So other than pulling the old "You thought it was your friend but it was a worm controlling his brain" trick...

...

Oho, the old Jaffa trick. This is good.

The parasites protect their host from disease and poisons, and are generally more help than harm.

t.parasitic pathogen

That's a symbiont, you goober.

The whole 'sneaky sentient parasite' thing is cool, but I think it's more interesting if it's some sort of clandestine mutualism. Like that Futurama episode, but less wacky.

Played a game where there was a race of sentient brain slugs. A player got friendly with an NPC, only to find that his new best friend was actually a slug. He figured it out when the NPC didn't know him a few days later.

Well, that'll show me for not reading the thread.

Parasites manifest if a specific language is spoken by it's host

How about "the brainworm is actually a pretty great guy and a big improvement on the person it took over"?

The ole' toxoplasma gambit?

They just slowly and steadily remove your ability to feel fear and slow your reflexes down, in the hope that you eventually get eaten by a dragon or something, which is the next stage in its life cycle.

Since this is fantasy ecology, it probably makes you greedier or something so you are more likely to seek out the dragon's hoard.

>The parasite took him over BEFORE he and you became friends
>You've really been friends with the worm all along
>Your friend's host gets killed it's up to you to find someone who's a big enough asshole to infect with your brain-eating buddy

It wasn't really diarrhea.

IT WAS WORMS IN HIS INTESTINES

Zombie apocalypse

Rifts Atlantis had a whole thing about this in their "biowizardry" bullshit, both symbiotic and parasitical.

Worth a read when interested.

I loved this execution so much. The worms are basically going to turn you into superman in return of living in you, but you will lose much of your original personality.

>>The parasite took him over BEFORE he and you became friends
>>You've really been friends with the worm all along
>>Your friend's host gets killed it's up to you to find someone who's a big enough asshole to infect with your brain-eating buddy
The whole point of that episode is that Fry is an idiot and makes bad decisions, like he usually does. You lose your "original personality" when you learn new things and expose yourself to new perspectives, it's something you should desire.

The worms are intelligent, friendly, and utterly incapable without a host.
They require a host to live. They regret the necessity, they understand your issues, but they absolutely must have hosts. It's them or you. They hope you understand.

The worm doesn't actually control your mind, it just makes you really unstable by exaggerating your normal personality traits to the point that you're basically a physical manifestation of your id. It does this by releasing chemicals that are critical to its life cycle but unintentionally harmful to the host.

No lie. If I didn't want my personality changed I'd stop making terrible decisions.

The parasite infects the brain, but before it infects it's basically mindless/not sentient. Only after it gains the brainmeats of the infectee that it gains sentience and sapience, and is horrified at what it did for survival.

Bonus points: The former infectee is secretly evil-aligned, but the now-sapient parasite is good-aligned. Shenanigans!

I just thought I'd pop by and say that I'm sure as hell not going to read through this thread for the sake of my anxiety.

>parasitic worm used to work as a street surgeon before joining the party
>says he's as good as a regular doctor, but couldn't get a medical license because the tests were biased

>makes you greedier or something so you are more likely to seek out the dragon's hoard
that's a cool idea

>You lose your "original personality" when you learn new things and expose yourself to new perspectives, it's something you should desire.
What? There's a difference between changing as a person because of your experiences and changing because of some external force like medication or, in this case, parasites. The former can be good, the latter is never good.

You thought your friend was a talking animal but it was a worm controlling a regular animal.

Infesting yourself with symbiotic worms to acquire superpowers.
Infesting yourself with worms to drug yourself and be on a constant high thanks to the drug they produce as their excrements.
Infesting yourself with worms for medicinical purposes, such as the worm snacking on another parasitic lifeform or draining you of pus.

There are quite a lot of things you can do with parasites, if they have symbiotic effects.

Your experiences are an external force, they do not originate from internal stimuli.

> the latter is never good
Counterpoint: nanomachines/medication rebuilding your body and mind so that you can transend your mortal form.

You though it was a worm but it was actually your friend controlling it's brain.
Like it's a biological remote control device that get's planted into someone by your friend, and the friend pretends to help to remove it, but it's actually the friend who is in control.

