6 Navigator GLOG Classes (Lanthanide Horizon)

This is an experiment - Lanthanide Horizon has always been classless, so I was interested in what would change if I replaced its backgrounds with more standard GLOG progression. No idea how I feel about it. 

Koryonos
A: Warband, +1 to-hit
B: Hunter-Gatherer, +1 skill
C: Houses Like Torches, +1 skill
D: Pack of Wolves, +1 attack per round

A: Warband
You lead half a dozen of the koryos - the youth-band, those not yet ready for the responsibility of full sept membership. Unbound by propriety, you live in the wilderness through the Blue season, then attach yourself to whichever sept deigns to take you in the Black. 

Warband members are 4 HP, 10 AC, 1 Discipline, and deal 1d6 damage with hatchets or 1 with thrown rocks. “Stop ransacking the town and stealing silverware and throwing people out windows” is a maneuver requiring a successful Discipline roll. 

Your warband has two advantages, and one disadvantage:

Advantages

1. Your warband is armed not only with stones and axes, but with Navigator throwing darts (1d6 damage, can be thrown 50’, or further with a -1 to-hit penalty for every 10’ feet).
2. Your warband carries shields, raising their AC to 12.
3. Your warband is doubled in size - its other segment led by a lieutenant you promote.
4. Your warband follows you loyally, increasing their Discipline to 5.
5. One member of your warband is betrothed to a sept - as long as they live, this sept is a safe haven.
6. Your warband carries a device with it - something halfway between a chariot and a shotgun. 2d8 damage in a 120’ cone, though you move terribly slowly as you pull it.

Disadvantages

1. Two members of your warband fight for the affections of a third in a way that is certain to eventually blow the whole thing up.
2. You are followed by something - the lights of some machine shine on the edge of your firelight.
3. A sept considers you in their debt.
4. Your band is young and still untested. They have -2 to-hit.
5. Your band is impatient, chafing against even successful orders to halt an attack or abandon loot. 
6. Your band has become known for impiety, beyond that expected of the koryos - outsiders find you offputting, if not a potential magnet for curses.

B: Hunter-Gatherer
As long as your warband never spends more than a night in the same place, they collect enough food to survive. 

Each night, ask one of the following questions and receive an answer:

•     Where is the closest drinkable water?
•     How do I avoid the most dangerous creature in the area?
•     What is the most fortifiable defensive location around?
•     Is something hidden from me here?
•     Am I being tracked, followed, or watched?

C: Houses Like Torches
What a beautiful light. With a shout, your unit moves and attacks once again. You can’t do this again until you’ve done one of the following: revel in the ruins, land a critical hit, or slay the leader of an opposing force. 

D: Pack of Wolves
Units you lead have +2 HP and +2 damage. Enemies you face have disadvantage on Discipline rolls and rolls on the Failures of Discipline table. When they rout, roll 2d8 instead of 2d6.

Espatier
+1 to-hit per template.
A: 3D Mindset, +1 attack per round
B: Saboteur
C: Turn Against Them All
D: Ulfheðinn 
Δ: Lictor

A: 3D Mindset
You move through 0g as if you were flying.

B: Saboteur
The torch is your tool - the axe is just to get people out of the way. With appropriate tools, you can cut a door-sized hole in a wall in a single round, or perform other acts of property damage.

When applicable, your list of combat maneuvers now includes “hack a hole in the wall and see what comes flying out”. 

Many stop here, and turn to peaceful arts.

C: Turn Against Them All
Before taking this template, you must seek a hero of the Ulfheðnar, the breakers of men.
You sit in the airlock, breathing. In, out. In, out. The smoke fills your lungs, the moxa burns round scars into your skin. In, out. In, out. Think about what you have done, and what more you could still do.

The airlock opens. Your spit boils on your tongue in the moment before you fall unconscious.

You wake with four points of rage.

D: Ulfheðinn 
Before taking this template, you must complete the task given to you by your teacher.
You will be sent out to do something none could. Raid your hated rival alone, and return with five captives. Duel a towering machine and bring it to the earth.

