How can i make the succubus more horrifying as a concept?

[Rainbownaga]

And, since the mind control is somewhat effective, and seems to have been more so then (though that's from today's popular image of that time, so I don't really know) the horror was there, at least a little, somewhere in people's minds. The point is, the horror, to whatever extent it worked, came from demonizing sex, and that's harder today.

Yeah, I guess we have different views of the middle ages; I think the succubus was more of a cautionary tale rather than something that had been instilled into the general population.

While the development of contraceptives and social support has made getting pregnant by a stranger less deadly, there are plenty of other dangers associated with sexuality that could be played upon if you want to catch the aesop angle. E.g. The succubus impregnates the man; causes some horrible disease; begins to stalk him, etc.

Or you could play with modern day taboos: make the succubus appear adolescent; or make it a temoprary condition so that the succubus's host body is the one being raped.

The "rape by deception" that I mentioned earlier counts too, but it's harder to convey.

[Bohandas]

...Oh, except he's still got all your sperm and he's going to corrupt it and play a similar trick on a woman to impregnate her with your semen to spawn more evil creatures...

Ekolid's still better for this angle. They lay eggs in your body

[Yora]

Make the succubus prey on multiple victims at once, who then have a lot of explaining to do, inlcuding to themselves.

In practice, being compelled to have sex against your intentions should be horrifying enough. It's just in fiction that all people are happy to have sex with random hot women. I guess there are some, but I assume it's a minority.
In fiction land, where everyone is happy to take up any offer by pretty women, you can spoil the fun by making a succubus merely disguised by an attractive illusion that hides a revolting monster.
This should help players feel "I really wouldn't have wanted this if I had have my full senses".

[Ashtagon]

If you're trying to make the succubus more Cthulhu-like in its horror, you're either very mistaken about the nature of Cthulhu style horror, or very mistaken about how a succubus should be horrifying.

Succubi are horrific because they are temptors. The nature of Lovecratian horror is that humanity, in all its works and plans, is simply irrelevant, barely fit to be food for their equivalent of livestock. While a Lovecraft horror might possibly interact with a human in order to trick them into performing some ritual that will open a gateway or wake a great old one, that is a very different motivation to succubi-style temptation, in which ruining the target in the eyes of their community is the goal.

If the PCs' first interaction with a particular succubus is a fight, you're doing it wrong. At the very least, make the succubus the centre of a Slaanesh-style pleasure cult. That way, even if the PCs aren't tempted by lust, they still have to cope with a town whose upper echelons are thoroughly smitten with the demon.

In traditional lore, succubi/incubi were sex demons. It's not too much of a stretch to make them more about temptation in general, if you want to at least open up a possibility of a PC getting ensnared; most players are far too paranoid/suspicious to give in to them otherwise.

[Fire Tarrasque]

Make it eat children. Whole.

[TripleD]

Yeah, I guess we have different views of the middle ages; I think the succubus was more of a cautionary tale rather than something that had been instilled into the general population.

To be honest I don't think Succubi/Incubi were ever part of general folklore. Most incidences I recall seeing them referenced from were tracts on demonology, Kabbalah, etc. Fairly esoteric stuff your everyday person would not have been familiar with.

In fact the only example I can think of that may have had some popular appeal is the fathering of Merlin by an incubus. And that really doesn't work as a "cautionary tale". If anything it says sex with an Incubus is awesome; just make sure to baptize the kid as soon as they are born and on top of saving their soul they will have superpowers!

In any case Succubi/Incubi can be scary. They're a psychological horror that preys on human fear and desire. A good writer could easily work with that.

D&D doesn't really do that kind of horror well though. I've read a lot of "share your worst D&D story" and "share your best D&D story" threads; DMs lovingly describing a rape scene only ever pop up in the former.

[Bohandas]

I recommend throwing mythology out the window and modeling their behavior amd personalities after Ted Bundy, Dean Corll, Robert Berdella, Ian Brady & Myra Hindley, and Fred and Rose West
edit:also

Gilles de Rais

[brian 333]

I recommend throwing mythology out the window and modeling their behavior amd personalities after Ted Bundy, Dean Corll, Robert Berdella, Ian Brady & Myra Hindley, and Fred and Rose West
edit:also

Gilles de Rais

Since such creatures steal life force with a kiss, why have them 'go all the way' at all?

