Gorbels

Imagine a 2d wizard, living entirely in the photon-thin surface of your television screen, who learns about the existence of a third dimension--hitherto unobserved by himself.

Wizzrobe from Zelda (1986)

And even though the two-dimensional wizard might have some understanding of these spaces and its inhabitants, the wizard still has no way to interact with it.  None of his tools give him the ability to interact with the world in a three-dimensional way.  Even his mightiest spells are two-dimensional.

So what that wizard needs is a three-dimensional tool.  Even a humble instrument would give him the purchase he needs to begin his three-dimensional machinations.  But it is difficult--so crushingly difficult--to construct such things from two-dimensional tools.

But by now you already understand that all of this is just an analogy for three-dimensional wizards struggling to interact with the four-dimensional universe, so let us speak plainly.

A tool that allows a three-dimensional creature to access the fourth dimension is called a tetravect.

The smallest four-dimensional organisms are gorbels, and many wizards attempt to summon the blasted creatures and attempt to make a tetravect from  their bodies (which have organs that grow fourth-dimensionally).  This is a difficult road--gorbels are maddeningly obtuse in both mindset and biology.  (For example, every dissection presents a new set of organs.)

Geminoids are also an option, but no one knows their true nature yet.

Second, other wizards may also attempt to summon slaad, but they are fools.  Slaad interact with the multiverse, which is entirely different from the fourth dimension.

The third and final option is to build a tetravect out of three-dimensional parts.  (This is akin to building a cube out of squares, or building a hypercube out of cubes.)  The resulting creature is a triphage (or more commonly, a tirapheg).  

We'll come back to tiraphegs in a second.  Let's talk more about gorbels first.

Gorbels

Only a fucking idiot would attempt to reach the fourth dimension with a gorbel-based tetravect scheme, and yet it happens often enough that we had better stat out the little monsters.

Gorbels are red, rubbery orb creatures.  They have three eyestalks that can be retracted inside their head.  They have two blubbery baby arms that terminate in bulky claws.  And they have a dull, drooling mouth that hides a decent set of fangs.  They are 2-3' in diameter, and they weigh less that you think.

Gorbel from the Fiend Folio (1981)
Does anyone know who the illustrator is?

Gorbel

Lvl 3  Def leather  Bite 1d6

Climb average  Int 2  Dis oblivious

Rubbery - Immune to bludgeoning damage and falls.  Bounces as well as a basketball.

Self-Insertion - Whenever a gorbel takes damage, it splits into two nearly-identical gorbels (with the same current HP).  (This the actually a different insertion of the same gorbel, but don't worry about that.)

Spike Burst - When a gorbel is killed, it deals 1d4 piercing damage to all creatures within 10'.  Dex save for half.

Psuedoresurrection - Gorbels that die have a 4-in-6 chance of reappearing 1d6 minutes later at some location within 200'.

Gorbels are difficult to keep in captivity.  When bored, they bite themselves (creating more gorbels) or engage in "barbering" where they bite the eyestalks off of other gorbels.  They are famously difficult to entertain, and gorbel-keepers are advised to hire professional entertainers.  (Gorbels enjoy slapstick and children's stories.  At no point do they laugh, smile, or show any reaction.  If bored, they will wander off and commit mischief.)

Wizards who wish to keep gorbels are advised to have a disintegrator on hand so that excess gorbels can be killed instantaneously.  They will also need a system to hunt down psuedoresurrected gorbels and throw them into the disintegrator.

Gorbel-keepers are also advised to construct their lair in such a way as to avoid Gorbel Resonance Cascades.  GRCs occur when a gorbel takes damage in such a way that when new gorbels are inserted into existence, they also take damage.  A pit of acid can cause GRCs.  So can a small room with strong walls.  Once more and more gorbels are bent into a space, they can begin taking crush damage from all of the other gorbels, creating a runaway reaction that can explode castles and collapse dungeons.

And of course, the sequela of a GRC is always a bunch of gorbels reappearing in the area.  Gorbels can become aggressive when they outnumber non-gorbels by a large margin.

It is not known what type of food gorbels actually eat.  They obviously get hungry, and they are always trying to eat things, but nothing seems to give them sustenance and most things cause them to vomit and take damage. 

They are famously oblivious.  Roll a d3 when you encounter one to determine its disposition.

1 - Oblivious.  Ex: staring into the sun.  Aggressive if touched.

2 - Distracted.  Ex: trying to eat a rock, gagging, and throwing it back up again.  Aggressive if touched.

3 - Aggressive.  Will try to eat you while shouting its name.  Aggressive gorbels in adjacent rooms will hear the commotion and come bouncing in.

Magic Items of the Gorbels

In the process of making a tetravect from a gorbel, there will be many failed attempts.

Gorbelblood Potion 

Creates a clone of the drinker without any clothing or items.).  Prepared spells are split randomly between the two.  Yes, if you use it on a PC, you can now control two identical PCs.  After 1 hour, one of the two clones (determined randomly) melts painfully over the course of five minutes. 

