Chasing the Dragon: Play Report/Setting/Rules/Reflection Post

Over the last ten or so months now I've been playing in Chasing the Dragon, a play-by-post duet game DMed by friend of the blog deus ex parabola, and specifically in his setting of Yland. This game, being an experiment on several levels, is by all accounts a successful one, and I think it would be fun to talk about it for a little while. 

No better place to start then at the beginning, naked on an operating table in a dark and empty room, with no memory of any prior life. Racing through lightless corridors to find the resurrection-men who made their choice of tomb based on mistranslation; slitting one's throat in their sleep to repay the insult and steal their clothes, killing the other without thinking once they awoke from their sleep trembling with rage. It's all been downhill from there. Exploring the tombs and the town nearby (a glorified war-camp) over days and weeks began to give some context as to who I was, where I was, and most importantly, what position I was in. 

[Aside: since deus gave no prior context as to what the game would be, I started playing under the assumption that it was set in his Unfinished World setting, which it is not. In a bit of mild metagaming early on I went to peek outside to see if the sun was stationary in the north to find no, and that also it burned my eyes and skin like fire. Luckily this issue, the result of a curse laid on me during sleep, was rectified.] 

Who I am: Doll Eyes (aka, Doros, Toyer, Latro, Death Fear, the Disturber...), a [godlich|jealously guarded] of Har Magdala, the great Mountain, fortress and tower and gateway to the underworld. An ancient hero with inhuman ability, whose body has been specially prepared such that the soul can be returned to it to resurrect, again and again. 

Art by Nothic's Eye

Doll Eyes is an assassin, a sneak, a scout and a skirmisher. She's as quick as greased lightning, has senses of an acuity humans can only dream of, is as silent as she wants to be and is an expert duelist. [Aside: another earlier assumption when I started play was that she was closer to the barbarian type; some relics of this are her impractical rounded sword tip and her tendency to sometimes howl, sob and scream during battle as a sort of warp-spasm intimidation display.] Her huge black eyes and slight frame mark her as a harpisch or harpy-child; a troubled half-demon child, conceived by rape and murder and abandoned in the wilderness, an unquiet spirit, fearsome and fearful. A kind born under a bad star if there ever was one. Her appearance is forever frozen as a young teen, though her eyes have seen the passage of centuries if not longer. Who she was before, and why she was made an immortal elect as a child, she does not know and does not approve of. She is not eager to contemplate it and even if she was doesn't have the time.

Doll Eyes is arrogant, contemptuous, bitter, hateful, raging, pessimistic, confused, wild-eyed and despairing.  All this is barely contained in an iron shell of self-control. She's a very strong personality who's fun to play, and a change of pace since I don't usually play such nasty characters. It also ties into the first big experiment factor of the game, which is the unreliable narration. Playing Doll Eyes feels like playing a Disco Elysium type, or a well thought-out Malkavian or so on. Deus' descriptions of things are highly, unapologeically biased. This effect really works well in a duet game like this, where the DM only has one PoV to have to worry about. It's not just that I know Doll Eyes as a character is bad with people and sees the worst with everyone, but all the descriptions bear that out; everyone is ugly or stupid or cowardly. It took a good seven months of play before I realized that people responded to Doll Eyes' presence not with rage like herself towards them, but with terror; in retrospect I could've found that out when the child I brought as hostage to my tomb was described as shaking with anger.

 

This allows for a lot of introspection and interior brooding and, frankly, angsting. Since she is an amnesiac, with a mind like a maze full of locked rooms, introspection and ruminating can genuinely help with acquiring information that she knew long in the past. On the other hand it means that she suffers from flashbacks and periods of lost time, which can get in the way depending on what she's trying to achieve. Retrospecting on it now it gives a fairly trad (eugh) slant to the game, though that's not meant to cast aspersions at all; I enjoy it a lot.

 Another experiment is the rules. While we started with a G24 statline, we very quickly switched to a FKR-ish (also eugh) dicepool system where 1-3s are failures and 4-6s are successes, and combat is determined by rolloffs and fictional positioning. Doll Eyes has Dexterity 2, Fortitude 1, Prudence 3, Celerity 4, Audacity 2. I'll post deus' own words to explain what those mean:

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The swordsman's skill is DEXTERITY, which is the highest virtue. DEXTERITY in turn is made up of four lesser virtues. Each of these virtues may be assigned a value, which is how many dice you roll when asked to check that virtue. I will not explain how a dicepool works.

FORTITUDE

I am the elephant and a castle is my cargo, and I do not kneel nor lose my way. 
FO is the strength of your body and the care in your footwork. A normal person is killed when they receive one fatal blow; your FO is how many fatal blows it takes to kill you. Check FO to lift gates, bend bars, force doors, or stay unmoved.

PRUDENCE

No other creature is able to see so clearly as I the lynx, and I bring proper order and full measure. 
PA is the keenness of your mind and acuity of your eye. A normal person has merely human senses; a PA higher than 1 represents more-than-human senses. Check PA to seek out or identify the enemy, to find them in darkness, or to predict their next move.

CELERITY

I am the tiger, so quick to run and turn that the arrow of heaven can't overtake me. 
CS is the speed and precision of your movements, and your ability to do several things at once. In situations where a normal person would have just a split-second to react to danger, a swordsman has CS split-seconds. Check CS to flee or pursue your enemies, to dodge rocks and serpents, to throw darts and knives, or to stalk in silence.

AUDACITY

No one has a bolder heart than I, the lion, and so I invite everyone to fight. 
AA is the gravel in your guts and the redness clouding your vision. A normal person looks like a match for one person; a swordsman can probably scare off AA people with a menacing glare. Check AA to close with an enemy and kill them.
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This... isn't my first time using a dice pool system, but Mage the Ascension generally sucks dick (derogatory). This is my first time using a dice pool system that's so airy and freeform, and I gotta say it's really opened my eyes to how easy and fun it is to play like this. While I probably won't stray too far from standard GLOG rules for procedural dungeon- and hexcrawls, for stuff outside of that I'm definitely using this basic system with bespoke stats for the game. It really doesn't seem to me like you need much besides this and whatever bespoke bolt-on MOSAIC strict (also also eugh) systems you want to apply. 

I will say, one thing that didn't work for me was playing with the rules as a black box. Learning my capabilities as a character is a very important part of the loop, and knowledge acquisition is highly important; but not even knowing what my dice results meant or why I was rolling what I was felt like a step too far, and hindered me from getting into the game until I learned a little more about the basics.  

 Back to setting. The Jealously Guarded sort themselves according to their highest virtues. Those of Fortitude are Strugglers, of Prudence Counselors, of Celerity Dancers, and of Audacity Destroyers. In happier days Doll Eyes was one amongst many brothers and sisters who worked to serve Har Magdala's will together. Some of the notables which she remembers more are:

Candle Friend, a struggler. The opposite of Doll Eyes in every way: strong, clumsy, a kind and optimistic gentle giant. His corpse is the one I have access to, and one of the major arcs of play is finding a means to have him risen.
Far Light, a counselor. His tomb is blocked by rubble. Once he wielded a pair of hooked swords, his WAIST HEIGHT FLOWERS. 
Heir Light, a destroyer. His sword, Icheteremos, is fashioned after the style of those in the Holy Islands. He jested to a giant that it could be taken from dead hands; the giant did, because they are creatures without hearts and do not jest or love or regret.
Cloud Watcher, a struggler. Is a Nimbad, a ripped dude with a crocodile head.

