jacinto adventures, afternoon espresso, angels, megadungeon murder mystery, monsters, san serafín, table

XIII

This is kind of an experiment. Every session there is a 1 in 6 chance of one of these things coming up or being mentioned or whatever. It’s a conspiracy generator. Not the best format, but it was fun to write so whatever.

by Dominic Alves, distributed under CC

I
There is a god, and its name is Thirteen. It is the lord of inversion and the architect of misfortune; its clerics wear yellow and hold power over doppelgangers, oozes, and devils. The Constables hunt its worshipers like animals, but there always seems to be more.

by Jerry Kirkhart, distributed under CC

II
There is a society, and nobody knows its name or its members. Everyone who matters has gone to one of their parties–they only invite thirteen people at a time, and it’s terribly difficult to secure an invitation. Sometimes people don’t come back, but that just makes it all the more exciting, doesn’t it?

III
There is a city where nobody goes, a city of sepulchers, a city by the sea. You can’t find it on a map, and no matter how far you travel, you won’t ever reach it. Some priests say the gods cut it out of this world like a tumor, but if you take a certain route, passing through certain cursed doorways and traversing certain cursed crossroads, you will arrive on one of its thirteen grand avenues, which intersect in the center like a spider’s web or a perverse star. The dead hang by cables from the telephone wires.

IV
There is a man by the side of the road, and he is shouting at you. He speaks of an angel with thirteen wings and a hydra with thirteen heads. He says he will be dead soon, but this is a thing that you all must know.

V
You found a book about a crow with thirteen eyes, scattered across its face like any ugly constellation. It is terrible old and utterly malign: a colossal rival of dragons, a gleeful anthropophage, a bearer of curses. It steals children from their parents, raises them and loves them with all its evil heart. They don’t grow up human.

by Anne-Sophie Leens, distributed under CC

VI
There is a syndicate with thirteen captains. They traffic in drugs, slaves, and precious metals; they are undercutting just about every major player in the city. Nobody can figure out who their suppliers are, or where their shipments are coming from, but everyone wants them gone. The Weaver’s Guild has placed a colossal bounty on the heads of their leaders, but it’s only resulted in a lot of dead assassins.

VII
Somebody murdered a Saint of Honey and Salt, carving a thirteen-pointed star into their chest. The local House has promised blood, and rumor has it they’ve had to purge their ranks of spies, though the details are fuzzy on who they were working for.

VIII
This buried and desecrated temple is the home to thirteen warlocks:

  • Gog and Magog, the hateful witch-children, each of which draws magic from the other
  • Illhammer, who casts spells with a mace fashioned from a devil’s femur
  • The Perfect Child of Man, who wears a yellow hood. The emissary of a god-city exiled from this world
  • Ratbelly, the red eyed waif, bound by her own oaths to the Forbidden Hour, which once sat between midnight and 1 a.m
  • Catbelly: the neurasthenic malefic, carried on a silk palanquin by 5 horned skeletons and empowered by a devil of smoke and blue fire
  • Murderboy: he walks on ceilings and weeps black tar; he was raised by a spider the size of a school bus that still sings him to sleep
  • Toothgirl: a creeping obsessive, built a god of neon tubes and rat bones that tells her who to kill
  • Gurn: she can unhinge her jaw like a snake and spit out almost anything she wants; cursed by her mother to be killed by a weapon of her own making.
  • Mammon: everything he does looks awkward and wrong, like a dog walking on its hind legs or a man running on all fours. A centipede lives in his clothes that teaches him the secrets of secret-eating and memory-killing
  • Nadir: wild haired troglodyte who lives at the bottom of a hole, which moves around when nobody’s looking. Sold her soul to a gravity angel, so she can’t pick herself off the ground.
  • Maculata: jelly-fleshed voyeur with a visible skeleton; holds congress with puddings, oozes, and jellies of all sorts.
  • Maastricht: a wretched old man with metal teeth, his pact with Satan makes him nigh omnipotent; his secret weakness is that he can only move when you’re looking at him

IX
There’s a series of thirteen pamphlets everyone’s reading. They make you remember things you’d forgotten, give you advice that makes you feel smart and capable and stronger, they make you forget your own inadequacy and weakness and stupidity, they make you want to find the other pamphlets, but they’re so hard to find and you can’t figure out where they come from. Everyone says something wonderful happens if you read all thirteen.

I’m tired of writing now. I’ll probably write more and I want to find a d13 for this.

jacinto assassins, classes, is this gonna work, LotFP, monks, san serafín

Love and War

Having taken a closer look at Swords and Wizardry Complete, I have come to the conclusion that assassins are boring and monks are dumb. This is somewhat inspired by +Arnold K.‘s excellent post on void monks.

