Cosmic Horror Story / Tabletop Games

• The entire point of the Arkham Horror board game is the fact that you play as 1-8 humans who are the only people trying to actively stop the Ancient One from waking up. It is possible (although highly unlikely) to force the Ancient One back through combat, however strictly speaking you cannot win the game this way as it ends in a draw: you beat the cosmic evil, but humanity is likely in shambles, it probably did serious damage to the planet, it's likely a bunch of people died the second it showed up, and you failed to seal it, so for all you know it could be back tomorrow. The only true way to win is to seal six gates or close gates equal to all players on the board and have all the gates closed simultaneously. In this scenario, you sealed it off to keep it from arriving, but nobody will ever know your efforts, and people will still think you insane. Its spin-offs, the Arkham Horror card game, Elder Sign, Eldritch Horror and Mansions of Madness, differ mostly in gameplay mechanics but share the same bleak tone.
  • The game line was recenty expanded with Unfathomable, a reskin of Fantasy Flight's previous Battlestar Galactica (2003) boardgame, where the crew and passengers of an ocean liner crossing from Britain to America in 1912 find their ship besieged by dark shapes in the water, and to make matters worse, not everyone on board is who they seem...
• In Bleak World most races are caught up in petty minded squabbles and being on the brink of war, but all that is meaningless because of the Princesses' story. Their entire planet was consumed by an Eldritch Abomination that can only be stopped by a force field that is made of the stolen wonder and hope of human beings. If the barrier goes down for even a second, they, and every other sentient being in the Milky Way, will end up exactly like the dark princesses, mindlessly destroying other barriers of other galaxies.
• Breakfast Cult takes place in an academy set in a world where a new era of progress has been achieved by combining science with magic. The players normally end up uncovering a sinister background conspiracy involving the occult, one of several Eldritch Abominations, and an intertwined conspiracy connecting it all.
• Call of Cthulhu is an RPG based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft, embracing and expanding upon what he developed (though at times in the direction of Lovecraft Lite, depending on the Guardian or scenario). An alternate setting for the game, Delta Green, takes place in modern times and adds in conspiracy theories of every stripe by giving them a Cthulhu Mythos spin (The Greys that Majestic-12 are in contact with are cats-paws for the Mi-Go, surviving South American Nazis have access to Mythos-related occult knowledge and are being manipulated by an avatar of Nyarlathotep, the mutated cannibal homeless people in the New York underground are renegade Ghouls, etc.). Curiously enough, in Delta Green it's mentioned in the main book that by the turn of the millenium, most Mythos entities and their minions are far less present and/or active than they were even in the 20s and 30s... They don't need to be. They already won. They just need to wait a comparatively short while for the Stars will soon be Right.
• CthulhuTech. Mix the above with Robotech, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Guyver and AKIRA. The good news: You have all sorts of wonderful toys (Magitek Humongous Mecha, Psychic Powers, Functional Magic, Lovecraftian Superpowers...) to fight against the Migou invaders and the Eldritch Abomination-worshipping cults. The bad news: the fact that the Migou and the cults also fight each other only barely slows down their systematic conquest of more areas, both have thoroughly infiltrated human society despite The Government's increasingly (and justifiably) draconian security policies, a handful of godlike abominations and countless lesser ones are already here, and the first storyline-progressing book can be summed up in three words: It Got Worse. It's even mentioned in the core book that should Great Cthulhu be woken up by the Esoteric Order of Dagon, it's game over for anything not in thrall to the Old Ones.
• The boardgame Cthulhu Wars takes the premise of a Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror Story to its logical conclusion - the fighting isn't sane humans versus cults and abominations, but rather cult against cult. The world has already fallen to the Great Old Ones and their thralls; the only question is which of them will run the show.
• Long-defunct late-80s/early-90s RPG Dark Conspiracy had this sort of vibe — even though the Big Bad Ensemble of the Dark Lords took several cues from mythological gods and demons, they were still overwhelmingly powerful and unknowable extradimensional entities, who managed from behind the scenes to turn near-future Earth into a horribly depressing dystopia with the worst aspects of Cyberpunk cranked up and almost none of the cool stuff that comes with it (they stalled technological progress because too much of it could give humanity hope for the future, y'see, and since they thrive on our despair... Their minions had access to plenty of creepy, evil tech). Oh, and almost everyone even the slightest bit in the know was either an Unwitting Pawn, collaborating, or worse, one of countless monstrous minions who infiltrated and preyed on an apathetically oblivious humanity in secret.
