Maneaters

  One of the most feared groups of monsters in Asteria is the Anthropophage, the man-eater. A handful of creatures that not only eat sentient beings, but feed almost exclusively on them. While there are many creatures in this category (Ghouls are probably the most common example, but other common anthropophages include tengu, false lycanthropes, and certain varieties of elf), by far the most common are the Night People: the Hags, the Bagmen, and their various children. Most take humanoid forms, perhaps to better lure in their most common prey, or perhaps merely a case of you are what you eat. However, their relationship with humankind is deeper and more complicated than that.

        Night People come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and natures, but a few features are common more or less across the board. They all need to eat the flesh of sentient beings (though most have a huge preference for humans), they all possess supernatural powers, and they all are incredibly malignant. Night Folk are incredibly, inhumanly hateful. Their biology is steeped in it. They breathe in kindness and breathe out cruelty, black hearts pump spite and bile  through bulging veins, stomachs filled with bitter vitriol to burn away every last trace of happiness, joy, or hope from their victim’s corpses. Much of the their magic is simply a result of them hating the world, their victims, and sometimes themselves so much that reality buckles a little under the weight of their disgust and malice, and the shape it takes when it reforms is just a little (or a lot) worse than what it used to be.

    Hags and Bagmen are both predators, but the nature and method of their predation varies vastly between the two. Hags are like spiders. They spin webs, and wait at the center for their prey to get trapped. Whether these webs are of lies, of glamours, of tricks, or (in certain rare cases) of actual webs. Regardless, Hags tend to be very passive killers. By the time that their prey realizes that their in the hag’s clutches, it’s already too late. It’s often said that hags are weak, which is technically true as all but the most physically powerful hags are little match for a fairly strong human, but  this is rarely actually helpful to their would-be victims. A clever hag (which is almost all of them) waits until her prey is weakened, confused, and afraid before swooping in with needle teeth and talon nails for the kill. Hags are masters of trickery, and oftentimes their victims don’t even realize their near the hag before she manages to strike, as hags are cloaked in layers and layers of illusion to the point it can take weeks to figure out what a dead hag really looks like.


   Bagmen (Or boogeymen, or nightjacks, or whatever the local villagers decide to call the men who dwell in the woods at night) are active, pack predators. Nearly everyone knows it’s not safe to go into the woods after dark, or along the backroads at night. Most assume it’s because of wolves or bandits or some other petty, mundane threat. Those things may well kill you if you go out into the dark alone, but the real killer, the one most of those warnings originally referred to, are the Bagmen. Each and every breed of bagman is strong and fast, and a real bastard to kill. This is because, unlike the hag whose magic turns outwards, the bagman’s magic courses through his own mishapen body, making it far more powerful and far more hideous than any mortal man could ever hope to be. The last thing many travelers see, be they prepared and armed or not, is the hulking shapes of giant men crawling like beasts, an arm darting out from shadow to pull you in, and the last bit of dying torchlight glinting off of hungry eyes and huge, yellowed teeth. These are the lucky ones, the ones eaten now. Bagmen get their name from their tendency to kidnap, to stuff screaming men and women into giant, filthy sacks, to be taken back to their awful lairs for fates far, far worse than merely being eaten alive.


        One similarity that all Night Folk share is a love of family. Well, “love”. Both hag covens and bagmen gangs tend to be made of a few head members, their progeny, and any lesser specimens they’ve managed to bully into subservience. However, an astute person might begin to wonder how exactly hags and bagmen have children, if they’re all female or all male, respectively. The first response might be to guess that they breed with each other. This is actually true, but surprisingly rare. Hags and bagmen absolutely despise each other, to the point that one crossing into the territory of the other can lead to region-devastating feuds. Only at certain times in their lives do the Night Folk seek out their opposites for a little bit of hatefucking. Unfortunately for nearly everyone, they more often slake their lusts on humanity, and thus produce a variety of strange and hideous monsters, the Nightkin.

