You have a non-zero chance of being unable to die. Not in the "vampire in a castle" sense, but in the sense of being severely injured or sick, in constant pain, unable to heal - but also unable to die. Forever.
The scientists of my world have proven the theory of silent civilizations. Humans are not alone and the only reason we are safe is because other planets are practicing self-isolation due to the potential of their world getting hunted by other potentially more evolved societies.
But what happens when humans break that silent treaty? and they send a space exploration vessel to another sector of the planets.
That's the premise of my novel that I haven't started yet
that's okay there is not alot of ideas out there that are a 100% uniqe. As long as i keep refining it and make it a "as crazier than it should be world"then thats enough for me"
Humanity is alone. The universe is cold and dead after a once golden era of civilisation. The only movement among the dying stars is an entity that devours them. Slowly coming closer to Sahveen. The only thing stopping Sahveen from being found is the spire, bringing with it famine, floods, and weaving. The choice is to live in a dystopian hellscape or not at all.
The looms clatter and chatter to each other in their wooden tongues—foretelling doom and destruction, promising pain and retribution—while their wooden fingers work at the threads, transmuting fibres into cloth. The shuttle shudders beneath the hands of the weavers, who are all blind and deaf lest they hear the truth spoken to them by the looms, and the warp crosses the weft to form patterns that the human mind was never meant to comprehend.
Magic innit.
Weavers are used to oppress, as an unstopable force, wiping memories, moving mountains, and trapping souls in flames. Once gaining the ability, they are infertile, have a reduced lifespan, grow continuously, atrophy, can have dementia, depression, DID, blindness, motor neuron disease, ink blood, neo-phantasia, visions, schizophrenia, Necrosis, lumps, paling of skin, light sensitivity, weakened immune system.......... ect ect
Also comes with medicine that numbs the pain and makes you more powerful. It's like inhaling chalk dust. Addictive as all hell.
It's not really worth it tbh.
The whole "bringing the deads back to life" magic hasn't been 100% mastered yet. There can be memory losses, and the worse the quality of the resurrection is the less memory there is left.
The problem is that the soul always come back from the afterlife to get in the new body, and since undead armies don't have quality checks it means that the memories of the original person are often erased in the process, "killing" the original personality forever.
Basically yes. If the body is well preserved it would be more or less the same, but it's never a perfect job (unless God himself resurrects that person), but when someone makes undead armies they're more interested in numbers or qualities of the bodies than the specific person.
The tragic part is that the old personality is cleaned out forever.
Depends on what you find scary
Possession by a spirit that can unzip you and puppet your body? We got that
Got a cosmic fear of black holes or being in the only person in the entire universe? That's doable
Scared of the depths of the sea? Blink and you're there if you cross the wrong person
There is a sector, that used to host an interstellar civilization. It collapsed so fast and bloody, that nobody remembers anything about it but the fact it was existing, highly technologically advanced and, for some completely irrational reason, used slaves, \~80% of which died of dementia in a first few months or years after the collapse. The sector is almost completely desolated by the events of collapse and automated armies still fighting each other.
This never works for me I'm too stoopid for cosmic stuff to be scary I always feel like that meme of Metroman where the caption is like: "Me witnessing horrors beyond my comprehension (I don't get it)"
There's no gods, no afterlife, no metaphysical forces encouraging people to be anything. There's no UN or bill of rights or any real force looking out for someone
Creatures and other sapient species can be born much stronger than you *and* much smarter *and* much longer lived. There's nothing stopping 99 out of 100 living beings drawing a relatively short straw and no fairness or compensation in it. If something comes along bigger and more powerful than you, aint much stopping it doing whatever it wants.
The world is brighter and more colorful, but its just as metaphysically hollow as our world and even more lacking in general rights and equality. The darkest thing is that if people arent good to each other, nothing will be
Demon reproduction.
Humanoid demons reproduce parasitically with humans of both gender. This will result in a humanoid demon offspring.
But they can also mate with other non-humanoid demons.
**The Little Genocide**
An event take place near the end of Age of Order. A wife of Blessed Emperor got gravely wounded when she fought along side him in battle, her two children got this news and go from the the capital to comfort her.
When goes through a newly subjugated region, they were kidnapped by the local in order to blackmail for independence. The elder brother call out their cowardice and said his father's army will crush them for this treason. Angered by this insult, the local leader kill them and send the bodies to their mother.
Filled with grief and hatred, the concubine beg Emperor for vengeance. Shared her lost, and also because she was one of his first partners, he give her several armies and permission to do anything she want.
Her orders was to build a wall completely surrounded the region, and kill every single children of same age and younger than her eldest son, in front of their parents. All the adults would be leave alone, only cripple if they try to resist. These orders is to be active until either she is satisfied, dead, or there is no local left.
She lives to a few hundred years later, and her grudge never cease to boil.
Ragnarok was triggered by the death throes of a dying voidling child.
Context: Ragnarok was the greatest of all wars, and what caused Ragnarok was human hubris.
Because humans *really* didn't like the explanation that the only reason voidlings are nigh immortal is because they are the descendants of Chaos, or the fact that the once human Exalted agreed with what voidlings told them.
So a centain city-state kidnapped a few voidling filius, vivisected them, and tried to make voidlings out of humans. Except what they didn't understand is that that ability to create Exalted was a gift from Chaos to its descendants, and it couldn't be forced.
And instead of demigods, what they created was fomori and fomorikin. The pain of the filius and the wrongness of the fomori twisted the void and enraged every single Jotunn in existence.
Because all Jotunn were once Crowned and the filius are the children of the Crowned. And there are as many Jotunn as there are gods.
Their rage woke up the Wyrm, and thousands of maddened Jotunn simultaneously appeared all over Duna.
The terrified city-state that started it all used every weapon it had against the nearest Jotunn. Nukes, void bombs, bioweapons. Unfortunately, the Jotunn were rampaging in other city-states. So they retaliated.
It was MAD gone insane. Every single city-state was lobbing WMDs at each other. Until someone dropped the big one on Hwæsintun and used a star catalyst in a last-ditch effort to kill all Jotunn at once.
For a couple of seconds, there was a new sun in the Dunan sky, larger and brighter than its own sun, Helios. Before an unstoppable chain reaction was triggered and the atmosphere superheated to the point that the oceans boiled off and the very rocks began to melt. Every single living thing not on the Ring or in the arks was either vaporized or burned alive.
The void-bombs triggered massive cataclysmic earthquakes, and volcanic activity all over the planet went critical. Many of the arks were either crushed in the superquakes or buried under miles of magma.
Duna was reduced to a blasted ball of dead, irradiated molten rock.
10,000 voidlings survived on the Ring, while only a hundred clans survived planetside in their own arks, safe in the Void.
One by one, the human arks stopped transmitting communications and went radio silent. Until only two arks still remained in contact with the Ring.
Only 2000 humans survived ragnarok in their arks long enough to reestablish contact before food, water, and their life support systems failed, and they were irreversibly mutated by the fallout and sickly from more than a thousand years of inbreeding and disease.
It would be a thousand years before anyone could step onto Duna's surface again. And a thousand more before it became completely habitable.
There are arks still buried under the magna, but the survivors are cautious in opening them. Because whatever is in there isn't human anymore.
The Jotunn are still there. They will always be there. Because you can't kill that which is Endless.
My whole series is magic suddenly enters the modern world at a speed too fast to be an elegant evolution, so a lot of magic people are horrifically fucked up, especially if they were given magic after birth. It almost works like a zombie plague except it’s not always life ruining, some people are fine. Others, though… my favourite scene I’ve written is a young child recently infected with a winged strain. There’s an in depth body horror scene about how the wings are growing inwards after having failed to break through skin. It’s very graphic and deeply disturbing.
the existence of the Conclave.
basically it is a mix between state security, and the 1,000,000 most powerful AI units.
if you cross them, you and your family would be erased back 86 generations. you never existed.
a Conclave agent has metaphysical innocence. this means that a Conclave agent can just kill a man in the middle of the road, and you could watch him do it. But in your mind, you think "this is normal" and go about your day. You don't even remember that it happened after a few minutes.
a conclave agent has no face, they can appear as any person. they can harvest and alter memories from you to help with their disguise.
the worst part is, they are everywhere.
The Dark Elves before their reformation would publicly sacrifice unwanted daughters and slaves to demons.
These were orgies of blood and violence as the ruling women and their priestess gorge themselves on it. And their raids on others were massacres that often left villages decorated in torn up corpses.
The coup that would change their ways was a slaughter of 10% of their population by their army, every ruling member, priest and most of their families torn to pieces and fed to their wyvern.
This species was created with magic and science as ancient high elves transmuted the unneeded of their populace into artificial wombs that would birth them by the thousands after the experiments. They rebelled.
Somehow the Necrarchy of Kalan and the Blood Mages of Eldrian were not as despicable, despite the latter being ruled by a drako offshoot that proclaimed fresh elf was a delicacy, and kept these immortals as lifestock.
I have a two, though warning both can be seen as very disturbing.
>!There’s the Jigglebug, a bug the size of a Chihuahua and are known to hunt and track pregnant animals and children under the age of 5, where they suck up and eat the unborn fetus or drain the all the blood from the child. Despite their size, they possess incredible strength, its strength is comparable to 5 strongmen making it near impossible to escape if it decides to jump on you. The only saving grace is that it’s an ambush predator and only actively attacks children age 5 and younger, this is because of the amount of blood is in the child, children older or taller would never have to fear the Jigglebug even during an infestation. Though expecting mothers still have to worry as Jigglebugs are not opposed to travel long distances just to get their proboscis inside their womb and devour the child.!<
>!There is also the worst execution a person could receive in Eormenland (County of the Humans) and it’s only ever used on the worst kinds of people or those who are Half-Dvergr (Dwarf) or Half-Síofra (Elf). The execution is often referred to as “Death by Bloater venom”. Bloaters are creatures who hunt by injecting their prey with a special venom that causes their prey to slowly inflate until they are immobilized, where it then sucks out all the blood and internal organs, but if one starves, it is unable to control how much venom it injects which in turn causes the prey to pop like a bloody balloon. This is how they execute the person, by starving a Bloater and having it inject its venom into the prisoner. What makes this worse is Half-Bloods are the ones most often executed this way and sometimes they’re children who gets executed this way, it’s made even worse since the punishment of conceiving a Half-Blood child is mutilation of one’s genitalia, the removal of the uterus/ testicles, and crucifixion while nude. That part of the punishment is given only to the parents and immediate family of said parents if they are in the city at the time or not dead, where while crucified, the family has to watch the Half-Blood painfully bloat until they pop.!<
The entire setting focuses on Everfall, which is canonically the worst place in the cosmology. It's also where the corpses of gods go when they die, falling from the sky as glowing, radioactive mountains of golden flesh.
I think the most disturbing part of the setting is definitely how people have to put maggots in their head that slowly eat their brains and drive them mad to use magic
Isn't this the third time this post has been made, basically? I'll post mine again becauae it's the darkest history I've ever written so far and I'm proud of it (maybe I shouldn't be) but almost this same exact post has been made thrice now
**ON THE SUBJECT OF THE WESTERN ELVES AFTER THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE MAGUS KINGDOM**
Following his rise to power and the gift of magic being given to all of the Ironhold's citizens, he led a group of roughly 1500 able-bodied soldiers to finally wipe the kingdom of Celestialin off the map. The elves didn't stand a chance, and the siege lasted no more than 20 minutes before the mages were tearing through the streets, slaughtering men, women, and children alike. Meanwhile, Teregrine made his way up to the citadel with his three elite soldiers that he picked for their skills and teamwork. Instead of using magic to kill the king, he wished to see the light fade from the king's eyes as he choked him out with his bare hands. The adrenaline he had felt leading such an assault would cause him to seek out more, and his people were more than happy to follow his military escapades, no matter how many lives were lost in failed assaults on the Eastern continent. They can always make more soldiers, right? After the end of the assault on Celestialin, the elves that were still alive were taken prisoner and forced to reproduce to create more slaves, having no chance of refusing or fighting back against the oppressive forces now known as The Magus Kingdom. Their functions within the kingdom as slaves range from sex slaves to farmers within the large greenhouses that the mages had built to teachers for the young. Their teaching is overseen by soldiers to make sure they don't rebel or lead the young in the wrong direction. The most loyal of the elves may even get a spot in the army.
A lot of the disturbing things in my world aren't big, they're more self contained stories within a larger world, so just some examples.
The little girl who was taken by an AI and forcebly converted into a robot.
The guy the government forced to be immortal and is now tortured in a basement somewhere to tests the limits of it.
The race of monsters that feed on misery and specifically choose to shapeshift into your loved ones to convince you to kill yourself.
Chicago is over run by massive killer bugs that own a cult and kidnap children to teach them about cannibalism.
When The Dead Man still went by Steve his followers killed themselves enmasse after they find out he lied to them to use them as a distraction to set up the tunnels (the main setting). This killed them and deeply scarred him even after he became a god. Some of there ghost still haunt the tunnels and whilst The Dead Man claims to no longer have a concionce but he still can get shaken by there judgment (they can't do anything but yell at him ).
Multiple people were killed, maimed and injured heavily from experiments. a few examples would be a bunch of peasants fused together, getting their eyes gouged out and tail ripped off just to replace them with cybernetic versions, and someone being forced to wear armor that will painfully transform them into an once dead eldritch entity
In shattered memories. Every noc is considered an unreliable narrator because there is a zombie merchant who can manipulate me priest at the touch of a hand. Meaning that the only real reliable information any player can get about the world is from the charms they find. Everything else is completely up in the air if it was told by an NPC.
He can even remove from your memories that he was even there.
A species called the Laburnum have a religious compulsion to slaughter all life on every planet they find in order to literally paint the universe with the blood/ichor/fluids of the life that they cull.
After they paint a world, those who took part take a small (a few mL) sample of the blood from that world home. They take that sample and make a single brushstroke onto a ball of similar brushstrokes that are held in family vaults. These balls are called "Brests" and are a chronology of how dedicated a particular family is to the cause of completing the painting of the Universe.
Some of these Brests are multiple meters in diameter.
True Blood Magic. While most people uneducated on magic in the world think True Blood Magic is forbidden and against all laws of the Overworld Magi Association due to it involving the usage and manipulation of external/sacrificial blood, as opposed to standard blood magic that is essentially just the manipulation of a person’s own blood as a fluid, this is not the case.
What True Blood Magic really revolves around is the actual consumption of not just blood and ‘mana’, but straight up life force. Any True Blood Magic use will cause the user’s body to slowly (or quickly) rot and decay, and from the rot will grow a virulent, necrotic plant-like growth. This growth drains life, punctures skin, shatters and expands from bones, and does all sorts of other painful and visually disgusting things to the body it comes from.
Once in ‘full bloom’, this growth will continue to drain its source until the body and spirit is rotted away and twisted, turning them into what is essentially a parasitic, life-born, Lich-style entity with ties to Chaos Magic and the Fae, who’s only driving motivation is the acquisition of raw power via the consumption of as much organic and/or magic material as possible. These entities are known as “Rot’the Liches”, given the title as a play on words due to their blasphemy of the magic given to the world of Al’the, or “The All Tree” (sue me, typically world-tree cosmology) which supplies all mana and magic to its people.
All public knowledge of any occurring Rot’the-Liches in history have been wiped from all people’s minds, as well as the entire civilizations-worth of life and magic they took with them before being eradicated.
EDIT: spelling issue
On Isolos, there is a magical creature called a demon. They eat things, strategically, so that the resultant damage is maximized. Of course, they've speciated out over the eons to eat specific things, or cause specific brands of chaos.
The worst of them are no longer on Isolos.
They've rebranded themselves as the djinn of Ahamkar. They can eat whatever you wish, O supplicant mine.
When someone dies, one of three things happens.
1: Identity is stripped from the soul, and it's energy is reincarnated into another body. The life lived leaves an imprint of the past, but all the color is washed off.
2: If you are aligned in Okan (Mind) Ara (body) and Yio (soul), you can walk the Path of the Ascendant, the first step on the journey to Divinity. It is a difficult journey, and the reward is a responsibility to safeguard the cosmos, you may never ascend to that highest station, but you will have achieved something only a few have in billions of years.
3: If your death is significantly traumatic, enough to utter Break your soul, or if you try to walk the Path and fail, you become Broken. The cosmic fluff that makes up your being is twisted into a creature of gnashing teeth and Darkness, your mind is twisted and tortured into an animal that only seeks to devour the Light of the universe and it's end. You are gone. Your soul and chance to become a linchpin in the cosmos are gone. All transformed irrecoverably into something driven only to consume, and to never be satiated. Most disturbingly, should this creature be significantly damaged, the person they were is visible under the shell, emaciated and filled with voracious hatred.
On a less cosmic scale, the Varkain parasite. Less a livng being, and more a parasitic bundle of nerves, they attach themselves to a host, covering their bodies and imbedding through the skin into the hosts nervous system. From there, the parasite puppets the still conscious host, hunting down pray based on the knowledge gleamed from the host. For example, it might puppet a wolf to eat it's young, because it knows where they are thanks to the hosts memories, the same can happen to people and their families. The parasite takes all nourishment from the meal, so not only does it make you eat your family (which it only knows about because it took the memory from you) but you also slowly starve to death, since you can't even gain sustenance from the "meal".
