Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 29

Beast Fears Fire - Whither Next?

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The Beast Fears Fire - Blood Wolves

Blood Wolves [Want 3]

Impulse – Infect as many as possible. Blood wolves stand slightly taller than great wolves and live in the Crimson Forest, which, if you live in Crickton is just beyond the border in Savel or Murren, depending on which nation is closer. They have blood red fur and eyes of fire. They kill at will.

Blood wolves are people infected with a disease that lives in their blood. They are fine most of the time, but startle them or make them angry and their hair will go red and twine together into snake heads, their hands will turn into talons of bronze and their mouths will stretch open to reveal the heads of red wolves, struggling to climb out of the throat of the sufferer. They kill at will.

Blood wolves are a story set to plaster over accounts by ignorant folks of mass hysteria; ergot, amanita; bad, bad winters, malarial autumns, bad water, brutal summers. Those things, they kill at will.

Blood wolves are a meme in a world where memetics isn't a topic of study. Maybe. Or mayber they're big wolves from the crimson forest.

Harm – Front. The (debatable) fact that blood wolves (probably) don't exist (or maybe they do) is irrelevant to what happens in a place where (people think) they're about. The signal of their coming can vary a lot, both by place and time of the outbreak. A place that has weathered previous outbreaks of the blood wolves can manifest entirely different symptoms the next time this happens, and whether the previous epidemic was forestalled or ran its course makes no difference to the perception. The blood wolves show up when people think they do, and from there, you can advance the front with any Hard Move (it's better to advance it based on player interaction with the front itself). This is how the front advances.
1. First signs appear. People begin to speak of blood wolves.
2. Someone gets killed, mysteriously, an accident, suicide, opportunistic murder or monster attack. Blame falls on the blood wolves.
3. Signs increase. People begin to flee if not prevented from doing so. Means of avoiding or appeasing the blood wolves become topics of discussion.
4. Consensus forms around one of the competing methods of protection. A leader steps up to be the spokesperson for that method.
5. Hate and murder. The faction with the supposed knowledge of how to ward off the blood wolves does something horrible. In the aftermath, the survivors bury their dead and try to forget.

Debunking
When you have some evidence (real or fabricated) that there are no such things as blood wolves, face Want.
On a Hit, you get the people's attention, and have a chance of putting them at ease if you perform some sort dramatic action to put things right.
On a Hard Hit, your evidence is enough to forestall the course of the front. Go you.
On a Miss, advance the front twice. Good job breaking it, hero.

The poison is blood.

Blood wolves are not necessarily the best name for this phenomenon. You might actually want to name it something else entirely, because you can bet your players have totally read this. That's not to say they won't buy into it and play it out at full speed, but there's always a little more reward in the surprise.

This front is, essentially a mystery, and it works best if there are some clues, both genuine and spurious (make sure that you give out genuine clues on hits and spurious clues on misses, and don't get upset when the players take the genuine clues more seriously). Red herrings, up to and including actual monsters who are doing actual bad things are another good element to have going on with this front.

Blood wolves are notoriously poorly recorded, as the phenomenon tends to run its course, with blood and bodies and shame all acting as incentive to keep silence. That said, oblique references to the blood wolves shouldn't be hard to find. Likewise, bestiary entries showing red furred great wolves and other fanciful things shouldn't be hard to find either.

The Beast Fears Fire - Great Wolves

Great Wolves

Impulse – Hunt, feed and remain unseen, unless... Great wolves are exactly what the label says. They are wolves, standing about as tall at the shoulder as a fairly tall person, with comparable intellectual capacity and the ability to converse in a rough equivalent to human speech in any language they learn. They aren't exactly common anywhere, or, at least, they don't appear to be common anywhere, in part due to their desire not to provoke the kind of reactions they usually get from humanity (hunting parties, torches, guns, dogs, the works). Most great wolves are content to stake out tracts of wilderness and be apex predators in those places, but some get interested in other sociable sapients, and since humanity appears to be one of the better of a bad lot, they sometimes seek people out. This has understandably mixed results. The more adventurous great wolves tend to spend a lot of their time, understandably, with the more adventurous of the bipedal folk, since adventurers, for all their personal faults and blights upon society, are a little more open minded than most people.

