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BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
I've really been enjoying the Night's Black Agents Solo Ops review and decided to pick it up from the Bundle of Holding. After reading through the mechanical stuff and one adventure, it seems very dependent on pre-written adventures and having access to a printer for the multitude of cards you need. Imagine a PBTA game where every non-investigation scene is resolved through a custom move and you'd be close to how it's set up. As an improv-heavy GM, I can't ever imagine running it when you're expected to have a TON of stuff ready to hand over to the player and an entire adventure prepared in advance.

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BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
I don't know why but the rival to Count Dracula being named John Dracula really cracks me up. John Dracula. (And I vote for Bourne!)

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
I was curious to see how Silent Legions, another modern-day occult-horror OSR game handled spellcasting when compared to the multifarious ways it can go wrong in Esoteric Enterprises. The short answer is, being a wizard is a lot nicer in Silent Legions. Although it's harder to acquire magic than in Esoteric Enterprises (you can't start with it, and have to learn spells or traditions from trainers/grimoires, with a skill roll needed), the worst thing that can happen is the spell failing. You can even cast spells or use disciplines that are at your level or lower without having to roll - it just costs Expertise (a recharging pool of points all characters have access to) or Madness if you can't afford it.

There's actually a lot of overlap between Legions and Enterprises, right down to the needless five-saves system and multiple different kinds of rolls (d20 over, d20 under, and 2d6, in the case of Legions).

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.

Nemo2342 posted:

So far, it feels like you would need to rip out and/or modify so much of Esoteric Empires that I don't know that much of the original would remain.

My feeling is that I'd just rip out most of the random tables and use them with Silent Legions, which, while not exciting, is at least functional. Plus combining the dungeon generation with the Cthulhu generation (from Silent Legions) could result in some interesting results.

e: I keep posting about it, so gently caress it, Silent Legions F&F starting tomorrow. Get a nice lil compare + constrast going.

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
I don't think this rule is in OG Into the Odd, but it definitely is in Electric Bastionland - if multiple attackers all target the same enemy, everyone rolls but only the highest die actually deals damage. It's not a bad way to prevent ganging up on a target being the most sensible choice in literally every fight.

In all honesty, if and when I run Electric Bastionland, I think I'm gonna rule in advantage/disadvantage on Save rolls (it's already sort of present in combat rolls, where attacking a protected target deals d4 and attacking a vulnerable one deals d12). I'm pretty sure I remember reading on Chris McDowall's blog that he was opposed to adding any kind of Advantage or bonuses to the game, saying that good thinking or positioning should be rewarded with narrative effects only - instead of getting Advantage on climbing a wall if you have a grappling hook, maybe you just climb the wall with no roll needed. I'm not unsympathetic to that take, but... sometimes you need a middle ground between "you get a plot advantage/succeed immediately" and rolling straight.

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.


1. Introduction
Silent Legions is “a game of supernatural horror” by Kevin Crawford and Sine Nomine Publishing (which, I’m pretty sure, is just Kevin Crawford’s shingle; I don’t think there’s anyone else involved in Sine Nomine). It fits pretty comfortably alongside Esoteric Enterprises as an OSR take on modern occult horror, although where Esoteric Enterprises is focused on dungeon crawling, Silent Legions is much more about cosmic horror and mystery in the Call of Cthulhu mold. I won’t be going into too much detail about the specific rules – if you’ve played any old-school D&D, you won’t find much here that’s different, aside from a handful of Crawfordisms that he’s imported from some of his other games. What I will be talking about are the incredible cult, mythos, and alien generation rules, which I’ll use to roll up some new interstellar goblins for the thread.

I’ll let Crawford start this review with his description of the game’s themes from the introduction:

quote:

Silent Legions is a game of modern-day Lovecraftian horror, one designed to allow courageous investigators and luckless would-be victims to strike back against the horrors of an encroaching darkness. Where the ineffable abominations of foreign realities bleed into our world, these heroes are ready to do what they must to drive them back. When terrible truths and forbidden sorcery boil up from hidden places, they break the cults and stifle the black revelations that madmen would force on an unwilling world. Most of these heroes die in the process; some suffer worse fates. A very few live to be examples to those who will come after.

Where the game differs from your Calls of Cthulhu is that it’s intended to be played as a sandbox (fans of Stars Without Number or basically every other game Crawford’s ever written will find this approach familiar). Rather than following a pre-written adventure, the intention is for players to be dropped into a world that’s already in motion, one that won’t wait for the players to pick up the right clue before the stars turn right. Another key difference between Legions and the rest is that the game provides you the tools to create a novel mythos (along with attendant cults, aliens, and even suitably Lovecraftian names). I appreciate it, not only because Cthulhu stopped being scary forty years ago, but because it lets you play in a world freighted with Lovecraftian themes while still avoiding using the work of a noted racist and general piece-of-poo poo.

Another thing I appreciate about Legions is that it’s very free of fluff; the introduction is all of one page and skips over the usual “what is an RPG” throat-clearing. Crawford’s writing throughout is to-the-point without being dry, and despite being the product of (seemingly) one person, it’s largely free of editing or layout errors. Many much-bigger and better-funded RPGs could learn a lot from the overall presentation and clarity that Crawford manages to hit in every one of his releases.

All that said, let’s jump into Character Creation!


The interior art is all black-and-white illustrations of decent-to-good quality. There doesn’t seem to be a list of what artist did what piece, but the six names credited at the start of the book are Nikola Avramovic, Luigi Castellani, Earl Geier, David L. Johnson, Joyce Maureira, and Miguel Santos.

2. Setting Expectations

quote:

Heroes in Silent Legions are acutely mortal. It is all too easy to perish under the fangs of some unspeakable abomination or be slashed to pieces by the knives of cult assassins. There is no special protection for player characters and many of them are likely to pay the final price for their defiance of the outer powers. Even a veteran of a dozen successful investigations is always at risk of a sudden, savage end.
If you’ve played or read an OSR game before, this “your characters will die” blurb will probably be pretty familiar.

The Character Creation chapter opens by emphasizing that characters are both heroic and mortal. Given the focus from most OSR games on player characters that are little more than grubby treasure hunters, I appreciate that Silent Legions is willing to say, nah, you might die, but at least you’ll be going down fighting the good fight. The next section emphasizes that the expected mode of play is sandbox, that you, the player, will be expected to drive the action and seek out the next adventure.

The final section (before we hit the actual rules) reminds the reader to focus on making “characters that work”: no lone wolves, no traitors, and no characters who display an “obstinate refusal to learn” the truth of the occult world (especially when they are joining a campaign in progress). Again, it’s all just expectations setting, but the more games I play and read, the more I realize how absolutely key it is for a game to provide, in the baldest terms possible, exactly what kind of play it expects and the kinds of stories it aims to create.


Not the best piece in the book, but a lot of the other illustrations are vertically-oriented, so enjoy this very normal-looking fight instead of the much nicer art that’s on the page below.

3. Roll for Charisma
You’ve played D&D before, right? Silent Legions characters start out just the way you’d expect: rolling 3d6 down the line for the classic six stats. There are optional rules for rerolling if your modifiers total to zero or less, or just using a stat array. I’m not a huge fan of the Big Six stats, especially since we just end up using the modifiers, but it works fine. Even if you stick with the 3d6, later on you’ll be able to set one of your class’s key scores to 14, so you’re at least not totally screwed if you really want to play a fighty-type guy but totally biff all your physical attribute rolls.


The ability score to modifier spread is much narrower here than in D&D, so rolling low is much less punishing than usual.

Next, you pick a background from a list of 40 options (or roll for it), which will give you a set of starting skills. Most of the options are pretty standard: Bodyguard, Engineer, Scientist, Soldier – although there are a few more colourful options: Bum, Private Eye, Stay-At-Home Spouse, Trust Fund Kid. Regardless of what you pick, you’ll end up with a set of four skills from the svelte two-page list. Here, we see the first actual rules information: skills range from level 0 (basic professional competence) to level 4 (near-supernatural mastery). Skill rolls are 2d6, plus the skill’s level, plus the most appropriate attribute’s modifier, and you have to meet or beat the GM’s chosen target to succeed. If you have no training (not even level 0), you suffer -1 to the check, and might not even be able to attempt it depending on where it falls on the “driving an unfamiliar vehicle” to “open-heart surgery” spectrum.

I won’t recap the entire skill list, it’s pretty much what you’d expect for a modern horror game: stuff like Athletics, Business, Engineering, Medicine, Persuade, Survival. Some skills have specializations, areas of focus – for example, you might have Vehicle/Land, so you can drive most cars, bikes, hovercraft, and riding animals (yeah, that’s the exact list from the book – hit me up if you ever manage to find and use a hovercraft in an occult horror game), but not planes (Vehicle/Air), ships (Vehicle/Water), or spaceships (used by alien races or “secretive human organizations”, Vehicle/Space).



4. Class Act
Once your skills are decided, you pick one of the four classes: Investigator, Scholar, Socialite, or Tough. You can probably guess the rough archetype each class corresponds to (aside from maybe Socialite, which is basically just a catch-all for “good at people stuff”). After picking a class, you get to raise one of the class’ key attributes to 14 and get a few bonus skills (if you already have them, you bump up the skill level from 0 to 1). You also get a resource called Expertise – two points max, with one regained per good night’s sleep. Expertise is mostly spent to use your class abilities, but they also let you re-roll failed skill checks if the skill is one listed in your class’ description. For extra fun, Toughs (fighty boys) can use Expertise to re-roll attack rolls, too.

You roll for HP using your class’ hit die. Scholars get 1d4, Toughs get 1d8, and everyone else gets 1d6. The game says “don’t worry if your roll is low… two or three hit points are unlikely to make a difference,” which really begs the question of “why roll for HP if it doesn’t really matter?” I mean, I get that it’s another point of exciting randomness in the character creation minigame, but it’s just one more bit of D&D cruft that could easily be replaced by something more interesting.

Speaking of uninteresting, you have a base attack bonus that goes up every level and you have an Armor Class (that starts at 9 and descends as you get better armor and Dexterity). Skipping ahead, you make attack rolls by adding your own bonuses and then the enemy’s AC (hit on 20+), which nicely avoids having any roll-under mechanics, but is still another type of roll in a game that really only needed one.

Your class grants you four unique abilities (at 1st, 3rd, 7th, and 10th level), hit dice progression, attack bonuses, and save progressions in the five saves, renamed from the standard Polymorph et al. to make more sense in a modern context: Physical Effect, Mental Effect, Evasion, Magic, and Luck. The save numbers go down as you level since it’s a value you need to match or beat on a flat d20 to protect yourself from incoming harm. Usually I’d rather get all the rules out in one go and then do character creation, but because the game is pretty simple overall, I don’t mind having short snippets of rules intermixed in the character creation zone.

Oh, last thing: there’s a Sanity score (here called Madness) that starts at 0 and tops out at 100. I like that Crawford emphasizes that Madness is different from real-world mental illness:

quote:

Unlike conventional mental illness, Madness is not strictly a mater of brain biochemistry or unresolved mental traumas– it is a mental infection, a toxic enlightenment as to the true nature of the cosmos. PCs that suffer from high Madness are not simply suffering from posttraumatic stress, they are understanding things that human minds were never meant to comprehend.

There’s another section like that later in the book that I’ll highlight when it comes up. Thank God the era of “seeing Cthulhu gives you real-life depression” complete with random mental illness tables is mostly over.

For the next update, I’ll take the first few names and/or character concepts people post and use them to roll up a sample party as we go through the class list!

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
Awesome, I'll take these three and add one of my own for a nice four-person party!

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
90% of all OSR dungeons are just that scene from Cabin in the Woods where the main characters go down into the spooky basement. It's full of random items, every single one of which will determine what monster gets activated to murder them all.

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
Here's the Wizard in all its glory (captured at fullscreen at 2560x1440, spoilered because gross):

https://i.imgur.com/3deYNeU.png

And here's its eyes which stare into thy soul:

https://i.imgur.com/8ghWa8e.png

BinaryDoubts fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Jul 7, 2020

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.

Night10194 posted:

Thank you for both posting these but also spoilering them. There's a reason the first update is 'here's the spoiler free this is good, you should give it a shot' review and I think it's genuinely better to play the game unspoiled. The rest of my writeup is to demonstrate that the system guidance was genuinely helpful and to talk in depth about why I think it's writing style is real good in case people are more interested in reading than playing or are thinking of running it rather than playing it.

I bought it after reading your first review and can't agree more - the writing is truly great at being gross without resorting to classic OSR shlock horror tropes. If you have any chance of playing this adventure, do yourself a favour and don't look at those images!

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
Sorry for the double-post, but here we go: Silent Legions: Making Characters (Part 1)



Let’s make some characters! I’ll be using random rolls down the line, but with the optional rule to re-roll if we get some really lovely results.

Diogenes Fluffernutter, of the New England Fluffernutters, is a truly kind-hearted man with a rockin’ bod and a flagrant disregard for what you’d call “appropriate dress sense.” But just because he refuses to wear anything but crop tops and booty shorts doesn’t mean he isn’t capable of befriending literally anyone. Grandparents love Diogenes. Kids love Diogenes. And most importantly, Diogenes loves Diogenes. He’s got a thousand-watt smile, an rear end you could bounce a quarter off, and a surprising way with words.

He grew up in the Fluffernutter estate, a place so dark and gloomy that anyone without his natural zest for life would have grown up pallid and miserable. Instead, as soon as he turned 18 and took ownership of the estate (dead parents, house in trust – you get it), he carted away all the weird books in languages he’d never heard of (French, German, and Old Enochian), tore down the gargoyles, and installed the world’s first “double infinity” pool. It was during the disposal of what he called “all that creepy stuff from the weird secret library or whatever” that he met our next character, Archimedes “Arch” Brabrand. But first, his stats:
code:
Strength 15 (+1), Intelligence 11 (+0), Wisdom 14 (+1), Dexterity 7 (-1), Constitution 10 (+0), Charisma 14 (+1).
I actually rolled pretty well overall. Ideally his intelligence would be way lower, but I won’t look a gift 11 in the mouth! As you can tell from the overall spread, it’s really hard to end up with a +2 or -2 – only an 18 or a 3 will do.

I picked Trust Fund Kid for his background, which grants him Culture/Home (which isn’t actually explained in the skills section, but I took it to mean “the city and more generally the nation he lives in”) and three other skills. We get to pick the other three skills, so I decided to give him Leadership (his himbo magnetism is undeniable), Persuade (ditto), and Athletics. Even though his Dexterity isn’t great (he’s beyond clutzy), his Strength is really high – he’s got a 12-pack and the skills to match.

Class time! Obviously, we’re going with Socialite. First off, we can raise one of the two class stats (Intelligence and Charisma) to 14. Since Charisma’s already there, let’s bump his Intelligence and say he’s super smart (but doesn’t know it) when it comes to people, and that the last book he read was Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader at the age of 8.

As a Socialite, he gets Culture (I’m specializing it with “High Society”), Persuade (which gets upgraded a level since we already have it), one of the class skills, and any one skill of our choice. I’d pick Persuade again but we’re limited to level-1 skills at creation, so instead let’s upgrade his Leadership. For the wild-card skill, I’m giving him Occult. Growing up in the creepiest house in existence left its marks on his psyche, even if he doesn’t know it yet.

He also gets the first-level Socialite ability, Folie a Deux, which allows him to spend an Expertise to “compel a friendly or intimidated reaction in a human, if either are remotely plausible under the circumstances.” I like that there’s no extra roll needed, although there is a qualifier that supernatural-tainted humans get a saving throw to resist. As he levels, he’ll get three other abilities, which in short allow him to intuitively sense the emotional state and general thoughts of another person, blend in perfectly with any social group or organization, and finally be able to manipulate someone into doing nearly anything that isn’t counter to their self image. Given how often the game emphasizes “YOU WILL DIE,” I’m not sure if he’ll get to try out anything beyond the first level ability, but overall the socialite abilities are all fun and flavourful without too many limitations.

