Spectral Arquebus (Wermspittle)

There's a terrible, underground trade in dead-lead; dull gray metal ripped scandalously from consecrated lead caskets and used to create shot for these weapons no one will take credit for having introduced into our lands. Like a pestilential scourge these Spectral Arquebuses cut down the flower of our knighthood, living or undead, without distinction or discrimination. These are vile, peasant's weapons that spread terror and anarchy in their wake...

Spectral Arquebus
Cost: No one will sell one for less than 75gp, and most will ask for twice that, depending upon condition & provenance.
Variable Damage: 3d4 + Save versus petrify or suffer discorporation or dismemberment (see table below).
Weight: 5 pounds unloaded, 2 pounds loaded
Rate of fire: Once every other turn
Chance of trapped soul: 30% (Base willpower 20 for influence check purposes)

A Spectral Arquebus actually gets lighter and more manageable once it is loaded, if one is using dead-lead shot. Anything else and the weight remains the same and the weapon incurs a -1 penalty to hit due to its unwieldiness. If used as a club there is a 25% chance of damaging the wrought iron firing mechanism, rendering it a heavy, unwieldy club until repaired by a gonnesmith or talented blacksmith.

Octoscholar

Octoscholar

No. Enc.: 1d4 (2d6)

Alignment: Neutral (Chaotic)

Movement: 90'

         Swim: 90'

Armor Class: 8

Hit Dice: 4

Attacks: 1-4 tentacle, bite or spells(some use weapons)

Damage: 1d3 per tentacle/1d4 bite/ byspell or weapon

Save: F2

Morale: 9

% Liar: (2d10 per HD as %)

Cold and calculating, unforgiving and given to sorcerous feuds amongst themselves over the most arcane bits of trivia. The Octoscholars have had a long-standing multi-planar cold war with the various offshoots of the primordial serpent people, especially the tube-born clone-descended serpent men who no longer even remember the long ago rule of their now nameless Queen.

Octoscholars are the sages of their particular sub-species of Octopoidal Degenerates and as such most of them know 2d4 random spells and will possess 1d4 random magic items(usually [30%] scrolls, [30%] rings or [30%] wands, but sometimes[10%] weapons). Their areas of expertise tend to be quite esoteric and wide ranging, often veering into areas of restricted scholarship, forbidden knowledge, primal arcana or even more troubling fields.

Octoscholars have an innate ability to spew forth a cloud of clinging, inky darkness (as Darkness spell, only an actual cloud of suspended ink droplets), or to Befuddle Laymen with their grossly arcane and convoluted pseudo-scientific discourses, lectures and rants (effectively a Confuse spell). They also use their natural ink to inscribe scrolls and to form sigils. They have a rather fine sense of touch and are extremely dexterous, enabling them to pick pockets, open locks, or disarm/set traps just like a thief.

Their ink becomes a more potent poison the angrier they get.

For a small fee (X3 the going rate) an Octoscholar will attempt to decipher and translate ancient inscriptions, old journals and spell-books, or scrolls. They always reserve the right to make copies for their own use, of course. If they roll over their % Liar score, they complete the translation honestly and with no hidden pranks or spurious gibberish to complicate matters or cause things to fail, explode or melt-down spectacularly.

They also have a base (20%) chance to cobble together some infernal contraption or improbable device, if sufficiently motivated. It is left to the GM/DM as to what constitutes 'sufficiently motivated,' in this instance.

Impressionable Young Shoggoth (Class/Race option for Labyrinth Lord)

Matthew from Rended Press demanded that we provide a Class/Race write-up for Irving the Shoggoth, so here it is, at least the first draft. We kept it to one page. A lot is intentionally left to the devious imagination of the GM. We've uploaded the Free PDF to our Freebie-Folder over at BOX. Use at your own risk. Monsters may be hazardous to your health. Side effects may include nose bleeds, sporadic fevers, discoloration to the skin or schlera, sudden weight-gain, night sweats, mild hallucinations, uncontrollable flatulence, and brief periods of disorientation or even acute paranoia coupled with violent outbursts. Consult your local GM in case of any lingering strange rashes, itching/oozy sores that seem to move about on their own or any sort of writhing lump in your throat or belly that just won't go away. These are all temporary and nothing to worry about. Void where prohibited.

Irving the Impressionable Young Shoggoth

This is Irving.

He wants to be an adventurer.

