d4 Wisps Better Than Will

December 13, 2015, 1:44 pm

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Stop trying to turn wisps into shitty little taser ghosts.  (Are they ghosts or air elementals?  Either way, you shouldn't be able to beat them to death with a piece of wood.)  They were cool when they were just spooky lights out in the swamp, flitting between the trees and making victorian neurasthenics fail their saves vs fear.

Stop trying to make them into combat monsters.  They're like the definition of an atmospheric background monster.  Not everything has to attack your HP, you fucking hacks.

Okay.  I feel better.  Good enough to propose some alternatives.

Design guidelines:

• not a combat monster
• wants something from the party (e.g. follow it somewhere)
• threatens some other party resource (not HP)
• appears out in desolate, godless swamps (probably as a result from the wandering monster check)

Some monsters:

This is my take on a wisp.  It's bad luck.  It just shows up and starts following you.  It wants you to follow it, and if you don't, it'll cause you to get lost.

except all you see is the floating lantern the ghost is invisible

1 - Lantern Ghost

HD 1 AC leather

Fly 18 Int 10 Morale 4

*Ethereal

*Invisible - This is an invisible ghost carrying a visible, tangible lantern, which holds a ghostly blue flame.  This light is its soul.

*Aura of Disorientation - While a lantern ghost is following you, you have an increased chance of getting lost.  (Whenever you leave your current hex, you have a 50% chance to move to a random adjacent hex instead of the direction you intended.)

*Boredom  - Each time you enter a new hex, the lantern ghost has a 2-in-6 chance to get bored and wander off.  It won't leave the swamp.

*Steal Light - If the party is carrying a light source, the lantern ghost can add it to its own lantern.  A torch affected in this way goes out, and can never be relit.  A player's lantern suddenly becomes useless, and any oil it contains becomes inert.  (Treat this as a permanent curse.)  Any light-based spell (e.g. light, daylight) can also be stolen out of a spellcaster's head (no save).  When a lantern ghost steals a light, it collects the new light in its lantern.  If the ghost is killed or satisfied, it releases all captured lights.  It uses this ability if it is ignored or attacked.

Lantern ghosts are said to be the spirits of the damned, cursed to wander the swamps until they atone for their crimes.  (A task that most of them have apparently given up on.)  Most folks call them swamp candles or bog faeries or corpse lights. 

The lantern shatters upon the ghost's death.  If, god forbid, the players manage to capture or coerce the lantern ghost into aiding them, they can use its lantern as a magic item.  The blue candle inside functions in every way like a normal candle (lasts for 2 hours of total usage) except that invisible things become visible within 10'.

Where does the lantern ghost lead you? [d6]

1 - The site of a mass drowning (ritual sacrifice).  It wants you to honorably bury the dead.  50% chance that all 3d6 corpses rise as zombies when disturbed.

2 - A forest shrine (a 2-room dungeon: a wooden building and a limestone cavern).  It wants you to remove the 3d6 bandits who have taken up residence there.  The bandit leader has a Brynthic warhound.

3 - A fire-damaged tower where the party will be ambushed by 1d4+1 hunger spirits.  It wants you to die.

4 - A tar pit.  Strength checks to avoid getting sucked down, more strength checks to avoid losing your shoes, more strength checks to avoid losing loose items (such as worn weapons).  It wants you to suffer.

5 - A lost girl carrying a sick parrot in a cage.  It wants you to help her.

6 - Buried treasure.  900gp, a gilded rat's skeleton worth 50gp, a telescope, and a cursed axe (+2 vs treants, cannot be discarded, no other melee weapon can be used, must attack most threatening enemy or none at all).  It wants you to take the rat skeleton (since it was a beloved pet, in life).

2 - Swampy Knockers

These are adorable little nature spirits that start following you in large entourages.  The noise from their rattling heads attracts trouble, but attacking them is a terrible idea.

They have many names, but the swamp folks call 'em swampy knockers.  Back in the cities, the nerds classify them as some kind of nature spirit.

They embody a playful, childish interpretation of the druid philosopy, and as such, revere the forest-as-eternal-concept while condemning all notions of cities, civilization, and symbolic thought.  Although, being children, their condemnation is more of a playful teasing.

HD 0 (HP 1) AC unarmored

Move 12 Int 6 Morale 0

*Cowards - They run away at the first attack roll.

*Protector - If they are attacked, there is a 50% chance that the next random encounter in the swamp will be with their protector.  If one of them is killed, this becomes a 100% chance.  If the protector shows up, the swampy knockers will also show up to watch the ensuing battle, but they won't participate.

*Aura of Rattling - Swampy knockers constantly rattle their heads.  This doubles your chance of a hostile random encounter, and negates any chance of a non-hostile random encounter (assuming your wandering monster table has wandering merchant NPCs on it).  

*Boredom  - Each time you enter a new hex, the swampy knockers have a 2-in-6 chance to get bored and wander off.  They won't leave the swamp.

*Appeasement - The players must discard 25% of their coins and 25% of their other metal items into the swamp before the knockers decide that you aren't craven pawns of civilization.  These percentages are fungible--the players can discard 50% of their coins and 0% of their other metals to the knocker's satisfaction.  The knockers don't care about craftsmanship, just total weight of metal discarded.  They know coins are especially wicked, though, since coins are both refined metal and used symbolically.  (It is common knowledge that knockers will leave you alone if you throw a bunch of your money and metal into the swamp, but no one knows the exact requirements.) 

As you travel, more and more and more swampy knockers will join the first batch in following the party.  If they don't get bored, you'll eventually have hundreds.

Who is their protector? [d3]

1 - Shambling mound.

2 - 1d4 Druids of level 1d4 (each rolled separately) and 2d4 forest people (stats as berserkers).

3 - Grand kodama (see below).

Grand Kodama

HD 8 AC chain Bite 1d8+2 + poison.

Move 12 Int 14 Morale 6

*Poison - 1d6 Dex lost once per round, lasts one round on a successful save, three rounds on a failed save.  Those who have their Dex reduced to 0 by this poison are permanently turned into a thorn bush.

*Fade Step - At will.  When used, the grand kodama fades out of reality.  The next round, the grand kodama fades back in anywhere in the swamp.  (This is basically a really slow teleport.)

3 - Cloud of Ill Omen

HD 15 Move as the wind

Other Stats are unnecessary.  It's a fucking cloud.  It is only hurt by things that can hurt a normal cloud.

*Ill Omen - Upon seeing the lantern ghost, hirelings make a morale check.  (Failure means that they will abandon the party unless paid significantly more.  Multiple hirelings failing simultaneously may cause a mutiny.)

*Aura of Bad Luck - While following the party, any critical hit or critical success that they roll is instead turned into a critical failure.  It also rains constantly on the party, in case that matters.

*Boredom  - Each time you enter a new hex, the cloud has a 2-in-6 chance to get bored and wander off.  It won't leave the swamp.

*Appeasement - The party must invite a curse upon themselves.  The easiest way to do this is to blaspheme the name of the Prophetess Yanu (leader of the Hesayan church).  This immediately satisfies the Cloud of Ill Omen.

*Spite - If the party achieves some great victory, the cloud has a 50% chance of becoming spiteful and firing down a 10d6 lightning bolt at them.

The Blasphemy Rule: Anyone who blasphemes against the Prophetess Yanu in Centerra has a 5% chance of being immediately struck dead through whichever means are most appropriate and dramatic.  Everyone knows this (and players should be informed of this before they commit to such an action.)  Evil clerics can usually blaspheme safely, since they are protected by their god.  And of course, you may not be struck dead if life is a better punishment than death.  Additionally, blaspheming causes religious hirelings (and this is 90% of hirelings in Centerra) to lose a point of loyalty/morale, as they are disgusted by your moral repugnance.

This is a small, intensely black cloud.  Sometimes red lights can be seen dancing within it; sometimes a face can be seen.  It wants to see failure, humiliation, shame.

4 - Gremlins

Everyone knows about gremlins.  They're the ones you blame when things go missing, or suddenly break.

Once you roll a random encounter for gremlins, they'll follow you until you run out of things for them to steal or break, or until you leave the swamp.  Once notices, players usually have a few options: appease them, kill them, or leave the area.

When chained and trained, gremlins can be forced to build and repair things.  (They are as ingenious in construction as they are in sabotage, but the very act infuriates them.)  Owning a gremlin is hazardous though, as there are many rules of gremlin ownership that must not be broken.

HD 0 (HP 1) AC chain Bite 1d4

Move 12 Int 8 Morale 4

*Minor but Constant Thievery - Once per day and once per night, gremlins will steal one random item from one random party member.  That party member makes a Wisdom check to notice the gremlin's pick pocket attempt (with circumstantial bonuses/penalties as needed).  It is possible that many items get stolen before anyone knows.  (DM tip: ask to see their character sheet, then roll to see what is taken.  Consumables (water, food, potions) are not stolen, but are instead spoiled with feces and/or urine.

Obvious things may get noticed immediately, such as a missing hat.  How did the gremlins steal a hat?  The player must have set it down briefly when they were drinking from a stream, and when they looked back over, it was gone.)  There is nothing that gremlins cannot steal.  Large items (wagons, catapults) are especially attractive, and should be treated like another party member, except that they are sabotaged instead of robbed.

Stolen items are broken, if possible (they have the strength, resources, and attention span of a kindergarten class, so ask yourself if a bunch of 4-year-olds could break it) and then hidden.  More durable items are merely defaced and then hidden inside tree trunks or buried in ant nests.

*Appeasement - They must be served either blood or milk--at least a cupful for each gremlin (and this fact is common knowledge).  Opening your own veins for this purpose reduces your max HP by 1 point per HD until your blood regrows.  If a gremlin drinks your bodily fluids, you are tormented by nightmares and gain no benefits of sleep (no healing, no spell recovery) (few know this).  Beginning on the second night, you get a save to shake off this minor curse.

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Rat Master

December 14, 2015, 1:59 am

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The point of this class is that you get to command large swarms of entirely disposable rats.  (Disposable minions are extremely useful for dungeon exploration--even tiny ones.)  You also get extra rumors when in town, and the ability to send rats out to scout dungeons for you.

I started out imagining a goblin rat master, but there's no reason you couldn't be a human, wererat, dwarf, or even a crab-man because why the fuck not.

Level 1 - Rat Friend, Call Rat

Level 2 - Rat Gossip, Throw Rat

Level 3 - Transfer Affliction

Level 4 - Rat Mapping

Level 5 - Summon Dire Rat

Level 6 - Thief Skills

Level 9 - Rat Apotheosis

Rat Friend
You can speak freely with all rodents.  All rodents recognize you as the beloved of the rat god, and will improve their starting attitude toward you one step.  This protection doesn't extend to your friends.

Call Rat
You tap on a wall, sing a song, or emit a high-pitched squeak.  If there are rats nearby (and there are nearly always rats, unless you are underwater or on Antarctica or something) a rat who is loyal to the rat god will emerge from somewhere nearby and join you.  You can call one rat per turn.

Rats obey you because they are terrified to disobey the rat god for reasons they struggle to explain.  They obey you unhesitatingly, although they will cry little rat tears and complain if you give them obviously suicidal orders.

The maximum number of rats that you can summon per day is equal to 3 times your level.  However, the maximum number of rats you can have under your control is equal to your level.  Rats who are out on missions for you (such as carrying messages or mapping) still count towards this limit.

If you order your rats to fight, use the minion rules.  Each rat has HP 1, AC as unarmored, Movement 6.

Sidebar: Minion Rules
When attacking minions, you don't roll to see how much damage you do, you roll to see how many you kill.  Minions attack in groups, and make a single attack roll for the whole group.  This single attack does 1dX damage, where X is the number of minions in the group.  AoE effects kill all minions in its area of effect with a failed save, or half of them on a successful one.

Rat Gossip
When gathering rumors you gain 6x as many, as long as you spend at least 6 hours interviewing rats about what they've overheard.  You can only use this ability once per city.

Throw Rat
You can throw your rats as weapons.  On a hit, use the rules for attached weasels.

Sidebar: Rules For Attached Weasels
Each attached weasel does 1 point of damage per turn.  A weasel can be pulled off and held with successful Str check (with a +4 bonus, as rats aren't very strong) made by anyone.  A held weasel can be crushed in your hand automatically on your next round--this doesn't require an action, but it does require you to hold a weasel for an entire round, occupying your hand.

Attached weasels can also be attacked.  Make an attack roll against AC 10.  On a hit, the weasel is instantly killed.  On a miss, the weasel is instantly killed, and any damage in excess of the weasel's single hit point "rolls over" onto the person it was attached to.

Transfer Affliction
Once per day, you can transfer a disease, poison, or curse onto a willing rat.  Your super-obedient rats always count as willing (although they may curse your name).

Rat Mapping
You can send your rats into a dungeon to map it.  This takes 20 minutes per room explored (how many rooms the rats explore is detailed below), but is relatively low risk, since you can just sit outside the dungeon and interview the rats that come trickling back out.  Choose how many rats you want to send in, and remember that you are still limited by how many rats you can control at once.  (A level 4 rat master can only control 4 rats.)

The end result of this process is a map of the dungeon.  Rooms are described primarily through smells (and remember that rats lack darkvision) as well as a general sense of "good place", "bad place", or "indifferent" based on whether or not the room contains anything of interest to a rat.  Rats enjoy food, water, safety, warmth, and an abundance of places to hide (such as furniture debris or dirty straw).  Rats don't enjoy fire, noise, large creatures moving around, people talking, or a complete lack of places.  Because rats are stupid, lazy, easily confused, and really bad at passing messages along.

So the map is just a list of circles with lines drawn between them, labeled with the predominant smell of that room (if any), with occasional smiley faces and sad faces, depending on whether the rats did or didn't like the room.

Rats find all obvious exits to a room.  They have a 2-in-6 chance of finding secret passages.  Even if they can't enter it, they can still detect it, and tell you about it.

To draw your rat map, get a d6 for every rat that enters the dungeon.  Assume that all the rats move into the first room and roll all the d6s.  So if you sent in 6 rats, roll 6d6 for the first room.

Every result of a 1 or 2 indicates a rat that has died, gotten bored, or wandered off.

If you have at least two dice that show a '6', the rats have paid especially good attention to this room, and return with a more useful description of the room.  (More details than just smells and whether or not they liked it--they actually return with a description closer to what a person would describe.  Remember that they are limited by their language.  A throne is described as a "fat human resting place", and a library is described as "human paper granary".  They have names for all the common monsters.  You don't get to cross-examine the rat about the description--it's all just knowledge passed along by the rats.  This basically equates to an extra line of description for the room.

Then pick up all of the remaining d6s, pick an unexplored path (from any room), and then go through it.  Repeat this process for the next room.

an example of what the rat mapping function will return notice that they must have gotten at least two 6s on the first room also notice that they have an equal chance of exploring any unexplored room

You can use this ability from within a dungeon, too.  Just point them in a direction, but also, remember that you're probably going to incur a few wandering monster rolls while you sit there waiting for the stupid rats to come back.

Rats that you use in this way consider this a good enough fulfillment of their duty that they wander off, unless you use Call Rat to make them obedient again.  (Mechanically, this is the same as all of your rats dying when you use them to explore.)

Summon Dire Rat
You can choose to summon a dire rat instead of a normal rat.  Dire rats count as five rats for the purposes of your Call Rat ability.

Thief Skills
You have thief skills as if you were a thief 5 levels lower.

Rat Apotheosis
You can establish a stronghold in the sewers beneath a city.  You attract 2d6 loyal wererats, 1d3 paladins of the rat god, and an insane cartographer.  When you call for rats beneath this city, rats summoned in this way do not count against your daily limit.  Once per day, you can cast rat swarm, but only in places where rats can be found.

Other variations:

• Rat Un-catcher
• Songbird Maiden
• Bat Baron
• Snake Lady
• Fishomancer
• Jellyfish Bastard
• Captain Olimar

Revamping the Undead: The Shadow

December 17, 2015, 8:29 pm

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History and Culture

Shadows are undead, but they were never alive.  They are from the Ersatz (the Plane of Shadow and Mirror), where light is not only unknown--it's impossible.  (Have fun adventuring in a place where all the players are blind.)

In the Ersatz, they lived like ghosts.  They could not affect the world, nor each other.  If they wished it, they could become utterly undetectable.  They dwelt in anonymity and impermanence, and they loved it.  Shapeless, nameless, timeless.

Shadows two-dimensional.  There are inky reservoirs of them in the Underworld, millions of them packed inside a single crack, paper-thin (except much thinner). They enter Centerra when they ascend, slithering up through coal seams and flitting up secret creases.

And sometimes a dwarven pick will crack open this folded city of shadows, and from that tiny void a million shadows will pour out into the world, where most of them will encounter that cruel impossibility: light.  And they will perish uncomprehending.

But the larger shadows--the ones that are almost the size of a halfling's shade--sometimes persist.  And although they were hateful before, that inchoate avarice is honed like a knife's edge and then pointed at those torchbearers, those who would bring light into darkness.

They talk to each other of the sun, and of daylight.  The younger ones don't believe it.  It seems too vast and cruel to exist.

The Church teaches that shadows are the souls of the unborn who died while in the womb.  If the miscarriage was never baptized into the Church and given a proper burial, that soul becomes a shadow.

Behavior
They are flat, and they live on flat surfaces.  Walls, floors.  They cannot leave their surface, although they can reach up to 5' away from it.

In total darkness, they are basically massless.  They cannot be affecting by either sword nor spell.  But then, they cannot affect anything else, either.

So yes, if you find yourself surrounded by shadows, it is a viable strategy to extinguish your torches and head back out into the daylight.  You'll be safe from their claws as long as you remain in perfect darkness.  (Sidenote: I'd love to a blind dungeon run back to the surface.  A literal dungeon-crawl.)

But even in perfect darkness, the shadows will still follow you.  They will run their fingers over you, and you will feel their cold, frictionless skin against your own.  And they will whisper strange cruelties in your ears.

If there is light, they gain some mass.  They become paper thin.  They can be wounded, but they can also wound you.

Combat

Shadows sometimes attack in groups.  They roar (and it sounds like paper tearing).

Shadows sometimes attack by jumping below a person and hiding in their shadow.  Or by giving the person an extra shadow, in a direction that is not cast by any real light source.  (They are quite good at this.)  They move when the person is not moving.

Shadows sometimes make allies.  Evil clerics are most common, but really, anyone with a lantern-mace is a possibility.

When shadows attack, they attack by tearing apart your shadow.  (This is represented by Charisma damage.)  If the shadow cannot reach your shadow, it cannot harm it.  Standing with a foggy abyss to your left and a torch on your right is safe, for example.

 If you have a healthy shadow, it is a perfect reflection of yourself.  It moves when you move, strikes when you strike.

But as your shadow takes damage, it begins to lag.  At first it merely moves a half-second slower than you.  But then it begins to limp while you walk.  It stumbles where you jump.  It drips blood where you are not wounded.  Finally, it falls, and it will not move.  It is the exact shadow you would cast if you were dead.  And you have a full second to stagger around in confusion before dying yourself, because the loss of your shadow is always fatal.

As your shadow dies, you don't feel pain.  Not really.  You feel a rising panic, but also a diminishing ability to feel panic.  Or indeed, anything at all.  You are becoming hollow.  The Church teaches that you have 23 souls that all overlap, and believe themselves to be a single creature.  But as your shadow dies, those souls are beginning to lose their synchronization.  The myth of singularity is beginning to come unraveled.

Their claws deal 1d6 HP and Cha damage.  (Roll 1d6 for both.)

