Tuesday, 22 December 2020

Planescrap : Ocean Protean

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:

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

Tuesday, 15 December 2020

Planescrap :Mt Erebus

PDF

The project too big to die continues.

The writing for this realm is way closer to my earlier posts and was trying to make to with a "hook , colour , encounter" tables . The realization that the longer this project was going to take the more likely that I'll wind up rewriting the earlier realms from scratch was the realization that lead me to just turn it into a series of massive blog posts.

Here's the links to the planescrap primer:

Other Realms:

EREBUS

(Chaotic Neutralish)

.

Also known as Mount Erebus, The Solitary Mountain, or just Solitary, is a titanic spire of rock, its base at the crimson planes near the Flesh Rifts and its peak jutting at the fringes of the Protean Ocean. Souls are drawn to Erebus from less concrete allegiances than other terminal realms. The souls of the mad, who are unable to shed the burdens that drove them mad, come here, to thrash on the hooks in their minds, some eventually finding catharsis as howling winds, others taking on physical form again and enact their old lives, hoping to make sense of it this time. While the outside of Erebus is desolate slopes, the inside is riddled with endless mind-grinding miles of tunnels and cyst like pockets. Wind is present here always, and you never know just how far anything spoke, whispered or shrieked will be carried.

In some of the tunnels the wind is soft, almost soothing, with the emitted streams and drips being subdued. In most places, however, it's dark, cold, and damp, and the wind tears through your mind making it impossible to be heard with anything less than a shout. In some places it can get strong enough to sweep up an party and send them helplessly tumbling end over end in the dark, battered to death, pieces, gore, bone then finally dust.

Table: Wind Whispers (d20)

“They’ve nearly found your book, they are going to find it and know what you did”
“Follow me to find yourself”
“You should be here”
“You have another you inside you”
“Lies lies lies lies lies trust only dead flowers”
“Come to the banquet bring your friends”
“They could forgive you still”
“When you fear my voice, that’s when you know I’m telling you the truth. I love you”
“Someone is here, just for you, closer now, closer, can you hear them?”
“It might be too late, it might not. Follow follow follow”
“It’s choking you, so slowly, lose it here lose it here”
“There will be a sign. Then another sign. Hope not to see the third.”
“New skin! New skin! For you! New skin!”
“They are right to hate you, rejoice, rejoice, rejoice in this”
“You’ve been here before”
“Leave something here, you’ll be back before the end”
“Oh-oh-oh-oh child we have been weeping for you”
“It will be bad, very bad, but it will end”
“We can find peace together”
“Everything is backwards Everything is blackwards everything is black squids everything is backwards”

The water here is mainly confined to dripping "ceilings" (see note about gravity later) and shallow streams running along tunnel walls, or occasionally the middle of the tunnel. The fish in these waters are pallid and gruesome at best. There is a network of flooded tunnels at the very depths of Erebus.: the water here is sluggish and still, and its cold embrace acts unnaturally fast, causing fatigue and unconsciousness in minutes rather than hours. Anyone losing consciousness in these waters will be in state of suspended animation however, but is potentially lost for a very long time, in the stygian labyrinth of black tunnels.

There is a vast lake somewhere at the very bottom where all the contrary currents eventually wind up, full of countless floating sleepers. There are rumours of a eldritch race of flatworms carefully tending this library of sleep for purposes nigh-incomprehensible.

As well as the tunnels, there are various sealed chambers, like bubbles of air in the rock. Some Souls form in these, finding the peace that they have always desired.. It's always a great risk to crack into such a cyst, as dangerous individuals and artifacts can be entombed in them.

And that’s skimming over the fact that trying to find a sealed chamber in a vast expanse of rock with no tunnels leading to it is no small task. There are numerous towns and settlements set up around mining ventures devoted to following a plausible rumour of a treasure stash in a particular cyst.

Another curious thing about Erebus.: food and drink from here can actually sustain mortal life. The Salt harvested in the tears of the poor mad souls that come here stays in the waters and vitalize the mushrooms, crawdads, lichens and algaes that serve as the default meals here. This is why Bedlam, the largest point of the trading ring known as the Vermin Road, is based here. It's the biggest and least insane -- not that that’s saying much -- of the numerous towns and villages buried here. Even so, the nigh-constant winds and being around so many crazies is a constant tax on the sanity of the most stable. Possibly, this is the secret behind the food here sustaining mortal life. Somehow, Erebus. draws substance from the crazy.

