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So it's Creator Day on itch.io, which means everything you spend there goes to the writers, artists, designers, etc. All my stuff is half-off, or you can get literally everything I've ever made on itch for $15. That's like. You can buy my best bestiary for $15 for that much on any other day. That's a steal. You are literally stealing the food in my mouth with your bare hands when you buy this from me, or you would be, if I was not a liar.

It's still a frankly ludicrously good price for some quality ttrpg materials tho. The sale ends in like 9 hours tho, so you're gonna have to act fast.

Oh, and if you like anything you pick up from here, please don't forget to comment and leave a rating!

[teratoscope]

So it's Creator Day on itch.io, which means everything you spend there goes to the writers, artists, designers, etc. All my stuff is half-off, or you can get literally everything I've ever made on itch for $15. That's like. You can buy my best bestiary for $15 for that much on any other day. That's a steal. You are literally stealing the food in my mouth with your bare hands when you buy this from me, or you would be, if I was not a liar.

It's still a frankly ludicrously good price for some quality ttrpg materials tho. The sale ends in like 9 hours tho, so you're gonna have to act fast.

Oh, and if you like anything you pick up from here, please don't forget to comment and leave a rating!

[teratoscope]

IT’S HERE!

It’s been an age—way, way longer than I meant it to take—but the Freestar One collection is finally assembled and available for purchase HERE. It costs $15 and it’s 105 pages long.

Because of all the delays, I felt it would only be appropriate for me to release a version of the book that was an even more visible improvement on the blog material. That’s why, in addition to the 22(!) internal illustrations, index, and edits, the complete Freestar One bestiary includes new setting material, new stat blocks, rules for Herlog-ban, Enluss, and Mag-angel PCs, and quick, easy, consequential mechanics for cyberware, psychic powers, and Enhancile Armor. It’s not quite an entire game in itself, but it’s really close.

I’m not back back, not just yet (my life isn’t quite in enough order yet for me to properly commit to regular updates), but Teratoscope is only sleeping, not dead, and its squamous limbs kick and twitch, foretelling the end of its long hibernation.

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Hey I made a new game. It’s $3, it’s based on Jared Sinclair’s What’s So Cool About Outer Space, and it’s great for if you’ve ever wanted to play a character whose fresh new aspiration in life is to turn into a FromSoft boss. Content warnings in advance for body horror stuff and implicit police violence.

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Yo so if y’all are at all interested in my tabletop design stuff you should check out STRONGEST UNDER HEAVEN, my piece for the #TroikaJam. Troika’s a really killer piece of ruleslight dungeon crawl game design, and I had a blast finding new ways to make the system do cool shit.

This lets you play Goku. Need I say more?

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Hey so for the past month or thereabouts I’ve been writing a little self-contained TTRPG for Goon Jam and now, finally, it’s basically done. Basically. It needs playtesting, and there’s stuff I still want to pin down in a more structured way re: map creation, but I’m comfortable calling it Crisis Complex v1.0.

It’s a game where you play hapless robots trying their absolute best to hold together the rotting dystopian megastructure that created them. Also you might meet an Egyptian god.

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Update

SO: I had originally expected that I was going to clear through the remaining Request Week prompts in the course of the past week. Obviously that didn’t happen, mostly for professional reasons; I wrapped a big-deal contract this past weekend, got interviewed for an upcoming episode of The Monster Professor, and did a lot more prep work than I anticipated needing for the impending semester (day-one reading lists and all that). What time I’ve had off has been Recovery Time. Also I turned 25.

Put simply, shit’s been busy, and it’s about to get busier. That said, I am not one to break my word re: Request Week prompts—they will get fulfilled. I’m going to try to parcel out what’s left at a pace where they can get the development time they deserve while still leaving me time to be on top of my other obligations (probably about one a week) and then, once they’re all satisfied, AMNION is going to go on a bit of a hiatus until such time as I am no longer panicking about my thesis.

Thank you all for your patience and enthusiasm you’ve shown for my work. I promise I’m not even close to done with this project.

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No update tonight, I’m afraid. Hip deep in the paying work at the moment.

