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15* ''[[http://buriedwithoutceremony.com/little-games/abnormal Abnormal]]'' is a free tabletop RPG for one to three players inspired by body-horror driven films like ''Film/{{Eraserhead}}'', ''Film/TheFly1986'', or ''Film/TetsuoTheIronMan''. Players take on three roles: the Witness, the victim of the story who tries to find out the source of the horrifying things happening to them; the Horror, the embodiment of the mysterious manifestations plaguing the Witness (which range from HearingVoices to [[TransformationHorror unsettling transformations]]); and the Support, characters who can help the witness (but also might fall victim to the Horror and become Infected).
16* ''TabletopGame/CthulhuTech'' has Tagers, people with interdimesional PoweredArmor... which happen to look like {{Eldritch Abomination}}s. At least they have it better than their enemies, the [[SuperSoldier Dhohanoids]], who frequently aren't even ''humanoid''... although they can still shapeshift back into a human form at will.
17** Tagers don't ''look'' like {{Eldritch Abomination}}s, they ''are'' {{Eldritch Abomination}}s. Relatively friendly ones, which are summoned and fused to the human host's body and soul, altering both. Not only do you get the power to change into a biomechanical nightmare, you also are going slowly insane as your mind gets altered to more closely resemble the kind of Tager you had stapled to you.
18** Dhoanoids are just like the Tagers. Except they're not friendly. And there's nothing left of the human host at all. The body is a meat puppet to be torn off whenever it's not convienent. If you haven't noticed the ''Dho''anoids are basically ''Zo''anoids and the Tagers are Manga/{{Guyver}}s.
19** Then there's the more "normal" Deep Ones who are not above drug-induced rape to bolster their ranks with human-Deep One hybrids.
20** Participation in the Rapine Storm, a giant chaotic army marching around Asia in the name of Hastur, guarantees some kind of hardcore bodily mutilation.
21** And to top off the menagerie of horrors, improper use of magic or psychic powers can open you up to possession, which ends as well as one would expect possession to go in a Cthulhu-inspired world. The government does not consider rogue sorcerors to have human rights, because one cannot be sure they're human anymore.
22* ''TabletopGame/{{Deadlands}}'' can feature some quite horrific monsters at times, like if you catch a skinwalker in their natural form (I.E. with no skin attached). One particular creature is the glom, which is a zombie created from a bunch of dead bodies fused together. Sometimes you get a glom colony, which is a much larger lot of dead bodies fused together to make one single zombie. It just looks like a big mound of corpses crawling about.
23* The Nightmares from ''TabletopGame/DontRestYourHead''. A fusion of Victorian-era societal roles and Dali-esque mutations.
24* ''TabletopGame/DoubleCross'' has the characters infected with the [[TheCorruption Renegade virus]], with their super powers varying based on the syndrome they express. The Chimaera and Exile syndromes are especially horrific, allowing the users to become [[OurWerebeastsAreDifferent bestial monstrosities]] and perform full-blown fleshcrafting upon themselves, respectively.
25** God help you if you end up facing a Chimaera/Exile crossbreed.
26* ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'':
27** Mind Flayer reproduction works as follows: They stick a tadpole in your head, which eats out your brain and fuses with the nervous system to take the whole body as its own. And it has tentacles.
28** Also to mention are the Aboleth, who secrete a musk into the surrounding water that transforms the skin of everyone who touches it into a thin membrane that quickly dies up outside of water, and makes the person to breathe water instead of air. For permanent enslavement, they transform their mostly helpless captives into fish people.
29** There's an ancient powerful entity, [[Characters/DungeonsAndDragonsElderEvils Ragnorra]], which is the opposite of your average undead creating monster, but actually even worse. Its coming is heralded by widespread mutations and upon its arrival causes endless body horror for every living being in the whole world. The same sourcebook has Father Llymic, one who does this with TheVirus. Turning into a horrific multi-eyed ice-bug monster does not sound like very much fun.
30** Vargouilles, vampiric outsiders resembling disembodied human heads with tentacles and wings. Should one kiss you, you'll grow tentacles on your chin, your ears will turn into wings, and your head will tear free from your body. Congratulations, you've become a Vargouille.
31** The Tsochar, composite beings composed of about a dozen lamprey-like creatures twisted around each other. A Tsochar colony can burrow into another creature and connect to its nervous system as a parasite, or just hollow out its brain and wear it like a suit.
32** Any D&D character with Willing Deformity or Aberrant Feats, Pseudonatural (or [[HalfHumanHybrid half ]] [[EldritchAbomination Farspawn]]) template or levels in the Cancer Mage or Fleshwarper classes.
33** Living Walls, which "feed" by assimilating creatures that happen to come within grabbing distance.
