Class: Paladin

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

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

Paladin

Skills: None.

Gear: Nothing.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Annunciation, Jacopo da Pontormo, around 1550.

Cherubim

 

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

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

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

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

Cherubim

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cockerel Destrier

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

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

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

Fairy Attendants

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

War Bee

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

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One Year On

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

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

Class: Lead Box

Days that pass in succession, like lead boxes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The face:

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

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

In Memorium AH

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

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

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

Monsters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Player Roles for Cataphracts Systems

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

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

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

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

In addition:

Metabolic Vehicles 

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

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

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

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

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

A vehicle has: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MODULES TO COME

The Chorus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DREAM-SENDING TAROT CARDS TO COME

SPELLS TO COME

Little Birds

Along the Western edges of the Barony, inside the Forest of Worms, live a people culturally distinct from the Baronials. They have their own language, which they would tell you predates the Baronial culture by thousands of years. They train hawks and other hunting raptors like the steppe nomads train dogs. They live in mobile bands of hunter gatherers, eschewing agriculture and settlement entirely, and are constantly alert, via woodcraft, keen eyesight, and the shrieked reports of their avian companions, to the seething movements of the hundreds of thousands of Worms that traverse the forest at all times. Baronials cannot chase them into their home territories, and they are said to be impossible to ambush or surprise while their birds are watching from the air.

They are called Little Birds by their enemies. They lead raids against the Baronial settlements, hunting for trade goods, captives, and alcohol, and the Baronials organise massacres and ambushes of their enemies where they can. This has been going on for hundreds of years. Along the Western forest border, it is understood that an unfamiliar or undomesticated bird is threat, and they are often shot on sight or hunted with cats trained for the purpose.

Little Birds 

Little Birds are hairy and long limbed, with huge, bright blue eyes. They dress in hides and looted fabrics. They make chains and crowns from wildflowers, and rub their bodies with ash and earth, to act as camouflage and to hide their scent from the Worms. Their knives and spears are cold-hammered iron and bronze, and their longbows are of extraordinary quality. 

Whatever procedure the DM uses to indicate that the PCs surprise or ambush their foes is rolled with disadvantage against Little Birds. Whatever chance they would normally have of ambushing the PCs is at +1. 

A typical raiding band will be composed of 10+d10 Fighters, 5+d6 Hunters (looking to become Fighters by taking their first captive), and d3-1 Flower Men/Flower Women. 

Hunter

Stats as a Commoner, but with the morale of a Man-at-Arms. Armed with a longbow and a knife. Doesn't speak Common, and gets +1 to hit with their bow. 

Fighter

Stats as a Man-at-Arms, but unarmoured, and armed with a longbow, a spear, and a knife. Doesn't speak Common, and gets +1 to hit with their bow.  Also accompanied by one of the following bird companions (roll a d4 for each Fighter in the band): 

1. Eagle or Vulture: Sits on the shoulder or between the shoulder blades. Attacks whoever its companion sics it on each turn (this is a free action), using their attack bonus. HD1, terrible claws and beak (d8 slashing), can swoop instead of attacking, which forces the target to make a STR save or be knocked prone.  
2. Raven, Owl: Sits on the shoulder or between the shoulder blades. Attacks whoever its companion sics it on each turn (this is a free action), using their attack bonus. HD1, beak (d6 piercing). Can speak, and translate between Common and the language of the Little Birds. 
3. Hawk, Harrier, Falcon, Kite: Sits on the wrist, and attacks whoever its companion sics it on. 1hp, eye peck (d4 piercing). Can also forgo an attack to attempt to snatch something that a hawk could reasonably carry during flight out of someone's hand, or from their person. This forces a DEX save, and on a failure the bird brings it back to its master. 
4. Sparrows, Robins, Jays, Bluebirds: A whole flock that settles across the shoulders and hair when at rest, and surrounds their companion in a shrieking, darting swarm when in battle. All melee attacks against the Fighter are made at disadvantage, and on a critical failure to-hit the attacker takes 1 piercing damage from a tiny but well-aimed beak.

Flower Man/Flower Woman

An elite fighter and protector of the warrior band. Flower Warriors weave ablating armour suits out of bulky wicker 'plates', which they tie to themselves with sinew, and weave through with hundreds and hundreds of wildflowers. Each panoply is made for a specific fight or raid, and they are not expected to last long. Flower Warriors fight with long, terrible hardwood staves, which had been hollowed out and weighted with lead, and which can crack bones and pulp organs with frightening ease. They are accompanied by enormous, bright-plumed songbirds, princes of their kind, and, it is said, by spirits and pixies. They sing in their alien language as they fight, clear and true. They are the executioners and judges, and infamously practice lynchings, hangings, and cruel disembowelling when they take captives. The Baronials burn them alive where possible, but more usually they fight until they are killed.

HD3, heavy Weighted Stick, Flower Panoply, movement: human, disposition: raiding captains, champions. 

The Weighted Stick will be woven with wildflowers just like the wicker armour of the Flower Warrior, and these flowers are often the homes of motes and fairies. Roll a d4 for each Flower Warrior to determine how many motes they are accompanied by: the Weighted Stick has an equivalent number of charges. Charges can be expended to add cumulative +1 damage to any strike, and while any charge remains the Stick can be used to strike entities as though they were corporeal. 

Flower Panoply counts as heavy armour the first time it is struck, medium the next, light the next, and then falls to pieces completely. It also gives excellent camouflage in any field of wildflowers. It is bulky but not heavy, and floats in water. 

The Flower Warrior's songbird companion counts as an eagle (see above), but while it lives the entire warband roll morale at +2. If it is killed, the Flower Warrior will enter a berserk mourning trance: they fight to the death, and need to be killed twice.

