Prestige Class: Ogre

With thanks to PRIMEUMATON and Loch for the stimulating ogre chat. 

Gustave Doré's illustrations for Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel

OGRE

Requirements: Fighter AB, Poet AB, CON 14, STR 14, CHAR 14.

To become an Ogre you must spend a night doing Ogreish Things. What these are exactly will be down to your DM, but they will always require a check derived from CON, STR, or CHAR. Most of them will be easier to do when drunk. Ogreish Things will include things like:

• Eating a whole sheep (CON).
• Fucking someone's husband or wife while you keep them occupied elsewhere with a meaningless task (CHAR). 
• Challenging and beating the entire population of the inn at arm wrestling (STR).
• Dancing all night and demanding (with threats of violence) that the minstrels play on (STR or CHAR).
• Beating a tax collector to death with your bare hands and escaping legal consequences (STR).
• Shitting in a place of high honour (the church, a throne room, the bed of the innkeeper) and escaping legal consequence (CHAR).  
• Letting all who wish to punch you as hard as they can in the gut, and laughing as they do so (CON).
• Drinking enough alcohol to reasonably kill an adult human (CON). 
• Etc., etc.

You must do at least 3 Ogreish Things in a single night of debauchery, and not fail any of the checks - once this is accomplished you gain a single point in VITALITY and may upgrade one of your Fighter or Poet templates to its Ogreish version. You choose which to upgrade, they don't have to be taken in order.

Henceforth, every time you do 3 or more Ogreish Things in a single night, you gain another point of VITALITY and may upgrade another template to it's Ogreish version. 

You must also save WIS to avoid doing an Ogreish Thing when you have the clear opportunity - this is adjudicated by the DM. This save is at -1 for each VITALITY you possess, and an additional -1 for each Ogreish Thing you have already done that night. The save is made at disadvantage if you are drunk.

Each point of VITALITY that you possess grants you +d8 HP, and +1 to STR, CON, and CHAR, which can take you past 18.

VITALITY can be lost, but only over a long period of time, and probably only in a monastery. In functional terms you would need to retire your character to lose VITALITY that you have acquired. 

• Ogreish Fighter A - In addition to the normal effects, you also gain to ability to knock humans prone with your attacks (they may save STR to avoid this). Your melee hits against prone targets do damage as criticals.
• Ogreish Fighter B - In addition to the normal effects, you may eat humanoid carcasses to revive yourself. Each corpse that you eat (which take five minutes or so) heals you d6 HP, and after eating three you must either vomit or shit them out before eating more. 
• Ogreish Poet A - In addition to the normal effects, you recitations always heal you d4 HP and cause your next attack to crit. If this is a comic recitation, you instead heal d8, and your crit triples your damage instead of doubling it. You think yourself hilarious. If you perform at an inn you will need to pay them d4x100s in the morning, to mitigate the property and reputational damage to the establishment.  
• Ogreish Poet B - He dances and dances and he says that he will never die. In addition to the normal effects, your reputation now includes you being literally unkillable. People are scared of you the way they might be scared of a demigod or a famous monster. You instinctively know people's fears and weaknesses, as well as their intentions. 

Ogres with 1 VITALITY look like large, brutish humans. Ogres with 2 or more are obviously monstrous: they are much too large, they have sharp, predator teeth, their eyes are insane with bloodlust and mirth, their faces swell purple and distend with laughter or rage, and their bellowing voices are accompanied with hot steam from the throat or ears.  

If you ever gain 4 points of VITALITY you become a savage and extremely dangerous monster dedicated entirely to the pursuit of its own pleasures - you are now under the control of the DM. 

More Doré

The Deep Hot Biosphere - or - What is trying to kill you in Bloom Pools?

Initial movements towards a bestiary for THIS environment.

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Garden of Mouths

Colony organism that lives in holes bored into the iron beneath the surface of the water. Simple, 2ft long wormlike bodies with a keratin claw or tooth at the tip. They shoot out of their burrows en masse and 'chew' their prey by tearing it to pieces in the water. Once it's dead and ripped up they will use their bodies to hold what's left of the corpse against their burrows, and extrude soft mouth parts to consume it.

Each colony is made up of 2d6+6 worms, and a single pool may have many colonies.

They are HD0(1hp), can attack within 10ft, and deal d3 damage. Coming into range will trigger attacks from all living worms. They will prioritise eating a corpse over attacking.

Pattern Jelly

Ambulant slimes and jellies whose bodies strobe with a million different colours and patterns - a stable form that allows them to confuse and even disrupt the simple light sensors of the other things that live in the pools. They engulf their prey and dissolve them into absorbable nutrients with their acidic bodies.

Each jelly is HD1, slow, and attacks by engulfing the target. If you can see a pattern jelly you must make an easy WIS save (-1 for each additional jelly you can see) each turn to act normally. 

Engulf: hits automatically. Each turn spent engulfed does d6 acid damage. If the jelly takes damage while it has prey engulfed, that damage is split between the two targets. 

Thrasher Insect

Euphemistically called 'insects' because they have exoskeletons, many multi-jointed limbs, and a feeding 'head' with attached mandibles. There is no standard body-plan. Their armoured, whip-like appendages lacerate and tear at things that come near them, and they hunt by vibrations. Their jerky and unnatural movements are deceptively quick. 

