Great Cthulhu's Cute Neice

[Michael Hopcroft]

I was wondering how one would design (hopefully as an NPC) a little girl with the powers of the Elder Gods. Maybe she's the unfortunate product of interbreeding, or maybe she's an Elder God herself in human form.

 

If she were evil, she would be a truly firgihtening character indeed. But what if she were just curious about the world, inexperienced, or didn;t know hwo to use her powers yet?

[Lord Liaden]

This notion reminds me of that classic Twilight Zone episode of the little boy with the power to alter the reality around him in any way he could imagine. Even if not inherently evil, a small child with practical near-omnipotence is a sufficiently frightening prospect.

 

The model I'm thinking of is the old Champions supervillainess the Black Enchantress from The Coriolis Effect. That character was indeed evil, but she also started out as a child who developed power well before maturity, and the kind of powers she employed could work here. For example, Transforming people in various physical and mental ways - a good way to create havoc that would draw heroes to investigate. Then there are Mental Powers to learn people's secrets, influence their behavior or cause them to experience hallucinations.

 

If you want the character to have versatility of godly scope, these abilities or others could be part of a Multipower or Variable Power Pool. OTOH, if you want the girl to be innocently causing chaos, they might have No Conscious Control on them.

[keithcurtis]

Originally posted by Lord Liaden

This notion reminds me of that classic Twilight Zone episode of the little boy with the power to alter the reality around him in any way he could imagine. Even if not inherently evil, a small child with practical near-omnipotence is a sufficiently frightening prospect.

 

Based on the 1953 short story by Jerome Bixby. You can find it in the Science Fiction Writers Guidl Hall of Fame Vol. 1

 

Keith "Not very helpful, but amazingly trivial" Curtis

[starblaze]

It was called It's a good like and the child was Anthony played by Will Mumy. There was a sequel episode on the new Twilight Zone where Anthony is all grown up and with a daughter who has the same powers as well as the ability to bring things back. Cloris Leachman was also in the sequel.

[lemming]

I wonder if the girl eats d4 investigators

[Mordacius]

Based on the 1953 short story by Jerome Bixby. You can find it in the Science Fiction Writers Guidl Hall of Fame Vol. 1

Wasn't that It's a Good Life?

 

As for the girl: Cosmic VPP, some heinous Regeneration with the Resurrection advantage, and PsychLim: Doesn't Understand the Consequences of Her Actions (VC, Total).

 

Frankly, I'd find a child with that power more terrifying than some sort of evil god - less predictable.

[Michael Hopcroft]

Originally posted by Mordacius

Wasn't that It's a Good Life?

 

As for the girl: Cosmic VPP, some heinous Regeneration with the Resurrection advantage, and PsychLim: Doesn't Understand the Consequences of Her Actions (VC, Total).

 

Frankly, I'd find a child with that power more terrifying than some sort of evil god - less predictable.

 

Actually, that would be a Phsycial Limitation by the letter of the rules because it's not something that can be overcome with effort. She simpyl doesn't understand -- she can't will herself into being compassionate or empathetic. This is the same way Illteracy is a Phsyical Lim -- no matter how much you want to, if you can;t read you can't read.

[Lord Liaden]

If the child truly is innocent and doesn't understand the consequences of her actions, you should decide whether she is physically indestructable (to most ordinary forms of harm at least), or as fragile as a normal child. The encounter could go in different directions based on the answer to that: if she's invulnerable then the primary focus would be on finding the key to neutralizing her, whereas if a well-timed shot could take her out then there's likely to be more sympathy for her on the part of the PCs, and more debate over the morality of taking the life of an innocent because of the sins of her parent. It would make a difference whether or not your players are the kind to shoot first and agonize later.

[starblaze]

Basically the problem I see is that a child with Anthony like powers would have no real concept of morality. The reason being that with a child that had all that power you couldn't really correct or punish them. So without that in thier thinking everything comes down to what you want or desire being good and what hurts you as being bad.

 

Another good example of this would be the Charlie Evans character from the Star Trek episode Charile X, although he was a teenager.

[Mordacius]

Actually, that would be a Phsycial Limitation by the letter of the rules because it's not something that can be overcome with effort.

Nah, it's something I could see her overcoming under the right circumstances, unlike a Physical Limitation. (I probably should've put Strong rather than Total on that: sorry.)

[keithcurtis]

Originally posted by Mordacius

Wasn't that It's a Good Life?

 

Thanks, I just realized I had posted everything but the title.

BTW, IIRC, the title is: It's a Good Life. The italics are actually part of the title to emphasize the irony.

 

Keith "It's good what you turned him into..." Curtis

[Mordacius]

The italics are actually part of the title to emphasize the irony.

D'oh. I knew I was somehow off. Darned subtlety.

[Mr. Negative]

Re: Great Cthulhu's Cute Neice

 

Originally posted by Michael Hopcroft

I was wondering how one would design (hopefully as an NPC) a little girl with the powers of the Elder Gods. Maybe she's the unfortunate product of interbreeding, or maybe she's an Elder God herself in human form.

 

If she were evil, she would be a truly firgihtening character indeed. But what if she were just curious about the world, inexperienced, or didn;t know hwo to use her powers yet?

 

Rather than being evil, curious, inexperienced, or untrained in her powers, you might consider another alternative. One of the most horrifying aspects of the Elder Gods was that they were not malevolent, curious, or cruel, but that their motives and intentions were simply inscrutable to mankind. Their actions, because their very existence was so completely different from ours, were likely to be destructive in the extreme to humanity, but there was little to no sense of them being "classically evil".

