Have at. They're better here than in my notes app. Some of these almost certainly stolen from other people's blogs, too far back for me to remember which from where.
Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.
Thursday, September 12, 2024
Gestures at a cosmos
Towards “Sundering” Planescape. The project no longer grabs me, but I’ve been sitting on this draft too long, and put too much work into making it half-decent, so it’s time to give it its quiet, gentle release into its next stage of life.
Here are the principles behind my design.
- Each plane can be practically mapped and crossed.
- Each plane corresponds to a deadly sin.
- Each plane is some sick fuck’s perfect world.
REVEL (Lust)
Above a jungle teeming with an overlife that cavorts with its teeth in its own flank, brilliant treetop palaces host parties that never end, the floor getting stickier and stickier and the tropic air getting so thick with smoke and sweat it fills your lungs with a single breath.
SIX PARTIES YOU DON’T WANT TO BE AT
1 The party is a front for a skinjacking hive mind that calls itself Best Friend.
2 There’s spiked punch going around that makes you dangerously thirsty for human blood.
3 d6 people at the party want to kill another attendant, and will try and rope you into their plans.
4 The party takes place in a collective dream; time passes faster in the dream, so an evening is enough to dehydrate.
5 Everyone here is dead, and all this new loud breathing is making them ornery.
6 Every 10 minutes, a gong rings and the partygoers all vote to throw one person out into the jungle.
REVELER CUNNING
1 You’re an expert poisoncrafter.
2 You have intense sex appeal.
3 Your feet are just as deft as your hands.
4 You can kiss anyone and they won’t get upset about it.
5 You’re immune to harmful drugs, poisons, and their ilk.
6 You breathe out campfire smoke.
REVELER FOIBLES
1 You won’t break eye contact.
3 You don’t have impulse control.
3 You can never tell how people feel about you.
4 You have a hyper-addictive personality.
5 You have intense narcolepsy.
6 You’re immune to drugs, even medical ones.
MOIL (Greed)
A bruise-red storm whirls in the sky, casting lightning down upon a sea of molten fool’s gold. Suspended in the sea are massive fatbergs of unhewn metals and gems, too much to ever be mined, too much to ever be refined, too much to ever be valuable again.
SIX ISLANDS AMIDST THE PYRITE
1 A hermit with a chisel carving a cathedral out of raw ruby.
2 Dozens of nervous systems swimming in synaptic fluid below a foot-thick diamond shell.
3 Six monks, surrounded by carefully-set bells, sit in silent meditation so they may hold open a portal to Earth.
4 A sapphire honeycombed with cave networks given ravenous sentience by a lightning strike.
5 A religious commune trying to use the quartz spires to build a ladder into the thunderheads above.
6 A silver-wrought coliseum whose occupants turned on each other when they ran out of gladiators to watch.
MOILISH CUNNING
1 You’re a masterful metalworker.
2 You can appraise to the dollar by taste.
3 You can speak Gemstone.
4 You swim as well as you walk.
5 Your fists work like a pickaxe.
6 You bleed oil.
MOILISH FOIBLES
1 You can’t swim.
2 You get unnerved living any worse than lavishly.
3 You get unnerved living any better than in squalor.
4 You can’t count above 5.
5 You don’t have any sense of value.
6 You eat gemstones and coins.
CAIN (Envy)
A hiemal world within a great sphere filled with tumbling snow and bitter cold. When you cast your gaze above you, you can see the burning sparks of a thousand fires you can’t light, and hear the laughter of people in warmth and safety you can scarcely imagine anymore.
SIX ABANDONED FIRES
1 A dwindling pile of ashes, surrounded by the frozen corpses of those it didn’t warm.
2 A raging bonfire, which attracted the other long-slumbering denizens of the cave.
3 A smoky blaze from a smoldering wagonful of pelts; if I can’t have it, no one will.
4 A small, oily thing, extinguished by reaver-spilled blood.
5 A burned-out torch clutched in skeletal grip, the remains of darkness with teeth.
6 A long-burning hearth that served its sentence and kept a pilgrimage mercifully safe and warm.
CANIAN CUNNING
1 You can use stone and sticks as workman’s tools.
2 You can smell blood in the vein from a mile away.
3 Your breath can indefinitely sustain fire.
4 Your vision can’t be impeded by weather.
5 You’re impervious to the cold.
6 Your touch is freezing.
CANIAN FOIBLES
1 You must sleep unobserved.
2 You won’t willingly turn your back to anyone.
3 You can’t express emotion.
4 You distrust, and won’t use, metal arms or armor.
5 You’re afraid of water.
6 You go mad if you don’t eat human meat daily.
THE SINEWS (Gluttony)
You’re in the belly of the beast now. Slick red, pulsing organelles, coursing veins, cathedrals carved out of living and forever-screaming bones. The sickly, stillborn son of God.