With this complete, your teacher presents you with the demon-face mask and the feather mantle. Nothing separates you. 

You know how to make the same moxa that turned you into this - if you are prepared in this way before a fight, when you rage you automatically attack anyone who attacks you in melee, and ignore the effects of wounds and death until your rage ends. 

It will not be long until you have a student of your own, hoping to walk the killing path.

Δ: Lictor
Abandon your sept, and pledge yourself wholly to the service of the Imperious.
All doors are open to you, and tyranny shrouds you like a cloak. Human foes must check Morale to begin combat with you.

Gunsmith
A: Someone Else’s Child
B: Calming Voice, Modification 
C: Journeyman, Breathe Easy
D: Master

A: Someone Else’s Child
You are immune to the decrees of the Imperious. Let them howl and scream all they like. You are the most prominent member of any group - perfectly still in the midst of them. Navigators must save or be unable to bring themselves to harm you. 

You can expect to be hosted in any sept-vessel that harbors the Society. Members of it will approach you, expecting the same - even if they come from your greatest enemy, and your sept hungers for their blood.

These protections are lost if you show greater loyalty to your sept (or to yourself) than to the Society.

B: Calming Voice
You may attempt to calm all listeners with soothing words. Intelligent creatures get a save, though those with fewer HD than you fail automatically. When a creature fails the save their emotions dull to grey outlines, anger drains, joy becomes hollow, battle-lust fades.

After using your Calming Voice you can't use it again until you have done at least two of the following: get a full night's rest, drink a dose of wine, consider the mysteries of the Society for two hours.

C: Journeyman
With an evening’s work you may make modifications to firearms, at the cost of weight and misfire chance, or make 3d4 rounds of specialized ammunition (tungsten-core AP, hypergolic magnesium, et cetera).  

C: Breathe Easy
You are meant to use them, sometimes. Each round you spend aiming before firing provides you +1 to-hit and allows you to roll an extra damage die, keeping the highest 2 (or however many your chosen gun happens to roll).

D: Master
Before taking this template, you must build a weapon that fires further and more accurately than any Master’s.
With a week’s work, you may make a rifle.

Lawspeaker
A: Judge of Character
B: Prediction OR Code of Hammurabi

A: Judge of Character
Once per Season, when presented with a social situation, you may ask one of the following questions to the GM directly - they will answer honestly. 
    Who is really in control here?
    What is about to happen?
    What trait rules this person?
    What here is not what it appears to be?

B: Prediction
If you've spent more than an hour in someone's company or read sufficient biographical information you have a 2-in-6 to predict their reaction to any given event (increases by 1-in-6 for spending a week/month/year in their company). 

B: Code of Hammurabi
You have forsworn the common law of the Navigators to spread the commands of Spiral tomes and steles. You learn the language of the Spire, if you did not know it already. 

When writing a contract, you have a 2-in-6 chance to slip in clauses the other side misses. If someone breaks an oath sworn in front of you, you know immediately.

Skald
A: Leveling Mechanism
Δ: Jester’s Privilege

A: Leveling Mechanism
If you tell a tall tale, people will believe it and pass it around. Your tales are attributed directly to you. Those you slander will hear of it, and may pay you a visit if thoroughly incensed.
If a tale you’ve told is proven false, save vs. a tarnished reputation. Once tarnished, those who know of you will still pass around your tales, but will not believe a single word without clear proof.

Δ: Jester’s Privilege
Insult the Imperious to their face and get away with it.
You can hold the attention of any crowd as long as you keep talking. Watch them hang on your words. Even if they’re here to kill you, they can’t help but listen.

Katabatist
A: Beneath Notice
B: Follow Me
C: Apotrope
D: Alone, Alone, Alone

A: Beneath Notice
Passive machines (those built for noncombat purposes) don't notice you unless you attack them, and you will always be attacked last by combat machines and Firstborn. 

