Pb: Three Truths and Five Principalities

House cleaning on the new and improved Pb, coming sometime early next year. If you've been keeping up with the setting, not much here is a revelation. But I do have a map now, which is more than I could say at any other point in this setting's development. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

THE FIRST TRUTH. The landscape is no unbroken mass of endless earth. Rather, it is composed of floating motes of land held in place by titanic chains plunging down into the luminescent, eldritch Æther below. The largest cohesive land mass, the AGGREGATE, was a work of deliberate artifice from the earliest civilizations, the product of lashing countless motes into a patchwork. No sun nor moon hangs in the star-spackled sky.

THE SECOND TRUTH. The AGGREGATE is ruled with an iron-gauntleted fist by the EMPIRE and its right hand the CHURCH (or perhaps it is the other way around). The CHURCH teaches the doctrine of the Warrior-Poet, who compiled the stories of the Saints, mythopoeic personifications of the chemical elements, into the Codex Periodicum. Whispering adherents venerate, for example, Saint Gold the Witchfinder General or Saint Iodine the Mysteriarch.

THE THIRD TRUTH. The OLD WORLD was the age of the Saints, when human civilization was still in its infancy. When the first great human congregation, known to historians as the CONQUEST, crafted the AGGREGATE, it ushered in the NEW AGE, marking the decline of the Saints and the beginning of an age of stability and growth only interrupted by the insurgency of the Warrior-Poet’s successors. As order waxes, magic wanes. The UNDREAMT WILD surrounding the AGGREGATE is still in a tumultuous, hypermagical state of nature, making the AGGREGATE a fragile bastion in a sea of undifferentiated OLD WORLD.

To allow for ease of administration and to alleviate ethnic tensions, the EMPIRE is divided into 5 major principalities, the domains and influences of which are broadly safe from politic’s fickle maneuverings.

IODINIA. The heartland is littered with the EMPIRE’S most bountiful jewels. Raz Haruungar, the greatest city of this or any age and the capital of the EMPIRE, lies beyond the ensnaring hyphae of the Mycelion, a colossal fungal forest-organism. Iodinians have fair or lightly browned skin and eyes in any number of unnatural prismatics, a holdover from the physiognomic tinkering of the CONQUEST.

SACCHARINIA. The closest thing this imploding dynastic power has to a holy book is Machiavelli’s The Prince. Massive spires of sugar-crystal grow out of the sweetened soil of the Sugarspire Flats, into which the Saccharinians carve palaces and dance halls silly with decadent splendor. Saccharinians are known for exaggerated bod-mod, from bleaching their whole body in vibrant pastels to piercing anything that isn’t bone to elaborate full-body works of tattoo artistry.

BURSINGR. The cold here is so bitter it will cut the skin right off your back if you’ll let it. In the shadow of Zenith Mons, king of the motescape’s mountains, glacial fjords thich with piracy cut through the gelid landscape. Bursingi are built thickly and pale, bristling with red hair and marked with spiraling tattoos, breathing tapestries of genealogy and reputation.

GOLGOTH. This is where the old faiths still live, and they don’t mind the heat. It is named for the Golgothan Edifice, the cliff face upon which the first painting of the human form was painted. Golothans are barely unified by their bark-brown skin, hair, and eyes; each clan has developed its own conventions and aesthetics over the centuries.

CHURLIA. Here, the EMPIRE is ripping the riches from the earth’s singing hands. Churlia is dominated by swathes of rolling grasses, in which are littered the rusted ruins of OLD WORLD wars, and its native tribespeople find themselves in the crosshairs of the EMPIRE’s expansionism. Leather-browned and olive Churlians integrate beadwork into their oil-stained overalls, sewing their aviator hats out of Yeabu pelt and woven grass.

