GLoGtober '21 Day 5 - Green is What is Left When Ardor Fades, When Passion Dies, When We Die

    For the GLoGtober conversion prompt. Inspired by the movie The Green Knight.

Knight of Spring

Pierre Droal

Starting Equipment: A bronze battleaxe [described below]. The Horn of Springtide [described below]. A set of plant-covered chainmail armor [+4 AC, 4 slots]. A direram mount [described below].
Starting Skill [d6]: Botany, Alchemy, Geography, Chivalry, Animal Handling, Survival.

Level 1: Fae Immortality, Superiority of Arms
Level 2: Greentongue
Level 3: Thirst for Blood
Level 4: The Storms of Spring

Fae Immortality
    You used to be human, but are not so now. You left your humanity behind in your reliquary. The reliquary itself is a small bronze-bound chest of living wood containing your bones. You sacrificed your bones to the Thousand Gods for eternal life and power. In place of them, you have a structure of living wood that can only be broken by a knight.
    Every time you die, after 1d8-[level] days, you will return fully healed from the earth near your reliquary. You do not regain lost equipment with this feature.

Superiority of Arms
    Any weapon you wield, even your fist, has its damage die scaled up one. For example, a light weapon would deal 1d8 damage, while a medium weapon would deal 2d6 damage. When a heavy weapon is scaled up one, it is 3d6 damage.

Greentongue
    You can speak Root, the language of plants, trees, and flowers. This can be used to converse with them but it can also be used to command them. [level] times, you may utter in Elderspeak a command to the plants within 30' of you. Some example greentongue commands are:

1. Grow: Plants equal to your [level] grow up to 30 extra feet over the course of d6 rounds.
   
2. Ensnare: Roots burst from the earth and trap your opponents for [level] rounds if they fail a DEX Check of 11+[level].
3. Ripen: Plants equal to your [level] grow large fruit, even if they couldn't before. These fruits count as [level] days of rations.
4. Sunder: A single plant explodes, dealing [level] piercing damage to all within 10'.
   

    Some ways to regain your greentongue abilities: make a large sacrifice to the Thousand Gods, awaken an ent, kill an enemy knight, restore a fairy ruler to power, etcetera.

Thirst for Blood
    You can now attack twice per round. You force Morale Checks on all 1 HD minions who see you. Your name is whispered throughout the land, for all the good and ill that brings.

The Storms of Spring
    You rival the power of some of the Thousand Gods. You have 5 points to distribute across your character sheet. They can increase any stat. People will worship you and try to slay you in equal measure.

Adam Glazer

The Armaments of Springtide

1. A bronze battleaxe. A two-headed bronze battleaxe with a haft of living wood. Deals 3d6+STR damage and takes up 2 Inventory Slots. Can be thrown 20' and returns magically to its wielder's hand.
2. The Horn of Springtide. A great instrument of ram's horn. 1 Inventory Slot. The horn itself is engraved with Elderspeak runes detailing the Maiden of Spring. If an action is spent blowing it, the Wild Hunt appears the next round. The hunters are composed of 1d4+1 faery knights, 1d6+1 faery huntsmen, and 2d6+1 direwolves. The horn can only be used once before it has to recharge again. To recharge, dip it in the blood of a king.
3. Direram Mount. A regal direram. 3 HD ram with an Armor Class of 12. Has a 2d6 gore attack. Can speak to all animals in their native tongues and is quite persuasive.

GLoGtober '21 Day 4 - Traincrawl Engineward Entries

    Traincrawl. I never thought I would be writing about trains on my game blog given my dislike of train games, but here I am. I am working on the engineward portion of the Immortal Train, while my collaborator theisticGilthoniel is writing the coldward portion.

    The Traincrawl is a depthcrawl. When you enter a new car, roll a d6 on both tables, adding the distance in number of cars from your starting car (so the first car you explore will be +0, the second +1, etc.). Every car has a 2 in 6 chance of being semi-permanently inhabited, and each inhabited car has a 50% chance of having a party and a 50% chance of having a murder mystery. If the car cannot be feasibly inhabited by humans, dwarves live there.

