Five Pounds Of Meat

[Acrozatarim]

... Time to make some STL models. Does that count as one or two of five?

What's an STL model?

This entry counts as one; that there's two stat blocks doesn't change that

[Second Chances]

What's an STL model?

That would be something like this. They are digital models that can then be loaded into a 3D printer. I have a thread of CofD related stuff I've made in the main Chronicles forum. A good chunk of them are of Werewolf stuff.

I don't usually do scenery, I'm more focused on monster minis, but the idea of a tooth-based plant was too neat (and creepy) to pass up. I do have some other ideas, but it may take some time, so I'll link to them as they get made. This entry had made me really happy that you're also writing for Deviant. And now that I think about it, a Toothcracker that somehow retained their personality and is now trying to avoid/strike back at the Maiden of the Maw would be an awesome Deviant!

[Gryphon's Feather]

A particularly powerful drop of nightmare fuel you've written, here. I can see much here that could leave a certain pack, and their players, disgusted with the Maiden of the Maw, hopefully they never have to face her. Seth would totally mistake a Toothwight for some kind of tooth-spirit claimed, if they did.

[Nyrufa]

Toothcracker

Reminded me of Qian Ya from Shadowrun, Hong Kong.

She's a Yama King (the Queen With a Thousand Teeth). She creates demons made out of enamel and gum tissue!

[Malus]

Reminded me of Qian Ya from Shadowrun, Hong Kong.

She's a Yama King (the Queen With a Thousand Teeth). She creates demons made out of enamel and gum tissue!

And she could give you 7 years of extremely good luck.

[Nyrufa]

And she could give you 7 years of extremely good luck.

Yeah, I thought that was funny, because the story mode for the DLC expansion plays out differently if you make a deal with her.

[Second Chances]

Here's another tooth tree!

[Acrozatarim]

MEATWAVE
It pours through the airwaves, a broth that seeps in through the eyes and ears and simmers in the brain. It's a putrescence chewing pixels out of an advert for HIGH PROTEIN SUPPLEMENTS and THE LATEST DIET TREND! It's a sour note flitting amongst the chords of the chart-topping pop song, a hidden bass whenever the starlet screams about heat and bodies and sweat. It's a new way of living, the impossibly-white teeth of a smiling presenter, a blood-slick butcher's board, concerned voices on the radio talking about how to feed the population, the pulsing lights of a promise of exotic and distant travels where the people are different and surely more primal, more alive, more real than the hollowed-out, empty, tasteless existence you're drowning. It's meatwave Meatwave MEATWAVE.

MEATWAVE is a multi-part process of monstrosity, a corporate body concerned with flesh and bone - spiritual technology, or technological spirituality, that overturns the simple constancy of meat and sinew in favour of something new and hungry. MEATWAVE isn't about the same old same old, the humdrum, the boring days where each has the same dull stasis with your innards on the inside and your skin a cold, isolating barrier from the fleshy unity of the rest of life. MEATWAVE is fresh. MEATWAVE is the future. MEATWAVE Is what you want to be, and how you want to be.

The initial vectors of MEATWAVE are data spirits - entities of radio and light and information. They do a lot of the drudge work of the enterprise; they sink their claws into the pulpy brain matter of the humans who need to serve as the infection nodes. The spirit goes after its chosen target directly - an anchorman, a singer, a media executive - and attacks through something the human reads or hears, beginning the process of turning them Ridden and eventually Claimed. The Claimed serves as the hub for the support network that needs to grow - the humans caught in its orbit who give it further access to media outputs. This forms a cell or cult dedicated to pushing MEATWAVE out onto the data highway and into the population.

