I’m working on some Deep Ones for a brooding coastal Cthulhu spittle drenched Torchbearer game. Thoughts on the fishy ones please, in particular ideas for nature descriptors would be very welcome.
Other than that they’re just looking like ugly fish-eyed, spear armed, leather armour equivalent, Might 3, Nature 4 baddies, with the occasional spell caster thrown in. The casters have 1-6 spells from the following list:
Music of the Elder Gods (Celestial music)
Stupefaction of the Deep (Daemonic Stupefaction)
As Dark as the Deep (Shroud of Shadows)
Dagon’s Curse (Execration)
The Cold Emptiness of Space (Hands of the Lords of Entropy)
The Despair of Mortals (Malison of the Lords of Terror)
Nice. Of course they do lurk in the deep, but I want them to sneak and lurk a little bit wherever they may be - I think glimpses of them might be an important way to build tension. I like the taking sacrifices, it makes sense of giving them a good capture conflict.
Yeah! Broadening it to just lurking is great. That aspect of taking sacrifices is exactly what I had in mind – capture or flee are both good options it opens up. I think Promising Abundance is the hardest, because it opens up a sort of weird potential for social conflict, but I’m not sure where one might go with it. Mostly I feel like it’s reflective of their interactions with NPCs, but that could be handled in the creature description in stead of Nature. There’s gotta be something good that points to the foul bargains they make!
It’s true that most parties wouldn’t be swayed by promises of good fishing… but I love the notion that the PCs might meet these creatures and only gradually realise how they are tied to and allied with local human communities. The promise of abundance is the key to how these guys are part of the local community… quite closely related to it in fact!
One of my deep ones made a brief appearance last night, looking out from on high as the party landed on the rocks below a long abandoned lighthouse! They haven’t had a close look at the fishy ones yet though, so they’re not quite sure yet what kind of game they’re in.
I’m really happy with the promising abundance descriptor, as the story develops it’ll lead the whole salty mist-shrouded coastal mini-campaign.