{. . .}
The problem is when you want to factor Lovecraftian Mythos in. They are predatory by their very nature - In order to preserve the authentic Mythos feel, they have to be beyond even the other gods. If they aren't, they become simply Very Big Aberrations, and thus, not Lovecraftian at all.
{. . .}On the contrary, Very Big Aberrations are quite Lovecraftian. Who says Aberrations can't be so big as to give deities pause? Rovagug would qualify for this if not already classified as an Outsider (really ought to be able to combine the types and have things like Outsider Aberration, etc.).
Except... Not really.
Lovecraftian Great Old Ones are not only about power. They work by completely breaking down a character's sense of reality, causing upheaval in the whole structure of the story. They shouldn't exist. They are not rational. They are absurd.
{. . .}
That's sort of the idea of Aberrations. (Admittedly, in practice it often seems to get somewhat lost.)
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@ Patrick C. -- in the Pathfinder universe, the Old Gods, the Great Old Ones and their servitors serve on the Prime Material Plane the same role that the qlippoths and whatnot serve on their outer planes.
They are the ancient evils that have plagued the universe for a very long time.
However, much like Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories, the Pathfinder universe also contains entities that can stand up to them.
(Seriously, Elric could fight Cthulhu and possibly even perma-kill Cthulhu with Stormbringer. The Eternal Champion and his many incarnations are probably a good baseline for what a tier 10 mythic character can do.)
The Old Gods are still a very real threat, though.
The demons and devils want to subjugate reality.
The daemons want to end reality.
The Old Ones want to rewrite reality.
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(Seriously, Elric could fight Cthulhu and possibly even perma-kill Cthulhu with Stormbringer. The Eternal Champion and his many incarnations are probably a good baseline for what a tier 10 mythic character can do.)
The best that Elric, or any other Eternal Champion could do was to banish an aspect of a Lord of Chaos (Or Law) from his or her material plane, by killing it's manifestation.
The Ultimate Champion however, would take out the Cosmic Balance itself.
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I live by the premise that any entity could be Nyarlathotep in disguise; it's only prudent.
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(Seriously, Elric could fight Cthulhu and possibly even perma-kill Cthulhu with Stormbringer. The Eternal Champion and his many incarnations are probably a good baseline for what a tier 10 mythic character can do.)The best that Elric, or any other Eternal Champion could do was to banish an aspect of a Lord of Chaos (Or Law) from his or her material plane, by killing it's manifestation.
The Ultimate Champion however, would take out the Cosmic Balance itself.
Being able to kick a god right off the Prime Material ain't a minor thing, though =P
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I live by the premise that any entity could be Nyarlathotep in disguise; it's only prudent.
That's exactly what someone who is actually Nyarlathotep would say!
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@ Patrick C. -- in the Pathfinder universe, the Old Gods, the Great Old Ones and their servitors serve on the Prime Material Plane the same role that the qlippoths and whatnot serve on their outer planes.
They are the ancient evils that have plagued the universe for a very long time.
However, much like Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories, the Pathfinder universe also contains entities that can stand up to them.
(Seriously, Elric could fight Cthulhu and possibly even perma-kill Cthulhu with Stormbringer. The Eternal Champion and his many incarnations are probably a good baseline for what a tier 10 mythic character can do.)
The Old Gods are still a very real threat, though.
The demons and devils want to subjugate reality.
The daemons want to end reality.
The Old Ones want to rewrite reality.
Unfortunately, much of the time in practice the difference is more "academic" than practical, as with all of those examples they are effectively Bug Eyed Monsters (B.E.M) with different trappings. (BEMs being generically malicious/hostile towards humanity and therefore things to be put down/ran away from as the genre dictates.) Different motivations are nice, but they don't tend to translate into differenes in behavior. Cultists are still faceless mooks who try to break all the seals and unleash supposedly unfathomable evils whether they serve a fiend or an eldritch abomination. When a horrible creature is tearing you apart and tearing out your soul, it doesn't matter that much whether they want to utilize it, destroy it, rewrite it, or simply swallow it. The weapons and tactics you might use against these different types of foes might vary slightly, but the specifics rarely vary significantly.
