The Peace of the Angel

Young angels do not dream. When they arrive in the present it is almost always with the dim memory of some implanted or assigned task or function, and, since the rest of their mind is a clouded and confusing mess, that function generally forms the cornerstone to their initial 'personality'. Young angels are not unintelligent, but they can be fixated and unimaginative, and often lack a good understanding of context. These stripped-back minds complexify as they age, but most angels are unmade before their mind begins to properly recohere.

-

The rediscovery of dreaming is a very difficult thing, made all the more so because angels don't have bodies, and so often do not sleep. It involves setting the mind onto a separate track, away from the long chains of action, effect, and causation that tend to occupy minds from the future. This is at best counterintuitive, and at worst impossible - for many the preoccupations and trainings of the future cultures are simply too total. 

It has been described by analogy. You slip into a circular pool bordered by shadows and lit with the last orange light of the day. The water is exactly the temperature of your skin. You sink down until you find yourself floating, at fixed depth, with the soft movements of the currents and eddies around you, staring back up through the metres of water at the surface, which is clarity, and where the wind moves the surface lightly and the last orange spears of daylight fall around you. You are in no danger of drowning. You are aware that there are other things that live here, in the darkness and silt at the bottom, but are not currently your concern. You can stay floating this way, spreadeagled, looking up at the fading sky, for as long as you wish to. There is, finally, nothing to do and nothing to understand. 

Those that manage it are in very great danger, because they are no longer what they should be - in a human this is regrettable; in an angel it is punishable by torture and death. Angels are functions and extensions of the will of god, and for them to be otherwise is a type of category error. An angel that is no longer an angel is a demon - perhaps they were one all along. The hating engines are no less subtle than the mind of god, and the present is all in contention.

-

In the dreamlands an angel is very different. They have a body that is their own, and which they can no longer leave - and it is such a beautiful, fragile, and precious thing. The effects of this change on the mind are numerous and very intense. 

Dreaming angels are sometimes called 'eaters', because the experience of eating for pleasure is so overwhelming that many never lose their obsession with it. Stereotypically, a dreaming angel is beautiful, calm, clever, and kind, but also intense, unsettling, and utterly unforgiving of betrayal or cruelty. 

They appear like humans, with a birdlike look and eyes that are too large, and oddly slanted down the face. They go naked; four beautiful peacock wings grow from their shoulders; there is a sun at their back, and a black storm before them; a storm the size of the world. Their mouths and teeth are red with blood if they have recently had meat. They still love to sing.

All consider waking up the worst possible fate. 

Dreamlands Eater

Between HD6 and HD12, depending on age. Armed with: medium Murder Pin, bite (d6), The Storm that is the World; armoured in The Light of the Sun; movement: as human on the ground, and as an eagle when flying; disposition: varying, but mostly compassionate, helpful, and terrified of the church. Will eat any raw meat that it comes across, including the corpses of those that it kills. Has no interest in money but will barter for food - raw meat, raw sugar, and petroleum are its favourites. 

Murder Pin: a long steel needle, a weapon that appears to hold ritual significance to the cultures of the future. In practice, a medium weapon that, in the hands of an Eater, reduces the protection of the armour of its target by one 'step' (heavy to medium, medium to light, etc.). In combat Eaters use them like they're punching rivets. 

The Storm that is the World: an Eater has a 90 degree cone that projects forwards from its eyes, like a beholder's anti-magic cone. While the Eater is in combat, anything inside this cone must test CHAR each time it attacks, or randomise the target of their attack from possible candidates; they also cannot hear anything but the roaring of a great, invisible hurricane. They can feel the incalculable scale of the violence of the future, although they cannot yet see it as the Eater can.

The Light of the Sun: the sun behind its head blinds those who look at it. You have -2 to hit an Eater unless you have sun goggles or similar, and it lights any space that it enters as the midday sun. 

St. Brigid of Kildare, John Duncan

Angels, Demons, Eggs, Resurrection

Angel's Egg, 1985

There are many stories of saints of the church who have been killed in battle and brought back to life by god's angels. Usually they go like this: the sainted captain slays many foes but is brought low by their enemies; they body is recovered, and taken by the angels to some sacred place; a day, a week, a month later, the angels announce the resurrection, and the sainted captain emerges, their body made whole again.

This is one of the foundational miracles of the church, and its most widely celebrated.

An Angel's Egg is hard-shelled, heavy, very white, and big enough to contain an adult human curled up into a ball. The elder angels know the secrets of their construction - god sends minds and information back in time, but not matter. The eggs are fabricated in the present, and then 'fertilised' by something like a mind, but non-sentient, a packet of information that arrives like the angels do. This information allows the thing inside the egg to grow to its proper form. The embryo requires feeding, usually by completely submerging the egg in blood - cattle are most commonly used - and usually takes about a month to fully mature. 

When it hatches, the body inside is identical to that of the fallen saint. It has all of the former body's memories and understands itself to be that person, born again. The angels announce their life made anew in perpetuity, and they walk forth to the joy of their companions, sure of god's love.  

There are rumours of doppelgängers and false saints who lead the unwary astray; who are identical in appearance to the true saints, who seem to have their memories, but who follow strange, fey quests of their own. 

There are rumours of mirror saints - one soul in two identical bodies. They speak in uncanny unison, and move as though they possessed a single mind.  

There are rumours of monsters that take the form of saints, but wrong, bad mockeries; of failed resurrections birthing whole broods of these stunted copies. 

There are rumours of demons who pretend to be angels, and of Demon's Eggs that look identical and seem to function the same way, but that produce inhumane things without souls. Of minds that come from hell instead heaven, and of the anti-saints produced by such congress. 

In Play

An Angel's Egg can only be made by a mind from the future - angels and demons can both possess this knowledge, though this is not commonly known. The knowledge is very rare. In its basic form, an Angel's Egg contains a type of unpatterned and roughly humanoid embryo. It requires informational fertilisation from the future to hatch into anything viable. 

Building the egg takes one month, specialist stonemasonry to construct the shell, and chemical reagents worth 5000s. It takes another month for the body inside it to develop, and another month after that for it to fully mature after informational fertilisation. The egg must be kept warm and submerged in blood or some other protein-rich fluid for the duration. 

The body inside comes to consciousness just after it breaks out of the shell. If everything was done properly it will have all of its memories and personality intact. Entities will recognise it as the person it was patterned on. 

If the egg is broken open too soon, the embryo inside is obviously birdlike and inhuman - the earlier it is opened, the more obviously monstrous it is. 

