Pages

Monday, December 23, 2019

Secret Santicorn 2019: The Shellcraze

So every December, the OSR Discord runs a Secret Santa where we all throw in our names, a quick prompt, and get someone's prompt to fulfill. This was my first Secret Santicorn, and I hope I've delivered! ambnz's response to my prompt was fantastic, and can be found here: Skyscraper Mimics

semiurge requested the following: The latest fashion craze (refer to: tulip mania, ostrich feather boom) has made an unusual and inconvenient-to-get commodity into a valuable treasure (while it lasts). What is the commodity? What are the lengths people must go to get it? Who stands to lose the most when the market crashes? And so on and so on"

I'm setting this in the Meatropolis because it could always use more development! And it seems to be compelling enough that others won't mind.


The hatcheries of Ogoath's many wombs bear bitter, mutant fruit. Turtletomas, stillborn or soon-to-die, shatter their eggsacs and plummet into the benighted abyss of stars. Some are plain, pallid, twisted things. Others have shells that shine like gems: brilliant, cold, vibrant, twinkling. It is the latter that now possess the attentions of the idle nutrient-rich of the Meatropolis's fleshcrafter houses. This season's fashion trend is turtletoma gem-shell, and it adorns every eligible heir's clothes to a dazzling degree.

Gem-shell is worn in jewelry, or as charms, or bracers, or studded into flesh. Cloaks are woven out of thinly pounded castoff dust; the odd fully-intact shell forms a pauldron or even is worn alone. A minor heir may have teeth replaced with shell, or fake eyes, or horns. A fleshcraft liege these days goes nowhere without a full assortment of shell trinkets like stained glass, in their house's ancestral colors. They jingle as they walk. The louder the better, so as to alert the masses that their better approaches.

Living turtletomas grow scarce these days. The shellcraze has driven hundreds of enterprising adventurers to the hatcheries, and Ogoath's corpse can no longer bear young. While millions of eggs in every stage of development form great walls of eggsac, adventurers are tenacious and endlessly inventive. They crack the shells by the dozen, extracting the stillborn fetal turtletomas and checking their shells for rare patterns. Most are discarded; perhaps 1 in a hundred is worth bringing to market. The few that resist are made short work of, like clubbing seal pups in aeons past.

There were people in the hatcheries long before the shellcraze. Turtle-breeders and turtle-riders in villages of eggshell, caring for the few hatchlings they found and nursing them to health. Some have decided to capitalize on the new trend, flash-growing and mutating strains into ever-brighter patterns - even custom-growing them to nobles' specifications. Of course, this has led to a cottage industry of stealing and sabotaging each others' designer turtletomas, and adventurers are always looking for more work. This has started to destabilize the strains, however, and many have made this their entire business. When the shellcraze ends, they'll be ruined. And the rampant experimentation with mutations and new patterns is hard to control - new, dangerous mutations aren't uncommon with such quick work.

Patterns
1. Bladed; while plain it's sharp around the edges to the point where you could use it as a combat discus.
2. Bloodsoaked. The stains won't come out. It keeps leaking, as the marrow inside continues to pump even after death.
3. Fractal pattern (d4 for which: 1. mandelbrot, 2. julia, 3. sierpinski triangles, 4. koch snowflake)
4. Furred, the turtletoma's shell mutated to be covered in a layer of incredibly soft hair.
5. Gridded (flip a coin for whether it's hex or square)
6. Jagged and broken, a confusing dissonance of bright clashing colors
7. Map of the Old World
8. Metallic sheen (d6 for metal: 1. gold, 2. silver, 3. copper, 4. platinum, 5. mirrored, 6. cobalt); while it's not actually metal, it happens to be magnetic
9. Pareidolium; the features on the shell resolve into a snarling mortal face - it may look like someone important...
10. Piped, like an organ. When wind passes through, it produces dissonant tones.
11. Rocky and speckled like granite.
12. Single gem, to be cut and polished (d8 for which: 1. diamond, 2. ruby, 3. emerald, 4. sapphire, 5. topaz, 6. opal, 7. smoky quartz, 8. amethyst)
13. Snakeskin
14. Solid matte color
15. Spotted with polka-dots like a ladybug's carapace
16. Stained-glass mural depicting an event from the turtle's genetic memory
17. Starry, a void filled with a swirl of shining pinpricks that gleam with an inner light
18. Striped between d6 colors
19. Unadorned bone. Sometimes simplicity is elegance.
20. Words and letters cover the shell in a bizarre script. Translated, it may carry secrets, or hidden magics.

