Ok, I was flipping through the Beastairy 4 and noticed they decided to do a write up of the great old ones. This kind of bothered me though. Why? Because the Great Old Ones are supposed to be unimaginably powerful. Pretty much unstoppable. The problem is, with the write up, they can be stopped.
So what do you guys think? Is giving what amounts to a diety a creature write up a good idea?
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When you write up the stats for something your basically inviting people to come and try to kill it, and no matter how awesome you make it, its bound to done. You give it the one thing it doesn't have before being statted up, mortality.
Personally, I think its an awful idea for that reason alone. I really like things being more surreal, especially if its being stolen from another person's literature.
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On Golarion the Great Old Ones aren't unstoppable and not unimaginably powerful, just very powerful. If you want unstoppable, give the Outer Gods a look. Like all other gods, they fall outside killing range for PC's. They are in killing range for the other gods though, if it ever comes to that.
Great Old Ones are demigods, like the Empyreal Lords, Demon Princes and many others. Demigods can be killed. You might not agree with them being on that scale, but on Golarion they are. This isn't Lovecraft, just inspired by it.
Great Old Ones can be stopped and have been in Lovecraft's canon. Cthulhu got killed by some E6 ship captain ramming his ship's prow through his chest. A sailing ship's ram damage is 8d8, so in canon Cthulhu has, at the very most, 63 HP, assuming the ship rolled max damage and he has 1 Con. If you assume the ship didn't roll max damage or he has a higher Con score, then Cthulhu gets even weaker.
Either way, Lovecraft's Cthulhu is nowhere near as tough as Pathfinder's. A lot of nice SLAs including something similar to a lich's phylactery and one hell of a fear aura, but little to no DR, no regeneration, and very low HP.
tl;dr: Cthulhu was a wussy glass cannon who died when he lost initiative.
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Wait, are you thinking this through?
The stats arent for the deities, they are for their avatars.
In before "cthulhu was beaten by a boat".
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I fail to see why anyone should consider Cthulhu unkillable. He isn't even a god in Lovecraft canon. He is the most powerful member of a species that is as far above humans as we are above ants, but still concrete and physical. The predecessors to humans, the elder things, were strong enough on science alone to actively war with cthulhu and his species and force a truce. All of that makes me think that mythic PCs killing him is fine. High level PCs even without mythic far outstrip anything real-life humans or even vaguely plausible humans can do. They are super heroes. Mythic PCs go the extra mile and are literally small gods.
Killing Cthulhu should the culmination of an entire campaign similar to killing Ravana at the end of the Ramayana. For this to happen he needs stats. It isn't the fault of statting him if someone doesn't build the fight up properly.
Also the Great Old in this situation are not even suffering a final defeat. Defeating this doesn't not kill them, but simply serves as a temporary solution and they simple will reappear some where else.
@Alex Smith
To be fair, people fight against hastur and nyarlathotep all the time in the mythos, but neither of them is ever killed or destroyed.
The ship may have rolled a natural 20 and backed up the crit for double damage; also, Cthulhu had only just risen, so he likely wasn't at full strength at that point.
If his condition was more or less equivalent to the state of someone just subjected to raise dead, he'd have only one hit point per HD and could indeed have CON 1.
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No they aren't killed because the closest thing to a classical hero we have ever had in the Mythos proper is Nodens who is really more of a side character. Players capable of beating a properly run CR 30 are characters from the Silmarillion not Lord of the Rings.
And if you read the abilities right, then you'll see that you can't kill them. You just send them back to their home planes/dimensions.
Though that ability has similar wording to the Tarrasque's. Which really means that there should be a campaign specific way to permanently kill him set up by your GM or an adventure path, assuming your GM is using him as a direct combat encounter.
In CoC ol' tentacle face is unkillable. He may get blasted to atoms for a while but that greasy gas will coalesce into that flabby tenticular form we all know and love.
Drop nuclear bombs on him, he'll reform in ten minutes and now he's radioactive...
I fail to see why anyone should consider Cthulhu unkillable. He isn't even a god in Lovecraft canon. He is the most powerful member of a species that is as far above humans as we are above ants, but still concrete and physical.
That said, Lovecraft didn't have monsters that were killable quiet so much as Derleth did. Off the top of my head Lovecraftian occultist were burned to ashes and thrown into acid to make doubly sure they don't steal your corpse or haunt you, while Derlith had monsters that were physical in nature, killed by silver bullets, and had a fear of god in them. Only real outer planes creature in Lovecraft's literature I remember being killed were the twin brothers Whately(they were half-human!), but its been forever since I've read Lovecraft.
