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** One of the last 3.5 books Wizards released is called "Elder Evils", which features a guide of how to create your ''own'' [[Cosmic Horror]], as well as several examples of [[Big Bad]] Eldritch Abominations, including Ragnorra, the [[Mook Maker]] [[Space Whale]] with an [[Evilutionary Biologist]] streak; Pandorym, the living [[Forgotten Superweapon]] with a personality you don't want ''anywhere near'' a [[Forgotten Superweapon]]; Atropus the [[Omnicidal Neutral|undead planetoid]] (who is the quasi-sentient remains of the thing that birthed the universe); Kyuss, [[The Worm That Walks]] (that's his ''[[Exactly What It Says On the Tin|actual title]]''); and of course, [[Alien Invasion|the Hulks of Zoretha]].
*** It also updates/reimagines one of D&D's earliest published examples of this trope: Zargon, a tentacled aberration revered by a fanatical drug-cult in ''B4: The Lost City''.
*** Since most of said world-threatening Elder Evils described in the book are actually beatable (in some cases ''killable'') by non-epic (i.e. non-godlike) characters, quite a few cases of [[Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?]] can result. On the flipside, many of these cases are either fighting the monster before they've fully awoken/recovered from crash impacts, facing down a cult that was about to flood reality with beings like the one that just almost killed the party, or taking down an alien weapon designed to soften us up for invasion.
**** Atropus is a [[Genius Loci]], so you kill his aspect. The Leviathan wraps around the world, and all you can do is defeat minor aspects of it and put the thing back to sleep. Pandorym is probably the toughest being in the cosmos, so powerful that its stats (the strongest monster in the book) is only a fragment of its consciousness. Stats are not given for its fully released mind because it would be too much for the party, and when it unites with its body it's stronger than ''all the gods combined.'' You fight Ragnorra while she's regenerating from her crash-landing on the planet. Sertrous is fought after you force him to manifest in a weaker-than-normal form. Zargon has some very powerful abilities that only affect gods. Father Llymic, the Hulks of Zoretha, and Kyuss are all fought at their full power.
** 3.5 Edition also included the Alienist class. The class features made all your Summoning spells summon creatures from the aforementioned Far Realm, which took the forms of creatures you could normally summon, but took on a template that gave them more hit points, resistances, tentacles or other deformities, and the ability to shift into their "true(r) form" which scared everything like crazy. Further, your familiar became one of these creatures. Basically, you're calling tiny C'thuloid monsters. In addition to that, the caster who takes the class eventually starts ''becoming'' like one of these creatures, goes more then a little insane, and (with the timeless body class feature) is taken to the Far Realms by the unspeakable Eldritch Horrors when they would normally die of old age, specifically ''never seen again'' by people on the prime material plane. If you manage to reach the maximum level, you can cheat dying of age altogether, gain the "Outsider" trait and become a [[Humanoid Abomination]]. Your character grows a tentacle or two at this point.
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*** The Dark Powers, the force(s) that created Ravenloft itself, could also apply, since their actual nature, methods and motives are entirely unfathomable. As well, the Nightmare Court could qualify.
*** Regular old fiends (demons, etc.) were described pretty much in cosmic horror or eldritch abomination terms in ''Van Richten's Guide to Fiends'' for this setting. It didn't seem inappropriate. Horrifying creatures of great power and alien minds from other realities...
** Cthulhu ''himself'' has an entry in the 1st edition Deities & Demigods supplement -- and the way 1st edition rules worked, a high enough leveled player character could, in fact, [[Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?|punch him to death.]]
** Also the Gibbering Mouther (and its 4E relatives, the Gibbering Abomination and the Gibbering Orb). The name alone is obviously inspired by Lovecraft.
** The First Edition was no stranger to Eldritch Abominations as well. Aside from the Nightmare creatures (like the Diaboli and the Malphera), whose physiology was utterly alien and horrific to humanity, there were also the creatures from the Vortex, a place beyond all dimensions and planes of existence who could cause inexplicable phenomenons with their mere presence. Even the [[Physical God|Immortals]] are afraid of such things.
