What are you wearing?

Armor is not very fashionable. (1DR; -1 to Reaction rolls) The refined adventurer has other options.

1. Mourning Black - A particular shade for particular occasions. Grief is unavoidable when swaddled in mourning black. All the folk of House Devinsen are required to wear this color in public.
2. Ensign's Coat - Signed by the Queen herself. No sacred place or disputed territory is off-limits to you.
3. Top Hat & Tux - +1 extra pocket for each magic trick you know how to do (max +8).
4. Sensible Swimwear - The bold striped pattern makes it harder for predators to pick a target out of the beachgoing herd.
5. Savage Mink - In your dreams, this warm winter wear is replaced by a 7' carnivorous mustelid.
6. Mothwing Cloak - Unlocks the air dash ability.
7. Living Floral - Sprawled across the head, chest, and shoulders. Requires daily water and sunlight to maintain its color and aroma.
8. Gothic Dress - Dark, lacey symbol of the Gotlandic warrior. Terrifies Catholics.
9. Coat of Honors - Military badge mosaic. You can carry (decorative!!!) arms without ruffling any feathers.
10. Cage Crinoline - Metal support for a wide dome skirt. Can, in a pinch, trap a creature no stronger than a cat. 
11. Cold Crinoline - As above, except it keeps the temperature of any item stored within, and you have to wear long underwear.
12. Cottagecore Bullshit - Fools the upper and middle class into thinking you are lower class. Doesn't fool anyone else.
13. Cuirasse-douce - Appears to be armor; is in fact made of beautifully embroidered cloth. In your dreams, the armor is real.
14. Squirreler's Sleeves - Four secret (unsearchable) pockets, tucked into folds and frippery.
15. Graduate's Blazer - From Tobias Walnut's School for Sharp-Faced Boys. Alumni are honorbound to assist one another. (Their motto translates to No lad left behind.)
16. Blood Red Ruff - Antiquated accessory. Puts one in mind of zinnia in bloom. Unfolds into 45' of crimson fabric if you're willing to ruin the outfit.
17. Inverness Cape - Weatherproof, waterproof, acidproof, bloodproof. Has a dedicated pipe pocket.
18. Patterned Shawl - As invisibility cloak in rose gardens.
19. Academy Waistcoat - The armor of the skeptic. (Ghosts avoid intellectuals if they can help it.)
20. Ancient Robes - A cultural artifact no less than 300 years old, tailored to fit modern sensibilities. Its origin is mysterious, not for lack of historical context, but because the tailor didn't give a hoot.

Additional Accessories

1. Midnight Sleeves - Shoulder-to-wrist tattoos of the night sky. A useful astrological reference. 
2. Amber Brooch - Some primordial creature is suspended within.
3. Original MacHotep - A painting folded in the Eastern style into a priceless piece of headwear. Popular with art collectors but not artists. 
4. Ticking Timepiece - Has hands for days, months, years, and centuries. Very heavy.
5. Chastity Belt - +2 Save to resist temptation. May manifest mild Ψonic abilities.
6. Pants - Only men wear pants. Thus, anyone wearing pants is a man.
7. Big Wig - Fashionable to foreigners, vain to locals.
8. Liquid Lead - For coloring nails, lashes, and lips.

clan-as-individual-as-class-as-npc

You meet a young Celd on the road, scouting ahead of her clan. She introduces herself as Shan, and says that it was she who built Giant Finger Castle (exactly what it sounds like) together with her brother.

Reasonably suspicious (quite an old castle, that), you ask for her brother's name. She says her brother's name is Hong, and that although he is an effeminate lout, they fought side by side against the giants a few hundred years ago. She then adds that her brother's name is Cairenn, and he is twenty-three and quite handsome if you are interested?

She's not a compulsive liar; you've actually met a remarkably honest Celd! Her name is Dara ap Shan. Her brother is Cairenn ap Shan; Shan and Hong are clan names, passed down from folkloric ancestors. She is not, in fact, 600+ years old-- she's 22. You breathe a sigh of relief. Everything makes sense again.

You and your friends assess the situation and decide to rob her blind. Then she breaks every bone in your arm. 

* * *

 

Celdic heroclans are seminomadic communities of ~60 (30 adults and 30 children) that are simultaneously a singular folkloric hero, specifically an ancestor who survived the end of the world.

The heroclan is both communal and individual, practical and exalted, at once eking out a living and seeking adventure in the treacherous hintercity.

In the Celdic perspective, this is a form of immortality earned by the City's surviving vanguard. They have earned the right to walk its roads and sample its hunting grounds forever, to see their lineage extend into eternity.

Talking to a Heroclan

For the most part, treat heroclans as rival adventurers. They take a single turn in combat, and speak as a single entity when conversing with outsiders. They tend to travel with eclectic bands of hangers-on and tamed beasts, much like player characters do. (the best way to make a heroclan is to play a solo rpg and see what comes out)

Heroclan duality is context-sensitive: the Celd who is actively representing their clan is their clan, and the clan is the hero, so the Celd is the hero in that context.

