Gods: Main Deities, Inner Sea Deities, Tian Xia Deities, Azlanti Deities, Racial and Cultural Pantheons, Outer Gods, Other Deities Demigods: Empyreal Lords, Fiendish Divinities, Great Old Ones, Other Demigods Divine Heralds
The Outer Gods are the most utterly "other" deities in existence. Their worship is commonly associated with the Dark Tapestry, the void of space in which many of them reside.
Outer Gods
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In General
- Complete Immortality: Unlike most gods, who can die despite their divinity, the Outer Gods just cannot die. This is due in large part to the fact that they predate Pharasma, and thus death itself.
- Eldritch Abomination: One and all, with a number of them being lifted directly from Lovecraft’s works.
- God of Evil: Some of these entities are evil, and even the non-evil ones are extremely dangerous.
- The Old Gods: It's in the name; they are the oldest beings in existence, predating Pharasma, the qlippoth and the proteans alike.
- Outside-Context Problem: Origins, motives, and links with other powers of the Great Beyond are all things the Outer Gods lack. As best anyone can tell, they just are.
- Physical God: The majority of them dwell on the Material Plane.
- Public Domain Character: All Outer Gods were originally created by Cthulhu Mythos authors and long predated Pathfinder, except Nhimbaloth, a creation of Paizo creative director James Jacobs.
- Time Abyss: All Great Old Ones and Outer Gods are unimaginably ancient and their age far dwarf that of "ordinary" gods. As far as anyone can tell, they were just always there.
Abhoth
Source of Uncleanness
Outer god of disease, fecundity, and oozes
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Existing simultaneously in the cavernous depths of every world, Abhoth constantly sloughs off parts off itself which form new life to slither out into the dark. It appears as a lake of amorphous ooze dotted with constantly forming and dissolving eyes, mouths, limbs, and organs.
- Asteroids Monster: Abhoth constantly spawns monsters by fission from itself.
- Blob Monster: Abhoth appears as a vast lake of seething, surging, protoplasmic ooze.
- Monster Progenitor: It’s the original parent of many, if not all, ooze monsters. Its cultists maintain that all life is descended from its mutated children.
- Public Domain Character: Abhoth is the creation of Clark Ashton Smith, from The Seven Geases.
Azathoth
The Daemon Sultan
Outer God of entropy, madness, and mindless destruction
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
The blind idiot god said to lie at the center of the Material Plane, Azathoth gibbers and thrashes to the eerie tunes of its court of lesser gods. It resembles nothing more than a shapeless mass of destruction the size of a star.
- Almighty Idiot: It’s debatably the most powerful being in the setting, but it might not even be capable of thought.
- The Artifact: Azathoth retain the title of Daemon Sultan, originally given to it by Lovecraft, despite daemons being a distinct race that have nothing to do with it in Pathfinder and are in fact mostly unaware of its existence. In-universe, this is considered to be a homonym.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: It’s not even clear if Azathoth is sentient, much less capable of considering something as complex as morality.
- Evil Is Not a Toy: Some have attempted to harness its power, attempts which usually end in the destruction of the entire planet.
- Primordial Chaos: Its general appearance and state of being. It’s chaos without any morality.
- Public Domain Character: Azathoth comes from the short story of the same name by H.P. Lovecraft.
Nhimbaloth
The Empty Death
Outer Goddess of despair, ghosts, and swamps
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Nhimbaloth hunts those who would themselves prey on souls traveling to the afterlife, consuming predator and prey as one. She has no form and is known only by the marks of her passage.
- Always a Bigger Fish: She's the bigger fish to things like astradaemons and sahkils. As they prey on souls, Nhimbaloth preys on them in turn.
- Cessation of Existence: If she consumes a soul, they’re gone for good. No passage onward, no afterlife, nothing but the agony of death and nonexistence.
- Food Chain of Evil: Predators hunt the metaphysical banks and depths of the River of Souls, eager to pluck out and devour drifting souls before they can be reach Pharasma's Boneyard. In turn Nhimbaloth feeds upon those predators.
