02-23-2019, 03:14 PM | #1 |
Join Date: Jan 2006
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[Monster] Keepers
KeeperNotes: Keeper Spirits are bound to protect something, but also bound to keep it from being forgotten. Originally placed to guard the tombs of the great royalty of old, the keeper spirits kept their charges safe with elaborate tombs, guardians, and traps ... and kept them from being forgotten by luring greedy yet braggy types into their clutches, letting out just enough hoarded wealth the keep the legend alive. Over time, the secrets of binding ritual to create these spirits has spread, been used, re-used, and mis-used in many times and spaces. Yet exactly how common keepers are is unknown, as they are very shy and cautious. They observe their mandate from the spirit world, making subtle changes here, and exerting subtle influences there, like a fanatical hobbyist adjusting the rigging on a ship in a bottle. In practice, most keepers use their powers to make the denizens of their domains committed defenders, with fanatacism, sense of duty, or other binding disads, as well as a sprinkling of trickster, greed, and other traits that make for opponents worth singing about in the tavern later. Those close to the object of the keeper's curse will often have one or more levels of higher purpose, and a favored few will have been subtly modified in other interesting ways. (The GM should always feel free to add "fun" traits to their dungeon critters of course – the keeper is just getting the blame.) The oldest keepers tend to be the shyest, and the ones with the most mundane looking focuses for their curse. There is a keeper who has been protecting the same set of three finger bones (all that is left of an ancient prince) for millennia. Occasionally explorers have breached the inner sanctum, and driven off and exorcised the spirit, and destroyed the (decoy) prince's undead body, but those finger bones have been carefully wedged between two wall stones in a back corner, and the keeper has been called back again. An example of "Corrupt Weakness" – a group of delvers, exploring the omni-maze, sets up camp in the outer domain of a keeper. The curious keeper seeps through the cracks of the stone to the room where they have camped, and listens to them talk of their adventures, noticing that Tvalin (who has a sense of duty to underground nature) really appreciated the natural beauty of the Flowcaves, another area inside of its domain. In the morning, Tvalin wakes up with a new quirk: Really Likes the Flowcaves. Usually that's it as delvers seldom linger ... but Tvalin gets captured by the local orc tribe in a terrible battle that forced his fellows to flee the dungeon. By the time the rescue mission finds him again, Tvalin has a -10 point duty to protect the caves from interlopers. The next delvers through that cave are going to have to deal with him. |
Tags |
dfrpg, gurps, monster, spirit |
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