Suffice it to say, I'll be interested in seeing if this AP will make the alien truly alien or if the enemy effective transforms into another evil outsider race where their actions are generic evil but under a different name.
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OK, Cthulhu Mythos 101, and why it actually does work for PFRPG Horror. You NEVER will see any of them in a game, other than their handyman/herald Nyarlathotep. The why is simple, they are SO Vast and incomprehensible that their very presence ends the game. The Gods can probably get clear, but could not face IT without perishing. Azathoth destroys the underpinnings of reality itself. Fortunately, somehow, the gods or their forerunners or perhaps the most powerful force in the cosmos, the writers, made this part of reality unpalatable to Azathoth and his Posse. Nyarlathotep deals with the ick factor (that is us) because it is part of his purpose, can we understand it? Nope. He does seem to want to encourage us thinking that we do have him figured out.
Part of Nyarlothotep's skill set is that he has figured out how to project a tiny part of his reality into our reality, thus not really messing up our reality ..much.. When he showed himself to Randolph Carter he demonstrated this. By inference of the effects in the few stories where he sort of appears, the High Priest of Azathoth and Crew, Cthulhu, does the same thing, but clumsily, causing sub-cataclysmic destruction. Fortunately, he appears to be currently dead and is entombed in a reality where that means something. He is sleeping away his imprisonment until Death stops doing its job.
The parts of the Mythos that PCs get to deal with, apart from occasional direction/misdirection from Nyarlathotep, is with the lesser races, and cultists. You see, they have plans. They are pretty sure they can become gods themselves, (or whatever) if they can be in just the right place relative to a contact event. That they are probably wrong is not really relevant when you have to consider a fairly minor contact event might depopulate a big chunk of Avistan. Now, the probability of the cultists actually succeeding in anything at all is small, but can you take that chance?
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A more serious rumination on the topic of Cthulu:
... mmmmmmmmmeh?
Don't get me wrong.
I mean, I agree that the same existential horror that the Cthulu Mythos heroes feel can never be replicated by the players in PFRPG, but the characters can feel that (albeit, we know, for certain, they're under a very specific rule-set of affliction).
The thing is, Cthulu, itself, isn't really all-that, as-presented in the original texts of the authors. And he's not even supposed to be.
The problem I see with many Mythos fans (including the version statted in PF) is that they try to put Cthulu into this completely unassailable realm where nothing can stop him, harm him, or cause him minor inconvenience. That's... not how Cthulu works in his own mythos. The dude doesn't care about us, not because we're insignificant, but because he doesn't care about us.
Boats pop his head (and cause him to leak madness-gas and reform a bit later). Turns out he's not smart enough to realize, "Hey, that massive heavy thing moving at my face at great speed? I can't swallow that." But then again, Cthulu himself was never supposed to be the thing to which we all just throw up our hands in horror and give up. He's supposed to be chump change in his own universe - he's a priest/descendant of some of the bigger dudes out there. I mean, his Star Spawn went to a non-determined war with Elder Things, and didn't win. That's... uh... that indicates something is kind of, you know, off with their relative CR levels. Granted, Elder Things were made of terrestrial matter instead of whatever the others were, but they actually held their own against yith and mi-go as well as the "star spawn"... right up until global cooling, I guess? I mean, the shoggoth rebellion hurt them pretty badly, but that was before the shoggoth actually really became as "advanced" as they ended up. I mean, yeah, they degraded eventually, but that just sounds like the difference between a mortal (be it humanoid or aberration) and an outsider, in PF.
But here's the thing. Mythos characters were supposed to never, ever, really care about anything we peon mortals ever did. We're not important, right?
But, uh, we are. To them. Explicitly. Yog-Sothoth wanted people to get pregnant with its spawn - of course, it also didn't really charge anything for its services, and allowed others to use it freely. Kind of a nice chap, really, if you were prone to be nice to it.
Nyarlathotep could be an entity, or just a common "face" used by many other entities, but either way he's explicitly interested in humanity and making it do things. This is not indifferent.
