Chilling touch attack for undead idea

[b-dog]

I am thinking of a power that ghosts and other undead might possess where the ghost strikes a PC and then it does damage as normal but then the PC suffers a penalty to all rolls of the same amount as the damage done by the ghost. So a ghost or vampire strikes a PC and damages him for 8 points of damage them all of the PCs rolls are at -8 until the wound is healed. Holy water can also be used to cleanse the wound and remove the penalty to skill rolls but does not heal the physical damage.

[zoncxs]

That is extreme, maybe make it -1 penalty per successful hit. With more powerful ghosts/undead upping the penalty.

[Anders]

-8 to all rolls is really crippling. That is a lot of penalty to eat. It pretty much means you're useless at everything except two or three skills.

[Kromm]

The most powerful Curse spell causes -3 to all rolls; there's no way to go past this. It has two specific "escape clauses": a spoiled notable success or a Remove Curse spell. Only clerics with Power Investiture 5+ may cast it, and it costs 20 energy and takes six seconds. There's no reason why undead should be more powerful than this . . . a central conceit of DF is that, at the highest levels, clerics outmatch undead.

Something more like this would fit better:

Impure Injury: Track HP of injury this specific monster (not all monsters with this ability) inflicts on a given victim. Read the tally as energy points in a Curse spell (Spells, p. 51) cast automatically as follows: -1 after 3 HP, -2 after 10 HP, or -3 after 20 HP. Healed HP subtract from the total; e.g., 17 HP gives -2, but if that person is fully healed, it takes another 20 HP (not 3 HP) to inflict -3. These penalties don't "stack" with themselves, the Curse spell, or anything similar – a greater penalty dispels a lesser one. Unlike the Curse spell, Impure Injury won't cancel a notable success and go away on its own. But also unlike Curse, it can be removed by not only the Remove Curse spell but also the Esoteric Medicine (Holy) skill, which requires one dose of holy water per -1. Impure Injury resists Remove Curse and Esoteric Medicine using the monster's Will.

[b-dog]

Originally Posted by Kromm

The most powerful Curse spell causes -3 to all rolls; there's no way to go past this. It has two specific "escape clauses": a spoiled notable success or a Remove Curse spell. Only clerics with Power Investiture 5+ may cast it, and it costs 20 energy and takes six seconds. There's no reason why undead should be more powerful than this . . . a central conceit of DF is that, at the highest levels, clerics outmatch undead.

Something more like this would fit better:

Impure Injury: Track HP of injury this specific monster (not all monsters with this ability) inflicts on a given victim. Read the tally as energy points in a Curse spell (Spells, p. 51) cast automatically as follows: -1 after 3 HP, -2 after 10 HP, or -3 after 20 HP. Healed HP subtract from the total; e.g., 17 HP gives -2, but if that person is fully healed, it takes another 20 HP (not 3 HP) to inflict -3. These penalties don't "stack" with themselves, the Curse spell, or anything similar – a greater penalty dispels a lesser one. Unlike the Curse spell, Impure Injury won't cancel a notable success and go away on its own. But also unlike Curse, it can be removed by not only the Remove Curse spell but also the Esoteric Medicine (Holy) skill, which requires one dose of holy water per -1. Impure Injury resists Remove Curse and Esoteric Medicine using the monster's Will.

Thanks for the correction. Could there also be something like impure wound for sanity blasting Elder Things? Where you steadily gain a penalty to your Will as you go more and more insane? Maybe Remove Curse can heal the broken mind of the PC? And what about vampires who drain blood? Can they also cause penalties to Will rolls after they feed on the PC?

[Kromm]

You could easily replace the generic -1 to -3 curse with a focused Will penalty. Whether it would ever matter is another question.

Heroic 250-point delvers with weapons and armor aren't likely to give a vampire time to suck blood. That's why the vampires in Monsters are smart enough to leverage their great strength by wearing DR 7 armor themselves and using heavy two-handed weapons. The blood-sucker who sneaks up and bites people is a horror trope; hack 'n' slash vampires are for brutal combat.

Likewise, Fright Checks that blast sanity aren't going to matter that much to delvers, given their high stats and all the bonuses on p. 10 of Exploits. Usually, Elder Things are scary because they have weird, dangerous combat powers like teleportation, telekinesis, tentacles, and freaky gaze and touch attacks that bypass DR. Losing your mind to them is horror, not hack 'n' slash.

Remember that the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game is a single-genre game focused on hack 'n' slash. For genre blends, there's GURPS, which more strongly supports horror. This is actually the biggest single difference between the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game and GURPS Dungeon Fantasy – the latter isn't so much hack 'n' slash fantasy as it is kitchen-sink fantasy, which spans epic fantasy, hack 'n' slash fantasy, historical fantasy, horror fantasy, steampunk fantasy, and even science fantasy.

