ISLES OF THE IMPRISONED MOON - Char Gen

You are a traveler to the Isles of the Imprisoned Moon.

1. Roll 3d6 for each Ability Score. You may swap any two of your scores.

Strength – Fighting, fortitude and toughness.

Dexterity – Stealth, athletics and reflexes.

Willpower – Confidence, disciple and charisma.

Characters start with d6 Hit Points.

2. Consult the following table to find your starting equipment and any special information about your character. Match your highest Ability Score against your Hit Points.

	1HP	2HP	3HP	4HP	5HP	6HP
9 or less	Sword (d6) or Pistol (d6) A Navigator of Nox.	Musket (d8) Sword (d8) Flashbang Porcelain Armour & Mask.  Cleric of Agorath	Independently Wealthy & Uniquely Beautiful with an Unquestioned Reputation. Pistol (d6) & Knife (d6)	Widow of famed explorer. Three extra languages. Pistol (d6) Knife (d6)	Blunderbuss (d8) Cleaver (d6) Intelligent Rat Dreams show your undiscovered surroundings.	Musket (d8) Hatchet (d6) Flashbang Knows Seal of Asmoday
10	A Queen.  Your STR must be your lowest score.	Musket (d8) Hatchet (d6) Hawk Practitioner of the Subtle Art	Musket (d8) Gloves. Kleptomaniac. Can Pick Pockets on a whim but must if a Will roll is failed.	Delusional and brilliantly faking nobility. Rapier (d8) Pistol (d6) 2 Acid Flasks Arcanium.	Pistol Brace (d8) Grappling Hook Knows Invocation of Buer	Rifle (d8) Mace (d6)  Experienced Thief. (has lock picks)
11	Rifle, Porcelain Armour,(1) Hawk, Knows Seal of Asmoday	Dueling Rapier (d8) Dueling Pistol (d8) Tame Spotlight Dog.	Musket (d8) Marbles. Unmarried debutante with famously ‘fine figure’. Climbs like an ape.	Musket (d8) Bayonet (d6) Has intelligent hound-sized Fly	Machete (d6) Pistol Brace (d8) Tarot Deck. Can Dance.	Club (d6) 3 Bombs Rocket Five dead children, immune to fear.
12	You seem harmless and are 12 years old. Club (d6) Throwing Knives Arcanium	Extremely Beautiful artists model. Near destitute. Musket (d8) Intimate of the Incubus Rosier	Former Nun and Pyromaniac. Pick Axe (d6) Manacles Matches. Familiar with the Watcher Penemue.	Pistol (d6) Rocket. Religious,  immune to madness if singing.	Harpoon Gun (d8) Baton (d6) Acid Alcoholic.	Maul (d8) Dagger (d6) Chain
13	Pistol (d6) Ether Poison Knows Sign of Ose	Renowned Artist with Exceptional Hair. Sword (d6) Pistol (d6)	Severe melancholic. Pistol (d6) Smoke Bomb Shovel Tame Sonic Pig	Musket (d8) Portable Ram Game Set A low sort.	Blunderbuss (d8) Bolt-Cutters Fiddle.  Can calculate interest in a jiffy.	Longaxe (d8) Rum. Bomb.
14	Cane (d6) Acid Spyglass Iron Eyes	Extremely silly young girl. Pistol (d6) Bell. Steel Wire. Smoke Bomb.	Husband a wretch. Numerous debts. Longaxe (d8) Throwing Axes Fire Oilide	Pistol (d6) Saw Animal Trap Spyglass	Pistol (d6) Fairy needle empowered by sarcasm (d8)	Dagger (d6) Fire Oil Mirror
15	A Doctor. INT will be useful to you.	Divorced Entertainer Longaxe (d8) Ferret Fire Oil	Escaping abusive spouse. Club (d6) Ether Crowbar Flute	Plain, with Sapphic Drives. Bow (d6) Knife (d6) Rocket, Fire Oil	Sword & dagger (d8) Magnifying glass. Spouse in debtors prison.	Pistol (d6) Knife (d6) Bomb Serving Girl who weeps too much.
16	Educated Laudanum addict. Musket (d8) Pocket Watch. Bomb.	Pipe-smoking Beggar. Staff (d8) Tongs Glue	Former Prostitute Hatchet (d6) Net, Fire Oil, Burnt Face	Insurrectionist. Pistol (d6) Whip (d6) Cigars, Lost Eye	Pistol. Acid. Bird Repellent. Hook Hand	Pistol (d6) Bomb Pursued by Violent Husband
17	Escaped Prisoner & experienced cross-dresser. Halberd (d8) Fake Pistol	Spinster. Former Bedlamite. Sees Things. Pistol (d6) Net. Prosthetic leg.	Club (d6) Paint. Crowbar. Loud Lungs.	Musket (d8) Accordion Old, with Wooden Leg and a shameful dog.	Sword (d6). Steel Wire. One month pregnant.  Unmarried.	White Ape. Mute
18	Garotte (d6) Musket (d8) Faints Under Stress.	Pistol (d6) Grease Hacksaw, One arm. ‘Given to the Bottle’.	Obsessive Abolitionist and Hysteric. Pistol (d6) Cigars, Poison, A Fugitive.	Sword (d6) Shield Armour  Sword (d6) Questionable ferret. Hideous Tobacco-Chewing Crone.	Olm	Albino Crab Man. Mute

(Several results involve information from Mateo Dias Torres' Pernicious Pamphlet, which you are under no obligation to buy. If you need a rule or some information, message me and I will give it to you. Likewise if you need an Arcanium and don't have 'Into the Odd'. Likewise if you roll something wierd and don't know what it is or if the rules look odd or there are no rules.)

