Skin-Changer
- HP
- 12
- Defense
- 10
- AR
- 1
- Mettle
- 2
Attacks
| Attack | Pool | WR | Tempo | Qualities | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claws (true form) | 7 | 4 | 4 | Bleed (1 HP/turn until treated). | |
| Borrowed Weapon | 6 | 0 | 0 | — | Uses victim's equipment and fighting style. WR/Tempo vary by weapon stolen. |
Traits
- Perfect Disguise: While wearing a skin, indistinguishable from victim to all normal observation. Insight TN 15 to notice subtle wrongness (smell, temperature, animal reactions). Psionics can attempt ECHO + Insight TN 13 — the mind beneath the skin is alien and reads as static.
- Consume: Must kill and consume a victim over 1 hour to take their form. The process is silent but leaves traces — blood, hair, and a smell like burning fat that lingers for days.
Abilities
- Shed Skin (Tempo 3): Drops disguise explosively, revealing true form. Gains +2 dice to all attacks for 10 Ticks from the burst of freed muscle. All witnesses within Near must roll ECHO + Resilience TN 11 or become Suppressed by horror.
A thing that wears people. Nobody knows what a Skin-Changer looks like underneath — the few who have seen one shed its disguise describe something thin, wet, and wrong, like a person turned inside out and stretched over a frame made of too many bones.
Skin-Changers are ambush predators of the most intimate kind. They kill a person, consume them over the course of an hour, and then walk out of the room wearing the victim’s face, voice, memories, and mannerisms with absolute fidelity. The disguise is perfect — not an illusion, but a physical reconstruction. The only way to tell is an Insight check so difficult that most people don’t bother, or the subtle wrongness that dogs don’t miss: animals bark at Skin-Changers. Children stare. The air around them smells faintly of copper.
They are thankfully rare. The Circle estimates fewer than a dozen operating on the Frontier at any time. Each one is a slow-motion catastrophe — by the time you realize someone in your settlement has been replaced, the Skin-Changer has already chosen its next victim.
Speed 8.
Tactics
Infiltrate. Isolate. Replace. A Skin-Changer never fights openly unless cornered or unless it has already weakened the group from within — poisoning supplies, leading patrols into ambushes, sowing paranoia. When it fights, it targets isolated individuals and uses Shed Skin only when it has the advantage.
Encounter Design
The best Skin-Changer encounter is a mystery, not a fight. The party arrives in a settlement where someone has been replaced. Tensions are high. Accusations fly. The real combat only happens once the Skin-Changer is identified — and it’s already chosen its escape route.