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For request week, if you're so inspired: "the violence of language"

Elemental Exile: Rounshy

Something serpentine and hornet-colored flicks down the hall; out of curiosity, you poke your hand mirror around the corner.It twines itself into intricate knots, flush with the place where the wall of the left-hand dead end meets the ceiling. Interlocking rings of outer shell clack and spin around a wet, pale, fibrous inner body bristling with black nodules; one end comes to a wicked point, while the other opens onto a cluster of rigid tongues, like the strange offspring of television aerials and the fronds of a filter-feeder.Before you can get out an offhanded declaration of your apopleptic panic, a noise rolls off it like a bass-boosted submarine sonar ping, and your words come out minced and deep-fried beyond recognition.

HD 5 MV 180’ flying AC leather & shield AT stinger (15’ reach, d8), counter-howl (1 attack roll vs. all in 240’ cone, 2d8 damage; if attack roll beats target Wis, target silenced for 1 exploration turn) Special volatile reaction

Volatile reaction—words and rounshy mix like gunpowder and house fires. Any time anyone speaks within earshot of a rounshy, there is a 1 in 20 chance per word spoken per sentence that it and the offending language will go up in a catastrophic semantic crisis event. This deals 3d6 damage to the speaker and everyone within 300’ of the rounshy (Dex check for half) and kills the rounshy instantly. What’s more, the speaker cannot use the words they spoke that killed the rounshy. They have been burned from their mind and will not recover. If the speaker attempts to use them, they take 1d3 Int damage for each word instead (Wis check for half).

Load-bearing antitheses are part of the critical infrastructure of creation. It’s just part of the rules that if you’re going to have something around in ordered reality, you need to incorporate its natural opponent. Matter requires anti-matter, most famously.

The rounshy are made of anti-language. It is a troubling and counterproductive quirk of fate that they’re also living, feeling creatures. No-one knows why they’re in Amnion; by definition there aren’t really any primary sources to fall back on, so any explanation is destined to be founded on conjecture.

Rounshy avoid sapients like the plague; folklore persists that if you can wrestle one into submission in complete silence it’s bound to serve you for a poetically appropriate span out of gratitude for your fair if firm-handed treatment, and sometimes—more often than is at all comfortable—people strike out to make their fortune off that sort of partnership. It is complete horseshit and gets people and rounshy killed. The best end result is one badly suffering, deeply anxious rounshy on the short leash of a paranoid, increasingly amoral sapient.

Some romantic idiots chase rounshy on a suicidal quest to expunge certain key bits of language from themselves, to ensure that they will never, ever say certain words to their loved ones. For similar reasons, the creatures are of interest to the Ouroboros Mob—the premise of being permanently denied anything is a unique curiosity for the dons.

So it’s not uncommon for rounshy to stay evasive and, when possible, bump off any fool who might get full visual confirmation.

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Request Week 1 begins Monday, August 5

Are you curious about some yet unilluminated corner of the Amnion campaign setting? Looking to spice up an encounter you have planned for your next session? Desperate for an alternative to More Orcs?

Our ask box is open! Step right on up and getcher crimes against God!

Every good-faith request will be honored, but on a strictly first-come, first-serve basis, and the window to submit requests closes Monday, June 3, so get ‘em in as soon as you’ve got ‘em!

I allow multiple requests per person; priority goes to requests from new faces, however.

[teratoscope]

Any other monsters named after fetishes

Elemental Exile: Dacryphilic Harvester

The thing in the wall looks a bit like a beetle pupa, if it was made of dusky, frosted-over glass. A dark, wormy mass writhes inside. A long, gleaming, needle-like proboscis tucks neatly into a groove down the middle of its bulk. As you linger, the battery of smooth, slender tendrils wrapped tight around its body slacken and slither free. The tip of one brushes your hand, and you see edges form in the air, tracing the outline of an irregular mesh of interlocking planes of hardened air.

HD 7 MV 300’ teleport AC plate AT crystallizing touch (½ target MV (round down), d4 Dex damage—recovers d4 points at a time with a Str check) or drain vs. immobilized target (d8 Cha damage, Wis check at disadvantage for half) Special griefsense, drink tears

Griefsense—dacryphilic harvesters have perfect knowledge of the character, interrelation, and relative positions of experiences of emotional turmoil. This awareness is total. They are aware of all suffering, everywhere, in complete detail, and can triangulate by this sense.

Drink tears—if a dacryphilic harvester drains a victim to 0 Charisma, it gains 1 HD, doubles its teleport range, and increases in size by 25%. The victim becomes incapable of emotional suffering. Harvested people can’t communicate in a way that the un-harvested can parse, though they are still able to do something like socializing with other harvested people.

The harvesters are as old as creation; they are part of its central infrastructure. Most sleep in the deepest, least accessible reaches of Amnion, waiting for the time they are called to serve their function.