Irving is a youngish shoggoth, whose bud-parent only shed him just a short time ago (362 years...). In shoggoth terms Irving is the equivalent of 13 years old. A precocious 13 years old. He'd like to join your party...

In fact, that small, timid and oh so child-like voice calling out from the darkness "Is there anybody out there?" just might be Irving.

Irving isn't like the other shoggoths. At least not at first.

He's a little bit shy, at first, but after a bit of conversation and some wheedling, and a CHAR reaction roll or three, Irving will eventually ooze forwards from the shadows and try to prove himself to the group.

He's young, inexperienced, and very naieve. Or so it seems. At first.

Did we mention that he's a shoggoth?

Yeah.

You'd have to be insane to let such a thing join your party...but how do you turn it away without really getting it angry? Chances are, you wouldn't like Irving when he gets angry...

After all, he's a frikkin' shoggoth...

Irving's character sheet for Labyrinth Lord:

or



A few of the Pros in accepting Irving into the party:

• The half-ton or so of this dim-witted blob of praeterhuman plasticity won't attempt to eat you, yet
• The thing can extrude sensory organs and appendages at will, enabling it to spot things you'd never think of checking for. Of course you might not have words in your language for some of this stuff...
• You could have a shoggoth to help break down doors, lug around godsawful-heavy piles of loot, and intimidate the goblins
• It floats
• Irving loves to learn new tricks
• He is terribly loyal to his friends
• His flesh is a lot like silly putty and has a 40% chance of reproducing any scroll you mush into it (with an additional 10% chance that the spell becomes lodged in Irving's brain and he's now a multi-class Fighter/Magic User...with just that one spell, so far...)
• He's practically indestructible, regenerating even if reduced to a thin coat of slime by some particularly wicked trap or major demon...

Some of the Cons incurred by accepting Irving as a fellow adventurer (and by no means all of them):

• It's a frikkin' shoggoth
• It will eat you. It's only a matter of time...
• There's something very wrong with this creature
• Irving has wild mood swings depending on how long he goes without eating human brains -- the more brains he eats, the more human he thinks he is -- its a strange allergic reaction that he'll eventually grow out of before he gets too much older...
• Every time Irving gets reduced to zero hit points, his brain has a 30% chance to reset as it regenerates and he loses all trace of his previous pseudo-human persona instantly
• Never, ever let the shoggoth bind someone's wounds...
• That's probably not water in your canteens/water-skins any more...
• This thing can eat several horses in one go and might ask for seconds
• Irving has a base 25% chance to go berserk if his most favoritist friend of all time gets hurt...
• Detect Lie won't work on this creature -- its brain(s) are too alien for it to register properly -- which is an automatic red flag right there...
• Irving may just be too incredibly clever for your puny intellects and this has all been a malevolent ruse that has allowed him to herd your party into a diabolical trap...
• These things are older than your entire species...
• He's practically indestructible, regenerating even if reduced to a thin coat of slime by some particularly wicked trap or major demon...

Last, but no means least -- keep in mind that this is the kind of creature that could get a human as one of the low-end options for its familiar...

TEKELI LI!

Free Labyrinth Lord Character Sheet

In the course of doing the mock Character Sheet for Irving the Shoggoth, we realized that it was not just a reasonable facsimile, but with a slight bit of revision this could serve as a fairly serviceable Character Sheet for Labyrinth Lord, so we revised it a bit and have uploaded to the Freebies Folder at BOX and we'll even embed it in this post to make it easier to print or download, just in case anyone else likes it and wants to give a whirl in their game.

If you do use this Character Sheet, let us know how it worked for you.
We'll be doing another Character Sheet for Wermspittle...



or

Trappings: A Random Table for Savage Worlds

What has attracted us to Savage Worlds is the stripped-down elegance of the core system, and the way it quickly and easily lets us adapt all that stuff we built originally around the D20 mechanics for Xembor. It is a wonderful baseline structure that encourages you to tinker with it and make it your own, not in terms of reinventing the wheel or adding-on whole new systems, but rather in adjusting the existing bits to suit your whims, desires or stylistic needs.

But why just tell you when we can show you?

Here's a quick example of one aspect of Savage Worlds that we really like. In Savage Worlds each Power is a fairly straight-forward effect that has its own Rank (how difficult it is to use/cast), Power Point cost, Range, Duration, and Trappings. Yeah--Trappings. What are Trappings? These are the stylistic and setting-derived/inspired qualities of each Power--the look, feel, and expression of each Power within your setting. It is a very simple idea, packed with loads of potential for allowing massive amounts of GM modification and creativity, while at the same time keeping everything running smoothly so that each game/setting remains compatible with every other one at the core.