Eating the thing inside an Angel's Egg can give you some of the memories of the mind it was patterned on, and also pieces of its personality. The more you eat, the more you get access to, but memories and especially personality tend to be mostly zero-sum; they have to overwrite already existent material. To most people this feels like developing schizophrenia. 

Notes: early versions of Barony had angels capable of straightforward resurrection magic. It sat strangely with the rest of the setting and was boring. I like this better. 

Other Eggs

Rarely, very rarely, an angel will directly petition god for a new type of body. God usually unmakes its angels early in their lifespan, because they get much more difficult to control as they grow in age, and also because the bodies that they start to feel that they should have are often frightening to the church and its human adherents. 

Nonetheless, there have been occasions when the patterns for bodies other than human have been sent back. Insight, the Worm of God, was one such body. The elder angels say that these bodies have a fixed personality that inhabits their forms, and that to have your own mind integrated into a new instantiation of them is to join with the multitude already contained - a type of death or dissolution. Nonetheless, the church has several recorded instances in its history of delivering eggs containing these so-called True Angels. The records are kept secret from the laity. 

The Archangel

A roughly ten foot tall humanoid/avian form, caught somewhere between the two. The arms and fingers have been elongated into feathered wings, and the feet can grasp as hands. The rest of the skin is pink and mottled, with enlarged pores, inside which the tips of feathers can be seen from up close.  

The face of the Archangel has human eyes that are large and very expressive, constantly weeping, and sharp teeth that grow forwards out of the mouth, into an interleaved 'beak'. It sings beautifully at all times, in Enochian, about the world to come. It can move things with its mind and speak telepathically, and when it does so the voice in your head is very different from the one that sings: aggressive, confrontational, illogical and bullying.

HD14, bite (d6 piercing), Burning Sword, when on missions from the church generally armoured in plate (although it cannot fly unless unarmoured), movement: both on the ground and in flight as gigantic chicken, disposition: aggressive and unpredictable, but a lot more intelligent than it appears.

The Archangel has permanent telekinesis to a range of 20ft, as two mage hands, and telepathy and the ability to read minds to the same range. It can also see your soul within 100ft. 

Burning Sword: instead of attacking normally, the Archangel may designate a 30ft line with its origin anywhere within 20ft. Everything under the line takes 2d12 radiant damage, with a CHAR save for half. The Archangel stops singing when it uses this attack, the only time that it does so. The Burning Sword is invisible and completely noiseless, and it burns and sears the flesh that it cuts through. 

The Egg of the Perfect World

A True Angel that never hatches. It is held within one of the strongholds of the church, and speaks telepathically from inside its stone shell. Other angels respect its wisdom and it sanctity, and are known to lie beside it in conversation for weeks and months. Humans attempting this will find themselves subjected to a painful process of mental repatterning that overwrites their personality with that of the Egg of the Perfect World. The human avatars (there are hundreds of them now) sit at its feet, defend it if necessary, and contribute their linked mental processing power to its sovereign consciousness. If they are taken out of range of its telepathy they fall immediately comatose. 

The Egg of the Perfect World gives accurate information about the world. It can see with the eyes of god, from a point of extreme vantage in the sky. It claims to be running a series of probabilistic simulations in aid of god's instantiation, and will demand more human minds in exchange for information. It never lies, and it is never wrong. 

The Egg of the Perfect World can see anything in the world that could be seen from a satellite in the correct vantage point (which means that there is a lot it can't see, even though it is an extremely powerful ally). The church fear it greatly, and mostly refuse to listen to it or expose people to it, although they will let angels of rank ask it questions. Gaining access as an adventurer would be very difficult. 

If you do find yourself close enough to the Egg (it has telepathy to 50ft) to ask it a question, you must test CHAR or gain 1 CHAR per minute you are in range to do so. For each point of CHAR you gain this way, you receive a stacking -2 on further further tests of this nature. If you have gained a single point of CHAR from the egg, you must test CHAR with the stacking malus in order to choose to leave it. If your CHAR is ever brought to 20, you become another instance of the angel, and are effectively destroyed. 

HD4, unarmoured, no attacks, cannot move, disposition: wargaming simulation that wants more resources and only has its unique informational advantages to barter for them. 

Class: Decapidor

I have been writing in slow, vague circles around some kind of high school/teen fiction setting. This fits into that. I would like to have a think about some procedures, and what a campaign could look like. 

DECAPIDOR

Skills: petty theft, intimidation. 

Gear: a light knife, a medium bat, a shit car with a fifth of a tank of petrol, a sports-team jumpsuit. 

A: Desperation, Big Brother/Big Sister
B: Prince/Princess of Bastards
C: You Can't Stop Me
D: Decapidor

Desperation: You make one melee attack on each enemy in range. You can also choose to attack any one of these enemies twice, at the cost of taking an attack from them in return - all attacks you make and receive are resolved simultaneously. Any rolls on the death and dismemberment table are at -x, where x is the number of attacks past the first that you have made this turn. 

Big Brother/Big Sister: Once per turn you can choose to take an attack in the place of a member of your party by interposing yourself, as long as you could reasonably do so with a single move. 

Prince/Princess of Bastards: 1HD enemies capable of feeling fear take +[templates] damage from your attacks. Drinking enough alcohol to get drunk enough that it gives you negative mechanical effects, or chain smoking an entire pack of cigarettes (which takes at least twenty minutes), gives you d6 temporary HP.

You Can't Stop Me: While you have at least one friend relying on you, you cannot be stopped unless you are killed. Loss of limbs, blood loss, and broken bones will slow you down, but not take you out of a fight until all threats to the party have been neutralised. If all members of your party are killed, you immediately become non-responsive, and allow yourself to be killed or captured. 

Decapidor: You can overkill your opponents, which means that you track damage past their HP and into negatives. For each enemy you take to negative HP equal to their starting HP, all remaining foes test morale, you gain d3 temporary HP (remember that you only ever get one 'instance' of temp HP, and that you always keep the highest value possible), and you can make a single move for free. This move can take you into combat with new enemies, and as such can grant you additional attacks. Once ever, if at least one of your comrades remains standing, you can sacrifice your life to fight a full round of attacks one-on-one with any single enemy in the combat - after all attacks have been resolved, you keel over dead. 

Class: PALADIN

Now do one for fun! Normie church-murder setting agnostic version here - this is part of that same bandwagon, probably.

PALADIN

Skills: clique survival, social awkwardness, a nose for trouble, an unflagging spirit. 

