Two-Headed Alchemist
Finally, Abercrombie gets his time to shine! We first met the lovable little meatball back in “Strange Brews,” the same comic where we introduced Alchemist himself. That’s also where I first started talking about my love for “garbage pail” characters, named for the squicky 1980s IP that reveled in grossing out older sisters the world over. As some of you may have noticed, we haven’t seen much of everyone’s favorite tumor familiar lately. Or Alchemist’s freaky muscles. Or his growing tentacle collection. That would seem to be against his character, right? Well it so happens that there’s a reason for that, both in-fiction and out.
You see, Alchemist takes a regular dose of a homebrewed antimutagenic serum. It’s designed to keep his less aesthetically-pleasing side effects in check, which is useful when you run a popular storefront rather than a mysterious shack in the woods. Being driven out of town as a mutated freak show is bad for business after all. More importantly though, the antimutagenic device means that Alchemist’s monstrosity ebbs and flows. You might see the full on chaos beast in one comic and the mild-mannered dwarf in the next. And that has everything to do with horror.
I think we’re all familiar wit the concept of monster delay (TV Tropes warning). Basically, if you hint at the monster rather than showing it in all its glory, you wind up with a greater impact when it finally does emerge. For example, I remember running my players through a mythos-themed dungeon back in the day. After the third creepy room description, everyone was thoroughly sick of it.
“We get it! The walls are made out of tentacles. Geez.”
The principle doesn’t belong exclusively to GMs. When you set out to build a creepy PC, you quickly lose your edge when you’re constantly showing off your weirdness. That’s what today’s comic is all about. We’ve seen Alchemist’s bizarre body modifications in remission, and now they’re flaring up again. His character type isn’t just about being freaky-weird. It’s about the battle against monstrosity. If you let that monstrosity fly its freak flag all the time, then you’re guilty of “showing the monster.” Keep it in check, let it enter the story and recede by turns, and you’ll wind up more horrifying. The character seems normal for a time, mundane even, and then something unnatural begins wriggling underneath the loose-fitting robes. That’s how you wind up with properly squicked-out players. Or at the very least it’s how you wind up with an assistant store manager growing out of your neck.
Question of the day then! Have you ever been guilty of “showing the monster?” Conversely, have you ever managed to really freak out the rest of your group with garbage pail shenanigans? Let’s hear all about your creepiest characters down in the comments!
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Twice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
In an Anima: Beyond Fantasy game I did recently, I did end up going a little overboard for the “Darkest Dungeon” inspired section. The hazy visions, the cultists who had clawed out their eyes and cut sigils and runes into their skin, the gibbering skulls that taunted the players as they walked down the stairs. The strange fish monsters near the bottom. It was all a bit much, and i think I may have ruined the appearance of the titanic tentacle surrounded by eyes peering out of cracks in reality from all angles when they finally got down to the boss.
On the other hand, the cultists did seriously ick everyone out, and my husband banned me from playing Darkest Dungeon for a month afterward, so it was apparently horrifying. Though a close second is “Bloody Mary” from the current Changeling game, who looks like an old burlap sack style raggedy Ann doll come to life, complete with being the size of a thirteen year old. That really got them.
It’s so tough to do horror in RPGs. You can’t direct a player’s attention like you can with a screen or a written text. Building tension is possible, but it works very differently. That’s why I think an infrequent approach works well. Let them forget for a moment, and begin to believe again that the world is sane and normal. Then introduce he macabre in an almost offhand sort of way.
One time, my character was bitten by a rat that was carrying some kind of otherwordly, lovecraftian magical disease. Soon after, a third eye grew out of her shoulder, fully functional with built-in winking capabilities.
She was cool with it, but her fellow party members were thoroughly freaked out as she chased them around, her eyes closed, winking at them with her shoulder eye.
Eventually, she was urged to have it removed by a surgeon friend, so she did. Apparently it was gonna get a lot worse, real fast, so it was probably the right move!
Yeesh… Rats and eyeballs in his thread!
I bet being covered in eyeballs wouldn’t be so bad. You’d probably become immune to flanking at least.