B: Follow Me
There is something wrong with your eyes. Look into someone else’s and they are forced to make a Morale roll. If they fail, they are rooted to the spot until you break eye contact. They may still defend themselves. If they pass, they notice nothing amiss.

C: Apotrope
Machines roll Reaction when meeting a group you are in. On a positive roll, they blink lights at you. They hope you will understand.

D: Alone, Alone, Alone
Those who fail morale rolls caused by Follow Me are knocked unconscious.

Archpendix N

The wagon of bands for September 8th - inspirational media (in this case, for Lanthanide Horizon). Like weirdwriter I will be writing this in 15 minutes, though in my case that's because if I think about it for too long I will cringe right out the back of my own head. 

Debt: the First 5000 Years / The Dawn of Everything

David Graeber's Debt is not the origin of my fixation with the gift economy (nor is Marcel Mauss's The Gift), but since I don't recall the source it gets the spot.

Graeber and Wengrow's TDoE is the direct source for Navigator subsistence and seasonal government (based on their description of the Nambikwara) and the institution of the Imperious (based on their description of the Great Sun of the Natchez).

Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants

A good bedrock for the "evil chemistry" pillar of the game - a multi-decade comedy of errors. People burn through concrete with aluminum-fluorine cutting torches, try to shame rocket motors into working correctly by playing the sounds of a launch, blow up extremely valuable scientific equipment, cover acres of woodland in powdered metal, make a fuel so unrelentingly foul and fly-attracting that they seal the container and throw it into the San Francisco bay, and get attacked by "nine thousand demented bats".

Atomic Rockets fulfills a similar role for my obsession with deeply impractical radiator designs.

Firelock 198X is a recent fixation that filled in the vat-grown Firstborn and (in combination with Ignition) has given some 1960s-military-engineer-fever-dream tinges to megastructural technology. 

Also there are a lot of things I haven't read - The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom, which I know only through these blogposts, or the fact that when I really give up I just poke around in front of the Wikipedia pages for political and economic anthropology. Eclipse Phase should clearly have some influence on the transhuman elements of the setting, but I've never read it either, only the yearblogs Farcast and Seedware.

 

Mounted on a Pin (Aclas Dungeon)

The central dungeon of Those Fragile Bridges, my funnel hexcrawl for Locheil's Aclas.

The Panopticon is shaped like its namesake - a 3-floor tower of 30 foot high rooms, each open to a central pillar and its arcflash-white spotlight.

There are no random encounters; the Mystic would not permit loose variables in his home. Instead, each exploration turn the spotlight clicks one segment clockwise - starting at 2/5/8, then 3/6/9, and so on.

If the spotlight sees the PCs (which is different than "passing through the room they are in" - there is a chance to hide), it flashes red. Puyinthel notices you. He reaches out with telekinetic hands to drag a PC into room 10 for interrogation. The rest take 1d8 damage per round as the light burns them away into nothing.

This spotlight is a real, physical object, and can be destroyed. If it is, Puyinthel leaves 10 to hunt the saboteurs. The spotlight does not notice those under the influence of the killing-chalice from hex C1. 

Each room connects to each other on its floor, with the exceptions of 8 and 10. The staircase between the first two floors is from 3-6, then the next from 5-8. There is an unlocked door into room 1, and a barred window into room 6.

1. Tribute Room

The only place in the Panopticon open to others - an altar for the people of the island to leave food, water, and gifts for Puyinthel.

2. Ankle Cutter

Seams run across the bottom of this room's outer wall, and a holographic two-dimensional eye floats in the center of it. If the eye sees you (it cannot be destroyed, but can be blinded with sand and so on) pass through this room, curved blades snap out from the seams, aiming for hamstrings (1d8 damage, immobilizing you on a 6+), and the eye laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs as the Gargoyle comes.

3. Gargoyle - Stairs

A statue of a bearded man dredged up from the depths, its cracks filled with gold. Its head ends above the lower jaw, a flat ruby shaped like <0> hovering where it would have been. 4 HD, 14 AC, takes only one damage from things not meant to break stones, slow, knocks you prone with a slap for +2 1d8 or stomps on the prone for +4 2d10.