Don't get all technical on me, you know what I meant.

So, taking medication so that you stop being a depressed asshole is a bad thing?

Parasites is a very negative word. If their effect is beneficial, like in Fry's case, and they do not seemingly cause undue harm to their host, they're symbiotic.

Getting into a new hobby because you met someone and became friends is an example of an external force changing you as a person.

Well, "undue harm" is subjective and would vary from person to person. While some people consider anti-depressive medication to be fine (and I don't begrudge the people who do, like since it's their opinion and they aren't forcing it on me) I personally don't. If a symbiote was going to change my personality I would consider that to be undue harm regardless of whether it makes me a "better person" in the eyes of others.

Everything is subjective and would vary from person to person. Some people think that book learnin' is evil. Other people think that drinking is evil. So what?

Believing that your personality is worth shit on its own is a sign of immaturity. As you move through life you will find that the world doesn't care about your safe spaces, and not adapting to the world is not a pure and valuable choice.

What kind of fucked up setting are you running in your games where not injecting yourself with a symbiote that heavily changes the way you act and think is considered a backwards way of thinking? It's really not comparable to "book learnin'" or something like that.

If you setting has symbiotes that do this sort of thing, not taking advantage of that symbiotic relationship would be very backwards indeed.

A peasant that herds cows or plants potatoes all day wouldn't see any good in book learnin' when herding cows and planting potatoes was all his father and grandfather did.

A species of sentient brain parasites. The hormones released by a host body during pregnancy cause their parasite to start dumping microscopic eggs into the bloodstream, where one of them will reach and infect the embryo.

An uninfected human (only possible via growing a human in an exowomb where they'd never get a chance to be infected in the first place or using drugs to kill someone's parasite) is only around as intelligent as a chimpanzee.

Everyone is infected and has been for the whole of human history, since the worm in the apple of the garden of eden.

Worms as characters. The brain worms are non-sentinent until they eat their first sentinent brain and at that point the absorb the sentinence of the being who's brain they just devoured and their memories so they are immediately overcome with the horror of having their own brain eaten and the memory of eating their own brain. Their first memory, ironically, is dying a horrible nightmarish gruesome death. They also have the memories and personality of the person they devoured but are aware that they are not that person for real, and so have to deal with either trying to be that person from here on out or trying to just cut ties and be someone new, but they still have all of the memories and enotional ties to the people in their person's lives.

Is a complete copy of you still you? If it has 100% your thoughts and feelings and emotions? Does it have your soul? Does it have a soul at all? When it dies and goes to an afterlife are you there waiting for it? Do "you" still exist in some dream realm able to comunicate with it when it dreams to offer it advice on being you?

I don't even know what to say to this. I can't exactly tell you you're "wrong" in something so subjective but it actually scares me that people think this shit is normal. Are you some kind of hardcore utilitarian?

That's... pretty cool.

Assuming that human culture as we experience it today is the be all end all of sentient existence instead of just current happenstance is a big mistake.

>the worm in the apple in the garden of eden
Genuinely interesting line. I'm now imagining cultists who have figured out humanity's true nature as parasites inside monkeys rather than monkeys ourselves.

the vocal chord parasites in MGSV were a pretty unique idea

Make your eyes glow

Plasmids

Although that isn't really hosting the slug I don't believe...

Indeed

Magic in many settings is something that fundamentally alters how you perceive and interact with the world, often transmitted by some event (astrological event, another wizard dying nearby, being affected by a spell, "magical areas") is not a far stretch from it.

Divine magic in D&D, especially. You form a connection to another sentient being that heavily affects your behavior. You spread it by spreading your religion, possibly creating more clerics among suitable candidates who form their own connection with "the divine". The god(s?) you follow may subtly and not-so-subtly affect your behavior via sacred omens, visions, and quests.

Get out of the thread Kojima, its time for your happy pills!

No, it is just injecting the modified vomit of little girls, who do have the slugs, into your veins.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontypool_(film)

The one and only time I've ever had some kind of parasitic infection in a game was to introduce psionics into the campaign, via fungal contamination.

