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[✗] [Event Creature] and [Feat of Strength] The Remnants of the Abyss


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The Remnants of the Abyss

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3yxnD9Lflw]

The abyss is all around us; it is our darkest thoughts, our greatest ambitions, our deadliest sins.  

It has made us, molded us. We are it, and it is us, inseparable.

 

 

 

Upon the sundering of the mortal arts in the mid-1600s, the manifestations of the abyss — scars upon light itself — became beacons for the nameless and unnamable.  Taking root upon the land Arcas, both artifacts and entities depraved became commonplace as outlets of the Abyss’s influence and the countless wounds it shares with mankind.  These conduits, manifestations, and memories tortured the landscape and its inhabitants.  They are spawns of Abyssal influence remain with a likeness of the damned Resonant Knights and the Abyss Wraiths that came before — though as the devilish things that mankind is told would come after.

 

 

Once proclaimed the “roamers” by the Judges of Xion, long forgotten in their days of self-proclaimed righteousness as actors of deliberation, these nameless beings of craven nature are drawn like locusts to areas where the lifebanks had grown stagnant.  They are manifestations of negative mortal emotion, and surely where there is torment and suffering they would come.  Invisible and intangible, they exist creeping in the slightest movement of shadows, as noises in the sleepless nights—just out of sight or invariably enough to cause the sanest of men to question the very threads of nature. 

 

Honing to the that which is marked with darkness, these nameless beings come seeking to torment, to consume, and to instigate fear in the meek.  Mindless and incomprehensible, there are none who quite understand the nature of the nameless fiends and their beacons, some spouting them as the curse of Malkaathe, a last spiteful act against deeds both terrible and degenerate.

 

Lesser Roamers

You’ve felt them too haven’t you?

 We musn’t stir the light—

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Spoiler

Shadows of the night, the monsters that children fear are under the bed, the creeping panic one feels entering their house along.  Nameless, formless, faceless, lesser roamers exist as mere shadows of this world. They can seldom interact with the material plane in lone numbers, thus lesser roamers congregate in areas of grave trauma or in areas where land has been scarred so deeply by the abyss and stagnation.  In vast numbers, however, they plague the land like mischievous locusts, consuming everything good and positive in the world and draining the land and people of life itself, often driving those they afflict mad, until they move onto the next shanty, village, or county.

 

Physical Description:

Lesser Roamers are incapable of being seen wholly through the mortal world; some extra dimensional anomalies that traverse the thresholds of multiple realities at will.  What is projected is instead their shadows in two-dimensional form, as the mortal mind is incapable of discerning their horrible, true form.

 

Mental Description:

What is observed of these shadowy fiends is that exist within a hivemind — they coalesce together in places of great mental angst.  Like magnets, they are drawn to their opposite: mortality, feeling, emotion and suffering because these are things that they cannot, thus they seek them at as things that will not.  These Lesser Roamers are incapable of higher thought; they simply wish to consume the essences of mortal beings.  Somewhat similar to geists, lesser roamers will often find momentary reprieve in gorging upon mortal woe.

 

Abilities:

Gorging

Feasting on positive emotions, sanity itself, and the esoteric vitality, by observing these miscreants in their devouring frenzies — which is seldom done—it appears as if they eat the very shadows of men.  Those who have had the unfortunate favor of crossing these denizens are marked with a temporary outlook of their gloominess and lifelessness—and most unmistakably — a form that does not cast a shadow.

  • Should someone be fed from by a lesser roamer, they will appear deathly pale, have voidal mage-tier strength, fatigued, absent of a shadow, and feel an excess of negative emotions such as, but not limited to, paranoia, depression, or anger for upwards of three narrative days.

  • Lesser roamers are incapable of causing any true, lasting harm upon those they afflict.  Simply, they become a nuisance — an infestation that preys on the productivity of civilization itself.

