Demon of Lust / Fertility...without the...uhh...you know

[tribalxgecko]

I have some players who are working for a creature that is considered to be a divine being that is associated with nature, fertility, and lust (it is really a demonic entity looking to corrupt people). They have an artifact they are delivering for said being, that invokes these feelings / traits in those who handle it. I know my players are not keen on the more sexual nature of such things, and I have no interest in getting into such sexual scenes. However, this being is a major part of the story and adventure. Thus far the lust and stuff is more background oriented. They know the ideas behind it and stuff. So I am looking for some ideas on how this artifact might manifest these traits and emotions, outside of the very obvious sexual nature. I can touch upon that, but I don't want it to be the focus. Any thoughts or ideas? This is for a dark fantasy game with touches of horror.

[BWR]

You can go the Shub-Niggurath route instead of the classic succubus. Alien horror perverting natural urges rather than animal lust leading to moral downfall.
Portray it something like as in Charlie Stross' story Equoid (familiarity with the Laundry universe is a plus but not super necessary to enjoy the story - just think of it as MiB meets CoC).

[Inevitability]

Fertility isn't necessarily a good thing (Ragnorra illustrates this very well). Perhaps thousands of fleas, flies, and other vermin continuously swarm the PC's, hatching, giving birth, and dying within minutes? Read about SCP 027 for more information.

And lust, well, perhaps expand it to 'desire'? Desire is far more sexually neutral and can still be very corrupting.

[Gildedragon]

Strange eflorences from dead wood: leaves and twigs and blooms and roots start sprouting.
People manifest psychological pregnancies or strange humanshaped internal growths.
Also Lust isn't merely erotic. It is desire and hunger.
People accidentally say their hidden desires.
Can also be that obscenities are blurted out; uncouth things, lascivious things.
Inanimate things take sensual appearances.

[Honest Tiefling]

Lust can be more then just pleasures of the flesh. A lust for knowledge, power, beauty in the form of static art. What is nature, other then something to despoil, warp, exploit and twist to one's desires? What is fertility, but the way in one acquires wealth and uses the land to amass an army? Think of a garden, carefully and artificially tended to produce many flowers to please the senses, nature warped to suit the whims of another.

[Eldan]

Catholic Luxuria is any strong desire, not just the one for sex. Money, power, fame, anything. Extravagance is actually probably a better translation. So use non-sexual lusts.

[kestrel404]

Corruption is what you should be focusing on, if you want them to notice the difference between the demonic and the devine. Corruption is all about things going wrong.

Corruption of Nature means that the unnatural becomes prevalent. Perhaps the party are constantly harassed by Aberrations, to the exclusion of other encounters. Maybe there are lots of undead who rise in their wake, or magic which goes awry. Perhaps a Druid will tell them how the thing they carry is spreading a metaphysical sickness.

Corruption of Fertility means lots of miscarriages, or trees and crops that fruit out of season or rot before harvest. It means far too many wolves are born, and not enough deer. Corrupted fertility means that the Bounty which is the natural result of Fertility is lacking - thus leading to starvation, hunger, sorrow.

Finally, the one you're worried about. The corruption of Lust means empty, meaningless lust, or destructive lust which destroys love and friendship. This can be hinted at strongly without ever even mentioning the physical aspects - focus on the emotional ones, especially the aftermaths. Crying women. Hard-hearted men with bad tempers. Lonely children. Tavern Maids who act like automatons and fail to react to groping hands. Husbands and wives who have recently been abandoned for others.

[Coidzor]

Babies born mutated. Babies born as necropolitans, or worse forms of undead if you want to conjure darker imagery of a ghoul baby eating its way out or a wight baby draining the midwife and setting off a mini wightpocalypse that interrupts the PCs at their inn for the night or when they're crashing in some farmer's barn.

Human babies(or something like daelkyr halfbloods) born in non-human towns. Orc babies being born in human ones. Pets giving birth to humanoids, humanoids giving birth to cats and dogs. The PCs finding out the next morning when they go by a public witch burning in the morning of the local midwife/midwives that delivered the infants.

