Are Illithids unknowable terrors?

[Vahnavoi]

Oh, I don't disagree with you. I just wanted to raise a couple of additional points about LotFP, because I could.

[Psyren]

I’m not saying they should always be offered as pc’s but the argument that I always hear against them is that they are unknowable horrors.

What do you mean by "argument against them?" Being playable?

They are playable in D&D (3e anyway), they have a level adjustment. Tables that don't allow them typically either don't allow monsters at all, or don't allow LA that big.

[Grim Portent]

Even most of the entities from Lovecraft had pretty understandable plans, insofar as they involved humanity anyway. They were mostly just powerful aliens who didn't care about humans beyond finding them entertaining to torture and kill. Some of them even had children with humanity which were relatively ordinary people, barring the ocult aspects to their being.*

Mind flayers are no more incomphrehensible than various organisms from our planet. As is they're basically squid-headed-vampires. They make new members of their species from humans, feed on humans, can mentally influence and control humans, and are individually more powerful than humans. Hell, there's plenty of people who've postulated human societies run by Mind Flayers who decided cooperation would be more practical, and they look almost identical to the ones people propose for vampires.

If you aren't primed to be scared of Lovecraftian tentacle gooblies and the implications of their existence then they're no scarier than anything from old monster movies. Mind flayers don't usually even have the implications present in Lovecraftian gooblies about humanity being insignificant specks of no grand importance to the cosmos, so they just rely on being evil and a little gross, sometimes with inhumane nazi-esque experiments on living people to reinforce a sense of revulsion.


*I would say Lovecraftian horror has aged in the same way the horror aspects of Frankenstein have. The cultural values that made it work are largely absent in a modern audience.

[Duff]

On this, to be truly horrifying to most players, you have to be using ideas which won't be published for a mass audience*
To be unknowable, it has to be arbitrary to everyone, which can be unsatisfying or just wildly inconsistent. If you're consistent then you're doing things which make sense, and if it makes sense it can be understood

* Which I think is a good thing

[Wizard_Lizard]

Honestly I am lucky my players have no grasp of dnd lore and I can have things like Mind Flayers and Aboleths be weird and terrifying.

[Segev]

Even most of the entities from Lovecraft had pretty understandable plans, insofar as they involved humanity anyway. They were mostly just powerful aliens who didn't care about humans beyond finding them entertaining to torture and kill. Some of them even had children with humanity which were relatively ordinary people, barring the ocult aspects to their being.*

Mind flayers are no more incomphrehensible than various organisms from our planet. As is they're basically squid-headed-vampires. They make new members of their species from humans, feed on humans, can mentally influence and control humans, and are individually more powerful than humans. Hell, there's plenty of people who've postulated human societies run by Mind Flayers who decided cooperation would be more practical, and they look almost identical to the ones people propose for vampires.

If you aren't primed to be scared of Lovecraftian tentacle gooblies and the implications of their existence then they're no scarier than anything from old monster movies. Mind flayers don't usually even have the implications present in Lovecraftian gooblies about humanity being insignificant specks of no grand importance to the cosmos, so they just rely on being evil and a little gross, sometimes with inhumane nazi-esque experiments on living people to reinforce a sense of revulsion.


*I would say Lovecraftian horror has aged in the same way the horror aspects of Frankenstein have. The cultural values that made it work are largely absent in a modern audience.

A fairly accurate assessment. I will add that the "man is insignificant on a cosmic scale" thing doesn't bother me whether true or not. (I don't believe it, but that is outside the scope of this thread.) If it is true, we're still significant to ourselves, and we're demonstrably too robust to be randomly removed from the board. If it is not true, then even less reason to be scared by the concept.

Heck, I tend to be the sort who, in a Lovecraft story, would "go mad from learning things man was not meant to know," but likely would be the demon-sorcerer transformed by that knowledge. And I'd probably consider that a victory in such a world. I also tend to think a real lovecraft story would be closer to Star Trek than Lovecraft. The horror and mystery would be there, but man would rise up to understand it and grasp it.

But even that's just "warring genre" discussion.

What I think is a more interesting question is: how can we take illithids and make, for a modern audience, the kind of chilling, stomach-dropping discomfort that the notions of Lovecraft posed to Lovecraft himself and his contemporaries?

Ultimately, I think the "existential" aspect of Lovecraft's "existential horror" is a fear of death through powerlessness. Yes, it's expressed through these "big concepts" of man's insignificance, but it comes down to "we're like ants, and like ants, we can be squished without the boot even knowing it stepped on us." Again, it's "man vs. nature" where nature is more innately hostile than usual, because the aliens are almost non-agents insofar as our existence goes.

Agency being the ability to make informed decisions (even partially-informed). A human is not an agent when he steps on a beetle in the grass; he didn't know it was there, and could not have made a choice to avoid it because he didn't know it was there to avoid. In this sense, Lovecraftian aliens are often not agents insofar as human life is concerned.

I suppose the horror, here, arises from the notion that the thing unintentionally killing you IS an agent that, given information, could choose differently. It's the horror of watching somebody who thinks they're just pushing the button on an elevator push the button that also triggers the bomb that will blow up your own neck collar. While you're gagged and unable to communicate with them. It's somehow worse, knowing it's a choice they're making but that they aren't even thinking about you, than if it were just an oncoming lava flow that was going to destroy you because that's physics.

