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Nightmare Fuel / Starfinder

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All the Dark and Edginess of Pathfinder in a setting as vast as space. You better believe it's got some Nightmare Fuel.


Adventure Paths

    Dead Suns 

1. Incident at Absalom Station

  • The players' exploration of the Acreon, the derelict ship towing the mysterious asteroid. They board the ship to find the airlocks open, the ship's atmosphere flushed into space, and things only get worse from there. As it turns out, the metal pods the crew had salvaged from the drift rock were cocoons from akatas. The creatures soon hatched and began attacking the crew, forcing them to resort to opening the airlocks to try and suffocate them. Unfortunately for them, and the players investigating the airless, emergency light lit spaceship, akatas don't need to breathe. The crew ended up retreating to the drift rock to try and escape, only to find that those wounded by the akatas were infected with void death, aka the microscopic larva of the akatas that grow into parasitic worms that kill you from the inside and puppeteer your corpse.
  • The fate of Moriko Nash. She wanted nothing more than to explore and discover but ultimately found her end in the depths of the drift rock. Wounded and hunted by the garaggakal, she was left cowering in a forcefield with a dying battery as the monster stalked around her, knowing full well what it would do to her when the power ran out. She ultimately killed herself rather than let it take her only to rise again as a driftdead. She spent the next 75 years trapped in the small room she died in until the asteroid was finally pulled into the material plane, allowing her to become incorporeal and escape. It's no wonder she's so spiteful.
  • Everything about the garaggakal. A laprey-faced monster just off of a humanoid body shape, it came to the drift rock 75 years ago, hidden aboard the Sunrise Maiden. It promptly killed its unwitting pilot and made itself at home, preying on anyone who comes too close to the rock. And how do the players discover its existence? They find a pair of bodies it carefully dissected (or maybe vivisected) with their remains arranged in an artful display, a discovery promptly followed by the creature descending on them to drain their life force even as it telepathically broadcasts its idle musings about what their flesh will taste like. Yikes.

2. Temple of the Twelve

  • Most of the adventure path takes place in the untamed jungle of Castrovel, a planet with a not-undeserved reputation as a Death World. Highlights include a giant carnivorous plant hidden among other vines and bushes that hypnotically lures its victims into its jaws, being stalked by a creature that alternately wants to infect them with deadly spores or consume them to gain their traits and memories, a storm of fungi spore that root in and break down flesh, and a nearly invisible squid-like creature descending from the sky to try and snatch them up.
  • Salask, the shirren sniper and Devourer cultist. Once a Steward, a mission gone wrong saw her unit massacred by an aberration on Apostae. While she first tried to save her teammates, she soon stopped and watched in fascination from afar as it devoured them. She soon became obsessed with carnage, leading her replacement teams into dangerous situations or feeding them false intelligence so she could watch them die.

Other

  • Just about everything to do with Aucturn. Technically the farthest planet from the sun in the main solar system it's actually a gigantic organism, theorized by many to be the egg of an Outer God. Corrupted, mind-warping husks of ruined ships surround the world, the remains of those who have tried to cleanse it. The atmosphere is a sickly mix of poisons, drugs, and mutagens, forming cloying mists and clouds that obscure vision and leave most wandering blindly. The landscape constantly shifts and warps, forming tumorous mountains, misshapen fungal forests, fleshy ruins or towers of half-biological machinery, while rivers of black hallucinogenic ichor flow beneath the surface like veins. Sane beings don't willingly land on Aucturn, and the beings that leave it certainly aren't sane.
    • What's worse than a living nightmare world? One that's the site of a war between the Outer God cults and the Dominion of the Black. The cults want to awaken Aucturn so it can usher in the age of their gods, while the Dominion wants to enslave it. Neither of those is a good option for anyone else and the additional layer of danger provided by bioengineered monsters and summoned abominations is just another reason to avoid the planet.
    • One of the most notable locations on Aucturn is the Gravid Mound, a massive polyp-like mountain. If Aucturn's residents are to be believed, Aucturn itself is pregnant and the mound will someday hatch to release its monstrous child.
  • The Wailing Stone, an asteroid in the Diaspora that was hollowed out and filled with miles of tunnels to quarantine victims of some form of madness. As least that's what it was. Now it's empty and seems to have been that way since the Gap. Every attempt to stay there longer than a few days has failed as nightmares plague explorers and colonizers while twisted figures clad in yellow stalk them in their waking hours.
  • On Verces, in the center of Fullbright, rises a massive hollow spire that descends deep into the mantle. Expeditions have tried and failed to explore deeper but all have been lost, leaving behind only ravings about winged creatures in the depths.
  • Lashunta who travel to the sun feel their psychic senses overloaded with a sense of oncoming dread, as if something is surging up from the depths to consume them.
  • The planet Arquand turns subconscious thought into reality. For lower life forms, this planet provides food, shelter, and maybe a companion or two. For higher, more sentient life forms, it has been known to drive them mad with visions of their desires from deep within their subconscious.
  • One adventure path after Dead Suns is cheerfully titled Signal of Screams, and it deserves it. The primary antagonists for it are velstracs (aka, kytons) and the twisted Mad Doctor who not only turned herself into one intentionally, but is so overjoyed at her new state that she wants to share it with your party. Fun times.
    • The second installment features a section on velstrac ecology and society. Probably the darkest part is the fact that each and every velstrac wishes to precede its ascension to a demagogue by unleashing "apocalyptic agony" on a chosen planet. The luckiest worlds have their suns snuffed out so that their doomed people learn the velstracs' twisted "lessons" from their suffering. On other planets, the entire population might be encased in ice, fully and eternally conscious, or even stitched together into a continent-sized mass of screaming flesh held together by piercings made from the ruins of their greatest monuments.
  • There are undead who reflect the nature of their death, including:
    • Being slowly choked to death by a decompression event (Nihili).
    • Watching their resources dwindle with no way to attract attention. Eventually, the water, food, and/or air ran out, and there's nothing that could've been done but give up when they realized their friends wouldn't be coming back for them. But how did they know that another ship wouldn't come along as soon as they took their helmet off? (Marooned One)
    • Having their ship wander too close to a black hole, and being painfully stretched out into a molecule-wide string while their perception of time slows because of relativity (Vorthuul).
    • Being mutated to death by some radiological or magical mishap (Marrowblight).
    • Being encased in silicon while still alive due to an industrial accident (Silicon Mummy).
    • Being mangled, body and soul, by a misfiring Drift Engine (Itmi Vruh)
    • Having your entire specise wiped out in some sort of disaster (Endling).

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