 


 

Lesser Possession

Lesser roamers are capable of “possessing” living beings.  This takes two shapes: torment of a humanoid mind or the total control over animals.  For the former, a roamer may enter the mind of a player and subsequently begin to influence their emotions and prime them for being gorged upon.  Similar to what phantoms have been notorious for, a lesser roamer pushes emotions and torment into a mortal being’s mind. Though they cannot directly incite a person to carry out heinous acts, it makes these thoughts to do so more intense and alluring.

 

The latter half of this ability details how lesser roamers may subjugate and meld with a living creature.  They end up as twisted, tumorous looking beasts that seek to devour the basest of mortal life itself: flesh.

  • Lesser roamers may control living creatures, taking on a malformed appearance and despicable guise left to the ST actor’s interpretation.

  • Possessions used on players cannot coerce someone to violence, but it can incite moods of extreme anger and malaise.

 

Weaknesses:

It is only by enacting rituals of superstition can these devils be driven from towns.  These acts, defying the very physics and science of a world of magic, seemingly bate these resonant remnants from committing their opulent devilry.  Sprinkling of salt around the corners of a room, drawing circles in the dirt, and—most importantly—vast sources of light, can stave off or even drive these beings off from claiming a poor, new victim.

 

General Redlines:

  • Lesser Roamers exist as ST Actor creatures that can influence the behavior of players subtly via emotions.

  • Not exclusively, lesser roamers congregate around areas that have been tainted with the Abyss; this is largely open to interpretation and is anything where negative emotions persist greatly.  It can range from an area that mourns in great number the loss of soldiers, an area that had previous been touched by lifeforce-related magics such as Necromancy so much so that the land itself is scarred, or the remnants of an inferis’ slaughter.

  • Lesser roamers can “escape” these areas of great torment and seep into nearby towns and villages, though often heralding more if they are not properly driven out.

  • Lesser roamers are unkillable, but can be driven away, staved off, or sealed away.  The acts of driving away or sealing these creatures away is not meant to be concrete and left up to the ST actor incorporating them into an event.

 

 

Greater Roamers

Do not trust the whispers of the dead;

Do not trust the children screaming;

Do not trust the shadows in your eyes;

Do not trust the tidings of your mind.
 

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Spoiler

Unlike the lesser roamers, their greater variants are amalgamations of insidious depravity unimaginable.  In meager numbers, they are capable of driving entire populaces into frenzied madness and mangled corpses.  Where lesser roamers tend to act as chaotic neutrals, greater roamers exist as chaotic evil.

 

These dark creatures culminate in the epicenter of great chaos, spurning from mankind or the abyss itself; they can come about from a starving lesser roamer, a roamer that has been corrupted, or a twisted morphing of many roamers into a singular being.  Territorial in nature, a greater roamer tends not to exist beyond packs of one or two, however, this is of no particular rule.

 

Physical Description:

A greater roamer is capable of possessing the very land itself, be it nature such as grand trees, or abandoned homes and castles.  Whatever they touch becomes twisted with the very nature of the abyss itself, taking on a visage of ghastly dark and abhorrent shades of black, an atmosphere of seething fog and visible paranoia, dancing shadows.  While lesser roamers are capable of causing panic and stir among those they afflict, a greater roamer outright commands their vessel and has been known to slaughter and devour mortal essences, wholly.

 

The true form of a Greater Roamer is as incomprehensible as their lesser kin, never capable of taking shape beyond the depravity of what it inherits as its new form.  Once formed, a Greater Roamer corrupts the shape of its host in twisted spawns of Abyssal chaos.  The host and its occupant become inseparable unless it is purged.

 

Mental Description:

Greater roamers entities are unmoving, remaining centered in the land they have taken host within.  As such, the means at which a greater roamer can prey upon the weak are made up with in creativity, showing some semblance of a sentience their counterparts do not hold. While not truly whole, they exist as a vast infrastructure and hivemind of these metaphysical entities working together for a single purpose: chaos and death.

