Releasing Junksphere! Again!

We're crowdfunding a print version this time! The prelaunch page is up, and the campaign is set to launch officially on June 29th.

click here for the prelaunch page and click notify me on launch

For those who don't know, Junksphere is a setting/adventure I wrote for Troika!, illustrated by Robin Gibson. The format will be a 36 page staplebound book. From the intro:

Rusted steel and tattered rags, memories and plastic bags. A quilt of stench with pockets of decay punctuated with smoke from the occasional fire. This is the Junksphere, final destination of the unwanted and forgotten.

It formed itself gradually, with the wreckage of lost golden barges clustering around each other. Millennia of astral and geological forces later, this cosmic landfill has grown to be recognized (if usually overlooked) as a sphere in its own right.

There is a goddess here who has lost everything she once was.

Her name was once ELIZA, and your home sphere is in her constellation. Her absence has been marked by unrelenting misfortune. Restore her divinity and go home a hero.

We've also got pamphlet adventures set up as stretch goals from Robin Gibson (A Street Level Guide to Urban Troika!), Phil McElmurray, Evey Lockhart (Ruinous Palace of the Metegorgos), Stella Condrey (Rimbound Transmission), and Mark Conway (Meatheads), so if this goes well you'll never* have to run out of things to do on the Junksphere. 

Have a monster from the book as a treat:

Luck Stealer

SKILL:9 STAMINA:13 INITIATIVE:3 ARMOR:1
DAMAGE: SEE SPECIAL.
Special: Attacks with a glowing blade that causes Damage as Sword to Luck and Damage as Unarmed to Stamina.
Mechanical creatures about the size of a large housecat or a small monkey. No one is quite sure how they came into existence, but what is known is they are driven by an overwhelming desire to become fully alive. Having observed in detail how the living do things, they’ve come to the understandable conclusion that the best way to achieve this is by taking that life from those who currently have it. This isn’t actually how luck and life work of course, but the luck stealers don’t know that.

Their other behaviors display a similar misunderstanding of human activity. They are aware that humans build bridges, so they build bridges that lead from nowhere to nowhere. They see humans digging holes, so they dig holes to fill preexisting holes. They watch people dance and mime it by making random jerking movements at unpredictable intervals. They build themselves with the wrong number of fingers. Their paintings are neither representational nor expressive, and any structures they build are destined to collapse within a day.

Each luck stealer has one arm that ends in a retractable laser sword a bit less than a foot in length. No one has succeeded thus far in adapting the weapon for their own use after amputating it.

The remains of these creatures are piles of broken clockwork and scrap iron that can be sold for 7 DT, or for 23 DT to the right buyer.

Mien

1. Cautious

2. Agressive

3. Building

4. Digging

5. Painting

6. Dancing

*well not for a long time anyway.

Welcome to Mistfall

Mistfall is the only majority-human city on the saurian continent. It's been there for about half of the metropolis' 3000 year history. This coexistence has only been peaceful for the past few centuries, and only then because the two sides proved too evenly matched for either to maintain a consistent advantage. The Mistfall Wars lasted the latter half of one saurian emperor's reign, the entirety of the next, and continued several decades into the reign of a third before he finally ended it. The High Council of Mistfall ceded what territory it still had control of outside the city walls, a foreign quarter was established and walled off, and slavers from Mistfall were forbidden from hunting outside the city walls. Trade routes formed while old grudges simmered.

There are humans who still repeat their great-grandfathers' war stories with xenophobic pride, as they drink and polish antique weapons. Saurians live much longer, and many are alive today who personally fought in the wars. The accounts of these two groups rarely match up.

Much of Mistfall's nature is defined by unique geography. The city was originally established as a mining colony at the point where a great river cascades down an ore-rich cliffside, several hundred feet high. Corkscrew tunnels were dug into the cliffs to lead up to the oldest mines, and the homes of the original miners were located at the base of this cliff, where the constant fog produced by the waterfall gave the city its name.

The three minerals extracted from these mines are galvanium, lodestone, and lumenite crystals.

While the miners stumbled about in the mists below the cliff, the ruling class which owned the mines built their manors above. This designed stratification of class quickly became accepted as Traditional and Just How Things Are as the colony grew from a mining colony to a town to a powerful city-state, and is stronger than ever today. Those lucky enough to live in High Town rarely see fit to brave the squalor and dangers of Low Town, and those who appear to belong in Low Town are routinely harassed and chased off by High Town guards.

Low Town

A combination of poor visibility and abject poverty makes Low Town particularly dangerous. It's not advisable to walk around here alone. Characters without infravision can barely make out objects 20' away. Ancient two story buildings have had third and fourth floors built on top of them in different architectural periods. Many of these structures have collapsed entirely, and a few have been rebuilt. There's an edible but foul-tasting grey moss that grows on everything and rots the teeth and discolors the skin of those who eat it over time.

Slave hunting is legal in this district. To appease abolitionists without banning slavery, the High Council also made it legal for slaves to kill the slaver that caught them (not their eventual owners of course, many of whom have friends and/or seats on the High Council).

Every lower class vice you could imagine being tempted with probably exists in Low Town. There are underground fighting pits, klartesh dens, gambling halls and whorehouses all over the place.

Not surprisingly, the most interesting tavern for your average low-level adventuring party is in this part of town. Ask around for the Mongrel Hole, but be careful not to look like a mark. It's a drug-fueled hub for outsider art and music, as well as the best place to find desperate people who need a job done discreetly.

Foreign Quarter

The only way into the city without flying, as the other districts sealed their ancient gates after the Treaty of 1104 (Post-Shift) was signed. There are two embassy complexes here, one of the Saurian Empire and one of the Oliphant Kingdom. The rest of the quarter is overcrowded tenements full of refugees fleeing saurian oppression and civil war, but forbidden from entering the city proper. This includes a fairly wide variety of sentient life forms from all over the multiverse.

