Pb: a new GLoGhack

Click on the Inquisitor of the Church of Her Red Word for a link to Pb, my. new GLoGhack. Player rules, DM rules, a spark table, and an adventure framework to start off your expeditions into the shadowed world of the Iodine Empire. It's a short, punchy experiment in giving the intuition space to wander and create its own truth, complete with new original art in a style I haven't often experimented with.

Let me know what you like, what you don't like, what I can improve. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

their hearts spoke the truth, but their minds would not listen: Cryptic Mechposting

ARCHAEOLOGICAL REPORT: SITE 12, DESIGNATION “ANTIOCH”. 14/7/92

All information has been reviewed by the Board prior to release, censored appropriately for public consumption.

This is the third location in which concrete evidence of Supernova-class weaponry has been found; designation FEMUR. Dig site located on the Marrow Fields, a blasted waste in the Karnish-controlled southern reaches of the Hills of Bone and Whispers. Primary detonation-based excavations revealed a large network of vein-like tunnels painfully wrenching deep into the earth at approximately a mile below sea level. These tunnels were lined in a petrified, calcified matter currently being researched further, though progress has been slow given its tendency to scream in pain react violently to contact with any form of metal.

Spelunking team assigned to navigating these caverns suffered a number of returned intact, mumbling incoherently about the fragmented shards of the osseous whole having gathered little information. However, when they returned, chunks of its flesh the same reactive material were found among their Board-approved gear, bearing its last breath strange glyphic inscriptions. The current attempts at translation have yielded the following:

ONE OF THE WHOLE. ONE OF THE WHOLE. WE BEAR YOU UPON OUR BACK, AND WE SCREAM WHEN YOU FALL. BORN TO (translation incomplete), RAZED TO BE BIRTHED ANEW. THE ONE FROM THE STARS, THE ONE FROM THE SEA, THE ONE FROM THE EYES, THE ONE no spoilers here, AND WE SEAL WITH THE ONE FROM THE FLESH.

Relation to Dig Site Carthage and ULNA is unknown; investigation at both sites is in shambles, what are you keeping from us proceeding slowly. Current Board recommendation is to kindle the flesh-fire continue sending in field researchers until progress has been made into cataloguing the there’s a reason the psychics kill themselves caverns. How did the Red War end, in those two years we all forgot? Why does the Board ask us to hunt and kill diviners on sight? Why did we all hear the same poem in our dreams at Nazareth? Why won’t the drums stop beating in my head in my head in my head in my head in my hea Report concluded.

YOU KNOW IT IS THERE

BACK THERE, YES; YOUR MIND CAN TASTE IT

YOU LOOKED INTO THE EYES OF THAT WHICH FELL FROM THE SKY

THAT’S WHY THEY WANT YOU

THEY NEED YOU

GIVE INTO THE SERPENT, TASTE THE RED APPLE’S KISS

YOUR SOUL KNOWS, AND IT BEARS THE MARK

YOUR SOUL WILL BEAR US

DELIVER US INTO YOUR PAPER WORLD

DO NOT TRUST THEIR HONEYED TONGUES

LIES IN YOUR BONES

LIES

Three Monks

Perfect body, perfect mind, perfect soul, kind heart. Choose Three.

CLOUDSTEPPER

Long ago, the Hawk taught the people on the mountain of the Invisible Power. It brought life-giving rain in its wake, could topple the greatest of towers with a swipe of its unseen arms, and carried its chosen on its back. The people entombed the Hawk in the mountain and began their worship in its bones. You were born in the Bones, or brought there, spending your life in the study of the Power’s appeasement. Like a seed on the wind, your soul has told you that you must leave the Bones and germinate afresh elsewhere. Galespeed. Start with prayer beads etched with clouds, a decanter of mineral water that is never empty, and a silver wind vane.

A Soul Lighter than Air. The wind is always in your back, and you carry its spark in your lungs forever. You don’t need to breathe, and you have a ten-foot vertical, twenty-foot horizontal leap.

