Goblin Filthomancer

How Human Sages Explain Filthomancy

How much information is there on a sheet of printed paper?

There's the printed words, and all of their coded and uncoded meanings.  Perhaps the choice of font and ink can tell you about the era and region of origin.  The paper can tell stories, too, of trees and glue and grinding metal.

Now, tear the paper up.  Has the information increased or decreased?

A clever mind can match the edges, and a steady hand can reassemble them.  All of the original information is still there--and a great deal more.  What was the shape of the hand that tore the paper?  Fingers, claws, or blades?  Was the force strong or subtle?  Was the paper gnawed upon as if by vermin, or was it carefully folded before its trauma?

There are obvious limitations--the system gains information even as it loses accessibility, and of course completeness is always a problem.  But these are not insurmountable.  The elegant mathematics of chaos can unmix two dyes as well as it can blend them.  Decay informs as much as construction.

Now that you know this, you must realize that a rotten tome contains a secret chapter, accessible only to some.  The filthomancers know this--they know that a handful of grave dust can speak louder than the living man ever did.  It is truly a wonderous lens through which they gaze out at us, learning carpentry from ashes, and hearing long-dead voices sing out in the crunch of a dead leaf.

How Goblin Filthomancers Explain Filthomancy

Okay, okay.  Shut up.

The first thing you want to do is--

I said shut up!  Clasp ya hole or yammer afar, cotter's bean!

The first thing ya start doing, is you gotta start stretching.  Stretch yer hoops!  Yer neck!  Not your pungies, though.

Practice bending over, then touching your toes.  Thenways, ya fine a big rock with a crack in it and you start sleeping innit, folded over.  If you can't sleep whats bendwise folded, drink some scumbo to grease yer dreams.

Wait, shit.  No, shit.  Wait.  The first thing ya do is stop bathing.  That's the most important thing.  I should have started with that.

Second thing you do is make flexible.

Once you're flexible enough to bend right around, you gotta stick ya face into your own crotch.  Really--and I can't stress this enough--you really gotta stick ya nose in there.  Ya smell that?  That's yer fundus, yer fundament, that's ya animal soul, what ya been ignoring.  That's the real you.

Anyway, then you hyperventilate until you pass out.  Try to get your nostrils to cover your whole taint.

This is the start of self-awareness, and that's the start of business.

from WHFRP, 1st Edition

The Goblin Filthomancer

Restrictions

You lose all of your spellcasting abilities if you are ever cleaned.  Gently easing yourself into the water is fine, but if you fall into water or spend more than a minute in the stuff, you lose your spellcasting.  You can regain your spellcasting by spending 10 minutes rolling around in a dirty place.

Boons

Immunity from stench.

Theories of Dust -- decrepit or crumbling books are always legible.

(More broadly, no method of destruction can obscure the information content of an object, as long as all of the pieces are there.  You can smash a chair into tiny splinters and a filthomancer can still tell you what the original carvings were.  Burning makes a book inaccessible (since a lot of information leaves with the smoke).  Likewise, using a statue to make cement also obscures the statue, since not all pieces of the statue are visible.  A stone tablet that has been ground into dust is still 100% readable, and just as easily as the original object.)

Starting Equipment

Giant Back Scratcher (as staff),

Bag of "Magic Dust" (mostly skin flakes) that they sometimes cast on objects but also causes sneezing.

Spellbook (varies, but is usually encoded into their tangled, dirty hair)

While filthomancers can grind their spellbook into dust as use it just as easily, sacks of dust tend to get blown away by wind or dispersed by water, and so dust-books are shunned by adventuring filthomancers (but not sedentary ones--sedentary filthomancers use all sorts of things as "books", and eventually learn to use broken housewares as easily as intact ones).

Spells

1. barf
2. burp
3. booger
4. decrepitate
5. dust bunny
6. entropium
7. fart
8. mend
9. piss
10. psychometry

Barf
T: self  R: 10' cone  D: 0
You take [dice] damage unless you've eaten in the last 30 minutes.  All objects in range take [sum] acid damage.

Burp
As message, except that it carries [dice] words and [dice] smells, delivered in any order you wish.  Also gives you a new saving throw against any ingested or inhaled poison.

Booger
T: self  R: 1 mile  D: until divested
You pick a booger out of your nose.  You have [dice] senses that extend through the booger.  Sight counts as two senses.  If you put your booger in someone else's nose, you can also control what they smell.  Flicking a booger with any accuracy requires an attack roll.

Sidebar: Goblin Greetings
A quick tug on the nose is a casual hello, but friends usually greet each other by picking their nose and putting the booger into their friend's nose.  Because of this, blowing your nose is considered very rude.

Decrepitate
T: object  R: 50'  D: 0
Object ages.  You can age a single part of a living creature by [sum] years.  Objects damaged by the passage of time take [sum] damage and become tarnished.  This is the opposite of mend.  This spell is also useful for aging wine instantly.  If decrepitate is cast on an object multiple times, only the highest [sum] applies.

Dust Bunny
T: dust  R: 10'  D: until you cast another spell
You spit into the dust and create [dice] dust bunnies.  They're basically just soot sprites from Spirited Away.  You can probably get them to do stuff for you if you feed them candy or liquor.  They're not very smart.

Entropium
T: object  R: touch  D: 6 rounds
A touched object becomes more disordered.  The letters in a book become more scrambled every round.  A soup becomes extremely well-mixed.  A trombone warps to become out of tune.  And a living creature takes [dice] damage each turn, as their face and organs become slightly asymmetrical.  (The damage mostly comes from mild, systemic hemorraging, as certain capillaries no longer line up quite right.)

Fart
T: creature  R: 100'  D: 1 minute
You rip a tremendously loud fart.  Although others may get faint whiffs of it, only your target will smell its full strength.  As message, except the only message a single, chosen foetor and does [sum] stench damage.  If this damage does not kill the target, the damage vanishes 2 rounds later.

Mend
T: object  R: 50'  D: 0
An object repairs itself.  Broken swords rejoin, and ancient metal regains its luster.  Objects regain [sum] hit points.  Because the scars and mental clutter are essential to wisdom, if you cast this spell on someone's head within 10 minutes of them making a decision, they have a [sum]-in-20 chance of behaving foolishly.

Piss
T: self  R: 0  D: 0
If you are poisoned, you piss out the poison.  This works on drunkenness.  Additionally, if you invest 2 MD, the piss poison retains its potency, and can be reused.  Additionally, if invest 3 MD, it also works on curses, and you can piss up to 50' away.

Psychometry
T: object: R: self  D: 10 minutes
You learn the physical history of an object, essentially learning about everything that has affected that object.  Every scuff, every sun-fade, every ingrained odor.  1 MD yields you minor revelations, while 4 MD gives you a staggering, encyclopedic knowledge of the object's entire history (down to learning about the wildlife that lived on the mountains where the ore was mined that was used to make the sword).

Legendary Spells of the Filthomancer

These spells are not learned by leveling up.  Instead, they are discovered in dungeons and other perilous places.

Arcanodynamics
T: spell or magic effect  R: 50'  D: permanent
Only works on spells that have a duration.  (Permanent and instantaneous spells are unchanged).  You can choose to either double the intensity while halving the duration, or vice versa.  You must invest a number of MD equal to (or greater than) the strength of the spell effect.

Power Word: Shit
T: self  R: 0  D: 8 hours
You take a big, smelly shit.  Your shit stinks to everyone except [dice] categories of creatures that you have chosen to exclude.  Those creatures take [dice] damage per round that they smell your shit.  A creature is immune to this damage if they pinch their nose (requires a hand) and close their eyes tightly.  Regardless of damage and spell immunity, all affected creatures are repulsed by your shit as if by antipathy.  You can only cast this spell once per day, and only if you ate a big dinner the night before.  You can throw your shit up to 50', but it requires a second action.

Where is Filth?

A lot of the filthomancer's abilities depend on being able to spit in dusty place, or to roll around in a dirty place.  These qualities depend on your DM (and you should ask how common they are before you roll a filthomancer) but it is fair to say that your average dungeon is probably quite filthy.

I found this guy when I googled "garbage goblin" and he is also quite lovely.
From here.

New Wizard: Baboonist

This should come to no surprise to anyone, but nature never gave us the baboon.

How could they?  The face, the teeth, the genitals, the cruel intelligence of the baboon--these things set it apart from their fellow beasts.  They are artificial, as false as any other chimera.

Technically not a baboon.

You'll find most baboonists among the nobility.  Baboons require a large amount of space and food, and require a large amount of resources.

