GLOGtober: Six Awful Books for Buckets of Blood

I'm doing GLOGtober out of order. For Day 3 I rolled a magical book. Here's six of them.

How to Use These Books

• Build a character class around them, or hack an existing one. The Dabbler Cultist could always use more reading material.
• They make perfect McGuffins. The player characters must race their rivals to claim the book before it falls into the wrong hands! They player characters were hired to transport one of these books across the country!
• Give a copy to an NPC and you've got a villainous cult leader.
• Hand them out as loot. They're worth a fortune to the right buyer.
• Have an NPC use one to accidentally unleash something ancient and awful.
• Just one of them unleashed upon the world would be a nightmare. What if all six go missing? It's up to the player characters to unravel the secrets of these tomes before Doomsday arrives....

10 cheap DM tricks

 I blame Phlox, for many things but especially this post. I've used all these tricks in my games at some point or another and I think they all work well.

1. Give the PCs a pet with a twist. The baby dragonling is ill and needs a rare herb that only grows somewhere dangerous. The goofy talking ferret is a secret agent spying on the party.

2. Give the PCs a ridiculously powerful single-use magical effect right at the start of the campaign. Once they use it, let it accomplish exactly what they hoped for, but also create unforeseen consequences.

3. Let players describe their hirelings when they're hiring them- "so before you stands a crowd of misfits and swords-for-hire, what kind of scoundrel are you looking to hire?" Then make sure the hirelings are funny.

4. When given a chance to humiliate a dickhead authority figure, the PCs will go to incredible lengths to do so.

5. Every city needs a magic tattoo parlor.

6. Have a list of fantastical foods and drinks on hand, and describe them on equal terms as mundane ones. Players go crazy for cocktails that turn their PC blue or whatever, and it adds texture to the world. The Gourmet Street zine is great for this.

7. Low-stakes contests are irresistible sidequests.

8. Every encounter table should include representatives of every local factions, as well as rarer encounters with wider-scale factions. And every place has at least three local factions.

9. Remind PCs of their reputations as often as possible.

10. If you need a unique NPC with absolutely no prep, just imagine them being played by a cool actor you like. A generic wizard is a lot easier to characterize when you decide she's being played by Pam Grier.

Buckets of Blood Masterpost

There's a Chainsaw Wizard and a Re-Animator. Locheil wrote a Loser Assassin, Sundered wrote a Hot Rod from Hell, and PurpleCthulhu wrote an ingenious framework for stringing the whole thing together. By now, the sensitive reader will surely have picked up on the hot new craze that's undeniably sweeping the GLOGosphere.

We're calling it Buckets of Blood and it fucking rules.

THAT IS NOT DEAD WHICH CAN ETERNAL LIE (GLOG Class: Re-Animator)

 A member of the same adventuring party as the Chainsaw Wizard. The Re-Animator knows that a human is a machine of meat and chemicals, and that the best way to fix a broken machine is by switching it off and then on again.

In other words, this is a necromancer-as-healer for a Weird psychedelic grindhouse setting.

The King in Yellow

This is all there is. You tried to argue against that. You picked up a job as a starsailor, or you fell in love, or stood for a cause, but at the end of the day, it doesn't add up to much. You're a lowly little human incapable of dedicating yourself fully to whatever narrative you've picked out to keep yourself fulfilled, because your identity is muddled and confused. Your love is poisoned with doubt and ennui, your revolution strangled by logistics, and starsailing- well, that's a job for people who are already one bad day away from realizing that absolutely none of this bullshit matters.

When you realize this, the Queen of Apathy laughs and whispers "right on!" in your ear. The Khatun-in-Dreams offers you a place far away from it all, among Her court of dreamers. They pull you towards cowardice. They want you to think that nothing mattering is an immunable fact of your life. You're lucky that the King in Yellow finds you, too, to keep you from turning your back on reality entirely. After all, it can still be repaired. Just needs a bit more glamour.

