SCRAP PRINCESS PLAYS FOURTH EDITION

When the world finds out what you've done, Scrap, they're going to stop inviting you to the yacht parties that the OSR throws every month.  They're going to cut you off from the Cocaine of the Month Club, too.

READ THESE REVELATIONS AND TREMBLE, O UNTIDY FALSITY

Devil
Heavenly Bureaucrat

So:

Zulin rules the world from his golden Heaven, and yet his clergy do not claim that he is omnipotent.  He is certainly not omniscient.

This is an oversight, and it must be corrected.

Heaven is a vast and unknowable mansion, filled with gardens and apartments where the faithful dead enjoy eternity.  It's also a vast and incomprehensible maze of offices and archives, because long ago Zulin decided two things.

First, all of the world must be observed, cataloged, and judged.  Sins must be observed.  Souls must be tracked.  Prayers must be quantified and tabulated, weighed against the current and prospective sin markets, and then the summary given to the Angels of Judgement.

Second, he had absolutely no desire to do any of this.

Zulin exists in his own part of the labyrinthine mansion, where he is currently engaged in what is best described as an eternal tea party.  He entertains and is entertained.  He is attended by gods and godlings from Centerra, the planet's interior, the moon, and other such ultraterrestrial locales*.  Importantly, he is also accompanied by several of his greatest foes, who are unable to leave due to the chains of etiquette (which bind even gods) and who Zulin is unable to defeat (because he would be overpowered).

Once, perhaps, the Bureaucracy of Heaven was knowable, in the sense that a single mind could see it all, or at least hold a mental schematic of how it all fit together.  But it's outgrown that.  It outgrew that a long time ago.

The Goals and Means of the Bureaucracy

At this point, you can surely see that heaven has a great need for spies, bureaucrats, census-takers, writers of ethical protocols, judges, lawyers, and art critics (to judge the beauty of artworks made to glorify Zulin, and quantify the amount of sin that such an artwork compensates).

Heaven does not know how many grains of sand there are.  It does not know how many hairs are on your head.  It does not know the dreams of every babe nested at its mother's breast.  But they are trying to find these things out.

Angels are absolutely rubbish at counting sand.  That fact hasn't stopped Heaven from trying, though.

For the most part, angels are summoned creatures.  They exist for a day or an hour, performing some task, and then vanishing with a contented sigh.  So while they might count a million grains before their happy death, that only amounts to about a shovelful.  (And a small shovel, at that.)

The true power of Heaven lies in its Law: the ability to dictate the laws of nature, the truth of any terrestrial fact, and their power over men and their souls.  While Zulin is objectively the master of these considerable powers, their actual enforcement goes to the vast and unknowable offices of heaven, which are staffed by living humans, of course.

So after that angel has tabulated a million grains of sand, who do you think it reports to?  She is a woman in a white robe, with a sun-disk wired to a her skull, and a small serpent living her her sinuses that verifies her sums with an approving nod.

The First Bureaucrats

Mathematics was rewritten in order to make calculus possible.  The laws of mathematics were codified, and all the heretic possibilities were imprisoned far from Centerra, in order that 2+2 would always equal 4 (as opposed to all of the regional variations).

The principles of economics were invented.  Then logic.  Last grammar.  These things were delivered to the priests in the form of gold-inscribed mirrors, and the priests were then taught to teach these things to the children.

After a decade had passed, the Heavenly Examinations began to be held in every provincial center.  The minds that shone brightest during these examinations--the inventor, the artist, the mathmatician, the scientist--were taken up to Heaven to become its first bureaucrats.

(Maybe this is why everyone on Centerra is so fucked.)

The Church's examinations have slowed, but never really stopped.  There is still an examination held in Coramont every year, where the quick-adding, powerfully-adept children are taken up to Heaven for blessed employment.  But they are a minority.  A drop in the ocean.  How could they be anything else, when Heaven is a place with no restrictions on population, and a great need for able hands to hold an abacus?

The families there are old and strange and specialized.  While they know a great deal about a particular thing, they know very little about everything else.  For example, while the Department of Tabulation knows the sums of the sand on a great many beaches, many of its bureaucrats are unaware that there is anyone living down there at all.  As far as they know, the vast bureaucracy of heaven exists for the singular purpose of enumerating sand.  And they are entirely satisfied with this view of the world.

(Do not think them mad, dear reader.  They are as sane as you are, and no less perceptive.  Who are you to judge?  You know as much about the purpose of life as they do.  And while you might know a great deal about the evaluation, purchase, and distribution of wine in the UK, I suspect you know very little of the arcane workings of the machine that you are reading this on.  Perhaps the Truth is to be found in there?)

I won't go into any more broad details.  The races of heavenly bureaucrat are too varied for easy classification, and too bizarre for swift elucidation.

Instead, here are a (partial, very partial) list of Scrap Princess' vile misdeeds.  All readers are advised to bring a bucket adjacent, lest her wanton prurience drive you to vomiting all over your no-doubt tastefully decorated home.

Note 1: Nearly all of these guys can summon angels.

Note 2: Additionally, each department has "interns".  Souls serving their sentence in Purgatory.

Note 3: These classifications might seem like each department has a defined, organized domain and hierarchy.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Each task has multiple competing departments assigned to it, and the Gordian knot of authority clauses sometimes means that a department ends up serving its own sub-department (and other such explosions of apparent nonsense).

