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A Dated and Annotated Catalogue of Encounters

Victim de Fashion


Some people are much more fancy than others, and when your players meet them you don’t want to be caught with your pants down saying, “um, they’re wearing like, a big, hat..”

So tables.

 

d20Ostentatious Fashions
1A thousand pearl-drop spiders, trying to cocoon them, repairing tears as they walk.
2The lengthy feathers of one hundred birds plucked during their mating dance, splayed out in absurd plumes of colour from all the best parts.
3A hanging gorget of lorica plumata, flimsy golden scales dangling over the naked breast, filmy silk underwear covering their modesty, leggings and loose sleeves sewn from the hides of Dividing Leopard Worms, venom milked from the (majority of the) defensive hairs for safety.
4A brass monkey cage strapped to their back, extending above their head, anchored by an elaborately embroidered corset. The monkey has honey-coloured fur and void-black eyes, shrieking at you with a crimson void of a mouth. Monkey spit and shit stains their shoulders and they seem not to care.
5Overlapping copper plates like a flower blooming up around their chest, face powdered with dabs of orange spices like an explosive spray of pollen.
6An intricate set of leg armour carved from dark wood, with shingled shins and sickeningly colourful fungus growing from the backs of their thighs, bobbing fruiting bodies dusting spores in their wake as they walk.
7Constrictive bands of silver polished to blinding, prickling with long randomly jutting spikes that necessitate dramatically raised arms and tiptoeing in a constant pose of ballet absurdity.
8A floor-length black loincloth and naked skin dripped with malleable lava flows of resinous wax, the shimmering carapaces of entombed beetles and spiders visible through the translucent surface like veins of amber.
9Deep purple robes open to expose flashes of naked skin, their oversized length smeared with muck and trailing silver chains leashed to a trio of albino monkeys with crimson script dyed in bands around their fur.
10An eight-arch crown covered in vivid living fungus, probably crawling with insects, body draped in an apron of gold-dusted hanging lichen.
11Prodigious weight held within a beaten copper plackart, absurdly round, plates of powdered breast jutting over its girth like balconies of naked flesh. Severely tapered legs sprout from the glittering ball covered in gauzy white ruched fabric, laced at intervals to form tiers of billowing pouches.
12Night-dark fabric stitched together with exposed golden thread, weeping purple fruits impaled upon a collar of iron spikes extending above their head in a storm cloud of buzzing insects.
13Half mask of horns, horns on the eyes horns on the temples horns horns horns. Lips painted lifeblood red and limbs wrapped all about with rich red velvet string, pale flesh bulging between the lines.
14All puffed pantaloons and slashed sleeves, ruffled and pouchy in fabrics cut and dyed in resemblance of a cacophonous bouquet, a placid black bone china mask obscuring their face.
15Ochre-painted naked skin but for a collar bearing five vertical spikes that support a black veil draped over their head.
16The remains of two boars sewn into a kind of shawl, their rearing heads mounted on the shoulders, grotesque open tusked maws like screaming epaulettes, the outer foreleg of each sewn into a sleeve, their spines joining together, fused with thread, tails dangling salaciously about the wearer's glittering posterior, bedecked in a gown of clingy gold chainmail.
17An elaborately decorated bustle sprouting from their hips, overlapping organic spiralled layers of silk making it look like an absurd voluptuous cocoon. And it is, carefully chosen so as to hatch a swarm of butterflies at the perfect moment of the night for maximum visual effect.
18A big boofy bell-skirted dress made entirely of glass, it has to be lowered over her head by a team of sweating steady-handed attendants. The refraction of the angled glass means you never really get a good look at her tits, the moment you think you see a nipple it jumps six inches to the left.
19Luscious bunched wrappings of fabric in violet hues around their legs and hips, framing a ceramic paunch of a belly plate, bone white and hanging over their groin, full of holes like a pot belly hive.
20They kneel upon a small podium carried on the backs of two long-haired goats, wearing a girdle of hair that obscures their legs and tumbles down the goat's sides, fusing them together.
Gold-dipped goat hooves line the lower back of their tight-stitched black leather bodysuit, each successive row showing more trembling leg up to their shoulder blades.
They pout red lips and ring sulky bells hanging from the goat's curved horns as they pass you by.