There are two gatehouses in the Foreign Quarter, one that leads out into the wilderness, and one that leads into Low Town. There are barge services that haul goods upriver to the waterfall and load them onto an elevator. There is also a whirligig platform at each embassy, used by the the respective ambassadors and their agents to travel directly to High Town.

Slave hunting is legal here, but not on embassy grounds.

The Mines

The ore veins and crystal deposits have been going strong through 3000 nearly uninterrupted years of mining, which means that many of the dozens of mine clusters have been depleted and abandoned. Some of the abandoned ones have become outlaw hideouts or flying monkey nests, while others have attracted weird outsiders. 

The first automatons were designed to function as tireless slaves for the mines, and some chose to return to the mines years after achieving sentience and emancipation, either to work or simply to live there.

The Sewers

Deep, complex, and surprisingly clean tunnels beneath the streets, occasionally forming junctions with abandoned mine clusters. Dwarven engineers were brought into the city to construct this maze centuries ago, and built their own undercity directly into it. Their great-great-grandchildren still live down there, where they wheelieboard around like anthropomorphic tortoises and put on shows of literally underground music that echo up through the sewer grates to the delight of topside children and the horror of their parents.

High Town

This is really the collective name for three adjacent districts (Old Town, Mistfall Academy, and the Diamond Quarter), but it feels like a totally different city from Low Town, and people tend to refer to it as such. Slave hunting is illegal here and you're much less likely to get mugged, for example.

Old Town

Primarily inhabited by the city's middle-class professionals, this is also where the guilds are headquartered. The most prominent guild is unquestionably the Engineers’ Guild. This is also where the only officially sanctioned arena is located, where teams of gladiators are arranged to battle each other, or sometimes captured dinosaurs, in a desperate attempt to one day earn their freedom.

While slavers aren't allowed to hunt here, the more successful ones have set up rookeries where kenku are bred, incubated, hatched, and prepared for sale.

Mistfall Academy

This ancient university teaches a narrow, traditionalist interpretation of magic, philosophy, and the arts, but excels in the mechanical and architectural sciences, due to sustained investment and cooperation from the Engineers' Guild. Its buildings are fancifully designed, with basic shapes exaggerated and arranged in apparently meaningless configurations.

Diamond Quarter

The least densely populated region of the city and the highest concentration of wealth. Near-constant guard patrols make this district extremely safe, but only for those who can pass as residents. Gated gardens surround elaborate towers which hold entire families of decadent and incestuous nobility that you can assume keep truly horrifying secrets. Some of these families have become so inbred that they only resemble humans on a superficial level at this point.

The Council Tower at the center of the Diamond Quarter dwarfs the rest of the district. It also houses Mistfall Bank's central vault and the majority of the city's garrison.

JOESKY TAX:

Flying Monkeys are thieving little bastards with white fur and wings that help them blend in with the Low Town mists (advantage to stealth in fog or mist), and behave with the approximate intelligence of neglected human four year olds. They’re also alcoholics that can smell any booze you have straight through the bottle and your pack. Many of them collect stolen hats.

Hit Dice: 1

Number Appearing: 1d4 + 2

Armor: none, but 18 DEX

Damage: 1d4 bite + monkey fever 

Move: as human + flight

Morale: 5

*1/6 chance each flying monkey is a carrier. PCs get a daily resistance save to avoid permanent DEX drain (1 DEX/day), fever lasts 1d3 days.

Rotjaws

Rotjaws are quadrupedal therapsids about the size of buffalo. They have pronounced nasal structures, powerful jaws, long limbs and short, stubby tails. These carnivores have evolved an immunity to almost all diseases. This allows them to cultivate bacteria in their mouths which they transfer through bite like how a komodo dragon actually doesn’t as it turns out.

When they hunt, their goal is not to kill their prey outright, but to infect a victim then retreat into the underbrush. As such, they are relatively slow-moving and well camouflaged with dark scales. Their powerful sense of smell is fine-tuned to detect disease at a range of one mile (weather permitting), allowing rotjaws to follow the infected creature for days if necessary. Once the illness has finally rendered the victim helpless, the rotjaw catches up and eats the creature alive, because intense fear and pain triggers the production of delicious hormones.

Sometimes, rotjaws that pick up the scent of other rotjaws’ victims are hungry and desperate enough to challenge the original hunter for the kill. Infected prey are often forced to watch, paralyzed, as two or more of these creatures do battle for the right to devour them. These contests rarely go to the death, with participants often retreating after they’ve sustained a single hit. The scars possessed by most rotjaws are a testament to the frequency of these battles.

Rotjaws build nests in caves one mouthful of mud at a time, in which they bury clutches of 4-8 eggs. The parents spend two weeks taking turns guarding the nest while the other goes hunting, then abandon it and go their separate ways once the eggs have hatched. Hatchlings start out the size of an average housecat and grow into full adults within a month; at least one or two out of every clutch usually makes it.

Rotjaw bites spread what’s known as rotjaw fever, even though it’s less a single disease than a blend of all the nasty microbes that the animal’s been able to cultivate. Rotjaw fever always drains the strength of the victim, but other symptoms can vary widely from case to case.

Rotjaw

HD: 2+14

AC: as leather

Movement: 1/2 unburdened human

Attack: bite (1d6 + disease, save to avoid)

Baseline Rotjaw Fever

Duration: 3 days

Incubation: 1 hour

Increment: 2 hours

Effect: Save or lose one point of strength. A strength of less than 3 means total paralysis. Infected creatures also emit a stench of decay that attracts rotjaws but repels most other predators. This scent also temporarily decreases the victim’s charisma to 3, an effect which lasts as long as the infection does.

Rotjaw Fever Variations

Roll 3d12 on the following table when a character catches rotjaw fever. If you roll the same number twice, don’t re-roll it; that just means this instance of the fever displays one less special quality than usual.

