I'm getting the feeling that pathfinder is embracing this combination. I have always been intrigued by the alien nature/extra dimensional aspect of aberrations and want to build a campaign around it. Lovecraftian horror fits in pretty good with the whole idea too.
The challenge is how to take the Bestiary/Monster manuel aberration and Lovecraftian horror to challenge & scare the PC's out of their minds. Any ideas how members have used/presented aberrations in your games would be great! Thanks!
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Any ideas how members have used/presented aberrations in your games would be great! Thanks!
Idea: When describing aberrations/Lovecraftian beasties, you could try to be as utterly vague as possible?
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For example:
''The sound of an inhuman wailing assaults your ears.. as you enter the room you are confronted by a hideous blue and green, tentacled mass roughly fifteen feet tall about the same wide. It's body has dozens of mouths, each snapping the air. It giggles and writhes before you, daring you to approach.''
versus:
''A creepy eldricht presence chokes the senses and onwards beyond the portal.. a stain from the foul mind of chaos, cloaked in unholy falsehoods from eons past, an unfathomable mass of undulating matter, plasmic maws snapping hungrily, eagerly suckling upon the frigid void. The blasphemous parody of life awaits the lost sleeper, daring to be woken.''
So yeah, tell them more than they need to know without ever telling them anything!? :D
1-Distortion and corruption of the mind and body and soul. The more the PCs learn about the other realm and creatures from it, the more they are affected. If they try food that has been tainted, they may grow an extra ear or have one arm 1 ft longer than the other. This may go away with time, but their shadow/aura shows the taint forever.
They may gain mental illness, from temporary hallucinations or permenant phobia or delusion. The key is to bring on the change slowly, not just suddenly they wake up with a third eye. Also there should be a need to find out more about the creatures, eg they have to learn about the beasts to defeat them, perhaps to shut off the portal, but by then the interaction has tained them in some way. Later other such creatures will smell the taint and try to interact with them.
2-The encounters with the strange creatures are accompanied by Time, Light, Temperature and Space distortions. Determine randomly when and who is effected, including the Abherants themselves. I generally use this for fey, but you can use it for creatures from beyond. The reason is the clash of realities, laws of magic and physics are not the same on both realms and strange things happen as result.
For example one PC could be frozen in time for a round, another may be teleported 20ft to the north, the monster may suddenly faitigued by great heat for 2 rounds. These effects should to add drama to the situation and be random.
3-Have regular encounters during and after the Abherant ones adds to the uniqueness of the abherrant encounters. It will make them stand out more. Having some humanoid race work for the aboleth/naga/illithid etc that is very scared of them will add to the 'what in Hades are we dealing with here?' factor.
Go look up Ruby Quest. Read it. The comments can be NSFW, so be careful.
That's an example of players interacting (through giving commands to a character ala MSPA) with a Lovecraftian plot.
Sounds good! I'm looking for a way to bring together the aberrations and the Lovecraft theme of "old ones", "unspeakable horrors from other dimensions" into a D&D setting so I can run a campaign. Any references? Suggestions? Adventure hooks?
The problem here is that Lovecraft consciously chose protagonists who were easily squicked and horrified. The people who were not squicked and horrified generally have their brains in jars flying off to Yuggoth with the Migo.
If you have a highly academic wizard, telling him that something is "unspeakable, unmentionable, incomprehensible!" is basically a challenge.
I remember a character of mine who snuck invisibly into the lair of the cold spawn, one of my DM's Lovecraftian beasties. He told me I would go mad if I were to truly grasp what they were. I asked simple questions: What color were they and how big they were? I then said I was squinting my eyes so all I could see was a blur and then would look in the direction of the unspeakable spawn. Was I seeing the color out of space, or was it just some terrestrial color?
It turned out the cold spawn were an unpleasant shade of puce. Similarly, by deriving that the vault of the chamber was twenty feet tall, and counting down sections of column until there was something so unpleasant I could not bear to look, which occurred at the twelve foot mark, I concluded that they were about eight feet tall.
So, cold spawn: puce, about 8' tall.
There's also the problem of knowing too much to be horrified.
I mean, Lovecraft managed to make the heathen rites of the islanders horrifying by putting them off stage and having them described by a paranoid old coot who speaks in thick dialect, but when the fact of the matter is that it's Polynesian islanders doing the blasphemous rites to the deep ones, that means is likely going to involve luas and hula dances, especially since hula can be used as a descriptive language and would be perfectly reasonable for spellcasting.
