Located in rural or urban noise-dense areas

Writing: Jim McCarthy; Art & Design: Graham Roewe; Illustration: Kim Diaz Holm

A formless parasite that seeps in through sound. It starves in silence, but every scream feeds it, twisting space and time into a nightmare maze.

 

Abilities: Aberrance 10, Athletics 10, Health 10, Scuffling 10

Hit Threshold: 3

Armour: +1 (gelatinous)

Awareness Modifier: +1

Stealth Modifier: +1

Damage Modifiers: +1 (stinging pseudopod, elicits screams of pain unless Stability test at difficulty 3 is passed as victim absorbs psychic transference from nematocysts, see Amplified Terror)

Amplified Terror: If anyone screams or cries out in fear or pain nearby, the echovore heals 1d6 Health and grows by a cubic metre (and increases the maximum of all abilities by +1). A dormant echovore is usually a formless mass of around one metre in diameter, e.g. a puddle, a mound, a slick trail of gore. An echovore must spend 1 Aberrance to achieve this.

Distort Landscape: Use of sound to confuse prey, see DISTORT LANDSCAPE, plus

increased difficulty on rolls at the Keeper’s discretion. It does not need to spend Aberrance to achieve this effect, but it relies on the echovore having spent some time at its location to alter time and space.

Psychic Pressure: On initially entering the zone of an echovore, PCs feel compelled, on a failed Stability save, Panic, creating the very sound it craves. echovore spends a point of Aberrance to affect a group of PCs within twenty metres.

Mimic: On reaching maximum of 15 on any attribute, an echovore can assume the form of whatever creature or object’s sound it has consumed by spending 1 Aberrance.

CREATURE DESCRIPTION

At first there is nothing but a faint acoustic distortion – echoes that arrive a fraction too soon or linger a heartbeat too long. As it feeds, a slick, tar-black mass begins to coalesce, its surface sheened with trembling, blood-red membranes that pulse to some alien rhythm.

In perfect silence it withers, collapsing into brittle, translucent filaments. These can be scraped away as a fine grey dust – inert to the eye yet somehow still alive, waiting.

When an echovore grows vast on sound and fear, it begins to fashion crude, grotesque imitations of what it has devoured. In this state it can move, mimic, and interact with a dreadful parody of the living it once consumed.

BONUS INFORMATION

Most often it is discovered where sound is restless and unrelenting: beside a thunderous waterfall, beneath the rising roar of jet aircraft, or within the cavernous pulse of nightclubs. It hungers for panic, drifting first towards the loudest, most frightened gatherings, drawn as if by the scent of fear carried on the air.

Once an echovore has fed enough to anchor itself, its presence begins to deform the world around it. Walls buckle, corridors loop, and space itself grows treacherous – consult the COLLAPSE SPACE table to chart the slow, dreadful formation of its lair.

USABLE INFORMATION

A formless, extra-dimensional parasite, it seeps into the world along fractures of sound. In silence it starves; but with every vibration – every cry, every fear-charged scream – it fattens and gains strength, until the very architecture around it begins to twist and deform.

Its origin is unknowable. Some whisper of abandoned acoustic experiments, resonance chambers that opened the wrong door. Others speak of a forgotten god of panic, drifting between realities, waiting for the tremor of noise to draw it through.

Vast, mature echovores are rumoured to wield their sonic and spatial distortions with such precision that they dislocate both place and time – shifting their lairs through the past, the

present, and into unsuspecting futures through an explosion of apocalyptic energies.

Some claim that the desiccated remnants of an echovore – the brittle dust scraped from its withered husk – can be harnessed to fuel strange and uncanny artefacts, devices of unsettling provenance and unpredictable power.

WEAKNESSES

True Silence: If an area is magically or technologically silenced, an echovore loses 1 Health per round until it reaches a dormant state, see CREATURE DESCRIPTION.

White Noise Overload: Continuous loud but emotionless noise (e.g., static, mechanical drones, shoegaze) disorients it; attacks are increased in difficulty.

DISTORT LANDSCAPE table

1	Echo Lag: Sounds repeat a few seconds later from a random place or direction.
2	Whisper Chorus: PCs hear their own voices whispering secrets or fears from nearby walls.
3	Tinnitus Surge: Sudden ringing deafens a character for 1d3 rounds, difficulty target increases for relevant actions, e.g. listening, balance, concentration.
4	Doppler Warp: Quiet noises rush by at impossible speed; loud ones seem far away.
5	Reverse Audio: Speech, footsteps play backwards; use a suitable Investigative ability to understand.
6	Heartbeat Amplifier: Each PC hears their own pulse booming; Stability test, Difficulty 3 or lose 1 point of stability.

COLLAPSE SPACE table

1	Endless Hall: Corridor stretches; walking one turn returns you to the same spot. Use an Investigative ability to break out of the cycle or be trapped for 1d3 hours.
2	Spatial Skip: Stepping through a doorway jumps you 1d6 rooms ahead or behind.
3	Impossible Angles: Corners bend wrong; line of sight breaks, disorientation, tripping and falling.
4	Silent Void: Entering a doorway dumps a PC into total darkness, no sound for 1d6 minutes before spitting them back out.
5	Room Flip: Door opens to a room from their past, but it is mirrored, strange and unsettling.
6	Eardrum Dome: The lair’s heart: a vast, fleshy resonant chamber, vibrations are alive, the echovore looms, fed by all noise. Even a whisper risks instant detection.

Art Kim Holm, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence 2024