Sunday 29 May 2016

Goblin Knights

Sir

The
Steed
Weapon
  1. Jab
  2. Rib
  3. Hop
  4. Lump
  5. Grab
  6. Heap
  7. Shab
  8. Toad
  9. Crab
  10. Gut
  11. Trot
  12. Spit
  13. Squid
  14. Turd
  15. Mud
  16. Grit
  17. Pop
  18. Cob
  19. Sad
  20. Cold
  1. shank
  2. snatch
  3. catch
  4. grind
  5. grope
  6. creep
  7. spine
  8. snarl
  9. rank
  10. stench
  11. reek
  12. moil
  13. nard
  14. nork
  15. muddle
  16. scare
  17. leech
  18. clench
  19. kin
  20. sy
  1. Mutinous
  2. Cankerous
  3. Squinty
  4. Sly
  5. Purple
  6. Morbid
  7. Sensible
  8. Glutinous
  9. Hungry
  10. Putrid
  11. Terrible
  12. Cunning
  13. Bold
  14. Lucky
  15. Magnificent
  16. Foul
  17. Drab
  18. Backwards
  19. Pigfucker
  20. Sour
  1. Frog
  2. Hog
  3. Dog
  4. Centipede
  5. Rat
  6. Cat
  7. Human
  8. Spider
  9. Goat
  10. Snail
  11. Roach
  12. Gorilla
  13. Rabbit
  14. Ibis
  15. Bat
  16. Tick
  17. Chicken
  18. Worm
  19. Camel
  20. Broomstick
  1. Snailflail
  2. Biting axe
  3. Clawhammer
  4. Rusty hooks
  5. Huge fish
  6. Rotten lance
  7. Snake bunch
  8. Magic sword
  9. Shit musket
  10. Toothed mace
  11. Mancatcher
  12. Epic katana
  13. Umbrella
  14. Pumpkin bombs
  15. Giant’s penis
  16. Claymore
  17. Broken halberd
  18. Book on chain
  19. Shillelagh
  20. Macuahuitl

The role of goblin knights is to defend the innocent from the tyranny of adventurers, desecrate all things humans consider sacred and uphold the laws of goblin chivalry, which is basically the same as human chivalry. Goblin knights are brave, honest, generous and unstinting in their pursuit of goblin justice. They keep oaths and will always insist on a fair fight. Otherwise they have the same value system as normal goblins. The ultimate ambition of every goblin knight is to find the Holy Grail and take a shit in it.

Goblin knight encounters:
  1. A goblin knight has sworn not to let anyone cross a particular bridge. The townsfolk built a second bridge next to them and use it all the time.
  2. A goblin knight has fallen in love with you and now follows you around wooing you with songs from its awful guitar.
  3. A goblin knight seeks your aid to slay a terrible giant with club of wood and hat of white. He leads you to a bakery. The baker has been eaten by a terrible giant.
  4. A goblin knight seeks to avenge the death of a bunch of normal goblins you killed at some point without really thinking about it.
  5. A goblin knight has saved your life and now it believes you owe it a debt of service.
  6. A goblin knight, its heart broken by a perfidious lover, aims to die in glorious combat by picking a fight it knows it cannot win.

Saturday 14 May 2016

Transhuman Classes

  • The Repatterned. Artificial cycling of day and night combined with heavy adenosine control during first two years of life force adaption to state of permanent sleep walk. Heavily retarded for first decade and a half of life before dual wake/sleep halves of brain develop. Patients now exist in dream state, basic functions like feeding, breeding, conversation performed automatically. Somewhat clumsy but incredibly intuitive, adaptive thinkers. Reports of telekinesis likely unfounded. Those of telepathy may bear some investigation.
    Key Manifestations:
    • Lie-Detection
    • Heightened Empathy
    • Uncanny Accuracy

  • Lizards. Psychosurgery on the cerebral cortex is possible at any point after the development of speech skills and before inducing puberty. It is recommended that major body-modifications be installed during the puberty period, but small adjustments to the patient may be performed at any time. Patients will operate a greatly enhanced 'lizard brain', piloting their own bodies. IQ and emotional intelligence are somewhat stunted, but high-speed and precision activities are performed with minimal effort; endurance and control of bodily functions vastly increased.
    Possible Modifications:
    • Bioweapon Integration
    • Cerebral Overclocking Systems
    • Extrasensory Interface Module

