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The Dry-Rotted Archives of 2013

New Feierland Travel Tips: Never Leave Home


I played my first online game by taking a trip to Trent B’s New Feierland, a place every bit as horrible as I’d been told. I loved it.

What follows are the thoughts of Rasmus Carbuncle, Belligerent Soldier of Lost Fortune.

 

 

Well when I came to my senses I was below ground with a bunch of sketchy fellas that seemed to be looking for something, a little nimbly bloke had climbed up to the roof and waved at us when some stitched up dead goatmen fucks came wandering out of the dark.

The prancy magic man next to me cops a javelin through the arm but doesn’t cry much, so I yank it out and stab it in front of us like a pike while he starts waving his arms around. The first dumb dead goatfuck comes charging straight at the pike so while he’s flailing around I behalve him with my horrible blood-rusted claymore, then piss on the shards of his stomped-in skull for good measure. A fella in armour misfires with his fancy-schmancy pistol while another picks up a rock and dusts a goatskull with it, then nimbly little Blixa drops from the roof knife-first and lands in a cloud of broken beastbody.

Javelin boy’s arm-waving stops and the rest of the goatfilth finds themselves caught in some kinda magic web I guess, I don’t know, I don’t traffic with that stuff. We knife them real quiet and head off towards the grumbling roars that started after that useless pistol shot.

 

I pull one of these fellas up and ask for a refresher of just what I’m doing here apart from hitting goats with swords, and he tells me some eye creature is giving the filthy miners bad dreams that makes them not work which is bad. Fair enough.

Little Blixa’s up on the roof again but soon enough there’s sounds like something mighty huge digging its way up from below the tunnel and more of that godawful groany roaring. So we sets up a rope tripline with walrus tallow all smeared over the rocks in front of it while the noise gets louder, and Blixa buries red and blue gems under the stones further into the tunnel like a crazy fuck before climbing back up to the roof.

 

Out of the darkness comes this slimy bulk of god damn rock dragging itself along with its forelegs, staring at us with glowing green eyes and making our trap look powerful stupid. Blixa looks like he’s going to throw up for a second then handwaves something about eyes being bad but I don’t get it. It drags its body over the buried gems and there’s a great fucking explosion, the slimy moss covering it catches fire and it starts running at us and I take a few discrete steps backwards.

Blixa drops from the roof like he’s going to knife it in the face but falls flat on its head with a wet smack, staring into its eyes then sliding off and falling right in the fucking grease we were going to light up.

The fella in the heavy armour and this big Salt Soldier the prancy magic man summoned up start taking swings at the thing between getting smacked away, and rock-thrower Gaffer Grunion sticks with what he knows but passes out as soon as the rock leaves his hand. Okay eyes bad, I get it now. The handy bloke next to me lassos Blixa with a nice silk rope so I grab it and pelt in the opposite direction, which is pretty easy seeing as he’s all greased up.

 

Behind me fireballs are exploding and grown men are soiling their pants, I flip Blixa over and grab every explody gem he has left and stuff it into my ded rat sack.

The big rock sludge fuck is on fire now, stomping around in flaming grease and beating the shit out of the Salt Soldier. I open up my Monkey Skull Snuff Mull and breathe deep, I feel good, this is good, I run at the big dumb rock fuck staring at my feet and hurl my precious rat sack right into its big dumb face. I feel good.

 

 

 

What follows from this point are the thoughts of Remus Carbuncle, in New Feierland to find his father Rasmus.

 

 

 

Well, this place is awful. No one knew where my father had gone except for this dwarf guy and now that we’re here, the people my father had gone with are climbing out of a stinking hole in the ground covered in blood and filth, telling me that my father just saved them by blowing up a flaming rock creature with a stupid amount of exploding gems and dead rats not ten minutes ago. They say the resulting unholy green explosion vapourised one of their friends and a chunk of stalactite took my father’s head clean from his shoulders, leaving his body to slump to the ground in a fountain of blood. I don’t know why they would tell me that.

 

They lead me to his body and I lose it for a minute, screaming at the dark. I take his Monkey Skull Snuff Mull and his Sabatons, still full of warm piss, he would have wanted it this way I think.

They tell me all about the things you can find in this godforsaken hole in the ground and my ears perk up at the Alter of Transmutation, or Transformation, Trans-fuckingsomething and right now I want nothing more than to be something else. They lead me to it and I take a hit of booze for my father, then pour it onto the alter amid my falling tears. My knees go weak and my stomach cramps and I’m rolling around in the caltrops some fuck spread around the alter while I wasn’t looking and I’m vomiting and rolling in the vomit. When I can stand up the only thing that seems different is that looking at light hurts like hell and I want to scratch my eyes out. I hate this place.

 

We go back out into the caves and ignore whatever’s flapping around in the dark and come to a short hall with a barred door. Some stitched abomination is standing inside and the little guy they call Blixa spritzes holy water through the bars which of course makes it start sizzling and throwing itself against the door snapping its teeth. They’re all talking about throwing rocks at it until it dies or wasting crossbow bolts and I tie a rope around the hilt of my sword and start jamming it through the bars until the thing is dead, stupid thing doesn’t even stop throwing itself at the door.

