I'm trying to create a society of merfolk led by vampires living below the photic zone of the ocean, and I need merfolk art, the creepier the better. Also discuss the viability of underwater vampires
The ocean does not count as running water, the jetstream might though
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I don't have a fucking clue, but bump for interest.
Maybe run them similarly to Deep Ones?
I don't think I have any art, but this could be an interesting idea.
Now, if the merfolk aren't vampiric, then they're like other abyssal-dwelling fish horrors - these are probably stunted, totally black for camouflage, and don't actually move a lot, they drift in the darkness as easy cattle for the vampires and to conserve the energy being fed upon drains. They rely mostly on their vampire masters to draw in outside prey. I imagine the merfolk resemble Fiji Mermaids, but a bit bigger.
As for the vampires, they could be merfolk vampires (based off those horrible fucking gulper eels, viper fish ans anglerfish are too overdone) or long dead waterlogged corpses of seamen drifting in the darkness, rising up with the fall of night and sending dreams to passing ships to drop anchor at some spot, which they conveniently climb up and onboard, devouring the crew. Or they send the merfolk up to do that, keeping their cattle strong as they feed on the ship's crew and cargo. Maybe they both go up sometimes.
Look up Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. It had vampires that had evolved to be immune to the harmful effects of water. Check it out and see if you can't steal a few ideas.
The idea I was going with at the moment was a group of merfolk vampires who have been using their immortal perspective to guide the evolution of their race to allow them to leave the depths and walk on the surface (and be less creepy) in order to get resources like metal from the surface folk, once they have this they plan to go Nazi germany on the worlds oceans. That's my plan for the game I'm running these in right now, but I also want to hear other plans since I want to use this idea in some of the games I GM
Sounds cool
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In thumbnail, looked like a fishman with a gigantic dick.
How does it use the tolls at it's waist?
Or anything, really, with hands like that?
>tolls
tools
Those things use to scare the shit out of me
From the looks of it, with its feet.
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I have underwater vampires. In fact, the only undead necropolis in my setting exists underwater. Lack of oxygen also doesn't affect zombies, liches and skeletons, after all, and few can do something against it.
I copied it from a Swamp Thing story from the 80s.
The story went beyond, it had a kind of abyssal-like deep one born from the vampires somehow.
hypnogoria.com
tomlowell.files.wordpress.com
tomlowell.files.wordpress.com
Also:
>Draugar possess superhuman strength, can increase their size at will, and carry the unmistakable stench of decay. "The appearance of a draugr was that of a dead body: swollen, blackened and generally hideous to look at
>The draugr's ability to increase its size also increased its weight, and the body of the draugr was described as being extremely heavy.
>In folklore, draugar slay their victims through various methods including crushing them with their enlarged forms, devouring their flesh, devouring them whole in their enlarged forms, indirectly killing them by driving them mad, and by drinking their blood. Animals feeding near the grave of a draugr may be driven mad by the creature's influence.
>Draugar are noted for having numerous magical abilities (referred to as trollskap) resembling those of living witches and wizards such as shape-shifting, controlling the weather and seeing into the future.
> In legends the hero would often have to wrestle the draugr back to his grave, thereby defeating him, since weapons would do no good.
Sea-draugr would be created when people drowned in the ocean. Just imagine a great viking warrior unjustly tied alive to a ship, cursing his foes and drowning, seeking revenge against family lines generations later through his undead/undersea kingdom.
Drakkars whose rowers never stop for they do not tire, built from whale bones.
Alan Moore's Swamp Thing has in one issue and "evolved", aquatic vampire that looks like a viperfish with limbs. It's mentioned that stagnant or otherwise non-running water would be the perfect environment for vampires, although considering these vampires literally melt in running water, there'd be a pretty big risk involved (said vampire gets defeated by a damn being broken, turning the stagnant lake it dwelled in into running water).
Bogleech's vampire monsters are also mostly based on aquatic animals for the same reason (no sunlight underwater beyond the first few hundred meters).
See
I'll consider this thread a good enough excuse to dump my deep sea mermaid pictures (I've collected them in my deep sea stuff folder), and offer random facts about deep sea fish, because that's what I do.
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This one looks like it's drawn by Blanche.
>sophisticated suspense
WHERES THE FACTS BRO
Really glad I'm not the only one. Been here way too long.
