Was posting these in a clockwise fashion , but should of done this one (Chaotic Neutral) before Erebus (Chaotic Neutral with Slight Evil). This one is another old post and is closer to the original planescrap posts, which assumed Planescape was still being used (so Sigil , various factions etc). I think I've sanded off all Planescape bits. The Slaadi get renamed Xoads even though this isn't a commercial work anymore. When the plan was to release this commecially , this Realm was marked for an extenstively rewrite, with the adding of "void crawling" rules,and dialing down the early scrap mania tone, maybe less tables for the sake of tables.

However since it's now a blog post with the intention of giving you maximum content to pick through I'm not rewriting into some elegant slick piece. Hope there's something useful or interesting here

Here's the links to the planescrap primer:

1,2,3

Other Realms:

THE OCEAN PROTEAN

Aka Protean Ocean, All Sea, Seether , Limbo

Like a unidirectional polluted sunset, like a big old mess of floating stuff, a gravitationally shameless ink-sea, Ocean Protean is a bright burning chaos. Drifting island clumps, the materials of which are an odd mixture of basic, protean, stratified, and recognisably stolen from elsewhere.

Xoads

They are most definitely here and making nuisances of themselves. There’s broadly 2 categories: the chromatic; which you can find in various D&D monster manuals (as slaadi), and the perverse; which are newly created here.

Perverse Xoads are not colours. They are simple concepts like slangral and spumescent but in a large frog being way. They don’t really associated with the chromatic Xoads in any consistent way. Someone decided to categorize with lesser, wanton and coherent .

Lesser are animalistic and simple and about as dangerous as medium wide animals with inconsistent and often violent behaviour

Coherent are clever fellows and have ideas and plans and will use words with them.

Wanton are possible clever , but do not care about anything you might care about and generally are destroying everything around them and are extremely dangerous.

Numerous islands are infested with the Xoad Either a couple of mobs of bickering red and blues (maybe with egg-laden humanoids in the middle of it) or a couple of more powerful quantophrenic or mellifluous Xoad. They have been known to play games where each Xoadseals up a number of creatures into a twisted hive and watch or listen to the creatures explore and fight. Other times, a more recognizable arena is made, with an audience of Xoad and Mockers* and travellers. The conditions of the arena are prone to sudden change by the grey or death Xoad who has claimed it.
*(Mockers described here)

Sometimes various structures and buildings (up to half a city) are stolen by the Xoad and used as a playground / battlezone / gladiator arena / zoo. It's not so much a coordinated effort as it is mob of Xoad all randomly having the idea at the same time and pouring through a portal to grab whatever architecture and flora fit their bizarre whim. These haphazard clumps are steadily warped and dissolved by the Protean Ocean, causing the ill nature of it to become even moreso.

These stolen landscapes / battlegrounds / arenas / playgrounds are known as a Glean, and sometimes they proceed to attract more floating pieces of whatever from the churning matter seas, and grow and grow. Xoad are then more likely to dump more found structures on top of this mix. There is also what is known as a Gleck, which is basically an even weirder Glean, sometimes with even space and time operating as strange as anything else here. Glecks has been wholly generated by the Protean Ocean, whereas Gleans are made of things brought to Protean Ocean

However! is not uncommon for Glecks and Gleans to be combined in some fashion. The largest is known as Detropolis, which seems to be able to draw more material to it than any other Gleck or Glean. It’s a “city” in the sense that it has structures that people live in and they joined together but any other comparisons to one are more of a stretch. Yet it has a thriving trade -- somewhat hampered by having no portals directly opening to it, meaning visitors have to make a dangerous journey across the Protean Ocean to find it. The safest bet is to use its trash gravity and dump a large mass of rubbish and hide in this trash raft: the currents of Ocean Protean will guide in towards Detropolis. However, nothing is certain in Protean , and while most Xoad will not bother investigating a trash raft, some might.

Surprisingly, Detropolis is safe(ish) from Xoad attacks, rumored to be because of a particular large and powerful quantophrenic Xoad in its core. Leading strength to this rumor is the fact that Whisper Forms of unusual power defend the city and inflict a mockery of city codes on its inhabitants. Most chromatic Xoad (blue, green, red) barely visit here, but dessicated, slangral, mellifluous, spumescent, bleached, and quantophrenic make themselves at home.

