#OUTERGODS

[gbhbl]

Album Review: Outergods - A Kingdom Built Upon the Wreckage of Heaven (Prosthetic Records)

As far as talent goes, Outergods has it in spades and all that talent combined, results in a debut that has the potential to set the extreme world alight.

Having inked a deal with Prosthetic Records, Nottingham, UK-based Outergods are preparing to release their debut album, A Kingdom Built Upon the Wreckage of Heaven, on September 1st, 2023. While they might be a new band on the scene, Outergods features members who are embedded within the UK underground scene. Members from the likes of Raised by Owls, Antre, and Evil Scarecrow. As far as talent…

[themetalwanderlust]

Single Reviews: Svalbard, Death Dealer Union, Outergods, Hexvessel

Artist: Svalbard Track: How to Swim Down Label: Nuclear Blast Album/Release Date: The Weight of the Mask – October 6, 2023 Svalbard are no strangers to beautiful instrumentation – layered, delay-driven guitars, driven by co-vocalists/guitarists Serena Cherry and Liam Phelan. Their last album (2020’s When I Die, Will I Get Better? – Church Road Records/Translation Loss Records) was a…

[metalshockfinland]

OUTERGODS Share New Single + Visualizer 'Flesh Prison'

Photographer credit: Rise Again Photography Nottingham, UK’s OUTERGODS has today shared their new single, Flesh Prison, with an accompanying visualizer. Flesh Prison is the third track to be taken from the extreme metal group’s forthcoming album, A Kingdom Built Upon the Wreckage of Heaven, which is set for release via Prosthetic Records on September 1.  Flesh Prison follows OUTERGODS‘ recent…

[dailyadventureprompts]

Thirsting Grail, Outergod of Wants and Wounds

Artsource

Adventure Hooks:

While travelling the party encounters a once famed surgeon who seeks their help in undertaking pilgrimage to the distant shrine of a death god. When pressed on her motivation, she reveals that through some curse or divine act of cruelty, those she operates on can never die, but also cannot heal. 

There is a tree that grows in the ruins of the old braon’s castle, said to have sprouted from the chopping block upon which he had his wife’s lovers executed. The tree grows no leaves, only flowers, and it’s said that if you make a tea from its blossoms, you will receive a vision of your one ture love.  Beings of woven thorn are said to guard the tree, but there are those who would pay desperately to drink of its boughs. 

A once peaceful kingdom dissolves into a generations long civil war, any hope of peace drowned beneath a tide of violence, ruination, and grievance that none can hope to escape.

Among the outergods there are none more eager to engage with mortals than the entity known as Thisting Grail. It is a thing of violence and appetite, and seems all too eager to lend its power to those most likely to misuse it, whether they sought it’s aid in the first place or not. 

Scholars and madmen have long debated the Grail’s motivations, what goal or ideology it is trying to achieve with the visions and often horrific miracles it bestows. In truth, Thirsting Grail has no goal beyond the pursuit of violence and longing, it is a means without an end, ready to lend itself to any cause that would make the world a bloodier, hungrier place. 

The god is formless, an ocean of boling blood that takes on the shape of whatever “vessel” its followers imagine for it, borrowing their cultural iconography and birthing itself anew each time. There are litanies of these avatars, hundreds more likely forgotten by history;  blood saints and baleful red stars and heart hungry blades. Perhaps because of blood’s ubiquity in ritual and occult practice the Grail’s influence can “seep” its way into the worship of other entities, divine or demonic, and it’s not unheard of for otherwise upstanding and dogmatic worshippers of banal gods to accidentally begin practising the grail’s bloody rites. 

Sanguimancy and other forms of blood magic are the most obvious of Thirsting Grail’s gifts, but it has other more esoteric offerings: smoke from sacrifices or incense mingled with the formless god’s essence can grant visions of desires made manifest, though often twisted through a disturbingly carnal (in both senses of the word) lens. All too often worshippers ( and the cult leaders that encourage them) see these visions as prophetic, leading to the outergod being sometimes called “the mother of truth”.  It can also manifest the objects of desire: succulent fruits, unearthly lovers, weapons of inordinate power, but there is something fundamentally wrong with these creations as they cannot grant true satisfaction, and often leave those that partake of them wanting more than when they started. 