Souls do find peace here though, some having found a cure for their personal hells (and indeed passing on to other terminal realms), others embracing the endless freedom of being wind itself, or the oblivion of the quiet dark.

Getting Around

These are the “Main Veins:” the most-travelled network of large tunnels, leading from the Plains of Desolation to Bedlam, then connecting some scattered mining communities before broadening out into a vast mass of capillary tunnels, of such verisimilitude and number that they are nigh unmappable. They are motile, like an inversion of worms, slowly insinuating through the stone dark.

Moving anywhere off the main veins without a guide (Souls, Denizens and natives can more-or-less find their way) or a Strange Compass (see the Why Would Anyone Go There? table) is entirely random.

Table: For Each 4 Hours of Travel (d8)

1 | Monster encounter (use cave, urban or water table)

2 | Wisdom check or lose an hour to tantrums, catatonia and paranoia from the constant wind

3 | Roll on What Could Go Wrong? table

4 | Roll on Local Colour table

5-8 | Just the wind, the dark, and the stone

If you get the same number twice, you have arrived (after resolving any encounter)!

If one does not want to put body and mind at risk there is always transport in the form of the Screamer Boats. Like the world’s worst hydroslide, a screamer boat is a small watercraft equipped only with wheels and a sail, and the captains possibly-preternaturally deranged understanding of a tunnel series that the boat can rocket along at terrifying speeds. The boats are named for the only sane reaction there is to hurtling at frightening speeds in a black tunnel, narrowly avoiding sharp stone spikes and sharper corners at the command of a cackling, paranoid-deluded ship captain (all good screamer boat captains are mad. You really really don't want to trust the ones that are not).

Gravity

If you live here, you get to decide which tunnel surface is down for you. If you don't, you don't. Down stays whatever direction for you that it was when you Erebus. until you fail 4 Will saves or Wisdom checks. Then you can make a Wisdom check to change which tunnel surface is down for you (note: you have to fail this wisdom check).

Souls

About 1/3rd of Souls choose dissolution and are immediately swallowed by the winds and merge with it. All others take physical form, however. They appear much as they did in life, but bonier, and the howling winds seem to affect them as much as they do visitors of the plane. Most of them are utterly insane.

Vermin Road in Erebus.
Table: Available Goods (2d4)

2 | Resident artisans make 1d4 different random high quality expensive goods

3-4 | Basic goods, and a 25% chance (per item) of anything more complicated being available

5-6 | Food, and basic equipment only

7 | Basic goods and 50% chance of anything else. About 50/50 chance of being shoddy (will completely break on the next 1 or 2 on attack roll or 19, 20 on a stat check)

8 | One thing and one thing only. Randomly determine

Table: Local Charm (d12)

1 | Absurdly cheap! Like force you at sword point to take all their stock of whatever you want to buy

2 | Everything is so fine. And not weird at all and totally stress this fact about how normal and happy and everything everyone is and how the equipment looks decent and the prices are fair

3 | 10% of money is refused on the grounds that its fake, or has rude imagery or has some royal everyone hates or looks like that guy anyway

4 | Coins not used. Just rocks. Just the right kind of rocks. 1-in-4 chance of any rock presented to the shop owner being acceptable. If players start asking about what makes it acceptable make up some shit and but still have the shopkeeper turn them down 75% of the time. "Oh no, you see how this sedimentary and has a slant ellipsoid tilt to it? That is normally acceptable but only if its a clockwise tilt. This, I'm afraid, is counterclockwise." Encourage players to make wisdom checks to look out for just the right kind of rock. It wouldn't do them any good

5 | Roll again but this time have a flat 50% chance that halfway through the transaction a number of townsfolk walk into the shop, and then they and the shopkeepers matter-of-factly draw weapons and attack with a completely casual indifference

6 | Choose one player that everyone in town discriminates against in an complete arcane way "hey look at that frigging Lobeswinger, pike off Lobeswinger, we don't want none of your shellfish around here!"

