Beached Mermaids

For GLOGtober '23, per PRIMEUMATON's challenge:

Atlantis-type situation but in reverse. It goes up instead of down.

...

It is known that the sea is full of cities — as above, so below, etc. etc. We know this because we've gone to one of them- more accurately, it came to us.

Mer is a city designed for swimming thru, in much the same way that Heaven is designed for flying and New York is designed for teleporting. There are no streets, but there are parks. There is a distant sense of human beauty, beneath the abyssopelagic architecture. There are rows of whalebone columns, and gardens. There are bathhouses.

Sixty years ago, it surfaced just off the coast of Guam. It is carved almost entirely out of pumice. It is home to the mermaids.

In the city of Mer, humans outnumber mermaids 16-to-1. You might call this relationship symbiotic: mermaids have money (from deep sea treasures and contributions to the pharmaceutical industry) and humans have legs.

So it is that the most common mode of transportation in Mer is the man-powered palanquin. There have been pushes from the automobile industry to break into the mermaid market; none have held water.

And the livable quarters of the city have been retrofitted with spiraling stairways for two-legged folk and elevator shafts for the rest. The unlivable quarters are still under reconstruction, or have been preserved by the protests of the elders.

The elder mermaids remain, swollen blankets of pinkish flesh pouring out of inaccessible towers. (Their bodies were never meant for light, dry air, and low pressure environments.) They remember the day of judgement, when their homes turned to porous stone and the Seven Plagues of Air were set upon them. They watch the seagull-infested horizon (ech) thru milky, basketball-sized eyes, and rumble disapprovingly.

The greatest of the aquatic generation, Matriline Susubyr, pours from her laboratory, driven mad by the ascent. A powerful biomancer in her own right, she is the reason the Mer can breathe above water. She is also the reason for their banishment.

People have mixed feelings about her.

The younger generations forget that this life is their curse. They forget what they lost — the freedom of movement they enjoyed in the deep sea before their banishment, the weight of the sin that earned them its enmity. They just want to do TikTok dances and yeet a naynay.

...

So you want to play a Beached Mermaid:

Perk(s): You are 15'-45' long mermaid. You can take twice as much damage as normal and are immune to old age.

Quirk(s): You can't swim or breathe underwater. You must be hauled around in an appropriately-sized wagon.

Celdaenni Domainthings

MOONS MOONS MOONS

In Cath Celdaenn, each season is associated with a phase of the moon:

• Spring is the season of Geas, the Blue Moon.
  
• Summer is the season of Tigerna, the Titan Moon.
• Fall is the season of Jove, the Harvest Moon.
• Winter is the season of Nemesis, the Blood Moon.
• Interstice is the period between Winter and Spring, during which there is no moon.

Each phase tugs at Creation in a different way: Travel is more dangerous under the Blood Moon. Magic is stronger under the Titan Moon. The Blue Moon favors lovers and knights.

Traditionally, Celds travel under the vast, bright Summer moon, and guard settlements thru the dark and dangerous Winter.

100c

Celds trade in c, which stands for coins, or lowercase-c celds (because they are minted with the faces of famous Celds)

Coins in Cath Celdaenn are made of wood, tin, stone, gold, glass, etc etc etc. Coins are recognized not by material, but by temperature; City currency is supernaturally cold

In domain play, c stands for cows (worth ~10 coins). This is roughly equivalent to gp (ghost pots)

Road Quality

From worst to best:

• Newly blazed trails are slow/confusing/dangerous to travel.
• At upkeep, if the trail is well-used, it becomes a more straightforward path.
  
• With an action, a path can be secured to become a road. Small settlements provide safe places to stay the night. Also, travel along secure roads can be mostly handwaved, allowing for Simple Visits.

Traditions

Cath Celdaenn is "about" a cultural renaissance. Celds remember little of their own heritage, and must work to rediscover it. Tension between old and new traditions is important.

so i think Customs and Traditions should be something you can add to your domain as an action, like a kind of Asset. Stuff like:

Festival - Choose a season. Each year, the town hosts a festival worth [Temple x 25]c. You can contribute additional funds to the festival without an action.

where [Temple] is the level of the relevant Temple holding.

potentially:

• Each tradition you maintain gives 10(?) XP at upkeep
• Some traditions have a bonus effect if you have Temple 2+
• Traditions spread along secure roads between settlements. Higher Temple level = more aggressive spread
  

some sample Traditions:

1. Necropolis - The dead must be brought, at great cost, to a specific ancestral burial site. If you founded this tradition, you choose the site.
   