• Demon: The Descent straddles between this and Lovecraft Lite. On the Lite side, you can actually win against the God-Machine's machinations, foil its plans, cause setbacks, and at the end of the day it will actually avoid ruffling your feathers. But on the Cosmic Horror side, the God Machine is several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything in the setting, it has no definite form,^note The rulebook actually says that you cannot see the God-Machine directly, only traces of its influences. The closest description of it is 'an ecosystem'. it has utterly alien agenda that not even the angels fully comprehend, and your victory over it is simply because it sees you not worth allocating more resources to deal with. That's right, even if you win and gets what you want, it will still get what it wants, just using different methods. And if you confuse that for weakness on its part, you're in for a rude awakening.
• Dungeons & Dragons very gladly hands the Game Master the tools necessary with the Far Realm. Though D&D already had weird, Lovecraftian monsters like the squid-headed illithids, mid-2nd Edition game designer Bruce Cordell started adding even deeper cosmic horror elements. One of his more influential contributions was the idea of a "far realm" of everything outside the borders of time, making the multiverse into a bubble in the infinite cosmic horror stew. Eberron's plane of Xoriat is strongly inspired by it, and a lot of weirder monsters that weren't from "the planes" or "A Wizard Did It" became the result of Far Realm intrusions into reality. The denizens of the Far Realm don't even care enough to want in, but constant accidents and random events cause little openings in the very thin wall of reality. Add in your standard insane cultists, mad wizards seeking alien power, world-ending monstrosities from later books like Elder Evils, and a bevy of alternate rules including a Sanity Meter rule cribbed from Call of Cthulhu, and D&D is very inviting to someone who wants to inflict this trope on a high fantasy world.
• Elder Sign is a fast-paced, cooperative dice game of supernatural intrigue for one to eight players by Richard Launius and Kevin Wilson, the designers of Arkham Horror. Players take the roles of investigators racing against time to stave off the imminent return of the Ancient Ones. Armed with cards for tools, allies, and occult knowledge, investigators must put their sanity and stamina to the test as they adventure to locate Elder Signs, the eldritch symbols used to seal away the Ancient Ones and win the game.
• Eclipse Phase can fall into this. The apocalypse has already happened. 9/10ths of humanity have been wiped out (read: had their brains pulled out and read like floppy disks) by enigmatic AI superbeings called the TITANs, with the remaining ten percent only surviving because apparently the TITANs lost interest for no explainable reason (and apparently human extinction was only a side effect of their goals anyway). Before leaving, they released mindless killing machines charged with harvesting heads, superweapons never dreamt of by human minds, plagues and nanobots capable of turning someone into Body Horror. Space folds differently around some TITAN artifacts, and psychic powers exist... as a side effect of one of their mutagenic plagues which may or may not turn you into a time bomb of some sort. Looking at TITAN artifacts can be damaging to your mind, or even infect you with a mutagenic horror, rewrite your mind, or simply destroy you... from across vaccuum and through the best protection humanity has ever devised. Monstrosities prowl the dark parts of space, just left behind when the TITANs vanished. Of course, the TITANs only started this menagerie of horrors because a cosmic superbeing (superbeings?) of enigmatic origins and goals did something similar to them for similarly ineffable reasons. Transhumanity's only hope lies in the fact that apparently nobody who matters cares enough to take the few months required to finish the job, but they might do it anyway out of carelessness.
• Exalted. It looks bleak. The ghosts of dead titans are trying to drag all of Creation into Oblivion, the demonic creators of the universe want to reclaim rule of it, and the infinite armies of shapeless chaos want to dissolve all existence back into chaos. After a series of catastrophes, about 98% of the world has already been irreparably destroyed by the start of the series, civilization has been steadily crumbling for hundreds of years, and everybody is lining up to be the one to finally finish the job. Of course, you're Exalted. You can solve all these problems by punching them in the face.