7 | Shop keeper talks backwards

8 | Everything is labelled and sold as something else: torches as spoons, helmets as salads, dogs as property deeds, etc. Shop is in the style of general store with everything behind the counter, so you have to ask for what you want

9 | Everything pretends to be deaf and illiterate. Actually are not. Use charades for communication

10 | Shop unattended. Everything, and I mean everything, is nailed down

11 | Shopkeeper directs all questions to a hand puppet. Hand puppet overcharges. Shopkeeper starts argument with hand puppet and stabs it. Then is helpful and gives discounts before passing out from blood loss. Immediately another shopkeeper with a hand puppet enters from back room and repeats process

12 | Win a paper/scissor/stone contest for a discount on food and perishables. Win a paper/scissor/stone/wind beetle/xorn contest for a discount on armour and weapons. Win a paper/scissor/stone/rock beetle/xorn/paladin/orb of destruction/crossbow/fireball/shoes contest for a discount on anything else

Table: Why Would Anyone Go Here? (d12)

(the rumour / bait / whatta we doing today boss table)

1 | Someone makes sculptures by trapping animals in these spaces and using magic to sustain and spur their growth horribly until they grow to the very contours of the spherical rock, eventually dying from bones pushing against organs. This vast skeletal ball is then teleported out and makes a fine conversation piece for your hellish entry way. If you find a portal leading to one of these -- and are willing to fight a pig that's nearly taking up the entire 20 foot diameter chamber, kill it, and dig through its guts -- you can find the ring of substance and abnormal growth implanted inside!

2 | Huge open caverns with rock formations like organ pipes that play music. Horrible music. Possibly if you had some crazy musical artifact that you needed to play a tune on, here's where you would try and find it

3 | On that note (ha) there's a place here where all the music that's ever been played is being howled all at the same time by the wind whipping through frightening rock formations. The Cacophony, it's called. It's just the kind of place a quest to find or destroy something sound related would end up

4 | Whisper Kings: they are the wisest, oldest and schemingist of Howlers. All their spikes have grown into a crazy tall crown and they are long, dirty and elegant. They know which caverns the whispers stick to and pick up many, many secrets. They respond to flattery , perverse gifts, bad poetry delivered by people completely oblivious to how bad . They also like to give people weird quests that have some “joke” to them. They are not really interested in the completion of the quest as they are the quester discovering the “joke”, which are normally some banal nihilistic statement.

For example

QUEST: you must carry this limbless lamb everywhere. The lamb, more likely than not, will eventually comes to horrible end. The Meaning? Weakness is a burden.

In regard to anyone secret-thing the players wish to know: (d8)

1 : It knows too much about this

2: It knows half of the matter truthfully and half of it falsely . It’s aware of this but is obnoxiously post-modern about it

3-4 It knows a little about it, and is suspiciously happy to share it

5-6 It knows a little about it , but is evasive about it and makes the players work for these crumbs

7: It knows nothing, and is amused by this

8: It knows nothing but just flat out lies.

5 | Many of these caverns have stale air within them, if any at all. Surrounded by solid stone, these bubbles of space hide many secrets. It is rumored that many a deity has either stashed treasures of great value or imprisoned beasts too mighty to be slain in these small, rounded rooms of stone. Numerous bands of solemn flattened fishmen following Strange compasses search them out.

The Keys is one such vault. It’s long and curved, cave like an edge-up knife. A vast array of keys is here, dangling like idle spiders. Each is at the end of single coarse thread, terminating somewhere above. Legend has it that every key ever made has its twin here. When a key from here is tried on a lock, it has a 1-in-10 chance of just coincidentally happening to be the key for that lock. There is also a 1-in-6 chance that a key randomly grasped here will unlock a painful memory in scouring vivid detail , reducing the wisdom of the grasper by 1 until they leave the cave and have decent sleep. Being reduced to zero in this way causing the heart to be fully unlocked which involves massive and abrupt internal bleeding. The detail of the recollection can actually be quite useful though, it’s sharp and accurate enough to recall exactitudes normally beyond a human ability to recall.