2. Berserkers - One in every twenty troops has a big personality, a heavy weapon, +1 attack per round, and is immune to cold and fear.
3. Ideal Bodies - Shaved heads, long beards, strong calves, etc; the ideal Celd looks like this.
4. Labor Unions - All district upgrades cost +20c, but Unrest is reduced by an additional [Temple]. If you founded this tradition, you can name the union leader.
   
5. Fianna - You have access to twice as many levies in Summer, but no levies in Fall and Winter.
6. No Flesh Forbidden - Celds will eat dogs, cats, birds, snakes, horses, and so on.
7. Swords For All/Swords For None - Everyone carries a sword, or at least a dagger./Bladed weapons are forbidden to all. If you founded this tradition, you choose a class to exempt from this rule.
8. Oracles - Receive omens of season events before they happen.

not entirely sure how exactly I'll use this idea

Ivan's House

For GLOGtober '23, per Locheil's challenge:

A glance at a city that should never have been built.

...

Ivan's House is a three-story manor in the Cistercian style, behind a low defensive wall and a moat, both of which are mostly decorative. The vane, visible from a distance, is a fanged rabbit. A perpetual aurora hangs overhead. The flowers around the foundation are painted on.

Any fighting force that gets too close to Ivan's House is struck from an impossible angle by a ballista bolt. Traces of the last siege remain: a buried war helm, a broken tent pole, a hastily-covered fire pit, a gnawed horse bone.

Past the courtyard, present your merchant's token to gain entry. Once inside, follow the signs past the portrait room, the covered furniture, the master bedrooms, to the long hallway. Walk forward without looking back -- it will take a few minutes -- until you smell souvlaki. Only a few more steps 'til Ivan's House.

...

Ivan's House is a city, and a well-fortified one. It is made up of several miles of tunnel-hallway-streets lined with white doors and looks like the inside of a dimly lit hotel. The greater part of it exists in the fifth dimension, behind the white stone facade — roughly 5000 men and women in total. They call themselves Children of Ivan, or just Ivans.

If you can't move in the fifth dimension, Ivan's House is a good place to learn.

Ivan's House is a major exporter of drugs and metal crafts, mostly fine cutlery and clasps. They are strikingly critical to the local economy; disrupt their supply lines, and you'll have a lot of lords complaining about shortages of electrum spoons and laudanum.

Ivan's House is cold. It is cold because its extra-dimensional surface area is so vast. Their main import is coal for the furnaces; the smoke paints the ceilings sootblack.

The name "Ivan's House" is a colloquialism. Locals have their own name for it: Bnodura. This name is rarely spoken, except by the city planners, and only when they need to expand a neighborhood or adjust a street.

There are five other names, known to select members of the upper cryptocracy. These are the keys to Ivan's House.

There are abandoned places in Ivan's House: spiraling stairwells with no bottom, massive chambers like ten ballrooms stitched together lengthwise, chapels of inordinate sharpness. They exist between residences, down alleys and under floorboards.

Usually, these are stripped of all valuables. Sometimes, they contain gifts:

• A wooden cube that sings when struck. Strike it again, and it will change the tune. Changes lyrics to beg for its life. 2HD.
• Unworked steel, reproduces asexually.
• Black, sharp grass that grows on glass. Glasswork animals come to graze on it.
• L-shaped titanium wand of Stones to Shogs. (Shogs is very, very friendly. She wants to meet the people depicted on your coinage. She has 20HD.)

...

Ivans favor the kestros; they can arc most projectiles thru the fifth dimension, allowing them to throw thru solid matter 9 times out of 10 (in other words, they ignore armor and most forms of cover) (EXCEPT for lead, which is infinitely long in the fifth dimension)

They can do the same with a ballista, but it's much harder.

Besides this, Ivans are regular men and women -- most with coarse, dark hair, soft noses, dull green eyes -- except that they are always cold, and occasionally ragdoll out of existence upon death.

...

Ivan was a landlord first, a father second, and a wizard as distant, distant third. When the Menuans darkened his doorstep, exhausted by their long campaign into the Boiling East, he was made to house their 800-strong army. When he failed at this, the Menuan general, who was called Caliphreus, brought the heads of Ivan's three sons, and bade him try again.

