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A horrifying new creature: the Todal (10 min read)
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 26, 2016 11:41 pm    Post subject: A horrifying new creature: the Todal (10 min read) Reply with quote

The Todal


An "exote," or being from beyond the galaxy, completely unknown to science, which seems to only hunt down Dark Side characters who are not doing enough evil or Jedi who have come back from the Dark Side and been redeemed (e.g. Anakin or Luke Skywalker).


Description and History:
The Todal is a nightmarish creature or entity which hunts down practitioners of the Dark Side and punishes or kills them for either not doing enough evil or for trying to change their ways. The Todal’s favorite punishments for offenders are enucleation (removal of the victim’s eyes), the ripping out of their tongues, the pulling of their teeth, and the melting away of their face and/or hands with its acid regurgitations. The worst offenders (those who have turned back to the Light Side completely) it simply kills and/or takes with it. What the Todal does with those whom it takes with it is unknown, though it is whispered that it plays with them like dolls even long after they are dead, mainly out of ennui.

The legend behind the creature tells that it was once imprisoned, frozen under fifty kilometers of ice inside a colossal comet, but one or more black holes somewhere near the Galaxy altered the comet’s course so that it entered the Galaxy and passed too close to a star. This thawed the comet and released the monster. This event occurred circa 3,000 BBY, a timeline which coincides with subsequent sightings of the creature. Indeed, there are records of ancient civilizations describing what appears to be the passage of the Todal’s comet, some of them hundreds of thousands of years apart. If these sightings are used to plot the comet's course, its trajectory indicates that it is definitely extra-galactic in origin, and it appears to have been merely passing through the area when deep-space black holes diverted it, causing the eventual release of the Todal. It entered the Galaxy at an oblique angle somewhere in the Mid Rim, and would have exited the other side of the Galaxy via the Colonies had it not been vaporized.

Biologically, the Todal is best characterized as a ‘galactic interloper,’ an entity which has no precedent and which is completely incomprehensible to science so far. Its mode of relocation is a mystery; it has no known starship, yet it has been known to just appear on any world in any place at any time. Its choice of victims appeared erratic at first, though it has become apparent that all of the creature’s known victims have been current or former practitioners of the Dark Side of the Force. Encounters with the Todal tend to be far apart temporally too—some individuals who otherwise fit the criteria for a visit from The Todal never see it as long as they live, while others who merely dipped their toes into the Dark Side and recoiled from it have been left sightless and mute by the thing. If it is an agent of some kind of universal justice, that agency is an erratic one.

The Sith regard the creature as an enigmatic but fundamental galactic force—the ultimate culler of the Dark Side’s weak or irresolute. When the creature hunts down and kills those who have thrown off the mantle of the Dark Side to strike a new path, the Sith celebrate. The Jedi, for the most part, do not acknowledge the monster’s existence, and regard the Tale of The Todal as a moral tale intended as a warning against what they see as a philosophical hypocrisy of the Dark Side.

Appearance:
The Todal appears as a huge, mostly shapeless and semi-transparent gelatinous mass, colored with striations of brown, green, black and pink. A closer looks reveals a network of black blood vessels that throb within The Todal's body, and more than one heart has been seen. As a creature composed primarily of slime and goo, it undulates and shifts its form, almost seeming to roll as it moves. It is basically a 1.5 to 2.5 meter-tall mound of mucus, presumable able to assume any shape its whim invents. Within its body, human and alien body parts—mostly eyes, teeth, tongues, and digits—can be seen floating, pieces the creature is said to have picked up from its victims and which are currently being digested.

Survivors speak of noticing the noisome stench of the Todal first, invariably describing it as a mix of feces and decomposition. These same survivors state that once the Todal was sufficiently proximate to them, its odor was so overpowering that it interfered with their thinking, their movements, and eventually their senses. Also, survivors state that the Todal can form arms, hands, and tentacles from within itself, appendages that emerge dripping and jiggling from within its body. Tt engulfs its victims completely within itself while it carries out their punishments, only releasing them once the deed is done. Sometimes the only clue that someone has been visited or carried off by the Todal is the abovementioned trail of slime.

