As adventurers level up...

What is anyone supposed to masturbate to then?

That's a pretty cool premise for a villain. Someone who started as a regular adventurer, saw the potential of such elixirs and now seeks to go Übermensch.
Most beings are inferior to him and he seeks more and more power, until the party catches his attention.

>cool monster body horror
>furry

>The fuck kind of games are you playing where +stat drops completely derail the campaign or might as well not exist?

Players will literally ignore every plot hook and story element if there's something else to do that gets them money, XP, and especially stats.

>The fuck kind of games are you playing where +stat drops completely derail the campaign or might as well not exist?
Most gamers nowadays will ignore any and all story elements within the campaign if they even whiff something that yields a greater return in terms of XP, gold, or stat boosts.

It's the same shit as those gamers who waste hours of playtime on some mini-game that has nothing to do with the story, except they take it to its logical conclusion and go out of their way to ignore plothooks just because "we can do it after gain more levels."

Could mix things up a bit by making some critters easier to absorb too. Makes the players go seek out a few things instead of just looking for the biggest, baddest monster they can currently take on.

I like the idea.

What about things that force a trade-off? Like they give big boosts but have extra mutations. Sure that Con increase is nice but the crab claws and becoming increasingly aquatic is a problem.

can easily be mistaken with magical realming, be careful

Can you harvest secondhand elixirs from other adventurers?

>a villain is born

Dude. That is a fantastic way to just get players to go out and slay some classic monsters.

Giants = Str
Displacer Beasts = Dex
Troll? Ooze? = Con
Mindflayer = Int
Lich = Wis
Mimic = Cha
Beholders = Saves

Dragon = All mental stats or all physical stats
Legendary Threats, Tarasque, Demon Lords = All stats

When are crab claws not a bonus?

A different picture attached to this might make less people think it's magical realming.

I think it sounds awesome. It'd have to be run as the focus of the campaign, as it'd definitely bog down most other arcs. It'd be kind of slice of life, where you're collecting slices of life.

Liches are Int since they're almost always wizards

If the players have a goal, you have a story.

Dehumanize yourself and face to bloodshed.

Not really the same, but extremely similar is a mechanic from Ragnarok Online.
All Monster have a 0,01% chance to drop a card of themselves. Then you can use that card to imbue an item with a special effect that is Always themed with the Monster itself.

There are also alchemist that take Monster drops to create various potions, but I guess that's way too generic.

It worked for Pokemon.

yeah I played that game

HOW THE FUCK DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS GAME
ONLY I KNOW ABOUT THIS GAME

I played the 2nd one. Sod off Apollo, my laser spam is greater than your aegis!

CoC thread?

>No not that one... the OTHER one.

This is literally what a geomancer is

You know, I always went out of my way to stay a pure human without any mutations or corruption, smiting all the evil and only having consensual lewds. In retrospect, I might have played the game wrong.

This is just the plot of CoC.

Go on...

>that guy who keeps hunting nymphs

When you are harvesting Tarrasques for parts, it might be time to stop adventuring.

Any point where manual dexterity is needed

Like most situations

I like it. You might even play with the idea of these changes affecting the way they think. If you alter yourself to be too much like an Ogre, maybe you start yearning for human flesh?

I think the real kicker in OP's idea is that the PC's essentially dehumanize themselves, and literally grow closer to being monsters than humans. Quite the apt, little metaphor for that crazy chink magic leading them to plunder the natural world like a bunch of... well... monsters.

What would the market for adventurers selling the parts they don't need be like? What would they go for?

I had an idea for something like this a long time ago, but it wasn't mostly tinctures and elixirs: People would graft parts of monsters onto themselves to gain their powers.

Problem was some of the grafts would kind of resist each other, or they might be too well attuned to each other, and could cause a biological version of Shadow Run's cyberpsychosis. If too many grafts of opposing elements are used, the grafted individual warps into a bestial, inhuman monstrosity, a fusion of all the different kinds of creatures that they were grafted with; too many of the same type, and they turn into a bestial, but cunning, humanoid version of that creature. In both cases, the player loses control of what's left of their character. You have to ride that thin middle line between, "too many," and, "not enough," to get the most out of it.

