Old Gods

Known also as the Great Elder Ones or the Great Old Ones, these five unfathomable entities are the first wills to ever stir within the fabric of the world. Ancient beyond reckoning, they emerged—or perhaps always were—from the Void between stars, shaping the earliest nightmares of the world. They are not deities in the conventional sense, but forces of reality-warping alien will, existing across multiple realms at once, too immense for mortal minds to comprehend without fracturing. Their influence leaks into dreams, into madness, into the trembling spaces between time’s weave.   None know whether the world formed around the Old Gods, or whether they invaded it. In the lost age known only as the Primeval Time, they each commanded grotesque empires of monstrosities—aboleths, beholders, mind flayers, and worse—battling for supremacy in a war of shifting flesh, minds, and impossible geometries. This age ended only when a cosmic object known as the Birthing Star gave rise to the leylines and the Elemental Titans. These new powers, and their dragonspawn, shattered the dominion of the Old Gods and banished them beyond the Astral Filament into the howling prison-realm now called the Realm of Insanity. But exile is not erasure.   Today, the Old Gods remain bound, but not powerless. Their touch reaches across the veil, whispered through broken minds, prophetic dreams, and arcane echoes. Cults fester in the shadows of civilizations—some ancient, others newly born—driven by visions of their return. Few mortals can resist their call once heard. Though their forms are vast and alien, their presence is all too intimate: felt in the crawling paranoia of the watched, the unraveling of fate’s thread, the swelling of rot beneath clean stone. Their worship is not faith, but infection.

Forgotten Knowledge

Knowledge of the Old Gods is perilously rare. Among the peoples of The Known World, their names are all but forgotten—erased deliberately by ancient powers or lost to time through blood and silence. Most mortals live and die without ever hearing of Azorr’Baloth or Yug’Thuul, let alone grasping the significance of what they are. The few scraps of surviving lore are scattered across broken tablets, half-burned tomes, and whispered cultic rituals—fragments of sanity-shattering truths buried beneath layers of obfuscation.   Those who do stumble upon their existence often dismiss them as myth, delusion, or metaphor. In academic circles, the term “Old Gods” is more likely to be encountered as an abstract philosophical concept, a cautionary allegory of ambition and madness. Among the arcane elite, any true research into the Great Old Ones is highly taboo—dissuaded by ancient edicts, cursed compacts, or the quiet disappearance of those who dig too deep. Libraries that dare to hold such texts bind them in iron and keep them locked in vaults, their pages unread for centuries.   Even among clerics and sages, it is commonly believed that such entities cannot exist within the cosmology as it is currently understood. Their dominions are alien, not merely in nature but in logic—violating the sacred rules of cause and effect, of time and will. The gods of the pantheon do not speak of them. Angels turn away. Demons fear to name them. And the stars, it is said, tremble when they are watched too long.

Cults of the Old Gods

Worship of the Old Gods is neither widespread nor organized—it is a contagion. Those who serve these entities are the broken, the curious, the desperate, and the damned. Cults of the Old Ones do not proselytize in the open. They whisper in alleyways, bleed in basements, and dream in silence. They are not united, not even among themselves—each god's followers act in isolation, often at odds, bound only by shared madness and the promise of something vast, alien, and true beyond the veil of reality.   Old Cults are not religions in the conventional sense. There is no doctrine, no scripture, only fragments of forbidden knowledge passed between initiates or found scrawled on the inside of asylum walls. Some cults believe their god will devour the world. Others think they will be elevated into some new state of being—free of the flesh, free of time, free of meaning. Most simply obey the compulsions pushed into their minds by voices that claim to be divine.   Their rituals are often brutal, abstract, or both. Offerings of blood, dreams, and memory are common. Some cults seek to open gates to the Realm of Insanity through sacrificial rites. Others attempt to summon the godspawn—aboleths, beholders, slaadi, and worse—as living avatars of their masters’ intent. In cities, cults hide in plain sight: disguised as apocalyptic street preachers, self-help communes, secret academic societies, or revolutionary cells. In the wilds, they gather in forgotten shrines, caverns of warped stone, or sunken ruins that seem older than the stars.   And yet the greatest horror lies in this: the gods rarely answer. Most cultists will never hear the voice they pray to. They act on instinct, on vision, on obsession. The Old Gods have no interest in the pleas of mortals—only in the slow unraveling of reality itself. Those few who are noticed are forever changed, their minds peeled open, their identities consumed. They do not return with divine blessings, but with eyes that do not blink, and mouths that whisper things they cannot remember saying.

