jacinto Isle of the Unknown, LotFP, table

Necromancers of the Unknown

EDIT: Super awesome automagic generator here

Isle of the Unknown’s magic-users are okay I guess but I like Logan Knight’s idea of making a crazy undead Island of the It’s Unknown Why Anyone Would Come Here so here are some necromancer tables.

Necromancers are all Magic-Users with 2d8 HD. Their saves are 12 minus half level. They have 1 random spell per available spell level. Like the Isle’s vampires, they might have use for adventurers, so roll on a reaction table  if you have one.

From Viewtiful Joe
by Harry Clarke

This necromancer’s source of power is
1. A wheezing wheeled calliope. Its disturbing music must reach the dead for it to raise them.
2. A room-sized mechanism of cedar and black metal. Their magic only works within a 10 mile radius. 
3. A kiln. Reanimate earthly remains by placing them in its cool black flame.
4. A book bound in gold. Must read directly from its pages to work their magic.
5. A silver-gilt hookah. Breathing its smoke into the faces of the weak-willed transforms them into shambling servants
6. Red candles. If placed on a grave or tombstone and burned, it reanimates all those buried below.
7. Tarnished silver coins. If placed in the mouth of someone recently deceased, it creates a powerful form of undead, but there are only twelve, numbered with Roman numerals.
8. A wand twined with asphodel. Stolen from the King of the Dead; can raise the dead with memory intact.
9. An ebony and silver pocketwatch. Raises all dead in sight, but permanently returns them to a peaceful afterlife after 12 hours.
10. A crude bronze knife. Anyone killed with this knife will rise again as a loyal zombie servitor
11. Parasitic orchids. Infest skeletons and the recently deceased; animation is sustained with sunlight
12. A bone signet ring. Any remains affixed with a wax seal bearing its symbol rise again, but fall if the seal is destroyed or removed.

This necromancer wears
1. A suit of armor made from bones
2. Nothing but swirling tattoos
3. Stilts
4. A peacock-feathered coat
5.  Black and red ritual vestments
6. Ceremonial garb carved from jade
7. clawed prostheses of wood and ivory (1-4 random limbs)
8. A crow mask
9. A mask shaped like a rose blossom
10. a tooth-studded cloak
11.  A spider head mask
12. heavy gold jewelry
13. knives strapped to every part of their body
14. body piercings everywhere
15. a swarm of live hummingbirds, attached to their clothes with tiny chains
16.  long white gloves
17. a blond wig
18. an electric green ballroom gown
19. a little black dress
20. a domino mask

This necromancer’s servant(s) is/are
1. A murder of crows.
2. A pack of wolves.
3. Thirteen crude clay idols, human shaped and the size of a child.
4.  2d6 ex-bandits, each bound to service with a sigil tattooed to their chest
5.  an elderly butler in traditional garbs
6. an axe-wielding brute, who always wears a cowl
7. a swarm of rats.
8.  Six stone gargoyles.
9. a man with the head of a wolf. 
10. an easy to replenish swarm of razor-edged origami spiders
The servants’ special ability is
1. The necromancer can see through their eyes and speak through their mouth
2. They can disguise themselves as an unassuming human
3. They can disguise themelves as statues
4. They can spread disease
5. They are master poisoners/terribly venomous
6. They can fly through the air wildly, on great gusts of wind
7.  They can draw on the necromancer’s memorized spells in times of need
8. They are immune to mundane weapons.

This necromancer’s magic fails in the presence of/contact with
1. The sound of iron bells
2. Sunlight
3. Moonlight
4. Rowan wood
5. A holy relic
6. a hamsa
7.  recitation of the Prayer of St. Apollinaire
8.  holy water
9.  wolfsbane
10. a crowing rooster 

from Twilight Princess
jacinto Isle of the Unknown, LotFP, table

Vampires of the Unknown

A little disappointed with Isle of the Unknown. It has bad-wacky monsters and lacks the aesthetic consistency of Carcosa (as icky as it was). However,  I really like vampires, and hexmaps can be easy to repurpose, so here is a table to replace IotU’s polyhedral panda-snakes with undead.

from Boktai

An encountered vampire has 3d6 HD. Its saves are 13 minus half HD. They aren’t necessarily hostile, especially to potentially useful adventurers, so roll on a reaction table if you’ve got one.

