Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 26

The Beast Fears Fire - Werewolves

Werewolves [Ignorance 5]
Impulse - To murder and cause murder. Fantasy taxonomy is a funny thing. Werewolves do spend some time in a sort of Lupine form (moreso than Blood Wolves), but we're listing them as cruelties, and the reason being is that we know damn well where werewolves originate. Of all the cruelties, werewolves are the variety we understand best. We just tend to ignore a lot of the implications of werewolves, because their existence is pretty strong evidence that, even though magic is normative, it is not always just.

A person risks becoming a werewolf when they witness death, usually traumatic, usually in numbers, usually in violence. The risk increases for sole survivors. In the forests, in the wake of three generations of war and disease, there's not shortage of these people, and with the drop in population, there is a lot of movement, so no one really knows their neighbors as well as they used to. This is perfect hunting for a werewolf.

During the day, a werewolf is a person. This person will never have any recollection of their nocturnal activities or their status as a cruelty and a killer. There are no signs, no line of questioning will get the werewolf to reveal what they do not know. At night, the werewolf takes a different form. This one is shadowy, indistinct, and, like many cruelties, kind of hard to look straight at. The mind doesn't fully process what the eyes see when they look at a werewolf, just something that looks a lot like a wolf.

Maybe.

Harm - 4 or Hard Move and Soft Move. Werewolves are incredibly strong and fast, and will gladly tear into anyone they see with fang and claw if confronted, but they much prefer to kill the sleeping, the inattentive, the weak, and do it messily, then sit back and wait for the town to go crazy trying to find the werewolf. Werewolves aren't subtle, but they are incredibly hard to track. They will leave no doubt that some lupine horror is stalking a settlement and lots of dead-end trails and false clues to implicate others, because the only thing more gratifying to the werewolf than killing seems to be seeing someone else kill an innocent because of them.

Are you a Werewolf?
When you are hunting for a werewolf, face Ignorance.
On a Hit, you can determine a list of likely suspects (one of which is the werewolf) or eliminate a name from the list.
On a Hard Hit, you can determine a list of likely suspects and eliminate a name from the list or eliminate up to 3 names from the list.
On a Miss, the Moderator gets a Hard Move (usually killing someone offscreen) and a Soft Move (usually implicating an innocent or you).

Calls me on the phone, tells me all the ways that he's gonna mess me up
Werewolves are reasonably well known, but they are also close enough to enough other things that they are even harder to correctly identify before they've had their way with a settlement. In the west, they don't see a distinction between werewolves and great wolves, and a sufficiently clever and murderous great wolf can confuse the issue enough to keep investigators off their trail. Likewise, Barghests sometimes use werewolf legends for cover and as an amplifier for their evil ways.

To make matters worse, werewolf attacks can trigger an outbreak of Blood Wolves, accelerating the pace of the killing and making the mystery that much harder to untangle.

As icing on the horror cake, a large proportion of sole survivors are survivors of vampire epidemics. It's happened a few times that a settlement has successfully put down a werewolf only to have it then rise as a vampire. Sometimes the invisible world just wants you dead.

The Beast Fears Fire - Giants

Giants [Hardship 2+, Gathering; Hardship 6, Rampage]
Impulse - Raise a ruckus, then become one. For something that's 5 meters tall, giants can be pretty hard to notice when they are not interested in being loud. Eerie shadows in the trees, strange footprints, an odd smell that not everyone notices, that's all. When they are in the wilds, giants move in a trance, barely acknowledging the terrain, let alone other creatures. They are large enough that nothing poses much of a threat against them, and they tend not to pose much of a threat when they are in their fugue state. Lanky, shadowy figures clothed in shadow, sometimes with glowing eyes and sometimes without, they make no sound when they move.

Once a giant comes near a group of people, though, things start to change. The giant's natural stealth gets augmented by awakening purpose as the giant starts seeking out the largest groups of people it can find. Whether giants are able to control the weather or they just happen to have good luck, they always seem arrive at a settlement in the awful stagnation of the summer, the depth of winter, the 15th day of straight rain or the 60th of drought. They release pheromones that cause people to become irritable and aggressive, quietly cause misfortune and pain to help things along and then sit back and help itself to the psychic energy that the conflict releases. These pheromones don't have a detectable scent on their own (and their effects seem to only extend to humans), but some people do report a funny smell in areas where a giant is active.