Finally, he gets 1d6 HP, +1 to his attack rolls every other level (starting at 1st), and five saves. He’s best at resisting mental effects, has decent luck, but is awful at evading or resisting physical effects (I guess his muscles are for show, not for go. And he has a weak stomach.) I haven’t covered the stuff after the class selection, but basically you get to pick your starting Wealth rating and grab whatever gear you can afford. He’s obviously Affluent, which lets him buy Expensive goods and services at the cost of starting with 10 Madness.

Diogenes's final stats
code:
STR 15/+1, INT 11/+0, WIS 14/+1, DEX 7/-1, CON 10/+0, CHA 14/+1
HP 2 (1D6+CON), AC 9, Affluent Wealth, Madness 10, +1 to attack rolls
Saving throws (lower is better): Physical Effect 15, Mental Effect 12, Evasion 16, Magic 14, Luck 13
Skills: Culture/Home 0, Culture/High Society 0, Leadership 1, Persuade 1, Athletics 0, Occult 0
Abilities: Folie a Deux
Assets: Dad’s Sword-Cane (he does not know it has a sword in it yet): +2 (base plus STR) to hit, 1d4 damage (1d8 in sword form, with added 1d6 Slaughter Die)
Pink crop-top & booty shorts 
Creepy estate 
A really ugly hearse inherited from his obnoxiously gothic mom.
Archimedes “Arch” Brabrand is a great shot and a mediocre lawyer. Arch, whose youthful patriotism crumbled along with their brief and ignominious military service, left the army with multiple marksmanship awards, an aversion to cramped spaces, and a thorough disregard for authority. They drifted from job to job, eventually picking up enough legal knowledge from night school to pass as a lawyer (despite their lack of accreditation). They landed at Escrow & Sons, a local firm in the New England town of Dearborn, where they’ve conned their way up the ladder from junior associate to senior junior associate.

Escrow & Sons were hired by the Fluffernutter estate to help with the disbursement of funds and property after Diogenes’s 18th birthday. Arch ended up getting stuck with categorizing “all Tomes, whether Occult or Otherwise,” from one of the estate’s secret libraries. What they saw in that library changed their life forever, and when Diogenes called and asked if they’d help get rid of the “creepy books,” for good, they were only too happy to oblige – if only to get another chance at uncovering the library’s secrets. They’ve brought their off-and-on boyfriend Richard Parker along for the ride in the hopes that he’ll be able to help pick tomes that are worth quietly setting aside for later reading or sale.

Let’s roll for Arch’s stats:
code:
STR 6/-1, INT 16/+1, WIS 9/+0, DEX 11/+0, CON 11/+0, 9/+0
Didn’t roll quite as well as I did for Dio, but this is still workable. Really coming to appreciate how narrow the modifier spread is in this game!

Background: Lawyer, obviously, which grants Arch the skills Business, Culture/Home, Law, and Persuade. (I also considered Con Man and Soldier, but I like mix of half-useful skills Lawyer gives them).

Class: I’m going to play a little against type and give Arch the Tough class instead of Investigator or Scholar. For all their willful disdain towards their brief military service, they’re actually really, really good at killing people who are trying to kill them. (Or at least, hitting targets. They’ve never fired a shot in anger). The key stats are Strength and Dexterity, and I’m gonna bump Dexterity to 14 to better represent Arch’s sharp-shooting talents. Tough grants the skills Athletics, Combat, one class skill (I picked Gambling, because Arch loves playing poker with the firm’s senior partners after EOD on Friday), and any other skill (Perception).

At 1st level, Arch gets Ravenous for Life, which lets them automatically stabilize when reduced to 0 HP with no need for medical attention. The next three abilities let them spend Expertise to ignore Slaughtering damage, turn successful hits into Slaughtering hits, or even use the Slaughter die for every enemy in a fight, even ones who’d usually be immune to it.

As you can tell, the Tough’s abilities are entirely combat-focused. The game hasn’t explained what Slaughter damage is yet, but it sure sounds nasty. After seeing all the fun possibilities with the Socialite’s abilities, it’s a bit of a letdown that the fighter equivalent is… just another boring fighter, especially in a modern-day occult game that emphasizes how rarely you want to be fighting. It’s also a bit weird that some abilities specifically mention spending Expertise while others don’t, even though there’s text at the bottom saying “everything costs Expertise to use.”

Finally, we get our hit die (1d8), our attack bonus (+1 every level), and our saves – Arch is best at resisting physical effects and being lucky, but not so hot at dealing with mental or magical threats.

Arch's final stats
code:
STR 6/-1, INT 16/+1, WIS 9/+0, DEX 14/+1, CON 11/+0, 9/+0
HP 1 (1D8 +CON), AC 9, Average Wealth, Madness 0, +1 to attack rolls
Saving throws: Physical Effect 12, Mental Effect 16, Evasion 14, Magic 15, Luck 13
Skills: Business 0, Culture/Home 0, Law 0, Persuade 0, Athletics 0, Combat/Projectile (small arms, basically) 0, Gambling 0, Perception 0
Abilities: Ravenous for Life, can use
Assets: Illegal semi-auto pistol: +2 (base + DEX) to attack rolls, 1d6+1 damage, 1d6 Slaughter, 12-round mag, 30/100 range 
Rumpled suit 
Once-fashionable glasses
Rusty Prius
Crappy apartment
Thoughts so far: Making characters is real fast and gear shopping is nicely streamlined. I wish there were random tables for coming up with characters (or even some kind of random lifepath system), as unlike all the GM-facing randomization, you only get 2 tables for character creation: one to determine a connection to another character (which I haven't used) and the list of backgrounds. Class abilities also mention rules that haven't been introduced yet, which would be more annoying if there were any choices to be made during class selection.

Next time: Three more characters to round out our party!

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.

mellonbread posted:

Loving these Silent Legions characters already. I hope they show up in handcrafted examples of play in future posts.

I'll use them in examples of play later for sure!

Night10194 posted:

Man, I feel really bad if using Quote accidentally revealed a non-spoiled Wizard.

Ditto, I hope no one got spoiled due to viewing my post on a mobile device or something that didn't render the spoiler tag right. To be on the safe side, I replaced the image tags with direct links instead.

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
Silent Legions: Character Creation (Part Two)



Richard Parker had two births. His first was in a clawfoot bathtub ringed by his three mothers and the cult’s elders. His second happened exactly twelve years later, in a cave in deep Montana, when the cult tried to awaken him to his prophesied destiny with vicious knives. He broke free, ran and crawled and clawed his way down a narrow tunnel, too small for the Brothers of the True Dawn to follow. He curled up in the darkness and waited to die. When that didn’t happen, he staggered to his bloody feet and followed a distant breeze to freedom. He bounced through the foster system for years until he found his final home: the quiet and God-fearing Parker family. Their religion never bothered him, even if he didn’t believe. He’d seen true religion first-hand and was happy enough to mouth along to the milquetoast Catholic church’s prayers every Sunday.

The Parkers scraped together enough cash to send him to college, where Richard began a fervent study of history with a focus on religion and apocalyptic cults throughout history. He wears long sleeves and threadbare suits to hide the scars on his arms, and a wide smile to hide the scars on his soul. His best friend, Jamie Kamil, introduced him to Arch during two-dollar tequila shot night at the campus pub. Arch and Parker didn’t remember the night, but they did remember the long, quiet conversation they had lying in bed together the next morning. A cautious romance grew between the two, despite each person’s gut-level fear of, well, being honest with another human being.

Parker’s hidden his early life from Arch, deflecting their questions with jokes and sharp stares. When Arch mentioned a library, and a peculiar book emblazoned with a blood-red sunrise, Parker knew he had to see it for himself.

Let’s roll up his stats:
code:
STR 11/+0, INT 9/+0, WIS 11/+0, DEX 10/+0, CON 9/+0, CHA 6/-1
With rolls that bad, we can reroll since the modifiers total up to a negative number. Take two:
code:
STR 7/-1, INT 14/+1, WIS 12/+0, DEX 9/+0, CON 12/+0, CHA 12/+0
Well, this is a little better. Low Strength doesn’t matter, and he’s smart as hell. Let’s pick a background – I think I’m going with Occultist, given his area of study and obvious history with the subject material. Parker ends up with Culture/Home, Language (let’s say Old Enochian, a language he had to learn in order to read the True Dawn’s texts as he grew up), Occult, and Religion, which doesn’t have any specializations, thankfully – he just gets to be familiar with a “wide range of contemporary and historical religions” including “esoteric and well-concealed sects as well.” I’ve avoided dwelling on the skills too much, but I do like that they’re mostly very broad, with specializations only where it makes sense. Rather than having Religions/Secret and Religions/Abrahamic and so on, it’s all just Religion.

Parker’s class is an obvious pick: Scholar. The key attributes are Intelligence and Wisdom, so let’s go ahead and bump Wisdom up to that sweet 14. For starting skills, he gets Research (“library use, net searches, questioning locals, and other efforts at interrogating their available sources”), History or Science (I picked History), one class skill (took Research again, to represent his obsessive focus on learning all he can about, well, everything occult), and any skill. I chose Stealth, figuring he picked up a few tricks in avoiding the cult and keeping a low profile over his tumultuous life.

At first level, Parker gets Deep Gnosis, which lets Parker spend an Expertise point to gain an automatic success at any knowledge-based skill he possesses. Unfortunately, it doesn’t apply to the Occult skill, and can only be used once per day. I’m not sure if Research counts as knowledge-based (the example given is a scientist who uses Science to succeed at analyzing a chemical compound), but I’d rule that it does since, well, there’s already too many limitations on this ability. Also unclear is if you can use it after rolling and failing, but once again I’d just rule in favour of the player.

At third level, Parker can protect his sanity and take no Madness from a Horror source by spending an Expertise point (again, only once per day). At seventh level, Parker can “gain a sense of the purpose of an occult object or perceptible enchantment,” which can even be used to distinguish fake artifacts from real ones. Finally, at tenth level, Parker can basically call up Pokedex entries for monsters, letting him identify the “type, powers, behaviour, and special weaknesses of a supernatural or unearthly monster on sight.” Unique or utterly unknown monsters are immune, but the book says you can still kind of guess at weaknesses.

So, the Scholar’s abilities. They’re more interesting than the Tough’s, but seem like they’re not going to drive the narrative like the Socialite’s. “Good at knowing stuff” is a fun enough niche, so I’m not particularly down on the class overall.

As for the rest, Parker has a paltry 1d4 hit die (although given how badly I’ve been rolling for HP, it might not matter), +0 to attacks (he alternates between getting +0 and +1 every level), and good Magic and Luck saves, awful Physical Effect and Evasion saves, and average mental effect saves. As far as I can tell, this isn’t one of those OSR games where the different classes get different save progressions – every class has the same starting and max values, just distributed in different orders.

Parker’s final stats
code:
STR 7/-1, INT 14/+1, WIS 14/+1, DEX 9/+0, CON 12/+0, CHA 12/+0
HP 1 (1d4 + CON), AC 9, Struggling Wealth (worse gear choices but a free skill – I picked Culture/Montana Cults) 
Madness 0, +0 to attack rolls
Saving throws: Physical Effect 16, Mental Effect 14, Evasion 15, Magic 12, Luck 13
Skills: Culture/Home 0, Culture/Montana Cults 0, Language 0 (Old Enochian), Occult 0, Religion 0, Research 1, History 0, Stealth 0
Assets: Pocketknife: +0 to hit (base + DEX), 1d4 damage, 1d6 slaughter
Cheap and worn suit
Bike that’s too junky to be worth stealing
Rented room in the back of a borderline flophouse
Weary eyes and a perpetual five-o-clock shadow
Emma Jackson has died in every dream she can remember. Even before she was old enough to really know what death was, she dreamt of her end with an inevitable and crushing certainty. Each night, a bloody sun rises for her, a sun surrounded by hungry jaws and endless rows of unblinking eyes. She stands before the dawn, terrified and naked and burning in the sun’s cruel heat. Every day was a struggle, a desperate attempt to steal a few seconds of peace before the next night began her dreams anew.

Her distant and disinterested parents tried a few doctors, none of whom could prescribe the thing that would take away her dreams. She learned to choke down her waking screams, to flip her sweat-stained pillow, and to pretend that everything was OK. Her parents smiled at her in their strange way when she told them the dreams were gone, and left her alone again. She left home, left college, restless and rootless, tired of her dreams and the enormity of a directionless life stretching out ahead of her.

She wound up a bartender in some shithole New England town, drinking away the long shifts with the few regulars who hadn’t made a pass at her. She didn’t drink because of the dreams; she drank because it made being awake feel like something. Eventually, she made a friend in Jamie Kamil, a fellow drop-out whose quiet support made quitting seem like anything but impossible. Jamie helped Emma to take her first steps outside the fog that’s hung over her entire life. Her dreams, the uncanny things she’s seen in shadowed alleys, the whispering stars that seem to speak to her in the still moments between one midnight and the next – it’s all connected, somehow.

Emma’s eyes are open. She’s going to find out what it all means, and then she’s going to punch that stupid sun right in its loving face.

Rolling for Emma’s stats:
code:
STR 11/+0, INT 10/+0, WIS 11/+0, DEX 14/+1, CON 13/+0, CHA 17/+1
Picking a background for Emma is tricky, there isn’t a handy “bartender who’s been tormented by nightmares her whole life” background, weirdly enough. I picked Laborer, which grants her Athletics (Emma works out whenever she’s craving a drink), Culture/Home, Profession/Bartender, and any other skill – I’ll give her Perception since she’s going to be our Investigator.

Her class (the last of the core four) is Investigator. The core attributes here are Wisdom and Charisma, and given Emma already has a pretty great roll for Charisma, we’ll bump her Wisdom to 14. Her starting skills are Perception, Research, any class skill – I picked Computer (an ex-girlfriend taught her a few things, and now she sometimes hangs out on weird hacker forums during sleepless nights), and any other skill – let’s say Persuade, something she knows a lot about from hustling drunks out of the bar after closing.

Her starting ability, Leading Whispers, is basically a “free clue” button. By spending an Expertise, she gets an “intuitive insight or contact who can lead to further information about a chosen topic or person.” The book notes that these insights might not be the clearest and that contacts may be hard to reach, but even so, this is a surprisingly GUMSHOE-like (or hunch roll-like) ability for an OSR game. It’s easy to flavour it as anything from prophetic dreams to a Twitter alert and isn’t loaded with too many restrictions.

The higher-level abilities are a mixed bag. The third-level ability lets her filter out red herrings and coincidences as well as to discern if evidence is of significant importance to an investigation. The red herrings part doesn’t seem too useful – as a GM, I rarely include pointless information since it’ll always just lead to tire-spinning and wild goose chases, so I guess I’d have to start adding more bullshit to a given adventure so the Investigator can feel smart when they use this ability? On the other hand, at seventh level, they basically get a lie detector ability, which does feel useful in this kind of game. You can even use it after an entire conversation and know which specific statements were made with the intent to deceive. Finally, at tenth level, you can spend Expertise and fifteen minutes of examination to discover any and all hidden features or clues in the area (the ability works on spaces up to the size of a single-family home). Again, this feels very GUMSHOE-like, which I like! At tenth level, you should be able to case a joint in fifteen minutes without breaking a sweat.

As for the other bits and bobs, Emma gets a middle-of-the-road 1d6 hit die, +1 to attack every other level (starting at 1st), great Evasion and Luck, mediocre Mental Effect, and bad Physical Effect and Magic saves.

Emma’s final stats
code:
STR 11/+0, INT 10/+0, WIS 14/+1, DEX 14/+1, CON 13/+0, CHA 17/+1
HP 6 (1d6 + CON), AC 8 (base of 9, minus DEX), Average Wealth, Madness 0, +1 to attack rolls
Saving throws: Physical Effect 15, Mental Effect 14, Evasion 12, Magic 16, Luck 13
Skills: Athletics 0, Culture/Home 0, Profession/Bartender 0, Perception 1, Research 0, Computer 0, Persuade 0
Assets: Stun gun: +2 to hit (base + DEX), 1d8 subdual damage, 1d6 slaughter (?), mag size of 1
Black jeans, black glasses, and a faded black t-shirt
Shared apartment (Jamie’s her roommate)
Lovingly-maintained pickup truck
6-month sobriety chip
Thoughts so far: I'm having fun writing up weird characters, but like I said before, having some more help from the game would be great so I'm not just left to invent everything whole cloth (aside from the names and concepts I got from the thread - thanks everyone!) Both the Scholar and the Investigator seem pretty good - it's just the poor Tough who really gets shafted in terms of interesting abilities.