(The King in Yellow is one of Starsailor's Seven Sovereigns.)

YOU EXUDE A COSMIC DARKNESS (GLOG Class: Chainsaw Wizard)

 The legends tell of the great sages with wisdom unparalleled, who could chart the course of a kingdom's lifetime from a single utterance of its lowliest peasant. Of the mighty magicians who drew from the base nature of the universe itself to force reality to reshape itself to their wills. The invokers, the healers, the learned and the wise. All gone from this world, now, with only emptiness where wonder once was in their wake.

You don't trouble yourself over that shit. You've got a chainsaw.

DOPESMOKER: The Game

Click the images for the full-size versions. Partake sensibly and make sure to blare some doom metal. And if you actually play this, PLEASE let me know how it went.

 

Starsailor: Computers' Calculations

When you play as a Computer, your greatest tool will be Calculations- mystical workings upon the numerical underpinnings of reality. When you advance to a prime-numbered level, you gain the capacity to learn more Calculations. You can choose which ones, and learn them from any Computer textbook. Learning a Calculation takes a day of study.

Starsailor: Holy Primes and Computing Orders

[...] and from this we may deduce that our Gods are essentially detectable in nature, in those laws that govern us and our number systems, in the uncurling of ferns and the spiral of florets, appleseeds and snailshells, all that which grows and flourishes upon our low world. They are the very base units of the Heavens. A mathematician would call a God a ‘prime number’, such as may be defined as a number which may be divided into no components but itself and Unity. Though each shall have a chapter devoted to it, I offer a brief introduction to the divine nature of the first 97 Gods [...]

Fragment from the lost treatise A Practical Guide to Geometria, 1964.

GLOG Class: Vernian Science Hero

Jules Verne was probably the first writer whose books I truly loved, and most definitely the one whose work has influenced me most in life. It’s doubtful I would’ve become such a science nerd at a young age if not for his books making it seem cool. I won’t claim that his writing style was particularly great; perhaps three or four characters in his immense oeuvre actually stand on their own as characters and not just narratively-convenient cliches. But the Vernian Science Hero has become an archetype in himself, even though he usually just served as a convenient exposition mouthpiece in Verne’s own works; here’s a basic Science Hero class. They would suit a game with exploration-as-XP well. 

Vernian Science Hero 

You are a dreamer, an optimist, and- most essentially- an expert. Magic and violence are the domains of fools; all you’ll ever need is to keep your wits about you.

 Start with a dandy’s formal clothes, 2x your system’s normal starting funds, and a few widely-respected research papers already published. 

 A 

 You are an expert in [INT mod] scientific disciplines. Do not declare these at character creation; instead, you will decide what they are as they come up in play. Should your INT mod increase, you will be able to learn more things. You know absolutely everything there is to know about these topics at your setting’s current technology/knowledge level. This may only include magic if magic is a widely-accepted field of rigorous scientific study in your setting. These areas of expertise also count as skills, of course. 

 B 

 When you attempt to do something ridiculous and totally improbable, but you have a decent science-based explanation for why it should work, you can test INT to see if it works. If it falls in the domain of an area of your expertise, you automatically succeed.

 C 

 When you discover something totally new and unknown to modern science, you can ruminate upon it for an hour to intuite 1d4 true facts about it (2d4 if it falls within your areas of expertise). 

 D 

 Whenever discovering something new that falls within one of your areas of expertise, you may immediately declare one fact about it; as long as this fact is within the realm of pre-established possibility, it becomes a provable truth. 

 1d8 Example Scientific Specialties 

 Astronomy 

 Marine biology 

 Mechanical engineering 

 Geology 

 Paleontology 

 Chemistry 

 Medicine 

 Botany

Seven Plot Hooks involving the Khatun-in-Dreams and the Dreamlands

Because all that lore around the Khatun-in-Dreams doesn't mean anything if the players never interact with it.