    How monstrous a nightkin is depends on it’s sex. Should a hag bear a daughter she will be mostly human , but marred with a number of strange and monstrous deformities and powers. She will also have a great propensity for witchery, both mundane and magical. These half-monstrous daughters are called Hexers , and are often doomed to a life of servitude to their mother’s coven. They are often bitter, fearful, and contemptuous of outsiders, but unlike their hag parents they have the capacity to feel positive emotions, and to become something other than a terror of the night. Not so lucky are the sons of a hag, the Ogres. (See below for more about them)

  Should a bagman manage to sire a son, the result is a hulking, deformed, almost simian giant of a man called a Brodkil. Also called a Formorian or a Low Giant , these unfortunate sons possess only a fraction of their father’s strength, which still vastly surpasses any humans, and only have a fraction of the cruelty and barbarism as well. Furthermore, they possess a limited ability to turn their magic outward to do a bit of magic in addition to their unholy fortitude and might. Magical too are the daughters of the bagman, the Turnskins.  Turnskins are by far the most hideous and inhuman of the Nightkin, and perhaps of all the maneaters. Their true forms are a nightmarish conglomarate of twisted limbs of human, animal, and things not seen anywhere in nature, in  a shape like every horrible beast you could ever imagine, and generally with a personality to match. However, turnskins have the easiest time of their kind fitting in among humans, because they have the gruesome ability to steal the skin of one of their kills, and wear it like a disguise. The illusion is fairly convincing, but only lasts for a little while. Generally this is all the turnskin needs to lure some travelers from the road into the backwood, and to her brothers.





A quick list of a few different sorts of both hags and bagmen, along with a short description


Hags

-Wood: “Hag classic”. Warty, hunched green skinned old women with wolves’ teeth and hairy, digitigrade legs. Have the power of flight, divination, and suggestion, and are always born in threes. Their daughters often are mistaken for dryads or wood-spirits, until people see the fangs. Their sons are covered in wood-like warts, and their blood blights crops

-Night: “Hag deluxe” Giant old women with leathery purple-blue skin, ram’s horns, talon-like fingers, and removable hearts. Can lay powerful curses, weave fates, steal the souls and possess the bodies of the sleeping, and their hearts are powerful magical artefacts in their own right. Their daughters are incredibly beautiful, but have black goat’s legs and a deadly kiss. Their sons are huge, grey skinned brutes with the ability to turn into mist and powerful regeneration, but turn to stone in the daylight.

-Sea: Withered nightmare mermaids with corpse grey skin, lamprey mouths, eel’s tails, webbed claw-hands, and a constant coating of noxious slime. Can control the weather and the minds of those desperate or lonely. Daughters are like beautiful mermaids, so long as you’re viewing them above the waterline. Look quite like their mother otherwise. Have two sorts of sons, depending on whether they were conceived on land or in the sea. The latter are humanoid masses of seaweed surrounding a frail, angry, ugly fish-man. The former have dull green skin, terrifyingly jovial personalities, and live in swamps.

-Frost: Wry, pale little old women with the eyes of birds, caribou’s antlers,  needle teeth,  and charred stumps where their legs should be. Have great command over the elements and the spirits, and like to make deals with mortals they know they’ll never lose.  Often live in strange, chicken legged shacks. Their sons are like great, six armed, bloody mouthed yetis that can strike men dead with a glance, and their daughters are red headed maidens with cow’s tails and backs like hollow logs.

Bagmen

-Skulker: Thin, oily giants perpetually cast in shadow. Can jump between any two dark points, but withers when exposed to light. Sons are all either jet black or bone white, and hate to be looked at. Daughters look like roiling masses of animal shadows, and stain anything they touch in human form.

-Deepwood: Freakishly muscular satyrs with shark teeth and massive beards. Can’t be killed so long as they’re in contact with the ground. Fond of the banjo, panpipe, and human scream. Sons are exceptionally fair if hairy, but have short tempers , goat horns, and the power to terrify at a glance. Daughters look like humanoid goats with six , broken limbs and disturbing voices, and reek of blood in human form.

-Krampus: Rotund old man with flaky, coal black skin and a giant, bushy beard. Hoards seemingly random but expensive items, and leaves them in place of victims, which they often abscond with through the fireplace. Sons are pointy eared, one eyed masters of crafts, love the cold. Daughters look like mutilated, bioluminescent caribou, and gorge themselves on human foods in human form.