* The [[Forgotten Realms]] has three Elder Evils. Ityak-Ortheel the Elf-Eater was created when the blood of the orc god Gruumsh and the elven god Corellon Larethian merged. Its appearance is Lovecraftian-inspired (a massive body supported by three legs, tentacles everywhere) It lives in between the planes and is occasionally released by mad cultists (mostly of Malar) to, well, eat elves. And anything else in its way, of course, but it takes pleasure in destroying elven towns and cities and slowly devours them over hundreds of years. The second is Kezef the Chaos Hound, who appears as a massive, skinless hunting dog, its coat covered in maggots. It hunts for the Faithful, those who worship a god, and kills them, and then the maggots swarm over the body before returning to Kezef. The soul of the person slain is utterly destroyed, and not even the gods can bring them back. It also [[Does This Remind You of Anything?|bit the hand off Tyr when the gods were trying to chain Kezef down]]. The third is Dendar the Night Serpent, a serpent several hundred feet long that came into being when the first creatures had a nightmare. It feeds on (and causes) nightmares of every sentient being in the world. As far as Eldritch Abominations go, Dendar serves a somewhat useful purpose: if she wasn't around, people would remember every nightmare they've had in exact, excruciating detail, never wanting to sleep again, for fear of adding to their terror.
* [[Greyhawk]] has a few of these as well:
** The most horrifying example is Dread Tharizdun, a monstrosity that threatens all of existence and that the rest of the gods were forced to cooperate to imprison. Since 3E, Dread Tharizdun has also evolved to become a more general Abomination for the whole D&D cosmology.
** Another example is the Elder Elemental God, a bizarre entity that, from what little we see of it, is all tentacles, eyes and sluglike bodies. Worshipped by some particularly depraved drow, some people think that the god is in fact another form of Dread Tharizdun, although canon remains unclear on the issue.
** An entity that actually exists on Oerth itself is the Mother, a bizarre entity served by a colony of degenerate and inbred humans who found it while they fled the destruction of their old empire. Physically, the Mother looks like a large mass of disgusting white ooze that slithers across the walls, floor and ceiling of the caverns it inhabits, with the ability to drain the life out of anything it makes physical contact with. Unlike the other examples, it's possible for the [[Player Characters]] to actually [[Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?|punch the Mother out]], as it's mentioned in one of the adventure ideas provided by [[Gary Gygax]] in the original 1983 Greyhawk boxed set.
* The [[Psychic Powers|psionic]] Slarecians of the third-party (by a [[White Wolf]] subsidiary, unsurprisingly) ''[[Scarred Lands]]'' setting. They're revealed to originally have been beings of pure thought, who were trapped in the world as it was forming, and now they want out. They've decided the only way to do that is to completely destroy the world. The guide book detailing them goes into details of their various experiments during their time on the world Scarn, which, befitting their origins, are pretty damn weird.
** To a lesser extent, the Titans, the original rulers of Scarn. While they usually appear humanoid, and can easily interact with mortals without driving them insane, they're also powerful to the point of not having statistics, they usually see mortals as irrelevant, and their mindsets are incomprehensible.
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** Third: The Qlippoth are basically Obyrith with the [[Serial Numbers Filed Off]] (or rather [[Older Than They Think|the reverse]]; see the Obyrith entry above), and cosmology-wise, the Abyss is basically a cancerous sore that's wrapped itself around reality. And the qlippoth may just originate from whatever is beyond it...
** Fourth: Not only is there a Far Realms equivalent, called the Dark Tapestry, but it isn't very far, relatively speaking- it's actually ''The Void Between The Stars'', and to top it off, [[Oh Crap|it's the domain of literally Lovecraftian entities, Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth included]].
