The haunting tradition is back – It’s time for Scare the Storytellers, 2022!

The Ishvana. Spoopy death cultists. Nanotube obsessed scientists. Those people you escort on station missions that ALWAYS seem to be up to no good. The hagda, in general… have you ever really LOOKED at a hagda? Don’t. There are things you cannot unsee.

This year we wanted to start Scare The Storytellers, our annual Halloween contest, a bit earlier so that you’d have more time to submit your entries. If you weren’t around for last time, we want you to send us details about the scariest legend, critter, ghost, or monster in your race’s history you can come up with!

What we want:

A paragraph or two from you describing a creature, fear, nightmare, or terror commonly known among members of your character’s race. Give us your space bigfoots, your slender men, your cthulhus, your ghosts, and your headless horsemen. This is your chance to dig deep into your psyche and flesh out your understanding of your character’s culture. Make it weird, guys. Our bodies are ready.

Things to include in your entry:

• Who you play/what your character name is.
• A name for your horror (e.g. The Foogu, slime monster of Benu Wen)
• A description of your horror (e.g. The Foogu is a massive horror of ever-increasing size and amorphous shape made of viscous, ambulatory slime. Fungus and moss grows liberally upon it, making it impossible to detect when walking in dark forests until you are already consumed.)
• A backstory, explanation, or creepypasta about why this is scary to your character’s race. (e.g. Said to have been grown from unstable molecules that escaped from a laboratory of W’hoorn scientists several centuries ago, tales of The Foogu and its rise to sentience are used liberally by W’hoorn parents to make their children mind them and stay close to home. Rumor has it that those lost in the woods are absorbed by the Foogu, but don’t die, remaining in a fullyaware, hellish stasis, used as nutrient batteries for the monster’s continued existence. Though no definitive proof of the Foogu’s existence has ever been found, a plethora of photographs and grainy video footage can be found on the commsphere.)

The winning entry will receive a unique item of some kind or a minipet loosely based on their creation (depending on what the person would like, what the staff thinks, and what the creature IS, at staff discretion!) and details about it will be added to our public wiki, solidifying the fruits of your depraved imagination into game canon forever.

Entries should be emailed to Damiel@Starmourn.com, and will be shared among game staff where they will be judged mercilessly and/or cried about while we all hug pillows and tremble vigorously. Your deadline is 11:59pm EST on October 31st. We’ll take a couple days to decide, then announce the winner!

A lil’ something about the rules

• Must include ALL required information detailed above.
• One entry per player.
• Entry must be 500 words or less.
• Collaboration is ok, but only the person who submits the entry can win the prize.
• No stories or creepypastas lifted directly from current Earth culture. Taking inspiration is fine, but the final product should be unique and wholly yours.
• Player must already have a character of the race they are writing about, and this character must have been created before this announcement was posted. In other words, if you want to write about a Krona ghost story, you must play Starmourn as a Krona. Note: If you had a HC character of that race that had a compelling story arc, but is now dead, they count too. BUT, if you played them 5 minutes and died to a rat, having never spoken to anyone, they do not.

Good luck, Starmourners – let’s get spooky!

Discuss this post in our forums, OR start brainstorming your entry with the rest of the community on our Official Discord.