Saturday, March 31, 2018

Amazons and Androgons

Allaroundspaces

Amazons, the Happy Horsewomen


The golden plains to the east, where the lazy river Thermodon winds north to the Blackwine Sea, are a fertile land. Vast fields of grain and corn and countless herds of horses, bison, and oxen can be found there, as well as all manner of fruiting trees, nuts, and spices. At the river's mouth sits Temiskyra, and in her port all manner of boats travel here and there across the sea.

This is the land of the amazons; it is a land of peace and prosperity because no one in the world is fool enough to invade, and anyone fool enough to try is never good enough to get past the border.

Tales of their martial prowess are entirely true. The average amazon stands eight feet tall, and has been training with the horse, the bow, the spear, and the sword since she was old enough to walk. Amazonian men still taller and stronger than the average man, and are not the downtrodden slaves some would have you believe. Rumors of cutting off breasts are unfounded. Stories of their legendary hospitality and good humor are entirely true (why not laugh when nothing poses a threat?)

Otherwise, the following touchstones are important for travelers on the way to Temiskyra.

Damascene steel - The smiths of Temiskyra produce some of the best blades in the world (sans dwarves), through methods known only to them. The shimmering, swirling patterns have proven impossible to replicate by other men. Carbon nanotubes, y'all.

Barbecue - The wild boars of the golden plains are terrifying monsters. Hunts for both sport and necessity are common enough that they barely classify as news. This leads to a great amount of pork in local markets. Family-owned amazonian barbecue joints are one of the region's primary exports.

Lacrosse - It's like normal war, but nearly everyone lives through it so you can do it again. Often paired with barbecue. Used to solve disputes, mark holidays, or just for fun. Instituted in ages past as a way to avoid internal strife among the amazons.

Horses - Temiskyran horses are, as one would expect, huge. Large enough that it is next to impossible for non-amazons to ride them (and the reverse is true for amazons riding normal sized horses). Smaller horses are kept as beloved pets

Greatbows - The signature amazonian weapon. Even one skilled in its use must utterly root herself to the earth to draw it back.

The greatest warrior among the amazons is currently Sofi Scarbelly. She and her retinue are currently off fighting some sort of monstrous humanoids.

There is no link between the amazons of the Thermodon and the black amazons of the North, beyond naming conventions.

Amazon Character Class


Reroll STR and CON, take higher
HP: d10
XP: As elf
Saves: As fighter
To-hit: As fighter
Armor costs 1.5x the normal price.

Starting kit
  • Leather or chain armor
  • Spear and shield, sword and shield, or longbow
  • Longbow or greatbow
  • Quiver with 20 arrows or 5 greatarrows
  • A horse or a Fighter 0 hireling (usually a husband, son, or daughter-in-training)

5e Option: As Goliaths, replacing altitude acclimation with an additional +1 CON.

Tomas Duchek

Androgons, the Man's Men


In the days of the emperor Darvatius there was an entire legion formed of pairs of consecrated male lovers, sent out to pacify distant corners of the world and gain great glory for the banner of the eagle and bull. In the last days of the conquest the sacred band was sent past the Wall of Rhavian to subjugate certain tribes that had taken shelter with the Folk there, and there the record ends.

A few centuries later, when the world is still rebuilding from the global catastrophe of Darvatius' second conquest, a tribe calling themselves the Androgons descends from the lands beyond the Wall into the world at large. Scribes of the time considered them to be some new tribe of barbarians, but modern historians are quite certain they are Darvatius' lost legion merged with the tribes they had been sent to exterminate.

These Androgons (occasionally called the Gargareans, especially in older texts) are for the most part a wandering people: there are a few townships under their control, but most live in small bands of 20-200 individuals. They are quiet and isolationist: outsiders are not welcome in their camps, and their interactions with the greater world tend to be either succinct or violent. They make their living as soldiers of fortune, having no love of peaceful, settled lives. It is a hard life, but they enjoy it well enough.

Those who come into contact with the Androgons ought to bear in mind the following:

Virwyrd - lit. "the way of men". Androgons have strict pillars of manhood that they hold up: combat, camaraderie, practical handicraft, and stoicism. Public displays of emotion ought be limited to triumph over enemies or anger towards them - friendship is to be kept to the mess tent, and tenderness to the bunk. Sexual relations between Androgons are spoken of in near-businesslike terms outside of private moments.  