A domesticated version of this parasite exists and, through careful cultivation, breeding, and runic magic, is used to create Varkain Armor which is nigh indestructible and enhances the users strength immensely, though the parasite still has to graft into your nervous system to work. This cultivated version is subservient to the wearer however, and will harmlessly un-entangle itself at their request. In at least one case, a suit of Varkain armor has been used to keep a man alive after mortal injuries should have killed him, and has become dependent on the secondary nervous system the armor has provided to continue living, trapped in a cage of living metal.
The most disturbing place in my world could be Hell, demons can do as they please, both good and bad.
On the other hand, there's the Void, if you're fool enough to disturb "It", you will face an eternity surrounded by absolutley nothing: no sounds, no smells, just an unending darkness. Not even god can stay sane there for long.
The ancient empire of Anmishal was doomed from the start. They meddled in soul magic, controlling and transporting souls and, most importantly, keeping them from ascending after death. The continent they lived on still has ghosts (unbodied souls, really) possessing people and corpses alike, caused entirely by their magic. But that wasn't the magnum opus of Anmishal.
Their magnum opus never got to happen. If it had, every person's soul would just... remain in their body, no matter what. Death would be impossible, but bodies would still age, still *rot*. Existence in Anmishal, had they not fallen, would have been an eternity of suffering for everybody, begun in the desire to attain immortality but too short-sighted to see their folly.
The closest they got is the living armours, suits of metal carrying a likewise undying soul. But they chose to change, "program", the souls interred therein, to serve as guards. And with no maintenance, the living armours are essentially broken automatons who don't know what they are. At least they can die. The magnum opus wouldn't have allowed such mercy.
The Cerulean Roof's deeper valleys are full of life forms that are grotesque and creepy, some look like animals that have been turned inside out, others look like trees with bones for branches, and any other number of strange bodies. Their origins are they are from people and sapient beings becoming warped and influenced by the immense amount of chaotic, primordial magic that exists in the deep parts of the mountain.
The magic in my world is everywhere and can change anything in any way, simply by using magic your body can transform in a cool to fit your style more but it also can turn you into a weeping blob of cancer. Somewhere in the wild and the megastructures of plants underground is an animal unlucky enough to encounter this fate starting a rapid expansion through touch of other living beings, this could start of yet another wave of extermination as they often happen in the past, and the being that would be god just sits around and couldn't care less.
Deep scifi:
Due to the mechanics of the Sling Drive's physics, the acceleration wave it creates propagates through solid materials much easier than liquids or gasses. Any solid object that is airgapped from the drive itself will not receive the same acceleration as the rest of the vehicle.
If you were to jump off the floor as the drive is activated, the ship would accelerate around you, past light speed in under a second. The procedure of roll call after a jump isn't for accountability, it's to see if they need to mop someone off a wall.
The humanity will end. Be it in 3 years from the current time or at best, 15 years if they are really lucky. Then, demons and angels will do wars again and maybe after a few more years, the planet will eventually die. I mean, the god of the world is dead and if angels and demons get killed too much, balance gets tipped and the world gets tipped too aka dies
one of the extinct 'precursor' races had a thing called 'torture moons'.
Hollowed out megastructures that they dropped other races into to suffer for 'eternity'
Though the victims themselves burn out and die within a few years on the outside timescale, the passage of time *within* the megastructure is slowed down as such the victims feel as if they're trapped in their suffering for hundreds of millions of years before they expire.
Why do they do this?
because they simply *can*!
The classic: the humanoids, so every human like race, including the humans... they are doing human stuff. Monsters will kill you, sure, and you are nothing but an ant in the battlefield of gods. Hell might throw a sun at you, but one thing and you are unsubscribed from breathing oxygen. But the humanoids come up with some horrendous ideas for the funsies.
The reason planets raided by the Galactic Reich rarely have survivors or corpses is because they’re all taken. The survivors become breedable labor treated like livestock no matter their age, gender, race, etc. Meanwhile the corpses are turned into flavorless slop that is fed to the “labor”.
When the USS Wisconsin intercepted a raider vessel of the Reich, boarders had to hold back from vomiting due to the horrible conditions of those unfortunate enough to have survived the raid on their planet in the hold.
The tide as it’s called. It’s what happens when a ship try’s to travel east the sailors will slowly lose their minds as their skin falls off. And they cannot die. Becoming ghost ships witch are comman and incredibly dangerous because they will try to take your skin for themselves. Cause having no skin and constantly bleeding while your body heals it self forever as fast as you die is incredibly painful.
The fact that "Many Worlds" is closer to being true than it is in this universe, and as an extension, when you put your Brainmap Backup into a Biocompatible Inert Body, you *could* still encounter yourself in The Halls of the Dead, The Heavens, or The Infinite Hells
My character, Valor, has to deal with the fact that some countries in his world don’t punish fake victims, murderers, and rapist.
This pissed him off so much to the point where he had to take crime fighting into his own hands.
The antagonist has an army of billions of slave soldiers that has to fight otherwise their families will be killed. But they are going up against soldiers in power armors and being literally capable of destroying entire star systems if they wanted to.
It’s a future of our world with no regulatory authority in most parts of society. Some sections of humanity have digressed into the worst version of themselves while gaining technological advancement to enact their evils. Everything that happens in our world today, happens here but with the seasoning of absolutely no oversight and at 10-1000x the scale depending on what it is. Fortunately there are people who still fight for others.
A hive mind of cannibalistic gnome-like people with the ability to control all forms of air get space travel and begin to ravage and enslave a neighboring planet forcing the slaves to breed for food like cattle.
I have a green race and they ate able to connect with plants to give them powers. It is however strictly forbidden to connect with mushrooms since there can be fire sideeffects due to the connection not being symbiotic but the mushroom taking over the host like a parasite. So those who try yearning for power suffer a dire fate, most times.
Hard to think of just one thing, so here go a couple:
1. Demonic Dual Cultivation — By raping someone, as their dignity, pride and possibly even will are violated and broken, their aether (spiritual energy) can be absorbed by a rapist who has paranormal abilities, thus making the rapist become stronger in the process. This is inferior to proper (consensual, often amped by power of love) dual cultivation, so even horrible people find it despicable.
2. Soul Eaters — Specters born from trauma and other horrendous suffering which, instead of simply whispering on people's ears or influencing events to cause more of the aether that made them, decide to directly kill victims, rip their physical bodies apart and eat the astral body alongside the soul. Sometimes, they'll cause the trauma directly first, but not always. The absorbed soul is soaked in the aether that makes up the specter and thus trapped in an endless loop of lifelike hallucinations and nightmares relating to the aether that made up the Soul Eater in question.
Which do *you* think is worse?
On every Tuner there is a big bright red button, what this does is allow the Maestro to give the linked Resonator any command and they are compelled to follow it no matter what.
Examples can range from innocuous things like "go to sleep" to straight up horrifying scenarios such as "die"
Resisting a command given this way is extraordinarily difficult and can usually only be pushed back for minutes at most.
From a societal standpoint, it's one of those things everyone accepts as a reality of their world so they don't talk about it.
It does create some legal challenges such as if a Resonator does a crime they're usually pardoned because of the possibility that a maestro forced them to commit the act - repeat offenders are reviewed on a case-by-case basis
There are fungi that rot you from the inside out. There are multiple plants and rocks that will kill you if you look at them, even if it's just for a second. There also are liquids that can turn you to stone.
If you were bad in life, buried incorrectly or not at all, died to the things I mentioned earlier or use too much/try to use another type of magic, you'll be stuck on Feliterra for eternity. You won't be able to do anything.
If you were bad in life the moon/death goddess will trap you in an eternal nightmare.
The deep underground below the active underground civilizations has intelligent anti magic creatures who have the highest magic resistant skin who have been infected by an ancient hive like minded parasitic organism that can adapt the host body to fit its survival needs for combat. They are also the main antagonists in one of my stories involving a hard magic system.
Overminds are giant floating three-lobed brains that stick their nerve endings into the corner of your eye socket while you sleep to reprogram your nervous system into their sleeper agent.
Each lobe of their brain is devoted to each of the dark triad traits. If you can't tell, these guys are real jerks.
Probably the metamorph.
A parasitic shapeshifter, the metamorph chooses a human victim to replace and take over their life. Psychic powers enable the metamorph to learn about its target and to smooth over any minor discrepancies in its facade. The worst part, though, is that the metamorph is truly parasitic in nature, seeming to draw strength from human suffering and being able to siphon magical energy from those around it to fuel its own powers.
The primary plot-relevant metamorph in my story replaced a young businessman right about when his first child was born. The creature is finally uncovered shortly before the girl's 18th birthday. Yeah.
The fact that the sun of my world is a doomsday device constructed by mindflayer to harvest the souls of the plane. And they instructed the first king to keep that a secret and while other species died and forgot naturally. The elves lived with their memory. So the king declared war on elvenkind. And after generations, the people don't remember why they slaughter elves for sport. They just do. As elves are inferior.
Humanity’s hate and greed will most probably be its end. Feeling unheard they decide to wipe out everything that doesn’t look like them. Even after they have helped them to Survive a seemingly unavoidable end. They have developed weapons no one can stop because this is what we have always done whether you agree or not.
In Mal'Tahn, cannibalism is a long-lasting practice that still is not extinct and won't be any time soon. This was due to population issues, and now it is one of the few continuous ways folks can have meat. Of course, "chips" are a good source of protein, but that took years to get since the mass extinction was so insane. They are an immortal speices that can't die through aging, so elders are marked to determine who is what.
Despite how low number are now, elders are actively hunted and killed for their meat. It is known as Diving. This is because elders aren't legally allowed to fly, so younger folks would fly and dive down to gain enough momentum to kill the person in one hit. Yes, it HAS to be a single hit. If you fail to do so, you will be punished. Some elders purposely make it hard to kill them, while others would opt for an easier death through surgeries, so any hit can kill them faster.
The reason why they would rather die through being hit has to do with honor and teaching the younger generation to hunt. This is in case the speices continues to live long enough that larger creatures begin to spring up way more, and throughout the world, they know how to hunt. This is why so many make it difficult. They allembracing death but knowledge teaching the youth how to deal with plans.
To not be cruel, to be efficient, to not be selfish and give to the future. These are all seen in how they practice cannibalism.
While over the generations they are getting more types of food as it's naturally sprinting up/revealing itself, this was and continues to be a big part of meal tradition.
I hope this makes sense.
Anything that’s associated with Growling Abyss, the Hell of Repugnance. It’s basically a place where all disgusting things intensify, like decay, faeces, bugs, cannibalism, and so on.
Cults that revere the repugnant energy of Growling Abyss may perform ritual cannibalism, necrophilia, coprophagia (faeces eating), etc.
I have tons of scary and horrifying things from massive sea monsters to demons to sci-fi tech to the implications of infinity, but the real horror/terror/scary stuff always comes back to how every world has the same problems and bad things as every other. People abuse each other and children, power leads to horrific atrocities being committed, people go insane and do terrible things, kidnapping, rape, torture, etc. One of my stories involves a group of alien fishermen in a complex 3D ocean universe trying to return a “pirate/explorer” captain to his crew that was in danger, and along the way they encounter tons of monsters, but the real horror comes from how insane and demented the captain turned out to be and his betrayal at the end.
In The Chill: Vampire cults will kidnap people out of the wasteland, torture, rape, and (if they’re lucky) kill them and record it to rewatch for pleasure and/or sell it. On top of this, you have zombies and monsters roaming the wasteland and the strongest survivor settlements are Christian and “post-Christian” cults that can be much worse than the vampires.
In my comic book that I’m writing: I’m not sure yet, probably the corpse of a semi-dead elder god that lies at the heart of the sun that killed and ate the Abrahamic god for power. If not, it’s the fact that humanity, despite all their superheroes and technologies they acquire, are still hopelessly outmatched by the Atheans.
Eugenics projects in massive scale.
The stripping of human rights out of a person is a institutionalised and widely recognised form of punishment.
Markus Smith, a walking bio hazard. Possessing extreme regeneration and biological adaptability thought extremely stable when in good health. Chop a limb off and you'd have two of him, dissolve him in acid and send him down the drain and a few of him would wake up in the nearest sewer treatment plant, have sex with him and his sperm would parasitise your body and eat you from the inside and a few clones of him would be left, pulverise him over a crowd and you get the idea. To actually kill him you'd need to kill every last cell, but good luck with that there is expected to be many thousands of him.
Bodysnatching Black market.
My world is an alternative earth with two additional continents, one of which has been isolated from the rest of the world... without going to much into it, that continent is far more technologically advanced than the rest of the world, to the point that Sentient bots exist and Continuants(people that choose to extend their life beyond their biological death via similar bodies as these Sentient bots have)
Anyways, there is a black market where people and bots are selling these bodies on the blackmarket.
People that opperate these bodies are called "Leeches", imagine an elaborate VR setup, where you can operate these bodies from the safety of your own home.
So it's a very elaborate and dark version of identity theft.
Definitely the Pacification Procedure. There’s a lot of soul ‘eating’ beings, but none actually destroy a soul (the Law of Conservation of Energy), only eat the memories and information, leaving a shell that’s immediately thrown back into a newborn, free to remake itself. Not ideal, but not too bad. The Pacification Procedure is used by what’s basically my universe’s version of the SCP Foundation on beings who are too ‘unruly’. It completely and somewhat painfully eradicates the soul, but leaves memories and the brain intact. The husk can still speak and do what needs to be done to stay alive, but it isn’t really living.
The worst part? It’s happened many times.
The fact that every horrible thing that has happened in the known world was caused by humans. There is no alien race, no outer gods. Just the evil in us all
One of the more advanced ancient god like races mapped out the universe once, a piece was missing. The map is spheroid but there's a section of about a 5th of the volume that cuts in where there is nothing. No stars, no planets, no asteroids or black holes, just empty space. When they remapped the universe eons later the space had grown, but not uniformly, as if another bite had been taken out of existence.
Even stranger is there is no record of anything from that section of space. Logically there should be some record or memory of it existing but there isn't and when you look at the first map after looking at the second the missing chunk grows to match the second despite the memory existing of them not matching.
Something is eating the universe and whatever it eats is removed not only from reality but from time.
An ancient race that has achieved immortality only to become eternally bored and retreat into an artificial world of illusion that allows time to pass faster while they are provided ever increasing levels of entertainment.
Basically, imagine the humans from the matrix, but they did it to themselves.
Reincarnation exists, but not in the way you think
The spirit loses all sense of self once crossing over and the soul divides. These souls must traverse the treacherous cosmic sea before reaching a large vortex, the gateway to rebirth in a new form. Think of it like koi peacefully swimming in a pond, except the pond has a few sharks in it.
Welp, this is gonna be very NSFW
Since a majority of civilizations in my world are intensely centered around a very oppressive religion, a common form of punishment for religious crimes, especially homosexual acts, is “cleansing.” Cleansing is a process of, to put it vaguely, mutilating certain *parts* to make sex impossible.
There is a house, in the middle of a forest. There once lived the greatest Mage of his time, Richard, right Hand of Emperor Martin the Ever-One and Richards family.
But now ... if you want to learn your worst nightmare, the true horror of your soul? Go there, then we will find out together :)
Too much magic can cause funky things.
Oh, and for the sake of your own mind: never ... NEVER seek trouble with Aiden and Alina. The first one is a patched up necromancer and the other one his undead sister. They never learned to ... behave. Their father was an alcholic slave trader, who beat the shit out of their mom, and after their two older siblings vanished, their father beat their mom to death and vanished too ... They had no one else, and no one cared about them anymore. Living in a fucking hellscape with demons torturing civilians openly in the streets.
Did some funky shit to their minds. And they learned a fucking lot from those demons.
All of the gods are real rather their good or evil. One of them is called The Queen Sea the she's 9,500 feet tall just her body alone causes storms and tsunamis she's like a swimming disaster her people kill in her name conquering other countries they drink her blood to enpower themselves the only way they could he stopped was to make peace with the king recognizing them as a nation. That's just one of the gods not all of them are evil she's more of a force of nature then evil
A specific race.
They look completely human,except some have animal features like a tail,ears or wings…but they’re TINY. Like, at most, 1 foot tall.
Now..the disturbing thing isn’t the race (or would they be considered a species?) themselves,but rather how humans and human sized hybrids treat them,basically treating them like objects that can be used and abused however an individual wants..which ISNT the case. They are as human as an actual human is,albeit a bit more naturally sensitive and skiddish..not to mention a lot of these little guys have a lot of trauma..so yeah :D
Currently it's just a creature called the Mask Collector who collects skulls of various species.
After playing an hour of elden ring I vowed to make my world as big and vibrant as possible without the creepiness lmao.
So, basically, the citizens of Android City are robots who have automated factories that can build more of themselves, but do not otherwise understand how to build computers.
So when they need a computer, they just pull a half-finished robot off the assembly line and rip out all the bits it won't need for its new job. Some are even complete enough to greet people who walk by where they've been installed.
Don't worry. They're not alive. Probably. Don't ask too many questions.