HD3, thrasher spin d8 x2, armour as leather, speed: very fast. 

Light Beast

A predator-scavenger built around a single incandescent bioluminescent organ at the centre of its body. Within a certain distance the light does damage to biological matter, causing other animals to weaken, blacken, and eventually die. Its typical method of attack is to attach itself to a prey animal that is already too weak to fight back. Looks like a perfectly round glowing ball of light, with various translucent grasping limbs growing from it radially. These creatures, as well a bioluminescent algae, are the reason why many of the creatures that live in the bloom pools have developed light sensors.  

HD1, no natural attacks, unarmoured, speed slow. 

Gives off light like a torch - if you are within this light you take 1hp damage per turn. If you are within 5ft of them, this goes up to d4 damage. 

Aquatic Ape

Rare, intelligent dweller in the pools. They look like white apes with translucent skin (you can see their internals) and no fur. Stat them as H1 White Apes with simple spears, knives, and clubs made from scavenged bone and keratin. They will hunt in packs of 4-8, and are one of the apex predators down here - depopulated pools are a telltale sign of their presence.

Paralytic Bloom

Coral-like animals whose long, barbed, nearly-invisible tendrils barbs deliver paralytic toxins. When prey has been subdued it is reeled back to the central mouth. 

1HD, stinging tentacles (see below), unarmoured, immobile. 

Stinging tentacles: save DEX when trying to move within 10ft (advantage if you are wearing chain or better). If you fail, save CON or become paralysed, with a save every round to end the effect. If you spend a turn paralysed within 10ft, you are moved to its mouth. If you spend a turn paralysed at the mouth, you take d10 damage. 

Armoured Crawler

Aquatic pillbug-like insects with extremely tough armoured carapaces. They are slow but their legs and manipulator limbs are hideously strong, easily capable of tearing a human to pieces. They eat carrion and group together around sources of strong heat.

HD4, mouth d10, armour as plate+1, extremely slow. 

Iron Thing

Long, sharp, splinters of iron that attempt to burrow under the skin of living things. In realty there are a tiny wormlike creature that makes use of the substructure of the iron maze to build their splinter-bodies. Once embedded, they reproduce by metabolising the body of their host into more Iron Things, resulting in many ambulatory iron splinters growing beneath the skin and trying to force their way to the surface.

HD0(1hp), burrow in d4 (-2 against chain or better), unarmoured, speed: as human.

If their 'burrow in' attack hits, the worm is now inside you. You have 3 turns to get it out before it lays its eggs. You can still attack the Iron Thing while it is inside you (you must deal slashing or piercing damage, bludgeoning and unarmed attacks won't do it), but any damage to the worm will be mirrored on the host.

If it manages to lay its eggs, you are infested. For d10 days thereafter d3 Iron Things will emerge messily from your body, doing d6 damage and 1 CON damage each as they do so. They will have new splinter-bodies made from the bone and cartilaginous matter of your body.

The Culture of the Academics

Far above in the darkness of the sky and the storm there are obscure beings whose bodies are composed and ordered by great sets of parallel lines that stretch away into the darkness. There are thousands of them, maybe millions, since they do not seem to be extensive in space, and they recede in series, held between the bars which correspond in some obscure way to the architectural lines and surfaces of the captial. Their bodies are enormous. They fill the sky. Their flesh is the same dark translucent colours of the rain in the nighttime. You cannot see any faces. Each one adopts its posture, dictated by the bars that hold it in position, and each of these is unique. They are composed in reference to contingency, sufficiency, survival; a pure survival even fixed here, unsheltered in the teeth of forces that would crack stone and level buildings. There is no rupture of a scream. Each is a copy of a copy of a copy. If they could be made to remember the pleasures of eating, the smells of cooked meat and of fat popping from the charred bones of the communal spit then perhaps they would come back down among us to feast— a chastisement for pride, for the vanity of our separation. 

Above and around the figures the space of the air is carved into by wind that moves across the sky in enormous sheets. Between the sky and the earth the rain coheres into its programme of vertical bars. There is the verticality of the rain and the horizontal substrate of earth and sky, and these compose her body as surely as they do these others that have been brought forth from nothing, from vapour and obscurity, to illustrate the poverty and the autonomy of saintly beings.

The Reverse Needle

All of these notes continue from the outline in this document.

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The Reverse Needle

The reverse needle is built from five identical iron rooms, which stretch downwards from the superstructure of the Iron Maze, towards the High Energy Material sea.

Each room is 30ft x 30ft with a 20ft high ceiling. Each features a large, open circular drain, and a stairwell that leads to the floor below. The iron features are decorative - think Deco cast-iron fences and railings. Each room is also open on all four walls - nearly the entire space of each wall is taken up with a broad, uncovered space that serves as a window.

This means that the whole structure is open to the incredible noise, light, and heat of the HEM sea. It is a transpierced and interpenetrated 3d volume.

