Goblin Punch

This is a continuation of my series on the non-Euclidean, this time a non-Euclidean monster.

Imagine a 2-dimensional world, full of 2-dimensional castle and 2-dimensional people. Now imagine a person standing to the left of that world, so that their body doesn't intersect with it in any way. Now imagine that they have a couple of paper puppets, and that they insert into the 2-dimensional world, making them stand on top of that 2D castle as if they belonged there.

Now you know what a geminoid is.

completely inaccurate
a 2-dimensional drawing of a 4-dimensional fellow
and the geminoids should be larger relative to the puppeteer

They look like twins, with a strange look about them.

Their shapes are crude, with odd ridges and flat spots, like wax pressed into the shape of a human. They seem like imitations, because they are. They wear thin cloaks to obscure their clumsy shapes.

They are hand-puppets, pieces of a much larger creature that is projected into our world. The puppeteer cannot be seen, cannot be felt, cannot be heard, cannot be smelt. It is sideways to our world, and you cannot reach it any easier than Mario can turn sideways and leave your television.

Beneath their cloaks, they do not wear much. They are always hot to the touch. The puppeteer, floating in the vacuum of the void, struggles to radiate heat. There is no air there. And so the hand-puppets must manage the temperature of the entire beast.

Sometimes the puppeteer relaxes, and turns the puppets slightly sideways. One arm might shrink to a stump; another arm might grow thick and untextured. A normal-seeming eye might relax into a colored spot on featureless skin, like a giant freckle. If you pull back the hood of a sleeping geminoid, this is what you will see.

(I will speak of geminoids in the plural. This deception is for your players.)

Their arms are as bony as their fused ribs. Their legs are thick, calloused things, made to support more weight than you'd expect.

If you watch closely, you will notice that geminoids don't seem to breathe. Their extra-long breaths form condensation in cold places, but their chests don't rise and fall. This is because the lungs are in the puppeteer, not the puppet (although the puppeteer must still breath through his hands).

Inside a geminoids spindly body, you will find almost nothing except muscle, bone, and circulatory system. Some of these will seem illogical or impossible, such as an artery that forms a loop with itself, and connects to no other part. (Their heart and lungs are located inside the puppeteer--you will not find them.)

what looks like levitation is really just a geminoid raising its hand behind the scenes

If the attack deals low damage, this may indicate that they are striking you with their puppet-limbs, like you would expect a skinny fellow to do. If the attack deals high damage, this may indicate that the geminoid has curled themselves up into a ball and flown at you, as if hurled telekinetically.

Geminoids can hit you a lot harder than you think. (A hand-puppet curled up into a fist can hit you a lot harder than a man the size of a hand-puppet.)

Geminoid
HD 6 (HP 24) Def chain Slam 1d10 each
Move * Int 10 Mor 4

If you define them according to the format of a game system, geminoids have a lot of abilities. But once you grasp the concept, it's really simple.

Shared Body -- Geminoids share an HP pool: 24 points. They also share their weight, which fluctuates depending on how much of the overall creature remains in the void (which has no gravity). They share a blood supply and a mind. They function as two creatures against AoE damage, but against spells that target creatures, treat them as a single creature.

Flight -- One geminoid can fly anywhere within 20' of the other geminoid, provided the other geminoid remains on the ground. (This is equivalent to the puppeteer using one hand to pull themself higher while reaching with the other hand.)

Exit -- A geminoid can leave our dimension. This looks like the creature being sucked down its own bellybutton, and then shrinking until it is just a small sphere of flesh the size of a basketball. It looks like new types of skin are flowing from the asshole on the back of the basketball and swirling down the bellybutton on the front. Smaller and faster and then it is gone. (This is equivalent to the puppeteer taking his hand-puppet off the stage.)

The puppeteer needs to have both hands in our dimension in order to hold on. Without at least one geminoid to anchor it, it will come untethered, and starve to death in the void.

A geminoid can grab a character and pull them sideways into the void. This requires one turn to grab, and another turn to pull them sideways. The character gets a Cha save to resist, and if they are holding on to something, they also get a Cha save. If they are tied down, the geminoid must break the ropes before it can pull them sideways.

Once a character has been pulled into the void, they gain 5 Trauma and begin to suffocate and overheat. There is no light in the void. The geminoid can attempt to throw them away or pass them to the unborn twins (see below).

Entrance -- A geminoid that is in the void can enter the world the same way it left. It can appear anywhere within 20' of its twin, even on the other side of walls.

The puppeteer may carry items on its extradimensional body, similar to a bag of holding.

Unborn Twin -- Every geminoid has 1d3-2 (min 0) immature buds. The yare the unborn twins gestating in the void, like unfinished hand puppets. If it needs reinforcements, the geminoid can put these unborn twins into the world, effectively doubling the number of geminoids. The unborn twins have the same stats and abilities as their siblings, they just look wet and unfinished (because they are) and have AC as unarmored.

Full Entrance -- The puppeteer has no reason to ever enter our dimension. It has no reason to. Besides, it is too Thick to exist here, much like a puppeteer can never put their whole body atop a paper-thin diorama. (The only reason I can think: it might need to pass its body through our dimension to hide on the other side from a larger predator.)

Still, nothing is preventing the puppeteer from pulling its whole body sideways and materializing in front of a stunned party. This would make it look like an inside-out octopus, with each of its four tentacles connected to an inside-out human. Viewed from the side, its head looks like a three-dimensional version of a CAT scan of the human head, magnified to monstrous proportions.

These would be inappropriate structures for Super Mario World
A geminoid's true body is an inappropriate body for our world.

Extradimensional -- The puppeteer can see if you are carrying a bag of holding. It can rip it open and steal its content without you ever knowing.

Biology

When describing geminoids and the puppetmaster, remember that they are not natives of the Void. (True natives have no interest in an incomplete dimension, and would actually struggle to affect it in a systematic way.)

This is because they were human before they were aliens. They have adapted to the liminal spaces between worlds, like penguins, pelicans, or flying fish.

It is believed that the first proto-geminoids were created by mishaps while investigating extradimensional spaces. (Beware the bag of holding. Never allow the extradimensional space to detach from the burlap and attach to you.)

They are not a true species. They are created by the induction of a fourth-dimensional uterine prolapse during the first trimester.

Psychology

Their minds are completely human. They are not Outsiders. (But they know strange things. They have met Outsiders.)

When they are born, they seem almost like a regular pair of twins. The puppeteer is still undeveloped at this point, and they seem like two creatures instead of one.

The easiest way to test a newborn is to attempt to separate it from its twin. Newborn geminoids cannot be moved more than a few feet away from their twin.

If you forcibly try to separate a pair of geminoids, you might rupture their sac-like body. Their blood will spill out into the Void, and the two babies will blanch, weaken, and die.

More likely, though, you'll just succeed in pulling the baby sideways. It will volute in your hands, shrinking through a thousand stages of deformity in the second before vanishing.

I've been playing Crypt of the Necrodancer and I've realized that I like the idea of bumping into merchants in the middle of a dungeon.

Among other things, it makes the dungeon able to replace one of the functions of the city, without making it any safer.

from Crypt of the Necrodancer

1 - Dungeon Bugs

Something like long-legged roaches, each as tall as a child. They scamper like children, and laugh like goats with a mouth full of dice. They're friendly, but callous. You'll find them on the ceilings of rooms,

They taste terrible, and so are largely ignored by predators. They have little interest in any task requiring their attention for more than a few moments, and are all competing with each other to collect enough shiny crap to attract a mate.

No one has ever seen a female dungeon bug, or knows what happens when a dungeon bug gets hitched. The dungeon bugs themselves might not even know. They rarely talk about their secret nests, except to boast of them.

A voice from the ceiling, "By the seven fucks, no, you don't want to go that way. Two silver and I'll tell you which way is most goodwise! And a refund if you don't thank me when you go to bed tonight!"

"That's my corpse! Look, I marked by it by biting off the earlobe--I have it right here. I was saving it for later, times like these. You can have the pockets, though, for 20 silver. Eat my eyes if I can go any lower. Just eat em!"

"Just climb down this shaft and head towards the smell of seaweed. That's my cousin's store! You can buy a pickled piercer for a penny!" (The Pickled Piercer costs 30s. You can buy a barrel of pickled goblins for 200s, though, which counts as 100 rations.)

2 - The King of Hens

A ponderous thing with pale skin like a drowned man. A full head taller than a tall man. Thin limbs, stretched and slightly bent, like ghastly taffy. The hands are huge flippers, like hands that have been run over by a cartoon car. They open and close slowly.

The feet are chicken feet, and they are strong.

The chest is huge, and the belly is stretched to bursting. It is wearing the remains of a red robe, fallen off the shoulders and only held on by a belt around the waist. It is filthy and matted, but it was once silk. It's back, chest, and arms are all covered with lashes, both old and new.

The face is shambles, perhaps from unlucky birth, perhaps from a creative torturer. The face has little to do with a chicken's, and even less to do with a human's. It is, at least, a bit beaked, where the cleft palate climbs into the sinuses. The dark, watery eyes are entirely unlike poultry, however.

The King of Hens is accompanied a quartet of small, loud women. They are the king's court. They will announce what is for sale today, and what the prices are. If you agree to buy something, one of the hags will stay with you while the other three lead the creature around a corner. After listening to a few minutes of cracking whips and ragged sobs, they will return with a bloody egg. Inside the egg is your purchase.

Suggested Items (Roll a 1d6 twice)

1 - A nutritious egg. (Counts as a ration. DO NOT INCUBATE IT.)
2 - A random curse. Latches onto the nearest person when the egg is broken.
3 - Black sugar.
4 - Midnight wind.

3 - The Hive Dead

A cyclopean door. On it, someone has written "Put the sword on the ground and step out of the room. Wait until they offer the right payment. Stay away from their holes."

Inside is a cavernous room. The center of the ceiling is dominated by a huge crack, going upwards. You seem to be at the bottom of a very deep abysm.

The walls are studded with holes, each one about two feet wide. The holes are roughly circular, and are arranged roughly as honeycombs are. (This is the most efficient way to stack circles.) There are several hundred of these holes on the back wall of the room, and several hundred more up inside the ceiling crack.

Each hole is home to an undead. They are not visible in the gloom, but they are watching the center of the room with an unblinking intensity. When an item (or items) is placed in the center of the room, an undead will approach it after 1d6*1d6 minutes, and place a roughly equivalent item across from it.

If you enter the room and take the offered item, you have just sold your original item. If you wait another 1 hour, the undead will return and reclaim the item it offered as a trade--there is a 50% chance that another undead will appear after 1d6*1d6 minutes and make a similar offer. If you reclaim your original item, the deal will be cancelled, the dead will be offended, and all future responses will take twice as long. If you take both items, all 660 corpses will attack you. (Stats as zombies, Int 10, movement as human.)

Some items that might be offered:

The bones of a horse.
A suit of plate mail in perfect condition.
The lost crown of a local principality.
A spellbook (contains 3 pyromancer spells).
A large package of ancient tea. (Worth 1000s).

If anyone dies in the room, the undead will command the dead to rise. The fallen character will arise as a new undead, painfully gag down all of their coins and gems, and dig a new hole in the wall.

4 - Charlie Pox

He looks more like a flock of freckles than anything else. He appears on your belly, using your bellybutton as a mouth. He's cheeky and talks fast. He'll crack jokes to put you at ease.

Buy something why don't ya! I've traveled all this way!

This is Charlie. You probably caught him from a rat bite or something.

Mustard! 3s
Lockpicks! 20s
Picture of a Duck! 30s
Magic Ring! 500s (Alternate Self Ring)

The purchase will be produced from your own body. If Charlie likes you (and Charlie likes most people), this will be orally.

If you try to hold Charlie hostage, you'll get sick. Real sick. Best just to buy something and let him pass one. The prices aren't even that bad, don't ya know! He's doing you a favor!

Once he's gone, all he leaves behind is a patch of freckles in the shape of a winking smile and a mild cold.

5 - Sir Savin Ghastlecrumb

A brute in a suit.

Picture a man shaped like a gorilla. Wrap him in the most expensive clothes that money can buy. Give him a fierce beard and a brilliant top hat. Make him love violence the way that scared soldiers love their mothers. Make him loud and brusque and ambiguously British.

When you find him, he's spooling intestines from a naga, draping them over a fire, and eating them, all in a single continuous assembly line. He has a little silver fork. (It's a regular fork. It just looks small in his hands.)

He hopes you will give him a reason to kill you, and will tell you as much. He is a devout Hesayan, and if you are also a member of the flock, he cannot attack you unprovoked. He has his afterlife to consider.

Why is he selling things? He has too much loot to carry.

16 swords. Must by all of them. 50s
A magic bird that can learn any song, and will invent new ones besides. 100s.
A duke's son from a nearby city, worth 1000s in random. 300s.

The other stuff in his bag is equivalent to a dragon's hoard, but he's not selling it.

Stats as a giant. If you miss him with a melee attack, make a Str check. If you fail, Gastlecrumb breaks it. If he fails a Save, he can choose to lose 10 HP and reduce the effect of whatever he just saved against.

6 - Machinduma

A coiled machine sits alone in a dark room. It looks like the polished extrusion of some massive crustacean, with gently fluted crests and warped gullies. The front is the tallest part, and you must slip between some flying buttresses to reach the "front" of the machine.

You can only see the seams if you look close. (Those who have seen both will recognize similarities to the Egg of Drume.)

There are two alcoves here, set into the machine like eye sockets. Above them, you can read the words "One is taken, the other is improved."

If you put two objects into the alcoves, the chambers will slowly recess and then close off. Out of the two objects, the more valuable one will be taken by the machine. The less valuable object will be returned in an improved form.

Shitty swords will be made excellent. A magical sword will be made amazing. A non-magical item may be made into a magical one, but the enchantment will be a trifling one.

A living creature that is improved will be given a random beneficial mutation.

If you do a lot of exchanges with the Machinduma, and if you show a certain ambivalence for human life, it will start offering you fetch quests. It will extrude soft white disks with writing on them, which dessicate and crumble away from the warm, bloody interior of the machine.

People that are taken by the Machinduma are not lost. You will see them again, in a different city, at a different time, on some different business. They will have a different name, and they will not recognize you. They will have a different history and speak accurately of a different home town (very far from where they are now). They are always fetching an item.

The Machinduma has stats as four ogres in full plate, fighting in tight square formation.

See Also

Dream Merchants

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Stuff to Buy

The Metal Earth has finally birthed a book. Check it out here.

Patrick has translated Gawain and the Green Knight, which seems like an immensely Patrick thing to do. You should buy it in order to one-up that one guy who won't stop talking about how much Appendix N he's read.

On the Taste of Wyrm

When Emperor Mando first tasted the meat of the purple wyrm, he declared it to be unrivaled among the bestial meats. His bounties on the great wyrms made them a rarity east of the Elterspines, and you can still wander among the enormous bones of the failed Amaranthine Ranch in Mount Baldero.

While the emperor and his family claimed that the flesh of the wyrm was delicious, everyone who has eaten wyrm in recent time reports that the flesh is as vile as gall. The sole exception to this is Queen Chessaline, who attended several wyrmhunts in her youth and has spoken highly of the meat.

The first theory claims that the taste of wyrmflesh was exaggerated by the sycophants and courtiers that thronged the palace like feathers on a cock.

The second theory maintains that there is something quixotic in wyrmflesh, which is only pleasing to the nobility, while those of common stock will merely be repulsed. After all, it is not meant for them.

from Elminage Gothic

On Dragons and Wyrms

Dragons are enthroned among the blues and whites of the clear sky, and their bodies are filled with purest fire. In their chests, the heaviest organ is their heart. They speak dismissively of their cousins.

Wyrms dwell in the earth, and their bodies are filled with poison. Their heaviest organ is the liver, which is of an incomparable solidity, being nearly as dense as lead. They speak constantly of dragons, and of the theft of their birthright. Where dragons can be roused to wrath, wyrms are melancholy and obsessive.

While dragons will collect, catalog, and display their collections, wyrms will compulsively swallow their hoards. It is believed that the gold in their bodies leaches into their blood, and is the source of both their great poisons and their great bitterness.

The other behavior unique to wyrms is dust-eating. They compulsively swallow vast amounts of silts and clays, only to regurgitate it when they become too bloated to breathe. In some parts of the world (primarily sections of riparian Underworld), vast tracts are composed of this regurgitant. It is a fertile soil, but nothing woody will grow upon it. Wyrmlands are filled with enormous recumbent ferns and mottled fungi.

The Inheritance of Wyrms

To believe the drooling stories of wyrms is to believe that they once soared through the sky on a dozen black wings. They could turn the winds to poison, and their shadows burned anyone they passed over.

The wyrms will tell you of how the dragons stole this from them, although the theft seems to be less of a robbery and more of a wrongly-assigned inheritance. Dragons, they will tell you, were originally meant to be small, clever companions, much like cats.

And then the wyrm will sigh, and jealousy will seep from the cold tonnage of their livers. They will eat you without ever thinking of you, fixating only on this great injustice. Every time a wyrm bites, or crushes, or poisons, the wyrm will imagine that it is harming a dragon.

It is the hateful equivalent of calling out the wrong name during sex.

Culture

Wyrms dwell in the wild places of the world. Both Celestialists and the naga regard them as semi-divine creatures, and so have some passing interactions with them. Notably, the princes of Abasinia must be knighted by Glauroch, the Conqueror Wyrm, before ascending to the throne.

