Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Nobodies

Stats as NPC wizard.
<Pseudoexistence> Only take damage from AoE effects.  Intangible except to characters under the effects of a powerful hallucinogen. If no one is perceiving them, they "pause".

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Nobodies are a type of Outsider, like the Strangers (the guys described in this post).  You may find them near Strangers, or in strange places like the black stacks below the Library of Asria.

Outsiders are things from beyond the universe and even the other planes.  (Whether or not other planes exist is a source of continual discussion among scholars.  Many of the things that were thought to be other planes have been proven to be merely distant locations across the globe.)

Outsiders are beyond our natural order quite literally beyond our comprehension.  There is no single explanation that can explain them, no logical narrative that can tell their story.  They are a surrealist film, or the incoherence between Newtonian and relativistic physics.  They are a gash in the fabric of universal consistency.

from Constantine
Psuedo-Existence

They live by borrowing your imagination, and as such, they lack any specific appearance of their own.  They appear as a hodgepodge of people you've known before.  Your mother's hair, your father's hands.  A silly little hat you saw on a bard once, as he passed you in the street, but that you still remember vividly.

They may appear differently to different people.  When they speak, different people may even hear different things.

They cannot affect the world directly.  They are wizards (and can be very high level) but their spells cannot deal direct damage.  (No fireball, yes reverse gravity).  

You cannot affect them directly.  You can tackle them, and feel the mass of their bodies, smell the tweed of your dead brother's jacket--but then you are on the floor, grasping at dust.  Inconsistencies, small impossibilities.  Reality doesn't quite line up, as if the DM is developing a mild case of dementia.

"Your sword passes right through his body, as if he was a ghost, but then he was standing further back than you thought, so you can't reach him with your sword, and when your sword hits him, thick droplets of blood spill from his wound and bounce across the floor like marbles."

They can't be affected by anything except non-damaging spells, and things that affect an area.

So magic missile can't hurt them, but a pool of burning lantern oil can.

This is because, they don't occupy a single location, they occupy a conceptual one.  Every one sees the nobody standing in slightly different locations.  Unless a spell or attack hits all of those (closely grouped, probabilistic) locations at the same time, the nobody will take no damage.

Spells that rely on identity, but not exact location, such as suggestion work fine on them (as long as you have line of sight to all of the areas near the nobody).

Confused?  It's enough to drive your PCs insane.

Borrowed Minds

Everyone who sees (the location where) a Nobody standing around loses 1 point of Wisdom.  They regain it as soon as they are out of the Nobody's line of sight and aren't currently thinking about the Nobody.

A Nobody who wants to continue existing will probably follow you around.  You can get rid of them by closing a door between you and them and then doing something attention-getting, so that everyone stops thinking about the Nobody for a moment.

Nobodies who stop existing are "paused".  They remain in the same location until someone approaches and sees them again.  Time doesn't pass for them while they are paused.

In crowded or hectic situations (combat, raves, a busy bakery) it is easy to lose track of the Nobody.  The more you pay attention to the distractions around you, the harder it is to find the Nobody.  It isn't like seeing the hazy outline of an invisible creature.  The more you examine the room around you, the harder it is to see the Nobody.  You need to stop looking at obdurate reality and allow your imagination to speculate and then the Nobody appears.  Well, not really "appears", it was standing there the whole time.

A character in a busy situation needs to fail an Wisdom check in order to see the Nobody (because they are too good at observing the world around them).  A character who states that they are going to try to ignore the room (possibly by closing their eyes or thinking about butterflies or something) is allowed to make another Wisdom check to see the Nobody, and this check they must pass.  You can make this check once per turn.  Once you see them, you will continue to see them clearly until something else distracts you.

A Nobody can easily end this effect by drawing attention to itself (such as by speaking).


Mindless

Because they don't really exist, they don't really have a mind of their own.

However, they do have a book.  Every single one of them does.  Hanging on their belt, tucked into their breast pocket, or in their hand.

This book is their mind.  Everything that is written in that book is true in their mind.  The book contains all of their knowledge, their opinions, their personality.  Everything.

They sometimes consult this book to remember/discover facts about themselves, such as whether or not they like cats, or what their name is.

Nobodies are always writing in their books.  If they didn't, they wouldn't remember what happened.  It is their memory.  If the book is changed, their minds are changed.  If it doesn't exist in the book, it doesn't exist in their mind.

The easiest way to get a hold of a Nobody's book is to wrestle it out of their hands.  This requires being able to touch a Nobody, and there is one simple method that I haven't mentioned yet.

You need to get massively fucked up on hallucinogens.  Luckily dungeons are full of mushrooms.

By the time the rest of the world starts to look unreal, the Nobody will begin to look real enough to touch.  Then, you can stab them, wrestle them, pull their hair, pinch their nipples. . . whatever.

Of course, being fucked up on hallucinogens carries its own risks.

A Nobody's book is not part of the Nobody, nor is it really a book.  It is something else entirely.

source unknown

4 comments:

  1. This is really awesome. I've been wanting to run a game themed on the Realm of Dreams and this is really inspiring!

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  2. Hmm... Wouldn't magic missile work on them by your description? You don't have to roll for it to hit, so it's more likely it works on identity rather than accuracy (i want THAT target hit)

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    Replies
    1. Up to the DM.

      But magic missile can't break mirror image, and you can't be like "I shoot magic missile at the doppleganger" and expect it to work. . . so that's my logic.

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  3. This is now one of my favorite posts of all time. I'm imagining it locked up in a vault by an ancient civilization (who got sick of trying to unwrap the Nobody's mystery). When the players crack the vault, instead of riches, they find a probabilistic cloud of WTF.

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