She also believes in constant motion to keep oneself unconstrained and has a number of abilities that let those she's empowered move faster, kill faster, and never tire (like one where you can regain energy as if sleeping while sprinting and another that lets you inhale dead bodies instead of needing air). Adjoran herself believes in a kind of nihilistic dark mirror of Buddhist enlightenment that's about cutting free of attachments that hold you back and a kind of Zen amusement with life, but while she's very free with the murder and torture to help you reach the right mindset, killing is ultimately not required as one of the magical techniques her favored can wield allows them to simply permanently end their strong emotions (positive or negative) about anything with a small onetime expenditure of magic. Like all her kind, she has a number of subsouls who are sentient creatures in their own right and represent aspects of her personality, and each of those has its own subsouls, all of which go around fulfilling their own agendas. The only sound you might ever hear from her would be occasional laughter. She's a silent wind, not just a wind that makes no noise but a wind that brings silence. For another example, there's a short story I heard about which uses the horrors of the Belgian Congo to explain why someone would want to end all of humanity, which, again, very much makes sense.Ĭlick to expand.Exalted backstory gets pretty detailed and dense, but Adjoran is a Yozi, one of the warped remnants of one of those who made Creation out of primal chaos, who were overthrown by the Exalted. I actually found it more terrifying because I could imagine someone I knew, or myself, becoming a cultist, and otherwise participating in the terrifying stuff that those cultists do. The same goes for stuff like fertility, and in one case, drug addiction. I can't go into too much detail, given the NFSW stuff, however, I'll note that both sex, and stuff related to it, can make people do things they would never do otherwise. One of the most effective Cthulhu anthologies I've ever read was the Conqueror Womb which, yes, was often erotica, however, the most effective portions of that anthology from a horror perspective worked because it firmly centered what people were getting out of worshipping Eldritch entities, or otherwise interacting with them. I need to have a reason to buy the cultists get something out of it besides just death or insanity. Yes, people do stupid shit in reality all the time, however, you can find motives for that, such as bigotry or otherwise being enslaved to a harmful belief system. Most cultists in eldritch horror are in this infuriating middle ground where there's no reason, logical or otherwise, that can possibly justify their worship, which just makes them tedious cannon fodder, not meaningful antagonists in their own right. Since I don't like human antagonists to be indistinguishable from mindless cannon fodder, this is something I find very frustrating about Eldritch Horror. However, the main reason I dislike it now is because, for the most part, it makes any worshippers of the deity impossible to sympathize with, or otherwise empathize with. Eldritch entities like this can work, however, I think it's very difficult to come up with ideas in this space that haven't already been topped, as it were. Unknowable motives don't really solve this problem, as too often, that isn't distinguishable from something that is just overtly malevolent, or apathetic. So, with that in mind, do we have many examples of this? I bring it up because I find the traditional Eldritch Abomination kind of boring at this point because it's either straightforwardly malevolent, or, apathetic. Rather, they're just apathetic to the point of causing destruction, harm to humanity, ect., For what I mean by that, a lot of Cthulhu entities aren't intentionally malevolent. For another example, this thread on page 4 has one from the video game Stellaris.Ģ. For an example of this, I've heard interpretations of the Borg that are along these lines, and I feel like an unknowable monstrosity could work this way. Rather, I'm talking about an entity that thinks it is being benevolent, but doesn't realize how horrific what it's doing is, or otherwise is doing horrific things for, what the entity thinks, is for the best. I do not mean the Eldritch abomination is harmless or lacking in threat.
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