jacinto Pernicious Albion

upon the ancient shores of albion…

A Most Thoroughly Pernicious Pamphlet has received an Honorable Mention in the distinguished 2016 Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence in Gaming, an honor I will treasure until my dying day, and one I will clutch in my bony fist long after.

I’ve decided to lower the price of the Pamphlet to $2, so if you’ve been holding out in hopes of a lower price, your day has come. You can get it here. If Gumroad gives you any trouble, which has been known to happen, let me know in the comments of this post or over on Google+ and I’ll get you a copy.

jacinto fairy, intro, is this gonna work, magic, occult, Pernicious Albion, spell, type v

MAGICIANS: THE MAGICKING: THE RPG

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is a very good novel that you should read. I have been wanting to run a game based on it (Austen pastiche in moody Napoleonic-era Britain; wicked fairies, whimsical magicians, intrigue, kidnapping, murder) for quite some time; my setting Pernicious Albion is me turning it into a D&D game. I have been wanting to run something more true to form, but it’s a bit tough. Magicians operate in quite a different scale than most people; one of my favorite parts of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a footnote where the author tells us Spain considered demanding reparations for one of the main characters after he rearranged a fair chunk of its geography.

Ars Magica and Fate are obvious solutions, but I’m not too hot on actually running them. This is a bullshit hack, but its starts to get at the feel I’m going for.

Character Creation
Make a 5th edition character. Pick human as the race, and do not pick a class. You are all Magicians.

Magicians start with 10d6 Magic dice. This represents the strength of their sorcery. They can temporarily lose Magic dice through exertion, but they can never have more than their maximum.

Magicians do not have a set list of spells. Each time they cast one, they determine what it does by assigning dice to its Duration, Range, Area Of Effect, and Intensity. Each category must have at least one dice, and can have up to 5. The total number of dice assigned to a spell cannot exceed a magician’s current Magic dice.

Once a magician has determined a spell’s effects, they roll all of the assigned dice.

  • When a dice comes up 6, the magician removes it from their pool of Magic dice until they take a long rest.
  • If a number of dice greater than a magician’s level come up 1, the spell is a botch. Something happens, and it is related to the spell’s effect, but only incidental to what the magician wanted to happen.

Casting a spell does not expend Magic dice unless they come up a 6. Unless the spell is a botch, the spell always works, even if the magician loses or runs out of dice.

The following charts state how many dice a magician must assign to a given category in order to achieve a given effect. All spells use the same Duration, Range, and Area Of Effect Tables, but no two spells use the same Intensity table.

Most of the tables are self explanatory. Area Of Effect details the size of the area effected around the actual spell. Intensity (each Intensity table is listed with each spell) details the greatest creature, object, or concept that can be affected by the spell. If a magician has an Area Of Effect that encompasses an entire city but an Intensity of “a torchfire” when casting the spell It Burns, they could put out every candle in town. If Intensity ever seems to encroach on Area of Effect, just use whichever the magician has placed more dice in.

DURATION

1d6 A moment
2d6 A day
3d6 A week
4d6 A month
5d6 A year and a day

RANGE

1d6 an arm’s span
2d6 a stone’s throw
3d6 shouting distance
4d6 within sight
5d6 out beyond the horizon

AREA OF EFFECT.

1d6 all within an arm’s span
2d6 all within the range of a thrown stone
3d6 all within shouting distance
4d6 all within sight
5d6 all to out beyond the horizon

Spells
There are, of course, far more spells than this. Magicians start with 3.

Utterance of Black Feathers
Allows a magician to perform feats of manipulation, transformation, summoning, and destruction pertaining to crows.
INTENSITY

1d6 one crow
2d6 thirteen crows
3d6 a murder of crows
4d6 crows to cover a field
5d6 crows to blacken the sky

Breath of the Holy Earth
Allows a magician to call forth, direct, and banish wind. (+Alex Chalk gets credit for this one)
INTENSITY

1d6 a draft
2d6 a breeze
3d6 a gust
4d6 a gale
5d6 a whirlwind

It Burns
Allows a magician to enkindle, throw, extinguish, shape, and otherwise manipulate flame.
INTENSITY

1d6 a torchfire
2d6 a campfire
3d6 a bonfire
4d6 a funeral pyre
5d6 a housefire

Fingers of Night
Allows a magician to create, shape, and banish darkness

INTENSITY

1d6 a shadow like that of a passing cloud
2d6 the gloom of a thick forest
3d6 night, just as the last of the sun is leaving the sky
4d6 a moonless night
5d6 a darkness heavy enough to be felt

Greatest Folly
Allows a magician to ignite, strengthen, diminish, and twist feelings of affection.

