Eldritch Location / Tabletop Games

• Arkham Horror allows the players to visit the locations from H.P. Lovecraft's mythos, like the Plateau Of Leng, Yuggoth, and R'lyeh.
• Ars Magica has "regios", Places of Power spread out across two or more layers of reality, each layer more suffused and distorted by the supernatural forces that created it. This can create potent Holy or Unholy Ground, crossings to the Land of Faerie, or regions with a Background Magic Field powerful enough to warp creatures who enter. Fortunately, crossing into "higher" levels of a regio requires magic or special conditions; unfortunately, so does trying to get back into the regular world...
• Beast: The Primordial has the Lairs, individual to each Beast, an otherspace that is reflective of their own power (the higher their Power Stat goes, the more chambers it gains) that can be entered through any doorway, as well as any area that resembles it in at least one capacity to a sufficient degree (a flooded lair could be accessed from any location with enough water, for example). The latter is more difficult though, since the less similarities there are between the real world location & the Lair, the harder it is to open up the pathway between them; fortunately for the Begotten, however, as spiritual creatures born of the primordial essence of nightmares, they can utilise dream logic to their advantage in such associations (for can't a desert be described as a maze without walls?)
• The titular setting of Betrayal at House on the Hill always has a random layout, and can have things such as walls that devour you and spit you out elsewhere. It is possible to have a non-euclidean house where the rooms loop around the front door the players 'entered' through and connect to the foyer (the starting room) on the opposite side. And also to have a second story of the house that is twice as large as the ground floor.
• In Bleak World this is what the Death Beyond Death is, if a ghost dies they go to a place where they are in constant pain, but can never gain the release of going insane. The whole area is guarded by The Caretaker which is liquid field of darkness filled with constantly disappearing eyes and mouths
• Changeling: The Lost gives up a couple of examples.
  • First is the Hedge, the mysterious otherspace between Earth and Faerie. Not only does it seem to map roughly to Earth in size, but it could technically be considered four-dimensional, as there's always going to be a direction that's just "towards Faerie."
  • Faerie (Arcadia, Alfheim, et al.) itself is another example. A place formed purely of the magic of dreamstuff, where reality only exists because everything in it has agreed to exist and interact. This is completely disregarding the fact that many of the Realms in Arcadia are The True Fae themselves.
• Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine is set in a potential future of Nobilis where most everything is drowned in Primordial Chaos save for one surviving cosmos called Town, which has multiple regions, each with their own set of rules that support particular types of stories. For example, Fortitude lends itself to quiet Slice of Life stories, Horizon lends itself to obsessive, Gothic types of stories, the Walking Fields lend themselves to Ghibli-esque stories, and so on.
• Critical Role: Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting: The mountain of Gatshadow seems unusually tall and thin because it's dimensions were distorted when a priest of the Chained Oblivion summoned his master into the mortal world. The very presence of this mad god created seemingly-endless labyrinths around the mountain and stretched the rock itself "like puddy." It serves as the location of a few adventures in the book that deal with fighting Eldritch Abominations and old Curses.
• Delta Green
  • The city of Carcosa. When places and people are exposed to the corrupting force of Hastur, it will infect our reality and start pulling it to Carcosa. The city itself looks like a mishmash of multiple cities and civilizations from different time periods (especially Victorian and Edwardian) built on the top of another, with a white sky with twin-suns and black stars, while the city is eerie empty and devoid of population. The city operates in Alien Geometries and dreamlike logic, governed by the mysterious figure of The King in Yellow. Once in Carcosa, thoughts, dreams, ideas and feelings start to become real, while humans are enveloped and digested by Carcosa until only their thoughts and perceptions remain, forever an echo in Carcosa.
  • The Vagnoptus Manor, the headquarters of the Cult of Transcendence. From outside it looks like an ordinary abandoned mansion, you can find it on a map located just outside Stockholm with property and tax records. However, the architecture of the manor is formed with Alien Geometries, and walking through the halls of the Manor in the right way will eventually result in ending in the "Nightmare mansion", an alternate version of the mansion (or it's still is the same mansion, maybe) that is in orbit of the court of Azathoth.
• In Dragonstar there is a large region of space outside Imperial space known as the Dark Zone. Few who venture into it ever return, but the few who do speak of darkness and terror. It's also the setting's counterpart to the Far Realm in that it's the home of mind flayers (their original home, it is speculated) and other aberrations.