Car

1. Boxcar
2. Seating Car (six seats wide)
3. Seating Car (four seats wide)
4. Dining Car
5. Sleeping Car
6. Observation Car
7. Tavern Car
8. Prison Car
9. Slave Car
10. Torture Car
11. Mine Car
12. Tomb Car
13. Arena Car
14. Eugenics Car
15. Ritual Car
16. Engine Car
17. Assembly Car
18. Angelic Car
19. Beacon Car
20. Locomotive Car

Details

1. Empty
2. Hot
3. Dirty
4. Burning
5. Industrious
6. Ruined
7. Dead scrappers
8. Dead dwarves
9. Unstable
10. Massive exposed silver train-wheels
11. Protruding machinery
12. Massive orrery
13. Lava pools
14. Clumps of iron
15. Bloodstained
16. Dead angel
17. Smoke-filled
18. First generation murals
19. Heavily guarded
20. Ominously silent

Encounters

1. Empty
2. Outgoing scrappers
3. Returning scrappers
4. Pacifistic, but hunted, cyborgs
5. Fire cultists
6. Dwarf soldiers
7. Drunk dwarves
8. Imprisoned slaves
9. Slave village
10. An angel torturer and tortured slaves
11. Dwarf miners
12. First generation tomb
13. Blood-sport arena
14. Angel gene-manipulator and its mutant servants
15. Engine cult
16. Grand Enginepriest
17. The Assembly Master
18. The Lord-Ophanim
19. Sentient chained star
20. The Conductor

GLoGtober '21 Day 3 - Occult Inspirations

     This was supposed to a runes post for GLoGtober. Then, as always, my muse left me at the last possible moment and gave me a really vague idea to write about.

    It's this game where everyone plays wizards in a normal medieval world. Except the wizards are weird, mysterious, and all a bit crazy. A player would engage in dangerous wizard politics, recover and create deadly mystical artifacts, and deal with monsters and their mutating bodies. Watch out for those Dooms too.

    So, I figured I would write down the inspirations for the game, in the same vein as this post. I will try to fulfill to the wizard prompt. This is mostly to help myself but if you find a cool link, then all the better.

Wizardly Links (Last Updated 11-20-2021)

Bastionland - Primordial Wizard (New!)
Caput Caprae - Class: The Sage
Caput Caprae - Language for Wizards
Coins and Scrolls - 1d1000 Mutations

From the Pilgrim's Temple - Class: Invoker (New!)

From the Pilgrim's Temple - Class: Thaumaturge (New!)
Goblin Punch - Sister Witches and Monastic Wizards
Middenmurk - The Affairs of Wizards (New!)

Numbers Aren’t Real - ClΔss: Wizard (New!)

Numbers Aren't Real - Class: Masked Cleric
Numbers Aren't Real - Class: Virtuous Saint
Numbers Aren't Real - Who, Whom, Why
Portals and Pegasi - Class: Philosopher (New!)
Save vs. Worm - Class: Mad Poet (New!)
Spiceomancy - Random Advancement Templates
Spiceomancy - There Are No Mundane Towers
Sundered Shields and Silver Shillings - Four Types of Old Magick (New!)
Tarsos Theorem - d100 Weird Powers
The Hill Cantons - Corelands, Borderlands, and the Wierd
The Mad Queen's Court - 1d20 Fantasy Languages
The Mad Queen's Court - Class: Artist
The Mad Queen's Court - Mountain: On Fire, the Elements, and Old Gods, Oh My
The Nothic's Eye - Class: Magos
Tower of the Lonely GM - Your Wizards Are Losers

Occult Images

A. Shipwright

cobaltplasma

JasonTN

Sarunas Macijauskas

This list will be periodically updated with new links as I find them. Hope you are inspired. (:

GLoGtober '21 Day 2 - Stygia, A Land of Ash

The northwest, a land of ash and folly

     In a past age, the Stygian kingdoms ruled the northwest of the world. Their land was not like verdant and magical Arcadia; it was barren and mountainous, and the humans there fought unendingly for resources. They, like all human tribes, were ruled by Kings.

    But the Arcadian Kings and the Stygian Kings were not the same. The Stygian Kings were a hard-pressed lot, as, unlike their Arcadian neighbors, their kingdoms were far less abundant in resources and people. The Stygian Kings still revered the Titans while the more advanced Arcadians worshipped the six sacred metals.

    Everything remained this way for hundreds of years, until, as always, one individual changed the course of history. Her true name has been forgotten and now she is referred to as the Flamescar Worm. The Worm used to be a female King and artist of the Witch-in-the-woods. She came up with the brilliant idea to start consuming magical energy, including the souls of her fellow artists. She started to consume the sacred metals, especially gold. Then, she found the original Knight of Eyes, a great stone card engraved with a divine rune.

    And consumed it.

    Her skin blackened and became scaly, her tongue and fangs serpentine. Her eyes, reflecting her diet, became spheres the color of molten gold. Wings sprouted from her back and her breath became that of scarlet flame.

