Libra, Session 12 - The Finale

Well, here we are. Last time, the players shattered the ontological balance of the universe. 

This session starts with nearly all the PCs booking it - bursting from the door to the Contact Room just in time to see one OSIRIS office worker make a dropped-metal-pipe sound and shoot the guy next to him. The PCs agree that this only confirmed their choice to run. 

Back in the Astral Plane, Joe Normal gets a lecture: 

Your [assassination attempt/reunion] was [appreciated/unsuccessful]. Condolences, OSIRIS employment is not available at this time. Please take [this] pill. [This] will protect you from Office Politics. [They/I/We] will know where [you/we] are. Please dispense of the [child/third law/contraband] as quickly as possible. We are now closed for the winter.

And then gets thrown out to a riot - flaming skeletons escaped from the Thermodynamics incinerators fill the halls, the tiny moon is out of its cell, and CATERPILLAR's guards are too busy shooting each other and dissolving to do a thing about it. He throws himself to the PA, using the voice of the Pyramid to drag the Site Director, a couple psychic liquidators, and the warden of CATERPILLAR's cells to come to him - unfortunately, the Director is dead, and the rest maddened. 

So, he flees, meeting up with the rest of the PCs to navigate around Bad Weather (square zones of perfectly-flat blue sky ruled by the Other Law, surrounded by halos of lightning and inverse gravity where the incompatible physics rubbed up against each other), the Kanopy office building (now site of a dogfight between Thermodynamics fighter-bombers and the Kanopy Loss Prevention Phoenix), and the retreating members of 131 Halley's Comet, Kanopy's private guards.

As the city collapses, they call Templar - surely he'd have a safe place to st... nevermind, he's in a fistfight with a tank. Great. After the party helps with that problem, Satan takes his five minutes of Valrel's soul - using her vampiric hypnosis to drag Templar away and force him to consign his soul to Hell.

Or, at least, that was the plan - Joe Normal said "OK. Valrel just said she was going to apologize to Templar for all the bombings and murder and so forth. However, she's straight-up evil and power-hungry, so this is clearly some kind of scheme. I want in on the scheme." and sent his demon-fractal to eavesdrop. 

This, technically, if you squint, violated the "private conversation" part of the vampire's hypnosis - so Satan made a remarkably short-sighted decision, pulled out a gun, and shot the demon in the forehead. When the wizard freaks heard a gunshot from the alley with no one in it except for the evil vampire and the perfect paladin, they went "hm!" and arrived just in time to wrench the soul-selling contract out of Templar's hands.

Satan considered for a second, then shrugged "welp!" and ended his tenancy. There'll always be another chance.  

A couple more ducked gunfights and the PCs made it back home - ready to awaken the Philosopher's Stone both for its own benefit, and also because they expected the chunk of Black Metal to be the [child/third law/contraband] warned of by the Pyramid. They had already figured out "boil a thing that cannot be heated or cooled" (vacuum chamber), and within a few minutes have bloomed the stone in vaporized Black Metal, fueled its inner light with surrendered MD, and made homunculi out of suits of armor, OSIRIS combat aides, and mannequins.  

Outside, the city crumbles - but nothing lasts forever. OSIRIS quiets in a few weeks - running out of ammunition and targets, then being suppressed by non-Lawful sections of the American military. When the Pyramid resolidifies, OSIRIS remains shattered into regional testing sites, militias, and wandering Theurges. 99% of its membership is dead. It's strange days ahead for the occult underground.  

Epilogues

• Joe Normal wanders America as the Pyramid's messenger, patching OSIRIS back together from the ruins. Someday, when the other Lawful organizations are merged with his, he plans to inaugurate the Statistical Topography division; a new section of OSIRIS focused on finding and fusing more lost Pyramids. 
• Moon Dan reaches the end of the indestructible hamster subplot I never mentioned, and begins mass production of such things.  
• Toka remains at the right hand of Templar as monsters swarm the law-struck earth. 
• Valrel runs for Senate - vampire politics is pretty rough these days, let's try some human politics instead.
• The Finance Optimizer really tries some human politics - having already succeeded in accumulating the wealth of the world, he institutes a conspiracy to manipulate world governments to increase long-term economic growth. The chance of this descending into paperclip-maximization is... worryingly high.
• The psychic, who showed up at the 11th hour for a couple sessions, was also here. They never got a name, to my memory, let alone a backstory. I bet they'll turn out fine. 

Analysis 

Ough. 

I tend to run games on a short timeline - I made the first post for Rota Fortunae on May 20th and started running it on the 28th, for instance. I did the same for Libra, but unlike Rota Fortunae or Go Away, Libra required classes, patrons, equipment kits, and so on. The time I would have used building prep was used hammering away at the player's document (unsuccessfully! I never finished the planned-for new Wizard!). 

This, along with being overall busy (a strange and unnatural state) meant running Libra was kind of stressful - most of my prep decayed into blindly hammering tiny evil labs together the hour before a session. Faction moves fell away, I had no useful prep tools or generators, et cetera. 

I consider this (along with having no Go Away-like central goal) to be the root of all the other problems I've been complaining about - or at least, as one of the reasons I failed to solve them.

Libra, as presented here, is honestly uninteresting to me as a setting. I don't plan to run it again - if I wanted this kind of high-action freak comedy I'd've been better off with one of my superhero games, and if I wanted a stolid conspiracy-and-evil-psychics campaign I'd be better off slowing down with some Delta Green. This is pinned, tonelessly, in the middle. 

Play report posting will return with Not My Destination sometime in May (Libra's finally gotten me to slow down and do some prep beforehand, else I'd be doing it sooner), and with a less doomed vibe. 

gaming :) 

Libra, Sessions 10 & 11

Last time, the players continued their reign of terror, then went to Washington D.C. to buy a corpse. 

After derailing a tour of the White House to personally warn the President about how they sold a sympathetic-magic token that could potentially kill him, the PCs decide they've had quite enough of D.C., and the city agrees.

Back in Philadelphia, they notice one of the Zontamancer's ragdolls hovering around their house - so, obviously, Toka leaps from a moving car and instantly slices it in half. And then the rest of the party goes "hm. we could've interrogated it, or something, maybe". Oh well. 

Fortunately, on their way back they had slammed the bottle of comet wine they bought at the Auction, and among all the negative Ynnian effects this gave them from failed saves, one of them did manage to become able to speak to birds. Obviously they decided to threaten the birds in question until they said where the ragdoll had come from. 

Then they heedlessly sprinted into the Zontanamancer's lair, opening the door to a vast room filled with:

• one dozen vampires, out for revenge against the killers of their sire
• the last six city bug infectees
• the Zontanamancer, his "son" in the guise of the Idol of Apollo, and an animated car
• and a scout UFO from the alien Empire.

The players absolutely pasted them. No problem at all. I'll be talking about this later.

Then, with their downtime, they put their nose to the grindstone on analysis - they knew the Black Metal of ibn Yazid appeared on Earth at certain times and places, and between the reanimated ibn Yazid and a few pressganged OSIRIS researchers, they managed to predict the next appearance and identify what these manifestations were. 

Portals. To... somewhere, deep in the Astral Plane, far from the view of the Pyramid. 

Before diving in, the party decided to wind up some other projects. OSIRIS Thermodynamics offered a flash-training image for the psychic techniques Transparentize (does what it sounds like) and Uncrossable Distance (makes [dice] people count as [dice] miles from you) in exchange for the "Protean", an indestructible walking cell that escaped their liquidation campaign. No problem - it was chilling in the partially-exploded (but still in use - gotta make those sales) Walmart looking at Legos until the PCs stuffed it into a cooler, slapped a padlock on it, and sent it off to CATERPILLAR. 

