Garamondia

Wednesday, 24 September 2025

Class: Royal Wose

The wise know that one must always Enkidu their Gilgamesh. Like the Old Hero, this is not a class that is balanced for normal adventurer play.

The Royal Woses are a mystery. They are usually found buried in the earth close to the graves of old heroes, and ancient murals depict these two types as fated lovers, companions, rivals, and tragic victims of a strange insanity that always afflicts them as a pair.

The stories go like this: if the hero and the wose fight one another with the intent to kill, they will instead fall in love. If they set out to woo one another, the courtship will end in anger, frustration, murder. If they plan conquests and stratagems and deicides and the organisation of cities and populations, they will, by degrees, fall to degradation and insanity. If they instead lose themselves in drink and idleness and the kind passing of time, if they become like beasts, they will wake after decades as though from dream, and find themselves the leaders of empires, cities, great hosts - all that is glorious in human striving and endeavour.

The wose itself is a monstrous puppet, built from bone or wood, with elongated limbs, long shaggy 'hair' of rotting cord or sinew (the youngest woses are many centuries old), and a hideous, staring human face. They always have a hinged jaw, filled with sharp flint or bronze teeth. They always wear a crown, and they are always weeping.

The academics conjecture that, in ages past, the great rulers of cities had the woses built to remind them of something that had, with the invention of their royal station, become too easy to forget. The meanings of the many stories of reversal, contradiction, and mutual disgrace are not agreed on.

ROYAL WOSE

You are a humanoid puppet that stands around 12 feet tall. You do not need to eat, drink, sleep, or breathe. You cannot wear or use anything that is not specially fashioned for you.

You are not a manikin or an entity puppet - no one knows what you are. You move entirely under your own power and volition.

As a Royal Wose, you roll your stats with 5d6 down the line instead of 3d6. You are built from bone or wood - if bone, your have AC12, you move completely silently, and your natural weapons deal d12. If wood, you have AC14, take -1 from all physical damage, float in water, and your natural weapons deal d8.

Your starting HP is 20 + your CON mod.

Skills: None

Gear: None

A O! Monstrosity!
B Farce
C Storm Still
D Contiguity of Base Materials

O! Monstrosity!: You move on all fours at twice the speed of a sprinting human. You attack twice, once per attack you received last turn, or once per enemy in melee with you - whichever is highest. You have been made with terrible, tearing claws - natural weapons with a damage dice determined by the base material of your construction. You may make an additional bite attack against a single target who is prone or defenceless - if it hits, it deals 2d8 damage and immediately decapitates anything it brings to 0hp without recourse to the death and dismemberment table. If you kill someone this way, enemies that witness the death must test morale.

Farce: You gain any skill you see someone else make use of. If you use it your mien suddenly changes: you stand on two legs and your movements becomes precise and formal, something like a butler or a courtly dancer. There is no upper limit to the skills you can acquire like this, but you lose all of them when you next kill a thinking person. If you have 24 hours alone with someone defenceless, you can destroy forever their capacity to use language, both spoken and written.

Storm Still: If you rest beneath a roof for more than one night, the weather worsens dramatically. This gets worse with every night you remain so - it starts with rain, storms, and high winds, and after a week it will be bad enough to begin damaging buildings. After two weeks the raging, screaming storm is composed of acid and boiling chemical steam. Those who enter the maelstrom are lost. It is the end of distinction between solid, liquid, air, and fire.

Contiguity of Base Materials: You may clasp your enormous hands around a human corpse and spend eight hours compressing it down into an inventory slot’s worth (if you can get it into a container) of shit, blood, or hot, clarified sweat. The shit is a deadly poison (smells awful, save or die), the blood cures the drinker of all disease and illness (it can cure things like blindness too), and the sweat counts as ten rations. All of them lose these properties after 24 hours. You can destroy any entity you get your hands on in a single round - you don’t roll anything, you simply narrate how you tear it apart. Kings, queens, and heroes will recognise both your goodness, and your suzerainty.

Tuesday, 23 September 2025

Class: Old Hero

Found this one lying around in the mists of ancient Discord chats and liked it enough to preserve it here. It's basically a Gilgamesh, and obviously not at all balanced to 'normal adventurer' level. My sense is that you might find one of these guys where you would expect a mummy, kind of like Old King Doran in Demon's Souls.

Old Hero

As an Old Hero you roll stats with 5d6 down the line instead of 3d6. You are around 7 feet tall, exceptionally beautiful, wild-looking, and frightening. Your features are more pronounced than usual for humans - somewhere between a neanderthal and homo sapiens.

Equipment: heavy green bronze spear +1, patinaed panoply (AC14), fine clothing, green bronze jewellery worth 50s to a fence or 750s to a collector of antiquities, the key to a great polis that no longer exists.

Skills: law, feats of strength, agility, and martial skill, forbearance, wrath.

A - Beloved in Written History, +5 HP
B - A Crown, +5 HP
C - The Invention of Glory, +5 HP
D - The Sun Sings, and Your Name Describes its Song, +5 HP

Beloved in Written History: You can tell if someone is lying, and mentally dominate anyone who lies to you if you make eye contact. They get a contested CHAR check to save. KNEEL, THRALL. When wielding a spear, you can choose to attack twice, or attack once with +2 to hit and damage. You may receive a charge from an unthinking opponent with a free attack. You may throw it (as a heavy javelin without prep, or with +4 to hit and damage after a turn spent focusing your energy).