Promise never to feature Abercrombie in the Handbook of Erotic Fantasy.
Meanwhile, my current ratfolk wizard for return of the runelords is a bit… Odd. He lost his eye years ago to a book ward (which lead him to be a bit insane and become a wizard), so now he regularly collects eyeballs from monsters and just jams them into the socket, regularly replacing it. And eating them. And pickling them. Here’s a picture of him!
https://www.reddit.com/r/characterdrawing/comments/9zev0d/rf_eyeballobsessed_ratfolk_spell_sage_for_uzarhon/?utm_source=reddit-android
Yeah…. yeah. That dude needs a dose of anti-mutagenic serum STAT.
Counterpoint: Please feature your Alchemist and my Alchemist in the Handbook of Erotic Fantasy. They can be horrible monsters together <3
I blame myself for this comic.
Suffice it to say that you neve know what version of Alchemist you’re going to get.
I like this comic
It reminds me of the Billy and Mandy episode with Yaap-Yaap, the creeture that grew out of Billy’s pimple (“Billy’s Growth Spurt” or something like that)
It also makes me think of the beginning of rap song “Down With The Clown” by ICP (“What if I grew another ****in head, and his name was Violent Ed, and he head butt me every time I cussed – I would need two microphones when I bust – would you still show me love even with another head, or would you be like ‘**** you and Ed'”….)
Well then. This comment has been an exploration of unfamiliar cultural references. Thus do we learn and grow.
I suggested Alchemist a vegan burger not a McDonald’s vegan burger!!! See this is the kind of thing that happen ween people eat that kind of things 🙂
About the question of the day, there is a funny story of how our D once have some fun with us and the terrible secrets of our pcs. Some time ago our DM got a funny idea. He talk to me and told me that for the next short campaign he wanted for me to do a character that in secret was a monster. The idea was that my pc was a monster who have infiltrated an newly made adventure party of some other guys who have meet in a tavern. He told me to use the Corruptions from Horror Adventures to give monster-flavor to my character. That way my lich-wizard was hidding his dark secret for the party while he was collecting information for some kind of monsters organization. As anyone can guess there was a moment when my pc was about to be discovered… only for the party to unleash their steel when they discovered our party Lycanthropic-fighter. Mere moments later the party discovered the truth about our Hellbound-bard and our Ghoul-rogue. Meanwhile our DM was trying to not squeal with laughter. Apparently that Monster’s organization send various agents and all of them ended forming a adventure party to infiltrate. I am not the only one with that kind of humor on the group.
Now about creeping the party and the players. Do you know a song called “Still alive”? It’s from the end credits of a game called Portal. Fairly innocuous even funny. Then i DM a whole mini-campaign. The idea was a mix between System Shock and Resident Evil. The party used to be employs of a company in that company family-friendly secret underground base of illegal operations. The central AI have gone rogue, the experiments are unleashed, everybody except some survivor die. These guys team up, defeat horrors, kill the AI, all the normal run. Except for the part when i was the DM, so the horror were real horror. The pc, and their players were a little traumatized by the time they defeat the AI and manage to escape. Campaign ends and be start cleaning everything. I ask them what their character are doing… lets say a year after the whole incident, obviously i ask in a complete innocent way. One was doing this, another was doing that, normal survivor things. That is when i continue the game a little more to say that their characters receive a message, the exact moment that a year has passed since they escape. The message was that, “Still alive”, song. If the players reaction was any indication of their characters reaction i thing that their pc got white in fear. Since that time i am not allowed to play that song in front of them and greatly discouraged of DM any horror campaign. I give nightmares to my friends 🙂
What exactly did you do to traumatize them so badly?
