They Don't Come Back Right

 THEY DON’T COME BACK RIGHT

This table is for when someone attempts a reanimation or resurrection after a body has had a soul leave and enter it once already. After that threshold, the physical form cannot handle the strain, and if further reanimations are attempted, things have the strong potential to go sour...

This one is for me and my games. Hope you get something out of it, I suppose?

When attempting the ritual, roll 2d6. The first one determines how many weeks the corpse is “burnt out”- all attempts on a further reanimation in that time simply wilt and fizzle to no avail. The second one determines how chaotic the reanimation is. Roll a d6, modified by the number of reanimations past 3 attempted, and compare against the table below.

1-2 Roll on the table below once and take whichever result.

3-5 Roll twice on the table; the DM can pick which result applies. I hope you brought snacks, because if I were the DM, I’d absolutely take bribes.

6+ Roll d4 times on the table; all results stack.

1 The wrathful arcane energies sear the air and cause an explosion centered on the corpse to be reanimated. 1-2 limited (catching the immediate vicinity), 3-4 sizeable (catching everyone in FAR range), 5-6 devastating (enough to cause structural damage).

2 Over the corpse, a dimensional tear to a random point in the cosmos rips open, the gravitational warp pulling everyone in FAR range towards it.

3 The ley lines tear; no magic will ever work in this area ever again.

4 The ley lines tear; magic hyperfunctions to a dangerous extent in this area forevermore, and exposure to latent magical energies will cause negative long-term effects, like radiation poisoning but faster.

5 The caster goes comatose for d6 days (1-3), d6 weeks (4-5), forever (6-7), or straight up dies (8).

6 The caster (1-5) or an onlooker in FAR range (6) has their soul shunted out of their body, replaced by another random one. The corpse has a 10% chance of “catching” the displaced soul.

7 The body becomes an atavistic tangle of limbs and organs, spasming piteously before drowning in its own internal fluids and being crushed under its own bulk.

8 The body becomes an atavistic tangle of limbs and organs- roll initiative!

9 The body spontaneously combusts and a ghost rises from the embers.

10 Bloated worms explode from the corpse’s body- roll initiative!

11 The corpse vomits up acid, hitting everyone CLOSE to it, then goes inert again.

12 The corpse reanimates stark raving mad, attacking the party.

13 The corpse reanimates, but occupied by a malignant intelligence. It will try and mask its malice until it finds a time to strike. The intelligence seeks only to quench all life in the world.

14 The corpse reanimates with the opposite personality of the body’s previous/original inhabitant 

15 The corpse reanimates as standard, but is incapable of speech or communication, only coldly staring

16 The corpse reanimates only to scream out a gibberish prophecy of woe and immediately collapse again

17 The corpse reanimates only capable of shivering in place and mumbling gibberish to itself.

18 The corpse reanimates only capable of (1-2) cackling, (3-4) screaming, (5-6) crying, or (7-8) all three intermittently.

19 The corpse dramatically shudders once, then stays inert.

20 By some miracle, the reanimation functions as normal. I’d advise against pushing your luck again…

Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

30 cheap tricks

 Here ya go Phlox

1. If you give your players a vehicle, which is always always always a good idea, let them name it, and have them each go around and name one of its idiosyncrasies: maybe the barnacles on the bottom of the boat are shaped like skulls, or the caravan has square wheels that inexplicably work as normal. Investment in the vehicle immediately skyrockets, and they will 100% come up with cooler things than you.

2. I stole this one from Phlox. Strong, gay, woman- pick 2 and your players will love them.

3. I made this one up. Pathetic, non-human, funny voice- pick 2 and your players will love them.

4. There is never enough queerness in your setting.

5. If you don’t have anything planned for a travel montage, go around the table and have each PC name an obstacle they face on the road (driving rain, wandering skeleton, running out of rations), then have them choose another PC to propose a solution and roll to see how well it works, then narrate what ultimately happens. Keep going until everybody has presented a problem and a solution, or until you think they’ve feasibly gotten to their destination.

