Some Locations that might be hard to map

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(note people at bottom for scale)

So there are these things called Washingtonia filiera or Washington palms and that is some terrible colonyist name for them but hey.

Anyway they shed their leafs and it all builds up in a big ass skirt thing.

There is (on some? all?) a crawl space between the the trunk and the palm skirt. It's a cool , dark , quiet and dusty and a occasionally throughfare for all kinds of life that lives in the skirt
(tarantulas, rats, wasps, scorpions , some birds I think, my research here was pretty light)

Now the thing about the skirt is that it can slough in big heaps , crushing and suffocating anything caught in its way.

Let's imagine a gianter palm, like a 100 stories , with the barks forming  stairs and platforms , and occupationally rooms and niches in the every present hatches. And a variety of vermin and flattened life cable of moving freely through the hatch.

Or just keep it how it is, with something humanoidish making nests in the skirt, accessible by climbing up the trunk, but with the danger of movement or activity bringing a section down with you or ontop you, pressing you against the trunk but still kept aloft. Maybe the nest is firmly attached to the trunk , so sections of the skirt can be defensively sloughed as an ablative fortress.

Climbing on the outside is extremely risky as there is no handout that might not give away with no notice

(Note as is these skirts are highly flammable. Accept,  adjust or accommodate this as a g.m)



Other places:
 A dungeon in a house. But in the house, a series of interlocking false ceilings, crawlspaces, wall cavities and slender rooms, the house and the secret house interlaced completely, each traversable without realizing the existence of the other.

An easy said than done approach is to start with a isometric building plan and carefully start moving walls and dropping ceilings and blocking off corridors until you have the second house.

The Dead are still here:
The astral and the ethereal planes are generally described as space limitless.
Let's go the other way. The astral plane is contained in anything solid and rectangular . Its astral dimensions vary. Sometimes the same size sometimes 10 fold.
The dead might stay in the walls. A round room is one the dead cannot watch you from. The astral plane only maps to these spaces. Astral forms squeezing through walls and along floors , underground tracing a box around the unalterable curves of a cave. A series of acute angles suggests a curve and these are astral significant as traps and portals.

Ethereal space is maybe a  2 dimensional shadow world painted on surface of everything. Except inside. That's the astral. It hurts to travel from the astral to the ethereal.
EDIT: I just realized how much this owes to "Foundation" from China Mieville's short story collection "Looking for Jake". So shout outing to that right now.

The wonderful world of symbolic armour 4 : MEAT

Print PDF I'm tired and all kinds of diseased but now I have painkillers and a sleeping dog beside me and I can't be bothered seeing what format I did the other parasite armour posts in so here we go: No wait I did because it was easier somehow. I'm craving marshmellow based candy so bad right now it is worrying.



Meat:
growing meat stick on your meat keep all the pointy objects out.
Hoorah.
 Either reanimate with  necromancy and lax corpse disposal protocol or growned in vats or degenerate peoples that are so degenerate you can wear them as a helmet
 Advantages:

 You can eat it

Improved strength

Relatively easy to adapt to your system



Possible enhancements:
I Think I hate this format I'm just going to skip to the fun bits

Disadvantages:

Who can hook a girl up?

Necromancers or golem crafters that deal a specially with flesh. Cults. Always the cults. These ones worship a perfect cube of meat. Womb witches take carefully regulated doses of terragens in order to give birth to graftable components.
A people that are always born with a conjoined twin that they separate themselves from in a coming of age knife dual and then keep the bits of the twin around for trade/spare parts.
Dr Moreau types.



Specific Strains:

Saint homunculus:
 It's a little version of you inside you that suffers instead of you.
Any spells or maledictions  effect just the homunculus not you. Which might kill it as it has no special powers of regeneration or resistance. Despite its "saint" title , it fucking hates you , but lacks the strength to claw its way out, but if someone knows it is there , they can target it with beneficial magics , maybe empowering it to eat your heart. So .. watch out for that.

