GURPS Special Forces

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Characters

World

Reference

The Hungry God

Abilities

  • Host-jumping on death
  • Faster-than-light travel
  • Absorbs power from empowered beings
  • Grows by feeding

Weaknesses

  • Must be drained of power via juice extraction (true kill)
  • Arrives weakened and starving
  • May be unable to survive the Regenerator's zombie infection

Summary

What it is and the threat it represents.

A celestial devourer — a cosmic entity traveling toward Earth inside a roughly 12-foot meteor at faster-than-light speed, drawn by the juice beacon emitted by powered planets. After roughly a century of hibernation inside the rock, it arrives starving and weakened, like “a bear leaving its den in early spring.” ETA: approximately one week out from the end of Session 08 (≈May 14, 2019) — confirmed by GM ruling at the Session 08 reconcile. It represents an extinction-level threat: it consumes all life on the worlds it harvests.

Description

Appearance, behavior, known capabilities.

The Hungry God follows a recurring harvest cycle. It previously devoured the planet Terra, consuming all life there, and deliberately left the giant bugs alive as livestock — a seed crop to repopulate the world for a future harvest. In the prophetic footage it manifests as a three-legged, three-armed creature wielding a sword (see The Hungry God’s Sword).

A key mechanic governs its survival: if it is killed, it jumps into a new juice-bearing host. This is how the champion of Terra became the previous Hungry God. To truly kill it, it must instead be DRAINED of its power via the juice extraction procedure.

When it arrives it will seek out the largest stores of power first — the Giant Anglerfish and the Fragment Bear — to feed and grow.

Session 09 Update — Manifestation, Possession, and Destruction (in the rewritten timeline)

[!note] Reconciled (Session 09): canon. Scope ruling — past preserved, future changed. These events happened as played; the net outcome is that the entity is destroyed at its origin and removed as a future threat. It never reaches Earth.

In [Session 09 - The Day the Timeline Unwound](…/chapters/Chapter 1 - The Hungry God/Sessions/session-09-the-day-the-timeline-unwound.html) the entity (referred to in play as the Alpha Predator) finally manifested — and behaved exactly as the cosmology warned:

  • It arrived embedded in / arriving through a hostile alternate-timeline Brittany duplicate (Bad Britney), using her as a vessel. She stripped the flesh from Jens in an instant.
  • When Bad Britney was destroyed, the entity’s essence — a red mist — leapt directly into Dragon, confirming the host-jump-on-death rule live (see The Battle of RD3, cosmology).
  • In its true, unbound form it is a sixty-foot tentacled, whale-like creature that falls from the sky trailing re-entry fire (matching Voss’s Session 05 “whale crossed with a squid” description and the ~100-ft bones on Terra).
  • Destroyed at the source. Via The Timeline Rewind, the party reached Terra’s deep past and warned The Terran Warrior, who flew the Alpha Predator into the sun (The Sacrifice on Terra) — total annihilation with no surviving host. Because the Terran champion died with it instead of becoming the next devourer, the Hungry God never forms, and (by implication) never comes to Earth.

This refines the kill-method: alongside “drain, don’t kill,” complete destruction with no host in range also works.

Abilities

  • Host-jumping on death — leaps into a new juice-bearing host if killed, making conventional kills futile
  • Faster-than-light travel inside its meteor
  • Consumes and absorbs power from empowered beings
  • Grows by feeding (will seek the Giant Anglerfish and Fragment Bear first)

Weaknesses

  • Juice-drain extraction via the juice extraction procedure is the true kill method — it cannot host-jump if its power is removed
  • Arrives weakened and starving (“a bear leaving its den in early spring”)
  • (Theorized) The Regenerator’s zombie infection may be something it “cannot survive”

Game Stats (if known)

Relationships

Outgoing:

Incoming:

Appearances

Relationships

  • Drawn to Power Juice — Drawn across space by the juice beacon emitted by powered planets.
  • Devoured Terra — Consumed the planet Terra in a previous harvest cycle.
  • Cultivates Terran Insectoid — Deliberately left the giant bugs alive as livestock/seed crop for a future harvest.
  • Targets Voss Campus — In the prophetic footage, the future battle takes place here.