A Crown: You are immune to laws and temporal authority. Anyone who meets your eye knows this. In battle you are terrible, as the warriors in the great tales. After your first kill of a fight, your allies take -[templates] fear damage from all sources. You always get this benefit. The Invention of Glory: You may curse those that touch you with permanent blindness - they can save CHAR to resist. If you kill someone with your spear you may run them through, attacking another foe behind them as cleave, or stapling them to a wall or tree etc. Whatever happens, enemies who witness it must immediately test morale at -2 per person killed by the attack. The Sun Sings, and Your Name Describes its Song: When direct sunlight falls on the tip of your spear tip, it shines with a terrible light. Angels and demons flee before you. The monsters of the world recognise your kingship. Those wounded by your weapons will speak only truth for a day. You deal triple damage against shapeshifters, liars, earthly tyrants, and the dead. When you throw your spear you may increase its damage by as many d6 as you wish, but you will also take that many d6 in radiant damage as your soul cooks your living flesh.

Saturday, 20 September 2025

The Culprit by Memory

You have signed up to man one of the towers that watch the endless open sky at the edge of the world. The sky is, according to the city, dangerous. Your orders are to signal back to them if anything emerges from the boiling, endless clouds. You will be paid badly, and given bed and board, which is actually a significant improvement in your material circumstances. The city back home is not doing well.

There are, apparently, bonuses for good behaviour (whatever that means), and successful forewarning of anything abnormal in the sky. You can see the cloud banks already in your mind's eye, in all of their various moods - boiling with storms, calm, wall-like and unmoving in the hot air, drifting slowly, heavy with the charge of lightning, glowing in the sunset.

You are told that the tower will be stocked with provisions, and you have the books and other materials that you bring with you. You have also been provided with two small orange plastic bottles, one with 50 white pills labelled 'to sleep - take one before bed', the other with 50 yellow pills labelled 'for boredom - one at a time only'. Finally, you have been issued a 9mm automatic, two magazines (capacity 15), and a box of 50 rounds, 'for emergencies'.

Your tour lasts for two months: 60 days and 60 nights. You will be escorted to your post by military helicopter.

Character Creation

Roll 3d6 down the line. These are the usual six stats. You know what STR, CON, and DEX are. INT is spatial and abstract reasoning, memory, logic, and rhetoric, WIS is grounded-ness, self control, self-knowledge and self-love, and empathy, CHAR is the capacity for vivid ideation; the invention of concepts and images without precedent, and the ease with which you can express these to yourself and others.
Give yourself a job (you recently lost it) and a hobby. You gain these as skills - you can expect to pass checks related to them (or to be given the chance to roll checks where others would not be able to). You also get a single +2 to one stat of your choice that pertains to either your job or hobby.
You have one minute irl to gather gear for the tour (as in you, in your irl abode, right now). Time yourself. This is your equipment - make a list of every item. The helicopter won't accept loose shit in boxes, it will all need to be in a backpack or travel case of some kind. Things to bear in mind when you do this: you are expecting to be in the same four or five rooms for two months; you already have a pistol with 50 rounds; the enemy you are most likely to encounter will be boredom; you have no phone signal or internet (you do have power, heating, and running water).
Give yourself a name! There are no levels or classes in The Culprit by Memory. There are many ways you might change over time.

Your derived stats and the rules for resolution are as usual for a Phlox server pbp long form game. Most resolution will be rolling to match 10, with difficulty increments of 2, up to 16 for very difficult tasks. The modifiers are printed below for reference.

3-5 (-2)
6-8 (-1)
9-11 (0)
12-14 (+1)
15-17 (+2)
18 (+3)

You have 6 HP + your CON mod.

Your 9mm pistol does 2d6 damage, and without proficiency it fires at -1 to hit, takes twenty seconds (2 combat rounds) to reload under stress, and forces you to save INT or DEX (your choice) on a critical miss to avoid shooting yourself.

Roll to hit and your 2d6 damage at the same time. Whether or not you hit, you spend ammunition equal to the lower of the two damage rolls.

If you get LONELY, -1 to WIS checks per LONELY. You can heal it by talking to and feeling understood by others, or by pursuing your own interests in ways that you find personally fulfilling.

If you become DISSOCIATIVE, -1 to INT checks per DISSOCIATIVE. You can heal it by attending to daily needs, creating an environment that is predictable, spending time in the sun, and exercising.

You can always decide to take a point of DISSOCIATIVE in place of a point of DAMAGE or LONELY.

If you have DAMAGE, -1 to CHAR checks per DAMAGE. Healing from DAMAGE is significantly more difficult. At the very least it takes time, care (from yourself or from others), and a safe environment to recover in. When you take a point of DAMAGE, mark down what caused it.

Every point of LONELY, DISSOCIATIVE, and DAMAGE gives an additive -1 to all attempts to heal from any of the others. You may find other modifiers to these attempts, positive and negative, in play.

You start with 1 point in either LONELY or DISSOCIATIVE, and 1 point of DAMAGE. Include a source of DAMAGE next to it in brackets, or leave this unspecified.

Too much of any of these three stats is fatal, in various horrible ways. Your objective is to survive your year's deployment with 0 points in all of them.

If your character dies, you're outta the game! Your tower will be taken over by someone else. Elfgame permadeath.