Saint of Honey and Salt
a class for old school D&D-likes

HP and XP as Magic-users
Attack bonus and saves as Clerics

Also called Las Basiliscas, the Velvet People, Pretty Poisoners, Beauty Monks

Each major city has a House of Honey and Salt, which acts as the home and headquarters of all Saints in the region. These Houses are temple-brothel-hospitals; few injuries or illnesses are beyond the flesh-crawling curatives of the Saints, though they charge a high price.

Saints are the enemies of the medusae, the drow, and the Weaver’s Guild. Their cousins are the vampires. They have treaties with the basilisks, dryads, nymphs, succubi, and shadows. Saints make servants of bees and flesh golems.

Saints have a reputation for espionage, though nobody knows where their interests lie. They’re that good. A nation’s monarch having a Saint in their court is viewed the same way as having a child king or a doddering regent: a sign of instability and bad things to come.

The dogma of the Saints is Love and their doctrine is Spite. A Saint cannot wield weapons and must avoid inflicting pain wherever possible (This is interpreted liberally. The Saints as an organization make extensive use of poisons, and have no problem telling their underlings to do exceedingly painful things to their enemies). Saints also cannot wear armor, as it conceals their bodies.

from full metal alchemist

A Saint is like this:
You’re always a little flushed, a little feverish, though you never seem to sweat. The whites of your eyes have no blood vessels, you tongue and lips are red; your hair is albino white or the iridescent black of crow feathers or else it shines like the sun on the sea etc etc. You look like the fervid imaginings of a court poet or a Raymond Chandler character or the lover of a hero from antiquity.

  • While you suffer the physical effects of old age like anyone else, you always appear to be in the full flush of youth. 
  • You are thoroughly trained in the arts of dancing, singing, and/or acting. 
  • Your Charisma score increases by 1 every time you gain a level, to a maximum 18. If you wish, you can use your Charisma score in place of your armor class.
  • You can make somebody’s blood weep painlessly out of their skin by touching them, flesh to flesh. A hand’s worth of coverage deals d6 damage (and requires an attack roll in combat, assuming they aren’t completely covered). More area of contact deals more damage, to a maximum of d20. This makes grappling with you very dangerous. Looks sort of like this:
by Bernypisa, distributed under Creative Commons

Level 2: Sweet Nothings
You can cast Suggestion at will by whispering into somebody’s ear for a full round, close enough that they can feel your breath on their face.

Level 3: Fascination

You can Charm someone by kissing them. They must be willing or restrained, and they get a saving throw. People Charmed in this way become obsessive, withdrawn, feverish, and Detect as Chaotic and/or Evil.
Level 4: Fountain of Youth
During downtime, you can prepare a special bath of animal hormones, plant extracts, and generally weird drugs that

  • cures diseases
  • restores lost limbs
  • removes deformities, like scars, tumors, and dermal fungal colonies

This bath costs 1,000 gp and works for a single person. You might have trouble finding the ingredients in backwater areas, though you can haul them around if you so choose; they count as 2 significant items. 

Level 5: Carnation

You can spend a downtime action to change your appearance. You can’t radically alter your body plan (so you can’t become a quadruped or grow new limbs or change your arms to wings) or mimic a particular person, but you can change your build, posture, sex, pigmentation, and so on. 

Level 6: Pretty Poison

If you consume a poison or drug and survive, you become immune to its effects. Furthermore, consuming a poison or drug to which you are immune allows you to preserve it in your body for d6 Turns. Anything that eats you (or at least a significant chunk) isn’t going to be feeling so great after, and your bodily fluids work as a contact poison of the same type, though victims get a +3 to saving throws against it in this form. Saint Malvada defeated the Blue Iron King by spitting into his eye, then getting his pet dragon to eat her arm.

Level 7:
You can read someone’s mind as per ESP by staring into their eyes for a full round. They can feel you reading their mind, so usually they must be restrained or otherwise unable to look away. 

Level 8: All Shall Love Me and Despair
Once a day, you can issue a Mass Command. (As Command, but afflicts everyone in earshot)

Level 9: House of Honey and Salt
You found your own House of Honey and Salt and gain 2d6 disciples.

Level 10: Only Lovers Left Alive
Once per day, you can kill someone with fewer HD than you have levels by touching their bare chest with your forefinger. No save.

christian dior
from fire emblem awakening
jacinto Carcosa, LotFP

Postal Service of Carcosa

In the beginning, when the Primordial Ones constructed their first cities, there was Mail. They sent missives and read them, and thus they prospered.
When the Primordial Ones and their works fell to monstrosity, the Great People took to the business of civilization, and so there was Mail. They sent missives and read them, and thus they prospered.
When the Great People and their works diminished into nothingness, the Serpent People bent their sorceries to the task of civilization, and so there was Mail. They sent missives and read them, and thus they prospered.
The Serpent People and their works are gone now. The world is gone dark and strange, and monsters revel in the wilderness. We are small and few and harried, but so long as we live, there is Mail. We send missives and read them, and thus will we prosper.

 Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

by diamond-mind, distributed under Creative Commons

When the Thirteen Peoples of Carcosa murder, devour, and enslave each other, when sorcerers build their power on mountains of sacrifices, when horrors beyond the comprehension of the People slither through the desecrated ruins of civilization, you keep the faith. You remember the Charter. You deliver the Mail.

Create characters as normal for Carcosa.

  • Sorcerers can’t learn nasty Carcosa rituals, but they can cast spells from Silent Legions (if they manage to find any). 
  • You may also choose Specialist as a class.

Players start out in the castle in Hex 1512, ruled by the Lawful Purple Sorcerer known as the Postmaster General. Their first mission is to travel to Carcosa and swear their oath of service upon the steps of the First Office.

jacinto Pernicious Albion, table

mother dearest father mine

had 3:00 pm double shot of espresso today so I am RIDING HIGH and LIVING LARGE. Strictly mechanical bonuses and penalties for races bore me like nothing else so here’s some that aren’t that.
 

Cambions
by Luisa Uribe, distributed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Humans born under the auspices of a lord or lady of Hell are known as cambions. This can be a legal, magical, or familial relationship; a cambion might be the inadvisable fruit of a union between an incubus and a human, or his parents might have appointed a Prince of Hell to be his godfather. Regardless, a cambion carries within himself a modicum of infernal power.

A Gift From Father: Roll on the table below to determine which which demon the cambion claims his inheritance from:

  1. Malphas: The cambion’s eyes are pale and beady, like a crow’s. He possesses a small and venomous familiar, most often a serpent or spider. It can speak English and Lament. It has a 4 in 6 chance of knowing any given fact about a particular subject, but if it does does not actually know the answer to a question, it will lie convincingly. The familiar is simply knowledgeable; it doesn’t have any more access to information than an exceedingly well read scholar. The familiar will not suffer to be removed from its master’s person, and can evade all attempts at detection and capture. Its can deal no damage, but its venom causes excruciating pain for d6 turns. Roll a d4 at character creation to determine the familiar’s area of expertise:
    1. Demonology: The familiar knows all about the names, behaviors, powers, appearances, and weaknesses of demons.
    2. Sorcery: The familiar knows all about the names, effects, limitations, and histories of spells, enchantments, curses, and rituals devised by humans.
    3. Angelology: The familiar knows all about the names, behaviors, powers, appearances, and weaknesses of angels. 
    4. History: The familiar knows all about the history of Albion and can answer questions about archaeology, historical figures, paleontology, and architecture.
  2. Astaroth: The cambion’s left eye bears the Sigil of Astaroth. While this eye is open, a cambion can see things as they really are, and must make a saving throw every round or take d6 Wisdom damage as sheer stark reality erodes his sanity. However, while this eye is open, the cambion may also do one of the following (randomly determined at character creation):
    1. Perceive magic, discern the invisible, and see through illusions
    2. See the sin each person in line of sight most wants to commit
    3. See the sin each person in line of sight last committed
    4. See what action each person in line of sight intends on performing next round
  3. Ose: The cambion’s teeth and sharp and yellow and curved, like a leopard’s. He can insert a thought into somebody’s mind by forming the sign of the horns in their direction. The thought must be short enough to be said with a single breath. The victim of this magic may not make a save, but is under no compunction to act on the thought in any way—they simply believe it to be their own idea.
  4. Buer: The cambion has a lion’s tail. When he drags his forefinger along a rough surface, his fingertip combusts like a giant phosphorus match. It burns until the cambion chooses to extinguish it and does not hurt him in any way.
  5. Amaimon: When the cambion breathes into somebody’s ear, he can control what dreams they have the following night. No matter how unpleasant the dreams, this cannot prevent the victim from getting a full night’s rest on its own, but it can affect their mood.
  6. Bathin: The cambion can instantaneously travel as half as far as he can run in a round, so long as both his point of departure and arrival are unobserved by thinking creatures. The exact details of this process are mysterious, even to the cambion.
  7. Belial: The cambion can give false life to a poppet or small doll, transforming it into a clever and loyal familiar. It is swift and subtle, but cannot lift more than a pound and forever ceases to function the moment anyone other than the cambion lays eyes on it. The cambion can create such familiars at will, but can have only one at a time.
  8. Asmoday: By tracing a five pointed star in the air with his forefinger, the cambion can perform a minor, short range hex, such as severing a rope, shattering a pane of glass, or spoiling a piece of food. 

