SHAMAN Class

SHAMAN Class

HD: 1d6

WEAPONS: Any Wood, Bone, Teeth., Stone. No metallic. (Including arrow tips.)

Saves: INT, WIS;

Skills: 2 from: Survival, Nature, Insight, Performance, Medicine, Animal Handling

Equipment:
(a) a Jawbone Club or (b) a Flint Knife;
(a) a Component pouch or (b) An Enemies Shrunken Head (Arcane Focus); 
(a) Crazy Piercings or (b) Tricked out Mad Tattoos or (c) Disturbing Scarification


SPELLCASTING

When you sleep you go to where the spells are, you hunt the spells. The spells try to get away but you catch them pretty easily becasue you are a SHAMAN. Finding the right ones can be hard though. The longer you sleep the more spells you can hunt. The higher your level the deeper into that place you can go.

When you sleep or meditate to get spells, roll a d6. Go to that number at the bottom of the chart, this is where you start. A cantrip will be here with you. You can catch the catrip if you want, put it in your head, write it on your spell sheet.

For every hour you meditate or sleep, you can travel along one black dotted line to a place where a new spell is. Whenever you reach a new spell, you can put it in your head and write it on your sheet. When you wake up, you can use that spell whenever you want, then its gone back to the hunting ground. When you sleep, all of your spells escape and you have to look for more.

So if you sleep for eight hours, you can hunt eight spells.

BUT. There is a catch. Some spells don't like each other. If you have two spells in your head connected by a dotted line, thats right next to each other, then you have to roll on the Shaman Madness Table once for each line.

So if you go to sleep as a level one Shaman for eight hours and hunt eight spells, then you will have seven madnesses the next day. This is why Shamans are so crazy. You can avoid madneses by not having spells that are connected by dotted lines in your head at the same time. But this means you get less spells.

As you get better as a Shaman you can go deeper into the dream lands to hunt more powerful spells.

From levels 1-4 you hunt in the Plains. From level 5 you can also hunt in the Forest, at level 11 you can also hunt in the Hills and at level 17 you can visit the Mountain for the most powerful spells.

You always start at the bottom though, with a d6 roll.


Lvl 2: A number of times per day equal to your level, any spell you have caught may be cast as an illusiory version of itself.
Lvl 3: ---
Lvl 4: Ability Score Improvement.
Lvl 5: You may now hunt in the Forest.
Lvl 6: Your cantrips deal half Damage even on a Save.
Lvl 7: ---
Lvl 8: Ability Score Improvement
Lvl 9: ---
Lvl 10: add your Int Mod to your Evocation Spells'Damage.
Lvl 11: You may now hunt in the Hills.
Lvl 12: Ability Score Improvement
Lvl 13: ---
Lvl 14: You may halve the number of madnesses (rounding up) that you must take after hunting spells.
Lvl 15: ---
Lvl 16: Ability Score Improvement
Lvl 17: You may now hunt on the Mountain
Lvl 18: You can choose where you begin your hunt on the bottom row.
Lvl 19: Ability Score Improvement
Lvl 20: Instead of beginning on the bottom row, you may drop a d4 on the chart and begin where it lands.

VaporWare Contrails in the Prehistoric Sky

Reading through 'Wolf Packs and Winter Snow' made me think a lot about prehistory. It made me think about things I would add and take away. Vaporware contrails. What would 'my' Prehistoric game be like?

.......

Perhaps classless. Prehistoric and tribal societies are less likely to have 'jobs'. Or at least their lives are less job-like. Everyone essentially has the same job: be an effective hunter-gatherer, from there people branch out a bit into different skill sets as provoked by talent and circumstance.

I spoke about this a long time ago in Godz Without Limitz. I think older less densely populated societies with a lower tech level regarded their individual members with a much lower degree of specialization. When you thought of a problem and needed help you considered the shape of the problem and cast your mind through the varied talents of your friends, looking for a matrix of capacity within a particular person, not for someone with an assigned role.

"I've gotta butcher this animal. Blue-teeth is really good at butchering, I'll see if he's around." Rather than. "I've gotta butcher this animal, better call the tribes butcher, who is called Blue-Teeth."

So it makes sense to have, maybe a developing skill system related to the basic stat line with skills growing as you try new things, (as promised in every fucking Elder Scrolls game until you jib it off and become a super-armored-mage-knight-assassin.)

.....

I might not include INT as a stat. I would tell new players that they are portraying among'st the most intelligent people ever to exist in the human race.

This might not be literally true, its likely that prehistoric man was pretty much 'as' intelligent, or, as capable as we are. It's an interesting question as to how you account for intelligence vs 'capacity. So much of how we understand intelligence is based on our culture or our mind state having a *lot* of abstract information to move around. And dealing with abstract information teaches familiarity with abstract information, it feeds on itself.

How do you measure intelligence in a world where almost nothing is abstract? Where everything is sensory? Being able to guess or predict the path of migrating deer is a bit abstract. Tracking an animal through broken terrain is hyper-complex, but not abstract. Facing off with a live animal that you want to eat in a situation where, if it gets away, you starve and if it doesn't, it dies, is hyper-complex with multiple highly sophisticated result paths interacting with each other at high speed and in a situation of significant stress, but I'm not sure how you would measure the IQ factor in it.

We remind the players continually that they are playing intelligent people to remind them to act in an intelligent way, even though they have few of the signs, signifiers and mental tools of intelligence as we measure it. These people are smart, they just don't have very much to think *with* (by our standards).

In the same way I might not include WIS. Let's just assume that everyone is as observant as its possible for them to be. The way Into the Odd insists you tell people stuff if it is there to be seen is interesting so lets continue with that.

Not only the discovery of technology but the transmission of knowledge would be important
dancing, storytelling and performance would all be vital for forming culture-groups.

(It's kind of staggering how much we don't know about dance. I've been reading Wendigo papers and all the time they say "This was communicated with his dance", "they were frightened by his dance", "his dance was tamed by their medicine dance", "in winter, the society was organised by dance", but we never find out how the dances fucking work or even what they are like to see.

We have no good language for describing dance and apparently don't give a fuck about it. It's like an alien watching white people and saying "Ah, of course they manipulated the actions of their sub-group with a book", "much of the continent was inflamed by war after reading a book" "he was hanged and his books destroyed because of something he had put in a book", "books are a vital medium of exchange and influence for this culture" but no-one talks about whats in the fucking books.)

Since you wouldn't speak the language of most people you encountered and they might seem racially or morphologically very different to you you might simply view them as monsters or 'other'. The role of peacemaker, translator or culture-transmitter could become a powerful one.




MAGIC - whooooo

There are few, or no, spells in this setting. In "our" world, or the more common fantasy world, reality is a given and magic users unleash spots of unreality, thereby defining the boundaries and rules of the imagined world as well as their own distinctive natures in it.

In the prehistoric world mild magic is everywhere. Shamans use magic a lot less than they investigate and refine the borders of reality.

the concept of 'dreams' doesn't exist, or at least not to the same extent or in the same way we understand it. People know that what happens while you sleep is of a different quality that what happens while you are awake, but, what happens while you sleep is still important, worthy of consideration, decision and even worth sharing if it seems necessary.

You might meet dead people when you sleep, you might meet them when you are awake, neither of these would necessarily be more or less frighting or important than the other. There aren't that many people and if you don't like the people around you, you can usually leave  go somewhere else
so the terror of people is more about what they mean to you, rather than numbers.

If you see a dead person you know well while you are asleep and *don't* tell people when you wake up, then that might be a mistake. Good or bad, they wouldn't come to see you for no reason.

In the same way, laughing or making fun of what someone tells you about what they saw when they were asleep doesn't make sense (most of the time). It's just more news, more information.

One of the most important things a Shaman does is keep the dead in their place and maintain a very clear boundary between them and us so they don't just come back all the time and do stuff.

In our own time we might regard Shaman as psychopomps, people defined by their ability to go back and forth between this world and the other world, but I suspect we have it the wrong way round. Yes, they cross the border, but as custom officials, border guards or ambassadors, reaffirming the reality of the border even as they cross it.