Gulper eels are one of my favorite deep sea creatures (actually, they're pretty high on my list of favorite animals in general) due to just how completely bizarre they look. It's pretty much what you get when you take a fish and strip away all unnecessary components (unnecessary being anything not strictly necessary to let you eat things): a gulper eel lacks scales, swim bladder, ribs, and most of its fins, its muscle fibers are of simpler structure than of any other fish, and it has a tiny brain, even compared to other fish (most which are not know for being particularly smart, although there are exceptions). It's pretty much just a huge mouth and a stomach, with the bare minimum of a body needed to make it function.
I'm getting to it, bro. Most of these are just generic deep sea fishy things, and I prefer to drop facts when I have one based on a specific animal.
I can switch to posting pictures of actual deep sea fish as well. I've a lot of those.
Stoplight loosejaw is another really cool deep sea fish. First of all, as the "loosejaw" part of the name implies, its lower jaw is on a hinge that allows it to spring forwards and grab its prey. It lacks a floor on its jaw to reduce water resistance. Somewhat confusingly, its diet mostly consists of small copepods (so does that of msot deep sea fish really: copepods small squids and such are a lot more common than fish), which logically should be able to just swim out through the hole in its jaw.
The really special thing about it, however, is the "stoplight" part. It's the only deep sea fish that produces red light. That might not sound important, but red is the first wavelenght of light absorbed by water. Thus most deep sea fish can't see red, as it would be largely pointless. The stoplight loosejaw can see red, and because of that it has what is effectively an invisible (albeit short-ranged) spotlight that lets it see its prey while remaining hidden. It also produces the red light through a pointlessly complicated mechanism that involves the use of chlorophyl, a process not found in any other bioluminescent animal.
I really like this artist's stuff. Sadly he's only done 4 deep sea fish pictures. He's also the guy who did those "hoard of whatever" dragon pictures that crop up on Veeky Forums at least once a week.
Not much to say about anglerfish that everybody doesn't know already. They're pretty much the archetypical deep sea fish. Although one of the things they're famous for, the "parasitic mating" thing where the male merges with the female, is actually only found in I think three genuses. For most anglerfish, the male just dies shortly after mating, as with most deep sea fish (then other ones are hermaphroditic).
Anglerfish of course have the glowing thingy (properly called an esca) on the end of a "fishing rod" (illicum, actually a modified dorsal fin spine). The light is produced by symbiotica bacteria, and the organ often has complex lenses, shutters and other devices for controlling the amount of light. So far, attempts to get the glowing bacteria to work outside of an anglerfish has been met with failure.
Strangely enough, some anglerfish who have additional bioluminescent organs along with the esca have completely different mechanism for producing light in those, implying they evolved bioluminescence twice on the same fish.
This is as far as I know the last of the pictures this particular artist made. I've only a few non-anglerfish deep sea mermaids aside from these.
Cookie cutter sharks are small sharks with huge teeth designed for scooping bite-sized pieces from larger sea creatures. Theoretically one of the few deep sea creatures that could harm a human (not lethally, but getting a piece bitten out of you would be very painful), although they normally live far deeper than humans dive to. They have been known to bite submarines, though, sometimes damaging the rubber coat designed keep external sensor components from getting wet while sublmerged.
Rest I have are mostly more generic anglerfish-like mermaids. This one's a viperfish, though, which is another of the "standard deep sea fish". Nothing particularly special about it, other than that its teeth are so long it needs specialized grooves to slot them into or it'd stab itself in the brain whenever it closed its mouth.
Also, they're apparently capable of rising closer to surface during the night, can swim fast for short burst of time, and their skin is covered with "a transpartent coating of unknown substance" (according to wikipedia), which makes it look like they have scales while they don't (most deep sea fish lack scales, because apparently growing scales is a waste of energy).
I think the artist mentioned that this one is supposed to be a black swallower. I take their word for it, as the black swallower isn't particularly distinctive appearance-wise. It's a relatively normal looking fish (note: were's still taking about deep sea horrorfish, so "normal" here still implies pitch-black scaleless skin and sharp pointy teeth), but as you might've quessed from the name, it's very good at swallowing things. Many deep sea fish can swallow things their own size or bigger (hence why the deep sea is also known as "underwater vore hell"), but the black swallower is even better than average at it. They regularly swallow fish twice their own size and ten times their own mass, and can swallow even bigger things (the record is a fish four times its own size). In fact, most specimens of the fish have been collected due to it swallowing a prey so big that it started decomposing before it could be fully digested, and the resulting buildup of gasses lifted the fish up to the surface like some kind of grotesque fish-balloon.
