| “ | You are off! Send back Earth’s gods to their haunts on unknown Kadath, and pray to all space that you may never meet me in my thousand other forms. Farewell, Randolph Carter, and beware; for I am Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos!
— The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
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Summary
Nyarlathotep, known to many by his epithet The Crawling Chaos, is an Outer God in the Cthulhu Mythos. He is the spawn of Azathoth.
Most of the Outer Gods are exiled to the stars, like Yog-Sothoth and Azathoth, and most of the Great Old Ones are sleeping and dreaming like Cthulhu; Nyarlathotep, however, is active and frequently walks the Earth in the guise of a human being, usually a tall, slim, joyous man.
Powers and Stats
Tier: Varies depending on the avatar, the strongest are 1-A | 1-A
Name: Nyarlathotep, The Crawling Chaos
Origin: Cthulhu Mythos
Gender: Varies depending on the avatar, can be male, female or neither | Inapplicable
Age: Transcends time
Classification: Outer God, Spawn of Azathoth
Powers and Abilities: Superhuman Physical Characteristics, Regeneration (High-Godly), Immortality (Types 5 and 10), Chaos Manipulation, Higher Dimensional Manipulation, Space-Time Manipulation, Reality Warping, Acausality, Non-Corporeal, Eldritch Physiology, Fear Manipulation and Death Manipulation (The Haunter of the Dark has a single three-lobed burning eye which appears able to kill by fear alone), Shapeshifting (Nyarlathotep is a horror of infinite shapes), Precognition (Knows the future of at least the entire world, and can show it to others), Matter Manipulation (Twisted a city), Elemental Manipulation (Caused a blinding, deafening holocaust of fire, smoke, and thunder that dissolved the wan moon as it sped outward to the void), Madness Manipulation (Can drive others mad), Invulnerability (Outer Gods are beyond change and perspective) | All previous abilities, Immortality (Type 4, Is the messenger and soul of the Outer Gods, and thus, cannot be destroyed unless they are)
Attack Potency: Varies depending on the avatar, the strongest are Outerverse level (The Hunting Horrors are nothing but mere servants to him, Massively more powerful than even the strongest Great Old Ones, Can access realms past the bright clusters of dimensioned space where there is neither time nor matter, such as the location where Azathoth resides, Massively more powerful than Hypnos, who can ascend far above many dimensionless planes above the dizzy and reachless heights of archetypal infinity which are impossible to describe in any language, yet died by simply catching the attention of the Outer Gods) | Outerverse level (Can effortlessly create avatars which vastly transcend dimensionless beings such as the Great Old Ones, The Hunting Horrors and Hypnos, Exists far beyond the confines of dimensional space and time, Unfathomably more powerful than his avatars)
Speed: Varies depending on the avatar, the strongest have Irrelevant (The Hunting Horrors are nothing but mere servants to him, Massively more powerful than even the strongest Great Old Ones, Can access realms past the bright clusters of dimensioned space where there is neither time nor matter, such as the location where Azathoth resides, Massively more powerful than Hypnos, who can ascend far above many dimensionless planes above the dizzy and reachless heights of archetypal infinity which are impossible to describe in any language, yet died by simply catching the attention of the Outer Gods) | Irrelevant (Can effortlessly create avatars which vastly transcend dimensionless beings such as the Great Old Ones, The Hunting Horrors and Hypnos, Exists far beyond the confines of dimensional space and time, Unfathomably more powerful than his avatars)
Lifting Strength: Irrelevant | Irrelevant
Striking Strength: Outerversal | Outerversal
Durability: Varies depending on the avatar, the strongest are Outerverse level (The Hunting Horrors are nothing but mere servants to him, Massively more powerful than even the strongest Great Old Ones, Can access realms past the bright clusters of dimensioned space where there is neither time nor matter, such as the location where Azathoth resides, Massively more powerful than Hypnos, who can ascend far above many dimensionless planes above the dizzy and reachless heights of archetypal infinity which are impossible to describe in any language, yet died by simply catching the attention of the Outer Gods) | Outerverse level (Can effortlessly create avatars which vastly transcend dimensionless beings such as the Great Old Ones, The Hunting Horrors and Hypnos, Exists far beyond the confines of dimensional space and time, Unfathomably more powerful than his avatars), His position as the messenger and soul of the Outer Gods makes him practically impossible to kill
Stamina: Varies depending on the avatar, the strongest are irrelevant | Irrelevant
Range: Varies | Outerversal
Standard Equipment: Varies depending on the avatar, Mostly none | None notable