Animals and places and people have spirits, the exact difference between a spirit and a real thing is permeable. Shaman can tell the difference and work out how they work Everyone else pretty much has to deal with what they get. What we call 'dreams', 'spirit' and the material world, all interpenetrate. PC's and shaman mark things, perform rituals and tell stories to mark  boundaries, between sleep and waking, death and undeath, solid and perceived. The difference between 'corporeal' un-dead, ghosts, dreams and just someone who has recovered from what seemed an impossible illness or wound, is unclear.

Human beings have incredible minds. We can model reality with a sophistication and range no other animal can match, but it won't. stop. we can't turn it off. A huge amount of what the religions and social guardians of early societies have to do is just dealing with the overwhelming sophistication of the human mind and all the incredible things it can do, and keeps doing. you need to repress and transform so much to get get human beings acting together, but you can never repress anything directly, its like pressing bubbles on plastic over glass, instead you have to divert, transform, persuade, suggest, and you have to invent the culture to do it with.

In this game the job of a Shaman is less 'doing spells', but controlling magic, controlling otherness, naming it and giving it it's boundary. Investigating and reaffirming the borders of reality, of 'what is'.

I'm imagining something a bit like the Civilization tech-tree, but showing different ways of dividing up reality. No-one knows where the dead go, or how to keep them there, or what spirits are where or how they work, or where people came from, or where they are going, you would have to 'discover' these things, and by discover I don't mean just make it up, you would need to come up with a coherent set of culture rules that *make sense* according to the experience of the people who hear them and which deal with the pressures and strangeness of the human mind.



THE RAY MEARS PROBLEM

The big problem (if you consider it a problem) with putting so much effort into making things from the natural world and noticing things IN that natural world is that the game becomes one where whomever paid most attention to the survival manual is a badass and its hard for PC's to subtly investigate the natural world if the DM doesn't them-self have a deep knowledge of it.

This is really different to the investigation of imagined worlds based on genre or story type or fictional constructs. Someone can know more about Faerun than you, depending on how you run your game, but its hard for them to know more about how a dungeon works, or about how horses work in a fantasy setting (you jump on them to go somewhere, they eat at the end of the journey, they rarely run away, they fade into the background when not needed, they poop only when it would be funny). Horses in *reality* are probably much more complex and weird to deal with and the same goes for all natural things. Can you make a canoe from the bark of that tree? Well can you?

Fuck knows.

I don't have a great answer for the Ray Mears problem. I guess you would put together a simple yet interesting crafting system, that would help. But crafting is never interesting. You could maybe take the OSR route of breaking down sophisticated world-information into attainable objects, except the objects are aspects of the world. Like understanding part of an ecosystem is like a treasure. No idea how that might work.



END GAME

It's the Bronze Age. Even though that doesn't make sense, the idea is too cool for it not to be. The adventures of your neolithic PC's become the seed for the hero-cycle of a Bronze Age culture. "Hey, you remember when those guys fought that giant thing, and it looked like they were going to lose? But they didn't? Well its thanks to people like that that we currently have a unitary culture."

You might not start with a class but maybe you can end with one, depending on what you do.

God King. Or legendary hero for a fighty person, like the Herakles or Gilgamesh of a culture, someone who made the world safe for humanity, or (if you're a hippy) founder of something like the Iroqois Confederacy.

Crafty Dude."I literally invented bronze motherfucker! you remember flint? It was a shitshow!" or maybe you are the person who invents agriculture, or writing. Or you could become the Trickster-figure who dicks the gods around to help humanity.

Magicy Person. This could be the  revealer of a core religious faith and cosmic schema capable of creating and linking an entire culture, think Zoraster, less someone who named the gods, but someone who laid out the cosmos, discovered where the dead go and how that relates to us. You'll need a big mad religion to help the God-King make people live in your terrifying cities.

Velvet Hooks; Zug-Zug

Aye the content-mines have ruined many a man..

BUT NOT ME!! 

For behold, after consulting with my Art Director, I/we now continue and enhance our long-running additional content series for out book 'Fire on the Velvet Horizon' (see right side bar for copies), in which we add adventure hooks for the monsters, hopefully making them slightly more workable for an actual game.

So now we will attack this alphabet of creatures from both ends. Scrap from the front and I from the rear.

Here are Scraps already done posts;

ABHORRER & AESKITHETES

Anemone Men & Ants Of Neutrality

Atrocious Crows & Azul

Bedlam Birds & The Blathering Bird

Boa Boy & Boa Constructor

Brainstormer & Capitualtors

Colour Monster & Corbeau

Crimson Contrarodron & Cryptospider

And here is;

Zug-Zug

The Zug-Zug, a creature with the scaled physical capacities of a giant man-sized Honey Badger. Dangerous enough if it were simply an intelligent beast, but the Zug-Zug is not only incredibly hardy and physically dangerous, but very long-lived, and measurably more intelligent than a man, though still with the instincts and priorities of a solitary beast.

Hooks that are pretty much in the text already:

1. Bring Me Its Skin. A depraved (and stupid) ruler demands a Zug-Zug skin, offering an astonishing price. Finding and killing a Zug-Zug will be hard enough but if the tribes local to its area discover your intentions their responses will vary from unhelpful to outright hostile.

2. Bring Me The Beast. A deranged Thaumaturge has built the worlds ultimate prison and wants a live Zug-Zug to test it on. Something never before achieved.

3. Avenge My Balls. A great hero and leader defeated many terrible monsters in the area and was beloved by all the tribes. he seemed set to unify them into a nation until he was semi-castrated by the Zug-Zug in the night. Now, crazed and embittered, yet still wealthy from his adventures, he seeks a fresh source of testosterone and revenge against the Zug-Zug.

4. Find The Child. The only child of a high-status tribal leader has wandered off into the bush and disappeared. The evidence suggests they may have encountered The Zug-Zug. They have been known to "adopt" lone children and defend them relentlessly. The chief wants their kid back.

5. The Zug-Zug War. A wandering shaman has declared a great vision quest against the Zug-Zug! No longer will human communities act as passive cattle for the creature but unify, break it dominion and become great themselves. Some groups favour this loudly, others quietly, and some are against it. Many are split. The cultural shift has lead to internecine strife, group-on-group violence, and more Zug-Zug attacks. If you enter this territory, you better be prepared to take a side in the developing Zug-Zug war. Some thing the Shaman is protected by his magic, others think the Zug-Zug has allowed him to preach to further divide the tribes.


OTHER WEIRD STUFF I CAME UP WITH...

6. Nothing but a Soulless Man. Some wacko wants to turn into a Zug-Zug and believes they can do it if they can only find a way to remove their soul. The religious authorities are dead-set on stopping this person, mainly due to the soul thing, but also because they are quietly worried he may be right. What does the Zug-Zug think? 

7. Caverns of the Zug. The Zug-Zug has disappeared and a hunter claims they have stumbled upon its abandoned lair. Most of their party were killed by simple but cunningly arranged traps of various kinds, or the less-dangerous creatures which have also taken up living there, but they did come back with some strange and rare items. (The Zug-Zug is breeding in another territory but will be back).

8. Invasion of the Zug-Zug. A young new Zug-Zug has broken away to form its own territory. This intersects with the expanding satellite settlements of a growing frontier town. Now its a brawl; human society vs The Zug-Zug. A battle across every level, tactical, strategic and logistical.

9. The Too-Wise Girl. A much-loved local healer has begun having complex thoughts about her communities relationship to the Zug-Zug; "Do we belong to the Zug-Zug?" "Are we its pets, or its food?". The locals, who all like her a lot, desperately want someone to find a way to get her to stop thinking these things.

10. You Are Expected. The PCs are hired to protect a researcher travelling the plains interviewing people about the Zug-Zug. But as they go on it emerges that many of those who chose to speak to the researcher are killed shortly after they leave. Is the Zug-Zug  using you to indicate potential future threats, or is something else going on?

