Statting a God: Death

This post follows up my earlier post on Aziza, Queen of Dawn, wherein I tried to turn an encounter with a goddess into a different kind of mini-game rather than a combat encounter. Using this as a template for each of the "ruling spirits" of the the other realms of Pariah, I set to work on Death...

Nergal: a Sumerian death god

Note: I almost immediately reneged on my original brief and ended providing options for turning this into a combat encounter... if only because the death of death is a fun and familiar trope.

Genius Loci — Linking Encounters, Hazards and Reaction Rolls

This post is a sketch or a collection of notes... or maybe a starting-off point. It is an attempt at addressing a self-imposed problem: that of making an environment that is also a character, not just a spirit of the place, but a spirit-as-the-place.

The Genius Loci

The words are latin: "genius" = spirit (hence genie, which was also used to translate the Arabic word jinn) and "Loci" = [of the] place (locus).

I never came across it until I was studying landscape architecture, when we were introduced to the English landscape garden, the picturesque and cultural appropriation ("chinoiserie" and "orientalism") in our singular design theory module in the first year. This introduction came via Pope, who was a garden designer as well as a poet:

Consult the genius of the place in all;
That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;
Or helps th’ ambitious hill the heav’ns to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,
Now breaks, or now directs, th’ intending lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.

...and through an unnecessarily complex process of backwards and forwards engineering, learned that the term originally meant a Roman guardian spirt but has come to mean the ambience/character/"personality" of a space in contemporary architectural discourse.

I preferred the original definition, but also didn't really see much of a distinction.

Before we brush this aside, I just want to add a nice design quote form a former teacher of mine:

"The genius loci must be consulted... but it does not have to be obeyed..."

- Tom Turner

Ancient One — derivative Isopod Monster

It used to be that I'd look back on a forgotten /abandoned piece of writing and be pleasantly surprised by its quality... or maybe (should it have been below par) there'd have been some nugget or turn of phrase which caught my attention. The older I get (and, dear readers, I'm barely into my forties) the less this occurs and the more I'm struck be the weird spelling mistakes ("no" and "know"?), missed typos, odd grammar and sentences trailing off into the void. Not sure if I have a degenerative brain disease nor if this is the platform upon which to talk about such things... but maybe I should speak to someone.

All that neurotic hypochondria aside, nothing really prepared me for picking up the Bestiary the other week in an attempt to turn it into something at least partially table-worthy and realising the first entry was a complete rip-off of the isopods in lair of the lamb. This was disconcerting: I'd read the adventure at some point in the summer of last year, then within a few months I'd added a very similar (albeit somehow more aboleth like version) to my bestiary without really acknowledging or realising that I had stolen the core idea  (metal eating woodlice) from another source. 

It's not so much the plagiarism (I've ripped off loads of stuff, but I always try to cite my sources)  but the worrying fact I hadn't realised I'd done it. It's such a specific thing. What made it worse was the fact that I read the adventure through AGAIN around December  and STILL didn't twig the connection (I had somehow forgotten about my rip-off monster). The 3 sessions I ran never made it to the Isopods but I had read ahead and was eagerly awaiting the party running into them.

There's something weird going on and I don't like it: being a pitiful human, I believe that my actions are somehow powerful enough to mould this universe back to a state that I am more comfortable with, and I offer up this post as an act of sympathetic magic: take this derivative shit away from me, with apologies to Arnold K.

Common pill woodlouse via wikimedia

How to Stat a Goddess

It's been a while. I'll leave it at that, and also pledge to post with greater regularity.

Image copyright Games Workshop, in case their lawyers track this blog down through reverse image search and threaten to have me kneecaped. 

In stolen moments (between work, childcare and attempts at eradicating my lockdown pounds) I've been diligently chipping away at the coalface of the PARIAH bestiary. It's still very much a w-i-p, but there's  a link to the free PDF at the end. Expect updates each week for the next month or so. Don't expect Fire on the Velvet Horizon, or the excellent monster-manualling of D4 Caltrops or Coins & Scrolls; do expect , however, sufficient tools to populate a proto-neolithic psychedelic animist sandbox.

Anyway, I digress: the purpose of this preamble is to set the scene. Like probably everyone before me I soon found that writing stat  locks gets old very quickly (even if you're just ripping off the Rules Cyclopedia...), and that in some instances I was skipping the block entirely or throwing in placeholders. After all, how does one stat a goddess?

SOME SIMIANS

CW: Mind control, cannibalism

Before you continue, please read Arnold Kemp's glog class the baboonist because you should.