1. A bunch of radical beat poets who worship the Khatun want to rediscover one of the Lost Forms of Abstract Thought. The players' crew is hired to escort the sheltered, rich bohemians across the seediest space stations in this sector in search of a psychoactive drug intense enough to help them rediscover the forbidden poetic technique.

2. After a mixup in the universe's collective unconscious, the crew wakes up in the Dreamlands in a blimp powered by gaseous hope, taking the place of a newly-recruited gang of revolutionary sky-pirates planning to bomb the Khatun's palace and free her dreamers to imagine their own dreams instead.

3. Cultists of the King in Yellow, who orchestrated the attack on the Khatun-in-Symbols out of jealousy all those aeons ago, have started a war of aesthetics that's sweeping the planet's music scene. The King in Yellow cultists favor traditional forms and exquisite craftsmanship, and the Dreamer cultists champion DIY aesthetics, surrealism, and free-association. It's all coming to a head at the upcoming planet-wide Battle of the Bands, and if the crew doesn't intervene, it'll boil over into a riot to make Altamont seem tame. Maybe they could start their own band to win the contest instead...?

4. Every member of the crew has seen the same face in their dreams for three nights straight. A man with bushy eyebrows, rambling an advertisement for some new brand of soda- and reclining on the Khatun's own throne (which is actually the abstract idea of a throne, and also a cloud)! Has the power balance in the Empire of Repose shifted? Has the Khatun accepted a sponsorship deal with this huckster? And will anyone in the crew get a good night's sleep until they figure it out?

5. When the crew stops at one of their hometowns for a quick resupply, they find every single person there has recently fallen into a coma- and that the longer they spend there, the more they start to feel oddly drowsy. Can they break the local Khatunic cult's spell before the entire town wastes away?

6. The macguffin that the crew so deperately needed got disintigrated or something. They're no cultists, but they've got drugs that'll send them straight into a Dreamland haze. They'll have to brave the ever-shifting landscape to find the macguffin and bring it to the waking world. It's lost in the depths of a dream-dungeon, which just so happens to be the GM's favorite fantasy dungeon that they wouldn't get to use in Starsailor otherwise.

7. A scientist's bold new theory- that the Dreamlands are the 'real world' and this world is the one that isn't real- has led to a diplomatic/scientific expedition into the heart of the Khatun's palace to recover the crystal ball she uses to scry her lands... only thing is, she doesn't accept non-worshippers into her courts. Time for a dream-heist!

The Seven Sovereigns and the Khatun-in-Dreams

There are those who are older and more essential to the nature of reality than humankind. We call Them the Seven Sovereigns, and They are embodied in concepts, cognitohazards, and the soft voice in your head that makes very bad decisions seem reasonable. They intrigue against each other endlessly via the bursting of supernovas and the revision of the laws of physics, and They hate the Holy Primes, for binding even Them. 

The Seven Sovereigns will never understand you, in much the same way that you will never understand the microdramas unfolding among the bacteria in your gut. Humankind exists on a scale so inferior to Theirs that we are nearly beneath Their concern, even as we are scattered and tormented by the aftershocks of Their cosmic maneuvering. If you completely abandon common sense and sacrifice all you have gained in recognition of Their superiority, you may gain even the merest iota of one of Their titanic awarenesses, and inevitably you will be crushed like a gnat in the great engines of Their workings. But until then, how glorious Their attention will be....

Stolen By Bats: The Pentecost Ape!

Locheil made a few posts about Stolen by Bats, an in-progress GLOG hack based on the Fallen London/Sunless Sea/Sunless Skies games. The Fallen London games absolutely kick ass, so of course I'm getting in on that action with a Pentecost Ape class. Embrace the social-climber lifestyle and Return to Monke.

you're this guy, you have soul magic, and everybody hates you

Pentecost Ape

+1 Mirrors and +1 Hearts per template

Starting Equipment: Ancient artifact (which was created just last year), elaborate headdress that doesn’t fit, and see below

Skills: See below

You are an ape- but oh, what an ape you are! Your soul coruscates merrily, as though it had always belonged to you. It isn’t enough, though. You yearn for more.

