Weaknesses of Far-Realms-esque Horrors

[NowhereMan583]

Once more, I come to the Playground for ideas.

So, right now, I'm running a sort of epilogue for my previous campaign, which mostly consists of e-mails and Facebook messages to let players wrap up any loose ends they feel their characters need to deal with before we start a new campaign (in the same setting, a few generations later). I'm providing this background so that y'all know that there isn't going to be an actual battlemap & dice rolling & whatnot -- it's pretty much entirely for flavor & story/setting development.

Anyway, that said, here's what's going on. One of my players has this dangerous magic item they found during the campaign proper. It can open a very large gate to this hellish, Far-Realms-tainted demiplane, but there doesn't seem to be any mechanism for closing the gate afterwards. They never did anything with it during the campaign,because they decided it was too dangerous, but he wants to use it now to try and wipe out an NPC organization the whole party violently dislikes.

So he came up with a plan that involves a lot of reconnaissance and research first, and one of the central questions he has is whether the creatures on the other side of this gate have a weakness he can exploit. I don't want to give him a cop-out answer like "not that you can tell", or "point-blank annihilation", but I also don't want it to be something dull like "silver".

So I was hoping to get y'all's ideas for something much more esoteric, especially as I might bring this back in a later campaign.

[Coidzor]

Well, as far as I've gathered from what I've read of Terry Pratchett's works, creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions in Discworld expend a lot of energy to exist when they really shouldn't, so if they're removed from their anchor or the dimensional fatigue/breach is fixed, they'll eventually snap back out of existence, or at least be drained by the expenditure to maintain their forms that they'll be more easily dealt with/dispatched/sent back/baleeted.

So off the guy whose mind went insane and opened the door or fix the magical artifact that's messed the cosmic wossname up or damage/destroy their temple/idol/mystic doohickey in order to weaken them for a more manageable/possible fight?

Unless you're specifically asking how to destroy your gate when you really should have included a way from the getgo when you made it. XD

[Red Fel]

One uniquely anticlimactic answer is that their strength is their weakness. Say that these beings are profoundly other-worldly, and simply cannot survive all that long in this world. It's a classic Lovecraft-style gambit - they arrive, cause havoc, chaos and insanity, but then withdraw, because our reality is as anathema to them as theirs is to us. Perhaps the way to beat them is simply to show them a way home, through which they will instinctively flee.

Another option is to use their alien logic. Simply put, they don't understand the creatures they have encountered in this world. If you can find a way to communicate with them, in a manner they understand, the idea that you're actual beings instead of merely moving objects may so thoroughly shock them that they flee in terror. Imagine if you discovered one day that the dust particles accumulating on your dresser were not only intelligent, but had formed a complex society, and were aware of you. You'd freak out, man.

As a bonus, this latter option opens the door to their return, having prepared for the possibility of encountering intelligent talking dust particles.

[Rhynn]

Ye Powder of Ibn Ghazi
A special magical substance that renders them vulnerable (visible, corporeal, non-regenerating, non-invincible, whatever). This could be something more esoteric, too: a piece of music, a sound, a sentence, a unique spell, whatever. It won't defeat them by itself, but if prepared and used, it will make defeating them possible.

Ye Elder Sign
A symbol, substance, sentence, gesture, or other thing that wards off, frightens, shields from, conceals from, or simply banishes the beings.

Sealing the portal with such a symbol is a classic. (Cf. The Lurker at the Threshold, leaving a plot hook hanging around for later - when someone unseals the portal.)

Call/Dismiss Nyogtha
For each type of creature, and for each unique creature, there exists a particular spell to drive them away; these may be long rituals, requiring preparation, ingredients, sacrifices, and so on, and must be conducted precisely and perfectly to succeed.

Stick your head in the sand
The strain of existing in our reality is great, and they can only exist for so long. Eventually, they are forced to go away. Perhaps the portal remains open for a day, or a week, or a year; or, having closed after some hours or days, it intermittently and randomly opens, at greater and greater intervals. (Plot hook again.)

[Red Fel]

Awesome stuff.