Bric-a-bracs

16 | Some other humanoid group like halflings or something. Roll on some other table someone else wrote

17 | Seemingly empty, 50% of something there but hidden! roll again it that case. If you get this result again, ignore the 50% thing just roll again but make it super super hidden

18 | A theatre:

1 | Is performing

2 | Is rehearsing

3 | Is empty but still used

4 | Is long abandoned

5 | Undergoing repairs

6 | About to began / just finishing. Thespians and Audience potentially anything

19 | Treasure stash:

1 | Badly hidden

2 | Well hidden, and it's rubbish!

3 | Kinda cool

4 | Real good but someone will come looking for it and it's got a tracking device

20 | Prisoners infected with blue / red Xoad eggs:

1 | Xoad not here

2 | Xoad guarding

3 | Xoad with arrive in a couple of minutes

4 | Some other creature tied up and guarding (roll on any encounter table, reroll if it seems too stupid like a lich, but keep if it's only kinda stupid like a giant crayfish or octopus)

Table: Okay, So What's This Gleck Made of Then? (d30)

1 | A insane warren of cardboard cells , like corrugated cardboard with the surface peeled off, and additionally modified by drunk paper wasps

2 | A clump of stone with ever burning trees growing out of it

3 | An iceberg with frozen iron poles stuck in it

4 | A paper thin plate of obsidian

5 | A spider's web of coral

6 | A hollow crystal skull

7 | A tropical island made entirely of glass

8 | Smooth iron ball 50% chance of being hollow

9 | Columnar basalt

10 | A ball of water

11 | A churning yet solid storm cloud

12 | A castle made entirely of flesh

13 | A dirt mass with giant fungus also made from dirt

14 | A giant ball of string

15 | Big rock mass

16 | Big dirt mass

17 | A frozen wave of blood

18 | A honeycomb made from tin

19 | A delicate fluted tower made from solid purple light, 1 in 3 chance of it existing in a radial symmetrical form

20 | A goliath diatom!

21 | A big flat clay dish with miniature sand dunes

22 | An massive organ fully functioning:

1 | Heart

2 | Lung

3 | Stomach

4 | Intestines

5 | Liver

6 | Brain

23 | A tent like structure like a massive leather box kite

24 | A tooth

25 | Some kind of giant candy!

26 | Some kind of congealed half dried organ mass like old meat and very old coffee

27 | Snowball

28 | Roll on Bric-a-brac form table, if result is an animal, it is not alive but not rotting (...or it can be if you want, but you know that right?) 1-in-3 chance to roll again and either merge the results or have them on top each other

29 | Roll on Glean table and 2-in-3 chance to roll again and either merge the results or have them on top of of each other

30 | Roll twice and merge the results

Table: Hey This Gleck Is There Madness In Its Very Physics? (d20)

1-12 | No not really

13 | Okay its gravity kicks in as soon as you get within 20 metres of it, thus sending you falling toward it at high speed

14 | It looks flat but actually is a sphere, and if you go off one side you wind up on the other

15 | Weird lagging effect. Every round or what have you:

1-2 | Affected as if by a slow

3-4 | As if by a haste

5-6 | Nah you good

16 | All surface on the Gleck are frictionless. As a grease spell but also means you do not stop sliding

17 | The air tension is weird. It's like being underwater, but in air

18 | Lighting reversed. shadows glow and light sources darken

19 | Sound is twice as loud

20 | Silence, no sound can be made

Table: I Can't Help But Notice There Is Not A Table For Type of Xoad

1-5 | Chromatic

4-7 | Perverse, Lesser

8-9 | Perverse, Coherent

9 -10 | Perverse, Wanton

11 | Grey or Death Xoad

12 | Roll twice

Table: Chromatic Chromatic (d4)

1-2 | Green

3 | Red

4 | Blue

Table: Perverse, lesser (d4)

(weaker, or more animalistic)

1 | Slangrel

2 | Bleeding

3 | Dessicated

4 | Verminous

Table: Perverse, coherent (d4)

(medium to strong power, will start encounter with conversation, have to be motivated to commence violence)

1 | Quantophrenic

2 | Spumescent

3 | Mellifluous

4 | Bleached

Table: Perverse, wanton (d4)

(strong to very strong in power, immediately dangerous, do not approach, does not play well with others)

1 | Radiant

2 | Prismatic

3-4 | Fizzing

Table: Artifacts of No Purpose Nor History (d12)

This is a table for huge weird things that can be stumbled upon. Each artifact is unique. That does not mean it can't keep showing up in unlikely places; indeed it's incredibly unlikely that they will ever be in the same place they were last time.