Heralds and Harbingers

Where most mortals break under the whispering weight of the Old Gods’ presence, a rare few are twisted into something more. These are the Heralds—those touched by the distant gaze of an Elder One, warped in body, mind, and soul. They are not chosen in the way a priest is called by a benevolent deity, but more like a wound chooses rot. Heralds are created when the veil between a mortal and their patron thins to nothing, and in that space, something vast notices.   But the path from Herald to Harbinger is not guaranteed. Among the Heralds of each Old God, there is bitter, fratricidal competition. To be a Harbinger is to be the mouthpiece of madness incarnate, a walking omen of the god’s eventual return. Heralds tear at each other—sometimes literally—fighting in secret wars, arcane duels, and ritual dreamscapes to prove themselves worthy of becoming their patron’s chosen vessel. Only one may rise at a time.   When a Herald ascends, they become a Harbinger: a terrifying conduit through which the Old God can more directly act in the world. Their minds are shattered mosaics of alien thought. Their forms may no longer be entirely mortal—eyes where there should be none, mouths that speak backward truths, limbs that bend time, or skin that glimmers with the stars of other realms. Harbingers do not spread faith. They spread revelation—often through ruin.   To witness a Harbinger is to feel a truth you were not meant to know. Civilians flee or fall into catatonia. Animals go mad. Arcane Magic distorts in their presence. Harbingers often serve as the final sign before catastrophe—summoning the godspawn, opening cracks in reality, or leading their cults in suicidal uprisings to breach the veil. And when a Harbinger dies, their body sometimes seeds a place of corruption, forever tainted by the echo of the Old One they served.   No god has more than one Harbinger at a time. And should a Harbinger fall or be forgotten, the Heralds will begin their cannibal courtship anew—each one convinced they are the next to be touched.

Temples of the Old Gods

Temples dedicated to the Old Gods are not sacred ground—they are scars upon reality. Most are not truly built, but uncovered, summoned, or revealed through prophetic dreams or catastrophic ritual. Their architecture defies local design, appearing alien, ancient, and asymmetrical—rising from swamps, the ocean floor, sunken fault lines, or even within warped dreamscapes. Many who behold these sites for the first time experience nausea, vertigo, or spatial confusion, as the geometry disagrees with the mind.   These temples are sometimes cyclopean, made from impossible black stone veined with luminescent green or purple ichor. Some are living structures, grown rather than raised. Others are half-submerged monoliths with sigils that twist when unobserved. In rare cases, temples phase in and out of existence entirely, appearing only under specific stellar alignments or through sacrificial rites.   The Old Golds' Temples serve as conduits between the Realm of Insanity and the world. Each one is a point of convergence for dreams, madness, and divine infection. Cults perform rites such as sacrificial silencing, reversed baptisms, inscriptional dreaming, or vein-leech offerings—each designed to weaken the veil or call godspawn into the world.   The existence of these temples is aggressively denied by most governments, religious authorities, and magical academies. Some have sanctioned elite orders tasked with destroying these sites or sealing them with divine wards and forgotten magic. Unfortunately, destruction is often impossible. When razed, some temples merely reappear elsewhere. Others retaliate, unleashing psychic backlashes or summoning godspawn defenders.   Most common folk speak of them only in folktales: “the Tower That Watches,” “the House of Thirteen Doors,” or “the Shrine with No Shadows.” To hear such names spoken in earnest is often enough to invite trouble.

Dream Rot

Dream Rot is not a disease in the traditional sense. It has no known vector, no microbial agent, no contagion borne of breath or blood. It spreads through awareness—a memetic infection seeded by the Old Gods, particularly those who dwell in thought, time, or vision. To hear, read, or even glimpse a fragment of their truth is to plant the seed. From that moment on, the soul begins to fray.   Scholars of forbidden lore classify Dream Rot as an infohazard: a curse of cognition. The earliest stages manifest as vivid, lucid dreams—visions of spirals, drifting cities, dead suns, and eyes that are inside the dreamer rather than seen by them. As the rot progresses, the afflicted begin speaking languages they’ve never learned, scrawling unknown symbols, or murmuring star-charts in their sleep. Days blur. Time folds. Reality becomes inconsistent.   Eventually, the dreamer may come to believe they have always been dreaming—and that waking life is the lie.   Dream Rot cannot be cured by traditional healing. It is a psychic infection, and its progression is almost impossible to halt once seeded. The only known remedy is erasure—magical memory wiping, psychic warding, or divine intervention by gods of purity, knowledge, or order. In the most extreme cases, victims must be placed in stasis or mind-locked via imprisonment, Wish, or more forbidden methods.   Containment is nearly as dangerous as the affliction. Reading the writings of a victim, studying their glyphs, or even discussing their dreams in too much detail may expose others. Because of this, some secretive institutions exist solely to locate, neutralize, and erase all signs of Dream Rot outbreaks.   Some Old Cults deliberately spread the rot, believing it is a communion, not a curse. They leave fragments of true names etched in alley walls, whispered in theaters, or embedded in dreams through magical rituals.