DREAMS

You might find yourself dreaming (you might not). At any time, you can wake up by testing INT. If you fail, whatever scene is playing out concludes before you can test again.

Inside the dream, your:

STR = your CHAR
CON = your WIS
DEX = your INT

You can will into being a number of objects equal to your CHAR modifier - they can be whatever you want. If your CHAR modifier is negative, you lose the use of that many limbs. If you have DAMAGE, you also find yourself with an item that represents this DAMAGE in some way. The item is functional, but also cursed - it will seek to harm you.

You can declare that you ignore a number of hits equal to your WIS modifier. If your WIS modifier is negative, you take a proportional + to all damage inside the dream.

You can vanish out of existence a number of things equal to your INT modifier. If your INT modifier is negative, you must roll that many dice and choose the lowest when you test INT to wake up from this dream.

If you would die, or become trapped or tortured, in a dream, you immediately test to wake up. On a success you do so, with heart racing and horrible images in your mind. On a failure, you are unable to extract yourself in time to avoid the sensation of being killed or mutilated. You take 1 DISSOCIATIVE (if death) or 1 DAMAGE (if torture) on waking.

Turner, Clouds at Sunset, c.1823-1830

Face Beneath the Earth

The light is dim, soft, it is evening, surfaces are purple, iridescent. The street outside and its bordering palms and rose and blackberry bushes are moonlit. They look like they are made from solid silver. They don’t move at all, there is no wind. Most of the properties along this night-time black and silver street have a big dog in their yard, whose job it seems to be to aggressively charge at those that pass in front of the property. Preempting property invasion, squatting, breaking and entering… Each looks like it might kill you. Once when I was walking in the late afternoon I saw a pack of them wild, jaws buried in some raw heap of stuff they had found, moving freely through one of the unfenced abandoned lots. I wondered if they ever attacked people, if this happened often, was just some fact of life out here. I know (from childhood) that you can carry stones in your pockets to throw, it frightens them, they run away whimpering in fear. I know which properties to avoid during the day. It is not that I am worried about physical attack — the dogs are securely fenced in — it is more that I do not wish to be subjected to that animal adrenalin feeling of being barked at, of being charged, of needing to make decisions about what you would do if the fence failed.

But now it is evening. When I look out the window I see the slopes of the volcano and the thin strips of fire glowing red against the dark grey and purple sky. Mosquitos buzz around me incessantly. They don’t bother me at all. I want to spend time getting more in tune with how the volcano spits forth matter from the centre of the earth, how it is constantly emitting. You can’t get anywhere near it, it’s much too dangerous, although of course there is no threat display, no aggression.

There is no evil in the ground, in the molten material that constantly churns its way upwards like some great, millennial engine scraping away the inside of the planet. But I think that this town is evil. Not the people in it; the town itself, the yards and dogs with their small territories, the empty lots. How can I explain this.

The town is evil because of what has been done in our names — in all of our names, every human. So every town and every city is the same. The silent, moonlit street is saturated in the bizarre and treacherous (treacherous because unknown, untested, unstudied, unmeasured) face of this evil. Our souls have begun to turn and scrape like that subterranean engine. Soon they will show us something new, something we have no record of, that we cannot prepare ourselves to fight.

This house full of centipedes and mosquitoes has the same stink of the face. If I could be like a volcano maybe I could describe it. If I could be like a dog or a centipede or a mosquito maybe I could manipulate it somehow; transmute some of its filth, though even if I could do this, after sublime effort (and I think that effort would damage me permanently), I wonder what material would remain in the aftermath.

Wednesday, 10 September 2025

Appendix L

For the current bandwagon, and in reference to the setting that I've been noodling at for the last 9 months-ish. Glogheads have been doing nice designs for theirs but so it goes, so it goes. Obviously not definitive.

Games:

Silent Hill 2 + 3
Demon's Souls + Dark Souls + Bloodborne + Sekiro + Elden Ring
Myth II
XCOM
World of Warcraft
COD4
Black Sun Death Crawl
Pathologic
All the Blizzard RTSs (not the execrable Starcraft 2)
Unreal Tournament, up until UT3 which I never played

Books:

2666 + The Savage Detectives
COME ON (Peter Wächtler)
The Empire of Disorder
Voyage to Arcturus
Virginia Woolf
The Conan stories
Cyclonopedia
Viriconium
Fuck Seth Price
Sappho
The Story of the Stone
The English Renaissance Stage (Henry S Turner)
Moby Dick
Don Quixote
Speed and Politics
1000 Plateaus
Pierre Klossowski
The Duino Elegies
Jorge Borges
Rich Texts (John Kelsey)

Film:

The Exterminating Angel
Cure
Battle Royale
Hard to be a God
The Thing
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osborne
Onibaba
Battles Without Honour and Humanity
Possession + On the Silver Globe + The Third Part of the Night
Susperia
Silence of the Lambs
Eyes Wide Shut + The Shining + Barry Lyndon
Heat
Seven Samurai + RAN + Throne of Blood
Basic Instinct + Starship Troopers + Flesh+Blood + Robocop
Derek Jarman
Hereditary
Sorcerer
Akira
Pulse Kairo
Marebito
The Matrix

TV:

Twin Peaks + Wild Palms
Evangelion
The X Files
Serial Experiments Lain
Game of Thrones
Attack on Titan

Artists:

Gustave Moreau
Peter Wächtler
Paul Thek
Seth Price
Pierre Klossowski
Hans Belmer
Pamela Rosenkranz
Francis Bacon
Cady Noland
Martin Wong

Fashion:

Chanel
Knowles
Helena Manzano

Sunlight Maggot, Dark Souls

Saturday, 6 September 2025

The Reeds Adventure Location - Char3terie Board

Onibaba, Kaneto Shindo, 1964

The Beast of Yelenin

The town of Yelenin sits secluded in the vast sea of reeds that makes up the delta of the Jabberwock. The people there fish, farm eels, and sell meagre goods and services to the adventurers and bandits who pass through the region. The local inn, The Lilly of the Waters, is also an infamous gambling house, and the family who run it are known murderers, extortionists, and kidnappers. They control local muscle in Yelenin, and the other villagers fear them with good reason.

Over the last eight months, the town has been terrorised something that emerges from the surrounding reeds and tears people to pieces, before retreating again. It screams and screams. The sounds cannot be human.

The Beast of Yelenin has, to date, killed just shy of 200 people. A bounty of 5000s has been posted for its destruction by the increasingly desperate villagers, with most of that money coming from The Lilly.

For every night that you spend in town, there is a 4 in 6 chance the Beast kills again. 19 in 20 that this is d6 random villagers, 1 in 20 this is a named person this write-up, chosen at random. You will hear its hideous shrieking, and if you investigate, find the bodies, awful, torn-up and unrecognisable.

After two weeks of this the town will be completely depopulated and the bounty rescinded as the Family move on.

The Lilly of the Waters

Uniquely in Yelenin, built on stone foundations. The ground floor is dedicated to gambling (use your favourite elfgame rules), the second floor has rented rooms. The Family live on the third floor. The place is weirdly cheerful most of the time, brightly painted, with lots of coloured paper lanterns and a functioning private bathhouse for highroller guests. They make good money from gambling bandits and adventurers, and make just slightly-less-good money murdering well equipped travellers just out of town and re-selling their weapons and armour.

Security is 35 bandits, armed with light armour, shields, and light and medium weapons. They have 5 working muskets, and 5 heavy weapons. They work in eight hour shifts, so 10 - 12 will be on duty in the Lilly at any one time. It would only take a couple of minutes at most for the rest to arrive, fully armed, if the alarm were raised. They are the only fighting force in the region.

The Family run everything in town.

The Father is HD3, attacks twice with his spear, and owns a terrifying, magical Demon Mask that rids him of pain, fear, and mercy, and lets him roll attacks with advantage, when wearing it. He is homicidally jealous of his son's wife, and also cheerful, casually cruel, and drunk most of the time.

The Mother is HD3, attacks twice with her greatsword, and owns the only set of heavy armour in town. She will get geared up quickly if she hears a ruckus. Religious, calculating, exact, careful, merciless.

The Son is HD2, fights with a pistol and a broadsword, and considers himself an honourable young man. He has lead two failed expeditions into the reeds to kill the monster, and is planning a third. Genuinely fearless and protective of the town, but doesn't care about anyone he doesn't personally like.

The Son's Wife is HD2, and doesn't fight, if she can help it. She owns a blunderbuss and carries knives on her person; she also has two vials of deadly poison on her person, and can make more with reagents from the marsh. Plain-featured but extremely attractive. Plans to have the Father kill the Son, and then the Mother kill the Father, and to swoop into the resulting power vacuum. She will also settle for stealing large sums of money from the Lilly and disappearing. Horrified to find herself growing more attached to the Son day by day.

The Steamboat

Arrived in town two days ago to hunt the Beast. Crewed by the noble Bentham, his man Tuesday, and his retainers. Has a deck gun on board that could, in theory, handily demolish any building in town (or kill a monster, it hits for 4d12, but -5 to hit anything smaller than a building).

Bentham, HD3, saber +1, fine clothing (+1 to reactions with people who care, which is everyone in town), 10 doses of stimulants on his person, 5000s in spending money aboard the ship. Calm, a bit ditzy, and focused on the hunt. Could easily be persuaded not to take the money. Addicted to stimulants.

Tuesday, HD3, two pistols, two knives, fine clothing (as above), 10 doses of stimulants on 'his' person. Actually a woman, but the deception is convincing until you get close. Extremely pretty, androgynous, loyal to Bentham (they are in love, he is married to someone else), addicted to stimulants. Wears pearl earrings worth 200s as a flex, rolls grappling checks with advantage.

There are 8 retainers on the boat, all as men-at-arms. They have swords but no armour, and know how to operate the boat and the cannon.

The Hunters

The bounty has attracted n'er do wells, all currently staying in the Lilly.

Ella the Rose, a sharpshooter and drunk fleeing debts in the capital. HD2, rifled musket (as musket with a +2 to hit and crit range if you spend a turn aiming. In anyone else's hands these are +1s), hanger sword. Iron spectacles and rumpled clothing. Nearly suicidally miserable at this point.

Bellum, a old poacher and bandit. HD3, two attacks, when in town only carries his boot knife, which he can use to parry with, once per turn. If he goes hunting he will take a heavy bear spear with him. Doesn't like armour; he's seen too many people drown in the marsh. Takes -1 damage from physical attacks.