34** The Slaad, whose alignment was switched from ChaoticNeutral to ChaoticEvil in 4th edition partly because of this fact:
35*** Red slaad "reproduce" by stabbing or slashing you with a claw, injecting eggs into your flesh as a side-effect. If you don't get healing magic or surgery, the eggs hatch and the Slaad "tadpoles" chew their way through your nervous system to your brain, devouring it and then breaking out of your skull to grow into new Slaad adults.
36*** Blue slaad do it differently, but are just as nasty. Their bite carries a disease known as slaad fever that warps your flesh and eats away at your sense of self until your increasingly malformed body becomes a red slaad that remembers nothing of its previous life. And will then go around laying eggs in people. Yay!
37*** There's even a Slaad Demon Prince, whose layer of the Abyss is like a gargantuan, sprawling array of pestilential entrails flocked with screaming slaves sewn into the walls -- said "Prince" is a giant "female" Slaad, so bloated with eggs she can't even walk and instead drags her swollen body through the rotting, pus-oozing fleshy tunnels, implanting eggs into any slave that catches her attention.
38** An oldie but a goodie, the Yellow Musk Creeper and Yellow Musk Zombie! The titular Yellow Musk anesthetizes most humanoids very efficiently, and the self-mobile vine then plants a seed in the victim's skin. The seed germinates and kills the victim, taking over their body to walk to a new place to grow.
39** The ''TabletopGame/{{Spelljammer}}'' setting had outcast Elves based rather obviously on Manga/{{Guyver}}. Player characters could find a 'seed' that, if touched on the trigger point, would explode and envelope them. It would kill any orc, goblin, troll, ogre, or similar creature outright. If you were human or part human, it might merge with you, and would always merge with any kind of elf, turning the affected character into a Guyver-style biomechanical warrior, including the ability to hide the exoskeleton away internally when not in combat.
40** Those who displease the Drow goddess Lolth are transformed into driders, horrible human/spider combinations. This transformation is hideously painful in 5th edition as it drives the victim mad.
41** In the ''TabletopGame/{{Ravenloft}}'' campaign setting, Yagno Petrovna, the darklord of G'henna and [[ReligionOfEvil high priest of Zhakata]] can transform people into mongrelmen, misshapen, deformed, ugly creatures.
42** The Despoiler of Flesh is a [[ArtifactOfDoom powerful evil artifact]] first mentioned in the epic ''TabletopGame/{{Planescape}}'' module ''Squaring the Circle'' which later appeared in ''The Book of Vile Darkness''. It can basically inflict this sort of condition on a victim, and is limited only by the imagination of the user. Worse, the Despoiler is probably the most disgusting magic item in the game; it's a wand made of human tongues which constantly drip saliva. To recharge its power, the owner has to sew ''more'' tongues onto it.
43** The Liber Mortis includes the Mother Cyst feat, which gives the user an, optionally visible, swelling that enables them to inflict horrific cysts on creatures. They can then use said infection to track or scry the targets, dominate them, or inflict painful or lethal swelling. At the highest levels it can turn into a ChestBurster or outright devour their soul. Though if the target is killed in this way it then absorbs some of their tissue to become an undead monster. This can be a good or bad thing, depending on whether you can control undead.
44** The 3.5ed's Monster Manual IV has the Necrosis Carnex, an undead monster made of sewn together pieces of multiple corpses. In illustrations, the torso is facing the wrong way for the limbs it's walking on, which includes the arm which is apparently replacing the head. As a bonus, it apparently has consciousness and thinks for itself: it has an INT score, and uses strategy in combat.
45** 3.5e also gave us the ''[[SarcasmMode lovely]]'' addition of the Fuse Flesh [[PsychicPowers Psionic power]]. This particularly horrific ability gives a high-level Psion the ability to warp and twist a target's body with a thought, causing their flesh to bubble, grow, and merge together until they're [[AndIMustScream reduced to a blind, deaf, amorphous blob of meat that's unable to move or do anything to undo its torment, but is just functional enough to be able to continue living in such a state.]]
46** The ''TabletopGame/{{Eberron}}'' setting has basically everything related to the [[HumanoidAbomination daelkyr]], people whose main foot soldiers consist of two goblins horrifically merged together into a creature called a dolgrim. With Belashyrra, you might end up with [[EyesDoNotBelongThere an eye on your palm]] (people with this mutation typically form vigilante cults murdering the "hidden demons" they can see through it). With Avassh, your flesh might turn into wood, culminating in roots pushing out your no-longer-functioning eyes. And Dyrrn the Corrupter, patron and creator of mind flayers, is so known for this that his most common cult is called the Transcendent Flesh; now that the dwarves of the Mror Holds have drawn his attention, some of them have been known to be born with a mutant symbiont already attached.
