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).

        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.

        jacinto monsters, Pernicious Albion

        Secret Trash

        Three Lore Garbage facts about Albion:

        1. There are two secret cardinal directions in Albion, both orthogonal to the conventional four. Going Deathwise leads one closer to the Hereafters. Going there is generally a one way trip, but travelers can stop at the Sunless Lands, the miserable marches beyond the Lands of the Living where the angels, demons, and vampires make their courts. The opposite direction, Whimwards, leads into the Kingdom of Faerie, ruled by the King of Roses Red and his sprawling, decadent court. 
        2. Death is a physical entity in Albion. It is responsible for ensuring that the deceased transition to the Hereafters properly and employs a vast, sclerotic bureaucracy of psychopomps and demigods to fulfill its duty. Known as the House of Death, it largely does its job, but history is filled with powerful magicians who extended their lives by banishing, imprisoning, or binding the psychopomps sent to collect their souls. Death always wins out in the end, however–neutralizing a psychopomp means that the House will eventually get around to sending something more powerful to find out what happened to one of their agents, and at the top of the hierarchy is Death itself. (Functionally, this means rather than a Death and Dismemberment roll, there’s a Les Petites Morts table that determines which psychopomp is coming to scoop out your soul, and what you can do to stop them)
        3. Hell sent the Infernal Expeditionary Army to occupy Albion centuries ago. It failed utterly, but its leaders decided to stay–the climate was lot better, and they only had an eternity of excruciating punishment to look forward to if they returned. Now their general and her officers pass their time by waging perennial war against the angels the vampire warlords in the Sunless Lands, collecting souls and sowing sin all the while.

        Here’s a monster: 
        Vestal of Cinder
        HD 10 Speed human (hover)
        Armor none Attack throw Black Fire (as greataxe, see below)
        Morale 12 Alignment Lawful
         
        Vestal Virgins who blasphemously immolated themselves in the sacred flames they tended, charred skeletons in pristine white vestments. There are thirteen in all the world, and they serve Vesta Mortua, Goddess of the Cold Hearth. In their freezing temples, they endlessly perform the rituals that sustain the necromantic legacy of fallen Rome.

        Vestals of Cinder can cast Necromancy spells as a 10th level magician.

        Any flame ignited or tended by a Vestal of Cinder is Black Fire, which sheds cold and dark rather than heat and light. Just as true flame burns the living to death, Black Fire burns the dead back to life, raising them as malevolent undead creatures with the abilities, appearance, and knowledge they had when they lived. 

        When a Vestal of Cinder dies, her body reforms in the Black Fires of her home temple the following midnight. These flames can only be extinguished through supreme magical effort–a powerful Angel of Seas or a huge quantity of Clarified Water might do the job.

        Inverse Revenant
        HD as in life Speed human
        Armor as worn Attack as wielded weapon
        Morale 12 Alignment Neutral
         
        Black Fire is inverse flame, and those burned to life by it share that quality. Inverse revenants retain the memories, abilities, and attributes they possessed in life, and appear as a mirror image of their living selves. Inverse revenants do not retain their personality–they are all malicious, albeit loyal, servants of whoever started the fire that raised them. They speak to each other backwards and will do anything to avoid the sight of their own reflection. 

        jacinto classes, clerics, LotFP, wonders and wickedness

        Cult Class(ic)

        I’ve had this idea rolling around in my head for a while, and when I saw this post by Arnold, i figured out how to fit it all together.

          GODLING

        A  race-class for Old School D&D

        HP and XP as Magic-user
        Save and Attack Bonus as Cleric
        Godlings are minor, furtive divinities unable to directly interfere with the Land of the Living and the mortals therein. Instead, they act through cults and miracles, in hopes of establishing a true religion and becoming a greater god. Godlings can look like pretty much anything (that isn’t stupid) and their size and appearance becomes progressively more impressive as they gain levels.
        SHRINES

        Godlings can perceive, speak with, and cast spells on anything near their shrines. If all of a godling’s shrines are destroyed, their connection with the Land of the Living is permanently severed (i.e. it’s time for a new character).

        1st level godlings start with a single shabby shrine in the nearest settlement. Godlings gain 1 xp for every gold piece spent on improving any of their shrines. Improvements can be aesthetic, or they can make the shrine harder to find or destroy. Godlings can also build new shrines to make themselves harder to permanently banish–establishing one costs 1000 sp and doesn’t count towards experience.

        FOLLOWERS 
        from princess mononoke

        To interact with the Land of the Living beyond their shrine, a godling needs followers to act as proxies. In any town they have a shrine, they can establish a cult. To do so, they need to formulate some sort of creed or promise for their followers. Funny clothes help, too. The total number of cultists cannot exceed the godling’s level. Cultists work like retainers, save for the following:

        • A godling can perceive through any of their cultists’ senses, communicate with them mentally, and cast spells through them 
        • Cultists will do any mundane, non-dangerous task their godling tells them to do without question, and can be trusted not to steal items or money. 
        • Cultists receive a permanent +1 to Morale for every spell their godlings casts in their presence
        • Cultists do not require payment

        Godlings still might have other worshipers, but cultists are the ones fanatic enough to put themselves at risk. Godlings can hire regular retainers, too, though they require pay and won’t sing your weird songs or wear those stupid robes. Other player characters cannot become cultists.

        MIRACLES

        Godlings can cast a number of spells equal to their level each adventure. They can cast any spell they know and begin knowing all the spells in a single school. Godlings can gain access to additional spell schools by hunting down one of their fellows in the Land of Spirits and eating them. Any spell that targets the self can instead be cast on a godling’s cultists. A godling’s spell school is a reflection of their nature:

        Devil: Diabolism
        God of Nature: Elementalism
        God of Death: Necromancy
        God of Magic: Spiritualism
        God of Travel: Translocation
        God of Dreams: Psychomancy
        God of Life: Vivimancy

        LOCALITY

        The Spirit World coincides perfectly, intangibly, and invisibly with the Land of the Living. Every location in the Spirit World has a Land of the Living analogue. Godlings can directly interact with creatures and objects in the Spirit World, so players should be explicit where their character is–a godling can function perfectly well hanging out in town, sending miracles at a distance, but they won’t be able to interfere with Spirit World obstacles for their co-adventurers if they do so.

        In any situation where a godling actually enters combat (such as when they confront another spirit or if they are pulled into the Land of the Living by a spell), they fight as a Cleric of equal level.