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| Nation | Excruciator |
| Species | Abomination |
| Classification | Construct |
| Sphere | Agony |
| Origin | Lavahem Yadavet Yavavra made them from his own flesh. |
| Lifespan | Inmortal |
| Habitat | Cold northern islands |
| Food | Pain. Intelligent mortals produce the most potent pain for them, but unintelligent animals can also provide nourishment to them. Plants and fungi provide their own versions of pain, but it is not as sustaining. |
| Description | An excruciator appears to be tall (7'), skinless figures with pallid musculature, blue blood, and razor-sharp, hooked appendages, which they use to rips their own bodies and the flesh of others. |
| Procreation | Though the original excruciators came from their god's flesh, new ones are formed from victims of the excruciators via ritual evicseration or by ponomancers via a ritual of torture. |
| Esoterica | Excruciators are beings of arnum. They generally only use other kinds of arnic energies--hunger energy, desperation energy, cacophony, uafas more than hollow energy, baleblood, or doom. Mijjit, mansam, Raesian energy, aifaellam, and blood energy are not uncommon. They never use celestial energies. Other energies are rarely used. |
| Special Powers | The hooks at the end of the tentacles of an excruciator cause unfathomable pain when they tear flesh. They absorb this pain into their own flesh. If they are not sated by the pain they take from others, they must rip themselves. Because they do not die a natural death of old age, they can subsist on small amounts of pain for a long time. They can sense the weaknesses in others. |
| Weaknesses | Euphoria can harm them. |
| Maleficing | Excruciators can be created, controlled, or summoned by powerful ponomancers. The ritual to create one requires capturing a mortal and torturing them until they are nearly dead or in a state of trauma-induced mental failure (dissociation, catatonia, psychosis, etc.). Once they are in such a state, the ponomancer must bind them into a magical circle and inscribe their own Name or the Name of a powerful being of arnum into the victim. To control an excruciator, one either needs the Name used to create them, or they need to capture a bit of the excruciator's flesh. They must then wash that flesh in acid (hydrochloric is best) and place it in a ceramic jar full of nails. The jar must then be shaken while the ponomancer chants a Name of power. To summon an excruciator, a ponomancer must take a piece of someone's flesh (their own or another mortal's) and place it in a magical circle. They must then produce the tears of someone who has been tortured emotionally, the blood of someone tortured physically, the phlegm of someone mentally perplexed into a state of agony, and the heart of one metaphysically tortured (usually via some traumatic action that makes them lose their faith or through direct esoteric metaphysical assault). Then a Name of power must be invoked. |
| Culture | When left to their own devices, excruciators are a small nation, generally not found much outside of their cold, dangerous island homes. They live in small groups near the rocky shores and wait for shipwrecks or lost travelers. Every group lives in constant conflict with the other groups and any other living things in the vicinity. Excruciators reproduce asexually, ripping off body parts from victims that are rituall transformed into new excruciators. They do this when they need more numbers in their group, which happens rarely because of their remote location and inmortality. They create a few dozen at once by ripping a few people to shreds. Children are left to fend for themselves, usually destroying and devouring the pain of other children born at the same time, or feeding on animals' pain. Eventually, they grow strong enough and large enough to join a group, usually the nearest one (which would be the one that created them), and engage a member of that group in combat in order to gain a place in it. If they lose, they either die or find another group, if they recover. If they succeed, they decide whether to keep the excruciator they defeated as a slave or to kill them and feast on their agony. Once part of a group, they continually fight for a position of dominance within it, for the strongest and most brutal get the most food. Those who are able to maintain control usually enslave most of the others, allowing some freedom for those who agree to fight for them or have special or useful skills. The three most common roles within a group, other than the leader, are wreckers who help lure in ships to the rocks, ponomancers who wield the energy of arnum, and priests who serve as conduits to the Lord of Hooks. Sometimes these roles will overlap with being the leader of a group. Names are unimportant among excruciators, but they sometimes use them. They choose their own names if they are strong enough, or they are given one for convenience by those who own or control them if they are not strong enough. Gender is irrelevant and a foreign concept to them (individual pronouns are usually translated as "it"), and love is even more alien to them. They know only pain and the need for pain. Their language is barely intelligible even among themselves. There is one larger group of excruciators who are enslaved by a powerful Aeonian warlock named Mnemnon. This group are his army, a few hundred strong (the largest group that exists), and considered legends among the "free" excruciators. This group is led by the Excruciator Manifest, who Mnemnon captured and enslaved many Ages ago. Mnemnon maintains a powerful cult in the Lamb Wood in Ansulym; he serves as the Lord of Hooks' primary agent in the world, though the truth is, he is more the puppetmaster than the puppet. His goal is to take revenge upon a world he believes wrongly caused him suffering long ago, and he intends to use the Lord of Hooks to do so. In order to keep them from running rampant, Mnemnon controls the size of their population carefully. |
| Religion | Their religion varies slightly from group to group, but the main gist of it is that the Lord of Hooks, a massive, mindless Divinity that dwells beyond the edge of the horizon, spawned them into a world where all that exists is suffering and pain. Pain exists to feed them and the Lord of Hooks creates that pain. They honor it by creating pain. Every so often (they have no words to measure time and do not delineate it in any way), their priests gather a powerful animal or mortal for a sacrifice to their horrifying Divine. Everyone in the group takes part and feeds during it, and this feeding is more potent than others. They believe that if they die (which is rare, since they are not mortal), they are returned to the body of the Lord of Hooks. |
| Notables | Amnoch, the Excruciator Manifest |
| Notable Occupations | Leader, Wrecker, Ponomancer, Priest, |
| Mortal Interactions | The most common interaction mortals have with excruciators is if their ship wrecks on the shores of Jotuk, the main island where they live. Their interactions are usually very brief and painful. Sometimes they end up there simply because they are lost at sea. Most sailors know to avoid the area, speaking of it with great fear. Outside Jotuk, there is the large group in the Lamb Wood thay serves Mnemnon. These are assumed by most in the area to have been created by the warlock, and he does nothing to dissuade them of this. In rare cases when an excruciator is found outside these locales, they are viewed as monsters and destroyed. It is theoretically possible than an excruciator can exist without feeding on the suffering of intelligent beings, but they rarely do. |
| Sample statistics | PRO 12 ATH 12 STR 12 Hooks +5/+5 AWA 6 WIL 8 ROG 6 Hook (Arnic Power) 13 Vulnerability Sense 12 |
GrandGuignol
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