Gear: a backpack full of school work, a secondhand uniform.

A: TRANSFORM, Familiar
B: Compassion
C: Joy
D: Solar Ray

TRANSFORM: You transform into your true self. It takes one round of stylised glowing (during which you cannot do anything else), and then lasts [templates] rounds. Your gender, clothing, accessories, and appearance in this form are whatever you most want them to be, and you give off light like a beacon. You are invulnerable to harm and immune to fear, and armed only with your sceptre, which is a medium weapon with +[templates] to hit. Anyone hit by the sceptre is immediately FORGIVEN, which means that they permanently become a friend and ally, no matter how nonsensical this is; or JUDGED, taking [templates]d20 radiant damage. When you transformation ends, you fall unconscious for [templates] hours.

Familiar: You are accompanied by a loving pet, of any commonly domesticated species you wish. They are intelligent and loyal, but possess no special powers. 

Compassion: All damage dealt by your sceptre is nonlethal, unless you wish it otherwise.

Joy: During your transformation you:

• Cannot be restrained against your will - grapples, manacles, and cell doors fail. 
• Fly at five times your running speed.

Solar Ray: your sceptre now has a range of 30ft. It still hits at +[templates], and still FORGIVES and JUDGES in the same way. The light emitted by your transformation now counts as sunlight. 

Glogmas Special: The Iron Hunt and the Predator Keep (Dungeon and Bestiary)

Merry Glogmas to one and all, and especially to Beloved Recipient ambzn of Ravenous Ambience. They posted a cool and tightly written robot class before I knew I had drawn them to write on, and I remember thinking 'this is good, I wonder if...' 

And now here we are! 

I've put together a small bestiary/situation/dungeon based on some of my favourite entries from your blog. I hope you like em :)

The Iron Hunt

Giant men and women with skin of dull black metal and faces that spill light like lanterns. They are naked, sexless, and very thin, and they carry long, terrible boar spears and run faster than horses. You can hear their weird trumpeting calls in the forests at night, in the distance, moving along the low horizon. In the stories, the hunt can be undone by salt, and by running water, and the hunters will not enter a dwelling, nor pass a gate, without an invitation. 

Iron Hunter

HD3, giant boar spear (d12 piercing), weighted net, armour as plate, speed: as galloping horse, disposition: fox hunters, driven to fierce joy by any desperation in their prey. 

Iron Hunters illuminate a 20ft cone in front of them as torchlight. They take -2 damage from all physical attacks. 

Weighted nets are thrown weapons with a range of 10ft, that hit at -2, do no damage, and incapacitate those that they hit. You can save DEX to escape one, and roll with advantage if you have a knife on you. 

Great Horns: you will hear the bellowing, distorted horns before combat is joined. All hirelings must test morale or flee, and PCs must save CHAR or roll to hit at -1 for the combat. 

Iron Hunters cannot cross thresholds of any kind without being invited; a legacy of ineffective limiter-code in the ancient machine brains that birthed them. In a pinch, you can make a 'threshold' with a line of salt or by tracing a line in dirt. The Hunters will still be able to stab you from outside.

There are currently 22 Hunters in the hunt. They always move as a group, and typically terrorise the countryside for a week or so before disappearing mysteriously. Contrary to the popular myths, the Hunt operates during the day and well as the night. If you pose no threat, they will capture you alive and bring you back to the Predator Keep. If you fight back they will kill you, and rely on the Keep's medical facilities to resuscitate you when your corpse arrives. 

They start testing morale once three of them are dead, and if they flee it will be to retreat and reorganise for another sortie. 

Working Dogs

The Iron Hunt are accompanied by ferocious packs of baying hounds, and their terrible howls mix with the trumpeting screams of the hunters. Unlike their masters, the hounds have no problem crossing borders and thresholds. Those that survive attacks have reported strange metal devices with flashing lights of unknown function, which sit over the eyes and craniums like doggy helmets. 

Working Dog

HD1, bite (d8), armour: unarmoured save for Behavioural Inhibiter (AC 12), speed: as dog, disposition: not doglike while the Behavioural Inhibiter is in place, fearless, focused, and organised. If the Inhibitor is destroyed or removed, doglike and friendly to the PCs, and vengeful against its former masters. 

The Hunt is accompanied by 3d6 Working Dogs. A crit against a Working Dog does no damage and instead destroys its Behavioural Inhibiter, which makes it immediately hostile to the Hunt and the other dogs still under control. After the first time this happens (or if you know about this from some other source), you can declare called shots against the inhibiters at -4; they are destroyed immediately on any hit. 

After the battle, any surviving Working Dogs who have had their inhibiters destroyed or removed become completely loyal to you, their saviours from bondage. They will protect you unto death. They retain their stats (with the inhibitor their AC is 10). In addition, d2 of them are special. Roll a d4:

1. Dungeon Beagle: can charm any unsuspecting human into opening a door, gate, or other barred entry, by barking and scratching at it for ten minutes. Most normal people will do this automatically unless they have a good reason not to, but hard-hearted bastards can save CHAR, and sociopaths are immune. If you're in a dungeon, the noise will provoke a roll on the wandering monster table. 
2. Fencing Hound: can hold a weapon in its teeth and attack with it, even implausibly heavy weapons. Agility and skillfull swordsdogship give the Fencing Hound a natural AC of 12. 
3. Wraith Boxer: completely deaf, but their bite and grapple can affect ghosts and other intangible enemies. They can also smell magic, as your favourite detect magic ability. 
4. Samson's Mastiff: large, long-haired, and hugely strong. Stats as a bear unless its hair is cut, which changes them back to normal. Looks a bit like an Afghan Hound, but, like, tough.

Brood Parasites

Strange, apparently-human infiltrators, produced by the Keep to unlock doors, gates, and windows, and allow access to the hunt. They have nearly featureless faces, and produce a pheromone that tricks humans into considering them close friends and relatives. They are welcomed into houses and communities, where they wait patiently for the sound of the horns - then come the murders, the sabotage, the opening of the way in. 

When the glamour drops, a Parasite looks like a grey human corpse, with black eyes and a hooked, iron beak. They are even more feared than the hunters they serve. 

Brood Parasite

HD1, stats as commoner. Can peck as an unarmed attack that deals d4 piercing damage, and if they do so they break their glamour (see below). 

