Headscratchers / At the Mountains of Madness

• If I understand it correctly, the Old Ones WON a war against Cthulhu, and then LOST a war against the Mi-Go? I know some of their technology had been lost when they took on the latter, but still, Cthulhu's people should have been several orders of magnitude more powerful.
  • Several points:
    • First, the Old Ones didn't WIN. They never managed to drive Cthulhu & Co. back off Earth, for starters. Both sides simply eventually agreed to stop making war upon each other and stay within their respective boundaries established by that point. It's said that they fought each other to a standstill, but then some millions of years later the Cthulu-oid cities were destroyed through natural tectonic action, and eventually the Elder Things expanded back into those regions after they were abandoned.
    • Second, we have no idea how advanced Cthulhu's people are and were technologically and how well their psychic powers might or might not have worked on the Old Ones (and if they did, which countermeasures the latter may have been able to devise). It's thus hard to argue that they "should" have been orders of magnitude more powerful than either the Old Ones or the Mi-Go; we just plain don't have enough information to go on to judge that.
    • And third, the battle against the octopoids is said to have taken place before (probably well before) the Shoggoth rebellion that in turn happened "toward the middle of the Permian Age", whereas the Mi-Go only invaded sometime during the Jurassic. We're thus looking at two wars at least 70-80 million years apart, and quite possibly considerably more than that. Even assuming the Old Ones were virtually immortal (and it's probably safe to say that they were at the very least naturally tough and long-lived), that's all of human recorded history so many times over that it's not even funny — heck, it's longer than the dinosaurs have been extinct looking back from our present-day point of view. A lot can happen over millions of years.
  • Also, even if they never fought the Mi-Go off the planet either they weren't conquered. The impression I got was that they were on more-or-less even footing with them, and they made peace because the Mi-Go were more interested in the land while the Elder Things were more interested in the oceans.