an ice-encrusted super-Earth drifting through the
inter-galactic void after the collision of the Andromeda and Milky Way
galaxies 4.5 billion years from now, its gelid vaults boiled away to
cool processing components for information flowing from and to other
coordinates in space-time. Their host-body there resembles a raw smash
burger covered in bubble wrap, with a mineral wedge and mantid claws in
front.
2
the Earthly archipelago that would become the
Philippines, where they inhabit a primatoid species resembling giant
tarsiers, 50 million years into our past. This site is a sort of
vacation spot where Yithian minds can decompress and meditate on what
they've learned.
3
a satellite-library orbiting a black hole, used to
store info-hazards, memetic viruses, and other such dangerous knowledge,
ready to plunge below the event horizon in moments if there's ever a
breach. Their host-body there is bulbous and spindly, like a jellyfish
that's had its bell inflated and its tentacles replaced with spider
legs, using carefully-sculpted vortices of gas and magnetic force as
hands.
4
a pirate transceiver station embedded in slime-farms on
the surface of Venus some 2 billion years ago, monitoring time travel,
even among their own kind, and inserting falsified data to convince
others that time is exactly as deterministic as this sect of Yithians
want it to be.
5
an observatory buried deep beneath the Appalachian
mountain range a mere thousand years ago. Their host-body there is a
large, albino, lobe-faced troglobitic leech.
6
a dome-city among the blasted ruins of Teegarden's Star
B, primarily a launching point for archeological excavations. Their
host-body there sort of resembles an anomalocaris that walks on its
facial tentacles.
D6
This Yithian is
1
a complete psycho freak by the standards of both humans
and Yithians - they've projected their mind to a thousand battlefields
seeking "true knowledge of combat" but they're not even particularly
good at fighting because all their bodies are expendable. Their
time-neighbours are happy to see them gone.
2
a jaded, workaday agent who just wants to get their mission over with as quickly and effortlessly as possible.
3
a big fan of the period they've been deployed too, and will have too much fun with the costumes and slang and suchlike.
4
Yithian by culture rather than by the species of their
original body - born to parents (or parent, or swarm-merger, or whatever
else) of latter host-bodies and uplifted into their ranks. They have a
chip on their shoulder and a lot to prove.
5
secretly the servant of an outer god, and will subvert
their mission at the last moment to rip a foothold for their master into
reality.
6
a hapless fall guy sent out on a mission which is well
beyond their capabilities, with the expectation that they will fuck it
up.
D6
This Yithian's psychic time-host
1
is an opium-addicted veteran whose substance use and
already-existing mental strain force the Yithian to take an indirect
hand in controlling them, appearing in dreams and as a voice in their
head.
2
is a drifter, able to go everywhere but not welcome for long anywhere.
3
is a young child and natural medium, who acted as a sink that drew the Yithian away from their intended host.
4
is a criminal of some infamy, with shady connections in many walks of life.
5
is a nebbish scholar who came to know a little too much
- while the Yithian is here, the mind of their host is being
interrogated and memory-wiped.
6
is a rich recluse.
D6
This Yithian's psychic time-mission
1
is to arrange a heist to steal an artifact that will be
destroyed in an upcoming disaster, and replace it with a perfect
replica.
2
is to orchestrate a catastrophe and the omens leading up to it (like Mothman).
3
is to infiltrate a vile cult and root out secrets that they've magico-technically shielded from remote investigation.
4
is to protect and guide a nascent genius who will at some point discover a key piece of lore for the Yithian collection.
5
is to track down a rogue Yithian agent, find out what they know, and eliminate them.
6
is to untangle a temporal anomaly - a time loop, a town
where two split histories co-exist, a portal to a parallel world, or
whatever else.
D6
An obstacle to this Yithian's time-mission
1
is a mystery crusader who goes about in a mask and cape, and is obsessed with researching and unveiling oddities.
2
is an abandoned mi-go brain cylinder, the occupant of
which has gone terribly mad. Their phrenic reverberations have whipped
up mobs into a witch-hunting frenzy.
3
is a langolier, which sniffed out the chronons left by
the Yithian's transmission and followed their trail out of the devoured
past.
4
is a secret society of former Yithian hosts who
remember just enough of their time outside ordinary time to be
dangerous, and have cottoned on to the Yithian's activities.
5
is an android wearing a disguise of living flesh, sent
from a future of flickering possibility by an artificial intelligence to
make its creation inevitable.
6
is themself, a nega-version of themself with opposed values, splintered off by a flaw in the time-projection procedure.
D6
Besides projecting their mind through time, this Yithian's psychic ability lets them
1
inflict paralyzing agony on a target within their line of sight.
2
wipe the short-term memories of a touched target.
3
create still and silent illusions.
4
command simple-minded animals.
5
detect the presence of nearby intelligent minds, and
whether those minds are paying attention to or have hostile intent
towards them.
6
flare out a beacon to soul-eating predators in the noospheric realm, a sort of localized mutually-assured destruction.
psychedelically-colourful shells with hypnotically-swirled lines and ridges.
3
black shells with orange spots, and cruel-looking hooks lining the inside of their claws.
4
glossy blue shells, and antennae that curl like silly straws.
5
translucent shells, showing off glassy organs and the flow of their colourless blood.
6
pale shells, and a great number of silky setae along their limbs which resemble fur.
D6
These yurians are
1
sea-bottom nomads, taking advantage of their rugged physiques to wander stretches few other undersea peoples could handle.
2
inheritors and scavengers of some Atlantean sunken
civilization, adopting its fashions to their crustacean frames and
getting a good way into understanding its technologies.