The shellcraze has given rise to other nascent trends. Shellomancy, divining someone's future from the shells they wear and how they catch the light of a burning turtlefat candle, casting undulating shadows on the wall. Counterfeit shells, fleshcrafted from whatever spare bone lies around, and a variety of "professionals" who purport to tell the different between the fakes and the real thing (often, they run a thriving counterfeit shop on the side). Defrauding the nutrient-rich has always been a favorite pastime of the Meatropolis, and every new fashion is merely a new coat of paint for every old scam.

Everything ends. The shellcraze is no exception, as greater terrors rise. The hatcheries are an ecosystem, even in death. The half-formed spirits of the millions dead animate swarms of corpses into hurricanes of cheap shell and turtleflesh. Hydratomas break free of deeper eggs, seeking the newly-liberated food with their under-developed clusters of eyes and snapping beaks-within-beaks. Scores of adventurers plummet to their deaths before the day's harvest is done, and soon only the luckiest and most well-prepared survive. Shell spirals in rarity to the point where even the rich dare not bother with it - they've moved on to artisanal custom-grown masses of grey matter.

Monday, December 16, 2019

Wizards Die Messily



Wizards aren't stable. I think this post speaks for itself pretty well; magical catastrophes are a staple of the arcane arts and there's so many different ways for things to go wrong that are more interesting than "rocks fall, everyone dies". Not all the explosion effects kill - but all of them will do something nasty.

Reasons a Wizard (or Warlock, or Sorcerer, or Witch, etc) Might Explode
1. Angered the gods
2. Ascended to the astral plane
3. Ate something funny
4. Bred two spells together that hate each other
5. Captured a spell that overwhelmed their brain
6. Cast a Wish spell and fucked up
7. Died with too many spells in their brain
8. Failed a save (pick a save, any save)
9. Lost a wizard duel
10. Orgasmed
11. Patron wants to punish them
12. Purposely triggered it just to see what happens
13. Read the spellbook backwards
14. Research gone horribly wrong
15. Ritual components were wrong
16. Rolled quadruples on casting a spell
17. Someone walked up behind them and shouted "Boo!"
18. Spell mutated too many times
19. Tried to channel too much power
20. Tried to finagle the laws of magic

d66 Ways a Wizard Explodes
11. Angelic Ascension. The wizard shines with inner divine light and ascends to become a terrifying angelic figure, growing more eyes and wings out of every pore. Save or fall to your knees singing hymns; everyone who witnesses the event is now part of a religion whether they like it or not. They'll be held to the same demands and standards as everyone else who follows that deity.
12. Birdsplosion. Everything that isn't animate for d10*10' around the wizard turns into a bird and flocks to attack people in the area (thanks, Hitchcock!). The swarm as a whole has like 5 HD, takes up a [radius] area, and gets to attack everyone in the radius once each turn. It can fly around at the speed of birds.
13. Bismuth. The wizard crystallizes and metastasizes. Oily rectangular rainbows of sharpened bismuth cut through the air itself, rooting themselves into the ground and everyone within d10*10'. 2d6 piercing damage (save for half) and pinned to the spot. Removing the bismuth that's pierced through you is going to be a challenge.
14. Bloodsplosion. Everyone within d10*10' is soaked in scalding blood (d6 fire damage, no save) as the wizard is violently exsanguinated. Anything bloodborne is contracted (no save). The wizard instantly drops to as near-death as the system you're using allows. Everything's soaked through in blood, destroying all papers and writing. You can't get the blood out of any items affected, no matter how hard you try.
15. Bone Rebellion. The skeleton war has come and you're ground zero. d20 of each bone-haver within d10*100's bones squirm their way out of their body and assemble into a great bone golem with 1 HD for each person exboneguinated. It wants the rest of your bones, and gains another hit die for every human-sized person it kills and exboneguinates. Can cast Debone once per round.
16. Cancer. The wizard's flesh boils and ruptures, reduplicating explosively to encompass a d10*100' sphere. Save to run. If you fail, you are engulfed in pulsing flesh that crushes inwards for d6 bludgeoning damage each round until someone can free you. The wizard takes 1 Stress every time their new horrible flesh is cut at, though they lose no hit points. They can try to control it by making Charisma tests, though if they fail it will act against their wishes.