47** In the setting of ''TabletopGame/DungeonsOfDrakkenheim'', [[GreenRocks Delerium]] steadily induces this, to the point that it's a game's mechanic that players gain a mutation every time their [[TheCorruption Contamination]] level increases, with these mutations getting worse if their Contamination Level rises over 3. There's a d20 table of mutations that includes sprouting extra eyes, skin sloughing off or turning into chitin, growing boney spikes, developing a BellyMouth, losing minor body parts like your fingernails, teeth, eyes, ears, nose, lips, or tongue, having your eyes fuse into a singular cyclopean orb that shoots EyeBeams, and having your bones and organs develop the consistency of gelatin.
48* The nastier Exsurgent virus strains in ''TabletopGame/EclipsePhase'' deliver this to their victims. It is strongly recommended that you don't end up with said strains. We mean seriously, [[MercyKill bullet-through-the-stack]] recommended.
49* ''TabletopGame/{{Exalted}}'' gives us many a case. Let's start with Casteless Lunars. Due to spending several centuries hiding out in [[RealityIsOutToLunch the Wyld]], the very act of being Exalted as a Lunar means you get infused with some of its chaotic essence; you need to receive moonsilver tattoos (and thus, a Caste) to resist its influence. Those who don't risk losing a portion of their control every time they shapeshift. Eventually, they begin to accrue permanent [[WithGreatPowerComesGreatInsanity Limit]], and with it, the ''really'' weird mutations. In time, the Casteless Lunar may well become a Chimera, utterly inhuman and utterly insane.
50** Canon example Chimera, Echinna, was imprisoned in the Wyld for decades (or was it centuries?) and has, as a result, ''completely'' lost control over her shapeshifting powers. In her illustration, she has (hidden for the sake of readers' appetite) [[spoiler:bony appendages for hair; three eyes on her forehead; three breasts of different sizes; feline striped furs on her right side; righ--''a leg'' of a mantis, an ostrich, and... one that is a whole squid with a moose's leg emerging from the tentacles; a reptilian tail with a whole upper body of a lizard at the end, which is vomiting a tail of a tadpole and a raptor's talon; a leather butterfly wing and a mess of bird's wing bones; a left arm with saurian talons; and two right arms, one of which is an erroneously grown cluster of tentacles and another which is a '''wolf fetus'''. She is covered in random, half-grown body parts (such as eyes) and bound with a braided length of intestine]]. While such a random, impossible arrangement of mismatched body parts can be a form of Chimerism, some Chimerae go the other way -- one suggested example is a pool of body fluids that stares at you.
51** Also, a lot of stuff to do with the Infernals. We're talking people who can self-induce hyper-speed, tumouriffic-skin-peeling-off radiation sickness and only get nastier. One of the nastiest examples is Lillum,[[spoiler: who was a young (about twelve-year-old) who was sold to the Yozis by her mother and transformed into a phylactery-womb to hold the Infernal Exaltations when they're not currently in a mortal host. This has had the dual effects of shattering her mind and mutating her body into a massive, bloated ''thing'' covered in diseased flesh upon which various unnatural orifices randomly open and close.]]
52** And anybody who goes into the [[WorldGoneMad Wyld]] is automatically dealing with a strong risk of this.
53** Voidtech Charms for the Alchemicals tend to involve modifying their forms and installed devices with a horrifying blend of machinery and meat. This would merely be "bad" if Voidtech didn't by its very nature inflict a form of psychosis.
54* ''TabletopGame/{{FATAL}}'' is a tabletop game with too many issues to possibly list, but body horror is right up there. One egregious example is that a miscast spell can leave a spellcaster afflicted with a massive, grotesquely swollen nutsack for a random number of days. This game is infinitely worse for women and female characters, too.
55* ''TabletopGame/FateOfCthulhu'' uses this as a substitute for where one would expect a SanityMeter. Influence from the Great Old Ones gradually manifests in the form of physical deformities that can serve as an advantage to the recipient, but pile up to the point where the player character is corrupted beyond recognizable humanity.
56* ''TabletopGame/FateOfTheNornsRagnarok'': The "Rend Flesh" spell creates "small, deformed mouths on the surface of the victim's skin. The teeth begin to devour the flesh and insides".
57* ''TabletopGame/FengShui'': Anyone who uses [[{{Magitek}} arcanowave]] gear on a regular basis runs the risk of mutation due to [[TheCorruption the way that arcanotech sends bent magic into your system like a virus whenever you use it]]. Use it too much, and you risk becoming an abomination, one of those altered demon things that the government of 2056 uses to fight its wars.
58* ''TabletopGame/{{Godforsaken}}'': The bite of the snakelike hass causes victims to grow random and disfiguring mutations, such as huge nodules of fat or useless extra limbs. This serves to both incapacitate victims and provide more food for the snake.
59* ''TabletopGame/{{GURPS}}'':
60** ''TabletopGame/GURPSFantasy'': Most monsters in ''GURPS Fantasy II: Adventures in the Mad Lands'' are former people who have been transformed into hideous monsters either by the land's insane gods or by [[TheHeartless their own evil natures]].
