Dominant Clans of the Golgothan Principalities (GLoGtober 3)

 For use with Pb: New Age. This is a view into my creative process: it begins with the art, which tells me so much about the dominant aesthetic influences on a given subject, which in turn informs much about the rest of its nature. This is coupled with as little and as memorable of text as possible, so that it may live organically in my half-memory, and so its re-discovery may bring me almost as much joy as its genesis. My general principle is that if I don’t remember it with a hint of prompting, it wasn’t worth remembering- I like things to be sticky. Hopefully this is of some utility to you.

THE LEAK. Mud reeks and vermin breed, teeming in the burning sun. The Empire ends here, whether it wants to or not.

KANGO. “There is no god as strong as steel, there is no hell as wine-dark as the blood of your spouses and children, there is no heaven as exalting as courage flowing gold-pure in your veins.”

ZADMOR. “Ask a hundred men in a hundred lands, and none of them will ever claim that their chosen bible’s sin is in its verbosity. Why are so few of us starlight made flesh, with souls that live in awe of water and earth?”

THE GREENLEAGUES. Dense forests and foetid jungles cloak life older than thought in the sweltering embrace of a tempestuous tango.

DJUK-DJUK. “Epiphany is the Edifice’s greatest gift, no simpler and no greater. Enter the Waking with me, child.”

OCUL. “The clay of our body is whetted with the Edifice’s spit. Isn’t that the most profound tragedy of them all?”

THE HEARTLANDS. The foothills of the God in Stone. Peace is whispered and sinew-strong.

ASSADEM. “Three, five, seven, nine, thirteen, one-hundred. Patterns within patterns, worlds within worlds. These are the whispers of the Edifice, if we listen hard enough.”

IBYSSARI. “What? Absolutely not. They are cheap imitations of us. We used the scepter and the globus cruciger well before they ever could work the requisite metal.”

THE FINGERS OF GOD. Mesas stretching for a star-laden sky they will never grasp. Red sediment crumbling to ash under calloused hand.

OZATA. “And in due time, the Great Calendar will turn again, yes, and the Turning will make the Edifice’s prophecy come to pass. This is the Age of the Lion, and when Serpent's bite and Hawk’s hunt and Rot’s great settling has come to pass, we will see the age of the Great Man.”

THE DUNE WASTES. The old cliche says that every shattered statue and fallen palace wall is reduced to cinders and floats on birdswind here, to the graveyard of civilization.

FLAGELLATI. “We are born thinking ourselves as gods. We teach ourselves to make order out of chaos. This is our highest heresy, and we must pay for it with a pound of flesh.”

YBIN. “Where do we see the Edifice’s touch? In tea that warms our bellies and bones from the inside out, in the pipe-smoke that laces our tongues with laughter, in the drawings we trace for our children between the stars above. We strain and break and bend so that we may be once again be made whole.”

Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

GLoGTOBER 2: Honestly Don't Even Read This One

Dance with me, baby.

SAMPLE CLASS IDEAS, EACH WITH AN ALTERNATIVE MODE OF COMBAT AND NAMES FOR EXTRA ABILITIES OR SOMETHING:

Aristocrat. Pay 50g or something ridiculous per point of damage automatically dealt; attack rolls are for poor people. Passive income, inheritances, “crypto”.

Antimage. You are anti-magic, in the sense that when you touch magic, most specifically magic items, you annihilate it, causing a momentary burning and flash that could scald or blind those in the immediate vicinity. How this anti-magic effect came to be is a highly intriguing mystery to the world’s leading minds. Smell the occult, phantasmism, spit anti-particle.

Improvisatori. A variation on my flyting system, as found in WWTD and Pb. Offer a CALL and time the DM for a response. The amount of time your DM gets to craft a RESPONSE is proportional to your Level. If the DM cannot, the target takes damage as proportional to your Level. Hearth-shadows, castigate, charge with myth.

Cartomancer. Play War with your DM. Winner deals damage to loser proportional to the magnitude of the victory; your loss is mitigated by a factor determined by your Level. Ace up your sleeve, up the ante, sweeten the pot, insert any number of limp-dick puns here.

Variant Cartomancer. Find a really fast strategy card game, a la Pokemon or Magic. (Extra points for making such a game yourself. I might do that, actually.) On your turn, you and the DM both play a round. When you win the game, your chosen target dies. If you lose, you immediately go unconscious in the most unstable way your game permits.

Sympath. You get extra hit points per Level. Take voluntary damage; a target you say automatically takes the same damage from that same source (so if you burned yourself with a hot poker, a fire elemental wouldn’t be affected, but an ice golem would). Take the pain, chakra-sight, messiah.

Light-Eater. You can consume torches and oil to breathe out fire. You can consume rations to belch out toxic gas. You can eat hireling’s brains to reanimate them as skeletons. Waste not, want not, but at what cost to your party, and your humanity? Bones to steel, red harvest, lights out.