City of Doors Actual Play

    City of Doors is/was an open table game run/ran by Locheil, in a setting close enough to Planescape's Sigil that it's Planescape's Sigil. An endless city curved over itself, full to the brim with rain, crime, and the kind of creatures otherwise only seen in latter-day 3.5e monster manuals.
    And one day in Sigil, a few real miscreants slink into the Drooling Elephant to get out of the weather (which is, currently, On Fire) - ??? the amnesiac Tiefling, Princess Clarissant, Kyriakos the sword-poet, the wizard-adept Merry, and Doystev, spawn of vampires and idiosyncratic occultist.
    It’s been long enough that the Elephant’s proprietor recognizes ???’s whole deal, and tosses them the address (56 Green Dragon Place) of a reputable tattooist, probably not for the first time, while the rest of the party peers at the Elephant’s collage of a jobs board. While ???’s general aura of ruin slowly decays the lettering, the group manages to decide on a “personnel retrieval” job for the local gang leader Big Bufo - grabbing the “Bone Wizard” Langstrom Loy and dragging him in “alive, or mostly alive” for 600gp, or 400 if he’s dead.
    They stumble through the smoke outside to Darkwell Court, manage to not get stabbed on their way through Bufo’s house despite stumbling into (and sometimes into) all manner of dubious individuals and armed guards, and get both the address of a slaughterhouse Loy hangs out in, and warned that while Loy is definitely a kind of necromancer, he prefers to animate his own bones rather than others’.


    Along with a map of the slaughterhouse, they also manage to pick up another two friends; the extremely dubious Ashtray and Edge-of-Heart-and-Mind, a corpse full of knives disguised as a person thanks to an utterly unreasonable number of veils.
    They take an ill-advised shortcut through an undersigil sewer and into a section of Advanced Darkness that talks about sacrifices until Edge tosses one of the arms of their corpse to pay the toll. The sewer runs straight into a grate in the slaughterhouse and up into the front room, past its locked door and pair of guards. While the players squat in an incredibly unpleasant blood-filled tube and frantically conspire, someone else hammers on the door from outside and announces they have a warrant for Langstrom Loy.
    The guards scramble off,

and by shouting through the door, the players manage to persuade the police that they were already hired by the local Sergeant, and need the Hardheads to stay outside in case Loy runs. With the guards distracted, they creep out from the grate and start checking through the building, eventually finding two gunmen and the 8-foot tall Loy doped up on Extra Bones, all dragging a cage with a huge pig-demon inside.
    Unseen, the party sets up outside the corridor and when Loy and his guards come through to fight the Hardheads, they’re jumped by all six of them - Doystev grapples Loy and uses the spell Pass Through Hidden Places to teleport both of them into some horrid claustrophobic tunnel and bites him and bites him and bites him and bites him while the rest set upon the guards with knives and axes. As more guards pile in from other rooms, Ashtray cracks open the lock on the pig cage. The rest of the group slips down Doystev’s teleport-tunnel-gate as Kyriakos and Edge successfully duel the pig-demon, then toss a few of Edge’s knives in to possess it and slam it right through the front wall to distract the Hardheads.
    Down in the tunnel, Doystev cracks Loy over the head with a piece of concrete and Princess Clarissant envelops him in a net to drag him back to Bufo’s. The presence of the Hardheads gets them an extra 100gp in hazard pay, and once Bufo’s assistant Chella shoots Loy, Edge-of-Heart-and-Mind gets to borrow his body, too. And that's a kind of success, I say.

I Caught You (GLOG Class: Revenant)

(another draft trade/theft, this time from EosOfDawn - any non-Archonful decisions in formatting or design are probably because of them)    

Maybe you deserved it - the bullet over the poker table, the knife in the alleyway. Or maybe no one deserves anything. 

Skills: 1. Cattle Herding 2. Cattle Rustling 3. Knotwork

Items: Light Accursed Six-Shooter, Medium Blackened Levergun, all-black concealing outfit, 40ft. of hangman’s rope, 20 bullets, 2 Devil’s Gifts.

