Anomaly

Print PDF  It is been awhile!

My brain seems to have all its "write rpg material" being sucked limp by trying to finish those planescape notes that I said I was done with but now have an editor for .

the landscape art is being done with collage . Everyone loves collage.

I found this written down while I was cleaning up my room , it's reality problems and rotten incomprehensible technology .
I just wrote down the best ones (10 of about 40) and now are adding some more



1. Dark sickly red fluid , when it contacts rock or bone it makes it bubble, froth and melt. It acts like this for 30 seconds, longer/shorter if the temperature is low/high (respectively)

2.A liquid mirror that staring into it will random swap your skills with some alternate version with you.

3.Contagious glow that slows down fire and explosions to a trickle

4.A crystal that's a big mess of spikes that if it stabs a limb , the limb develops its own personality

5. A leech twisted into an endless writhing know. If place on dead flesh , it will animate and make it repeat its last 5 minutes of life until it completely falls apart

6.Gleaming dust that rigidifies a soft material until its hard as steel. Applied to skin it will just harden the skin which will make it eventually rip off the body as the skin and tissue underneath and around it loses its hold

7. Drifting fog which crystallizes into razor sharp , gravity defying shards sporadically

8. A bouncy orb that doubles in bounce height each time. After d20 bounces it blows up with lethal force

9. A black rock that pulses every 10 second with a deep , bone shuddering,  bass note. Each bass note will trigger an ancestral memory

10. Stack of glass discs, grinding on top of each , make horrible noises. Stuff keeps coming alive around it, spontaneous generation style

11. A stain in the air , like a film strip about to burn. Starting at it for a minute will cause a permanent blind spot in the vision of the starer. They however can reach into this blindspot as if it was a portable hole , with a opening of 30 centimetres.
 Anything living placed in this"hole" will disappear, more or less forever. If something living is not placed in the hole each day, a centimeter hole will appear on the inflicted. If it keeps not being fed , it will continue to grow ,doubling in size each day.
The hole will not cause blood loss or expose the internal flesh to infection , but will limit function as a hole in the body normally would.

12. A black pole, seemingly like coal or slow burned wood, stretched up from its metre base to hair thin over a 100 metres. Nothing can die in its shadow.

13.  A simple brass like hoop, warm to the touch , indestructible and fixed in space.

14. Pulsing mass of needles. If a vertebrate touches them they dive under the skin and proceed to convert them into a invertebrate, chasing and flattening out the bones into plates and sewing the muscles into the necessary ties to move them. It's more than a little painful.

15. A glass ball. Touching either it removes the ability to feel pain for an hour or discharges all the pain that would of been felt by the last toucher into them.

16. A mass of organs turned into something like a circuit board. It removes and stores hunger into salt tubes.

17. A field of white grass, rustling to unknown winds. Each blade of grass ranges from a metre to 3 metres in height. Walking through the field will cause 1d4 duplicates of the walker to appear somewhere in the world. Their personalities will be each different weird exaggerated versions  of aspects of the walkers and each has a 10% chance of wanting to ruin and consume the original. The duplicates all know the exact location of the original at all times.
This effect doens't trigger more than once an hour.

18. A knife with a rainbow blade. The blade is harmless and as solid as an actual rainbow. However anything it "cuts" though will have a mirage appear of them repeating their next minute of actions an hour after they were cut with the blade. The mirage appears 376 centimetres in front of the current location of the swinger of the blade and corresponding to their line of vision.
If the knife's handle is covered with the users blood the mirage will be real for all purposes , for that minute. This will then age the user by 10% of their natural life span.

19. A square of some kind of flexible metal. Its single colour slowly shifts through the visual light spectrum, over the course of a day. Anything wrapped in it will have objects of that colour effectively not exist for it.
Results vary on how much a colour has to match the current colour for it to be effective.  An art programs "fill selected colour " option could be your arbiter here.

20. A small moon that orbits whoever is alive and oldest within 10 metres. It produces moonlight as if an actual moon ("produce" = reflected sunlight if you run that kind of campaign), that does all the things that moonlight usually does to certain magics and magical beings.
Unfortunately anything that happens to this moon, also happens to the actual moon.

Artifact , II

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That post was too brief , here is more MORE

The Heartworm

A thing mostly like an arrow. Hold gently in your hand , say someone's name (the first name their mother gave them) , and it will fly away, faster than a thought and as unstoppable and traceless as a rumour. It will arrive in the heart of the named.

The Egg

If passed through the pelvis of a creature (regardless if it's alive, dead, skeletal, ash, or fossil) it will quicken and hatch in 2 nights as that creature. An exceptional sculpture can also work, even if it represents nothing that has lived before.