INTENSITY

1d6 Delight
2d6 Friendship
3d6 Infatuation
4d6 Craven Obsession
5d6 Love

Really should put up a setting sketch, but I’m tired and don’t feel very good so eh. Tomorrow maybe. Here’s some pictures of magicians.

the Lackaday Twins (not actual title, by John Singer Sargent)

John Pharoah, Ursurper to the Northern Throne (not actual title, from El Shaddai)

Lord Umberlin of  the Bells (not actual title, from etrian odyssey)
Claude the Gaul, wanted in 10 counties for violating the course of history (from Persona 5, not actual title)
jacinto lordy lordy, Pernicious Albion

SPACE MAGIC

So I found this mess while digging through my unpublished blog posts. It’s Pernicious Albion circa January 2013, back when it was based directly off of Carcosa, as you can probably tell from the amount of gonzo science fiction elements.

ORBITAL WIZARD
Aurelian is a lich that has blasted himself into space with stolen Moth Elf technology, strapped himself onto an arcane satellite, and parked himself in geosynchronous orbit above Silver Fork Carcosa, observing it with grafted-on telescopic eyes. He projects his magic down to the surface with great metal dishes, and is the terror of several small towns scattered across the Western Hemisphere, though cities generally have enough magicians to keep them safe. He also has a small network of spies, which he maintains through magical communication. He often sells information to various Dark Lords, Fairy Sorcerers, and Lunar Giants, as there is nothing he cannot see. However, his field of view when zoomed in is incredibly narrow (the party doesn’t have to worry about being Fireballed from high orbit), so while he can watch everyone that passes through a town, he can’t find them wandering the countryside. Aurelian covets the space station occupied by the gravity dragon known as Charles V, as it is both secure and filled with texts describing the strange space-warping and cthonic magic of the station’s inhabitant. If the party makes a name for themselves and the lich’s spies find out, he will offer to pay them an outrageous sum of money if they kill Charles V. Aurelian will provide the transportation.

GRAVITY DRAGON
Charles V is neither chromatic nor metallic; the dragons of Carcosa are affiliated with greater powers and stranger frequencies. He has taken up residence in an abandoned Moth Elf space station, which traces a crazed trajectory high above Carcosa’s surface. His size is immaterial; Charles V occupies several planes and can snake his away around obstacles along alien axes. He does not attack with anything so unsubtle as fiery breathe, and favors tearing of chunks of his enemies with small gravity fields. Depleted uranium weapons deal double damage against him. In addition to various magical tracts, Charles V’s hoard contains maps marking the locations of several other dragon lairs. More on this later.

OTHER DRAGONS
Include gamma dragons, are white hot and cause terrible sickness in nearby communities; tidal dragons, which manifest themselves as waves (regardless of the material they travel through, so they are like sentient, mobile Tacoma Narrows Bridge disasters); entropy dragons, which induce catastrophic disorder through their breathe.

ON SORCERERS IN SILVER FORK CARCOSA

This is actually recycled stuff from an abandoned campaign
I hate pointy hats and robes, so in Silver Fork Carcosa, all sorcerers have something terribly, terribly wrong with them.
About this sorcerer
  • Is bound in an immense brass coffin; carried about on a palanquin by blindfolded and gagged slaves who act in perfect coordination
  • Has a furnace for a heart; requires coal to live
  • Only has one eye located in the back of their throat; must open mouth wide to see
  • Has long, stilt-like legs that terminate in iron spikes
  • Has a head is put on upside down
  • Has lungs that don’t work; golem servant pumps a set of bellows stuck into abdomen
  • Has been embalmed and stuffed with rose petals; perfectly ambulatory
  •  Exudes a powerful odor of lemons
  • Has the voice of a screaming choir
  • Has a millipede instead of legs
  • Has a face (not a mask) carved from ivory; if removed, you can see their brain
  • Is always on fire
  • Has elephant tusks growing from their elbows
  • Has smoke instead of blood
  • Has extra-long, exposed, articulating ribs
  • Has small tentacles instead of teeth
  • Moves in time with the ticking of the giant clock embedded in chest
  • Verbal components of spells manifest themselves as razor blades tumbling from sorcerer’s lips
  • Bulging chameleon eyes afford panoramic view 
  •  Nearly limp body carried about on spider-legged apparatus
jacinto amateur hour, is this gonna work, Pernicious Albion