The name of the potion is a bit of a misnomer, as gorbels lack blood, instead having a pneumatic circulatory system.

Gorbel Bile

Comes in a vial with 5 applications.  Each application of bile reduces an objects weight by 20 lbs, down into the negative weights.  Smaller doses can be applied, if you wish.  Lasts 1 hour.

If applied to a 20 lb object, the object now becomes weightless.  A second application causes the object to weigh -20 lbs, and causing it to fall upwards if not secured.  A third application causes it to weigh -40 lbs, and so on.  

If drank, each application gives you +2 to jumping and -2 to shoving (and similar).

The name of this potion is absolutely accurate.  Gorbels are 50% bile by weight--although distilling it correctly is another challenge.

Gorbel Bone Chariot

Gorbels are boneless.  Inducing osteogenesis in gorbels is a biomantic and spiritual challenge.  So is removing them, since gorbel corpse disappear shortly after their death.

A successful gorbel bone chariot is a successful tetravect--the point of this whole exercise.  The chariot described below is only one form that a gorbel-based tetravect could take.  The chariot is a spherical cage, 10' in diameter, made from chrome-plated gorbel bones.  When used, all creatures inside the cage are shifted along a fourth-dimension access to a place a few centimeters outside our universe.  The rider with the highest Charisma is the "driver" and controls the function of the chariot.

Unlike most (spirit-facilitated) teleports, this is a "sharp" teleportation.  Anyone who is halfway in the chariot when it teleports will be cut in half.  If you teleport into a solid object you will be fused with it.  It sounds like a thundercrack every time it is used, and hearing protection is strongly recommended.

There is no three-dimensional air out there.  Anyone who uses the chariot without fully exhaling and relaxing their airways will take 1d6 Con damage (if reduced to 0 Con, the result is lung eversion and death).  Even with that precaution, anyone remaining in an extradimensional space will lose consciousness after 2 rounds.  (I'm glossing over the other effects, like the nitrogen bubbles and edema.  You honestly need a space suit.)

From here, you can observe any location as if you could see through walls.  Additionally, you can teleport to any visible location with 1000'.  Each of these two usages causes the passengers to gain 1 point of Trauma.  

If you see a gorbel's true form from this vantage point, take another point of Trauma.

Outsider Psychology

I've written about Outsiders a few times before.  I don't mean outsiders like angels and demons.  (Those things are part of the normal moral/ethereal ecology of Centerra.)

I mean proper Outsiders, from outside the narrow banks of time and space.  Things that have slipped in when no one was looking.  Things that don't make sense, or at least not any sense that we can comprehend.  They are disruptive to the setting--they spoil it.  They ruin the logic of it.  They expose inconsistencies.  If it were a TV show, they would break the fourth wall, or spoil the ending of the series for everyone.

Anyway, this post has 4 points to make.  The first two have already been established (or at least strongly alluded to) while the last couple are novel.

This is not canon.  (There is no canon.)  But the existence of Outsiders seems to imply a few things.

1. The things outside our own universe are much, much bigger in every way: time, space, and significance.

Our universe stretches from big bang to its inevitable heat death, spans a few billion years.  The time scale outside that extends for trillions or quadrillions (depending on how you count the cyclic parts).

We cannot escape the walls of our universe, because there are no walls.  It wraps back in on itself.  To escape this universe would require more energy than the universe contains.

To continue a previous analogy, we are bacteria in a Petri dish.  The greatest bacterial heroes cannot see past the walls of their home, and our greatest works will not survive the experiment.

2. Human souls have a history prior to their conception.  It is much longer and much more important than everything that happens after conception.

Before you were plugged into your mother's endometrium, you were someone else.  Someone with a full life, with triumphs, failures, friends, and enemies.  Because that life occurred on the extracosmic scale (see above) it is too large to fit in our brains, and what little we remember is too complex to be understood.

This life is a reduction of what we once were.  It's stuffing the soul of a human into an ant, or perhaps an amoeba.  What is retained?  What can an ant-brain know of its previous life?

That is why the Awakened are so furious to see us clinging to our ant-lives.  Looking at us, they can see the creatures we were, before we were reduced to simpering idiocy by the machinations of cruel sperm and scheming egg.

A trillion-year friend reduced to a simpering, traitorous idiot in only a few decades.  (Less than an eyeblink, for some.)

And while our life here is short, the universe traps our souls for far longer.  And while we are here, we are not out there, where there are much more important things to do.  It represents a neglect of duty, as if we were emperors who refuse to stop playing tea party with stuffed animals while the kingdom burns down around them.

No matter how important our troubles seem, or how important our achievements, they are utterly dwarfed by the greater multiverse.  Centerran wars leave hundreds of thousands dead in the mud.  Wars in the multiverse leave quintillions of souls banished to the coldness between the stars.