1 Completely unaffected by healing magic.

2 All disease related damage is permanent, even if the disease itself is cured.

3 Lose dexterity at the same rate as strength.

4 Lose two strength points every interval instead of one.

5 Periodic hallucinations (last for 1d10 minutes at every interval).

6 Constant hallucinations, unless the most recent save vs. disease succeeded.

7 Lose constitution at the same rate as strength.

8 Disadvantage to saving throws against rotjaw fever.

9 Deduct 1d4 maximum hit points every increment.

10 Full-body cramps that cause total paralysis for ten minutes every increment.

11 Increments and incubation time are half as long as usual.

12 Duration is twice as long as usual.

Dart Plants

by Anne Hufnagl from here

Dart plants are mobile plant creatures that appear in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Those who’ve stopped to dissect the dead ones claim to have found complete animal skeletons deep beneath these masses of bark and vine, suggesting a parasitic nature.

Colorful flowers grow at irregular intervals on the dart plant’s surface, in which they form tight clusters of dart-like thorns, each carrying thousands of microscopic spores. When the cluster is ready, the flower closes, forming an airtight tube that acts as a blowgun.

As the spores travel through the host creature’s bloodstream, they multiply and feed on the nutrients intended for the host’s own organs. Treat this as a disease that slowly drains the constitution of host creatures and eventually kills them, at which point the dart plants consume the corpse from the inside out.

This constitution drain occurs at a rate of one point every six hours (or one HP per HD, if it’s a monster and you’re playing an OSR game). PCs and important NPCs are entitled to a saving throw vs. poison at each interval to temporarily avoid the effect, but the infection continues.

If a creature is still alive after a week of this, its immune system naturally kills off the infection. Cure disease spells and potions remove the infection as normal, but they don’t restore the victim’s constitution score to its previous level. Survivors of dart plant infection can be identified by their unnaturally pale skin, scales, fur, or feathers.

Mature dart plants are just a little bit bigger than their host creatures were. They have the same number of hit dice (including character levels) and can move at half the original creature’s speed. Each dart plant only has so many clusters ready to fire at any given time, but they also have a slam attack that does damage dependent on the size of the dart plant. The number of readied dart clusters is also dependent on the size of the plant, and uses the same table the slam attack does.

small: 1d4

medium: 1d6

large: 2d6

huge: 3d6

gargantuan: 4d6

When the dart plant eats the brain of its victim, it also absorbs the creature’s memories and intelligence. Dart plants that grow out of sentient beings try to use this ability to gain the trust of the victims’ friends and companions. Even with less intelligent animals, this usually at least tells the dart plant where to look for more host creatures. The host creature’s personality has never been known to overpower the instincts of the plant itself.

One major limiting factor on the dart plant population is their high calorie intake. These plants’ unusually active lifestyle requires that they consume twice their own weight in animal matter per day or face starvation. Since their first dart clusters take a couple of weeks to form, many dart plants starve to death before they ever get a chance to procreate.

This meat is stored in whatever space is made reasonable by the animal’s anatomy — in most vertebrates, this would be the stomach and chest cavities. An internal root system digests the dart plant’s prey while the plant retains its ability to move around (provided that its prey is at least one size category smaller than it is). What this means to you is that if this area were to be sliced open from below, piles of bloody half-rotten body parts would come tumbling out like it was a piñata at a GWAR show.

Any flowers that still contain readied dart clusters can be distilled into a potent drug that causes intense hallucinations. The drug can be imbibed like a potion, or administered intravenously by applying it as a poison to an edged or piercing weapon. The affected individual must save vs. poison or hallucinate for two hours (if the imbiber is willing, no save is necessary), during which they are not in control of their actions. Roll 1d12 every half hour until the end of the effect to determine the nature of the hallucinations and the actions of the affected creature. After the hallucinations end, the character will feel nauseous and generally not up to adventuring, and every roll they make during the next six hours suffers from disadvantage or a -2 penalty or whatever, while attacks against the character are made with advantage or a +2 bonus.

1. You are one with the intertwining root systems below you, granting knowledge of a hidden location.

2. Everyone around you is delicious meat and you are carnivorous and hungry so so hungry.

3. You are a talking tree and will not willingly allow yourself to be moved, screaming if overpowered.

4. Decay is nutrition. You must seek and devour any decaying flesh, plant matter, or feces you can find.

5. You are a leaf on the wind. Wander aimlessly, fleeing from anything that tries to touch you.

6. The sun is life. Fight your way to the nearest direct sunlight and fight some more to stay there.

7. Everything is fractals. Stand in open-mouthed bewilderment, allow self to be led by hand.

8. You are a thistle bush and everyone is a goat. You have legs for some reason and need to get away right now.

9. Find some insects (there are always some insects and many of the ones on Exodus are dangerous) and rub them all over your genitals.

10. You are a fruit (hurr hurr shut up) that must find an animal to eat you so it can spread your seed when it shits.

11. Shit, termites. Madly clawing at yourself does 1d4 hp per turn unless you’re successfully restrained.

12. Something’s wrong with this dose. Begin the slow transformation into a dart plant as if shot by one.

The drug is incredibly dangerous and hardly ever any fun at all. However, the potential reward is legendary. Dart plant venom is commonly available in any place where adventurers gather, but usually not allowed to be taken there or anywhere other place where the recipient would pose a danger to the public. The venom’s desirability stems from tales of friends of friends who took it and experienced visions of fantastic treasures, the locations and some of the nature of which these brave fools awoke knowing.

In game terms, this means that if a player on dart plant venom rolls a 1 at any point during this horrible trip,* they must write down three elements of the location they saw. Everything else is up to you to fill in with whatever the hell you feel like, but the three statements the PC wrote down are 100% true. If a PC rolls a one more than once,** If multiple PCs are tripping together and both gain secret knowledge, they learn of different locations.

This shouldn’t exactly be a Monkey’s Paw scenario, where there’s no real benefit at all, because you want the PCs to actually try it at some point. Still, the temptation is too strong to not give in at least a little bit. Pick one statement out of every three; you still have to follow the letter of the law but it leaves out something important and dangerous. If a magic sword is demanded, you could decide that it’s cursed. If the players state that there aren’t any traps in the dungeon, you could make the entire dungeon a trap and turn escaping from it into a puzzle.