The COMPLICATION table, or, reactive random encounters

    After some playtesting, I find myself wanting to make some tightening revisions to NEW AGE. One of the revelations I had recently is that the primary reason I wasn’t utilizing random encounters is because of the extra cognitive load of tracking dungeon-time, which was necessary to ensure that there would be regularity to when I checked for an encounter. That, plus the possibility that a random encounter would possibly coincide with and as such interfere with a planned encounter, made them a tool I didn’t often use- except, that is, to check what happened when the players tried to take a rest in dungeon-time.

That made me realize that what I needed was a reactive system of random encounter checks, not a proactive one. Me rolling for a random encounter wouldn’t be at my will, but in response to the players wanting to take a rest or undergo something with a high time cost. This concept of reactive random encounter checks, my want for tools that I could use for multiple purposes, and my love for the d12 led to the below rules, which I’ll bring to the table with NEW AGE 2e or whatever. This is the absolute first draft, so phraseology and language are subject to change, particularly in the realm of getting closer to succinct, natural language, but I think the concepts have legs.

BREATHERS AND RESTS. If you take an uninterrupted hourish to nurse your wounds and eat a snack, you regain [WEIRD]* SOMA. This is called a BREATHER. If you spend a peaceful night in a warm bed with a full belly, you regain all your SOMA. This is called a REST.

*I’m calling [MAGIC] [WEIRD] in the new version for the same reason I call HP SOMA.

COMPLICATIONS. If you undertake an action that lasts more than a half hour in a dangerous place, like a BREATHER or an excavation, the DM can at their discretion check for a COMPLICATION, which might be mitigated by precautions you take before your undertaking, like barricading.

The Great Generic COMPLICATION table:

1 ENVIRONMENTAL INTERRUPTION. This should be a light annoyance, but enough to interrupt any action requiring the duration to check for COMPLICATIONS.

2 WEAK HOSTILE FORCE. This is a creature that is by default violent, but doesn’t pose a threat to the party, serving mainly to interrupt them and marginally drain their resources or strain their creativity to come up with an alternate solution.

3 FRIENDLY FORCE. This is a force that is actually helpful for the players, be it an environmental effect and a creature.

4 NEUTRAL FORCE. This is a creature whose motivations are such that their interaction with the players could go either way. If it turns to hostility, this creature usually poses a fairly serious threat/resource drain to the party.

5 HOSTILE FORCE. This is a creature that is by default hostile and is a fairly large threat/drain.

6 OVERWHELMING THREAT. This is something with the potential to wipe the floor with the players, environmental or animate. The challenge then becomes circumventing it safely, not necessarily encountering it head-on.

7-12. Nothing happens; the action goes through. [The first 6 entries can also be used as a d6 table for whatever nefarious purposes a wily DM may devise.]

COMPLICATIONS for a volcano dungeon or some shit it’s late:

1 GEOTHERMAL GASSES. Hot sulfur pours up from subterranean chambers. Roll TNCT or go blind for d6 hours, sweating like a pig and being incapable of resting on a success. [Cracks in the ground spewing yellow smoke.]

2 DRIP. Lava drips on a character, causing d10 damage and destroying a random piece of equipment. [A fresh crack in the ceiling starts to glow.]

3 HARDEVOIR. A dwarvish architect doing research on the natural design of the caverns. He knows a good chunk of the place by the back of his hand. [The tapping of his cane against the volcanic stone.]

4 TARRANAX. A red wyrm navigating the caverns in search of the Blueflame Blade, once a part of its hoard. Will do or say anything to retrieve the blade, then attacks as soon as it’s back in its scaly clutches, or if its ego is not sufficiently stroked. [An illusion of trumpet fanfare Tarranax projects before it enters any room populated by smelly apes.]

5 OBSALAMANDER SWARM. Living within the igneous rock, these elemental carnivores manipulate the cavern walls, floor, and ceiling to pin victims in place and drain their blood, even flowing into metal implements when struck. [Swimming patterns in stone, like ripples in water.]

6 PYROCLASTIC FLOW. Lava floods the room over the course of ten minutes, destroying anything short of fireproof therein. [A sudden increase in the room’s temperature, plus the glow of flowing lava if applicable.]

