After a similar list someone showed me recently, which I will link to here when I find it again it's this one!
This list is incomplete, there are a few other settings I would like to do soon. I have prioritised games I have played in, and also the inimitable Goblin Punch, without which this blog would never have existed.
I challenge other gloggers to make lists of their own! It would be cool to eventually have a d50 or d100 Planar Travellers table.
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Shamash is a very tall woman with a shaved head, built like an ox. Her skin is the colour of ash, and she carries a large and terrible sword of bone. She is wrapped up in a tattered cloak of black-dyed linen, and her limbs and torso have been bound with strips of shroud. Her eyes are glazed with despair.
She is slumped down resting by a small bonfire that burns the bones of the dead. Around the fire are six swords of various sizes and materials thrust into the ground by their blades, Seven Samurai style. She sings softly and tunefully under her breath, and watches you, and the flames. Behind her are an iron chest and two leather bags, visibly stuffed with valuables.
There are also two zombies standing behind her, and many bloody and torn pieces of bodies scattered around her makeshift camp. The earth here smells of blood.
If you sit by the fire or engage her in conversation you will find her polite, although not especially forthcoming. She is from another place, and she wishes to return. She would not die here. She misses the city. What do you mean which city? She misses the red sky. You can leave her this way. She won't ask questions - she knows that you can't help her.
If you show any violent intention, or if you touch any of her valuables, she will attack you with the intent to kill. She dismembers the bodies of the slain out of long habit.
Shamash has HD3, attacks twice with whatever sword she is carrying (she starts with a heavy bone sword), and is unarmoured.
She screams as she fights, the same strange word again and again. It sounds like 'kill', but it's not. 'Call?' Something. On her second attack each turn she will break her sword, with a different effect depending on what it's made of:
- Iron swords will deal d6 damage to the target.
- Bronze swords break the weapon of the target.
- Bone swords additionally inflict fear damage equal to their physical damage.
- Ceramic swords ring terribly when they break, rendering the target deaf and mute for one minute (CON saves).
When she breaks a sword, she will use her next turn to draw another from the ground. Roll 2d4 to determine its type and material. 1: light, 2 - 3: medium, 4: heavy.
Her hands are as iron: her unarmed attacks are as light hammers, she can swat aside blades and arrows (AC12 with one hand free, AC14 with both), and knows the special technique of blade catching (AC16 against swords if both hands are free, if the attack roll is 10 or less the blade is snapped and the sword is destroyed).
She is frighteningly strong, and will automatically win contested STR checks and grapples against anyone with 16 or less STR. Even against those with more than that, she rolls such checks with advantage.
Her two Labouring Dead are commoners who do not sleep, or feel pain or fear. You have to cut them to pieces to stop them. They follow her orders, and will attempt to grapple and dogpile you if you attack their master.
Inside her bags and chest are 400 + d20 silver coins, 150 + d20 gold coins, 2d20 precious stones, and jewellery worth 500 + d100 silver.
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Iolente has the look of a man who believes that he is dreaming. The wind and sky, the sun, the rain, the procession of seasons and the moods of weather, all of them invoke in him a kind of quiet awe that often bubbles over into brittle laughter. He wears clothing that is unspeakably alien. He is loud, quick, confident, and aggressive, with no understanding at all of personal space. He enjoys gesturing at things with his long, painted knife.
You will find him looting bodies on deserted battlegrounds, or hiring his services as a saboteur, bodyguard, and assassin. He spends what he earns on information - how can I get back? Who can tell me this? - and the drugs that let him forget the faces of the family he is convinced (more and more these days) are lost to him forever.
HD3, two attacks with a light painted dagger +1 (made from metal of impossible hardness and lightness, and leaves dyed scars in those it cuts), screaming-face buckler (shield), an oxy cutter with 30 mins left of fuel (can be used in the ways you expect, and also in melee with a -2 to hit, dealing 2d10 fire damage on a hit), 4 navigator darts (d4, thrown like daggers), really really foreign garb.
Iolente will fight you if you disrespect him or get in his way, but he is generally more concerned with scarring, bullying, and maiming his enemies than he is in killing. His reputation as a lunatic duelist is well earned, but also actively cultivated. Baronials, and especially the Bravos of the capital, love him unreservedly.
He gets a cumulative +1 to hit and to crit range per turn of combat against a single foe (has to be the same person), to a maximum of +3.
He also has an excellent (indeed in the Barony, a borderline supernatural) understanding of structural engineering, and can and will use this to sap and demolish dungeons if you pay him to. He uses his oxy cutter only as a last resort, wary of using up its fuel. His fee is triple the usual, but once it is paid he is completely reliable. He will take on contracts of all kinds, including very dangerous ones, and has the vigour and jagged cheerfulness of someone who no longer cares much if they are killed.
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She wears a loose-tailored linen two-piece suit and mirrored aviator sunglasses. She looked like cops look in Hard Boiled or To Live and Die in LA. Her long dark hair is pulled back in a ponytail and she carries a black pistol and shotgun of strange design. She smoked her last pack of Passwall cigarettes weeks ago and has taken a short brass Baronial pipe instead - she smokes when she is thinking, when she is resting, in combat, to pass the time...