A (nearly) perfect example of the above:

Thus speaking, the withered apparition raised his spidery hand in a two-fingered "V" sign and uttered an eldritch spell:

"Tim, Tim Benzedrine!
Hash! Boo! Valvoline!
Clean! Clean! Clean for Gene!
First, second, neutral, park,
Hie thee hence, you leafy narc!"

The towering plant shivered and the coils fell from its victims like yesterday's macaroni, and they sprang free with joyful yelps. As they watched with fascination, the great green menace whimpered like a nursling and sucked its own pistils with ill temper.

[NowhereMan583]

Unless you're specifically asking how to destroy your gate when you really should have included a way from the getgo when you made it. XD

He's actually got people working on finding a way to close the gate -- that part I can just handwave, essentially.

The trick is making sure all the eldritch horrors are on the far side of the gate before they close it. See, it's a really big gate. The artifact in question is a pair of bookends that, when activated, open a gate that fills all the space between them. And he wants to place them several miles apart. So driving them back into Þe Olde Hell-Dimension is going to take serious organization & effort, and he's primarily interested in making sure that his group isn't overrun.

[The Glyphstone]

He's actually got people working on finding a way to close the gate -- that part I can just handwave, essentially.

The trick is making sure all the eldritch horrors are on the far side of the gate before they close it. See, it's a really big gate. The artifact in question is a pair of bookends that, when activated, open a gate that fills all the space between them. And he wants to place them several miles apart. So driving them back into Þe Olde Hell-Dimension is going to take serious organization & effort, and he's primarily interested in making sure that his group isn't overrun.

And how is he preventing more horrors from coming through to this side with a gate that big?

[Driderman]

He's actually got people working on finding a way to close the gate -- that part I can just handwave, essentially.

The trick is making sure all the eldritch horrors are on the far side of the gate before they close it. See, it's a really big gate. The artifact in question is a pair of bookends that, when activated, open a gate that fills all the space between them. And he wants to place them several miles apart. So driving them back into Þe Olde Hell-Dimension is going to take serious organization & effort, and he's primarily interested in making sure that his group isn't overrun.

You know, this kind of madman scheme is just begging to backfire. This is just the sort of evil plan that parties of PCs have to clean up after when something the planner hasn't taken into account happens.

Also, I like the idea of the creatures unable to exist for too long in alien enviroment like the player's plane of existence. Might add the caveat that the creatures are able to affect the world and people around them in way that gradually makes their enviroment habitable for them (and very uninhabitable for non-Far Realms beings due to this), so if they get to stick around for long enough and cause havoc, they stay.

[Rhynn]

Yeah, it's sounding like your next campaign is going to have to include an enormous wasteland of eldritch horror, unnatural geography, and alien ecology, caused by this crazy b*****d who did something incredibly ill-advised with this very powerful magic item...

Awesome.

[supermonkeyjoe]

They are so inherently chaotic that the application of any kind of law will massively weaken them, they are unable to approach any kind of courtroom or library and if arrested, tried and found guilty will immediately cease to exist.

[Rhynn]

They are so inherently chaotic that the application of any kind of law will massively weaken them, they are unable to approach any kind of courtroom or library and if arrested, tried and found guilty will immediately cease to exist.

This one cracks me up.

Bands of roving judges & juries corralling and indicting alien monsters... until they condence the system into one-man teams...

"I AM THE LAW!"

[Accordion Twome]

Maybe the 'horrors' are just as scared by the portal as any one on this side would be.
Just think about it.

If you were an alien mail man delivering your iced kittens for all the flowers, who are very sad by the fact of stuck in the clouds.
Then a portal opened.
you see the clouds on the other side with no depressed flowers!
something on the other side has inhaled all the cloud flowers!
I should close the portal before they inhale my costumers!

So you see any alien would be confused by see portal and freak out.
Then they put ^ and $ together and decide to try and close the portal to save their flower costumers.

As simple as that when you think about it...

[Deophaun]

Then they put ^ and $ together and decide to try and close the portal to save their flower costumers.

As simple as that when you think about it...

The problem becomes in how they think to close the portal. After all, it's just like closing a door, right? You rain the bells and spin.

[Slipperychicken]

Dismissal and Banishment spells: Every extraplanar outsider is weak to those.