Interacting with the Todal work is the stuff of nightmares. The surface of its “skin” has a slight opalescent quality to it—possibly something it may have picked up by passing through fuel at some point. If it decides it wants a closer look at a character, it will glide silently toward that character and then stop. Then, since the Todal is mostly transparent, the character might see up to eight of the partially-digested eyes within its body turn toward him or her and float or dart forward to observe that character. The effect is much like fish coming to the edge of an aquarium to be fed. If the Todal wants an even closer look, it may form one to three eye stalks, each of which will have another of its stolen eyes at the end of it, which would examine a character closely from top to bottom.

If the Todal speaks, and it has been known to do so on occasion, it will form up to ten mouths of varying size and shapes in various places on its body. Each will be lined with the mismatched and half-blackened teeth of both aliens and humans. All its mouths speak at once, a discordant sound because each mouth sounds vastly different in depth and timbre. The Todal has sometimes even been known to speak in two or more languages at once. It speaks only rarely, however, and never to its victims. If it does speak, though, it will ask for information or directions only. Once it has the information it needs, it tends to either roll off or simply vanish, leaving behind it traumatized witnesses and a trail of slime.

Obviously, visual descriptions of the creature vary considerably—it seems that no two see the same Todal. Other attributes of the creature which are also described by multiple survivors include: a feeling of dread which grows greater as the Todal approaches; the ability of the creature to spit powerful acid a distance of several meters from any of its numerous orifices; and most saliently, the seeming existence of a bubble around the Todal within which Force powers are either inoperative or do not have their intended effect.

Interactions with Others:
Should a character ever find him or herself entering combat with the Todal, he or she will be facing down an exceptional and formidable foe. The Todal is impervious (or at least highly resistant) to a number of weapons, including melee weapons such as swords, knives, axes, clubs, and staves; energy weapons such as lightsabers, blasters, ion and laser cannons; and bullets from firearms or shrapnel or pieces of detonated grenades. However, the Todal does not like fire at all and will flee from it immediately, a behavior that suggests that the creature may be especially damaged by it. It is also vulnerable to explosives, though it can re-form itself from the bits of slime and mucus which are thrown everywhere after such an attack, and the Todal needs only a minimum of such bits to regenerate itself enough to transport itself away.

Obviously, so far it is unclear whether the thing can actually be killed, or if the best result that can be hoped for is to drive it off temporarily. However, it seems that once an individual has entered the Todal’s perception and has been targeted, voluntary disengagement is no longer possible. Even decades after brushing with it, witnesses whose punishments the Todal could not complete—for one reason or another—have an almost 100% chance of encountering it again, ostensibly so the monster can finish its work. It seems the creature carries a grudge.

Though it is known to Galactic biological science as a “chimeric exote,” the Todal has acquired a considerable collection of names, sobriquets, and epithets during the last three thousand years. Chief among these are:

- the Darkness beneath the Darkness
- the Adumbrate or the Odium (its name in the Deep Core)
- It that Denatures (a translation of its name in Mando’a)
- the Odium of Korriban (a Sith nickname)
- the Agent of the Nothing
- His Heinousness (a fringer/pirate epithet)
- Anathema Eldest
- the Inexorable Guest
- the Interloper
- the Rue of Remé Chun (the famous case of Remé Chun, who was said to be a Sith-turned-Jedi who was hunted and eventually carried off screaming and gurgling by the Todal)
- a Nihilant or Nihilant exote (a descriptor given to it by those who study it)


