Moaning spirit: Difference between revisions
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Revision as of 18:16, 30 April 2018
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Intense hatred for those living drives the moaning spirit to traverse the bounds of space to attack its enemies. Crying out in constant pain, it marshals magic, claw and fist against its foes, destroying relentlessly to sate the desires of the forces that bind it, then returning whence it came to await the intrusion of another living creature. Its semi-transparent countenance is passably humanoid, save for the eagle-like claws replacing what would normally be the human's feet.
Hunting strategies
Casting Corrupt Essence (703) efficiently blocks their ability to cast more dangerous spells.
Alchemy Types
Alchemists seeking glimmering blue essence dust will find the moaning spirit to be a very accommodating hunt.
Other information
Moaning spirits have an attack that is deadly when it follows a Call Wind.
PR> The spirit wails a sad, eerie song! The moaning spirit swings a suddenly quite solid arm at you! Powerless to move out of the way, you can do little but flinch and pray. ... 25 points of damage! Strong blow breaks your neck!
Special messages:
A moaning spirit gets a glint in its eye! A moaning spirit begins to chant an eerie tune! Arrival: A wailing and screaming can be heard, as if off in the distance. Suddenly, a rift in the dimensional fabric appears and a moaning spirit struggles through! Searched: A moaning spirit is cut short in mid-wail, sent back to the ethereal plane where it belongs!
Behind the Scenes
The moaning spirits were originally designed for the valley before the leap into Shadow Valley. They are based on the apparitions in "The Mound" ghost-written by H.P. Lovecraft, who would suddenly become solid or dematerialize, taking trespassers below ground with them with impossible time paradoxes. Their description refers to Captain Lawton having his feet cut off by a telepathic immortalized race who performed sadistic experiments on lesser life forms, followed by a chieftain named Grey Eagle warning them to leave the mound alone because of the serpent demon. This refers to the Great Old One Yig, and Lawton also babbles about Nyarlathotep. This race briefly worshipped the toad god Tsathoggua, until they were almost destroyed by shoggoths. These were a hideous buried secret in the ruins of some ill-known reptilian race these Old Ones (the humanoid K'n-yans) conquered and hybridized into slavery long ago. The entrance to this place is a crevice below The Graveyard corresponding to the underworld of the Old Ones, which was sealed off because of surface daemons except for natural fissures. Old Ones here refers to the telepathic race with undead slaves, rather than beings like Yig and Cthulhu, who were the incomprehensibly terrible sleeping gods they offered human sacrifices.
The reptilians had the (red-litten) material form of the vaults of Zin, but were not the Elder Things with green-lit shoggoths, who destroyed the trans-temporal telepathic Great Race of Yith. (Though the premise of visions across time is represented.) The powdered chalk (an emulsified paste of the dispersed bone residue) of the mine reflects the fungous magru tunnels, as well as the black sludge pond with the piles of bones and the bone pit of the Dark Grotto. The mine is coated with black mud or ooze remnants, implying it was flooded with the doom when the Terrorite was awoken. This can be interpreted as a cross-reference to the shoggoths below Yoth from "The Mound" and "the colour" from "The Colour Out of Space". (The "black rivers of pitch" on Yuggoth is from "The Whisperer in Darkness", which also refers to Yig, Yoth, N'kai, Tsathoggua, and the K'n-yans.) Their presence in what was once part of the Lysierian Hills is significant because the magru were first made when the area was controlled by Kadaena. It is possible the underground portal of the Shadow Valley story is the gateway to The Broken Lands, as both feature sleeping major demons. The "moaning spirit" and dirges aspect may come instead from "The Fall of the House of Usher" with its buried alive and other overlapping motifs.
Moaning spirits are also found in Castle Anwyn, an addition to the Lysierian Hills for the Vvrael saga. This involves a great deal of serpent imagery, a demonic summoning chamber with a fissure into the darkness, burial mounds, fairy folklore, and a perpetual shroud of unnatural fog. Annwn is the Celtic Otherworld which was often entered through burial mounds, which in medieval poems were guarded by wyrms like that of Shadow Valley below The Graveyard. The ghostly pookas and possibly spectral miners were influenced by Welsh folklore as well. The carceris and nonominos appear to be allusions to medieval poems involving Annwn. It was a land where time did not pass and was filled with fantastic demonic creatures. In context the moaning spirits likely refer to the bainsidhe (banshees), which were invasion creatures, whose wailing follows the recent death of a family member.
References
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