1 | A huge brass bull (the size of a 4 story building) with 7 long necked swan heads emerging in place of its head. It is hollow and the insides of it can be accessed via its anus. If one travels up to any of the swan heads (which is a difficult climb) there is a large pearl the size of a baby's head. Looking into this pearl's murky depths reveals a vision of who hates you the most. If all the pearls are removed from inside the bull (and not just the swan head), it animates and relentlessly and unerring chases the pearls (going for the closest one first) and when it reach of them will swallow them up with a swan head. It will then continue until it has retrieved all of them. It cannot planeshift but will hone in on a portal large enough for it that will take it a step closer to the pearl. It will not attack or undertake action other than moving towards the pearls. Anything in its way will be crushed, however, if it cannot evade its great hooves

2 | An insanely complex siege engine. Anyone educated in engineering matters who attempts to decipher it's workings must make a will save (DC 20) or spent all the time engrossed its endless gears and devices. They will not sleep or seek out food (and so will starve unless food is brought to them). After each week they may attempt the save again. If they are entranced for 4 weeks in a row, they discover that the underlying logic that has been teasingly out of reach, is in actual fact a cosmic farce, and will forever crush any hope of a greater order to the multiverse. They lose any lawful alignment (and can choose another off either axis to replace it) and 6 points of wisdom. However if they succeed on the 2nd will save they will gain EXP equal to 200 times their level (but still be convinced that there is something more to discover in the workings of the artifact)

3 | A featureless, glossy black cube, 20x20x20 feet. It is immune to everything, including spheres of annihilation. Can be moved, but weighs as much as an iron cube of twice its size (assuming gravity is present)

4 | An endless waterworks , an M.C Escher print in actual form

5 | A great stone foot with 4 toes and inscription on its plinth. The inscription is in a language that the viewer knows (if any), and will be describing a particular bitter childhood memory of theirs

6 | A rat wheel, big enough for a man to run in. Actually contains a man, naked, screaming, and endlessly running. He will not respond to stimulus, and is just a weak ass 0 level human if you shoot him with something. If you remove him from the wheel, he will stop screaming, and give a look expressing emotions unknown to any other. Then he will age to dust in seconds. If this dust is mixed with water and consumed, the drinker will awake from their next sleep 1d4 times 10 years younger, and haunted by dreams of eerie grandeur and loss that they will never quite shake

7 | A large black iron crab, adorned higgledy-piggledy with fine wooden chairs with lush red velvet cushions. Emerging from its head is a formidable cannon, the length of 2 horses. If the cannon is primed and fired as would you any other cannon, the ball (or indeed anything else in the barrel) shoots out and arrives somewhere else in the multiverse, unhurt. The destination is seemly random, but may be influenced by additives to the black powder used to fire it

8 | A great ornate empty frame. big enough to ride a stagecoach through. Anyone passing through it feels lighter and freer but with a sadness as if something was lost a long time ago and suddenly not quite recalled

9 | A whale skeleton formed from compressed sherbet

10 | A huge book, the size of an emperor's bed. Opening it and laboriously turning its pages reveals blank page after blank page. Every now and now again things seem to flicker off the page just as it is turned. Shutting someone in the book will press them flat and reduce them to a inky silhouette. They may then explore a hidden 2D world in the pages, the inhabitants of which are welcoming but do their best to remain unseen. One thus transformed may be freed from the book by cutting out their outline. They will then be able to move around the wider world as a Shadow (but without the strength drain). Any items they have will however be only able to affect them and other shadows. They do not count as undead. The book will heal from the cutting like butter melting in the sun. It should be difficult but not entirely impossible for them to recover their original form, depending on your whims