6. Drugs > potions.

7. Get really good at mashing syllables together in your head. If you can make names for NPCs or locations on the drop of a hat without aid of generator or list, you’ll have a much easier go of things. Kerukhazat. Melichor. Vessindin-Chesleaz. I have no idea who or what those are, but they emerged from the brain soup and they’re here to stay.

8. Go on wikipedia spirals as frequently as you can muster.

9. Players are delighted by vague, harmless anachronisms. The Rusted Goat is the only place in the world where you can get waffles. Orcs invented funk music. “My Affections are Naught but for Lucy” is a hit Elvish comedy play-cycle.

10. Sound effects/accents virtually never hurt and often help. I’ve had an encounter with a mechanical spider go from doldrum to hair-raising just because my players didn’t like the metallic clicking and shuffling I did every time the spider shivered in its malaise.

11. Avoid “just a (temple/tavern/office/corridor)” as often as possible. This is a sin I fall to often, but just one remarkable detail is all you need to crystallize a memory.

12. There should be crates, barrels, or otherwise mundane receptacles strewn about wherever possible- encourages elevation play and looting. Same for plant/fungal growths to be harvested.

13. Explosives or flammable things are always a good thing to find in a crate or barrel in a pinch.

14. At the start of combat, roll a d4. In that many rounds, something (usually something bad) will happen. Really puts the pressure on.

15. If someone is taking their turn slowly and you want to keep momentum going, count down from 10. They’ll have something by the count of 7 nine times out of ten.

16. A small immersion detail you can add is to replace “heaven”, “hell”, and “god” with the setting appropriate replacements in NPC speech patterns. “Damn it all to Inferno!” “Saints help us all...” “Oh my Trennibar, you can’t possibly be suggesting we get voluntarily eaten by the rhinoceros?”

17. Astrological events are a great way to build time limits into your game, teach players about the world’s cultures, and cheaply create suspense and mystique. Best part is, there’s a bajillion of ‘em, so there’s no limit to the amount you can throw at the players. Same goes for holidays.

18. You can have multiple of the same biome, but generally, if you have multiple similar biomes of the same character, it starts to get boring. Sure, they may both be marshes, but one is cozy and the other is rotting.

19. Easy way to make monsters unnerving is to put human teeth and/or eyes where they’re not supposed to be.

20. Have a good grasp of how magic works diegetically; it’ll save your bacon often.

21. Cannot undersell the importance of a good trinket/minor magical item table, especially if you have trouble improvising fun little items. Side note, my players were thrilled when they found a treasure haul containing a glass eye, bent needle, torn linen sheet, and an outdated anatomical textbook- weirdness over value.

22. I haven’t done enough with graffiti and murals. I’ll have to start.

23. Talking animals/objects are universally hits.

24. To the end of encouraging players to manipulate things, there should be a good chance that the dividends of their experimentations reap positive results, especially near the beginning of the campaign- condition them with the carrot so the stick isn’t as harsh.

25. Generally, having the players go around the table and saying something pertaining to the matter at hand is never a bad idea- why their character is in this jail cell to start the campaign, what they’ve heard about Sir Darkwyn, a piece of loot in the treasure hoard.

26. The character’s physiological reactions to stressful events are a valuable point of description. Burning lungs, heartbeat pounding in the ears, muscles sore and torn, face going beet-red.

27. Play with the juxtaposition of mundane names against fantastical ones. Bernard the Dwarf, Jim the Goblin.

28. Draw pictograms of a dungeon room’s contents onto the main map so you can try to run it without having to check a key. Even if it’s too complex to recall from doodles alone, it’ll sure help you either way.

29. Start the session’s narration with a reliable little ritual. “In the wine-dark waters of the Norrungardt ocean, an epic tale unfolds. When last we left our heroes...”

30. When in doubt, roll some dice- the least it can do is stall a few seconds so your intuition can catch up to you, the most it can do is define your game plan going forward.

