Silent Legions Sandbox Tools: Eldritch Deformities

Body horror is a classic element of, well, horror and H.P. Lovecraft was no stranger to the idea of physical corruption and deformities which hinted at some strange, eldritch influence in the character's heritage. However, surely today, in 2018 in more 'enlightened times' nobody would ever be freaked out by the strange appearance of someone.

R-right?

'Brundlefly'.

Unfortunately, having a disturbed or terrified reaction to someone with a strange appearance is inherent to human nature. There's a deep sense of discomfort which come to being exposed to deformities, be they fairly minor (such as my crooked fingers) to the physically-crippling genetic conditions which can unfortunately affect people and make their whole existence nothing but suffering. It is sad and perhaps wrong to feel unease when exposed to it but humans tend to fear the unknown and things which activate all those primitive instincts: in this case, a fear of sickness and crippling. Those who live their whole lives with crippled and deformed individuals feel no fear, for them these are just people, their friends, families and loved ones. However we can't blame strangers when they meet something which their brains register as wrong. It make use feel uneasy.

In real life, deformities are hardly an indicator of some malign corruption and they hardly make anyone suffer safe for the poor person stuck with these crippling ailments and their immediate family. But what if, for a moment, we abandon these ideals of tolerance we find so lofty and allow the primal instinct to kick in. Even worse, what if our primal instincts which tell us 'this person looks wrong' is true? What if this person looks wrong and feels wrong not because of a genetic condition or accident but rather because they have become inhabited by some eldritch terror from beyond or suffered arcane injuries in the practice of foul sorcery? And even worse still, what if our own bodies started being 'wrong'? What if some otherworldly sickness was corrupting us? Then there is the fear of aging, our bodies decaying and twisting, growing weak and ugly. Even the iconic zombie plays upon this fear as they drag their decaying bodies around, not to mention Videogames having brought a fusion of body horror and the zombie in the likes of Resident Evil and Dead Space. Cancer is a constant, looming fear for us today too.

It remain a poignant, very real fear. The fear sickness combined with the fear of the unknown. There's a reason the movies of David Cronenberg remain classics of horror, as does John Carpenter's 'The Thing'. In fiction, the fear of physical corruption and degradation can be a very real sign of some otherworldly force twisting the world and people.

Minor Physical Changes and Malformations (Which are explainable by a health conditions, right?)
D6	Skin	Eyes	Hands	Other
1	Skin is pale and slightly discolored, almost to a white or grey tone in places, depending on ethnicity.	Bloodshot, hungry eyes. Seem to almost turn red when excited.	Fingers are unnaturally long and creepy.	Unnaturally tall, almost seven feet or above. Limbs are long and oddly-jointed.
2	Bizarre, discolored splotches which may or may not be odd-colored rash or scars.	Eyes are discolored and they often leak what appears to be pus.	Seemingly lacking nails, as if they never existed.	Fat deposit in weird places, appears to be bloated in some places and thin in others.
3	Skin is unnaturally cold or warm to the touch and a bit oily/slimy.	One eye can’t open completely. Rash and scar tissue around it and it appears inflamed.	Nails are thick and tend toward an unusually dark green, yellow or blue.	Unusual gait, possibly slightly deformed legs and/or feet.
4	Skin covered in large, discolored and sometimes throbbing veins.	Unusually pale eyes: a shade of light grey, unnatural light blue, yellow or green.	Large, knuckle-heavy hands covered in warts and bumps.	Body odor is repellent. Smell unlike any human.
5	Skin has a sickly greenish, almost purple or blue tinge.	The eyes appear misaligned and maybe move independently?	Joints are strangely loose and flexible.	Unusually twitchy, constantly seem to sense things which aren’t there.
6	Unusually smooth and rubbery to the touch. Looks younger than they appear.	Never seem to blink.	Hand grip is unusually tight and firm, could almost break bones.	Body emits weird noises, like strangle gurgling sounds or the crack of bones.

