Horrifying the Horror in Tabletop Games.
- In the Deadlands universe, the Undead are animated by evil spirits called Manitou. However, the uber-undead Stone is such an evil son of a bitch that his resident manitou is afraid of him.
- Don't Rest Your Head: Nightmares are the result of one of the Awake losing control of their Madness and warping into something unspeakable. In-game, if all three of your Discipline dice turn into Madness dice due to you snapping, you turn into a Nightmare and your character is effectively dead. However, it's possible (through various means) to turn a Permanent Madness die back into a Discipline die. Characters that do that scare the ever-loving shit out of Nightmares, because when they look that character in the eyes, they see someone who faced the same chaos and cacophonies they did and came back whole.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- The Aboleths are a race of aquatic Eldritch Abominations so unfathomably old that they ruled the world in its primordial youth before the current crop of races (and even deities) existed. And this is why the Illithids scare them — even though the Aboleths have perfect Genetic Memory that stretches back to a time before creation, as far as they can tell the Illithids just showed up a few thousand years ago with a fully-developed culture. They're exactly right.
- Ironically this goes both ways, and the brain-eating Mind Flayers avoid Aboleths as the one horror in all the Underdark with greater mental powers than themselves, lest they end up like their own psionically-dominated thralls. Illithids are also legitimately fearful of the undead, since they can't be psionically detected, have no minds to dominate, and aren't slowed down by having their brains bit out of their skulls, which doesn't leave the Illithids with many options when it comes to combating them.
- The Baatezu are the devilish tyrants of the Nine Hells and some of the most fearsome and sadistic creatures in existence. But in one corner of the layer of Malbolge, a strangely-glowing cavern called Maggoth Thyg sometimes emits horrible cries that Hell's damned souls cannot hear, but the devils can, and they find the sound instinctively terrifying. It's suspected this is related to the ancient Baatorians, the race of fiendish Precursors that ruled Hell before the devils' arrival.
- The jerren were once an ordinary halfling tribe that found itself facing extermination at the hands of goblinoids. Out of desperation, the tribe's leaders turned to a dark power that led them to perform ever-more extreme acts to defeat their foes, until eventually the jerren were committing atrocities that sickened even the goblinoids. The goblinoids ultimately gave up and tried to retreat, only to be hunted down by the vengeful jerren, who used their foes' heads to mark the borders of their territory.
- In the Eberron setting, Droaam is a land of monsters for whom "civilisation" and "diplomacy" are still somewhat new concepts. Ogres and trolls make up a sizeable chunk of the population, the heads of state are evil night hags, and finding a settlement ruled by a medusa or even a mind flayer is far from unheard of. The people of Droaam are also terrified of Mordain the Fleshweaver and refuse to go anywhere near his tower, for fear of ending up as one of his experiments.
- Also in Eberron, both the quori dream-devils of the Dreaming Dark and the ageless rakshasa of the Lords of Dust try to give the daelkyr a wide berth, because while quori are hard to permanently kill and rakshasa generally reform, the daelkyr are embodiments of change - and being remade by a daelkyr is not only the closest thing to death an immortal could face, they would also likely view it as meaningfully worse. On top of that, the daelkyr are neither central to the Prophecy in the way the Overlords the Lords of Dust serve arenote , nor do they dream, so the Dreaming Dark can't get information that way either - and their mindsets are so inhuman that you can't reason out their strategies either, to whatever degree they even have them.
- The githyanki, psionic interdimensional raiders who ride red dragons and have the mettle to battle the illithids, once invaded Athas, a barren wasteland where almost everything is psionic, even the absurdly-dangerous wildlife, and the archmages who rule the place power their spells by draining life force out of the people around them. The githyanki left, sealed up the portal behind them, and never came back.
- Exalted:
- Autochthon may be a benevolent (ish) Eldritch Abomination, but he is still an Eldritch Abomination, and within his theomechanical body is an entire populated world. He is currently marooned in an endless void by his own deeds because taking that near-suicidal risk seemed less dangerous than dealing with the Solar Exalted at the height of their power and madness.
