Eldritch Abomination / Tabletop Games

Meet the Cosmic Horror.

Eldritch Abomination in Tabletop Games.

---

Subpages:

• Dungeons & Dragons

---

Other examples:

• BattleTech is a weird place to find one of these, as the game is a relatively hard sci-fi setting about military combat and Machiavellian politics, but it's got an in-universe rumor of the Black Marauder AKA "The Dark One", a Marauder Battlemech piloted by the infamous pirate Black Kevin Langstrom. Said to be totally devoid of a serial number or any manufacturer's mark at all, it is supposed to possess a subtly wrongness about its appearance- the lines are too smooth, the ring holding its dorsal-mounted autocannon is a bit too thick, it seems to grow larger in darkness and also supposedly performs much better under such conditions. It was supposedly found standing on an asteroid, undamaged and spotless despite its exposed location, but after a number of accidents (including killing someone by firing one of its weapons while supposedly shut down and a pilot simply vanishing from the cockpit after screaming in terror, never to be seen or heard from again) it was abandoned and buried. After Black Kevin got ahold of it while he was still in the Federated Suns Armed Forces, he supposedly suffered a shift in personality, becoming much more aggressive and eventually killed one of his fellow mechwarriors by beating him to death with a wrench, then going pirate. After becoming a pirate captain, other pirates claimed to have seen the Marauder turn its torso ahead of the arms (something that should be physically impossible) to look at them and to reveal a mouth lined with sharp teeth and five terrifying eyes. It was also alleged to have the ability to drain the souls of people near it and walk on its own without a pilot. Whether or not any of this is true or merely the result of superstitious Periphery folk and drug-addled pirates telling stories is left to the reader to decide. The incident of it walking on its own is at least implied in-universe to have been the result of equipping it with a salvaged drone control system while the rest can (possibly) be explained by Black Kevin simply being an exceptionally skilled and psychopathic mechwarrior.
  • Its very rare, but occasionally a JumpShip will undergo a "misjump" which normally deposits the ship a distance from its intended (with "distance" here being anywhere from kilometers to hundreds of light years). However, in a small percentage of cases the ships drop out of the jump with claw and bite marks marring their hull and devoid of life. Or they are just straight up never seen again. What causes these events are never described.
• Betrayal at House on the Hill has, as one of its 'haunt' scenarios, 'The Stars are Right'. Just guess what the survivors are trying to stop and what the traitor is trying to do.
• The darkness in Bleak World is an unstoppable force that eats planets and turns everything on them into its dark servants. It is locked out of the Milky Way Galaxy for now, but it still manages to get its servants in from time to time so they can get it in.
  • Also whatever The Caretaker of the death beyond death is for ghosts.
  • The Caretaker is actually implied to be the Darkness itself, and is described as being "a massive field of liquid darkness, made of thousands of mouths and eyes". It presides over an Eldritch Location where ghosts go when they die; they feel eternal pain, but can never actually go insane from it.
• Naturally, Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu game is just full of them. One of the basic stats of PCs, along with the normal STR, DEX, CON, WIS, INT and such, is SAN. That's Sanity. It's arguably the most important single stat unless you want to keep rolling up new characters. And driving the trope home, increasing your Cthulhu Mythos skill directly reduces the extent to which your lost Sanity can be regained. These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know indeed.
  • In addition to Cthulhu Mythos beings, several Canon Foreigners originated from this game, including Arwassa, Baoht Z'uqqa-Mogg and groups of lesser Outer Gods.
  • There's a board game based on Call of Cthulhu by Fantasy Flight called Arkham Horror which has tokens for hit points, knowledge of other worlds, and (you guessed it) sanity. Every turn, there's a high chance of a gate opening to another universe, and as more gates open, more monsters come flooding through... and as the game progresses, the Doom Count slowly rises. If it gets high enough, the Ancient One (Cthulhu or one of his cousins) appears and the players have to battle it. (Each Eldritch Abomination has special powers — Azathoth's power is "if summoned, the game is over. Azathoth destroys the world.")
    • There are also two more derived games — Mansions of Madness and Eldritch Horror; while the original takes place in Lovecraft Country, the followup games have creepy old houses and the entire world as settings, respectively.
  • The CCG based on Call of Cthulhu (also by Fantasy Flight) has loads as well, although it's actually possible to see a game played in which they don't appear. Just not likely — sanity is too valuable as an attack vector.
• CthulhuTech. An RPG set about 80 years in the future after the Mi-go (or rather, Migou) have attacked Earth and the Great Old Ones are stirring. It combines H. P. Lovecraft with Neon Genesis Evangelion (what with the gigantic biological weapons called Engels that pilots mentally sync to and ride in their spines). It also throws Guyver into the mix, with abominable Expies of Guyvers and Zoanoids (you can actually play the former — and the latter, with the advent of later books).
• Dragon Warriors
  • Balor, the god of darkness. A humanoid being, but of such immense size and power that he can rampage across the world unstoppably. It's a good thing that he's entombed in magical ice. His cultists, the Darkness Elementalists, are granted some of the best elemental spells, and their spells from other elements are usually enhanced.
  • From the same setting, the Blood Sword campaign/series reveals there are others, such as a trio of truly hideous demon-things that were worshipped in the Middle-East equivalent before the spread of their Crystal Dragon Islam, and the Archmagi of Krarth, whose return from the void between the stars to their ruined fortress of Spyte heralds The End of the World as We Know It; the battle againt just ONE is the hardest fight in the series.
• In the world of Earthdawn, the cyclical ebb and flow of magic periodically allows Horrors to slip from their own dimension into the world and devour anything that moves. If you're lucky, they will devour your body before they start on the good stuff. Luckily for the world, magic energies are on the decline, so the survivors of the last cataclysm the Horrors caused have just got to outlast their ability to keep existing in our world for a generation or two before they're all gone (most of them already are). The Horrors are bad enough that just knowing anything about them can hurt you in various ways.