 

Greater roamers feast upon the essence of death itself, feeling an ephemeral satisfaction upon taking up a new victim and becoming.  These deaths often sate the possession for a sum of weeks to years, only requiring one at a time before reaching a trancelike state of inactivity.  This has often led to yokel and superstitious villages offering these places a culture of routine sacrifice to appease the darkness.

 

Abilities:

Greater Possession

Greater roamers are limited to the total control of their possession and the tumorous morphing of their presence upon it.  Houses, large trees, and castles that are inhabited by the shadowy denizens act as places where the physical setting itself is possessed.  A castle possession, for instance, may open and close its gates at will — often inviting poor, unsuspecting travellers for reprieve before taking their lives in the twisted corridors.

  • Unlike lesser roamers, greater roamers cannot possess player characters or directly incite their emotions.

  • Greater roamers, however, are capable of taking possession of an entire edifice the size of a small castle or natural structure like a grand tree.

 

Illusions

Capable of disguising its corruption to trick the unwilling into a feigned state of security, greater roamers will can veil appearances such as a derelict, corrupted manor into an inviting palace — for instance, a lord’s home, brandished with feasts and immaculate displays of wealth and golden cutlery.  It has been known for roamers to even pose their illusions as people themselves, capable of catering to their guests moments before a horrible death. Should one who is affected begin to suspect that something is off, however, this illusion would rapidly fall apart.

  • The illusions that a greater roamer is capable of is purely audiovisual.  Smells, touches, and otherwise any other form of sensation cannot be simulated.

  • If a person were to realize that there was something off about the illusion, it will dissipate for them only.  Other players may worn those caught in the illusion, beholding them to the same.

 

Weaknesses:

The only way to “destroy” a greater roamer is to sunder the heart of its corruption.  In whatever structure they possess, there exists some still-beating heart of chaos within it.  It resonates with a loud thumping sound, beating with an assymetrical heartbeat that fuels the madness it spurns forth.  Though this beating heart of darkness scales with size, all that is needed is needed is any means to disrupt its flow: fire, stabbing it with an iron sword, or — in less subtle means — giant conjuration and infernos.  Breaking the heart does not kill the roamer, rather, it disperses it into the many lesser roamers that composed it.

 

This heart can exist anywhere within the dark torment of a greater roamer’s will, its size ranging from the scale of its possession: a dungeon in a castle, a townhouse attic, or simply within the hollowed husk of a tree.  

 

General Redlines:

  • Greater roamers are ST played creatures that have possessed some entity or ruinous edifice.

    • Greater roamers manifest only in the form of a possessed entity, be it a large tree, a derelict house, manor, or castle.  

  • Greater roamers can come about in largely abandoned derelict buildings or areas, in areas of grave trauma (open to interpretation), or outright manifestations of the abyss, simply waiting for untimely victims to tread unknowingly so they may enact their unfounded vengeance.

  • While lesser roamers feed upon positive emotions of the living, greater roamers feed upon denizens of a populace outright by devouring entire families and mangled corpses.

  • By destroying the heart of darkness in a roamer possessed tree, building, or other structure, a greater roamer is expelled from its vessel and “broken up” into many lesser roamers that scatter into as a horrendous squealing of shadow-beasts.

    • Once the location of the heart is chosen by the ST Actor, it cannot be changed.

    • These lesser roamers are driven off and incapable of fighting back.

 

 

Seeds of the Abyss

 

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My little seed, my little seed…

Even now, my darkest deeds germinate within me.

 

 

Spoiler

Once artifacts of great pride held by Knights of the Abyss and Abyss Wraiths alike, the Seeds of the Abyss are the surviving conduits of Malkaathe’s realm beyond Aegis — the Abyss.  Those who have learned to create these conduits can once more imitate an art of the resonant knights—imperfect and far from what was once capable.