I just play a song 🙂
The message the characters received was an audio file of that song. A remind of their old friend the happy and completely safe company’s computer, who was “Still alive” 🙂
I love playing monster Characters, from the Barbarian Wrestler Ogress in my current GURPS Dungeon Fantasy game who casually rips the heads of off enemies with her bare hands (so far she hasn’t eaten an Intelligent enemy, but only because they keep telling her not to), to the teenage Troll Wizardess obsessed with revenge on the group that massacred her village (and thus her parents, her mentor, her boyfriend, her friends, etc), to the completely normal Human Ranger who is a /sociopath/ with a unknown (the the group) serial kill streak…
When I play ‘the monster’ I play the monster. But even when I’m not playing an out and out monster (racially or just personality-wise) there’s usually something dark going on. Like my Dity, Drunken, High Elf Sage that could possibly, maybe be convinced to sell the party out if it he thought it would get him substantially closer to his goals (he’s obsessed with learning the secrets of a particular megadungeon… and the Elder gods who speak to him in his nightmares).
But I’ve played a Drow Necromancer, Elven Degenerates† (best not discussed exactly what debauchery they got up to), a Goblin Arsonist, lots of Ogres and Trolls (at least three each), Greed/Revenge Seeking Dwarves† (who sold out party members to get what they wanted), uncountable numbers of Humans† with serious problems…
† The only races that I’ve played that ever turned on the party, always for good reason, occasionally they even survived. Amazingly my numerous Trolls and Ogres never turned on their ‘non-monstrous’ party members, the Gobbo was eventually accepted into Human society, etc.
Okay, the one Drow Necromancer turned on the party, but I was literally a plant by the DM to turn antagonist at a specific moment and then play adversarially. So she doesn’t count.
I think there’s a distinction to be drawn between characters who are monsters in the mechanical sense, and ones who are monstrous in the visceral gross-out sense. The ogress wrestler sounds closest to the mark, as head-ripping followed by skull-crunchy-brain-sucky mastication is the sort of thing that gets that “garbage pail kids” reaction.
That said, if we’re talking about freaking the party out in a broader sense, your sociopath seems to have the most potential. Hiding the monster in plain sight and then springing it on the group will definitely get a reaction. Just make sure you foreshadow it a bit! There’s always that risk of coming off as arbitrarily evil when you make the big reveal.
Sounds like a fun stable of characters all around though. 🙂
“Dity, Drunken, High Elf Sage”. Sigh.
Dirty
?
I’m rather fond of a build I’ve only ever used in a one-shot, but that I’d love to use in a longform Pathfinder campaign.
For this to work, the race must be one of the shapeshifter races, but preferably Vanara (with the Change Size alternate racial trait) for the proper imagery.
Secondly, you must take the Gruesome Shapechanger feat. This allows for the ick-factor to ramp up to 11, and it can be taken at level 1. When you change shape, you do so in a mess of gore and viscera, and unprepared observers must make a Fortitude save or be Sickened.
Thirdly, go down the Dazzling Display feat line, and take Startling Shapechange. When you change shape around an unsuspecting person, you get a free intimidation check on them. They become Shaken if they are intimidated.
Combine this all together, and you’ve got either a Small Vanara bursting out of its Medium form all Alien style, or you’ve got a Medium Vanara tearing off its skin from its small form all MIB-Cockroach-Alien style.
I guess it could work if you’re one of those Skinwalkers, but you’d just be peeling off a single body part (though the racial feats can allow you to do this with more body parts).
Describing this around unsuspecting players may result in you being punched or other forms of repercussion. I hope this satisfies your query though.
By the time “Horror Adventures” came out, I’d given up on reading through all of the official feats. I’m kind of glad I made that decision. Now every time I learn about one of these things it’s a marvelous discovery rather than an “oh yeah, I vaguely remember that.” What a build-around, lol!
Now I want to tack on thug or rake or whatever and really crank this sucker into a gimmicky Intimidate build.
Yeah, I caught this one pretty quick, since I’d been mulling over the Gruesome Shapechange with a Coldborn Skinwalker, but when the Blood of the Beasts Player Companion came out (one I was highly anticipating), I saw the Vanara racial trait first. After I did a deep read through, I realized it all just fit into place like a glove.
If you’re playing with another Intimidator build, you or they could use Disheartening Display in the first round of combat to make the foes Frightened (because honestly, I have no clue how to just get two Dazzling Displays in one round) and Sickened, which means a -6 penalty on saving throws. The wizard rolls in with a Fireball or some shit and you’ve got an easy encounter that the GM can’t even really be too upset about: it requires teamwork and showcases synergy! Getting a group of players to do that is like herding children! All the better if they do it themselves without being prompted.