Glauroch knights them with his tail spine, which is as long as any sword, and twice as thick.

Wyrms are intelligent and wise, but they are also melancholy and quick to hate. They cannot easily be reasoned with, and most successful interactions with wyrms involve nurturing resentment towards a third party.

Biology

Like bedbugs, wyrms practice traumatic insemination. That's what the tail spike is for (contrary to most published bestiaries).

Once they reach adulthood, wyrms are almost always solitary. During periods of loneliness, they will seek out members of the opposite sex that they encountered in their juvenile years.

Wyrms undergo a form of metamorphosis, changing between three different color morphs: white, red, and purple. These changes seem to be driven entirely by respect. A wyrm that is respected will darken to purple, while a wyrm that has especially low self-respect will eventually become pallid and thin.

None of this applies to tatzlwyrms (green wyrms) who appear to be a separate species. Other wyrms consider them to be closer to common serpents than to themselves.

They live about twice as long as dragons.

by Ville Sinkkonen

Combat Stats

All wyrms can burrow though dirt about as fast as a man can walk. Stone is difficult, but not impassible. They have terrible vision, but incredible hearing (and tremorsense).

All wyrms have a particular poison. These poisons never affect anyone who is currently poisoned, or any creature that is poisonous. These poisons apply to both their bite and their breath attack.

Wyrms are immune to all poisons, but ingested poisons cause a pleasant intoxication the first 1d3 times a wyrm consumed a new poison. Cure poison spells deal damage equal to [sum] without any Save allowed. Bezoars (antivenom) deals 1d6 damage if eaten, while a carbuncle deals 1d6 damage each turn until the wyrm is dead.

Def plate Bite 3d6+swallow
Burrow 4 Int 10 Mor 10

Breath Attack -- Usable every 1d4 rounds, and affects an areas within 50'. The air is as opaque as fog for 1 round. This inhaled poison is slow, and does not take effect until the end of the target's next turn. However, the poison is especially potent, and all targets Save at a -4 penalty.

Whirlpool -- Usable when burrowed in dirt, after a minute of preparation. Creates a whirlpool 100' across. Creatures who fail a Movement check fall 20' and are subject to a free Bite attack.

Tatzlwyrm (Green Wyrm)
HD 7

Tatzlwyrms cannot burrow.

Tatzlwyrm Poison - As sleep.

Albicant (White) Wyrm
HD 8

Albicant Poison - 1d6 damage, ongoing until Con save.

Rubicant (Red) Wyrm
HD 9

Rubicant Poison - 2d6 damage, ongoing until Con save.

Amaranthine (Purple) Wyrm
HD 10

Amaranthine Poison - 2d6 damage, ongoing until Con save. While you are poisoned, the Amaranthine Wyrm can read your surface thoughts and remember your memories. You get -4 to hit it, and it gets +4 to hit and Save against you. Each round, it has a 1-in-6 chance to remember something extremely useful from your memory.

Glauroch, the Conqueror Wyrm
Stats as an amanranthine wyrm. Max HP. All damage from non-royalty is reduced to 1. Wizard.

Once, there was a dream called Goblintown. My players were imprisoned gladiators there, the only humans in an entire city of goblins.

Greasy, giggling, cruel, playful, clever, stupid goblins.

Anyway, here are the fights that your party might go up against in Goblintown.

The fights are semi-lethal. The audience wants there to be a clear winner and loser, but they don't particularly care if anyone dies or not.

Whenever you drop unconscious (or pretend to), your opponents have a 0-in-6 chance of stopping to coup-de-grace you. This increases by +1-in-6 if you have previously killed a teammate of theirs, or if you are unpopular. Choosing to deal non-lethal damage gives you a -2 Attack penalty.

If you "kill" an opponent by bringing them down to -3 HP or less, they will die in 1d3 rounds. If you "kill" an opponent by dropping them to 0, -1, or -2 HP, they will probably survive the battle.

Things that make you unpopular with goblins:

using the same tactic twice
always being cruel
always being kind

If you are unpopular, goblins will pay the Arenamasters to give you disadvantages. Examples:

Replacing your weapon with a turnip on a string.
Making you fight naked, with a funny puppet on your genitals. (Enemies will target this.)
Getting you really drunk (expanded crit fail range) and making you fight while wearing a pig head.

Things that make you popular with the goblins:

Showing off, e.g. saying "I don't need this sword to FUCK YOU UP!" and then throwing your sword into the audience.
Good insults. (Criterion: did most of the players laugh?)

You can escape from your shoddy jail cell (the walls are literally made of garbage) but you have no where to go. Everyone is goblins, every third person recognizes your face (and will happily recount your exploits/defeats), and the surrounding wilderness is much more lethal than the arena.

Above the circular arena are the audience stands, the announcer's box, and Gorp son of Gorp's skybox. Above that is a bunch of catwalk and rigging.

Below the arena is a bunch of empty space, mechanisms, and the beast elevators.

Anyway, here are some random fights that you might get matched up against.

looks like Gorp, Son of Gorp to me
by Redeve

1. Flying Cows

The party is put atop of a huge platform, 20' in diameter and 10' off the ground. Suspended from the rigging are two cows, each at the end of a 50' rope pendulum. Each is ridden by a goblin (dressed like a human and armed with a bucket), and each can make a charge attack every other round. (One cow attacks each round.)

You can climb on a cow with a combat maneuver. If you hit a cow hard enough, you can get the cow spinning, which reduces the damage that it does. Bigger impacts can tangle the cowlines, trivializing the encounter.

2. The Pope

Three goblins, dressed in a very crude approximation of the human pope. Face painted pink (like a human's) and with a bunch of garbage wrapped around his fingers like rings.

You'll have to fight another team during this fight. During the fight, the Pope will shout commandments. Whoever doesn't follow them gets shot by the two goblins under his robe (each wearing a crossbow).

No looking at me! (Everyone fights with eyes closed. First person to open them gets shot.)

Everyone pray! (Everyone makes Initiative checks to drop into a prayer position. Slowest two people get shot.)

Everyone be nice! Everyone has to stop fighting and hug each other. Anyone who is mean gets shot.

Okay now fight some more! Resume fighting.

Gimme some money! Whoever gives the least gets shot. (NPCs each donate 1d20-10 (min 0)).

Eat this bread! Drops a loaf of bread on the ground. Everyone has to take a bite. Lasts person to take a bite gets shot.

The floor is lava! Last person standing on the floor is shot. (Climbing on the pope is okay. There's also a couple of chairs around here, but not enough.)

3. The Dragon

Basically just a big pile of garbage on wheels. Piloted by a trio of goblins who ride around on top of the "head".

HD 3 HP 30 AC leather No obvious forms of attack
Move slow (and can't turn around very fast either)

Secret Attack #1 -- Frontal Flame Thrower
1d6 in a 20' cone, usable every 1d4 rounds

Secret Attack #2 -- Rear Flame Thrower (Hilarious)
1d6 in a 20' cone, usable every 1d4 rounds

Secret Attack #3 -- Bag of snakes
Usable twice. 30' range. Garbage wings glued to each one.

Secret Attack #4 -- "Claws"
1d10 damage, save vs Tetanus.

Halfway through, the wheels will break and the goblins will call for a timeout to fix it. Respecting the time out will increase their reputation. Ignoring the call for a timeout will reduce their reputation (unless they can do it in a funny way).

4. Death Match

The PCs are forced to fight another team. Only one person can win, everyone else, including their teammates, must lose.

It'll essentially be a team-vs-team fight that must transition into a free-for-all.

Once at least 50% of the combatants are downed, the goblins will release a couple of methed-out warthogs covered in chili powder.

5. Death Cake

The PCs are delivered an enormous cake in the dead of night. It's big enough to hold a person.

The cake contains 2 huge centipedes. As soon as this is discovered, a crane pulls down one of the garbage walls, revealing the audience, which now erupts into applause.

6. Chicken Fight

The PCs are forced to fight another team. The only caveat is that you are not allowed to harm anyone unless you are riding on someone's shoulders. (Bottoms can still do non-damaging things, like shoving or spitting. Triple-stacked PCs are theoretically possible but come with enough penalties to be inadvisable.)

If the PCs have an odd number of people, they will be loaned a teammate from a third team. (Letting them die with make permanent enemies out of the third team.)

After the first round, the arena begins to fill with a choking fog. It comes up to a person's thighs.

After the second round, the choking fog comes up to a person's neck.

After the third round, it covers the bottom people. They are blind and must hold their breath.

After the fourth round, a bunch of trapezes are dropped from the ceiling. Goblins will hoist you 20' up in the air if you grab hold of a rope. From now on, the rules are reversed: the tops must hold onto the rope while the bottoms kick each other.

7. The Other Dragon

Two teams will work together to kill a sludge dragon. However, the winning team will be the one that delivers the death blow. They will get the money and prestige-the losers will be stripped and spanked by Gorp, Son of Gorp.

This fight is a Big Deal, and will be accompanied by fight promoters, coffin makers, and interviewers. ("Do you think you'll enjoy being eaten by the dragon?")

A sludge dragon would normally be a pretty fierce opponent, but luckily, this one is heavily intoxicated.

Drunk Sludge Dragon
HD 10 Def Plate Atk 1d6/1d6/2d6
Move as dwarf Int drunk Mor drunk

Drunk -- Triple the range of fumbles.

Breath attack -- Usable every 2 rounds, and used preferentially to the claw/claw/bite. Effects are a bit random, however, so roll a d6:

1 - Watery vomit. No mechanical effect. The first time this happens, a goblin in a dead clown costume is also ejected(and disappointing Gorp, Son of Gorp, who was promised a surprise clown--he loves surprise clowns.)

2 - Hurbek the Mighty, a level 2 dwarf. He deals 1d6 damaged to whoever he collides with. He will join the fight against the sludge dragon. He swears so much he is nearly incomprehensible. If this result is rolled a second time, the dragon belches painfully.

3 - Sludge. 20' radius, 50' range. Dex negates. Anchored to the ground until successful Str check.

4 - Bile. 30' cone of acid, 1d6 damage on the first turn, 1d5 damage on the second, etc. Dex for half. Can be washed off with water (or vomit).

5 - Broken cutlery. 3d6 damaged to one poor bastard who gets hit by the whole pile, and 1d6 damage to the dragon. Dex for half. Anyone digging in it will find a decent spear.

6 - Fire, somehow. It must be sick. 30' cone of fire, 2d6. Dex for half.

These monsters are natives of the Mythic Underworld. The Dungeon beneath all dungeons. The darkened halls that we all visit in our earliest nightmares. The liminal ur-space that borders Hell as well as your grandmother's cellar.

These monsters don't necessarily have a full history, biology, or psychology. (This is probably because I couldn't come up with anything good.)
That's okay. They're still good monsters.

I've mostly not bothered with full stats. Assume AC as chain, improvise the rest. You'll be fine.

a False Hydra by NisseLindblomArt

Buggy Birds

Level 1

Actually an insect, a buggy bird is about the same size and shape as a heron. They look majestic in profile, but a bit ridiculous the rest of the time.

Pedants will point out that, actually, they should be more accurately called "birdy bugs". This is why the traditional punishment for pedantry is Impalement by Buggy Bird.

Spend one round retracting their head, inflating their chest, and cooing. On the next round, they attack for 3d6 damage and make a horrible BWEAGH noise.

Attercop

Level 2  Dagger 1d6

About the size of the smallest guy in your high school class. Tusks like a boar. Nose like a skull. Each eye is a gem worth 10s.

Can shoot webs from their hands and swing from them. Can shoot webs onto foes, entangling them. Can create bungees and slingshots. Can spend two rounds shooting a web to two points, and then create a line between them. Can create inelastic webs if needed. Capable of huge leaps. Can climb up sheer walls.

Can the DM think of a new way to use this ability every turn? The DM can, because the DM can google spiderman as well as anyone else.

Attercops hate spiders. They hate being compared to spiders. They hate anything spidery.

Attercops don't lay eggs or weave webs. (Although they do weave tripwires, alert wires, ropes, and nets.)

Attercop is a last name. They are an example of what happens when a cult successfully completes their master plan. They are irredeemably evil, and believe that everyone else is prey. But they are a family in the Legal* sense. If you marry into the family, you will gain their mutation and skewed perspective. If one of their sons disowns them and everything they stand for, you will lose it.

*I mean legal in the sense that the Authority recognizes your marriage, and therefor the universe does as well.

Demonoid

Level 3  Weapon 1d8

Rapacious -- The demonoid makes two melee attacks against its target. The target makes one melee attack against the demonoid. All three of these attacks happen simultaneously.

A demonoid is what happens when a demonic possession is never cured.

This is not to say that the demon that is possessing this poor man is the same demon that originally possessed them. It is far more likely that the original demon sold the body after they tired with it, and so on and so on, over the long years, until the body ends up in the possession of some idiot.

'Orrible Gregory

Level 4  Claws 1d8/1d8  Climb

They look like bipedal crabs with the heads of fat-necked vultures. They are famously ugly, but adore cute things. (Their babies are famously cute.)

Can replace one of their claw attacks with a hook pull, which pulls the target creature adjacent. Str/Dex negates. 30' range.

Their tendons can be harvested for use as ropes. They take up 1 slot, but are twice as long (100'). They will rot in 3 days unless preserved. They hang out near ledges, bridges, and dark cave entrances.

Replaces hook horrors, which are kind of lame.

Loctus

Level 5 Grab Fly 10

The most famous of the braided golems. A flying hand the size of a man, composed of (holed) coins tied together with red string. Worth 777s if disassembled. Rhymes with "woke bus".

Once it grabs someone, it starts casting scatter to the winds. The spell completes at the end of the next turn, and all enemies in the room are teleported. Each of them should add 1 silver to their inventory.

Loctuses "in the wild" will teleport you to a random room on the same floor. A loctus that is created for a particular purpose will probably teleport you to a furnace, a cage, or a pit next to a wyrm's nest.

There is at least one story that tells of a thief who painted himself gold, held very still, and tricked a loctus into teleporting him into the vault.

Elder Throx

Level 6 Grab/Grab/Grab
Casts as a level 4 transmutation wizard.

Basically just a flying obelisk with a bunch of tentacles coming out the bottom. Smart people avoid reading anything on it.

At the start of its turn, all held creatures take 1d12 damage from biting and/or neck-wringing.

They're very evil, but their machinations are directed elsewhere. Humans have little ability to help or harm their plans. Because of this, they're also kind of friendly.

They will offer to rent you by implanting an embryo inside you. (It will puppet your body for 1d3 sessions in a distant location, during which you'll have to play an alternate character.) Afterwards, the embryo will remain with you, visible inside your abdomen (because it can make your skin translucent), where it will let you cast a random spell per day. and happily dispense Forbidden Knowledge. If anything weird happens while you're sleeping, it can kick your kidneys to wake you up.

The unborn throx will be sad because you are not smart enough, nor big enough, to carry it to maturation. Although it could attempt to grow to maturity inside you, it knows that such an attempt would probably result in the death of you. If only you could somehow get much bigger and smarter, we might be able to make a deal. . .

Panoptigore

Level 7  Def plate Sword 1d12
Can cast ganonball and fear. 2 MD.

An floating, armored giant with a single eye and no legs. Magnificent cape.

Gaze Attack -- If you meet the gaze of the Panoptigore, you instantly create a side combat. The side combat lasts 1 round and takes place inside the Panoptigore's eye, a spherical space 50' in diameter. All of these sub-combats occur instantly, and are always 1-on-1 fights.

If six people lock eyes with the Panoptigore, then six separate 1-on-1 fights occur instantly.

New Spell: Ganonball
A ranged attack roll that does 2*[sum] damage. Opponent can reflect the ganonball at a new target by beating your attack roll with an attack roll of their own. (If it can make an attack roll, it can reflect a ganonball.) Ganonballs can be hit back and forth as long as people keep rolling higher than the previous roll. All this back and forth is resolved instantaneously.

There's a problem with the word "fish". The word "bug" has the same problem.

In both cases, the word was coined and propagated by non-specialists, describing something without any need for precision.

A bug is any little creepy-crawly with more legs than a decent Christian should have.

A fish is anything that swims in the water and breathes water. Even the beaver can be classified as a type of fish, with a bit of squinting.

(Don't resent past generations for their shitty systems of classification. Their systems served different needs.)

Intentions notwithstanding, the end result was still overlapping systems of poorly-defined categories, which leads to labyrinths of conflation whenever anyone tries to have a technical conversation about them.

This is the exact problem that the Lesser Undead currently have.

Classifying the Undead

The term "zombie" and "skeleton" do not apply to any specific thing. They can refer to the same thing (because zombies must surely decay into skeletons at some point), which is an idea that Gus first impressed upon me.

And conversely, the word "skeleton" can refer to two very different things.

Let's start with negative energy. There is not such thing, and any scholar still insisting on the existence of such a material deserves to be fed to ants.

Platypus Skeleton
by Katrina Mengchen Zhang

The Demonic Undead

Let's start with the obvious. There is no such thing as negative energy. There is no such thing as positive energy either, and anyone who tells you otherwise deserves to be eaten by ants.

The very idea of negative energy (as something that is simple, sterile, and easily harnessed) endangers any aspiring necromancer by hiding them from the true powers animated every shambling corpse.

The truth is that corpses are invested by spirits summoned from hell.

These may be demons, but more commonly they are just lost souls (and in hell, there is little distinction between the two).

