5E MANPAC background.

 OK TIME TO START WEIRDING THIS SHIT UP.

Some of you may know a little about MANPAC already. Here is a 5e background for those who worship him.


You gain proficiency in Religion and Intimidation

You know Yoo-Suin Trade Tongue.

You gain a set of, and proficiency with, either:
Chefs Tools or Butchers Knives or Drug Paraphernalia


Equipment:

A Holy Symbol of MANPAC.
Ribbons of silk showing maps of unknown mazes visited in dreams.
Spices.
Knife, Fork and Plate.
A bag full of fist sized ROUND FOODS, oranges, dumplings etc. (Each of these can be used as a symbol of MANPAC and Divine Spell Focus.)
A pack of cigarettes.


CREED.

There are many strange gods in the theology of MANPAC, your cult recognises one particular Saint, God, or being as an intercessor with, or enemy of, MANPAC

1. The Blue Hog. The Spiked One is a messenger who moves so fast he cannot be seen.
2. The Man Of Pipes. This Cthonic Deity manages the endless flows of water deep beneath the earth. All things come to him eventually. His tread is feared.
3. The Prince of Ash. This maniacal and amoral hunter wanders the earth, trying to trap one of every kind of being.
4. The Tower Beast. This ancient titan keeps watch from his mountaintop perch. He sees all and challenges heroes to climb his mountain and throw him down. None have.
5. He Who Rebounds. This neutral god waits outside reality, playing his endless game balancing out the impulses of the physical world.
6. The Sleeping Bard. If woken, the Bard in Green becomes increasingly brave and heroic. But always falls asleep at the end of each adventure.
7. Giygas. He is outside all, he is beyond all, you cannot comprehend the form of his attack.
8. Shedinja. This hovering empty shell of an insect saint is neither ghost nor flesh.


Feature. Known by the Hungry, Feared by the Dead.

You know the creed of MANPAC and will be offered hospitality and aid by his temples and priests. MANPAC is considered a 'Good' deity in Yoo-Suin but is not well known in other lands. As your adventure continues, you will also become as infamous to the Undead as you are famous to the living. Any bonuses to CHA or reputation you gain for good deeds will be as powerful with intelligent Undead as with the living, except in the opposite direction. As you are loved by the living you will be feared by the dead.

(Should you become a heretic of MANPAC, the opposite is also true.)


d8 Personality Trait

1. The truth comes to me in dreams. I do what my dreams tell me to do.
2. I'm relentless. Ever forward. Like MANPAC! FORWARD!
3. I never directly confront evil, I let it pass, then stab it in the back.
4. I know reality is a trap I must decode, defeat and escape.
5. I know each problem has a particular solution, encoded in a single object.
6. I hear sirens screaming during danger, this makes it hard for me to hear my friends.
7. The darker it is more I feel the urge to run. Racing through the darkness. I stumble in the day.
8. I continually open and close my mouth without realising it.



d6 Ideal

1. The Maze. This world will soon be done. Long term social compacts have no meaning.
2. Food. Starvation is a tool of the ghosts. The starving must always be fed.
3. THE TRUE FAITH. I must tell people about MANPAC. I must tell everyone.
4. His Will. I am destined to cleanse the deep places of the earth.
5. Eat The Ghosts. Undead are the true evil. ALWAYS side with the living against the dead.
6. The Four. All evil forces interconnect into one giant conspiracy. They just wear different masks


d6 Bond

1. I will punch through time and space and come face-to-face with MANPAC himself.
2. My parents were murdered and returned as hungry ghosts. A cleric of MANPAC consumed them, and saved me.
3. A great famine killed almost everyone in my province, they came back as zombies. I will grow strong enough to destroy them all.
4. I was captured and tortured near to death by dungeon dwellers. MANPAC came to me in my dreams.
5. I was raised by cannibals but 'rescued' as a child. I seek to find them still.
6. I must cleanse a huge dungeon and transform it into a temple IN HIS NAME.


d6 Flaw

1. I am a compulsive Eater. Eat it! EAAATT IIIITTT!
2. I obsessively attack undead whenever I can.
3. I refuse to map underground. MANPAC will guide me.
4. I think vomiting is a terrible sin.
5. The dead should be eaten, to prevent them coming back as ghosts.
6. SECRET HERETIC. I seek to aid the ghosts! No-one must know.

