You need some fresh inspiration for your horror scenarios? Then just go back to the source, but not all the source. Let's take just one story, the Dunwich Horror, and use it in isolation from the other stories as inspiration. 

Nor is it to be thought, that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.

Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraven, but who hath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly.

Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They rule again.


What does this excerpt tell us about the Great Old Ones?

Well, it doesn't say anything much about tentacled horrors or giant beasties or indeed much of the stuff in CoC. Rather the Old Ones:

1. Are timeless, either outside of time or eternal. Yog-Sothoth at least is clearly outside of time and an atemporal entity.

2. Are invisible and immaterial (without sight or substance), but capable of affecting the material including by somehow warping genetic material to produce hybrids influenced to varying degrees away from the host species.

3. They can destroy whole forests or cities, not by stomping on them but as an unseen destruction which leaves that which is destroyed ignorant of what befell it.

4. Places that feel their influence are lost to us, unknown and unknowable.

So, what does that imply? If they are coterminous with time and space, by invoking them all manner of things might be learnt. Knowledge of the distant past and the future and of secrets today. Where did the Templars hide their treasure? What will be the results of tomorrow's lottery? Does the Pentagon keep ufos in Area 51? All these things, with the aid of the Old Ones, are knowable.

And beyond knowledge? If your son died in a war, could that be changed? If time is all one to them, could they reach back and retrieve him? Perhaps. Perhaps through their power you could peel back time and space revealing all, reach through and crush hearts within bodies and bring back the dead to walk and breathe again. With such power almost anything becomes possible.

Of course, in the process your own mind may stretch, knowledge once learnt cannot be unlearnt and that which the Old Ones show you may not always be useful or welcome. Once a man has witnessed dying suns, the first fish crawling out of the primeval sea, his own death and the bloody rituals of the Aztecs at first hand, he may not be quite the same as he was before. His power had a price and his sanity is not the sanity of other men.

However, he now sees the true reality, beyond the illusion of time and space. The Old Ones have given him this, he knows that they will return for he has seen that too but he no longer cares, for since time has no meaning it means nothing that our time will end. To see further, to understand more, perhaps he will even help bring about that time, as they move closer contacting them becomes easier after all and there is no closer than here.

The cultist could be an astronomer, so desperate to understand how the universe began that he will let it be destroyed to find out. A mother who lost her child and will let all others die to see it again. A man so fearful of his own ultimate death that he will kill us all to find some way of escaping it. A general in a conquered army, willing to call down a destruction on the cities of the enemy that their ballistic missile defence system will never prevent. An archaeologist, so desirous of seeing the lost places of the Earth that he will bring them all forth in place of our own cities and homes.

The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be.

Nothing about tentacles and physical horrors in any of that. HPL and CoC are not the same thing, the Cthulhu mythos is not HPL's mythos and he makes as good a source of a new mythos as any you might find.


Credits: Balbinus