HORNED DEVIL AND BETTERISHPHOTOS OF GERYON and then some campaign malarky

Print PDF Okay so I'm having trouble remembering what's a horned devil and what's a hamatula and what's a crogunsdnflkndfgn'dg and blah they all look like gargoyles. I fancied up the horned devil , because I had some flash fabric scraps

And I retinkered with Geryon, made his mouths look more like anus:

I've decided I'm bored of the alphabetically progression, and now will proceed randomly.
Rolling a d100 and counting down gives me..
A mastodon!
A mastodon is what I will make next. Unless anyone was so very exciting about seeing the ice devil?


Also here's some half-assed encounter tables I wrote last night when I couldn't sleep for your gleaning/amusement/derision
Decide on some arbitrary chance of an encounter
It happened?
cool,

roll a 1d8

1-3 is some kind of notable wild life encounter, like a what's that rustling in the bushes psych out, a game animal wandering dumbly in plain view, or like "aw isn't that bird amazing/an omen of doom"
4-5 Is a potentially combat type thing! phwoar! See tables below!
6-Is some kind of environmental hazard/obstacle. Not necessary appropriate to the terrain depending on your whimsy quota.
7-Strange! Mysterious ruins! Ominous geo-glyphs! Unidentifiable carcass(strangely mangled) Inviting statues! A voice in the dark! Spooky lights!
8-Freebie! Something benevolent, like a drinking water, a half picked over caravan still lootable, beneficial herbs , a nice safe cave, etc.

Potentially violent encounters for...
Mountains!
1d12
1- Wendigo
2-Snow panther
3-Furred Quetzalcoatlus
4-Sinister Goats
5-Corbis
6-Howling Albino man things bearing mummified corpse on throne!
7-Sky ticks
8-hoop snakes
9-Vulvines
10-Stilt walking insane cannibal degenerates!
11-Gravity Hounds
12-Gremlin(s)

Islands
1.Fishing spider
2.Giant coconut crab
3. Gluttonous
4.Hairless monkey with bits of machnes bolted to their heads, that nail people upside down to trees
5.Pygmy Axebeaks
6.Whip scorpion
7.Cyros
8.Harpooner snail (a giant cone shell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conus )
9.Half stuck men
10.Flux tainted shark. Swims in air. Blinks.
11.Rocketeer Trilobite
12.Lampreys that fall out of trees on you

Munnish Forests
1.Great dogs
2.Man hives.
3.Raptors (small
4.curmudgeon
5.Gorillas, head hunting
7.Tri wolves
8.Giant harvestman(Opilione)
9.Carnivorous kangaroos
10.giant albino kiwi
11.Murder spirit
12.Whip tailed lizard

Desert
1.Nomads/bandits
2.Tumble ball beetles
3.Ambush Turtle
4.Heatray scorpion
5.Glass eel
6.Desiccator
7.Dainty killer
8.Whirring cactus
9.Rippers (carnivorous kangaroo)
10.Preserver
11.Sand anomaly
12.Giraffe , dire, burning gaze

mangrove
1.Mauler frog
2.Ridden
3.Piranhadon
4.lobotomized brute
5.Squibbon
6.Strider Squid
7.Electric eel
8.mud giant
9.Vampire fly
10.Draping doom
11.Otter, maneater, giant
12.Carnictis


and needless expanded:
What are they doing for intelligent encounters?
(corbis,gremlin, fishing spider, bandits/nomads)
1 Searching!
2 Fleeing!
3 Traveling!
4 Hunting!
5 Lost!
6Guarding!
7Gathering!
8 Wandering!

no, really, I couldn't sleep
this could all be so compacted..

searching for:
1.for a lost item
2.for children! Aw!
3.for a criminal!
4.for an exit/entrance
5.for a friend!
6.for the enemy! grrr!

Fleeing from,
1. A monster!
2. prosecution!
3. A disaster!
4. murderers!

