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Quote Originally Posted by Phelix-Mu View Post
A friend/DM in a multi-DM setting once homebrewed up creatures known as Primordials (major Exalted echoes, I now realize, but I don't think he was cognizant of such), basically Elder Gods that predated the gods and whom the gods had fought against and imprisoned (classic Greek mythology is classic). One of them was a being of fear and assimilation, a giant ooze-like thing (at least its outer-manifestations were like black puddings). It radiated a contagious, psychic scream/corruption that basically twisted the weak-minded (read almost everything) into its mindless, incredibly hard to damage minions, whose veins were filled with black ooze. Called Terrors, these minions could spread the condition by touch or by their screams (it wasn't a disease, either, but a mental condition or corruption of sorts...affected everything that is subject to Taint, which is nigh everything).

All of the Terrors were extensions of the thing's singular consciousness, as it's impulse, out of fear, was to draw everything into itself, making everything as it was. In significant numbers, Terrors could morph into Horrors, homebrewed monsters with custom mechanics designed to make them challenging for high-level characters to kill (shared hp-pools, spell reflection that wasn't SR-based, assimilation abilities to heal each other, scalable abilities based on HD, AoE attacks, sonic attacks, reach attacks, spell-eating, etc).

In really big numbers (post-epidemic cities, the Underdark, etc), the Terrors would morph into sentient black ooze beings that had thousands of HD and had Gundam-scale attacks capable of dealing close to 100d6 in damage if they landed a hit. Eventually the entirety of the Lower Underdark of our custom setting was flooded with the stuff, and it could penetrate up to the Upperdark with its attacks.

All of these creatures dealt some degree of Taint, usually depravity (though I later added akuma from the Rokugan stuff to spread some corruption as well). We used a pretty harsh homebrew of taint, and ran into taint well-before any of us had Purity of Soul (though late in the game pretty much everyone we knew and ourselves had retrained it or died).

Anyone slain by the Captive (that was the only name it was known by) was irrevocably absorbed into its being. The sole exception was one of the pcs, who turned out to be a kind of reject/antigen to the contagious effect of the Captive, and was spit back up after an attempted absorption (turned out to be one of the cooler characters in a campaign full of cool characters). Moreover, the only way to actually neutralize it was to sacrifice a deity to imprison it once again, as had been done back in the original war with the Primordials, sealing it back in its chamber in Carceri.

On the good side, this Captive and its absorption of most of the souls on the Prime led to the evolution of the Incarnation, another Primordial based on self-propagation, and the basis for me introducing Incarnum into my setting (as I totally dislike the default fluff for Incarnum). The Incarnation sprang into being in the vacuum formed by the disappearance of all of those beings, seeking to fill a gap in the probabilistic nature of reality on the planes, and was all that remained in the cell where the Captive had dwelt since before time was even a thing when the party finally got around to visiting Carceri, seeking a method to halt the spread of the Captive.

Great campaign. Possibly the best I was ever involved in. The Captive crept inside your mind and turned you into it. Psychological, but horrifying nonetheless.


You mean slivers that turn other people into slivers?