Saying "The natives did the hula and played their ukeleles until Cthulhu arose from the waves"? Somewhat less horrifying, even if it's an accurate description of what's going on.
Run through the paranoid old coot it could become "The natives writhed in their queer heathen way, making eldritch gestures to the dark sea or playing them blasphemous instruments they got from the Portugue'e traders."
Much creepier, certainly, but it still boils down to doing the hula and playing the ukelele.
There also comes the question of whether aboleths and other unspeakable horrors can comprehend human concepts, and not just easy ones like "love" or "grief." Give them something hard like "kitsch."
How does "kitsch" or "tawdry" translate into aboleth, and would their fishy eyes bug out in horror if they were to understand the unspeakable horror that is gnomish taste?
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The problem here is that Lovecraft consciously chose protagonists who were easily squicked and horrified. The people who were not squicked and horrified generally have their brains in jars flying off to Yuggoth with the Migo.
If you have a highly academic wizard, telling him that something is "unspeakable, unmentionable, incomprehensible!" is basically a challenge.
I remember a character of mine who snuck invisibly into the lair of the cold spawn, one of my DM's Lovecraftian beasties. He told me I would go mad if I were to truly grasp what they were. I asked simple questions: What color were they and how big they were? I then said I was squinting my eyes so all I could see was a blur and then would look in the direction of the unspeakable spawn. Was I seeing the color out of space, or was it just some terrestrial color?
It turned out the cold spawn were an unpleasant shade of puce. Similarly, by deriving that the vault of the chamber was twenty feet tall, and counting down sections of column until there was something so unpleasant I could not bear to look, which occurred at the twelve foot mark, I concluded that they were about eight feet tall.
So, cold spawn: puce, about 8' tall.
There's also the problem of knowing too much to be horrified.
I mean, Lovecraft managed to make the heathen rites of the islanders horrifying by putting them off stage and having them described by a paranoid old coot who speaks in thick dialect, but when the fact of the matter is that it's Polynesian islanders doing the blasphemous rites to the deep ones, that means is likely going to involve luas and hula dances, especially since hula can be used as a descriptive language and would be perfectly reasonable for spellcasting.
Saying "The natives did the hula and played their ukeleles until Cthulhu arose from the waves"? Somewhat less horrifying, even if it's an accurate description of what's going on.
Run through the paranoid old coot it could become "The natives writhed in their queer heathen way, making...
LOL!!! Love everything you've said here, Kevin. Great stuff!
I love everything Lovecraftian, and I'm happy to see Paizo using Lovecraftian things in Pathfinder. In my homebrewed game/setting I've used the Old Ones and the Outer Gods as Forbidden Deities who's worship is banned in most areas.
Also, weirdly enough, it wasn't until I bought and ran Call Of Cthulhu that I was exposed to the mythos. I didn't start reading Lovecraft and other until afterwards. Anyway...
Awesome! Did not know about taint and insanity in the unearth arcana. I want to start a new campaign with first level PC's with those variants playing a minor role. Any suggestions on how to fashion encounters with the various aberrations starting at 1st level and beyond?
I ran a low level adventure with the Pseudonatural template fom 3.5 being put on some animals and had the group investigate the source of the mutations. That worked pretty well for a low level group, and was able to be carried on to higher levels as they dug deeper into the problem. Or if it doesn't convert well ( I have not tried it) just throw some tentacles on them or give them a strange attack form and have them act strange.
I ran a low level adventure with the Pseudonatural template fom 3.5 being put on some animals and had the group investigate the source of the mutations. That worked pretty well for a low level group, and was able to be carried on to higher levels as they dug deeper into the problem. Or if it doesn't convert well ( I have not tried it) just throw some tentacles on them or give them a strange attack form and have them act strange.
Pseudonatural? How does that alter the creature? Thanks!
I ran a low level adventure with the Pseudonatural template fom 3.5 being put on some animals and had the group investigate the source of the mutations. That worked pretty well for a low level group, and was able to be carried on to higher levels as they dug deeper into the problem. Or if it doesn't convert well ( I have not tried it) just throw some tentacles on them or give them a strange attack form and have them act strange.Pseudonatural? How does that alter the creature? Thanks!
It gets DR and SR based on HD and a little acid and electricity resistance, plus true strike once per day and an alternate form, which I believe is up to your creativity. I don't have it in front of me but I don't think the alternate form has any in-game stats, more of a flavor thing. Either way it's out of the Complete Arcane and it went with the Alienist class.
