Was Once A Man / Tabletop Games

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• Bleak World: Every member of the Experiment Gone Horribly Wrong race are this, and desperately want to go back. Some have it worse than others though: Legion, Super Soldiers and Androids are all more capable of blending in and regaining humanity than their Patchwork and Radio Zombie brethren.
• Dungeons & Dragons: A large number of monsters start out their lives as regular humanoids, before something happens to make them not be regular humanoids anymore.
  • Vargouilles are monsters resembling flying heads with batlike wings instead of ears. They "breed" by kissing humanoids, which causes their victim's ears to grow into wings themselves before their head detaches from their neck and flies off as a new vargouille.
  • Illithids are a borderline case, as their larvae eat humanoids' brain and uses their body as the foundation for their own.
  • Skum are a species of Fish People who used to be human, long ago, before being taken by the Aboleths and turned into monstrous servants.
  • Nothics are creeping, one-eyed monsters who used to be wizards, until their research in arcane secrets caused them to stumble across ancient, protective curses. Nothics retain no awareness of their former selves, beyond a vague sense of having once been something greater.
  • Worms that walk are collections of wriggling vermin in the shape of a humanoid; they all begin their lives as regular humanoids, which through a variety of methods that change between editions become consumed by or possess masses of worms, maggots and the like. Their Monster Progenitor, Kyuss, is also the only Elder Evil to have begun life as a normal man.
  • All humanoid undead, of course, used to be living people at some point.
  • The kaorti originated when humans or elves who went to the Far Realm and were changed by what they found. They reproduce through assimilation.
  • Blue slaadi transmit a magical disease known as chaos phage through their bites and claws, which over time causes infected creatures to undergo a full mental and physical transformation into a new slaad. Regular humanoids become red slaadi, while spellcasters become green slaadi.
  • A number of prestige classes, such as the alienist and fleshwarper, eventually become something inhuman as well (and not in a good way, like a monk's ascension to outsider status), although without necessarily being evil.
• Games Workshop games:
  • In all games, Chaos Spawn are the result of the Chaos Gods rewarding their champions with many gifts, including physical mutations. Champions rewarded with too many ill-considered gifts will eventually lose their sanity and become little more than beasts, herded into battle by their former followers.
  • Scylla Anfinngrim, a champion of Khorne from Warhammer and Warhammer: Age of Sigmar devolved into a giant, hairy, shambling clawed horror. Unlike most spawn, he's proven nearly impossible to kill, and his tribe keeps him fed and worship him as the mighty warrior he was in exchange for getting to take a pure killing machine to war with them.
  • Warhammer:
    • Ghoritch, from White Dwarf #311, was once a powerful Norscan chieftain but, after Archaon handed him over to the Skaven as punishment for getting a large chunk of the Chaos forces wiped out on a foolhardy attack on a strong posiiton, the mad surgeon Throt decided that he would make good experimental stock and transplanted his brain into a modified Rat Ogre. In his current state, Ghoritch is a hulking, rodent-like cyborg monster with little outward resemblance to the man that he once was.
    • Tamurkhan from the supplement Tamurkhan Throne of Chaos was turned into a child-sized maggot-like creature with multiple eyes who can borrow into people's bodies and take them over to be his own while they're still alive.
  • Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: Some Tzaangor were originally humans who have gone through dark rituals to be turned into the avian beast-kin. This transformation is often voluntary with members of the Cult of the Transient Form in particular seeing being turned into a Tzaangor as a great honour.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • Fabius Bile is shown pulling this on a large number of Space Marines in the Horus Heresy novels. Only one or two retain some fragments of sanity after the mad Apothecary finishes tinkering; the rest are little more than rabid killing machines.
    • The Necrontyr were once a sentient organic species, but long ago had their consciousnesses uploaded into robotic bodies, becoming the Necrons. Among other things, this cost them their souls, which were devoured by their gods. Some Necrons have further afflictions: the relatively simplistic method that was used to transfer most of the civilians into their bodies left them as little more than automatons, while the Flayed Ones have been driven mad by the loss of their mortal bodies, and seek to recapture the sensations of life by garbing themselves in the flesh of the living.
    • The Haemonculi fleshcrafters turn some of their prisoners into Grotesques, massive hypertrophied things with iron plates fused over their faces and weapons grafted into their limbs. They are treated as Cannon Fodder in battle, and frequently used against their own species. Given how the Dark Eldar feed on physical and emotional anguish, it is quite likely that Grotesques retain their original minds but are trapped in bodies no longer under their control.
    • The Wracks, Dark Eldar who willingly let a Haemonculus turn them into lesser Grotesques. Some of them treat this as an apprenticeship, hoping to become Haemonculi themselves, but many are just bored with their decadent lives and want to spend decades as horrific abominations.
• Godforsaken: Gorgons were humans once. After they offended the gods with their vanity, they were transformed into hideous monsters.