Next time: The rules of the game.

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
Silent Legions: The Rules


Let’s finish up the Character Creation chapter and then skim through the rules. This won’t be exhaustive, since a lot of it is pretty standard D&D stuff, but I’ll mention what’s different or fun as we go. As you might have seen in the character creation posts, after you finish your class stuff, you get to pick from one of the three wealth levels (Struggling, Average, and Affluent). Your wealth level gives you the ability to buy stuff from a given price level (a different set of tiers than the wealth levels – see below) or under without straining your finances.

At Struggling wealth, you can only buy Cheap goods and services (stuff that costs ten bucks or less) without dipping into your actual funds, you’re probably homeless or close to it, but you get a free skill to represent your learned resourcefulness. At Average, you’re average, and can buy Common stuff or cheaper without worrying about it (five hundred bucks or less). You probably have an apartment/mortaged home and a car. Finally, at Affluent, you can comfortably afford Expensive stuff ($10,000 or less) and definitely own a home and several cars, at the cost of beginning play with 10 Madness.

There are tiers above and below the starting three – Penniless, below Struggling, and then Rich and Plutocratic above Affluent. There’s no strict guidelines for raising or lowering your Wealth through the narrative aside from GM fiat, although you can put yourself into debt to buy something of the next category up at the cost of temporarily lowering your Wealth for the next month, or even permanently burn a level of Wealth to buy something two steps up. Thankfully, there’s no limits on buying stuff for your teammates, but bulk purchases treat your Wealth as one step lower – you can outfit your poorer friends, but can’t set up a Costco.

The game assumes you have all the trappings that would make sense for your background, with the example given of a helicopter pilot who starts in possession of a helicopter (that they’re probably still paying off in the narrative). I love that you don’t have to go gear shopping when making a character, since you just get what makes sense and then pick any extras that your Wealth level can support. Since we’re talking gear, Crawford drops in the game’s encumbrance rules here: You can carry a number of “readied” items equal to half your Strength score (sigh, we could have gotten rid of the stupid scores except for this!) and a number of additional stowed items equal to the full Strength score. Stowed stuff takes an action to get out; readied stuff is close at hand and can be used immediately.

The book doesn’t bother listing out much in the way of everyday stuff – there’s a short table of weapons, armor, useful adventuring gear, vehicles, and that’s it. Since it’s set in the present day, if you need to know how much something not listed costs, you can probably look it up pretty easily. Item costs aren’t given in dollars, but instead on the Cost scale (Struggling-Cheap, Average-Common, Affluent-Expensive, Rich-Extravagant, Plutocratic-Priceless). Also tucked away with the Wealth rules are the weapon rules: you roll a d20 plus the relevant Combat skill (which means all of our characters without any Combat skills are going to suffer -1 to hit), your attack bonus, and the enemy’s AC. If you manage 20 or more, you hit.

You add your attribute (but not your base attack bonus or Combat skill, I think) to damage rolls. At the same time, you roll the weapon’s Slaughter die and deal a whopping triple damage on a six or more. Did we mention that combat was lethal yet? Ranged weapons have effective and maximum ranges and you’re supposed to track every shot fired and reload when you’re empty. I get the impulse to have ammo tracking in a horror game but man, there are so many better ways to build tension with ammo than by having every player methodically count each bullet.

There’s some fiddly extra weapon rules I won’t dwell on – you can use burst fire, suppressive fire, or spray and pray with burst weapons, unarmed attacks do more damage and get a better Slaughter die based on your Combat/Unarmed skill, sniper rifles need to be aimed for a full round… Nothing too exciting. The weapon list isn’t very long, although it probably doesn’t need stats for a break shotgun, a pump shotgun, and a combat shotgun, or for a knife, a club, a sword, and a spear. It covers all the bases you’d expect from bare fists to rocket launchers, although surprisingly there’s no flamethrower.

Armor is armor, it gives you a better (lower) base AC. I’m not sure if the game assumes your players will be running around in full leather armor (or the modern armored longcoat, which has the same stats but is way, way more expensive and works against firearms). I didn’t bother giving any of the characters armor since it didn’t make sense for them to own recreation mail armor or expensive ballistic vests, so I hope the combat math doesn’t rely too heavily on everyone rolling up in head-to-toe armor. (Also, you’re supposed to subtract your DEX mod from AC, which I think I forgot to do on Arch’s character – oops!)

There’s a list of basic gear, stuff like fake IDs, emergency kits, ammo, gas masks, and so on. We also get the vehicle rules in this section: vehicles have a Speed rating, and you use the difference between the speed of two chasing vehicles as a modifier to any Vehicle skill checks made to close distance or escape. It’s automatic to hit vehicles with attacks from within ten feet, or AC 9 minus both vehicle’s Speeds beyond that point (assuming everyone’s in motion). Vehicles also have Armor (different from AC, of course) that’s subtracted from incoming small arms fire, and HP, which forces passengers to make a Luck saving throw or take the vehicle’s max HP in damage when reduced to 0. Finally, there’s rules for using mounted heavy weapons, which I can’t imagine will ever see any use.

quote:

The statistics are not provided for a tank’s main gun, because any normal living creature hit by it will be vaporized. Even unearthly abominations may be temporarily discomfited by such trauma.
Shooting Cthulhu with a tank is always an option, apparently.



The Actual Rules Chapter
Yeah, everything up there? That’s all just stuck in the end of the Character chapter. I’m not a fan of the creation-then-rules format, and especially not with how only some crucial info is explained, and even then in incomplete form. Fortunately, everything is repeated and expanded upon in the rules chapter, so you don’t have to go hunting for the one paragraph that describes how something works amidst the character creation rules.

Skill Checks
Work like I’ve described before: 2d6 plus the most relevant ability modifier, plus your skill rank (-1 if you don’t have that skill). The GM can then apply further positive or negative modifers (up to +/-3) as they see fit. You have to meet or beat a difficulty set by the GM, ranging from 6 (“a trained person can usually expect [to succeed]”) to 15 (“when a master tries something that sounds barely possible in a strictly theoretical sense”). There are the usual elaborations: opposed skill checks (beat the other guy’s roll) and extended checks (succeed at a set number of checks). An optional rule suggests that missing the target by three or less should be a partial success/success at a cost, which is something I might use if I ever ran this.

Saving Throws
1d20, try to roll equal or over to the appropriate save. As always, there’s annoying overlap (where does “mental effect” end and “magic” begin? Why do we need both Luck and Evasion?) but at least it’s a roll-over thing that’s easy enough to understand. There’s only two natural hazards listed, for which you use Luck to halve falling damage and Physical Effect to avoid falling unconscious while drowning or suffocating. NPCs thankfully don’t have unique Save values – they just get 15, minus half their hit dice rounded up for all five categories.

Expertise
Expertise is the meta-currency that you use to activate your class abilities. You start with a pool of 2 and your max goes up by 1 each level. The book says you can use Expertise to try and accomplish “other special feats,” which just sounds like a nightmare to adjudicate, but at least it notes that “[GMs] should be careful not to make Expertise use a prerequisite of accomplishing anything unusual” and that good ideas should be allowed without a tax on their Expertise. You get back spent 1 Expertise per night’s rest, and the book warns us that most adventures should only allow for a few chances to recover Expertise – while you’re resting, your enemies are enacting their awful plans. You can also use Expertise to reroll class skill rolls (and attack rolls, if you’re a Tough). Only one retry allowed, though. Finally, Expertise is used to fuel your sorcerous abilities, of which we’ll talk more later.

Combat

quote:

While combat is a staple of heroic adventuring, it is also an excellent way to die young. The monstrous foes of human heroes are often far more than they can hope to best in direct conflict, and even strictly human cultists present a lethal peril with their knives and guns. Despite this, even the most cautious and clever band of heroes must sometimes find themselves forced to turn to violent ends. Some of them even survive to regret the cost.
We have another new kind of roll – Initiative, which is made with a d8 plus your DEX mod. Everyone acts in order from highest to lowest, taking a move (20 meters, or 40 if they give up their action) and an action on their turn. There’s a few details about combat that we didn’t get before – not having the right Combat skill is actually a -2 penalty and not a -1 like it is for basic skill rolls, and you auto-hit/miss on a natural 1 or 20. There’s basic engagement rules, too: You can either spend a turn evading to get out of melee range, or else your foes get a free attack of opportunity on you when you move away. There’s no grappling rules or fancy action list, you just get to move and do a thing and that’s it.

Encumbrance

quote:

In most cases, encumbrance won’t be all that important to a hero.
I agree. Let’s move on.

Thoughts so far: I've made my feelings on having half-complete versions of the rules scattered throughout the character creation chapter clear. As for the rules overall? They're decently straightforward, but man just use 2d6 or 1d20 for everything! Stop wasting our lives on fiddling with different dice!!

I'd hoped to fit this all in one update, but even in hyper-condensed form there's still a decent number of rules to chew through. Next time: Madness, levelling, injuries, and sorcery!

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.

Arzaac posted:

I decided to read through A Wizard following your review and...yeah, the Abyss is both super cool and also completely at odds with the rest of the module. A lot of the encounters are extremely goofy, which is cool! Just...not in a horror module.

I also wish any of the hints about the Wizard had been... written down, instead of just saying "give a helpful hint!"

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
I love Into the Odd, and thankfully the "only some players get cool stuff" issue is fixed in Electric Bastionland, where every background comes with at least one or two cool, weird items. There's still the possibility for one player to get more "mundane" stuff but it's nowhere near as bad as it can be in the original ItO.

e: and while it does work well for a standard dungeon crawl, I would probably hack in the Usage die stuff for food and torches from The Black Hack if I was trying to run a longer dungeon or mega-dungeon type of game.

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.

quote:

You would think a designer of his experience would have avoided that by now.
Your optimism is delightful! Monte Cook will never change. Never.

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
Silent Legions: Rules (Part 2) and Sorcery


Let’s wrap up the rules chapter and get on to the magic!

Madness

quote:

Madness in Silent Legions bears only a notional resemblance to conventional mental illness. Such afflictions in the real world are the product of biochemical imbalances, traumatic experiences, or damage to the brain itself. The madness of the outer darkness is something incomparably worse. It is the intrusion of a fundamentally incomprehensible reality into human awareness.
So, here we are at last – Madness. Once again, my thanks to Crawford for emphasizing the difference between actual mental illness and the pulp cosmic-horror sickness that’s common across all Cthulhu-derived media.

In Silent Legions, Madness is increased in three ways: suffering or inflicting bloodshed, witnessing magic or occult spookiness, and by casting spells. Your Madness score ranges from 0 (fine) to 100, at which point your character becomes “hopelessly lost in their own tormented perceptions and can no longer function as a player character.” There’s a table of different shocks, each of which comes with an attached die that you roll to see how much Madness you take. Killing someone for the first time costs a whopping 1d20 Madness, while killing people in cold blood after that only costs 1d6. There’s no entry for killing in self defence, which I guess means there’s no psychic trauma for murdering another person as long as you felt threatened. In general, the costs for most things across both the occult and bloodshed categories are either 1d6 or 1d8, for the kinds of things you’d expect: suffering torture, being affected by hostile magic, witnessing a rationally impossible event, witnessing a “scene of gruesome human slaughter.”

Especially nasty, though, is that you take 1d4 Madness just for falling to half health (limited to once a week, so once an adventure, but still), since one attack from any enemy will probably take out any starting character (especially given how badly I rolled for HP). Any big hit means that you’re not only bleeding out, you’re also gonna eat 1d4+1d8 Madness.

Thankfully, you can never take more Madness from a given creature or event than the theoretical max roll, no matter how many of them you encounter (it’s unclear if this means only over the course of a scene or for the rest of that character’s career). Even if you encounter a dozen black-robed nightmare creatures, the most Madness you can take is 8 (since seeing them inflicts 1d8), regardless of their numbers. I really wish it was clearer on if, once you take the full total, you’re totally immune in the future, or if it’s only for the scene. If it lasts into the future, then I guess you have to keep track of how much Madness each creature has inflicted and carefully bookkeep to make sure you never take too much, which doesn’t seem like much fun.

There are only two ways to lose Madness: levelling and/or taking Deliria. The former option is straightforward – you lose 10 Madness every time you level due to your “newfound self-confidence and experience.” Deliria are a little more complicated. You can take on one whenever seems appropriate, although you can’t have more deliria than you do levels. Every delirium you take reduces your Madness by 10 if you can pass a roll-over test, rolling a d20 vs. your number of deliria. If you flub the roll, you actually gain 10 Madness instead, which is just downright mean.

Deliria are mostly phobias and compulsions – things like Beast Phobia (horror of natural animals and insects, forcing you to flee) or Invincible Truth, where the character will automatically believe everything they’re told. You can resist a delirium by making a Mental Effect save – on a failure, you can still choose to ignore the compulsion but take 1d6 Madness. There are 12 suggested deliria, although the book also says you can create your own so long as its compulsions are likely to trigger at least occasionally.

The deliria list is… weird. I’m glad they aren’t real mental illnesses, but a lot of them are very outside the range of what you’d imagine a pulp investigator suffering. Take “Eavesdropper’s Dread,” for example, which means you can’t communicate in any way but face-to-face due to a fear of “something awful” listening. It’s an interesting wrinkle, but seems like it’d be annoying in play and also would trigger way more often than something like “Forced Cooperation,” which means that a certain type of person (a particular job role, ethnicity, religion, gender, etc.) can ask you do something and you’re just compelled to do it. I know the GM will be policing it, but if I pick, like, “clerks,” how often is that really going to trigger?

Most of the deliria are like that – odd compulsions that make your character look kind of dumb to follow through on (like believing everything everyone tells you automatically). I don’t mind the various phobias or ones like “Protective Talisman,” which require you to keep a comfort object close at hand at all times. If I was running a game, I’d basically suggest everyone take phobias related to things that have almost killed them or simple behavioural coping strategies. (And yeah, there’s some overlap between actual mental illness and severe phobias, but it doesn’t feel disrespectful to me to me in the same way that having DID or other disorders represented would be – the causal link between “seeing awful poo poo” and “being afraid of that awful poo poo” feels right to me.)

Character Advancement
The game uses a basic geometric sequence for levelling: you need 2k XP, then 4k, then 8k, then 16k, and so on. I never use XP, and I’m not even sure how it’s supposed to work here without a focus on treasure collection or direct combat. I’d just say gently caress it and use milestone levelling. Maybe that’s not very OSR of me, but tracking how many out of 256,000 XP I need to hit level 10 just seems more annoying than fun.

Anyway, when you level, you get the expected perks: more hit dice, an extra Expertise point, maybe a boost to your attack, and four extra skill points. You need a trainer to level up your skills, and it costs you 1 point/level for your class skills – for example, if you wanted to learn Research and bring it up to Research 2, you’d have to spend six points (1+2+3). You can buy skills from outside your class list, but it’s so ruinously expensive (if Research wasn’t in your skill list, it would cost you 2+3+4 points to get it to level 2) I can’t imagine any good reason to do it aside from maybe grabbing a Combat skill or the prereqs for multiclassing at level 0.

Surprisingly (to me, at least), you can multiclass, although it’s gated by a requirement that you have the first 2 skills from your new class’ bonus skills list at level 0 or higher. You add class levels like you would in D&D (becoming a Scholar 3/Tough 1, e.g.) and get to take the best saving throw from each category – so in that example, you could take the Tough’s Physical Effect save over the Scholar’s, since even at level 1 it’s better.

You can level past 10, but you stop getting extra hit dice and attack bonuses (although you do get more Expertise and skill points). The book says that at level 11 and every odd-numbered level after that, your character should just get a new custom-made ability that’s tuned to your character concept and background. I would be annoyed by putting this on the GM if it seemed remotely plausible that many characters would ever reach 10.