We are gonna make a hundred of them.

(The shadow is a Fruit Hound, that's different.)

#12 THE MOBIUSNAIL
or 'SAILSNAIL'

Most of the body of the Snail is concealed within a large lozenge-shaped shell with usually consists of an charming range of varied colours. The shell is usually about four feet long and about two and half high, or wide, at its thickest point.

The shell has a series of holes along its length, these are naturally developed parts of the organism rather than bored. From within the holes comes the singing of the snail.

The 'foot' of the Mobuisnail is a gigantic, slender, yet strong loop or ribbon of flesh in a state of continuous movement like a flood of pink silk in a strong wind.


Technically it only takes one continuous step throughout the whole of its existence, its curling megafoot looping round in a ripple of flesh, one peak, like the peak of a wave, held above its head in the manner of a swimmer. The other, lower peak pressed into the ground like the bent leg of a man mid-sprint.

The snails seem to move upon a vertical 'sail' of flesh, giving them their common name 'SailSnails'. When seen from side-on, it does look as if they are 'balancing' on a narrow ribbon. however, if seen in profile from above it can be observed that the snails megafoot curves sinuously like a snake on its point of contact with the ground, which gives it a more secure footing than might be expected.


The MOBIUSNAIL is engaged always on its first step into the world, the moment of it fist passing the portal of its nest into a world of discovery. Since it is still taking that same step it responds to everything with a sense of delirious optimism.

They do not live long.

The 'singing' of the snail is actually a kind of invertebrate laughter.

The Snails come in vast seasonal migrations and move together incredibly fast across the plains. Sometimes the gigantic herds move from breeding grounds in the dark dank depths of cyclopean forests, looming ruins or cave systems, to the feeding grounds of vast shining estuaries, long crashing tidal banks or the silver beaches richly-fished inland lakes. If the season is unusually rich and the snails feed well, they may set of en-mass on journeys that seem to have no purpose other than the joy of travel, swooping in their hundredsof thousands across fields and through woodlands at a speed of about sixty miles an hour.

Most civilised people know not to try to outrun the Snails and, should they hear the snail song in the distance, simply to drop face-first onto the ground and let them pass over. There is no risk of being trampled by the snails delicate megafeet, but sometimes, very rarely. the unlucky have been suffocated by being covered in the slime of an especially densely packed herd.

A small and obsessive religious order(the Order of Saint Cephalos)  worships the snail and seeks to die in this way. They believe that being mummified in the snail-slime will preserve their souls through the challenges of hell and help them reach heaven. The rarity of the herd of this density, and the speed and unpredictable nature of the Snails means they rarely achieve this and have to settle for purchasing recently recovered snailslime from peasants near a migration route and embalming dead monks in that instead.

The monks of St Cephalos are assumed to all be former criminals and sinners trying to escape a well-earned hellbound fate and though this is by no means always the case they do have a slightly dark reputation and are not always well trusted. In a small number of cases they are truly evil men engaged on active wrongdoing under the cover of religion and either pretending to 'seek the slime' or doing so only to escape a divine judgement they full expect to find them guilty.

Nevertheless most of the Monks are peaceful, though troubled folk, valued for their extremely fast foot-pace (banned from using horses, they are all very good long-distance runners). This has given them their common name 'the panting prayers' since many of their prayers are designed to be panted out one breath at a time whilst running.

The Mobiusnails are so fast that most predators become exhausted simply chasing them and their soft and rippling megafeet do so little damage to the ground that humans and others depending on agriculture are usually not offended by the snails moving quickly over their property. The silvery strands of snail slime extending in a ribbon sometimes half a mile wide and stretching off into the distance. The strong and heavy shells do sometimes bump and bang into vertical walls, stupid people or animals unwise enough not to lie down when the snails come.

Deep Carbon Observatory Released!

The adventure written by me and Scrap Princess, with art by Scrap, laid out by Alex Mayo and brought into being at the command of Zzarchov Kowalski, has finally been cleared for release on RPG.now thanks to the efforts of a nice man called Chuck.

We have to wait for RPG.now to clear a print copy which might take a while, but as soon as it does we will make the available.

Click the image to go to its page.

