No time-travelling Yithians?


Pathfinder First Edition General Discussion

Silver Crusade

I figured I'd start this topic for a pretty minor issue. I like that Paizo's been giving us some of the fun Cthulhu gribblies, they've been with sword and sorcery stories since forever.

That being said, some of them in stats just seem to fall a bit short. The Shoggoth definately doesn't, and the Color out of Space sure looks on target, but the Yithian (admittedly a minor creature in the Lovecraft stories) seems to be missing one of his core powers.

The Yithian's pretty scary, don't get me wrong, his amnesia power and his body swapping are still there in all their terrifying glory. And the idea of this non-human thing bodyjacking them left a party of mine watching the thing suspiciously in one adventure where they had to deal with him, but short of relying on 2e cosmology, I had no method for explaining the Yithian's capabilities for temporally shifting themselves.

I'm mostly wondering if this is just me being particular, or if I'm missing something (maybe in their astral projection ability?), or if Paizo's trying to avoid people messing around with time in general.


Messing with time opens up ridiculous cans of worms. I can certainly understand a desire to avoid it.


I agree with drbuzzard. Temporal physics and paradoxes and all that is simply too big a headache to mess around in.

The Exchange

One option available in the PF cosmology that wasn't in Lovecraft is to make Yithians natives of the Astral Plane. The timeless nature of that plane can provide a pretext for Yithians that are thousands... or millions... of years old without introducing temporal complexities.

"Oh, look, honey, they built a new Material Plane! Wanna go mess with some mortal minds?"

Silver Crusade

I usually get around it by letting them move through the Temporal Prime from old AD&D 2e, but I still find it odd that they didn't have something like by default.

But I can definately see it creating bizarre complications. Like time displaced adventurers having to yith around trying to save Aroden or something.


In HPL's story, the Yithians didn't travel in time physically. Their technology allowed them to swap minds with, e.g. a modern day human. The Yithian's mind would inhabit the modern day human's body while the human's mind inhabited the Yithian's body tens of megayears in the past. It was time travel, but the huge gap of years and the relative helplessness of one human mind in a strange body surrounded by a whole civilization of super-intelligent Yithians eliminated any possibility of time paradoxes.

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