To gain a template, you must acquire another soul. The process of extraction takes about an hour and is about as pleasant for the soon-to-be-soulless as you’d expect. When you get somebody’s soul, you learn some of their specialized knowledge and gain one skill they had (your choice).

A- Ape, Fairly Bartered Soul

B- Twice-Souled

C- Thrice-Souled

D- Four-Souled

Ape

You are, indeed, an ape. An unscrupulous talking ape with a human soul, but an ape nonetheless. You are exceptionally good at climbing, monkeying around, and otherwise committing acts suitable for an ape, but you cannot understand particularly advanced human logic. Ape logic has gotten you this far, after all. Furthermore, you are unwelcome in polite society. You know what you did.

Fairly Bartered Soul

You have a human’s soul granting you speech, slightly uplifted intellect, and a few handy pieces of their knowledge. Now, whose soul did you take, exactly?

1- A man of the cloth, who cast away his soul during a crisis of faith that turned out to be short-lived. If word got out that he’s soulless, he would be ruined. Not that you’d ever stoop to blackmail, of course. You have the Neath Christianity skill (quite different from surface-dwellers’ Christianity!), an effective command of fire-and-brimstone rhetoric, and 7d100 extra starting Echoes that you’ve already exacted from him.

2- A player of chess, in all its variations. You have slightly-outdated knowledge of the structure, cryptology, and activities of a well-placed network of spies that spans from Fallen London across the Unterzee, but you’re an ape who doesn’t care about politics, so whatever. You have a copper ring with a code-breaking wheel of letters inside and +1d4+1 Veils. You’re also quite skilled at actual chess.

3- A ‘blemmigan biological enthusiast’, obsessed with the propagation and perseverance of blemmigans- a sort of walking purple mushroom with razor-fangs. You have a blemmigan butler of your own, sworn to aid you; it has 2 HD, it’s as big as you are and far more intelligent, it’s witheringly sarcastic but ultimately devoted, and it cannot talk but its fronds are delicate enough to allow it to write. You also have the Blemmiganology skill, for all the good that does you.

4- A delightful adventuress, who came to your island to plunder your temples and steal your loot. Truly, it was a delight to con the fool out of her soul. Whenever you visit parts unknown or encounter an ancient artifact, 2-in-6 chance that you already know a little about it. You have the Academia skill.

5- A madman with seven scars and a red hunger gleaming in his eyes. The soul he foisted upon you is a rancid, stained thing, and the nightmares are best left unmentioned. When you lock eyes with somebody, they must Save or be paralyzed by terror. You have the Esotericism skill and some sort of dreadful candle.

6 - A shipwrecked zailor, last of their crew and out of hope. You have their good-luck charm (a white bat finely carved from ivory, admired by any other zailor) and expertise in zee-faring (unimpressive, considering their ship sank), as well as the skills of a (1d4) 1. doctor 2. engineer 3. gunner 4. cook. 

Twice-Souled

You’re getting better at this soul-extraction thing. From now on, if you get a soul from someone with a special ability of some sort, you gain that ability (subject, of course, to all the same limitations). Only one ability per soul. You are marginally less detestable by upright Londoners now.

Thrice-Souled

Three surrendered souls chatter within. Once a day, when you need an answer to an esoteric question, there’s a (# of templates)-in-6 chance one of your souls knows it. You may come and go as you please in Fallen London without suspicion, too.

Four-Souled

You are debonair, impeccably mannered, and the envy of all other apes you meet. Your accumulated charms are more than enough to overcome the little question of your humble origins; in fact, figures of high society fall over themselves to invite you as the guest of honor to their soirees. Once a day, you can talk your way out of any legal or social predicament.