6 | Ghostwood is an abandoned mining camp that, having found a mysterious vein of some silvery glowing metal, was set upon by gibbering hordes of translucent toad people, claiming the eggs of their gods were laid in the metal. The toad people now guard the vein, extracting it by licking away the surrounding stone. Nobody thinks it could be any good what they will do if they find their eggs

7 | A medusa was paid to petrify a purple worm to serve as a mausoleum for worm worshiping priest, but the twisting words of the contract meant she was paid far less than she thought and she risks a terrible curse if she loots the tomb herself

8 | Someone in Bedlam has made a oxygen creating ooze bubble and wishes to fund a expedition into the watery depths of Erebus., to verify the rumours of the Sleeping Libary

9 | The Fungal Tyrant is a cruel, fungus-infested man, who occasionally makes fungal diseases to infect the gardens surrounding Bedlam, making the mushrooms there cause horrid hallucinations. The mayors of Bedlam want him dead. Nobody knows where he is, but there are stories that he hides out in a parasitical house in Bedlam, or in a tumbling fungal ball in the tunnels, or a seemingly abandoned mining camp --however a fungal usurper has the miners mine still .

10 | A previously flooded tunnel has suddenly drained, exposing a mirror maze, surrounding a tower of bone and fire. Treasure and madness await!

11 | Once a year in Bedlam, a game is played. All the non-contestants barricade themselves in their houses, and every light is extinguished. For as long as it takes, the contestants -- naked and wielding knives -- try to find and murder each other. Every 24 hours a wraith is released to hurry up the process. Anyone with infravision, dark vision or sonar must take a handicap in the form of massive amounts of hallucinogens. The prize is a choice of a treasure from Bedlam's "Museum of the Madness of the Gods and Novelties Emporium"

12 | Periodically, nautilus with delicate white lady hands for tentacles and a sorrowful human eyes come to Bedlam. They sell Strange compasses that point to the holders most desired thing. The majority of miners tunneling after the Vault Cysts are lead by one of these. These nautiloids are are known both singular and collective as “Gloomchild“. They do not accept money or Salt but dried leaves, if the leaves are to the Gloomchild liking

Table: Trouble

(the beefed-up encounter table / great they are here now what? / trouble / players are looking bored / Need something interesting right now table)

1| a random party member has one of their secrets carved on a wall here, especially one that would turn anyone nearby against them.

2 | Natural traps that are just small holes in the tunnel, that sandblast the skin off anything in the way

3 | A ragtag group runs a toll booth besides a swiss cheese wall with high speed winds whistling through it. Refusing to pay means they quickly jam all kinds of broken weapons and glass and bones into one hole, and then pull a switch and all these hatches slam over the other holes, and the wind blasts out of the remaining hole sending all the shrapnel rocketing forward inflicting 1d20 damage. DEX save for half

4 | A frost giant completely blocks the tunnel with his face. He threatens to spit diseased blood at you if you do not pay the toll

6 | 1d4 Sail sleds each with 3 bandits will swoop past attacking with +2 to damage and preventing return attacks if you do not have range or beat them in initiative. They will return 2d6 rounds later, following a looping back tunnel

7 | This chamber is large and bristling with weird rock formations of beauty which also look an alarmingly a lot like people. There is also 1d12 insane bandits tucked away in the little grottos and alcoves, giggling, armed with poison knives, and near invisible in the bizarre twisting shadows

8 | The caverns and tunnels are becoming even smaller, require crawling and squeezing to get through. Of course, this tends to focus the force of the wind, so getting through these tunnels is a miserable experience

9 | Water, either in a stream running through the air in the middle of the tunnel, or in deepish pools along the sides. Is full of dangerous chuckling fish

10 | Klesha begins stalking someone in party

11 | The remains of a Vermin Road caravan being picked clean by a swarm of flies. Disturbing them brings risk of being attacked as a Insect Swarm

12 | This tunnel is huge and lined with numerous little capillaries and grottos. Gaspermen begin stalking you and waiting for a opportunity to strike

13 | A crashing is heard upwind from the party. Horse-sized chunks of pumice are being blown toward them and will arrive in 1d6 rounds, resolve as 1d4 unmodified attack roll(s) on anyone in the way, inflicting 2d8 damage from impact and abrasion

14 | A huge, skeletal eel has been set to guard an upcoming tunnel. It will bite and swallow whole, its rib cage is full of skeletons that will attack anyone swallowed. Anyone dying in the ribcage is immediately animated

15 | A toll booth with a wight attending. It wants its name back in exchange for passage

16 | The wind proceeds to pick up force, slowly but surely, until it reaches hurricane strength. Party will have 5 minutes to try and secure themselves or find shelter. Otherwise it will sweep up and batter anyone for 1d20 damage and scatter them a couple of kilometres away