Anato Finnstark

   It was midnight when the Flamescar Worm burst from her blazing palace, letting out a screech that alerted all the Kings in Stygia that a new power was on the rise. In perhaps the only time in the long history of Stygia, the mountain Kings united. The goal of the combined kings? Kill their vermicular foe. The Kings traveled to the lair of the Flamescar Worm and fought her there. In their hubris, they thought they could defeat her.

    An innumerable number of Kings died that day. The ashy detritus of their bodies still blows from Worm’s Peak. A few wandering families of artists settled down near the Flamescar Worm’s lair and have become her devout acolytes. Most of the Stygians, King-less, decided to migrate to the mountains of the world, becoming the dwarfs.

GLoGtober '21 Day 1.5 - Oredon the Drowned

    For theisticGilthoniel's planetary fantasy setting and also a second surprise GLoGtober collaboration post because I love lore.

Eric Elwell

" A flooded, tropical world. The only things that rise above the waters are the gilded spires of the previous civilization. Plant life flourishes under the water and around the ancient towers. Only has a few permanent inhabitants, mainly fishers and pirates on woven barges."

The Association of Towers

    Deep within the tropical jungles of Oredon, ancient spires jut out of the ground, piercing the sky like solitary daggers. These steel towers were once home to the Tower-Dwellers, a precursor species. From recovered bones and crumbling art, they are shone to have been ten foot tall individuals They are thought to have been a warlike race, as most of the towers are heaps of ash and their bones are found in mass graves. What wiped them out is unknown, but their towers hold technological artifacts of great power, which have drawn the curious and greedy eyes of a few Stormsages.
    They have set up the Association of Towers, a loose coalition of scholars, archaeologists, and magic-users that ostensibly work together to recover the Tower-Dwellers culture and technology. In actuality, they are bunch of feuding, pretentious bastards who horde and exploit technology.

The City of Bazaar

    Oredon is host to a single great city: Bazaar, the City of Pirates. It sprawls horizontally across the water, composed of thousands of ships. Every pirate creed in the world regards this as "neutral territory", by which I mean "don't get caught and you're fine". A mobile city pulled by four chained blue whales, Bazaar is a place of criminals, outlaws, and sailors. It is ruled by the four specialized pirate captains: a Whalemaster, in charge of directing the whales, a Trademaster, who tracks all the deals and oaths made within the city, a Dockmaster, who lets ships in and out of Bazaar, and a Warmaster, in charge of the defense of the city.

Peter Dimitrov

The Harbingers of the Flood

    The Towers once stood proud on the surface of Oredon before being swallowed by the tides. The Harbingers of the Flood seek to bring them and their inhabitants back. Although they count several Stormsages and Necromancers among their ranks, the Harbingers are mostly made up of common people who desire an peaceful civilization without pirates and crazy Tower-mages. The Harbingers' leader is Sigbjorn Mikaelsson, a prophet who receives messages from underneath the waves commanding him to take back the fallen Towers from the tides.
    A shadow war against Bazaar and all it represents started around one hundred years ago and continues to this day.

d6 Hooks

1. A new Tower has been found in the wilderness. You are part of an expedition funded by a Stormsage to claim it.
2. You work for a Stormsage (maybe one of the party members) who hired you to assassinate another member of the Association of Towers.
3. A coup is happening in Bazaar, like always, except you're part of it. Usurp the Whalemaster and take her place.
4. You're part of a crew that just joined Bazaar. Explore the city and don't die.
5. The Warmaster was recently wounded in a sailing accident. Now is your chance to finish him and leave Bazaar leaderless.
6. You are part of a Harbinger group that was sent beneath the waves in an ancient iron apparatus to explore one of the fallen Towers.

GLoGtober '21 Day 1 - The Heptarchy of Magnos

     This is hopefully the first post in a series of seven posts about GLoGtober 2021. If you want to learn more about the GLoGtober challenge, head over here. Now, the first day of the challenge is collaboration. For this I have decided to write about Magnos, a nation in the world of Firmament. Without further delay...

-

    Magnos is often said to be a land of two seas. One of water, referring to the magically polluted Sea of Vir which wracks the surface of Firmament with hurricanes and storms, and one of trees, as the land of Magnos is covered in woodland as far as the eye can see, split only by towering mountains.

    The peculiar government of Magnos is called a heptarchy; a council of seven bizarrely long-lived and terribly callous scholars have dominion over the land, granted to them in ages past by the Sun King. In times of great importance, they meet at a council in Aikamo and make a united decision. Most of the time, however, they spend plotting against one another in shadow wars and hidden conflicts.