Its a quest adventure that takes you from a ruined town, through a strange Ballardian transformed landscape, the ruins of an ancient civilisation to the Deep Carbon Observatory itself, an abandoned relic of ancient science, hanging in the darkness beneath the earth, haunted by something terrible.

It is strange.

Most of the monsters and almost all of the treasure is original. There are a few D&D classic standbys thrown in.

Scrap and I are partners so we are splitting the roylaties 50/50.

Zak Smith Is Not A Homophobe

[EDIT - 25/05/2018. I no longer stand by many of the claims and assumptions I made below, so take that into account when you read it. I am going to leave everything I wrote down there in place as I think deleting the record would be wrong. This is what I thought in Summer 2014. It is not what I think now.]

[EDIT 11/02/2019, all my Zak posts,

July 2014 http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2014/07/zak-smith-is-not-homophobe.html

February 2017 http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2017/02/a-timeline-of-zak-wars.html

September 2017 http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2017/09/fuck-all-of-you.html


February 2019 http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2019/02/you-should-read-this.html ]

(No clever title this time, its there so google knows what this is about for once.)

REASONS NOT TO GET INVOLVED

1. The ancient policy of this blog is 'if it’s an opinions, don't blog, if it’s an opinion about an opinion, definitely  don't blog'. It is a policy that has served me well for many a year.

2. The Internet is increasingly essentially just isolated groups of people with exactly the same ideas getting into gangs and agreeing with each other. How pleasant it is to see another group of people who all agree that they are right. About another group of people. I loathe the idea of slowly decaying into one of a chorus of yes-men, and that is always a deep danger with online friendships.

3. Forums are balkanised hellscapes populated mainly by those who have been weeded out of personal circles or just by the very robust. Policed by self-defining cliques of sociopaths.

4. I strongly doubt the possibility of convincing any one of anything on the internet. And since that is the stated purpose of argument, then arguing on the internet is like masturbating with knives. Fun for a limited few perhaps.

5. Beyond all those intellectualisations is a deeper truth about my character. I find arguments tiring and fatiguing and upsetting. I get angry quickly. I get hurt easily. I take a long time to calm down. I do not behave well when I am arguing. I do not like the person I am when I argue. I have spent most of my adult life trying to change into a different kind of person. If you find my presence on the internet one of general civility and peace then good. That’s not my natural character. That’s the person I wanted to be. I am civil not because I am good but because I am wrathful and weak and I need the rules of my conduct to protect me from myself.

AND YET NOW.

1. It’s a little more serious this time. Words on the internet are more real than they should be and they never go away, which means the accusations made will still be there in 20 or 30 years time and can, and will, dog those accused for the rest of their lives.

2. I put that ‘funny’ little thing in the title of my blog last night. Now, thinking about it, it’s not really enough. Because what is being done is not funny.

3. There is the real, though very small, possibility of someone seeing who reads my blog hearing the name Zak Smith and going 'oh, isn't that the guy who tells gay people to kill themselves?'

4. And there is a point where the smallness and cruelty of the claims calls out for some kind of redress, or at least a statement of reality. I don’t think friendship should drag you into pointless online arguments that can never be won. But the truth remains the truth and if the lies should have some long lived memorial then the truth should as well.

So here is my gulf of Tonkin moment. I am sure everything will go well.

REASONS TO BELIVE ME?

None. As previously stated, I am a CLOSETCASE, one of the Clique Of Self Absorbed Knobends Who Cluster Around Zak Smith. I am even embarked on business ventures with him. I am also the kind of person who thinks a shit Gay-Panic joke like CLOSETCASES is hilarious. You can make you own (probably accurate) judgements about that. The only thing I ever did for gay rights was to maybe buy a Queen album or two and get sad when Freddie died.

NOW I SAY BAD THINGS ABOUT MY FRIEND

If you go out into the internet and forums you will find black and ruined fields of battle where the corpses wear smiles of grim relief to be released from life. Where nothing pure or good will grow again, where the ravens on the ruined trees spontaneously  drop dead from ennui, fat though they are with carrion from the field.

What are these places? What happened here?

They are the places where Zak has argued.

An abrasive hyper-rational obsessively legalistic mind that never ever gets tired and never ever gives up and seems to grow more obsessive and more narrowly legalistic the deeper the stress and rage of the war. A man who thinks the problem with the battle of Verdun is that neither side really gave it their all.