 

“But Logan, what about cults, gangs, and social clubs, sometimes they dress alike!”

 

Got you covered.

 

 

d20Cabalistic Aesthetics
1Little finger removed from left hand and kept in a velvet-lined box where no one will ever find it.
2Big puffed shoulders, one of them much larger, a tumour of coiled fabric. Sleek clinging moist drapery.
3Esoteric symbology tattooed in black around their jawline and up to their lower lip, a solid black circle on their throat.
4The whites of their eyes dyed a startling shade of violet, skin vigilantly powdered deathly pale.
5Neck and throat painted bronze, stopping severely at the jawline.
6Eyelids are painted metallic black and bear an inverted white triangle.
7Sleek muscled limbs and a belly hanging in cellulite neglect. It's almost impressive in its absurdity.
8A stubby off-white candle attached to the back of their hand by a mess of melted wax, lit at times appointed by their inscrutable religion.
9An elaborate plaster chest-piece hanging from their neck, baroque floral sculpting like a painting's frame.
10Ritual scarification of a flower opening in the centre of their chest.
11Left arm dyed blue with the distilled pigment of the crushed petals of the lotus.
[Stolen from one of my favourite little details in Vornheim]
12Bottom lip split in the middle and cauterised to leave an ever-drooling gully of perfect pink flesh.
13Eyelid removed from right eye, carrying a small glass jar of water with a brush attached to the lid to moisten their exposed eyeball.
14A small orange bird attached to their left shoulder by a golden chain, singing coded messages to each other.
15Oil of vitriol burned into the nape of their neck in a perfect bare hand print, fuck knows who did it, the hand prints are all the same.
16They all have a stocky little black dog strapped to their chest, like a baby harness, it hangs there with its legs sticking out, limp paws hanging, staring at you through a porcelain doll mask, a low humming growl resonating from its ribcage.
17Hands dip-died red past the wrist, nails tapered and lacquered black, copious amounts of white fabric.
18Golden needles like quills bristling from the back of their necks.
19A large sickly green poison dart frog, crawling over their face, attached to a delicate brass chain threaded between their ears, forehead, and nose by a circlet around its foot.
20Fields of tiny oil-black mushrooms grow from the inner sides of their arms, constantly held slightly aloft from their body so as not to damage them, looking eery as fuck.

 

And hey, if you prefer visual aids over words, you can roll on this d20 Pinterest board I made instead.

 

RUBENS, Pieter Pauwel (b. 1577, Siegen, d. 1640, Antwerpen) Portrait of Maria Serra Pallavicino 1606

 

Speaking of, Pinterest seems like a remarkably overlooked game tool, especially if you’re playing online.

 

Starting a new campaign or introducing new players and want to quickly convey the feel you’re going for? Throw a bunch of inspiration pictures on a Pinterest board and send everyone a link. Jeff Russell’s a sharp one so he’s already doing that here.

 

Prefer visual encounter tables to written ones? Number a board like I did with the fashions, and if you do want to know their stats or make other notes about them, you can put that shit in the image description below it!

 

The only real drawback of Pinterest is that you can’t reorder the images, and just when you think you’ve ordered them by adding them in sequence, it shows them in different orders at different resolutions. But pfft, whatever.

 

For your convenience there’s a whole lot more fashion compiled here, as well as a board more specifically tailored to Weavers of the Dark Arts.

 

Special fashion assistant thanks to my lady Rose with her fecund imagination and good looks.


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This Place is Crawling with Tables


It all started when I found the old AD&D Lankhmar supplement, which features this gorgeous map right here:

See all those white boxes? The supplement contains neighbourhood geomorphs that you randomly insert when the players move off the main streets and into the ‘burbs, and even suggests changing the geomorph if the players don’t go back there for a while to make the city feel more alive. I know, it’s wonderful.

 

Around this time I was also having chats with the also wonderful Jeremy Duncan about mapping Cörpathium and his own Galbaruc, and the trouble of figuring out how much is too much, what to nail down and what to keep loose. Because as pretty as the above map is, forget that.