On the other hand, a lot of Lovecraftian aliens are able to recognize humanity as a thing. Even as something relevant to our plans. The "Nazi-like experiment" business that is part of what makes mindflayers scary is involved, here. These things are "so far beyond humanity" that it's like a human conducting experiments on mice, or ants, or whatnot. If you found yourself in a mouse's body, and couldn't communicate to the scientists conducting the experiments that they shouldn't be doing this to you, that'd be pretty horrific.

But is that really enough to go beyond revulsion and saying, "Oh, they're evil monsters," into true horror? Part will depend on presentation, which is always a challenge in a tabletop RPG.

I think either emphasizing the dehumanization of it (where the illithids don't even acknowledge there's a mind there that's important enough to consider), or playing it up such that they just see nothing wrong with tormenting you and barely register that you DO see something wrong with it, and are content to have cordial conversation even as they torment or destroy you.

This is distinct from the "demonic" sort of evil, where the pain of the victim is relished.

[Mechalich]

I think either emphasizing the dehumanization of it (where the illithids don't even acknowledge there's a mind there that's important enough to consider), or playing it up such that they just see nothing wrong with tormenting you and barely register that you DO see something wrong with it, and are content to have cordial conversation even as they torment or destroy you.

In the Drizzt novel Exile, when Drizzt and his companions are captured by Illithids the Illithids just perma-lockdown their minds, without really even bothering to look into them in any detail. They simply don't care what these 'lesser beings' are capable of thinking at all, they're only interested in their utility as organic automatons in service to the community. They don't see what they're doing to others as torment because they both don't recognize the minds of others species as aware and they have no problem doing whatever they want to other such things. The idea of 'animal cruelty' simply doesn't exist to Illithids, and from their perspective all other species are functionally animals. They view holding gladiatorial games with mind-controlled minions more like a session of Battlebots than an actual gladiatorial contest.

I think that remains a viable horror angle for Illithids. Though the tricky part, of course, is that mechanically Illithid mind control really isn't anything special and as individual monsters they aren't actually that powerful (and they have a bunch of specific vulnerabilities). It's hard to present as invincible masters of the mind when the invincibility part is so easily challenged (this is a general issue with horror in tabletop as a whole though).

[Grim Portent]

I'm not sure there really is a way to present a race, or any enemy really, that inspires existential dread, except perhaps when presented as a problem on a scope so large it's unbeatable or at least artfully implies that what you see is a mere fragment of what is.

Inhumane experiments, casual dismissal of others as thinking beings, indifference to the concept of inherent rights, all that stuff is more likely to create revulsion and hatred more than horror. I would be horrified by the acts of Mind Flayers but I wouldn't find the creatures horrific in themselves, and I've played several characters who were basically as evil as they are, and have character ideas that I haven't had a chance to play who might be more evil than Mind Flayers are usually presented as.

I've been scared of some things on a personal level, the '****, that thing will tear my arms off in two rounds,' kind of fear, but true terror or horror requires a lot of build up which most games aren't paced for. Not to mention the whole mood can be punctured by one well placed joke on someone's part. You could spend a year building up mind flayers, creating tension, fear, insinuating something so terrible and dire... then someone makes a Zoidberg joke the first time they actually see a Mind Flayer and the whole mood collapses.

I do think they suffer a bit from being on the diet side of the horror spectrum. Sociopathic scientists, mind control, cannibals, parasites, aliens, lovecraftian abominations, etcetera have all been done, and often done much more intensely than Mind Flayers. Doesn't help that they're associated with goofy looking things like the intellect devourer, a brain running around on lizard feet sounds like a rejected prop from a knock off version of the Thing.

If I were to try and get some of the horror they're supposed to bring into a game, it would probably start with more passive environmental details putting humans at the bottom of the food chain and prey to a hostile universe. Start with humans who've become hosts to creatures similar to the broodsac flatworm and just found a convenient place to sit and wait for the parasites next host to come along and eat them. Still fully sapient and aware, it's just that their brain's been overridden to think that being eaten by a roc is a decent idea, while parasitic worms pulsate through the swollen skin of their cranium. Work up from there, various creatures and even ideas being predatory, but in a more grotesque and passive way than something like a manticore. Eventually build up to mind flayers as the foremost example of a universe where cruelty rules and mankind is merely meat. Would probably up the body horror of ceremorphosis so that mind flayers actually look horrifying as well.

Maybe go with an infection theme? Tone down the brain eating, up the spread of tadpoles into more and more things, with the implication that it's all a small part of a bigger parasitic lifecycle. Maybe even make them keep more of the original person, but act as a prosthesis for bits that they feed on like the tongue-eating louse does.

[icefractal]

A fairly accurate assessment. I will add that the "man is insignificant on a cosmic scale" thing doesn't bother me whether true or not. (I don't believe it, but that is outside the scope of this thread.)

Very true. "Imagine if there was no God and no underlying purpose to the cosmos!" ... "So, like normal then?"

I saw a good quote about that, but it's from a sig, so all I know is it comes from "Mord":

Today if I say to the man on the street, "Did you know that the world you live in is a fragile veneer of normality over an uncaring universe, that we could all die at any moment at the whim of beings unknown to us for reasons having nothing to do with ourselves, and that as far as the rest of the universe is concerned, nothing anyone ever did with their life has ever mattered?" his response, if any, will be "Yes, of course; now if you'll excuse me, I need to retweet Sonic the Hedgehog." What do you even do with that?

