Orc God Generator

(Format borrowed from TLN.)

It is well-known that the gods hate orcs. It is equally famous that orcs hate the gods, and will spite them in a variety of ways ranging from risky death-bargaining to outright annihilation. What is less well-known is the character of those gods, who are so often lost as individuals among the laughing, mocking throng.

They may be uniformly wicked and inspiring of misotheism, but they are not generic and dull. Each hates different things, and in different ways and intensities, and knowing their differences is essential to surviving any dealings with them- or better yet, avoiding them altogether.

D2 Modus Operandi

1. Brutally Cunning

2. Cunningly Brutal

D4 Power Level

1. Godling

2. Lesser Power

3. Greater Power

4. Ineffable

D6 Wakefulness

1. Profane Dormition. Often sleeps through both day & night.

2. Listless. Sleeps regularly during the day. Occasionally naps at night.

3. Average Sleeper. No more or less active than an ordinary hateful godhead.

4. Fitful Slumber. Awakens briefly and at random during the day.

5. Insomniac. Regularly stays awake well past high noon.

6. Blear-Eyed Sentinel. Always watching. Always waiting.

D8 Hostility Level

1. Cold Indifference

2. Wry Schadenfreude

3. Naked Disgust

4. Violent Opposition

5. Ruthless Bellicosity

6. Gleeful Sadism

7. Omnicidal Malice

8. Yes

D10 Manifests as...

1. Humanoid Avatar

2. Graven Idol

3. Meteor Shower

4. Image of their Symbol

5. Voices on the Wind

6. A Hole in Existence

7. Invisible yet Palpable Presence

8. Roiling Orb of…

1. Blood

2. Fire

3. Shadows

4. Limbs & Animal Parts

5. Light in an Alien Color

6. Rusting Metal Fragments

9. Sacred Animal

1. Musk Ox

2. Spitting Lizard

3. Buzzard

4. Hyena

5. Blood Wasp

6. Dire Zood

10. Natural Disaster

1. Thunderstorm

2. Earthquake

3. Tornado

4. Flood

5. Insect Plague

6. Wildfire

D12 Craves

1. Widespread Fear

2. Grief & Depression

3. Toppling of the Mighty

4. Cessation of Existence

5. Upended Hierarchies

6. Grinding Oppression

7. Pointless Cruelty

8. Desecration of Holy Sites (except their own)

9. Savage Conquest

10. Insidious Betrayal

11. Transgressed Taboos

12. Breaking of Friendships

13. Excessive Sacrifices of...

1. Blood

2. Bones

3. Raw Flesh

4. Fat & Sinews

5. Yet-Living Things

6. Wealth (i.e., Skulls)

D12 Despises

1. Contemptible Weakness

2. Enviable Strength

3. Foolishness

4. Excessive Cleverness

5. Humility

6. Pride

7. Social Mores

8. Peacetime

9. Gentle, Painless Deaths

10. Loyalty (except to them)

11. Priests (including their own)

12. Moderation

D20 Domain*

1. Death

2. Dying

3. Fecundity

4. Famine

5. Disease

6. Opulence

7. Flames

8. Beasts

9. Hope (Lies)

10. Darkness

11. Blinding Light

12. Manipulation

13. Strength

14. Artifice

15. Sky

16. Cunning

17. Earth

18. Non-Orcs (this deity is everyone’s problem)

19. Roll for 2 domains, ignoring 19s or 20s.

20. Roll for 3 domains, ignoring 19s or 20s.

*Note: There is no “War” domain because that is a given for all gods here.

D100 Quirks

1. Recently lost a ton of followers by conversion to another god who said they were their friend, and is feeling very insecure right now.

2. Doesn’t actually exist in between encounters. The god is destroyed and created anew out of the ether every day.

3. Does not actually exist, at all, ever. The god is just a collective hallucination created by a very aggressive strain of ergot.

4. Always has the juiciest gossip on the other gods.

5. Was so frustrated at the “chicken or the egg” dilemma that they ate the metaphysical concepts of both, and that’s why chickens are a type of mythical creature now.

6. Gained the power to return from the dead by seeding a portion of their power among several unkillable orcish champions and indestructible artifacts. Orc-cruxes, if you will.

7. Constantly sends minions and other challenges to test its most faithful. Emaciated from lack of prayer as a result.

8. Is an amortist- they don’t believe in the existence of mortals.

9. Will only accept sacrifices that have been stolen from other deities.

10. Designed that misbegotten, pig-headed variety of orcs as a sick joke.

11. Requires that an idol of their likeness be given a high office among its followers. The actual, mortal holder of office ritually marries the idol and acts in the deity’s stead as their “spouse”.

12. Has a skin condition that causes them to regularly slough off divine abominations that terrorize the world.

13. Determines its mortal champions by arm-wrestling contest. The deity’s current champion is an unassuming wimp with a killer wrist technique.