This vampire can
1. Transfix with its stare. Target must Save vs Magic or stare into vampire’s eyes until eye contact is broken.
2. Murder with its song. Can sing a bloody tune that deals 1d6 damage/round to all others in earshot.
3. Freeze with its breathe. Range: Melee; target Save vs Paralyze or take -4 to hit as icy blood courses through body. Lasts until dawn.
4. Bind with its shadow. Shadow is an impassible obstruction. If someone occupies the same space as it because of a change in lightsource, they take d12 damage/round until the shadow is moved.
5. Rend with its claws. Each successful attack also reduces AC from armor by d4.
6. Warp with its touch. Can cast Polymorph Other at will on whoever it touches; lasts d6 rounds.
7. Subjugate with its words. Can cast the cleric Command spell at will.
8. Avenge with its death. Whoever lands the killing blow on this vampire becomes a vampire.

This vampire feeds on
1-90: Blood
91: Mud
92: Other vampires
93: alms, willingly given
94: hair
95: fingernails
96: roses
97: Gold
98: Marrow
99: Dreams
100: Darkness

This vampire turns into
1-30: Baaaats
31-60: a giant wolf
61-90: mist
91: a gentle breeze, holding aloft fragrant flower petals
92: a monstrous man/bat hybrid
93: a swarm of scarab beetles
94: a ghastly blue flame
95: a black cat
96: a two-headed serpent (extremely venomous)
97: a lemur
98: a mobile patch of grave mold
99: a twisting length of red silk
100: two smaller vampires

This vampire wears (among other things) a(n)
1. full suit of armor
2. silk robe
3. waist-coat
4. magnificent dress
5. jackal mask
6. thigh-high boots
7. cape
8. crown
9. makeup
10. broken shackles
12. fur coat
13. veil
14. wimple and habit
15. mohawk
16. large number of tiny bells
17. smoked lenses
18. bunch of empty scabbards
19. giant steel cestus
20. antlered headdress

This vampire’s secret weakness is

(If a vampire reduced to 0 HP succeeds a Save vs Magic, it will return in d20 days, regardless the state or location of its body, unless its killers take advantage of its secret weakness. These can be determined by tricking vampires into revealing them, or finding a true sage, hierophant, or scholar who can divine the answer.)
  
1-30: A stake through the heart
31-60: Decapitation
61-90: Exposure to sunlight
91: recitation of its epitaph (located in a graveyard d10 hexes away in a random direction)
92. fatal wounding with a silver spear
93. submersion in a swift-moving river or stream
94. burial by a cleric in consecrated ground
95. incineration
96. repairing and reblessing its vandalized burial place
97. physically carrying its body into the underworld. The King of the Dead is known to provide generous bounties for this.
98. vertical, head-first burial
99. mouth packed with salt
100. sincere absolution from its most-wronged victim
jacinto LotFP, Pop Tartary, table

It isn’t all glitter

Pop Tartary is awash with sour psychic static: The Signal, a malign spectrum emitted by America’s most gorgeously horrible nightmares.


When The Signal manifests…
1) The Gate Opens
All nearby screens go to static and _______ begin to swarm out.
   1. Rats
   2. Black snakes
   3. Crows
   4. Hagfish, coiling through air as if it were water
   5. Cockroaches
   6. Flies
2) Something Wicked This Way Comes 
The area is suffused with the fatigued yellow glow of a sodium bulb, and everyone present loses 1 point of Strength every round until they make a Save vs Paralyze. Once everyone had made their save, the following creature appears and attacks everyone present:
     Incarnation of Ennui
     Lumbering sickly radiance, immense grasping hands, wet ingénue eyes
     HD: Total number of Strength points lost
     Saves: 18-Strength lost
     Damage: d8
     Special Attack: Target must Save vs Paralyze or go last the following round
Once the creature dies, everyone recovers their Strength.
3) All Is Still
Nothing apparent happens. The party is now being followed The Noise, an irreal creature that wants to help them, but is only able to do so through spectacular acts of violence. The party will leave in their wake a trail of murder and mayhem, most of which tips the balance in their favor. At least until somebody notices.
4) You Change
   To find out what happens to the ones exposed to the Signal, roll a d6:
   1. Their eyes vanish, and their sockets look into a hissing field of static.
   2. They now look grainy and washed out, like an old photograph.
   3. Their shadow always looms behind them, black and twisted, like that scene from Nosferatu
   4. Their voice comes from nearby speakers when they try to speak, but they are otherwise mute
   5. Their breath smells like metal and cooking meat. Animals and children hate them.
   6. Their face is always blurred, like on the people being arrested on Cops.
5) Deceit Rules
    Pick a random PC. A Signal entity secretly tells them that an important (preferably seemingly friendly) NPC is secretly evil and must be stopped.
   Pick another random PC. A Signal entity secretly tells them that this NPC will play a vital role in stopping a terrible, possibly apocalyptic plot.
  A Signal entity secretly and separately tells each of the remaining PCs that a malign intelligence has seeded several of their comrades with dangerous delusions.
   Which of these messages is correct is up to you.
 6) Power Gathers
Those exposed to the Signal gain a random MU spell. They can cast it once before it is gone forever, but the must make Wisdom checks in times of stress in order to not cast it right then and there.

