How do YOU roleplay an eldritch abomination...

[Das Platyvark]

...from beyond this mortal sphere, and to look upon whose appalling countenance can drive men beyond the brink of insanity?
My general tactic is to channel Cthulhu and issue an occasional blood curdling scream to tear into the hearts of men, driving them beyond the brink of insanity, etc. etc.
What do YOU do when you need to play a horrific abomination who will eventually rise to restore his terrible madness to the world?

[The Glyphstone]

What's roleplay? Couldn't resist

[BIGMamaSloth]

well that's hard to say. that's a lot like trying to comprehend a 4d image with human eyes. I mean you can, to an extent but it's not truly realistic. A lot of the madness of lovecraftian horror is the fact that you simply can't comprehend the motives and likeness of these creatures.

[The Dark Fiddler]

I spend a week on 4chan studying.

[Welknair]

I read the Crack Pairings thread.

...


Oh god, why. WHY?!

[Hiro Protagonest]

What's roleplay? Couldn't resist

Something the weak-minded ones do.

[Ksheep]

Obtain the mindset of a bunny. No, not an ordinary bunny, but rather THAT bunny. You know the one. It's got large pointy…… it can jump about yea…… LOOK AT THE BONES!!

[The Dark Fiddler]

I read the Crack Pairings thread.

...


Oh god, why. WHY?!

Cause I saw it on another forum and thought it could work for this fandom. I suppose it did, by certain definitions...

[Alleran]

Poor, misunderstood creatures who can never have true friendship because mortals can't look past the surface (or are too busy screaming in agony as their brains bleed out through their ears from the mere sound of "Hello.") and see the lonely child beneath.

[Morithias]

"Malstorm come. All who oppose me... DESTROY!

Power mode activate, Black Storm initiate."

Hats off to anyone who gets the reference.

[Ksheep]

"Malstorm come. All who oppose me... DESTROY!

Power mode activate, Black Storm initiate."

Hats off to anyone who gets the reference.

Oh, it's that one thing, from that one place.

Also, shouldn't it be "Maelstrom"?

[D_Lord]

It shouldn't get fully what is every day and normal to people. Unless it's crazy, "crazy" for an eldritch abomination, an book or a box would be an strange and counsing object. Having trouble telling what is an other living being or what isn't. And Keyly having a big problem with not braking anything and everything that gets in the way of what it wants.

[Morithias]

Oh, it's that one thing, from that one place.

Also, shouldn't it be "Maelstrom"?

Spellcheck. Did. Not. Pick. It. Up.

Destroy! XD

[Knaight]

Obviously, eldritch abomination imitations are best when aided by chemicals. Ethanol works, but a proper hallucinogenic works better.:smallwink:

[Anderlith]

I go on vacation to Japan & prep Evard's Black Tentacles as many times as I can

[Arutema]

Pl.y Bla.Bl.e un.il c.n spe.. l.ke Ara.un.

(it was for a cosplay)

[Ravens_cry]

No more caring about humans then we would care about the welfare of an ants nest. At best, we are ignored, at worst, we are a pest to be exterminated. Even in their apathy, they can be destructive, twisting reality in ways not healthy to our continued existence or sanity, with no thought for us. They are not evil, they are amoral, almost a personification of the pitiless laws of physics, destroying the just the just as readably as the unjust. They can not be overcome, merely prevented temporally. They don't gloat, they don't cackle, their goals and motives are so incomprehensible that they might as well not exist. They do or they do not. Bargaining them or negotiating with them is as pointless as negotiating with a landslide or an avalanche, like reasoning with the sea in an attempt to stop drowning.
Tentacles and eyes in wrong places are mere window dressing, an attempt to give shape what is beyond shape, beyond our merest comprehension.

[TheCountAlucard]

Do the Primordials in Exalted count? :smallamused:

[Geigan]

http://images.wikia.com/earthbound/images/5/51/BossGiygas.png
I'm H A P P Y
NESSNESSNESSNESSNESSNESSNESSNESS

[Shadowknight12]

As if the entire universe was made of bacteria.

[awa]

as a dm i dont. To explain an elderich abomination just does things it's reasons are incomprehensible to mortal beings as both I and my players are mortals I wouldent be able to comprehend them either so insteade it just does things. why? becuase the stars are right it dosent need any more motivation then that.

[Gensh]

More often than not, eldritch abominations come across as being more sane than the average player character, so a lot of times, I take it to 11 and go with making them the most reasonable, well-mannered NPCs in the entire gameworld. Sure so-and-so might be out to eat the world, but he'll tell you there's not a thing he can do about that, old chap, as he adjusts his monocle and tophat. It's just nature taking its course.

