Hunger Lives in the Wolf

pauliina kinjama / kipine

 "The endosymbiotic hypothesis suggests that mitochondria were originally independent organisms that fostered a symbiotic relationship with eukaryotic organisms. They generate power for the animal, and piggyback onto its reproductive success."

—heavily paraphrased wikipedia

Anyway.

Magic is and is not a part of the human organism, which plays host to a wide array of spells. These dwell in the body, tucked away in corners that cannot be dissected out, assisting oneself in the basic functions of life.

They make up what you might call your soul.

It is theorized that all animal drives—hunger, procreation, and so on—are magical in nature, which explains why great feats so often arise from great emotion. [Consider a mother lifting a car off of her child; isn’t that a kind of magic?]

No part of the soul is shared among all living things. Lust, for example, is unknown to certain species who produce purely asexually. Hunger is an alien concept to angels, who drift thru existence as filter feeders, deriving energy from meaning itself.

Likewise, some magicks are more pronounced in certain species or individuals. This is why no (relatively) sane sorcerer would turn their Pride against that of a high lord Crab; the crab wins 9 times out of 10.

(This also explains how certain individuals can be born with inherent magical prowess, why wizards often specialize in one type of magic, and why magic often follows a bloodline; its all genetic.)

The unifying theory of magic is thus: that magic is life, and life is magic. All living things are similar in the sense that they are magical, from the hungry wolf to the mana-made angel to the reanimated zombie. Humans are not just magical, but too magical in too fundamental a way to extricate themselves from the natural world.

Joesky Tax

Wolf-that-looks-like-a-blue-jay
HD as wolf; AC as wolf; maul as wolf
Appears: pack of 2d6
Special: always described as a blue jay, except by wizards, who describe it as an octarine jay. Does not fly because it is a wolf 

 

patterson clark

There Are No Mundane Towers

 

Yoshitaka Amano

[Yes, this post is going to be metaphysics of magic. Stick with me, I promise it's usable in-game]

Magic rolls uphill, searching for the quickest route to the highest point, like lightning in reverse. This may be because spells love the sun (which is made of magic) or abhor the earth (where the Dark dwells).

This means that in any structure that is taller than all other nearby structures, magic will slowly accumulate over time. This magical buildup makes the structure weird; the older and taller it is, the weirder it gets.

1d6	What's Wrong With The Tower You Built Last Year?
1	The tower begins to animate. Gargoyles, mimics, and other “trap” monsters are born. In severe circumstances, the tower may pick itself up and attempt to climb the nearest mountain.
2	The tower begins to grow, both upward (approaching the sun) and downward (to set strong roots). The rooms are unsettlingly “organic”, and nothing is as it should be; the ceilings are too high, the walls slope inward, the stairs are all different heights.
3	The tower attracts 1d4 demons; goblins; shades; pigs, who grow fat and dangerous lapping up the excess magic.
4	The tower’s inhabitants change. The bats, the rats, and the lichen on the cobble grow dangerous, intelligent, or downright odd.
5	The tower is levitating upwards at a glacial pace. It’s currently 30 ft off the ground and rising faster with each passing month.
6	The tower is slowly filling itself with riches, inciting all sorts of brigandry and territorial disputes between nobles. The madness of greed settles over the countryside

Yes, this happens to non-tower things too: tall trees, mountain peaks, etc. Frequent "venting" can prevent a tower from weird-ing, although it's a dangerous and mishap-prone process.

SPEAKING OF...

When a tower falls down, all that built up magic is suddenly released, causing any number of magical catastrophes.

1d6	What Happened To The Tower You Knocked Down Last Week?
1	The nearby land becomes haunted. dead things buried here start waking up.
2	a FRACTURE opens: a tiny crack between two realities. Left alone, it will expand into a full-fledged portal to another plane
3	Time or spatial distortion; infinite labyrinthine woods and impossibly huge lakes. May cause backwards aging
4	Chimeric fusion zone. Bifurcated stone-trees and liquid hillsides. Owlbears come from these
5	Everyone in a ten mile radius has nightmares about the same previously-unknown figure. If enough of them gather in one place, a sermon begins and a god is born.
6	New tower. An enormous spire of bone and mineral sprouts from the ruins of the previous tower. It is impossibly tall, full of impossible things. Looking directly at it is bad luck.

Pawel Hordyniak

Wizard Towers

This is also why wizards always build their own towers; to gather magic more efficiently.