** Fifth: And of course, the deepest parts of [[Beneath the Earth|the Night Below]] are filled with gibbering, unsane things, among them [[Cthulhu Mythos|Gugs]], the aforementioned Aboleths and Neothelids (the latter who explicitely worship the Lovecraftian entities of the Dark Tapestry), the [[Puppeteer Parasite|Intellect Devourers]] (whose constant, horrific abuse of their [[And I Must Scream|still-aware hosts]] just for [[Sense Freak|sick]] [[For the Evulz|kicks]] place them in [[Complete Monster]] territory) and [[Humanoid Abomination|the Urdefan]], an artificial semi-vampiric race created by the [[Omnicidal Maniac]] [[Neutral Evil|Daemons]] to carry on their [[Kill 'Em All]] agenda on the mortal plane. Fortunately, all those things are [[Evil Versus Evil|locked in constant conflict with each other and the other dark forces of the underground]].
** Sixth, well, apart from Gugs, plenty other Mythos creatures found their way to the setting, such as the [[Blob Monster|Shoggoths]], [[Clock Roaches|Hounds of Tindalos]] and [[Humanoid Abomination|Denizens of Leng]]; in fact, [[Eldritch Location|Leng]] is [[Another Dimension]] that has infrequent bleedovers with Golarion, [[Reality Is Out to Lunch|with obvious results]].
* Naturally, Chaosium's ''[[The Call of Cthulhu]]'' game is just ''full'' of them. One of the basic stats of PCs, along with the normal STR, DEX, CON, WIS, INT and such, is SAN. That's ''[[Sanity Meter|Sanity]]''. It's arguably the most important single stat unless you ''want'' to keep rolling up new characters.
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*** There's also the Nemesis Continuum. It's the [[Mad Scientist|scientific]] [[Cosmic Horror]] to the Prince's [[Mad Artist|perversion of the humanities]]. It's an altered set of the laws of physics. Bits of the material world it contaminates are [[Reality Is Out to Lunch|twisted]]; what if anything green was suddenly boiling hot, and the speed of light was slower than the speed of sound? [[It Got Worse|It gets worse.]] The Nemesis Continuum is summoned by intelligent scientists "accidentally" (the book says that most proofs are found through indirect interference by [[Eldritch Abomination|acamoth]]) finding a proof for it, which then becomes true. And they become obsessed with finding more proofs. The best part? The Nemesis Continuum is apparently [[Hyperspace Is a Scary Place|the physical laws of the Abyss itself]], so to fight it on its own level, ''you probably need to infect yourself with them''. By the way, [[The Virus|it's also easier for a scientist to explain and thus prove a proof once he understands it...]]
** The [[Sourcebook]] ''Summoners'' includes some other examples, such as the chthonians of the Underworld (known as the "neverborn" since they exist in the realm of the dead, but cannot be reliably said to have ever been alive) and certain Supernal beings. Said Supernal beings include the [[God in Human Form|Ochema]], avatars of the [[Big Bad|Exarchs]] in ''Seers Of The Throne''. [[Humanoid Abomination|Sure, they look]] [[Pride|(and act)]] [[Humanoid Abomination|like people]], [[Starfish Aliens|but look at them with Mage Sight]]... Unlike many examples, this is actually because they're ''less'' corrupted than everything else: [[Crapsack World|The Fallen World]] simply [[Divide By Zero|can't handle]] [[Heaven|Supernal]] beings like them... Although they stay significantly longer than and don't cause unintentional damage like Abyssal creatures, since they're ''supposed'' to be a part of the natural order of reality.
** In addition to mentioning the above Chthonians, ''[[Geist: The Sin Eaters (Tabletop Game)|Geist: The Sin Eaters]]'' features Kerberoi -- wholly alien in mindset, bizarre in appearance, and nearly unstoppable, they exist solely to enforce the Old Laws of the Dead Domains. Geists can also border on this -- they're universally completely or near-completely alien in mindset, and varying degrees of bizarre in appearance.<br /><br />The supplement ''Book of the Dead'' introduces the Leviathan, the Kerberos of the Ocean of Fragments, who pretty well embodies this trope. It's an [[Giant Swimmer|impossibly vast sea creature]] of some sort -- it's assumed to be a [[EverythingsEverything's Squishier With Cephalopods|cephalopod]], but that's just because it has tentacles; it's too big for anyone to ever see enough of it to make out its true form. ''Every'' human in the world has had nightmares of it lurking beneath them in an endless ocean, even if they've forgotten them. It cannot be killed or placated, any more than the tide or any other force of nature, and stats are provided solely for the purposes of escaping it or inconveniencing it enough to drive it off temporarily. Fortunately, it's rarely seen -- to the point that most people think the Dead Dominion's only other notable inhabitant, the Admiral, is actually its Kerberos.