11. A Sacrifice Too Far. The villagers make regular sacrifices to appease the Zug-Zug. Its not clear this is really necessary, other local tribes don't do it, but they are all convinced they have a special relationship with the creature. They now believe they have to sacrifice one of their own or the Zug-Zug will be enraged.

12. Voice in the Night, Words in the Dust. A local tribal poet gains some fame abroad after their verses are transmitted by a traveller from Jukai. But are they real or did the traveller make them up Ossian-style? Investigation reveals there is a Poet, but local rumours say they only transcribe words in the night and signs in the dust from secret encounters with the Zug-Zug. What is the real truth?

5e SAVAGES Hunter Class

So my four classes for SAVAGES were going to be Fighter, Thief, Hunter and Shaman. Fighter and Thief should remain relatively unaltered. Shaman is a mish mash of Cleric and Magic User. Here is my first attempt at a Hunter Class.


HD d8
ARMOUR Any non-metallic
WEAPONS Simple, Simple Ranged, Martial Ranged, Shortsword, Scimitar, Trident, Whip, Bolas.
SAVES WIS, CON
SKILLS Three from, Animal Handling, Insight, Nature, Perception, Stealth, Survival, Medicine

EQUIPMENT, choose either

a Net              or b Whip
a Mace           or b Trident
a Blowgun       or b Sling
a Hunting Trap or b Spyglass
a Manacles      or b Caltrops

A Trident or Whip can entangle if you use it. It requres an opposed roll between you and a hit target to maintain this.

Bolas, thrown (30/120) d2 Damage, entangles as net, one target only.


Tracking
In a natural environment you can track creatures. This is either a WIS or INT roll to which you add your proficiency bonus.

The total amount rolled is the distance you can see into the past. The first digit is the number of words  the DM must use to tell you what you have found. If you find anything at all the DM must always give you a direction.

So if some Orcs have passed in the last ten hours and you roll '13' the DM would simply say 'Orcs, North'. If you roll '35' the DM might say 'Five Desperate Orcs, North'. 


Trapping
When the environment allows it, you can build traps. Describle the actions it will take for you to build one to the DM. You roll using either yout INT or DEX, whichever is higher, plus your proficiency bonus.

The total of your roll is the difficulty for the target in spotting your trap.

The DC is 10+ the die size of the damage you would like the trap to do. So a d3 damage trap has a DC of 13. A d10 damage trap has one of 20. It takes minutes equal to the die size for you to build the trap.

Roll with disadvantage to trap anything at least two size catagories larger or smaller than you.

If you take the full time required you roll the DC check yourself. If you are cut short by any period, the DM rolls the check and does not tell you the result until the trap is triggered, spotted, or fails.


Lvl 1:  Tracking and Trapping.
Lvl 1: You count as having Stealth if you are in a natural environment, hiding and still. If you already have Stealth, take advantage on the roll under these circumstances.
Lvl 2: Birdsong. In a natural environment where birds are present, your passive perception check includes up to a mile radius if you have it in sight.
Lvl 3: Add an extra attack if at least one of the weapons you are wielding entangles.
Lvl 3: Climbing no longer costs extra movement.
Lvl 3: Add your DEX or STR Mod to the distance covered with a Running Jump.
Lvl 4: Ability Score Improvement
Lvl 5: Beastmaster. You gain the ability to tame and train the following creatures. If Orc - Boars & Dire Boars. Gnoll - Hyenas, Hyenadrons and Trolls. Goblin - Wolves, Worgs and Spiders. Mantis Man - Giant Insects. The creatures must be found, captured, tamed and fed in-game. You can naver have more than HD worth of creautures equal to your CHA bonus tame at any one time.
Lvl 6: Expertise. One more Proficiency.
Lvl 7: Entangler. Enemy saves against your entangling attacks with disadvantage.
Lvl 8: Ability Score Improvement
Lvl 9: You know what the weather will be like tomorrow.
Lvl 10: Ability Score Improvement
Lvl 11: Monster Language. Learn one monster language and add your Prof bonus to any test you ake to communicate with them.
Lvl 12: Ability Score Improvement
Lvl 13: You can now track incorporeal creatures like ghosts.
Lvl 14: Blindsense 10'
Lvl 15: Proficiency: Wis Saves
Lvl 16: Ability Score Improvement
Lvl 17: You can calm or tame any natural unintelligent creature with half your HD or less. Only one at a time. They may not obey but will not attack.
Lvl 19: Ability Score Improvement
Lvl 20: You can track Death. If Death has passed nearby you can follow her path and find those recently dead. Be aware, if you overtake Death and find the target alive, the real target may be you.

Twenty Trade Towns

1. Tortopolis

By RwHayes

Last of the Tortoise Towns. A pretty simple trading centre, has ancient cannon and those giant crossbow things to defend itself, tortoise is super ancient and pretty much does what it wants. On the shell a pretty standard market town where you can buy and dispose of most of the low-fantasy material you need, alchemists shop, wizards, a blacksmith etc. Look, it does what it says on the tin.

2. Gaggletown 

A Witch-Village! A big stalking Baba-Yaga hut has laid eggs and a bunch of smaller single-person huts with down for thatch  waggle after it on giant duck feet, a child-witch in each one. The little witches are all different and are kids so will sometimes trade things for geegaws and nonsense, but they are also witches so be careful. better do your deal before the flock wakes up and goes on the move again.

3. Snailopolis

By Attila Gerényi

Thinks itself superior to Tortopolis despite leaving a sticky trail everywhere. The slightly pretentious though still-beautiful Montreal to Tortopilis Toronto, or Paris to its London. More high end goods, a sharper aesthetic, they don’t talk about trade outright. You have to know someone to get in (or on).

4. Dawn, the fading city. 

Assembled from flowing beams of light - moves across the earth at the speed of the sun. Inside everything feels like glowing glass, streets and buildings assembled from smoked crystal with the sight of the world outside flowing like a river of blurred images, the rising sun is always in one direction and a world of eternal shadow always being revealed in the other. To get on you have to jump from specific mountaintops, precipices and waterfalls at exactly the right moment. To get off you need to leave at the precisely the right time in precisely the right place. If you miss your time you may end up on the wrong side of the world, or smeared across a mile of countryside. 

5. The Crawling Mountain

Full of savage shaman who keep the mountain rolling for whatever reason. Truthfully it’s more of a hill, though it does look very dramatic, a bit like Arthurs Mount in Edinburgh. The shaman sell all kinds of animals and strange animal products from the wilds and the north, furs, amber, honey, bones, bears narwhal tusks etc. Has a Kung Fu dojo on the top with white bearded masters who give you a lot of shit. Underneath the primitivist pretentions the whole thing is a bit nakedly capitalist.

6. The Spider Library

Not quite like this but honestly I'm impressed that someone even got close.

By Bruno Balixa

A huge semi-ruined Ornthanc deal walking around on obsidian legs. A classic mages market, inside the tower is a diagon alley/name of the rose/tumbledown maze/alchemists warren-type situation with lots of strange boutique places full of cackling old men who look at you with a gleaming eye.

7. The lichCrawler

At least one of the proto LichJammer captains was more into capitalism on this planet than eternal exploration beyond it. Now has a big tumbling bone city (more of a small town) thing made up of a gazillion skeletons that crawls across the earth on a thousand skeleton limbs. Always needs bones, has bone buildings, big skeleton trading house with gargantuan omni-abacuses endlessly clacking back and forth, plus skeleton coffee houses where they meet to discuss futures, (they get wired by inhaling the fumes through their skeleton heads).

8. Pleasure-barge of the Painted River 

A huge gaudy wheeled-steamboat-type deal, (actually the wheels are turned by debtors and golems). Music and merriment drifts from it like fat gas. Floats upon a lambent river painted endlessly into existence by artists at the prow and fading into imagination at the back. A creation of Narcissolis, full of gamblers and partiers, persists largely due its own inflated reputation. Hungers for talent and drama, needs to attract artists or it dies. The Great Gatsby on crack.