This was after deciding against their first plan, which was using their military-surplus helicopter (they bought a military-surplus helicopter) to death ray the ceiling open (they put a death ray on it) and then harpoon the Protean (they put a harpoon gun on it) up into the air. Because I guess it was too much collateral damage. Somehow.

Then, of course, it was time to finally handle Kanopy - especially because Thermodynamics promised a "demon fractal" that "[unfolds/zooms in/extrudes] into an antimatter-shadow" if they would close down the door to Ynn in the Kanopy basement. They considered a few options - death ray! Plane crash! Death ray plane crash! - before realizing they had all the money in the world, and the Finance Optimizer had been spending a long while buying controlling shares in... uh, "the stock market", generally. They were already majority shareholders in Kanopy's pharmaceutical business. 

So, with a bit of arm twisting, they persuaded the Kanopy board that it would be much, much more profitable to move their headquarters to Albuquerque, with its favorable corporate law (I guess) and (comparative) lack of vampires. Then, while the building was being closed down, they just walked in and smashed the door. Life easy. 

Well, there's no more delaying. Time to enter the Astral Plane. As they stepped through the portal, Philadelphia disappeared, replaced not with the white stone and looming Pyramid of their last visit, but with a floor of fine white dust. The Pyramid hovered on the horizon, a barely-visible speck - and before them was another, half-sunk in the silt. Dead and decomposing, its corners and edges blunted, its surface turned to eroding chalk - a forgotten Pyramid. (The players had, in fact, suspected this for a while - Law is consolidation. Once there was not just one OSIRIS, but all manner of Deltas Green and SCPs Foundation - perhaps there were once more Pyramids.) 

Joe Normal looked at the dead Pyramid and pondered with the other players. "Hey. I have like. 5 MD, and a pile of Necromancer levels." 

"Ah. Huh. Well. Uh. Hm."

The forgotten Pyramid, living again (or perhaps never dead in the first place - or perhaps never alive), rose from the silt to hover just as its partner did. Its corners sharpen, its chalk exterior turns back to the solid Black Metal, its hollow interior of carefully-prepared dungeon rooms spits out Then the two rushed towards each other. Law is consolidation. There cannot be an overlap - to have two Laws invites Chaos. 

The two Pyramids met and [merged/warred] as the Astral Plane flashed fuligin and ultraviolet. In a blind panic, Joe cast Uncrossable Distance on the other PCs to put them a mile away (as space cannot bend on the Astral Plane, this was true teleportation instead of its standard effect), right next to the door to the Contact Room in CATERPILLAR.

Then he looked up at the Pyramid(s) and waited - and he'll have to wait a while because all I could say was "👁️👁️. Interesting. I have no idea what happens now. See you all next week!"

Analysis

Firstly, a little change - the OSIRIS Theurge should, probably, be mandated to be a rogue Theurge. As it is, their access to institutional power makes them wildly out of scale with other classes.

Secondly, combat has gotten completely out of hand. Low, GLOG-standard HP levels combined with modern weaponry (and infinite money, and forgetting to check state laws against buying missile launchers) have turned fights into rocket-tag nightmares where the players are nigh-guaranteed to win any fight they win initiative for. 

This means fights are player-favored - they tend to be the proactive ones, and if I started a fight by dropping two missiles through their front window they'd complain. They win! Pretty much always! That huge pileup fight in session 10 was resolved with a few grenades followed by some anti-tank rockets for the Idol and the UFO. 

At the same time, any fight that doesn't end with a player alpha strike that levels a building leaves them open to an equally exaggerated retaliatory attack, making it even more pressing for them to never, ever, take any fight except for "we kill all of them instantly, turn 1." There's no room for mistakes, and any decision other than "pick the option that does the most damage to the most guys Now" becomes a mistake. 

Obviously, the easiest solution to this is "don't let the players turn lead to gold, you idiot", but there are a couple others. 

For one thing, we've been creeping upwards in damage output. We're past "handgun" or even "rifle" into the lands of "alien death ray" and "I think I can just hold antimateriel rifles in each hand", with the commensurate outrageous damage values. (Sure! +4 to-hit, 2d8, crit on 16-20! Why not!) The leap in numbers here should be way, way smaller. As a contrast, I was talking to Maple and she mentioned that in her science-fantasy games "heat rays are +1, electric beams are +2, laser is +3". 

Of course, crimping the scaling like that removes some of the fun of "heehee, death ray" - but this problem didn't haunt me as much in games like Rota Fortunae, even when I still handed out cannons and C4. The difference is, I think, due to a lack of defensive ability. Rota Fortunae (and the earlier Go Away) were superhero games! Enemies had DR, or ignored dice, or flat-out took half damage from attacks, et cetera, et cetera - these were people who could just eat a couple rounds from a .50 cal. 

At the very least, some setpiece enemies should have had more defensive layering than "AC and some amount of HP" - you shoot a missile at the scout UFO and the point-defense laser fries it. You pelt the Idol of Apollo with machine gun rounds and it just wades through them with its 6 DR. Silver-fearing where's wolves and vams pire and so on. 

(I did eventually figure this out - the dungeon inside the decayed pyramid was full of Lawful "demons", angular living ideas whose orderly aura shut down fire (including guns) and electricity in a radius around them - this would've really messed the players up (they've heard this fact a few times, but forgot to prepare for it on their Astral expedition) had they actually had to enter the dungeon.) 

Also yes, obviously a necromancer should not be able to affect a dead Pyramid - it isn't a living thing, it's a manifestation of particular laws of entropy, etc, etc, etc. Shut up. It's rad. 

Libra, Sessions 8 & 9 - The Wizard Freaks Skip Town

Last time, the party realized they had infinite money and learned how to become immortal. 

I'm going to tell you the truth - I barely remember session 8 and it was mostly a gunfight. The players decided they had gotten all the value they could out of the Vampire's Head, they wanted to stabilize the city and end the Head-Kanopy conflict, and they thought it would make them look good with OSIRIS to do something about it. It turns out no amount of vampires mean much when the PCs have a pocket sun and all the weapons American gun laws and infinite money allow. 

In between sessions, Valrel decided to pick up Satan as her new patron, take him out for dinner, and harass him with questions (in exchange for only a minor timeshare in her soul), Moon Dan figured out how to turn on the alien antenna in his jaw (listening to 🗏︎🗏︎ ☞︎💣︎📪︎ ⍓︎□︎◆︎❒︎ ❒︎□︎♍︎🙵 ❍︎◆︎⬧︎♓︎♍︎ ⬧︎⧫︎♋︎⧫︎♓︎□︎■︎ and making the extremely dubious decision to start broadcasting), and the Finance Optimizer put his head down to focus on obtaining the Black Metal of ibn Yazid. 

Of course, this is troublesome. Alchemical authors falsely attribute their work to Classical writers, never city their sources, and cloak their text in ciphers, poetry, prophecy, and gibberish. It would take months... without help. 

1. The Stygian Library would certainly have any relevant texts.
2. Someone with comprehensive knowledge of celestial law and the Astral Plane would know more about the Metal - though all of those are OSIRIS researchers. 
3. And, you could always work with ibn Yazid himself. It's possible that his body is the "Law-Struck Corpse" rumored to be for sale at this year's Black Auction in Washington D.C.

So, especially because they leveled the Vampire Head's tunnels and blew up a Walmart in the process, the PCs decided it would be a great time to not be in Philadelphia.  

Unfortunately, the Black Auction is invite-only - fortunately, flashing around plenty of money and the theater ticket the immortal Abraham Lincoln bought before his unfortunate first death got them through the door. 