A heroclan is not a hivemind. The members are individuals, capable of keeping secrets, forgetting things, getting sick or injured or falling in love, etc. on their own. They can fail to live up to their ancestors. They can forget their roots.

[digression: Clanhood is not a performance, but it does have performative elements. The ancestors are passed down thru storytelling tradition; in Shan's case, this is a 14'x24' quilt that depicts his many exploits. He has a definite character in these stories, and leaning into that helps lubricate inter-clan relations-- the Hongs would be very upset if they met up with Shan and found him lacking in courage.]

Being a Heroclan

Heroclans are exogamous, and maintain long-standing relationships with their fellows for marriage and trade.

When many clans come together to accomplish a common goal, it's called a tribe (basically an adventuring party of folkloric heroes, as well as a big and very messy intermingling of Celds).

Heroclans are living, breathing identities: marrying into one makes you part of it, marrying out takes you out of it; they can split in two opposed halves, or fuse with neighbors; they can die, if forgotten.

[digression 2: disrupted oral traditions and demographic collapse can also kill them. Starvation is especially lethal-- as much as they function on storybook logic, heroclans are still subject to the offscreen material reality of being ~60 people]

(Heroclans also have a class, and gain xp collectively, see below)

They can be hunter-gatherers, nomadic pastoralists, and sometimes stationary agriculturalists. If it comes up, there are 1d4-1 births and as many deaths per year.

 

All of the above is set dressing to justify this generator. It began as a jscript that built interconnected clans of 60+ named npcs (ripping off archon's navigators completely) with extensive family trees, but it had no sauce. So I returned to my favorite mechanic: treating abstract concepts as people. 

24 Sun Gods

There are 24 sun gods; 24 emperors who ring in the day and lay down the night; 24 great and terrible Hours, who rule the 24 sects of humanity.

There are 24 suns, and they are all at war.

[sidebar: the names of the 24 evil wizards below are stolen from the real world cultures which (very loosely) inspired them. If you take any part of this post for your own games, I suggest renaming them- I'm just riffing on a tumblr post]

1 - Tagaloa
Light has weight, and Tagaloa is the scale. Those who earn his ire float off into the sky, or are smashed flat by the weight of their own skulls. He's got a lot of tricks up his sleeves; currently, he's working on time travel. He will be 16 in December.

He is orbited by twin moons of his own creation. The shadow of one blinds the eye, the other blinds the soul. He hasn't experienced guilt in a decade.

His desires are those of a teenage sociopath.

 

2 - Kāne
Light is life, and Kāne is the life-bringer. He raises angels out of mud and turns deserts into lush jungles. Nothing can die under his watchful eye, so butchers work in the dark.

War was once a nighttime activity in the kingdom of the living. Kāne was so distraught by this that he refused to leave the sky. To his dismay, this has not banished violence from his kingdom, only made it more horrific: an endless, deathless war rages in the heart of Polynesia.

He desires an end to all suffering.

3 - Malina
Light is justice, and Malina is the judge. At night, with a fistful of ash, she marks the guilty for death; in the morning, the touch of sunlight annihilates all who bear her mark. This is where vampires come from.

Her throne on Novarupta has been exploding non-stop for the last hundred years, raining volcanic ash on everyone in a 100 mile radius. She has given up on her people. All are guilty. All are consigned to the night.

She desires solitude. To this end, she orchestrates extinction.

One Hundred Languages

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Ceci est un linguistic hexmap. Connections are in yellow, language barriers (heh) are in red.

I made it by running a picture of shiny fabric thru a crystallize filter, dropping a hexmap on it, and working outwards from my first handful of ideas (tonal bird latin/atonal chinese/nahuatl c++)

There are roughly 7000 languages spoken worldwide irl-- only 69 more of these and I'll finally have a fleshed out setting.

How to Use it

• decide how much vocabulary overlap there is between any two characters
• (I'm particularly proud of the word categories approach to shared vocabulary above, like "logistics" and "emotion". If I were smarter I'd just post a d100 list of those)
• maybe local (cheap) translators only bridge the yellow connections, and all other translation services are rare and expensive.
• maybe learning new languages takes more time based on the distance between them on the map?
• as a scaffold for a linguistic archaeology game, where the goal is to reassemble this map for college credit
• as a worldbuilding prompt, i guess

okay, but why tho?

If you aren't a dedicated conlanger, languages (in ttrpgs) have two gameable components:

• 1-3 vocab words
• relative positioning to adjacent languages

The first is immersive: say fasoy to a bartender for a hard drink, say maigen to an mermaid to make a friend. It also gives you (pl.) a sound library to riff on. (Does this language sound like GWAGWAGWA or skisisisis?)

The second is a measure of immediate interpretability. Can you communicate with these goblins if you don't speak goblin? If you only speak American English, how well can you get by in Italy? In Japan?

Consider this an incomplete experiment in maximalist language gaming. The important part is it was fun to make, and it looks pretty.