  • Shadowrun is more or less on the opposite end of the scale from EarthDawn, with Shadowrun being a world where magic is on the increase and the Horrors not terribly far behind. While there's at least one group working to speed the process, there's also others working to delay things, with the hope that this new-fangled technology thing can prevent The End of the World as We Know It this time around.
• Eclipse Phase. Encountering any alien life triggers a stress check, and the only canon sapient species that transhumanity has contacted resemble giant slime molds. And then there's the Seed AI that can potentially achieve god-like intelligence, and the effects of some strains of the Exsurgent virus are not pretty.
  • Warning, GM only info ahead: the ETI, a Kardashev III or maybe IV entity that created the Exsurgent Virus. Described as being eons old and capable of megascale engineering with an understanding of physics, matter, energy, and universal laws that makes all of transhuman knowledge seem insignificant. And for some reason, it has seeded the galaxy with probes that infect near-singularity intelligences with civilization-destroying multivector viruses.
• White Wolf's Exalted has some bizarre entities which originated in the chaotic non-place outside of reality itself.
  • The Primordials came out of said Primordial Chaos and built Creation, with all its gods to take care of it, so that they had time to smoke magical crack. Their minds are so vast that they're divided between entire hierarchies of multiple souls, each of which has a mind of its own and multiple lesser souls with minds of their own.
    • Most of the Primordials that didn't get killed are now the Yozi, demon princes who have had their very beings and souls turned inside out and who live in the broken body of their leader. They wish to turn Creation into Hell as part of a rather demented plan to escape their prison by expanding it.
    • The Neverborn are dead Primordials that you have to meet face to architecture. Killing them broke the universe and shat the entire Underworld into being. Their goal is to drag the whole of creation into Oblivion so that they can finally actually die.
    • Autochthon, a living non-Yozi Primordial, is a giant hollow machine-deity approximately the size of a planet, mostly made of steampunk (and he's a good guy. Sort of.)
    • The three kinds of Primordial Exalted — Alchemicals, Infernals, and Abyssals — are gradually evolving into something closer to their patrons. Alchemicals gradually turn into cities, but the others have only existed about three years and, as such, have had nowhere near enough time to turn into... whatever it is they end up becoming.
    • Return of the Scarlet Empress revealed Yozi charms which define the ability of Primordials to exist in their worldform jouten^note Technically, all of a Primordial's jouten are defined by charms (as are all of their capabilities and personality aspects). The most accurate way to describe a Primordial is as a sentient collection of charms built around a central theme. Which a Green Sun Prince can learn. Which means that every Green Sun Prince is actually an infant Primordial.
    • To up the fun, PDF supplement The Broken-Winged Crane gives the Green Sun Princes another path to transcendence, the Heresy charms. Instead of turning yourself into a world, you gain the ability to create worlds within yourself. It's explicitly stated that the day the first of the Heresy Charms is discovered, the aforementioned Primordials will all immediately know, and subsequently shit themselves.
    • Once the Exaltation shard becomes redundant, it is released to be implanted in another Infernal...
  • In addition, there are also The Fair Folk. The ones that aren't pretending to be something human-shaped for fun are most easily understood as formless living stories who either want to return Creation to the primordial Wyld it used to be or just look at Creation until they get bored and wander off, but ALL of them like to eat the dreams and souls of whatever mortals they can catch.
    • The purest Fair Folk horror would be the hannya — a special kind of Unshaped that is formed from a narrative of predation, and serves as an Ultimate Life Form of the Fair Folk ecosystem. Even the other Fair Folk are afraid of the hannya, which is why they cannot return to the Deep Wyld — they will either be devoured by the hannya or become hannya through victories in the constant feeding frenzy.
• Fading Suns has the Void Krakens, who dwell in interstellar space and are never actually physically described. The only sign of their existence is the frequent loss of ships that don't use the Jumpgate system and instead rely on conventional, non-FTL propulsion (such as First Republic generation ships), which sometimes arrive at their (long since settled, due to Jumpgates) destination with ruptured hulls and gigantic sucker marks on them, as well as distress calls mentioning unimaginable, horrific things before being cut off in mid-sentence. The alien races of the setting seem to have had trouble with the Void Krakens as well in the past. The good thing? Apparently the beings cannot enter star systems — it's theoretized in-universe that either the Jumpgates or the stars themselves repel them. The bad thing, which incidentally lends credence to the second theory? Since the fading suns phenomenon began, Void Kraken attacks have again begun after millenia of inactivity. And not only begun, but increased exponentially...
• The Gumshoe System has openly embraced the concept for its first settings — there is Trail of Cthulhu, their own take on the Mythos, but there is also the basic campaign world for The Esoterrorists and Fear Itself, which they have given the cutesy moniker of World of Unremitting Horror. The monsters, most of them described in the supplement The Book of Unremitting Horror, are, for the most part, ghastly humanoid abominations that seem straight out of one of Clive Barker's more horrifying stories, many also blurring the line with other monster types such as demons, undead, and fairies, the worst being Reality Warpers from "The Outer Black"; many others feed on and/or are created by the worst aspects of human nature (for example, the Snuff Golem). The entries, which include numerous fiction pieces and detailed descriptions of how to identify the things' depredations through forensic sciences, all add up to some serious Nightmare Fuel.
• GURPS
  • GURPS: Fantasy treats Tiamut as this, giving stats for a minor avatar of hers that, while not particularly odd looking (it's an enormous dragon with four eyes), can still cause terror from just looking at it. Said avatar automatically regenerates every year, making the effort of trying to kill it futile. To get rid of it permanently, you'd have to track down and kill the real Tiamut... who is half the size of the universe (about 2.24* 10^18 Hit Points), so good luck with that. There's even a Lovecraft quote after the stat block.
