Wednesday, November 12, 2014

CYOA brainstorming: Spooky Adventure

What is this about?

Form: Everyman (face in a crowd)
Immortality: Rebirth
Domain: Person
Powers: Cult, Extra Sustenance (Joy), Paralysis, Wanderer, Unbound, Durability, Voices
Weaknesses: Nocturnal, Monster Hunter

The Woathman has been hunting for a long time. Its origins, even its original sex, have been lost to history. The Brandons do not remember how it started, the first transformation from human to Woathman. A deal of Faustian proportions... a ritual gone wrong...


What they know is this: Whether originally patriarch or matriarch, the Woathman is their ancestor. Their cousin. Even, for some, their future descendant. Upon its death, you see, the Woathman is reborn to one of its descendants. And after centuries, the Woathman has many descendants.

Among these are the Brandons, who have long carried the knowledge of the Woathman and its habits and powers. They continue the bloodline in order that they might eliminate the Woathman a little faster on those occasions that it is reborn to one of their own.

There are other descendants who know of the Woathman, who venerate it as tutelary spirit or kind of household deity. Perhaps fewer in number, they are very useful for preparing a "grounds" for the coming of the Woathman.

The Woathman feeds on fear. It feeds, strangely enough, on joy. It claims both of these for itself in the killing act, the culmination of days or weeks of careful sowing.

Though no different from another human in the day, at night it is supernaturally tough and difficult to kill. It may speak to people from a great distance (as the Brandons know very well), though it is not perceptible as more than a whisper.

It looks like anybody. It looks like everybody. When it is in a crowd, it is literally impossible to notice. It is in the daytime, in the mall or the town square, that the Woathman is at its deadliest. The only saving grace is that it cannot walk freely. It is bound to follow within a few miles of a single person, in whose "shadow" the Woathman must live. and to this person the Woathman is but a shadow: Its words will not be heard, its knives not felt.

Most "burdens" to whom the Woathman has revealed itself, have considered themselves insane. Some have even killed themselves, doing in the Woathman at the same time. It has become less enthusiastic about revealing itself since, understandably. It can, for as long as it wishes to be complete invisible and intangible, wander from this boundary, but that is all.

Yet this state of affairs is not permanent. There is a day coming- whose hour neither the Woathman nor the Brandons know- when it will be let loose. For only a short period, to be sure, but those months will be long enough for the Woathman to find and kill each and every one of the Brandons.


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