This is not to say most great wolves are friendly. They like their privacy, and tend to react to the presence of other thinking and speaking creatures as though it's an invasion. Also, while they don't find people especially tasty (we're wicked salty, apparently), they have no compunction about eating a fellow sapient, when it comes right down to it.

Great wolves are fairly idiosyncratic in terms of their capabilities and proclivities. The more savory elements of their society group in small packs (up to 7 individuals) and stake out a pretty large territory. The riff-raff will sometimes spend time with the riff-raff of other species. Their capabilities are up to moderator interpretation on a case-by-case, but generally, you are looking at a Threshold 3 individual and Threshold 4 or 5 gang.

Harm – Injury 2 (4 as a gang). Unlike other large and magical lupines, great wolves are not too good for tried and true wolf pack tactics. The difference is just fewer sets of bigger teeth, and maybe more interesting conversation during dinner. Some wolves take to witchcraft (often wood witchcraft, both for the obvious habitat-related reasons and the fact that wood witchcraft has the most utility to offer a creature without opposable thumbs).

Wolf like me. You can play a great wolf if you want. In a mixed group, you would clearly be the riff-raff of great wolf society, but, at the same time, you get to be a gigantor talking wolf, and that's got to be worth something.

Playing a great wolf does not cost you anything in particular, and with a couple exceptions, it doesn't change your mechanical capabilities. The exceptions are as follows.

First, you do not get the “Get Something You Need” move. Instead, you face Want for two different moves.

Walking Man's Road
When you want to do something that would require human hands (and not a lot of fine motor skills) or social interaction with strange people that does not hinge on them being terrified of the fuckoff big wolf you are, face want.
On a Hit, you can accomplish the thing, it just (choose 1) takes a long ass time, is an awful, embarrassing hack-job, or comes with unforeseen consequences (Moderator Soft Move).
On a Hard Hit, you do as well as a human being would, under the circumstances. Note that Make or Take makes no difference to a Hard Hit.
On a Miss, someone takes notice of what you are doing, comes to the absolute worst conclusion about it, and acts accordingly.

What's for Supper?
When you are hunting for supper in places that are not forests or are forests entirely unlike your forest, face Want.
On a Hit, you do eventually find something suitable, which is either enough or doesn't take a long time (but leaves you Hungry as a Peril).
On a Hard Hit, you manage to find something that is enough in a fairly short time.
On a Miss, the Moderator gets a Soft Move.

Great Wolves don't use Gear, exactly, but they come equipped with most of the stuff they will ever need. Instead of Clothes on my Back, Coin in my Pocket and Food in my Pouch, they get the following, at D8.
Big Teeth.
Quiet Paws.
Thick coat.
Wolf Senses.

Since Crickton runs on Murrenic law, it is technically murder to kill a great wolf, though enforcement is sometimes spotty on that account, and judges are usually eager to acquit on extenuating circumstances. Great wolf pelts aren't any finer than normal wolf pelts, so they aren't sought for fur. They'd make an impressive hunting trophy, but there go your extenuating circumstances.

There are rumors that the great wolves of the Surlycrow plateau are full citizens of the Rukh's republic, but since there is very little trade and no formal diplomatic relations, that could just be a rumor. In the west, the people there hunt the great wolves, calling them werewolves or dire wolves and pinning all sorts of unspeakable evil on them. But the westerners are superstitious, irrational jackasses, so fuck 'em.

Submissions Don't Matter

I wasn't doing this for a while on advice, then I wasn't doing this a while because I wasn't doing anything, but today, for the first time in a couple months, I shined something up nice and sent it forth. 

Also, getting up from being seated on the floor a dozen times in a row is better exercise than it might otherwise appear.

Bestiary entry late.

The Beast Fears Fire - Barghests

Barghests [Malevolence 4]

Impulse – Bring forth evil. We don't like to use the word evil too often around here; even in a world where it has a tangible presence, it gets used a little too often and too freely. Barghests are evil; cartoonishly, haplessly evil. Spirits who are fully manifested in a maleable form that goes between large, nasty looking wolf to werewolf style hybrid, covered in distressed fine fabrics and attenuated jewelry, waves of psychic menace rolling off them like a good stink.

Barghests like to set up shop in abandoned places (country manor houses are their favorites), take on a less flamboyant form and start making trouble. Barghests like authority (they also like food, liquor, nice surroundings, money... You get the idea), so they tend to gather local adventurer-bait to them and set up gangs of bandits or monsters or what have you. Barghests are usually pretty good at subduing other creatures with their magic and browbeating them into doing what they want.

