[WARNING: PERCEPTION IS A FRAGILE THING. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.]
SUBJECT: Bestiary: The Transients (A Rumor with Teeth)
Let’s get one thing straight. Riftspawn are our world’s life, warped and repurposed. Echoes are the psychic scars of our own history. They are horrors, yes, but they are our horrors.
Transients are not from our world at all.
They are brief, impossible intrusions from the other side of the Rift . They are not creatures; they are living, breathing glitches in the natural order. They are theorems of a hostile geometry, made flesh for a few, awful moments . Most survivors live their whole miserable lives without ever seeing one. If you do, it means your mind is already broken, or it’s about to be.
The Threat: A Mockery of Natural Law
You cannot understand a Transient. It is a walking mockery of natural law. Survivors who’ve witnessed one and lived to tell the tale can’t properly describe it. There are no words for them . Their stories are fragmented, insane. They speak of a creature that moved in reverse time, of a being made of angles that should not exist in three-dimensional space. To see a Transient is to have the comforting illusion of a stable universe stripped away forever.
Roleplay Hook: How to Roleplay an Encounter
You don’t fight a Transient. The only sane reaction is to flee. An encounter with one is not a combat scene; it is a trauma scene. The roleplay is about the aftermath.
- The Unknowable: Your character cannot logically describe what they saw. Don’t write about its “eyes” or “claws.” Describe the effect it had on the world around it. Did the light bend? Did sound die? Did gravity feel wrong?
- The Psychic Scar: The true horror is the certainty it leaves behind: that the universe is infinitely larger and more hostile than you ever imagined. Your character is now burdened with a terrible, maddening truth. How does that change them? Do they become paranoid? Fanatical? Do they seek to warn others, or do they retreat into silence, knowing that no one would ever believe them?