Shadow
HD 4  AC leather  Claw 1d6 damage and Cha
Move 18  Int 4  Morale  6

<Undead> 
<Two-Dimensional> A shadow cannot move off a flat surface, nor attack anything that is not in contact with that surface.  They are undetectable when hiding in a shadow.
<Daylight> They are powerless in daylight, and flee it unconditionally.  It is the Worst Thing.
<Total Darkness> They are powerless in total darkness, but this is a powerlessness they enjoy.  They will follow players, caress them, and whisper to them.  If this goes on for more than a minute, the characters gain a Trauma Point.

Sometimes shadows will infest a corpse, filling it's internal planes and piloting it around.  It takes at least 3 shadows to do this.

It may look a bit like a tottering zombie, depending on the decay. Or it may simply be a recently-dead person, showing few signs of violence or decay.

Infested Shadow Puppet

HD 4  AC leather  Weapon 1d8
Move 12  Int 4  Morale  6

<Puppet> This isn't really a creature.  It is more like a piece of equipment.  If you want to smash the body to bits, the body has 2d4 x 10 hit points.  Only attacking the puppet's shadow will get you anywhere quickly.  After a round of combat, it is obvious that the puppet's "shadow" doesn't line up with any of the light sources, or even move appropriately.  Once the shadows realize that their deception has been discovered, they'll usually abandon the corpse and attack the party as a swarm.

Revamping the Undead: The Shade

December 19, 2015, 3:38 pm

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A Different Sort of Death

The paladins are rejoicing.  A sinner has been redeemed.  After six years in a labor camp and thirteen as a squire, the murderer has been knighted as a paladin.  This is a rare event, and there are tears in old men's eyes.  It is proof that even a damned soul can be saved through faith and good works.

Not a single member of the paladin order doubts that the ex-murderer deserves to be knighted.  (If any of them did, he wouldn't be.)  Hymns are sung, and there are readings from the Testament of Karzai and the Holy Sungra.  Every man, woman, and child goes to bed that night full of hope and optimism.

The necromancer is also optimistic, but it is not a pleasant optimism.

She does not go to bed with the others.  She creeps through darkened halls until she finds the rooms where the murderer lived for 13 years.  It is clean and empty, and will remain that way until the next squire moves into it.  The moon peeks curiously through the window.

She has done her research.  In his youth, the murderer was violent, cruel, impulsive, and best of all--easily misled by others.  That troubled young man is dead, killed by the man he eventually became.  But necromancy is the art of death, even subtle deaths such as this one.

She sits on the floor, runs her fingers along the freshly laundered pillow.  There is no dust, but there are memories.  She can feel them in the air.  A decade of tortured dreams.  She dives past the guilt which coats everything like a grease, and mingles with the deeper layers.  The fear of capture.  The frustration and the anger.  And the long-repressed memories of slaughter: the naked joy it is to feel one's thumbs press through someone's eyes and into the softer stuff beneath.  This is the memory-stuff she seeks.

The moon no longer shines through the window by the time she is done.  It averted its eyes hours ago.  The necromancer is exhausted.  She struggles to rise, but then, she doesn't have to do it alone.  The murderer gently reaches down and helps her to her feet.  She expected his hands to be strong, but the coldness of them shocks her.

He is not dark as much as he is dim, like something half-remembered.  His outline is blurred, not visually but conceptually.  (Her eyes understand what they are seeing even if her brain cannot.)  She can see--with difficulty--the blood on his belt and on his thumbs.  And she can see his grinning teeth; he feels optimistic, too.

Shade
HD you pick  AC chain  Touch 1d8 + <Clouded Vision>
Move 9  Int 10  Morale 12

<Clouded Vision> Save vs curse.  You seem to be surrounded by howling, thrashing shadows.  It is loud and it is dark, and you cannot see further than 10', nor hear a shouting person more than 10' away.  This curse lives in one of your eyes (which becomes cloudy).  Removing this eye ends the curse.
<Dim> When a shade is hostile or consciously activates the effect, all light sources within 100' emit half as much light.  One or two shades have no effect on daylight, but three or more will dim the sunlight (down to a reddish brown disk) enough that it stops functioning as sunlight and is treated as merely another light source. Shades are banished by sunlight, and cannot manifest in it.
<Phantasmic> Non-magical, non-holy damage cannot reduce a shade below 1 HP.  When they are at 1 HP, they look like a person-shaped hole in the universe and speak like a windstorm (full of wordless sound and fury).  Destroyed shades return the next night unless a mass is held over the object of their haunting (chance of success is X-in-20, where X is the number of faithful people participating in the mass), or if they are confronted with the loathsome truth (with undeniable evidence, such as the sword of the paladin they went on to be, engraved with "To Loroth Kilbraden, who redeemed himself several times over in the eyes of Zulin.")
<Shunned Incorporeality> A shade can become incorporeal but is loathe to do so (as it reminds them of what they really are).  They will pass through surfaces if needed, but they will always become corporeal when they attack or at the end of their turn.  When incorporeal they have Fly 12.

Shades are raised from discarded fragments of a person's identity.  When a person rejects their religion, stops loving someone they once held dear, or has their innocence violently despoiled--these are huge and irreversible changes (but not necessarily instantaneous: it sometimes takes a very long time to stop loving someone, for example).

They are born from cognitively dissonant fragments of souls (personhood) that linger around the site of their ejection.  For example, a woman might be haunted by very faint micro-ghosts of those who loved her in her youth, or a battleground might be haunted by the lost identities of soldiers' innocences, who were incapable of reconciling their previous worldview with the slaughter that they saw around them.

These abandoned micro-ghosts manifest when they are called by a necromancer, or when the dissonance is especially great.  A micro-ghost of a spurned lover might manifest into a shade when it witnesses a couple kissing in front of it, for example.

Shades of good people are only good as long as they are not confronted with something that causes them internal conflict.  For example, the shade of a good cleric who converted to a different goodly religion will be good only until it sees a religious symbol, then it will fly into rage.  Because that is the secret center of every shade: anger at an incompatible world.  Shades of jerks will be doubly evil in death.

Shades haunt the places where they were "born" or the necromancer who raised them.  They may be incorporeal, but it is more likely that you will encounter them when they are corporeal and behaving much as they would in life.  They may only appear at night.

If a shade manages to kill the person they became (who killed them), the shade becomes the real person, and the real person becomes a shade.  If a person reverts back to who they were (a paladin decides that he wants to go back to being a murderer, for example) they re-incorporate the shade into their psyche, and the shade is no more.

Shades appear as the people they were in life, except indistinct and somehow muffled.  They are not immediately recognizable as undead, nor are they immediately hostile.  For example, the shade of a goodly cleric can converse, give directions, and even wish you good luck on your journeys (sincerely).  Since they are only fragments of people, they lack a complete set of memories, and nearly all of them don't know their name.  Confronting them about their incompleteness (asking their name, for example) is likely to upset their worldview and lead to the aforementioned rage, unless done very, very delicately.  They become dimmer and more indistinct as they become unsettled, so you can tell you are upsetting them when their eyes fade from grey to brown and you can no longer count the (individually distinct) buttons on their tunic.

Using This Shit in Your Game

Yeah, shades can be used as another bishop in a tactical encounter.  Their dim ability synergizes well with enemies that have ranged attacks (like a spellcasting evil cleric).  But their origin story means that they are begging to be explored.  And this is a fresh take on undeath (fresher than most, anyway) which means that you can still surprise players with the "how did this undead come to be and how can we get it to stop haunting this place" revelations.

They can also be very personable, for undead.  You can talk to them, swap jokes, intimidate one.  Heck, you can probably have sex with one.

The whole reason undead are so over-represented in dungeons is a naturalistic one: who else can you have in a long-sealed tomb except oozes, golems, and undead?  And none of those classes of monsters are usually very chatty, which is a pity, because I believe that every dungeon should have (at least) one role-playing encounter and it's tough to fit one in if you are limited to those.  Consider a shade!  (Or a nice pack of gentleman ghouls who quote Shakespeare.)

Some Plot Hooks

1. A vampire employs a quartet of shades to walk around in the day.  These are the uncorrupted remnants of people he has corrupted over the years.  If confronted with the right evidence, they might be turned against the vampire.

2. A paladin is now under suspicion of murder.  He (or his younger twin brother) was seen digging up corpses at the graveyard and then murdering the gravedigger (whose body still hasn't been found).  This is caused by his own shade, and is basically the story from the little piece of opening fiction.

3. In a dungeon, you come across the shade of a goodly cleric, presiding over mass in a room that he has made resemble a chapel.  He has all the powers of a level 3 cleric and will behave exactly like a level 3 cleric, unless you confront him with uncomfortable truths (e.g. "How long have you been down here?", "What have you been eating?")

4. A group of shades.  Hirelings and level 1 warriors who refused to believe that their beloved leader was leading them to the demon on level 4 for the sole purpose of sacrifice.  He was like a father to them.

5. An old woman is haunted by shades of past lovers.  They've been coming out of the walls of her mansion at night (where she's lived her entire life) and killing each other.  She wants the house exorcised, but it is not the house that is haunted, it is her.  Exorcising her might include a ceremony where you fight all the past lovers at once, or it might involve each past lover (most of whom are still alive) and confronting them.

Change is Death

This next section is all just half-baked philosophy.  I post it here because I want to talk more about the idea of fractional death through change.

Back when I was Catholic, the notion of death bed conversions never sat well with me.  Spend 79 years as an asshole and five minutes as a regretting those last 79 years and then you get into heaven?  What an unsatisfying approach to justice.

I imagined a myself as a four dimensional object.  My height, width, and depth, multiplied by all the time I would be alive.  Sort of like a four-dimensional sausage with a baby on one end and a dying old man on the other.  If the cut the sausage in half, you'd see me in the cross-section, typing out this blog post.  That was the sum of a person, I thought, one long mass of time-meat-thought judged in all four dimensions simultaneously.

I no longer agree with that, though.  Not quite

I'm 28.  What's left of 25-year-old Arnold?  Probably a lot.  My memories, my personality, my beliefs, my ideals--those haven't changed very much.  But as we go back along the time-sausage, the connection gets fuzzier.  What's left of 6-year-old Arnold?  Not very fucking much.

6-year-old Arnold had a very different personality, beliefs, and ideals.  The amount of overlap between me and him is negligible.  I have more overlap with my peers than with 6-year-old me (as long as we are still discussing memories, personality, and beliefs).  If I was cut out of the fabric of life and someone else was copy-pasted in, you'd find many better candidates than my 6-year-old self.

Hell, if you're reading this blog, you'd probably be a better me than 6-year-old Arnold.  We might have more in common than me and him.

Yes, there are matters of memories and details.  My dog was named Yoshi and yours was named Birdo, but they probably played with us in much the same way.  These are superficial distinctions, not substantial ones.  (I mean, there are a lot of substantial differences between people, I just think we overestimate them.)

But that's a digression.  I'm not really arguing that you and I are the same thing (far from it).  I'm just saying that 6-year-old me is not me, not in any meaningful sense.

So, perhaps you'll get where I'm coming from when I say that 6-year-old Arnold is dead.  Nothing of him remains.  And 26-year-old Arnold is fading fast.  Nothing of him will be left by the time I'm 58, got a sex-change operation, and lost a tit in WW3.  I'll probably still play D&D though, but it'll be 4e the only true edition.

So I don't think of people as four-dimensional meat sausages anymore.  I think of a person as a series of objects.  A new one is made each day, and it is prototyped from yesterday's object.  Each day's object is a pretty accurate copy of the previous one.  They're largely interchangable, and you can treat them as functionally equivalent in the day to day.

But over time, the differences add up.  Philosophers have talked about this before.

You hug your uncle because you hugged him yesterday.  But when you see your uncle after he's spent fifteen years in jail since your last hug, and gained a neck tattoo and a droopy eye, do you still hug him?  Is he still the same person?

Do you ever worry that you'll change into something you abhor?  Do you worry that, while you're saving for retirement now, you will one day will all of your savings to your least favorite political party?  Future-you might be an shitbag with nothing in common with current-you.  You might not exist in that person.

And there is a word for when you stop existing: death.

We usually reserve the word "death" for something that happens quickly and decisively.  But what about the slow death of dementia?  What about the million fractional, microdeaths that you undergo every year?  Death is a change, but any change is death.

</pontification>

Dragon Cult Barbarians

December 21, 2015, 3:04 am

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When a dragon rules over an area, it is called a desolation (similar to how merfolk rule over mazes).  It's meant to imply a barren, inhospitable land, but these places are usually fertile and support large, tasty animals.

The Desolation of Cataphractus.  The Desolation of Beyhoc.  The Desolation of Lagazizi.  The Desolation of Tar Lath Lien.  The Desolation of Torakta.  These are names on a map.  Cartographers use the same font for the names of human kingdoms.

Dragons domesticate humans.  They'll grab a few children, drop them in their nest, and feed them a steady diet of cow blood and dragon propaganda.  Sometimes they refine their stock by interbreeding their humans with a prince or princess.  Hell, if one of their pet humans is especially effective, they may be able to get stud fees from other dragons.

These domesticated humans are members of a dragon cult.  (Except in the case of Tar Lath Lien, where it is better described as a wizard college-cult.  And sure, he has his huntresses, but that's a whole different thing.)

Dragon cult barbarians tend to be big.  At least a foot taller than the soft people down in the lowlands.  They've been bred for size.  (And dragons live long enough to benefit from these breeding programs.)

Over time, a dragon builds up a tribe of people.  They usually don't live in the cavern with the dragon.  That's too bold.  Would you share a bedroom with your god?  Instead they usually live in primitive dwellings on the mountainside just outside the dragon's den.

They never build cities or roofs.  In fact, a desolation is often studded with abandoned cities, where a dragon's barbarians are forbidden to go.

A dragon likes having you where it can see you.  It doesn't want it's pets to build stone walls, where its fire can't reach.  There have been insurrections, you know, where a tribe killed their god.

Dragons keep these tribes of ignorant, dragon-worshipping barbarians on hand to deal with all the things that they can't. Domesticated humans can carry their hoard, hunt down thieving goblins in their tiny holes, and serve as a buffer between the dragon and all those annoying people who want to pay tribute or pick a fight.

And because they serve dragons, they sometimes get the good stuff. Picture a 15- year-old kid with the physique of Conan, wearing the golden armor of ancient kings and armed with magic spears. The kid is also illiterate, covered in fleas, and thinks that humans were created by dragons.

And its not hard fascism either.  Their barbarian tribes don't chafe at the collar.  They've believe in their dragon.  And when you stand in front of a dragon, you can see why.

They laugh at your gods, because your gods are invisible, puny things like wind or light. Their god is muscle and fire and furious roars. When you die, you rot in the earth while your soul is trapped in your body. When they die, they will be eaten by their god and reborn into dragon eggs.

Gretchlings and Grues

January 11, 2016, 1:20 am

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They are also called grey goblins, deep goblins, or lesser goblins.  I wrote about them before, in the Book of Mice.  That's actually a gretchling up at the top of this page, as part of the Goblin Punch logo.  I suppose he's as good a mascot as anything else.

Gretchlings are similar to goblins, only more pathetic and miserable.  They are goblins that have been touched by the shadows of the Underworld.  They delved too greedily and too deep, perhaps.

They are usually not a separate culture, but rather an affliction of the goblin race.  They usually exist within a goblin city (as an underclass) or outside of it (as outcasts).  The methods of transmission are murky, but it does spread from goblin to goblin in a method similar to a disease.

A gretchling has no shadow, because in a way, they are already their own shadow.

They are incapable of enjoying anything.  Food turns to ashes in their mouths.  Music becomes mere noise.  All that is left of the goblin psyche is self-pity, boredom, and above all else a keening, persistent fear.

Gretchling
HD 0 (HP 1)  AC none  Weapon 1d6
Move as human  Int 5  Morale 5
<Darkvision>
<Photophobia> If anyone spends a turn brandishing a light source (e.g. a torch) and yelling, all nearby gretchlings must make a morale check (as a group) or flee in terror back to the edges of the light source (30' for a torch), where they will lurk.  While lurking, they make another morale check every minute to see if they can muster the courage to overcome this crippling fear.  Terrified gretchlings who cannot escape a light source are essentially helpless--they throw down their weapon, piss themselves, curl up into a ball, and sob uncontrollably (at least until an opportunity for escape presents itself).  Under no circumstances will they approach within 60' of a large light source (such as a bonfire, or a pile of burning furniture).  They dislike attacking lightbearers in melee, and will only attack them if no other attractive options present themselves.

they also embody a lot of my design philosophy 1. monster weaknesses are as interesting as abilities 2. keep light sources relevant 3. Pathetic monsters are cool (like this guy, who can't piss without hitting his own feet)

Gretchlings have an instinctive fear of tall things as well, though not as pronounced as their fear of fire.

Tall gretchlings tend to become leaders of their people, and those tall gretchlings vie for authority among themselves by augmenting their own height with stilts.  They are also the spellcasters among the gretchlings.

Gretchling Stilwalker
Stats as gretchling, except:
HD 2  Int 10
<Spells> extinguish x 2

New Spell: Extinguish
Level 1 Wizard Spell
R; 50' T: light source or creature  D: 1 day
Target light source is extinguished and cannot be relit.  Magical light sources are allowed a save.  Multiple extinguish spells must be cast simultaneously to extinguish things larger than a campfire.  Alternatively, this spell can be cast on a creature who is in total darkness, who must then save or go blind for 1 day.

Sidebar: Rules For Lighting a Torch or Lantern
Assuming you're kneeling beside the item trying to spark it with a flint and tinder, it takes 1d4 rounds to get the flame going.  This die size is modified by Dex, so a character with -1 Dex gets it lit in 1d5 rounds, and a character with +2 Dex gets it let in 1d2 rounds.

Advanced Player Tactics

One or two experiences with gretchlings should be enough to teach the party how the gretchlings work.  Since they are usually shittier than goblins, feel free to throw lots of them at the party.  And I do mean lots.  Maybe 1d20+10 or something.

I can easily imagine a party moving through a large room full of gretchlings.  They're carrying three torches, because past experiences have taught them the importance of light sources.  They can hear the the gretchlings keeping pace all around them, like an unseen escort.  The gretchlings might even follow the party to other parts of the dungeon.  Too afraid to enter the light. . . for now.

If the torchbearers sprint into the gretchling-infested darkness, they can catch a few of the gretchlings who were too slow to get away and butcher them easily.  After a couple of rounds of this, the gretchlings learn to hang back much farther from the light sources.  Farther than an adventurer with a torch and a sword can run in one round.

The players might also hit on the more advanced tactic of throwing their torch into the darkness, where it will surely illuminate 1d3 gretchlings, and the archers in the party have a chance to pepper them with arrows before the gretchlings rush the torch and smother the hateful flame with handfuls of dirt.

Advanced Gretchling Tactics 

One thing you need to decide is gretchling tactics.  Gretchlings aren't complete idiots, and when they start getting desperate, they may start attempting to extinguish the light sources, instead of making melee attacks.  Expect them to run up with buckets of water, or burn themselves trying to extinguish the torch with their bare hands.

They are still goblins, after all, with all the dangerous ingenuity of that breed.  Are they willing to flood their own home?  Of course they are!  It's a whole new dungeon now that there's a foot of water on the floor, and one of the main tunnels is completely flooded.  (Is there a gretchling ambush on the far side?  Of course there is!)

You could also give the gretchlings ranged weapons, but then it becomes a lot more like fighting normal goblins.  So I'd advise against giving the gretchlings more than one or two bows.  Far better to just give them another 10 gretchlings, or a stiltwalker.