When some part of creation no longer has a place—when it poses a comprehensive threat to the macroverse, or when it has entirely outlived its usefulness and attracted the notice of whoever it is who calls the shots, it is the Harvesters who come to gather it up and take it away.

For the longest time, they were all dormant.

But now, by ineffable accident or ineffable will (to us it scarcely matters which) they are starting to rouse themselves. A divine imperative blazes in their impenetrable minds: grief is over. Now, in little-ventured corners of the labyrinth, they are mustering. Learning the taste of sorrow as they begin their work.

Maybe they’ll do something with all that misery when it’s all pulled together. Maybe they’ll just go back to sleep. They aren’t telling; they weren’t made to be talkative. We don’t really have a call to make in the matter anyway, at least from the way they conduct yourselves.

It’ll be a while before they’ll be really ready to do their work. It’s long, difficult work just getting extricated, and heaven knows there will be complications. No effort this large goes off without a hitch. But there are a lot of very worried people in Amnion now. There are strange rumblings in the Ouroboros Mob—whispers of a schism among the leadership over whether the crisis even warrants a response. The House of Unknowing denounces their existence publicly, but everyone’s noticed their increased street presence; they never used to be so evangelical. Niflingland and Ginnungagap are dubious about the matter, and officials of both polities have under-the-table bounties out for clearer information on the strange new visitors. Even the Gardens seem more tightly policed lately. And everywhere you go, there are little millenarian cults springing up, which isn’t exactly new but it’s weird how consistent the message seems to be lately. The Auberge Rouge alone seems to retain an atmosphere of business-as-usual.

Smile. It may be the only thing that buys you time soon.

[teratoscope]

Request Week 1 begins Monday, August 5

Are you curious about some yet unilluminated corner of the Amnion campaign setting? Looking to spice up an encounter you have planned for your next session? Desperate for an alternative to More Orcs?

Our ask box is open! Step right on up and getcher crimes against God!

Every good-faith request will be honored, but on a strictly first-come, first-serve basis, and the window to submit requests closes Monday, June 3, so get ‘em in as soon as you’ve got ‘em!

I allow multiple requests per person; priority goes to requests from new faces, however.

[teratoscope]

I always love critters that assimilate the traits of things they've eaten. Is there anything like that in Amnion?

Pandourous Glom

You suspected your host tonight was the same man you met on the road the day before; they had exactly the same hair, in spite of everything else. You knew they were the same man when he tried to slit your employer’s throat in the night. Now, perhaps too late, you know he’s neither, as his jaw unhinges, and the netlike maw inside him furls out further, further, yet further.

HD 10 MV 120’ AC leather & shield AT swallow whole (no damage, target is engulfed and then deposited to an adjacent space the following round, see below) or hexed bone knives “Tender” and “Mild” x2 (d6, see below) Special mix and match, murder unliving

Mix and match— Pandourous Glom may swap out parts of himself with those of anything he has eaten in a process he calls “hrinching.” As such, he can give himself alternate modes of movement, attacks, natural armor, and special abilities, as well as transfer physical features between people by using himself as a go-between. However, there are several key limitations:

1.     He can only perform one swap per round.

2.     He can’t swap parts unless he has direct line of sight on the target he’s swapping with, or a physical token taken from the target’s body.

3.     Parts are swapped “as is.” If he uses his ability to swap away wounded parts of himself, he can reroll one of his HD and recover that many hp once per round, up to his original maximum, and deal the same damage to the target of the swap.

4.     He cannot swap parts in order to gain an ability based on knowledge, experience, or training.

Murder unliving—Pandourous Glom’s knives have the uncanny ability to cut stone, metal, wood, and the like as though they were flesh. Whenever he misses with a knife attack against an armed and/or armored opponent, there is a 50% chance that the blow deals damage to the weapon or armor that intercepted the blow. Weapons have HD equal to their damage dice; armor have hp equivalent to their AC adjustment. Unliving things heal slowly, given that they aren’t used to having blood and organs, and recover 1 hp/day of “rest” (that is, going unused). Once fully healed, blood cannot be drawn from an item again until it is cut with Tender or Mild.Pandourous Glom can incorporate items into his body by wounding, eating, and then swapping them in as above.

 Pandourous Glom is a well-regarded hitman for the Ouroboros Mob. Like all ranking members of the Mob, he is extraordinarily hard to kill and could hypothetically live forever, though his particular method is dodgy. His peers see him as a bit of an irregular, and question his commitment to the Mob’s larger cause, but his skills tend to smooth things over when their relationship gets rocky.