If they stay in place too long with it, aberrations start cropping up/converging on the area and animals start getting nabbed to build a cathedral of flesh. You can play that a number of ways, either they start brainwashing people into being cultists or they're making a baby factory of infiltrators that look humanoid but subtly off which will carry the corruption inside and proselytize like genestealers. Or they infect the local populace and travelers with genestealer plague laced with devotion to their demonic patron.

Or some of the fetal humanoids or animals are possessed in utero and develop malign intelligences and the ability to influence their mothers and work various magics, becoming more powerful magically after being born.

Of course, it all starts out innocently enough, they start doing an imitation of a spirit of spring, with flowers and grass spontaneously blooming out of whatever surface they step upon and then withering away moments after they move on. And farmers they stay with awake to spontaneous harvests of giant fruit/grain/beanstalks way before harvest time. Or way afterward.

Maybe after a while of traveling the food produced this way is more sinister and the withering plants left by their footsteps become toadstools nigh-instantly.

[Gildedragon]

Corruption of Fertility means lots of miscarriages, or trees and crops that fruit out of season or rot before harvest. It means far too many wolves are born, and not enough deer.

the converse (too many deer) is also terrible and perhaps more fitting with the idea of lust: uncontrolled desire.
Plague of rabbits: voracious, multiplying, insatiable... and terribly dangerous in swarms (both for crops and people: nibbled and nuzzled to death is a horrible way to go)
If your system has drowning/suffocation rules you can bring them out.

[Bohandas]

-Increased testosterone with correspondingly increased aggression.

-Any STD that also spreads via other vectors (such as AIDS with needle drugs)

-Animal swarms; animals reproducing too much

-Everything becomes overgrown

[Jeff the Green]

How about the aftermath of unbridled lust? Murders (of unfaithful spouses and/or their lovers and/or the person cheated on to get them out of the way) and suicides is plenty horrific for me, you get the background of the lust demon, and you don't have to show anything remotely sexual.

[Bohandas]

How about the aftermath of unbridled lust? Murders (of unfaithful spouses and/or their lovers and/or the person cheated on to get them out of the way) and suicides is plenty horrific for me

Don't forget sexually transmitted diseases

[Jeff the Green]

Don't forget sexually transmitted diseases

True, especially if the demon's also into fertility: imagine gonorrhea, herpes, and chlamydia supercharged by a demon.

[Coidzor]

True, especially if the demon's also into fertility: imagine gonorrhea, herpes, and chlamydia supercharged by a demon.

Syphilis would be doing double duty, too, since it makes people randier or otherwise impairs their judgment to promote its spread before it eats their eyes/brains.

Or making things that shouldn't be STDs, let alone contractable by humans, become STDs. Sort of a Nurgle-meets-Slaanesh deal.

[Jeff the Green]

Or making things that shouldn't be STDs, let alone contractable by humans, become STDs. Sort of a Nurgle-meets-Slaanesh deal.

Sexually transmitted mad-cow. Sexually transmitted cancer (dogs have one of those, actually). Sexually transmitted mental illness. Sexually transmitted broken bones. Sexually transmitted *******ry.

[Honest Tiefling]

Sexually transmitted psychotic rage might explain most murderhobos...After a few nights of trying to bang anything with a pulse, they contract it and then attempt to murder anything in a 50 mile radius just on the off-chance it might have a few copper.

[Coidzor]

Sexually transmitted psychosis might explain most murderhobos...

See, now I'm just imagining a party trying to figure out how to harness this in order to start turning Commoners into PC-classed individuals for some form of profit.

Possibly by making them then fight until their murder hobo fighting pits yield NPCs of sufficient level for them to get a nice chunk of XP by fighting them. Or just making them fight one another until they've got several teams of murderhobos of sufficient level that they might live for a little while and then unleashing them into the wild in a place they want destabilized.

