My interest in vore probably started with horror movies like
The Blob but especially with Dungeons and Dragons®.
D&D has many opportunities to satisfy a vore enthusiast. After all, many monsters in the game are monsters because adventurers are part of their complete diet, and the swallow whole attack has existed for some of the bigger critters since the original edition. Here on Eka’s one can see D&D or D&D-inspired games catering to our tastes.
The D&D edition my local gaming group uses, version 3.5, is littered not just with monsters that suggest vore but spells—
hungry gizzard and
bite of the king from the
Spell Compendium,
great worm of the earth from the
Complete Mage, and even two clerical domains from the
Spell Compendium, Gluttony and Hunger. This doesn’t even take into account summoning spells and the many kinky uses of
polymorph and
shapeshift.
A few years ago, I was asked to join a D&D game that had been running for awhile, so I tried to make a character that would fill in a gap in the party. The adventures seemed to mostly be taking place outdoors, and while the party had a cleric, she was multi-classed and so less powerful as a cleric. Therefore I decided on a druid to bolster the party’s divine casting power and cover some of the “outdoorsy” functions like tracking and Survival checks.
I wanted something different from the typical tree hugger, though, so I decided on a druid from a jungle environment. I wanted an elf because druids are also the sensor arrays in an adventuring party, even more than rogues are: Wisdom is a druid’s primary attribute, and Spot and Listen are class skills for druids, and elves get racial bonuses to those skills. A jungle home suggested a wild elf, and for a change-up on the animal companion, since I was bringing the character in at 5th level, I chose a constrictor snake (allowed to 4th level druids), with the idea of trading up to a giant constrictor snake at 11th level. I gave her golden-blonde hair (which was different for a wild elf, as their hair usually varies from black to light brown) because as part of her background I wanted her to care for three orphaned bear cubs she found as she traveled north to where the game was currently taking place. (Yes, I had to have the pun. Don’t judge me. And yes, she used wild shape to take the form of a mama bear.) I also wanted her to have a decent Charisma for the wild empathy class ability and for Handle Animal, which is also a druid class skill. (Many players mistake Charisma for appearance—which it isn’t, strictly speaking—but if you’re going to play a wild elf jungle gal, she might as well be a pretty wild elf jungle gal.)
I didn’t name her Zōēā—that was chosen later when I decided to write the first of the
Visceral Voyager stories—but it was there that she was born.
When I did finally decide to write about Zōēā, the main problem was that if Zōēā was going to be prey (and let’s face it, how can a female elf
not be prey?), then I’d have to deal with the nagging side effect of getting eaten: death. Now, in D&D, death isn’t necessarily as terminal as it is in real life (or real death, if you will). There are a variety of spells to raise the dead, but they are expensive to cast, particularly the only spells that will restore a completely digested character to life:
true resurrection,
miracle, or
wish. Moreover, even these spells take something out of the recipient aside from the financial cost. But without a way around death, you’re pretty much limited to one vore story about that character as prey.
While I like fantasy, I'm also a stickler for detail when writing. The more you call on a reader to suspend disbelief, the less that reader tends to invest in your story. So if I was going to use Zōēā in more than one story where she gets swallowed, how was she going to survive the stomach?
To be sure, there are many ways in D&D to get fresh air where there normally isn’t. Magical methods to resist acid exist, but there are fewer and less effective ways to survive the bludgeoning damage. (Recent research of the D&D 5E Standard Reference Document shows me that bludgeoning damage has been removed from the effects of stomach damage, although the acid damage has been increased to a rather ridiculous degree. But that’s hardly the worst complaint I have about 5E.) Still, even if the caster manages both, then he or she becomes a bowel blockage that kills the predator, leaving her stuck in a rotting body unless she is able to cut herself free or someone on the outside does it for her. That doesn’t make for a good vore story.
There is always transmutation: magically turn into something that can survive the passage through a creature’s alimentary canal without killing the creature. So what thing could satisfy both requirements? Answer: the product of that creature’s digestion, of course. This can technically already be done with the
polymorph any object spell from the
Player’s Handbook, but it would only have a duration of 20 minutes to an hour at most, twice that if one used the Extend Spell feat on it. The time spent in a creature’s gut is usually rather longer. What was needed was a new spell.
And so was born the
kwurdāin (“waste-form”) spell: it would convert acid (or, in the case of some creatures, fire) and bludgeoning damage taken in the stomach to non-lethal damage, and when that damage exceeded the caster’s current hit points, it would trigger the transformation, which would last long enough (up to one day per level of the caster) to allow the monster to excrete the caster normally and completely. The monster would have no interest in its own dung, so after it left, the caster could dismiss the spell and leave in safety. The spell also prevents the predator from suffering from constipation or diarrhea, as this might cause a problem in being excreted properly. (Yes, the
kwurdāin spell promotes healthy bowel movements in monsters.) The caster would have to keep a sense of touch while transformed so she could tell when she had been excreted, so the spell allows for that. And since non-lethal damage takes many forms (pummeling, starvation, exhaustion, and such), why not exhausting pleasure in the case of the spell? After all, in D&D, there are no game effects from damage until you run out of hit points, and even non-lethal damage has to equal current hit points to cause a staggered effect.
I set the spell at 4th level: it was a contingent spell with a fairly long duration after triggering, which makes it more powerful, but it was also a very specific transformation into a singularly useless form—no Strength, Dexterity, or Constitution scores and a movement speed of zero, because let’s face it, shit can’t do shit. As a personal range and target spell, it is also sharply limited. When the spell ends, it causes temporary Constitution damage and extreme hunger: the predator would still take something from the caster as she passed through its bowels, although not as much as if she were actually digested, of course. (For one thing, it would take most of the caster’s stored fat. That’s right folks, you can lose weight with the new
kwurdāin diet! The only diet where
you are the diet—for a hungry predator! Not approved by the FDA.)
Druids have a wide variety of spells for changing their forms, and this spell is well within the range of power for those spells. After all, even their wild shape class ability eventually allows them to change into elemental forms, and dung can scarcely be harder to change into than water or earth or air or fire—and that’s just using a class ability, not actual spells.
I even wrote up a description of the spell (see
“The Magic of Āen”) and researched it in the game that inspired Zōēā (under a different name); my druid there can actually cast the spell. I did, however, omit the notes on the pleasurable side effects from the description as being, ahem, not game relevant. I also did not describe the actual transformation process for much the same reason. In story terms, I decided to depict it in the form of a very fast digestion to mix horror with pleasure, so that
the first time it happened to Zōēā she wouldn’t be sure if she was dead or alive.
Having made Zōēā, I dropped her into a customized setting I had made for running my own (non-vore) D&D games, added a few additional characters, spells, and magic items, and started writing…
None of the adventures that happened to Zōēā have actually happened to my druid in the game. The campaign ended without her ever having to use the spell, although she did have it running from the moment she successfully researched it. Ah, well…
No comments yet, make a comment please