Barghests can alter their appearance to more or less anything they want and usually adopt some sort of disguised form (usually not a specific person, they aren't very good mimics and tend to make up their own identities), and only assume their true appearance when they are being pressed, or want to be dramatic.

Harm – Injury 3, Peril (Despair). Barghests are usually above just tearing their enemies with fang and claw (except when they're not), and use their massive spiritual powers to inflict psychic injuries. Whichever way they go, they've got power to make it very unpleasant for their victims and enemies. Barghests tend to like to maintain whatever disguise they were wearing in a fight until things have swung either for or against them. Barghests unleash a nasty psychic attack whenever they drop their disguise. (A side note, this is common for a lot of disguised evil critters, so expect to see this again)

Behold My True Form – And Despair!
When a powerful being drops its disguise or assumes its monstrous form, face Malevolence.
On a Hit, you do not suffer harm, but do suffer peril (in this case, Despair).
On a Hard Hit, you suffer neither; your enemy done goofed – its revelation has given you new resolve to kick its ass, gain a free hit for all moves you make against this enemy for the rest of the scene.
On a Miss, you suffer the peril and the moderator gets to make a Hard Move (usually inflicting Harm as stated).

I don't like feeling nice, I like feeling eevil.

As fully manifested spirits, barghests are vulnerable to all the various forms of physical injury you would want to inflict on them (and you will), but don't suffer from trauma the way creatures that need tissues and organs to function do. Also, they are difficult to kill permanently – beating them down or blasting them with magic will cause them to unmanifest, but they will often return, though it may be decades later, to avenge themselves on your descendants. Rituals to truly destroy a barghest are kind of hard to come by, requiring a lot of hunting for clues, some specialized ingredients, and a reasonable amount of luck. And then you have to catch the barghest.

Barghests are lupine in appearance, but their origins may be human. At the very least, they tend to take on identities of folks from history who were miserable people in life. Of course, whether or not they are telling the truth about their identities or just trolling the people to whom they reveal it is up for debate. If, in our world, you encountered an 8 foot tall, semi-bipedal skeksi-werewolf who claimed to be Hitler, whether or not he really is becomes secondary to the 8 foot tall skeksi-werewolf part.

Barghests like to co-opt goblins for their capers, to the point where there's some confusion as to whether they aren't goblins or somehow associated with goblins. People who make a study of this are pretty sure there is no connection beyond the fact that goblins are convenient minions for a megalomaniac with magic powers, but these are people who study barghests and they are crazy fuckers, one and all.

When a barghest is forced to unmanifest, whether destroyed permanently or not, they leave behind sinistrite, which is a magical material with all sorts of fun uses. People who are into that sort of thing pay well for it.

The Beast Fears Fire - Revenant Wolves

Revenant Wolves [Ignorance 4]

Impulse – Appear, do something horrible and then vanish. Revenant wolves aren't wolves at all, but fantasy taxonomy is always going to be sort of tenuous, so let's roll with it. You remember I mentioned the Murren resistance and its warrior cults who venerated wolves, right? Well, these are they. Or they were. Once, they were feared guerrillas who appeared, caused terror and bloodshed in their white, wolfish masks and then vanished. They still do that, but now they are sort of trapped in some otherworld where time doesn't flow right. Dealing with them is a little trickier, since they are usually slightly out of phase with this world.

Harm – Hard Move. Revenant wolves don't always interact directly with the world, sometimes they can't, but they are usually able to use terror tactics to maneuver their targets into dangerous situations. Sometimes, though, they can come through fully, set fires, hack people up with machetes and more or less behave like the masked slashers they have become.

Revenant wolves are particularly tricky to fight because they exist most of the time out of phase with the world and have to tune into it in order to do bad things to people. This makes them very hard to find until they've put whatever nasty plan they had in motion.

When you look for clues in a place where a revenant wolf operation is taking place, face Ignorance as normal, but...
On a Hit, you are aware of their presence and you and anyone who you make aware of them can face Malevolence to fight them.
On a Hard Hit, you catch them unawares and when they tune in, you and those you make aware can use whatever you want to face them, gaining a free Hit for any move you make against them.
On a Miss, you get to see them as they slip away, having put their awful plan into action. Moderator gets a hard move, and you cannot touch the revenant wolves unless they come back and keep trying to mess with you. Assuming you survived, they probably will.