StingerCysts:
Cysts storing poisons, potions or acids , to be released from blunt trauma

 Viscerous Cloth:
like a fat suit but more of a hollowed out ogre you can climb inside and wear as an exoskeleton, but kinda the exact opposite of exoskeleton but not really I guess??

Black Milk:
Your milk production glands are replaced with something that duplicates a spell like charm person or web or melfs acid arrow. But via milk.
Let's presume there were no metaphors in Shakespeare just literals.


Matryoshka Kernel:
Is this even armour anymore, it's just turning into a list of body horror you can shop for. Anyway every time you come to a major decision point in your life, the type that forever shapes you in a different direction, 
 you grow a smaller you just under your skin. If you die, your outer layer peels away and a you that would of made the other decision steps out all naked and glistening and with actual memorys up until that point, and then hazy not real memorarys beyond that , as if they had been living out that alter life path you did not take.

Unkind things

Print PDF Unkind things
1. Rooms filled with a single fish
2. Castle vital organs
3. adulthood here is obtained when 3 children climb onto each others shoulders and never come down again
4.the sword is a sensory organ. The more it tastes only you the greater the chance that it will emerge to eat you
5.the cauldron contains the boiled down fat of an entire city. It will be used to make a single candle
6.The speak with dead spell has unlimited duration and effect. You may ask nothing of them, only listen.
7.Every house has toad that they do not speak of but worship painstakingly
8.The dogs are very big and very smart for dogs. They are smart enough to enforce the laws but not well. Not well at all.
9.The wars of ancestors have left rivers of blood. This has frozen in a glacier which makes its way home slowly even now.
10.Take turns being the cow
11.This land is insects.
12.The disease breaks you like crystal but rarely kills.
13.The city walks on small soft legs
14.Dimensional parasites tunnel out space and brains from the inside of tall hats. There are books about it.
15.Souls are water.
16.You mint  your own coins with your own pain. Suffering is the only guarantor , really, when it all comes down to it.
17. Gods are dirty unkillable old men who make the weather work and harvests ripen.
18. There is no limit to hunger. You will not die. You will be just more hunger
19.Kings.
20.The most fertile land is that around flood prone river and muttering volcano

Her Loose Materials

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So the previous post was some mechanics loosely aligned with character races.

There was an evocative title but not much else. I was going to built on it because I often start these blog posts with a vague idea and start writing to see what happens.

This time I decided to leave the shadow of a skeleton or whatever.

THEN it gave me an idea for blog game. Basically you take those Kinds (or this other bunch of mechanics that will slouch in at the bottom of this post) and built on it whatever descriptions , fluff, back story, explains, emergent mechanics , elaborations , concept art etc, that you see fit.

Then I include a link here whenever that happens and I don't know SPIRITUAL PROFIT or something.

I inserted my feelers into g+ to see if there was interest and there was, and now these people are AHEAD OF THE GAMe (though this mission is not time sensitive. If you do it way later and show me I'll put a shout out about it back here and on the most recent post I do):

http://gameswithothers.blogspot.co.nz/2014/02/some-kinds.html
(also if haven't explored this blog before you should because it is quality)

Cédric Plante
drew some starting items based on this theme?

Wil Mckinne
wrote this on the original g+ post


"I think that the people who hack..

Always take the path of most-resistance. Like, too Compelled towards processing through a situation. People who have lots of self-convinced 'short-cuts', that are somewhat creative and occasionally brilliant but are generally just overbearing and arduous when put into action.

Like, might be able to easily disarm a complex trap after studying it, but requires a STR check for opening a door that's unlocked, because the door has to be pulled and not pushed."


NEW MECHANICS FOR THE GAME EVEN LESS PREDISPOSED :

1: take a reroll on a d20 roll.  Make a note of the number you rolled before the reroll.
If you roll this again something happens.
You must use the new number from the reroll.