I suppose that's being pedantic though. In the end I'm not happy to see other people's intellectual property taken and stated out to be killed. Just... something off about that.
Breaking Cthulhu apart with the boat didn't actually seem to do anything to actually hurt it. It just recombined, sent some people crazy, and went back to sleep.
So... not a morning guy?
** spoiler omitted **
I can kind of see that but no one really raised a stink when Ahriman was statted out and he's a real world religious figure. I tend to base my pathfinder assumptions for mythos creatures off of the Dreamlands centric works simply because those are the only times that someone physically and magically capable interacts in any real way with the mythos. Most of the rest of the time it is timid scholars and other people not really geared or prepared to interact with the otherworldly.
Take for instance the pathfinder shadowdemon. To a normal real world person no only is it completely unbeatable but it is also absurdly powerful. It could arguably be considered godly with its ability to walk through walls, ignore physical attacks made against it, and control peoples minds and bodies. The difference is that Pathfinder is not a game about normal people or gritty down to earth people. It is a game of mythic heroes. You aren't playing guard #3 you're playing Achilles, Rama, Lancelot, or any other number of character who define their place in life and the normal setting for the world.
** spoiler omitted **I can kind of see that but no one really raised a stink when Ahriman was statted out and he's a real world religious figure.
I have a low opinion of that also, but no one asked me.
If only they had known this encounter was coming, they could have brewed a 400-lb. cup of coffee as an offering.Breaking Cthulhu apart with the boat didn't actually seem to do anything to actually hurt it. It just recombined, sent some people crazy, and went back to sleep.So... not a morning guy?
I'd accept it...
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Derleth's vision of the Mythos is vastly different to Lovecraft's.
He had people defeating them left right and centre, moved away from the absolute hopelessness of man verses the G.O.O. Personally I find most of Derleth's ideas regarding the Mythos very wrong.
Yeah, Derleth just did not seem to "get" the Mythos fully.
I don't mind Great Old Ones being defeated at the end of a campaign by kitted out level 20's/mythic characters. After all, at that point it is a group of demigods against a demigod. At least you can't actually kill them permanently... that is what I would have had a problem with.
As long as the Outer Gods remain far out of reach and hideously powerful, I am happy with the treatment of Mythos things in Golarion.
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Breaking Cthulhu apart with the boat didn't actually seem to do anything to actually hurt it. It just recombined, sent some people crazy, and went back to sleep.So... not a morning guy?
Nope.
It's actually made fairly clear for those who read past the boat ramming into Cthuhu that he doesn't cease his pursuit because of being rammed, but rather because the stars were no longer right.
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One thing that's important to keep in mind with 3.x D&D and Pathfinder is that most fantasy heroes top out around 6th-level. So, as far as the Fellowship, Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, or Lovecraft's protagonists are concerned... CR 30 is straight-up unkillable.
Especially as described in Bestiary 4, the Great Old Ones are forces that can lay waste to nations. But when your party is also a force that can lay waste to nations (as high level Pathfinder parties assuredly are), one of them has to lose.
Speaking as a huge Lovecraft fan I'm both glad they appear in Bestiary 4 and think, if anything, their power level is higher than it needs to be.
Cheers!
Landon
I guess it boils down to what you prefer in your game.
The Derleth version of mankind wielding Elder Signs like a crucifix to a vampire or Lovecraft's where at best you delay the inevitable. Slightly.
There is a very good article in an old White Dwarf magazine which sums it up nicely.
Why is Derleth being brought up? The only times people are talking about him here is how he was wrong but nothing in the bestiary or from other posts reference any of his works. Unless someone is under the erroneous belief that the Dream Cycle was Derleth's work. Those were Lovecraft's baby and a favorite campaign setting for Chaosium. Basically no one else wrote about them.
That is not dead, which can eternal lie;
Yet with strange aeons, even death may die!
To be fair given their friendship and mutual view worldviews this would mildly fit in with Lovecraft's image of the world. To adapt to a Mythos controlled world people would become like the other higher beings. Randolph Carter became a being of thought briefly in his journey before becoming trapped in an alien body. This is implied to be a step along the journey to true understanding the world beyond three dimensions. Similarly Howard believed civilized man to be a temporary transitional state and that only barbarians could truly thrive and reach human potential. Thus it can be assumed that people of PC power in Pathfinder would be outside of what Lovecraft and by extension the Mythos setting would consider human regardless of what their race line says.
maybe its for the people that want to able to kill cthulhu...like myself. heck i plan on just using its starspawn as a stand in.