Besides, many noble families enjoy employing the baboons as thugs--equipping them with blackjacks and matching vests.

Baboonist

Restrictions

You may never employ any hirelings except baboons.  You may never use any mount or war beast except a baboon.  If you break this rule, your baboons will realize your treachery as soon as they see you or smell you, and they will immediately revolt and never again obey your commands.  Your baboons are assholes.

One of your starting spells is always create baboon.

Boons

You can command a number of HD 1 baboons equal to the size of your liver.  To increase the size of your liver, you must eat livers from magical creatures.  Each liver eaten this way increases your liver by 1 size, up to the HD of the magical creature minus 1.  You start with a size 1 liver.

Baboons

The name is a misnomer.  A baboon can be a baboon, mandrill, or various mandrilloids (permutations of the mandrill schema).  The provenance of the liver determines the type of primate produced by the create baboon spell.

You can only give your baboons commands as a group.  They will not allow themselves to be separated or to be commanded separately.  Treat your baboons as a single pile of HP.  For every 4 points of damage the baboons take, one of the baboons dies.  the horde makes a single attack, with +1 to Attack and damage for every baboon beyond the first.

The baboons will not do anything helpful unless commanded to.  This means that your first round of combat is usually spent telling you baboons what to do.  They can understand up to three words, optionally accompanied by you pointing at something.

Spell List

1. calm
2. create baboon
3. rage
4. Shadoom's serpecation
5. speak with beast
6. weigh heart
7. psychography (variant: your baboons do the writing)
8. spider climb
9. overload baboon
10. secret beasts
11. golden needle
12. possess baboon

Legendary Spells

1. wild polymorph
2. elevate beast

Mishap
You take damage equal to whatever the doubles showed (1-6), and. . .
1. You are silenced.  (Int check at the start of each round to end; lasts at least 1 round.)
2. You are blinded.  (Con check at the start of each round to end; lasts at least 1 round.)
3. You lose all prepared spells except one, randomly determined.
4. You cast a random prepared spell at a random target with a random number of MD.
5. You start turning into a baboon.  Body party chosen at random: face, tail, hands, fur.
6. You learn wild polymorph.  If you've already gotten this result in the past, wild polymorph is instantly cast on you.

Doom
You turn into a foul-tempered baboon for 1 hour.  You, and all of your baboons, go on a rampage.  They will flee difficult combat in favor of easiest targets and/or rampant vandalism.  You forget that you were ever anything other than a baboon.
2. As above, except for 1 day.
3. As above, except permanent.

Also not a baboon.

Appendix A: Spells and Shit

New Rules: Mixed Success in Spellcasting

Some spells have graduations of success.  You invest your magic dice normally, but only the highest roll counts for the result.  The more dice you invest, the greater your chance of a critical success.

1-3 = Mixed Success

4-5 = Full Success

6   = Critical Success

Create Baboon
R: touch    T: primate    D: permanent
The ingredients required to make a baboon are 8 hours, a fresh liver, and a live mammal.  The animal must be fed a large amount of the liver.  (Rats can be purchased in a major city for 1c.)

Mixed Success -- Disfigured baboon causes you 1d6 Cha damage.
Full Success -- You create a normal baboon.
Critical Success -- Brilliant baboons allow you to give more complex commands.  (+1 word)

Shadoom's Serpication
R: touch  T: creature  D: permanent
Target is cured of a poison, which they vomit out in the form of a serpent.  The form of serpent depends on the type of the poison.  Although they look exotic, these new species behave like normal snakes.

Mixed Success -- Serpent immediately attacks you, and acts normally afterwards.
Full Success -- Serpent acts normally.
Critical Success -- Serpent is nonaggressive to you and will obey one command, once.

Weigh Heart
R: touch  T: heart  D: instant
You hold a heart in your hands.  The creature does not get a save, but [sum] must equal or exceed its Level.  You learn the best and worst thing that the creature has ever done (in the creature's own estimation).

Psychography (Baboon Version)
R: 50'  T: baboons  D: 1 hour
Ingredients: writing utensils and appropriate surfaces.  After one hour, one of your baboons will bring you the best piece of writing they've accomplished so far.

Mixed Success -- Pure gibberish.  Eroded Shakespeare.
Full Success -- The last interesting thing that happened here.
Critical Success -- The last two interesting things that happened here.

Overload Baboon
R: 50'  T: baboon  D: permanent
Each round, target baboon gets +1 to Attack and Damage.  At the end of each round, the baboon has a 1-in-4 chance of exploding.

Secret Beasts
R: 50'  T: creature D: permanent
Up to [dice] willing creatures are hidden inside of your body for [sum] hours.  (If you are a baboonist, up to [sum] baboons can be hidden this way.)  This lasts until either you or the creatures wish to be ejected (a free action).  Creatures hidden this way manifest on your skin--for example, a blond person will put blond hairs on your skin.

Golden Needle
R: touch  T: creature  D: 2 * [dice] rounds
Target creature takes Xd6 damage once the spell dissipates, where X was the spell's duration.  You can end the spell early as a free action.

Possess Baboon
R: 50'  T: baboon  D: [sum] rounds
Exactly what it says on the tin.  If the baboon is your baboon, it gets no saving through.

Wild Polymorph
R: 50'  T: creature  D: [sum] rounds
Look up [sum] random creatures (use the index in your bestiary) and choose one.  The target turns into the chosen creature.

Elevate Beast
R: touch  T: beast  D: permanent
Touched beast immediately turns into a beastman with an intelligence of [sum]-[dice].  You permanently lose 1 Wis and 1 Cha.  You choose how much of your memories, knowledge, goals, and personality you want to copy into the beastman.

The Dustwind and the Zaris Malgunnun

I started writing Centerra setting info back in 2010.  One of the first things I wrote were these places: the Dustwind and the Zaris Malgannum.  You can tell its from an early source because 'Dustwind' is sort of a stupid name (see also: Underdark).  August 20th, 2010 to be precise.

'Zaris Malgannum' is pretty awesome though.  I love that name.

every name on this map has a writeup somewhere in my computer

The Dustwind

The Dustwind was formed when Eladras fell to Earth.

Eladras was the ancient elven homeland: an enormous tree.  It's roots were in the moon, and the furthest tips of its branches brushed the mountaintops of Centerra.

It survived the Time of Fire and Madness only to later succumb to its own, private apocalypse.

Many of its fragments persisted as free-falling orbital biomes.  The druids somehow salvaged a seed and used it to grow Aglabendis, the Tree of Beasts, destined to destroy all civilization.  Its dead roots form the halls of Rah Shem Bool, the greatest of the lunar cities.

When the pieces fell into the Dustwind, they shattered.  Long limbs crossed valleys, each chambered with elven homes and entomo-gardens.

Even with a disaster of that magnitude, many elves survived.  Their homes were shattered, filled with the unreachable corpses of their families.  Many were killed as more flaming debris fell from the sky over the next night.

But the elves had hope, and they had magic.  They coaxed life back into the dying branches.  They sent down fresh roots and grew new branches.  Lights gleamed from the windows of new-sprung gall-houses for a while.  Taproots uncovered water, deep under the Dustwind.

They would have survived if Zevernus hadn't found them.

Zevernus

Zevernus is the eponymous Dustwind.  He is a Wind, like many other spirits of the air.

Unlike them, he is not of this world.  He is a refugee from the Milk Star, one of nine stars the Church has identified as moral hazards.

Those who observe the Milk Star for too long become determined to travel there.  This desire becomes obsessive and self-destructive, and many of its victims die in the pursuit of this foolish mania.

Sometimes, however, the victims leap skyward on moonless nights, and fly away cackling.  They are never heard from again.

Star-fools who are restrained from flying to their star eventually go howling mad.  After several weeks of this, they eventually die, leaving behind an empty husk and a pool of poisonous 'milk', hence the name of the star.

But I digress.

Zevernus hails from that evil star.  He has never been persuaded, befriended, nor coerced into telling what he knows of that place.  He spends his days and nights arranging the sand into vast geometric patterns.  Whether art or alphabet, no one knows.

He has been described as a "sucking" wind, rather than the regular "blowing" winds that we are all familiar with.  He has strange powers of desiccation and fossilization.  When he discovered the new-sprung elven homes, he destroyed them utterly.

He usually doesn't deign to interact with small groups of travelers, unless they interfere with his work.

The Petrified Forests

These are the last remnants of the elven refugees.  Half-buried ridges of petrified trees.

Beneath most of them are the hollow sections of elven construction.  Some are chambers from the original Eladras, with all of their strange wonder and artifice.  Other rooms are newly constructed, filled with the hopeful collections of desperate elves, and their fossilized bones.