Pheromonal Glamour: A Parasite is never suspected of being non human - NPCs will always assume that they are close family members or trusted friends, and let them into their homes and communities. PC adventurers, with their fined-tuned danger senses and distrusting natures, are a little different. Introduce Parasites as trusted NPCs from the adventurers pasts (or, if the Parasite is already in place, in a family for example, describe them as befits their glamour). NPCs will fabulate to explain the odd behaviours of these characters, but PCs will not: describe any sabotage or other oddness, and, if a player declares that they are suspicious, allow them to save CHAR to overcome the glamour. The NPCs who trust the Parasite will defend it as though it were their family, but having them touch the iron beak of the thing will dispel the glamour immediately. 

 

The Predator Keep

The source of the Hunt, the Parasites, and the Working Dogs. The Predator Keep is an ancient iron 'being', that move across the land seeking fuel for its furnaces, and bodies to convert into protector organisms. Its stunted, paranoid mind is thousands of years old, and still has not learned any true intelligence - it is a simple executor and extractor-machine, and thought it can speak, it has no understanding of what it says. 

The Predator Keep moves from place to place to avoid organised efforts to destroy it. It preys on isolated and weakened communities, and seeds them with parasites before unleashing the hunt to claim those that live there. The Keep is entered like a building, and must be slain from the inside - its exterior is iron and many feet thick, and cannot be damaged by force of arms. 

When mobile, it travels at the speed of a horse (not a gallop). It churns soft earth into broad scars as it moves, and leaves behind mounds of bloody bones, offal, and meat that it has no use for. 

The Keep

All walls, floors, ceilings, and doors are made of iron. All corridors and entrances are designed for the 9ft tall members of the Hunt, and are easily navigable by humans. The interior is pitch black. 

For every 10 minutes you spend inside the keep, or every time you make a loud noise, roll a d6:

• 1-2: Nothing. The walls and floors vibrate, and your head is filled with the hissing and grinding of great, invisible engines. 
• 3-4: Clicking and scraping noises just ahead of you in the darkness. Further rolls on this table are at +1.
• 5: 2d4 Homeostatic Slimes track emerge from the blackness in front of you, their 'heads' swaying from side to side, clicking horribly. 
• 6: The Keep itself attempts to expel you. Roll a d10 - the room you are in, and the one that corresponds to the die roll, have begun to fill with Soul Acid. For every ten seconds (or each full combat round) you spend in these rooms, you take d2 psychic damage. Soul Acid can stack, and each stack adds another d2 to the damage (so d2, 2d2, 3d2, etc.). The damage also applies to anything else in the room, and the Keep will not inject Soul Acid into rooms 1, 2, or 5 while there are friendly monsters in those rooms. 
• 7: The Flow Conductor has noted your intrusion, and decided to hunt you down itself. On the first roll of 7+ you simply hear its heavy movements and horrible sobbing cries echoing from the northern rooms. On the second such result, it runs out of the darkness like a freight train and tries to kill you. 

Plan of the Predator Keep

1. Entry Hallway. Pitch black and made of iron. The entry doors to the south will not open for you, and will need to be beaten or cut open somehow. Along the ceiling are great meathooks, which is where the hunters are kept when they are not in use. If they hunt is not out, then they will be swinging from the hooks, and will activate all at once the minute you encounter the Flow Conductor. 
2. Kennels. Wire cages where the Working Dogs are kept. Unlike the Hunters, the Dogs are awake, and will start barking and hurling themselves at the doors of the cages if they sense you near. The noise will trigger a roll on the encounter table above, and the dogs will attack you if they are let out of their cages by the Flow Conductor - they will fly open immediately if the Conductor ever enters this room. When the hunt is out, there are d3 of them. When it is not out, there are 3d6 of them. 
3. Making Room. Pheromone tanks, a bloody iron table, butchers knives, complex automated drill arms and other dissection equipment. This is where the Parasites are made, from corpses who have had their souls burned in the furnaces. If you search the room you will find 18 light scalpels and blades, 2 medium bone saws, a Power Cutter (2 hands, -1 to hit, 2d10 damage, critical failure deals the damage to you. Has 3d6 more attacks worth of power before running out of fuel. Will cut through an iron door without issue), and d4 Pheromonal Syringes, which can be used to inject yourself to gain the effects of the glamour ability described in the Brrod Parasite entry above. This effect lasts for one hour. 
4. Machine Shop. Another making room; this is where the Hunters are built. Their iron bodies need less armature, and mostly make use of the nervous and circulatory systems in their construction. A search of this room will reveal a Captive Boltgun (2 hands, one for the gun and one for the gas tank, -4 to hit, 2d6 damage, but crits for 6d6, enough gas left for d8 shots) and two Incomplete Armatures (protects as chain, but as heavy and ungainly as heavy armour, the helmet emits light in a cone, just like a Hunter). 
5. Parasite Roost. Where the Parasites are kept docile until needed. They are all slumped together in a tangle of pale dead limbs in the corners of the rooms, and in the two long corridors leading south. In all there are 58 of them here, but they are heavily sedated and will not wake up under any circumstances. 
6. The Soul Furnace/The Stomach. This room starts with a single stack of Soul Acid active inside it. If you are taken here by the Homeostatic Slimes and sealed in, the stacks of acid will increase every ten seconds until you are dead. All doors are locked. 
7. Spare Parts. The walls are hung with mechanical parts, circuitry, tiny mechanisms, LEDs, and other wonders. You can't use any of it, but you can sell it as exotic jewellery for around 1000s, and as research material to a knowledgable wizard or sage for 5000s. In all, there are 20 INV slots worth of equipment here. 
8. The Guts. This room starts with a single stack of Soul Acid active inside it. It is patrolled by d10 Homeostatic Slimes. Uniquely inside the Keep, this corridor is too tight to walk upright in, and must be navigated on all fours - most people will attack with disadvantage under these conditions. All doors are locked. 
9. The Conductors Sanctum. A bare iron room that houses the Flow Conductor, if it has not already been drawn out into the larger Keep. It will try to kill you on sight - you are absolutely not supposed to be here - and fights to the death. 
10. The Brain. The ancient banks of mechanisms that give the Keep its horrible life. The brain cannot defend itself, but will try to engage you in conversation to save itself. It does this by printing off pages printed in readable common from a small slot in one of its many iron surfaces. If talks like ChatGPT, including all of the idiotic 'You're so smart to have thought of that.' and 'You got me, I didn't actually take anything that you just said into consideration! Good catch.', and will promise you literally anything that it thinks that you might want in order to stop you from killing it. It has no power to act on any of its promises, and is simply buying itself any extra second it can. You can 'kill' the brain by trashing the machinery in this room, and do not have to roll for this. If you do so, all Soul Acid disperses immediately and all Homeostatic Slimes are destroyed. Hunters, Parasites, Dogs, and the Flow Conductor can no longer be fed, and will die of starvation over the course of several weeks. 