    Mooncalf
    screencap from Only Lovers Left Alive

     All fairies are bound by immutable laws, and one of them is a prohibition against theft. A fairy may seize reparations for some slight or claim a price for services rendered, but none may simply take what they wish. When a fairy plucks a child a child from the cradle for whatever reason, they always leave behind a mooncalf, a strangeling, changeling elf-child born from some mysterious and doubtlessly unnerving copulative process.

    Mooncalves make for exceedingly ugly babies, to the distress of their adoptive parents, but usually grow into a kind of disturbing beauty, an extreme jolie laide.

    Roll 1d4 times to determine the mooncalf’s characteristics

    1. Albinism
    2. Cleft palate
    3. Dwarfism or Gigantism
    4. Hairlessness
    5. Heterochromatic eyes
    6. Minor animal aspect
    7. Minor plant aspect
    8. Polydactyly
    9. Sexlessness
    10. Vitiligo

    Honesty: Mooncalves cannot utter a lie or break a promise. This is a physical prohibition; changelings may violate an oath no more than humans can lift themselves up by their own hair. However, mooncalves are free to mislead or omit and are must honor only the word of a promise.

    Glamor: A mooncalf can alter its appearance and voice however its pleases, so long as the result is within natural human variation. It may also change the seeming of its clothing and gear. Such glamors fool all the senses. Mooncalves must assume their true form while on consecrated ground. They take d6 damage if they walk beneath a horseshoe.

    Languages: Mooncalves speak Fol, the language of fairies.

    jacinto Carcosa, classes, clerics, Pernicious Albion, spell

    eat your heart out

    Queen Agorath is an incomprehensible  goddess-behemoth that resides in the hadopelagic void beneath Creation. Nobody remembers how or when she became Queen of Albion, but inquirers into that particular subject have died in sufficiently discomfiting numbers that more or less everyone has stopped trying to figure it out. By all mortal measures, the Queen is quite insane, but despite a few fits of psychotic pique every few centuries, she does a rather passable job of keeping the country running, and her mortal Council can be counted on to attend to the details that might slip her royal mind.

    Queen Agorath is the goddess of black magic and bodily transformation. Her Royal Clerics can only cast the reversed versions of reversible spells. They cannot Turn Undead, but can transform into creatures. 

    When a Royal Cleric eats a beast’s heart and succeeds a saving throw, she gains the ability to transform into that creature once per day for 10×level minutes (a number of Turns equal to her level), gaining all its powers and abilities for that time. The cleric receives a +1 bonus to her saving throw for every ritually significant step she takes while eating the heart; the Queen’s ritual sensibilities tend towards the perversely elegant and darkly sumptuous.

    from tale of tales

    Examples:

    • Eating the heart off of a plate of precious metal
    • Eating the heart while dressed in an luxurious gown
    • Incorporating the heart into exquisite confectionary
    • Being fed the heart by silent and finely-dressed servants

    Eating the heart of a creature with more hit dice than the cleric has levels does nothing. Furthermore, a cleric’s flesh can only remember so many shapes; a Royal Cleric can only learn a number of forms equal to half her level rounded up. Successfully consuming a heart while at this limit requires that she forget one of her existing forms.

    from bloodborne
    jacinto classes, clerics, demon, encounters, Pernicious Albion

    Lucifer

    Lucifer is at the bottom of every encounter table in Albion. He is in the streets and in the dungeons, in parlors and tombs and dreams. He is unfathomably evil and incalculably powerful, but not all that difficult to deal with. Lucifer is the architect of human sin and warden of every wicked soul to ever die; the idea of wanton destruction for its own pleasure lost its luster several epochs ago. Ultimately, Lucifer is bored; he is possibly the most bored being in existence. He responds well to the amusing and poorly to the tedious, and will grant a Wish to either if he thinks the results will be interesting enough. When encountered in the field, he will converse and observe, but not intervene; however, he will often agree to officiate or judge contests and wagers.

    Lucifer has stats as a Baalroch/Balrog/Balor and can cast Wish at another’s behest. In normal circumstances, he wears fine white clothes and possesses the wings of a bat. In a fight, he is as large as is convenient, though never bigger than a storm giant, and appears as an armored man bathed in excruciating actinic radiance.

    His incarnation can be destroyed for a time, but killing him in truth, if it is even possible, requires a great deal more than a simple fight. A player whose character makes a deal with Lucifer can henceforth choose Cleric of Lucifer as the class of new characters, even if the original deal-making character died.

