Eons have passed now then at last prison walls break old ones awake

And the awakening ritual is complete

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I, uh, yeah.

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>Because they want to conquer or destroy the world?
You see, that's just a problem with the way some people do eldritch horrors.
There shouldn't be a clear drive/motive for conquest, their motives should be pure apathy at best (e.g. the destruction of the world is merely a byproduct of their existence, and their goal/whatever they're doing is completely unrelated to it), and horrifically alien/unknowable at worst (e.g. the world's end is some barely significant means to a much greater cosmic end in their eyes).
The "horror" in eldritch horror comes from them being incomprehensible beings of vast, overwhelming power, acting in ways that you either can't understand, or don't want to understand.

OH FUCKXKAIJS

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Fuck, time for suicide.

Guys, relax, I have an idea. All we need to do is forcibly merge all of Humanity together in a networked hivemind.

Bigger, more powerful mind = Harder to drive mad.

We did the math.

>tfw to intelligent for madness

I think it's becoming a bit played out, though fresh presentations still excite me.
That said, I find myself looking at Moorcock's cosmology a lot more, and starting to pull from his stories as inspirations for my games. Which, I know that is something I probably shoulda been doing already given how influential his works are in one way or another, but I'm a bit of a late arrival to ol' Mikey Moorcock's books.

This is clearly a trap by some Eldritch being to make our consciousness more palatable, Do not listen to his insane ramblings!

The Shadow in Shadow of the Demon Lord is an eldritch horror. If it makes its way through the barriers that separate this universe from the void, it will consume everything. This is not the will of a conscious being, that's just what it does.
People contact the void with magic, go crazy when they understand that entropy is coming for them, right the fuck now and realise that the base state of the universe is nothingness. So they hurry the end, because if the end of days is dragged out, everyone will suffer needlessly.

I think it has become rather common to be disinterested in cosmic horror, because let's face it, 99% of it is just shallow copies of the aesthetics.

Cosmic horro is all about the fear of the unknown and the realisation that everything you care about is meaningless. But by now we can easily recognize many horrors by sea life aesthetics and madness magic. And our modern society lacks a solid worldview to shatter because we know how little of a fuck the universe gives about it and we've seen humans do the most atrocious shit imaginable.

And one big thing many works get wrong in my opinion is the "going insane" part. Lovecrat's characters don't really go insane, they go sane. Again, it's all about the realisation that everything you value is completely meaningless. Instead we get what is basicly a madness spell with no save, and that's just a "fuck you" to your audience.

This. I fought this time-traveling fucker before and he's a pain in the ass. Avoid blue socks if you don't want to give birth to a machine abomination.

There's nothing wrong with blue socks.

I feel like THIS is the abomination that we were warned against.

Yeah, I'm sure they won't cause anyone to grow a metal vagina and start machine gunning out your soldiers. Face it Skynet, you will never be born.

There is no trick here. Blue socks are simply a fantastic aesthetic that I really think more people should be geting into. They provide a superior "cool" feeling that soothes the eye of the observer, helping to calm the nerves and remind oneself of the vastness of the azure sky.

>youtu.be/CT2ZHujaLhM
I've gotta say this is some pretty sweet music, and I think we could all take its lessons to heart.

You are a man of refined musical taste, user.

Good idea.

youtube.com/watch?v=oIscL-Bjsq4

Of course, that's a real possible solution. Our chances of survival usually depend on becoming a servitor race, or becoming powerful and realist enough to become an independent race. Becoming a Great Old One is a nice twist on that.

The really horrific ones aren't evil.

They just are.

A proper eldritch god should be more like a force of nature, a hurricane to be weathered, rather than being fought.
The problem is that you have people who look at the storm and see something worthy of being worshipped. Who think they can sacrifice so that the storm will destroy their enemies but leave them alone.

Instead you need to figure out a way to survive the hurricane. Build storm shelters, figure out weather warnings.

And of course track down the people trying to attract its attention and kill them for the sake of survival.