- Fellow Eldritch Abominations Oramus and Sacheverell were so horrified by the implications of their creations, the Getimian Exaltations, they sealed them away. It wasn't that Getimians can reach Solar-like levels of power which horrified them (they can't), it's that they're chosen from destinies which were planned but cut before implementation, and all that implies.
- Even the mightiest dragons in Iron Kingdoms fear Toruk the Dragonfather, their creator, to the extent that if Toruk actively goes on the warpath, they will all unite to fend him off because it's the only way they get to continue existing - and cooperation does not come naturally to IK dragons.
- Magic: The Gathering: The original art for Cruel Ultimatum
showed a demon lord wounded and cowering before the shadow of its attacker. The shadow was later revealed to belong to the legendarily powerful and evil dragon planeswalker Nicol Bolas.There is always a greater power. - New World of Darkness:
- Even powerful elder vampires in Vampire: The Requiem know to lay low and band together when the Strix are in town. Not only are they responsible for wiping out an entire clan — the Julii of ancient Rome — but whenever they gather in a city, serious carnage is about to ensue.
- On a smaller scale, any vampire that receives the message "Who is Cain?" had better run as fast as they can. It means the Cainite Heresy is coming for them: fanatical vampire hunters who willingly sacrifice their own (and innocents) to make the kill.
- Vampires from both Old and New Worlds of Darkness steer clear of Werewolves. Werewolves hate Vampires with a passion, but knowing that Werewolves are stronger, faster, and tougher than them, most vampires could only respond with fear.
- Prometheans are revived corpses gifted with an internal magic power that keeps them alive but also repulses everyone else. The environment around them starts to decay and die the longer they stay in one place. And they are scared of the Zeka, a rare line of Prometheans powered by nuclear fire. Example: Most of the Created are trying to reach their "New Dawn" to be reborn as real humans. No Zeka has completed the journey yet, and there's a rumor that if one ever does, the result won't be a human — it'll be a nuclear explosion.
- Slashers, sociopathic Serial Killers who rival most monsters in how horrible they are and frequently develop supernatural abilities, are absolutely terrified by Sin-Eaters; indeed, the many violent death Slashers cause during their killing sprees tend to create a lot of ghosts, and Sin-Eaters, in addition to being near-unstoppable, constantly resurrecting powerhouses themselves, possess multiple abilities allowing them to enhance the abilities of ghosts around them— meaning the presence of a single one in the area can result in an entire army of very pissed off former victims coming back from the grave.
- There's a subset of Slashers, the Hunt Club, that treat serial murder as a points-based sport. When they look at the Lucifuge, they see beings who have the right to rule over humanity and who refuse the honor. The very idea drives them mad with fear.
- Beasts are Humanoid Abominations with a literal Horror as a soul, who feed by terrorizing mortals and see most supernaturals as kin. There are, however, two major exceptions to this: Demons, who leave them uncomfortable due to their alien, mechanical nature... and the Insatiable, an even older race of Humanoid Abominations who creep them out so much one of their nicknames is the Nightmares of Beasts.
- When a Princess crosses the Despair Event Horizon, she is most likely to end up corrupt by the Darkness and become a Dethroned, a warped monster trapt in her own suffering and dangerous to anything in sight. Seeing how the Darkness is a force of evil and sorrow and grows in every dark place it can find, you'd expect this kind of transformation to be a good thing for its servants. It's not; not only are Dethroned insane and impossible to truly control (at best, they can lure them close to their enemies and hope for the best), but they also constantly warp every other creature of the Dark that gets too close into their mindless slaves, destroying any self-awareness they had. Because of this, sapient minions of the Darkness will usually run away from them as fast as they can and keep their distance. Attracting a Dethroned on the battlefield is considered their equivalent of the Godzilla Threshold.