Noomancer
HP, XP and Saves as Magic-User

Noomancers are people who have a device that has Signal and can use it to warp the world around them. Spells are alien transmissions propagated through the Signal. A Noomancer starts play with 1+half level+Intelligence modifier spells, randomly selected from all spell levels of the Magic-User and Cleric lists. When a Noomancer spends 6 hours tuning their device, all remaining spells are replaced with 1+half level+Int mod new spells. They also must make a Save vs Magic or reality weakens. (Table compiled by Patrick Stuart)

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Pop Tartary Warfare

 I know I said I wasn’t going to use Pop Tartary, but this is too much fun.
Level 1

Weapons
Can be anything you want, really. Pick a range and size, and if you think your weapon should be able to do anything else, like stun or entangle, let me know and we can work something out. 

Range 
Melee: base damage is d10
Reach: base damage is d8
Ranged: base damage is d6

Size
Small: -1 die size. one handed, easily concealable
Medium: base damage, one handed
Large: +1 die size, two handed


Armor

The more remarkably you’re dressed, the better your defense. You get a bonus to your AC equal to your Charisma modifier, rather than your Dexterity modifier. 
 
Boring: 12 AC. Examples: T shirts, cargo pants, gym shorts, something you’d wear to work (for most of us)


Cute: 14 AC. Examples: You know it when you see it.


Titillating: 16 AC. Examples: fur coats, handcuffs, stompy boots, big hats, leather, things with lots of buckles, cabana boys and French maids, dayglo

Toxic: 18 AC. Something you’d only ever see on a runway.  Whole animals, stilts, fish tanks, peacock feathers


As a note, this isn’t “Painstaking describe what your character is wearing” (unless you want to, of course). I am more thinking “find something amusing on Image Search.”

Not sure where this fits in, but I feel like it belongs

jacinto intro, LotFP, Pop Tartary

Post Pop Apocalypse


DnD requires give and take between what the players want and what the DM wants, and so there are some ideas I have that will probably never see the table, just because my players aren’t interested and I don’t have the confidence to pull it off if they were. This is one of them.
Pop Tartary* tastes like bubblegum and isopropyl alcohol.
Pop Tartary looks like Divine:
And sounds like these:
 
 
Pop Tartary Americana is: ruined future, nuclear science and black magic, leather vests, platform shoes, pop star prophets, glitter in the streets and blood in the water, go go boots, sweat sheen, garbage witches, strange frequencies and nightmare channels, sentient music videos, compulsory reality TV, weak reality, false eyelashes, record producer liches, Lady Gaga has a cult but Azealia Banks has an army, nasty cute, the devil wears Birkenstocks, occult street drugs, glass jewelry, Elvis impersonator priest/esses, Our Lady of Wigs, neon samurai, the Electric Saint, the Rocket Messiah, vinyl miniskirt is 18 AC, syringe demons 
Classes:
Noomancers tap weird subliminal Jungian frequencies to produce Magic-User spells; rely on radios and cell phones to work their art
Pop Mediums create servants from the psychic leftovers of lost fame
Gleaming Divas/Shining Adonises glammer their enemies with preternaturally good looks and eldritch voices
Neon Samurai fortify their martial expertise with the power of the electromagnetic spectrum
Henshin have turned sad fantasy into violent reality by actually gaining superpowers when they don costumes

Who’s Who of Pop Tartary:

Johnny Deluxe is the oldest vampire in Las Vegas
Marie Laveau is still alive and more sorcerous than ever
His Royal Majesty, The President of the United States of America is the iron-fisted monarch of the world’s greatest democracy
Adam is a superintelligent AI from Silicon Valley that has flourished since the end of the world
Monsters
Uranium Elementals, glowing nightmares born in the aftermath of the Incident
Discoheads have disco balls for heads and flail about with needle sharp claws
The Trash Dragon was born from a landfills and terrorizes the Southwest with its fallout breath
Big Crocadilly rules the luminously green swamps of Florida
Static demons crawl out of televisions tuned to the wrong sorts of channels
Paparazzi avoid direct conflicts, but love to snap pictures of you in compromising positions. Wagers of social warfare. 
Inspiration 
Blueprints of the Afterlife, Persona, Scissor Sisters, Diplo, Simon Green’s Nightside series (thoroughly mediocre!)
*by this I mean it is an anachronistic post-apocalyptic science fantasy setting like Richard’s Tartary and Jason K’s American Tartary, not that it is set in Asia

jacinto classes, is this gonna work, LotFP

Complete Arcane is completely terrible

It’s interesting fitting homebrew into LotFP’s paradigm. Its classes are very spare—the four main classes each have this one Thing That They Do, and they get better at it every level, but they can’t do much else. So making a class that fits into LotFP means you have to boil a class down to a single mechanic. I don’t know if I will be including any of this in my current game, but I want to get it on paper so I can stop thinking about it.
Okay, so first thing is two things.
  1. Warlocks from 3.5 are not very good.
  2. This short is charming:
It also demonstrates nearly everything a warlock is trying to be, minus the diabolism. The witches are blasty-shooty magic-users that have a wide array of tricks they can use as much as they want.
Witch, a class for LotFP
From Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together
 HP as Magic-User, Experience as Specialist, Saves as Cleric
All witches have a wand. They require it to cast spells. They can cast as spells as often as they wish. A spell can affect anything within 100 feet of the caster. A spell can do the following:
  • Replicate the effect of any simple weapon, tool, or mechanical object, such as a torch, grappling hook, bow and arrow, or ladder.
  • Manipulate an object. The witch uses Charisma in place of Strength and Dexterity.
A Witch can cast simultaneously a number of spells equal to 1 + half level. The maximum number of spells they can have active at one time is also 1 + half level. Otherwise, spells last until dismissed. 
I like shapeshifting characters in theory, but in practice, it seems to require a lot of paperwork. I think LotFP’s one-class-gets-one-ability structure works well in this case.
 
Beast Child, a class for LotFP
HP, Experience, and Saves as Fighter
Beast Children can turn into creatures. In order to be able to turn into a creature, a Beast Child must
  • Have a level greater than or equal to the creature’s HD.
  • Possess some part of the creature, such as a tooth, scale, or bone.

A Beast Child can have a number of forms equal to 1 + half level. If they exceed this limit, they must choose which forms to keep and which to discard. They can regain lost forms by reacquiring the corresponding creature part.They can transform as much as they like. It takes a full turn to turn into a creature. When in the form of a creature, Beast Children:

  • Keep their max and current HP, saving throws and attack bonus.
  • Gain the Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, of the creature
  • Gain any special abilities the creature possesses.

jacinto Carcosa, items, LotFP, Pernicious Albion, treasure

Treasure

I like magic items that go away when used. It makes them more valuable and interesting to the players, and I don’t have to worry too much about accidently turning the party into a bunch of superheroes.

  
FOUR THINGS YOU MIGHT FIND IN A DRUID’S LAIR

Wrathful Countenance
A lacquered wooden mask bearing an expression of ineffable rage. Whoever wears it grows to a prodigious size and gains:
  • 1d10 temporary hitpoints. These are tracked separately than normal HP, and damage depletes them first.
  • +2 to attack rolls
  • A strength score of 18
  • A Charisma score of 3
The mask cannot be removed until all of the temporary HP are depleted, at which point all other bonuses and penalties vanish and the mask cracks in two, falling to the ground.
Gurning Poppet
A small straw doll with a terrible grin stitched into its face. If a body part of an intended victim—a hank of hair, a nail clipping, a drop of blood— is pressed into the doll, and the doll is set alight, the victim will burst into flames and takes 3d6 damage.
Flower Slave
An large and delicate blue blossom with petals folded into the shape of a face. Once crushed, it releases a fragile but swift warrior, which will obey whoever destroyed the flower. It has the following statistics:
Armor Class: 18
HD: 1 (1 HP)
Move: 120’
Alignment: Chaotic
Saves: 13 in each
Weapon: Deals d4 damage. Roll 1d4 for details: (1-rose whip, entangles on hit; 2-venom spear, target must make Poison Save or take -2 to hit for a turn; 3-willow switch, enrages enemies with low intelligence; 4-filigreed bow, range as longbow
Somnolent Bell
When struck, this glass bell produces a stultifying tone, forcing all who can hear it, including the user, to Save vs Paralyze or fall asleep for d10 minutes. This shatters the bell.