The Gargoyle sees only through the ruby, which can be plucked from its head (worth 200gp - the gold in the statue is worth another 100). If Puyinthel dies, it shuts down (the intact Gargoyle, sold as an art piece, is worth 1000). 

It sits on the floor like a reprimanded child, still except for the ruby spinning like a radar dish. Next to it, stairs lead up to room 6.

4. Serpent's Egg

This room has no doors in or out, only thin plaster walls. Behind them is an empty, dusty room, with a soft golden egg laid haphazardly on the floor.

If brought to the sea serpent in hex A2, it will do anything for you in return, even if it spells its own death. If heated in a forge, it will hatch into a newborn sea serpent.

5. Lockbox - Stairs

A heavy safe with jewelry (750 gp) stolen from Puyinthel's guests or manifested from nothing. It has no key - Puyinthel locks and unlocks it with his Crown when he needs to pay his Pursuers. As such, the keyhole has been filled with lead.

6. Window

The outer wall here is barred, instead of solid. Small and agile PCs could sidle in through it. On the inside, it is covered in a sheet of paper with the barest beginnings of some convoluted design painted in ink on its bottom-left corner.

7. The Error

Kept where Puyinthel can see it. A haunting spirit, something like a tree, something like a worm, colored perfectly flat grey like a missing texture. The Mystic has stuck it to the wall with nail after nail after nail. It bleeds a sheenless black.

He made a mistake, when he was younger and more foolish. He let it in. It has a parasite-Crown drawn from Puyinthel, under the inverse focus Loneliness. This Crown overrides Puyinthel's - it is immune to all of his effects, but he is not immune to its.

Anyone touching it disappears as long as they are doing so - and cannot see anyone else as long as they are under this effect. 

The Error exists only to kill Puyinthel, but is also mindlessly, obviously hostile to all other humans. It has an effective 2 HD and 10 AC (and grinds for 1d8 damage at +2 to-hit with its radula), but as long as the Mystic lives it will return from death, crawling out of the earth miles away.

8. Collage

The inner wall of this room is covered in hanging paintings - amateurish portraits and landscapes and delirious abstracts, many half-finished. They are layered - take a canvas down and find another beneath it. Take it too and reveal another image, painted directly onto the wall. 

9. Prisoner

This room has no doors in or out, only thick stone walls. 

A room empty apart from painting supplies and a jug of water, home to the weaver Jarde. He has spent weeks here, Puyinthel coming daily to ask questions. How did you feel when you were born? Please, draw an image of yourself. What day do you think it is? What is your favorite color? 

Jarde is unharmed. Not even shackled - where would he go, except down a 60 foot drop? When Puyinthel bores of his answers, he will be hurled from the Panopticon to break on the stones of the Graveyard (hex B1). 

10. The Pupil

There is no path to the center of the eye. 3 doorways stare out in each direction, but there are no bridges. Jump.

When you do, you reach a massive domed room, dominated by a raised-relief map of the island. If you look closely, you can see tiny figures walk across it - and tiny figures standing in the Panopticon, looking closely at a raised-relief map of the island. The map updates automatically to show the nearest seven hexes.

If you have escaped Puyinthel's notice, he is here, absentmindedly painting a figure for the castaway Siwatu Amaechi.

Puyinthel has 10 HP, and is unarmored, though he carries a finely-made cane-sword (+1, 1d6, worth 350 gp) to protect himself from the Error. His Crown is a 10 meter (30 foot) radius marked out around him in staring holographic eyes. Within this radius he has complete control of reality. He could do whatever he wishes - his favorite options are

a) to annihilate you, layer by minuscule layer like an MRI scan, so every particle of you can be viewed and known.

b) to replace you, first disintegrating your brain and then constructing a new one with a set of forged experiences that make you fully loyal to Puyinthel.

On his turn, he can do either of these to one person inside his Crown. Neither provides a save.