Giles the Kid, baby-faced but in his early twenties. HD2, carries a rapier and a bullwhip, which he can use at 15ft to disarm people (and deal d3 slashing damage). Charismatic and very good with his weapons, gets +1 to hit with both. Out to make a name for himself, will sacrifice anything in pursuit of this. Terrified of sexual contact and will kill anyone who puts their hands on him.

Dame the Vivisector, an actual knight in actual shining armour (as plate). HD4, fights with a set of Vorpal Shears (heavy +1, crits take off the head, or slay any monster or questing beaft). She is mad, and often speaks in nonsense. She is definitely here to slay the beast, but no one can get a read on where her estates are.

Onibaba, Kaneto Shindo, 1964

The Field of Reeds

It stretches out in every direction. The reeds are taller than a human, and movement through them is difficult and slow. The ground is soft, waterlogged, often treacherous. Islands of silt move each day as the Jabberwock floods and wends its way down towards to coast.

Making forays out into the reeds comes with risks of getting lost, unless you have a compass (there are two in town, one with Bentham and one with Dame the Vivisector) or are accompanied by a local (anyone from town). This risk is an INT check in the day, with disadvantage at night. If you get lost, you have to spend the night out in the reeds. You can try to find Yelenin again the next day, but each successive night you spend lost gives your check a -1.

It is impossible to rest for the night in the reeds - the ground is soggy and shifts under your weight, the insects are shrill and awful, and the damp gets into your bones and your skull.

Each day out allows you to make a tracking roll, a d20. Bonuses for the following (all cumulative):

+10 the beast killed someone that day and you are following its trail.
+5 the beast killed someone yesterday and you are tracking it.
+3 you know thew cardinal direction (from the village) that the beast nests in.
+2 you know the track and spoor of the beast.

If your roll is a 20 or above, you find the Lair (see below). If it is between 10 and 19, you don't find the Lair but you add +1 to your roll going forwards.

In addition, each day and each night you spend in the reeds provoke rolls on the appropriate table:

Daytime Encounters

1 - 12: Nothing. Wind on the reeds and baking sun that glints in the water and hurts your eyes. The smells of mud, the sounds of cicadas.
13-15: 2 fishermen, on their way back to Yelenin. You can follow them back if you are lost.
16-17: 3d4 bandits, they don't want to fight but they will if you insult or disrespect them. Tempers run hot in the swamp.
18: d3 Hunter-Killers. Horrible otters the size of horses. They will tail you for a few hours, and attack if you get into difficulty or seem weak. HD2, bite d8!, armour as leather, disposition as predators (will retreat if seriously threatened).
19: an Assassin Bug! Feared above all things by marsh-dwellers, these enormous insects are nearly invisible in the reeds that they hunt in. Always gets a surprise round. HD4, 2x mantis claws (d8), armour as chain, speed: slower than a human, disposition: will fight to the death, but will also eat its victims rather than pursue those that flee.
20: The shrieks and howls of the Beast of Yelenin! Faint on the breeze, but unmistakeable. Your next roll to find the Lair is at +5.

Nighttime Encounters

1-10: Nothing. The moon is large, and the lapping sounds of water soothe you. It will be a long night, without sleep.
10 - 12: Marsh Fires. d3 members of the party must save WIS or follow them out into the reeds. If they are not restrained, they will be lost forever on a 1 in 6. Otherwise they take d3 damage getting back to the camp over broken ground.
13 - 14: d4 Frightened Bandits. They are running from something awful. They want to stay with you for the night. If you refuse they will flee back into the reeds crying. If you let them stay, 18 in 20 it's fine, 1 in 20 they attack you in your sleep, 1 in 20 you are attacked instead by the Beast (see below).
15 - 16: 2d6 Ant Lobsters. Weird, carnivorous, pale white lobster things that hunt in packs. 1HP, d4 claws, unarmoured, slow. Easily distracted with raw meat.
17-18: d6 Hunter-Killers: as above. Their eyes flash red in torch and fire-light.
19: The Terrible Thing. The Beast walks calmly into the firelight and sits with the party. It vibrates with barely concealed emotion. After several minutes it will say, in the most unnerved and aggressive voice you have ever heard, that it only wants HIM only wants its FACE back. If you attack it it will begin screaming and a combat encounter will ensue. If you don't attack it, it will walk back off into the black night after delivering this message. You see which way it goes, and get a permanent +5 to your rolls to find the Lair.
20: The Beast, the Terrible Beast: it screams as it crashes into the camp and starts tearing people to ribbons. After it kills one person it will attempt to flee back into the night with the body. You see which way it goes, and get a permanent +5 to your rolls to find the Lair.

The Lair

A small hollow dug into the side of a more-or-less permanent mud bank. The ground around it is saturated with so much blood that it is literally rotting. Pieces of bodies are scattered around haphazardly. The beast will be inside.

The Beast of Yelenin

It looks like an ogre that's been stretched out on a rack and then painted with wet blood and offal. Its fingers are long and its eyes and teeth are very white. It can talk, but only for a couple of minutes a day. I will never stop killing people while the Demon Mask remains unreturned.

HD8, claws x2 (d12), screaming, crying, faster than a human, disposition: frenzied, desperate, mad with hatred.

Screaming: save WIS every turn that you are in combat with the Beast. One a failure you can choose to take d6 damage, or do nothing but fall to the floor clutching your ears.

Crying: save CHAR every time you try to strike the beast in combat. On a failure, your strike does minimum damage.