[Grim Portent]

That reminds me of another issue with horror in a D&D context, nearly guaranteed afterlife and ressurection. Death is not the undiscovered country, you can in fact go visit it for a picnic. So what if you got tortured to death in cruel experiments and your brain was eaten by a squidman? You met your god and chilled out on a cloud for a few weeks before coming back to life only a little worse for wear. No matter what the illithid may assert about the universe, any cleric can ask their god about it and get told 'nah, us gods exist and do care about you.'

In Dark Heresy by contrast the only way to come back from death is an expensive, illegal and debilitating cyborg reconstruction which needs to be done relatively quick, and you can actually be maimed, disfigured and suffer from mental trauma. As a result my brother and I are far more scared of Genestealers, Chaos Daemons or Slaugth than anything in D&D. I'd sooner fight Tiamat with a pointy stick than try to take on a Genestealer while wearing power armour. At least in the former case I can come back to life and suffer no risk of long term side effects.

[Wizard_Lizard]

I would like to say, fear of death is very valid for evil pcs.

[Mechalich]

I wouldn't say the fear of death is particularly relevant to the horror issue at all. In tabletop, death isn't really all that horrifying, because it means the player rolls up a new character. They might be pissed at losing the old one, but unless the game is extremely immersive (so like, less than 1% of all games, and probably less than 0.1% of all D&D games), they're unlikely to be horrified at what happened to the character.

The real issue is that D&D has no horror affiliated mechanics. The game is extremely adverse to damaging a character's mental state in any sort of permanent way (as opposed to being afflicted by 'fear' for a few rounds or similar spell effects) and most of the methods that do exist, like ability drain, impact capability rather than stability. Consequently, having 'your brain eaten by a squidman' isn't necessarily associated with any sort of character trauma at all. PCs just sleep that s*** off the same way they do anything else. This isn't surprising, D&D has wargame roots, and initially characters weren't really expected to survive long enough to actually accumulate any trauma, and if they did, it was assumed the table would handle that by fiat anyway, but since D&D is a highly competitive gameplay environment, there's generally considerable social pressure to avoid taking on any sort of character limitation that isn't mandated.

This is the reason why actual horror-based TTRPGs have horror mechanics of some kind. In Call of Cthuhlu everyone slowly goes insane. In Eclipse Phase your character is mostly impossible to kill, but accumulating trauma can turn them into a gibbering vegetable. Even in the oWoD characters struggled with various forms of loss of self (through loss of humanity as Vampires) or growing madness (through the various 'quiet' mechanics in MtA). All of these mechanics have various strengths and weaknesses, but they do at least provide a framework for allowing a kind of horror to emerge in gameplay.

[Segev]

I wouldn't say the fear of death is particularly relevant to the horror issue at all. In tabletop, death isn't really all that horrifying, because it means the player rolls up a new character. They might be pissed at losing the old one, but unless the game is extremely immersive (so like, less than 1% of all games, and probably less than 0.1% of all D&D games), they're unlikely to be horrified at what happened to the character.

The real issue is that D&D has no horror affiliated mechanics. The game is extremely adverse to damaging a character's mental state in any sort of permanent way (as opposed to being afflicted by 'fear' for a few rounds or similar spell effects) and most of the methods that do exist, like ability drain, impact capability rather than stability. Consequently, having 'your brain eaten by a squidman' isn't necessarily associated with any sort of character trauma at all. PCs just sleep that s*** off the same way they do anything else. This isn't surprising, D&D has wargame roots, and initially characters weren't really expected to survive long enough to actually accumulate any trauma, and if they did, it was assumed the table would handle that by fiat anyway, but since D&D is a highly competitive gameplay environment, there's generally considerable social pressure to avoid taking on any sort of character limitation that isn't mandated.

This is the reason why actual horror-based TTRPGs have horror mechanics of some kind. In Call of Cthuhlu everyone slowly goes insane. In Eclipse Phase your character is mostly impossible to kill, but accumulating trauma can turn them into a gibbering vegetable. Even in the oWoD characters struggled with various forms of loss of self (through loss of humanity as Vampires) or growing madness (through the various 'quiet' mechanics in MtA). All of these mechanics have various strengths and weaknesses, but they do at least provide a framework for allowing a kind of horror to emerge in gameplay.

I actually find "horror-oriented mechanics" of the sort that CoC and many like it use to be...underwhelming.

There's nothing more immersion-breaking than being told how your character feels when you, yourself, aren't feeling it. And these mechanics just tell you how your character feels. Worse, horror is the situation that you need immersion in the most.

Now, I've gone on at length about how to apply mechanics to characters that make a player feel some of the pressures the character feels, but this doesn't quite work for horror. For horror, you need to limit the player's information in a way that represents what the character does.

This can greatly increase the load on the GM. Especially since the best way to handle madness is to gaslight the player via the character's incorrect perceptions of reality.

[Vahnavoi]

The real issue is that D&D has no horror affiliated mechanics.

You need to rethink your standars of "horror affliated mechanics". LoTFP's player-facing mechanics are straightforward B/X retroclone, it's still an efficient horror game.