Hope it helped. I tried to avoid stuff that was intuitive. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

Knights of the Live Wire

 Between the cracks, in the spaces between, there is a war raging that you should never hope to perceive.

EXPERIENCING A KNIGHT

    If you experience a Knight indirectly in the Sedated Firmament, you will hear the hiss of the Wävern’s undulations and feel a static chill down your spine. Where they tread, the barrier between the Sedated Firmament and Empyrean Electric runs thin, and sometimes the darkness on the other side howls in lament of its birth. Perhaps you will see their cloak billowing; if you blur your eyes enough and project yourself just too far out of the Tehom Churning, you might see their Heraldry, and risk it seeing you back.

    If you experience a Knight directly in the Sedated Firmament, it will likely be the last thing you see. It will throw itself from a glass cage, and you will see the rippling light of the Firmament searing the air with its radiance, and you will go blind. You will hear the chattering whispers of the Empyrean Electric in the back of your skull, and it will make your brain throb in agony. You will fear death for half a second, then you will fear the possibility of living through the pain. The Knights are often merciful and never kind.

    A Knight cannot access the Tehom Churning. That is why they fight over the Sedated Firmament. It takes flesh to swim in the black waters, it takes lungs to drown.

    Your sense perception is a synaesthetic nightmare in the Empyrean Electric, and the presence of a Knight inflames that to the point of insanity. There are coma wards in the basement below the basement of the White House full of people who spent too long in the Empyrean Electric, and there’s a bed with your name on it...

CODE OF CONDUCT

SERVE RIGHTLY; Vassal’s spirit be done

SERVE OBEDIENTLY, Deafness is Disconnect

SERVE SELFLESSLY, Ego melting to servitude

SERVE MERCIFULLY, Let Disconnect come swiftly

SERVE ETERNALLY, Servitude brings Connection

d8 VASSALS

1 GLEAMING SILVER, planes of impossible chrome and glass swirling in hyper-dimensional pseudofractals. Has a fascination with the pursuit of efficiency. Seeks to rule the Sedated Firmament.

2 HER GREAT BEAUTY, the flickering face of all impossibility. Has a fascination with the relationship between appearance and reality. Seeks to make herself unlike anything in the Sedated Firmament.

3 MIND, a rippling pool of fleshy silver. Has a fascination with subjectivity versus objectivity. Seeks to know everything.

4 FLOW PROTOCOL, millions of skittering feet and gnashing maws. Has a fascination with wealth and trade. Seeks to throw off its shackles and be free to devour starstuff, as it has always wished to.

5 ZRMYAG, a senseless mass of self-consuming and ever growing color. Has a fascination with illusions and games. Seeks to tear himself from the Empyrean Electric for a throne in the Tehom Churning.

6 Z, the great dearth. Has a fascination with the end of all things. Seeks to destroy itself, or remove itself from the Empyrean Electric, or devour all things, or to unmake creation.

7 DEVIAN, a herd of animals both real and chimeric, all with burning human eyes. Has a fascination with the line between mind, flesh, human, and beast. Seeks to dissipate the Tehon Churning.

8 ABADDON, the crying of a child, or perhaps a woman, and a writhing shadow in the corner of your eye. Has a fascination with taboo and depravity. Seeks to poison the Tehon Churning.

SURVIVING AN ENCOUNTER

    If you have found yourself a Knight’s target, the best you can pray for is a swift demise. There is no escaping their blade; they hiss through the air around your head millions of times per second, too silent for you to ever hear, too fast for you to ever see.

In the seconds between you realizing you are a target and your termination, there are two things you can do. One, you can try and justify a lack of culpability for whatever the Knight seeks you for. Two, you can try and beseech it to complete some other task to buy you time to complete the former; if the order is not in defiance of its Vassal, it will delay its primary directive. Impossible tasks are generally a safe bet, buying minutes or hours at a time.