The promise of illicit sex is enough to lure the PC into doing things they know they shouldn't. Play it like a tease. Tempt, then move the goalposts subtly so the player gradually crosses the line. Use the bait to lure the PC into compromising behavior, then blackmail the PC into worse.

The sucubus or incubus isn't ever interested in sex. Its only interest is in corrupting souls. Simply killing someone is a fail. Sex is but a tool to use in tempting a PC to corruption. Any sex or life drain should only come after the PC has fallen from grace.

Would your PC like to be lord? Head of a wizard's guild? A great hero who saves the world? She's got a plan. It might have a few morally questionable bumps in it, but how much does the PC really want to achieve the goal? You gotta break some eggs...

Temptation to sin, not illicit sex, is what such creatures are all about; sex is just the cheese in the mousetrap.

Before about 1940, sexual promiscuity could result in an entire village infected with venereal disease. It was scary stuff. Sexual mores were not in place because the elders were uptight; they existed to stop the progression of very nasty diseases which could not be cured and which would render the victim infertile, covered in horrid skin infections, insane, and eventually, after a short lifetime of misery, dead. If that isn't scary to you, add in the disease made famous in Eddie Murphy's Raw comedy tour.

(It is worth noting thay many aboriginal cultures were casually promiscuous which had devastating consequences when European explorers and missionaries began to arrive.)

So, if your players aren't aafraid of illicit sex, give them a disfiguring cursed disease along with the level drain which can only be cured after Atonement. Reduce Cha by a point per week or so as boils, blemishes, and weeping, crusty sores spread across their bodies rendering any movement of the infected skin painful. Yeah, they got some then killed the succubus, but now there are consequences! And everyone knows how they got that way.

Old grannies throw curses and rotten vegetables at them. Innkeepers turn them away. Shopkeepers won't touch their money. Little children follow them down the street crying, "Shame, shame, shame!" Show them some Dark Ages compassion for their affliction

[Bohandas]

I prefer to write out the steal life force with a kiss part though as that's clearly an ***pull to appease censors.

[Max_Killjoy]

Succubi (and incubi) don't need an energy drain or a disease spread of any kind to be incredibly destructive.

Their real power is being able to use their "gifts" to shred the fabric of a family or community in a time when that had real and life-threatening consequences beyond hurt feelings and divorce proceedings.

If anything, succubi should "feed" on guilt, shame, recrimination, secrecy, betrayal, loss, and pain. Children starving because their parents killed each other in a fit of jealous rage should be fine wine to a succubus.


E: the real horror is that a succubus or incubus can't make you do anything. It's always still your choice. It's still always your fault when things go wrong. When the man who lost everything because he got caught with "the maid" loses it and tries to choke her to death, screaming "You did this to me!" as he slams her against the wall... her eyes roll back as if she can't breath and then she starts laughing at him... and says "You did it to yourself, and in your soul you know it's true."

[Sharad9]

Old grannies throw curses and rotten vegetables at them. Innkeepers turn them away. Shopkeepers won't touch their money. Little children follow them down the street crying, "Shame, shame, shame!" Show them some Dark Ages compassion for their affliction[/QUOTE]

who throws rotten vegetables?

[brian 333]

who throws rotten vegetables?

Anyone can. It's part of the fun.

[Fire Tarrasque]

On a more serious note, take a tip from the Three Musketeers. That books has a dangerous woman, but she doesn't rely solely on sex appeal, no, nothing so blatant. Its subtle. There's a sequence where she slowly and insidiously corrupts a noble man not through the lure of sex, but by slowly fooling him into thinking that she's perfectly innocent, and its the people in charge who messed up. All this after he was distinctly warned about her. Make it slow. Don't make it so they're out too corrupt and then kill. They are here to turn people too their whim, and use those people for whatever schemes they want. Slowly, yet surely. Little things, like appearing to pray when and only when they're looking. Fasting on holy days. INSISTING that they don't blame the PCs or NPCs for anything. And never, ever, EVER should she reveal her nature. Unless forced too, or absolutely sure that they had won, or that it would benefit them. They will keep weaving and weaving and weaving their set of lies and minions until it becomes so complex that the PCs come lose and bring the whole thing tumbling down.
Seriously, read the Three Musketeers, and USE IT. Its a classic for a reason.