14. Invented that loud, discordant new type of music that young people listen to, and despises monotheists for giving credit to their own devils.

15. Spent most of its energy sending a prophet down to spread the True Word centuries ago, but the prophet promptly died in obscurity.

16. Regularly organizes massively corrupt competitions between the gods and their champions.

17. Cheated like hell in a recent deific competition and still managed to lose.

18. Enjoys swapping their sacred relics and ancient artifacts out for mundane junk at random.

19. Insists that tusks were their invention and contribution to the orcish species, and encourages their followers to elaborately decorate their own. Massive, impractical prostheses and extensions abound.

20. Their mind flutters unraveling in their wake, like a fraying scarf whose threads are magic and dementia.

21. Never gives a good omen without pairing it with an awkward, uncomfortable, and utterly mundane revelation for the recipient to deal with.

22. Was once killed and torn apart to create the world and/or heavenly sphere. May or may not have since gotten better.

23. Poses as a Great Old One or Outer God to seem more edgy.

24. Is a major proponent of the “you are what you eat” proverb. Followers have decimated the local wolf population.

25. Looks upon mortals with the same confused, out-of-touch disdain that rich people afford the poor.

26. Rips a permanent tear in the fabric of reality wherever it manifests.

27. Missing an eye or limb, either literally or metaphysically. Blames another god for losing it.

28. Only accepts prayer delivered in the form of aggressive yodeling.

29. Slowly subsumes their high-priest’s identity until they become a deific vessel.

30. Secretly created the orcs and instigated their torment in the hope that they will someday bring about the end of all things, gods included.

31. Every millennium the deity tries to manifest a child into the world. The mountain-sized godling is invariably stillborn, and it soon petrifies into a new piece of topography.

32. Could probably be convinced to start acting nice ironically.

33. Is recently deceased, but not all of its facets and emanations know that yet.

34. Keeps mutating living things, including their own followers, into crabs.

35. Is said to lie waiting and dreaming at the bottom of a shifting, maze-like dungeon Below an island.

36. Perceives the world through inverted senses. They unknowingly punish that which they try to reward, and vice versa.

37. Is even more hungry for sacrifice than most gods. There is a wave of famine and a food desert growing in the wake of their cult.

38. Actually a hyper-powerful wizard pretending to be a deity.

39. Really is a deity, but pretending to be a powerful wizard pretending to be a deity as part of a long con.

40. Inevitably drives all their priests insane with their endless rambling about how the world is a four-sided cube that experiences four simultaneous days.

41. Granted magic to mortals to spite another deity.

42. Is on the run from their own followers, who want to capture them and use them as a divine battery.

43. May or may not currently haunt the moon.

44. Too bestial and non-sapient to communicate directly with mortals.

45. Too eldritch and hyper-intelligent to communicate directly with mortals.

46. Originally a non-orc deity, expelled from their old pantheon out of petty shame.

1. Goblin

2. Swamp Dwarf

3. Ogre Flea

4. Graft-Elf

5. Mer-Maggot

6. Night-Wind Ghoul

47. Was originally the god of a city-state, but then the city got gentrified and the whole cult was priced out of the area.

48. May be soothed and appeased by awful puns.

49. Turns anyone who rejects their amorous advances into an animal. This does not necessarily mean the advances stop.

50. Has a distressing number of demi-god children.

51. Guards an ancient, cursed city- not for any especially nefarious reason, but because they don’t want anyone to see the city’s murals that depict the deity in their awkward teen centuries.

52. Sends most of its divine blessings and punishments to a completely different plane of existence by accident.

53. Spreads its cult via memetic information that can infect a mortal just by sight or sound.

54. Genuinely cares about the orcs and their plight, but hides their pity because an even greater cosmic force than the gods would punish it severely.

55. Accidentally created trolls and goblins by mashing together and splitting up orc prototypes. Humans were created when ████████████████████████████.

56. Completely unrelated to all other dogma, the god holds that the world is actually an egg that will soon hatch.

57. Recently misplaced its afterlife and all the souls therein.

58. Demands agonizing personal sacrifices of their followers before telling them it was ‘just a joke’ at the last possible second.

59. This god’s totem animal is somewhat less fierce than others.

1. Sugar glider

2. Pika

3. Mola mola

4. Juvenile pangolin

5. Extra-fluffy silk moth

6. Tree frog the size of a pinhead

60. Has an exact twin. Both are enraged by being confused with the other.

61. Has a polar opposite twin whom they hate. They’re both equally nasty though.

62. Is agitating for a good old fashioned god-war and is looking for a pantheon to challenge.

63. Occasionally answers prayers with the message “we have been trying to reach you about your chariot’s extended warranty”.