Others are even vaguer names: Fame Light, Far Goal, Vase Breaker, Scatter Bones, Turn Tail, Sunder Born.

 Two stand above all others. One is Fickle Heart, the archwizard. At his command Doll Eyes was set aside from the other to sleep dead, await as contingency to waken when the worst has come to pass. The other, whose tomb he sealed, above even him, is Orphan Eyes. Orphan Eyes is the oldest and greatest of all heroes, the lord of the mountain and father to all the Jealously Guarded, the plucker of heroic souls who feast and fight and serve him. Har Magdala is his great citadel on the west end of the world besides the seas of grass where the sun sinks each night.

 His foe is the Red Titan, the king of demons and lord of evil. His chief lieutenant in the area around the mountain is Aster, a wind-demon served by red-robed wizard priests in their towers, by harpies, and by demon knights, who ride winged serpents or maybe pterodactyls or maybe just the winds themselves. He is the Enemy, and Doll Eyes' purpose is to oppose the Enemy and kill its servants.

The Red Titan has won. The Twilight Kingdom, which Har Magdala sits at the end of, is the weakest and most irrelevant of all the kingdoms under his command; and Saborda, the major city closest to Har Magdala, the weakest and most irrelevant of all its cities. Its king is weak and accompanied at all times by a horrible demon-advisor named Maserit. His sons plot against him and each other and a war is inevitable, and his one true friend, his general, lies slowly dying from a wound. Candle Friend and all the soldiers under him were slaughtered in a desperate last stand two or three centuries ago now. The situation is beyond dire; it is irreparable and has been for generations. It is Doll Eyes' great task to begin to reverse it.  

Art by JFoliveras

 What of things so far? She went to the glorified encampment of Warguard, and met there a foreign shapshifting warrior-princess named Shor (the ugly gluttonous werehorse, Doll Eyes thinks of her); and Wolf, the young precocious son of the town priest. She brought the latter back to her tomb as hostage, and the former followed. Some demon-knights attacked, and she slew them; Warguard was being razed, and she saw the fires from afar. She went to investigate and to try to recover the corpse of Candle Friend. She slew a wizard, several demon-knights, and many mortal servants of the enemy before a knight cut off her arm. She wandered off in a daze clutching it and her sword, burrowed into the snow, and died.

[Aside: while I'm taking a light, skimming touch with this recap, I do want to note that Doll Eyes' death here was by far the saddest a game has ever made me. It was very effectively and affectively played out. Compliments to the DM.] 

Then, an intermission. I played for a while as Wolf, the bookish and newly-orphaned child who Doll Eyes had inadvertently saved from being put to the sword. He wandered through the halls of the mountain with a sort of cheer, trying desperately not to think about his father. His sensitive mind half-possessed by both Fickle Heart and Doll Eyes, he gained access to the great library, read about Sadan Sade from cross the sea who saved the town of Belmarie, and assembled and used the means to resurrect Doll Eyes once more. For his troubles her curse was transfered onto him, and now he lies insensate and withered like an old man.

 Back to Doll Eyes. She found that the few survivors of Warguard had brought Candle Friend's corpse to the edge of the mountain. She ran to Saborda and reestablished contact with an ancient thieves guild which she must've founded, seeing as how they all throw knives and wear masks of harpy-feather, but has no memory of. She received a fortunetelling from a witch and a weapon commission from a friendly smith. She wanted to do more to plan a diversionary dawn raid on one of Aster's temple-towers, to let Shor bring the corpse over to the city, but the servants of Maserit cracked down. Human guards above and demon-panthers below. As of posting this, she stands armorless, with a useless exsanguinated arm and a wizard's fugue-curse on her brain, scrambling for time and a chance to lick her wounds and worrying that the stupid mortals underneath her will get themselves killed while she's gone. Throughout the whole game, one thing remains consistent: poor, miserable Doll Eyes can never, ever, ever catch a break.

 There's not much more to say than that, I think. It's a fun game. 

Mask Relay 39: Mask of Venus' Smile

Previous Post: Sundered
Next Post: Prime

A once-delicately scrimshawed bit of ivory dented with tooth marks. A bar affixed to the front attaches it to a plate of stiffened leather covered in turn by a stretched length of fuligin cloth, completely flat and featureless except for a pair of eyeholes. On the inside of the mask in the forehead region of a Venus or nymph with a heart impaled on a spear. On the back of the pasted Venus is a delicate sigil of golden ink; tucked into a hollow in the bit is a rolled-up slip of paper with a second. The two sigils bind a grue to the mask.   

You hold the mask in your teeth; you can't speak while wearing it, of course. While the mask is worn, the fuligin cloth turns into a vast, echoing hole in your face. Punches and daggers pass right throw, bullets from head on whiz harmlessly into the void. You can reach into the void yourself to pass things inside or take them out; you can hide up to three slots of items in there at a time, held by clammy hands of darkness.

You can bite down on the bit and crack open a tooth, slurped out of your mouth into the darkness, to Charm a person you've made eye contact with for so long as and whenever you wear the mask. Even though you cannot speak, they'll hang onto your every subtle movement and gesture. If you get a private moment with them, the thing inside the mask will reach out to pull them inside. It'll take their eyes and their stature and let you assume both as you please. Be mindful of where you do this; it'll leave spiraling tooth marks gouged all around you. You can do this as many times as you have teeth.

If the sigil on the Venus is damaged, next time you don the mask the eyes seal over with fuligin, and delicate threads creep in and around your ocular nerves to hold them hostage. The void in the mask becomes annihilating. If the sigil in the bit is somehow damage, the threads will fill your nose and mouth and hijack your airways, the wardings on the cloth become reflective, an obsidian mirror that charms all it sees whether you'd like or not. If both the sigils are damaged and you don it, you become a grue.

GOODRINKER ETYMOLOGY CALLOUT POST

While the phrase "drink the goo" was first used by an embryonic baddoctor all the way back in November 2019, the term and image of the goodrinker was properly coined in Phlox's Ten Blade Demigod game, December 2021; lichsgetstiches' character drank radiation goo in a poison swamp and it melted his throat (luckily, since it was also a ghost swamp, he just turned into a ghost before dying later for unrelated reasons). The precise term "goodrinker" was coined by locheil specifically before breaching the OSR server in January 2022.

Following the exodus of much of the then-active members of the OSR to the GLOG server later in 2022, the term left the server with those for a period of two years, as a GLOG ingroup term; the phrase goodrinker was first used as a combined term by deaddelver in the GLOG server in February 2023, and the goodrinker emoji was first made by firstgokun in March 2023 in the Ashes to Ashes game server. The term was finally reintroduced to the OSR server in July 2024 by weirdwriter and vodka gobalsky.

That is all.

 

An Incomplete Dream Cartography

A supplemental post for Louis' lovely Dreamlands; some offhand mentions, such as entering a nightmare or crossing a threshold, refer back to rules originally referenced in there.

Ever since I was a child I've been blessed with very vivid dreams. Not lucid, exactly, but very clear and elaborate, and (at least for a while, back when I more regularly recorded them in one place and before I chose the vice of dream-suppressing THC) very rarely fearful. I've hunted through the many places I've typed them up (and a few that I haven't, but simply remember) and collected them all in one place, here, to use as various transitional places while travelling through the Dreamlands.