My best advice is to not open the gate at all. You really don't want to flood the world with madness,

[Doorhandle]

Ye Powder of Ibn Ghazi
A special magical substance that renders them vulnerable (visible, corporeal, non-regenerating, non-invincible, whatever). This could be something more esoteric, too: a piece of music, a sound, a sentence, a unique spell, whatever. It won't defeat them by itself, but if prepared and used, it will make defeating them possible.

Ye Elder Sign
A symbol, substance, sentence, gesture, or other thing that wards off, frightens, shields from, conceals from, or simply banishes the beings.

Sealing the portal with such a symbol is a classic. (Cf. The Lurker at the Threshold, leaving a plot hook hanging around for later - when someone unseals the portal.)

Call/Dismiss Nyogtha
For each type of creature, and for each unique creature, there exists a particular spell to drive them away; these may be long rituals, requiring preparation, ingredients, sacrifices, and so on, and must be conducted precisely and perfectly to succeed.

Stick your head in the sand
The strain of existing in our reality is great, and they can only exist for so long. Eventually, they are forced to go away. Perhaps the portal remains open for a day, or a week, or a year; or, having closed after some hours or days, it intermittently and randomly opens, at greater and greater intervals. (Plot hook again.)

Also worth noting that the elder signs are fated to fail at some point in the future, leading to all sorts of nastiness.

I think taking a page from skyrim may be a cool idea. The "dragonrend" shout works by psychically/magically introducing the concept of mortality and a finite lifespan to an otherwise immortal species, making them vulnerable. You could apply the same rules to your monsters, using different concepts: such as limiting them to 3.d space and Euclidian geometry, or forcing them into a weaker form that can be viewed by mortal eyes.

[Slipperychicken]

I think taking a page from skyrim may be a cool idea. The "dragonrend" shout works by psychically/magically introducing the concept of mortality and a finite lifespan to an otherwise immortal species, making them vulnerable. You could apply the same rules to your monsters, using different concepts: such as limiting them to 3.d space and Euclidian geometry, or forcing them into a weaker form that can be viewed by mortal eyes.

I feel like it cheapens such beings to let mortals wield such power over them. Also, I don't think anything should let them be viewed normally: Their form (and their very nature) should always be incomprehensible and mind-rending. They aren't so horrible if they can be simply defeated without some great and terrible cost.

Like if you just want the role of "big scary outsider which you can totally kill", fiends fill that just fine. I feel like lovecraftian entities are better-suited to a more supernatural, psychological fear of the unknown and unknowable.

[Excession]

With the artifact being a pair of bookends, perhaps the weakness is related. If presented with an open book, the creatures will be sucked into it, imprisoned forever, or at least until some poor fool reads it. Incidentally, the book becomes essentially invulnerable after this happens. Maybe that was actually the point; someone wanted to keep silverfish out of their shelf of rare first editions, and ended up with a portal to hell as a side effect.

So you just hijack a library, collect all the demons, and throw them back into the portal. Except for that one that inevitably gets missed.

[Erik Vale]

I'm going to skip to the end here.

The Far Realms is inimical to life, why shouldn't life be inimical to it?
I remember mention of some adventure where in built in the module they summon something that makes Cuthulu look cute, however when it arrives [should the pc's fail] instead of destroying the world, the sheer number of humans cause it to go insane.

Sure, a human going to the far realms is a bad idea, have him learn that. And then have him see a far-spawn come through, and see a far-spawn become a jibbering wreck by far-spawn standards. Sure, it could still be violent and dangerous, but not the sort of thing you need to be extremely worried about.

[NichG]

Here's a thought - the primary mode of interaction is by changing that which is around them to be a bridge between their existence and the existence of the world they're entering.

So basically, its not so much that a giant Far Realms creature actually passes through the portal - that would be impossible, because it doesn't 'fit' in the space of the universe its entering. Instead, it alters the people around the gate to become the higher dimensions it needs to project its being into the universe, and therefore exists on an emergent level in the forms and altered states of the people influenced by the portal. This altered state can be in the form of a great massive creature, but this creature is formed through various mechanisms from the individual madmen created by the gate.