So far, so normal, inasmuch as Claimed tend to behave; but it's MEATWAVE that makes this different. There's something wrong with the hive of radio spirits tangled up in this affair, even by the frankly gutchurning proclivities that such spirits tend towards normally when given a chance to meddle in the Flesh. They're a little bit magath round the edges - a little bit meat, a little bit gristle, not enough to drive them deranged but enough to mark them as servants of the MEATWAVE. Their Claimed forms soon turn nauseating, forcing a retirement from public activity and greater influence through human cultists instead. The main thing is, though, that they know the secret codes of the MEATWAVE - a rite, a manipulation of the laws of Flesh and Shadow being wrought on a massive scale. They aren't the originators - they're just the heralds.

MEATWAVE-Claimed
Int 5 Wits 4 Res 3 Str 5 Dex 2 Sta 5 Pre 6 Man 6 Com 3
Academics 2 Computer 3 Crafts 4 Occult 3 Politics 2 Athletics 3 Brawl 2 Drive 2 Larceny 1 Stealth 2 Weaponry 3 Empathy 4 Expression 5 Intimidation 3 Persuasion 4 Socialize 4 Subterfuge 5
Merits: Allies (Variers) 4, Contacts 3 (Varies), Fame 1, Fast-Talking 5, Resources 4, Status (Varies) 3
Willpower 6 Essence 15 Health 10 Initiative 5 Defence 5 Speed 12
Influences: Data 2 Flesh 1
Dread Powers: Eye Spy, Gauntlet Cloak, Hunter's Senses (MEATWAVE-affected humans), Hypnotic Gaze, Interface, Natural Weapons 2, Pierce MInd
Flesh Transmitter: After incapacitating a human with its natural weapons, the Claimed can spend 3 Essence to transform the victim over the course of an hour. This rebuilds the human into a twisted amalgam of technical machinery, meat, and bone - a living transmitter, flesh pierced by vanes and antennae, innards threaded with wires and optics. A transmitter allows the Claimed to use Hypnotic Gaze and Pierce Mind against all humans within a mile who are seeing or listening to a media device such as a TV, radio, etc. Adding more flesh transmitters to a comingled gestalt increases the range by another mile, up to a maximum of fourty-four miles. A human transformed into a transmitter cannot be reverted back to their original form and is essentially incapable of doing anything other than occasionally twitch or moan to express their agony.
Cartilage Panoply: By touching a MEATWAVE-affected human or cultist and spending 1 Essence, the Claimed can cause the target's body to buckle, twist and reshape instantly into battle-panoply for the Claimed. Spine and ribs crack and reshape into a shield, guts hanging loosely below them as limbs flop off and the head blossoms into a cranial plate; or the human arches forwards, arms coming together and melding into a cruel sickle-shaped blade of resculpted bone and sinew as the useless lower body comes apart in a welter of blood and meat-parts; or the human is dragged into an embrace, innards pulping as the skin and meat slides across the Claimed's torso to form a pulsating gambeson. A human reshaped in this way either increases the natural weapons of the Claimed by effectively raising it to 4 dots (yes, this does go above the usual maximum of 3), gives the Claimed 3 points of armour, or provides the Claimed with 1 more point of armour and an additional point of Defence. Each option can be used in subsequent turns if the Claimed has more suitable humans on-hand, but a given option can't be used more than once in a scene. The humans are obviously tragically reforged in the process and there is no way to reverse it; they will die at the end of the scene and their remains are useless, requiring new targets if the Claimed wants to use this Dread Power in the future.

Now, the MEATWAVE idea-virus that manifests itself in the bubbling data of the media stream doesn't necessarily have immediate or drastic effects. Sometimes it latches on to the brain of a human and just simmers there, pushing gently like the weakest of Ridden. Eat more meat, it says, or, change your life. Seek out the things that thrill you, it mutters. Indulge your appetites - all of them. It gives gentle dreams of gnashing teeth and flesh against flesh. It occasionally spikes into skinless nightmares of unity-of-meat, of cathedrals of sinew and intestines. Travel, it says. Consume. Meet new people and crack their skulls open with a rock and eat the spattered brain-matter. Run across the plains and hunt and revel. Break the mould. Live free. Eat eat EAT.

