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dailycharacteroption · 4 months

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Deity Drop 6: Abhoth

Just as we did when be touched on Great Old Ones in a previous deity special, we are heading back to cosmic horror with our first Outer God.

But what exactly is an Outer God and how does it differ from a Great Old One? Well, a Great Old One is a demigod-level entity that has a body that can be noticeably affected by it’s mortal environs, and for all their defying of sane physics and geometry, it is possible for a mortal to fight back against such an entity and with a little luck “kill” it, forcing it into torpor or at least making it decide that being there is not worth the annoyance.

An Outer God, on the other hand, is a true deity, albeit an unknowable one that doesn’t even try, or perhaps is incapable of understanding why one would try and take a form comprehensible to the majority of mortals.

Like the Great Old Ones though, most of these entities cannot be bothered to even notice mortals, their cults often calling upon deaf ears, with only a rare few ever being granted power, perhaps as an afterthought or even without the deity realizing. While some may have specific malevolent designs, most seem content to stew in their own incomprehensibleness with no real plan beyond just existing in a way that mortals strain to understand, seeming to embody the belief that the universe is truly uncaring.

Abhoth himself is the “Source of Uncleaness”, a monstrous parent figure to all manner of horrors. His children ranging from just as formless as himself to ambulatory limbs, to surprisingly complex entities both fully formed and malformed. Most are immediately seized and consumed by him, but some escape to wander away, wandering the extradimensional tunnels of his realm until they find their way into the underground of other worlds. That’s right, many true-breeding aberrations in Pathfinder, including the classic gibbering mouther, are descended from this foul god!

All of this reflects his nature as patron of the misbegotten, an avatar of life gone wrong in violation of every natural order.

Abhoth himself is described as having a twisted and cynical personality, seeing no beauty in the world and seeking only to add cruelty to it.

This outer god is originally from Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborean Cycle of short stories, where he made the jump to the Call of Cthulhu and other such RPGs and then on to Pathfinder.

Though the original source describes him as grey in color, Abhoth’s art in Pathfinder paints him as a bright light (possibly glowing) blue. This may have been to help distinguish him from another cosmic horror staple in the game, the shoggoth. Indeed, for like many formless horrors, Abhoth’s only defining feature is his formlessness and tendency to form and reform various random body parts from his mass seemingly at random with varying degrees of recognizability.

While it is not given a name in Pathfinder, Abhoth’s grotto is connected to many different underground realms across various planets, and his realm itself is a maze of tunnels that he wanders through aimlessly as the spawn that survive his hunger.

As a god of fecundity, I can see some twisted remote culture venerating the Source of Uncleaness as a fertility deity, or perhaps warded against with the hope that children are born whole and fully formed. However, those that delve into his monstrous true nature may come to believe that his formlessness and cruelty are the truest expression of life, and get up to the usual nasty cult business of trying to summon him, or more likely, some of his children, and generally venerate all manner of unnatural life forms, often to the detriment of their health.

As a particularly cynical outer god, Abhoth counts none among his friends, not even his own children.

He also lacks servants in the traditional sense, being directly served by no one. However, he is able to see many worlds through the eyes of his spawn, and may even invade such a world through them on a lark.

Abhoth favors the domains of Chaos, Darkness, Earth, Madness, and Strength, with the subdomains of Caves, Ferocity, Insanity, Night, Nightmare, and Resolve. All of which reflects his cruel but not overtly malevolent demeanor, as well as his connection to caves, physical might and the horror of his own existence.

While a handful of Outer Gods have been written up in 2e, Abhoth has not gotten that treatment yet, so no list of his domains exist there yet.

Like all cosmic horror gods, Abhoth is too uncaring to offer any rewards of obedience.

With all sorts of horrors found in the depths of countless planets, you can bet your buns that Abhoth is definitely still out there in the far future of Starfinder, even if he hasn’t been officially mentioned yet.

That does it today, and yes, Abhoth’s story did inspire the demon lord Jubilex, but we’ll talk about how Pathfinder sometimes doubles up on certain deific concepts some other time. For now, eagerly await the final deity we’ll be covering this week, the first non-evil one we’ve had in a while!

#pathfinder #deity #Abhoth #Cthulhu mythos #elder mythos #pathfinder 109 in search of sanity

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