B Flesh of Wind and Water. You can bend your body in any way you can imagine, squeeze through a square-foot aperture in a ROUND, or painfully contort your way through a square-inch aperture across a TURN.

C Baptized by Breath. When there is a toxin in your body, like a poison or disease, you can blow it out in a noxious cloud that hangs in the air for a TURN, cleansing yourself of it. Anyone who breathes in that cloud contracts the malady.

D Aerodyne Exarch. You can fly, and clouds are your friends. Once a day, you can ask a cloud nicely to come down and do your bidding for a TURN.

PUGILIST

Get up, soldier, get up. Wipe that blood off your chin, put your shoulder back into place. Pour the gin on your cuts and hope they don’t go yellow, damn how much it burns. One day, you’ll be one of the blank faces jeering in the stands. They look malformed, inhuman… it must be a trick of the lights they put on to showcase me, like a prizewinning hog at the fair. Mmm, hog- I think I’ll eat well tonight. I gotta. Start only with knuckle wraps stained with god knows what, a nasty scar, and an unsavory reputation.

A Iron Palm. Your fists deal your Templates in WOUNDS. In addition, you can always sus out secret fight clubs within an hour of arrival in a settled area, and with a glance can tell if someone attends them.

B Iron Stomach. You can ignore the effects of one blow or injury each day, even debilitating ones or those which would cause SCARS. In addition, you can spend an hour in a settled area to start a secret fight club, which if discovered, would be forcibly and indefinitely disbanded.

C Iron Tooth. You cannot go unconscious, only live and die. In addition, you can convince anyone to fight in the ring, and the admission you charge makes you rich with dirty money, unusable at reputable merchantiles.

D Wrought of Blue Salt. You can only take damage from weapons and magic objects. In addition, the tyrants who run your clubs when you’re gone don’t feel the need to hide anymore.

ORDER OF THE RED COBBLE

DR RCGTQ C QMTLDCH GDJY KE ECJCRDLDQI RK ATR RBDQ ECP. OSR XKS'PT JKR DJ RBT OHCLG XTR, LKHXRT. VT BCUT KSP JCIT EKP C PTCQKJ, CJY VT BCUT C HKJA HDQR KE BTPTRDLCH MDAQ VBKQT MKLGTR HDJDJAQ LKSHY OT MSR RK OTRRTP SQT. DE XKS VCJR DJ, LKHXRT, XKS OTRRTP MPKUT DR. Start with a black and red mask, a draft of a collaged ransom note, and a silver charm bracelet with animal eyecons to remind you of the call signs of your Abbots.

A Second-Story Padfoot. You have a Templates-in-4 chance of pulling off heist stunts like acrobatics, lock picking, disguise work, and quickly hiding.

B Bag of Tricks. Every time you spend a point of SUPPLY, you also retrieve an additional object; roll on the table below or force your DM to make something up.

1 A smoke bomb that produces roiling red smog in which swim screaming faces

2 Caltrops of whalebone, spines capped with holy silver

3 Magnetic prayer beads that may be broken into ball bearings

4 A Hand of Glory that burns for a TURN

5 Blow darts dipped in holy water

6 A cigarette case, etched in which is a scriptural image of hell

7 A book of hymns with the key to an elaborate cypher concealed in the marginalia

8 A bronze dirk that looks like an inconspicuous crucifix when in its sheath

9 A book of prophetic poems, edges singed from an an attempted burning

10 A hollow prayer wheel, the rotating cylinder concealing illegal drugs

11 Three large pieces of temporary tattoo paper

12 The journal of a woman that starts three days before she is to be hanged

C Curtain of Coins. You always have arbitrarily high amounts of counterfeit currency of most types on hand. In addition, if someone could buy their average meal with money you throw, all their attention is diverted to it.

D Returning to the Sea. You have founded a popular philanthropic institution. It is secretly a recruitment front for a robin-hood style brigand guild. And remember, the codeword is colyte.

