Juiblex and the One Flesh

THE GREAT GLISTENER 

 

The only constant, such as it is, is change. All that exists can be altered. Not even the gods are spared from change.  

In many cases, the act of change is a subtractive one. Entropy is wrought upon the subject through the chaos of transformation. Objects break down, ideas lose meaning—each alteration, in some small way, breaks down what was hard, certain, and true into that which is soft, malleable, and uncertain. And at the end of it all is a great formless mass; an ever-flowing, ever-shifting soup incomprehensible in size and scale of all things altered beyond the boundaries of form and reason. This is Juiblex, the Faceless God, and by its will the world will melt. 

 

EDICTS OF THE FACELESS GOD

Structure and individuation are untenable to Juiblex. Each step toward the complete dissolution of such things brings an object or idea closer to perfection. No distinction need be drawn between metamorphosis and decay; in the doctrine of Juiblex they are one in the same. 

Within the purview of the Faceless God are the aspects of mutation, transience, amalgamation, and deliquescence. 

It is known as the chaos lord of oozes and slimes, and indeed such beings are the burbling, quivering children of the Great Glistener. All oozes that lurk in the dark and forgotten places under the earth trace their origin to the ichorous discharges of Juiblex that it ejects into the cosmos. The most sacred of all its children is green slime, the loathsome substance that devours any metal and organic material it comes in contact with and instantly converts it into more of itself. 

The most deranged of scholars and radical of heretics believe that Juiblex is the dream of an unborn being. Something as yet unformed yearns for the convergence of all living matter on earth to form a single, perfect organism—the Faceless God itself. 

THE ONE FLESH

The followers of Juiblex are identified by outsiders as less a formal religious order and more a collection of desires and observed phenomenon, referred to loosely as the One Flesh. It can be found in any settlement of sufficient size, or anywhere where large quantities of diverse people groups gather. Most followers are unaware of who or what they follow—while they may not have a name for their god or conceptualize it as a distinct entity, they act on its behalf without heed of who or what they do it for.

There is a formal form of worship, though it has no name. The ritual involves members of the One Flesh congregating in abandoned or decrepit areas and engaging in vigorous, violent bacchanal, bolstered by heavy use of psychoactive substances. Some would say that this is merely a practice of hedonistic revelry, but in truth the purposes of the ritual extend far beyond the scope of personal pleasure. Observers have described horrifying scenes of men and women  of all ages and even animals fornicating, fighting, and writhing together in an anonymous mass of bodies; of bodily fluids of all sorts spilled, mixed, rubbed upon each other, bathed in, and imbibed in various ways. Most haunting of all, some have even claimed to witness people seem to melt into one another, as though freed from their anatomical constraints.  

Participating in such an orgy is the first and only step in joining the One Flesh. After an aspirant engages in the ritual, they will immediately feel an empathic bond to all other followers of Juiblex, and slowly lose their sense of personhood in favor of the collective identity of the One Flesh. When that occurs, new urges and desires will emerge in their minds—these are the whims of Juiblex, which its strange followers are compelled to obey. 

Operations of the One Flesh are erratic and hard to predict due to its diffuse organization. They include the contamination of water supplies; the gestation and delivery of chimerical monstrosities; the defacement of monuments, landmarks, and historical records; mutagens; experimental surgeries; radical alchemy; and unstable amalgamations. The primary goal of all their strange undertakings is to bring more individuals into the warm, viscid folds of the One Flesh. Often, this is done through promoting feelings of disillusionment and isolation among a populace. Social pariahs and disaffected outcasts are the most likely to join the One Flesh, both for the promise of connection and the disregard they may have for their own personhood. 

Devotees of the Faceless God may ambush a traveling caravan, slaughter its guards, and induce a deep, narcotic coma in the noncombatant travelers. Then, after inflicting severe-yet-non debilitating disfigurements upon them, the devotees will sort the travelers into small groups (taking care not to pair individuals with too many similar characteristics together), take their money and valuables, and spirit them to nearby cities where they will be deposited in slums and other poor areas with little memory of who they are or how they got there. When each person experiences the peak of their alienation, they are most susceptible to the burblings of Juiblex that invite them to take part in the One Flesh ritual. Eventually, a new chapter is born. 

  

Should enough people take part in the orgy, the true ritual transformation begins. Bodies release their physical forms and merge into one another to form a great tumorous mass of living matter as big as a house. Looks like a giant knotty ball of melting fat and throbbing viscera shot through with multijointed limbs; smells like intense body odor, nose-burning bile, and meat on the verge of going rancid. Winking ventricles open and close between blobbly layers of slick meat, oozing mucus and smelling the air for organic material that bloated elephantine pseudopods in horrid approximations of various limbs sprout forth to claw it toward. Great swollen flesh sacs burble out from the mound like bubbles rising to the surface, from which burst expanding masses of viscous bile that collapse into sizzling puddles to digest the matter around them such that it can be consumed and anabolized by the ever-growing flesh mound. The mound continues expanding in this way until no more viable material is left to consume or it collapses under its own weight, at which point it sheds sheets of flesh that slough off its sides as they melt into green slime. As it does so, the mound releases waves of mutational impulses like radiation, inviting nearby creatures to take part in a new incarnation of the One Flesh. 