Don't forget that most characters get -4 to attack and AC if they can't see their opponent.  That's pretty damn significant.

Gretchling mutants also exist, who have the body (and stats) of an ogre, but the same tiny gretchling head.

And if you want to make gretchlings dangerous against higher level parties, you could always try. . .

Grues

Just as goblins can be infected with the shadows of the Underworld, so can dire moles.

Except where goblins are lessened by the affliction, dire moles are strengthened by it.  They are miserable creatures, all shadow and hunger.  They are hostile towards all living things except gretchlings, who they pity.

Grue
Stats as owlbear except:
<You Are Likely> In grue-containing dungeons, the party must keep a light lit at all times.  If they have no light source at all, the grue(s) will show up after 1d6 rounds.
<Shadowstuff> Immune to non-magical damage.
<Banished By Light> If a grue is ever within the radius of a light source, even a small one such as a candle, it is banished back into the dark earth of the dungeon, where it will return after another 1d6 rounds of total darkness.  Light-based spells will also banish grues.

Advanced Party Tactics

Don't forget that grues are a great way to get rid of a rival adventuring party.  Just extinguish their torch, close a door between them and your torch, and try to make small talk over all the screaming.

Impressions of OrcaCon 2016

January 13, 2016, 2:56 am

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So I went to my first con.  I wouldn't have gone if Vic hadn't bullied me into it, so thanks, Vic.

It was awesome.  It was like a zoo full of nerds.  I spent a few minutes gawping before I found myself discussing dice mechanics with a guy in a 13th Age shirt, and I realize that I, too, am a nerdy zebra, and this is herd.

It was a small con in its first year.  I stayed in the same hotel, six floors above.  This was convenient because I like to mix beer and D&D and I was worried that this would be impossible at a con.

I got to meet +Stacy Dellorfano, so that was cool.  She speaks about games optimistically and critically, as if they were tools that could change the world for the better.  Which of course, they are, but it's rare to have it discussed through that lens.  She also has really nice hair.

---

Everyone at a con has one thing in common: we are all passionate about games.

Some of the players you meet at your local comic book store are just there because their friends are there, but anyone at a Con shelled out some serious shekels to be there.  There were no filthy casuals, stinking up the place with their talk of raids or Heismans.

And this homogeny was doubly nice, because it's always easy to talk to someone about the subject of their passion.  (Most people are passionate about something.  Some people are passionate about lots of things.)  I could walk up to someone and just start yelling at them about how bluffing and bidding games were awesome because they had a built-in metagame, and they would happily start yelling back because they had opinions about that.  Everyone did.

Some of the people that I met were the stereotypical nerd-introverts.  But they didn't behave like it, because they were in their element.  Everyone I met was interested in games--really interested--and really interested in talking about games.

There really wasn't time for shyness.  I don't know about everyone else, but I felt a sense of urgency. 
  Every hour I spent sleeping or eating was an hour that I would be missing out on all the cool stuff.

Maybe that's why everyone was so friendly.  Or maybe all cons are like that, and it's not just because OrcaCon bills itself as an "inclusive analog games convention".  I was wondering what "inclusive" implied until I saw that you can identify your preferred pronouns by hanging a ribbon underneath your badge that identified your preferred pronouns.

My Name Is Arnold K. and my preferred pronouns are he and him.  <Contessa ribbon goes here.>

There were also pins that let you identify yourself as asexual, pansexual, other sexuals, and/or a straight ally.  Also the t-shirt was an orc riding an orca riding a big gay rainbow wave.  It was very lovable.

There was a game called Golem Arcana.  I played it and it was awesome and I had fun.  It's a miniatures wargame where you control a team of golems (basically fantasy mechs) and smash other fantasy golems.

But what was really interesting about it was that everything took place inside an iPad.  All of the positioning, movement, dice rolling, cover calculations, etc took place inside the iPad.  The minis (and they were big, beautiful minis) were just a mirror to the stuff on the iPad.  You moved your pieces on the screen, and then you moved the minis so that the situation on the table would mirror the situation on the iPad.

The minis were entirely superfluous.  You could run the game just fine without them.  They only existed because people love relics of our hobbies.  We love things we can pick up and hold.  The spine of your DCC shirt looks cool on the mantle, sure, but a row of miniature dragons looks cooler (and is a lot easier to explain to your aunt).

Digression: You could also claim that minis aren't a lot more than just a representation.  They give a sense of depth, thickness, stability, motion that a picture can't do.  And you'd have a point.  But bear in mind that these are $40 minis, so I'd argue that people are paying for more than just an interesting piece of art.

Now, when you love a hobby, you want to go out and buy it, surround yourself with it.  But D&D, as I play it, is a pile of intangibles.  It doesn't have a lot of physical artifacts unless you play with minis.  It's plots and monster descriptions and words like "batrachian".

Dice are the only real artifact that we have.  That's probably why I buy so many I don't need.

Digression: There's nothing wrong with minis, but I have noticed that a lot of DMs and players treat them as if they were all the description a situation needs.  You already know what the monsters look like and where they are, so there's no need for the DM to go into any further details about them.  It makes (some) DMs lazy.

The OSR was not represented there.  Except, I suppose, by me.  In a couple of the 5e games there was some scheming, improv, and rules flexibility (things I associated with the OSR), but the other games were just naked mechanics.

Mind you, some of the mechanics were excellent mechanics, and/or mechanics that allowed for fun roleplaying.  I played in a 13th Age game, and there was tons of roleplaying.  But the roleplaying was just a paint job--it didn't really affect the actual gameplay one iota (which was just a set piece combat against a pile of nameless, mute orcs).

Digression: I feel like 13th Age has a lot of things that encourage roleplaying (icons, one unique thing) but those are just wrapping paper on a combat system that is as rigid as 4e.  (And by rigid, I mean it depends on rules, not rulings.)

And talking to people, I saw all this excitement and attention given to mechanics.  Games were codified, judged, and discussed in terms of their rulebooks. There was the sense of "any problem can be fixed by fixing the mechanics, because any problem is a mechanical problem". (At least among the few people I talked to on the games room floor, not at the panel about games and education.)

Which is weird for me, because I see rules as only a tiny part of D&D.  Like, you pick up a Swords and Wizardry book and you look in it, and you see all these rigid, interacting systems, and you'd be forgiven for thinking that the game was just as rigid and deterministic as chess.  But then you actually play in a Swords and Wizardry game, and you realize that the rules are just a skeleton inside a fleshy body, and that the real meat of the game is DM rulings and players scheming outside the box.

Anyway, there was little attention given to the softer aspects of a game.  Maybe its my fault for talking to board game designers about the value of rules that lend themselves well to improvisation, or why rulebooks (even rulebooks for board games) should include a few words on interplayer attitudes and framing.

I dunno, man.

Online, I hang out in my echo chamber of OSR bloggers (as do a lot of you, I suppose), and it's easy to forget what tiny minority we are in the larger tabletop RPG world.  I felt like an island king who sees a world map for the first time.

Car Wars looks awesome

I ran a table.

I was nervous to DM, which was interesting.  I haven't been nervous about DMing for years.  Even that was pleasant, in a way; nervousness is a young man's game.

Perhaps it was because every other table that I saw had polished, finished products.  They ran D&D with glossy DMGs and fully painted minis.  All I had was a backpack full of dice and paper.  And not even the right paper, dammit.  Ten minutes before the game I was still printing out handouts and stealing pencils from better prepared people.

It is at that point that I must thank my friends James, Joe, and Matt Shimek.  They have some sort of bootleg screen printing operation in their garage, which they used to print the Goblin Punch logo onto a table cloth and also a nice black shirt.  So if was going to be a filthy homebrew D&D guy, at least I would be a filthy homebrew D&D guy with a fucking brand.

Thank you, Shimeks.

Anyway, the game was excellent.  Everyone had a lot of fun.

I ran a semi-sandbox in Goblintown (which grown enough that I should probably write another post or two about it).  Out of five or so options, they chose to sell their services as bounty hunters, and attempted to kill Filthmaster Blorth, reputedly the filthiest goblin in goblintown.

(Goblintown is ahistoric.  Goblins do not keep records of anything.  They have no idea what year it is, and they disagree over who the last king was.  Filthmaster Blorth is also the closest thing that the goblins have to a historian, since he can read the secret history of objects.  His filthiness is next to godliness.)

The high point was probably getting to the end of the Filth Library and finding the final room empty, except for walls covered with creeping crud and a porcelain throne.  Sitting on the throne (and making their save) granted the players a free question, which would be answered honestly.

They asked "Where is the Filthmaster?"

I told them "Behind you, descending the shaft inside his gelatinous cube mount."

The session ended with the players looting the Filthmaster of his ring of control ooze, ring of protection from acid, porcelain snorkel, and then riding away inside his gelatinous cube.  At least one of them wanted to become the next Filthmaster, which honestly sounds like a great start to a new campaign.

I fucking love D&D.  Thank you Jeff, Brody, Brandon, Cici, Andrew, and Bev for being such excellent players.  You were the pros of the con.

Anyway, those guys and girls gave a lot of feedback, mostly good, but I've been mulling over one piece of advice: "When you write adventures, be aware that most people aren't as good a DM as you are." I think that's a suggestion to write more clearly defined adventures, with more rigid and clearly defined mechanics.  Less improv, more machinery.

It's an interesting point, because I mostly write adventures with myself in mind as the DM.  Writing for other DMs is a different challenge, I suppose.  I guess my playtests will have to include playing in games where other DMs are using my stuff, which feels like arrogance or masturbation.  Not that those are bad things, mind you.

Also, one of my players noticed that the filth was dissolving their body, and they decide to allow it, becoming one with the filth.  One of the more metal deaths I've had in my games.  Truly a superlative goblin.

New Class: Demon Blade

January 17, 2016, 12:07 am

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One path to immortality lies through undeath.  This is lichdom, and it is frequently sought by spellcasters.

Another path lies through demonhood, and it is usually a warrior's path.

Like the process of a lich's acension, a demon blade's transformation is a closely held secret, shrouded in secrecy and red rumor.  It is known to require a willing demon and a paladin's blade.

Digression: The essence of a demon is corruption.  Demons are not made from evil souls; instead it is the greatest saints who are shaped into the greatest demons.  Because demons do not exist separately (they do not breed nor build) they are forever the our dark mirror.  Their history does not, cannot diverge from our own.

The process creates a cursed blade, imbued with the warrior soul (or more accurately, the warrior's seven souls).  This demonic weapon is the true demon blade.  The figure clad in bone armor, whose blade burns with green fire, who pulls his enemies heart into his hand from across the room--that is just a puppet.

THE DEMON BLADE

Use the cleric as a base template, subtract clerical stuff.  Use the fighter's XP progression.

Level 1 - Demon Blade, Chariot
Level 2 - Harvest Soul
Level 3 - Spellcasting
Level 9 - Minions

Demon Blade
You are a hellish red sword (although I guess you could be a hellish axe or hammer if you really want).  You are a sword +1 that can dominate whoever wields it (as is standard for many cursed weapons).  People who are unwilling to be dominated follow the usual rules for the dominate spell.  Dominated creatures use their own ability scores, but every else (save, attack bonus) is derived from you (the death blade).  Dominated creatures chafe against the reins, and get -2 to all attack rolls for the first week.  The domination effect ends as soon as they stop touching you, so if you are disarmed, they're free to follow their natural inclinations.  You cannot dominate a new person unless you release your old one, and if a target makes their save against your dominate, you cannot try again until tomorrow.

You can see and hear out of the blade, but you cannot speak except through your wielder.  (But really, who is wielding who?)  Regarding damage and breakages, you follow the same rules as any other magic weapon (you can be damaged by things that are at least as magical as you are, like a bad hit against a shield +1 or a demon that can only be hit by +2 weapons or greater.)

Chariot
A person who willingly joins with you (instead of just being dominated by you, and without coercion or threats from you or your allies) becomes your "chariot".  That's the demonic term for a willingly dominated person.  When you are wielding a chariot, you get several advantages:

• Your chariot reduces all fire damage by the HD of the highest HD angel, paladin, or goodly cleric you've ever killed.  (Yes, keep track of this on the back of your character sheet.)
• At any time, you can choose to deal 1d6 damage to your chariot in order to deal an additional +1d6 damage on a hit.  (This is called burning the chariot in demonic parlance.)

Getting someone to willingly be your chariot is not something you can do with coercion or threats.  You need to find a truly, truly desperate NPC to agree to it and then probably perform some service for them.  (Sounds like a quest to me!)

Harvest Soul
You can drain the soul from a recently killed enemy.  This takes a standard action and requires you to impale the corpse with your demon blade within 1 round of the corpse's death.  No effect on targets that lack souls.

This has two effects.  First, your wielder heals 1d6 HP, plus 1 HP for every HD of the target.  Additionally, the target's soul is trapped in the demon blade.  The demon blade can hold up to 3 souls.  Trapped souls can see and hear from inside the demon blade.

At any time, you can chat with souls trapped in the demon blade (and it may be difficult to get them to shut up).  They are generally unhelpful (similar to speak with dead) but can become helpful if you do favors for them (pass messages on), fight against a mutual enemy (orc souls will happily tell you everything they know about elf territory), or entertain them (a soul might appreciate seeing a favorite opera, for example).

Spellcasting
You can cast spells from the demon blade list.  Beginning at level 3, you learn a new spell every level (your choice), and another new random spell every time you kill a dungeon boss.  (If a dungeon has no obvious boss, the boss is the highest level hostile creature in there.)  If you learn the 12 spells listed below, your DM has to come up with some newer, better ones.

Spells are powered by souls trapped in the demon blade.  You can cast as many as you wish, as long as you have sufficient trapped souls.  If you see an 'X' in the spell description, it refers to the HD of the trapped soul.  You use a soul in its entirety--no half-spent souls.  And when you use a soul to power a spell, always try to flavor it as appropriately as possible.  Using reap with a goblin soul should probably sound like a shrieking goblin and leave goblin bite-marks on the target.  Using burning blade with a lich's soul should probably conjure up blue flames that cause numbness rather than immediate pain (that comes later).

Minions
A bunch of demons show up to pledge their loyalty to you.  3d20 lemures, 1d4 bone devils, and 1d4 succubi.  They will expect you to lead a crusade back into hell, to reconquer it from the paladins.

Demon Blade Spells

1. Burning Blade
R: 0   T: self (blade)  D: 10 minutes
The demon blade does an additional +X damage on a hit.

2. Dance of Hell
T: self (blade)  D: X rounds
You function as a dancing weapon.  You still maintain control of your chariot.

3. Deathgrip
R: 50'  T: creature
If a creature fails a save, it is pulled to adjacent to you.  You may make a basic melee attack against it if you wish.

4. Demon Claw
For one round, you can make all the melee attacks of you were the highest HD demon you've ever killed.  (Yes, keep track of the highest HD demon you've ever killed.)

5. Disguise
R: 0  T: self  D: X hr
You appear as someone else of comparable size.  This is only an illusion, but it also changes your voice to match.  (If you are playing with detect evil, I suppose it can fool that, too.)

6. Heartripper
R: 20'  T: creature
If a creature has Xd6 HP or less, it's heart is ripped out of its chest and into your hand.  No save.  This is usually fatal.  No effect on creatures that lack hearts.

7. Hellbolts
R: 50' T: object  D: 0
You fire X bolts at the target.  Each bolt requires its own ranged attack roll and does 1d8 damage on a hit.

8. Inferno
R: 20' T: self  D: X turns
Everything takes 1d6 fire damage each turn (Con check for half).  Most shit catches on fire.  You are immune to fire damage for the duration of this spell.

9. Reap
R: 0   T: self (blade)
Free action when the demon blade does melee damage.  Deal +Xd6 damage.

10. Salvage the Chariot
R: 0  T: self (chariot)
Instead of dying, the chariot survives with X HP and is stunned for 1d6-X rounds (min 1).  You still suffer the other effects of the injury (broken limbs, etc).

11. Summon Lemure
R: 20' T: piece of floor  D: 1 min
You summon an obedient lemure.

12. Teleport
R: 20' T: self  D: 0
You teleport to a point you designate.  You do not need to have line of sight.  You can bring along X-1 willing creatures.

Discussion

They lack a fighter's HP and attack bonus, but they get a lot of little tricks to compensate.  The first and probably strongest is just that you're a cursed blade.  You're really hard to kill, but then again, even goblins will probably figure out that this blade is fucked, let's pile a million rocks on top of it and be scared of it forever).  And of course, there's always the option to just pass the blade off to an enemy, who you can then dominate.

What a really want to see is a player chuck the demon blade like a spear, impaling the enemy commander, and then dominating him.  I'm okay with this because it has so many ways that it can go wrong.

And since the only thing that you import from the dominated creature is ability scores, even a dominated goblin will have your levels and (a similar) HP.

Some of the spells are quite powerful, but the slow rate of acquisition balances it out somewhat.  The small capacity of the blade (3 souls) and the rarity of the ammunition (you gotta stab people the round after they die) balances it out further.  Plus, it creates an interesting dilemma in combat.  Do I harvest the soul of the guy I just killed, or do I help kill the ogre that's still standing?

There's no class abilities after level 3, but that's because the spells are self-balancing.  As the players kill higher HD creatures, the demon blade character will have higher HD souls to spend on bigger spells, like a +8d6 damage reap.

There's also a bit of character motivation backed into the mechanics, since players benefit from killing high level clerics and demons.  A person playing a demon blade for the first time, who has no idea what to do next can read the character sheet abilities and announce, "guys, I think we should go to the church and kill the cleric".

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Dungeon Checklist

January 18, 2016, 3:48 am

≫ Next: Dwarves Are Lazy Because They Are Hardworking

≪ Previous: New Class: Demon Blade

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Sometimes I write dungeons.  Today I wrote a checklist of things to put in the dungeon.  The first couple items are pretty obvious, but it's still good to enumerate their usage.

How to Use This Checklist

Read it once before you write you dungeon.  Then read it again when you're done, to make sure you got everything.

1. Something to Steal

Treasure gives players a reason to go into the dungeon in the first place.  On a metagame level, treasure is money, money is XP, and XP is tied to the idea of character advancement.  It's the prime mover of the system.

Two points.  First, remember that treasure doesn't need to be treasure.  It can be:

• Shiny shit, such as boring ol' coins, or the jewelled brassiere of the zombie queen.
• Knowledge, such as where to find more treasure, or information you can use to blackmail the king.  Or even a sage, who can answer a single question honestly.
• Friendship, such as an amorous purple worm that follows you around and protects you when it's hungry and a little bored.  Occasionally, it leaves egg sacs laying around for you to fertilize (and it will get angry if you don't sit on them for at least an hour).
• Trade Goods, like a wagon full of tea (worth 10,000gp).  When I give out large parcels of trade goods as treasure, I give half of the XP now, and the other half of the XP when it's sold off.  (I just really like the idea of a mercantile campaign.)
• Territorial, like a tower the players can claim as their own, or an apartment in the nice party of the city (and the chances of being stabbed in your sleep are dramatically reduced).
• Useful adventuring shit, like a magic sword, scroll of blot out the sun, or a parachute.

Second, treasure tells a story, too.  Cover your treasure in religious symbols, annoint it in trollblood.  Don't let your coins be coins!

2. Something to be Killed

This is pretty obvious.  Of course there are threatening things in the dungeon.  There has to be some challenge otherwise it isn't a dungeon.  The simplest way to do that is with things that are trying to kill you.  (Yes, you can have monsterless dungeons based on traps.  Those are cool, but that's why this checklist is written in pencil, not in stone.)  There are many ways to make combat with even basic monsters more interesting.

