Items with personality or even minds.

In The Lord of the Rings, the elven cloaks and ropes that the fellowship received from Galadriel in Lothlorien were very helpful. The rope seemed to know when to stay tied or un-knot itself. The cloaks reliably hid their wearers from hostile eyes. In this post we examine a game mechanic for this sort of item, and go beyond it to granting physical objects personalities and even minds. Such items can function better than mundane items, but may also be argumentative, grouchy, and might have veto power over an item’s powers. The form of the game mechanic, for Realm of the Powers, takes the form of three additional spiritual talents that grant low level awareness, personality, or a full mind to the items.

Animation Gems

Something we do from time to time here at Dan and Andrews is to take an idea from one genre and see how it does in another. In this case, we want to borrow an idea from Paranoia and export it into fantasy gaming. In Paranoia one of the game features is artificially intelligent robots with personalities and fully functional artificial intelligence brains. In the dystopian future of Paranoia, they have forgotten how to make AI brains and so recycling these brains — even from otherwise wrecked robots — is a fairly important activity for the characters in the game. The qualities we want to emulate are (i) critical to making an automaton work, (ii) no-one knows how to make them, and (iii) actually intelligent. What could possibly go wrong?

The Myrmecodd, a Demon Clan

Native to the nether realm of hivehell, the myrmecodd are a race of demons with a very odd form. Created by the powers of the netherlords from ant-like demons, they have only an ant-like head with huge jaws. One of their powers is to reanimate a dead body, usually one with no head, to serve as a carrier for their head. Placed where the missing head is, the myrmecodd can control the body as if it is their own. This yields a creature with a zombie body and a demonic head, subject to more control and banishment spells than most, but said spells act independently on the undead and demonic parts of the creature.

High Level Magic: Wish

This post is the next in our series on high level magic where we explore the implications and give management strategies for really high level spells. The topics of cloning and antimagic have appeared earlier in the series. Today we investigate the ever problematic wish. Sometimes a wish is used to simply set the world aright, which is the least disruptive application. Another use of wishes is to increase the powers, level, stats, etc. of a character or affect the fortunes of a group, a polity, or a people. These uses of wishes can affect the tides of fate and destiny and may cause problems. Finally some uses of the wish, like restoring a dark lord defeated by the action of the heroes which clearly swim directly upstream from the will of the gods and the path of destiny. In the post we try and establish some boundaries and explicate the forces that act against the abuse of the power of wishes.

A Note of Verminous Horror

Today’s post deals with a rather potent and horrifying curse, based around vermin. The curse is one that affects an area of land or a structure. Within the area of the curse, the bite or sting of vermin like flies or wasps has a long lasting and awful effect. The default effect is this. The insect attack raises a welt in a few minutes. A 1-3 hours later, 1-3 of the same vermin climb out of the welt. After a similar duration, 1-3 more climb out. Each time vermin are emitted a point of Class I slow damage (d4 in d20 systems) accrues, and the vermin emitted can bite causing the curse. The welt emits vermin 2-12 times before starting to heal. A spell that cures disease or treatment of the welt with fire will end the effect. Dispelling magic will cause the effect to skip one emission of vermin, but it gets moved onto the end of the effect. This is the base curse. To make this more fun, we have a table of modifiers below the fold.

Spirit Manifestation Monsters

In our gaming system, disembodied spirits have the ability to manifest physical bodies. Since the disembodied personalities either lack or have very little intelligence and personality, the manifestation of a body makes them much more complete characters, it grants them intellect and personality that they only get when the extend into the material world. This, in turn, suggests that we can have a wide variety of monsters that are manifestations of spirits. Things like shambling mounds might be the action of a spirit animating a pile of vegetation, for example. This leads to some balance issues — manifestation takes an action and so the spirit could re-manifest its physical body the round after that body was destroyed. The power can take the cost advantage demanifestation trauma which embeds a delay before the spirit can again manifest; the death of the physical body is painful. The remainder of the post consists of suggestions for monsters of this type.

The Flowery Dead

Necromancers can control, raise, and even create various forms of undead. It seems unfair that they are granted this advantage and today’s post attempts an artful move toward redressing the balance of power. Postulate a druidic ritual performed over a mixture of seed of various types, infusing them with the force and energy of nature. Someone that has committed grave sins against the forest is spiked to a board of oak or rowan wood and sprinkled with the seeds. A circle of druids invokes the power of the flora and fauna of the wood and curses the person to make good. Depending on the mental state of the person as he or she dies, a particular sort of flower sprouts and grows through flesh, leaving a skeleton held together by roots and vines and adorned with a that flower. This is the druidic version of a post-life entity. The powers of the entity depend on the type of flowers that sprout. Examples appear below the fold.

Do the little people shape human culture?

The little people are, well, little. In a melee, one hit typically kills one of the little people, but they have many magical powers and are not stupid. They avoid melee and work toward their ends through concealment and magical powers. A fairly typical view, by the little people, of the big people, is that they are large toys, potentially dangerous but often comic. A power that many of the little people have is to make a magical suggestion. They put an idea or notion into the mind of one of the big people. This post is about the kind of impacts this might have on human society if it goes on for a long time.

Mystical Masks

Masks are used to conceal your identity or express your personality, but in a fantasy universe they can do a good deal more than that. This post is about various sorts of magic items and even artifacts that are also masks. In line with the general idea of what masks are, most masks do modify the appearance of those wearing them. There is some precedent in movies and literature. In the movie The Mask we have an example of a remnant mask, in this case containing some part of the power of the god Loki. Fred Saberhagen postulated incredibly high tech masks that granted remarkable powers in his novel The Face of Apollo.  In Buffy the Vampire Slayer the episode Dead Man’s Party a mask containing the essence of the zombie demon Ovu Mobani; a zombie donning the mask became an incarnation of the demon. In our opinion, something that is missing from the vast store of magical items is ordinary magic items in the form of masks, so that is where we will start the post.

Fake News for Fantasy: Rumourmongers

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The problem of fake news is a huge issue in the modern era. It includes things as absurd as people claiming the vaccine will make you grow green tendrils that were designed by Bill Gates as new components in his mind control network and goes from there to unfounded claims that we are cancelling all Captain Marvel everything because strong women are a completely intolerable idea to the author of the news item, personally. Modern communications technology make this sort of baseless news into a plague in its own right. Whenever something is a huge problem in the current day, it can be rewarding to retro-extrapolate it into the settings we use for fantasy games. That is what is happening in this post.