Not In Petty Gods

Back at the end of 2011 I sent a submission for James Maliszewski's 'Petty Gods'. I thought I was going to be int it, but now apparently am not. So here is the guy I made anyway.

I must be memory-obsessed

The God of Lost Chapters

Some books are so long, and so boring, that almost no-one finished them.

During the reading of a an important but very long and turgid book, the mind of the reader will abruptly enter an unaware fugue-state. It is at this moment that the god of lost chapters makes his appearance.

Say half-way through Das Kapital or the Bible, your head begins to nod, your eyes are open but in fact you are mildly unconscious. The God of Lost chapters will fill your mind with the memory of the chapter you should have read. After a few moments you wake up again. You never realise you passed out. You have the memory of reading the book and the book is in your hands so your must have read it. You continue.

But he never ever gets it exactly right.

This god is the reason people who spend their lives reading very long books always disagree about the exact meaning of what they have read. They remember reading different things. His powers are mild, almost non-existent, but he has probably started a few wars. And a few crusades.



Name: Moorealeth

Symbol: A broken circle

Alignment: Neutral

Movement: Human

Armor Class: Standard unarmoured

Hit Points (Hit Dice): Random, d20 HD, reroll every encounter, he forgets how divine he is.

Attacks: Probably just a normal guy with bare hands. But if he touches you, you don't know why you're there. Twice and you don't know who he is. Three times and you don't know who you are.

Damage: Low. 1D6?

Save: High. he is a godlet after all.

Morale: Fights and forgets why he's fighting. Runs away and forgets why he's running.

Hoard Class: Like treasure? Books. Expensive, valuable beautiful books of spells and strange knowledge. All slightly wrong. None of them work. You could probably prise the gems off the front or sell them for the dragonskin bindings. If you try to sell them to anyone who knows what they are  doing they are going read them, wait a while, read them again, and get very pissed off.

XP: 1500? But if anyone doesn't remember why they were fighting at the end then they don't get any.

If a PC ever tries to hit Moorealeth and misses, they forget why they were trying to hit him in the first place. Another member of the party within earshot must spend one round explaining to them why they are fighting and what is going on. If everyone forgets and there is no-one to remind them then the encounter is over. Moorealth also forgets.

Moorealeth looks like a distracted bearded man wearing tattered grey robes. He knows everything but can never relate it correctly. He is unaware of this. He is eager to help anyone who passes by. His assistance is always slightly wrong. if you ask him where the Goblin City is he will give your the wrong place, or the wrong spelling. Or tell you it is a city of Gnolls, or say that the name 'Goblin City' is based on a misspelling of an ancient tribal term and actually it's a mountain, or an oasis. Or he will get it exactly right but transpose the co-ordinates so you end up on the wrong side of the globe, exactly opposite the goblin city. Or he will send you to 'Roblin City'.

Art-Deco Shoggoth

Nearly done with basic geology, moving on to underground life next. The following is just the highlights of my notes so far, to convince people I haven't been dicking around.

"Geology acts as a kind of collective unconscious for the world, a deep control beneath the oceans and continents." (Literalize?

Jungsworld deep below the surface?)

VOG – Acid mist – water on recent lava produces sulphur-enriched fog called VOG.

Sulphur crystals form tiny perfect prisms.

Tears Of Pele – tiny, black, drop shaped stones. (Tears of the goddess, she likes handsome youths, poss swap CHA and STR to gain heat resistance.)

Hair Of Pele – Glass filiments drawn out as the gasses speed from lava. Like spun suger but brittle, almost golden sheen.

XENOLITHS

“the inner earth is green too, but a rich gren such as is seen on the leaves of climbing plants in the rain forest.”

GHOST REEFS + ULTRA FOSSILS

UNDEAD CORAL

Mad Old ideas about nature of the changing earth surprisingly useful in the context of a fantasy world.

An earth cooling and shrinking

An earth growing from within.

Kirchner – mountains are bones of the earth, a skeleton for the planet.

Beumont – fault lines shaped by pentagons discovered from the connections of great circles.

RADIOLARIANS – glassy silaca spheres or nets, delicate as lace. (huge hyper-adaptive Radiolarians like beautiful art-deco shoggoths, but terrestrial not alien)

“We must be humble, we are so easily baffled by appearances

And do not realise that the stones are one with the stars

It makes no difference to them whether they are high or low

Mountain peak or ocean floor, palace or pigsty

There are plenty of ruined building in the world, but no ruined stones.”

-Hugh MacDiarmid 'On a Raised Beach'

Cockroaches can sense rockfalls before they happen and are valued by miners (obvious cockroach god for drow)

TORNQUISTS SEA

"Dark nor light

the region, nor bright nor sombre wholly

A dusky empire and its diadems,

One faint, eternal eventide of gems."