Asmodeus, Baalzebul, Geryon (Arch Devil), Dispater
Ministers
The higher ranking bureaucrats of heaven are all heads of their respective departments, which is nearly the same thing as saying that they are the heads of their respective families.  They jockey against each other for access to the Office of Natural Law, where they have the swiftest means to dispatch their enemies and recruit more resources for theirselves and their department.

For example, a 10% decrease in the rate of sedimentation would vastly decrease the amount of free sand grains in the world, leading to less need for the Department of Tabulation, leading to more effective petitions by other departments for diversions of human resources.  The pendulum of power swings thus.

Changing the natural laws in order to improve sedimentation constants may also be accompanied by a concomitant rise in kidney stones and renal failure.  This is none of their concern.  Suffering is a normal and expected part of mortality, and if it ever gets out of hand, they can expect the Department of Tribulations to issue an injunction.

This is why we have such things as tornadoes and syphilis, by the way.  A loving god wouldn't create those things.  They're Unforeseen Consequences (one of the smallest and most understaffed departments).

How many more of these do I have to do**?

Barbed (Lesser Devil)
Bureaucrat of Weights and Measures

Looks like a guy in a robe and a pointy shoes with a giant scale strapped to his back.  Accompanied by a cylindrical brass 'golem' that weighs a very specific weight.  His job is to weigh things and record whether they weigh more or less than his brass cylinder.  He must also destroy things that are the improper weight.  Can alter weights, distances.

Bone (Lesser Devil)
Bureaucrat of Tabulation

Looks like a guy who is entirely laminated with counting beads.  Has the powers to shoot beads, which is a little underwhelming.  Also has the power to audit one character sheet per round and investigate the numbers there.  If he finds any mistakes, he can imprison your character for as long as it takes you to find the errors and correct them.  (DM: six seconds of real-world time equals a combat round.)

Enrinyes
Bureaucrat of Maculate Conception

Soft, pink androgynous person, pristine and slick inside their tight robe.  Ensures that the appropriate sperm reaches the egg, and that spontaneous conception occurs according to design.  Also responsible for making sure the womb catches the proper type of soul.  Can pick two people of roughly compatible biologies and summon up their hypothetical offspring to fight them.  Can also stir your flesh like a spoon in a vat of multicolored paint.  Also capable of shrinking down and swimming in you like a frisky salmon, but this option is distasteful.

Horned
Bureaucrat of Continuance

Ensures the smooth passage of time.  Makes that time is uniform within a time zone.  Carries out conversions at the borders of time zones, so that travelers between them never even realize that they are passing through them.  Makes sure that everything doesn't happen at once.  Keepers of the Doomsday Clock.  Sentinels against the dinosaurs gnashing their way up the timelines.  One of the many reasons that PCs shouldn't attempt to time travel.

Like like men and women with bellies full of flashing sand, each grain beating out a different tempo, which together allows the bureaucrat to keep perfect time.  Powers are varied, and powerful.  Their wounds heal quickly, arrows slow in their flights, and many of their opponents die of old age.

One of the largest and most powerful departments.  The Minister of Continuance is Apocalypse, the only Minister that is not human.

Ice
Bureaucrat of Imagination

Their job is to judge the objective value of a piece of artwork.  They use a complex system of reference books to calculate this value, which is measured in Good Deeds.  These measurements are then passed on to the Department of Morality.

They are strange people, with flowing robes that shift colors and abilities every round.  They fight through a system of counter-attack.  Every action brings a reaction.  Learning these reactions is key to defeating them, but by then it might be too late.

Lemure
Bureaucrat of Dreams

Soft men, with soft skin and soft voices.  Vestigial faces cover vestigial minds.  They are dressed very, very well, and they move very, very politely.  This is why they are so easy to kill.

They sit at the bedsides, invisible, intangible.  On their tablet, they listen to the murmurs of your animal soul and record your dreams with their stylus.  These dreams are brought back up to heaven for classification, sorting, and interpretation.

This is a very important job.  Revelations of the future are most often first seen in dreams.  This is how Heaven knows so much about what is going to happen.  These are also the guys sent down to kick over the dreidel when your cleric casts augury.

Pit Fiend
Bureaucrat of Morality

A head full of eyes and a dossier filled with your sins.  Metal-skinned men who can blast down a door with a word, or limit the actions of everyone at the table.

They do not perform the collection or the sentencing of a soul (that's the Department of Death and Eternal Life), but they certainly measure it.  They are responsible for keeping track of you and all of your good deeds and sins***.  They don't have time to watch everyone personally, all the time.  But they use methods of deduction and interrogation to collect the information they need.  They hardly ever make mistakes.

A soul has value.  Knowing where it will end up after it dies is therefore a useful fact, and those who control the dossiers on those particular soul are worthy of a fee per soul.  And so dossiers are traded within the Department of Morality.  Not individually, of course, but most likely bundled into vast portfolios of thousands of mortals of similar moral bent.

-----------------------------------

*Scrap also eats cereal out of a shoe.  Like, the same shoe every time.  I don't even think she washes it.  I don't know where the other shoe is, who is eating out of it, or why we don't know about them, but I wouldn't be surprised if Scrap did something horrible to them to make them disappear.

**Also I met I guy at a gas station once who told me that once Scrap got drunk and made out with a  seagull, was also drunk.  The guy didn't buy anything except one of those heinous nut-covered donutoids though, so his ability to Discern Realities is probably pretty suspect.