9. The Thermo-Hydraulic Chilopod of the Philosopher King. 

Giant steam-powered centipede and/or millipede depending on how you count it. Always needs coal and carbon, shits clinker, pollutes everywhere but is quickly gone. Full of dwarves, gnomes and stem graduates ready to trade contrivances for knowledge or raw materials. Philosopher King died ages ago but they continue in his name and in his on-the-spectrum manner.

10. The Blue Souk. 

Not sure of original

A classic floating island with iron hooks and chains hanging down grazing the earth in furrows as it drifts past. Atop is a magnificent pleasure-palace/mausoleum now somewhat decayed and re-purposed as a Bazaar. The result of a Wish from a long-dead trafficker with spirits.

11. The Scarab Travellers

Giant scarab beetle caravan crossed with 19thC-Novel style Gypsies. - I know its basic but its a weird fantasy classic come on. Fortune telling for ye master?

12. The Perpetual Gyre

A huge wheel, as if from a divine chariot of cyclopean cart, rolling endlessly, but very slowly, across the land in looping ellipses the size of continents. The huts and homes hang from its spokes on swings so they are always the right way up. Prices depend on where things are in the wheel at the time. Shops that are easier to access at the bottom have high prices. If you want to try the difficulty of climbing to the top you might get a better deal.

13. The Nowhere Bridge. 

A suspension bridge or half of one. One end disappears into a nebulous unseeable vagueness while the other end has iron hawk claws which pin it to the earth as it stalks forwards. Traders live in the bridge or in its girders for a while before dropping off - no-one knows where the bridge leads to but its rumoured some of the older traders know something and can trade you services and items from there.

14. The Caravan of Dreams. 

Howdahs on top of huge soft-blue stem-limbed cloudstepping dromedaries. Goods are lowered up and down in baskets and messages transmitted by softly droning bees. The howdahs are built with springs and bounce-suspension on their bottoms. The beasts are dreamed into being by the Mage who's caravan this is, they only exist while she is in REM sleep. She does not react well to being unexpectedly woken up.

15. The Wild Exchange. 

A flying caravan of deranged anarchocapitalist magic-users. Each caravan different and all pulled through the air by a bedlam of crazed carnivorous and dangerous flying creatures. Swoops through the air cackling and lands for a few hours to trade in anything, yes ANYTHING!!!! - Free trade for all!

16. The Somnulent Docks. 

Encountered only when lost in mountainous or broken terrain and only by those half waking from nightmare on the borders of sleep. A narrow path leads to a deep fjord on a black sea. There many silent ships are docked and the soft-robed and bemasked traders silently make sign to trade in pearls and promises. 

17. The Tinker-Ouroboros.

Seems to be a hunched figure stooped under a heavy pack hung with jangling doodads. When their hood and cloak is pulled back, it reveals that no person lies beneath. An automata, golem or spirit made up of animated junk and geegaws, walking in the shape of a man. The Tinker will trade pieces of themself for other parts that take its fancy. Then the creature moves on in a state of permanent exchange.

18. The Slow, Stumbling man. 

A truly ancient, wizened and thin stooped man who shuffles forwards - he wears a hat and the brim of the hat is the width of a village and there is a village market on it. Actually if you saw it from a distance it would be hard to tell the man is there at all, the village is just four or five feet off the ground and the radius of the brim is a 1/4 mile - magic means he never sinks into the ground but it’s hard for him to manage an incline so the hat-town is mainly encountered on the plains. In the village everyone wears silks and furs and makes deals lying on couches while smoking hookahs, if asked how this came about the townspeople will only say that the man is "suffering for his sins". They complain constantly if the man stumbles or judders. One set of naked footprints in the earth is all that is left behind.

19. Mammoth-Town. 

A large wheeled bog-oak contrivance pulled forwards slowly by hairy mammoths. Encountered largely in northern latitudes, ruled by expatriate bog elves who, on the election of a long-distant king publicly announced "if XX becomes King I am moving to the far north!" and then actually fulfilled that promise. They do not want to hear about the successes of the Bog Elves left behind.

20. The town of Hidden Giants. 

Is actually a whole bunch of giants crammed into hollow houses pretending to be a village - blindingly obvious to everyone as you can't actually enter any of the houses and the giants put on giant booming voices pretending to be the baker, Mrs ... door, "I CAN'T COME TO THE DOOR RIGHT NOW DEARY!". But you can sometimes trade for things they have in their pockets, if you are willing to shout through the doors or windows, they push small items out through cracks or pop them out of the chimney.

(Idea based on that Warhammer kitbash guy - SORRY)
 

Velvet Hooks: Vore Bull & Vitillary

Previously in this series;

Abhorrer & Aeskithetes
Anemone Men & Ants Of Neutrality
Atrocious Crows & Azul
Bedlam Birds & The Blathering Bird
Boa Boy & Boa Constructor
Brainstormer & Capitualtors
Colour Monster & Corbeau
Crimson Contrarodron & Cryptospider

Whirlwind Wurm!

Wound Whisp

Xaxavraznazak
Yam-Man
Zen Beast
Zug-Zug

and now...

Vore Bull 

- Hecatomb empire - endlessly sacrificed
- kingdom obsessed with justice revenge and sacrifice
- nothing is forgotten
- deep secreted places, passions in stone
-  army of bulls 
- long darkness 
- hints of rebirth
- bull required
- entering the skinned bull
- slight frame
- virtually indestructible
- some lethal violence
- ferocity into the small beast
- spirit, mind and engine

Cow Country - you just need Bulls for the ritual and that means pastureland, specifically, cattle country. Either the pasture of river valleys or the cowboy-inhabited vast plains of waving grass. The Vore Bull will almost always be a monster of the farmlands or the Plains.

HOOKS
1. The Cult of the Long Darkness - a hidden Mithratic semi-faiths is actually what it thinks it is; the last relic of a long-dead empire, holding a few half-remembered scattered secrets of its magic. They will kill to defend their secrets but what strange memories of the dead empire lie hidden in the caves nearby?
2. The Bull Demon - one, or a series of attacks by a nightmare demon of skinless flesh in the outlands. Whole settlements laid waste and nothing seems able to stop it.  Big surprise the destroyed settlements all have a dark secret in that they ignored or took part in the destruction of an isolated minority community, the survivors of that event are now taking terrible revenge.
3. The Fierce Wee Beasts - a plague or eruption of insanely angry small animals, voles mice etc, which seem possessed by some disease of hyper-wrath. 
4. The Peaceful Ones. A group of abused and maltreated people seek peace in a ranch-like cult out in the valleys. They seem to have found it but their secret is that they are actually forcing their rage into small creatures and disposing of them that way. Like a drug which wears off, the rage re-grows each time, more rapidly and more totally and the surges of wrath are starting to become noticeable.
5. The Foolish Academic. A relatively innocent historical researcher is accidentally finding out stuff about the rituals and nearly making them workable but is being manipulated by a Dickensian grotesque who wants revenge on the world
6. Race for the Ritual. Some evil person heading a cult or org full of damaged people has the last part of the ritual - the Bull part, their own ranch and tbh pretty much everything you need to start up your own army of unkillable monsters and wreck the nation, but they don't know the first part, and the answer is... in a dungeon! Which you need to get to before they do and either control or destroy the info.

Could I go deep on this one? Most of the depth comes not from the circumstances of the origins of the rage - did I write a a .. STORY GAME MOSNTER?? NOOOOO. Yes I probably did. This one is more about people, alienation, societal cruelty victimhood and rage. And access to cows. The bull just makes the rage a physical thing that the culture needs to actually deal with.
OK ON TO THE NEXT ONE







Vitellary
The horror of an insect on your flesh which you can't get off. It feeds off tears, mates then injects eggs  which cause a highly specific disease with some odd upsides but which is always lethal. Vitillary Blindness makes you see the world 'as text', but text which is always 'true'. Essentially you are reading the code of the Matrix, or it seems like you are. But then your head bursts open and Glyphapillars climb out.
here



So I seem to have STACKED this one with possibilities. Insects and Multiple stage life growth patterns seem perfect for D&D somehow, the distinctness and uniqueness of each form, with different dangers, utility and cultural significance and the fact that it transmutes into useful but obscure "lore" as well, ahhh yeahhh baby.

