So the Mother of Monsters, being a demon and a god, tends to fill her niche fairly well; monsters, madness, kill kill etc. On the sliding scale of Evil she's certainly dangerous and corrupting, but there are others who seem to draw more direct hatred and opposition. She is neither innocuous or ignorable. Her modus operandi is clear, and her servitors follow it to their utmost.
I'm trying to imagine if she was less about the sheer joy of wanton violence and death and corruption by direct (i.e. by her hands) means, and more of a Very Dark and Dangerous Quiverful Movement™ pastiche, with her violence being incidental to her being a nightmare variation on the Mother Bear archetype. Would this be plausible? Or would that be more fitting for those of her clergy, instead of the Mother of Monsters herself?
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I see Lamashtu being all about "Make more monsters, let the ruined entrails of their prey sort things out." Being a demon, she would cherish chaos, destruction and ruin. It being carried out by her millions of 'children' is all the more satisfying. In my mind, she wants to harvest your genetic material, cross breed you with a bugbear, rip out your soul and stuff it in a quasit, then force you to knowingly watch your progeny carry out any half-human half-bugbear atrocities it may for the 20 or so years it lives, rinse and repeat for eternity.
See, I dig on this in general, because the Abyss is not a nice place, and its spawn not nice things in general. However, there's the occasional urge to slightly tweak the contrast and 'brightness' knobs, and in some weirdly amusing alternate interpretive way, I could see something of a mildly less-freaky-looking take of a Stepford Smiling, dissonantly serene, stuff-of-nightmares 'Demon Chick With a SCREAMINGLY Loud Biological(?) Clock', where she isn't snarling and vicious, isn't laughing maniacally as she cuts people down, but is simply intent on laying with you, directly or inderectly, and wants you to enjoy it, because if you enjoy it you will give her your seed, and with it she will steal a bit of your soul, fashioning some unspeakable evil that she will love and adore like you would expect any proud mother to adore her progeny, who are the ones who do the slaughter and killing and murder and all the little things that make Mama so proud, and if you so much as harm her children THEN the more familiar face of the Mother of Monsters comes out, and she will feed her children upon your remains.
It's about as plausible as turning Saerenrae into a Valley Girl Elf Cheerleader, but that's part of the fun of alternate character interpretations.
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I haven't read "Faiths of Corruption" but I can see a church of Lamashtu kidnapping women and men for the entire purpose of handing them over to monsters, or summoning demons in the hopes of having half breeds of that sort. It's pretty dark to think about, but you could easily use it as a story seed. Adventurers might find a meeting of an orc tribe with dozens of human women being handed over by the church all in the name of making half orcs, or what not.
I see Lamashtu being all about "Make more monsters, let the ruined entrails of their prey sort things out." Being a demon, she would cherish chaos, destruction and ruin. It being carried out by her millions of 'children' is all the more satisfying. In my mind, she wants to harvest your genetic material, cross breed you with a bugbear, rip out your soul and stuff it in a quasit, then force you to knowingly watch your progeny carry out any half-human half-bugbear atrocities it may for the 20 or so years it lives, rinse and repeat for eternity.
I agree, Lamashtu is a corruption of the Mother archetype. Her goals are to corrupt and pervert everything through sex and birthing, and everything is a potential mate. Anything that she doesn't mate with is food and/or a toy for her offspring.
I see Lamashtu being all about "Make more monsters, let the ruined entrails of their prey sort things out." Being a demon, she would cherish chaos, destruction and ruin. It being carried out by her millions of 'children' is all the more satisfying. In my mind, she wants to harvest your genetic material, cross breed you with a bugbear, rip out your soul and stuff it in a quasit, then force you to knowingly watch your progeny carry out any half-human half-bugbear atrocities it may for the 20 or so years it lives, rinse and repeat for eternity.I agree, Lamashtu is a corruption of the Mother archetype. Her goals are to corrupt and pervert everything through sex and birthing, and everything is a potential mate. Anything that she doesn't mate with is food and/or a toy for her offspring.
...which is more of what I was looking at. I like the concept of the corruption of the Mother archetype, but the corruption strikes me as being more violence-focused than the 'breed'n'spawn' end of the spectrum. In part the idea cropped up because, after reading Mythic Monsters Revisited, I was pondering both Harpies and Medusas in regards to the worship of the Mother of Monsters. The reference of the Quiverful movement struck me as an apt comparison, as there is an eagerness, a willingness to breed an army for one's deity, but there's also the perception that the focus is more on the progeny than the act itself, even if there might be other focuses among the worshipers.