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Old 04-15-2021, 11:21 AM   #8
Varyon
 
Join Date: Jun 2013
Default Re: what do Lilitu eat, and what is a Daily Dose of Infants' Breath?

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Originally Posted by Plane View Post
One other thing interesting here... Lilitu are barren and can't give milk. If barren is a racial feature then how are Lilitu actually created if not through reproduction?
Up to the GM. Maybe, as Anaraxes suggests, they've always been around. Maybe they're actually the tortured souls of women who murdered their own children - or mothers who refused to sacrifice a child to some baby-eating evil god, and now are forced to harvest souls for said god as punishment. Maybe a portion of the energy they take when stealing an infant's breath is channeled down into Hell, and once enough is gathered it coalesces into a fully-formed Lilitu. Maybe they're the final stage of the (supernatural) life cycle of some creature that was fertile at a previous stage (say an egg hatches into a small, violent Imp, the Imp matures into an alluring and fertile Succubus, and eventually the Succubus withers into a Lilitu).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Plane View Post
Maybe that could be some special Lens of an enhanced Lilitu who buys off both their Dependency and their "No Doesn't Eat Drink" disadvantage making them more like the traditional Spirit/Specter?
Perhaps add Gluttony and Unnatural Appetite, to represent the spirit's compulsion to consume food (and babies).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Plane View Post
The "Material Lilitu" interestingly does remove this disadvantage, which means it does enjoy "Doesn't Eat or Drink"
Yeah, it's rather odd that the spirit version of the Lilitu requires food and water, while the material version doesn't; seems like these should be reversed.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Plane View Post
Maybe anything alive that dies leaves some kind of ghost for other ghosts to eat?
That's kind of what I was thinking with the whole "pantomiming eating" thing. Perhaps the "soul" of something is trapped within its mortal shell, and the process of decay is actually the result of the soul slowly breaking free. The Lilitu can pull the soul out and consume it, causing the food to rapidly decay. Under such a paradigm, burning a body (or it being otherwise consumed, as in a sky burial) is done to release the soul more rapidly, and methods of body preservation would be seen as sadistic and ghoulish for trapping the soul for longer.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Plane View Post
You might in theory have "plant ghosts" and the like too, although the idea of Lilitu feeding on an "apple ghost" is less apeeling.
If you want to require Lilitu to eat the ghosts/souls of recently-slain animals, adding Restricted Diet would be appropriate (it's roughly comparable to what cats have). And I see what you did there...
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