• GURPS, given its wide variety of settings, hits this trope on occasion:
  • Cabal, where the eponymous secretive organization of amoral sorcerers and monsters tinker with the fabric of reality for fun and profit. The good news: you're one of them. The bad news: there are much worse things out there, and not all of them play by your rules... including fellow Cabal members.
  • Cthulhupunk's setting is on the surface a typical cyberpunk setting... where the Cthulhu Mythos happens to be real.
  • In Infinite Worlds one of the greatest fears of Homeline is precisely discovering worldlines where Lovecraft was right, which, given the number of worlds where other elements once thought purely fictional are somehow real, is worryingly possible. They technically found one, Taft-7, where fortunately the Stars were Right about 16 million years ago and so while humanity never evolved, the Great Old Ones left long ago (which didn't stop the Things left behind from slaughtering and driving insane the members of at least one survey team, and may have led to catastrophe if not for the timely intervention of a Call of Cthulhu-style investigator from another worldline). Unknown to Homeline, there's a second one as well: Taft-1 (Taft worlds have a reputation as Weirdness Magnets), where Stalin's USSR's steady post-WW2 ascension actually owes at least as much of its success to Stalin "signing his name in the Book of Azathoth" as it does to the US's isolationist policies... especially since said isolationism derives from the secret assassination of Harry Truman through Mythos sorcery. Of course, if that's not enough, there's also the fact that since Infinite Worlds is a meta-setting connecting most ^note settings with interstellar travel, such as Transhuman Space, are the an exception GURPS settings, almost every other GURPS example also exists there; the aformentioned Cabal is a very concerning Wild Card third faction that intrudes unpredictably in the Homeline VS Centrum conflict.
  • Technically, The Madness Dossier is at the low end of the Cosmic Horror range; the "Red Kings", overlords of the antagonists, probably couldn't destroy the Earth, and have an actual interest in humanity (as slaves at the bottom of their hierarchy). Nonetheless, reality is unstable, the Red Kings are godlike Eldritch Abominations who can probably only be slain by crossing the Godzilla Threshold if at all, the heroes are far from certain of victory and may be driven mad in the struggle, and humanity has a very low place in the universe.
• Some years ago, a short-lived CCG called Hecatomb had this as its premise - each player was an "Endbringer", someone who, whether Mad Scientist, Evil Sorcerer or what-have-you, competed with other Endbringers to be the first to gather enough souls to bring about The End of the World as We Know It to fuel their powers, then move on to the next Alternate Universe to start over. You fought each other by summoning/creating monstrous minions (many of them eldritch abominations in their own right) and fusing them together to form Abominations, calling down evil gods (including Great Old Ones), and similar dirty tricks, all to get the requisite 20 soul tokens at your enemies' expense. And since every player gained a soul token at the beginning of his/her turn...
• JAGS Wonderland is a massive subversion. The world is being menaced by the Caretakers, a group of entities who live based on story rather than physical laws, as we humans do. They have collectively decided to drive humanity to self-destruction, and have done so via a viral insanity that causes reality to lose its grip on you... The Caretakers hate humans because they're actually terrified of us, since we act in ways they find utterly incomprehensible. That, and the reveal of the fact that vice versa is not true...
• The world of Kingdom Death. On top of the Crapsack Death World filled with monstrous, madness-inducing horrors where humans are at the bottom of the food chain, the fluff hints at one or several unknowable, unkillable entities who created the world and everything in it for completely unknown reasons. Even managing to defeat the endgame Final Boss of a given campaign is likely to be a Pyrrhic Victory at best. In fact, even the monsters themselves, despite usually being some shade of Eldritch Abomination, aren't immune to being hit by this, the intelligent ones especially - the Dragon King, for example, is the Last of Its Kind, and explicitely angsts over this and the fear of ultimately being forgotten, showing it to be as insignificant as the human chattel it lords over.
• The Swedish RPG KULT mixed Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Aleister Crowley occult traditions and the Hellraiser movies, and took its aesthetics from Splatter Punk, Clive Barker and H. R. Giger art. It's actually a subversion. Humans are hopeless against supernatural forces, but will triumph once awoken. In fact, most supernatural beings are hopelessly trying to prevent that. In other words, they broke their arms punching us.