Three things to notice: one, the 7-12 is implied; I just write it as a d6 table so a cunning DM’s instinct becomes to repurpose it in a pinch. Two, I’ve also included a way to foreshadow each COMPLICATION, so that the players have a moment to react to whatever’s being telegraphed, which is just good practice. Three, I've built the generic table so that a DM in a pinch or converting on the fly or improvising could use the generic table on its own to inspire an extemporaneous encounter or in conjunction with another random encounter table that isn't structured as the COMPLICATION table is.

Alright, time to get back to the rest of the NEW AGE overhaul. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

More Cheap Tricks

 

• Sprinkle 8-12 landmarks, microdungeons, or other oddities on your overland map. When you need to quickly generate an adventure, roll a dWhatever to determine where the macguffin or villain is.

• For an extra twist that significantly extends the adventure’s duration, roll again for where the macguffin or villain is rumored to be.

• Even for the most amoral murderhobos, it’s hard to say no to a child, and by extension a missing child.

• Going around the table board-game style, even in moments of roleplay and exploration, is a great way of reminding yourself to keep the spotlight moving, and encouraging players who fall into the backseat into making decisions that propel the game in interesting new directions.

• Handing the players a map that you slowly fill in with more details is a lot of fun for both you and them.

• This map can be made all the more fun with the addition of flaws, discrepancies, and falsehoods, especially when they communicate more information about the world. Why is the Barony of Fenderburg so much smaller on this map from the Agrappen Dynasty? Why did Fordsbridge collapse? Who the fuck thought there was a town in the middle of the forest here?

• Mobility aids can be a great way to not only provide in-world representation, but also make your world all the more fantastical. Dwarvish tank-wheelchair? Using a cloth-wrapped spire of quartz as a crutch?

• This is an old and oft-told trick, but it bears repeating. Whenever you can, describe monsters without using their names, then pick up on whatever the players are calling it and call them that yourself. It heightens the mystery of the fantasy and shows that you’re invested in their perceptions and experiences.

• When your campaign is feeling sluggish or listless, ask yourself what goal your players are pursuing. If the answer is nebulous or unclear, do some work to fix that. A goal is not the enemy of agency; in fact, it is its friend.

• Contrast is heightened by familiarity. If you want to deliver a big emotional impact, get players used to the equilibrium before changing it. An encounter in which a festival breaks into a bloody melee feels more poignant if the festival has been proceeding peacefully and enjoyably for hours of table time.

• This advice exists in many forms, but this is my mantra: anxiety may be born from what is known, but deeper horror comes from what isn’t.

• When building religious traditions, create stories, not characters.

• Idioms encode a lot of world information in very little space, and add to players’ immersion if they’re inclined to use them.

• Multiple possible truths, always. Rumors, lies, apocrypha, academic discrepancy…

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.

Chat chat chat, rah rah rah, buzz buzz buzz, blah blah blah, rhubarb rhubarb (GLoGtober 1)

More idioms from the world of Pb.