Negotiating with the damned is usually a fairly straightforward affair. They are usually eager to sell themselves into an interminable servitude in exchange for nothing--the chance to feel air on their skin again, for example. A great many of them can be lured into a corpse merely by the suggestion that they may get to see a loved one.

The exact type of investiture determines the nature of the Undead. They are usually not allowed to have any free will at all. Lesser undead are usually created to be an extension of the necromancer's own will.

But the soul's jail is not without its cracks. If your skeletons hate you (and they probably do), you may notice them staring at you. They may stand too close to you when you sleep. They may find ways to deface their bodies, grinding down their feet in order to slow their paces, or allowing their hands to be crushed in hinges. This is why experienced necromancers are always instill self-care into their undead.

But of course, shivering slave-shades are not the only spirits that can be invested in a corpse. Higher demonic spirits can also be housed by the shabby walls of flesh, and these more powerful spirits have waxed in wit and puissance.

Remember that every human possesses seven souls. Four that pass into the afterlife, and three that remain with the corpse. (How else could the speak with dead spell work? You merely speak with the meat, not the eternal.)

A demon that possesses a corpse can capture, torment, and control the three early souls. Although the fleshly souls are not a person, they contain a bloodless recitation of all the body's early deeds, and this is what the demon can use to gain power over the living.

A demonic corpse may know all the names and histories of the corpse's former associates. It may even know certain secrets (although many secrets are beyond his grasp. The flesh remembers the smell of the lock, but not necessarily the combination. If it remembers a number, it may not remember the meaning or the significance.) Still, when these memories are combined with a demon skilled at impersonation, resultant creature can accomplish great things.

There are also people who argue that necromancy is a victimless crime, since the undead can till a farm and produce food. These people are fools.

The three worldly souls suffer. The damned souls suffer (though less, perhaps, than if they had remained in Hell). And when the Undead slip the leash, as they invariably do eventually, they are incapable of anything except hatred, cruelty, and self-destruction.

The Butcher's Heresy

Before we can talk about Skeletons, we must talk about Flesh.

According to the Butcher's Heresy, Flesh preceded Soul.

In the earliest days, Flesh grew in the seas, and coated the rocks. But it lacked breath, and it lacked mind. They drifted without thinking. They had watery spears and crude pumps, but they struggled to wield their own biology effectively.

And so these earliest tissues--plant, animal, insect--hatched schemes to give themselves some executive agency. Their most successful plots involved the capture of the Soul from the Places Outside, where it would be scrubbed clean and invested into the Flesh.

Once laundered and installed, the Souls would believe that they were the body, and they would toil ceaselessly in the service of the Flesh. They would fight for the Flesh, they would breed the Flesh, they would raise the Flesh's children as their own. The Soul would forever be a slave the Flesh and its vicissitudes. And it would be the ideal slave--one that always thought itself to be free.

The First Skeletons

Many allegiances were struck in those earliest days. The Beastly Kingdom of Flesh was the first one to negotiate an alliance with the great spirits of Earth, who had begun to take notice of all the workings of the Flesh.

From that allegiance was struck the Covenant of Bone. (Or the Covenant of Flesh, as the Skeletons call it.)

The Covenant in a Nutshell:

We, the Elders of Earth, will allow Calcium to swear obedience to the Beastly Kingdoms of Flesh. Calcium will form an endoskeleton, so that the Beastly Kingdoms will have greater protection, stature, and strength. In return, once the Flesh has failed, the Skeleton will be granted use of the Soul, in perpetuity.

The Skeleton People live far to the west, beyond the dying of the sun. The land is dim and pale, and there is no wind.

They look like skeletons. They walk. They talk. They carry backpacks.

They hate us, because we have forgotten the Covenant. Only the whales still keep the covenant, and journey west to die.

They do not come here often, because the skeletons of whales do not swim as well as they used to, and the skeleton people are usually destroyed when they arrive.

But if left to their own devices, the Skeleton People will usually rescue their peers by killing humans and animals. They know how to awaken the Skeleton inside (the Skeleton remembers the covenant, even if the Soul does not). Then, they help the bloody skeleton out of the corpse. Lastly, the newborn Skeleton rinses off the traitorous fluids and joins their brethren in a welcoming dance.

Awakening as a newborn Skeleton is a startling thing. He is still Otho the Chemist, Husband to Marlia, but he is also a million grains of Calcium. He has spent a millennia on the seafloor, fighting for better representation among the Salt Princes. He is of Earth, and he is finally free of the machinations of that nauseating Flesh. There is no question as to where his loyalties lie.

And so Otho the Skeleton is joyous to remember his true life. His new friends are also joyful. The least he could do is to go home, in order to share this same gift with his wife Marlia.

The Skeleton People are not much concerned with us. We are oathbreakers. They would punish us, if it were within their power.

But they are creatures of Earth, and the Skeleton King follows his Father above all else. We are the least of their problems.

from The Last of Us
except that it's not quite right for Falcabrina
A human mind inside a fungus would have notions of grooming/beauty, for example

Legion (Falcabrina)

Once there was a God of Fungus. He was called Shendormu.

He was assimilated by the Hesayan Church, as the Authority dictated that all lesser gods must be.

Except Shendormu wasn't completely assimilated. A piece was left behind. A death cult that eventually regrew into something entirely different, a sect that worshipped a particular aspect of their former religion. They called themselves The Falcabrina. They preached Oneness.

Or perhaps Falcabrina was another fungal spirit, sliding into a vacant chair.

Or perhaps Falcabrina was a cleric of the cult, who found a way to deify herself, and insinuate her godhood into her god.

Certainly anything is possible when hallucinogens are taken in these quantities.

Of Falcabrina, only this much is certain: there is a throne. And upon the throne is the corpse from which grows the goddess. And around the throne are the colonized faithful, each alloyed together into a singular will.

And so Falcabrina is a fungal hivemind zombie hoard (that is distinctly not-Undead), except it's not that simple. The hive-mind connections are imperfect. They are not instantaneous. They leak. They disagree. And so Falcabrina has reproduced through violent fission.

What is cancer, except a cell that outgrows its parents?

Falcabrina has been limited by these disruptions. When a contingent of her bodies begin to dissent, she must purge the cancer from her body. But these civil wars can never be launched in secret, since their minds are still joined at the roots. So while you might see fungal zombies dismembering each other with clumsy efficiency, for Falcabrina, the experience is more like a wolf chewing off a leg that has become infected.

Still, the purges have never been perfectly effective. She attempts to rule the ruined city of Mosphorai as well as she can. You can buy food from her farms, and she will certainly not attempt to infect you, but the city is plagued with a population that exceeds the grasp of a single mind. And so disruptions are not uncommon, and are frequently fatal for travelers. Because what better way to better fight your jailer than to recruit new bodies to your cause?

And it is also a city that must be navigated cautiously. The process of fission is not a binary one, where a faction of bodies decides one day to rise against Falcabrina. It is a gradual one, where every cell of her body secretly conspires against the whole, and must be suppressed by the rest of her body.

In fact, its entirely possible that nothing is left of the original Falcabrina. Certainly the slouching heap that sits in the throne is just a figurehead. Nothing makes that cluster of mushrooms any more significant than any other in her corpus.

Lastly, we musts mention that Falcabrina is constantly seeping into the world. Pieces of her body (in the form of dozens of fungal zombies) sometimes develop autonomy faster than the rest of the body can react, and flee into the world.

Each of these pieces of Falcabrina is a complete organism. They can grow (infest), adopt new philosophies, and are even capable of undergoing the same type of violent fission that Falcabrina herself did.

The most common form of these factions are animalistic, violent shamblers. Nearly blind from their cranial growths, the mostly hunt by sound. As a category, these creatures are called Legion. Their bite is usually infectious.

But they are not the only of Falcabrina's children to depart. Some of her rebellious organs are singular individuals. Not a hoard, but a person with an agenda all of their own. A person who happens to be piloting a human body.

Falcabrina and her brood are staunchly opposed by paladins of Shendormu. These brave men and women strive to protect the innocent with all of the powers of the Sacred Shroom, the Holy Mold.

Paladins of Shendormu

Paladins of Shendormu can cast illusion in the minds of those that they strike with their spear (no save). Their Mount is the psilocybin mushroom. When one of them dies, you can plant their head in compost and the character will regrow. They will regrow smaller, though, and will return with -1d3 Str and -1 Int.

Ghouls and Paralysis

Ghoul paralysis sucks. Don't use it. Remember, the first precept is to give players interesting choices. Paralysis fails this simple test.

I've been trying to find a good replacement for ghoul paralysis, all built around the idea of giving a player a more interesting choice. My first attempt was Agony, but people didn't like it much.

Agony:

Each turn a player can choose to writhe in agony, or act normally.

If they choose to writhe in agony, they take no damage, and take no actions.

If they choose to act normally, they take 1d6 non-lethal damage. This damage is reduced by 1 point for every round that has passed, so Agony would only deal 1d6-2 (min 0) damage on the third round.

from the 3rd Edition Monster Manual

Horror:

Each turn, a horrified character can choose to accept the horror, or to deny the horror.

If they deny the horror, they lose their turn, and the horror die decreases 1 size. They spend their time mumbling "no no no" and trembling.

If they accept the horror, they take 1d6 non-lethal damage. If they take 6+ non-lethal damage from this, they gain 1 Trauma.

So, a character who spends 1 round denying the horror and then accepts the horror on the next round would only take 1d4 damage. 1d6 becomes 1d4 becomes 1d2 becomes 0. Big things can use a larger horror die, of course, but the default is a d6.

Terror:

A character who is terrified gets -4 to their Defense and their Save. This penalty ends once they are safe from whatever terrified them. If their HP drops below 0 while they are terrified, they gain 1 Trauma.

In combat, this usually means running out of the room and hyperventilating briefly in the hallway.

A player can also choose to risk staying in combat. After all, they might be terrified of the corpse shark, but still manage to destroy it with their next attack. And of course, the best path to safety might be a interesting question in itself.

Templates

Drowned

The lungs of all living creatures within 50' are filled with water. They will need to make Con checks after 3 rounds (18 seconds of high-exertion combat) in order to stay conscious. If you can breathe water, feel free to ignore this effect.

This introduces a new defeat condition into combat. Players can choose for themselves how long they want to risk staying in combat.

To utilize the mechanic to the fullest, the arena cannot be something that can be exited at a moments notice. Give them a grapple-happy enemy, or require a Movement check to exit the room.

Twilight

Can only be seen by characters who are blind, or who possess at least 1 Madness.

All non-magical damage is reduced to 1, unless dealt by a character who is at death's door (0 HP). Can only be permanently killed by a character at death's door.

Mummy

Half of all the damage that they deal is cursed damage, and does not heal normally. You can remove the curse by visiting a church, or by appeasing the mummy.

Appeasing the mummy involves sacrificing one of the mummy's enemies at the local altar and begging for forgiveness. The enemy can be a tomb robber, a particular ethnicity, or the mummy across the hallway. (And if you are going to put mummies in your dungeon, they need at least this level of context. Mummies have history.)

Horde Dead

Undead combo packs. Must be created from a specific relationship.

So, in my last post, I talked about how undead are created by inviting demons into a corpse. Those are lesser undead.

Greater undead are created by imprisoning people inside their corpses, and dominating their ego through trauma.

Candle Family

Made from killing a woman's children, rending them into tallow before her eyes, and using them to make a candle. 1d6+1 wicks emerge from her neck and shoulders, one for each bound soul.

Candle Mom
Lvl 3 Claw 1d6+ignite

As bright as a torch BUT creates darkness around itself for 20'. The only thing its light illuminates is itself.) Usually travels with 1d6 skeletal children (HD 1) who are hidden inside her enveloping darkness.

The Lover and The Beloved

Made by removing all of the teeth from a pair of lovers, and forcing them to swallow the other's teeth. Only then are they killed, both pierced by the same black iron spear. The necromancer must then keep their hearts on their belt.

Beloved
HD 3 Claws 1d12

Any damage that the Beloved would take is instead redirected to the Lover.

If the Beloved is ever separated from the Lover, it rots into heavy dust.

Lover
HD 3 HP 50 Caress 1d6 cold

Damage that is redirected to the Lover appears as grievous wounds.

If the Lover is ever separated from the Beloved, it flies into a rage, gains a bite attack that does 1d20 damage, and drops to 1 HP.

I'm one of those people that thinks that ghosts shouldn't have stats. Instead, ghosts are lingering bits of soulstuff, typically just a painful moment without context. A ghost might materialize and go through some motions, but they are a type of recording, a recitation of misery.

They're meant to be interesting traps, where the players find success through cleverness, rather than rolling high with their most relevant skill.

by Luca Nemolato

How Ghosts Work

Pouring holy water on an affected person can pause the effects of the ghost for 1d6 rounds. Everyone knows this. (This works on possession, too, if they succeed on a Save.)

Ghosts can be laid to rest through some action, usually laying their corpses to rest, completing their unfinished business, or sanctifying an area.

If you don't want to do all this sanctification business, you can destroy a ghost by breaking both femurs. This instantly ends the haunting and puts a curse on the person who broke the bone.

A cleric can also perform a funeral rite to appease the spirit. This requires bathing the bones and singing to them. It takes 2 hours.

If no trigger is listed, assume that the ghost triggers whenever you pass through the area.

By default, each ghost affects only a single person in the group; they get no Save.

The speak with dead spell can usually give you some big clues. What does this ghost want more than anything else? Ghosts are usually emotional wrecks, so it should be obvious.

So here are some ghosts:

The Fallen

Premonition

Vertigo. An intense fear of heights. Intense pain in your shins, wrists, and head. Everyone is the group feels this.

Manifestation

No one is allowed to climb in this area. Ropes will be cut. Rocks will shift under your fingers.

Corpse

Half-buried in the rubble, a corpse with broken tibias, wrists, and a fractured skull.

Propitiation

Carry the skeleton out of this dismal hole. Once the skeleton has been removed from the hole, the ghost is propitiated. You can climb as long as you bring the skeleton with you.

The Starved

Premonition

Intense hunger. You feel like you just lost 20 lbs. You did just lose 20 lbs.

Manifestation

You must eat a ration every 10 minutes or fall unconscious. 10 minutes later, you will die from starvation, having lost over 100 lbs.

Corpse

Out of the many skeletons in this room, the skeleton with bite marks on its fingers. (Ignore the other skeletons.)

Propitiation

An offering of food, placed direction inside the rib cage. The ghost will be propitiated for as long as the food lasts.

The Drowned

Premonition

Walking alongside the water, you catch a glimpse of your own corpse under the water. A moment later, it is gone.

Manifestation

You feel hands on your back as someone shoves you into the water. From this point on, you cannot escape the water. If you try to crawl back to dry land, the water rises up with, weighing you down and dragging you back in. With great effort, you can get within an inch of the surface, but no further.

Your allies can breathe air into your lungs, or you can breathe through a tube.

Corpse

A skeleton, hidden in the muck.

Propitiation

Remove the skeleton from the drowning pool.

The Shackled

Premonition

You can feel cold metal around your ankles and wrists. Whenever you take a step, you can feel a chain dragging behind your foot.

Manifestation

You cannot leave the room. Your wrists and ankles cannot cross the threshold of the doors.

Corpse

There are many corpses in this room, some still shackled, some scattered across the floor.

Propitiation

You must destroy all of the shackles. There are 4 sets in this room. Bashing them out of the wall (or breaking the links with a hammer) will incur 4 wandering monster checks. If you have a crowbar, you can do it more easily and quietly, and will only incur 2 wandering monster checks. Either way, it takes two hours of work.

The Betrayed

Premonition

Your companions are looking at you when they think you aren't looking. You can hear snatches of whispers. You suspect they are plotting against you.

Manifestation

You flee from your companions. After 3 rounds, you can save every 1 round to end this effect. When you recover, you can remember being stabbed between the shoulderblades by a green-jeweled dagger. The ghost will manifest again in 1 hour until you leave the dungeon, or the ghost is propitiated.

Corpse

A shriveled corpse with dagger wounds in its back.

Propitiation

Destroy the skeleton of the Betrayer. Alternatively, destroy the green-jeweled dagger and return the corpse's coin purse.

The Betrayer

Premonition

White-hot greed, so powerful it feels sexual. You can't stop looking at the valuables your companions have.

Manifestation

Whenever new treasure is available, you will insist that it is yours. If your allies force you to give it up or share, or refuse to let you carry it, you will pretend to agree, then grab the item and attempt to flee out of the entire dungeon.

Corpse

A shriveled corpse with two coin purses and a green-jeweled dagger.

Propitiation

Destroy the skeleton of the Betrayer.

The Sacrificed

Premonition

You hear the chanting of the cult. You feel the heat of ancient torches. Your shirt is ripped open, and you can the feel the tip of a dagger resting on the skin over your heart.

Manifestation

Everyone hears the chanting now, repeated endlessly "The lord demands a gift". You are stunned, and your chest is bared. Everyone can see the deepening wound on your chest. In 2 rounds, you will die. "The lord demands a gift."

You can flee from the room, but you'll drop to 0 HP, the ghost will trigger the next time you enter the room, and you'll never have enough time to pry the gems out of the idol.

Corpse

A skeleton on an altar.

Propitiation

Sacrifice someone else on the altar. Alternatively, sacrifice a valuable possession on the altar.

The Abandoned

Premonition

Your leg becomes stuck. You call out for help, but all you see is receding torch light. Your allies have abandoned you here.

Manifestation

You will become a useless ball of terror unless someone is holding your hand.

