What's the Freakiest/Most Gruesome Things That You Have Put in your Campaign/World?

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Simple question, will hopefully have some great content for discussing, taking inspiration from, and examining the cruel brains of DMs/GMs.

What are the most freaky, or gruesome, or otherwise messed up things you have put in your campaign or world? If it's extremely disturbing/NSFW, put it in a spoiler. Here's an example from my world (I may put more later in the thread):

Spoiler: Clothes and Servants Made of Body Parts and Skin

My race of corporeal-undead touched humanoids, the Vezyi, have a complex society. They were created by and worship Vecna and his demigod servants, serving as "farms" that produce bodies for Vecna to use in his army of undead and as living servants of his will. Vecna communicates with them through necromancy-focused Arcana Clerics known as the Iremongers, who serve as the leaders of the community. Vezyi are allowed 10 lives in return for their service. When a Vezye dies, their body is returned to the Iremonger and revived, adding a dot to one of their fingers. Once all of their fingers have this mark, they are out of lives, which are called "pardons", they are incapable of being revived again. If they accidentally receive 10 pardons (typically happening if they've lost a hand/fingertips), they receive a circumpunct on the palm of each hand and on their forehead (Called the Eye of Vecna), marking them as a "Vulek". They are then driven out of their community and are never accepted into any other Vezyi settlement, as well as being hunted down by assassin bounty-hunters known as "Palmbearers".
If a Vulek is found by a Palmbearer, they'll kill them, cut off their hands, and flay the skin around their forehead's circumpunct. They then bring these back to the Iremonger that created this Vulek, who rewards them by magically erasing a pardon from their fingers. The Iremonger then takes the hands and turns them into crawling claws and will stitch the forehead-skin with any other forehead-skins that they have. If they have enough of this, they will make a cape or sometimes a robe out of the Vulek skin. (A cape will typically also have 2 crawling claws sewed to it to keep it connected to the Iremonger.)

So, what do you have? I'm excited to hear!

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

In my campaign where Ymir's corpse crashed to another world after dying in Ragnarok, tearing through planar barriers and causing an impact winter, one of the gruesome things that really troubled my players were being attacked by starving halflings (originally, it was going to be children, but I remembered that's a no-go topic for some players so... easy substitute)... as the party would melee them, they noticed strips of their flesh had been removed. What they'd discovered was that they had been taking these layers of flesh and mixing it with water/melted snow to make an attempt at a subsistance stew. I'd taken the idea because I thought I remembered a story about the siege of Stalingrad and people taking wallpaper and boiling it so they could pretend it was food.

There were also infected zombies that, as they moved, it looked like someone had edited out three frames of film so... real jerky and dischordant.

 

[DemoMonkey]

A flesh golem made entirely of children.

 

[DammitVictor]

I am actually babysoft on this sort of stuff, because I don't experience horror the way normal people do-- I can't enjoy getting the horror "just right" and I can't tell when I'm going too far, so I don't really aim for anything other the agony of victory and the ecstasy of defeat.

Storyteller asked me to play his villain in a Werewolf: The Wyld West game so I made a BSD/Tzimisce Abomination. The PCs never encountered him outside of his immaculate homid form, or his long black fur coat, or without his ghoul kept on a leash with a silver collar. He was never cruel to his familiar... only when he spoke, softly, the ghoul flinched like he'd been whipped.

The players tried to investigate where this monster had come from. They managed to make-- tense-- contact with the local pack of Black Spiral Dancers who confirmed my villain was BSD, but not theirs. He'd made overtures to them, after being Embraced, about some joint project between the Sabbat and the Black Spiral Dancers, but they weren't willing to work with him or tell the PCs why.

A couple weeks later, they found out the pack had been torn to pieces and put to the torch.

The BSD's Galliard, the sole survivor, tracked the PCs down and gave them a package-- told them, to their faces, his pack would be avenged one way or the other. It included some fetishes, and a handwritten journal.