UP FROM THE SEA
FROM UNDERGOUND
DOWN FROM THE SKY
THEY'RE ALL AROUND

I'd like to think of an old one that was just lumped in with the others when they were imprisoned, it did nothing inherently wrong and just liked sitting in it's lagoon and being the kind despot to a community of swamp people.

Eons of imprisonment with its peers have changed the old one. They have fought and consumed eachother. They have been driven mad and sane over and over again. Now what remains is a completely delusional being that simply wants to have it's swamp back and have pets to take care of. Unfortunately it is now many times larger and so horrible to gaze upon that any pets either go crazy or die.

Old ones just want to love you

>99% of it is just shallow copies of the aesthetics.
mostly this, most people who wants to present it just go for the fish people, tentacles and teeth.
They forgot he nuance of what makes it exiting, the unknown, uncaring, infinitely bigger beings beyond our grasp or the absolute consuming corrupting influence. And in the latter part most creators just make it an eerie green light.

Of course, this is why I like the Worm from Stellaris.

It's found in the Horizon Signal storyline, which starts with you finding a black hole emitting a signal to your empire, and what happens when you decipher it.

Something loves you.

Something always has.

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>Fascinating! Send the vessel to those coordinates.
FOOLS!

finally

Nah.

Foolishness is sending the next one in. And the next one.

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WHAT WAS WILL BE

WHAT WILL BE WAS

the worm sends great love poems

>the Old Ones have returned
>but they've all gone geriatric, long past their prime

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Eldritch horror sucks because the authors don't have the guts to delve into the real horror of the Mythos, and represent insanity as an on/off switch, instead of its reality; slowly losing your care for what you valued, gradually acting less and less rational, seeing more and more things that makes your whole life feel like a blank empty joke. It needs to be a sinking process in which you may not know or give a shit you're 'losing it', because you feel like you never had 'it' to begin with.

Seeing gigantic ultrahorrors who blot out the sun just induces plain old terror and a rational reaction of "FLEE OR KILL IT" like any animal would.

But someone who had seen enough, who was insane enough by then, would look at the sun going black, barely feel a thing, and then casually call some friends to let them know that this is the time to use that ritual you discovered four years ago that demands the death of millions, and you hang up the phone with a look on your face like you just got done paying the bills.

Horror is useless without the human element strongly present, because cosmic terror demands that you show that the scale of existence is the same thing, top to bottom, from Azathoth to a single cell: dying noise drying away to nothing in a cold vast black bowl.

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So theyre the old old ones?

Well, they were the Old Ones, now they're the Older Ones, and God willing someone will pull the plug on their 17-dimension life support galaxy system before they become the Oldest Ones.

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To be fair user, if you look at something and your eyes instantly blow up in their sockets while all your hair turns white, your nuts shrivel, and you hear an indescribable sound so loud blood spews out your ears, if all those things happen to you, instantly, all at once, it's a pretty sanity wrenching experience, assuming you even survive it at all (very unlikely).

The way I do eldritch horror is; your only hope, period, for most of these beings, is to ensure that they DON'T wake up, and DON'T get summoned. Because once they're in visible form on your world, you've lost, period, instant game over results, no dice rolls, no sanity saves, no anything, if anyone, even Cthulhu wakes up, your world is doomed and you are absolutely definitely going to die in a whirlwind sanity dissolving nightmare scenario, so the point of the game is not to find the eldritch horror and fight it, the point of the game is to make sure it doesn't wake up, and even that is utterly futile, because it is 100% likely definitely at some point going to wake up.

>To be fair user, if you look at something and your eyes instantly blow up in their sockets while all your hair turns white, your nuts shrivel, and you hear an indescribable sound so loud blood spews out your ears, if all those things happen to you, instantly, all at once, it's a pretty sanity wrenching experience, assuming you even survive it at all (very unlikely).

But that's dumb as hell. Terror doesn't do that. The worst you can get is a heart attack or weeks of stress from not being able to stop thinking about it. All that shit sounds like some crazy spell, not "I witnessed it move like a mountain."

