Secret Santicorn 2019: Skyscraper Mimics (and other Structural Horrors)

Lexi over at A Blasted, Cratered Land has requested the following prompt for her secret-santicorn:

"Skyscraper Mimics (and other Structural Horrors)"

A Rampaging Structure

Mimics are pretty much just traps-as-monster. They most iconically take the shape of treasure chests and subsist on a diet of greedy adventurers. They can be dealt with through caution, thorough checking with a long pole, or through tell-tale signs and prior experience.


So if you just took that concept and made a classic mimic HUGE- say, skyscraper-sized - and gave it the form of a tower or other vertical building, it might just eat anything greedy enough to go inside.

There are two paths here I could think of. Either a long drawn out existential horror version of a sphere of annihilation at the end of a hallway with no save and just eventual death that will definitely make players hate you~
"You've reached the top! The treasure you find within is...A FLESHY STOMACH THAT IMMEDIATELY FINISHES THE DIGESTION PROCESS! GAME OVER, SUCKERZ!"

OR you can make it a challenge, which strikes me as the sort of gameable that would let me keep my group.

They can take a variety of forms, from 

How to Kill a Building

Not with a sword, at least traditionally. 

Maybe the characters are aware that a structure is living, maybe they aren't. 

But you don't kill a skyscraper mimic (or a Monster House/Living Dungeon) in normal combat. 

Imagine each room is a part of the body, and the adventurers are a virus or other hostile foreign body. The body dispatches defensive mechanisms to eat and dispatch the foreign matter - perhaps white-blood-oozes, or baby mimics, or symbiotic parasites. The foreign element is either dispatched and removed, or it overcomes the bodies defenses, eventually killing it.

That's pretty much how most dungeons work already, right?

Death by Attrition

By far the more popular choice, this method involves clearing (destroying) a certain number of rooms in the structural monster. Kill and remove all the living defenses and traps, remove the valuables (down to the brass door knobs), and deface and graffiti anything left.

The graffiti part is important, for reasons that vary dependent on the structure. Perhaps it further removes the hold of the resident ghostly apparition, perhaps it further irritates the giant mimic, or perhaps it confuses the nanobots.

Do this for a majority of the rooms (70-80% to be safe) and the structure horror will die. Unfortunately this will also kill any remaining treasure-bugs or potentially valuable artifacts, as they decompose and evaporate.

Shot through the heart

The other known method to kill a structural horror is to "slay" or grievously injure the "heart" or "brain" or equivalent vital structures.

Such structures are invariably well hidden and guarded, so even finding the secret doors that lead to a vital structure is a legendary task. Should you find the right room though, you can potentially strike down the structure in one blow.

Some of the more popular vital structures are listed below.

"Brain"

HD: 9

AC: As Chain

Attacks: Electrical feedback and neuron tendrils strike out at foes nearby. Save vs Dragon Breath each round and when damage is dealt to brain. Take damage as Lightning Bolt on failure.

"Heart"

Stats: As Immobile Dragon

Attacks: At the top of each round, the heart convulses, expanding 15 feet around it as it beats. It deals severe bludgeoning damage in this radius. 

The remains of these vital structures are exceedingly valuable alchemical components, and their death will also remove the living defenses but will leave the treasure and valuables left in the structure unharmed.

Secret Doors in Structural Horrors take on many strange forms

Generate-a-Structure-Horror

	Structural Horror Super-Type	Outer Defenses	Reason You Need to Kill It
1	Mimic (hermit crab)	Automatic ballista	The locals are afraid it could go berserk
2	Mimic (glue-flesh)	False Entrances	The Lord wants to use it as a summer/winter home
3	Lich Phylactery	Gargoyle Creatures	It's hideous and doesn't match the local aesthetic preferences, the housing market could crash any day now!
4	Gothic Ghost	Animate Caryatid Golems	Everyone's Really Tired of the minor earthquakes
5	Demonic Influence	Mesmerizing Stained Glass Patterns	It's housed right over a diamond mine or other valuable resource
6	Dead (Minor) Deity	A Powerful Riddling-Door	Children keep going missing, locals blame the structural horror (70% chance they're right)
7	Enslaved Para-Elemental
8	Nanobots

I'd plug donjon as the layout generator of choice depending on your system.

Quest Hooks

• A "Wizard's Tower Epidemic" has struck the country-side. Imposing brick-towers now litter the rolling hills and farmlands, and someone should probably investigate them. In truth, it is a migratory swarm of tower-mimics, and while they may not pose much of a threat to veteran adventurers initially, the alpha-tower has yet to arrive.