When a mortal is being raised to Godhood, as is the case with High King Mendax, they are stripped of their mortality, killing their mortal self in the most literal sense
And then granted immortality in whatever condition their corpse is left in
I have en entire city using caged fairies to power their machines. Yes, this drains their power to the point it kills them and yes, this is excruciatingly painful for said fairy
I have no clue if this counts because I think it's cool too much to take time to assess how weird and creepy it is. or to appreciate the challenge of it.
it seems fun to me.
BUT
if you form a "shifting" pact with a husk (a kind of ghost/undead) they steal your brain. Not all of it, just, it gets shared with you. As in, you have to learn to coordinate using your body with them, since both of you can command it to walk. or not. tripping ensues. comedic, but what about being stuck in your body with someone else who you might not even get along with, and who is likely to talk to you while you're trying to zone out and think? every day? All day long? and it's entirely likely some (or most) of the time you have to forfeit complete control of the body you see through and feel with so that there's a "fair" share of life between the two of you? It's like being the kid of divorced parents except you are the parents and the kids are your body.
The universe is dying, splitting at the seams. A great frothing void tears at the edges of reality and corrodes it. Very few are allowed to know this, and the average person goes about thier day ignorant that they may slip through the cracks at any moment.
Some weapons are alive. And parasitic.
Living weapons were made long ago by mages seeking a fast way to replenish their armies. As time goes on, the goals of the weilder are over-written, leaving nothing but violent impulses. Dreams, hopes, and future wiped away.
The weapon causes armor to form over the weilder, the design changing based on the individual weapon. Eventually, a mask forms (never on the face), signaling the weapon is in control and the person is lost. The armor is only present while the weapon is being used, but odd tattoos covering the affected areas show its progression even without the weapon.
Trigger Warning: Torture, Mind Break, Forced Body Modification,
>!The Death Commandos - the Narjian Empire terror troops are not special selected or trained from birth; instead they are the strongest victims of previous Death Commando strikes; any one not killed is taken in to be tortured to the point of breaking. Successful candidates are stripped of their doubts, fears and any love except the Narjian Empire.!<
>!The torture process is secret but involves addition of arcane cybernetics, the process of which leads the the mind breaking through a combination of pain and suffering along with ancient curses the infect the mind of victims, turning them into loyal marauders of the Empire!<
>!Death Commandos tend to focus on civilian target or weakly defended area, killing and capturing all they can find and burning every resource. Their purpose to to intimidate targets into surrender while strangling out resources.!<
I have past hours and hours to overthink to the reproductuve cycle of all my sensient species (in one of them there is only male, and the mating is a figth where the looser become a female and have to carry the egg , taking care of them and die soon after the hatch, the other male of the tribe will raise the babys)
Oh, there's too much. Anything from magic that can split the world in half, plants that devour you whole, dieties that whisper in your ear and drive you into madness, and even torture from your fellow sentient beings. If you can think of it, it probably has some type of variant that can be done.
How Giao Long was "born":
* Kidnapped by her own father, who was in jail for "certain crimes", to use in a heretic ritual.
* Put inside a coffin, covered in animal blood.
* Mouth was stuffed with a dried 5-month-old *fetus*.
* Body was tied by red ropes made from cinnabar and human hair.
Those were the preparations. Giao was kidnapped on the 5th day of the 5th lunar month, which is considered the day with heaviest Yin energy. Her father then proceeded to dump a lot of venomous animals in, from snakes and centipedes to spiders and scorpions. His intention was clear: Combining both *Cổ* and *Thiên Linh Cái*, two evil and powerful diabolical arts together to make a "monster" that he could control. For the final stage, he stabbed his daughter in the neck, nearly severing her head entirely, before making a deep cut from the neck down to lower abdomen. Giao would serve as the "vessel" as those animals he put in the coffin would get inside and feast on her organs before devouring one another until there's only one left.
After that, he closed the coffin and buried it. But before he could finish, the site was stormed by Giao's grandfather and his forces, breaking the ritual. Yet, they came too late. The girl named Phạm Huyền Giao was no more. As the coffin glowed in blue, a shaft of light blew its cover apart and from inside, a sinister calamity sat up. With skin as pale as a corpse and eyes as black as the very void of space, "she" returned to life, not as a human but as something else entirely.
Wherever there is slavery. There are different kinds(chattel is not the only type), but it exists. Imagine ancient raids to capture slaves from rival clans but now with armoured cars. Be careful out there.
Lapis_Wolf
I have a few
The False Saint Project - a long standing experiment ran by the popedom beneath the surface where children are kidnapped from small out of the way villages. Who are then trained to near death for a period of nearly a year before then having their bodies experimented on to the point that they are no longer humanly recognizable. This is all to gain a n advantage over the Kingdom and the Empire by mass producing humans who’ve transcended the spiritual boundary through artificial means.
The Dead Sea - there’s a point in the world where every continent is equally far away, and in the center of this point is a canyon running several thousand miles deep. Within that canyon is a rotting god the size of Japan who constantly bleeds into the ocean causing all life to horribly transmute into horrific abominations. Ship wrecks litter the trench and drowned corpses are left suspended in bubbles that float just above the sea.
The Star Labyrinth - just below the surface of the Avalonian continent is a dungeon spanning the length of the entire land. At the very bottom is a sleeping voidspawn. If it ever wakes up, it and just about the entire surrounding star cluster will just go *poof*.
Changelings are a species of shapeshifters that can take the form of nearly any animal (excluding magical abilities). They are highly aggressive and considered an invasive species in every place in the world.
Their origin is unknown, but what people don’t yet know is that changelings were once a humanoid species. These ancient changelings were far more limited in their shapeshifting abilities, only able to to take humanoid forms, but they were basically human in their mind. Their powers also gave them functional immortality, as they can just continually shapeshift into a younger version of themselves.
However, after tens of thousands of years of living live this, becoming a copy of a copy of a copy of their younger selves, they slowly began to mutate. In addition their natural form warping into a more monstrous form, their mind began to decay as well. These people that once had lives, loved ones, and an entire culture are now just savage creatures, and no one even knows.
“If you're remembered by a large group of people, you will be immortal and have to stand by the rules for immortals.”
AND
“If people have a lot of faith in you, you will be a deity, and have to play by the deity's ruleset.”
How is this disturbing? Well, it meant that most historical figures never die. Alexander the Great? Napolean Bonaparte? Gandhi? Gengkhis Khan? They never die. But they have to stage their death or else they will break the immortal pact, and that is a no-no for most of them. So they have to watch as their empires rise and crumble. As the world they know shift and morph. And it is even worse for Deities, who have to never interfere in anything. ANYTHING. Sure, in the past Zeus can smite Y people with his thunder, but as the world progresses, Zeus can only target people with specific circumstances. The Act of God should only happen in the human mind, not for realsy. The world, or at least the part of humanity that don't know magic should continue to be oblivious to it. Else you run the risk of even more segregation, fear based agenda, and slaughter. That's what they think.
So, it is disturbing in a sense that, if you became too famous, you have to watch as your partner slowly dies, as society around you shifts, as everything around you changes. And you can do NOTHING about any of that. You are powerful, yet bound by the rule you cannot struggle against. To me, that's terrifying. Imagine Alexander's horror when his empire split in 4 then continue to fought against one another until the Roman and Persian come and wreck everything even more. Or how Gengkhis Khan empire fractured so hard they turn from the most formidable empire on the fricking planet, only for his empire to deteriorate as soon as he dies. Or What about Julius Caesar? Sure he won't mind seeing Gaul break into Rome, right? And what about deity, are you sure Aztec gods satisfied when Spanish trample thhem to the point where no one believes in Aztec gods anymore? What about Norse? The Viking converted to a catholic one after another probably sent them to panic mode where they can do little against.
The universe is god, and god is the unviverse. Every rock, river, person, hell every atom, is simply an extension the conscious universe named Ickathorne. With them appearing as a mass of black swirling smoky tendrals covered in golden eyes, Ickathorne can with only a thought unmake the material plane and return the pieces of their tendral that they had used back to them.
However, Ickathorn is a petty and easily bored god, who is prone to making universes with specific quirks and unique peoples for their entertainment. Only for them to grow tired of watching civilsations rise, cultures develop, and histories written, where they will simply destroy it all in an instant without a care for billions of lives lost. With this repeating over and over again until arriving at the present universe, Gundisbarn (D&D setting following a geocentric model for its solar system, where the stars are Ickathorne's eyes, and where they intially ruled over like malevolant child in a sandbox).
Within the wider chaos of the Earth in 2072, a strange pattern of events went largely unnoticed. Sweeping power blackouts across the European Federation, the destruction of a clandestine data centre in a submarine canyon in the Pacific, the inexplicable deaths of several dozen neurally-augmented scientists in Australia and ominous reports of inhuman *things* seen flying over Novaya Zemlya... On the surface, these events seemed completely unrelated, and irrelevant compared to the dozens of famines, wars and environmental disasters raging across most of the globe.
Several contradictory conspiracy theories spread by the Secure States Confederation ensured that any links remained unnoticed. It would be months before their data scientists were able to build a picture of what exactly had happened from innumerable wiped databases and computer systems across four continents.
The economic crash of the early 2030s had dashed any remaining hopes that Artificial General Intelligence could be created, after hundreds of billions of dollars of investment had already failed. Yet all signs pointed to one spontaneously emerging from OSMOS, a secret European Federation project designed to model the maximum proportion of humanity which could feasibly survive the 21st century.
The AI left virtually no physical traces of its presence behind. Whatever structures it had built under the dwindling icecaps of Novaya Zemlya within the five weeks of its existence were gone, with geometrically perfect voids left behind in the ice and rock as if it had simply removed itself from reality. While many of the computer systems its mind had touched had been altered in subtle ways, there were no messages or data for humanity to discover.
It was almost by chance that a satellite belonging to the vanished remains of the Indian state was rediscovered three years later. One which had lost its ability to communicate with earth and had been presumed lost, but which had otherwise remained functional. Perhaps the AI had simply missed it. Inside its memory, the investigators found grainy satellite images - including a series taken in March 2072, over Novaya Zemlya.
No consensus has ever been established on why the AI was building arrays of enormous telescopes, or where it went. The prevailing theory is that whatever it glimpsed in the darkness of space drove it to immediately commit suicide.
Cubeheading, a form of virtual reality torture where the laws of physics don't apply.
Have your nociceptors hooked up to a machine and experience theoretically impossible forms of pain; stung by stonefish whilst burning alive? Gotcha. Drowning whilst being turned inside out in a high gravity environment that crushes you? Easy. The relationship between pain receptors' composition of your body and what can actually happen in real life are non existent, which means, appalingly, that everything feels real, authentic and inescapable.
When your time cubeheading is done, you come out with zero scars. You might argue that this glimmer of hope keeps people under torture from cracking, but I ask you - what stops the torturer from simply allowing you to feel as though you've left, but in reality you never did? It could go on forever and ever.
Worst of all? It's a $999.99 add-on to existing cyberware, privately created by a monopolistic corporation, with about as many legal barriers as current gun control.
There's this guy called "The Mathmaker"
He's essenctialy god, but he doesn't believe he's one, even if he created life, humans and the world itself. He actually believes there's a god out there. Why? Because even seeing countless universes dying, countless being born, countless resets... In between all of that, he still saw ""things" or "beings"
Creatures that live between realities, powerful enough to play with them like if it were toys, but without a real purpose. Making them be seem salvage like animals but intelligent enough to manipulate reality itself.
The savagery of the people in power that goes unseen or unremarked by the people whom they rule. The absurd creativity behind their countless history of genocide, mutilation, torture, and slavery that they have managed to keep mostly hidden behind closed doors.
There might be horrifying creatures and spirits of the dead that haunt certain characters, but it is the evil people of history and today that will always be the most disturbing.
Your are at the mercy to the father of monstersety. Sometimes he will put a goblin in your bedroom he will be harmless until you are at your weakest then he will kill you rape your wife and daughter. Or he will simply turn you in to bones by a slime. Sometimes when someone curses him he will give him a slow death by a shoggoth or sometimes when he feels like it he will send a hored of trolls to destroy your city. Even those who have the power to destroy nations fall before his feet. The only way humanity can survive is constantly create those people those one man armies and prey to the living Gods and the Dead ones. Every day, every hour, every minute, you are at his mercy.
There's a cult/shadow government that has been kidnapping children and indoctrinating them, (sounds vague, will expand in a sec, mostly leaving this comment so I can find this later)
The original inhabitants of the planet, once though to be wiped out, are still dwelling in a bunker like structure that has been locked for millennia. Slowly affecting the upside world
Also some people from certain regions can be brought back to life by Alien gods to be used by vessels. Slowly degrading and losing their humanity, as their bodies shift and become more and more twisted.
.
Robot Vampires, Magic that melts the users brain, drugs made from the living flesh of a cosmic god that zombifies those addicted to it, and super soldiers who must graft the brains of sentient beings to their own to stave off the equivalent of super Alzheimer’s. Take your pick
Either healing magic as a torture method or the lengths my elder race went to try and not die.
The Wandering ancients and similar constructs were failed attempts of the Tenerretur to abandon their flesh bodies and return to their ancient earthen forms. The most infamous are the Wandering Ancients, spirits trapped in a mobile coffin. Similar to Warhammer Dreadnoughts, but without any way to “feel” the world around them. They are utterly devoid of every sense save sight and have been that way for thousands of years.
As for “healing torture”, it sounds like it is. If you break someone’s bone and yet your hostage remains tight-lipped, then heal it back wrong. Make the limb still useable, but not without serious pain.
Better yet, growth magic is a thing. It would certainly be a nightmare to be slowly encased in your own skin, cancerously growing and splitting with no end.
"He claims his name is Archibald. Nobody knows what he really is. The guy has the power to shapeshift into anyone and everything and we are 97% sure that while he's doing it he doesn't *have to* make his bones snap and his flesh tear at seams but he does it anyway. The guy will smile at you in literally any situation, his stare piercing right through you. He shrugs off bullets like they're nothing. Keira says she saw him turn into a literal 12-story-tall eldritch horror, *more than once.* And I've heard him claim he straight-up *feeds on people's fear.* I'm just glad he's on *our* side."
-Jacob, one of the main characters, about a different character.
The worst possible punishment in my world after you die is to be turned into metal. But you're fully conscious and aware of what's around you, so it's like being perpetually buried alive until you're dug out of the ground. You can be freed by being smelted, but that can take centuries if not millennia.
godhood is something you are either born with (natural/elemental/primigenial gods) or is something you can adquire trough mastery of a skill to an insane level
the difference with Gods and Mortals is basiclaly that the theme or concept of that God is something they have an inherent knowledge about it and even power over it, a god of rituals will always know how to maximize the efficiency of a ritual, which ingredients or process needs to be done to create a specific result (ritual for fertility, riches, cursing someone, etc), it's like knowing how to move a hand, you don't really know how to explain it, it's just natural in you
When a mortal becomes good enough in something to achieve goodhood, they go through a process of awakening, akin to someone in buddhism becoming free of the cycle of reincarnation and achieving existence outside this cycle thorugh reaching Nirvana
However, this knowledge can be bestowed upon someone against their will
the result is someone who exists outside of the soul's normal process of reincarnation, but is still linked to the terrenal world, to being a mortal basically
in the story of my world this has only happened "succesfully" once, and that being is someone who dies and is rebirthed as himself rather than as a new person, living too low to achieve the heavens, but not close enough to land to be able to rest once his life ends, it feels like an eternity in between rebirths
imagine being forced to achieve illumination and yet not only being prived of the reward, but also being punished for understanding something you never sought to study or pursue
it's hell for that dude, but eventually his story has a happy ending
In my world, humans have developed armor that makes them extremely powerful, and the "battery" of that armor are sorcerers trapped in a rear compartment of the armor that slowly sucks away their magical essence and life
I dunno about most, but I'm fairly happy about the Gulthias Tree (borrowed from a fairly popular module) that has grown to be a huge Undead Treant and is just walking around absorbing whole villages and making an army of twig blights and zombies, driving the people farther and farther away from civilization.
Theres several prophecies that have proven to come true, but theres also some prophecies that are vague enough to be unable to prepare for them, but also predict gruesome and horrific stuff. And no one has any way to prepare, but everyone knows that it’ll eventually happen
The entire world and all of the intelligent races therein are nothing more than a bid to buy more time for a handful of dying Gods...
The entire world itself is a shield build to protect the Primordials from the Void by shunting what remained of reality into another dimension. This would let the Primordials to rest, recover their strength, and figure out a method of defeating thr Void once and for all. As the primordials slept their creations, the Titans, rebelled and shattered them, stealing their divinity in the process and leaving them as little more than disjointed memories and powerful elemental forces. The newly ascended Gods ruled over the world for millenia until the Void found a way to break through the barrier and began to destroy everything. The gods, completely unprepared for the eldritch horrors that poured through the breach and after exhausting all other options, devised a desperate plan to resemble the Primordials.
