Creatures beyond our comprehension

[Asmayus]

I'm looking for images creatures that transcend understanding or explanation. It's so easy to describe something as being beyond comprehension but so few monsters out there capture it. Can you think of any? I'm aware of the Gibbering Horror, Shrieking Terror, Cthulhu, and the word "Psuedonatural", which after some unfruitful googling, has lead me to post here.

[A Tad Insane]

Yog sothoth or Azathoth (I think I spelled those right) are giant formless masses of madness

Edit: In fact, any Lovecraft monster besides Cthulhu would do, and Cthulhu only lost his terror because he's been reinterpret so many times as to remove all horror from him

[Amaril]

This may be some of what you're looking for.

Spoiler: Image

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[Tarlek Flamehai]

Women, any of 'em.

[Telok]

Try these

yog-blogsoth.blogspot.com

Pseudomonarchia_Daemonum

[DoomHat]

Pretty much anything ever conjured by the diseased mind of Junji Ito fits the bill I think.

Actually, come to think of it, Salvador Dali is actually the place to look.

Just try to imagine any one element, object or creature, from a Dali painting moving around in the normal world. If you just soiled yourself in terror, then congratulations, you've succeeded in picturing it accurately.

[Geostationary]

Motherfrickin' angels and their vast and alien gods.

Also, if we're being traditional about it the biblical God, though that's all I'll say on that matter.

[goto124]

Just try to imagine any one element, object or creature, from a Dali painting moving around in the normal world. If you just soiled yourself in terror, then congratulations, you've succeeded in picturing it accurately.

Instead, it just made me go 'what'.

Which, I guess, is the non-scary kind of 'beyond our comprehension'.

[Asmayus]

Cheers folks, you may consider me equal parts intrigued and sorry I asked.

I'll call that a successfully answered thread :D

[Honest Tiefling]

Just try to imagine any one element, object or creature, from a Dali painting moving around in the normal world. If you just soiled yourself in terror, then congratulations, you've succeeded in picturing it accurately.

Instead, it just made me go 'what'.

Which, I guess, is the non-scary kind of 'beyond our comprehension'.

I agree with goto124, all I got was thinking about a melting clock flopping around screaming 'heeeeeelp meeeeee' in a tiny little voice. It's not scary, it's hilarious.

[A Tad Insane]

Just try to imagine any one element, object or creature, from a Dali painting moving around in the normal world. If you just soiled yourself in terror, then congratulations, you've succeeded in picturing it accurately.

I can imagine all of it moving, and it makes perfect sense to me. Maybe I just stare at too much M. C. Escher, or maybe I'm just insane.

[Solaris]

I can imagine all of it moving, and it makes perfect sense to me. Maybe I just stare at too much M. C. Escher, or maybe I'm just insane.

Eh. Only a tad.

You know what creatures have driven men insane since the dawn of time? An incomprehensible mind-breaking creature that plagues mankind, unavoidable and inextricable?

Spoiler: MADNESS LURKS WITHIN!

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Women

[Jay R]

If you can describe it, or draw it, it doesn't fill the requirements. Here is a verbal non-description from Alan Moore's Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?:

"I can't describe what <it> became. It had width, breadth, height, and a couple of other things. ... It hurt my head to look at it."

[JusticeZero]

Honestly, I find it to work best if the horrors ARE comprehensible, but use alien rules. For instance, I had a game on a ruined Kirbyverse world once. The characters were always having to jump off high places, at minimal danger (in D20 terms, falling damage was capped at one point, DC 4 Tumbling check to avoid, for terminal velocity), and casting metal.

They found a huge metal object left by the invaders impaled through one of their gods, thus trapping it in statue form about on the scale of the Statue of Liberty. They broke some of it off and tried to melt it down, but had difficulty - it was an irregular piece, and if you turned it 360 degrees, you found you weren't looking at it at the same angle as before - you had to turn it 720 degrees to turn it around once, so they had to rotate it in the fire to heat it up. Then they dug the bottom of the rock out to get the bar out, and it dropped like a rock, wrecking stuff below. Between the two behaviors of the material, they seemed pretty freaked out. However, the alien stuff worked on predictable physics, just alien ones. Every time they figured out a bit more about the things, they got more creeped out by the alienness and not once did I try to retreat to "indescribable" and the like.

There are a lot of alien things in the world to use as a basis. For creatures, any extremophile or invertebrate is likely to have a remote enough craziness to use and work with. For physics, just read any of the new stuff on particles or whatever. One physics student I knew remarked that their favorite professor started out the class by telling everyone that their lectures were once a week on Thursday, and on any given week, if anyone hadn't found themselves wandering sleepless and gibbering at random people at 3 AM by Monday, they needed to be in his office to find out what they didn't understand from the lecture. Then proceeded to explain something about how everything in the universe was equidistant to everything else but that size was a dimension.