 

When it’s in pieces they find a box in the room that Blixa pries open with a crowbar, he pulls out some axes and a book and some kind of spice pouch and I don’t care.

 

Back out in the caves and then we find a room with a round wooden door standing slightly ajar. The room inside is round too and looks like some kind of lab, with two benches carved right into the floor in the middle.

There’s a grated cabinet towards the back and they all start hitting it with things and fucking up their weapons, but hey the cabinet is slightly dented now so whatever makes you happy.

Blixa climbs up on the roof and I grab a hooked pole from the wall and walk towards the door with this Salt Soldier thing. Next thing I know some miner with pale skin like black-shot marble is pulling himself around the corner with a sack in his hand. The others try to ask him what he’s doing here but that black shit is pulsing and he’s getting closer so I swing at him with my new pole and break myself off a piece.

He screams to his friends of course but then Blixa’s dropped a net on him and I’m stabbing him in the back with swords, but then his friends drag him away and shut the goddamn door on us!

 

They’re yelling something about us stealing their treasure but we haven’t even got anything yet and from the sounds of dropping stones I think they’re trying to brick us in?

We smear oil around the floor and rig up a rope attached to the door, running it around the corner of a bench for leverage, three of these guys yank on it and get the door back open but two of them fall down and seven miners come running into the room, including the prick I sworded in the spine. I lob the rest of my booze right into his face but before I can throw a torch the Salt Soldier topples over and knocks it out of my hand. God damn it.

People are tussling on the floor with these miners and getting black vomit all over them, then Blixa smashes his lantern into the oil and two of the fuckers light up like pyres, so I hook booze boy with my pole and send him staggering into the flames.

 

And right there, when it seems like maybe things aren’t always fucking terrible in this place, right there is where the big guy in all the armour comes swinging through the smoke, misses the miners, and fucking stabs me. If I were to measure how good I feel on a scale of ‘hit points’ right now I would give it a solid none, none hit points. No wonder my dad is dead.

He mumbles an apology and scuttles off and I’m still standing so I charge at the smouldering miners with my sword, hoping for a shishkebab, and what I get is my sword knocked out of my woozy hands and black bile spewed all over my right arm.

The skin is tight and chewing and I’m on the floor, I reach for my poniard to hack off the arm and everything goes dark.

 

I’m cutting off the arm but no matter how much I cut there’s always more arm, and then all the right arms have been cut off but they’re always regrowing and the severed ones crawl up to my mouth and try to climb inside, the hands on the floor detach from their arms and they’re shiny new piles of goo and they tear at my ears and nose and they become goo too and always always I’m cutting and it’s eating and I want to wake up but I’m not asleep but this is a dream but there’s always more arm.

 

When I wake up we’re outside and they’ve amputated my arm to the shoulder, they say there’s still more of the black shit in my shoulder though, it’s spreading towards my face, they’ve tied me up and I have this overwhelming urge to bite something.

They say they’re taking me back to town to find someone that can help me, Blixa says he owes me a blood debt for what my father did, they say they need to lock me up in a box now. That seems reasonable.

 

 

 

 

Remus is now back in New Feierland, locked up in the basement sanatorium of the newly founded Baron Blixa Von Apfelsaft of Barovia and Barovania Center For The Amelioration of Unspeakable Afflictions. Blixa takes his blood debts awful seriously and is spending more money than Remus has seen in his whole shitty life to save him, giving the matriarch healer of the area 10,000gp now and promising another 40,000gp if she’s able to find a cure instead of burning the still-living body as is customary in New Feierland.

When they opened the box it was full of black bile and he was growing a new arm and snapping his teeth, so uh, we’ll see how that goes.

 

 

New Feierland: Utterly Terrible 10/10 Would Play Again.

 

 

Appended Obituary by Trent B:

 

The look on his face makes it wonderful.

 

Like… Pissing into his only nice thing, being a pair of steel boots, whilst not even using his fly correctly and holding a dagger… nothing in that registers as being anything worth any kind of thought or emotion. It’s just exactly what needs to be done. All of it. He’s not even looking. He’s like staring down the shitty road that he is in the middle of, just waiting to finish pissing in his boots so he can put them back on and keep walking.

 

Worst character.


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The Fogwalk


If for some reason the players ever decide to leave the joys of the Rookery, here’s its closest neighbour.

 

The Fogwalk, a borough of seaside views, commerce and depravity.

 

 

 

Sights, Smells, etc.

  • Smells of salt, sweet fish, tarred wood and a lingering hangover.
  • Moss grows around the docks and on the walls of nearby buildings. At night it glows a bright bioluminescent blue.
  • The morning mist rolling in from the Hollow Sea to swirl about your ankles thins out through the day and returns at night.

Buildings:

  • Strong black stone along the shore, towers raised up against the Hollow Sea, wide doors to admit cargo and release machines of war.
  • Mixtures of stone and jettied wood the further you get from the sea.

Building: d6 storeys, d6 sub-levels (3-6 no sub-level).

