from the stitched soles of men who outran justice.
2
from a wicker-like weaving of the spines of serpents.
3
from a pair of hollowed camel-humps and the unplucked hide of an ostrich.
4
from the manes, fangs, and leather of a pair of gay man-eating lions.
5
of quicksilver miraculously woven into rippling cloth.
6
from the contiguous carapaces of remarkably boot-shaped insects.
D6
These boots are adorned
1
with colourful ribbons like ballet shoes.
2
with jingling golden bells.
3
with feathery plumes down their backs.
4
with bejewelled hobnails.
5
with in-sewn stockings embroidered with calligraphic prayers to gods of movement and travel.
6
with thin chains of tin and painted glass.
D6
These boots let their wearer
1
tread unharmed on water, lava, oozes, and all other at-least-mostly-fluids.
2
dance any dance perfectly.
3
kick with the force of a horse, and let any of their strikes against something marked by their boot-print - even something as light as a breath - hit it with the force of a horse's kick.
4
leap vertically up to any height they can see - though they provide no protection on the way down.
5
march forever without becoming exhausted, and at the moment of death set a location anywhere in the world for their boots to march their corpse to.
6
click their heels together twice to return to the position they stood ten paces back.
D6
These boots can be found
1
with their last wearer's legs still sticking out of them - bone-in - in a dungeon.
2
being modelled by an animate mannequin.
3
in the collection of a leprechaun cobbler who is trying to figure out how to curse them, as he does all his wares.
4
in the cottage of a giant, who uses them as thimbles.
5
being worn by a senile wanderer with outlandish tales of far-flung lands.
6
being worshiped by a colony of feral cats as their god.
D6
If these boots don't fit
1
you're shit outta luck.
2
they can be resized by any wizard with knowledge of transmutation.
3
they'll magically resize themselves.
4
they'll Bed of Procrustes your feet to fit them.
5
you can go on a quest on behalf of a god of footwear (or some similar domain) to have them miraculously reshaped.
6
you can remake them by hand - but take care not to break their enchantment in the process.
nostrils carved and scarified into shuddering trenches
across their faces, and eyes that constantly weep from the pressure of
their perpetually-closing tear ducts.
2
vaingloriously jewel-inlaid tusks.
3
parasitic vines embedded in their skin, leeching off their regenerative nutrients.
4
quill-tufted tails.
5
serrated bone-ridge mohawks stretching out the skin of their skulls.
6
jaws that split open down the middle like insectoid mandibles.
D6
These trolls' hides
1
are abused-looking things, bruised flesh puckering and stretched around the osteoderms of their gnarled and knobbly skeletons.
2
are mucus-membrane pink, slathered in dripping, viscous slime like a worked-up hagfish.
3
are boar-bristly, blubbery and layered and grey like a very well-fed rhinocerous.
4
are wrinkled like fingers left underwater for too long.
5
twitch with a coating of stubby, hairy-knuckled fingers.
6
are veiny tangles, red and blue and purple, rippling with every heartbeat.
D6
These trolls are
1
primordial man-shapes, pseudo-hominids, living fossils
from a time before the strict delineations of species and organs and
forms.
2
unfortunate sorts mutated by wandering into zones of intense positive energy.
3
proscribed elementals of the forbidden plane of flesh.
4
hosts to an abstract parasite that feeds off and prolongs their suffering.
5
hungry ghosts - gaki - who crawled out of the underworld, trapping themselves into a wheel of samsara contained in one flesh.
6
teratomas excised from the bodies that grew them and
then nurtured into independent yet still-cancerous organisms in vats of
alchemical serum.
D6
These trolls regenerate
1
like molting crustaceans, popping out of their own hides a little smaller and softer.
2
by melting like wax under a blowtorch, their fattened frames thinning out to restore lost flesh.
3
with amniotic fluid-filled boils that sprout around
injured areas - popping the boils before they can resettle as new
tissues stops the regeneration.
4
multiplicatively - adding more limbs, more flesh, until eventually they collapse under their own weight.
5
by rapidly accelerating their metabolism - they become
painfully hot to the touch while regenerating, and if injured
excessively will spontaneously combust from their own heat.
6
adaptively, becoming more resistant to damage sources that have previously injured them.
D6
These trolls can
1
regurgitate high-pressure hose-blasts of their
hyper-corrosive stomach acid, adapted to digesting their own kind's
regenerating flesh.
2
bud off little goblin-clones.
3
rapidly extend their nails into brittle spears, or their hair into entangling nets.
4
infect those exposed to their bodily fluids with a
myriad of diseases - they're multi-disease reservoirs, which never kill
them due to their special biology.
5
temporarily hypertrophy their muscles for a telegraphed mega-hit.
6
contort themselves down into the flayed skins of their
prey as a disguise, their regenerative power keeping the skins from
decomposing.
D6
From these trolls you might loot
1
a bezoar that neutralizes poison you ingest by transmuting it into a totally-random potion.
2
essential salts that can be sniffed by hirelings to
supress their fear response - negating the need for morale rolls - by
way of increasing the pressure on certain lobes of their brains through
anomalous nervous growth.
3
a serum you can inject into animals to turn them dire and vicious.
4
their blood, which you can drink as an impromptu healing potion with a high risk of mutation.
5
an ever-lengthening matt of hair that can be woven into an endless amount of rope.
6
magical items they've embedded into their flesh as
external gastroliths, using their exceptional durability to mash durable
materials into an edible paste or crumble.
with panels of stained redwood carved with intruiging mythical figures.
2
with embossed plates of verdigrised brass.
3
in smaragdine dragon-scale, the tome eternally warmed by the trace of fire-made-flesh.
4
with spiders' silk, wefted through with the jewel-like husks of the spiders that wove it.
5
with tartan cloth in the pattern of its authour's clan.
6
in black velvet inlaid with fractal patterns of gold leaf.
7
in some alchemical material that seems halfway between ceramic and steel.
8
in a colourful patchwork of leering, stitched-together imp faces.
9
with corded zebra-leather.
10
in blue-white crystalline origami.
11
in layers of delicate silver chains.
12
with thickly-laminated autumn leaves.
13
with thin, geometrical chunks of green marble, interlinked like the pieces of a puzzle-box.
14
with slabs of teeth lumped together by a pale fungus like tempeh.
15
with rounded slats of yellowed bones, inscribed with arcane formulae.
16
in fuzzy grey cloth woven from the voluminous beard of an arch-mage.
17
with strips of purplish bamboo, inked with prayers to a tutelary deity.
18
with fused crab shells with patterns suggestive of the arcana of the oceanic abyss.
19
with the platinum skin of some half-divine lamb.
20
with blood-splattered sackcloth.
D20
This spellbook contains
1
spells of internal pyromancy - of the art of inflaming passion, sparking inspiration, and burning away the soul.
2
rituals which allow for the summoning and interrogation
of extraplanar entities which have knowledge of lost treasures and
hidden powers.
3
spells of flesh-forging, which allow the reshaping, alloying, and purification of living tissues.
4
spells to call up or cast out plagues and swarms of vermin.
5
spells which mimic the incredible feats of a legendary hero.
6
spells perfect for an aspiring dark lord - spells which
allow one to brew goblins in a cauldron, cow others with terror, raise
fortresses of black stone, and suchlike.
7
spells which induce the growth of fractals, and behaviour mimicking fractals.
8
spells which draw out the latent powers of the mind - telepathy, telekinesis, astral projection, and suchlike.
9
numismatic spells, which imbue things which are not
coins with the attributes both physical and abstract of coins -
fungibility, flippability, etc.
10
spells of reversed golem-making, for taking the life
out of flesh to turn it into inert clay, and then applying that raw life
to varied ends.
11
spells to trap things within folded paper, animate
origami, instantly pulp wood into paper, and other such things of a
papery theme.
12
subtle & long-term spells affecting urban
environments - spells which preserve some buildings or lead others to
ruin, spells which attract or repel target demographics to or from
areas, a meta-spell that allows others to benefit from using a city as a
ritual diagram, and so on.
13
spells to conduct bees & their feeding habits, with
fantastical effects on their honey & hives - though it can also be
immediately useful, such as by making them feed on the blood of your
enemies or on acid.
14
spells which blur boundaries, such as those between
nightmares and the waking world, or between shadows and the bodies that
cast them.
15
spells that let you half-ass creating magic items by
tricking the universe - such as turning a stick you just found into a
wand with a fraction of the time and materials you'd normally need, but
with few charges & an increasing risk with use that the universe
will notice your trick and inflict backlash.
16
spells fit for a chef - spells to slice things to
pieces, to bring the heat of the oven, to preserve with cold, and so on -
all able to be put to lethal effect.
17
spells of blood magic - spells to injure someone's
relatives by injuring them, to control what one's blood has soaked into,
to make oneself more vivacious by bathing in others' blood, and so on
and suchlike.
18
spells to manipulate time - to stop its flow, to hold things in stasis, to accelerate it, even to reverse it.
19
spells dealing with wounds - able to transfer wounds
from one body to another on contact, to speak with wounds to learn about
the one who dealt them and the means they used to do so, to turn wounds
on oneself into fanged mouths, to birth beasts made of gore from
wounds, and so on and suchlike.
20
power word upon power word - a collection of utterances of terrible potency.
D20
This spellbook is protected
1
by its writer's ageless familiar, who takes the form of a fat calico cat that can hiss out curses.
2
by a complex mechanical lock.
3
by an enchanted lock which can only be opened with a
paired key which by most accounts is entombed alongside the spellbook's
authour.
4
by a hell-beast mystically bound to carry it from place to place until the end of time.
5
by trapped pages that entrance the unwary with maddening nonsense.
6
by the mutant descendants of the apprentices of the
wizard who wrote it, all members of a wealthy secret society who wear
heavy clothing to conceal their deviations from the uninitiated.
7
by a curse which prohibits readers from speaking of or replicating its contents, on pain of a lot of pain.
8
by a warrior oathbound to defend it beyond death.
9
in a vault surrounded by a complex full of deadly contrivances.
10
by a vengeful wraith imprisoned within the spellbook,
the vestige of someone slain and bound by its authour, released when it
is opened.
11
in the forbidden library of the temple of an order of warrior-monks who have deemed it anathema.
12
by its location in a cave at the peak of a monster-haunted mountain.
13
by its riddlesome encryption.
14
by the ghost of its authour's dog, able to possess whole packs of canines at once to maul whoever tries to take the spellbook.
15
by its current bearer, a wizard of some power and renown.
16
by obscurity - it is stuff into a hollow between the
walls of an old house, known only to the spiders and the rats, who hate
the thing and want it gone.
17
under lock and key and constant watch in the office of a witch-hunter who burned its previous bearer at the stake.
18
by the statue holding it, which will come to murderous animation when the spellbook is taken from it.
19
by a trap set to go off when the spellbook's weight is lifted off the pedestal it rests on.
20
by being written in an ancient, mostly-forgotten language.
D20
This spellbook is written
1
in a grandiose, prolix, self-aggrandizing manner.
2
briskly and brusquely, requiring one to read between the lines to really grasp it.
3
in a friendly, condescending tone, and is peppered with personal anecdotes.
4
with many ranting tangents on unrelated subjects.
5
circularly and self-referentially, the end being needed
to understand the beginning, the middle of a section being needed to
decode its adjoining parts, and so on and so forth.
6
in a paranoiac tone that switches freely between first-, second-, and third-person perspective.
7
haphazardly, with an abundance of over-crossed lines and marginalia.
8
in the form of an overly-expository novel.
9
using the politics of its time as a series of metaphors for magical procedures.
10
in the form of a sprawling cosmic mythos.
11
in colourful, extended allegory.
12
with clear excitement in the parts the authour was
interested in, and with near-suicidal proceduralism in the parts they
weren't.
13
in a tone of erotic temptation.
14
in a morbid and morose mood, with a grossly pessimistic slant.
15
beginning with simple syllogisms and escalating into mind-bending conclusions.
16
in an obscure dialect, with frequent & impenetrable allusions.
17
in alternating religious admonishment and heretical glee.
18
apparently by several different authours with clashing attitudes and styles.
19
sharply, comedically, in critique of its contemporary magical traditions.
20
in an exhaustively-detailed, mind-numbingly dull manner.
D20
Besides spells, this spellbook also contains
1
a collection of recipes for an especially-acquired taste.
2
a memoir of the authour's time as an apprentice.
3
seasonal poetry.
4
fanciful accounts of distant lands and other realms.
5
a frame narrative written from the perspective of
wizards in some future period discovering the spellbook and praising its
authour's genius.
6
some really bad puns.
7
the outline for a malformed ethical philosophy.
8
complaints about the authour's wife.
9
wrong theories about natural phenomena.
10
enough text in certain other occult languages that it functions as a sort of Rosetta Stone for them.
11
schematics for various Rube Goldberg machine-esque labour-saving devices.
12
strong opinions on the diet one must have & the exercises one must do to live a healthy life.
13
an account of a failed attempt at lichdom.
14
meditations on power, its meaning & responsibilities.
groves of terrestrial tube-worms which filter out the dust and chemical contaminants of the air.
2
spiny, neutrally-buoyant cacti floating in an elastic
web of vines under tension - slamming into creatures who blunder into
that web incautiously.
3
scraggly fruit-trees with roots and boughs that grow
intertwined with each other and with the walls and roof of their home -
their fruits thin and black and seedy.
4
tremendous tubers that glow with a slimy coating of bioluminescent, symbiotic bacteria, their leaves broad and white and shiny.
5
a plethora of predatory plants - pitchers and flytraps and so on.
6
great warty red gourds with translucent flesh that flash in pin-points irregularly with absorbed neutrinos.
D6
This dungeon garden is tended
1
to by a crew of goblins whose botanical knowledge is inversely proportional to their enthusiasm about gardening.
2
by an affable old otyugh who fertilizes it with collected waste.
3
by an albino dryad with gouged-out eyes, hair thin like fungal hyphae.
4
by a retired adventurer, still wise to the dungeon-ways - they will defend this sanctuary to the death.
5
by a silent, faceless golem molded from blue-grey clay - a sword impaled transversely through its head.
6
by a clutch of chattering skeletons who strip the flesh
from intruders to feed their plants, then animate the bare bones to
join their number.
D6
This dungeon garden is designed
1
in concentric circles, the inner circles lower & more lush and elaborate.
2
to be the pleasure-retreat of some under-noble - at its center is that under-noble's cozy yet richly-appointed cottage.
3
to lay along the serpentine path of an artificial stream, making up the serpent's flanks.
4
in fields of orderly interlocking geometries - it is a farm as much as a garden.
5
as a sort of living airlock between a more breathable cave system and one full of toxic, stale air.
6
to appear as a natural oasis of underground flora rather than a tended space.
D6
In this dungeon garden you may encounter
1
a wayward giant shrew, snuffling about for a route up to the underlands closer to the sun.
2
an ornery hermit full of cynical wisdom, who lives and rolls about in a big snail shell.
3
swarms of pollinating bats that drink blood opportunistically.
4
skittering alchemical drones, like dog-sized wingless
mosquitoes made from filigree of copper tubing and bulbs of glass - sent
out by their wizardly master to suck up ingredients. If obstructed in
their mission they can spit streams of acid.
5
a blind and furless great ape who lairs nearby and
sneaks into the garden to pilfer fruit and suchlike high-value food
items - the ape's got a hair-trigger temper, is strong enough to rip
your arm clean out of its socket, and is infested with so many parasites
that just touching it is enough to risk catching them.
6
a pitflower cuckoo - a vegetable creature blooming with
superstimuli to sound and smell, designed to broodily parasitize places
such as this garden.
D6
This dungeon garden's boundary
1
is a fence of barb-cut bones.
2
is a moat of briny hard water populated by oversized, predatory barnacles with barbed, flesh-ripping cirri.
3
is a curled-up cave wall painted with a trompe l'oiel of verdant surface vegetation.
4
is an ashlar wall with carefully-placed holes that produce a whistling song.
5
is a crevasse of some lightless depth, criss-crossed by spindly stone bridges.
6
is a coiled vermiform fossil.
D6
From this dungeon garden you might harvest
1
a strong, straight-growing stipewood that makes for good crutches, splints, and stakes.
2
nuts that act like flashbangs when smashed.
3
nodules that can be crushed to extract a musk that mimics the scent of a dragon.
4
a drug that lets you astrally project your soul half
the times you take it, and just gets you high enough to believe you did
the other half.
5
flowers that can be boiled into a tea that acts like a truth serum on those who drink it.
in the rimey northern reaches of the Canadian Rockies.
2
in a pocket-space that can only be found by following
certain pilgrim-paths in the Pyrenees that predate the coming of
Christianity.
3
strangely snowless among the peaks of the Tian Shan.
4
in a corner of the Drakensberg, and only appear during certain celestial alignments.
5
at the dry & dusty southern tip of the Andes.
6
nameless & geologically-impossible somewhere in the north pole.
D6
These mountains of madness are
1
sickly things, rotten from within by a strange silvery radiance that leaks out from within as will-o'-wisps.
2
near-agless, thick cords and veins of their structure
standing against erosion and gravity, reinforced by some unknown energy,
the lacuna between these timeless components worn into deep &
honeycombed crevasses.
3
volcanic, emitting a feverish heat and sometimes spewing poisonous, invisible clouds of gases.
4
sheer, unevenly-stepped things, their cliffs engraved
with unwholesome shapes that might be unlikely natural formations, or
the rough hewings of an unaesthetic hand.
5
unstable, but not geologically - landmarks and safe passages shifting by the day.
6
blasted by unforeseeable winds and storms, horned with branching fulgurites.
D6
These mountains of madness are home to
1
giant land-conches that leak a numbing slime - if they
come across you sleeping they will lick the flesh from your bones with
long radulas without you ever waking.
2
tall, headless man-things whose necks taper to an antenna-point which receives commands from some unknown signal-source.
3
big, hateful rats which bear heavy, worm-filled boils.
4
infectious octopi that can wriggle beneath your skin and convert your muscle fibers into more of themselves.
5
fat saucers of fungoid flesh which hover about with an ululating whimper. They can swallow things of an improbable size.
6
great cats with grinning, eyeless faces, and toxin-leaking spines instead of fur.
D6
An expedition to these mountains of madness
1
was funded by crypto-Posadists in communist Albania. It went horribly wrong.
2
was launched by a tech billionaire & adrenaline junkie who thought Everest was for pussies. It went horribly wrong.
3
was put together by the Jesuit Order. It went horribly wrong.
4
was arranged by the occult department of the University
of St. Andrews, who believed that it was the location where their
relic-corpse of St. Andrew was washed ashore from. It went horribly
wrong.
5
is being organized by a new religious group called the
Brethren Stars - whose leaders were all born from donations to the same
sperm bank. It will go horribly wrong.
6
is being assembled by a militarized branch of NASA with
the mission to tame & colonize the unusual spaces of the Earth
rather than look among the stars. It will go horribly wrong.
D6
These mountains of madness bear ruins
1
of a temple complex constructed by an offshoot-species
of Rhynchippus, uplifted into sapience and manipulative dexterity by
ray-finned arachnoids from somewhere in the embrace of Cassiopeia. The
art and records of the complex indicate a shift from worship of the
arachnoids to a more existentialist faith recognizing a waning divinity
in their communities after their once-benefactors infected them with a
sterility-plague and left the planet.
2
that grow from their stone like mineral-vegetable
hybrids. Flickering holographic "ghosts" found in the ruins suggest the
ruins were grown by a species non-native to Earth, as they bear a
dizzying variety of forms with no resemblance to any Earthly life. Those
the "ghosts" pass through find themselves porous.
3
built by a culture of intelligent Xenarthrans sometime
around the mid-Eocene. The ruins are apparently the palace of a "sacred
king" type figure, constructed according to occult principles so that
when the exactingly-cultivated "sacred king" was sacrificed their mind
would be sent beyond the bounds of space-time.
4
of a last redoubt raised haphazardly by a species
anatomically resembling labyrinthodonts to survive some mass extinction
event which swept the planet several hundreds of millions of years ago,
yet is not reflected in fossil records or any other signs detectable by
human science.
5
built from the fossilized bones of an entire and as-yet
unknown sub-species of homo sapiens. It's unclear if the sub-species
built the ruins themselves.
6
assembled by a collective of fungal symbiotes that
arose in the wake of a mass-extinction, glutted to easy intelligence by
the abundance of rot. The original purpose of the complex seems to have
been to launch chunks of the Earth impregnated with spore-infused
embryos of the fungal symbiotes into space, on collision courses with
other planets deemed likely to bear life.