64. Shapes reality as an elaborate form of fanfiction.

65. Carries an entire civilization inside their vacant mind.

66. Presently exists somewhere as a small, squid-faced worm in the care of a mannequin.

67. Is infatuated with another deity and expresses that attraction immaturely through childish pestering and meanness- this takes the form of continent-swallowing religious wars on the material plane.

68. Knows the location of a hidden tree that bears the sour fruit of immortality. They already ate them all, though.

69. Demands that its image be spread far and wide- urban worshipers have made the deity and their symbols popular subjects of graffiti.

70. Is the fusion of two separate gods with similar-enough portfolios that they were conflated by mortals. They are in constant agony, and are actively looking for a way to split themself apart.

71. Fills their followers with an irrational urge to find a way to punch the moon.

72. Currently operates out of their cosmic parent’s stomach after the latter tried some things to avoid a prophecy being fulfilled.

73. Formerly a demon from another pantheon who went freelance and made it bigtime.

74. Is weakened by prayer, and diverts those energies into exploitable proxies.

75. Gains strength from the hatred and anti-prayers directed at it.

76. Is easily offended, but instead of smiting people they just get very passive-aggressive.

77. Never got the memo that spikes of villainy are out of style.

78. Has hypnotist-priests who control the minds of large groups of people to pray to the deity briefly. The affected have no memory of the event, and are often confused to find themselves kneeling in a circle.

79. May always be appeased by offerings of sweet things- honey, candied fruit, orphans, sugar, etc.

80. Recently agreed to worshiper-swap with another deity. Neither sect approves.

81. Locked in combat or a game of wits with another deity right now and will send most prayers to divine voicemail. Please leave a message after the mocking cackle.

82. Seems to have recently split into multiple personalities that each jockey for dominance.

83. Everyone within a hundred miles of their point of manifestation tastes orange for a week- the color, not the fruit.

84. Regularly grants mighty, albeit temporary boons to the absolutely most wretched, pathetic, and lowest of the low just for the laughs.

85. May or may not be the figurehead of a religious pyramid scheme.

86. Always manifests alongside a distinctive, often distorted leitmotif.

87. Recently struck out on a solo career to create a monotheistic faith and is considered to have sold out by most other gods.

88. Has just now suffered a major setback and is much weaker than usual.

89. Has just succeeded over a rival and is much stronger than usual.

90. Really doesn’t enjoy or “get” the whole blood sacrifice thing, but goes along with it for appearances.

91. Invented the orcish double-axe as a sick joke. They still can’t believe how far it went.

92. Sends blessings via a winged messenger. No post on weekends.

93. Was born when a conspiracy concocted by maltheistic ur-priests got a little out of hand.

94. Invests a secret police force of their priests with considerable abilities in stealth, miracles, and psychic powers. Nothing is more damning than sending Thoughts & Prayers after someone.

95. Has gone catatonic from hunger and won’t stop gibbering about a spider.

96. No one has ever heard of this god before just now- are you sure you didn’t just make them up?

97. Is so bemusingly average for a cruel, distant god that they have no Quirk.

98. Changes so dramatically in between appearances that this entire generator must be rerolled before their next appearance.

99. Actually just one part of a conjoined triumvirate of gods. Use the god generator two more times, ignoring rerolls of this Quirk.

100. This god’s away on business.

New System, New Face: Organizing the Chaos of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay's Random Character Generation

This was a lot more of a painless bandage yank than I was expecting.

Generally, when I see that the default for character generation is to randomly roll for everything from species and class all the way down to eye color, I expect that the default result is also masochistically difficult to work with, and that that is intended as part of the Dwarf Fortress-esque "FUN" of the whole experience.

But on revisiting my not-too-old 2nd Edition books of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, I found that wasn't exactly the case. I found that there was control amid the chaos, and therein laid some tantalizing new character build potential.

Game/Context

WFRP 2E was the second iteration of the Warhammer roleplaying game that started in 1996. It released in 2005, developed by Green Ronin and published directly by Games Workshop through Black Library, later to be picked up by Fantasy Flight Studios. Like Fighting Fantasy it is a super British property with roots in 80s fantasy, but mechanics are not part of that shared DNA.

It uses the same skills-focused d% system introduced in the first game, revised and updated in areas like the magic system. It would be the last edition to use this system before FFS launched its radically different 3rd edition that was far more board-gamey, relying in part upon specialized decks of cards and custom dice for play. 3rd edition proved to be a bit of a "D&D 4E Moment" for Warhammer, and it was less popular than the previous versions (though much like D&D 4E, I'd probably find it fine if I sat down to play it).

WFRP 4E, the current version that launched in 2018, has far more in common with the first two editions than its immediate predecessor, but some notable differences and updates are present. I don't actually know what those differences are though, because I've only ever flipped through the core rulebook, so that's a post for another day maybe. And I have no freaking clue what the Soulbound game by Cubicle 7 is like because I've not kept up with Age of Sigmar stuff since its release- I'm not opposed to the prospect of throwing out the tired old Old World setting and starting fresh, but I don't think they've done what they could have with it so far.