-Mountain: crude, hugely deformed grey-green old men. LIve in caves, ften alone. Can grow to titanic sizes. Sons are lumpen, stone faced giants with the power to reduce their size and increase their skin’s hardness to that of stone. Daughters are like giant, hideous lobsters with human faces and rocky chitin, and are unnaturally firm in human form.

-Tome: Reclusive, wizend old man, somehow looks tiny despite being 9ft tall. Stick thin, hunchbacked, with massive, bushy beard. Carries a giant book made of human skin. Unlike all other Bagmen, is exceptionally skilled at magic, which it learns from consuming wizard brains. Sons are born looking like bearded old men, and can absorb spells to learn to cast them. Daughters are twisting clouds of rainbow colors and indigo fire, and their eyes glow in human form

-Filth: Morbidly obese, gelatinous man-thing. Come in many different colors, often dwell in swamps, sewers, or dungeons. Can absorb foes a la an ooze monster, or vomit out acids and oozes. Sons are chubby, semi-opaque jelly men who can eat anything and puke up a pet ooze. Daughters are filth encrusted amoebas with human-faced nuclei , and leak a mild acid in human form.



Ogres

Ogres are massive, twisted hulks of fat and muscle that are completely in thrall to their matriarchs. Strong of body but weak of will, an ogre will spend it’s entire life murdering and eating just about anything it can come across, in a vain attempt to fill the whole in it’s heart left by it’s mixed heritage. Ogres are perhaps one of the cruelest tricks a hag can play, because their human half leaves them knowing affection and happiness and craving it, but their hag blood prevents them from ever actually feeling it themselves. The only solace an ogre can ever find is in the brief few moments after eating another thinking being, when all the joy and goodness in their victim breaks down and floods into their body. It’s a short lived high,though, and soon enough they’ll start feeling the emptiness again. Even if their hag dies and the horribleness in them isn’t being reinforced, an ogre will always feel the hunger gnawing at them until the day they die.
In general, there are only two ways an ogre can ever really be free from their curse, neither of which is pleasant. The first is to simply keep eating, and eat worse people in larger amounts. An ogre absorbs the bad with the good when they eat someone, but for the most part the negativity is just digested and absorbed. Some thoughts,some minds are just too vile and dark for the ogre to break down, and they fester and grow like a tumor on the ogre’s soul. And on their shoulder, in a less metaphysical sense. Eventually the concentrated vileness reaches critical mass and breaks through the skin, sprouting as a second, even more unpleasant head. This can continue on, ad infinitum, but each time it does, something changes.

 The ogre can only hold so much awful, only be so hungry, and each head is another brain to shoulder the burden. Get enough heads and they can each, sort of, think clearly. More heads grow, and the ogre’s body is forced to grow to accommodate them. Some of the heads feel like they’re not having enough say, so they decide to quite literally lend a hand as whole arms burst from the ogres side, back , chest, wherever there’s room. Usually, legs soon follow so they can help guide where the ogre will go. Eventually the resulting creature looks more like some weird, fleshy tree, with scores of heads and dozens and dozens of arms and legs. And a much better personality, as all of those heads have, for the first time in it’s life, allowed it to behave as a person. These Hekatonchieres are a rare and unusual sight, but can sometimes be seen absentmindedly grazing on flocks of sheep in the mountains while debating amongst themselves where to go next

The other way an ogre can be free is less pleasant. Ogres are often maligned as stupid, which isn’t true. They’re just too distracted by pettyness and hunger to ever really learn anything not related to killing and eating. What they are, though, is weak willed. Their hag mothers wouldn’t have it any other way. This is a bit of a liability, though, as that makes them prime targets for possession. Sometimes, a demon will become desperate enough to possess an ogre, not realizing quite what that will entail. This is a bad thing for both parties, as an ogre’s soul is a yawning void of hatred, sloth, greed, and malignancy that’s as corrosive to the demon as the demon is to it. The two spirits wrestle for control of the body, and in the end tear each other apart. The not-quite soul that winds up in charge of the now drastically changed body is something better and worse than the sum of it’s parts. Something withmagical prowess and infinite zeal that eclipses the demon, and the brute strength and petty hostility that surpasses the ogre. This is an Oni , or if you’re really uncreative, an Ogre Mage. It will more often than not slaughter and consume it’s parent and siblings,before setting off on a hideous rampage of desruction and debauchery