Glom describes himself as a full-time “shape enthusiast;” murder is just a convenient way to facilitate his real work, which is the perpetual task of determining the ideal arrangement of other people’s physical features. Since no individual part of him is wholly invulnerable to age, inevitably he has to swap out bits, and more often than not this throws off the whole ensemble. Glom is at his most dangerous when he hasn’t yet found the one limb, organ, or facial feature that perfectly suits the look he’s cultivating.

Something that puzzles many who are versed in Mob lore is his insistence that his ability isn’t magic. Rather, he claims that “hrinching” is just a sort of higher-dimensional digestion; the people that he’s eaten never really left the incalculable and invisible volume of his stomach that happens to intersect with Amnion, where he happens to also keep his body.

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Request Week 1 begins Monday, August 5

Are you curious about some yet unilluminated corner of the Amnion campaign setting? Looking to spice up an encounter you have planned for your next session? Desperate for an alternative to More Orcs?

Our ask box is open! Step right on up and getcher crimes against God!

Every good-faith request will be honored, but on a strictly first-come, first-serve basis, and the window to submit requests closes Monday, June 3, so get ‘em in as soon as you’ve got ‘em!

I allow multiple requests per person; priority goes to requests from new faces, however.

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Clambergaunt

The silver-blue slopes are cratered and etched with strange grooves. They look almost chewed on, though to sate what appetite you aren’t interested in thinking about for long. Something perks up on the ridge up ahead at the sound of your passage. Eyes like distant lanterns in dark hollows stare from a knobby, jawless head. A dry, corded tongue as long as your arm flicks this way and that, betraying some spark of curiosity. It rears up, the body inchworm-long and bristling with bony arms that flicker and overlap as it moves, passing hand over hand, the count of limbs never quite consistent. Its approach is slow, but in spite of that you feel this strange simultaneous compression and expansion of space, like the volume containing it and you is shrinking while the distance to the city below telescopes out, out…

HD 2 MV 180’ climb AC leather & shield AT pounce & frisk x2 (d8, if attack exceeds target Wis, the Clambergaunt steals a random item in the target’s inventory) Special vertigo

Vertigo—clambergaunts have a peculiar cognitohazardous effect on observers, causing profound inner-ear perceptual distortions. Anyone with a clear line of sight on one takes 1 Wisdom damage when they move more than half their MV in a given round, or 1d6 Wisdom damage if they use their whole action to move.

 A clambergaunt is born when a traveler dies of thirst or exposure somewhere narrow and sheer. Many lair in the silvery, lifeless upper slopes of Ginnungagap, where all expeditions peter out as the air grows thin and the lure-stars of the abyssal hunters that dwell in the great rift loom close. The city below is beset with clambergaunts on days when the starry rift is brightest; they come both to hunt and to escape the questing jaws of larger horrors.

Some faintly recall their origins and can even be persuaded to mix with the living with minimal complaint—at least on their part. Civil or not, only neighbors with nerves of steel can stand to share living space with them. As such, most settled clambergaunts are minor servants of the House of Unknowing, gathering fallen things for the monks to archive or rehabilitate and providing spiritual consultation to the acolytes. Acquiring and mastering a perpetual sense that you are falling with no hope of being caught is, after all, a critical step in the development of any dedicated void worshipper.

As spirits of the restless, clambergaunts don’t need to eat, but they all possess an obsessive thirst for the sweat of the living. They especially like the sweat of desperate people. This is where they get their reputation for kleptomania; material possessions don’t do them much good, but when you part someone from their valuables they tend to produce top-quality refreshment by clambergaunt standards.

Many clambergaunts also like to hoard the goods that would have served them better in life—rope, crampons, spikes, and anything that holds a good edge after a lot of abuse, for example. An attentive traveler can avoid a lot of trouble with an appropriate bribe.

Clambergaunt psychology is built on a deeply hazy grasp of the concept of self; there seems to be a collective pool of memory that they all draw from. Memories tend to bleed between individual clambergaunts that spend too long in community, and they easily lose track of their names—often the most they can handle is a fixed syllable across several dozen with roughly approximate scansion. Sometimes this is an advantage; a service done for one clambergaunt may be recalled by one you’ve never met before and duly repaid. The opposite scenario applies just as often, though.

