Chuuls are just weird.
Intelligent, but uninterested to actually converse with you.
Evil, but not really petty or grandiose or anything like that - they're just out to eat your face and then spit on your grave.
While their monstrous appearance and their penchant for irredeemable evil make them perfect one-off faceless villains, I'd suggest actually playing up their weirdness, making your players not just scared for their characters' lives, but also creeped out by the very existence of these buggers.
The docks of the port city of Gulibash are infested with chuuls, to the extent that almost no-one is allowed to go there at night. Smickersmacker was a famous gnome children's poet that lived in the city, but after going missing one day, was presumed to have been eaten by the waterfront. A recent series of attacks has fueled some wild rumors though - an old and heavyset chuul female has appeared, that apparently sings lullabies to its victims before devouring them. At first, those songs were Smickersmacker classics, but oddly, new songs are appearing - so stylishly impeccable as to be indistinguishable from Smickersmacker originals.
For millennia, humans have shared the planet with chuuls, sadistic, monstrous crustaceans who live in underground waters, and occasionally sewers. Due encounters with chuuls always ending in violence, no real attempt was made to decipher their weird language. That is, until one day, a group of brave teenagers decided to record it, and then played it in reverse.
What they ended up hearing, in perfect english, was "in a week, the reckoning comes. Time starts flowing back in another direction, and who once were chuuls, shall now walk as humans, and who once were humans, shall be monsters again".
The kids not only face scorn from their parents for risking their lives so foolishly, but now need to convince the world at large that action is required.
For ages, people have been freaked out by chuuls devouring all flesh from the bodies of their victims, and leaving perfectly clean bones in their wake. But when even bones started going missing, the panic only grew. Returning from a spice run to the north, a captain of a merchantman swears to have spotted a towering structure made entirely out of bones on an island just off the coast.
Intelligent, but uninterested to actually converse with you.
Evil, but not really petty or grandiose or anything like that - they're just out to eat your face and then spit on your grave.
While their monstrous appearance and their penchant for irredeemable evil make them perfect one-off faceless villains, I'd suggest actually playing up their weirdness, making your players not just scared for their characters' lives, but also creeped out by the very existence of these buggers.
The docks of the port city of Gulibash are infested with chuuls, to the extent that almost no-one is allowed to go there at night. Smickersmacker was a famous gnome children's poet that lived in the city, but after going missing one day, was presumed to have been eaten by the waterfront. A recent series of attacks has fueled some wild rumors though - an old and heavyset chuul female has appeared, that apparently sings lullabies to its victims before devouring them. At first, those songs were Smickersmacker classics, but oddly, new songs are appearing - so stylishly impeccable as to be indistinguishable from Smickersmacker originals.
For millennia, humans have shared the planet with chuuls, sadistic, monstrous crustaceans who live in underground waters, and occasionally sewers. Due encounters with chuuls always ending in violence, no real attempt was made to decipher their weird language. That is, until one day, a group of brave teenagers decided to record it, and then played it in reverse.
What they ended up hearing, in perfect english, was "in a week, the reckoning comes. Time starts flowing back in another direction, and who once were chuuls, shall now walk as humans, and who once were humans, shall be monsters again".
The kids not only face scorn from their parents for risking their lives so foolishly, but now need to convince the world at large that action is required.
For ages, people have been freaked out by chuuls devouring all flesh from the bodies of their victims, and leaving perfectly clean bones in their wake. But when even bones started going missing, the panic only grew. Returning from a spice run to the north, a captain of a merchantman swears to have spotted a towering structure made entirely out of bones on an island just off the coast.
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