Ivans live in fear of Caliphreus, who blows ash into their lungs while they sleep.

Ivans live in terror of the Headsmen, who roll thru abandoned hallways and bite the legs off of ambitious scavengers.

d20 Ways to Keep a Corpse

For GLOGtober '23, per xaosseed's challenge:

Unusual corpse preservation methods.

...

1. tune - the song of Faraway Endings; an endlessly looping song which forestalls decay in a room. played with at least three instruments
   
2. landowner - surround a large coffin with many smaller coffins; each small coffin will rot a little bit faster, while the large coffin will be free of decay. often practiced for dead kings
   
3. power - armor, weapons, a terrifying helm: a strong and well-armed corpse can fight off Decay on its own
   
4. hive - let the bees deal with it; with a little guidance they can transform a soft corpse into a resilient, reinforced comb. the tomb buzzes
   
5. left - death begins on the left side; cut the body in half, and the right side will never know rot
   
6. mourning - corpses do not decay for as long as they are being actively mourned; this is because the god of death is a big softie
   
7. marine - things don't decay in the sea because of the salt and the cold. on a related note, the Great Pacific Corpse Patch is getting pretty large
   
8. giant - as the corpse swells, loosen the skin- just enough to prevent it from bursting. repeat. repeat. the older the corpse, the longer the coffin
   
9. salon - keep corpses fresh by providing them with constant, lively conversation; the origin of stand-up comedy
   
10. leftovers - feed the table scraps (the toes, the brain, the hair) to a magic dog, and the rest will keep
    
11. wrestle - a Very Strong Man stands in the tomb, and wrestles escaping ghosts back into their bodies, keeping them fresh forever; the role of Very Strong Man is hereditary. he also needs to be naked
    
12. agile - the Grand General's coffin is in a tomb-chariot pulled by tireless cannibal steeds, such that they might outrun Decay. twelve Grand Generals have been buried this way.
    
13. wound - we have a sword of embalming; as long as someone dies by this sword, their body will keep forever. the village elder does her best to stab people before they die of natural causes.
    
14. ecstasy - okay, so like, hear me out: stuff the corpse with drugs????? HEAR ME OUT HEAR ME OU
    
15. hook - with a long hook, remove the brain, the lungs, the heart, the blood, the muscle, the teeth, and so on; if emptied slowly, carefully, the corpse will keep forever. (throw the waste away)
    
16. treasurer - Decay can be bribed: fill the dead's mouth with gold and millet, and it will keep for as long as the offering lasts
    
17. invisible - that which is unobserved ceases to age (this is how druids in isolation can live for thousands of years); thus, we must hide the body, wrapping it in masks and cloaks
    
18. river - wrap the dead in semi-permeable sheets, attach weights to each end, and throw them into the river; this method turns the dead to colored stone
19. fear - living and dead alike are frozen by fear; thus, the village elder dons on a fearsome mask and terrifies the corpse into an embalmed state
20. turducken - so what we do is feed you (whole) to a python, then feed that (whole) to an alligator, then feed that (whole) to a refrigerator-dragon

Potion Brewing (ech, agh, bleh)

For GLOGtober '23, per SunderedWorldDM's challenge:

Potions and how to brew them.

...

Potions are spells for non-casters. They're more or less identical to scrolls, depending on your ruleset.

Potions are more interesting than scrolls as treasure because they usually don't come with instructions. Instead, you have to take a whiff/sip to figure out what it does: "if a whiff gave me vertigo and blew bubbles out my ears, what would chugging the bottle do?" it's fun, it's cute, 10/10 good rpg mechanic

[You can cast from illegible scrolls, but they don't have the same "take a sip" gameplay that potions do. They're still interesting, but in a different way.]

Anyway.

...

I think the appeal of brewing a potion is that it's Kinda Like Cooking™. Creating a scroll is very abstract, but anyone can throw shit into a cauldron and turn on the heat.

So, first proposal for a potion brewing system: Throw a Feast. Magical ingredients like dragon toes and acid jelly and unicorn tears give you a spell for the day you can cast from your belly. The more you spend on the feast, the longer the effect lasts/the more MD you get.

pros: gathering numinous ingredients is Cool Gameplay; i have yet to meet a player who doesn't want to eat a monster; before (and sometimes during) a delve you get to rp having dinner with your hirelings and camp followers and Unlikely Allies; piggybacks onto existing magic system, is otherwise extremely mechanics-light

cons: can't "chug a pot" mid-combat; low chance of cauldron blowing up in your face; no opportunity to play a "mad alchemist" character, which is the whole point of adding a potion brewing subsystem, i guess

Here's an alternative:

...