 

For G L Å U G U S T 2 0 2 5 - prompt 3:1 "wizard tower dungeon (must have a gimmick) OR train dungeon (NOT too linear)" 

Those Fragile Bridges (Aclas Hexcrawl)

Far in the south of Aclas, in the Yaladine archipelago, is an island, and a looming tower. Sailors call it the Lure - they say it glows at night, and is the home of misshapen beasts and a cult who wishes to flood the world - so they keep their distance.

It is, in truth, a prison, or a toybox. Domain of the Mystic who calls himself Puyinthel - mystic of the focus Control. From his tower he watches you dance, and he calls you his. Escape attempts are untenable as long as he lives - from miles away he looks down, reading thoughts and breaking necks.

Your parents lived and died on this island. You don't plan to do the same.

Random Encounters

2. The mystic's attention - he checks a snapshot of your fears, emotional state, and obsessions (as Insight) for anything out of the ordinary. The hair on the back of your neck rises.

3. 2d4 Pursuers (1 HD, shields, swords, shortbows) - Puyinthel's guards and killers, armed with figments of his imagination. Barbed arrows damage you again each time you move between hexes - but they'll catch you if you slow. If you roll an 8, this is the full set of Pursuers and includes Inga.

4. A cow-sized nudibranch (stats as carrion crawler) festooned with Sithican decorations in verdigrised bronze.

5. A recurring NPC - if the players have met no one, a fisher from Home out on a pleasant walk :)

6. 1d6 predatory lungfish (1 HD, slow movement, ambush predators, bite +1 1d6) drag themselves out from the damp earth.

7. Siwatu Amaechi, a hapless soldier (2 HD, big spear, real armor) from some island or another, now washed up on the Lure. 

8. The Ghost.

Hex Keys

A1: Home

A fishing village of a couple hundred - with no boats. Its residents dive, or fish with spears, but never further from shore than they can swim.  

Well, almost no boats - Puyinthel's eight Pursuers live in a long hall, and keep one among them to hunt for those desperate few who try to swim. Their foreign captain (and Duelist A, with the Vom Tag technique of her former Ossean training), Inga, tires of this post - Puyinthel provides them little for their loyalty. She is, in a way, just as much a captive as you. If you hunted down the deserter in C2, this would be enough to turn her towards you, and away from the Mystic.

A2: Sea Serpent

A great snake made of gold writhes offshore - it has been dying, bleeding glowing ichor into the sea, for decades. Ever since Puyinthel struck it down.

Serpentists see this as an extremely heavy-handed and not particularly positive omen - and for more materialist PCs, the dying snake means anyone swimming or sailing through this region has a 4-in-6 chance to be crushed, drowned, reduced to splinters, et cetera. 

Its blood ignites like gasoline. Its hatred of Puyinthel burns like the sun.

B1: Graveyard

Where the Mystic leaves broken toys. Sometimes, whether he doesn't trust them or because he's just bored, someone from Home gets an invitation to his tower - and when he's tired of them, they find themselves thrown, bodily, to the west to shatter on the ground.

These people are only buried at night, when the villagers think the Mystic isn't looking. 

And during these nights, and their vigils, a ghost stalks the graveyard. It tears at its own grave, howls at the rising sun, howls at the Panopticon, screams and screams and screams and screams its childrens' names and its parents' names and then, in the middle of a syllable, falls silent.

If it were given someone to possess, it could think. And it could take revenge. It knows this - and it screams this, in those moments when it is conscious enough to communicate.

B2: Panopticon

The pillar of the tyrant, manifestation of Control. 

B3: Shipwreck

Once the pirate ship Never Seen This Man In My Life, Officer - now, a ruin, scythed apart by coral and stones. Inside is a sole survivor, mind fizzing from exposure to Puyinthel, maddened by the belief that he is that mystic.

On his hip is an immense break-action pistol (1d8+4 damage, ignores armor, two-handed) - four brass cartridges jangle in his pouch, and a fifth is loaded.