Or if they figure out how to game the system to make Artificers and then use cooperative crafting to drain their craft reserve as a really inefficient form of crafting XP compared to liquid pain or ambrosia schemes.

[Honest Tiefling]

You are why we can't have un-nice things, good sir. But I was more imagining the succubus doing that, which seems pretty chaotic evil to me.

[Nifft]

Perhaps the artifact inspires sex-precursor effects instead of sex directly.

Like:
- Poetic inspiration & romance
- Festive inebriation & revelry
- Warm, sultry weather

Maybe it also affects sex-related magic, and expands or empowers spells that increase fertility (like D&D's plant growth in many editions), and similarly benefits spells that deceive (like illusion spells) or force friendly relations (like D&D's charm person).

[Jeff the Green]

force friendly relations (like D&D's charm person).

Or maybe it twists them a bit. Charm person now works like a love potion.

[Nifft]

Or maybe it twists them a bit. Charm person now works like a love potion.

Now you're just putting back the creepy crap that we had been working to avoid.

[Gallade]

You could also interpret Lust as the corruption of love. Have a NPC develop some innocent affection for a PC, then turn them full Yandere.

[Bohandas]

Page 9 of Elder Evils details the "Appalling Fecundity" that heralds the presence of some elder evils. It starts with accelerated crop growth then progresses to mass restlessness, mutation, and explosive cancer

[Coidzor]

You could also interpret Lust as the corruption of love. Have a NPC develop some innocent affection for a PC, then turn them full Yandere.

Have people that survive conflicts with Yanderes have a chance of being infected and themselves turning Yandere, like some kind of mental lycanthropy.

[Gildedragon]

It could also indicate a propensity to become ensnared or entangled with other things. Brambles are trickier to break through, grapples easy to initiate but hard to become free of (even if one initiated it)

[Jeff the Green]

Now you're just putting back the creepy crap that we had been working to avoid.

Since when are we trying to avoid creepiness?

This is for a dark fantasy game with touches of horror.

[Inevitability]

Page 9 of Elder Evils details the "Appalling Fecundity" that heralds the presence of some elder evils. It starts with accelerated crop growth then progresses to mass restlessness, mutation, and explosive cancer

Don't forget the party where people are plagued by horrific boils that burst open to release swarms of vermin.

[tribalxgecko]

Been a really crazy week+ and I never got the chance to thank you all. So thank you! I appreciate all the help with this. Now I have plenty to work with.

[Knaight]

If we look towards the fertility side, a fun effect could be it pushing nurturing behaviors, suggesting feeding the local animals, protecting infants, etc. On top of that, the birth rate in the area affected by the demon is prodigious (think routine quintuplets), everyone is having tons of children, and food starts getting scarce. Then it just gets worse and worse, with more and more mouths to feed. People start having to choose to let some children starve to save the rest, infanticide gets more and more prevalent, people start killing each other for food, and the demon is encouraging all of it.

This does run into the issue of just how dark you want to get. Children starving to death and infanticide is pretty bleak even by horror standards.

[Segev]

A plot arc that never quite got run, but which I was planning in a game before it got terminated, involved the party noticing that the youths and maids of their small colony were suddenly pairing of very...enthusiastically. Investigation revealed that a mad druid in a mountain cave was tainting the headwaters of the main river they used as a water source with Elixer of Love (essentially using it as a lust potion).

They thought little of it after putting a stop to it (unfortunately, the druid, in his madness, forced them to kill him by throwing himself into combat with them and not responding rationally to anything).

As winter set in, the couples would have had the mothers have...difficult pregnancies. Most of them would have died. After their burials, when snow was falling, their husbands would, one by one, be found having committed suicide over their graves.

Just before spring, when the snows would have not quite started to melt, thorny flowers with enormous, blood-red blooms would have grown from each of these, and in each would have been an infant of the appropriate race for their parentage.


I had plans for this, but beyond this point it doesn't really matter what those plans were for discussing corruption of fertility.