  • Plug-Ins. Key sections of hind-brain are removed and replaced with highly-parellelised circuitry, the skull port providing machine interfacing. Learning time for new interfaces is minimal, regular updates to hardware are recommended to assist bug-fixing. Patient now communicates all needs through the on-board AI. Some basic functions may be performed autonomously. Reports of 'inhumane behaviour' unverified. No AI takeover has been confirmed in a laboratory. Subjects, though more expensive than conventional computers, are incredible proficient at adaptive algorithmic solutions; useful for high-speed navigation, database searches, strategic planning.
    Available Upgrades:
    • Mechasuit Guidance I/O Bus
    • Eidetic Memory Store
    • Advanced Hacking Protocols

  • Clouders. Additional sensory input channels must be installed prior to puberty. Mental conditioning should be maintained throughout lifetime, endorphin drip monitored from birth. Client is now a viable node in an ad-hoc cloudhive network. When connected to a cloudhive, mindshare with other members is available over local comms as well as via the central hub. It is recommended that clients avoid over-exposure to new environments to minimise risk of lethal culture shock. Mass consumption of information in safe environments is heavily encouraged. Ownership of firearms is strictly prohibited, as is membership of political parties.
    Benefits of Membership:
    • Mindshare with other Clients
    • Direct-Download Access to Central Infostore
    • Temporary Skill Imprinting

  • Second Lifers. Subject should be monitored after installation of headjack and spinal taps to ensure permanent paralysis has been achieved. Nutritional supplements must be supported by direct stimulation of smooth muscle to prevent atrophy, illness. Subjects connected to V12.6.0.1 equipment or older should be 'woken' every few months to prevent disassociation from their unused body. The subject is now capable of piloting almost any android, drone or vehicle, though repeated transitions between host bodies and occupation of non-humanoid hosts has been shown to have long-term psychological effects.
    Common Host Configurations:
    • 'Wolf' Combat Android
    • 'Raven' Scouting Drone
    • Fursuit


Wednesday 4 May 2016

Oracles

Somewhere, on a hill or in a cave or sealed in a temple, is a huge, slow creature. It is slow because it perceives reality more in its memories than in its senses. It is huge because it must live a very, very long time. You cannot talk to it. Not really. It will likely speak, but it will only be guessing at what you will say. It doesn't know you, but it predicts you well, because it remembers everyone, everything, that was ever like you.

Oracles don't see the future perfectly. They don't predict things they haven't seen before. This makes older Oracles more valuable, and also ensures no-one can control the known world for very long with one. Sometimes they live in mosques or monasteries, palaces or prisons; are used and revered by the people that listen to them and study their riddles. But they do just as well in forests, mountains, savannahs, the seas. Oracles come in many shapes.


You're going to need to talk to the people that maintain it. Maybe they're captors psychologically torturing it with randomness, or priestesses worshiping and overfeeding it. Maybe they're wolves, a flock of several thousand starlings. Many things will be fiercely territorial around an Oracle, a sympathy carried in genetics or memetics that ensures their sleight advantage. Things that protect an Oracle are always a little advantaged, in the long run.

In the wild Oracles wander between areas of greatest bounty. They can predict rain, tides, natural disasters. For this reason they are sometimes thought, erroneously, to be bringers of good luck. A wild Oracle is curious, cautiously probing the edges of its knowledge, standing in a river and staring at the sky for days on end. To be used in the machinations of civilisation they must be fed news. Any data is useful; whether they understand it or not they grow to see the patterns within it. Battle plans, crop yields, share prices, the latest court gossip, everything that is fed to an Oracle will shape its mood. Interpreting its response, its moods, its wandering, is the simplest way to tap into its power.

size of a god damn truck

Killing young Oracles is not terribly hard. They are strong and large and tough but they cannot fight randomness, new tactics, surprise. Their attack bonus is inversely proportional to how surprised they are. Older Oracles are harder. They have seen your tricks before, and remember them precisely. They rarely miss, but are usually simply not where you want them to be. They called the guards before you thought you'd shown your hand, before you even turned up.

eyes as big as your head no fucking clue what they're looking at

The bit below is an informal analysis of this post, as it stands as a kind of standard layout for a monster manual entry in terms of flow of information.

Tuesday 3 May 2016

Tengu

Tengu are Japanese mountain spirits with wind powers and enormous noses. I like them. They are a good mix of funny and awful.