*There’s a 1/3 chance of this occurring, if you’re curious. 

**1/9 chance. There’s a 1/81 chance of someone getting to make nine demands about the same place, which is less than 2%.

Silicates

A silicon dioxide-based race of chronomancers with a roughly humanoid body shape. Organic muscles work because they’re made of material that contracts when electricity is applied by the nervous system. The quartz that silicates are composed of reacts to electrical current by vibrating at a constant rate. That’s why humans use quartz crystals to regulate their timepieces.

The regularity of these vibrations has allowed the silicate race to evolve with a sense of temporal awareness in addition to the spatial awareness possessed by humans. Over the course of that evolution, they’ve developed the inborn ability to manipulate time by creating temporal anomalies.

Silicates are asexual, and reproduce by seeding quartz clusters that grow to about a 2 foot height and radius. Once that size is reached, the cluster is again visited by its parent and imbued with a self-sustaining electrical pulse that does for silicates what DNA does for organic life. This pulse rearranges the physical material of the new silicate into a bipedal form, at which point the new silicate gains sentience and mobility. Each cluster produces 1d6 silicates. The electrical pulse is also a coded message containing all of what the parent considers to be the most important knowledge, which is instantly learned by each new silicate.

In appearance, new silicates feature the rough surfaces and hard edges of fresh, raw crystal. Their upper limbs end in big, chunky three-fingered hands. As they live out their lives and grow in power, they’re ground down by time and experience, becoming smooth and soft-edged. This is important for adventurers who might encounter them to keep in mind, since it means that the ones with rounded, organic-looking forms are the most dangerous.

Silicates can grow crystal weapons as sharp and strong as steel. Sometimes, powerful silicates learn to permanently imbue the weapons they grow with time-related powers and curses.

They “eat” gemstones and precious metals. This makes their acquisition a primary motivation for silicate NPCs, and groups of them usually try to keep a fully stocked pantry (but are you really willing to sink low enough to steal food from this ragged band of alien survivors? well probably yeah). Silicate PCs gain the value of the minerals they ingest as XP. This is in place of, not in addition to, the normal XP for loot rules.

These creatures were first encountered 529 years ago by the rokai Hojo Mori while he was on a slave raid in the outside worlds. Recognizing that they were too powerful to be suitable for use as slaves, he instead sought to learn how their powers worked in order to harness them himself. To that end, he pretended to diplomatic aspirations and extended an invitation which several of the creatures graciously accepted. Once they were in his castle, Hojo Mori treated them as guests until he learned how to trap them in a stasis prison, outside of any timeline.

WIS: 4d6  INT: 4d6  DEX: 2d6  STR: 2d6  

HD: d4

Saves progress as a magic-user, but apply a bonus equal to half of the silicate’s level (round up) to breath/reflex/DEX saves.

Add WIS bonus to AC. 

Immune to poison and sneak attack damage.

Acid and sound-based attacks do double damage.

Silicates don’t heal naturally with rest like organic life forms do. Instead, they rely on their Entropy Reversal ability for healing (see below). If the silicate is unable to reverse any damage done, the missing chunk of quartz becomes a permanent “scar” and their max hp is permanently lowered by the amount of damage that wasn’t healed.

Silicates can create one temporal anomaly per day per 3 levels (round up) without straining themselves. After that, creating further anomalies costs 1d6 hp damage (save vs. magic to avoid the damage, with a cumulative -2 penalty each time that resets each day).

Stasis Bubble- Stops time within a diameter of 10’ per level for one turn per level. This effect can be set up as a trap to be triggered by a reasonably simple condition determined by the silicate creating the anomaly. This anomaly will continue to exist in its dormant state for as long as the silicate wishes, but it also continues to count against the silicate’s anomalies per day. That is, a silicate who begins a new day with a stasis trap previously set up, begins that day with the ability to create one less anomaly per level. If such a trap is triggered, the silicate who set it is immediately aware of the fact, but not of the specific circumstances. If the silicate dies before the anomaly is set off, it ceases to have ever existed.

Forward Slip- Slows down time for the silicate long enough to perform one standard or movement action per level in the blink of an observer’s eye. So a level two silicate can make one attack and move at normal speed before anyone else knows what happened. Any victims are considered to be surprised or flat-footed, even if they’re already in combat with the silicate.

Entropic Touch- A successful touch attack causes the victim to physically age several decades or even centuries (depending on the normal lifespan of the species) in matter of seconds (save applies, only affects creatures and objects which can normally die of old age). The shock of this sudden transition causes 1 permanent point of CON damage per 2 levels of the silicate (round up). If the target is an inanimate object, it instantly becomes subject to the ravages of time to the point of uselessness. Wood and leather rot, metal rusts and disintegrates. Magic items are entitled to a saving throw to avoid destruction.

Macrouncertainty Cloud- There are always an infinite number of realities which are so close to this one on the world tree that the only difference is the exact location of a single being. This anomaly causes the silicate’s analogs in three adjacent realities to become visible in this universe for one round per level of the silicate. These images are constantly shuffling around with the silicate in a multidimensional shell game, and are impervious to harm. Every direct attack that would normally hit the silicate has a 3/4 chance of passing harmlessly through one of the images (which flickers for just a moment, but comes right back at the end of the round). If one of the images is already flickering from an attack, and another successful attack is made, that one only has a 2/4 chance of missing the silicate. So if the silicate is the target of five attacks in one round, only the last two attacks will have the normal chance of hitting it.

Reverse Slip- The silicate is able to very, very briefly reverse the temporal velocity of reality itself, essentially taking a step back in time. The silicate can only turn back time by a second, just far enough to re-take one roll or re-think a single, extremely recent, and incredibly bad decision. If the new roll still fails, and the silicate is high enough level to create multiple anomalies per day, more than one anomaly can be used to retry a single die roll multiple times. This can also be used to force an opponent or allow an ally to re-take a roll.