21. Chain Detonation. Everything within d10*10' explodes in shrapnel, taking 3d6 damage. Everything destroyed this way deals 2d6 damage to everything within the same radius of it. Continue, decreasing the number of d6 each time until you run out of d6s.
22. Clonesplosion. Everyone within d10*10' is cloned d3 times. Each clone is d6. (1. evil, 2. more good than the PC, 3. different race, 4. different class, 5. different appearance, 6. roll twice).
23. Compulsive Murder. For everyone within d10*100' for d20 days, to gain the benefits of a rest you must murder someone.
24. Dataclysm. All information within d10*100' is wiped. Lose all backstory, name, XP, and return to level 1. You no longer know why you are here or what you are doing or who your allies are. All books and other methods of information storage are wiped as well.
25. Dinosaur. Summon a tyrannosaurus rex from 65 million years ago. You have saved it from certain death; it responds with the only thing it knows - hunger. It's basically a walking, feathery, dragon, so stat it up as such. It will eat, cronch, and swallow you whole. Armor is no match for a mouthful of six-inch enamel knives. The unfortunate wizard begins in its jaws.
26. Ennui. Everyone within d10*100' feels an inescapable wave of existential "why bother"? Charisma save to take additional actions past the first one - this applies to rounds, exploration turns, hexcrawling, etc. Wears off when you succeed your third Charisma save this way.

31. Escher Explosion. Each opening within a d10*1000' radius now leads to a different, random opening within the space (can be outside the radius). This includes pouches, but not orifices. If two openings have a size difference, anything passing through is rescaled accordingly.
32. Everyone Reincarnates. Make new level 1 characters. Randomly roll for everything; don't get equipment. They wake up in the bloody shreds of each previous character.
33. Everyone's a Wizard Now. The wizard collapses into a pile of robes and teeth. Everyone in the vicinity now has a chunk of the wizard's magical power and a corresponding little copy of the wizard's mind in their head. It'll chime in with bad advice, but you have 1 MD and can cast one spell the wizard used to know.
34. Flesh-Eating Bacteria. Everyone within d10*10' contracts a bad case of incredibly contagious and virulent flesh-eating bacteria on a random area of their body. Save each round or take d6 necrotic damage. It ends once the bacteria are removed or you succeed three times. Anyone you touch contracts it too (no save).
35. Fountain of Youth. The wizard transmutes into a well of antitemporal thaumatic energy, reversing the age of everything within d10*10' by d20 years. Things reduced to 0 or fewer years of age undisintegrate, never having existed. Touching the well after the initial burst of energy ages you by d20-10 years the first time (so +/- 10 years); each additional time roll an additional d20 and subtract an additional 10. The well lasts for years equal to the wizard's age at time of explosion.
36. Fusion. Everything within d10*10' must save or be fused into a horrifying monstrosity. The wizard doesn't get a save. Each round, everyone in the monstrosity gets to collectively vote either democracy or anarchy.  If democracy wins, a plurality of minds get to choose what they do, and if there is no plurality then nothing happens. If anarchy wins, everyone must come to a unanimous consensus within 1 minute or the turn is allocated randomly to one mind of the monstrosity.