A couple notes: this project is definitionally incomplete, and spans a range of time from dreams I've had as a child to ones I've had only a couple days ago as of writing. Outside of the aformentioned occasional insertion of mechanical referentia, I've tried to stick faithfully to the original contents of the dreams, presented with little embellishment. Unfortunately this means that many of my earlier dream journal entries are too sparsely detailed to now used for this, but such is the nature of this kind of project. I'll probably intermittently update this as I gain more materials for it, but to start I present you with a nice round 50. 

Diane Arbus

1. The halls of a school, walls painted blue and lined with rusty lockers. Everything is slimy and waterlogged and barnacles grow everywhere. Statues of the Madonna watch serenely from niches in the walls. There is a bright red light at the end of the hall.

2. A highway along the coast at night. Tall dark pines rise up on one side, and a sheer cliff drops down to the ocean on the other. Somewhere along the road is a diner with a huge neon heron sign. Inside the menus are covered with nonsensical dirty jokes.

3. Your bedroom, but something is off; there are a few too many windows, which all look out into darkness, and things aren't where they're supposed to be. You are half-naked, and the threshold is somewhere down the hall beyond where your roommate is walking around; you need to get dressed, and also to avoid looking at their face which is horrible and wrong and which you somehow feel you've seen many times before.

4. Humongous halls upholstered in warm, desaturated reds and purples. Like a movie theater complex for giants. Balconies and arcades look out into wide empty chambers. People in cartoonish technicolor armor bluster around. You could spend years here, although the feeling is comfortable and slow.

5. A swan-shaped house. The halls form a loop, and everything is cramped and angular and bangs on your head and elbows and shins - protruding cabinets, narrow door jambs.

6. A covered alley late at night. Your head swims, you are very tired and very intoxicated. What isn't in shadow is linoleum tile and lit by harsh fluorescent light. People are sitting here and talking quietly, stealing looks at you. Some of them have their heads and hands cast in oversized replicas made of dribbling wax or clay. If you linger it will become a nightmare.

7. A deep dark forest, tall trunks and a canopy blocking out sunlight. The forest floor is covered in a tangle of roots and stones. People and wolves hunt each other during the gloom. The boundaries between gender are slippery here.

8. Rolling fields and trees, bright blue sky, and a huge pit in the earth. Bridges crisscross within the pit. If you decide to descend down the pit, on one of the bridges, you see something small and fleshy shuffling. It has no distinct body, it's covered with cords of tissues and struggles to breathe. You are in a nightmare.

9. A bare concrete house with uncomfortable furniture. Someone in a cheap scary clown costume tries to jump out around from corners to startle you, but the effect is more unwelcome and obnoxious than frightening.

10. A small dining room with a table covered in disorganized papers. Sitting in the other chair is a corpse which whimpers and chokes. It grows louder and louder. If you do not silence it somehow, enter a nightmare.

11. A dim, low hallway which feels as if it's underwater. The walls are painted with luminous blue handprints, and strung up with lights of the same color. The air is filled with lovely, ethereal music.

12. A lush forest filled with low-hanging trees with green and red leaves. The path is made of tiered steps of polished green agate, gradually leading downhill. The margins are cluttered with kitschy marble statues.

13. You are in a nightmare. Your limbs are heavy, and there is something pale with a drawn face and long claws in the darkness below your floor and behind your wall. Pray.

14. A path upwards through the forest. The trees thin and break onto a field of dry, swaying grass. 

15. An office building if it had the proportions of a cave; narrow squeezes, tight crawls and tall shafts. Plain ecru walls are painted with cave art. Windows and skylights look out onto an endless coniferous forest. Things like bright red gelatin dogs with spiny heads hunt intruders here.

16. Many people on one side of a door with you, and crying coming from the other side. You are now in a nightmare. There is crying coming from the other side of the door but you know you absolutely should not open it. Outside, through the windows you can see disembodied heads on the ground laughing, singing and jeering. 

17. A shopping mall with nondescript storefronts ringing huge cylindrical shafts, in turn interlinked by various paths, catwalks, and bridges. There are no windows or indications of an exit anywhere.

18. Suddenly falling, falling, falling. Below are bright yellow autumn leaves, above a soothing purple sky. You reach the threshold when you hit the ground.

19.  An endless grid of narrow, perfectly straight concrete corridors. A zoo, somehow. People and animals cross perpendicular to you in the distance. The occasional door opens up onto bare, empty concrete rooms with the floors covered in straw.

20. Dunes of smouldering grey ash, a dense cover of bleak black clouds above. Across a body of water a city skyline burns. Jets roar through the sky and do battle with a colossal beast among the wastes.

21.  A flat, gently-curving concrete path with a steep, scrubby cliffside to the left and a railway to the right. Whitewashed, new and well-maintained. Beyond the rail and far below, a city stretches out and rolls to the bay. Blighting the otherwise pictureesque cityscape is a monumental, impossible huge bridge and tower of twisted black metal, construction still long unfinished.

22. A mazelike manor, hot and humid, with most of the walls constructed of semi-opaque glass. Potted plants sit on the floor, on tables, hang from the ceiling, and spill out everywhere. Dwelling among them are dozens of huge but perfectly docile snakes and lizards.

23. A large, sumptuously furnished room with red wallpapers and red hangings, and large framed paintings of greyscale biomechanical-psychosexual scenes. A party is going on here, or at least a salon. Figures all in black sip cocktails and look for muted, enriching conversation.

24. Narrow cobbled streets winding between tall and tightly-packed buildings, storefront-galleries with no signage save for the windows displaying their art and goods.

25. A long wooden house on a grassy knoll by the sea. Mist blows in and blankets everything. Before a copse of trees nearby, a depression in the ground ringed by graves. The graves are all for a moppet; dig them up and you'll find them none the worse for wear for their premature burial. 

26. A desert split into strips by long parallel walls housing bars and factories for herky-jerky plastic automata. Every so often a meteor crashes down into the dunes and births nonsense chimera which the automata hunt.

27. A stone maze, walls slick and veined with glowing blue-green slime. Huge spiders with mammalian mouths and coated in said slime hunt wanderers within.

28. You are in a room. In another room there is a dog. The dog is able to perfectly perceive all your thoughts and influence them. The dog wants you to strip naked and run out dead dissociated into the night, because the dog wants you to be very very badly hurt.

29. A wide concrete plain shrouded in a fog so thick you can only see a couple feet in front of you. Somehow this is all inside an immense building. Wrought-iron lampposts with elaborate gothic motifs sprout up and cut through the gloom. Interspersed throughout the plain are some or another cooking stations; figures rush to and fro, delivering ingredients and food, always knowing exactly where to go next.

30. A filthy, miserable village square. The sky is slate grey, the ground is churned mud, the sagging houses are filled with black mold and heaps of rotting waterlogged wood.

31. A nondescript factory space rapidly filling with sand falling from the ceiling. Human-sized pillbugs hollow like jumpsuits run round and pursue intruders in the chaos.

32. Dreary rainy city streets. In the middle of the road is a massive skull wrapped in yellow silk; let it look at you, and lesions and sores begin to break out on your arms.