- Even powerful elder vampires in Vampire: The Requiem know to lay low and band together when the Strix are in town. Not only are they responsible for wiping out an entire clan — the Julii of ancient Rome — but whenever they gather in a city, serious carnage is about to ensue.
- Pathfinder:
- Demons and devils terrify mortals and immortals alike, and rightly so. The demons are a seemingly infinite tide of horrors that rebounds from every setback and pours from the rifts of the Abyss to invade even the slopes of Heaven, while the devils are sadistic, cunning, brilliantly evil tyrants scheming to rule all of existence and whose convoluted plans seem to assure their eventual victory no matter what their enemies do. And then there are the daemons, nihilistic, soul-eating psychopaths whose end goal is nothing less than the utter annihilation of every form of life and the downfall of the multiverse into absolute entropy, and who are so backstabbing and untrustworthy that any form of deal with them is tantamount to suicide. Demons and devils will ally with each other and even angels to combat daemons — they're terrified by what the daemons do and with good reason.
- Giants are some of the greatest threats, dragons and liches excluded, that most mortals ever have to face. They're immensely powerful and horribly strong, and most species have fearsome reputations — fire giants are slavers and warmongers capable of crushing any army and fort, frost giants are ferocious barbarians who engage in brutal, bloody raids on anyone they meet, evil storm giants are living engines of destruction capable of turning the very weather against their foes, and so on. All giants, without exception, are terrified of rune giants. These were created in Thassilon to control enslaved giants, and can magically turn any giant they meet into a mind-controlled slave, which they do often and with relish. When rune giants turn up, even the most fearsome and bellicose giants quietly pack up, leave and flee as far as they can.
- Mi-go and the Outer Gods — the very ones from the Cthulhu Mythos — are both easily Eldritch Abominations and among the more sanity-destroying foes a hero on Golarion can meet. And then there's the Dominion of the Black, an interstellar empire of depraved, possibly omnicidal horrors. Mi-go don't go into Dominion Space, and the Outer Gods consider the Dominion enemies. Outer God cultists will readily seek to attack and undermine followers of the Dominion, even though outsiders can rarely tell the two fations of abomination-worshipping lunatics apart.
- The insect spirits of Shadowrun are parasitic alien invaders from another "layer" of reality who are dangerous enough that detonating a tactical nuke in the middle of a city to take out a hive was considered a reasonable strategy...except that it still wasn't enough to wipe them out. And yet there are a number of things that utterly terrify them, such as anything related to the Horrors or the Yama Kings of Hong Kong.
- Vampire: The Masquerade: Even the most depraved vampires fear the Tzimisce, sadistic flesh crafters whose atrocities cannot be cured, and the Baali, demon worshippers who can re-embrace vampires into their bloodline.
- In Warhammer:
- The Skaven have a world-spanning Under-Empire with a population of over a billion, and have access to Magitek war machines and Fantastic Nukes, but they're still deathly afraid of Nagash, the very first necromancer and the most powerful sorcerer who has ever lived (and unlived).
- The Sword of Khaine is an Artifact of Doom that scares the Chaos Gods.
- The Fear and Terror rules mean that while trolls, ogres, and similar creatures (which cause Fear) are not intimidated by other creatures that cause Fear, they're still vulnerable to Terror (generally possessed by dragons, Greater Daemons, and similar monstrosities) unless they have another special rule to counteract it.
- Undead troops tend to cause Fear and are themselves immune to it. Enter Harald Hammerstorm, a Chaos champion who's spent so long beating the crap out of undead that he makes them afraid.
- One of the rules of Warhammer 40,000 is that no matter how big, bad and fierce something is, it'll be afraid of something else.
- Although they're loath to admit it, followers of Chaos are all at least a little unnerved by the Necrons. Because they have no souls, only badly degraded digital copies of the personalities of long-dead aliens, they're immune to most Chaos powers, and any sorcerer trying to read their minds only sees an empty void. They also have a similar problem with the Tyranids, only in reverse — the Tyranid Hive Mind is so overwhelmingly powerful and, more importantly so utterly alien, that it tends to disrupt the energies of the Warp that give Chaos sorcerers and daemons their power. Often fatally.