2: as above  but you may choose to use either roll , but if you use the reroll ,  make a note of the number on the reroll. If you roll it again , something happens.

3. Make a stat check on anothers behalf. They will then have to accept something of yours.

4. You are a catalyst

5. teleportation kills and reincarnates

6. your density is effected the waxing and waning of the moon

KINDS

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1.The People that hack themselves out of the wall

intelligence , wisdom, charisma start at a 1d4 . In your second session add a d6. In your 3rd session add a d8.

You may never be stopped, held or slowed again.

2.The People that conceal birds.

When you die your next character may start with one stat the same as this one

3. The people that eat soil

you need not nor cannot drink. Your body contains no water and expels it immediately from consumed things.

4. The people that lost the sun

light is dark and dark is light

5.The people with snakes for bones

you are always prone but can squeeze into the smallest gaps. Your mind is shared amongst all your bones.

6.The people that cannot lie
you always lie

The Wonderful World of Symbiotic Armour; Plants

Print PDF Plants!
They can grow on you or even inside you!
As symbiotes go they are not really that great at incorporating themselves in their hosts. Which also is a good thing. While fungus always threatens to take just a bit more and coral is a constant weight (physically and dynamically), plants are pretty upfront.
"we will do this for you, and when the time comes, we will take this"

Advantages: Photosynthetic. They will feed and heal you with the magic of the suns burning beams!
Less demanding of resources, often self contained!
Disadvantages: Will shut down or die without regular access to sunlight. Tend to be expensive when they finally want their due. Abilities tend to concentrated on the plant than in the hosts body

Possible enhancements: High velocity seed shootings. Thorny whips. Root hold fasts.

Who Can Hook a Girl  Up? All those vanilla woodland creatures in the monster books. Wyrd druids,  cults, ancient and forbidden grains. Seeds from the stars. Astral orchids needing roots on the physical plane.

Specifics Species:

Insinuate Frond: 
Okay there is these huge mountain sized flowers in the astral/ethereal plane and like real plants needing bacteria to fix nitrogen in the soil and making special nodules on their roots to give the bacteria a home, Insinuate Frond need to grow roots straight through your skull and out your eyes and assorted head holes.

The translucent shimmering tendrils enhance your senses but kind of fuck with them as well. Like you can see in the dark and get True seeing but you see everything in allegorically magic realism way or something. Like you might see someone as tiger person not because he is really a tiger but because he is fierce at heart. The d.m should basically just mess up descriptions of things for you all time.

You can get this by accepting the flowers offer in your dreams. The flowers don't really understand that people don't think of dreams as legally bonding.




Gravetree:
 This is some seeds that you eat and they live in your stomach for pretty much ever. When you die they immediately and rapidly convert your entire body into a tree , so some bad old necromancer can't use you for any magics or undead making. While the seeds are in you , you get +4 vs saves to necromatic magic and take half damage from any necromantic spells

Amberplate:
This is a tree helmet that secretes amber forming platemail but requires a hammer and chisel to get off


Sap Shooter:
This is a pitcher plant helmet that can also shoot sticky goo once a day

The Mulcher:
This one extends its thorny tendrils all over your body , forming armour. It can also shoot forth its thorn seeds which grow rapidly into thrashing thorny plants when striking flesh, striking as light crossbow and , if a reflex save is failed, then inflict 1d8 damage a round, unless removed with a strength check and additionally round of damage. It has enough ammo for one thorn shot, but will grow 2 more to replace that one after a successful kill is done with it. It will demand each thorn to be fired everyday with the intend of killing.


Trauma Blossom:
This is delicate tree that lives on your back and turns painful experiences into fruit, so you don't remember them. Eating the fruit causes the (re) living out of the experience . The tree only can convert experinces that happen while the tree has been on you unfortunately, but rumours of ethereal one that can extent it's roots into your past have been heard.

Regarding Criticism towards Contessa

Print PDF fuck off