Water flows from the top of the Reverse Needle at all times; it moves across and covers every surface. This cools the iron enough that the structure can be traversed without protective gear. The wet iron surfaces are uniformly black, slicked (extremely slippery), and constantly hissing and steaming. The water moves quickly and with violence, churning around the floor of each room before swirling down its central drain. Each room has a second false-floor of close set iron grillwork installed (like a catwalk - you can see down through it), that sits above the boiling, churning water.

Each level/room is furnished with ornate furniture, made from fireproof materials (mostly iron and white, carved stone). The taste takes accents from the carvings of the White Ape Monastery. 

The roughest diagram ever.

All rolls to hit are made at -1 in the Reverse Needle, due to the slippery surfaces and sheets of boiling steam. 

Notes on individual floors:

First (top) floor

• Almost empty. A single painted and etched steel panel faces the 'door' into the Reverse Needle. It is secured in place in front of the open window with four thin chains that anchor to the corners of the room. The imagery is abstract, but it appears to depict an oddly elongated and elaborately jewelled human torso. The crop of the image cuts away at the head, hips, and limbs, and the figure emerges from sheets of boiling steam or concealing fog. The etched marks layer on top of the original painted surface. The sheet is heavy and unwieldy, but if you could get it to the surface the painting would be worth a lot of money - between 800 and 2500s, depending on the collector's interest in the study of Chaos. 
• There is an inscription stamped into the iron wall below the painting: THESE ARE NIGHTMARES
• Hidden beneath the churning water are four animated cloth manikins. A sharp-eyed character looking beneath the surface will see them, but they will be playing dead/inanimate. They are aware of any trespassers, and will wait until the PCs have moved down to the second floor before climbing up out of the water to shadow them. When they emerge from the water they will be sodden with water and sheeting steam. They carry long silk ropes and scarves that they use to strangle foes. 
• Cloth Manikin. HD2-4, silk rope d2 (d10 if attacking from surprise, or if grappled), unarmoured, speed: unnervingly quick, disposition: patient and methodical stalkers. Unbreakable, and only barely intelligent. Manikins move silently, and will do the Weeping Angel freezing thing to attempt to avoid suspicion. 

Even rougher! The hanging system for the paintings and mirrors.

Second floor

• Low, carved stone table and chairs. On the table is an exquisite, jewelled set of smoking paraphernalia worth 600s; a long, sharp, and beautifully carved dagger made from a single piece of stamped and worked steel; and a protective, decorative stone box containing a book. The book has no listed title, seems to be handwritten, and contains thousands and thousands of curses - they aren't magical, but they are very creative and some of them are chillingly cruel. If it is taken out of the box the heat will cause the fragile paper to combust after ten minutes (true for all books down here). 
• There is also a strange container with an elaborately worked screw top lid. It contains water that is cold and refreshing. It's basically an insulated thermos flask, and will keep hot things hot and cold things cold. Ambiguously magical, worth 1000s easily. 
• Hanging from the ceiling, from a hook attached to a chain, is a vicious-looking, barbed duelling spear, and a heavily scratched and marked steel buckler. The hook is designed so that both can be easily grabbed, ready for use.
• If you leave this room without taking the knife or spear, and the manikins are still following you, two of them will arm themselves when passing through.

Third Floor

• Slumped in a corner is an Imperial War Body. See here for details. 
• A large mirror with a gold-Baroque frame, hung in the same manner as the painting on the first floor.
• A carved-stone pedestal table, and an iron box with many compartments crammed full of extremely expensive cosmetics, all obviously well-used. There are rare and gorgeous perfumes, coloured powders of all sorts, and heavy oil-based face paints, as well as compartments for grooming implements. The contents are worth 300s in the capital. 
• The box also contains also four pillboxes, each containing 50 or so pills; two with grey, one with white, and one with blue. The grey ones protect you from the HP loss that humans normally experience in Chaos - one pill protects you for 24 hours. The white and blue pills are hormonal cosmetics, that respectively feminise and masculinise your features. You have to take them every day, and results take about a week to start showing. Unlabelled, but a chemist will be able to analyse them and discover their properties. 
• A wrought iron stand, a bit like a coat rack, which is hung with jewellery chains of various sizes, weights, and materials - probably 3 inventory slots and 3500s worth of lucre all told. There is a marked preference towards warm gold, set with pearls, white crystal, and diamond. 
• If you make it to this room and the manikins haven't attacked yet, this is where they'll do it. One of them will try to get to the War Body and use it against you. 

Fourth Floor

• This rooms has two paintings hung up in it. They are obviously by the same artist as the paintings on the first floor (and will be worth the same). One depicts a constellation of point lights, whose beams carve up an ambiguous, chaotic, semiliquid environment. The other is of a distorted human face, with a smile and eyes that are stretched open far too wide - the eyes output the same beams as the constellation.
• A stone chest against the wall. Resting on its lid is a messer sword with a rose-pink glass blade (longsword +1, shatters into pieces if all of your attacks crit miss). The blade rings like a bell when struck, and absorbs blood like tissue paper.
• The chest contains many books. If you spend a day studying these you get truthful answers to d3 (Academics get d3+1) questions about the history of God, the dragons, and the wars against Chaos. Worth a lot to the academies. 
• It also contains a handwritten manual of meditation and breathing techniques. Studying these over a week of downtime will triple your capacity to safely hold your breath. 
• Finally, it contains 5 doses of rare hallucinogens. If you ingest these in sight of any of the three paintings in the Reverse Needle (or any of King Magda's completed artworks) you must save INT or suffer -1 to all mental stats, in addition to the listed effects. 