33. Heaps of gothic buildings caked in a thick layer of dust; at the apex of the pile sitting on a throne is an androgyne thickly swathed in red and silver cloth, who wishes now to leave dreaming but has no body to return to.

34. Concentric bands of lightly-forested grasslands and coastline, rising up in all directions towards the sky. Dilapidated farmlands still inhabited by cows and chickens, but no longer by people. The sky rumbles with the engines of bombers. Underground, in cellars and bunkers, furtive dwarves that creep out to steal words from your head.

35. A dome of concrete in a wasteland blasted by dust storms. Inside, a clown hangs a demon by its feet from the ceiling; she carves off long strips of its flesh with a knife to hang besides it and cure.

36. A large, well-appointed bathroom with walls made of clear glass. The floor below consists of parallel cloth strips with a vertiginous fall below.

37. A cave, but proportioned such that one can stand and walk comfortably within it. An ascending ramp that switches back on itself over and over. The lair of a child-thieving trogloraptor.

38. Huge factory on a dreary beachfront. Conveyor belts transport and process absurd amounts of used needles; other rooms hold rows of inorganic rods from which human organs grow like fruit. It's possible to catch a disease in here, even in dreams, one which is incapable of killing but instead leaves the sufferer catatonic.

39. An art noveau skyscraper, plant life spilling out of the walls, cats everywhere. In the middle of the lobby a huge spiny torus hovers; nearing it causes regression back down the evolutionary corridors of life.

40. A vast cistern-grid of white stone streaked and stained green by algae, dizzyingly vertical. The exits at the structure's various borders are large water intake pipes, sealed by metal grates.

41. A wedding and a funeral, held at once in a rolling grassy field. There's a ceiling but no walls, painted to look like the sky; light streams down through trellises of white roses. Music soars, everything is bright and strange and beautiful. If you're in a nightmare, it ends.

42. Twisted forest grove where nuns and monks tend to beehives and wailing agglomerations of nude flesh with baby bird heads larger than themselves. In the center, a hellmouth; ultradense minerals is degraded by the heat and pressure, turns soft and fluffy, and unleashes screaming poison fire.

43. Bunker built into a mountain's summit, rooms with one-way mirrors designed to observe isolated subjects. Notes dispassionately discuss biological experimentation on parents and children. Abandoned, dilapidated; none of the original subjects or experimenters are here anymore, just a giant dog with blue fur peacefully sleeping in a pool of milk.

44. Small square room, most of it taken up by a pool of deep, cold water with a ledge ringing it. The walls are painted with murals of whales swimming in arctic seas. Dive underwater, and stay there until your lungs are almost bursting, and one can almost imagine that they hear the voices of the dead conversing with them.

45. An empty, endless black void with a chrome obelisk floating within, a blinking red light at its center. It can speak, and try to coerce you by bringing up all your traumas and worst memories, but cannot do anything else besides. Cross the threshold when you turn from the obelisk and leave it to the darkness.

46. Carnival haunted house ride shoddily constructed of grey dryrotted wood. Men in wasp masks with finely-made pistols dart behind wooden boards daubed with faded paint and take potshots at intruders.

47. A bouncy castle the size of an actual castle, a grand and harmless gauntlet with giant nubbed rollers and other such playful obstacles.

48. Concert hall, the lower lever flooded knee-deep with water. Chains affixed to the wall from which the stage rises up slither underneath, trying to coil around legs and drag down people to drown, possessed by pained and vengeful ghosts.

49. A mall filled with dense fog. No ceiling, just endless grey mist above. Plague doctors with actuated metal legs and crossbows spring about, and giant centipedes made of ground meat crawl. A strange herald of nightmare; this place doesn't count as one, but the next area you enter becomes one unless it specifically counters nightmare.

50. You have to go to Phlox's house even though you don't want to. Enter a nightmare. 

 

BONUS: Various misc dream entities slushpile:

Woman with kind face, multiple wings, lower body of a feathered serpent, white as snow and aglow with soft light. Appear when the sun is rising and setting at once

Sexy vampires with razor sharp tongues and katanas

"creature with wide triangular shoulders, long arms and a lower body that both taper into thin points. Eyeless, elongated face/head with a huge toothy mouth, a bit like the giant worm from beatlejuice. Swims around from behind mirrors. Takes things like laundry and big wads of wet toilet paper and throws them at peoples' heads to harrass them. Ultimately wants to trap more people inside mirrors like itself. Human intelligence, smug, resentful, and petty personality."

A timeman - with blue skin, representative of one of the 20 hours of night. He has two names; the blue one you can't say without reprisal, but the white one you can

"horrible blubbery white creature with red throatsac" 

Death's Cousin (A Dungeon for GLAUGUST)

Surprise, I'm writing stuff for Glorantha now. Bitch. However, this dungeon should be easy enough to adapt for any setting which might have your earth mother goddess types. This is for Glaugust, specifically Prime's prompt for a deicide dungeon.

Typhon, Tarquinia Tombs

This nameless vault was built early in the First Age to safeguard a rare and terrible killing tool of the powers of Earth. Over the long deluge of centuries, the temple above crumbled, the priestesses left, and the sacred grounds were forgotten. This dungeon can be put anywhere Ernalda is or once was worshipped, which is to say a significant chunk of central Genertela where everything of relevance is happening anyways. Likewise, the reasons you might come here are varied. Perhaps you've been hired by the Lunar Empire to capture a prized Orlanthi barbarian artifact, and use it against them before they can use it against you. Perhaps a minor Esrolian noblewoman has learned of it in dusty archives, and wants it for herself without going through the wealthy, power-hungry ruling Grandmothers. Perhaps you just have a treasure map and few scruples. It should be made known that this dungeon is a death trap; it should also be made known that it is not a negadungeon, and the prize within is genuine and true. [future purplecthulhu note: as I write this out it's obvious to me that you should probably run this as some kind of funnel].

Map by the exemplary Paratime

 

General Dungeon Info: squares are 5ft. The whole dungeon is suffused with the pungent, sulfurous smell of the gas from 2. Doors are heavy stone and unlocked, except for the double doors to 29, 30, and 31, which are fragrant wood covered in sheets of hammered copper. The rows of dots represent barred copper gates. Secret doors are opened with cleverly-hidden buttons placed near the floor or ceiling. Stairs always descend deeper.

Areas 6-24 demarcate the maze, walls covered with frescos of deep wilderness, wild animals, and reveling dancers and corpses. Random encounters are only checked for while inside the maze. All random encounters are hostile to anyone who's not either an Earth priestess of some stripe or directly escorted by one.

Random encounters (not including stats because I'm lazy, square up)

1. 1d2 painted saber-toothed tigers, leaping out of the walls [painted enemies circumvent the cramped space by becoming 2D at will, and traveling through the art. They are immune to mundane harms while like this, but must emerge from the walls partially or fully in order to attack] 
2. 1d6+1 painted venomous snakes, leaping out of the walls
3. 2d6! painted maenads, leaping out of the walls
4. The statue (only encountered once someone either sees or passes the statue at 9. More information there).

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1. The entrance, a spiral staircase that bores 500ft down into the earth. Above, on the surface, the stair and temple ruins are now secluded in an elf grove. Watched vigilantly by 10 elven warriors camouflaged up in the trees, armed with bows and spears. They have little love for the fleshly human goddesses but are bound by ancient pacts and debts to guard this place. If defilers prove a tough fight, they'll beat a false retreat and then return to hunt the humans in the maze below. They are immune to the gas spewing from 2, and ignored by the painted guardians and statue, but do not know where traps are located. They refuse to pass 25a lest the holy place turn against them too.

