Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 21

The Art Fears Fire - Golden Fox Demon

We have art!
I should be exhorting you not to pay attention to it, but it's so cool!  How can you not?
Uh oh...

Originally posted by asakiyume at Golden Fox Demon





cucumberseed is creating a wonderful, terrifying bestiary. The entry on golden fox demons was begging for illustration:

In their initial form, they are very attractive, golden-furred foxes with pierced ears and a strong yellow aura. They will behave solicitously toward visitors to their realm, twine themselves in and out of your feet like cats, bark and whine. It's vitally important that you ignore them.
--cucumberseed, The Beast Fears Fire: Golden Fox Demons

The Beast Fears Fire - Perils of the Great Bogsong

The destruction of the Ketteleye and formation of the Gulf of Catastrophe caused a lot of dramatic changes which persist to this day, one of them being the Bogsong micro-climate that persists along the western half of the Gulf. Warm ocean currents dominate this area in a tight bend that leaves a visible dividing line in the waters of the Gulf. The Bogsong climate is significantly warmer and stormier than the rest of the region, and has become home for animals and plants not seen elsewhere in the region.

The Great Bogsong is a subtropical bayou that extends along the western shore of the Gulf, north along the Crickton/Savel border to the foothills of the Surlycrow Plateau. It's one of the largest swamps in the world, and, given its recent formation and difficulty of travel, most poorly mapped.

It's hard to call the animals and plants that live in the Great Bogsong invasive, exactly, since the climate, topography and everything else about the region changed drastically from when it was part of the Ketteleye, but most of the things you can find there are new arrivals since the creation of the Gulf of Catastrophe.

The Great Bogsong has become a home for an incredible variety of dangerous plants and animals, most of which are not getting individual entries. Some highlights:

Alligators [Threshold 2 | Harm 2/Drowning] - Savelish gators aren't generally aggressive towards humans, but anything they think they can eat, they are going to try. Alligators are very optimistic.

Salt Water Crocodiles [Threshold 3 | Harm 2/Drowning] - Crocodiles are not native to the continent, so who knows how they got here, only that they are here and seem to like it quite a bit. What goes for gators goes for crocs, only being a meter longer requires less optimism on their part when it comes to grabbing humans.

Marsh Elk [Threshold 2 | Harm 1] Grayish-furred elk who might be one of the only large animals once native to the Ketteleye that adapted to the Great Bogsong. The are not the greatest tempered ungulates you ever met.

Venomous Snakes [Threshold 2 | Harm 1-4 depending on species/Poisoned, Sick, or Paralyzed]. The good news about the Great Bogsong is that there are, currently, no constrictor snakes large enough to threaten people. Hurray. There are several kinds of venomous snakes, ranging from the merely dangerous to the almost immediately lethal. Most common is the shore viper, which is a lot like a copperhead which doesn't mind dips in the ocean. Most famously lethal is the Kingdevil, who's got some impressive warning coloration and packs some very powerful neurotoxins in it's venom sacs.

Goblin Pitchers [Threshold 2 | Harm 1/Trapped, Paralyzed & Digesting]. To the person who's never been to the Bogsong, this seems like an especially dumb way to die - Underworld-infused pitcher plants grown to the size that a person could conceivably die in, but here's the problem: Fresh water is really hard to come by in the Bogsong, and goblin pitchers contain most of it. Boring through the wall of the plant releases mildly paralytic digestive juices which contaminate the water, so your only choice is up over the top. Inside the pitcher, there are hairs that, if you touch, also cause those juices to be released, so getting the water can be, to say the least, tricky.

The Bogsong is also a popular place for evil spirits (wisps especially), ghouls, ogres and monstrous spiders, to say nothing of the kind of people who come here from Crickton and Savel because they do not get along with their neighbors.

Add in swamp gas, sinkholes, geological instability (there was once a very extensive network of caverns somewhere in the western edge of the Ketteleye...), poisonous plants, and you get a place where almost no one ever wants to go.

But the trees are quite lovely.

The Beast Fears Fire - Dragons

Dragons
Impulse - To Destroy the Land

Dragons are rare. Dragons tend to prefer the mountains. They are intelligent, conversant, but not at all human. They are usually hungry. They are usually impulsive. They don't really care about much of anything, even when they form bonds. Some don't form bonds. Dragons don't gather wealth. A person who goes to face a dragon or roost of dragons and expects to come home rich or come home at all has a name and that name is fool.

