< Uncanny Valley
Uncanny Valley/Tabletop Games
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- The New World of Darkness roleplaying game Promethean: The Created puts a different spin on the Uncanny Valley. The player characters are artificial humans, ranging from reanimated corpses to magically animated statues, who appear human through the thinnest of supernatural veneers. Muggles can tell the difference on some deep, fundamental level, meaning that spending too much time around them is enough cause to haul out the Torches and Pitchforks.
- A similar effect happens to vampires in Vampire: The Requiem. As they get older and lose touch with their Humanity, it gets harder for them to interact nicely with mortals. They forget to do things like blink, breathe, vary their vocal inflections or send off the other signals that humans unconsciously do without thinking. Even if they do make an effort to do all these things, vampires that have lost enough Humanity will appear like walking, talking corpses:
A Kindred with low Humanity can put great effort into acting like a living person. He can force himself to breathe and remind himself to blink now and then... but he can't fake that subtle, unconscious dance of nonverbal interaction. Mortals soon pick up on this. They cannot consciously spot the problem, but their instincts tell them that something is very wrong and they should get away.
- The Nosferatu clan gets this all the time, no matter how high their Humanity. Some of them look just plain ugly, but others might look perfectly normal... but when they interact with other people, they may carry about them the sterile scent of a hospital ward, or a gaze like they want to see what the other person's guts look like. They always carry the idea that there's something wrong directly centered on them. There's even an entire bloodline devoted to inverting the curse by bathing in blood to improve their appearance... and even then, it doesn't work, because they become too beautiful to be anything human.
- The Hot Chicks RPG doesn't address this so much in the game as it does with the artwork. The CG art instils the Uncanny Valley much of the time, that is when it doesn't fail to get that far with the fact that 2/3rds of the women's facial expressions look like they were modeled off blow-up dolls.
- Elan in Dungeons & Dragons have this. Their skin is too perfect, their hair too red. This is because they are aberrations that merely look human. This also justifies their -2 Charisma.
- Likewise, changelings in Pathfinder (the Half-Human Hybrid offspring of hags). They're Always Female and conventionally attractive, but their otherworldly demeanor and minor deformities (like Mismatched Eyes) make them disconcerting to be around, imposing a penalty to Charisma.
- In both cases, expect actual real-life people who look at the art to say But Your Wings Are Beautiful, or at least mock the blatant attempts at letting players play a So Beautiful It's a Curse character, while still Min-Maxing for low Charisma.
- "Uncanny Valley" is the name of a trait in Eclipse Phase that can be taken in exchange for Customization Points. It means that your character's body (or "morph," in the game's lingo) is designed to look human (and not like a spider robot or an evolved monkey or something) and doesn't quite make the grade. It has the effect of giving a -10 penalty on all social interactions with humans.
- Magic: The Gathering's Phyrexian race goes toward this, being undead cyborgs, but especially jarring is Phyrexian Unlife, which shows someone finding out that she(?)'s become a Phyrexian.
- The Eldar. They are creepy.
- It depends on the artist in question, be it official or fan-made. Sometimes they look suitably creepy, or stereotypically elf-beautiful.
- Mortasheen has the Lester, a monster designed to look like humans and infiltrate their societies. But, because of "some imperceptibly trivial flaw in the monsters camouflage," humans immediately recognize it as a fake.
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