2. Torches and lanterns flare bright in here. Sulfurous volcanic gas spews out from a copper grate in the center of the floor and causes hallucinations in any who breathe it in and fail a save. Those affected perceive the statues and frescos within as vivid, fearsome, and alive. If for whatever reason the grate is pulled out of the floor, the flow of gas increases and the atmosphere becomes unbreathable and explosive.

3. Three statues. From left to right: Maran Gor, the Strength of the Earth (armored, holding an axe and a maul); Esrola, the Bounty of the Earth (naked, pregnant, holding a cornucopia and a sheaf of grain); Ernalda, the Wisdom of the Earth (robed, crowned, holding a serpent and a spindle). Each has a skull in place of their face.

4.  Plain stone room with wooden benches and empty footlockers pushed against the walls.

5. Outer purificatory baths. Frescos on the wall of women bathing in rivers. A large, empty pool on the south side of the room 5 feet deep.

6a. 20ft deep spike pit, swinging open in response to at least 25lbs of weight. A hidden mechanism resets the trapdoor after 30 seconds.
b. as 6a.

7. A ginormous crushing block slams down from the ceiling. Save vs death. Cracked flooring and more-than-usual wear on the frescos give the trap away to watchful eyes. A lowered block trap blocks its corridor completely and slowly, agonizingly resets after 10 minutes. There is a slight delay to the trap so that it triggers only after one person has already passed it; if this splits the party, a random painted encounter springs out to savage the smaller group.

8a. as 6a.
b. Statues of Axe Polisher (smiling) and Axe Grinder (frowning), the minor tutelary goddesses of the dungeon. At the end of the hall, hanging on a peg is a large brass key to the gate at 22. If someone not an Earth priestess touches the key, the statues scream and immediately trigger a random encounter roll.

9. A huge statue of Babeester Gor, berserker daughter of Ernalda. Fanged, naked save for a belt of human hands, wielding dual axes. Huge, impassable unless you're foolish enough to try to crawl between her legs. After defilers either first look at her, pass through the detour passage around her, or open the secret door in the northwest, she animates and begins to stalk them. She plays by Weeping Angel rules, at least until she gets close enough to bury one of her axes in your skull.  

10. A steep, greased chute that descends 40ft into a wall of spikes, hidden by a trapdoor that swings open in response to at least 25lbs of weight.

11. as 6a.

12. as 6a, but the trapdoor has jammed open; the blue robes of an ancient skeleton have caught in the gears, and the corpse still hangs suspended. Besides the robes the skeleton also wears 100 lunars worth of jewelry; a sage would recognize the style as God Learner.

13. as 7.

14. as 6a.

15. Behind a locked copper gate, stone flowers grow out of the wall. A thick, dark green liquid slowly oozes out of them and collects in overflowing wood and stone bowls beneath. The liquid is a powerful psychedelic; besides hallucinating, those who drink it also gain a bonus to parlaying with and binding spirits of Earth and Darkness.

16. as 7.

17. as 6a.

18. as 6a.

19. as 15, but the liquid is frothy and reddish-pink. If drank, it's a medicine which guarantees a safe and healthful pregnancy and birth (no effect if the drinker is unable to bear a child).

20. as 7. 

21. Statues to more minor goddesses: Echo-Maker, Beer-Brewer, Copper-Layer

22. A locked copper gate. The key is in 8b.

23. A 10ft length of swirling unnatural darkness. Within it, copper chains hang from the ceiling and attempt to throttle any who pass through who are not an Earth priestess.

24. as 15, but there's no locked gate, and the liquid is oily and greenish-white. If drank, it's a powerful purgative that instantly, violently rids the body of any disease. It's also a deadly poison against creatures of Chaos.

25. Frescos on the wall of a peaceful grove. Sections a and b are divided by a shimmering silver curtain (worth 1000 lunars) held in place by a golden plate with an etching of a loom affixed to the ceiling (worth 200 lunars). Those who try to pass directly through the curtain rather than through 27 are attacked each round by an invisible, dagger-wielding force until they retreat. If the curtain is taken down the effect expands to fill the whole room, and can no longer be mitigated. 

26. A tapestry of a dense forest devoid of animal life. Study reveals it to depict the hidden body of Aldrya, goddess of the forest and mother of elves. This shrine was the gift to the elves in exchange for their protection of the place. Worth 1000 lunars, but a curse is placed on the thief that takes it from the shrine that marks them as a hated enemy of elfkind.

27. Inner purificatory baths. The 5ft deep pool taking up the southern half of the room is filled with hot, steamy water. Near the door to 25b, a chest with 10 folded green linen robes and pairs of wooden sandals, miraculously unaffected by the humidity.

28. Heaps and heaps of fine cloth fill the room, 10,000 lunars worth; a true hoard, although it would be exceedingly heavy and difficult to transport out of here. Working at a loom is the ancient priestess and sage Marane. Not undead, that would be Chaotic, just someone who has forgotten to pass on, deep in the womb of the earth where death is only sleep. She is dreamy, kindly, and very happy to have someone to talk to again. Marane is exceedingly knowledgeable in weaving, medicine, midwifery, the many gods and demons of the deep earth and underworld, and how to properly perform human sacrifice. However, she is also completely ignorant of history, and her long isolation has left her gullible. She knows how one may enter the inner sanctum of 31 without being attacked; why, you just need to perform the heroquest Funeral of Ernalda :). She even has the costumes you would need right in here! She also possesses the keys to 15 and 19 and will happily explain the effects of the various fountains.

If a hair on Marane's head is harmed, the cloth twists and transforms into a gigantic monstrous serpent. The full wrath of the painted guardians is unleashed on the defilers as soon as they step back into the maze; automatic encounters every turn.

29. Frescos of the many, many goddesses and spirits of the Earth, all with skull faces.

30. Two huge, stout lamia statues in this chamber frighten away any bound spirits not aligned with Earth. The doors to the south have a simple etching: a Death rune inside an Earth rune.

31. Unlike the rest of the complex, this room is a natural cave, a hollow of sharp glassy stone. Axe Polisher and Axe Grinder wait inside incarnate, two huge, spindly Earth elementals with long, long bladed flint fingers. They are the last line of defense; anyone who enters the chamber without performing the Funeral of Ernalda beforehand, even an Earth priestess, are immediately rushed by them.

Beyond them, on a plain bloodstained altar, lies a knapped flint knife. This stone was taken from the same cave where the sword known as Death was hidden within and bears a modicum of that blade's terrible power. The knife ignores all warding magic, and kills spirits too. If you take it into a heroquest, it can kill a lot more.

There is a good reason why this knife is so jealously hidden, kept away from all but the most devoted daughters of the power of Earth. It is a tool to be used very delicately. All good Orlanthi know that the misuse of Death was what first let Chaos into the world.   

