Akros

Akros

Lord of decay, filth, and necrosis. Akros appears as a blob of gelatinous, putrid matter that can take the shape of anything he desires, often with bones and other more solid rotting material visible within. He claims gops, especially black ones, as his creatures, preferring their mindless hunger and desire to break existence into the base dust and ooze that it was wrought from. Akros often displays considerable bravado, being quite chaotic and unsubtle, and occasionally chooses to skirt dangerously close to breaking the self-imposed rules of the great game waged between the spirits. The disaffected possessed of a desire for slow destruction and debasement are often drawn to his fold.

Basic Pact

• Bid: I bid you to defile.
• Offer: I offer you the power of inevitable destruction.
• Purpose: You will seek out what is truly worthy of preservation, and return everything else to dust.
• Gift: Each supplicant is gifted a torc of any tarnished metal, most commonly that of rusted iron. Once a day, when worn, the torc can render its owner impervious to any corrosive chemical or material for thirty minutes (plus one hour per hero point spent at time of activation), allowing them to swim through potent acid if they so desire.
• Mark: Akros' dedicants tend to look wild and dishevelled, even if subtly so. This manifests in many ways on an individual basis, rendering them hard to immediately identify from impoverished beings - and allowing them to get close to spread rot and decay on their masters' behalf.

Benefits

• By expending a hero point, a supplicant of Akros may rapidly advance the deterioration of a moderately-sized inanimate object, such as a corpse or suit of armour, by one year under the conditions under which it is currently under. For example, holding a blade in seawater will cause it to rust, while in air it may merely gain a tarnish. The size of the affected object, as well as the duration, may be multiplied by how many hero points are spent. The supplicant must be in physical contact with the object for this power to be used.
  • A dedicant of the Life Court may attempt to prevent this, at the cost of as many hero points as is being used to cause said object to decay. A d20 is rolled each with applicable and reasonable modifiers at the judge's discretion, and if the preserver's roll is higher than the supplicant's, the attempt fails.
• Dedicants to Akros are impervious to corrupting and necrotic diseases such as gangrene, infected wounds, tumours and the like. They are much more difficult to poison, and do not suffer ill effects from eating spoilt food, drinking tainted water or being in the presence of filth and decay.
  • This does not affect damage from poison abilities and the like.
• At the expenditure of a hero point, dedicants to Akros may call up a swarm of one type of decay-related creature (for example, flies, cockroaches, rats, vultures). Creatures within 100 metres are drawn to do the dedicant's bidding; this radius may be extended another 100 metres for any extra point spent. Conscious effort must be spent to direct the creatures; if the dedicant is unable to focus on the task, the compulsion will be broken and the creatures will scatter. Furthermore, the creatures must already be present - the dedicant cannot summon them out of thin air. Only one swarm may be called at a time per dedicant.

Personality

• Being the embodiment of entropy and decay, Akros tends to be on the slow-witted side. He'll eventually "get" an idea, but the metaphorical gears in his head turn quite slowly, taking the long, winding route to an idea instead of the straightest path. He's fully self-aware of this fact. As a result, he's been known to rehearse his words.
• Finding thinking quite a bit of a hassle, he'll often speak and act on the spur of the moment without thinking things through, especially if provoked. This often results in his words being taken as bragging, or his plans being dropped because he didn't think through how to get from point A to B.
• When working in concert with another Old One giving the orders and doing the thinking, he's actually rather good-natured and trusting about it all, content to do the heavy lifting and trust others to get the planning done right.