If you're an alchemist, or a witch, you start with a cauldron (big enough to fit a human body, just in case). Good cauldrons are expensive; like, 100g.

It's made of cast iron (get it? cast?)

The cauldron is the most important part of potion-making. If you don't have a cauldron, you're shit out of luck.

• If you know a spell, you can make a potion of that spell for 50g. This is trivially easy.

• If you have a recipe of a spell, you can make that potion using its primary ingredients. This is stuff like troll heartstring and gypsum: things that are difficult to get your hands on but ludicrously effective once you've got them. You can still substitute generic ingredients (eye of newt, etc etc) for 50g.

[note: if you have a reliable source of primary ingredients, you can make a lot of potions. enough to flood the market, or reliably breathe water all the goddamn time. This is what makes potion recipes Very Good Loot]

• If you don't know a spell, you can experiment. Drop 10g basic reagents + other ingredients into your cauldron. Roll 2d6 + 1d6 for each sufficiently numinous and hard-to-acquire ingredient:
• No multiples: inert sludge
• Doubles: explosion, noxious smoke; 1 vial of poison, effect scaling with the number rolled (see below)
  
• Triples: you get a potion! now figure out what it does :dmthink:

[optional rule: no smoke cloud on doubles, DM rolls secretly; players must determine experimentally whether the result is sludge, poison, or potion]

Write down the result of the experiment: it is now a defined in-universe recipe

No matter how big your cauldron is, you only get one dose at a time. (As everyone knows, the first few drops hold all the potency; the rest is just broth)

Doubles Value	Poison
1	1d6. Odorless, colorless.
2	Induces weakness.
3	Induces vomiting.
4	Induces sleep.
5	Induces mutation.
6	Slow, certain death. Can be delayed, but never evaded.

The Book of Useless Sorceries

For GLOGtober '23, per semiurge's challenge:

Come up with a grimoire with some unique spells, a story behind it, perhaps some trap or riddle to figuring it out, etc.

...

The Book of Useless Sorceries, also called The Big Four by theoretical wizicians, is a tiny tome- almost a pamphlet. It fits snugly in the back pocket of the skinniest jeans. It belonged to Denton the Anesthetized, who downloaded it from a private forum on the wizardweb. (The wizardweb is like the darkweb, except with more robes and less effective assassins.)

The text is attributed to Amanita-anamita, self-titled Archivist Supreme. The authorial voice flipflops between extremely dated humor (like an excruciatingly topical 1000-year-old stand-up routine) and crippling paranoia on a sentence-by-sentence basis. The foreword thanks two other wizards for their contributions to the archival process. Neither is named anywhere in the book.

It contains four spells:

• Scry: Receive visions of the interior of a tavern.
  
• Finding: Learn the direction of the nearest Moon.
  
• Golem: Roughly sculpt a lump of clay into the shape of a hand.
  
• Fireball: This spell does nothing.
  

On a related note, here are 6 ways to learn more about spells for enterprising wizards:

1. Cast them with more power. If you cast a big enough fireball, eventually you'll hear it- the explosion echoing in the distance.
   
2. Cast them in the right place. The closer you are to that mountain- yes, that one- the louder it gets.
   
3. Cast them at the right time.
4. Cast them with the right tools.
5. Cast them wrong. For GLOG, you can use mishaps and dooms. Sometimes, the spell not working the way you expect is a good thing. Just as many times, the wizard rolls triples and teleports into a tiny room full of fire for a twelfth of a second; just long enough to burn the soft parts off.
   
6. Get the right person to cast them.
   

These are the clues. Putting them together is the adventure.

...

The Tribunal of Deep Earth is an underground complex full of earth elementals (gnomes, moles, grue, giants, dinosaurs, etc). It is run by Gloria Shaytan, who is all the sand in all the world's deserts at once. She is going through a messy divorce with the Dead Sea, which everyone is talking about. She is trying her best not to take it out on her colleagues. She is failing.

Imprisoned within the Tribunal is an elemental named fireball. She is contained within a titanium cube the size of a bathroom stall. She is undeniably evil, and serving out a very fair 15,600 year sentence for various crimes against the creation itself.