- The Ghost: She's never been seen and only the corrupted land left behind by her passage proves her existence.
- Monster Progenitor: She's thought to be the source of will-o'-wisps, in part due to their mutual connection with desolate wastelands, despair and pointless death.
- Soul Eating: Nhimbaloth revels in the digestion of souls already being digested in the gullets of predators.
Nyarlathotep
Nyarlathotep as the Black Pharaoh
The Crawling Chaos
Outer God of conspiracies, dangerous secrets, and forbidden magic
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
A god with a thousand forms, Nyarlathotep takes pleasure in manipulating and toying with mortals.
- Always a Bigger Fish: An intellectual version. Between him and the angel Tabris, one of them pulled this on the other.
- Ancient Egypt: He influenced Osirion, the Fantasy Counterpart Culture of Egypt on Golarion, in its history. Though Earth does exist somewhere in the setting, so it’s entirely possible he played this straight as well.
- The Chessmaster: He has eons to wait for his plans to pay out, and he has lots of them.
- Fantasy Gun Control: It was his whisper that led to the invention of the first gun on Golarion.
- For the Evulz: Nyarlathotep seems to enjoy toying with and causing discord among mortal races.
- God Is Evil: He’s one of the only Outer Gods who eschews alien morality for outright malice.
- Humanoid Abomination: He takes human (or dwarf, or elf, etc.) form to further his plans.
- I Have Many Names: He has many identities, each of which can be worshiped as its own separate being.
- Keeper of Forbidden Knowledge: He knows forbidden magic and technology from every culture across the planes.
- Nepharious Pharaoh: One of his avatars, the Black Pharaoh.
- Public Domain Character: He’s another Lovecraft creation.
- Scary Black Man: As the Black Pharaoh, definitely, with the twist that his skin is actually black as pitch. Averted with his go-to human guise of an Osirian man, where he’s a dark-skinned man but is trying to appear non-threatening.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting: He takes many forms to appear to his worshippers or to subtly tweak the world. Two of his best known forms are the Haunter in the Dark, a bat-like creature with a burning tri-lobed eye, and the Black Pharaoh, a man with skin as dark as pitch.
Shub-Niggurath
Black Goat of the Woods
Outer Goddess of fertility, forests, and monsters
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
The mother of a thousand young, Shub-Niggurath is most commonly worshipped around Lake Encarthan.
- Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": If you’ve seen a goat that looks like a cloud of mist and flesh that constantly evolves and consumes new appendages, orifices and sensory organs, you probably have bigger problems than what it’s called.
- Monster Progenitor: She has far more than a thousand children; her cultists often claim she is the origin of all biological life.
- Mother of a Thousand Young: Shub-Niggurath is said to have spawned a thousand young.
- Public Domain Character: She was originally mentioned by Lovecraft and characterized by later writers.
- Really Gets Around: Many of the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods are believed to have mated with Shub-Niggurath.
Yog-Sothoth
The Key and The Gate
Outer God of gates, space, and time
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
The god of the void between worlds, and perhaps the void itself, Yog-Sothoth is generally believed to be preparing the universe for a new age ruled by him and his kind.
- Half-Human Hybrid: Cults often call upon Yog-Sothoth to bless unborn children, turning them into monstrous hybrids.
- Interspecies Romance: Romance might be overselling it, but cultists can call upon him to transform unborn children into his children, monsters that will further his goals.
- The Omnipresent: This... thing exists simultaneously in all of space and time, yet also transcends it.
- Public Domain Character: You guessed it, another Lovecraft creation.
- Space Master: Distance means nothing to it because he is the very concept of space.
- Time Master: Part of his domain.
- Void Between the Worlds: He seems unable to properly exist in the reality shared by most mortal life and can only partially intrude upon this dimension.
- You Cannot Grasp the True Form: He appears only as a mass of slithering incandescent spheres or motes of light, and even those may be nothing but his shadow.
