Monday, May 25, 2015

Gurgans

Gurgans eat beauty and shit salt.

They're squat things, like shriveled men with distended bellies and enormous, flaccid penises, which they drag through the dust behind them.  They lurk in alleyways, croaking out their sorrows.  Sometimes they break into houses and gulp down babies with their gummy lips.  But most often you'll find them in the middle of the street, pouring dust on their head and sobbing.

Everyone knows that Gurgans have curses.  (This is automatic knowledge--all adventurers know it.)  If a Gurgan asks you to feed it and you do not, it will put its first curse on you.

The First Curse of the Gurgan: It licks you with its rancid tongue (requires an attack roll).  On a hit, your Charisma is reduced by 1d4+1, and the Gurgan shits out a brick of salt.

If you attack a Gurgan or drive it off, it will give you its Second Curse.

The Second Curse of the Gurgan: Your natural 20s turn into natural 1s.  Until that time, all food tastes like ashes (but provides the same nutrition).

If you kill a Gurgan, it will give you its third and final curse.

The Third Curse of the Gurgan varies.

Towns usually endure the Gurgan long enough for it to get bored and move on to the next town.  This usually takes 1d6 weeks.  Attempts to reason with the Gurgan are usually met with self-loathing and incoherence.  The creature is a master of redirecting conversations into different, more miserable topics.

The most remarkable thing about Gurgans is that people sometimes go to great lengths to avoid the horrid little things.  If there is a Gurgan in town, 1d8 x 10% of the people will just evacuate.  For a few weeks.  They'll go visit their cousin or something.  Anything to get away from that horrible Gurgan.

If you need stats for them, give them stats as a goblin that gives a negative amount of XP.  If you use more gurgans, consider giving them alternate curses.

from Star Trek
Plot Hooks

1. The obvious one is that a town wants you to get rid of a Gurgan that refuses to leave.  Maybe they have an important festival coming up.

2. Get information from a Gurgan.

3. Get a Gurgan to curse someone else.  This is going to involve tricking either the Gurgan, or the other person.

4. Protect a Gurgan.  It's horrible, demeaning work, but if you don't defend the Gurgan from the ire of the townsfolk, they'll attack the poor thing, and it'll curse the town with bone cancer or something.

5. Oh my god, there's a whole city of these things.  They just weep and masturbate and curse each other.  Go there and kill them all.  Or steal something important from them.  All that matters it that you're going to get so many curse-curse interactions in your body.  It's like mixing potions.  Who knows what'll happen?

5 comments:

  1. Great for the salt farmers, though

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    1. You'd think so, but not really. Gurgans ruin everything, even something as positive and mundane as salt.

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  2. What happens if you create something like pit traps that they fall into? Would like to see rules on that, as rule lawyering seems to be important here. Especially what killing one of those means - can it curse you if it stepped into a deadly trap you made? Even if it does not know who made the trap and if the trap was not made for that in particular?

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    1. The gurgan would probably break a leg, crawl out, and curse the first person he saw with a shovel.

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    2. Or in regards to XP? I don't think it applies, since I don't think players should get XP for creatures that fall into holes that they dig.

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