Hunting, they are hunting WHAT
1.why, something big and dangerous
2.some unfortunate intelligent creature,for EVIL reasons
3.some unfortunate intelligent creature,for GOOD reasons(like justice, or um.. to tell them their mums not dead?)
4. some ordinary food animal
5.some harmless but cute and rare
6.something complete bizarre , for reasons of DARK MEDICINE or PROPHECY or BECAUSE ITS STUPID LOOKING AND SHOULD DIE

Lost!
1.and their home is very near
2.they don't have a home
3.they are very far from home. And sad.
4.From somewhere impossible!

Guarding!
1 herd of animals
2 children playing
3 others of their kind gathering something
4 A fresh kill
5 a entrance/location
6 a wounded comrade

Gathering! its totally different from hunting and searching!
1. Medicine! herbs and shit
2.spoils from a battle site
3. plants/fungus/seaweed for eating
4.resources to build something out of, like a bridge!
5.some kinda fancy resource  like  dyes or clays or flowers MOTIVATED BY CULTURE
6.small edible animals caught in snares or nets

Travelling!
1. because they are gonna trade something!
2. because they need to buy something!
3.they are going home!
4.migrating!
5.to aid another group in war!
6.for some kind of ceremony reason, like attending a wedding or a funeral

Wandering! like traveling but you have no idea where you going and totally different than lost because you know where you've come from
1.Vision quest
2.exiled!
3.Bored!
4.looking for a new home!
5.crazy!
6.trouble seeking!


Oh and here's a brief description of those monsters mentioned above
GREAT DOGS
a massive gangly legged english mastiff, with glowing eyes and spittle. Hunt in eerily silenct packs.

WHIP TAILED LIZARD
its a great big skink, with a tail, twice its length, that tapers to a impossible point. Could slice a mans eyelids and he wouldn't know it until he tried to blink.

SKY TICKS
Ticks that swell up with air and drift up behind you like dreadfully balloons, then exhale , to ram into you and gorge on your blood. Only attack from behind, and dart for cover if you catch them sneaking up on you and turn around. Only to resume stalking you, the moment your back is turned, like some RETARDED CHILDREN'S GAME

TRI WOLVES
3 wolves joined together jowl to jowl to jowl, a demented triangle of fang and limb, alternating the bottom wolves in mid-charge, thus having a bizarre side tumbling movement even as they close the distance to your tender guts

MURDER SPIRIT
A floating gel like thing,its centre glowing with mandalas, it waves its mockery of limbs at you and makes you bleed with its stare


AMBUSH TURTLE:
its a snapping turtle that hides in sand dunes. yep.

TUMBLE BALL BEETLES
a mass of fleshing rending beetles that travel by locking limbs and forming a large tumble weed like ball. When the ball collides with meat, the structure collapses in a feast of agony!

GLASS EEL
A translucent eel, the thickness of horse's leg, diving through the sand. When it brushes against you, its smooth skin is so eerily sharp, it has disappeared beneath the sand by the time you blood starts gushing out

WENDIGO
The terror of the mountains, there furry white forms appearing benign form a distance, but with their leaps are horrible, suddenly covering 100 of metres in seconds, there black furless skulls snarling open with a mangle of teeth and gore. When they land, they can do so as lightly as snowflake , or with the sudden jarring impact their velocity demands. It is said they void waste on the wind , which entertains the mind in howls, and there it corrupts causing cannibalism and infanticide.

DAINTY KILLER
a glistening shimmering wind born jellyfish, its dangling ribbons cause paralysis. It will then carry the paralyzed victim to a great height and drop them.

PRESERVER
A hulking lizard thing , squatted on 2 legs, like a age crippled man, with long thin spines its height again crowning its head and back. Its named for its habit of impaling its kills on the end of its spines to wind dry. It cries salty red tears, which it anoints these bodies with, in cruel mockery of mourning, the banal reason being the tears deterring flys.