Occupants: d10 per storey, 0 = currently unoccupied.

 

 

Activity

 

Morning:

Dockhands going to work, fish buyers with baskets, men with knotted arms and sharp knives removing barnacles from the docks.
Encounter chance 1 in 6 per hour
Overhear Rumour on a 6
Chance of Godless: 20%/Turn

 

Noon:
Cargo unloaded, goods being shipped out and haggled for, Neophytic Sisters of the Cathedral of Lost Virtue waiting to lead more discerning seafarers back to the Cathedral and away from the Plaza of Earthly Lust.
Encounter chance 1 in 6 per hour
Overhear Rumour on 6
Chance of Godless: 20%/Turn

 

Night:
Workers leaving, others arriving to unload the night cargo, revellers of the Plaza, Godless night watch.
-2 to reaction rolls unless inside the Plaza
Encounter chance 1 in 6 per hour
Overhear Rumour on 5-6
Chance of Godless: 30%/Turn

 

 

Facts

  • Murder Loot: d100 sp. Carrying Curio on a double.
  • Dock Trade: They may be the most powerful trading company in the Dockmaw, but Haugroten & Sons are far from alone. Organisations like the Hollow Sea Co. and Leviathon Cargo Cult maintain a presence on the Dockmaw’s boards, generally hiring mercenary dockhands job-to-job. Many speculate that Haugroten & Sons allow their competition to persist merely to avoid boredom.

 

 

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Horrors of the Unknown: The Family Man


The thing shambles at you out of the dark, its phallus half hard and bobbing before it as it walks, heavy testicles churning beneath its girth. Something viscous seems to be slowly dripping from its tip, until suddenly it sucks back inside. As you brace your shield and unsheathe your blade similarities to a snail’s eye occur to your subconscious. The thing shudders and retches on itself and the base of its cock swells to triple the original girth and continues to inflate until something you cannot fathom emerges from the tip. The beast wails in pain and terror and collapses to the floor.

 

Have you seen the snails infected by mind-controlling worms? Like that. Something that enters your penis and takes residence in your scrotum after consuming your testicles, it needs the room, it is not small. Penises can be surprisingly elastic, but fuck it hurts. But you don’t process that. The chemicals it’s pumping into your bloodstream just make you want to mate. Make you want to woo. It is always looking for the perfect host, someone pleasing to the opposite sex. It needs you to find a mate. It needs it to be consensual and loving. It needs your mate to care for the offspring once you have passed away from a mysterious wasting disease, right up until hundreds of its kind emerge from her womb amidst screams and blood and madness.

 

It is not completely averse to you engaging in same-sex relations, it has found that to be a very convenient way of entering a handsome new host.

 

Cocks can be both invaded and invading. NO ONE IS SAFE.


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Drink Me


Not every potion will make you shrink, Alice.

 

 

Unexpected Side-Effect of Consuming this Unknown Substance
d20
1Random Mutation.
2Your skin turns a mottled purple, like a spreading rash, over time it loses its elasticity and grows more than it should, forming wrinkled folds.
3You hear hundreds of voices talking over each other in your head for the next d4 Turns. The thoughts of the people around you are in there somewhere.
4It was full of the eggs of some parasitic insect. The next time you're in a crowd of people make an Intelligence check to resist the urge to embrace the nearest person in an open-mouthed kiss as you regurgitate larvae down their throat to start the next development cycle. They need to be passed on three times to reach maturity. If you resist, the larvae will die and pass out of your system.
5Everything but your circulatory system seems to dissolve into invisibility. You can see things crawling through the space where your flesh should be.
6Your mind goes into overdrive, flooded with possibilities. For the next hour gain a d6 bonus to each knowledge check, save, and to-hit roll. After an hour you lose consciousness for d4 Turns, with a 20% chance of gaining a random Insanity, and a 10% chance of gaining permanent knowledge of a new spell, regardless of class.
7Your gender changes, but not very well.
8You reek of rotting meat for the next d4 days.
9For the next d4 days any wounds that don't kill you outright heal d6hp/Round, flesh knitting before the eyes of your bewildered foes. When the effect ends there is a percentage chance equal to hp healed that your old wounds continue healing at an accelerated rate, developing bulbous cancerous growths. If they are allowed to grow to the size of a fist they will contain a luminous green gem like a cluster of bubbles.
10You develop extreme photosensitivity for the next 2d4 days; spending more than an hour in direct sunlight causes steam to rise from your broiling skin, I wouldn't push it.
11The bones in your arms become soft and elasticised for d4 Turns, hanging down below your knees. They still function but it's hard to move anything but your hands, you kind of need to swing them in the right direction.
12Scent of Fear. For the next day you exude pheromones that trigger danger signals, that mark you as an alpha predator. Animals will not attack you unless desperate, you gain appropriate bonuses to intimidation, and intelligent beings attacking you in melee must make an Intelligence check to swallow their panic.
13Fertile Fields. Small plants and fungus sprout from your skin, it's fucking painful. Soon your back and shoulders look like rainforest undergrowth.
14You start seeing a cherub with bored-out black hole eyes floating around you, but it doesn't exist for anyone else. The more you talk to it the more it is able to interact with reality.
15Your teeth blacken and fall from your shrunken gums, your tongue burns as it splits like a dividing worm and stretches to twice its original length.
16Neurons fire and multiply like catastrophic culture in a Petri dish, latent telesthesia manifests and small puckered holes open around your skull, venting thin vaporous streams. For d4 days you are able to implant irresistible mental suggestion or alter memory and perception in others simply by rolling under your Intelligence; if you wish to force them do something unthinkable or open an imploding pocket of nothingness inside their grey matter they may save vs. Poison.
When the duration ends the subsiding electrical fever will cause a deterioration that permanently decreases your Intelligence by double the duration. In your heightened mental state you know this will happen. You also know that the only way to prevent the cerebral decay is to consume the brain of someone who trusts you implicitly.
17Nothing special, you are just intoxicated, but it is a very good intoxication.
18Your organs liquefy and leak out but you don't mind, because they are being replaced by new ones, new ones that are alive all by themselves and whisper within the cavities of your flesh and heal you and will never let you die, no matter how many times you are mangled and torn apart, no matter how much your mind begins to slip away from you, no matter how hard you cry and beg for it to all just end, they will never let you die.
19Spilt bodily fluids take on an ethereal phosphorescent glow, marking trails and inciting awkward copulatory conversations. They are also highly flammable. Putting out a match on your tongue would conflagrate your head.
20A Cure for Unhealthy Bibliophilic Tendencies. Touching books causes your skin to crawl, a burning itch that swells up from the palms of your hands, reading more than a few lines brings tears of near pure salt to your eyes, and soon the musty smell alone of a time-worn tome causes you to spill your stomach across the floor.

