manyeyedhydra
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Harlot Spotlight - Sister Squeeze
🕑 Added 2024-09-20 13:16:01 +0000 UTCWe're now onto the low-tier harlots of the fifth faction. This is also getting closer to 'hot off the press' as I only received this batch just last week. The next batch might also take a while as the crowd-funding website Marwmellow was using now seems to be blocked by paypal/banks/everything. We're currently trying to find workarounds, so fingers crossed this will only be a temporary disruption. In the meantime, I have five new harlots from faction five to introduce. Sort of, the new art should already be in the HoHH1.5 private demo, so you might have already seen it. I will keep the spotlight series weekly for now, but I might drop it back to one every two weeks if I get caught up too quickly with the art.
I do have other harlot art in reserve. All of the artificial beings harlots have art as well as a couple of others. The nice thing is I haven't put the mid- and high-tier harlots in the HoHH1.5 demo yet, so those will actually be exclusive early previews.
Anyway, with that out of the way, let's pick the first one and it will be Sister Squeeze.
Sister Squeeze is an existing character from one of my old short stories (Squeezed). Like Acarina, her Bad End is pretty much the same scene from the story with a few tweaks to account for changes in tense and PoV. I thought this would be a quick way to add some additional harlots (although not always – Nicolette wasn't quick to write at all despite being an adapted version of one of Nicole's scenes). Sister Squeeze actually finished high up (maybe top, I can't remember) in a poll to add existing characters.
Despite this, it took a while for me to add her. The fifth faction was loosely defined as the 'erotic wrestling' faction, but then the Huntresses took on a much stronger identity. It also came down to which slots needed filling. Because of her abilities, Sister Squeeze could easily fit in either the low- or high-tier categories.
In her original story, a superhero with actual super-strength couldn't break out of her hold once she'd wrapped herself around him, so I didn't think any kind of stat check would be appropriate for a 'normal' being. So, the other delay in adding Sister Squeeze was trying to come up with a good mechanic for her.
Because she's actually quite powerful (albeit with an unusual power set for a succubus) it makes sense to have the mechanic come down to whether she chooses to kill the player. The other thing I like to lean into is that despite being sex daemons, the harlots are also sex workers, and sex workers frequently offer specialised services. One of those is erotic roleplay. Sister Squeeze's session is her running an erotic roleplay where her punter pretends to be a superhero defeating and sexually having his way with a sexy supervillainess. The twist being she actually has super powers and is fully capable of squeezing the man dry if she wanted to.
Which tier to put her in would be determined by how frequently she chose to give the man a good 'squeeze'. If she liked doing that a little too much and was prone to losing control, then I'd put her in the high-tier bracket. From the story she seemed quite apologetic about squeezing the protagonist out (even though he borderline deserved it), so I felt she better fit a low-tier position where Bad Ends are infrequent.
The mechanic ended up being very simple RNG. Whenever Sister Squeeze is introduced to the player there is a 10% chance she is in 'lethal' rather than 'safe' mode. There are subtle tells in the text to indicate which mode she is in, and the player can override it by socialising with her and buying her favourite drink. As a mechanic it's a little sketchy, but it does give nice 'surprise' moments when a harlot thought 'safe' suddenly Bad Ends a player on a subsequent run. The Bad Ends should also happen infrequently enough to make her a good early-round harlot.
I think I still have a slot remaining for a high-tier 5th faction harlot. I might make that another supervillainess with exotic powers to mirror Sister Squeeze, only she'll be a lot more prone to losing control and enjoying Bad Ending the player.
Onto the lore, which is tricky in this case.
Sister Squeeze is a character from an old short story. I hadn't really created a shared universe yet, so rather than being a succubus, she was just a super with exotic sex powers that used them to kill a super 'hero'.
This created a problem for integrating her into the House of Hellish Harlots, as in-lore all the harlots are sex daemons from the Dominion of Lust. To fit her in she either needed to be a different expy Sister Squeeze with a lust daemon background or retconned.
In the end I did elements of both. She could be the same Sister Squeeze. She was summoned to an earth where super powers exist. Her brain was scrambled during the summoning, so rather than remembering she's a lust daemon, she thought she was just another mutant with weird superpowers.
This leads to her being very confused with her existence in the House, as she tries to reconcile what she thought she was (a superpowered mutant) with what she actually is (a lust daemon). Given how she behaved in the story, I thought she'd probably be reluctant to kill 'innocents'. This lines her character up with her mechanics. Most of the time she's happy giving punters a safe, sexy roleplay of defeating a hot supervillainess.
Unfortunately, The Madam is very into 'her game', which means that while the 'guests' should always have a chance to escape, there should also always be a chance they can die as well. She can be quite menacing getting this point across, which means every so often Sister Squeeze gets a bollocking and has to pick a random visitor and completely squeeze them out to make her 'quota' of deaths.
I felt this was a nice way to bring her into the universe. It also gives me some flexibility. She could be the same character, but could also end up being a similar alt version expy if I go back to that 'superpower' universe and spin it off in a different direction.
The art direction I gave Marwmellow was for a naked blue comic-book style villainess striking a haughty and powerful pose. I think he nailed that admirably!
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