Those who fall prey to Thirsting Grail’s influence can become warped as their own veins become polluted by the entity’s ichor: becoming feral creatures of endless cruelty and appetite, or having their wounds open wider and wider until there is nothing but wound remaining of their swollen flesh. Those so overtaken grow and warp and merge with others until new horrors are birthed from them, a permanent seedbed of 

Titles: Mother of truth, formless mother, font erubescent, the bloodstar.  Symbols: A red grail or fountain, cultural iconography stained with blood.  Signs:  Wounds that bleed but do not heal, plants overflowing or cracking open to expose their innards. Unsettling red dreams.  Worshippers: Those with bloodstained hands be they doctors, butchers, or murderers. Vampires, occultists, and other sanguiphiles. Instatiable gourmands and unfulfilled lovers.   

Inspiration:  I wear my influences on my sleeve with this one.  I’ve been turning the Elden Ring mythology over in my mind for some time partially because I think there’s a lot of fun ideas there but also because I felt like (in typical Fromsoft fashion) there wasn’t enough shown to really scratch my itch for discovery. 

The formless mother/bloodstar was chiefest among these elements: A killer aesthetic with lore that was a little too thin to use as inspiration. After a while that thinness turned into a feature, the idea of an eldritch entity of pain and violence that conformed to the needs of those who worshipped it, granting power to those who would go out and make the world more violent and painful.  I liked the idea that “mother of truth” was a misnomer, and that cultists would ascribe meaning and intent and iconography to a god that didn’t care one way or another. 

Another strong influence is the Grail from Cultist Simulator/Book of hours ( SERIOUSLY, play book of hours you fools), an eldritch entity/aspect of reality that presides over hungers and births be they literal or figurative.  The Blood + Mother connection was obvious here, but the Grail provided some more texture and esoteric aspects to fill out my version’s storytelling potential.

[digidrakncreature]

Shit, I didn't even get to how reincarnation and souls work uh

Important notes:

outergods are not all powerful. Not all knowing either. They're the tesseract to our Flatland squares.

In my framework a soul is the individual – the consciousness, the 1st person pov of You. If something has its own consciousness then it is a soul. (as opposed to the body or brain or 'mind' which is mostly the individual but heavily influenced by the brain+body)

Also I'm simplifying in the following.

Souls and reincarnation (or transmigration or whatever)

Souls cannot be destroyed, at least not by the outergods. When a vessel/body 'dies' (whatever counts within that universe for that kind of vessel) the resident soul(s?) become untethered to it. Normally this means that soul(s) will become unconscious/dormant/unaware and will drift from the universe they're in to a different universe and reincarnate. (An involuntary process.)

(Depending on the universe, some have false 'deaths' that send individual souls to different layers or locations of reality, as a purposeful way those universes work. Ex: universes with afterlives or ghosts or such. For our purposes these are just stages of 'life' within those universes, and the drifting would happen after those are concluded.)

I don't think the outergods really like that that natural drifting and reincarnation happens, I think it adds what they consider an unnecessary variable to their experiments. So I think in some universes they've tried creating traps. Afterlives with the sole purpose of containing souls to keep them from drifting away, instead of being 'life' stages for continued stories/experiments. (I don't know how successful these would be. Afterall, if they don't contain a soul forever, then they'd be useless because of the whole time doesn't exist between universes thing?)

TL;DR:

souls become untethered to their vessel and universe upon 'death'

souls also become unconscious/unaware and drift to a different universe involuntarily

unknown what might effect their path to the new body/reincarnation

outergods can't destroy souls and probably don't like the whole uncontrollable reincarnation thing

mini theory: outergods might try to contain souls in afterlife-traps?

I refer to the Outerverse Theory a lot, so I should probably explain it. Basically it's my theory about how "infinite"/many universes might exist and work.

I'm going to use computer metaphors here a lot, so let me preface this by explaining that this isn't another Simulation Theory. Every soul and person is a Real Person with Real Experiences. I'm not theorizing that anything is false or "just a simulation".

Also this is literally just a theory. I don't "believe" this is "the one truth" or anything. I'm currently working under this framework due to it being the only one I have at the moment that makes sense to me, but I'm not married to it.

This post is the basic jist, I'll post additional parts separately

Intro:

So, we're starting with the idea of many universes existing, right?

I've seen the concept that "infinite universes exist, so everything must be true somewhere" and I disagree. I don't think there can be infinite universes in the sense of an actual infinite amount. (There's probably an "infinite" amount if you define infinite as "way too many to count" or "new ones being added all the time in addition to there being too many to count".)

I've also seen the idea that the way new universes are created is when anyone makes any decision and/or whenever there's a chance of multiple outcomes, that the universes just split naturally.