Harm - Moderator Soft Move while Gathering; 6 in Rampage. While a giant is gathering, it will do everything in its power to stay out of sight. Its pheromones help stymie would-be investigators, fostering conflicts and causing those conflicts to escalate.

I Smell Trouble
When you are in a place where a Giant is gathering strength and don't want to spend your time yelling and being irrational, face Hardship.
On a Hit, you feel unaccountably angry, but this doesn't affect your actions. Tell the Moderator something that annoys or irritates your character, which is now in play as a possible Soft Move.
On a Hard Hit, you know that your emotions are being manipulated somehow, and you can smell something odd (if you ever encounter other giants, you will smell them as well, and recognize there is a giant about on a Hit).
On a Miss, answer a question as with a Hit, but you also suffer the Peril Angry and the Moderator gets a Soft Move. The Giant's Threshold increases by 1.

While gathering, it's not actually possible to kill the giant. Engaging it with physical or psychic attacks will drive it off for a little while, but the giant always returns. Giants don't become vulnerable until they rampage.

While it's gathering, the psychic energy a giant gets manifest as belts, rings, straps, bracelets and the like. Once the giant advances to Threshold 6, its body is totally obscured by them, with the exception of little peeks at turquoise light that leaks out between the armor. At this point, the giant goes from merely observing chaos to causing it, embarking on a destructive rampage until it's killed or it's able to drive off all the humans in its chosen territory.

Once a giant starts rampaging, it is vulnerable, but hurting them requires opponents to find the gaps in its psychic armor to strike at with weapons and magic.

Shadow of the Really Big Guy
When you want to try and hurt a rampaging giant, climb on its body and face Hardship
On a Hit, you cause Harm as stated.
On a Hard Hit, you get to use your Hard Hit option for facing Violence.
On a Miss, you fall off and suffer Harm as stated.

With snow white pillows for my big fat head
It's not really clear what impulse makes a person into a giant. It's hard enough to conclusively identify the proto-giant in the first place, and no accounts from people who knew the one who became a giant really identify anything in particular about them. That said, they seem to arise in circumstances of great interpersonal conflict, which may make them products of suppressed anger, forever drawn to the same situations that created them, lashing out and then repeating the process.

Giants usually go dormant for several years between completed rampages, disappearing into the wilderness.

Whatever the case, there tends to be a lot of astracite left over when you kill a giant, which makes it a worthwhile thing for daring heroes with very good grip to try.

There are rituals and formulas that can drive a gathering giant far from a settlement it has chosen. They aren't common, but they're not prohibitively difficult to find or enact. With luck, you can drive a giant far enough off that it heads off into the wilderness for a few years or alights on another settlement. There's a story about someone who managed to extort a lot of money out a string of settlements as a giant killer. The end of that story is not a good one.

The Beast Fears Fire - Ogres

Ogres [Disaster 5]

Impulse - to trap, torment and eat people. Sometimes, it's difficult to view transformation into one of the cruelties as an unmitigated curse.  Certainly, your days among polite society are over, but ogres don't seem all that upset by it. Ogres appear to be pretty happy, as long as they have people to hurt. People who think about these things tend to agree that the impulse that gives rise to the ogre is that of bullying cruelty, the love of having someone in your power and terrifying them. Whether or not that is the impulse that created them, it certainly is the one that governs their behavior after transformation.

Ogres can twice the height of an adult human, and are proportioned to match, skinny to stocky. They tend toward long limbs, and long, lank hair. They have a distinctive odor, but aren't particularly dirty. They aren't particularly stupid, either, despite the fact that stories that feature them usually feature a cunning hero outwitting them. In fact, they can be downright brilliant in certain narrow areas of expertise, such as the making and placing of fiendish and deadly traps. Ogres love traps; making them, setting them, watching people fall into them and get maimed by them. Ogres tend toward a greenish coloration, which they can shift to match the forests and swamps in which they like to hang out (the are able to go gray and brown and white in the winter, too). Ogres have indefinite lifespans, but require the flesh of something sentient at regular intervals to maintain their own intellect and health.