These places are haunted by enormous, translucent ants.  Some say that they are elves who transformed themselves to survive the Dustwind.  Whatever the case, the ants seem to be uncannily familiar with elven technology, and are not accosted by protective enchantments or the surviving elven ashakkas (wood golems).

The Highway

Before the Great Tree fell, and perhaps before the arrival of Zevernus, there existed a system of aquaducts.

Now they exist only as sort of highway across the desert.  In some places, you can walk atop them for miles.  In other places, only the posts remain to guide you across the trackless hills of that place.

Many of the pillars have names and constructed shelters, as the desert does have its share of pilgrims.  Some of the pillars hold shrines.

At least one stylite calls the desert home, and meditates atop one section.  Her name is Vangoda, and she is an excellent source of information about the Dustwind.

And lastly, those who camp on the elevated highway are safe from the Dustwind's most famous danger, the Grinding People.

The Grinding People

They are basically zombies.  They run across the desert in large groups.  Most of them don't have arms.  They are called the Grinding People because they constantly grind their teeth.  It is the only sound that they make.

If you are bitten by one, you will be compelled to seek them out and join them.  Your mind will rot away, your soul will leak away from your flesh, and eventually your arms will fall off.  (The transition to undeath is very gradual, like a ghoul's.)

Their constant presence makes drives most travelers to the Highway.

The anatomy of the grinding people is unusual.  They grow teeth in their stomachs.  If you cut them open, their stomachs will be full of polished teeth, gleaming like pearls.  And their shoulders never seal over into stumps, but instead remains as holes.

When the arms fall off, they all crawl towards the Zaris Malgannum.

Digression Time: Endosymbiosis Theory

Wikipedia does a better job explaining it, but this is basically the idea that the mitochondria in our cells were once their own species.  Here's the quick version.

A long time ago, there was a single-celled organism that ate another, smaller single-celled organism, which persisted inside the first one.  The smaller organism persisted inside the larger one, breeding true.  And what's more, it proved to be really good at oxidative respiration, which was great for the larger cell, because it could get more energy out of its food.

The smaller cell went on to become mitochondria, which are present in all animal cells as an organelle with a fucked-up origin story.  The larger cells went on to become us (among other things).

This is perhaps similar to human gut bacteria, which can perform digestive feats that we cannot.  After we eat food, they eat the same food, making digestion more efficient.  Everyone wins.

With eons, the mitochondria lost a lot of their functionality.  They were no longer complete cells, and could no longer reproduce on their own.  They were just an appendage of the larger cell, entirely dependent on it.  Parts of the mitochondria genome fell away and were incorporated in the human genome.  We took their DNA and made it our own, in order to keep our pets alive.

Current mitochondria are vastly reduced things, a shadow of what they once were.  Mitochondria are so devoted to cellular respiration, that they are incapable of anything else.

Anyway, this is true for human mitochondria as well as for human hands.

Human Hands

Once there was a species of animal.  It was a mammal.  It didn't have hands or anything resembling hands.  It had hooves to help it run, or perhaps hooks to help it climb in the trees.

And there was another animal.  What it looked like wasn't important.  All that's important is that it had hands, and that it was most certainly not a mammal.

At some point, the first animal ate the second animal.  And against all odds, the second animal persisted within the first.  Not bodily, but functionally, it persisted in the germline.

<digression> Skeletons have a similar-but-different arrangement based on the Covenant of Flesh, made between the Flesh God and the Skeleton God long ago. </digression>

In fact, if you were to bring a microscope to Centerra and dissect some early human embryos, you would see that the hands develop independently from the body.  Only in the ninth week do they fully attach and become integrated into its body.

The second animal, the one that first invented hands, did not extinct.  The descendants from that ancient race persist, and can be found in the Zaris Malgannum.

The Zaris Malgannum

It's built like a strip mine.  An inverted ziggurat, ovoid and imperfect.  You can see the white walls from across the Dustwind, where they sheared through the shale strata of fossilized seabed.

The bottom floor of the inverted ziggurat is a vast mirror.  No dust collects there.  Zevernus is careful not to litter its surface, and the smaller winds of the Dustwind follow his example.

There are many entrances into the Zaris Malgannum, which weaves itself around the inverted ziggurat like a negative space bird's nest.

This is where hands breed true, with no human parasitizing their biology.

The ambrago are the final surviving finger on this evolutionary limb.  They are the masters of the Zaris Malgannum.

If you were to look upon one, you would see a tall, broad man in a heavy cloak.  The head is a giant hand, or something very much like a hand.

The rest of the ambrago's biology is concealed beneath the cloak.  They walk like old men, because they are old.  They suffer from a particular type of ossifying carpiculosis that inflames their synovia, and they have a great deal of joints.

Underneath the cloak is something like a man with bifurcated limbs, giving it a total of four limbs and eight hands.  All the limbs end in hands.  Though they walk like men, they run like horses.

At the center of their body is something akin to a face.  A beak-like mouth, ringed with palps and tactile hairs.  Radiating canals of auditory sulci.  Two more manipulating organs, similar to hands, attend to the face.

Ambragos communicate through a series of whistles, created by blowing through their hands.  They copulate through clapping, and spawn through budding.  Their crawling babies are nearly identical to human hands.

There's more to them than just the hand-theme.  They entomb their dead inside colonies of carnivorous plants that resemble coral.  They obtained the obedience of Zevernus by getting him addicted to ambragian music, which they practice religiously.  They sleep underneath furniture that resembles a padded turtle shell.  They eat spiced vegetables, threaded on long strings.

They employ a sort of weaponized feng shui.  Certain rooms become poisonous if the furniture is removed.  Taking certain paths through their labyrinthine dungeon causes brain lesions.  The players will have to learn some of these as they go: e.g. going under two arches of the same color in a row causes paralysis.

and you can use puzzles like this

The players won't care about most of this.  They'll just see the magic staves topped with big hands and the hand-faces and start with the puns.  You've been warned.

The ambrago are more than a little bit disgusted by the hands that humans have growing at the ends of their wrists.  They'll sever any hands that they can, and awaken them back into their rightful sentience.  Awoken human hands don't "grow" into adult ambrago, but they are usually loyal to the ambrago. 

Are there giant hands that serve the ambrago?  Of course.

Is there a severed hand of a titan in there as well?  Only one: Ashrendar's right hand.  (The titan's were primordial fire gods.  Each one was linked to a volcano that shared their name, like a dryad with her tree.)

All hands are their domain. 

They are very reasonable, and they are not evil.  But still, they will not want you to leave with your stolen appendages.  Humans are abominations, chimeras of two species.

Some Hand Themed Spells

• Bigby's Hand.
• Applause.  Opponent repeats the last action for 1d6 turns.
• Finger Wag.  Opponent is banned from repeating its last action for 1d12 turns.
• Magic Slaps.  Very high damage to unarmored opponents, very minimal damage to armored opponents.
• Handiwork.  Does 10 hours of unskilled labor instantly.
• Control Limb.
• Detach Limb.  You still can't see out of it.  At a higher level, the limb can fly. 

PLANTS: Monsters, Spells, Items

So I'm writing a plant-themed dungeon.

I've never written something so strongly-themed before.  It just seems cheesy.  Lava dungeon with fire monsters.  Snowy mountain with ice monsters and slippery floors.

I'm having more fun with it than I thought I would.  There's plenty of diversity in plants.

What is This Post?

I'm going to try to invent some content for my forest dungeon.  I'm going to do that by identifying plant themes and then expanding them.

Godzilla vs Biollante

Theme: Growth

Okay, this one is a little stupid.  When you see plant magic in video games and fiction, it's always about growth.  Bellsprout used growth, etc.  The fact is that everything grows.  And I'd argue that a baby whale's growth (gaining 200 lbs every day) is way more impressive than any feats of growth that plants do.

It's anthropocentric.  We can think of all sorts of things that whale's do, but when it comes to plants, we're stumped.  What do plants do?  I guess they just. . . grow.

I don't want to discard Growth, because its so universal though.  Maybe we can make it interesting?

Monster: Evil Tree
HD 10  AC chain  Int 10
Drop Seeds -- An evil tree has 2d6 evil seeds growing from it.  As a standard action, it can drop as many or as few as it wants.  Dropped seeds immediately begin gaining HD (see below).  They can grow 1d4 seeds per day.  It is possible to attack seeds on the tree (HD 0, HP 1), but only with a ranged weapon.

Wants: General evil stuff.  Blood.  Sacrifices.  Cults.  The "performance" of evil.

