Which came first the Chicken...I mean Dagon or Yog-Sothoth

[Lazaro]

So while thinking out ideas for my lastest game a thought struck me, and afterward I was left confuzed and just a bit maddened...

Which of these is the oldest entites? In one corner the Qlippoths, beings of pure malice, the Abyss incarnate, ancient beyond imagining. In the other corner The Great Old Ones, beings of madness and alien intellect, who's existance predates the gods.

So which of the horrors came first?

[Kthulhu]

Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.

Basically, Yog-Sothoth IS time and space. The only being that is possibly older would be Azathoth.

Also, Dagon is a just fish/frog-man minion of Cthulhu. :P

Of course Golarion's mythology and interpretations of the Mythos may vary.

[DM_aka_Dudemeister]

Technically if they arose in a time before time existed then they would have arose at once. For a given value for "at once".

[Todd Stewart]

Things get a bit complex I think if you're referring to potentially multiple races which originated outside of Golarion's reality or planar structure. It's like asking what happened before time began. Objectivity becomes impossible with no universal constant to measure it by.

The gods of the Old Cults, the oldest of the "normal" (for lack of a better word) deities, things like Rovagug that came from elsewhere, things like the Proteans who view Golarion's cosmology as something new and tiny drifting in the shallows of a preexistant Maelstrom, plus the Abyss which was potentially its own thing before it leaked into Golarion's cosmology (or was broken into or even created depending on which protean chorus you talk to), or some of origin stories of the Axiomites which have them also arriving from somewhere else.

And with myths and origin stories, it's always difficult to judge them by anything other than their own subjective claims since the sources are so ancient and so few. History gets very muddy when you go back further than mortal history. I like it that way. :D

Edit: and what the previous poster said, that if they existed outside of Golarion's reality, technically some of them would have arisen at once.