Who Let the Dogs Out?

Revenant wolves are generally thought to have lost their humanity, and their actions when they tune in tend to bear that out. They do not appear to recognize their own descendants, even those with separatist or rebel bents. They appear, they kill and torment, and then they leave. They aren't terribly communicative [and only speak an old Murrenic dialect] when they are about.

Shadow and water witches will pay handsomely for their masks, which they can work into means of scrying or shifting in time.

The Beast Fears Fire - Boreal Wolves

Boreal Wolves [Hardship/Violence 3]

Impulse – Huff, puff, blow your House in. Then eat you. Boreal wolves are large, white wolves that occasionally migrate down into the mountains from the Surleycrow Plateau. Unlike normal wolves, they tend to be solitary, and, even when hunting in packs, they more often than not get in each others' way, so rarely gang up. They make up for this fact by their enhanced strength and aggression and the fact that they can control Black Wind to chill, terrify and batter their prey before they start with the biting.

Harm – Injury 2, Peril [Terrified, Numb, Chilled, Shaking, etc.]. The standard boreal tactic is to knock their prey around with the black wind until the cold and fear slows them down and then wade in with the fangs.

When someone is using the Black Wind to hurt you, face Hardship.
On a Hit, you can choose to take harm as stated or a Peril.
On a Hard Hit, you take neither.
On a Miss, you get both. Sucker.


What all the howling's for.
The general consensus is that some unpleasant wind spirit way back in the day possessed a wolf for unpleasant reasons and ended up sticking around. The descendants of that wolf ended up with the spiritual powers of their secret, third parent, because that's how heredity works in fantasy worlds. Stories persist that somewhere up on the steppes of Murren, the progenitor of the Boreals is still hanging around, grown to truly massive size and wickedness.

Boreals hang out in the mountains when they come to Crickton, the lowlands being to warm for their tastes, even in the occasional snowy winter. They are thankfully uncommon, even in the Surleycrow, and on the Steppes where they are widely believed to have originated.

Wind witches will, not surprisingly, pay well for the remains of a boreal wolf; a lot of their bits make good components for their talismans. Coats and cloaks made from boreal pelts are good gear against the cold and against fear, which makes them fairly sought-after, and gives some hunters of normal wolves with the access to a little time and bleach the notion to try counterfeiting boreal pelts. This meets with mixed success; the average Crick has never seen one, so there is a chance you can pass it off. Wind witches know the real from the fake at a glance and trying to gull the most notoriously cranky of the traditions is probably not a great career move.

Some folks compound medicines to help with anxiety, timidity and erectile dysfunction out of boreal organs. These are not clinically proven, so beware.

Beast Fears Fire - Wolves, Intro and the Wolves of Crickton

Okay, getting something out of the way early.  The story of the wolves of Crickton is stolen for this, the dry run, because I liked the idea and I needed something to jump off from.  You can find the original inspiration here ; I reworked it to be a colonizer's narrative about the people who lived in Crickton before the Cricks.

Wolves
This is one of those stories that has fallen just far enough out of fashion that it's a discovery for a lot of modern Cricks and gains an aura of secret truth it probably doesn't deserve.  It goes like this:

The people who used to live in Crickton, back before the first eastward-settling Savels and wandering sea people met here, well, they were awful.  Boogeymen out of the dim past of Murren, these were the decadent and violent, the jaded and wicked.  We're talking golden cities caked in blood, a child in every blue-glazed kiln and a blue-glazed kiln in the center of every settlement, and even their wicked deities were afraid of them.

Then they, as a culture, as a group, decided that their wickedness could find no new outlets in their cities and settlements, so they walked away.  Put off their bloody-hemmed clothing, put aside their heavy ornaments and turned their back on fire and building, religion and philosophy.  They chose to become wolves, to abandon the land, and run with the pack, leaving the place empty for settlement by the sons and daughters of the swamp and the sea.

Some of their descendants remember, though.  They remember the things of humanity, and it fascinates, terrifies and repulses them.  So they come out of curiosity, but their ancestral memory makes them frightened and their natures make them kill.

