This is information for a semi-successful, semi-abortive campaign I ran off and on for a handful of denizens of the double-concealed exclusive invite-only GLOG server between January and June of this year. I reproduce it here for your edification, that you may learn from my failures.

UNTO THE CRUEL

In early 2025⸻the official account at the time went⸻CIA occultists, working in concert with TSMC researchers, opened a portal to Hell(?) in Hsinchu, Taiwan province in a grossly irresponsible attempt to upset the strategic balance of the region. The government immediately acted in accordance with international law to contain this threat, but was regrettably foiled by the outbreak of unrestricted nuclear, magical, and conventional war. The People's Liberation Army and state-level armed police forces were quickly pushed back from the coasts, and eventually routed entirely.

It is presently early January, 2026. Communications infrastructure and state capacity have completely broken down. The status of the rest of the world is unknown. You have fled to, or lived all along in, a small village in Kashgar Prefecture, which was until very recently fortified by local authorities and relatively secure against demonic incursion.

I say "until very recently" because, last night, your player characters received a revelatory vision in which an indistinct-but-humanoid being formed of golden light spoke to you of a divine pattern, a circuitry which could, if brought into being at the hellmouth, bind all fiends and banish them from the earth forever. It bade you look upon its face, and there you saw a fragment of its glory! Then, it turned away and warned you of imminent attack. You awoke already springing from your bed, knowing the truth of its words and armored by them against panic⸻which was fortunate, as you had very little time to escape.

So, the objective then: A roadtrip across modern, but post-demon-apocalypse, China to reach the TSMC fabs in Taiwan and close the hellmouth. Fighting demons and the possessed all the way.

Rules

This campaign was run with the GROG rules, the modern fiddly firearms rules, and the following modifications. If you wish to pilfer or steal any part of it to run with your own system, you have (but don't need!) my blessing, but those are the assumptions the rest of the content was written with.

Expanded Cover Rules

prone at a distance/leaning around a corner/mattress/car door/other 'soft cover': +2 AC
chest-high wall/pallet of curiously oversized 55-gallon drums/car engine block/etc (default case): +4 AC
purpose-built firing position/small window and elevation/prone at a distance plus cover/threading two corners: +6 AC
gun port or firing slit sufficient to significantly restrict vision: +8 AC

Also, because armor doesn't give AC here, attacks against prone folk from real close up have advantage.

Encounter Table

1. Corpses

2. Animals

3. Demons

4. Alive people

1. Regular folk

2. Banditos, or otherwise armed and organized non-governmental forces

3. Government remnants

4. Possessed :fearful:

5. Foreign invaders

6. Roll twice and combine

Demon/Possessed Reaction Table

2-7. Attack immediately

8-10. Horror movie bullshit, toying with prey

11-12. Non-immediately-violently hostile, lying, insulting

Demon Stats

As dog, as man, as bear, as ogre, et c. Every demon has a special ability or spell, related to their name. Some example demons (I wrote all of these myself. Especially the good ones. Friends-of-the-blog archon court, mi hau, and deus ex parabola didn't help at all):

Hangnail
Cigarette
Cryptocurrency
Domestic Violence
Asbestos

a little freak, rough ivory skin, buboes, long droopy nose, about 24" tall, arms bound to his sides with dental floss. He can create a choking cloud of dust (or be bullied into other simple tasks) with MD.

Sodapop
Stress Fracture
Missing The Bus
Choking
Stonewool

HD 1, three feet tall, three feet wide, very low density, lower body squozen into a fishbowl (2 slots). He can abrade objects in a fashion which is annoying but non-damaging to living creatures, and moderately destructive to the inanimate.

Seep
Lesion
Microplastics

HD 5, 8' tall, hulking deep blue hairless ape, sheds microplastic shards like sweat, may spew the same as an action to form a concealing cloud or deal 2d4 sandblasting damage (dex half) in a 30' cone. wields the gunmace - a massive weapon, five or six type 95 assault rifles melted into a ball, barrels and sights and magazines poking out to concentrate force, attacks with disadvantage when wielded by a human because it's big and unwieldy

Cholera
Nepotism
Invasive Species
Speeding
Simony
Short-Form Video Content

HD 1, 6" tall, sickly phlegm-yellow, funny cartoon demon face, wrapped securely from armpits to ankles in jute twine, hung from Professor Genius's neck like an amulet - mesmerizes single target (one at a time max.) for [sum] rounds, save for [dice]

Misogyny

HD 3, 4' 6" tall, lurid hot pink, four pendulous breasts (fourfoldedly radially symmetrical), done up in cheap rope shibari (professor genius is a pervert) with hands bound together - i don't know what he does as a spell, probably nothing useful

Punctured Lung

HD 4, 6' tall, dull bloody magenta, muscular with rib-points exposed through chest wounds, chained and padlocked - [sum] damage, save or lose your second action for the rest of the day (i.e. move or act on your turn)

Malaria
Smallpox
Dysentery
Aneurysm
Indigence
Dysphoria
Alienation
Indifference
Car-Centric Urban Design
Invasive Advertisement
Regulatory Capture

4 HD. a business suit and mind-control-helmet combo walking as if occupied by an invisible person. talks in circles and circles and circles and circles. grapples you and then puts itself onto you and replaces your priorities with rampant greed, short-sighted self-interest, and restoring American glory.

Concrete Lake

6 HD, 3 feet tall but ten feet wide, undersea bug made of rebar with a statue's face. a [dice]*100 foot area becomes uninhabitable for [sum] hours - dealing [dice] damage a round to those within via radiation poisoning, spontaneous generation of toxic compounds within the body, and omnipresent cutting dust

Someone Waving At You So You Wave Back At Them But They Were Actually Waving At Someone Behind You
Falling Down Stairs
Dead Battery
Misfiled Paperwork

6 HD, a vast ticking typewriter-spider, spinning a web of ink-ribbons out one end and carrying it across its many legs to be devoured into the other. Swap two randomly-determined numbers on your character sheet

Dropping Your Keys Through A Grate Where You Can't Reach Them
Spilled Beverage
Tunelessness
Blackout
White Phosphorus
Used Needle

1 HD, made entirely out of glass with graduated-cylinder lines. filled with greenish-reddish Ominous Liquid. Restores [best] HP but also make a save with a [best] penalty or get tetanus or something. If turned upside down or smashed near the bottom, all the Ominous Liquid falls out and runs away and they transform into... (see below)

Medical Supply Shortage

3 HD, no one can regain HP as long as it is looking at them, stalks you for days to wear you down

Torn Apart By Wild Dogs

4 HD but they're d4s and are damaged individually, four disembodied limbs and a hovering biting dogjaw, [dice] target animals are given a point of rage and driven to wrath.

Internet Flamewar
Unknown Reference
Tardiness
Flour Mill Explosion
Degloving
Tetanus
Design By Committee
Spontaneous Human Combustion
Locusts
Cavity
Pica
Predatory Loan
Sinkhole
Sex Tourism
Halitosis
Suicidal Ideation
Organ Failure
Tapeworm
High Pressure Sales Tactics
Hostile Work Environment
Personnel Stack Ranking
Looming Deadline
Antivaccination Movement
Claustrophobia

You see the theme, I'm sure. They're just, bad things. Pick a bad thing, pick some stats, write their spell.

Further Errata

Unarmed strikes deal 1+STR damage, unless you're a martial-arts-knower (a skill) or so on, then 1d4+STR.

Light armor is 2 slots carried, 0 slots worn
Medium armor is 4 slots carried, 2 worn, slows you by 5'/round, and requires you to make STR checks to climb, leap, or swim.
Heavy armor is 6 slots carried, 4 worn, slows you by 10'/round, requires the above, and causes sinking or falling on any failure.

Suffused by the power of your divine(?) patron, Serious Wounds heal or (for permanent ones) can be compensated for in 1d6 ingame days.

XP Rules

Characters gain:

25 xp per session attended.
20 xp per friend made.
20 xp per HD of demons (or possessed) defeated, divided by present party members.
xp equal to 450 minus one-tenth of the distance in kilometers between Hsinchu City, Taiwan and the nearest point the party has ever reached to it, regardless of whether or not the character was present at that point.

The last point was based on the idea that the campaign started in western Xinjiang, about 4,500 kilometers from Taiwan. We'll talk about that a little more later. You should scale the mileage xp accordingly by start location, if you attempt to imitate me.

The XP structure heavily incentivizes killing, binding, or exorcising demons and the possessed, but by design gives no xp for human opponents. This actually played out really well in at least one instance during the campaign, where the party got heavily invested in out-tactics-gaming a scared US Army soldier they had cornered in a dormitory only to be crestfallen upon their victory when they realized that they had killed but a man. :rleie:

The Mad Queen's Court

Sunday, June 15, 2025

Unto The Cruel (campaign setting, GLOG classes, gamerunning musing)