  • The game has a few more from different settings and splatbooks: GURPS: Cabal, with its cosmology based on the qabbalah's Sephirot, has the creatures of Qlipoth and its Ur-Lords; Creatures of the Night has the godlike Betweeners, the force called "the darksome", which is responsible for the creation of the literal organ-farmer Darklings, and many of the non-undead creatures described; a few licenced settings (like Cthulhupunk and The War Against the Chtorr) have their own native abominations; and Infinite Worlds, the meta-setting that ties The Multiverse together, not only makes all the previous settings inter-accessible, but also has at least one world (Taft-7) where humanity never evolved in the first place because of Great Old One (or similar) influence 50 million years back — and although they're long gone, they left enough "Fun Stuff" behind (and the risk of attracting their attention is great enough) for the agencies overseeing interdimensional travel to quarantine the world from any travel there whatever the reason.
  • GURPS newsletter Roleplayer #10 (May 1988), adventure "The Isle of Night". T'Soquat is a minor Thing That Man Was Not Meant To Know. It resembles a giant lobster with pale gray-green skin and glowing red eyes. It has an acidic secretion Super Spit, Super-Strength and large Power Pincers, and each Human Sacrifice it receives improves its defenses against being harmed.
• Kingdom Death is set in a Dark Fantasy cosmos where humans are initially born from the ground in a world of mostly perpetual darkness and are prey or hunters to strange monsters and Eldritch Abomination. In fact the place that is the sole source of light is actually the hatching ground of one especially powerful abomination.
• While our nature in KULT allows us to kick most super beings with ease once awakened, the Forgotten Gods are different stories. These beings represent principles incomprehensible to humanity and are powerful enough that they do not even care about the plans of the Demiurge or Astaroth.
• Magic: The Gathering has several kinds of those:
  • The more mundane ones, which have been around for some time, have the "Horror" or "Nightmare" creature types. Not all of them fall under this trope, but a fair number do. For example, the Nemesis of Reason. Many of them either kill creatures simply by being them (in a way reminescent of Terror, an old and classic spell for killing creatures), or attack the cards in your hand (representing your thoughts) or deck (representing your memories), which can eventually kill you.
  • Marit Lage is an ancient, betentacled Sealed Evil in a Can. The card Dark Depths allows you to unseal her. She's strong enough to kill a player in one hit if you manage to do so.
  • The Zendikar block storyline was about the awakening of a race of abominations called the Eldrazi, which live outside of the universes and "feed" off of reality, leaving the worlds they enter dead and bare of life and energy, and had been locked away six thousand years ago by a trio of planeswalkers (Ugin, Sorin Markov and Nahiri). The block culminated in the Rise of the Eldrazi after Sorin failed to re-seal the prison. Unlike all other non-artificial creatures in Magic, the Eldrazi don't have a color: they are beyond the concepts the rest of the known Multiverse abides to. In addition to their entirely alien look, they also annihilate a large part of your opponent's resources just by attacking, before they can even try to stop them. Eldrazi are also associated with some non-creature spells, which have very telling names such as All is Dust or Not of This World.
    • In addition to having no color, the Eldrazi in their native state also have no form. They were forced into physical form by the planeswalkers who trapped them on Zendikar so they could be fought.
    • It's been revealed in recent material that the Eldrazi creatures aren't individual monsters, but simply lesser parts of a greater Eldrazi entity in the Blind Eternities (the space between the planes). So, each of Ulamog's brood, including the one referred to itself as Ulamog, are more like organs and extremities than anything else.
    • At the end of the Oath of the Gatewatch storyline, when the entireties of Ulamog and Kozilek are pulled into Zendikar, they lose their physical forms altogether and become the sky, with a dome of bone and flesh replacing the clouds and sun, as if the whole world was now inside them. Alien Geometries is in effect, too, as one character compares the effect to space warping so that the outside of Ulamog's body is now in every direction she looks at, with its "actual" body still overhead even as its limbs and appendages pointing from every direction.
    • Of the three Titans, Emrakul is the most eldritch. Ulamog and Kozilek have vaguely humanoid features (limbs, torsos, heads, etc.). Emrakul looks like a jellyfish from hell or a floating mass of rock with a tangle of arms and tentacles hanging from the bottom, as can be seen on the main page. Emrakul is also the biggest of the titans, and surprisingly, sapient.
    • The Eldritch Moon set illustrates nicely what Emrakul does with living creatures: they mutate, often merge and become extensions of her will, growing much stronger in the process. The two other titans merely eat everything and transform landscapes into wasteland.
  • A backstory of Nicol Bolas mentions that the first dragons in Magic multiverse were birthed by the aptly-called Ur-Dragon. While a dragon siring more dragons is normal, the Ur-Dragon gets an eldritch point by being able to traverse the Blind Eternities willy nilly, not unlike the aforementioned Eldrazi.
  • Some of the kami of Kamigawa are insanely otherworldly and weird, intentionally designed that way as they were in a state of war against humanity.
    • The aptly named The Unspeakeable essentially behaves like a proper lovecraftian entity, providing knowledge that drives people mad.
    • Even after 1,200 years of relative peace the spirits still look freaky. Kyodai, the Top God, is essentially a dragon made entirely of human hands.
• The Lords of Cthul from Monsterpocalypse are the Cthulhu-esque, Godzilla-sized avatars of powerful extradimensional monsters... who get bodyslammed regularly.
• In Monsters and Other Childish Things, one of the types of monsters used in its dark and twisted take on Mons are Eldritch Abominations. The non-statted sample monster Dewdrop is an Eldritch Abomination take on a unicorn, while one of the statted sample monsters is a Lovecraftian monstrosity merged with a teddy bear named Yog-So`Soft. Both these and the more "normal" monsters (for a standard of "normal", one of the monsters is a giant gestalt of ghosty football players who died in a bus crash and another is a Polynesian shark god, etc.) tend to cause bouts of panic and madness in people who see them as well, further adding to it. There are also a few non-Mon antagonists that are also abominations.