***They would shoot vomit out their metal noses if they ever saw Scrap, though.  They were never trained to handle her.  (She would be a Level Nine Depravity Locus in their system of classification, though, if their system didn't stop at Level Eight.)

The Fighting Mountains

 The shadows of old birds

crawl over young stone

while pines huddle together

and knot crowns beneath the earth.

You fled south from the Cold Hills, leaving behind the icy fogs and venturing under the open arms of the sky.  You watched the dirt give way to granite.  You watched the sky grow huge and blue and flat as a plate.

And now your maps are wrong.  Beneath the shrugging pines and laughing choughs, your maps have become completely, utterly useless.

The rivers are running the wrong way.  The mountains are not where they were described.  The shrub-throttled 'road' that you followed so carefully ended at a flat slab of granite, almost as if the road had disappeared into a crack on the mountainside.

And so there you were, sitting on a glacial erratic, eating the last of your horse, when you looked at the mountains for the tenth time and finally saw their faces.  And once you saw their faces, everything snapped into cold focus, the realization filtering through shades of confusion, terror, and finally awe.

You were so shocked you dropped your chunk of horseflesh.

The Fighting Pile

A mountain might gain half a centimeter of elevation every year.  It might also move three centimeters to the north.  By standard geologic standards, this is a very fast mountain.  This is a leaping gazelle.

The mountains of the Fighting Pile move many hundreds of feet every year.  They are able to do this because they are not mountains, not quite.

They move so quickly because they are trying to kill each other.

What It Looks Like

Thick-browed mountains covered in smooth young granite.  Jagged ridges elbowing themselves over each other.  Piled strata on their sides dappled with shrubs.  Crows, chickadees, magpies, hawks.

A trained geologist would burn his books in a haze of tearful doubt.  The average traveler would never notice anything amiss.  (Except perhaps the occasional hillside of C-shaped trees, formed when the east side of a mountain becomes the west side of the mountain within a tree's lifetime.)

But examine the sides of the mountains, and you can see the clenched teeth and straining neck.  You can see ridges like forearms, struck through with veins of hematite, the whole hillside tense with pressure as one mountain attempts to unseat the other.

Stone hands wrapped around an escarpment, crushing it, forcing it back into the earth.  Two mountains restraining another, limestone crushed beneath granite.  A stone face, shattered and wincing, covered with granite boulders where a granite mountain struck it a century ago.

Minor earthquakes occur almost weekly.

The average mountain moves less than two feet per day.  And while many mountains duel alone or in triads, the great bulk of them all surge towards Young Mount Torgedda

The Monks of Young Mountain Torgedda

The monks live atop Young Mountain Torgedda, as they have lived for generations.  They travel across all of the mountains, following obscure routes and schedules.  Every morning, each mountain is drawn from a half-dozen different angles.

They have vaults of these drawings, yellow reams brushing the cobwebbed ceilings.  Cabinets groan with the weight of these papers.  Each of these pictures shows a fighting mountain.

And in the evenings, they study their sketches.  From these sketches, they have taught themselves to fight.  They tattoo Serpinski triangles onto themselves and break their hands so that the bones may grow back thicker.  These are the Fighting Monks.

Their leader is the Fight Master, who is said to be the greatest warrior in all of Centerra.  She was once known as Ziraludra of Worthless Zyro, a former lieutenant of the Pearl Divers Mercenary Company.

She wears the Four-Tower Crown.  Her lieutenants wear Three-Tower Crowns.  The sub-lieutenants below them wear Two-Tower Crowns.  Those below them, the fully inducted members of their cult, wear a white stone tied around their brow with a red string, because there are too many of them to adorn with crowns.

While the higher ranking members rarely engage in lethal pursuits (except to combat the monks of the void, who they despise), the novices are often killed in their practices.  Crushed by boulders while running up a hill, or thrown from precipices while learning The Bull Tosses His Horns.

They despise the void monks because they have a common history and contrary philosophies.  The fight monks believe that Life and Truth live in the heart and the blood and the muscle.  They believe that the meaning of life, if there is one, is to be found in this world, not the next.

The void monks think all of this is laughable.

Young Mountain Torgedda

The monks live atop his crown, a five-towered structure made from the same white limestone as himself.  It is the only intact building within the Fighting Pile.

According to the monks, he is the youngest mountain as well as the strongest.

The Mountain's sword lies discarded nearby.  A dusty, irregular mirror seven hundred feet long.  Its length has mostly been buried by spilled earth, and what bands are exposed to the sky are clouded and warped.  The sword is solid adamantine.  It'd be worth a fortune if anyone could ever find a way to break it into smaller pieces, or melt it, or reshape it.

The monks speak of the scabbard, a vertical shaft that has not been seen in centuries.

Young Mountain Torgedda is not the tallest of the fighting mountains, but it is the straightest and the strongest.  A number of slightly-salty springs cascade down his flanks, proof of his great exertion.  The amount of foreign boulders that lay scattered in his valleys is proof of his prowess.

His long reaching spurs and hard, quartz-rich fists have broken the jaws of many of his challengers.  And of course, there is the fate of Young Mountain Gundregor, of which the monks do not speak.

The Transmetallic Alchemists

They frequent Young Mountain Bora-Dhun.  It is believed that they may have discovered some way of communicating with the mountain, however unlikely that seems.

