The Old Ones were powerful eldritch beings who dwelled beyond the stars, whose return to Earth would herald the end of the universe, or at any rate of the world as humanity understood.
In one reality, the Old Ones intended to descend upon the universe when the stars aligned properly. They sent a lesser eldritch being, the Cthulhu Kid, before them, possibly to dispatch that universe's Jenny Everywhere. Although Jenny managed to defeat the Cthulhu Kid, it was too late for her to stop the coming of the Old Ones, who coalesced from the stars themselves into a single gestalt being with one great eye. Jenny, defiant, looked them in the eye and stuck out her tongue. PROSE: Showdown in the End Times)
Behind the scenes
The term of “Old Ones” for a group of eldritch abominations is a hallmark of fiction associated with the Lovecraftian mythos. Lovecraft used the term of “Great Old Ones” only twice. In The Call of Cthulhu, they are a group or race of powerful interstellar beings, not made of conventional matter, who can rampage from planet to planet when the stars align, but are currently dormant on Earth in a buried city, awaiting the stellar alignment which will allow them to rise again; Cthulhu himself is the greatest of these Great Old Ones, interchangeably referred to as “Old Ones”.
They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died.
They had shape (…) but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, they could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, they could not live. But although they no longer lived, they would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them.
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| —H. P. Lovecraft
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Lovecraft's second use of the term was in At the Mountains of Madness, where he seemingly retconned their nature, “revealing” the more science-fictional Elder Thing, from whom Cthulhu was clearly distinct, as the origin between the human myth of “Great Old Ones”.
This usage has generally been ignored by post-Lovecraft fiction associated with these concepts; instead, it became fashionable to depict “Old Ones“ or “Great Old Ones” for a conceptualisation which harkened back to Call of Cthulhu but made them even more godlike, conflating them with Lovecraft's various nigh-omnipotent deities such as Yog-Sothoth and Nyarlathotep, and crystallising a view of them as being trapped beyond the stars, possibly outside the universe itself, with Cthulhu's entombment in R'lyeh being specific to him and his spawn. Subsequently, modern riffs and reimaginings have been divided in whether they treated the “Great Old Ones” as the same group as the “Outer Gods” (the apocryphal name which had otherwise emerged for Lovecraft's alteruniversal deities like Yog-Sothoth).