• Spoofed in the Munchkin Cthulhu stand-alone Munchkin set and its expansion, The Great Cowthulu. It added a new dimension to the game in the form of the players being able to become cultists. And if everyone in the game became a cultist, the game was over as Cthulhu won. Also, one of the monsters featured is the very cute Chibithulu. Cthulhu also shows up as a monster in the original Munchkin game (based on Dungeons and Dragons).
  • Now with a second expansion, based on The Unspeakable Vault (of Doom), with artwork by the webcomic's artist! Yum Yum!
• The Unspeakable One from the Freedom City Mutants & Masterminds setting. (It also provides Golden Age stats for an eldritch entity, although that barely qualifies — it may look like Cthulhu, but it doesn't drive you mad simply from looking at it.)
• White Wolf's New World of Darkness, published as Lovecraft's works are getting more influential, shows several of these.
  • The True Fae of Changeling: The Lost skirt the line between The Fair Folk and this, especially when taking into account the rules in the Equinox Road sourcebook. In addition to the traditional inhuman beauties and horned hunters, you might face a Fae that appears as a pool of sentient darkness, a squamous, be-tentacled thing, an entire tribe of ogrish monsters, or the whole Arcadian realm itself.
  • In addition to mentioning the below Chthonians, Geist: The Sin-Eaters supplement Book of the Dead introduces the Leviathan, the Kerberos of the Ocean of Fragments, who pretty well embodies this trope. It's an impossibly vast sea creature of some sort — it's assumed to be a cephalopod, but that's just because it has tentacles; it's too big for anyone to ever see enough of it to make out its true form. Every human in the world has had nightmares of it lurking beneath them in an endless ocean, even if they've forgotten them. It cannot be killed or placated, any more than the tide or any other force of nature, and stats are provided solely for the purposes of escaping it or inconveniencing it enough to drive it off temporarily. Fortunately, it's rarely seen — to the point that most people think the Dead Dominion's only other notable inhabitant, the Admiral, is actually its Kerberos.
  • With the release of the God-Machine Chronicle, we now have the titular God-Machine. Let's put it this way: Literally the first quote in the book is Clark's Third Law, and it's implied to have created the concept of technology on Earth so humans could create spare parts for it. Bonus points for being the most classically Lovecraftian being in all of both Worlds of Darkness: It isn't malevolent, it isn't cruel, it isn't even mindlessly destructive. It's just completely apathetic towards human existence.
  • BIG Hunter: The Vigil spoiler: The Cheiron Group is run by ten of them, with illusions of human beings to let them interact with people. It's the Storyteller's choice whether they're working to defend our world or are planning to exploit it for everything we've got.
  • Abyssal entities from Mage: The Awakening come from what could best be described as an "anti-universe," a world that lives by rules wholly antithetical to those of Earth. Truly, however, the most horrifying thing about Abyssal entities is that the idea that beings of the Abyss always take such predictable — horrifying and maddening, but predictable — forms as "monstrous, unclean abomination" is actually a comfortable lie that Mages tell themselves to hide from the fact that the Abyss is, in fact, in no way as banal and quantifiable as that.
    • An Abyssal entity that's been known to sell a lot of prospective players on the setting is the Prince of 100,000 Leaves, a demon made of living anti-history whose first summoning rewrote history and spawned a cannibal cult that eats its victims out of history in an attempt to bring the world in line with the Prince's native timeline.
    • Oh yeah, and Imperial Mysteries has the reason for the strange predictability: each and every Abyssal being is actually a resident and part of a Greater Abyssal Entity. You know what those are? Semisentient stillborn universes. The Prince is explicitly stated to be an example of one, with all his manifestations being him trying to replace all of reality. Now think: what kinds of beings gave birth to everything else in Intruders, since they aren't part of the Prince...?
    • There's also the Nemesis Continuum. It's the scientific Cosmic Horror Story to the Prince's perversion of the humanities. It's an altered set of the laws of physics. Bits of the material world it contaminates are twisted; what if anything green was suddenly boiling hot, and the speed of light was slower than the speed of sound? It gets worse. The Nemesis Continuum is summoned by intelligent scientists "accidentally" (the book says that most proofs are found through indirect interference by acamoth) finding a proof for it, which then becomes true. And they become obsessed with finding more proofs. The best part? The Nemesis Continuum is apparently the physical laws of the Abyss itself, so to fight it on its own level, you probably need to infect yourself with them. By the way, it's also easier for a scientist to explain and thus prove a proof once he understands it...
  • The Sourcebook Summoners includes some other examples, such as the Chthonians of the Underworld (known as the "neverborn" since they exist in the realm of the dead, but cannot be reliably said to have ever been alive) and certain Supernal beings.
  • The sourcebook Second Sight has a pretty good chapter on building your own abomination, a Misanthrope Supreme or Fallen Hero to serve as their high priest, and a cult to worship them. The creation example is a being of dissonant sound. (Although one suggested weakness for this being — music of unity — seemed uncannily reminiscent of Ghostbusters II.)
  • The Unchained, the titular characters of Demon: The Descent, are this as well. Unchained begin as sentient computer programs created by the aforementioned God-Machine as its servitors and messengers — its "Angels". Somehow, though, they became self-aware and rebelled against the God-Machine, becoming "Demons". Though they feign a human existence, this "Cover" is literally only an artificial mask woven over their true alien natures, the remnants of the reality retcons that the God-Machine originally wove around them to disguise them as humans. Using their more potent abilities will slowly fray away and discard their Cover, or they can "go loud" and assume their monstrous true form. They can form "Pacts" with mortals, where they trade something the mortal desires for retroactively stealing some aspect of that mortal's existence and transplanting it into their own Cover — at its highest level is the Unchained's equivalent of Demonic Possession. When a mortal trades an Unchained their soul, the Unchained can erase that mortal from existence, taking their former life as the Unchained's new Cover.
