YOU ARE HOME

Print PDF THIS IS HOW IT WORKS

Mole Moles
oh no it's not a mole on your skin it's a mole it moves around and is hairier than usual but with softer hair.
They eat parasites and infections so if you have made a bunch of saving throws against them recently you prob have Mole Moles. Oh god . Some of these moles are actually spies for Jubilex. So they are mole mole moles.



Organ Snakes
As a form of organ replacements snakes are fine. Everyone knows this. However they require special care and maintenance.

Brain : Any time you take a direct approach to something you need to make a saving throw or lose a point of intelligence. If you let your snake out at night it will eat books. This means you have read the book. There is no accounting for the taste of a snake though.

Liver: any successful save vs poison heals you 1d4 hitpoints. Poison never really tastes that bad or unusual to you.

Stomach: After a big meal you can sleep for a week. Chewing food  before swallowing it will make you nauseous.

Heart: You don't ever really get that excited or frightened.

Kidneys: You piss causes plants to die.

Womb: Snake or mostly snake babies.

Lungs:  No-one hears you breathing. Whenever you specifically tell people that you are telling them the truth it sounds really suspicious



"Meat"

It's just meat , what does it do? it's red it's not organs or muscle how did it get here? It's an IOU a flesh elemental is borrowing your particulars they'll be back any moment.

grab bag of symboitical armour mechanics

Print PDF I had all this mechanics in mind and I was going to have each type of mechanic for each one but all of them seemed to fit and each seemed to suggest taking it another way so I just decided to put this out as a pick and mix post of problems , limitations and etcs of having things growing on you.


PROBLEMS WITH THE THING GROWING ON YOU:


skim healings it wants a cut: 1 point of every die of healing or amount of healing goes to the symbiote

it has cravings: when ever a die of healing rolls a 4, all of that die goes to symboite

it gets paid first: 1 point per level of healing need to go the symboite before you start getting the benefits

Eat more: either by leeching nutrients from you directly or by via a mouth of its own your food bills are going up. Specifically through one of the following options

 twice as much : if you keep track of that sort of thing. Tick off 2 rations every time you eat, and pay twice as much for meals. Because you are eating for two! awww!

twice as often :
your stomach isn't any bigger but you sure burn through food fast. You need 6 meals a day and a day counts as two days for starving damage.

Fussier:
you need top quality ingredients or fresh food or obscure meats or whatever. You can never be (nutritional) satisfied with the cheap option and must always choice the expensive option. Eating random things that are obscure and food has 50/50 chance of satisfying you. ( Say, goblin steaks. only roll when first tried)
Eating random things that are not really considered food exactly has a 1 in 6 chance of satisfying you . (again roll only the first time it is tried. Gives no additional resistance to poison or disease but does allow you digest the formally indigestible)

Usurper: it wants to make some of the decisions. This can be just a triggered compulsion or a continual campaign to get some more say/ completely takeover.

Shareholder takeover: this is the one I had mentioned for fungal armour. It works with the symboite having some healing or hitpoints it can offer you. Keep a running total of how much hitpoints you have got of the symboite in this. That is your percentage chance the symboite will usurp at end of session. A harsh option is the loss of character permanently or temporarily or a forced quest for the symboites weird goals. Another option is the additional of a Compulsion , or a Goal  or anything else below

Compulsions:  when the opportunity arises you must save or do this thing. If you fail 3 saves you always do this.

• Lick Corpses
• Deny its existence
• avoid populated areas
• evangelically discuss the benefits of the symboite
• Piss in food , secretly

• Immerse yourself in water
• spit in the mouths of unattended children

Scooby Doo:
YOu now have a morale  score like a monster. This acts as a normal morale score, failing it means the symboite has taken over and is protecting its investment with dire cowardice.

YOu NEED ME :
it's now hooked up to your vitals. Killing the symboite results in 1d4 major organs failing.



Goals/Plans for you: The symboite has dreams you know? This might manifest as a geas if prolonged too long or you are usurped (as above)

Corpse Harvest: when you die , it will immediately convert your body to a fruiting body or as fuel for another stage of its life.

Travel: It needs to go to a particular far away location

Infection: It wants access to a water supply that provides water to atleast 2000 intelligent beings

Cult: It wants a social organization of some kind to be growing more of its kind and preparing hosts

Hushing: It wants the knowledge of its kind's existence to be destroyed

Disinformation Campaign: it wants all kinds of wild rumours spread until no-one is sure exactly what is true about it


 Exp options:

• Bonus exp in any session that advance towards  the goals of the symboite
• Penalty exp in any session in which you don't

It ain't heavy:
You may assign exp to it like a henchmen to increase its power.

Allergys:
if exposed to these its powers are suppressed and/or you and it take damage. This might be a good thing if you want to dislodge it.

• Salt
• Vinegar
• Alcohol 
• Temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius
• Temperatures below freezing
•  Direct Sunlight

The Wonderful World of Symboitic Armour, Coral

Print PDF part 2 in a series. Also go back and look at the first one  because some sweet art got done for it.