(Fractals are a theme in Centerra.  If you zoomed in on a grain of sand, you would find tiny kingdoms of dust mephits fighting and dying amid the milliseconds, vying for control of a square micron in multigenerational wars that last entire seconds.)

Anyway, there is a third business to this business, one that involves the multiverse.

jose segrelles

3. All quantum events spawn a parallel universe of the opposite result.

Or to put it another way: whenever a coin is flipped, it creates two universes: one where the coin comes up heads, and one where it comes down tails.  (Don't tell me that a coin is too big to be influenced by quantum events.  I don't want to hear it.)

A lot of coins are being flipped all the time.  A lot of coins.  Every nanosecond, a billion universes are branching off from our own.  (And our own universe isn't special.  It's just another branch like all the others.)  And another nanosecond after that, each of those billion universes spawns off another billion universes.

Whenever you roll a d6 and get a 6, you create five more universes, one for each other result.

Whenever your mother dies of the plague when you are five, somewhere there are a billion billion other mothers that lived to happy old age.

Whenever your father sits back in his chair and licks his thumb before carefully turning the page of his hymnal, there are a billion billion other fathers who are burning alive, caught in the fire that started after they dozed off and dropped the pipe on the carpet.

Everything that is possible has already happened.

This is because a great deal of unlikely things are possible all the time.  How many chances do you have every day for a once-in-a-million experience?  (A lot.)  They don't happen to most of you, but they certainly happen to at least one of you.  And that lucky one goes on to spawn their own nested set of a billion billion universes.

This is a lot of mass and energy, but its not infinite.  And of course, the parallel universes don't interact.

Unless you are an Outsider.

4. Outsiders span the parallel dimensions.  For the most part, they can't move anything between universes except knowledge.

Each Outsider is dimly aware of all of its local parallel selves--those who are separated by only a recent branch in the timeline.  It's a fuzzy, ever-changing qualification, but it works.

So when an Outsider enters combat and makes an attack roll that has a 75% chance of hitting, they can see 15 slightly different universes where the attack hit, and 5 universes where the attack missed.  One of those universes is their own, while the other 19 are their local neighbor-selves.  And each of those universes will have it's own branches (for different results of the damage die, for example).

This awareness gives them a different sense of perspective than us.  Since they spread across a billion universes, fighting a billion (non-unified) foes, they don't mind losing a few battles in order to win the war.

They don't think like we do, in terms of life and death, winning and losing.  They think in terms of percentages.  This fight is 94% victorious.  That poisoned killed 25% of me.  I devoured 99.9% of her bodies.

It is very hard to die permanently in the multiverse, since if it is at all possible for you to be alive, you will be alive somewhere.  The only cost is influence (more on that later).

In combat, an Outsider might stand perfectly still and allow you to hit it.  It is learning how hard you can hit, and how much damage you can do.  It will use this information to triumph against you in a billion other worlds.

In combat, an Outsider might flee even though it seems to be winning.  It needs to scout out another room so that all of its billion twins can use that information in their universes.  It's already pulled your brains out of your sinuses in a billion universes; it can afford to squander this one, since the other billion selves need a piece of information more than they need one more negligible victory.

In combat, an Outsider might hurl itself at you, nearly suicidal.  Again, it is not trying to defeat it, merely learn from you, so that all of its other selves can triumph in their respective universes.

And when you talk to an Outsider, be assured that each of the billion Outsiders is asking you a different question.

One will ask you what your name is.  Once you answer, they will all know.

Simultaneously, in a different universe, another Outsider will ask another you where you are from.  Once you answer, they will all know.

Simultaneously, in a different universe, another Outsider will ask another you what you are doing here.  Once you answer, they will all know.

That's three questions.  There are still 9,999,997 other Outsiders asking questions.  Is it small wonder that some of the questions they ask seem nonsensical or trivial?

So when the first thing they say to you is, "Lettuce or Cabbage?", rest assured that it is not a trivial question.  They've already asked you all the important questions in parallel universes and gotten their answers.  They're just going for completion.

Talking to an Outsider is enormously one-sided.  A billion humans ask a billion questions to a billion Outsiders, but its the same question.  A billion Outsiders ask a billion questions to a billion humans, and each one is different.  The human learns one thing.  The Outsider learns a billion (including whether you prefer lettuce or cabbage).

This is why people say that Nobodies or slaad are insane.  (Slaad are the closest thing we have to "naturalized" Outsiders.)   Humans see only the battle in their own house, and miss the war consuming the city.

It is not insane to allow themselves to be struck dead.  They will kill a billion of you with the knowledge they gain.

It is not insane to flee from a combat that they are winning.  They have already triumphed a billion times, and this will allow them to gain some small knowledge.

It is not insane to ask strange questions, like "What color was your mother's horse?"  They have already asked a billion questions.  (That's how they learned your mother rode a horse.)

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".

---

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