[teratoscope]

Request Week 1 begins Monday, August 5

Are you curious about some yet unilluminated corner of the Amnion campaign setting? Looking to spice up an encounter you have planned for your next session? Desperate for an alternative to More Orcs?

Our ask box is open! Step right on up and getcher crimes against God!

Every good-faith request will be honored, but on a strictly first-come, first-serve basis, and the window to submit requests closes Monday, June 3, so get ‘em in as soon as you’ve got ‘em!

I allow multiple requests per person; priority goes to requests from new faces, however.

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Knight of Immaculate Oviposition

A massive figure sits beneath the blue glass arch of the House of Unknowing. The lopsided bulk of his body is draped in shapeless white cloth, bound in place with black cord. Three growths the size of toddlers, cinched in the middle like drinking gourds and riddled with deep, dark holes, jut from the small of his back. His right arm is twisted into a column of gnarled flesh to bear the weight of his load; the other rests on the pommel of a longsword hanging at his hip. His eyeless hood flutters in the current of his breath. It fogs your glasses. “A toll,” he says, “must be paid. Blood or coin. I care little whose.”

HD 6 MV 120’ AC chain AT by weapon (attacks are always treated as magical when relevant) Special chosen host

Chosen host—the body and resolve of a Knight of Immaculate Oviposition are kept eternally pure by the blessed humors of its ward. They are immune to disease, poison, and effects incurred by spiritual taint. Furthermore, every Knight of the order has a unique boon, akin to the ones below:

 Boons of the Knights of Immaculate Oviposition

1.     Radiant gaze. All lies and deliberate attempts at concealment, magical or otherwise, fail in the Knight’s presence.

2.     Proto-halo. The Knight hovers 10-30’ clear of the ground and cannot be knocked prone.

3.     Wormblessing. Corpses turn to soil at the Knight’s touch, and soil blooms with pale shoots after a round of physical contact with the Knight. Every round, all plants that the Knight has line of sight on grow at a frightening pace—cosmetic growth becomes difficult terrain, and difficult terrain becomes impassible without a Str check to muscle through or use of a strong hacking implement and an attack action.

4.     Oracular rash. The Knight may “capture” any natural die roll made for an action in their line of sight and substitute that roll as the final result of any other check made in its presence.

5.     Tears of honey. The Knight may transfer any hp loss they suffer to someone else with skin-to-skin contact. This requires a melee attack at disadvantage if used against an unwilling target.

6.     Iron tongue. The Knight may, by speaking a syllable of the yet-unformed name of their ward, deal 3d6 damage to every target in a 480’ cone (Wis check for half).

 From time to time a perfect being walks the corridors of Amnion. Sometimes for duty’s sake, sometimes on a lovely whim. They come as bringers of joy, or at least justice. But sometimes, very rarely, they come to give us their children. Perfection has no truck with fertility. To reproduce is to admit defeat, to divide the unified and perfect sexless whole, devoid of change and thus devoid of entropy. But perfection demands also a nourishing urge, a will to sustain and multiply life, and to give solely for the good of giving.

And so it is the duty of the imperfect to bear what the perfect cannot.

So it is taught within the eggshell-white walls of the monasteries where the Knights of Immaculate Oviposition hold court. To some it must soften the burden of their role. If in the privacy of their votive chambers they curse their divine donors, if they from time to time resent the weight of the nascent power in their flesh, if the praise names of those faraway gods turn sour on their tongues, they alone know.

But many suspect these things, most especially those who have seen the Knights in the field. They fight like they are entirely spent of compassion. Perhaps it is bitterness. Perhaps it is love, love of the child and nothing else at all.

No child is the same. All dwell in the flesh. All are attended by miracles. It takes lifetimes to carry them to term, and so there are lineages within the order. A knight chooses a squire and grooms them over the years so they will be fit to carry the child when the knight’s body is at last spent. The nomme de guerre and the child is all that persists.

The Knights are exempt from all law. Each is a theocracy of one, a living doctrine. They wander because while they are loved and welcomed they are never trusted. They fight because the child is nourished by worship, and the Knights know better than anyone that the root of all worship is bloodshed. They draw together because otherwise they would be utterly alone, and they inevitably break away from each other because each is too deeply wounded, too monstrously obsessed, to be able to bear anyone’s existence but their own and the child’s.

Each secretly hopes that if they can kill enough and in the right way their child will come to term in their lifetime. They do not expect to survive the process; they only fear that they will never see what they have lost so much for.