They hang around with the rich, famous, and magic in the opulent (and mildly-haunted) Hay-Adams hotel, intervene in a duel between an exceedingly upset hedge fund manager and the Comte de Saint Germain, lose a duel with the Comte de Saint Germain, crack the hedge fund manager over the head with a cane and then kind of stand around not knowing what to do, frantically try to avoid En-men-lu-ana, the ancient Sumerian king Moon Dan shot at back in the 90s, and walk out of the ruins one exceedingly cuboid law-struck corpse and one bottle of comet wine richer.

Hey, wait a sec - the ruins?

The final lot of this year's Black Auction was Tango, the extremely psychic elephant - when "the Officer", dressed in misshapen medals with molten text from the exceedingly nonspecific "Eurasia", lost the bid, she pulled a whistle from her pocket and drove the elephant mad. Tango promptly disassembled the Hay-Adams dining room into floating geometry, then fled into the sky as the PCs stopped the Officer from escaping with her. 

Tango hasn't been seen since - the PCs lost track of her over the Atlantic Ocean. It was generally agreed that this was a perfectly average Black Auction... except for the theater ticket, which is sure to power some kind of presidential-assassination-via-sympathetic-magic, as the PCs realized right after putting it up for sale and right before getting outbid for it by En-men-lu-ana.

Oops. 

Analysis

I'm starting to run out of things to say, honestly. 

The Black Auction was overstuffed - I had six NPCs, all with help from Phlox's wonderful GLOG server, and one packed session is Not enough time to introduce all of these people and what their problems are. They will never show up again - maybe if I run another campaign of Libra in Washington D.C. these'll be the local factions or something. 

There are Four (4) (IV) sessions left of Libra, and I think it'll all line up perfectly. One session for kidnapping some OSIRIS scientist, one session for the Stygian Library, and then a climactic session where they reach the final step of the magnum opus while I the rapidly-expanding teamup of people who want them dead hammer on the doors. (Currently, that's the Zontamanancer, his son (as the idol of Apollo), the last City Bug infectees, the leaderless vampires, and a scout UFO from the alien empire.) OK, that's 3 things and 4 sessions, but I'm sure one of them will go long, or they'll decide to try their luck against Kanopy (now reinforced by the PMC "131 Halley's Comet"), or they'll forget what they're doing entirely, or we'll have to skip one. See? Perfect.

Libra, Session 7 - The Wizard Freaks Crash the Economy

Last week, the party got baited into an ambush.

Most of the PCs start by questioning Alex Fuller, the last survivor of the cult of Apollo, while Valrel checks the next room, where the great bronze idol of Fuller's god dances and dances around a wine-filled swimming pool. She decides, inexplicably, to take a swim - and is then bodyslammed by the Zontanamancer's golden hunter-ragdoll. 

Unfortunately, she is now stuck under hundreds of pounds of gold. Fortunately, she doesn't need to breathe, and the plodding mind of the ragdoll takes a hot minute to realize hey, I don't think I'm actually killing this person right now.

Long enough, in fact, for the other PCs to go "huh, where's Valrel", find her in the pool, and huck a steel cable in with her. She ties it to the ragdoll, the party above ties the other end to the dancing Apollo, and on his next turn the ragdoll whips across the room, snaps the wire, punches through the wall, and smears itself down two blocks of city street. 

The PCs scatter - a couple run off to make sure the ragdoll's deanimated, Moon Dan makes sure Alex doesn't notice the party had looted his temple, and Joe decides to think about that "EXTREMELY CURSED" book...

Surely C-something the Morally Dubious Skull knows something about EXTREME CURSES, right? Sure, he says. Just give me a body first...

The PCs reunite at Toka's shack - best not to cause too much collateral damage - staple C-something to the body of a dead Apollonian, and toss him the book.

"Well?" they ask. 

C-something nods sagely. "Locusts."

"Can you do something about it?"

"Probably."

"Probably?"

"Probably." 

 C-something surrounds the book in salt, says a couple words, and the salt circle shifts, twists into words in some dead language, and flashes pure white. Then he picks it up, snaps it open to a conveniently ribbon-marked page, and Isn't instantly consumed by a swarm of locusts. 

Instead, he presents the party with

from the Splendor solis

[...] rubedo, the red stage. It is at this point, the point of the first gate's opening, that the stone takes on the wonder of its fourth facet, the Solar facet, chrysopoeia.

De re Cauda Pavonis

To approach the final stage of the Great Work demands care. Take up a flask of the black metal of ibn Yazid, that the people of that place call lam yamasa because it is not heated nor cooled (and, they say, only comes from those places where the motionless Fields of Asphodel intrude on the living world) and set it to boil. Place the miraculous stone within and it will take on the aspect of the peacock's tail.

One becomes two. The stone will open and reveal its heart - be wary, as the heartlight strikes like fire. Each hour of the day you a mote from those with a connection to the Fields of Asphodel or to the land of Dream must be put into the heart, and this fire will catch them.

Two becomes three. When this is done, the fire of the heartlight is quelled but it is more vital that you keep your eyes from it. Bring forward the body of glass, and let it gaze upon the heartlight. Only then may you open your eyes.

Out of the third comes the one as the fourth. The heartlight burns in the head of the homunculus. It breathes and stares - it must be kept alive, with food and drink. When you would pass to the hereafter you will, instead, be caught into the homunculus, and live again.

from the Ampitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae

C...ool. Sure. OK. 

While a couple of the PCs do some considering, the rest make a realization. They have the philosopher's stone? Which turns any material into gold? Why haven't we been doing this the whole time? A couple schemes and a few minutes later, the PCs all put a celebratory ∞ in the money section of their character sheet. 

The considerers lay out their understanding - the land of Dream is obviously the Gardens of Ynn. That makes the Field of Asphodel the lawful Astral Plane. I've never heard of a "black metal of ibn Yazid", but it sounds pretty distinctive so I guess we could just to the Astral Plane and... poke around? 

How do we get to the plane of Law.

Actually, not that difficult - Containment Center CATERPILLAR has a "Contact Room" that leads to the Astral Plane, and since Joe Normal remains in good standing with OSIRIS, the door is actually there when he goes to look for it. 

He creeps in, hiding Valrel as a bat and the Finance Optimizer as a 2D projection under his coat, and opens the door to a blank white expanse, the Pyramid hovering overhead.

Joe asks if the Pyramid knows anything about the "black metal of ibn Yazid" and gets slapped down, gaining harmful Notice and an answer of this is on the list of unacceptable questions.

Joe asks if he could, maybe, get a description of the list of unacceptable questions, then cringes, expecting another punishment. unacceptable questions are questions related to the physical integrity of the Pyramid or surrounding objects.

The physical integrity. Of the Pyramid. The black, metallic Pyramid. 

Oh boy.

Analysis

Incidentally - an error. The Vampire Head's hand is not going to "1,000,000% escape" - they buried it in a steel box after bending all of its fingers backwards until they broke and tying them to the back of the hand with cables. It's stayin' in the box.

The Pyramid is, fully and without shame, just the Board from the game Control. When I first started posting about Libra, seven years ago, (seven years ago. bizarre) this was the point. A bare minimum mashup that could fit SCPoid and V:tMoid and Esoteric Enterprisesoid and so forth gaming - it slotted in perfectly next to "literally just Delta Green" and "literally just GRU Division "P"" and "literally just the Gardens of Ynn". Usually I try to be a bit more artful, but eh. I have settings aplenty, I don't have to take them all seriously. 