Harm - 4/Moderator Hard Move Ogres are ridiculously strong and carry around weapons that make use of this fact (usually axes, clubs and saws. Yes, saws. No, it's not a good scene.), but they prefer to let their deathtraps and, better still, their not-quite-deathtraps do the work for them while they look on and taunt you.

Would You Like to Play a Game?
When you enter an ogre's trapped territory, face Disaster.
On a Hit, you can stay out of the traps, but you are also herded by their placement. Moderator gets a Soft Move.
On a Hard Hit, you can traverse the area safely or find the ogre without triggering any traps, your choice.
On a Miss, you walk right into a trap. Moderator gets a Hard Move.

I taught the killing game first
Ogres may be capable of reproducing. Fortunately, if this is the case, it happens so rarely, thanks to ogre misanthropy and miserableness, that it doesn't really affect the population. Ogres are extremely territorial, but they are willing to work with villains who impress them and/or are not any good to eat on an enterprise, if the enterprise is likely to give them the opportunity to try out new designs and eat people.

Ogres who were literate in life tend to like to sketch out their designs and write down records of making and using the traps they create. It's possible to approach an ogre with this quirk and trade large blank books to them and customized writing supplies, usually for safe passage. If you're lucky, and the ogre isn't too hungry. Also, some ogres have grimoires that are filled with technical notes and designs for all manner of weapons, traps and various other things, which can be worth a lot to the right person.

The Beast Fears Fire - The Cruelties of Man

In Crickton, people in the know understand that the real difference between magic and science is not a matter of replication (both disciplines are about roughly equally repeatable in individual workings and experiments), but an entirely different distinction.  Magic is normative and science is not.  A chemical reaction doesn't have insight into the mind and soul of the person who kicked it off, but magic knows you, and magic judges you, sometimes even if you are not interacting with it.

The cruelties were once humans.  They lived lives, sometimes with no outward show of the evil within them, sometimes with dramatic and terrible show.  Then they changed.  Magic took hold of them and turned them into monsters.  That's what we know for certain.  These monsters can be short lived or, barring violence or accident, immortal.  No one is certain if there is a guiding intelligence behind the transformation of humans into cruelties, let alone what its purpose is in doing so.  In the short term, the transformation leads to much greater and more dramatic acts of evil than a person would otherwise be able to commit.  That said, only a very few of the cruelties prove cunning and circumspect enough to last long in their new forms. 

There are six varieties of cruelty, and philosophers in every culture that has encountered them grapple with the implications of the number and the forms.  There's a sort of fuzzy consensus that there is a reason why a person becomes and ogre rather than a werewolf and that all ogres share the quality that made them ogres.  No one agrees on what those qualities are, or if the number of cruelties has some special significance.

Some people have come to view cruelties as a secondary epidemic or an opportunistic infection that followed along with the vampires, as the last two generations have given rise to more cruelties, across the continent, than any period in recorded history.  Some folks look to it as a sign that some greater cataclysm is coming or already arrived.  Transformation doesn't seem to give the cruelties any greater insight into why they have become monsters, but then, the defining feature of the cruelties, besides their monstrosity, is evil, so the reliability of their revelations leaves a lot to be desired.

The Beast Fears Fire - Necroleptes

Necroleptes [Want 4]
Impulse - Be the reason why we can't have nice things anything. So far, we have mostly been taking the live and let live, or whatever it is they do, approach for ghouls. Ghasts and Gholes and Kappha can make it hard, Goolies make it briefly impossible, if they are taking things you care about. Necroleptes throw that whole notion out the window. They are an enemy of everything that lives, and when they show up, you cannot ignore them. Necroleptes destroy everything, they tear up the land, topple trees at their roots, blight plants, poison water, and create acres of trench-and-tunnel labyrinths, dotted with sinkholes.

Necroleptes are about half again as tall as an adult human and three to four times as massive. They are huge, they have unhingable jaws, they are covered in black and blue and red marks that leak poisonous miasma into the land. Their hands are like badger paws that are the size of badgers. Necroleptes are capable of eating decaying plant matter as well as animal remains, which is probably for the better, since their metabolisms are kind of ridiculous, and they are constantly in or on the verge of hunger-fueled rage.

