The Beast Fears Fire - Trowir

Just as a fair warning, this entry contains pyschic assault by spirits who enter the bodies of their hosts. It reads moderately rapey to me, and while I try to fix the wording to turn that bit down (it is not something I want in this project), I'll throw a cut on that part.

Trow [Hardship 2+]
Impulse - To Die with You.

It's not difficult to pervert a custodial spirit of nature, you simply need to poke at it long enough and in the right way. Trowir are, however, the result of the only large-scale and systematic attempt to do this, dating back to the last generation of the Ash people. There's a facile and popular interpretation of history that paints the Ash people as having a legacy of only monsters; that they were an especially wicked people, possibly even deserving of extinction. It's wrong in both the sense of being incorrect and immoral, but the existence of trowir make it tempting.

Trowir used to be elves, and when they manifest, they resemble elves, at least in the sense that you are not going to mistake them for anything that isn't an elf. You also will not mistake a trow for an elf - they are clearly gone all wrong. Trowir are about half a meter tall, when they manifest, freely levitating, proportioned similar to oversized, sexless human infants (unlike elves, they are not proportioned toward the shoulders or hips depending on the gender they have chosen to express). Their skin is ashen, ranging from black through gray to white, with a distinct "front" and "back" skin tone. Their hair is lank and patchy, ears long and ragged, and the creepy-cute aspect of them is degraded to fully creepy.

Trowir were created as terror weapons. Most of the time they drift, unmanifest, in a fugue state, grouping together unconsciously, and moving toward human habitation. When they reach a critical mass of trowir and humans, they activate. Trowir want to die. Unfortunately for them, the only two ways to manage death for a custodial spirit are being deliberately destroyed by a practitioner of magic and inhabiting a host when he or she dies. I suppose you can guess which one the process that made them usually prohibits them from seeking out. Elves are custodial spirits of human nature, so people are their only viable hosts.


Trowir cannot control the actions of their hosts, so they remain inhabiting them in hopes that the trauma of their presence will drive the host to a psychotic break and death through accident, suicide or external violence.

In Modes and Fits and Verbs
When inhabited by a Trow, face Hardship
On a Hit, suffer Harm as stated, but you may act to eject or destroy the trow as normal.
On a Hard Hit, you eject the trow and force it back into its unmanifest fugue state.
On a Miss, suffer Harm as stated, and the Moderator gets a Hard Move to describe what you did while driven out of your mind by the trow.

I influence so easily, so influence me please.
Some trowir are stronger than others, and may have a higher Threshold, depending. There are wards and charms to prevent a trow from inhabiting a person, though these are not terribly common knowledge. Hosting an elf prevents a trow from entering as well (hosting a trow prevents a different trow from entering, but whoop-dee-do), and any human who plans on going up against trowir is going to have very little difficulty convincing any elf to help.
No one knows how many trow there are. Elves say that there were enough of them made to have affected their population some, elves don't know how many elves there are or what proportion of the population would have had to have been changed. Every elf from that time and before does know someone who was turned into a trow. And there are new ones still being created, though not a consistent rate or in high volumes. Barghests love getting their hands on the formula, and there are other villainous, self-willed and magic capable creatures out there who do as well, but they don't account for all the trow creation.

It is possible, however difficult and dangerous, to heal a trow and make them into an elf. This requires someone willing to host a trow for extended periods of time. It's generally considered not worth the risk; elves are usually horrified that someone would even try.

It's probably worth noting that exposure to a trow psyche leaves a fair amount of psychological damage. There's no mechanics for this; it's entirely up to an individual player whether they want to explore this aspect of their character or not, but it would not be unreasonable for a player to change one or more of their character's Traits in response to the attack.