Corpse

The shriveled corpse of a woman, hidden in the gloom of a pit trap.

Propitiation

As long as you bring the skeleton with you, she will not harm you. You must treat her like one of the party, though. If you forget to introduce her, the sense of terror will begin to return. She takes up 3 inventory slots.

Lashiec and the Stylite

In the mornings, Lashiec would milk his goats, check his duck traps, and then eat breakfast with his mother. If there was any food left over, he would bring it to the stylite, who lived on top of a column.

In exchange for onions and sour cheeses, the wise man taught Lashiec everything he knew.

In the beginning, these were mundane things: the organization of the spheres, the seven souls of man, the color of Zulin's teapot. It took a great deal of time for the wise man to tell Lashiec everything he knew, for he had learned a lot by communing with the upper air, but it eventually came to pass.

In the end, the elder even told the boy the secrets of heaven.  On the seventh day, the stylite told his last secret. Lashiec was astounded, and stared at the horizon. "I understand my place in the world," he said.

But the old man was looking around in confusion and horror. At his hands, at the ground below, at nothing.  "What is this horrible place?" the old man asked. There was nothing left of him, for his spirit had departed.

-From the Seventh Sermon of Lashiec, Son of Heaven

In Lashiec's seventh sermon, he is explaining the nature of non-commutative knowledge, which is knowledge that cannot be shared.

We could say that the act of telling causes forgetting, but this is an oversimplification.

Non-commutative knowledge breaks from regular semiotics, because the signifier is the same thing as the signified, and yet neither has any meaning in the regular sense of the word.

In Centerra, these are called the Secret Names of God.

The Secret Names of God

They are believed to be the true names of the Authority, or perhaps just fragments of it. Each is too powerful to be splintered among many minds. They are described as an iron orb, sinking through the oily sea that is the world.

If I tell you one of the Secret Names, it will leave my mind.

If I write down one of the Secret Names, it will leave my mind.

If I read one of the Secret Names, I will gain it, and the ink on the paper will become meaningless. (There are scholars who study these empty cocoons. Each one is different, and bears little resemblance to each other, or any known language.)

If I die while I hold one of the Secret Names, it will remain in my brain, and later, my skull. Different methods are required to retrieve the Name from these locations. (Grand hookah, skull player.)

I've printed six of the Secret Names below. They belong in your dungeon, like any treasure. A character who holds a Secret Name gains the listed power for as long as they hold it.

A secret name can also be used to create a golem.

Secret Name: Shaimok

When you fire a bow, range penalties are turned into bonuses. This doesn't affect your maximum range.

Secret Name: Phacops

At any moment, you can choose to die. Your body rots into dust immediately. The next morning, you will be reborn from the dirt beneath the location where you last awakened from sleep. The word remains in your old skull, and must be retrieved.

Secret Name: Deiphon

You can walk on water. The bottoms of your feet still get wet.

Secret Name: Destra

You can learn what spells someone has prepared by looking in their eye.

Secret Name: Zhuul

A character who holds this secret name can turn invisible whenever they close their eyes and hold their breath.

Secret Name: Amkala

If you sit in someone's warm spot, people will believe you to be that person. Lasts until you stand up.

The Wizard Trap

So here's the problem:

We look at our fantasy world and classify the contents into the non-magical and the fantastic. Fine.

The problem is that we use the real world as a the yardstick for measuring what is magical, and what is not. This limits our creativity, and it limits how our players interact with the world.

Wolves exist in the real world. Therefore they are not magical, right?

Gelatinous Cubes do not exist in the real world. Therefore, they must be magic. (Or at least, be capable of things that real world monsters are not, such as super-acid.)

If you pick away at this dichotomy a little bit, the flaw becomes apparent.

Why shouldn't there be something fantastic about the common wolf?

Why shouldn't our imaginary monsters be more mundane? (e.g. The psuedodragon would be a stronger concept without the tail sting.)

When the line between magical and non-magical creatures is blurred, it strengthens the setting, and by extension, the game. (Scrap learned this long ago.)

This same flaw extends to how we see wizards. It's a mistake I've made in the past: allowing only wizards to identify scrolls. It extends far beyond that, though.

Many people will look at a force field and say, "this doesn't exist in the real world, therefore it must be magic, therefore it must be something that only the wizard can interact with."

And this is a shame, not only because it shuts fighters off from a huge portion of the game, but also because it limits us in how we interact with magic.

The Secret Names of God escape the wizard trap because they can be used by anyone.

Bad:

Only the wizard can get us past this force field.
Only a wizard can read this scroll.
Only a cleric can raise the dead.

Good:

We can break the force field if we hit it really, really hard.
We can shatter the force field if we play a really high music note.
We can set the force field on fire.

Anyone can read a scroll as long as they're really drunk.
Anyone can read a scroll with the right training.
If the scroll is inside your body, you can cast the spell.

Anyone can raise the dead by sacrificing 77 people to the 7th Satan (provided that they aren't in Heaven).
Anyone who is level 10 can become a lich as long as they are willing to sacrifice everything they love. There are fighter-liches and thief-liches.

Challenge your goddamn assumptions.

You may rightly note that some of these things require the players to know stuff. Many people will assume that a magic scroll needs to be deciphered by a mage, but the flammability of a force field is more ambiguous--which just means that you'll have to work harder convey it.

Maybe the force field has a bit of squish when you touch it. Maybe it has a crack in it already. Maybe the force field vibrates and makes a single note. Maybe it is common knowledge in your setting that force fields are flammable (based on a popular myth). All of these ideas work.

And let me state, for the record, that these are not chores that my players perform in order to get back to the game. These sorts of things are the game. Figuring out how to set a force field on fire is rad. Having the wizard make an Arcana check to identify (or paying a sage to cast identify) a scroll is lame. If identifying a scroll isn't fun, why even have it in your game? If a forcefield isn't interesting, why is it blocking the hallway?

Bad Golems

At their most boring, a golem is a big stone dude that punches you to death. You will note that this is not very different from earth elementals, and the in many games, the two are sadly indistinguishable.

In D&D, golems have a couple of wrinkles. First, they may go insane and try to kill you. Since you will usually be meeting golems in combat, the party may never even notice.

Golems also have different interactions with spells, like clay golems getting tossed around by move earth in some editions, healed by acid, etc. These vary depending on the type of golem, and are sort of like the different resistances of oozes--the party just has to learn them. This type of stuff is fun.

Subtype Dilution

D&D has a tendency to take an evocative monster and then create spin-offs until all the magic is gone. Even if you like the green acid dragons, you might not like the brass dragons, and you probably don't like the shitty little guard drakes. It dilutes the brand.

Part of it is a need to create different CR versions of a monster in a game with a long power curve, part of it is just a failure of creativity.

The same thing has happened to golems, with the different material golems. Even scarecrows and Frankenstein's monster have been squeezed onto the same shelf.

So, let's fix that. The original conception of the golem was a uniquely Jewish myth, probably the most clearly Jewish mechanism in the machine of D&D (moreso than phylacteries, I would argue). Have you familiarized yourself with the original golem of Prague?

Miloslav Dvorak, Le Golem et Rabbi Loew près de Prague

Fixing the Golem

Golems are not made by wizards. Golems are clerical productions, created when one of the secret names of the Authority is written on clay. (They are not inherently clerical, but most of the secret names are in the hands of the Church.)

This recreates (and honors) the creation of mankind from the primal clay.

Each golem has a glyph written on its body, a set of instructions in a grid surrounding the secret name, which cannot be read while the golem lives.

Golems are as intelligent as a human, but their minds are limited by the confines of their glyph. They are unable to conceive of a broad interpretation of their instructions, and will instead interpret their duties according to the narrowest possible interpretation.

A golem that has been told to "prevent anyone from entering this room" (and nothing else) will stop caring about people that successfully run into the room. After all, it has no instructions about what to do with unauthorized people that enter the room. They will still fight in self-defense, though.

All golems will rest on Sundays. Forcing a golem to work on a Sunday risks madness.

All golems are made from clay, and filled with an inner fire. (Suggesting that other cultures might have golems of their own is only mildly heretical--who knows what the benthic demons of the merfolk are capable of? But whatever it is, it isn't a golem, even if it seems similar.)

Clay Golem
Level 7 Def chain Fist 2d6+grab
Move slow Int 10 Str 20 Mor 10

Immunities - Bludgeoning weapons deal normal damage, while other types of weapons deal 1 point of damage. Immune to magic except for magic which specifically affects stone (which always has a maximized effect against the golem, and never allows a save).

Grab - On a hit, target must make a Strength check (-4 penalty) or be grabbed. If they are still grabbed on the clay golem's subsequent turn, roll a d4.

1 - The golem squeezes, automatically dealing 2d6 damage to you, and possibly crushing your skull. If you die or fall unconscious, it drops you.
2 - The golem throws you at someone else. On a hit, you both take 2d6 damage. On a miss, only you.
3 - The golem crushes your weapon and breaks your wrist (gain the injury). If you are not holding a weapon, roll 1d2 instead.
4 - The golem crushes your armor. You take 1d6 damage, and your armor value is reduced by 1d4 points. If you do not have any armor worth crushing, roll 1d2 instead.

Inner Fire - Visible fire burns behind the golem's eyes and mouth. Throwing a bucket of water on it deals 1d6 damage, and submersion deals 3d6 damage each round.

Glyph - The golem's glyph is usually hidden. If the glyph is destroyed, the golem instantly dies. If the text is altered, the golem's directives can be overwritten or corrupted. Attacking the glyph (once its location is known) is as difficult as attacking plate. Golems are smart enough to know when their glyph is being targeted, and will take steps to protect their weak spot.

The location of the glyph can be observed in combat--a character in melee range can take an action to look. They'll observe two locations with a successful Wis check, but only one location with a failed one.

Alternatively, you could just watch the golem as it walks around.

It is simple to recover the secret name from a dead golem. You can even make your own golem--all you need is a decent sculptor and a full command of the heavenly tongue.

Locations of the Glyph

Left Palm - visible when the golem attempts a grab.
Right Palm - visible when the golem attempts a grab.
Sole of the Left Foot - visible when the golem ascends a ladder, or walks through mud.
Sole of the Right Foot - visible when the golem ascends a ladder, or walks through mud.
Inside of the Left Thigh - visible when the golem jogs past you on the left.
Inside of the Right Thigh - visible when the golem jogs past you on the right.
Left Armpit - visible when the golem raises its left arm (e.g. throwing).
Right Armpit - visible when the golem raises its right arm (e.g. throwing).
Behind the Left Ear - visible when you are behind the golem.
Behind the Right Ear - visible when you are behind the golem.
Inside of the Mouth - visible when the golem takes water damage.
Navel - visible whenever anyone cuts off the golem's belt.

Discussion

As a straight-up fight, a golem should be a bigger challenge than a giant.

However, a golem has a plethora of weaknesses that can be exploited. The inner fire should prompt most parties to ask, "what happens if we extinguish the fire?"

This is nice, because then the expectation matches the reality. You don't have to teach the players anything before they can start scheming.

The glyph also gives a smart party of level 0s a way to defeat a much tougher enemy.

The different follow-ups for a grabbed enemy keep the golem feeling diverse, without loading it down with a bunch of abilities.

And lastly, I envision the golem as the type of enemy that players will come across early in their careers. It's the boss of level 1 or 2, and as such, it's important that the players have an easy time escaping, hence the slow Movement speed.

Golems are puzzle-monsters, and like all good puzzles, they can be brute forced (if you brought enough sledgehammers).

It is possible for slavery to persist into death. This is, essentially, what separates mummies from other undead.

There are many types of mummies within this definition, but let us begin with

The Mummy

When certain aristocrats die, it is common for their household to follow them into death.

Their finery will be heaped into the tomb alongside him. Their spouses will poison themselves at the announcement of his death. Their slaves will drugged and sacrificed at his funeral. Even prize racehorses are not exempt.

In some cases, this is a mere embalming. When a potent cleric is involved, this is something more.

A slave will pressured into swearing eternal servitude. It does not seem like such a terrible deal--the slave receives preferential treatment in exchange for a mere ritual. But like many magical oaths, this one is binding.

If the contract does not require an eternity of servitude (as most of them do), then the duration is usually for ten thousand years.

The body must be preserved if the mummy is to persist. The only thing that unified the souls was their service to the flesh--without the flesh, they begin to unravel. Imagine seven birds that were huddled together in a nest during a storm. As the storm stops, each bird begins to realize that they are not a seven-beaked creature whose lower half is a nest; they take flight. This is what happens when a body decays.

For these mummies, the lowest of servants, beasts, and wives, their existence as a mummy is a living nightmare. Brief flashes of existence, a half-life inside a tomb, separated by oceans of darkness and lost time.

WARNING: Pictures of mummies ahead.
This one is King Tut.

Their memories are usually scrubbed away. The clerical embalmers use long hooks to pull the purple soul out of the nose of the recently deceased. What need does a servant have for a full memory? The only knowledge they need is how to serve, and that lives in the belly, not the head. A servant without memories is a stable servant, one who will not change with the long eons.

Instead, the soul(s) are bound in certain strictures. This occurred during the binding ceremony, but the bustle of life keeps the servant from ever noticing the net being woven around their soul.

Not all mummies are hostile. Depending on the instructions that they have been given, they grovel on their bellies in order to welcome you into their tomb, or they may be trembling things that curl up in a corner and await their demise. Or they may be shuffling things that flee in order to rouse their brethren, and return at the head of a horde.

If you ever come across these damned things, know that destroying them is a the greatest kindness you could ever provide.

Mummy
Level 3 Def leather Claw 1d6+rot
Move human Int 10 Mor 10

Mummy Rot -- Half of the damage that a mummy deals is cursed damage, and will not heal normally. You can remove this curse by visiting a church, or by appeasing the mummy.

Appeasing the mummy involves sacrificing one of the mummy's enemies at the local altar and begging for forgiveness. The enemy can be a tomb robber, a particular ethnicity, or the mummy across the hallway.

Lindow Man

The Mummy Lord

At the opposite end of the spectrum are the clerics themselves, who bound themselves according to the same covenants, in order to serve their lords on the far shores of death.

Unlike the lesser mummies, they retain a great deal of memory and free will.

Their existence is not much better. Their behavior--and even thoughts--are confined according to the same covenants which they made prior to their death. While they might appear to have agency, their limitations are just as present, and possibly more painful, since they may remember what they've lost.

Their duties usually entail the guardianship of the tomb, but their most important role is ceremonial.

An entombed pharaoh might still arise every morning in order to command the sun to rise. A mummified warlord might still want to have his army paraded through the tomb every fortnight, and their weapons presented for inspection. A peaceful queen might still wish to hold mass, her bells ringing out underground, week after week, year after year.

The tomb of a mummy, then, is far from an inert. This is not an oddity--this is why these people were desperate to become mummies in the first place.

Tombs are not happy places. Eventually the candles burn down and the books become unreadable. Eventually the weapons chip and corrode. Eventually, the memories rot out of the skull, and the souls become unglued. What a mummy loses can never be regained. They have slowed entropy, but they have not halted it.

Those who were waiting for a long-promised messiah or armageddon are disappointed. Where is the apocalypse where they would be crowned eternally? All there is to do is to lie alone in the dark, feeling the hard tissue of your limb becoming thinner every century, grasping at your fleeing memories as your mind hollows itself out. You remember having sons: what were their names? You are waiting for ragnarok: what were the words that you must greet the gods with?

And so the minds of mummies slip into something sullen and foreboding.

Mummy Lords usually have either clerical spellcasting, a powerful magical weapon, and/or an Aura of Majesty.

Aura of Majesty

You must succeed on a Save vs charm in order to approach the mummy lord, and you must succeed on a second Save in order to harm them. You gain a bonus on this check according to your social standing: +4 if you are aristocracy, -4 if you are a murderhobo without any title.

The Great Royal Wife Tiye

The Shabty

Erroneously called "least golems", the sad creatures known as shabties are even more wretched than the lesser mummies.

They were made from slaves that were despised, or known to be untrustworthy. They were made to swear the same binding oaths as the other mummies, but their bodies were disassembled after death.

A shabty resembles a small figurine, about 3d6 inches tall. They are made from clay, hair, bone, and paint, more-or-less assembled into a pleasing shape. You will find them inside a small sarcophagus or bag.

Shabties will obey any command that they hear, and so smart owners will usually bind their ears closed with cloth (which may be discovered with the shabty). They make poor combatants.

Every time a shabty accepts a command, it bows. Every time a shabty completes a command, it shrinks an inch. When it is less than 3 inches tall, it becomes inert.

Shabtys are usually carved with exaggerated servile features, such as hunchbacks and small feet. Their faces never look up from the ground, and they will twist their heads to avoid meeting the gaze of anyone inspecting them.

They are treasure.

Gallagh Man

The Mandrogi

Erroneously called "grass golems" or "debtor golems", these are bundles of grass shaped like men. They are employed by the merchants of the Pashetso as a labor force.

The merchants tell people that they little grass men are made from grass that has been bound together and animated with the breath of an industrious horse. This is a lie.

In truth, each mandrogi contains the soul of a debtor, who died while owing money to a Pashetso matron. After the death of a debtor, it is up to the young men of the clan to crack open the coffin and extract a single tooth from the mouth of the deceased, wherein hides the terrified souls.

This is all part of the standard terms of a loan. Few bother to read all of the fine print.