** The [[Fair Folk|True Fae]] of ''[[Changeling: The Lost (Tabletop Game)|Changeling: The Lost]]'' deserve a mention. Now, they're more recognizable than their stablemates above, capable of great [[Pride]], vanity and twisted creativity, but they are ultimately alien, incredibly powerful and terrifying beings with [[Evil Cannot Comprehend Good|no concept of empathy, kindness or selflessness]], capable of rending souls and striking pacts with aspects of reality itself, and within their [[Reality Is Out to Lunch|home dimension]] they are capable of [[Reality Warper|just about anything]], and can twist their kidnapped human subjects to meet their needs. That they happen to have inspired [[Fairy Tales]] perhaps only makes them ''more'' frightening. And do you wanna know how they're born? {{spoiler|[[And Then John Was a Zombie|No. No, you don't.]]}}
** The sourcebook ''Second Sight'' has a pretty good chapter on building your own abomination, a [[Misanthrope Supreme]] or [[Fallen Hero]] to serve as their high priest, and a cult to worship them. The creation example is a being of dissonant sound. (Although one suggested weakness for this being -- music of unity -- seemed uncannily reminiscent of ''[[Ghostbusters]] 2''.)
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* ''[[Genius: The Transgression (Tabletop Game)|Genius: The Transgression]]'' has the Cold Ones, entities living at the end of time, who'd like to go back and experience things like heat and movement.
* [[White Wolf]]'s ''[[Exalted (Tabletop Game)|Exalted]]'' has some bizarre entitites which originated in the [[Primordial Chaos|chaotic non-place]] outside of reality itself.
** There are several vast armies of insane, unreal things "out" there positively ''itching'' to roll up reality like a carpet and devour the souls of the living. And these things are the setting's [[The Fair Folk|elves]]. Since this is ''Exalted'', it's the player characters' job to [[Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?|punch every last one of them in the face with the power of their undiluted, shiny awesomeness.]]
** The Primordials came out of said [[Primordial Chaos]] and ''built'' Creation, with all its gods to take care of it, so that they had time to [[Memetic Mutation|smoke magical crack.]] Their minds are so vast that they're divided between entire hierarchies of multiple souls, each of which has a mind of its own and multiple lesser souls with minds of ''their'' own.
*** Most of the Primordials that didn't get killed are now the Yozi, [[Demon Lords and Archdevils|demon princes]] who have had their very beings and souls turned inside out and who live in [[Genius Loci|the broken body of their leader]]. They wish to turn Creation into Hell as part of a rather demented plan to escape their prison by expanding it.
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* ''[[Magic the Gathering]]'' has the "Horror" and "Nightmare" creature types. Not all of them fall under this trope, but a fair number do. For example, the [http://www.wizards.com/mtg/images/tcg/products/alarareborn/oz5ev5t1ru_EN.jpg Nemesis of Reason]. As well, there's [http://www.wizards.com/magic/images/mtgcom/arcana1000/1119_maritlagetoken.jpg Marit Lage], an ancient, betentacled [[Sealed Evil in A Can]]. The card [http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/CardDetails.aspx?&id=121155 Dark Depths] allows you to ''unseal'' her.
** For those who don't play MtG, a brief explanation: The deck, generally consisting of 60 cards, represents the player's spell reserve and memory remaining. So, effectively, everytime the Nemesis of Reason even ''looks'' at you funny, you ''lose one sixth of your mind''. No questions. And Marit Lage? She is 20 times as strong and resistant as one of the heroes who defeated the ''Empress of Fae'' in one of the more recent sets, gameplay wise.