For a more orthodox abomination, I recommend imagining a small animal that scares you. Now imagine they've filled your house while you were taking a nap and all speak a foreign language that you don't know but recognize as being human. Freak out. "OHMYGODS NORWEGIAN CENTIPEDES EVERYWHERE"

[Pokonic]

Simply imagine that you are a powerful, potent godlike entity and that its equivilent to a vaction in jamaca (http://ursulav.deviantart.com/gallery/7872436#/d20hbk3) needs a little tweaking before it can get cozy. In this case, Jamaca is your universe. The tweaking involves sanity-blasting abominations making your universes laws its bitch.

[RandomNPC]

Is it odd that I find the answer to the OPs question "I just do."

I find it difficult to rp several "normal" people at once, but a single entity, no matter how odd, just seems to come to me.

[Lord Raziere]

A subtle difference there, something wrong here, a feeling that you are being watched from all angles by one eye and being digested by eleven stomaches at the same time even though you are perfectly fine.....

[Kuma Da]

Keep them childlike. After all, communicating in human ways is foreign to them, so they'll make some of the same social fumbles that a human child would. The fact that they're a twelve foot tall writhing horrorvore is just icing on the cake.

[Eakin]

In my mind it depends on why the EA cares enough to communicate with them at all. Unless it is far far weaker than the impossibly incomprehensibly powerful level I usually associate with them then it should be able to get whatever it wants itself or may find it easier to just break a pcs mind and make them go do it's bidding willing or not.

Reminds me of a recurring demigod npc in a campaign I played once. Players were grumbling about him being a dmpc. During a dungeon dive to recover a macguffin artifact on an unrelated quest we came to a room that didn't fit with the rest of the dungeon at all. The room was just a giant puzzle that involved channeling and luring assorted pests to various points to manipulae a mechanism that opened the door. Said demigod was hanging out on the other side of the door and basically proceeded to explain that from his perspective, we were those bugs and vermin, and it wasn't necessary for us to understand why he needed assorted things done and just to shut up and do our part.

Probably sounds insufferable, but he worked well as a sometimes ally sometimes enemy who was clearly on nobodies side but his own.

The dm later had put characters discover that this guy had cultivated the civilization that built the ruins, specifically inserted this room into their building, then turned on them and torn apart their city in a matter of hours all millennia before the campaign was set, exclusively so that he could make a point to our characters. This guy had a fairly loose relationship with linear time so it may have even been an in universe retcon.

Anyway, that's the kind of stunt that I think an EA might like to pull

[Kalirren]

If we think an eldritch abomination is ugly, it probably thinks we're cute. Its actual beauty aesthetic should be downright unfathomable.

It probably also doesn't have a good idea of what a normal object is, or rather speaking, where its boundaries are. Like it might decide to spontaneously rip off one person's arms and legs and glue them onto another person because it thinks that one person with all the limbs must be better than two people with half as many limbs, at least one of them's not broken anymore. Or rip off a head and glue it onto someone's backside for the sake of symmetry.

Also, whichever way you think is up, isn't, and whichever way seems out, is acutally inside out.

[Jjeinn-tae]

So much destruction left in his wake, there are no survivors, all senselessly devoured, for incomprehensible reasons or semi-imagined slights.

Read and learn, read and learn. This is one of the most straightforward Eldritch Abominations there is. (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Kirby)

[Jothki]

I'd say give it a concrete motive, and have it act to achieve that motive. The motive can make no sense, the motive can be impossibly large-scale or time-consuming, the motive never has to be known by the PCs, but it should be there.

[Tvtyrant]

I like to play them as zoologists or botanists; they kill "interesting" specimens to dissect them and record them. Attempts to stop them are written down as part of the specimens information. "Today I proved that humans care about members of their species from other tribes! I performed a dissection of a child I found wandering the forest near a village some hundreds of miles away and they responded similarly to how a tribe reacts to one of their own young being killed. I will repeat this experiment to confirm the reaction, though it seems beyond all doubting at this point."

[Chilingsworth]

Poor, misunderstood creatures who can never have true friendship because mortals can't look past the surface (or are too busy screaming in agony as their brains bleed out through their ears from the mere sound of "Hello.") and see the lonely child beneath.

Oh Contraire! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OFkMzo7-n0)

Similarly (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQg-_gmGOIw&feature=related)

[Mikeavelli]

So much destruction left in his wake, there are no survivors, all senselessly devoured, for incomprehensible reasons or semi-imagined slights.