A: Dead//Quick, Contract, +1 to-hit

B: The Knight, Extra Attack

Dead//Quick

Dead: you do not need to eat, drink, breathe, or sleep. You are, in the literal sense, unkillable - while you can be maimed to immobility or nonfunction, you cannot die, and any injuries short of a lost limb repair themselves in the next new moon. In the presence of your Vendetta, that hated rival who killed you, and who you now live to kill, this flips to Quick.

Quick: you can die now, I’m sorry to say, but you lose that skeletal shamble and come back to life, almost - and you can move a lot faster when there’s no biology telling you what to do. You win initiative automatically.

Contract

Once your Vendetta, whether that’s one person or a dozen-man posse, are all in the ground, your time is up. One last choice - let your soul return to Judgment, dissolving to dust (and allowing you, the player, to make a new character already at template B, or template C if you have the B template in Revenant), or serve the Devil eternally as his Right Hand - no longer needing food or drink and always winning Initiative, but no longer regenerating and subject to repossession if your body is damaged beyond use. And, of course, the Devil has uses for an agent on Earth.

The Knight

It can be lonely, with only the desert to listen to. Whenever the sun does not shine, you can bring a horse, or something close to it, to you - an assemblage of bones and burning embers, as fast as any horse but never tiring.

And, by now, you’re starting to understand your situation. When your Vendetta dies, you don’t need to surrender, not to Heaven nor Hell - all you really need is another target. As long as you’re able to chain together new Vendettas with people who have greatly harmed you, you don’t need to rest. Your work is not yet done.

Devil’s Gifts

1. A second light Accursed Six-Shooter - anyone killed by it is sent directly to Hell, and its damage dice explode in a flare of hellfire. 

2. Three sticks of dynamite - each one detonates completely silently and with a bitter green light. 

3. Light bowie knife - in its reflection, everyone is a corpse, except you - you haven’t looked that healthy a day in your life.

4. Bullet with your own name on it. Whenever it’s fired, it comes right back to you, perfectly intact and ready to be recased - even if it has to go around corners or through walls to do it.

5. Holes in your own skeletal arm - you can whistle through them, and when you do everyone in earshot hears Absolutely Nothing.

6. Turquoise poker chip, theoretically worth $5,000.

7. Deck of 52 cards, all marked - no matter what, any game you play with them you lose. Pull ten of them and they’ll murmur about your future, then turn to ash. The two left over, I’ve heard, tell you if you’ll get into Heaven.

8. Midnight Brandy - smells unnervingly of meat. Whoever drinks it vomits up a near-mummified rattlesnake; it’ll follow your directions until the next dawn, at which point it will turn to dust.

9. An entire crew-served gatling gun, complete with 100 rounds of ammunition. Impossible to move without a horse, deeply illegal, generally inconvenient, but it’ll turn 25 rounds into a 3d6 damage hail in a 100’ cone.

10. Your own coffin, chained to your ankle. Takes up 5 slots when you carry it on your back but can store an extra 10 slots without encumbering you. The chain is exactly 6 cubits long (about 9 feet) and you get a bad feeling about breaking it.

Musing on the Wreck (GLOG Class: Attainder)

This is a draft trade from Locheil, itself set in deus ex parabola's Unfinished World. As such, its format, layout, and general Vibe is deeply influenced by them both.

The Attainder is a practitioner of Destruction - inheritor of a shrouded history of witch-work, a forgotten, unloved Art passed down in the lands of Man by isolated monasteries run by the foolish and the bitter. Up North, in the lands of the wise, noble Monkeys, it’s said that this work takes on a brighter tone - but here, further from the sun, all is rot.

—

Perks: You get Advantage on saves against poisons - you’re more hostile than they could ever be.

Drawback: People who see you doing Destruction things will probably shit themselves and cry. You smell like embalming fluid or oxtongue mushrooms. 

—

Skills: 1. Anatomy 2. Poisons 3. Chemistry 

Starting Equipment: Heavy Robe, Jeweler’s Loupe, light scalpel, 2 Pieces of Attainder’s Kit

A - Avizandum, +1MD

B - Deodand, +1MD

C - Res Ipsa Loquitur, +1MD 

D - Repugnancy, Mala Fide, +1MD

You know one Technique, determined by rolling 1d8. Others may be found in foul scrolls of strange witchery, or learned from other Attainders. 

