Diasporea

The stranger moves towards you in slow, gliding steps, their body hunched inside a great coat covered in dry leaves and sticks and rotting plant matter. Metal trinkets and bones hang from the gnarled branches extending from their head like horns. A powdery whisper accompanies them as they move closer, and a low thrumming voice like rain asks where your dead grow.

Light washes over the stranger’s coat as they move into the glow of your lantern, and you see the gaps amidst the sticks and filth. You see fungal sinew strung inside, like the forest floor caught in a web. A thick mass of lichen veil hangs in the hooded space below the stranger’s antlers, and ever more unexpected mounds and wooden horns are illuminated across their back. Small stout yellow round-capped mushrooms in jagged rows beneath its throat and chest quiver and begin to thrum against wood and bone, forming the words that politely ask again, “Where do your dead grow?”

Colonies of fungus and mould that cobble debris together to gain a locomotive form. They will talk to you, they’ll even trade, but they have no empathy. They won’t understand why you’re so upset that they dug up your daughter, pulled her corpse apart, and placed the pieces amongst their body. Fragile but hard to kill permanently, and the spores that erupt from them in times of stress end up everywhere, and your flesh is ever so fertile.

Time-worn faces adorn the surface of a clay relief set into the wall like a door. It cannot be moved, it cannot be broken, but something in its centre gleams in the torchlight. Thin layers of clay have fallen away over time, exposing a blood-red gem the size of a man’s fist. The sculpted faces seem to be twisted towards the gem in sorrow.

If a character removes the gem, ask about those they hold most dear, of friends, of family, of lovers. Make a list of 2d6 of them. The clay seal soon crumbles and falls without the gem to bind it.

Long limbs that emerge and contract carry a bulbous mass of flesh from the space beyond in a shambling riot of locomotion. The whole surface of its skin writhes with the faces of the only people the character cares about, they moan and cry and beseech as it crashes forward with grasping appendages.

If it catches hold of a character it will pull them in towards the distending mouth of the person they care about most. A lover, their mother, a mentor, the quivering lips wrap around their body while the creature’s gnarled hands struggle to push them further in until they are gone.

Once someone is within it, the creature will flee if it can.

The creature’s limbs constantly wither and re-emerge, removing them does nothing.

Successful attacks against the creature’s body will instantly destroy a random face, cutting deep and silencing their pleas, black muck spilt from limp hanging skin like a burst blister.

The amount of damage caused determines the affect on the person whose face was imitated.

When the last face has been destroyed the creature will instantly collapse, devoid of life. Anyone that was swallowed in the last hour can be cut out from its mass, apparently unharmed, but over the coming weeks the lesions on their torso come more and more to resemble the faces of people dear to their companions.

If no one was swallowed, the person whose face was last destroyed grows ill, their body swells, they constantly ask after the family of others, and their limbs grow spindly, disconcertingly long..