The 7th descendent of this creature will lay The Egg back into the world.


The Hammer

When held breaks anything it hits. After breaking something it begins to vibrate , and after 3 rounds will release a destructive pulse for a kilometre around, pulverizing anything as strong or weaker than what it just broke. It will continue to vibrate and release pulverisation waves until it makes contact with something harder than what it broke to trigger it.


DISTINCT POWER SOURCES FOR ARTIFACTS:

Low Hanging Fruit:
Radically Out of Genre, Anachronistic , Alive and Fleshy and Toothsome, Hyperreal (like at the end of Promethea or the Lego movie mcguffin) , Something physically in the room as the players, Origins in mythology otherwise not used in setting like having Excalibur or The Holy Grail

Remaining Fruit:
Jack Kirby style magic technology

Artifact-shaped Nothing , like a hole in space that your eye slides across but sword shaped or something

New Impossible Colours. Grudgingly , "Sunless Sea" was cool with the Neathbow if you want some inspiration

Everytime Artifact Is Used a Star Goes Out

Messages To Players Written On Artifact

Still Living Body Parts From Creator or Prometheus Type

Superdense Material that means artifact ways 100 times more than it should and causes time distortions around

Reshaped Intelligent Beings otherwise not in setting like Draculas , The Middle Class , or Whales

Impossible Machines Of Rutting Cog

Protruding Sex Organ of Extra Spatial being .  Appearance gives no doubt of this.

Miniature Cities Frozen at the moment of horrible disasters 

Out of Scale objects ; like a urticating hair  2 metres long, or a solar system held in the palm of your hand

Artifact

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"Pick an artifact from the old DMG 1e Gygax thing.  Rewrite it - make it good."

Artifacts are almost an "artifact" themselves by now, i.e something that's still there because it was there at the start.

The nature of the label of them suggests a categorization and standardisation somehow of magical items that is annoying.

The original dungeon master guide had this bizarreness with each artifact having its entry listing it's powers as 1 of I , 3 of II 10 of III.
Each letter referred to a list of powers , and then the d.m would make their selection and write it in the space provided in their entry.

This was so players couldn't ever know what the artifact exactly did , without stealing the d.m's copy of the dmg.

It meant that none of the artifacts had much in the way of themed powers and was overall pretty goofy.

Am I going to rewrite one? No, I don't like any of them enough.

For artifact to be a useful categorical distinction from magic items then we need to think about how magic items work first.

If magical items are common , then the world needs to super weird to make that interesting, and the magical items more weird. Like everyone have rings of flying is bad, but everyone have pig-balloons is good and inflatable pig technology being part of the setting.

So what would make an artifact in that setting? It would need to be powered by something super rare and the rarity be part of the setting. The last works of the gods, alien leakage, the unravelling of the space itself etc.

If magical items are rare , then they would benefit greatly from having the lore of the artifacts anyway, This is the Sword of the Great Betrayer, These are Teeth of The Moon Eater etc.
So  would artifacts risk just being the upper scale of magic items, which is fine, but artifact then is a looser term?

I'm losing my point here .

New point:

Make artifacts do one thing that seems like a complete cheat, the rules of the game are broken or atleast warped greatly. 

Examples:

THE LENS 

it's apparently a retina from some kind of early beings, of great size. It's used by replacing the top of your skull with it , it's about that size . 

Once this is done the possesser can cast anyone elses spells, depleting them from their reserves. Anyone they can see or are otherwise reasonably sure of their position can be used in this way.

Unfortunately the possesser can no longer undertake any task which would require a roll to succeed. They must use magic or automatically fail it.

OTHER MECHANICS SUITABLE

THE HAND

You assign all targets of attacks (within normal range of the attacks) . However any attacks that are directed at you (and not assigned else where) automatically hit .

THE COIN

At the start of a round,  estimate how many rolls will be needed, then roll those dice at the start of a round and assign them . If you overestimate you lose this ability next round.

However must always accept a fair wager

THE SKIN

no longer suffer damage, don't have hitpoints anymore.

but can't change at all. Always the same mood, can't get exp or lose levels, don't get more or less hungry or thirsty, no long term memory. 

THE DOVE

don’t roll to hit anymore , just hit them , but must keep fighting until all participants in a combat  are slain

Not understanding the question : Animal Mineral Vegetable

Print PDF So this is a thing:
http://rayleklai-world.blogspot.co.nz/2011/06/story-of-leklai.html

Key quote:
"... one is assured that Lek Laï is not a simple mineral but a kind of metal-animal , capable of "swimming across mountains"

Which other than being worth sharing because it's amazing, is interesting because it's easy to take for granted the thinking of animals, minerals and vegetables as obvious and distinct categories.