An Attainder in a delightful hat, by Locheil

Avizandum

Your eyes are trained, looking beyond what is to the forms that must be - the true core of the objects around you. These cores have the four following Properties, which are easily visible to you:

• Purpose - what is the object meant to do? An axe cleaves, a shovel digs.
• Material - what is the object made of, truly? Not necessarily the majority composition, but the most fundamental composition - an axe may have more handle than head, but to the eyes of the Attainder it is made of steel.
• Scale - how large is the object, roughly? 
• Blessedness - is the object worked by magic? Accursed? 

 Living creatures have a Scale and a Purpose, but instead of a Material they have an Element (one of “Hot Metal”, “Ice”, “Lightning”, “Rot”, and “Force”) and instead of blessedness you can view their karmic burden. 

Deodand

The unguarded touch of your hands rots and rusts - through an inch of wood or half an inch of stone or nonmagical metal per minute. It does not affect living animals, but you can’t make it stop. Silk and lead are immune to this; the former for its purity, the latter for its baseness.

Res Ipsa Loquitur

The true cores move, and you know why - when you use Avizandum to focus on an object and learn its Properties, you can ask it questions about them - when was the last time you performed your Purpose, sword? Who made you this way, magic ring?

Repugnancy

Notoriety follows you! Level 1 apprentice Attainder, and 4-in-6 chance of people going AAAAAAAAAAA in fear when you announce your name. 

Mala Fide

Your spells and abilities can now target yourself - change your Purpose, your Scale, hide away your burdens in others. There is no law where you step.

Techniques:

Consumption

R: Stomach. T: Anything you can swallow. D: Instant.

You can eat (and safely digest) one remotely organic item of up to [dice] slots’ size. This counts as [sum] days’ worth rations. This obliterates whatever you consume, in totality. 

Tenancy 

R: Touch. T: A wall, ceiling or floor. D: [sum] hours.  

Physically meld yourself with a sturdy physical surface, leaving behind nothing but a stain. While Tenant, you are inaccessible, invulnerable, blind and deaf. 

You can choose to end the Technique at any point during the duration, at which point, you slither out from where you went in. If the surface is anything less durable than adamant, you damage and disfigure it as you leave. 

Acquisition 

R: Touch. T: A person. D: [sum] hours. 

You may graft up to [dice] loose organic body parts (i.e., arms, legs, ears) to a target, and have them function for the duration. Unwilling targets may save. Afterwards, the target takes [lowest] non-lethal damage for each grafted part, as they rot into muck. 

Cessavit

R: Touch T: An object taking up [dice] or less slots. D: [sum] hours.

You obliterate the target object, extracting one of its properties. You may then impart this extracted property to something you touch within the next minute. The change lasts [sum] hours.

When cast with 4 dice, you may instead transform the extracted property into a small, gallstone-like chunk, which allows you to indefinitely store properties for use with this Technique.  

Joinder

R:[dice]*5 feet. T: Up to [dice]+1 animals. D:[sum] hours. 

You combine the target animals into a monstrous Chimaera.

The Chimaera gains an extra [dice]HD for the duration, and will follow the spirit of your orders, albeit perhaps with some extra collateral damage and clumsiness. When the duration ends, the Chimaera will die, and collapse, immediately decaying into a toxic fungal bloom. 

Suo Motu

R: Touch T: [dice] consenting individuals and [dice] objects D:[dice]*10 minutes

The target individuals become erased, their properties placed into the target objects for the duration, allowing them to move and otherwise manipulate the object until they pop out of it. Fit your allies into a rock and throw them through a window, turn them into curtains so they can spy on people, hide backup in a pocket.

Tithe

R: Touch T: Something living. D: [sum] minutes. 

You can steal a total of [sum] points worth of stats from the target. Unwilling creatures may save. This deals [dice] damage to the target, and bolsters your capabilities for the duration. 

Lacuna 

R: 60 feet T: A location D: Instant

Destroy, in a sense, the distance between you and your target location to arrive there instantaneously. The target location must be reachable by both sight and air in a straight line from you - you could blink through a net, but not a pane of glass.