Pretty much in the text:
1. Glyphapillar forest fire! There are known to be Glyphapillars in the woods. A fire has started in the woodlands, which wouldn't be that big of a problem, but its known that burnt Glyphapillars produce Vitillaries and now everyone is too scared to fight the fire. But if the fire goes on, Vitillaries will be everywhere..
2. FUCK THERE ARE VITILLARIES WHAT DO WE DO??? Jump in the fire? Ok does anyone have flour I can roll my kid in and then set them alight? Anyone have acid? How far to the nearest water I can jump in? Can someone hypnotise me or get a dumb monkey to pick them off?
3. Vitiallry suicide armour - you should never have fucked with those swamp drunks because now their shaman or main berserker has gone mental and is rampaging through town covered in fucking vitillaries which means nothing physical can touch them!
4. Bring me the Blindness! A shaman, magic user, maybe someone terminally ill, or a fanatic, wants to be infected with the Vitiallay Blindness so they can see the world "as it truly is". But for that to happen, they will need Vitillaries. Yes its another "find and transport an insanely dangerous animal" mission!
5. Vitillary Detective. Some deadly crimes are going on and the guilty parties have some super-technique or subtle magic to keep the law off their backs. Last resort - *someone* must be infected with the Vitillary Blindness to help them 'read the scene' and catch the baddies. The PCs need to either do this or find and protect someone who can. 
6. Vitillary Conspiracy. Some crime gang or evil conspiracy has a way of inducing and slightly controlling the rate of Vitillary Blindness, they use those infected as guardians and inquisitors to prevent infiltrators. The PCs need to find some way to infiltrate the gang without being discovered....




NOT IN THE DESCRIPTION ARGUABLY
1. Human Testing!. Someone thinks they have found a way to slow, or even put into stasis the vitillary blindness so its non-lethal across the course of a normal human life and is offering money (or freedom, or forgiveness) to test it (this is illegal). Its getting you out of debt/legal trouble etc at least!
2. Search for a Cure! You get the blindness somehow and need to search for some way to end it before it kills you.
3. Glyphapillar Bombers! - some nutter has managed to somehow grab a bunch of them and plans to lock the doors on the longhouse and throw them into the fire - now EVERYONE will see the world 'as it really is'.
4. Aiding the Detective. Someone hires you or you pledge to help them look for a cure and they follow you about - however, their blindness does turn out to be veeeery useful while they have it, do you *really* want them to be cured?
5. Tombs of the Aurulent Empire. Are they a weapon, a tool that got out of control? It would be strange for the Aurulent Empire to leave a 'pure' weapon hanging around. If they are part of a larger, forgotten process, could there be systematically ways to control their effects? Perhaps incorporating them into a larger process? Maybe tomb raiding the Empires leavings will explain things.
6. The Sketchy Treasure. PCs get frozen of amber-held Vitillaires as treasure and/or payment, or an amberised glyphapillar. Its the ultimate in illegal hard currency! Do you try and trade them or do the honourable thing and search for a way to destroy them safely?

The Vore Bull, a giant meat-suit powered by rage and ancient rituals from a forgotten empire.

Lets see what we have here..

Dreaming of Beastmen

I still go to sleep some nights day-dreaming of Beastmen, Beastmen and what they could be...

 Blanche

AESTHETIC, ENVIRONMENT & CULTURE

Beastmen and Flowers;

This could be a whole thing. They probably don't have much interest in "treasure" but attaining a flower that only grows in a super-difficult area and gifting it to a high status war leader or shaman as payment or tribute would be cool. There are not enough beastmen garlanded in roses and lilies. There is no reason for Beastmen not to like flowers.


Beastmen and Realmstone;

Being bestrewn with lumps of raw realmstone would be good. It's raw magic, and therefore the stuff of chaos, so they should have a natural affinity for it in its raw unworked state and also, having a contempt for people and cultures who work realmstone and *use* it, because as the stuff of primal transformation, it should be respected and honoured, not utilised as a tool. The ritual destruction of such things and pilgrimages to return them to their natural place would be interesting behaviour.


Beastman standards and Trophies

They should have way more stuff from cities they have destroyed, like the skulls of kings with the crowns nailed on, a pyre or brazier fuelled by burning books, the skeletons of formal magicians used as fetishes. HEAD SHRINKING - its been a while since we have seen that!

Beastmen and the Penumbra of the Realms;

This is chaos-land, but not Chaos chaos. Reality decays into strange abstractions, impossible to survive, but this seems like a natural place for Beastmen to hang out - in the Ballardian apocalypse - those who went compulsively towards the perimeter inimical and were changed by it. Turning into a Beastman is a very Ballardian thing to happen; "Oxton glanced at the neighbours dog, he could smell its pregnancy.
"Odd horns old chap," blathered Winstabley as he fumbled with the keys to the Jaguar, its sky-bright surface pulsing incandescence under the lamps of passing traffic,

 "fashion is it?"

"Mm yes," murmured Oxton, "the wife you know. Trends." He would piss in Winstableys face and rape the car.



More Religiosity;

The fact that the Beastmen have and actual value system, other than just "wreck stuff", should be move visibly present in their armies. They should have fanatical priests, dervishes, sacred items or holy mutants they take along with them . Or maybe their sacred objects are the sacred things of other cultures, just defiled, like the book of Sigmar pissed on. Interesting in that idols of the chaos gods, nagash AND Gork and Mork would also be there - it would be pretty cool if you had a beastman standard bearer carrying an idol of defiled icons with Sigmar and chaos and everyones symbols all piled in together - the ultimate "fuck all of you"


Ballgowns;

Beastmen wearing the rags of fine ballgowns should be a thing, the very high-status wear of a destroyed city, defiled, altered and adopted as both a gesture of contempt and an adoption of power. A little like Native American adoption of fragments of western dress but in a strange or misaligned way - wearing them as totems. But yeah, a beastman wearing the shitstained rags of a debutatnes ballgown with the debutantes head tied around his neck by her long fine hair like a medallion, a judges wig, a magicians beard skinned from their face and worn.

Weapons;

these should be more obviously the weapons of other races or groups taken and altered - having poles and hafts made up of parts that clearly come from different cultures and realms - much more of a bricolage.


THEIR OWN SYMBOL!

Even Skaven have one but Beastmen have to trudge along using the same octed that has already been colonised by the shitty godworshippers, they should have their own cool thing, like a version of the octed but primal and simpler, maybe an inward-turning spiral, or a stick-man with an inward-turning spiral for a face.

Adrian Smith?

UNITS

Honoured Spawn;

Funky new spawn models, hung with incense and silks, set with silver chains and braziers hanging from the tentacles, strewn with petals, carried forth on palanquins.

Nascent Turnskins "Half-Hooves"

Normies who reached adulthood, or puberty before they began to mutate into beastmen or otherwise, so like a half-mutated rabble, kind of like the Beastmen version of Imperial Fanatics - having been directly rejected by civilization they will be hyper invested in tearing it the fuck down - but many of them still wearing the rags of clothes and tools from their former lives. Used by the Beastmen as chaff but if they survive and keep winning they can become Beastman _spies_, covering over their mutations with a beggars rags or acolytes robes, infiltrating the despised cities, reporting back and working out how to destroy them. Someone with the memory and experience of civilisation but who has turned against it. Then maybe they can even get leadership positions.


Man-Chariots;

Beastman chariots drawn by lines of enslaved humans (GW too COWARDLY to give us this!)



Turnskin General;

A named character. Like a half-beastman wierdo who is just *that good* at winning battles that they run their own brayheard, maybe he only grew one twisted horn so the other one is beaten out of gold taken from his enemies crowns & is strapped to his head, or their swords. The mutational space between a human and a beast is sculpturally interesting, in some ways much more horrific than a simple goat-man.


Super-Mutation Primarch-Level Beastman;

(I guess they already have this with the "Gorfather", though so far he exists only in lore I think). Something like this must happen occasionally, a freak where all the mutations worked out just right and you got an awful kind of winged animal angel - a nice big hyper-charismatic model for GW to make bank off, could go back to Medieval Devil Imagery.


