Old-School Queen Class

This is my attempt at a Queen class for LotFP and other Old School games, based on the Queens in Christine de Pizan's 'City of Ladies'. (It's mainly the crafty, sneaky version, the martial version would be a different thing I think.)

A Queen gains levels like a Thief.

In LotFP a Queen has a 5 in 6 capacity in two unique skills; King-Secreting and Cross Dressing.

King Secretion - If the Queen has her King (see below) with her, she is an expert in secreting or disguising him in almost any conceivable manner or way so long as it is at least vaguely within the bounds of reality. She might dress him as a maid, hide him in a log or carpet or almost anything else.

Cross Dressing - If she has the clothes or materials with her, the Queen can disguise herself as a man with an incredible degree of effectiveness. All the negative effects of her beauty will still be in effect and will now apply equally to both genders though some would-be paramours may be too confused or repressed to immediately act on their feelings.

Though she has no spells, during play she can learn to cast Ritual magic in settings where that is a thing.

Every Queen is Queenly, Feeble and hot.

Queenly
Every Queen comes garbed in the robes of Queendom and is clearly identifiable as a Queen if she wishes to be so. If she acts and speaks in a Queenly way no one reasonable will doubt her status or nature.

Weak and Feeble*
A Queen rolls 2d6+2 for her Strength, she does this regardless of what any other character is rolling, whether male or female.

Beautiful
So long as she is declaring herself as a Queen she never has to roll for high-status treatment from any civilised people. She always has Charisma 18 from simply being royal though for  the precise nature of her beauty, roll a d6;

1. Afflicted.
2-3. Beautiful.
4-5. Superlative.
6. Renowned.

An Afflicted Queen has some minor but strange physical flaw like a second row of teeth or a lazy eye. This is looked on by most people with deep sympathy and the Queen is well thought of for bearing with her affliction. She is treated like a normal person of high status and rolls charisma tests as normal. She is not excessively bothered by mad knights, transformed demigods, pervy wizards or fucking bards.

A Beautiful Queen can test her CHA against large groups like armies & mobs  and against otherwise hostile people, like assassins sent to kill her.

A Superlative Queen can also test her CHA against otherwise automatically-hostile monsters.

A Renowned Queen can also test her CHA against natural forces & divine beings.

Any Queen more beautiful than afflicted cannot fail a Charisma test against a male (and 5% of females), they simply get unwanted effects. If a Queen rolls a fail on a CHA test against a man (or an army, assassin, monster or natural force) then roll on the table below using a die size depending on the Queens beauty level. (With women roll normally and roll below if a 1 is the result or of they are clearly gay.)

Beautiful - d4
Superlative - d6
Renowned -  d8

1. They proposition the Queen OR a Bard arrives whichever is worse.
2. They stalk the Queen.
3. They Declare Their Love OR a Knight appears and does the same, whichever is worse.
4. They propose marriage. If the target is already married, they promise to divorce, if the Queen is, they may try to kill her husband.
5. A Jealous Spouse or Partner arrives.
6. They try to abduct the Queen or a Creepy Wizard arrives and tries the same, whichever is worse.
7. A Fight Breaks Out OR they attempt suicide from thwarted desire, whichever is worse.
8. It's a rapey transformed demigod trying to bone the Queen. If this has happened before then it's the same one as last time.

Queens generally have both a King and a large amount of treasure..

The King!
A Queen never does anything for herself, she does it all for the King. She either has the King and is trying to get them back on the throne or she is looking for the King to then get them back to the throne. The King is (roll a d12);

1. Ancient Father - lost
2. Ancient Father - banished
3. Ancient Father - imprisoned
4. Ancient father - He's here and he's an idiot
5. Small Child - very small, he's 5.
6. Small Child - stolen by witches/a goddess/elves.
7. Small Child - she's 8 months pregnant.
8. Grown Child - He's an idiot.
9. Husband - with her, he's an idiot.
10. Husband - imprisoned somewhere.
11. Husband - ensorceled by a witch somewhere.
12. Husband - lost on quest.

If a Queen is found committing any non-lethal crime and its clear she is doing it to protect the King, in any civilised society, she will get away with it. In fact most people will applaud her for her bravery. Sometimes this can even apply to lethal crimes, if she can give a good speech about it.


Treasure Train
Every Queen begins the game with a large amount of treasure made up of heavy chests of gold and silver, precious tapestries, paintings, delicate china, furniture, an extremely rare and entirely untameable animal in a cage, at least one large musical instrument like a piano and, of course, a crown. This is found, with the Queen, lying on the side of the road.

To begin with this treasure is worth 100,000 gp. Gaining this treasure does not help PC's gain XP but all PC's who assist the Queen collectively gain 1% of the treasures value in XP for very day they keep it in her hands.

She has no-one to help carry it.

Someone is usually after this treasure, (probably the usurpers, see below) if they aren't now, they will be soon.

Usurpers!
Every Queen comes from a real and identifiable Kingdom somewhere on the edge of the map. She has been usurped by one of the following;

1.Evil Uncle.
2.Democratic Mob.
3.Hot Sorceress.
4.Barbarians.
5.Dragon or equivalent.
6.Creepy Theocracy.

The usurpers have agents after her and will have to be defeated if she is going to get her Queendom back.


*It's a quote, look it up.

Chtonic Codex - Academia Apocrypha Review

The last one gave you monsters, this one gives you you. A character to play. Specifically an apprentice mage in the Valley of Fire. So this is kind of the Players Handbook for the Chthonic Codex. All of the classes are Magic User.

Let’s go through what you find inside.

The 5more system

Paolo has come up with a handy d6 omni-system for deciding things that is also a skill system.  It seems simple, but like a lot of apparently simple systems the granularity that isn’t on the dice ends up seeping into the game, with good and bad effects, which we will examine as we go on.

I prefer a d20 but whatever.

Did I whine about this already in the last review ? I’m whining about it again now.

Apprentice Preparation

So we have a new casting system. I am one of those people who daydreams of playing a Magic-User, then takes a long look at the rules for that in almost any game and thinks ‘fuck no’. So this review comes from an essentially sceptical place.

Magic points.

Each spell only once per day.

Only casters generate magic points.

Spells and points come back at dawn.

You can get other sources of magic points.

A new learn magic spell that isn’t read magic.

Rules for learning magic are exactly as irritating as I have always found them

I like that spells are renewed by the sunrise, which is simpler than memorisation and easy for everyone to understand.

I like the new ‘read magic’ equivalent  ‘Unveil Arcana’ which is a bit like that and ‘Identify’ which make sense to me as magic comes in all kinds of crazy forms. If you fall asleep with something next to your head you learn about it in your dreams without expending the magic points. I like that.

Stuff

You get free stuff when start. One thing you do not get is a weapon. (You do get a knife and staff but they are almost the only normal weapons mentioned in the entire book, which fits the feel of the ‘Magic University’ setting and makes it more fully a problem-solving-improv game rather than a fighting game.

Since the free stuff depends on your college I would probably have put it in those sections. That way you can print it out for each player.

(Artificers do get a crossbow maybe (or even a gun!))

Then there is a list of 180 rrrrandom items. This is a slightly more ‘Blackadderish’ list than the mainly-serious ‘Zakish’ list that matches the tone for most OSR item lists. It’s a bit more gonzo and funny than the rest of the book and in a slightly different way.

I smell Barry Blatt on this list.

Art Of Magic

Oh god rules for crafting rope

hhhnngg, rules for picking flowers

Somewhere there is someone who dreams of going to a fantasy land full of adventure and danger and becoming a pharmacist. But not here.

Does anyone ever research spells? I feel like Brendan might. I must have read spell-research rules in about 20 games. Never seen them used. Well they have to have some as that’s what this game is about and here they are

Rules on spell casting - this bit is interesting

Some questions. Can anything be a curse? That is, a normal spell with a negative effect cast with a specific trigger that you say out loud? Or is it just things with 'curse' in the title? If its anything then that’s a very innovative and wide-ranging change.

Dispensations - these are very good, more on these later

Alternative procurement! – There is raw magic oozing out of the earth and you can go down there to huff it like fumes and invent spells. This is what everyone will be doing. So you can go into the caves (for a low low price) get lost and go crazy. Then you get the spell but there is something freaky about it that makes you mental or mutated or obsessed with some strange thing. Good. This makes the dullards up top carefully researching spells look even more boring.

Mana-Tar gives you magic points and also acts on you a bit like a drug with some serious side effects. This is good, turns mages into sketchy addicts.

THE SCHOOLS

Fire Dervishes

If I was going to bet on a single simple idea from Chthonic Codex going out into the wider nerdosphere and becoming a new fragment of the Generalised Fantasy Arcytype it would be the reinvention of fire mages as Sufi Dervishes.

It was about time someone weaponized Rumi. The character of the Fire Mage and the mystics relation to god match perfectly. You fall in love with the fire, the closer you get to it the more pure your love becomes. As you empty of everything else the fire loves you more and more. Except this time the fire is not a metaphor.

The spells are ok fire spells. Hope you like burning stuff. The dispensations involve losing control and endlessly dancing so that works. High Level spell Invocation of the Raptor of Embers is my favourite reincarnation spell that I have read anywhere so far.

Gatekeepers

Door mages essentially. The dispensations are excellent, leading to players talking to doors, obsessively building their own doors with fancy embellishments and leaving secret marks, circles and glyphs everywhere. These guys start off as someone who is really good at running away and end up as a general TARDIS mage.

There are some very powerful but highly specific spells limited by both what you need to do them and the fact that, like all colleges, you can only be this college. No mixing and matching.

Chimerists

Be friiiiends with the animals and annoy the DM by bringing like twenty pokemon to every fight and constantly playing the flute.

Example Spell: Xanathon's Xenophilia

“This spell effects two beings of very different species. The two subjects of the spell will save or be very very physically attracted to each other, regardless of inconvenient incompatibilities.”

PAGING RPG.NET

The only problem here is the spell doesn’t specifically say they will produce viable young, which I think is the point? Unless you just like watching them fuck.

This class is about seducing frogs, stabbing people and being naked. Maybe you are a friendly Dr Doolittle type or maybe you are Ash from Alien looking at the Geiger monster in a jar and talking about its ‘perfection’.

Stargazers

These guys look into the future every night and then spoil everyone’s fun by worrying about it all day. The class is mainly about moving odds around, getting intimations of the future and trying to shift things generally in your favour. The dispensations work well with making the character obsessed with the future, with doing or not doing certain things.

The basic fortune-telling mechanism is another occasion where I must revolt against Paolo’s use of the D6. Instead of one d20 or d100 you get like a five stage process of d6 rolls.

Question, they say if you are down a well and look up, you can see the stars. Much of this game is assumed to take place underground, if you look up from a cave through a narrow well-like crack in the day, can you do stargazing then?

There is another really good high level spell in ‘Call Down The Baethilus’ which I think is what they cast on Monkey in journey To The West to trap him under that mountain.

NNNnecromancy

Immortality, blood, pineal glands, eating hearts, messing with bodies another good high level spell essentially makes you Sauron. Much of it specifically ‘evil’, so if you want the play the #notallnecromancers necromancer or the ‘Don’t We Need Slytherin Really’ guy then you will have a hard time doing so.

Artificers

In a sense this is half a school given in the spell list. It’s all meant to interact with the crafting system I skipped past earlier on. You can make commander data and gradually upgrade him. A bunch of other rather odd spells. For people who like building things really. You get a gun! (I mentioned that already). There would be a lot of interaction with the DM to decide what you can or cannot do but the possibilities are wide open. Go from MacGuyver to Aulë.

Pharmacy

The big deal with these guys is they can heal you and also they know a lot about plants. They are almost the only guys who can heal you. I wish that was more interesting. Interacts with the plant rules the same way artificers interacts with the crafting rules so they are almost both half-a college if you just read the spell list. Scrap you might like this. Plants?

There are some very nice pictures of plants.

Hermits.

I like these guys, simple rules too, spells are characterful and appropriate, goat based. The most original of all the schools. Paolos goat fetish really came out with this one.

Asceticism - this is another form of spell research which is less boring than normal spell research. No books, no stuff, one tenth the cost, at least twice the time, sit on your own and think. People are going to be like Patrick you don’t want to search for plants or build things but you do want to sit alone in a cave and  to that I say yes that is who I am.

Captivating Container is a pure, excellent fairy-tale spell.

This class turns you into the guy who turns up an a Greek Myth and you are like ‘Fuck no hero don’t talk to that guy’ but they do and end up fetching hot girls for a Cyclops to eat because they made the wrong deal. Well now You can be That Guy. The weird soothsayer from Act Two who fucked everyone’s shit, running in and out of your self-made karst on your goat legs.

Three Spells About Undergound Trees

At the end there are three spells about underground trees.

There they are.

Dispensations

Dispensations in the spell descriptions are elements of the imagined world which, if they are in place, allow the Magic User to cast a spell without using Mana. Or in standard Old School D&D, without using a spell slot.

This is interesting. It does several things I like.

It offloads complexity onto the written document so you don't have to remember it all the time. But does so in a short and simple way that doesn’t add much weight to the spell description.

It gives strong impetus for the PC to interact with the world in a certain way in order to gain advantage.

So a Gatekeeper spell is that you can talk to doors and see what went through them. But if you build your own door and make it fancy with at least 100 worth of stuff then you can always talk to it without cost. So gatekeepers end up in houses and buildings full of really fancy doors they made themselves.

Dervishes can animate tiny spirits from fire. If they choose to they can do this for free, but they get more spirits and cannot control what they do.

Chimerists can make frogs into giant frogs, but if they seduce the frog first they don’t need to burn the spell points.

This leads to mages doing a lot of mage like stuff, looking for weird things, building things, dancing, playing instruments etc. It produces excellent magelike behaviours which the player will fully indulge because it gets them something if they build their own doors.

They are a bit like Carcosan Rituals but embedded into the Players info rather than the setting.

Question: do level 9 spells take 9 mana to cast, or one? If its one then the dispensation for high level spells is not that useful since for a 9th level mage burning 1 mana isn’t such a big deal, if its 9 then the dispensations are VERY useful indeed.

How would it work, what would you do with it ?

If you use this as-written you get a bunch of disparate mage PCs who are all going to act stranger and stranger but really can’t get much done on their own. So the stage is set for co-operation and conflict.

The characters of the schools are embedded well into the objects, spells and behaviours that surround them.

If you want to tear it up and turn it inside out you can turn the Players handbook into a setting relatively easily. The schools become mages you can talk to who both need and resent each other. The specifics of the Dispensations become quest seeds.

I would make a Karst desert full of Goaty hermits in caves or on the tops of poles and Fire Dervishes spinning endlessly on pools of vitrified glass.

SHAMAN Class

SHAMAN Class

HD: 1d6

WEAPONS: Any Wood, Bone, Teeth., Stone. No metallic. (Including arrow tips.)

Saves: INT, WIS;

Skills: 2 from: Survival, Nature, Insight, Performance, Medicine, Animal Handling

Equipment:
(a) a Jawbone Club or (b) a Flint Knife;
(a) a Component pouch or (b) An Enemies Shrunken Head (Arcane Focus); 
(a) Crazy Piercings or (b) Tricked out Mad Tattoos or (c) Disturbing Scarification


SPELLCASTING

When you sleep you go to where the spells are, you hunt the spells. The spells try to get away but you catch them pretty easily becasue you are a SHAMAN. Finding the right ones can be hard though. The longer you sleep the more spells you can hunt. The higher your level the deeper into that place you can go.

When you sleep or meditate to get spells, roll a d6. Go to that number at the bottom of the chart, this is where you start. A cantrip will be here with you. You can catch the catrip if you want, put it in your head, write it on your spell sheet.

For every hour you meditate or sleep, you can travel along one black dotted line to a place where a new spell is. Whenever you reach a new spell, you can put it in your head and write it on your sheet. When you wake up, you can use that spell whenever you want, then its gone back to the hunting ground. When you sleep, all of your spells escape and you have to look for more.

So if you sleep for eight hours, you can hunt eight spells.

BUT. There is a catch. Some spells don't like each other. If you have two spells in your head connected by a dotted line, thats right next to each other, then you have to roll on the Shaman Madness Table once for each line.

So if you go to sleep as a level one Shaman for eight hours and hunt eight spells, then you will have seven madnesses the next day. This is why Shamans are so crazy. You can avoid madneses by not having spells that are connected by dotted lines in your head at the same time. But this means you get less spells.

As you get better as a Shaman you can go deeper into the dream lands to hunt more powerful spells.

From levels 1-4 you hunt in the Plains. From level 5 you can also hunt in the Forest, at level 11 you can also hunt in the Hills and at level 17 you can visit the Mountain for the most powerful spells.

You always start at the bottom though, with a d6 roll.


Lvl 2: A number of times per day equal to your level, any spell you have caught may be cast as an illusiory version of itself.
Lvl 3: ---
Lvl 4: Ability Score Improvement.
Lvl 5: You may now hunt in the Forest.
Lvl 6: Your cantrips deal half Damage even on a Save.
Lvl 7: ---
Lvl 8: Ability Score Improvement
Lvl 9: ---
Lvl 10: add your Int Mod to your Evocation Spells'Damage.
Lvl 11: You may now hunt in the Hills.
Lvl 12: Ability Score Improvement
Lvl 13: ---
Lvl 14: You may halve the number of madnesses (rounding up) that you must take after hunting spells.
Lvl 15: ---
Lvl 16: Ability Score Improvement
Lvl 17: You may now hunt on the Mountain
Lvl 18: You can choose where you begin your hunt on the bottom row.
Lvl 19: Ability Score Improvement
Lvl 20: Instead of beginning on the bottom row, you may drop a d4 on the chart and begin where it lands.

I have a time machine but it drove me insane

This was provoked by Matt Diaz’s LOTFP classes. And by Richard G’s Monster Trainer Class and various other old-school class re-imaginings on G+.

Matts rules for sorcery and shapechanging are very neat and concise.

Because LOTFP classes only get better at one thing you have to take all the extra crap that comes with a splatbook class and distil it to one powerful idea. Then you have to take that idea and encode it in a rule. This rule has to be as simple as possible as most class rules have to fit on a page of A5. It also has to scale neatly over 10 levels without a lot of bumpf and crap. Doing this is intellectually and creatively interesting.

This made me think about what’s going to happen to Fourth edition. Now we all know that as soon as Fifth edition comes out Fourth will be forgotten. Then it will slowly slowly become cool till, in about 30 years, when D&D has built up enough new contradictions and fuckups, Fourth edition will be radical again. This is inevitable.

Our aged greybeard future selves will be creeping through attic, ready to move the old ‘books’ away from rising sea levels to the refugee camps. The kids don’t care about hardcopy and the robots are malfunctioning. We spy a dusty old copy of the Fourth ed players handbook. It’s creaking covers crack open like a book of spells. We sit down, ignore the sirens and the screams outside, and read.

 People will go through those books, mine them for whatever was interesting, create new stuff based on that and essentially have an OSR for Fourth.

Now that sounds like fun for my older self. But fuck that guy. I’m bored right now. Let’s have the autopsy early.  We should pretend we are in the future so we can have a renaissance about right now. A Pre-naissance.

Lets create a splatbook for the imaginary Fourth edition of LOTFP.

Come with meeee to the distant time of 2043. Raggi will have been shuffled aside by a board of directors with business degrees from affordable universities. The full name will no longer be used. The acronym LOTFP is now the official name because the original wouldn’t fit on the bases of the plastic toys created as a tie in an international Googlecast web series that was never released because the Indonesian island tax shelter that housed the shady production company Raggi hired to make the series because they were the only ones who didn’t vomit at the concept art fell prey to rising sea levels an emergency international fracking treaties and has disappeared from maps.

Sometimes people dredge up what they claim are lost ‘production materials’ but could just be bullet-riddled skeletons infested with mutant coral and broken computer parts. It’s hard to tell. Zak Smith found the Hand of Vecna and is now the Republican Senator for the Ocean City of New Idaho*. Jeff Rients fucking ate a guy.

Imagine with me a future splatbook retrieved by someone with a time machine. But the machine drove them crazy.

It would have a vanilla-esque name so bland its almost creepy. Like a stepford wife module.

“Burning Shadows, Heroes of Daggerknife Keep.

A supplement for Fourth Edition LOTFP.

Copy of Fourth LOTFP necessary for play. 

Including Errata for the FAQ of the Fourth edition players handbook volume 3 (9^th printing).

Multiple new classes and guaranteed fixes for multiple rules issues with the LOTFP family of games. All your questions answered.

(item may not be returned once seal is broken.)”

And it would be stupid and it would be a joke but also it wouldn’t be. Because we understand things as much from watching them fall apart as from creating them. So why not transport ourselves 30 years into the future and watch the sad ignominious end of a thing we love. Like taking a time machine to interview your children as they lie dying in an old folks home. Using that information to raise them better.  You can’t fix everything, but you can do better than you did.

We can’t stop things dying. Ideas have a life inside them. For them to be any good they have to have an end. But we can make that life as good as possible.

We could have fun by ripping the shit out of all the things we dislike about late-period low-creativity RPG overproduction.

We could ferret through all the Fourth stuff we thought had a glimmer of something inside it, then use intelligence and creativity to purify, simplify and concentrate it, which would be difficult and interesting. Then build a new game from what we had made. Something both like and unlike what we know.

We could learn more about what we are doing right now by imagining its necessary end.

It would have

-Old School reducions/distillations of every thing good we could find about Fourth.

-Old school versions of as many of the weird splatbook classes as we could find. ESPECIALLY the weird ones no-one ever plays, like the Shardmind AND the boring ones no-one ever plays like the Rune Priest, or the Ardent, god that was a boring fucking class. But our versions would be good because the RunePriest is a guy who knows the Enochian language and an Ardent…. Well it could be good, it could be. 

 -All the most fourthy Fourth edition things that were half good but rewritten, condensed and with a LOTFP twist.

-Decrepit patch-on fixes for imaginary rules problems created by a byzantine decadent 30 year old version of LOTFP. Fun because we get to think about how game structures grow/decay over time and interesting for the same reason.

If we imagine its really popular and there are 1000’s of nerds going ‘ghhhaaa the investment rules interfere with level progression above Sixth level! Fix it!’

“The animal sacrifice rules conflict with the human sacrifice rules. Harmonise it!! Don’t nerf my druid if he wants to sacrifice both at the same time!!!”

It wouldn’t even need to make that much sense as a lot of the Fourth stuff is so fractured and disconnected you needed a fucking doctorate in D&D to even make sense of it. Like the essentials stuff. What on earth was going on there?

-Instead of an endless list of weapons that looks like it came out of a spreadsheet, make stuff like the treasure gen tables from Realms Of Crawling Chaos (that was some good shit)

-And all the strange classes people have come up with online. Living Statue plus Matts Warlock plus Monster Trainer plus Anarchist Librarian? Why not?

-And anything else that was good and interesting.

It’s a Science-Fiction Renaissance.

*Vote Smith. Duty. Honour. Country.  Idaho! Drowning The Weak.

Kamikaze Librarian

 Extra class thing based on the LOTFP ruleset. 

The idea and one or two of the entries yanked from Zak Smiths Fighter, Wizard and Thief

Its this-

 Plus this-

 

No shields, no plate mail, Its Kamikaze Librarian.

 This can be applied when you level up to either .

A Specialist; when you level up add  d6 Hp,  or

A Dwarf; add d6 Hp

And also, roll twice on the table below for each level gained.

(All references to books can also count for equivalent cultural artefacts, paintings, sculpture etc, so long as it makes sense in context.)

(Elves and Halflings cannot be Kamikaze Librarians, they are not Punk enough. Elves are Disco, Halflings are Folk.)

1-15 A dull day out indeed, add 2 skill points if a Specialist, if a Dwarf, either roll a d10 for hitpoints, or add one skill point to any skill of your choice.

16-30 RAAAAAGGGHH!!! Either +1 to hit (continual) or attacks equal to your level for one fight per game or one extra move action whenever you like, so long as you use it to get into melee combat with something bigger than you.

31-50 I have a book on that… Name a book, its contents and subject. You own it. Once per game you can use it to add your level to a roll regarding something relevant to the subject of the book.

51-52 Bookzerker. If a book (or equivalent cultural artefact) is in immediate danger of destruction, then you gain +1 to hit AND +1 attack AND +1 move action for each item that is threatened, up to 1/2 your level (rounding up . So a level 10 bookzerker gets +5 things they can do and can decide each as they wish. Only in effect while the item is in danger. (If you deliberately put it in danger then fucking shoot yourself, don’t play this class.) If you roll this again, add one to your total  of actions each time.

53-54“It belongs in a MUSEUM” Once per fight, as a free action you can grab an item of cultural/historical significance from someone adjacent to you. No roll or penalty. (Significance, i.e.  A Sword, no, but The Sword Of The King Of Tazadun, yes.)  roll this again and on a dex test they didn’t notice, 3 times and they definitely didn’t notice plus you get a free move action.

55-56 Bookclub/ Scrollknife You can roll up any scroll and turn it into an impromptu D4 weapon Jason-Bourne style. A book likewise. A big book you need two hands for becomes a d6 weapon, though that is less of a surprise. If it’s a magic book or scroll then the dice ‘explodes’ on a max roll. Add a die size every time you roll this result.

57-58 ‘Oh..  My… God’  The daVinci Mode. This carving on the wall, detail on the cup, marginal note, the sculptures eyes, concerto’s notation, the temples alignment, THE RAYS COMING FROM THE STAFF. It breaks the whole thing open, now you see what’s really going on. Once per game you can talk for exactly thirty seconds, no more, without pause or prep, about some detail you have found and how it REVEALS EVERYTHING. If the DM and players buy it, then can re-write reality equivalent to a limited wish spell. It must make sense in the context of the game.

59-60 Alexandrian Fire Brigade. You are really good at stopping things (and people) being on fire very very quickly. Books, buildings, city states. It scales up if you have the time and resources.  Roughly one second for a painting or book,  Takes about 10 seconds per man-sized-mass-equivalent. 

61-62 Curatorial Expertise. You can tell when any organised group of physical things is out of place or other than it should be given the system in which it is arranged. Books in a library, statues in a row, paintings in a gallery, knives in a cupboard. There must be five or more things. Time taken to inspect is relative to the size of the grouping. It tells you nothing else about the thing, what it is or why it is there. Not people, unless they are arranged like objects to an abstract logic. The assassin in a dancehall, no, one of the red queens playing-card guards, yes.

63-64 An Angel of Formaldehyde. Give you a jar big enough and a solid place to stand and you could pickle the world. You can pickle any dead once-living thing you find. Assuming you have a jar big enough and the chemicals.  If you take it home, every day of study will grant you some piece of knowledge about the thing. Up to your level. (Base expectation is a vulnerability or a +1 to hit or damage). If you only have part of a thing then it might take you more time or more examinations to works stuff out proportionate to the chunk that you have. As you increase in level you can go back to your old specimens and maybe find new things about them.

65-66 An Axe to Smash the Face of Time.  Time is the enemy of Librarians, a book is a stony dam in the torrent of Lethe, a museum is like the Hoover Dam. If carrying an Axe in Tragic circumstances (i.e. witness to things being subject to inevitable loss) then you may enter a screaming fit and hew your Axe into the face of Chronos. Chronos is currently incarnated,( in the manner of Moby Dick) as the people/things pissing you off at this particular moment. (It’s an Ahab thing). The Axe will wipe their memories. By smashing their fucking brains out of their head. Every blow is to the head of humanoid enemies, d20 damage each time. One fight per game. Add one for each time you roll this. Any survivors suffer amnesia. If you are not carrying an Axe, why not? Not even a small one? A tomahawk? What kind of librarian are you?

67-68 Five Thousand Furies in the Teeth of the Gods. You know the names of 5000 furies from scraping for weeks through broken cuneiform script. Well you sort of know them, you kind of forgot most and they blur a little into one after a while. If you can point at a person (or intelligent monster) and name correctly the thing they have done that would enrage the Kindly Ones then the Fury of that particular act will plunger out of the heavens and fill you with divine rage. So long as you are trying to kill that particular person. Plus (=your level) attacks and plus (=your level) damage for each hit so long as you fight that person. Pass out for minutes =your level after fight is over. Once per game for every time rolled. 

69-70 An oath of bone, and eye of stone. Your word is as a rock, and that rock is for caving skulls. You may single out one opponent whose name you know and describe in sonorous pseudo-celtic or plastic anglo-saxon verse, exactly how you will kill them in this fight. If you score a critical against them in this conflict, and if at all possible, the oath comes true. Once per game per times rolled. 

71-72 Raw Punk Hair. You get a new haircut and it looks punk as fuck. You now stand out as an opponent of Authority. Anyone who has been oppressed by the Man will find it hard to distrust you. Anyone working for the Man will peg you straight on as trouble. (Who the Man is shifts relative to circumstances). Hair effect disappears with skull shaving or a helmet, but reappears once the hair grows back or helmet (or hat) is removed. You will not change the hair. Why would you? +1 CHA to those opposed to authority each roll. No-one suspects you are a narc.

73-74 Sharp Motherfucker.  You look like a detective in an off-kilter tv series, a teacher who reads Vice magazine, a social worker whose sister owns a boutique.  Kind of a low-level vaguely beneficial authority figure who dresses really well. Police will trust you. The mayor likes you shoes. If you ask about the crime scene people will just assume you are supposed to know. You going to that thing later? +1 CHA to authority figures each time, plus no questions at the door. (if you roll both Raw Punk Hair and Sharp Motherfucker then you will confuse the fuck out of people, you can decide how people take you, but you better act the part, you also look amazing).

75-76 Dewy Decimal Deathsong.  As your life bleeds from you, in a flurry of doomstruck blows you categorise the fuck out of everything you can see. Add your WIS and INT modifiers together. When at half hit points or below, you may have this many extra attacks per round, so long as you (the player) shout the category of each individual thing you are hitting as you (the character) swing. Once per game. Plus once for every  time you roll this.

77-78 Flynnsertion. One per fight, as a free action, you can grab a rope or curtain or chain or anything like that and freely swing anywhere it could reasonably take you. If you are swinging into danger, there is no roll involved. If trying to get out of danger, roll your DEX, unless you are carrying a book away from someone who shouldn’t have it. Once per fight every time you reroll this.

78-79 ‘lefthanded writer,  just ate lunch, hates his mother’  You can analyse handwriting, ink types, paper scars, all kinds of pseudo forensic bullshit. Reading any piece of handwritten text lets you describe/discover nouns and adjectives equal to your level about the writer. If you get it wrong (if the identity is already set in game) then the DM has to give you the correct word.

80-81 We Have Heard of Those Princes Heroic Campaigns. You remember these guys from somewhere.. When confronted with a high level noble, king, merchant house, church, guild or equivalent you can recall the real story as to where they come from, they source of their power, it rarely what they say it is. The DM must provide any and all information about this family/organisation. The information must be at least 100 years old. Once per game per roll.

82-83 Chomskarian Rhetoric. With an opposed CHA vs WIS roll and a long (an hour at least) conversation, you can use reductive logic, carefully chosen evidence and shocking confidence to  temporarily  convince low level members of any group that EVERYTHNG THEY KNOW IS WRONG. Up is down, black is white, THEY are US. Wears off after a day or so. Once per game per roll.

83-84 Divine Mandala Telephone. Pick a god of knowledge or writing from the setting or from real history. You know them. You don’t necessarily worship them. They don’t necessarily like you or owe you anything. But you know them and can contact them by making a complex mandala of special sand (takes d6 – DEX mod hours and no wind or interruption)

85-90 ‘dammn my eyes’ Your eyes are fucked, you now need glasses to see. Roll this twice and your glasses can see one thing normal glasses can’t (Infrared, ghosts etc) Add one thing for each time you roll this result. Make sure to clean them carefully after each blood-spattered brainbashing.

91 My Axe is my Bookmark. +1 Str to racial max, excess goes to Str or Con.

92 You are the steely-eyed one at the end of the bar. +1 Wis to racial max, excess goes to Int or Cha.

93 Reading pays off. +1 Int to racial max, excess goes to Wis or Cha. Note: You look no smarter.

94 You actually DO know what you’re talking about. +1 Cha. to racial max, excess goes to Wis or Int.

95-96 Cartographers guild party crasher You were at this party, with these map guys, you think, you were pretty drunk. Anyway they had this map that looked a bit like where we are now. Probably…  Player can close their eyes and draw, with pencil, and their off hand, one thing on the DM’s map. It’s probably there, or roughly there. Something like that anyway. Once per game per roll.

97-98 I only read the action scenes You actually read a prophecy about this exact event ages ago somewhere, actually you skipped most of it and you forgot how it ends but the death scenes were really specific. 2+ save against the next thing that would have killed you as you suddenly remember what it was. Of course now the prophecy is useless because you broke it. Once for each reroll.

99-100 Marcus Brody You have a Brody,

 an excellent, decent, civilised, knowledgeable friend at home. They consistently advise you no to go on adventures. They will never (no matter how much the Dm wants them to) betray you. If you make it home wounded or broken they will patch you up. They will look after your stuff while you are not around. If you are captured and they hear about it they will bravely (and stupidly) set out to rescue you. This rescue will, amazingly, considering how utterly useless they are at adventuring, be successful. As soon as you are rescued, the Brody will themselves be captured by someone horrible. Should you fail to rescue them, they will be killed. Who’s going to look after your stuff now you self-centred piece of shit?

And you get this

‘Another piece for the collection’ You have a place, somewhere, it’s safe. Like a small off the beaten track museum, library or gallery. You can keep your stuff there (reasonably) safe from DM interference. Name it.

For each exhibit of a type (sword, vase, picture, style, era, genre, author, smith.) retrieved and preserved safely by you. Once per game you may assess any item of that type. Roll a percentage dice.

-if the first d10 is under the number retreieved, the price, makup, creator, likely owner and any other mundane information within reason are known.

-if the 2 d10s, taken as a 2-digit number, are lower than the total slain, you know EVERYTHING that may be useful about that item. Including magical effects, strange conspiracies, likelt plot relavence e.t.c

Identicals or multiple mundane examples don't count, max is 90, collected after that just goes to bragging rights at your FLGS.

GMs are free to determine what constitutes a "type", Librarians are free to bore everyone by buying endless books in little second hand shops for no reason just to notch up, and the other players are free to have a little talk with them if they abuse these rights and perhaps should view them doing so as a nice little red flag.