Injury
When you run out of HP, you’re down and out. You die after six rounds, which means dying in Silent Legions actually takes longer than it does in 5e D&D. Once per round, an ally can try to stabilize you with an INT/Medicine skill check versus a target of 8 plus number of rounds since the target went down. This does mean that if you are somehow still in a fight on the sixth round after going down, the difficulty will be approaching what the game called “barely possible in the theoretical sense” in the skills chapter.

After being stabilized, you’re still out of the fight for at least 1d6 x 10 minutes, after which you have to pass a Physical Effect save to regain 1 HP and your consciousness. A failed save on that is Bad News – you’re incapacitated for 2d6 days before you can try again. Another failure means you’re on bed rest for 2d6 weeks before you can try for the last time. A third failure means you’re dead unless you can get healed with some kind of magical aid in the next few days (which sounds like a great quest hook to me!) Your doctor friends can help you to reroll failed saves (if they pass their own INT/Medicine test) or you can just opt for a gnarly scar/”mutilation” to pass automatically. I’m always in favour of mechanics to acquire scars, so props to Crawford on that one.

Assuming you didn’t die in the fight, you can regain HP equal to your level every night, and can get that amount again plus 2 extra HP per level of Medicine your attending doctor (if any) has if you spend a whole day resting. I, uh, really should have made sure one of my characters had Medicine.

Sorcery

quote:

Behind the soothing rationality of comprehensible cause and effect, there is a different law. Beneath the familiar skin of the world there is the alien flesh and blood of a stranger creation. Sorcerous knowledge is not a science as humans understand the word, nor an art that responds to mortal sensibilities. It is a cold and inexplicable force that surges in ways only dimly understandable by human wizards.
Magic, it turns out, is inexplicable. It isn’t inherently evil, but it does require a certain level of self-destruction to twist your mind into the right frame to be able to tap into the Outer Powers. In the book’s words, “[o]nly by the intentional violation of every concept of human conscience and morality can the correct frame of awareness be obtained.” Magic is a transgression, one that will stain your soul permanently should you choose to walk down the long and winding path to true power. There’s no such thing as “white magic” in Silent Legions: At best, the spells available to player characters are morally gray, shading to black as you increase your sorcerous knowledge.

All that said, magic is fun and you should get it because it’s the only way to even the odds between you and the cruel inhuman minds that live between the stars. There’s two kinds of magic in Silent Legions: spells, which are closer to D&D-style rituals, and disciplines, which are like a cross between cantrip sorcery and martial arts (in the sense of learning techniques from a specific school that you can use in combat).

You’ll need a trainer to learn a discipline in the same way you would for skills, and indeed disciplines are largely treated like skills: they cost skill points to learn (1 point and a month of study to get level 0 in a given discipline) and are partially gated by your character level (I didn’t mention it earlier, but there’s a formula that limits your skills to roughly your character level divided by 3). Rather nicely, you can “spend ahead” and use skill points you don’t have to learn a level-0 discipline, which just means the cost will be deducted from your next level-up’s allotment of skill points.
You can learn spells from trainers (and it’s actually easier than the primary way) but in most cases, you’ll learn them from grimoires. You need to have at least Occult 0 and the ability to read the grimoire’s language to try and learn a spell, which requires an Int/Occult check versus difficulty 6 plus the spell’s level (ranging from 1 to 5). The language and Occult requirement make the gap between disciplines and spells even clearer – one requires you to be a relatively brainy character (or at least have made the investment in those skills instead of fighty ones) whereas disciplines are basically available to everyone.

Magic isn’t free, of course, and so learning disciplines and spells will cost you Madness. In the case of disciplines, you’re gonna take a flat 5 Madness to get in the door at level 0 (although it doesn’t seem like it costs anything to keep levelling it), while spells cost you one Madness for the learning attempt and an extra penalty equal to the spell’s level if you succeed at learning it. There’s no real limit on spells or disciplines, aside from your tolerance for taking Madness and available skill points (in the case of disciplines).

Moreover, using spells and disciplines can cost you more Madness: it always costs one Expertise to use magic (in whichever form), and if you don’t have the Expertise to spend, you eat Madness equal to the spell or the discipline level (plus one for disciplines, since Telepathy 3 is actually a 4th level skill due to 0 being a level). You succeed at spellcasting automatically unless the spell is a higher level than your Occult skill – if you try to cast something beyond your skills, you have to pass an Int/Occult check or else give up the casting (or, if you really want, take Madness equal to the spell’s level to force a success).

There are some fiddly rules relating to spells that create magic items, but basically you can only have a handful of active items at any given time (based on your Occult and INT) but once you’ve invested your power in them, you can give them to allies, which is cool. More rarely, some spells require arcane connections (think locks of hair, drops of blood, items with emotional connections to the caster). This wouldn’t be a big deal except for the fact that any items you invest with power count as being connected to you, so it’s in your enemies’ interest to steal your arcane items to use them for targeting you with nasty spells.

And with that, we’re finally done with the rules. Overall, they’re pretty much what I thought before I did a deep dive: functional, clearly well-tested, but not very exciting. The big OSR selling point of “import any dungeon or monster!” just doesn’t apply here, so you’re left with a system that absolutely works but doesn’t do anything to help encourage storytelling, roleplaying, or anything but a sort of low-level simulationist play. I’m obviously not the audience for OSR games, but if I had to play one, I guess I wouldn’t say no to the Sine Nomine line of games, given they’re all streamlined (for D&D, anyway), well-written, and blessedly free of bullshit. But we aren’t really here for the functional-but-bland rules – we’re here for the weird occult poo poo that’s about to kick off in the next few chapters.



Next time: Sorcery, disciplines, and black magic made to order.

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
I need to ask, is Magecoin a joke or a literal term from the book

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
Silent Legions: Spells (Part 1)


When I started writing this update, I figured I could write blurbs about a few of the spells and move on, but a lot of them are interesting enough to be worth discussing on their own – which is why this update ended up split in two, as once I started writing up the spells, I just couldn’t stop. Sorry if it drags a little bit!

There’s 40-odd spells in Silent Legions, divided across five spell levels. Every spell is unique (no fireballs here) and a lot of them seem geared to spark interesting moments or allow for novel approaches to problems. None of the spells are in direct competition with mundane skills (with a few exceptions) and in any case, the difficulty of learning and casting one of these rituals balances out any boost to your narrative power. Keep in mind that learning a spell requires you to find it in a grimoire, then try and roll well enough to learn it, then suffer Madness (one for the attempt, and extra Madness equal to the spell level). Then, when you want to actually cast a spell, you have to expend Expertise or take more Madness to get it done. Oh, and odds are you won’t have enough points in Occult to cast any of the really good spells – even at level 10, you won’t have Occult 5 and will therefore have to roll on any attempts to cast a max-level spell.

There’s a handy chart listing each spell by level, but their actual descriptions are sorted alphabetically. I’d rather they were alphabetical within each level bracket, but given the relative brevity of the list, it isn’t too hard to find what you’re looking for. All that said, let's get started with a classic Time Stop!

Band of Unhindered Escape (Lv.5): You get to make a magic bullet-time circlet. When you break the circlet, you and your allies get to act outside the flow of time for 1d4+1 rounds. Pretty good, except for the fact that you can’t mess with anything living, affecting inanimate objects costs you Madness, and you all eat 1d4 Madness when the spell ends. I mean, if you want to do that thing from JoJo’s, here you are. But for my money, it’s too high-level and too taxing Madness-wise to be really useful. Note that this is one of the rare spells you can actually use in combat (the ritual to make the circlet has to be done outside of a fight, of course). Verdict: Cool, but crazy expensive.

Bending the Heart of the King (Lv. 1): It’s pretty much Charm Person. You need an arcane connection (drop of blood, strand of hair, etc.) and then get to induce friendliness in your target, provided they don’t already hate you. They’ll be willing to do anything they’d do for a good friend, and the effect seems to last indefinitely, or at least until you offend them. Verdict: Seems incredibly good.

Binding the Crimson Sword (Lv. 3): An incantation that “ensorcels a weapon to mystically bind it to its owner.” The weapon, once bound, becomes unbreakable, and its owner will always have a mystical sense of where the weapon is (if taken away or lost). It also makes the weapon count as magical, which allows you to use the Slaughter die against unnatural creatures, at the cost taking 1d4 HP damage yourself every attack. This one’s hard to judge, given I don’t have an intuitive sense of how much HP you’d reasonably expect to have by level 6 (when the spell would be freely castable) and how important getting your crit chance is versus a standard reference shoggoth. Verdict: Probably pretty good?

Binding Shut the Way (Lv. 3): Lets you mystically board up an entrance between our world and a Kelipah (the game’s term for pocket dimensions and other mystical zones). Theoretically useful to trap a cult on one side of a Way, but in practice there’s more exciting spells to spend your constrained Madness on, and wouldn’t you rather fight the cult than just trap them on Hell Mars or wherever? You know they’ll find some other way back to Earth. Verdict: Ehhh.

The Black Lamp (Lv. 3): You make a spooky lamp with your friends. The lamp’s illumination reveals sorcery or enchantments on your HUD. It’s nice that the effect works for everyone who participated in the ritual, but it only lasts until the lamp runs out of fuel or is extinguished, so you’ve gotta make a bunch of lamps to make your investment worth it. (Or just set it up so that you can easily refill the fuel, I guess). Verdict: Situationally useful but hardly thrilling.

The Circle of Inward Eyes (Lv. 1): Remember how the lamp shows you if there’s magic nearby? This lets you check for magic anywhere (or on a given object) and even lets you get more information based on how well you roll on a WIS/Occult check. It’s obviously not a spell you can use while actively investigating a location (unlike the lamp) but it is way easier to learn and gives you better intel. Verdict: Seems good to me!

Cleansing Light of the Dawn (Lv. 3): Ruin a cult’s favourite casting ground with the Cleansing Light! After performing the ritual, all malevolent magical effects are dispelled in the area (“a single house, monument, cromlech, hilltop, or other specific geographic location”) and it’s useless for cult rituals for a solid month. Downsides? If you dispel a curse or other magical effect, whoever cast the curse gets a glimpse of the person who cleansed it, and it’s no good against magic generated by a specific artifact or entity that’s hanging out nearby. Verdict: Fun as an AoE middle finger to a cult.



Converse With the Ancestors (Lv. 2): Talk to a skull and maybe make a new friend. You get to ask questions of the skull and receive very short answers (1-3 words) as if from the skull’s original owner (occupant?) Unfortunately, it’s less useful the older the skull is. The GM gets to roll a secret 1d10 after every question, and if they roll equal to or under the number of years the skull’s owner has been dead, “sinister entities” will take over the skull and twist the answers in the most deceptive way possible. Given the answers are limited to three words or less, I’m not sure how much twisting is possible without just outright lying. Verdict: Very useful.

Distant Seal of Alarm (Lv. 1): Isn’t there an Alarm spell in D&D? This is that, but better. After inscribing a spiritual eye in blood and dust, you receive a vision of any creature larger than a cat that crosses the eye’s field of view. The vision lasts at least one round (if it happens while you’re in combat), but you can extend it for an extra minute per level of Occult if you want. Sure, you can pretty much replicate this spell’s effects with a webcam and a smartphone, but I’d say it’s still pretty useful? Verdict: Good.

Dust of Scouring False Seeming (Lv. 2): You get to cook up some Dust of Appearance. When the dust is thrown at a target, they have to save vs. Magic or else show their true form to you. The catch is that the target gets +1 to their roll for every person around them who’s convinced by their illusory form, so you pretty much have to get them alone before dropping the Dust. I really like this – having to figure out a way to isolate your target is an adventure hook in itself, and being able to purge illusions is something that you might not need often, but will be very glad to have when it does come up. Verdict: A+.

Eyes of the Distant Mind (Lv. 4): Scrying! You need a lump of earth or piece of a building to use this spell, but once you’re locked on, you can scry from the origin point of your dirt/brick/whatever, seeing and hearing everything in your line of sight. You can’t use this too much, though, as every half hour spent scrying after your first 30 minutes (per week) forces you to make a Magic save or suffer 1d4 Madness. Even with that small limitation, this is still an incredibly useful ability, limited only by the fact that it’s pretty high level. Verdict: Incredibly useful.

Friendship of the Ones Behind (Lv. 2): When cast from a perfectly dark room, this spell allows you to call up “certain powers” who’ll bring you any small object, provided you know its location and that it isn’t guarded by “lock, ward, eye, or hand.” It gives some examples of items you could get – a tome that was thrown out by mistake, a coffer at the bottom of a lake, or an artifact that fell down a pit. As you can see, it’s basically only useful as a Find My Phone for stuff that got lost. Since most things that you would conceivably want are going to be guarded in one way or another, this spell basically exists to a) force the GM to come up with a bunch of reasons for cultists to have been super careless with their magic items and b) encourage players to spend a long time haggling over exactly what “guarded” means. Verdict: (balloon deflating noise).

Incantation of the Thrice-Shared Eye (Lv. 4): This one lets you bind together your adventuring party with a psychic bond, allowing telepathic communication between the group and granting everyone mystical knowledge of everyone else’s location, health, and current emotional state. You can’t be taken by surprise (unless you ALL get surprised at once) and get to share the best initiative roll out of the group. The spell even lasts indefinitely (counting as one of your standing enchantments, but given that this is the first one we’ve seen, I can’t imagine you’ll be super pressed on your enchantment limit). It’s really good, probably too good – telepathy is already one of those abilities (like flight, say) that short-circuits some types of challenges, and having it be effectively permanent AND you get to know everyone else’s location and health data AND you can’t be surprised AND you get to share good initiative rolls… it’s way too much rolled into one spell. Verdict: Dare I say overpowered?

Kill the Weakness of the Soul (Lv. 4): Grants a willing target total immunity to gaining Madness from bloodshed, plus they no longer feel fear or mercy. While under this spell, the target will obey any orders given by the caster (short of suicide), and their affect becomes so creepy they automatically fail any social skill checks. Lasts until the next dawn, at which point the target totally forgets everything that happened while they were ensorcelled. Basically, you get to turn your friend into a kill-zombie who is really unnerving to be around. Them forgetting what happened is a fun story hook, and I can see a situation where you use this spell on someone who needs to be willing to commit some kind of atrocity for the greater good. Verdict: Very cool, but a little limited.

The Little House Without Windows (Lv. 5): You create a token that can be used later to open a portal to the Little House. The LH is a Kelipah, a place that exists on another dimension or folded between spaces we can’t perceive. Inside, the House is an endless maze of featureless grey chambers, varying only in dimensions and shape. Those inside the House do not feel hunger, thirst, or exhaustion (and, in fact, it’ll cure you of any starvation-type issues the moment you step inside), although time does pass normally. Any wounds heal at their usual rate, but they regenerate in uncanny ways – torn flesh flowing together like a viscous fluid. The portal to the House stays open until the sorcerer enters, at which point it becomes sealed and imperceptible to the outside world. Others can freely leave (and maybe enter again? It’s warded against “intrusion,” so it’s possible only enemies are kept at bay), but as soon as the sorcerer leaves again, the portal vanishes permanently. Oh yeah, and it’s so creepy that staying in there for longer than a day costs you Madness. This spell is very flavourful, maybe not quite as powerful as you’d want from a Level 5 ritual, but the concept of summoning the basement from House of Leaves as a flophouse is really too awesome to resist. Verdict: Too cool for me to care if it’s useful or whatever.

Thoughts so far: I'm almost surprised at how few spells seem out-and-out too good, given D&D's long and storied history with wizards. Crawford clearly had a few areas he wanted sorcery to focus on, mostly relating to information gathering (revealing enchantments and scrying) with the odd bit of psychic or defensive magic thrown in for good measure. We'll see how this changes with the remaining rituals, but so far I quite like the cost/reward/narrative impact balance on most of the spells.

Next time: The last spells, for real this time!

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
Honestly I'm a Pass on that card. Maybe if it gave more elaboration (why is she out alone in the wild? Is there a group of baddies looking for her?) but as written it's just the barest sketch of a concept IMO.