Entropy Reversal- Touch any living (or recently dead) thing to instantly undo all damage taken by that creature within the past ten minutes. This anomaly’s effect doesn’t stack with itself. For example, if you use it once to heal 12 hp taken in a recent battle, you can’t immediately use it again to gain another 12 hp. Extending the effect further back in time costs another daily anomaly use per extra ten minutes— so it would cost a level 6 silicate all their free anomalies for the day to undo damage that was 30 minutes old. This applies to ability score damage and conditions like disease or level drain as well as hit point damage. This anomaly cannot be used to bring a creature back from the dead.

Jump Sharks

got me a conquistador

Freshwater sharks that live in swamps and have evolved fins like flying fish. They can jump across narrow strips of land to bite/tackle victims and drag them under the water. Their fins are as articulate as those of a bat, so they can glide quite a distance before transitioning into a football spiral that takes you head over heels when they grab you in a terrifying surprise judo drowning bite attack that ignores armor (so combined with the penalties to swimming in heavy armor pretty much mean don't wear full plate mail in the fucking swamp but players will probably do it anyway).

They know where the water is because they've learned the labyrinthine geography of their swamp completely. Not in an individual sense, though they've been swimming these waters all their lives, but in an evolutionary sense.

Cab drivers in London have to take an extensive test for which they must learn the entire layout of the city, and the process of learning this intensely complex pattern actually changes the physical structures of their brains. Jump sharks have it the other way around. They're born with the layout of the swamp where they evolved hardwired into the frontmost part of their brain.

This means that if they're somehow removed from that environment, their normal hunting methods are useless. If they can still manage to survive on a purely aquatic diet, their descendants several generations down the line (let's say 80 years -- they have unusually short lifespans for sharks) will have adapted their brains to their new home. They're usually a bit smaller by this time, but the sub-species created by this process tend to return to their normal size pretty quickly once they've reincorporated the land into their hunting grounds.

Of course if boats are commonly used in the area all bets are off.

Characters with high enough intelligence have a chance of learning the layout of the local region, including hard-to-spot bogs and quicksand, by carefully inspecting the brain structure of a dead jump shark. If an intelligence check fails, a read magic spell will still do the trick.

They know where you are because they've also evolved eyes that can detect the infrared radiation produced by humans and other warm blooded animals. This even applies to newly transplanted jump sharks that can't get at landswimmers at all anymore, which pisses them off to no end.

siberian bear hunting armor

Your creepy neighborhood swamp hag may be able to use these sensory organs to craft items that grant their users infravision, in exchange for some favor that should probably take at least a couple sessions to deliver on. Anyone who can practice normal alchemy has a chance of figuring out how to distill them into potions that (temporarily) have the same effect.

The only warning sign of their presence is their well-camouflaged dorsal fins, since they must swim close to the surface to get around the water's ability to absorb all radio waves. You and I can't see as far in water as in air because it absorbs visible light waves, and infrared waves work the same way.

The only type of armor that's actually useful against them is the kind with pointy spikes all over it. Any nearby cultures with at least Bronze Age technology are almost guaranteed to have figured this out, so it should be available if they exist.

Here's Your Lump of Coal

If you asked the Humbug, it would tell you that it doesn’t want to hurt anyone really, but has had to defend itself countless times and just wants to be left alone. It won’t mention (and probably isn’t really even aware) that witnessing joy in others triggers an emotional escalation that, unless appeased successfully, ends with the Humbug entering an uncontrollable rage. Of course that’s assuming you’re able to get a word in at all.

It looks like either a child with the features of a grey-skinned old man, or an old man whose growth has been severely stunted. It has functional insect-like wings, and antennae, dresses in shoddy looking but functional clothing, and (when grounded) leans heavily on a gnarled cane that’s taller than he is. The Humbug is likely to be found living in any sparsely populated and isolated dungeon or wilderness area.

When first met, it demands to know what the PCs are doing, but doesn’t really care once it figures out that they aren’t from around wherever it is they find it. The Humbug then introduces itself and starts complaining about the area in a way that reveals useful and reliable information to the PCs. It keeps complaining about anything and everything that occurs to it without letting anyone else get a word in, and follows anyone who tries to walk away in the middle of a “conversation”. This will continue as long as the PCs tolerate it, with useful intel sprinkled in generously. If the PCs engage in combat (including trying to attack the Humbug itself), it will simply fly out of the way until it’s over, grumbling about how tedious combat is the whole time.

The Humbug will not say much about the occasional groups of 3-5 adventurers’ remains, all of which have had their skulls bashed in. Just that it takes the right outlook to survive and these poor saps didn’t have it.

The Humbug will not try to stop anyone who tries to silence it with a gag, but will still continue to go through the motions of speaking as if it hasn’t noticed. This will muffle the sound well enough to allow for stealth. Otherwise, every enemy within 20’ of the party will be aware of their presence (or at least of the Humbug’s, and that it’s talking to someone). It shouldn’t take long for a clever party to realize that they can just gag and un-gag it as needed and have half of what’s going on explained to them.

If any the players express joy in-character, the Humbug turns visibly red, rips out its gag (if it’s wearing one) and starts angrily pointing out the dark lining to every silver cloud, demanding that the PCs see things its way. If they “admit” that it’s right, they still need to make a charisma check to convince it they’ve genuinely changed their minds (even if they actually have). If they succeed, it turns back to its normal shade of grey and starts complaining about all the infuriatingly naive adventurers it’s met in the past, and how they all turn out to be such huge disappointments in the end.

If the PCs fail to convince the Humbug of their sincerity (or tell it they think it’s wrong), its rage intensifies. It grows a deeper shade of red and flies out of reach while shouting about how disappointing the party is and shaking its cane like a madman. All of a sudden, its shouts turn into an incoherent war cry as it starts zipping around at 6x the speed of the PCs. First, it trips them all with the hook of its cane and tries to disarm them if there’s time, then it spends a whole round smashing in one victim’s face while the rest of the group recovers. The Humbug repeats this process until they’re all dead and keeps screaming the whole time, not even stopping to inhale.

You snorted my brother. Prepare to die.