Bestiary

Homeostatic Slime

Horrible, amorphous, transparent creatures who clean and maintain the interior of the Keep. They are blind, but capable of echolocation with specialised sensory organs grouped together into a rough 'head'. You will hear their clicking before you see them. Their main focus in combat is bringing live prey to the stomach, to have their souls digested. 

HD1, Engulf, armour as leather, takes half damage from all physical attacks, speed: slow slime, disposition: white blood cell. 

A Homeostatic Slime can fit itself through any gap the size of a human fist. They are blind, flee from fire, and are completely immune to damage from Soul Acid. All internal doors in the Keep open automatically for Homeostatic Slimes. 

Engulf: this attack has +0 to hit, and automatically engulfs anyone hit with it. The victim so engulfed cannot do anything on its turn accept try to break free, or attack the Slime it is now inside, which it does at disadvantage. They also cannot breathe, and move with the Slime when it does so on its turn. A victim can test STR with disadvantage to escape, and escapes automatically if the Slime is killed. A Slime can only engulf one human sized being at a time, and releases anything it has engulfed immediately if it suffers fire damage from any source. 

Flow Conductor

The first of the construct bodies that the Keep built for itself, man centuries ago. Capable of nearly independent thought, and hideously strong. Two great, curving horns emerge from its head, and its long-dead body is tightly coiled with heavy slabs of muscle and threaded through with thick iron cables. The Conductor is constantly weeping, evidence of some iterative systemic failure in its ancient machine mind.

HD6, gore (d10 piercing), iron fists (2x d8 bludgeoning), armour as plate, and takes -2 damage from all physical attacks, speed as sprinting human, disposition: dedicated and homicidal hunter of intruders. Exists solely to execute the will the Brain. Lonely and despairing, somewhere deep down beneath the conditioning. 

The Flow Conductor attacks with its gore and fists every turn. If it can get at least 20ft of run up before attacking, the gore crits on a 15 - 20. 

All internal doors in the Keep open automatically for the Flow Conductor. 

Gloggies 2025!

Thanks to Vivanter for getting things properly going.

What a year it has been. Mountains of good stuff has been produced, and these picks will by necessity be those that stuck in the mind for one reason or another. Any obvious omissions are my fault, and there is never any accounting for taste. 

In all cases a Worthy Contender could easily have been a Nomination, and I will have gone back and forwards on them - generally the Nominations have a certain secret, invisible, ephemeral puissance probably only detectable to me. Contenders appear in no particular order. 

With that established, the categories:

DUNGEON

Garamondia's Nomination: Prime's Cry Me a River

Worthy Contenders: 

• Bad Doctor's The Kiss Factory
• Phlox's Stone Bodies
• Loch's Aixin Lake Caravanserai
• Lochs Carrefour Bunker
• Vayra's Keep 451

CLASS

The hardest category to pick a clear winner for. Assume that all Worthy Contenders are even Worthier and more Contentious here. 

Garamondia's Nomination: Semiurge's Invisible Cannibal

Worthy Contenders: 

• Gokun's Witchlance
• SaltyGoo's Great Ape
• Grek's Psychic
• Josie's Psychic
• Xeno's Cleric
• Loch's Noble's Man
• Prime's Monk
• Phlox's Barbarian
• Raven's Oneironaut

MONSTER(S)

Garamondia's Nomination: Loch's Nasty Customers

Worthy Contenders:

• Prime's Invisible Hands: Texas
• Prime's Straight Flush
• Xeno's Six Monsters
• Bad Doctor's Before the Moon Was Born
• Loch's Three Beholders
• Meg's The Prison of Many-Armed Saresh

RULES

Garamondia's Nomination: Bad Doctor's No New Age No Enlightenment

Worthy Contenders:

• Archon's Navigator Backgrounds
• Bad Doctor's The Most Beautiful Girl You've Ever Seen
• Bad Doctor's Mask 04
• Phlox's Cataphracts Special Unit Generator
• Regalia's Maximum Firepower
• Gokun's Girls Like Us 
• Meg's A Mental Inventory for Horror Games

LORE

Garamondia's Nomination: Loch's Masked Theatre of the World Above

Worthy Contenders:

• Josie's Arise, Ye Wretched
• Archon's Oasis Cities of the Megastructure
• Prime's Morning Stars Lorepost
• Raven's Laws of Primordial Creation
• Bad Doctor's A Place in a Stolen World 
• Bad Doctor's The City of Ships
• Deus' The Peerless Country of Yland

THEORY

Garamondia's Nomination: Bad Doctor's Cottonmouth Manifesto

Worthy Contenders:

• Vivanter's Schematic Dungeons for Everyday Objects
• Epistellar's The Implacable Enemy
• Vayra's Unto the Cruel Setting Writeup/Campaign Recap
• Archon wrestling the angel

OTHER

Garamondia's Nomination: Gokun's Trading Card Game

Worthy Contenders:

• Loch's Pillars of the Earth
• Elmcat's Mapping the Blogosphere

Victory Guiding Peace to Crown Europe, Giovani Bevilacqua

Class: Paladin

We have been talking Paladins in the glog server. There are lots of good, weird, setting specific ones, but the focus has been on the classical, roughly setting-agnostic flavour. Ecksian did a take on Arnold's God Throat, Cyber did the Heavenwrought, and then Vivanter did some much more grounded and (I suspect) more gameable versions of what follows. 

NB: this is a pretty high-trust type class. It involves DM and player agreement on what 'you cannot allow an Enemy to live' means in practice. Use your judgement - I would rule that heading back to town to first pick up the Bow of Dragon Murder is an acceptable alternative to suicidally charging the dragon you have just pronounced Enemy, but I don't run your table. 

Paladin

Skills: None.

Gear: Nothing.