Mandrogi are not rare. Most people do not repay their loans to the Pashetso. Why would they? The strange clan has little ability to collect. And of course, everyone dies. If the Pashetso do not operate the graveyard, then they are owed money by the people who do.

After all, gravedigging is ignoble work, best left to those itinerant outlanders.

Sidebar: the Pashetso

A tremendously insular clan of merchants, magicians, and charlatans, the Pashetso are rumored to be ruled by a cabal of demonic cats. They shave their daughters in order to make them unappealing to outsiders, and their sons are ritualistically blinded in one eye for the same reason.

In most caravans, it is only the elders who are allowed to speak to foreigners. This taboo against speaking with outsiders is sometimes dodged through the use of puppets. Despite these oddities, they Pashetso are well-known cosmopolitans who are involved in minor mercantilism, moneylending, and horse racing of all types.

Despite their social buffers, they have more than their share of runaways, and the streets of Shangalore are filled with eyepatched acrobats and short-haired scribes.

Excavating some ogodai.
This might also be Pompeii.

The Ogodai

Sometimes a jail sentence exceeds the lifespan of the condemned. For these poor souls, there is the Ritual of the Ogodai.

Unlike the other covenants that are used to bind a person's soul to their body, the Ritual of the Ogodai is very explicit, and is always achieved through torture. The prisoner usually relents in order to stop the suffering, and then lives out the rest of their days knowing that death is only the beginning of their sentence.

The ancient empire of Cheox built several prison-tombs to house their ogodai, and it is from their records that we know that the sentences range from one lifespan (100 years) to eternity (in the case of pretenders to the throne).

After they die, their body is compressed under a layer of burning ash. For a year they are left buried.

When they are excavated, the trembling thing is half-mineral, a faceless manikin of ash, heat-reduced flesh, and (deep inside) a blackened skeleton.

An ogodai is only capable of kneeling and bowing. Cheox interred vast numbers of them in their prison-tombs, and faced them towards Coramont, so that they could pray for forgiveness. The ogodai with eternal sentences (imperial pretenders, serial killers) were instead hung upside down inside tiny cells, which were then bricked up.

Cheox believed that the ogodai would remain trapped in their corpse forever. With the passage of centuries, we now know that they are wrong.

The enchantments decay at the same speed as the body. Moisture, movement, heat, and vermin all contribute.

After a hundred years, an ogodai might be able to turn its head to the side, in order to look at a new wall. Another hundred years, and it might be able to crawl. A few hundred more, to walk. A few hundred more, perhaps to speak--who knows? But what would a man speak about, after so many long centuries in the dark?

The Rendswühren Man on Display

Here's how you put bosses into your dungeon.

You Don't Need Bosses

The first rule about bosses is that you don't need bosses. A dungeon can be an excellent experience without one.

Bosses are fun. They can be the charismatic face of a dungeon, or they can be the thing that needs to be beaten in order for the good guys to win. (If that's the kind of game you're running.)

But bosses can also be fragile. They can be too easy (if they fail a roll) or they can be too hard (if the party fights them in a depleted state). As far as emotionally-charged centerpieces go, bosses are pretty fragile.

If you must have an emotionally-charged centerpiece of a dungeon, may I also recommend: stealing a certain treasure, rescuing a certain person, or breaking something.

How to Keep Players From Fighting Bosses When They're Depleted

Show them the boss fight is coming, and give them a chance to prepare. Don't spring it on them.

How to Keep Players From Steamrolling a Boss

You could use multiple enemies instead of a single foe. The Shadow Council, instead of a dragon. This spreads the rolls around, smooths off a lot of the statistical rough edges, and produces more reliable results.

You could make it a puzzle encounter. Only a certain weapon can hurt the boss, it can only be defeated in a certain way, you need to avoid a certain attack, etc.

You could make it too powerful to defeat in a straight-up fight. This is the simple method of doing what I recommended in the previous paragraph. Bosses that are numerically impossible to beat cannot be overcome by running up to it and hitting it with your strongest attacks. You'll have to scheme. (That's what LaTorra does here.)

Dynamism

I've talked about dynamism before. Essentially, you want the fight to evolve. Every 1-2 rounds, the circumstances should change significantly enough that the players will have to re-evaluate their tactics.

If the circumstances never evolve, you're left with. . .

Turn 1: I attack. I hit. 7 damage.
Turn 2: I attack. I miss.
Turn 3: I attack. I hit. 3 damage.

Dynamism in a boss battle can come from a few places.

The simplest place it comes from is just from resource depletion. The fighter is at 1 HP, and must now change tactics and back away from melee. The wizard is out of his best spells, and must now find a way to leverage her second-rank spells.

There's also some crude attempts at dynamism: enemies that unleash a very powerful attack when they're bloodied, or bosses that change form.

These are a step in the right direction, but oftentimes the people writing them miss the point. A dragon that gets a free fire breath when its bloodied isn't dynamic unless the fire damage is enough to force the party to change tactics.

And anyway, HP damage isn't a very dynamic mechanic anyway. (I'd actually argue that it's the opposite--HP exists to help players predict how much more risk they can accept.) A player might not play very differently between 60% and 100% HP. Only when they start getting low will they start thinking about changing their tactics. And besides, you can only damage HP so many times before someone dies. HP isn't ideal.

The dynamism in a boss fight should come from the same places as other fights: circumstances change in such a way that the players need to come up with new tactics. They don't have to be fancy.

Examples:

The dragon takes off.
The dragon lands.
The dragon burrows underground.
The dragon sets the forest on fire. (Always a favorite.)
The dragon leaves. It'll come back and drop a cow on the party.
The drakencult arrives to defend their dragon.
The drakencult flees once the dragon is bloodied.
The giant grabs someone and prepares to throw them.
The giant overturns his bathtub, causing players to risk being washed away.
The giant blows hard enough to extinguish everyone's torches.
The wizard turns into a swarm of hornets with wizard faces.

Remember that it isn't dynamic unless it forces the player to re-evaluate their tactics. A giant that stomps the ground (Dex check or fall prone) isn't very dynamic. There's no chance to react (except a passive Dex check) and characters that fall prone will probably just stand up and resume their generic strategy: fighters swing swords, and wizards wiz.

Wind-Up Attacks

A big gout of dragon breath isn't very dynamic if it's just a Dex check, but how about this:

At the end of the first turn, the dragon takes a deep breath. At the end of the second turn, it uses its fire breath attack.

See the difference? The players have a whole turn to react. Some players will choose to stay in melee, some will jump on the dragon's back, some will take cover. We've given them an interesting choice, just by telling them that something big is coming.

You can have the wind-up attack trigger at the end of the next round, or on the boss's action at the end of the next round. (One gives everyone an interesting choice. The other gives players an interesting choice only if they succeed on their Initiative checks.)

Examples of Wind-Up Attacks:

A giant could literally wind up for a haymaker that will deal double damage next turn.
A giant could pick up a boulder, preparing to drop it on someone's head.
Tongues of fire could start licking up out of the ground. Better get off the ground before the floor is lava.
The dragon starts beating its wings. Next turn, it'll blow people away.
The dragon starts beating its wings. By next turn, it'll be too dusty to see anything.
The dragon roars and stalactites crack. They'll land next turn, and are especially dangerous to players who spend their turn ignoring the threat.

A Changing Landscape

There's also some subtle dynamism incorporated into regular fights against groups of enemies: enemy death.

A group of orcs becomes less threatening over time, as the players kill orcs. They might fight three orcs the first round (taking at most 3d8 damage), two orcs on the second round (at most 2d8 damage), and finally a single orc on the last round, because orcs don't surrender (at most 1d8 damage).

This gradient allows players to (a) see their progress, and (b) react to a combat that is changing.

Bosses sometimes lack these nice benefits. Be sure to give the players a constant update on how the boss is looking, so they can see their progress. Is the boss sneering through a few cuts, or coughing up blood as they lean on their staff? I always tell players when enemies are bloodied, and I think I've literally drawn health bars before (which is a bit dissociative, but doesn't really give them any information they don't already have, assuming that you're being very descriptive).

I've talked about dynamism in the sense of round-to-round changes, but you can also have gradual changing that force the combat to evolve.

Examples:

The boss gets weaker as it takes damage. (See also: wizards running out of spells, dismemberment)
The boss gets tougher as it takes damage.
The arena decays: gets smaller, floods, sinks, or catches on fire.
Reinforcements arrive each turn.
The party must fight the serpicant in a different room each round.

A party that is kiting a serpicant throughout the dungeon might know that eventually they're going to get cornered and poisoned--unless they go through an unexplored passage that might give them they time they need to kill it. See, interesting choices.

You can also have some dynamism come from unique arenas: maybe the arena is criss-crossed with enough acid streams that the party will have to change up their generic tactics a little bit. (This is what people mean when they say "interesting boss fights need interesting environments".)

Dismemberment Rules

You can dismember monsters with crits or with combat maneuver rolls. Generally, allow players to target whatever the hell they want. It's a great way to evolve the combat and give a sense of progress, outside of regular HP depletion.

Want to shoot a manticore's armpit so it can't flap it's wing? Sure. Now it can't fly.

Want to shoot a dragon's armpit so it can't fly? It'll make a rough landing, pull out the arrow, and take off again. (Dragon's are tougher.)

Want to lop off a displacer beast's paw so it loses a claw attack? Fine by me.

I don't have any hard rules for dismemberment. It works for me.

Unlucky Saves

Players love telling stories about how they killed the boss in the first round, when the boss failed a save vs polymorph and got turned into a snail.

I honestly think that these stories are a feature, not a bug. If a player wants to spend a round casting an unreliable spell, they are free to do so. I like giving players that freedom.

However, that unpredictability still runs counter to many people's instincts, who think that a boss should be something that requires many rounds of combat and drops at least one character to 0 HP.

Well, for those who would to blunt the sword of RNG, I recommend Ablative Saves.

Ablative Saves

This is going to get compared to legendary resistance in 5e, so I guess I should start by talking about that. This is legendary resistance (typical for epic boss monsters):

Legendary Resistance (3/day): if the dragon fails a saving throw, it can choose to succeed instead.

They wrote this rule to insulate dragons against unlucky saves. And as a rule, it sucks.

It sucks because it creates a separate track to victory, then forces the players to choose between them. Do they try to damage the dragons HP? Or use things that cause saves, hoping to whittle down the legendary resistance enough to fire off a polymorph?

I once wrote a class that didn't deal HP damage, and instead attacked enemies' Morale score, defeating them by destroying their will to fight. It might be fun if the whole party was attacking Morale, but if not, you're just splitting your attention in two directions.

So dragons are effectively immune to casual polymorph attempts.

Here's mine:

Ablative Saves (at-will): if the monster fails a saving throw, it can choose to succeed instead and take 20 damage. Alternatively, it can take 10 damage and suffer from half the effect. All Level 9+ creatures have this ability.

Now everything is back on the same track. Failed saves now damage the HP total.

Fiction-wise:

The dragon shudders as power word: kill rips through its body. It slumps over, gurgling out a death rattle. But the party's cheers die on their lips as the great wyrm somehow staggers to its feet, a few seconds later. Black blood leaks from its furious eyes.

OR

The wizard could feel their polymorph spell twist as they cast it, warping around the psychic bulk of the dragon's soul. The dragon didn't deflect the spell entirely, but neither did it suffer from the full brunt of its transformative energies. Instead, some sort of snail-dragon now faced the party, with huge claws pulling its coiled rump around the cavern, green slime dripping from its once-fiery maw.

GLOG Rule: Affecting High-HD Enemies With Spells

A spell cannot affect a target if the [sum] is less than the target's HD.

I've been using this rule in my home games for a while, but I forget if I've posted it on the blog.

Action Economy

Bosses also sometimes get held up by the sheer number of actions that they need to take in a turn. 5e solves this by letting bosses take extra actions over the course of a turn, in the form of legendary actions.

This is perfectly fine. It smooths out the damage curve, removes some variability, and gives the party more flexibility to respond when an ally is injured.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with letting the dragon take all of it's turns at once. Spikier, traditional damage. And besides, if the dragon is using wind-up attacks, it's effectively making two attacks each turn anyway, which has much of the same function.

Threat

Bosses who focus fire on a single character should have no problem killing them in one or two rounds. On the other hand, bosses that focus fire usually ignore the rest of the party.

One solution to this is to make enemies dumb. Dumb enemies allow the players to choose who will be attacked. The barbarian bangs on his shield and waggles his genitals at the harpies--they're guaranteed to attack him next turn.

Another solution is to make enemies slow (this is often a good way to make boss encounters escapable). Slow enemies allow the party to retreat wounded party members.

This isn't a flaw. Yes, it makes the encounter easier, but more importantly, it gives the players more control and more options. You can balance it out by having the enemy deal more damage.

Intelligent enemies with a high damage output can (and should be) especially threatening. You'll have to deploy them more carefully (and players will have to engage more carefully).

I highly recommend giving bosses attacks that hit multiple targets at once, such as everyone in melee range.

GLOG Rule: Focus Fire

You can never make more than two attacks against the same target in a single round.

Interesting Boss Mechanics

Look them up.

by Paolo Puggioni

Dragon

Usually accompanied by 1d6 drakencult barbarians, who will be riding the dragon if necessary.

I put a lot of bells and whistles on this dragon, but you can dial it back if you want. Every round, just pick who it's gonna attack, and what wind-up attack it's going to do. It only knows one spell, and it unlikely to use it except to mess with players. Don't forget the Aura of Heat.

Level 10 Def as plate Attacks x3 1d12
Fly fast Int 10 Mor 6

Gold Sense - Dragons always know if something has been taken from their hoard.

Aura of Heat - Anyone who ends their turn adjacent to a dragon takes 1d4 damage.

Spellcasting (MD 3) - control fire

Wind-Up Attacks

At the end of each turn, you announce the one that will occur at the end of the next turn. You cannot use the same wind-up attack twice in a row.

Fire Breath - 4d6 fire damage, 50' cone, Dex for half.
Smoke Exhalation - As fog.
Wing Flap - Unsecured objects/creatures will be blown 50' away. 50' cone.
Pin - Grapple target, bite them in half next turn (2d12 damage and +4 to hit).

Combat Start

Roar - Save vs terror. Free action.

When Bloodied

The earth itself casts heat metal is cast on 1d3 metal objects. (Whatever will make life hardest for the players.) Free action.

Upon Death

All fires in 1 mile extinguish, and cannot be relit for 24 hours.

Dragon Tactics

Basically, just remember that dragons can fly and have little incentive to fight to the death. They'd rather stay in the air and make strafing runs (fire breath, graps, fly-by attacks). They can drop objects on the party if they need to. Most dragons don't mind starting forest fires.

Dragons in their lairs are easier, since they must fight on the ground. However, their lairs usually have loops (dragons hate getting cornered) and more drakencult barbarians. And of course, getting stuck underground without any light will probably present some problems, too.

And lastly, remember that dragons are just as smart as we are. They will use their abilities to the fullest.

Here are some trigger monsters. You'll figure out the theme after you read a few.

Everything on this page (except for the gribbly) is meant to be accessory monster. They aren't going to be the biggest monster in the fight; they'll be flitting around in the outskirts of combat.

I know I've written about wisps before, but this one is better.

Wisp

Keep them away from fresh corpses.

Lvl 1 Def none No Attacks
Fly slow Int 10 Mor 10

Incorporeal Undead

Luminous -- Appears as a ball of light. Illuminates as a torch, unless it wants to turn invisible.

Animate Corpse -- Can enter a Dying person or freshly killed corpse and animate it, creating a lantern ghoul. When the lantern ghoul is destroyed, the wisp will exit the corpse. The lantern ghoul will be hostile or neutral based on the table below.

Follow Me -- Roll on this table instead of making a reaction roll.

1 - Wisp will attempt to lead the party to a secret door or valuable treasure. It may not be nearby. (Neutral)
2 - Wisp will attempt to lead the party towards vulnerable enemies. Perhaps the monsters in a nearby room are sleeping or distracted at this moment. (Neutral)
3 - Wisp will attempt to lead the party into a trap. (Hostile)
4 - Wisp will attempt to lead the party into an ambush. (Hostile)
5 - Will just follow the party around, acting as a friendly light source. (Neutral)
6 - Will just follow the party around, acting as a friendly light source. (Hostile)

Wisps cannot speak. Even the neutral ones hate you for being alive, just a little.

Lantern Ghoul
HD 3 Def leather Claws 1d8+agony
Move human Int 10 Mor 10

Headlights -- Eyes shed light as a bullseye lantern (60' cone). If it is looking directly at you, the glare gives you -4 Attack against the ghoul.

Neutral ghouls will give advice and accompany you as long as you are able to provide them with fresh corpses. Hostile ghouls will try to kidnap someone, or at least kill someone. It will use these fresh corpses to provide bodies for their fellow wisps.

Discussion

Whether or not they're trying to lead you somewhere, wisps will probably hang around for a while. And as soon as they find a fresh corpse to inhabit, they'll dive into it. If this happens during combat, it could quickly make things difficult for the party. However it goes, I hope it'll be a memorable lesson.

The fact that a wisp can enter (and kill) a Dying PC can be a shitty experience, if the player was expected to survive an otherwise fatal blow.

Wisps are incorporeal, and are capable of turning invisible. Parties may not have the tools to kill one easily. However, you can always run away from a wisp--they fly slow. And a wisp inhabiting a lantern ghoul can also be locked in a sarcophagus or something.