>Spores spread, get breathed in by the host
>Moisture and darkness there allow the spores to grow and spread
>A week or so later, mycelium tendrils make it from the lungs to the host's brain and begin takeover
>Memory loss, confusion, PHENOMENAL PSYCHIC POWERS, and wracking cough manifest over the course of a day
>The first three are basically the fungus rewiring the host's brain and forming a new gestalt personality
>Meanwhile, spores are being expelled from the lungs by the coughing

I hadn't intended for it to be treated like John Carpenter's The Thing, but that's more or less how it ended up playing out when my players encountered the introductory outbreak in a mining village.

So you're an Eclipse Phase fan. That explains our huge differences in opinion here.

Your reaction to external forces is what determines who you are, and that's all internal. If you were right then doing the same thing to 10 different people would make them turn out the same way. It's been shown time and time again that that is not how it works.

I got hit by a car and had almost no injuries. Now I'm terrified of driving. Someone else might go through the exact same thing and become more fearless for having survived it.

The forces are external but the reaction is internal. Everyone reacts differently, the same experience won't cause the same change in everyone. We're too complex for that. And hell, to give you the exact example of what's being discussed, an analog of the worms. I was put on extremely strong behavioral medication as a child. They made me able to control my emotions, focus, stay calm and in general removed all of my problems. They also destroyed my personality completely and made me into a different person. It was for all intents and purposes, suicide. The person I was before taking those pills died and didn't come back until I stopped taking them. Instead of letting something control my mind and body "for the better" I decided to live and die with my flaws, fixing them or making peace with them on my own.

Anyways, stop being such a nihilistic little cunt. I know that when you're 15 (and you are 15) it seems like cruise control for sounding smart but your little "we're just robots, nothing matters" shit is pathetically shallow.

Nihilism doesn't work that way, user. Try dogmatic determinism instead.

Well then, have you heard the story of the dreamer squid?

north-of-reality.tumblr.com/post/144939352895/the-dreamer-squid
I'd link it to the non-tumblr website but it appears to have an internal server error.

A step further. The worm is literally most of our nervous system, eating and replacing everything but subconscious upkeep areas during gestation, with the skull growing much larger than normal to accommodate the worm. Which explains why humans are one of the few animals to be so fucking terrible at having children, with mothers frequently dying because their snatches literally aren't big enough for giant baby heads. A human without the worm would have a much smaller ape like skull.

I've read a pretty amusing creepypasta from /x/ about half a decade ago with a similar premise. Except it wasn't the nervous system that was the parasite, it was the whole skeleton.

Skeleton based stories are all lame "boo haunted house" level shit. The nervous system is the thing with real eldritch horror potential.

What does Eclipse Phase have to do with it? He's right. Socially speaking, we only have what we have because of random chance. The very fact that there are multiple cultures and not one homogenous 'human' culture proves this.

A lot of things people take for granted in the western culture of 20th/21st century are rather new ideas that haven't really been around 300 or 1000 years ago, much less spanning the entire existence of human civilization.

Literally every single culture ever studied has fart jokes. They all place significance in meals and cooking. Humans have a singular culture if you go down deep enough to the roots. You can't just point at only the branches growing out from those roots and go "look at all these different trees."

Can we start to post parasite art yet?

Cultures may change, but people will always stay the same.

It just seems like a really pro-transhuman thing to say. I suppose if he just meant creating new cultures made by humans, it doesn't have anything to do with it, but considering we're talking about injecting ourselves with symbiotes it really does seem like a topic of transhumanism.

>humans have legs and arms
>humans use tools
>humans live and die

Same culture, everyone!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_happiness

Correct.

>Believing that your personality is worth shit on its own is a sign of immaturity.
Please. I decide what's worth shit to me and what isn't, and what you consider valuable is completely irrelevant to that decision.

The word you're looking for is "species". Culture is a combination of knowledge, belief, art, contemporary morality, laws and customs and habits. If you think you totally share the culture of some random Greek guy from 200BC, you're entirely wrong.

You're awfully confident about that.

One science fiction parody webcomic used that exact idea. The ships's chief medical officer got infected by a brain-eating parasitic worm at some point before the comic began. However, upon eating her brains the non-sapient parasite gained all of her memories and personality, so to everybody else she seems to be the same person she always was, only with a worm sticking from the back of her skull. However, the parasite has a guilt complex about the fact that "she" is actually just a mental copy of a person killed by the parasite.