There was also another faction that was basically a blue magic version of maneuvers, taking in the same kind of food the monster does, as well as tinctures of its blood, marrow, skin/scales/feathers, bones, etc, to be able to mimic its abilities.

...

I like it. I've been playing SaGa 3 lately and it has a really similar core mechanic, where monsters can either drop meat or cyborg parts and players can ingest/install them to alter their stats and appearance. You can easily go back to base form in that game (oddly enough by installing cyborg parts on a beast PC or vice versa, doesn't make much logical sense) though.
Shit, someone already mentioned the game.

>yfw no one wants to hire giant mutant killing machines for anything besides adventuring

That's what Savage Worlds Rippers does, basically.

I usually throw insults at r9bots, but this post made me want to do the anti-normie screech
10/10 bait

Unless the campaign is just about monster hunting. I could see it

>Party is a roaming band of monster hunters
>World is filled with scattered settlements, various monsters roam the unsafe lands inbetween
>Any town has a bunch of monsters that need to be killed at a higher priority
>While in town you could decide to go out hunting for a monster your fighter needs the left nipple of
>When you come back or when you get to it, turns out the one the cleric needed got killed by someone else
>Choose between moving on or getting involved with that party, either honorably fighting them, attacking brazenly, or killing them in secrecy

It could be fun.

Think its less furry and more like drinking an elixir made of gorilla teeth and your muscles get a bit denser. Graft a bit of bones from a demon onto your back and it leaves a little stain but increases your fire resists. Drink some distilled dragon piss and occasionally spit fire.

If you're willing to find bigger and stronger humans, likely adventurers, and kill and eat their corpses, sure why not?

A thought; what if it's not only adventurers that can absorb monster essences?
As OP said, you can only use the elixirs when your body and mind are suitably prepared. But that doesn't preclude the possibility that a minor monster trait couldn't be taken at chargen.
Mildred the baker down the street has a fire salamander essence, she barely notices the heat in her kitchen! Frank's family used to be rich and they had a few essences bottled up, so he got this demon cat thing (the label was pretty faded) but I swear he can walk on gravel silently.

I assume only very minor monster essences could be absorbed at a low level, most commoners being fairly lucky to absorb two in their lives.
But it could be a coming of age thing in this society where you take on a minor monster trait. Rich fucks getting rarer monsters and commoners mostly getting giant rats and the like.
In any case, there'd be quite the trade in monster essences as people want the best for their kids, and those who manage to break through whatever ceiling prevents a second infusion then shop around for something to complement their current essence.

>party plans a heist on the monster auction house for a great wyrm heart
>then the arguments start on who gets to use it
I can dig it.

>use wyrm heart
>wyrm starts influencing your mind
>you want to track down the rest of its body and take the parts into yourself

Had a female rogue once who, for a spell component, had to steal the ovaries from a succubus. (The succubus wasn't happy)

mite b OP, mite jus b.

>dragon heart gives you a breath weapon and spell-like abilities of the dragon it comes from
>also gives you resistance to their damage type and +1 hp per hit die as though the size of your hit dice went up
>the older it is, the more likely there's lingering magic that hold its genetic memories

If it's a red, this makes sense. Reds have Locate Object, and they tend to be self-absorbed, believing that they're as close to perfect as you can get.

So, basically, the person it gets put into is a ticking time bomb; their heart is constantly pinging Locate Object, trying to find the rest of its body, and there's basically no chance they don't end up cannibalizing another grafter for their draconic parts and become a twelve foot tall, ravening mad, bestial, humanoid red dragon bent on killing everything that it can get to.

Nah, that's just another way new dragons come about in such a world. Once someone's consumed the entire thing, they've become a full dragon, all humanity replaced with a lust for treasure and raiding.
People keep being warned about it. It's foolhardy to take on a dragon. But someone always thinks they know better, that they can control it or only take ONE BITE, and it always ends up the same way.