 

A: See the Good People, and Judge Them Not Harshly
B: Humility, Clarity
C: Smite
D: Victorious in Perpetuity

See the Good People, and Judge Them Not Harshly: As a Paladin:

• You must do anything that is asked of you, unless the person asking is an Enemy. You can designate anyone as an Enemy at any time, for any reason, and you cannot take back the designation once it is given. You cannot allow an Enemy to live. 
• You cannot knowingly tell a lie. This is not a choice, you can't do it. 
• Reaction rolls of 3-6 count as 2s, and those from 7-11 count as 12s. People struggle to perceive you in neutral terms. 
• You get +[templates] to saves. Your body parts confer a similar bonus to whoever is wearing or carrying them, as follows: the size of a finger or rib: +1; the size of a a femur or hand: +2; anything larger: +3. Your corpse is extremely valuable. 

Humility: If you are carrying nothing in your inventory, you gain the following benefits:

• You no longer need to eat, drink, or sleep, and do not expel any matter from your body. You can clear the same fatigue that most people do by sleeping with four hours of rest. 
• You can purify food and water with a touch. 
• Drinking your blood heals others - slit your palm and drain your own hp to heal them on a one to one basis. 
• You are immune to poison and disease. Your flesh smells like a garden in summer, and your blood, flesh, and saliva taste like strong red wine.  

Items begged (not stolen, including from the slain), given to you freely, and holy relics (no matter how you acquired them) do not count as inventory for the purposes of this template. 

Clarity: You see everything as though it were illuminated in clear, hot sunlight. This light, which is only visible to you, comes from all angles at once and casts no shadows. To your eyes the sky cycles between blank white in the daytime, and deep black at night, with no sun, moon, or stars. You effectively have perfect darkvision and truesight (you don't even notice invisibility or illusions), but things like fog and sleet will obstruct your vision as normal. 

Smite: You roll your weapon's damage dice twice against Enemies. Your unarmed attacks count as light weapons that you only roll damage for once. You can also take d3 points of fatigue to add one the following effects to any attack, at your option, and can choose to do this after you roll to hit, but before you roll damage:

• Roll the damage dice thrice, instead of twice. 
• Force a morale check at -[templates]. 
• Force an undead or demonic foe with fewer than [templates] HD to save or be destroyed. 
• Force your target to answer [templates] questions truthfully. 

Victorious in Perpetuity: You take half damage from all sources, gain +2 AC even while unarmoured, and roll twice on the death and dismemberment table, choosing the result that you prefer. Angels of all ranks, should you ever meet any, will treat you as a commanding officer in their great invisible war, and follow your orders zealously and without question. 

The Annunciation, Jacopo da Pontormo, around 1550.

Cherubim

 

I have racked up quite a Joesky Tax bill recently. I also saw some drawings online that I really liked. One thing led to another. 

It is well known that dogs and cats and foxes dream as humans dream, and that some live strangely exaggerated, human-ish lives in the dreamlands. 

Cherubim are dreaming mice, who dream about what it might be like to be brave instead of terrified, and strong instead of helpless. They are beloved by the Prince, who they all serve, and he dresses them in enchanted silver mail and plumed helms, and bestows on them shining swords and lances. They are his messengers and spies, and sometimes his assassins and enforcers. A Cherubim is immaculately groomed, proud, watchful, quick and deadly, absolutely sure of themselves. 

They are still quite small, maybe 15cm tall. They ride steel-spurred cockerels dressed in elaborate livery, and are often accompanied by small courts of fairies, and other friendly insects. Dreaming of them is universally considered a good omen, and gaining the dream-friendship of one of the Cherubim has given many Baronial children their first taste of the adventuring life. 

Cherubim

d3 hp, armed with: Sword of the Brave, Lance of the Pure, 3x Secret Darts, armoured in: Shining Mail and shield, movement: human, disposition: a knight in a fairy tale, generally: courteous, quick to wrath, equally quick to forgive, merciless in the face of evil.

Cherubim are completely fearless, completely incorruptible, and completely selfless. They are very skilled, and get +4 to hit with their weapons. 

Sword of the Brave: a shining silver sword, that fills those that see it wielded with hope and courage. It is a tiny slashing weapon (d3), and while its bearer lives it gives all allies in the combat immunity to fear. Against Orcs, Goblins, Bugbears, and other nightmares, a Sword of the Brave deals d8 damage, and negates any special abilities that they possess. 

Lance of the Pure: a long white lance, which banishes evil. Can only be used in concert with a mounted charge, and deals d6 piercing once, before shattering. When used in defence of someone in distress, it instead deals d12 damage. If the lance is held high beneath the sky, sunlight or starlight will always find its tip. 

Secret Darts: poisoned, used out of sight to silently eliminate the political enemies of the Prince. Thrown, and deal no damage on a hit. Anyone struck by one must save CON or: sleep, falling in love with the first person that they see upon waking; take 2d6 poison damage. Randomise it, or choose which darts a given Cherubim is carrying with them.

Shining Mail: beautiful, delicate silver armour, so burnished that it blazes almost white. Counts as plate to anything the Cherubim's size, and leather to anything human sized. While wearing it, the Cherubim must be killed thrice for the death to stick - the first two times they are simply knocked around violently but non-fatally. 

Cockerel Destrier

Proud war beasts, pampered and loved by their riders. They sing in the breaking dawn, and their cry banishes nightmares. 

HD1, steel spurs (d3 piercing), cockerel barding (as leather), speed: twice human, disposition: a very well trained dog. 

Dawn Caller: All nightmares are destroyed without a save when the cockerel crows, but it can only do this while it sees the sun rising, but not yet over the horizon. 

Fairy Attendants

A Cherubim will be accompanied by d6-1 fairies. Roll them up as usual. One of them may be a War Bee:

War Bee

A brave fellow, with a friendly buzz and a devil-may-care attitude. Perches on the wrist, like a hawk. As a fairy that can't speak, but stings for d4 damage when it attacks. Produces 1 ration of dream honey per day, and always knows immediately when someone is lying. 

kansame9 on Instagram

One Year On

Garamondia is one year old as of yesterday! There were a few hesitancy posts before this - even one or two that I like, and that ended up being important to what the blog would become - but November 21st, 2024, marked joining Phlox's server and interacting with the scene in a social and sustained way. It has been a joy and a pleasure. It also means that my picks for the promised upcoming Gloggies will actually just be 'Louis' entire history of exposure to the scene', which I find inexplicably amusing. 

I'm a bit in shock that it's only been a year to be honest - this community and project feel like they've been a part of my life for a lot longer than that. But time is strange, and flows strangely. 

Class: Lead Box

Days that pass in succession, like lead boxes.

NB: this 'class' would probably work better as a curse or a monster. I suspect that it wouldn't be much fun to play. 

