Pictorial Wargames - Citizen of the White City Redux

Many moons ago I wrote a class for the the Citizens of the terrible imperial metropole. This was in the very early days of the blog, and many things have since changed. I was never really happy with it - it ended up being a sort of downtime class that could nebulously 'infect' populations with ideas and concepts. Not a terrible idea for a class, but a bit blunt and brute-force and crude. 

I wrote a while ago about optical wargames, which depend on the machine/interface relation to produce a play space composed by sensors, registering marks, spoofing tech, etc.; a literally or infinitely 'artificial' space, layered atop the one that the characters physically navigate with their bodies. 

A pictorial wargame operates under superficially similar principles - it introduces an abstracting/artificial strata over the embodied space where the game usually takes place. Unfortunately, the image/relation diagram is much trickier to build out than that of the machine/interface - where the interface aims to produce clarity from obscure processes, the relation introduces layered interpretations into previously distinct categories. The class is an attempt in this direction. A debt is owed to Grek's very great Psychic. 

This is also technically a Glaugust post: a class that is absolutely not a Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, or Thief (I cheated a bit in that this class is also NOT short lmao). 

Class: Citizen of the White City

Introduce an image, then introduce a relation. The image is anything-whatever; the relation is the thing that you tie to your soul. 

Gear: a heavy spear, a heavy arbalest, a light stamped-steel misericorde, light fabric amour, two detailed and accurate maps of your starter region, one topographic, one Special (roll on the list below), d3 Intelligence Reports.  

Skills: none that are useable outside the White City - while in the City, you have an innate and unselfconscious sense for the million shibboleths required to be recognised and accepted as a native of that place. In addition, your militia training has given you proficiency with spears, crossbows, knives, and the digging and maintenance of earthworks, tunnels, and fortifications. 

A: The Machinery of the Eye
B: Postures of Critique
C: The Place of Abomination
D: A Prototype

Angels, demons, and entities hate and fear you as a baseline.

The inhabitants of Dream find it difficult to think of you in neutral terms: treat their reaction rolls of 2 - 7 as a 2, and rolls of of 8 - 12 as a 12. No matter what their reaction to you is, they will appear to you as their nightmare variants. 

The Machinery of the Eye

Every person that you meet has a Mind. Unlike other people, you can both perceive the Mind and interact with it. The interface that you use to do this is complicated and intuitive, but it can be (crudely) represented spatially. 

This means that every NPC you meet can have their mind represented by a small dungeon-like space, which you can interact with. Expect your DM to veto this class if the campaign they are running is not the type that is interested in things like every NPC's mind being represented by a dungeon space. 

A Mind will be more or less complex depending on its host's mental alacrity, imaginative power, and self-awareness. In practice, the Mind will feature [derived INT bonus +1, minimum 1] +[derived WIS bonus +1, minimum 1] + [derived CHAR bonus +1, minimum 1] rooms, plus an additional +1 room for every HD they possess.

These rooms will always be connected to one another directly, and will always be pitch black throughout. You should also mark which specific rooms are derived from mental stats (INT, WIS, and CAR), and which are generated from HD. All rooms and corridors are nondescript, colourless, and empty. 

Other PCs also have Minds, but interacting with them is analogous to PVP play, and you should check in with both the DM and other players before doing so. If necessary, the DM will design Minds for other PCs in conversation with them. 

People who have grown up in the White City or otherwise have a facility with its strange culture have twice as many rooms in their Minds as normal. You might also find ancient or inhuman Minds with impossible or actively hostile architectures of various kinds. 

To interact with a Mind at all, someone must enter into unguarded conversation with you for at least an hour. This could be while marching, in downtime, by a campfire, in the prince's audience chambers, whatever. Once this contact has been established, you have access to their Mind and can go to work.

You have a pool of 'points' that facilitate this work, and which are initially equal to your templates in this class. You always start with [templates] points in any Mind you gain access to, and additionally gain one point for each of the following:

• You learn what someone is prepared to sacrifice in pursuit of their goals. 
• You learn what those goals are in specific detail. 
• You learn what someone fears most. 
• You learn what that fear might push them to do if they thought there would be no repercussions.
• You learn if they love anything or anyone selflessly. 
• You learn who or what the object of that love is. 
• You learn the extent to which desire rules them. 
• You learn the object of their most powerful desire.

You get your template points with every new Mind that you contact, but additional points are on a case-by-case basis per Mind. Once a point is spent, it is spent forever and can never be recovered. Once a change has been implemented in a Mind, it is permanent, and can only be reversed or removed by spending its cost in points a second time.

Using a single point you can:

• Instantiate yourself as an avatar in the mind. This is in a fixed location, with a fixed 90 degree line of sight. In a mind you can see forever, providing that what you are looking at is lit. If you wish to 'move' inside a mind, or change your angle of view, you must do so by spending an additional point. 
  
• Instantiate a light source in the mind. The light is omnidirectional and travels forever, but is blocked by walls as you would expect.
• Instantiate an image in the mind. This is 'drawn' onto a surface wall, and can be of any scale you wish. If you wish to remove, move, or resize an image, you must do so by spending an additional point. Images that you can 'see' inside the mind, from the POV of your instantiated avatar, have various effects, which are elaborated further on in this most. Most of your class abilities rely on 'seeing' multiple images at a time from your avatar's fixed POV. Each room can only hold a single image without the aid of mechanical contrivances, elaborated below. 

If your instantiated avatar can 'see' more than one image at the same time, then the Citizen of the White City can choose to make the two images alike, not alike, equivalent, mutually exclusive, opposed, or complimentary, in the view of the person whose Mind you are working in. Establishing a relation this way costs a point, and players are encouraged to come up with their own relations and suggest them to the DM. 

This process can lead to serious personality changes and the working through of violent contradictions. The DM is encouraged to give a Citizen broad leeway when interpreting images for this purpose: a sunrise might stand in for a birth, a night sky for death, a rose for repetition, a face for a specific face, and so on. Any changes will occur to the affected party as though they were the natural and reasonable products of their own thinking. 

Inside the mind, the instantiated avatar is itself an image, provided that it can see itself. It is always an image of the subject whose Mind you are working on, or of you yourself, the Citizen, and is the only image that can be interpreted as either of these two things. As a general rule, the avatar cannot see itself without mechanical assistance (by mirrors etc.). 

In addition, specific rooms marked with images have the following effects: 

• If the room corresponds to a mental stat, the Citizen of the White City can declare before the roll that a check or save made using that stat is +/- x, where x is the number of rooms marked with images. If ALL of the rooms that correspond to a given mental stat are marked with images, and all these images can be 'seen' by the avatar, then the Citizen of the White City may instead choose whether the test is passed or failed, with no roll necessary.
• If the room corresponds to an HD, the Citizen of the White City may choose for that HD not to apply during combat. They can choose to do this when the combat is first joined, or when the effected person first takes damage, and HP will immediately rerolled at that moment (in rare cases this may result in more hp being rolled, which is intended). The person will feel something wrong, but will not know that the Citizen is responsible. 