Also remember that dungeons tell their story through nouns.  The history of a dungeon is usually relayed through monster choices (why use orcs when you can use degenerate cannibal versions of the original dwarven inhabitants?) and descriptions of those creatures (a barnacle-covered zombie, an iron golem charred by dragonfire, the elven armor scraps that the goblins are wearing, the elven wand-rifle that one of the goblins has for some reason).

Examples: 2d6 orcs, 3d6 mudmen.

3. Something to Kill You

Dungeons are designed to be beaten.  That's why we don't fill them with inescapable obstacles (rocks fall, everyone dies) or impenetrable barriers (sorry, the whole dungeon is wrapped in an adamantine dome, you can't get in).

BUT dungeons need to feel like they were designed to be unbeatable.  It's important to feel like this isn't just a bowling alley where the DM sets up the pins for the players to knock down.  You need to have deadly elements in your deadly dungeon for it to feel deadly.  

Just follow these two important rules.  Try to follow at least one

• Label your deadly shit as such.  A sleeping dragon.  A door barricaded from the player's side with a sign warning of deadly spiders.  These things look deadly from a distance.
•  A chance to escape.  Maybe the dragon can't fit into the smaller tunnels around his lair.  Maybe the manticore is chained to a rock.

Both of these serve the same function: they allow the players to pick their own battles, something you can't do on a linear railroad game.  I think that's why a lot of OSR folks hate the idea of boss battles: because they're the one battle in the dungeon that is required.

Horrible monsters that are avoidable give the players agency and allows them to be architects of their own demise.

Sidenote: I think that nearly all combats should be escapable. Sometimes with a cost (dropped food, gold, maybe a dead PC or hireling). In my experience PCs will get themselves killed often enough even if the enemies never left the rooms they were in.

Also, putting "unbeatable" monsters in your dungeon also allows the dungeon to be self-scaling.  The level 1 party will just tip-toe past the dragon, while the level 6 party might consider fighting it so they steal the treasure it is sleeping on top of.  And just like that, a dungeon becomes appropriate for both level 1 parties AND level 6 parties.  (And this is another reason why I think OSR games have such a wide range of level-appropriateness--It's both easy and expected that players will flee from fights that they can't win).

4. Different Paths

Different paths allow different parties to experience the dungeon in different ways.  It's a randomizer, similar to what you'd get if you ordered the dungeon rooms according to a random number generator.  And it keeps you (the DM) from getting bored

Player agency.  Players can choose the path they're better suited for.  The party with 2 clerics can take the zombie-infested tunnel, and the party with air support can get themselves dropped into the courtyard.  It also allows dungeons to be a little bit self-adjusting, too.  Players who are more confident can challenge the front door, while lower level parties will creep around the outside.

It allows parties to walk away from rooms they don't like.  Part of the OSR philosophy (as I see it) is the ability to walk away from fights.  If a party doesn't want to fight a room with archer skeletons entombed in the walls (especially after two of them were blinded in the last room) they can retreat and find another way in.  It's an option they have.

The last reason to have multiple paths is to allow for dungeon mastery.  I don't mean DMing.  I mean that, as the players learn more about the dungeon, they become better at exploiting its geography.  They can lure the carrion crawler over the pit trap that they know is there.  They can retreat into a looped path, instead of retreating into unexplored rooms (always a dangerous tactic).

At the same time, don't throw in random paths just for the hell of it.  The more paths you put in, the less linearity there is in your dungeon.  And sometimes you want linearity, especially when it comes to teaching your players things, or giving clues.  Sometimes you want to show the players the eerily clean hallway before they bump into the gelatinous cube.  Maybe you want them to meet the zombies with hook hands before they meet the room of crawling, animated hands.

There's nothing wrong with a little linearity if you're putting it in there for a reason.  I still think that a heavily branched dungeon should be the default assumption, but linear sections of a dungeon are a venal sin, not a mortal one.

5. Someone to Talk To

People forget this one, and yet it's the one I feel strongest about.  Strong enough for caps lock.  EVERY DUNGEON NEEDS SOMEONE TO TALK TO.  It's a roleplaying game.  NPCs are the cheapest and easiest way to add depth to your dungeon.  It's easy because everyone knows how to roleplay a generic goblin prisoner and has a pretty good idea of what information/services that goblin prisoner can provide.  And it's got depth because there are so many ways that a party can use a goblin prisoner.  There's almost no bloat--you don't need to invent new mechanics, and it takes almost no space to write "There is a goblin in a cage.  His name is Zerglum and he has been imprisoned by his fellows for setting rats free."

The problem is that a lot of dungeons are treasure vaults, tombs, and abandoned mines.  The only creatures you usually encounter in those places are undead, golems, oozes, and vermin with ambiguous food chains.  None of those are really known for being chatty.  So, here are some options:

• Rival adventuring party.
• Goblins never need explanation.
• Spell effect, like a chatty magic mouth spell or something.
• Graveyard nymph.
• Ghosts.  Make a sympathetic one.  Everyone expects them to be jerks.
• Ghoul head, sitting on a shelf.  It can talk if you blow through its neck-hole.
• Old man trapped in a painting.  Communicates by painting.
• Demon trapped in a mirror.  Communicates by repeating your own phrases back to you.
• Ancient war machine trapped by a stasis field bomb.  Seeks enemies who died thousands of years ago, will self-destruct when it learns that it lost the war.
• Consider giving your players speak with stones or speak with lock spells.  Dungeons usually have those.
• Demonic succubus, who has spent the last 1000 years on a bed, trapped by the silver threads woven into a circle in the bedsheet
• Pterodactyl-riding barbarians who are looting the place
• Time-displaced wizard, caught in a paradox while exploring the place.  Resets every 3 minutes.

6. Something to Experiment With

Aside from something that will probably kick the party's ass, I think this might be the most OSR-ish.

These are the unexplainable, the weird, and the unknown.  And I don't mean unknown like an unindentified potion is unknown.  I mean something that introduces a new wrinkle into the game.

• A room with two doors of different sizes.  Anything that is put into the small door emerges from the large door at twice the size, and vice versa.  Anything that goes through the doors twice in the same direction (double enlarged or double shrunk) has terrible consequences.
• A pedestal.  If anything is placed on top of it, it turns into its opposite.  (Okay, the opposite of a sword is an axe, but what is the opposite of a banana?)
• A metal skeleton.  If a skull is placed atop it, a speak with dead spell is cast on it.
• Wishing wells that are portals to other small ponds in the dungeon.  Where the portal goes is determined by what item you throw in the well before you jump in.  Copper coins, silver coins, gold coins, gems, and arrows all lead to different places.
• Two doorways.  Impassable when you walk through a single one, but if two people walk through them simultaneously, they are fused together and transported to a city of similarly-fused people.
• A machine that turns finished products into raw goods, and raw goods into ammunition.
• A sundial that controls the sun.
• A boat golem that flees from loud noises.  You can direct it by standing at the back of it and shouting.
• Two holes in the wall.  If two limbs are put in the holes, they are swapped.  If only one limb is put in the hole, it is severed.  Can be used to graft new limbs onto amputees.

There's some overlap here with magic items.  There's also some overlap with non-magical stuff, too.  There's also some overlap with combat, because some combats can be puzzly, or can rely on new rules/victory conditions.

Combat, for experienced players, for the most part, is a solved problem.  Weird shit is important because they give the players an unsolved problem.

Players know how to best leverage their attacks and abilities.  Sure, you can mix it up a bit, and force them to think and use different tactics.  But by and large, they already know how to use their character to their best effect.  They've been practicing it for levels and levels, after all.

(It's important to let player practice the stuff they're good at, i.e. combat with their character, but it's also important to put throw some wrenches in there, too.)

Weird shit follows its own rules.  Suddenly, players don't know anything about how to solve this problem, and they have to figure it out anew.

Bonus points if its something that could potentially unbalance your game.  Nothing gives a player more agency than the ability to completely derail your setting.  (Not that you need to go that far.)

More bonus points if its something that will probably hurt the players at first, but can be used to their advantage once they've figured out how it works.

One last perk: it gives level 1 characters a chance to be as useful as level 10 characters.  Anyone can stick an arm into a hole in the wall, and anyone can figure out what it does.  Weird shit often poses threats and rewards that are level-agnostic.

7. Something the Players Probably Won't Find

This one might be contentious.  Why put stuff in your dungeon that your players won't find?

First, you don't have to put much in the dungeon.  Just a few words here and there to reward the players who are more thorough.  "Inside the purple worm's stomach is a bag of holding full of 1000 gallons of purple worm stomach acid." Or "The pirate captain has a gold bar hidden in his peg leg, wrapped in felt so that it won't rattle." It's not like you're designing multiple cool rooms that no one will ever get to enjoy.  (I mean, I do that sometimes.)

I think it's important to hide things because there is a sincere joy in exploration and testing the limits.  If all of the things in a dungeon are obvious, why even bother wondering what is at the bottom of the well?  Is there anything interesting buried underneath all of this mud?  Players who don't have the time or resources to explore a dungeon 100% (and they shouldn't) will always walk away with a feeling of enormity, that there was always more to find.

Sure, completion is a nice feeling, but so is wonderment.

I like to reward people who are good at the game.  And being good at finding things (thinking about where they might be, exploring those places despite the risk it involves) is one of the ways that a player can be good at D&D.  I've written about this before.

It should be a spectrum.  Some things (most things) should be out in the open. Some stuff should be hidden behind curtains.  And some stuff should be tucked deeply away in the dungeon's folds.

So yeah, the next time you decorate a room with a mural of a defeated king presenting tribute to his conquerer, be sure to put an actual treasure chest in the wall behind the painting of a treasure chest.  (I've run that dungeon three times and no one has ever found it.  I get a little excited every time I describe it to players.)

There's also undead skeletons entombed in the wall behind the paintings of skeletons.  No one's ever found them, either.  But some day, some party with the right alloy of greed, cleverness, and patience will find them, and that will be great.

Dwarves Are Lazy Because They Are Hardworking

January 19, 2016, 11:29 pm

≫ Next: Detaching Advancement From Levels + Secret Monk Techniques

≪ Previous: Dungeon Checklist

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The industriousness of dwarves is well established, even across multiple settings.  They're also dour, obsessed with gold, and possessing of an ambiguously Scottish accent.  They don't like elves or trees, but they like grand halls and forges.  Family and tombs.  Honor and beer.  Lots and lots of beer.

Dwarves are extremely well characterized.  The dwarven character is as strong and as distinctive as the character of Homer Simpson.  Except one is a single dude and the other is an entire race.

Race is the lazy way to define your character.  (That's one reason why I killed all the humans.)

What I mean by well-characterized is: I have no problem imagining what Homer Simpson would do in any given situation, just as I have no problem imagining what a dwarf would do in any given situation.  As soon as you told me their name, I knew them.  I can already hear their voice.

And of course, that's why people play dwarves.  They're prepackaged bundles of character.

No longer do you have to define your character through word and through deed!  You merely have to say "I'm a dwarf!" and people know all about your character, exactly as if you had said "I'm Homer Simpson!" It's a big shortcut, and best of all, this characterization doesn't require any roleplaying at all.

Imagine the inverse.  Imagine that you decided to play Homer Simpson the fighter, but that you introduced him to the other players as Scrotar the Gladiator.  And then you said things that Homer would say, and did things that Homer would do, and over time, the other players (and in-game NPCs) would get a very good feel for your character.  He would be very well characterized, and you would have earned it.

But that's difficult, and takes a long time, which is why people like being dwarves. It's nice to have NPCs treat you as your character expects to be treated, and if you're a dwarf, that takes about five minutes.

The same is true for elves (haughty, beautiful,slim, clean, beardless, magical, serene, fuckin' Mary Sues), orcs (yell, smash, intimidate, be tough as a two dollar steak), and gnomes (chipper, excitable, mischievous, witty, impulsive, mildly magical).

People who change their setting so that "their dwarves/elves/whatever are different" would be wise not to change their dwarves too much, since players expect a certain degree of cliche dwarfiness to be present (so they can roleplay their character easier) even though they might sigh at how generic the dwarves are in this setting.

You Should Play a Dwarf If. . .

If you're new to roleplaying, by all means, be a dwarf.  The easiest characters to roleplay are the ones that are the most strongly characterized.  A stereotypical dwarf fulfills that niche handily.  And after you establish your dwarfiness, you cban start striking out into new territory, away from your racial stereotype.  Perhaps you're the only dwarf who likes trees.  Or maybe you're a shitty craftsman.  Or you eschew beer in favor of opiates.  That's (mildly) interesting stuff.

Or you might just play a hack and slash game, where characterizations don't really matter because everyone is a murderhobo.  In that case, this whole essay is moot.  Go put on your pointy helmet, beard-face.

You might not be a confident roleplayer, or you might not have a good idea for a character.  In that case, may I suggest a dwarven ancestry for monsieur?  It's strong, reliable, and easy.

Or you genuinely don't give a shit about characterization.  For you, the game lies in other directions.  That's fine, too.  There's many ways to play a game.  Don't let me shit in your fun-bucket.

You Should Stop Being a Dwarf

There is no if.  You should stop being a dwarf.

Just be a human.  Anything a dwarf can be, a human can be.  Greedy?  Humans can be that. Honorable?  Humans can be that.  Drunk and possessing a ridiculous accent?  Humans can do that.  Scornful of elves and their fruit wines?  I already do that all the time.

Rolling a human forces you to come up with a unique character concept.  If you can't come up with one, and would prefer to fall back upon the ol' bearded crutch, consider some famous personalities.  Be Bill Murray from Ghostbusters.  Be Nolan's Batman.  Hell, be Nolan's Joker.  Be a good-guy version of Hitler.  Be Scrooge McDuck (miserly, loves his asshole nephews).  Be Borat.  Be Princess Mononoke.  Be that guy from the Old Spice commercials.  Be Han Solo.

Show, don't tell.

Second, being a demi-human can actually interfere with a lot of roleplaying/characterization choices.  Want to romance the human princess while you're a halfling?  Get ready for a lot of size jokes.

Did you have an arm replaced with a troll's arm and a second row of teeth from a mutation?  Well, that sounds alright for a human, but for an elf to have those things, it seems a bit overloaded, conceptually.  Like a half-demon dwarf who invented the grenado and is attempting to be the next king, also seems a bit overloaded.  But half-demon human seems alright, I think.

Objection!

Strawman: when we play fantasy races we can explore new roleplaying opportunities!  Like what it's like to be a dwarf who's afraid of the dark, or an elf who is dreaded how her husband will die from old age while she is still young.  Can you really explore those things if everyone is a human?

Of course you can.  You can have Genghis Khan's son who is afraid of horses.  Or you can be in love with a person who is dying from the Slow Death.

Or, if you really want that whole "lives underground, drinks heavily, reveres ancestors" thing, have you thought about how weird it would be to just transpose humans into the dwarven lifestyle?  We already accept the dwarven culture as normal, but humans who spend their whole lives underground, digging their own graves, toiling over furnaces, and birthing their children atop anvils. . . that's way weirder.  And therefore, more interesting and more memorable.

Also, another benefit to having everyone be a human: it creates a zone of normalcy within the party.  The game stays firmly rooted, and doesn't drift up into kitchen-sink fantasy, where everyone is a different race of unique snowflakes.  This leaves room for weirdness later, so that when the elves emerge naked from the trees gnawing on pieces of babyflesh, they are the other and they are weird and horrible and alien.  As it should be.

The forest should be a little alien and hostile.  This is harder to do if you have elves in your party.

The underground should be unknown and oppressive.  This harder to do if you have dwarves in your party.

Detaching Advancement From Levels + Secret Monk Techniques

January 20, 2016, 1:53 am

≫ Next: Bottle Imps

≪ Previous: Dwarves Are Lazy Because They Are Hardworking

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I'm a big fan of detaching character advancement from level progression, for three reasons.

• It makes a character's increase in power more gradual, and less staggered.  It gives them something to look forward to between level-ups.
• It reduces the burden on the XP -> leveling system.  Sort of like taking some of the eggs out of the basket.  This makes things like level drain (slightly) less painful.
• Just as XP -> leveling drives a goal of getting more loot, a different system of advancement can drive a different goal.

There's already an obvious example of this in play: wizards can learn new spells by finding scrolls and adding them to their spellbook.  So a wizard, even if they are at the level cap or whatever, still has a mechanically incentivized reason to play.

And there are a few old-school things that advanced characters without just giving them XP.  Like a fountain that gave +1 Str to whoever drank from it, for example.

You could also argue that magic swords and their ilk are a method of advancement not tied to XP, but we're getting into gear, and that's almost a different thing.

I've been gradually inserting other examples into my homebrew.

• My skill system (which has been revised innumerable times) ties skill advances to how often you use a skill, with a cap based on your level.
• Fighters keep track of how many kills they get with particular weapons.  At certain thresholds, they learn a new ability with that weapon.  Because tracking kills is fun, right?
• Bug Collectors gain badges from collecting all the bugs in an area.  This is basically pokemon, and encourages bug collectors to tell their friends "Wait!  We can't leave the mountain yet!  I still need to find a grimbly fly!" which is basically the buggiest collectoriest thing a bug collector can shout.
• Demon Blades have a couple of abilities that hinge on the highest HD angel (or whatever) that they've ever killed.  This motivates them to go out and kill bigger and weirder angels.

<digression>   I just had this idea about cherubim, and added it to the angels page.

Cherubim are extremely important, for one reason: they are engineering the birth of the messiah.  You think saviors are born just by chance?  It requires hundreds of generations of careful breeding to bring about the right collection of genes and environmental factors to create the next Prophetess, which only happens if the right people fall in love with each other.  And woe to anyone who interferes with the finely wrought clockwork of their fanshipping.  </digression>

So, with that in mind, here's my idea about monks.

When I picture a monk, I'm basically picturing a pastiche of all the martial artists I've ever seen in anime.  This includes Goku.

And how does Goku become more powerful?  Not by winning.  Goku becomes more powerful by losing, and then running away and training for a fucking six episode piece of shit why is King Kai even a thing.  Fuck him forever.

Anyway, here's my first draft of an ability that you learn at level pXX:

Secret Techniques

You learn your first Secret Technique: Stunning Fist.  You learn additional secret techniques whenever you are defeated by a powerful foe and then spend a day training in some dramatic location in order to beat them.  

What constitutes "defeated by a powerful foe" is left up to the DM, but a sincerely-fought combat that ends in player death or retreat should be considered a defeat.  Alternatively, the monk could seek out a Hidden Master and receive training from him.

Secret Techniques

Each secret technique costs 1 HP to use, maybe.

1. Ten Thousand Punches (Keep making punch attacks for as long as you want.  For every two punches you throw, you take 1d6 damage, hit or miss.)
2. Quivering Palm
3. Too Many Shurikens
4. Fire Punch???
5. Flash Step
6. Goku Beam???????? 
7. Focus (Spend a turn declaring to your target how determined you are to win.  Your next hit on the target turns into a crit.)
8. Counterattack
9. Immovable Stance
10. Koan (bonus on a save vs some mental effect, if you save, target must save or be confused)
11. That thing that Dhalsim does
12. Consider the Lotus (lets you pay XP in order to deal more damage because monks are craaaaazy)

my next monk will be a voldo

So Where Is This Hidden Master Anyway?