Fifth Floor

• The Sainted Captain and their companion angel Adoration are here. See here for details. 
• A stone bed, a stone sidetable, a stone chest, and a small iron box. 
• The box is locked, the key is with Magda's corpse on the surface. It contains many cheap notebooks and writing implements (the notes and sketches are fragmentary, encoded, and illegible), and a heavily-annotated bound work of fiction titled Dream of Golden Days. 
• The stone chest contains many very beautiful but entirely mundane fitted jackets sewn with semi-precious stones, golden thread, mirrored sequins, etc., and other plain, tailored clothing. The whole collection is bulky, and worth 600s. 
• Another cloth manikin waits below the water. It will only emerge if the PCs open the chest with the jackets. It is non hostile, and will make the PCs understand by soft gestures that they should dress it in one of the jackets. If they do so it will pose for them, turning slowly so that they can get a good look at the way the fabric sits. If the jackets are put away, the manikin will retreat down into the water and become inanimate again. 

Church Assassins and Gnostic Militias

The fact that the church has innocent people killed sometimes is an open secret, but one with a significant amount of cognitive dissonance attached - a rough analogue would be knowledge of the Guantanamo atrocities, or COINTELPRO in the US population. Some people have heard of it, but many haven't. Most people disapprove of it, but they also don't think about it much, and when they do they choose to believe pretty firmly that it's something that happens to other people.

God's saints are, very occasionally, given the names of people who must be killed. There are saints who take this duty upon themselves, usually those unaffiliated with the church proper, but most of the time the saint will give the name to the church, and the institutional machinery will take care of the problem. 

That this is for the good is a matter of faith. The church have been told that they work towards God's instantiation, and that these killings are in aid of that plan. It is understood in the ranks of the clergy that this type of arbitrary, lethal impunity would make their position untenable if it were widely discussed. It is in everyone's best interests to keep these killings low profile.

There are several institutions within the church that exist to facilitate this. At the very lowest levels of devolved responsibility, regional clergy will often have a small group of fixers, who they pay to abduct and murder people whose names come up. These are often non-professionals, but they work well enough most of the time.

Further up, regional heads will have a trained group of specialist killers, who can be seconded out where needed. They are generally very good at making things look like accidents, and their skills are called in where the locals botch their work, make too much noise, or draw the name of a target who is protected beyond their capacity to touch.

Then there are the Church Assassins. These men and women reside in the capital, and hold rank within the religious hierarchies. They are all very pious and very lethal, and most of them are now very old, because the church is modernising (to keep pace with the Baroness), and the ritualised killings of the Assassins are considered old fashioned and slightly embarrassing. Of particular note is their practice of taking the heads of their victims, to provide the angels with proof that God's will has been done. They all carry small hand saws beneath their vestments for the purpose, alongside the many other tools of their profession.

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The Baroness largely adopts a don't-ask-don't-tell policy with the church about all of this. She understands that they are a powerful institution in the Barony, but she is equally keen to have them understand that, if it really came down to it, she is a lot more powerful than they are.

This is because, about four years ago, the Baroness' name was given by God to its enforcers. The mainstream church officials immediately notified her of this and issued an internal memorandum that the angel responsible had made a mistake, but several hardliners found this unacceptable and a number of attempts were made on the Baroness' life. None of them were successful, and the church was immediately and quietly subjected to a brutal purge that wiped out everyone found even tangentially responsible. 

Since this minor drama, the ranks of the clergy have been heavily infiltrated by the Baroness' professional spy service. The religious authorities have given assurances that there will be no more misunderstandings with the angels. It's probably not the first time that someone whose name came up in the lists was not killed, but it is certainly the only one that almost everyone in the church knows about. The theological implications of this on God's future instantiation are the subject of debate - usually debate outside the public ear.

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If you think that this state of affairs would be broadly controversial to those who knew about it, you would be correct.

The gnostics of the Barony come in two main flavours, though all are officially heretics. The church call them 'cooked' and 'uncooked'. 

A cooked gnostic is an intellectual, often a scholar, someone who has access to information about God, its angels, and the Material Hell, and who has come to the conclusion that, at least formally, there is not much difference between God and the Hating Engines, and even less difference between an angel and a demon. A cooked gnostic will be the first to admit that there are certainly very extreme differences in the competing future visions of God's instantiation and the realisation of the Material Hell, and will tell you quickly and earnestly that one of them is obviously preferable. They will probably approve of clerical killing on these grounds; they simply refuse to adopt a properly religious attitude to God, its angels, and the church itself. The Hidden Secret Masters of All are gnostics of this type, as are most academics. The church formally repudiates them but they are completely tolerated in the society of the Baronial Capital.

