Wednesday 28 June 2017

Misremembered Men

In The Destruction of the Philosophers Al-Ghazali teaches us that all things in the material universe exist only as information in the mind of God, much as all things in a video game exist only as information in the mind of a computer. He was not quite right. In fact all things exist only as information in the mind of Yaldabaoth, the corrupt and rebellious entity who created the material universe against the express will of the Ineffable Monad, who wished to remain forever in eternal contemplative unbeing. Yaldabaoth does his best to keep track of everything, but his brain is slowly rotting with age and he was never a particularly diligent student of philosophy in the first place. Sometimes he forgets things, and those things simply blink out of existence. Other times he gets the details wrong. In the book of his memory all things are written in the divine language Enochian, and even a single misremembered letter can have dramatic consequences.

These are the Misremembered Men, the Flawkind or Glitchenkin. They were not always like this. Some have memories of their former lives. They have the stats of a normal human, but they
  1. Have one random stat set to 99.
  2. Have one random skill set to 999.
  3. Have no HP variable and therefore cannot be killed. Blood and viscera gush from their wounds but they take no actual damage.
  4. Do not register as a valid target for an attack roll. You can't attack them, though you can still damage them in other ways.
  5. Can glide through solid objects, ragdolling frantically and spraying polygons everywhere. Will grab you and pull you into the negative space under the floor.
  6. Can swim through air as if it were water and walk through water as if it were air. 
  7. Can, whenever you leave a room they're in, spawn a duplicate of themselves in the next room you enter.
  8. Can interact with anything they can see as if it were in melee range.
  9. Are slowly growing larger at all times. Reset to default size whenever they roll a 1.
  10. Are ten times as fast when walking backwards.
  11. Are invisible so long as their hit points are an odd number.
  12. Turn anyone they deal combat damage to into a level 5 elven wizard named Risparillion.
and they
  1. Have no inventory and therefore cannot hold, wear or possess objects.
  2. Have a memory that resets every time you initiate conversation with it.
  3. Can't turn left.
  4. Can't go through doors.
  5. Can't make sound, directly or indirectly.
  6. Can only speak in mangled, distorted word fragments and write in broken spidery symbols that crawl across the page.
  7. Are completely passive - can't instigate action, though they can respond to stuff done to them.
  8. Are constantly, rapidly aging. When they turn 100 they roll over into a baby again.
  9. Will instantly teleport back to a particular spot if they move more than a hundred feet from it.
  10. Freeze up whenever they roll a 1 and can't do anything until they are manually returned to where they were at the beginning of the day.
  11. Looks like a mundane object - broom, dog, teakettle, etc. Still can do anything a human can do.
  12. Looks like whoever's standing closest to them. But all glitched out, obviously.
Some Misremembered Men just want to lead normal lives. Others take revenge on a world that hates and fears them, or act out of motivations comprehensible only to themselves. The Syntagmatic Order wants to find Yaldabaoth, said to lurk shamefully in a cave beneath the world, and force him to remember than again. They do other chivalric stuff as well, and are often found waiting by bridges to challenge those who cross. Their horses are nervous.


Misremembered Men grant corrupted XP. If you level up in a session where you kill one, you get a corrupted level. This probably needs to handled on a case-by-case basis, but you could get bonuses to the wrong stats or spells from the wrong class. They also sometimes drop treasure.
  1. Perfectly neutral and generic object. Has no properties. Valuable as a curiosity to a certain type of collector.
  2. Fishing rod with the data of a broadsword. Can be used to do anything a broadsword can do. Cannot be used to fish with.
  3. Boots that let you walk through the air, but only along a flat plane located at exactly sea level.
  4. Infected coin. Lettering distorted, face of monarch warped. Slowly dissolves into pixelated rainbow dust, but not before it's infected 2d6 other coins in the inventory of whoever's holding it.
  5. Displaced horse. The rider sits in the air ten feet behind it.
  6. Bow with infinite range. Arrow gets bigger the longer it travels. Can be used to destroy the sun. Don't do that though.
  7. Spellbook full of corrupted spells. If you memorise them they can't be cast but also can't be forgotten, and just sit in your head taking up spell slots forever.
  8. Sword of plus. Not plus anything, just plus.
  9. Rations that make you feel full but don't provide nutrition.
  10. Cuirass that takes up a head slot instead of a torso slot. Wear it as a hat along with a normal cuirass.
  11. Whistle that, when blown inside a room, makes all the doors in that room lead to the Minus World. The Minus World is constructed out of bits and pieces of all the other settings in your campaign, copied and pasted in incoherent order. It is said Sophia, Yaldabaoth's mother, dwells therein, imprisoned by order of the Ineffable Monad in the sinful universe she helped her son to create.
  12. A fuzzy mass of pixels. If ingested, causes one random item in your inventory to duplicate itself 99 times. Stolen from here.

1 comment:

  1. Super great! Definitely going to add them... or maybe hand it out as a weird spell in a glitch-textured spellbook?

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