1. On a mountain top, inside a giant, angry tortoise.
2. He retreated from this illusion into another.  You can meet him if you go into the swamp and smoke a wisp.  You'll have to catch it in this magic pipe, first.
3. He's in hiding because of his stance against the current king, who has ordered the hidden master to be hunted down and killed.  If you cause enough trouble for the king, the hidden master will surely find you.
4. He's out fishing.  Follow this miniature whale through an ocean full of horrible bullshit, where you will find him on a tiny raft made of sake bottles, enjoying his nine-year bender.
5. He's on the moon, you poor fuck.  Go catch the Cat's Tail (the dangling end of a space elevator that passes over the Brimstone Waste every once in a while) and ride the elevator-golem up.
6. He's dead and in hell.  Pack some holy water.

What Bullshit Does the Master Demand Of You?

1. A fucking riddle.
2. Get drunk with him and his extra-special carousing table.
3. Defeat him in single combat.
4. Something truly awful, like get swallowed by a purple worm and then survive.
5. Serve him for a year and a day.  He mostly wants a cook, but also someone to fight off all the annoying assassins that keep arriving.
6. Marry his beautiful but incompetent offspring.

underneath the mask will be the smiling face of the goku

Bottle Imps

January 22, 2016, 12:26 am

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by Jeff Haynie

There are many demons you can summon from hell, and the least of these brimstone-belching brutes are the bottle imps.

Bottle imps are small, usually only one or two inches.  They come in all sorts of colors.  Some of them even appear as miniature versions of other demons.  (1" high balor, anyone?)  They are very labile, and will react violently with oxygen.  If their bottle is every opened or broken, they die instantly in a small, sputtering flame.

Bottle imps answer questions.  Each type of bottle imp is a completely reliable source for a particular strain of information.  If asked, they will give you an accurate answer.  (Yes, most demons twist their answers, but not bottle imps.  Their answers have already had their sinful price paid; that's how you summon a bottle imp.)

They are chatty little bastards, and will do their best to get you to ask them a question.  They know that the longer you talk with them, the greater you'll slip up and ask them a question.  Because as soon as they are asked a question, they answer it, and then they are free to go.

Player: Do you really think I'll fall for that, imp?
Bottle Imp: You just did!  Ahahaha!  *disappears back to hell*

If you ask them a question that they do not know the answer to, they'll probably shout "I dunno!" and gleefully disappear.

Just as you can determine what a potion does by tasting small portions of it, you can determine what type of knowledge a bottle imp has by talking to it.  Just be careful not to ask it a question.

And just like potions shouldn't be hard to identify, neither should bottle imps.  Anyone should be able to figure out what an imp does if they talk to it long enough.

by fobiapharmer

Types of Bottle Imps [d8]

1, Sagacious Imp - Knows everything that a extraordinarily complete library might have (with nothing printed more recently than a year ago) as well as all the daily newspapers printed since then.  Can also identify another magical item, like a sage.  Finds a way to fit sexual or violent anecdotes into nearly all of its answers.  Identifiable because they are always asking about science, geography, current events, etc.

2. Scandal Imp - This is actually an anti-imp, which doesn't dispense information but instead allows you to inject it into the world.  If you give it a rumor, it will spread it across the city overnight.  If you give it a lie, it will seamlessly insert the lie into whatever book or document that you wish.  Identifiable because it fucking tells you exactly what it is--contrary little bugger.

3. Scavenger Imp - Knows everything that has been forgotten, and can help you forget things that are best forgotten.  By whispering in your ear, it can restore lost memories and even cure insanity--and afterwards you'll have forgotten what it said.  It also has a knowledge of really, really old things--before recorded history.  Identifiable by its enigmatic, nonsense phrases and the fact that it spouts off the events that drove long-dead men insane, such as "Meechum the Kingslayer went insane when he viewed his mother's incest.  That's a common theme, as it struck Bulwarg Fallowheart, but his brother Hurkis remained lucid until his deathbed, when the apparition of his dead wife appeared in his chamberpot."

4. Scryer Imp - Knows everything in the local area: what's inside that chest, the layout of the current dungeon, the shortest route to the exit, where's the nearest secret door, etc.  Contemptuous personality.  Identifiable because they are always showing off by telling players what they have in their pocket, or telling you that a trap was poisoned (lol!) right after it has already stabbed the rogue.

5. Scuttlebutt Imp - Knows three true rumors about everything.  Alternatively, knows a dirty secret about everyone (and everyone has a dirty secret) that you can probably use to blackmail them.  Identifiable because it's always gabbing about interesting people and dungeons across the world, and all the different people that they've been gossiping with.

6. Seeker Imp - Knows how to find any thing you are looking for.  Identifiable because it's always talking about magic swords, and saying things like "but of course, you have no idea how to get there, poor thing."

7. Spell-fetcher Imp - If a spell is known to exist, the imp can fetch it and scribe it on the inside of the bottle before disappearing (where it is treated like a scroll).  For spells that might not exist, there is a 33% chance that the imp finds the new spell as described (effectively discovering a new one), a 33% chance that the imp retrieves a vaguely similar spell, and a 33% chance that the imp just writes down a bunch of dirty limericks in draconic.  Identifiable because they're always asking you what sort of spells you know, and if you've heard of any interesting spells.

8. Spy-brain Imp - Can read someone's mind (like ESP) or extract a specific memory out (the person doesn't even have to be present).  Will then relay all of the juicy details to the querent, lavishing extra details on anything even mildly scandalous.  Identifiable because they are always asking you what you are thinking, and talking about how dirty-minded humans are (even the priests).

How To Use Bottle Imps

Bottle imps belong on your random potion table.  They are the same size as a potion, and they are single-use.  Therefore, they are a potion.

They're not rare.  A wizard PC would know what they are, and would know all the general information in this post (e.g. don't ask them questions unless you mean it).

If the players are having trouble figuring out what an imp does, they can have a sage identify it just like a potion.

Any bottle imp can become a familiar.  They'd love for you to ask.

from Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood

A Few More Words on Dwarven Culture

January 22, 2016, 11:00 pm

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Dwarven Religion

Dwarves don't worship the dwarf god.  There are no dwarven gods (possibly because no dwarf has been creative enough to invent any) and in fact, the whole notion of gods usually requires some explaining in the first place.

Hesaya is the primary religion of the dwarves, just as it is the primary religion of the entire continent of Centerra (although it takes a few different forms).  Like everyone else, they indirectly revere Zulin, Prince of the Upper Air and directly worship a multitude of local priests and slave-gods.  But how do you get dwarves to worship an air god?

Missionary: "What is better, the earth or the air?"

Dwarf: "The earth, because it gives us toil, tombs, and bread."

Missionary: "But does not the act of digging create an air-filled tunnel, which allows you to access more of the earth?  You claim to love the earth, yet you strive for its absence."

Dwarf: "Harrum.  This does not seem to be entirely untrue."

And so this is the root revelation of the Dwarven Covenant: that goodly dwarves will never escape the cycle of rebirth and enter the Heavenly Mansions of Truth.  Instead, goodly dwarves will simply be reborn as dwarves, to dig in the endless earth for all eternity.

One knock on effect of this philosophy is that each dwarf believes that they are already the best lifeform possible.  There is no hope for a better life, because the dwarven life is the best life for them.  This leads to a great deal of civil contentment and smugness.

Note: If you're a regular reader of this blog, don't try to follow Hesaya too closely.  It's gets rewritten every couple months because I can't make up my mind.

The Dwarven Crusades

Given the Hesayan predilection for antonyms and inversion, it is entirely possible that the Riddle of Air is not a metaphysical one, but a physical one.  And it is possible that the answer is to be found downward, rather than upward.

And so the most devout dwarves engage in the Quest to Find God, which mostly involves digging as deeply as possible.  It's a cross between mining, a never-ending pilgrimage, and the Crusades.

There are multiple, concurrent Under-Quests.  Each one is a legion of dwarves digging to the center of the world, supported by supplies from their surface cities.  In the centuries since they started, the front of this ant-line has moved deeper and deeper into the Underworld, leaving dozens of empty cities and cathedrals behind them, abandoned as they build new ones deeper and deeper.

Quite of few of the Dwarven Crusades have become lost, and the fate of these unknown, eternally digging colonies is not known.

Dwarven Gender and Sexuality

Dwarves have no concept of gender, and struggle to discuss sex.

Male and female dwarves look identical, unless you get them naked.  They are completely unromantic when sober, and marriage and conception is something that is usually performed in the service of their king or council.

The non-creative, work-obsessed dwarven psychology disappears entirely when they are drunk.  It is during these times when dwarven acts of passion are committed.  These include marriages and joint mortgages, but they also include more traditional one night stands (which are usually accompanied by a lot of fumbling around with belts and beards, and a lot of speculation whether the other dwarf's hardware is a "bolt" or a "nut".  Not that it changes the outcome much, except when it comes to pregnancy.)

They don't have gendered pronouns.  The closest thing that they have are the concepts of craftsdwarf and miningdwarf, which they use as translations for 'female' and 'male' respectively.

A big divide in dwarven culture exists around the concepts of those who obtain raw resources (the miners) and those who refine them (the crafters).  This schism is large enough that dwarves often lament their irreconcilable psychologies ('craftsdwarves are from Venus, miningdwarves are from Mars').  And like human genders, these labels come with a host of stereotypes and cultural expectations.

Craftsdwarves tend to care more about their appearance and be more assertive, for example.  (The appearance thing is not to be understated; some miningdwarves are filthy, and spend decades without beds, baths, or razors.)

Dwarves use craftsdwarf and miningdwarf as stand-ins for 'woman' and 'man' in private, or around humans if they are still largely unexposed to human culture.  This is because miningdwarves are usually away from home, doing hard labor, while craftsdwarves rarely travel too far from their hearths.  This is the most salient detail dwarves notice when trying to tell apart human men and women.

They struggle to notice boobs and timbre.  Gender just doesn't sit very close to sexuality in the dwarven headspace.

The biggest oddity is that dwarves sometimes change professions throughout their lives, especially in the miningdwarf to craftsdwarf direction.  This leads to odd questions, such as:

Dwarf: "You repaired that saddle excellently.  Are you planning on becoming a woman in a few more years?"
Man: "The fuck you say?"

It is rare, but not unheard of, for biologically female dwarves to adopt human culture down to its gender roles.  These dwarf-women shave their beards; other dwarves usually mistake them for halflings at this point.

Dwarven Names

Dwarves frequently identify themselves according to what their labor produces.  Here are some sample names for a miner, gemcutter, and warrior.

• Brevigon the Calcite Strand
• Tivik the Smagdarine Eye
• Korlag the Nine Orcs

First names are reserved to intimate friends.  Those who meet Tivik had best become accustomed to addressing the dwarf as "The Smagdarine Eye" for a while.

<digression>This is similar to how dragons identify themselves by their hoards, or by the most valuable item in their hoard.</digression>

Dwarven Rulers

Being non-creative, sober dwarves struggle in leadership roles.  For this reason, dwarven kings are never kings themselves.

They are known for kidnapping clever people and forcing them to rule the dwarven kingdom.  (They are good at detecting duplicity and schemes.  They are non-creative, not stupid.)

But they sometimes engage in the practice of shackled kings.  This is when they summon a clever devil and force them to become their king after extracting a lengthy and comprehensive contract has been drawn up.

And not just one devil-king.  They usually get a hold of several devils and force them to work at cross-purposes.  (Pitting the Devil King of Infrastructure against the machinations of the Devil King of Military keeps the devils working in the dwarves' interest.  Most of the time, anyway.)

The only time that dwarves are ruled by dwarves is when they have a Council of Drunkards.

Upside-Down Colonialism

When dwarves invade a place, they usually kill all the underclasses, but preserve the nobility.  The captive aristocracy is confined to their houses, but is generally allowed to continue going on as they always have.

They are attended by dozens of servile dwarven war-butlers, armed with daggers in case the old nobles try anything funny.  The children of these nobles grow up in a city that is 99% dwarven.

The former aristocracy will be depended upon to run the administrative tasks until the dwarves figure out how to take over these things themselves.  Then these human families will be ushered into service industries: masseuse, psychiatrist, and bards (roles that dwarves struggle with, or despise doing).

Dwarven Debts

Dwarves have a great love for contracts and courts.  They have a great many of each.

Debt is something that is common to many dwarves, and they frequently incur a mutual debt in order to cement a treaty or a marriage.  It is a revered--almost holy--tradition.  Since one dwarven family might be richer more than another, or they may be unequal when it comes to repayment, it is often that one family slides into debt to another.  A large proportion of dwarves are born with huge debts.

This isn't seen as too onerous, since it is honorable work.  It only requires fourteen hours of labor a day for several decades, and then the dwarf is free.  Working your way out from under a large debt is immensely respected among dwarves, and is accompanied by parties, laurels, and all the tasteless beer they can drink.

Dwarven Prisons

Dwarven prisons are always fortified labor camps.  This is also not seen as too terrible, since there is always work to do and the work is always tallied accurately.  Sometimes a human is condemned to a life of hard labor in a dwarven work prison, and the dwarves will wonder why the human cries so much when the sentence is read.

The second-most terrible thing you can do to a dwarf is to cut off their beard.  The second most-terrible thing is to cut off their hands.

Even dwarves in solitary confinement are given bricks to stack or a pile of straw to sort.  Lacking that, dwarves go insane, and will smooth the walls until their hands bleed, or slip into the idiosyncratic madness known of fleshmining.

Dwarven Madness

More than any other race, dwarves tend to go insane.  There is a lot of genetic pressure on their behavior, and it creates a lot of psychic friction.

Stable colonies of insane dwarves are known as the duergar.

But there is an upside to this madness.

It is well-known that magic items (aside from scrolls and potions) are only created by a master craftsman in a mindset of great instability: fear, love, and of course MADNESS.

Dwarves are also the most likely of the races to allow madness to run its course.  Mad dwarves are often sealed up inside their homes and given the materials needed to perform their crafts.  A close eye is kept on them, and they usually send for the healer when the mad dwarf begins headbutting the floor monotonously or eating their own beard.  This is why dwarves have more magic weapons than anyone else.

They also sometimes die from overwork, but this is something to be revered, like starving to death because you gave all your food to hungry orphans.

Dwarven Tombs

What do dwarves do when they have no work to do?  When there is an absence of gems to cut or metal to work into armor?  There must be a release valve somewhere, for the overflow.

And this is the function of tombs in dwarven society.

A dwarf's most prized possession in their tomb.  The usually begin digging it when they are very young, and they will slowly excavate it throughout their entire lives.  They like this because it is concrete and (relatively) impossible to steal.  It is eternal.

And so every dwarven city is surrounded by a halo of tombs, most of which are occupied.  This also helps with their brand of ancestor-worship.

If you do a great service for the dwarves, they will probably reward you with one of the royal tombs.  (The laborers who built the royal tomb are already buried under the floor.  It is their tomb, too.)

Humans who would prefer to have territory, money, or soldiers instead of a royal tomb are usually given these lesser honors, with a shrug.  Who can understand the minds of humans?

Remember. . .

According to the high elves (who alone have a history that predates the Time of Fire and Madness), dwarves were created by them be a race of asteroid miners.

I've been thinking a lot about dwarves lately.  Hopefully this will make the beards stop.

See Also:
A Few Words on Dwarven Culture
The Dwarves of Mt. Doldrum

MY FAVORITE MONTH IS DISMEMBER

January 25, 2016, 8:11 am

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I rewrote the Death and Dismemberment table again.  As well as the Insanity table.  I did this because I am a crazy.

>CLICK HERE TO GET IT<

Goddamn, the old one was complex.  I don't know why I ever thought it was simple.

Anyway, this was all precipitated by a D&D game I ran last night, wherein a couple of players died, going from full health to dead dead dead in one fell swoop, with no chance to run away.

Yeah, they were first level, and first level is supposed to be squishy.  Was there sub-optimal playering?  Perhaps.  Was there sub-optimal DMing?  Perhaps.  Was there sub-optimal dungeon design?  Perhaps.  But I can't fix any of those things right now.  What I can fix right now is system.

Compared to my old Death and Dismemberment Table, this one is. . .

• Smaller.  Only 3 lines instead of the prior 6.  Why did I think I needed 6?  Christ.  
• About 20% fewer dice to roll, on average.
• Less superfluous.  (Of course you fall over if you get your leg hacked off, why even waste a fucking entry stating that?)
• More injurious.
• Less deadly.  In fact, instant death isn't even on the table any more.
• The injury sources are more comprehensive: fire, acid, lightning, eldritch, non-lethal.
• Just as shoddily styled.  Three tables, three different ugly formats.

New ways to fuck up characters includes:

• Crushed Throat.  You cannot speak louder than a whisper.
• Crushed Ribs.  You suck at holding your breath.
• Burned.  You cannot wear armor.
• Split Personality. Roll up a new level 1 character that uses your current physical stats, but new mental stats.  The class must be different from your current one.  Each session, alternate between these two characters, each one tracking XP separately.

I dunno.  I think there's less chaff and more good, usable stuff.

But shiny new thing is the Fatal Wound thing.  That's what I'm going to replace "Dying" and "Instant Death" with.  We'll see how it works out.

I don't think I've posted pictures in a while, have I?  Here's a bunch.

Regional Classes - Kaladar

January 25, 2016, 6:21 pm

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Why not have regional variations of each of the four basic classes?  Regional subclasses.  Like in one part of the world, fighters train in this style, and in another part, they train in this style.  Maybe not all the fighters in that part of the world, but perhaps most of the fighters.  Or perhaps that is the style of fighting that they are most known for, even though few people actual practice it.

It gives a map a different kind of texture that players will care about.

If I wrote a bunch of these, it might just be a book of alternate classes.  You don't need to restrict player choice when it comes to these classes BUT YOU COULD.  There could be two levels two character generation: the first one when the gaming group decides where their adventuring party is from (which determines which classes are available) and a second one when each player decides what class they are from.

It allows a group of players to create a party that is already identified with an organization or a group within a part of the campaign world.  They are born complete with affiliations and motivations.  I like that.  Born with hooks in 'em.

One thing that unites all of Centerra is that they all bow (to varying degrees) to the Reincarnated Prophetess and the Holy City of Coramont.  This support is paid not through money (that was condemned by the Prophetess) but through personnel.  A great deal of talented people assemble in the name of Coramont and then set out to work in the interest of the Church or the free people of the continent.

The Kingdom of Kaladar

When I first started writing Centerra stuff down, I decided that there would one vanilla, generic, white-bread place somewhere on the map where I could stick all the knights and dragons and damsels and people with names like Goldenloin and Lionsbreath.

That place is Kaladar (formerly known as a bunch of other names that all started with K).

It's basically a generic Camelotoid except for:

• It's one of two superpowers in the world, the other one being the colonial, rapidly industrializing nation of Noth.  They're basically opposites of each other.  These are the only two nations (and everyone else is a city-state of some sort).
• Kaladar and Noth are the only two places that aren't Points of Light-styled, because they're well populated.  They're Points-of-Darkness where the society will lean pretty heavily on adventurers, though.
• It's where the Prophetess (who founded Hesaya) and is where the Pilgrimage usually starts.
• It's the only place where dragons are allowed to own property.  Some of them are landed nobility who are allowed to eat peasants without having to justify it, and others are Dunkelzahn-style merchant-kings, the most powerful of whom is Maladryn Masaat.
• I'm probably going to put in a couple of Orientalisms in there to keep me from falling asleep when writing it.  Like, everyone eats a lot of noodles and sits on the floor.  Honorable suicide is expected when you fuck up.
• They are the inventors and primary practitioners of culinary alchemy (see below).