 

Really what I want is to capture the sprawling mutability of cities like Viriconium and Ambergris, something you experience by running around in it rather than poring over a lavishly drawn map, with just enough grounding to make it work as a game.

 

 

OKAY SO WHAT DO YOU SUGGEST SMART GUY?

 

Map your main streets. That gives you a framework, points of reference, clever/punny street names for players to remember. Everything else though? Doesn’t matter until it matters.

 

When your players want/need off a main street drop a d4 and a d6 (try to use a d6 with sharp corners, you need that random bounce). If the numbers match, there aren’t any reachable exits.

 

Otherwise, treat the d4 as the player’s position on the street, facing the way you are. The number is how many alleys they can see, and the points of the dice show the rough direction they’re in. Add them clockwise from whatever point is closest to the d6.

If there are 4 alleys put the 4th wherever.

You might prefer to drop the dice directly onto the map instead, do whatever makes you happy, I’m not your mother.

 

There’s also this roughly where the d6 landed:

 

1.  Someone left their door open

2.  Public house

3.  Sewer entrance

4.  Way to climb onto building

5.  Lesser street

6.  Intersecting lesser street

 

So if you rolled like below, there’s four reachable alleys; one back off in the direction of the 2, one ahead in the direction of the 1, one directly off to the right thanks to the 3, and another one wherever takes your fancy. The d6 came up as a 5, so there’s a lesser street leading away back on the left side of the main street.

 

 Okay so now we’re running around in alleys, fun!

 

Every time the players enter an alley, drop the d4 and d6 again and generate the exits like before, using the tables below. If the numbers are the same, there’s a complication.

 

 

AlleyCrawling
d4Points of Diced6
1Alley.1Back door.
2Alley.2Darkened nook.
3Alley.3Boarded-over alley.
4Alley.4Way to climb onto building.
5Reachable window.
6Alley complication.

 

 

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The Fogwalk


If for some reason the players ever decide to leave the joys of the Rookery, here’s its closest neighbour.

 

The Fogwalk, a borough of seaside views, commerce and depravity.

 

 

 

Sights, Smells, etc.

  • Smells of salt, sweet fish, tarred wood and a lingering hangover.
  • Moss grows around the docks and on the walls of nearby buildings. At night it glows a bright bioluminescent blue.
  • The morning mist rolling in from the Hollow Sea to swirl about your ankles thins out through the day and returns at night.

Buildings:

  • Strong black stone along the shore, towers raised up against the Hollow Sea, wide doors to admit cargo and release machines of war.
  • Mixtures of stone and jettied wood the further you get from the sea.

Building: d6 storeys, d6 sub-levels (3-6 no sub-level).

Occupants: d10 per storey, 0 = currently unoccupied.

 

 

Activity

 

Morning:

Dockhands going to work, fish buyers with baskets, men with knotted arms and sharp knives removing barnacles from the docks.
Encounter chance 1 in 6 per hour
Overhear Rumour on a 6
Chance of Godless: 20%/Turn

 

Noon:
Cargo unloaded, goods being shipped out and haggled for, Neophytic Sisters of the Cathedral of Lost Virtue waiting to lead more discerning seafarers back to the Cathedral and away from the Plaza of Earthly Lust.
Encounter chance 1 in 6 per hour
Overhear Rumour on 6
Chance of Godless: 20%/Turn

 

Night:
Workers leaving, others arriving to unload the night cargo, revellers of the Plaza, Godless night watch.
-2 to reaction rolls unless inside the Plaza
Encounter chance 1 in 6 per hour
Overhear Rumour on 5-6
Chance of Godless: 30%/Turn

 

 

Facts

  • Murder Loot: d100 sp. Carrying Curio on a double.
  • Dock Trade: They may be the most powerful trading company in the Dockmaw, but Haugroten & Sons are far from alone. Organisations like the Hollow Sea Co. and Leviathon Cargo Cult maintain a presence on the Dockmaw’s boards, generally hiring mercenary dockhands job-to-job. Many speculate that Haugroten & Sons allow their competition to persist merely to avoid boredom.