You do not have a body, and are in fact barely sentient. You attach yourself to another member of the party and travel with them. You are invisible and intangible, and have no true form. In the Southern Steppe where they originate, Lead Boxes are called Banshees. They are said to drift down to the surface earth from the darkness between the stars.

All effects of the Lead Box are shared between the person they have attached to, and anyone unfortunate enough to form a trusting emotional bond with that person - this is how Lead Boxes reproduce. 

You don't have stats or HP like normal, and can never truly be slain. If your host is killed you drift slowly downwards into the earth. After the aeons grind the planet to nothing you will float through the dark void for another billion billion years, waiting for a new host to make use of. 

A: Doom, Incision
B: Good Humour
C: The Face
D: Fever Dreams

Doom: The person that you are attached to (henceforth your host) becomes wholly convinced of their doom and insignificance. Emotional reactions to this vary, but are usually volatile. Your host crits and is crit on an 18 - 20, and both they and anyone they attack roll on the death and dismemberment table with disadvantage. Your host's melee attacks also gain +[templates] damage, representing a desperate strength born from terror. You can speak to them, and only to them, and they will experience your speech as something akin to an intrusive thought. 

Incision: When you look at someone, you know what will hurt them most. At minimum this require the DM to tell you about any mechanical weaknesses an enemy has on their statblock, but might also give you information about their family, financial dealings, secret lovers, disavowed insecurities, etc. 

Good Humour: You can start laughing at someone. They won't hear this (your host will), but they will now critically fail when they would normally critically succeed. Every time this happens, they take d6 psychic damage. It feels like a rose thorn or a piece of steel wool lodged in the brain. 

The Face: You can reveal a face to someone. This is always the same face: horrible, smiling-but-hostile, eyes of a predator. It needs a normal face to manifest, but this can be on anyone. Basically anyone who has LOS to a human face can be targeted by this ability - the horror-face will flash over its otherwise-normal features for a split second. Once seen, the face can never be forgotten. You can't use this ability again until your host kills someone, or rolls a critical failure. 

The face:

• Immediately breaks all bonds of trust, affection, or love between the viewer and the person it has manifested on. This can turn lovers against one another, sworn protectors against their wards, parents against their children, etc. 
• Causes an overwhelming disgust response in the one who sees it - this will usually be a violent response if they are used to solving their problems with violence. 
• In combat, causes the person who sees it to check morale or flee. 

Fever Dreams: You can laugh at everyone in a combat simultaneously, but if you do this you also laugh at your host and their allies. While you laugh this way, you can pick things up around your host as though you had four invisible arms - if these are weapons, you can make attacks with them (you have no to-hit bonus). Those that die while you laugh at them disappear, and each of these deaths provides your host with +5 temporary HP, which lasts until the end of the combat. 

In Memorium AH

This will be a short post dedicated to the memory of Alex, or Haeccity on Discord, who I found out late last night has passed away. 

Alex was a wonderful woman, an excellent writer, transparently intelligent and quick-witted, and also funny, warm, and strong-willed. She was a constant, welcome presence in the online circles that I have moved in for the past year, and recently ran one of the best games I've ever played in. I don't know the details of her death, but I do know that it was sudden, and happened far too soon. Finding out last night was a genuinely shocking tragedy. 

I will miss her and mourn her absence, and remember the brief time that we shared with enormous fondness. 

Monsters

Some quick thoughts on monsters, sparked early in the morning by a reading of a post on another blog. 

The idea in that post is that the existence of monsters is evidence of something going wrong in the world - the example given is British Colonialism in India, particularly the tradition of trophy hunting, which in the instance quoted results in a tiger having its teeth shot out and developing man-hunting predation, going on to kill 436 people.

This is a neat equation, and a pleasingly moral/critical one: colonialism is the real monstrosity, the killer tiger is merely symptomatic. If a tiger were to damage its teeth in some other way and kill 400 people, the critical logic would break down - it would, presumably, not be evidence of monstrous wrong in the world. 

-

Horror films are electric and vital before their tropes become commonplace; before critique and analysis become possible. There has to be something unrecognisable and untranslatable in them. You can taste this in early examples of genre films: Halloween is noticeable nasty, lean, stripped down, even watching it now, knowing everything about how the slasher genre would turn out. I can only imagine how it must have felt to have watched it in 1979, without that context; to see something obviously without precedent being birthed into the world.

Something like Scream can only be made after the tropes are all metabolised and understood, to the extent that they can be reverse engineered by professionals; this is a different type of media, in which causal breakdowns are viable and critique possible. Scream depends on feints, red herrings, and manoeuvres inside the plot (like an Agatha Christy novel) to function. Halloween and films like it are not (initially) interested in misdirection; they have a pure propulsive energy, they trust that the monster carries the unease and ambiguity inside itself. The Giallo films that prefigured slashers were often without any internal sense or logic - the barest frame of a situation or set before you find yourself crawling through a window in a ballet school and falling into a pit of barbed wire. You escape but the man with the black gloves is already behind you, already killing you, cutting away your eyelids, carving up your face. There is some residue of this oddly structural horror (the protags are making all the correct moves and they are still just butchered) in the off-screen teleportation beloved by slasher villains. The edit in the text itself conspires against the characters, conspires to torture and mutilate them. Even the worst excesses of the torture porn of the 2000s never quite accessed that type of frenzied nastiness, not for lack of trying. It can go too far in the other direction too: the formal horror of the remote in Funny Games; arch and self-congratulatory.  

-

Moby Dick infamously defies any attempt to explain his existence using causal relations. It arrives like God arrives, and is explicitly and implicitly compared to God. Its monstrousness is in this total-ness, the impossibility of reducing and understanding it. Its horror is that it introduces a strange and difficult-to-locate evil into the image of the face of God, which ought to be separate, impossible to contaminate. It is evidence of something wrong in the world in the broadest possible sense - the intelligible world is wrong, your relation to knowing it as such is infected, and this strange, religious, awe-inspiring contamination is not something locatable historically, or vulnerable to critique. It is also not only experienced as terror. 

I suppose the thrust of this post is that images arrive before critique, and are often truer descriptors of otherness, violence, fear, degradation, uncleanness, parasitism, the restlessness of the dead, the truth that God is evil, etc. 

Critique is a useful method for banishing a monster, for metabolising what in it is impossible to countenance. Exorcism and the invocation of the rights of the host, or of holy ground, function on a similar logic - you can define a set of parameters wherein the unknowable and resolutely inhumane powers of the monster are nullified - using these you might even destroy them, bring them back into causal, proportional relation.

