Faction Prompt: The Stilyard

The Stilyard deal in luck, morality, and free will.

In return, you incur a debt to be paid. This is not a debt of coin, but a debt of choice. You owe them a moment of your free will.

You won't find them at city markets, nor do they have shops. The Stilyard keeps themselves hard to find, accessible only to those who truly have the drive to seek them out. Those that find them and those they seek out are a special clientele - individuals that live lives filled with harsh decisions, drastic action, and catastrophic failures.

Goals

The Stilyard's true objectives are hard to determine, but there are clues in their transactions. They trade free will for control, luck for finality, chaos for order. The Stilyard wants to see the world on a script, with each line pre-rehearsed and each part played correctly. Whilst it presents itself as a neutral party, it is an inherently Lawful Neutral faction, for the only payment it seeks is the ability to determine how events will play out. What exactly the final end point is is unknown, potentially even to the Stilyard themselves. But there is a degree of comfort in knowing where all the players in life's stage will fall, what their lines will be, and how things will end before the curtains fall.

Individuals that work for the Stilyard can apply to have their own choices and goals taken into consideration when payment is due - the degree of influence they have increases with the amount of dealings they make. In return, their power over decisions can only be used at the authorisation of the faction as a whole.

Cuombajj Witches by Seb McKinnon

Mechanics

Members of the Stilyard can provide two primary forms of service. Firstly, they can alter alignment (if such a mechanic exists in your game). Depending on the system, this may be a percentage/value reduction or a binary change, depending on whether the relevant mechanic is analogue or digital.

Secondly, they can sell luck. Mechanically speaking, they sell a predetermined dice roll to the player, which they can use to replace a roll of their choice, after which it is expended. For D&D 5e, this would allow them to replace an ability check, saving throw, or attack roll. Treat this as if the player is using the divination wizard's Portent ability.

In return, they seek control of a player's luck or free will in the future. For a dice roll, the Stilyard may choose the player to succeed or fail on a dice roll that would directly or indirectly benefit the Stilyard. The DM can either choose such a roll based on the action's consequences, or roll a d20 (or d100) and then determine that, in that number of rolls, the Stilyard makes its move. The roll the Stilyard chooses can either be proportional to the player's dice roll (e.g. a 1 for a 20, a 5 for a 15, a 3 for a 17 etc) or could be rolled immediately after the transaction is made.

For an alignment shift, the Stilyard requires a heavier price to be paid: 1d8 hours of a character's free will. There is no saving throw for this control.

d10	What the Stilyard does with your free will
1	You sign a devil's contract with your own blood
2	You march into a courtroom as a surprise witness
3	You set up an assassination for a passing noble
4	You tell a beloved friend the truth they needed to hear
5	You donate half your carried wealth to a noble cause
6	You deliver a package to someone in a back alley, then drink to forget
7	You allow a spirits to inhabit your body
8	You act as messenger for other Stilyard clients
9	You witness a brutal, unforgivable crime... and walk away.
10	Nothing seems to change from what you would normally do

Inspired by the Mann, Levinn, and Lewis Firm from Wildbow's Pact series.

Faction Prompt: Gorgon Templars

I was sent this post recently, and having both a soft spot for bullet point worldbuilding and gorgons, I wanted to have a go at expanding on this concept a bit.

The tale of Saint Orabella is one of martyrdom and monsters: her homeland decayed under the weight of their corpulence and corruption. Distraught at what she saw, Orabella prayed to take on the sins of her people so that they may be given a chance to start anew and redeem themselves. In doing so, she was transformed into a gorgon, and her church cast her out as a monster. Orabella held onto her faith for the rest of her life, until another saint slew her as part of their journey.

Knights that seek to emulate Saint Orabella - to take on the burdens and sins of those around them, to endure deformity and exile for their faith and the betterment of others - may find themselves entering her sect. Entering her cathedral, they are watched by stone sentries, their faces wrought with looks of defiance, endurance, and exhaustion. The cathedral's interior is plain. At the far end, an altar awaits its worshipers; held atop in the caring hands of a headless statue is a relic, covered in a thin veil of silk.