For example, something like a Shoggoth: perhaps it is a dream-creation of a thousand cultists, and if the cultists were to wake up, the Shoggoth would simply vanish; or perhaps it is literally a physical agglomeration of said cultists.

The weakness is that basically these creatures require sentient minds to have the necessary expansiveness to even attempt to create such a quasi-existence. So if you basically kill all life on the planet, they can't come through. More practically, if you move people far enough from the gate in all directions, it becomes difficult for them to exist on this side.

The problem is that each creature that comes through is itself a gate - e.g. witnessing it causes a creeping, spreading madness that brings more such creatures into existence. So this is the sort of weapon that could well backfire on the user unless they made sure to really scorch the earth around the impact point so that things didn't have a chance to spread. On the upside, there's a small self-correcting mechanism in that people who have been turned into gates (e.g. driven mad) tend to reveal themselves as such and also tend to have a much higher mortality rate, especially in a D&D-like world where people are so used to 'see a monster, kill a monster' and wouldn't try to e.g. ensconce them in a sanitarium where critical mass can be generated.

[Erik Vale]

-snip of awesome-

I think this is my favorite.

[Rift_Wolf]

Maybe the only way to close it to travel through the gate, imposing your own definitions of reality on their world, search for the cornerstone that reverses their ideas of an 'open' to 'closed' and then find out that's what all the Hounds of Tindalos that leapt through the gate into your world were trying to do as well?

I wonder who the REAL unspeakable horrors are, etc.

[NowhereMan583]

And how is he preventing more horrors from coming through to this side with a gate that big?

He's kind of not. It's not a very GOOD plan. It runs kind of like this:

1. Get a group of high-level wizards the party has previously formed a tenuous alliance with to mess with the artifact a bit. He wants them to add an off switch and modify it slightly so the gate can "bend" instead of just appearing across the shortest distance between the bookends. The complexity of this task will take five in-game YEARS... and it's only that fast because they have access to a fast-time demiplane.
2. Use the bookends to encircle the area in question with a ring-shaped gate, open side facing inward.
3. Wait.
4. Chase all the eldritch horrors back through the gate.
5. Close the gate.

Note that he's missing key elements like, for instance, what to do if it turns out they have wings or a burrow speed... he's got some two-dimensional thinking going on here. Or if they're just too strong for him to chase back through. Or if their presence permanently contaminates the land / damages reality / has other lasting effects. I'm not exploiting any of this to the degree that I COULD, because:

1. It's an epilogue to a campaign, not the actual campaign, so complications will just be slow and frustrating instead of interesting RP opportunities.
2. I want him to feel like he's accomplishing something.
3. I don't want to cause the apocalypse in a perfectly good campaign world.

Yeah, it's sounding like your next campaign is going to have to include an enormous wasteland of eldritch horror, unnatural geography, and alien ecology, caused by this crazy b*****d who did something incredibly ill-advised with this very powerful magic item...

Oh yeah. I'm already dreaming up templates for "Contaminated" humanoids in the next campaign. Kind of a pseudonatural-tiefling sort of thing...

With the artifact being a pair of bookends, perhaps the weakness is related. If presented with an open book, the creatures will be sucked into it, imprisoned forever, or at least until some poor fool reads it. Incidentally, the book becomes essentially invulnerable after this happens. Maybe that was actually the point; someone wanted to keep silverfish out of their shelf of rare first editions, and ended up with a portal to hell as a side effect.

So you just hijack a library, collect all the demons, and throw them back into the portal. Except for that one that inevitably gets missed.

I kind of like this concept, but normal books seem too... easy. Maybe they would have to be a specific kind of book, or enchanted in a specific way, or made with esoteric materials... hm.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure that the horrors are going to have the basic body plan of silverfish now.

[Starbuck_II]

So he came up with a plan that involves a lot of reconnaissance and research first, and one of the central questions he has is whether the creatures on the other side of this gate have a weakness he can exploit. I don't want to give him a cop-out answer like "not that you can tell", or "point-blank annihilation", but I also don't want it to be something dull like "silver".

Milk, butter, cheese!
Turns out all Far Realm creatures strangely avoid cows, the players do not know why.

