The Hungry Empire expands across the land, spewing new gods and conquering lands and Denizens, people and stories and mind. The Broken are the Fair Folk, beings who were once part of the great Courts, corrupted and twisted into incomprehensible forms by the corruption of the Grey and the Locust King.
- The Pope: The Grey Locust (The Grey)
- The Evangelist: The Harvester (The Primal)
- The Confessor : Starheart (The Sleeper)
- The Crusader: Falsenight (The Great Serpent)
- The Missionary : The Devourer (The Shepherd)
- The Inquisitor: Contagion (The Weaver)
- The Apostate: Ashdawn (Mystery)
- The Heretic: The Messiah (The Survivor)
“Lord, we know there is no good order except that we create. There is no hope but us. There is no mercy but us. There is no justice, there is just us.”
Terry Pratchett
The Grey Locust
The Locust Spirit is not villainous alone, twisted by addiction and fear. A plague of hunger and paranoia devours those it does not convert. The Grey Locust is some bizarre gestalt form, a minor spirit empowered by one of the fear touched Elders, latched parasitically upon a nameless lost Magus of a long forgotten Demon Court. This strange legion of beings is what transformed the youngest of the Seven Siblings from the Archetype known as Lion, into the Archetype now known as the Locust King.
Falsenight
An oily smoky skeletal fossil powering dark ambition with stolen fuel. This is what powers the Hungry Empire’s Expansion, a forgotten Fortuneteller from the same now nameless Demon Court that birthed what become the Grey Locust. To give his captured Demon the power he needed, the Locust King bonded this captured demon with corrupted flesh stolen from the Great Serpent. But Falsenight needs tribute to provide its power, and the tribute must be paid.
The Lesser Broken
Not as powerful as Falsenight, the other three servitors of the Locust King are nonetheless powerful beings. Starheart is the youngest of the Lesser Broken. The Devourer is the eldest, older even than Falsenight- but no longer the Locust King’s favored monstrosity.
Harvester
The Grey Reaper
A thing of metal blades, with legs made of plow shears and scythes, with a body of industrial boilers and spewing smoke, and pesticides and fertilizer, the harvester appears to be a monstrous metal oxen that strips the landscape of natural minerals and vegetation. The Harvester is modern agriculture, and also the Hungry Empire’s vision of Death (known as the Grey Reaper, but not officially acknowledged by the Empire).
Starheart
The Golden Bull
An emormous bull Auroch, wearing an ancient headress of kings, Starheart is one of the Broken and what this fallen Fair Folk was before his perversion at the Hands of the Locust King nobody knows. The youngest of the Broken, Starheart’s breastone has been split and his organs reach out like intelligent tendrils – shining blinding bright with nuclear fission and revealling his new role. To stare into Starheart’s open chest is to go blind and risk permanent radiation poisoning. The Auroch’s skin is burnish gold, and a bullet wound between the eyes still bleeds across the beast’s eyes and muzzle.
A false idol, a beast to the slaughter, a deadly source of power and might- Starheart is many things, all of them tragic.
Devourer
The Stillborn Tomorrow
A horrifying being, that when it manifests a physical form in the Shadowlands, does so as a massive caterpillar composed of the rotting corpses of children who died in childbirth. The spiritual embodiment of the phrase ‘Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it.’ The Devourer spreads small pox and other transmittable diseases as if moves across the land whether in spirit or physical form.
Contagion
The Fisher King Spider, The Deep Water Spider, The Eye Spider
A Bright painted spider with an elongated abdomen and which sports, instead of a cephalothorax, a miniature carapace shaped like an eyeless human skull. Mandible protrude from the front of the thorac, where the skull would have teeth. And in place of a cranium, the carapace fascimile skull sports a human-like eye swivelling in a bizarre ball socket.
The Fisher King Spider is a creature like Falsenight, stolen from and built by the Locust King from a piece of an ancient Elder- one of the Three. In this case, a stolen eye from the Weaver.
Unlike other mythic creations of the False King, the Eye Spider is not a large monstrosity. The Spiders that form its temporal bodies in the Shadowlands are only slightly larger than a typical hunting spider, smaller than a tarantula or camel spider certainly. The Deep Water Spider is not any spider however, and creates many avatars in the Shadowlands- an army of quietly watching bodies.
The Eye Spider is paranoia and surveillance and the chilling effect that such surveillance has upon creativity in creating the story.
The Eye Spider makes webs out of stagnant or polluted water and travels along its webs and only along its webs. but it can allow the web to disperse and ‘surf’ along drops of water or within (or upon) any stagnant or polluted body of water- as these things are all implicitly its web as well.
The Eye Spider can cast a charged line of water to strike the skin of a denizen, and thereby influence what they see, changing their perception of the Shadowlands.
Due to the Deep Water Spider’s movement limitations, it is at its most powerful in the Foglands and nearly as powerful in the Mirrored City, and virtually powerless in Arcadia and The Painted Labyrinth, and completely powerless in Hollow Heart.
Ashdawn
The Dust Vulture
The Locust King, in his hubris, tried to steal a portion of Mystery, as he did the Weaver and the Great Serpent. But though the Grey is powerful enough to allow the False King to steal scattered chunks of two of the mightiest of the Others, nothing Prepared the False King for the ordeal he underwent when he willing touched the Firebird itself. The Locust King, no matter the generation, refuses to speak of the Ashdawn, the Dust Vulture, or his role creating this mighty spirit of resistance to his own rule. The spirit of rebellion and resistance. The Ashdawn in the spark that fans the Freepath back to life no matter how hard the Hungry Empire clamps down upon the stories. From the ashes, a spark, a new dawn rises.
The Messiah
The Good Man
The False King crafted the concept of the savior to keep his people distracted, aiming their hopes at equality and freedom at an afterlife rather than a nowlife. But the Good Man (and it is normally a man when the Messiah forms a physical body) believes in his task of saving his children, his faithful. And as such, though still bound to the Hungry Empire and still loyal to the Grey Path, The Messiah frequently finds himself at odds with his brethren and his masters. And he does not care. He is the Messiah, kill him, sacrifice him, martyr him- he will return, for the Afterlife is the source of his power.
Professor Harbinger's School for Villains 