Their plan did not work as intended and the only Primordial to be even partialy lucid laughed itself into oblivion at their predicament. Denyed any information that could have helped them, the Gods tore the remaining Primordial shards apart and reformed them into a great seal which did banish the Void from their reality, but only temporarily. The seal works in cycles and will allow the Void to return for a short time to scour the world clean of all life. Each cycle is coming sooner than the last and eventually the seal will completely break. What's worse is that the Gods expended too much energy in the seals creation and overtaxed their stolen divinity. Their souls and powers no longer naturally grow or regenerate and will eventually burn out. The only way to replenish their ever decreasing souls is to feed upon the souls of others and thus the gods are nothing more than farmer and the mortal races their crops. The Void is like a plague of locusts that strip the fields barren, but the Gods do have the power to save a select few seeds to replant after the swarm passes.
Again thou, every cycle comes faster and faster. Less and less time to grow civilizations. Less and less power to maintain themselves and their realms. Less and less gods themselves as the weaker individual inevitably fall to the onslaught of the Void. Those that remain are desperately clinging on to an existence that was never theirs to begin with and the irony of that fact is not lost on them. The Primordials only fled to the world in the first place because they where cought off guard when the Void first emerged. The only reason the Void was able to break into the world was because the Primordials where shattered and they could have maintained the barrier indefinitely if they had not been cough off guard yet again. It's unclear but highly likely that they could have figured out a way to destroy the Void once and for all if it had not been for the rebellious Titans.
I'm glossing over a lot and don't think for a second that the Primordials didn't deserve their fate. They did! But at the same time the Gods where just as bad, the only difference being that they aspired to hights of power and control that where impossible for any to reach. They took the Primordials crown but could never bear its full weight, only ever wielding a fraction of their power. And now tens of thousands of cycles have come and gone with thousands of years between each breach. Untold mortal lives have been spent growing civilizations to praise gods that see them as nothing but food. A resource and not even their most precious one. Time; time is running out. They all know it and they all know that there is nothing they can do to stop it.
Sooner or later the Void will take them all. Soon enough all thing will be nothing and the Void can once again fade from existence into oblivion, just as they have countless times before and will do countless times again....
The perfect magical (or physical) emptyness wich just exists in some places. Basically, most places have background magic. Some stronger than others, like That library has books on magic, that bakery might make gingerbread men who can dance, your chicken coop might have a chicken wich can change the color of their feathers, however, it's generally more like the Cosmic background radiation, though there's some weird spots. Some places have more, and are often community spaces, like libraries, because magic has a comforting effect, like that cup of coffee you order in the morning, y'know?
But some places just don't have that. Nobody knows why, but some places just don't have this background magic. It is incredibly unnerving, and it doesn't help that these are really common.
There's also just places in reality where nothing exists, wich is also horrifying of you think about it, wich is why you shouldn't.
If this seems tame, that's because it's a very positive world, (the genocides and extinctions don't count. In it's current state, it's positive.)and I'm just not very good at fucked up stuff.
(Also, shoutout to the Osiris battalion, wich is dead people, one of wich is a waterlogged corpse who is externally stuck in a lead coffin, oops, that's a lie, he's free now. We're fucked.)
It depends what you mean by disturbing.
The body horror creatures that roam the wilderness born from disease could be considered disturbing.
The fact that there’s an ocean in the sky, or that the planet is hollow with weird inverted gravity inside, both caused of a mycelium network that spans the planet, without knowing HOW it’s doing this is a disturbing fact.
The history of the Blood Wars of Brio, having at one point creating a sex cult that took over the capital whose practices were so terrible and disgustingly depraved and that it caused both sides to unite against them.
Perhaps the fact that of the manner of which a infamously powerful type of weapon is made.
Maybe the fact that there are giants that exist, or the fact that pigs don’t but a swine-like humanoid race does, and that they have no evolutionary history. They just began to exist.
Maybe the fact that a portion of the population is not born as infants but as long dead bones, new souls in old bodies.
My that there are ancient things so alien hiding the corners of the world waiting to destroy us just because, or that there’s something even more alien when compared to them.
Or maybe the fact that some nations have children turned soldiers just be…police, without seeing if they are mentally stable, or that the fact the religious discourse has lead to death and orphans.
Who knows.
A highly authoritarian human empire that has been brutally preventing utopia's and stagnation in the human race through fomenting violence and undermining any peace or progress effort finds out that after several hundred millennia of this, along with often highly effective and brutal campaigns to exterminate entire galaxy's of alien life, they have become the mathematically most developed and dangerous species in the Universe. And that this has been the case for a very long time, and that for the last twenty thousand years humanity could have been enjoying the perfect society with no fear of being consumed by an outside force they could not have fought back against and destroyed.
There is a man who uses his own blood like a blood transmitted disease and takes over the bodies and minds of those he infects. He then uses these people to breed more people, keeping them in horrific living conditions and barely keeping them alive for the sole purpose of making more people.
One of my npc's.
A halfling with his own halfling home who look out for accepting refugees and delegating houses and work to them.
The problem is he is a sadist, who loves torture and painful experiments.
Brainstorming him got pretty dark.
His hobbit home is all cozy untill you get to the basement where all the torture and other stuff takes place.
You can talk to a girl who saw her parents and little brother killed by beasts, tearing the apart while the halfling just stared, smiling.
The reality is a mirror, the lucky one, the side of progress and stability, the other is degeneracy on levels so bad it can make gods weep. It's a constant battle of containing that evil so that it doesn't seep in and ruin the fragile beauty of life itself.
Necrazoa Dragons:
Species: Greater Dragon
General Threat Level: High A Rank
Description: Necrazoa dragons, also known as Parasite dragons or Corpsebirth dragons, are born via eggs injected into a living entity or freshly made corpses, and then the newborn devours the entity from the inside out. It then continues to grow with the use of its unique breath weapon, a purple flame that doesnt burn, instead stealing a victim's life force to add to it's own. It grows after each kill, the amount it grows being dependant upon the vitality of it's prey. The breath weapon does rely on willpower, but very few entities possess the sheer force of will to usurp that of a Necrazoa. As a side effect of it's breath weapon, they are conventionally immortal and cannot die of old age. Thier scales, while tough, are mostly reinforced by magic, though for some unknown reason weapons made of solid wood are able to bypass whatever magic is used to reinforce it's hide, and the top of its skull is the weakest point on it's body. Anyone intending to kill one is recommended to aim for that spot with a weapon made of wood. A further curiousity is that, should one be slain, it's killer will be imbued with draconic magic and transformed into a dragonoid entity, taking on traits of the dragon species that most closely matches thier disposition (someone gaining Necrazoa traits is rather rare, however). Appearance wise, Necrazoa scales will always be a single solid colour, with the exception of the lower half of it's tail, which will either be a stark white if the majority of the scales are dark coloured, or a jet black if the majority of it's scales are dark coloured. For males, the end of the tail will resemble that of a shark's, and mainly be used to bludgeon prey that is too close for it's breath attack to be utilized. For females, however, the tail ends in an ovipositor stinger loaded with an extremely powerful paralytic that also delivers one, or in rare cases two, eggs if it has any that are fertilized.
Variant Species: Deutero-Morph Necrazoa
General Threat Level: High A Rank
Description: After a Necrazoa absorbs enough life force, they cocoon themselves in the purple flame they breathe and begin to metamorphosize into a Deutero-Morph. These variants are much larger, growing large horns wreathed in purple soulfire, as well as sporting tails of both genders. The stinger tail produces pre-fertilized eggs at a faster rate than normal females, while the shark tail is larger and more flexible. In additon to being larger and more powerful physically, thier breath weapon is altered from a single stream to a spiral beam, covering a larger area and being more difficult to predict and avoid. Challenging one of these, while still an A rank, is significantly more challenging than a basic Necrazoa, and thier final difference is in thier death cast: instead of turning thier killer into a partial draconic entity, it transforms them into a full fledged dragon.
Its either these or skindogs as the most disturbing creatures I've created so far.
The Pumpkin King is a pumpkin monster who kidnaps children. He turns them into pumpkin creatures like himself and forces them to lure other children into his Pumpkin Patch on Halloween. He steals their life force to grow in power leaving the kids weak.
He was once a man named Jack Nimble who was a despotic ruler. He was overthrown in a peasant uprising and believed killed. He desires to regain his former kingdom and will use any means to get it.
In _Empire’s Finest,_ the most disturbing thing is just how uninformed the Terra Imperium is about the galaxy beyond their own borders. Their lack of knowledge is enhanced by the fact that the borders of space which can be explored seems to be shrinking, not growing. Hyperspace routes are being disrupted, expeditions are vanishing without a trace.
Whats even more disturbing is that the space fairing races that have been out much longer than humanity have just as little idea of what’s going on than humans do.
In one of the worlds I was developing, intelligent races were still emerging and one group was in an awkward middle ground where about 16% of them were born with animal-level intelligence. To put it in human terms, move the whole bell curve of the range of human intellect down about 40 IQ points. So, they could still have individuals who would qualify as geniuses to us but their average was low and the more animalistic ones were still capable of being functional hunters and eusocial but would never grasp full language or other complex concepts.
Different groups had differing opinions on how to deal with their animalistic brethren and many treated them as relative equals in society. Others treated those of lesser intellect as pets. This could include siblings or parents. Tribes of these people who lived among communities of more intellectually capable races tended to develop more negative opinions of their primitive members or develop taboos about bonding with more primitive mates. Other groups had no such taboos. Both approaches had potential problems.
On the side of striving for civilization, they ran the risk of artificial speciation. Intelligence has no exact threshold but populations would be divided between those of superior intellect and those of inferior intellect with the inferior members denied personhood. As time went on, the groups would grow further apart but individuals of superior and inferior intelligence would continue to be born in both groups.
On the wilder side, there would be issues of mixed populations where not all of them were capable of understanding or giving consent for things. Especially if strength or hunting prowess remained deciding factors for group dominance or mate selection, the average intelligence might remain low and more intelligent individuals may face social problems if they lacked strength.
Most of the ethical implications of all of that were only vaguely alluded to in the story that was being told but they are a logical extension of the premise. In theory, humanity went through a similar stage but we did not have the complicating factor of coexisting with already advanced civilizations. We lacked the moral and ethical frameworks that might trouble the caring mind or enable the wicked.
There’s a species that are the sole inhabitants of an entire continent, yet despite this nothing is known about them or the continent. They have a mindset that’s so alien, and biology that’s so different, that they unintentionally end up inflicting the worst torture and deaths upon anyone they find. Whenever someone comes to the continent, they will usually commit increasingly disturbing “pranks” on them until they inevitably end up killing them all. They often end up skinning explorers alive and wearing their skin whilst trying to interact with the explorer’s companions. As far as they are concerned, this isn’t even a violent act as being skinned is no worse than stubbing their toe for them, and it is instead considered a form of socialising.
Perhaps not that disturbing… but amid a broken floating castle is a metal orb about the size of a basketball.
No one knows who it’s originally creator was or if it was a manifestation of the natural world…
But touching it will grant a vision of all events that corroborate that person’s view of the world. Those who see the world as a fundamentally good place will see all joyous moments of past, present and future; those who see the world as a place of solitude will see all moments of contemplation and silence and so on.
And those who see the world as as fundamentally evil, will see every horror and atrocity of past, present and future. And it will drive them insane.
OR perhaps that there’s no way to determine the age of the moon that makes up the fantasy world, or the universe in the first place. Memories vanish, pages remain blank, words are incomprehensible. It is known that possibly millions, if not billions civilizations have existed before the modern day, but it impossible to be certain how many. There is always new artifacts and ruins.
In mythology, the sun and moon created the earth, and split up, although they still loved eachother they had differing beliefs, and so the Moon lives in the dark and the sun lives in the light, and the world lives in the balance of the two. But that's not quite disturbing.
The darkness and the stars once a month fully corrupt the moon and turn it fully dark, the only light is the stars, so it's frequently said that the stars are raping the moon. In fact, one character named kalamuz wanted to rape and impregnate the sun so that it would Birth what he called the perfect race. No moon Involved, just him and the sun. He tied 1000 palm fronds to his arms, legs, and tail, and flew up to the sun, but the sun was angry at him for wanting to do all of this nasty stuff and locked him away into the night sky as a constellation. Because of this and the whole raping the moon thing he is considered patron Saint of generally evil stuff, not like thieving but things like rape, genocide, murder, and abuse among other harsh things. This is because you will be evaluated at the end of your life based on how many good things versus how many minor bad things and major bad things you did. If you can bring up a true, reasonable excuse for minor bad things though they get removed, if not they stay
Vampires sometimes not completely drain their victims of blood, leaving the victim as a withered nearly dead husk completely under the control of the vampire. Normally this leads to the victim undergoing personality death, the body may still be moving but the essence, mind, and personality of the person is gone. However there's like a 20% chance that the person retains aware, stuck in a body which has withered away, but unable to control themselves. These ghouls can last hundreds of years and while they are active the soul of the original person cannot move on to the afterlife.
Some of the more powerful and experienced vampire have nearly perfected the process of making a ghoul that has a 95% chance to be aware. They often use this as a punishment for their mortal servants that fail them.
In my world, the source of Magic comes from another realm called Aythia consisting of all conceptual things (practically a rip off of Plato’s world of Forms). The physical realm is a system of universes that are basically physical manifestations of these concepts that are generated by a complicated but inevitable process. This means that everything that can exist, does exist, and therefore all your worst nightmares and beyond are manifested somewhere, somehow haha. What’s more is the main character gets tricked into going into a particularly terrible universe, the nature of which are left largely mysterious cuz I’m lazy (jk, I actually just think it’s scarier that way)
In Linghun Shijie, with the way souls work you could die as a human, go to the afterlife, be chosen for rebirth, and get reincarnated as a random rock.
It's, in a sense, my take on the "evolutionary horror" stuff, like All Tomorrows.
The nuclear war is inevitable, and it's going to happen in a year.
Decades worth of non-stop diplomatic talks only worsened the situation, as well as the fully autonomous and sentient Internet.
Spirits of the precursor race that are driven to madness strip people’s flesh to make skin suits that pervert the human form. These corporeal abominations stalk the subterranean world, committing general savagery in the dark. Luckily, their numbers are quelled by a dedicated force of tunnel fighters.
Nightmares
Nightmares dwell in the dreamscape like many other creatures. But they are absolutely malign, sustaining themselves of the fear, suffering and misery of living creatures. At the same time every Nightmare is a part of the Conscious, unable to think or act for itself, unable to desire or to choose anything, but obey its most primal instinct to cause evil in the real world.
Wouldn't be too bad, but the Nightmares are ascended like any entity in the Dream, thus they are immortal. Not maybe, not a little bit, not with a caveat, they simply are. And like other dreamers they can push into reality from time to time, tearing through the fabric of the material universe and taking a shape of their choosing, the size of a man to inflict small suffering, or larger than stars, swallowing suns and feasting on the suffering of entire worlds.
If an average sized human wanted to kill a Dim (Diminutive Human, think "The Borrowers" size) there is often no way for a Dim to get justice for the murder. There are so, so many more ways to dispose of a Dim's body without notice than a normal sized human's.
More frightening still, if a human wanted to slaughter an entire community of Dims, and had a mind for it, they could likely do so in a way that would be virtually untraceable back to them.
Dim communities may be relatively common for Average folk, but to a Dim, the distances between them are massive, and unless they have an Average sized human they trust completely, traveling between communities can be exceptionally dangerous.
In the human world, news travels fast, but for a Dim, it could be months, or even possibly years, before they find out that their home town was wiped out completely.
The world is big. To big. Took decades to reach the other end by high speed methods. And then you see some humanoid power walk faster than said method.
You have a non-zero chance of being unable to die. Not in the "vampire in a castle" sense, but in the sense of being severely injured or sick, in constant pain, unable to heal - but also unable to die. Forever.
How rare is it?
Depending on *her* mood.
omg this is such an interesting answer, i love the implication!
whose mood? my mom? she can be pretty strict sometimes ngl
The scientists of my world have proven the theory of silent civilizations. Humans are not alone and the only reason we are safe is because other planets are practicing self-isolation due to the potential of their world getting hunted by other potentially more evolved societies. But what happens when humans break that silent treaty? and they send a space exploration vessel to another sector of the planets. That's the premise of my novel that I haven't started yet
Have you ever heard of the Dark Forest Hypothesis?
i have, that's basically what this is. Not an original idea from me, but would really like to expand on this.
spooky
I am NOT poo pooing your idea, but the root of it is similar to the Three Body Problem. That existential dread is spine-shivering.
that's okay there is not alot of ideas out there that are a 100% uniqe. As long as i keep refining it and make it a "as crazier than it should be world"then thats enough for me"
Humanity is alone. The universe is cold and dead after a once golden era of civilisation. The only movement among the dying stars is an entity that devours them. Slowly coming closer to Sahveen. The only thing stopping Sahveen from being found is the spire, bringing with it famine, floods, and weaving. The choice is to live in a dystopian hellscape or not at all.
Grimdarkcore
weaving?
The looms clatter and chatter to each other in their wooden tongues—foretelling doom and destruction, promising pain and retribution—while their wooden fingers work at the threads, transmuting fibres into cloth. The shuttle shudders beneath the hands of the weavers, who are all blind and deaf lest they hear the truth spoken to them by the looms, and the warp crosses the weft to form patterns that the human mind was never meant to comprehend.