Major Settlements in Magnos

    Aikamo is the largest of the six major ports in Magnos, walled and bustling with traffic. Tough sailors bring in metal and ore from the storm-wracked islands in the Vir while traveling Zzargodish merchants ply their wares. In the industry district of Aikamo is the seat of its ruler, Sarvom the Swordsman. Sarvom appears to be a middle-aged man with green eyes, unkempt red hair, and a long, straggly beard. He is always seen in dull gray plate-mail. He -- in his own words -- is a scholar of war and collects THREE WORD SWORDS. Sarvom wishes to eradicate the other heptarchs and establish himself as the Duke of Magnos.

    Yorrai is located a day's travel north of Aikamo. It is home to the Academy, a place of cliques, theorization, and academia. Enrolled in the Academy are many kinds of students and scholars from all over Firmament. Its heptarch is Philosopher Minoru, who appears to be an old man in gray robes with bug-like eyes and a gray beard. He founded the Academy three hundred and forty-two years ago. Minoru collects opinions and apprentices. Minoru's goal is to collect Scripture (magical texts) and to spy on the other heptarchs.

    Kelika is the most well-known of the six major ports in Magnos. Its many taverns and inns provide shelter for all different types of sailors, explorers, and merchants. Its heptarch is Hinata the Magnanimous, a massively obese woman who sits within the town hall of Kelika. She collects stories, historical texts, and myths. Hinata requires a story if a ship is to be docked inside Kelika. She, inspired by the tales of the Five Knights, hosts a secret resistance against the Sun King, and desperately doesn't want to be found out by the other heptarchs.

    Helkau. A city of deep pits, stone towers, and palpable misery. Built on an ancient gold mine, Helkau is the source of Magnos' material wealth. Mined by tortured slaves and debtors, the gold is melted down and turned into beautiful statues for the heptarch of the place, Avaracious Juro. Juro himself appears as a handsome blond man with piercing red eyes. He is always covered in jewelry and other finery. His goal is to expand his power and establish more mines within the wilderness of Magnos.

    Aidran, is a place of strange fog and even stranger myths. Few sailors ever dock here because they are afraid of being disappeared, as the rumors attest. The few locals who live there prefer to be left alone. Aidran's center is a great lighthouse, which dates back to the beginning of the Age of the Sun. Dwelling within the lighthouse is the ruler of Aidran, Ayako the Masked. No one knows what Ayako looks like, for she -- if they are a she -- hasn't left the lighthouse since her appearance two hundred years ago and anyone who goes into the lighthouse doesn't return. Ayako's agenda is unknown.

    On the swampy coast, wracked by storms from Vir, lies a stone island. The small village of Pelei rests on this island. No one lives there except the Reliquary Order, a specific Minor Charter that work for the heptarchs. The Reliquaries can smell magic and trace Scripture, leading them to collect it for the heptarchs. Their leader is Elikki the Cruel, the eldest of the seven rulers. She has been in Pelei since before the Age of the Sun. She collects the skulls of the magically empowered, specifically those Reliquaries who betray their master or otherwise fail to meet her expectations. Her sinister agenda is unknown.

    The only of the seven major settlements in Magnos not on the coast, Ayfen is a place of unending cold and snow. Situated high in the peaks of Magnos, Ayfen is called the Province of Winter. Its folks are an eccentric sort, preferring machines and clockwork to travelers and merchants. They are largely insular. The heptarch of Ayfen is Maerga the Green, a beautiful young woman with lustrous green hair. She leads the town's effort on a mysterious project.

    Due to the ongoing War of Regicide Hubris, conscription has been forced onto the populace.

d8 Hooks in Magnos

1. The Reliquary Order is seeking new members after several Reliquaries were killed trying to retrieve some powerful Scripture from a pre-Sun tomb.
2. A thief has stolen one of Sarvom's THREE WORD SWORDS and he is willing to pay highly for the thief's head and the sword.
3. Raised and dissected corpses have been found near the town of Yorrai. Hysteria is spreading among the students as they believe one among their number is a terrible Skull Scribe.
4. You are part of the Reliquary Order. You have been commanded by Elikki to pursue a peculiar objective: find damning evidence on Hinata the Magnanimous.
5. You are slaves in the city of Helkau, tortured and beaten by the golden hand of Juro. Your goal is to either escape captivity and seek asylum in the wilderness, or lead a successful revolution amongst the powerful heptarch.
6. The lighthouse in Aidran has flickered out. Find out what happened and try not to die.
7. You are burglars hired by Philosopher Minoru to break into Maerga's lab in Ayfen and find out what she is working on there.
8. Rumors have spread of a mysterious woman who can control lightning with a twitch of her hands and a blink of an eye. The rumors also say that she is very anti-heptarchy. All of the heptarchs are worried and have sent agents to eliminate her.