 

As with the abyss seeds of yore, twisted visages of life in its influence are the result of masses of lifeforce becoming denatured and, thus, stagnant, turning once lush forests into depraved fields of death and decay; it is not to be confused with taint, but rather, the culmination of life that cannot progress along its natural cycle and so it festers and churns devilish sludge and black viscous fluid and zones of negative mortal emotion.  Though, unlike their counterparts in the past, an Abyss Seed holds only the potential to dampen the powers of immediate deific influences or forces of nature.

 

Abyss seeds exist now as expanded influence of the Abyss itself.  Though they bear no direct connection to the realm, they exist within the same resonance as it.  Lifeforce is slowly denatured in the area of the influence, causing it to be unable to turn normally and progress through the natural stages of life and death.  Much as it happens in the Abyss, this process causes lifeforce that is affected to cause lesser forms of life to fester with sludge-like depravity, for the air to take up a dark eternal night from nefarious smog, and for damnable things in the night to be drawn to its location.

 

Learning:

Those who have studied the Lesser Roamers with much detail, such as former Resonant Knights of the Abyss, begin inherent with the knowledge of how to recreate the cancerous growth of the Abyss.  They may reach back to their former resonance with the Abyss and show mortals and undead creatures how to replicate and spread the means to create more pockets of the Abyss in the realm.

  • As the Abyss directly conflicts with the deific presence of Aengudaemonic entities, those who practice holy magics that utilize a connection to a specific aengudaemonic entity are incapable of learning this feat of strength.

  • After four months of having this feat of strength, one may put up a TA to teach others how to produce an Abyss Seed.

 

Types of Abyss Seeds:

Those who have learned how to perpetuate the darkness of the Abyss are capable of spawning an Abyss Seed into existence.  These creations require a ritualistic setting, and for one to draw upon a grave moment of suffering — iconic of the abyss itself — to spurn forth.

 

Abyss seeds exist in two variants: greater and lesser abyss seeds.  Requiring one person to create, a lesser seed is capable of covering up up swathes of land equivalent to a small hamlet, county, or forest and can reach its peak maturity at a much faster rate than other seeds.  

 

A greater seed, however, is a seed requiring several participants to enact its creation.  Greater seeds cover much larger copse of lands — becoming the defining aesthetic of an entire area. Over the course of three narrative months, a greater Abyss Seed will reach a point of maturity, growing not only in size, but in influence until it reaches a critical threshold.

 

Though only differing in size, both Lesser and Greater Abyss seeds function the same.  Provided they remain in a fixed location and remained intact for its germination period, its influence will spread depending on the scale. Those who are experienced enough to have dealt with such otherworldly abominations and darkspawn ushered forth by its malign depravity can use this to their advantage, covering swathes of land in the very uninhabitable horrors that are drawn to it.

 

 

General Redlines:

  • A Lesser Abyss Seed requires a lore signed item placed into an item frame to represent it, and it reaches peak maturity after a narrative month of remaining still in one location.

  • A Greater Abyss Seed requires a MArt to create, and it reaches peak maturity after three narrative months of remaining still in one location. 

    • If a Greater Abyss Seed is destroyed, the ST Writing Team should be informed and its MArt status is moved to denied.

    • Only a maximum of five Greater Seeds can exist at once.

  • The seed perpetuates an aesthetic of a grim darkscape, growing in influence across its field of influence and may receive staff builder assistance in “spreading.”

    • The maximum size of a lesser abyss seed is 150x150, or covering an entire owned region and a 50 block radius outward from that.  

    • The maximum size of a greater Abyss Seed’s reach is the entire tile it is in.

  • For the purposes of how things are weakened: creatures within the influence of the Abyssal corruption are weakened by “half” of their total physical power, and deific-connection based magic that is cast by these creatures are also inhibited by half of its strength.

    • Dark creatures, such as inferis, ghouls, skeletons, ghosts, wights, or any other similar creatures, are not bolstered in this realm.

    • The weakening of deific influences only works on Aengudaemonic ST Actor creatures and nothing less. A paladin or cleric would have no issues and operate at full strength.