I am inordinately happy with my alchemy puzzle. Deep on my list of campaigns is a faux-Italian mercenary game, and I was considering alchemical recipes like this as a core of the magic system - especially ones with inefficient instructions. To make an ever-burning fire you must follow these four steps - but actually, if you experiment, step 3 is completely unnecessary and using different gems in step 2 creates different kinds of fire. That kind of thing.  

Having literally infinite money will have... an effect on the game - though it was always, really, part of the plan. The players are hyped to get their FFLs, buy expensive cars, stop living in basements, and see how much societal damage they can do.

Libra, Session 6 - The Special Parade of Mistakes Edition

Last week, a microsingularity consumed a city block of Philadelphia before winking out. Unsurprisingly, the powers that be are hopping mad. Over the week, OSIRIS Weights & Measures is sidelined for the far blunter OSIRIS Thermodynamics - the City Bug nest is bombed to ruin, the OSIRIS kill list is about to be whittled down, and Thermodynamics division liquidators stalk the halls of Containment Center CATERPILLAR with clipboards and 4 MD casts of Ignition. 

The PCs realize they're on the clock if they want to rescue the Vampire's Head's body, and then realize they don't want the body. Even Valrel, vampire descendant of the Head, has decided she's gotten all she will get from her Patron - except, perhaps, for his vorpal claws.

A call to друг later (Joe Normal plans to abandon друг and see if he can meditate his way closer to the Pyramid - he's happy to throw favors away) and one of the Head's hands is twitching and bleeding on Toka's couch as they pry off its fingernails. Then, they shrug and bury it in Toka's backyard, just in case it turns out to be important later. (It will, 1,000,000%, escape.)

The players then consider. What if we just asked друг to tell us about the Philosopher's Stone? They do, and Joe Normal is immediately struck in the back of the head by a tome, helpfully labeled "EXTREMELY CURSED // DO NOT OPEN // REALLY". Cursed, you say - wonder if the Zontanamancer could help, he seemed wizardly. 

Bad news! Four sessions ago, they stole the Zontanamancer's son and turned his hands to gold! When they call, he gladly picks up and says sure! Meet me at Delphi, the club those Apollo guys run. I'll be there soon. 

He never shows - instead, the PCs wander through an emptied-out club, stalked by the Zontanamancer's animate golden ragdoll and living car, while the idol of Apollo dances in slow circles, unconcerned with the death of his cult. The PCs take this as an opportunity to loot the place, collecting a book of Apollonian Ynnbringer spell components and Satan's golden fiddle before finding the cult's apparent last survivor, the chaos-magician and coryphaeus Alex Fuller.

Analysis

I had an epiphany on my way back from the session - the campaign's not built correctly. Neither was Rota Fortunae, and I didn't notice. My urban sandboxes are built off of Go Away, but Go Away had a clear end goal. Get $100,000,000. Get off-world. 

Neither Rota Fortunae nor Libra have had that. With no goal to direct the players, they become listless - to keep them moving I kept turning up the dial on faction moves, putting the PCs not in an "urban sandbox" but in a reactive spiral where every session is "pick one of the two adventures I wrote this week for the faction moves". 

More reactive PCs leaves me with a higher bar for prep: A, I can't use player desires as a gauge for what will happen next (the PCs ending the session by saying "next session let's go rob Len Abbatelli, maybe we can get some of that $100,000,000", etc), B, since all the factions are constantly moving all the prep is unstable (for instance, sites like Delphi or Containment Center CATERPILLAR look different now than they did last week), and C, if the players are stuck picking between adventure 1 and adventure 2 those had both better be pretty cool adventures... half of which aren't chosen, and evaporate.

This game should have focused more tightly on the Philosopher's Stone. You have it, it doesn't work, you want to make it work. Here is a pile of rumors about the Stone and a bunch of wizard-freak factions. Trail information backwards (person X references book Y, which is in the possession of this faction - go get the book, it leads to books Z and A) and piece together contradictory information to figure out how to use the funny rock. Instead, the Stone was a kind of funny inciting incident that then slid right into the background. 

Also a couple of more minor problems:

• the OSIRIS Theurge explicitly says you can just tell a target to kill themselves. I thought the common aversion to this was just due to power level concerns, and went "eeh, if they want to pour MD into a single-target damage spell, more power to them" - but no! It's an optimization concern - if mind control can be used as direct damage the player will always choose to use it as direct damage! 
• друг rewards their actors with nonspecific "favors", and my players seem to be of the belief that they can literally do anything - which seems to be true, given how I've played them! This is totally scuffed - that phone should've had a much more specific and much more sinister effect, closer to 6's skeleton key.

I think it's funny that my two sets of recent posts are a game with absolutely no prep ever and a long-winded series on rules, procedures, and tools for an upcoming campaign. I'm kind of looking forward to not running anything and getting some time to bolt stuff together without being under a deadline.

Libra, Sessions 4 & 5

Last time, the wizard freaks went to a party and really harshed the vibe. 

This week, things got worse. The grey-market eigenpharmaceuticals company Kanopy had entered into open war with the children of the Vampire's Head, but the PCs have decided to ignore this for now. Instead, they split up - Joe Normal heads to the local OSIRIS station, CATERPILLAR to try and persuade them to stay hands-off as the city explodes, while Toka and the Finance Optimizer take a break to go hunt down the necromancer. 

In the ruins of the necromancer's house they find his mentor, the talking skull [Charles? Camouflage? Correction? literally any word starting with C - the PCs have studiously ignored his name], who laughs about his idiot student - I don't need anyone stupid enough to burn their own house down as an apprentice... which means I have a position open, especially if you bring me a body... 

Joe Normal sees the body of the Vampire's Head get loaded into OSIRIS storage, picks up the coordinates of the City Bug nest, and hears about an "anomaly" that happens to line up exactly where the Templar first awoke, then heads out from CATERPILLAR to meet up with the others, who have found enough clues in the trashed house to pinpoint the necromancer's car (with a little help from Joe Normal's tap into the traffic cameras) and guess at his harebrained scheme to kill the U.S. president, the immortal Abraham Lincoln (don't worry about it). 

A short car chase later, the necromancer and his one (1) skeleton are obliterated. Problem solvlem. The PCs shrug, decide they have free time (still not worrying about the active shootouts between the vampires and Kanopy) and run off to poke around in Templar's birthplace(?), a 5-story apartment building. 

A 5-story apartment building with only 3 different people inside, copied and copied to fill the rooms, and with a staircase up to the sixth... floor... above the roof... and a door that opens to a round room of brightly-polished steel and strangely-proportioned, inhuman spacesuits. 

 The PCs wandered through round rooms, past cylinders scrolling with text in unknown language, past wall-sized touchscreens with targeting reticles over Philadelphia buildings, and into a cryobay where they found a sleeping creature, 10 feet of fur and teeth and wild, burning eyes - just like Templar. 

Eventually they oopsed and poked enough buttons to turn on the ship and awakened the space marine, then immediately stole his armor while he stumbled, cryosick and deeply confused, to the ship's bridge. PCs scattered across the ship - Joe Normal learning how to walk in stolen power armor, Toka throwing herself into the UFO's augmentation bay to get her skeleton reinstalled, Valrel winding up stuck in the singularity core, and the other two locked in the ship's bridge asking stupid questions to the space marine and the newly-awakened Grey bridge crew. 

louie zong

 

Around the time Toka slid out of the augmentation bay, newly Templar-ized, the PCs realized that being separated by irising steel doors and increasingly frustrated aliens was, maybe, a bad thing. So, Joe Normal gave Templar a phone call, crammed his phone next to the power armor's microphone, shut the visor, and had Templar lie fast in the peeping alien language while Joe collected the other PCs (with some help from the Finance Optimizer locking doors and shutting off lights, when necessary). Then, all collected in the space marine drop pod bay, and with the floor enticingly open, they decided to suplex one of the aliens off the ship with them and run.