Weird little abortive goat foetus shaman guys;

Being carried around by a bigger dude obviously,


Ivar-The-Boneless Spawn General

Someone who got chaos-spawned but kept their mind and individuality, this makes them sacred to the Beastmen as a raw example of Chaos untainted by any particular pseudo-god. They are fucked up and random like a Chaos Spawn but have all the accoutrements of Lordship, like beastman chicks to fan their hideous cancerous bulk and they are holding a wine goblet in one pseudopod and holding up either a telescope or a monocle to their giant insane egg-yolk eye.


Anti-Priests

Hardcore Sam-Harris Daoist immortal/Purtitan Beastmen. Like the Beastman versions of Sigmarines, in character at least, so juiced up on unbelief and sacred ritual that they can resist and undo the work of gods. The more powerful and singular your model is the greater the effect they have.


Humanoid Riding Beasts;

Like huge naked mutated asymmetric men, all a bit different and skew-wiff - hair and beards dragging in the murk, being ridden by wierdly attractive multi-breasted female beastmen YEAH I WENT THERE YOU KNEW WHAT I WAS YOU KNEW


JUST A WHOLE NEW RANGE OF CHAOS SPAWN

and I want them modular too! Spawn Legions - some real super-random Hironimus Bosh apocalypse legions shit, look like they are literally made of crazed human sins combined with teratomas plus a circus freakshow. 

Chaos Goblins - VotE Remastered Development

Anarchists of the infinite dark. Chaotic where nothing so uncertain should be able to survive. By chance alone they thrive, by chance they die

Russ Nicholson

Physical Appearance

Are these monsters even Goblins? No two are quite the same. Most have no heads. Instead, big gawping faces occupy the centre-mass; lumpy spheres ringed with limbs; long dandling legs and nearly indistinguishable arms spreading out like spiders limbs. Others so crooked-backed that they are grown into hoops, even rolling along on their knobbly spines, bouncing the ground with pugnacious faces on each turn. Others long and loopy, with fifty eight vertebrae and six to eight limbs, who scurry like centipedes along the ground.

The chaos goblins sunless skin stained black with crazed tattoos, full-body or half-body black paint, tattooed vantablack ‘gloves’ or ‘boots’ so that they seem to move along like ghosts, or one half blackened, the other kept pristine. Others graffitied with crazy notions and scurvy pictures. In off hours the Chaos Goblins tattoo each other and themselves with whatever they have to hand; blood, brain paint, ash, ichor, mondmilch. Don’t confuse it with a Culture.

The Chaos Gobs have monocoloured eyes. Either utterly black, like a sharks, or and infra-white sclera and iris that backscatter unlikely radiations into visible light, meaning the whites of their eyes, which are the whole of their eyes but for the pupil, glow or stand out clearly in the dark, especially when there is no other light at all. Such goblins often paint or tattoo themselves utterly black, leaving only their eyes. They find this hilarious.

Chaos Goblin eyes can also ‘bulge’ and ‘flex’. Rings of muscle around their cartilaginous orbits, and very robust jelly, mean the eyes themselves writhe and warp in shape, sometimes pushing and squeezing the ball into a peeping scope, or even ‘closing’ entirely, making the face a blank,

Somewhere equatorial to the eyes, swivelling radar ears turn like blinking chameleons. Beneath; their twitchy noses poke and point this way and that, leading the way, and under those the mouths are full of teeth of knives, while the Goblins carry knives of teeth, along with the most bizarre assortments imaginable; umbrellas, hats, man-skin gloves over tattooed black hands, geegaws and trinkets. Always jiggling and poking, snorting and chuckling are the Chaos Gobs.

Russ Nicholson

Culture (?)

Horror Goblins banished from the sun for deeds too-queer. Worshippers of primordial chaos, and the chaos Dukes they find in worms, in pies, in dung, in eyes… Even Goblin Lands won’t take them in. Thus came they, blindways, nightwayes, west of Midnight, north of Quiet, down down down to the Underground, where no sun shines and dreams and dark are one.

Even here nobody likes them! (Maybe the dErO, who use them as hunters and deniable ‘proxies’, (like a rabid frog on a candyfloss leash). Or at least they try to. The Chaos Goblins find the dErO hilarious, but they find everything hilarious.)

Anarchists of the Veins. Hell Gobs! Terrorists! Friends to slime and slug. Goblins who got a little too dark. Chaos! Or expressions of it.

They must engage in some kind of economic activity, if only for the fun of it. They seem to have…. stuff. As well, they must have some kind of irregular pipeline to other multiversal goblin cultures - they have some animated weapons and goblin guns. They have met David Bowie. (The actor, not his character in Labyrinth.)

Too twee? Too cringe? Too twenty-twelve blog post? They don’t care. In fact, that makes it better. In the whole of any Veins-World, the Chaos Gobs are the only creatures who may have met David Bowie, or will even know who that is, when even the Player Characters don’t.

I’ll say this; the Chaos Gobs have so much respect for Chaos they will usually respect a bet, and the more inane and chaotic the bet the greater respect it has. Cards & Dice? = FOR CUMPS. Lets bet on flies landing on shit-piles, or whose eye pops out first, or who can eat more of a live snake, each starting at a different end. Yes, the Chaos Goblins will respect a bet, for the five to thirty minutes that makes up their short-term memory. After that they stop caring at all.

But that doesn’t mean they will chase you down. They are chaotic after all. Might simply doodle on the walls, or sing a song, or eat each other. Best to run while you have the chance.

Pathfinder

Material Culture

Wherever they are the Chaos Goblins ‘Chaos Aura’ (see ‘Mutational Effect’ below), warps and alters the environment in various ways, but they also make raw physical changes that anyone could do.

In the living expression of course, its hard to tell where madness ends and the extra-real beings. The Chaos Gobs certainly don’t know.

They shit everywhere, paint the walls with shit. They poop in many colours. They paint the walls with Brain-Paint, (see below), and who knows what that might do? And they paint the walls with paint, if they happen to have any. They carve passages into goblinish shapes, their halls are like cathedrals where only gargoyles and grotesques are allowed. Gieger would enjoy them, and yes! He was one of them! They bore random holes to nowhere, build castles made of moon-beams, imported from the seas of the Imprisoned Moon (How did they get them, since they are so poor in every other way?)

So, imagine this; a ridiculous cathedral with the windows being crazed paintings in luminescent shit, or actual para-reality doors…

Yes they might have some treasure. They might have the treasure. Of course they don’t know what it is, or care. Its in a bucket and the bucket is what they value. They will chase you TO THE ENDS OF THE FUCKING EARTH about that bucket!!!

On the move you might find them hiding Man-Camels in a hole that wasn’t there before, or collectively inside a box that shouldn’t be present at all. (Many Chaos Goblins can climb out of one thing.)

Storyforge art

Tools And Weapons

Man-Camels

Trepanned or brain-screwed naked human beings with elongated limbs. Used as beasts of burden.

Brain-Paint

Vital Chaos Goblin tech, and a major source of conflict with Soft-Heads who also needed those brains. Brain-Paint is made from the brains of wizards, or anything analogous to a wizard in Goblin eyes, mixed with.. whatever really. What a Chaos Goblin paints with Brain Paint becomes conditionally-real. A tunnel painted on a wall becomes a tunnel, a hole becomes a hole, a princess becomes a princess (a Chaos Goblin version of one anyway). This may be how Chaos Goblins gain irregular access to other Goblin Realms; by just painting them on the wall and walking in, then getting out fast before they forget they can’t really be there. The useful effects of Brain-Paint for non-chaos-goblins are highly irregular, and it doesn’t work at all if not painted by a Chaos Goblin. The negative effects usually work.

Living Weapons

Chameleon Whips actual chameleon tongues make their targets appear differently, Sting Stones are wasp-souled sling stones, Spider-Guns like silk-spewing bagpipes. They are rumoured to use tame (?) Ungulix as hunting hounds.

