Horrifying races

FATAL plz go home. Y2k called, it wants it's edgelordism back.

but the magical realm doesn't want to go out of you

Friendly reminder that FATAL has a theme song.

youtu.be/8TLlbVW-VA0

...

>That night the enemy was completely silent until three am. Suddenly, hundreds of enemy soldiers charged head-first into the Imperial lines screaming incoherently with animal fury. The Imperial machine guns and swordsmanship manage to hold back the raging foe, but panic spreads like wildfire when it is revealed that the enemy troops they are facing are their fellow Imperials who were lost to the woods the night before. They had gouged out their eyes and had cut out their tongues, but they still screams and screamed and screamed as they charged head-first into the guns of their former comrades. As the Imperial lines crumble into a mass panic, the drums and chanting started up again, and the Sabinites appeared.

>Cloaked in rags of flesh and eyes glowing with witch-light, the Sabinite army marched forth and charged in orderly, disciplined ranks of twisted beings, putting to the sword the terrified Imperials and their camp followers. Possessed of incredible resilience and a cold, blinding fury, they slaughtered their way through the enemy lines like revenants of a dark god, and the last thing the Imperial commander saw before he was impaled on the filed-down finger bones of a Sabinite horror was a massive, black being three times the height of a man striding forward from the woods on reticulated legs, cloaked in flayed and bleeding bones arranging in mind-numbingly horrifying designs as its eyes glowed with green hellfire and black hymns poured from its fleshless lips.

>To this day, the Sabinite remnants are believed to live in the Wildwood, and the drumming and chanting one hears at night is the endless parade of the damned as they prepare for the next raid from their hell-wrought forest. Skeletal cavalry are said to patrol the woods around the Wildwood in search of victims, and the half-chewed remains of humans have been found all throughout the region with eyes gouged and tongues cut.

And it's all true.

Dolls

Fractured pieces of a monster's psyche organized into thirteen emotions. Created when a certain woman betrayed, fell into a fit of madness and turned into a monster. This also set up a ton of bullshit in that she's been unable to fix since and likely will never be able to.

Resembling a young idealized version of that woman before and after her transformation these albino dolls have joints all along their porcelain bodies allowing the same degree of movement of a normal human.

Society practically doesn't exist. They're almost mindless automatons if not for the fact that they're incredibly childish and slightly show the emotion they are tied to but don't really have any morals whatsoever. They mostly serve their creator out of sight and despite being extremely old almost no historical documentation, something they actively search for and destroy.

Considering their creator used to be human the Thirteen, leaders of their respective emotion, and some abnormal dolls have grown a personality, which can be lost in a time of extreme grief. These personalities are often single minded and simple, such as the desire to focus on playing an instrument.

Technically they can eat anything though they don't need to. They do find that humans taste better than most things and will eat them in the middle of a battle, sharp needle-like teeth punching through steel to reach the neck or face. Some with personalities will have a varied palate as most people do, often leaning towards the extremes such as unbearably spicy, salty, or bitter tastes.

The second sentence tipped me off.

What makes them frightening is the power they have combined with their lack of morals. All dolls are made of antimagic and as everything else that exists is made of magic, even a rock, it makes them extremely difficult to deal with. Fighting them is difficult as their porcelain bodies need to be smashed apart without getting any blood on yourself or touching the mass of antimagic in the middle of their shells.

The blood would eat away at magic reserves and then eat away at the body and soul if not cleaned off right away. Magic that touches actual antimagic is annihilated instantly. Imagine stabbing one with a sword only to find the blade didn't go through and pulling it out to find your entire blade gone.

Using magic does not work either unless used in an indirect manner such as increasing the strength of a swordsman or throwing a boulder. The only effective way to fight a doll is to use antimagic yourself, a nigh impossible task in the setting. Even if you were to defeat one it would rise back up fully healed in a matter of hours if it were particularly lazy at that moment.

Actual death is impossible for a doll. Complete eradication would just make it reappear somewhere else, often back near others of it's kind. The stronger ones will use antimagic fueled spells to do what would seem impossible to a normal spellcaster like minor time or space manipulation.

The reason no one has tried to kill them all is 1. They can't actually be killed and 2. No one really knows they exist apart from a few select people.

In reality their purpose is to collect magic with souls being the most dense form of natural magic as the world is far, far too saturated with magic. Magic needs to be cycled in and out otherwise things get all fucky, like people turning into monsters around magic dense areas.