Anyway, WFRP kicked off the "grim & perilous" genre of TTRPGs that has seen hundreds (thousands?) of entries over the decades, some of them very derivative and others only sharing the common thread of a dismal world and lethal gameplay rules. The major split between it and OSR games tends to be relative rules complexity and how many things it tells you to just roll dice for, to my knowledge.

The Warhammer world is often a crapshoot whose renaissance only reinvigorated the arts of war, devastation, and persecution, hope is on the wane, death and fates worse than death abound, and the player characters generally serve self-interest and/or inhumane powers who are the "good guys" by way of the opposition being presented as almost uniformly worse, often being supernaturally corruptive in nature.

Back in the old days of Warhammer it was far more tongue-in-cheek and happy to satirize any and all tropes, but since the late 90s they've been played progressively more and more straight so that their current grimdarkness is only surpassed by Warhammer's futuristic 40k cousin, and much of the dark comedic value is accidental.

But I digress. I came here to build, and build I will.

Rolling All of the Things

Character species (or "race" as the game calls it, and would continue to call it up until 4th edition) is one of the few selectable options by default. But in the spirit of chaos (but not yet Chaos) I decided to add that to the random rolls. So I whipped out my twenty year-old black caltrop and gave it a toss.

The species, as arranged on the career table, are Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, and Human.

My 1d4 landed on 2, meaning my character was going to be an Elf.

My heart dropped as I imagined what kind of aristocratic snob I would achieve a new hoit of toit with. Does huffing one's own farts count as mastering a Wind of Magic?

I went on to start rolling Characteristics, your primary stats. Each is 2d10 added to a number that varies depending on the species and stat in question. For example halflings only get a +10 for the Strength roll, but enjoy a +30 to Agility. This guarantees a certain minimum number range, so you can't be stuck trying to roll under 2 on d100 checks right off the bat. It's an interesting system where the inherent bonuses are equally or even more important than the random rolls, as opposed to games like D&D where outside of point-buy's minimum of 8, the only baseline you often get is a +1 or +2 to one attribute from ancestry.

Elves are actually super well-off with their primary Characteristic bonuses. Everything is a 20 or 30, and I happened to roll pretty average across the board. My nascent elf ended up with:

Weapon Skill 37, Ballistics Skill 39, Strength 32, Toughness 39, Agility 41, Intelligence 36, Willpower 36, Fellowship 30.

Not bad.

So average-to-okay in fact that I barely had anything to apply my free adjustment to. Every character gets Shallya's Mercy, a pity bump from the setting's resident luck goddess which lets you change one low stat to your species' average value instead. Since I figured my elf will be using a bow at some point, I bumped their slightly low 39 in BS (my favorite shortening of a stat name ever) to 41.

The elf's Strength Bonus and Toughness Bonus were then calculated. Both are 3, taken from the first digit of each value, which means that when they deal melee damage they inflict +3 damage, and when they take damage, they can absorb the first 3 points that bypass any armor they're wearing- built in damage reduction, essentially. You gotta be tough to survive at all levels of play.

... I say that like I have any authority whatsoever on playing this game.

Next came Wounds and Fate Points- health and get-out-of-trouble cards, basically. These also vary by species, with a d10 roll corresponding to different numbers in a range. I rolled the lowest for Wounds but high for FP, getting 9 and 2 respectively. It's a good thing my elf can use a bow, because they'll be slightly squishy. I also put my free starting advance into Wounds to offset it a bit.

At this point I deviated slightly and took care of personal customization before finishing building my character.

What materialized was a 5'11" male with brown hair and eyes, and a star sign symbolizing mercy, death, and rebirth, born in the rough-and-tumble free city of Marienburg. About the only thing saving my elf from being a Ubisoft protagonist is his distinguishing mark, which gives him a Huge Nose. I decided Larandar's big honkin' schnoz looks like a leaf from a succulent plant. One of those really fleshy ones that you're tempted to bite as a kid but definitely don't ever do, not even when nobody's looking, because that would be weird, right?

...

Also his name is Larandar. That was another random table roll.

The next major step is to roll your Starting Career. Characters don't have their futures set in stone by a class or single progression path in WFRP. Instead, you semi-freely move between different careers which allow you to pursue specialized skill and talent (basically feats) training, as well as give easier pathways to future careers. Like AFF, there is no level system, and you buy improvements to your character piecemeal (in the form of those aforementioned advances). Unlike the quirky little 2d6 dungeon crawler, your choice of incremental advances is guided by career choice.

Up until recently I believed that you were hard-locked into a career path and couldn't deviate from its exit or entry branches. But then I finally read the books and learned that you can hop out of any career into any other that you want, so long as you complete your current career's stat advances, and can afford the increased XP cost and the various Trappings you need in order to qualify as equipped for the career in question.