Mechanically modelling mental state of characters isn't particularly relevant, because creating horror is about mental state of players. Sanity mechanics are only useful if they serve as a vehicle to get to the player.

To use a video game example, Eternal Darkness has a highly effective sanity system. It's effective because it doesn't just concern the character. It actively breaks the fourth wall in ways that would unsettle the player. One example that actually made my bro scream in terror: the game put up a prompt "Do you wish to delete all saved games?" as if my bro had just accidentally pressed a menu button. And of course, once my bro predictably pressed "No", the game gleefully informed it's "Deleting all save files".

For a tabletop example, you know the one real mechanic that's actually made my players shut their eyes and cover their ears and chant "Lalala this is not happeni~ing" ? A random encounter chart with spiders on it. Turns out, arachnophobia is pretty common and some people get pale at the idea of fictional spiders. (This wasn't intentional on my part; it was a convention game and all the players were strangers to me. The frightened player's character wasn't even the one facing the spider, so them shutting themselves out of that event was a complete non-issue.)

Point is, you don't create horror by making characters behave irrational and insane, you create horror by prompting irrational thought and insanity already present in your players. If your players are perfect pictures of rationality, sanity and stoic virtue, no mechanic can help you.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Now, I've gone on at length about how to apply mechanics to characters that make a player feel some of the pressures the character feels, but this doesn't quite work for horror. For horror, you need to limit the player's information in a way that represents what the character does.

Point is, you don't create horror by making characters behave irrational and insane, you create horror by prompting irrational thought and insanity already present in your players. If your players are perfect pictures of rationality, sanity and stoic virtue, no mechanic can help you.

I'm definitely with Vahnavoi on this one. I don't think character-facing mechanics, limiting information, using unknown monsters, etc. really work for horror, for all of the reasons mentioned already (different social context than Lovecraft's day, genre conflicts, death not being a permanent penalty, and so forth) plus the fact that a lot of the basic beats of horror are already present in D&D in different forms.

Tentacly things from outer space want to take over the Prime and don't even care that they're wiping out (what they view as) sub-sapient beasts? Big whoop, there are infinite layers of the Abyss full of infinite demons who want to wipe out humanity, but unlike the Lovecraftian beastsies they're going to enjoy every minute of it. There are nameless Elder Gods beyond the stars of unknown power who have unknown plans regarding mortal life? Big whoop, there's an embodiment of entropy out there named Tharizdun, and unlike the Old Ones he has fully known power and fully known plans, which are respectively "enough that an entire pantheon couldn't put him down, they had to imprison him beyond reality and he can still reach into it with the power of an intermediate deity" and "destroy absolutely everything everywhere and if he gets out you're totally screwed."

In my experience, it's the known monsters (or other threats) that work for horror because it's the act of playing against monsters and having terrible things happen that makes players really dread dealing with them again.

Several campaigns ago, my party walked into an encounter with an aboleth going "What, a big ugly tentacled fish thing with illusion powers? How bad could it be?", got their asses completely handed to them, and spent a few sessions as aboleth thralls until they finally managed to pull off a convoluted plan to free themselves from domination...and then went back to confront the aboleth again and got their asses handed to them again. Now, any time a plot hook takes them anywhere near deep water or subterranean lakes, they all go "Oh ****, there better not be a ****ing aboleth around here" and take a whole bunch of precautions, just in case.

The campaign after that, my party went into it viewing elves as basically poncy humans with pointy ears and a thing for longbows, but the elves they encountered were Norse-mythology-and-fairy-tales sort, sealers of oaths and stealers of children and speakers of cryptic riddles. Now, whenever the party runs into a finely-dressed elf noble or a solitary elf in the wilderness who greets them with an enigmatic smile, they all go "Oh ****, it's an elf. Prep cold iron, don't make any promises, and write down exactly what they say in case it's important later."

Illithids, balors, liches, and other big baddies are objectively stronger and more capable of causing lasting harm to the party than either aboleths or elves, but my players go into encounters with those guys with a smile because they're only in-game challenges and they don't have that metagame fear/aversion/trauma/whatever for the former that they do for the latter. If you're going to make illithids scary, I'll bet dollars to donuts it's not going to happen the first time you send them against the party, or maybe even the second, it's only going to happen the third or fourth time around.

[Mechalich]

The thing about horror in tabletop is you have to translate the horror from character horror to player horror. You can't do that just by metagaming - if you trigger some player's phobia through the presentation of an in game element all you've done is impose real-world horror through a roundabout means. The same thing is true of breaking the fourth wall. The GM may be able to horrify the players that way, but it's not a in-game element.

In game horror mostly requires making the characters care about something in game and then continually threaten them with losing it. Character death doesn't really work with this because unless you have a very specific sort of wounding system that allows health to degrade across multiple sessions, characters bounce from perfectly fine to death's door and back so commonly that no tension can build. You can have characters fear losing in-game assets of some kind, and this can work - the most horrifying monster in D&D is arguably the humble Rust Monster - though it requires the characters to have assets in the first place. A horror-based in-game mechanic can work in this way by essentially mapping out an otherwise unmonitored asset, like sanity, or mental stability, or whatever, and then gradually strip that asset down so characters move close and closer to the edge and leaving the player constantly worried about when, rather than if, they'll lose them.