An uncooked gnostic does not care, and probably does not know anything about, Hell, God, angels, or demons. They tend to be bands of people who have lost loved ones or neighbours to church-affiliated death squads, and who have taken up arms in defence of their communities, or to avenge those already taken. They usually live as bandits and poachers, fearing retaliation from both the church and the authorities, and often engage in low level irregular conflict with both. The Baronial Agents make no distinction between gnostic militias and common criminals, but if the church catch them they are often tortured before execution, and their heads taken in deference to the ancient customs of angelic accounting. 

Elden Ring Confessor concept art

Prestige Class: Actor

I love Buster Keaton

The actors are an ancient organisation that long predate the Barony. There are records of their performances dating from before the Old Kingdom, and for many centuries their school was located there. When the Kingdom was destroyed, the actors came to the Baronial Capital and reestablished themselves in a building gifted to them by the academies.

They are instantly recognisable in their pale makeup and dark clothing. People love actors, and many people are afraid of them. Their plays are famously recursive; each of the standards is written such that it neatly frames the next, and new plays are always written in this format. In this way the performance never ends, and all stories, all comedy and pathos, all deaths and births, all tragedies and triumphs; all of them are merely the pre-conditional framing for what is still to come. 

There aren't many graduates, and the school is notoriously demanding of its students. Some die in the training, and the people who emerge are not the same people that enter. Trained actors tend to serve as advisors for various powerful interests, and there are several in the employ of the Baroness. Their unique skills in mimicry and mockery, and their odd, flexible minds make them excellent analysts, spies, information gatherers, and interrogators.

ACTOR

Requirements: Specialist AB, Artist AB, CHAR 16.

In order to train as an Actor, you must present yourself to the school in the Baronial Capital and submit yourself to the exam. This will cost 2000s, which is not refunded if you are refused. Make a difficult Performance check derived from CHAR. If you succeed, you may train at the school after paying the tuition: 6000s. If you fail you are refused. If you fail badly, you lose 1 CHAR permanently as you are laughed out by the judges. If you crit, you are accepted and the staff enthusiastically waive your tuition fee.

After one year of intensive training, you emerge from the school with your new class. You lose all of your old templates, which, since you were an Artist, means that you killed or otherwise destroyed your bonded entity. Other Artists will hate you, and most entities will be scared of you. You cannot gain new templates once you become an Actor. 

In return, you gain the following:

Skills: performance, sleight of hand, acrobatics, comic timing. 

Gear: prop sword, prop dagger, greasepaint. 

A: An Actor Prepares.

An Actor Prepares: If you have access to greasepaint, you may spend time getting in character. When getting in character, you choose templates from other people that you have had at least one day to observe closely. Once you are in character, you have those templates until you choose to get out of character by removing your greasepaint. You cannot take Artist or Academic templates, but all others are available for you to mimic.

You may take a maximum of four templates, and you must have at least one A template before taking a B template, one B before a C, and one C before a D. You may take multiple A, B, or C templates if you wish. Getting in character takes: 

• 10 seconds per A template.
• 30 seconds per B template.
• 1 minute per C template.
• 10 minutes per D template.

You receive all bonuses from templates that you take on this way, including HP bonuses, but you lose these when you come out of character. The templates that you receive are identical to the originals, with the following exceptions:

• You can only ever use prop swords and prop daggers. Prop swords count as d4 clubs, and prop daggers do d2 damage. You may never wear armour or use a shield. 
• White Ape: you don't receive natural weapons as part of your A Template.
• Folk Hero: you don't need 14 STR to access these templates. You don't get a hireling as part of your C template, but you have permanent access to the associated benefits for your Trance of Labour. 
• Elf-Friend: you don't attract motes as usual. Instead you always have one mote per template in this class, which are not spent when you use them. These motes are invisible, do not give off light, and do not heal fear damage for your party.

While you are in character you are immune to mental effects (magical and mundane), do not need to sleep, cannot be magically aged, have natural armour equivalent to chain, and roll twice on the death and dismemberment table (+1 for each class feature that lets you roll twice), choosing the result that you apply. 

Design Notes: I have no idea how strong these are - I suspect very, because of the flexibility, but also they are limited to shitty weapons and chain without a shield. They will be relying on their death and dismemberment ability for survival I think. It's also ok for a prestige class to be strong relative to the others, and the requirements are a pain in the ass. They are also just a base adventurer if they can't get in character in time. 

The flavour is somewhere between horror clown and mime/silent actor. I was also just thinking about how insane it is that Buster did his stunts 100 percent for real. In my head all magic-type effects (and other weird stuff like drinking petrol for food) that Actors get from their borrowed templates can be not-very-convincingly (as in not convincing in-universe) explained as elaborate sleight of hand and commitment to the bit. The obvious subtext that there is something really fucking weird about Actors is the perpetual elephant in the room. What happened to their entities?!

Thanks to Josie for getting me thinking about prestige classes in the first place. 

Dogs of War/Vermiform

DOGS OF WAR

The Barony is nominally controlled by the central authority in the capital, but in reality there are many regional nobles and other powers who maintain small armies, and who often engage in low-level conflict. It is an unstable region, and more so the further out from the capital you are.