• Dungeons & Dragons has a cosmology that gets weirder the further you venture from the Prime Material Plane. The transitive planes, the Astral and Ethereal Planes, are familiar enough to those who have heard of out-of-body experiences, and the Plane of Shadow is a morose Dark World based on the Material Plane. The Inner Planes are each dominated by one of the four classical elements, while the Outer Planes are impossibly beautiful in the case of the Upper Planes and utterly horrifying in the case of the Lower Planes. In any case, each plane in the Great Wheel has its own internal logic to it, even if in the case of Limbo that logic is "chaos." And then outside of this cosmology, perhaps on the very edge of reality, is the Far Realm. The only identifiable trait of the Far Realm is that none of it is identifiable, or even quantifiable in any way, shape or form. Simply entering it threatens a visitor's sanity — characters may sprout eyes on their palms (but not really), relive a hundred lifetimes in which their parents were Far Realm wights, or backwards speaking begin... Unsurprisingly, the Far Realm is based on the works and mythos of H.P. Lovecraft.
  • Sigil, City of Doors and the City of Adventure for the Planescape setting that introduced many of the above planes, is a downplayed example of the trope. It is a city located on the inside of a torus that circles the top of an infinitely tall spire in the exact dead centre of an infinitely wide plane known as the Outlands, itself the Portal Crossroad World between all the Outer Planes. In Sigil, portals are everywhere and can reach to practically anywhere in The Multiverse, and more to the point remain invisible and undetectable unless the correct key (which can be practically anything from a deity-made artifact to having a particular melody stuck in your mind at the time) is brought to it, at which point it opens and either brings some poor Clueless into Sigil or causes an unwitting citizen to get a free trip to somewhere. The day-night cycle happens without a moon or a sun, looking into the sky you see the rest of the city curve in on itself above you, and it is literally possible to fall off the edge of the city if you walk far enough in one direction. Natives of Sigil tend to be a jaded lot.
• Exalted:
  • The Wyld. Divided into the Bordermarches, the closest regions to normal reality, which are only mildly weird, the Middlemarches, where the laws of physics cease to be reliable and movement and distance are based more around narrative conventions than concrete measurements, the Deep Wyld, where reality is officially Out To Lunch, and the Pure Chaos, which isn't so much a location as it is the unshaped, incoherent chaos outside of the universe.
  • And then there are the Shadowlands, sites of past atrocities and mass murder where the border between Creation and the Underworld is just a bit thinner. Regaining Essence is hampered (unless you're a creature of the Underworld, in which case it picks up by comparison), ghosts can get around more easily, and improperly buried bodies tend to rise as zombies.
  • Several of the Primordials/Yozis are this as well. Things like the local geography, physical laws, and even time flow are often at the whims of the Titan that is the world. The most notable are Malfeas (the Demon King/City whose body acts as the prison of his fellows, and consists of multiple layers that constantly change shape and correspondence, and all inexplicably have the green sun of Hell right above them), Cecylene (the Endless Desert who is accessible from every layer of Malfeas and always takes exactly five days to cross) and Autochthon (who needed to deliberately modify his world body to make it habitable; the deeper parts of it show the reason for this).
  • There are even a few places in Creation that work like this. One is the Well of Udr, overseen by the Dowager of the Irreverent Vulgate in Unrent Veils. It's a nexus of all possible dimensions where the strata of potential worlds collide and crash against one another, occasionally disgorging impossibilities. It's very tricky to get anywhere within its vicinity and hold onto your marbles, let alone stare into it. It's from here that the Dowager retrieved the Great Contagion.
  • The Elemental Poles, too, each of which is an unending font of elemental power. The trees at the Elemental Pole of Wood are infinitely tall.
• Bardos in Genius: The Transgression are places that were once thought or believed to exist, then proved not to, or were hoped to exist but never came to pass. You can still travel to them if you know where to go (or stumble into them). They range from the Martian Empire and Tsoska to the Hollow Earth (recently taken over by Nazi mad scientists) and The Grid.
• Most of the JAGS Wonderland setting has this in spades. There are eight layers of reality, referred to as "Chessboards." You live on Chessboard Zero. Chessboard One is more or less identical, except everyone's kind of nuts. Chessboard Two is a run-down, dilapidated Dark World. Chessboards Three through Six are a sliding scale of Cloud Cuckoo Land and this trope. And Chessboard Seven can barely be called reality by any stretch.