-Keats Endymon

“Large, flat prismatic feldspars float in a matrix of finer dark grained basalt. As if bold white brush strokes have been added to the faces of the sculptures”

(theoretical column, 3 kinds of meaning encoded in one artefact, religious relation of elder gods which tells their story, changes in the nature of the carving and the inference of the story tell the changing attitudes of the culture that carved the column over hundreds of years, geological strata tell story of deep time, actually influenced by the elder gods told of in the myth, for instance, in a fantasy world, there will be 'Cthulhu Strata. Each kind of encoded meaning gives clues to the other.)

A lava cavity or air bubble is called a 'Vug'

Granite preserves culture but limits detail in sculpture. Artist must consider essence of form. (Poss views on what 'ancient' art looks like formed more by the materials that carry it than we suppose? Lots of fancy shit we never see because it decayed on weak materials?)

“FORTEY: Oh, well Lapworth was a brilliant man who solved the problem of a structure in the northwest highlands of Scotland called the Moine Thrust. Lapworth realized – for very good evidence, because he was a marvelous field man – that the Moine Thrust was a layer where one enormous load of rocks was pushed bodily over another layer of rocks. Older probably over younger. But many, many people disagreed with this; they wanted the rocks, as it were, to be piled up simply in the right order. And Lapworth suffered mentally tremendously as he fought out this controversy, to the extent that he used to dream or have nightmares about being crushed under what he called the great Earth engine. "

"The mantle contains 'blobs' of a different composition on the scale of a few kilometers, which may be the last remains of subducted lithosphere slabs." - remnants of falled continents, solid outposts of the high-pressure silicone beings, at war with the frost giants beneath the earth where they were driven by the gods. Combat zone is inhabitable by hmans but also a post-war-berlin style intelligence nightmare crossed with a titanic battlefield.

A Possible Index

I have a shitload of books to read so this is going to take a while. Will update you as it goes.

It might end up looking something like this. Probably not in this order. (or nothing like this)

1 Grow Your Own Planet with the various areas labelled. Map left blank and tools and random tables given for gms and players to genreate a fiction tectonic history of their planet, should they wish to. So they can map out the general geography and get a clear idea of where they could go. Will leave the names the same as tribute to the scientists and geologists who discovered them but the meaning will change. So there should always be a Mohorovičić discontinuity. But Mohorovičić might be the explorer who discovered the edge of hell, or the stellar dragon that curls within the earth, or the Liche that trapped the god that powers the magma flows.

2 corpse of a river in the body of the sea. Karst diagram, most likely entrances. How Karst works, what it's like.

3 life without light extremophile and fungal personalities, treasures, magic, politics. Cracked and ancient evolutionary paths. Ancient genetics from the dawn of life. Forgotten Phylum.

4 his body blocked the route failures, successes, famous deaths and survivals, wealth, insanity. Legends to inspire and drive the explorer.

5 the vampire court/and others low level adventure area/linked areas. Near the surface so some relation to surface ways. Last light from the sun reflected by ancient lenses through lava tubes to dim dawn-gloom cave. Only way to kill vampires in the underdark. Also run by vampires, justice for blood, last safe space before you reach the middle reaches.

6 the fungal underground railroad Either hunt or protect the weird/innocent fungal life forms for fun and profit. Also a beastary of fungal life.

7 the hive of glass extremophile knowledge storehouse. Panopticon of the Underdark. Dangerous, corrupting. Dungeon of smokey volcanic glass where you can see the whole thing from any point, but nothing is as it seems..

8 classic climbs table/diagram of classic spelunking problems for educational purposes. Like that one-page illustration from a D&D book somewhere that shows someone falling and shows the falling damage from each height as well. May also include a kind of table/guide showing the different levels of climbing ability shown by humans so far, fading slightly into the superhuman, so DM's can convert all the different ways climbing works.

9 Cave Crawl Rules – fuck knows how I'm going to do this. Probably DEX for small scale, CON for large. Also creating larger cave systems

10 the shape of the space small scale immediate/tactical cave generator.

11 whispers in the dark rules for oral recitation and direction-riddles. Sensory information?

12 black market item costs, diagram to help map changes in what costs what going up and down. Some materials raise in price as you go down and visa versa. One page diagram/illustration?

13 Eigengrau. the impossiblity of darkness the eye can't see real darkness without light kinds of darkness, kinds of light, sight generally.

14 breakdown falling apart mentally and physically. Maybe also a reading list. Including Hallucination table never tell players if you are rolling on this or the encounter table.

15 nobles of the deep Random table for generating rivers, water features, water generally.

16 extremophile/fungal treasures and tools

17 people you meet and why they want to kill you npc's (is there such a thing underground?

18 maps and guides

19 encounters 2 part encounter table, geographical and animate

20 I search the body

21 dying in the dark what happens when the lights go out or (they search your body)

22 speliothaumaturgy

23 we happened to meet..

24 larger cave system equivalent to street system.

Still need – equipment/light breakdowns

BRITAIN!!!!