The idea of spontaneous generation is possibly the first thing you might think of ; the idea that animal life 

(specifically verminous and unwanted life; I guess this was the only kind no-one bothered to check that hard. If someone was "hey silkworms come from water evaporated in moonlight" some entrepreneur would of got onto that )

could spring from inanimate; maggots hatched from meat, mice from old grain, snakes from dresses trellises left in rain barrels. 

Other examples from this mindset were the mandrake( it's a plant but a screaming plant) or bears licking their cubs into being from salt, the "vegetable sheep" explanation for cotton.

Numerous plants marked a mythological event  ; the first cultivated daffodil "Narcissus poeticus" , Judas ear fungus springing from the tree Judas hung himself on*

And then there was all shenanigans with whatever the fuck alchemists were on about.

Now before we get talking about animism : how do we know what was actually believed , what was metaphor or some kinda of catchy story to remember what a plant looked like or where it grew or just something to tell the kids to shut them up for minute? 

Who the fuck knows and it's possible it was varying degrees of all this at  various times or more accurately it would be some semi-fluid hybrid of bullshit, pragmatism , belief and faith which cannot be easily translated to any modern mental frame of reference.

So that plants don't have feelings, animals are distinct entities from the landscape  , and just what was going with kings love life is completely irrelevant to soil quality : these are not self evident facts at various points of time and culture.

So this is where I go : make up weird shit for how the world works for your campaign for fun.

Well yes But. 

So Ars Magica was set in "mythical europe" , the idea being, somewhat in passing, that all that weird medieval shit was true. 

Which was a somewhat terrible idea as if all the ideas we actually treated as true it wouldn't actually feel medieval. 

As in if dress trellises always turned into snakes could a siege hold out by turning spare clothing into protein? (okay maybe medieval people believed snakes were poison so it wouldn't work)

The point being in would kinda turn into a baron munchausen setting . Which is fine but it's just interesting result. 

Though arguable you could make up more medieval bullshit  to stop people treating the bullshit seriously or start claiming that being rational about things just makes them not work (because of the Realm of Reason , a thing in Ars Magica which was awkward and dumb)

I'm getting away from myself.

Um.

Animism. And those "tribal stories" where a mountain is also a daughter who ran away but also a mountain. 

Animism can't be easily understood as "invisible things in stuff"  , it's a complete rethinking or irrelevance of those categories of animate / inanimate, animal and mineral , agency and co-incidence.**

Tribal stories: are they a story or belief or a metaphor? My understanding of my own un-understanding is , that, basically no.

Trying to frame them or understanding them in such terms seems like trying to understand an ocean  by writing about what the splashing noises sound like.

Fuck this is what keeps throwing me off writing posts , this was gonna be a list of weird shit  and it's spiralling out of control in multiple directions and taking up hours.

I'm will try and wrap up somewhere useful:

Defining "animals" as things that are animals in this world and "monsters" as everything else is pretty terrible.

Everything should have a reason to exist that makes sense for the world and hopefully little sense in ours. I'm sure Arnold wrote something about this but now I can't find it so read this one as an example:

http://goblinpunch.blogspot.co.nz/2016/01/ogres-and-their-hungry-kin.html

Magic as technology or magic as technology in a pulp comic have been done a lot.

Magic as technology is pretty familar, but so is the other one, it's just not explictly labelled as such.

Basic this form : there is magic, it's all over the show, it doesn't make sense , but it doesn't intergrate with anything and only monsters and wizards and their various aracana have it.

(Which in one form is the "magic is chaos" variant , where magic is always spooky and rare and corrupting and outside civilisation which is just kings and digging holes but some how magic is still worse than that. Which is generally considered more interesting than guards with +1 swords but I still think it's played out as shit and is more echos of christian metaphysically framing which is even more played out as shit. Even if has great production values like lamenations.)

AS opposed to "folk magic" , where everyone is kinda doing spells or bargaining with spirits and shit and there is an absolute intregation between magic and how the world works. There might be a lot of risk vs reward type deals and death spells and  curses .

Like a guy that you buy magic items off sounds like bullshit but that's literally what happens 

here 

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/akodessewa-fetish-market

and it's great and there is couple of books I wish I had on me to reference right now about "outside priests/magicians" and "inside priests/magicians" and the activation of objects to deflect curse but I don't so it's a dumb content farm link.

but also average people have been doing magic forever 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_tablet

and voodoo dolls was people mistaking vodoun stuff for how white people used to curse each other and then promptly forgetting they used to curse each other

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppet

So I'm saying you can world where the barbarians have magical armour because they snuck around and dug up all your graves and made shirts out of your mourneds hair and that's even better than the shit where there is no magical swords except for one and it's super weird and you have to roll on a mutation table every time you use it and there is kings and hole digging.

and possibly you could reskin something that everyone**** complains about doesn't feel cool because everyone has magic powers (like 13th age or 4th edition or Feng Shui wait no-one complains about Feng Shui. Well okay they don't complain about that) not just the wizard and the priest.