[Vahnavoi]

You can have characters fear losing in-game assets of some kind, and this can work - the most horrifying monster in D&D is arguably the humble Rust Monster - though it requires the characters to have assets in the first place.

See? D&D has horror affliated mechanics after all.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

The thing about horror in tabletop is you have to translate the horror from character horror to player horror. You can't do that just by metagaming - if you trigger some player's phobia through the presentation of an in game element all you've done is impose real-world horror through a roundabout means. The same thing is true of breaking the fourth wall. The GM may be able to horrify the players that way, but it's not a in-game element.

Certainly, you can't lean entirely on metagaming and waving previous game experiences in the players' faces, you do have to layer that on top of the in-character elements, if I wasn't clear about that. But I do feel both layers are necessary for a threat to work at all due to how free from permanent consequences characters otherwise are.

To take your example of rust monsters, "Oh no, we might lose all of our sweet items!" is scary both in-game and out-of-game, but it's scary in an abstract sort of way ("Those creatures are stupid beasts, if we all toss our daggers at it it probably won't be much of a threat" in-game and "I doubt the DM is actually going to screw us out of our gear, we can probably get out of this with everything intact" out-of-game, for instance). It's only when some PCs get their heirloom battleaxe or holy avenger eaten that the rust monster becomes a tangible threat, that the PCs know the easy solutions won't always work and the players know the DM isn't going to pull any punches, and so the in- and out-of-game horror come together to make things work.

Same goes for non-horror threats, really, like wizards losing spellbooks and any PCs getting NPCs from their background killed off. In-game, wizards should be super-paranoid about their only source of power and adventurers should be more protective of their friends and loved ones, but you don't see that caution really reflected in player behavior until they've had it happen to them once (or, in the case of bad DMs, continually get burned by it) and then you see any future wizards in the party make backup and traveling spellbooks out the wazoo and PCs be much more cautious about leading threats to their family's doorstep.

[Grim Portent]

Thinking about it a bit, I think the ability, and expectation, to nope out of a scenario is an important part of horror. Being able to retreat from the unfathomable and abandon the area it's in to it's fate is a big piece of encouraging feelings of being small.

If you're able and expected to slash and smash your way through the eldritch as par for the course with minimal risk then they're just like any monster.

If you're genuinely having to evaluate the possibility that you might die or be injured in a way that outweighs your desire to stop the eldritch, and you know that walking away is an easy option, there's a lot more gut wrenching tension there. That tension helps draw you in, makes the stakes feel more real.


If you can reliably kill the Deep Ones then Innsmouth isn't forboding, if you could maybe kill the Deep Ones, but also might get injured or die in the attempt it encourages a feeling of waryness while in the area that can lead into more genuine fear, or even attempts to placate the threat.



Obviously assuming you care enough about the characters that you'd feel genuine emotions about them. Without that there's not really anyway to have stakes.

[Vahnavoi]

@Grim Portent:

What you talk about is important feature of LotFP scenarios, such as Death Frost Doom and Death Love Doom. They give players hints that things are seriously off, and leave a lot of room to just flee the scenario before things get too bad.

A lot of players still continue out of perverse sense of curiosity. The key part is that once the situation escalates and they no longer can flee, they know it's because they didn't flee in time.

[Segev]

I'm definitely with Vahnavoi on this one. I don't think character-facing mechanics, limiting information, using unknown monsters, etc. really work for horror, for all of the reasons mentioned already (different social context than Lovecraft's day, genre conflicts, death not being a permanent penalty, and so forth) plus the fact that a lot of the basic beats of horror are already present in D&D in different forms.

I clearly didn't get my point across, because I also agree with Vahnavoi on this point.

I am not talking about giving them "oh, this monster is so mysterious, because you don't know what it is or what it's stats are" sorts of limiting information. I mean limiting their information the same way Silent Hill 2 does: thick fog, for instance.

It would be tricky to use, but placing figures on a map and carefully controlling their vision distance with monsters you hint are just outside...but you do not place on the map except when they can see them, would give some sense of that unease.

I'm talking about giving them untrustworthy information when their characters are hallucinating.

I'm talking about giving them "oh, it was just a cat" moments. And making them doubt whether they were, in fact, just cats.

Tentacly things from outer space want to take over the Prime and don't even care that they're wiping out (what they view as) sub-sapient beasts? Big whoop, there are infinite layers of the Abyss full of infinite demons who want to wipe out humanity, but unlike the Lovecraftian beastsies they're going to enjoy every minute of it. There are nameless Elder Gods beyond the stars of unknown power who have unknown plans regarding mortal life? Big whoop, there's an embodiment of entropy out there named Tharizdun, and unlike the Old Ones he has fully known power and fully known plans, which are respectively "enough that an entire pantheon couldn't put him down, they had to imprison him beyond reality and he can still reach into it with the power of an intermediate deity" and "destroy absolutely everything everywhere and if he gets out you're totally screwed."

In my experience, it's the known monsters (or other threats) that work for horror because it's the act of playing against monsters and having terrible things happen that makes players really dread dealing with them again.

Like I said, I wasn't advocating making the monsters "unknown." Making them unsettling is less about knowing nothing about them, and more about how off from the instinctive human expectation they behave. Even if you KNOW they behave that way, it clashes with your expectations and makes them...disquieting.