Madlights

Important in the Veins, Chaos Goblin lamps are always varicoloured and always move madly, either flung and whirled about the head, or actual living bugs and floating frog-balloons lit from within but still trying to hop. They are carried like child’s balloons or like toys, or streamers, bouncing and whirling about.

Other Items

Potion-Pots, Sticky Pokers, Fiddle-Diddles, Hidey Box, Boomerangs, Hooks, Grease, mall-bought shuriken, Madness Pipes.

Russ Nicholson

The Power of Chaos!

Existence for the Chaos Goblins is a dark, violent, anarchic comedy that never ever ever ends. A cruel, surreal, picaresque from which they cannot escape, from which they cannot wish to escape.

They are like a corruption, a Cancer on Reality. Causality bubbles and warps around them. Extremities of chance become common, rare events; regular, humours change. Their physical environment also warps, becoming emblematic, expressionist, arch and Caligarish, somehow performed.

Those who are captured by Chaos Goblins, inevitably monstered, stripped, tattooed, altered, are either made into man-camels, or slowly devolve into Chaos Goblins themselves, as they go utterly mad. These ‘Changed Ones’ are the Chaos Goblin shaman who perform their Grand Transformations.

Chaos Mechanics

Chaos Goblins don’t roll dice, they just flip coins. Heads is a crit, or the highest number possible from the equivalent die roll, tails is a fumble, or the lowest number possible. A die-equivalent can be managed by making all ‘odds’ crits and high and all ‘evens’ fails and fumbles.

All Chaos Goblin action oscillates between bizarre flukes of terrifying good luck, and the most laughable and deranged failure, with nothing in-between. Their 'magic' is the ability to act like cartoon characters.

Chaos Aura!

The Chaos Aura around a Chaos Goblin randomises the effect of any spell cast upon them. Usually this just randomises between any spell of the same level, but on a d20 roll of 20, it randomises between all possible spells of any level.

Knightmare Miniatures

Chaos-Tricks!

Thankfully, each Chaos Goblin can only use one Chaos Trick at a time, and usually only one Chaos Goblin can use each Chaos Trick in each encounter.

It takes actual concentration to do it. But more important than concentration is circumstance. In the words of Roger Rabbit, ‘it has to be funny’. Though ‘funny’ for a Chaos Goblin doesn’t mean funny for anyone else.

Still, in effect, if a Chaos Goblin uses a Chaos Trick during an encounter, that Goblin can only use that one power, and only that Goblin can use that ability. Otherwise it wouldn’t be ‘funny’.

Elongating Arms

Extend your arms like a huge accordion! Or like long loopy animated limbs! Or like big mad snakes!

Inflated Body

Huff and puff and a Chaos Goblin can inflate itself just like a balloon and float about in the same way, waving its limbs for some level of control. Pierce it and it goes ‘vvvveeeeeeeeee’ and flies about like a balloon, instead of collapsing like a body of equivalent mass.

Deranged Disguise

A Chaos Goblin can disguise itself by dressing very crudely as whatever it wants to be seen as. They can even disguise themselves from the Dungeon Master. For instance the Dungeon Master might say;

“In the middle of the battle, a hot princess appears and starts making lovey dovey eyes at you?”

“Where did she come from?”

“I have no fucking idea.”

Bear in mind; Chaos Goblins are mad, stupid and cringe, so while their disguise might be impenetrable in a metatextual sense, it will often stand out as being utterly retarded. (But look out for those occasions where it isn’t.)

Harmless Liquefaction

A Chaos Goblin can be liquified and poured into something, before being decanted and reassuming its form. This honestly has limited combat utility.

Hiding

A Chaos Goblin can hide behind something that has no space to hide behind, like a long thin rod, or under a rug.

Limb Fix

A Chaos Goblin can lose a limb and replace it with something else that is sort of like a limb, simply popping or screwing it on or in. This might be sword, a hook, a bone, another Chaos Goblin or anything really.

Impossible Shadow Puppets

A Chaos Goblin can make shadow puppet animals or beings on a cave wall and use them as actual creatures.

Grand Transformations

A Shaman is required for this, or someone the Chaos Goblins think is a Shaman. A Big Ritual takes place and one, or more, or all Chaos Gobins are transformed, either randomly, or all into Bat-Goblins, or Fish-Goblins with smiling goblin faces, or Mist-Goblins or are agoblimated into a single Mass Goblin Mega-Goblin.

My Owlbear Laboratory

 OwlBear

One of the canonical D&D monsters and a really hard one to conceptually Goosify.

• Things about the Owlbear;
• I don't know if its copyrighted.
• Its goofy as fuck .
• I already did a version of it in FotVh as 'Imperator Ape'.
• It doesn't seem to do anything even mildly interesting mechanically.
• Ecologically there is almost nothing interesting.
• Is basically - a big ferocious hyper-territorial bear.
• Added to all this is the difficulty of making an "this instantly attacks you" encounter something for GG&G

Ok lets summon some Galaxy-Brain energy and break this one down;

All images by Scrap Princess - thanks Scrap!

Interesting things about Owls;

• Flight.
• Utter silence.
• Can fly real slow too.
• Because of the super-silence they are not waterproof, will avoid rain and can drown easily.
• Whiteness (for barn owls) linked with death.
• Seem to stand upright, more so than other birds.
• Forward facing radar faces (unusually characterful for birds).
• Dumb long legs.
• Young ones sleep face down.
• Fucking terrifying talons.
• Hypersenses in the dark.
• Nocturnal.
• Mythic associations with death, wisdom.
• Super soft feathers but very murdery.
• Pose well on fenceposts and Godess shoulders.
• Very goth.
• Derpy in internet images - the old-school 'O Really' meme was an owl I think.
• Puke out nuggets of dried stuff which you can collect and dissolve to retrieve the fine bones of their small prey.
• Have a cool spooky call (though the cool-looking barn owl actually just does a screech).
• There are small tunnel-dwelling owls that live in and around prairie dogs and native Americans used to call them the shaman of the prairie dogs.
• HEADS ROTATE I can't believe I fogot that, can't turn their massive eyes, probably due to their size and the thickness of the optic cord piping shitloads of bandwith to their tiny brains so move their heads like periscopes.

Now,

Interesting things about bears.

• Fucking massive.
• Act kinda dumb.
• Climb like motherfuckers.
• The most dangerous thing a modern man can meet in the forest.
• Can kill their way through most stuff.
• Colour coded (very D&D).
• Deep mythic associations with strength, potency, bigness, toughness, arguably a sub-association with being a bit dumb/direct.
• This association strong enough that there are a few names which mean 'bear', like Bjorn, (so far as I know, no-one ever called their kid 'Owl'. Though it might have been cool if they did.
• Fish for salmon.
• Polar bears are basically bears-plus.
• Dumb short legs.
• Look kinda fat.
• Very not goth.
• Look slow but actually quite fast.
• Like HONEY - famous for it.
• Killed Timothy Treadwell.
• Have to scratch their backs on trees, look derpy doing this, have favourite trees and you can tell which ones due to all the bear hairs.
• Get in your garbage.
• An old name for "Bear" might actually be a kenning or side-name as if you used their true name they might turn up and they were so potent and feared that you had to be real scared of them much of the time.
• you can allegedly kill one by waiting for it to rise up on its hind feet then get a spear underneath them, then when they come down on you the spear runs them through
• (this method seems one of those ok in principal but how the fuck do you actually do it deals).

Curious things about Owlbears

• They are alone in their imaginary phylum - there are no colour-coded bears or "this-terrain" bears. fifty kinds of giant but only one kind of owlbear.
• They don't have any noted interactions with any kind of monster race - no "hobgoblins ride/keep owlbears as guards" or "wizards love to have owbears patrol their gardens", they seem to be pretty much dangerous to everything all of the time.
• No reason for them to have treasure, other than by accident - like they carried a body back and its former stuff is hanging around lost in the dirt.
• No particular, specific reason for them to be in the adventurers way, at least any more than any other wild beast, they don't guard a special plant or love useful-to-humans areas.
• Its just this single encounter, out in the forest, with this single creature, which is the only thing of its type.
• And it specifically says that when it attacks it just goes the fuck at you till either you die or it does...
• Almost the quintessence of the D&D single monster attack encounter.
• They don't even have some bullshit mythic origin, its literally "yeah probably a wizard did it".
• They have almost none of the particular and interesting elements of either owls or bears, they are not silent, cannot fly, do not have barn-owl radar faces, do not swivel their heads, are not nocturnal, have no hypersenses, are not goth, have no mythic associations, do not hibernate (I think), don't scratch their backs on trees, maybe they eat salmon and honey??