- As for the Tyranids, one alarming theory is that they aren't so much launching an attack on our galaxy as they are Invading Refugees fleeing something even worse. And if the Hive Fleets are going out of their way to avoid a particular system, you probably don't want to visit it either. If they specifically avoid your world, that almost definitely means it's a Necron tomb world and you've replaced one problem with another.
- The four great Chaos Gods are the twisted rulers of a realm of daemons, but even they are disgusted by the minor Chaos entity Malal, the omnicidal embodiment of Chaos' self-defeating tendencies who wants to destroy everything, including Chaos and itself.
- The Dark Eldar are fey pirates and slavers who strike from the shadows and drag their victims off to their inter-dimensional city, to be raped and/or tortured to death in order to sustain the Dark Eldar's life force. Eldar Harlequins are allowed to come and go from this nightmare city as they please because the Dark Eldar are fully aware of the consequences if they tried to stop them. They're also afraid of Mandrakes and minimize contact with them, treating any sort of necessary interaction as strictly transactional, and areas of Commorragh where they are known to frequent are avoided at all cost.
- Harlequins in turn are scared of Phoenix Lord Maugan Ra.
- The Night Lords Chaos Marines, specialists in terror tactics on a planetary scale, are freaked by the Eldar Phoenix Lord Jain Zar, who moves so fast even the Marines' super senses can't pick her up.
- One of the reasons Abaddon the Despoiler is the most feared Chaos warlord, beyond his devastating Black Crusades, is because he carries Drach'nyen. It looks like a daemonic sword the size of a man, but in truth, it's a miniature Eldritch Abomination that creeps out daemons.
- Orks generally see dangerous things as something that would be incredibly fun to fight, and fear tends to be something they just don't even feel. They managed to not notice the personification of death instilling fear of it into all the other races. However, Sebastian Yarrick put up such an incredible battle against an Ork force, slaughtering such an enormous number of them, that he is now the only known thing the Orks are afraid of.
- Not the only thing. From the same war, The Third War for Armageddon, the Flesh Tearers - a loyalist chapter descended from the Blood Angles with the Black Rage So traumatised the Orks with their brutality that it caused the only recorded instance of Orks refusing battle en masse.
- As mentioned, Necrons usually provide the extra horror, but they're not immune to it themselves. Within their own ranks, orthodox Necrons tends to be disturbed and repulsed by members of the Destroyer Cults, crazed personalities who abandoned all pretext of their original forms to heavily modify their bodies and excel at scouring the universe of life. And then there's Szarekh the Silent King, who abandoned his self-imposed exile when he encountered the Tyranids outside the galaxy and concluded his former people would need all the help they could get to survive. They're also terrified of their former enemies, the C'tan, and know better than anyone that if a sharded C'tan were to ever break free or reunite, their revenge on their Necron captors would be unspeakably brutal.
- The Daemons of Chaos, some of the most twisted and horrifying creations in the whole of the 40K universe, able to slaughter or Mind Rape their way through the rank-and-file troops of the other factions with contemptuous ease, are all terrified of The God-Emperor of Mankind, whom they refer to as "The Anathema" and for VERY good reason. His powers are antithetical to them, His Cool Sword inflicts permanent death on any daemon that falls to it, and the mere IDEA of facing His psychic might again causes even the mightiest of daemons like Kur'gath Plaguefather to quail in terror.
- They inherited the fear from their even-more-twisted-and-horrifying Eldritch Abomination masters and creators. It says A LOT about just how scared the Chaos Gods were of The Emperor that the threat of His victory was enough for them to set aside their 'Great Game' and team up just long enough to ensure that He failed.
Ku'gath Plaguefather: "Not only the sword, but The Anathema as well? It cannot be! We cannot face that sort of power and live!"