Evil trees have no attacks besides their seeds.  They are reluctant to drop all of them at once, because they would be defenseless once all of the seeds die.  They are smart enough to use this ability intelligently.

They are capable of speech.  Horrible, groaning speech.

Monster: Evil Seed
HD 0/1/2/3/4  AC chain  Claw 0/d4/d6/d8/d10
Move as human  Int 6
Impossible Growth -- At the beginning of each round, an evil seed gains 1 HD (HP increases as well) and increasing their damage by 1 die size (starting with 1d4), up to a max of 4 HD and 1d10 damage.  If an evil seed reaches HD 4, it gains the ability to shoot a laser from its eye (1d10, 50' range).  They die after they've been alive for 1 hour.

The seeds begin growing immediately into horrible little plant creatures, with shriveled bark, mouthless faces, cyclopean eyes, tentacular hair, and bony claws.

Item/Spell: Oak Elixir
If administered to plant, it immediately grows to be a large adult specimen of the appropriate type (as if 50 years had passed).  If consumed by an animal, immediately grows to be a large adult (1d4 inches taller than average, for a human).

Item/Spell: Acorn Elixir
The opposite of an Oak Elixir. It turns plants into seeds and adult animals into adorable juveniles.
\
Item/Spell: Potion of Monstrosity
Pour on a plant or object.  That plant or object is now a monster of HD 1d6 that is ready to rampage.  If someone drinks it, they get all monstrous and rage.

Theme: Immobility

Sure, I guess I can't argue with that one. Plants don't move much.

How do we make it interesting in combat?  Gus mentioned a reskinned roper: that's a good one.  A tree that constantly throws lassos (or nooses) and tries to drag people into its toothy maw.

Or we could give it ranged attacks.  Darts, spines, or perhaps EXPLODING FRUIT.

Seriously, bombfruit tree.  Great idea.  Especially if combined with

Monster: Dendroid

This is just a tree with a skinny version of mind-flayer powers.  Telepathy, mind blast, illusion, dominate person.  When it gets damaged, it pulls itself into the ground.  To fully kill it, you have to dig it out.

All of these things are possible because its actually a sessile species of octopus, not a tree.  (Octopi are capable of other feats of amazing mimicry, so this seems entirely plausible to me.)

Item: Arboreal Helm
At will, you can turn into a tree, quadrupling your height but not allowing you to break through ceilings (your branches grow to the side instead).  As a tree, you heal 1 HP per hour in sunlight.

Item: Oaken Sword
A creature stabbed with this magic sword must make a save vs magic.  If they fail, they are immediately turned into a small oak tree.  (Yes, this effectively makes the sword a single use item.)

Inverted Theme: Hypermobile Plants

Zelda's peahats are a good example.  Let's invert it as hard as we can.

Monster: Astronomer Pines

These are ancient pine trees.  When you piss one off, it blasts off like a rocket ship.  Fire shoots from the tip of each of its roots.  It looks messily efficient, with every root tip twisting independently-but-nearly mindlessly.

It can fire lasers straight down, and only straight down.  The lasers come from the central tap root.

Alternatively, it can cast levitate offensively, in order to pull you up to its roots, where it can grab you and crush you.

Monster: Tumblesnatchers
HD 2  AC leather  Snatch 0+grab
Move 12  Int 4

These are monstrous tumbleweeds.  They appear in groups of 1d4+2.  Each tumbleweed attempts to trap someone inside itself.  Once it has a prisoner, the tumblesnatcher immediately heads off in a random direction, exposing the poor prisoner to whatever perils await in that (potentially unexplored) room.  If allowed, they just keep rolling around.

<Design Note>This is a good example of a monster integrating into the dungeoncrawl.  Party cohesion is a very important thing for surviving a dungeon.  Having a monster that attacks that is rare, but potentially effective.  A more extreme example would be a trap/monster that teleports you to a different part of the dungeon.</Design Note>

Theme: Poison

This is potentially a very broad theme.  You've got the pokemon trio of effects (HP poison, paralysis, sleep) plus hallucinations and a bunch of boring debuffs.

HP poison should be horrible (given that it has more chances to be stopped, compared to regular HP damage).  For very poisonous creatures (save or die), the deadly poison should be telegraphed beforehand.  (Similar to how players should never be surprised when they get level drained.)

Nightshade Boy
HD 1  AC leather  Touch 0+poison (1d6)
Elites -- Nightshade boys with maximum HP carry a fruit, which functions as an antidote to their poison.

Glass cannons.  They can potentially do 3d6 damage  on a hit (if the Con check is also failed).  That alone, should give the players pause.  They're a bit like spiders in that regard (lil guys with horrible poisons).

Nightshade boys are also intelligent enough to spread their attacks around, in order to poison the greatest number of people possible.

Poppy Boy

Like a nightshade boy, except their touch does 1d6+sleep.

Glory Boy

Big blue flowers.  Cause hallucinations even before they walk into the room.

Hemlock Boys

Hemlock causes ascending paralysis before death.  It's pretty cool.  Instead of damaging HP, they just paralyze your legs, then your arms, then your heart.  You have to find the antidote before you die.  Fun!

Could be a part of a puzzle, or a dungeon-specific challenge.

Poison Tree

Everyone in this room of takes 1 HP damage per round until the tree is dead.  A very videogamey mechanic, but still a fun one, I think.  Must be paired with other things in the room that are trying to kill you (in order to give players an interesting choice).

I wouldn't try to disguise the fact that the tree is causing the deadly room effect.  That seems too much like pixel bitching.

Theme: Fire Vulnerability

This is pretty anthropocentric.  We think of things that plants do and we're like "I guess you can use them as firewood, too" even though trees are way less vulnerable to fire than humans are.  I'd like to see a human survive a forest fire.

If you wanted to gameify it, you could just say that all plants take half damage from bludgeoning and double +50% damage from fire.  That seems mechanically satisfying, I guess.

Treants could make morale checks when confronted with large amounts of fire (more than just a few torches).

Inverted Theme: Fire Power

Monster: Dragon Tree

Stats as dragon, except immobile.  Looks cool as fuck.  Arrows combust before they strike it, and slingstones can't hurt it.  More of a puzzle than a monster.  How to get past it is one puzzle.  How to kill it is another.

Theme: Fruit

This one also seems pretty anthropocentric, but alright.

Well, I already mentioned bombfruit, didn't I?

Tumble melons were one of my first blog posts ever.

Item: Dancing Mango

Look sorta like a starfish.  When it falls off the tree (or is plucked) it starts dancing.  If you eat it, you start dancing (and cannot stop until you collapse of exhaustion).  Everyone who you start dancing with is affected by the same thing (as irresistible dance) except you are the only "contagious" one.

Item: Potion Fruit

Fruits make great replacement potions.  That's what you get when the wizard waters a strawberry plant with displacer beast droppings and wizard jism.

Theme: Parasitic Plants

Monster: Slavedriver Orchid

This is an orchid that grows on your head and it drives you like a chariot.  It yells (squeaks?) and pulls on your ears to direct you where to go.

Theme: Sun Power

This one's a little bit silly, because sunlight isn't as energy dense as we depict it in fiction.  Superman would get more energy by eating a hamburger than he would by laying in the sun all day.

But like Growth and Fire Weakness, Sun Power is difficult to shake.

Item: Black Phantom Bushes

So there is a huge arms race among plants for sunlight.  Trees win it by being taller than their neighbors, and by spreading their arms wider.  Vines win it by climbing trees.  Smaller plants win it by requiring less sunlight altogether.

The black phantom bush has solved this problem by making things invisible.  You see, if its neighboring trees are invisible, then sunlight goes right through them, allowing the black phantom bush to bask in all of the sunlight that is wishes.

They are sometimes surrounded by invisible trees, or by invisible logs (from invisible trees that died due to lack of sunlight).

If you kick a black phantom bush, you will piss it off, and it will turn you invisible.  This also causes you to go blind (because how would you see, if light is going straight through your eyeballs

Theme: Mimicry

Item: The Orchid Wife

It's an enormous skin-colored orchid.  It changes colors to match the skin tones of its prey.

From a distance, it looks like a woman, opening her arms invitingly.  Players will feel compelled to embrace her.  This is not like a suggestion spell, just. . . it seems like the thing to do.

Anyone who embraces the orchid will lose 1d6 Con as the lotus drinks their blood through their skin.  During this feeding, the orchid will fill their head with peaceful dreams and botanical wisdom, causing them to gain 10 XP for every point of Con lost.

As they pull away from the orchid, it will seem to carefully dab the blood from their skin, similar to a human grooming another.  This is just the flower collecting the last of the blood.