It has been mentioned that there's no manifestation of the archetypal spirits of apes, since like humans they are intelligent creatures with their own ambitions.

This does not mean that every ape (nor their monkey cousins) encountered is mundane encounter.

Far from it.

What follows is a list of five simians that might be encountered in the primeval world of PARIAH.

Monkey—a former familiar

Sorcerers, wisewomen and witches sometimes like to bind a spell-spirit to an animal to create a familiar: a loyal but sometimes frustratingly stupid servant. Monkeys are often favoured for their prehensile hands, and their binocular vision (when peering through your familiar's eyes, it's nice if those eyes are familiar).

When the sorcerer dies, the spirit returns to their realm of origin. However, there exists fates worse than death, and while these can be a living hell for those that befall them they likewise leave their familiar spirits stranded in the Here & Now.

GHOULS

This post is the bastard lovechild of the following blogposts:

http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2013/10/everything-you-know-about-ghouls-is.html

http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2015/02/half-ghouls.html

http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-ghast.html

http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2019/10/scraps-of-undeath.html

...but especially this post from Cavegirl:

http://cavegirlgames.blogspot.com/2018/07/wendigo-sickness.html

Liberally borrowing from the above material to fashion a disease, a monster, and a weird mode of lateral character progression (but not necessarily in that order).  

SPOILER: they're ALL ghouls.

MORE ANIMAL SPIRITS (continued)

Part 2 continued: Spirits in a Semi-Material World

A series of posts about primeval spirits

I'm still looking to strike the right tone with all this animal spirits stuff, and I don't think I've cracked it yet, so brace yourself for some very rough around the edges stuff. As ever, your feedback is most welcome.

This is a follow up to my recent post about animal spirits. I thought I'd focus on a few individual animal spirits that PCs might encounter, corresponding with the kind of animals they will encounter in the fertile plains of the river valley.

There are just two entries, the Hyena Queen and Cat, with more to come. I've included stats and "dynamic" abilities to make them suitable boss monster encounters, if that's the kind of campaign you are running, but they might make better allies than foes for most parties.

HYENA QUEEN

This is a Magic the Gathering card designed by Winona Nelson

Of course, the spirit of the hyenas is female, though she is often worshipped as an androgyne  (owing to humans' poor understanding of biology, they often mistake the female hyenas terrifying clitoris for a penis). The hyena queen is aware of humans' clumsy categorisation and is indifferent: what she wants is for her pack to feed.

SPIRITS IN A SEMI-MATERIAL WORLD

Part 1: Spirits in a Semi-Material World
A series of posts about primeval spirits

Real world animism: Dogon, an indigenous people of Mali,

ANIMA UBIQUITA

Everything has a spirit, everything is alive: and not merely in the way that you are used to thinking of things being alive. The stars move and respire, grow and reproduce: do they have life? Probably.

GLAUCONS - (Creatures of a Darker Age No.1)

From the cold waters of the Old Sea to the murky depths of the Lake Ishmakh, legends abound of  aberrant creatures combining both dwelling beneath the waves and surfacing only to spawn and to feed. Across the known world, these legends take on my forms and terrifying shapes, yet none more frightening than the Glaucons... it is a terror born from a curious twist of fate: though these creatures despise humanity, their dependence upon us is total.

Illustration by Mani Vertigo

The Spectral City

This is not a mirage, though it is seen in the desert when one is desperate and weak.

Inspired by The Pilgrims in Jack Vance's Eyes of the Overworld.
Contains paraphrased passages and quotes from that work, not cited. Fair use etc.

First it comes for those on watch, whose eyes become uncontrollably heavy. They will close them - only for  a second - but that is long enough. When they open them again, they see that the desert is quite different from how they remember it.

THE PYRAMID, THE PRIESTESS, AND THE PIT-FIEND

The Pyramid

Nearly eighty feet high and at least as broad at the base, it dominates the small city of single-storey buildings. Crude granite blocks make up its angled walls, tapering to the apex in three distinct tiers. The temple at the top is open to the elements, and consists of four braziers around a square hole: a vertical shaft leading into the bowels of the pyramid.

The High Priestess

Nira is young. She assumed the post following the ritual suicide of her predecessor, Mirdok, who threw himself into the pit. Since this happened her dreams have all been nightmares, and always of the same thing: a hunger that cannot be sated, a gaping maw threatening to swallow the entire world, a crushing despair that has bled into her waking life.

Nira leads the acolytes and through them controls the city. She alone now realises the horrible truth: her entire culture exists in order that the Pit-Fiend be fed, else it might swallow the sun and stars temselves.