Is this bullying? Not to the person doing it. He would say that  he was being entirely logical. And this is true. He is. the more heated the argument becomes the more relentlessly and entirely logical he becomes. The fact that almost no-one in the whole world works like this, that arguments are rarely about logic or the exact meanings of words or that it never seems to work, has no effect.

This is difficult to believe for a lot of people. A man who says exactly and only what he means. It’s so unusual that it takes some mental gymnastics the first few times to wrap your head around it. You realise how fully we talk in code most of the time and you realise he's not doing it. he means exactly and precisely what he says and he thinks everyone else does too.

Has this done damage to people arguing with Zak? It might have. Has this done damage to innocent people arguing with Zak? It might have. It’s possible. Someone too depressed or fuzzy or without enough self-knowledge to fully realise that they can walk away any time and lose nothing and he won't follow them home.

If someone puts their hand in a food blender and loses a chunk of skin, I have some sympathy for them. We all do dumb shit sometimes. If they then force their hand into the blender and keep it forced down while holding it on full speed. And then complain. My sympathy begins to wane.

Other unpleasant things about Zak. The total absence of grace in victory against his foes. If he won gold in a race he would bend down and lick the tears of the silver medallist right off their face. And would think it reasonable to do so. The whining about people with children. The fact that he’s probably a communist.

So you could say a lot of pretty bad things about Zak Smith and they would be generally true. Or, at least, true enough that little argument could be made against them. You could simply say he's a bit of a tit and there is little that could be claimed against it.

So it’s strange that anyone would claim that he hates gays or hates trans people or tells gay people to kill themselves. Since he has never done any of those things. Not only has he never done them, but I am willing to make the unusually strong statement that he never will. Not while drunk, not while high, not while angry, not at the age of 105 in the nursing home with Alzheimer’s. 

The accusation is so alien to the nature of the man that it is difficult to comprehend. We all have darker aspects to our character, and he does too, but those are not his darker aspects. This isn’t a Mel Gibson situation where someone is nice enough with their friends but gets drunk and crazy and a bunch of darker suppressed atavistic stuff comes out. It’s not a situation where someone raised in another age of gender assumptions (all of us at this point) gets angry and loses control and responds with words that belong now to another time.

I mean that if you took a mining core of his soul and went through all of it and even examined the black gloopy stuff at the end and had that analysed you still wouldn’t find any homophobia. The dark secret version of Zak Smith you would get if you stripped away everything good about him and left only the nightmare shadow self is still not a homophobe. In the Star Trek mirror dimension where he wears a goatee? That guys still ok with the gays.

HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS?

That is a good question voiceless Word-Cursor. To address it I have to talk about how we decide who to trust in a strange age in which everyone differs in the rituals of their life.

Back about 30-40 years ago, all ‘decent’ people did exactly the same things and behaved exactly the same way. You knew where you were with people. You could judge them by their clothes and their class then 40 years later work out they had been a paedophile the whole time but that doesn’t mean the barbecues weren’t great.

And now everyone is insanely different to everybody else. Never before have we been connected to so many odd-seeming people who do not share our rituals or our patterns of life. How are we to know these people good or ill? The answer is generally that we watch them and that we stay aware of them and we learn gradually through the patterns that they leave in the world around them and this process never stops. Sometimes you worry about the loud family in the restaurant because they are loud, but sometimes the loud family is loud because none of them are afraid of each other and you worry about the quiet family because the silence is fear.

Now my friendship with Zak is pretty classically neuro-typically male in that we only exchange hard information and discuss ‘things’.  I am not sure if we have ever discussed our feelings about a thing, the relations of multiple things or even the meaning of a thing but only the correctness of the things themselves.

A typical conversation might go like this:

P – “Here is THING1.”

Z – “This thing is a functional thing.”

P – “Yes, it is good that there is a functional thing that works.”

Z – “Yes. It is good. Here is THING2.”

Actually that’s more like my dad’s conversation. Ours is more like.

P – “Here is IMAGINARYTHING1.”

Z – “This imaginary thing is a functional thing.”