  • In Vampire: The Requiem, the very first Mekhet progenitor recorded was a creature of blades and tentacles, cold and alien and before words. They may not be the only clan to trace their origins back to an eldritch abomination; the Hidden Ones, the Gods Below, of Nosferatu legend certainly sound the part.
  • Some of the Utterances in Mummy: The Curse invoke cosmic horrors, but the standout here has to be Ancestry of Forgotten Stars in Guildhalls of the Deathless, which invokes the power of otherworldly entities that once interbred with humankind. The first tier gives its participants a demonic spiritual form, allowing them to see and interact with spiritual entities, the second gives its participants access to powers utilising Alien Geometries and makes the demon-form visible in the material world, and the third sees the participants voluntarily and temporarily merge into an entity known as the Herald of Forgotten Stars, a creature of collapsed, convoluted space with many eyes and limbs, impossible to fully describe. Among other things, the Herald strikes terror into any mortal who sees it, inflicts damage on any non-supernatural living being unfortunate enough to be in the area, interacts with the physical and spiritual worlds simultaneously, and can answer any question posed to it save for certain key ones concerning the Mummy setting.
  • Fan-made supplements also have a few:
    • Genius: The Transgression has the Cold Ones, entities living at the end of time, who'd like to go back and experience things like heat and movement.
    • Dragon: The Embers has the Deep Ones, faustian bargainers who like to approach Oroboroi and trade them favors for their organs, which they harvest for unknown purposes, presumably so they can feel emotions from it.
    • Princess: The Hopeful has the All-Consuming Darkness, a mindless cosmic force of everything evil in the Universe trying to warp every living being into these.
    • Leviathan: The Tempest allow you to play as one. It's not as fun as you might think it is.
• Nobilis has three main types. First, the True Gods — some of the earliest gods to come into being, to be found below the world in an enormous mass of tentacles and weirdness, simultaneously fighting and mating with each other. Next, the Excrucians, beings of not-being from outside reality who aim to destroy the universe, and finally, the Actuals, the precursors to the True Gods — the movement like life, before it learned to live. The Actuals are vital to the existence of reality — but if one is summoned into the world, it will consume everything in a futile attempt to attain self-awareness if it isn't stopped. The True Gods, on the other hand, could quite possibly be the guys who empower the PCs.
• In White Wolf's Old World of Darkness, cosmic horror story is not the central theme of the game, but the authors love to incorporate Eldritch Abominations from beyond time and space into the setting, whose presence corrupts souls, drives people insane, or warps reality. To break it down a little:
  • Changeling: The Dreaming gives us the Fomorians, primordial beings of many forms, lords over winter and dark dreams. They were banished to the depths of the Dreaming by the Tuatha de Danaan, but as Winter approaches, they've started to make their way back...
  • Demon: The Fallen has the Earthbound, demons who were drawn out of the pit by mortal sorcerers long before all the other Fallen were; however, as their demonic souls were bound to relics and not humans, their Torment had nowhere to bleed off, meaning they've been warped, twisted, and made both all-powerful and wretched. It says a lot when one of your unique Lores has a power named "Mind Rape''.
  • Mage: The Ascension has some of the patrons of the Nephandi. The Malfeans worship the Wyrm (see below), while the K'llasshaa worship the Outer Lords, broken alien beings who feed on negative emotion and who were supposedly the lords and masters of the world in its pre-history.
  • In Vampire: The Masquerade, most of the Antediluvians are still quite humanoid — in appearance, at least. But then you've got people like Ennoia (the Gangrel Antediluvian, a mass of animalistic features who is believed to have melded with the earth itself, rocked to sleep by its rotations like a babe in the cradle), Malkav (the Malkavian Antediluvian, willingly diablerized by his clan, existing in their head as a madness-linked Hive Mind, and sometimes appearing in forms such as twelve identical little girls), Lasombra (believed destroyed, but instead he became one with the lightless Abyss that helps power Obtenebration) and Tzimisce (which spent some time as a gigantic mass of sculpted flesh).
    • Which, in the case of V:TM, makes it only scarier, seeing as the central theme of the game is how a human is transformed into a monster and to what extent this transformation can go (and how it can be fought). Usually, the transformation is psychological — holding on to the last shreds of humanity is a necessity for a player character (unless he/she chooses a vampiric Path). But, with the Tzimisce, it is also physical, and willingly self-inflicted. The scary thing about powerful Tzimisce, especially the Antediluvian itself, is that they were human once, and are Eldritch Abominations now.
    • V20 Dark Ages introduces a minor Abomination in the backstory of the Bonsam bloodline: an ancient darkness from before the universe was formed that tried to possess a human, but accidentally killed him in the process. The darkness acknowledged neither life or death, so it animated him as the first of the Bonsam. It's implied that it may not be the only one lurking out there...
    • The Baali have strong connections with a group of horrors called the Children of the Outer Dark, believed to have originated either before the universe came into existence or during its birth. Most of the time they're asleep, but should one begin to wake, all sapient minds around it will be driven to ever-greater acts of depravity — and in at least one case where one started waking up, reality warped and twisted around it to the point of breaking. Some of the Baali have taken it upon themselves to keep the Children asleep through the use of sacrifices and atrocities, which soothe the Children in their slumber.
  • Werewolf: The Apocalypse gives us the Wyrm, originally one-third of the primal forces of existence and the blessed end of all things until it got caught up in the webs of the Weaver, at which point it turned its goals towards corruption and destruction in an attempt to weaken its bonds. Most of its servants are either subjected to eternal decay or driven mad by its wisdom.
    • The Weaver itself is no slacker in this department either, though its particular set of strange and alien activities is actually more alien than the Wyrm, and thus less likely to single out the players for destruction.
  • Wraith: The Oblivion has the Neverborn, forever-dead, eternally-dreaming lords of Oblivion whose scattered thoughts serve to drive and guide the Spectres. Orpheus gives us Grandmother, the thing that created the Neverborn.