Bands of villains and deserters from defeated armies roam the countryside. They steal, kill, rape, and generally treat the population as prey animals. You have to catch and kill them quickly. The best is if you can try them and hang them, judicial process dissipates the wolf energy - if there's no time just kill them and burn them. If you don't then they can start to grow strange; strong, and fast, and cunning, and rabid in combat or when they are feeding on the weak.

The rabidness is catching, but it only really takes root in people that view other humans as prey. This is almost always soldiers or criminals (or teenagers in their sociopathic years), although there is thought to also be a tiny section of the population who are naturally susceptible. Over a long period of time there are physical changes. Absolute physical monstrosity is very rare (although not unheard of); generally you grow hairy, fanged and clawed, yellow eyed, snarling, guttural, quick and tearing and vicious.

Most werewolves are still dressed in the scraps of their uniforms. They clutch tin medals, and many bands still have a ragged, bloodstained standard that they will rally around in a sad attempt to convince themselves that they are still human.

War Dog

HD1+4hp, sword d6, bite d3, armour as leather+shield, speed: faster than a human, disposition: pack hunter, cunning, easily spooked.

Hates fire, prefers butchering civilians to combat with professionals. Will fight to the death anyone who calls them a coward/deserter/monster. Eats corpses.

Werewolf

HD5, claws and teeth d10 x2, armour as chain, speed: twice human, disposition: suicidal berserker.

Takes half damage from all physical attacks (full damage from fire, silver, and magic). Never breaks, always fights to the death.

Howls when it kills something, dealing d10 fear damage to anyone who can hear it. Eats people, whether or not they are dead.

VERMIFORM

People become ill with desire - this is well known, and there are many societal pressure valves designed to mitigate it. When these fail, you get obsessives, whose lives begin to assume the contours of their obsessions.

Vermiform are human worms, insects, rats, and leeches. They suck blood and they leave drained corpses. They spread filth, disease, and degradation. They make the world around them worse, and they love persecuting individuals and ruining lives. They are swollen, pale, crawling things with soft eyes and whispering voices.

People hate vermiform. They are usually found alone or in small colonies in sewers, wells, and drains, and they often emerge at night to spread disease and to feed. Many heroic tales in the Barony are of farmhands or woodcutters descending down into dens of squalor with naught but a lit brand and holy symbol, and emerging again, battered and bloody and clutching the heads of the human monsters that live in filth.

Vermiform

2HD, bite d8, unarmoured, speed: human, disposition: cruel, cowardly.

Hates fire, attacks defenceless foes by preference. Drains defenceless prey, doing one HP per round, and healing itself one HP at the same rate. They can gain temporary HP above their maximum this way, which they lose at daybreak, or if exposed to sunlight.

Takes half damage from all physical attacks (full damage from fire, silver, and magic).

Can hypnotise foes. If you can see one another at the start of your turn, save CHAR: if you fail, you cannot do anything this turn. You can close your eyes to succeed (blind for the turn). Vermiform cannot use this ability if they can see a naked flame, or a symbol of the church.

Subclass: Elf-Friend

There are tiny, vaguely magical things that live in the wild places of the Barony. People call them 'motes' or 'fairies', and the academics argue about what exactly they are. Popular theories are that motes are what entities eventually turn into after many years, when their sense of self fades to almost nothing; or that motes are baby entities, not yet fully formed. 

The following is generally known:

• Motes are not very intelligent, but they are obviously conscious. 
• They look like tiny points of light that move under their own power, like determined, curious, fireflies. 
• They inhabit the wilderness by preference, and dislike settled places.
• They can hurt you (as a bad hornet sting) or heal you (as a pleasant warmth, and a strong sense of your own vitality). 
• They are fickle, spiteful, and loyal; they despise cruelty, love sugar and milk, dislike lies, and are strongly influenced by the emotions of those around them. 
• There are some people who motes are drawn to, who they flock around, live with, and protect. These people are called fey-touched or elf-friends. Often they are hermits and woodsmen, but there are exceptions to this.

Elf-Friend

Starting Equipment: hatchet, staff. 

Starting proficiencies: Choose agriculture or woodcraft. 

A Motes
B Mischief

Motes: You can attract motes when you are in unsettled places, which would be likely contain spirits or fairies - pristine forests, steppes, mountains, bogs - you know these places when you see them. Very rarely a particularly wild or overgrown park or graveyard in a city may house them. Motes are never found underground. 

When you sleep you may leave rations out to attract motes. Normal adventuring rations attract d3 motes per ration, delicious, homemade, or expensive rations (or a bowl of milk) attract d6, and fresh baked goods (cakes, sweets, pastries, baked the same day) fill your available slots completely. You may have a total 6 motes per template in this class at any one time. 

Once they have been attracted, motes live with you (in your clothing, under your hat, in your staff, inside a bottle you carry for the purpose, etc.) In order for them to do anything, they must be free to fly around you under their own power. 

• Motes are tiny dots of light. They are very visible. Each one gives off the light of .5 of a torch, so if you have 4 flying around you, you are outputting the light of 2 torches.
• As a free action motes can be asked to attack someone who has already attacked you in this combat. They will streak towards them and sting viciously, doing 1 damage per mote. They always hit. Motes used this way disappear.
• Motes can be used to heal you or your party members when you rest. You may ask you motes to heal specific people, at a rate of 1 mote per HP. Motes used this way disappear.
• Motes passively heal fear damage sustained by the party. Each mote heals .5 fear damage from each member of the party when you rest, rounding down. This does not spend the mote.
• Motes will signal to you when someone you are talking to is lying. If you lie they will all leave. 