>When are crab claws not a bonus?
>Any point where manual dexterity is needed
>Like most situations
Indeed...

>CoC thread?
>>No not that one... the OTHER one.
>This is just the plot of CoC.
>Go on...
>I like it. You might even play with the idea of these changes affecting the way they think.
Yes... yes....

>Had a female rogue once who, for a spell component, had to steal the ovaries from a succubus. (The succubus wasn't happy)
...The fuck was the DC on that, and what was her bonus on that roll?

>get female party member
>only level her up using snake monster parts
>get naga gf
feelsgoodman

>Be filthy min/maxing scum
>Decides to spend all first level hunting spiders and collecting spider webs
>Weaves the spider web into silk bundles
>Replace skeletal muscles with spider silk upon level up
>Instantly becomes 50 times stronger
>Just so happens to be the party meatshield
>Tank a shitton of damage
>Suture up all flesh wounds with spider silk
>Wounds heal over the spider silk sutured mesh and skin becomes bullet proof
>Bones keeps breaking under the enormous torque newly acquired spider silk muscles can generate
>Skims the coastline catching sea snails
>Replace all bones and teeth with iron mineralized limpet teeth
>Become a indestructible monstrosity before 4th level

Spider silk isn't a body part.

Don't spiders eat their silk to recycle it? Watch yourself around arachnids is what I'm saying.

I'm imagining narcissistic aristocrats hiring adventurers to kill certain monsters and grab their parts just so they can get cosmetic changes they find desirable.
>sirens are said to have beautiful eyes; I want you to bring me a pair
There'd probably be a few of them who develop a complex about it and graft more and more parts until they look bestial the same way some celebrities get too much plastic surgery.

i'm sorry you have autism

See NOW we're getting to something that resembles an interesting setting

And not just because it finally justified my monster girl fetish by proxy

It dovetails nicely with the nascent 'alchemypunk' idea i've been trying to cook up in the back of my head

>Wyrm steals YOUR heart
>ABANDON ALL DELUSIONS OF CONTROL

>>Wyrm steals YOUR heart
>bring it chocolates and flowers

I love me some dragon's dogma. That's probably the coolest dragon fight I've ever had in a game

Do you think there are essences that are forbidden to the populace?
Stuff that brings plague could be one. Or if, for instance, the nobility all use essences of a particular monster, then it's natural predator or counter? When all the nobility is spliced with displacer beast, they probably don't want to see blink dog gangs.

>alchemypunk
Tell me more.

you provide them but narrow it down, you can choose paths A B or C to get giant, fishman, or dragon parts respectively

>rival adventuring party
>DM rolls to see which one they go after
>sometimes they'll go after the party's target and they'll have to compete to be the first to claim the essence/corpse
>other times they'll take a different target and one of the rival party members will appear next with that monster trait
>party now has to consider taking sub-optimal targets to ensure their rivals don't get a particular ability

>I think the real kicker in OP's idea is that the PC's essentially dehumanize themselves,
and face to bloodshed?

>Start the game as low level heroes
>Eventually become full time monster hunters in order to gain power
>After years of slaughtering monsters and attaching them to yourselves you barely look human in any way
>You are so obsessed with power by grafting parts to you that your moral code is barely human

>Mildred the baker down the street has a fire salamander essence, she barely notices the heat in her kitchen! Frank's family used to be rich and they had a few essences bottled up, so he got this demon cat thing (the label was pretty faded) but I swear he can walk on gravel silently
So like Plasmids, but the ads actually tell the truth

Well, it was pretty great at first with plasmids. At first.
Give it a bit, maybe monster numbers start to decline due to overhunting

Naw, once the monster populations start diminishing the "Real Hunters" start turning up the difficulty level and start going after other hunters.

On the other hand, would eating humans grant bonuses or variations of one sort or another? Maybe a lot of slaughtered villages and lost travelers were just some too-far-gone adventurer's attempt to go back to being human.