Special Abilities:
Gleeping: This unique attack of the Todal is named after the sound it makes. If the Todal decides to “gleep” an individual, it happens as a single action, and the creature basically attempts to swallow a target. First, the Todal must form arms and/or tentacles (these may already be present; sprouting them is a free action). Then, it must select a target and roll its Brawling skill vs. a difficulty determined by the GM (or directly opposed by the target’s Dodge skill). If the Todal succeeds, the target is sucked into the largest of the Todal’s mouths, which can be stretched enough to pass a full-grown Gamorrean in complete armor with a weapon. The sound of escaping gasses after the victim has been sucked in and squeezed by the Todal are the source of this ability’s name, as witnesses have stated these gasses make a “gleeping” sound, almost like squealing belch.

Once inside the Todal, the target is completely immobilized and can only be moved around inside the Todal’s body by the weltering goo and slime that comprise it; in other words, only the Todal can move, rotate, or eject the target. Even if it is somehow chased off or dealt damage, the Todal will continue to confine its unlucky captive inside itself until punishment is complete.

After 12 combat rounds (or one minute), the victim begins to undergo suffocation damage. Usually, however, the Todal will have exacted any nonlethal punishment (enucleation, pulling of teeth, severing of tongue/fingers, acidic melting away of the face, hands, or other body parts, or other nonlethal disfigurements) by then or within 1D+1 × 4 combat rounds. After it is finished with a victim, the Todal will generally spit it out, to a distance of 2D meters. This victim will emerge dripping with goo and reeking of rot and sewage, and will be incapacitated by pain for another 3D rounds. If the Todal’s goal was to kill the individual, it will instead keep it inside itself for as long as it takes, dealing 6D+1 worth of acid damage per round until the target either suffocates or dies of acid damage. The Todal may also take such an individual’s eyes and teeth or other parts and spit the rest back out.


Game Notes:
In order to attract the Todal, a Force-user must have intentionally lost five or more Dark Side Points within the span of a standard year. Alternately, if that Force-user is a Dark Sider to begin with, he or she must fail to gain more than two Dark Side Points per standard year for at least three consecutive years. However, even individuals who meet these criteria (some of them spectacularly) sometimes fail to attract the creature. It is unknown if there are more criteria that the Todal uses to select its victims, though without additional information, it is impossible to explain such inconsistencies. The Duinuogwuin philosopher Borz’Mat’oh postulates that the creature must be able to read the hearts of its potential targets, and therefore it may take the information gleaned thereby into account when selecting its targets. Another theory puts forth the notion that the Todal may simply be feeding, though this is extremely unlikely because eyes, tongues, teeth, and fingers are hardly rich enough in calories to fuel such an immense creature, and such a being could feed just as well on any appropriately-sized organism, not merely a languid Dark Jedi or Sith, or the even rarer redeemed Jedi. This latter fact seems to establish that the Todal is not feeding but is manifesting some kind of agency.

Unfortunately, once a character has been selected by the creature for punishment (even if the punishment is a low-level one for the Todal, such as a basic enucleation), he or she will not be able to outwit or baffle the creature until it finishes its work, no matter how strong any obfuscations or hindrances are erected to this effect. Even redressing that character’s Dark Side Point total will not deter the Todal once it has become fixated on the individual. Changing locations is not an effective solution, nor is attempting to communicate or reason with the creature. Trapping it is impossible due to its highly variable form, and the fact that it seems to have the ability to teleport.

There is a thousand year-old legend which tells of a reformed Dark Jedi who saw in a vision that the Todal had begun to hunt him. This Jedi had heard of the creature’s apparent fear of or aversion to fire, so he surrounded his dwelling with huge circular fire pits, thinking that as long as he could maintain such a barrier, he could never harmed by the creature, and that it may eventually even lose interest. He hired guards to keep his fires fed with wood and coal, and he hired still others to continuously bring such materials so that his supplies would never run out. Unfortunately, however, on the first night after the Jedi had lit his fires and retired, smiling, confident for the evening, the Todal simply entered the minds of the Jedi’s guards and made them kill him in his sleep, and then they killed each other. Stories such as these have led to another epithet “the Inexorable Guest”.


