How does your party fare against pic related? Hard mode: Detect evil and the like don't work

Oh man, WHFB is fucked. I guess maybe chaos can resist it?

Assuming spellcasting is a skill that can be learned or caused by your body then yes. It wouldn't work if your metaphysical soul causes it, or if your powers come from some god, unless even gods can't tell it apart

If their spellcasting comes from education or biology, sure. It's not a hivemind, though, so it would just be that instance of Thing.

Upon hearing a blood test can expose it, it can extrapolate where blood stockpiles may be and who would have the key for it. So either it has excellent cognitive skills or it retains memories. Either way it could feasibly have some spellcasting ability.

Personally though, I'd say no. In fact I would even make it something of a blank, causing spells to not work around it. Add that much more uncertainty as to who it is.

>The Thing copies a cleric
>starts praying daily to receive divine spells

It kept people's memories, which is how it was able to mimic them.

I always assumed it had both. The Thing has innate intelligence passed on to each instance (explaining how it can build a spaceship looking contraption from scrap parts) and also retains memories (explaining how it can correctly mimic people's behavior and responses).

>Pokemon
We're fucked, and it's particularly tragic since I fucking love my pokemon.

>Vampire the Requiem
Much much more fucked than in Pokemon. We have a lot of people with Auspex who could detect it, and maybe some disciplines to help handle it, but we're chucklefucks and would inevitably let it loose.

>Exalted
High essense party probably keep it for research.
Low essence party could kill it, and has the wherewithal to find it.
Solo game I'm super fucked, but my lunar friend will probably eventually solve the problem.

It wouldn't be able to interact with them at all, it would probably just avoid them.

>Vampire the Requiem
How well do you think the Mages would do against it?

Do you think it was consciously mimicking them or do you think it was some kind of organic subroutine?

I ask myself that about me every day

That is one of the things that's open to interpretation: whether The Thing "knows" it's The Thing while it's mimicking. My take on it is that it's fully aware of what it's doing, it's just extremely cunning like a chess master.

Well, it sabotaged the blood, built a spaceship and attacked the other survivors so it clearly knew it was the thing

so do I

Undead it would eat, but would probably avoid elementals (other than any sort of flesh, bone, or perhaps plant elemental). Golems it would similarly avoid, except for those crafted from bodies or bodyparts.

It would retain knowledge based casting skills such as wizard levels, but those tied to the soul such as sorcerer would be lost, as would any powers obtained through divine pacts, though it's not impossible that a Thing mimic could establish a new divine pact.

I don't see The Thing wanting undead. It's very much a creature of life, and it wouldn't be able to mimic whatever it is that is animating the corpses. The Thing only consumes what it can mimic.

Towards the end of both movies, a thing that knows its cover has been blown just eats people to increase its mass and thus power. Though admittedly, in neither case was the person definitively killed before being eaten, so it's possible that it could not or would not want to mess with a corpse, animated or otherwise.

A corpse that is fresh enough that there's still cellular activity I can see (since The Thing attacks at a cellular level). The necrotic dead I can't.

Also, I've never bothered to watch the new one, so there's that.

This has actually happened several times now. The gods are ok with it, because the replicant worshipers still worship after all. Everyone has just been keeping up the ruse this entire time.

>The PCs just arrived by boat in this new country, everyone in there is actually a Thing

Would a Paladin-Thing be compelled to slay other instances of The Thing?

My character's a psion with a huge Insight score.
He roots it out, whoever it's impersonating, and crushes the fuck out of its mind. Bodily defenses mean nothing to psychic damage.

Yeah but what about in a non-erp game?

Do things know other hidden things are things?

Only really two reasons to watch the new one:
>Mary Elizabeth Winstead is a major cutie
>One scene which is so impossibly clever it had to have been an accident.

elaborate on the second point

The party lets me possess each one of them one at a time. I'd be able to tell if the physiology was fucky and they know I don't like sticking around, so the guy who won't let me gets the beatdown.

Are you talking about those moments where they found alternate ways of seeing if people were Things?

My party kicked its ass because they were World of Darkness Mages. Was way too easy to detect or cure it, so it never got out of the undersea base it was trapped in.

>Why didn't it just swim away?

Because 10,000 psi that's why.

Pic related was the boss. Hundreds of pounds of ANFO later and the Thing was dead.

I say no, they don't. Each instance of The Thing is independent. However, should a Thing be uncovered, would a Paladin-Thing slay it? I would say it would in order to keep its own cover.

Kate determines the Thing can't replicate metal when she finds discarded fillings in a bloody shower. She tells the survivors to check each other's fillings. The person who "checks" her is the one guy who can't speak or understand English. All she does is hand him a flashlight and point at her mouth. He looks in and shakes his head with a confused look on his face

does this mean she's the thing?

>Thing mimic could establish a new divine pact.

Does this mean the setting acends into a singularity of thing-life singing praise to their now supercharged god?