Or more likely, this is merely a convenient halfway point between the Four-Chambered Mountain to the east and the Hills of the Hollow Men to the west.  In any event, the alchemists will happily buy any stone eggs you find, laid by the shaggy grey orn, a giant bird that seems to be going extinct, since no one in living memory has ever seen them produce a viable egg.

The Miners of the Ridgeways

With the fickle orientations of the earth and the regular tremors, men have been taught very quickly not to erect anything larger than a tent on the Fighting Mountains.  And even a cluster of tents might have to move hastily one day when a miner notices a hillside shifting, in order to swat them with a rockslide.

They are not good miners.  Their excavations are hasty and easily collapsed.  They have a poor working knowledge of geology.  But they are fast, and they are desperate, and geology doesn't work here anyway so fuck it.

They circle the mountain like vultures, just flinty eyes casting their gaze over the next hill, wearing their donkeys' hooves down.  They are sometimes comically under-equipped, just a pair of boots, a pickaxe, and a hole in their belly that can only be filled with rubies.

Because this is where rubies come from.  It's possible that all the rubies came from the Fighting Mountains.

The miners live like vultures.  They watch the struggle like veteran gamblers, arguing about fighting techniques.  Sometimes they ape the positions of the mountains and then try to fight each other, trying to figure out which mountain has the advantage, and which mountain will be speared down.

The miners are looking for weaknesses.  A prone mountain pinned beneath his fellow.  A broken arm, where an outstretched ridge was broken over a knee.  A new wound, not yet scabbed over with landslides.

And then they rush in, with their shovels and pickaxes and buckets.  And they dig their terrible shallow mines, pour their agonized excavations out on the hillside beneath them.  And sometimes in that frantic flotsam, they find rubies.

Among the faithful, rubies are known as earthsblood, or ichorine, and they are seen as symbols of savage power made humble.  The largest ruby ever mined was the Heart of All-Desiring, and it was plucked from the chest of Young Mountain Gundregor.

Young Mountain Gundregor

The corpse of Young Mountain Gundregor lies to the south of Young Mountain Torgedda.  If you stand on Gundregor's shoulder, you can usually see the sun shouting off Torgedda's crown through the hurly-burly of the intervening mountains.

Young Mountain Gundregor was the mountain that came closest to defeating Torgedda.  Gundregor had his foe staggered and was driving his thumbs deep into Torgedda's eyes, when Torgedda threw Gundregor over his shoulders.  In fifteen years--the blink of an eye to a mountain--Gundregor's neck had been snapped.

Or so we assume.  Who can tell when a mountain is truly dead?  In any event, Gundregor has not stirred from where he fell.

You may be wondering what a mountain looks like when it is being thrown.  The monks know, although they do not like to speak of it.  The thing is considered obscene, embarrassing.  It is like seeing your father naked.  Which makes sense, since of course they consider the mountains their fathers.

Mountains draw power from their feet, submerged deep in the magma below.  To throw a mountain involves wrapping your arms around its neck and whipping it over your hips hard enough to wrench it from where it is anchored.  Assuming you are a mountain, of course.

Imagine wrenching out someone's leg from its socket over the course of a decade and you'll have some idea.

Spurts of magma shot up along the fractures as indecent strata were uprooted, pulled up several feet each day, until the roots of Gundregor strained at the clouds, and found no footholds among them.

Mountains are very strong in once direction.  They have great compressive strength.  But hold them sideways, and they will break.  And that is what the great legs of Gundregor did, as they hung in the cruel air, like fingers poised over piano keys.  Leg-lengths fell by the quarter mile, hemorrhaging stone, magma, unnamed ores, and yes rubies as well.

Gundregor groaned and shook, and all the mountains stopped their struggles to watch their brother die sideways in the sky.

When they perform this technique, the monks call it technique The Bull Tosses His Horns.

Rubies are normally mined from the seams of the mountains, when they are revealed in moments of weakness.  But Gundregor, unmoving, was completely hollowed out.  The miners descended on its body like flies.  The largest ruby in the world was produced from this pillaging: the Jewel of All-Desiring, which vanished from history amid a flourish of corpses, and many enormous jewels are wont to do.

The other mountains have sealed Young Mountain Gundregor through small landslides, perhaps the equivalent of kicking some dirt onto a corpse.

Explanations

The wizards claim that the mountains are fighting for the Crown of the Earth.  (It is not the structure on top of Young Mountain Torgeddon, but rather a ring of solid diamond inside him.)  Mountains think on the same time scale as us, but they move much slower.  Because they have so much time to think, their movement are ultra-efficient, with each punch carrying years of careful calculation, like dueling oil tankers piloted by genius machines.

The Church claims that this is the final result of Zulin's extirpation of the powers of Earth.  With the volcanoes dead and the mountains sleeping, the last batch of powerful Earth spirits has been confounded into destroying themselves.

The elves claim that this is normal behavior for mountains.  They are fighting to occupy prestigious positions in a new mountain chain.  There are many similar instances recorded in elven libraries. . . just none in the pamphlets of human history.

Elven Revolvers

Gunpowder was discovered a long time ago in Centerra.  It just doesn't work anymore.

When they were taming the land and laying straight roads, they were also fighting the fire cults.  They won, as they always do, and the fire gods were sundered.  Some were gelded and boxed.  Some were driven into the sea and quenched.

You can still see some of them from the Victorious Coast.  Time and tempest have worn away some of their features, and only blasphemers claim that they are merely offshore rocks.

It was around that time when gun powder stopped working.