61** There are a whole bunch of "Body Control" spells that produce body horror effects.
62* ''TabletopGame/IronKingdoms'':Dragons can warp, if not kill, their surrounding with their blight, but the most visible warping occurs within the ranks of Everblight. Mutations among his warriors include scales and pointy spikes protruding from their skin, change of human-like legs into wolf-like, up to growth of wings.
63* ''TabletopGame/{{KULT}}'': This can happen to you if your mental balance falls low enough. Your new look will tend to reflect your soul.
64* ''TabletopGame/MummyTheCurse'': The deceived all share their bodies with monstrous insane spirits that happen to be {{Mad Artist}}s and like to work their statements on their hosts' flesh. As a result, every Deceived looks like they got caught mid-transformation between two forms.
65* ''TabletopGame/InNomine'': While all celestials can assume human form on Earth, many demons' true forms are extremely unpleasant to look at.
66** Kyriotates -- who, notably, are angels, not demons -- are roiling, pulsing clouds of disjointed body parts, with limbs, mouths and eyes constantly emerging, moving and vanishing again. Their demonic counterparts, the Shedim, are much the same, but with distorted and often unrecognizable parts and pulsing chaotically. Humans who see either of them like this risk remaining stunned for a short period of time.
67** Habbalah's bodies are covered with elaborate, painful piercings and carvings, leaving patches of flesh bare and pulling their faces into twisted grimaces.
68** Pachadim are grotesquely obese, diseased, and covered in pustules.
69** Magog, Prince of Cruelty, is a thing of nightmares. His skin is pierced and twisted by long hooked chains, while his hunched back and thick neck bristle with agonized human faces and a tangle of slimy tongues pours from the gaping maw splitting his eyeless head. Two rows of malformed udders dangle from his chest, and a second maw opens in his groin and releases a snarl of long tentacles.
70%%* ''TabletopGame/NuclearRenaissance'': Many of the mutants and cyborgs look like this trope, possibly for comedy value.
71* ''TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}}'' keeps the driders from its [[TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons parent game]], but instead of being the result of a divine curse, they're one of many products of a hideously painful process known as [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin fleshwarping]], which the drow use to transform unfortunate subjects into new forms, with the results depending on the subject's original species. Drow become the spider-bodied driders, which are actually among the ''least'' horrific of the fleshwarps. Humans end up as putrid, barely-sentient sluglike creatures known as grothluts, but even they get off easy compared to surface elves. They become irnakurses, fleshy pillars studded with randomly-placed limbs and organs who are in a constant state of indescribable agony.
72** The velstracs, as loving [[{{Expy}} expies]] of the Cenobites from ''Film/{{Hellraiser}}'', get into this quite a bit as well, reshaping their subjects' bodies via horrific surgeries. Both velstracs themselves and their mortal cultists eagerly embrace these procedures as ways to "improve" themselves; other subjects are rarely so enthusiastic.
73* Many monsters in ''TabletopGame/{{Rifts}}'' also feature some element of body horror. Then again, the player characters may end up as magical cyborgs with not-terribly-clean designs, or poor quality from [[MedicalHorror body-chop-shops]]; they may have horrid parasites grafted to them, or strange symbiotes which do not look very attractive and can cause insanity due to the side effects of hosting them; they may also be turned into bio-borg by having much of their bodies replaced with bioengineered, magically-enhanced organisms in the same way as having major cybernetic conversions done. Or maybe not: with so many races playable as player characters, your species may conform to the trope anyway. You could even be captured and experimented on by alien mad scientists living on a submersible starship under the sea. Also, there are bio-wizard weapons made by magic, metal forging, engineering, and trapping beings inside for a source of magic, from faeries to a psychic worm that looks like a length of intestine with an eye on the end as it is, and is sadly trapped, brain-damaged, in a device to provide a source of power.
74* ''TabletopGame/SeditionWars'' has this trope caused by an alien biomechanical artifact which took over human technology and now infects everyone it can and converts them to biomechanical monsters. Early stage infectees look more like this trope than later stages, as they look less biomechanical and more like rotting zombies. Studio [=McVey=] also have a range of daemonic creatures in the works for their ''Seven Deadly Sins'' range, some of which conform to this trope nicely, including missing skins, tentacles instead of tongues in mouths growing at odd angles out of any part of the bloated body...
75* Some of the Incapacitated artworks in ''TabletopGame/SentinelsOfTheMultiverse'' are very nasty. Friction, of the Vengeful Five, begins twisting and distorting thanks to her experimental, unsafe super-speed suit; [[SizeShifter Sky-Scraper's]] Extremist variant suffers from out-of-control growth surges in random parts of her body; and the Hunted Naturalist is already suffering from uncontrolled shape-shifting, it just gets worse when he's incapped.