Grievous Bodily Harm 

R: Touch. T: Anything. D: Instant.

The Art of Destruction can do so much more than its namesake. On the other hand, it’s not an unearned moniker. 

A target you touch with your left hand suffers [sum + dice] damage - living things may save for half. The target’s surface takes on the texture of anything it’s touching, and if this kills a living creature, they immediately collapse into a bloom of fungi. 

Excambion

R: 60 feet. T: Any two objects. D: [sum] minutes. 

You may select up to [dice] properties, and swap them between the objects targeted - give a house the Purpose of a sword to turn it into a death trap, and the sword into a birdhouse.

Chance Medley 

R: 15 feet. T: a 10’ radius circle D: [sum] minutes

One of the feared Signature Techniques of the Attainders. 

Spreading outwards from you, the borders between things begin to break down, transforming into inchoate slime, a matrix of colors and angles. Anything nonhuman touched by the Medley dissolves into more of it. Living humans can walk on the Medley without issue, though their equipment will dissolve. It’s like walking on a water balloon full of Legos. 

The Medley expands at a rate of one foot every minute until its duration runs out, or until you shut it down intentionally. If you roll a Mishap while using this Technique, you cannot turn it off until it reaches its end, and if you roll a Doom while using this Technique, you instantly dissolve into Medley instead of your target location.

Ultimus Haeres 

R: 60 feet. T: Yourself and a creature of [dice] or less HD. D: n/a

One of the feared Signature Techniques of the Attainders. 

If your target fails a save, you both die. [sum] minutes later, you arise as a new creature with as many total HD as the both of you had, a mixture of your physical features, and a combination of your personalities and memories - these skewed in favour of the Attainder. 

If your halves were fighting when the Technique was used, you may suffer a serious existential crisis in your first hours of new life. 

A Man owns many pairs of shoes over his life. From this, we conclude that Man is immortal.

Mishaps of the Attainder:

1. For the next [sum] days, you loudly vomit spores whenever you roll a 6 on an MD.
2. You take 1d6 damage and go blind for [sum] minutes.
3. Your feet sink a foot into whatever you’re standing on, and your body takes on [dice] properties of whatever you just destroyed. This lasts for [sum] rounds.
4. You destroy your outer layer with the nearby air, and catch fire.  
5. You did something wrong. A choking cloud of greyish dust explodes out from you. Everyone nearby saves versus disease. 
6. The Technique doubles in strength, but you lose the use of [dice] eyes, limbs, ears or organs, your choice, for [sum] days. 

Dooms of the Attainder: 

1. Patches of your skin, especially on your throat and stomach, blotch, split, and turn foul. The pain is constant, but manageable. 
2. Your sclerae fill with blood, your gums pull back from your teeth, your hands blacken, and your fingernails fall out. Thick fingers of fungal matter grow from your skin, unless you scrape yourself regularly. The agony is quite severe, and quite unceasing.
3. You die, and rot. Mercifully, the pain subsides. Your body no longer heals naturally, and must be repaired with needle and thread. You no longer need to sleep. If you are caught by the Sun, your body will dissolve, and the character will no longer be playable.

Attainder’s Kit: 

1. Vial of Cheap Poison - causes vomiting and on a failed CON save the loss of 1d4 points of Max HP for a number of days equal to the number of lost HP
2. 5 Embalmed Rats 
3. Kukri, Wickedly Curved - a light weapon with exploding damage dice, though it’s mostly used to cut plants
4. Cursed Ring - every night, when you sleep, the finger this ring is worn on rolls off to cause mischief 
5. Sneezing Powder - 3 doses
6. Vodka - 3 doses
7. Book on Arelian Interparty Politics OR Pulp Adventure Story, your choice. 
8. Jar of potted meat in butter
9. Perfume (plum-scented), six doses
10. Broad rainproof hat, absolutely awful pastel fish patterns
11. Trained falcon and glove
12. Lead lockbox, no key and impervious to Deodand. Probably filled with dust and pennies, but at least you can hit people with it.
13. Cane sword, Medium, pommel decorated with a round grinning face
14. Silk glove, singular
15. Backgammon set - the board is broken in half, but you can’t bear to part with it
16. Sledgehammer, 3 slots - technically a Massive weapon, but good luck hitting anyone with it unless they’re unconscious or something
17. Needle and thread
18. Bottle of Dr. McIntyre’s Wholesome Patent Medicine - mostly laudanum and whatever weeds were growing at the back of the factory this week. 3 doses. 
19. Lantern of blue glass, that burns a cold white. 
20. A Curio! 