BIRD AND RING: Left and right, respectively. See “birdwards” and “ringwards”.
BIRD AND SEASON [ARGUMENT]: Chicken-and-egg argument. Do the birds follow the pattern of the seasons, or do the seasons follow the pattern of the birds? See “birdwards”.
BIRDWARD: Clockwise. “Birdwards” because it is the direction the birds migrate over the course of a year. The birds’ arrival marks the coming of warm summer, and their absence marks cold winter. Given the lack of sun and moon (whatever those are, ask the Lunatics), the bird-patterns are how centennial time is kept.
CHAINKISSER: Lesser-than, pauper, of a lower class. When you’re on the chains, the only way to go is up.
DRAGGING A CATHEDRAL: To be carrying a burden or performing labor unnecessarily. An allusion to Saint Zinc’s trial of strength, in which he dragged a cathedral to the other side of a mote, and in so doing burst the first spider egg, to make sure his mortal son would be sheltered from rain.
[TO HAVE] CHLORINE’S LOVE: To repeatedly return to a toxic relationship. A reference to Saint Chlorine, whose embrace is so tight as to inevitably smother its recipient. Only the tempestuous misanthropy of her twin, Saint Sodium, can assuage her stifling affections.
[TO HAVE] LOVE LIKE WATER: To love deeply and richly. An allusion to the Courting of the Stars, and the eventual wedding of Saints Hydrogen and Oxygen. To have a love as steadfast and generous as theirs is a high compliment indeed.
[TO] HAVE THUNDER [IN ONESELF]: To never be able to stop working on something.
[TO HAVE] NEON’S NOSE: To be unnaturally perceptive. An allusion to Saint Neon the Great Hound, the only non-human Saint, known for his unerring olfaction.
[TO BE] ON THE CHAINS: At rock bottom.
[TO BE] ON THE ROCK: So old its origins aren’t popularly known. “The rock”, in this case, refers to the Golgothan Edifice, upon which is painted the first image.
[TO BE] PLAYING THE PITS: Gauche, out of style. A reference to a practice from the Saccharinian Conquest in which operas and plays that ceased to be in vogue with the cognoscenti and popular audience were performed in pantomime for prisoners in oubliettes, as a sort of salve to ease popular cognitive dissonance about the use of oubliettes.
POP: Magic user, occultist, thaumaturge. So called because they’re known for going “pop”; it’s a dangerous profession, you know.
RINGWARD: Counterclockwise. “Ringwards” because it is the direction of the Ringfire Rail’s circuit. The Ringfire Rail is the current hubris-fuelled magnum opus of the ever-ambitious Iodine Empire, upon which screams and soars the Lightning Rail.
ROCKHOPPER: Vagabond, mendicant. Hops from rock to rock. What do you want from me?

Delicacies on the Ocean of Oil (GLoGtober 4)

BLUEGRUBS. Those aren’t twinkling stars, but little blue larvae, letting off light as they pupate into stirges. If you harvest them, you get a little bit of salty, but not repulsive protein. The question is how to safely get up to the ceilings of the towering caverns they’re attached to without waking the broodmother stirges…

HAIRCAPS. The Ocean’s response to spaghetti. Anemone-like fungi that grow out of demon shit whose “hairs” are removed from the stalk and served with odiferous eel-sauce. The process of extracting the phosphorescent poison from its strands is one that demands intense culinary skill, meaning an innocent bowl of street noodles could be an unstable, even lethal, mutagen.

CRANIAL MUSH. Crack the skull of one of them Crik-Criks or Moodles or whatever’s handy and stir around the pinky-grey stuff in there. Toss in a couple of mushrooms, their eyeball/s, and their left big toenail, if you want that particular blue cheese flavor. Let sit over a campfire to warm and enjoy when lightly bubbling. Survival of the fittest, baby.

DIPSIES. Normally the Granny’s Lips, an oozing fungus reeking of sulfur and unearned sweat, induces the gag reflex in anything capable of it, but when dipped in oil, they become palatable enough to be safely eaten. “Dipsies” is also the name of a popular contest of fortitude: how many can you stomach before the oil can’t counteract the Lips’s natural stench?

TACKSLATE. Calcified minerals scraped off of the underside of limestone that’s been shit on by bats for many years. Often with a pinch of salt. It’s as utterly unappealing and liable to cause dental damage as eating a rock sounds, though post-scavenging societies often manufacture a stockpile in case of emergency or long journeys. Shut up ‘n eat yer stones.

SHADOW. In the most desperate of desperations, when hunger becomes all you can see and rage becomes all you can taste, you can eat your own shadow, if you can find yourself a scrap of light. It’s a dangerous position to be in, because hunger so ravenous doesn’t beget restraint, but those who grow fat on their own shadows inevitably succumb to become the pallid and cannibalistic Id, boogeyman figures in the Ocean’s mythopoetry.

