Silent and invisible, the only herald of the arrival of Kayrun the Disintegrator is the screams of his victims.
Quest entry
Quest - Unspeakable Horrors
All things Lovecraftian in flavor. Star-spawned beasts and ancient, perverse cults. And tentacles. Lot's of tentacles. When Star-Spawned maladies invade your realities, you'll need nary a nudge to find yourself knee-deep… Open the quest
Full quest brief
All things Lovecraftian in flavor. Star-spawned beasts and ancient, perverse cults. And tentacles. Lot's of tentacles.
When Star-Spawned maladies invade your realities, you'll need nary a nudge to find yourself knee-deep in Shoggoth sludge.
Oh yes, what an unpleasant romp you'll have through the festering flesh-swamp of Rr'lavinav. And when you begin to see the fog thin, a monstrous worm of pus, topped with a fin, will rot you skull from deep within.
That is why we play these horrible games, not for honor or glory, but to see whose named can be attached to the death most gory.
Welcome to the Lovecraftian Unspeakable Horrors Quest. Unspeakable horrors, indescribable phenomena, unpronounceable names... Extra experience for each Quest submission with first and second getting 150xp and 100xp respectively.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn
Jonathon fled through the starship, his heart pounding and the cold sweat of his fear leaving a reeking trail of droplets as he soared through the air in the tight cabins, fleeing for the engine room, and the fold-drive there. That horrible, sickly light seemed to follow him, an indescribable stench in its wake, the oily, coppery taste and smell only echoing the terrifying screams, the shrieks that echoed within his skull like claws across his very soul. There. There was the console. Surely if they could outrun the light itself, they could out run this.
His spine arched, and he began to spasm. The pain was beyond comprehension, and his scream, high and agonizing, stuttered as his body began to fail him, just as he had reached for the console. It wasn't... fair!
So went the last thought to pulse through his burning brain, his eyes surviving just long enough that what remained of the tortured primate core of his mind would register that dread light beginning to shine form from his own limbs, as they transformed to nothing.
Empty at last, the ship floated silently through the void, quiet and still as the grave, unburdened by life or its messy remains.
Security Videos of the SFS Eye of the Maelstrom, Marcal 23, 3151.
Silent and unseen, unknown to instrumentation, Kayrun the Disintegrator comes upon the living, and ends them. Not even a ghost upon sensors, tightly and internally coiled as he is, not in matter, but a tessellated pattern of distortions within space, almost entirely upon the unseen dimensions which are coiled into the strands of the fabric of space time, the first sign of Kayrun's appearance is the pain and terror.
Mad from simply existing as he does, Kayrun was created in the distant past, in the attempt of a now forgotten race to ascend from the mortal coil, seeking to become beings of energy, written upon the universe itself. Torn from his body, Kayrun's mind radically changed, and his re-birth destroyed the world from which he arose.
Now, Kayrun seeks a companion. Coming upon living sophonts, unable to communicate, or even make himself noticed in any other way, he begins to attempt to change them into those like himself. Seizing the body, with his ability to manipulate the basic forces of the universe, he attempts to copy the information contents of its body into subspace, beginning with its neural system. But the universe will not bear this, and the body begins to disintegrate under quantum effects, emitting a terrible light, and the stench of electrifying flesh as it unravels into photons and individual quarks. The mind, loosely etched into nothing, begins to fall apart as well, its patterns dissipating into the chaotic noise of the universe. The victim is destroyed utterly, gone without the faintest trace, save for the free hydrogen that coalesces from the 'ashes' of his body.
It will not be long now, before Kayrun enters known space, coming upon the farthest flung colonies of man...
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Also for this quest
Other entries under Quest - Unspeakable Horrors.
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Grey Reaver
'It was just after nightfall when it came; a horrible, rotten mass of bone and flesh, with a voice that was like a thousand screams braided together. I only sur…
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The Dumuzid
He raised his sword to fight the foul undead thing in front of him, which was when it threw something only just glimpsed in the beam of his torch at him. When h…
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30 Bad Effects from touching Evil Artifacts
'No, don't touch...that. Too late.'
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Eib-ha-bok
The Voice of Time
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Miros, the Devouring World
'Captain's log, date unknown. We have been exploring a region of dead space, wandering between the dull cinders of dying suns, looking for an explanation to wha…
Use alongside
Submissions that pair well with this one at the table.
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30 Bad Effects from touching Evil Artifacts
'No, don't touch...that. Too late.'
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Eib-ha-bok
The Voice of Time
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Miros, the Devouring World
'Captain's log, date unknown. We have been exploring a region of dead space, wandering between the dull cinders of dying suns, looking for an explanation to wha…
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Grey Reaver
'It was just after nightfall when it came; a horrible, rotten mass of bone and flesh, with a voice that was like a thousand screams braided together. I only sur…
-
The Dumuzid
He raised his sword to fight the foul undead thing in front of him, which was when it threw something only just glimpsed in the beam of his torch at him. When h…
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The Keep Beneath the Dusky Star
From that silent place fear flows in unseen waves, like white fog. The shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements…
That would certainly be a good one to include in a 'last man down' horror game - even better if the creatures he kills leave imperfect echoes that themselves try to hunt down other survivors.
On death, a player quits playing a 'survivor' and becomes a 'hunter'... Limited, of course, compared to the original, and likely only with a set lifespan before they unravel completely.
Not as deliberately malicious as most Undead.
It's not even an undead; it's an immortal mind, driven to madness, which is quite lonely. The fact that trying to create companions is a horrific, brutal, painful death for those it tries to transform is irrelevant to it.
It will still kill you dead, agonizingly slow. Does it really matter what a failed attempt at manufacturing a transhuman demigod's motivation really is?
Well written. Fails to hit home with me for some reason. Kayrun is undetectable, invincible, intangible, immortal, and it is impossible to communicate with. I think it's too powerful for my tastes. I really like the background though.
Cthulhu is also immortal, immune to standard weapons, difficult to communicate with, and swallows 1d6 PCs whole per round of combat. The purpose of the encounter - which should focus on him eating redshirts - is to scare the bejeebers out of the PCs. This does not mean that he can not be killed, or evaded, or satiated, just that the PCs are going to have to get out of the comfort zone and start praying to Angus MacGyver.
*brain bursts*
A deep-space horror of Orakian proportions, twisting quantam-physics-space-time this way and that.Very well written and scares the bejeebers out of me. So what can/does kill it out of curiousity? Another question is, how does a being like this get a name like Kayrun? Does it mean anything?
There is also this; '...and swallows 1d6 PCs whole per round of combat' Hahaha!
And this, '...stench of electrifying flesh' Nice and visceral that.
Finally, I learned a new word today.
Etymology
First used in the 1966 works by Poul Anderson, coined by his wife Karen Anderson. See ?????.
Noun:
sophont (plural sophonts)
An intelligent being; a being with a base reasoning capacity roughly equivalent to or greater than that of a human being. The word does not apply to machines unless they have true artificial intelligence, rather than mere processing capacity.
Kayrun was his name before the transformation. Killing it will take a weapon that can affect subspace itself. But then, it's not really something that a PC is supposed to /kill/. Cthulhu devours 1d6 PCs per round, if you fail to stop him from awakening, you've lost your chance.
forgot to vote, while lost in subspace...
Well described, but something that would be a challenge to use.