And so-on. Now this might strike other people as utterly emotionally retarded and maybe it’s not good that there is someone I have known for several years now and that I like a great deal and his family could explode in mid-air and I wouldn’t know about it unless it came up in a description of an imaginary world several weeks after the event, but that is how things are. You do, however, over the years, soak up a little of someone’s life, even through a screen. And a core self is very hard to see over an hour but impossible to hide over a year or more.

You see their relations with the people around them. How do you know if someone who works in porn is an abusive bastard who hides it well or a good person? Bad people leave damage around themselves, they can disguise what they are but what they do builds up and cannot be hidden.

What do we see when we look at the people closest to Zak? Damage? No. Generally just the opposite.

What do we see when we look at the list of people he has worked with? Rage? Battered ruined tricked or worked-over people who he used and cast aside? I have not seen any. I have not heard any. Again, generally, quite the opposite.

What do we see in his day-to-day relationships?  Homophobia? Telling little ‘jokes’ like the one I made above? Never actually. And I mean Never. Not once in my experience. Again, quite the opposite.

A contempt for women? A secret lift of the brow that suggests ‘hey guy’s, were all in this together right?’ Nope. Again, if anything an almost strained desire to be fair in terms of gender, race or looks. The result of what I suspect to be a rather hippyish lefty upbringing. One not working against but  running closely to, the grain of his core character. This is not a man forcing himself to be a big inclusive liberal, or even reminding himself to be a big inclusive liberal. It is baked-in and fully supported. If you cut him he would bleed it.

It might surprise you to find that this radical punk with the weird hair should carry that particular mark of the bourgeois American meritocracy, a very-slightly-taut anxiety about people not being treated fairly. He hides it well.

THE ONLY REAL POINT

If you happen to be gay or transgender or transsexual and to have stumbled upon this blog, and if you happened to have read something about Zak Smith on some dark corner of the internet that suggests to you that he may be someone whose contact you should fear, or who will mock and sneer about your sexuality or your gender or your looks either to your face or behind your back: it is not true.

I have seen this man go out of his way to prevent nerds commenting on the weight or looks of someone who effectively accused him of hate crimes, and that was not unusual for him

I will not tell you that you will be safe in his tender arms. The truth is you will be exactly as safe as any other human being. He might be a prick to you but if he is, it will never ever be about your gender, who you fuck or the way you look. It will be what you say, and only that.

I urge you not to believe me. Don’t trust what I say. Look and seek for yourself. But, if someone makes an accusation of a moral crime. Please simply ask for proof. You will find none because there is none.

Click for 5e PC

This probably isn't illegal.

A World To Watch The End Of Time

Start Trek: Coelacanth
SE01E15

EXT. THE LABYRINTH OF NIGHT
The USS Coelacanth drifts the hypnotic swirls of the Labyrinth Nebulae.

VOICE OVER: SPACE CAPTAIN JENNY HAMMER
These, are the voyages of the Star Ship Coelacanth. Our mission: to patrol the Labyrinth of night, to de-crypt strange worlds and doomed civilizations, to boldly go from whence none have returned.

The Coelacanth glimmers like a bruised pearl as swoops through the enfolding tendrils of Summerdust, Tochzal, Ochaar and Adat.

VOICE OVER: SPACE CAPTAIN JENNY HAMMER (CONT’D)
Captain’s log, star date 03072014. Whilst seeking rumours of a Star-Grool, the Coelacanth has clipped the radio emission shell of an unknown civilization.

CUT TO:

BRIDGE OF THE COELACANTH
Space Captain Jenny Hammer leans forward in her command chair, her body curled into a glyph of suppressed action.


SPACE CAPTAIN JENNY HAMMER
Coils. Alive?


Manu Coils, Science Officer, scans the para-translation of the emission shells unfolding tableaux, his eyes flicker madly and his fingers skitter through his consoles shadow field as he smiles.


MANU COILS
Ngh accountingcultureflux, past time, beyond, decay decay translanalysis blue and falling.


SPACE CAPTAIN JENNY HAMMER
Coils!


BOOMER DOGS
(All of these worlds are dead)


MANU COILS
Captain. Rapid analysis of this cultures transmission forms as we move deeper into the shell of its thought, strongly suggest a world moving rapidly towards either death or singularity. We burrow through an ethereal past towards a core of dead tomorrrows. I recommend we resume out search for the Grool.