Nah, she killed one later, and with no one else around that she could be trying to trick. She just knew that she had no metal fillings and found a way to avoid drawing suspicion to herself.

Secret tyranid backstory

>All of the god's worshipers are replaced by Things
>all at once, they stop worshiping
>God is depowered
>Things successfully overwhelm and mimic the god
>God-Thing starts mimicking other gods.

clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/

For anyone who may have never read this short

I suppose the true horror would always be
>Could I be the Thing, and just not know it?

>checking inside the mouth of someone to see if he's a flesh eating shapeshifting monster.
Yeah, no.

That was part of what made the scene so great, if you saw John Carptenter's the Thing, you were waiting for somebody to get CHOMPED. But because the Thing was realizing that overt action just got it shot at, and there were a LOT of people around to do the shooting, it held off, biding its time.

In the books yes, in the movie it depends who you ask and I say yes.

That's... I'd never thought of that before. It's as clever as the twist in the radio drama.

But I don't agree with the implant weakness being absolute. If a Thing digested and built a new body sure it'd lack any implants unless re-inserted, but if one was taken over in the same way as Bennings or Blair then the Thing flesh would just replace the meat connecting the implants.

It's been a long while but I don't think the movie suggested it's a foolproof way of detecting the Thing. Just a logical conclusion a scared but intelligent woman came up with based on an observation. or made up to throw attention off her

It's definitely clever. They never roll with it further, which is disappointing. But considering how modern horror movies usually spell shit out to you in the most simplistic manners, a bit of subtlety and vagueness was appreciated.

guess now i have to watch it

That short story gets recommended as much as the Last Question in appropriate threads. I'd be surprised if anyone interested hadn't read them already.

Makes me wish that Who Goes There film hadn't gotten stuck in development hell.

It's pretty meh. Not braindead retarded like most modern horror prequels but not any good either. There's a few good scares and Mary Winstead is a likable lead, but that's about it. Overall it's a boring and predictable movie telling a story we didn't really need to be told, and it throws way too many CGI tentacles in your face.

The last part is particularly depressing because the production crew actually made some fantastic puppets in the spirit of the original film, but the suits told them to put more CGI in so it all looks cartoony.

aw. While you're at it, wanna reccomend any good horror films? I particularly enjoy cosmic horror and sci fi.

>Event Horizon
>Sunshine
>Europa Report
>Alien Covenant, but only because it looks good and has cool creature gore

I assume you've seen the original Alien film if you're in a thread about the Thing.

I haven't seen Pandorum but I hear it's good. Please no spoilers from anyone ITT.

Actually might survive against them, if the one to first contact the thing is the one that is made of fire.

We would be fine, except for one guy who is Centimanus might want to keep some of it for a pet, though I doubt the rest of the throng will stand for it; he has pulled just a bit too much shit as is. I doubt the thing would care for Prometheans any more than the rest of the WoD denizens do, though I am curious as to how Disquiet and Azoth would affect it.

Alien Covenant is kind of funny. The inhuman androids are the most likeable characters by far. Throughout the whole movie, I was essentially rooting for the monsters. The twist downer ending was actually the most cathartic part of the movie. It's like someone took a horror movie and inverted everything and I'm not sure if that makes it good or bad.

>A crack team of two Veteran Ordo Xenos Inquisitors, an librarian of the Deathwatch (originally Blood Angels), a magos biologis who got kicked out for being a Cawlite and an ex Navy Officer who commands their Battlecruiser

Eh, I'd say they're a match for the Thing

The covenant humans were flat, but at least a step up from the prometheus crew, who were all shitheads. And yeah, that ending was great, the first movie in the franchise that actually had a different plot from the original.

>The reapers are going to reach your setting’s planet/prime material plane/Whatever/whatever the fuck you call the place where all the mortals are living in five years.
Indoctrination fails because everyone is already mind controlled by one of the branches of the Illuminati or their rivals.
Reapers get taken out by Relativistic Kill Vehicles shot from the mass accelerators they build around suns

Mages do well against everything except their hubris, that's the point

>Your party encounters the super algae from Peter Watt's Rifters series in an underwater base. How do they avoid the total destruction of any carbon based life?

I like the theory that states people who have been taken over by Things aren't aware of it until the creature "comes alive" so to speak in times of need to defend itself or when a chance presents itself to infect something else. In the carpenter film palmer is already infected when the norris defribrilator scene takes place and the spider head would've escaped if not for him pointing it out.

That still leaves the question of who sabotaged the blood, but it's the theory that makes the most sense yet

if we're taking into account the events of the 2011 film, the thing could've learned to be proactive in undermining any idea the humans came up with to expose them. The act itself could've been done by any of them, Windows dropped the keys in a panic when he saw bennings being tentacle raped in the storage room, so anyone could've picked them up.

Was it smart enough to survive? We don't know if a part of spit split off and froze...

>That scene where they investigate Blair's shed
>There's a fucking noose hanging
>Tfw THE THING is a fucking smartass.