• Pathfinder has inherited many of D&D's aberrations, and also includes a number of actual monsters from the Cthulhu Mythos, but it still has a few unique horrors of its own.
  • Like the Spawn of Rovagug, the monstrous kaiju-sized abominations spawned by the resident God of Oblivion, Rovagug the Rough Beast, in an effort to destroy the world and set him free. Remember the Tarrasque? It's back in Golarion, it's even more unstoppable, to the point its In-Universe appellation is "The Armageddon Engine", and it's just one of the Spawn. The others named consist of:
    • Festering Ulunat, The Unholy First — An immense ten-limbed three-eyed beetle-monster that sprayed gouts of acid, chewed its way through mountains and could absorb spells before returning necrotic energies that drove spell-wielders into insanity.
    • Great Doom Chemnosit, The Monarch Worm — A kaiju-sized Sand Worm with Disintegrator Ray Eye Beams and the ability to Mind Rape people into insane, ravening cannibals who will devour their own flesh if nothing else is available.
    • Unyielding Kothogaz, the Dance of Disharmony — A horrific slug-beetle abomination that spawned countless abominations in its wake and which reanimated its victims as a ravening Zombie Apocalypse.
    • Wrath-Blazing Xotani, the Firebleeder — An immense dragon-centipede made of living volcanic rocks and flames.
    • Volnagur, The End-Singer — A star-shaped monster suspended by an endless array of eternally rotting and regrowing random wings, which sings a ceaseless cry that drives the listeners into madness.
  • Rovagug himself is a titanic world-destroying alien monstrosity which had to be imprisoned in either a demiplane, Golarion's core, or a demiplane at Golarion's core by an alliance of of often otherwise opposed major gods at the dawn of creation, who still manages to unleash its spawn through the gaps in his cage and who is worshipped by nihilistic doomsday cults all over the world; he may have ties to either the lovecraftian Outer Gods of the Dark Tapestry, the abyssal Qlippoth, or both.
  • Another example is the god of pain, loss, and darkness, Zon-Kuthon. Maybe. A young, carefree god of beauty traveled outside of reality and whatever he saw there either drove him to madness or possessed him. If it is the latter, than the entity that returned and became Zon-Kuthon almost certainly applies.
  • Ghlaunder, the god of parasites, infection and stagnation, is typically represented as a gigantic mosquito, but his description in the Windsong Testaments depicts him as something a lot more horrific, a collection of half-formed body parts only vaguely resembling the lifeforms that would arise long after his birth.
    Ghlaunder crawled from quiescence: eyes and mouths—eyes that were mouths; legs and tongues—legs that were tongues; hunger and hate—hunger that was hate.
  • The qlippoth are the D&D obyrith with the Serial Numbers Filed Off (or rather the reverse; it's complicated). The qlippoth themselves are far more alien and monstrous than the demons, and predate any mortal concepts of forms and sanity, and the demon lords who started out as qlippoth are invariably the most monstrous and least humanoid ones. Cosmology-wise, the Abyss is a cancerous sore that's wrapped itself around reality. And the qlippoth may just originate from whatever is beyond it...
  • The literally biggest one would be Aucturn, an entire living planet roughly twice the size of the Earth-like Golarion with rubbery soil and vast seas and rivers of black ooze beneath. Features of the planet include literally rotting temples of flesh-stone blocks, citadels of insane cultists, a valley full of cloying mists that make the inhabitants impregnate any outsiders (as opposed to eating or sacrificing them elsewhere) and a massive tumorous mound that contains Aucturn's gestating offspring. Oh, did we mention this horrible, horrible planet is pregnant?
  • The Far Realm's equivalent, called the Dark Tapestry, isn't very far, relatively speaking — it's actually the void between the stars, and to top it off, it's the domain of Lovecraftian entities, Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth included. Many other Cthulhu Mythos-related entities make an appearance as well. Aucturn may have links to this, as well — like a lot of things concerning it, not much is very clear.
  • And there also is the Dominion of the Black, an entire organization whose rank-and-file are apparently purpose-bred lesser abominations (such as the neh-rhalggu brain collectors, the intellect devourers, and a variety of other horrors like fleshy tree-like things that eat emotions and hideous Living Ships), who all hail from the dark recesses of the cosmos. They may be preparing an invasion of Golarion (Pathfinder's main setting/world), and one of their supposed leaders is... THIS thing. Surprisingly enough, they don't get along with the Great Old Ones and the Outer Gods; in point of fact, they detest them and their followers and the two groups are locked in bitter rivalry.
  • The Vaults of Orv hold their fair share of abominations, such as the neothelids and their minions (giant psionic worm-things who worship Shub-Niggurath), the intellect devourers and the ghorazaghs, also known as Gore Weavers because they use the blood of their victims as building materials for their bizarre hive cities. Most of the creatures living here worship either the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods, the Dominion of the Black, Rovagug or some combination thereof.
• Spoofed in Pokéthulhu. Yes, there are hideous, evil, non-Euclidean critters. But you can tame them and use them as Mons (and they still drive you to insanity).
• Ponies & Parasprites interprets the character of the Nightmare Force (the entity that corrupted Luna on the show and Rarity in the comics) as this. One of its Specialties is "Things Ponies Were Not Meant To Know" and one of its powers is 'The Shadow out of Space'.
• Rifts has a lot of these monstrosities in its ranks, under the umbrella term of Alien Intelligences, and several different kinds are present on Earth. The first two world books alone (on Atlantis and Mexico) have the Splurgoth and the Vampire Intelligences. Both are functionally mountain-sized eyeballs with mouths and tentacles, but the Vampire Intelligences are arguably more dangerous; they are the ultimate source of all vampires throughout the Megaverse, and cannot even manifest themselves unless a sufficient number of vampires are already existing first.