Now technically, Gruesome Shapechanger is a Monster feat, so not all GM’s would allow it, but with how easily resisted Fortitude Saves are, it’s not too scary in a player’s hands.
Dammit… Now you’ve got me reopening my old blade of mercy / natural attack + unarmed strike / slayer / rake / wild rager were-tiger. I do not have time to be filling my head with these fascinating build puzzles! Argh!
Well I accidentally squicked out my players when I introduce an Ant Queen character that was part-ant part-person….
and then had her invite them for a shared bath.
You ever see those French AIDS awareness images? NSWF:
https://www.wired.com/2007/05/french-aids-cam/
And now I must repress the urge to make horribly inappropriate jokes that would offend someone, if not everyone. Thanks. =P
😀
I have a sudden urge to make some kind of drider style character just so I can cite these images as their background story.
“I just laid 10,000 eggs, my thorax needs a good soak!”
Well then. I was waiting to get properly squicked out in this thread. Kudos to you, Sir!
In the horror campaign I am currently GMing, I have focused on atmosphere and mystery rather than gore and monsters, and it has worked pretty well. Things like a tentacle beast observing the party from a distance before disappearing or a pair of dead bodies the party saw before being dragged off while they are in another room. The steady drip of hints and information about what is going on has helped as well. And lots of cryptic declarations from crazy people and enemies. The occasional nutty dream. The only real squick reaction was when I went a little too far with the ghoul that bit a PC, fled the fight, and later returned, obsessed with eating her (and with a promotion of Ranger levels, Favored Enemy: Her). She eventually cut his head off, though, and kicked it like a soccer ball at his master, so it worked out.
As for PCs, this isn’t exactly garbage-pail stuff, but I just a few days ago came up with a dark-but-interesting character concept, probably for a Spiritualist or similar. Basically, some drow captured and enslaved a relatively young surface elf girl (probably elf equivalent of human teenager). Then, when the family’s matron had her most recent daughter, the family killed the elf girl in a sacrifice ritual intended to enhance the daughter’s magical prowess. However, this unintentionally bound the elf’s soul to the daughter (though the spirit wasn’t conscious for a while). Years later, the daughter began to have dissociative episodes as the elf’s spirit began to assert herself. This started as small blackouts and sleepwalking, but eventually the elf took complete control, freed all of the family’s slaves and burned down their house before fleeing. When the drow girl reasserted herself, her family had already ordered her death (as they have no idea she was possessed). With no other choice and now switching control fairly frequently, the drow/elf flee to the surface. Though they really hate each other, they also need each other’s knowledge and skills. As time goes on, the elf also tries to teach the drow to be a better person, since the elf understands that the drow was raised terribly, and isn’t inherently evil. In effect, the character is a Chaotic Evil (leaning Chaotic Neutral) and a Neutral or Lawful Good wrapped into one, switching off at random and stepping on each other’s toes. If done using the Spiritualist or Summoner or a similar class, then the other personality can appear at the same time, but the two continually trade off who has the body and who has the mind. Overall, not the creepiest character, but the backstory does have a necessary enslavement-and-brutal-murder component to it (plus all of the wonders of a drow childhood). So I could see that being an issue with certain other players, depending on how the backstory was introduced.
I suppose my regular Half-Drow Magus is technically an orphaned child of rape (though that never comes up), so maybe I just have a thing for overly gritty character backstories.
I also have one transforming PC who is the exact opposite of what you were thinking of: A hideous Tiefling Alchemist/Master Chymist, her mutated form is not a Hulk-like monstrosity, but rather a strong-jawed, broad-shouldered Lawful Good human man, whose personality is that of a paragon of justice and virtue. She created him based on a character from a book to be the hero she never had, and also to get some respect and admiration that she doesn’t think she’d get otherwise.