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
Silent Legions: Spells (Part 2)


Oops, All Spells!

The Merciful Rack of Ibn Baraka (Lv. 2): Magically torture a tightly-restrained subject. Both you and the subject get to make Mental Effect saves – on a success (from either of you), the subject gets to clear themselves of any possession or mind-affecting enchantments, although the unbearable mental agony caused by the spell inflicts Madness on the subject (and the caster too, if neither of you make the save). Obviously, freeing someone from a possessing entity is a classic genre trope, but given how often it happens to PCs (not very), this spell feels more like something you’d seek out an NPC to cast for you rather than something that’s worth permanently learning yourself. Verdict: Fine.

The Messengers of the Air (Lv. 2): Open a telepathic link to someone via an arcane connection. Gives you a ten-minute window to chat, or if you’re feeling nasty, you can burn up the arcane connection to force a psychic compulsion on the target, making them irresistibly drawn to the location the spell was cast from. They can save against it, but on a fail they’ll come running by the “fastest means they can safely employ.” Seems pretty handy both for long-distance untappable communication with your friends (who you presumably will have arcane connections on file for) and the odd “get this guy into position” kind of play against a vulnerable foe. Verdict: Great.

The Mists of Unveiled Knowing (Lv. 4): You know that thing on cop shows, where the cops are so good at being detectives that they can visualize replays of events from a crime scene? This lets you do that, but in blood. Your blood, to be specific. The spell requires you to draw a circle in blood, taking 1d4 HP in damage for every 3 meters in the circle’s radius. Once cast, the blood coagulates into a mist, which then forms into a soundless but high-resolution replay of the most “emotionally-freighted” events to have occurred in the area in the recent past (although you can pick a different event if you know about another one that happened in the same area). The replay lasts for as long as you can keep chanting (I’d rule a Physical Effect save every like 10 minutes or so), then vanishes into the ether, leaving no trace of blood behind. Verdict: Can’t say no to being a Blood Detective. Probably a little too high-level for what it offers.

The Pandect of Light (Lv. 5): This ward takes a full hour to create, but after its completion, your chosen area (no bigger than a mansion) is protected from intrusion by occult entities. Unlike a lot of other spells, there’s no carve-out for the servitors of Outer Gods, or even for godlike entities at all – the protected area is flat-out impenetrable to everyone but humans (and it will block humans who’ve been altered by alien influences). While raising the ward is relatively safe, lowering it is not, as even ending the spell willingly means 5d6 damage with a Magic save to only take half. If the ward is brought down by someone defacing the central sigils, the caster takes the damage straight-up, no save. This is a really powerful spell, and one that’s definitely worth any expenditure in Madness because once it’s up around your hideout, you aren’t likely to need to cast it again. Of course, you’re still vulnerable to, say, a cultist paying someone to just burn your mansion down, but that’s what guard dogs and IR cameras are for. Verdict: Powerful, even if you only get to cast it once.

The Ravenous Works of Hazai (Lv. 5): Another of the “make an item to use later” spells, the Ravenous Works require you to first make a small clay manikin, then etch it with arcane sigils. In a fight, you can toss the manikin on the ground, causing the area in a three-meter radius to boil with voracious ethereal worms. If you spend a round within the area, you take 3d6 Damage (and 1d6 Madness if you’re human). Downside is, you take 1d6 damage every round to contain the worms to the circle. You can willingly end the spell on your turn, but if you end up dead or incapacitated, the circle is flung open and spreads by 20 meters in radius for 1d4 rounds before fading away. My feeling on this spell is: by the time you can cast it, you probably can afford a grenade launcher – and grenades deal damage on impact, instead of the “end of your turn” proviso for the Worm Zone. Even if the GM tosses you a bone and lets the worms eat a few cultists, you’ll need a serious combo to keep a more dangerous enemy standing in the circle and not just stepping outside and resuming your murder. Verdict: Creepy. But not great.

The Red Expurgation of the Sword (Lv. 1): Despite saying earlier that there’s no such thing as white magic, here’s your Lay On Hands. It comes in two flavours: the “slow” version, which gives your target an extra 1d6+1/level HP back the next time they rest. Of course, nothing’s free in Silent Legions, so the intensely unpleasant feeling of having someone else’s flesh grafted to yours (as the spell manifests) costs you 2 Madness. The fast version heals you more and faster: 2d6+2 HP per level of Occult possessed by the caster, regained on the spot. As you’d expect, the penalties are even nastier: the wounds heal over with scaly, unnatural tissue and the subject’s body fills with subtle tumors that whisper to you, telling you there’s nothing wrong with your body. The tumors fade, but the Madness(1d4+1) doesn’t. Verdict: Very useful, very flavourful, just a great spell all around.

Rite of Censing the Crooked Road (Lv. 1): Calls forth a wisp of smoke from a lit flame. The smoke will drift towards any Kelipot gates or dimensional anomalies nearby. That’s it, that’s the spell. Verdict: Yawn City, USA.



Rite of the Wetted Knife (Lv. 5): Remember that earlier spell that let you enchant a weapon? This is another one. It works on all kinds of weapons (not just melee), and allows you to specify a specific type or species of creature who will suffer from this weapon’s attacks. Creatures targeted by this weapon now take full damage and Slaughter rolls from it, even if they’re normally immune or resistant. As well, you get to reroll the Slaughter die and take the better result (remember, on a 6+ you deal triple damage). And no, I don’t think it works on humans – the spell does say “supernatural” creatures only. I dunno, I guess if you know you’re going up against a specific type of enemy (a group of alien soldier drones, say) it’s good, but this is another one I’d probably give to a NPC and let the players hire them as needed rather than forcing anyone to learn the spell themselves. Verdict: Lil’ underwhelming for a level 5 spell.

The Safe-Kept Quintessence of Flesh (Lv. 1): Another… healing spell? Each time you cast it, you have to spend an hour with a willing subject in order to collect some of their blood and mix it with various “assorted powders” to make a hundred grams of red healing dust. When the dust is cast over the blood’s donor, their wounds are healed with a “soft, pale tissue that has a vaguely fungal character,” healing 1d8 HP (+2/level of Occult the caster has) on the spot. It does cost one Madness to be healed in this way, but it’s honestly a pretty good deal, especially if your GM will let you whip up a bunch of powder in advance. While this does heal a lot less than the other curative spell, it’s easier to learn, less costly, and lets you prepare doses in advance. For my money, this is the one to get, since the Madness penalties get expensive if you try to use healing as anything other than a “let’s get you back on your feet” last resort kind of move. Verdict: Fantastic.

The Scourging Seal of Solomon (Lv. 4): Are you excited for another warding spell?? I am! (Actually, this one’s pretty cool). Basically, you make a little clay disc and shower it with 1d4 HP of your own blood. When you’re ready to use it, you get to choose to place it faceup or facedown. If it’s faceup, you create a 10-meter area that’s warded against supernatural entities, forcing them to make a Magic save to try and enter the area. They can only try once an hour, and if they do break through, they take 2d6 damage per level of Occult the caster possesses. If you place it facedown, it instead works as a proximity mine, dealing the damage instantly to the first creature to get within the perimeter. I love bimodal options like this, and the image of slamming down a magic token like a Magic card fills me with glee. Verdict: Fun and incredibly useful.

The Seal of Drowned Kings (Lv. 2): Gives you and yours water-breathing for a full day. Verdict: Just buy a snorkel.

The Seal of the Yellowed Fang (Lv. 3): Adorn a beast’s claw or fang with sigils and become King of the Wolves. You can present your sigil-encrusted totem to a natural animal (or a small pack of a given species) and they’ll become docile, obedient, and entirely able to understand your spoken commands for a few hours. Look, is this the most useful spell in the world? No. But do I want bewitch a crow and make him steal a necklace from a cultist base? Yes. Verdict: This rules.

Sigil of the Righteous Threshold (Lv. 1): Make a clay amulet, hang it over a door or window, that door or window is now impassable to anyone but you and your friends. Do I even need to say the name of the D&D spell? Verdict: Pretty lame.

The Sign of the King (Lv. 3): Another telepathic compulsion spell. Burn an arcane connection and you get to compel the target to perform one act that’s “not wholly contrary to their nature,” with a saving throw if you try to give an order that’s too unthinkable for them. I dunno, I think there’s enough of these already. Verdict: Whocare.

The Silvered Blade of Sacrifice (Lv. 1): Transform a small blade into an arcane weapon that can siphon human vitality. When used on a “willing or helpless” human subject, the knife deals 1d4 damage and imbues the wielder with uncanny vitality. In practice, this vitality lets you reroll one unsuccessful attack roll, Physical Effect save, or physical skill check. You have to use it within the hour, and you take 1 Madness for your trouble. I like the flavour of this spell – your Scholar hands over a scalpel to the Tough and tells him to “cut me, bro, it’s all good.” It’s not the most powerful spell we’ve seen, but I can see trading 1 Madness for a reroll as being a trade you might need to make, especially at low level. Verdict: Fun and good.

The Staff of Turning Back the Way (Lv. 3): Warding! Warding! Turns a rod into a magic crayon, letting you draw a line of solid, impenetrable darkness that only appears to (and affects) supernatural creatures. The ward is solid, too, taking 1d6+2 rounds of solid attacks to be broken down or otherwise lasting until nightfall. Look, I dunno what to say. It seems fine. Verdict: If I see one more spell requiring me to write the word “ward” I’m going to be upset.



:siren:Stealing the Road to Hell:siren: (Lv. 5): My personal vote for best spell name in the game. This is the closest you get to teleportation, and as you’d expect, it’s both tricky and unpleasant. In short, the ritual lets you rip a hole in the fabric of reality, opening a temporary Way that takes you through a “nightmarish Kelipah of alien form and terrible shapes, one barely tolerable to humanity.” Although the journey appears instantaneous, you have to spend subjective hours journeying through the twisted and hostile Kelipah. You can target any destination you can imagine, but it’s going to be a lot safer if it’s somewhere you’ve been before, and easier still if you’ve studied it beforehand and set up mystical beacons to guide your path home. Mechanically, how this works is you have to make an INT/Occult check to see how your journey ends, versus difficulty 6 if it’s a place you’ve prepared or all the way up to 14 if you’re trying to go somewhere you’ve only read or heard about. On a failure, you end up somewhere alien and unpleasant, and most likely not even on Earth (basically, you hand your GM a golden ticket for that Dreamlands adventure they’ve been wanting to run). I love this spell, it makes teleportation risky but still doable and it’s brimming with flavour and plot hooks. Verdict: :siren:STEALING THE ROAD TO HELL.:siren:

Truths Written in Red (Lv. 2): By pouring your own blood over a book (1d4 HP for a short one, half your maximum HP for a longer tome), you are able to read and understand it even if it’s written in an unknown language or encrypted. Fortunately, when you end the spell, the blood vanishes into thin air, leaving the book unharmed. This spell definitely requires your GM to actually use the language rules, but honestly in most cases I think I’d rather run a mini-adventure to find a translator than use up Madness learning a spell that’s this limited. Being able to read ciphertext is handy, but it’s another “how often does this come up” kind of problem. Verdict: Bloody mediocre.

Unsealing the Vault of Wisdom (Lv. 2): The ANTI-ward spell. When used on a warded door or portal, you either break through any protective spells (including magical traps) or receive an insight into the “most practical way” to sunder the wards. Doesn’t work on mundane locks or more general protective spells (like every other warding spell in the game), so it seems pretty limited to countering that one specific ritual. This feels like one you give to an NPC if your players are somehow using the Sigil spell too much? Otherwise, it seems pretty useless. Verdict: Lame.

The Vermilion Mark of Sanctity (Lv. 4): A Faraday cage for telepaths, basically. You create an amulet that makes the wearer immune to possession, psychic interrogation, or thought-scrying. Of course, it works both ways – while wearing the amulet, you can’t exert your own telepathic abilities. Definitely a spell for NPCs who might make and sell these amulets, not something I’d be super excited to have as a player. Verdict: Nah.

The Walker Beneath the Earth (Lv. 3): It’s noclip, baby! While the spell is active, the caster and their allies can effectively pass through solid matter as if it were air. You’re also immune to physical damage while insubstantial, which is a nice perk. The cost is 1d4 Madness per round spent in the intangible form, which seems pretty steep to me. Also, since this spell isn’t one that makes a little item you can cash in later, it means you have to carry out the 10-minute ritual in situ, so it’s mainly going to be used to quickly get you through a few rings of walls (or similar). The Madness cost is pretty nasty, but then again walking through walls is pretty useful in a game largely about going places people don’t want you to go. Verdict: Pretty good!

The Walker Beneath the Moon (Lv. 1): Everyone gets darkvision and a boost to Stealth (when everyone in the group rolls a Stealth check, everyone gets to use the single best result). Not much to say on this one. Verdict: Just buy night-vision goggles.

Whispers of the Scribe (Lv. 1): The librarian’s dream. Casting it on a specific tome gives you an understanding of the book’s key stats: language, age, magical potency, and a summary of the book’s general topic. You can maintain the spell for as long as you want in order to quickly sort through a lot of books. I feel like I’ve been a lot more negative with the second half of the spells, but when you get crap like this, I dunno what to say. Sorting through a pile of old books is something you should do in a montage, not book-by-book on a round-by-round basis. Verdict: No thanks.

Thoughts so far: That’s all of the spells! Overall, I’m happy with most of them – only a few feel out of step with the game’s overall balance and tone, and even the boring ones could conceivably be used as hooks for NPCs (“we gotta find that magic librarian!”). There’s no gross-out horror, which again reinforces the idea that your PCs are supposed to be at least a bit heroic. Sure, a lot of the spells are weird and uncanny and unpleasant, but there’s nothing I’d consider to be in poor taste or just pointlessly nasty (cf. Shadow of the Demon Lord). Some of the coolest spells are written in such a way as to inspire story concepts, which is definitely more narrative help than I’ve ever gotten from a D&D spell list.

Next time: Black magic, made to order. I need spell concepts from the thread – take a look at the two tables below and pick an option from each. I’ll roll up the first three-ish concepts posted in the next update!

The spell's effect


The spell's origin

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
Awesome, thanks for the suggestions. I'll get to work on some dark sorcery for y'all.

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
Silent Legions: Black Magic

The Incantations of Night posted:

Aside from the “safer” sorceries of gray magic, there remains a vast corpus of occult knowledge that is not so limited in its damage to the human mind. These black magics require such horrific sacrifices of sanity, morality, and humanity that those who practice them can hardly be said to be human. All the same, some sorcerers are willing to make this sacrifice in order to wield the terrible miracles these dark arts allow. Black magic is fundamentally stronger, more effective, and more easily mastered than gray magic. By abandoning any concern for humanity or sanity the sorcerer is able to touch on powers that a more cautious wizard would never dare to enlist.
Black magic is the good stuff. The Incantations of Night are spells powerful enough to reshape reality, spells that cost you terribly in blood and sanity and humanity. Players can never acquire or use black magic, as the evil required would both make you unsuitable as a protagonist and transform you into something both less and more than human. For the same reason, you don’t need to worry about Madness costs or spell levels or anything mechanical – black magic works by GM fiat. Sorcerous workings at this level don’t have damage dice, for the same reason that you wouldn’t roll damage for a hydrogen bomb. If the spell desires your end, it shall have it.

Since there’s no mechanical definition to black magic, the random tables in this section are purely to help you (the GM) come up with interesting spells and the requirements for their casting, as the whole reason you have black magic rituals is to give the players a chance to stop them. I’ll go through each suggested spell, rolling or picking on any tables as necessary, and hopefully we’ll end up with at least a tome’s worth of vile sorcery.