76* In ''TabletopGame/{{Trinites}}'', the members of one of the secret groups, the Devoured Ones, have dark powers that allow them to curse their enemies when they are wounded. To make things quicker, they tend to scarify themselves right in the middle of combat.[[spoiler: Their goal is to gather the body parts of what they think is their lord Cronos. To protect the body parts they have, they will graft it to a dead body, resulting in a horrible zombie that curses you when you slash it.]]
77* ''TabletopGame/Turnip28'': The horrible mutating tubers that make up the remainder of the food available in Europe can have some pretty nasty effects. The strategist Von Sneg, who serves as a viewpoint commentator in the book, is a seething mass of disembodied toes. Then there are Cults like the Brotherhood of Greed, mutated cannibals whose officers feed parts of themselves to their troops to share useful mutations.
78* ''TabletopGame/UnknownArmies'' has the magical school of Epideromancy. Epideromancers gain charges through self-hurt, and use magic to mold flesh like putty. Their minor blast can cause small changes, such as muscular spasms, and does damage. A modified version, Greater Warping, does no damage, but allows you to, in the words of the book, "[[spoiler:[[Film/TheMatrix seal someone's mouth]] and nose shut, or cause their eyelids to grow together, or melt their arm to their side, or stick their feet together]]" (censored to protect sensitive stomachs). And their significant blast is called Body Melting. No explanation required.
79** The school's name translates as "Skin Magic".
80*** Skin ''divination''. Relating to the outer layer of skin, to be precise. See {{Whatevermancy}}.
81* Creator/WhiteWolf RPG ''TabletopGame/VampireTheMasquerade'' has the Tzimisce clan, vampires with the Discipline of Vicissitude, otherwise known as... "Fleshcrafting". As you can imagine, this led to horrible, horrible things. How horrible? Their Antediluvian (the oldest known vampire of the clan) was a ''cathedral of flesh''. And he didn't make the whole thing ''himself''...
82** Further, in the Vampire Apocalypse "Gehenna" campaign, the Tzimisce clan ends up "winning". Because their Antediluvian begins to absorb ''every living being on the planet into one writhing mass of purified flesh and bone.'' Unless one of the major characters has enough true faith to call down the hand of God himself at this late point, that's how the world ends.
83** Don't forget the Nosferatu clan, whose Embrace guarantees that no matter what you looked like before, male or female, from now on you'll be [[LooksLikeOrlok a rat-fanged, bald monstrosity with clawed hands and beady eyes]]. Some Nosferatu don't mind their own grotesque looks and enjoy the disgust it creates in others- which is why it's not unheard-of for them to seek out beautiful humans just to Embrace them and make them into hideous Nosferatu themselves. Most Nosferatu who do this take a moral stance, choosing only cruel and immoral people they believe deserve to be PunishedWithUgly (thus earning them the nickname "Cleopatras", after the beautiful but cruel tightrope walker in ''{{Film/Freaks}}'' whose murder plot against her midget husband leads the other sideshow performers to disfigure her until she's no longer fit for anything but the freak show herself), but there's always the occasional innocent victim who simply aroused a Sewer Rat's jealousy...
84** Every member of the Gangrel clan develops a new animal feature each time they frenzy. Prior to the 20th anniversary edition, these features were permanent, meaning that elder Gangrel had a distinct habit of ending up looking like animalistic monstrosities. In the 20th anniversary edition, the features are temporary... but they have been known to become permanent given the right conditions.
85** Members of the Gargoyle bloodline can be either Embraced or created from an existing Kindred. Either way, whatever the victim looked like before, after the transformation they now look the very part of a gargoyle.
86** Being Embraced into the Samedi bloodline means you end up turning into an animate rotting corpse. Much like the Nosferatu, the Samedi have been known to inflict their Embrace as a punishment on others.
87** The Harbingers of Skulls similarly all look like emaciated corpses, although they're not known for retributive Embraces.
88** In the successor, ''TabletopGame/VampireTheRequiem'', it's a little more complicated and possibly even ''more'' psychologically damaging. There are about a billion new and different ways the Nosferatu Embrace can disfigure a new vampire compared to the original -- there's still a ''chance'' that you'll wind up looking like Orlok, but the odds are just as good that you'll end up some ''other'' kind of horrifyingly ugly. And even if you don't? There's ''still'' always going to be something about you that makes humans find you repellent and wrong (a lack of human scent, an underlying hunger in your gaze, even just winding up so ''beautiful'' that it plunges you straight into the UncannyValley).
89*** In fact, there's a Nosferatu bloodline called the Galloi who have it particularly bad, because their clan affinity for Taurobolium[[note]]BloodMagic rituals that require [[BloodBath bathing in a cocktail of human blood, vampire vitae and arcane reagents]] to alter the body[[/note]] gives them a choice. One, they can bathe in a special BloodBath to make themselves into beings who are so unnaturally beautiful that, combined with their androgyny, they [[UncannyValley are just as creepy as more conventionally hideous Nosferatu]]. Or two, they can forgo the bathing, and become foul-smelling revenants that look like nothing more than desiccated, withered corpses (the phrase "walking skeletons swathed in rotting cloth" is used), something that, not surprisingly, drives them mad with insecurity, giving them a derangement until they bathe in blood and become beautiful again.
90* ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'' is rife with examples from almost every faction:
91** The Imperium:
92*** Let's start with the Emperor, who has been stuck on his throne for nearly eleven millennia. He's decomposed, and felt every second of it. DependingOnTheArtist he's in various states of rot and decay, which can be seen as glimpses of the Emperor through the Millenniums such as [[https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/warhammer40k/images/4/47/Custodians_Guarding_The_Emperor-RT.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20141223232416 here]] and [[https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/warhammer40k/images/e/e8/God-Emperor.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20111202170238 here]].
93*** The process of becoming a Space Marine can also be just as horrifying. The standard procedure involves ''18 major surgeries'', one of which requires the implantation of a second skin under your existing one (Black Carapace; thankfully they only have to put this in your back). None of the surgeries are conducted with anesthesia because that would interfere with the bonding process, and in some chapters it is ritualized, so the priests and doctors doing it will take ''prayer breaks'', which ends up complicating a lot of the recruits who would require reconstructive surgery after. The end result is a creature that is so vastly different from the homo sapien they started with that they can no longer eat the same foods (well, space marines can eat human food, but not the other way around. Space Marines also require a vastly different set of dietary needs as well, to maintain their bodies). And that is not to get into the various rituals individual chapters have, which range from putting on gloves that stimulate every single pain nerve in your hand ([[MachoMasochism Imperial Fists]]) to flat out lopping said hand off ([[{{Cyborg}} Iron Hands]]). [[SelflessnessTropes There's a reason these things are worshiped as angels.]]
94*** And all of this is when the gene-seed organs are in good condition. Quite a few Space Marine chapters have missing or mutated gene-seed implants. The Thousand Sons are the worst case since their gene-seed is the most unstable one. The Thousand Sons were prone to suffering spontaneous mutations due to their unstable gene-seed reactly poorly to Warp energy (not helped by the fact that many of the Thousand Sons were also psykers). Their Primarch Magnus made a deal with Tzeentch to "stabilize" their gene-seed. After they fell to Chaos, the Flesh-Change returned with a vengeance. One of the Thousand Sons sorcerers, Ahzek Ahriman, went behind Magnus' back and performed the Rubric of Ahriman spell in an attempt to stop the Change. The Rubric led to an ''even worse'' case of Body Horror: while it restored and empowered the psyker Thousand Sons, all of the non-psyker Thousand Sons were reduced to dust inside their PoweredArmor, becoming little more than puppets controlled by the Thousand Sons sorcerors.
95*** Chaplain Cassius, although he's a good(ish) guy. Most Chaplains appear to have a SkullForAHead because that's the helmet that serves as their badge of office. Cassius appears to have a SkullForAHead because he copped an awful lot of Tyranid bio-acid to the face and that's his actual skull plainly visible. The only reason he can still see is because of the heavy-duty bionics he got.
96*** There's also what happened to Angron, the Primarch of the War Hounds/World Eaters. After the Primarchs were scattered across the galaxy by the Chaos Gods, Angron landed on a world called Nuceria, where he was MadeASlave for GladiatorGames. His transhuman physique resisted much of what the slavers tried to do to "improve" their "stock", but the so-called "Butcher's Nails" were successfully implanted into his skull, replacing the limbic lobe and insular cortex even before the implant remapped his brain, eventually making him suffer crippling agony whenever he was not inflicting violence. Even the Emperor Himself could not remove the device without killing Angron in the process, and the Nails continued to degrade the Primarch's brain even as his body tried to heal the damage. Angron then forced crude imitations of the device on the Marines of his legion, with all Psykers that underwent the procedure dying horribly from it.
97** Chaos:
98*** [[DemonicPossession Daemonhosts]] very often reshape the bodies of their victims into a more inhuman state.
99*** Those who displease the Chaos Gods are doomed to become Chaos Spawn, horribly mutated monstrosities that no longer remotely resemble anything made by nature. Other servants of Chaos may keep them as pets, occasionally unleashing them in battle (imagine fighting one of those things). Also, it isn't necessary to have displeased the Chaos Gods; sometime it's done for shits and giggles. [[AlwaysChaoticEvil Such is the nature]] of Chaos. The transformation process is described thusly:
100---->The body collapses under the unbearable weight of [[TheCorruption corruption]] and is infused with the raw power of Chaos, forcing all manner of strange and disturbing transformations. Chaos Spawn lose what little remained of their original forms, becoming a shifting mass of tentacles and eyes.