<sidebar> The only survivor of that is Lady Hellfire, the only volcano on Centerra.  Where fire and stone failed, paper prevailed, and she now existson the but should the treaty ever be declared void, it is likely that the last volcano on Centerra will cool. </sidebar>

not ornate enough

Elven Revolvers

Elves are loathe to ever give something up once it has been claimed.  The same is true for their firearms.

And so while the other races were cussing and melting down their cannons, the elves were figuring out ways to retrofit their pistols.

Elven pistols are baroque and highly personalized.  Each one is unique piece of art, and is worth a fortune to a historian.  They're also very functional--elven goods rarely break.

The pistol known as Charge Onwards Brave Horse bears only the slightest resemblance to a horse.  Mithril is used for the reinforced parts, but most of the rest of the gun is alchemically strengthened glass, stained a pale blue color.   It gives you +4 to hit.

One DM to another: I think guns are cooler than wands.  And anyone can use them.  I plan to give them out in place of wands whenever possible.

Elven Ammunition

In the absence of gunpowder, the elves were forced to find new propellants for their guns.  It was a welcome diversion, after the wars.  Like the guns, each part of the cartridge appears to be handcrafted.

We're still not sure what they used, but it is highly magical.  The ammunition is sorted into categories based on the shape of the shell and the type of note produced upon firing.  Note: while there are several variations of the "circle of dancers" cartridge, this one is the most common.

Casing: painted circle of dancers, tossing rose petals

Firing: brass horn chord, G# major

Effect: deep punctures that billow white smoke

Mechanics: 3d6 damage

Casing: engraved elephant, flayed

Firing: Harsh guitar strum, ascending, C#

Effect: Incandescent bullet burns path into retina for a few minutes

Mechanics: 2d6 corporeal damage, 2d6 incorporeal damage (actually fires two bullets, one ethereal and one material; enemies that can affect both are struck by both)

Casing: sculpted songbirds erupting from a mouth

Firing: clashing cymbals

Effect: Shooter appears to turn into gunsmoke, then dissipate

Mechanics: 2d6 damage and teleports you adjacent to your target (shooters also holding a rapier and trained in elven teleplay can make a free attack)

Elven ammunition is only ever found in dungeons or looted from elf lords, and only then in small amounts (1d6, maybe 2d6).  Its manufacture is an utter enigma.

How To Design Death

From a game design standpoint, the purpose of a Death and Dismemberment Table is four-fold. 

Death Table as Death Dealer

When players start Losing The Game, the Death Table delivers the most final punishment the game offers: death.  It is probably the most obvious knobs a game designer has when they want to adjust the difficulty of their game.

Actual death is the most permanent form of punishment the system offers.  You don't get to play the character you've grown attached to.  There are smaller versions (unconsciousness, petrification, etc), but Death is the big one.

Death Table as Urgency Modulator

So one of your companions just got dropped.  They're lying on the ground, bleeding out.  How urgent is it that your PC runs over there to heal them?  It depends on the system.

• Some games, dropped characters always revive as long as you get to them eventually.  
• Other games require 3 death saves, or negative HP at a certain point.  Either way, these systems allow the other players to gauge how near death their companion actually is, and react appropriately.
• There's a third option, where a dying character has a small chance of dying each turn unless tended to.  I can't think of any examples, but it's the one that I am going to playtest next.

But think about this when you're writing your Death Table (or the section of your rules titled Death and Dying). Because it has a big effect on gameplay when there are 1-2 characters laying on the ground, bleeding out.  

This has a big effect on how hard it is for a party to bounce back from a losing comeback.  How much do you want to encourage/discourage comebacks?  (And it's easy to say, yeah, comebacks are exciting and fun, but those same mechanics also make near-death experiences feel a little shallower and less impactful.  If the whole party bounces back to full HP within 10 minutes of half the party getting dropped by Gutripper Demons, it makes combat's effects only last as long as the combat.)

Death Table as Behavior Driver

I'm talking about what happens after your character recovers from the near-death experience.  Injuries, basically.

You can approach this from a simulationist point of view, and start thinking about all the different types of injuries its possible to get, then think about how you'd model that in your system.

You can approach it from the maximum chaos point of view: what are all the possible effects I can invent?  

You can approach it from a gamist point of view, and think about what sort of behavior do you want to encourage after a player nearly dies, then think about the fiction that supports it.  This is where I'm at right now.)  You think about what kind of behavior is worth encouraging when the party is getting their ass kicked?

• Example: if survivors get adrenaline rushes and extra attacks, 0 HP doesn't become as uniformly dreadful.  It encourages (okay, allows) parties to come back from near-TPKs (easier).
• Example: if survivors get permanent, crippling injuries, it (hopefully) encourages them to retire their character.  But in the short term, it doesn't discourage them from pushing deeper into the dungeon.  If there is no mechanical advantage to retreating and healing up, why retreat and heal up?
• Example: if survivors get short term penalties, they (hopefully) will retreat and rest until those injuries heal.

So you can build Rules for Dying that incorporate any or all of these possibilities.

Where I'm at right now, I think I want near-deaths to be strong suggestions that a party should get the fuck out of the dungeon and go rest somewhere safe.  (I've mostly given up on having different hit locations and tracking the duration of different, ongoing injuries.  You'll see.)

Death Table as Scar Giver

Near death experiences can reinforce the character's story (i.e. series of comedic mishaps).  if your character is missing a hand, hopefully they can remember where they lost the hand.  They can be used to strengthen a character's identity.