11 | A grinding wheel the size of a largish hill. On its side is a complex series of gears leading down to a small pedal drive, allowing someone of human size to pedal the wheel into motion. With this wheel one could grind down a towers’ worth of steel into a blade that could sever an astral cord or the fabric of the planes, depending on the quality of the steel

12 | A hourglass tall as a giraffe. If the glass is broken the sands will rush out in terrible roaring wind, to quickly disappear from sight. Randomly choose a person of great personal significance in the breakers life. The sands will sweep to that person, and whip past, taking with them the curse of age. They will no longer age, naturally or by any other means

Table: Excitement (d20)

1 | A caravan viewed in the distance is being under attack

2 | Xoad egging raid

3 Vermin Road Caravan

4 | Something going horribly wrong with reality

5 | Random monster encounter from anywhere (possibly escaped from a zoo or an arena or bathhouse or...kiln?)

6 | Mocker wanna get your opinion on an "art work"

7 | Flux Storm

8 | Lifesurge (inanimate stuff comes to life)

9 | Ferocious cloud of verminous Xoad

10 | 2 elementals mixed together , in pain

11 | Xoad (roll on random brute table)

12 | Horrible spiked ball the size of a castle starts pulling characters towards it with its gravity. Holes beside spikes with feeding tentacles

13 | In this area (assume half an hour of travel) every time you speak a verb you get a year younger

14 | Skeletons attack! Actually animated by intelligent translucent jelly creature. The creature is located a few metres behind the skeletons and animates them by extending pseudopods inside them. Doesn’t understand other things are alive and just wants more bones to play with, hence the attack.

15 | A whirlpool churns into existence d10x10 feet away, will get to full strength in 2d4 rounds and will suck everyone in it through a portal

16 | An ever burning forest makes passage difficult in the current direction

17 | The contents of 100 kitchens rocket around here at vast speed. Every round you get attacked by a thrown:

1-3 | Nah nothing this round

4 | Pot

5 | Vegetable

6 | Half eaten pie

7 | Knives or forks

8 | Chair

9 | Table

10 | Spoons

18 | A cloud bank swirls slowly into existence around the characters. The clouds are solid and it rapidly develops into a 3D cloud maze

19 | Huge deafening sounds out of nowhere, making conversation near impossible

20 | Everyone suffer mood swings for the next 10 minutes. Every minute there is a 50/50 chance of mood changing to:

1 | Really really sad. Nearly suicidal

2 | Sleepy. Catatonically sleepy

3 | Angry, pissy, irritated by the slightest thing

4 | Terrified

5 | Content. Smugly so

6 | Crying because sad

7 | Crying because happy

8 | Amorous

9 | Near berserkly angry

10 | Annoyingly talkative

Table: Stuff Going On Right Now (d20)

1 | A travelling Bric-a-brac band tootles past

2 | A giant (30ft) bust of someone's head, hollow and containing a bee hive drifts past

3 | A streaming of fluorescent water twists and spins through the Protean Ocean It could act as a hydroslide, leading possibly anywhere

4 | Wreckage of ship

5 | Big stone torus carved with Mocker texts

6 | 1d4 chromatic brutes fighting to the death

7 | A snowman complete with coal eyes and a fine top hat

8 | Limbs of great insects, torn and drifting

9 | Bubbles. Vast clouds of tiny bubbles, with giant bubbles interspersed

10 | A castle wall with graffiti carved into it. Graffiti might offer clues, but definitely offers abuse

11 | String. Either end disappears far off into the distance

12 | Grave stones, random numbers and letters mark them

13 | A drifting washing line with clothing. All the clothing has one extra leg or arm. One of the socks has a neatly severed foot in it

14 | Clump of Protean Material (see table)

15 | A merry whale!