Harm 4 or Moderator Hard Move Necroleptes don't really have the luxury to wait for you to decay, so they'll just shovel you into their terrible, terrible mouth and start chewing. But that's assuming you find the thing without falling through the floor of their labyrinths, getting buried in a collapse or sinkhole or being poisoned by the toxic muck they leave everywhere.

So my Labyrinth's a Piece of Cake, is it?
When you travel in or through a necroleptes labyrinth, face Want.
On a Hit, you avoid the dangers of the place and choose 1: you find an exit, find the necroleptes, avoid the necroleptes, do not spend a long time wandering around lost.
On a Hard Hit, choose 2.
On a Miss, you run smack into the dangers of the labyrinth. Moderator gets a Hard Move.

It's only forever, not long at all.
Killing a necroleptes does not end the difficulties it causes. The remains of one of these things is toxic and very difficult to transport, handle or contain, and left to its own devices, it will poison the water and land in the area for years to come. The last necroleptes known to be killed in action in Crickton was only contained with the use of an artifact bought from a goblin market with a cost almost as terrible as the remains themselves.

Cleaning up after a necroleptes requires a gang, if not a force, and extraordinary means (what those means are is up to the Moderator). The Necroleptes remains a Threshold 4 opponent even in death.

This is Not a Place of Honor
When you attempt to use extraordinary means to contain or dispose of necroleptes remains, Face Want.
On a Hit, it is possible to contain the remains in place. The area around the remains will remain poisonous and desolate for five generations, but it won't spread.
On a Hard Hit, it is possible to dispose of the remains somewhere they won't cause harm or contain the remains so well the land can heal. It'll still take a generation for the area to restore itself, but you may live to see it happen.
On a Miss, inflict Harm as stated from exposure to the remains. The poison extends to what the ghoulish agenda wanted, the land is forever a wasteland.

The extent of the necroleptes' toxic effect is totally up to the Moderator in case of a miss.

The Beast Fears Fire - Ghouls

Ghouls [Violence 2, 4 Gang]
Impulse - Close ranks, protect their own. Ghouls are, by far, the most common and plentiful of their kind, to the point where they are referred to as standard, default and synecdoche. They are also the variety most likely to communicate with other creatures, though people find that they would rather ghouls not communicate with them - they are the kind of droll scavengers whose strongest apparent positive emotion is a quiet schadenfreude. Garrulous ghouls have determined that speculating on the quality of the remains you'll leave behind is a fine way to put you off balance and get what they want.

Ghouls can tunnel at respectable speeds and tend to make underground warrens for shelter when they visit our world for any length of time. These tunnels aren't designed for surface creatures to navigate (an average to small adult human will have a tight squeeze and no room to maneuver, and a larger person won't usually be able to enter at all). They have extremely keen senses of smell and excellent night vision. They are as strong and fast as an athletic person, decent free-climbers and terrible swimmers (ghouls are kind of afraid of water). Intellectually, they are very similar to humans, though less likely to show brilliance.

Harm - 2/Peril (Paralyzed) Ghouls gang up when they can, and coordinate well in a pack. They can use weapons, but do so only rarely, and usually only bows for distance. They much prefer to claw and bite. Ghouls have a paralytic venom in their saliva, and lick their formidable claws in order to transfer some of the effect.

Perilous Fight
When you are fighting something whose major attacks deliver Peril, face Violence.
On a Hit, things go as normal, but add the option to avoid the Peril as something you can pick.
On a Hard Hit, use the options from a Hard Hit for a normal face Violence.
On a Miss, suffer Harm as stated, with Peril.

Brains for every single meal
Ghoul venom remains potent for a few minutes, once exposed to air, and, yes, it is possible to harvest the venom and preserve it to use to coat weapons, if you're nasty. The stuff is a little tricky to work with, since it absorbs through the skin, so only experienced poisoners use it.

Ghouls also produce a preservative chemical in their saliva, which, when you can get it, is unmatched at keeping animal tissue fresh pretty much indefinitely. Ghouls who are tasked with selling things to other creatures usually have this as the mainstay of their merchandise.

Ghouls tend to, either by instinct or education, preserve organs and tissues from creatures that have value to magicians and philosophical scientists, and any ghoul in a coat probably has something really interesting to the right buyer in its pockets, preserved and kept just in case it needs to make a trade.