Several campaigns ago, my party walked into an encounter with an aboleth going "What, a big ugly tentacled fish thing with illusion powers? How bad could it be?", got their asses completely handed to them, and spent a few sessions as aboleth thralls until they finally managed to pull off a convoluted plan to free themselves from domination...and then went back to confront the aboleth again and got their asses handed to them again. Now, any time a plot hook takes them anywhere near deep water or subterranean lakes, they all go "Oh ****, there better not be a ****ing aboleth around here" and take a whole bunch of precautions, just in case.

Sounds like it wasn't a horror thing for them, even now, but they did learn healthy respect for them.

Thinking about it a bit, I think the ability, and expectation, to nope out of a scenario is an important part of horror. Being able to retreat from the unfathomable and abandon the area it's in to it's fate is a big piece of encouraging feelings of being small.

If you're able and expected to slash and smash your way through the eldritch as par for the course with minimal risk then they're just like any monster.

If you're genuinely having to evaluate the possibility that you might die or be injured in a way that outweighs your desire to stop the eldritch, and you know that walking away is an easy option, there's a lot more gut wrenching tension there. That tension helps draw you in, makes the stakes feel more real.

This is an important point, horror or not: not everything has to be a fight to the death, and you should have loss conditions that don't require dying.

In horror, you're right about part of the "feeling of insignificance" horror arising from the need to consider that throwing away your life won't make any difference. Though you also war with the futility that creates in players; do they feel like it's worth playing if they can't make a difference?

Which is why the stakes being personal in horror are so important. The players SHOULD make a difference...even if not in the cosmic scale.

[Telok]

Try a thought experiment.

Someone invents, and sells in all stores world wide, a watch with a button on it. It basically casts D&D plane shift on you but only goes to an alternate dimension Earth(s).

The big difference between our Earth and the alts is that there were never humans on the alts, they're pristine, unspoiled, Earth duplicates without people. Except... There are a whole lot of wolves everywhere. Lots. But that's ok. Even though a rabid wolf or a wolf pack can kill a few unprepared humans we, as individuals and societies, can handle wolves. Oh, and the wolves are made of chocolate. Some form of chocolate that has lots of nice vitamins, does not rot teeth or make you fat, and it cures acne & hair loss.

So some choco-wolves get brought back to be farmed and anyone can go visit and exploit a nice new planet. Strap on your magic watch, put on a personal flotation device (plane shift is a bit inaccurate), and make sure your ultrasonic wolf repeller tool has a full charge. Humans are the illithids here.

Run your illithids like that. A scientist coming to study how being made of chocolate makes these wolves biology different. Someone who wants to live alone in a new wilderness. Someone starting a new chocolate farm. A dog breeder trying to domesticate or hybridize.

[Vahnavoi]

If you want to explore "tentacled brain-eating monsters treat us like we treat animals", I think there are ways to grasp that which don't involve chocolate wolves. But it was good for a laugh.

[Lo'Tek]

Mind flayers don't usually even have the implications present in Lovecraftian gooblies about humanity being insignificant specks of no grand importance to the cosmos

Well they do have that cosmic sense of scale, but usual encounters between heroes and Illithids do not project it. The Illithids are a faction of an interdimensional-intergalatic timewar. They consider the gods their enemies and the bloodwar of grand importance. So a human farmer boy who never even knew of such things, grew up with a single pantheon and can, at most understand "orcs raid village = bad" is not of much relevance. In a way the illithids fear orcs more then humans, because if every shaman had a vision calling them to wage WAAAGH! against the illithids, that would be a serious problem and with humans, due to their diverse set of believes, that doesn't happen.

Humans are, at cosmic scale, even worse to handle then even the chaotic Drow: the later have accepted that the key centers of information and power in drow society have an "illithid advisor", they piggyback on the net woven by the spiderdaemon queen. Humans do not even have such a common society: some illithids spent two hundred years to empower a local monarchic dynasty and place a key asset and out of the blue some "heroes" assassinate that asset and the next illithid to check the situation finds the whole imperial kingdom is gone and now a collection of free merchant cities.

So the illithid places itself as advisor to some thiefguild/spymasters to at least keep information flowing and it discovers some humans are flying around in a magic sailboat. That means all hands on deck: such a situation has a 7 in 10 chance to turn into an organized spelljammer-harbor and human ingenuity will have them industrialize that in just two hundred years to the point where they have a small fleet in orbit of that one world in this one dimension. That is bad news - not a WAAAGH! level problem - but one that needs to be calculated with. Yet there is also a 3 in 10 chance it will just disappear after this one sailboat gets eaten by some space-monster without the heroes telling anyone the secrets of the Arcane, because they probably don't even know, or some high-elves told them to keep it secret, or something like that.

And then the illithid spymaster-advisor is also assassinated and the next to go there is also killed on sight. Drows don't do that, they kill the drow-head-mistress and maybe replace the whole house, but they keep the basic structure of society, keep the illithid-advisor or at least accept a replacement. Such "kill on sight" methods hints at heroes that work with High-Elves, or worse, Gith - both fanatic factions that won't agree on any temporary cooperative coexistence or similar common ground for larger scale reasons. But it could also be coincidence. So: send another agent into the meat-grinder or call a ship to check it or wait 100 years and if they are building a spelljammer hub, bomb it from orbit? Dominating the whole surface (of this planet in this dimension) isn't scheduled for another millennia and accelerating it has been discussed and can not be prioritized, so small localized operations it must be.