Also the priest is as boring as possible so he's not mistaken for the wizard and mutation tables and what the fuck am I doing I'm literally collating very different systems philosophies into one straw man here I need to stop adding more to this bit and finish the table at the bottom which is what I intended to write 5 hours ago 

and you should read everything here if you haven't already 

http://straitsofanian.blogspot.co.nz/

and I just started to scratching the surface of this oh gawd I just wanted to make up this thing

like that thing I talked about at the start.

1. Mountain Bear : It's a type of rock but it's also a punishment for taking too much prey and not leaving offerings when staying in caves.

Like it's any rock that looks like a bear that someone found , and everyone lets their kids play with them. But it's also death scary to find one in a cave if you don't have anything to offer them because then a large bear of earth with a rock skull that breathes with stolen breath will kill you before that night is over. Unless you go out and kill and over the first thing you see. If you make that promise , go off and see something and don't kill it then the Mountain Bear will kill both of you.

It's also a rock that is good for sharpening hunting spears and knives (reroll the first attack roll with that weapon in a hunt and take the best), but if used for war you then have to go to Mountain Bear (it's a place too, but not a literally place, except it kinda is) and make a successful case to Mountain Bear (it's a god too) why it was a legal war or your entire village disappears. 

2. Traitors river: This is water that will poison peoples minds against those that trust them. You can find it by drowning someone and using them as a boat in a moonless night in most small bodies of water.  After that the easy bit is getting someone to drink it , it's exactly like water and so can be easily slipped into their drink or food. The next bit is a bit tricky; whatever you were hoping to happen will genuinely work but create such a shitstorm it will fuck your shit up as well. 

So in order to not have that happen you have got to work out what the water wants to do and then betray it before it betrays you.  

A good rule of thumb for how this works is if when you, as your character, declare you are using it and the d.m can't work out why the fuck you would do that or at the very least , why you would do that right now, why then the Traitor's river is properly just as shocked.

3. There is this tree and this whale and they swap places sometimes and tell each stuff and pissing off one means the other is going to be really pissed off and everyone in the respective environment listens to the tree / whale so it's going to be a bad time. The locals use the same name for both the whale and the tree but are real vague if they are talking about every one of this tree and every one of these whales or there is just one tree and one whale or even if they recognise there is difference .

4. Cats are literally shithead shadows from hell and the only good thing about them is they eat mice and mice are terrible gossips as well as shitheads from hells so if a cat knows something you know only that cat and whoever in hell bought the secret knows it. Mice learn something, everyone in hell and everyone who talks to hell  will know it.

Nobody kills cats that often because all the mice that haven't been digested will escape. 

Also all shadows are a kind of dead cat and cats age in reverse so there's bound to be another one soon anyway.

Oh and when they digest mice they cough them up as moths which are idiots and fly to moon and tell them all the stories they have misremembered and/or made up. Then the moon tries to verify all this bullshit with you at night and that's what dreams are.

So obviously if you can keep away from mice, cats and mothies you will stop dreaming and then no-one can see or remember you except in song.*****

No , none of those entries were "rumours" , I am saying they should be literally true if you use them in campaign. 

*yeah for purposes of ye olde time fungus is a plant. Also the tree is supposedly a elder tree, so good luck finding a decent strong branch there Judas"

** I mean someone's prob going to learn me here , I mean all you bastards seem to have all these degrees and such. But I will learn something

*** Speaking of grossly ill formed but talking about stuff anyway let's just stop here

**** by "everybody" I'm just flailing at some fucking straw windmills here like Don Quixote on a rpg forum this is worst mixed metaphor.

I was watching Vikings and man if you are going to play that loose with your historic "France" just give everyone onions  and striped shirts and berets and have the fucking eiffel tower right there it would distract me from how terrible that siege plan was like holy shit guys they have crossbows inside the castle we didn't expect them to shoot us with crossbows when we got inside though they only worked when they used them against people outside the castle. 

No, I'm not being facetious I would be able to take it seriously if all the French people had berets but don't take it seriously when they have a stupid plan and keep forgetting about shield walls. You don't understand my complicated relationship with the ridiculous yet. 

***** Rats are noble and wise because they have kings which is the dumbest thing about this whole thing. No-one has worked out what happens when cats eat rats or rats eat mice. When rats eat cats however it's a matter of political delicacy and people don't talk about it.