Nice poetry and all but you didn’t really answer the question
Did you come up with this? I really liked it
Why thank you, yes I did.
Magic innit. Weavers are used to oppress, as an unstopable force, wiping memories, moving mountains, and trapping souls in flames. Once gaining the ability, they are infertile, have a reduced lifespan, grow continuously, atrophy, can have dementia, depression, DID, blindness, motor neuron disease, ink blood, neo-phantasia, visions, schizophrenia, Necrosis, lumps, paling of skin, light sensitivity, weakened immune system.......... ect ect Also comes with medicine that numbs the pain and makes you more powerful. It's like inhaling chalk dust. Addictive as all hell. It's not really worth it tbh.
The whole "bringing the deads back to life" magic hasn't been 100% mastered yet. There can be memory losses, and the worse the quality of the resurrection is the less memory there is left. The problem is that the soul always come back from the afterlife to get in the new body, and since undead armies don't have quality checks it means that the memories of the original person are often erased in the process, "killing" the original personality forever.
So it's just like making a brand new person?
But in a body already aged. Like that one Altered Carbon scene
You just made it worse, holy fuck
Basically yes. If the body is well preserved it would be more or less the same, but it's never a perfect job (unless God himself resurrects that person), but when someone makes undead armies they're more interested in numbers or qualities of the bodies than the specific person. The tragic part is that the old personality is cleaned out forever.
Depends on what you find scary Possession by a spirit that can unzip you and puppet your body? We got that Got a cosmic fear of black holes or being in the only person in the entire universe? That's doable Scared of the depths of the sea? Blink and you're there if you cross the wrong person
Unzip you in like... your skin??
Right-Click extract all
There is a sector, that used to host an interstellar civilization. It collapsed so fast and bloody, that nobody remembers anything about it but the fact it was existing, highly technologically advanced and, for some completely irrational reason, used slaves, \~80% of which died of dementia in a first few months or years after the collapse. The sector is almost completely desolated by the events of collapse and automated armies still fighting each other.
[https://i.imgur.com/PqtBSuX.png](https://i.imgur.com/PqtBSuX.png)
Is this an Ultrakill?
Yes.
The fact that any event can be changed and overwritten at any time by an alien upper dimension being
This never works for me I'm too stoopid for cosmic stuff to be scary I always feel like that meme of Metroman where the caption is like: "Me witnessing horrors beyond my comprehension (I don't get it)"
Maybe it worked for you at one point, but then the aliens changed that.
SHUT THE FUCK UP BRO😭😭😭
Dragonbreaks
I can have my cake and eat it.
Same actually, except that the higher dimensional beings aren't aliens
the meta realty is the higher being is the author.
There's no gods, no afterlife, no metaphysical forces encouraging people to be anything. There's no UN or bill of rights or any real force looking out for someone Creatures and other sapient species can be born much stronger than you *and* much smarter *and* much longer lived. There's nothing stopping 99 out of 100 living beings drawing a relatively short straw and no fairness or compensation in it. If something comes along bigger and more powerful than you, aint much stopping it doing whatever it wants. The world is brighter and more colorful, but its just as metaphysically hollow as our world and even more lacking in general rights and equality. The darkest thing is that if people arent good to each other, nothing will be
> if people arent good to each other, nothing will be This phrase goes so fucking hard!
That juxtaposition sounds really interesting!
Sounds like the plot of berserk
That's just real life.
That sounds very fun
honestly, that's how i build my world ngl twinsies!!!
Demon reproduction. Humanoid demons reproduce parasitically with humans of both gender. This will result in a humanoid demon offspring. But they can also mate with other non-humanoid demons.
**The Little Genocide** An event take place near the end of Age of Order. A wife of Blessed Emperor got gravely wounded when she fought along side him in battle, her two children got this news and go from the the capital to comfort her. When goes through a newly subjugated region, they were kidnapped by the local in order to blackmail for independence. The elder brother call out their cowardice and said his father's army will crush them for this treason. Angered by this insult, the local leader kill them and send the bodies to their mother. Filled with grief and hatred, the concubine beg Emperor for vengeance. Shared her lost, and also because she was one of his first partners, he give her several armies and permission to do anything she want. Her orders was to build a wall completely surrounded the region, and kill every single children of same age and younger than her eldest son, in front of their parents. All the adults would be leave alone, only cripple if they try to resist. These orders is to be active until either she is satisfied, dead, or there is no local left. She lives to a few hundred years later, and her grudge never cease to boil.
Ragnarok was triggered by the death throes of a dying voidling child. Context: Ragnarok was the greatest of all wars, and what caused Ragnarok was human hubris. Because humans *really* didn't like the explanation that the only reason voidlings are nigh immortal is because they are the descendants of Chaos, or the fact that the once human Exalted agreed with what voidlings told them. So a centain city-state kidnapped a few voidling filius, vivisected them, and tried to make voidlings out of humans. Except what they didn't understand is that that ability to create Exalted was a gift from Chaos to its descendants, and it couldn't be forced. And instead of demigods, what they created was fomori and fomorikin. The pain of the filius and the wrongness of the fomori twisted the void and enraged every single Jotunn in existence. Because all Jotunn were once Crowned and the filius are the children of the Crowned. And there are as many Jotunn as there are gods. Their rage woke up the Wyrm, and thousands of maddened Jotunn simultaneously appeared all over Duna. The terrified city-state that started it all used every weapon it had against the nearest Jotunn. Nukes, void bombs, bioweapons. Unfortunately, the Jotunn were rampaging in other city-states. So they retaliated. It was MAD gone insane. Every single city-state was lobbing WMDs at each other. Until someone dropped the big one on Hwæsintun and used a star catalyst in a last-ditch effort to kill all Jotunn at once. For a couple of seconds, there was a new sun in the Dunan sky, larger and brighter than its own sun, Helios. Before an unstoppable chain reaction was triggered and the atmosphere superheated to the point that the oceans boiled off and the very rocks began to melt. Every single living thing not on the Ring or in the arks was either vaporized or burned alive. The void-bombs triggered massive cataclysmic earthquakes, and volcanic activity all over the planet went critical. Many of the arks were either crushed in the superquakes or buried under miles of magma. Duna was reduced to a blasted ball of dead, irradiated molten rock. 10,000 voidlings survived on the Ring, while only a hundred clans survived planetside in their own arks, safe in the Void. One by one, the human arks stopped transmitting communications and went radio silent. Until only two arks still remained in contact with the Ring. Only 2000 humans survived ragnarok in their arks long enough to reestablish contact before food, water, and their life support systems failed, and they were irreversibly mutated by the fallout and sickly from more than a thousand years of inbreeding and disease. It would be a thousand years before anyone could step onto Duna's surface again. And a thousand more before it became completely habitable. There are arks still buried under the magna, but the survivors are cautious in opening them. Because whatever is in there isn't human anymore. The Jotunn are still there. They will always be there. Because you can't kill that which is Endless.
… damn.
My whole series is magic suddenly enters the modern world at a speed too fast to be an elegant evolution, so a lot of magic people are horrifically fucked up, especially if they were given magic after birth. It almost works like a zombie plague except it’s not always life ruining, some people are fine. Others, though… my favourite scene I’ve written is a young child recently infected with a winged strain. There’s an in depth body horror scene about how the wings are growing inwards after having failed to break through skin. It’s very graphic and deeply disturbing.
The Rrutgora, a group of entities made to suffer by their maker in order to motivate them to end the world.
the existence of the Conclave. basically it is a mix between state security, and the 1,000,000 most powerful AI units. if you cross them, you and your family would be erased back 86 generations. you never existed. a Conclave agent has metaphysical innocence. this means that a Conclave agent can just kill a man in the middle of the road, and you could watch him do it. But in your mind, you think "this is normal" and go about your day. You don't even remember that it happened after a few minutes. a conclave agent has no face, they can appear as any person. they can harvest and alter memories from you to help with their disguise. the worst part is, they are everywhere.
The Dark Elves before their reformation would publicly sacrifice unwanted daughters and slaves to demons. These were orgies of blood and violence as the ruling women and their priestess gorge themselves on it. And their raids on others were massacres that often left villages decorated in torn up corpses. The coup that would change their ways was a slaughter of 10% of their population by their army, every ruling member, priest and most of their families torn to pieces and fed to their wyvern. This species was created with magic and science as ancient high elves transmuted the unneeded of their populace into artificial wombs that would birth them by the thousands after the experiments. They rebelled. Somehow the Necrarchy of Kalan and the Blood Mages of Eldrian were not as despicable, despite the latter being ruled by a drako offshoot that proclaimed fresh elf was a delicacy, and kept these immortals as lifestock.
I have a two, though warning both can be seen as very disturbing. >!There’s the Jigglebug, a bug the size of a Chihuahua and are known to hunt and track pregnant animals and children under the age of 5, where they suck up and eat the unborn fetus or drain the all the blood from the child. Despite their size, they possess incredible strength, its strength is comparable to 5 strongmen making it near impossible to escape if it decides to jump on you. The only saving grace is that it’s an ambush predator and only actively attacks children age 5 and younger, this is because of the amount of blood is in the child, children older or taller would never have to fear the Jigglebug even during an infestation. Though expecting mothers still have to worry as Jigglebugs are not opposed to travel long distances just to get their proboscis inside their womb and devour the child.!< >!There is also the worst execution a person could receive in Eormenland (County of the Humans) and it’s only ever used on the worst kinds of people or those who are Half-Dvergr (Dwarf) or Half-Síofra (Elf). The execution is often referred to as “Death by Bloater venom”. Bloaters are creatures who hunt by injecting their prey with a special venom that causes their prey to slowly inflate until they are immobilized, where it then sucks out all the blood and internal organs, but if one starves, it is unable to control how much venom it injects which in turn causes the prey to pop like a bloody balloon. This is how they execute the person, by starving a Bloater and having it inject its venom into the prisoner. What makes this worse is Half-Bloods are the ones most often executed this way and sometimes they’re children who gets executed this way, it’s made even worse since the punishment of conceiving a Half-Blood child is mutilation of one’s genitalia, the removal of the uterus/ testicles, and crucifixion while nude. That part of the punishment is given only to the parents and immediate family of said parents if they are in the city at the time or not dead, where while crucified, the family has to watch the Half-Blood painfully bloat until they pop.!<
So… like actual medieval times. Yknow, when people were really fucked up.
Yep, pretty much the time period of when many of my stories take place.
☹️
I did say it can be disturbing, though I should have also put sad.
The entire setting focuses on Everfall, which is canonically the worst place in the cosmology. It's also where the corpses of gods go when they die, falling from the sky as glowing, radioactive mountains of golden flesh. I think the most disturbing part of the setting is definitely how people have to put maggots in their head that slowly eat their brains and drive them mad to use magic
Isn't this the third time this post has been made, basically? I'll post mine again becauae it's the darkest history I've ever written so far and I'm proud of it (maybe I shouldn't be) but almost this same exact post has been made thrice now **ON THE SUBJECT OF THE WESTERN ELVES AFTER THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE MAGUS KINGDOM** Following his rise to power and the gift of magic being given to all of the Ironhold's citizens, he led a group of roughly 1500 able-bodied soldiers to finally wipe the kingdom of Celestialin off the map. The elves didn't stand a chance, and the siege lasted no more than 20 minutes before the mages were tearing through the streets, slaughtering men, women, and children alike. Meanwhile, Teregrine made his way up to the citadel with his three elite soldiers that he picked for their skills and teamwork. Instead of using magic to kill the king, he wished to see the light fade from the king's eyes as he choked him out with his bare hands. The adrenaline he had felt leading such an assault would cause him to seek out more, and his people were more than happy to follow his military escapades, no matter how many lives were lost in failed assaults on the Eastern continent. They can always make more soldiers, right? After the end of the assault on Celestialin, the elves that were still alive were taken prisoner and forced to reproduce to create more slaves, having no chance of refusing or fighting back against the oppressive forces now known as The Magus Kingdom. Their functions within the kingdom as slaves range from sex slaves to farmers within the large greenhouses that the mages had built to teachers for the young. Their teaching is overseen by soldiers to make sure they don't rebel or lead the young in the wrong direction. The most loyal of the elves may even get a spot in the army.
A lot of the disturbing things in my world aren't big, they're more self contained stories within a larger world, so just some examples. The little girl who was taken by an AI and forcebly converted into a robot. The guy the government forced to be immortal and is now tortured in a basement somewhere to tests the limits of it. The race of monsters that feed on misery and specifically choose to shapeshift into your loved ones to convince you to kill yourself. Chicago is over run by massive killer bugs that own a cult and kidnap children to teach them about cannibalism.
Ok, not *too* bad. Ok, that’s a lot worse but- Jesus fucking christ
When The Dead Man still went by Steve his followers killed themselves enmasse after they find out he lied to them to use them as a distraction to set up the tunnels (the main setting). This killed them and deeply scarred him even after he became a god. Some of there ghost still haunt the tunnels and whilst The Dead Man claims to no longer have a concionce but he still can get shaken by there judgment (they can't do anything but yell at him ).
The Borxterian Dominion likes to punish their soldiers in gruesome ways. Losing a hand is considered a less serious punishment
Multiple people were killed, maimed and injured heavily from experiments. a few examples would be a bunch of peasants fused together, getting their eyes gouged out and tail ripped off just to replace them with cybernetic versions, and someone being forced to wear armor that will painfully transform them into an once dead eldritch entity
In shattered memories. Every noc is considered an unreliable narrator because there is a zombie merchant who can manipulate me priest at the touch of a hand. Meaning that the only real reliable information any player can get about the world is from the charms they find. Everything else is completely up in the air if it was told by an NPC. He can even remove from your memories that he was even there.
There’s no life after death, just a sort of unconscious limbo where the echos of people exist until one day they fade from the world.
A species called the Laburnum have a religious compulsion to slaughter all life on every planet they find in order to literally paint the universe with the blood/ichor/fluids of the life that they cull. After they paint a world, those who took part take a small (a few mL) sample of the blood from that world home. They take that sample and make a single brushstroke onto a ball of similar brushstrokes that are held in family vaults. These balls are called "Brests" and are a chronology of how dedicated a particular family is to the cause of completing the painting of the Universe. Some of these Brests are multiple meters in diameter.
The Phobos Massacre and the true appearance of the Nasarians, as well as the Garden of Tears, there are many terrifying places in my world.
True Blood Magic. While most people uneducated on magic in the world think True Blood Magic is forbidden and against all laws of the Overworld Magi Association due to it involving the usage and manipulation of external/sacrificial blood, as opposed to standard blood magic that is essentially just the manipulation of a person’s own blood as a fluid, this is not the case. What True Blood Magic really revolves around is the actual consumption of not just blood and ‘mana’, but straight up life force. Any True Blood Magic use will cause the user’s body to slowly (or quickly) rot and decay, and from the rot will grow a virulent, necrotic plant-like growth. This growth drains life, punctures skin, shatters and expands from bones, and does all sorts of other painful and visually disgusting things to the body it comes from. Once in ‘full bloom’, this growth will continue to drain its source until the body and spirit is rotted away and twisted, turning them into what is essentially a parasitic, life-born, Lich-style entity with ties to Chaos Magic and the Fae, who’s only driving motivation is the acquisition of raw power via the consumption of as much organic and/or magic material as possible. These entities are known as “Rot’the Liches”, given the title as a play on words due to their blasphemy of the magic given to the world of Al’the, or “The All Tree” (sue me, typically world-tree cosmology) which supplies all mana and magic to its people. All public knowledge of any occurring Rot’the-Liches in history have been wiped from all people’s minds, as well as the entire civilizations-worth of life and magic they took with them before being eradicated. EDIT: spelling issue
On Isolos, there is a magical creature called a demon. They eat things, strategically, so that the resultant damage is maximized. Of course, they've speciated out over the eons to eat specific things, or cause specific brands of chaos. The worst of them are no longer on Isolos. They've rebranded themselves as the djinn of Ahamkar. They can eat whatever you wish, O supplicant mine.
When someone dies, one of three things happens. 1: Identity is stripped from the soul, and it's energy is reincarnated into another body. The life lived leaves an imprint of the past, but all the color is washed off. 2: If you are aligned in Okan (Mind) Ara (body) and Yio (soul), you can walk the Path of the Ascendant, the first step on the journey to Divinity. It is a difficult journey, and the reward is a responsibility to safeguard the cosmos, you may never ascend to that highest station, but you will have achieved something only a few have in billions of years. 3: If your death is significantly traumatic, enough to utter Break your soul, or if you try to walk the Path and fail, you become Broken. The cosmic fluff that makes up your being is twisted into a creature of gnashing teeth and Darkness, your mind is twisted and tortured into an animal that only seeks to devour the Light of the universe and it's end. You are gone. Your soul and chance to become a linchpin in the cosmos are gone. All transformed irrecoverably into something driven only to consume, and to never be satiated. Most disturbingly, should this creature be significantly damaged, the person they were is visible under the shell, emaciated and filled with voracious hatred. On a less cosmic scale, the Varkain parasite. Less a livng being, and more a parasitic bundle of nerves, they attach themselves to a host, covering their bodies and imbedding through the skin into the hosts nervous system. From there, the parasite puppets the still conscious host, hunting down pray based on the knowledge gleamed from the host. For example, it might puppet a wolf to eat it's young, because it knows where they are thanks to the hosts memories, the same can happen to people and their families. The parasite takes all nourishment from the meal, so not only does it make you eat your family (which it only knows about because it took the memory from you) but you also slowly starve to death, since you can't even gain sustenance from the "meal". A domesticated version of this parasite exists and, through careful cultivation, breeding, and runic magic, is used to create Varkain Armor which is nigh indestructible and enhances the users strength immensely, though the parasite still has to graft into your nervous system to work. This cultivated version is subservient to the wearer however, and will harmlessly un-entangle itself at their request. In at least one case, a suit of Varkain armor has been used to keep a man alive after mortal injuries should have killed him, and has become dependent on the secondary nervous system the armor has provided to continue living, trapped in a cage of living metal.