    • Due to how denatured lifeforce functions, druidism or necromancy or any future lifeforce based manipulation of magic, cannot be used to drain, manipulate, or control stagnated lifeforce in the area.

  • Abyssal corruption is not blight, and as such techniques such as druidic blight healing do not affect abyssal influence.

  • As a “chaotic zone,” the Abyss Seed will perpetuate a chaos that denatures the lifeforce of lesser flora and fauna and draws in inferis, feral undead, and these “roamer possessions.”  The area of influence becomes an event area where these things may roleplayed by ST Actors.

    • These creatures are not allied to the owners of the seed and can find themselves as much the victim to such things as any other being.

    • The Abyss Seed mirrors the effects of the abyss: it acts as a chaotic zone and promotes the natural occurrences of inferis in the region and culminates feral undead.

    • The Abyss Seed cannot be used “offensively” to corrupt a nation’s city.  

  • The Abyss Seed requires OOC consent of the PRO to place, though if it should spread across the tile to another settlement it does not require the new region owner’s consent.

  • Abyss Seeds will “mature” over the course of a three IRL months, expanding over one tile worth of region at maximum capacity.

  • If a seed is displaced from the tile or regional influence it is in, or destroyed, the adverse effects will revert over the course of a narrative week.

    • The Abyss seed has the material consistency of petrified wood, easily being destroyed by any mundane weapon by one person.

  • The ST Actor roamer entities can form in these areas, though it is not limited to such.  An ST actor may well roleplay roamer entities that have nothing to do with an Abyss Seed.

  • Though it is promoted as an eventzone, an Abyss Seed functions mainly as a component for creating a dark gloomscape.  ST Actors are by no means obligated to provide those with an Abyss Seed RP and it is purely within the scope of the lore for these entities to never actually occur in a seed’s region.

 

 

 

Purpose:

Spoiler

This lore is meant to take one of the redeeming aspects of Strength of the Abyss and capitalize on its uniqueness, notably Abyss Seeds.  It places an emphasis on a spooky, darkscape aesthetic and aims to make more spooky looking things, and more dark creature based events rooted in lore.

 

The premise of this piece is then that it is structured around the existing lore of the Abyss itself, and functions off similarly to the recently shelved Strength of the Abyss lore without being attached to a specific magic.

 

 

Citations:

 

Writing – Dardonas

 

Abyss Lore - Swgrclan

Inferis Lore – Helfiaz and Swgrclan

Resonant Knight Lore – Swgrclan
Resonant Knight Lore Amendment - Swgrclan and Dardonas

 

 

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Denied. Please send me a forum PM if you wish to know more regarding this decision.

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Just now, FlamboyantTyrant said:

giphy.gif

 

i had this doc saved for a rainy day, if I fail this war is yours

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this wouldn’t be happening if strength of the abyss was still a thing...

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Just now, Dardonas said:

 

i had this doc saved for a rainy day, if I fail this war is yours

 

I’m just glad it’s just the seed stuff and not a revival attempt of the magic itself

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1 minute ago, Keening said:

this wouldn’t be happening if strength of the abyss was still a thing...

Mi nam keening. Me didn’t get SotA.

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1 minute ago, FlamboyantTyrant said:

 

I’m just glad it’s just the seed stuff and not a revival attempt of the magic itself

if only it were ?

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Let the games begin

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all of these staff trogs beefing on my minecraft legacy like i dont notice and ****

 

go ahead and seduce some synco on the lore team to edit in a PK system when this goes through so they have to suffer another 5 months of rewrites and delayed communication

 

-big c

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let it die, it was a **** magic.

 

even cam knows that

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giphy.gif

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This lore has been denied as per this thread: click me. 2 weeks were given to reformat and correct the submission to match the current criteria, which were not done.

 

If you believe this is a mistake (as this was a big sweep, yours may have been overlooked), please contact me over the forums here: click me.

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