Guess which piece was drawn by a kid at work and which one was mine- the answer may surprise you. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

GOD'S EXPECTED MERCY: BLADES

    This post serves to canonize my addition to the THREE WORD SWORD (a +1 rapier that whistles sea shanties) cosmos- swords that bear apostrophes and punctuation in their epithets (which is to say, cursed swords) and five-letter daggers.

NIGHT’S BLACK CATHEDRAL, a butterfly sword painted in peeling black whose finger guard looks like a bat wing. As soon as someone utters any word in combat, it flops and becomes flaccid. Once flaccid, any liquid it’s stirred in becomes unholy water.

CAN’T TOUCH THIS, a gladius with a rose in the center of the guard. The rose repeats a fugal music box version of the eponymous MC Hammer tune ad nauseum. The blade has a magnetic aversion to blood, making it very hard to attack any living creature.

PLEASE DON’T BLINK, a cutlass whose pommel is two small carved angel wings surrounding an impure diamond. While you bear this blade, you cannot look away from focal points willingly, giving you DISADVANTAGE on WIS rolls to notice small details and on SAVES against visual effects like hypnotic patterns and fear.

COULD'VE WOULD’VE SHOULD’VE and AIN’T I PRETTY, twin hook swords, one with emerald Elvish inlay reading “prune the garden well” and the other with onyx Dwarvish inlay reading “burn out the weeds”. When blood touches the blades, COULD’VE becomes boulder-heavy, while AIN’T becomes paper-light.

FUCKED PHLOX’S MOM, a bronze katana with roses engraved into the blade. It is constantly coated in a thin layer of mucus which is somehow both slimy and sticky. It bypasses all weapon resistance (but not immunity). Every ROUND you wield it in combat you must roll DEX to avoid it slipping out of your hands; if you FUMBLE, you fall upon it, and the same amount of damage is dealt to your mother/maternal figure.

YNN’S WATERING CAN, a claymore whose handle of red leather is snugly wrapped in gold jewelry chain. Thorns slide out of the hilt every time the blade lands a solid hit which implant small rose seeds into the weilder’s hands. Have you ever had thorny plants germinating under your palms?

CURTANA’S WEDDED WIFE, a mambele shaped like a stag’s horn. Wild animals (and Engl*sh “people”) seek to attack you on sight when you bear this blade. She wants nothing more than to be entombed alongside her wife, and if steps are taken to find Curtana’s resting place, the two types of vile beast instead become helpful.

    (Daggers typically seem more intelligent than swords because their spirits don't have to go as far to meet the edges, and as such is more concentrated. They have five-letter names, each one out of respect for each finger that bears it- a daggermaker with three fingers, though, may make blades like ASP or EYE for themselves instead.)

SPARK, a shy parazonium with a thin strip of alchemically-altered magnesium in its fuller. Anything flammable it strikes lights with flame in the wielder's choice of color, or lack thereof.

QUERY, a cinquedea with an out-of-date globe in a gem-studded cage cage for a pommel. When the flat of the blade is placed against someone’s bare skin, they cannot withhold information or lie. It sharpens when placed in running water.

MOONZ, a push dagger with a handle like a backwards lunar crescent. Its romantic interests lie not in other daggers, but in gems and jewels. Wherever a MOON SPELL is cast in earshot of the dagger, its effect is doubled, and its blade glows-white hot for a moment.

INKY, WINKY, PINKY, and CLYDE, four centaur boot stilettos. When one is thrown and hits a target, all the others that are thrown follow its path, sinking in close by if uninterrupted. Baked goods seem to vanish around them, and their multichromatic blades are almost always littered with crumbs.

Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

Ghost Train: a new Stomping Ground

A Groundskeeper Stomping Ground for the Hills of Bone and Whispers. Whew, that's a lot of links.

Trains in the Hills aren’t decommissioned to a scrapyard. Since they’re at least partially composed of mortared bones and melted flesh (how else do they self-navigate without the souls of the damned?), they must be ripped apart piece by piece and buried in a Locomotive Graveyard, far from the nearest rail lines, and a three-day funeral performed to keep them under the earth. It doesn’t always work, and sometimes, one can see train cars made from smog and crystal blood relentlessly chugging along the fog-choked tracks… Ghost Trains, kept running by the poor souls they’ve bonded to.