GLOG Death Rules (Version 26)

When you take damage in excess of your HPs ability to absorb it, you roll on the Death Table.  Roll d20 + excess damage and look up the result on the table.

Natural 1 = Regain 1d6 HP.  Gain a cool scar.
5 or less = Prone and Disarmed.
6-15 = Knocked Out. Beaten for 1 day.
16-25 = Dying. Beaten for 1 day.  Gain an ugly scar.
26+ = Dead

Scars
No effect beyond the cosmetic.  Write them down on the back of your character sheet.

Beaten

• -2 to Attack rolls.
• 20% spell failure chance.
• When you roll on the Death Table, add +10 to your result.

Knocked Out

• At the end of each combat round, make a DC 11 Con check.  
• If you succeed, you wake up.  (You are still Prone and Disarmed.)
• If you roll a natural 1, you lose a point from a random stat. 
• If anyone spends a standard action tending to you, you wake up.

Dying

• At the end of each combat round, roll a d20.
• Natural 1: you lose two points from a random stat.
• 2-9: you lose a point from a random stat.  
• Natural 20: your condition improves to Knocked Out.
• If you've lost more than two stat points from this injury, you die.
• Anyone can attempt to stabilize you with a DC 15 Heal check or a DC 17 Int check.  Once you are stabilized, your condition improves to Knocked Out.

Magical Healing

Magical Healing always restores your HP from the regular floor of 0 HP, eliminating any Knocked Out or Dying conditions.  (A character healed for 3 HP will be left at HP 3.)  You remain Beaten, however.

Discussion

The big driver of behavior here is the Beaten condition.  It does two things.

• It erodes a party's ability to kill things without diminishing their ability to run the fuck away.
• It makes future near-deaths much, much worse.

Those two things, hopefully, should motivate the affected player to seek shelter for the night.  I've played removing one of those two bullet points or the other, or making it stacking, but I think it's bad enough as it is.  

Players are free to push onward, but they'll do so knowing that they are putting themselves at risk.

I don't like players dropping to near-death on one turn and then popping back up on the next round like a jack-in-the-box.  Getting dropped to dying is probably going to be at least 3 turns of downtime: one round spent getting out of Dying, one round getting out of Knocked Out, and one round standing up and recovering your dropped sword. Magical healing can shorten this to 2 rounds, and that sounds about right.

Is it too difficult to revive a dying character?  My back of the napkin math says that an average character has ~75% chance to save a person from death, if they act immediately.  If multiple characters are helping, the chance is even higher.  (There is a high amount of variability, though.)

The stat loss should feel awful because dying is awful, but at the same time, the GLOG gives characters three chances to improve a stat whenever they level up, so stats that get lowered tend to not stay low for long.  Stat loss isn't as dire as it would be in other versions of D&D.  This is the part that puts the "mangled fingers" and "concussion" in the fiction.

I also stepped away from my Just-In-Time philosophy of resolution (the effects are tested at the end of the combat round, rather than at the beginning of the players turn) because I want dying to be a little more predictable.  If a character drops from Dying to Dead, I want them to see it coming, not have it pop out of the blue.

This rewrite also has the advantage of being simple enough that I can memorize it, which I like.

SCRAP DOESN'T KNOW WHAT PIGS ARE

This is a response to this is a response to this is a response to this.

Evidence 1: A Story That Is Probably True

Scrap Princess is visiting her friend's farm.

"This is a nice farm," Scrap says, taking a sip of her Red Lion through a straw.  "Your sheep are so robust."

"Yes," the friend says.  The friend is sitting in a plastic chair with a kiwi bird in her lap.  She is petting it, so she feels relaxed and not very talkative.

"Wait!" shouts Scrap, so shocked she nearly drops her meat pie.  "What are those people doing!?"  She points at two pigs who have trotted out behind the house and begun eating a kiwi fruit.

"The pigs?" the friend says, confused.  The kiwi bird flinches at the noise.

"Hey!" Scrap shouts at the pigs.  "You people can't just crawl naked onto someone else's farm and eat their kiwi fruits!"

"Scrap, those aren't people!  Those are pigs," her friend explains, but Scrap is not listening.  The friend looks down at her knuckles.  Why doesn't anyone ever listen to her?

The kiwi bird isn't listening either.  It's gone cross-eyed with concentration, focusing on the giant egg growing inside its belly.

an unknown species, according to Scrap

Evidence 2: More Opposite Monsters

Carrion Crawler
Baby Jumper

Looks like a long-legged infant, but is actually a type of hairless monkey.  Has a tail that shades towards blue at the tip.  If it touches you with its tail, you must save vs uncontrollable rage.  (You must attack something each turn 1d6 turns.)  They like to force groups to attack each other, then gang up on the last remaining survivor.

Hunt in family groups of 1d4+1.

Catoblepas
Golden Hind

Literally a small, beautiful deer made out of gold.  Everyone who sees it falls in love with it, and the people who send you to hunt it have never seen it, or else they wouldn't want you to kill such a beautiful, innocent thing.  When you kill it and bring its pelt to them, they will weep and pay you the gold they promised you, and then quietly loathe you for the rest of their lives.

The tricky thing about hunting it is that the whole forest will try to stop you.  Trees will drop branches.  Gnats will choke your eyes.  Sparrows will fly down the throats of your hunting dogs and choke them.