To find my starting career, I broke out the big book of them. Up to this point I was consulting the core rulebook, but the Career Compendium has every career ever published for 2E, and packs them all into a single whopping d1000 table. I also had never rolled a d1000 before, and wanted to try the novelty. At a high 973, my elf landed in the last entry on the list: Woodsman.

Here's where things finally got interesting for me.

Putting it Together

The woodsman is exactly what it sounds like- a forester and lumberjack who fells timber from the massive, deadly forests of the Old World to fuel the Empire. Plenty of monsters infest the forests, so it's a dangerous job. Woodsmen get a smattering of ranger-esque abilities like following trails and setting traps, as well as fluency and literacy in a literal Ranger language used to speak or sign coded messages.

They also get a big fricking axe as their primary weapon, and according to the career fluff they are "known to clash with Elves, since the Elves do not take kindly to the clearing of their precious forests." Suddenly Larandar went from being voiced by Nolan North to having a somewhat unique position in life. Why would an elf be working as a forester in and around the humans' Empire?

Politics, I decided.

As with any derivative fantasy setting that doesn't care too much about hitting the mark on the tropes from the stories they lean upon, there are several strictly delineated families of elves in Warhammer- your fancy high elves, your fey wood elves, and your sadomasochistic, mass-enslaving dark elves- because there's nothing problematic about ascribing all evils and sexual deviancy to a single ethnic group, right?

Anyway, only high and wood elves really enter the scope of WFRP's setting outside of specific adventure books, and they each have ambivalent relationships with one another and the Empire. The high elves across the sea in not-Atlantis still hold benevolent watch over their wayward forest cousins, and it is not often appreciated. Both groups have strained but peaceful relations with humans on average, but if you enter a wood elf realm like Athel Loren unbidden, you will probably get shot on sight.

Which is why Larandar's randomly rolled origins in Marienburg become so interesting to me.

Marienburg is basically the free Netherlandish city-state to the Empire's decaying renaissance-era Holy Roman Empire, but with more rocky wasteland and less fertile low country utterly beholden to whatever god keeps the dykes working. It is a wealthy port city built upon trade with the outside world, and naturally the thalassocratic high elves from Ulthuan want a piece of that pie. There was a war at one point, and there's still some low-key mutual piracy that everyone politely ignores within the city limits, but Marienburg and the high elves are guaranteed allies and trade partners, ensured in part by the city's Elf Quarter.

Sith Rionnasc'namishathir, or just Elftown, is an independent enclave populated by semi-democratic sea elf clans who facilitate trade between the two powers. Sea elves, AKA high elves who happen to live on a coast and don't hate manual labor, are consummate mariners, and for their ships I figured they need a steady supply of lumber.

In enters Larandar, or really any other schlub from one of the less prestigious clans who might be assigned to guarantee that lumber supplies from the nearby forest of Laurelorn remain uninterrupted. This might only require an extra pair of hands and an axe at times, but having a friendly high elf on hand to diffuse the situation in case wood elves show up with bowstings taut could be the difference between life and death for the woodsmen of the Old North Road.

Maybe Larandar even fancies himself a White Lion of Chrace, one of the axe-wielding woodsmen from back home- albeit one who is greatly removed and much-reduced. A 110 year-old cub with a bite, if you will.

Of course it'd be a cakewalk if the only dangers were wood elves understandably acting in defense of their homeland in the face of existential threat from a rapidly industrializing imperial power. The forests of the Old World are also full of beastmen, tribes of greenskins, bands of mutants who are none too pleased with the whole 'systemic extermination' policy most people have going on, etc. The time will probably come when Larandar's lumber camps need more proactive protection, or perhaps the wood elves will need assistance dealing with a mutual threat.

For that reason I mapped his future careers out to be Hunter for basic ranged weapon familiarity, Kithband Warrior for more military skills and combat talents like Marksman, Scout for, well, scouting, and finally--if he lives this long--Ghost Strider, to reflect him becoming the elvish equivalent of spec ops.

He's almost guaranteed to be dead to some Ungor with a sharpened stick before then, but we can still dream.

Little is left after that to finish a character- just some bookkeeping and inventory. It's a good thing advanced encumbrance rules are optional, because Larandar started off overburdened by his default loadout thanks to great-weapons weighing 200 units- over half his total capacity right away.

Some Chaos on the Side

Of course I couldn't put Chaos in the title without dabbling a little, so after I finished with Larandar I cracked open the Tome of Corruption to take a look at player character options for the Ruinous Powers. 

Rolling up a stereotypical devil viking from Norsca was too obvious a choice, so I decided to roll with the Kurgans instead.

The Kurgans are like ancient Scythians, if the Scythians were seven foot tall musclebound Mad Max extras who were not actually Scythians at all, and just happen to wear pelts and ride murder-ponies. They routinely descend from the eastern steppes alongside the Hung, Tong, and other parodies of historical Eurasian nomads, oftentimes making up the bulk of a Chaos invasion behind the more popular Norse vanguard.