Fighter Variant - Dragon-knight

Oh man, everyone thinks that it's so great to be a dragon knight.  Ride dragons into battle, be a bad-ass.

Well, I got news for you.  It sucks.  Compared to his mount, a dragon-rider is about as badass as a rat riding a wolf.

Because think about it.  Between a man and a ten-thousand pound killing machine, who do you think is going to be in charge?  That's right.  The dragon is the boss.  All the dragon knight does is protect his neck with a shield-lance (the only really vulnerable part of a dragon) and try not to vomit during the acrobatic parts.

If you don't clean Sir's scales perfectly by the time he wakes up, you're fucking fired.  He'll get a new squire faster than you can say 'flambe'.  There are a lot more dragon-knights than there are knight-dragons.

• Lose some defensive abilities of the fighter.
• Gain the ability to defend your allies a little better.
• At higher levels, you can bargain with a knight-dragon for a service.  It requires the king's approval and a lot of money, but you can pay a dragon to join your party for a day.

Some dragon-knights are wizards.  They specialize in divination and communication spells.  They're basically the knight-dragon's radar and comm systems.

Fighter Variant - Knight

Keldon is the Generic Fantasy Kingdom so of course it has Generic Fantasy Knights.  I f igure the fun thing about being a knight is the knightly character, and how the knight fits into the rest of the world, not so much the mechanics themselves.  They're interesting in the same way that a paladin can be interesting.

• Slightly less good at hitting things.
• Code of Honor, paladin-style.
• Huge social benefits.  Can kill peasants and no one gives a shit.  Invitations to parties.  The king has patted you on the back before.
• You get a free horse every level!
• You can throw lances for some reason!
• If you carry a battle standard in one of your hands and yell shit like "King!  Crown!  Honor!  Princesses!" all your allies get +1 to hit and +1 vs fear.

Rogue Variant - Black Rabbit

The Black Rabbits are a family of wererabbits loyal to the king.  They were formally a powerful cabal of thieves until they were captured and threatened with execution.

In time, what started out as a forced relationship (the king held many members of their family hostage in his household to ensure their loyalty) has turned into a convivial one (many of the Black Rabbits have now married into the royal family).

There is a secret place called the Royal Warren.  It is full of rabbits, and the rabbit king lives there.  The black rabbit family has intermarried into this royal family, too.  (And some of the Black Rabbits are married to a rabbit princess and a human princess, neither being aware of each other.  Rogues, right?)

The Black Rabbits aren't common knowledge, but people in Kaladar know not to fuck with rabbits.  Fuck with too many rabbits and you end up buried in five different burrows in five different counties.  They're rabbity ninjas.

The Black Rabbits manipulate a lot of things in Kaladar.  They're the only reason the dragons are still in power, for example.  The dragons are powerful and immensely good at focusing their attention at a single big task (like leveling a kingdom) but they are basically blind when it comes to noticing things that aren't shiny, shouting, or waving a sword in their face.

• Less ability to kill things.
• Can turn into a rabbit and back again, at will.  Bonus powers during full moons.

Cleric Variant - Cleric of Saint Borgaine

There's a part of Kaladar called the Plentymore Plains, named after their fertility.  It's full of big networks of farms built around hub-towns, each one about a day's travel from each other, like what actually existed in the medieval ages.  It's entirely safe to travel through as long as you don't ask questions or open any locked doors.

Saint Borgaine is sort of the anti-druid.  Forests are evil; parks are good.  Forests must be pushed back and tamed until future generations think of forests as someplace peaceful and relaxing (because that is true victory over the wild).

• Instead of turn dead, they get turn nature.
• Possible leric spells: speak with farm animal, multiply food, farm animal growth, make straight the path, control sun, summon harvest angel (it's got a scythe and a pumpkin head), touch of starvation, corpse to cornucopia, summon the mighty ox, everything in its place.

Wizard Variant - Hundred-Year Chef

So there's this space dragon called Forganthus Valore.  Centerra holds nothing that he desires, except perhaps some tasty food.  But not just any food.  He needs a stew cooked to his specific specifications--which are so exotic and precise that it usually takes about a hundred years to assemble and cook them all.

So Forganthus shows up every hundred years or so, eats a huge stew brimming with exotic flavors and impossible alchemy, gives instructions for the next stew which is to be served to him in 1d20+90 years, and then flies back into space.

In exchange for this stew, Forganthus answers questions.  He was alive prior to the Time of Fire and Madness, and knows the truth about the elves.  He doesn't see the future, but he's a hell of a prognosticator (and gives really good stock tips, so to speak).  He has two heads; one eats while the other answers questions.

Example ingredients: Three black goats, each born with a third eye.  The tear of a laughing angel.  The laughter of a man who has destroyed what he loved most.  Ten thousand mermaid hearts.  Basilisk blood boiled with butter for the last three years.  A furball coughed up from a calico cat.

And Forganthus has a delicate tongue.  Delicate enough that he could taste the difference between a hairball from a calico cat and a hairball made from the mixed hair of different colored cats.  That little fuckup cost Kaladar 60,000gp (for the new tower) and a princess (which was kidnapped and never replaced).

The particular little branch of the royal Kaladarian* apparatus that is in charge of overseeing this stew-dragon-prophecy business is the Stewer's Guild.  Except for the dragon families (taken as a whole), they are the most powerful force in Kaladar.

*Ye gods, it sounds even worse as an adjective.  I love it.

They are composed primarily of alchemical chefs, but their numbers also include some bureacrats, mercantile speculators, historians, spies, and seers.

• They're based on the manrider alchemist class (which was itself based on the wizard) except that instead of making lots of small potions that can be stored indefinitely, they produce a few huge meals that must be eaten immediately.
• Examples of feast powers, which will usually affect the whole party: anyone can teleportingly switch places with another party member, inter-party telepathy, anyone can send HP around like Paypal money, the whole party fuses together into a big fucking Voltron made of meat with one hand made of sword fingers and another hand made of wand fingers. 
• They are the only class that can wield a telescope fork, because they comprehend a need.  These magical instruments function as wands, and become more extensible as the thousand-year chef gains in power.

Should I watch Toriko? It sounds cool, when people describe it to me.

---

Ogres and Their Hungry Kin

January 26, 2016, 2:39 am

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You must first catch a child between the ages of four and ten.  It must be shown no gentleness, nor hear any kindness.  The child must be kept from other children, lest they feel sympathy for others in a similar plight.  It must be beaten when they are bad and ignored when they are good.  It must never, ever be allowed to learn manners, or politeness, or cleanliness.

Cuss at 'em, slap 'em.  Leave them out in the rain.  But leave the door unlocked sometimes, so that the child can creep back indoors.  They will learn that a soft bed is a reward for deceit.

And above all else, they must eat, eat, eat.

They must eat until their tummies cramp and nausea curdles their brains.  They must eat until fat blossoms on their small limbs and plumps up their neck.  Their face is buried beneath it, their heart is entombed.

They are rude and lazy, but they are not cruel.  They merely lack all compassion, and in some ways, that's worse.  They are restless and indolent, always roaming, never reaching a destination.

When they have swallowed their tears to the bottom of their bitter bellies.  When they have forgotten all words except curses and mockeries.  When they no longer miss their mom.  When they will spit on you for asking if they miss their mom.  When they think themselves to be grown.

This is when they are ready.

They are hung on racks and washed with bird blood.  Bog water is forced down their throat until their bellies bulge, and then kicked until they vomit it back up.  This process is repeated until their bodies are round like barrels, and just as hollow.

They are stretched, pressed, and beaten.  Their limbs are pulled long, long, long and their fingers stretched until they can completely encircle a man's neck between their thumb and forefinger.  And finally, they are fed bones and sugar, to build an ogre skeleton inside them.

They are full of thick bones.  Not a single one is straight, and no two are identical.  They are big and bent and hungry, and their body is not wrapped in fat nor muscle but some amalgam of both.  This is a newborn ogre.

They are always eating, but they are never full.  They wonder why, but never for long, because that is a complicated, discomforting path that their mind must tread.  And if there are two things that an ogre absolutely cannot abide, it is complexity and discomfort.

Bugbears

The youngest and the smallest of the ogres are called bugbears.  They are also the stealthiest, and they are used to steal more children.

Most are eager to do so.  They have been weak their whole lives, and would like nothing more than to feel more powerful than someone else.

But children are also a danger to a bugbear, as well.  If the bugbear feels any kinship with the child, or pity, or empathy, their whole ogre quintessence will erode.  And so it is that children sometimes kill the bugbear that was sent to kidnap them.

By the time an ogre grows out of the bugbear stage, they are beyond such trifling doubts.  They are an ogre, and will forever be proud of that fact.

Ettins

Ogres eat.

Ogres are horrible people.

Sometimes ogres eat horrible people.  When this happens, the horrible person isn't digested down into nothingness.  They exist within the matrix of casual cruelty that forms the ogre's biology.

Sure, there are kidneys and spleens in there, but those organs don't do what you think they do.  An ogre's kidney removes kind thoughts from the blood.  The spleen produces bile and pumps it into the brain.  The lungs filter the ogre's breath and exchange gentle words for callous ones.

And into this metaphysical ecosystem enters the half-digested psyche of whatever curmudgeon the ogre happened to eat.  Fire cannot burn fire; like cannot devour like.  And so the horrible parts of the eaten person persist, like islands of fat floating on top of chicken broth.

And sometimes these people--those who were eaten and then halfway digested--sprout back out from the ogre in which they were buried.  They grow a new head on their shoulder.  They become a two-headed ogre: an ettin.

The head that grows isn't the dead person, not exactly.  It's more like a crude imitation prepared from the worst parts of their original personality and memories (which is all that survives the brutish fermentation of the ogre's guts).

Ettin heads usually argue among themselves, and in true ogrish fashion, this usually leads to violence.  Sometimes, it even leads to decapitation, a process that the ogre usually survives, unfortunately.

Ogre Magi

Sometimes the horrible person that an ogre eats is another ogre, and then the brute has two ogrish heads sprouting from their shoulders.  Sometimes an especially foul human was already ogrish enough that it counts as an ogre for this purpose.  (Not all ogres are shaped like ogres; remember that as you go about your day.)

They are smart, because they have two heads, but they are also dumb, because they have two heads.  None of us is as dumb as all of us.

As an ogre grows a second head, it gains in sloth and bitterness.  But it also gains in magical acumen, as well.  No one knows why this is exactly.  They cast spells like a group of people competing for a bartender's attention.

More heads sometimes, but not always, correspond to increased magical power.  So while there are some potent ogre mages with two heads, the exemplars of their type are enormous, ancient cannibal-giants with vast nests of grimacing heads atop their shoulders, some from kidnappers, some from kings.

Hags

Ogre mages are ostentatious and bold.  They favor outward displays of power: flight, lightning bolt, cone of cold, darkness.  And so it makes sense that their wickedness is displayed outwards, manifesting as new heads.

But some ogres are elusive and crafty.  They favor inward displays of power: invisibility, charm, illusion, polymorph, mirage arcana.  These are the hags, and they hold their wickedness inside themselves, where it cannot be seen.

They are made in the same way as ettin and ogre magi: by the consumption of especially wicked people.  But these sinners are not reborn into the ogre, as they are inside an ettin.  Their bodies are not cradles, but tombs.

It is for this reason that every hag has a belly full of corpses, or perhaps just their heads.  The more corpses in her belly, the greater her power.

If that sounds repulsive, yes, it certainly is.  But I doubt you will think that when you meet a hag.  They are wrapped in so many layers of illusion, glamour, and polymorph spells that it sometimes takes wizards years to figure out what a hag's corpse really looks like.  They don't renew their aging glamour spells; they merely put down another layer.

Cyclops

Now, ogres are lazy hedonists, that much is known.  And although they despise all forms of thought and intellectualism, they are not stupid.  If they behave stupidly, it is because they despise the act of thinking, not that they are necessarily bad at it.  (This isn't quite captured by "Int 8", but use your imagination.)

The constant pursuit of pleasure often leads to pain.  Alcohol leads to hangovers.  Stealing sheep leads to a painful rain of slingstones.  Raping bear cubs leads to a mauling.

And so, among some ogres, a new type of thought emerges.  A bastard form of Epicureanism.  An ogre seeks pleasure, but pleasure can also be defined as the absence pain.  Freedom from noise, fear, distraction, and stimulation.

Remember that an ogre's body is a mirror of its mind.  As soon as an ogre begins to think these things, its body begins to change.

An eye becomes red-rimmed, rots, and falls out of its socket, so that the ogre may see less of of the world and the sundry sensations that cause it displeasure.  The remaining eye grows large and yellow.  The two eye sockets merge into one.  Now it is a cyclops.

They seek the loneliest places possible.  Their mindset is nearly monastic.

But remember, they are still ogres.  They are not at peace, and they are not satisfied.  That frustration and gnawing dissatisfaction is still there, except it is now a mental turmoil instead of a physical one.  They don't seek things to make themselves happy, they seek absence of things to keep themselves from being unhappy, but towards this end they have failed miserably.

Everything annoys them.  Sounds annoy them.  Silence annoys them.  They hate everything.

Cyclops have a unique power, too.  They can see the future.  It is a cruel gift, because to look into the future is to accept more unwanted stimulation, more hateful scenes of an unwanted life.

And so a cyclops may make for a passable oracle, if you approach them with a great deal of sheep and a very small amount of noise.

Headless Ogres

These are ogres that have decapitated themselves.

Ogres move through stages of gluttony, indolence, and annoyance.  Ettins remove annoying heads by bashing them in their sleep and then chewing through the neck.  Where else could this wretched cycle end?

But decapitation is not death, for an ogre.  (However, disembowelment is, because an ogre's guts are much more essential than their head.)

Remember that an ogre's body is like a fairy's body: it exists and operates as a manifestation of the mind.  Not the inverse, as is sometimes claimed of humans.

Headless ogres are damned things.  They wander the moors and the wastes, living only a slightly more pointless life than before.  They catch small animals and pulp their corpses between two rocks.  This bloody pulp is then pushed down their sucking neckholes by dirty thumbs.  In this way, life goes on.

Poets love headless ogres, and say that they are a reflection of ourselves.  We all grind up coyotes between flat rocks and shove them in our neckholes, and having done this, stagger off into the next wasteland.

Ogres feel a great deal of sensation.  They feel so fucking much.  They have the biggest appetites and the biggest joys.  Nothing is as hungry as a hungry ogre, and nothing is as jolly as a drunk ogre.  They have the biggest hearts, though they be bent and blackened.

They are carnal creatures, perhaps the most carnal.  And because an ogre feels so fucking much and a headless ogre has no meat-brain to feel that muchness, the sensation spills out into the environment.  They're broken fire hydrants, pumping themselves into the street.

We are candles; they are torches.  Everyone feels what they feel, but they also feel what it is like to be an ogre: restless, hungry, and frustrated.

Stat Blocks

Ogre
HD 4  AC leather  Club 1d12
Move 9  Int 8  Morale 7
<Bully> The ogre insults, intimidates, or shoves a creature.  If the target fails a Charisma check, they take 1d6 non-lethal.  However, if this would reduce a creature below 0 HP, they do not get knocked out, but instead run away in tears/frightened if they fail a save vs fear.
<Omnivore> Given enough time and ketchup, an ogre can eat anything softer than metal.  They are immune to harmful effects of things they've eaten (e.g. acid, poison, green slime).

Bugbear
HD 3  AC none  Cudgel 1d10
Move 9  Int 8  Morale 7
<Spells> invisibility 3/day, self only, this invisibility only works on adult humanoids.
<Nemesis of Experience> Bugbears are childrens' foes.  Innocence is the key to fighting them, not experience.  Attackers get a penalty on their AC and attack roll equal to their level, max -6.  Children deal double damage to bugbears and can hurt them even with flimsy improvised weapons (such as cardboard swords).

Ettin
HD 5  AC leather  Club/Fist 1d12/1d6
Move 9  Int 8  Morale 7
<Two-Headed> An ettin is harder to surprise.  If you can get the heads to disagree on something, they have a 2-in-6 chance to waste 1d6 rounds arguing, unless you do something obvious like attack them.
<Omnivore> Given enough time and ketchup, an ogre can eat anything softer than metal.  They are immune to harmful effects of things they've eaten (e.g. acid, poison, green slime).

Ogre Mage
Just give an ogre a few more HD and some of these spells: lightning bolt, cone of cold, fly, darkness, disguise, earth tremor, command, stone snare, dancing weapon

Hag
Just give an ogre a few more HD and some witchy spells, such as these: illusion, charm person, invisilibity, disguise, gaseous form, sleep, dominate person, fear, reduce

Cyclops
HD 6  AC leather  Club 1d12
Move 9  Int 8  Morale 7
<Foresight> A cyclops can see the future, or at least a few of the most likely timelines.  All creatures that the cyclops can see get -4 attack and AC when fighting the cyclops.  A creature gets immunity to this ability for 1 minute if they do something completely unexpected (i.e. everyone around the table agrees that they did not think the creature would do that).  This shunts the person onto one of the less-likely timelines, and the cyclops' third eye must spend a minute casting around for the proper thread.

Headless Ogre
HD 6  AC leather  Club 1d12
Move 9  Int 8  Morale 7
<Broadcast Self> Everyone within 1 mile feels more ogrish.  Within 100', creatures cannot benefit from morale bonuses or anything that depends on positive emotions.  They get -4 against anything that depends on negative emotions.
<Broadcast Pain> When damage is done to a headless ogre, half of that damage is mirrored onto the person that damaged it (as long as there is a person that directly caused it).  Save for half.

Bardic Services

January 28, 2016, 1:29 am

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Bards are a service that the players can (and should) seek out in town, similar to how they seek out sages and alchemists.  They usually offer the following things:

#1 Information

Bards talk to a lot of people.  Specifically, they talk to the kind of people that adventurers are most likely to be interested in: tomb robbers, travelers, law enforcement, and one-armed Joe.

This means that they can be convinced to part with some of their knowledge.  Want explicit knowledge of where the dungeons are?  Done.  Want to buy some rumors to go along with those dungeons?  Done.  Pay even more and you might even get some higher quality rumors that the bard knows to be true.

The party might pay in coin, but they might also pay in information themselves, but it has to be the stuff that bard is interested in.  A rival adventuring party looted a legendary sword and used it to kill a a paladin of Saint Ferragun?  That's juicy stuff.  The ghost in the mine moaned the king's name?  Tell me more.  Stories, in a word, not just mere information.

I like this because it quickly tells the party where adventurin' is to be had.  No pussyfootin'.

#2 Rumor Management

I feel like this one is always underestimated.

Want to keep rival adventuring parties from looting the newly discovered dungeon out from under your feet?  Spread rumors that it's empty except for dust and the deadly dickrot disease.

Want to get invited to a fancy party?  Spread a rumor that you killed the hydralisk that was menacing the local swamp (even when you didn't).

Want to keep the local law enforcement off your back for a short while?  Spread a rumor that someone saw Kesselgrave in the nearby swamp, pulling the heads off bears.

#3 Designing a Dungeon

This is getting into story game territory, but bear with me.

Basically, the party asks the bard to tell them about a dungeon that they haven't heard of before, and then the DM asks the group to provide the details about the dungeon.

So the DM asks about what dungeon do they want to hear about, and they're like, let's hear about the sunken tomb of the pirate wizard.

Then the DM rolls their eyes and asks about what treasures are in the dungeon ("Why, I didn't know anyone else had ever heard of the sunken tomb!  It is a tale believed to be false by most.  What hast thou heardest?") and the players are like, a magic boat and a telescope that can teleport you to wherever you're looking.

