THE HOLLOW MEN (Stats) (Patreon)

"Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion;"

-T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

The Great Race of Yith has long architected the comings and goings of human history and beyond. Their minds have raced through the corridors of time, flung into creatures malign, indifferent and struggling, to steward and shape a future they could escape to, when the dreadful Spectral Polyps overwhelm their prehistoric civilization.

   This is a ceaseless task. The timeline is a precarious tower of choices which is forever toppling, and requires thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of corrections to keep it on track to the Colepterous future they conspire to flee to when the time comes. The human epoch is simply a blip in the midst of the vast timeline the Yithians police, but humans offer a ready vessel for the vast and cool intellects of the Race.

   The Great Race has long seeded the modern era with human servants — temporal coolies if you will — called the Motion. These people, to whom the Great Race has revealed but a fraction of their power and plans, have lost themselves in supplication to the powers beyond.

   Occasionally, a Great Race Agent will be flung forward to the human epoch, to occupy a mind and carry out the inscrutable plans of the creatures. The huge minds of the Great Race cannot fit in the human vessel. Invariably some data is lost in the transfer. Great Race Agents inflict a debilitating and serious damage on their minds every time they enter a vessel with limited intellect. Still, those who return to the prehistoric time of the Race are repaired with their technology.

   Sometimes, however, there are fatal mistakes: huge copy errors in the transfer, due to temporal disturbances, sun spots and worse. In these instances, more often than not, the human the Yithian was traveling into is wiped clean like a slate, and the Yithian is lost in the corridors of time. But sometimes, a portion of the alien consciousness is slammed into the human and the Yithian perishes in the transfer, leaving behind fragments of inhuman knowledge in a severely damaged human mind. 

   These are the Hollow Men.

   The Hollow Men have access to limited knowledge of the future (for invariably, the Yithian agent must have studied the nearby timeline) and access to the science and technology of the Yithians. They can create lightning guns and more. This knowledge is imperfect, as is the drive to use it. The Hollow Men are creatures set on an imperative with no clear goal — the need to complete a task consumes them, but due to the copy error, they have no idea what that task may be. 

   Sometimes they are drawn to one another — particularly if multiple Yithian agents were to coordinate in the human epoch — and pool their efforts.

   They tend to be drawn to profound events, elections, historical inventions, wars, in the hopes they might discover their purpose. To the outside world, they appear as lone madmen who have slipped a mental track, and have become obsessed with a single world event or person.

   They are hunted by the Motion, and the Yithian agents, and represent some of the gravest threats to the timeline that exist. Their power and influence is so great, they have "destroyed" the forward progress of the Yithian's chosen many, many times.

STR As human, CON As human, DEX As human, INT 18, POW 16

HP As human, WP 16

SAN As human -25%

SKILLS: Fragmented Knowledge 55% (see FRAGMENTED KNOWLEDGE)

ATTACKS: Electric Gun 50%, damage variable (see JURY-RIG)

DRIVEN: Hollow Men are certain that they are here for a reason, even if they don't clearly know what that reason is. They are haunted by visions of the future (see FRAGMENTED KNOWLEDGE) which seem to describe the outcome of events before they happen. Often, this draws Hollow Men into the spheres of influence haunted by important individuals—politicians, media stars, power brokers. From there, it is not long until the Hollow Men work out a (fictional) purpose.  

JURY-RIG: Compared to the power of the Great Race, human science is pathetic, still, Hollow Men have—at best—fragmented knowledge of Great Race science. Any attempt by them to create with the arcane secrets trapped in their brains requires a Luck roll (50% or less). Otherwise, the attempt fails.  

Electric Gun. Almost all Hollow Men can build this device, though their version tends to be larger and more unwieldy than the standard, small, hand-held device Great Race Agents use. Looking something like an old-fashioned vacuum cleaner made of various radio parts, a lightning gun inflicts Lethality 10%. It ignores body armor but can be blocked by cover. On a fumble, the device overheats, and in 1d6 turns, explodes and inflicts Lethality 20% to everything within 3 meters. 

Booby Trap. On a successful Luck roll (50% or less) and 1d6 minutes, a Hollow Man can modify nearly any electronic or mechanical device to blow up, catch on fire, fail dramatically or otherwise explode inflicting Lethality 5% damage to all within 1 meter. Much of the time, such an effect inflicts lasting damage such as a fire or structural damage.  

       Limited Alien Science. On a successful Luck roll (50% or less) and 1d6 hours, a Hollow Man can modify existing human technology to exceed its operating norms by a huge degree or to operate even in ways that seem impossible. A Hollow man could modify a television set to transmit everything in view of it to all TVs within 5 miles, modify a combustion engine to run on water, or even change a microwave oven into a machine that converts base metals to gold. These devices are never used for personal gain (most Hollow Men selflessly pursue some wispy, higher goal), but may be used to gain access to money or materials to complete their "mission". Such items never last, and are destroyed or confiscated by agents of the Motion before they can propagate and ruin the timeline. 

FRAGMENTED KNOWLEDGE: Due to fragments of the Great Race Agent still embedded in their minds, most Hollow Man gain flashes of insight which can easily be mistaken for prescience. Anytime some dramatic event occurs (violence, some significant historical event, etc...) and on a successful Luck roll (50% or less), the Hollow Man knows what will happen next. In gameplay, this grants them a +20% bonus to any skill roll navigating such an event. 

HUNTED: Hollow Men are always pursued by the Motion, or, at worst, a Great Race Agent. Anytime a public incident occurs involving a Hollow Man, or one of their devices is discovered, there is +15% increase in the possibility the Great Race has found them. So, after two public incidents, there's a 30% chance of Great Race or Motion involvement, after 5, it's a certainty. The Great Race hunt the Hollow Men in an attempt to take them alive, to conduct studies to uncover just how, and why, the copy errors occurred.  

SAN LOSS: 0/1D4 (if its alien science is revealed).