Turnabout being fair play I'd say that I dig Gebruzhall's aesthetic overall, you approached it from a good angle I think. The demon has a really strong hook in how they can be used and what, specifically, they are used for. They're there to tell a flavor of weird haunted house story/silent hill story where the dwelling has an uncomfortably organic feeling and seems to a. be alive and b. actively hate you, yes you in particular.
I'm very reassured to hear that. As my post suggests, I was very nervous I'd missed the mark and created the weakest 2CD concept in this lineup.
But he also has a good avenue for somewhat positive interaction? I mean he is a Manse and an Infernal who allies with them or a sorcerer who impresses them or whatever and is willing to collaborate to ensure that Gebruzhall has a steady diet of victims has access to a fucked up rubix cube horror house as a fortress.
My idea there was that a theoretical Ylagran Infernal would get a lot of use out of him, because Ylagra's charmset pushes you to make what you're afraid of define you and determine what your actions are - Ylagra's chosen can totally use him as a mobile base for launching their terror campaigns, while a Lunar is probably going to have more trouble unless they've got their back to the wall.
I guess my question would be why he in particular is the Messenger. He communicates and spreads fear but it seems like a lot of the GTW's souls do stuff like that. So what in particular is he saying about fear, like I can make some guesses: that it drags you down, that it turns everything against you, that fear eats you up from the inside out and breaks you along the way and this is all as it should be. But I was sorta curious for your take.
I initially made him the Messenger Souls for two very simple reasons - first, I already had an Expressive soul lined up in the form of Yyrizesh's brother (Leshtekuph, a giant pile of mouths that constantly screams, thus demonstrating Ghalu-Than's eternal message of *TERRIFIED HELLWORM NOISES*), and second I just felt that a being that actively seeks a captive audience to impress his "lessons" upon seemed more nebulously messenger-y.
My main underlying idea was that he's taken Ghalu-Than's behaviors and translated them into a loose doctrine: the Great Terror Worm constantly runs away and actively seeks to avoid perceived aggressors, so therefore people who just sit around and live by going with the flow are Doing Something Wrong and need to be shown the error of their ways. He tends to infest houses and temples because those are places which he feels correlate to the kind of mortal who has a comfortable routine and lead lives defined by things other than paranoia. In other words, the kind of people he
hates.
A major part of my plan was to avoid the "movie monster tortures people for shiggles" idea. I wanted Gebruzhall to be motivated more by a sense of annoyed obligation: he's ruining your life because you are
wrong and it's up to him to
correct you and your stupid wrong face, and when he finally kills you it's more out of frustration than anything else. Hence why he makes his FCDs out of victims who manage to impress him - having someone "learn from their mistakes" (by his twisted metric) is part of what makes all the failures worth it for him, so he legitimately thinks he's rewarding those success stories by taking them apart and using them as raw materials for demon-crafting.
I actually finished up my next 2CD rather ahead of schedule, so get ready for the Hunter-Breeding Hart tomorrow!