The Light was so Blue, and the Air was so Cold

The Beast Fears Fire - Gholes

Gholes [Malevolence 3]
Impulse - Conceal, Eliminate all Trace. Knowledge of gholes is a relatively new thing, as people begin to spread out from their homes, looking to see if neighboring settlements and communities weathered the epidemic. There are some records floating about in old grimoires about ghoulish heralds of the forest that help the forest swallow up what had once been settled, but it's only since people and ghouls have started to come into conflict over settlements abandoned or wiped out that gholes are trying to reclaim for the forest that those records have appeared in any kind of numbers.

Gholes live in the forest and in the trees, unlike their cousins, they are always fully dressed, wearing tattered capes and coats and scarves, dark bandages wrapped around their limbs. Gholes have somewhat more developed claws than ghouls, particularly on their feet, and slightly longer arms. They travel almost exclusively in and through the trees, possessing the same transportation magic that wood witches have, likewise, they have the ability to control the growth of plants and cause them to move. This they do extensively for the purpose of destroying or concealing abandoned places.

Harm - 2/Entangled, Flowering. Fighting a ghole and fighting a wood witch are fairly similar and similarly unpleasant experiences. Gholes bend the plantlife around them to fight on their behalf, lashing with limbs, entangling and strangling with vines, making harmless plants grow irritating thorns and shoot them at people. They have no compunction about attacking anyone who interferes with their work, in order to drive them off, but save their big guns for the determined foes. Ghole venom, in conjunction with their magic causes vines and flowers to sprout from those they have poisoned. A person who falls under this Peril has their body consumed and becomes flowers.

Gholes are somewhat more aggressive than ghouls because humans are naturally resistant to a lot of their land reclaiming powers, and the presence of a single person, even one not magically trained, in a territory they are trying to reforest can prevent them from accomplishing their goal.

Garden, City
When you are in an area that a ghole is trying to reforest, face Malevolence.
On a Hit, reforesting stops for as long as you remain in the area.
On a Hard Hit, the power rebounds on the Ghole, and it Harms itself as stated.
On a Miss, the forest continues unabated, you suffer 2 Harm and are Entangled.


Suddenly I stop. I know it's too late. I'm lost in a forest, all alone.
Gholes are no less enemies of spirits of the dead than other ghouls, and have a particular method for fighting the evil dead. Their strategy involves growing ghostwood persimmons into cages around the spirts, entrapping them. A ghostwood-entrapped spirit, in the right hands, can become a very impressive battery of mystic energy, and, at worst, is probably full of crystalized spirit in the middle.

So far, no one has witnessed a feud between a ghole and a Lich. It would likely be interesting.

The Beast Fears Fire - Kappha

Kappha [Ignorance 3]
Impulse - Reveal and Conceal. The brave souls who collect information on ghouls have a consensus that when ghouls appear in the world of the living, they are acting with purpose, following an agenda. Ghouls, when they bother to speak with humans reference this as if it is a fact, though they do not speak of what that purpose or agenda is, nor anything about the identity of its architect, lest ghasts show up to silence them for it. Whatever this agenda is, there are aspects of it about which no one has yet been able to even make a plausible guess. Kappha sit right in the middle of one of the murkier areas of the ghoulish unknown.

Kappha are amphibious, with webbed hands and feet, gills and coloration that allows them to go fairly well hidden in the water. Kappha are perfectly capable of operating on land, but lose a lot of their unique abilities. Kappha possess a power that is a close relative of some of the things that water witchcraft can do, but it is more limited and weirder. A kappha's presence in a body of water alters the properties of the water (a certain volume around the kappha, about the size of a small pond, in most cases), making it into a rather unsecured and unpredictable scrying pool.

Harm - 3/Drowning, Shaken. When they need to defend themselves or neutralize someone who has seen something they shouldn't have, Kappha use their environment to their advantage, seeking to drag air breathing opponents into the water and drown them. Their venom is not as potent as that of other ghouls, nor is it quite the paralytic. Those who have survived kappha bites describe the venom as burning and really painful Kappha aren't primarily fighters, though. They generally only attack to defend themselves or when someone has seen the wrong thing in their pool.