101*** Daemon Princes do not escape this either. It is said that the difference between Spawndom and Daemonhood is willpower, meaning that a Daemon Prince is simply a Chaos Spawn that managed to not have its mind utterly broken by the heaps upon heaps of body horror and associated trauma forced onto him.
102*** One of Chaos's iconic powers in older editions, the Gift of Mutation, is basically weaponized body horror. To put the effects simply, it instantly turns any target model into a Chaos Spawn. Let that simmer for a bit...
103*** Obliterators are Chaos Space Marines that are infected with a Warp-borne virus that causes their bodies to sprout weapons. One such depiction of this:
104---->[RECORD BEGINS]\
105The process of absorption fascinates... [unclear] ones body might somehow swallow the item, like unto a serpent or the surface of some [viscous?] fluid. Yet it doth seem a mutual [process]. For not only doth the body absorb the [weapon] but also [doth the] weapon, in some strange way, seem to [absorb] the body... [RECORD CORRUPT] as the weapon becomes like unto my flesh, so doth mine flesh... [unclear] like unto the weapon. Indeed, I trace this [stylus] upon mine arm, and the shape and form of the weapon appears under [my touch?]. It doth not appear in mine hand so much as mine hand doth arrange itself so as to become the weapon... [BREAK IN RECORD] capakhity of mine new form to abkhorb weaponsh ish akhtonishing... [unclear] a whole lakhgun! But I do shtart to lokhe zhe shenshation in mine shkin. Mine jawkh are [hardening?] and mine ribkh are protruding from mine [chest]. Zhey are of a dull, metallic sheen and tekhts show zhey are a mix of [bone?] and shome metal I cannot identify? [BREAK IN RECORD] thsi wil be mmmylsat [RECORD CORRUPT] cannnnnnnnnnnot useth esse febel mahcinsse aaaaany log;ner [RECORD CORRUPT] tothe eyeof the larybinht the hearto fthe maichnettttto the pppplaceo f... metalll...\
106[RECORD ENDS]
107*** Chaos Mutilators are the melee counterparts to Obliterators, but the only difference is ''they sought out this fate themselves''. It doesn't help that instead of forming guns from their flesh, they just flat out have ''metal claws'' literally dripping out of their bodies.
108*** Lucius the Eternal, a champion of Slaanesh whose killer slowly turns into Lucius from the inside out if they feel even the slightest iota of pride in having slain Lucius. Their face remains on some part of Lucius' armour. His description from the Chaos Space Marines 6th Edition Codex:
109---->Lucius continued to distinguish himself in the service of his Primarch as the Legion descended into Chaos worship[...]the champion remained undefeated until he was finally beaten and slain fighting the infamous Lord Commander Cyrus.\
110Slaanesh was loath to let such a promising protégé slip into Oblivion. Over the next few weeks, the artificer armour Commander Cyrius wore began to warp and change. Cyrius' hair fell out in clumps, and dark lines appeared under his flesh, slowly pushing through his skin as a maze of scar tissue. Soon, Lucius had emerged completely. All that remained of his executioner was a screaming, writhing face, subsumed for eternity into Lucius' armour.
111*** Being infected by Nurgle's Rot was agonizing enough to reduce even a space marine to a broken mess.
112---->‘Help me!’ He would have screamed those words if only he could have opened his rictus-locked jaws, if he could have parted his dry, gummed lips, if his throat could have channelled anything but a thick paste of blood-darkened mucus. Decius writhed on the support cradle, livid bruises forming about his body where flesh went dull with infection. He clawed at the glass walls around him, arms like brittle sticks in bags of stringy muscle and pallid flesh. Things that looked like maggots with three black eyes bored through the meat of his torso, raking him with tiny whips of poisonous cilia. There was so much pain, and every time Decius imagined he had reached the peaks of each new agony, a fresh one was brought to him.
113** Xenos races:
114*** Interestingly, Eldar (of all people). If you're a Farseer, you'll slowly turn into a crystalline deposit that serves as a giant digital library for your future generation. If you're an exarch, your body fuses to the suit you have and your mind is slowly absorbed into the suit. Neither this or the Farseer's conditions are reversable. Then there's any sort of mishap with Warpspider jump packs, which can fused you to a boulder, merge you and your pal into an unrecognisable mess, or plant you firmy into the ground while half your organs is turned into plant mulch.
115*** Any Tyranid biology, especially the abnormal ammo they carry. The Hive Guard's weapon is by far the most horrifying: the living ammunition on the weapon is shot out via a muscle spasm that ''violently tears its internal organs out, driving it to feed like mad during its last few moments in life'', to say nothing less of what it does to the actual target.
116*** ''Space Hulk'', a boardgame variant of the "Marines vs. Aliens" type, later adopted into an RTS/FPS video game. The information on how Genestealers reproduce (described in loving detail on the FaceFullOfAlienWingWong page)is BodyHorror, made all the worse by [[RuleThirtyFour certain]] groups.