GLOWSHOTS. A mix of haircap poison, oil, and moonshine, mixed into a dubiously luminescent shot. How people ingest this and still survive is a matter for theologians, not physicists, but it’s said that no one has ever drank more than 5 doses in their life and survived to tell the tale.

DREDGELETS. Information on a Dredglet nest’s location is valuable, but not as valuable as the skill required to spear and prepare them without being unceremoniously devoured. If you manage to catch one of these buggers swimming just below the rainbow-ripple surface, if you manage to drive the spear down at just the precise angle, if you manage to strip it of its spines and rip out its teeth and cut through the chitin to the stringy meat in the core, you can get the closest thing to a tasty, square meal the Ocean has to offer. But, and this is very important, you must be absolutely careful not to wake their mother in the process of fishing.

What's the buzz, tell me what's a-happenin'!

Idioms from the motescape, because I couldn’t be bothered to write up Potassium’s Pilgrimage, the Courting of the Stars, or the Craftsman Wars in full.

[TO BE] ANKHED: Converted, usually unwillingly. Though the imagery is that of the Church, it is colloquially used even in non-religious senses, though the ankh-shaped scarring burned into the backs of ex-heretics hint that there yet lurks truth in the old saying.

[TO BE] AIRSICK: Synonym for lovesick. See “Airy Eyes” for explanation.

[TO HAVE] AIRY EYES: To be ignorant of something, usually willfully. An allusion to St. Oxygen’s obliviousness to St. Hydrogen’s advances.

[TO HAVE] ANTIMONY’S EYES: To have bags under one’s eyes from sleepless nights of work. An allusion to St. Antimony’s commitment to craft.

BORON’S HAMMER: An all-purpose interjection of dismay. Melted down after the Craftsman Wars as a display of goodwill.

CYANIDE’S BOX: A distraction or diversion. An allusion to St. Carbon’s contest post-Craftsman Wars; St. Cyanide, throughout the Wars, was safeguarding their submission, a chest-sized box carved of ivory. When St. Carbon finally opened it to judge St. Cyanide’s artifice, she found that it was empty, as the time it took to appraise the box gave St. Cyanide time to steal her Death Mask.

[THE] DOWNS: Covert name for the Undermarket. “Wherever there is a city with doors that can be closed, there follows the shop that cannot sleep.”

GALLIE: Animal lover, often derogatory. Originating from St. Gallium, the very first to bond with a Naursic, Hamble (now the traditional name for all bonded Naursics). Naursics are indigeouus to the windward-side shadow of the Golgothan edifice, resembling crosses between news, elephants, and shaggy-haired deer.

[TO BE] HERCULEAN: To do something difficult but worthwhile or good. An allusion to Hercules, the only sinless Dwarf ever built by St. Boron.

[TO RECEIVE] THE KISS: To die. An allusion to St. Carbon’s Death Mask, as stolen by St. Cyanide following the Craftsman Wars (see “Cyanide’s Box”).

IODINE KNOWS: Nobody has a single fucking clue.

LUNATIC: Someone utterly insane. Originally, someone who believed in “the moon”, whatever that is.

[TO] LISTEN TO THE WHISPERS: To do something utterly unexpected, most often a betrayal. A reference to St. Potassium’s pilgrimage; while in the White Lands, his disciple St. Magnesium attempted to kill him after hearing something in the wind howling through the broken pillars and arches.

THE MOUNTAIN: A metaphor for enlightenment, or, more broadly, one’s goals. An allusion to the destination of St. Potassium’s pilgrimage, though some take umbrage with the idiom’s usage, claiming the Mountain is a literal place somewhere in the motescape.

[TO GET THE] NICKELJITTERS: The stage between the euphoria of learning something new and the confidence of mastery. An allusion to St. Nickel and his eternal apprenticeship under St. Antimony post-Craftsman Wars.

[TO] PASS THE SNIFF TEST: Given the pungency of magic and how many people have learned to smell Old World, passing the sniff test means being proved or suspected an arcane oddity. Frequently shortened; something simply “sniffs”.