Once a player has gained 100 XP from the orchid, they will be compelled (magically, forcefully this time) to protect the orchid.  They will consider it to be their orchid, and will not want to share it.  They will probably want to marry it.  At this point, they can choose to feed or not feed the orchid whenever they wish (it can survive without blood).  They can still gain XP from the orchid once per session.

They'll probably put it next to a window, in their house.  If they don't have a house, the orchid will motivate them to settle down and get one.  You want to protect your orchid, right?  You don't want to take your precious orchid dungeoneering with you, right?

Most "spouses" talk to their orchids while feeding them.  Pillow-talk, really.  The strange wisdom imparted by the orchid sometimes allows the feeder to come to useful, common-sense conclusions.  (DM: Feel free to insert any information here that you think the party should have got, but missed.  Example: The shopkeeper is obviously a vampire.)

Honorable Mention: Little Petshop of Horrors

I guess Audrey II would make a good villain, but she's make a much better ally.  Especially if the players find her when she's all small and cute.

Wizard: Botanimancer 

You can make a botanimancer pretty easily by just pulling ideas from the themes above.

Restrictions

You cannot cast spells unless sunlight (or reasonable facsimile) has shone on you in the last 24 hours.

Perks

If you ever lose a limb, you can grow a new botanical one in 2 weeks.  Additionally, if you have speak with plants as one of your memorized spells, you can cast a 1 MP version of it for free.

Spell List

1. Entangle
2. Growth (as enlarge, except only on living things, long duration on plants)
3. Light
4. Tree Form*
5. Speak with Plant
6. Warp Wood
7. Awaken Treant
8. Hallucinate (or Confusion)
9. Heal
10. Poison Touch
11. Dessicate (AoE similar to fireball, efficacy varies by target type)
12. Wall of Wood
13. Legendary Spell: Seed* 
14. Legendary Spell: Treant Form

Seed
R: touch  T: object  D: permanent
An object gets turned into a seed.  It turns back into the original object only when submerged in a body of water sufficiently large enough to reconstitute the item with water mass.  You can use this spell offensively, but it has no effect on targets with HP greater than [sum] * 3.  The size of the object is also limited by the casting dice invested.

1 MP = handheld object
2 MP = human or chair
3 MP = giant or cottage.
4 MP = dragon or ship.  Alternatively, immaterial things such as happiness.

Tree Form
R: touch  T: creature  D: permanent
Primarily used to turn yourself into a tree.  You can still see and hear.  If you are in a suitable climate, you do not need to eat or drink.  You can remain as a tree for as long as you like (until you choose to dispel it).  You can use this spell offensively, but it has no effect on targets with HP greater than [sum] * 3.  They will remain a tree until you choose to dispel it.  You choose the species.

Yes, this allows you to turn the boss into a tree, and then make him into a nice chair.  It would look great in your house, beside your orchid wife.

Note on Save or Die Spells

I'm considering having all of them have the clause "no effect on targets with HP greater than [sum] * 3."  Or perhaps just including a keyword.

P.S.

More plant monsters here.

Door Wizard

Back when the True Elves ran things, the world was both bigger and closer together.

They had grabbed Space, bundled it up, and bound it into knots.  Everything was near everything else, and distance was as meaningless as maps.  They rarely bothered to learn where something was, since everything was just on the other side of the Door.

The Door was everywhere.  They called it the Gem of All-Facing.  They compared it to a box with infinite sides, and no interior.  It connected the distant corners.  It made everything adjacent.  Its doors were everywhere, with forms as varied as their destinations.

They called it the Door, but the doors were just its skin.  It's body was a lamellar labyrinth of hypertoroidal tissues, a universal linkage.  It's handlers could whistle and it would arrive, inserting itself as a local door.

It is rumored that they originally grew it from a blink dog.

When the Time of Fire and Madness came, the Door was fractured.  The knots were pulled, tightened, and torn.  Trillions of gallons of unseen blood boiled off into the Nowhere.  Skeins of odochrysm froze like ice on the surface of dead highways.

You can still see artifacts of that trauma all around the world, if you know where to look.

The doors in Old Clavenhorn all slightly shifted, torsioned within their frames, some bearing more sever scarring, such as midline offset (evidence of pandemic truncation of the Door's n-forks).

The road between Asria and Trystero is thirty miles longer in the northward direction than it is in the southward.  (And dogs always shiver when they walk south along it.)

And near Meltheria, there is the Enigma, the most enduring blasphemy against natural law.  Mages speculate that it was not the Door's heart, but perhaps it was where it first started to die.

A few fragments still remain intact, such as the nineteen windows in the palace of the Cerulean Slave-Kings.  Each one looks out on a different sea, and each one incurs a different type of insanity in anyone who passes through it.

Many other doors, we destroyed because of the danger they posed.  The spaces between the doors had grown strange.  Without the care and support of the True Elves, parts of the Door became carnivorous, and then cancerous.  They survived by feeding on themselves.  (Because while the outer world burned, what else was there to eat?)  Nested hallways, digesting themselves.  Negative space eroding and reconstituting through stolen architecture.  A war of cancers, empty places eating each other to death.

Parts of the Door are predatory, escaping the confines of their metastatic dimension and hunting through ours.  But always the old blood reasserts itself, always the schema of the hound.

If they have a point of origin, it is rumored to be a place called Tindalos.

from Full Metal Alchemist

Wizards of the Door

It is wrong to treat the Door as if it is a monolith.  It is a system perverted against itself, exactly like a human who is suffering from cancer.

Parts have gone rogue, and they have bitten at the heart of the superstructure.  But the superstructure remains--it must--and it remembers its duties.

These are the parts of the Door that the Wizards serve.

To become a Door Wizard, go mess around with portals and extradimensional spaces.  Alternatively, seek the elves (the only remaining practitioners of the teleport spell).

The Rules

Remember back when I was writing up wizard subtypes for the GLOG?  This is another one of those.

Restrictions

• You must never imprison a living creature, or allow one to be imprisoned.
• You must never harm a door, or allow one to be harmed.

Boons

• You begin the game with a skeleton key.  It unlocks the keyhole on your chest.  If unlocked, your chest can be safely opened and your heart removed.  This doesn't harm you, but you must obey any creature that holds your heart.
• You can cast a version of the knock spell that involves pushing your skeleton key into a creatures sternum (requires a successful attack roll).  The creature takes [sum] damage on a successful save, and dies on a failed save (as most creatures die when you messily open their rib cage).  (This requires you to cast the knock spell normally, by memorizing it from your spellbook.)
• The room created by your secret room spell becomes enlargable and decorateable.  Each dungeon key you feed it creates a new 400 sq. ft. room shaped however you wish that holds up to two pieces of furniture and/or decoration.  The created room, furniture, and decorations all match the style of the dungeon that generated the key.  (Only keys found in dungeons have this ability.)  At the DM's discretion, very important keys may generate NPCs within the secret room.

GLOG Wizard Rules: Players begin with two spells from this list generated by rolling d6. When they research a new spell, they roll a d12.  Spells #13 and #14 are rare spells, and are as rare as magic weapons in your game.

1. Knock
2. Lock
3. Map
4. Secret Room
5. Speak With Lock
6. Emergency Exit
7. Command Door
8. Summon Door Hound
9. Wall of Doors
10. Secret Chest
11. Transpose
12. All Things Adjacent

Rare Spells

13. Portal

14. Teleport

Spells

All Things Adjacent
R: 0
T: self
D: 1 turn

You are adjacent to all things within your line of sight.  You can punch anything you could see.  You can pick up any object and put it in your pocket as if it were beside you.  However, you are affected as if you were in every location at once.  (To put it in grid-based combat terms, you are affected by all effects effecting every observable square.)  You do not suffer multiple effects from the same hazard (even though you are standing in all parts of a wall of fire, you only take its damage once).  Obviously, casting this spell within sight of the sun is instantly fatal.

Command Door
R: 50'
T: door
D: until midnight
splittable
A door becomes your loyal servant until midnight.  This spell only affects doors that have been tamed (unlocked, detrapped, opened, and passed through).  Larger doors may require more casting dice (2 dice = double doors, stone doors, 3 dice = metal doors, enormous doors, 4 dice = magic doors).  The door will obey your verbal commands to open/close, lock/unlock, disarm/arm, and even attack.  An average wooden door deals 1d8 damage and attacks as a HD 4 creature.

If you control multiple doors within the same dungeon, you can cast this spell while investing 3 dice to link them together for 10 minutes.  Whatever enters one door exits the other.  You can decide which side of which door leads to which side of which door.