ON SLAAD (HEXPOST GUESTPOST)

"Before the Gates there sat

On either side a formidable shape;

The one seem'd Woman to the waste, and fair,

But ended foul in many a scaly fould

Voluminous and vast, a Serpent arm'd

With mortal sting: about her middle round

A cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing bark'd

With wide Cerberian mouths full loud, and rung

A hideous Peal: yet, when they list, would creep,

If aught disturb'd thir noyse, into her woomb,

And kennel there, yet there still bark'd and howl'd,

Within unseen.   Farr less abhorrd than these

Vex'd Scylla bathing in the Sea that parts

Calabria from the hoarce Trinacrian shore:

Nor uglier follow the Night-Hag, when call'd

In secret, riding through the Air she comes

Lur'd with the smell of infant blood, to dance

With Lapland Witches, while the labouring Moon

Eclipses at thir charms."

 

A guest post for Josie's Hex setting.

 

A slaad's attempt at human features

 

    The fuming seas of Limbo rest deep below in the atrament, underneath the gelid antisun and the surface of the underside. Among its constantly-shifting peaks and valleys sit the sprawling, warring domains of the slaad, also known as demons or devils. For millennia they've meddled with and terrorized the peoples of the underside, shaping countless bizarre species of animal and humanoid alike. The few times they have breached the Interdark, the World Above has trembled with fear. But now, with the power of rational inquiry and materialist analysis, we have finally become able to accurately report just what these bizarre creatures are like.

 

    Above all else, slaad are master sculptors of the flesh. Biology is their delight and plaything. Though they have the capacity to look like almost anything, they have a strong preference for forms resembling amphibians, proto-reptiles, and bony fish; tetrapodomorpha freshly crawled out of the seas. In their eyes everything else is just experimentation. The sole exception are human features, which are useful tools for delicate manipulation (both hands and faces can be used for delicate manipulation). The degree to which slaad adopt parts of the human varies wildly, but as a general rule they get better at maintaining them in not-too-horribly-uncanny equilibrium with age.

 

A slaad extending its human face for diplomacy :)

 

    Slaad, however, are just as accomplished technicians of the soul as they are artists of the body. While thought, memory, logic, and other aspects of the mind are beyond them (in fact, even the most intelligent of slaad struggles mightily to understand theory of mind), they are experts at adjusting passions, emotions, and perceptions. What happens to the soul after death is still an unknown to the science of the Hex, but the slaad love to boast about claiming them. Any beings who they've meddled with directly, they like to say, are imprinted onto them, and their souls whisked away to be put to all sorts of nebulous use in their fortresses in Limbo. If true, this would be revolutionary for the scientific understanding of the soul, but the slaad guard these secrets jealously, and so far the depths of Limbo remain unplumbed.

 

    Instead of a brain, the slaad's soul inscribes itself directly into its body on a gnarled hunk of cartilaginous tissue called a slaadstone. These range in size from anywhere between a fist to an entire person curled up in a ball. The slaadstone keeps their physical form (relatively) coherent and is the organ from which they project their crown. Their crown is contiguous with the body; if a human can project their crown outside them, then a slaad instead grows to fit it. The shape of the slaadstone, when mapped and converted to a mathematical transformation, is the slaad's true name. Every diabolist is also an expert in topology.  

 

Fire on the Velvet Horizon

    The coloration of a slaadstone determines their maturation and is where color categorization of slaad comes from (although of course their outsides can be any shade they wish). At first, it only corresponds to how they reproduce. Red slaad oviposit eggs into a living victim, which later hatch into baby blue slaad; blue slaad all carry a virulent disease which slowly transforms victims into red slaad. Red and blue slaad are totally random in their behavior, and are where slaad get their reputation for being animalistic and inscrutable.

 

    When a slaad figures out how to consciously expand and shape its crown, the slaadstone grows additional green nodules, and it loses the ability to reproduce. It can take a slaad days or millennia to accomplish this, depending entirely on random chance. Green slaad are beginning to become able to possess longer-term plans and goals, and to communicate clearly to non-slaad. However, they're still strongly carried by whim, and struggle to follow complex chains of cause and effect, especially when it comes to the psychology of non-slaad. 

 

Dark Souls 2

 

    When a green slaad becomes able to retract its crown at will, the entire slaadstone turns grey. Before this stage, if a slaad grew an appendage or organ that later became unwanted it'd have to tear it off of itself. This stage is where you begin to see more advanced interpretations and uses of human parts, as well as ability to stick to a single course of action, working towards goals years or even decades in the making.

 

    After this, the slaadstone no longer changes color, but it continues to slowly grow. What exactly makes a slaad lord a lord rather than just an especially powerful grey slaad is still highly debated, but one of the most commonly accepted definitions is that it's when they become able to metastasize to get around their ability to affect their crown outside their bodies. They can shed clouds of tiny particulate pseudo-slaadstones which they can manipulate as extensions of themselves. One of the rarest and most feared natural disasters on the underside of the Hex is devilfog, where great cloudbanks of the stuff drift up to the earth and expose whole towns and cities to the dangers of demonic possession.

At this point, slaad also develop and cultivate obsessive pseudo-lawful schemas which they follow, and force lesser slaad to conform to. While these do form a method to their madness, it's important to keep in mind that these are adopted entirely because it pleases them. Most slaad lords discard their schemas completely and take on new, wildly different ones every couple centuries during fits of pique. Even more stable ones are prone to frequent overhauls and alterations to their mental models. 

Slaad lord self-descriptions, in their language, contain recurring combinations of tones which describe their current model of desires and states of being. These tones are consistent between slaad lords, and can be simplified into human speech to help create rough categories for their behaviors. These categories include but are certainly not limited to:

    - Jubilexes, which try to rid themselves of (pseudo-)conscious thought and return to a blessed vegetative state
    - Zuggtmoys, who strive to achieve radical mutual empathic understanding with other beings, especially non-slaad
    - Grazzts, explorers of the far reaches of physical pleasure
    - Lolths, who delight in studying the far links and ripples of dependent origination, and who experiment with it via long-reaching manipulation
    - Orcuses, melancholic misanthropes who want everything around them to reflect their own self-percieved suffering
    - Frazurbluus, who are obsessed with simulacra, and nesting, merging, and splitting them
    - Yeenoghus, who are fascinated by how people, things, and systems degrade and fall into ruin, and encouraging said degradation in interesting ways 

Berserk 

 

Finally, to end this seminar, let's discuss slaad-related beings.

First and most obvious, of course, are elves, which possess souls but no minds (as opposed to the modronic-angelic dwarves, which possess minds but no souls). However, elves are too complex of a topic to cover adequately here, and must be discussed at a later date. 

"Chuul" is a blanket term the slaad use for their creations. While by this definition nearly every native living being on the underside is, in some small or large way, chuul, this term is most often used for non-reproducing biologic creatures which serve as tools/thralls of the slaad. Still, it's very vague, and describes everything from sessile organ banks to tremendous warbeasts.

Finally, lemures are slaads which have had their slaadstones removed from them for extended periods of time, and who are no longer able to maintain any physical coherence at all. Lemures are semi-liquid and can melt and pool into each other, sometimes forming whole rivers and lakes of flesh. When a slaadstone is dropped back in, the lemure or lemures quickly reconstitutes back into a proper slaad. Fortunately, the amount of lemure biomass that a slaad can incorporate back into itself is limited by the size of the slaadstone. 