Note that the avatar itself does not move, change its POV, or meaningfully navigate the Mind that it is placed in. Every point spent in the process of working on a Mind changes a fixed set of spatial relations within that Mind - it can and should be represented by a diagram, which the player will be responsible for producing, which can be referred back to if in doubt of any particular effect, and which will need to be redrawn should another point be spent. 

Postures of Critique

You may now spend a point to create a mirrored plane of any dimensions that you wish inside a Mind that you are working on. It reflects light perfectly. 

In addition, you have +templates to to-hit and damage rolls against anyone with a visible image of you inside their Mind.

The Place of Abomination

You now gain a new point each morning for every Mind hosted by someone who trusts you. This point is lost if not spent before the next is generated from this template. 

You may now spend a point to create a magic lantern - a machine that projects an image in a 90 degree cone and displays it on the first wall it hits. The room hosting the lantern counts as holding the image it projects, regardless of where the image actually lands. 

If your avatar can see an image of you, and of the host of the Mind being worked on, you can choose to permanently sever any connection that they have to entities of any kind. 

A Prototype

You can choose to give your avatars 360 degree vision or to turn all walls in all of your Minds transparent. You make this choice once, when you receive your D template, and it applies in perpetuity. 

You can choose to become invisible or inaudible to anyone with a visible image of you inside their Mind.

Humans and other sentient beings capable of feeling fear must test CHAR to strike you in melee. 

Special Gear

Intelligence Reports

For each report, ask your DM a question about the area that you find yourself in. They will give you a truthful answer, such as would be known by a well-informed local. You must spend all Intelligence Reports on campaign start, you cannot 'bank' them. Just say NO to unmarked packages. 

Special Maps

I addition to your topographic map, you have (roll a d10):

1. A map of the local waterways, wells, and faults that give access to the water table. 
2. A map of marked with local population densities, fertility, and life expectancy. 
3. A map of local petroleum deposits beneath the earth.
4. A detailed and accurate map of local military forces and political alliances.
5. A map that marks all local productive farmland. 
6. A map of local weather patterns, notated to cover the whole year. 
7. A map of food distribution hubs and logistics chains.
8. A map that marks the names and locations of the 20 most influential people in the area.
9. A map that marks the locations of all local concentrations of monetary wealth above 5000s.  
10. A Pragmatist's Map, a strange, swirling constellation of diagrams tracking flows and state-changes that are largely illegible to you, non-specialist that you are. When you study it it reminds you of home - if you do this for an hour, you heal 1 fear damage. 

 

Brythwin Island Sessions 0-2 - The Landing - First Two Days

I haven't posted to the blog in nearly a month, which is not usual for me, but it's because I've been building a big dungeon campaign and, for the first time in years (and first ever for an OSR style game!), running it for some people from the phloxserver. 

As with the DEGRADER playtest, actually running systems that you've been spinning around in your head in the abstract does a lot of teaching very quickly. I'd like to do some reports as the game progresses, in order to better organise my thinking around what's working and what isn't. 

But first, the session report (the wonderful EcksianRaven, or 'Glaumring', has put up one of the own here):

The Swallows, a crew of Baronial fixers only recently brought together by circumstance, arrive in the court of Petty Queen Gloran, and are charged with travelling to nearby Brythwin lake. Their mission is to put an end to the magical, perpetual storm that rages there, and to slay or drive off the monsters that have been emerging from it. 

Their captain is 'Little' Ganzorig, once a farmhand, now a holy man and spiritualist. 

His personal servant, and second in command, is 'Old' Leo, a veteran fighter and one of the Barony's ancient order of Stewards. 

Their cartographer Euphemia, a Captial Bravo, and a saint of the church in her rough way.

Their quartermaster, Ysolte, the Southern Mentat, who stands seven feet tall and grins horribly, with a brain like a computer and a head full of tumours; whose touch freezes men solid and whose blood runs clear, and burns like gasoline. 

His loyal Cat companion, CCC (Concupiscent Cannibal Constellations), the dream-walker. 

Many Deaths Adorn Her, 'The Duchess', queen of predators, one of the ancient race of Terror Birds. 

Maud Mercy Mandolin, companion and friend to the Duchess, a painter and a street brawler: a dangerous woman. 

Gwynnfain, questing Errant from the southern steppes, entrusted with the terrible flamethrower that bears the name Sunset and Evening Star. 

His cousin Glaumring, the youth whose arms are Unencumbered by Presumption; a strange and ancient suit of pale metal, with a helm that banishes illusion and falsity. 

Professor December August, schooled in the pattern languages of the academies, friend to ancient and powerful entities. 

Xir Dog companion Harken, stalwart guardian and sweetheart. 

Jane Jansworth, a poet and professional fixer, a woman of quick wit and many talents.

The Mountaineer Foresight, one of the so-called God Warriors, whose feet and fists are death. 

Ymogen the Right Arm, of the reclusive Harpooner cult that makes their home on the Lantern Berth. 

SUN, most gentle animal, a white ape gambler, and bearer of the company colours. 

Lypolde the fighting man, all in black, deadly with the sling. 

Gerald, an elder, a chemist and a manservant both, responsible for keeping his companions in amphetamines, sedatives, and medicines. 

And finally, the company's fortune and their high spirits, Hyacinth the fairy. 

(class list here)

A list of worthies, truly! 

They chose for their requisition: two of the queen's mannequin soldiers, ten civilian attendants (including a smith and chemist), arms and armour from the royal armouries, and a mobile drug lab with equipment and reagents for several weeks use. They also choose the following report on the dangers that they expect to face:

REPORT ON THE CURSE MEN, BY ONE WHO HAS FOUGHT THEM They attack in small group - five or six at a time. They appear to have once been humans, and you will hear them before you see them because they scream constantly: the screams are anguished and miserable. They do not appear to be able to speak, but they are very fast and very physically tough. They are not disciplined or organised, but they also do not flee, or even notice much when they are wounded. They fight with strange glass weapons - these blades are poisoned or cursed in some way. Those wounded by them waste away beneath the eyes, and none so-afflicted have yet healed of their own accord despite the care of physicians and treatment with medicine. The wasting happens slowly, and then very drastically, all at once. It appears that each wound suffered advances the illness (if such it is) a little more, until the tipping point. The curse is worst of all in the mind - the few survivors cut with the glass blades report a hideous buzzing noise that will not let them rest. 'Splitting' is the world they use; as if the head or mind was 'splitting'. Other than this, nothing is known. None have yet been captured, and none of the slain yet recovered.

Then they set out from the Glorani stronghold and travelled two days to the shore of the lake, where a barge waited to bring them and their supplies across.

Once inside the storm proper the Swallows find themselves needing to decide where to land. The ruins, which house unknown dangers, lie to the south, and the rest of the island is an overgrown, saturated, muddy bog after two weeks of rain. The boat is tossed about and endangered, so they quickly decide to land outside the ruins (which they mistrust) and slightly to the north, and put her to ground on one of the silt beds formed by the recent erosion. Ymogen the Harpooner, a capable sailor, ably oversees the dangerous landing. 