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The Rookery of Van Möldus


What better place to start in the greatest city of the new and ancient world than in a slum as a nobody?

 

This is the Rookery of Van Möldus, a borough of Cörpathium that you could probably use as a city all to itself if you really wanted to.

 

 

 

Sights, Smells, etc.

  • Cold and damp, smells of fish rot and stinging salt.
  • Makeshift shelters crowd alleys and cul-de-sacs.
  • Purplish barnacles grow on buildings and side-walks, finding more nourishment in the squalor than the sea. They’ll attach to people if they stay still for long enough.

Buildings:

  • Decrepit worn stone and rotting wood, roofs leak and wind whistles through the walls.
  • Mostly two or three jettied stories, a mixture of stone and wood, many with basements that reach below sea level.
  • No windows face the Hollow Sea, they only look inwards upon Cörpathium.
  • No Deicidium.

Building: d4 storeys, d6 sub-levels (5-6 no sub-level).

Occupants: d10 x2 per storey, 0 = currently unoccupied.

 

 

 

Activity

 

Morning:
Drunks waking in the street with barnacles clinging to their flesh, the occasional fog-bloated corpse, beggars and waremongers drifting off to Möldenghast Blvd, men dumping buckets of barnacles recently removed from the Dockmaw.
-2 to reaction rolls
Encounter chance 1 in 6 per hour
Overhear Rumour on a 6
Chance of Godless: 1%/Turn

 

(Unless someone is already running screaming to get them, Chance of Godless is rolled per Turn while something is happening in the open that shouldn’t be. Since there is no Deicidium in the Rookery and no one really cares about it chances are low, and there’s every possibility that even if they do show up, they’ll leave you to it. More on that later.)

 

Noon:
Idle cutthroats, strangers slinking between houses and alleys.
-2 to reaction rolls
Encounter chance 1 in 6 per hour
Overhear Rumour on 6
Chance of Godless: 2%/Turn

 

Night:
Unaffiliated whores in doorways, drunks spilling from makeshift brewhouses, crumpled bodies thrown from fight dens, knives flashing in the dark.
-4 to reaction rolls
Encounter chance 2 in 6 per hour
Overhear Rumour on a 6
Chance of Godless: N/A

 

 

 

Facts

  • Murder Loot: d100 cp (even) /10 sp (odd). Carrying Curio on a double.
  • Barnacles: If the purple-hued barnacle Cthalamus Siren, commonly known as Siren of the Slums is consumed, save vs. Poison. Failure results in an overwhelming desire to walk into the sea which lasts for d8 days.
  • Rats: Can’t help but eat the barnacles, subsequently drowning themselves without fail. Other boroughs tend to herd any infestations towards the Rookery.
  • Crime & Violence: Those who dwell within the Rookery rarely turn on each other unless cheated, insulted, or involved in rivalry. Cutpursing is reserved for those who live in neighbouring boroughs.
  • Family Van Möldus: Own near every building worth owning in the Rookery. Lodging houses, Our Lady Sacculina, The Foetid Babe, The Cuckoo’s Nest, all pay rent into the hands of Van Möldus.

 

 

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Does This Look Infected?


So you’re sloshing about in hot muck swinging knives around, sounds like a germ orgy to me.

