Okay getting ready to incorporate the major great old one that I want to build into the game. He is waking raising cults, and creating dangers for all people.
There are to thoughts to this build. A very powerful demon from the abyss that surpases even the false gods. He radiates pure hate and evil and works to destroy everything, not just the church. But God has a lot of power and enough to stop him.....sort of.... his earthly and angelic followers cannot just channel the amount of power needed it would destroy them. So the fact is that they need help from other sources, enter folkwitchs and Rune Wizards. Their gods are not fairies but actual pagan gods and all need to work together along with the order joined to save the world from this threat.
Option 2 he is from the magical realm and therefore the dominion doesn't have enough power by themselves to stop him, so they need to work with other gods to defeat him. Acctual Gods not just faeries.
So how would you build this guy? By lovecraftian lore yug seldome comes out. But I am thinking he is working through cultists.
thoughts on how to build him?
Fortunately for us, the question of “what are Yog-Sothoth’s game stats?” has been asked before, albeit for other game systems. While these answers may not be ideal for your purposes, they’re a useful place to start.
I happen to have Call of Cthulhu 3rd edition on the shelf. Yog Sothoth has a POW of 100; let’s use this for his Might.
Yog-Sothoth’s “Spells” entry is simply “Spells: All”. Give Yog-Sothoth the ability to cast any Hermetic spell up to level 100, obeying all Ritual restrictions and expensing 1 Might per magnitude.
Yog has a corrupting touch power that does permanent CON damage and silver bolts that slay everything in a 5-yard circle. These are Perdo effects.
Y-S can transport one character per round anywhere in the universe or in time. For Ars, this would be sending characters to any Realm or in or out of any regio.
Its Size is variable, anywhere from hundreds of yards to miles across. Since Size in Ars is mostly important for Wounds, we can simply say all Wounds Yog-Sothoth takes are treated as Light Wounds. Yog also has Immunity to any damage that doesn’t come from a non-magical source. Note that Yog’s Magic Resistance of 100 makes it highly resistant to magical damage as well.
As for your question of Realm, it’s interesting. In ArM5, the Magic realm is pure nature. Lovecraftian entities represent contra-nature, and I’d not make them Magic. They don’t care about humans, so Faerie is out. Infernal would work. But since you’re already changing the rules for faeries and pagan gods, you might consider making the Lovecraftian mythos a kind of “anti-Realm” distinct from the current four.
There’s much still to do, but I would not try to write a complete stat block for Yog-Sothoth. A lot of work for something you’ll probably never need. The basics are all you need, and you can handwave the rest.
Try searching for the Reddit post entitled "The Hermetic Necronimicon: A brief treatment of Lovecraftian Realism within the Medieval Paradigm". It might give you some ideas
I would tend to agree with Jason Tondro, the fact that they are alien, outer gods would preclude them from belonging to one of the four Realms.
Aetheric Realm alignment could be possible.
Yeah, to make Elder Gods and Old Ones work you have to change the realm paradigm. If you wanted to mess with your player's heads you could go with the gnostic horror approach and give them a Dominion aura with the horrible secrets that would go with Dominion being tied to tentacle monsters from the stars.
Yog Soggoth isn't counternatural. He, and the other things in the CM pantheons, are nature with the comforting human blinkers taken off.
I'd make him a diamon, so you can only ever fight one Aspect of him. I'm reminded he creates a pair of half-human heirs/Messiahs/tools in the Dumwhich Horror.
The other advantage of Aspects is you don't need to set your stats ludicrously high. Destroying an Aspect doesn't end the threat, just this one scheme.
This is all really great stuff. I know where he is and that he is sleeping but he is waking up. I don't want newbie characters fighting him, i want to have cults, demons working wth him, a very overwhelming sense of alien presence that requires humanity to bad together to save the world.
i think this whole thing could take years as they battle demons and cultists each time giving them a clue to yog. I am thinking that the aspect thing could be a good way to dispense clues to the nature of things. Ultimately working together will save them
Side Note: In 13th Century Dunwich is a major port and population center, apparently bigger than London in several ways.
Another thought.
I have heard mention in other game systems that both Heaven and Hell value souls. The Great Old Ones don't really acknowledge them, except occasionally as tasty non-noms.
Translated into ArsM, the Great Old Ones wouldn't belong to Divine nor Infernal based on the disregard for souls.
Faerie cares about human stories, but creativity seems to associated with the soul.
It is the Magic Realm that doesn't care about Humans.
Perhaps a Kosmocreator (spelling) defeated in the Titanomachy and driven mad by defeat and captivity....
I wouldn't. The challenge is to stop the insane followers bringing it in to our world. It is an old god. It existed before the world was made, and will exist after the world crumbles to dust. God cannot stop him.
Making fragments of a dark god enter this realm is an option. The Fragments I would recommend any realm except infernal. Infernal is satanic, and an Old God is beyond Satan.
The next question is, do you want the players to have a chance if they fail to stop the fragments entering? That is the key to what might you want to give it, and what powers.
i am a believer of the first angel war which is documented in Sumarion mythology and other mythologies that believe in angels. And in this mythology, Angels were created by God to defend his creation from the endless hordes of destruction coming from the abyss. But when God told Lucifer and his choir to bow before man and Lucifer was cast out of heaven, Hell was formed and the abyss became the third level in that hell (Dante) and the fallen angels not only punished by also gaurded against the endless spawn from hell. So if I take it from this aspect then the abyss existed before god, god made hell and put the abyss in hell, that means the old one could be from the abyss as it was always there.
