The Empty

Of those who've seen Dark Passions, the response to the Empty has been pretty much the same. Cool. Sick.

What are they? In a nutshell, take a person who has fallen into utter despair and hopelessness (not necessarily a hard thing in the Strange Aeon), someone who has become hollow on the inside. Then have some thing ever so gently reach inside of them and destroy whatever humanity is left inside them and set up shop in its place. Now you have a person who has succumbed to the darkness.

The Empty are the people who molest every child in their family, the parents who abuse their children to death without blinking, serial killers, serial rapists, and all the other kinds of people that we can't believe exist when we read about them in the papers. All without a conscience, so they talk about the horrors they visit upon the world as simply and calmly as one would recount going to the grocery store.

Like so many things in CthulhuTech, the real horror comes from the evil that men do, not from the evil of gods or monsters. The Empty came to be after I went back to Minnesota/Wisconsin for Christmas a few years ago. My Mom told me a story from the newspaper about a little girl whose life had been great up until she was like 10. Then her mom died and she went to live with her dad and step-mom. Her life went downhill quick. First, she was sexually abused. Then, she was physically abused, regularly. One night, her step-mom got really pissed at her and put her under the shower on super-hot and basically boiled her (the police would later measure the water, which was somewhere around 140 degrees). Oh, and she left her in the tub. The police later found tracks of this girl's skin, which was sloughing off of her and sticking to the floor and walls, as she crawled into bed. Her dad finally came home and in a drugged haze decided the best thing to do was give her aloe and tell her to sleep it off. The girl was dead a few hours later, suffering the whole while. The dad and step-mom had nothing useful to offer in way of explanation for their actions and in a win for the justice system were both sentenced to hard time. (It's just my opinion, but I hope something bad happens to them.)

Well, I've seen some messed up things, heard some messed up things, and personally experienced some messed up things, and after hearing this stomach-churning story I got to wondering what it was that allowed people to perpetrate inhuman acts so casually on the people they love. I had this blank in the Dark Passions outline entitled "some kind of cult that has something to do with Gurathnaka." I just started writing and the Empty came to be. They are an explanation in the Strange Aeon of how some people can do the horrible things they do, without remorse, without conscience. They are a disorganized group of amoral freaks that can add an element of unease and outright unexpected terror to any game. Of course, the kind of terror they bring is the kind that comes at you from a very personal place, the kind that may catch you in such a way that you'd much rather be facing creatures from beyond. At least that way, there's an explanation.

Of course, in the real world there is no such convenient explanation or supernatural force. It's just horrifying.