I disagree with both of those. So then how many universes are there? and what creates new ones?

And more importantly, how the hell can universes that are fiction Here actually exist?

I theorize the possibility of simply higher dimensional beings. Please bare with me.

Actual Start:

First of all the "Outerverse" is what I'm calling the outside realm that all the universes reside inside. The higher dimensional beings that live there I'm calling "outergods" for ease of talking about it. They aren't divine or godly or whatever, just way more powerful than us.

The outergods make and control universes. The best way I can explain and conceptualize it is that they're like programmers, like game devs.

Why do they do this? I don't know. I think they just find it interesting. "What'll happen if this? What about a world like that?" etc.

Time as we know it doesn't exist between universes. Each universe's timeline is self-contained, so the concept is kinda meaningless? Once outside of any given universe, that universe's entire timeline exists. (Of course that doesn't mean any of us have access or total knowledge of the contents of entire timelines)

And the outergods take our ideas, our various fictions and versions of fictions, and then make those universes too, in addition. And because time doesn't really exist between universes, they sort of already exist from our perspective?

At least that's my theory for how fictional universes can exist "before" the fictional media is created and published, and how many different AUs of said things can also exist.

TL;DR:

This is all just a theory

"Outerverse" = place all universes exist inside,

"outergods" = not-divine higher dimensional beings that live in the outerverse

outergods make and control universes sorta like programmers/game devs

each universe's timeline is self-contained, so time doesn't really exist between universes

[vangold]

Warped Perception somehow feels like a free pass to Lovecraft. Most Outer Gods would probably have fitted the description. But I decided to go for the god from the panteon of more familiar peeps that was still missing from our ensemble, Yogh Sothoth. Eyes, tentacles, more eyes - a classic :D I, for one, have fun with the idea that each eye is actually a wormhole into another dimension - and Yog can peer through each one into that very dimension...

Creeptober-Promptlist by @creep-tober

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[kracovx]

Nyarlathotep

[bashfulrayarts]

Based on  "The Inhabitant of the Lake" story by Ramsey Campbell

[art-from-within]

Elden ring outer gods head canon, formless mother favors girls. Periods become blood boon sessions...

[lazyleafeon]

i put a lot more time into my piece for the serenity zine than I usually do, so ive been wanting to make a write up with more details about what i was intending + stuff thats easy to miss (full piece without the character names can be seen here)

[ID: a drawing centered on a young kim dokja writing in a notebook, surrounded by paper cut outs of ways of survival characters. there are names next to the cut outs to clarify which characters are which. End ID]

1: text on the characters

the text on all of the characters are all quotes from orv. for characters from specific rounds, the text is specifically linked to those rounds (ex: 1863 uriel has text from when kdj is thinking about how gabriel isn't aware of her own betrayal of eden). Where i could, i tried to find text that paralled kdj somehow (sp with changing the 999th worldline, and 41 sys with her resentment towards yjh paralleling kdj's towards lsk for leaving him behind.).

for characters that aren't from specific worldlines (or where i couldn't find text i wanted to use that related to their worldlines) , the text either centers something i feel is central to orv (ex jhy talking about the final wall is used in both of her cut outs), kdjs perception of the character or thoughts of them from wos (ex lsh and his line about not really knowing her), or something about the character that parallels kdj (bihyungs cut outs are both about his ending of sacrificing himself, yma is about yjh leaving in the epilogue and her belief he won't come back (which works doubly as yjh leaving as kdj often did, and yma being left behind by her guardian)).

there is also sunfish yjh. who only says "the sunfish" because of the constraints of being a tiny piece of paper. The full quote is "Maybe I had been lucky until now. I might be the 'sunfish' rather than yoo joonghyuk" from chapter 38.

i don't think everything like, perfectly follows these categories, but that was the intent for the most part. One intentional exception is that the yjh near the bottom of the drawing has the text: "I want to read this story for a little bit longer"

if you want to read all the text, I have it up on a doc here. (you can also ask me about thoughts behind specific quotes if you want to know why i chose them)

2: amount of characters + visual details

there are 2 versions of each character for the most part, with 4 exceptions: kdj (3), yjh (6, counting the sunfish but not the kkoma), and na bori and knw only having 1.

the reason there's only one na bori is because her fate is, for the most part, set before her story can be changed by yjh. there is only 1 of her in all of the characters memories, outside of the 1865 worldline (though given we see knw after kdj kills him, its not out of the question there isn't a worldline where she reappears.)