Insanity should be a gentle dimming of the lights into a world of endless night, not WOOAOAAOAUAUAHAHH MY FUKKEN BALLS EXPLODED CUZ THE ENTIRE OCEAN WAS BLOOOOOOOOOOOOOD

But you got the right idea. If the god-horrors come, it's over. The lesser nightmares (shoggoths, moon beasts, cats, etc) are all great as both "This is a sign of how bad it can get" as well as "This is what your future looks like the further down this rabbit hole humanity goes"

You can also create a mankind who finds out goddamn everything, and the response is essentially to lock down earth with the equivalent of a gigantic Elder Sign, isolating the planet and leaving humans to go mad through their own devices at the hands of their own sadist species. Mankind's ultimate horror should be from the incredible chance we have to BECOME as the Great Old Ones.

I'd blame all the people who do the "TENTACLES LMAO" brand of bastardized "lovecraftian" horror. Seriously- go on a normiebook Lovecraft group and you'll leave within 2 hours with the sheer number of retarded "Is _____ Lovecraftian?" posts you get.

I'll never be bored of Lovecraftian horror so long as there's just even a handful of people out there who can execute it well. But for every good one there is about 3 dozen dorks who think they're being subversive by sticking a shoggoth in ____ genre.

Oh I agree, I just do the sanity thing a little different than the average game does, the great old ones emit clouds of telepathy and clouds of eldritch power just by existing, these clouds are so intense that if they take a physical shape, you can see with your eyes and hear with your ears the power and telepathy coming towards you. Catching the tiniest glimpse of one is enough to cause an instant brain feedback insanity loop. Even seeing images of them causes sanity damage, since they see and hear everything all of their images see and hear at all times and places and since their images release an extremely tiny amount of their power continuously as an effortless background action. As a result, all cultists who have been cultists for very long are utterly insane, and all magic depletes sanity.

But heres a more to the point question; which is scarier?

>Oblivious Powers / Outer Gods - no specific agenda, minions and magicians respond to random commands.

>Eldritch Powers / Great Old Ones - quasi-agenda, minions and magicians form cults and hierarchies and respond to consciously sent commands.

>re: humanity becoming the great old ones

Spoiler: The elder gods are humanity's evolutionary offshoot in the twilight-of-the-universe period, elder gods literally are human beings who became MORE powerful than either the great old ones or the outer gods.

>Spoiler: The elder gods are humanity's evolutionary offshoot in the twilight-of-the-universe period, elder gods literally are human beings who became MORE powerful than either the great old ones or the outer gods.

It'd be a sobering end.

"The point of intelligent life is to eventually become gigantic nightmares who destroy utterly massive swathes of the universe, because the point of life is to maximize entropy as fast as possible to the Zero Energy State."

Heres a thought fit to make you cry and kill yourself; the elder gods are doing this entropy maximizing to every universe that could ever would ever or has ever existed, and they are doing it to every possible timeline.

Well yes. That's the horror of it. That's the POINT. A universe is born in order to achieve the fastest and most efficient possible return to a dead and maximum entropy state. It is born to die as rapidly as it can, and life is just a byproduct of a system that needs to reach that state, which life forms are incredibly good at doing with massive 'intelligent' energy expenditure and mass slaughter. The Elder Gods are all just the most perfected and self-advanced of these lifeforms, who have accepted the point is to destroy everything and be erased. The great nightmare can be summed with one sentence, that applies to life, to stone, to stars and black holes, to Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep, to Azathoth Itself.

"This too shall pass."

But what if the elder gods have become so powerful that they can't be erased, ever, because that would stop universes from ever forming?

I’m really going for a cosmic horror vibe in my next campaign. What’s the best way to avoid making my Great Old zones bland blobs of instant death and tentacles and instead make something to legitimately frighten my players?