Emergency Exit
R: touch
T: [sum] objects
D: 0

Up to [sum] touched objects and/or creatures are teleported out of the dungeon.  They arrive safely, but are all scattered within 1 mile of the dungeon's primary entrance.  Each carried item has an independent 5% chance to be similarly scattered.

If used in a building, it will eject all objects and/or creatures from random entrances (each rolled separately).

If used in a city's streets, it will eject all objects and/or creatures from random entrances (each rolled separately).

Knock
R: 50'
T: object
D: 0
splittable
Object is opened. Doors are flung wide, locks are broken, shackles are bent open, belts come undone. Treat this as a Strength check made with a Strength of 10 + ([dice] * 4). Worn armor falls off if the wearer fails a save. Creatures must save or vomit (a free action).

Lock
R: 50'
T: object
D: 10 minutes
splittable
Non-living object closes and becomes locked. If the object is a door, chest, or similar object, it will slam shut, dealing [sum] damage to any creature passing through it and then trapping them. This spell works on things that aren't technically portals (for example, a sword could be locked in its scabbard). When resisting being opened, the object has an effective Strength of 10 + ([dice] * 4).

Alternatively, this spell can be cast on a creature's orifice, or paired orifices; the creature gets a save to resist, and another save at the end of each of its turns.  (This works on eyes, mouths, nameless sphincters, etc.)

Map
R: 0
T: self
D: 0

You get a brief vision of the surrounding rooms in the dungeon.  Not the contents--just the topology.  The DM reveals [sum] random, adjacent, non-secret rooms that are so far undiscovered.  Just draw it on the players' map.  If used in a city, it gives an accurate map of the city, with more dice resulting in a higher level of detail.

Portal
R: 20' x [dice]
T: 2 surfaces
D: [dice] rounds

You create a pair of linked portals, each attached to a flat, immobile surface (such as a wall or a floor).  Anything that passes through one portal passes out the other, with momentum being conserved.  You can create a door beneath a creature, but they get a Dex check to avoid falling into it.

Secret Chest
R: 0
T: self
D: 10 minutes

You can access [dice] extradimensional chests, each one having 3 inventory slots.  The chests are ordinal, i.e. you can only access the third chest by investing three casting dice.  (You cannot switch chests around).

Secret Room
R: touch
T: wall
D: varies

A touched wall grows an extradimensional room.  This takes 30 minutes.  Behind the door is an empty 20' x 20' room of matching architecture.   The room lasts for 2 hours, doubling in duration for each invested die.  At the end of the duration, all objects inside the room are ejected.

Speak with Lock
R: 50'
T: lock
D: [dice] minute

You can talk with locks.  Locks tend to be practical and no-nonsense.  Trapped locks are liars.  Locks remember everyone who ever locked or unlocked them, but their descriptions might not be useful (since they mostly center on descriptions of their hands and personalities-as-expressed-by-turning-a-key).  Picking a lock is a terrible sin to them, but it is the only sin.  Many believe the form determines function determines morality.

Summon Door Hound
R: 50'
T: conjuration
D: concentration

You summon a houndlike creature that obeys your commands.  It has stats as a wolf except that it has HP [sum] and deals +[dice] damage.  It can teleport 50' once for every dice invested beyond the second.


Teleport
R: touch
T: objects
D: 0

Up to [sum] touched objects and/or creatures are teleported to a random room within the dungeon.  If cast within a building, they are teleported to a random room.  If cast within a city, they are teleported to a random building.

It is possible to cast a version of this spell that allows for targeted teleportation, but it requires 10 minutes, a well-known destination, and affects half as many creatures/objects.

Transpose
R: 50'
T: 2 objects
D: 0

Pick two very similar objects.  They switch places.  Attended/worn/held objects are allowed a Save.  DM's discretion as to what counts as 'very similar' but they are encouraged to invent a fail chance for borderline cases.

Wall of Doors
R: 50'
T: conjuration
D: 10 minutes

You create a rectangular wall composed of 10' x 10' panels arranged in a flat plane.  You can conjure a total of [dice] panels.  You can orient it however you want.  It has [sum] HP.  You can control who and what can pass through the wall.  (For example, a wall of doors could be used as a bridge; allies can run across safely while enemies would fall through suddenly open doors.)

The Seven Souls of Shadoom

Shadoom was the ur-Sorcerer, the greatest villain that the world has ever faced.

His schemes were limitless, and his inventions beyond categorization.  His traps and manipulations were so subtly woven that we are only now figuring out their depth, 700 years later.

He was the first to capture the spell that went on to become Power Word: Kill.  He built the first wizard tower (intending to eventually ride it to space).  He invented the cackling monologue.

And then he was hunted down (many, many times) and killed.

Ever since the Yellowcoat incident, the Church has been aware that occasionally the dead and the damned do not stay in hell, but instead return to the living world at the head of an ungodly host of demons.  And so it was decided that Shadoom would not be allowed to descend to hell, although he deserved many infinities of suffering, but would instead be kept here, where the fragments of his soul could be contained and monitored.

I: The Mineral Soul

First there is the matter of the mineral soul, what you might think of as chemistry.  This soul stays with the body after death, maintaining the concept form and ensuring adequate nutrition for decomposition.  They are quiet and hardworking engines of natural laws.  It is the ghost-in-the-corpse.

Shadoom's physical soul is not like it's kin in other rotting bodies.  It seems to have a fierce desire for continuation, although very little means to achieve it.  Attempts to communicate with it are met with blasphemy and gibbering.

The corpse is growing.  Although Shadoom was much less than 6' in life, his corpse is now more than 8' tall.  Most of the growth has occurred in the rib cage.

The only type of growth that the mineral soul permits is a fungal.  His skin is buttery with yeast, and what remains of the head is almost entirely obscured by polypores.

It's not a body anymore.  It's a lair for the mineral soul.

There are many who believe that it is not a mineral soul at all.  They claim that it is something much stranger, something invited into the body at the behest of Shadoom (or perhaps inserted as a punishment or means of control).  While attempts to study it have stalled, many are hesitant to burn it,

studies have stalled as the spirit has frustrated their attempts at investigation.  Still, Lady Stravia is hesitant to have the body destroyed, since that may release whatever is holding it together.

II: The Vegetable Soul

Think of the second soul as "the laws of biology" and you won't be far off.

Shadoom's vegetable soul exists in the body of a young man named Tappernick, who is an exact physical clone of Shadoom.

He is the assitant gardener at the Minthic Priory is Kaskala.  He is short and swarthy and tanned from the sun.  His hands are rough with callouses.

He is unaware of his heritage.  All he knows is that the paladins always seem to enjoy dining with him when they pass through.  He doesn't know why, since he doesn't consider himself to be very interesting.  Nor does he understand why the paladins are sometimes tense in his presence, or else amused.  He's just a gardener.

He always tries to send the paladins off with a magnolia blossum.  Sometimes they accept.

The whole thing was Lady Stravia's idea, of course.

III: The Animal Soul

The third soul can be thought of as the instinctual soul.

Shadoom's animal soul is possessed by a incredibly unhappy young girl by the name of Ursiline.  After her second attempt to drown herself, she was entered into the convent of St. Rashene on her 17th birthday.

It is unclear how the girl found out that she possessed one seventh of Shadoom's soul, but she now dwells on it constantly.  She has written letters to Shadoom blaming him for her unhappiness.  She has written letters to Lady Stravia assigning blame for her "imprisonment".

Lady Stravia, for her part, has expressed regret about how the whole thing was handled.  She may end up removing Ursiline from the convent entirely.

Those are the first three souls.  For most people, they are reincarnated.  They are the earthly souls.

The remaining four souls are the heavenly souls.

IV: The Purple Soul Which is Memory

The fourth soul, the purple soul, is composed of memories.

Shadoom's memories were reborn into the child of a farmer.  The boy's name was Roflund, and he was fully aware of his past life since three months before his birth.

Roflund was born on a hot summer night in the second basement of the Lustrine Cathedral in Coramont.  Lady Stravia herself helped deliver the baby.  Her hands touched him before his mother's hands.

Also in attendance were 40 paladins and a priest-wizard.  Such caution ended up being unecessary, but there were many who were convinced that the fetus would be able to work some deviltry in the womb, and were therefore prepared for *anything* to come through that dilated cervix.

The newborn was also panicking.  Nothing in Shadoom's memories had prepared him for the nightmare of being born, that offensive tumult of noise and cold and fluid-filled lungs.

The attending paladins were not put at ease by the newborn's reassurances.  A wizard's vocubulary sounds bizarre enough coming from a wizard.  It sounds even stranger coming from a newborn at his mother's breast.