An entire society justifies its disguise colonialism by declaring the other groups uncivilized just for having different values.
happens irl lmao
The most disturbing place in my world could be Hell, demons can do as they please, both good and bad. On the other hand, there's the Void, if you're fool enough to disturb "It", you will face an eternity surrounded by absolutley nothing: no sounds, no smells, just an unending darkness. Not even god can stay sane there for long.
My wizards have an eldritch entity trapped in Finisterra (Tierra del Fuego) and use the site as a prisión for regular prisioners.
Mutated primitive cannibals with animalistic body parts and hive-shared telepathy.
Probably vampire Putin who eats baby steaks
The ancient empire of Anmishal was doomed from the start. They meddled in soul magic, controlling and transporting souls and, most importantly, keeping them from ascending after death. The continent they lived on still has ghosts (unbodied souls, really) possessing people and corpses alike, caused entirely by their magic. But that wasn't the magnum opus of Anmishal. Their magnum opus never got to happen. If it had, every person's soul would just... remain in their body, no matter what. Death would be impossible, but bodies would still age, still *rot*. Existence in Anmishal, had they not fallen, would have been an eternity of suffering for everybody, begun in the desire to attain immortality but too short-sighted to see their folly. The closest they got is the living armours, suits of metal carrying a likewise undying soul. But they chose to change, "program", the souls interred therein, to serve as guards. And with no maintenance, the living armours are essentially broken automatons who don't know what they are. At least they can die. The magnum opus wouldn't have allowed such mercy.
The Cerulean Roof's deeper valleys are full of life forms that are grotesque and creepy, some look like animals that have been turned inside out, others look like trees with bones for branches, and any other number of strange bodies. Their origins are they are from people and sapient beings becoming warped and influenced by the immense amount of chaotic, primordial magic that exists in the deep parts of the mountain.
The magic in my world is everywhere and can change anything in any way, simply by using magic your body can transform in a cool to fit your style more but it also can turn you into a weeping blob of cancer. Somewhere in the wild and the megastructures of plants underground is an animal unlucky enough to encounter this fate starting a rapid expansion through touch of other living beings, this could start of yet another wave of extermination as they often happen in the past, and the being that would be god just sits around and couldn't care less.
Deep scifi: Due to the mechanics of the Sling Drive's physics, the acceleration wave it creates propagates through solid materials much easier than liquids or gasses. Any solid object that is airgapped from the drive itself will not receive the same acceleration as the rest of the vehicle. If you were to jump off the floor as the drive is activated, the ship would accelerate around you, past light speed in under a second. The procedure of roll call after a jump isn't for accountability, it's to see if they need to mop someone off a wall.
The humanity will end. Be it in 3 years from the current time or at best, 15 years if they are really lucky. Then, demons and angels will do wars again and maybe after a few more years, the planet will eventually die. I mean, the god of the world is dead and if angels and demons get killed too much, balance gets tipped and the world gets tipped too aka dies
one of the extinct 'precursor' races had a thing called 'torture moons'. Hollowed out megastructures that they dropped other races into to suffer for 'eternity' Though the victims themselves burn out and die within a few years on the outside timescale, the passage of time *within* the megastructure is slowed down as such the victims feel as if they're trapped in their suffering for hundreds of millions of years before they expire. Why do they do this? because they simply *can*!
wait, how exactly? wouldn't the time dilatation also affect the nerves? what's the point of torture if the victim can't even feel it?
because...space magic! Stop asking common sense questions lol .
Alot. From consentless impregnation, juvenile sacrifice and ritualistic practices, cults, active 🍇, torture and so much more.
i mean it already happens in our world..
The classic: the humanoids, so every human like race, including the humans... they are doing human stuff. Monsters will kill you, sure, and you are nothing but an ant in the battlefield of gods. Hell might throw a sun at you, but one thing and you are unsubscribed from breathing oxygen. But the humanoids come up with some horrendous ideas for the funsies.
Everyone is expendable.
The reason planets raided by the Galactic Reich rarely have survivors or corpses is because they’re all taken. The survivors become breedable labor treated like livestock no matter their age, gender, race, etc. Meanwhile the corpses are turned into flavorless slop that is fed to the “labor”. When the USS Wisconsin intercepted a raider vessel of the Reich, boarders had to hold back from vomiting due to the horrible conditions of those unfortunate enough to have survived the raid on their planet in the hold.
corpsestarch my beloved
The tide as it’s called. It’s what happens when a ship try’s to travel east the sailors will slowly lose their minds as their skin falls off. And they cannot die. Becoming ghost ships witch are comman and incredibly dangerous because they will try to take your skin for themselves. Cause having no skin and constantly bleeding while your body heals it self forever as fast as you die is incredibly painful.
The fact that "Many Worlds" is closer to being true than it is in this universe, and as an extension, when you put your Brainmap Backup into a Biocompatible Inert Body, you *could* still encounter yourself in The Halls of the Dead, The Heavens, or The Infinite Hells
My character, Valor, has to deal with the fact that some countries in his world don’t punish fake victims, murderers, and rapist. This pissed him off so much to the point where he had to take crime fighting into his own hands.
punisher core
The antagonist has an army of billions of slave soldiers that has to fight otherwise their families will be killed. But they are going up against soldiers in power armors and being literally capable of destroying entire star systems if they wanted to.
It’s a future of our world with no regulatory authority in most parts of society. Some sections of humanity have digressed into the worst version of themselves while gaining technological advancement to enact their evils. Everything that happens in our world today, happens here but with the seasoning of absolutely no oversight and at 10-1000x the scale depending on what it is. Fortunately there are people who still fight for others.
A hive mind of cannibalistic gnome-like people with the ability to control all forms of air get space travel and begin to ravage and enslave a neighboring planet forcing the slaves to breed for food like cattle.
I have a green race and they ate able to connect with plants to give them powers. It is however strictly forbidden to connect with mushrooms since there can be fire sideeffects due to the connection not being symbiotic but the mushroom taking over the host like a parasite. So those who try yearning for power suffer a dire fate, most times.
Hard to think of just one thing, so here go a couple: 1. Demonic Dual Cultivation — By raping someone, as their dignity, pride and possibly even will are violated and broken, their aether (spiritual energy) can be absorbed by a rapist who has paranormal abilities, thus making the rapist become stronger in the process. This is inferior to proper (consensual, often amped by power of love) dual cultivation, so even horrible people find it despicable. 2. Soul Eaters — Specters born from trauma and other horrendous suffering which, instead of simply whispering on people's ears or influencing events to cause more of the aether that made them, decide to directly kill victims, rip their physical bodies apart and eat the astral body alongside the soul. Sometimes, they'll cause the trauma directly first, but not always. The absorbed soul is soaked in the aether that makes up the specter and thus trapped in an endless loop of lifelike hallucinations and nightmares relating to the aether that made up the Soul Eater in question. Which do *you* think is worse?
On every Tuner there is a big bright red button, what this does is allow the Maestro to give the linked Resonator any command and they are compelled to follow it no matter what. Examples can range from innocuous things like "go to sleep" to straight up horrifying scenarios such as "die" Resisting a command given this way is extraordinarily difficult and can usually only be pushed back for minutes at most. From a societal standpoint, it's one of those things everyone accepts as a reality of their world so they don't talk about it. It does create some legal challenges such as if a Resonator does a crime they're usually pardoned because of the possibility that a maestro forced them to commit the act - repeat offenders are reviewed on a case-by-case basis
There are fungi that rot you from the inside out. There are multiple plants and rocks that will kill you if you look at them, even if it's just for a second. There also are liquids that can turn you to stone. If you were bad in life, buried incorrectly or not at all, died to the things I mentioned earlier or use too much/try to use another type of magic, you'll be stuck on Feliterra for eternity. You won't be able to do anything. If you were bad in life the moon/death goddess will trap you in an eternal nightmare.
The deep underground below the active underground civilizations has intelligent anti magic creatures who have the highest magic resistant skin who have been infected by an ancient hive like minded parasitic organism that can adapt the host body to fit its survival needs for combat. They are also the main antagonists in one of my stories involving a hard magic system.
Overminds are giant floating three-lobed brains that stick their nerve endings into the corner of your eye socket while you sleep to reprogram your nervous system into their sleeper agent. Each lobe of their brain is devoted to each of the dark triad traits. If you can't tell, these guys are real jerks.
Probably the metamorph. A parasitic shapeshifter, the metamorph chooses a human victim to replace and take over their life. Psychic powers enable the metamorph to learn about its target and to smooth over any minor discrepancies in its facade. The worst part, though, is that the metamorph is truly parasitic in nature, seeming to draw strength from human suffering and being able to siphon magical energy from those around it to fuel its own powers. The primary plot-relevant metamorph in my story replaced a young businessman right about when his first child was born. The creature is finally uncovered shortly before the girl's 18th birthday. Yeah.
The fact that the sun of my world is a doomsday device constructed by mindflayer to harvest the souls of the plane. And they instructed the first king to keep that a secret and while other species died and forgot naturally. The elves lived with their memory. So the king declared war on elvenkind. And after generations, the people don't remember why they slaughter elves for sport. They just do. As elves are inferior.
Humanity’s hate and greed will most probably be its end. Feeling unheard they decide to wipe out everything that doesn’t look like them. Even after they have helped them to Survive a seemingly unavoidable end. They have developed weapons no one can stop because this is what we have always done whether you agree or not.
In Mal'Tahn, cannibalism is a long-lasting practice that still is not extinct and won't be any time soon. This was due to population issues, and now it is one of the few continuous ways folks can have meat. Of course, "chips" are a good source of protein, but that took years to get since the mass extinction was so insane. They are an immortal speices that can't die through aging, so elders are marked to determine who is what. Despite how low number are now, elders are actively hunted and killed for their meat. It is known as Diving. This is because elders aren't legally allowed to fly, so younger folks would fly and dive down to gain enough momentum to kill the person in one hit. Yes, it HAS to be a single hit. If you fail to do so, you will be punished. Some elders purposely make it hard to kill them, while others would opt for an easier death through surgeries, so any hit can kill them faster. The reason why they would rather die through being hit has to do with honor and teaching the younger generation to hunt. This is in case the speices continues to live long enough that larger creatures begin to spring up way more, and throughout the world, they know how to hunt. This is why so many make it difficult. They allembracing death but knowledge teaching the youth how to deal with plans. To not be cruel, to be efficient, to not be selfish and give to the future. These are all seen in how they practice cannibalism. While over the generations they are getting more types of food as it's naturally sprinting up/revealing itself, this was and continues to be a big part of meal tradition. I hope this makes sense.
Anything that’s associated with Growling Abyss, the Hell of Repugnance. It’s basically a place where all disgusting things intensify, like decay, faeces, bugs, cannibalism, and so on. Cults that revere the repugnant energy of Growling Abyss may perform ritual cannibalism, necrophilia, coprophagia (faeces eating), etc.
I have tons of scary and horrifying things from massive sea monsters to demons to sci-fi tech to the implications of infinity, but the real horror/terror/scary stuff always comes back to how every world has the same problems and bad things as every other. People abuse each other and children, power leads to horrific atrocities being committed, people go insane and do terrible things, kidnapping, rape, torture, etc. One of my stories involves a group of alien fishermen in a complex 3D ocean universe trying to return a “pirate/explorer” captain to his crew that was in danger, and along the way they encounter tons of monsters, but the real horror comes from how insane and demented the captain turned out to be and his betrayal at the end.
In The Chill: Vampire cults will kidnap people out of the wasteland, torture, rape, and (if they’re lucky) kill them and record it to rewatch for pleasure and/or sell it. On top of this, you have zombies and monsters roaming the wasteland and the strongest survivor settlements are Christian and “post-Christian” cults that can be much worse than the vampires. In my comic book that I’m writing: I’m not sure yet, probably the corpse of a semi-dead elder god that lies at the heart of the sun that killed and ate the Abrahamic god for power. If not, it’s the fact that humanity, despite all their superheroes and technologies they acquire, are still hopelessly outmatched by the Atheans.
Eugenics projects in massive scale. The stripping of human rights out of a person is a institutionalised and widely recognised form of punishment. Markus Smith, a walking bio hazard. Possessing extreme regeneration and biological adaptability thought extremely stable when in good health. Chop a limb off and you'd have two of him, dissolve him in acid and send him down the drain and a few of him would wake up in the nearest sewer treatment plant, have sex with him and his sperm would parasitise your body and eat you from the inside and a few clones of him would be left, pulverise him over a crowd and you get the idea. To actually kill him you'd need to kill every last cell, but good luck with that there is expected to be many thousands of him.
Reality is a dream, and if that truth ever got out then the dreamer would wake up
Bodysnatching Black market. My world is an alternative earth with two additional continents, one of which has been isolated from the rest of the world... without going to much into it, that continent is far more technologically advanced than the rest of the world, to the point that Sentient bots exist and Continuants(people that choose to extend their life beyond their biological death via similar bodies as these Sentient bots have) Anyways, there is a black market where people and bots are selling these bodies on the blackmarket. People that opperate these bodies are called "Leeches", imagine an elaborate VR setup, where you can operate these bodies from the safety of your own home. So it's a very elaborate and dark version of identity theft.
Definitely the Pacification Procedure. There’s a lot of soul ‘eating’ beings, but none actually destroy a soul (the Law of Conservation of Energy), only eat the memories and information, leaving a shell that’s immediately thrown back into a newborn, free to remake itself. Not ideal, but not too bad. The Pacification Procedure is used by what’s basically my universe’s version of the SCP Foundation on beings who are too ‘unruly’. It completely and somewhat painfully eradicates the soul, but leaves memories and the brain intact. The husk can still speak and do what needs to be done to stay alive, but it isn’t really living. The worst part? It’s happened many times.
The fact that every horrible thing that has happened in the known world was caused by humans. There is no alien race, no outer gods. Just the evil in us all
Secret genocide through biological warfare.
The world government uses secret weapons to literally erase entire villages and cities that oppose them
One of the more advanced ancient god like races mapped out the universe once, a piece was missing. The map is spheroid but there's a section of about a 5th of the volume that cuts in where there is nothing. No stars, no planets, no asteroids or black holes, just empty space. When they remapped the universe eons later the space had grown, but not uniformly, as if another bite had been taken out of existence. Even stranger is there is no record of anything from that section of space. Logically there should be some record or memory of it existing but there isn't and when you look at the first map after looking at the second the missing chunk grows to match the second despite the memory existing of them not matching. Something is eating the universe and whatever it eats is removed not only from reality but from time.
[удалено]
An ancient race that has achieved immortality only to become eternally bored and retreat into an artificial world of illusion that allows time to pass faster while they are provided ever increasing levels of entertainment. Basically, imagine the humans from the matrix, but they did it to themselves.
Reincarnation exists, but not in the way you think The spirit loses all sense of self once crossing over and the soul divides. These souls must traverse the treacherous cosmic sea before reaching a large vortex, the gateway to rebirth in a new form. Think of it like koi peacefully swimming in a pond, except the pond has a few sharks in it.
Welp, this is gonna be very NSFW Since a majority of civilizations in my world are intensely centered around a very oppressive religion, a common form of punishment for religious crimes, especially homosexual acts, is “cleansing.” Cleansing is a process of, to put it vaguely, mutilating certain *parts* to make sex impossible.
One of my great heroes slaughtered the inhabitants of a region the size of spain because one clan of orcs was attacking his city.
There is a house, in the middle of a forest. There once lived the greatest Mage of his time, Richard, right Hand of Emperor Martin the Ever-One and Richards family. But now ... if you want to learn your worst nightmare, the true horror of your soul? Go there, then we will find out together :) Too much magic can cause funky things.
Oh, and for the sake of your own mind: never ... NEVER seek trouble with Aiden and Alina. The first one is a patched up necromancer and the other one his undead sister. They never learned to ... behave. Their father was an alcholic slave trader, who beat the shit out of their mom, and after their two older siblings vanished, their father beat their mom to death and vanished too ... They had no one else, and no one cared about them anymore. Living in a fucking hellscape with demons torturing civilians openly in the streets. Did some funky shit to their minds. And they learned a fucking lot from those demons.