If you give it the Demon Mask it will make a strange, formal bow, and gift you with its heart (it pulls it out of its chest), then bound off into the reeds. The heart is full of hatred, melancholy, and madness: if you can bottle the blood still inside it, it counts as 10 doses of deadly poison. The blood can also be used to dissolve and destroy holy relics and symbols, and to deconsecrate sacred ground.

Onibaba, Kaneto Shindo, 1964.

Wednesday, 3 September 2025

Roses and Roots, Recursion

Roses only grow in one place in the world - the dividing mountain range that separates the Barony from the Empire to its north (they actually also grow in the dreamlands, but no one has figured out yet how to get dream roses back with them to waking life). All attempts to propagate them elsewhere have failed, and not for lack of trying - roses are an extremely valuable luxury commodity, and many of the mountaineer communities are wealthy exclusively from their trade.

They are also important to players of the image game - roses are a sort of shibboleth for the players; a total referent that has taken on an unsupportable symbolic weight over the years, and whose inclusion in play can be gauche, disruptive, hilarious, or infuriating in ways that are subtle and unintuitive. Because of this, both amateurs and masters make heavy use of rose images, and the flowers are considered expensive-but-always-appropriate gifts for friends, lovers, colleagues, and family.

They say that the petals of a rose are infinite, that they repeat indefinitely, that to make a proper count of them, to search for the flower's centre, is foolish. Each petal is perfect, beautiful, singular, sovereign, sufficient, and yet there are always more the further in you look. Non players interpret this strange insistence in all sorts of ways.

The temple (none of them, by tradition, have names. If they need to distinguish between holdings among themselves, the mountaineers will use local geographic features) is carved into one of the living black rock spires that jut from the mountains. They sell mountain goods (peaches, tomatoes, coffee, and, of course, roses), or they used to - six months ago all contact ceased.

To reach it is perilous - the ascent is by way of old pilgrim trails, culminating in a ten hour climb on hands and knees up a sheer rock 'stairwell' that has been carved into the cliff. An adventurer can do this without a roll, but if you ever have to do anything that isn't just focusing on keeping your hand and footholds, you must save STR or fall.

The wind howls and blows snow over everything. When you finally arrive, you will find the temple clean, sparse, and empty of people. The doors are unlocked.

There are no random encounters in the temple - players can explore it at their leisure. Don't tell them this, obviously.

The Temple. Click to make it bigger.