    Clerics of Lucifer cannot cast reversed Cleric spells. They can Turn Undead as normal, allowing their patron to reclaim the fugitive souls of  the damned. Their only commandment is Don’t Be Boring.

    jacinto review

    “The father of every misfortune”

    This is the first of what I hope to be many reviews–many of the books I’ve purchased over the last few years are quite good, and warrant all the attention they get, and more. Today, I’ll be reviewing Dreams of Ruin, a setting book describing the Forest of Woe, a cosmic/planar threat for high level campaigns. It’s by Geoffrey C Grabowski, who seems to be making a jump to the OSR from Exalted. As a heads up, I did receive a review copy.

    Dreams of Ruin is currently undergoing a kickstarter. It is going to be released on May 15 under a restrictive Creative Commons license, but will be available under more generous terms depending on how well the kickstarter goes.

    The primary drive for this setting is the Forest of Woe, which is a self-propagating curse or a self-casting spell or an infectious metaphor induced to intrude upon reality. In practice, it is a monster-filled pseudo-forest that grows until it covers and destroys an entire world, hopping from one plane of existence to the next. It was created by something like a magical Manhattan Project that was also a sort of alt lit Masonic ritual. The beginning of the book has a full script of this ritual, so here’s an excerpt:

    This is Dreams of Ruin at its best. A great idea, cool implementation, something explicit and player-facing you can drop into a game (DoR suggests as a vision if someones casts Legend Lore, but they could also unearth it as a script or it could turn into a freaky reoccurring dream/motif/whatever.) All of the monsters are like this, too. Here’s a bit about the trees that make up the Forest of Woe:

     

     Awesome! There’s also

    • giant hand-spiders described as “the wind-up strangler-priests of the forest running on broadcast power”
    • a magically projected anti-pattern that prevents institutions from effectively dealing with the Forest
    • an entire section on magical social engineering
    • animate puppets that act out Grand Guignol murder sprees on each other
    • murderous sprites with various modes of behavior, controlled by the drugs the Forest provides them. 

    All of which are either really cool, really usable, or both.

    Unfortunately, Dreams of Ruin is not like this all the way through. The Forest of Woe is an act of primal malice, rolling down from antiquity with glacial inevitability, but Dreams of Ruin consistently presents it in a really fussy, actuarial manner. It spends many pages discussing ways to deal with the ever-expanding forest, but does so with charts like this:

    Yes, it has a column for how much volume your Divine Ichor source is outputting. This is the key frustration of Dreams of Ruin–it has things like using fountains of god-gore to sanctify and destroy a cursed forest (COOL), but then requires the use of lots and lots of fussy math and book-keeping (NOT COOL).

    One of the most egregious examples of this is research. Players can learn more about the Forest and how to fight it or use it by investing in research laboratories. An example project is researching spores–to do so, players must build a device to trap the spores in a Temporal Stasis bubble that still allows researcher to magically probe it. To construct this device, players must spend 2.5 million gold pieces and have access to the spells Arcane eye, chain lightning, continual light, dispel magic, ESP, floating disc, maze, limited wish, magic aura, prismatic sphere, secret chest, telekinesis, permanency, imprisonment, spiritwrath, and identify.

    This is just way, way, way too much. Every single topic of the Forest, from the different kinds of creatures to the trees to the spores to its various magical effects, has its own set of required spells and a lengthy explanation of how the lab works. On top of that, players must choose if they are conducting Arcane, Divine, or Druidic research, each of which yields different discoveries. The discoveries themselves aren’t that helpful—much of the time the DM has to decide how these revealed bits of knowledge are actually helpful, which is barely more useful than not putting them in the book at all. To compound all of this, the Forest itself has its own complex lifecycle of shedding monsters and spreading at various speeds, so the DM and players have to figure out how much research they can get done before the situation gets worse.

    The methods of confronting the forest are equally complex–aside from the infinite holy water fountain table, there’s charts on how many Geases clerics and magic-users of various levels can cast per day to create an authoritarian society immune from the stultifying effects of the Forest, and tables that enumerate the percent reduction of productivity when a society uses various means to inoculate itself agains the Forest’s curse.

    Everything is just this huge tangle of complicated timelines and rules and costs, not only constrained by the elaborate and interconnected schedules of research periods and Forest growth but occluded by huge amounts of information that isn’t of obvious use to DM or player.

    I’m also not a huge fan of the way magic is presented in this game. Grabowski took all of the magic rules as written in Labyrinth Lord at perfect face value and then extrapolated them until he reached a sort of Vancian industrial age. It’s interesting, but requires a very deep knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons and doesn’t really allow for many other conceptions of the supernatural. DoR includes suggestions on what to do if the game is taking place in a low magic setting, but in games with a more fairy tale or mystical flavor, much of DoR doesn’t really work.