Dragons tend toward 8 to 10 meters, tip to tail, though there are solitary great dragons that manage up to 40 meters, and are the largest animals in the world. Most dragons have wings, and while their wingspans are impressive, they don't justify dragon flight, but dragons do fly. Beyond that - they have a reptilian appearance but are warm blooded, they possess a serpentine body with varying numbers of limbs (and, in some cases, heads), their coloration tends toward warning rather than camouflage (though sapients are the only thing that ever manage to prey on them), there is very little tying them together outside of behavior.

Dragons destroy. Some of the more thoughtful dragons argue that this is a necessity and a moral good, but to all outsiders and most less-thoughtful dragons, this is mostly hunger and boredom. A dragon or roost will stake out a territory as their own and then systematically destroy everything within it until nothing growing remains and no two stones are vertically stacked. Luckily, dragons spend almost all of their considerable lifespans in varying stages of torpor and hibernation.

How to Make Your Dragon Lesser dragons get 9 to divide between Dragon Moves for their thresholds and Harm 3. Greater Dragons get 12 and Harm 4. Their Thresholds should be no less than 2 and no greater than 6. Dragons don't need to have all of the available Dragon Moves, and absence of one doesn't necessarily mean the dragon doesn't have that capability (e.g. not having Dragon Breath doesn't mean the dragon can't spew forth something nasty when it has the mind to do so), it just means that those are not the capabilities that the dragon uses when threatened or threatening.

Dragon's Breath
Most dragons can open their mouth and spew out something horrible when they have a mind. If you're facing a dragon who likes to do this in confrontation, face Disaster
On a Hit, you avoid the destruction and can respond however you choose. The Moderator can have the dragon use this Move again as a Soft Move.
On a Hard Hit, either something you have done or something the dragon has done prevents it from breathing forth terror again.
On a Miss, you take what the dragon is giving in the face. Suffer Harm and a Peril that is appropriate to the substance or energy the dragon breathes (On Fire, Chilled, Poisoned, Sick, Stunned, etc.)

Dragon's Blood
Dragon blood is usually incredibly poisonous and occasionally caustic. Some dragons are able to bleed a little through their scales so that any contact with them causes contact with their poisonous blood. If you come into contact with a dragon's blood through injuring it or touch, face Hardship
On a Hit, you avoid the blood and get a sense of where you don't want to stand when stabbing the thing. Continue stabbing away.
On a Hard Hit, your body does the thing that sometimes happens to a person when exposed to dragon's blood and you get supercharged for fighting that particular dragon. Gain +1 Hit forward for all moves you make against this dragon.
On a Miss, you suffer Harm and are Poisoned and Sick. Poor bastard.

Dragon's Guise
Dragons are pretty mutable creatures in form in the first place, so it shouldn't be surprising that some dragons are accomplished shape shifters, who are really good at messing with people who are hunting for them. When you begin the hunt against a dragon who has this inclination and capability, face Ignorance.
On a Hit, you can draw out or track down the dragon and confront it.
On a Hard Hit, you catch the dragon up vulnerable and get +1 Hit forward on your next move against it.
On a Miss, the Moderator gets a hard move as the disguised dragon messes with your lives.

Dragon's Dread
Dragons are fucking terrifying. When you first see the dragon, face Malevolence.
On a Hit, you master your fear and may fight the dragon.
On a Hard Hit, you master your fear and strike while the dragon expects you to cower. Inflict great harm.
On a Miss, the Dread overtakes you. You may choose to turn and run or stay and suffer Harm as stated from shock and terror. In either case, you suffer the Peril Dread.

Dragon's Arsenal
Dragons have claws and scales and teeth, and while some choose to use more refined weapons to take down their prey and enemies, most are only too happy to wade in there, swiping and biting. When you engage a dragon at close range, face Violence.
On a Hit, you Harm the dragon and suffer 1 Harm in return.
On a Hard Hit, you get a Hard Hit as normal when facing Violence.
On a Miss, the Moderator gets to choose a Hard Hit option for the dragon against you, from both the Hard and Soft options.

Dragon's Flight
Most dragons are not great fliers, but they can fly, which is remarkable, considering. Those who can relentlessly patrol their territories, looking for food, intruders, and something to wreck. When you travel in a dragon's territory, face Want
On a Hit, you can confront or avoid the dragon as you wish.
On a Hard Hit, you can confront the dragon when it is vulnerable, gaining +1 Hit Forward on your first Move against it or you can avoid the dragon's notice entirely and reach your destination with it none the wiser.