41. God Says No. The effect that caused the explosion stops. The wizard stops. Everyone within d10*100' stops. A voice informs you, loudly and politely, that what you've done is not allowed. Time is rewound to before you considered doing such a thing, and that effect is no longer possible.
42. Gun. The wizard is transmuted into a random legendary gun (see Vault Hunter rules here) and becomes its onboard machine-spirit. It must kill something every day to remain intelligent.
43. Lightning! A massive lightning strike obliterates the wizard (4d6 lightning damage, no save) and scars everyone nearby (2d6 lightning damage within d10*10', save for half). Metal objects are charged with static electricity and remain so for the next 24 hours, attracting or repelling other metal objects (50% chance of each) as well as discharging when touched with bare skin (1 lightning damage).
44. Magic Dead Zone. d10*100' radius sphere becomes an anti-magic zone. Magical creatures, items, and effects persist for 10 minutes in the zone before disintegrating.
45. Mindbomb. Everyone randomly passes their character sheet to another character (including NPCs, hirelings, monsters, etc).
46. Miniature Sun. For 10 minutes, the wizard shines with the light of a sun. This magically leaves the wizard unharmed, but melts everything on their body. This also blinds permanently and deals 4d6 radiation damage to everyone within 10', blinds save ends and deals 3d6 damage within 100', and save vs. blinding (save ends) and deals 2d6 damage within 1000'.

51. Mutations! Everyone within d10*100' rolls d100s on the mutation table until they roll a positive mutation (they get all the mutations they roll).
52. Paintbomb. Roll 8 times on the Esoteric Colors table. Each cardinal direction is soaked in one of those colors for a d10*10' long cone. The wizard is coated in all 8.
53. Seeking Spores. The wizard's body sprouts with fungus that reaches for everyone within d10*100'. The spores are paralytic (save negates) and will grow rapidly once they encounter biomass. This weighs you down by 1 inventory slot, doubling every round until you're immobilized. Then you start taking damage as they crush you (d6 bludgeoning per round). The spores can be neutralized with fire, water, acid, etc - but there's lots of them, and growing fungi will release more spores.
54. Spellified. As a 4-die Spellify, applied to everyone within d10*100' of the wizard (they end up in the wizard's brain). They can interact in the wizard's mindscape (see Cavegirl's Astral Projection rules for how this might look).
55. Tear Open a Portal in Time. A d10*10' radius circle below the wizard becomes a portal in time to a random prehistoric era and everyone in the circle falls through. It lasts for 1 hour.
56. Teleport. Find the nearest thing that passes for a map in your campaign; whether it's the dungeon map, city map, region hex-map, world map... or sketch something quick. Then, throw a dart at it (drop a pencil if you don't have darts on hand). Everyone in the party teleports there.

61. There's a Crater Here Now! It's d10*1000' in radius. Good job. Everyone gets shunted to the outside and saves vs. being pulped by the air friction.
62. Transmuted into X. The wizard and everyone within d10*10' must save or become a random substance. Roll on the periodic table of elements, or a substance table of choice (see Mimics and Miscreants' spells section for mine). Dispel magic effects can return transmuted characters to their flesh-and-blood state.
63. Tunguska Event. Everything in a d10*1000' radius falls inwards. Save to remain standing. Stuff will fall on the characters; more saves as appropriate. The wizard, at the nexus of this shockwave, implodes for 6d6 bludgeoning damage (save for half).
64. Turn To Moon. Save vs. blindness as the wizard turns into a great orb of marble and ascends to the heavens. This absolutely obliterates anything in its path. You may save to jump off the new moon; if you succeed, roll a d10 to figure out how many d6s of falling damage you take. If you fail, you have about a minute of oxygen in your lungs. Make it count.
65. Uncontrollable Cackling. Everyone within d10*100' starts laughing uncontrollably. Save vs. suffocation, then unconsciousness, then 1d6 bludgeoning damage per round as your skeleton starts to shake apart with the force of your mirth. Passing a save ceases the cackling.
66. Vacuum. A d10*100' radius sphere around the wizard becomes airless for 10 minutes. Even the air in your lungs disappears. Every action in the bubble, without air, also requires a save vs. unconsciousness. You can survive 3 minutes without air in your lungs before irreversible brain damage. Good luck.