Don't forget that wisps can be encountered as lantern ghouls, with the wisp itself only becoming visible later.

by kreis-b

Flying Eyeball

Puberty is magical.

HD 1 Def chain Piercing Gaze 1d4 (50')
Flying fast Int 10 Mor 2

Looks like a flying eyeball. If it vibrates its pupil while looking at something, a puncture wound will appear. Each one serves a terophidian, who sees whatever it sees.

Spell Eater -- Whenever a spell is cast within 50', the eyebat captures the spell and becomes an optical hound, forever capable of casting the spell that created it.

Optical Hound
HD 3 Def chain Piercing Gaze 1d8 (50')
Move fast Int 6 Mor 6

Gaze Attack -- Anyone who meets the gaze of an optical hound must save or howl. (An optical hound has no proper mouth, so this is how it must summon its packmates.)

Spellcasting (2 MD) -- An optical hound can cast whatever spell birthed it.

Discussion

Flying, ranged attackers are a rare niche in D&D, but an important one. They either need to be shot by an archer, or lured into a hallway with a low ceiling. Neither one is difficult, but it may still force the party out of their usual tactics.

An optical hound is a fairly beefy opponent. If it picks up a good spell, it can be fearsome.

An eyebat also prevents the wizard from unloading their best spells on the first round of combat.

from Paper Mario

Gribbly

Rapidly multiplying menaces.

HD 1 Def leather Bite 1d6
Move human Int 6 Mor 6

A small black hairball with beady red eyes. It's got arms and legs hidden in there, along with one hell of a mouth. They are only capable of one type of behavior: running around and biting things. They're smart enough to open doors and break windows, but that's about it.

Making Friends -- Whenever it bites someone, the gribbly will shit out a new gribbly with HP equal to the damage dealt. The new gribbly will look like the flesh donor, but mostly it will look like a gribbly.

Photophobia -- Save vs fear if they encounter a bonfire. They will automatically flee from larger fires and bright lights. They need to succeed on a Morale check in order to attack a group carrying a torch, and will preferentially attack non-torchbearers. They can get bonuses on these Morale checks if they outnumber the party.

A gribbly can turn a human corpse into 16 groggles in about 4 rounds. Every 10 lbs of flesh can only yield 1 gribbly, even though the gribbly only takes a partial bite.

Gribbly King

Stats as a HD 2 gribbly, except that it has two MD and can cast darkness. Formed when a king is eaten.

Discussion

Can be used to inject a little bit of chaos into a battle. Gribblies are inherently destabilizing--either the party kills them quickly, or the party gets unlucky and finds themselves vastly outnumbered. Once the players know what gribblies are capable of, gribblies become a threat even in small numbers, since they cannot be ignored.

Encounter design tip: give players a good reason to ignore the gribblies. This creates an interesting choice, beyond "the gribblies are obviously the biggest threat, let's kill them first".

And if the gribblies get too numerous, the photophobia weakness gives clever parties a way to escape.

And you can also create destabilizing situations with gribblies. What happens when a gribbly runs past the party, into the room where the pigs were tied up?

The gribbly king is essentially a Fuck You to parties that have been fighting gribblies for a while, and have developed an effective strategy for killing the poor things. The darkness spell can quickly topple that strategy, and force them to come up with something new.

from the 2e AD&D Monstrous Manual
Still one of my favorites

Imp

They'll eat your fumbles.

HD 1  Def chain  Claw 1d6
Fly fast  Int 6  Mor 6

Spells (1 MD) -- bedevil

Eater of Woe -- Whenever an enemy rolls a fumble, the Imp grows. It gains 1 HD, 1 MD, increases its damage die, and heals for 1d6 HP. It also loses the ability to fly and gains the firebolt spell. These changes last until the imp rolls a fumble.

New Spell: Bedevil
R: 50' T: creature D: 10 minutes [splittable]
Expands the fumble range of the target by 1. No save.

Discussion

The Bedevil ability is interesting (no save) but has a good chance of never becoming relevant, if no fumbles are ever rolled. The Eater of Woe ability has the same problem.

However, increasing the number of imps in a fight can exponentially make them more dangerous, since their abilities synergize with each other. Imagine 20 imps all casting bedevil on the first round of combat.

Like the gribbly, imps are inherently chaotic, and randomness is its own special type of threat.

What are birds? There are many who say that they don't exist, except as a conspiracy of the trees.

The Arovila and the Iphinno

The arovila is a sluggish beast, a sinuous crocodilian as long as your house. She shines like white clay, and basks on sunny riverbanks. She is a cousin to the river, which rises to meet her when she enters, but is afraid of the sea, which drowns her every time she touches it.

The arovila lays a single egg every few years. It is a massive thing, a vast rubbery ball half-buried at the waters edge. The arovila waters it with her tears, which are pale and nourishing like milk.

Inside the egg are two daughters, as serpentine as their mother, with the same discerning eyes and hooked teeth. They will follow their mother for years. When she stops biting her daughter's tails off (for the tails regrow) her daughters have grown enough to live on their own, and they will leave to start their own life.

Or perhaps the egg doesn't hold a pair of daughters. Perhaps it holds a hundred sons.

There are always exactly a hundred, excepting the stillborn (which are useful in a certain elixir which can make any animal permanently carnivorous). And each of the hundred sons is a small, red bird called an iphinno, resembling their mother not in the least.

Each iphinno is an insect-catcher and a nectar-drinker. They will never grow larger than your hand. They help their mother hunt by leading her to prey, and by driving prey to her. When she sickens, they feed her depositing drops of honey on her tongue. It is not much, but she may have many hundreds of sons.

Only when their mother dies, will they disperse. Each one desires the absence of his brothers, and seeks a new horizon. No two will ever fly in the same direction. On some distant riverbank, they will find a fertile arovela of their own. After they mate with her, they will pluck all of their own feathers and lie down on her tongue, curled up into a ball so as to be easier to swallow.

The men of Basharna believe the iphinnos to be inimitably romantic, and wear their feathers in their hair during courtships.

The People of Binlah

They are a sluggish folk, slow to trade, and slower to war. They are isolated by the coils of the Shunatula river (which they know well), the choking tangergluss vines (which struggle to overcome their masks), and dwindle pox and dauntledregs (to which they are immune).

The people of bianlah all wear masks depicting the faces of monstrous baby birds. There is a certain time of swamp-dwelling passerine called the ponli bird which regards them as their own offspring. An inhabitant of Binlah has only to tilt their head up and open their mouth, and within minutes, a dun-colored ponli bird will perch on their shoulder and regurgitate fish into their mouths.

There are a great many ponli birds, and a great many fish. It is rare for the people of Binlah to go hungry.

As a result, they have grown idle and contemplative. But they do not debate philosophy, nor art; instead, they discuss the smells of fish and the sound of rain. It is only halfway accurate to call them lazy, for they are not lazy--they simply never learned how to properly want. They desire little and obtain less.

They would have been invaded and killed long ago by some ferocious people, were it not for the ponli birds, which fight like demons to protect their babies.

The Cloak of the Simurgh

The cloak of the Simurgh is not a cloak. It is a phenomenon which has been independently observed in many places and times, and by many disparate parties.

You when know when the cloak of the Simurgh is near, because all birds become indistinguishable from each other.

A farmer goes out to feed his chickens and finds that he is not able to identify them as chickens. He recognizes that they are birds of some sort. Their size is difficult to discern. Only by counting the number of them inside his chicken coop can he rationalize, slowly, that the birds cannot be any larger than cats.

A hunter comes across a pond and startles some birds, which take to the air. Of their size and distance, she cannot say. The sounds from their throats are indescribable. Are they rocs or ducks?

It is believed that this phenomenon occurs whenever the Simurgh passes by. One of the unidentifiable birds, then, is her.

The Simurgh

The Simurgh is the queen of all birds. She is all birds, and none.

All birds have a secret lust for milk--this is the mechanism by which the Simurgh ensures their loyalty. A bird that is blessed by the Simurgh will lay an egg containing the sweetest milk imaginable. (A bird that is cursed by the Simurgh will lay only black stones.)

There are some who say that she appears as a women clothed in every bird of the world, a woman inside an insane tornado of birds. Her voice is lost among the hurricane of their wings. It is very difficult to communicate with the Simurgh.

The Hummingbird Chariot

It is a bamboo cage with a set of simple seats on the inside. It looks like simple scaffolding. The bamboo is brittle and old. A few unrecognizable letters are painted onto the bamboo, seemingly at random. There is space for a few people to sit around a brass basin, and a tiny bell hangs from the roof. Ten-thousand shaggy strings hang from.

If the basin is filled with honey and the bell rung, hummingbirds will gather. They will slip into the traces (for that is the purpose of the strings) and begin to fly. They will carry you wherever you wish, as you sit inside your sphere of beating wings.

It is difficult to see in any direction except down. Navigation is possible, but scouting is difficult.

Their strength is in their maneuverability. No winged creature can turn as quickly as a hummingbird. But there is a weakness, too. Hummingbirds are easily startled, and any loud noises or intimidating gestures are liable to scare them off. Laugh too loudly, and you might find yourself in freefall.

The chariot was originally created by men, but the traces were woven by mice.

How Human Sages Explain Filthomancy

How much information is there on a sheet of printed paper?

There's the printed words, and all of their coded and uncoded meanings. Perhaps the choice of font and ink can tell you about the era and region of origin. The paper can tell stories, too, of trees and glue and grinding metal.

Now, tear the paper up. Has the information increased or decreased?

A clever mind can match the edges, and a steady hand can reassemble them. All of the original information is still there--and a great deal more. What was the shape of the hand that tore the paper? Fingers, claws, or blades? Was the force strong or subtle? Was the paper gnawed upon as if by vermin, or was it carefully folded before its trauma?

There are obvious limitations--the system gains information even as it loses accessibility, and of course completeness is always a problem. But these are not insurmountable. The elegant mathematics of chaos can unmix two dyes as well as it can blend them. Decay informs as much as construction.

Now that you know this, you must realize that a rotten tome contains a secret chapter, accessible only to some. The filthomancers know this--they know that a handful of grave dust can speak louder than the living man ever did. It is truly a wonderous lens through which they gaze out at us, learning carpentry from ashes, and hearing long-dead voices sing out in the crunch of a dead leaf.

How Goblin Filthomancers Explain Filthomancy

Okay, okay. Shut up.

The first thing you want to do is--

I said shut up! Clasp ya hole or yammer afar, cotter's bean!

The first thing ya start doing, is you gotta start stretching. Stretch yer hoops! Yer neck! Not your pungies, though.

Practice bending over, then touching your toes. Thenways, ya fine a big rock with a crack in it and you start sleeping innit, folded over. If you can't sleep whats bendwise folded, drink some scumbo to grease yer dreams.

Wait, shit. No, shit. Wait. The first thing ya do is stop bathing. That's the most important thing. I should have started with that.

Second thing you do is make flexible.

Once you're flexible enough to bend right around, you gotta stick ya face into your own crotch. Really--and I can't stress this enough--you really gotta stick ya nose in there. Ya smell that? That's yer fundus, yer fundament, that's ya animal soul, what ya been ignoring. That's the real you.

Anyway, then you hyperventilate until you pass out. Try to get your nostrils to cover your whole taint.

This is the start of self-awareness, and that's the start of business.

from WHFRP, 1st Edition

The Goblin Filthomancer

Restrictions

You lose all of your spellcasting abilities if you are ever cleaned. Gently easing yourself into the water is fine, but if you fall into water or spend more than a minute in the stuff, you lose your spellcasting. You can regain your spellcasting by spending 10 minutes rolling around in a dirty place.

Boons

Immunity from stench.

Theories of Dust -- decrepit or crumbling books are always legible.

(More broadly, no method of destruction can obscure the information content of an object, as long as all of the pieces are there. You can smash a chair into tiny splinters and a filthomancer can still tell you what the original carvings were. Burning makes a book inaccessible (since a lot of information leaves with the smoke). Likewise, using a statue to make cement also obscures the statue, since not all pieces of the statue are visible. A stone tablet that has been ground into dust is still 100% readable, and just as easily as the original object.)

Starting Equipment

Giant Back Scratcher (as staff),

Bag of "Magic Dust" (mostly skin flakes) that they sometimes cast on objects but also causes sneezing.

Spellbook (varies, but is usually encoded into their tangled, dirty hair)

While filthomancers can grind their spellbook into dust as use it just as easily, sacks of dust tend to get blown away by wind or dispersed by water, and so dust-books are shunned by adventuring filthomancers (but not sedentary ones--sedentary filthomancers use all sorts of things as "books", and eventually learn to use broken housewares as easily as intact ones).

Spells

1. barf
2. burp
3. booger
4. decrepitate
5. dust bunny
6. entropium
7. fart
8. mend
9. piss
10. psychometry

Barf
T: self R: 10' cone D: 0
You take [dice] damage unless you've eaten in the last 30 minutes. All objects in range take [sum] acid damage.

Burp
As message, except that it carries [dice] words and [dice] smells, delivered in any order you wish. Also gives you a new saving throw against any ingested or inhaled poison.

Boogers
T: self R: 1 mile D: until divested
You pick a booger out of your nose. You have [dice] senses that extend through the booger. Sight counts as two senses. If you put your booger in someone else's nose, you can also control what they smell. Flicking a booger with any accuracy requires an attack roll.

Sidebar: Goblin Greetings
A quick tug on the nose is a casual hello, but friends usually greet each other by picking their nose and putting the booger into their friend's nose. Because of this, blowing your nose is considered very rude.

Decrepitate
T: object R: 50' D: 0
Object ages. You can age a single part of a living creature by [sum] years. Objects damaged by the passage of time take [sum] damage and become tarnished. This is the opposite of mend. This spell is also useful for aging wine instantly. If decrepitate is cast on an object multiple times, only the highest [sum] applies.

Dust Bunny
T: dust R: 10' D: until you cast another spell
You spit into the dust and create [dice] dust bunnies. They're basically just soot sprites from Spirited Away.

Entropium
T: object R: touch D: 6 rounds
A touched object becomes more disordered. The letters in a book become more scrambled every round. A soup becomes extremely well-mixed. A trombone warps to become out of tune. And a living creature takes [dice] damage each turn, as their face and organs become slightly asymmetrical. (The damage mostly comes from mild, systemic hemorraging, as certain capillaries no longer line up quite right.)

Fart
T: creature R: 100' D: 1 minute
You rip a tremendously loud fart. Although others may get faint whiffs of it, only your target will smell its full strength. As message, except the only message a single, chosen foetor and does [sum] stench damage. If this damage does not kill the target, the damage vanishes 2 rounds later.

Mend
T: object R: 50' D: 0
An object repairs itself. Broken swords rejoin, and ancient metal regains its luster. Objects regain [sum] hit points. Because the scars and mental clutter are essential to wisdom, if you cast this spell on someone's head within 10 minutes of them making a decision, they have a [sum]-in-20 chance of behaving foolishly.

Piss
T: self R: 0 D: 0
If you are poisoned, you piss out the poison. This works on drunkenness. Additionally, if you invest 2 MD, the piss poison retains its potency, and can be reused. Additionally, if invest 3 MD, you can piss up to 50' away. Additionally, if you invest 4 MD, it also works on curses.

Psychometry
T: object: R: self D: 10 minutes
You learn the physical history of an object, essentially learning about everything that has affected that object. Every scuff, every sun-fade, every ingrained odor. 1 MD yields you minor revelations, while 4 MD gives you a staggering, encyclopedic knowledge of the object's entire history (down to learning about the wildlife that lived on the mountains where the ore was mined that was used to make the sword).

Legendary Spells of the Filthomancer

These spells are not learned by leveling up. Instead, they are discovered in dungeons and other perilous places.

Arcanodynamics
T: spell or magic effect R: 50' D: permanent
Only works on spells that have a duration. (Permanent and instantaneous spells are unchanged). You can choose to either double the intensity while halving the duration, or vice versa. You must invest a number of MD equal to (or greater than) the strength of the spell effect.

Power Word: Shit
T: self R: 0 D: 8 hours
You take a big, smelly shit. Your shit stinks to everyone except [dice] categories of creatures that you have chosen to exclude. Those creatures take [dice] damage per round that they smell your shit. A creature is immune to this damage if they pinch their nose (requires a hand) and close their eyes tightly. Regardless of damage and spell immunity, all affected creatures are repulsed by your shit as if by antipathy. You can only cast this spell once per day, and only if you ate a big dinner the night before. You can throw your shit up to 50', but it requires a second action.

Where is Filth?

A lot of the filthomancer's abilities depend on being able to spit in dusty place, or to roll around in a dirty place. These qualities depend on your DM (and you should ask how common they are before you roll a filthomancer) but it is fair to say that your average dungeon is probably quite filthy.

I found this guy when I googled "garbage goblin" and he is also quite lovely.
From here.

All theories about the city of Yog are unlikely.

The Lost God

There is a story about Yog that is almost certainly false. It goes like this.

A long time ago, there was a god of green places and a generous race. In time, the people and their cities decayed under the weight of ancient wars and plagues, declined, and were destroyed.

Yog, the god of those people who was also those people, and was also their city, swore that they would not perish but instead persist, for ever and ever. His lands become wastelands, became swamps, became verdant again. Yog's eyes grew clouded but his mind became refined, honed to a singular edge by the scouring sands of his guilt. His world was a distorted one, but he perceived the distortions clearly than he had ever seen the real world (because there is no such thing).

And so he brought them forth again.