Every item is covered in gold!
There are esoteric and practical uses for every part of a dragon. Seriously. Medicines, talismans, reagents, magical power sources, weapons... If anything, its the remains of a dragon that give any credence to the stories that dragons collect wealth. In a sense, they are wealth. There are rumors of a small roost of dragons up on the Surlycrow Plateau, and maybe another somewhere way up north in Murren, but no one has seen a dragon in Crickton in over twice living memory. Dragons can sleep years at a time between 3-9 month active periods. What are the odds that one or more of them will show up now?

The Beast Fears Fire - Liminal Merrow

Liminal Merrow [Want 3]
Impulse - To Take You Away

There is a hypothesis, something admittedly difficult to test and with very little strong evidence, that the Other is what Water tried creating as an afterworld for humanity, something that went utterly wrong somewhere, either after humanity rejected the water as a place to rest or during its creation, which led to it being rejected. There are only three points of evidence that lead to this hypothesis. The first is that the pre-Murrenic peoples of the region seemed to think that their spirits were destined for a watery afterlife and were terrified of the dead and the notion of an afterlife, learning spiritual techniques that were meant to hasten their dissolution and return. The second is the fact that the Other transmits through and destroys knowledge, which we associate in a hundred stronger and better proven ways, with Water. The last is the merrow.

Liminal Merrow are slight, waifish folks with pale skin (often tinged yellow-green to blue) and long black hair with with strong green or blue tones above the waist and very impressive greenish or bluish fish below. Most of the time. The are attractive, so much so that it's hard to tell where their features depart humanity; maybe their eyes are too big, their proportions kind of off. It's hard to tell when they are peaking through the wall. Liminal merrow don't swim in the ocean, or any other natural water. They swim in the spaces between, neither here nor there. Within the walls, at crossroads, in hallways between more important rooms. Here they have access to our world from the limitless twilight ocean that separates our world from the Other. They want company.

Harm 1/Peril [Charmed/Drowning] Liminal merrow don't interact with humans in the same way that most denizens of the Other do. The most enduring explanation left by someone who has had experience with them is that interacting with them is like petting a strange cat. They can be extremely friendly, but at some point, they are going to turn over and maul you. In this case, liminal merrow have charm and the ocean between the worlds instead of claws.

Liminal merrow are fairly knowledgeable, can and do like to converse (though they do not like to talk about the Other, understanding what danger that puts the listeners in, assuming the merrow doesn't drown the listeners first.); they are extremely charismatic as well, and can back that charisma up with empathic projection and pheromones to get you to go back to their place for coffee drowning.

Memorized by the Sirens
When you are talking or interacting with a liminal merrow, face Want
On a Hit, things go well, you can continue the conversation, but the merrow might try to pull you in again if the Moderator makes a Soft Move.
On a Hard Hit, the conversation continues and ends without another thought to drowning you.
On a Miss, you notice that you are surrounded by water and in the embrace of a merrow or two, or seven. Suffer Harm as stated.

Someone who has been pulled into the liminal waters has to Act Under Fire to swim free. Alternately, someone else can do the same to try and haul a victim back into the world. On a Miss for the victim, it's trip to Death's Door. A Miss for the rescuer puts them in their intended rescued's same position. It's possible for Misses to also land those who rolled them on the frozen beaches of the Other, which, really, isn't always a lot better than Death's door.

You don't belong to that part of the sea
Liminal Merrow don't seem quite as much a part of the Other as the other denizens we discussed. Accurate accounts of them do degrade, accurate knowledge of them places you in danger, but the Crick Sea People have all sorts of stories of merfolk living in the ocean that cause no harm at all (and, as far as we know, no non-Otherworldy merrow exist).

Crick Sea Folk have a means of compounding liminal merrow scales into cosmetics that greatly improve a wearer's appearance (treat as a D10 piece of Gear for anything social). The cosmetic presents less danger to the wearer than most anything else from the Other does, but it's still probably a bad idea to have the stuff on every day. Also, the cosmetics are traditionally stored in ghostwood, so take notice.