(This concept came from the description of a similar creature in the children's novel The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber (read it, it's brilliant). In the end, the Todal consumes the evil Duke and drags him off to Hell for not doing as much evil as would befit his station. As for the Todal's physical form, I took heavy inspiration from D&D's Juiblex, the Faceless Lord, the demon king of all slimes, oozes, and jellies.

I'm not sure exactly the kind of roleplaying blunders my PC's would have to get into before attracting the Todal. They would have to be Dark Siders first of all, and I don't really like GM'ing for PC's like that. So it may be a creature I never use, but I really like the idea. I am retaining the name because I am regarding the Todal as an extra-galactic (or even interdimensional) phenomenal entity which could appear in any mythological universe under the right conditions (here's looking at you, H. P. Lovecraft).)
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Last edited by Error on Mon Jan 30, 2017 2:31 pm; edited 1 time in total
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 17, 2017 4:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Form

The Todal is technically capable of taking any form that is physically possible for a 400-kilogram writhing and dripping mass of slime and mucus, which smells like a combination of feces and decomposition. For most of its documented appearances, the creature seems to favor a largely amorphous two meter-tall shape that is somewhere between a shapeless blob and a warped humanoid face. Under a typical three-meter ceiling, the Todal will stretch and stick to the ceiling much the way it does to the ground. In fact, it can stretch into a 4-5 meter-tall column shape which is about 1 meter in diameter, and it can also flatten itself completely (against either the ground, a wall, a ceiling, or any other surface, including irregular ones such as ceilings of caves) until it is 3-5 centimeters thick and takes up an area roughly equal to 400 meters square. Individuals have been known to unknowingly walk on top of the Todal when it is in this last form, though many times it either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. Other times the trespassing individual simply vanishes without a trace.


- The creature's surface is oily in complexion, or opaline, though it is semi-transparent.

- The Todal’s body acts as though it were not quite homogenous. Some types of slime flow more freely than others, or drip more, or are of the various colors of decay: brown, gray, black, white, green.

- The creature cannot be frozen or drowned or electrocuted; in fact, it sometimes electrocutes its victims.

- Body parts the Todal has taken from its victims (particularly eyes, followed by tongues, teeth, ears, etc.) tend to churn slowly within its gelatinous body, and some of them appear to be in the middle of being digested or rotting.

- When the Todal has formed eye stalks, it gets +1 to its Perception attribute per stalk.

- Blasters make little splashes of goo against it, lightsabers and blades pass through it with almost zero resistance, and the Todal’s flesh immediately reforms behind such weapons. Blows from blunt weapons merely thump against its body and splash goo all over.

- In the event that a powerful enough explosion disperses the Todal's body far and wide, it will only be 1D hours before the creature simply reforms again, as its constituent parts are all propelled by pure Dark Side Force toward one another.

- The Todal is immune to all Force powers, and within a 5-meter radius around the creature, no Force functions. (E.g. Force Lightning, Telekinesis, and Force Push all stop five meters from the creature. A being within this radius cannot use or feel the Force at all.)

- The Todal is extremely averse to fire. Meaning any fire damage rolls against the Todal deal an additional 1D+2 damage to it, and the Todal resists at a -2 penalty. Fire will repel the creature, often times triggering it to use its phasing or teleporting ability to escape. However, if the Todal encountered the fire in pursuit of a target, it will still not be deterred and will reengage as necessary until an exploitable weakness becomes apparent.