Godspawn

The word Godspawn is spoken with awe and terror by those few who dare study the Old Gods. It is a poetic term, not a literal one—an epithet granted to the aberrant creatures believed to be shaped in the wake of the Old Gods, not through intention or affection, but as inevitable consequences of their presence in the Primeval Time. These are not divine creations in the traditional sense, but unnatural echoes of immense cosmic power, birthed like tumors from the psychic and physical wounds the Old Gods left on the world.   Each of the five Old Gods is said to have spawned an entire lineage of such beings, though whether they were truly forged or merely awakened is debated in forbidden circles.

• Aboleths. The aboleths are intimately tied to Azorr’Baloth, the Wandering Eternity. They remember the world as it was before time had meaning, before even death was consistent. Possessing flawless ancestral memory and ancient psionic might, the aboleths believe they were the first rulers of the world—because, in some terrible way, they were. In every subterranean ocean or drowned ruin, they recall the shape of a world that was never meant to last.

• Beholders. The beholders, sometimes called the Hadari by cultists, are traced to Baal’Hadar, the Sight Beyond Sight. These creatures are born not through reproduction but through dreaming—an eye’s vision given form. Obsessive and paranoid to the extreme, each beholder sees reality differently, and that perception warps its own body and the world around it. They are not mere monsters, but fragments of Baal’Hadar’s endless gaze—each a sentinel built to stare forever, and to destroy whatever breaks their imagined order.

• Arachis. The Arachis, a little-known race of spiderlike planar weavers, are associated with C’tethx, the Weaver of Fate. These beings create vast web-temples in the Underdark and forgotten realms, interlacing strands of fate, memory, and magic. Their societies are ruled by seven matriarchal seers—“broodmothers”—who believe themselves to be living extensions of the Old God's infinite limbs, each plucking at the strands of possibility to shape the outcomes of lives they will never meet. Though less overtly hostile than other godspawn, the Arachis are no less alien, and their prophecies have toppled kingdoms simply by being believed.

• Slaadi. From the decay of Gorl’Boroth, the Ruinous Maw, come the Slaadi—monstrous, reproductive agents of entropy and plague. They are chaos incarnate, not in the whimsical sense, but in the decaying, ravenous erosion of structure itself. Slaadi do not breed through normal means, but through infection—implanting chaos into their victims, transforming order into dissonant, shrieking life. Wherever they spread, they leave behind collapsing reality, fungal overgrowth, and the loss of meaning itself. It is whispered that their forms are not stable, and that their very being is sustained by the continuing hunger of Gorl’Boroth gnawing on the edges of the world.

• Mind Flayers. Perhaps most feared are the illithids, or mind flayers, who are believed to trace their lineage—whether directly or through some cruel manipulation—to Yug’Thuul, the Deceiver. These psychically dominant slavers operate in shadows, deep time, and buried cities, manipulating civilizations over centuries. Unlike the more bestial godspawn, the illithids scheme with intention, building hidden empires and guiding others like pieces in a game no one else can see. Though they rarely speak of the Deceiver, some suspect they do not need to—for Yug’Thuul weaves itself into the plans of its children whether they serve it knowingly or not.

The Godspawn do not always recognize their own origin. Most live independent lives, ruled by instinct, obsession, or empire-building agendas of their own. And yet, every one of them carries the psychic residue of their parent—an echo that calls to them when the stars shift or the veil weakens. Old Cults revere them as saints, as heralds, or as keys to unlock the return of their masters. Some cults attempt to bind them, breed them, or become them. A few, in their mad devotion, believe that the path to true ascension lies in melding with godspawn flesh—though none who attempt such rites are ever seen again, at least in a form that can still be called mortal.   The list of known godspawn is likely incomplete. Some claim that entire subterranean ecologies have evolved around forgotten species of godspawn. Others believe that creatures like gibbering mouthers, neothelids, or star spawn may be embryonic forms—larval echoes of gods whose minds have not yet breached the veil. Still more disturbing is the theory that mortals can become godspawn through exposure to Dream Rot, divine madness, or prolonged communion with the Realm of Insanity. In the end, the Godspawn are not a taxonomy—they are a warning. For where they walk, something greater follows.

Old God	Alignment	Dominions of Influence	Offspring	Rival Gods
Azorr'Baloth	N	Eternity, knowledge, timelessness, and stagnation	Aboleths	Gorl'Boroth
Baal'Hadar	CE	Paranoia, fear, envy, and sixth-senses	Beholders	C'Tethx, Gorl'Boroth
C'tethx	LN	Destiny, fate, luck, misfortune, and order	Arachis	Yug'Thuul
Gorl'Boroth	CE	Chaos, decay, destruction, entropy, and undeath	Slaadi	Azorr'Baloth
Yug'Thuul	LE	Change, deception, greed, knowledge, and time	Mind Flayers	C'tethx