Liminal merrow can change their shape into an entirely human (or at least humanoid, if beautifully alien) form. They have been with human lovers. There are children, that, while rare are the most common (and least squicky) form of Other-child. Stories about these relationships, as long as they are free of most Otherworldly details, are safe for listeners. Also, universally tragic.

The Beast Fears Fire - Lobstermen

Other's Day continues!

Lobstermen - [Violence 4]
Impusle - To Fill the Monster Cupboard

If you are in the Other, near the Other, or around where denizens of the Other are active, you should assume there's a lobsterman somewhere. You won't know where at first. It won't move. It will wait. It can wait, perfectly still, for as long as it needs to. Behind a door, around a corner, someplace you would have noticed it getting into. The lobsterman has time, all the time in the world. It knows someone is going to open that door, look in that alcove, come around the corner, and there it will be, 2 meters tall, dark green and mottled and 1000 kilograms.

Lobstermen look like bipedal atlantic lobsters, their legs having formed a composite pair of legs and with heavy, crushing claws. They appear places and wait for someone to happen on them. That's what they do, that's what they're all about. Once someone has found them, they are fast, strong, and ruthless, clubbing and crushing and tearing.

Harm - 3 Lobstermen are utterly straightforward in every way, really. They destroy anything in front of them and then shuffle off to a different hiding place, or back to the Other. Their shell is made of a dark green metal that is stronger and harder than anything else in either world, which makes them very difficult to hurt in a fight. It also seems to protect them from psychic and magical attacks as well, and is very hard on weapons you bring to bear against it.

Shell Game
When you seek to harm a lobsterman and you bring weapons or talismans to the task, face Violence.
On a Hit, you do minimal Harm to the lobsterman.
On a Hard Hit, you can do Harm as stated.
On a Miss, you break the weapon or talisman you were using and get a moment to look upset before the Lobsterman inflicts Harm on you as stated.

Creeping up the stairs in the dark, waiting for the death blow.
The beast, in this case, actually does fear fire. If you use a larger bonfire or a weapon aligned with fire on the lobsterman it breaks the structure of the shell and lets you avoid the Shell Game Move entirely. The lobsterman is still a skilled and deadly combatant, but it could be a lot worse.

If you can kill a lobsterman without fire (good luck) and shell it, it is possible to make amazing armor out of the shell, which protects against physical attacks and magic. Unfortunately, it requires serious earth witchcraft to reshape the shell, because fire still makes it brittle and worthless. The armor is worth D12 when facing Violence and D8 when facing malevolence. Unless fire's involved, at which point it is worth precisely dick, as it will be from here on out because it's ruined.

Wearing lobsterman armor does also put you at risk of having your armor's relatives show up to collect, so beware.

The Beast Fears Fire - Golden Fox Demons

Happy Other's Day!

Golden Fox Demons [Malevolence 4]
Impulse - To Hurt People

There are unknowable dead hulks in the Other, things a lot like dragons, all poison and dread, but they are dead, sleeping, and in as much as the Other has leaders or rulers, the golden foxes seem to fit the bill. At least, the other denizens of the Other seem to defer to them. It's not quite like that, exactly, since golden fox demons don't seem to want much of anything from their countrymen, and most of the other denizens don't really act exactly on hierarchy, but there are times when these beings have exerted something like authority on the others.

Golden fox demons want your attention. In their initial form, they are very attractive, golden-furred foxes with pierced ears and a strong yellow aura. They will behave solicitously toward visitors to their realm, twine themselves in and out of your feet like cats, bark and whine. It's vitally important that you ignore them. They can do little more to you in this form than annoy you. Deliberately paying no attention to them is a standard Hold Steady against Hardship, Threshold 3, but instead of suffering Harm on a Miss, they assume their second form and the fun begins.

Their second form is a golden furred human/fox hybrid, bipedal, with opposable thumbs, fox features, dressed in rich yellow robes, gold jewelry, and with the same yellow aura. In this form they will concentrate their magic on the person who noticed them or anyone who takes aggressive action on them.

Harm 4/Lost Insight Anyone who succumbs to their magic finds themselves transported to a little pocket world where pain is God and the golden fox demon's final form (human wrapped in yellow robes and bandages, studded with golden barbs, and sporting tall, almost turban like headdresses) is pope. In this place, their victim suffers tortures. Bad ones. For a long, long time, before being deposited back in the world at the instant they were taken. This treatment reduces a character's Insight by 4. If they have less than 4 Insight, it reduces their Insight to 0 and raise their Ratio by 1. Really. It's fucking awful.