Finding that the ground close to shore is soft mud two feet deep, they send Duchess the terror bird on a scouting mission for firm ground. She makes use of her great speed to run clockwise along the cost of the small island, and quickly runs into the local feral cat population along the northern shore: first five or six, then fifteen, then forty or more, watching her through the rain with curious, predatory eyes. She has discovered their stronghold; and lets loose her terrifying hunting warcry - the cats spring into action and move to cut her off, so she retreats back to the group. On her return, the Swallows decide to move inland, dragging the barge and wagon with them, then send out more dedicated search parties to find a suitable location to pitch the main camp. 

After some scouting revealed a low hill close by the ruins, they drag the barge over to form a stable platform for the main tents, and set about clearing the brush around the camp with swords, and setting up their production facilities and defences. As they work they have a sighting of two large feral cats watching intently from the long grass, but after several minutes they disappear. 

Just as the sun is dying one of the attendants, Tyranox, who is busy clearing brush, lets out an anguished scream. Her leg is caught in the pincer of a huge white coconut crab, and sliced almost to the bone. The Swallows rush into action and quickly exterminate the five horrible marsh crustaceans, before tending to their wounded hireling. As their first night falls on the island they cook the crab meat and eat it, and sing songs, and post watches along the perimeter.

First Day

The Swallows wake, and Captain Ganzorig decides to begin the exploration of the ruins in earnest. He sets his watches and orders for the smiths and chemists, and then gather the first away party: 'Old' Leo, Deaths Adorn Her, Ysolte the Mentat, and the cat CCC.

Together they approach the ruins from the north. The Duchess once again begins a scouting mission, running between the ancient, crumbling buildings, and reports no movement. The ruins themselves are strange: crumbling white 'sheets' of stone divided into rough rooms and corridors, but falling into themselves, without any clear sense of purpose. In the rain they are failry rotting into the earth. 

Between these are three larger buildings, more sturdily made from red brick: one to the north, circular, three stories high; one centrally placed, largest of the three, two stories high, and a smaller one to the south.

In fact, the ruins look like...

...this. 1, 2, and 3 are red brick buildings, 4 represents squat concrete towers with bunker windows, 5 is an iron chute that disappears into darkness, and 6 denotes cast iron stairwells that likewise drop into the earth. The large unmarked sections are collapsing plasterboard rats' nests that once may have had recogniseable purpose, but now just look like (in the words of the duchess) mush and slop.

Ganzorig and party spend some hours going through several of the collapsing sections, and find little of value - some glass bottles, rot and mould, drains in the concrete floors. They try to force access into one of the concrete blocktowers but, having left their pry bars in camp, have no way of forcing the locked doors.  

Next they decide to enter the large northern circular brick building, and to their surprise the huge iron doors are unlocked. Inside they discover three floors of iron cages built around a central shaft, inside which is built an iron scaffold tower, with stairs, walkways that allow access to the cage-levels, and a strange and complicated looking mess of machinery at its top. The building is a panopticon. The floor is tiled, and sinks (beneath the tower) into a broad pit that drops away into darkness. Slumped against the walls they see two fifteen foot tall glass or crystal humanoid figures - statues? puppets? not clear. One of them has a weird iron box on its head, the other holds an enormous translucent spear. They appear totally stationary. 

Side plan of the Panopticon, not to scale. 

The Swallows decide that they don't really want to fuck around with fifteen foot tall living statues (although they spend a long time discussing their worth as treasure if they do turn out to be genuinely inanimate), and leave this building be for now. 

They continue searching the surrounding buildings, and come across a series of crudely installed noisemakers rigged to wires in some of the collapsing buildings, and what appears to be the remains of a shooting range: glass bottles lined up in windows, smashed shards scattered about, bullet holes in the walls. As they emerge from the warrens they hear something else for the first time since they entered the ruins - the sounds of human screaming, off in the distance, but growing nearer. They have thirty or so seconds to get in formation before three naked, screaming humans run out of the rain at them. They hold long white knives, and they sound horrible and sad. 

The Swallows make the fateful decision not to open fire with guns for fear that the noise will bring more of these things down on them. Ganz and Leo brace spears and draw steel, CCC hides in the nearby foliage, and Ysolte flanks to right of the group. When they reach 10ft distance, the Duchess fells one of their enemies with a throw barb from her crown (she hurls it by flicking her stately head) - it goes in at the eye and kills the thing instantly. The other two fall on Ganz - he gets his spear right through one, which doesn't seem to slow it down much, and Leo beats at it with the pommel of his rapier, and then many things happen simultaneously: Ganz takes a bad wound from one of the glass knives, and looks about to take another before Leo jumps in front of the blow - both are gashed open. CCC springs out of ambush and attacks with claws, Ysolte barrels into one and crushes it to pulp in a bear hug, and the duchess sprints up behind the last, wounded enemy and caves its skull in with her killing beak. 

Everything is over in a few seconds, and Ganz and Leo have both been cut up badly - if Leo hadn't put himself in harms way Ganz could well have died. Immediately their heads fill with a horrible buzzing noise, and they both lose a point of CON. Breathless, shaken, and bloodied, the Swallows decide to return to camp for the night. They take the bodies and knives with them, and after several minutes Ganz and Leo report that the terrible buzzing has ceased. The CON does not return. 

Back at camp, they set about experimenting with the knives. December August, the company academic, happens to have an entity in xir stable, Stygia, that specialises in curses. Stygia (who takes the form of long fingers and the whisper of pages in forgotten libraries) is summoned, and immediately gets excited about having a new curse to study. She gives them some pointers as to its nature, and bids them keep her in the loop. Then they rest. 

Second Day

On the second day the Swallows decide to trying to map the rest of the surface ruins, before attempting a foray down into the earth. Instead of the messing with the giant figures and the panopticon, they head south to reconnoitre the other two brick buildings. The group is mostly similar, but captain Ganz is shaken by his near death experience, and decides to spend the day taking the camp in hand - he is replaced by the sainted Bravo, Euphemia. 

The first thing they do is check the smallest of the brick buildings, which they discover is a church. Eight dead cats and two dead Curse Men are strung up around the exterior, and the building has been heavily barricaded and barred from the inside. Quick exploration of the roof discovers a hole in the tiling, and a ladder into the interior, where they find the remains of the camp left by the first expedition to Brythwin - many supplies, some weapons and ammunition, a sacred timeline painted over an older mural, two more curse knives, one shattered.

They decide to secure this site as a potential second camp/strong point, and move on to the surrounding area. They find little of interest in the nearby block towers (although one appear to have a tunnel leading down into blackness in the floor), and quickly decide to move on the last of the brick buildings yet to be explored: the large, centrally located one. The main door is barricaded shut and painted with a large 'T', but one of the iron doors has been bent out of shape creating a small crawl-way. The party quickly decide that this obvious entry is far too dangerous, and seek alternate routes. 

After some false starts, Euphemia uses her acrobatic skill to get onto the roof, and sees a that the building is a double story barracks or dormitory, built around a lush and vibrant central garden. The roof is partially glass to allow sunlight to feed to plants below, and one of the panels is missing. The party use ropes to climb up with her, and then rappel down, while Duchess runs frustrated circles around the exterior. The check out the garden, which is beautiful and peaceful and moon-like and full of strange fruit and berries (they take 2 INV with them), and then move to disassemble the barricade at the entrance to let the bird in. They find a nasty like barded-wire cage trap around the crawl point at the entry, as well as a thick, weird-smelling, vaseline-like goo on the floor, which they wisely decide not to touch.