• Everywhere outside of Illusion in KULT. Weird geoscapes are the least of your worries. Gaia is the primal world where even the earth can get hungry and swallow people, Metropolis is a city filled with lunatics and Inferno is a classic hell.
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • The locations associated with its resident Eldritch Abominations, the Eldrazi; in particular, a combination of solitude and proximity to the Eye of Ugin, which sealed the Eldrazi within the plane Zendikar, cost the planeswalker Sarkhan Vol his sanity for a time, and it wasn't until several months after leaving that he had fully recovered. The home plane of the Eldrazi, called the Blind Eternities, is even described as not concisely describable.
  • Innistrad isn't as bad as Zendikar until Nahiri summons Emrakul to it but there's clearly something off with its moon. The moon of Innistrad is a powerful source of mana of multiple types and is responsible for the existence of Innistrad's various supernatural beings: angels, werewolves, and the vampires since Edgar Markov became the first vampire by drinking angel blood. The Helvault, a nigh indestructible prison for demons, was created from a fragment of the moon. The moon itself eventually becomes Emrakul's prison.
• In the game Magical Burst, Youma, the creatures Magical Girls fight, frequently surround themselves with a distortion in the tapestry of the world called a Nightmare. For most people, this manifests as a vague feeling of dread, owing to how Muggles cannot even perceive Youma or their influence, much less hurt them. For Magical Girls and those attuned to magic, the Nightmare appears as an increasingly surreal region of distorted reality, getting weirder and weirder as one nears the Youma.
• In Nephilim, Selenim are capable of creating Realms, pocket universes that exist according to their will, which turn out like this trope.
• The Shadow Realm of the New World of Darkness is more a Dark World. But if you go deep enough, you get to the parts of the Shadow Realm taken over by lords among the Spirits, and then the rules disappear.
  • Mage: The Awakening introduces a few of its own. While they're more layers of reality, we have the Abyss, which is an anti-reality made of everything that reality isn't; the Supernal Realms, which are realms of pure concepts and ideas, which will obliterate anything concrete that would try to enter them except during a mage's Awakening; and the Astral Realms, which is a mental world that comprises multiple layers, with the 'surface' layer being the individual mindscapes of all living humans, the next layer being humanity's collective mindscape, and the layer after that being the entire planet's collective mindscape.
• The various cosmoi of Nobilis run on their own set of rules - including mundane Earth, which is a fantasy the Earth created for itself after the trauma that destroyed the dinosaurs, a way for it to deny the existence of karma and thus the belief that it deserved that trauma. It's self-maintaining, self-rationalising... and overstretched, as it's getting far too complex to sustain.
• The Umbra from the Old World of Darkness folds in itself any sort of alternative reality and other states of being. And one has to step sideways to reach it. Sideways to reality as a whole. Furthermore, different places in the Umbra have their own laws, and the further one gets from Earth, the weirder and more hostile the worlds become, until the Deep Umbra is reached. Things are just plain wrong there. And very, very inhospitable for almost any type of earth-like life.
  • And then there's the Black Spiral, located in Malfeas (the Shenti of the Wyrm). Depending on which game in the cobbled together setting you happen to be operating in, the Black Spiral is either in the Deep Umbra, the Dark Dreaming, the center of the Maelstrom, or is either a convergence or a place that has doorways to all three. Put simply, it's Hell, but of course it's not that simple and entire books have been dedicated to describing, expanding, contradicting and redefining what the Black Spiral actually is. Werewolf: The Apocalypse describes it as the tormented mind of the Wyrm itself. There are even allusions that it is the dessicated husk of ancient Malfeas from Exalted. It breaks, reshapes and fundamentally corrupts anyone unlucky enough to find themselves there, and we're talking mentally, physically and spiritually, all at once. It is the home, seat of power, dying body and prison of the Wyrm, the primordial force of entropy in the setting's universe. One tribe of werewolves are called the Black Spiral Dancers. Guess what they do for an initiation rite?
• Pathfinder has a multitude of planes like its predecessor. One that's particularly interesting is the First World, commonly described as the gods' first draft of reality. Like most first drafts, it bears only a passing resemblance to the final product. It's also the home of the Fey and other magical creatures.