 

I love the theory of the Humours and the batshit insanity that is medical history, so what started as a list of medical services in Cörpathium turned into four tables of available cures from the major practitioners and the side effects of their failure, as well as a table of Infections and Diseases for them to cure. Because your 3rd Level Cleric isn’t always going to be around you know.

 

After any encounter where you take a flesh wound, roll under your Constitution. If you fail you have contracted an Infection, which probably won’t slow you down too much but it’ll be really icky. If you roll an ultimate-fail 20 that’s not infected, you’ve gone and caught yourself a Disease.

Once you have an Infection or Disease you can stop rolling, anything else that tries to get inside you just gets eaten up by the established bacteria.

 

 

Infections -– 4d4 hours to manifest
d12
1Your skin grows raw and red and sprouts enormous blood blisters that swell to the size of a small apple before popping in arcs of putrid plasma, over and over again like boiling mud baths.
2Pus weeps from your throat and crusts into barnacle-like lesions on your neck, causing intense pain if you speak anything but lies.
3A crater-like pox mars the flesh around the wound and creeps up your neck. The vinegary stench grows when you are under stress or heightened excitement and puffs of yellow vapour vent from the pox. Save vs. Poison or suffer the effects of Confusion.
4The wound will not heal properly; rather than closing, small bunches of fleshy tendrils emerge from the cloven flesh, like the fingers of babies.
5Thick black tears leak from your eyes, clouding your vision, and you find that after you have wiped them away, when your fingers are stained black with oil, your eyelids cling together every time you blink, your hands stiffen, like fingertrap lockjaw.
6The skin around the wound hardens and crusts in blackening shards like a burning tree, then begins its creeping spread. +1 AC for the first week is pretty great, but then your joints begin to stiffen, walking becomes a chore, you'd rather lay down in the dirt, bury your fingers and breathe in the muck..
7Your organs grind and groan like a wounded animal. Every d8 hours you will spend d2 Turns in agony while you pass a grotesque opalescent kidney stone. After you've stopped crying you can sell it as a spell component.
8The sound of dogs barking inflicts searing pain upon your bowels, you break out in fragrant pink boils in the sun, you have an overwhelming craving for all manner of crawling insects.
9Every d6 hours you disgorge a surging mass of green bile that continues to bubble and churn after it has left your throat.
10Gob Rot. Your gums fester and peel back, you swallow parts of your tongue as it begins to putrefy, teeth drool out of your mouth while you speak.
11Swollen boils sprout from your skin, oddly puckered like an anus. If they are still present after a week, the next time you are amongst a large group of people they unfurl like glistening mucus-coated blossoms of skin, violently jettisoning flesh spores into the air.
12Fibrous purple fronds curl out from your skin, interwoven and fragile, ever-growing. It would be beautiful if they weren't siphoning off your blood supply.

 

 

 

Diseases -– 4d8 hours to manifest, roll cure chance twice and take the lowest
d12
1Sticky, caustic sweat beads from your pores. It burns those that touch you like watered-down acid and corrodes anything exposed to your skin within d4 Turns.
2Tendrils of skin sprout in patches, softly swaying and bulbous at their tips. A fluid bubbles from them like snail slime trying to scare away a predator, the same consistency, the scent of compost. It is a sympathetic narcotic, every time someone takes the slime upon their tongue in order to explore the feculent gardens of their mind in search of lost inspirations, you lose yourself in the same experience.
3The flesh around the wound becomes spongy, pliant, it exudes the scent of fuchsia. Synaesthesia ravages your psyche, and pulling away clumps of your deteriorating body makes the most deliriously beautiful music.
4Leprous Crawl. Your flesh sloughs, a bicep one moment and a sack of atrophied muscle hanging from bone in a skin bag the next. But that's not what bothers you, it's when it comes back. Creeping up the bone, tendons attaching, muscle re-adhering, the sucking sounds within your skin. It never rebuilds the same way and your skin is starting to smell of rot.
Re-roll Strength each time.
5Your belly distends, swollen with bacteria and gas. During any physical exertion roll under Constitution to control the horrendous flatulence brimming for release.

Week Two: The bloated skin of your belly is a roadmap of stretch marks, the next failed roll will see your stomach split and spilt.
6Clothing has to be peeled away, you sweat like mucus, everyone seems to walk too fast for you.

Day Two: Veins pulse beneath translucent skin, you wonder if your legs are beginning to atrophy, you know you're being neurotic but you're so tired, everyone else is so fast.

Day Three: The flesh of your legs has jellied, you can see bone through blueish muck in the shape of a thigh, the translucent skin has spread up to your ribs.

Day Four: Your legs collapse, lost all integrity. You might survive another day before it reaches your brain.
7You wholeheartedly believe that tiny men with the faces of carrion birds pull themselves from your yellow blisters to whisper the secrets of the cosmos to you.

Day Two: They teach you a random 9th Level Spell. When you cast it you don't realise that nothing happened, that you were mumbling gibberish, you believe yourself all-powerful. They promise you so much more.