20x20 Space Adventures

 A few months ago, the Mothership discord server started using this tool called Playscii (http://vectorpoem.com/playscii/) to make 20x20 graphics that could be used to run a game. It was a fun challenge in information density and minimalism. I made a ton that I posted there, but here are my best ones.

Another Space Station

 I did this one in an hour.

Jumpgate Hyperspace Cults

Jumpgate Hyperspace Cults, who you can read about here and here, are religious groups who worship hyperspace, and their highest-ranking members expose themselves to hyperspace travel fully conscious to achieve enlightenment (it also drives them insane and sometimes gives them limited psychic powers). They operate the jumpgates that make large-scale interstellar travel possible, they employ a lot of non-believers to run upkeep on the space stations that host the gates, and they’re in a constant power struggle with everyone else in the galaxy. Each gate is run by a different cult and there is no central authority; generally members of different cults will get along, but the rare conflicts are bloody and awful.

Using all these tables will quickly develop a unique cult- I’d recommend supplementing the space station with the tables from A Pound of Flesh. Although these cults are a major thing in my setting, you could drop a single, solitary cult into your own setting without much trouble.

Also, if you have Skerples’ Kidnap the Archpriest module, try reskinning it as a cultist space station with security androids, laser hallways, etc. I did, and my players really enjoyed it!

What’s this specific cult called?

1. Apostles’ Gate Church

2. Sisterhood of Void Exultation 

3. The Lack

4. Empty Communion

5. Prismatic Temple of the Boundless Rainbow

6. Freedom Through Infinity

7. The Most Holy Abbey of the Kelvion-C54 Jumpgate

8. Peace Beyond All

9. Arcturus’ Saviors

10. Gorged Church of the End Times

What’s an identifying feature of their believers?

1. Constantly humming a low drone

2. Sacred geometry tattooed all over their faces

3. Vow of silence

4. Intricate robes and shawls, all in one specific color; nonbelievers on the jumpgate’s station are forbidden to wear clothes of the same color

5. Blindfolds and visors prevent them from gazing upon this unworthy realm

6. Ritual self-scarification leaves their skin a knotted, roiling mass of lumps

7. They smile, always, just a bit too widely

8. Reek of formaldehyde and soil

9. Brains uploaded into simple robotic bodies, leaving the prime self free for round-the-clock meditation

10. Speak to each other in a babbling, fractured conlang

What are their fringe beliefs apart from basic hyperspace worship?

1. It’s not enough just to go through hyperspace conscious, you’ve also got to be on psychedelics to get fully enlightened

2. Attempts to impose human rule over outer space (ie interplanetary governments) are sinful

3. Random civilians should be forcibly sent through hyperspace while conscious, to give them the gift of enlightenment

4. An embodiment of pure evil that can only be fought and killed in hyperspace is going to destroy humanity unless we can destroy it first

5. Hyperspace must be colonized

6. Each time you jump through hyperspace you’re actually traveling to a branching parallel dimension with subtle differences; you can never return to the original

7. The strange phenomena that occur during a failed jump are clues as to the true nature of the universe, and should be studied extensively

8. The only way to go to heaven is to die ritualistically in hyperspace

9. Hyperspace IS heaven

10. Meditation is a perfectly fine replacement for a cryopod

What are their aesthetics like?

1. Gothic cathedrals, stained glass

2. Poured-concrete brutalism

3. Geometric mosaic tiling and gold everywhere

4. Spare and ascetic, translucent plastic and plain white walls

5. Ultra-primitive; high-level technology cleverly concealed in rough-hewn hallways and handwoven tapestries

6. Infinite mirrors (Yayoi Kusama-style) in every room

7. Too hardscrabble to scrape together an aesthetic- just industrial grit

8. Neoclassical; glowy crystals and Jack Kirby geometries proliferate

9. Neo-midcentury modern Tomorrowland raygun gothic

10. Art Nouveau revival, floral scrollwork on every surface, some of the ultra-organic looking mechanical stuff starts to look a bit less Alphonse Mucha and a bit more H.R. Giger

What problem will they hire spacers to solve?