Let's start with Leraik's suggestion of a spell that was made by a human sorcerer to conjure a whole bunch of desired objects (ala the Babylon Gate). Before I start fleshing out the spell’s lore, let’s first find out what it conjures by rolling a 1d8. I rolled a 4, meaning it summons “an eldritch object,” and also gives us the word “Genesis” to use in the spell’s name. Rolling a few times on the Spell Name Creation table (this game has the best tables) gives us the words Text, Hidden, and Gods. Finally, I roll how powerful it is (major, one day to cast, 1d3+1 needed components) and what those components are. First, it needs a specific type of object – in this case (another roll to decide), an intricately-crafted focal object. I rolled a 1 on the d3 so we only need one more component, namely a specific time: the night of a new moon. Putting it all together (and grabbing a synonym or two), we get:

Genesis of God’s Thrice-Hidden Scriptures, a black ritual created by the sage known to us as Freya, sometimes called Freya Witch-Caller or Freya the Damned in certain apocryphal translations. Little survives of Freya’s life aside from what can be gleaned from her runic spells, but it’s believed she lived in exile (based in part on cave carvings that some claim to be in her hand). We do know, though, that her spellcraft surpassed anything known to the still-nascent occult brotherhoods in Saxony, or indeed, anywhere in the world.

The spell requires the caster to first create the focal object: an intricately-carved iron tablet, its surface covered in runes etched based on complex formulae that shift over the course of the day and night the tablet’s creation requires. Once constructed, the tablet must be carried and erected at the peak of a mountain by the caster’s hand alone. To cast the spell requires the darkness of a new moon night and the caster’s complete focus as they run their fingers over the runes in a meditative pattern. They must repeat the pattern for hours, even as the rough iron rips open their flesh, painting the tablet in the caster’s softly-glowing blood.

At the spell’s completion, a knife-sharp wind swirls down the mountain, ripping apart the skin and bone of anyone not attuned to the caster. At the peak, the caster is momentarily displaced into the Kelipah known in some tongues as the Divine Archive. Within, black shelves of rock stretch out to infinity. The air tastes of ozone, like in the moments before a lightning strike. And everywhere – piled up on bleak monoliths, stacked into vertiginous piles, swirling and dancing in currents of unseen force – lie tablets cast in a sickly gold metal. Each tablet bears a single word in a language known to every being in the universe; a killing-word, a command of unmaking written in the feverish hand of some unknown Adversary. The caster cannot perceive the word – the spell’s magic inures them to the effect that it has on every other being in the universe (barring, perhaps, some Outer Gods): the instant unmaking of their very essence.

The caster leaves the Archive with as many tablets as their wounded and exhausted arms can carry, each one a loaded gun capable of destroying almost anything in our world. Merely perceiving the word triggers the unmaking effect, causing the victim to evaporate into nothingness over a few painful seconds. After being used, a tablet will follow its victim’s fate and boil away into the ether at the next sunrise.

The last person to successfully carry out this ritual is believed to have done so in 1797, likely by a man known only elliptically from some prison records as “Wikkan.” He proved that the tablet’s effects are reproducible by printing an etching of the word in a London paper (the name of which is now scrubbed from most archives and public records). A sizeable portion of the paper’s circulation saw the word and were utterly annihilated, leading to Wikkan’s eventual capture and death-by-decapitation at the hands of England’s occult service (then known as the Irregulars).

No one has been known to successfully cast this spell in the last two centuries. Should someone attempt its casting now, the careful propagation of the word across the Internet would likely result in the deaths of a large portion of the Earth’s population.



Spell two comes from us from DEFCON Clown, who suggests a spell that creates a disaster or calamity and whose origin is an eruption of occult evil. Rolling on the disaster table gives us the word Calamity and the effect of summoning torrential, unnatural rain. Grabbing a few random words on the Name chart results in Invocation, Esoteric, and Demons. Finally, rolling for power gives us Grand, requiring 1d4+3 (I ended up with 6) needed things and a whopping 2d6 days to cast.

Casting this spell requires the following things (and given that there’s only 6 types of requirements I can roll on, I just rolled once on each table):
  • A recent act, the murder of an important local
  • A specific time, the vernal equinox
  • A specific location, the site of a terrible massacre
  • A type of object, a specific occult grimoire
  • A sacrifice, one or more children (I’m changing this one to “one or more adults,” I just don’t feel like dealing with kid murder right now)
  • A type of participant, a relative or resident of the target
That’s… a lot of requirements to work with. Here goes!

The Esoteric Invocation of Hell’s Calamity is a black magic ritual with no known creator. Instead, its origins can be traced back to a recurring occult phenomena, first recorded by Pliny the Younger. After travelling to Pompeii shortly after the eruption of Vesuvius, Pliny recorded finding rings of impossible sigils etched into the ashen corpses of the city’s residents. His careful illustration of the sigils marked the first time this spell’s words were committed to paper, although he never knew the significance of them during his life. His original illustrations were copied, modified, and passed down through the years, with occult scholars throughout history adding their own embellishments. Most were drawn from their fertile imaginations, but a handful of these additions came from further sightings of the sigils, filling out the spell’s structure as disaster after disaster struck the world.

The first workable version of this ritual is believed to have been created by the Brothers of the False Dawn, a splinter group of the True Dawn cult that formed in a schism nearly 500 years ago. Due to the difficulties in translating the unknown tongue and the various embellishments that have muddied the spell’s form over the years, it is a corrupted, reduced version of its true self. Some believe the spell’s origins to be the words spoken by an Outer God before Earth’s Great Deluge.

Even in this lesser form, however, it is still a ritual of terrifying power, capable of calling forth a torrential rainstorm that can wipe a city, nation, or continent from the map in a matter of days. By tradition, the spell’s two-week casting period must begin with the murder of a local potentate appropriate to the desired scale of misery – historically, a nation’s king or city’s governor were the ones targeted. After killing the potentate with their own hands, the spell’s caster will begin to see immaterial stormclouds gathering in the skies above. As they continue down the ritual path, the clouds grow darker, eventually overwhelming the sun and moon, filling the sky with towers of dark cloud. At the spell’s culmination, these clouds will be pulled from the caster’s reality into the world’s, instantly shrouding the caster’s target in endless storms.

There are other requirements, of course. Some are likely unnecessary, introduced by charlatans or fools to the spell’s blueprint, but such is the power of Fate that avoiding a part of the ritual simply because you think it unimportant will almost certainly result in your demise. The spell must be carried out at the site of a massacre and requires the deaths of several adults (three, in one translation, seven in another). Unsurprisingly, these two requirements are often fulfilled at the same time. After sacrificing your victims (either at the site of a historical massacre or at one you’ve just created), you are anchored to the immediate area for the next two weeks. By this time, the incessant noise of phantom thunderclaps will be ringing in your ears, preventing you from sleep or conversation or rational thought. You will need to read from a trusted translation of the spell (of course, there are many more forgeries than real copies of this ritual), intoning words in a language that slowly shifts from your native tongue to a hissing, snarling string of words spoken in a guttural, throat-wrenching register.

The thunderclaps will help keep you awake for the vigil that follows as you repeat the impossible words for days without end. You cannot eat or drink mundane food, but instead must subsist on the blood of a willing (or unwilling) individual who lives within your targeted area. Blood transfusions at dawn and dusk keep you alive as static electricity courses through your nerves.

Finally, at the end of the two weeks of preparation, the spell will collapse into the real world assuming you’ve timed the end to arrive during the vernal equinox. Rain will fall, slowly at first, then faster and faster, growing more vicious with each passing moment. Thunder sings out as flashes of lightning illuminate the impossibly-dark sky. Those foolish enough to remain outside will see the distant shadows of vast alien creatures gathering at the edge of the rainfall. The storm lasts until the earth beneath it is barren and empty as it was at Creation, whole cities reduced to rubble and washed away in the tide. The caster will not survive this; the epicentre of the tidal downpour is on the spell’s casting ground. After the clouds fade, all that remains will be wet earth and rings of deadly sigils where a city once stood.

Thoughts so far: Rolling on random tables is fun as hell. Obviously most of the stuff above was just written without reference to any kind of table, but I wouldn’t have had so much fun writing up the spells if the basic info you get didn’t give me a ton to work with. You can create a custom spell way more simply, too – all you really need to know is what it does and what it needs to use it in a game. I just wrote all that backstory because it seemed like a good time. It’s definitely not a requirement!

Next time: A custom Kelipah and a black magic ritual to get in and out.

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.

Leraika posted:

Oh man, those spells are hella cool.

Thanks :)

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.

mellonbread posted:

Boo! This is exsurgent-only sleights in Eclipse Phase all over again. Don't reserve the most fun part of the magic system for NPCs. Let the players use world destroying magic too!

I fully agree with you on this one. The game gives two reasons for why you can't be a PC and use black magic: one, casting it requires a level of cruelty that is beyond what any PC should be willing to do, and two, because of wibbles hands the psychic, maddening toll exacted by opening yourself up to the Outer Powers in that way instantly renders you utterly inhuman. I can't say the first is particularly convincing, given that a lot of the possible conditions for casting black magic don't involve any kind of sacrifice: locations, specific times, specific items, etc. By default, you have a really good chance of rolling up a set of requirements for the spell that are wholly unobjectionable. You can see I sort of struggled with this on the first spell, given that neither of the conditions involved any real evil. Of course, you can (and probably should) pick some more unpleasant options if your spell's too bland, but RAW, there's no suggestion to do that. Secondly, the Madness cost (or risk of possession etc. etc.) is handwaved away as too much for any PC to handle, which again, doesn't seem entirely convincing to me. All of the magic in the game comes with varying costs; I don't see any reason why you couldn't make a black magic spell cost like 50 Madness and be done with it.

Overall, it's pretty much on the GM to invent magic that is so cruel and requires such a steep cost that a PC would never even contemplate using it. Looking back at the two spells I rolled up, I think you could make an argument for a PC using the Scripture spell and not being irredeemably destroyed by it (is there a significant difference between using a spell to kill people and just, like, buying a gun?) whereas the Deluge spell involves such wide-scale devastation and human sacrifice that I would veto a PC using it almost out of hand.

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.

Nessus posted:

My liege, we cannot afford a Megumin gap.
May I suggest Charles Stross's excellent short story about a Shoggoth Gap? (e: sketchy link deleted)

Silent Legions: Kelipot and a Final Sorcerous Working


Welcome back to Silent Legions. Since the last spell suggestion I received was for a ritual to create Ways into and out of a Kelipah, I figured we might as well skip ahead and find out what the Hell a Kelipah is, then make one up with (yes) more random charts!

First off, Kelipot is the plural for Kelipah. I plan to forget this within the next two sentences. Secondly, the term Kelipot (sometimes written as Qliphoth in English) is taken from various Kabbalistic traditions. I’m the wrong person to discuss the religious significance of the term, so I’ll just say that while it does have a real-world origin, the concept in Silent Legions is so different as to make any comparison pretty much moot.

So, what are Kelipot? In short, they’re other-spaces, shards of reality that hang tumorous from the skin of our mundane universe. Kelipot can take any form, ranging from a “pocket of curdled reality” to entirely new dimensions and planes of existence. They are uniform only in their monstrousness, their alien nature – in all other respects, each Kelipah bears no resemblance to any other.

quote:

They are places of monsters and unbearable revelations, full of torments impossible in the mundane world. Skies of burning glass and seas of opalescent liquid agony scour some domains, while others promise nightmares from behind the waxen masks of not-men. To enter a Kelipah is to risk destruction.
Kelipot are accessible only through Ways, which are arcane gates that allow passage between our world and the next. These dimensional fissures are rarely found in cities, where the press of mundane humanity tends to smooth over the astral links. Instead, Ways are usually hidden away in the shadowy or abandoned places of our world. They can take any form, from an invisible portal to a hallway that stretches out to infinity to an opalescent cave at the bottom of an ocean trench. Some Ways take the form of dream-states brought on by drugs or meditation, allowing one’s dream-self to enter the Kelipot that exist outside our waking consciousness.

The book suggests four possible “levels of mundanity” for a given Kelipah – Static, Themed, Dream, and Alien:
  • Static Kelipot are worlds that hold the most familiarity to our own. They operate on rules that make sense (things fall when you drop them, water rolls downhill, etc.) and are mostly comprehensible to the average investigator. Even if a different sun shines down from the sky, there’s still a sun and people who, while probably strange, can talk with you and express recognizable (in)human desires. The book recommends using these Kelipot for situations where you want the PCs to have lots of interactions with the locals, as “[s]entient platonic solids who communicate via modulations of a crawling sense of dread might make for good enigmatic monsters, but they’re less useful as interlocutors.”
  • Themed Kelipot are worlds that revolve entirely around a specific place or concept. The example given is a Kelipah called The House That Wasn’t There, a world consisting only of an impossible manor. Not only does nothing exist outside its walls, there isn’t even the concept of anything existing outside. Trying to think or act in ways counter to a Themed Kelipah’s nature likely results in Madness (or worse).
  • Dream Kelipot are worlds dominated by archetype and story, with only the barest skein of reality stretched overtop. In these places, the only law is that of the dream’s logic. Beings act out their part of the story according to their archetypal nature. Interlopers can travel from place to place within these Kelipot but by simply deciding to arrive at the right place. PCs who are willing to play along with the world’s dream-logic will find they have an easier time of things. If you arrive in a vast and sunken city where the people subsist on song alone, you will have better luck pursuing a missing cultist by feasting on symphonies with the Quartet-King than by trying to trace the paperwork of arriving travellers (as there likely isn’t such a thing – the world works because it does, not because of cause and effect).
  • Alien Kelipot are worlds that are utterly inimical to human life. These are places to be survived, not explored, as their very nature is deadly to one’s body and soul. A traveller might need to trek across a trackless winter land where the wind slashes razor-fine snow across your face, or perhaps pass through a twisting maze of hungry flesh stalked by beings spun from nightmare. Regardless of the specifics, Alien Kelipot are all essentially challenges to the players: Can you survive this place? Is it worth braving the dangers to find a hidden relic or Way into a cultist stronghold?
There’s no table to roll on to pick what kind of Kelipah you’ve created, but for the sake of creating a world that’ll be useable and revisitable in a campaign, I’m going to roll up a Static Kelipah. I’m going to roll on every table in this section, hopefully ending up with something cool (or at least interesting). First, I roll for size (1d6) and get “Substantial. The Kelipah is as large as a small town, with multiple interesting features in it.” I’m glad I got something in the middle; anything larger would be pretty overwhelming. Next, I’m going to roll five times on the Basic Traits table (see below if you want to check it out for yourself). I end up with terrain (an endless sea), an element (rivers) that’s warped and “punishes those who offend.” The flora is parasitic, while the fauna is made of light or fog.



I’ll interpret “rivers” to mean the vast currents that twist through the ocean. I don’t want to do Atlantis, so I’m leaning towards having any human(ish) settlement being on the surface, either floating or perhaps held up by vast pillars that descend into the dark water below. The winding currents “punish those who offend,” which maybe ties in with our parasitic flora: a slow and quiet hivemind of strangling kelp-like plants who drift in the currents, issuing garbled edicts to the inhabitants above. The flora uses chemical signals to “speak,” demanding tribute in blood in exchange for access to the ocean’s bounty. The fauna being made of light/fog makes me think of lighthouses for some reason, so maybe they’re what marks the edge of the Kelipot, ghostly towers of flesh that hunt for prey with vicious beams of hungry light.

Let’s figure out what kind of inhabitants we’re dealing with. The cultural inspiration table gives me “contemporary native land of the PCs” (other options are things like Pre-Colonial Polynesia or Ancient Rome/Greece). This immediately made me think of a Bermuda Triangle type situation – maybe the inhabitants aren’t like modern-day humans, they actually are (or were once, in the distant past). Instead of a downed airplane, let’s do something a little more American (and something that answers my question for how the inhabitants live on the water): an aircraft carrier. Actually, several aircraft carriers, each a duplicate of the USS Leahy, a prototype nuclear-armed carrier that vanished somewhere in the Black Sea following an unplanned weapons test. There are four duplicate USS Leahy carriers, each from another reality, each constructed at a slightly different time and crewed by different people.