    "Losing faith in gelignite we finally came round to the possibility of diving and Graham Balcombe's engineering skill produced a snorkel-like device from a cycle frame, raspberry valve and a garden hose. Water pressure on the chest prevented the diver reaching the necessary depth and wetsuits were then unknown and Graham Balcombe was removed from the water too cold even to speak. I had a go with the outfit but the engineering skill which had constructed it failed to ensure that the garden hose remained attached, and I also had to be removed from the water, wet inside and out."

Jack Sheppard helping to invent cave diving in 1934. Thats the kind of thinking that has got this country where it is today.

From 'The Last Adventure'

"You can't feminize me, I'll demote you."

Teens are back and the tables have turned. Boyd Of The Rope is no longer a man mountain with a strength of 18 but a tired toothless middle-aged man, desperately clutching the Birdhouse that now contains his soul.

A massive battle using Zak S's Moshpit Rules and the Dungeon Dozens Army Of Evil tables saw the teens facing an epic force of evil plant-based necromancers with only friendly Lizardmen, a detachment of Predator Drones from the future, a Gorgon, pick-wielding man-ape shock troopers and Evil Fake Luke Skywalker.

Result 7 on the Heavy Infantry table is a 'Hard-bitten division of armoured simulacra of famous champions of good'. So I let them name the hero's. We got:-

Lancelot.

Aulcard. (Teen 1's Halloween costume. He brought the hat to the game.)

Ben 10. (Soul eaten when he fell into a moat made of the evil green mist from Anastasia.)

Buzz Lightyear. (Stamped to death)

Teen1 "Ahhh, we could have got Superman. But we just went for ones that were funny."

The Terminator. (T1000 died saving Teen 2 from lightning caused by flying Predator Drones into Climate Hawks.)

Luke Skywalker.

Ash Ketchum. (Punched to death before deploying his first Pokemon. Generally considered by all present to be secretly evil as 'he never ages, he's been on missions that take 13 years and he still says "I'm twelve".' Table opinion was that Ash hangs around with a lot of new people as he is secretly disposing of them to conceal his freakishly aged body.)

Mario. (Cause of death unclear. Either tried to jump on someone in the battle and got skewered, or tried to eat a bad mushroom and exploded. Not enough time for anyone to check.)

Commander Shepherd. (Survived. I think.)

And perhaps one or two other Amine characters I'm not familiar with.

Teen3 ably prevented a FLAILSNAIL incursion by pointing out that 'I've got a telepathic snail right here.' Teen's high charisma and snail-based psionics enabled him to subvert the FLAILSNAIL'S loyalty. Same teen still takes 5 minutes of furrowed brow when I ask him 'how to you hide?' when he wants to use stealth.

Battle ended with the Teens taking down an evil* Zoimancer that Teen 1 had previously tricked into becoming a Minotaur, thereby making him more dangerous, while an evil Liche with recently stolen eyes sat on his new Flailsnail and laughed.

Success resulted in no magic items, but a field promotion for Teen2, who was randomly assigned command at the start of the battle, now making him a 'Major General'. Which proved useful when the others laughed at his Halloween costume for possibly containing a skirt.

*Though the word really has no relative meaning in the campaign.

Khara-Khoto

I've been watching the NHK 70's doumentary series on the Silk Road. Pretty much every episode has tonnes of GameFuel but episode four, 'The Dark Castle' is almost a D&D module in documentary format.

We have-

-An ancient ruin whose name translates directly as 'dark castle'.
-Local peasants who warn the film crew not to go there as 'bad things happened there'
-An old Mongol guide who takes them, but refuses to go inside.
-And won't approach at night.
-And sings an ancient tribal song of the castles doom.
-The keep itself, a ruin the size of a small town.
-A freaky blair-wich camera shot when the 'Dark Castle' first appears over the dunes.
-Collapsed temples, preserved by the desiccating wind from the gobi dessert.
- A last king. The Super-strong Buddhist named 'Batir' known as 'The Black General' and his unbeaten army.
- Batirs treasure, 80 cartloads of gold and silver.
- His war with, besiegement by and death at the hands of... GHENGIS KHAN.
- Batir killed his family and hid his treasure before his death. Treasure has never been found.
- 2000 year old silk fragments, a collapsed column disgorging ancient tokens for the dead, a single building standing alone outside the castle walls (the Mosque) and some handy PR for the Peoples Republic if China (they launch missiles!)

If you have an hour free... 

 

Students often happen to accept and transmit absurd information

'Al-Mas udi for instance, reports such a story about Alexander.

Sea monsters prevented Alexander from building Alexandria. He took a wooden container in which a glass box was inserted, and dived it to the bottom of the sea. There he drew pictures of the devilish monsters he saw. He then had metal effigies of these animals made and set them up opposite the place where building was going on. When the monsters came out and saw the effigies, they fled. Alexander was thus able to complete the building of Alexadria.

It is a long story made up of nonsensical elements which are absurd for various reasons ...'(Khaldun lists some reasons)'... Furthermore, the jinn are not known to have specific forms and effigies. They are able to take on various forms …. All this throws suspicion upon the story.'

(my italics)