Roflund spent the first six months of his life being extensively interviewed by the Church.  (Claims of torture are unsubstantiated.)  Roflund proved to be much more helpful during interrogation than his soul's predecessor.  It was through Roflund that we learned of such things as the resurrection engine and the four-chambered mountain.

Unfortunately, Shadoom anticipated his capture and removed many of his memories in the days prior, entrusting them to certain lieutenants.  Some information, such as the location of the third apocalypse maggot or the fate of the princess of air, is still lost to us.

Roflund is now a paladin of the second rank in the service of the Lustrine Bishop.

V: The White Soul Which is Morality

The fifth soul is the white soul.  It embodies goals, values, ambition, and morality.

It belongs to a woman named Jetta of Harwater.  She is awaiting trial and execution after murdering her debtholder.  It is possible that this is not her first murder, but there is scant evidence.

Her trial has been delayed indefinitely, after Lady Stravia suggested it to the magistrate.

VII: The Red Soul Which is Personality

This is the personality of a person.  It contains their mannerisms and their perspective.  It controls (and is controlled by) their moods.  It is their emotions and their intellect.

The red soul is contained in Lady Stravia, the bishopess of the East Temple of the Shackled Flame, one part of the Church in charge of ensuring that old troubles do not rise again.  They have more historians in their ranks than paladins.

The discovery of the identity of Lady Stravia's red soul occurred when she touched Roflund during his birth.  As soon as it occurred, she was imprisoned and interviewed extensively.  She was released nine months later, at the command of the Eastern Pope.

She has since been reassigned to minister the penitent's commune in Guilder.  It is said that their farms have never been so productive.

VII: The Blue Soul Which is Divine

Of Shadoom's blue soul, little is known.  The blue soul is the seat of the spirit, the divine conduit, and the magical tongue by which the mind speaks.

In theory, this is the most perilous of Shadoom's souls, since it contains all of his arcane puissance.  And yet, no recent sign of it has emerged.

It is possible that it has eluded capture by avoiding reincarnation.  If so, it has managed to trickle down the the anonymous chaos of the hells.

Or it is possible that it dwells in a simpleton, who has neither the intellect to comprehend the power the possess, nor the will to wield it.

And it is even possible that Shadoom's blue soul eventually outgrew Shadoom himself.  A man cannot dominate the world with so much power without being dominated by it in turn.  If this is the case, then Shadoom's blue soul lives on without him.  It will be mindless only until it certain arcane furcations occur (and they must occur, or else it will be eaten by the creatures of the upper air) until it becomes its own creature, seven-souled and independent.

And if that is the case, the six new souls will themselves be cast-offs, the flotsam of identity, survivors of some other personal extinction.

Nothing is destroyed, nor anything created, except by the Hand of the Authority.

The GLOG: Wizards

I'm not happy with it, but I'm getting real fucking tired of rewriting it.

My OSR-compatible rules for wizards can be found right. . .

HERE

They include the Illusionist, Necromancer, and Orthodox Wizard (the most traditional one).

I think these wizard rules are cooler than a witch's tit and hotter than a witch's other tit, but if you aren't interested is wading through another homebrew in search of bits to steal, here are the parts that I think are the most hackable:

• I think the whole spell slots + casting dice is pretty elegant.  It removes the whole quadratic wizard thing and gives players a clear idea of how much spellpower they have and are bringing to bear.  (I actually give them aluminum casting dice at the start of each in-game day.  It's very tangible.)
• Book Casting is a great ability.  It actually makes wizards feel more like wizards, since they're wading into combat with their big dorky spellbooks out, chanting stuff.
• Vancian Preparation would be good to port into a 5e game, except maybe give a different benefit.  Maybe +1 to the spell slot, can only be used 1/day.
• Giving mono-class bonuses is a great fucking idea and I'm sad I didn't hit on it sooner.  Just: I think it's a good idea to incentivize the all-wizard party or the all-thief party.  It makes the game experience more diverse, gives us more ways to play the game.
• You'll notice that a lot of the old-school spells are a lot more powerful, and a lot more hackable.  A lot of them have multiple uses.  I tried to make spells like feather(fall), floating disk, lock, and levitate more comparable to sleep on the scale of usefulness.
• Also check out the Illusionist's Final Doom where they turn into an illusion and get stuck there.  There's enough there for a blog post on its own.
• I tried to give a lot of diversity in the undead that low-level necromancers can raise.  They all have different functions, and the necromancer's corpse economy means that they'll have to pick their favorite.

Non-Euclidean Geography

This is a continuation of my non-Euclidean architecture posts (part 1, part 2) where I'm not going to postulate anything new, just expand on an idea in part 2 about multi-directional gravity.  See also, the three-sided square hallway in the Meal of Oshregaal.

So, here's a picture of the room you're in right now, viewed from the side.

It's got a chair in it, and doors at both sides.  (You should really think about getting some more furniture.)

The arrows represent the direction and strength of gravity.  As you can plainly see, the gravity in your room points straight down in all places with a normal amount of force (9.8 m/s^2).

But here's another room.  In this room, gravity is upside down!  The doors are in the same places (down), but the chair is now sitting on the ceiling.  The gravity is uniform throughout the room, with moderate strength throughout.

But what fresh new hell is this?  It looks like this third room has both types of gravity in it.  On the west, the gravity points in the normal direction, but in the east, the gravity is inverted.

But that's still nothing too fancy, as far as D&D is concerned.

(By the way, if you stand with one foot in a normal-gravity zone and the other foot in an upside-down-gravity zone, you'll start to do cartwheels in place as one side of your body falls up and the other side of the your body falls down.)

How about this room?  Notice the difference?

In that room above this paragraph, there is no abrupt reversal of gravity.  Instead, gravity gets smaller near the room until it eventually reverses.  It's a gradual inversion, instead of a rough curtain of gravity that you pass through

Let's see how complex we can make this, shall we?

Here's a room where all the gravity points to the center.  Anything not nailed down in this room will fall to the center of the room, where it will join the chair in a big Katamari pile.

If you fell on the chair, you could hang on to it.  Stand on it.  But trying to jump from the chair to the door in the (local) ceiling would be hard--if you jumped off the chair, you'd send the chair crashing against the opposite wall, while you wouldn't move very much at all.  (This is because you weigh a lot more than the chair.  Imagine trying to jump off a planet the size of a tennis ball.)

Here's a room that's the opposite of that one: one where the gravity falls away from the center of the room.

notice the 'B' at the top

In this room, you'd walk past the chair, walk over the door on to the wall, and keep walking across the ceiling, then down the other wall, until you returned to your (much abused) chair.

BUT HERE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THIS ESSSAY

Your journey has ups and downs in the local sense.

Do you see what happens when you walk past the chair, going left to right?  The gravity goes from pointing down-left (where you were walking leaning forward) to pointing down-right (where you must start walking leaning back).  And when you are walking while leaning back relative to the floor, it is because you are descending a hill.  Likewise, when you are walking while leaning forward relative to the floor, it is because you are walking uphill.

Therefore, the chair sits atop A LOCAL HILL.

Sorry for the caps, but if you don't understand this section, the rest of this essay isn't going to make much sense.

To think about it another way, the corners of the room are lower (locally speaking) than the walls.  Imagine that there was an immovable rod fixed in the exact center of the room, and you had tied a rope to it, and you were swinging from the rope around and around the room, so that your feet dashed across all four surfaces (floor, wall, ceiling, other wall, repeat) like the hand of a clock.

While swinging from this rope, if you wanted to touch one of the corners with your feet, you would have to descend the rope, down to the corner, since the corner is farther from the center of the room, and therefore lower (locally). 

When I say locally, I mean that if a very tiny ant were passing through, that's how it would seem to the ant.  The corners would be downhill and the chair would be on the top of a hill.  (If you were a giant that filled the whole room, this whole thing goes out the window.)

So, here is another picture of the same room.

In this diagram, the gravity is pointing down, and the floor/walls/ceiling are the ones that are bent.  

THIS DIAGRAM IS LOCALLY IDENTICAL TO THE LAST DIAGRAM.  We have fixed the wonky gravity by making the space wonky instead.

Imagine an ant, walking counterclockwise from the 'B' on the ceiling.  He walks through a valley (the top-left corner), over a hill that includes the (left) door, into another valley (the bottom-left corner), and then over a hill that includes the chair (the actual, global floor of the room), and so on.

Anyway, once you recognize that the last two diagrams depict the same space (locally, from the surface of the walls), we can move on.  (Yes, larger walking-things like giants break this rule; that's literally what makes this space non-Euclidean.)