A quick whip around the remaining interior spaces reveals some small human footprints in the ash of a fireplace, and 2 plastic rain ponchos hung up on a wall, which are essentially magical artefacts to Baronials, and which represent the first genuine treasure found during this game. They explore enough of the interior that they get the map, which looks like this:

Barracks, ground and first floors. 

The only space not yet explored is 6, which when they enter appears to be some sort of tiled kitchen area. All of the heavy iron surfaces, implements, and stoves have been piled up in a haphazard pile of sharp metal along the eastern wall, which Euphemia immediately decides to pick through, to see if it hides anything. Leo wisely suggests that she tie a rope to herself in case of trouble. As she makes her way across the pile, she realises that the ground beneath it, and some of the iron itself, have been slathered with the same odd-smelling vaseline stuff that they found at the entrance - she puts her hand on it, but makes her CON save against whatever it is, which is to say that her head swims a bit but she basically retains her awareness. She also hears the softest movement from just in front of her, behind the final overturn table. Overcome with curiosity, she climbs further, only to see: a small tunnel leading back and down into the earth; two red eyes but human-looking eyes; the flame of a tallow lantern, thrown at the ground beneath her. 

WHOOOOMP. The whole pile goes up explosively, and Euphemia is immediately reduced to 0hp in the flames. She is quickly yanked to safety by her friends, but the three petrol bombs she was carrying have also ignited - Leo tries to draw out the burning rags and throw them away but as he attempts this one of the bottle shatters on him, nearly setting him alight as well. 

Thick black smoke, with a strange and bitter smell (Ysolte the Mentat detects potent hallucinogens), starts to fill the room. The party consistently make their CON saves against this, and retreat out of the building post-haste. Euphemia is on her feet, but barely, and they decide to cut their losses and retreat back to the camp. 

The deposit the fruit and the strange ponchos in the war chest, which awards them their first XP of the game! 540 all told, split five ways. 

That night they hatch many schemes for dealing with the hated 'vaseline gnome', and also perform some experiments on the curse knives that they have recovered: it seems that shattering the knife does not disperse the buzzing noise from the glass, but melting it down appears to. 

All bed down for another night on Brythwin, and, now that the surface has been conclusively mapped, a descent into the unknown beneath...

Ysolte, the Southern Mentat

Death Adorn Her, 'The Duchess', Terror Bird

'Little' Ganzorig, Little Saint and Elf Friend

'Old' Leo, Fighter and Steward

Euphemia the Ugly, Capital Bravo and Little Saint

CCC, Cat

SUN, Gentle Animal, White Ape

Maud Mercy Mandolin, Artist and Fighter, with the entity Danse Macabre

 

Their Submission Only Shames the Victor - Campaign Primer

Steamboat in a Storm, Turner, 1841

Brythwin Island

Petty Queen Gloran is a pale, cruel-faced woman, about fifty years old, strong willed and sharp-minded. She wears pearls, rubies, opals, lead, and glass. Her colours are black and red. She hates the capital, and hates the Baroness. 

Gloran has hired you and your companions to investigate nearby Brythwin Island, which two weeks ago was enveloped in an unnatural and apparently perpetual storm of great intensity. Horrible things have been emerging from this tumult and killing people in the surrounding region. The locals are calling them Curse Men, and they are, apparently, something like demons. 

Details are currently not known. The first team of fixers she sent to investigate have not returned, and she does not want to risk sending in house troops without some idea of what she's walking them into. 

Your missions, should you choose to accept them, are:

• To discover the source of the unnatural storm, and if possible destroy or neutralise it. 
• To discover the source of the Curse Men, and if possible destroy or neutralise it.
• Failing that, to get word back to her with as much information as possible about the nature of the disturbance on the isle. 

She offers a reward of 25k silver for each of the first two, and 5k for the third. 

The island in known to house strange ruins, originally built by one of the ancient, pre-Old Capital Baronial kingdoms. Before the storm came it was deserted and uninhabited save for the local feral cat clans. The name Brythwin is known to have once meant 'castle of light', or maybe 'castle of heaven', in a language now long-extinct. 

The Journey

Two days by foot, and then a barge across the lake. The sky looks scrubbed clean in the mornings, and the sun is pale and beautiful. It is chill this time of year, but very bright. 

You have with you, in addition to anything given by your class:

• 1000 rations, packed such that they will not spoil. Oil, coffee, salt, eggs, sugar, dried fruit, salt meat, and other luxuries to last two weeks - after these run out, this store will count as iron rations unless you can find some other way to supplement it. 
• 150 torches, 6 oil lanterns, 50 INV of lamp oil. 
• 50 doses of stimulants, 50 doses of sedatives, 5 bottles of white alcohol. 
• The necessaries for making camp: tents and bedrolls, pots and pans, soap and incense. A writ of passage and a banner that proclaims you as the queen's men and women. 
• Basic tools: 2 crowbars, 2 sledgehammers, 5 buckets, 5 hammers, 5 shovels, 1000ft of rope.
• A pack mule and cart, laden with your gear.  

In addition to these essentials, you may choose x of the following options, where x = 2 + the group's highest CHAR mod. Any of these (with two obvious exceptions) can be taken more than once, and the 'essential' options listed above may also be chosen again, at the cost of one of your additional picks.  

• Medicine: 50 doses of Prophylactics, 50 doses of Painkillers, 10 doses of Curatives, 500 doses of Immune Boosters. 
• Specialist Kit: 2 iron files, 2 long-handled bolt cutters, 20 climbing spikes, 5 hand mirrors, 5 vials of acid, 5 vials of petroleum, 5 vials of holy water. 
• Whatever mundane armour or weapons you want from the royal armouries, true for the entire party, up to one set of armour and two weapons (or a weapon and a shield) per person. 20 pieces of ammunition for any ranged weapons. All in addition to your class gear. 
• 10 civilian attendants, who will not follow you underground, or fight in combat. Two of these can be trained specialists (blacksmiths, carpenters, etc.) of your choosing, with all tools necessary for their work - these two specialists can also be men-at-arms (HD1+1, medium weapon, chain, shield) who will fight and adventure with you. 
• 1 of the Queen's personal retainers: loyal, courageous NPCs with character levels. Roll on a table below for each that you pick. If anyone in your party has a CHAR mod of +2 or better, you may modify the roll up or down 1 at your option. All options not picked to accompany the PC party at campaign start will be retroactively declared to have departed in the first, vanished expedition. 
• Histories of Brythwin Island. There has not been time for you to take proper notes of all of this before you leave, but the Queen might be persuaded to let you pack these tomes and old maps with you, to aid in your undertaking. She will want a sincere promise that they will be returned unharmed. In practical game terms, a collection of lore snippets, rumours, incomplete maps, and contested histories of the island you're about to travel to. 
• The Glorani familial heirloom sword, THIS WAY OUT, a huge, black heavy runeblade of ill favour and dark repute. This option will cost two picks on this table (which represents whoever gets to carry it actively charming and ingratiating themselves with her majesty before you leave), and its gifting will mark your party as the Queen's personal executors, not mere employees. THIS WAY OUT has not been wielded in combat in a generation, and its properties are no longer well understood, but in the family histories it was said to steal the souls of those that it slew, and use them to fuel ever greater feats of carnage. THIS WAY OUT comes with a suit of ornate black plate called the Mournful Harness, which you can ask the armourers adjust to your frame if you wish - wearing it will mark you as a Glorani Champion. 
• Anything else you might reasonably request.