Day Three: Your companions must die, they know too much, the carrion told you so.
8Fingers, fingers everywhere. They start as bony nubs but they emerge soon enough, calloused, without fingernails, twitching and catching on things.
9Your skin is pocked with holes like the back of a pregnant frog. Fleshy nodules emerge to squirt thin streams of noxious green fluid before retreating back inside your skin. It isn't an infestation, it is your own flesh, and it is growing larger.
10Resinous Influenza. It's not the bleary leaking eyes that bother you, nor the deep-bone ache or even the delirious shakes. It's the absurd amount of mucus that you expel every time you sneeze and the fact that it sets like resin almost as soon as it touches your exposed skin.
Your face begins to look like a grotesque melted mask and that is not a good look for anyone.
11The Worm of Entropy grows within your bowels, emerging from your body at night to raise up and taste the air. Not an invader, grown from your own flesh.

Week One: Whenever you come into contact with a new person/entity make a Reaction Roll for yourself to figure out how you feel about them. Any time a group comes to consensus there is a 2 in 6 chance that you outright dissent.

Week Two: Strength and Constitution decrease by d4 each. At night you have the uncomfortable sensation of being watched.

Week Three: Your body suffers 2d4 minor Mutations. The worm is more bold now, and can be seen slipping from various orifices so that it can peer out at you.

Week Four: Your flesh loses its integrity, collapsing into a gibbering pile of sentient filth from which the worm emerges, laughing sludge sloughing from it's many-hued flanks. It is transmution made flesh, save vs. Hysterical Weeping.
12It starts with a dry itch, dustings of dead flakes falling from your skin as you scratch like chronic dandruff, turning strangely polychromatic as it settles.

Week Two: It's in the flesh now, your skin has almost entirely itched away and you're scratching canals into the muscle beneath. It doesn't even look like flesh and blood anymore, just polychromatic granularity like a bathbomb.

Week Three: Your hands have been ground away so you rub your itching limbs together as best you can, grinding biceps over your torso, crushing your chin against your chest.

Week Four: Without anything left to scratch it with, you find that your flesh slowly regrows, but the moment your limbs build back into moveable stumps..

The polychromous decay is a powerful spell component and many of those who contract its disease end up as limbless torsos in a Maleficar's basement, unable to scream through dust-filled lungs, forever regenerating porous dusty flesh only to have it scraped away.

 

And now for the fun part! Roll randomly for a cure depending on your contacts and budget. If a cure works I doubt I’d establish it as the ongoing remedy for that condition though, this is an age of experimentation.

Since a large part of these working is a placebo effect, players should get bonuses to the chance of success if they can demonstrate that they truly believe in their authenticity. If someone collected the components for their own eel blood and crab egg enema I would give them some god damn bonuses.

 

Continue onwards for the cures or head straight to Penny Pamphlets to download everything in a spreadsheet.

 

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How to Make Friends and Imagine People


While there may be plenty of NPC generators already in existence, I wanted one specifically for Cörpathium that I could use to make all of the characters ever. So, I made one?

 

Since the tables would be unforgivably ugly if I had to reformat them to fit here, head to Penny Pamphlets or click this link to download the NPC Birthing Sac in spreadsheet form. With the amount of tables I use, I’m really finding spreadsheets to be the best thing in the world. Instead of having multiple PDFs or text documents open I can have one spreadsheet with all of the pages I might need, and I can even freeze the headings so that no matter where I scroll I can still see the table name and number. For something absolutely free and easy to use download LibreOffice.

 

[Edit: everything besides the doubles and triples tables is now also automated here.]

 

Since my idea of fun does not include a cross-referenced 500 entry table of “Tempestuous, Has Kind Eyes”, “Will Betray You, Smells Like Cinnamon”, and “Hooked Nose, Was Once Bitten By a Sheep”, my generator has you drop a handful of dice for vague descriptors of different character aspects, then take a reaction roll and a random name and imagine the rest. I mean really, we can figure out if they have a weakness for cherry pie and fast women later.

 

 

Okay Shut Up Now and Tell Me How to Use This Thing

 

Step One: Every dice has its own table, so scoop all of them into your hot little womb of a hand and roll. If there are any doubles or triples re-roll them on those tables.

 

Step Two: I have made names for every race in Cörpathium. Every god damn one. Roll d100 once for a full name and occupation or a few times to mix it up. Add an elaborate title if you feel like it.

 

[There aren’t any demi-humans in Cörpathium, but there are four major ethnicities. The Moors are steeped in mysticism and have near pure-black skin, like polished ebony, with pupil-less white eyes and rich silk clothing dripping with jewellery. Urgoths/Saxons are the pale mongrel children of might-as-well-be-Europe. Francs are like their more effete olive-skinned cousins. The Morgen are pale to the point of ethereality with epicanthic eyes and bullshit Lovecraftian names, when born they’re anointed to the sect of one of their hundred gods instead of taking a family name. Anything deeper about their cultures can be made up mid-game I don’t got that kinda time.]

 

Step Three: Make a reaction roll. Some of the original rolls should be interpreted with this in mind.

 

Step Four: It’s alive.