[Excession]

I kind of like this concept, but normal books seem too... easy. Maybe they would have to be a specific kind of book, or enchanted in a specific way, or made with esoteric materials... hm.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure that the horrors are going to have the basic body plan of silverfish now.

And that's rather terrifying. Arthropods in general are pretty nasty when scaled up.

Edit: Does this mean the bookends cast "Summon Bigger Silverfish"?

[Erik Vale]

Edit: Does this mean the bookends cast "Summon Bigger Silverfish"?

... Is there a far-realm language? Because if so I think the bookends happen to have that written on them in far-realm.

[Slipperychicken]

If he causes the apocalypse, why not give him a game over, then retcon it so the game can continue, or "rewind" back to that fateful moment.

Perhaps the wizards might refuse his plan, likening it to the Xaxox expedition? They might say it's folly because Winterwood (the mad wizard and expidition-leader of Xaxox) would surely pervert the portal, then return and help unleash the typhoon wave of insanity he has been waiting for? Or they could point out the flaws we have already covered?

[Driderman]

Here's a thought - the primary mode of interaction is by changing that which is around them to be a bridge between their existence and the existence of the world they're entering.

So basically, its not so much that a giant Far Realms creature actually passes through the portal - that would be impossible, because it doesn't 'fit' in the space of the universe its entering. Instead, it alters the people around the gate to become the higher dimensions it needs to project its being into the universe, and therefore exists on an emergent level in the forms and altered states of the people influenced by the portal. This altered state can be in the form of a great massive creature, but this creature is formed through various mechanisms from the individual madmen created by the gate.

For example, something like a Shoggoth: perhaps it is a dream-creation of a thousand cultists, and if the cultists were to wake up, the Shoggoth would simply vanish; or perhaps it is literally a physical agglomeration of said cultists.

The weakness is that basically these creatures require sentient minds to have the necessary expansiveness to even attempt to create such a quasi-existence. So if you basically kill all life on the planet, they can't come through. More practically, if you move people far enough from the gate in all directions, it becomes difficult for them to exist on this side.

The problem is that each creature that comes through is itself a gate - e.g. witnessing it causes a creeping, spreading madness that brings more such creatures into existence. So this is the sort of weapon that could well backfire on the user unless they made sure to really scorch the earth around the impact point so that things didn't have a chance to spread. On the upside, there's a small self-correcting mechanism in that people who have been turned into gates (e.g. driven mad) tend to reveal themselves as such and also tend to have a much higher mortality rate, especially in a D&D-like world where people are so used to 'see a monster, kill a monster' and wouldn't try to e.g. ensconce them in a sanitarium where critical mass can be generated.

It was actually something like this I was imagining with my last post, just nowhere as thought out

[veti]

See, it's a really big gate. The artifact in question is a pair of bookends that, when activated, open a gate that fills all the space between them. And he wants to place them several miles apart.

I'm reminded of the time one of my party-mates tried to sacrifice a two-mile radius of densely-populated city to some archdevil or other.

He managed to build a suitably scaled-up sacrificial pentagram. Fortunately, he couldn't figure out how to get candles (think lighthouses) at all five points (several miles apart) to light up at the same time (by the time he got to the 3rd or 4th candle, someone had noticed the 1st one and taken it out).

Moral: extraordinary stupidity should require extraordinary resources...

[Erik Vale]

Thing is, resources have already been shown/told to be low, unless it turns out the curving needs lots of resources which could work.

Also, that sounds like a fun evil game.

[banthesun]

I kind of like this concept, but normal books seem too... easy. Maybe they would have to be a specific kind of book, or enchanted in a specific way, or made with esoteric materials... hm.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure that the horrors are going to have the basic body plan of silverfish now.

Hows this: all the horrors that invade already exist in a book somewhere in the world. For generations they have been invading the world, creeping into the minds of madmen and dreamers seeking to have their forms recorded. Because the gate is only enough to bring their bodies into the world. For their minds to exist they must be described in a book. Perhaps one of the wizards sent to help recognises one of the creatures since he has one of the books needed, having mistaken it for a textbook on far realms creatures. That should be at least the start of a clue how to stop them.