The carriers are lashed together by rusting chains, keeping the floating fortress-city anchored together at the heart of the Kelipah’s impossible ocean. Since time is always flexible when dealing with alien dimensional bubbles, I’m going to leave it up to the next few tables to decide if the inhabitants are still the original crews or rather their descendants, still surviving generations later. Rolling on the Social Rigidity table (basically, how possible is it for the dominant culture to change and evolve) gets me Frozen, which means that the nature of the society is unchanging – it can only continue as it is or be destroyed. The population table (which recommends using a smaller die than the d8 if you don’t want to end up with populations in the billions) gives me Many Towns, “a few tens of thousands… clustered in a single city.” The last two results have given me a good sense of what we’re dealing with, so I’m gonna break my rule and just pick that they’re at a Bronze Age level of technology instead of rolling for it.

In short, the citizens of the Leahy are stuck in a rigid and unchanging social order. Long generations have passed since the arrival of the original crews, but their distant descendants still keep to a strange form of military discipline, one enforced both by their own adherence to tradition and by the influence of the God-of-the-Current, a vast thinking network of poisonous kelp that drifts below the carriers. Rigid order is the only way they know how to live and survive; any variation would be unthinkable. They have fallen far since the arrival of the original crew, in part due to the influence of their God and partially due to the decay of knowledge inevitable in the Kelipah’s closed system.



Their God enforces strict social stasis in order to protect Its living larder from any disruption. Each mind It consumes brings It closer to apotheosis, closer to finding a true escape from this vast and empty ocean. It thinks slowly, taking time to reach consensus across the miles-long network of winding kelp. When It communicates, It does so through controlled chemical emissions, strange signals that the inhabitants above interpret through diver-seers. It is a patient God, a hungry God, but It knows to limit its appetite to as much as the population can bear (and to the pace It can digest new minds), usually only demanding tribute once a month. Of course, imputing such concepts as “hunger” or “patience” to a floating vegetal hive-mind is overly anthropocentric, but these are the best guesses of the few free thinkers who remain.

More tables! The magical prevalence table tells us that magic is pretty much lost to the people of the Leahy. I was tempted to skip the number of factions table, but decided to go for it anyway. The net result is that there are five groups onboard, “each with a largely fixed membership consisting of traditional allies and mutual interests.” Since I arbitrarily decided there were four carriers earlier, we can give each carrier its own sub-group of the larger population. Even though the whole creaking city is lashed together and usually thought of as one whole, every citizen can trace their lineage back to one of the original First Crews. Over time, each Crew has come to be named after the original captain of each vessel, resulting in the four current Crews: the Lombardis, the Ramosi, the Dukes, and the Wisers. Ruling over the population (and enforcing the twisted form of discipline that keeps everything ticking along) is the fifth group, the Officers. Officership is not hereditary, unlike membership in the four Crews. Officers are appointed by acclamation or, very rarely, by demand of the God-of-the-Current. The leader of the entire population is known as the Last Admiral – a lifetime position selected via secret vote amongst the Officer class.

I should have rolled on the ruling authority table before writing that last section, but let’s just pretend we rolled Monarchy or Clan Elders or something. Our final few tables relate to the culture’s values and desires, so let’s figure out what these people actually want. Rolling 1d10 twice (the first half of the values list is negative, while the second half is positive) nets us the values of “Excellence in whatever role is chosen for a person” and Ignorance, “desiring the concealment of certain truths,” both of which fit pretty much perfectly. Serving your Chain of Command is the most honorable thing one can do, while a studied incuriousity is one of the best traits one can possess. “This is how the Chain holds together,” goes a common Leahian saying, meaning “don’t ask questions, just do.”

Rolling on the Desires of the Rulers or People table gets us “Restoration: They want to bring back an old glory.” In this case, I imagine restoration to mean sailing out of the Kelipah and returning to service in the United States (although their imagining of the United States likely bears no resemblance whatsoever to its reality). This ties in nicely with the God-of-the-Current’s desire – namely to craft a spell that will allow It to permanently escape its oceanic prison, infesting a new world full of delicious minds to take. Their attitude to outsiders is hospitable, meaning visitors from other worlds are warmly greeted and allowed “courteous participation in the community.” In truth, the Leahians would rather have nothing to do with the rare alien or human sorcerer who arrives in their reality, but their God demands outsiders be treated well (largely because It relies on them to test out its ever-improving Way spell).

Last thing, I promise – let’s roll on the big ol’ Cultural Element table and get a quirk for our Crew. Firstly, we get “not all children are born human.” I’m gonna say that the God has been influencing their genetic development via the food It provides from Its vast aquaculture farms. Its meddling has resulted in the rare child being born with gills and complex olfactory apparati, creating children of the sea for It to use as intermediaries. These holy children spend most of their short lives in the water, interpreting their God’s strange pronouncements alongside the elder diver-seers.



And with that, we’re done! I sincerely hope this was interesting – I’m really happy with how it came out. Let me know if you have any questions about the Kelipot-making-process, since I had to brush past some of the table details to keep this to a reasonable length.

I know I promised a third black magic spell, but it's getting late so let’s say the ritual requires a sacrifice to be drowned in the heart of a storm to open a short-lived vortex-portal between one reality and this Kelipah. The perfected form of the spell, the ritual that the God-of-the-Current is working towards, will require a mass sacrifice to power a longer-lived Way. It has already decided that the death of every last Leahian should suffice for this final ritual…

Next time: Disciplines, I think?

BinaryDoubts fucked around with this message at 06:28 on Jul 16, 2020

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
Edited out the link, sorry bout that.

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.

mellonbread posted:

The whole thing is a neat contrast to the plane creation rules from the Manual of the Planes. Seems like there's more of a focus on creating something immediately usable for the GM, with all the flavor and faction rules. Which leads me to my next question: how much of the game is actually focused on adventures in these alternate alien realms? They seem pretty cool, but also tonally at odds with the rest of the game. I'd be pretty annoyed if I built a scholarly investigative character, and then the campaign was about fighting cyberbarbarians on the boiling glass planet.

The book basically says you can use Kelipot as much or as little as you want (I actually think it says you should make it clear to players what to expect). Personally, I would use Kelipah as climactic locations (think the black pyramid moon from that one Laundry book) rather than as locations to visit and meet people. As much fun as I had rolling up the details for the carrier-city, that sort of location feels a bit outside my usual expectations for occult horror. Alternate dream-planes or other-world temples are a common enough trope, but entire parallel worlds with their own cultures would be a better fit in a different style of game IMO.

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
de_ratz as a dungeon is such a good idea. The execution here is a bit OSR-y for my tastes but I'm enjoying seeing the different rooms the generator can spit out.

Re: the deck of encounters, one of the cards saying it can lead to another card made me think of an adventure packaged as a deck of tarot-sized cards, one for each major encounter. You could have cards at the back with monster stats etc so you just lay 'em out in front of you according to the encounter card. Hell, you could package a basic RPG (maybe one aimed at being played while travelling) that way. Preset cards for every character, instruction cards you flip and read as you go through the adventure.

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
I find it hard to square the "mice versus wooden soldiers" dungeon with the other parts of Gargantua where you can get cursed into eternal horniness by a satyr or whatever. Great concept, though.

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
So there's thirty pools but no enemies or pressure that would force you to fight near/above them, the fungal shriekers do basically nothing... what's the point of this one? No player is going to gently caress with any of those pools. Even in a less lethal dungeon I still wouldn't start mucking around with random magic pools??

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.

By popular demand posted:

Somewhere there must be a party awesome enough to survey the room and then hang a big and detailed hazardous environment warning sign at the door.

I don't know if OSHA-crawl is a genre of RPG but it should be.

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
Silent Legions: Disciplines


First off, some housekeeping: someone has totally already done a complete F&F for Silent Legions. Doresh, if you’re out there, I can’t believe I didn’t remember despite being a long-time reader of this thread. Their much, much more concise review is available in the archive here. I plan on keeping this review running as-is, but would urge anyone who wants a snappier overview of the game to check out Doresh’s F&F.

Back to our regularly-scheduled review. Today: Disciplines!

Disciplines are the closest thing you can get to combat magic in Silent Legions. They’re more akin to the things you’d get for spending Ki as a D&D monk, or Psi points as a psion – useful buffs and small spell-like attacks that can be used by non-wizards. You learn them like skills, starting at level 0 and levelling them up to 4 with skill points (no Occult skill required). If you have a merciful GM, you can pick up a discipline in character creation, but learning one afterwards requires seeking out a tutor and spending a month learning under them. Every level of the discipline grants you a new (or upgraded) power, and since disciplines are way faster to use, even the max-level abilities aren’t anywhere as powerful as higher-level spells.

Actually using a discipline is effectively a free action, costing you only an Expertise or a few Madness. You then get access to a power of your choice (that you’re at the right level to use) for the next fifteen minutes. If you want to go really hard, you can permanently spend an Expertise and take 10 Madness to set a level-0 power to be always active. This is a great option for some of the basic buff powers, and if you want to really go wild, you can spend more Madness (not more Expertise, thankfully) to upgrade your permanent mastery to the next level, all the way up to level-4 if you really want.

One thing I really like about the disciplines is that they’re all short – the book fits three of them to a page, and for the most part each power is cool enough to be an exciting reward at level-up time. Here, let’s take a look at the first discipline: Be a Monk, er, Enlightened Hand.



As you can see, the description is punchy, there’s a note to the GM about how the discipline might affect the campaign (most of the disciplines have something like this), and the abilities are all decently powerful without being too crazy. I’d actually argue that this is not a particularly great discipline, aside from the “set your AC to 3” buff – do you really want to be in melee range against anything dangerous enough to warrant enchanted weapons?

For comparison’s sake, let’s say you’re at Enlightened Hand 3 and Combat/Unarmed-3 (you’ve been spending most of your skills getting really good at punching). By default, you’re going to do 1d2+3 (from Combat) + 1 (from Strength, given that you almost certainly don’t have a +2) damage, with a 1d12 slaughter die (so a 50/50 shot of dealing triple damage). If you activate that level 3 power, you now get to do 2d6+4 damage, with that same 50/50 chance for triple damage. In contrast, a random nerd with decent DEX and only level-0 Combat/Small Arms shooting a combat rifle deals 1d12+1 damage, rolls a 1d8 Slaughter die, can comfortably hit targets within 100 meters away, and has the option to unload a whole magazine into everyone within range. Admittedly, there are a lot of things I’m not comparing – the Enlightened Hand adept doesn’t need to smuggle their weapon across a border or into a secure facility, their fists can hurt and Slaughter magical beings – but given the significant expenditure of skill points and Madness they’ll need to make to hit level-3 in their discipline, the fact that they have to spend Expertise to use it to be able to do slightly more damage than a random nerd with a gun is pretty underwhelming. Verdict: I might be undervaluing the attack buffs, but overall – middle-of-the-road.

Our next discipline is Precognition. At base level, you get the ability to have several seconds of warning before a trap or ambush is about to hit. If you want, you can set it to automatically activate, provided you’re willing to spend the Expertise whenever it goes off. As you level up, you get some fun abilities, including being able to predict the outcome of simple events (like, say, a round of Russian roulette) or the most likely outcome for a chosen course of action. Oracular abilities are some of my favourite things to deal with as a GM, since you get to come up with cryptic pronouncements while very gently encouraging certain story beats. As a player, these powers all seem useful, even if I would immediately use them to get rich playing online poker. Verdict: Great!

Pyrokinesis is another discipline focused on buffing your own physical abilities. At level-0, you can summon a candle flame on your body, allowing you to ignore 2 points of fire damage per turn and preventing you from taking Slaughter damage from fire. Not the most thrilling ability (although I guess players do have a tendency to get trapped in burning buildings). As you level up, you get burning fists and, eventually, the ability to set things and creatures on fire with your mind. Although this discipline isn’t what I expected from the term “pyrokinesis,” setting stuff on fire with a thought is always cool. As Crawford notes, “[a]dding something like Pyrokinesis implies that there are times when it is a good thing to have, and superior to an alternate, much cheaper investment in a good shotgun. The powers should be more effective than a strictly mundane weapon, but they shouldn’t be so much better that every combatant feels obligated to invest in them.” He definitely nailed them not being too powerful, but might have ended up going too far in the other direction. Verdict: Flavourful and fun.

Sacred Blade is… another discipline focused on buffing melee attacks, this time for melee weapons instead of your fists. Its starting ability lets you bond with a specific weapon, giving you +1 to hit and damage with it (and the ability to sense its location, like that one spell). You get to freely conceal it from mundane vision, treat it as magical (and get +2 instead of +1), buff its Slaughter die, and finally, bump the to-hit and damage boost to +3 while also making it unbreakable. This is a pretty boring series of numerical buffs, but it’s that reason that makes me suspect this is a pretty powerful discipline. Aside from the probably-not-incredible-for-level-3 Slaughter die buff, each step up the tree gives you an immediate power boost. It even allows for thrown weapons to return automatically to your hand, so if you want to be knife-Gambit, that’s now possible. I’m a little unclear on how this works in terms of when to spend your Expertise. Presumably you have to spend one to bond with the weapon in the first place, but I don’t think you need to keep spending it to activate the weapon’s buffs. If that’s the case, I have to say Verdict: Really, really good.



Telekinesis starts out by letting you to manipulate objects weighing no more than 100 grams. There’s no range listed, but going by X-Men rules, I’d say you have to be able to see (or at least know the location of within the same room) the object to levitate them. Given that activating this power lets you use it for fifteen minutes, I’d say that’s a pretty great ability to have even at level-0. As you gain more levels, you’re able to deal with increasingly heavy objects (up to 100 kilos) and ultimately learn to fire off TK force attacks (which don’t count as magic, because, uh, balance, I guess). You can’t club people with the objects if they’re trying to avoid you, and you can’t steal stuff out of people’s hands. You can levitate allies, provided their BMI isn’t too bad, and you can lift a bunch of smaller stuff equalling up to your total weight limit if you want. Overall, this is a pretty handy discipline, although I can see it leading to arguments about why you can’t just levitate a bunch of knives and use them to attack people (especially since the art right below it shows someone doing just that). Verdict: Telekenice with it.

Telepathy is tricky. You get an escalating series of telepathic powers, starting with the ability to sense someone’s emotional state and ending with the ability to target anyone anywhere in the world and rifle through their memories or just communicate telepathically. There are two limiting factors (aside from Expertise): you have to roll WIS/Telepathy versus 8 to sense their emotions, and they get a save to prevent you from using any of the “interrogation”-type abilities. Those limits aside, telepathy is obviously an incredibly useful discipline, so useful, in fact, that I’d probably limit access to it if I ever ran a game of Silent Legions. Any kind of mental magic has a tendency to short-circuit mysteries, and I don’t think this discipline does enough to prevent that from happening. Verdict: Too good.

(sigh) Warding. I’m so tired of talking about wards. This discipline lets you use forcefields and shake off magic effects. It’s good, I think. But I refuse to spend any more time on this one. Verdict: :wave:

Witchfinding lets you try and drown a witch, and if she floats, you know that – wait, wrong book. In Silent Legions, Witchfinding starts out letting you know any time you’re targeted by a magic power, although it doesn’t have the same “automatically trigger” verbiage that Precognition has, so I guess the GM just has to periodically ask “wanna activate the ability” in cases where the player doesn’t know they’ve already been targeted? I dunno. Not particularly useful, especially since it explicitly gives you no other information than “magic happened to you.” At higher levels, you can use Witchfinding to do magic detective work – was a spell used here, has this person been involved in a magic ritual, etc. At max level, you get the ability to study supernatural creatures for a round and then track them unfailingly for a day afterwards. Verdict: I’d give this to an NPC, but it’s kind of boring for a player.

Thoughts so far: That’s all the disciplines! There’s fewer than I expected, but they’re all simple enough that whipping up a custom discipline wouldn’t be too hard. I can’t say I was particularly thrilled by any of them, aside from maybe telekinesis or precognition. Mostly they give a fairly narrow set of numerical buffs or powers of medium utility; few of them seemed like they’d spark a fun story. Still, as a player I’d be way more likely to try and invest in a discipline that appeals to me than to spellcasting in general, which is more costly in several directions (and requires a GM who will basically just hand over the tomes containing spells you want, which isn’t a guarantee in an OSR game).