for kim namwoon, its part because of kdj's hatred for him as someone he sees himself in, and part because kdj in orv like. replaces knw pretty directly by killing him and trying to become yjh's companion. so in kdjs notes and doodles based on wos, knw is here only as an outergod king, where kdj is unaware of him.

the outer god kings all have at least one element that sets them apart from the other cut outs: sp has his crumpled paper cloak, knw's cut out is in the shape of dragons near the edges, uriel is on fire, lhs is partially tin foil, and ljh has a water stain and some of her paper is peeling off into water. this represents them being unbound from the worldlines, but since they're still bound to the story they're still made of paper.

anna croft (near uriel) is intentionally a little more 3D than the other characters, since she has memories from past worldlines. she's supposed to seem like shes going against the tide.

1863 uriel is also a bit of an exception, though not intentionally, since her halo looks better as a separate piece of paper, and i wanted her to have flames too... it fits because shes a constellation and seeing the story from a somewhat outside perspective but is still a part of it, but it wasn't intentional.

near the edges of the piece towards the right, some characters outlines start to become faded, and the paper cut out outlines become more irregular. the outer god kings are exempt because they've managed to keep their sense of self to an extent outside of the worldline.

some of kdjs books are from his library in orv.

the text for all characters is slightly cut off (i tried to make it so most of the quotes are missing some texts so you can't actually read them in full). this is both because they're cut out of a larger page, and because kdj can't actually learn everything about the characters once he meets them by reading them because you can't read people like that. so some of the text is out of view because the characters are viewed as characters to kdj and not "real" yet, so kdj doesn't see their full stories.

some concept art + one of the earliest digital sketches i have. all of my works in progress have a billion notes left on them so i know not to forget something when i get back to them:

[drawing of yjh made of paper, and an earlier sketch of the overall piece]

i sort of wish i kept the paper style of this yjh, but it wasn't meant to be....

3. final thoughts........

this really is the most... orv piece i've ever done (?), in a lot of ways. there is nothing that makes you feel more like kdj like searching up orv quotes from memory and then scrolling through the epub on your phone to find what you want. i even ended up explaining it to my mom and having to show her what a sunfish was.

there are things i would change about it if i did it now (i would probably erase the outline from adult kdjs cut out and emphasize his shadow falling on it instead), and things i didn't get to do that would've made it more like what i envisioned (ideally i would've reread all of orv to find quotes. and i didn't do that).

It's personal to me in ways that are kind of silly. I used to doodle a lot of paper cut out creatures in high school, which helped a lot with getting the sort of paper movement down here. and of course the handwriting is just my own, so i had to actually rewrite the quotes i found. it's probably the most ambitious piece i've drawn yet composition wise, and i don't think ive spent so long on a single illustration besides art studies for school. It feels like a love letter to everything orv means to me.

if you've read this far, thank you :)! i don't normally go into this much depth about my thought process, but there's a lot here i don't expect people to pick up that i wanted to get into

[velvet-apricots]

Oh man, why are my late night musings always so fucking fire??

OK, so I believe Miquella intended to become God via the Haligtree. And he probably would’ve succceeded, but he ended up getting kidnapped.

To protect himself, he charmed Mohg, and out of rage and spite he hastened the inevitable decline and destruction of his dynasty.

So if Miquella did not actually need Mohg at all at first, how the hell did he learn about the land of shadow? Easy. St. Trina!

There is the possibility that St. Trina learned something by visiting their own mother’s dreams. St. Trina’s love is extremely deep, even when Miquella abandoned her, she loved him. Why would she not visit her mother and ease her growing despair over being trapped in a cage?

This is also how St. Trina learned just how horrible godhood is.

This knowledge offered Miquella one final opportunity to ascend to godhood that did not involve becoming a vessel of an outergod. So he took it by any means nessisary. Even if it meant doing things that are downright awful, and against what he believed.

Mohg’s body was used out of convenience AND a final spiteful insult to him. Further signifying, how his desperate attempts to attain godhood corrupted his ideals.

I don’t have all the pieces sorted out in my mind, like why Radahn had to die. Perhaps he had by that point abandoned his vow, and so Malenia went to go ensure that he kept it? That does sound plausible.

Anyway. I am really liking how this is coming together.