I think, with the power level of heroes in PF, staying up Great old ones, and putting on the powerlevel with arch demons and the like, is fine.
Morals also have no business beating up fallen angles but they do it all the time in my games.
And remember that great C him self is put to sleep by a few scared sailors and a boat in the original Novel. So pehaps he should only have been CL 6.
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I think, with the power level of heroes in PF, staying up Great old ones, and putting on the powerlevel with arch demons and the like, is fine.
Morals also have no business beating up fallen angles but they do it all the time in my games.
And remember that great C him self is put to sleep by a few scared sailors and a boat in the original Novel. So pehaps he should only have been CL 6.
Curse those pesky fallen angles! The non-Euclidean ones are the worst! :P
In all seriousness, I don't have a problem with it. Like others have said, this is more like a Robert E. Howard take on the Mythos, with big damn heroes kicking the eldritch horrors back to sleep (remember, you can't actually kill them, and in the case of Hastur, it's actually suggested that he really is just the avatar of a true god).
About the boat thing though. As has been mentioned, they didn't put him back to sleep. They forced him to turn into mist for a brief time to recover, then he went back to sleep because the stars were no longer right. If the conditions had been right for him, he'd have stayed awake, and then the world would have seen some horror and despair.
I don't like endless powerful and impossible to kill creatures.
So yes they are a bad idea in my book.
The thing is though, the Great Old Ones are consistently stated as being rediculously powerful. More than a few times, it is said that they can pretty much crush a good chunck of Golarian on their own. The Outer Gods are even worse (more than a few times it is mentioned they would pretty much end even the gods).
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The thing is though, the Great Old Ones are consistently stated as being rediculously powerful. More than a few times, it is said that they can pretty much crush a good chunck of Golarian on their own. The Outer Gods are even worse (more than a few times it is mentioned they would pretty much end even the gods).
The good news? By and large, neither the Outer Gods nor the Great Old Ones give much of a rat's arse about humanity (to include elves, dwarves, gnomes, etc)
...(more than a few times it is mentioned they would pretty much end even the gods).Unsurprising, really. Even Rovagug, terrible as he is, is a provincial little destroyer-god trapped on a backward planet lost in the backwaters of a drab little galaxy in an out-of-the-way dimension. Not that his tendency to shred reality isn't cute in its own self-absorbed little way. He may even be allowed to stick around as somebody's house-pet.
Funny thing is, apperantly Golarian is in the same universe as we are... Essentially they are just another solar system in the galaxy.
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That's where the difference lies, though, Alleran. The Great Old Ones of the Call of Cthulhu RPG are just that - inherently unstoppable forces, where your only options are to prevent their appearance. If Cthulhu shows up there, 1d4 of your closest friends die every round. It fits that genre - the beings of the Mythos are mind-bogglingly powerful, and none of our weapons can even begin to hinder them. PCs aren't looking to save the world - they're looking to forestall its death for a few years more.
In Pathfinder, he goes from "unwinnable" to "mostly unwinnable." His CR places him out of reach for even 20th level PCs. If the PCs aren't mythic themselves, then they likely won't fare any better than CoC's investigators. Even then, fully ranked 20/10 PCs won't be able to face Outer Gods - they're still unstated. According to Paizo, Great Old Ones are on the same playing field as demon lords and archdevils. They can be killed, but it's just really, really tough. I think that's where the disconnect truly lies - people are expecting creatures that effortlessly crush PCs like ants, and are confused when PCs have a chance to actually fight back, let alone win!
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Leading to the terrible idea that PF characters are tough enough that the Cthulhu-types might actually learn the value of teamwork from the PCs.
I don't want to meet that adventuring party.
What's the WBL for creatures CR 21-30? As unique entities, I'm gonna assume that Great Old Ones get full PC WBL, instead of NPC WBL.
From what I can find:
"Interesting... it's not what I expected, but here's a workable formula. Note that this is only a rough approxamation for higher-level wealth; while close, it's certainly not exact.
W=3256*1.314^L
where W is wealth and L is level.
Extrapolated baseline (millions of gold pieces):
21 1.01
22 1.32
23 1.74
24 2.29
25 3.00
26 3.95
27 5.19
28 6.81
29 8.95
30 11.8
31 15.5
32 20.3
33 26.7
34 35.1
35 46.1"