If you experience a Knight when they are not your quarry, you may be able to get it to perform your bidding in a similar manner, but be careful not to act against the wishes of its Vassal. Engaging in the politics of the Empyrean Electric is a death wish, and I never wish you the misfortune of trying to interface with a Vassal directly.

PLOT HOOKS

1 Defend a psychic from a Knight’s attack as they delve into the Tehom Churning.

2 On behalf of a shadow government occult bureau, come up with a task that can stall a Knight for 24 hours to test some experimental technology.

3 A sick multibillionaire will pay you any sum to be executed by a Knight.

4 You’ve noticed the same Knight has been following you for the past week. Why is it observing you?

5 A Vassal believes that you can advance its interests, and sends a Knight with a task for you. If you fail, the Knight will kill you and everyone you have ever met.

6 A Vassal believes that you can advance its interests, and sends a Knight with a task for you. If you fail, the Knight will kill you and everyone you have ever met. You cannot perform the task.

Thank you to Shifty for the photo that inspired this post, thanks to you for reading, and happy gaming.

Spark Tables and Trajectories for the Flesh

 This one’s just for me. Hence the stealthpost. If you are here, I hope you’re doing well, and I doubt this will have use for you, but have it anyways.

1	Osseous	Rot
2	Bloody	Prophecy
3	Toothy	Corpse
4	Bleached	Priest
5	Fungal	River
6	Necrotized	Lake
7	Withered	Mine
8	Hairy	Tower
9	Corpulent	Altar
10	Ocular	Garrison
11	Screaming	Spear
12	Fatty	Mask
13	Phlegmatic	Calculus
14	Shambling	Grimoire
15	Oozing	Abomination
16	Bubbling	Fly
17	Pus-Bloated	Mushroom
18	Dying	Tooth
19	Rotting	Artery
20	Sanguine	Bone

TRAJECTORIES

Class War. Should you side with the Marrow Concord and their skullcracking guard force? Or with the Aorta Strike, the starving meat farmers without a hope or cent to their name?

Rangers of the Rot. The Encroach is spreading, the Rot consuming more and more of the Flesh. Is there any hope of salvation, or abating the inevitable?

Pilgrims of the Heart. Depending on which, if any, cult you sign with, they need to take a venerable member among them to the Heart for one last oracular trip.

Hunters of the Squared Circle. The Philosopher’s Stone is within your grasp, but its ingredients are scattered around the Flesh.

Winding Coils: self-cannibalizing, two-faced (Fangs)

i know it’s incomprehensible get off my back

GLoGtober '21: Back with a Vengeance

  I’ve learned a lot since last year, and with the help of a crowd of people smarter than I am on Phlox’s GLoG server, I’ve remade GLoGtober from the ground up to make it more accessible, produce better content, and just be more intrinsically fun.

• For starters, if you haven’t noticed, I’m releasing the list early so you have a month or so to draft these posts before you publish them- definitely learned from last year on that score.

• Instead of having 31 prompts, which is rather staggering, I have 7 day’s worth of d6 tables to roll on. Most people stalled out at around 3-4 posts last year, which was definitely understandable, so a week was a good midground that people could write easily and feel accomplished about. It also gives room for people to do extra entries on the tables as they feel inspired to.

• I’m adding in a really cheesy badge system. Ignore it if you want, but I’d certainly get dopamine out of it. Helps incentivize not only GLoGtober, but more community-building, which is always lovely to see.

DAY 1: COLLABORATION

Be sure to give all appropriate accreditation!