17 | A mid-level insane wizard semi merged in a wall

18 | An abandoned town. 3d6 Shadows (the undead) acting out the inhabitants lives. If the characters do not go along with the charade, the Shadows first show anger and frustration (as if you were in a town ignoring everyone's attempts to communicate with you and walking into their houses and smashing their pots) and then attack

19 | A wide open chamber with 1d8 naked frost giants wrestling to the death in the dark and the mud. Some prize awaits the winner. The prize will be in the middle of the room and not obviously looking important to the frost giants, however taking it will turn all the giants onto the taker . Even so engaged, their senses of hearing and smell are terribly keen

20 | A expensive looking carpet is weighted down with rocks in place over a shallow pit containing a random ooze

Table: Local Colour (d20)

1 | Scene of great past violence. Stone hewn, blood splattered, half powder bones, broken teeth and rent armour. Wind suddenly stops

2 | A crying figure, seemingly a child and an old wizened elder, surrounded by relevant figures licking the tears from its feet

3 | A stream running through the middle of the cavern, fish wearing faces of dead family members

4 | You catch half a conversation about you being said elsewhere in the world

5 | 1d20 peacefully sleeping people, some in a stream, some on the "ceiling"

6 | Group of miners, with their eyes torn out and mounted in lamps in place of flames. They seem to know where they are going though

7 | Person in rags, knows too much about you, but is friendly and offers good advice before as he walks towards you on bloody feet

8 | Wind picks up suddenly, dust blows in mouth with a really nasty flavour reminiscent of old sweat

8 | 1d20 trepanned skulls come bouncing down the tunnel

9 | Water turns to blood briefly

10 | Screams that turn into laughter and then back into screams are heard

11 | Beautiful organ music is heard then abruptly stops. Minor earthquake follows. Happens 1d6 times over the next hour

12 | Traveller following a wool string, doing a quest to find out his name from a Whisper King. Wool string leads to yarn ball, seemingly endless, always bouncing just out of reach and sight of the traveller. Traveller is unaware of the source of the yarn, and revealing the futility of it causes them to become suffer a complete breakdown.

13 | Stalagmites with holes in them causing plaintive whistling

14 | 1d20 ragged clad wretches, all claiming parentage of the PCs

15 | Children's drawings scratched on the walls. Animate out of the corner of your eye

16 | 1d6 severed hands worn down to the born from being used to scratch messages in the stone. What is scratched?: (d10)

1 | Nothing nearby, but maybe someone a couple of 100 miles away?

2 | Treasure map to a cyst

3 | Boring Diary entries

4 | "I forgive you" scratched over and over

5 | A continuous line leading elsewhere, following it leads to a random result on the Trouble table or the Why Would Anyone Go here table

6 | A random spell with slight but disturbing extra effects

7 | Incredibly detailed portraits

8 | Music / poem / theorem / engineering diagram 50/50 chance of being complete screed or complete genius

9 | Warnings about nearby inhabitants. 50/50 chance of being lies

10 | Rude limericks

17 | Smells! Smells like delicious cooking to all but one member of the party. To them, it smells like pigshit

18 | 2d6 unkempt Souls guarding a toll booth. They wave the party through, saying Bob has already payed for them

19 | Street stall attended by a glum mute, sitting in the darkness, alone in the tunnels

20 | Tunnels becomes neat, square and hand carved for 1d100 feet

Threats

GasperMen

GasperMen look like those rays people used to taxidermy up to look like monsters (a "Jenny Haniver") with long, slender fingers. Malign and cruel, possessing of secrets. Gliding along the floors and ceilings real sneaky like possessed door mats or manta rays, and then rear up gibbering (will save or paralysis) if it works they snatch on to you and fly off and dump you somewhere and then go back to to split the party up more, before finishing people off. Will give mouth to mouth to corpses and then push on the chest to Speak with Dead to find out things

Klesha

3 kinds. The Kleshas, "the 3 poisons" Desiderium, Dominus, and Abhorreo. All Klesha are surprisingly stealthy and have exact visual knowledge of their surroundings in 300 feet radius, even through barriers such as stone or darkness. Also true seeing

Desiderium appear as naked humanoid with 2 great hands emerging from their back. The hands are arranged as wings the palms open and front facing and each one is bigger than the humanoid in between them, the feet of which do not touch the ground. The hands constantly feel out the surroundings. In a narrow environment the fingers support the central figure by pressing against the sides of the tunnel but in the rare event of encounter one in a open space the hands rotate, still palm forward, but with the fingers touching the ground