1. A ship recently docked to hand off some cargo that turned out to be a bloodthirsty alien organism- it escaped and it’s eating everybody

2. The nonbelievers have unionized and they’ve got a list of demands a lightyear long

3. The usual cargo supply ships are all arriving empty, with their entire crews slaughtered and the ships running on autopilot

4. A hijacked prison transport ship docked here and the convicts escaped, blending in with the other nonbelievers and biding their time before their escape (after which they’ll be truly impossible to recapture)

5. Cult members are being killed off and the only suspects are also cultists

6. There’s a charismatic cultist attempting to start a splinter faction and engage the original cult in a holy war

7. They need a ship outfitted with ultra-delicate sensors to make a dangerous hyperspace jump to settle a theological debate, and none of their ships are sturdy enough for the jump

8. All communications from the place their jumpgate leads to have ceased, following a single message: “THE ANDROIDS WON, BE VERY AFRAID”

9. Some cultists are trying to leave the group but they know valuable corporate secrets that could get everybody into big trouble if leaked

10. Hyperspace has begun rejecting their ships- upon trying to jump, the jump drive just fizzles out

What’s the deal with the nonbelievers they employ?

1. The entire jumpgate station is segregated into believer and nonbeliever spaces

2. Plotting to overthrow the cult and seize control of the gate

3. Prisoners working for no pay as an alternative to life on an deadly irradiated prison world 

4. Persuasive cultists have turned them into believers too, now they want full cultists status and benefits

5. All of them are androids… and they’re hiding the fact that they’re defective (or Cloudbank Infiltrators?)

6. Involved with organized crime (arms dealing? sycorax smuggling? identity laundering?)

7. Operate a popular interstellar casino on the jumpgate station

8. Hardened Marines and mercenaries; they won’t explain why this specific jumpgate needs the extra security

9. Apathetic and underpaid enough that the jumpgate frequently breaks down

10. Totally cheerful, polite and hardworking; secretly infected by an alien hive mind planning a hostile takeover

What does their jumpgate lead to?

1. Dense city-planet whose skyscrapers reach miles into the atmosphere

2. Lunar headquarters of an illegal salvage operation servicing a nearby derelict graveyard

3. Asteroid at the boundary of a black hole’s event horizon, used as a research site

4. Overworked, over-exploited farming colony responsible for growing most of the fresh produce in the sector

5. Maximum-security Interplanetary League prison

6. Active planetary warzone

7. Tropical lunar resort

8. Barely-explored, resource-rich planet with insanely dangerous wildlife

9. Military training basecamp surrounded by planetary mining facilities and geodome farms

10. The Dead Planet- the jumpgate itself was sucked into its orbit and the cultists now worship the Gaunt

What else is on the jumpgate space station?

1. Digital library of obsolete media contains knowledge long thought to be lost

2. Top-secret Corporation laboratory that the cultists were blackmailed into defending

3. Safe house for embattled members of a brutal organized crime syndicate. The password is a few lines quoted from “Kubla Khan”

4. Magnificent aviary where real, live birds swoop and soar. Beautiful enough to bring a tear to the most grizzled spacer’s eye. The birds of prey feast on the bodies of the cult’s enemies

5. Massive, completely-clear hull panels, overlooking the vast field of space

6. Well-kept, often-used self-mortification chambers full of flagellants

7. Bustling nonbeliever bazaar stalls in the central hub where all your contraband can be discreetly passed off to creepy buyers

8. Makeshift shanty town housing refugees from a recent cataclysm

9. Choral hall whose acoustics cleverly ensure that the atonal song of the Voidnuns can be heard everywhere in the space station

10. Rickety space elevator to the celestial object below