VAMPIRE FLY
a fly the size of a man, its back alive with squirming maggots. These are dropped in swooping dive bombs, the maggots latching on , and sucking blood. The maggots suck as much as they can in a short amount of time, then drop off into the water, where they rapidly swim away to begin metamorphosis into the adult form.
 
HALF STUCK MEN
unfortunates that have subjected to a cruel dose of slurring flux radiation, they randomly fluctuate between moving Slow, Hasted and frozen (and invulnerable) in time. They appear to be maddened by this strange agony that drives them to kill! kill! kill!
Some groups of halfstuckmen are synchronized, freezing , hasting and slowing together. Others deviant individually in time.
   
CYROS
a snake tracing figures 8 in the air, surrounded by a blue, freezing flame, it drinks heat and is to be feared

GLUTTONOUS
a pig that when fully opening its jaw, nearly splits in 2! infamous for one gluttonous luring hungry sailors by with its innocent piggy looks, the other gluttonous lying in wait close by.

RIDDEN
a large sword limbed arachnid that latchs on to the back of a monkey, punch its fangs through the eye sockets and usurping the monkey as a macabre steed.

HEAT RAY SCORPION
A large scorpion, with in place of the stinger, is a crystal lens, which with it focuses the suns rays in a killing beam.

SQUIBBONS, STRIDER SQUID:
see here
(strider squid as megasquid)

DRAPING DOOM
a sea anemone disguised as a tree

MUD GIANT
a slime mold colony that animates a mass of vines mud and branchs in looming form. It rears up like a wave and crashes down bludgeoning and drowning. Anyone played moonstone on the amiga?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5CZ6TqCgps

WHIRRING CACTUS
those big flying things in the hyrule plains in Zelda: ocarina of time

SAND ANOMALY
a malevolent point in space that whirls sand around it, killing by abrasion and feeding solely of the last breath of intelligent beings

GRAVITY HOUND
A thing like a vomiting bicep with mismatched legs that chooses down for itself

ROCKETEER TRILOBITE
A trilobite the size of a fist. When startled takes off at great speeds. The danger is that its half blind, the direction it flees in is random, and its quite capable of punching straight through a tree with its speed. It can be placated with soothing voices or funny dances.
 
PIRANHADON
A piranha evolved in a large ambush predator. From the book below

CARNICTUS
did you see king kong? yes, it was truly awful, but the scene where the worm thing sucks a guys head off? Thats a carnictus.
also if you see the The world of Kong in a 2nd hand book shop, get it. That turd of a movie had quite a amazing amount of detail done on skull island.

VULVINES
A hairless wrinkled bat ape thing. Squirts noxious oils on prey it can't defeat in a few rounds. This oil attracts predators.

MAULER FROG
a frog the size of a small dog with a iris arrangement of teeth , jumps and takes circular cuts of meat from prey, ala cookie cutter shark http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cookie_cutter_shark

CURMUDGEON
A shark so disagreeable it grew legs and chases people up trees.

....

So I think I excitedly talked up some shit about doing a bestiary in the style of a mixture of field notes and Pliny the Elder level failed research.The kind of nonsense above would be what to expect. The drawings, similar. If anyone would actually like to see this, I'll bother to get it done and scan it and put it here. Otherwise the players in my campaign will be the only ones unfortunate enough to be subjected to it.

UPDATE:
if the bestiary was to have stats what system do people prefer?

GERYON

Print PDF Okay , so camera died and then a gots a new one and then I leave it someplace then I find it, and yeah.
Geryon is a three bodied giant in the original greek mythology , which means it was a dude with one head and 3 bodies growing below it. Like a super siamese twin/trine. Then in Dantes inferno he's he cast as a chimera manticore animal part salad style. In d&d he's like a big hairy snake man with a giant horn. Then way later in 4th edition he's like 3 dudes coming out of a snake, in a ominous spooky way.
I , in my ways, decided to make Geryon 3 people devouring each other perpetually.