THINGS TO KEEP

• Soft, white, silent predators.
• Nocturnal.
• Can fly.
• Expressive radar faces.
• Head rotates.
• Derpy as fuck.
• Fucking huge, like the size of a bear.
• Easily freaked out by loud sounds, bright lights and strange behaviours.
• Also vulnerable to water and rain as not waterproof, can drown easily.
• Very soft.
• They look round but remove the feathers and they look very odd indeed.
• Sleeps lying face down like an idiot.
• Head rotation.
• hibernates but randomly, stores up huge amounts of food before hibernation causing it to raid everywhere nearby, then finds some place it likes (often just a barn, attic or stable) and falls asleep there face down for who knows how long.
• If you wake them up from this they freak the fuck out, but you can move them in a group so long as everyone is extremely quiet.
• Silly long legs.
• Hypersenses.
• Cool spooky call.
• (Or maybe a really stupid but somehow still sinister call? Like "WHOOOO WAKKA WAKKA WAKKA". This is meant to be a game for families so something the DM can do which will be fun would be nice.
• Can kill its way through most stuff.
• Walks like a dumb violent penguin when it finally hits the ground (an innovation on my part rather than synthesis).
• Often flies into trees and stuff with a WHACK also houses, barns, windows, anything really.
• Has really great taste in food, honey, salmon, cavier, mice, resteraunt bins, cooked food. 
• Real, reaaaaal dumb.
• Like its a terrifying apex hyper predator due to its size, supersenses and natural abilities, but the side effect is that it is a moron.
• Like you can fool one by making mice out of honey, dressing up as a mouse, pretending to be a salmon in distress, hiring honeymice (its natural prey) to lure it. (Note to self, add 'Honeymice' to the game.)
• If they eat a person they poop them out as one wet bag of skin and guts and also puke up a dried nugget of bones, clothes hair and shoes - to put the person back together you need to find all the wet bits and the dry nugget and bring them to a barber, or at minimum, a really good seamstress, and reassemble them.
• Like to scratch their backs on trees, soft feathers can be collected from here, quite valuable. 

ALTERNATE NAMES

• "Owlboar"????
• Fowlbear??? - like a terrifying duck-headed bear?
• barn bear???
• Strigibjorn

These are all terrible

So, the mysterious...

 Strigybjorn 

(better names in comments please);

Beehives, Honeymice, resteraunts, confectioners, butchers, food delivery people and fisherment are attacked in the glaoming or the darkness by a creature of 'a terrible whiteness'. Something utterly silent, fleeting in on pale wings as quiet as the dawn.

At nights, the mysterious call of the Strigybjorn echoes through the woodlands and shadowed hills; WHOOOO WAKKA WAKKA WAKKA it cries mournfully, WHOOOO WAKKA WAKKA WAKKA WHOOOO!

The Strigibjorn, an Owl with the size, ferocity and temperament of a Grizzly Bear, and the intelligence of a cart-flattened hedgehog. Once this unearthly and untraceable creature moves into an area it preys on all nearby sources of honey, fish, truffles, picnics, caviar, fresh pizza and pie. Ghosting through the darkness in the most absolute and terrifying silence, swooping down to seize its prey in talons like scimitars and either feasting where it lands, or leaping off into the night.

The Strigibjorn flys alike unto the bumble-bee, its flappy wing arms, which seem insufficient to support its weight in flight, thrumming with increadible blurring speed, yet still with the unearthly silence of the night-haunting owl, its huge body vertical, swaying slightly with the inertia of its flight, the Strigibjorns head swivelling this way and that like a periscope.

The Strijbjorn tunnels its lair beneath a massive tree, or in some dry and sandy ground, either using its own scooping limbs or cohabiting with some other large tunnelling beast. There it lies in the wan day, huge, majestic, face down on pizza boxes like an idiot, surrounded by its own dry vomit.

As night falls, the Strigibjorn emerges to pose on a tree, hopefully one large enough to bear its weight, but as the Strigibjorn is real dumb it often lands on a wrong-sized branch, which bends or snaps off, sending the Strigibjorn to the ground.

Then it rises like a spirit into the starless dark, using its incredible hearing, smell and telescoping night vision to locate its prey; always some kind of delicious food, nothing cheap you know?

That food can be a person! But not a poor one.

After taking its prey in the darkness, slicing homeward through the air, maybe hitting barn, also possibly a tree or two, the Strigibjorn retreats to its dry tunnelled lair where it eats the prey (if it hasn't already) and then, after digesting it for most of the night, goes outside to drop a wet glutinous poo, before returning to vom up a dry nugget of bones, hair, shoes and coin.

In daylight a Strigibjorn often wakes up woozy, with a terrible itch. Unable to easily scratch itself the Strijibjorn will, (after a few attempts) roll over and get itself up, then stagger out into the wild like a murder penguin, its head rotating this way and that, eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. Then it will locate a particular tree which it favours, and rub and roll itself against it, attempting to salve the itch. 

The Strigibjorn cannot move its eyes due to its huge tubular optic nerves, instead rotating its head around like a bottle top. If it has an itchy head it will press it against the tree trunk and rotate it, going "WHRRRRRRR ZE ZE ZE, WHRRRRR ZE ZE ZE".

The extremely soft, silent and valuable down feathers of the Strigibjorn are often left embedded in this tree, marking it. These feathers are so soft that shoes packed with them will make no sound and a pillow full of them can put anyone to sleep, even severe and cursed insomniacs

During much of the year the Strigibjorn is a threat in the dark to all, but at unknown times, (for the Strigibjorn never really knows what month or season it is, being surprised each night), the Strigibjorn decides the time has come to hibernate. It will put on weight and prepare itself for the long sleep.

Thence begins a reign of terror as the Strigibjorn goes into predatory overdrive, attempting to eat everything in its chosen territory, smashing into butchers and takeaways, eating delivery boys, stealing cheese and annihilating the populations of Honeymice.

When it has eaten enough, or just forgotten what it is doing, the Strigibjorn will decide that the time to hibernate is NOW and will lay facedown somewhere dry to sleep it off. Though not necessarily anywhere out of the way, it might be a stable, your bedroom, your attic or shed, the post office, an aunts house, who knows?

The Strigibjorns hibernation will last for an unknown period of time. The creature can be moved out of the way, but this must be done VERY CAREFULLY, by several people with slender poles either stretchering it out or putting a bag over its head and carefully and softly, and QUIETLY, rolling it.

YOU NEED TO BE REALL GODDAMN QUIET OK?? IF THIS THING WAKES UP IT WILL FREAK THE HECK OUT AND KILL US ALL!!! DEAD YOU HEAR ME? DEAD! SO BE QUIET!!!!!!

The creature has few weaknesses. One is its incredible stupidity, though this is as much a threat as a weakness. Another is water, for the Strijibjorns stealthy feathers are not waterproof at all. It will flee from rain, can easily drown if forced into deep water and drenching it makes it look utterly crazy and severely limits its flight capacities.

For those eaten by the Strijibjorn, there is a slim hope. If someone can invade the creatures lair and locate exactly the right death nugget, and can also find the wet pooping place outside and find most, or even all of the victims wetter elements, they can return to town and dissolve the nugget, revealing the bones, teeth, hair, clothes, cash and socks.

Then, perhaps, a seamstress of incredible skill, a great barber or a Possible Witch could sew the victim back together, with varying degrees of success and horrorfication, depending on the amounts recovered, how well they were assembled, what they ended up being stuffed with and the size of their stitches.