Beyond that, there are certainly elements of the great old ones that ring true with all normal living creatures: they seek to replicate and keep themselves and (for the most part) their progeny effectively "alive" after some form or another... though they have a different relationship with "dead" than others (which, incidentally, is just Cthulu's big trick - the three things that define him, aside from his appearance, are a pop-able head, stinky madness-gas/looks, and "I got bettah." power). Either with each other or with other things, or just by themselves, the Mythos entities seek very fundamentally "mortal" concerns - sure the various protagonists (who, it must be pointed out, seem to mostly be emotionally unstable, fearful, and unreliable in most cases, before meeting the things) inform us that it's impossible to win, and you really have no option other than to flee and/or avoid the things altogether, else you risk madness. But, uh, that's not a hard thing to replicate in PF. Oh, the madness? Admittedly more difficult, but even animal regression isn't all that impressive.
That said, I think one of the major problems is that Mythos fans try to shoe-horn the feeling of the Mythos protagonists into the players of non-Mythos characters. To this end, the Mythos creatures become unassailable super-monsters incapable of ever being defeated by mere mortals (never-mind that they are absurd by their own literature standards) or even the gods themselves (which, incidentally, aren't all that impressive, either, by PF standards).
That said, I think that tables are also "doing it wrong" when it comes to the Mythos stuff. It's not that they have to do things in a certain way, but people brush off the fear - the very real fear and pain and madness - that their characters are threatened by. Forcing your character to do and become things they can't understand or even entirely rewrite they're core personality... sometimes with an "or else" clause that they don't even know about that causes them to degenerate or weaken.
This sort of thing is very real and common in PF. But it's also very scary, and most people (such as 1920s earth-based humans) would have no concept or idea about what the crap is going on, or how to deal with it. To them, this sort of junk is exactly the mind-bending truth as Truman <spoiler'd!>*.
But Truman didn't break. Similarly, neither did Conan, when confronted with untold horrors from beyond or Mythos implications.
I mean, it's true: the universe is utterly terrifying and horrible in every way, but, you know, it's still comprehensible.
That's the thing that the Mythos is wrong about, in PF, at least - even entirely incomprehensible things are, in fact, comprehensible. It's a neat trick humans have learned. It's called "science" and it shows us things we were never meant to know, and truths fundamentally beyond our ken or ability to understand them. Yet, they're still true, and we're doing sort of okay at coping and working with them.
But showing an atom bomb to primitive people by blowing up a mountain side would probably cause a whole lot of issues, panic, and emotional decay - not to mention the radiation poisoning and other issues.
I want the Mythos representations to be really compelling. The zygomind has been the best one there is, really, that I've seen. It's utterly terrifying. Make that puppy a sigil-appearing outsider, and name it Hastur (plus the unconscious agenda effect), and I'll likely accept that the mythos is fundamentally terrifying in every way. Because it would be.
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OK, Cthulhu Mythos 101, and why it actually does work for PFRPG Horror. You NEVER will see any of them in a game, other than their handyman/herald Nyarlathotep. The why is simple, they are SO Vast and incomprehensible that their very presence ends the game. The Gods can probably get clear, but could not face IT without perishing. Azathoth destroys the underpinnings of reality itself. Fortunately, somehow, the gods or their forerunners or perhaps the most powerful force in the cosmos, the writers, made this part of reality unpalatable to Azathoth and his Posse. Nyarlathotep deals with the ick factor (that is us) because it is part of his purpose, can we understand it? Nope. He does seem to want to encourage us thinking that we do have him figured out.
That's exactly why I say the Cthulhu Mythos are incompatible with a heroic fantasy campaign setting (You can, of course, play Pathfinder Horror in a Mythos-setting) - Tey reduce the rest of the cosmic players to chumps. "The Gods might survive if they run"? Come on.
That said, I think one of the major problems is that Mythos fans try to shoe-horn the feeling of the Mythos protagonists into the players of non-Mythos characters. To this end, the Mythos creatures become unassailable super-monsters incapable of ever being defeated by mere mortals (never-mind that they are absurd by their own literature standards) or even the gods themselves (which, incidentally, aren't all that impressive, either, by PF standards).
Exactly.
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Now that you mention it, I have never seen both of them in the same room at the same time...
I've never seen either of them in the same room with Cosmo.
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Tacticslion wrote:
Boats pop his head (and cause him to leak madness-gas and reform a bit later). Turns out he's not smart enough to realize, "Hey, that massive heavy thing moving at my face at great speed? I can't swallow that.