    

Ending this post with a bunch of other relevant images

 

Diplocaulus

Second Apocalypse - I haven't read this series yet don't @ me

Franken-Fran

John Martin

Bruegel the Elder

Postscript: much like the slaad, blogger formatting follows no rhyme or reason and is annoying as fuck

Lapis Tablet (Three Theurgic Bronze Age Wizard Schools)

I, G_d willing, intend to whip my brain back into DMing shape with some very casual, low-stakes dungeoncrawling gaming, with the very very cool Tell Arn. Bronze age, swords and sorcery, the works. I was urged to consider who the gods of the larger setting were by a certain someone, and after a bit of thought and back-and-forth landed on something simple and fun. 

So, here are three wizard schools. I'm not including a full class with it, there's more than enough GLOG wizard templates out there to pull from and adapt. One little idea I am including is a required implement/fetish/material component for each spell, as I think wizards should be encouraged to carry around a lot of random junk. Also, this implies a theurgic wizard-priest model where magic is acquired through devotion to a certain god, rather than wizardry and clericry necessarily being seperate. As a final note, as usual, many of these spells are stolen from friends around the GLOGosphere (mostly loch, let's be real).

Nurgle

1. Bind
Component: a heavy metal shackle clamped around your ankle and wrist

Gesture at [sum] HD of creatures you can see; their limbs are bound together and their backs weighed down with heavy iron chains and manacles.

 

2. Shatter 
Component: a set of iron molars, replacing your own in your mouth
Clack your teeth together, and glare at something inanimate that you want broken. At 1 dice, affected as a weighty hammer blow; at 2 dice, two people with tools; at 3 dice, as six people with levers and pulleys; at 4 dice, a dozen workers with a full day.

 

3. Corpse-Eaters' Call 
Component: a rattle filled with human teeth
Shake the rattle with one hand and make a rude gesture at something or someone with the other, and [sum] HD of animals will swarm from nowhere to harrass and savage it. At 1 dice these are flies and scorpions; at 2 dice bats and rats; at 3 dice crows and jackals; at 4 dice vultures and dogs.

 

4. Agonize 
Component: a poultice made of blood and stinging nettles
Apply the poultice to a hand; it is effective for [dice] uses. Those touched by said hand must save vs. agony, in the Arnoldian sense; if they attempt to take any other action besides shuddering in pain they take 1d4 nonlethal damage. They may repeat this save each minute.

 

5. Cone of Exhaustion 

Component: A rod topped with a piece of polished agate worth at least 75 gp

Project a 90 degree, 30 ft cone of green light from the tip of the rod. All creatures caught within gain [sum] slots of fatigue, save for half. Plants affected by the cone wither, and domestic animals must save vs. death.

 

6. Speak With Dead

Component: a lead box, hinged on one side and with an amplification cone protruding out another

Place a skull or severed head inside the box, compelling the soul of the dead to answer [sum]+[dice] answers to the best of their ability. You may compel them to speak the truth in exchange for -[lowest] to the total of questions asked.  

 

7. Curse

Component: a lead tablet, inscribed with the target's full name and driven through with nails

Place a curse on the named target with up to [dice] negotiated effects, to slowly take effect over the course of [sum]+7 days. This curse may only have potentially (directly) fatal effects if cast with 3 dice or more.

 

8. Heat Metal

Component: a sword sealed in a scabbard filled with blood

With a wave of your hand, [sum] slots of metal become burning hot to the touch for [dice] minutes, dealing 1d6 damage per round of contact. Casting on loadbearing metal objects may cause structural degradation.

 

9. Pyromancy

Component: a fire-blackened human bone

Roll MD and choose one of the following effects: a) cause a fire to grow [dice + 1] times in size, power, and brightness, (b) create a huge amount of smoke from an open flame, that lingers for [sum] minutes, (c) cause a fire you can see to spread even in defiance of logic, (d) ignite something that is meant to be burnt, such as a match, kindling or pipe. If cast with 3 dice or more you may also choose to change the affected flame into hellfire, black flames which can only be extinguished by your command and which produce a horrible keening wail and rotten stench.

 

10. Summon Guardian 
Component: an iron spike driven through a freshly severed human hand

Drive the spike into something and a daemon with [dice]+3 HD will burrow up from the ground to swear fealty to you. It will defend the spike and the area around it to the very best of its abilities, but is unable to stray more than 60 ft away from it. It is a fearsome fighter, but also dull and meanspirited, and if the spike is ever uprooted it is banished.

 

11. Locust Storm 

Component: a dried stomach of a human or cow, converted into a bag

A black swarm of locusts rushes out of the bag, and devours all plant life within [sum]*[dice] acres around you.  

12. Contagion 
Component: a large ceramic jar with one human corpse interred in it per MD spent, buried in filth and allowed to melt into malfeasance.

Shatter the jar and let miasma billow out. Everyone exposed to the gas, which spreads in a 20ft cloud, must save vs infection against a noxious disease of your design. It has [highest]+1 symptoms of your choice, [dice] transmission methods, and is fatal in 20-[sum] days if not properly treated. You yourself are automatically infected but asymptomatic.

 

Dooms
1 - Your skin turns grey, your blood becomes thick and black, and you now weigh twice as much as you did before.

2 -  Your flesh becomes tough hide, giving you a natural AC of 12. Your eyes become solid red orbs, and you now weigh four times as much as you did before. It's difficult to move at any pace faster than walking - you need to succeed at a check in order to break into a jog.

3 - You have been judged worthy. Your skin fully hardens into stone, and you now weigh eight times as much as you did before. The earth swallows you up and you plummet down to the citadel of Nurgle in the underworld. You are condemned to serve as a common soldier for the rest of eternity, ambitions forever stymied.

 

You may escape your doom by destroying an entire city and every man, woman, and child within it, proving yourself of continued use as an active agent to your god.

 

Tzeentch

 1. Unseen Servants 

Component: A clay figurine with lapis eyes worth 10gp, one for each servant summoned

Summon [dice] unseen servants who tend to your fires, cook your meals, and otherwise do all menial labor and chores that you wish done for you. They are invisible, except for the occasional set of footprints wet with freshwater, and silent, except for the odd childish giggle when they think you can't hear. They last until dispelled by you or until their corresponding figurine is destroyed. If you can see invisible things then they appear as humanoids made of starlight, with nonsense mismatched anatomy.

 

2. Counterspell
Component: a set of silver incisors, replacing your own in your mouth 

You may cast this as a reaction to another magician's spell. Snip your teeth together and shear apart another work of magic, subtracting your [sum] and [dice] from the original working.

 

3. Weirdfire
Component: a lantern with special-made colored lenses, costing at least 25gp

Shine the lantern's light on a target, who becomes coated in heatless blue flames. All attacks against them have +[dice] to-hit and they are incapable of hiding or concealing themselves. This lasts for [sum] rounds. 

 

4. Fog of Reverie
Component: a small bellows constructed of serpent's skin and a newborn's caul
Pump the bellows and blow out an opaque cloud of silvery fog, lasting for [sum] minutes in still air or [sum] rounds in wind. Those caught in the fog must save vs hallucinations, which linger for [dice] dungeon turns after the fog dissipates. 

 

5. Consult the Heavens

Component: a set of astrological tools 

Measure and calculate the position of the moon and stars relative to each other. You may ask the heavens [sum] questions; it knows about the events of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the workings of magic, and about anything that can be seen from the open sky.

 

6. Illusion
Component: a set of five different pigments

Dip a different finger into each pigment and trace your hand through the air. Create an illusion [sum]*5 square feet which fools [highest] senses. It can be reshaped at will and lingers for [dice] hours.

