Creepy...

WayneLigon · Apr 29, 2005

The group is camped for the night when a voice comes from the road 'Haloo the camp! Travellers! We are knights of the count, and we would share your fire!'. The group looks over the knights, who look to have been in a fight at some point in the day, and bid them welcome. The trio comes over and shares the fire on this bitterly cold night, though they say they are fasting and so partake only of water and a little broth.

The group chats with them for several minutes, with a couple of the more perceptive people just 'getting the willies'. Something is wrong but they can't figure out what. A couple of crows flutter down to peck at the edge of the camp, as they do in this part of the world. The party has seen this many times in the past. Around about the same time, two things happen: the party leader realizes that the knights breath does not plume in the bitter night air, and one of the crows hops over to the youngest knight, who has removed his gauntlets and has his hands on the log the group is sitting on, and casually teases a chunk of flesh from the man's hand without him noticing.

That, of course, makes the mage sit up and yell, and the knights - who have been ghouls for about a week now -- spring to the attack...

The players later said they got pretty spooked when they realized the knights breath was not warm.

Since they, they ask this about any humanoid encounter: Are they breathing?

Nebulous · Apr 29, 2005

Sounds like a a perfect scenario for a Midnight campaign. The Fell are often still sentient and lay traps for the unwary.

Xath · Apr 29, 2005

Not too long ago, the DM faced us with a Cadavor Collector. But this one was different in that it had a little girl's head on one of it's spikes and the room we were in was covered in bodies. The little girl's head talked about all of its dollies and when we entered the room it talked about how it had new dollies to play with. Certainly creepy.

Shemeska · Apr 29, 2005

Joshua Dyal said:
My new favorite thread! Let me finish reading it later today, and I'll contribute. I'm a big fan of creepiness. I've been accused of turning fantasy games into Cthulhu games before.

You're not the only one

DungeonmasterCal · Apr 29, 2005

I once made my sister run gagging from the room describing larval carrion crawlers emerging from a corpse.

One of my faves was while running a game where only two players (both women, incidentally...though this is not meant to imply women get scared easier) were investigating a cult of pain. They entered a burned out temple where the nave was hung with dozens of chains softly swaying and chiming in the breeze. I described the moonlight coming in through the broken windows, the dark stains on the floor beneath the chains, the eerie silence except for the clinking, when the wind through my own window slammed a door shut. They both screamed and jumped.

DMH · Apr 29, 2005

This goes back to the 1st ed and my experiments in changing critters.

Just after sunset, the party was travelling through a forest of large trees (200'+) along a dirt road when they noticed a campfire with no one about. Since it was just getting dark, they decide to investigate and find no signs of the person who started the fire. A little foolishly they sit down and use the fire as their own and that is when the blood started dripping on one of them from the branches above. They can't see where it is coming from and use a light spell- that is when the mushy corpse was dropped on the MU and the gliding aboleth landed on the fighter. They had no way of curing the skin effect and were in serious trouble for the next few hours- until they found a stream. The constant nips from the local fish population (which just love mushy skin) didn't help them at all...

Nebulous · Apr 29, 2005

Gliding aboleth? Eww. Now that is a nasty monster. I bet he'd be even worse with Maggot Breath range 30'!

Drew · Apr 29, 2005

Great thread. What IS with all the maggots, though?

Kemrain · Apr 29, 2005

Notes given in character...

"It was during the war with Malecan, the necromancer, that I ran across something that made my blood run cold. It wasn't the crates of black bone, pulsating with the scarabs he used to pick his skeletns clean, and it wasn't the skeletal wyverns, who's screech could turn a man's bones to whipped cream.. We had come across a small village, late at night. We were on the run, from one thing or another. The town was deserted, except for the coprses strewn through the fields outside. Thank Alerum they didn't move. We searched the town, looking for any signs of life.. A plant that wasn't blackened.. A rodent hiding in the brush.. Even a crow, picking at a corpse.. There was nothing.. But that's when I heard it.. A baby crying.

Folowing my ears I dashed into a building, crashing through a door into the nursery. I quickly hurried over to the crib, thanking the gods for their mercy, that an infant might have survived this devistation... I was too quick with my praise. In the crib, reaching up to me, was an infant, split open down the middle, it's tiny ribs splayed apart and it's chest writhing with the only living thing to be found.. Maggots crawled up inside it, as it reached for me, cooing softly.

Bile in my mouth, I took my mace and... Gods.. I wanted to burn the village to the ground.. To be rid of the taint.. But the others ran into a different sort of trouble. I only hope I gave the babe its afterlife. Such innocence is not meant for this world."

- Melissa Corinth of Alerum.

shilsen · Apr 29, 2005

Allanon said:
Double wow... thanks for the inspiration for my one-shot d20 CoC game Shilsen

Glad to be of service. I was really happy with how it worked out since I made the entire encounter up on the fly. The players in the group are all experienced gamers, and much more so than me (only started gaming in 1999), so I find that things they can't immediately identify or directly affect tend to have the best results on them. I'm also big on using standard PHB/DMG/MM stuff with very variant descriptions to that end. Preferably icky descriptions, of course