Harlot Spotlight - Chén (Patreon)

I'm still working through the artificial beings faction. Next up is Chén, who I actually received earlier than the Pêls, but I put off showing. And in a break with the usual format, I'm going to talk about the art first.

This one's a little cautionary and shows that sometimes what's in your imagination doesn't always translate well to canvas. Chén is a dainty glass mannequin that dances like a ballerina and has the coarse personality of a dockside whore. Her glass/plastic case is fully transparent and her insides are a mix of living organs and intricate clockwork.

When the first sketch came back I suggested some tweaks. The sketch gave Chén some artificial robot eyes. Chén actually has human eyes and there is supposed to be a whiff of body horror about her in that rather than being an android or sentient bioplastic gel like some of the other artificial beings, there are strong hints that The Doctoress transplanted living human organs into a glass mannequin case.

Marwmellow also suggested a nice headdress. I changed it to a flapper-esque headband. The headdress was a pretty good idea and was given to N3P-NTHes instead (that piece is exceptional, can't wait to show it off!).

The problem with all my meddling is it tipped the design too much into pure horror. Marwmellow took the idea of human eyes transplanted into a mannequin body and came back with something that was pure nightmare fuel. I've attached that to the post as well. You really get the sense of someone being reanimated into a plastic/glass shell and being unable to control a body that is now a prison.

It's a really nice horror piece.

Unfortunately, HoHH is supposed to be an erotic game and Chén has the sarky personality of a potty-mouthed dockside whore. That nightmare stare doesn't really suit her at all. So, I had Marwmellow modify the face to give some eyelids and a bit of a smirk. Which I felt really bad about, as the original is a fantastic drawing for unfortunately the wrong character.

The main takeaway I had from this is do not meddle too much with your artist!

Now, with that out of the way, onto the lore.

Chén is another creation of the House's resident mad scientist, The Doctoress. In this case she was experimenting with transplanting human parts into a glass shell to improve both their longevity and durability. Because The Doctoress is a bit scatty and easily distracted, she mixed up the body parts of a petite little ballerina with a tough dockside floozy, which resulted in Chén having the potty-mouthed persona she has.

Fortunately, the mixup in personalities did not affect Chén's abilities as a ballerina. Despite being a strange mix of organics, glass and brass clockworks, Chén is a superlative dancer and has a good eye for rating the abilities of her dancing partner. The Doctoress uses her to seek out the high-quality semen of exceptionally supple and agile men. She provided Chén with a special semen extraction unit to harvest it, which Chén 'charmingly' calls her "dickbag".

Because The Doctoress had originally thought she was giving the Chén the personality of a petite little ballerina, she wanted to give her some defensive measures in case an unsuitable man forced himself on her. Being The Doctoress, these defensive measures took the form of acid-secreting glands that could fill Chén's dickbag with a powerful organic acid in the event of the 'wrong' penis being forced inside.

Chén used it once.

After which The Madam forbade her from ever using it again. Such things were not becoming a House of Pleasure!

And finally, the game mechanics.

The central themes of the artificial beings faction came together fairly quickly once I added the NPC Doctoress to the House. They care about harvesting semen, lots of it, and – in particular – 'good quality' semen.

I also wanted to copy a mechanic I'd seen in Lobotomy Corporation. In that game some of the abnormalities will kill your worker if they are too high in a certain stat. I wanted that for HoHH to make it clear the game is not a regular RPG and the stats are identifiers rather than a value that needs to be pumped up and up and up. Being too high in a certain value can be just as bad as being too low depending on the harlot.

(There is a very strong hint this is the case in that The Doctoress also sells potions that temporarily lowers stats.)

Chén is part of a cycle of harlots that are looking for players with 'high quality' semen, with this being indicated by the player having the max value of 5 in the relevant stat. She turns away players that have 1s in that stat (rather than Pori or Nef, who Horror End them outright, which is why they are Tier 2 rather than Tier 1 harlots), but if she finds a 5, her 'dickbag' is capable of sucking out all the fluids in the man's body as semen.

And that's the spotlight for Chén, who I must confess I was a little worried about showing off given her art is a little more 'horror' than the others. I hope you like her anyway. Let me know your thoughts below.