Wednesday, February 20, 2019

D20x5 Horrible Homunculi

The original Fullmetal Alchemist anime was better than Brotherhood.




Automator of the list generation: https://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

D20 This homunculus looks like
1 a flayed Vitruvian Man, écorché perfection.
2 a smooth and unblemished person, entirely lacking eyes and orifices.
3 organs suspended in a translucent mucosal body-sheath.
4 an invertebrate humanoid with an exoskeleton of ridged bone.
5 a hirsute proto-human atavism.
6 an overgrown fetus with a bulbous head and thin, veiny skin.
7 a person stretched into a frame somewhere between that of a greyhound and a gibbon, all lithe and loping.
8 a cornucutaneal satyr, with curling asymmetric horns, ruddy bruised skin, and nails crowding with hairs down their back and legs.
9 a crookedly misarranged person, no ligaments or muscles connecting like they should, creaking along just as fast as you regardless.
10 a deformed deva with too many arms and too many heads.
11 a hermaphroditic Venus of Willendorf portrayed in flesh rather than stone.
12 a Galatean figure of uncannily ideal mathematic beauty and symmetry.
13 a person whose parts are more metal than flesh: copper-wire hair, silver eyes, golden skin, and so on.
14 animal parts patchworked together into a facsimile of a human body: porcupine quills for hair, a horse’s teeth, fish-scale skin, and so on.
15 a medieval attempt at a cyborg, inadequate machines propping up synthetic flesh. Bones with pulleys screwed in at the joints, intestinal hoses linking alembics, stained-glass eyes crowding their temple, and so on.
16 a waxy-skinned fresh corpse, their thick blood visibly worming through their veins.
17 the victim of countless disfiguring plagues, rife with boils, buboes, and sores.
18 a gaunt person with all extraneous fat, cartilage, fingers, and toes pared away.
19 an exceptionally unexceptional person, exactly plain, with no distinguishing features.
20 flesh that’s been crudely pinched and molded by hand into human form.
D20 This homunculus can
1 rapidly splinter and extend its bones into steel-hard lances.
2 cough out cloying clouds of flesh-melting vapour.
3 vomit up swarms of sub-homunculi drones.
4 adapt its biology to resist any attack used against it. Each similar attack becomes less effective each time.
5 change its shape to mimic any animal or person it has entirely devoured.
6 reflexively petrify itself to defend against an incoming attack, becoming immune to all damage and completely immobile for one round.
7 understand alchemy on an instinctual level, and is never found without a collection of potions and poisons.
8 dissolve its body into a mass of corrosive jelly, to slip through cracks and suchlike.
9 eat people’s brains to gain their knowledge. If it eats a magic-user’s brain, it can cast any spells that magic-user had left at the time of their death.
10 recall the memories of its creator and all its creator’s ancestors. It is at times possessed by the spectres of the past carried in its mind.
11 inflict mutations with a touch by means of osmotic contamination with its unstable humours.
12 push its body far beyond its biological limits, damaging itself in the process.
13 concentrate its body’s volatile elements into specific parts, then tear those parts off and hurl them like grenades. Torn-off parts regenerate slowly.
14 exude pheromones that charm the weak-willed into doing its bidding.
15 manipulate stone and metal as if they were clay, casually tear through armour and walls of the same.
16 immediately grow to great size if provided with a sufficient food supply. It must continue to devour similar quantities of food or its extra mass will slough off and it’ll shrivel back to normal.
17 create a hive of its own tissues. Within its hive the homunculus is more potent, and aware of all happenings within.
18 extrude samples of any sort of organic matter it’s absorbed.
19 adapt its biology to mirror any attack used against it. If it’s set on fire, it might exude probosci that spit a fluid that ignites on contact with air, it’s put to sleep it might start emitting soporific spores, and so on.
20 completely and swiftly regenerate if even a scrap of its flesh is left whole.
D20 This homunculus can’t
1 forget. Strong reminder-stimuli will trap it in a reverie of relived memories. Eventually its mind will be so full of recollections that it will be ever afterwards stuck in fantasies of the past.
2 lie, or comprehend lying. Novels send it into a fit of corrective rage.