3
decadent chivalrites with little knowledge of or
interest in what goes on outside the ingrown courtly intrigues of their
snail-iron citadels.
4
undersea gangsters, pirates and protection racket extractors on everyone who dares to sail above their territory.
5
the last of a dying civilization, their god slain. A
plague afflicts them, their cycles of reincarnation are disrupted, and
they huddle around divine relics while their ruins spatter the oceans'
floors.
6
industrious, bureaucratic, and paranoid - records kept
in strands of clay beads, marked exactingly to ensure everyone meets
their quotas, for the good of all.
D6
These yurians' beauty standards
1
lead them to exaggerate their rear segmentation with the use of corsets during their molts.
2
are obsessed with the delicateness of their telson and uropods.
3
have recently adopted eyeshadow and blush from surface-folk - an uncanny sight to be sure.
4
involve inlaying their shells with precious stones and nacre.
5
are based more on jellied perfumes and urine-additives than visual aesthetics.
6
have led to the cumbersome overgrowth of their right claws over generations of sexual selection.
D6
These yurians are often accompanied by
1
concentric, iridescent, animate bubbles, about the size of watermelons - serving something like a religious function.
2
a sort of jellyfish they keep on hooks through their
non-essential parts, like a clown with a cluster of balloons - the
jellyfishes' venom gets them high, but is dangerous for anyone else.
3
koalinth mercenaries who prove more nimble fighters.
4
swarms of of a species of wrasse they've domesticated,
which dive between shell segments to pick out parasites and bits of
detritus.
5
a gigantic, domesticated species of tripod fish, which
are able to walk on their stiffened fins, used by the yurians as beasts
of burden.
6
sea cucumbers they herd as quick snacks.
D6
These yurians are troubled
1
by slavers who capture them just after they molt, when they're too soft and weak to fend them off.
2
by a dark mer-wizard, who is plying the ruffians and
malcontents among them with narcotic mutagens, aiming to turn them into
super-soldiers and war-beasts for their burgeoning army.
3
by a cannibal-crusade launched by a nation of sahuagin,
proving their devotion to Sekolah by devouring those too weak to fend
them off.
4
by a kraken that marks them with its suckers and invades their dreams to turn them to its cult.
5
by the king of a seaside kingdom, who has acquired a taste for their boiled flesh.
6
by a clutch of topaz dragons that have moved into the
region in search of unclaimed (by other dragons) territory, and seeking
minions to war proxily with each other.
D6
In return for help with this trouble, these yurians might offer
1
a sworn honour guard who would lay down their lives at your command.
2
immortalization as a hero of their culture.
3
the egg of a tameable leviathan.
4
a lord's ransom in pearls and untarnishable gold.
5
the location of a sunken treasure fleet.
6
a mighty artifact of human realms, next to useless underwater.
made of flesh like tongues of fire that lick off burnt-black bones.
2
of a shade darker than black, and is shrouded in perpetual smoke and shadow it blends into seamlessly.
3
whip-thin like a starved greyhound, its bones malformed and stretching its flesh into translucent sheets.
4
as crocodilian as it is canine, splayed limbs dragging
its belly along the ground, bald mange-spots exposing scaly, peeling
skin beneath.
5
grotesquely over-muscled, to the point that its skin has split in many places, revealing wet muscle and slavering maws beneath.
6
wrinkled like a bulldog but all over its body, with cataract-wracked eyes weeping from under the folds.
D6
This hellhound can
1
break off its teeth into bite-wounds, which continuously inject venom and burrow away from attempts to remove them.
2
mutilate a corpse to create a temporary portal to the lower planes.
3
only been seen by its current target.
4
howl loud enough to wake the dead, who lash out at the living around them in pain and terror.
5
appear in the dreams of their targets, turning them to
nightmares of being stalked through infernal environs, denying them rest
and potentially killing them through fear.
6
fly through the air but only at night or during a storm.
D6
This hellhound's master
1
is a gambler using it to breed bigger and nastier dogs for fighting, indulging in its savage tendencies to keep it in line.
2
is another hellhound, the alpha of their pack - it wants to take over and become the new alpha.
3
is a cynical priest using it to drive people to dogmatic obedience.
4
is a secret witch using it to eliminate rivals and threats.
5
is a freelance soul-hunter collecting on diabolical contracts.
6
is a serial killer hiding their own murders among the hellhound's spree.
D6
This hellhound has a fondness for
1
bribery, pausing to scarf down any coins thrown to it.
2
betrayal, sparing a group if they sacrifice one of their friends to it.
3
sadism, prefering to kill slowly and painful more than efficiently.
4
arson, often losing track of prey in the blazes it sets.
5
corrupting the innocent, putting itself in the employ
of children to kill their bullies and suchlike and then killing them in
turn once their souls become heavy enough with sin to be damned.
6
the meat of mundane dogs, going out of its way to hunt them down.
D6
This hellhound is
1
a living curse which claimed a bit of the body and mind
of each person it felled until it was able to make a body and mind of
its own.
2
a former church grim whose charge was desecrated.
3
a demoted and devolved devil.
4
a vicious and ambitious soul working their way up the hellish ranks.
5
domesticated descendant of the pre-human inhabitants of the netherworlds.
6
the reincarnated spirit of a very bad dog.
D6
This hellhound can be held at bay
1
by smoke from burning esfand, which blinds and chokes them.
2
by stakes carved from an oak tree that's been struck by lightning - even a scratch from one will wound them terribly.
3
by the sound of silver chimes.
4
by the blood of a man-eating wolf, a line of which they're unable to cross.
5
by fireworks.
6
by kittens, the presence of which makes them unbearably nauseous.