The severed head of Orabella.

Medusa Head by Shafiq Cromwell

Initiation into the Sect of Saint Orabella requires each knight to gaze into the eyes of their saint and endure her stare. To the knights, petrification and the power it brings is as much a symbol as a real affliction. For them, it is a physical representative of the burdens one has to bear and the temptations one must resist in order to be a good person. Those that are petrified give in to these temptations and cannot carry their burdens, whilst those that endure are able to push them back... for a while. In time, they too shall fall victim to the curse and join their brothers and sisters as stone guardians of the cathedral.

Exactly why this happens has been interpreted in many ways. Some argue that temptation is not something that can be resisted forever by mere mortals, and the petrification takes its hold over all because they are simply human (or whatever other species they may be). Others claim that the 'blessing' of their saint is simply a curse given by a monster, and that the knights are clearly deluded for seeking power from a monster's affliction.

The knights bear their marks with subtlety at first. Their eyes look weary, sometimes reddened and weeping. Their joints ache and muscles tense without provocation. Though their skin may be clean and youthful from the constant use of healing salves, the smell of alchemical ingredients clings to their body, and over application may stain their skin in time. It is this staining and reliance on alchemists that has led to this sect being ousted in the past; few alchemists are willing to withhold details of their clients when a templar inquisition is at their doorstep.

The excommunication and imprisonment of these knights has been kept a close secret, for knowledge of splintering within the templars - or that this splintering was due to the praise of a saint turned monster - would do little to aid their efforts in maintaining control and praise of the common folk. Justifying bloodshed and raiding in the name of their lord is hard enough without including severed heads and petrification into the mix.

Faction Prompt: the Dreambreakers

A bit of a shorter post today- just want to get ideas down onto a page so I can work on them later when I have more mental energy.

Beholder dreams warp reality. To dream of another beholder creates more beholders; to dream of blood loss creates a death kiss. Many have speculated as to where beholders go in their slumber, by what power they can bring new life into reality, and whether this power is solely limited to a beholder-like manifestation.

Enter the Dreambreakers*.

Mages and psychics. All working to decode the psyche of beholders, to access their dreams and probe them in the desired direction.

Their large scale methodology is simulations. Sometimes simulations within simulations. Interacting with the beholder's subconscious, interpreting the characters and setting to gain further insight and access. There they travel as shades of their past selves, warped by the beholder's madness and subconscious influence.

The Dreambreakers of course must have beholders to indulge their research, and precautions against their physical forms being destroyed by whatever entities the beholder dreams up. Some choose to infiltrate beholder cults and organisations, acting as servants to get close to their aberrant masters. Others hire adventurers to incapacitate beholderkin, or to find weakened and diseased individuals that can be easier to exploit.

Conflicts are frequent. Different people interpreting dream aspects often results in mixed views. This conflict and tension ripples through into the dreams, which in turn shape the dream itself. Little is truly hidden within the dreams of the beholder.

As the members enter the dreams, they too may be dreamt into existence. These copies are mostly the same. They hate their originals, and will seek their immediate destruction. The Dreambreakers are aware of this- they all have their own copies to hide from, small gangs of not-entirely-themselves that seek their deaths. They also have experience encountering (but not stopping) the other entities their experiments bring into the physical world.

*Dreambreaker is a sucky name and I need to come up with a better one if I ever intend to use this in an actual game presented to players I respect.

Heads of Lerna

Based on some brainstorming for a cult dedicated to the Lernaean Hydra.

Awakened Hydra by Artur Treffner

The Heads of Lerna are cultists that treat the hydra as their totem and idol. They provide her with protection (from her perspective, they provide a distraction for those wanting to disturb her slumber), food, and treasure, and in return the hydra provides the tools for the cult's machinations: her poison.

The toxins of the hydra emanate from everything: blood, tears, saliva, breath, shit. All of it is toxic, most of it is lethal. The cultists have gained resistance over time to the noxious fumes she produces, but her blood is still dangerous. Most of the toxins they take from her come through saliva and waste products, or collecting the water that she wallows in.