 

One way to reflect this might be to have the girl behave as an autistic. One of the more common ways of describing the behavior and experiences of an autistic is to say that autistics have no filter on their senses. They cannot ignore the feeling of the clothes on their bodies, or background noise, or the titles on the spines of the books behind them (this, of course, is a simplification, and not necessarily applicable to all autistic people).

 

Mark Haddon's novel, "The Incident of the Dog in the Night Time", is written as if it were actually written by an autistic 15 year old boy, and has this reflected in the work. The main character also likes math and logic, as he appreciates things being in order, and in a predictable format. He also knows that he makes illogical emotional responses (he hates brown and yellow foods) but reasons that other people are illogical as well (you can't like everything you eat, so he chose to dislike brown and yellow foods, instead of disliking things on the basis of taste).

 

The girl could have extensive, or even really quite limited reality-altering powers which she is using, consciously, but without sophisticated understanding and moral reasoning, to reshape the world around her. This could either be through mind-control (she "wears grooves" into the minds of her mother and father, so that they serve her the same food each day, behave in the same manner every day, do the same activities each night...) or through transformation or change environment (the neighbor's barking dog can no longer bark, the faucet can't drip, all the books on the shelf look the same....). Most insidiously, she might even be reshaping people's perceptions so that they don't even notice that this "normalizing" is taking place. The players might have to figure out some way to shield themselves from being similarly "smoothed out" in order to address the issue. To make this more insidious, perhaps her powers start as being very limited in scope (just her room, then her house, then her block...) but expand once everything within her current radius is "adjusted".

 

This would give you both pathos and horror. This girl's galactic consciousness/awareness is overloading the human sensory/emotional system of her brain, causing her reptilian hind-brain (linked with the Elder Gods) to reshape her reality in such a way that it isn't disturbing her consciousness. Perhaps they can readily stop her "reality altering" powers, but they cannot cause reality to revert without her help and acquiescence. More tragically, perhaps there is no way to shut down the unfiltered reality that is threatening to overload her consciousness. So they can either cut down a morally innocent child, or consign her to a life of extreme unreachable autism. If you wan to be really heartless, she might even be able to understand this, and be allowed to make the choice herself between oblivion and being walled off from the world around her.

 

Man, I knew there was a reason people only play Call of Cthulhu with me once a year (Halloween).

[Michael Hopcroft]

The series Everything was Fine in the Jungle until Guu Came played the concept for laughs by presneting this obscenely powerful little girl who tookm it into her head to make live a living hell for one little boy in an isolated jungle. Her motives are inexplicable, her power is enormous, and there is an entire world in her stomach in which people can not only live but thrive.

 

All speculation over what Guu actually was, or why she had chosen this particular boy to harass, was left completely unanswered. The series emphasized the comic chaos her powers caused. And it turned out the guy's life was a mess already -- his mother was a brillaint hunter but lazy at home and entirely too fond of beer.

[GamePhil]

Well, the general powers are probably a horrendously large Cosmic Variable Pool, but another alternative might be something like:

 

Reality Warping: Extra-Dimensional Movement, Any Dimension, Usable As Attack (+1). She then sends her victims to a universe that is warped in the way she wants. You can also throw in Area Effect or Increased Mass to get more targets in one shot. This also fills the role of eating her targets: the stomach is one of the many dimensions to which she can send you. This way you never have to trouble with building the actual powers in the VPP (not that you really have to, anyway).

 

The defense against this Power is being another elder being. This is a bit cheesy since she's the only one on the show, but what can you do? It gets the job done.

[Michael Hopcroft]

She probably has EDM to reflect her, um, swallowing abilities, but she does a lot of other things that can;t be explained by transporting someone to another dimension. She's displayed some disturbing Mind Control abilities, for example, which she uses on everyone other than the guy she ahrasses (apparently she thinks it beneath her dignity to control his mind). She can also change her own appearance from her usual somewhat weird-looking self into uber-kawaii (useful for conning adults) and into a gorgeous adult female with massive martial arts talents.

 

The three people who live full-time in her stomach are loyal enough to Guu that she can take them as Followers.

 

Guu is, in essence, an inexplicable force of nature. Everyone else in the campaign is a normal (at least in HERO terms).

[GamePhil]

Originally posted by Michael Hopcroft

She probably has EDM to reflect her, um, swallowing abilities, but she does a lot of other things that can;t be explained by transporting someone to another dimension. She's displayed some disturbing Mind Control abilities, for example, which she uses on everyone other than the guy she ahrasses (apparently she thinks it beneath her dignity to control his mind). She can also change her own appearance from her usual somewhat weird-looking self into uber-kawaii (useful for conning adults) and into a gorgeous adult female with massive martial arts talents.

 

Well, the idea is that she's not really moving them through the planes, but is instead using that mechanic to represent altering this universe. Since there is little difference between transporting him to a place where X is true (someone is Mind Controlled, she is in another form, and so on), and making X be true in this reality, the cost is about right.

 

I admit freely that it's a *really odd* way of doing these things, but considering the oddity of the series in question, it kind of fits. It's also used in the write up for a Wish spell in the new Fantasy Hero book. In general, I'd consider doing it this way if and only if:

 

1. I was certain that the specifics of building each Power would never matter. Points and specific powers were not relevant.

2. Some form of purchase needs to be made, it will not be hand waived by the GM (for me, this is always the case, but nevermind

3. The effects she can toss around are odd enough to not lend themselves easily to Hero construction, or I want to use the EDM for some other reason.

 

Ya, in general I'd use the massive VPP, though. Just put the EDM: to Stomach Dimension, in that, and buy your followers and base in the other universe.