C1: Sithican Temple

A buried ruin, carved with angular squid. Its half-sunken, gateless door is just large enough for you to crawl through, into a claustrophobic tunnel flooded with sticking, drowning mud.

Past this, the temple opens - a dark room, filled up to your knees in silty water. Rolling in it, desperate to stop itself from asphyxiating, is a multicolored cow-sized sea slug (stats as carrion crawler). 

Behind the nudibranch, on a mud-covered stone plinth, is a pearlescent chalice of piercingly blue water. Those who sip from it feel as if they are drowning, and then "die", for three hours - they still move, and speak, and think, but according to spells, spirits, anyone you ask, and mind-reading, there is nothing here but a corpse. There are six doses.

C2: Deserter's Camp

Surrounded by noisemakers on strings. In the center, Matvei fails to sleep. He fled from the Pursuers out of conscience - unable to bear any more time acting as the Mystic's boot.

Inga will execute him if he is captured - she has a reputation to uphold. 

For G L Å U G U S T 2 0 2 5 - prompt 5:1 "Tiny regional hexcrawl" 

Navigator "Gunsmith's Societies" (Lanthanide Horizon)

The "gunsmith's society" is an occult ritual organization within the clan-ship society of the Navigators, specializing in military leadership, mutual aid, and mediation across the lines of the three Navigator "assemblies".

Behavior
Gunsmiths have an inverse set of virtues when compared to mainline Navigators - where they are invasive, obsessed with equal treatment and insult, expected to react with high emotion, and aim for decisiveness in action and thought, gunsmiths are instead expected to keep the secrets of their order, accept the hierarchy of masters and journeymen, remain calm, and forsake immediate action to instead consider all angles.

This makes them, in the eyes of their neighbors, frightening - difficult to predict, difficult to understand. Additionally, members of the society are the only Navigators with the permission to ignore demands of their Imperious tyrants.

Social Function
Members of the society have a monopoly on the authorized production of Navigator airguns. Manufacture of these weapons is not hidden, nor even particularly difficult - any Navigator ship-tender has the necessary understanding of pressurized systems - but it is socially prevented. Navigators behave in a saga-like way (i.e. they go flying off the handle for basically no reason all the time) - do you trust them with guns? Really?

The society, with its more restrained social expectation, keeps these weapons to themselves, and to those Select and Imperious they can trust to keep them turned away from each other for use in war and against machines.

As a group they theoretically have no political desires beyond mediation - in practice, individual gunsmiths tend to stand in opposition to the twin cultural shifts of Legalism (who seek the development of writing, sedentary agriculture, and other ideas taken from the local Oases) and the Golden Sphere Revelation (which believes in an alternate eschatology than mainline Navigators). 

Mythological Basis
One of the secrets revealed during initiation into the gunsmith's society is the secret of heredity. Members of the society are not, in fact, descended of Parva Weightless (the mythohistorical first Navigator) - but instead children of Saveriu, a hunter and minor character in conventional tellings that the gunsmiths expand into the warrior-philosopher-king of Parva's home pre-Navigator culture. As members of the society are not children of Parva, they are thus not Navigators, permitting them to act as the society demands.

This was written for G L Å U G U S T 2 0 2 5 - prompt 1:2 "He Wields A Gun", maximum word count 500

More Treasures and Sept-Vessels of the Navigators

The third in the set (one, two) - I'm making another attempt at a play-by-post Navigator domain game and realized I put half of the obligatory PC starting treasures on the map somewhere, so. I need. more of those.

New Sept-Vessels

Falsifier - centerpiece of the secretive ritual “gunsmith’s society”. Members of this group appear in many septs, providing mediation, calming advice, and firearms expertise to the Select and Imperious - but they consider Falsifier their home.

• Left-Handed, Assembly Elegiast, Level 1: Reliquaries 1 (society lodge), Gunsmith’s Workshop (asset)
• The Select of this vessel is called Breathless - and the head of the gunsmith’s society is titled Occluder.
• This sept’s fabled ancestor is Ansgar, thief-inventor of the air rifle.