Centaur
Bully Horseman

Whenever you roll a random encounter in a labyrinth, roll a d6.  On a 1, the Bully Horseman shows up on the second round of combat, grabs a random PC, and attempts to run off with them atop his shoulders.  He'll bring them back after giving the a tour of some of the (potentially) hazardous rooms in the dungeon.  His voice is panting and apologetic.

He looks like a huge man with the head of a horse.  Corpulent inside his black toga.  Anyone who kills him becomes the next Bully Horseman.  Anyone who injures him feels their head becoming (temporarily) more horse-like.

Centipede
Giant Worm

Huge, herbivorous, harmless, gross.  Put it on your wandering monster table.  Watch what your players do when they encounter it.

Cerebral Parasite
Flesh Driver

This is a small worm-spirit that infects a body part.  Roll a d6: hand, foot, finger, mouth, bellybutton, genitals, eye.  That body part then grows to monstrous size, while the rest of the body shrinks to the size of an appendage.  (It can also grow tentacles if it needs more mobility.)

Basically, if it infects you hand, you turn into an appendix riding around on the back of a rampaging hand monster.  (Infectious fingernails, mouth in the center of the palm, etc.)

If you cut off the original body (which is usually dangling off the back like a keychain, still sentient and screaming), you kill the worm and everything returns to normal.  The severed body part is still severed, though.

Chimera
Elephant Men

These are six dudes.  They all suffer from skeletal deformities, but they wear elephant masks to hide the worst of it.

One dude is armed with two big ivory spears.  He is the leader of the group.  His name is Cornu.

Another dude is armed with two bladed fans.  He has the best hearing and he is the scout of the group.  He can run fast and jump high.

The third dude has a tower shield and an armored belly.  He's really good at protecting his brothers.

The fourth dude just carries around a big snake.  He is a stealthy contortionist and has a powerful sense of smell.

The fifth dude is armed with a log and big iron boots.  He's the brute, and is always kicking down doors and crushing skulls.

The sixth dude has a lasso.  Everyone forgets about him, and he is sad and resentful.  His brothers don't think they need him and always give him pointless tasks, such as "keep the flies off us".  He should have picked a better weapon.

Cockatrice
Gallomox

This is a snake with an extremely unsettling head (sort of like a chicken skull).  When it bites its own tail, it is capable of playing itself like a flute--it has holes on its back and it uses various yoga poses to cover them up.

It knows different songs, and each has a slightly different effect.  Each effect is some variation of "blow something up".

I want to go on record and say that I find no part of this picture arousing.

Coatl
Slunk Bird

A quadrupedal bird with an enormous, axe-like beak.  It observes travelers from a distance and attacks those who don't commit any crimes.  Everyone knows this (and DMs should tell their players this when they first see the owl-like eyes watching them).

If you don't commit any crimes, it creeps closer.  When it reaches you, or when it is attacked, it will kill you with its magic powers (most involving crushing, imprisonment, and ice).

CrabCrayfishCrocodile
Boiler Boys

Soft-shelled arthropods that walk on two legs.  They're flesh colored and look like they have whiskers and goggles if you squint your eyes and huff a little glue.  They're about three feet tall.  They collect treasure and they never share it, so people like to kill them and take it.

They have only one attack, and that is the giant acid gland at the heart of each one.  When they wish to die, they contract the gland, which pumps acid through all of their rapidly-dissolving veins, and then jump at their enemy.  They land with a splash.

HD 1  AC leather  Acid Suicide 1d6 + 1d6 acid per round until washed off.

Demon
Friendly

They are like the angels who weren't quite structured enough to be angels.  These are the angels who never went to church, never learned to tell a sin apart from a good deed, and have little understanding of how the mortal world actually runs.  Famously, they can't tell pigs apart from people either, which is handy if you ever want to trick one.

They're not evil, they're just extremely confused about what good is, and they never listen to you.  You might be able to convince one of them otherwise with an especially dramatic display.

Demogorgon
Metagorn

Metagorn appears as a headless baboon accompanied by two snakes.  All three of them are Metagorn, and unless all three are killed simultaneously, Metagorn can swiftly recover.

Metagorn approaches people and urges them to make plans.  An unplanned life is not worth living!  You must tell Metagorn your plan, and then you must execute it.

The problem is that Metagorn requires a high level of detail (how many steps will you take to cross the room) and doesn't understand that you don't necessarily know whats in the next room.  If you deviate from your plan, Metagorn with make you conform to your plan, even if it means killing you and puppeting your corpse.

The smart thing to do is to make a plan with Metagorn to lock yourself in your current room and organize your packs until Metagorn gets bored.  Anything else is suicide.

If you follow through with your plan to Metagorn's satisfaction, you can suggest who Metagorn should help next.

Jubilex
Orthogon

Prefers to travel through objects.  When he does that, the object becomes clean and straight and perfect.  Like if you staring at a highway, and all of a sudden the highway got a little straighter, all the potholes filled in, the paint got fresh, and then a moment later it all went back to normal--that's Orthogon.

Manifests as an androgenous alabaster statue exactly 2m tall.  (This bothers him, because what's so perfect about humanoids?)  Hates inbetween states and gradients.  A person should be either healthy or dead, nothing in-between.  And so mostly healthy people are healed, while heavily injured people are killed and turned into beautiful corpses.

If Orthogon gets really pissed, he starts turning things into cubes composed of their base matter.  For example, a human would be turned into a cube of flesh, a cube of bone, and a cube of ice.  Which are then stacked.