    Dreams of Ruin is a book with a lot of good stuff that you can drop into your game. The ritual, the ecology of the Forest, and the basics of research are all things you can use as starting points for more usable mechanics, as well. However, it would be a real challenge to use Dreams of Ruin as written to run the Forest of Woe, and would likely require as much if not more preparation than if you decided to come up with rules of your own to support the books premise. At the end of the day, Dreams of Ruin is the rare kind of game book that is actually useful as inspiration.

    jacinto goats, items, Pernicious Albion

    Equipment List

    There are a million million ways to distinguish weapons that deal the same amount of damage, especially in OD&D-likes, where just about everything deals d6. I like that simplicity, though, so I’m favoring weapon differentiation to be social–if you bring a barbarian’s axe to a noble wedding, people are going to look at you funny, and if you’re wearing a diamond-studded dragoon helm in the bad part of New Londinium, everyone’s going to think they can eat you for breakfast.

    Albion Specials

    • Goat, sacrificial; £30: If sacrificed and offered to a nearby supernatural creature, the petitioner can retry their reaction roll
    • Mummia, £10: allows the consumer to make a saving throw to overcome a single curse or disease.
    • Carbide Lamp, £10
    • Carbide canister, £5
    • Quietus, £150: the victim must make two saves; if they fail the first, they become infatuated with the first person they see. If they fail the second, they die instantly and painlessly.
    • Tintype camera,  £150
    • Tintype sheets (6), £10

    Grimoires 
    Albion is filled with knowledge. Most of it is wrong. Grimoires are books filled with riddles, aphorisms, parables, inscrutable diagrams, obscene marginalia, and a smattering of actual information. A character with such a book has an x-in-6 chance of being able to determine the correct answer to a question pertaining to the grimoire’s subject. Each grimoire has a different chance-in-6, but it never exceeds 4. Characters with 15 or greater Intelligence have a +1 bonus to grimoire checks. The Referee makes grimoire rolls in secret, and on a failure, the research attempt yields deceiving, incomplete, or nonsensical results. Grimoires with broad subjects like Angelology or Botany can be easily purchased (£100 for a 1-in-6 grimoire, with an additional £20 for every additional +1-in-6 chance). More specific texts, such as biographies of greater fairies or monographs on particular dragons, can cost many hundreds or thousands of pounds sterling.

    Light armor 
    -1[+1] AC, costs £15

    • Girdle (fairy)
    • Goetic scrawls* (noble)
    • Woad* (Britonnic)
    • leather cuirass (vagabond)
    • Greatcoat (New Londoner)

    *require the wearer to be mostly naked. Can be permanently tattooed for £150.

    Medium Armor
    -2[+2], costs £30

    • Filigree Armor (fairy)
    • Bone china cuirass (noble)
    • Enamel breastplate (New Londoner)
    • Hides (Britonnic)
    • Roman lamellar (vagabond)

      Heavy Armor
      -3[+3], costs £50

      • Gilt half-plate (fairy)
      • Ivory half-plate (noble)
      • Carapace half-plate (New Londoner)
      • Coin armor (Britonnic)
      • Lorica plumata (vagabond)

      Supplemental Armor
      -1[+1], costs £20

      • Shield (fairy)
      • Mask (noble)
      • Helm (New Londoner)
      • Torc (Britonnic)

      Light Weapons
      d6-1 damage, easily concealed or disguised, costs £5

      • Misericorde(fairy)
      • Press-on claws (noble)
      • Brass knuckles (New Londoner)
      • Athame (Britonnic)
      • Pugio (vagabond) 

      Medium Weapons
      d6 damage, one handed, costs £10

      • Thistle club (fairy)
      • Rapier (noble)
      • Pistol (ranged) noble
      • Saber (New Londoner)
      • Gladius (vagabond)

      Large Weapons
      d6+1 damage, two handed, costs £10

      • Sewing needle (fairy)
      • Longbow (ranged) (fairy)
      • Rifle (ranged) (New Londoner)
      • Axe (Britonnic)
        jacinto dungeon, fairy, garden, vampire

        In the Lambent Gardens

        The God of the Earth pointcrawl turned into something else and it’s super fun to write so here’s some NPCs and monsters and stuff in it.

