ENTRY 21: THE UNKNOWN
"If you hear a soft voice crying out for help in the woods, stay the hell away. The true nature of The Unknown remains a mystery, barring one fatal certainty: to cross its path is to risk an unknowable fate."
LORE SUMMARY: the Unknown's lore actually doesn't tell its own story, but is written from the perspective of a journalist investigating a history of unexplained disappearance, piecing together rumors of a mysterious being spotted around the same town...
LORE SUMMARY: the Unknown's lore actually doesn't tell its own story, but is written from the perspective of a journalist investigating a history of unexplained disappearance, piecing together rumors of a mysterious being spotted around the same town...
Of the original killers, we're only now into the full blown monster-monsters, with very little humanity left if they had ever been human at all, and the Unknown is probably of the latter category. Its true form seems to be a squirming mass of tentacled flesh, but it crams itself into a hollowed-out human corpse as a crude "disguise" with stretched, twisted features and an even cruder imitation of a human voice. AWESOME.
The unknown has a couple of different abilities, and they're all pretty peculiar. It can spit globs of goo that bounce around wildly before exploding, inflicting survivors with the "hindered" status. The globs leave behind a "blast area" that continues to afflict survivors with "weakened" status, and weakened survivors sustain actual damage if they contact a blast area again. The Unknown also leaves behind a "hallucination" duplicate of itself every 45 seconds, maintining up to four of them simultaenously, and it can teleport itself to any one of them, which in turn leaves a decoy image behind for five seconds.
The Unknown's basic design is marvelously distressing. The mangled, possessed corpse has an elongated, twisted neck, an oversized grin full of yellow teeth, empty black holes for eyes, crooked limbs and a lopsided stance. It moves, of course, with all the unnatural gangliness you expect from a boneless tentacle monster stuffed into a humanoid frame. Rumored to have arrived either from outer space or from an occult ritual, it hits a nice, broad range of sci-fi horror notes calling back to John Carpenter's The Thing, all sorts of Lovecraft whosits, cryptozoology, folkloric bogeymen and creepypasta villains alike. The ambiguity of its true nature is the whole theme here, that it's something not of this world, and that means it can fill in for all sorts of monster types you might have been craving at any given moment.
BEST SKIN(S):
"NORO:" a downside of the Unknown is that it doesn't have a whole lot of cosmetic options, and there isn't a whole lot of variety to what it does have, but this head-only item gives it an almost featureless white noh mask with big, painted on teeth and lips, giving it a nice freakish yokai-like look.
"UNSOLVED:" dressed like a detective with a dirty wet trenchcoat, a trilby or fedora (I never remember the difference) and yellow police tape wrapped around its neck, covering its eyes. Together with the cocky smile, this is both a snazzy and threatening aesthetic!
"REAL LIFE TALE:" hilariously wearing a floppy, twisted wolf skin, which is in turn wearing a pink gown and poofy little bonnet; the Unknown, disguised as the Big Bad Wolf, disguised as Red Riding Hood's grandma. Cute! We need a few more this outlandish.
BLIGHTED SKIN: this one hasn't even been released and named yet at the time of this posting, but if you liked the contents of this goofball a bit more than the wrapper, this skin has the gooey, wormy pink contents bursting out for the whole world to gawk at, with little remaining of the human host but the upper half of a withered skull!
MY SUGGESTIONS:
A Reptilian Skin: the Unknown's overall shape would lend itself quite well to a sort of lanky snake-person or mutated dinosaur, with more serpents bursting out as its tentacles!
A Ragdoll: a patchwork cloth or plush skin, colorfully quilted or filthy burlap, with a stitched-shut mouth and button eyes, right? It would be perfect here.
A Cephalopod: for another of those skins that gives you a whole different kind of monster, the Unknown's proportions and animations could work very nicely for a boneless, humanoid mollusk with squid-tentacle limbs and an Illithid sort of head design. Maybe you could throw in a big ammonite shell, too!