In the deepest bogs, toads went mad, bit off their tongues, and began pushing stones together. Trees rotted and fell away, forming straight lines and avenues. New springs burbled forth in the wilderness, forming fountains.

It was not in the same place, and the streets did not quite match the original, but what of it? Memories are more real than dead stones laying under the peat.

In that place, all of the does miscarried, and all of the unborn crocodiles rotted inside the their shells. The does became pregnant again, late in the season. The crocodiles laid new eggs, much larger than the old.

The city had grown. Sickly bears regurgitated seeds into half-way cleared fields. Wild pigs dig ditches until they collapse. The black pines are not apple trees, but they try their best--slick apples growing in clusters underneath the dark branches. They are not quite apples, but Yog remembers the apples fondly, and how the children used to spit seeds into the creeks.

And the children! Now they are arriving. They crawl out of the mud on the riverbanks. The does lie down and birth squalling babes. They are malformed, but perhaps not as much as you might think. They have a certain consistency. In their minds, the deer speak, or perhaps Yog speaks, and they grow up with language. They move into the warped city, filled with dirty stones and crooked streets. To their eyes, the streets are straight and clean. In their minds, their grandparents died last summer, instead of ten thousand years prior.

The streets were made straight, the wild grasses were pulled up and proper wheat was sown. The walls grew tall, even as the city began extending its roots downward, into the sacred spaces of Yog. The walls grew thick, and knotted overhead. The city has been here a long time. The city never fell. The city will be here for a long time. The city is Yog.

Other people, and other cities, have heard this story and prayed to Yog for preservation. Yog has heard them.

The Calculator

There is a story about Yog that is almost certainly false. It goes like this.

According to this theory, Yog is not just the center of the world, but is in fact the purpose for the universe's existence, everything else having been built for the sake of the city at the center of everything.

They say that the city is a thinking machine, a vast and unsympathetic device built prior to the universe to calculate some obscure function. Or perhaps it is studying us, and every person inside its walls carries a variable of interest.

The fact that we cannot perceive the mechanism is only further proof of its sophistication and antiquity.

People inside Yog go mad with startling frequency, but the madness is specific and directed towards the city's goals. A fisherman goes mad, forgets all language except for one that he never spoke, and spends a year carving spirals onto the walls. A doctor, visiting the city for the first time, sees the spirals and goes mad, and spends the rest of her life building an empty tower before strangling a slave with an apron, and only then regaining her sanity.

These are all pieces of the same mechanism. The parts that seem to be contradictory and opposed are merely the opponent pieces of a calculation. Whichever faction triumphs over the other is just another binary logic gate, a domino that flipped one way or another, it's calculation finished.

And once the city has finished its calculation, the world will end, swept away by a flame that is swifter than thought.

Worm Steaks

There is a story about Yog that is almost certainly false. It goes like this.

The worms that are farmed in Yog are victims of a subtle and ubiquitous parasite. This parasite is not killed by cooking, and those who eat the worm steaks quickly become subjected to the city's own peculiar strain of madness.

Do not the beefworms build tunnels that echo the nonsensical architecture of Yog? It does not take a large leap of deduction to discern the truth in the matter. So what if the parasites are too small to be discerned? It doesn't rule out their existence. The parasites may be exceedingly fine, of a form not recognized, or perhaps even spiritual in nature.

This also explains the sensation of insects crawling upon the skin that so many experience as they attempt to sleep within Yog for the first time. The insects are not real, but the sensation is still a warning from the depths of your mind. Cut your skin and pull forth the long threads of this city's infection! See? These threads and nodules do not exist in the flesh of those who have never passed its gates.

And of course, the madness occasionally affects those who bring their own food into the city. The flaked flesh of the worm is found on nearly every food in Yog. And of course, on the flesh and breath of every creature within that city. Best, then, to join the other wise folk in their daily baths of lye.

The rest of can be explained by the unstable geologies unique to the area.

The City of Yog

The northern boundary of Centerran maps is always a purple, equatorial landmass called the Madlands. Its is nearly twice the size of Centerra, and is regarded as a place of madness, violence, and vice.

In the center of this place is the city of Yog. Even in such a place, there are a few facts remain unchallenged, even by the lunatics.

First, the city has no formal power structure. There is no King of Yog (although there are many kings in Yog), and the laws and taxes change from street to street, block to block. This is not to say that there haven't been many attempts to unify Yog in the past. (Some have almost been successful.) But something about the city resists rulership.

The houses of Yog sometimes have allies in the neighboring cities of Bazozo, Zhul, Kel Bethor, and Farthest Vod.

Second, the city is always growing. Residents (and sometimes visitors) are sometimes afflicted with the strange urge to build. They will refuse all help, and sometimes spend the rest of their lives building vast, incomprehensible structures. Mansions without doors. Stairs too large to ascend. The Apromenond is a system of pillared chambers beneath the city, flooded and filled with incomprehensible statues, that is used as a passage for ships.

(Buildings without any doors or windows are called 'spirit houses'. Anyone with a pickaxe and a couple of hours can break into one, but this is considered unwise. They are not always unoccupied.)

Third, the city is sinking. This makes more room for new construction, and in fact, may be caused by all of the construction atop unprepared foundations.

Fourth, the city is much larger than it seems. Infinite, some say. One thing is certain, each labyrinthine sublevels are larger than the one above. Certain places are impossible to access a second time--perhaps a function of the unsettled geology of the place, or perhaps something stranger.

Fifth, the people are mad. (There are humans in Yog, but only as slaves.) People are sometimes born from animals (sometimes virgin animals) who grow up speaking a language that no one else even recognizes, but who are sometimes able to read graffiti that had long been thought to be incomprehensible.

Visitors sometimes abandon their companions, declaring that they are some other person, from some other place, and that Yog is their true home. They were confused, but now they can see clearly for the first time in their lives.

Many of them claim to be from distant places, and distant times. Many claim to have died, after praying to Yog. If a sailor drowns with Yog's name on his lips, and is reborn 600 years later in Yog from the womb of an anemic cow, does that count as a true resurrection?

Of course.

A lifelong resident looks at a mouldering wall and sees the face of Yog. They listen to the murmur of the marketplace and hear the voice of the city. The visitor hears and sees nothing, and is constantly in danger because of this. Who, then, is mad?

And of course, the residents will tell you that they are sane, and it is you, the visitor, who is insane.

What proof is there of the outside world? You babble about Old Bospero and the Church, but those are meaningless noises. Step past those gates, and you will wander the wastes deluded until you die. The dundriago spawned you, you mad thing, and it will swallow you again when we are done with you.

The Dundriago

There is no analog for the ecosystem that surrounds Yog.

It is a desert, but the valleys are filled with strange forests of stiff growth that stretch upwards like the pale skeletons of dead leviathans. Some are pale green. Most are white. A few are pink. There are very few animals, but an astute traveler can can hear writhing underground.

Dundriago plants are generally formed with an extremely long taproot, long enough to access the subterranean seas, sometimes as deep as half a mile beneath the surface. In these hidden oceans, they function as coral reefs, filtering out their food from the currents.

The part of the plant that extends above ground, then, mostly serves as a place for gas exchange to occur. Leaves are reduced or (more commonly) absent. There is no need for tall trunks, except to get above the dunes. Without leaves, there is little that rots into dirt. The plants are dry, but perhaps not as dry as you think.

The plants (who grew downwards) compete with the anthozoans (who grew upwards). Some of the extrusions onto the surface are actual outgrowths of contiguous coral reefs that have their roots in the hidden seas, where they capture blind whales in their filaments and digest them over several years.

It's a complex ecosystem, since the plants of the dundriago respond to changes at both the surface and the subterranean sea (much to the confusion of the locals in both places).

The surface is hostile place. Compared to a desert, the valleys of the dundriago at least offer shade. Water is available to anyone who is willing to descend a few hundred feet down, to where the taproots thicken and branch. But the dundriago is not without its own dangerous fauna, such as the poisonous voles and enormous, psychic beetles.

And although they are rare, the flying worms of the dundriago are the most famous inhabitant of the dundriago. Popular knowledge has them cutting horses in half and flying off with men's heads. (These stories, at least, are accurate.)

Written for Jeff Russell, who wanted lore for a big city in Centerra, and for Sam Passanisi, who wanted to know more about the Darklands. Thanks for being my patrons!

I wanted to write more about Yog, but before I can do that, I have to explain about these guys first.

A Story

Imagine that your world was dying. Your sun was fading, Ice and starvation begin to chew your civilizations apart.

And so you set out in a bizarre ship, it's design purchased at great cost from the greatest and farthest of the demons of the upper air. It the wealth and time of an entire generation, but you set out. You travel farther than the margins of your maps, farther than the light from your farthest stars, and beyond the trappings of conventional physics.

Finally, beyond the margins of the possible universe, you find an impossible one. A place of slow time and unimaginable gulfs of space. You find an entity that lives in that place. It is colossal beyond imagining-a million miles long, itself more diverse than all of the ecosystems of your homeworld.

At first, your only contact is with the people that live upon it. Whole civilizations nurture and instruct upon the entity's body, subsisting in secret among its detritus. Many of your people choose this life, and leave your arcology forever.

But certain members of your society wish to speak with the entity. And so you do, though it takes many lifetimes to learn how to speak with it. Your ship is of a comparable size--it is possible. It takes a year to speak a couple of sentences to it, another year to hear the response, another year to decipher it.

Over the generations, you learn of the shapes and limits of this outer world. You meet other entities, and although some of their thoughts and motivations are utterly inscrutable, you are still able to find common ground. They, too, need to eat every few millenia. Like you, they have children, some of which are shameful to them, others that are their pride.

These people are similar to bacteria. We are the entities that they interact with, on an multi-generational timescale. The hyperbolic macrologies are their arcology ships, which exist uncomfortably in our space. It is uncertain whether they sprang from the same source, or if they all arrived independently.

Walking Arcologies

Having to deal with gravity, limbs, and "walking" is pretty alien to the worldview of bacteria. About as strange as hyperspace would be to us. Perhaps that's the closest analogy--a flying arcology that enters hyperspace and never leaves.

The macrologies exist in a variety of shapes, but the most common one is a sphere that walks on a series of articulated, metal limbs. It's central sphere is almost indistinguishable beneath arrays of bulbous sensory apparatus, and its manipulator arms reflect a short-sighted series of past needs. (For example, they build a page-turning hand, but it is too fine to be used for any other purpose. They couldn't afford a better one--the act of building that simple manipulator nearly bankrupted them, and caused riots that lasted for generations.)

Sometimes they just hire someone to carry them around--a pitted metal pearl with a thousand subtle seams and apertures. This is risky, though, and even these macrologies must be able to sprout legs when the need arises. The importance of self-sufficiency is not lost of them.

Older, successful macrologies will have bodies attached to themselves, usually necromantic. (The analogy breaks down a little bit here, but it would be equivalent to an ark ship attaching itself to the corpse of a space-god in order to better interact with an alien world.)

They can offer a few superlative services. Playing chess! Generating vast amounts of mediocre music and poetry! The construction and repair of ultra-fine structures! (They can pluck the flaws out of gemstones.) Many of them become wizards.

The civilizations that exist inside the macrologies tend to be fundamentalist, autocratic regimes. The true nature of the macrology is almost always hidden from the inhabitants--something that they've learned over many revolutions and purges. By most accounts, they tend to be pretty brutal and uncompromising.

A macrology piloting the corpse of an ogre.
(Actually concept art from Bioshock Infinite.)

Interacting with Macrologies

Because of the sheer number of minds at work within macrology, you might think that they would be extremely intelligent. And this is true--most of the time. Although they have a billion minds thinking much faster than we could, they are prone to disruptions and errors of memory.

"Why should I broadcast the answer to a problem that my great grandfather tasked me with? There are no such things as Ancient Ones. There is nothing out there but stars."

One of their "years" goes by approximately every 30 seconds. Any task that lasts more than a few minutes requires a extremely stable power structure with immaculate record keeping.

They have deep, synthetic voices. They tend to talk fast. They usually hate being told to speak slower--every second you delay costs them precious time.

Macrologies tend to be difficult to wake up in the morning--a thousand years pass every night, and the inheritor civilizations must follow the orders inscribed on their pyramids. How do you get someone to carry out an instruction a thousand years in the future? How do you ensure that type of consistency?

They are also prone to sudden bouts of torpor and inactivity, as their worlds are ravaged by civil wars and plagues. Sometimes they simply destroy themselves unexpectedly, simply destroying themselves though pollution, genocide, or exposure to the outside air. Dead macrologies can be sold to other macrologies for a hefty sum (a new world-ship! a second chance!) unless the macrology is uninhabitable for some reason (radioactivity, billions of microscopic undead).

Working with them is also frustrating, because they are sometimes mildly contagious. It is no uncommon for a (microscopic) ship to leave the macrology every hundred years or so, which is to say, roughly every hour. If this tiny ark lands on you, you can expect to enjoy a skin rash called "gripworm". This is the tiny descendants of the macrology attempting to subsist on you.

But within a few days (within a few thousand years) your immune system will fully mobilize to the site and the infection will clear up. There has never been a recorded case of these tiny people living successfully outside of a macrology--our world is hostile to them in a way that is difficult to explain.

If you scrape out the inside of the blister, you will find the same thing that you will find inside a macrology: very complex dirt.

This post is inspired by a Scrap Princess post about a time bomb, that I cannot find for the life of me. EDIT: This one.

EDIT: Stats

HD 6 Armor plate Ragged Claw 1d20+effect
Move dwarf Int 14

Immune fire, ice, lightning, poison

Weakness sonic

Spells As level 3 wizard.
Sample Spells reverse gravity, emergency exit, transpose

Claw Effects [d3]
1 - Blind (until Con save).
2 - Cast all of your spells at once. Save to choose target; otherwise random.
3 - Poison 1d6 (until Con save).

When a macrology succeeds on an Int roll, it succeeds in the way that a hypergenius would. When a macrology fails an Int roll, it fails horrendously, as if it has forgotten something that happened a few minutes ago, or as if it were ignorant of some basic fact.

The bestiary has been updated. There's now about 351 entries on it. That's a lot of monsters.

Check it out

>HERE<

Looking back at a lot of my old posts, most of them still hold up.

My very first post was the Tumble Melon Tree. I wrote it in 2012. I had forgotten that it had poop in it, which creates a link to newer posts like the Goblin Filthomancer. (I guess I haven't changed much.)

The creatures I'm more proud of, though, are the interesting-concept ones like the macrology or the interesting-mechanic ones like the flying eyeball.

How hard is it to introduce a search function for a database on Blogger? Asking for a friend.

Note: Not a Patreon post.

by Pierre Clayette

Part One - Part Two - Serylites

The Library of Asria is the greatest library in all the world. Built atop catacombs of incinerated books, the library has continued to grow by rapaciously acquiring all books that it can.

Anyone bringing a book into the city must allow it to be copied. (It will be returned promptly, and probably cleaned and repaired as well.) Anyone who seems interesting will be arrested, required to write a biography, paid, and released.

The library is run by Malboaz, a former librarian who has found immortality by mapping his neurons to a collection of 512 books. He functions like an analog AI--librarians enter numbers into his books to determine what he "hears", perform calculations to determine what he "thinks", and play a strange set of trumpets according to the results in order for Malboaz to "speak".

Malboaz has a brother who shares his condition, imprisoned in the basement. However, Auteruch has no idea of the coup that put him there. He doesn't even know that time has passed. Without librarians to update his brain-state, how could he?

Most librarians are serylites, a race of blue-skinned women. They have a single source: the Staff of Seryl. Using the staff causes you to become pregnant with a serylite. There is no other known source of serylites.

More on this stuff in Part One.

Beneath the upper library are the black stacks, where the true rulers of the library reside: the books themselves.

The Black Stacks are guarded by a erudite, tea-drinking giant named Poor Lucan. The area around the Unpolished Gate has been built around Poor Lucan, so the poor fellow literally cannot leave without breaking down a wall. Since their are books on both sides of the wall, and since Lucan would never hurt a book (his only friends), Lucan is trapped there. Not that Lucan minds much. He reads constantly and writes occasionally.

Lucan will absolutely not anyone past him without a serylite escorting them. He knows all of the serylites well--there's only a couple dozen of them.

Lucan is about 20' tall, average for a giant.

Poor Lucan
HD 8 Def Plate Kick 2d8 Broom 1d12 to all within 15'
Move as horse Int 14

Lucan's manning broom can attack all targets in 15' simultaneously, but only if they're human-sized or smaller. A manning broom is basically a bushy broom, giant-sized, made from bundled pieces of metal--mostly long whipping poles but also a few chains.

Lucan's plate armor only extends up to his waist. If you can hit a target 10' off the ground his Defense counts as leather. The same rule applies if you can get him prone (in addition to the +4 for attacking a prone enemy.) Aim for the kidneys.

A wickedly spiked belt prevents people from climbing up him. (Think of razor wire.)

Blades on the front, back, and sides of his greaves cut any rope that would try to entangle him. (But not chains.)

I picture him looking like the shopkeeper from Frozen, with a comfy sweater on top of a heavily armored lower body. So yeah, you should feel bad if you kill him.

More on this stuff in Part Two.

Digression: Giants vs Humans

This is basically how most giants equip themselves when they're expecting to fight humans. The only things that are missing are the helmet and the energy drinks made from talakeshi jelly and panther piss. (And also the "lawnmower" knights.)

This is because the average pitched battle between giants and humans is about 20 giants versus 20,000 humans and the humans don't have a chance. See here.

