Shall We Design A Creature?

I've mentioned my Density-powered tabletop RPG Ebonmire before on this blog, but only in passing. My intent was to just release the game and then post about its existence here without really discussing any part of it. But as I've been working toward completing the thing I have created something that I need to just get out there, because it disturbs me deeply and I want to share the love.

Or lack thereof, as the case may be.

See, the game is basically a hoard mode. There's not really any written way to "complete" it short of the entire player party dying. GMs can, and are encouraged to, build an ending in for their party as desired. But the setting doesn't give you an ending. It's intended to feel pretty hopeless as the game progresses, and to that end I didn't want to have the endless hoard be something boring, like zombies. I wanted to introduce something similarly existential but new, and so I sat down and started trying to figure out how to create my own eldritch horror.

I've written scary stuff before, but I've always preferred to treat the very concept of 'fear of the unknown' as the antagonist. I keep any actual creatures obscured as much as possible, and I define as little as possible. That's what works best to unsettle me, as in cases such as Jaws, Alien, most of the Cthulu mythos, and the early parts of Dracula. So that's what I write. But that wasn't going to work here. I needed creatures that were definable but still unsettling, that players could interact with and even loot the corpses of, but which they would also dread and not become bored with.

So I did what anyone would do when trying to create a terrifying monster and started working on their biology. W-was I the only one that scared of my biology classes? Yeah? M'kay.

My first piece of inspiration was the flower headed demogorgon from Stranger Things, which I feel okay leaning on because the creators of that monstrosity were cribbing their notes quite widely. The concept of a faceless horror is pretty universal, culturally, and one who's entire head is, essentially, just a mouth... well, it hits the right notes for me.

So I started designing. I made the decision to match the number of legs on these things up with the number of mouth-parts, and then I made the decision to have three versions, to add variety to the game. My initial creature had a three-parted mouth that sprouted directly from between its shoulders, and an accompanying third leg placed not unlike a tail. After plenty of revision, you can see the final product below. These things are uncomfortable, but primarily animalistic. It looks like a creepy alien dog predator thing that can also stand upright. Not a bad start, but only a start.

Not bad, not super threatening but certainly not comfortable.

For the next one, the larger cousin of the three-legged-thing, I decided to just straight rip-off the demogorgon and go with five mouth-parts (there's a lovely symmetry to it that actually feels biological, I can see why they landed on that for the show) and a matching five legs. Again the mouth springs directly from between the shoulders with no neck, and when opened in that configuration it's genuinely pretty unsettling to look at. Pair that with five legs sprouting unnaturally from its incredibly bizarre pelvis (I do in fact have sketches of this thing's pelvic bone, thanks for asking) and you get some humanoid spider vibes, which as I hope you can see below is a nice progression from where we started.

Oooh, now we're talking, I don't like that at all.

Then I decided that I'd shift my track slightly and look to H.R. Giger for inspiration. This is the guy that designed the xenomorph and face-hugger from Alien, and I have a lot of respect for someone that wrong in the head. A lot of the intent behind the designs for Alien was to play on perverted male sexuality for horror, and I, in my folly, went "sure, why not?" And then, given I was running off the idea that there was some sort of alien biology driving these creatures, I wondered what would it look like if you had a predator specifically evolved or even designed to prey on human cis-male sexuality? From thence springs... this.

Oh... oh no... it gets worse the longer I look at it...

I drew it, and it is deeply unsettling to me. I suspect that says something about the US, culturally, but you could probably make an argument that it's a personal issue. In either case, I hate it and it freaks me out, so of course it's going in the book.

But yeah, the game is coming along nicely! Just please don't buy a copy for your kids.