All motes will flee you immediately if you act in a way that is unnecessarily cruel or callous. They don't understand long chains of cause and effect, so signing an order to sack a city probably won't faze them, but torturing someone or killing innocents definitely will.

Mischief: Your motes are bolder, with stronger personalities. They now do d2 damage when they attack, as long as they can find a needle or pin (or a rose thorn, a toy sword; fairy weapons!) in the room to attack with. You can also ask them to manipulate the world in more direct ways. Your motes, working together, count as a mage hand with the following strength:

• 2 motes can pick up a coin or ring.
• 4 motes can pick up a brooch or necklace.
• 6 motes can pick up a dagger, candlestick, or ring of keys.
• 8 motes can pull a door handle or pick up a boot.
• 10 motes can pick up a book or a full waterskin.
• 12 motes can pick up a helmet or a short sword.

Motes are clumsy, treat most things as a game, and have no particular sense of urgency. 

Whenever you witness an act or cruelty or someone tells a lie in your presence (you included), d3 motes will attack them whether you want them to or not. 

Your last mote is always with you and is never spent, even when attacking or healing. Maybe you should give them a name?

Joseph Noel Paton, The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania

Princess Mononoke

The Dungeon - CHAOS ITSELF

 

The very great John Blanche, probably the single most potent visual influence on my teenage imagination

Chaos

The Maze of Iron

The descent into Chaos leads eventually (it takes about a day of descending the well from the White Ape Monastery) to a thick layer of rusted and faintly warm iron ore, honeycombed and bored through with natural pockets and tunnels of various sizes. Tunnels that start tall enough to walk through narrow without warning into crawlspaces and vice-versa. There are dead ends everywhere. A rat-run iron labyrinth of worm holes and tubular air pockets. The smells are overpowering; rust, metal, ozone, petrol. Some sections are diseased, some are superheated (and glow red hot), and both of these hazards become more prevalent and more intense the further down you go. 

For each full day that the PCs spend in this place, they must save CON or suffer -1 max HP permanently (White Apes excepted) - their bodies eventually blacken and start to lose feeling. This is not an environment where humans can live. 

Living in the tunnels are mites, tardigrades, polyps, and other strange extremophiles. Many of these are hostile and hungry, and all of them are extremely difficult to damage. The tracks of the Law Eaters are visible as brightly scored scratches in the oxidised surfaces. 

Also in the tunnels: sections that are crusted over with calcium and other mineral deposits. Sections of visibly different metal with different properties. Surfaces that crush to powder under human weight, that are powerfully electrified, that are freezing cold, that pulse in colours unseen on the surface, that are infested with tiny parasites. 

The following elements are randomised each time the PCs re-enter chaos, or if they fall asleep there:

• The location, extent, and properties of the variant sections of the maze. 
• The location of diseased sections - these get more common the further down you go. 
• The connective routes that run through the iron superstructure, 

The tunnels eventually lead downwards far enough that the floor opens onto a vast expanse of empty air above an ocean of blistering heat and white light. It is hot enough that exposure without protection will burn you, and bright enough that looking directly into it can make you blind. The closer to the edge you get, the more heated the metal superstructure is. If you are close enough to be looking into the sea of High Energy Material, the iron around you will be white hot and impossible to move across without specialist protective gear.

There are structures built into the iron honeycomb lattice. 

John Blanche

The Sanctum of the Law Eaters

A strange temple or barracks inhabited by the Law Eaters. It is carved out from the solid iron ore, and is close enough to the edge of the superstructure that the entire structure glows red hot at all times. It is not be traversable without protective gear.

The ways of the Law Eaters are very strange. There are 48 in total, 4 of them captains. They never take off their armour and ornamentation, and mostly spend their time standing perfectly still at different points in the Sanctum. Occasionally one of them will make a series of specific adjustments to what look like a series of gigantic iron prayer wheels. If the PCs can find some way of entering and traversing the Sanctum without dying the will be treated courteously by the Law Eaters. There is not much of value here - it is simply a series of red-hot iron rooms, full of motionless insectoid guardians. 

The walls have been carved in the same way that the Ape Monastery was, but at a far larger scale, and into broad tableaux and bas reliefs instead of individual figures in alcoves. The ceilings of the sanctum are all about 100ft tall, and the thousands of figures that crowd these scenes each 14 or 15ft tall. The reliefs depict the genocidal wars against the dragons, and the terrible plagues that God sent down in the aftermath to ravage the core.

The Elevator

Another structure built into the iron lattice, further 'up' from the the edge of the superstructure, and so traversable without protective gear. The elevator consists of a single large antechamber carved out of the iron, connected to wide, circular shaft of white metal that plunges straight down into the HEM sea itself. The white metal does not conduct heat and is cool to the touch.