Disquieting, even disgusting, but such a call-of-the-void is sufficiently low-key that it won't do a great deal to most humans it touches. They're infected, but they're probably just upset by the experience. It adds another layer to the deviant voices in the back of the head urging them to do things society tells them they should not, but humans are remarkably good at pretending those urges aren't there. A few decide to change their lives and start on new fad diets (meat meat MEAT but a surprising number turn vegan) or go travelling or start taking drugs. A few break, suffering episodes of irrationality or violence, and the police who turn up at the apartment take a moment to vomit at the scenes of cannibalism and art-wrought-from-the-neighbour's-flesh within.
There's a few that MEATWAVE gets right into the intestines of, though. Some humans just click with the message so deeply that they see right through it and into the full code of the rite. It's enlightenment in a TV-screen-flash that lets them see the writhing guts of reality; revelation in the clamour of a thundering new music track that speaks more of the clatter of teeth and the crunch of gristle than whatever insipid lover the singer thinks they're spouting their emotions for. It's truth written in crimson light and sound.

These humans suffer mental breakdowns, traumatic visions of a world of endless flesh unbroken by the barriers of self and skin, momentary glimpses of Twilight spirits and other nightmarish experiences in the aftermath of the MEATWAVE revelation. Those that don't break are the ones who, faced with the horrific truth, embrace it. They see that the world is a rash on the surface of a slithering hell-leviathan of gore and cartilage, and realise this knowledge is their opportunity. They're the ones that overcome their revulsion with a craving to discover more, or to use it for their own benefit. They see the endless meat and think it may just be the chance to indulge the appetites they've always held in check.

MEATWAVE cultists forged in this way are remarkably capable of remaining outwardly calm and normal. Their brains seethe with spasmodic notions that slowly coalesce into a particular belief or dogma - that they can acquire occult power through cannibalism, or that they need to usher in a future where humanity is one unified flesh-organism to achieve its true potential, or that through blood and bone they can uplift themselves and others to a higher state. During a MEATWAVE outbreak, cultists in a given area naturally gravitate towards one another, able to sense other 'enlightened' ones; if this happens early enough, they will thrash out a mutual dogma as they struggle to understand what has happened to them. If it takes too long, the MEATWAVE cultists may end up in splintered factions, each believing that the others are heretics who are misinterpreting the holy message of meat, and begin waging a shadow war of brutal murder against each other.

Once established, MEATWAVE cults try and carry through whichever divine message they believe is the truth. They monitor the airwaves for further holy writ, sometimes managing to track down the Claimed nodes at the heart of events. They try to acquire occult items of power or knowledge, attack other cults and occult groups, and craft their handiworks of flesh and blood. They give a name to the thing they worship - the Leviathan of Flesh, or the Lady of Hungers, or the Lord of Mount Pe'or, or the Thousand Crimson Letters, or other ostentatious titles. They try and invoke it, or spirits that serve it. They wait, though they do not know it, for the true architects of MEATWAVE - the Gluttons.

To Uratha and other Essence-using beings, the cultists are mouth-wateringly alluring. They are like vessels that fleshy resonance collects in, their meat succulent with raw Essence. Devouring a cultist is a hit, a high, an orgasmic experience that demands repetition. Cultists are Essence pinatas unaware of the targets drawn on their souls.

