I would like to start putting down some thoughts about games, world building, genre, and writing, and have been recently inspired by the truly excellent Goblin Punch and False Machine (in particular, Patrick Stewart's Deep Carbon Observatory), Raggi's modules, and the broader OSR approach.
I am a writer and an artist, and I play games. I haven't played as much dnd over the years as I would have liked to, but I like to think about systems building, narrative, and what is specific to how these worlds and stories feel.
I have the very strong sense that in my recent blog reading I have been observing a community with its own codes, community dynamics, assumptions, and shibboleths, almost certainly from a POV well after its heyday. I love the content that they produce. A huge part of what I love is the extremely effective and laconic house style, the commitment to both literary abstraction and visceral/bodily intensity, and the enthusiastic encouragement that others should make free use of what they publish in their own games.
It's all heady and gorgeous stuff. In this spirit, I present:
CHEMICAL COURTESANS
The Courtesans are tall and their bodies are stacked with heavy slabs of muscle. They are built from the bodies of the orphans that are taken by the soldiers of the Empire during their wars of extermination. The children become palace slaves, but live in material luxury. They are taught philosophy and rhetoric, poetry, painting, and literature, and they are schooled in pragmatics, the Imperial system of making war. They are fanatically loyal to the Emperor, and act as his guards, assassins, lovers, and diplomatic corps. They are also terrifying shock troops, deployed like equipment to his most wretched and hopeless warzones.
The Imperial alchemists build their unique bodies over several years, by implanting a second set of muscles over the originals, a second heart, and second set of lungs. There are other specialist organs implanted. Their skeletons are strengthened and their skin is sliced open and sewn shut many times. The process by which the Courtesans are made is the Empire's most closely guarded state secret. They will be dependant on muscle relaxants, immunosuppressants, sedatives, and stimulants for the rest of their lives, and without a steady intake of these drugs their enhanced biologies will quickly cease to function.
This physical degradation and withdrawal is horrifying, and Courtesans fear it above all else. Most would rather die as suicides than go mad as their muscles grow rigid and tear inside them, and their blood begins to spread infections through organs and tissue.
When they fight they strap on black steel armour and carry terrible, long black swords. They swallow stimulants and psychotics and their breath turns to thick black smoke that pumps from their helmets and swirls around them as they sprint towards their enemies. They are far too quick. They hack and slaughter their way through whatever is in front of them. They are unstoppable, unkillable.
This is when they fight hand-to-hand. More often they are sent out in 'Genocide Squads', with broader strategic objectives, and practice mass poisoning, ecosystem destruction, the propagation of fire and diseases, widespread chemical sterilisation, and other techniques of population control. They are rarely captured alive by their enemies, and when they are it does not take long for their bodies to cease functioning; organs boiling in torsos and muscles hardening and tearing visibly beneath their skin.
When they fight particularly well the Emperor will reward them with elaborate jewelled chains made from tin, lead, and cut glass. To anyone else these are fairground trinkets, worthless scrap, but the Courtesans fight and kill for them and nothing else, and prize them above all things. They have no interest in or need for money. Their stitched together bodies are considered beautiful in the Empire, and ritual scarification, in imitation of the process of their construction, is common among the capital's elites.
They have strange ideas about the humans that they serve. The body is meat; is stinking offal and raw materials. The Emperor is an image, a gaze, a will, a voice; his body is almost an afterthought. His cruelty and His mercy are arbitrary and cannot be relied on. None of them know how many humans had to be dismembered to build them.
HD4
Armour: Plate
Movement: As human, or as horse when dosed on stimulants.
Black Sword: 2 attacks per turn, 1d10, 2d10 when dosed on stimulants.
Stimulants: Each Courtesan will have 1d4+1 doses of stimulants on them. Using one dose gives the benefits listed in the stat block above, and also gives 15 temporary HP. After 20 minutes the effects wear off and these HP are lost, which can kill the Courtesan. They will then enter a fugue state and become non-responsive and lethargic for 24 hours. For this period of lethargy all attacks and ability checks are made at -4.
Psychotics: Each Courtesan will have 1 dose of psychotics on them. Using psychotics will make the Courtesan impossible to kill for 30 seconds, but will also make them unable to distinguish friend from foe, aggressively attacking any target within reach. Note that this effect is biological, not magical, so the DM should use their judgement - getting disintegrated (for example) will still take them off the board, but getting stabbed in the head or cut in half might not. These effects stack with the effects of stimulants. After 30 seconds the Courtesan will immediately take d8 damage in addition to any damage suffered while they were immune. They will not use psychotics in the presence of other Courtesans, but tend not to care as much about other allies.
Chemical Maintenance: Without a regular supply of drugs from the Imperial alchemists, a Courtesan will die. After one week without their drugs, they will start losing 5 max HP and suffer -1 to all checks. These effects reapply each day, and are cumulative and permanent; their muscles and organs are ruined. Getting access to their drugs will stop this process from progressing but it will not reverse it (the process can however be actively reversed surgically, by an Imperial alchemist with the necessary tools and equipment). Each will carry two months of chemical supplies on them when they leave on mission. These are valuable loot for anyone brave or foolish enough to try to steal them.
HOW TO PLAY THEM
Introduce them as a strange and poorly understood regional threat, poisoning wells, salting fields, spreading disease, etc. Educated characters will probably have heard of them, and will have some chance of understanding what is going on. They will generally be posted in a Genocide Squad of four, and should be very scary to fight head on. Luckily they also have some built in weaknesses that characters of all levels will be able to exploit.
If they suspect that they are being tracked or spied on they will switch their focus to wiping out whoever is snooping. They are supremely confident in their abilities, to the extent that they might do something like storm a stronghold and start massacring guards if they think that their quarries are hiding inside.
To relax they all smoke sedatives and narcotics. Thick, orange smoke, smells like burnt coffee, honey, cinnamon. They find it very difficult to sleep without these. They also all have sex with each other all the time, Band of Thebes style.
Their gear is all black iron, far too thick and heavy for a normal person to use. In battle they move like berserk Evas, too quick and fluid for something so heavily armoured. Unnerving, jerky, dog-like. The same weight and momentum as an insane, human-sized Iron Golem. When they are high on combat drugs their heads do the Jacob's Ladder thing.
They scream and scream, and they laugh, which sounds almost the same. Black smoke pumps from the gaps in their iron helmets in an endless cascade.
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