Eternity to Know Your Flesh
When a golden fox demon turns their magic on you, face Malevolence.
On a Hit, you stay right where you are and the fox demon looks a little upset when you do what it was you were planning to do.
On a Hard Hit, the fox demon resumes its first form and retreats.
On a Miss, you get an all-expenses-paid trip to the pain dimension. Suffer Harm as stated.

Get on your knees, you won't survive tonight.
Some idiots get the great idea to strip the clothes and jewelry off a golden fox demon if they kill it. Really, don't do that. It's a bad idea. Donning anything a fox demon owned subjects you to the Eternity to Know Your Flesh move, which, if you Miss, instead of torturing you, it turns you into a golden fox demon. These creatures aren't playable under any circumstances, so go make someone wiser to play.

The Beast Fears Fire - Codices

Codex [Ignorance 2]
Impulse - To Bring Forth Forgetting

I have some bad news for you. Thanks to my writing down things about the Other in this bestiary, there will be a time when it becomes a codex and attempts to kill you or those who receive this book as a bequest. I apologize in advance.

The Other likes to keep its secrets, which is why liminal merrow might drown you between the walls for reading this, or a lobsterman might appear in your wardrobe one morning while you are dressing. In writing this, I have killed some of you, and I am sorry. The Other will eventually notice the copies of this book, one by one, and infect them. There's no stopping it. It will grow, burst the shelves of it's book case, the pages and cover will darken. Codices grow to be the size of the largest books made, a meter across, end to end, when open. They levitate on their own, in lazy loops and spirals. They will lay eggs, clear, teal jelly, the size of songbird eggs, in clumps. Inside, you will see tiny books starting to develop. More codices.

Codices are very aggressive toward any being that is literate, which, in Crickton (thanks to the Murrenic school system), is almost everyone. Their slow and apparently whimsical flight patterns sometimes conceal it, but when they start slicing up minds with extruded words, their intentions become pretty easy to read.

Harm 3, Forgetting. It can be hard to see the words stretching out from the pages in a dark place, but you can feel them, and more importantly, you can, even without seeing them, read them. If you cannot read, you're fairly safe from these beings; they might batter you with their covers, but they don't really have the force to harm you. If you can read, they will make you read, and if you do not make yourself understand the word you read, it will hurt you, mind and brain. This isn't a matter of vocabulary, the words a codex will tell you are from the language of the Other, and they do not place nice with native minds. A person killed by a codex usually has soup in their skull where their brain used to be.

But Don't Take My Word For it
When a codex tries to make you read it's Otherwords, face Ignorance.
On a Hit, you understand well enough to avoid the Harm it causes.
On a Hard Hit, you infect the codex with your language, causing Great Harm to it.
On a Miss, your mind rebels against the word. Suffer Harm as stated and choose one piece of information that you utterly forget. If it is interesting, the Moderator might let you Refresh Strength.

Take a Look, it's in a Book
Codex eggs can take a while to hatch, but there is a method (the Sondowey Technique, developed here in Crickton!) to controlling when they will, which makes them one malicious deposit away from being really good assassins. Fragments of a destroyed codex can be rebound, such that they do not fly around or lay eggs, but reading the text causes the same attack that an active codex would level.

There are rumors that someone tried teaching young children to read the language of the Other instead of the languages of the Sea. The rumors don't cover what came of this, but I am not holding out hope that it went anywhere at all well.

The Beast Fears Fire - Maiden Trees

Sassafras Maidens [Hardship 2]
Impulse - Bring Forth Confusion

Opposite the strangers, no one has ever seen these beings in our world. They are a feature of the land, almost, in the Other and they wander together as forests or groves surrounded by a shimmer you might be forgiven for mistaking for wind-kicked snow. It's not snow.

Sassafras maidens (there are also sassafras youths, but there seem to be about 10 apparent females to every 1 apparent male - I say apparent, because biological sex doesn't always match expectations) are white at the trunk and shade to red at the branches with sparse leaves in the single, double and triple lobes of sassafras in our world. Their trunk appears to be that of a human (most often a young woman as discussed, but sassafras "mothers" and "crones" are also evident in larger forests, as well as males of various ages) from the last three ribs down. They are not rooted, and can walk and run somewhat faster than the average human (though not usually as fast as the fastest or as long as a long-distance runner). Their branches can reach up to 3 meters high, but their human portions are about the size you'd expect from a human being.