>not creating factory farms of rare monsters
>not paying hunters in rare monster parts to capture or destroy rival farms, making the rare monsters even more rare
>not sucking every last ounce of essence you can out of these once mighty beasts

Even with the best intentions, it quickly becomes difficult to interact with ordinary people once you start consuming legendary monsters.

Just give them a bounty list where they can pick between 3-4 monsters and they'll be fine.

>start out with monster hunter
>slowly morph into monsterpunk
>fantasy Shadowrun with monster-farm megacorps

I don't see how that's a lie.

>Tell me more.
The gist being you replace a lot of the 'tech' in cyberpunk with 'fucking magic', albeit Hermetic Magic, and exploring the social and metaphysical ramifications of a high magic high fantasy world - where food crops can be magically grown and harvested by skeletons, textiles woven by swarms of sentient mystical spiders, etc. What happens to scarcity, what happens to the average person? When even their labor no longer has significance, what significance do people have?

Rather than cyber limbs, you have alchemically grown homonculis appendages, that can theoretically take any shape or appearance. So you could replace your arm with a giant crab claw for example.

But the more you deck yourself out in magical grown body parts, the less mundane and more supernatural you are, until you become a truly supernatural creature in your own right. What ramifications this might have isn't something I ever really got into.

Also it would take place in a giant medieval megacity like Gondor turned up to 11
kind of like this

So... if everyones going after, hunting and consuming monsters to "improve" themselves functionally, cosmetically, or both- what happens if people go to far? Obviously monster populations for attractive traits go down- but what if "hunters" realise those qualities are found in the previously-humans that consumed them and can be "recycled" via harvesting those post-humans just as they do monsters?

What if people want to go back to normal? Is consuming the essence of a regular human / humanoid a good way to get normal again? Would there be towns of folk desperate to become human again after disfiguring themselves via monster elixirs, more than wiling to cannibalize other, less afflicted, humans to become what they revere as "pure"? Therefore becoming less monstrous in form, but even more frightening in possibility. For example, if the elixirs are magical and not passed genetically. you could have couples consuming their pure infant children to "reset" their forms and possibly try different elixirs or recover from failed ones.

My mind races with ideas for such a setting.

My first thought is that perhaps Elixir of Humanoid just doesn't exist - or at least, it's not made in the same way as the monstrous ones. Doesn't stop people from trying, of course.
Someone who simply doesn't know and just assumes it works like normal murders someone only to find they did it for no reason.
Another hunts down the best examples of humanity in order to gain their traits, and insists it's working when it's not.
An alchemist repeatedly hunts down people, enhanced and pure, in an attempt to perfect such an elixir, believing it isn't that such is impossible it's just that only their own genius is capable of cracking the formula for getting it right where everyone else has gotten it wrong.

Perhaps this also extends to the the parts that have already been enhanced by said elixirs. Then you have such things as people hunting down a strange, unknown beast only to find it's a former adventurer, mutated to the degree that they're utterly inhuman, and nothing they made works.

and start the next adventure
saltinwoundssetting.com/2015/04/salt-in-wounds-overview-origin.html#more

>belatedly realize spider silk isn't muscle tissue
>be bedridden

Sounds like what Perdido Street Station ought to have been.

I think he's talking about the dragline support strands, the ones that could be used to make bullet resistant vests if we could harvest it efficiently enough. They stretch about as much as muscle does, and, theoretically at least, if bundled up, would behave much the same way as muscle.

The return wouldn't be fifty times - you'd need carbon nano-tubes for that - but if that theory is correct, then you would be stronger for how much muscle you showed.

Might b overcomplicated and ultimately annoying,

Great idea.
And you really have to play with corruption vibes. Like having a cult who flood elixir market with illegal elixirs made from parts of cosmic horror being. Cultists believes they are ascending humanity to higher state of being.

I like how this core idea can be taken in multiple directions.

In one, we have a fairly straight xianxia-like setting with monster spirits adding mostly benign mutations and powers.
In another, you've got alchemists trapping the blood of monsters within the body of man to make something greater and lesser at once in a grimy dark setting.
And in a third you've got Monster Hunter: TF fetish edition. Now with catgirls.