Peer into the Abyss
When you look into the water that is affected by a kappha, face Ignorance.
On a Hit, ask a question. You get an answer to that question which is disjointed or cryptic and also very disturbing. Suffer Peril (Shaken).
On a Hard Hit, you get a clear and contextualized answer, and do not suffer.
On a Miss, you see something you shouldn't have, and while you are fascinated by it, the kappha attacks you. Suffer Harm as stated.


You leave me breathing like the drowning man.
If you take water from a kappha's pool, it loses its scrying capabilities, though some water witches claim that it makes especially good scrying water for their workings. Not good enough to be worth a lot of money to them, or anything, but enough of a thing to sweeten any deals you wish to make with one.

Water witches tend to dislike and distrust kappha more than most, and hold that the visions you get from looking into a kappha pool are fairly transparent manipulation covered up with the appearance of prophecy. A lot of people say that about water witches, too.

Kappha are a little more negotiable than most ghouls; it would seem that their remit gives them a little more latitude for dealing with others than most ghouls get. They are willing to accept bribes, and particularly like cucumbers of any type and smoked or dried meat that was made wrong and has spoiled. With offerings, the penalty for a Miss in viewing the kappha pool is 1 harm from psychic backlash and Peril (Shaken).

The Beast Fears Fire - Ghasts

Ghasts [Hardship 4]
Impulse - to kill the dead (also the occasional living).  Ghasts are, well, they are not very subtle.  Stealthy, yes, but not subtle at all.  Ghouls tend to mix fairly easily among varieties, and prefer to be in groups (goolies can't not be in a group), but ghasts are solitary and other varieties of ghoul do not like them.  Ghasts have a very distinctive appearance compared to ghouls, with round ears, long, shaggy hair (black or white or gray), and huge, round, lambent eyes that dominate their faces, making them look a little like nightmare tarsiers.  That said, their visual appearance is not the first thing that witnesses remember, however.  Ghasts are surrounded at all times by a faintly visible miasma, an odor so terrible that it affects the soul as well as the body, weakening and sickening both. 

Ghasts are, by all accounts, a sort of constabulary force for the ghouls.  While they are able to subsist for a while on carrion, their diets require guhal, and for that, they have to prey upon their fellow ghouls.  Ghasts get dispatched to the world to hunt ghouls who have, somehow, gone off the straight and narrow, as well as to face down spirits that the ghouls need destroyed.  Their spiritual targets can be any kind of spirit, but the evil dead are constant marks, if not on purpose, then of opportunity.  This makes them a sort of auspicious figure to living folk, or it would, if their presence didn't make everyone desperately ill and they weren't occasionally sent to murder mortals that offend the purpose of the ghouls.  Which, unfortunately, they do.

Harm - 3 and Peril (Sick).  Ghasts have an ability similar to that of breakers, allowing them to physically (and violently) interact with spirits regardless of their current level of manifestation.  They are strong, clever and resilient enough to kill ghouls for a living, and though they lack the paralytic venom common to their bretheren, they more than make up for it with their godsawful stench.

He who Smelt It
When a ghast shows up in the scene, anywhere, for any reason, face Hardship.
On a Hit, choose the Harm or the Peril to suffer.
On a Hard Hit, well, it's not pleasant, but you aren't harmed.
On a Miss, take harm as stated.

Prince of the Land of Stench!
Ghouls are nothing if not extremely loyal to their purpose, so whatever transgressions they can make that warrant a ghastly visit, people haven't quite figured that out.  That said, it is safe to assume that on the rare occasions that a ghoul has been induced to give information to non-ghouls, they are putting in a transfer for a new career as ghast intestinal-occupant.

Ghast's bodies contain sizable deposits of Miasmite, but the strength and elusiveness of ghasts as well as the inherent danger of just being in the same locality as them makes folks willing to go looking for the creatures to harvest for magic crystal number in the zeroes.  Some witches have been able to mix guhal, crushed miasmite and some other assorted herbs and spices in order to create ghastly stench.  Opened in the vicinty of a, well, anything, it has the same effect as a ghast's presence.  If used to coat a weapon, that weapon gains the ability (for the scene) to hit unmanifested spirits, though using it is kind of a trick.  The stuff is highly volatile, so any dose sublimates totally once exposed to air.  The black wind does not blow the smell away, but earth witches have been able to crystalize the stench of a ghast into miasmite.

Hero scarves do help to protect against the effects of the stench.