 

 

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Horrors of the Unknown: The Family Man


The thing shambles at you out of the dark, its phallus half hard and bobbing before it as it walks, heavy testicles churning beneath its girth. Something viscous seems to be slowly dripping from its tip, until suddenly it sucks back inside. As you brace your shield and unsheathe your blade similarities to a snail’s eye occur to your subconscious. The thing shudders and retches on itself and the base of its cock swells to triple the original girth and continues to inflate until something you cannot fathom emerges from the tip. The beast wails in pain and terror and collapses to the floor.

 

Have you seen the snails infected by mind-controlling worms? Like that. Something that enters your penis and takes residence in your scrotum after consuming your testicles, it needs the room, it is not small. Penises can be surprisingly elastic, but fuck it hurts. But you don’t process that. The chemicals it’s pumping into your bloodstream just make you want to mate. Make you want to woo. It is always looking for the perfect host, someone pleasing to the opposite sex. It needs you to find a mate. It needs it to be consensual and loving. It needs your mate to care for the offspring once you have passed away from a mysterious wasting disease, right up until hundreds of its kind emerge from her womb amidst screams and blood and madness.

 

It is not completely averse to you engaging in same-sex relations, it has found that to be a very convenient way of entering a handsome new host.

 

Cocks can be both invaded and invading. NO ONE IS SAFE.


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The Rookery of Van Möldus


What better place to start in the greatest city of the new and ancient world than in a slum as a nobody?

 

This is the Rookery of Van Möldus, a borough of Cörpathium that you could probably use as a city all to itself if you really wanted to.

 

 

 

Sights, Smells, etc.

  • Cold and damp, smells of fish rot and stinging salt.
  • Makeshift shelters crowd alleys and cul-de-sacs.
  • Purplish barnacles grow on buildings and side-walks, finding more nourishment in the squalor than the sea. They’ll attach to people if they stay still for long enough.

Buildings:

  • Decrepit worn stone and rotting wood, roofs leak and wind whistles through the walls.
  • Mostly two or three jettied stories, a mixture of stone and wood, many with basements that reach below sea level.
  • No windows face the Hollow Sea, they only look inwards upon Cörpathium.
  • No Deicidium.

Building: d4 storeys, d6 sub-levels (5-6 no sub-level).

Occupants: d10 x2 per storey, 0 = currently unoccupied.

 

 

 

Activity

 

Morning:
Drunks waking in the street with barnacles clinging to their flesh, the occasional fog-bloated corpse, beggars and waremongers drifting off to Möldenghast Blvd, men dumping buckets of barnacles recently removed from the Dockmaw.
-2 to reaction rolls
Encounter chance 1 in 6 per hour
Overhear Rumour on a 6
Chance of Godless: 1%/Turn

 

(Unless someone is already running screaming to get them, Chance of Godless is rolled per Turn while something is happening in the open that shouldn’t be. Since there is no Deicidium in the Rookery and no one really cares about it chances are low, and there’s every possibility that even if they do show up, they’ll leave you to it. More on that later.)

 

Noon:
Idle cutthroats, strangers slinking between houses and alleys.
-2 to reaction rolls
Encounter chance 1 in 6 per hour
Overhear Rumour on 6
Chance of Godless: 2%/Turn

 

Night:
Unaffiliated whores in doorways, drunks spilling from makeshift brewhouses, crumpled bodies thrown from fight dens, knives flashing in the dark.
-4 to reaction rolls
Encounter chance 2 in 6 per hour
Overhear Rumour on a 6
Chance of Godless: N/A

 

 

 

Facts

  • Murder Loot: d100 cp (even) /10 sp (odd). Carrying Curio on a double.
  • Barnacles: If the purple-hued barnacle Cthalamus Siren, commonly known as Siren of the Slums is consumed, save vs. Poison. Failure results in an overwhelming desire to walk into the sea which lasts for d8 days.
  • Rats: Can’t help but eat the barnacles, subsequently drowning themselves without fail. Other boroughs tend to herd any infestations towards the Rookery.
  • Crime & Violence: Those who dwell within the Rookery rarely turn on each other unless cheated, insulted, or involved in rivalry. Cutpursing is reserved for those who live in neighbouring boroughs.
  • Family Van Möldus: Own near every building worth owning in the Rookery. Lodging houses, Our Lady Sacculina, The Foetid Babe, The Cuckoo’s Nest, all pay rent into the hands of Van Möldus.