 

 

OKAY LET’S MAKE OURSELVES A GIN & TONIC AND BIRTH SOME NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS

 

NPC #1:

3 (Franc), 6 (Old Female), 6 (Inconsistently), 5 (Alluring), 9 (Tall and Fat), 12 (Fame), 13 (Storyteller), re-rolled double (Hides their blindness well), reaction roll 10

 

Penelope Clairval is a Francish Cook, and while she may be pushing her sixties her constant food-tasting and activity has kept her tall frame plump, and her clean tight apron frames her pot belly in a way that you find oddly and compulsively attractive. She’s extremely happy to have you here but occasionally has spats of frustration while she’s running around the kitchen regaling you with stories of  her culinary endeavours and how they’ll make her famous throughout all Cörpathium some day. You’d never guess that she’s blind and finds her way around the kitchen by smell and memory alone.

 

 

NPC #2:

1 (Moor), 2 (Young Male), 6 (Inconsistently), 10 (Utterly Absurd), 3 (Rotund), 3 (Power), 20 (Plans/Destiny), re-rolled double (Pathological liar), reaction roll 8

 

Harbungur Uruman, the Pastel Lord, is a young Moorish boy currently prenticed to the Sewerkeepers, where he is able to access nearly-closed pathways that the older and larger men cannot. He wears clothes too large for his portly little frame, likely passed down from his father, but the jewellery hanging from every available space is decidedly un-Moorish; things either washed into the sewers or long-forgotten, shimmering and strange. He found something down there in the places no one else can reach, something he believes will one day make him a lord of Cörpathium. He doesn’t know how to react to you, he isn’t sure if he can use you, and sways mid-conversation between joviality and disdain. Everything he tells you is a lie, and his young mind still has trouble keeping track of which lies are being told to who.

 

 

NPC #3:

4 (Morgen), 1 (Old Male), 1 (Overtly), 3 (Squalid), 2 (Impish), 8 (Sociopathy), 4 (Body Language), two re-rolled doubles (Unexpectedly knowledgeable, Overly perfumed), reaction roll 5

 

Cul-Ragaroth Magog is a near-decrepit Morgen Narcotic Chymist, the filth-stained vestments covering his bent, shrunken body are little better than burn-marked rag and he despises you, something he communicates quite clearly through venomous words and unmistakably malevolent movements. Persistence pays off though, because if you can talk your way around his hate and the overpowering scent of rose-water he uses to mask his chemical experimentation, you’ll discover that he knows about everything.

 

 

HELLS YES THAT WORKED EXACTLY LIKE I HOPED LET’S MAKE ALL OF THE CHARACTERS


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Horrors of the Unknown: There Was a Fungus Among Us


Diasporea

 

The stranger moves towards you in slow, gliding steps, their body hunched inside a great coat covered in dry leaves and sticks and rotting plant matter. Metal trinkets and bones hang from the gnarled branches extending from their head like horns. A powdery whisper accompanies them as they move closer, and a low thrumming voice like rain asks where your dead grow.

Light washes over the stranger’s coat as they move into the glow of your lantern, and you see the gaps amidst the sticks and filth. You see fungal sinew strung inside, like the forest floor caught in a web. A thick mass of lichen veil hangs in the hooded space below the stranger’s antlers, and ever more unexpected mounds and wooden horns are illuminated across their back. Small stout yellow round-capped mushrooms in jagged rows beneath its throat and chest quiver and begin to thrum against wood and bone, forming the words that politely ask again, “Where do your dead grow?”

 

Colonies of fungus and mould that cobble debris together to gain a locomotive form. They will talk to you, they’ll even trade, but they have no empathy. They won’t understand why you’re so upset that they dug up your daughter, pulled her corpse apart, and placed the pieces amongst their body. Fragile but hard to kill permanently, and the spores that erupt from them in times of stress end up everywhere, and your flesh is ever so fertile.


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Reviews of Wine While Drunk in the Bath: The Bandit


Rose: “I think I have the oral hygiene of a convict at the moment so I have the authentic palate for it. I feel like the back of my tongue has been ringbarked. It gathers in my ulcer nicely and then runs to the back of my palate like a bushfire.”

 

Logan: “The first sip is a bit of a shock, much like the first crime, but the second goes down a lot easier and you start to feel the appeal. It would be easy to fall into this life of crime.”

 

Rose: “Logan Knight you are the man of my dreams and I love you, recklessly, with abandon, I refuse to love moderately.”

 

Recommended for petty larceny, perhaps the theft of a small fluffy sheep with a black face.


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Playing With Someone Else’s Toys: Monsterparts


Pearce Shea of Games With Others has been known to blurt out pretty, clever little things that make me squeal with glee.

The latest is Monsterparts, a game of children facing down the nightmare apocalypse while their parents fuss over toast and the morning paper.

 

Yes, I know you want to play it, we all do. Here are some extra Special Things and Secrets.