A MOST THOROUGHLY PERNICIOUS PAMPHLET ON SALE NOW

Upon the Ancient Shores of Albion an Evil Makes Its Way

 A Most Thoroughly Pernicious Pamphlet is now on sale. You can get it here

What is A Most Pernicious Pamphlet?
It is an A5, 17 page staple-bound booklet on my old school rpg campaign setting, Pernicious Albion. It’s all insane angel conspiracies, occult aristocracy, revenant Romans, tennis with vampires, evil couture, Ars Goetia, royal spawning pits, realpolitik, light homoeroticism, and lakes of human teeth, but for now, you get the pamphlet, which contains
  • two ruleset-agnostic classes: the vampire and the warlock
  • modifications to the cleric and the magic-user
  • three supernatual patrons with tables for motivations, goals, and methods
  • equipment, services, weapons, and armor tables designed for new characters in eerie fairy tale settings
  • Esoteric languages

Why should I buy it?
I’d like to think it is filled with good ideas you can include in your game, but also 

  • You like what you’ve read on my blog.
  • I tried hard to make it an entertaining read.
  • It features monstrously beautiful art by the likes of Logan Knight, Matthew Adams, Alex Chalk, and the Anxious Princess.
  • I wrote this with an aim to compress setting description and character creation into a single process: the classes, starting equipment, and languages all convey Albion to players without the need for a lot of exposition. This might be a good template for you if you want to do the same.

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 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 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).

        jacinto demon, fairy, i am sick, monsters, Pernicious Albion, wonders and wickedness

        Personages Seen in the Miserous Hills

        Prose is a little extra purple today, but this was fun to write. Adapting my half-assed God of the Earth dungeon for Albion.
         
        Countess of Secrets-kept, true Lady of Faerie
        Wolves proclaim her arrival and foxes bear her train: the Countess of Secrets-kept, 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.

        HD 10 Speed human
        Armor none Attack none
        Morale 9 Alignment Chaotic

        Abilities

        • Command Canine:  All foxes, hounds, and wolves in Albion must obey the Countess, for they sold their service to her long ago. 
        • Fairy-power: As a greater fairy, the Countess can cast Totem/Polymorph Other, Geas/Covenant, Revisitation/Teleport, and Bewitch/Charm Person. She cannot cast more than 10 spells in a day.
        • Lich-craft/Animate Dead:  The Countess’ closest and dearest ally is Lucifer, with whom she plays chess every Sunday. As a birthday present some centuries ago, he gave her the ability to raise the dead, though she only has power over the remains of the damned.

        Her servants are three brothers named Mercy-me, Noose-tight, and Lackaday. They are perfectly identical in their hideousness and eloquently rude to all but their mistress. Each has a different, baroque scheme to depose the Countess, claim her title, and curse her house unto thirteen generation as revenge for these long millennia of servitude. They bicker amongst themselves endlessly.

        The Countess of Secrets-kept is currently pursuing the God of the Earth for its heart, so that she can make it into a chess pawn–she misplaced her last one, carved from Helen of Troy’s rib.

        Too Little Too Late, Demon of the 4th Circle
        It changes shape like humans change clothes, but no matter how it looks, it always feels wrong, like a nail pounded into the flesh of the world. Without its magic, Too Little Too Late is as red and slick and slender as a man without skin, its mouth crowded with crocodile teeth than can punch through steel.

        HD 9 Speed human
        Armor as plate Attack as longsword (claws)
        Morale 8 Alignment Chaotic

        Abilities

        • Temptation of the Miser: Victim must save vs Magic or have a large, beautifully cut gem worth £100×d10 grow painlessly and harmlessly in their forehead. Removing this gem is excruciatingly painful, horrifically bloody, and invariably fatal.
        • Deception: Too Little Too Late can assume any human appearance it pleases
        • Hell-power:  As a demon, Too Litle Too Late can 9 spells a day from the Diabolism school. It can also assume bodily control over humans by crawling into their mouths, though they are allowed a single Save vs Magic to expel it.

        Too Little Too Late hunts the God of the Earth to possess it and build an infernal kingdom from the safety of its monstrous new body.