[ONE’S] SOULMATE [IS] IN AN (ANIMAL): In reference to someone failing to find or seek romantic success. Since pure souls are redistributed upon death (or so it is believed), the common explanation for such failure is that one’s beloved is in a beast’s form. The more ludicrous the animal, the better.

[TO BE] READING POETRY: Proselytizing unwantedly or in poor faith. Like “Ankhed”, used broadly, despite clerical origins.

SCROLLSNIFFER: Out-of-touch intellectual. In a rather patronizing display, Mordent University’s front gates still retain this graffitied word from the Paint Riots.

[TO HAVE] WINGS ON [ONE’S] BOOTS: A straight person with a strained relationship to queer people, anywhere from fetishistic to homophobic. Derived from the winged boots of St. Mercury, the messenger who was corrupting St. Oxygen’s messages to try and get St. Hydrogen to fall for him instead.

Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

Pb: New Age (Rules)

 AND THE STARS KEEP CHURNING...

IF YOU DRIVE US OUT, SEND US INTO THE HERD OF PIGS (Demon Binding)

"And he said unto them GO and when they were come out, they went into the herd of pigs: and, behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a cliffside into the sea, and perished in the inky abyss."

 

Here is my entry for the eternally-waylaid Char2terie zine, may it rest in peace. Big thank you to FilthPig and Epistellar for their contributions. If you all like what you see, I have an idea for a post about designing effective Demons, so leave a comment if that tickles your fancy.

Speaking of contributions, my art and cartography are slated to be a part of a couple of Kickstarters that I'd love to shill to you humble readers! If you're interested in getting to play as the fodder monsters who serve as loyal MINIONs of the BBEG, you can check out this Kickstarter, which wraps up 6 days from this post's publication. If you want a a streamlined take on a character-as-inventory system and a madcap funhouse dungeon about exploring a wizard's defunct home linked with the LIGAMENTS of a cute-weird fantasy world, check out this Kickstarter, which wraps up 16 days post-publication.

Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.

GRASS WILTS, THE BIRDS CRY, THE SUN SCREAMS, AND BROTHER, WE HURT PEOPLE

 Every night, for the past five days, your dream has been the same.

Rivulets of blood cascade through fields of writhing digits and plow-lines of hair and glass. The air is wet and sour with rot, carrying the russet whisperings of bitches separated from litters and chiclets screaming for water. Hanging in the pregnant claret sky is an unblinking eye, fat with spiders. And it ends when the great teeth split the world and eat you like a rotten pill and your feet give way and your breath catches and all is darkness and silence and fire and rot and sanguine red sleep.

Every night, for the past five days, Anna has been missing from the streets of lakeside Creaksport, where the wind carries the smell of mouldering lakewater and getting out of bed to face the day is as miserable a heave-ho as ripping the serpents from the sea. Grubby hands count silver, a king’s ransom from pauper’s pocket.

This is a tragedy.

BACKGROUND

The Red Maw, the earth below, transcending as it does winter’s marrow-chill and summer’s swelter, had no such mithridatism for greed. Blood ran black to red, and from the firmament came the Celestial Harmony to assuage the Red Maw’s apocalyptic fever dream.

Anna is missing.

LOCATIONS (Check to see where Anna is and where they think Anna is. Asterisk indicates a clear road from Creaksport.)

1 Blood Rock.* 20 minutes by skiffer, an hour by rowboat. Waves beat senselessly against the long-fallen walls of an Old World temple. At its epicenter, a crater bears a bloated husk of skin that illuminates the night. This is where the Celestial Harmony fell to earth. THE AGGREGATE. A tangle of dead lobsters and eels, crawled undying out of corrupted water into a golemic hulk. It’s hungry and melancholic; no more, no less.

2 The Crumbling Lighthouse.* Juts from the earth like an accusing finger, ringed in paint and spit. Rubberly crimson biomass overgrows long-crumbled stairs. The lantern gallery harbors a knotted heart weeping caustic crimson oil, shattered windows framing Blood Rock and the Umbral Conch. LILIES OF THE ARTERY. Polyp-blooms bind long enough for the capillary-vines to attach their probusci.