3 make or use tools. Its conception of the manipulable world begins and ends with its own body.
4 conceive of its own mortality. It will destroy itself in pursuit of its goals without ever realizing that was even a possibility.
5 process intoxicants. All drugs are fatally poisonous to it.
6 dream. Absurd deviations from its expectations induce temporary but catatonic shock in it.
7 experience empathy. Other minds are a mystery to it, and it kills without hesitation or remorse.
8 survive on anything but a diet of human meat.
9 recognize faces or voices. It must settle on some other method for distinguishing people.
10 forgive. If an opportunity to take vengeance for a past offense appears they must take it.
11 easily manage its own biology. Without access to alchemical reagents, it heals slower than humans and is prone to sickness and autoimmune attacks.
12 regulate its emotions. Each day it’s either pathologically (1d4): 1, choleric; 2, melancholic; 3, phlegmatic; 4, sanguine.
13 see. Whatever eyes it has are vestigial. It finds its way by (1d4): 1, waving cilia so fine they seem invisible at first; 2, echolocation; 3, scent; 4, hijacking the senses of other organisms.
14 conceive of spiritual experience. It is an easy, vulnerable host for ghosts and demons.
15 comprehend abstraction. Symbols and theoretical mathematics alike baffle it.
16 perceive beauty or other sensual pleasures. The only value it finds in the world is that of right and wrong. Music annoys it.
17 understand violence except through an animalistic lens: to hunt, to defend its territory, and so on, but never for its own sake.
18 identify as part of any group. It can have relationships with individuals, but clans and churches and the like will always be beyond it.
19 express its emotions comprehensibly. When it is happy it might scream, when it is angry it might smile, and so on.
20 conceive of its own self. While it has thoughts and urges as any living thing, these are as impersonal and driving to it as gravity.
D20 This homunculus was created
1 by an alchemist in despair over their lost child.
2 by a narcissist as a culmination of their self-love.
3 as the prototype for a mass-production series of bioweapons.
4 to be the next step of human evolution.
5 as a companion for a very lonely alchemist.
6 accidentally, as an unlikely offshoot of a more rudimentary working.
7 to be an assistant in the pursuit for the philosopher’s stone.
8 as a source of exotic humours to harvest.
9 as a scapegoat who would inherit its creator’s sins.
10 as a successor when no apprentice proved worthy.
11 as a pedagogical parody of human existence.
12 as an ethical substitute for humans in a horrific human sacrifice.
13 to be an inhumanly strong and loyal guardian of its creator’s laboratory.
14 as an act of devotion, to better understand the mind of God as He created mankind.
15 to be the progenitor of a subhuman slave-species.
16 as a study into what truly defines the boundaries of humanity.
17 with the intention of being a blank slate, to see where nature ends and nurture begins.
18 as a rebis, a physical exemplar of the principles of alchemy.
19 by a hubristic alchemist, simply to see if they could.
20 from the remains of an entire village lost to disaster.
D20 This homunculus thinks humans
1 are mere beasts created by accident rather than artifice.
2 need to lighten up and accept that life and death alike are comical.
3 have been rendered obsolete by its creation.
4 are no different from its creator, who it loathes.
5 fall sadly short of their potential for rationality because they are slaves to their animal drives.
6 are an inescapable, unanswerable enigma.
7 waste their lives on meaningless distractions, and so their lives are not worth much to this homunculus.
8 use art to insulate themselves from direct experience.
9 will all seek to control it or render it down to useful materials.
10 are arrogant fools who reach beyond their place in the natural hierarchy.
11 are a charming animal, and pins noteworthy specimens down in their collection.
12 don’t fit neatly into the natural hierarchy of all things.
13 are a superstitious and cowardly lot.
14 are tragic mistakes of history and evolution.
15 are limited by their own biology to ignominious patheticness.
16 are worth no more than the resources their bodies provide.
17 will be adequate servants when it seizes control.
18 have manipulated it to its and their detriment.
19 embody all worldly sins.
20 are embarrassingly fragile.

No comments:

Post a Comment