Humans win by either (a) tripping the giants and then piling on them with long needle-pikes, or (b) wearing them down. Giants can resist the first tactic by fighting in pairs and trios, but the giants struggle the longer the battle drags on. They can run down a knight on horseback, but it is exhausting. And each giant has to kill a thousand humans--it's gonna be a long day.

Anyway, enough about giants. Back to the library.

The Ivory Towers

This is the upper library, where there are windows and fresh air and humans are allowed. The books in this section will be about topics that you recognize. It is relatively safe, here, but visitors should ensure that they have the correct library pass.

Vampiric Scroll
HD 1 Def chain Bite 1d6
Fly as bat Int 2

Immune to everything that isn't fire or slashing.

Whenever a vampiric scroll bites you, it sucks your blood. Red text then appears on the scroll, which contains a perfect description of you and many facts of your life. 50% chance that it contains some secret that could be used against you.

Once a vampiric scroll has collected your data, it will fly off and relay it to the authorities. The alert dice increase, and your next encounter will be with the stamp golem (or possibly multiple library golems, depending on the alert level).

You can learn how to make your own by capturing and studying one, of course.

Library Golem
HD 6 Def plate Stamp Hammer 1d12
Trudge as dwarf Int 6

Everyone who takes damage from a library golem is permanently branded with a stamp that describes their trespass, location, and date.

If a library golem kills you, it will ink your face, take a pressing in its book (which is a part of its body), and send a find to your family.

Magic Item: Bookmark of Yesod

Break it in half to save. Break the halves in half again to reset. This works exactly like saving and resetting in a video game.

(DM: Take a bunch of notes about the state of the game.)

Chance of success depends on the time that has elapsed.

Seconds: guaranteed success
Minutes: 5-in-6
Hours: 4-in-6
Days: 3-in-6
Weeks: 2-in-6
Longer Still: 1-in-6

Magic Item: Abacus of Mesmerane

Thrice per day, answers any question with 5-in-6 accuracy (failure = no response, rolled in secret). Only answers with integers greater than 1. Metaphysical questions generate irrational numbers (that no human can understand). Asking it questions about things more than a mile away cause all of the beads to fall off.

So asking it "how many times does the duke intend to assassinate me on this hunting trip?" will fail, because that answer is going to be either 0, or 1.

Asking it how many drops of poison are in this cup of wine might succeed. A positive result of 320 drops tells you that someone has added a lot of poison to your wine (or, alternatively, that Mesmerane considers wine to be poison). A negative result doesn't tell you if the abacus failed or if there is no poison in your wine.

Magic Book: Rat Ledger

The Library hires rats to collect information. This book lists all of the rat contacts in the city, their rates, and their areas of expertise.

The library would be very desperate to get this book back.

Magic Book: The Witness

Every copy of this book begins with something similar to "And then Pokor Tenpenny finished enchanting the book. He was proud of what he had done, but also weary. He didn't want to go home to his wife, who was not a very good cook."

Everything that happens within eye- and ear-shot of this book is recorded, in the same tedious diction of Pokor Tenpenny. This effect is blocked only by lead. Copies of The Witness are always stored in lead coffers.

by Pierre Clayette

The Black Stacks

This is the true library, where the books rule. Most of the librarians have their private chambers on the top level of the Black Stacks, which are sort of a neutral area between the books and the librarians.

While the Ivory Tower organizes their books to be useful, the Black Stacks strive to be complete.

In the ancient days, when this place was a temple to Mesmerane, the Black Stacks were infinite--or nearly so. They held every possible book with 411 pages. Each book also featured an illustration which seemed to be unique, but also unrelated.

Since every possible "411-paged book" contains not just every book, but every possible typo of that book, as well as every possible alternate ending for that book. Damningly, it also contains every possible combination of letters and punctuation possible, which means that nearly every book in the Black Stacks was composed of pure nonsense, arranged according to no pattern.

Still, somewhere in the Stacks would be a book describing your life and death in perfect detail. There would also be many imperfect recountings of your life. There would also be a book that served as a perfect index of the rest of the library.

When Mesmerane ruled, the shamans would discern maps from the smashed brainpans of infants. The maps would be dried, redrawn, annotated, and the shamans would descend into the depths of the library to find the book that their goddess indicated. The trips would take days or weeks. The shamans did not always find the book they sought. The shamans did not always return.

The lower levels of the Black Stacks blend seamlessly into the Underworld.

But when the Church civilized Asria, the practice was ended and the shamans were killed through the same method of execution that they had once practiced on children. (A few of them fled into the deeper levels of the Library, where their descendants still tread.)

After a generation attempting to make sense of the Library, it was decided that the world had no need for a library filled with gibberish. A complete assembly of every book was no different than a complete assembly of no books, because you could give a pen to a child and tell them to write gibberish, and it would be no different than pulling a book off the chaotic shelves of the deep Stacks.

This is why the wisest men in Asria decided that the Library would be flooded with oil and ignited. It burned for 41 years, then stopped.

Explorers have reported that the destruction is very incomplete. There are entire wings of unburnt books. Still, the library was successfully diminished, it's ash-choked halls now holding a smaller piece of infinity.

It also explains why the books of the Black Stacks are so distrustful (and many are simply hateful). Still, storage space is plentiful in the Black Stacks, and the books look after their own.

from Blame! by Tsutomu Nihei

Ashen Savage
HD 1 Def leather Lunellum 1d6

Can use duodimension on themselves at will. Their ash-covered bodies blend in perfectly, except for the whites of their eyes, which are usually easy to spot. They use this ability to hide in bookshelves and travel through cracks.

The "ashen savages" are actually quite erudite, they just dress like shit. They understand only written languages, and actually have no concept of a sound-based language.

They use their lunella, pestles, saliva, and hair to repair books.

Ashen Shaman
HD 3

Spells - find the path, disgorge

When fighting an Ashen Shaman, the PCs are at a disadvantage. The shaman has already read about this encounter, and knows how it will go (at least for a little while). To reflect this, all d20 rolls that the party makes in the first round of combat are rolled at disadvantage (roll twice, use worse).

In combat, they use disgorge to dump people's inventory's on the ground (everything except what is held or worn).

New Spell: Disgorge
R: 50' T: container or creature D: 0
Target container ejects its contents. 1 MD affects a backpack, 2 MD affects a chest, 3 MD affects a carriage, 4 MD affects a small cottage. Locked containers cannot disgorge their contents (but will eject a hearty whiff of whatever smells they contain). If used on a creature, it must make a Con save or spend 1 round vomiting.

Magic Item: Library Card

A precious heirloom bestowed upon only a few trusted families. It allows access to the deeper, protected parts of the library. One may also be awarded if an exceptional amount of worthy donations are made.

Magic Item: Rendering Pen

When stabbed into an object, the object will darken and dissolve over the next hour. A portion of the liquid flows into the pen, which then begins to write down a description of the thing impaled. Roll a d3 to see whether the description is physical, functional, or psychological/contextual. Doesn't work on stone, metal, or anything you couldn't stab a pen into. Single use.

Magic Item: Nodal Ink

When swallowed, a node map of the floor appears on your back. (A node map shows only connectivity, not orientation, size, or distance.) Single use, both for the ink and for your back.

A node map.
The hallways might be oriented N-S but the map doesn't have to be.

Magic Book: Heretical Gazeteer

It looks like a boring folio of local maps, but this is actually a suppressed book of local maps. It includes a town that has been deemed damnatio memoriae, most likely by the church. The town was removed from all maps and hidden by "knitting" the spaces around it (usually with plans to reinstate it later once the heresy dies down).

By closely following the map, you should be able to reach the forbidden town. It probably won't be anything fancy. Just a regular abandoned town that no one else will be able to find unless they have a similar map, or if they follow you closely. (You may run into members of the Obliterat, though.)

Magic Book: The Missionary

A small notebook half-filled with a dozen different handwritings. Each handwriting usually spans a couple of pages and details some highly specific event or knowledge.

Anything written in this book will spread to adjacent books. For example, writing that giraffes are carnivores and then hiding the book at your local school will cause the lie to spread to neighboring books. Larger books and older books are more resistant to this conversion. A newly-printed pamphlet will convert overnight, while a venerable encyclopedia might resist for decades, or never convert at all.

Psuedo-Imaginary Creations

Books require renewal. Renewal requires materials. And what are books made from?

Vellum stripped from the sides of young calves. Trees that are ground up, mashed, and baked. Books have these material memories encoded in them. They have a mineral memory of it still.

The shamans dream these things into being. They are harvested. Kill one of them and you will kill a sleeping shaman, somewhere in the Black Stacks.

from Blame! by Tsutomu Nihei

HD 3 Def leather Attack 1d8
No Appearing 1d6

Psuedo-Imaginary -- It doesn't move right; it doesn't seem real. When you first encounter it, you can chose to attempt to disbelieve it. If you succeed, the creature becomes invisible, intangible, and unaffectable. You become similarly invisible + intangible to the creature. It is possible (and expected) for some party members to see the creatures and others to not.

The same might not be true for your allies, who might now be fighting an invisible creature that you can no longer affect.

Escort -- Each psuedo-imaginary creation is escorted by 1d8-4 (min 0) ashen savages.

Random Generation -- The creations are [d6]: 1 calves, 2 oaks, 3 squids, 4 calves and oaks, 5 oaks and squids, 6 squids and calves.

When a Psuedo-Imaginary Creature is killed, it spills words (usually loose sentences from agricultural handbooks) that stain everyone adjacent. These words will mark you as a murderer of the worst sort, and will make diplomacy with the ashen savages impossible.

Psuedo-Imaginary Calf

Trample -- 1d8, 50'

Twice as tall as a man. Completely covered in smooth, pale skin. Even hooves, eyes, and mouth. If killed, can be used to make high-quality vellum. Full of tasty pink meat, but utterly bloodless.

Psuedo-Imaginary Oak

Swallow on a hit, with a failed Str/Dex check.

They would only be about 10' tall if they weren't walking around on their roots like giant spiders. The leaves are attached wrong. It looks like they're glued to the bark. When they stand still, you can see them breathing.

Pseudo-Imaginary Squid

Flying because why not.

Blindness on a hit. Con save ends.

Their tentacles bifurcate seemingly at random. (In fact, the tentacles form a reasonably good map of the Black Stacks.) They have no mouths. They have no organs, in fact--their bodies are entirely filled with high-quality ink. They sound like waves crashing when they swim.

The shamans are capable of dreaming other things, and if you antagonize them, you will see exactly what.

Written for Francesco Gasperini, who wanted monsters, magic items, and books. Thanks for being my Patron!

If you want a tl;dr, just skip down to the part about

People have criticized the GLOG thus:

"For a game that says that stats don't matter very much, they seem to matter a lot. Since so many things are decided by rolling under a stat, and stats vary so much, your starting stats matter a lot. This reduces the impact of good gameplay."

FIRST OF ALL: a lot of that comes down to how often your DM asks for stat checks, and how often the players work to bypass situations that require stat checks. (This is all your fault, not mine.)

Secondly: Eh, that's a fair criticism.

Let's Talk Shit About Stats

This is not something that I am unaware of. After all, this is why I've been asking for stats to be generated with 4d4 instead of 3d6--to have a lower standard deviation.

Since moving to 4d4 stats, I've learned two things.

1. People hate rolling 4d4. That sacred cow has too many hit points, man.

2. There's still a lot of starting variation, even with 4d4.

It's pretty common for one character to have a 14 and another character have a 6. That's a 70% chance competing against a 30% chance.

I'll admit that this is a matter of taste. A lot of DMs and players are comfortable with that high level of variability. A character that has one exceptionally bad stat often has other stats that make up for it. Or it's okay to have one shitty character, because other characters in the party will compensate for them.

Sure. Fine.

But think about this: why have that variability there in the first place? What do you gain by it?

1. Your stats tell a story about your character. Many players (myself included) first start to get a feel for their character during the process of rolling stats. It's like turning over Tarot cards--each new dice roll reveals me more about my character's abilities, goals, and personality.

2. Your stats help you qualify for (and synergize with) certain classes. Wanna be a wizard? Well you better have good Int.

3. Your stats help your character feel distinct during gameplay. If you are playing a burly barbarian, you expect to have a easier time jumping over a pit than an asthmatic wizard. When you succeed on your jump, and the wizard fails, this is reinforced. If the opposite happens, the narrative feels inconsistent, and it feels bad.

In game A, the stats range from 3 to 18. Game B is identical, except the stats range from 7 to 14. When you switch from Game A to Game B, how does that affect the 3 points above?

1. Minimal effect. A Str 14 is just as exciting and descriptive as Str 18 used to be in the old system.

2. I sort of hate synergies. Game B is preferable to Game A in this regard.

3. Game A might be ruled superior here, since the mechanics reinforce the fiction that we expect. The barbarian outjumps the wizard 90% of the time instead of 75% of the time (percentages are speculative). But I would argue that a more unpredictable world is potentially more exciting, since the wizard has more chances to surprise you with his jumping acumen. And anyway, I have another solution with the Lawful Roll, below.

Anyway, here's my new proposal.

Stat Squish

First, I'm switching to roll-over for a while. (I may switch back; I'm fickle.)

Second, ability scores are rolled with a 3d6, then divided by two (round down). This is your bonus. Everything is bonuses.

Throw the ability score in the trash. We only track bonuses now.

Here's the probability breakdown.

Bonus	%
+1	0.5
+2	4.2
+3	11.6
+4	21.3
+5	25.0
+6	21.3
+7	11.6
+8	4.2
+9	0.4

25% of stats will be perfectly average at +5, just like how 25% of people used to be roughly average with a 10 or 11.

A+9 is just as rare as the coveted 18 used to be. Both are 1/216.

The DC for everything is 16.

Smoking Math

Why do this? Because it reduces the impact of exceptional stats without affecting average stats. Consider what your chances are of succeeding on an average stat check, for a character with average stats and a character with exceptional stats.

Old 3d6 Method
Average 10: 50% chance to succeed.
Mighty 18: 90% chance to succeed.

Squished Stat Method
Average +5: 50% chance to succeed
Mighty +9: 70% chance to succeed.

By the way, this is functionally identical to the system of ability scores and bonuses that has persisted from 3rd edition all the way into 5th. You can wiggle around with DCs and proficiency, but it's the same beast: every 2 points you gain in a stat gives you a +5% chance of success.

Since we want a stats to have a smaller contribution, we have succeeded at our design goal.

The Lawful d10

There is one tremendous advantage of roll-over that people don't use very often.

We shrank the score into a bonus in order to reduce the contribution of the stat to a random event. We can shrink the size of the die to reduce the contribution of randomness. The smaller the die, the more the stat matter.

The barbarians might have Str +8 and the wizard might have Str + 4, and that might not matter much on a d20, but it matters a lot more on a d10. So in situations when the DM wants to call for a roll that has less randomness in it (and stats are weighted more heavily), the DM should call for a Lawful Roll (as opposed to the usual roll, which is a Chaotic Roll).

The Chaotic Roll (d20)
Rolled against DC: 16

The Lawful Roll (d10)
Rolled against DC: 11

Let me prove it to you.

Barbarian (Str +8) Jumps a Pit
Chaotically: 65% chance of success
Lawfully: 80% chance of success

Wizard (Str +4) Jumps a Pit
Chaotically: 45% chance of success
Lawfully: 40% chance of success

If you're good at something, the Lawful Roll makes you better at it. If you're bad at something, the Lawful Roll makes you worse at it.

This is a useful tool for DM's to have in their toolbox, because some things are more random than others. Rock Climbing is more random than arm wrestling, even though I would use a Strength roll for both.

As a bonus, the Lawful roll is identical to a roll-under using the bonus as the target number. (+8 = 80% chance of success.) This is nearly identical to rolling under the non-squished stat with a d20, so in a way, we're right back where we started.

But What About Roll-Under?

I'm not interested in discussing the merits and pratfalls of a roll-under system compared to a roll-over system. I've lost sleep thinking about this and I guarantee I've already considered all of them.

I think I'm going to completely purge roll-under from the GLoG, and yes, it does feel like a betrayal on a fundamental level. And if you think angst is not appropriate for a discussion about dice mechanics, you obviously don't know me very well.

Fuck, man. Who am I?

Joesky Tax

Idiot Birds
HD 3 Defense leather Peck 1d10
Move horse Int 4

Aura of Idiocy
Anyone within 5' of an idiot bird must save or fall into an idiot rage (as the spell) except even dumber. All you can do is make "WAWB WAWB WAAAAW" noises and attempt to break/kill things with your bare hands. If you succeed on an Int check, you retain enough awareness to use your weapons instead of your bare hands. The effect ends as soon as you move 5' away from the bird, the bird dies, or the bird stops making its stupid noise.

Idiot birds look like obese cormorants. They are six feet tall and smell like fruit and dog shit. They appear in groups of 1d4+1. You can hear them a mile away, because they never shut the fuck up.

Cosmic Monster: Geminoids

d6 Dungeon Merchants

Wyrms

d7 Goblintown Arena Fights

Monsters of the Mythic Underworld

The Tangled Cladistics of the "So-Called" Undead

Scraps of Undeath

Ghosts

The Secret Names of God, and the Wizard Trap

Golems

Mummies

Bosses

#triggered

Birds

Goblin Filthomancer

Yog

Hyperparabolic Macrologies

Updated Bestiary

Library of Asria: Part Three

Stat Squish and the Lawful Roll