 

 

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Welcome to Cörpathium


Greatest city of the new and ancient land, the overhanging levels of jettied houses stacked atop each other shadow the sprawling streets, solid stone architecture unknown to any of the old countries nestles behind shouting waremongers in the morning mist, birds sing from a neighbouring rooftop and something scuttles from under your bed. It’s another beautiful day in Cörpathium, watch your step.

 

When entering a new borough roll below.

 

3d6Boroughs of Cörpathium
14-18Well, You Don't See That Every Day..
4-13Another Day In Paradise
3End Times Cometh

 

Another Day In Paradise
1d20
1A young woman bumps into a random PC as they push through a crowd, she blushes and apologises and continues on her way.
Further on into the neighbourhood the PC will find an old man hawking something that looks very much like something important to them, something they no longer seem to be carrying. There are already several interested buyers standing by his stall.
2A shrieking man falls to his knees in the street, clawing at his skin.
1. He is the son of a Corvuscult family, prone to fits of madness. Discretion would be appreciated.
2. A wasp has crawled under his skin to lay her eggs.
3. He's just a plain old loon.
4. He is a Haruspex, suffering a vision of locust plague, harbinger to the coming of the Locust Queen.
3A young woman is bitten by a dog.
4A Speaker of the Godless announces a curfew in light of unnatural maulings in the neighbourhood the past few nights.
5A couple of inherited wealth dandies sitting at a coffee house laugh at a random PC's attire.
6A vendor of fig pies scrambles to collect the contents of his upturned cart before the crowd consumes it all.
7A rat the size of a terrier emerges from a nearby sewer and slumps back on its hind legs in front of a random PC, scratching its bloated stomach.
Roll Loyalty. It won't be pretty if you roll low.
8A young girl hawks her services as an assistant in dangerous and foolhardy ventures.
She can't be more than 14, she's an exceptionally skilled thief, and she can fit into places your fat old arse never could.
9A street urchin attempts to snatch a coin purse or other item from a random PC.
10A woman with old letters sewn into the folds of her dress glides through the street. Her sunken eyes are the colour of despair and she fawns over every man she meets like a whore, murmuring and cooing through full red lips.
11A bucket of innards and vomit is dumped on the PCs from an overhead window, it is unclear if it was accidental.
12A gaunt man with stretched hanging skin stands on an iron stool preaching to 2d10 onlookers about the evils of the Corpulent One.
13A Mother of Silence strides through the street, her footfall would crash in your ears if her presence hadn't stolen every sound within 30'. [Mothers of Silence will be another post]
14A spruiker in a jaunty hat proclaiming himself to be the originator of Cuckold's Courage sells bottles from a cart on the street corner. The bottles are full of:
1. Urine.
2. Fermented onions and cat faeces.
3. Putrefied fishguts.
4. Curdled milk and rubbing alcohol.
5. River water and silt.
6. Crushed lice and dust. "Just add water!"
15An elderly woman drops the fruit she was carrying and four young men in ostentatious clothing start dancing a jig, stomping it into the road.
16When they return home a random PC will find something important missing and a yellow feather on their bed. Hagatha Gloom of the Golden Harpies has taken a liking to them.
17A burly drunk emerges from a brewhouse and shoves his way through the PCs.
18A woman in obvious Toad-Dropping withdrawal pushes her way past the PCs and into a nearby alley.
19A man wearing a large stitched leather top hat and a coat embroidered with images of vicious rodents hawks bottles of Verminbane. Caged rats are piled behind him for demonstration and several greased tame rats climb over his shoulders and crawl about his feet, leashed to his belt by string.
20Seventh Goat mercenaries jostle the PC with the highest Strength as they pass. If offence is taken they invite you to settle the matter in the Viper's Nest fight den tonight, they've been in need of an opponent anyway.

 

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