Indemnifier - a vessel with great potential. As well as the standard solid radiators found on any sept-vessel, Indemnifier holds an emergency high-flow loop using 1400 °F vaporized potassium. In the future, this could let it run all sorts of extreme technologies - for now, it acts as a convenient anti-boarding measure.

• Right-Handed, Assembly Cloudspinner, Level 2: Trade Goods 1 (potassium gathering), Mysteries 1 (Ti/K Vapor Tube Radiator)
• The Select of this vessel is called Optimist.
• The famed ancestor of this sept is Dydier, who was thought lost in distant lands but crawled back to his sept on foot.

Decalcifier - a baleful ship clad in carbon fiber. They hope to arm themselves, and then follow Sidereal into the Next World as a sentry, rather than join the assembly-ship’s crew; or, if the few of its members who fell into the Golden Sphere Revelation have their way, become self-sufficient and then vanish into that bleak place.

• Left-Handed, Assembly Sidereal, Level 1: Weaponry 1 (trained wanderers)
• The Select of this vessel is called Absent.
• The famed ancestor of this sept is Per, a poisoner reviled by all others.

additionally, sept Listener has been remade, now that Arcologists are no longer part of the setting:

Listener - a new-made vessel. Its people are celebratory, and its halls are shining. Crewed, in part, by glass-masked Firstborn… refugees? orphans?, slowly adapting to the thunder and glory of Navigation.

• Left-Handed, Level 1: Trade Goods 1 (3D-printed fabric), Reliquaries 1 (shrine to the voice ringing in your head)
• The Select of this vessel is called Stargazer.
• The famed ancestor of this sept is split; both Yzabé, whose descendants form the born-Navigator core of the sept, and the bodiless voice are revered.

New Treasures

10. Metamaterial Cloak - a misshapen parallelogram of tarp-like plastic. Refracts light, making its wearer invisible.

11. Ninety-Seventh Casket - a boron monolith the size of a shipping container, taken from the Hanging Gardens. Diagnostics sweep across its surface - the thing inside is not yet ready.

12. Eye Closer - a blue stone box with a mouthpiece on one end and a barrel on the other, filled with 5 doses of baleful powder. Those afflicted with it are first paralyzed by spasms, then driven to hallucination and paranoia.

13. Grain of Sand - contained in a magnetic apparatus. Glows with a blinding white heat. If it was released, it would fall, burning, forever. 

14. Bladeless Hilt - a +1 light “weapon”. Deals no damage to living things. If a machine is “killed” with it, it follows the commands of the hilt’s holder until another machine is “killed”.

15. The Volume’s Most Eligible Bachelorette - [sept] Balsinde Hierosme. Superlatively intelligent, kind, well-spoken, virtuous, et cetera, et cetera. Puts you in the best possible position for marriage arrangements.

16. Scalpel - an uparmored monopropellant-driven ultralight with an octet of laser-guided missiles. Carries one pilot and six desanting passengers.

17. Speaking Fire - carried rarely by Firstborn officers. A point of oilslick light, hovering by your shoulder. Lights your path, magnifies your voice, flashbangs people, and projects a burning shield of the same light (+2 AC, lights fires).

18. Siege Fusil - masterpiece of the gunsmith’s society. Fires 5 millimeter pellets at 6 kilometers per second, powered by a two-stage hydrogen gas-piston. 2d12 damage, +2 to-hit increasing by one for each turn spent aiming. Disadvantage on attack rolls if firing from an unsupported position.

Small Rules for Lanthanide Horizon (Dissection, Climbing/Caving)

Usually, I shift between genre with each campaign - but I'm now two failed Navigator sept campaigns deep and still haven't stopped thinking about them, probably because of the. failing...