Meat Cultist
Int 3 Wits 2 Res 3 Str 3 Dex 2 Sta 3 Pre 2 Man 3 Com 3
Academics 1 Investigation 2 Medicine 2 Occult 2 Athletics 2 Brawl 2 Drive 1 Firearms 1 Larceny 2 Weaponry 3 Empathy 1 Intimidate 2 Persuasion 2 Streetwise 1 Subterfuge 2
Merits: Allies 2 (Varies), Contacts 2 (Varies), Iron Stamina 1, Resources 2
Willpower 6 Health 8 Initiative 5 Defence 4 Speed 10
Addictive Essence: A meat cultist gives twice the usual Essence to any werewolf devouring their flesh, and inflicts the Addicted Condition on the werewolf in the process.
Blood Rites: A meat cultist is capable of performing and participating in the Shadowcall pack rite, but a meat-cultist-led Shadowcall rite requires the sacrifice of health levels equal to the spirit's Rank, either through bloodletting or flesh consumption. A meat cultist can learn additional pack rites, and can also acquire other supernatural merits once they reach Occult 3.
Flesh Is No Barrier: A meat cultist can spend a Willpower point when making a Brawl or Weaponry attack to inflict the Arm Wrack, Leg Wrack or Blinded Tilts with the attack if it deals any lethal damage, or to grant it Armour Piercing 3.
Gristle Gnaw: A meat cultist regains 1 health level for every four points of lethal damage inflicted on a human or human corpse by eating them. By eating the flesh of a human, a meat cultist gains some knowledge of the human's memories in the past month - it's mostly a hazy mess, but by spending a Willpower point, the cultist can fish out specifics or hunt for a particular bit of information they desire.
Unity Of Meat: This capacity is not initially available, requiring at least one cultist in a group to reach Occult 4 before it becomes available. By touching another cultist, a cultist can spend 1 Willpower point and partially meld with them. This does not kill either cultist but is a ghastly fusion of cartilage and blood; the experience is ecstatic for all cultists involved. Initially the fusion is essentially just incapacitating, but as more cultists add themselves to the unity, its power grows. Every three cultists adds +1 to a Mental attribute of the gestalt horror, and grants it a minor Dread Power. The gestalt still needs to eat, and is likely entirely immobile; it can manifest mouths on any of its extremities for this purpose. Once sufficiently massive at 21 cultists or more, the gestalt can form new limbs that will allow it to move or attack, requiring a custom stat block depending on how it has evolved.

Flesh cultists are, in some ways, the lucky ones. The ones who see the full revelation and break suffer a rather more extreme and immediate collapse. A MEATWAVE overload varies in how it manifests. Some victims literally fall apart, their body peeling away in layers to leave a bubbling, steaming pool of meat-petals and viscera that starts to spread tendrils and roots like some ghastly rendition of a plant. Some are driven to tap themselves directly into the holy message; forcing their heads or bodies against a television or antennae until their warped souls lead to a communion of meat and metal; a man lies, slumped, everything from the neck up nothing more than a tangle of meat meshed through the innards of a radio, vegetative and somehow not dead. Some turn inside-out in a moment of fleshy metamorphosis. Some vomit and vomit and vomit until it's just blood and guts, spin the mess into a hardening cocoon, and break out as ghastly Claimed where the spirit has literally been formed at the moment of the infection. Some have their insides liquefy and pour out, leaving them as moaning, slithering skin-things that roll along the floor looking for victims whose skin they can usurp. Sometimes more than one infectee occurs in the vicinity of another and they unify, little fragments of an imagined world without barriers between people - reduced to whining, oozing collectives of flesh that soon wither and die unless some sort of critical mass can be reached.

Those are the side-effects, the detritus and cast-offs.

Behind every outbreak there's an architect, a ritemaster who initiated the MEATWAVE. Gibbering Claimed and screaming cultists call them the Gluttons, these werewolves who have inflicted MEATWAVE on the world. Most Gluttons wait til the dying echoes of the infection have run their course, emerging to harvest the cults that have sprung up. They come, then, appearing to the cults as messengers or commanders, coralling them together and exploiting them. Sometimes a Glutton invokes the MEATWAVE rite for raw resources, eating cultists or using them as useful Claimed-Hosts or rendering their malleable flesh down for major-scale craftings of monstrous horrors or machinery of guts and teeth. Another Glutton may use the generated cults as pawns or minions, a quick-spawned powerbase; or perhaps as lures for other werewolves, dangling the cultists out to draw Uratha into tangling with them and becoming addicted to their flesh. Some Gluttons just want to cause chaos. A few believe in a twisted vision of the future, of humanity united via visceral, physical connections, and thus MEATWAVE is, to them, actual revelatory truth - they are missionaries of meat and maw. Lesser Gluttons don't have any grand plan or intent to exploit the outcome or other self-driven motivation, but are just carrying out the commands of their own master without any real interest in the overall purpose or possibilities.