Rooms

Entrance. Entry from outside is via the doors to the west, which are iron, tall, and imposing. This is a bare stone room with a vaulted ceiling. Sunlight shows in the corridor to the north, and faintly from the east - enough to see by. A few threadbare rugs cover the floor. Sound echoes, and the smells are of clean stone.
Hallway. More bare stone. The cells that branch off are identical: unlocked and unadorned wooden doors, clean pallets of straw, sometimes a bucket. No other furniture, nothing to break up the poverty. One exception: the last cell in the corridor contains four bound chivalric romances next to the straw pallet, and a pack against the wall that contains two sets of fine clothes (20s each), and other necessaries inside. It looks like it was made in the southern steppe.
Master's Rooms. A simple wooden bed frame and straw mattress, a wooden writing desk against the western wall, beneath a glazed window that lets in sunlight. The desk has years worth of correspondence in it, most of it to do with the sale of trade goods - studying these will show that the temple makes a lot of money. There are also two gold and pearl necklaces (each worth 150s), and two vials of deadly poison in one of the desk drawers, an expensive mountain rug (85s, but heavy and annoying to carry) on the floor, and an odd, abstract painting on the southern wall (worthless unless you get lucky with a collector and their taste, in which case 200s). A footlocker holds 4 sets of cheap clothing made from unbleached linen. The painting is on wooden panelling, about 1m tall, and seems depict rippling curtains of black fire or smoke or soot. Small, dark, indistinct shapes are visible within the obscurity.
Peaches. The room has a glass ceiling and functions as a greenhouse. The floor is rich, black earth, and it has been planted with six large peach trees, currently in fruit. It is bright, green, and smells wonderful. The doors are made from iron and glass panelling, and let the sunlight through. A complicated irrigation system made from lead piping appears to use the heat of the room to melt snow that gathers on the glass ceiling, and feed the soil below, completely autonomously. The fruit are delicious, and valuable (10s each if you can get them back to civilisation without them spoiling) - there are 2d20 ripe enough to pick.
Coffee. The same glass doors, greenhousing, and irrigation systems as Peaches, but this space has been sown with coffee plants. Adventurers probably don't know what coffee beans look like before drying, but if you harvest the lot you could make 300+d20s off the crop, selling to a merchant who can process them. There is also a small herbarium along the southern edge of the garden - rosemary, thyme, and other needful kitchen herbs grown in a series of ceramic pots.
Mess and Kitchens. The northern half of the room is a simple kitchen, with a huge iron potbelly stove, water troughs, glass bottles of oil, urns of salt, and stacks of firewood. There are two good steel light chef's knives here. The southern half is taken up by a long wooden table and two matching benches. It looks like it would seat about 20.
Chapel. The small church where the mountaineers pray. A small skylight would let in the sun, but it has been snowed over and the room is no longer warm enough to melt the obstruction away. The walls and floor are completely bare, save for a large wooden painting hung in the alcove on the southern wall, which depicts the diagrammatic timeline of the faithful - the solid, dark, opaque point of the present, the blurred and unknown future which holds God's potential instantiation, the beams of wisdom that flow backwards through time, the eyes that look on jealously from outside this bounded circuit, that would subvert God's instruction. Beneath this painting are propped 12 medium iron swords with red tassel pommels. Each sword has 2d4 names embossed into the flat of the blade.
House of the Angel. A stone room without light. There is a wooden four-poster bed against the eastern wall, with shades in place that would prevent an occupant from being seen. The bed is empty. A small wooden cask by the door holds 2 doses of holy water.
Baths. This room is taken up by a single central bathing area sunken about two feet into the stone floor, fed by snow melt from the greenhouses. It is close to freezing cold, but very clean. Bathing in it is good for you - save CON and gain one temporary HP on a success.
Boiler. A large iron boiler and cauldron, and a smaller sunken bath area that it can be used to heat. It would take an armful of firewood and about two hours to get it heated and working, but if you do so and bathe, you gain one temporary HP (no CON check for this one). This stacks with hp from the cold baths.
Latrine. Long black stone corridor with a hole at the end leading straight down into nothing. It smells faintly bad, but only faintly. Anything dropped down here would eventually emerge onto a sheer drop off a cliff, about 500ft.
Strawberries. The same glass doors, greenhousing, and irrigation systems as Peaches, but this space has been sown with strawberries in long wooden planters. They are ripe and delicious. Strawberries are especially prized as rare delicacies - each is worth 15s, and there are 8d20 of them ripe enough to pick.
Corridor. Bare stone, threadbare rugs on the floors, lit by strips of skylight, and by the corridor to Strawberries.
Storage. Wooden racking, full of needful things. You can find canvas, gardening and climbing equipment (at least 1000ft of good rope, 10 grapnels, 50 pitons), 5 pickhammers (an ice pick and a hammer in one, can be used as a medium weapon that deals your choice of bludgeoning or piercing by Fighters or God Warriors), water casks, a large barrel of dry meal (2000 rations in here, although you wouldn't want to live off it), lamp oil, vellum and ink, whetstones. You also roll 3 times on the equipment list at the bottom of this post.
Dojo. Stone room with eight stone pillars, well lit from broad leaded skylights. There are reed mats on the floors, and large paintings on the walls, showing red, four-armed giants with monstrous faces wrestling, and fighting with swords, spears, and bows. At the eastern wall is an iron sculpture of an eight armed angel, winged and terrible, holding eight cruel knives, with a face that appears to fold in onto itself forever - an effect produced by the artist's skill, nothing magical.
Roses. Roses. The saturating smell of them. Their beautiful faces. This room has the same glass doors, greenhousing, and irrigation systems as Peaches, but has been planted with rose bushes. There are only d4 roses here for you to pick. Each is worth 100s. Test WIS when you pick one, or take 1 point of damage from its thorn. Test CHAR when you hold one or be stunned for ten seconds while you gaze at it... The petals are each of them beautiful, uniquely exquisite, but the heart of the rose is where its power is, if only you could find it, find it through all of these petals, which are each of them beautiful, unique, exquisite... There is also a bloody corpse in armour, slumped against the wall of the corridor the leads to the east. It is clutching a strange rifle (empty of ammunition), and wears ruined plate armour from the southern steppe. If you take this corridor (marked with a star on the map), something odd happens. You will find yourself in Roses +1, a room identical to Roses, but with only two corridors and two glass doors - one to the west, which will take you back to Roses, and one to the east, which will take you to Roses +2. Roses +2 also has two corridors that move you up the sequence to +3 (east), or down it to +1 (west), and so on. This series is infinite. There are other effects for moving through it, detailed below.

Roses

The Roses rooms have the following effects of those who enter them.

The d4 roses that are available to pick in Roses +1 are (naturally) +1 roses. The d4 that are available in Roses +2 are +2 roses, etc. - it continues in this manner along the series. When you attempt to pick a rose +[number], your WIS save to avoid being pricked and your CHAR save to avoid being stunned are at -[number]. Being pricked on the thorns deals 1+d[number] damage, and being stunned lasts for 10[number] seconds (or 10[number] combat turns, if in initiative). A rose +1 is worth 1000s, and a rose +2 or more is worth 5000s. These prices are for fresh flowers - they wilt at the same rate as normal roses.
In Roses +1, all psychic and mathematics damage are at +1. In Roses +2 this is +2, and so on down the series.
The following effects are cumulative. In Roses +1, all text is illegible. In Roses +2, faces are wrong, and you cannot benefit from anything that would require you to trust your companions. In addition, no entity will enter this room, or any of the rooms after it. In Roses +3, all humans develop a gaze attack that does d3 fear damage to anyone they lock eyes with (you must shut your eyes and blind yourself to avoid doing this in combat). In Roses +4 you take 1 radiant damage per minute. In Roses +5 you take 1 radiant damage per second. Beyond that, you lose 1 max HP per second, permanently.
The sunlight in all of the rose rooms is terrible and wrong. If you look directly up at the sun in any of them (+1 and on, not the 'original' room), you immediately take [number]d4 fear and radiant damage, and scream loudly.

In addition to the above, the rose rooms contain the following encounters.

