"It’s different every time you look straight at it, but the details are always viscerally repulsive. Fractal insect limbs and cracked teeth and spores all co-mingling in wet, stretching flesh. Its outline is sharp and fluid but your left and right eye can’t agree on the details. The edges of it feel too far away, and the middle won’t focus unless you look at your own nose. When you do, all its eyes glance there as well. "
“Pieces continuously break away and reattach to the whole. Some shrink away into nowhere while giving the impression of getting closer. Others boil into existence and join themselves together. All give the sense that they belong to a single being, but you cannot find the connections between them. You feel heat radiating from the closeness of its flesh, from a direction with which you are not familiar.”
I think a lot of people say they like Lovecraftian horror without fully grasping what makes a creature Lovecraftian rather than just “a monster”. Like in the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG where having enough Int to understand what you just experienced makes it worse. If you can look at a thing and it makes rational sense in the physical world, like a giant humanoid with tentacles on its face, then it isn’t Lovecraftian. It’s not just that it’s unknown, it’s incomprehensible in the context of our reality. In Lovecraft’s own words, “The Thing can not be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.”
The way they’re presented in a lot of RPGs don’t really help this. Giving any kind of Mythos being a stat block inherently violates the idea of it being some kind of incomprehensible horror, because now it’s rigidly defined with numbers and words within the rules and context of the game.