As a break from three hundred years in the mines making Lanthanide Horizon hexcrawls I can't post because all my theoretical players read this, here are some leetle rules-modules I stapled to the latter campaign and barely used. 🙂

(later - I want to alter the Navigator backgrounds (i don't like Skald or Ropemaker), rewrite the Navigator septs so they can be used as NPC factions, and write some kind of generator for their Imperious management-kings) 

Machine Dissection

Ripped off from this system by Benign Brown Beast, but inverted - assigning dice, then rolling them, instead of rolling them before being assigned. 

When you move to salvage, pool 2+[INT bonus] d10s - with a relevant skill, add 2 more. Before rolling, divide them as you wish between three categories:

• Receive answers to [dice] questions about this machine and others like it (HD, AC, attacks, purpose, etc).
• Obtain minor components - roll all dice in this category and sum them together. Addone to the first digit of the sum to determine how many slots are collected, and the last digit keys what component is obtained. Any results that say "either X or Y", the player chooses. (For example, “26” is 2+1 = 3 slots of component #6)
• Take [best] on a secret table of attempts to recover a major component - a machine-specific tool that could be repaired, with work. (OK I realized that this is kind of a pain in the neck, "the table" is honestly probably just. 1-5 you really do it wrong and the dying machine catches your hand in some gears and crushes it, 6-8 you get Nothing, 9-10 you get "broken component that could do Thing The Machine Does In Its Statblock if you fix it) 

Minor Component Table

1. Wire (either stout copper or beautiful fiber-optic).

2. Either intact batteries, or manganese dioxide (flammable, used as a dark green pigment).

3. Propylene glycol, used as a coolant and lubricant - startlingly, somehow, safe for human consumption.

4. Jumbles of small springs and synthetic tendon, or fragments of soft solder.

5. Elbow-sized servomotors, or shin-long electric pistons.

6. Contact adhesive, or screws and bolts.

7. Multicolored plastic insulating sheaths, or dice-sized blocks of graphite.

8. Strings of status LEDs, or single lightbulbs.

9. Lengths of metal skeleton, or external plates.

0. A clicking mechanical eye, or the tangled-bismuth brain - a piece you can’t understand, but the men of the Vault will buy. ("the men of the Vault" are a local group of Foreign Types - more generally you could just say "[...] understand, but have value as decoration and trophies.")

Climbing/Caving

Also ripped off, this time from Sam Sorensen's Lowlife, and this blog post by Xenophon, and the classic Veins of the Earth system. I've been alternating between this and a stat-damage-mapped-segment thing with every campaign and I'm not happy with either of them, but this one is faster which makes it better.

When climbing/caving, roll 1d6 - looking for a 4-in-6 normally, or a 2-in-6 under poor conditions (evil overhang wall, evil your-head-is-touching-the-wall-and-ceiling-simultaneously tunnel). 

Add 1 to your chances if:

• you have an already-set rope line
• you have 15 or more STR (for climbing) or DEX (for caving)
• you have a theoretically relevant skill (if you literally have Climbing or Going Through Tunnels, add 2) 
• you've had at least ten minutes to study the route

and subtract one if:

• you have at least 5 filled inventory slots
• you have something in one of your hands
• you are in darkness
• the ascent is, in some way, out to get you (a general situational penalty for icy climbs, rubble-filled tunnels, or other such things)

If you pass, you're good! Probably. Reroll every 10 minutes or if your situation ever suddenly changes.

If you fail, roll 1d4 - this is how many quarters (25/50/75/99.9) of the obstacle you made it through before either falling on a climb, or becoming trapped in a tunnel. If you have and are using sufficient rope and pitons, you fall only 1 quarter and take that much fall damage before becoming caught. 

If you ever have to crawl vertically, do the math for your chances at both and then roll a single d6. Experience the wonders of falling 30 feet down a pipe and getting stuck still 80 feet up.

(this system removes the large tables of possible failures in Lowlife and Veins. Instead, I get to build on this basic system by keying climbs and tunnels - electrified walls, pipes flooding with boiling water, or places with added or changed failure penalties - "fall one segment before being caught in the moving gears", "fall, and also wake up the robots that live in the walls", etc)