Body Horror Corruption
D8	Skin	Body	Face	Other
1	Spot of skin on the body are now covered in disgusting, knotty tumour-like growth.	Limbs are growing longer, quadrupedal movement is now possible.	Face is still human but permanently twisted in an expression of rage, fear, madness or rapturous pleasure.	Body has an unnatural, eldritch glow.
2	Skin become covered in horrific blisters and cracks. What’s under the peeling skin isn’t remotely human-looking.	Back is hunched, spine is twisted and the back is bulging with malformed growths: soon to be new limbs?	Lips have shrunken back/peeled away, exposing rows upon rows of newly grown sharp teeth.
3	Hardened scabs which are starting to jut out from the soft human skin.	Lower body is formed and new hind limbs are growing: they look nothing like human limbs.	Lower jaw is melting away, replaced by some disgusting straw-like organs.	The body no longer feel any pain and even regenerate lost limbs.
4	The skin has dried up and started turning into something coarse and inorganic.	Hands have split into two halves, hinting at the growth of separate arms.	Multiple bulging eyes, glowing with baleful light in places where eyes should not be.
5	The skin is now completely slimy and gelatinous. Body is partially transparent.	Limbs have twisted and deformed, increasingly useless. Body has grown bigger and longer, almost like a worm.	Head is a deformed lump, less a head and more a protrusion in keeping with the other malignancies.	Can phase through walls as if they weren’t there.
6	A disgusting, eldritch fungus (or something like it) has symbiotically grown and is part of the skin.	A monstrous, alien secondary face has grown somewhere on the body.	Mouth as wide as the body. Gut is now twice as large and can swallow humans whole.
7	Skin has begun peeling off and bulging cords of newly grown alien muscles surge.	Skeleton is now growing on the outside of the body like body armor.	Skull is broken and peeling away, revealing a tangle of neural tissue, tentacles and mouths.	Body can turn invisible at will.
8	Skin is constantly shifting consistency and texture, sometimes revealing ‘things man was not meant to know’.	Arms have twisted into what can only be described as ‘something-like-wings-which-are-only-wings-in-fonction’. Flight is possible.	Head is swollen, with the brain pulsing under the skull which can barely contain it.

Silent Legion Sandbox Tool: Random New Age Cult

When it come to the imagery of 'cults' in relation to Cosmic Horror, it conjure up images of degenerate cults filled with insane individuals in black robes, all chanting in an unspeakable tongue and sacrificing humans to some evil elder entity whose name seems like it was created by vomiting Scrabble game pieces.

The creepy and infamous 'Aum Shinrikyo',
responsible for the Sarin Gas Attack of 1995.

This is all fine and dandy (and iconic) but there is a case to be made for a game set in more recent times (say, the Sixties onward) to have a very different imagery and style from the cults of Pulp stories. Cults, in real life, are more likely to project a very different image and it arguably make a lot more sense for a modern cult of some elder evil to blend in with the more mundane 'new spiritual movements' than to walk around with black robes and chanting about 'the rise of Chu'ygltegor the Devourer of a Thousand Worlds With a Million Maws'. Sure, they may in fact worship said Entity but there is very little practical reasons to openly do so. It is, rather, more efficient to construct a myth and rites which praise their dark patron without anyone, including (but especially) their lower ranked members, knowing the dark truth. Even people susceptible to joining a cult are more likely to respond to a benevolent Guru speaking of cosmic unity and healing than going around ripping people apart and drinking blood from skulls.

This is meant to add to/replace parts of the Silent Legions cult generator. You may also use this generator, as it will do a much better job generating New Age crap than I can.

D8	When were they founded?
1-3	In the last few years. Roll 1d4+1 to find how many years the cult has been formally established.
4-6	In recent times and they have begun to grow these last few years. Roll 2d4 to find out how long the cult has been established.
7	The cult has been established for more than a decade, maybe up to two decades.
8	The cult is older than it appears but it’s current ‘new age’ form is a recent creation. Reroll on this table (ignoring any result of 8) and roll on the table found in Silent Legions for its real age.