Then the DM asks about what sort of deadly perils the dungeon holds, and the players are like, barnacle men, zombie sharks, ghost-possessed treasure, and lots of cursed gold that you really don't want to touch.  ("Touch no coin of the pirate wizard's hoard!  Because they are all cursed, each and every one!")

Basically, you just design an outline of a dungeon with the party, bouncing ideas off each other.  Especially pay attention to what they are most excited about, and what they don't want to have in the dungeon.

And then the characters pay the NPC bard for the honor, and you go off to design that very dungeon in between sessions.

But here's the kicker--everything that you just established about the new dungeon are just rumors, which means that they can be true, false, or anything in between.  You can even roll for their veracity if you want, in a pleasant inversion of how things normally work.  (I like a rumor table that is 70% true, but I also think that this should be influenced by how much they pay the bard.  Cheapskate the bard, or threaten him, and the bard will tell you more lies (50% true), but pay off the bard very well, and he will tell you the secrets that he promised not to tell anyone (80% true).)

In a way, it's like the payers paying GP in order to play as the bard, who is playing as the DM.

And then when the players get there, give them the dungeon they wanted, more or less.

Foreign Angels

January 29, 2016, 1:57 am

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Go read a list of demons and you'll notice how Christian they are.

I don't mean that the demons themselves are Christian, just that they are designed as an evolution of human morals.  Demons are often designed to exploit one of the seven deadly sins, for example.  And angels are stamped from the same Judeo-Christian coin, just the opposite side.  And this set of Christian morals informs the whole structure of morality and divinity within a game.  The good gods are the ones that embrace Christian values, and the bad ones are the ones that eschew them.  Time and time again.

This is moral chauvinism.

The funny thing is that D&D has often been about exploring other cultures, religions, and ways of life.  The best parts about it were like the best part of old Star Trek.

And yet this diversity of otherworldly cultures never really spread into morality.  And once you notice that, a strange incongruity begins to emerge.  There are lots of races with bizarre cultures and moralities, not just Christian ones.  Yet, the arrangement of heaven and hell mirrors Christian values, and only Christian values.  Where are the foreign angels?

Lust and wrath are bad. . . right?  What about a culture in which lust was considered sort of okay, and extra-marital sex didn't condemn you to hell?  What about a culture where you were expected to fly into a murderous rage if your honor was insulted, and it was pathetic if you didn't?  What about ones where incest was okay?  Or funerary cannibalism?

And that last paragraph was just for normal, Earth-human cultures.  We haven't even gone into the deep end of fantasy cultures yet.

What if D&D was written by elves, for whom pride was the highest of virtues, and chastity the deepest of shames?  Or by druids, who see language as the root of all evil and bestial mindlessness as something to be aspired to?

Fuck, what if it was written by work-obsessed dwarves?

There are many places where we could begin rewriting the moral cosmology, but maybe we should start here, and just start 

Foreign Angels and Demons

Human angels represent human values (which are not monolithic, but have certain predispositions), and tend to resemble humans (if they resemble any humanoid at all).  Their angels tend to be white and radiant, while their demons are often muscular and fiery, and speak to their private shames.

Dwarven angels represent dwarven values (which are not monolithic, but have certain predispositions), and tend to resemble dwarves.  Most notably, they all have beards (which dwarven demons never do).  Dwarven angels swim through the earth, and many of them resemble moles or other burrowing creatures.  Most of them give gemstones as gifts, or leave them in their wake.  Many of their angels are associated with fire or other symbols of the forge.  Dwarven demons tend to be invisible things, or creatures without any muscle or callouses.  Every dwarven demon is supposedly unique.

Elven angels are freakishly beautiful.  They offer a great many compliments, and expect a great many in return.  They are also fairly worldly, and many expect hospitality to be offered to them.  Elven demons are tremendously ugly.

Orcs have no angels, only demons to torment them.  Their demons sometimes resemble the other races.

Merfolk angels resemble edible fish, and are themselves edible.

Goblin "angels" (of the goblins who worship the False God) resemble goblins with wings made from wires and trash.  They have no powers, no special knowledge, and are mechanically indistinguishable from normal goblins.

Druidic angels are all fucking bears.  So are their demons.

How to Use Foreign Angels

Like all angels, they're sent to help the good guys.  But the cultural gap can be huge.

Maybe the party is supposed to seal a demonic portal in the Underworld, and the cleric prays for assistance.  A dwarven angel is nearby, hears the prayer, and decides to show up.  It casts (a morally relativistic version of ) detect evil and sees that one of the party members donates their money to people they don't even know, and another of them is only interested in knowledge, not money.

If the party can convince the angel that they are good, greedy, and hardworking, it might help them out.  It'll probably just leave, mildly disappointed and disgusted by the party's vulgar display of unrepentant sin.  It probably won't attack them (angels, on average, tend to not be total dicks) unless the party pisses it off by casting ESP on it, trying to pick its pocket, or arguing theology.

OR

Maybe the party is in an abandoned Elven rocket-ship tree and they pray at an elven shrine for assistance clearing out all the orcs.  An elven angel shows up and nearly vomits at how repulsive the party is.  None of them have a Charisma above 15.

But the angel is a professional, and made certain Oaths in the name of Authority.  Besides, it hates orcs, so it negotiates for a little while.

It wants to challenge mortals to testing their skills, so perhaps it will ask the party to go through the dungeon in a more difficult way.  Or challenge them to fight a certain monster in a duel, rather than a group fight.

"You are skilled with a blade, are you not?  If you were truly excellent, you would walk up to those orcs, naked except for your weapon, and challenge their leader to a duel." or  "Orcs are truly miserable creatures, worth your contempt.  A party of elves could kill all of the orcs in this building in less than an hour.  If you could do the same, I will open the door to the basement, and you can perhaps claim some weapons of the Elven ancestors.  Though you cannot escape the ugliness of your race, there is no reason why you could not bring your skills to an elven level of prowess."

(Dwarven) Angel of Greed

This angel usually manifests as a dwarf with gemstone eyes and enormous badger claws.  It's dirty, muscular, and has a soothing musky scent, like lumberjack beard.  It's belly is fully of dark soil and silver nuggets.  It exists to help dwarves overcome the obstacles that would prevent them from achieving the object of their greed, or to reassure them if their greed should waver.  They strive against evil (lazy dwarves who aren't greedy) 

Digression: a strange bureaucracy of heaven seems to be emerging where dwarven angels oversee dwarves and hold them accountable to dwarvish morals, human angels oversee humans and hold them accountable to human morals, and everyone bows to Zulin, Prince of the Upper Air, Servant of the Authority.  How does this work?  Can a dwarf convert to human-flavored Hesaya?  Are the angels of one the demons of another?

<Unworthy Wealth>  10% of a character's metallurgic wealth combusts (gold, silver, copper, etc).  (5% on a save.)  It does X holy damage to them, where X is equal to the square root of the wealth that was lost.  (So if 100gp were lost, the character would take 10 damage.)  It can do this ability once per round as a free action.

<Mine> Whenever a beneficial magic effect occurs within 100', the Angel of Greed can copy it onto itself.  (This applies to healing spells, as well as healing from potions.)

<Spells> Can give a person a permanent version of find the path so that they will always know how to get to the thing that they want.  Can give away one of those extradimensional chests that is summoned/dismissed by waving the key around.

(Elven) Angel of Pride

This angel usually manifests as an extremely tall elf, clad in a shapeless cloak of leaves in which diminutive birds-of-paradise nest.  Flowers trail behind it, and the whole world seems to be more beautiful because the angel's sense of magnificence, but also uglier by comparison.  When it is in the room, all other beautiful things are not beautiful.  Not your lovely young wife with Cha 18, not the naked nymph (whose beauty-based abilities would also be suppressed).  The Angel of Pride has no Charisma score, because (a) that would be enough to heretically suggest that it's beauty is finite, and (b) it's Charisma is ineffable.

It wants creatures to be proud of what you are good at.  It wants everyone to strive to be better, more skilled, more beautiful, more exemplary.  It wants you to love yourself, and love that excellence within yourself.  And it wants you to ignore anything to the contrary.

It leaves most groups wanting to take a bath and buy some exfoliating skin cream.  It fights with a rapier and a halo of bird-of-paradise feathers, which dart around like arrows, or like hungry minnows.  It can probably also turn you into an ugly little bird, like maybe a kiwi or a small wood duck.

<Perfection> As long as the Angel of Pride is at full health and hasn't embarrassed itself, creatures who want to attack it must succeed on a save or be compelled towards admiration.  Once it takes damage, the illusion of perfection is ruined and you see it for what it is: a vastly superior creature with immaculate skin, otherworldy grace, and incandescent beauty.  The person who kills it must make a save or fall into a deep depression that lasts until the end of the day or until they get a positive emotion effect.  While in this fugue, they won't want to do anything except mope and apologize to the angel's corpse.


<Look Down Upon> Each time the Angel of Pride is damaged by a filthy mud-creature, it reacts by growing 1d6 feet taller and more beautiful.  (The ceiling grows to accommodate the angel, if necessary.)  It casts command as a free action.

<Eloquent> When it talks to you, every sentence is a suggestion.  When it smiles, save vs charm.

<Boons> Gives away a permanent +1 Charisma to whoever has the most Charisma already.  Give away a suit of elven mithril +1 that can glamour itself into a party dress/tuxedo, but all of this sweet magic only functions while the wearer is at full HP.  Gives a ring of glamour to whoever is highest level that also increases XP gain by +5% or something.  Maybe give you a really racist magic sword that only obeys you as long as you kill orcs and don't take orders from ugly people.  Gives the whole party a blessing that they can expend at any time to double their bonus to a roll (so the people who are already good at something get extra better).

Other Ideas

Angel of Cannibalism

Angel of Incest???

(Elven) Demon of Humility

(Dwarven) Demon of Charity

(Dwarven) Angel of Toil (the value of hard work, and lots of it)

(Dwarven) Demon of Invention and Creativity (humans are very susceptible to this one)

(Elven) Angel of Sloth (wants you to rest, take care of your body, get other people to do it)

(Elven) Angel of Lies (especially white lies)

(Elven) Demon of Honesty (tells uncomfortable truths)

(Elven) Demon of Chastity (bundled up in many layers, full of STDs)

(Orcish) Demon of Mercy (spare the child and spoil the horde)

(Orcish) Demon of Peace and Agriculture

(Orcish) Demon of Calm

(Druidic) Demon of Languages and Symbolic Thought

(Druidic) Angel of Insect Mindlessness

(Druidic) Angel of Selfishness

d100 Horses With Chris McDowall

February 15, 2016, 11:42 pm

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Me and +Chris McDowall had a baby.  And then we had 99 more.  And all of those babies were horses.  And now we are putting them up for imaginary adoption, because you want some of these horses in your game, and honestly, where am I even going to keep that many horses?  Even my imaginary house isn't that big.

This is the OSR-compatible version.  Chris has put up an ItO-compatible version over on his blog.  The two versions are identical, except for where they reference system-specific rules and stuff.