Next thing you'll be telling me, using a teleporter actually kills you and creates a mental copy on the other end.

How is it any different from falling asleep and waking up the next day? Or getting blackout drunk and coming to the next morning? Or getting knocked out?

i like this idea

A cult around these guys.
Giving yourself to the Worm is an act of greatest faith, and only high-ranking priests of Worm Gods have a chance to become One with the Worm.
Thus, parasites choose out of the best hosts taht don't even resist.

Is turning your computer off and on again completely 100% the same as cloning all of it's data onto another computer and then throwing the first one out a window?

I'm not taking sides or saying you're wrong, but there's an argument to be had and it's been going on for thousands of years.

Probably, Eclipse Phase. Fucking exhumans. Jovia strong.

Parasite which is used to infest human lungs to help them adapt to an all sulphur atmosphere.

Humans generally die in 40 years with the parasites but it's planters and prisoners who live on this planet anyway so it doesn't matter a fuck.

You could also use parasites as a bioweapon; think of a fantasy version of horsehair worms or mosquiteos.

>your buddy asks if you'd do him a huge favor and let him stay in your body until he finds a permanent home
>he doesn't want to be a nuisance, it's just that he'll kinda die if he doesn't find a host quickly

Pokérus?
Grants the host extra growth and strength.
Applied to creatures that actually experience time it would be the equivilent of Captain America's serum

Worms are highly empathetic, great friends. They stay with you in times of crisis, over good advice, and generally help you get on your feet. You can't ask for a better emotional companion.

Their lifespan is ten years, maximum. They resides inside your brain, so you can physically feel the "lights go out", so to speak.

People tend to avoid infection because getting over the death of a worm companion is just as hard, if not harder, than getting over your entire nuclear family all dying horribly on the same day.

i've had the idea for a parasitic plant-like species. once you're infected, it slowly eats and then replaces your physical body, cell-by-cell.
when it completely takes over, that's it. you are that species now, just designed to be exactly like you. you wouldn't even know at what point you went from human to not.
the most interesting thing that comes out of this, i think, is whether or not the person can be considered the original person or not. like theseus' ship. and you can also play with the idea of your new brain cells fucking with you, making you do things like giving you an incredibly strong urge to climb somewhere tall and release more seeds/spores

t. worm

The parasite wants the host to live for as long as possible, so it gets him to chill out and not be a super aggressive asshole and actually be a relatively friendly guy, being in close quarters with more people gives the parasite more opportunities to spread

>the worm controlling the person has an actual personality and isn't just a zombie making tool

...

In a service, they all walk with perfect, synchronized rhythm.

I have a few versions of pic related. Some are just parasitic, they latch onto a body part and replace it. You get an infected looking and swolen eye or foot or hand, eventually it stops hurting, because it's been consumed and replaced. Works just as well, looks a little odd, though they tend to poison other parasites (overburdening a host is bad) so you're likely only going to get infected once.

The more benevolent version is that the parasite, at least in a tiny, larval stage seeks out wounds, binds them, and just kind of lives there. Some cultures would use them as medicine. "Yes, I know having a weird chitinous arm that blinks at you is not ideal Gragnar, but it's better than no arm".

In the most abstract and benevolent version, they are also attracted to psychological wounds. Basically the parasite tries to reshape you according to whatever your damage seems to be. The problem is, they're not really sentient, they're just borrowing bits of your brain to think with. So someone with, say, anorexia will have the parasite keep them alive and functional as basically a skeleton, because the parasite perceives the problem as 'I'm too fat'. Someone carrying guilt for not taking action to protect someone, or being too weak to save someone, will get stronger, faster, more aggressive, even if that's not what they actually need. Most people avoid them no matter what the benefits might be for that reason.

After the spiritual/dimensional calamity the Atlanteans unleashed upon humanity, when a human soul is born they are immediately swarmed by spiritual parasites that feed off of their aura and severing them from the collective unconscious of the Earth.

Only through achieving enlightenment can these parasites be purged and your journey as a True Human can begin.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal

Some things are just part of who we are.

he's also right.