What cosmic horror do you want?

[Grumpy RPG Reviews]

So I will be revising Hunger from Beyond, my ST Vault book about including cosmic horror in VtM. The new version of the book will be for V5.

What kind of cosmic horror do you want? What is the strangest thing to happen in one of your games?

[Reasor]

I've never seen the subject touched upon in Vampire, but I love the idea.

A request list off the top of my head:

Storyteller tips on avoiding revealing so much that the mystery disappears; how to emphasize the horror of feeling small in a vast, dark universe.

Tips on translating existing Umbral entities from other game lines into Vampire game mechanics, with examples unless there are legal issues.

Blood Sorcery for vampiric Nephandi cultists.

A chapter on E Division, the Camarilla's own X Files department.

[Chris24601]

For more cosmic horror I lean towards embracing some of the Vampire-adjacent elements like Mummy (2e, not the revised reboot), Wraith and also Banes/Fomori reimagined as more Egyptian/Middle-Eastern/Hindu demonic entities and really highlight that Vampires are NOT actually the oldest evil in the world and may even be fairly low on the actual pecking order.

[Jonny]

Honestly, I've always loved the Tzimisce extradimentional parasite stuff

[Grumpy RPG Reviews]

A chapter on E Division, the Camarilla's own X Files department.

I've already included everything else you mentioned. But this, E Division, is good and not something I had thought of. Thanks.

Honestly, I've always loved the Tzimisce extradimentional parasite stuff

I reference this in the book.

[Ventrue Busboy]

In my own V20 Chronicle, the players have encountered malevolent spirits (Banes), and even visited a Sorcerer's Demesne in the Umbra (though they lacked any context to understand where or what this nightmarish dream-world was). I've chosen to focus on borrowed bits of Werewolf/Mage cosmology, with Wyrm Banes taking the role of evil outsiders contacted and summoned by Infernalists (taking the place of Demons, which I've chosen to ignore). The form, names and lore surrounding these spirits will vary with the Sorcerous tradition and its mythology, but I slot them into the Spirit-Incarnae framework and give them a slant according to the Wyld/Weaver/Wyrm cosmology. [The players have yet to encounter any Kindred with Spiritus or Dur-An-Ki, but inasmuch as those Disciplines deal with Spirits powerful enough to have an identity and ego, those spirits would also fall under the Triat/Gaian rubric as well].

[Grumpy RPG Reviews]

Hunger From Beyond has been updated for V5 - and its available at the Vault! “I have seen the dark universe yawning

Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.”
-H. P. Lovecraft, Nemesis

This book provide tools for including elements of Lovecraftian, or cosmic, horror in a Masquerade game. These elements may add dreaded flavour to games growing stale with too much familiarity with a World of Darkness gamers think they understand.

Hunger from Beyond includes:
• New creatures of cosmic horror,
• NPCs to rope the coterie into Lovecraftian horror,
• New locations touched by the beyond,
• And alien blood magic!
• And now it is more likely to drive you and the other players at your table insane!

[MyWifeIsScary]

Obtenebration's abyss as an unknowable dimension of evil and the mysticism around it is cool... oh wait.

I like far-flung banes and creatures from the sea. There's these wonderful little octopus monsters in W20 book of the Wyrm. I really like the "Science gone wrong" aspect of the WoD, especially as WoD has hyperscience (magic with the trappings of science) and wonderful things can happen when you're too into it . You can potentially have a blast by something mundane like making a methuselah... weird. Controlling a town and commiting attrocities within it for reasons not possible to understand all the while remaining unseen.

Cosmic horror beats out "personal horror" for me, but pales before political horror.

[Grumpy RPG Reviews]

I don't get into Oblivion or Obtenebration. But I do explore, and stat out, the octopus monsters. They are the Petyranos Chulorviah, and appeared in the the W20 Book of the Wyrm and in Blood Dimmed Tides.

[MyWifeIsScary]

Thinking about it more:
I feel cosmic horror is, to some degree, entirely antithetical to what I think the WoD is about. In cosmic horror, knowledge is bad. Knowing too much will make you insane. Ignorance is bliss. The WoD is inherrently satirical. In WoD, the world is shit because people are ignorant, and if they knew more, the world wouldn't be so shit. Knowledge is enlightenement, and a path to self-betterment. Ignorance is a trap and reality a prison. They're entirely opposite notions.