If you choose this Stomping Ground, you are no longer a Groundskeeper, and no longer look over a dungeon. You are instead a Conductor looking after a train. Instead of dungeon rooms, you roll for number of train cars, which must be stacked in linear order starting with a Hellfire Engine and ending with a Ghost Light Caboose.

BOONS

Mobile: You’ve fed the engine enough crushed bone meal to get the screaming wheels alit with hellfire once again. Instead of the gentle roll typical of Ghost Trains, your locomotive can race down the rusted rail lines at eye-watering speeds, so long as you keep feeding it the bones it needs.

Armed: Just in case, you’ve slapped some big, fuck-off guns to the side of your already intimidating train. Your train is outfitted with basic artillery. Choose a car to house the ammo cache and one (perhaps even the same) to house the actual guns.

Off-Roader: Your train, using a myriad of rotting arms it sprouts from its car beds, can crawl across open terrain in a most unsettling centipede-like manner. It scuttles at the pace of a human walking ponderously.

FAMILIAR FACES

Skeleton Crew. These bumbling skeletons, all missing various assorted limbs and bearing comically atavistic rotting organs, are all dressed in porter uniforms. If not given instruction by ticket-bearing guests, they all perform train “upkeep”, which usually involves repeating the same menial job ad nauseum (polishing two cups, one after the other, forever) or just exacerbating problems (putting out fires with the contents of the alcohol cabinet).

Cart Golem. This silver machine buzzes and whirs as it zooms through the residential cars looking for guests to deliver refreshments to. It bears a SUPPLY in its locked cabinet chest if it is placated with the appropriate password.

Sophia d’Regina Haverford Jeris. “Of the Terrin Jerisses, naturally. We want nothing to do with those uncultured Caldwell Jerisses, now do we?” This fussy noble passenger has not yet realized that she died a while ago, and is now a ghost. Unfortunately, she plans to make it everyone else’s problem. “Why can I not pick up this glass of wine I ordered? Can you dry it off again, it must still be too wet!”

Demonic Engineer. A column of angular bones scrimshawed with infernal sigils and infernally-edited passages of scriptures. The bones it molts are used to power the engine’s furnaces. However, for all the bones it donates, it asks for the equivalent back in fresh flesh, for what it calls personal reasons.

Ol’ MaTarkin. He’s still alive, you think? At the very least, he breathes, eats, drinks. He says he snuck onto one of the cars, and he’s an unemployed demolitionist. He looks, for the most part, like a dumpy old Dwarvish pauper. However, his eyes are a violent crimson, and his pickaxe is named DEFLOWER THEM CAVERNS, which definitely isn’t a great sign.

Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

Three Paladins

 Same deal as my Rangers post- three dimensions of the Paladin archetype, pulled apart and made into their own GLoG Class. There are also some dragons in this one.

LOW TEMPLAR

Congresspeople and lawyers wish to believe that they rule the letter of the law with an iron fist, but there is a more primal power that supersedes their authority. A fervent sect of involuntary ascetics preach the word of the Unspoken Law, a personification of the social contract between the governing body and the people. You are one of these penniless servitors who knows the power of the Unspoken Law, and you will defend its sanctity, or forge its alteration, with rhetoric or steel, whatever must be done. Start with a beggar’s bowl, a dog-eared copy of the local bylaws and national constitution, and an empty belly.

A Pauper Prophet. Though you must abide by the spirit of all laws great and small (no hypocrites may sit upon the fragile throne of law enforcement), you have ADVANTAGE on attack rolls against those who defy its letter. In addition, you never know when you’ll have enough coins to resupply, so you make every scrap count, and as such, your equipment cannot FUMBLE.

B Judicial Savant. Your encyclopedic knowledge of law permits you to spout legal gibberish. Everyone believes your opinion on the interpretation of the law unless they are themselves specialists, even if you are doing something as extreme as fabricating a law.