[tyr4nt-ula]

Rah

Future au stuffs, still debating if i want to give it a dumbass name ..like..oh shit theres outergods in my shitty apt.. or just give it a regular au name…(cross will be added tmr<3

[deadgrantaires]

i think we should start giving orv outergods all white eyes like ghosts in homestuck

[metalshockfinland]

OUTERGODS Release New Single 'Nothing But a Fetid Worm' + Share Guitar Playthrough

Photographer credit: Tom Kelly UK extreme metal group OUTERGODS has today shared their new single, Nothing But a Fetid Worm, and shared an accompanying guitar playthrough for the track. Nothing But a Fetid Worm is the second song to be taken from the Nottingham based band’s forthcoming debut album, A Kingdom Built Upon the Wreckage of Heaven, which is due for release via Prosthetic Records on…

[dailyadventureprompts]

Villain: Jysh'parun, Outergod of Unwelcoming Earth

As distant and ancient as a mountain, as scornful as an axebitten tree

Many philosophies debate and negotiate the relation of mortals to their environment. Some see nature as a thing to be tamed in the name of survival, domesticated, exploited. Others proffer a more symbiotic path, a holistic system to be protected and stewarded.

Beyond these there are the ravings of those claimed by Jysh'parun, who claim that mortals have no right to exist at all, and survive merely by the beneficence of the trees and stones. While all but the most foolish agree that heed must be paid to nature, none but those under the unwelcoming earths dominion would think that there is some geological-feudal hierarchy to which we must all submit.

This then is the paradox of the Unbowing Mountain: a god that claims the worship of things that do not traditionally think, but views nature through a distinctly mortal lens of domination and hierarchy. It's an absurdity bordering on being a joke, atleast until Jysh'parun's influence washes over the land and the forest marches off to war while the rivers start demanding tribute.

Adventure Hooks:

Having come into possession of a disused tract of land, a young farming couple were picking the stones from their new field in preparation for planting when they came across the petrified remains of some indescribable horror. Resembling nothing so much as a horse sized mandrake-root with teeth, they've reached out to neighbours, the sheriff, even the local wizard looking for advice about what to do... only to wake up one morning and find the thing gone. Theft or reanimation are both equally alarming possibilities, and the whole region has been on edge since.

Having been thought dead for years after being lost in a winter storm, a dwarven cartographer descends from the mountains claiming to be their mouthpiece and demanding sacrifices in their name. Her words at first go unheeded, at least until the glacial rivers begin to run with noxious acid, transforming back only when something living is thrown in. Farms and villages are drying out and grisly offerings of livestock now fail to meet her standards she claims the mountains will only be satisfied when the people of the realm throw their rulers in and swear fealty to the peaks on high.

The king's palace is in chaos after a coup took place in the royal gardens, specifically when the great tree that shaded his majesty's favourite thinking bench stabbed him in the back with one of it's branches and then skampered off to replant itself on the throne with the crown in tow. Before Anyone knew what was happening, greenery had overtaken the palace locking most outside while trapping certain vital hostages inside.

Inspirations: Something that's all too often lost in the "madness and tentacles" misinterpretation of eldritch horror is that much of the genre is spun off from the particular phobias of HP lovecraft. When we use the iconography without understanding the anxieties behind it, we risk creating a shallow B movie version of the horror we want our audience to feel.

To write good horror then, we need to draw off fears we understand, and with Jysh'parun I wanted to tap into climate anxiety in a way I don't think I've seen before. We've all resigned ourselves to the fact that climate change is happening, with the understanding that its being driven by the bullheaded egos and greed of people who are so powerful their perspective on life bears no resemblance to anything we could possibly conceive of. Translate their willingness to let us suffer for the sake of profit into a psudo historical fantasy context and you get the Unwelcoming Earth: widening sinkholes that demand tolls from passersby while an approaching tsunami proclaims the divine right of kings. It's not only absurd it's fundamentally idiotic but that it doesn't mean it won't destroy you and everyone you know.

Worshippers: Delusional druids and geomancers. Goliaths and dwarvenkind who get too into being "children of the mountain". Sentient trees, Living crystals, and other elemental entities who seek to put themselves "above" other forms of life. Corrupted primoridals.

Signs: Aberrations that resemble roots or stone spontaneously emerging from nature, acid flowing from normally clear running springs, statues of lordly alien figures carved from erosion, not tools. Proclimations in an unknowable script engraved deep under the earth or on monumental scale.

Symbols: A glyph resembling a mountain range or branches of a tree in the shape of a crown.

Titles: The Unbowing Mountain, The Insuperable, King of all Corners,

Artsource

[sexmares]

Tiny terror Tuesday is back, custom OuterGod that went out a few days ago