Norse and Kurgans both have a deep spirituality that gets hinted at in this book, describing how they see Chaos in all things, not just violence, and that the changes and transformations of life and death are sacred things to be embraced. They also believe that the material world is a dream, and that the realm of the gods is the only thing truly real. Death becomes something not to be feared, and the act of killing takes on the positive aspect of helping "sleepers" wake up to the ultimate truth of reality.

This is an extremely odd passage for me. It feels like it was lifted from a book that was written when Warhammer was much younger, and not as many parts of its world were boiled down into self-parody played straight yet. It hints at the vibrant, creative humanity possessed by Chaos-worshiping peoples that is presented nowhere else in the universe, nor is it even supported elsewhere in the same chapter of this book. Everywhere else, the tribes are presented as singularly brutal and without nuance, slaughtering, razing, mutilating, corrupting, and--especially in the case of Slaaneshi war hosts--committing sexual atrocities against anything other than themselves- but also sometimes themselves because cHaOsSS!

The sole exception to this (sometimes) is the southernmost Norscan people, who take mercenary work or trade with as well as raid their Imperial neighbors on an ad hoc basis.

I wonder if the writer of that section had wider plans that never panned out.

Anyway, in the absence of customization tables like what the species in the core book get, I whipped up a pretty rindy, haggard marauder named Tcha'laar. I decided she didn't like the prospect of hunting down the best warrior to squirt babies out for like most Kurgan women are expected to do if they want any form of standing in their society, so she stole some horses from her father's herd a few years ago and has been causing trouble on the steppe ever since.

She's also blessed by the gods because I rolled under the 25% necessary to have a starting mutation.

Mutations are a wild array of random effects, sometimes beneficial, sometimes detrimental, but always terrifying to behold and likely to lead to more mutations, which will eventually cause most creatures to collapse into a mindless beast called a Chaos Spawn.

Just one mutation isn't too harmful to start off with though, and they are highly esteemed among Chaos folks besides- it only fits.

So I rolled another d1000, and got a 47.

Then I rolled a 54 on that mutation's sub-table.

And then I learned the true meaning of regret.

I guess I should be thankful.
At least it wasn't Orifices.

Hearken and despair all ye feckless, would-be baby-daddies. Tcha'laar, Beast of a Thousand Nipples has come! She is the Champion of Chaos Undivided!*

*Each of the four Chaos Gods gets exactly 250 nipples dedicated to them.

New System, New Face: Cobbling Together an Orc Shaman in Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2nd Edition

Introducing another sub-sub-segment that takes me even farther away from what I initially started this blog to write about!

As I've mentioned in the past, generating characters is an old pastime of mine. I enjoy making character builds, not so much to powergame but to see how closely I can execute on a thematic concept within the confines of a system's mechanical limits- of course there's nothing wrong or contradictory with wanting to deliver roleplay potential and an effective party member. I think that's called the Stormwind Fallacy or some such?

Unfortunately, I'm only remotely good at this with games in the d20 system sphere. I have made far, far too many characters for D&D 3.5E, Pathfinder 1E, the Warcraft RPG, and more recently D&D 5E. This is natural to some degree, because d20 rulesets tend to have tons of rules and, conversely, tons of nitty-gritty player options that I enjoy tinkering with. But it reinforces the narrowness of my exposure to TTRPGs, and that's not a very good thing. So, I try to push against it once in a while.

This is why my blog has random bouts of TROIKA! and GLOG creativity- the rules are simple enough, and my attachment to the games minimal enough, that I can just futz around with them without triggering my anxiety.

New System, New Face (or whatever I end up calling this) will be another stab at that.

In essence, I pick up a system I've never played before that has enough crunch to build a character, and then do that. I put in some practice with those books I hardly touch while rambling like crazy, and you lot hopefully get some compelling NPCs out of it.

Cool?

Cool.

First in the lineup is, coincidentally, a child of the first gamey book I ever picked up as a whelp.

Game/Context

Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2nd Edition is based on the rules of Fighting Fantasy, the old choose-your-own-adventure book series with an RPG twist designed by Steve Jackson- no, the other one.

Goofy, grungy, and at times excruciatingly British, Fighting Fantasy had dozens of installments in the 80s and 90s, generally set in either fantasy or sci-fi worlds. You roll dice, track your character's Skill (do-everything combat and action stat), Stamina (health, and in the case of sorcerers, your magic pool), and Luck (permanently depleting saving throw stat), and hopefully don't die in a variety of horrible ways before hitting that last reference page. And gods help you if you didn't photocopy the character record before that cheap, mass-produced softcover book paper got erased full of holes.