[b-dog]

Originally Posted by Kromm

You could easily replace the generic -1 to -3 curse with a focused Will penalty. Whether it would ever matter is another question.

Heroic 250-point delvers with weapons and armor aren't likely to give a vampire time to suck blood. That's why the vampires in Monsters are smart enough to leverage their great strength by wearing DR 7 armor themselves and using heavy two-handed weapons. The blood-sucker who sneaks up and bites people is a horror trope; hack 'n' slash vampires are for brutal combat.
.

What about a nosferatu style vampire the uses stealth to sneak up behind PCs and then begins draining their health? Once he drains a lot of HT the nosferatu could control the PC to help attack the other PCs due to the Will of the PC being reduced and the nosferatu eye charm gaze mind control

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by b-dog

What about a nosferatu style vampire the uses stealth to sneak up behind PCs and then begins draining their health? Once he drains a lot of HT the nosferatu could control the PC to help attack the other PCs due to the Will of the PC being reduced and the nosferatu eye charm gaze mind control

You're welcome to try! See The Problem with Replacing PCs (GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 3, p. 8) for a relevant discussion of the difficulties.

In brief: Delvers nearly always move in a tight marching order, using a host of extraordinary abilities to see in the dark, sense monsters, detect danger, etc., which makes the situation difficult to engineer. Those scouting ahead or watching the rear, who are best positioned as targets, are classically the super-observant heroes who are the hardest to sneak up on. Assuming you succeed at sneaking up, those high-Per PCs tend to be that way due to high IQ, which comes with high Will . . . so mind-control isn't a safe bet, and failure means a noisy call for help, struggle, or combat that will bring the others running. And assuming you avoid all that, you're asking a player to accept an un-fun situation and not telegraph what's going on to the other players.

When I first started GMing, I tried things like this. It never went well. My view of mind-controlling and body-snatching loner monsters who pick off single victims is that they're best used against NPCs.

Ambushes are different, because while they generally pick one or two victims quickly, they're combat challenges that allies will usually engage and eliminate immediately. In many cases, the person picked off is put back in the fight by a quick healing spell, somebody cutting a web, or whatever.

[b-dog]

Originally Posted by Kromm

You're welcome to try! See The Problem with Replacing PCs (GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 3, p. 8) for a relevant discussion of the difficulties.

In brief: Delvers nearly always move in a tight marching order, using a host of extraordinary abilities to see in the dark, sense monsters, detect danger, etc., which makes the situation difficult to engineer. Those scouting ahead or watching the rear, who are best positioned as targets, are classically the super-observant heroes who are the hardest to sneak up on. Assuming you succeed at sneaking up, those high-Per PCs tend to be that way due to high IQ, which comes with high Will . . . so mind-control isn't a safe bet, and failure means a noisy call for help, struggle, or combat that will bring the others running. And assuming you avoid all that, you're asking a player to accept an un-fun situation and not telegraph what's going on to the other players.

When I first started GMing, I tried things like this. It never went well. My view of mind-controlling and body-snatching loner monsters who pick off single victims is that they're best used against NPCs.

Ambushes are different, because while they generally pick one or two victims quickly, they're combat challenges that allies will usually engage and eliminate immediately. In many cases, the person picked off is put back in the fight by a quick healing spell, somebody cutting a web, or whatever.

I guess to make the nosferatu scary in Dungeon Fantasy the nosferatu would have to do an ambush attack and sneak up behind the PC like a thief backstab ability and do some sort of super blood drain that would severely injure the PC. The small amount of damage of 1 to 3 HP per round would be like a mosquito to a 250 point PC. Doing like 3 d 6 (3 to 18 ) HP drain in one round would make the vampire scary and deadly.

[Kromm]

My secret is to see vampires not as monsters, but as villains. They hang out in haunted manors (inspiring dungeons), terrorize villages (generating quests), and prey on or enslave friendly NPCs in town (generating more quests). When combat is really inevitable, they command hordes of lesser undead from the rear, where they can flee to fight another day.

If the delvers clear the manor, come to the rescue of the village or NPCs, or beat the hordes, the vampire offers them deals to tempt them into evil . . . maybe even the power of vampirism. This doesn't have to be with the strings of dominance attached – spells like Compel Truth and Mind-Reading make it pretty easy to determine whether the vampire is planning a double-cross. But there are still the strings of social rejection: The vampire adventurers will soon learn that they are the villains now, putting them on their old enemy's side without any need for mind control.

I find that's how "subtle" needs to look in dungeon fantasy. It needs to be on a large scale – the scale of villages and hordes and long-term consequences. Most heroes think only of what they can kill, loot, and weaponize with their own two hands, and rarely look far into the future. On that scale, they'll just about always prevail against "subtle" foes, because on that scale, "subtle" is just skulking around until a fight breaks out. But good villains can turn the shortsightedness of delvers to their advantage by playing the long game.