Also in the picture is a vampire squid. Which is neither a vampire or a squid. It's actually more closely related to the octopus, but even then it's not very close at all. The vampire squids are all that remains of a genus of cephalopods that used to be more common in the mesozoic era but were superceded by modern squids and octopodes. The one remaining species live in deep, oxygen-poor waters (actually, most deep sea fish are also very ancient, the deep sea ecosystem seemingly not having had a major change since the time dinosaurs were still a thing). The vampire quid feeds on marine snow and small invertebrates. When attacked, it pulls its "cape" of tentacles over its heads, apparently relying on the predator not being able to see it if it can't see the predator (it also pulses its lights in a way that makes it appear to be moving away, sending the predator chasing off after a phantom).
Posting some pictures of the actual fish for the sake of comparison.
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IIRC, this picture was actually drawn by the guy who built the first bathysphere (deep sea diving bell thing), based on the observations he made while using it.
But are they cute?
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To be a bit more on-topic, here's one of Bogleech's aquatic vampire monsters. This one is based on the viperfish, and the long eyestalks are actually something a larval viperfish has. As it grows up, the eyestalks are slowly reeled into its head, but their remains still exist coiled up behind the adult fish's eyes.
"Deep sea" and "cute" are generally incompatible, unless you find having huge needle-like teeth and being able to swallow things your own size cute traits.
Although in one thread I did mention that given the traits of actual deep sea fish (they tend to have very weak muscles and soft bodies, generally preferring to just float in place and wait the food to come to them in order to coserve energy), and the fact that these traits are likely to have evolved through neoteny (ie. retaining traits found in young animals into adulthood), a deep sea mermaid should be a very weak and lazy merloli. That also had huge needle-like teeth and could swallow you whole. Mileage vary whether that would be cute or not.
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Well that /is/ sort of cute. You look very knowledgeable in all this, do you know of an already existing game where it's possible to play with/as relatively accurate deep sea creatures?
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I don't think such a thing really exists. I have a pdf for a deep sea supplement for an oceanic-themed 3rd party Pathfinder setting, but I wouldn't call it "relatively accurate" (it seems to do OK at what it sets out to do, though, although I'm not a huge fan of 3.PF as a system). I wrote some rules for playable deep sea mermaids for both 3.PF and 5th edition (the 5th edition ones are actually a subrace of a memaid race I wrote), along with some monsters based on deep sea fish, but unless I actually go through with a vaque idea I had of writing a bunch of deep sea themed races and some dumb plothooks that's about the closest I can think of.
Here's my own stuff, as well. Can't be arsed to just rip the relevant pages out of it, so you get the whole thing. Finding the relevant stuff shouldn't be too hard (the playable races are at the beginning, the the deep sea monster stuff is almost the last thing in the pdf, aside from a page or two of hastily put together naval combat rules).
Alternatively, the 3.5 rules and a slightly older version of the 5th edition rules for abyssal merfolk can be found here: pastebin.com
Noice as fuck. I'll read those more carefully later, thanks user, and great job.
>Sea elfish catgirl octopus-mermaid race
Did we went too deep ?
Deep sea bump.
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CONTINUE !
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Quickly as I can m8
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whitewolf.wikia.com
maybe this will help
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Wait... NO! NO PLEASE NO! For the love of god stop!
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The ocean frightens me. These fish frighten me. Deep sea mermaids frighten me. This thread frightens me.
Have a deep sea cutie.
Uh, I don't think you can post all that here. As much as I like that comic.
Forgot pic
And thus concludes issue 1.
Yeah, I was going to link to the rest. It gets pretty nfsw if I remember right.
boy howdy does it ever
Yeah I'll take the link if you don't mind :D
Hang on, all the zippys are dead. Give me a few
What's with the huge greenhouse?
You'll see in like half an hour when the upload has finished
Cool, thank you user.
rpgcodex.net
Yo can read it here too if you don't want to wait for the upload.
>rpgcodex.net
>That goddamn end
Didn't even get to see some global scale crazy shit
Holy fuck, that was shitty.
Why user, why?
Because fishman.
I think I lost a few San points back there.
Nigger that was the worst hentai doujin I ever read.
Do merfolk vampires also shift into vampire squids instead of vampire bats, and clouds of ink instead of clouds of fog?
Because Alan Moore is a hack.
I didn't think it was that bad though. At least the idea of R'lyeh being a metaphor for her cooter was kinda cute.