• Hinted at in Rocket Age. There is a psychic entity powerful enough to sense and be sensed by psychics in our solar system across the void of deep space. Atanakawa, a Lizard Monkey, has frequent visions, one of which showed her a tall, thin, purple and black creature, who sensed her at the same time, and is now coming to Venus to find her phsyical body.
• In Glorantha (as seen in RuneQuest and other sources), Chaos is like this. One major empire, the Lunar Empire has an enslaved Chaos god/demon/thingy called the Crimson Bat of the Red Goddess. It's huge, it flies, it is covered with eyes, has tentacled tongues, it glows with unholy energy, and it will eat your soul. It is crimson, and I suppose it's at least as much like a bat as it's like anything else... which isn't much. In the 2018 4th ed. RuneQuest bestiary, the Crimson Bat is in a special category of monster known collectively as "Terrors". These are unique monsters of tremendous power and their purpose is to show that there are threats well beyond what an adventuring party can handle.
• The Greater Titans of Scion are beyond mortal ken. They're beyond divine ken. They are so divorced from reality (despite being incarnations of its primal concepts) that they had to divide their power among Avatars just to have a clue what they were doing. Each one is its own internal world. Worst of the lot, though, is Hundun, the Titan of Chaos. It alone of the Titans couldn't be bound, for doing so requires definition — and Hundun cannot be defined. An easy way to enter Hundun is to have a God become the Void, the living embodiment of chaotic... and then jump in.
  • Second edition's upcoming Masks of the Mythos supplement adds an entire pantheon of them.
• Sentinels of the Multiverse, being a Superhero setting, contains quite a few including but not limited to:
  • Gloomweaver, the Dimension Lord of the Realm of Discord with a skull for a flaming head and an alligator tail whose main goal in life is to escape into the regular universe and spread as much despair as possible, probably turning the world into a living hell. It's telling that his original concept was created by one of the guys behind Arkham Horror.
  • Akash'buta, Gaia's Vengeance personified who awakens every century or so to punish humanity for its hubris and desecration of the land and can only be defeated by a line of magical musicians called the Virtuosos of the Void.
  • Voidsoul, an ancient entity as old as time itself that looks like shadowy smoke and desires to feed on power and despair.
  • Singular Entities, a collection of beings older than the multiverse itself who represent different concepts, can warp reality on a whim, and can range from humanoid in appearance to completely abstract. The two Singular Entities featured in the game are Wager Master, a little blue imp who loves to play "games" with heroes and OblivAeon who desires the destruction of the entire multiverse and is what happens when one Singular Entity eats another.
• Shadow of the Demon Lord has the titular Demon Lord, a nigh-omnipotent and hostile entity that's always trying to destroy the universe, often unleashing demons, including the mighty demon princes, onto the world. Additionally it can affect climate and even reality of the world despite being outside of this universe. The truth is that the Demon Lord is all that remains of God after genies ripped out and stole his best bits while he slept after creating the universe, he was only exiled because the genies had stolen the bulk of his power and were going to use it and they were remorseful over what they did.
• Silent Legions, an product from Sine Nomine Publishing, is planned for modern-day delving into eldritch secrets, and will be compatible with Stars Without Number. Core SWN, meanwhile, has the Shibboleth, strange aliens that can have any kind of weird shape, and which emanate an aversion field that prevents most species from realising the Shibboleth even exist, coming up with increasingly ludicrous rationalizations for the results of Shibboleth activity. Thankfully, a form of brain surgery that mimics the effects of psionic torching can render people Clipped and immune to this field.
• The Star Wars RPG has the DarkStryder, a self-aware supercomputer created by a Precursor-type race that has created several species of its own and looks like THIS◊ and the Mnggal-Mnggal, a sentient fluid adept at possessing bodies so horrible that even the Celestials (a Precursor race even more mysterious than the DarkStryder's creators and believed to be nearly omnipotent) didn't want anything to do with it and sealed it away. Word of God from the creator of the latter abomination says it's supposed to be the same type of being as fellow Star Wars abomination Waru.
• Parodied in Toon with the "Crawl of Catchooloo" setting, full of Slurping Horrors that can drive a typical Toon character sane.
• Unknown Armies deliberately subverts this trope, at least in a way. What's scary about the universe isn't that it's so alien and vast and inhospitable to humans. What's truly scary is that You Did It.
• Games Workshop:
  • Warhammer, Warhammer: Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40,000 have the Chaos gods. Residing in the deepest layers of the Warp, composed of every sapient thought and emotion, they personify things like rage, scheming, despair and lust, but also things like honour, hope, resilience and love. They are so powerful and so incomprehensibly vast that they are utterly incapable of influencing anything outside of the warp, requiring their daemon hordes (all of whom are both separate individuals and aspects of the respective god) to recruit and kill in the material plane in their name.
  • Tzeentch deserves special mention, because it is essentially the personification of cause and effect, meaning that as long as some things cause other things, it grows in power and influence. In a setting where all of the gods are intentionally or unintentionally malicious, Tzeentch is extra terrifying because sometimes his gifts DON'T have any kind of catch, and are distributed frequently based on whim and randomness rather than any kind of consistent evil — there is literally no way to know whether you're part of a plan or not, and even if you think you are there's no way to know whether the plan is intended to succeed or fail. At least the other Gods have motives that are comprehensible to mortal minds: Khorne wants blood, Nurgle loves disease, and Slaanesh is after pleasure. Good luck deciphering whatever Tzeentch is pursuing.
    • Actually, we do know exactly what Tzeentch is pursuing: Nothing. If one of his plots were to ever be successful, he would vanish as things could no longer change. He wants the stalemate to go on for an eternity.
  • The C'tan of 40K are literally the oldest beings in the universe, creatures of light that wrapped themselves around stars to feed off of them, and operated on a scale so vast they originally had no idea that planets existed, let alone the noisy little things living on them.