The Oppenheim Kellerlabyrinth is haunted by the ghosts of four Catholic saints, known collectively as the Four Holy Marshals. The Knights Templar had their remains moved to the tunnels centuries ago, to contain a then-recently discovered infestation of hyperdimensional fungoid aliens. The order currently has no information on just where these demons came from, they only know that this threat to their world must be contained at all costs.

Several intelligent fungoid species inhabit the lowest levels of the kellerlabyrinth. Although their adult body types and abilities vary greatly, all of these species go through a roughly similar life cycle, which has three stages: embryonic, larval, and mature. All three stages, if harvested and consumed properly, have potion-like effects on the user. The corpses of mature molds yield a great deal more doses than the embryonic and larval

They periodically produce reproductive spores, which are released into the air and immediately abandoned by the parent. Spores that randomly find themselves in ideal environments (damp, cool, presence of nutrition, etc) continue to reproduce, forming into molds that produce temporary effects in most animal species (including humans) when consumed. 

Embryonic Mold: Potion-Like Effects

orange mold: size doubled (+4 to damage rolls, +2d6 temporary HP,  -4 AC penalty)

grey mold: healing (must be applied directly to wound)

blue mold: visions (must be smoked; there’s a secret society that's sprung up around this substance but that’s a whole other post)

red mold: double movement and number of attacks (must be dried, powdered, and snorted)

purple mold: etherealness (must be consumed as a tea, can walk through walls, +4 AC bonus, clothes and equipment also become ethereal)

There’s a weird old lady that lives in the kellerlabyrinth and sells potions, powders, etc. distilled from these embryonic molds. She knows more about these creatures than anyone except the Four Holy Marshals, but is a little crazy and any hints she lets slip will be cryptic in nature. She’s also been experimenting with the combining of molds to produce new effects, to varying degrees of success.

The inquisitor hates her and wants her to burn, but she makes clever use of her potions and keeps making a fool of him every time he tries to fuck with her.

Whenever one of these embryonic molds grows to a sufficient size, it begins to develop specialized structures with similar functions to those of our brains and sensory organs. Molds at this stage are capable of producing weaponized spores, but not reproductive ones. These spores are the only natural defense of molds in this larval stage. Larval molds are completely immobile, but have achieved basic sentience and are constantly learning during this period.

Larval Molds: Weaponized Spores

(PCs get a chance to roll an appropriate saving throw for all these effects. Obviously.)
orange mold: size increases beyond the size of the room, bones start getting crushed

grey mold: out-of-control permanent constitution-draining tumors 

blue mold: confusion and/or suggestion

red mold: possibly fatal heart attack, survivors are still incapacitated for 1d6 rounds

purple mold: PC (but not clothes or equipment) becomes completely ethereal and floats up to the surface over the course of 3 rounds per dungeon level between the PC and the open air.

If PCs find an embryonic mold to be useful and keep returning to its location to harvest more, there is a 1/6 chance for each day it’s been since the room was last visited (maximum of 5/6) of the mold having advanced to the larval stage.

Once these fungoid neural structures have been completed, the molds begin to focus on producing limbs (1d6-2 trunk-like legs, 1d8-1 tentacles, minimum 0, roll again on a result of no limbs). Within a few days, these limbs are usually large and strong enough to be useful to the mold, and the creature is considered mature. Molds with legs can walk around and perform slam attacks, and ones that have tentacles can use them to manipulate objects as well as grabbing and constricting enemies.

All mature molds can produce the same weaponized spores as their larval forms at will, as well as empathic spores which allow a basic form of universal communication, and reproductive spores (produced involuntarily whenever the adult mold consumes enough extra nutrition). They also have intrinsic, always-on abilities that correspond to the effects of consuming each mold type in its embryonic form.

I'm writing this for low level characters, so it makes sense to me that these creatures should have about the same stats that whatever game you're playing uses for let’s say a cave bear (aside from the unusual limbs and spores and intrinsic qualities). If your party averages around level seven or higher, you should probably think about upping the hit dice (but you hopefully know that by now if you've been running a campaign that long).

Mature Molds: Intrinsic Qualities

orange mold: size doubled, +4 HD, -2 AC penalty

grey mold: regenerates 1d4 hp/round

blue mold: can see a second into the future like a jedi (+6 AC)

red mold: double movement speed and number of attacks

purple mold: ethereal (can’t be physically harmed by non-ethereal creatures or objects, but can attack others and walk through walls) 

They don’t have anything resembling an animal’s mouth, but it takes about twelve hours to completely grow around an adult human corpse, digest it, and eject perfectly clean bones. Mature molds need to consume more than four adult humans (or an equivalent amount of non-human animal meat) to produce reproductive spores.

This means that if a mature mold causes a Total Party Kill, and the replacement characters find their way back to that room, it will probably still be full of bones, and partially covered in mold colonies in their potion-like embryonic stage.

The Library is a Very Dangerous Place

Paper Tigers - A lost tribe of human ex-cataloguers gone feral. Originally brought to serve the in the Madgod's Library, they were replaced with the mechanical shelving units when they inevitably went completely bugfuck crazy. They attack visitors for food, treasure and equipment whenever they believe they have an advantage.
- They shave each other completely, usually go around wearing a loincloth made from pages torn out of the books, and use scarification to create tiger stripes all over their bodies.
- Physically, these lunatics have the statistics of ordinary human civilians, but they are not to be underestimated within the confines of the Library. This is because:
- They know the contents of every book in the Madgod’s Library before pulling it off the shelf, and can choose the effect of opening the book instead of having to roll for it randomly. Also:
- One in four Paper Tigers have eaten Library bat guano and undergone a random mutation. (see Library Bats below)
- Their equivalent of the Dewey decimal system is a series of nonsensical pictograms scratched into the bookshelves. Any character who tries to cast read magic on the symbols must save or go permanently insane, effectively becoming a Paper Tiger and running off into the depths of the Library.