FURTHER DETAILS

Fighting one of those big blobby things: It's a bad idea. By the time one appears in an adventure, it's probably already veered into fail-state territory. But given how that's not always an unlikely outcome, here are the stats. 

One Flesh Bloom

HD: 20 (90 hp) AC: 9 Move: 20' Morale: 12 Attack: Elephantine pseudopod (2d8, save vs. paralysis or be subsumed by the blob) x 4 

Immune to acid, poison, and psychic attacks.

• Subsume: if the bloom moves into a creature's space or attacks with a pseudopod, the target must save vs. paralysis or become engulfed. On a success, the creature is harmless knocked back 10'. On a failure, the creature pulled into the blob takes 1d10 damage each round from being crushed+digested, and can only be pulled out by a combined strength score of 17. Engulfed creatures can damage the bloom using small weapons without needing to make an attack roll. 
• Digestive Bile: Creatures in melee range save vs. breath weapon each round or take 2d6 acid damage.
• The bloom reduces incoming damage by 3, unless the damage source is fire, cold, or holy in nature. 
• The bloom gains 1d8 hp each round, capable of exceeding its hp maximum.  For every 30 hp the bloom has over 100, it gains another attack and 10' of move speed. 
• If the bloom is reduced to 0 hp OR reaches 500 hp, it can no longer sustain itself and collapses into 20 HD worth of green slime. Everyone in a 120' radius must save vs. wands or mutate, and everyone in a 15-mile radius must save vs. spells at +4 or become compelled to join the One Flesh.

Joining the One Flesh:

After taking part in the One Flesh ritual, make a Wisdom test with a -2 penalty. You can willingly choose to fail the roll. On a failure, you join the One Flesh, your alignment becomes Chaotic, and you lose 2 points of Charisma due to depersonalization. In exchange you can transmit empathic messages with others of the One Flesh, who you recognize at a glance. Slimes and oozes no longer attack you. You can speak with them freely, but they typically don't have much to say. You can command ooze once per day, affecting a number of HD of ooze equal to your level.

The first time you take part in the ritual, take 1d6 damage and save vs. poison or contract a disease (puts you out of commission; save again every week, three successes means you survive, three failures means you die). If you avoid contracting a disease, you still suffer a -2 penalty to all rolls the next day as you recover.  

Once joined, you must take part in the ritual whenever you spend at least a month on downtime (ie not going on adventures). The ritual still deals 1d6 damage, but you are no longer in danger of contracting a disease and receive a +1 bonus to all rolls the next day as you bask in putrescent afterglow. 

Treasures valued by devotees of Juiblex:

1 Mixed potions (roll twice on the potion list and once on the miscibility table, ignoring the instant explosion result)

2 Expensive alchemy equipment

3 Green slime kept in all manner of vessels

4 Melted ingots

5 Opalized ooze 

6 Oozified opal (wax-sealed in long vials, looks like a lava lamp)

7 Pearlescent polyps

8 Jade amphoras

9 Rare and expensive oils

10 Royal jellies

11 Squishy globules containing hallucinogenic, corrosive, or soporific gases  

12 Imperfect attempts at the universal solvent: liquids that completely dissolve only one type of material (wood, stone, metal, etc.) 

Powers granted to those chosen as champions of the Faceless God:

1 Oil-slick skinfilm

2 Acid excretion

3 Rapid regeneration

4 Self-mutate/cause mutation 

5 Amorphous form

6 Lashing tendrils 

7 Malleable body

8 Command ooze

9 Cling to sheer surfaces

10 Chameleon skin

11 Induce intoxication 

12 Projectile vomit on demand

 

Clerics and acolytes of Juiblex can spew out 1 HD of green slime per day. The substance doubles as their unholy symbol, which is why many keep a small vial on their person, careful to hide it away lest it dissolve in the sun. 

 

Groups of 3–10 acolytes can merge to become a single fleshy monstrosity, pooling their HD and hp totals and getting a number of attacks equal to the amount of acolytes merged. This is an excruciating process and usually done as a last resort

Allied monsters:

1 Oozes, slimes, and jellies of all types

2 Mutants and mutated versions of local fauna 

3 Ropers

4 Otyughs

5 Giant slugs, leeches, and other slimy mollusks

6 Chimeras

7 Doppelgängers 

8 Flesh golems

9 Trolls

10 Gibbering mouthers

11 Malformed lycanthropes

12 Abominations augmented through fleshcrafting

 

Traps and hazards found in their pustulant lairs:

1 Camouflaged pits

2 Mutagens and flesh-warping parasites

3 Noxious miasmas

4 Quicksand-like sucking floors

5 Melting chambers; collapsing ceilings

6 Oozes, lurking or disguised

7 Seemingly mundane objects that fuse to the skin

8 Mysterious pools

9 Experimental gene-splicing machines 

10 Slippery floors. Slippery stairs. Slippery walls. Slippery everything. 

11 Birthing sacs and spawning vats 

12 Volatile alchemical experiments