        The Gardens of Lambence
        There is a garden where the flowers bloom forever, where nothing ever grows or dies, where everything waits in the quiet light of an eternal blue hour. These Gardens of Lambence are a cursed place, raised up from the wilderness by two beings of ancient and wicked power: the Evening Prince, who is both sorcerer and vampire, and the Countess of Broken-heart, who counts herself among the lords and ladies of Faerie. They have grown to hate each other in their immortality, but neither can raise a hand against the other; by the laws of the fairies and the laws of the dead, the Gardens belong equally to both. 
        Encounter Table
        1. d6 Evening Consorts, +2 to Reaction rolls
        2. Heart-break Courtiers, +2 to Reaction rolls 
        3. Chambliss, make a Reaction roll every encounter 
        4. The Evening Prince will arrive at this location next Turn; d6 anxious Consorts arrive and beg the players to leave or hide (unless the players have already caused trouble in the Gardens, in which case they try to kill the party as neatly and quickly as possible)
        5. The Countess of Broken-heart will arrive at the location next Turn; d6 anxious Courtiers arrive
          and beg the players to leave or hide (unless the players have already caused trouble in the Gardens, in which case they try to kill the party as neatly and quickly as possible)
        6. Roll twice
        The Countess of Broken-heart
        HD 9 Speed human
        Armor as         leather Attacknone 
        Morale 8 Alignment Chaotic
        Wolves proclaim her arrival and foxes bear her train: the Countess of Broken-heart, her dress the purple of beaten flesh, her high crown fashioned from black horn. A single red scar mars the pallor of her face, and all who knew or asked whence it came are now ashes.
        The Countess of Broken-heart has spent the long years of her feud with the Prince devising tortures of such complexity and cruelty that they give pause to even Lucifer, her dearest friend and weekly chess-partner. Her rage is so great because she already possesses the instrument of the Prince’s destruction, but cannot use it. Years ago, the Prince vitrified the angel Suriel when it attacked him in his own Gardens. The Countess can free Suriel to complete its murderous mission without violating any of the rules of hospitality, but she shall not so long as the Prince holds her lover hostage.
        • Glamor: The Countess can alter the seem­ing of a creature of object nearby. Glamors perfectly fool all the senses, but cannot effect true change. Glamor-swords hurt and seem to wound, but never quite manage to kill; glamor-horses gallop across the landscape, but their rid­ers find that they never get anywhere. Anyone who interacts with a glamor is entitled to a saving throw to see through the illusion.
        • Polymorph: Once a day, the Countess can transform an object or creature with fewer HD than herself into any non-magical animal. The victim may make a saving throw to resist the transformation, but if they fail, they turn into a creature with their knowledge and personality until the effect is dispelled.
        • Fairy-magic: The Countess is a fairy and has all the corresponding powers and weaknesses. As a noble, she can cast spells as a 9th level magician; she knows 5 Psychomancy and 4 Elementalism spells.
        The Evening Prince

        HD 9 Speed human
        Armor as         chain Attackrapier 

        Morale 9 Alignment Chaotic
        He speaks very softly and smells of the lilies woven into his coat, but his shadow drags behind him as heavy and luxuriant as a cape of sable. The Evening Prince was a magician of prodigious talent when his heart yet beat, and now even the gentlest of his speech makes the air shiver with what he might do.
        The Evening Prince wants to kill the Countess. He hates her down to the cold marrow of his bones, hates that she lives in the Gardens as if they were hers. He knows she hates him too, so he turned her favorite consort into a nightingale and locked her away in his chambers inside a golden cage. The Countess cannot harm him so long as he has her lover, for fear of losing her forever.
        • Vitrify: Once a day, the Prince can conjure a giant spar of smoked quartz around a creature with fewer HD than himself. The victim may make a saving throw to avoid imprisonment; should it fail, it is trapped indefinitely, fully conscious but immune to aging, hunger, thirst, or the need to breathe. 
        • Vampire: The Prince is a vampire, and has all the corresponding powers and weaknesses. He can transform into a nightingale, and will hide among the flocks that live in the Gardens if severely wounded. 
        • Magician: The Prince cast spells as a 9th level magician; for W&W casters, he knows five Necromancy and four Translocation spells. 

        Evening Consorts

        The Prince’s white-haired vampire servants, who loll about the Gardens in black evening suits when they aren’t tending to the Prince or maintaining grounds. Though they all adore the Prince—he Charmed them into doing so—they have no interest in his feud with the Countess, and would much rather spend their immortality playing tennis and taking long baths. They cannot refuse a direct order from their master, but have no compunction keeping secrets from him or willfully misinterpreting his instructions to maintain the Gardens’ status quo or protect peaceful outsiders.
        HD 3 Speed human
        Armor as         chain Attackgiant scissors (as sword) OR trowel (as dagger)
        Morale 8 Alignment Chaotic
        • Vampire: Evening Consorts are vampires and have all the corresponding powers and weaknesses. All of them can turn into nightingales, and will hide among the flocks that live in the Gardens if they fail a Morale check.

        Broken-heart Courtiers

        The Countess’ black-haired, white-cloaked fairy servants, who meander through the Gardens when they aren’t attending the Countess or working as house-staff. Though they are sworn vassals of the Countess, they have no desire to see her grudge to its bloody conclusion—drinking cordial and holding dances are far more appealing. The Courtiers must obey all of the Countess’ commands, but will happily keep secrets or follow the letter, rather than the spirit, of her orders when it suits them.
        HD 3 Speed human
        Armor as         leather Attackgiant needle (as spear) OR ribbon (as whip)
        Morale 8 Alignment Chaotic
        • Fairy: Broken-heart Courtiers are fairies and have all the corresponding powers and weaknesses. They can cast Shroud/Invisibility on themselves at will. 