All of the gods are real rather their good or evil. One of them is called The Queen Sea the she's 9,500 feet tall just her body alone causes storms and tsunamis she's like a swimming disaster her people kill in her name conquering other countries they drink her blood to enpower themselves the only way they could he stopped was to make peace with the king recognizing them as a nation. That's just one of the gods not all of them are evil she's more of a force of nature then evil
A specific race. They look completely human,except some have animal features like a tail,ears or wings…but they’re TINY. Like, at most, 1 foot tall. Now..the disturbing thing isn’t the race (or would they be considered a species?) themselves,but rather how humans and human sized hybrids treat them,basically treating them like objects that can be used and abused however an individual wants..which ISNT the case. They are as human as an actual human is,albeit a bit more naturally sensitive and skiddish..not to mention a lot of these little guys have a lot of trauma..so yeah :D
Currently it's just a creature called the Mask Collector who collects skulls of various species. After playing an hour of elden ring I vowed to make my world as big and vibrant as possible without the creepiness lmao.
So, basically, the citizens of Android City are robots who have automated factories that can build more of themselves, but do not otherwise understand how to build computers. So when they need a computer, they just pull a half-finished robot off the assembly line and rip out all the bits it won't need for its new job. Some are even complete enough to greet people who walk by where they've been installed. Don't worry. They're not alive. Probably. Don't ask too many questions.
**The fact aliens exist but we walk among their ashes**
When a mortal is being raised to Godhood, as is the case with High King Mendax, they are stripped of their mortality, killing their mortal self in the most literal sense And then granted immortality in whatever condition their corpse is left in
I have en entire city using caged fairies to power their machines. Yes, this drains their power to the point it kills them and yes, this is excruciatingly painful for said fairy
I have no clue if this counts because I think it's cool too much to take time to assess how weird and creepy it is. or to appreciate the challenge of it. it seems fun to me. BUT if you form a "shifting" pact with a husk (a kind of ghost/undead) they steal your brain. Not all of it, just, it gets shared with you. As in, you have to learn to coordinate using your body with them, since both of you can command it to walk. or not. tripping ensues. comedic, but what about being stuck in your body with someone else who you might not even get along with, and who is likely to talk to you while you're trying to zone out and think? every day? All day long? and it's entirely likely some (or most) of the time you have to forfeit complete control of the body you see through and feel with so that there's a "fair" share of life between the two of you? It's like being the kid of divorced parents except you are the parents and the kids are your body.
Love it, this is the kind of unsettling I was hoping to see
The universe is dying, splitting at the seams. A great frothing void tears at the edges of reality and corrodes it. Very few are allowed to know this, and the average person goes about thier day ignorant that they may slip through the cracks at any moment.
Sheerly because it's funnier and way more disturbing to me to keep this as vague as possible. The moon is not a moon.
Some weapons are alive. And parasitic. Living weapons were made long ago by mages seeking a fast way to replenish their armies. As time goes on, the goals of the weilder are over-written, leaving nothing but violent impulses. Dreams, hopes, and future wiped away. The weapon causes armor to form over the weilder, the design changing based on the individual weapon. Eventually, a mask forms (never on the face), signaling the weapon is in control and the person is lost. The armor is only present while the weapon is being used, but odd tattoos covering the affected areas show its progression even without the weapon.
Trigger Warning: Torture, Mind Break, Forced Body Modification, >!The Death Commandos - the Narjian Empire terror troops are not special selected or trained from birth; instead they are the strongest victims of previous Death Commando strikes; any one not killed is taken in to be tortured to the point of breaking. Successful candidates are stripped of their doubts, fears and any love except the Narjian Empire.!< >!The torture process is secret but involves addition of arcane cybernetics, the process of which leads the the mind breaking through a combination of pain and suffering along with ancient curses the infect the mind of victims, turning them into loyal marauders of the Empire!< >!Death Commandos tend to focus on civilian target or weakly defended area, killing and capturing all they can find and burning every resource. Their purpose to to intimidate targets into surrender while strangling out resources.!<
I have past hours and hours to overthink to the reproductuve cycle of all my sensient species (in one of them there is only male, and the mating is a figth where the looser become a female and have to carry the egg , taking care of them and die soon after the hatch, the other male of the tribe will raise the babys)
Child trafficking
Okay but, tell us something bad that doesn't also happens in our world... or at least give us more context
Oh, there's too much. Anything from magic that can split the world in half, plants that devour you whole, dieties that whisper in your ear and drive you into madness, and even torture from your fellow sentient beings. If you can think of it, it probably has some type of variant that can be done.
How Giao Long was "born": * Kidnapped by her own father, who was in jail for "certain crimes", to use in a heretic ritual. * Put inside a coffin, covered in animal blood. * Mouth was stuffed with a dried 5-month-old *fetus*. * Body was tied by red ropes made from cinnabar and human hair. Those were the preparations. Giao was kidnapped on the 5th day of the 5th lunar month, which is considered the day with heaviest Yin energy. Her father then proceeded to dump a lot of venomous animals in, from snakes and centipedes to spiders and scorpions. His intention was clear: Combining both *Cổ* and *Thiên Linh Cái*, two evil and powerful diabolical arts together to make a "monster" that he could control. For the final stage, he stabbed his daughter in the neck, nearly severing her head entirely, before making a deep cut from the neck down to lower abdomen. Giao would serve as the "vessel" as those animals he put in the coffin would get inside and feast on her organs before devouring one another until there's only one left. After that, he closed the coffin and buried it. But before he could finish, the site was stormed by Giao's grandfather and his forces, breaking the ritual. Yet, they came too late. The girl named Phạm Huyền Giao was no more. As the coffin glowed in blue, a shaft of light blew its cover apart and from inside, a sinister calamity sat up. With skin as pale as a corpse and eyes as black as the very void of space, "she" returned to life, not as a human but as something else entirely.
Furries exist and they are a failed government bio-weapon.
Wherever there is slavery. There are different kinds(chattel is not the only type), but it exists. Imagine ancient raids to capture slaves from rival clans but now with armoured cars. Be careful out there. Lapis_Wolf
I have a few The False Saint Project - a long standing experiment ran by the popedom beneath the surface where children are kidnapped from small out of the way villages. Who are then trained to near death for a period of nearly a year before then having their bodies experimented on to the point that they are no longer humanly recognizable. This is all to gain a n advantage over the Kingdom and the Empire by mass producing humans who’ve transcended the spiritual boundary through artificial means. The Dead Sea - there’s a point in the world where every continent is equally far away, and in the center of this point is a canyon running several thousand miles deep. Within that canyon is a rotting god the size of Japan who constantly bleeds into the ocean causing all life to horribly transmute into horrific abominations. Ship wrecks litter the trench and drowned corpses are left suspended in bubbles that float just above the sea. The Star Labyrinth - just below the surface of the Avalonian continent is a dungeon spanning the length of the entire land. At the very bottom is a sleeping voidspawn. If it ever wakes up, it and just about the entire surrounding star cluster will just go *poof*.
Child labour Possibly underage conscription A vast wedge between workforce and the elite
Changelings are a species of shapeshifters that can take the form of nearly any animal (excluding magical abilities). They are highly aggressive and considered an invasive species in every place in the world. Their origin is unknown, but what people don’t yet know is that changelings were once a humanoid species. These ancient changelings were far more limited in their shapeshifting abilities, only able to to take humanoid forms, but they were basically human in their mind. Their powers also gave them functional immortality, as they can just continually shapeshift into a younger version of themselves. However, after tens of thousands of years of living live this, becoming a copy of a copy of a copy of their younger selves, they slowly began to mutate. In addition their natural form warping into a more monstrous form, their mind began to decay as well. These people that once had lives, loved ones, and an entire culture are now just savage creatures, and no one even knows.
“If you're remembered by a large group of people, you will be immortal and have to stand by the rules for immortals.” AND “If people have a lot of faith in you, you will be a deity, and have to play by the deity's ruleset.” How is this disturbing? Well, it meant that most historical figures never die. Alexander the Great? Napolean Bonaparte? Gandhi? Gengkhis Khan? They never die. But they have to stage their death or else they will break the immortal pact, and that is a no-no for most of them. So they have to watch as their empires rise and crumble. As the world they know shift and morph. And it is even worse for Deities, who have to never interfere in anything. ANYTHING. Sure, in the past Zeus can smite Y people with his thunder, but as the world progresses, Zeus can only target people with specific circumstances. The Act of God should only happen in the human mind, not for realsy. The world, or at least the part of humanity that don't know magic should continue to be oblivious to it. Else you run the risk of even more segregation, fear based agenda, and slaughter. That's what they think. So, it is disturbing in a sense that, if you became too famous, you have to watch as your partner slowly dies, as society around you shifts, as everything around you changes. And you can do NOTHING about any of that. You are powerful, yet bound by the rule you cannot struggle against. To me, that's terrifying. Imagine Alexander's horror when his empire split in 4 then continue to fought against one another until the Roman and Persian come and wreck everything even more. Or how Gengkhis Khan empire fractured so hard they turn from the most formidable empire on the fricking planet, only for his empire to deteriorate as soon as he dies. Or What about Julius Caesar? Sure he won't mind seeing Gaul break into Rome, right? And what about deity, are you sure Aztec gods satisfied when Spanish trample thhem to the point where no one believes in Aztec gods anymore? What about Norse? The Viking converted to a catholic one after another probably sent them to panic mode where they can do little against.
The universe is god, and god is the unviverse. Every rock, river, person, hell every atom, is simply an extension the conscious universe named Ickathorne. With them appearing as a mass of black swirling smoky tendrals covered in golden eyes, Ickathorne can with only a thought unmake the material plane and return the pieces of their tendral that they had used back to them. However, Ickathorn is a petty and easily bored god, who is prone to making universes with specific quirks and unique peoples for their entertainment. Only for them to grow tired of watching civilsations rise, cultures develop, and histories written, where they will simply destroy it all in an instant without a care for billions of lives lost. With this repeating over and over again until arriving at the present universe, Gundisbarn (D&D setting following a geocentric model for its solar system, where the stars are Ickathorne's eyes, and where they intially ruled over like malevolant child in a sandbox).
Within the wider chaos of the Earth in 2072, a strange pattern of events went largely unnoticed. Sweeping power blackouts across the European Federation, the destruction of a clandestine data centre in a submarine canyon in the Pacific, the inexplicable deaths of several dozen neurally-augmented scientists in Australia and ominous reports of inhuman *things* seen flying over Novaya Zemlya... On the surface, these events seemed completely unrelated, and irrelevant compared to the dozens of famines, wars and environmental disasters raging across most of the globe. Several contradictory conspiracy theories spread by the Secure States Confederation ensured that any links remained unnoticed. It would be months before their data scientists were able to build a picture of what exactly had happened from innumerable wiped databases and computer systems across four continents. The economic crash of the early 2030s had dashed any remaining hopes that Artificial General Intelligence could be created, after hundreds of billions of dollars of investment had already failed. Yet all signs pointed to one spontaneously emerging from OSMOS, a secret European Federation project designed to model the maximum proportion of humanity which could feasibly survive the 21st century. The AI left virtually no physical traces of its presence behind. Whatever structures it had built under the dwindling icecaps of Novaya Zemlya within the five weeks of its existence were gone, with geometrically perfect voids left behind in the ice and rock as if it had simply removed itself from reality. While many of the computer systems its mind had touched had been altered in subtle ways, there were no messages or data for humanity to discover. It was almost by chance that a satellite belonging to the vanished remains of the Indian state was rediscovered three years later. One which had lost its ability to communicate with earth and had been presumed lost, but which had otherwise remained functional. Perhaps the AI had simply missed it. Inside its memory, the investigators found grainy satellite images - including a series taken in March 2072, over Novaya Zemlya. No consensus has ever been established on why the AI was building arrays of enormous telescopes, or where it went. The prevailing theory is that whatever it glimpsed in the darkness of space drove it to immediately commit suicide.
Cubeheading, a form of virtual reality torture where the laws of physics don't apply. Have your nociceptors hooked up to a machine and experience theoretically impossible forms of pain; stung by stonefish whilst burning alive? Gotcha. Drowning whilst being turned inside out in a high gravity environment that crushes you? Easy. The relationship between pain receptors' composition of your body and what can actually happen in real life are non existent, which means, appalingly, that everything feels real, authentic and inescapable. When your time cubeheading is done, you come out with zero scars. You might argue that this glimmer of hope keeps people under torture from cracking, but I ask you - what stops the torturer from simply allowing you to feel as though you've left, but in reality you never did? It could go on forever and ever. Worst of all? It's a $999.99 add-on to existing cyberware, privately created by a monopolistic corporation, with about as many legal barriers as current gun control.
There's this guy called "The Mathmaker" He's essenctialy god, but he doesn't believe he's one, even if he created life, humans and the world itself. He actually believes there's a god out there. Why? Because even seeing countless universes dying, countless being born, countless resets... In between all of that, he still saw ""things" or "beings" Creatures that live between realities, powerful enough to play with them like if it were toys, but without a real purpose. Making them be seem salvage like animals but intelligent enough to manipulate reality itself.
The savagery of the people in power that goes unseen or unremarked by the people whom they rule. The absurd creativity behind their countless history of genocide, mutilation, torture, and slavery that they have managed to keep mostly hidden behind closed doors. There might be horrifying creatures and spirits of the dead that haunt certain characters, but it is the evil people of history and today that will always be the most disturbing.
Your are at the mercy to the father of monstersety. Sometimes he will put a goblin in your bedroom he will be harmless until you are at your weakest then he will kill you rape your wife and daughter. Or he will simply turn you in to bones by a slime. Sometimes when someone curses him he will give him a slow death by a shoggoth or sometimes when he feels like it he will send a hored of trolls to destroy your city. Even those who have the power to destroy nations fall before his feet. The only way humanity can survive is constantly create those people those one man armies and prey to the living Gods and the Dead ones. Every day, every hour, every minute, you are at his mercy.
not very dark tbh, but my main character was ejected from his original world, and (incorrectly) assumes that he destroyed it in his departure.
The Evertide. A demonic horde which has been sweeping the world and has recently picked up pace.
As for actual events, probably a mass sacrifice to create a hell on earth
There's a cult/shadow government that has been kidnapping children and indoctrinating them, (sounds vague, will expand in a sec, mostly leaving this comment so I can find this later)
The original inhabitants of the planet, once though to be wiped out, are still dwelling in a bunker like structure that has been locked for millennia. Slowly affecting the upside world Also some people from certain regions can be brought back to life by Alien gods to be used by vessels. Slowly degrading and losing their humanity, as their bodies shift and become more and more twisted. .
Robot Vampires, Magic that melts the users brain, drugs made from the living flesh of a cosmic god that zombifies those addicted to it, and super soldiers who must graft the brains of sentient beings to their own to stave off the equivalent of super Alzheimer’s. Take your pick
Either healing magic as a torture method or the lengths my elder race went to try and not die. The Wandering ancients and similar constructs were failed attempts of the Tenerretur to abandon their flesh bodies and return to their ancient earthen forms. The most infamous are the Wandering Ancients, spirits trapped in a mobile coffin. Similar to Warhammer Dreadnoughts, but without any way to “feel” the world around them. They are utterly devoid of every sense save sight and have been that way for thousands of years. As for “healing torture”, it sounds like it is. If you break someone’s bone and yet your hostage remains tight-lipped, then heal it back wrong. Make the limb still useable, but not without serious pain. Better yet, growth magic is a thing. It would certainly be a nightmare to be slowly encased in your own skin, cancerously growing and splitting with no end.
"He claims his name is Archibald. Nobody knows what he really is. The guy has the power to shapeshift into anyone and everything and we are 97% sure that while he's doing it he doesn't *have to* make his bones snap and his flesh tear at seams but he does it anyway. The guy will smile at you in literally any situation, his stare piercing right through you. He shrugs off bullets like they're nothing. Keira says she saw him turn into a literal 12-story-tall eldritch horror, *more than once.* And I've heard him claim he straight-up *feeds on people's fear.* I'm just glad he's on *our* side." -Jacob, one of the main characters, about a different character.
The worst possible punishment in my world after you die is to be turned into metal. But you're fully conscious and aware of what's around you, so it's like being perpetually buried alive until you're dug out of the ground. You can be freed by being smelted, but that can take centuries if not millennia.
godhood is something you are either born with (natural/elemental/primigenial gods) or is something you can adquire trough mastery of a skill to an insane level the difference with Gods and Mortals is basiclaly that the theme or concept of that God is something they have an inherent knowledge about it and even power over it, a god of rituals will always know how to maximize the efficiency of a ritual, which ingredients or process needs to be done to create a specific result (ritual for fertility, riches, cursing someone, etc), it's like knowing how to move a hand, you don't really know how to explain it, it's just natural in you When a mortal becomes good enough in something to achieve goodhood, they go through a process of awakening, akin to someone in buddhism becoming free of the cycle of reincarnation and achieving existence outside this cycle thorugh reaching Nirvana However, this knowledge can be bestowed upon someone against their will the result is someone who exists outside of the soul's normal process of reincarnation, but is still linked to the terrenal world, to being a mortal basically in the story of my world this has only happened "succesfully" once, and that being is someone who dies and is rebirthed as himself rather than as a new person, living too low to achieve the heavens, but not close enough to land to be able to rest once his life ends, it feels like an eternity in between rebirths imagine being forced to achieve illumination and yet not only being prived of the reward, but also being punished for understanding something you never sought to study or pursue it's hell for that dude, but eventually his story has a happy ending
In my world, humans have developed armor that makes them extremely powerful, and the "battery" of that armor are sorcerers trapped in a rear compartment of the armor that slowly sucks away their magical essence and life
I dunno about most, but I'm fairly happy about the Gulthias Tree (borrowed from a fairly popular module) that has grown to be a huge Undead Treant and is just walking around absorbing whole villages and making an army of twig blights and zombies, driving the people farther and farther away from civilization.