Tuesday, December 10, 2019

The Far Traveler

The Traveler is probably the class I'd like to run a mono-class game of the most, with something like a d100 list of locations and a caravan-based plot. Such is their design that they're very modular; they could work for practically any genre or setting - merely replace the Been There table with planets for a sci-fi game, or nations, or just other biomes familiar and strange.

Traveler
by Daarken

Level 1: Been There, Done That
Level 2: +1 Done That, We've Met (2 Contact Dice)
Level 3: +1 Done That, +1 Contact Die
Level 4: +1 Done that, +1 Contact Die

Hit Die: d6
Starting Equipment: Sturdy warm cloak, heavy boots, random melee weapon, leather gambeson, leather greaves, set of dice or cards, telescope, annotated map of surrounding lands and logbook
Skills (d20, roll twice): 
1. Animal Handling
2. Astrology
3. Banditry
4. Begging
5. Butchery
6. Cartography
7. Foraging
8. Fortune Telling
9. Herbology
10. Holding Liquor
11. Hunting
12. Languages
13. Medicine
14. Merchantry
15. Pilgrimage
16. Riding
17. Sailing
18. Surviving Improbably
19. Tinkering
20. Use Rope

Been There: Roll three times on the following table for exotic locations you've traveled through. If you roll a duplicate, instead pick from the results above and below it (or just roll until you get a unique result). Each comes with a corresponding perk. When in similar locations, or the locations themselves, you have advantage on wayfinding/navigation, know the dangers of the region and their tell-tale omens, and double your party's travel speed.

These locations are specific to the Meatropolis and the Turtle-Corpse. Make new ones or rename these ones to flavor your setting. Or don't, and just assume there's a gigantic meat wasteland somewhere out there (that might be more fun, tbh).

1. The Meatropolis. The last city in a world gone rotten, pretending it's somehow immune from the pervasive rot and decay. They haven't seen the Turtle like you have. They think they're safe in their bone-spires, protected from parasites and disease by their reliance on blood-iron. They talk a big game, but they're soft like unworked muscle. You never settled down there; you brought trophies from the rest of the Turtle and feasted for weeks on the resulting riches, then left drained and bare-footed once the spoils ran dry.

You have a debt of d10*d10*d10gp (or indentured servitude until you complete a task to recover something worth same), and begin at level 2. You cannot level up until you've paid off your debt.

2. Cyclopean Shell-Ruins. Vast halls carved for people twice as tall as you, now frosted over from exposure, condensation, and neglect. The howls of fleshcrafted creatures too stubborn to die (and giants snoring in their stored slumber, awaiting a war for their awakening) still resound across its barren shellscape. You still remember the stars twinkling their baleful songs high above, and the comforting loneliness of the jagged ice.

You can map spaces with echolocation. Reveals room shapes and hollow walls. Makes a high-pitched keening audible anywhere within the mapped range.

3. Arterial Lattices. The Turtle's disparate organs are stitched together by arteries and veins, each as thick around as the greatest towers of the old world. While the blood clots and drips away at Ogoath's extremities, auxiliary hearts continue their frenzied pumping - for now. You crewed a subsanguine, ferrying passengers and cargoes from organ to organ and port to port, dodging blood cells playing sentry, cancerkrakens, parasite bloodworms, and - of course - vampirates.

You can identify things by tasting their blood. Pick one of the following to learn when you do (can't get more than one kind of info per creature):
- Time since blood separated from owner
- You can recognize the owner by smell
- Types of recent stressors, afflictions, substances in the owner's blood

4. Fungal Forests. At the skin and scales and fins of the turtle, the rot has set in deep. Spores from the farthest stars have taken root, growing mycological ecosystems and spreading their roots far. They've become a hunting ground for their own mutant food chains, all ultimately scavenging the rancid yet omnipresent meat of Ogoath. Gasbags floating on toxic fumes, sinuous insects twisting their way through tall stalk-forests, rains of glimmering spores whose appearance belies their danger - it's a realm of plenty, and power, and beauty, and if you make even one wrong move you could get eaten by the very ground you walk on. You harvested exotic spores and sap and carapaces from the deadly alien ecosystem, touching the ground little more than once a week, rappeling between trees and hunting in the choked vertical maze of decay.

You can scale surfaces at your walking speed, and can catch yourself midway when you fall within arm's reach of a surface (roll a d6 to see how far you fall before catching yourself, 6 is near the top, 1 is near the bottom). You still take falling damage.

5. Incubator Fields. They boil with eggs, birthing and metastasizing and hatching. Orphaned turtletomas (as the mutant hatchlings are affectionately termed) flock in hunting packs through withered egg-tubes. They're good eating, and even better trained as pack-beasts, mounts, or pets. Your travels brought you here, to the lands where all disputes are settled with custom-bred turtles, and cities are hacked into the side of giant eggshells.

You have a pet turtletoma. It's the size and personality of a round, slow german shepherd and has d6 each of eyes, heads, tails, shells, and legs, as well as a random positive mutation. Whenever you level up, it gains a new positive or mixed mutation and a new hit die (d6).

6. Starfolk Refuges. In sheer metal, woven and forged, dotting Ogoath's underbelly, lie the Refuges. Generation ships from worlds that ended long ago, seeking a new world undying. They failed in their quest, but bring strange devices and creations to the Turtle which may someday prove its salvation - or its final doom. You learned some ship of starfolk's tricks, and lived among them for a time, swathed in iron, breathing through a mask.

You speak a star-language. You have whatever new organs are needed to speak it - mandibles, internal gizzards, hooting membranes... The star-languages are spoken by certain starfolk, and carry the force of the dominions of stars with them. No lies can be spoken in star-language, and creatures from the stars will respond to it instinctively (if not necessarily positively).

7. Gigaparasite Corpse. The whalefall (turtlefall?) of Ogoath's death brought forth the vast gigapredators and scavengers between the stars. They gorged themselves and burrowed deep; some remain chewing through the bounty, others were brought down by heroic (Pyrrhic) effort when they encroached on people's homes. The corpses themselves often became shantytowns, where undesirables were sent to hack apart the star-hardened carapace and convert it into weapons. You traveled through a corpse the size of a nation, where the abundance of weapons and scarcity of meat pushed many to war and many more to eat the inedible.

You can prepare and eat the rotting dead. Your immune system will tolerate 1 ration's worth of rotting, awful, impossibly decayed meat a day.

8. Liveria. Where everything ends up, eventually. A mass of the purified dead, walking again as even entropy is purged from their flayed bones. Toxins and bile drip from the liver, to maintain fabled utopias of salt-crystal spires atop the gorged organ. The livches trade blessings for baubles, trinkets, mementos of the world outside, unable to leave the source of their immortality. Bring rot, and treasure, and you will leave rich in purified flesh.

Owed a favor by a livch. The favor comes in the form of a glob of stem cells in your liver. When you need them most, they will become what you need, and the livch's debt will be paid.

9. Alveol Tradewinds. Winds and weather systems gust furiously through the cavernous gaps between organs. Skyriders fly skin-gliders on the currents, leading charges through bloody thunderstorms against their fellows over petty grievances. The shrieking winds drive one to ever-greater feats of strength and madness, creating and destroying heroes every day, abraded like children's toys. Elementals spark to life in the bitter-cold sky, tearing themselves from winds and flesh into necromantic ravagers that know only hate. You flew the horror-skies with wild abandon, for fun or glory or repentance. While your time there has ended, the winds still howl in your nightmares.

You can pick out specific sounds from the background noise no matter how loud or quiet an area is. You cannot be ambushed by anything that can make noise.