Between interrogating their new free alien and looking through Toka's new 500 years of spacewar experience, they learned some stuff about the alien colonizing empire (that they mostly ignored after "alien colonizing empire") and decided they didn't like the sound of "alien colonizing empire" - so, they had the Finance Optimizer shut off the whole ship, including the containment for its core.

Oh. Oops. The core.

A black hole bloomed over Pennsylvania. 

Analysis

New change to the Infraspatial - the 10-foot radius of no fire or electricity was a huge inconvenience and a pain in the neck to remember, so it's now an active ability: "You can focus on an electrical device or a fire to shut it down as long as your focus is maintained. Firing pins hit primers and do nothing, computers crash instantly, cars stall. The same effect radiates from Lawful demons - a stilling of the world." 

This is mostly an improvement, though "if you can see the whole thing you can focus on the whole thing" was probably not the best precedent to set (see: the UFO exploding), but eeeeeehhhhhh, this isn't a game intensely focused on balance. 

Necromancy from the skull, space marine-ness from the UFO, and the full vampirism are all unlocked as 2-template prestige classes - I don't currently plan to post them, because while they aren't direct rips of pre-existing classes, they're extremely derivative (of Locheil's Necromancer, deus ex parabola's Cloudskater, and Gokun's Vampire, respectively). 

I think, between the open war, the microsingularity, the City Bugs, and the assassination plot, the campaign's about to pivot a bit. The local OSIRIS presence in Pennsylvania has been "Weights & Measures", an investigation-focused division with a reliance on "Haruspex" psychics. This isn't really working out for them (especially since the head Haruspex died in a друг-orchestrated freak car accident) - they'll soon be replaced by Orbital Mechanics, or Thermodynamics, or some other, blunter, option. Next session will probably begin with the City Bug nest being destroyed by airstrikes.

Libra, Session 3

A short one this week. Last time, the wizard freaks met an elderly wizard, wrecked his car, and made friends with Philadelphia's local cult of Apollo. 

This week, the cult sends them a letter - to celebrate the animation of their bronze idol to Apollo, they're inviting patrons and losers alike to a drug-filled feast on neutral ground, under the idol's eyes. The PCs weigh this against their other option, trudging around in damp graveyards after a novice necromancer, and decide the option with "light" and "people" and "alcohol" is preferable. 

At the party they met a couple more of the city's lesser factions:

• Kanopy Pharmaceuticals, a rapidly-expanding grey market parachemistry company, headed by "the Marquis", one of the billion petty lords of the sidhe. 
• and members of the private infraspatial club Commune Ataraxia, who eat gold. 

Among the Marquis' guards Valrel notices Islwyn, a runaway scion that the Vampire's Head hopes to capture and execute. She knows the Marquis is desperate for a peace treaty with the Head, so she lies - give me Islwyn, and the Head will sign whatever you want. 

Islwyn is sent out to die - it turned out he'd turned into a Troubled Antihero, pulled his fangs out, and tried to become a defender of the weak and powerless. He only gets as far as "Wait, you don't ha-" before the PCs blow his leg smoove off with a .50 cal and drag him off to get thrown into the maw of the Head. Valrel is allowed to sip from the hideous omnidirectional spray of blood and will soon morph into a full vampire - the other scions politely applaud, and nobody pays attention to Toka scooping up Islwyn's garage-built UV-lightsaber vampire-killing spear.

On the way back they are mildly annoyed by a token force of "city bugs", man-sized parasitic wasps farmed (for some godforsaken reason) by the Apollo cult's main rival. This poses no threat to anybody, but the city bug herders didn't want anyone to forget about how much they hate everyone. 

Back in the party, Joe Normal tries a Kanopy-original entheogen and awakens in Ynn. As he wanders through the Garden, he realizes he can no longer feel the strings of the Pyramid in the back of his head. When he reawakens, he begs the Marquis for more - and the sidhe nods. Of course, for a price. 

Analysis

This is more like it - a self-operating game. I did no prep until about an hour before the game, when I rolled twice on the Big Spreadsheet and learned that Commune Ataraxia and the City Bug Herders were acting this week. Since they're both related to the House of Musagetes, who just got the zôn last session, it was clear the House would be celebrating, and the city bugs would start swinging. (The Commune Ataraxia job was an interception of Kanopy's entheogen couriers that the PCs flatly ignored.)

Though that's the bare minimum, and even if the game's self-sustaining it'll need some work to shine. Basic bestiaries and expanded plans for the 5 minor factions (especially the City Bug Herders, who need the most work - for instance, a name. And an explanation for why they want to own man-sized parasitic wasps), actually finishing the patron jobs, etc. It's in a really "building the rails in front of the train" place right now, and it's a bit tiring.

Oh - and it turns out that however-many years of online roleplaying have left me with absolutely no capability to act out personalities. Almost all of my NPCs talk in the same way and make the same jokes, but I don't really care - the important part is that they want different things. 

Next week everything will get... harsh, as the negotiations between Kanopy and the Vampire's Head evaporate. 

Libra Actual Play, Session 2

Last week, our favorite wizard criminals trashed a hotel, found the Philosopher's Stone, and shot their way out of a police raid. We start this week with our group hiking (having still failed to figure out how to fit the Finance Optimizer into a car without his aura shutting off the engine) to Walmart, where друг promised they'd find a certain car that the voice on the phone wanted them to sabotage.

While Valrel gets distracted by the commercial glories of Walmart and throws her money away on questionable improvised weapons, duct tape, and a bicycle for the Finance Optimizer, Joe Normal climbs under the car and snips one of the brake lines. 

 

He is... somewhat taken aback when both ends of the brake line rear up like cobras, rather taken aback when they start injecting him with brake fluid, extremely taken aback when the car starts moving, and positively confounded when the Finance Optimizer hops on the hood and it doesn't stop.  

Valrel finishes her shopping trip just in time to find Toka hacking at the car with a machete, Joe Normal's bike leathers barely stopping him from getting grated on the asphalt, and a 70-something year old man hobbling towards them shouting "Bro! My car!". 

When he pulls a toddler-sized ragdoll out from under his coat and sends it skittering at the PCs, Valrel shrugs, takes out a handgun, and shoots him in the back. 

Over on the far end of the parking lot, Toka notices a pickup truck barreling towards them, its driver surrounded by a 40-foot Crown marked out in pinkish light. She rolls off of the living car, draws up her anti-material rifle (I don't know where she keeps that thing, to tell you the truth), misses completely, puts a fist-sized hole in a parked car, and then gets run over. 

The driver leans out and flashes a perfect smile while he helps Toka up - he and the half-dozen henchmen with baseball bats in the back of the truck are from the House of Musagetes, he says. Worshippers of Apollo in his guise as giver of music and poetry. What're you shooting at us for? 

Toka shrugs vaguely and argues that maybe you shouldn't run people over - the cultist laughs it off and then turns to watch Joe, his work done, drop from the living car as it barrels into a streetlight. The House is here for the zôn, the life-energy of the car, so it can be added to their idol of Apollo. друг didn't mention it, so surely he doesn't care about it and you won't mind if we just... 

The PCs consider if there's anything they pressingly need to bring to life, decide there isn't, really, and give the House a thumbs-up to pull the zôn, a ticking clockwork thing in a shoebox, out of the car's trunk. 

While the cultists peel away in their truck, the PCs turn to the still-living zontanamancer. He sure looks like a wizard - maybe he knows the key to immortality through the Philosopher's Stone?  