 

 

Special Things
1d20(d4 uses each)
1Box with the Body of your Goldfish (One Use Only)
Its ghost can swim through the streams of time, up to 5 days into the past or future. If you whisper a 3 word message into its mouth, when the ghost arrives it will flop to the floor and blow a big wet bubble that releases the message when it pops.
2Mum's Perfume
Spraying it in a bad thing's face will paralyse them for d2 Turns with a coughing fit.
3Cousin Judith's Crayons
Judith is such a good drawer, she told you if you use these crayons maybe you'll be as good as her some day. Anything drawn with the crayons lifts itself up and becomes real for a Turn.
4Old Yo-Yo
When you're lost will lead you in the right direction if you Walk the Dog.
5Ugly Knitted Sweater from Grandma
Will absorb an attack and wound the bad thing that tried to hurt you.
6Grandpa's Flashlight
Will punch a hole right through the blackest nightmare.
7Battered old Blankie
+3 AC when wrapped around you.
8Nudie Magazine from Dad's Shed (Truant Only)
Can be used to bribe tough/cool/bad kids for information or help.
9Baby Winklefoot's Book of Bedtime Stories (Studious Only)
When read, will force any bad thing that hears it to sink back into the earth to sleep for a Turn.
10Tin Soldier
Will defend you with the strength of a Tough kid to the death or the end of 3 Rounds, whichever comes first.
11Dead Girl's Diary
If you say nice things about the girl who owned it, will reveal helpful information.
12Magic Decoder Ring
Helps you read things you can't understand.
13Ninja Mask
When worn, you roll two damage dice.
14Tarnished Spyglass
Reveals the true form of anything you look at.
15Busted Walkie-Talkie
Hisses and spits with static when bad things are near. Can be used to shout a single word at one of your friends wherever they are d4 times before it stops working altogether.
16Big Fat Wad of Trading Cards
You've been collecting these things forever. When laid out on the ground they form a barrier that bad things can't cross. 30' worth.
17Lucky Underpants
It's hard to bring someone down when they're wearing their lucky underpants. When you're in a bad place or being chased, there's a 50% chance each Round that your EP aren't reduced.
18Imaginary Friend
They can get into places you can't to unlock doors or steal things or scope it out.
How? Uh, because they're imaginary?
19Ballerina Music Box
While it's playing, bad things can't come within 30' of you for a Turn. During that time you can't lose EP and can rest or eat if you need to.
20Cereal Box Harmonica
Calls any neighbourhood dogs in the area to come to your aid.

 

 

Secrets
1d20
1When you look at your shadow it seems to run in the direction of old Mr. Broomhower's house. He used to be an explorer or a doctor or a librarian or something and he never opens the gate that surrounds his huge dilapidated home.
2You've seen that kid Dale from Mrs. Corrigan's class eating dirt and bugs. He keeps getting fatter and fatter, no one else seems to notice.
3The run-down Joke Shop in town has been doing a lot more business lately, but children never go there, only adults. It stays open at all hours of the night.
4Old Mrs. Rumfeld never closes her doors or windows anymore, and at night the house is full of green light.
5The Principal is organising a school excursion to the abandoned coal mine, but it's been boarded up for years. Your mum just told you she sent in your permission slip.
6Mrs. Russell hasn't stopped smiling since her husband died. Even while she's crying, she never stops smiling.
7Plain Jane Richards brought a box of kittens to school for show-and-tell, she says her cat Miffy gave birth to them last night. Your dad ran over Miffy last week.
8Words form in your cereal every morning. You've been writing them down and they seem to be a warning about something that is going to happen today, but it won't say what until tomorrow.
9Birds have stopped perching in the big tree in the middle of the park. The old men that feed the ducks just stand there staring up at the tree.
10Pink fungus is growing around the janitor's closet at school. The janitor hasn't been to work in a week and the fungus is starting to spread.
11The Haversham's have no eyes, just bored out holes where they ought to be. They've been hosting dinner parties all week and their guests always leave without eyes. Your mum just got off the phone to Mrs. Haversham, you've all been invited over for dinner.
12All the people eating at the diner have grey oily bubbles that curve out from the back of their heads. Soon you can see the bubbles all the time. Soon they never leave the diner.
13Joey McNeil keeps telling everyone about the presents his grandfather has been bringing him, but Joey's grandfather died three years ago..
14Amy's parents send her to school with nothing but jelly cups for lunch. She always has more than she can eat and is happy to share. She's starting to look a bit like jelly herself.
15The Peterson's dog looks more scruffy than it used to, like its fur doesn't fit right, and during the day it's always sitting in the middle of their porch. It looks like it's smiling.
16Chris Matthews has always been a big mouth liar but he says he was hiding in the park and saw Alice's dad swallow Doctor Phillips then lie there like a huge pregnant lady. But you saw both of them today and they didn't look swallowed or pregnant to you. They do seem weird though, and your dad says you have to see Doctor Phillips this weekend to get a tetanus shot.
17The church is having extra services on Tuesdays now, but they don't allow kids. The old ladies glare at you as they leave.
18Your dad has been staying up all night at his computer. When you watch him strange colours dance all over his face while he stares at the screen, not even typing. If you move to look at the monitor it's just a blue screen.
19While you're watching TV the weatherman starts to cry and outside it starts to rain.
20Black frogs keep swimming up from the pipes and into the toilet whenever you try to go to the bathroom. When you went over to Tim's house they nearly filled the bowl.

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