Intelligence: Varies from Mindless (The Haunter of the Dark seems to lack any personality) and Nigh-Omniscient (Avatars such as The Black Pharaoh and The Black Man have the same mind as Nyarlathotep's true form) | Nigh-Omniscient (Much smarter than the The Great Race of Yith, who were described as being nigh-omniscient, Nyarlathotep is the messenger and soul of the Outer Gods and a direct spawn of Azathoth)
Weaknesses: Some avatars have a few weaknesses (The Haunter of the Dark can be destroyed by light, The Black Demon fears the light, but is not harmed by it, etc.), while others have none | None notable
Key: Avatars | True Nyarlathotep
Feats:
- Nyarlathotep's avatar can access the dimensionless realm where Azathoth resides:
| “ | Out in the mindless void the daemon bore me,
Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space, Till neither time nor matter stretched before me, But only Chaos, without form or place. Here the vast Lord of All in darkness muttered Things he had dreamed but could not understand, While near him shapeless bat-things flopped and fluttered In idiot vortices that ray-streams fanned. They danced insanely to the high, thin whining Of a cracked flute clutched in a monstrous paw, Whence flow the aimless waves whose chance combining Gives each frail cosmos its eternal law. “I am His Messenger,” the daemon said, As in contempt he struck his Master’s head.— "Fungi From Yuggoth" - 1930
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| “ | The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her bent back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression on her face was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could recall a croaking voice that persuaded and threatened. He must meet the Black Man, and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of ultimate Chaos. That was what she said. He must sign in his own blood the book of Azathoth and take a new secret name now that his independent delvings had gone so far.
— "The Dreams in the Witch House" - 1933
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- Nyarlathotep's avatar kidnaps several Great Old Ones:
| “ | Stars swelled to dawns, and dawns burst into fountains of gold, carmine, and purple, and still the dreamer fell. Cries rent the aether as ribbons of light beat back the fiends from outside. And hoary Nodens raised a howl of triumph when Nyarlathotep, close on his quarry, stopped baffled by a glare that seared his formless hunting-horrors to grey dust. Randolph Carter had indeed descended at last the wide marmoreal flights to his marvellous city, for he was come again to the fair New England world that had wrought him.
So to the organ chords of morning’s myriad whistles, and dawn’s blaze thrown dazzling through purple panes by the great gold dome of the State House on the hill, Randolph Carter leaped shoutingly awake within his Boston room. Birds sang in hidden gardens and the perfume of trellised vines came wistful from arbours his grandfather had reared. Beauty and light glowed from classic mantel and carven cornice and walls grotesquely figured, while a sleek black cat rose yawning from hearthside sleep that his master’s start and shriek had disturbed. And vast infinities away, past the Gate of Deeper Slumber and the enchanted wood and the garden lands and the Cerenerian Sea and the twilight reaches of Inganok, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep strode brooding into the onyx castle atop unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and taunted insolently the mild gods of earth whom he had snatched abruptly from their scented revels in the marvellous sunset city.
— "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" - 1927
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- Nyarlathotep is the messenger and soul of the Outer Gods:
| “ | Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctifled temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance yarlathotep slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.
— "Nyarlathotep" - 1920
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| “ | Past all these gorgeous lands the malodorous ship flew unwholesomely, urged by the abnormal strokes of those unseen rowers below. And before the day was done Carter saw that the steersman could have no other goal than the Basalt Pillars of the West, beyond which simple folk say splendid Cathuria lies, but which wise dreamers well know are the gates of a monstrous cataract wherein the oceans of earth’s dreamland drop wholly to abysmal nothingness and shoot through the empty spaces toward other worlds and other stars and the awful voids outside the ordered universe where the daemon-sultan Azathoth gnaws hungrily in chaos amid pounding and piping and the hellish dancing of the Other Gods, blind, voiceless, tenebrous, and mindless, with their soul and messenger Nyarlathotep.
— "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" - 1927
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Others
Notable Victories:
Notable Losses:
Inconclusive Matches: