Medusa are parasitic Snake Kings.

What if I told you a rumour I heard?

Medusii are not, in fact, snake-haired gorgons, but human limbed snake kings.

Hear me out.
Rat Kings are ditch witch abomination comprised of seething hatred, bitter intelligence and potent magic taking the form of half-score or more rats tethered like the star of chaos around the knot of discord, thus bound and ritualised, a King is born, seven minds become one, in agony and confusion sapience, nay sentience is born and through the center binding magic may flow.
Rat King controls rats, Rat King hates those with hands, Rat King can channel magic.

What, WHAT!, does Rat King have to do with Medusa and her progeny?
A different witch in a different gutter, more tropical perhaps, more humid.
Imagine me seven snakes and one knot, a new binding.

But now, as sentience congeals, hear not the squealing bitter fear of the gutter rat, but the reptile-cold acceptance of a patient hunter.
Watch in horror, the confident control of arrogant predator. Biological survivalism that declared evolution obsolete a millennia past.
Reel back in fear, as seven heads dart in turn, and pause to taste new magic in the air.
Before venom reaches the heart, that medusa-core, a new queen, rips stone-form from the strands of the ether and flexes its new instinct.
Fall back in death, shatter, the first victim, the mother of monsters.

Not a medusa you say? Sure. A medusa wig perhaps, you may joke.
Have you ever seen seven snakes attempt to move in tandem? You haven't and you never will. Perhaps after millennia of smooth undulation, it is time for the snake to feel legs, the queen requires a chariot.

The answer! A human corpse easily acquired in this wild land, nerve toxin stills it, neither dead nor stone.
An eye socket slowly invaded, a skull cap wrenched free, a jerk of psychic linkage and muscular testing, some stumbling steps and now! Now, in mocking defiance of its creator we have a walking talking magic flinging queen of snakes and men- stony gaze and snapping hair. A thrall for a body and a knot for a core, all hail the queen snake, Medusa of the sweating jungle.

This is just a rumour, mind. No man nor snake could look a medusa in the eye and live to tell the tale of what he saw there, behind those lids does one see black glistening scales, or the glazed orbs of a human? Truly though, I cannot envisage a  human of any type that could house a head of snakes and not die to their fickle whims within a chickens fart of cock-crow. 

Clearly it is the snakes that hold sway- if you MUST look a Medusa in the eyes, look with pity for the thrall of the snake queen, and look with awe for the reptilian mind of an alien creature gifted human locomotion, and ask yourself.... will I be granite, or will I be marble?

Farewell stranger, but before you go, can I interest you in this fine mirror,  50% gorgon proof, or your sliver back, that's our guarantee!

Why are none of the undead just smug?

Aside from the not-truly-undead Fallout ghouls, none of the undead seem satisfied with being immortal and free.

Previous posts and some podcasts have talked about peaceable skeleton communities or ecosystems but I feel like if I was a zombie I would kick back, relax, read a few dozen RPG books, play my Steam back-catalog and chuckle at the suckers who have to sleep, eat and face the black abyss of death.

Must be the eternal hunger or something, but aren't the living the ones who are truly trapped, having to eat constantly just to function?
 I know many undead are necromantically bound to serve others, but given 300 years to guard a tomb you could really work on your reasoning skills. Cut a deal, work a trade! poetry, man.
Or like... mine some precious ores? Create fine and intricate artworks. you want to be a gift-shop so good they forget the main attraction.

Horrible happy health potions

If health potions existed in a shitty world they would be the brandy of the rich and the heroin of the poor.

If drunk at full health it makes you warm, contented, swaddled in muffled bliss. This is a place you want to be. As much as possible.
It will heal your rat bites and your barked knuckles, it will salve your soul for an hour or two, and yet your belly remains empty, your muscles waste, your eyes become hollow.
You are free from bodily trauma, but trapped in the rapture of false happiness. Instead, a slow gyre of decay traded for fleeting perfection, initially free but increasingly difficult to obtain. Expensive in many ways, adventurer, there are easier sources of gold than goblinoids and dire beasties.

The lairds, the barony and the courtiers enjoy a healthful punch after supper. Peeled berries, champagne, a spritz of hartflower oil and an aged bottle of '84 health draught. It soothes a gentleman from the corns of his feet to the tips of his ears, brings back the warm memories of summers past. It is a pity the, '84 draught is almost deplete, good clerics are hard to come by and rarely last long, finding fatal aversions to indenture and servitude as a general rule.
Truly a balance must be found between the volumes a man can produce given local ingredients, and the amount that must be expended healing the reticent do-good back to productivity after applying judicious motivation.

Indeed, a man begins to wonder, how much of this fine aperitif is  even consumed on the battlefield, for a fighter must first battle the noble and then the gutter for a simple expedient field dressing.

Perhaps, a man considers, he who controls the draught controls muscle, controls the gutter, controls the noble houses.
It is hard to kill a man who controls the only means of rejuvenation, but it is easy to work for him.

Ok its a hamfisted heroin economy, whatever. Just give me a glass of HP punch and let me on my way. In most games health potions are middling, not too expensive but hard to get, but i assume that is on an adventurer budget which is higher than the average peasant. I do wonder who makes them and how. What if its made of people?

Bad Movie #5 Johnny Mnemonic.

Bad Movie #5  Johnny Mnemonic.

I am a massive William Gibson fan and fuck-you I will watch ANYTHING for a 3 min scene starring an insane, ageing, military dropout cyber-dolphin hacker in a dirty cyber-warehouse. Also Dolph Lundgren (patron saint of shit movies), Ice T and Keanu acting up.

The title card on the fade from black is "internet 2021" which only makes me wonder... where do I see myself in 5 years?
The answer is "The flaming husk of a heavily augmented dead masochist Media-Cult leader in Neo-Jersey, Postcode: Internet.'

Keanu is a cybered up Data Courier, or an emotionless talking USB dongle in a suit if you don't speak cyberpunk.
His head holds almost 160GB (no joke, 160gb of hot throbbing data... imagine that.), This of course is after the illegal and dangerous wetware upgrade.
Keanu is truly deeply terrible at acting, probably because he ran out of internal storage after Bill & Ted or something.
His best hacking gear includes the EyePhone (wtf Steve Jobs) and a Sinologic 16 which.. well, China logic I guess.
Ice T fucking rocks as usual in the role of a primativist ganger with a heart of gold, and by god my next camping trip will certainly involve making arrowheads out of smashed CD's.

If you dare mention the Virtual Reality scene or compare it to Lawnmower man I will throw my director's cut DVD of Lawnmower man at your head and then force you to watch it with me. Let it be known my tolerance for terrible sci-fi is off the chart.
This scene involves Keanu HACKING HIS OWN BRAIN WITH THE HELP OF A CYBER-DOLPHIN THAT RIDES DATASPACE ON A FIELD OF PINK SPARKLES.

There is actually some pretty ok subplot stuff about a mind-upload AI construct CEO being rooted out of its own corporation by the living shareholders due to her pesky morals. She combats this by using skype and social engineering to mess with a grieving Cyber-Yakuza boss. Its almost as if its all based on a brilliant plot by an amazing author.

Less interesting is the robot priest of the Church of Media who likes to dress up like jesus and gut people with his cruciform dagger.

100% Watch this trailer, if only for the Cyber Fingerguns at 00:54

Bad Movie #4 Liquid Sky (1982)

Bad Movie #4 Liquid Sky (1982) 

Something something a tiny alien UFO releases an alien made out of a crumpled sheet of aluminium foil which stalks wild tribes of Proto-Gaga through the fashion clubs of New York in order to drain their sexual energy. 

Heroin. Heroin. Heroin. Orgasms are space heroin. Plot pending. 

The lead actor plays two roles and in a pathetically easy and extremely confusing feat of double casting becomes a nominally female looking androgynous bisexual face-painted cocaine-chique fashionista AND a nominally male looking androgynous bisexual face-painted cocaine-chique fashionista. 

Best use of aluminium foil in a feature film, best use of Lady Gaga clones from the future in a feature film. Contains the best synth classical music you will ever find. Graces my alarm clock regularly. 

A playlist for your trouble, if you read this far.

Bad movie #2

Bad movie #2 
Stingray Sam (2009) https://youtu.be/k4uwrghMdSo 
American Astronaut (2001) https://youtu.be/vzVi_acjD-s 

Double feature! Because I lost one case and now they share a box. 
I managed to see Cory McAbee speak some time ago and he is a rotating ball of charisma. 
I cant plug this dude enough. 
He makes no-budget musical western operas with his small children and his novelty country (?) band. His commitment to stark black and white and dead-pan delivery adds some gravitas to the absurd and undeniably silly universe he inhabits. 
He uses Gilliam style animated interstitials to great effect.

Almost every situation culminates in some kind of dance battle in the country and western style which is an obvious plus. Probably lasers and mad science too.

Low budget sets and silly space props are pretty well done considering. My favourite example is a series of laser shootings where cowering sillouhettes are flashbulb projected from offstage and someone just throws a bucket of wet sand into the scene as the vapourised corpse-dust stand-in. It makes a nice wet thud. Some of the more demented characters are quite memorable.

They were releasing their HD films free in episodic form on YouTube a bit before it was cool which is nice. He has since started the Captin Ahab's Motorcycle Club whose motto is "participation equals membership" if you want some cool patches.
I own a few Billie Nayer Show albums because I want to give them more of my money, they are ok.

Warning! If you aren't laughing by minute two of linked clip we can't be friends anymore. I'll be watching.

Bad Movies #1

Bad movie #1 The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.

Some heterosexual clones of The Village People fight off surprisingly cool aliens and almost nothing happens in the best way possible.
I just discovered this movie has Jeff Goldblum in it and thought this might have added some credibility. Shortly thereafter I discovered that he plays the cartoonish cowboy-surgeon-rockstar in red chaps.
Soooo…. Moving on.

This movie is 99% style and no substance, everything is bizarre and an utterly ridiculous type of cool. Soundtrack, Spaceship-design and Posturing all get a solid A, I couldn't outline the plot to save my life but I would happily describe this movie in an excited and nebulous fashion to anyone who will listen.

This movie was whole-heartedly banking on spawning a media empire. They threw in a bunch of conspicuous references to not-yet-existing comic books and sequels they planned to build out the universe with. It flopped and now there are just 30 unexplained plot hooks and lines of reference hanging off this movie like a cenobite slumber party (eeeeh!).
The evil "World Crime League" exists for instance, led by "Hanoi Shan". This is never mentioned again.

The catchphrase is "No matter where you go, there you are."

Kevin Smith wanted to reboot the series recently and got sued for no particular reason.

IMDB also sucks at explaining this movie

“Adventurer/surgeon/rock musician Buckaroo Banzai and his band of men, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, take on evil alien invaders from the eighth dimension.”

Fun Fact: The credits music to this movie is infuckingcredible and I use it for my morning alarm regularly. If that theme doesn't make you want to strut down a flood-way dressed as a cowboy you are dead inside.

Dali made some seriously lovecraftian Jewelery. Also Red Coral!

Playing mostly online, I like to image dump in d&d so I can quickly communicate an idea or a vibe without neccicarly *preparing* or *doing any work*, and magic items can be hard because they are typically "an amulet", rings, whatever. Not very evocative and hard to find nonstandard images.

Anyway I visited Dali's castle in Figueres Spain a long time ago, and while I truly love his attitude, artworks, architecture and home decor I mostly remember the side gallery featuring his little publicized jewelry creations.

Primarily made of Precious Coral, or Red Coral they are horrifying and opulent and dark and organic.
Also featuring exotic flowers, pomegranates, angels and demons, severed fingers, bees, all of my favourite things.

More on red coral later!

These are certainly things I would show to elaborate on the strangeness of finding an exquisite and delicate golden flower in the midden heap of an ogre cavern.

A blasphemous vivisected relic made of blood red wood (?) atop a lustorous blue sphere in the deacons secret study.

A gemstone pomegranate heart locket tangled in the ribcage of a long dead blonde warrior. The seeds nestle in soft golden honeycomb

Pearls, lustrous and large, but melted like wax, a beautiful horror. Extracted from fleshy dungeon pool clams, they come out like pulled teeth.

Red coral, forking like mangled fingers of a ghastly red hand. Rumoured to be the severed members (on of uncountable frills) of a shoggoth.

A severed finger in jade, real bone juts from the cut end. The nail (golden) needs trimming every few days and is pure gold.

Bad Obscure Movie Reviews of Bad Movies.

In a shocking development I have stumbled upon a new years resolution more achievable than my standing "Try to be less baleful" (trickled through my mind when I scared a passing tweenager by absentmindedly glowering at him) and slightly more productive that making up a barefaced lie about exercise or travel to make people stop asking.

I'm going to post a terrible movie every week until I run out, complete with uninformative and smug 'reviews'.

Smuggling fantastic D movies into parties and projecting them on the roof just isn't disappointing people at the rate I need if I'm ever going to summon a mutant rat Zodiac killer before London sinks beneath the sea.

I have a long and sordid history of making my friends sit through bad bad bad movies and oftentimes they don't necessarily share my exquisite taste in film.
As we become more embroiled in real-life this became harder as we discovered "better" things to do and had to sacrifice large portions of prime movie time to "productive members of society".
Drinking til two and mainlining a mix of subtitled art films and 90s action garbage fell to The Office reruns until 9 and only occasionally throwing popcorn at the screen.

From there I started carrying an old and noisy projector with a MediaPlayer loaded rasperryPi microcomputer to parties and LAN events and pointing it at the roof so people could look up for ambient glimpses of trashy 60s scifi and fellini classics on the way to the toilet.
I boner-killed goss gatecrashers making out in our living room by projecting Ren and Stimpy, and chased them out entirely with Mondo Trasho's opening five mins of chicken decapitations. Harsh but fair, and they were theater folk too so there's some vague enmity there too..

That projector now has so many dead pixels it looks like that windows 98 starfield screensaver, so I carry a USB on my keyring loaded with a revolving cast three or four terrible movies so I don't have to watch Friends again, ever.
I push them on people if they open a laptop in front of me, I cant help it.

Finally, and most depressing of all, I discovered IMDB's watchlist caps out at 394 and wont let me add more (fuck you!)

Basically, I need to get this out of my system for my own gratification, and the safety of the general public.

Welcome to 2017 suckas. I hope you like Rutger Hauer. (Patron Saint of Awesome Shit Movies)

PRIME CUTS: The Black Arion

One of these bastards gave me nightmares when I picked one up thinking it a seedpod a few years back. 

Colours range from Ivory, Ochre to Black according to latitude.
As big and heavy as a severed thumb. Mature at 2.5cm, Grown at 15cm. Fifteen. 
They eat meat (esp. carrion and feces) but also fungi lichen and decaying matter. 
They exhibit significantly more bacteria and enzymes in their stomachs than other slugs.
Nocturnal by choice but out on overcast days.
Their mantle looks like a dead rat dipped in tar. 
They have a fucking mantle. Like John Snow.
They do not run or hide, they rear up and arch their shoulders like a bear and try to intimidate you. This is unique in the Arionidae family.
They produce three types of mucous one of which is described as "vile" to ward off predators.
They have calciferous granules in their mantle that acts as armor or "a resilient protective structure"
.They have been found to crossbreed with northern European slugs and to have gained frost resistance. Roll for fear.
Hermaphroditic, but can self-fertilise.
Lays eggs, 5mm diameter in moss and topsoil. 
Four clutches of eggs a year in up to one hundred and fifty egg batches.
They have a genital Ligula (*see cuts) suggesting copulation is a stimulating act for them.
The "genital pore" is below the "right upper tentacle" on the head. Asymmetry.. 
They find and track mucous trails to find a mate.
Motherfuck they were first found as an invasive species in Australia, 2001. We are done for. 
The Swedish traditionally used Arion Ater as grease to lubricate wooden axles since the 18th C.

The gut microbiome of the Arion, especially the extra enzymes used to digest cellulose are being studied in bio-fuel research.

If I ever saw a pile of these shoggoth-ing towards me... i shudder to think.According to this video footage further below they can possibly move in swarming masses oh god get me off this planet.

PRIME CUTS 

Fungi, God and Me. PRIME CUTS inc.

Oboy have I been reading about Fungi and the Bible over at " Answers in Genesis" and did you know that "The Curse" is the reason disease and evolution exist? 

I just wanted to see if there were mushrooms in the Bible, honest.
There's a bit where an apostle cries about a chicken and everything.

Get ready for more Capitalisations than Usual.

So when Adam got all sassy around the time of The Fall, God simply let creation off the leash to show that newly mortal sap what happens when divinity does not guide the way of nature. Corruption ensues!

Perfectly harmless nutrient recycling mechanisms like fungi and virus' got all corrupt and started eating our faces off and bible-acceptable Evolution started ruining shit for errbody all the time since that point. (6000 years mind you!) .

Apparently God bound nature (Circa Creation thru. Fall Of Man) can murder itself horribly all day because it has no immortal soul, but by heck humans are above that kind of degradation. That is until the Curse of Evolution corrupted their defined roles and all that replication got a bit wonky and oh god thats ebola what the hell dog!

By the way fossil strata merely represents the specific order in which The Deluge murdered things, one smack-down at a time as sediment, not the plodding layers of deep geological time.

I think that's a pretty bad ass mass grave. He METHODICALLY LINED THE ENTIRE SURFACE OF THE EARTH METERS DEEP WITH THE PILED CORPSES OF HIS FAILED CREATION.

Think about that. What took brutal nature billions of years to kill, God KO'ed in 40days/150days/about-a-year (depending on your interpretation, which I guess is the crux of this post). Not only that but he presumably phoned them one era at a time and gave them the old "I will find you and I will kill you" speech because he killed individual ecosystems world-over on different layers, almost like they were epochs or something. Like, if he had reaped them East to West or continent by continent there would be a layer of fossil (or... oil? not a geologist!) everywhere but like alphabet soup fossils from Alpha to Omega all jumbled.

EDIT: for the purposes of this blog I do not seek to be anti-religion or pro-evolution but simply "is it badass RPG fodder" and by the gods yes it is. Not to say I ain't heavily biased, but that's pretty obvious.

Lifeforms that don't evolve are called Baramin (Bara-Created Min-Kind) and everything else is just ruined garbage like sinful humans which I think is cool.

Lichen is Baramin, perfection in perpetuity, probably crocodiles too, but its an article about fungi.

Any natural thing that does not respect the manifest primacy of humans has had the sass to evolve (Read: Corruption) and therefore is not Baramin. Then again, it IS a Curse, so like, we deserve it.

All these creationist articles are like science fiction written by wizards. I keep forgetting that biblical language inspired fantasy and not the other way around. 

PRIME CUTS: Fungi from the Biblical Perspective Design and Purpose in the Original Creation. Ira Loucks, 2009

"In the biblical creation worldview, fungi were created by God during the Creation Week approximately 6,000 years ago as a variety of different reproductively isolated kinds or baramin (bara = created, min = kind; Marsh 1941). The Bible does not describe precisely when these organisms were created, but we can logically deduce when they were likely created based on the reasoning that each created system at the end of each day was complete or “good” (Genesis 1; Gillen 2008)). In this way, we can deduce that the mycorrhizal, endophytic, and land-dwelling, saprophytic fungi were likely created on Day 3 along with plants, while other fungi (that is, animal-associated Candida spp. and the aquatic Chytridiomycetes) were created on Days 5 and 6. Alternatively, all of the fungi may have been created on Day 3 with the other “plants,” given the traditional Hebrew inclusion of fungi and bacteria in the plant kingdom (Gillen 2008; Kennard 2008). Irrespective of their day(s) of creation, discerning the individual baramin of fungi may be possible based on their mode(s) of reproduction and physical characteristics.."


"...It is possible that the loss of mycorrhizal associations by these plants is part of the original Curse (Genesis 3:17–18), and may be part of the reason these weed species devolved from their original created state.."

"..Heat tolerance was conferred on tomatoes upon infection with the virus-containing endophyte, demonstrating the broadness of these higher-order interactions and suggesting that this kind of interaction was likely present during Creation Week. Indeed, these symbioses appear to have been designed to enable re-colonization of the varied soil types found in the post-Flood world..."

"..Presumably, these insects were originally designed to use leaf litter as compost for growing fungi, with recent corruption of this purpose resulting in the destruction of living plant tissue (Mueller and Rabeling 2008). The beetle-fungus and wood wasp mutualisms seem to have been created for a different purpose. These mutualisms take advantage of dead or damaged trees and may have been originally created to exploit nutrient recycling in completing their life cycles. These symbioses have also been corrupted since the Fall, resulting in damage to living trees and causing significant economic loss (Anonymous 2006, 2009)..."

"...These interactions are testaments to design. The relatively small number of pathogenic interactions compared to the total number of fungi allude to the original created order. Experimental evidence showing the effects of gene mutation in numerous systems demonstrate the ease by which these complex interactions can be corrupted. Future research in plant pathology and medical mycology may further illuminate the impact of the Curse on fungal mutualistic processes, and may help us better understand how different the current world is from the original, perfect creation..."

-https://answersingenesis.org/biology/fungi/fungi-from-the-biblical-perspective/

Perdition RPG Review: how to make friends and influence people

I wanted to do a setting writeup as there is very little explanation online and the book pitch does little to convey the awesome scale of the setting and its implications.
I am a Player Character, so not having read the actual rule-book forgive me many confabulations, wrong assumptions, slanderous lies. These are my impressions so far.

So my good friend and RPG Monster over at Renfield's Cat is running Perdition the RPG by HackSlash, a game set in what appears to me to be the fallen earth, a baroque medieval fantasy setting invaded and overrun by literal demons who now happily preside on earth doing demon things and stuff.
Perdition means something like "complete ruin" I believe.

There are remnants of the old world and the wars they lost- towns and artifacts, base humans trying to live on as base humans do. There are bastard races such as the Hobgoblins who served well in the war and reap their rewards as wealthy citizens, there are corpses of the Titans and old gods who were slain, a scarce few Paladins survive in the badlands, free agents hardened by defeat.

Demons operate in a pleasingly feudal way, it seems they are Machiavellian vicious, and fallible as any human Laird. It is simply that they hold demonic power and can tear a giant in two that distinguishes them from the previous landed gentry, curse their blasted corpses.
They fear only the Vile Conclave, enforcers of demon law and etiquette, for the branching pathways cruelty and violence are so old in this culture that they have become ritualised... and what good is a system if it cannot be taxed.

For an adventurer this changes almost nothing.

There are multiple currencies, ceramic shells, souls, gold and silver. Souls have been devalued to the point where they can barely be traded for anything except the being they were taken from, what use is another soul when you own the world it lives in. Still, they have their uses.
Fuck knows what shells are for, I assume they are fossilised and found in shale? Things dead and ancient hold some power here. I rolled so much gold I was generated as encumbered and had to go find a Platinum dealer.

As a party of three to five depending on the day we have a spectrum of comedic players, chaotic nihilists, Shakespearean demons and muscle bros  all of whom seem to be quite happy with the place they find themselves. We also have number crunchers and newbies- Minmaxers find the unusual rules alluring and disconcerting and newbies enjoy the theatrics and don't realise the rules are weird, after a little help at character creation combat and skill checks are simple.
Can't wait for an arraignment at the Vile Conclave though! Daemon Bureaucracy, devilish decorum what could possibly go wrong.

Classes are heavily modified variations aligning to Wizards (about 7 variants.), Paladin, Fighters (about 4 variants), Cleric, Thief, Ranger.

Gods and summons are incredible- just imagine what a DEMON would summon when it wanted something bizarre and evil.

Races are batshit crazy and will break you if you bring prior knowledge. Trolls are cored out servitor golems, Hobgoblins are the new money bourgeois of Perdition, there are gentle forest yeti and giants suck at being giant.

Evil is an interesting concept in this game, many players have assumed it to be an evil campaign because y'know "deamons". I feel however that demons in power are too petty and selfish to be serious about capital e Evil and in a world owned by demons its kind of a "does a fish feel wet" question.
The fact is that shit need doing and that base people are boring and pragmatic. Most powerful entities are obsessed with a single facet of evil in a sort of autistic fashion of course but that simply means they probably forget to pay proper homage to other sins.

I am playing a sort of apathetic destructive nihilism spawned from an fungal hate and the god of mathematical entropy (ok... its a sentient comet made from history, maths and the desire to smash the planet) which probably makes me pretty bad for everything around me.
Most of our party enjoys the freedom that "Evil-land" allows for in terms of general assholery but are unconsciously saving each-other, building fortunes and being team players in a way that undermines any true Evil so far. Which is fine, conscienceless selfish mercenary is a popular and productive role in RPGs everywhere.

The only other thing I want to mention is the Stress stat. As you get more stress points from KO's encounters & fatigue you get strung out and twitchy (initiative and combat bonus.) but also run the risk of snapping under pressure (straight up nervous breakdown in the form of formidable psy damage, probably other things I don't have the rule-book).
This is cool as you space your rest and rations according to your confidence, need for bonuses and gamble against death, not the normal factors of HP. Its nice to see rations do something useful too I hate those bastards.

Great game! God I missed terrible magic.

THIS IS MY CHARACTER'S MELODRAMATIC BACKSTORY.
(Red Troll Inheritor read: regenerating golem + mutant cleric,
Example of my Char Sheet from Roll20.com 5th ed OGL, modified to Perdition by Mr Renfields Cat- that guy sure can Roll20)

Igads, a heavy slow oxen of a man torn from his family for service the house of Naazluth Heralds of the Light during the height of the Devil Wars.
He was forged in the roaring hellfires of that house, soul and memories stripped from him, boiling pink blood forced through in his veins. Hardy, regenerative, sullen, obedient, a soulless flame.
A tool. A chimera, Cockatrice head crudely sewn upon his shoulders, jawbones fused to the jagged  and ossified beak, a brutal joke and a symbol of the House.
Igads is not a man, Igads is a Red Troll. Igads is a red troll for decades uncounted.

And Peter remembered the word of Jesus, which said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And he went out, and wept bitterly.

Matthew 26:75

When Naazluth Heralds of the Light fell to the Crimson Baron Sailor of the Ocean of Blood in a masterful display of treachery and deceit all of the Red Trolls fell to his whims. Spoils of war but also spoiled of image- the Cockatrice motif being of stark aesthetic contrast to the pink-weeping eunuch Trolls of House Sailor of the Ocean of Blood.

The flock were sent to the Black Swamps, told by their terrible new owner to walk west and eat dirt in perpetuity, pecking the muck like so many cowed cockerels.
Igads is not a Red Troll, Igads is a broken Cog, nothing, and not nearly sentient enough to realise it.

Somewhere deep in the swamp the unthinking Cog met the unthinking Scarbinger, fungal god, The End of Sentience, devouring the gargantuan corpse of the last titan.
Obeying his directive Igads fed on the god of change, the god of nihilism.
His empty body the tool, filled with spores and muck and pallid fungi intelligence. Intelligence well pleased by the corruption of meat-sentience it found therein, a thing changed and changed again, stripped of animal desires and commanded only to eat filth and grow. A rare meat-thinker with which it could commune.
Scarbringer gave the Cog life of a sort, this Red Troll is a drifting spore of Sarbringer End of Sentience floating through the turbulent world of Thinking Meat.

Igads scarred and burned husk of a meat brain, sparked to brief life at this rebirth screamed out decades of unremitting torture, toil and bloodboil in the single beat of a heart, a psychic gong heard clearly by those borne of hate, and driven by the unstoppable unraveling of the universe, motivated by the desire to pull and tear at those thrashing threads.
Igads the Plougman, last of his line flared one brief and monstrous prayer in an instant of lucidity and died hating.

As the Rot Queen gave a Cog life, Grandfather the Apocalypse Star, the ticking clock of entropic mathematics, reaches across space and time and gives Igads a gift. In an unspeakably rare act of creation he gifts the burden of Purpose, knowing that in this taboo creation lies the mathematical certainty of destruction, desecration and the end of things old and beautiful. A null sum at worst, a catastrophic ender of days and best.
Grandfather Count-the-days rests. He counts the days and watches the world he must sunder as it drifts closer through space with the pleasing certainty of physics in motion.

A medieval medicine setting, ft. The Crusades, Gods-Brother and the disturbing loss of magic.

It is important to realise that body-horror conditions we like to use in media and fiction like festering pustules, boils and most other diseases we see as horrific today were just everyday stuff throught most of history.
A horror that you dont understand. It is well documented that even the wealthy, those with physicians and warmth and food suffered a huge range of gnarly ailments. I still like to feel smug about toilets and soap, for all their wealth Cesar had no shitter and Cleopatra had to rub oils &etc all over her because who even showers?
Now think about travellers, pesants and doctors. Germ theory was not even a whisper of a thought.

In cities and towns water was an unwholesome alternative to ale and wine, both of terrible quality but at least sort of sterile. Offering a guest water was socially rude because of fun things like cholera, and diahreea that could in all likelyhood kill you. Hygine consisted of a protective crust of dirt, and clothes were basically rusted on all winter. Poops happened. Everywhere.
Kate Beaton is a fucking boss history nerd and I ALWAYS think of her Pesant series when I get medieval.
Also shoutout to those on Burgs and Bailiffs for the raddest ever quasi historical medical knowhow and also charts.

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Show your players a different paradigm of medicine- Humours (blood, phlegm, black and yellow bile), Miasmas (lit. 'Bad air') were the prevalent mode for most of medieval times, along with a little mystical alchemy and the practical approach of animal doctors+bonesaws.
Im thinking a world on the cusp of medicine haunted by the spectre of illness and widespread plague, that is your everpresent, your setting is a miasma of illnes: spurring religion, influenceing politics, killing friends.

Barber Surgeons, this is not a joke, only barbers had the tools and would treat a commoner.
Some farmers and butchers had knowlege of animal ailments and anatomy but no such tools.
Salves and poltuces are pulped plant and fat.
Clysters are medidical enemas, live animal enemas were a thing cos why the fuck not. Release the tadpoles.
Leeches and blood drainings (doctors used sanguination as an anaesthetic cos if they are too wacked to scream they are technically fine. Oterwise its hemlock is good- a deadly poison.)

Diorhea lets out black bile, vomit is yellow. These are all linked to elements eath fire water ether.
Throwback to the Skeleton Podcast- bones are clearly made of compacted semen and they are cold so like obviously earth, read it and weep suckas.

Sometimes you just pump in some cow urine or feces or whatever to balance out the element ratio in that ol patient. He lost a lot of blood.

Thats a dungeon I want- Early medicine in a world of fading magic. A quack charlatan sends you on miasmatic quests, you may never learn his alignment or intent.

Bro I kno that red cross means a lot to you, but it sure looks like a target.
Lucky you just invented the concept of fixing the wounded instead of mercy-killing them!

Forgotten Hospitallier vaults containing long lost plague cures must be opened with offerings of Bile Yellow and Black, Blood and Phlegm.
Yes you must indeed shit in the stone bowl while your paladin retches yellow bile into the Chalice. Now we find a phlegmatic pilgrim for snot and blood and praise-be-lord-saviour the portal shall open!

Stimulants and surgery do strange and unexpected things, no matter what the intent of the surgeon... The quack accidentally nicks the wrong nerve trying to paralyse your facial muscles (its all a complex scam you see) and dulls your pain nerves instead, the goodly Spirit healer Hospitaller removes the pike but leaves your intestines knotted and plugged with a thick "healing" salve of rendered fat and opiates, a recipe recently arrived from the eastern Yarusalem Holy City and a dodgy translation at best.
The good news is that you are bodily strong, and the plug will provide sustenance, pain dulling, sleep quelling miasmas for three days before your inability to eat starts to sap your strength. And your breath smells like rotting and sweet eastern spices.. The doctors last orders, whispered in shame and darkness- whatever you do, do not sneeze or commune with woman.

Quacks offer free trepanning to fix the mentally unstable, but only if they can keep the circle of curved bone he will bore out of your skull. He is hired, only to immobilise you with heavy bloodletting, produce a frogs liver from the hole via slight of hand, declare you fixed and then leave with your money before you recover from your lobotimised torpor enough to cry foul.
You CAN hear god better now though.. and you can FEEL that circle of bone over the west horizon. This must stop.

Barber Veterinarians are the plumbers of the body, there is a lower risk of mystical Humorous (pun intended) side effects (good or bad) but less actual healing. The rough, pragmatic scarring is a badge of honour and integrity to the lower classes.

The Barber is the only man with sharp, fine tools and via livestock, a blood smeared knowledge of an animal's insides and where they should reside. To bear those scars and survive is a rejection of the cloisters and towers of academia where the pesant patients are chewed up and spat out, sometimes healed, but always, always changed. Those scars bear a different pattern, baroque and haunting and not all visible.

The Court Physicians and Kept Alchemists spurn them, the butcher-menders they cannot even afford a decent plague mask. Superior alchemy and the application of Kabbalisthtic scarring, Mussleman chaemical salts and Vadic rhyming polemics provide superior healing.
Proper re-routing of the bile ducts and application of alchemic false-humors can stir even the old magics.
Magics thought lost to the world with the unholy evisceration of GodsMartyr and the Crusade to bury the taint of Gods-Brother.

Why, the last patient even turned wine to blood!
The thoracic shunt delivered sacramental red directly to the spleen, and behold he urinates fresh blood.
Martyr bless my work, as I write it clots before my eyes: too pure for the ether of the open air.
We know there could be no native blood, for the patient was properly exsanguinated previous to sanctification, and thus the spleen, holy engine of transmutation has clearly been induced to miracles bless out Father I shall have this specimen duly arrayed before the reliquary.

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I'm thinking the Crusades in a world where the death of Christ brought magic and the taken-for-granted magic healing to an end, throwing society into disarray.
Pestilence hangs over centres of civilisation, as in history. War is bloody and life is cheap.
We do not know whether God died with the Martyr-vassal and his epoch of magic. We know not to debase ourselves for forgiveness, curse magic or claw it back, earn forgiveness through self reliance, penetance or glory? Unified western faith is fractured into dozens of sharp edged splinters. There are rumours that there is a Second Messiah, one overlooked, an antivassal? Perhaps an angel, one thought to be also the devil, a two sided coin is still worth the same is it not. Rumors also he is here to save us, destroy us or reform us, all that is consistent is that he too is made in Gods image, and also in ours.

