seek to destroy everything else that is tangling up that part. So basically erasing Creation because of something only they understand about us.

>that wouldn't be easily induced
Since we're talking about otherworldly beings I don't think that would be a problem. I imagine a sort of PTSD reaction that doesn't go away with time, where they're still panicking because the images that caused the reaction is always prominent in their memory for some reason. Lovecraftian heroes, would as you say, be treated, and it gets less worse but never better, while random mooks can't even be calmed down at all for treatment to start, or just die from a terror induced heart attack.

OP's? I think that I see what you did there.

>truncate or skip investigation shit unless you're very good at it.
Seriously? Where’s the fun in that?

>humans can be the scariest thing of all if you do them right
I’ve never understood this sentiment, because I don’t think I’ve ever run across scary humans in fiction. As far as I can tell, the most you can do with them is suspense— and suspense is pretty good, but it doesn’t last.

I belive that the sweet spot in a CoC game is when the PCs start collecting a notable amount insanity because the players make more and more reality checks, which is an actual mechanic.

That is the sweet spot when the whole thing gets to the player. They know that something is out there and it's their own fear that gets to them.

Also surprisingly simple sentences that fly under the radar of new players can get veterans on the edge.
>The pear tastes bitter
>Now during the day the first send to be less dense

When you give them specific motivations they stop being unknowable and become predictable instead. Lovecraft gods are "vaguely hostile" in the same sense that you are "vaguely hostile" to individual insects. Unless you're an exterminator hired to get rid of an infestation, you're not some arcane horror bent on killing all bugs. You might step on one without noticing, you might swat one when it's annoying you, you might drown a bunch while watering your lawn, but in general you just don't give a fuck about them and are only vaguely aware that they're even there.

In the same sense, the things you do make sense to you, but an ant has absolutely no way of finding out what your motivations are. To a Lovecraftian deity, humans are like insects or even less than that so they don't give a shit about you and you have no way of comprehending what they are or what they want.

>imagine the investigators checking out an abandoned body shop on the outskirts of town, but they've been careless with their questioning. they hear tires crunching on gravel, look up and three or four beat up trucks are making a circle around the place. instead of dweebs in robes, leathery motherfuckers in flak vests and masks.
>
>if you've properly made the players feel for their characters and for whatever's at stake, that's going to be a tense moment

This is tense all right, but it ain't horror.
Unless you think that going out at night is horror too.

My PCs recently had a great "OH SHIT" moments in a Lovecrafting questline in an otherwise fairly generic (though grim) DND setting.

The players were sent by their handler to meet a one time liason for their quest. They meet the guy, Whistler, who is this really odd dude bald dude with a distinctive star tattoo on his cheek that makes them draw tarot cards. He also had a very distinctive handcarved bird-shaped whistle around his neck. Strange, but he guides them towards the next quest objective, so whatever. They remember him as a quirkly and strange one-off NPC. A couple sessions later when they report back after completing the quest, their handler is happy but confused - "how did you figure out where to go without meeting Whistler?". Cue player confusion, and they begin to describe Whistler. At which point their handler turns around and points at a dude who is very obviously NOT the Whistler they saw, and say, "No, that's Whistler over there."

It was a great moment for the players because of three things: 1) It was a completely unexpected twist; 2) Whistler made them draw tarot cards, which were now super suspicious; and 3) He also made them do certain... things... to the corpses.

A strange and quirky character very quickly became unsettling, with unclear motivations. I fucked with the players a couple times too. One time the players entered a lively tavern, and I described a whole range of faces rapidly, and in the middle I described Whistler - they did a double take and GTFO'd the tavern quickly. Another time, they were shopping at the markets, and saw a stall filled with dozens of handcarved bird whistles... the stall owner looked different, but had the same distinctive star tattoo. He winked at them. That put the players on edge.

You see what I did there.

It's only a thing because Love rafter was kind of brittle himself. Great horror writer, but the guy was deathly afraid of fish and the ocean in general. Not a terribly stable individual.

To be honest, while I personally have a deeb and abiding love for sailing, fearing the ocean is a natural reaction. The ocean, more than any other environment, shows us how fragile our illusion of dominion over the Earth truly is. Nothing made by man can withstand the fully fury of the ocean; even the greatest ships will sink in a bad enough storm. And just keeping a ship operational in normal day-to-day use is a constant struggle against forces of nature. Pain will wear, metal will rust, kelp and barnacles grown on the hull; without regular repairs a whip will quickly become unseaworthy.

Plus, have you seen what lives down there? Shit's freaky.

My idea for a Great Old One Warlock was that he is sent on quests to make miniscule changes that would only later have an effect, and all of them serve to weaken society by taking out those that would later go ahead and do good deeds. Example: Go into a forest and place a shortsword in a specific place with the blade sticking out from the ground, so that in four months time when a hero destined for glory walks this path and slips into what would otherwise be a harmless pile of leaves, he is impaled and dies.

Two questions.

>1: Is there a difference between a Great Old One Warlock and an Outer God Warlock?

>2: Does a priesthood of Nodens (adventuring clerics, sworn enemy of all great old ones/outer gods) exist or no?

The Thalmor want to destroy the Towers that hold Mundus' reality together because they believe themselves divine beings trapped on the world, and that once the world has been destroyed they'll be able to rejoin Auri-El in the Heavens.

The Thalmor believe that they are all gods and nirn is a trap that confines their immortal souls to shitty mortal forms (which is technically true). The thalmor want to destroy the towers holding up the world so that nirn will collapse and they will be free as souls floating in a universe without the linear time or space.

I like the idea of them being benevolent, but being so autistic that they cannot convey their intentions to mortals.