Edit: From what I understand, the Succubus has an origin from Irish folklore.

[Max_Killjoy]

On a more serious note, take a tip from the Three Musketeers. That books has a dangerous woman, but she doesn't rely solely on sex appeal, no, nothing so blatant. Its subtle. There's a sequence where she slowly and insidiously corrupts a noble man not through the lure of sex, but by slowly fooling him into thinking that she's perfectly innocent, and its the people in charge who messed up. All this after he was distinctly warned about her. Make it slow. Don't make it so they're out too corrupt and then kill. They are here to turn people too their whim, and use those people for whatever schemes they want. Slowly, yet surely. Little things, like appearing to pray when and only when they're looking. Fasting on holy days. INSISTING that they don't blame the PCs or NPCs for anything. And never, ever, EVER should she reveal her nature. Unless forced too, or absolutely sure that they had won, or that it would benefit them. They will keep weaving and weaving and weaving their set of lies and minions until it becomes so complex that the PCs come lose and bring the whole thing tumbling down.
Seriously, read the Three Musketeers, and USE IT. Its a classic for a reason.

Even better than mine.

Either way, the point is that they don't need some form of direct attack to be horrifying -- I think that's an affect of modern "horror"/gore genre fiction.

It's what they get people to do to themselves that's dangerous and horrible.

[VoodooPaladin]

Modern succubi are jailbait. Modern incubi are date rapists.

[Eldan]

If you're trying to make the succubus more Cthulhu-like in its horror, you're either very mistaken about the nature of Cthulhu style horror, or very mistaken about how a succubus should be horrifying.

Succubi are horrific because they are temptors. The nature of Lovecratian horror is that humanity, in all its works and plans, is simply irrelevant, barely fit to be food for their equivalent of livestock. While a Lovecraft horror might possibly interact with a human in order to trick them into performing some ritual that will open a gateway or wake a great old one, that is a very different motivation to succubi-style temptation, in which ruining the target in the eyes of their community is the goal.

If the PCs' first interaction with a particular succubus is a fight, you're doing it wrong. At the very least, make the succubus the centre of a Slaanesh-style pleasure cult. That way, even if the PCs aren't tempted by lust, they still have to cope with a town whose upper echelons are thoroughly smitten with the demon.

In traditional lore, succubi/incubi were sex demons. It's not too much of a stretch to make them more about temptation in general, if you want to at least open up a possibility of a PC getting ensnared; most players are far too paranoid/suspicious to give in to them otherwise.

Well, I mean, there's also the really squicky other stuff Lovecraft wrote, about all the evil foreigners and subhumans and degenerates who infest his great country with their evil customs, religions and languages. Succubi fit right in there.

[Grim Portent]

If I wanted to use a Succubus for horror purposes I'd probably go with a Mordred angle on it and involve them only in games where time skips are relatively common. There's a strong element of psychological horror in waking up to find your bastard child of an illicit liason is trying to carve open your throat in the night, plus how do you deal with them if they're still a kid? Most players would be very hesistant to kill a child NPC even if it was trying to throttle them.

The demon wants you dead, but it's not in a hurry, it's not super bothered about succeding either. It wants to do something poetic and emotionally damaging more than it wants to be effective.

So it seduces a PC, male or female, either works.

If male it then takes their seed and either directly births a part demon child or impregnates someone else with a demon child then makes sure the mother dies early in the child's life. Bonus if it uses the guise of the PC to seduce a woman but also used that woman's form to seduce the PC in the first place. It then ensures the child grows up directing it's demonically influenced malice towards it's father, desiring to kill him. When it's old enough to walk it's old enough to try and slit throats in the night. When it's old enough to plan it can poison food and drink. When it's old enough to fight it can take up a sword and challenge it's father. If the PC isn't around when it's born to participate in whatever birth ceremonies exist then they miss the narrow window to cleanse the demon taint from the child.