• In the nearby bayou lays a legendary haunted house. Locals know to avoid it and caution others to do the same, but a rag-tag group of well equipped mercenaries has recently arrived. They claim that the house is instead a rare and powerful elemental bound to a specific spot, and they are looking to hire brave souls to help them take it on. They promise good daily rates and a fair split of any treasure finds, but the perceptive and careful may notice that many of their claims don't entirely add up...

• The state religion holds a hideous secret- their Grand Cathedral is built into the corpse of a dead god. A normal daily rite has gone awry, and the Archpope and other residents of the Cathedral has disappeared. Minor earthquakes and other strange happenings are occurring around the site, and it's layout seems to change on it's own. The Crown wants someone to take care of this, rescue the clergy, and dispatch the dead deity once and for all. You also need to do it quietly, at risk of a public uproar and revolution.

A Structure-Horror Ready to Hatch

Paranormal G-Men One-Shot Rules - "Talkers"

It's the time of year when my home groups availability becomes more sporadic with the holidays, so with attendance not as regular we tend to try out various one-shots and stuff. So I made a quick and dirty ruleset. It's kinda sorta based on Silent Legions, DMT, and a weird mismatch of Cthulhu stuff.

Talkers

You are Talkers. You work to cover up paranormal activity for a Government/Institute/Foundation/whatever and occasionally deal with Fringe activity.

There are four types of Talkers (everyone should choose a different one if possible). Each Talker type has two abilities.


Tough-Talker - The Very Strong one. Good at arm-wrestling and in fights. Also knowledgeable on a variety of athletic and sports related trivia and hobbies.

• You may use a Point to perform a feat of strength or endurance that embodies exceptional human athleticism, such as kicking open a reinforced door, lifting a car, staying conscious after being shot, or hanging off a ledge by the tips of your fingers.
• You may use a Point to intimidate an individual- as long as they have some sense of rationality, they will comply with requests from you and your allies while you are in their presence and for an undetermined amount of time afterwards. This is not mind control, but rational beings will simply do all they can do avoid a potential physical confrontation with you.

Cop-Talker - The Authority one. Good at manipulating bureaucratic loopholes and getting along with all walks of government workers. Pulls rank/badge

• You may use a Point to successfully call off any government or police worker, essentially pulling rank or threatening to go to a superior officer
• You may use a Point to call in local military or police reinforcements, whether that be a SWAT team, coast guard rescue, etc. This can also be used to commandeer equipment of all types, including civilian or government vehicles and weapons.

Soft-Talker - The Empathetic one. Good at gaining the trust of normal folk, the grieving, the paranoid. Expert-grade psychologist.

• You may use a Point to successfully intuit the emotional state of an individual. This will also spot untrained attempts at deception as you pick up on microexpressions and inconsistent body language.
• You may use a Point to guide an individual to the general emotional state you desire. This usually involves calming down a distraught individual but can also be used to incite rage if you so desire. More specific emotional states can be induced in certain situations.

Tech-Talker - The Person-behind-the-screen. Expert hacker. Good at engaging with particular niche subcultures over nerd stuff. Knows random facts that no one else would.

• You may use a Point to successfully know or research a relevant fact to a situation at hand, even one involving esoterica or other fringe media.
• You may use a Point to perform a feat of illegal hacking (not without consequences). This involves DDoSing websites and domains, scrubbing information on government servers, but also may include grander feats like temporarily bringing down an electrical grid

If it's remotely plausible that a Talker has the ability to do something, they do it without issue.

Everyone gets 4 Points a session, or 2 Points per in game day. In addition to the mentioned specific abilities, points can also be spent for "Hunches"- essentially getting to confirm whether an object or fact is important to a particular investigation or other simple yes/no questions to the GM.

Everyone has a real name, a code-name, and a former government job.

When directly dealing with the horrific, traumatic, or impossible, Talkers gain Stress. If something would normally test sanity in another game, roll a d20 and add the result to the Stress of everyone present. Everyone gets to do one thing in a "round", and you keep rolling a d20 every round until the horrible or taumatic situation is "resolved" or somehow no longer shocking.

If a Talker ever reaches 100 Stress, they are "Out" (maybe they just retire or something, maybe they have a heart attack, maybe they get possessed by a brain ghost)

That's it. I don't usually go this deep into making my own rules so if anyone has any feedback or suggestions I'm certainly open to them.

I used the above ruleset to run the Delta Green introductory module Last Things Last and the players said they enjoyed it and had fun.