I had suitable impressions with the Nefilims:
>The blowgun is an example of the Nefilim's distorted perspective. It is a recent type, modeled after encountering muskets. So they made a sharpshooter, equiped with meat instead of metal and gunpowder. Imagine an armless man which his entire mouth stretched until forming a long bone funnel covered in skin. It has no nose, but many, many nostrils to suck air until the lungs inflate as bellows upon its back. The lickings of a long tongue lubrificate the "barrel", the ears serve as a bipod which helps when it is crouched in legs whose knees bend to the front like birds. The tongue loads a projectile. In this moment, it exhales, spiting a spiny tooth with enough force to make it disapear inside a tree's trunk. Once all the teeth are gone, its lips can hold anything, be it bullets, wood splinters, arrows or pebbles. If you intend to fight it, know that its eyes are the abdomen of wasps flying away from the nostrils to watch everything from the sky. Kill them and its aim becomes terrible.

This is, sadly, shit.

>hurr look at me I'm so edgy

I would regard these guys as horrifying, whilst lacking in the horror aspect.

OC donut steel

>it's terrible
Shocking!

Phoenixes.

Completely immortal, sapient phoenixes. Tyrants driven to madness by their unending lives.

I don't know if creature is the right word but I wanted to make a cleric afraid of their god who was forcibly given to them, so I made an "Abyssal Pantheon" basically when people stare into the abyss a little of the abyss goes into them and the abyss is infinite so that little bit is also infinite. Effectively turning the human wherever they might be at that moment into an deity and a corresponding realm.

Most of them are simple and actually positive where when you become chosen by touching a shrine of them, you essentially begin to lose yourself and become them. When you dream it's their world, and when you die that's where you go.

One of those places happen to be a catacombs worker who dropped his map and torch on the floor and when kneeling down to pick them up stared into the abyss. So he became an infinite scape of long stretching catacombs without light, partially flooded, and filled with pic related.

Literally this.

Antique Mimics

Mimics rarely live for that long. Young mimics disguise themselves as treasure or useful objects, so they can lure in more prey. They are also very aggressive. Although this helps when facing the lone adventurer, they are frequently killed by groups , as the element of surprise is their strength.

As they mature they become more patient. These mimics will be subtle with their disguise and more conservative with their attack. They tend to take the form of antique furniture or art objects. They allow themselves to be taken as loot and brought into homes and settlements. Once there they bide their time and play the long game. They will mostly eat pets and animals. Only when they are certain will they attack people. As the maid goes to the latrine at night the painting jumps off the wall and consumes her. The next day the missing maid has assumed to have eloped and the mimic may wait months before the next attack.

The insular noble buys an old writing table to put in his study. Over the course of several years his servants "leave" him one by one till he is alone. A deliveryman calls on his house , only to be unanswered. There is no evidence of anything violence, just an empty house. The estate is auctioned off or inherited, and the antique mimic is transported to another locale.

No

is it a phasm or a spider ?

But user, waste and overproduction is adaptive in social animals because tribal warfare is attrition based; the overproductive tribe can just kill more conscientious tribes and take their land if they need more

Literally any omnivore in the same position would do the same.

Problem is its somewhat predictable and the only way to spook players is to go meta or draw from beyond what should be frightening in-setting. Sure to post-war survivors this would be seven kinds of horrific. But to you or me it's just another corrupted madman sthick

This would make a great horror movie.

Mimics are too goofy for that to ever be genuinely scary.

Dark elf cult of the Red Queen.
Dark elves generally rank pretty high on the creep-o-meter, being worshipers of strange and eldritch gods and usually accompanied by various summoned horrors. But the cult of the Red Queen take it one step further by becoming horrors themselves. A powerful and militant cult worshiping the primal embodiment of life under the aspect of "nature red in tooth and claw", its members forsake traditional use of technology and instead use strange magic rituals to augment and alter their bodies. Footsoldiers of the cult may have sharp claws or bony blades implanted to thier limbs, while their elite warriors go to battle wearing living armour that augments their already considerable skill, and some among their numbers have even mastered the ability to shape their flesh at will, nearly instantly changing their form to suit the current need. Stranger and more horrifying still are various flesh-golems and war beasts created by the cults fleshcrafters, many out of unwilling slaves. The high priestess of the cult has altered herself to the point where she is more aberration than elf, and considers herself an arch-angel and avatar of her eldritch goddess.

The tenents of the cult are very simple: all life is engaged in a constant struggle, and you either survive and grow stronger or you die. To show mercy to their enemies would be anathema to their believes, and as such they are known for not just their nightmarish appearances but also their brutality (other dark elves will probably show mercy if you submit and convert to their faith, although that generally means subjugation and enslavement as slavery is seen as the rightful place of "lesser races". Still, at least they don't rip you to pieces and eat you, or meld your body together with your friends to create some kind of horrible flesh-golem). To face them in battle is to face a horde of horrifying monsters and beasts, backed by spellcasters that can turn your own bodies against you.