D6
In these mountains of madness is entombed
1
an old god and its cult - slithering, prolapsed things -
who've attained a sort of immortality by devouring & defecating out
each other.
2
a gateway of stable superheavy needles that sing in
energetic vibrations. The gateway leads to the Field of the
Ultra-Spectral Rays spoken of in Swedenborg's unpublished work The
Daughters of Wormwood, where the spiral winds descend from Nith, glutted
and open to negotiation.
3
a sorcerer from the modern day who hoped to use his
advanced knowledge together with his magic to conquer early agrarian
humanity - however a miscalculation saw him trapped in these mountains,
forced to enter a long period of hibernation to survive.
4
the vermiform Bgnghaa-Ythu-Yaddit, which torturously
bore the people of red vapour from their shrouded world within the
nebula Zlykariob before its doom. If unleashed, the people of red vapour
will attempt to optimize the Earth for caloric production, and restore
their vessel with a planet-consuming feast to take to the stars once
more.
5
the eggs of Glorious Echrr, which mutate those who touch them into that great one's children.
6
a living, borborygmus extrusion-portal leading to the
fabled Viscous Vortex of Sillhaa, wherein one can reshape their atomic
nucleii into new and imperishable forms, or else suffer a nigh-infinite
hellish implo-explosion into a conscious though powerless singularity.
two-dimensional predators so successful in their
hunting that they overpopulated their plane of origin and overflowed
into intersecting places.
2
victims of a magical superweapon that left them as nothing but twisted silhouettes.
3
native entites from a world of stark light and darkness, dragged here by some celestial confluence.
4
the occlusions of enchanted shadow-puppets which tore themselves free from the objects that cast them.
5
the tenebrous psychic ejecta of a terminally repressive community.
6
things of living vantablack pigment escaped from the workshop of an occult artist.
D6
These shadows' touch drains strength
1
by causing strands of muscle to agonizingly tangle and knot.
2
by sapping away the very will to exercise it.
3
by granting darkness a weight and viscosity that drags at all movement like tar.
4
with a shivery, contractive cold.
5
by inflicting acidic exhaustion in one's tissues.
6
by sharing a part of their own insubstantiality.
D6
These shadows lurk
1
in the abandoned observatory of a cabal of dark
astrologers, who foretold the future based on the umbras and eclipses of
celestial bodies rather than their light.
2
in the megalithic calendar-complex of a prehistoric civilization.
3
in the buried, tunneled refuge of a city left dry and bleached like bones in the desert.
4
in the cliffside caves of a valley so deep and narrow
that the sun only shines within it for a small fraction of every day's
noon.
5
around a nocturnal traveling circus, relying on prior suspicion on the carnies and freaks to deflect attention from themselves.
6
under the clouds of a perpetual storm, an endless dark night.
D6
These shadows can be held at bay
1
by shadow puppetry imitating their forms.
2
with a total darkness that consumes even shadows.
3
by the light of the sun, which annihilates them on illumination.
4
with a line, circle, or tossed fistful of glittering substance - gold or powdered gemstones perhaps.
5
with a bonfire big enough to singe those sheltering within its vicinity.
6
with chanted prayers to a god of light.
D6
These shadows are known to
1
be distracted by the silhouettes of wisps of smoke cast by fires of fragrant wood.
2
be burned by pure salt - as if the stuff was acid.
3
subordinate themselves to wizards with power over darkness.
4
claw out shrines of negative space in territories wherein they are powerful.
5
be confounded by riddles, so long as they are in groups - debating among themselves a while until a solution can be agreed upon.
6
sometimes convert spontaneously into glares - things
like shadows, but composed of light instead of darkness - this is
believed to occur when their ideals are incontradictorily challenged.
D6
These shadows seek
1
to destroy priests and paladins and suchlike of solar deities.
2
the incarnation of the anti-sun, who will bathe the world in darkness.
3
pilgrimage into the land of the dead, and a psychopomp who will lead them into a favourable position therein.
4
the black bile of melancholic sorts, which is narcotic to them.
5
the pieces of an obsidian calender, which when
collected will allow them to catch a ride on a black glass comet into a
void which will be paradise for their kind.
6
an ebony egg which under their tender care will hatch into a shadow-dragon whose breath will eclipse the world.