  • While the Tyranids may seem more like a Horde of Alien Locusts, the quintillions upon quintillions of ravenous beasts it unleashes are not actually individual beings, but merely tiny parts of the unimaginably vast single organism that is the Tyranid Hive Mind. Utterly alien and of a near unprecedented power, capable of screwing with psykers and daemons within hundreds of light years of it, even people who have regularly fought and bested the horrors of the warp are terrified of such an implacable force. And even worse? It's heavily implied something even more terrifying has been chasing them from their home galaxy all the way to the Milky Way, something that is still coming.
  • The God-Emperor of Mankind, amazingly enough. Even though he looks human, he's actually a living violation of physics so absurdly powerful that he serves as a navigation beacon in the Warp, a chaotic dimension which is constantly shifting. In the Horus Heresy novels, it's shown that the Emperor's appearance varies between who views him: for example, Lorgar saw him as a tall man with sun-kissed skin and black hair in a long ponytail, while Horus saw an old man with glowing wheels of fire for eyes, and Corax actually saw him as the latter first and then the former. Interestingly, his dedicated Anti-Magic specialists see him as a remarkably unremarkable man. It's speculated that if the Emperor ever dies then he will become a Chaos god himself, a Chaos god of order.
  • The original Warhammer has the Gods of Law, which are arguably more inhuman and, should the unlikely case of their victory occur, will turn the world into a stillborn reality where no change of any sort occurs. This is particularly more true to Alluminas, whose requirements for his worship are extremely bizarre and who can cast a light that makes anything it touches unmoving and unchanging.
  • The Great Maw, the god of the Ogres, is a seemingly endless, pit of flesh and fangs burrowing into the ground to unknown depths, is defined by an unceasing, all-consuming hunger that it imprints onto those that worship it, and is said to have been carried by a star that fell from the sky.
  • There is a thing in the 40K universe known as the "Echoing Vault". All Imperial records of it were expunged, but some details remain telling it contains bizarre xenoforms known as "The Harrowing" that in ages past destroyed thousands of worlds, broke the laws of physics by existing, drove millions of people insane by their mere proximity, and required the use of ancient, barely-understood psychic weapons to seal away. When a Chaos warband threatened to open it, a full battalion of the Adeptus Custodes (Super Prototype Astartes that serve as the God-Emperor's personal Praetorian Guard; small squads of regular Astartes are capable of conquering whole planets) were deployed to stop them, and stop them they did.
• In The Whispering Vault, the player characters are all minor Eldritch Abominations who act as a "police force" that apprehends and retrieves other abominations who have illicitly made their way to Earth. Reality is also All Just a Dream cooked up by those abominations who haven't gone rogue.
• The Mad Gods from Witchcraft. When they intrude on our reality, they spread taint, which causes mutations, madness, and a weakening of the veil separating universes, potentially allowing more to come through. In the follow-up game Armageddon, a Religion of Evil dedicated to one of them called the Leviathan is currently trying to conquer the world in its name; it's about halfway done. You know it's bad when most angels and demons, and even the old pagan gods, get to the conclusion that they have to work together if they want any chance of stopping it.
• Witch Hunter: The Hidden World has Behemoth. This unbelievably massive creature is easily one of the mightiest beings in the Cosmos which Witch Hunters theorize as to destroying islands and other large masses as a way to purify the land on behalf of God.
• The Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG has lots:
  • First you've got the Alien archetype of monsters, the two strongest of which are Cosmic Horror Gangi'el and Cosmic Fortress Gol'gar. Not quite as unspeakably horrible as some other examples, but still pretty terrifyingly hideous nonetheless.
  • Worm Zero is a giant, moon-sized thing that looks like it has multiple heads sprouting out of itself, going by its effects, it can erase monsters by assimilating them, implant some hive mind knowledge into its user, or give birth to a worm. Said worms could also qualify, given their origins. it gets even worse when you read the Master Guide explaining the Duel Terminal storyline. He's a huge mass of combined Worms — not because they merged into one, but because he devoured his own ranks. He's so powerful its mere existence warped time and space in the Duel Terminal world.
  • While we're on the subject of Worm Zero, let's take a look at Evilswarm Azzathoth. Its appearance has to be seen to be believed.
  • One of Pegasus' signature monsters, Relinquished, could also qualify. Its main gimmick is assimilating an enemy monster into its body, taking on its stats, and using it as a meatshield in the event that it might be destroyed. Even worse than this is Thousand-Eyes Restrict, a Fusion Monster that is summoned using Relinquished as one of the components; it does the same thing that Reliquished does, but also prevents all monsters except itself from attacking (the anime suggests that this happens because all other monsters are paralyzed by fear).
  • And then there's Fusion Devourer. Just look at the face-tipped tentacles.
  • It may not look all that impressive when you look at its Real Life card shown here, but in the anime, Unformed Void, used by the Shadow Giant in Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL, fit the Trope, being a giant, hideous thing with dozens of cold eyes on tentacled stalks, and an amorphous void in the center.
  • Next up is the 'Old Gods': Elder God Noden, Great Old One Chthugha, Outer God Nyarla, and their Boss Monster: Outer God Azathoth. Why is Azathoth their boss? By having all three as Xyz Material, it can wipe its opponent's field clean. These monsters also have a neat Spell Card accessory called The Unspeakable Trapezohedron.
  • Moving away from specific cards, let’s take a look at the Light of Destruction. This was the central antagonist of Yugioh Gx. Born from a white hole in deep space, this cosmic entity can only be described as a being of pure light and existed solely to bring destruction and calamity. It was responsible for the corruption of major villains like Sartious and Yubel and even claims the universe was destroyed in the past. When the light first came near earth its corruption caused major wars and even dictatorships.
• Zweihänder is the spiritual successor to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. As such the game has Expy to Warhammer's 4 Chaos Gods in the Abyssal Princes who are Khorne, Tzeentch and etc. with titles instead of names. Several other entities join the Abyssal Princes as part of the Chaotic pantheon, including the Black Lodge - a race of twisted fairies and an eternally hungry mouth on the surface of the planet.

---