If it sounds like you’re a woman then you probably are. If it’s unclear then you are whatever gender you prefer.

Languages are stolen from the Pernicious Pamphlet, they are:

Ara Gorash - The Outer Gods, Agorath, etc.

Elegaic - High Status dead. Vampires, Liches, some Ghosts.

Lament - Lesser dead, skeletons, zombies, rebels.

Shrike - The language of birds.

You can keep languages 'free' if you want.

3. You are, of course, utterly free to decide your own name. You may also click one of the buttons below and to the right marked either ‘Underdark Common name’ or ‘Underdark noble name’, you should not choose a name either beyond, or below your station.

The World

On the Nightmare Sea, where no Sun has ever shone, chiming ships navigate by the patterning of swells and the nightmares of sleeping Navigators.

The navigators come from Nox, the city of white flame which rules the Nightmare sea. Only the navigators of Nox have the power to reliably cross the black water, and the Navigators all eventually go mad, and therefor Nox is mad.

There are many strange places on the Nightmare sea. No-one has found its boundary. Isles of bone where tribes with iron eyes find their way with magnetism, insane psychic whales and silver caravels with indigo sails. There are warm reefs where phytoplankton stitch mazes under the black water and intelligent Nudibranch make libraries of dreams.

And there are the Isles of the Imprisoned Moon.

There is no Sun upon the nightmare sea, and never will be, but there is a moon, a stolen moon snatched from the 'skies' (whatever they are) and chained here eons ago.

The moon is huge and bound above the surface of the black sea with cyclopean iron chains. A link in the chain is about the sise of the World Trade Centre.

Is it as big as our 'real' moon? It seems impossible, but its fucking BIG. It reaches high up into the sky.

The Imprisoned Moon is a pale silvery white. It's not reflecting light from anywhere, so far as anyone on the Nightmare Sea knows, there is no-where for it to reflect light from, they know of the Sun only from theory and legend, but if you told them that the moon was reflecting light from a lamp it could no longer see, they would find the idea poetically appropriate.

There are isles around the imprisoned moon, ringed archipelagos like the rings around a planet or the splatters from an ink-soaked ball being slammed onto white paper.

Some of these islands may have been here when the moon arrived, some may be relics of whatever semi-continent was here before, many were called up by powerful magics, or simply built with armies of slaves.

They are here becasue the moon brings light, the greatest currency of the Nightmare Sea. (The currency of Nox is Mirrors, literally small coin-sized glass-fronted, silver-backed mirrors with the sign of their issuing city etched into the silver or the glass.  Large mirrors are always treasures. Anything larger is handled in Occultum (equivalent of 'Obols' from the Pernicious pamphlets. "Obols allow for otherwise impossible transactions—souls, kingships,futures, dreams.")

These are the Isles of the Imprisoned Moon, this is where you have been sent, or to where you have escaped.

Because of their gift of reliable light, the Isles of the Imprisoned Moon have foliage and ecosystems, the do not rely exclusively on bounty from the sea and on magic. Life grows there, and not just fungal life.

The isles are powerful but anarchic, if they were ever to combine they could form a challenge to the power of Nox, but they never will.


(In a sense you can imagine this as Egypt to Nox's Rome, if Egypt was a gigantic archipelago like Indonesia and was ruled in a manner similar to anarchic timelost city states. And if Rome was totally fucking insane)

The Society

A mish mash of anything from Regency to Victorian with technology stretching from the barrel-loading musket to (at best) the Navy Colt.

There are no automatic weapons, cased rounds are experimental and super-rare. It's just about possible that someone, somewhere is working on an experimental electric light, but its unlikely as magic can do the same thing better.

There is a class system. The Navigating Houses at the top and unreasonable cannibals at the bottom. in Nox, Liberals don't campaign against slavery, they campaign against cannibalism. 

People can be materially rich and still hungry. Food is scarce.

Almost everyone believes in the class system in some way, including your characters. Broadly, the further towards the left and top you are in the diagram above, the higher class you are, the further towards the bottom and left you are, the lower your class.

Ghosts, Liches and Vampires can all be civilized and higher class. Vampires, Skeletons, zombies and ghosts can all be horrid and common, it depends on their circumstances. They also believe in the class system.

Slavery itself is at ancient Greece levels rather than triangle trade levels and is status based (you can buy yourself out) rather than race based (apart from Crab Men).

Light and currency amount to the same thing, though we won't be tracking those heavily. It's assumed that everyone has, or has access to, a whale oil lantern. (The light from the oil of Psychic Whales gives of a slight moaning when lit.) Remember you will still need a free hand  to carry a lantern.

There are few Clerics but almost everyone is a bit religious. For the Navigating Houses their sleeper ends up being a quasi-god (though never actually worshiped). Other gods are Agorath, Chthulu (a commoners version of Agorath), Manpac and of course Conchodeus and Zoophoria who are known everywhere in the Uncertain Worlds, though both in somewhat nightmarish aspects down here.

Everyone is Poor

Your character might be technically rich compared to some other characters, but they are poorer than they think they should be, especially compared to their desired standard of living. Maybe they are in debt or have lost status due to a scandal, either way they are in a desperate state.

The higher status your character is, the more absolutely vital it is to them that they do not make it explicit that they are poor.