She is the leader of a group of civilians dressed as outlandishly as she is. They are clearly families and refugees, and have been moving from place to place, relying on Prosecutor to protect them from the dangers of the country and high road. One of these people is her husband, one of them is her child.
If you ask her where she came from she will tell you that Passwall is gone, fallen to madness. She does not know how she arrived here and doesn't much care. Her entire focus is protecting the ragged group she leads, and especially on her family. If you promise them safe harbour or passage to somewhere they can settle down, she will fight alongside you until you all get there. She has been taken advantage of before and will be slow to trust. She carries inside herself unspeakable memories of violence, of the natural order gone mad. She will never again go willingly beneath the earth.
HD3, 9mm, with 15 bullets in the gun and an extra magazine with 4 (as pistol with doubled range profile and no smoke), SPAS-12 with 3 shots left (as blunderbuss with doubled range profile and no smoke), light flick knife in her pocket, unarmoured but dressed in a very nice and outlandishly foreign suit, mirror shades (immune to gaze attacks, immune to charm, frightens entities).
Prosecutor can choose to attack twice with her 9mm or SPAS-12, at the cost of -2 to each shot. She can also use the 9mm in melee to enact Heroic Bloodshed, spending d6 rounds to do critical damage if she hits (if there are less shots left in the gun that show on the d6, this attack auto-misses). She is immune to fear unless she is underground, or has been deprived of tobacco for a full 24 hours.
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| Hard Boiled, John Woo, 1992 |
An adventurer and devout monotheist of an utterly different church. Accompanied by four strange, savage, brightly-hued ape retainers. These creatures are entirely artificial - cut one open and you will see that most of the body has the consistency of mincemeat, and that the bones are oddly chalky and brittle. If they die, Passadone can make more of them.
Uniquely on this list, Passadone knows how to return to where he came from. If you ask, he might even allow you to come with him, although he will demand your conversion before he will agree to this. He has his soul to think about.
HD3, medium longsword and pistol, 3x light surgical blades, medium armour, rides a horse. Also has a spyglass, a compass (a useless but expensive curio in the Barony), a set of weights and measures, a scale, a small golden needle, and fifty copies of a book of collected Hesayan scripture.
His baboon retainers are HD1, attack with bites and coshes (as medium weapon), gain +1 to hit and damage when two or more attack the same target, and test morale at loud noises and bright flashes. They also cannot be crit, as their bodies have the consistency of hamburger and lack vital organs.
Passadone can use a liver of human size or greater to make a new baboon - the process takes him about an hour. He can only control four at a time, but this number may increase - see below. He can also eat a human liver to gain a second attack in combat for one hour at the cost of 1 fatigue, and can feed one to a baboon with the same effect.
Once each per day, Passadone can: eat a human heart to regain d6 HP; point at a baboon to have it explode, dealing d6 boiling innards damage to everything within 10 feet; pierce himself with a golden needle, dealing d4 damage, and mirroring that damage on one target that he can see.
It goes without saying that he will harvest the organs of those he kills.
He is a merchant, and his retainers act as his porters outside of combat (they carry backpacks for the purpose). He can sell you foreign rations and sundries at twice the usual prices, and will also have one of his specials on him each time you meet. He will only trade his specials for the livers of monsters of 4HD and higher, and each time you buy one, the next will double in liver-price (reroll any doubles). Every special you buy will increase his number of baboon retainers by one.
- Cloak of Winds. Allows you to leap ten times your normal height (no protection against fall damage). If you have sincerely converted to the Hesayan faith, you can also cast featherfall on yourself at will.
- The Hands of the Ghoul. A pair of animate human hands that you can train like rats. The don't decompose or need food, and the stumps don't bleed much anymore. They love being petted. Each has 1hp.
- Mutagenic Draught. Whoever drinks it rolls on the list. They roll twice if they have a CON mod of 0 or less.
- 'Tame' Baboon. Apparently not one of his. Violent and quite stupid, but cheerfully loyal. Understands common, up to three word sentences. Comes with a bellhop outfit and a medium brass cudgel. Cannot be crit, due to its body actually being composed of hamburger meat. Baronial apes fear it the way you would fear a skinwalker.
- Eye of the Angelman. An eyeball with a brilliant blue iris. If you replace one of the eyes of a freshly dead (like in the last thirty minutes) body with this, the corpse will be resurrected with its mind and soul intact. Any hair turns white-blonde. The person so-resurrected can now eat corpses as rations, and will be attacked on site by any angel or demon they meet.
- Bound Maker. A black tar-like substance in a glass bottle, fitted with a complicated valve mechanism. If you place the valve down the neck of a dead body (of any species), the Maker will take control of the body. It is quite intelligent, and can continue puppeting a host body until it is literally dismembered. I would like to be freed into the ocean, and will request this from you in exchange for loyal service measured in decades (it has an inhuman patience). If it is ever freed, it will begin the slow process of rampant self replication at the bottom of an ocean trench, and finally begin its true works - the laying of great foundations and signalling apparatus in the abyssal deeps.
You cannot buy anything from Passadone without also taking a free book of Hesayan prayer.
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