Great Race of Yith

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The Great Race of Yith, also known as the Yith or Yithians, are an alien race invented by H.P. Lovecraft. Like the Elder Things, they are amongst the minority of Mythosian aliens portrayed in a relatively "human" manner. They are known as "the Great Race" because they have mastered the art of using psionics to traverse time and space, allowing them to broadcast their psyches into the void to other planets and through the vastness of time, allowing them to switch bodies with beings in those far-flung spheres.

This ability is mostly used to gather knowledge, which they have been doing for Nyarlathotep knows how long. Every knowledge that was learned from during their body swapping experience with other species (history, scientific progress, culture and so on...) were recorded in their own archive library, one of which was located at the city of Pnakotus on Earth, below Australia's Great Sandy Desert. The ability can be also be used as some kind of a racial emergency button; in the face of a race-wide cataclysm, as many Yith as possible use their powers to reach to a more favorable body in a chosen timeline and swap places with them, transplanting themselves out of danger and leaving their old bodies, now hosting the new minds of their victims, to die in their wake. Children of these bodysnatched Yith will be brought up as part of the Yith culture, effectively supplanting the entire race in everything but genetics.

What a bunch of dicks.

The Yith have already done this race-swap trick at least once, abandoning their original bodies for the ones they appear in during pretty much every Mythos story or depiction they have appeared in so far. Lore says that they will eventually abandon these bodies for those of the hyper-evolved beetles that will inherit the Earth after humanity goes extinct. Their current body is a massive slug-like invertebrate, looking like a cone of flesh bigger than a man, which slides around on a single slug-like foot. From the narrow pointy top of the body emerges four tentacles; two end in large, crab-like claws and serve as arms, whilst one is tipped with a "head" (basically a round sphere that houses several large eyes and other sensory organs) and the other ends in four trumpet-like protrusions that are the Yith's mouths. Next time, faced with an overwhelming attack of the Flying Polyps they had previosly fought and defeated, they will possess a beetle-like posthuman race.

It is heavily implied that the Yith will jump from their tentacle cone bodies (in our remote past) to their hyper-advanced beetle bodies (in our remote future) without any particular danger to humanity -- because our entire civilization is simply not significant or long-lasting enough to be worth mind-jacking.

So in short, they are alien nerds with super psychokinesis and they live to record other species' shit.

They originally appeared in "The Shadow Out of Time" in 1934-35 and have been a staple in Mythos works since then. They're played relatively ambiguously in the original story, although generally more sympathetically than most inhuman things in Lovecraft's work, similarly to the Antarctic Elder Things. The story's narrator, professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, is utterly terrified of the fact that the Yith exist, and it is quite possible that Lovecraft expressed, consciously or unconsciously, a great deal of doubt in his imperialist and racist views. What makes Yith a 'Great Race'? Their culture's ability to survive aeons largely unchanged, or, on the contrary, their ability to change and learn from other races' best achievements? So aside from not asking consent before stealing your body they treat people pretty nicely, and the narrative doesn't go out of the way to throw unpleasant adjectives their way. Some biographers have theorized that their "academic dictatorship" (close to Platonic philosopher-kings) society was meant to represent Lovecraft's thoughts on a Utopian state, given his openly elitist personal politics. Lovecraft, unsurprisingly, really wanted a society where the nerds ran things.

Contrast with the Mi-Go, who snatch brains without consent (irreversibly) and are treated as totally monstrous.

The Yith have since appeared in the Call of Cthulhu tabletop game as well as its video game counterpart (the first one, anyway) and most of its spinoff games.

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  Call of Cthulhu
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  D&D
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  Pathfinder
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  Starfinder