So you’ve decided to roll up a warlock. It’s time to pick a patron, but you aren’t sure what you want. You don’t want to always have guy watching over your shoulder, you just want to be a little weird guy that has a great cantrip. While I’m a fan of, let’s say, alternative warlock/patron relationships, only one actually has it baked into the description, the Great Old One.
The Great Old One might be unaware of your existence or entirely indifferent to you, but the secrets you have learned allow you to draw your magic from it.
PHB, Page 109
If your DM likes meddling patrons, then all you have to do is pick the Great Old Ones. They aren’t your teacher, they don’t even know you exist, your character just managed to find a way to siphon off just a fragment of their power. This is something that goes all the way back to the man that came up with the original Great Old Ones, H. P. Lovecraft.
The Great Old One patron is based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft. For a lot of you, you know the mythos from the works of Sandy Peterson, who gave us the original Call of Cthulhu game. His work was based more on August Derleth’s writings than Lovecraft’s. Derleth was a contemporary of Lovecraft, and upon his passing, he bought the rights to Lovecraft’s works, and continued to publish them under his company, Arkham House.
Derleth was perhaps a good business man, and ensured that Lovecraft’s works stuck around to inspire so many of today’s horror writers. In addition to a publisher, he also considered himself a writer. The problem here is that he wasn’t that great. A couple of the main problems are that he completely misunderstood what Lovecraft was doing. Derleth envisioned a world where Good fought Evil, so he decided that all of Lovecraft’s creatures should fit somewhere along that divide. He worked human morality into the greater cosmic background, and in doing so, completely missed the point.
One thing to remember in Lovecraft’s stories is that we can not understand these alien beings.
- We can not understand their science, so we call it magic. The Necronomicon wasn’t necessarily a book of spells, it was more like an advanced science text that was given to cavemen. The first caveman to make fire by hitting rocks together would have beenlabeled a wizard by his peers. The same goes for the old man Whately when he brought his sons into the world.
- We can not understand their motives, so we call them evil. Cthulhu may have killed those sailors, but did her do it out of malice, or was he just removing a pest from his home?
- We can not trust anything we think we know about them. Think about this, everything we know comes from mad men. The old Wizard Whatley was insane. The Cthulhu cultists were insane. The Marshes were insane. Even Abdul Al Hazred was insane. Most of the narrators in the stories are going insane by the time we get to the final paragraph.
It’s the last point that I think is the most important. Everything we think we know comes from people that saw too much and went at least, a little crazy. For instance, Castro, the old cultist that Inspector Legrasse captured in The Call of Cthulhu said that when the Great Old Ones rise, “all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy.” Does Cthulhu actually want this? All but two of the cultists were considered too crazy to hang, and since this was early 1900’s justice, that means the two that weren’t were still probably pretty crazy. Did Cthulhu actually say these things to the cultists, or did they just think that’s what Cthulhu wants?
Earlier in the story, we see several artists and poets going insane from intense nightmares of Cthulhu and his sunken city. This happened during the same time that R’lyeh had temporarily risen from the ocean’s depths. Cthulhu was only awake for a short period, but these people were going insane for weeks. Was Cthulhu actively trying to make them go insane, or was that just a side effect of his rising above the waters.
You ever see the show Ghost Hunters? The show featured two paranormal investigators that attempted to use science to investigate possible hauntings. One thing they would look for were sources of infrasound. Infrasounds are sounds that are too low for us to hear, but they still effect us in various ways. It’s said that they can cause feelings of fear, cause symptoms similar to sea sickness, can disturb sleep, and other things. What if “madness” wasn’t actually Cthulhu’s thing? What if Cthulhu isn’t trying to make people go crazy, what if his mind is like the psychic equivalent to infrasound?
So what does this mean for your character? You’re the Wizard Whatley, who found a book that gave him access to something beyond comprehension. You’re mind broke an you opened a door to something that isn’t supposed to exist in this world. You gained power, but that power wasn’t given consciously. Your mind and body warped. It’s like getting a high dose of radiation, your DNA was blasted apart, but instead of dying, you became a hulk warlock. Your patron doesn’t talk to you, but you think he does. You believe you’ve been given goals.
You basically have a blank slate here. Your “pact” can be anything you want since there is nobody actually enforcing it. Cthulhu has no idea you even exist, but YOU think he wants you to collect one of every different type of rabbit in your bag of holding. You opened a portal to Yog-Sothoth, and now your pretty sure requires you to never wear the same clothes twice. You read the that ancient cursed book one too many times, and now you think maybe you heard Azathoth tell you that you can only eat bugs.
Bonus Fact: Great Old Ones as a classification, exists because of August Derleth. Like I said, he changed a lot with the Cthulhu Mythos (A term he also came up with, Lovecraft referred to his works as Yog-Sothothery), the classifications of Great Old One, Outer God, and Elder God didn’t exist in this manner for Lovecraft. Lovecraft used the term “Great Old One” twice in his writing. Once, mentioned above by Old Castro, to refer to Cthulhu and his star spawn sleeping in the tomb city of R’lyeh. The other time was in At the Mountain of Madness, where they say that the elder things they find in Antarctica must be the Great Old Ones that were mentioned in ancient legend. He never meant it to be a reference to a specific group of creatures, but really ALL of the beings that came to Earth before man walked it’s surface.
This would mean that technically, your patron doesn’t even have to be Cthulhu or some other great eldritch godlike being. Mindflayers and Aboleths are both creatures that came to Earth (Oerth, Faerun, Krynn…) before man. Cambions and Unicorns are both valid patrons for warlocks per 5E rules, and both are DC 5. The Mind Flayer and Aboleth are both more powerful than them, and would make great patrons. For a more Lovecraftian flair, the same could be said for the Yithians and Elder Things.
Combining these two with what I said above, while their contact with humanity is a little more direct, they could still be patrons without forging a traditional pact.
The Yith were telepathic time traveling astronauts. They would send their minds across space and time to swap bodies with those of other races they wanted to learn about. You go to sleep normal, then wake up in the conical body of one of the Yith, in their great library city of Pnakotus. Of course, that isn’t their real body, it’s just the bodies they took over on Earth, so technically, you could wake up in the body of prehistoric creature from your world. Normally, you spend your time in the past being questioned about life in your time while the Yithian in your body spends it’s time absorbing all the knowledge it can. Then they mind wipe you and send you back to your body. You think you have some kind of amnesia, and your friends are all confused about why you spend the last three months in the library. Only, maybe you came back during the Spell Plague or some other magical event that brought some of the Yith’s power with you. You have some memories of what happened, and you think it’s your job to collect more knowledge until they call you back, which will never happen.
For the Elder Things, like Dyer’s expedition, you’re out adventuring somewhere and come across an ancient city that doesn’t exist on any map. In it you find the sleeping Elder Things. They dissect you, study you, then put you back together and send you back into the world. Only, they didn’t put you together exactly right. Maybe they ruined a couple organs, so they made you new ones. Now, you’re a warlock, and while you’re terrified of these creatures, you are pretty sure that they want to make all humanity better, like they did you. So you believe it’s your job to prepare civilization for their return.
The Great Old One pact should be one of madness, not because your patron wants it to be that way, but because contact with them has driven you mad. You have no master but the one in your head, so get creative and have fun with it.
