Marina Asylum Mods (marinamod) wrote in marina_ooc, @ 2010-10-25 19:44:00 |
|
|||
NOTE: Everything in this post only applies to your character if they have "darkness" in their hearts. This is not necessarily a literal darkness, but characters who are bad people, e.g. evil or psychopathic, do automatically qualify. Any character who has ever experienced something violent that haunted them -- whether or not it is their fault, whether or not the situation was later corrected, whether or not they remember it -- also qualifies. However, a deeply good character who is also from a school drama and thus has little experience with violence or trauma might see nothing at all.
There is a little wiggle room, though, if you really want your character to see monsters, and a character with more darkness in his or her heart can (optionally) experience more drastic effects.
If you're still not sure whether this describes your character, other players have asked more specifically about their own characters in the comments on the previous post, and you can do the same here.
Monday: Sirens will wake your character up right as the new day starts. It will take several minutes for the entire Asylum to be transformed as described above, so feel free to watch in horror if you've got a light source handy. If you venture outside, there will be no monsters yet; just a light rain falling. And, of course, everything else.
Tuesday/Wednesday: Monsters will begin to appear and attack characters who are outside. By Wednesday, characters who experience effects might also notice the occasional burst of static from their communicators.
Thursday/Friday: Monsters will be more numerous and, more importantly, more aggressive. They will chase you into your home and then fling themselves repeatedly at your door for a while before seemingly giving up. Communicators will start to become unreliable, falling silent for periods of time and making network communication difficult. Voice and video posts may be interrupted by static.
Saturday/Sunday: Monsters patrol Marina and fling themselves against the doors and walls of occupied your home, whether or not you've ever gone outside. Communicators will be completely unresponsive. The silence outside will be occasionally broken by what sounds like a piercing, petrified scream. This scream will sound young and frightened, but not like anyone in particular.
Some of those who attempt to investigate the scream will instead encounter The Watcher.
height: 5'8"
weight: 160lbs
difficulty: easy-medium alone, but they always travel in packs
found: all sectors, outside
A stooped reptilian creature -- two-legged, smallish arms, a long thick tail for balance, and large, powerful hind legs that sport a single mean-looking curved claw. (In other words, this monster looks rather like a velociraptor.) Where its skin isn't torn to expose muscle and bone, it's covered in crumpled molting feathers that are, if you've been in the Asylum for quite a while, a familiar shade of deep purple.
Lizards are fast, vicious, and -- oh yes -- hungry. This monster is unusually interested in actively hunting you down and will begin to do so the second it catches a whiff of your scent. It will use all of its available weaponry to maim you: its teeth, in short biting strikes; the smaller claws on its "hands", which are mildly venomous (think the way cat scratches itch); and of course the nasty claw on its toe, which can cause serious injury if you aren't careful. Lizards like to jump to close the distance between them and you, and they can jump as far as eight feet, so far away might not be far enough.
An individual Lizard isn't too difficult to take down. Pepper it with gunfire, shoot it full of arrows, or stab it repeatedly with a sword... they're all reasonably effective. (Needless to say, energy blasts also work just fine.) Unfortunately, Lizards never travel alone: there's always a full pack there, six to ten creatures, and that's when things get hairy. The equivalent of a high-powered shotgun works wonders!
Lizards are also very cooperative and very social. In fact, if you're fighting one pack too close to another pack's territory, the last Lizard you kill may sound an alarm that brings that pack running. If you're looking for a night of solid battle, Lizards will come the closest to swarming you indefinitely.
height: 8'6" (and about 5' wide)
weight: 605bs
difficulty: hard
found: all sectors, outside
An enormous mass of flesh, with misshapen hands and legs jutting out of it at odd angles. It has many heads, with over-sized bulbous eyes that will fix on you when you approach and then follow your movements as if hypnotized. Closer inspection reveals that it is messy surgical stitching that holds this creature together: elbows, fingers, cheeks, and thighs are all visibly sewn into place, layer upon layer.
Although you might not expect an Agoraphobia to be terribly agile, this monster moves quickly, using its many strange limbs like a centipede to crawl rapidly over all kinds of terrain, and mostly attacks by charging. Try not to let it knock you down, because it will climb on top of you and pin you to the ground with its many awkward hands. Expect a bruising grip and a good deal of muscle pain as it attempts to tear you apart, perhaps looking for more body parts to add to its collection.
Be warned: Agoraphobias are big and strong. You'll want a really powerful weapon before you even consider trying to fight them; there's simply too much flesh for bullets or, say, your typical sword to do much damage. Big energy blasts aren't a bad way to go, but keep in mind that this monster has high magic defense, too. It's not going down easily, no matter what.
They do not travel in packs and they will not swarm you at any point. You're not going to find these monsters more than once per city block of Marina; they don't like sharing territory and they do not come to one another's aid.
height: 7'6"
weight: 280lbs
difficulty: impossible
found: all sectors, outsideNOTE: There is only one of this particular monster, and it cannot be NPCed by players. If you would like to encounter it, reply to this post. There will be a maximum of three encounters with this monster per event, with preference given to players who present us with plot-related reasons for why they should meet The Watcher.The Watcher is roughly humanoid, with thick, powerful limbs. If for some reason you get close enough to notice, it has the usual number of fingers and toes -- but they are all the same length, blunted, and perfectly symmetrical. Its skin is exceptionally cold and has an odd texture, almost like brushed metal. Its face is perfectly circular and perfectly featureless -- until you do something to attract its attention and it opens its one large blue eye, which will swivel around slowly to fix on your face.
Or maybe lock on would be a better way to put it.
From this point on, The Watcher will step towards you -- slowly, stiffly, implacably -- while that eye, which can see perfectly well in the dark, follows your every movement with an almost mechanical precision, darting around to keep you in its sights. Bullets will ricochet off. Swords will fail to cut into The Watcher's cold flesh. Blunt objects will bounce. Magic will be completely ineffective. So you had better start running.
But if you stay where you are and think about it, you might realize that, even though this monster is incapable of making facial expressions, it seems to be... judging you. And this judgment is important. If the eye turns red, The Watcher will come after you unrelentingly and you will die -- permanently. (With player permission, obviously.) If, however, the eye remains blue, the Watcher may kill you carelessly, but you'll wake up tomorrow without so much as a scratch.
Unless you count the nifty new scar on your belly: a single rough line, an inch in length and about the width of a blunt, symmetrical fingertip.
1. No one can see monsters on video or in photographs, not even the person who was right there, recording it!
2. The monsters are edible, but not very tasty.
3. If you've got a great monster idea for future posts, please feel free to share it in a comment here!
4. People who travel together will experience similar distortions of reality, unless one of them has no darkness in his or her heart at all; in that case, that character will not see, feel, or in any other way sense the monsters that are attacking their companions.
5. And speaking of senses, there's no magic or any other kind of energy involved in the monsters for characters with such abilities to pick up on. As far as characters who can see the monsters can tell, they're just real, living creatures and give off no particularly strange energy; as far as characters who can't see the monsters can tell, there's nothing there at all.
The Lens of Truth is a mod-approved exception to this rule.
6. If you trip into one of the holes, you will fall for a while. Eventually, you will black out, and wake up the next morning in the middle of a perfectly ordinary street.
7. Both monster blood and monster bodies will disappear. Monster bodies do so when you're not looking at them -- maybe they've been eaten by other monsters? -- and the blood will be gone in the morning.
8. Monster difficulty scales with character ability. A monster marked as "hard" will be hard for your character whether they are Joe Average, armed only with a lead pipe, or Ms. Incredible, who kill you with her brain.