>> its likely I will take better photos when I learn to use the camera.
And I'll add some campaign notes some time.
OKAY THEN THNKS GHOSTBAT FOR CAMERAAAA

Blather, ERINYES

Print PDF So here I am sweating through my leopard print dress in the grip of some vile viral infection (but not meningitis, they stuck needles into my spine to know that), and wondering why its so damn difficult to get 3 or 4 people in the same place to actually start the damn campaign.
Which gives me plenty of time to go over the rules system i decided to use, pathfinder.
And on the outset it looked so stream lined, and so appealing to me... but, I don't want to have cut you pathfinder. but its for your own good, I wanted to use you straight of the shelf, but nooooo you had to go having tables of modifiers and bards and pointless rulings and now I have to cut you! <cut> You make me do this!
YOU! YOU! YOU!
<slice>
why can't I bullrush people into solid objects for damage? <stab>
Is it really that hard to to have a skills d.c table that goes like this:
d.c 5 a banal or trivial use of the skill, plausible for even the untrained and smelly
d.c 10 Routine, a typical use of the skill for some familiar with it
d.c 15 Tricky, requires waking up a bit for a trained user, a task that separates than suave from the cack handed
d.c 20 Impressive, the passing of which would draw attention and praise
d.c 25 Implausible, the type of thing which would make its retelling make people go like"really? HOly shit!"
d.c 30 Fuck off, as above but those same people would go "fuck off, your bullshiting me, pull the other one , its got bells on it, that's just fucked"
d.c 40 Legendary, a challenge that seems flat out impossible
<carve>
Someone who hangs out in combat playing an instrument, why? Why so much turd polishing of this concept?
<flay>
I guess some people like fine tuning and a sense of tactical detail. Me , I utterly hate looking stuff up.

I have rough concept in that rules should a)exist to validate fun choices and
b)should immediately be graspable in the context of the imagining of the game

I explain more about a) So for example, if its fun for you be thinking all cunning like and to have your character to jump up on a table to make it difficult for someone to grab them , this is validated by having some kinda mechanical back up, (which can be a on the spot thing and is far prefer than having to look something up).
That's not to say just having straight fluff without any crunch is bad, and overblown descriptions are truly the fried cheese of the gods,  but I personally found nothing but fluff, the whole interactive story style doesn't have the same immersion feel to it.
Having game mechanics means that a objective reality exists for the participants and having to work with, at and against that reality makes the creativity have more bite.
I'm digressing here but I reckon in someways creativity works better with limitations to channel it, like muscle anchored to bone , or water pouring through a narrowing hose pipe.

Up to a point though,  choices backed up mechanically should be those that are fun to make , ie "what horrible point object  does my character stick it in with?" as opposed to "how much does my character spend on getting clothing modified to fit them, because they are slightly shorter than average"

ANYWAY WHATEVER SO WHAT WHO CARES
PHOTOS!

scorpion whip!

scorpion!

Fun with Abulafia

Print PDF so made this

http://www.random-generator.com/index.php?title=Dragon_forms


It comes across as a bit stuttered though, ie like "It is a fat dragon. It breathes fire. It is the enemy of the jacobs. It takes it in the butt. Its tail is saucy." Maybe I'll reworked it later, but I think it already chewed up a good chunk of time already.

Did notice there was a random dragon generator already, (Zak S creation?) , but felt like making one from scratch. Maybe should cross linked it somehow.
But Not Today Mr Bond

MUMMY

Print PDF So this is what an aborted dispater became. It's a mummy but less of a elaborate ritualized burial of a godking, and more of a stitch a sack around that dead(ish) guy and chuck him in a bog/dry desert cave.
There's a large amount of mummification rituals in the world, so it seems kinda lazy that fantasy mummys always seem to get the Egypt treatment.