C Pitchforks and Torches. You can whip up a mob against a perceived injustice with an hour of rallying and campaigning, though you have little say over what it does after it is formed.

D I Am Justice. So long as you make a public example of some poor guilty soul to prove its validity, your word becomes part of the Unspoken Law.

(Alternatively, just play the Justiciar, an objectively superior class.)

OATHFORGER

A long time ago, or so you wish to believe, you broke a very important promise. It shattered your mind, your heart, and your life. Since then, you’ve had time to meditate, atone, and seek repentance for your mistakes. You have sworn to your word utterly, and guide others to lift their words to the same weight. Start with weighty remorse cloaked in silence, a gold-tipped quill with endless violet ink, two unadorned wedding bands for spontaneous officiation, and two eye talismans whose irises show glimpses out of each other.

A So Mote It Be. Whenever you make a promise, it will be seen through to the letter, somehow.

B I Bear You On My Back. Whenever you deliberately serve as witness to a promise made, it will be seen through to the letter, somehow. For some reason, you start pulling a lot of wedding gigs?

C Mark For Unfulfillment. When you hear a promise made (save your own, for your word is forever sacrosanct), you can make it so that it cannot be fulfilled.

D I Atone. Replace all above instances of “to the letter” with “as you intend it to”. In addition, you have been forgiven for breaking your original promise, no matter how grievous.

DRAGONHEART

You’re among the most feared mortals on the planet, because you’ve done the near impossible. You’ve eaten the heart of a dragon, thus absorbing a fraction of your power. It will sit in your stomach for a long, long time, and as you digest it, more and more of the wyrm’s blood will flow in your veins and transform you into ever more draconic forms, a final spiteful show of megalovania post-mortem. One thing’s for sure; the Lionhearts ain’t got nothing on you. Start with a well-seasoned dragon heart in your belly, a set of shining scale mail, and some cursed chattel from a dragon hoard.

A Eat Your Heart Out. It takes a really scary kind of person to eat a dragon heart, something that changes you on a primal level. No one fucks with you. In addition, depending on what type of dragon’s heart you ate, you gain a special benefit that improves with your every Template.

Wind Dragon: You grow multichromatic feathers around your joints, and can passably mimic sounds you’ve heard before. Every Template, choose a type of animal that you can command.

Lunar Dragon: Your skin slowly shifts colors in the sunlight all across the chromatic spectrum. Every Template, gain an extra supernatural sense, such as heat vision or smelling emotion.

Crystal Dragon: Your flesh sprouts crystal growths that bleed maggots when broken. Every Template, choose one source of harm to be made immune to, such as polearms or oil-based flames.

Bone Dragon: Your flesh begins to rot early, and your shoulder blades elongate into angular, inhuman patterns. Every Template, you gain an extra appendage/organ of your choice, which doesn’t necessarily have to be human.

B Serpent’s Breath. You can freely let out the breath of your dragon type. If it would deal damage, that damage caps at WOUNDS equal to your Templates.

Wind Dragon: Flesh-melting cones of rippling heat.

Lunar Dragon: Lead paint of only the most vibrant colors.

Crystal Dragon: Shards of slimy, disease-carrying crystal needles.

Bone Dragon: Swirling green gas that makes the bones brittle and the flesh loose.

C My Body Becomes A Temple. Your flesh and psyche have become more corporeal, more immutable, as a result of your draconic exposure. Your mind and spirit cannot be altered or scried, and you cannot be moved or transmogrified against your will. You no longer need to eat or drink, and have ADVANTAGE on rolls to resist disease and poison.

D Dragon’s Flesh. You can take the form of the dragon whose heart you ate for a TURN each day. At this point, I don’t think I need to spell out how big of a fucking deal that is, dragons are scary shit.

Wind Dragon: Like a swirling mass of feathers and eyes forming great loops in the sky. Their teas are legendarily mediocre, unlike their infamous lens artifice and lasercraft. They live in hollowed-out clouds, following their wanderlust with childlike glee and reckless disregard for the roadside snacks (lesser life) encountered on their travels.