My first exposure to the series was through the Sorcery! sub-series set in Titan, one of several FF universes. I actually found a copy of the first book, The Shamutanti Hills, tucked away in my elementary school library on a shelf low enough for me to reach. It hadn't been borrowed in half a decade before me, but I proceeded to take it out at least once every month for the remainder of my schooling. The librarians got so used to seeing me with that beat-up old thing, they gave it to me as a graduation present. I still have it tucked away in a shady spot in a ziplocked bag full of memories.

But this post is about building a character, not wistfully thinking back to the days before I learned what chilblains or systemic oppression are. On to the system!

AFF and its 2011 reboot AFF2E elaborate upon the same system as the old CYOA books. Skill, Stamina, and Luck are still there, but also Magic and Magic Points. You roll 2d6 to do everything, either opposed rolls or over/under target numbers, but you have a whole mess of special skills and talents to add to it. Character creation is fairly light and point-based, with no class or level-up system. You invest experience points in individual upgrades, and play how you want.

I want to play an orc, because of course I do, which means I need to turn toward the back of the book.

I find it pleasantly surprising that the core rulebook has rules for creating custom species and using them in mixed parties, especially when so much of Titan is divided along a hard, old school Chaos/Neutral/Good alignment axis. The rules aren't complex, but there are a couple of rounds to go through, and it works best if the type of creature you want to play already has a monster entry, either in this book or in the dedicated monster manual, Out of the Pit. Fortunately orcs do have an entry, alongside their goblin and troll cousins, and something like half a dozen crossbreeds.

A quick rundown of the rules is as follows: take the creature entry's stats and subtract 3 from Skill. Then, divide Stamina by 2 (but not really), throw out any fractions, and add your remaining Skill to that number. Then compare the sum to the baseline number 8- if your sum is below 8, you get extra points to add features to the new player species. If it's at the baseline, you're already on par with the book's default humans, dwarves, and elves. If it's above the baseline, you gotta pay for it in a small way later.

Orcs sit at a middling 6 Skill, 5 Stamina, which becomes 3 Skill and 5 Stamina. The point-buy formula number is 5 (3 + 2.5, nix the fraction), which is 3 points lower than 8. That means our orc gets 3 extra points to buy ancestry abilities with. The normal total is 6, but we have 9. Not bad!

Special Skills cost 1 point each, while characteristic bumps and non-combat talents cost 2 each. Combat or magic-related talents cost a whopping 4 points, and I won't be taking any of those here.

Orcs commonly live underground or are active at night, so I give my orc species the Dark Seeing talent for 2 out of 9 points. The Survivor talent raises that to 4, because they manage to survive in the most filthy and inhospitable places in the world, and that means constantly securing sufficient food, water, and shelter. I've decided my orc is from the deserts of the southern continent of Khul. That means my 5th point goes to the Desert Lore special skill.

The last 4 points I spend on characteristic boosts, increasing Skill from 3 to 4 and Stamina from 5 to 7. This makes the orc a little more competitive with humans, dwarves, and elves, who all start with stat minimums of 4 Skill and 8 Stamina, on top of their own racial bonuses. Luck starts at 8 for everyone, orcs included.

Building Friends out of Clay

I now have to decide what I want this individual orc to be like, and to choose that I need to know about the orc in general.

Orcs have it pretty rough in Titan. They and their aforementioned goblin and troll cousins are the premier foot soldiers and cannon fodder for the armies of Chaos, the blanket faction for everything evil ruled by a few dark gods in this universe. They are at home underground, but infest every known climate across the world. They live a miserable, squalid existence caught somewhere in between the flavors of fascistic Tolkien orc and the green-skinned savage pulp fantasy orc that was becoming popular in wargame circles in the 80s and 90s.

They are built from equal parts racial stereotype and boisterous rugby hooligan, and the disparate pieces are constantly on the verge of tearing themselves apart. No two depictions of orcs are the same across all of FF canon, from their culture and organization all the way down to their biology- and since FF orcs aren't resistant to Chaos like their Warhammer counterparts, mutations abound. Playing an orc in the modern incarnation of Titan means wading through this legacy-mélange of tropes whose only unifying factors seem to be cruelty and unhappiness.

It wasn't always like that, though.

The orcish origin story is rather Tolkienien. When the gods of good were ordering the world, a servant of the earth goddess Throff wanted in on the action. His name was Hashak, and he wished to create children of his own. So he stole a little lump of the Clay of Life from Throff, and shaped it into living things. First came the trolls, whom he was embarrassed by because of their lumpiness and stupidity. Next came the multitudinous orcs, and then the smaller and more refined goblins. They were all very primitive and childlike at this stage; the word "orc" seems to be a corruption of the first belch or grunt they made when they came to life- urk!

