Scare The Storytellers
The theme of this year's Scare the Storytellers was "misunderstood legends." We've challenged players to identify a mob or experience in game and create a legend about it from the perspective of an in-game character that doesn't fully understand what they've seen.
The winning entries will have their legend brought into the game, and the menacing creature of legend will be available to fight next Rapadruk as a NIGHTMARE.
Read the entries on our wiki and then cast your vote for your top 3 on Discord under ANNOUNCEMENTS.
Scare the Storytellers 2025
Repak is said to be a rather mischievous spirit in the parade of Elder Druk. It was known for being particularly fond of stealing small items, especially keys, chuckling with delight as it took them from their original place to either hide them somewhere else, or abscond with them entirely.
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Though the urban legend has fallen out of vogue in recent times, every would-be visitor to the resort-world of Usum Usutti has heard of it - there’s no shortage of monsters in the northern wilds, but the roving packs of skulfs are the least of your worries if you find yourself wandering out there.
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They say she only comes for the forgetful, those who speak too loud in the fog, or break the stillness of the swamp at dusk.
Don’t talk in the swamp. That’s the first lesson.
The second? If you see eight blue-slitted eyes blink in the mist, you’re already hers.
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This legend tells the tale of the Burrower Beneath, a sinuous and silent predator which lies below the surface of all things. It takes great vigilance and awareness to spot the tell-tale signs of its presence, as it is a voracious, merciless assassin of great stealth and guile.
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Every bounty hunter worth their mercenary listing in the sector has traversed the halls of Tranquility Deepness at some point or other, though not all have witnessed the ghost children of the station.
Those who have, might recall the innocent giggles and quick, pattering footsteps that echo down the barren halls, distorting into shrieks and groans. The children's likenesses seem to flicker with the lights of the station, their bodies bending in ways they shouldn’t, their faces expressing an almost-believable facsimile of childlike joy.
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Occasionally you hear about these popping up in the sketchiest of pawn shops, and the dark backroom clinics around Reynolds. As I hear it they were made by, and for, some old mining corp. They got hit with some legal troubles, or something like that, and the whole corp got scrapped and sold off. They came with an inbuilt prosthetic-to-mindsim system to help the adaptation feel as natural as possible; no phantom limb, just real feel.
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The history of Scare the Storytellers
In October of 2020, the Starmourn team launched what they hoped would 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.
Prior years' contests asked players to come up with a frightening story whispered about by members of their character’s race. Check out the entries below!
The following winning stories should be considered, if not true, at least canon.
Scare the Storytellers 2024
Dovic is a groundbreaking mutagenic pathogen that redefines the boundaries of biological manipulation. This extraordinary organism possesses the uncanny ability to shapeshift into a myriad of microbes, each with its insatiable appetite for genetic diversity. It replicates the DNA of any living organism it encounters, allowing it to integrate seamlessly into its host. Once established, it takes complete control, transforming the host into a puppet capable of complex behaviors and environmental adaptation. One of its most infamous hosts is known only as: The Twisted Soulhunter.
The site of a factory where proto-Decheerans were once turned into novelty furniture. Plantlife still hardly grows there, and Decheerans visiting the place are overcome with all sorts of unpleasant experiences.
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.