In bygone eras, they climbed the tallest mountains where they build the tallest towers and installed enormous vessels at the top—orbs of finely-sculpted crystal, barrels full of ghosts, whatever’s on hand really—within which they collect unstable arcane energy.

Then, they hauled these batteries into their dungeons, which were dug deeper than the deepest trenches, and release them. The upward current of magic powers all the equipment and experiments between the highest and lowest point. The deepest, weirdest dungeons are decrepit wizard-engines from before the end of the world.

You can spot them from a distance; just look for the tower.

Oh, and if you start running batteries up and down the structure, you might be able to turn on the machine again, but this would take ten armies worth of manpower.

Today's takeaway: If you're going to write magical metaphysics, make sure your players can interact with them.

Words to live by from https://fractalmeadows.blogspot.com/

 

7 Facts About Your Next RPG Setting

Crucible of Worlds, Ron Spencer

 

Made with Spwack's Generator Generator. Inspired by Scrap Princess' Dark Souls-y Worldbuilding Post.

So uh... where do all these fantasy creatures/concepts come from?

3 Alternative Monster Biologies

In a world where magic exists, calories are overrated.

Obscurovores — Eaters of Darkness

Dungeon ecologies are a precarious balance of scavengers and fungal culture. The only resource a dungeon has an abundance of is darkness. The challenge is turning darkness into energy, and this is where the Glowpig comes in.

Glowpigs are short-legged, headless swine, like the rear ends of two pigs stuck together. They eat darkness through their skin, which causes them to shed light as a torch (light is the absence of dark, as the drow will tell you). Their meat is black and rich and, according to some, corrupts the soul.

When threatened, they stop glowing (because they’re no longer eating) and curl up into a ball, relying on their thick, cactus-bristle hair to deter predators. They excrete noxious smoke (save vs. 1d4 poison damage) which crawls over the dungeon floor like a heavy fog, extinguishing campfires and choking sleeping adventurers.

[quick note: most creatures that live in the dungeon have true darkvision, and see as well in the dark as we do in the light. When everything that wants to eat you has darkvision anyway, shedding light isn’t a negative. It can even momentarily confuse predators when the light suddenly goes out and their vision has to adjust, buying the Glowpig precious seconds to flee.] 

Chronovores — Eaters of Time 

There is no such thing as immortality, a truth belied by the timeless nature of the fae. Their secret is chronovory: the consumption of one creature’s lifespan to extend another. This explains the faerie practice of abducting humanoid children, who are likely to have many years ahead of them, and their fascination with food, which they do not need but appreciate artistically much like theatre or music.

This is also why only human children are seen living alongside faeries; they die of old age before they ever grow up. 

Fae of Wishes by Wylie Beckert

 

Cogitovore — Eaters of Thought

There is a whole category of spirits which draw energy not from calories or magic, but from sapient thought. Among them are angels/devils, spells, nature spirits, and (arguably) gods, all empowered and affected by the thoughts of others.

Emphin are feral cogitovores without an onus or guiding principle to align themselves by. They are sometimes believed to be proto-angeloids, and as a result many eventually ascend to angelhood. Until then, they are as cordial as you would expect a rogue spirit to be.

Emphin are shapeshifters who look like you’d expect them to. Their identity begins and ends with the expectations of others, and their bodies fluctuate as wildly as the rumors surrounding them. Only their size is fixed, scaling based on the number of people who know about them.

If your players are hunting an emphin, describe it in vague terms. The villagers will have conflicting accounts of its appearance and abilities, and give it vague names like “the monster in the woods”. Right before they meet it, ask your players what they think the emphin looks like, then tailor its abilities to match.

CHOOSE THE FORM OF YOUR DESTRUCTOR

1d20	Emphin Rumors
1	It has many mouths and can skeletonize a cow in 30 seconds.
2	It flies on gossamer wings, but charges like a bear.
3	It cries acid and bleeds saltwater. It has an insect's maw.
4	It’s immune to fire, and spits flames from holes in its neck.
5	There are thousands of wasps in its mouth.
6	It can command undead. It’s afraid of holy symbols.
7	It eats soil and silt and regurgitates locusts.
8	It has gorgeous plumage and a long python-like neck.
9	It has a bird's beak and 2d8 additional heads all over its body.
10	It's lean like a panther and can tunnel through the earth like a mole.
11	It’s invisible.
12	Don’t look it in the eyes, or you’ll die from fright.
13	It’s actually a set of triplets.
14	It has a rhino's horns and shines like the sun when it roars.
15	It has claws the size of scythes, which weep cobra venom.
16	Its skin is harder than stone. Its mouth is long like a crocodile's.
17	It has two extra pairs of arms, which are always praying (+cleric spells).
18	It can speak, but only in blasphemies (+wizard spells).
19	It’s invulnerable to attacks by mortal men.
20	It’s actually pretty chill. Leave it alone.