Manes
Tayles

These look like armless, headless people.  Both genders, usually not naked.  They follow you around.  Whatever you do to other people, they try to do to you.  Intelligent but they have a hard time communicating.

Orcus
Anbless

She loves children.  She appears as a normal-sized woman wearing a 30' long dress.  She flies, of course, otherwise it wouldn't make any sense.

Anbless carries her children in the fabric of her dress.  They wander around in there like patches sewn onto the surface.  Think of her as a cat lady, except with children.

She kidnaps children and takes them away from abusive parents, which is all of them.  She tkeas them to her private heaven, called Kinderhalla, where they enjoy games and candy and playground for all eternity!

Except they do not enjoy timelessness, and so the children age into puberty.  Anbless kicks them out as soon as she catches them making out.  Repulsive little beasts.

Children who are kicked out usually die trying to find their way back to civilized lands.  Those that do are cursed to live a half-life.  Everything is cold and bitter and dreary compared to Kinderhalla, and they have no useful skills.

People who object to her methods are turned into children themselves.  If that is not possible, they are killed.

Succubus
Power Wife

Sort of like if Supergirl was violently committed to the idea of marrying you so could conceive a child of destiny.  You'll also be required to live with her and live a good, decent wholesome life in a good part of the world, next to a good school.  All of this precludes adventuring, of course.  You'll have to find a decent source of income, but the power wife will help.  She's kind, pleasant, and uncomfortably powerful.  She'll help you live a long, fulfilling live (without adventuring).  After you are dead and the child is grown, she'll move on to her next angelic assignment.

Can switch genders as needed, depending on the type of conception required.

Type I Demon: Vrock
Type I Friendly: Corpok

A pile of bird bones arranged into symbolic structures.  Hovers through the air with the sound of many flapping wings.  All creatures within 50' gain flight.

If three of them sing in unison for 3 rounds, all things nearby are flung skyward.

Believe that the earth is corrupt (since demons live under it) and the sky is heavenly (since angels live there).  They think everyone should just live in the sky.

Type II Demon: Hezrou
Type II Friendly: Crysanth

Cultivators of extensive flower labyrinths, sometimes planted atop clouds.  Flower people, with blossom heads and long, sensitive tongues.  The touch of their tongue confers temporary telepathy, which is how they communicate.

They believe that flowers are good, butterflies are tolerable, and beetles are evil.  There is no room for anything else in their cosmology, and so nearly everything else must be destroyed and somehow used to plant more flowers.  They fight with extremely painful swords (if one brings you below 10 HP, you must save vs unconsciousness) and illusions.

You can escape their predations only if you can impersonate a flower.  This means a pleasant smell and a lovely flower, at a minimum.

Is that such a bad world to want?  An empty planet covered by beautiful, peaceful flowers?

Type III Demon: Glabrezu
Type III Friendly: Mantlebru

A small, dapper man who always seems to be emerging from a hole on a flat surface.  His hats change when you aren't looking.

He will clean you up and give you fashionable clothes.  You must wear the clothes.  If you get them dirty he will kill you.  He will tell you all of these things in a polite, direct manner.  He fights by screaming until things blister, pop, and melt.

Don't go into his hole.  It's a peristaltic velvet tunnel that will crush your bones like a fistful of straw.

Type IV Demon: Nalfeshnee
Type IV Friendly: Tinglethree

Looks like a winged pig (a type of animal that I find sexually unattractive) that cannot fly.

He is the friendly most concerned with keeping you humble.  He has been watching you and has become concerned that you are winning too often, and it is making you proud.  You should lose the next 1d6 fights.  Yes, I think that would be best for all of us if you did that.

Can cast the dreaded mass reduce person and permanent reduce person.

Type V Demon: Marilith
Type V Friendly: Paxora

These are one-armed warrior women whose ankles end with flaming shoes.  They can fly and they are magnificent dancers.

They firmly believe in utter pacifism.  No one must fight.  They will escort you out of the dungeon peacefully.  Then they will help you break your weapons on a rock.  Then they will use their magic to clear some land so you can be peaceful farmers for the rest of your natural lives.

They believe in these values so much that they will kill to uphold them.  (It's okay to kill for peace because once you've killed everyone who isn't peaceful, there will only be peace forever and that is worth it.)

Type VI Demon: Balor
Type VI Friendly: Kylor

They appear like extremely tall women.  But not grossly elongated, merely long and graceful.  They make you feel like this is the way the human body plan should be, and you are just stumpy imitations.  They have the heads of deer.

They have concluded that you are part of the Problem and must be destroyed.  The only way to convince them otherwise is to convince them that your identity is no longer the same.  Only by changing your character as much as possible will you pacify them.  (If you pacify them, you can suggest who else is part of the Problem.)

Like a belt of gender reversal and a helm of opposite alignment would be a good start.  Better to give yourself a new name and speak in a different accent.

They fight by opening portals between their antlers and summoning things and people that you have already fought in the past.  They also fight with a hammer that shatters armor and enchantments on a hit.

Yeenoghu (Demon Lord of Gnolls)
Yarrock (Friendly Lord of Dogs)

Announces your doom in retribution for all the war dogs that you've allowed to die.  Kills you by flooding the dungeon with dogs.  Add 2d6 war dogs to every room in the dungeon.

Appears as an enormous man with the head of a mastiff.  Served by obedient berserkers, naked except for their spiked collars.

Not only are these not my preferred species, but they appear to be underage as well.