And if you're not giving this story the side-eye, you really should be.  There's evidence enough against that just walking around in the settlements and cities of Crickton (not the least of which is the Murrenic contribution to the physiognomy and culture of modern Crickton and Murren settlements that have been where they are since before the Savels showed up).  There are the records of an indigenous resistance to the Cricks that leaned heavily upon warrior cults that venerated wolf spirits.  There's the fact that a story that tells you the previous inhabitants of your land left voluntarily and were evil anyway is awfully convenient for you if you're a colonizer.



Wolves [Disaster/Violence: 3 | Gang]

Impulse – Surround, Infiltrate and Kill.  Crickish wolves hunt in packs, pretty much like any wolf, using numbers and old-fashioned lupine tactics choosing easier prey over chancy propositions.  If there is any real difference between Crickish wolves and wolves of our world it's that Crickish wolves have much greater self confidence and the infamous Eurasian wolf attacks of history are kind of their go-to and baseline.

Harm – Injury 3.  This isn't terribly mysterious.  They surround you, hamstring you, pull you down.  Then things get bad.

Packs of six or more individuals count as a gang, and they always gang up, if they can, it being kind of their thing. 

Gang 'Em Style - When you are pursued by a gang of organized enemies or predators, face Disaster.On a Hit, you avoid them for the time being, but the Moderator can call them back on as a Soft Move.On a Hard Hit, choose 1.      You give your pursuers the slip entirely, and they cannot come back on unless you seek them out .      You can engage them as individuals.      You get a free Hit when you do engage them, though you will have to take them on as a Gang.On a Miss, inflict Harm as stated and the Moderator gets a Hard Move.Individual wolves are [Violence 2, Injury 1] .

Fire is a good way to convince wolves they do not want to tangle with you.  If you decide to face wolves down with fire, it counts as gear, dependent on size (D6 for a torch, D8 for being near a bonfire, anything more and you may have more important things to deal with than wolves).

Of wolf and man.
Travelers from abroad notice there is something about the wolves in Crickton, their aggression, their cunning, their lack of shyness about humans; something is not right with them.  Crick wolves in bountiful summers are what other wolves are in the leanest winter.

Hospices and municipal governments sponsor wolf hunts fairly regularly, to the point where wolf hunting is a legitimate (if not highly regarded) profession.  They pay bounties for raw pelts and then tan and sew them to make blankets, rugs and coats for the needy.  This makes Cricks associate wolf fur with poverty.  As such, they don't trade very well.

The Beast Fears Fire - Intro

There's going to be some monsters here. 

I'm not sure how often or for how long, history is not to kind on my blogging series, but we'll see.  I'll be posting monsters in the style of an RPG bestiary, and yeah, since I run an RPG on Monday night, they will actually be useful in a version of my system, but mostly, I want to try to put things in that are interesting to everyone.

Setting - There's an implied setting here, but I know precisely dick about it.  It's probably pre-industrial, but it might not be medieval.  It could be as recent as early modern.  The place is called Crickton, it's a pluralistic society with two or three main groups contributing to its culture.  Murren is to the north, Savel is to the west and the Surlycrow plateau is to the northwest.  South and east is ocean.  I think.

System - The Rope (as in Get the rope - a common cry from my old gaming group when I foisted playtesting off on them), which, if you care, steals from Fate, Cortex Plus and mostly Apocalypse World.  If you care.  The important part of the system, which will come up are Moves.  This is from Apocalypse World.  Basically, a move is a situation in which you roll the dice.  If you roll kind of well, you get a hit.  If you roll really well, you get a hard hit, which is better than a hit.  If you don't roll well, you get a miss, and whoever is running the game gets to make a move of their own. 

Taxonomy - I'm going to do groups of 6 monsters, usually, per category, this being due to system consideration which I'll be happy to explain if you want to ask.  The grouping of these six monsters (or a certain number of less than six monsters and something that relates to them) is kind of up to me and not subject to anything but my own whim.  For example, the first category is going to be Wolves, and a couple of the things that show up in that category are canis lupus related.  The others, are thematically related, or look like wolves or something like that. 

cucumberseed @ 2012-11-30T17:11:00

Left to Right: Aveline, Sassafras and Meryl.

Also, it seems that Flickr, Photobucket and Livejournal hate the Ubuntu version of Firefox, and now so do I.