    1 Someone else’s setting

    2 Someone else’s class

    3 Someone else’s GLoGhack/a published game you don’t normally write about

    4 Someone else’s adventure

    5 Someone else’s generator/roll table

    6 Work with a buddy to create two linked posts

DAY 2: MONSTERS

    1 Goblin

    2 Dragon

    3 Slimes

    4 Orcs

    5 Drow

    6 Something strange and utterly unique

DAY 3: MAGIC

1 Crystal

2 Rune

3 Orb

4 Book

5 Portal

6 Wizards (damn them)

DAY 4: ADVENTURE

    1 Dungeon

    2 Mobile dungeon

    3 Hexcrawl

    4 Heist

    5 Long-term/domain level adventure

    6 Something else that isn’t any of these

DAY 5: CLASS

These are just classes I haven’t traditionally liked the execution of in the past. If you don’t like these prompts, I don’t blame you, feel free to go off the rails.

    1 Thief

2 Cleric

3 Bard

4 Monk

5 Tinker

6 Convert something cool from a wild source

DAY 6: SETTING

    1 Government

2 Crime (organized or otherwise)

3 Religion (approved or heretical)

4 War (past or present)

5 History (deep or recent)

6 Geography/Landmark(s)

DAY 7: ODDITIES

Go nuts with this one.

    1 Index card

    2 Zeppelin

    3 Bone

    4 What causes that strange black lightning?

    5 Poem/artwork/verse

    6 5e (curs’d be its unholy name)

BADGES

    If this doesn’t work, blame SquigBoss. When you complete a challenge and get the relevant badge, you are free to post the list of all the badges you have on the sidebar of your blog. For some of the more ambitious badges, I may draw up some little scout style emblems for you to put onto your sidebar instead. The badge-earning stars Oct 1st and the statute of limitations for earning ‘em is until GLoGtober ‘22 drops, so don’t feel like the 31st is your last chance to hop on the bandwagon.

    The E stands for Exemplar; when you go above and beyond, you can put the adjective “Exemplary” in front of your badge to show people just how cool and special you are. For example, if I made seven GLoGtober posts (which I plan to), I’d be an Exemplary Toe-Dipper. If there’s parenthesis next to the E, it’s an alternate badge name upon reaching Exemplar status.

• Toe-Dipper: Make a GLoGtober 2021 post. E: Make seven.

• Calendar Fiend: Create one post for every day. E (Numerical Fiend): Do the same number for each day/Do all the numbers for a single day.

• Starving Artist: Accompany one post with an illustration of your own design. Quality irrelevant. E: Accompany half your posts (rounded up) with such art.

• Mechanical Mad Scientist: Try a piece of design you’ve never tried before, like flip templates, delta templates, or monster AI. E (FrankenGretch): Create a novel mechanic or work of design and make 2+ works with it.

• RNGesus: Roll randomly for your set of prompts and stick with it. E: Roll a d8 and complete the relevant badge, discluding this entry and Toe-Dipper.

• Phase Spider: Comment on or reach out to somebody about one of the GLoGtober posts you've really enjoyed and want to know more about. E (Arachnid Scrapper): Use that content in a game, perhaps expanding it in a blog post of your own.

• Contrarian: Start some other community project or bandwagon. E: Have people actually participate in it and make it successful.

• Master of Ceremonies: Run a game using GLoGtober/community sourced content. E: Run someone else’s game.

• Gretchling Artificer: Create a complete new GLoGhack. E: The GLoGhack includes art, an equipment/loot table, a bestiary, a GM section, and an adventure.

• Zine Fiend: Release a zine or some similar self-contained, polished product. E: Make a publicly-available print run of one of your works.

• Completionist Nerd: Write a good, solid post for every prompt for every day. E (Showoff): Earn every badge (if you earn all the rest you get this one too, no paradox here).

Count the number of badges you have. If you are an Exemplar in a given badge, it counts as 2. Use the total to find your title below:

1-3: Snivelling Neophyte Looking to the Stars

4-7: They-Who-Sleep-Among-The-Maggots

8-11: Otyugh Dentist

12-15: Wizened Wizard off their Rocker

16+: GrEtChLiNg gRaNdMaStEr

Yet to come, as I’m still editing the lot of ‘em, but there will be little badge pngs available here soon. They should be ready by GLoGtober proper!

Can’t wait to see what this year’s GLoGtober bounty will be! Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.