SPACE CAPTAIN JENNY HAMMER
We’ll see about that Coils. Boomer, how long?


BOOMER DOGS
The Coelacanth’s making good speed Captain. The nebulae here is mainly Sessurea and Ochaar. Minimal resistance to the ships hull penetrating this space, scanners are operating near maximum. Should be any second now.
The voice of the ships computor Serenity Kong, sounds over the intercom.


SERENITY KONG
Excession. Strange World emerging.


Space Captain Jenny Hammer leans forward, her eyes search the folds of the Nebulae. Silver semi-transparent Sessura and blue-black Ochaar.


SPACE CAPTAIN JENNY HAMMER
There. Look.


A Strange World burns in the deepness of space, like something between an honeycomb, the folds of a brain and a heat exchange, but with a strange ab-symetrical beauty, and on a planetary scale.


MANU COILS
Intriguing.


JADE CONDITION
It’s like some impossible sculpture..


SPACE CAPTAIN JENNY HAMMER
Only nothing is impossible Lieutenant.


MANU COILS
Scans confirm Captain, this is a world, its fundamental makeup matches that for a planet of this type. And its total mass is correct.


JADE CONDITION
It’s been hollowed out..


MANU COILS
Simply transformed.


SPACE CAPTAIN JENNY HAMMER
But into what? And why? Boomer, can the Coelacanth get inside that thing?


BOOMER DOGS
Negative captain the..
Boomer suddenly notices, from the corner of his eye, the omni-angled form of an Alien Ghost, invisible to all except him.


SPACE CAPTAIN JENNY HAMMER
Boomer?


BOOMER DOGS
Sorry captain. They outer apertures might be big enough, but the interior is fractal, its like that all the way to the core. Scans come back scrambled. Its a kind of three-dimensional maze.


SPACE CAPTAIN JENNY HAMMER
Could you get us through in the Lemniscate?


BOOMER DOGS
I..


Boomer locks eyes with the Alien Ghost. Shadows unfurl like petals from its undulating limbs.


BOOMER DOGS (CONT’D)
Not me captain. It would take a genius.


SPACE CAPTAIN JENNY HAMMER
Or a madman. Coils, can you do it?
Manu Coils stares enraptured into the pixel-dot matrix arising from his consoles shadow field.


MANU COILS
The symmetry. Yes.


SPACE CAPTAIN JENNY HAMMER
Meet me in the shuttle bay. Lieutenant Condition, order the Lemniscate prepared for launch. You have the con till I return.


JADE CONDITION
Captain, Star Fleet regulations discourage a captain leaving the ship during..


SPACE CAPTAIN JENNY HAMMER
Fuck that. Don’t break my ship while I’m out Condition.


JADE CONDITION
Yes captain.


CUT TO:


INT. SICK BAY
Doctor Pug Tyler carefully assesses a hideous coagulated mass. Watching him is Quinn “Fear Itself” Books.


DOCTOR PUG TYLER
Perfect. Would you recommend a red wine, or white?


QUINN “FEAR ITSELF” BOOKS
I think feasting on the baked remains of an alien super-tumour suggests wasting good wine on you might be a mistake.


DOCTOR PUG TYLER
Spirits then.


Doctor Pug Tyler dashes back a tumbler of alien gin.


DOCTOR PUG TYLER (CONT’D)
You sadden me Quinn. This lozenge of corruption threatened the existence of an inter-stellar megafauna. Now, removed, by me, baked and anointed in sauce, it shall provide a tasty meal. From death I bring forth life.


QUINN “FEAR ITSELF” BOOKS
Life is more than a procession of nightmarish risk Doctor.


DOCTOR PUG TYLER
Is it?


Doctor Pug Tyler pours himself a strong measure of alien gin and begins to tuck a handkerchief into his collar.


DOCTOR PUG TYLER (CONT’D)
Any life not close to death seems death to me.


Tyler starts to carve the alien tumour.


QUINN “FEAR ITSELF” BOOKS
I think risk taken in some cause might be a finer spice.


Tyler pauses with the gobbet of cooked alien flesh on the end of his fork.


DOCTOR PUG TYLER
Ah, but they are few, and who has time to wait?


Enter Space Captain Jenny Hammer.


SPACE CAPTAIN JENNY HAMMER
Doctor. A word. Books.