D4	Who is the founder and who/what do they claim to be?
1	An ordinary man or woman disgruntled by society who received some divine epiphany and now lead the converts toward spiritual enlightenment.
2	Someone who claim to have travelled the world in search of truth, learned from Tibetan monks and all that fancy stuff.
3	The newly born/reborn messiah, there to lead the cult members toward salvation.
4	An alien/extra dimensional being or a reincarnated there to lead the faithful and advance mankind.

D6	Who really founded the cult? What are they really like?
1	A socially-maladjusted weirdo with surprising skills as a conman. He’s re-imagined himself as some enlightened guru, possibly with a new fake name and backstory.
2	A pretentious hippy and/or yuppie who was already into ‘New Age’ stuff but digged a little too deep into truly arcane materials and is reconverting his own old beliefs to serve dark forces.
3	A former Satanist of some stripe who, in his defiance toward established religions, begun an obscene worship of some foul eldritch entity. The cult is a suitable cover for his dark ways.
4	A real sorcerer of some kind, who hijacked the cult and/or is working with the founder to fuel his evil sorcery.
5	A hardline atheist who begun doing cult-like things as a mockery of organized religion, only to have a real religious epiphany. Unfortunately, their newfound God is some elder evil.
6	A science fiction or fantasy author who found something real when he was looking for inspiration. Any resemblance to a real life author and religious founder is purely coincidental.

D20	Their religious doctrine is a bizarre mixture of… (Roll twice)
1-3	Christianity
4-6	Bastardized Buddhism
7-9	Bastardized Hinduism
10-12	Ancient Alien Theories
13-15	Scientific-Sounding Nonsense
16	Kabbalistic Ideas
17	Aryan Occultism repackaged as something less offensive
18	Granola Hippy ‘Mother Earth’ stuff
19	Laveyan Satanism
20	Rehashed Hermeticism

D6	In order to practice their faith, they frequently engage in...
1	Hour-long meditation, which may be harmless or be the moment where special substances are added to incense to mess with their minds. Alternatively, there are eldritch codes hidden inside their meditation music.
2	Long lectures about the extremely complex (and frankly insane) nature of their cults and how their faith relates to the metaphysics of the universe. Usually render the subjects bored, tired and susceptible due to near-hypnotic nature.
3	Meditations and/or prayer with a higher-ranked member, either alone or in small groups. These are used to more properly tailor the lectures and prayers to have a stronger connection and effect to the poor shmuck.
4	Isolated meditations (for purpose of ‘purification’ or whatever it is) which may last for days at a time and members are forbidden to leave the room, eat, drink or sleep. They are left weak and exhausted afterward.
5	Self-harm for past ‘sins’ (they might not call it ‘sin’, of course). The list of what is considered a ‘sin’ by the cult is quite long. Members are left exhausted by the non-lethal but still reckless self-harm.
6	Massive orgies.

D6	They (unknowingly?) expose themselves to the eldritch when...
1	They recite their prayers, which appear innocuous to outsiders but are in fact coded messages of praise to some eldritch entity which resonate on metaphysical frequencies unknown to human minds. Possibly a homing beacon?
2	Their moments of prayer or meditation leave their psyche open to assault, be it by their dark master, a servant or a cult sorcerer of some kind, who can mold their thoughts and emotions. They do not realize this is taking place.
3	Major rites are actually disguised rituals meant to draw power from an entity and/or summon it. The version practice at home by cultists is harmless but when the ceremony is led by a sorcerer things may get nasty.
4	They frequently are exposed to their master or a servant but the experience is wiped from their mind and their memories are altered, be it by drugs or more eldritch means. They do not remember direct contact with these alien beings outside of vivid hallucinations.
5	The cult is mostly a charade meant to provide goods and money and the members are just brainwashed by regular means. Only the most promising members are guided to the real cult, where they will be truly exposed to the eldritch...or sacrificed to their dark master.
6	They themselves are fine but their children, born into the cult, will carry the will and/or essence of their dark master. The first pregnancies are already nearing their end, the result of intimate moments with the guru.