Such as this one involving monks slowly eating poison;

http://www.weirdasianews.com/2009/03/20/mummified-japanese-monks-enlightened-punishment/
or the Incas

"took your damn time"
or these

 Chinchorro mummification:The Black mummy technique (5000 to 3000 BC) involved taking the dead person's body apart, treating it, and reassembling it. The head, arms, and legs were removed; the skin was often removed, too. The body was heat-dried, and the flesh and tissue were completely stripped from the bone. After reassembly, the body was then covered with a white ash paste, filling the gaps left by the reassembling process. The paste was also used to fill out the person's normal facial features. The person's skin (including facial skin with a wig attachment of short black human hair) was refitted on the body, sometimes in smaller pieces, sometimes in one almost-whole piece. Sometimes sea lion skin was used as well. Then the skin (or, in the case of children, who were often missing their skin layer, the white ash layer) was painted with manganese giving them a black color.
The Red mummy technique (2500 BC to 2000 BC) was a technique in which rather than disassemble the body, many incisions were made in the trunk and shoulders to remove internal organs and dry the body cavity. The head was cut from the body so that the brain could be removed. The body was packed with various materials to return it to somewhat more-normal dimensions, sticks used to strengthen it, and the incisions sewn up. The head was placed back on the body, this time with a wig made from tassels of human hair up to 60 cm long. A "hat" made out of clack clay held the wig in place. Except for the wig and often the (black) face, everything was then painted with red ochre.
The final style of Chinchorro mummification was the mud-coat. Artisans no longer removed the organs of the dead, instead a thick coat of mud, sand and a binder like egg or fish glue was used to cover the bodies. Once completed the mummies were cemented into their graves. The change in style may have come from exposure to outsiders and their different cultures or from the association of disease with the rotting corpses. This style of mummification lasted for 200 year, until the Chinchorro disappeared.

'La Doncella',

This mummy was found wearing a magnificent headdress, which meant she was probably an aclla or Sun Virgin. That is, she was chosen and sanctified as a toddler to live with other girls and women who would become royal wives, priestesses, and sacrifices. She also wore a brown dress, and was buried with several statues. Her hair was braided elaborately and she had a few white hairs, perhaps indicating emotional stress. She and the others are believed to have been drugged with , a maize beer, along with coca leaves, before being abandoned on the mountain.

Boy mummy

Some of the boy's clothes contained vomit mixed with blood, suggesting that he may have suffered from a pulmonary edema. It is believed that he died from suffocation. He was the only one of the mummies to be tied up, and a piece of cloth had been pulled around him tightly enough to crack his ribs and dislocate his pelvis.


actually lets cut the middle man, and here's wiki with a good list

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy

Speaking of vulnerability to fire, has it ever bugged anyone else how plant/wood based creatures are vulnerable to fire in the majority of game mechanics?
Okay yes this is petty and irrelevant , but really you hold a lighter under a log and a lighter under your arm and see what gets fucked up first. And that's presuming the log is dry, a green log is gonna require a heap massive fire to get it going, the type a human would start to get fucked up just by being near. Something less treeish and more leafy planty would have delicate frondy bits to burn, but still not any worse than skin, eyeballs (which can boil), and then fat reserves just under that skin. Some models of human spontaneous combustion have a nylon item of clothing burning long enough to  get the fat going, and then its a big old human candle.
Its probably the precedent from  Ents being scared of forest fire , which if they are slow moving , would be scary. But forest fires are scary full stop. Except to eucalyptus trees. Those bastards actually like forest fires, have evolved thin papery bark  in order to spread the fire quickly past them and onto other trees. They also drop a lot of branches, aka kindling, and the sap is an effective fire starter, and , although maybe I'm thinking of a African tree here, can explode into fire by itself if the day gets hot enough. Eucalyptus seeds require a scotching to germinate, thus after a forest fire, when all the other trees have turned into fertilizing ash, the shoots of eucalyptus immediately spring up.

I digress,

 
Erinyes is nearly finished but going wrong.