No Girls Allowed - Androgon reactions to women are mixed: ignorance reins on the whole, accompanied by bemusement, confusion, apathy, or hatred. Many competing theories have emerged, claiming that women are alien beings, misshapen or depraved men, demons, or most radically, human beings. The first and second attitudes are the most common. 

The Trailing Camp - War parties tend to accumulate non-Androgon camp followers. Having little in the ways of their own roots, they will often pick up Androgon customs and modes of dress. If there are any women to be found among the Androgons, they will be found here. Any children sired will be brought into the Androgon party to be raised and trained. The relations which bear these children are not spoken of. 

Battle-Thought - Philosophy and rhetoric are greatly valued by the Androgons, despite their warlike manners and lack of written history. There are great minds of Darvatius' time that exist now only as Androgon oral history.

Folk Arts - The greatest treasure among the Androgons are secrets given to them in their time beyond the Wall. Little study has been conducted of their Pathmaking and Bread-and-Salt traditions, and greater secrets still remain.

The greatest band of Androgons is that of the Ash Moon Banner. They are currently harassing the townships outside of Janashkut.

Androgon characters are fighters.







Saturday, March 24, 2018

Health, Healing, and Injuries

This remains a work in progress, and is as-of-yet untested. It has been cobbled together from multiple sources of inspiration, including Into the Odd, Logan Knight's flesh and grit system, and Skerples' Rat on a Stick GLOG hack.

Further modifications are certain to follow.

Health

 

Characters have Hit Points and Body Points (or Grit and Flesh). HP represents a character's ability to avoid taking serious damage, and BP represents a character's actual bodily integrity. If you have HP, you can take a hit; if you've lost BP, there are things outside your body that really need to be put back inside.

HP at level 1 is equal to your full hit die + your CON bonus. At every subsequent level you roll for your HP with no CON bonus. HP caps at 20.

BP is equal to your CON score. It goes up and down according to that score, or in the occasional magical effect. Any damage taken to BP will be subtracted from both STR and CON. Taking BP damage means you are now bleeding out, and will lose and additional 1 BP / round until stabilized.

When you reach 0 HP, you are incapacitated. Any damage taken beyond this point will be taken from your BP. If you reach 0 BP, you are dead. If you are attacked while incapacitated, you are dead.

Healing

 

HP is restored to full by a restful night of sleep and a meal. Other circumstances, (sleep but no food, food only, partial sleep, etc) you will only recover 1d6 + lvl HP.

BP is recovered through the following methods, and is done so in the same intervals it is dealt in (minor, small, medium, great).

Panacea potions
Save vs magic to resist addiction. Addicts make saves to resist at -1. If health restored equals or exceeds character's max BP, they will progress to the next stage (gain 1 panacea mutation, save malus increased by 1). Total transformation into a panacea mutant occurs upon reaching stage 5.

Surgery
Chance of infection dependent on the surgeon's level of preparation. This will be a larger worry for players when in the field, but a visit to the barber should go with only minor risk.

Heal Serious Wounds
R: Touch T: Creature D: 0
Restores [sum] BP. Biomancy of this nature (the kind that won't give you cancer) is a carefully-guarded secret among the fleshcrafter guilds. They will charge you a premium for it, but it's possible to undo lingering injuries through this method.

Healing crystals
Can heal max BP equal to die type x 2. Healing crystals repair injury through absorbing and storing it; they will not only be rendered useless upon capacity, but become radioactive as hell. They are thoroughly illegal.

Rest
A stabilized character at rest will recover 1d4 BP per week.

Additional Skills
  • Medicine - Setting bones, stopping bleeding, stabilizing the injured, identifying injuries, basic knowledge of herbs and medicines. Not a permanent solution, cannot recover BP.
  • Surgery - See barbers.

Injuries


If you take BP damage, make a CON save against your new score. If you fail, you will take a lingering injury. Roll for one on your favorite table, and if you don't have a favorite table, James Introcaso has a good one.

Broken bones are healed after 10 days of rest.

Missing limbs can be repaired or replaced, but advanced prostethics  and grafts ought to be treated as quest rewards.

Special Injuries


Certain damage types will always leave specific lingering injuries, as appropriate.

Fire damage will result in burn scars.
Unholy damage will result in anathema.
Holy damage will result in sanctification.
Corrosive damage will result in acid scars.
Nectrotic damage will result in fleshrot.


Final Notes


This whole thing was made to retroactively fit into the normal LotFP health system I've been using with my group. I'll be running it proper when Hot Springs Island No Allergy Edition gets going in a couple weeks, and see what needs tweaked there.