That is pretty cool and bad a$$! +35 natural armor!
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That is pretty cool and bad a$$! +35 natural armor!
Like I said, there are other versions in other books that aren't quite so epic. WotC never could quite seem to settle on what they wanted the template to be.
3.0 Tome & Blood
3.0 Manual of the Planes
3.0 Epic Level Handbook
3.5 Lords of Madness
3.5 Complete Arcane
I'm not sure how similar/different the other four are. But the LoM version is CR + 0 for up to 3 HD, CR + 1 for 4-11 HD, and CR + 2 for 12 HD or more. So, substantially weaker.
PSEUDONATURAL CREATURE (Lords of Madness p. 162 for details)
Type: outsider (they are considered to me touched by the Far Realm)
Special Attacks: True strike 1/day
Special qualities:
Acid and electricity resistance, DR/magic as follows:
HD 1-3 - resist 5, DR -
HD 4-7 - resist 5, DR 5
HD 8-11 - resist 10, DR 5
HD 12+ - resist 15, DR 10
Alternate form (Su) creature appears alien - all attacks on it get a -1 morale penalty
SR 10 + HD
Abilities: int is at least 3
CR:
Up to 3 HD same
Up to 11 HD +1
more HD +2
Much more tame version than the horror from epic level handbook.
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Or you could just get stupidly epic and combine the ELH paragon and pseudonatural templates. Like I did here.
I call it the Great Old One template.
why quantify?????
if you want to use other/outer worldly entities etc to theme up your campaign i have one word for you.....THOON....
if THOON isnt a great old one i dont know what is, and the fact it doesnt exist as such leaves it beyond the touch of the most powerful PC's, they can deal with its minions and diabolical warped schemes but cannot directly interact with it, as it should be, i used a thoon infected elder brain(not standard from MM but closer to a pseudonatural template) as a main antagonist in a truly epic campaign spanning lvl 1 to final lvl23, with many infected minions and creatures from other games etc to represent its otherworldly origin to keep players dealing with the unknown often enough to avoid complacency(eg. had a kydian powerlord minion from Rifts) etc, useful for low levels only...i think not
I ran a low level adventure with the Pseudonatural template fom 3.5 being put on some animals and had the group investigate the source of the mutations. That worked pretty well for a low level group, and was able to be carried on to higher levels as they dug deeper into the problem. Or if it doesn't convert well ( I have not tried it) just throw some tentacles on them or give them a strange attack form and have them act strange.Pseudonatural? How does that alter the creature? Thanks!
Kthulhu posted one pseudonatural template, but one that is extremely difficult to use (+35 AC?).
The one I am familiar with is from one of the monster manuals if I remember correctly. It's a very basic template.
1: The creature gains the ability to transform into a writhintg tentacled mass. In this form attacks against it have a -2 penalty to hit or something like that.
2: The creature can, once each day, use True Strike as a supernatural ability. (+20 to hit on one attack)
...Pseudonatural? How does that alter the creature? Thanks!
Kthulhu posted one pseudonatural template, but one that is extremely difficult to use (+35 AC?).
The one I am familiar with is from one of the monster manuals if I remember correctly. It's a very basic template.
1: The creature gains the ability to transform into a writhintg tentacled mass. In this form attacks against it have a -2 penalty to hit or something like that.
2: The creature can, once each day, use True Strike as a supernatural ability. (+20 to hit on one attack)
Kthulhu posted the variant from the Epic Level Handbook - it's really that nasty. Standard variant can be seen in my previous post above. The Pseudonatural template has been published in multiple variants for 3rd edition D&D.
Howard Phillip Lovecraft wrote letters to Robert E. Howard and vice versa, they had quite a correspondence. Howard loved Lovecrafts Mythos and Made the Hyborean Age in the same world using the same Mythos... So some of Conans Villains and Monsters were very Lovecraftian ;) and Kull, and the Conan stories, and even Solomon Kane were very full of Lovecraft and Eldrich Horror :) Great for Inspiration :)
Have Fun
Lovecraft never had to deal with his characters being level 10+. his characters were all level 3-4 normal humans.
When you can summon up angels and demons to throw against things from the voids between worlds, they just ain't as horrible as they used to be.
Heroes of Horror and the Tome of Aberrations all had great stuff on playing Abberations. If you can get the complete Guide to Illithids, that one's pretty good, too.
Now, adding all that funny Mythos stuff dealing with space and time sounds like a fun new "It Came From the Void" template.