In the Mythos, Yog-Sothoth is outside the universe. He does not need to be part of any established Realm. His (Its) Earthly worshippers may have supernatural abilities that make no sense in the Medieval paradigm (I don't mean that they have arbitrary powers, just that magi and theologians and infernalists don't understand).
Here is a case where demons, angels, faeries, and magi may well set aside their usual concerns.
Thankyou I had forgotten about the origin myth. Going to go off now and read it again in detail.
Eh, I've always viewed the Cthulhu mythos as straight-up Magic creations, and Covenants to be "Medieval Cthulhu cults, from the perspective of the cultists".
- Crazy powerful supernatural entities that don't care one way or another about you? (Daimons) Check.
- Rituals that drive you insane, but give you power? (Initiation) Check.
- Crazy guys that (probably will) eat your face, but you have to work with them anyway? (Social effects of the Gift) Check.
- Brought into a community of rejects and dropouts and whom support a mystic lifestyle (the Covenant) Check.
And so on and so forth. I mean, treating the Cthulhu mythos as simply powerful Magic entities, to me, makes sense - it's a dark interpretation, but one that seems to fit fairly easily into "Magic entities have inhuman intelligence and barely comprehend us, and we barely comprehend them."
This is not to downplay the Mythos - rather, to upplay the horror and terror that the average peasant in Mythic Europe feels in the presence of the Gift and when experiencing the savages of Warp. To a wizard that Mi-go might just be a Mag20 Herbam spirit, but to a peasant it's a mind-shattering horror; to a Grog, it's still a mind-shattering horror, but it's also got the vis your employer wants for his latest ceremony. So close your eyes, say your prayers, and swing that sword, Grog!
wow thank you so very articulate
This the sort of thread that lends itself to necromancy.
I have been thinking about this and believe I may have come across a flaw in my reasoning.
I have been presuming that Faerie Gods emerged directly from magical Kosmocreators. Perhaps there should be intermediate steps. Greek, Roman and Nordic mythologies imply there were a couple a generations before you got to the current gods - ie Odin son of Bor son of Buri who was licked free from salty rime stones by the primeval cow AuĂ°umbla over the course of three days.
Perhaps AuĂ°umbla was a magical Kosmocreator and Buri started to feed off of the Vitality of humans.
But the ur-Fae weren't very good at extracting Vitality, for a first try. Perhaps could only grab Vitality when Humans were extremely passionate, so passionate they were effectively mad.
Later generations of Fae got more efficient at extracting/feeding off of Vitality. And according to Natural Selection theory, the later generations of Fae out-competed the ur-Fae in obtaining Vitality and supplanted the ur-Fae.
But the Great Old Ones are still out there, leeching off of the Vitality expended from Nightmares and Madness. How many Crusaders suffer soul-numbness/PTSD?
By this idea, Yug-sothoth and its ilk would be aligned with Faerie, but don't handle anything so delicate as stories.
The etymology of "Eldritch" seems to be 'elf' and 'rice' (realm), or 'el' (other) as in Otherworldly.
I lean toward Faerie for most such things. This makes the Mi-Go flying intelligent mushrooms, which seems appropriate.
The Outer Gods, though; they are uncaring and distant Magic entities. Yog-Sothoth is a kosmokrator, as is Azathoth.
Nyarlathotep is interested in humanity in some guises, and has a sense of humor. He/It is Faerie.
There is always the possibility that they form a different Realm entirely. They do interact with humans (through dreams, visions, and mad inspiration), and tend to reshape the very nature of reality (regios) into very alien forms. In D&D 3.5 they were aligned with 'paranatural abominations'.
But maybe that is just me; I have always regarded Ars Magica (with just three & maybe a half) as being a bit Realm-impoverished. I would love to see more Realms, maybe some with genuinely divine gods in a (or several!) polytheistic pantheon(s). And defining a 'Common' or 'Natural' realm, which holds sway wherever there is not another aura appeals to me, too.
I'm actually the opposite - I don't like the Realms.They lie.
Overhead, beyond the lunar sphere, It occupies all space, horizon to horizon, coils humping, writhing, tentacles extended in questing eye-tongues wrapped around every star in the sky. A cosmically coiling mass of churning flesh, at its center there shines a unblinking, universe-encompassing eye of black un-light and eternity. With the right magic, you see It, and It sees you.
It rushes down not at the speed of light, but infinitely faster, with the speed of darkness. The eye-tongue passes the lunar sphere like a forgotten dream. It ignores the mountains spiking into it, the covenant's towers, the people staring at you. The eye settles on you, just you, its weight crushing you, its foul cold substance pushing and entering you, then withdrawing as fast as it had come. It leaves your body broken on the ground, mind shattered. It recedes far years and decades away because it found you, tasted you, and you are nothing.
But you're not insane. There is no insanity. It is everywhere. It is what makes the night sky spin. It is the imbalance in the humours, the laughter in the dark. If you don’t know that, if you don’t feel it in your blood and marrow, you don’t know anything.
Reality is an insignificant scum floating on an ocean of chaos. There is no God, nothing solid, nothing of us that’s real. Only It is real: The mad, unseen everything, the weight of night.