Blog Index

Last updated: 2/11/23

Mother Stole Fire

 

Classes

151 Fantastic Beings

Dungeons & Adventures & Games etc.

Minimodule 3: Break Their Pride By A Woman's Hand (Part 1, Part 2) (Knave)
 

Mechanics 

Alternate Progression Methods
Cybernetics for Knave
Guns and Kung Fu for Knave
Health, Healing, and Injuries
Material Methods of Protection Against Evil 
Material Methods of Detection
Soul Magic and the Soul Cycle 
Unified Food Theory
The Greatest Table Ever Made 
Magical Languages
Card-Based Expeditions  
Violence, that Art of Fools

Random Tables

100 Biblical Events and Aesthetics
100 Convictions
20 Hordes of Monstrous Humanoids
20 Lingering Effects of Petrification
20 Memories of Old Wars
20 Magical Masks
20 Weird World Locations
20 Spells From My Playlist
20 Wizarding Colleges 
20 Wizardball Mascots and other Wizarding Sports
20 Soulslike Bosses 
26 Cults
24 Easy Family Trees
336 Wizards
What the Fuck am I Scrying?
The Crow's Foot
Goblin Plots, Pockets, and Broodmothers
It's October 9th!
10 Horrible Hives 
What's the Fishman Excited About? 
The World According to Mr. Welch
100 Level 0 Characters for Super Smash Classics 
66 Folk
Big Table of Cultural Traits
Post Apocalyptic Nuns on the Run
50 Animal Mutations
Archaisms and Alzabos 
10 Secret Hideouts
7d8 Road-Weary Wanderers
10 Magical Items 
Random Fantasy Christ Figure Generators
50 Esoteric Enterprises Inspiration Seeds
Random Tables from Twitter 1, 2, 3
JOESKY TAX PREPARATION
20 Magical Precipitations
30 Words That Don't Exist
 

Essays

Original, Simple, Ready to Hack
The Demons in Dark Corners
Organically-Grown Investigations
Dredge are the Coolest Orcs
Layman's Guide to Being Horrible
D&D Doesn't Understand What Monsters Are
 
3 Years, 300 Posts: Map of the New World

Fantastic Prehistory

Ancient Epochs 1
Ancient Epochs 2 
Gorgonopsid Space Liches

Play Reports

One offs: 1 (Tomb of the Serpent Kings), 2 (Sleeping Place of the Feathered Swine in Space!)
Fwea: 1 (Tomb of the Chimera Kings), 2 (Kidnap the Archpriest)
Diy: 1 (Blood in the Chocolate). 2 (Hot Springs Island)
DCO With Randos: 1, 2
D6 Star Wars: 1
Danscape Adventures: 1, 2, 3,4 & 5
Delta Green: Operation HYACINTH 
Esoteric Enterprises: 1, TAKE HOME CONTAINER
Mothership: GREAT SCREAMING HELL 1, 2, 3, 4,   
The Quiet Year  

Reviews 

Anime
Assorted Books 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
2019 Shotgun Scenarios
Chromatic Soup
 
 

Friday, March 23, 2018

Self-Indulgent Lore Garbage

This is in response to an old challenge of +Kiel Chenier 's that had resurfaced recently: ten pieces of setting lore that have absolutely no impact game-wise beyond flavor. I can totally do that.

1.  The hamsa is a common symbol of good fortune and warding off evil influence. It comes from the story of how Father gave up his eye for wisdom, and Mother held onto it out of love.

2. The most common written form of Manu-Babel uses the Deseret alphabet.

3. No one is permitted to possess anything of their own when entering the City Magpie - all belongings must belong to another, whether by theft or loan. This includes names, titles, and family members.

4. Angels and demons, like gods, are naturally created by humans and their actions. A laughing baby creates a legion of angels.

5. The known world is only one hemisphere: there is an entire antipode that lies beyond a burning meridian. This might be a lie promulgated by mapmakers, or a clever metaphor for a different plane.

6. The Necromantic Socialist Republics are actually quite pleasant places to visit, if you happen to like skulls. They're quite insistent on the skulls.

7. Saffron, white obsidian, red oil, and soul-pearls are all viable currencies. They are often accepted alongside the silver dollar and other coinage.

8. Old Acephavara collapsed under the strain of economic catastrophe, incestuous political corruption, and arcanonuclear war, but never seemed to get the memo that it no longer exists.

9. Troll-stones allow real-time communication across thousands of miles, though to actually accomplish that one must figure out a way to not be drowned-out by the ever-churning chaos of the Trollmoot.