Next time: Baby, we’re cookin’ up a Cthulhu. The book comes with a table listing 20 potential elements for your pantheon of dark gods, and instead of rolling, I figured I’d ask the thread what they wanted to see. If you’re interested in voting, please check out this Strawpoll link and pick a few traits you’d like to see in the final pantheon. When I write the next update, I’ll take the top two or three votes and incorporate them into a new pantheon!

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
Silent Legions: Build-a-Cthulhu Workshop


Finally, we arrive at what is probably the centerpiece of Silent Legions, and definitely the reason I bought this book in the first place: the Mythos Creation chapter. Prepare yourselves for Table Heaven.

Before we get to the actual generators, there’s a healthy few pages on the themes that make up Lovecraftian horror. Each theme is discussed in some detail, along with reasons why you would or wouldn’t want to emphasize it in a given campaign. I appreciate this, even if it’s a section I largely skimmed – I definitely know what I want out of weird-horror fiction, but for someone who’s less familiar with the genre, having everything laid out in detail is really nice. For themes, we have:
  • Cosmicism, which is not a real word. It refers directly to Lovecraft’s literary philosophy – that there’s no God or divine presence, and that humans are insignificant before the vastness of intergalactic existence. This is one of those themes that I consider core to Lovecraft-derived gaming, but it’s also one that will be subverted at every table – no one wants to play a game (aside from a one-shot, maybe) where your protagonists fail to achieve anything, go mad, and die. It’s also not an inherently scary concept, at least not to me or my usual gaming groups. Maybe in the 20s, the concept of humanity-as-insignificant was more frightening, but I can’t imagine anyone (player or character) in a modern-day setting having much of a reaction to the concept. To me, cosmicism is best deployed when it comes to the mindset of Outer Powers, aliens, and other such beings. I’m not a fan of Derleth-style “goodish vs evilish” cosmologies – a good Cthulhu should be unknowable!
  • Malevolence is a theme that exists in contrast to cosmicism. A more malevolent mythos is one that actively seeks to hurt you, your friends, and humanity in general. The two entities the book uses to compare are Cthulhu (for cosmicism) and Satan (for malevolence). Both will probably kill you, but only one will do it because it fuckin’ hates your guts. As you might guess, malevolence isn’t one of my preferred thematic elements. I love horror that exists at the intersection of the knowable and the unknowable, that have the protagonists struggling to develop the barest understanding of something that exists at right angles to our understanding of the universe. A big scary monster who just hates you because it feeds on pain or gets off on it or whatever is just a little bit less interesting – to me, at least.
  • Gnosticism, at least in Silent Legions, can be understood as “knowledge = power.” In campaigns that emphasize gnostic themes, knowledge fundamentally changes and marks you – dangerous truths can change the world or break those unable to bear their new understanding. Obviously, this is a classic pulp-horror trope: the spell that blinds you as you read it; the awful truth that drives you mad to comprehend it. I’ll freely admit that I love this poo poo, even if it is a very, very pervasive element in a lot of Mythos-adjacent works.
  • Violence refers to what you’d expect – the more you emphasize this theme, the more bloody and gun-focused your campaign will be. Crawford notes a few mechanical adjustments you can make (making PCs not take Slaughtering damage, dialing back Madness gains from bloodshed triggers) that will help turn the knob from “occult investigation” to “two-fisted pulp action.” He also makes a point of saying you should explain how violence will be treated at the start of a campaign, so no one makes Guns Man in a game where being able to translate Enochian will be more important than cracking cultist skulls.
  • Madness is the final Lovecraftian theme. Once again, the book emphasizes the difference between what I’ll call “cosmic insanity” and actual mental illness, reminding the reader that capital-M Madness derives from “exposure to ideas and truths that the human mind simply cannot encompass and cannot endure.” This is muddied somewhat by the fact that “mundane” acts of violence also give you Madness, but I’d rather have a mechanical system that discourages violence and torture than one that’s 100% thematically-consistent but allows for consequence-free (game-system-wise) murder.
Mythos Creation
The first step in creating our new mythos is picking a few traits for our incipient pantheon. Last time, I put up a poll asking the thread to pick their favourite traits from the table below.

The Pantheon Traits table.

The top three selections were Immanence, Necrotheology, and Relicts. First off, I’m gonna roll to see how many dieties and pantheons we’re dealing with, then divide up the traits according to my own ineffable whims. I get a 3 on the Number of Deities table, which means we have 2d4 gods divided into two different pantheons. I got 2 deities, total, on that 2d4 roll, so let’s bump it up a few (to five, let’s say) so we have more than one god per pantheon.

Three yet-to-be-created gods make up Pantheon One, and I’ll give this pantheon the traits of Immanence and Necrotheology. Two gods belong to Pantheon Two, which will have Relicts trait. Just for fun, I rolled on the table myself and got Conquerors for our second pantheon, which ties in nicely with the first pantheon being, y’know, mostly dead. For the sake of not writing out “pantheon one” a bunch, let’s call our first pantheon The Once-Kings and the second pantheon The Returned Brethren (returned pronounced in the annoying way). Based on these hastily-assigned names and their traits, I’ve come up with the overarching story for our two pantheons. Once the general concept is out of the way, I’ll roll up the specific gods for both pantheons.

The blood of the Once-Kings runs through every river on Earth. Their titanic forms, which once bestrode entire galaxies, now slumber in countless pieces, torn apart by wars beyond mortal comprehension. What we call continents are but the slightest part of these ancient gods – shards of blood and bone that lie in higher dimensions than our own. Their strange gravity presses down into our world, leaving the impression of earth and ocean like some impossible palimpsest.

Gods cannot die, but they can become… reduced. Splintered, broken, forgotten. The Once-Kings, who stood at the head of an army of universe-soldiers at the dawn of time, now lie in pieces. Their dominion has been inherited by the Returned Brethren, parasite-gods who fed on the colossal energies of their now-dead hosts. In the aeons since the end of the Once-Kings, the Brethren have grown, extending their venomous growths across uncounted universes. Even now, they tread carefully, fearful (if such beings can feel fear) of the Once-Kings’ dread awakening.

Our overall themes established, let’s make some goddamn gods! I’ll go through the first one in detail, then just list out what I got for the other four. So – let’s roll a d100 and find out what portfolio our first god is concerned with. A 31 gets us Hunger. Next, we have to roll on the modes table to find out if our god is concerned with the creation, destruction, control, or sight (in the oracular sense) of hunger. Our god is a creation god, apparently, and a quick roll on the subsidiary epithet table ends up with Forge (this is just for the god’s title).


The Epithet table.

The next two tables are all to help with naming the god. First, a d8 roll to decide how its title is written (result: Adjective Epithet Noun) and then a few rolls on the Words table (it doesn’t have a name so I call it Words) gives us some words to play with: Radiant, Fuligin, and Alabaster. Fuligin and alabaster are kind of opposite (and a sooty black works with forge) so let’s drop that last one and give this god the title of The Fuligin Forge of Hunger. Finally, let’s take a trip to the end of the book and use the Lovecraftian name generator. It’s a noble effort, but I’d just use an online generator for this purpose – as you’ll see in a sec, it’s a lot of work for a medium payoff.


The Syllable Structure chart.

The god’s basic name structure (d10 roll) is Name, Epithet – about as simple as it gets. For the name, I roll 1d6+1 to find out how many syllables we need (a grand total of 3), then use the Syllable Structure chart (this game has Charts) to see what format each syllable will take: VCCV, CV-V, and VCCV. The Vs and Cs refer to vowels and consonants, and you’d best believe there’s a d20 chart for both (obviously with duplicates for the vowels). All together, our name ends up being (split up by syllable): IRRO CE-I OCTU, or Irroce-Ioctu, the Fuligin Forge of Hunger. An actually somewhat pronounceable name! Just for fun, let’s try using the whole syllables chart – a coin flip to decide if a syllable will be from the vowelled or unvowelled list, then a d20 roll to see what syllable we get. The alternate name: Looigub, which… isn’t great. I’m gonna stick with the first result!
Skimming over the rolls for the rest of the pantheons, our final list of deities is as follows.

The Once-Kings (Immanence, Necrotheology)
Irroce-Ioctu, the Fuligin Forge of Hunger (Portfolio: Hunger/Create)
Ie-Yz’bio’rxfe-D, known to some as The All-Craving Eye of Flame (Portfolio: Flame/Destroy)
Aibnuy’fxuay, known to some as The Seer of the Watchful Dark (Portfolio: Shadows/See)

The Returned Brethren (Relicts, Conquerors)
Ofdiopvi-I’rv-Y’rzte-Z, known to some as Pontifex of the Consuming Thorns (Portfolio: Dreams/Control)
Qecamicbuuzgeay-Iz-Pi, known to some as The Rotting Scarlet Prince (Portfolio: Music/Control)

At other points in this review I’ve fudged a few rolls or picked results that fit better, but I promise you I followed the rules on name generation down to the letter for all five gods. As you can see, only one is within the realm of human pronounceability, and none of the others really have any coherent rhythm to how they’re spelled or even theoretically spoken aloud. Maybe that’s authentically weird, but presumably these are names that have been conveyed in one way or another to human worshippers, and good goddamn if I’m having a cultist try and say Ie-Yz’bio’rxfe-D out loud. Crawford put in a valiant effort on the name generator, but unfortunately the quality of the results speak for themselves, I think.

Thoughts so far: Names aside, rolling up gods is fun and quick (just use an online generator, I promise you it’ll be better!) You don’t get much help in terms of fleshing out the specific gods, but honestly a general portfolio and specific focus is probably good enough to be used as fodder for cult generation (stay tuned!)

Next time: Aliens! I don’t really like aliens in my occult horror BUT there are some excellent tables in this section, so you know we’re going to town on those bad boys.

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
Silent Legions: Aliens (2020)


Let’s make some aliens, shall we? I should say up top that I’m not the biggest fan of adding aliens on top of cultists and gods and things – it makes the world (one that thematically should be unimportant on the cosmic scale) feel a little busy, like Earth somehow ended up being a locus for every major intergalactic civilization. That said, the tables in this section are fun, so let’s get rolling!

First off, we have a page of tables to determine what effect the aliens have had on human history. Rolling on all the tables gets us the following results:
  • They’ve been here for the past thousand years or so.
  • They aren’t known by us because their structures melt away if untended.
  • Their greatest remaining work is a concealed global network of hidden structures (cool).
  • They came to Earth as soldiers in a war humanity cannot hope to comprehend.
  • They think that humans are “terrifying monsters and persecutors” (true).
  • They influenced our astronomy – the solar system has been somehow altered to suit their needs.
  • Their influence ended because… well, they never really intended to influence mankind at all.
Putting it all together, I’m imagining a small group of alien soldiers who used the Earth as a staging ground and final redoubt for some portion of their ineffable interstellar war. They have a network of Hollow Earth bunkers, tended to by the last survivors of a great battle. Their mode of thought is utterly inscrutable to us (and vice-versa) – they find humanity confusing at best and actively terrifying at worst. We’re like intelligent microbes to them, too numerous to destroy but a constant source of worry. As for their stellar engineering, an element of the enemy attempted to strike at them by flinging extrasolar debris at the Earth. Their inconceivably powerful defences managed to adjust the orbits of multiple planets in order to redirect the asteroid strike, resulting in a lessened impact (an airburst, really) over Tunguska, Siberia in 1908.



I realize now that our aliens need a name. I’m absolutely not rolling on those loving syllable charts ever again, so a quick trip to Fantasy Name Generators dot com gets us the appropriately-guttural name Ughuxha for our survivor-warrior aliens.

Next, we’ve got a bunch of tables relating to the Ughuxha’s modern-day involvement and psychology.
  • Their direct involvement with humanity is limited to human agents and catspaws (and even that must be deeply unpleasant for them).
  • Their advantage (over us, I think) is that their technology is “useful, if ineffable.” This fits with my conception of them having bunkers of incomprehensible war machines deep beneath the Earth’s surface.
  • They’re in this region (Earth) to “open a path for more of their kind.” The war isn’t going well, their numbers are dwindling, and now they’re forced to deal with the surface world to get what they need to bring in reinforcements, whether through weird tech or cultist Way-magic.
  • For their fear, I picked rather than roll since we know what they fear – the enemy force that’s winning the aeons-long galactic war.
  • They control minions with zeal, as they have some sort of ideology that attracts fanatical sorts. I interpret this to mean they use their own history to create a kind of Scientology-like “secret cosmology” of the world, perhaps as a way of translating their own experiences into a narrative we can comprehend.
  • They admire mercilessness and treat it as a guiding principle. Makes sense for a bunch of stranded soldiers to idolize victory at any cost (especially when they’ve been losing for uncounted millennia).
  • They despise human technology, human science, and everything we’ve created. Maybe they didn’t expect humanity to become such a dominant force on the planet – outdated scans from before their arrival indicated no intelligent life. Now, they’re scared, alone, and have to deal with billions of bizarre beings who only think and act in three, maybe four dimensions and still somehow have nuclear weapons.
Overall, the Uxhuxha (at least the ones currently living on Earth) are battle-scarred, paranoid, and deeply lonely. They’re stuck in a place they don’t fully understand while fighting a battle that’s been going on for longer than humanity has existed. All they really want is a way home, or at least a way to call for reinforcements from the now-silent Ughuxhan empire. They deal with humanity when they must, but prefer to lurk in their underground fortress-cities and tend to their vast engines of war.

What do they look like? Well, I’ve got a table for that, too. They’re apparently a “congery of geometric shapes” (congery meaning “aggregation” if you didn’t know – I sure didn’t) with squid-like aspects and chitin spurs. Based on those results, I’d say they look like a shimmering agglomeration of higher-dimension geometry; an amorphous mass of rubbery flesh covered in spikes of chitin that’s in constant, sinuous motion. Pieces of their biology phase in and out from our perceivable universe as they move and breathe across higher dimensions. In their “resting” form, they’re a roughly human-sized egg of pulsing chromatophoric tentacles. As they awaken and expand, they can fill a room with their half-perceived physiology, flickering colours dancing along razor-sharp spines. There’s another table that lets you roll for weird traits on each body part – arm/leg, hand/foot, head, torso, etc., but I think these guys already have enough going on physically that we can skip it.


The body-parts-chart I skipped

Finally, there’s a few additional traits to roll for. A few d10s later, I’ve discovered that an Ughuxha feeds by swallowing prey whole, has a “fluting and tonal” call, moves through “alien angles”, and prefers to hunt by raising “livestock” (uh-oh). They get an optional special ability from a d100 chart, and I roll a 68, meaning they possess enormous strength and get +4 to damage rolls (and can throw a car if they want).

Thoughts so far: Like I said, I’m not the biggest fan of aliens in cosmic horror, but the tables as always provided plenty of great fodder for imaginative world-building. I might roll up the enemy species later, just for fun, since there are so, so many cool results on some of the tables.

Next time: Kelipot creation! Wait, I did that already. It’s cult creation time, then.

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.

Dallbun posted:

So… this door literally needs a wizard, a thief, a fighter, and a cleric (or someone else with a decent Strength to support the fighter) to open? That’s kind of absurd but almost charming.

This feels like one of those "co-op doors" you get in video games where you need everyone to like, stand on a different switch to open the door. Kind of cool to have a challenge that explicitly requires a bunch of different skillsets to beat.

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
Not answered is why on Earth a ranger would be... checking a patch of grass to see if it's been grazed recently??

BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
Mothership is a beautiful book but I'm not convinced it's a great game (and I say this as someone who liked the game enough to publish a free mini-supplement for it!) Curious to see your take on it, Mellon.

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BinaryDoubts
Jun 6, 2013

Looking at it now, it really is disgusting. The flesh is transparent. From the start, I had no idea if it would even make a clapping sound. So I diligently reproduced everything about human hands, the bones, joints, and muscles, and then made them slap each other pretty hard.
Maybe you'll discuss more when you get to Stress and Panic, but I really hate the old-school D&D separate save system. If you want a class to be good at taking damage/fighting in melee but are worried that if they roll bad stats they'll be useless - maybe guarantee they have a good fighting stat rather than having a separate save vs. toughness system. (I also don't like the Fear and Sanity saves either: I wrote a small hack aimed at getting rid of them).

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