They have a few jobs, in the grand scheme of things:
  • Fuck with anyone who enters the mountains
  • Fuck with organised religion
  • Occasionally shake things up by going to towns and fucking with people there

They have a whole bunch of powers which make it impossible to beat them in a fair fight. They are immensely swift and strong. They can't fly but they can jump as far as they like. They can change shape and become invisible at will. They also own a lot of magic items. Each tengu has a fan of feathers which can stir up great winds, as well as grow and shrink people's noses.

Here are some things that a tengu might do to anyone who enters the mountains:
  • Bombard them with hail
  • Surreptitiously fill their packs with stones
  • Steal their rations and get them to blame each other
  • Pick them up and strand them on top of huge trees
  • Move them to a different part of the mountains while they're sleeping
  • Pretend to be an old man and challenge them to a wrestling match
  • Pretend to be an old woman and sell them weasel shit in the guise of foul-tasting medicine
  • Take them under its wing and teach them the arts of swordsmanship
  • Same as above, but intentionally teach them wrong
  • Straight up rip their throats out
  • RIDDLES

Here are some things one might do in town:
  • Get itself invited to a party, accuse the hosts of inhospitality when they can't keep up with the tengu's drinking and dancing, then wreck everything and leave
  • Sabotage the marriage prospects of the local lord's heir by making their nose huge and hideous
  • Take the form of a handsome suitor from a distant land, marry the local lord's heir and spirit them off to the mountains
  • Destroy the reputation of a venerable priest by taking their shape and going around town doing ridiculous things like wearing a fish as a hat
  • Eat the bridge. Talk very loudly about how delicious this bridge is and how grateful you are to all the villagers for making such a delicious bridge
  • Make it rain on the day of the festival that everyone has been planning for months
  • Sell magical items that break just when you've come to completely rely on them, like cream that makes you beautiful until your wedding day or a purse of endless coins that runs out when you promise someone enough money
  • Give enormous noses to all the sacred statues in the temple
  • Destroy the harvest, then take the form of a delicious fat pig and watch the villagers fight over who gets to eat it

So tengu are super annoying. But, and this is key, they are also cowardly and gullible. Here are some things that you should try on tengu:
  • Pretend that a mundane item is actually super magical and offer to trade it for something good
  • Offer it a fake riddle with no answer
  • Give yourself fake eyebrows made of moss and tell it you're the king of the devils
  • Talk about how hot it is until the tengu begins to fan itself, making its own nose grow so long that it reaches heaven and irritates God
  • Bet it that it can't become small enough to fit inside this bottle
  • Talk very loudly about how much you hate gold and you couldn't stand it if somebody filled your pack with heavy, awful gold
  • Teach them a fashionable new dance called the "let's all sit very still with our eyes closed" dance
  • Tell it that the ocean is sake and ask it to show you how much it can drink before it gets drunk
  • Ask it to demonstrate its mastery of swordsmanship by cutting off its own head, like that famous samurai totally did once
  • Basically any variation on don't throw me into that briar patch

As long as the tengu feels like it is in control of the situation it will be a cheerful bully. As soon as it feels itself outdone on any trivial thing it will either go to extreme lengths to prove its natural superiority or just give up and run away screaming into the wilderness.

There are also King Tengu, who are blue instead of red and have even longer noses. King Tengu have the power to see through exactly one layer of deception. The only way to beat a King Tengu is to get it to think you are trying to trick it one way when actually you are trying to trick it another way.

Also here are some magic items tengu can have, I forgot to do that:
  • Magic gun that never fails to kill something, even if you shoot it in the air
  • Straw cloak that makes you invisible and foul-smelling
  • Lute strung with hair that makes your fingers bleed as you play the most beautiful music
  • One-toothed wooden sandals that give you tengu jumping powers if you can balance on them, which you can't
  • Book that holds the answer to every riddle ever asked, but doesn't tell you which answer goes with which riddle
  • Addictive spinning top
  • Hook-nosed mask that makes everyone who looks at you flee in terror and can't be removed by yourself
  • Sword that makes the wielder incapable of breaking any oath
  • Kite that carries its flier into the air and doesn't let them land
  • Ebony figurine of an owl. Speak the magic word and it turns into an actual owl. The owl knows a magic word that will turn you into an ebony figurine