For example. The Barrier Power (p.86 of the Savage Worlds Explorer's Edition) creates a solid, immobile wall that defends the caster or can be used to trap their target. Very simple. The Trapping would be the setting-essential details of whether the Barrier was composed of antimatter, gelatinous goo, ectoplasm, enslaved nightmare pupae, shards of rusty scrap metal, or writhing vines pulsating with gibbering tooth-filled maws that drool wetly as they seek to consume the very soul of anyone that comes close...

You get the idea.

In fact, we like this Trapping approach so much that we drafted a random table of Trappings for the Barrier Power just now. Here it is:

Your Barrier is composed of...

1. Sparkling panes of overlapping transparent silica that distort visibility by revealing images of environments and events on adjacent alternate timelines.
2. Black, iron-like thorns that slowly extend with a harsh cacophony of clanking and scraping noises as they cruelly embed themselves into the surrounding area and anyone unfortunate enough to be within their reach.
3. Massive cycads and ferns emerge from a dense fog-bank rich in carbon dioxide. They are dripping with unwholesome moisture and pre-date humanity by several millions of years. You get the unsettling feeling that they are aware of you somehow...
4. Glistening globs of ectoplasm slowly accumulate from myriads of tiny tendrils drawn from every living thing within the range of the spell. Each tendril forms a palpitating blob of snotty, almost egg-white like matter that then rises into the air to swim about like globs of wax in a lava lamp...
5. Microfine dust particles that arrange themselves into any configuration that you can visualize.
6. A snarled mass of monomolecular filament.
7. Thick, ponderous and pitted bronze scales from some titanic sculpture akin to the Colossus of Rhodes, but of decidedly non-human character...
8. Seething mass of super-heated fluids resembling a witches cauldron, only without any cauldron to contain it.
9. Swarms of toothsome snails, all of them staring implacably right at you with what is clearly bad intent.
10. A densely-packed and radiantly green stand of bamboo that gently sways in a wind that does not carry past the range of the Barrier.
11. Frothing waves of crashing and smashing sea water that has the most lurid tint of reddish violet to it...
12. Incredibly hot, dry, red sand of a sugar-like consistency drifts into a sort of truncated, vertical mass of drifting dunes that smolder under a harsh glare that streams in from somewhere else.
13. Heavy, massively riveted plates of ultra-dense steel alloy that may or may not form the hull of what might be a space vessel.
14. Smooth, translucent tubes of ceramic and silica extrude throughout the range of the Barrier effect, forming an entirely entangled nanocology derived from the interior sub-systems of a Worldboat.
15. A corruscating storm of green electrical arcs that fan out from what appear to be a line of miniaturized self-mobile Tesla Coil Devices...
16. Slimy tentacles squirm from out of the places in-between here and someplace else and try to grasp ahold of anyone within the range of this Barrier...
17. Everything within the range of this Barrier effect is covered in a speckled mauve mold colony that is both toxic and potentially explosive...
18. Masses of space-adapted fungi rapidly expand into view from multiple phase-levels at once...
19. Shimmering webs interlaced with tiny, writhing blades set at random intervals through-out their surfaces cascade into place, one or two strands at a time, each one crossing a dozen or more phase-levels or extending into alternate time-lines or dipping into the ethereal, astral or whatever as they criss-cross the area encompassed by the Barrier effect.
20. Masses of writhing maggots and worms that exude a rotten, earthy stench that combines the worst olfactory hints of decay and corruption.

See? This is a great way to allow GMs to focus on the fun aspects of their setting and keep the rules simple, clean and elegant. Instead of tinkering with the rules, you tinker with the stuff that the rules make use of within your setting. It's not rocket science, nor is it entirely new to Savage Worlds necessarily, but it works nicely and we're going to play around with this for a bit.

These things are supposed to be fun, after all...

Unnamed Monster: You Do The Name and Stats

The above artwork is officially declared Public Domain. It is now YOURS, freely and clearly. We have surrendered our claims/rights to this image.

This thing is neither named nor statted, so we're inviting folks to name this monster and stat it up for whichever retro-clone, official edition or whatever rules-set you like, and let us know what you've come up with, if you'd be so kind.

