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.