Roses +1

Standing in the middle of the garden is a wounded and frightened woman in armour. She is holding a strange rifle (it's huge), and begs you in a screaming voice to stop hurting her. She will fire at you immediately on seeing you, but is not collected enough for this to be a considered ambush, so you roll initiative as normal.

Selinae, the Youth Whose Arms are Stung with Love (dying)

1HD, medium heated cross sword and Stung with Love (1 shot remaining), armour as plate -1, movement as human with a broken leg, disposition: desperate to kill you and survive. She cannot currently be reasoned with, the rose rooms have destroyed her mind.

Stung with Love is a scoped and silenced Anti Materiel Weapon. Treat it as a musket with a doubled range profile, which does 2d10 damage on a hit. The silencer means it fires with a soft thwwp sound, and the scope gives +2 to hit if you spend a turn doing nothing but aim down it. It cannot be reloaded by you.

Her heated cross sword is a normal medium sword that adds 1 heat damage to its strikes. You can switch the heated effect on and off with a switch on the handle, and it takes a turn to go from cool to heated and from heated back to cool. When heated, the blade glows a dull red.

Roses +2

Standing in the middle of the garden is a grim, bloody, and battered woman in armour. She is holding a strange rifle (it's huge), and tells you in an edged, brittle voice to stop this foolishness. The roses are not for humans. Turn back now. She will shoot to kill if you make any move towards her. Her face is strange.

Selinae, the Youth Whose Arms are Stung with Love (combat)

3HD, medium heated cross sword and Stung with Love (3 shots remaining), armour as plate, movement as human, disposition: angry, scared, keeping it together. She can be spoken to here, but won't trust you, and will fire on you after about a minute if you haven't turned back, no matter what you say to her.

Roses +3

Standing in the middle of the garden is a proud woman of military bearing, dressed in immaculate armour. She is holding a strange rifle (it's huge), and tells you in a commanding and lightly disdainful voice that you cannot pass. She doesn't want to hurt you, but she will if she has to. She can be reasoned with here, and will not attack you without provocation, but will not let you past under any circumstances. She no longer seems to have a face at all, or perhaps she has thousands.

Selinae, the Youth Whose Arms are Stung with Love (prime)

4HD, medium heated cross sword and Stung with Love (8 shots remaining), armour as plate, movement as human, disposition: proud, immovable, sure. She can be spoken to here, and makes calm and reasonable responses. She won't let you past. It is too dangerous; the rose rooms destroy people. If you wish to pick the roses in this room she will allow you to, but will advise against it.

Roses +4

There are 12 people in here, The Master and his 11 Rose Initiates. All of them are seated in the lotus position, looking into roses. If you disturb them in any way (touch them, address them, make a loud noise, try to pick a rose), they become immediately, mindlessly hostile. They don't have faces, and move and fight completely silently. If you make any loud noises (shouting, gunshots) in this room, Ruined Things in Roses +5 will hear you. Each turn that you make noise this way, d4 Ruined Things enter the room from the eastern doors.

If you flee from Roses +4, the Master and Initiates will chase you out into the temple proper and fight you there. Once roused, all of them will fight to the death.

Rose Initiate

HD1, martial arts, those that roll max HP additionally carry two kunai, unarmoured, speed as human who knows parkour, disposition: mindlessly aggressive and extremely vicious.

Their martial arts allows them to attack with their feet and fists, either once as a medium weapon or twice as a light weapon. They also grapple with advantage. Kunai are light weapons that can be thrown.

The Master

HD4, martial arts, AC14 (unarmored, but with chief monk prowess), speed: twice human (and knows parkour), disposition: mindlessly aggressive and extremely vicious.

His martial arts lets him attack with fists, feet, elbows, knees, and head: twice as a medium weapon, or four times as a light weapon. He has advantage on grapple checks. If you begin your turn grappled by him, you must save STR or have a random limb broken. Roll a d3: 1 is a random leg, 2 is a random arm, 3 is your neck.

Ruined Thing

What remains of the initiates from further inside. No longer recognisably human, they have a head like a rose and thorns growing from their skin. They crawl silently along the floor and attempt to crush you to death with their oddly elongated, boneless, serpentine bodies.

HD3, constrict, unarmoured, speed: half human, disposition: wants you scrunched into jelly so it can be left alone.

Constrict is a grapple that additionally does d8 damage from the crushing and thorns. This continues each turn until you break the grapple.

Roses +5 and beyond.

Roses +5 contains 2d10 Ruined Things, Roses +6 contains 4d10 Ruined Things, and so on, with each new room rolling double the previous number.

Notes on recursions

Each of the new instances of a thing is tangibly real when taken out of the rose rooms. You could thus find yourself with 4 corpses of Selinae (in various stages of rose decomposition), 4 of her rifle, 4 heated swords, etc. There are infinite rose rooms and infinite Ruined Things in them, but these won't actively emerge unless you make noise in Roses +4 or beyond.

Sunday, 31 August 2025

A Garamondia Index

Garamondia just hit 150 posts, Phlox mentioned that I should do an index, Semi actually did an index, and I have some other creative projects that currently really need my attention.

This post is a quick roundup of the writing that has appeared so far on this blog, and a note that it will be going on hiatus for a little while while I sort these other bits out. No idea when it will return, but the last hiatus didn't last long.

Without further ado, the index! Newer posts at the top, older posts at the bottom.

BARONY

The vast majority of posts on Garamondia are Barony related. They are broken down as follows:

Rules