Humans are empty vessels for the Arcane. We lack the great power the beasts, but by consuming their essence we may take this strength for ourselves.
One should not overindulge in these drugs however, as with the might we also gain the savagery of beasts. While many people have to live with the fact that some humans just have tails or weird hair colors, those who recklessly seek power will soon find themselves nothing but the monsters they have hunted. Indeed, this is how many demihumans like centaurs or harpies came to be: Nations domesticating the beasts and feeding their population a single essence until they became something not human. And from the seer scale of these endeaveurs, stable populations of abhumans were left behind. So thanks young hunter, ya keeping the neigberhood from growing cow asses.
Of course we alchemists aren't happy with munching sphinx hair all day, so we set out to extract the different traits of the beasts. It's a harsh art that requires the balance of several components and meticulous rituals, but we can create potions that improve our characteristics while keeping the human form.
Or give you a horse penis, if you're into that.
Translating this into mechanics, we basicly got several different EXP bars that give you different things when you hit a threshhold. You fill these bars by consuming various items you obtain by hunting or traiding monster materials. Common items fill multiple bars at once so you need to be careful not to pick up unintended effects.

You can tweek the complexity of the system and the nature of the side effects to what your group prefers. Maybe there's just a few monster families, maybe you 500 species. If you want grim dark, succubus parts make you depending on eating souls, if you want EPR they make you really damn good at sex.

It's almost guaranteed that there's some adult game where this is a thing.

If I were going to do something like this, I'd try to incorporate it into the system.

In, say, 3.5, I'd have it convert a set amount of XP into XP towards a monster class. I don't play 3.5 anymore, though.

In Mutants and Masterminds, I'd just tell them that, if they overused something, their CP would get banked towards transforming into that thing, until they reached a set milestone of the progression towards becoming it, then they'd gain it all at once, as a lump sum.

Well, if it works. I couldn't think of another transformation mechanic that isn't '"play another stat sheet for a few rounds".

Anyway, this is just a progression system. If you want a decent game, you need to integrate this properly into the game loop, make an interesting world where this is integrated, but not warping everything else and you need your creatures to feel alive like they do in a Monster Hunter.

Been some time since I played DnD too, but maybe a way to streamline the system is to gain XP normally and then use the items to switch the xp over to the monster pool.
So players can say "on level 3 I need ten steaks to get feat A and seven horns to get feat B. But if get B via to cow path instead I can easily get another point in CON at level 4, even if gives me the stupid tail ".

You could probably have common foods that can be mixed into the basic classes and require rarer and more specific combinations to get extra effects or weird classes.
I think a possible issue is that this is inherently a classless system. Even if you do have high pressure to stay in a few paths, there's nothing stopping the player from just eating grass and fucking their character over.

>the Tarrasque used to be an adventurer himself
>used to have friends
>as it turns out, his old friends were still human enough to come and help him
>and from how they're pursuing the survivors, it looks like they're still human enough to want revenge

I've been looking for a new direction to take one of my homebrew games.
Little did I know that both the mechanics and the fluff have supported this thread's ideas from the start.

>Table top CoC
I'd play it
As long as half the transformations weren't different flavors of dicks

This.
Everything became furry futa so soon in CoC....

>Anyway, this is just a progression system. If you want a decent game, you need to integrate this properly into the game loop, make an interesting world where this is integrated, but not warping everything else and you need your creatures to feel alive like they do in a Monster Hunter.
I'd probably default to something like replacing magic items with one use "upgrade" items, a set number of slots, can slot out ones you don't like but lose them forever, higher ones more monstrous you become collect a whole set and you become the monster

>Hey, GM, can I just completely ignore the campaign premise?

>people hunting down a strange, unknown beast only to find it's a former adventurer, mutated to the degree that they're utterly inhuman, and nothing they made works
>it's *not* worrkiiing... uhuhu... not wooRRRkiiing...
Ugh, I can just see it now.