*** To clarify further: The player's role is that of a Planeswalker, one of the most powerful kinds of beings in existence. The starting life total is sufficient to survive multiple attacks from [[Kraken and Leviathan|Leviathans, Kraken]] or [[Instant Awesome Just Add Dragons|Ancient Dragons]]. Marit Lage will kill you in ''[[One -Hit Kill|one hit]]''.
*** The fluff for the ''Zendikar'' block strongly hints at the existence of an ''entire race'' of Cosmic Horrors called the Eldrazi, all of which got locked away inside planets by a coalition of aforementioned planeswalkers. The name of the final set in that block? [[Oh Crap|Rise of the Eldrazi]].<br />The (comparatively) good news is that this is probably localized for now to Zendikar, and (hopefully) will be stilled there by Jace and/or Chandra. Still, there's something very unsettling about them. In M:tG, everything except lands and artifacts have at least one out of the five colors of mana associated with them; those mana colors define what aspects of reality they are most attuned to. Lands, meanwhile, almost always supply mana, and when colorless mana is supplied, that usually means mana too raw to have a particular slant; think of "colorless" as actually meaning "no particular attunement to a specific aspect of existence". The Eldrazi in question? ''They don't '''have''' a color.'' And no, they're not artifacts (the only type of colorless spell card until then). They're alien to ''the structure of the known multiverse''. And if that Annihilator keyword is anything to go by, wherever they go, a bit of the multiverse there gets destroyed. And to think that they were once worshipped as the main gods of Zendikar...
**** Now that the whole set has been revealed and released, there are THREE Mythic Rare Legendary Eldrazi: Kozilek, Emrakul and Ulamog. These can't be killed permanently unless you exile them since as soon as they hit your graveyard from anywhere, you shuffle your entire graveyard into your deck. There are six more non-Legendary Eldrazi, the smallest of which is a 7/7 and is COMMON. Of these six, 2 are common, 2 are uncommon, and 2 are rare. All of them have the Annihilator ability. Plus there are several cards that create Eldrazi Spawn (small creatures that can be sacrificed for mana to help cast the big guys). And there are four non-creature colorless Eldrazi spells with considerable power. Notably, the mythic rare ''All is Dust'' [[Kill 'Em All|destroys everything that has a color]] and the rare ''Eldrazi Conscription'' [[One -Winged Angel|turns any creature into an extremely powerful Eldrazi]].
** Of course, there was the original [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=2093 Cosmic Horror] if you go WAAAAAY back to the ''Legends'' expansion. The art says it all.
** The "Horror" creature type was actually used as a grab-bag for a blend of vat-grown monsters, demons, experiments [[Gone Horribly Wrong]] ([[Gone Horribly Right|or worse]]), and other creatures that shouldn't have been for various reasons. That said, many are indeed unbelievably horrific things that will burn your sanity.
* The Lords of Cthul from ''[[Monsterpocalypse]]'' are the Cthulhu-esque, Godzilla-sized avatars of powerful extradimensional monsters... who get [[Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?|bodyslammed]] regularly.
* The Unspeakable One from the Freedom City ''[[Mutants and Masterminds]]'' setting. (It also provides Golden Age stats for an eldritch entity, although that barely qualifies - it may ''look'' like Cthulhu, but it doesn't drive you mad simply from looking at it.)
* ''[[GURPS]]: Fantasy'' treats Tiamut as this, giving stats for a minor avatar of hers that while not particularly odd looking (it's an enormous dragon with four eyes) can still cause terror from just looking at it. Said avatar automatically regenerates every year making the effort of trying to kill it futile. To get rid of it permanently you'd have to track down and kill the real Tiamut... who is half the size of the universe (about 2.24* 10^18 [[Hit Points]]) so good luck with that. There's even a Lovecraft quote after the stat block.