Sassafras maidens constantly give off and are surrounded by a cloud of glittering particles that attach to the mucus membranes of (usually eyes, nose, mouth and eardrums) of animals nearby and, somehow, manage to randomly stimulate the nerves. This is extremely disorienting at best and incredibly distressing and unpleasant on average. Exposure to the dust has caused seizure and death in some cases.

Harm 1/Peril [Confused, Sickened] Sassafras maidens aren't very aggressive and will only attack someone when they are hungry. That said, the dust they shed is a constant danger and, in a larger grove, at least some individuals are bound to be hungry at any given time. Sassafras maidens hunt by incapacitating prey with their dust and then kicking it apart with their feet. They feed by rolling in the corpses of their prey, seemingly able to absorb nutrients through the skin of their human appearing trunks.

In the Forest, I lost Myself
When the glittering dust from the sassafras maidens reaches you, face Hardship.
On a Hit, you suffer from one of the Perils stated, but can still act as you see fit.
On a Hard Hit, the stimuli send you into a trance where everything makes perfect sense and you are perfectly in touch with all your faculties. Gain +1 Hit Forward on all Moves you make while exposed to the dust.
On a Miss, you get overstimulated and suffer Harm as stated.

Here in the forest, dark and deep, I offer you eternal sleep
Explorers have collected Sassafras maiden pollen and brought it back to our world as a weapon, or, for the truly jaded, a drug. Given the dangers of collecting it, it's almost wasted on any purpose, but being sold to someone who is willing and able to pay for it. Someone who has a buyer and a means of harvest could become fabulously wealthy selling it. And then probably get eaten by a lobsterman, but hey, we do what we must.

Speaking of the truly jaded, students of the Other have observed that sassafras maidens (and other age/sex configurations) have apparently functional apparently human genitals and wonder if any human has had sex with a member of the species. The short answer is maybe. The correct answer is I don't even want to think about that, but... There are rumors of apparent albinos showing up occasionally, with red braids for hair and yellow and orange leaves therein, dedicated carnivores, but otherwise human, if a little odd.

If you want to play a hybrid child of the Other, I'm not going to stop you. It's possible that you could be part Stranger, a Sassafras Child, or part Liminal Merrow.

Other Child
When you want to call upon your Otherworldly heritage, face Hardship
On a Hit you have instinctive understanding of what is going on with whatever denizen of the Other is present. You can ask a single question about the Denizen and get an honest answer. Likewise, this counts as a on any move the Other might make.
On a Hard Hit, you get the benefits of a Hit and can manifest the power that your denizen parent manifests.
On a Miss, you weird yourself. Suffer 1 Harm and the Peril Confused or Sick.

The Beast Fears Fire - The Strangers

The Strangers [Disaster 3]
Impulse - To Keep Secrets and Take Territory

They have lots of names - djur, tailors, foragers, the others; they are more tolerant of this world than most denizens of the Other, and interaction with them is less likely to attract the other. They are travelers. They come to our world, to abandoned places, places out of the way, and take up residence. Then they farm and make their shadowy garments. They are the most sociable of the Other's known denizens, but that doesn't really mean a lot compared to most of the Other's others.

The strangers make outposts on our world. We know that. There's no indication of why or the existence of a comprehensible why. This is just what they do. Set up a place, make a bridge to the Other and then go about their business. If they were spies, they are remarkably shut-in for spies. If they are taking something from this world to theirs, there's no indication what. Mostly they just plant gardens. There's some rumors that they have more regular relations with the Underworldly denizens, but most of those rumors come from goblins, and goblins like to bend peoples' ears all about the other for the same reason a child with a lens likes pointing it at ants on a sunny day. Apparently, the Underworld does not suffer from ill effects of contact with the Other.

The strangers are intensely private and hate coming into contact with humans, or really any creature native to our world that speaks. If discovered, or they feel they are in danger of being discovered, they will usually try to misdirect folk and turn them back. Failing that, they are more than willing to fight.

The Strangers are a little smaller and lighter than adult humans, their features are sharp, ears long and pointed, hair swept back. They are humanoid in body plan, though their feet are digitigrade. Some of them sport a pair of small, twisty horns on their foreheads. The vast majority of stranger corpses appear to be intersex, and no strangers have been observed that have identifiable secondary sex characteristics. When naked, the bodies of the strangers are a rich red or orange, but, while alive, they have never been seen not wearing their light absorbing garments. While wearing those, they are stranger-shaped blotches of darkness with a strong aura by which their features are visible that they can turn on or off (auras are usually red, blue, teal and green). The garments are loose, flowing, and in many layers. In that sense, they are actually a lot like Crickish clothing.