Queen Gloran, holding THIS WAY OUT

Glorani Retainers

1. Belaphon and Selinae, Murderers. Two mannequin soldiers, who will follow verbal instruction dispassionately and to the letter. A gift to the Queen from one of her noble friends years ago; they have since given good service. Belaphon is made from iron, Selinae is made from cloth. 
2. Charlie. A rising star in the Queen's staff, known as a competent, ambitious, and withdrawn young man. Good with a sword, but more valuable to his employer for his considered and discreet counsel. Wears fashionable clothing and a neatly trimmed black beard, and carries a pistol, buckler, and sabre. 
3. Executioner Smaug. An advocate for modern and enlightened judicial execution practice, which means that she is a professional chemist with the knowhow to produce high-quality poisons that have a similar effect to a lethal injection. Separately, known to be a hobbyist shooter and a crack shot with a musket. Comes with a mobile chemistry setup and limited reagents. 
4. Advisor Cylon. The Queen's court academic, a sociopath by reputation. Does not wear any makeup or jewellery, which decidedly others her in Baronial company. Nasty rumours about a chronic illness kept well-hidden. Trained as a historian, and keeps a stable of entities myopically focused on killing and maiming things in horrible ways - also wears a brace of pistols. 
5. Golgotha. A trained war hound of frightening size and ferocity. Grey coat, looks a bit like a borzoi with a lot more muscle - comes up to the shoulder on most adults. Exceptionally well trained, loyal, and intelligent, and extremely dangerous in a fight.
6. Dame the Vivisector. A friendly, chatty, and eccentric older woman who wears plate armour everywhere, known especially for her distinctive and terrifying Vorpal Shears. She is, apparently, from the nobility, but no one knows where her estates are. Queen Gloran treats her with extreme affection, almost like family, and the Dame treats everyone, including the queen, like a beloved and slightly exasperating grandchild. Her reputation is for insane bravery and viciousness bordering on sadism. 

Player Rules and Expectation Management

Barony rules unless specified (which are, of course, mostly G24 rules). 

Initiative is procedural, not rolled for. Reach weapons go first (they are controlling the terms of the engagement), and initiative proceeds in order of weapon reach. Inside this rubric, PCs go before monsters. Ie Orcs with spears go before PCs with swords, but the Fighter with a polearm goes before the orcs. Orcs with swords go after the PCs with swords. The PC with the knife goes last. 

Reach is not strictly codified, and is adjudicated 'as makes sense', depending on the weapon. This is probably not going to be worked out at the level of, say, individual medium swords (my estoc goes before your sabre or whatever) - that's too greebly. A heavy great sword longer than a medium straight sword? Yes. A medium sword described in x way instead of y way to give it the reach advantage over another medium sword? Probably not. If ever in doubt, all DM rulings are final. 

Long weapons roll attacks with disadvantage in cramped confines - in very bad conditions (crawling, squeezing through gaps) normal medium weapons might as well. A dagger or similar will never roll with disadvantage because of the environment. 

Typically this will mean that heavy weapons strike first, because typically these have a longer reach, but there will be all manner of exceptions to this (a medium or even a light spear might have reach on a medium sword, a monster's claws that hit as heavy weapons might strike after a medium mace, and so forth). Surprise rounds ignore these rules - the whole side acting with surprise simply gets a full round of attacks with whatever they are carrying.

Dual-wielding with a light weapon in your off-hand gets you +1 to hit with your main-hand weapon, and +1 AC. 

Weapon degradation is tweaked to the following: every weapon and piece of gear rolls a d6 at the end of each day of adventuring as long as it was used at least once. You get -1 to this roll per terrible, unwise thing you did with it (anything it's not built for), and on a 1 or lower, the equipment is damaged. If it was already damaged, it breaks and is lost. Repairing damaged gear is possible (but not broken/lost gear) if you have the skillset, tools, and spare time, and most looted gear will already be damaged. 

Armour and shields are harder wearing, and typically only damaged by acid and similar. 

Class list here. Blank Character Sheet here. 

Everyone starts with two templates, which means that your starting HP is 6+CON, or 2d6+CON, whichever is higher. Baronial humans can multiclass freely between the Baronial classes at character creation.

If you die, you probably remain dead. You might find a limited number replacement characters inside the dungeon, which might give the group limited 'respawns' in situ, but actual reinforcements will have to wait for a hypothetical second party arriving from Queen Gloran, the timeframe of which is by her royal fiat.

Since this is technically a playtest, the first character sheets submitted for each of the classes will be allowed to roll on a special hidden curios list. 

The game can have as many players as are interested - this is the fixer group of mercenaries hired in the first instance. Actual delves will be limited to (probably) four or five people at a time, because I haven't run games in a while and get mental overwhelm quite easily. As the dungeon progresses this may increase. 

Asynch chatting and other stuff can happen in the base camp in the public server; delves will be in real time. 

XP is awarded 1 to 1 (silver standard) for loot (coins, gems, treasure) deposited in the company war chest, and is divided evenly among surviving members of a delve. Saleable goods including art count for half their value, unless sold in town. XP might also be distributed for other achievements by DM fiat. Multi-classing after character creation will be difficult without access to specialists. 

Third template is 800xp, fourth is 1600xp (first is 200, second is 400, if that ever becomes relevant). 

Expect: 

• A small megadungon, with a focus on dungeoneering, resource management, and combat. Very little, if any, social and domain stuff. 
• Relatively high lethality I think?
• Some light and enjoyable scrambling of Barony lore :)  

Northern Steppe Encounters

 

Fleshing out a region that is still weirdly un-fleshed-out. 

On the northern steppe you may encounter:

Nomad Houses

A 'house', 'family', or 'clan' - terms the nomads use interchangeably. Northern nomad houses are universally mobile horse riding pastoralists, and they ride in extended family groupings. The largest houses are very large, some up to ten or fifteen thousand, but they only very rarely ride together to preserve grazing land. More usually, a group of nomads will be between fifty and two hundred, made up of kin groups, and presided over by an influential patriarch or matriarch. Every nomad rider has personal loyalty to their immediate family and to their larger house, and warriors, traders, and diplomats will wear the flag-capes of both to signal their political positioning and lineage to others. 

Houses are known by the livestock that they keep; either cattle, dogs, or horses. All nomads ride horses, but not all are 'horse houses'. Nomad marriages are typically arranged between houses of different kinds, and each has their associated stereotyped character: cattle people are wealthy, proud, hospitable, and warlike; dog people are practical, clever, aloof, obsessive, sometimes underhanded, and make bad enemies; horse people are charming, mercantile, physically attractive, gregarious, sly, and impossible to lie to. 

The nomad houses administer their territories and sometimes engage in limited feuds and border conflicts, but the steppe is currently in a period of relative stability, plenty, and peace. Many Baronials hold ancestral memories of terrible wars against their neighbours, but in the present day trade and cultural exchange are flourishing.