The god is the catacombs that is filled with spiders.

...

>The flayed bodies of locals and livestock have been found around town.

Okay, the story made less sense than a generic description would've done.

What do the Sabinites look like, is the Sabinite horror the name of a regular Sabinite or the tortured soldiers, and was the black being a Sabinite or something else?

Roughly person-shaped empty sacks of leather made from a patchwork of human skin. They create more bagmen by capturing people and collecting human bodies for their skin. They're semi-nomadic, typically congregating in roving bands that prey on travelers with predatory cunning, often luring them into ambushes and traps. They cooperate and set up primitive campsites, and no-one's sure how they organize since bagmen never speak. A bagman can repair itself with harvested skin and non-human cloth, but knows the skills of the people it's made of. Bagmen made from former soldiers often can be seen sporting the same armor and weapons they used in life.

Make good orc replacements as a vicious horde of vaguely humanoid monsters for PCs to exterminate guilt-free.

Another possibility is that they swap patches of their skin to transfer knowledge and skills between each other. Rather than a Bagman who had been made from a human soldier simply being especially dangerous, it would be disassembled by its fellow Bagmen who would then stitch bits of it into themselves and all acquire its skills.

> seeing as most priapists were formerly soldiers from penal legions

Fuck you, I laughed

A booblady, a creature with such large breasts it uses them to walk

>Should I post it?
>Yeah. I'm gonna post it.

I think we owe All Tomorrows an apology. By comparison anyway.

You reminded me of my doll phobia. Good job, fuck you.

I'm imagining them as looking a lot like this picture. How right or wrong am I?

Seconded.

27 pages.

I can't do horror, but I can do creepiness

>Minotaurs are one of the "feral" races living at the edge of civilization.
>Massive, solitary, exclusively male stonecutters, sometimes with a penchant for tinkering
>Generally very calm, there are many reports of civilized folks hiring minotaurs as masons, receiving quality work. Nine times out of ten, if you stumble across a minotaur in the wild, the worst you'd experience is a poor sense of hospitality.

>When a minotaur feels like it's time for an heir, apprentice, or scion, he will track down a woman of one of the other races, and be quite insistent upon having sex with her. He will never show malice, but he will NOT take no for an answer, and he cannot be reasoned with.

>After raping a woman, the minotaur will be completely mystified by her fear or hatred, and won't understand why her friends and family will attack him. As far as the minotaur understands the world around him, he did a completely mundane thing, and it's the humanoids who are acting crazy.

Monsters that are mentally children are the worst. So full of innocence, and no idea of what evils and depravities they wrought.

>I made a race of omnivorous herd animals notable mostly only for their extreme endurance and adaptability.
>It's humans isn't it?
>Rather than overpower or run down prey
>Yup it's humans.

Humans aren't inherently diseasy, it's just that some of the unnatural things we've learned to do, like herding and building cities, foster disease.

>Lamias are another "feral" race, a collection of people with upper halves that look suspiciously like humans, and lower halves that look like beasts. Serpentine, feline, and avian lower halves are the most common. This variety makes humanoids wonder whether Lamias are a single race or an alliance of them, just as "humanoids" themselves are an alliance of dwarf, elf, human, and orc.
>All humanoids agree that religion is an essential part of life
>Lamia culture does not distinguish between "gods" and "demons."
>Describing the concept of humanoid religion to a lamia causes them extreme distress
>Any cleric who has tried to preach to or convert lamias has been viciously attacked, often lynched
>Even lamias adopted by humanoids as infants, raised apart from lamia society, loathe churches and priests.

Pretty close, at least for the higher ups on the cult. The lower ranking members typically sport relatively non-complex augmentations, with little care for anything but functionality. The higher ups tend to extensively modify their bodies to attain what they consider physical perfection. Which, depending on the individual, may range from hauntingly beautiful to nightmarish monsters seemingly made mostly of teeth and claws.

>As time passes, peoples who live near minotaurs develop a taste for minotaur dick

That isn't creepy, it is just a weakness that can exploited.
Tricking and capturing it should be easy.
It can repay its debt to society with enslavement or its life.

This just went full CoC.

...

don't die

I've mentioned them in another thread but I created a race that dwells underground, they are blind and see via echolocation and smell. They worship an entity that dwells in the planet, and tend to only come to the surface to raid. There society is a caste system with religious leaders at the top. What makes them stick out is that they made a deal with their God to grant them immortal life but the price is the death and consumption of every 19 out of 20 babies born. They also have a ritual whenever a new moon happens where they come to the surface to steal random maidens for their Gods twisted experiments.