===Aelryinth
Thats the great thing about these types of monsters and scenarios, if you are creative enough in the way they are used and described, players will still be weirded out despite what their crazy-silly stats are. At least that was the goal when I use them, to keep my players on their toes and guessing "what the heck IS that thing".
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The Pseudonatural template from the Lords of Madness book was really nothing more than a reflavoring of the Fiendish and Celestial templates. As shown above, it adds a few defensive based benefits and true strike once per day to represent a burst of horrible alien insight. Its real purpose is to take the mundane and make it Lovecrafty, exactly what your looking for. Its perfect for anything from the spawn of unholy rites to Azathoth to the horrible creations of Dr Moreau.
As an example: being chased through a foggy, moon lit forest by a pack of pseudonatural wolves with slobbering mouths instead of fur being led by a Hound of Tindolos. That right there? That would suck. A lot.
The fun part is all they're really fighting is a bunch of wolves with some low powered resist energy and one boss monster with a couple of trick abilities (really cool and unusual abilities granted). But they don't know that, and they don't ever HAVE to know that. The joy of Lovecraft, I've found, is that by the end of the story (or adventure), despite all that the reader has been through, he still only has vague idea about what he read and a feeling of unease that their was more their than he realized.
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I'm considering adding large portions of the Eldritch Spawn template from Rite Publishings Book of Monster Templates to my Great Old Ones uber-template. I'll axe the bits about brain-extraction (too illithid-esque), but the rest looks like it would stack nicely. I also need to comb through through Green Ronin's Advanced Bestiary and Silverthorne Games' Book of Templates: Deluxe Edition 3.5 to see what else could make it more hideous.
Green Ronin's Advanced Bestiary and Silverthorne Games' Book of Templates: Deluxe Edition 3.5
Both are solid resources!
One of the 'best' CoC games I ever played was right after the players got wiped by trying to fight the highly amphibious Spawn from sculling boats in the Hah-verd pond. So with everyone paranoid, the GM gave us all the guns we could carry and sent us to investigate an old, spooky house at night (wind through trees and victorian house clutter; headlights playing offold, wavy window glass). It ended with a trigger happy player armed with a drum fed Thompson sudeenly seeing his reflction in a mirror. I must admit I emptied my shotgun into a 'dust cover draped floor lamp'. 6 of 8 dead and the other 2 wounded. Few monsters are as dangerous as scared player characters!
At least it wasn't the dreaded Gazebo.
I would really recommend getting your hands on Lords of Madness, which has been mentioned above in relation to the pseudonatural template, but it's got a lot of other stuff. A whole section on Aboleths, with glyph magic and lots of great flavor text. Others on Illithids, Grell, Beholders and a new race of body stealers.
But it also had a bunch of great new monsters and templates. One was for making aboleth constructs out of anything (with bleeding-from-your-eyes-geometry defenses), and a farspawn template that was to the pseudonatural creature what the half fiend is to the fiendish creature.
Best of all, it had a whole bunch of aberrant feats that players or NPCs could take that built on each other for some stunning powers, balanced out by giving you increasing penalties. Really gave you the increasing mutation feel for players. Great book overall, and not to be missed for the lovecraft fan. Probably one of my top five WotC books of 3.X
Also, if you haven't read them, Lovecraft's ghostwritten works are phenomenal, and some of his best, even if they didn't originally have his name on them. They were published by the Del Ray imprint just a couple of years ago as "The Horror in the Museum." Read especially "The Mound" and "Medusa's Coil" (with the caveat that HPL was a HUGE racist and misogynist).
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Also, if you haven't read them, Lovecraft's ghostwritten works are phenomenal, and some of his best, even if they didn't originally have his name on them. They were published by the Del Ray imprint just a couple of years ago as "The Horror in the Museum." Read especially "The Mound" and "Medusa's Coil" (with the caveat that HPL was a HUGE racist and misogynist).
I would recommend anything that Lovecraft wrote. As for the racism thing, I think it's been very magnified. Racism was more or less expected in that day and age. His wife was Jewish, and it's said that he never failed to be curteous to any visitors. As for his supposed misogynism, dunno where you're getting that from, unless it's from the almost complete LACK of female characters. The only one that comes to mind is Asenath Waite from The Thing on the Doorstep. Although she's the BBEG of the story, by the end of the tale you learn that she was the most tragic victim of all, as her own father transfered his mind into her body and vice-versa just prior to his death.
THOON! Sounds like a really good Chuthulu'esk entity. Just might look into it more. I just don't really know about that quienessence stuff.