Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Manifestations

In a dead lighthouse upon a rocky bluff in a sea of sedges and rushes and mud are half-a-dozen Caitiffs of the Conqueror Worm, their faces burnt black by the sin they have seen. They have a stone in a chest that is poisoning their minds. They crouch and yammer in the ashes of their uttermost ruin knowing what is imprisoned beneath their feet.

-The men are merely normal men but completely degraded and mad. They will shriek like demented children as they attack with cudgels and hunting knives. Their stone will destroy a point of wisdom every 1d20 days to those in its proximity.

Below, in its sanctuary of fell geometry is a man-thing of translucent obsidian that shimmers and buzzes with something vaster and more attenuated than fear , whose liver shines with fell incandescence and to whom the world is virulence unbearable – The Emblem of Yeterel, the 1st incarnation.

-Disturbing the intricate system of diagrammatic wards and glyphs in chalk, fishblood and sprinkled sand that surrounds the it allows the world without to penetrate its sanctuary/prison and annihilates the entity like a man in a nuclear firestorm with a sound like the echo of nightingales and a fragrant wind.

The 2nd incarnation is a grey stone wall nigh twice the height of a man and apparently endless, way out in the desolate forlorn. It seems right to sit by the wall –its immanence discourages vitality and the exercise of volition. After three days the third incarnation comes over the wall.

-The wall appears a league or so to the north of the dead lighthouse. Those who come close to the wall (20') must succeed in a wisdom check or settle down by the wall. Each day they may make another wisdom check to leave.

3rd incarnation: the Crocus Waif is like a tow-headed maiden in a flimsy green tunic, a simpleton, slack-jawed, willowy and vulnerable. She will wither and fade after a day. Whosoever lays hand upon her in the meantime will become afflicted with an infernal flux.


-The waif is bereft of volition, a listless thing in the form of a beautiful girl that will wander mindlessly southward falling down in ditches and getting tangled in briars. It will not resist anyone's approach, men will tend to be very interested in assisting/exploiting it, anyone that touches the waif will contract the infernal flux, becoming crippled (slowed) with diarrhoea after 6 hours and for 1d4 days thereafter and will lose a point of Con each day.

4th incarnation: From the filth of the afflicted will rise a garden of moss and grass and blooming crocuses which will spread in abundant proliferating fertility for six days. Those who tarry among the blooms become inspired.

- Save vs. spells when among the crocuses or start weaving.

5th incarnation- the weaving plague: Feverish intensity of inspiration engulfs those affected leading to a spontaneous display of virtuosic basket-weaving that becomes a contagion, The baskets are weirdly ponderous or delicate and seemingly without purpose but the impulse to produce them is irresistible until after thirty-seven days the sixth incarnation manifests.

- Each afflicted individual glazes over and murmuring softly produces 1d12 baskets per day unless physically restrained, seeking out canes, twigs, grass and the like as construction materials. Seeing a basket requires a save vs. spells to avoid the contagion. If after the thirty-seven days there are more than two hundred and fourteen baskets in existence the next manifestation incarnates and the weavers snap back to conscious normality under the sixth incarnation.

6th incarnation: There appears one night luminous filaments of stuff like webs of extravagant horror among the stars. A faint tinkling sound accompanies this phenomenon.

-There is no going back now

Out of the north the next day comes the final form of Yeterel like a long-leggety bull-thing with the face of a man distorted with toxic joy and magnificent contempt. Dismal choirs rejoice unseen. Crocuses bloom. The soil erupts in luxuriant corruption where his hooves tread. He speaks in seven voices and in seven languages of the mastery he will bestow upon those who aid in the creation of his dukedom of uttermost crimson, and of the locusts and black honey and bone-dust he will shower upon his most hateful slaves.

-Yeterel will suffuse the world with his abominable essence, all creatures of chaotic alignment with less than 1 HD** within 10 leagues must save vs. spells at -2 or be in thrall to Yeterel and troupe toward the master on a demented crusade, stopping only to swarm upon and disembowel the innocent.

Stats as a centaur with 32 hp. immune to all attacks but for those performed with saintly relics. He will direct his thralls to construct a terrible domain. Those who declare obeisance will be spared but called upon to scour the world for crippled minstrels and troubadours to scream his praise and red-headed children to drown in boiling tar.

Yeterel, with all his weird manifestations, is but a fruiting body of something buried deep in the inconceivable beyond. In the end Yeterel will fall but the wounds his manifestation iflicts upon the world will fester. Something else will come after.





 For black honey, the honey of necrosis, see Kanaima shamanism (in the real world)
** Jackanapes, Knockermen, Geryon Fleas, Cynocephalides, Fenris Curs etc.


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This is taken from my grubby blue book of stuff I scrawled in on lunch breaks in the forest over the last couple of years.

5 comments:

  1. Baroque and pulpy. A great combination.

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  2. Oh I am such a fan of any deity whose portents include a Weaving Plague.

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    Replies
    1. You're just in it for the black honey

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    2. Fed to me by wailing minstrels holding wooden spoons in their malformed hands.
      Are you getting in on Gorgonmilk's revival of Petty Gods?
      I wandered out to my balcony and wrote up an awful thing in the heat, just waiting for my girlfriend to illustrate it.

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    3. Yep, I just got to re-illustrate Chulg, the opportunity to do which I relish. Yeterel is not a God but the gangrenous fingertip of Ahelzebarbe which is in turn a fleck of pond scum from the wallow of Thrumbling-grynte the Clutcher which is in turn etc. etc. ad nauseam.

      It's demons all the way down.

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