3 The Abandoned Farm.* Unmoving drill rigs sag under years of rust. The maintenance shed is in gory disarray. One horse head covers a festering wound, a portal into the earth. Cold, dead stone becomes a red and wet throat a mile down, ripped, oil-slick skin hanging from above. OLD WOMAN. Limbs long and wrong and bent, tongue black and eyes blind. Bears a cudgel made of mortared teeth and a super fucked-up SPELL.

4 The Red Cave. A long-burned campfire and rune-scored human bones betray just how old the Old World is. The walls are smeared claret, with murals of half-bull monstrosities devouring prostrating masses. THE COLD. You see snowfall outside. Your torches grow dim. Your friends are whispering behind your back. You can hear them- they want to turn on you, slaughter you like a sick cow and rob you to flesh and bone…

5 The Umbral Conch. The first time you see it, it looks like a bristling mountain of tentacles and eyes. Then you blink, and it’s a foreboding iron shell tangled in ragged kelp. THE NODE. Like a snail in a shell, like a spinal cord thrust into the dark soil, like a great stinging jellyfish. The Celestial Harmony’s link to the stars.

6 Below the Rusty Goat. Above, fishers and tanners buy swill and gruel for whalebone pennies. Below is a sacrifice-soaked altar, adorned by deer horns and goat gall. SHAMBLER. Should the altar be defiled or the ritual interrupted, the hornéd fiend will rise, its scream perilous and paralyzing. It can only be sated by holly and oak.

RANDOM ENCOUNTERS (Check once per journey: 5-in-6, 3-in-6 on a road)

1 d3 Once-Bears, enraged by corruption

2 2d6 bloodlusting hares with sealed eyes

3 A rusting drum bloated with curdling oil

4 A dying bandit, chest torn asunder

5 A pilgrim in the robes of a distant land staring silently out to sea

6 A salt-smooth obelisk of inscrutable iron ice

7 2d6 tentacles tumbling out from a wound in the earth

8 d3 Conductors, executing anesthetization

ONCE-BEAR. Towers of sinew and claw, weeping in memory of a life unblemished by agony. Swallows all that lives to sate a hunger undying. Its butcher is cursed to be Once-Themself three days hence.

CONDUCTOR. Two maws, five legs, ocular clusters and flesh of bluefire. Their minds whisper interstellar secrets in madenning choruses. Uses tentacles to freeze prey in agony. Upon death, SAVE versus infection from Celestial Harmony meld spores.

CAST OF CHARACTERS. (Roll a die to divine what causes their madness. Red Maw on evens, for the Celestial Harmony is always odd.)

1 ANNA. A scared little girl with a birthmark like wine-colored fingers clawing at her face. Currently in mortal danger. Bed-wetter.

2 AGATHA HOLMSBY. As mayor, someone has to keep things running straight-laced and orderly-like around here, though no one remembers electing her. Picks her nails as a nervous habit. Old World heretic.

3 ICHABOD VIACHOLO. Every boat, every crate, every drill rig, every damn piss-pot is emblazoned with that Viacholo Incorporated logo. The richest and most powerful man in town for decades, before the oil dried and the slump came. Incarcerated for dementia; claims to hear a choir of angels sing inconceivable truths to him.

4 JEBEDIAH SUITT. A fire-and-brimstone preacher who wonders why the end times are coming so soon. His sister is one of the townspeople who for the past five days have done nothing but stare at the sea and smile. Always carries stale bread.

5 BILGE. Itinerant fisher and owner of the Lady Mary, who won the big race a couple years back. Always masticating a cigar and itching for a nap. Cannibal. 

6 XANTH. A wet, bedraggled corpse dredged from the lake and given life anew as a high priest. Touch from its left hand bears the sensation of drowning. Lisps softly. Collects spoons.

Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.