He doesn't know a thing, but the players have fallen fully into the wizard gangster mindset and decide to use the Stone to turn his hands to gold, in case that makes him a bit more forthcoming. When it doesn't, they go "uhhhhhh...", turn his freak ragdoll to gold to repay him, and then ditch him to go ask the Templar for work.

Fortunately, his magic allows him to shuttle life force into his now-golden hands, so it really didn't do him much harm, I guess.

Analysis

I'm getting closer to getting the thing really spinning - the players are meeting factions, and by the next session the game should just about be running itself as the faction tables get finished. The players seem a bit impatient to get work past the starting jobs from their Patrons - later sessions will start with a pair of faction moves delivered over the grapevine, but I'll probably make a minor job generator for extra Patron work in case I need it. 

I also think I'll be stealing the light downtime procedures from Rota Fortunae - there's not much to say about them (70 hours a week, choose how many 10-hour shifts you take during character creation, gain [shifts]d10*10 dollars each week, spend the rest of your time tormenting NPCs and practicing skills and so on) but they're nice to have. 

The zontanamancer was just a 4 HP guy with 4 MD and Primeumaton's variation of Animate Object - he was supposed to be a one-off joke character but I'm happy I get to keep using him (and, honestly, kind of amazed the PCs didn't kill anybody). I expect there to be more of these specialized caster NPCs, so (unlike the zontanamancer) I'll have to figure out how I'm doing mishaps and dooms for them. Probably just one of each, based around their spell. 

Libra Actual Play, Session 1

After a couple posts, my Libra game's on the road with a group of new-to-the-OSR players (which is fun, given my normal playerbase of obsessives from the various Discord servers). Our PCs are:

• Joe Normal, potentially undercover agent of OSIRIS.
• Moon Dan, who retired from fighting Sumerian mummies just in time to get abducted by aliens.
• Toka, a Ynnbringer who's decided to make ends meet with murder-for-hire. 
• Valrel, elven scion of the Vampire's Head.
• and the Finance Optimizer, who crossed to earth from the planes of law and decided to start gambling.  

The PCs woke up with pounding heads and bleary eyes in a pitch-black room with someone hammering on the door. Moon Dan stumbles up to peer at - oh, it's a cop outside - while Valrel smears her hands around the walls to hit a light switch. 

She reveals a ruin of lost bottles and obliterated furniture in a trashed hotel room, and drops a basketball-sized stone on Toka as the fan's juddering start dislodges it from the ceiling. 

The Philosopher's Stone. Lead to gold. Eternal life. Where did you get this?

Joe Norrmal flings open the curtains - third floor window, it turns out - to find two armored vans and four SWAT guys milling around in the parking lot.

The cop outside is insistent. Where's the Stone? Open the door. Hand it over. I'm calling the Haruspex. 

The PCs panic in all directions. Moon fails to talk down the cop, Finance Optimizer decides to embed the Stone in his body, Toka scours the bathroom (no clue what she was looking for, to be honest), Joe barricades the door, and Valrel considers just jumping out the window.

Then the door turns transparent. The Haruspex is here, an OSIRIS psychic in a long white coat. With a snap of her fingers (and a cast of Telepathy, and a. mishap.) she reads Moon's mind. The infral has the Stone. Kill them. 

Valrel decides she had the right idea, leaps from the window, and between an Acrobatics skill, a lenient ruling, and excellent luck, lands heel-first on one of the SWAT guys' heads, fatally. Moon pops a smoke grenade, Toka exposes the Haruspex and the cop next to her to the fire of the Sun, and the party hustles down the stairs.

Outside, Valrel is immediately shot like 20 times, makes a billion rolls on the death and dismemberment table, and winds up OK :)

Joe hucks furniture from a second-floor window while the rest of the party crashes into melee with the cops and routs them. As the sirens of a second wave of cops approach, the PCs pile into a stolen SWAT van and drive.

Valrel drags them to the home of her patron, the Vampire's Head, to plan for just a second. She talks to the Head (very pointedly not mentioning "the cops are after me" to instead extract compliments for getting the Philosopher's Stone) while Joe loots the SWAT van and throws a brick on the throttle to get it Away and Moon calls друг to do... something, about the Haruspex, and undoes all the Theurge's coverup work by deciding to steal a car for no clear reason except wanting a car. 

The PCs expect that... maybe? Nobody will be after them for a second? The news report on "an infraspatial, a vampire, three freaks" massacring a squad of police officers makes them... less optimistic. 

Joe throws up his hands - maybe друг can help with this too. The voice on the phone says sure, I'm always happy to help, I just need something in exchange. 

There's this car in a Walmart parking lot - green Civic, license plate CFE-7912. It should stick around long enough for you to get there.

Cut the brake lines. 

Analysis

The first session of these city sandboxes is always the most difficult. The faction turns aren't ticking along, the PCs barely know anyone, and you really need to give them a kick to start the game off running. Usually I do this with two things - a pre-set long-term goal, and an immediately provided short-term one. (In Go Away this was "get a ticket to the rocket" and "go shoot the technomonarchists and find out where they keep their money".) 

Here I got experimental - the long-term goal is "??? I'm sure you'll find something to do with the Philosopher's Stone" and the new patrons replaced a clear contact to give out jobs. So, I put them directly into A Situation instead, trusting that they'd run to their patrons to give them a hand with the cops. 

From here, it should keep itself spinning as the faction moves start up. 

Or, well. It should do that, but my standard operating procedure of starting a game and then doing prep has finally caught up to me.

thanks gokun and vik you're both a big help

Now that I'm on a time crunch I think I'll be turning to the generators in Cavegirl's modern occult game, Esoteric Enterprises - which'll be fun! It's nice to have an excuse to use something off my shelf.

Starting Patrons for Libra

My upcoming Libra game is built in the same way as my prior modern urban sandboxes. These games have usually included a patron - a mostly-neutral contact of the PCs who hands them their starting job. At the start of Go Away this was Carne, who had a lead about a technomonarchist bombmaker's workshop. In Rota Fortunae it was Labyrinth, who had heard both about a bit of work for the Vegas mob and about the giant crab currently throwing cop cars into the river.

For Libra, I decided to make this a choice of the players. The reasonable thing to do would've been to make this a party decision, similar to something like marsworms's patrons or grounded sept creation. Vote on your patron and starting job, then get going. 

What I did instead was a) make them individual choices and b) make them all hate each other. This will either be a beautiful second layer onto the faction game (where these starting patrons act on a different layer than the four more active, lower-level groups in Libra's prep spreadsheet - none of the patrons are interested in the Philosopher's Stone as they already have, or at least claim to have, unlimited resources and eternal life) or a disaster. We'll see!

(oh, and c) the starting job has nothing to do with any of them and is, instead, running away from a police raid. really none of that plan survived, apparently)

Satan
A toothless smile under a pair of pilot-light eyes. The adversary, who offers you things against your best judgment. Seemingly completely unrelated to the geometric "demons" of the lawful planes.

Wants:

• The Templar corrupted until he sells away his soul.
• A small hurriedly-stapled together book. Whenever you kill someone, their name is added to its pages, and their soul may be traded to Satan instead of your own. He says this condemns them to Hell no matter their actions. C'est la vie. 
• A particular golden fiddle returned to him, now that its owner has passed away. 
• A jar of hellfire, which radiates blood-red light and never burns out.
• The points of a sigil set in blood at 5 places in the city.
• A lemure - a 1 HP head-sized, boneless, flying imp. Turns invisible, fits under doors, has a myotoxic stinger. If it dies, it will crawl out from your mouth next time you sleep. 

