Revenant
| DECEASED? STAFF | |
 Revenant |
Access: You can fly through walls Additional Access: N/A Difficulty: Easy to Average Supervisors: None Duties: Eat the crew's life force, strangulate people, transmit spooky messages, cry when the chaplain hits you Guides: This is the guide |
Revenants are ghosts that have been infused with strange magical (read: alien) energies and brought partially back into the mortal plane. They are invisible to the naked eye but can still be influenced by mortal means (i.e. lockers). In addition, simple machinery or animals will recognize a revenant's presence and be alerted by their existence. Revenants are typically immortal while invisible, but some of their spooky abilities will reveal them to the crew for brief amounts of time.
Becoming a Revenant
There are two ways to become a revenant. The first is for an admin to spawn in a revenant and quickly place you into the mob. The second way is for a random event to happen. You must have the Revenant preference toggled on (use the verb for special candidancy in the Preferences tab) and you may be selected. A sound will play to your client in case you were alt-tabbed or something and you will spawn in space within a close proximity to the station. If flying around for a bit you don't find the station, keep flying until you find it or yell at the admins that you can't.
Delicious Life Force
So, you're a newly-spawned revenant. One of the first things you may notice is that you look badass you have a little counter in your status tab with a number and an E next to it. That's essence, and it is your most important resource. Your maximum health is controlled by this number, and it will regenerate up to 25. If your essence hits zero, you will be warned and have it jolted up to 1. If this happens three times, or 'strikes', you die for good. There's an ability called Life Tap that gives you a lot of essence for one of these strikes if you're feeling ballsy.
Anyway, most of your abilities are behind a lock and you need to have some essence to unlock them. To get essence, you have one ability by default: Lesser Harvest. This can be used while next to an unconscious or dead human to gain a small amount of essence. This is a very small amount and you can't drain the same corpse twice, so you'll need to get creative or wander around for a bit. Note that while you're harvesting something, you can be seen and attacked by the living.
Abilities
Below is a list of all the abilities a revenant can use.
| Name | Essence Cost | Cooldown | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lesser Harvest | N/A, unlocked at start | 10 seconds | This is the first ability a revenant can use. It will drain essence from a nearby unconscious or dead human - the essence depends on their state. If they were player-controlled before death, you will get more essence. If they are unconscious, you will get a lot more essence. If they're unconscious when you do this, the human will also die (go figure). While harvesting, you are visible to anything nearby, so try to find relatively secluded corpses to do this to. |
| Greater Harvest | 125E unlock cost, 0E use cost | 5 minutes | This is a very powerful version of Lesser Harvest that has a rightful unlock cost. It can be used even on conscious and living humans for a huge amount of essence, and it will also paralyze them. When you drain someone like this, they will die, even from full health. This is great for picking off individual people, can you can also Lesser Harvest them afterwards for additional value. |
| Transmit | 5E unlock/use cost | 5 seconds | This the revenant's only direct method of communication, since they're incapable of speech. You can transmit a single message in distinct text silently to a single person. Psyche people out, make deals with antagonists, do what you want - it's a very versatile ability. |
| Overload Light | 25E unlock/use cost | 30 seconds | This is a unique ability. Any nearby online light fixtures will be overloaded with essence. After a short time, anyone near these lights will be shocked by a bolt of lightning! This doesn't do much damage, but it stuns for a brief period and is good for causing paranoia. |
| Strangulate | 30E unlock/use cost | 1 minute | Strangulate will quickly deal a massive amount of oxygen damage to the target - around 140 - and put them into critical condition. It's easily stopped with CPR, so only do it to individual people if you're going the lethal route. |
| Life Tap | 25E unlock cost, 0E use cost | 1 minute | A high risk, high reward type ability, Life Tap will remove a single 'strike' from your life pool in order to gain 50E. Strikes are a valuable commodity, serving as a second chance after your essence hits zero, so this is a high tradeoff. If you're out of strikes, you can't use this ability, obviously. |
| Seed of Draining | 20E unlock/use cost | 2 minutes | The Seed of Draining ability is one of the most powerful abilities you can purchase, especially early in. Using it on someone from a short distance will corrupt them with draining energies which will slowly sap their life force. However, unlike the lump sum of a Harvest, this is closer to squeezing out that last drop of toothpaste |
Fighting the Unholy Menace
So you're a crew member and you just saw a guy with purple lights flowing out of him leading into a spooky blue ghost. You've shouted over radio and now the crew know. Revenants can range from annoying to amazingly dangerous, and the more corpses they drain, the more powerful they get. Once they unlock Strangulate you basically lose if they feel particularly like killing off the whole crew. However, there's a few things you can do to fight revenants.
First of all, get the chaplain. Their null rod is incredibly powerful against the revenant and will drain large chunks of essence from them. Revenants are generally hard to fight, mainly because they're both invisible, can phase through walls, and can't take damage in this state, but there are a few ways around it. Generally, waiting for them to drain someone or reveal themselves is the best time to go ham on their ass.
(NOTE: Not implemented) They also can't pass through tiles with holy water, and if there's salt on the tile they'll be stunned and revealed for a short time. Salt in general does exceptional damage against them due to its inherent ability to absorb essence.
Also, if they get too powerful, admins might trim them down to size or warn them to keep the killing down. Generally the most powerful revenants have ridiculous amounts of essence they don't need to kill for and can even be helpful in some scenarios if it can forward their own power. Just be careful of them and note that they'll be willing to double-cross you at any time if you so much as look at a salt shaker.+