The half-giant leans over and whispers to you, "Give him a break, he's been mostly dead all day."
Agree that compared to Azathoth and crew, Cthulhu is a minion, just what his potential is, well, the whole being dead may be holding him back a little.
I understand people's reservations about the Elder Gods interfering with their heroic feelings. I find the whole PCs are always superior shtick tiresome. I used to play Amber, and if that doesn't break you of the desire to play godlings, nothing will.
I find the thought of the gods faithfully performing their duties, knowing that it might all be taken away from them more resonant than the thought that they are are the peak of creation.
I may never want to climb the mountain, but taller it is, the bigger my world is.
Edit (I hate autocorrect)
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It's not so much "PCs are always superior" as "I wanna play something in which the top dogs are not tentacly things from the outer dark for once".
Almost every pop culture setting these days, from comics to RPG, introduce "Lovecraftian" beings at least once, and they always have this feeling of displacing whatever was at the top and warping, if not the entire story, at least the cosmology, around themselves... In the end, they are just a more pretentious form of Mary Sue.
This is not, of course, an inherent problem in Lovecraftian fiction. It's the result of overuse and thematic dissonance.
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The Elder Gods aren't the top dogs. They are environmental effects. They do not plan, they don't act in a way we can predict or explain. If Someone tells you they can control or predict, you need to neutralize that someone. Even their minion, Nyarlathotep, is alien enough that the best we can say is that he appears interested in us.
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I'm going to clap and applause tacticslion for his lengthy and Thought provoking post
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I thinks Tacticslion said something in his great post that is overlooked: we need to look no further than Robert E. Howard and Conan to see how PF characters would adjust to Lovecraftian horrors. You just stab them in the face or tentacle or body mass with the nearest pointy object.
Howard had the right idea that civilization is just a ruse and that barbarism is the true nature of mankind. Conan as a barbarian in Howard's world was always able to quickly adjust to facing Cyclopean horrors of the Mythos by never being civilized and thus "softer" as you see the characters in Lovecraft when they encounter these things.
A civilized man may go mad at seeing these things. A barbarian (or for Pathfinder practically every adventurer) would just instinctively fight the dang gum thing and wonder after the fight why the merchant went running off after pissing himself. I mean...I fought worse amirite?
I know Howard and Lovecraft were great friends but I always felt Conan's responses to very, veeeeeery Mythos creatures were a little dig from Howard to Lovecraft about how every single person in Lovecraft would go nuts and effectively do little to nothing against these things.
Have broadsword, will travel. You can have a Mythos feel, sure, but Pathfinder embraces such regular horrors that there simply is no room for the "my guy can eat you guy" nonsense that some Mythos fans want to see from Cthulhu and the rest.
I absolutely Lovecraft and his Mythos but I don't think that approach of "my guy can eat your guy" works at all...AT ALL...for Pathfinder.
I am intrigued by this premise.
For that matter... what if ALL gods are masks of Nyarlathotep?
What if the Starstone doesn't make people ascend, the Black Pharaoh just eats them and fashions them into a new mask to manipulate mortals with?
What if the conflict between all the gods is him fighting with himself at the behest of his incomprehensible masters?
I am intrigued by this premise.
For that matter... what if ALL gods are masks of Nyarlathotep?
What if the Starstone doesn't make people ascend, the Black Pharaoh just eats them and fashions them into a new mask to manipulate mortals with?
What if the conflict between all the gods is him fighting with himself at the behest of his incomprehensible masters?
Entirely possible. It is also possible that Nyarlathotep's true name is The Deehim, and they are actually almost everyone in existence. Or maybe it is The Geehim, but regardless of the case that might be stretching things a bit.
I am intrigued by this premise.
For that matter... what if ALL gods are masks of Nyarlathotep?
What if the Starstone doesn't make people ascend, the Black Pharaoh just eats them and fashions them into a new mask to manipulate mortals with?
What if the conflict between all the gods is him fighting with himself at the behest of his incomprehensible masters?
Also, his incomprehensible masters are just himself wearing ever more elaborate masks.
Oh dear,
It turns out that your character is, in fact, one of the masks.