Can *truly* alien cosmic horrors ever make legitimately compelling

Use saints.

When there's an incomprehensible being, it's not a bad idea to use intermediaries to help bridge the gap. An alien mind may be the true villain, but the cultist that acts under its orders provides the players with someone who has goals they can comprehend, even if the cultist themselves lacks that ability.

Also, keep your spoilered text to yourself next time.

>>44248186
But then it becomes a matter of the cultist's goals, as opposed to the true villain's goals.

>>44247901
I would say they work well as short term villains, to add a bit of a horror element to a campaign arc, but they shouldn't be used as a BBEG.

Heroic fantasy is all about the hero's battle having meaning to it. But when their enemy is just so different that you can't understand why it does what it does, you lose the emotional motivation. The

>>44247901
you could have describable reasons that are entirely alien. Like the paperclip god that sees paperclips as the greatest good, and works to turn all matter into paperclips.

>>44247901
>Can *truly* alien cosmic horrors ever make legitimately compelling villains in heroic fantasy campaigns? They work in horror, sure, but what about heroic fantasy?
>
>If you make them *truly* alien, then they are, by definition, completely impossible to understand. They act in ways that mortal minds simply cannot figure out any rhyme or reason to. That does not exactly make for an interesting story.
Just don't have them be the final boss. Not everything needs to be a grand battle with the evil force itself. In fact that's not needed at all.

Hell, one of the founding books of modern fantasy as we know it had the cosmic evil's defeat become a very personal conflict between ideals and the resolution come about by one of the involved parties giving into their vice.

If they can't understand the cosmic horror, that's totally fine. It doesn't have to be actively malicious to be something that's doing way too much damage and which needs to die. The first town that gets turned into a smoking, corpse-filled crater because 'who the fuck knows why, this thing just showed up and blasted the fuck out of it for reasons between it and God' should provide more than sufficient motivation to go kill the beast.

>>44248662
That's not especially alien. You can see the logic behind why he turns things into paperclips ("paperclips are great"), you can see what it is he likes (paperclips), and you can see the method he uses (turning things into paperclips).

>>44247901
Naw, I think that eldritch abominations beyond logic or reason can be used as bbegs in a campaign.

It doesn't matter why they do what they do, just that them doing it fucks with the PCs enough to motivate them to stop it.

I don't care why the giant tentacle beast is attacking my city. I care THAT the giant tentacle beast is attacking my city.

Perhaps they make for "shallow" villains, but they can make up for it by having cultists/acolytes that mentally stimulate the players before the big fight. The beast itself is just the final boss battle for when all the talking, intrigue, and puzzles are said and done.

>>44248446
This is often the case.

Take the Call of Cthulhu. The titular being does little damage intentionally. It's his cult which is the main threat. And he's a petty being.

But yeah, this all comes to how you present things, and what the cosmic horror is and does.

I liked the presentation of Atropus in 3e's Elder Evils book. Known as the afterbirth of creation, or the world born dead.
Atropus is believed by a few to be the remains of the Prime Mover who created everything. It now regrets this, and seeks to unmake creation. Of course, it's kind of hard to know exactly what a planet-god-corpse thing is thinking.

So it's an undead moon, which starts to approach the home planet of the PCs, and as it comes closer, the undead get worse and worse and worse. If it gets into orbit, everything that dies rises as a zombie.

>>44249928
Atropus isn't really a villain in the character sense. He's more of a force of nature.

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>>44250038
Any sufficiently alien cosmic horror will be more like that anyway.

Of course, if you can't fight forces of nature, what kind of hero are you?

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>>44247901

Nyaruko best abomination.

It would interesting to have an enemy that Is trying to wipe out hjmqnoty because it sees us as some unknowable being, or because it has such a blue orange morality and our very existence is heretical. Something like we can see the color blue, and because of that we must be exterminated

>>44248981
This is an underrated post

>>44248981
>>44251027
It doesn't really make for a more compelling story than "Go kill some savage monsters" though.

>>44250324

oh shit I should read this.