The room is inhabited by three huge, blind White Ape mystics, who ventured down into this place decades ago to be closer to their gods. Their fur is singed, matted, and blackened. They have excellent hearing, and can tell a human's footsteps - if they do so they will attack with the intent to kill. This is a holy place, and trespassers are not tolerated. They delight in throwing enemies (and the corpses of their victims) down the elevator shaft. Anything that makes contact with the HEM sea is annihilated utterly. 

The Reverse Needle

The Reverse Needle is a thin spike of metal that juts down from the underside of the iron superstructure. It is constantly doused in sheets of water from above - a large underground river empties itself here, and the tower has been built in this location to take advantage of the flow of liquid coolant.

The wet-iron structure is dark black, very slippery, and constantly emitting sheets of hissing steam. It is built on five levels, and all feature large central drains, and raised walkways that make up each floor. Each of its four sides feature wide open windows. The water is constantly flowing over the entire structure.

This was King Magda's residence during his studies into Chaos. There are four cloth mannikins hidden lying in a tangled heap beneath the flowing water of the first level - they will play dead until any trespassers have ventured further in, and then rise up and shadow them. They move silently, and will try to ambush lone or wounded enemies and strangle them with ropes of of silk. 

On the third floor there is an empty Imperial War Body. War Bodies look like giant, naked humans with beautiful, androgynous features and no genitalia. They have an open cavity in their chest, which a person can crawl inside of, and various ganglia and other nervous tissue inside that will attach themselves to the back of the wearer's neck. They are essentially a biological suit of armour that massively increases strength and durability. This one is mercifully unarmed. The technology to make War Bodies is lost, and an intact specimen will be worth a castle and a title to the Baroness (or a staggering amount of money to other powers that be). If you have not killed the mannikins, one of them will try to get inside the War Body and fight you with it. 

At the bottom of the Needle you will find an opening in the floor that looks down into the HEM sea. The water flows down through this opening where it vaporises after a couple of metres. Slumped in this room is the Sainted Captain, dressed in their immaculate plate and clutching their Sword of Law. They have been blinded by looking into directly into the sea for many days, and are almost dead with thirst and fatigue. If you speak with them they will ask you for water, then food, and they will ask after their companions. They speak with two voices. 

The truth is that the Sainted Captain, after the massacre of the Starlings in the dungeon, was possessed by their companion angel, Adoration. Adoration, seeking absolution for the shame and horror that it felt watching its companions die horribly, went mad, and in its mania heedlessly plunged the Sainted Captain's body deeper and deeper into the earth, convinced that battle with Chaos would absolve them in God's eyes. The Sainted Captain will ask to be taken to the surface, but if the PCs look like they might try to do so Adoration will reassert control over the captain's body and attack them with the Sword of Law. Neither the Sainted Captain nor Adoration are in very good shape, and this will not be difficult fight. 

The Sword of Law is an artefact of extreme value and significance (and also a powerful weapon in its own right). If you can carry it back to the surface you will be fabulously rewarded by the church. In addition, if the PCs have retrieved both the Starling's Banner and the Sword, then all surviving Starlings will pledge fealty to you until death. If you are seen carrying the Sword of Law, any Law Eaters or White Apes will attack you on sight.

Sword of Law

+1 Longsword, +3 against creatures of Chaos. With each hit, you are granted +1 to hit and to damage on your next attack. This effect stacks until you miss, and resets at the end of a combat. The blade of the sword shines as brightly as a torch at all times, and the one who wields it is immune to the normal damaging effects of exposure to Chaos. 

Imperial War Body

Donning the Body is easy and intuitive. You take d6 damage as it feeds on your blood to revive itself. While you wear it, your STR and CON are 22, your speed is as a horse, you gain 30 hp, and your armour counts as chain. You can see and hear, but you cannot speak. For every hour you wear it, you lose one max HP as it digests you. You must also save CHAR to try to remove it - if you fail, then the ganglia have penetrated too deeply into your spine, and you cannot be removed without it killing you. Wearing the War Body allows you to navigate the Sanctum of the Law Eaters safely. 

The Bloom Pools

The river that runs down over the Needle must seep down through the twisting passageways of the Iron Maze before it can do so. Many of the tunnels are flooded with, and other wider areas of the maze have into formed deep pools. These pockets of heated water are home to a dizzying profusion of savage alchemical life. 

This is where the vast majority of fauna in the Iron Maze will be concentrated. Any wandering encounters will be creatures from the Pools, of driven out by something more vicious than themselves. The ecosystem is absolutely predatory, seething, boiling, constantly iterating on itself. The forms are utterly mad by the standards of the surface; a profusion of brightly coloured acidic jellies, brittle, lacerating crustaceans, hunter worms, ravenous insects, invertebrates, parasites, and forms that defy any attempt at classification.

The bloom pools are extremely dangerous to navigate but there are many poisons, acids, and other biological reagents that can be gathered there that are completely unknown on the surface. They would be extremely valuable to those on the surface who know their worth. 

COMING SOON: 

• Bestiary for the Bloom Pools
• Rules for randomising the Iron Maze
• Asbestos protective armour somewhere in the underground level - maybe this is loot in the Serpentman Tombs?
• Maps?!

John Blanche