They wouldn’t be such a big problem if everyone wasn’t so convinced that all emphin are monsters.

 

Rivers with Personality

Rivers have names, mouths, and banks, which makes them pretty much 99% human. Here are three examples of rivers with human personalities.

a river, for reference (by Amir Zand)

Easybrook is a stream of no great repute. It runs once around the waterwheel of an old man’s mill, through a secret village of halflings, and is eventually absorbed into the rushing Wyrmtail River. Easybrook can whisper into her big brother Wyrmtail’s ear, convincing him to slow his current for those in need. She’s not the only being who will help you cross the rapids, but she is definitely the most agreeable. She collects a tidy sum, which she plans to spend hiring a wizard-engineer to divert water upstream and transform her into a more destructive force than her brother. If you find her treasure trove, she’ll try to drown you. If you threaten her, she’ll alert the halflings. They’ll defend her with their lives, unaware of her secret ambitions.

The Misra is a stream trickling through a dry riverbed. It claims to have once known the location of every gold piece lost in its banks, but its memory of these treasures is sealed away in an underground aquifer that it hasn’t the strength to reach. If you restore its flow (destroy an abandoned dwarven dam, cause an avalanche, open the lich king’s aqueducts) and return to the Misra with proof, the river will gladly shower you in coins. It will, of course, keep its most valuable treasure for itself — the one it discovered as the waters carved the riverbed for the first time in centuries — but a clever party can surely find a way to access it.

This is Haku. He is a river.

Montegrum is a fledgling trade city built on the banks of two great rivers, the Tressent and the Krahm. These bodies of water, colloquially known as “the twins”, meet only once, in the center of the city, before splitting unnaturally to go their separate ways. The twins possess an odd property that prevents their waters from mixing; a drop of ink in the Tressent will never flow into the Krahm, and vice versa. You can tell them apart by temperature: the Tressent is hot and the Krahm is cold. The townsfolk postulate that the twins have been in a minor dispute for several centuries, which is why they refuse to mingle. To take advantage of this phenomenon, merchants guilds in Montegrum employ “river politicians” — gangs who perform favors for the rivers in exchange for swifter trade ships.

1d6	Montegrum River Politics (is this is what D&D blogs do?)
1	The river wants you to dump a few tons of garbage in its twin’s waters. Watch out for rival river politicians.
2	The river wants you to halt construction of a dam upstream. Could be humans, could be dire beavers.
3	The river wants you to start a conversation with the other river, then pull a nasty practical joke on it. It suggests defecation. It doesn’t mention what happened to the last person who did this.
4	The river wants you to destroy a bridge for offending its decorating sense. Its a rickety wooden thing that connects two local gang hideouts. They run Blue Lotus shipments over it, so its heavily guarded.
5	The river wants you to drown a fisherman or two, to send a message.
6	The river wants you to remove an old anchor from its bed. The thing is cursed, and also sixty feet underwater, and also the river is not very clean.

Monica Antonie Meineche

Talking with rivers is pretty easy. First, locate an auspicious feature of the river, such as a peculiar eddy or school of iridescent fish clustered near a pier. This is where the river’s attention is most likely to be located (1-in-6 chance of success, 4-in-6 if you are particularly familiar with rivers/fae/augury).

Next, provide an offering to gain its interest. Offerings that are foreign to their waters are generally well received, such as igneous stone crafts or a pinch of desert spice. They also appreciate irony, and will accept drowned land animals as a kind of backwards fishing. If all else fails, rivers like gold as much as any intelligent being.

Now ask your question. Are you looking for something that was lost? Do you want to know a sailor’s secrets? Deliver your question, in written form if possible, and wait. The river might create a nymph-like form to converse with you. It might chuck a note right back. It might communicate in swirls and eddies (in which case, you’ll probably need a local river politician to decipher). It might simply whisper in your ear. Regardless, it wants something in exchange, and you probably won’t be able to threaten it; swords and shields do very little against a localized tsunami.