Scare The Storytellers
In October of 2020, the Starmourn team launched what they hope will be the first in a yearly tradition of Halloween writing contests. The goal of this contest is to bring a little spine-tingling space horror to the universe during the spookiest month of the year, along with letting players contribute their own creative twists to the game’s lore.
This year’s contest asked for players to come up with a frightening story whispered about by members of their character’s race. The following stories should be considered, if not true, at least canon.
Scare the Storytellers 2023
The Lys is, in a sense, the opposite of the Tal. It is said to make Decheerans leave their groves, often causing as much suffering as possible in the process, to pull them towards the dark side of Atria, where their bodies and their sanity will wither under the perpetual darkness.
A story of Arrick the Everdying, a Jin trapped forever-more in a very small box adrift in space.
A void of absolute darkness, the epitome of absence and negation. It devours light, leaving in its wake an unfathomable blackness that swallows everything in its path. An amorphous entity, it defies comprehension, a shapeless horror that instilled an indescribable dread.
Stern Emmaliare is a modern folk-tale told to Nusriza as they approach the Seventeen Mirrors ceremony. Though the specifics vary between retellings, she is said to be some sort of authority figure in life, who was so betrayed by her charges that she became a vengeful kith-spirit who fixates on bad children.
Scare the Storytellers 2022
Around the end of the War of Extinction and before the birth of the Amaian race, a wounded and shaken Lha Ti by the name of Katsyi fled everyone, and everything, to Delphi and secluded itself in its madness at the bottom of the Keter Ocean where it relived the horrors of a 1,500 year war in its mind alone. Unfortunately, the young Amaian race encountered Katsyi. Having no interest in this new race, Katsyi lashed out with void kith, ate the brave who got too close, or ignored the Amaians.
This is the story of family: of a community of Sisters, a monster, and the 'Mother' that extracts a price from her 'Daughters'.
The North Star or 'the girl with firey hair' only appears only in dreams as a beautiful woman with hair akin to a celestial blaze. Always appears as the most beautiful possible form to the spacer meeting her.
Zylas muses about shadows in the neon-lit gloom of the Undercity:
It isn't often that stories like this end with 'and our heroes all survived,' but if it helps, they were all in therapy for quite a while afterwards.
The Questioning Terraworm likes to try and convince growing Decheeran that they are, in fact, not growing. That they have died, and that they should just lay down into mulch so a healthier Decheeran can grow instead.
Scare the Storytellers 2021
Suahagan are thin, gray-skinned humanoids with small ears, milky eyes, and mouths full of lamprey-like teeth. They are said to use floodwaters to move stealthily, snatching up people to feed on, commonly characterized as tearing prey into long strips which the Suahagan can chew with its strange mouth.
The Fereshteh is said to be able to take any shape, and its original form is thought by the Jin to be ultimately unknowable. The constant between its forms is a multitude of eyes all over its body, which are said to help the Fereshteh to see not the shadow of a recent death, like the Jin's death eye, but instead to see the shadow of an imminent death.
Many non-Decheeran are familiar with the Tal, but very few are even aware of, let alone intimately familiar with, the horror this force allows the Decheerans to combat. There is a reason Decheerans cannot be forcibly ejected from a grove--to bud without a sufficient emotional connection to other Decheerans dooms the resulting proto-Decheeran to succumb to an emptiness that consumes its mind and warps it into a ghostly white and parasitic aberration known widely as a Sapropheratu.
The unfathomable is a deity that rules over a universe of infinite horror and madness. An entity so horrifying that even the elder gods are afraid of it.
The Butcher of C Block was once a Human executioner, still wearing the outfit of the prison guards of the Callisto Penal Colony, with a black hood covering his head, and the chains he once used to trap inmates scraping as he drags them along.
Scare the Storytellers 2020
"Hey, It's Kass,
I found what seems to be a confidential file while I was installing a backdoor on a facility that my old family company, Engram, was contracted to build, I don't know what all of this could mean but it could be something dangerous. Word needs to get out.
I'm going to see if I can't dig up more files from this facility while I'm here."
Only observed as flickers or tendrils, the shades are thought to be elongated silhouettes that disperse or vanish when directly observed. They are cast from whatever object they are attached to as if there was another, unseen light source.
Annavara is a humanoid creature, resembling the charred corpse of a Jin woman, at least while asleep. Once awake, the embers which make up her body give her prey ample warning, as the smoky stench of burnt flesh announces her approach. But for the oily flames dancing in her eye sockets, she might pass for a survivor of terrible burns.
The Kershk, a creature that seeks to undo all memory and reference of the creature that spawned it.
The Abyssinian takes various forms, but seems to prefer a humanoid shape, albeit one made of obscuring, blurry shadows making it difficult to get a sense of what it truly is. The Abyssinian's eyes are atramentous pools of the void itself held in a bone-white sphere, seeming to draw you in should you stare for too long and it lacks a discernible mouth. When moving it unnervingly does not demonstrate any ambulatory actions like walking or floating, it just seems to exist in one spot at one moment and another the next.
The Akkinova possess three large limbs around their torso, each a mix between bat wings and clawed hands. On one end of their body are three tails that are each ended in a foot long harpoon, sharp and powerful enough to pierce spaceship hulls and rend flesh. They do not possess a head, but instead many tentacles come from where one might expect a head to be, surrounding a maw of endless teeth. Their bodies are as black as space, though thousands of “eyes” that glow like distant stars cover their skin, appearing like the void itself until it is too late.
Perceived only by the faint twangs of sound, a choral brainjacker lurks here restlessly. Composed entirely of waves of dissonance, the brainjacker is perceived only by the faint rustlings of sounds as it zips around without a visible form. On occasion, a SONAR may capture the aura of the brainjacker when in modulates into audible ranges. On SONAR it appears like a restless cloud of ever-shifting energy, its form constantly evolving into ambiguous shapes as it violently reacts to any and all sounds in the environment.