I came up with a variety of poltergeist that likes to collect bones. It doesn't really care what kind of bones, it just likes bones. It starts small, collecting bits of dead mice and shrews, and works its way up. Sometimes they're harmless, if unsettling, misshapen monstrosities of badly-assembled bones jittering through the forests looking for another corpse to scour. Sometimes, though, they're greedy, and don't want to wait to find a corpse when there's so many skeletons being occupied by inconsiderate lifeforms. These ones grow aggressively, incorporating the biggest bones they can find to make it easier to collect more from any living thing they see. Lots of horse bones, cow bones, and of course human bones.

...

That looks like a centaur skeleton that just looked behind it and freaked because it thinks there is a horse skeleton chasing it.

What are Grues like?

I like this.
Maybe I'm a bit dumb, but it caught me off guard.
Besides, I like seeing what Humanity may look like to other, better/more haughty species.

The idea of a false hydra always creeps me the fuck out

I've got Wendigos, does that count?

There's also the Corpse Hydra. Its an artificial creation that looks like a rhino or ox body with a gaping maw and a few tendrils around the maw for a head. It gets its name due to its ability to collect bodies for the battlefield and store them in its body, fusing them to itself. Once it engages in a fight, it extends the collected corpses from openings on its sides and use them as appendages.

Oh god please no...

If I realized out of charactet my DM has inserted a false hydra into the game, I'd quit immediately.

The thing is made of all my phobias for fucks sake...

I put a false hydra in one of my games. It's how that group had its first party wipe

Story time. Now.

What's a false hydra ? Google isn't very helpful right now

We know they have terrible claws and fangs, from the remains of their victims, and the structural damage. We know they can fit through a relatively small opening, and are strong enough to puncture steel plate.

Some people think that grues haunt dark places because light burns them away faster than we see them. The truth is much worse. They exist where light isn't. They can't co-exist in space filled with light, so they exist somehwere else, instead. But when that light goes away, they can come back.

It's currently unknown whether or not they can perceive areas that are lit, but just imagine. They're there waiting, watching, sitting in their dark corner we cannot peer into. Waiting for us to extinguish our lights.

A medusa hiding her face so all you see is the snek hair?

goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2014/09/false-hydra.html

goblinpunch.blogspot.ca/2014/09/false-hydra.html

That's a pretty creepy concept, but it would be pure bullshit once implemented in a game.

The most horrifying race?

Why, it's man, of course.

youtu.be/7rwUdL9qXjk

How so? From what I've read of implementation examples in the link it could easily work.

Original creation - Children of the Black Dune yeah from the kulmorost threads if anyone here was in those

They're not overly horrifying in the traditional sense of being tentacle-rape machines. They just literally rose out of dead earth and quietly started wiping entire tribes off the map one day. a race that has aligned goals in its entirety, that are just as good or even better at adapting than other races, that can use subterfuge and other races own tactics against them. Don't eat or sleep or want for rest and can be collected and returned to the earth they came from. l think they're be pretty horrifying from a character point of view

they're pretty much just humans with a shared consciousness before birth that crawl out of black sand fully grown and intelligent

Sounds like an organic rather than robotic version of this.

...

I'll write it when I get home from work

My group seemed to like the way it was implemented, despite their untimely demise

>The Hunger
a six legged, insectoid like creature the size of a horse. its two back legs are shorter and designed for scuttling while the front two a longer and have serrated chitin blades, made for impaling and cutting prey while also being useful for climbing. their exoskeleton is covered in spikes, protecting them from attack and preventing other creatures from making them dinner. their mandibles secrete a venom that paralyzes flesh and is large enough to bite the abdomen out of a dwarf. their most distinguishing feature, however, is their eyes of which they possess four of, each in their own deep socket and glowing white. any person who gazes into their eyes feels a deep hunger fill them, as if they were starving. a glance may make you feel undernourished while extended eyesight brings forth crippling hunger pains. this combined with the fact that they prey primarily on livestock means that they terrorize villages and other settlements by starving them out. wherever the go, famine follows.

whenever they're not hunting or mating, they are typically in a deep hibernation, sleeping for months at a time. this allows such a large creature to last many years in famine stricken areas where food is more scarce. this also means they can survive in a variety of environments, with some adapting to extreme climates like deserts and frozen tundras. there is a pattern to hunger attacks which lets settlements prepare. when a hunger is full (which only takes a few hunts at most), they hibernate for at least six months. hungers are usually lone creatures, but sometime travel in pairs during mating season. hungers are also territorial and don't like traveling very far for their food and tend to stay in one place for the majority of their lives, although roaming hungers are not unheard of. an out of season hunger attack may be the result of a territorial dispute with another hunger or when their food source becomes unsatisfactory.