A nomad house will be composed of between fifty and two hundred adult riders, all of whom are capable fighters and especially practiced with the bow. They will be lead by family heads, who each have personal ties of allegiance (often via marriage) to the patriarch or matriarch of the house. The house head will be wealthy, and will keep a retinue of picked troops, who form an armoured and professional corps of fighters around which the rest of the house can organise in times of trouble. If the house produces any Errants, they will typically be outfitted by the largesse of the house head, and more often than not this means that only errants of aristocratic heritage are gifted the star weapons that they are so closely associated with.  

Nomad Rider

HD1, medium cross-hilted straight sword and composite bow, 50/50 unarmoured or light armour, sun goggles, movement: as human, disposition: typically clear-thinking, light hearted, gregarious, and claustrophobic. 

Will personally own two horses, and have access to more via the family's herd.

1 in 3 Riders will be accompanied by a Steppe Hound, who are considered part of the family. 

Steppe Hound

HD1, bite as medium weapon, unarmoured, speed: twice human, disposition: well-trained and well-loved companion animal. Will guard the bodies of downed Nomads to the death.  

If a Hound moves and attack on the same turn their target must test STR or be knocked prone. 

Nomad House Troops

As Nomad Rider, but HD1+1 and wearing medium armour. House troops are elites, and used to preferential treatment. They are easy to offend, and have a keenly developed sense of personal and house dignity. They wear the flag capes of their houses and kin groups, just like errants do.

Patriarch/Matriarch

As Nomad Rider but with between 2 and 4 HD, depending on seniority. Patriarchs and matriarchs are rulers of their territories, and administer these by personal fiat. They are used to being deferred to, and treated with complete obedience and respect. Patriarchs and matriarchs often quested as errants in their youth - 50/50 that they still have access a single star weapon that they used back then. It is considered a mark of prestige and shrewd political acumen to own star weapons that you no longer need to use. 

House Champions

Sometimes, a young errant will not get wisdom on their travels, or will find and preach a wisdom that is incompatible with the expectations of steppe adults: marriage, family, husbandry, and trade. These individuals are treated with a wary type of respect in their clans, and given the title 'champion'. They symbolically 'marry death', a ceremony that involves being buried in the earth for a day and a night, and are often outfitted with more star weapons, at great expense, by the family head. Steppe champions are extremely dangerous personal fighters, and typically become fixers, instructors, and war advisors (and even assassins) to their houses. 

Champions occupy a strange social position at the fringes of their society, and are significantly freed from many of the usual expectations of propriety. Young steppe fighters, from many different houses, are routinely apprenticed to famous champions to learn marksmanship, swordplay, and strategy, and the friendships, crushes, and rivalries of these formative years often go on to define the character of each fresh generation of riders. Enough fall in love with their tutors that social customs and allowances have developed around the relation - something between Greek pederasty and The Secret History - and this is seen as an appropriate, pre-marital sexual and romantic tutelage that unfolds comfortably outside the normal channels. 

Stat House Champions as Patriarch/Matriarchs, who additionally carry d3 star weapons. They are unbreakable, and roll to hit at +1 over what their HD would indicate. Champions are often highly eccentric, superstitious, and fey-minded. They might crossdress, or wear expensive and eye-catching foreign clothing and cosmetics. They are generally treated more like ghosts or spirits than people by the rest of their house, and most of them are used to this and not given to socialising much. A House Champion will nearly always have a companion animal, with even chances of a dog (use the Hound entry above), cat, or raptor bird.

Cats are HD1, have claws as light weapons, unarmoured, speed: twice human, disposition: catty. They move silently, can disappear in grass or shadow, and deal an additional d8 damage from ambush. 

Raptor Birds have 1hp, talons beak as light weapons, unarmoured, flight: as hawk, disposition: proud, swift hunters. They perch on the shoulder when not 'in use'. 

Finally, a House Champion has a 50/50 chance of being accompanied by 2d4 Youngbloods - use the the Steppe Rider stats above. If a Youngblood is killed in battle, d3-1 other Youngbloods (determined randomly) had a crush on them, and will now fight to the death. If the Champion is killed, this is instead d6 Youngbloods. 

Reapers

They call themselves Reapers because they think it sounds intimidating - most people just call them bandits, or scalping, murdering bastards. Reapers are a border phenomenon: Baronials who have grown up near the nomad territories, and who have adopted some of their ways and developed a strange hybrid culture focused on terror raiding and banditry. Reapers are still recognisably Baronials; they wear tattered and faded finery in the fashions of the capital, and make use of firearms and heavy armour where the nomads would use bows. They ride steppe horses, and ride very well, which is rare in the Barony proper, where heavy infantry are the socially-lauded troop type. Reapers are a perennial thorn in the side of both societies, and the nomads will often work with more settled Baronials to root them out and kill them. 

Reapers have developed a style of raiding that is significantly focused on terror and psychological warfare. They are famous for scalping, mutilating, and torturing captured foes, and for dumping the remains in uncovered mass graves about the border. Reaper bands are widely reviled, but successful groups can become powerful regional players, and there are often unspoken agreements between these successful raider-captains and their neighbours. Reapers make excellent deniable assets if you want to persecute your neighbours without playing hand too obviously. 

There are many romantic and bawdy tales of young Baronials fleeing poverty, debt, or the law by joining bands of Reapers, making masses of coin murdering on the steppe, and retuning home in triumph. The moral instruction in these tales tends to depend on the location of the Baronials telling them - more romantic further north, and less (and more concerned with illustrating the inevitability of their capture and execution) in the south.

Reapers

HD1, medium sabre or warhammer, light armour, sun goggles, movement: human, disposition: mad max raiders. Reapers ride good quality steppe horses, and will usually own two of them each. 1 in 3 carry a pistol, musket, or blunderbuss. 

Reapers who roll max HP are Baronial ex-mercenaries: they have HD1+1, are dressed in heavy armour, carry shields, and always hold firearms. 

All Reapers wear as much jewellery and expensive clothing as they can, and if the PCs loot their bodies after a confrontation they will find d3*10s worth of finery and cosmetics on each corpse. These goods are worth double in the north of the Barony, as long as you can convince the seller that they are authentic 'Reaper wear'. 

Smiths and Smith Houses

Smithing is a sacred profession for the nomads, and smiths are an exception to all of their usual customs. The Star Smiths are the most famous and celebrated, but all metalworking stems from their art, and brings its practitioners into contact with the divine. 

Nomad swords are some of the best in the world - the characteristic long, straight blade and cross guard are markers of quality everywhere. Most nomad swords are simply well made medium straight swords, but a masterwork made from a celebrated smith might be treated as a +1 weapon. Smiths never sell these weapons for money - you will need to get into nonspecific and potentially lifelong debt with them, or cause them to become so to you, to get access to them. 

All smiths live in a Smith House, which is traditionally built atop a mine or the site of a meteor impact. A Smith House is at once a fortification, holy site, demilitarised zone, and gaming house for other nomads, and smiths usually become vastly more wealthy from the patronage of their houses than the selling of their worked goods. Nomad maps note only three types of fixture dotted through the within the broad political territories: watering holes and rivers, burial grounds, including those of past civilisations, and Smith Houses. 