I think I found some concept art for you: https://pm1.narvii.com/6525/8eee147527b6e8ca308308c4ad932b02c229878a_hq.jpg
I think you’re onto something when you mentioned having the freak flag out all the time. Anything can become monotonous if it’s (… well … I guess it’s unavoidable) all the same tone all the time. I’ve struggled with pulling off the right emotions at the right time, both as a GM and as a players.
Monster lost its teeth: I ran a somewhat short-lived Abyssal campaign that, at least from my impression, suffered from a lack of impact. It started as a loyalist game, and I made the mistake of starting them off in their Deathlord’s citadel. Sure, I wanted to show them these great and terrible things so the players would really feel that they were important to this grand mechanism (and also try to get the characters to believe they would have a difficult time fighting it). There’s only so many elaborate descriptions of widdershins spirals and 13-stained-glass-windows and filigrees of soulsteel and chambers where souls beg for oblivion before… well… it all means nothing. I overplayed my hand and the players grew jaded. I probably should have just started the story later, when they were at their first big mission.
How did I not remember: Conversely, when I was playing a Sabbat game with some friends, I did a Tzimisce Cathari priest (to translate the lingo, imagine a fleshcrafting vampire who only cares about sensation and corruption of the purely spiritual… and is in charge of the PC’s mental and/or spiritual well-being). She was kind and somewhat doted on the other PCs, did lots of projects around their house. That said, every once in a while I’d catch another player in a moment that they forgot what she did (because I would save most of the details for ritual events). Invite someone out to go shopping. For what, they ask? For clothes. Sure, they agree, realizing a few minutes later that the task is going out to find the desired variety of human skin or bone. Body horror was always under the surface, but it ended up being somewhat normalized until certain moments.
Using the same tool too often dulls it. Scarcity improves impact. (Still a balance I’m working on right now, in a game where the players are Camarilla agents trying to establish a power base in Shanghai… where both the players and characters know relatively little about what to expect from anything that isn’t a Cainite.)
I’ve gone into detail about my monstrous alchemist on multiple occasions, so I’ll tell you a little bit about something that I designed but never got to play.
One time, in PFS, I got one of my characters killed. First session and everything. I had this fun idea where his sister would try to get him raised, but would be far too poor, and thus she would seek alternate methods.
A shaman of the dark tapestry offers something for free. They could use a creature from beyond the veil as a sort of tether to drag her brother’s soul back to his body, and then bond with him as a sort of “glue” to hold it together. She shaman warns her that he would never be quite the same, but the grieving sister cares little for any warnings. She just wants her brother back.
The ritual takes place, the sister offering a bit of blood, the shaman calling upon the Creature to aid her. And the Creature succeeds, pulling the unwilling soul into its body, and bonding with him to bring him back to life. To ensure the continued success, the gestalt entity is bound to his sister, giving her the power to bring him back from the dark place of his rebirth.
The brother, now, is a terrible abomination. Shaped slightly like a human, with coils of pink and bloody flesh filling his body and protruding out as though some overgrown parasite had sought to nest in his chest and gave up at the halfway mark. He’d look more like an Infested Terran from Starcraft, or some character out of Prototype. Each roleplay scene would be of a sister trying her best to keep her chin up while resocializing her brother, even as he struggles with the trauma of his death and rebirth, as well as the ever fading memories of his past life as the Creature gains more of a foothold in his mind with each passing day.
And that’s the backstory of my Very Sad Summoner and her Aberration Eidolon.
I haven’t gotten to play it yet, but I have plans for a character who’s basically an AI inhabiting a cloud of nanites. The plan is for them to pass as just a robot or exotic alien for as long as possible, then when everyone has lowered their guard, just ‘grey goo scenario’ some tough enemy.
I was DMing a Pathfinder game, and one of my players wanted to play a (heavily armored) skeleton who didn’t realize he was undead. I figured the rest of the group would slowly notice that things were amiss over the next few sessions and eventually remove his helmet and discover his secret.
Instead, the first words out of his mouth (jawbone?) were remarking on how he shouldn’t have survived for weeks without food or water. Ugh. Apparently his idea of “not knowing I’m undead” involves both remarking on and dismissing all the evidence for being undead.