SIX ORGANELLES
1 defibrilator
2 stalking vacuole
3 imagine a person on all fours, but they’re made of hands, and the hands are actually saw blades, and the saw blades are made of bone, and the bone is porous and leaks highly acidic digestive fluid (not much like a person at all, actually)
4 wandering synapse
5 enameleur
6 phlegmonaut
SINEWY CUNNING
1 You can safely eat spoiled or poisoned food.
2 You can bend any joint both ways.
3 You can climb unimpeded by moisture.
4 You can harvest workman’s tools from a corpse.
5 You can pull your eyes out.
6 You can speak Skeleton.
SINEWY FOIBLES
1 You can’t keep your balance.
2 You eat everything you can.
3 You treat everything as if it were livestock.
4 You are faceblind.
5 You spit on people in greeting.
6 You’re scared of open spaces.
GALLOWMERE (Wrath)
Cracks in the parched earth spit brimstone into the starless, blood-red sky. Blood waters every plant and soothes every parched throat, spilt by sword-steel in endless warfare. There are three sides: the saints, who manufacture godsblood-powered war engines, the sinners, who have strength in numbers, and the living, who aren’t fighting to win, but merely to abstain.
SIX ABANDONED ARMAMENTS
1 A rusty knife that is rendered as rubber when stabbing anything other than an eyeball.
2 A sheet of unrippable paper, whose rust-red edges show its history as a torture device.
3 The corpse of a dog, with a chunk of rock sewn into the cranial cavity to make it into a makeshift flail.
4 THE EARTH MAKES US ALL EQUAL AGAIN, a chainsaw that runs on pinkies.
5 A half-drunk bottle of a “tooth elongating serum” that smells of cotton candy dissolved in vinegar.
6 A grenade with its pin pulled, currently about halfway through a 250-year timer.
GALLOWMERE CUNNING
1 You’re a masterful tactician.
2 You’re immune to heat.
3 Your fists function as hammers.
4 You can smell fear.
5 You can use any weapon as workman’s tools.
6 You always have a dagger tucked away.
GALLOWMERE FOIBLES
1 You wound people in greeting.
2 You won’t fight anyone shorter than you.
3 You can’t feel pain.
4 Your hands tremor incessantly.
5 You don’t believe the law applies to you.
6 You would rather die than lose.
SHAHKAT (Pride)
Tunnels carved in glass, miles thick. Suspended in the glass are prisoners from across the cosmos, permanently frozen. Wandering the tunnels are rune-scored wheels of eyes and tongues and electrum referred to by apostates as wardens, and by believers as avenging angels.
SIX PRISONERS IN THE GLASS
1 A crab-legged version of Popeye the sailor man ripped from a child’s nightmare.
2 Ezekiel Midas, the cursed robber baron; everything he touches turns to oil!
3 Bub-Siir, the Atlantean warlock that first summoned the Shoggoths.
4 Seraphim, the pre-Godfall chancellor of the Thirteen-Fold Host.
5 Zzkzzts, the lightning elemental that once powered the Pancosmic Goliath.
6 Markov Rasputin, the innocent twin of Grigori Rasputin II, Butcher of Czarsway.
SHAHKATER CUNNING
1 You can worm your way out of any bindings within ten minutes.
2 Your teeth can cut metal.
3 You can see as if through the back of your head.
4 You can see auras.
5 You can grapple with one hand.
6 Your touch turns metal to glass.
SHAKHATER FOIBLES
1 You move at half speed, carefully weaving around cracks and pockmarks.
2 You panic if you can’t see out of the room you’re in.
3 You can’t knowingly break the law.
4 You can’t open or close doors.
5 You get lost when you can see the sky.
6 You can’t “read” people.
ELYSIUM (Sloth)
A mountain sits at the edge of the horizon, no matter how far you trek, and you know the view from the top will take your breath away. A tree from your childhood calls out to you to waste an hour, a day, a week under its branches, chasing a joy you barely remember and miss with your whole heart. You’re thirsty- so thirsty- when you notice an utterly still pond of what can’t possibly be pure spring water in the corner of your eye, its bed rich with bones.
SIX SIGNS TO STAY
1 A grasshopper that hums a song so heartbreaking anyone who listens to it weeps piteously until they’re dry.
2 A ferret that uncoils like a slinky to wrap around its prey.
3 A tree whose ever-ripe fruit is covered in acidic mucus.
4 A lake of aged sap pooling around a colossal dying tree, at the edge of which is a mountain made of sand when ascended and glass when descended.
5 A venus flytrap shaped like a pair of boots whose soles are rooted into the ground.
6 A wandering alchemist specializing in sleep draughts who appears as any given beholder’s favorite parent.
ELYSIAN CUNNING
1 You can’t be perceived by animals.
2 You’re a masterful herbalist.
3 Running water loves you.
4 You can talk to plants.
5 You can hold still as death.
6 Your touch turns metal to wood.
ELYSIAN FOIBLES
1 You’re deaf to the human voice.
2 You can’t stand being any colder than sweating.
3 You can’t turn around in place.
4 You don’t believe in lies.
5 You view animals as you do humans; leather horrifies you.
6 You can’t go faster than speedwalking.
—
Foibles and cunnings inspired by Phlox’s Barbarian class.