The places they frequent are shadowy and dim, mostly, and in anything less than bright sunlight, their garments make them incredibly hard to spot, if not invisible.

Harm 2/Peril [Poisoned] The strangers love poisons. They love poisons a lot, and they are quite liberal with their applications and cunning in choosing where someone is likely to contact the poison. If they have to fight directly, they usually do so with farm implements that have been treated with all sorts of interesting poisons. They also sometimes fight with reinforced gauntlets that have three short blades projecting from them that are, you guessed it, also poisoned.

A Little Drop
When you are exploring a place claimed by the strangers, or a place inhabited by the strangers, face Disaster.
On a Hit, you manage to avoid the poisons and the stabbings, you are aware that strangers are present, if they are, and you can respond to them however you choose.
On a Hard Hit, you know exactly where any present strangers are, which upsets them a great deal and usually puts them to rout. You can dictate one thing you do as they retreat which is not a Move.
On a Miss, you've been struck, stuck, or touched something that sucks. Take harm as stated.

The sky is a poisonous garden tonight
Stranger poisons are the very model of interesting poisons. Recorded poisons have turned the insides of people into the flesh and seeds of a watermelon, while still, somehow maintaining life. Another caused its victim to be able to eat ashes and nothing but ashes, requiring at least a kilogram of ash a day lest they burn from inside out. A third poison made its victim shift intermittently to the Other and back (until they did not come back). Interesting.

Stranger garments retain their properties - absorbing all light that shines on them and the person wearing them (even exposed skin and other garments) and making their aura sometimes visible. Humans can't control when their aura is visible or invisible, but they still make for excellent gear when being stealthy or scaring someone. Shadow Witches can do something similar, but they pay well for a chance to study these garments.

Strangers always have a space in their territory where it is possible to cross between our world and the Other. If a native from this world enters that place, the strangers decamp entirely from the area. Tracking them turns up, at best, the location of where the trail of a stranger in question leaves this world for the Other. We assume. No one has actually seen a stranger in the other that we know of. Records may have degraded or turned into codices, or the strangers might be just as reclusive in the Other as they are here (and who can blame them with the golden fox demons and lobstermen about). It is also possible that their form is different in the Other than it is in this world.

The Beast Fears Fire - Denizens of the Other

The Other divides the world into two populations: those who know nothing of the Other and those who are in constant danger from the Other. It doesn't have a name, because anyone who tries to name it ends up in that place or at the mercy of its denizens. Or they end up broken in mind and spirit some other way, nattering on about how the other is an infinitely small particle blowing about in this world and this world is an infinitely small particle dancing in the Other, simultaneously. Scholarship on the Other tends to degrade or, worse, turn into a codex and go flapping around the library, laying eggs and killing people with its sharpened syntax.

The Other might be what's on the far side of the Underworld, or its deepest reaches. It might be some other world altogether, one intermittently connected with ours. It might be some leaking lunatic asylum for things that deform reality just by existing. The people who have seen the place describe wintry landscapes, ruined structures of stone or bones or both, and eternal, starless twilight. Its denizens are hostile, and their hostility is the only thing about them that is comprehensible.

By reading this, you've put yourself in danger of attracting their attention. Its attention. The Other. It's attracted to minds which know about it, revealing more and more of itself more and more often until you come to some sort of grief or become a denizen yourself by virtue of the Other having taken you. There are incantations that are meaningless in any language, devoid of supernatural power, except for the fact that the Other hears these words and pays attention, to the extent that it pays anything. It is attracted to the words. Why you would do this is beyond me. If you are fortunate, you can live out a normal life just having the notion that this place exists before the Other pays you a visit. Every aspect of the Other is toxic to your reality, including knowledge, especially knowledge. Every artifact gotten from the other is dangerous for merely existing, and, over time, becomes dangerous in action. Knowledge degrades as the Other draws the knowing to itself or destroys them. Recordings become monstrous, eventually the balance resets with a handful of people in our world knowing that there is a place called the Other and nothing more.

Well, the balance has reset that way, so far.