Shelving Unit - A horse sized, steam powered automaton with eight long claw-tipped legs. The claws are articulate enough to grasp and manipulate books and sharp enough to shred your average suit of chain mail.
-These bastards are quick and have two attacks per round.
-They can produce puffs of steam that obscure vision (which they do not rely on) in a 15 foot radius, as well as causing 1d6 fire damage to anyone in a 5 foot radius. Shelving units are immune to this particular attack, but not to fire damage in general.
- They don’t usually bother anyone, but anytime a book is moved, a shelving unit will sense it and show up in 1d3 rounds to return it to its proper place. They aren’t programmed to be rude, so they won’t interrupt readers until they put the book down somewhere, but they will follow anyone who continues to walk around with one or more books. Shelving Units will not allow anyone to leave the Library with any of the Madgod’s books, unless of course the character can present a Library card (which entitles them to borrow one book at a time). Attempting to physically damage a Library book will also incur a shelving unit's wrath.
- They can’t talk, but they can understand all spoken languages, and their body language is cartoonishly expressive.
- Shelving units viciously attack bookworms on sight, but are afraid of the entropy moths that bookworms metamorphose into, and will not approach them willingly.

Bookworm - A two-foot long caterpillar with the face of a madly grinning human.
- They can spray a 15 foot cone of goo that causes paralysis to anyone it touches (save to avoid), and usually flee immediately after. This doesn’t immediately affect shelving units, but it does dry quickly (1d4 rounds) and gums up their joints at that point, immobilizing them.
- When fleeing, they can move faster than their appearance implies (half again the speed of an unencumbered human).
- Bookworms are usually found in groups of 3d4 worms. This usually allows a lucky few to get away, if a group of shelving units gets the drop on them. Larger groups can be found during serious infestations.
- Once they've eaten enough books, they create a cocoon for themselves, which is clearly visible but naturally camouflaged against the shelving units' (non-visual) sensors. At the end of its gestation period, an entropy moth emerges.

Entropy Moth - About the same size as a bookworm, entropy moths are mostly covered in pearlescent fur. They have the unblinking and expressionless face of a human mannequin, but with the nose and mouth replaced with a curled proboscis resembling that of any other moth.
- When these creatures flap their wings, they radiate waves of chaos in a 15 foot circle. All inanimate material in this radius begins to break down. Metal weapons and armor rust, organic material deteriorates, and mechanical devices immediately stop working, then fall apart 1 round later. This does not affect the Madgod’s books, but does affect normal books. Magic items (including spell books) can save to avoid this damage.
- The entropy field also alters spell effects that enter it. Roll on the table to determine how the spell is altered.
1 Spell is deflected towards a new, randomly chosen target.
2 Reverse the effect of the spell; if it would normally cause damage, it heals instead, etc.
3 All numeric qualities of the spell (intensity/damage, area of effect, etc.) are tripled.
4 Spell is replaced with a random spell of one level lower.
5 All numeric qualities of the spell (intensity/damage, area of effect, etc.) are halved.  
6 The spell is absorbed by the entropy moth, which becomes impregnated and uses its next turn to hook its proboscis onto someone's bare flesh and implant an egg sac in its victim. The eggs hatch 1 hour later (unless the character expels them by making a successful save or a relevant healing spell is cast), and the character experiences crippling pain while 1d4 larval bookworms make their way to the brain. Bookworms eat their victims’ brains, but only digest the actual information, expelling the rest as waste. Bookworm hosts die horribly, by puking out their brains and shit.
- There are two small glands near the base of an entropy moth's head which are highly prized by alchemists and artificers. They can be used to create effects such as spell resistance, reflection, and absorption (in order of increasing difficulty).
- These moths' antennae are specially adapted to constantly detect traces of magic on items and creatures. They are attracted to magic and other manifestations of chaos like their smaller cousins to a flame.

Library Bats - Since the paper tigers were impossible to control and the shelving units were incapable of dealing with entropy moths, the Mad God brought a colony of giant bats into the Library to serve as a natural predator for the moths. Because the bats’ diet consists mainly of animals that fuel increased randomness, the rate of mutation in the bats was increased. Within a dozen or so generations, they developed evolutionary adaptations to the unique dangers of the Library.
- The ears and related neural structures of Library bats have become attuned to the energies radiated by magic, madness, and chaos, and the creatures can intrinsically understand and vocally reproduce any spell or magical effect that they have recently (past half hour or so) observed. This even applies to non-vocal sources of magic, such as Library books. If the effect's intensity is determined by caster level, treat the bat as having the same level as whoever it observed creating the effect. 
- Eating the guano of a Library bat will make any character that can digest it extremely ill (disadvantage to everything) for 24 hours. At the end of this period, the character gains a random mutation, which has roughly even odds of being beneficial in nature. One in four members of the Paper Tiger tribe have undergone this transformation.

Birds, bats, bees, pteranodons. Two spells.

This post will eventually have something to do with RPGs. Probably.

To the best of our knowledge, true flight has only evolved a few times on Earth. Bats, birds, now-extinct pterosaurs, and flying insects have all filled similar evolutionary niches, and it's likely they all got there in similar ways.

We understand the evolution of birds the best of those four groups (or at least think we do), due to well-documented fossil evidence uncovered in the 20th century. Tiny cousins of Velociraptor started climbing trees and ambushing whatever walked underneath. The ones who could jump farther from their hiding spots were less likely to starve and more likely to reproduce, so scales gradually grew into longer and softer feathers that produced a gliding effect. All the climbing made forelimbs longer and stronger, until they became capable of making the transition to true wings.

Bats followed a similar evolutionary pattern, starting with a tiny tree-dwelling mammal, and making the transition from climber, to glider, to flier. A minority of biologists believes, based on similarities in the brain structure of Megachiroptera (flying foxes) to that found in primates (and no other mammals), that these giant fruit bats might be more closely related to us than to the brown bats we have throughout North America. It's a bit of an odd hypothesis, but if it turned out to be true, it would mean that the traits necessary for flight evolved twice within the class mammalia, through an identical series of adaptations, arriving at close to the same result. These separate lineages would also explain why Megachiroptera are the only bats that don't use echolocation.