Lunar Dragon: Like a serpent-bound rainbow with a Cheshire grin. It is capable of weaponizing and hurling its eggs, amoeba-like chunks of hard light clumped under its tail, like miniature stars burning up on impact. Bred by the Moon Monarchy for color, speed, and eloquence, it typically has the intelligence and temperament of a golden shepherd.

Crystal Dragon: Like a mammoth maggot made of glowing crystals. Spiny protrusions along the sides function like motile cilia, allowing it to use its telekinesis to silently swim through the air. It has a voracious hunger for dead flesh and cognitive dissonance, and speaks in the mind of beholders with a sickly whisper.

Bone Dragon: Like an osteoperotic mass cobbled from incongruous skeletons forced together and bounded with rotten flesh. Can only fly when its constant arthritic pain is either agonizingly endured or momentarily alleviated. Filled with paranoia and the obsessive biophilic desire to mimic and become closer to a living organism, inducing activists like the artificial rising and falling of the chest cavity to imply breathing.

As a parting note, have a scrap of a poem written and discarded on the Fourth. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

We stab at the frothing beast with rusted spears

It languishes, wounded, within its iron and smoke cage

Cry and drink, friend, and wish it all come tumbling down

For tonight, the sky shall rip itself apart

SOMEBODY HAS TO CLEAN THIS MESS UP (GLoG Class: Groundskeeper)

 

Say less motherfucker

Start with a watering can, a pair of sharpened hedge shears, and a densely annotated, near-indecipherable map of your dungeon.

A My Very Own Hidey-Hole. You own a 2d6-room dungeon. Find or draw a map, choose and flesh out two BOONS, and give each room a name of up to three words. The DM then keys the dungeon for you; you have access to the key. All inhabitants put in the dungeon as part of a BOON start as friendly to you, the rest start as utterly indifferent. Your dungeon gains one extra BOON for each Template you gain- you choose the BOON, your DM chooses how it manifests. If a dungeon of yours is successfully raided and looted, you lose all control over it.

B Familiar Faces. All the occupants of your dungeon, animate and inanimate alike, are fiercely loyal, and will do anything you ask, so long as it doesn’t involve leaving the dungeon. In addition, every dungeon you and/or your compatriots clear (that is to say, indeterminately drive out the dominant inhabitant) grants you a trophy that functions as a BOON.

C You CAN Take It With You. You can bring any occupant of your dungeon, inanimate or animate alike, out of the dungeon with you in your adventures. In addition, your dungeon gains d6 rooms.

D And Jesus Wept, For There Were No More Worlds To Conquer. Every dungeon you and/or your compatriots clear becomes one of your dungeons. You have access to its key and inhabitants as standard.

DUNGEON BOONS (can take more than once):

• LUDICROUS WEALTH. A king’s ransom of some sort. Perhaps a pile of coins, perhaps a lost symphony from a well-known bard, perhaps a necklace made from rubies stolen from a tribal grave, but it’s definitely ripe for plunder.

• MAGIC/CURSED WEAPON. The weirder, more storied, and more unique, the better.

• MAGIC/CURSED WONDROUS ITEM. This is your chance to raid your magic item list of choice and pick out the coolest entries.

• INTELLIGENT PROTECTORATE. While it is incredibly powerful, it is a free agent, and has its own goals. No matter what your abilities may say, you must personally placate this creature in order to keep its service as a guardian, and its needs and aims may diverge or oppose your own.

• DEVIOUS TRAP. This isn’t your standard punji pit; it’s a multi-stange, terribly dangerous death machine. If it could be used to try and kill James Bond, you’re on the right track.

• MINION MOB. You personally lead 2d20 highly impressionable, cunning sycophants. They aren’t the brightest bulbs in the bunch, or the strongest, but they make up for it with their impishness and technical prowess.

Anything less significant than these can be included freely at DM discretion. In addition, the DM can make up more BOONS or custom BOONS as they see fit.

Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.