The scramble to revivify the faded arts of medicine, alchemy and other knowledge lost in the shadow of "wizards did it" reliance of magic has compressed our history- we have Holy Wars, Religious Reform, Alchemy, Foerign Mytsticism, Occultism, Witchhunts, Empire building, Plague and Politics all going on at once.

Gods-brother is a Lucifer figure, think Mr Morningstar of Neil Gaimans Lucifer comic (really good, don't watch the TV show). Far more complex and ambiguous than the christian devil.
In a twisted way he is Gods favourite angel, as he was given both autonomy (pride, expulsion, self determination) and a kingdom, unlike anyone else in heaven.
He is said to have abandoned his kingdom to walk this earth in human guise after the GodsMartyr was killed and magic fled.
More of a suave trickster and courtesan than a tailed violent redman.

Gods-Brother (stole the name from Peter F Hamilton) worshippers range from basic Chaos and/or Satan devotees to those of Second Coming who think HE is the Second Messiah, (not the dead GodMartyr), who is currently being tested and ultimately groomed to replace God in heaven- functioning both as nemesis and heir. Note: Not necessarily evil!
(kinda like how Muslims rejected Christ as messiah and kept on keeping on.)

The church of course demonises him and he is the number one wicked devil Satan in their eyes, but thats propaganda for you.
The reality is up to  you. If you want a destroyer standin there is Abaddon who is THE great destroyer but actually works for God cos sometimes shit just needs destroying. Dont forget you fucked up the Christ arc and pissed God off so the danger is real..

Anyway religion aside, the vacuum left by the magical arts is being filled with mad science, tricksters, politics and ADVENTURERS.
Charlatans have a plethora of opportunities, fanatics, true believers, thieves, scholars also.
I forgot engineering..

I mentioned previously that medical and technical knowledge is faded, but not new.
Like how europeans leveraged themselves out of the Dark Ages with a little help from eastern Golden Age mathematics and so on. Civilisations rise and fall, and magic caused science to fall a long time ago.
That means there are lost vaults, unsullied libraries, mothballed research projects and secret societies to plunder. There are other civilisations out there too, an exotic Jerusalem analog, asia maybe. False gods etc. never even had magic perhaps. That means diplomats, saboteurs, exiles and spies in the mix too.

Your employers are insane alchemists, wealthy collectors, market speculators, monarchs, politicians and priestly scholar sects, whose budget just went from "pfft not even a wizard" to "help me Obi Wan Kanobi you're my only hope".



You are not the only party of adventurers, and not everyone was caught unprepared by the loss of magic. The pragmatic and hardheaded, the unions, the poor, many people lived without magic and some doomsday prophets even prepared for life without it.

Many town gates and village trees are hung with High Magisters and others who lost their powers at inconvenient times. Others are penitent flaggelators. Others were probably stage magicians all along. Some made sure that their status was cemented with state secrets, politics or other indispensable roles and struggle to maintain their more earthly power.

To make medicine and alchemy pack more punch I would say the more arcane it is the more it stirs the remanants of deep magic left behind. Players can favour the Barber for a crude but reliable patchup, or go to the far side for a risky treatment- leading to side effects, I would probably do a Gamma World 2e style mutation table with a wide range of positive and negative effects ranging from myopia to full spells or positive mutations.

Check out Gammaworld 2e mutation charts, Burgs & Baliffs superb medical charts, or any number of great blogs featuring magical and wyrd ailments.

Im feeling my love of Pillars of Eternity coming through a lot here too, especially the is-god-dead angst. check out their art.                  

Gamma World favours Pure players with stronger, heartier base stats (Crusader Paladin, Steady Pilgrim, Second Messiah Soldier, Quack Doctor)

While mutant/magic tainted ones get random unerthly powers and taints and less physical attributes unless their subsequent mutations happen to negate that. (Chaocite Godkiller, Warmended, an Alchemists Grist, Reconstituted Leper-Monk, Psychopomp Trepanee)

Pics relevant but with heaps more Templar and Crusader Knight shit going down.

Yup there he is

I cant decide if i want to go for desert and palms climate or central europe wet and grey, I would probably start with heists in Wetgrey and later send them behind the crusaders towards Desertpalms over a few sessions to get into some more exotic lost libraries and relics and some religio-political danger.

Death by Raving- rabies, seizures, madness of all kinds.
Wandering sickness- Likely dementia syphillis etc
Wasting- cholera, worms, basically everything etc
Broken Heart/ Grief- severe depression, torpitude, parasites, cancer etc
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DEAR HISTORY NERDS, NONE OF THIS IS RESEARCHED BEYOND WIKIPEDIA AND MOST OF IT NOT EVEN THAT, THIS JUST FELL OUT OF MY HEAD ALL AT ONCE
I would be more than happy to hear your comments, but refuse to reference my historical/hysterical claims (its all a made-up consensus fanfic anyway rite? hehe)

Seriously though I havent thought about the crusades since high school I dont know what happened here.
Comments and corrections super welcome :)