10. Cemetery Brain. Ogoath's mind was always impenetrable, both in content and in location, until it died and began to rot. Instead of fungal blooms or parasite infestations, it serenely crumbles away, eroded by the stellar winds and the footsteps of plunderers. Ghosts of memories flit between barely-active neurons, and qualia jump into the minds of other mortals, desperate to be experienced once more. In life, Ogoath learned secrets of the stars and the worlds and deep time; secrets that still call to travelers and adventurers from across its corpse. You sought knowledge, tightly bound your skin with rags and bandages to protect from the scouring thoughts and burning winds, and came out alive - perhaps wiser, perhaps more knowledgeable, perhaps less you than you went in.

You know what it is like to be the Turtle. Your spine is its spine, your mouth its beak, your hands its fins. Your mind knows the scale of aeons and the rumblings of continents upon your shell. When the world comes knocking, you can muster the strength of a world to resist its imposition upon your splendor. Retreat into your mind-shell and become unresponsive for a day, to resist any mental effect.

11. Fleshplains. Muscle fibers from here to the horizon, twitching with the last electrochemical rivers of neural input. The ground trembles, but still you run, for there's still a week's travel between here and the next bolthole. If you aren't there, then, you'll be crushed as the muscle folds in on itself. Life on the fleshplains is an unending race against time, hiding from the landscape itself contorting in death throes. You are stillness where the world is convulsion, you have learned to read the faintest quivers in expression and the tremors in the ground to stay on your feet both literally and metaphorically.

You can't fall down or be knocked over when on a flat surface. You can read hidden meanings and emotions in microexpressions.

12. The Blood Sea. The Cyclopean Empire sliced the top off the heart in their final turtle-shaping project, and revealed an ocean of blood as vast and as deep as a world. You plied its seething, bubbling currents, visiting ports around the sea and islands of clotsam that float atop its surface. All manner of dangers and defenses lurk below the opaque surface, but you've come to an uneasy detente with them - enough standoffs and near-misses has accustomed them to your presence.

Creatures borne of the Turtle will not attack you if you personally don't provoke them first.

Done That: Your journeys have changed you and given you power. Whether it's techniques other travelers have taught you, ways the environment has twisted you, or tricks you picked up along the way, these have kept you alive - and will continue to do so, Turtle willing.

1. Positive mutation
2. Supernatural mutation
3. Mixed mutation
4. Cosmetic mutation, roll again
5. Negative mutation, roll again
6. Random spell and 1 magic die
7. 3 random cuts (as Butcher)
8. Random talent (as Thief)
9. Random fighting style (as Fighter)
10. Random formula, can make with 1 die (as Chemist)

We've Met: Spend Contact Dice in a social interaction to realize you know someone in the interaction from your travels, and roll 1 die for each feature you want them to have. The extent and usefulness of the feature is based on how well you roll. You can spend multiple dice on one feature to take the highest of those dice. If you roll doubles when making a Contact, also roll a Complication. Spent Contact Dice return on a long rest, or when you enter a new settlement.

Sample Features
Information: 1. Common local wisdom → 6. Secrets known to few
Item: 1. They've got something similar, but you'll need to be creative → 6. They've got exactly what you need and are willing to share
Location: 1. Temporary access to a generic kind of place you're looking for → 6. Round-the-clock access to the exact venue you need
Relationship: 1. You met once, a long time ago → 6. You've been close since childhood
Skill: 1. Decent at a relevant skill → 6. Multiple class levels
Loyalty: 1. You met them once on the road and parted amicably → 6. You travelled the Turtle together, sharing fortune and hardship, and are as close as family

Complications
1. They want a favor from you before they help you out.
2. They're in danger and can't do anything that would attract attention.
3. They don't remember you. Oops.
4. They're doing something you find distasteful, perhaps at cross purposes to your aims.
5. They're working with/in a relationship with someone who doesn't like you, who's around making their own demands.
6. Their value to you has been misrepresented somehow. Decrease their highest feature by 2 (if it goes negative, they're actively going to hinder you).