10.The goblin kings went away to Parts Unknown, and the goblins eagerly await their return. Two of them are definitely Weird Al and David Bowe.

Sunday, March 18, 2018

1d10 Horrible Hives

This was going to be a post about Hot Springs Island, but the group only got about an hour in before I was struck by a terrible allergic reaction to store-bought General Tso's sauce. My face got all swollen up and boiled-lobster red.

My true form, revealed!

I think it's one of the preservatives in there, since the only other foods that trigger hives are Kraft macaroni and cheese and Oreo pop-tarts. The General Tso's at every Chinese place I have ever gone to has no effect. I have no idea what is up with this.

So instead of writing a session report (very little happened, and we rescheduled), have a random table fueled by the misery of last night.

1d10 Horrible Cases of the Hives

  1. You are filled with thousands upon thousands of ants, each the size of a sand grain and burning hot. They are perfectly fine where they are and don't want to leave.
  2. A glowing red spot of unbearable itchiness migrates from point to point across your body, with no sensible pattern. Scratching at it will root it to the spot for a moment, but increase the itchiness tenfold. It will shine brighter and brighter as it is scratched. If scratched too much, a burning, lidless eye will open there.
  3. Your face has inflated, removing your ability to speak. Your eyes turn red, and you are able to see the blood pulsing in others' veins. The only sound is the thump of your own heart in your ears.
  4. Each hive is the size of a silver piece, and bulbous. They expand and contract with your breath, quivering with wordless menace.
  5. The hives are blackened and cracked, and spit out wisps of necrotic miasmas. If scratched, they flake away like charcoal under your fingernails.
  6. Your sweat has the stink of bile, and your hands move on their own, seeking to tear at your skin unbidden by your mind.
  7. You seep honey from your scratches, and under the puckered skin you catch glimpses of the combs.
  8. Your hives rise and then separate from your body, buzzing about in a cloud before dispersing into the still and stagnant air.
  9. Hives harden into brilliant red pebbles. The itching fades, but in its place there are only the smooth, cool stones embedded in the skin.
  10. God-damn goblins and their god-damn itching powder!

Friday, March 9, 2018

YOUR SPORTS TEAM IS VASTLY INFERIOR



Wizardball


The official rules of wizardball, as collected and tabulated by the Fantasy Wizardball Association, have been successfully used as an implement of murder. The version containing the appendix of variant rules has a spine so thick it cannot actually be opened without mechanical or magical aid. Multi-volume collections have been known to grow unruly enough to devour the reader.

Thankfully, the wizardball community ignores all of this and embraces the maddening chaos that is the magical world's greatest sport. There is no understanding the incomprehensible layers of in-jokes and strategies from the outside; there is only the knowing of the initiated.

Wizardball gets into your blood. The roar of the crowd, the pounding of the drums, the colors of the jerseys, the ozone tang of octarine mists and the smells of lemon ice and sausages inna bun. Wizardball is life itself.

For the uninitiated, there are four simple guidelines that give structure wizardball.
  • The point of the game is to get the ball, by whatever means necessary, into the enemy's goal. Scores may go up until a time limit has been reached, or down until a team's pool of points has been exhausted.
  • The two teams are arrayed as one would set up a chess board: 8 pawns, 2 rooks, 2 knights, 2 bishops, a king and a queen.
  • Each position can be filled from a pool of variant classes. Each class is equipped with ta specific loadout of appropriate spells and equipment, and is beholden to a series of limitations.
  • Cheating is permitted, so long as it does not extend past the boundaries of the pitch and the cheater can manage to either outwit or overpower the referee.
Beyond this, well, the rules are made up and the points don't matter. The Purist Variant Ruling dictates that wizardball only has one rule, being that a rule cannot be repeated twice, but this variant is not considered league-legal.

1d20 School Mascots

  1. Ol' Rusty the rust monster
  2. Manny the Maniac Manticore
  3. The Green Gorgon
  4. Bullette Biter
  5. The Big Hungry Mimic
  6. The Tin Men
  7. Ozzie Ooze
  8. The Deep Ones
  9. Skeleton Dan
  10. Mopey the Catelopas
  11. Sidney Salamander
  12. The Hellhound Named Spot
  13. Bumf the Flumph
  14. The Great Griffin
  15. The Brawling Blemmeyes
  16. The Tartary Lambs
  17. Brother Wulfhelm, the Drunken Monk
  18. Mabel the Mermaid
  19. D. T., Princess of the Red Planet
  20. Terry the Tarasque

1d20 Other Wizarding Sports 

Sport names courtesy of +Skerples



1. Rugger

Teams are scrambled on the quarter

2. Soccer

Can only be played while blackout drunk

3. Blagger

Asymmetrical field

4. Blugger

Traditionally played nude

5. Crumpet

Synchronized musical accompaniment

6. Cornet

Uses sticks and shields

7. Horseshoe

Average match lasts nine hours

8. Bannet

One team replaced by demons

9. Lurp Ball

Players cannot touch the ground

10. Flems-fight

The arena is flooded and filled with trout

11. Tennis

Players launched out of cannons

12. Ballmight

Must sacrifice losing team to the SUPERB OWL during playoffs.