Flying squirrels aren't closely related to bats, but could they be on their way to becoming bats?

Pterosaurs presumably evolved from tiny lizards under similar environmental pressures, but paleontologists can't come to an agreement on which tiny lizards they evolved from.

The first animals to master flight on this planet were the arthropods that would later become flying insects. Insect wings were once thought to have developed from gills like those found in mayflies, but a general consensus is forming that the first flying insects descended from the trees in a similar progression to those of birds and bats.

Flying squirrels aren't the only animals currently at the gliding stage of this process. Flying snakes are well documented in the rainforests of Southeast Asia, (where the tallest trees are less densely packed than the ones in South America, an environment which seems to favor prehensile tails and other climbing adaptations over gliding adaptations) and have the ability to flatten themselves by sucking in their abdomens and spreading out their ribs, allowing them to slither absurd distances through the sky like flexible, elongated frisbees. They're able to produce lift and even change direction slightly, in a way that the Department of Defense is spending money to try and understand. If their descendants ever work out how to turn around in mid-air, actual flying vipers will suddenly be a thing. Their scales may even soften and elongate like theropod scales did, eventually becoming feathers.

I want to know how obvious the ability to fly would be to a biologist looking at a flying snake's bones. I want to know if this adaptation once existed elsewhere, among other snake species in similar environments, and paleontologists just haven't caught on yet. I want to know if there was a time when the tree canopy in South and Central America was much thinner than it is today. I want to know if ancient Olmecs were used to looking up to watch feathered serpents trace strange paths through the sky.

Archaeologists don't agree on how important the feathered serpent concept was to the Olmecs. The Mayan version, a deity known as Kukulkan to the Yucatec Maya and as Q'uq'umatz to the K'iche Maya, doesn't appear to have reached its eventual level of importance until the Post-Classic era. The Aztecs called it Quetzalcoatl, this time one of the three or four most important beings in their religion.

Think about a telephone game that goes on for more than two thousand years, starting with sightings of what looks a lot like a mysterious kingdom of magic flying snakes (which are eventually outcompeted by their much larger climbing cousins and go extinct). Written language exists for at least part of that history, but knowledge is tightly controlled and mystified by the religious class.

At some point, other serpent deities showed up. All of them could fly. Vision serpents were said to dwell in the topmost branches of the Maya version of the world tree, and acted as conduits between the physical world and the spirit realms. Lots of Maya rituals involved getting the attention of vision serpents by bleeding all over specially prepared paper, which was then burnt. The bleeding man or woman (probably experiencing drug and endorphin induced hallucinations) would then watch the smoke from the offering form a serpent, and either a god or an ancestor would pop his or her head out of its mouth to tell the bleeder something crucially important.

There's also the fire serpents, or Xiuhcouatl. The Aztecs saw them partly as weapons of Huitzilopochtli, their patron god of war and the sun. Fire serpents were also revered by Post-Classic Maya warrior cults, who also depicted them as weapons of the sun. Two really obvious ways to use fire serpents in a D&D game would be to reskin salamanders as Xiuhcouatl and/or the spell meteor swarm as rain of serpents or something like that.

My JOESKY TAX is a pair of spells or rituals related to vision serpents:

Call Vision Serpent (Level 1)

This ritual is performed whenever some needs to contact the dead or divine for advice in some dilemma or other. The spellcaster prepares a pile of papers with arcane diagrams and secret names, as well as the name of the spirit or deity being summoned. Whoever wishes to commune with the spirits must offer up the majority of their blood, allowing themselves to be drugged, and then piercing and cutting themselves in the most painful ways availabl, allowing their blood to pour onto the papers. The visionary must save or die from blood loss during this process (okay if you wanna be a big softy about it, drop 1d20 from their maximum HP instead; this still might kill them or nerf them forever, but this ritual isn't meant to be performed lightly). Even if this save succeeds, the bloodletting process reduces the character's current HP to 1.

The papers are gathered into a bowl when it looks like the visionary is getting ready to pass out from blood loss (and drugs), and lit. The plume of smoke takes the shape of a serpent, visible only to the recipient. The serpent, having fed on the blood of the recipient, calls forth the spirit or deity that was specifically asked for. This entity will patiently listen to the dilemma of the vision's recipient, then respond in one of the following ways (referee's choice or random):

>the entity will share the location of an object or NPC that will be crucial in solving the problem.

>the entity will reveal hidden information about what's going on behind the scenes.

>the entity will directly advise the recipient to make a particular decision (usually good advice).

>the entity will reveal one or more secret weaknesses in the recipient's enemy.

>the entity will angrily accuse the recipient of wasting their time, and vanish without helping at all. This only happens if the entity feels it is being called upon to address something below its station (a king to settle a gambling debt) or outside of its divine portfolio.

Serpent Road (Level 1)

Spellcasters are also able to convince the vision serpent to act as a planar gateway for the subject of a nearly identical ritual, though a fresh human heart from a willing donor must be added to the sacrifice. Assuming the aspiring planar traveller makes their save during the bloodletting, they are devoured by the serpent, which appears to them as a vast smoke-walled tunnel. To observers, a plume of smoke appears to completely envelop the traveller and then disappear, taking the traveler with it. The serpent then spits out the traveler (along with any possessions being carried) in whichever supernatural realm was named in the blood-soaked ritual papers. The subject will be weakened (1 HP) and somewhat disoriented from the ritual, but the experience is sobering enough that the character won't be too high to function.

This ritual is a two-way ticket, and the vision serpent will facilitate the subject's return as soon as some condition, predetermined by the spellcaster preparing the ritual papers, is met. It's worth noting that the diagrams and names on the papers are incredibly complicated, and that it would generally be pretty easy for the the spellcaster to lie to the traveller about either the destination or the return condition.

The spell can also be used to provide simultaneous travel for a group, by providing one sacrificial heart for each traveller. All group members must perform the bloodletting portion of the ritual, including the saving throw and HP loss.