1. A tattered boot - when turned upside-down, pours out somewhat slimy, probably nonpotable water. Contains, somehow, ten gallons of water and refills every day.  
2. Miniscule dried mushroom, a lurid red. Anyone who eats the mushroom explodes ten days later - dead, no save. Unfortunately, crushing the mushroom or introducing it to water also causes it to explode, so you might have a hard time hiding it in the Governor’s soup.
3. Platinum-iridium rod, exactly one meter long. Exactly one meter - before it ended up in your hands, it was in an Imperial weights and measures office.
4. Piece of paper recording the recipe for Red Powder - a black powder equivalent that burns silently, smokelessly, and with a bright red flash. Gives a -2 to gun damage, but more than makes up for it.
5. A Manufactory’s… something - a clockwork contraption that takes coal in one end and drops foil throwing stars (1 damage, throw 30 feet) out the other. A dial could be set to increasingly large weapons, but it’s jammed
6. Vial of sand from the furthest reaches of the North - when broken, the sand follows one spoken instruction to the best of its ability, and then collapses. If you collect the sand in another vial, you can use it again - so be careful around wind.

15 Minute Posting - The Isle That Was Barymeas

I've just finished running a Delta Green campaign, and am a month deep into running See It Descend Into, so there has been little time for posting - so, I threw things at Locheil until they told me something to write about, on a time limit because it's funny.

The Isle That Was Barymeas

O, woe upon those long-dead giants, struck down when that terror Gravity put her hands upon their bones to make way for lesser sorts. For even those who carved the mountains cannot stand up to the square-cube law.

While the rest of their kind sank into the depths long ago, Barymeas was fortunate enough to pass away in what, to them, was a waist-deep mire. So, even now, their grandeur can be seen.

Upon Barymeas humankind has built their first cities, separated by miles of calcified earth and tumorous trees. To the north are the great towers of the City Consumptive - open to the mouth of Barymeas, mining their teeth for toolwork and their tongue for clothing. Soon their lord is doomed to die, after years of listening to the giant's whispers day and night - i could have warned you, i could have warned you, i could have warned you.

His heirs are varied in height and hair, but all worse than the last. Already, they abandon their father to creep into homes in the night and abduct the occupants to transcribe Barymeas's messages, certain this will protect them. 

But the City Consumptive could not live on its own - off to the west is the City Dextrous, of silk weavers and net fishers. Barymeas transitioned past being "meat" decades ago, but the fish still come, and still change. You do not, could not, recognize them - they are not your brethren. 

The ships no longer leave sight of land - those that do vanish, and those that return are no longer crewed by the people who left.

But even when ambition is punished, it will not be stopped. South, in the City Motile, they set to work building a great vessel with sails, and wheels, and burning coals. Every year Barymeas twitches and the waters come to drown the city, and so every year they pace to the other of the isle's feet. It is said that every king and queen the City Motile has had is inside that great vessel, living long after death and guiding its builders.

Those of the City Dextrous wish to burn the vessel, certain that passing this many people over the horizon will lead to a terrible retribution. The lord of the City Consumptive wishes to steal it, to sail down into Barymeas's throat before he dies, and see the truth of what he's been told.

To the east is the Land of Strangers - but they are human like any other. Upon Barymeas's hand they graze sheep and goats, and wear crowns of woven grass. Their hand was the last part of them to die, as Barymeas was the inventor of them, and would not be betrayed by their creation. So, dozens of feet down the Strangers cut, to see the blood of the last living piece of the last dying giant pulse. And the blood says i can still curse you, i can still curse you, i can still curse you, i can still curse you.