CHEMIST
You are an artisan, dedicated to experiment and enquiry. There is a good chance that you trained in the capital, but chemists are also rarely self-taught. Your services are always in demand, from the most opulent courts and apartments to the meanest slums. There are many flavours of addiction in this world, and you cater to most of them.
Starting gear: 6 glass vials, a mortar and pestle, a small scale, a notebook, a writing kit, a musical instrument (with which you gain proficiency).
Starting skills: chemistry, performance, medicine.
A Chemistry, Hypnosis
B Separation, Traveller
Chemistry: You can mix a single smokeable dose of the following chemical compounds given 1 hour and 10s of ingredients: stimulants, sedatives, prophylactics, curatives, immune boosters, painkillers, deadly poison (ingestible). With 20s of ingredients you may make a vial of acid, holy water, or petroleum. If you can find someone to teach you, you may learn new recipes over your adventuring career. Your concoctions are reliable and effective. If you have access to an expensive chemist's laboratory both the time and the money requirements are halved. At the DM's discretion you may substitute costly ingredients with appropriate regents gathered in the world.
Hypnosis: By playing music you can induce a state of extreme relaxation in others. This can be used to give someone the full benefits from their full nights rest, even if there is some reason that they would otherwise be unable to (traumas, insanities, curses, etc.). It also cures any mundane insomnia. If you also expend a dose of sedatives, the target will recover the maximum possible exhaustion from their sleep.
Separation: Using 100s worth of ingredients and d3 days of preparation, you may craft a special Compound of Separation. This must be tailored to the biology of someone that you know intimately. Drinking a Compound of Separation tailored to you will remove your templates (all of them except your A template/s) and allow you to learn new ones - this is your second personality. Drinking another Compound will regain your original templates but forget any new ones that you have learned. You can swap between you first and second set of templates using these Compounds, and each set comes with a distinct personality. You may never have more than two personalities. If you imbibe one of these yourself you will lose your Chemist's B template, and be unable to create more of the Compounds of Separation until you regain your first personality.
Traveller: If you hypnotise someone before they sleep, and have used a dose of sedatives to do so, you can at your discretion allow them to travel in their dreams. Dream travel allows someone to explore a perfect facsimile of any place that they have already seen. The dream space is perfect, and the dreamer will be alone there. It only works on things that you have seen - you will remember the layout of a library, but not the content of the books, unless you have actually read the books. You might use this to explore a building you are planning to return to, study a book that you have read before, note the details of a specific painting, or whatever you wish - the only stipulation is that nothing new can be created in the dream space. If there is a container or receptacle of some kind in the space, you may deposit memories there. You will forget this thing on waking, and you can retrieve it again by re entering the dream space.
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FIRST HUMANS
The first humans were made to serve the dragon converts in their religious war against the core of the planet. They were horrible prototypes, built to kill and maim and terrorise. The things we call humans today are what remains of a servant species that God created to worship it while its true children were sealed beneath the earth, cut away from its sight.
First Humans are around 20 feet tall. They are fused into baroque, insectile suits of Plutonium Armour and armed with the Tools of the First Murderers. You might rarely find one that has wandered up into the tunnels and caverns closer to the surface, but usually they do endless battle in the seas of plasma and liquid iron at the centre. After five thousand years of separation from the God who loosed them on the core they have been reduced to utterly inhuman things.
Stat them as 30HD humanoids. Plutonium Armour counts as Enchanted Plate +20. The Tools of the First Murderers are crudely made from sharpened flint - stat them as Enchanted Maces +20.
First Humans cannot exist on the surface; they sink into the ground due to their mass (unless standing on solid bedrock). It is believed by the very few in the church who know of their existence that God created the gravitational force to keep them from ever gazing on its face again.
They have the following abilities:
- Nothing that is killed by the Tools of the First Murderers can ever be resurrected.
- Anything that comes within 50ft of them is exposed to infection by the Anathema.
- They cannot speak, and only understand the first language of God. They will obey any order given to them in that language.
Design Notes:
First Humans are obviously not designed to be fought by GLOG characters, with their 2 attacks and 20 odd HP. Cunning powergamers may find ways to do this, but the thinking behind the stat block is twofold. The first thought is that they make interesting roadblocks or environmental hazards in a dungeon. Make sure that players know from the off that they can expect to be killed immediately if they go anywhere near it, and then see what they do. First Humans have serious drawbacks - they don't have any defence at all against magic (they were made before it existed), and they are heavy enough that there are only specific surfaces that can hold their weight (expect the dungeon to be seriously damaged and deformed if one starts walking through the floor).
The second thought is harder to articulate. There is some intrinsic value in having monsters listed at insane power scales relative to your players' characters, and I don;t think it has much to do with the game as it is played. I was thinking about the Neutronium Golem (statted with over 2 million HP, with a natural AC of 932, an attack that drains 3d6 levels, and an aura that deals 500 damage every six seconds to everything within 5000 miles) when writing this - I don't believe that these were really made to be played, or to force players to act in clever, non-combat ways, or anything like that. I think that they represent a writer who is interested in systems (which is what DMs are most of the time I think), talking to themselves about scale, and using the simulational machinery of the setting to do so. There is a sort of gonzo pleasure in making up a damage system that simulates getting hit with a sword, scaling that up to getting trampled by a rhino, and then scaling that up to falling into the heart of a sun. The joys of abstraction make the correlations superficially easy to draw out. Even when for most adventurers the difference between suffering 2000 damage and 20000000 damage is negligible, there is a genuine pleasure in reading about Neutronium Golems and their ilk.
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