The Pantheon was wrong about itself

The twelve have always been ranked by threat rather than by cosmic station, and that is deliberate. The Unbound are not cosmologists. They are people counting how much Ruin a thing absorbs before it stops, and their ranking is what that counting produced.

That defence holds for most of the Pantheon. It does not hold for the two entities I have just moved, and it never did.

Nyarlathotep was a Herald

A direct child of Azathoth, sitting four ranks beneath Cthulhu, in a Herald’s chair. In Lovecraft’s own genealogy, the letter to James F. Morton that is as close to an answer as exists, Nyarlathotep is one of three first-generation children of the thing at the centre. Cthulhu is a great great grandchild.

Ranking by threat explains a lot. It does not explain that.

Nyarlathotep is now an Empyrean, one of the three entities that sit beneath the descents in the campaign. Abhoth takes the empty Herald of Swarm.

Azathoth was one of twelve

Worse, and for the same reason. Azathoth had peers. There were eleven other entities in its weight class, three of them holding the same rank, and you could meet it in a game that lasted twenty minutes.

Azathoth is now the Omegoth: sixty Dominion, thirty Strike, one tier above the Empyreans and outside the twelve entirely. It appears only in Cosmic Horror, which has not shipped, so nothing in the game reveals it yet.

Yeb takes the vacated Ancient of Void, and that is right by descent rather than merely convenient. Yeb is the parent of Tsathoggua, who already held Void one rank below. Parent now sits directly above child in the same Force.

Nothing replaces Azathoth as a peer, because nothing is its peer. A lesser entity taking the chair is the story: the Unbound discovering that their ranking was provincial.

Why the three Empyreans are three

They used to be one entity wearing four faces, which was tidy and meant nothing. They are now Darkness, The Nameless Mist and Nyarlathotep: Azathoth’s three first-generation children, in Lovecraft’s genealogy, which is also exactly the number of descents Terror has. That symmetry was there the whole time and I had not noticed it.

Naming them is what let Nyarlathotep leave the Heralds. You cannot promote an entity into a slot that has no identity.

What this is and is not

This is a revision of someone else’s canon, and I want to be plain that it is deliberate rather than ignorance. The Pantheon’s ordering by threat stays, and it is defensible in world. What was not defensible was a child of Azathoth ranked below Cthulhu, or Azathoth having equals at all.

The Pantheon page reads the levels rather than a fixed table, so the day Cosmic Horror ships, Azathoth appears there with no second edit.