Realms of Crawling Chaos

I've been reading the newly released Realms of Crawling Chaos all morning.

Dan did a tremendous job on this book. I love that he paid little attention to the existing RPG material, and instead went back to exhaustively mine the original Lovecraft stories. There's no artificial sanity mechanic, but the weird details in the book give referees plenty of ammunition to genuinely creep-out players. Check this:

This ritual requires previously prepared essential saltes. The magic-user calls on the attention of Yog-Sothoth, and harnesses properties of time and space to bring back the dead from their essential saltes. The success of the revivification is completely dependent on the state of the body from which the saltes were prepared. If saltes are prepared from less than 51% of a body, the ritual will bring up an unidentifiable mass of flesh that only lives for moments.

Or this:

[...] it should be noted that anytime an Outer One tank is found, the occupant will have no brain. The body is surgically altered to allow it to survive without the brain, but the brain may be in an altogether different galaxy or dimension.

There are some books that I admire but never use in play. Realms of Crawling Chaos isn't one of them. It's packed full of goodness that's easy to drop into any campaign. And the PDF is under $5. Go buy it!

NPC: The Wyrd

Use the Wyrd either as an NPC character class (or conceivably even a PC class) or as a unique individual. The Wyrd will likely already suffer from several Repercussions (see below) at the time you introduce her into your game.

Although widely known for her divinations and soothsaying, the Wyrd is able to cast any magic-user spell.

At minimum, it takes the Wyrd 1 turn per spell level to cast a spell. Unlike a magic-user, she does not memorize daily spells. For each spell the Wyrd casts, roll 1d6. A result equal to or lower than the spell level causes a roll on the Repercussions table.

The Wyrd may reduce the repercussion risk to 1 in 6 by spending 1 day per spell level on the casting instead of 1 turn per level. Spending additional days on the casting does not reduce the risk of repercussions below 1 in 6.

If the Wyrd gives a favor (and it must be a favor which someone else owes her) to the eldritch forces in exchange for completing the spell, any repercussion that would have affected the Wyrd instead affects the one who owes her a favor. This is not widely known.

Those who can't or won't pay in gold (or some other thing the Wyrd particularly desires), the Wyrd asks to pay with a favor. She keeps such favors for future use. The Wyrd never works for free.

d100 Repercussions Table

1. Afflicted with a stooped spine
2. Frequently suffer seizures
3. Afflicted with bowed legs
4. Fingers become webbed
5. Age backwards
6. Go deaf in one ear
7. Go deaf in both ears
8. Skin turns an unnatural color
9. Over the course of a week, one finger blackens, then falls off
10. Skin glows very faintly in the dark
11. Grow a pelt of shaggy fur over entire body
12. Loss of color vision
13. Grow an extra eye
14. Hair turns white, instantly and permanently 
15. One limb twitches involuntarily, even when sleeping
16. Boils
17. Crops wither in the fields
18. Ears become elongated and pointy
19. Pupils change shape
20. Grow a wart
21. Grow a hairy wart
22. All hair falls out (except on hairy warts)
23. Relive the events of one (random) hour every day
24. Always smells faintly of brimstone
25. Hear (imaginary) constant, indistinct murmurings that others can't hear
26. Grow a tail
27. Uncontrollable drooling
28. Patches of reptilian scales develop
29. Trees bend slightly toward her. Those trees in the vicinity of her home grow in a way that points toward it.
30. Grow extra toes
31. Grow extra fingers
32. Slowed (50%) in actions and speech
33. Livestock sickens
34. Vomit frogs 1d6 times per day
35. Tongue splits down the middle
36. Haunted by a mildly destructive poltergeist
37. Artificial lights within 10' will not stay lit, and any she passes are extinguished
38. Spontaneous pregnancy
39. Spontaneous pregnancy with a small mammal or reptile
40. Grow small goat horns
41. Pottery does not harden when fired within ten miles of her
42. Visual perception lags behind reality by 10 minutes
43. Compulsion to look under every liftable rock she passes
44. Grow fangs
45. Bottomless sinkholes open in any spot she sleeps on for more than 3 nights
46. Permanently levitated 1/4" off ground, making walking difficult
47. Smoke emanates from mouth when speaking
48. Nearby malleable things (oatmeal, tea leaves, mud) form into the shape of agonized faces
49. Stigmata
50. Grow an additional ear
51. Skin become transparent
52. Strange lights in the sky at night
53. Any words spoken do not reach listeners' ears for 1d6 turns
54. Animals no longer abide her presence
55. Human beings are invisible to her
56. Sleep for 101 days
57. Feet fall off, cloven hooves grow
58. 50-70 mph winds alway blow in vicinity
59. Age at double rate
60. Any words she writes change, and assume an ominous character
61. The ground makes noises like cracking ice wherever she walks
62. Flapping things flap on the roof at night
63. No reflection
64. Only sleep every seventh night
65. Grow large antlers
66. Speech comes out in reverse word order
67. Hair becomes too strong to be cut by steel tools
68. A new, unexplained bruise every morning
69. Sweats blood
70. Must concentrate to keep consciousness attached to body or be locked-out for 1d6 turns
71. Risk of future Repercussions becomes 2 in 6 at minimum
72. Weeping sores
73. Weeping sore that whisper secrets
74. Physically vanishes after falling asleep; reappears in the morning frostbitten
75. Heart turns to stone and stops beating, yet she lives
76. Roll 1d6 every morning. A result of 1 means that a random personal possession vanished during the night.
77. No one believes (until it's too late)
78. Skin nodules swell for days, then burst to release spiders
79. Her bones creak loudly whenever she moves
80. Animals speak to her, but only abusively
81. Narcolepsy
82. Burned for 1d3 damage whenever touched by another person
83. Irises turn yellow like a wolf's
84. The sky is always overcast within 25 miles
85. Weekly rain of fish
86. Teeth enlarge 2-3 times, deforming jaw and palette
87. Leave footprints that smoulder
88. Entire body shrinks or grows up 2% and 500% of original size every day
89. Wood spurts blood when she chops it
90. Any clothing donned begins to rot and smell of the grave after an hour
91. Age 20 years instantly
92. Sometimes, the third law of motion (equal and opposite reaction) doesn't work for her
93. Learns she will die in exactly one year
94. On a roll of 1 in 6, any dead thing she passes near rises as undead
95. Hourly fits of involuntarily speaking dead languages
96. Plague
97. Blogger posts lose all paragraphing 
98. Blindness
99. Instant death
100. Complete physical paralysis