Satan is always happy to make a deal for further rewards - and will throw in one of his gifts to sweeten the pot. 

• Freikugeln - a handful (1d4+2) of cartridges. Black-anodized aluminum cases, bare lead bullets, no primer. +4 to-hit, +1d6 damage, starts fires, any humanoid killed with them explodes into a cloud of caustic black smoke that deals 1 damage per round to those inside. If you pull the trigger and Satan would benefit from someone near you being shot, the freikugeln flies off to hit them instead of your target. He promises that this barely ever happens. 
• Cigar - tastes like smoked paprika and mint. Provides 1 MD, which is lost as normal on rolls of 4-6. Whenever this die is rolled, it deals damage to you equal to its result.
• Mimic Figurine - crush it in your hand to instantly heal to full HP and ignore all your wounds for 5 minutes. After this, take double the healed damage and a new wound for each one you had.

Characters sworn to Satan begin the game with one of these gifts.

Vampire’s Head
Four-eyed, elongated, and half-charred. The size of a person, carried on a litter by some of his favored descendants.

Wants:

• His body found and returned to him. 
• Reward: one of his claws, long as an arm and sharp as a razor (as vorpal sword). 
• One of 6 turned into one of his descendants. 
• Reward: a wax phonograph cylinder. When played, no sound is made or can be heard within earshot. 
• A wayward heir, Islwyn, hunted down and brought to him alive. 
• Reward: a cupful of Islwyn's blood. The next step of your transformation. 

Strange and unnatural bloods can be traded with the Head for further rewards.  

Characters sworn to the Vampire’s Head begin the game as one of its sworn “children” - in direct sunlight their skin chars slowly. Their bite deals 1d4 damage to a target and provides them an equal number of “points” that may be spent on restoring their HP or providing an equal bonus to a roll.

друг
The voice on the phone 🙂. Always a good friend. 

Wants:

• The brake lines cut on a green Honda Civic, license plate CFE-7912. 
• A note with the words "damaging habit formation" stuck to a streetlight on 16th Street. 
• One specific computer in the Cerulean Global building smashed with a hammer.

друг does not mention rewards, but rest assured a package will arrive promptly - as will more work.

Characters sworn to друг begin the game with a shattered phone (usable only to receive calls from друг - you can't call them, but whenever you would want to the phone rings) and two favors owed by друг.

Templar
A… something, under interlocked armor. Humanoid, under the hair and the teeth and the burning wild eyes.

Wants:

• The Vampire's Head as a trophy on his wall.
• Excalibur, granted to the Templar centuries ago. 
• The gateway to his home found. 
• The secrets of the Templar's posthuman augmentations.  
• The nest of the City Bugs cleared.
• An M4 for all of you. Don't tell the ATF.

Templar will continue to trade the heads and bodies of monsters for weapons and ammunition.  

Characters sworn to Templar begin the game with a .50 anti-material rifle (+2 to-hit, 1d10) and 10 rounds. 

6
Always someone different when you meet - but always the same voice. Collected, far-thinking, sees violence as purely a last resort.

Wants:

• Provide overwatch while another set of 6's agents break in to a penthouse apartment.
• Reward: $6,000.
• Containment Center CATERPILLAR infiltrated, and certain rooms bugged.
• Reward: $18,000.  
• друг positively identified.
• Reward: $72,000. 

6 will always accept actionable intel in exchange for further reward.  

Characters sworn to 6 begin the game with a skeleton key - 4-in-6 chance it instantly and silently opens any door.

GLOG Classes - OSIRIS Theurge, Ynnbringer (Libra)

My sprouting in-person group voted for Libra as our next game, so it's gone from "something to think about" to "an immediately upcoming deadline". As such, here are the game's two clerics.

• Infraspatial
• OSIRIS Theurge
  
• Psychic
  
• Mundane
  
• Wizard
  
• Ynnbringer 
• Sidhe

The Pyramid commands with the voice of Law - and yet, you've slipped away, to cavort with PCs. Is it still watching? Has it decided this is permitted? 

Are you still part of its plan? 

Class: Escaped(?) OSIRIS Theurge 

Skills: 1) Threatening People 2) Electronics 3) Paranoia 4) Forensic Accounting 5) Aggressive Driving 6) Police Procedure

A: No Argument, No Escape, +1 MD

B: Dead Stillness, +1 MD

C: Animism, +1 MD

D: Beg and Plead, +1 MD

A: No Argument

Your MD are used to speak with the Pyramid's voice. A human target must Save or follow a single-word command to the best of its ability for one round. For each MD past the first, you may choose one of the following:

• The command affects +2 targets.
• You may increase the length of the command by +2 words.
• You may increase the duration of the command by +2 rounds.

This command can be used to make targets attempt to kill themselves. "Forget this happened" is another favorite of OSIRIS.

A: No Escape

When you roll doubles on your MD, gain a point of Notice. When you roll triples, gain five. You are still under surveillance. 

At 5 or more Notice, you start to look vaguely plastic and perfectly symmetrical. People become unable to remember your face or name. 

At 10 or more Notice, your mind becomes impossible to read. Attempts to do so only return an empty white room. You feel the same - at least, you think you do.

At 15 or more Notice, you begin to hover 3.1415926 feet above the ground. The Pyramid's influence is inescapable. Once per day it will pilot you for five minutes, if it wants. 

At 20 Notice, you vanish instantly and silently.

When you dream, the Pyramid will send you instructions. Kill this person. Destroy this artifact. Fulfill them, and your Notice drops by 1d6. Thank you for your cooperation.

B: Dead Stillness

Under the Pyramid there will be no interference on Earth. You may spend your MD to oppose an incoming spell, lowering its [sum] by your [sum] and its [dice] by your [dice].

C: Animism

The voice of the Pyramid has no sound. Your commands may now be used on nonliving things.

D: Beg and Plead  

There is a phone in your house now. It's ringing. It never stops. 

Choose one:

• Pick up the phone. Let's work this out. In an emergency, you may roll 1d20 over your current Notice - if you succeed, the Pyramid will assist you. No matter what, you gain +3 Notice.
• Break it. You no longer gain Notice. The kill-team will arrive shortly.  

Inversely, the planes of Chaos provide no instruction. Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

Class: Ynnbringer  

Skills: 1) Pharmacology 2) Gardening 3) Avant-Garde Painting 4) Criminal Culture 5) Navigation 6) Sleeping 

A: Wonder-Worker, +1 MD 

B: Pet Sun, +1 MD 

C: Seeker, +1 MD

D: Catastrophic, +1 MD

A: Wonder-Worker 

You have a radius, called a "Crown", of [templates]*20 feet around your brain. All your magical effects originate within your Crown and must stay within your Crown. 

To perform magic, combine a Word, an Implement, and one or more MD. Each level, you learn 2 Words from the list below. Begin play with an Implement of your choice. New Implements and lists of Words can be found in game, but this is the most common tradition. 

MD spent to work wonders are not lost when they roll 4+ - instead, an Instability Die is added to your pool. Instability Dice are d6s and must be rolled whenever you work wonders. They are not lost on any roll, and do not count for any purpose except for mishaps on doubles, triples, and quadruples. At dawn, all instability dice are lost as the Sun draws on chaotic energy to be reborn.

Words of the Tradition of Ynn

1. Fear
2. Growth
3. Sunlight
4. Confusion 
5. Faces
6. Wood
7. Soil
8. Heat 

Implements of the Tradition of Ynn  

1. Grail - distill a potion of [Word], or cause one who drinks from the grail to be wracked with [Word] at your will. 
2. Camera - project images of [Word], or immobilize [Word] in your Crown.
3. Bow - make an arrow of [Word], or an arrow that seeks [Word], even as it is fired from your Crown.
4. Wand - create or conjure [Word].