• Magic: The Gathering has the Shadows Over Innistrad block, which is a continuation from a previous Innistrad block. Whereas the original Innistrad block is a Gothic Horror setting with humans being preyed upon by vampires, werewolves, zombies, demons, what-have-you, Shadows Over Innistrad has cultists, people going crazy and resident Eldritch Abomination wreaking havoc. Its ending especially cements the Cosmic Horror Story status: Said Eldritch Abomination is successfully sealed... only because it has decided it's done playing and seals itself for reasons unknown.
• The same Swedish company behind KULT also released Mutant Chronicles, whose basic premise is somewhat similar to that of Warhammer 40,000, if on a much smaller scale (humanity still hasn't expanded beyond the solar system); although depending on the Game Master's choices for his own campaign, it could be entirely possible for the players to rip the Dark Soul a new one if they try hard enough.
• Noctum has such a premise (mixed, like others on the list, with splatterpunk), but with the caveat that the reason the abominations were attracted to our world in the first place is because humans are bastards.
• The Old World of Darkness has elements of this in each of its gamelines, with each one having an apocalyptic ending. Vampire has the Antediluvians, their ancient, cannibalistic and godlike forefathers and Werewolf has the Wyrm and the titular apocalypse. Of the bigger lines, only Mage gives the potential for a happy ending, and doesn't involve one flavour or another of the Old Ones eating everything (unless the PCs screw up BADLY).
• Pathfinder loves this, creating a setting with so many Eldritch Abominations that they're starting to fight for space. Most of the Cthulhu Mythos is canonical, with an entire published adventure path called Strange Aeons, and the separate Dominion of the Black is a nightmarish Body Horror space empire that seems to revere the inevitability of oblivion and may well be returning to Golarion in force before long. Scholars of either have such a tendency to Go Mad from the Revelation that a nice little table in the Dominion write-up in "Valley of the Brain Collectors" helpfully classifies which Dominion scholars in the Inner Sea region are functional, which are semi-functional, and which have undergone some kind of breakdown.
• Pelgrane Press really seem to like this trope, since the first three published settings for their Gumshoe system — Trail of Cthulhu, Fear Itself and The Esoterrorists — all contain varying degrees of it. The first one is classic Cthulhu Mythos pulp horror investigation; the second is about playing more or less normal people suddenly confronted to the fact that their world actually is like every Clive Barker-esque supernatural splatterpunk story lumped together; and the third is about a secret organisation, the Ordo Veritatis, trying to stop an Ancient Conspiracy (the eponymous esoterrorists) from turning their world into a copy of the second one for fun and profit. Things are not going so well for the Ordo. A bestiary-style supplement released first for the d20 then for the latter two is very aptly called The Book of Unremitting Horror. Trail of Cthulhu's Purist mode is meant to emulate a Cosmic Horror Story at its most bleak and austere. The scenario "The Final Revelation" ends with the reveal to the player characters that the world was already consumed by horrible alien entities before their investigation even began, and everything they have experienced so far is a lie their fractured minds have told themselves. Every investigator immediately goes insane as reality itself dissolves into a surreal, endless nightmare.
• Sandy Petersen, who'd originally brought the Cthulhu Mythos to tabletop decided to revisit it with a different take on it in his Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos supplements for fantasy RPGs Pathfinder, Dungeons & Dragons, and The Dark Eye. One of the parts pushing the cosmic horror aspect further than usual for these games is that the Great Old Ones/Outer Gods themselves don't have a monster statblock -they may have a statted physical avatar or three wreaking havoc, but the true core of their presence is their "Elder Influence", which will often require something other than hack-and-slash tactics to vanquish... And even if the PCs manage it, it was only a small aspect of the entity, who can't be permanently defeated by any mortal means, and the Elder Influence could manifest again anytime that The Stars Are Right.
• Savage Worlds has published a supplement called Worlds Of Cthulhu. No points for guessing the premise.