- Dexterity 4D+1 Brawling parry 13D, Melee attack 8D+2, Melee attack: filament 12D, Melee attack: spit 10D+1, Melee parry 9D+1

- Knowledge 4D+2 Alien species 8D+1, Intimidation 14D, Languages 8D, Scholar 6D+2, Scholar: Dark Side 9D, Willpower 8D+1

- Mechanical 2D+1

- Perception 4D Investigation 7D+1, Search 12D

- Strength 5D+2 Brawling 13D+2, Lifting 10D, Stamina 11D

- Technical 2D

- The Todal may create a new set of arms as a full action, which gives it +1D to Brawling. It may have up to two sets of such arms, giving a maximum bonus to its Brawling of +2D.

- The Todal may spit acid twice a round to a distance of 10 m. This ability cannot be parried unless with a shield, and must be Dodged instead. Most any weapon or shield hit by the Todal’s acid will melt away in 1D rounds. If it gets on the floor in a starship, there is a risk of it eating through to (and past) the outer hull. A hit in the head, neck, or torso generally means that the affected character has about ten rounds to live (if he or she was hit in the torso, head, or neck) unless he or she can wash off the acid with an appropriate solvent. In the meantime, the acid will eat through all armor and clothing within 2 rounds and will begin damaging the flesh beneath it at 1D per round (e.g. in the fifth round, the affected character takes 5D damage). On the other hand, characters hit in a limb or in some sort of glancing way may only lose their limb or hand or foot or shoulder before the acid can be washed off. A character lucky enough to wash off the acid before becoming Wounded or Incapacitated will still have permanent scars from the attack. The known number of beings who have survived the acid attacks of the Todal is less than five.

- The Todal may also spray acid to a distance of 3 meters, which unless Dodged will cover anyone in that area with acid. Unless these individuals can immediately dive into a fountain or be sprayed down with solvent, they take 1D acid damage more each until they are dead. Incapacitated by acid means one or more of the victim’s limbs has been melted off. (Roll for which one[s].)

- The Todal’s grasp is capable of producing a strong electric shock. If the Todal can successfully complete a Brawling attack vs. a character, the Todal may opt to shock that character. If the Todal does, that character takes 7D+2 electrical damage that round.

- The Todal can shoot out a gummy/gooey filament meant to grab an opponent’s weapon or other object (skill used: Melee attack: filament). If it is successful in grabbing it, the Todal rolls its Strength vs. the Strength of the being or structure holding the weapon; if the Todal succeeds, it gains control of the weapon. It will generally fling the weapon way beyond reach (5D x 10 meters), or place it within its bodily matrix (again, out of reach, and now most likely clogged, power drained, and unusable).

- The creature is capable of entering the minds of others if it approaches them slowly. Once within 20 meters, the Todal rolls its Willpower vs. that of its target. If the Todal succeeds, it now controls that being and can pilot it remotely. This action may be “kept up” and counts as one action for the Todal each round. Once an hour, the Todal must make a Willlpower roll opposed by the Willpower of the dominated being. If the target succeeds, that character falls to the ground, stunned for 1D rounds, and the Todal is repelled from that person for 1D hours. The Todal may control up to five other minds at once and they will do whatever they are directed to do, whether it is murder family members, themselves, or some other depraved mischief planned by the creature. Such characters often wake up into their circumstances as though they had dreamed all the rest, though many of them never do, as they have been commanded to commit suicide by self or by others. The Todal has been known to punish certain lax Dark Side users not by harming them physically, but by taking them over and making them kill their entire families and friends, and letting them wake up into it. This penalty is rare and is probably intended to inspire hate, rage, and fear and other Dark Side emotions in the victims, making them even more evil and thus redeemed in the multiple eyes of the Todal.

- The Todal can survive the vacuum of space indefinitely, but if it is too close to a radiation source such as an active (or even a dead) star, it will begin to take damage. However, the Todal may then just use its purported phasing ability to phase away from the star.
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Last edited by Error on Mon Jan 30, 2017 2:44 pm; edited 7 times in total
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PostPosted: Wed Jan 18, 2017 2:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

^ LOL just reworded and reordered the above post to be more coherent and true to the descriptions of the creature.
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