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • In Innistrad the four primary creature types (Vampires, Zombies, Ghosts, and Werewolves) are all former humans who were transformed in some manner, with uncorrupted humans as the fifth.
  • Phyrexian Oil has a similar effect on literally anything, up to and including fossils, vehicles, buldings, and even weather patterns. Contact "compleats" the host, transforming them into a Phyrexian (somewhere between a Hive Mind and Scary Dogmatic Aliens).
• Pathfinder: Almost all outsiders begin their lives as mortal souls sent to the Outer Panes, who over time transform into shapes embodying their personalities and their deeds in life. While very, very few remember their past lives, every single one of the demons, devils and worse that infest the darker parts of the cosmos used to be a regular mortal, long ago.
• Rifts: The island of Manhattan (called "Madhaven" in the setting) is filled with some of the most squicky creatures in the series. Stuff like this guy◊. And the freakiest part? They're all mutated humans.
• Shadowrun:
  • HMHVV, the Human-Metahuman Vampiric Virus, is a supernatural infection that transforms higher primates — meaning metahumans (humans, elves, dwarves, orks and trolls) and sasquatches — into monstrous forms that need to feed on the flesh and blood of uninfected people.
    • HMHVV I, the original strain, causes its victims to undergo constant spiritual decay that can only be offset by parasitically feeding on other people's souls; this is where vampires (former humans) come from, alongside banshees (elves), goblins (dwarves), wendigos (orks) and dzoo-noo-quas (trolls turned into hulking creatures deformed by constant growth of dermal bone). The exact level of sapience varies — vampires retain full mental faculties, goblins are just about smart enough to work out how to use spears and dzoo-noo-quas are basically animals.
    • HMHVV Ia turns all infectees into ghouls, who retain their minds but become unable to digest anything other than metahuman flesh.
    • HMHVV II causes increased aggression, lowered mental faculties, and extreme muscle and hair growth. Infected humans become loup-garous, the local werewolves, while sasquatches gain magical invisibility and become ferocious predators called bandersnatches. Loup-garous are implied to retain some degree of awareness, but to have very little control of themselves before their minds are submerged again by their rabid impulses.
  • Subverted with Orks and Trolls: When millions of people began 'goblinizing' into Orks and Trolls in the 2030s, they were initially treated as unthinking monsters and sometimes attacked on sight. Once the initial panic had died down, the two metatypes found themselves begrudgingly accepted into the global community and by the 2050s both metatypes are firmly integrated in most societies, albeit with a fair bit of Fantastic Racism not suffered by the earlier Elves and Dwarves.
• The World of Darkness:
  • Changeling: The Lost: Your player characters qualify as this. Each and every changeling was once a human man or woman, until the day that The Gentry stole him or her away to Arcadia. There, they slowly lost most of their humanity and became bizarre faerie creatures themselves. The ones who managed to trick, sneak or fight their way back to Earth are the lucky ones; they still have something of a human mind left. Others remain in Arcadia until there's nothing human left — there's only the faerie. Even those lucky escapees aren't really human, physically, they're just wearing an illusionary cloak of being human called the Mask. And their mind is still rooted in Arcadia's madness, so they're slowly becoming less and less human mentally, anyway.
  • In Geist: The Sin-Eaters, the titular Geists are alien and horrifically inhuman monsters. Except, really, they're actually very old human ghosts who have fused with an Anthropomorphic Personification of death.
  • Mage: The Ascension:
    • A mage's avatar can be eaten away by the bane in exchange for body-horror-fueled powers (that seriously weren't worth the loss in Arete, but that's how the Bane Spirits get'cha). Mages with insight into Prime can actually see a Mage's Avatar writhe in pain as the Bane spirit consumes it from within.
    • People who spend too much time in the Spirit World irreversibly metamorphose into spirits themselves. They are warped caricatures of their former selves, physically and mentally distorted into something utterly inhuman. This is the origin of Threat Null; the Technocrats who were stranded by the Avatar Storm became something alien and monstrous, and the Void Engineers are the only thing preventing them from returning to Earth.
  • Werewolf: The Apocalypse: The Fomorii were humans whose souls had been tainted by bane spirits. Once the spirit itself had eaten through the human soul, it was destroyed and the remaning bane-possessed human had the memories and personality of the original host but a Cronenberg-inspired body capable of spitting acid, housing vermin in its cavities, or other gross antics. There was even a splatbook with rules on creating a Fomorii character.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade: All vampires technically qualify, but the older and more powerful a vampire gets, the more difficult it becomes to maintain the illusion. Very old vampires give up the pretense and morph into... something else. Of the oldest vampires depicted, one takes the form of a featureless child with skin so black it looks like a hole in existence, one is a Meat Moss growing in a metropolitan sewer system, one merged itself with the earth in a certain piece of forest, and two only exist as a bodyless consciousness.

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