16 | A wooden platform containing a guillotine and a stack of fruit, some recently executed

17 | A person with kites attached to pegs clamped on delicate areas of their body drifts past cackling "IT'S THE ONLY WAY TO FLY"

18 | Zepplin. Vermin Road traders

19 | Bemused horse

20 | Wickerman full of marshmallows

Table: Adventure Hooks, Bait, Rumours, Sweet Rewards, Etc. (d20)

1 | Impossible elements exist in the Protean Ocean Ice that burns, liquid steel, floating rocks, magnetic corn. Wondrous devices could be made from such things. There is a trick described in old tomes to attune a compass to such an element (assuming you have a sample of it in the first place), so you can guide yourself to a vein

2 |The strange property of Protean Material (see table)

3 | The Xoad have been known to use devices made from combining both animal and tool. It has been reported they do this by jamming them into mystery boxes that exist in the Protean Ocean for just this purpose. If you want a dog-gun or a horse-cage, you know what you need to do

4 | Detropolis is a major nexus of the Vermin Road. Making it there safely from the outskirts of the Blazing World or Solitary requires tricks, schemes, and more than a little recklessness. Vermin Road traders are always on the lookout for cavern guides, guards, or a new plan to make it Detropolis intact

5 | If you want to buy something that is impossible to find, Detropolis is where the impossible can be sold

6 | Some Gleans and Glecks have been there a long time. And some contain arenas, libraries, or theatres renowned for sights and prizes unheard of anyone else. You could properly find a reliable guide there, right?

7 | There are parts of the Protean Ocean that one can be unmade and remade, sloughing away all lingering traces

8 | Strange oozes of the Protean Ocean are corrosive to dimensional boundaries, making summonings or portal creation easier

9 | Luck can crystallize in the shape of objects here. The surrounding area will be dangerously unlucky, as all the luck concentrates in the form of a goat skull, old bottle, tiny shoe, etc. The lucky object can then be used to draw luck from other places (lucky objects have 1d8 rerolls stored in them. 1-in-3 will cause fumbles to occur on 1-to-5 instead of on 1 in the surrounding 20 metres, including the holder of the object. These "lucksucker" objects replenish one charge a month, up to maximum of 8).

10 | There is a great shoal of feral spell books, released into the wild eons ago

11 | Semi-abandoned citadels, lairs and crypts float here from cultures real and imaginary

12 | The great helliphant graveyard is here apparently, a fortune in dangerous ivory

13 | Giant Nautilus play host to delusional parasites. The parasites adopt a culture and crudely mold their own flesh and the internal shell of the nautilus to match. Inherent mental instability leads to banditry, and banditry leads to hoarding

14 | Sometimes crisis citadels go "wrong" and are sealed off by the anarchs and then abandoned with great haste, leaving considerable wealth behind. "Going wrong" is a catch all term to describe any variety of malignancy forming in animate object, dangerous localized phenomenon, and the spawning of hostile anomalies

15 | Miniature storms! So cute! Fits in a bottle! Bamboozle your friends! Inconvenience your enemies!

16 | Mad hags. The norns weave your fate; everything that happens appears on their looms. The mad hags weave everything that might happen, didn't happen and couldn't possibly happen in space-bending fractal tesseract looms. If it pleases, them they can attempt to rewrite your past

17 | Kaiju eggs

18 | Giant Friendship Snake

19 | Lost Worlds

20 | Dinosaurs made from leftover dinosaurs

Clum of Protean Material Table

Size of clump

Can reach arms around it
Can get anywhere with 3 steps
A medium room
You could build a house and have room for a garden
Size of a mansion
A small neighbourhood
Suitable for a town
Suitable sized being named after its main terrain feature, like the bays, the hills, the forest
If it was a forest you would risk getting lost in it, but not for longer than a day and night
If this was a forest and you got lost , you might not ever be found

Main material

Sticks
Sherbet/Sand
Rock
Paper
Dirt
Metal
Bone/Shell/Ivory
Mud/Jelly/Slime
Fungus/moss
Crystal/glass/ice

But it has the properties and nature of

Ball of Snakes
Candy floss condensing around the base of the machine
The life scuttering out of the light when a rotten log is turned over
The ponderous bubbles off a lava lamp
A trampoline in a Loony tunes cartoon
Brittle ice
Chocolate near melting point
Fluffy piled up cornflour
Chewing gum
Magnetised iron particles

Monster Manual Sewn From Pants

Pages

Tuesday, 22 December 2020

Planescrap : Ocean Protean

THE OCEAN PROTEAN

Xoads

Bric-a-bracs

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