• Sentinels of the Multiverse and its accompanying spin-offs are overall more in Lovecraft Lite territory, but the Tactics/Vertex universe goes straight into this, especially by the time Prime War comes along. One, everyone both hero and villain keeps being driven mad and into bad decisions by both their own powers and the lure of limitless cosmic power in the form of OblivAeon Shards. Two, the Vertex universe is threatened and eventually destroyed by the "Mist Storm" which is a mindless cloud of destructive energy formed by the aftereffects of Nightmist's interdimensional portals to gain aid during the OblivAeon fight combining with the forces in the destroyed Nexus of the Void. The heroes are sometimes seen trying to rescue people from it, but in the end they can do nothing to stop it and it just relentlessly consumes everything. Three, those few people who are rescued from the destroyed universe, are only rescued so they can serve as pawns in a war of cosmic beings known as Prime Aspects to determine which abstract concepts deserve to rule the outer realms of existence, with little care for the actual desires or morals of any mortals thus "conscripted". All in all it's pretty bleak and dripping in heaps of cosmic nihilism and Blue-and-Orange Morality.
• Shadow of the Demon Lord. Not only is the setting Darker and Edgier even by Dark Fantasy standards, as it stands, there is no way to effectively repel the Demon Lord (an Omnicidal Maniac Eldritch Abomination) and his forces. The best anyone can do is delay the inevitable.
• Unknown Armies subverts the trope; the setting's big secret is that the universe is humanocentric, existing only for our benefit. Any horrific monsters beyond time that make us insignificant, then, are actually the product, not the cause, of our sense of insignificance; it's a vicious cycle.
• Warhammer:
  • Warhammer aka Warhammer Fantasy takes place in a world infiltrated by Chaos, a corruptive force given strength by the ickier parts of the human psyche. The only way to combat Chaos is to be frighteningly dogmatic and wipe it out whenever it looks at you funny, no matter who gets caught in the crossfire.
  • Warhammer: The End Times took the trope to the logical conclusion: the world was conquered by Chaos and destroyed. A couple of months later the setting was given a Reset Button Ending in the form of Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, acting as a Lovecraft Lite sequel: we've seen what Chaos can do, now mankind fights to keep it from happening again.
  • Warhammer 40,000 (Warhammer's Sci-Fi Counterpart) is even worse. Not only is Chaos even more of a threat (powerful daemons in Fantasy can devastate cities; powerful daemons in 40K can devastate star systems), there are also the implacable legions of the Necrons and their former C'tan masters^note though they vary a fair bit; plenty will kill you on the spot, but plenty of others won't bother you as long as you stay out of their way, and a few are totally willing to work with you on reasonable terms as long as you have a common goal, and the limitless Tyranid hordes controlled by its immortal Hive Mind, as well as the Dark Eldar, aka the Eldar who gleefully continued with the behavior that created Slaanesh in the first place and now must descend into greater and greater depths of depravity to stave off his hunger for their souls, which translates into them being the one faction you absolutely do not want to be captured by, but are held back by their limited numbers and the borrowed time they live on. Indeed, it's often noted that humanity still survives despite the galaxy always being doomed not because of anything they do, but because the various unstoppable, incomprehensible menaces keep getting in each other's ways.
    • Even the closest thing the setting has to "Good Guys" are pretty horrific. The Imperium is a xenophobic totalitarian theocracy whose higher-ups sacrifice 1000 souls to keep the God-Emperor alive each day. The Eldar will happily sacrifice millions of lives of "lesser" species to ensure the survival of even a single one of themselves. The Tau are probably the least Xenophobic race in the setting and claim to serve the "Greater Good". However all that really means is they're willing to offer subjugation to other species rather than just exterminating them immediately, as they are every bit as ruthless as the rest of the main factions when their offers are refused, and numerous unsubstantiated but perfectly plausible rumors of labor camps and forced sterilization and eugenics on the human worlds they conquer exist. Probably the fourth "nicest" race in the setting is the Orks, because at least rather than wanting to totally annihilate their enemies (after horrifically torturing them), they're just looking for a good fight. Sometimes you'll encounter bands of Necrons that are on your side or, at the very least, won't shoot you on sight, sometimes, but even people who have worked with Necrons will tell you that you should never gamble on it and should assume that every single Necron is hostile until proven otherwise. The Kroot (who are typically employed by the Tau) are honestly the nicest race out there by a long shot; if you can get past the ritual cannibalism, taste for sentients, and perverse and assholish sense of humor, they're actually quite pleasant, and unless their employers are opposed to you or you've managed to royally piss them off, they are extremely happy to live and let live (assuming they don't decide to fuck with you and make you the butt of an incredibly unpleasant joke).

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