This next room is subtly unlike the last.  See the difference?

notice the 'A' at the top

This time, the gravity is pointed toward the nearest wall instead of away from the center.

This makes a big difference, because now there are no more local hills and valleys--everything you are walking on is always going to be flat ground.

Here's another local map of the ant's journey across all four surfaces of room A.

And here's another local map of the ant's journey:

The ant doesn't notice the corners because he's really, really tiny.  Just a point in space, really.  If he had eyes as the approached the wall in the first diagram, he would see that the wall curved up at him, just as he would see that the ground was truly flat (non-Euclidean) in the second diagram.  But our and has no eyes, only six infinitesmal footsies that he puts in front of each other.

Even for a point moving along a line, the direction of gravity determines whether the point is going uphill or downhill.

Here's two more pictures of surfaces that are locally flat:

i forgot to add doors and a chair to this one

i also forgot to add doors and a chair to this one

Anyway, once you recognize that the last five images depict the same local journey for the ant, we can move on.  (In all five diagrams, the ant feels like he's walking on flat ground the whole time, since the gravity is always pointed straight towards the surface he is walking on--local down.)

By now, it should be simple to understand what this next diagram would feel like to a person walking across it.  

the slope, as it appears (gravity lines are invisible)

The gravity is normal, except for the middle, where it slants to the left.  If you were to walk across it, it would feel (but not appear) like this:

the slope, as it feels

Basically, an incline.

What would it feel like to walk across this, from the left to the right?  Well, it wouldn't look any different, because it looks like a flat plain.  But as you got into the diagonal-gravity section, it would suddenly feel like you started walking up a hill.  You might fall backwards if you were unprepared.  And once you left the diagonal-gravity section, it would be like walking on flat ground again.  And if you tripped while walking along the diagonal-gravity section and tumbling all the way to the bottom (the left edge of the diagonal-gravity zone).

You could even make the diagonal-gravity section into a sideways-gravity zone, and then you'd have to climb your way across flat ground.

How about this one:

the flat valley, globally (how it appears from far away)

Although it would look flat from a distance, once you actually walked across it, it would feel like this:

the flat valley, locally (how it feels to walk over it)

The gravity changes are gradual, rather than abrupt, so the inclines in the local valley likewise change slope gradually.  It's a rolling valley, rather than the abrupt ramp of the previous example.

Walking across the flat valley would feel exactly like walking down into a real valley; it just wouldn't look that way.  From the bottom of the valley, you'd have no trouble seeing out of the valley, as if your vision was curving.  (And this is an important point--is it the local or the global version of the valley that is accurate?  From a local standpoint, you cannot tell if it is space or gravity that is bent.)

But it's a still a valley, right?  What happens if we fill it with water?

the flat lake, locally

Locally, the flat lake feels like a normal lake.  You walk downhill, enter the water, and swim around.  But from a distance, the lake looks like an enormous water droplet standing on a flat surface.

the flat lake, globally

If you were to walk towards it, you would feel yourself going downhill as you approached it (even though the ground feels flat).  You could run 'downhill' and even jump into the wall of water (equivalent to doing a bellyflop, since gravity is propelling you into the lake surface in both cases).

One big difference would be the light.  Since the lake doesn't sit in an optical valley, it would be well illuminated from sunlight hitting the lake on the backside.  The water would be lit up.  You may see fish and freshwater whales swimming around in there.

Here's the counterpart to the flat lake:

the flat mountain, globally

the flat mountain, locally

 What if you built a building on top of the flat mountain?

Since the gravity lines are always parallel to local up and down, you'd have to build your walls parallel to them.  That means that the walls of your mountaintop castle would appear to be slanting inwards.

It would look like this from far away.

the flat mountain castle, globally

 But once you were actually inside the thing, the walls would feel vertical to you.

the flat mountain castle, locally

Who lives inside?

The Dyzantine Brothers

People will talk freely, when they are frightened.  They will tell you about the three Dyzantine brothers, who live in the castle atop the Flat Mountain.

The brothers are cursed, they say.

Only one brother ever appears at a time, since the other two are cursed to sleep.  The brothers are always caked in frost, despite the heavy jackets they wear, and their breath is always chill bellows, no matter how brightly the sun shines.

One brother is very young, another brother is a youth, and another is middle-aged and stricken with gangrene.

That is what they will tell you, but they are wrong.

The truth is this:

Once there was a wizard who sought to move in the fourth axis, and to move in a direction that was neither up, nor down, nor any of the cardinal directions.  His name was Dyzan.

But three dimensional flesh cannot move in a fourth-dimensional direction, and so he needed to give himself a four-dimensional body.

He found a way to do this involving his own lifespan.  Time would be the fourth dimension, and he would alloy it to his body.

And so Dyzan became a four-dimensional worm.

To three-dimensional human eyes, he looked exactly the same, but he had hijacked his timeline, and plucked all of his past and future selves and wedded them together.

To four-dimensional eyes, Dyzan was a worm.  He was a baby at one end, and an old man at the other.  In the middle, he was larger in circumference, being a full-grown man.  But he was most definitely a worm, being soft and pink and tapered at both ends.

Dyzan immediately had two problems.

The first is that his worm stretched from birth to death, which meant that one end of his four-dimensional body terminated in an old, dying man.

And the dying man did what dying men do, and died.

Dyzan's immune system didn't flow in the fourth dimension.  His blood and lymph were isolated in three-dimensional layers.  When dead old man at the end of Dyzan's bulk began to rot, there was nothing to slow it down.

Dyzan has been rotting from the fat end ever since.  Hence the gangrene that is rapidly consuming his four-dimensional body.

Dyzan's small end, the one that was made from the newborn Dyzan, is fine.  It's a bit larger now, having aged a couple of years.  This irks Dyzan, who prefers his baby self to remain a baby, but his fourth axis is not Time, but now Space in the fourth dimension.

The second problem is that our universe is paper-thin.  To move a short distance in the fourth-dimension is to thrust yourself into the cold void of the outer dark.  This is why Dyzan is always cold--most of his body is in the lightless, freezing nothingness that is outside our three-dimensional slice of the multiverse.

Dyzan is seeking a vehicle that will grant him passage through the outer dark, to a four-dimensional world where he can be a four-dimensional worm in peace.

He didn't really think this one through.

As an NPC, Dyzan will be more than happy to explain how dimensions and non-Euclidean spaces work.  He hopes to get people interested in such things, so that they will be more eager to help him find a way to distant, extra-dimensional shores.  (He can be a quest giver NPC.)

He doesn't have much time.  He's almost halfway rotted already, but he is a long worm, and the gangrene needs to rot through 86 years before it kills him.  The baby--baby Dyzan--will die last.  He'll probably be about four or five years old--too young to understand what is happening.

Among his treasures are an immovable rod and an unstoppable rod (whose velocity cannot be changed by anything while the switch is depressed).  (He can also be an opponent that the PCs attempt to rob.)

In his tower, Dyzan also keeps a gorbel.  He has been trying to coax the secrets of void ships out of the beast, with no success thus far.

Stats as a level 9 wizard.

*Wrap-around - Dyzan can flex his body in the fourth dimension, curling it around so that re-enters the material (three-dimensional) plane as we know it.  This functionally gives him three bodies.  These bodies share HP and spells but otherwise take actions independently.

When he uses his Wrap-around ability, it looks like a frost-bitten corpse has just teleported into the room.  The corpse then rapidly de-ages back to a living age and attacks as normally.  Conversely, if Dyzan puts his smaller, baby-sized end into our dimension, it appears as if a two-year old has just teleported into the room, who rapidly ages up to an appropriate age.

*Fourth-dimensional Shove - Dyzan can shove you into the fourth dimensional outer void that surrounds our dimension.  Treat this as a normal shove attempt.  If it is successful, you are now in the outer void, riding a four-dimensional worm made out of the entire lifespan of a desperate wizard.  It's very cold (1 hp damage per turn) and dark.  You can get back to your own dimension by climbing along the wizard until you reach the part that is currently passing through our dimension.  So if you were pushed out by a 19-year-old wizard and you know that the 23-year-old wizard is still back in the Flat Mountain castle, you would have to climb across the 20-year-old wizard, the 21-year-old wizard, and the 22-year-old wizard in order to reach the 23-year-old wizard who is in the warm, well-lit room trying to kill your friends.

In this case, a year equals 100'.  You'll be climbing along the wizard-worm in a lightless void, but you will not suffocate.  The outer dark is filled with stale air and a very low concentration of peracetic acid, you poor bastard.