A typical Smith House will look, to a Baronial, like an extremely wealthy walled town. Mostly they are built in local, un-mortared stone - some import timber framing as a signifier of their status. Some Houses are built up enough within their walls that they become a single, massive, continuous building, subdivided into vast guest halls, gaming rooms, kitchens, forges, waterways, gardens, and kitchens. The wealthier the smith, the more prestigious their House - the houses of the Star Smiths are great and beautiful fortifications that rival those of the Baronial Petty Nobility. 

All smiths require access to a flowing waterway, and good quality fuel. Established Houses will already have both in ready supply, but should one of the other be compromised, a smith will pay extremely handsomely to have access reestablished. 

Smiths also keep apprentices; young nomads whose eyes are said to reflect the stars. Unlike the holy people of the ice clans in the south, this does not appear to be literally true, and refers to a specific sort of ungrounded and astral inclination in thought. Apprentice smiths work with mechanisms and firearms, competing to produce 'graduation pieces', and be selected for dream tutelage by the Star Smiths. If called on to defend the House, apprentices can do surprising damage with their strange contraptions. 

Stat smiths as commoners who possess a nearly supernatural facility with the metal that they work. Star Smiths are typically found seated in front of pools of still water, deep in dreaming meditation. They cannot be awoken from these trances, to the point that you can kill them, carve them up, etc. without a response. Killing a Star Smith with earn you the particular ire of a specific Star Person. 

Apprentices are statted as Nomad Riders without any equipment save their graduation piece. A graduation piece is a +1 pistol, musket, or blunderbuss with one of the following:

1. Repeating. Can be fired up to three times per attack action, with a -1 to hit per shot already taken that turn. 
2. Silenced. Makes a soft thwwppp sound when fired. The noise won't draw attention.
3. Sighted. If the firer does not move this turn, the star weapon rolls to hit at +1. If they spend a whole turn aiming with it, and don't move on their next turn, then it receives +4 to hit and a +1 expanded crit range that turn. 

In addition: Ghost Stories

Ox Men, Horse Men, Dog Men

N.B. 'Men' here is simply what they are known as, there are plenty of female Ox, Dog, and Horse Men. 

Tall, thin giants who hunt the peripheries and burial grounds of the nomad clans. They are said to live where horses cannot go: in stinking sumps, amidst sharp stony shale cliffs, in caves and pits. They have long fingers and skin like stone. They eat people; especially they eat lost people, or riders who rode their horses to death, or the wounded from battlefields. They are always watching and waiting for the moment to come loping out of the darkness grinning with the pleasure of imagining the meal to come. 

The nomads call them ghosts or spirits or demons or ghouls. 

Steppe Ghost

HD4, x2 long fingered, grasping hands as heavy weapons (If both hit, you are additionally grappled, and take an additional d6 strangulation damage per turn you remain so), armour: as chain, speed: twice human, disposition: lazy, smiling, calculating, utterly without pity. 

Ox Men are proud, bullying, bellicose. They have golden horns growing from their foreheads, and erect golden phalluses between their legs, including females. They are unbreakable, and deal fear damage equal to regular damage when they attack. Any currency that has been owned by an Ox Man is tainted and cursed: you roll on the death and dismemberment table with disadvantage while you carry it, and can only be rid of it by spending it, which, naturally, passes on the curse. Ox Men keep vast hordes of looted gold.  

Dog Men are sly and cruel. They run and stalk in total silence, but the alert can always hear the wet sounds that their mouths make as they salivate at though of devouring you. A Dog Man can eat a human corpse in thirty seconds, and will heal to full HP if allowed to do so. They always appear in groups of at least 2d2. Their shit is a deadly poison, and smells so bad that it can stun you if you have less than 10 CON; CON save resists. 

Horse Men are social and personable, though no less dangerous or sociopathic - you can bargain with horse men if you have something they want. They will appear, rarely, leading bands of desperate outlaws in terrible campaigns of wanton slaughter and abandon, they even occasionally come to administer small human settlements. Horse Men can run all day, as fast as their namesake can gallop, without tiring. They also deal quadruple damage instead of double on crits, which represents them kicking your head smoove off. 

Deep Time Nightmares

The further into the steppe interior that you travel, the older and stranger become its hauntings. 

Oliphant Men

Oliphants were an ancient race who fought against the Bird Kings, and who refused alliance with early humans, considering them weak and pitiable. They were exterminated in totality by their foes, and their bones can now be found packing out whole strata of the chemical burials. 

Oliphant Men are terrible to look upon, crowned with both wisdom and kingly wrath. They are HD6, and fight with huge bronze spears (gigantic weapons) which can fire burning beams by reflecting the light of the sun (as longbow +1, radiation damage, only works in bright sunlight). When they speak, humans hear it as a Command, and must save CHAR to resist the compulsion to obey. 

Oliphant Men must be actively disinterred from their chemical burials. They have the disposition of mummies. 

Bird Men

Whence came they? And how made? None now know. The most feared and bloodthirsty spirits of the steppe, and terrible to look upon. Tall, thin, proud, vengeful. It is not known if they are birds-become-men, or men who have taken some aspect of death into themselves, and changed. Bird Men fight with ripping talons (as 2x heavy weapons) in place of hands, and terrible great beaks shod in bronze, long and thin like that of a heron. The beak will only ever be used to kill humans, and counts as a vorpal gigantic weapon. If it kills someone, their soul is sucked and slurped messily out of their skull. 

Bird Men appear saturated with gore and the leavings of carrion. If you meet their eyes you must save CHAR or be paralysed with terror. Each is utterly, inexpressibly insane. They each wear d3*100s worth of hammered bronze jewellery about their neck and face. If you run from them they will always catch you. Behind them you can hear the din and clash and roar of terrible battle, and smell its stench. There are swamps in the deeper steppe where the very earth still reeks with poisoned blood and offal from the ancient wars against the Lords of the Universe. Bird Men are said to haunt these places.

Serpent Men

Serpent Men look like people. You will know what they are when they grasp you and you feel their hideous, bone-snapping strength. Then you will really see them. 

Serpent Men know things about you and the people that you love, and will shout the most hideous obscenities, and the most private intimacies. This is unbelievably demoralising for most people - unless your ears are stopped up with wax or similar you take d10 fear damage each turn you fight a Serpent Man.

The words of a Serpent Man expose you to a random disease. This is true whether you hear them directly, or read their writing, or listen to a recording or an echo: the words of a Serpent Man always carry contagion.  

The Ice Clans

 

The Southern Nomads inhabit the steppe country that girds the end of the world. Beyond their territories lie blasted polar wastes: black rock, white snow, blue ice, and a sun that drives people mad.  

There are people who live there, and to their northern brethren they are holy people, closer to the sky and the stars than any other. 

They say that if you look into their eyes you can see, buried deep within, the gigantic wheeling of the constellations, the glittering arcs of cosmic bodies, the frozen void space that is the home of the sacred progenitors of cognition. 

The men and women of the Ice Clans are tall and rangy. They eat only meat and blubber, and they do not work metal, though some will carry knives and other steel and iron necessaries traded with their northern neighbours. They are stereotyped as direct, simple minded, and prone to casual violence. Their reputation with other nomads is something like that of the Mountaineers to the Baronials -  simple, honest, pious, wrathful, fey. 

