Mad Science and Animal Hybrids

In my last post I mentioned a mad scientist creating a bunch of chimera-monsters. This was actually a zookeeper from Tennessee who went a bit mad and decided it would be a good idea to kidnap people and animals and start splicing them together. 

Why? Because the voices told him to, but also to make the world a weirder place and resemble its more magical past.

The players investigating these disappearing humans and animals (they were way more worried about the animals) and eventually stumbled across a bunch of these crude hybrids. One was a man with gorilla arms and the other had the horns and lower body of a bull. The gorilla man had already died when they found him but the bull man (who they named 'Benny' since he had amnesia) was still alive but slowly succumbing to infection.

They gave Benny some quick medical care in their stolen ambulance from the first game and from there found the zookeeper's underground lab. This was filled with chimeras he had created, some feral and wild and some preserved in stasis. There was also a Frankenstein monster which almost ended them, but for the most part they fought through or stealthed past most of the monsters without too much trouble.

In the inner-sanctum of the lab, they found the zookeeper who  called himself "The Surgeon". He tried to blow them up with a hidden bomb. They survived, but this woke up a the stasis chimeras and gave him time to run even deeper into the lab. After fighting off more chimeras, one of which included a man with a shark's head for a torso (just go with it) they found the Surgeon's final experiment: a pod that rapidly advanced the hybridization process.

He emerged with this pod as a winged centaur with snakes for arms. This new form tended to roll pretty badly though and even with several chimera henchman the player's plans were far superior than him. Rachel's siren character tried to mind-control interrogate him which led to this and to them finding out he had actually cut up his own brain and mailed the pieces throughout the world as a way to live again. They also got his bank account number since he won't be needing all that mad-science money anyway.

And of course they blew up the rest of his lab, because it wouldn't be an adventure without it.

For the chimeras I used a pretty simple chart where you roll to determine what body part is being replaced with what type of animal. I assumed most of the chimeras would be animal-human hybrids, but if you wanted something randomly determined instead of human you could roll on the animal chart, then the body chart, then the animal chart again and get a whole new set of options.

As far as stats go I usually come up with that on the spot with whatever seems to work best for the animal part that is rolled such as cat-chimeras having high agility/dexterity and most everything else being average.

These charts use a d6 and a d10 which I usually rolled simultaneously to save time. There's probably some overlap with the options and some of the results are pretty weird and may take some quick thinking but it's much easier than thinking up 20 or so chimeras without a chart.

To be replaced

1- Arm (s)

2- Leg (s)

3- Head/face

4- below neck

5- skin/hide

6- both beings alive but fused together in some way

Animals

1- Human

2- Reptile (snake, lizard, turtle)

3- Primate (chimp, gorilla, spider monkey)

4- Feline (lion, tiger, house cat)

5- Farm animal (goat, horse, cow)

6- Cephalopod (octopus,squid, cuttlefish)

7- Aquarian (shark, fish)

8- Avian (eagle, raven, robin)

9- Canine (dog, wolf, coyote)

10- Rodent (mouse, rat, capybara)

The apocalypse is something you can fight (and it should be)

She was in space. The stars swirled around her in a galactic spiral, but they were funneling away. All away. There she saw a void in the universe, consuming the energy and life around it. She looked at the void and could feel its intelligence and its stare. It burned a place within her mind where her own insignificance merged with its contempt.  Her mind fell back to the earth, but she could still feel the thing in the darker parts of her thoughts. It was the end, the limit, a living apocalypse, and its hunger was coming...

This is sort of a novelized version of what happened to one of my players last game. She used her mind control powers to try and figure out where the villain was getting his orders and all of a sudden her mind was whisked away to a dark corner of space and within the gaze of Eschaton the Devourer, though she doesn't know that's who he is. As far as the player's are concerned she met some kind of Sauron-eye, black hole thing.

They're not that far off really. Eschaton is definitely a lot like those things and also like Azathoth from Lovecraftian works, Galactus from marvel, and Korrok from "John Dies at the End".

Basically I wanted something that could be "a living apocalypse" and one day had a stress induced dream very similar the narrative in italics. It's sort of like a giant space funnel with stars, nebulae, planets and whatever all draining out of the universe.

I wasn't going to introduce Eschaton that session and hadn't had a real plan for him. But the villain the players were fighting had a lab and a whole bunch of chimera monsters. He was a former zoo keeper so after the players defeated him they wanted to know where his funding came from to have this incredible mad science lab.

A reasonable question, but of course I hadn't prepared for this. I had already thought of this Eschaton thing so it worked out that even though he's a sentient void of all matter, he also controls some kind of wealth that is being deposited into this villains bank account. How this actually works the players aren't sure but it will probably be through a corporation Eschaton psychically controls.

Here's what's going with him: As sentient destruction, Eschaton's lifespan lasts eons. He feeds on massive quantities of energy and matter to survive and as long he feeds he can survive indefinitely. But there's only so much energy and mass left in the universe. He knows this and has calculated that he won't be able to survive for much longer (relative to him, this could be thousands of years).

So he psychically scoured the universe for an answer to his food shortage and found the Earth. Bathed in mystical energies and essentially serving as a crossroads for a multitude of other dimensions, the Earth is Eschaton's answer. By feeding on it, he can gain access to other universes and thus other food.

But the Earth is far away, really far away. So far, his destruction won't be able to reach it before he dies of starvation. Earth is fortunately filled with summoning rituals that can magically bring him closer. So that means he needs folks on the planet to complete these rituals. Using his god-like telepathy, he can communicate and even possess people on Earth. But due to the distance and arrangements of certain planetary bodies he can only do this on certain occasions. Think of this as light from the sun, sometimes the moon or the earth itself prevents the light from reaching you, telepathic energy can act like this when used on a cosmic scale.

Eschaton will possess and persuade key people on the Earth to help forward his arrival. The rituals they perform often attract a lot of attention and general make their surroundings more weird or magical such as cursing towns or releasing hell spawn.

He's already burned in one player's mind, but I think these rituals will likely attract the other player's attention. If they interfere then they will attract the Apocalypse's attention, and that's good because I think that can make for a good story. But we will have to wait and see.