The central figure appears to be a drugged haze, with eyes closed and a smile of ecstasy on its face. Wounding the central figure does nothing to change the expression even though wounds to it are fatal as any other creature

Like all Klesha it seeks to turn others into more of it. It either does this choosing a particular avaricious individual and tailing them slightly or by isolating an individual by killing or otherwise removing its companions

That individual is "marked." It then silently follows just out of sight of the individual, (sometimes in a parallel tunnel) and keeps the target safe from other monsters. Natives of Erebus.can tell when someone has been "marked" by a Klesha although some are crazy or dumb enough not to care. The desiderium can the make minor illusions to hint at shelter, the re-appearance of companions or treasure if the individual is so motivated. The more effort spent to chase these the more the taint grows (represent by wisdom loss every time the player states "I want..." or "I need.." (either in or out of character) deduct a point of wisdom. Maybe give them a save if you want, but either way tell them they just lost a point of wisdom. Don't tell them why of course). If the reach zero wisdom they slip into a coma. If the Desiderium can get hold of them it will spend an hour gently cooing and massaging their flesh into a malleable putty and shape them into an egg like shape. The "egg" will then hatch, and the new Desiderium will emerge (the old form appearing as the humanoid in the middle).

Desiderium are loners however and will not remain around an "egg" that it has formed.

If the marked individual resists desire repeatedly and shows no sign of wavering, the Desiderium will kill them if they feel the have a reasonable chance to do so. In Combat they attack with grabbing and crushing with one hand at a time (the desiderium can only move slowly if one hand is so engaged) or flinging a grabbed individual into its companions. It can also make the tips of its fingers sticky and seize weapons or shields in this way. SOmetimes it will use this on a marked individual, to take a beloved object and then run away.

Dominus appear as gaunt human figure with a row of stitches running from the groin to the top of the torso. It has no sex organs and instead of a head and neck it has a tall paper crown. Blood stains are seen in the paper crown occasionally that are suggestive of a face bleeding on the other side of the crown.

Dominus are a lot more aggressive than Desiderium and will sometimes attack and kill things without regard for anything other than killing. In combat they may inflict a variety of hold person, command, and domination effects with grandiose hand gestures. They have little strategy about this other than sewing confusion. THey attack with frightful strength despite their withered frame, often grasping one opponent by a limb and using them as a club against others.

Sometimes they will already be in command of weaker inhabitants of Erebus. and will send them forth to die, sometimes supporting them with physical attacks and powers sometime merely observing. Dominus create more of themselves by repeatedly dominating a stupid or weak creature and then having that serving a marked individual. The more the individual relishes or abuse their newfound minion the more wisdom then they lose (effects as Desiderium).

Again once the individual has fallen into a coma, it either commands the marks minion to carry them off, or it attacks immediately. Left alone with the mark, it will take off its crown (revealing another crown underneath of the exact dimensions of the first) and place it over their head and neck. The mark head and neck are then dissolved into bloody goo by the crown over the next hour. The new Dominus will awake and proceed to strip off its clothes, pull off any external genitals and scoop out its guts and organs, and sew itself shut, using hair, pieces of cloth or intestinal strips.

Abhorreo appear as a black blurred assemblage of beetles standing on 2 legs, with an empty skin crudely draped over it's multiple mouthparts and antennae. It has similar approaches to reproduction as desiderium but instead uses hate, paranoia and distrust. With illusions relating to the same (same mechanics but use words like I don't trust, or suspicions of other people in the group).

If has gotten a mark into a coma, it will peel their skin off and stuff it full of discards shell plates from its hide. It will then leave it to rot inside the skinless corpse, and after a week a new Abherreo will emerge.

In combat they have a varying amount of bladed fangs, claws, and hooks (roll a d4 each round, that's how many attacks it gets) and can cast off their skin and fling in to wrap around a target holding them fast like a rubber straight jacket. If the skin is damaged beyond repair, the Abhorreo will peel a new one off the first available body. While it lacks a skin it cannot mark or use its illusion powers.

Monster Manual Sewn From Pants

Pages

Tuesday, 22 December 2020

Planescrap : Ocean Protean

THE OCEAN PROTEAN

Xoads

Bric-a-bracs

Tuesday, 15 December 2020

Planescrap :Mt Erebus