CORAL


Advantages:


It's solid , repairs very slowly but easily accepts grafts of coral.  Can be used to replace or internally buttress bone, sharp edges shred attempts to entangle or grapple
Possible enhancements: Poison stings

Anemones (either small and protect against vermin swarms or large and attack independently)

Astral feedings allow you to replace a cast spell if someone casts the same one near by. Spell will have reduced effect (-2 on any dice roll, +2 on saves)

Crabhammer : one limb is a big hammery fist mass. Shards break off into flesh of those struck causing pain and muscle spasms.

Obscuring Clouds

Bio-luminescence

 Disadvantages: heavy, requires periodically migration to nutrient rich streams or winds to filter feed. Will take you for walks at night if deprived.
Who can hook a girl up? 
mermaids, eldritch underwater types, wise and cunning crabs and crayfish, sentient reefs of coral and its druid guardians

Specific Kinds:

Cold Fire Crown:
People intruding on the reefs of the Drowning Druids will be forced to work out their sentence with one of these driving their body. It's a spired crown of coral that fuses to the skull. It glows and flickers blue and causes weird aftertrail effects (Treat as Displacement ). The thing about these druids is they have been known to deliberate lure ships on the reefs so they can claim fresh labour to enhance their reefs.
Each druid has a different reef and they compete by laying down fresh material for the coral to grow on.
The mind control effects of the Cold Fire Crown require the presence of the druid or the reef , so if found further afield it is benign. For now.


Red Ruin:
Thick sharp scab like bands in rings around the body. Thick around the knuckles , elbows and knees. Adds 1d8 poison/abrasive cutting damage to any grapple or unarmed strike. For going drink for 2 days triggers a survival mechanism in the coral, it drains and stores all your blood, keeping you preserved in a dessicated state. Being submerged in water will rehydrate you to life with no last effects, except for weird colonial organism dream hangovers.
Red Ruin has been used to store and smuggle troops into strategic locations


Architect of Bone:
This coral must be planted underneath the skin directly on to the bone. Once there it will spread , reinforcing all bone structure (+1 hitpoint per level) and repairing any breaks in a couple of rounds. If you are attacked without a weapon it will form a large spike out of your wrist, for use as a sword. This inflicts 1d8 damage on you however.
In addition , everytime it repairs damage , it is making the bone thicker than before, with the distinct possibility of turning the host into a immobile hulk. Each time it repairs a bone or you are reduced to zero hitpoints, deduct 2 points of dexterity or strength (players choice) Reducing either stat to zero means you are now sessile. 

The Wonderful World Of Symbotic Armour, Fungus

Print PDF

Cédric Plante drew this amazing pictures for this post!

and a follow up here


Lack of home gaming and disorganization in playing anything regularly like online , plus the bizarre swellings of on-going projects have left me feeling pretty hesitate to just pour stuff on here like I have being doing.

But in the interest of maintaining the current inertia , I asked on g+ for some ideas for a blog post.

The one I choose was  Tom Middlemurk's Jeremy Duncan's one for more species of symbiotic armours. This might be a series, because I have more notes.

FUNGUS:
okay I have already done this one, but I still like it and you should go and look at it again, because I'm referring to it below

Advantages: Self Repairing, protection from physical attacks, hitpoint "loans"

Possible enhancements: Spore Weapons (poison, percussive, choking), regeneration, breathing filters, autopilot in the case of extreme mental/physical distress or subjugation

Disadvantages: risk of being usurped , might be a strain that has a "take control of nervous system and make body climb as high as possible before rupturing it with spore delivering stalks" cycle of life. Or a stage of life that involves being eaten by something, and will effect your behaviour to make that happen.

Who can hook a girl up? Myconids, Fungal Cultists, Fungus elementals, wind blown infections, previous owners  now deceased, worryingly evangelical current owners sharing starter kits (in the style of  Kombucha teas)

Specific Strains:
The Destroying Angel:
Spores on the wind make contact physical and psychic with the dying and vengeful.
Destroying Angel will bond with the willing and give regeneration , weird slabby mushroom plate, and make them count as a fungus for mind effecting effects.

In exchange after the mission is complete it will ask to go to somewhere high where it can convert  the bearer into a large fruiting structure and disperse its spores.

The Candle-Snuff :
Sometimes found in the wild. Appear as over-lapping  black and grey circles on the hosts skin with fine translucent hairs . Anti-photosynthesizes converting both the darkness and the psychic energy in the straining to perceive something in the darkness into fuel/food for both it and the host. Feeding too long on one patch of darkness will convert it to another type of darkness
 
The Amethyst Deceiver:
Carefully grown by myconists of slippery characters. Purple, fuzzy matts. Could be mistaken for woolen vests. Interlacing spiracles of keratin mean it counts as leather. The real power of this is a constant release of hallucinogens  that mean the host is remembered differently by everyone they met and everytime they meet.

The Glutinous Gomphidius :
The host will look like a michelin man. Extra 10 hitpoints. Need to eat 4 times as much.