117*** Currently the Dark Eldar have this as part of their schtick, especially the Haemonculi Cult:
118*** Haemonculi themselves are already obsessed with rearranging limbs where they shouldn't go (and unlike Orks, do NOT possess their adaptive physiology) both on their own body and on their victims and slaves.
119*** Wracks are poor souls so jaded in their daily Dark Eldar life (which is saying something, since all Dark Eldar do is torture, raid, have sex and do drugs) that they ''actively seek out'' Haemonculi to serve them, in turn being turned into the same sort of body horror as their masters. Grotesques are similar, but they're ones who pissed off the Haemonculi instead, and were turned into gigantic mutants.
120*** Talos and Cronos Engines. These things are giant sacks of flesh and muscle floating around the battlefield in a vaguely human/scorpion shape and are designed to torture and dismember their targets. There is no real origin for these creatures, simply that the Haemonculi created them, which makes it all the more horrifying (given that the Cronos seems to spout new sets of spiny tentacles, one can only imagine where the "material" for these came from).
121*** Scourges are shades of this. They're Dark Eldar Nobles who desire to soar above their brethren as Scourges, which requires them to have wings painfully grafted onto their torsos and their bones hollowed out by the aforementioned Talos. Older ones have gotten more mutated, or have had cosmetic surgery, because they sport beaks and feathers in place of hair.
122*** Wyches and Succubi, incidentally, are an aversion in the Dark Eldar Army, as they must maintain their beauty in the arena, less they fork over their title due to no one wanting to look at them in the arena.
123*** Even the Kabalite Warriors. They don't wear their body armour normally, it's attached to them like giant ''piercings''.
124*** Then there's the matter of their true selves; Dark Eldar utilize pain and suffering in a way to artificially extend their lives and while they appear beautiful and youthful on the outside, especially powerful psykers and daemons can see through this. It's implied that their bodies are every bit has horrifying as you'd expect someone who's pushing into their third ''millenium''.
125* ''TabletopGame/WarhammerFantasy'' and its sequel ''TabletopGame/WarhammerAgeOfSigmar'' has just as much BodyHorror, in its way, as does 40k; the fact it shares the same Chaos Gods as 40K doesn't help. ''TabletopGame/WarhammerFantasyRoleplay'' and ''TabletopGame/BlackCrusade'' in particular give a very good look at some of the mutations it's possible to be "blessed" with.
126** To put this in perspective, mutations, especially from the "Tome of Corruption" splatbook for WFRPG, include things like having your flesh rip itself from your bones and slither away to pursue independent life and condemning you to an existence as an animated skeleton full of bloody organs, being utterly covered in eyes/noses/tongues/nipples, ''20 different varieties'' of AlienBlood, having your facial features rearranged across your head...
127** Chaos Forsaken are an army of horribly mutated humans, they feature tentacles sprouting everywhere, two hands in one arm, teeth sprouting out their bodies...and more.
128** The Maggotkin of Nurgle actually manage to ''outdo'' their 40K equivalent, the Death Guard, in awfulness. While the Death Guard certainly have twisted flesh and visible mutations - having [[TooManyMouths a monstrous mouth in their stomach]] is a recurring feature - they're still clad in full armour. The Maggotkin, on the other hand, [[WalkingShirtlessScene often go to battle shirtless]] - [[FanDisservice so you can see every pustule, patch of rotting skin and maggot-infested open wound]]. The [[EliteMooks Putrid Blightkings]] kit includes one guy with a minor daemon of Nurgle sticking its head out of his open guts, and another who has a visible hollow in his stomach that shows someone, with care and attention and [[MeatgrinderSurgery an extremely lax attitude towards medical hygiene]], has hung a bell from his ribcage.
129* ''TabletopGame/{{Warmachine}}'' has many Cryxian constructs, from simple mechanised zombies through to more complex units such as the Bloat Thrall, made of many corpse parts and [[HollywoodCyborg machine parts]]. Similarly, ''TabletopGame/{{Hordes}}'' also has a giant pig 'borg.
130* In ''TabletopGame/WerewolfTheApocalypse'', fomori are formerly-living beings (generally human, although the rules potentially allow anything to be corrupted) that get corrupted by the Wyrm by having one of its spirit minions bond to them. This transformation can be rapid or slow, happen whether or not the poor victim even realizes it, and the poor victim may find themselves press-ganged into a cosmic war where they still [[TragicMonster have the mindset of an ordinary human]] and their best-case scenario might be [[MercyKill getting ripped apart by werewolves]]. And the transformations can be many varieties of horror -- literal worms bursting from their insides, acid pustules growing all over (even their insides), painfully growing spikes from anywhere on their bodies, other body parts rotting off... there's no limit. The supplement detailing the many types of fomor (published by the "adult" line Black Dog) went into detail, for example, as to how a normal human becomes transformed into TheWormThatWalks.
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