Trepanning is nearly universal, and cannibalism is widely practiced - the Ice Clans take a equivocal stance to meat and sustenance. When they raid they fight with axes, picks, and bows. To pursue them onto the wastes is death. 

In game, stat Ice Clans as Southern Nomads with HD1+1, and access to light armour at best (no shields). All members of an Ice Clan band will be trepanned, and as such will have access to a single gift from this list. 

Sky-Gazers

A strange type of holy person, solitary and detached even by the standards of the southerners. Sky-Gazers move from clan to clan on vast circular pilgrimages across the ice. Each walks the orbit of a celestial body, whose interests they claim to represent on the terrestrial surface. Sky-Gazers speak rarely, and when they do it is usually in declamatory hate-poetry against sentient life. The Ice Clans treat them with reverence and fear, and provide them with food and shelter during their endless elliptical wandering. 

Sky-Gazers are conduits, like Mentats. Unlike Mentats, who maintain a degree of autonomy, a Sky-Gazer is nearly literally instrumentalised by the power that they serve. The Star People can use a Sky-Gazer's eyes to look out into our world, from a human point of reference. The Star People mostly have no need for or interest in the vision mechanics of a human, but they can hijack Star-Gazers to use like camera puppets to facilitate this when they wish to. 

Unlike the frightening but mostly incidental contact that most nomads have with the Star People, a Sky-Gazer can expose you to their terrible vision-consciousness directly. 

In game terms, a Sky-Gazer is an Ice Clansman or Clanswoman with a gaze attack that deals 2d10 psychic damage to a single creature that they can see, or d6 psychic damage to everything they can see. 

Unlike most gaze attacks, blinding yourself, closing your eyes, and using mirrors as reflectors has no effect. The 'gaze' is actually just a video camera feed to the being that is causing the damage, and that being does not give a shit about mirrors, or whether you can see it. 

The bodies of those slain in this manner disappear.

The eyeballs of a Sky-Gazer have strange properties. If you place them inside the sockets of a corpse, they will 'beam' the last things that the corpse saw in reverse, from from moment of its death, like a projector. Like a projector, this is useless if you don't have a surface to project onto, and it can also be used as a bright, directional light source. The video feed will play backwards for the exact amount of time since the Sky-Gazer's eyes were removed from their head.

If you implant a Sky-Gazer's eyes into a living body, they immediately become a feral ghoul-like thing bent on the destruction of all sentient life. If you do this to a PC, they immediately become an insane and dangerous NPC and their player must roll a new character. The Southern Nomads call these things devils or abominations. The hostility of the astral minds must be channelled through its appropriate agents - when the Gazers are slain and their eyes taken, it is only right that punishment be visited on those responsible. 

An Abomination is HD2+1 (or the HD they had in life, whichever is higher), x2 hands-like-claws as light weapons that deal cold damage, unarmoured but takes -1 damage from weapons, movement: human, disposition: clever and motivated serial killer. 

They constantly intone hate poetry in the language of the stars. They are unbreakable, and impossible to reason with. Northern Nomads kill them on sight, but Southerners and Ice Clans will instead attempt to restrain and 'keep' them as honoured guests. 

What this usually means is a gagged and bound ghoul-thing propped at the head of the communal table, given the choicest cuts and the best liquor, which it will not be able to touch, much less eat, and everybody present trying their best to avoid looking at its terrible, straining, bulging face. 

Stairs to the Sky

When the nighted heavens are draped in coloured fire it is said that one might find a stairway up into the strange cities and territories that can sometimes be seen behind the shimmering curtains of light. The stairways are made of glass or ice or starlight - the stories differ. They will deliver you into a Dreamland utterly unlike the one you know. Travel up into and then back from these strange passages is how Sky-Gazers are made. Many young, pious nomads go in search of them, and many are the frozen corpses of those searchers littering the ice floes. 

Mobile Fortresses

A persistent myth in the Southern territories. The Mobile Fortresses are said to be built from star metal, and excavated from solid core ice over hundreds of years by chosen Ice Clans. Those who are able to excavate them after decades and centuries of labour are said to be biding their time, waiting for the end of the world, which they will bring about with their terrible engines. 

Mobile Fortresses might have legs, tracks, they might fly, they might burrow beneath the earth. There are a hundred different stories. They are built from strange iridescent metal, and they effect subtle changes on their inhabitants, who grow taller, more slender, more terrible and more beautiful. 

None can truthfully claim to have seen one.

A Mobile Fortress is a dungeon like any other, and must be navigated like one. It will always have a heart and a brain (usually in rooms close to the centre), and if either are destroyed it will be 'killed'. You might consider using this dungeon as a template that can be reskinned. 

A Mobile Fortress is inhabited by Star Children, which are what remains of Ice Clans whose ancestors spent centuries in the holy work of excavation by hand.

Star Children are long limbed, slender, flexible, vibrating, with strange reflective skin and terrible eyes and faces. They are said to be beautiful, and they are said to be monsters, perversions of the human form.  

Star Child

HD3, armed with an invisible heat sabre (medium weapon, +1 fire damage, invisible blade makes defending against it difficult - heat sabres roll to hit at +2) and empathy (see below), unarmoured, but perfectly reflective skin confers immunity to psychic, radiation, and fire damage. Movement: like an octopus and a cockroach walking around using a mostly human skeleton. Disposition: curious, capricious, unpredictable. 

Star Children do not eat, drink, or sleep, and do not (or cannot) speak. They can share emotions and simple concepts (friendly, distressed, 'over there', go away) via telepathy if you look into their eyes, or if they touch your bare skin with theirs. 

If they want to kill you, they can use this innate ability to 'link' enemies together such that what one feels, all feel. In game terms, every enemy that falls under the gaze of a Star Child takes the damage that every other enemy under the gaze takes. Blinding yourself against gaze attacks works as normal, and a mirror will additionally subject the Star Child to the effect. 

Star Child Astral Raider

What remains of clan champions and leaders.

As Star Child above, but HD4, possessing four additional invisible arms, two invisible heat sabres, and an invisible Star Weapon, rolled for on the usual tables. This Star Weapon does not have ammunition as usual, and usually contains a single shot which immediately recharges under starlight.  

Astral Raiders can 'flick' their skin from reflective to Vantablack or Vantawhite at will. Vantablack renders them immune to cold damage and needing to breath, and Vantawhite confers AC as plate and confers resistance to normal weapon attacks (half damage). 

Star Child Projector Captain

As Star Child above, but HD5, and possessing the gaze attack of a Sky-Gazer. A Projector Captain's gaze attack has a 360 degree area of effect. 

Projector Captains are completely invisible, and can see invisibility. They can make other objects permanently invisible by painting them with their blood. 

They can confer the ability to see invisibility to, or blind, others who they are able to touch skin-to-skin. Both of these conditions are permanent, and can be resisted with a CHAR save, although the Projector Captain can attempt to do so again next turn as long as the skin-to-skin contact is maintained. 

If you drink their blood, your soul will henceforth be invisible to beings that would otherwise be able to sense it.