GURPSよろず

ST: 40
DX: 10
10: 20
HT: 20/45
Move/Dodge: 7/5
PD/DR: 2/8
Damage: 7d cut
Reach: 3
Size: 7
Weight: 7.5 tons
Habitat: primeval Earth
Fright Check: unmodified

　The Great Race of Yith, strictly speaking, is a race of disembodied, time-traveling intelligences from some other world.
When their own world was destroyed, they came to Earth in its primeval infancy and took up residence in the bodies of a strange iridescent conical creature they found here (the conical bodies are native to Earth, and represent some strange phylum so far unknown to paleontology).

　In this form, the Great Race was about 10 feet tall and 10 feet around at the base. They moved by undulation, and had four extensible tentacles. Two of the tentacles ended in claws, a third in trumpet-like organs of ingestion and respiration, and the final one terminated in a globe with the creatures' three eyes and other sensory organs. The cones reproduced by means of spores, but they did so only seldom since they naturally live up to 5,000 years. They ingested only liquid nutrients.

　The Great Race came to Earth about 500 million years ago, and about 50 million years ago they migrated to the far future, abandoning their conical bodies to extinction.

　The Great Race are dedicated temporal explorers. They have perfected the art of psychic time travel. They can send their minds to any era, taking over the body of a local and sending his mind hack to inhabit one of the cones. There are several Great Race researchers on Earth at any given time. They have established a human cult to help them in their impersonations and researches. The ability of the Great Race to impersonate modem humans is imperfect, and close friends and loved ones of the possessed individual can notice small personality changes on a successful IQ roll. Great Race researchers typically stay in the guest body for a span of about id years.

　When a Great Race researcher is in possession of a guest body, the original mind of that body is passing an equivalent amount of time as a cone-creature in the remote past. If the captive mind is capable of rational thought, like a modem human, he is set to work writing down everything that comes to mind about his species, culture and time-period. The Great Race treats their captives humanely, allowing them freedom to travel about in the past and to associate with other captive minds. At the end of the exchange, the captive's mind is psychically blanked to remove memories of his possession or his experiences in the past. However, this erasure is imperfect, and the captive will sometimes dream of his captivity. With the aid of hypnotism or other psychological tools it is sometimes possible for the victim to fully recover his memories.

　It is believed that the conical creatures were wiped out by the freed remnants of the Flying Polyps when the Great Race abandoned them. The only way for a modern human to encounter the Great Race is through time travel.

　In their conical bodies the Great Race could attack simultaneously with both pincers, doing 7d cutting damage with each.
However, their weapon of choice was a lightning-projector gun.
A typical lightning gun (though much more powerful models existed) might hold 32 charges and do 2d damage per charge.
The gun could be fired one charge at a time, or all the remaining charges could he discharged in a single shot (doing 64d damage at full power). Lighting guns have a malf number of 18, -1 for every charge expended above 4. Therefore, a lightning gun firing 9 charges in a single shot would bum out on a roll of 13 or more, and one firing all its charges would be certain to bum out except on a critical success. Lightning guns are at -3 to rolled damage for each I00 hexes of range after the first.

　A lightning gun which hasn't expended all its charges can be recharged. Presumably the Great Race has a device for this purpose, the exact nature of which is left to the GM. It may be possible for the Great Race to repair and recharge a burned-out lightning gun, but such an operation is impossible for a human (or would, at least, require a lengthy and expensive research study of the bumed-out weapon at a state-of-the-art lab).

　When they abandoned the cones, the Great Race transferred their intelligences to insectoid hive-minds living in Earth's far future. Each Great Race intelligence animates and controls a swm of several hundred largish, beetle-like creatures. There is no evidence that the Great Race have continued their research on modem humanity from the far future, but if an insectoid Great Race hive-mind is somehow encountered, the GM is referred to the swarm rules on p. B.143.