And then those (propably elven puppet) heroes get annoyed because they feel like they are only seen as "insignificant specks" and not as valued enemies of the great illithid empire. Like they even understand what that means. Humanity is the battleground of a proxy war. This Human "neutral - on average" thing makes little sense on the grand scale. Drows, Githyanki and Tanar-Ri are, as factions, at least predictably chaotic evil and work along some definable axis, but humans are just all over the place. They are not a unified faction, they don't teach their children plane-shift magic despite knowing it, and most don't even care about the blood-war. From the illithid perspective, Humans would be an unknowable cosmic horror, if they were not mostly harmless on the cosmic scale.

What I think is a more interesting question is: how can we take illithids and make, for a modern audience, the kind of chilling, stomach-dropping discomfort that the notions of Lovecraft posed to Lovecraft himself and his contemporaries?
...
On the other hand, a lot of Lovecraftian aliens are able to recognize humanity as a thing. Even as something relevant to our plans. The "Nazi-like experiment" business that is part of what makes mindflayers scary is involved, here. These things are "so far beyond humanity" that it's like a human conducting experiments on mice, or ants, or whatnot. If you found yourself in a mouse's body, and couldn't communicate to the scientists conducting the experiments that they shouldn't be doing this to you, that'd be pretty horrific.

There is a lot of gore, body-horror and mind-horror around illithids, but to experience that, one would need to be captured by them and enslaved in one of their cities.

Eat what you know is the meat of the npc you just talked to yesterday, who went into the arena a few hours ago, or go into hunger strike and get force-fed. Watch how they deform and mutilate someone by implanting a claw-like hand and thick scaled hide to make arena fights more entertaining. Learn to understand that most of the slaves aren't psi-dominated 24/7, but that planning rebellion is impossible, because anyone could betray it - without even wanting to - at any moment.

Get used to the horror of an orwellian terror where there is a literal "thought police" that can read minds and tortures thralls for thinking the wrong thoughts. And you can see that in your companions, see the paladin stop praying, her skin turning grey, the fire in her eyes goes out as she turns blind ... and then she is just gone. And while you scrub the floor you see two squid-heads training hand-to-hand and you KNOW those scars, her scars, and you scream in silence in your mind and notice you stopped working and that you stare at them and that they stare at you and you know you did wrong and you just want to run away but instead you roll two saving throws at -4 each turn until you black out. Only to awake in chains being dragged along the floor towards the chambers of agonizing pain and torment. And as you whimper below your breath "just let me die" you can hear it in your mind, a voice so clear, so structured and powerful that it leaves no question: NO.

The problem with the true illithid horror is that - by definition - it takes away player agency: a PC can escape when a DM gives them an opportunity and part of the horror is that even considering the opportunity will lead to punishment if discovered, because they can read minds. Again you are scrubbing the floor and notice the guards missing from a doorway. Dirts gets dragged in from that direction and many fresh prints show movement from the arena slave quarters towards it. You remain silent for a second and listen you hear faint combat noise in the far distance. And as you make a decision, drop your work and step towards the doorway two invisible illithids decloak and you can start rolling saving throws at -4 until you black out.

Many days later you are taking care of some rothe and find an opportunity to escape and you run deep into the underdark, wandering through caverns for many hours, trying to find water, food, rest, before exhaustion gets to you and you can't walk anymore and collapse on the cold stone floor. And in your mind you have all these thoughts swirling: why did i do that? They gave me food. It was warm there. I should go back. I should never have left. They will punish me for leaving. They might reward me for coming back. And you can't sleep because the voices keep you awake and so you scream into the darkness "get out of my mind" and you can hear it again, a voice so clear, so structured and powerful that it leaves no question: NO.
But your scream, as it echoes through the caverns, must have startled something: you can hear it in the distance: clank, clank, clank - closing in. And as tears run over your face you smile, for a moment your mind is just empty nothingness as you focus on the noise: clank clank clank. Soon it will all be over. And then two illithids teleport next to you - start rolling saving throws.

Then there is the liberal use of post-hypnotic-suggestions and psionic-geas for even trivial stuff. You will work in the washery, cleaning, drying and sorting illithid clothes all day. Mechanically you need to make a saving throw to not do it, and if you succeed, you may guess who decided to spend the day getting tortured. But enthralling relies as much on psionics as it does on psychology and pavlovian conditioning. In a way the true horror of the illithids is shown when, after a long day of excruciating slave-labor, they give food and a pat and psi-trigger the happiness emotion. (well that power seems to be removed in newer editions). A vicious DM may houserule some more "mind horror powers" like slowly rewrite memories of a character or have the illithids follow them even into their dreams or locking them out of their happy place when they attempt escapism, or change the face of their beloved to that of a squid, just to torment them.

But primarily it is all about breaking the thralls mind. Illithids are like an evil countess who mercilessly beats her chambermaid, calling her worthless and incompetent, because the tea is too hot. In their society almost all the manual work, like the construction of their citadels and spaceships, is done by slave labor. An illithid artist may imagine a large fresco for their citadel, but only rarely paint it themselves, instead offloading the physical task to a thrall.