        Location: Tennis Court
        Appearance

        A tennis court with a ten foot high spar of smoked quartz jutting from where the umpire chair should be. Close examination yields a murky figure trapped in inside, and anyone listening closely can hear a muffled, endless scream of rage. Two Consorts and two Courtiers are playing a friendly game of doubles, despite the fact that they are on guard duty.
        History
        The quartz contains Suriel, Third Sphere Angel of the Moon. Some years ago, it decided the Prince was infringing on its domain, and made the mistake of interrupting one of his tennis games in an attempt to confront him. Its prison rests on the old court even now, daubed with specious red sigils that siphon Suriel’s power and maintain the Gardens’ endless duskShould anyone efface these symbols, the natural cycle of night and day will return.Should anyone break open Suriel’s prison as well (0 AC, 100 HP), the angel will burst forth in a blast of scorching light and start rampaging across the Gardens in search of the Prince.
        Suriel, Angel of the Third Sphere and Governor of the Moon
        HD 7 Speedhuman (fly)
        Armor as plate Attack longsword, angelic weapon 
        Morale 11 Alignment Lawful
        • Armor Gematria: Suriel is immune to damage that is a multiple of or contains the number 3. 
        • Angelic Weapon: An ivory hierogram, embedded in Suriel’s palm. On a successful hit, it causes spears of lightning to plummet from the heavens onto the target, dealing d12 damage. If taken from the angel, it can be used 5 times before breaking. 
        • Domain: Suriel can cause localized eclipses. They only affect a small area (a village or a city block, for example) and are unnoticeable to anyone outside the afflicted locale. If the angel so wishes, it can center the eclipse on a particular person or item, so that they are trapped in a false and endless night. Suriel can also exert some control over gravity. It can double or halve gravitational forces at half shortbow range around itself

        jacinto classes, LotFP, Pernicious Albion

        how they hunger

        Most D&Dish barbarians don’t do it for me. Insane, screaming rage shouldn’t really be a question of resource management. So here’s an mystic order of heathens going into ecstatic rampages instead.

        Beast Knight
        a class for old school rpgs
        by Tiptoe distributed under Creative Commons

        (also maenads, berserkers, werewolves, bassarids)

        HP: as dwarf
        Saving throws: as dwarf
        Experience: as elf
        Attack bonus: as thief

        Once every few centuries, the sleeping nature gods of Albion awaken and convene a Wild Hunt, running down all they come across. Those they overtake have a choice: join the Hunt and be consigned to an eternity of slumber and slaughter with Albion’s elder deities, or perish. The Beast Knights are an order of warriors founded by a Britonnic hero who escaped the Hunt after joining–a feat performed neither before nor since, not by angels or demons or the greatest of fairies.

        The Beast Knights venerate wild animals: the grace of predators, the desperation of prey, nature red in tooth and claw etc etc. They’ll talk about it at great lengths if you let them. In any case, Beast Knights, upon initiation, take a spirit of the deepest forest into their minds and bodies. Its supernatural strength, rather than strict training, allows them to fight as effectively as any warrior. Beast Knights traditionally wear hoods or masks depicting the face of an animal, such as a wolf, bear, hart, or crow. Some believe these become a part of the knight’s body when they fight.

        by Lulsa Uribe distributed under Creative Commons

        Beast Knights improve their skills as half as fast as a specialist/thief. In LotFP, they start with 2 skill points and gain 1 more every level.

        When a beast knight spends a Turn calling up their spirit, they enter a frenzy. Knights in this state:

        • attack as a fighter. If fighters are entitled to special maneuvers, beast knights cannot use them.
        • must run on all fours, and their speed becomes 1.5 times that of a human
        • deal d8 with unarmed attacks (bite and claw)
        • must make a melee attack every round. If there are no enemies left, they move onto allies or bystanders, though they can still choose who to attack.
        • cannot use any skill or perform any task that requires anything more than base animal cunning

        To come to their senses, a beast knight must roll equal to or under 1+half level on a d6. This takes a full Turn, and if they take damage during that time, they automatically fail. Every time a non-frenzied beast knight takes damage when their current HP is 50% or less than maximum, they must make an identical check to stop themselves from going into a frenzy.

        The wild spirits that possess Beast Knights hate all the works of mankind; if a knight dons metal armor, their spirit will not allow them to frenzy until the next full moon.

        Knights can use their Languages skill to determine if they can speak animal languages (Serpent; Bird; Swine; Mew, the language of cats; etc).