• Terra Incognitae in Scion are all the mysterious islands and lost worlds described in mythology. You can't get to them unless you yourself are mythological (i.e., have a Legend score).
  • In addition, there are the Underworlds and Overworlds of the various pantheons, which operate by the rules the Gods set; the Greater Titans, living embodiments of a particular element such as Light, Water, Sky, Chaos, Time, etc;, and in first edition, Touchstones, the archetypal locations humanity has given meaning to (the Great Henge, the Colossus, the Dark Woods, etc.), which can be accessed through their mundane analogues. Again, you need to be mythological to get to these places, and in some cases you need to be of a certain Legend score or above to enter.
• Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: Following the end of the World-That-Was, the Eight Winds of Magic gradually "condensed" over time and formed the Eight Mortal Realms, each of which resembles a certain wind of magic — Aqshy, Chamon, Azyr, Ghyran, Ghur, Shyish, Hysh and Ulgu. Near the "center" of each Realm, things are fairly stable and "normal", with each Realm having geography resembling virtually every real-world biome (i.e., even in Aqshy, the Realm of Fire, there can be frozen-over tundra in the center of the Realm). However, going out farther and farther from the center of the Realm, the magic making it up gets more and more unstable, eventually resulting in a Reality Is Out to Lunch situation where the "Realm's Edge" consists almost entirely of pure, chaotic magic that is lethal to anyone without sufficient protection. As an example, the continent of Haixiah in Hysh (the Realm of Light) is right along the Realm's Edge, and it is completely uninhabitable, having features like fjords being rimmed in precise fractal shapes and being dotted with quartz-like structures made of Hard Light.
  • Each of the Realms are also weird enough in certain ways even near the center of the Realms that it's pretty clear they're ultimately not that close to conventional reality (despite first glances). Just as an example, while Ghyran (the Realm of Life) does still have volcanoes, it has these in the form of mountain-sized tree stumps that occasionally spew out tree sap instead of lava. Ghyran also regularly has "life-quakes," chaotic tremors on wild life magic surging through certain areas of the Realm, causing mass explosions of life (mostly in the form of plants growing taller or healthier, but people regardless of biological sex suddenly being impregnated aren't considered unusual). Meanwhile in Ghur (the Realm of Beasts), virtually everything in the entire Realm is alive and actively predatory in some way — plate tectonics consists of the continents trying to eat each other, and chasms can suddenly open up and swallow entire cities whole just because the ground was feeling particularly hungry that day. Mountains slowly grind themselves across the land, all the while forests dig their roots in as part of a parasitic attempt to consume the very mountains they're planted upon.
• Warhammer 40,000.
  • Aside from the mentions in the literature section, everything in the Eye of Terror ends up this way, as well as the Maelstrom (basically a mini Eye of Terror that doesn't even have the decency of an explanation of how it started). Any place a Warp Rift is opened starts to slowly turn into one of these, and if the rift is left unchecked it can end up turning the entire planet into a Daemon World. And that's just what happens when a tiny fraction of the Warp leaks into the real world...
  • The Dark City of Commorragh, home of the Dark Eldar, is also an example, being an enormous collection of realms located inside the Webway (a network of warded tunnels in the Warp), linked together with portals. It's basically Escher on crack and populated entirely by sadistic murder-elves. To make matters worse, in some parts the wards that separate the Webway from the Warp have become weakened, leading to things like districts where shadows come to life and things from outside reality lurk.
  • Necron tomb worlds are examples of non-Warp related eldritch locations. The Necrons' mastery over science allows them to create spaces that follow a higher order of geometry than we're used to, resulting in things like buildings that are bigger on the inside.
  • Even Eldar Craftworlds are such. They are not planet sized spaceships, but rather entire fleets that gathered together for mutual protection, linked by gates and warps that are tangental to the Webway as a whole. Any given door doesn't open onto whatever's on the other side, but rather to wherever you are wanting to go in the Craftworld itself. On top of this, the physical linkages joining the Craftworld is made from, effectively, psychic powers turned into a solid, called Wraithbone — and acting as a conduit for the souls of every Eldar whose Soulstone was recovered. And at the core of each Craftworld is an area called the Dome of the Crystal Seers. The apparent statues in here aren't — they're the solidified bodies of the greatest farseers of the craftworld, converted into solid wraithbone.

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