 

7. Rarify Mind

Component: a vial of smelling salts

Inhale the salts; for [dice] hours you can understand, read, and write (but not speak) in all languages, and read at a pace of 2,000 words per minute. 

 

8. Lightning Bolt
Component: a wand of fulgurite

Point your wand and fire a blast of terrible silver lightning, 5ft across and 60ft long, dealing [sum]+[dice] damage to all hit, save for half. Those in metal armor cannot save.

 

9. Suspend
Component: a bronze disk with a diamond of at least 100gp at the center 

Brandish the disk at up to [dice] objects or people, who become suspended frozen in time and space for [sum] rounds, unable to be moved or affected in any way. Unwilling creatures may save. 

 

10. Summon Spy
Component: a glass bottle with a human brain kept preserved within
Call an invisible daemon from the top of the firmament down to serve you. If you can see invisible things it appears as a devilfish whose head sprouts many wings and whose tentacles end in many talons. You can see through its eyes; it moves at the speed of the wind and serves loyally for [highest] hours before returning to the sky. At 2 dice you may also hear through it, at 3 dice you may speak through it, and at 4 dice you may cast spells through it.

 

11.  Transmute
Component: a set of weights fashioned out of the seven planetary metals

With a touch, transform one material into another for [dice] days. At 1 dice this can transmute copper, tin, wood, and chalk into one another; at 2 dice bronze, lead, and stone are added to this list; at 3 dice iron and glass are added; at 4 dice, the change becomes permanent and gold, silver, and mercury are added.

 

12. Implant Thought
Component: a silver sheet on which an intricate sigil has been engraved, each corresponding to a single kind of implantation; a sheet can be reused to repeat its effect. Takes 50gp of silver and a day of effort per MD spent

The first person besides you who sees the sigil after the MD have been rolled has a new thought or belief implanted in their head, decided by you. At 1 dice this is a passing, single coherent thought or idea; at 2 dice an implication and complex knowledge; at 3 dice a motivation and will to act on it; at 4 dice, definite knowledge which overwrites any and all contradictory memories and values.

 

Dooms

1 - The skin on your extremities becomes translucent. You become double-jointed, and your blood turns a brilliant golden color.

2 - All the skin on your body becomes translucent and squishy. You can no longer wear any armor, it's simply too painful. Your eyes turn pearlescent and can now see magic and invisible things. 

3 - You have been judged worthy. Your mind spills out of your head as so much vapor as your body collapses into a pile of clear jelly. It rises to the apex of the firmament where the great tower of Tzeentch hangs. You are given a new, more apt body and condemned to serve as a common scribe for all eternity, ambitions forever stymied.

 

You may escape your doom by rendering a language extinct on this earth such that it only exists in the archives of heaven, proving yourself of continued use as an active agent of your god.

 

Slaanesh

1. Pride
Component: a lion's tooth

Summon [dice]+1 loyal, intelligent [dice] HD big cats to fight alongside you. Their sharp, sharp claws and teeth have [dice] to-hit and deal 1d8+[dice] damage.

 

2. Feed
Component: a set of golden canines, replacing your own in your mouth.
Sink your teeth into another person and drink, making an attack roll to hit if appropriate. Deal [sum] damage to them and replenish [sum] of your own HP; you may decide if this damage is lethal or nonlethal. This experience is extremely pleasurable for both parties.

 

3. Aura of Hands
Component: a golden amulet of two interlocking hands, worth at least 20gp

For [sum] rounds you have an infinite number of translucent hands of solid air, which can only reach as far as you can.

 

4. Bottomless Appetite
Component: a silver tongue piercing
Create [sum] inventory slots of space within your stomach, which lasts for [dice] days. You store things in here by harmlessly swallowing them, and can regurgitate them with an action; if the spell ends while you still have things swallowed, you harmlessly spit them back up. Additionally, you can digest and destroy any nonmagical item you have swallowed, and are immune to most ingested poisons while it's active.

 

5. Dazzle
Component: a prayer wheel studded with at least 100gp of gemstones
So long as you spin the wheel, a warbling sphere of light appears above your head; creatures who look at it must save vs becoming stunned as they stare entranced at the light. Creatures with less than [dice] HD get no save. If a creature takes any amount of damage the spell's hold on them instantly ends.

 

6. Disguise Self
Component: a makeup kit
As you apply the makeup, your form shifts and changes into any person that you can picture for [sum] hours, fooling [highest] senses. While the spell is active you may shed and don the disguise as you wish.

 

7. Gracefulness
Component: a set of four bracelets with jangling bells around the ankles and wrists
For [sum] rounds you cannot be grappled. You gain [dice]+1 AC, take half damage on a failed save to dodge a threat and none on a successful one, and can squeeze through anything that you can fit your head through.

 

8. Wall of Blades
Component: a bronze sickle
Raise a wall from the ground up to [dice]*10ft long, in any precise configuration that you wish. Churning machinery powers cycling, scything blades on the side facing away from you, which deal 1d8+[dice] damage to anyone within 5ft of the wall. The wall has [sum] HP. When reduced to 0 HP, or after [dice] hours, the machinery fails and the wall tears itself apart. 

 

9. Split in Two
Component: an electrum torc worn around the neck, worth at least 40 gp

With a snap of your fingers divide yourself and become one mind in two bodies, distributing your HP as you two between the two halves. You still possess a shared pool of MD. When one half is reduced to 0HP, it dissolves into sparkling light, and the surviving half is revealed to be the real you, with whatever current HP that half had. If [dice] hours pass, you must choose which is the real you, and the other half dissolves.

 

10. Summon Friend

Component: a human tongue encased in gold

Beckon a beautiful feathered daemon from the middle air, invisible to all but you. At your command, it will sit atop another person's shoulders and influence their thoughts. While influenced, said person regards you as a trusted friend, and all their emotions both positive and negative are greatly exaggerated. The daemon may flit from one person's shoulders to another, but will leave again for the sky after [dice] hours.  

 

11. Fly

Component: a cape of eagles' feathers

You may fly for [dice] hours.

 

12. Call Forth the Legion  

Component: a clay mask sculpted and watered in human blood, one for each MD spent

At your command, [sum] 1 HD soldiers rise from the earth, faceless men who come equipped with spears, shields, and helmets, and which are otherwise nude. They have [dice] to-hit, will defend you to the death, and will follow commands diligently but literally. After [highest] hours they crumble back into dirt.

 

Dooms

1 - Your body becomes perfectly symmetrical and shapely, and your face becomes unnaturally beautiful. You always smell of perfume, and you weigh half as much as before.

2 - All your hair falls out and is replaced with brightly-colored feathers. The smell of perfume around you increases greatly; check for random encounter rolls twice. You weigh a quarter as much as you did before; you should consider wearing ankle weights so you don't float off or get blown by the wind.

3 - You have been judged worthy. Your face twists and freezes into a smiling ivory mask. You weigh an eighth as much as you did before, and the winds carry you up and away to Slaanesh's palace at the apex of the middle air. You are condemned to serve as a common concubine for all eternity, ambitions forever stymied.

 

You may escape your doom by throwing a tremendous wasteful party/feast/orgy at at least 50,000gp of expense, proving yourself of continued use as an active agent of your god.

 

And, of course, Khorne grants no spells.