1. Potentia: Mighty mahogany steed with skin like a sweaty lover. Any female horse he catches in his gaze must pass a Save or become pregnant. Riding him always causes slight arousal.
2. Master H: A red fighting horse with strong forelegs trained for punching. Only responds to requests, not orders, and insists on being called “master”. Anyone that tries to boss him around gets punched back into line.
3. Horatia “Dropkick” Horatian: A chestnut horse in a wrestling mask. Pretty well trained and moderately agile, but if you remove the mask he dies from shame.
4. Mockmare: Bits of horse strapped together and animated. Needs a Save after vigorous activity to avoid losing a bodypart. You can reattach any horse part you like though.
5. Fleschee: Big fat pale horse. Has a weird gelatinous flesh. Needs twice as much food as normal or refuses to act. Completely immune to physical harm though. Super dumb.  
6. Sweetpearl II: Spoilt pageant pony. Fears being alone, and great at making you feel guilty.
7. Quacker: Pretty fast horse wearing a wooden duck-head over his own. Doesn’t actually know how to quack. If you remove the duck-head he only goes slow and sobs quietly.  
8. Horsebox 1: Black wheeled metal box containing the remains of a horse, and “Horsebox 1” written in white paint with a skull and crossbones. Moves of its own will but always follows its owner at around the speed of a normal horse. Can also be ridden at this pace if you give very literal directions. Comes with the myth that a flaming ghost horse will arise in a time of need (it doesn’t). Always useful to have a dead horse on hand though.
9. Big Oz: The stupidest horse in history. Has a massive horse head, one eye missing, and no teeth. Smells so bad. Nobody would charge for this horse, they’ll just throw him in for free with any other.
10. Sweeper: Sleek horse trained to sniff out explosives.
11. Emerald Dream: Green-hued black horse with finely plaited mane. So beautiful that other horses hate him and won’t cooperate. If they fail a Save they’ll even be hostile.
12. White Velvet: This horse is so soft a ride that when you go back to another horse you suffer d6 damage each mile you ride for the first day. After that you get used to it.  
13. Scratch: Horse with spade-hooves, used to dig up roots in its native land. Can be made to dig but is pretty slow to make up for it.
14. Chap-Mozul: Snooty thoroughbred that absolutely refuses to get dirty. Really fast and great jumper though.  
15. Butterfly: A shabby grey horse partially dyed pink and with gaudy butterfly wings pinned to its back. Looks and acts ashamed, but resists any attempts to remove the decoration.
16. Worldsteed: Twice the size of an ordinary horse, mounted with a howdah. Really slow and actually pretty weak from bad bones. Looks tired.
17. Murmur Junior: A pony that makes whimpering noises. If you listen closely (takes at least a minute of coaxing) he actually gives quite good advice in common tongue.
18. Rok Savage: A golden steed with a flowing mane but sort of a goofy face. Adorned with fake barbarian furs and subject to many lies about his berserker rages. Is really quite placid.
19. Wruffal: A muscular brown steed that goes out of its way to antagonise any larger animals it encounters. Hates his brother Awaruff and they duel to first blood each time they meet.
20. Awaruff: A muscular brown steed that goes out of its way to stamp on any smaller animals it encounters. Hates his brother Wruffal and they will duel to first blood each time they meet, but Awaruff fights dirty.   
21. Bjors: A horse with distant bear ancestry. Can talk with bears as one of their own, and needs a little meat in his diet to stay happy.
22. White Slipper: A, exquisite, tiny white horse that can only carry children or the very small.  
23. Eric of Horse:  A peachy coloured horse that can carry out all of the functions of a well-trained squire from the olden days. He’ll sharpen weapons, help you in and out of armor, and neigh encouragement while you duel.
24. Jeremus Faltine Gratziarse: A blue-grey racehorse that only eats fine food. Will try to eat any gems or coins nearby, but if he gets a good fill of them he runs at twice the normal speed for that day.
25. Hurter: Total dick of a horse that loves to torture everyone else, but utterly loyal to his master.
26. Hamham: Pig-nosed horse that regenerates as a troll.
27. Anequin: Long faced lean-green horse. Hates all other horses, and anything that reminds him that he’s a horse. Loves the servitude of being owned, though.  
28. Ode to Forgotten Steeds: Dyed black horse, bred from stock fallen on some battlefield. Incredibly somber and depressing. Will point to anything likely to make you miserable with a solemn hoof.  
29. Icehorse: Rare breeding stock, raised in arctic conditions and high altitude to improve strength. Total badass of a white horse that will stand up to any punishment. Cries a little as it sleeps.  
30. Carltott: Big fat show-horse that knows a few disgusting dances and suggestive gestures.  
31. Ranton Spur: Mistreated horse that will never trust another master. Dull brown with lots of scars.
32. Maximum Grace: Burglary-horse that can move silently and climb brick walls.
33. Null Horse: You pay for a horse, but you don’t get a horse. There trader will say there’s a message there but it’s just a scam.  
34. Prancer Prime: Horse with some reindeer stock. Can fly if snow is falling.  
35. Karrier: Misshapen horse designed to carry heavy loads. Looks like four horses squeezed into one body, but can carry pretty much anything.
36. Oxkicker: Dark grey raid-horse trained to kick in doors with alarming power. Nothing special other than that.  
37. Venus D: Only has hind legs and runs very fast, like an emu. You have to hold on tight not to fall off, but it’s quite the sight.  
38. Loosie Lucy Lasso: A dumb brown horse with a silly cowboy hat stuck in.  
39. Yellerhed: This horse won’t shut up crying and yelling, but it’s cheap.  
40. Terrible Dennis: Really moody looking grey horse. Has clearly seen lots of action, but pretty slow in his elder years.  
41. Okler: Horse with one giant eye in the middle of his horse head. Can see for miles and will rear up at anything dangerous on the horizon.
42. Maynesteid: This tall muscular horse has had most of its skeleton replaced with metal parts, and comes with a pair of horseman-axes (d8) made from his bones. Seems really into battle and glory.
43. Fat One: Actually in really good shape, reddish-brown, but humble to the point of embarrassment. Will throw himself down in the mud so that you don’t have to dirty your boots.
44. Wickywalter: Light brown, branded with the seal of justice as a former bounty-hunter’s horse, and neighs loudly if his owner tells a lie in his presence.  
45. Redsaddle: A maroon horse formerly owned by a sea-raider. Swims really well and can hold its breath for an unnatural length of time.  
46. Hrissen: Conjoined pair of horses, connected along the flank. Two riders can ride uncomfortably close to each other.  
47. Ultratrotz: A shaky black horse that’s had metal plating (AC as chain) painfully bonded all over its body and a unicorn horn (d8) attached to its head. Has no taste for battle.
48. Effelletur: A dairy-horse that needs milking every day to avoid discomfort. Will encourage her owner to feed at her udder, which creates a telepathic bond for the rest of the day.
49. Chulepa Peek:  This self-abasing horse is covered in mud and feces.  It will not eat unless you kick it (believing itself to be unworth feeding) and will sleep in the rain instead of a warm stable (believing itself unworthy of such a luxury).
50. Golden God Farmer: This golden-haired horse is cursed.  It cannot stop running.  It will always move as fast as the fastest horse, unless it is racing away/towards another fast-moving object.  In that case, it will be slightly faster.  If it stops running, it dies.
51. No-Bath: This roan mare is also cursed.  Whenever it meets a new person it looks at them and says, “You must help me!  I’ve been transformed into a horse by an evil wizard, and cursed to only be able to speak once, after which I will forget my human past.  You must kill my owner to free me!  You are my only hope!”  (All of this is a lie, of course.)
52. Scabby Joe: Infested with lice.  Possibly their deity.  Their itchy, itchy deity.
53. Zooltharno the Gelid: This horse is ice-cold.  It moves slowly, but can levitate up or down at the rate of 1 foot per second.  When levitating, it cannot move horizontally unless it is pushed/pulled.
54. Ifrit: This is a gaseous horse.  It lives in a bottle.  When the bottle is open, it becomes a flying, purple steed.  If it ever takes any damage, or gets wet, it dies.
55. Shaggadoom the Questant: After an expedition to uncharted dimensions, this bug-eyed horse was the only survivor.  It is paralyzed, and its face is perpetually frozen in an expression of raw horror.  Anyone who falls asleep near the horse will wake up beside the horse, transported safely across as much territory a healthy horse could cover in the amount of time that they’d been asleep.
56. Griplatch the Klorohund: This greenish equoid is meant to be edible.  Each day, a reddish, pulpy fruit buds off from its face, providing an extra ration.  It doesn’t eat, but instead gains its nourishment by chewing your food (in its dead-end mouth), sucking all the flavour out, and then depositing the pulp back in your hands.  Very friendly.
57. Thorsor Greybreed: This horse is not a horse, but a demon wearing a horse’s skin.  Exceptionally fast and vicious.  Each day there is a 1-in-20 chance that the demon will be recalled to hell, leaving an empty horse skin behind.  It will return the next day and behave as if nothing strange has happened.
58. Tillamook Flenge: This is a reverse vampire horse.  It suffers from an overabundance of blood, and must be bled daily.  If it is not, it will begin to get desperate, like a cow that hasn’t been milked, and will extrude it’s glossal syringe in order to inject it’s heavily parasitized blood into the nearest mammal.
59. Hammerfaust the Invincible: This small, grey horse doesn’t look very special.  However, it is completely immune to damage, except for damage from stupid weapons.  Stupid weapons (nunchucks, a polehammer, a glaive-guisarme, a throwing chakram, etc) the attack becomes a critical hit.
60. The Horse of a Different Color: This is a fairy horse.  Every day, this horse changes into a different horse, always mundane except for this strange fact.  If you leave saddlebags on overnight, they will disappear.  5% chance that it appears with someone’s saddlebags in the morning, with something interesting inside.  (It is possible for other things to travel with the horse.  Once it was found with a corpse on its back, tied to the saddle.)
61. Double John: This horse is a horse at both ends.  Capable of running backwards as fast as forwards.  The two horse heads are known as “Eaty John” and “Shitty John”.
62. The Invisible Horse: Is truly invisible, but flatulence ruins any invisibility attempts 33% of the time.
63. Miriam Waggish: This mare is a were-human.  Every full moon she spends three days as a human.  She formerly worked as a launderer in town.
64. Stinger: Has a wooden leg with a wasp nest built into it.  The wasps automatically attack anyone who attacks Stinger, but will generally leave anyone else alone.  
65. The Metaphorical Horse: This is a book, not a horse.  It is about a metaphorical horse named Life that carries us through good times and bad times, with a clumsy, powerful gait.  Anyone who reads it aloud is able to run at the speed of a horse, but only over territory that a horse could normally run over.  They lose 1d6 Wisdom after this exertion.
66. Fiercer: This is a coal-black horse with a spiked iron collar.  Attacks as a sixth-level fighter.  Displays murderous impulses towards gnomes and things about the size of gnomes.  Is wanted for genocide, as it has exterminated two gnomish villages (over 150 gnomes have met their doom at the end of his shiny, shiny hooves.)  Is being hunted by Masdrana, the unicorn bounty-hunter, who intends to hang him.
67. Trismegistus: Shaved and tattooed with arcane symbols.  Each of his flanks contains one spell.  His back contains a fully functioning demonic summoning circle, which is capable of containing a demon, but will not prevent it from riding Trismegistus.  This horse has a terrible phobia of candles.
68. Lovely Lucy: An attractive roan mare.  She is the wife of Brogtharion, a barbarian from a tribe with a long history of very literal horse husbandry.  Brogtharion will come along (he is part of whatever deal gave you Lovely Lucy), but will not ride her nor speak to her, as they are currently having a marital dispute.
69. Gobby Nobbler: Lumpy looking horse with a dull hide.  Knees actually bend the wrong way.  Close inspection will reveal that it is actually some sort of giant insect wearing a horse’s skin.  Very affectionate and loyal.  Terrified of actual horses.
70. The Smaragdine Mare: This horse is green, and perpetually pregnant.  If fed something, will excrete a variation of it.  Milk turns into wine.  Apples turn into pears.  Potions turn into a different kind of potion.  Gems turn into other types of gems (but these require some coaxing to eat).  If she ever eats the flesh of another creature, she will birth a monstrous version of that creature (+2 HD) and die in the process.  The seller of this horse will usually add the instruction “Don’t feed her flesh.” but will not know the actual reason.
71. Mount Vlatingor: This is either a enormous man or a small giant.  Either way, he is educated, well-spoken, and completely insane.  He believes that he is a horse, and will become extremely angry if he is not treated like one.  After progressing through argumentation and threats of abandonment, he will leave.  Passengers are carried on his shoulders.
72. Motley Samson: Adorned in a jester’s motley.  Aging, grey-haired, and sway-backed.  Will perform a humorous little dance for as long as a tambourine is played (sold with the horse).  Also trained to detect the most common edible poisons.
73. Sir Tomborious: Barrel-chested Clydesdale with an enormous claymore strapped to his side..  Acts like a normal horse, albeit more loyal than most.  If he witnesses a damsel in distress, he stands up, removes his hooves (they are just painted, steel caps) to reveal his hands, draws his claymore, and wades into battle.  After the situation has been resolved, he sheathes his sword, puts his hoof caps back on, and returns to normal.
74. Svalbard: This horse turns into a small viking longboat (25 feet long) when wet.  In this form, it has a painted horse figurehead.  When it is dry, it turns back into a horse.  A splash from a puddle is insufficient to provoke the transformation, but rain will do it.
75. Madera: Whenever startled or scared, becomes as rigid as a wooden statue and falls over, unless she was standing still.  (Not actually wooden, just paralyzed, like those fainting goat videos.)  Fails all saves vs. fear.  Half-price.
76. Francifal Saint Montaigne: Makes owlbear noises.  Does not fear high places since it thinks it can fly. It cannot.
77. Joreppo La Bomba: An audible ticking can be heard from the horse at all times.  If this horse dies from an impactful death (non-poison, non-level drain) it explodes as a 5d6 fireball.  It is being sold by Joreppo Morone, an extremely nervous man who screams when startled.
78. Hammerhead: A normal-seeming horse gifted with an abnormally hard head.  Instead of stamping on enemies, it bludgeons them with its head.
79. Maggot: Exhales blue smoke.  Vibrates.  Moves jerkily.  Doesn’t need to eat.  Turns into a miniature black hole (as sphere of annihilation) upon death, a state that lasts for 1 minute.
80. Ekinna: Lays a chicken-sized egg each night.  If the egg is not destroyed, it will hatch into a horse-headed monstrosity (HD 1d4) that will seek to devour the marrow from whoever Ekinna loves the most (usually her owner).  If Ekinna doesn’t eat the slain monstrosity by each morning, she will sicken.  If she misses two of these meals consecutively, she dies.
81. Solaris: Supposedly a horse from the sun-god’s own chariot.  Golden orange coat, almost luminous.  Runs at 3x horse speed, but only in a westerly or partially-westerly direction.  Must be towed east if you want to go in that direction.  Immune to fire damage.
82. Rabban Lamadre: Very somber horse possessing a glorious mustache.  As long as its rider is honorable and motivated, Rabban will appear in their dreams to offer platitudes and advice.  When its rider dies, Rabban will appear to them, offering its body.  If the person accepts, they return the day, sharing Rabban’s body.  
83. Montresor: Staggers around as if it were drunk, falling over at least once ever hour.  Only sobers up when drunk (which only requires about 20 drinks).  When sober, is an exceptionally quick and attentive steed.
84. Bitey the Unicorn: Appears to be a unicorn with its horn sawed off, deprived of all its powers except for the ability to know the entire sexual history of anyone it looks at.  Makes for a passable horse, except it will only allow riders who are virgins.  Bites sluts remorselessly.  (A slut, in this context, is anyone who enjoys sex too much or has had sex too recently.)
85. Benisequash: An Enchanted Dwarven Pony. Under the saddle there is a keyhole.  If unlocked (by using the key provided), the entire back of the horse will open to reveal an wood-walled space, the same dimensions as a large chest.  This doesn’t seem to affect the horse’s biology.  At the bottom of the chest is the horse’s living heart, still pumping blood.
86. Iron Head: Head permanently locked inside a metal spike-helmet.  Trained to batter down doors.  Will knock down the average door after 1d6 bashes.  Will knock itself out after 1d4+2 attempts (unless the door is open by then).  Afraid of goblins.
87. Moonbeam: No legs.  Levitates.  Mechanically identical to a normal horse, except no kick or trample attacks.  Eats half as much.
88. Lucifer: This red-skinned horse smells of brimstone.  Instead of a tail, it has a long handle extending from its ass.  If this handle is grasped firmly and pulled, the horse will turn inside out and a morningstar will be pulled from the horse’s ass.  (You are basically turning the horse into a weapon.)  It is a morningstar +1 that does double damage to goblins, farmers, and clergy.
89. The King of Horses: Must be treated with the utmost deference and respect.  All other horses will bow to the King of Horses upon meeting him, and at no point will any horse act against the King of Horses, even refusing to charge against an army that fields him.  Will only allow himself to be ridden by royalty, but has a hard time figuring this out with his horsey brain.  Functionally--anyone in fancy clothes who wears a crown and smells nice will do.
90. Imbri: This coal-black horse sleeps all day, catatonically.  During the night, she can run at 10x speed overland by jumping through people’s dreams (but only over land where dreaming people are--she's mostly useless in a desert). If the rider is abandoned by Imbri while in a dream, they are stranded there.
91. Jigello: This simpering, idiotic horse has only 1 HP.  If it takes damage or suffers a sudden impact, it deflates.  It can be revived with 1 minute with a patch kit (or glue) and 10 minutes of blowing air into its mouth.  Extremely bouyant.  Loves sweets.
92. Guzza: This horse is always wet, and bits of him are always dropping off.  Can squeeze through openings as small as 1 inch in diameter.  Only eats roots, tubers, and animal skin.  Licks fingers to show affection.
93. Richelieu: This horse constantly emits a low glow, as bright as a torch.  Rapidly ages, and will die in a week unless it spends a day buried underground, which regenerates its youth.
94. Traverlane: Does not whinny, but instead sings like a bird.  If stabbed, songbirds exit the wound.  If kissed, any curses on the kisser are transferred instead to Traverlane.  All of this is disclosed by the salesman.  Currently cursed to die in a fire, and will take double damage from fire.  (This last fact is not disclosed.)
95. Milchie: Impossibly flatulent.  Makes it impossible to surprise things.  If hugged around the midsection and squeezed, will produce an stinking cloud, which causes all breathing things in 50’ to begin retching and vomiting for 1 minute.  Milchie is not immune to this effect.
96. Scamperella the Dancing Horse: Knows 55 different dances and can teach them to you, if you request them by name.  Includes the forbidden dance known as “The Black Mamba” which drives onlookers insane.  Can also be commanded to dance as it walks away, which exerts a pied piper-like effect on nearby children (or any juvenile animal).
97. Rufus Damascus: Smokes a pipe.  Trained to notice clues and solve mysteries.  If the party misses a clue, Rufus has a 5-in-6 chance to notice it, and then point it out by rolling his eyes and flicking his tail in the appropriate direction.  Each day spent riding through town gives Rufus a 1-in-6 chance of noticing a new mystery, which he will then be eager to solve, and melancholy if not allowed to.
98. Yellow Beedums: Prances like a deer.  Incredibly difficult to ride, and takes a week of practice before you stop having a bruised butt (move at half speed).  Moves twice as fast.  Only happy when sticking its head through a window and making goofy faces.
99. Sir Dashfallon: Immortal.  Grey.  Acts like an exceptionally intelligent warhorse with a peculiar love of battle.  Automatically succeeds at all saves vs fear, and gets +2 to attack and damage for the rest of the day when it does.  Whenever it or its rider kills a worthy enemy, it announces a number.  It is counting down from nine.  It never speaks at any other time.  When the count reaches zero, Sir Dashfallon announces “The circle is complete; the covenant is returned”, turns into a giant crystal shaped like a horse head, and offers to give the party a ride inside him to any location they desire (even extraplanar ones).  After discharging this obligation (if applicable), Sir Dashfallon flies into the sun.
100. The Negahorse: Horse-shaped hole in the universe, filled with stars and inky blackness.  Wears an insulated saddle to prevent frostbiter of the rider.  Immune to non-magical damage, does not tire, and is capable of running to any named location she has previously visited.  Possesses an uncontrollable urge to collide with a regular horse.  If this happens, both horses are annihilated in an explosion that does 5d6 damage (as a fireball) to all in 20’, gives a random mutation (save negates) to all in 100’, and kills all horses in a ten mile radius.  It is sold with a hood, so that you can throw it over the Negahorse’s head when it catches sight of another horse.  (This is the only method the previous owners have had success with, as the negahorse is a powerful runner and jumper.  They do not realize how dangerous an horse - antihorse collision would be.)

Signs That A Horse Is Nearby (d8)

1. Finding horse shoes in your food.
2. One of your hirelings has been trampled to death and none of the other hirelings are that heavy.
3. Giving birth to baby centaurs.
4. A sudden impression of muskiness and straps.
5. Horse teeth embedded in trees.
6. You suddenly feel self-conscious about your inability to run 10 miles while carrying a person on your back.
7. You are suddenly riding a horse when you could have sworn you were on foot just a minute ago.
8. There is horse shit on you.

The Never-Ending Guild

February 18, 2016, 2:41 am

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Sane people who have not been there regard it as a single city, occupying a single point on the map at the south tip of the Meltherian peninsula.  Those who have been there know better.

It is tough to tell.  It grows with each retelling, and expands with each visit.  It is called the Armenjero Empire.

It is the gateway to Ba Dwai La and the electric mismeras of Langa.  It was won from one of the mage-kings of Meltheria, the Judge of Green Hours, in a dice game, in which the legendary gambler Tammergale waged his life twice on a single flash of the pips.

He won, of course, because Fortune was terrified of Tammergale, because Tammergale alone knew how to kill Fortune (and he kept the tools in his belt pouch, it is said).

And so the Armenjero Empire is the narrow kingdom.  The top of it is delineated by the wind-gnawed edge of the seacliffs, and the bottom is delineated by the black rocks where elephant seals kill each other over blubbery harems.  Such were the terms of the wager.

The buildings hang like red lanterns, swinging from their red chains.  The buildings gamble, just like the people inside them.

Or the buildings stick out from the cliffside like an outstretched arm, holding a cup of tea.  And people do come here for tea as well.

And there is the City of Light, a nest of lighthouses, some leaning out from the same base.  The lighthouses are home to strange families, who compete against each other in contests of light-making, mirroring some arcane instructions delivered by the planets' wanderings.  They murder and marry only each other.  Many of the lighthouse keepers are blind.

But most of the city is built into the cliff wall, amid winding terraces and shrouded arcades, where the path disappears into the rock.  All the doors are secret doors, and all the people hidden.  This is where velveteens are made, and a jester's motley is more respected and feared than a knight's emblem.

It is a city of bards, gamblers, story-tellers, performers, tumblers, prostitutes, and actors.  They all have their secret clans and historic ambitions, but it is the last category that concerns us for now.

The Guild

The largest organization of actors in Centerra is the Never-Ending Guild.  They produce the greatest actors in the world, and the greatest of those are kept inside the guild as teachers.  They excelled too much as students, and are now forbidden to leave.  They pass through its halls wearing long chains of silver and enamel.  Their students gift them with newer lengths of chain, extending the distance that they wander.

Their actors are famous for the use of mimra, which is the practice of smoking live mephritic toads.

The toads are powerful dissociatives.  They are famous in storytelling for their ability to cause a suggestible form of amnesia.  It's the pharmacological analogue to the jedi mind trick.

Swanny Joe: "Where am I?  What did I just smoke?  Who am I?"

Hammertoe the Poisoner: "Your name is Ricarlo, a horse seller.  You were just about to pay me the 400 gold you owed me."

Swanny Joe: "I. . . am Ricarlo.  I am a horse seller.  Here is the 400 gold I owe you.  Sorry about the delay."

The actors of the Never-Ending Guild use mimra to literally assume the role of the person they are portraying.  It involves a conscious self-deception, which lasts as long as the production does.  It also requires many, many dead toads.

By interleaving periods of toad-blasted delirium with periods of relative lucidity, an actor is able to live in a theater like a normal person, while functionally becoming their role while on the stage.

Many of them eventually retire into peaceful confabulation.  There, they are free to relax and let the boundaries slip.  They age gracefully, as everyone would when they die knowing that they are the single most significant person in the world.  Each one dies knowing that they are the Main Character.

Immortality

The greatest service that the Never-Ending Guild can offer isn't actors, nor is it glass spheres filled with toad shavings and combustibles.  It is immortality, and nothing less.

In the Never-Ending Halls, people who have died sometimes show up for dinner.

Vega has an apartment there, the wizard who created both goblins and the apocalypse maggots.  So does Ashar Mevrock, the tyrant who almost conquered the entire continent of Centerra.  Even, the Prophetess Ianu, who founded the religion of Hesaya, can sometimes be seen in the dining hall, mopping up soup wit her bread.  Each of them drags a silver chain by their ankle.

These are actors, but they are also the people they portray.

If a woman smokes enough mimra and recieves a steady diet of who-she-is, what-she-cares-about, and what-she-is-like, she will eventually emerge on the far end as a blasphemously accurate facsimile of the Prophetess Ianu.

Make her read all of the Hesayan holy books, and tell her "This is you.  These are all things you did." Make her read everything ever written about the Prophetess, and tell her "This is what your apostles think about you." Then smuggle her to sermons, so that she can hear the most modern exegises of Hesayan Holy Law.  And then cut off the toad supply.

There's a bit more to it than that--minor cosmetic surgeries, the collection of historic possessions, the establishment of a supporting cast--but that's the general gist of it.

The resulting Prophetess has absolutely no memory of her previous life, and she is accurate enough that even angels are deceived.

But is it deception?  How much of a person is reproducible from their artifacts?  How well can we reconstruct them from the testimonies of their friends?

The actors of the Never-Ending Guild would say that they are not imitating, they are becoming.  They sculpt people into absolute equals.  Or in some cases, better than equal.  People change.  They stop being who they were.  But the records that the Never-Ending Guild keeps do not change.

Hanchurium Without Parallel was a king, and a good one.  But when his last son died fighting a foolish war, he became cruel and distant.  His own family killed him.  And then the family purchased a new Hanchurium from the Never-Ending Guild, a slightly younger Hanchurium, one who hadn't been spoilt by the war.

By all accounts, the new one was just as good as the old one.  Or perhaps better.  While the generals varied in their exact opinion of the newer Hanchurium, his wife preferred the new one.

And there was never any hesitation, nor any display of doubt.  The new Hanchurium slid into the throne as if he had been sitting in it yesterday.  He kissed his wife as if he had been kissing her for the last thirty years.  And he walked through the kitchen as if he knew what was in every drawer (because he did).

The Never-Ending Guild had done their job well.

How To Use The Never-Ending Guild

Use them for immortality, of course.

By visiting the guild, paying a hefty fee, and submitting yourself to some interviews, you can become immortalized.  Then, when you die, a replacement can be purchased from the Guild.  It only takes a year to train a new you.

I say "interviews", but really the process is several weeks of intensive, drug-fueled interviews, intermingled with certain scenarios.  The most accurate way to capture a person's identity is to observe it in a variety of scenarios, and so that is exactly what they do (with a mixture of drugs, illusion, and recreation).  And then a pair of tomes will be shelved, along with a fat portfolio of sketches.

And those two fat books are sufficient to resurrect a man, all by themselves.

Do not flatter yourself.  A single book is sufficient to recreate your entirety.  The second book is only for the sake of redundancy.

And honestly, if you can't think of a use for an asylum full of accurate recreations of famous people, shame on you.

That long-dead wizard who built the ruins the party is currently exploring, he lives here.  He plays chess with the Prime Deceiver, the architect of all evil in the world.  They are just flesh and blood, and they do not have the power to shatter the continents, but you might be amazed at what they know.

They know a great deal more than they have been taught.  The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, et cetera.  Through data mining, implication, and the insight of the insane, they are more accurate then they should be.