I feel encountering Eldritch horrors should be more terrifying and more dangerous. Just by looking at or being too close to an Eldritch monster or portal should slowly inflict a madness debuff. The longer you have one in sight, and staying too close to one the more the madness builds.
On its own, madness would simply do something like lower morale/focus related to how long its built up. However, every turn you have madness there is a chance to for it to become a permanent ‘Insane’ trait, and a tiny chance to gain an Eldritch type mutation. Chances for insanity & mutations are very slim, but start to rise if the madness debuff is given time to build. Madness would start to slowly drop if you flee from a horror, leaving its sight.
*Insanity trait - Besides the morale penalty, it brings vivid nightmares messing with sleep, crazy visions & etc.
*Eldritch mutations - would all be double edge swords like artifacts. They can provide interesting bonuses at some terrible cost. Here’s a couple ideas:
- Teleport - active mutation like the cbm only cost is inflicting teleglow
- Unwanted Knowledge - looking into the void gives a great intelligence bonus, but slight chance of randomly giving you the attention effect
- Void touched - active that can summon a rift that brings forth an uncontrollable Eldritch monster which could be useful with a tactical mind.
All these can easily be avoided if you simply don’t hang around these type of monsters. True to Eldritch & Lovecraft lore, getting just a glimpse of such horrors should be dangerous in itself, and come across such rare creatures will always become an intense situation. Perhaps insanity & Eldritch mutations are incurable, perhaps one can craft them from flesh of dead horrors, and perhaps some places on the map that are chained up with a warning not to enter punish those who can’t help themselves. I mean if we can join the fungal nation why not be able to become a worshiper of that which lies beyond?