Read and learn, read and learn. This is one of the most straightforward Eldritch Abominations there is. (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Kirby)

Has anyone ever done a writeup on Kirby in D20 stats? I kinda want to include him in a "dream\nightmare" adventure sequence...

[Dr. Roboto]

Whenever Cthulhu-esque creatures come up, I often see references to the 4th dimension tossed around. While I'm certainly not a geometer, I'd like to use an analogy to explain the implications of that. And yes, I did steal most of this from Flatland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland:_The_Movie).

Imagine a two-dimensional world. The inhabitants are polygons, with no depth. If there's a wall in front of them, they can't see past it. They can't see past the boundaries of other polygons.

Now imagine that 2D world floating in the air in front of you. With your 3D vision, you can see inside the boundaries of those polygons, and you can see over walls in a bird's-eye view. If you stuck your finger into this 2D world, and it went straight through without damaging the world, it would appear to the polygons to have appeared from nowhere. Additionally, they will only see the outside of a cross-section of your finger. They see it as a particularly complex polygon, but they only see a small part of it. And you can stick both hands in, and appear to them to exist in 2 places at once. Or maybe if you stick your hand, it just tears the 2D world like paper.

So switch the 2D world for our own, and imagine a 4D observer. It's literally impossible to hide; it can see all of our world at once. It can see inside you; if it wants to crush your kidney without any exterior marks, it can. It can appear anywhere it desires, at multiple places at once.

Now, to see how screwed we are against any 4D beings, go back to the 2D allegory. You've got your finger in the 2D world, and they're scared, so they slash you with a 2D sword. It makes an impossibly small cut; however, it's a cut that they can see. They think that they've won; the finger has a giant hole in it! But you jerk your finger back a centimeter. Suddenly, from their point of view, you've instantly healed.

I hope that this helped. If you didn't understand my allegory, I highly recommend the short film that I linked above.

[Knaight]

A point of irritation. Ignoring advanced physics, the world is 4d, with time the fourth dimension. We are 4d beings, those aforementioned 2d beings are actually 3d beings, so on and so forth.

[Jjeinn-tae]

Has anyone ever done a writeup on Kirby in D20 stats? I kinda want to include him in a "dream\nightmare" adventure sequence...

I have never heard of it being done, though I am sorely tempted to stat him up now... Definitely has swallow whole with some sort of ranged grapple...

[Xanmyral]

It depends on what they want, and several environmental factors. Really, just think "Omnipotent aberration" and you have eldritch abomination. Several things listed by others really say the most of it. They view things differently notched up to eleven. As to how I roleplay them? If the others have a migraine by the end of it due to trying to comprehend what is going on, then I have succeeded. Basically, incomprehensible. What do they care about greed? What do they care about emotion on general? Do they feel them? Perhaps they feel emotions in such a way that compared to humans, humans are emotionless. Perhaps they are emotionless. Nothing really needs to make sense. While a villain needs a goal to be an interesting villain, an E.A. doesn't. Perhaps they simply spilled the equivalent of salt and are wrecking around trying to clean it up, completely unaware of what they are actually doing simply because it is so miniscule. These are the kind of beings that wreck the world by simply being near it.

Aid to get in the right frame of mind? Watch the video in my sig, around the middle really stare at the object and try to figure it out. Really try. It's a square. You need to inflict that kind of confusion on those who interact with the E.A.

[The Dark Fiddler]

Has anyone ever done a writeup on Kirby in D20 stats? I kinda want to include him in a "dream\nightmare" adventure sequence...

Yes. Somebody made a Star Warrior for one of the once-monthly monster competitions in the homebrew section, which is basically a race of Kirbies. I forget how it turned out.

[Mixt]

The easiest type to have interact with mortals is the Humanoid Abomination.

Known examples of this type includes: Sephiroth (Final Fantasy 7, especially by the time of Advent Children) Vanitas (Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep) Freaking psychic ghost-thingy Alma Wade (F.E.A.R)

I usually pull heavily from those three when trying to roleplay an Eldritch Horror in a confrontation with mortals.

Taunt the little ants about how powerless they are (Sephiroth) before tearing them apart with reality warping psychic powers (Alma) and eating their souls (Sephiroth again), then spawn an army of monsters born from their negative emotions (Vanitas) and proceed to royally screw up the world.
Then bring about the end of the universe.

[Shadowknight12]

before tearing them apart with reality warping psychic powers (Alma)

Creating a psychic distortion of psychic reality and psychic psychic bendy spoons.

In before it gets old.