My favorite part about the noose is how no one says anything about it. It's just there in the background.

>Tfw you consider yourself a Thing fan and you never noticed this

it's more likely that the take over process is slow and blair still has some control and planned to take his life before losing the ability to do so; or, he had planned to do so, and was attacked before he could, being an easy isolated target that the thing knew about.

a pretty exhaustive look at what is the most likely chain of events.
youtube.com/watch?v=psxFyMoqbJ8

I still like the idea of Thing being a kys shitposter.

DM allowed a player to make them as a sort of race in the setting. Less overtly malicious but still the same nature and traits.

We might be fucked, if one of the party wasn’t one. Actually we’d probably still be fucked.

Explain how they haven't taken over the setting. They would literally assimilate the other races on first contact

The party consists entirely of robots, so they got this.

The idea as I understand it, is that while Things can assimilate living beings, they can’t really properly go through complicated and longterm life processes of the things they imitate. Like they can resemble a creature but in the end it’s nothing more than Thing biomass copying the look of biology rather than performing their natural functions/processes.

This is important in relation to reproduction, in that a Thing imitation can’t reproduce with a non-Thing for various reasons. So if a Thing or Things took over the world, then no new life after that is going to be created, which means no new life to assimilate. And like all biology, eventually entropy will take its toll and the Thing(s) will age, wither and die. So to ensure their own survival indefinitely, they want to ensure that there’s always life perpetuating life and rather than assimilating everything, they rather just parasitize off it. Some Things are gluttons that gorge themselves on biomass in an area without getting it all, some are conservative and just imitate life to mingle among them. Ones which go overboard and seek to assimilate everything for whatever reason, the other ones content to be parasites work together to take down the rogue ones, if non-Things can’t or aren’t aware of the danger.

At least that’s sort of what I got. DM allowed the player to do it, but didn’t want some explanation like “The Gods/magic/whatever prevent total assimilation”. Setting is standard D&D.

I dunno, the thing in the film had been frozen for a really fuckin long time, it didn't miss a beat when it thawed, and then seemed perfectly content to freeze again when presented with a no-win scenario. I don't think its implausible that things could have incredible longevity given those behaviors.

It's for balance reasons

Doesn't it want to return to outer space?
It was makign a spaceship.

That’s freezing though. I guess one would assume a Thing has to play by some biological rules, and perhaps the most basic one is that biology dies with time.

That’s what I figured right, if it could travel off world and has the rest of the galaxy at its picking then it shouldn’t care if it assimilates a whole world, there’s others out there with life most likely.

In this case though, medieval fantasy, traveling off-world isn’t possible or thought of... yet. I imagine once space flight were to become an increasingly regular thing, then the situation could shift dramatically in Thing behavior.

Pretty sure it just wanted to fly to civilization

Thing could be hurt by fire.

My party has torches therefore they will win.

A simple torch is not the same as a flamethrower. Remember how the first corpses they found were still alive after being burned, or how the palmer thing walked out and had to be blown up while on fire

You clearly weren't here for the last Thing thread we had.

Someone was ultrasperging about how Vikings could win against it because they had torches and lamp oil.

How long ago was that?
I vaguely remember an arguement like that years ago.

I'm not sure beyond "some time ago".

Meeting it is a standard TPK, regardless of anything. It's kind of the point of using it in your games - you want to perform a TPK scenario and your players are going to be ok with it.

Was it because of the comic?

That one where it's in the jungle and that somehow isn't already the end of the world? The one that looked like the mini comics that came with Alien action figures?

We fare horribly, but eventually conquer it, Ember Knight will probably be the MVP in the fight once we realize it's weak to fire...unless of course, the Thing keeps its biomass every time we die, in which case, we get the fuck out of there and onto a new province ASAP.

Depends. If it's something like investigating an isolated research station we stand a chance atleast. The party are Genestealer bughunt veterans, with any intel we'd break out the big guns. Inferno pistols, multi-meltas and heavy flamers are favorites in our Ordo Xenos armory. Nuking the site multiple times from orbit after the fact to ensure we got every single one as well. If they got out on a populated planet the only thing we could do is destroy the space ports, ensure they can't get off world and setup a quarantine until a proper vessel equipped for exterminatus can be dispatched.

The one where Vikings fought the Thing. My issues with the sequel comics could've generated long paragraphs a few years back.

As a person with AHS, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, I'm not sure the conscious mind controls anything at all, I appear to merely interpret and BS for the actions of a different individual whose body I share

Realistically we'd all die horribly. But my character consistently rolls 20's when confronted with unwinnable situations, so I know somehow Barry Knibbs would defeat the Thing.

It would probably involve - in no particular order - baseball bat, burning a building down, killing the elderly, having a foursome, drifting, unlikely acrobatics, or a lot of golden candelabras. I don't know how he'd pull it off, but that magnificent bastard could do it, he's Barry Knibbs.