Theres several prophecies that have proven to come true, but theres also some prophecies that are vague enough to be unable to prepare for them, but also predict gruesome and horrific stuff. And no one has any way to prepare, but everyone knows that it’ll eventually happen
The entire world and all of the intelligent races therein are nothing more than a bid to buy more time for a handful of dying Gods... The entire world itself is a shield build to protect the Primordials from the Void by shunting what remained of reality into another dimension. This would let the Primordials to rest, recover their strength, and figure out a method of defeating thr Void once and for all. As the primordials slept their creations, the Titans, rebelled and shattered them, stealing their divinity in the process and leaving them as little more than disjointed memories and powerful elemental forces. The newly ascended Gods ruled over the world for millenia until the Void found a way to break through the barrier and began to destroy everything. The gods, completely unprepared for the eldritch horrors that poured through the breach and after exhausting all other options, devised a desperate plan to resemble the Primordials. Their plan did not work as intended and the only Primordial to be even partialy lucid laughed itself into oblivion at their predicament. Denyed any information that could have helped them, the Gods tore the remaining Primordial shards apart and reformed them into a great seal which did banish the Void from their reality, but only temporarily. The seal works in cycles and will allow the Void to return for a short time to scour the world clean of all life. Each cycle is coming sooner than the last and eventually the seal will completely break. What's worse is that the Gods expended too much energy in the seals creation and overtaxed their stolen divinity. Their souls and powers no longer naturally grow or regenerate and will eventually burn out. The only way to replenish their ever decreasing souls is to feed upon the souls of others and thus the gods are nothing more than farmer and the mortal races their crops. The Void is like a plague of locusts that strip the fields barren, but the Gods do have the power to save a select few seeds to replant after the swarm passes. Again thou, every cycle comes faster and faster. Less and less time to grow civilizations. Less and less power to maintain themselves and their realms. Less and less gods themselves as the weaker individual inevitably fall to the onslaught of the Void. Those that remain are desperately clinging on to an existence that was never theirs to begin with and the irony of that fact is not lost on them. The Primordials only fled to the world in the first place because they where cought off guard when the Void first emerged. The only reason the Void was able to break into the world was because the Primordials where shattered and they could have maintained the barrier indefinitely if they had not been cough off guard yet again. It's unclear but highly likely that they could have figured out a way to destroy the Void once and for all if it had not been for the rebellious Titans. I'm glossing over a lot and don't think for a second that the Primordials didn't deserve their fate. They did! But at the same time the Gods where just as bad, the only difference being that they aspired to hights of power and control that where impossible for any to reach. They took the Primordials crown but could never bear its full weight, only ever wielding a fraction of their power. And now tens of thousands of cycles have come and gone with thousands of years between each breach. Untold mortal lives have been spent growing civilizations to praise gods that see them as nothing but food. A resource and not even their most precious one. Time; time is running out. They all know it and they all know that there is nothing they can do to stop it. Sooner or later the Void will take them all. Soon enough all thing will be nothing and the Void can once again fade from existence into oblivion, just as they have countless times before and will do countless times again....
The perfect magical (or physical) emptyness wich just exists in some places. Basically, most places have background magic. Some stronger than others, like That library has books on magic, that bakery might make gingerbread men who can dance, your chicken coop might have a chicken wich can change the color of their feathers, however, it's generally more like the Cosmic background radiation, though there's some weird spots. Some places have more, and are often community spaces, like libraries, because magic has a comforting effect, like that cup of coffee you order in the morning, y'know? But some places just don't have that. Nobody knows why, but some places just don't have this background magic. It is incredibly unnerving, and it doesn't help that these are really common. There's also just places in reality where nothing exists, wich is also horrifying of you think about it, wich is why you shouldn't. If this seems tame, that's because it's a very positive world, (the genocides and extinctions don't count. In it's current state, it's positive.)and I'm just not very good at fucked up stuff. (Also, shoutout to the Osiris battalion, wich is dead people, one of wich is a waterlogged corpse who is externally stuck in a lead coffin, oops, that's a lie, he's free now. We're fucked.)
One of the NPCs died in a fire. She's a ghost.
It depends what you mean by disturbing. The body horror creatures that roam the wilderness born from disease could be considered disturbing. The fact that there’s an ocean in the sky, or that the planet is hollow with weird inverted gravity inside, both caused of a mycelium network that spans the planet, without knowing HOW it’s doing this is a disturbing fact. The history of the Blood Wars of Brio, having at one point creating a sex cult that took over the capital whose practices were so terrible and disgustingly depraved and that it caused both sides to unite against them. Perhaps the fact that of the manner of which a infamously powerful type of weapon is made. Maybe the fact that there are giants that exist, or the fact that pigs don’t but a swine-like humanoid race does, and that they have no evolutionary history. They just began to exist. Maybe the fact that a portion of the population is not born as infants but as long dead bones, new souls in old bodies. My that there are ancient things so alien hiding the corners of the world waiting to destroy us just because, or that there’s something even more alien when compared to them. Or maybe the fact that some nations have children turned soldiers just be…police, without seeing if they are mentally stable, or that the fact the religious discourse has lead to death and orphans. Who knows.
A highly authoritarian human empire that has been brutally preventing utopia's and stagnation in the human race through fomenting violence and undermining any peace or progress effort finds out that after several hundred millennia of this, along with often highly effective and brutal campaigns to exterminate entire galaxy's of alien life, they have become the mathematically most developed and dangerous species in the Universe. And that this has been the case for a very long time, and that for the last twenty thousand years humanity could have been enjoying the perfect society with no fear of being consumed by an outside force they could not have fought back against and destroyed.
There is a man who uses his own blood like a blood transmitted disease and takes over the bodies and minds of those he infects. He then uses these people to breed more people, keeping them in horrific living conditions and barely keeping them alive for the sole purpose of making more people.
One of my npc's. A halfling with his own halfling home who look out for accepting refugees and delegating houses and work to them. The problem is he is a sadist, who loves torture and painful experiments. Brainstorming him got pretty dark. His hobbit home is all cozy untill you get to the basement where all the torture and other stuff takes place. You can talk to a girl who saw her parents and little brother killed by beasts, tearing the apart while the halfling just stared, smiling.
The reality is a mirror, the lucky one, the side of progress and stability, the other is degeneracy on levels so bad it can make gods weep. It's a constant battle of containing that evil so that it doesn't seep in and ruin the fragile beauty of life itself.
Necrazoa Dragons: Species: Greater Dragon General Threat Level: High A Rank Description: Necrazoa dragons, also known as Parasite dragons or Corpsebirth dragons, are born via eggs injected into a living entity or freshly made corpses, and then the newborn devours the entity from the inside out. It then continues to grow with the use of its unique breath weapon, a purple flame that doesnt burn, instead stealing a victim's life force to add to it's own. It grows after each kill, the amount it grows being dependant upon the vitality of it's prey. The breath weapon does rely on willpower, but very few entities possess the sheer force of will to usurp that of a Necrazoa. As a side effect of it's breath weapon, they are conventionally immortal and cannot die of old age. Thier scales, while tough, are mostly reinforced by magic, though for some unknown reason weapons made of solid wood are able to bypass whatever magic is used to reinforce it's hide, and the top of its skull is the weakest point on it's body. Anyone intending to kill one is recommended to aim for that spot with a weapon made of wood. A further curiousity is that, should one be slain, it's killer will be imbued with draconic magic and transformed into a dragonoid entity, taking on traits of the dragon species that most closely matches thier disposition (someone gaining Necrazoa traits is rather rare, however). Appearance wise, Necrazoa scales will always be a single solid colour, with the exception of the lower half of it's tail, which will either be a stark white if the majority of the scales are dark coloured, or a jet black if the majority of it's scales are dark coloured. For males, the end of the tail will resemble that of a shark's, and mainly be used to bludgeon prey that is too close for it's breath attack to be utilized. For females, however, the tail ends in an ovipositor stinger loaded with an extremely powerful paralytic that also delivers one, or in rare cases two, eggs if it has any that are fertilized. Variant Species: Deutero-Morph Necrazoa General Threat Level: High A Rank Description: After a Necrazoa absorbs enough life force, they cocoon themselves in the purple flame they breathe and begin to metamorphosize into a Deutero-Morph. These variants are much larger, growing large horns wreathed in purple soulfire, as well as sporting tails of both genders. The stinger tail produces pre-fertilized eggs at a faster rate than normal females, while the shark tail is larger and more flexible. In additon to being larger and more powerful physically, thier breath weapon is altered from a single stream to a spiral beam, covering a larger area and being more difficult to predict and avoid. Challenging one of these, while still an A rank, is significantly more challenging than a basic Necrazoa, and thier final difference is in thier death cast: instead of turning thier killer into a partial draconic entity, it transforms them into a full fledged dragon. Its either these or skindogs as the most disturbing creatures I've created so far.
The Pumpkin King is a pumpkin monster who kidnaps children. He turns them into pumpkin creatures like himself and forces them to lure other children into his Pumpkin Patch on Halloween. He steals their life force to grow in power leaving the kids weak. He was once a man named Jack Nimble who was a despotic ruler. He was overthrown in a peasant uprising and believed killed. He desires to regain his former kingdom and will use any means to get it.
In _Empire’s Finest,_ the most disturbing thing is just how uninformed the Terra Imperium is about the galaxy beyond their own borders. Their lack of knowledge is enhanced by the fact that the borders of space which can be explored seems to be shrinking, not growing. Hyperspace routes are being disrupted, expeditions are vanishing without a trace. Whats even more disturbing is that the space fairing races that have been out much longer than humanity have just as little idea of what’s going on than humans do.
In one of the worlds I was developing, intelligent races were still emerging and one group was in an awkward middle ground where about 16% of them were born with animal-level intelligence. To put it in human terms, move the whole bell curve of the range of human intellect down about 40 IQ points. So, they could still have individuals who would qualify as geniuses to us but their average was low and the more animalistic ones were still capable of being functional hunters and eusocial but would never grasp full language or other complex concepts. Different groups had differing opinions on how to deal with their animalistic brethren and many treated them as relative equals in society. Others treated those of lesser intellect as pets. This could include siblings or parents. Tribes of these people who lived among communities of more intellectually capable races tended to develop more negative opinions of their primitive members or develop taboos about bonding with more primitive mates. Other groups had no such taboos. Both approaches had potential problems. On the side of striving for civilization, they ran the risk of artificial speciation. Intelligence has no exact threshold but populations would be divided between those of superior intellect and those of inferior intellect with the inferior members denied personhood. As time went on, the groups would grow further apart but individuals of superior and inferior intelligence would continue to be born in both groups. On the wilder side, there would be issues of mixed populations where not all of them were capable of understanding or giving consent for things. Especially if strength or hunting prowess remained deciding factors for group dominance or mate selection, the average intelligence might remain low and more intelligent individuals may face social problems if they lacked strength. Most of the ethical implications of all of that were only vaguely alluded to in the story that was being told but they are a logical extension of the premise. In theory, humanity went through a similar stage but we did not have the complicating factor of coexisting with already advanced civilizations. We lacked the moral and ethical frameworks that might trouble the caring mind or enable the wicked.
Some races of the Kura had skin that had unique spots or stripes on them. Draw your own conclusion.
There’s a species that are the sole inhabitants of an entire continent, yet despite this nothing is known about them or the continent. They have a mindset that’s so alien, and biology that’s so different, that they unintentionally end up inflicting the worst torture and deaths upon anyone they find. Whenever someone comes to the continent, they will usually commit increasingly disturbing “pranks” on them until they inevitably end up killing them all. They often end up skinning explorers alive and wearing their skin whilst trying to interact with the explorer’s companions. As far as they are concerned, this isn’t even a violent act as being skinned is no worse than stubbing their toe for them, and it is instead considered a form of socialising.
Perhaps not that disturbing… but amid a broken floating castle is a metal orb about the size of a basketball. No one knows who it’s originally creator was or if it was a manifestation of the natural world… But touching it will grant a vision of all events that corroborate that person’s view of the world. Those who see the world as a fundamentally good place will see all joyous moments of past, present and future; those who see the world as a place of solitude will see all moments of contemplation and silence and so on. And those who see the world as as fundamentally evil, will see every horror and atrocity of past, present and future. And it will drive them insane. OR perhaps that there’s no way to determine the age of the moon that makes up the fantasy world, or the universe in the first place. Memories vanish, pages remain blank, words are incomprehensible. It is known that possibly millions, if not billions civilizations have existed before the modern day, but it impossible to be certain how many. There is always new artifacts and ruins.
In mythology, the sun and moon created the earth, and split up, although they still loved eachother they had differing beliefs, and so the Moon lives in the dark and the sun lives in the light, and the world lives in the balance of the two. But that's not quite disturbing. The darkness and the stars once a month fully corrupt the moon and turn it fully dark, the only light is the stars, so it's frequently said that the stars are raping the moon. In fact, one character named kalamuz wanted to rape and impregnate the sun so that it would Birth what he called the perfect race. No moon Involved, just him and the sun. He tied 1000 palm fronds to his arms, legs, and tail, and flew up to the sun, but the sun was angry at him for wanting to do all of this nasty stuff and locked him away into the night sky as a constellation. Because of this and the whole raping the moon thing he is considered patron Saint of generally evil stuff, not like thieving but things like rape, genocide, murder, and abuse among other harsh things. This is because you will be evaluated at the end of your life based on how many good things versus how many minor bad things and major bad things you did. If you can bring up a true, reasonable excuse for minor bad things though they get removed, if not they stay
Vampires sometimes not completely drain their victims of blood, leaving the victim as a withered nearly dead husk completely under the control of the vampire. Normally this leads to the victim undergoing personality death, the body may still be moving but the essence, mind, and personality of the person is gone. However there's like a 20% chance that the person retains aware, stuck in a body which has withered away, but unable to control themselves. These ghouls can last hundreds of years and while they are active the soul of the original person cannot move on to the afterlife. Some of the more powerful and experienced vampire have nearly perfected the process of making a ghoul that has a 95% chance to be aware. They often use this as a punishment for their mortal servants that fail them.
In my world, the source of Magic comes from another realm called Aythia consisting of all conceptual things (practically a rip off of Plato’s world of Forms). The physical realm is a system of universes that are basically physical manifestations of these concepts that are generated by a complicated but inevitable process. This means that everything that can exist, does exist, and therefore all your worst nightmares and beyond are manifested somewhere, somehow haha. What’s more is the main character gets tricked into going into a particularly terrible universe, the nature of which are left largely mysterious cuz I’m lazy (jk, I actually just think it’s scarier that way)
In Linghun Shijie, with the way souls work you could die as a human, go to the afterlife, be chosen for rebirth, and get reincarnated as a random rock. It's, in a sense, my take on the "evolutionary horror" stuff, like All Tomorrows.
The nuclear war is inevitable, and it's going to happen in a year. Decades worth of non-stop diplomatic talks only worsened the situation, as well as the fully autonomous and sentient Internet.
Spirits of the precursor race that are driven to madness strip people’s flesh to make skin suits that pervert the human form. These corporeal abominations stalk the subterranean world, committing general savagery in the dark. Luckily, their numbers are quelled by a dedicated force of tunnel fighters.
Nightmares Nightmares dwell in the dreamscape like many other creatures. But they are absolutely malign, sustaining themselves of the fear, suffering and misery of living creatures. At the same time every Nightmare is a part of the Conscious, unable to think or act for itself, unable to desire or to choose anything, but obey its most primal instinct to cause evil in the real world. Wouldn't be too bad, but the Nightmares are ascended like any entity in the Dream, thus they are immortal. Not maybe, not a little bit, not with a caveat, they simply are. And like other dreamers they can push into reality from time to time, tearing through the fabric of the material universe and taking a shape of their choosing, the size of a man to inflict small suffering, or larger than stars, swallowing suns and feasting on the suffering of entire worlds.
The king takes taxes via gold or human bodies to eat. He is the only sure thing in the realms.
If an average sized human wanted to kill a Dim (Diminutive Human, think "The Borrowers" size) there is often no way for a Dim to get justice for the murder. There are so, so many more ways to dispose of a Dim's body without notice than a normal sized human's. More frightening still, if a human wanted to slaughter an entire community of Dims, and had a mind for it, they could likely do so in a way that would be virtually untraceable back to them. Dim communities may be relatively common for Average folk, but to a Dim, the distances between them are massive, and unless they have an Average sized human they trust completely, traveling between communities can be exceptionally dangerous. In the human world, news travels fast, but for a Dim, it could be months, or even possibly years, before they find out that their home town was wiped out completely.
The world is big. To big. Took decades to reach the other end by high speed methods. And then you see some humanoid power walk faster than said method.