B: Pet Sun

A piece of the Sun travels with you - the size of a softball, silently floating on your shoulder. Its light does not travel past your Crown, but counts as sunlight for all metaphysical purposes.

Your pet Sun can be used to flare off Instability Dice, exploding for [best] damage to all in your Crown (including you) and removing all ID that rolled 4+ for the explosion. It returns in the morning. 

C: Seeker

Your pet Sun can leave your Crown, though not your line of sight - a ten-foot radius around it counts as part of your Crown.  

D: Catastrophic

Instability Dice now count for [sum], [dice], et cetera. They still must be rolled whenever you work wonders. 

Ynnbringer Doubles

1. Brightly colored sparks fly from your ears. 
2. You make a noise like a thunderclap.
3. A strong wind billows around you, extinguishing all torches and candles within 20'.
4. You act last in the next initiative round as your Crown sparks in your eyes like a flashbulb.
5. You broadcast your current emotional state. Everyone in a 60' radius must Save or experience your emotional state.
6. Take 1d6 damage, struck by lightning. 

Ynnbringer Triples

1. You become unable to tell the truth until the next dawn.
2. Dogs and other domestic animals abhor you until the next dawn.
3. Teleport 1d6x10' in a random direction.
4. Take 1d6 damage. You are flung 1d10' in a random direction.
5. Add +1 ID to all rolls for the rest of the day.
6. Take 2d6 damage.  If reduced to 0 HP or below, explode. 3d6 damage, 20' radius. 

Ynnbringer Quadruples

1. Burst into flames. The light of this fire counts as sunlight.
2. Effect is maliciously altered.
3. All plants within your Crown grow suddenly as if one hundred years had passed.
4. One of the Sidhe crawls out from the corner of your Crown, released into reality.
5. Save or become afflicted with the Idea of Thorns.
6. Take 3d6 damage. If reduced to 0 HP or below, explode. 5d6 damage, 50' radius.  

GLOG Classes - Infraspatial, Sidhe (Libra)

Law and chaos are mirrors. Earth sits between them, in the habitable zone (at least, the human-habitable zone). "Magic", "psionics", "demons", "fairies" - these all come from our neighbors ana (up/toward/Chaosward) and kata (down/from/Lawward). 

Both of these directions are, at a certain point, inimical to life. At the furthest reaches, the only difference between Chaos and Law is whether the universe of homogenous hydrogen atoms is very hot or very cold.

The classes of Libra are arranged in the same way - from the most Lawful to the most Chaotic: 

• Infraspatial
• OSIRIS Theurge
  
• Psychic
  
• Mundane
  
• Wizard
  
• Ynnbringer [which needs a rewrite]
  
• Sidhe

And the conflict between the two (often characterized by those on the ground as "war", but in truth more like fluid dynamics) gouges the world. Chaotic factions are many: necromancer collectives, witch-terrorists, rogue psychics, mocking fairies, player characters, and so on. 

But there is only one of Law. Once there were more, all manner of SCPs Foundation and Deltas Green and Majestics Twelve, but if Law is anything it is centralizing, and the distant Pyramid they draw power from gets to pick and choose who carries its mandate. Some merged, some collapsed, and now all there is is OSIRIS (an acronym for... something, surely - who cares).

They are unbound by governments - the Pyramid is on their badges and all doors open for it.

They are unbound by ethics - the Pyramid is in their hearts and tells them of an eternal future. 

They are unbound by physics - the Pyramid is in their heads and reaches out to make adjustments. 

And, from time to time, they reach out - in one direction or another - and bring someone back. 

Class: Infraspatial

Starting Skill: 1) distimming the doshes 2) rasking juffets 3) uncrenning the delcot 4) smibbing into the brangy 5) lelloing shamtags 6) deaving in the dorl

A: Castaway, Pulled Curtain

B: Sidestep

C: Mitosis

D: Follow Close

one of my relatives drew this for me years ago 
❤ 

A: Castaway

You may only take the A template of Infraspatial as your first template in character creation.

You are from the furthest reaches of Law where human-coherent consciousness survives - past you, nothing is known to live except for abstract "demons" and the commanding Pyramid. You are a 6.28 foot-tall humanoid assemblage of fluted, many-colored glass. 

You are technically blind, but your array of freaky fourth-dimensional senses mean that actually you can see just as well as a person even in the dark.

A: Pulled Curtain

Combustion and electricity fail within 10 feet of you. The same effect radiates from Lawful demons - a stilling of the world. 

B: Sidestep

At will, you may become two-dimensional. This lets you slip under doors and so on, but you have to become 3D again to manipulate or interact with objects. You cannot bring items with you in this state.

C: Mitosis

At will, you may step off of yourself and become two 3.14 foot tall Infraspatials. Each share your stats and so on, but due to being tiny little glass guys are incapable of combat. When separated you still have one HP pool - damage radiates between you through distant spaces.

The two halves have to reach each other to step back together.

D: Follow Close 

People may hold hands with one Mitosis version of you and then teleport to the other. This sends them through the lawful planes - they must make a Wisdom save or be made more lawful, taking 1d6 damage and the associated effect: 

1. They arrive in a flurry of papers - printed surveillance photographs of them. A demon waits to crawl through angles and hunt them. 
2. One piece of their equipment is replaced with a low-poly nonfunctional granite replica.
3. One of their stats is moved to the nearest prime number (16 -> 17, etc).
4. For the next 24 hours, they roll 2d10 whenever they would roll 1d20.
5. Their digits are reduced to the nearest lower prime number (conventionally this is the disappearance of one finger to bring them to 19).
6. They return with a small granite pyramid grasped in their freezing hands.

Infraspatials pass this save automatically.

 

Opening a gate to Ynn is easy. An ivy-covered wall and a piece of chalk. People have used Ynn to escape prison - growing moss ever-so-carefully under broken tiles. Opening the door from the other side is more difficult, but difficult things have a tendency to happen eventually. 

 

Class: Sidhe

Starting Skill: 1) Chess 2) Poetry 3) Screaming 4) Hallucinogens 5) Sleight of Hand 6) Firestarting 

 

A: Mad Ambassador

B: Detached From Earth

C: Flash of Recognition

D: Furnace of Chaos

Harry Clarke, The Colloquy of Monos and Una

 

A: Mad Ambassador

You have come from the nearer lands of Chaos - the great Gardens of Ynn, where sidhe play endless games with ever-changing laws. You may only take the A template of Sidhe as your first template in character creation. 

 

When someone makes a promise to you and keeps it, your face twinges. Don't they know a word is nothing like an act? Why do they think they have to do this?

 

You can speak to wild animals - life is an expression of Chaos, after all. Tame animals abhor you, breaker of laws. 

 

B: Detached From Earth

You have somewhere else to be. You can, at any time, choose to weigh nothing (allowing you to walk up walls, leap forever, et cetera). 

 

C: Flash of Recognition 

With an hour's work, you can reshape your face (or is it a mask?) to match anyone you have studied. At will, you can break your disguise (permanently - you will never be able to hide as them again) to force anyone looking at you to Save or seize. 

 

D: Furnace of Chaos

Law rules over mankind, many say - but some cultists point up to the Sun, purest expression of light, heat, and motion. Even from here, it pulls you towards it. 

 

When you break your disguise, you can shed your skin with it. For one beautiful minute, you and the Sun are one and the same. Your touch melts lead (2d8), your visage blinds, you step through the air, and then you are set to 0 HP and fall back to the uncaring ground. You are still too far away.

 

While you do this, your skin waits patiently where you left it.