rpanons | You'll always have anons

You'll always have anons

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lovecraftian "shadow out of time" inspired transformation-y game with quite a bit of body horror, I talked about this on my plurk but what the heck I'll tell you all too

alien presences (I'll call them the Yith here for convenience) bodyswap with characters for an intended five year investigatory period.

instead of coming to as pincered barnacles, these characters wake up almost normal and in a foggy victorian (?) square, with townhouses and lamp posts and etc. everything is grown of bone, shell, ivory, nacre, coral etc but it works, more or less, this is a place that can be lived in. if they manage to bust a hole in a wall something fleshy inside recoils. put an ear to a wall and they can hear a vaguely identifiable tune being hummed.

no one comes to meet them but if they investigate and start to search the city, there are more flesh traces in a certain direction. pink mortar. openings in brick filling in with granular tissue. wet recesses with eyes and hands in them. here the cobblestones are covered in a layer of soft tissue that gets thicker as it goes. ahead a whole city block has skin. eventually a mouth in the wall says "Oh my god" and "Hello! Oh no." "Can you wait? Don't come any closer! I'm a mess, don't look at me!" "I'm so glad to see you! And sorry" "Just give me... um, it'll be a few hours" "I mean you can come closer if you want, but- I don't want to upset you."

that's the most personable of the npcs, here I'm calling her "housemom", who can explain what's happened and that in five years they'll return, unless the yith who chose them dies, like hers did. it's not so bad, they've given her all this space. now she makes architecture the way a nautilus makes a shell so there can be something familiar and people aren't as freaked out as she'd been. she's nice and forthcoming and lonely and tries to sell the situation as being okay. she has no power to send you back, she wishes she could! but she can in fact make a sort of human puppet with an umbilical line trailing back to chat without people having to visit the flesh apartment she just wasn't expecting company.

"housemom i had a lot of important stuff happening isn't the alien in my body going to fuck everything up"
"it might! Maybe it won't though, they're all very smart. i wouldn't know."
"is there a way to get them to swap me back any faster?"
"it's happened a few times..." [dangles a plot hook idk]

characters are, instead of outright being yith-shaped, in bodies that are almost correct recreations of their bodies. a few details are off and like a close inspection will reveal more. sometimes the illusion slips and it just keeps slipping - no one's speaking their native language, and if they try now they can't quite get the pronunciation right. their bodies may change over time like idk
hair is always wet
skin clammy
color changes
arms and hands longer by a few inches
sprouted patches of curling moss
decorative suckers
hair clumps into tentacular shapes

with more dramatic changes coming from engaging in the setting outside of the park where housemom's set up. there's a grand library with entries put into it by all manner of peoples from across many canons. some npcs that turn out to be permanently jamjarred people like housemom, the yith themselves are very alien and you must engage and change to be able to comprehend or communicate with them very much.

the point isn't to have a full on lovecraft tone but definitely get some of that cosmic indifference in there. the yith think of themselves as benign seekers of knowledge. how much horror is there? is there a plot? honestly I just wanted to write about housemom, I love the idea of tracking her down and her trying to reassure people that they won't end up like her, probably, and if they did it would be okay.

all this delights me, anon

thanks! I love to come up with game ideas and shadow out of time screams "slimey jamjar" to me. I would love to like, dm threads of characters exploring this and finding housemom, but I'm never able to develop a premise past this sort of stage.

I guess there'd be a medley of human etc npcs in her 'city' too but they're mostly handwaved regular types living with minor mutations and just trying to wait out their five years in a slice of life environment, with breaks sometimes to hide in their brownstones when flying polyps or whatever show up. I'm not interested in a codified SAN mechanic but it's fun to think most of these npcs are unable to take housemom's true form or leave the environment she maintains without losing it, but pcs are variable and may be made of stronger stuff.

the fog hides that the sun is strange, the sky's not right, and there are like bizarre looming towers and flying beings etc. everyone drinks tea, lemonade, various kinds of alcohol because plain water tastes weird and do you really want to think about where any of it comes from. everything people eat and drink is made to resemble something recognizable but it's all impossible burger style, and no one actually has to eat nearly as often in these bodies.

one of the hiatus options is being taken away and asked lots of questions about mostly very banal things by something the character can't remember later, bc yith are curious. advanced mutations are themed after various mythos entities and weird monsters in characters' canons. 100% there are entities that characters and most of the npcs can't initially perceive hanging out and watching. housemom is married but functionally a widow and can be dated.

akira slides back over here it's me, the same anon again

death mechanic:
it's not that people can't be killed but the bodies they've been put in really are inhuman and just made to appear human. if your throat's cut you collapse bleeding and pass out and become rigid and waxy-looking yes

but when you're taken to the morgue you're laid out, not dead but dreaming, and can be repaired and be back on your feet. maybe not quite the same as you were, but what's a wrinkled scar with gleaming papules or a line of completely evenly spaced skin tags, anyway? heavier damage is harder to repair but it's doable.

some npcs full on do a fallen london game of knife and candle thing, wearing a pin to show that they're down for lethal duels or just being murked, but it's very gauche to do in public and a lot of people hate being 'killed' and getting those dreams and coming back. there are purge-like festivals where a lot of people stay in their brownstones and wild-eyed combatants murder each other in the more popular streets because that's more fun than keeping it to basements and distant alleys. housemom has a pin on her semi-remote body.

actually fully murdering someone is possible but takes creativity and effort and that's treated much more seriously. not only is it like regular murder but you're stranding a yith and who knows what it will do?

anon this fucking rules, i've never played in a game before but if you made this i would be there with bells on

This is INCREDIBLE, I want this so bad, I would even be down to PSL this. Lovecraftian horror is my jam and I love the idea of housemom

lol I don't have enough to bulk this up into a game game. What I have is enough for something slice of life maybe, but I'd really want to be able to have a world beyond the foggy streets, and a whole subset of heavily warped people who were stranded permanently like housemom but haven't held on to human perspectives and morality as well as she has (has she? well. as much as an off brand shoggoth can anyway) and seem truly alien at first, and the Yith themselves. I'd want to have some idea of what characters could actually do beyond hunkering down and waiting, things they could find out, actual ways they could return home...

I don't really know the mythos to be able to reference it properly, and tbh I prefer a lighter tone than it which is kinda why I snagged on this story in particular. But, even if someone stepped up and said "I could help you!" I'm not really suited to be a mod or run a game, even a little one. I have a bad time with conflict!

what I do have is a recent history of a PSL where I provided a semioriginal setting and over twenty original NPCs who changed with a timeskip. I ran this for a year, and I could've done it for longer. But I did have great chemistry with that player and we communicated well. I could start a PSL perhaps, but I'm not saying it would last anything like that long or go that well.

I probably wouldn't make a game myself as I have no experience with hosting one on DW, nor do I know if this has been done as a concept before but still wanted to share: A game based around Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, where muses are transported to the world of Pokémon and transformed into Pokémon themselves, from there they can choose to live out the rest of their lives there, join guilds and explore rescue missions, etc. It just seems like such a fun concept to do, and I have no idea if this had been done before.

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You'll always have anons

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