My villain had been born Black Spiral Dancer kinfolk, the son of the pack's alpha. A rough life under the best circumstances. The villain didn't have his First Change at puberty... or until much later... so his father considered him an embarassment and an obstacle to having a true heir. When the boy finally had his First Change at nineteen years old, he left the pack and fell afoul of the Sabbat. After several years of being a Tzimisce ghoul, he ransacked his master's lair, set it on fire, and cut his own throat with a silver knife.

The elder Tzimisce attempted to Embrace my villain solely to interrogate him... but as soon as he was strong enough to change, he seized his master and Diablerized him.

All of this is in his notes. He returned to his pack. His final journal entry complained that he had broken six professional baseball bats-- eight dollars each!-- to obtain enough fur for his fur coat and that his brand-new ghoul wasn't as intimidating as he remembered him.

He'd left the journal behind on purpose.

 

[MGibster]

In a Deadlands game, one of the PCs decided to take the Ailin' Hindrance and it's most severe level meaning that she was dying from it. Mechanically speaking, at the beginning of each session she got to roll the dice and if unsuccessful it meant she was going to meet her demise. The player wanted to do something weird so she decided that was was ailing her was that she was carrying the child of one Reverend Grimm (a big baddie from the game) and that this demon baby would eventually kill her.

Spoiler: Violence against children but not graphically described.

So one session she rolls, and oops, looks like you're going to die this session. I didn't have her character actually die during childbirth as I thought I'd let her die a little more slowly during the course of the adventure. She gave birth to a perfectly healthy baby boy who she kept saying was a demon baby. The other PCs separated her from the child for fear that she would harm it. But she was crafty, escaped, and ended up killing her son. So at that point the character turned into an NPC because you can't just kill a baby in my game and be a PC. I went ahead and let the newly created NPC die and come back as an undead abomination which the PCs then had to track down. She would periodically give birth to little monsters and fling them at people using their umbilical cord like a lasso.

 

[John Dallman]

The thing that scared a player most was a giant carnivorous shellfish, which was happily sitting in a pool looking like a rock. I gestured its opening and lunge, and frightened the player whose character was next to it more than I meant to.

 

[Marc_C]

Humans. They are the most dangerous and scary monsters in D&D. You never know what you are actually facing until the fight starts. ;-)

 

[el-remmen]

One PC once made his exit from the campaign by getting flushed down an orc toilet.

Another time, members of the party were exploring a Necropolis and fell into a pit of infant zombies.

Oh and once, while the PCs were paralyzed and helpless, a half-fiend gnome pried open the skull of a beloved NPC and scooped out his brain to eat some.

 

[Richards]

In our current 3.5 Raiders of the Overreach campaign, our PCs started out as slaves to the drow. On our first raid (against a small group of dwarven miners), one of the PCs - a gnome cleric - disobeyed the drow slavemaster's direct orders not to leave any evidence that the drow were behind the attack. (He did this by using his prestidigitation to turn his skin black like a drow and then leaving behind an unconscious survivor or two.) As a result, he was not only sent back to slit the throats of those he'd allowed to live, but we were all hauled before the Administer of Discipline when we got back to the drow home city. There the rest of us were lined up along the wall to watch while the gnome was forced to wear a ring of regeneration and then bound to a chair. The Administer of Discipline, it turned out, was a mind flayer - who then proceeded to crack open the gnome's skull and eat his brains in front of us, killing him in the process. Then, once the gnome had regenerated fully, the slavemaster had the punishment repeated a second time, and then a third time for good measure.

This was our second adventure in the campaign.

Johnathan

 

[prabe]

Like @Shroompunk Warlord I try to go a little gentle on this sort of stuff, because my tastes and boundaries are ... idiosyncratic, here. The thing that I've dropped on PCs that freaked them out the most was a contagious madness that had its victims speaking in what I described as "polyglot gibberish," where the victims recognizably were mashing languages together, as frequently as mid-word. The lowish-level party stumbled on some wolves who were looking really emaciated and in other ways clearly unwell. As the PCs hesitated about what to do, one wolf mewed at them; another screamed like a kookaburra at them.

The PCs freaked out and killed the wolves forthwith.