For a female PC the dynamic would have to change just due to the nature of the relationship involved. I'd probably have the child be less outright murdery towards it's mother and more just... nasty. Sociopathic, hurts small animals and eventually people and then resents it's mother for trying to stop it. Less themed about outright treachery and more about testing the bonds a mother has towards their child to the limit.

The child shouldn't be full demon mind, it should be close enough to normal that it's going to feel bad to kill it, but it's problems should be deeply rooted enough that they can't be fixed with a hug and a ten minute chat.

[jqavins]

On a more serious note, take a tip from the Three Musketeers...

This and other posts here are fine descriptions of the corrupting demon trope, a venerable trope for a very good reason. But there are corrupting demons (devils, whatever) of many types and "species" all over the lower planes. Succubi/incubi are, specifically, those that use sex, the offer of sex, the temptation toward sex, etc. as a weapon. That's their thing. If you take the sex out of a succubus then she's just another corrupting demon like all the rest. If she's not using sex, one way or another, then in what way is she still a succubus? Call her by some other name, take "succubus" out of the book altogether, and you're left with exactly the same thing.

I take the question in the thread title, "How can I make the succubus more horrifying as a concept?" to mean "How can I make the <demon who uses sex as a weapon> more horrifying as a concept?" Making them into corrupting demons that use sex as the means of corruption is good. Taking the sex out of the picture is missing the point completely.

[Telonius]

Just to throw this out there ... There is some speculation that the original succubus/incubus stories were actually based on episodes of sleep paralysis. The descriptions of the creatures usually match the symptoms (immobilized, unable to resist, seeing a "dark shape" in front of you that your mind interprets as something besides a blotch). Some modern stories of alien abduction tend to follow the same general formula.

As someone who had an episode of it as a kid, I can tell you that it is absolutely terrifying when someone is going through it. A lot of the scary comes from the fact that you did actually have that perception - you really were awake, your eyes and body really were reacting like that - but unless the people you tell about it know what the heck sleep paralysis is, they write it off as a dream. The people around you might get you to doubt your own memories.

There's all sorts of gaslighting horror fuel right there. In the D&Dverse, it might be a bit harder to pull that off (since succubi are a known quantity), but you might play with that "altered perceptions" aspect of it. Turning a society against a single person is something that even a Doppelganger can pull off, if they want to, and Succubi have similar shapeshifting abilities. Ruining a happy marriage is simple enough if the "wife" (or "husband") is seen going home with somebody else.

[Max_Killjoy]

This and other posts here are fine descriptions of the corrupting demon trope, a venerable trope for a very good reason. But there are corrupting demons (devils, whatever) of many types and "species" all over the lower planes. Succubi/incubi are, specifically, those that use sex, the offer of sex, the temptation toward sex, etc. as a weapon. That's their thing. If you take the sex out of a succubus then she's just another corrupting demon like all the rest. If she's not using sex, one way or another, then in what way is she still a succubus? Call her by some other name, take "succubus" out of the book altogether, and you're left with exactly the same thing.

I take the question in the thread title, "How can I make the succubus more horrifying as a concept?" to mean "How can I make the <demon who uses sex as a weapon> more horrifying as a concept?" Making them into corrupting demons that use sex as the means of corruption is good. Taking the sex out of the picture is missing the point completely.

It's not about "taking the sex out".

It's that "the sex" doesn't have to be an actual physical act, and that to be dangerous and horrible it doesn't need energy drains or infernal diseases.

[bc56]

A succubus is all about corrupting the good, making what was good something evil (through the outlet of sex). Their goal is to use their appeal to convince good people (especially heroes) to commit evil acts. As such, she will be a manipulator, acting mostly behind the scenes to bring the downfall of her target. She will target only one person at once, and will try to turn them from a hero to a villain.

[Fire Tarrasque]

What this thread appears to have boiled down too are two essential questions:
Question one: How far can you go before it's not a Succubus anymore?
Question two: How do we make a monster designed for a more traditional society scary for a society which no longer condemns sexuality nearly as much?
Random unrelated idea: Give a character an ACTUAL episode of sleep paralysis.