Project NEMESIS

A number of rare and unsettling paintings from the art collection of the British citizen Miles Shipley. 

Tier 1: 6
1) A portrait of a beautiful woman, unnaturally pale, sleeping delicately on a verdant carpet of writing serpents. There is a bite mark on her neck, and as you look closer at the painting, her flesh begins to take on a sickly greenish cast.
2) A storm at sea. A ship in the middle-distance is wracked by the elements. Dark shapes gather beneath the waters.
3) Two men kneel before a massive tree. The fruit of the tree is rotten and filled with maggots. The maggot’s faces are strangely human. In the background are dark trees with intertwining trunks and sinuous branches.
4) A castle on a moor. Mutilated bodies are impaled on its ramparts. Things that are not quite birds circle overhead, silhouetted by the setting sun.
5) An abstract piece, done in darker shades, this painting nevertheless suggests nothing so much as a sheet of bubbling, roiling necrotic flesh, gleaming with an oily sheen.
6) A lovers’ embrace. Both man and woman have suffered greatly from some wasting disease, as their bodies are bloody, decayed and insect-ridden.

Tier 2: 5
1) A city of dark, windowless towers made of some kind of black stone.
2) A screaming woman being throttled by a massive, coiling thing made of smoke and shadow.
3) A view of a human head from above. Much of the skull has been removed, and the skin pinned aside in triangular flaps to reveal the brain beneath. Fungal blooms are painted along the border.
4) While this canvas initially seems completely black, a closer study shows that Shipley has experimented with paints that reflect light differently. A careful viewing reveals a faceless humanoid horror with long, graceful wings.
5) Tiny serpents devour an infant child in its cradle.

Tier 3: 4
1) It is night. A vast black mountain rises from a savannah. A great figure rises over the mountain, blotting out the moon. Its head is a massive red tendril. Near a temple-like building, tiny human figures lift their hands imploringly towards the creature; each wears a headdress of the bloody tongue.
2) A man lies sprawled on a black stone. The man’s eyes look straight at the viewer. His lower torso is dissolving into a flood of black beetles. The stone is covered in carvings in Greek. The Greek reads as gibberish.
3) A sandy beach. The sky is grey and overcast. On the sand is a massive creature that most resembles a starfish. Looking closer, you can see that the brushstrokes subtly come together to form faces, human and otherwise, contorted into grotesquerie.
4) A monk praying before a massive crucifix. Though Christ’s body is clearly wooden, it is covered with searching green eyes that erupt from the messiah’s flesh; these eyes have a terrible semblance of life.

Tier 4: 6
1) An extreme close-up of a human eye. The pupil reflects endless rows of teeth, stacked one atop the next.
2) A humanoid figure made of rope and wooden slats stands astride a hilltop. Where its “hands” would be, were it human, are instead nooses, from which hang a man and a woman, their necks bent at unnatural angles.
3) A surprisingly normal painting of a very familiar apartment, voyeuristically seen through the windowpane. Lit by a dim lamp, one of the PCs can be seen hard at work at his desk.
4) A hill at night. Dark figures dance by the light of a fire. In the sky, a single star gleams brightly. (astronomy reveals it to be Aldebaran).
5) A painting of an urn, whose decorations are like those of the ancient Greeks. The figures on the urn are depicted performing cruel mutilations on restrained victims, and coupling with ill-drawn bent-backed things.
6) A self-portrait, Miles Shipley depicts his own shape as blotchy and inchoate. He is in shadow, seated, in a garden. Thin green snakes crawl among the weeds. The sky seems blurred and unnatural.