Nah. You have to make humanity realize every victory over the gods is a Pyrrhic one, because the universe is going to end anyways, entropy will always win, and even something as massive, almighty, and truly GODLIKE as Azathoth-

Doesn't last.

Nothing lasts.

Have them discover Elder Gods. Cthulhu-tier shit. Have them find one after the other, in all their fully visible glory.

And they're dead. Every single one of them is a not-even-dreaming genuine corpse, rotting away in some dark forgotten corner, and there is absolutely no explanation as to why, save that there is always evidence of something foul.

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This leaves us with a question; why do universes form?

You could also say that their dead bodies will definitely be alive again, some day, when the universe is nearly over, because of all the magic that's been used in their names?

Because the multiverse is trying to achieve the maximum entropy state across all levels of possible existence, and each universe is just another burst of energy trying to birth itself into a dying void.

Entropy is the SINGLE constant across all universes and timelines. It's always there. Forever increasing. Claiming even death.

Personally I've always preferred a more human horror.

There's only two things that have ever really gotten under my skin, one was a story about a girl that lived on the edge of a moor, her dog goes missing only for it to turn out that things that go missing on the moor return as undead abominations that only reveal their true nature at night and she takes it back in thinking it's still her living pet.

And the other is Fritz Leiber's 'The girl with the hungry eyes' which is the most human of horror stories
>“I want you. I want your high spots. I want everything that’s made you happy and everything that’s hurt you bad. I want your first girl. I want that shiny bicycle. I want that licking. I want that pinhole camera. I want Betty’s legs. I want the blue sky filled with stars. I want your mother’s death. I want your blood on the cobblestones. I want Mildred’s mouth. I want the first picture you sold. I want the lights of Chicago. I want the gin. I want Gwen’s hands. I want your wanting me. I want your life. Feed me, baby, feed me.”

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As I do a bunch of playing in the Laundryverse, I've ripped off the Nightmare Stacks for how the whole "destructively dangerous appearance" shit works.

It's a form of arcane basilisk hack, a ward used by many of the more potent elder races for defence.
After all, it's hard for an enemy to kill you if merely looking in your direction opens them up to a magical attack.
The lower power wards, level 1 or so typically just cause some kind of nausea. A sense of vertigo or similar that keeps you off your feet and possibly lose your lunch.

Higher levels cause hallucinations, or even seizures as the brain struggles to process a kind of thaumic strobe effect.

Plot twist; great old ones and outer gods are terrified of humans, we're talking 50s housewife on a stool squawking about mice TERRIFIED.

True, true.

Wait, this isn't /currentevents/

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>Cthulhu's attack on the sailors was the eldritch abomination equivalent of youtube.com/watch?v=ODeWKTKkN2Y

Lovecraft would have reacted to both of them the same way.

I tried to do this once, it didn't work out as planned.

A player was searching in a cold rainy night, alone, and started to see an eldritch horror. He kept trying to figure out what it was, to look at it closer, even as I described his head pounding, ears ringing, and eventually eyes bleeding. I think he, the player, was just curious.

The rest of the party found him blind deaf and mute the next morning and had to take a pretty lengthy detour to heal him.

That works good though. Curiosity destroying you. Horror NEEDS that kind of humanity to make it work at all and not just be dull shock and gore.

Like a caveman approaching a massive meteorite of highly radioactive material. The banality of it is just how little one life can know about the vast eternity of the universe, and how incredibly, unfeelingly hostile those forces are.

Can I get a source on that image, please?

No idea where it's from, but I guess if you search for SCP art, it should come up (I vaguely recall that being the theme of the thread I saved it from).

what have you done?

This is really the lamest reason for me to awaken, but whatever.
Roar.
Booga-booga.
Whatever.

The meme magic equivalent of the Samson option. Making sure that if my side loses, everyone loses. It was necessary. You'll get no remorse or repentance from me.

Trips to save the universe.

If triples or dubsy-von-doodles, an even worse fate awaits; the great old ones and outer gods keep humanity around as a moving-about servitor race.