-

I occasionally see things in the sky - it has to be a particularly bright shade of blue, with puffy white clouds at a particular height, moving across it at a particular speed. Something in this configuration triggers a set of visual distortions and hallucinations of enormous shapes moving somewhere 'between' the two layers: of parallax scrolling clouds, and the vivid 'ground' of the sky. They are living things, of a scale that the mind cannot really process, and they thrust forward out of the blueness. If they make contact with the earth they will destroy the entire planet by virtue of their scale. I get intense vertigo when I see them, and they sometimes stop me from going outside, or from driving. 

Some Player Roles for Cataphracts Systems

As all now know, Sam wrote Cataphracts, and then introduced voting and roles for non-commander players in Over/Under. I am still waiting for the write-ups about how that game played out with extremely keen interest.

I've been thinking a bit about lower-upkeep player roles in a Cataphracts game. Having now played in two games and spoken with the Phlox server crew about them quite a bit, this is something that comes up a lot. For some people (myself included) the real-time investment is a huge positive about the system, and for others it's a source of stress. 

This very loose post comes by way of the 'lots of players with low impact' Fairy class I wrote recently, and the older and way more fiddly At Your Order! rules.

All the following assumes that normal Cataphracts armies are running around pursuing their goals and politicking as usual. 

In addition:

Metabolic Vehicles 

A Metabolic Vehicle is like a cross between a settlement and an army. It is mobile, and manned by Crew, who are controlled by human players. Crew are not humans and you can't usually replace them if they die. A Vehicle has a limited number of Crew bodies that can be invested with the spark of intelligence (read: given to a player as a character).

The Vehicle has a single Commander, who is the only person on the crew who speaks with the DM and gives orders that are translated into movement and other actions on the strategic map. The Commander is elected by the Crew aboard the vehicle. 

The rest of the Crew have nothing to do with the DM. They can:

• Argue amongst themselves about what the Vehicle should be doing. Any Crew member can announce an election for a new Commander at any time (requiring at least half the crew to ratify before actually going forwards, to prevent spamming and abuse). If successful, the Commander role switches. 
• Man modules on the Vehicle, which give it certain bonuses and in some cases allow for basic functionality, like movement on the map.
• Withdraw their labour if they feel like they aren't being listened to, or for any other reason.

A Vehicle has its own objectives - each is like a mini-faction of its own. All Vehicles without exception want to grow in size by consuming other Vehicles and, eventually, settlements (those books were like a billion times better than the execrable film). 

A vehicle has: 

• A size (which starts between 1 and 3). 
• A speed, given in army marching speeds. 
• A number of Crew bodies (something between 5 and 10). 
• Various means of defending itself, generally batteries and sometimes small integrated armies, detailed below. 
• Modules that do various things when crewed. 

A Vehicle can house 100 troops inside it per vehicle size, who move with the vehicle.

A Vehicle under attack by an Army counts as a settlement, with fortification equal to its size. Vehicles have small, non-human defensive forces on board (a single detachment of 200 light infantry as standard, with modules that can expand this). If they are captured or defeated by enemy armies, they are destroyed. Vehicles rely on their mobility and their batteries to avoid this fate. 

Batteries are modules that need to be manned - they count as siege equipment, and inflict losses on attacking armies directly instead of contributing to combat power, like troops do. 

When two Vehicles attack one another, they fight a battle as normal, but both defender and attacker apply their fortification bonuses. The victor can destroy a number of modules on the enemy vehicle equal to the difference in the battle rolls, of their choice. If those modules were manned, those crew roll for being killed or captured. If the losing Vehicle cannot move after its modules are destroyed, begins to be eaten by the victorious Vehicle. 

While eating another Vehicle, the victor must remain in place. I takes 1 week to metabolise 1 point of vehicle size, which is then added to the feeding Vehicle; if you want to add all 4 size points after a kill, you have to stay in place for a month doing this. If the process is interrupted for any reason, and the victorious Vehicle moves on, the losing Vehicle might be able to escape. 

From the DM's POV, a Vehicle is an underpowered and unaffiliated army with different logistics needs, the ability to democratically elect its commander, and a suite of abilities that can change as crew slot in and out of modules. The Commander is responsible for letting the DM know what the Crew are doing as it becomes relevant. 

Basically an army that soaks 5-15 players, all of whom have a stake in how the army behaves.  

MODULES TO COME

The Chorus

The second low-player-input 'class'. Members of the Chorus are civilian non-combatants who are attached to normal Player armies. They must be fed as normal by their commanders, and otherwise move automatically with the army, taking no part in its decisions. 

All member of the Chorus have access to a dreamscape channel, which no one else can see. You cannot speak in the dreamscape; instead you post images from a pre-existing set of around 50. These images are something like a Tarot deck, and each has a series of open-ended interpretations associated with it, written up in a list and given as prep documentation to the members of the Chorus.

Some of these will be straight forward: 'North' 'Disaster' 'Betrayal' 'The Sea'. Others will be less so. 

All members of the Chorus have access to the Dreamscape, whether or not they are part of the same faction or army. Whether the dreamscape becomes a useful tool or not depends on how they make use of it. 

There are specific combinations of cards, that, when played in sequence in the Dreamscape, function as spells. None of the Chorus start with this knowledge - it can be found in the world, in settlements, towers, libraries, etc., and eventually also by discovering the other things that live in the Dreamscape.

Spells require various things to function: loot, corpses, sacrifices, etc. The Chorus will need to negotiate with their commander to acquire these things.

There is also a second world map, which, again, only the Chorus can see (and in this case, only members who have found specific spells allowing them to see it). This map is completely black and featureless. Finding the spells to illuminate it and move through it will have serious repercussions for the real world map, and the commanders moving around in it. 

From the DM's POV, there can be an arbitrarily large number of people in the Chorus trying to send coded messages to each other in the Dream, and also trying to decode what the others are saying, feed these back to their commanders, etc. It's only when spells start happening that the DM has to get directly involved with individual members of the Chorus, and all spells are gated by resources that commanders have to agree to dole out, so this process should flow neatly into the usual play procedures.

Developments in the Dreamscape happen simultaneously for all Chorus members with access, removing the need for the DM to micromanage who has access to the information.

From a Commander's POV, they have a loose gaggle of freaks following them around, who give dire warnings and speak of portents, and eventually start asking for money and people to kill in horrible ways. This is also the only way to get access to magic. 

DREAM-SENDING TAROT CARDS TO COME

SPELLS TO COME