Sonic Aggressors

The Church's semi-secret canon teaches of the First Humans and their diminutive descendants - God's super weapon, its virus-form, hyper-specialised, dedicated only to its own instantiation through and across every possible timeline. 

Whence, then, come the four armed inhabitants of the ancient burial grounds that dot the Barony and the Southern steppe? Their discovery was controversial enough that the Church waged a programme of targeted murder and silencing that lasted almost one hundred years. Even now, mention of them is considered poor taste. Officially, they are demon puppet-forms, popular for some reason with those Hell-launched terror troops in the distant past, and not now commonly seen. 

Academics who have studied the burials contend that they were actually an advanced city-building culture, interested in the structures of labyrinths, in singing and harmonising their voices, and in two philosophical or religious principles, inconclusively translated from their long-dead pictorial language as 'Freedom from Restraint', and 'Tunnel/Corridor/Passage Strategy/Warfare/Procedure'.

Their name for themselves, translated with similar inconclusiveness, was Sonic Aggressors. 

Sonic Aggressor (Degenerate)

An eight foot tall humanoid, with pearl-white skin, elongated facial features, four arms, and seven fingers on each hand. They are usually found underground, and possess extraordinary hearing and tissue regeneration capacities. Naked, filthy, corpse-eating. 

HD 4, unarmed (4x attacks), Sonic Hum, unarmoured, Regeneration, speed: as human, disposition: cave-dwelling and territorial carnivore. 

Sonic Hum: It comes from the throat of the Aggressor, scrambling clear thinking and increasing aggression in those exposed to it. Prolonged exposure can do damage to the eyes, ears, and brain. When combat with a Sonic Aggressor, your mental stats are halved. While in melee combat with a Sonic Aggressor, you take 1 frequency damage per turn, and your melee attacks strike random targets (including friendlies but not you). These effects are physiological, and deafness is no protection against them.

Regeneration: An Aggressor regenerates 1 hp per turn, and is biologically immortal. They can grow back limbs and vital organs, but the Academics conjecture that destroying the brain will kill them. Corpses should always be burned to ash. 

Sonic Aggressor (Healthy and Sane)

As above, but either clothed in flowing white robes tied off at the bicep and thigh, or nude but covered head to foot in a bright-red oily substance. Can speak your language, and has the most beautiful voice you have ever heard. Armed with four medium wave-bladed swords, or four light wave-bladed knives. 

Its Sonic Hum can be interrupted for a turn to make a Command of any who can hear it, or to Scream. A Command is a single sentence that you are compelled to obey, but you can choose to take d6 frequency damage or test CHAR to instead do nothing. Unlike the sonic hum, deafness does protect you from the command. A Scream deals d4 frequency damage to everything in the combat, including the Aggressor, and will usually be used only as a last resort. Stone, glass, and pottery artefacts (the size of a fist if solid, any size if hollow) are shattered by the scream.

Healthy Aggressors live in ancient communes beneath the earth. Each of these communes will have access to (roll three times):

1. Scramblers: Small devices that emit a hum just outside of human hearing, and which drive those exposed to them violently paranoid and insane over the course of weeks. 
2. Silver Chariots: Silent metal craft capable of limited flight, swift and invulnerable. 
3. Mind Tearers: Small black tubes full of white light, which can be held to someone's eye to make them forget an equivalent amount of time. 
4. Persecution Engines: Huge looms and mills that can 'cook' someone for one max HP per week, relentlessly, from any distance and through any substance, as long as it has been correctly 'patterned' on a piece of their body (hair, fingernails, blood, etc).  
5. Weather Machines: Used to create local microclimates, powered by silver lightning rods that jut downwards, further in to the core, or by feeding them biomatter. 
6. Soul Engines: Some foul means of preserving the consciousness in a small steel container. When inserted into the fresh corpse of another animal, where the brain would normally sit, the mind reawakens, in full control. 
7. Mimic Suns: A sun about the size of a wagon, and the songs required to move it slowly from place to place. The sun is black when you really look at it, and if you try this for more than five seconds you go permanently blind. The Aggressors use them for tunnelling through rock, among other things. 
8. Cloning Tanks: Can produce an exact copy of a person or animal, with all memories perfectly intact. They are dormant until removed from the tank. 
9. Projector Helms: A bulky black iron helmet and a small steel device. If you replace the brain of a corpse (of any species) with the device, wearing the helm will let you control the body and make use of its senses as if it were your own. Since you no longer control your original body, you will need to use the new one to remove the helmet, or rely on someone else to do so for you, if you wish to stop the effect. Corpses puppetted this way still decay as usual, and the device uses the natural nervous system to achieve its effect. 
10. The Geometric Perfection of the Brain: A series of songs that require at least five Aggressors to sing properly, and that can put a person into a state of permanent bliss. They will sit, content, until they starve to death. PCs can save CHAR against it in the first instance (failure here means permanent loss of ambition), after the first day (failure here means permanent loss of desire), and after the first week. If they fail all three, they are lost. 

Sonic Aggressor (Headless)

As a Degenerate but decapitated and somehow still mobile. Will attempt to pull corpses apart and stuff the meat down its open throat to feed. Still tries to sing, a truly horrible noise. Blind and deaf, but senses vibrations to a nearly supernatural degree (within 100 ft if walking on contiguous stone). 

Headless Aggressors move completely silently until they attack. The do not have a Sonic Hum, but take -1 damage from physical attacks and deal fear damage equivalent to the bludgeoning damage from their unarmed attacks. If safe to do so they will attempt to 'eat' the corpses of their victims - anyone witnessing this takes d10 fear damage.