13. Renfield

A live tiger released during second half

14. Nibblet

Indistinguishable from actual warfare

15. Zork

Played only in complete darkness

16. Mango

Played with 30 balls on the pitch

17. Gibbet

Goals move autonomously

18. Follow-the-Pony

One continuous game that has run for 187 years

19. Estivan Tony

Adaptable playing field

20. Flibbertygibbet

Oh gods, everything is on fire


Wednesday, March 7, 2018

1d20 Wizarding Colleges

David Wyatt

Wizards have degrees. This is the way of things. You can't be a proper wizard without a diploma. It's respectable. If you don't have a degree from a respectable school, why, you're no better than a witch!

The kicker is that there's no such thing as a respectable wizards' college.
  1. Twin boarding schools for the children of the rich and powerful. Male and female campuses on opposite sides of the street. Anti-canoodling rules prove only vaguely enforceable in the face of the student body's vast creativity.
  2. A flooded library buried deep undergound. Mushroom men maintain the records, though they are slow readers and often grow all over the books you need to get for class.
  3. A shipwreck inside a whale's stomach, haunted by the ever-tormented souls of the sailors that now serve as the faculty.
  4. Two aged sphinxes playing chess in a public park, discussing the mysteries of the universe. They will occasionally bring in someone from the circle of listeners to act as referee.
  5. An ancient mountaintop tower, carved from a primordial stone spear pinning a demon lord to said mountain. Has an excellent football program.
  6. A labyrinthine history department, severed from its parent school decades ago by a planar mishap. The inhabitants are descendants of the faculty and students, and have maintained the collegiate structure as a way of maintaining societal order.
  7. A fortress in the middle of the desert built on top of a gigantic dungeon, which occasionally provides a student, rather than just eating them.
  8. A haphazard cluster of bright-painted buildings on stilts in the center of a freshwater lake, sponsored by the Court of Lampreys. Tuition is free, but sometimes the administration needs a few favors. To help with the paperwork, you see.
  9. A grungy inner-city community center, taught by a well-meaning but thoroughly overwhelmed and unprepared noblewoman.
  10. A friendly traveling theater troupe with a curriculum of comedic-educational operettas. The tenor is remarkably good with the patter songs, though he does bear a striking resemblance to a wanted murderer.
  11. An isolated complex devoted to the various thaumartial arts. The admissions department requires prospective students to impress the director with a show of athletic skill.
  12. An opulent school practically a city unto itself. The dean is a dragon. The financial aid office is run by demons. The textbooks are sold by a vampire-owned publishing company. Many of the students are missing an arm or a leg. On the bright side, there's a diamond the size of a cow somewhere in the business office.
  13. Greasy back room of a spicy fried cockatrice shop. Totally legitimate. Definitely, totally legitimate. Please ignore the misspellings and smell of narcotics.
  14. You've had no learning besides the school of hard knocks (read: an old dwarf with a sturdy stick who took you on as apprentice.)
  15. A crumbling gothic castle, filled with all manner of ghostly maidens in diaphanous states of undress, the tormented spirits of diabolic monks, and the occasional humanities professor with a sheet over their head.
  16. Moon U, being the moon's first and currently only wizarding college. Started in a secretive bunker, has expanded into a full spaceport. It's an open secret that the New Gods are involved (all hail).
  17. A tower of sapphire rising up over the moors. Classical, respected, traditional...and everyone there is a woman wearing a fake beard and socks down her trousers. They don't have to anymore, but it's traditional by this point.
  18. An ordinary college town with a C-list school that is well-regarded in the region but one of the perpetually small fish of the academic world.
  19. The place hasn't been dusted in five years, the syllabus hasn't been updated in fifty, and the youngest faculty member is 87. They still talk about the glory days.
  20. Focuses entirely upon the study of a hypothetical parallel world where magic, and thus wizards, do not exist.