Gonna run CoC for some people, but I don't want to go for

>suggestions

Don't involve the Hounds, or don't leave any room for the players to catch their eye. If they're played as Hounds, they're a guaranteed campaign ender, either through death spiral or through TPK.

>>54755937
Maybe go for a less immediately dangerous thing? I kinda don't want to use the Yithians, because the painter's gonna be played up as an Erich Zann-like person who paints to keep something off her trail.

>>54756031

Ironically, with your painter, going bigger is probably better. The thing about the Hounds is that they're not big players on the cosmic scale, which is precisely what makes them dangerous. They're entities specifically devoted to fucking up the day of whoever's caught their eye, and everyone in their immediate vicinity, whereas a Big Thing would be easier to play off.

You mentioned she's gonna be an Erich Zann type. One of the better Lovecraftian stories in recent times was the Strange Case of N., where an obsessive photographer tried to hold the shape of the world in place by taking photographs alongside his O/C behaviour.

What if she's painting to "fix" the world in its normal shape, but the wrongness in her paintings causes mental distubances, etc.

>>54756239
Maybe! The whole thing with the painter is that her paintings are distractions for some entity or entities, since her search for truth/vision/insight is through time travel—which caught the attention of the entity in the first place. So they're *wrong* to observers because they depict stuff that *shouldn't be* on such an elemental level.

If the entity is gonna be a Big Thing, might end up being a tendril of Yog-Sothoth going 'stop that' in the painter's general vicinity

>>54756373

Yeah. It could even be a Big Thing of your own making. All you have to do to make a Lovecraftian entity is string together a bunch of words with capitalized initials.

The Thing With The Endless Piebald Side, the Watcher in the Water, so on and so forth.