All above are permanent effects, unless otherwise noted.

The weird is Fate

This is a slightly cleaned-up version of a comment I posted in response to Zak's philosophizing about the weird. I don't believe that my comment represents the only or best way to think about the weird, but it could usefully inform ideas about the weird in game terms.

The weird is Fate. Knowledge of the future is occult—in the sense of the hidden.

Zak is correct that it's not exactly unnatural, but it's frighteningly primal, in the way that the Greeks drew a distinction between the gods (who were powerful, but basically relatable in terms of human motivations) and older powers like the Furies or the Fate (who even the gods feared and found inscrutable).

So, Cthulhu is weird in the sense that he is fated to rise from his eons of slumber in the misty and indeterminate future, beyond the ken of man. Like the Greek Fates, he is older than mankind, and alien. 

Weird themes are bound to emerge, as Zak observes, at times when the popular imagination fixates on the uncertainties of the future. The interwar years would qualify.

In game terms, an encounter with the weird would involve a perhaps hubristic attempt by man to engage with the earliest, amoral, alien powers of the universe. The referee should give characters reasons to feel atavistic dread at the prospect of any such effort.

Weird motifs

On Saturday, I posted about the deep weird—that dungeons should get progressively weirder and more unique the deeper the characters delve. I've been thinking about how I can implement that as a practical matter, especially in so far as giving the whole dungeon a unique flavor while giving each level a distinct but related flavor.

Leitmotifs seem like a natural device to accomplish that. In terms of dungeon design, the use of a recurring image, sound, smell, event, or map element would serve to immediately characterize the level and orient the player.

 For example, if the big bad at the bottom of a dungeon was a group of mind flayers, all levels might have elements suggestive of tentacles. On this first level, there might be widespread tentacle-like vines, and kobolds who wield wavy-bladed kris. That level is ruled by an ogre who plays the bagpipes (which look a bit like an octopus). Throughout the level, the characters hear the playing of the bagpipes, long before they find the ogre. Bagpipes suggest a music motif, so the kobolds also sing rude songs. Stick a musical puzzle in there somewhere, and drop in a musical instrument as a minor magic item. As a bit of weirdness, the bagpipes can sometimes still be heard even after the PC's kill the ogre, and upon close examination the vines can be seen to twitch in rhythm to the music; the party may only notice this after they return from a deeper level. By dungeon level three or four, the carvings framing most of the doors (which were too worn-away to be recognized on higher levels) are a pair of tentacles that intertwine above the top of the door. If the players smell the stone tentacles, the stone smells faintly but distinctly fishy. Level five or six could have a sea theme (with the sound of water audible in certain places on the level above). The entire level smells of salt and seaweed. Most of the passages are natural twisty caves that lead to an underground sea overgrown with brain coral. A giant octopus lives there. Perhaps a room on this level is only accessible if the party approaches it using a peculiarly circuitous route they found mapped on a wall two levels above.

So, the overall motif of the dungeon is twists and tentacles. The motif of the first level is music. Both motifs should trigger associations that orient the players in your dungeon. These are off-the-cuff examples, but hopefully you get the idea.

The deep weird

I just had this (perhaps not completely novel) idea: the deeper the dungeon level, the less it conforms to the natural world known by the characters.

The first three dungeons levels might be quite naturalistic—vermin and low HD humanoids living sensibly (if violently) within the circle of life and whatnot. In one or two places, weirdness might peek through from the depths in the form of, for example, a magic well. Four to six levels down, weird elements become more common, and the relationships and behaviors of the inhabitants become less understandable. The dungeon, below level six, breaks down in terms of cause and effect. Fairy tale logic dominates the lives of inhabitants, and the structure itself sprawls in non-euclidean ways.

This could also differentiate one dungeon from another. Most dungeons, in the first few levels, would more or less resemble each other. The true and unique nature of a particular dungeon's weirdness would only be revealed within its depths.