Who is the master? Who is it that MEATWAVE oozes forth from, with whom ancient pacts are the wellspring for the rite itself? Uratha point at the Gluttons and say Bale Hound. They say Maeljin. They say Baalphegor. But are they right? Is every Glutton really a servant of the Lord of Hunger - or are there just enough such Bale Hounds, naturally drawn to power like this, so as to make the Forsaken assume the deeper link where none such exists? Is this really Baalphegor's dreams of a future world, or is the Leviathan of Meat something else entirely? Are the nightmarish servants of Ten Thousand Crimson Words the perpetrators, or just another group that have taken advantage of the meat-dreams of some ghastly, hidden horror? And how on Earth did such a gristle nightmare become bound up with the reach and grasp of modern technology?

MEATWAVE has its own, unexpected offshoots as well. There's the Flesh Collective, a unity of meat that has reached such levels of intellect that it desires transcendence from the mere physical; or the fungus-like colony of flesh that oozes through the pipes and basements of a major city and sprouts spirit-spores that Claim whatever they can bury themselves in; or the die-hard vegan movement that conceals a bizarre cult wanting to 'uplift' humanity into plant-Claimed, or the traveller-occultists who are constantly on the move, visiting new cultures and eating victims there to gain a greater understanding of the totality of human culture.

Whatever the truth behind MEATWAVE, its grinning executives of spirit-flesh and meat-interwoven-with-metal, its gibbering cultists thrashing in orgasmic unity, its leering and hungry werewolves, those Forsaken who come across its outbreaks consider it a significant threat. It doesn't affect Uratha directly, but such a spiritual malaise that breaks down the constancy of flesh cannot be ignored. It's a reminder that the world as it is, is a fragile status-quo, easily disrupted by the shivers and twitches of whatever flesh-thing slithers and groans behind the walls of reality.

[Thorbes]

Great as always. Loving the little easter eggs in the possible origins. I really want to either play or introduce as an npc one of those traveler occultits that want to "have a taste" of every human culture.

[LostLight]

Well, MEATWAVE is terrifying. Its emphasis on flesh and breaking the status que is so against the God Machine's agenda that it hurts, and the fact that it melds flesh and technology is just a spit in the eye of the clockwork God. I'm totally gonna steal it for one of my anti God Machine antagonists (I call it the "Living Devil", an ancient failed experiment of the God Machine which has exactly the same agenda presented in MEATWAVE- unity of flesh and challenging the status que).

On the other hand, the use of the "Ten Thousands Crimson Letters/Words" and emphasis on cannibalism, freedom and occult knowledge falls right in the Prince of 100000 Leaves's alley (its cult is called the Red Word after all). Anyway, MEATWAVE feels like a much more interesting adaption of the Hunger from Antagonists. So many plot hooks, so much potential. Good work

[nofather]

Nice. I especially like the addiction and all around good-tastingness cultists offer for werewolves, and werewolves acting as sponsors and leaders of some of the cults.

The other factions are interesting ideas as well, it's easy to see such a thing spawn into a lot of oddities like that.

[DSPaul]

ALL HAIL THE NEW FLESH.

[Nicolas Milioni]

How deliciously terrifying

[21C Hermit]

Freaking Lord of high heaven, that was the most horrifyingly fascinate and fascinatingly horrifying thing I’ve read in ages. I recently bought a book where urban legends and spooky stories are collected, but now I fear that the book won’t be so scary, between MEATWAVE and the Maiden of the Maw.

[Master Aquatosic]

This reminds of Bogleech's Parliament of the Old Flesh, but somehow at the same time less powerful and far scarier