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* Spoofed in ''[[Pokethulhu]]''. Yes, there are hideous, evil non-Euclidean critters. But you can tame them and use them as [[Mons]] (and they still drive you to insanity).
* While [[Humans Are Cthulhu|our nature]] in [[KULT]] allow us to kick most super beings with ease once awakened, the Forgotten Gods are different stories. These beings represent principles incomprehensible to humanity and powerful enough that they do not even care about the plans of the [[God|Demiurge]] or [[Satan|Astaroth]].
* ''[[Cthulhu Tech]]''. An RPG set about 80 years in the future after the Mi-go (or rather, [[Spell My Name With an "S"|Migou]]) have attacked earth and the Great Old Ones are stirring. It combines [[HP Lovecraft]] with [[Neon Genesis Evangelion]] of all things (what with the gigantic biological weapons called Engels that pilots mentally sync to and ride in their spines).
** It also throws ''[[Guyver]]'' into the mix, with [[Cosmic Horror]] [[Expy|Expys]] of Guyvers and Zoanoids (you can actually play the former).
* ''Dragon Warriors'' brings us Balor, the god of darkness. A humanoid being, but of such immense size and power that he can rampage across the world unstoppably. It's a good thing that he's [[Sealed Evil in A Can|entombed in magical ice.]] His cultists, [[Elemental Powers|the Darkness Elementalists,]] are granted some of the best elemental spells.
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* Well, though the RPG of [[Mortasheen]] isn't out yet, there are three creatures in the setting so powerful they might as well be some of these. Called [[Names to Run Away From Really Fast|The Destroyers]], these unfathomably powerful weapons are as follows.
** There is [http://www.bogleech.com/mortasheen/hestermoan.htm Hestermoan], a horrible Nuckleavee-esque monstrosity created "as an instrument of genocide against an entire civilization, and so effective that their very name remains unrecoverable". It is basically every variant of [[Plaguemaster]] rolled into one horrible monstrosity, including a [[Hate Plague]] to boot.
** Then there is the [http://www.bogleech.com/mortasheen/tormanshee.htm Tormanshee], a creature that creates that can be best described as a neural network of [[Mind Rape]]. [[Oh Crap|And every mind it adds to the the network increases its horrible mind rape radius]]. Oddly enough, it is also a [[Non -Malicious Monster]], which just serves to make it even more disturbing.
** And finally, there is [http://www.bogleech.com/mortasheen/mothneaser.htm Mothneaser], an enormous pillar of flesh with such perfect control over its blood that it can create massive [[Shapeshifter Weapon|Shapeshifter Weapons]], enormous Blood [[Golem|Golems]], and even use victims as [[People Puppets]]. And also, [[From a Single Cell|even a single blood cell of it's can multiply inside other creatures]] and consume them from the inside-out.
*** Oh, but we're not out of the woods yet, as there's an entire class of monsters based on the theme, called the Unknowns. These creatures include such lovely things as [http://www.bogleech.com/mortasheen/psychodrome.htm a creepy interdiemensional television "signal"] [[Touched By Vorlons|implied to have bounced off of]] [[Eldritch Abomination|Eldritch Abominations]], [http://www.bogleech.com/mortasheen/hobkin.htm a thing that's biology is] [[Bizarre Alien Biology|so alien]] that nobody has the foggiest idea how the thing works, [http://www.bogleech.com/mortasheen/xenogog.htm a diver-masked thing] that can make itself intangible at will; spawns from [[Alien Geometries]]; and can see something [[Ultimate Evil|so horrible in television static that it breaks the TV in fear]], [http://www.bogleech.com/mortasheen/underfiend.htm a horrible thing that is pretty much the embodiment of] [[Naughty Tentacles]], and [http://www.bogleech.com/mortasheen/avazoth.htm the] [http://www.bogleech.com/mortasheen/grenzo.htm Meteor] [http://www.bogleech.com/mortasheen/ziafel.htm Series]; [[Bizarre Alien Biology|which aren't even technically alive]].
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