However in my opinion the true horror behind this doesn't work well for a D&D campaign, unless you have a table that is really into D&D-PoW-Edition. Players will likely decouple from the experience. No one wants to "experience the true horrors of the illithids" first hand, for some reason, even if comes with free "post traumatic stress" and "horrible nightmares" bonus traits. So the psychological horror mostly gets cut short to keep the story more lighthearted and hero/adventure focused.

Spoiler: Hanoi Prison

Show

The key word for all of us at fIrst was fragility. Each of us, before we were ever in shouting distance of another American, was made to "take the ropes." That was a real shock to our systems - and as with all shocks, its impact on our inner selves was a lot more impressive and lasting and important than to our limbs and torsos. These were the sessions where we were taken down to submission and made to blurt out distasteful confessions of guilt and American complicity into antique tape recorders, and then to be put in what I call "cold soak," six or eight weeks of total isolation to "contemplate our crimes." What we actually contemplated was what even the most self-satisfied American saw as his betrayal of himself and everything he stood for. It was there that I learned what "Stoic harm" meant. A shoulder broken, a bone in my back broken, and a leg broken twice were peanuts by comparison. Epictetus said: "Look not for any greater harm than this: destroying the trustworthy, self-respecting, well-behaved man within you."

When put into a regular cell block, hardly an American came out of that without responding something like this when first whispered to by a fellow prisoner next door: "You don't want to talk to me; I am a traitor." And because we were equally fragile, it seemed to catch on that we all replied something like this: "Listen, pal,there are no virgins in here. You should have heard the kind of statement I made. Snap out of it. We're all in this together. What's your name? Tell me about yourself." To hear that last was, for most new prisoners just out of initial shake-down and cold soak, a turning point in their lives.

From: Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale - Master of My Fate: A Stoic Philosopher in a Hanoi Prison
- 14 pages; approved for public release; distribution unlimited

Key point is: illithids are about sadistic domination, slave labor, viewing humans as programmable cattle, mixed with some J. Mengele meets H.R. Giger body horror and otherworldy scifitech that is all dialed beyond 11 because the worst humanity can offer when it comes to such things does not include psionics. Next to "human > cattle" both "prison/reeducation camp" and the "victorian aristocracy > servant" relationship are valuable inspirations to make them knowable terrors.

[GrayDeath]

Try a thought experiment.

Someone invents, and sells in all stores world wide, a watch with a button on it. It basically casts D&D plane shift on you but only goes to an alternate dimension Earth(s).

The big difference between our Earth and the alts is that there were never humans on the alts, they're pristine, unspoiled, Earth duplicates without people. Except... There are a whole lot of wolves everywhere. Lots. But that's ok. Even though a rabid wolf or a wolf pack can kill a few unprepared humans we, as individuals and societies, can handle wolves. Oh, and the wolves are made of chocolate. Some form of chocolate that has lots of nice vitamins, does not rot teeth or make you fat, and it cures acne & hair loss.

So some choco-wolves get brought back to be farmed and anyone can go visit and exploit a nice new planet. Strap on your magic watch, put on a personal flotation device (plane shift is a bit inaccurate), and make sure your ultrasonic wolf repeller tool has a full charge. Humans are the illithids here.

Run your illithids like that. A scientist coming to study how being made of chocolate makes these wolves biology different. Someone who wants to live alone in a new wilderness. Someone starting a new chocolate farm. A dog breeder trying to domesticate or hybridize.

Mind if I steal that?

Our table cant really work with "real Horror(TM)", but this sounds like it could be both workable and a lot of fun inb retrosect.

[Telok]

Mind if I steal that?

Our table cant really work with "real Horror(TM)", but this sounds like it could be both workable and a lot of fun inb retrosect.

Go ahead. It's basically how I run illithid in my D&D games. Think of what a person would do faced with wolves and have the illithid do that, just subbing in alien-psi-tech for RL electronics. Radios, solar panels, electronic locks, etc., all things dogs won't understand or be able to work. You just have to keep in mind that you're doing an alien object that produces a certain outcome and responds to abilities & body parts the PC species don't possess or comprehend. Also, humans don't seriously value squeaky toys, chewed tennis balls, and rubber bones. But your dog is uttely devastated when you throw them in the trash.

Do not describe alien objects or their use as if it were human tech with a purple paint job and glued on rubber wigets. They produce understandable results through seemingly impossible methods with completely unknowable controls. Your dog does not understand how an Alexa speaker linked to the smart bulb lights allows you to control the light. Your dog sure can't get it to work.

[DrewID]

That's certainly not true, no matter which edition "your D&D days" took place in. In OD&D/BECMI they were Chaotic and somewhat primitive humanoids, but neither evil nor alien:

Additionally, in OD&D's "Men and Magic", Orcs appeared in the columns for both Neutrality and Chaos, and just to make it clearer, the table said "An underline indicates that the name appears in both the Neutrality and Chaos columns" and, yes, Orcs was underlined. The other low-level humanoids (Goblins/Kobolds/Hobgoblins/Gnolls), they were square in the Chaos column. But Orcs (and Ogres as well) could be Neutral as well. Go figure.

Mind Flayers (none of your pauncy Illithids) were introduced in "Eldritch Wizardry", and were aligned with Law, with the footnote "highly evil but otherwise lawful" as Gary & crew started introducing the 3x3 alignment grid without, you know, actually explaining it.

DrewID