The image and creature is yours to use freely on your blog, or even in your game or whatever you want, hopefully you name it something cool and add some stats for the system you prefer and let us know about it.

Please give it a good home.

All we are asking is that you let us know where you've posted the name/stats so we can include a link below. Maybe, if we get more than 3 or 4 sets of stats, we'll run a poll and let readers vote for the one they like the most. It would be fun to see how many different rules-sets we can get stats from for this critter.

The PNG version is here: http://www.box.com/s/lmivz8upioafj2983hhl
The Jpeg version is here: http://www.box.com/s/vsf39vgj0ldxzn7svm9n

If you need a different format, let us know and we'll do what we can.

The Monster has been spotted at the following blogs:

• Porky's Expanse: Lesser Daemon of Malal?
• Ix: Saturday Night Specials--The Trarkku
• Lunching on Lamias: The Monstrous Challenge of Netherwerks/Blair's Artwork First Monster Manual
• Kranj: Degenerate Shock Troops for Terminal Space
• Calis: Avian Demons of Pazuzu by Brian Libarge at Stuffer Shack
• More?

Monoptrian

Monoptrian
No. Enc.: 1d4 (2d4)
Alignment: Chaotic (40%), Neutral (60%)
Movement: 120'
Armor Class: 7
Hit Dice: 4
Attacks: 2 (weapon or gaze)
Damage: by weapon, or Eye-Beam
Save: F4
Morale: 6

Special: Eye-Beam (use Eye-Beam Table if chaotic), or Visual Dismemberment (use Random Dismemberment Table if Neutral). In either case the gaze attack is only usable x3/day.


Monoptrians are a ruthless, ambitious and monomaniacal non-race of degenerate mono-cloned descendants of a ferocious warlord who desperately sought for a way to not only be immortal, but to become his own army unto himself. Over time the cloned horde schismed, dispersed and fractured into rival groups under competing demagogues who claimed to be more purely the heirs of their progenitor.

They are immune to all Charm or mind-influencing effects or spells and they cannot be resurrected, but they can be converted into undead...and there are rumored to be mutant strains out there amidst the planes...

Flutter Worm (Wermspittle)

Flutter Worm
No. Enc.: 1 (3d12)
Alignment: Chaotic
Movement: 30' (crawling/digging)
              Fly: 120' (flutter*)
Armor Class: 9
Hit Dice: 1-10
Attacks: 1
Damage: 1d3/Hit Die of worm (blood drain)
Save: F1 (plus HD of worm)
Morale: 4

Flutter Worms are slimy, blood-sucking worms that flutter about in the dim shadows of ruined or abandoned buildings, certain mountain caves, or some basements. They are completely instinctual creatures, driven by their appetite for blood and cannot be communicated with, even by way of Animal Affinity or Speak to Animals. Blind and unreasoning, the flutter worm senses both body-heat and the presence of blood. In the wild, they are shy creatures, preferring to lurk unseen in the shadows and wait for things to get quiet before they venture forth to make their attack, often draining the blood of wounded or unconscious victims.

Some flutter worms have learned how to prowl the alleys and roof-tops of urban areas where they find open windows or holes in the roof through which they squeeze and wriggle and flutter in search of sleepers, drunkards, the bed-ridden or incarcerated prisoners to drain without interference.

When a flutter worm successfully bites a victim, they will greedily latch-on and score automatic hits for as long as they stay attached, often draining the victim dry.

Salt does 1d4 damage/turn to a flutter worm and a quantity of salt spread out on the windowsill will usually (80%) deter the things from entering by that means, unless commanded, or they are exceptionally hungry.

Flutter worms are roughly 8 to 10 inches long, gaining approximately 1 inch per hit die and one particular specimen preserved in alcohol at the Tatzelworm Tavern in the low village of Sprungen has achieved some notoriety in reaching a recorded and confirmed length of 22 inches.

*Fluttering is a sort of wriggling aerial motion coupled with a slight blink ability, allowing the flutter worm to suddenly shift 1d12 feet in any random direction at random intervals during the course of their movement.

The following monster was created from the free Public Domain clip-art image of a 'Sea Worm' found at the Public Domain Images section of the Karen's Whimsy site that we recently featured at Old School Heretic as a great resource. The stats we've attached to this revised image are for Labyrinth Lord, but could be adapted to Mutant Future or Humanspace Empires or something else fairly easily.