Hashak the Orc-God by Paul Bonner

But before much could be done with them, Throff came home, saw the missing clay, and commanded Hashak to destroy his unauthorized creations. Hashak feigned compliance, and mixed a bit of plain old soil into the ball of clay to make up the lost mass. Then he took his children and scattered them in vaults across the world, hopeful that at least some of them would survive in the world they were not meant for. His wish was granted in the worst possible way. The gods of chaos saw Hashak hide his children, and they followed in his wake, breathing evil into each and every one of their hiding places.

Basically, it's like if Aulë the smith was a well-meaning idiot who hid the dwarves when Eru Ilúvatar said playtime was over, and then Morgoth hotboxed them all into orcs with his halitosis.

Exactly like that.

Unlike Middle-Earth, pseudo-biblical redemption is not a very big part of Titan's story. It's a world of heroic fantasy that's every bit as noisy and dirty as the art style suggests. Orcs are only to be encountered as foes, and only rarely as pitiable characters in their own right.

Character Concept

Naturally, I say screw that. We're making a gods-damned orc shaman of Hashak, and he's gonna find a way rescue and valorize the hell out of the children of clay!

Our friend was once a totally unremarkable member of the small Withered Fist tribe from the Dark Land of Khul, located uncomfortably close to the Wastes of Chaos but not especially prone to mutation. One day he got cracked on the head so hard that his skull split open in an intra-tribal dispute, and his fellows left him for dead with the onset of a sandstorm.

Instead of dying as he rightly should have, something slipped into his fractured brain. A vision of Hashak came to him, urging him to take up the lost, old ways and reject the breath of evil. He also granted him a new name, calling him Gurumph'tani- a name very much unlike the stereotypically coarse, simple names most orcs seem to have.

When he awoke, Gurumph'tani was willing to pass it off as a hallucination. But he found that his skull was mended together with a piece of clay harder than rock. His mind felt clearer. For the first time in his life, he slowed down and started to think about things. He left the wasteland behind, and by some miracle was able to avoid getting killed on sight at the first human port city he came across- though they did butcher his name beyond recognition, so now he simply goes by 'Grumf' for the sake of simple human ears.

Now he follows the will of Hashak, always quiet and difficult to hear through the background static of Chaos. He is quiet, tolerant, and contemplative, though his pale yellow eyes and giant patch of head-clay can be off-putting.

My mind made up, we return to mechanics.

Building a Character (Finally)

A standard new "Hero" has 4 Skill, 8 Stamina, 8 Luck, and 0 Magic with 8 points to distribute between them, with points invested in Stamina counting for two. We have 4/7/8/0 which is close, and I'm sure that magic pixel of health won't be needed anytime soon...

As an orc who just wandered out of Khul, he's going to be hardy. But as a brand new shaman, he needs at least a little Magic. Fortunately Priestly magic is a lot less demanding than either Wizardry or Sorcery, so I think I can get away with a starting Magic stat of 3.

Luck gets 2 points added, partly because this character has been pretty lucky to survive up to this point, but also because you can never buy more Luck points after character creation, and it's a pseudo-finite resource that only gods and great deeds can restore, so you want to get as many as you can spare now. That leaves us with a nice neat 10, our highest stat.

Skill gets 2 to make a modest 6. This value gets lots of other numbers added to it depending on the type of roll, so we can compensate for the time being with decent skills. I was infected by the terribly video gamey trope of fantasy shamans being at least adequate melee combatants at an early age, like a less mail-clad cleric, and our buddy here will be attempting the same.

And yes, Skill and (Special) Skills being different stats is a bit confusing.

The last point goes into Stamina, bumping it up to 9. It's a little low for someone who isn't a dedicated thief or magic user, but the ability to self-heal with priestly powers will mitigate that a bit.

Speaking of priestly powers, we should address those next.

Instead of having to roll spellcasting dice and risking failure and a trip to the Oops! random mishap table like Wizardry and Sorcery require, Priestly powers just work. You say the power you want to happen, and it happens, but you can only use each power once a day. There are some numerical considerations, but all you need is your Devotion score (Magic stat + Magic-Priestly ranks). Grumf's starting Devotion is 5.

Powers are limited by the priest's deity, each of which has a list of 3 common powers plus one power unique to them. You can only be a priest of one deity at a time, and falling out of favor with that god is a massive ordeal that doesn't go well, because this is old school fantasy and unintuitive dogmatic henotheism is in full swing, baby. We're already riding or dying with Hashak though, so all we need to do is go to his entry in the list of gods and-

oh

Oh right.

See, Hashak only ever gets a few small mentions in a scattering of FF books, the biggest reference being in Titan- The Fighting Fantasy World. But aside from a holiday (6th of Snow Cloak, AKA January 6th), Hashak gets none of the other treatment a god gets. That means he has no clergy or worship information, and no priestly powers list.

But we can fudge that a tiny bit. It'll be our little secret.

No, I'm not going to homebrew a bunch of stuff in a post ostensibly about practicing with a new system. I'm just going to rearrange a few things to be more thematically appropriate.

Since Hashak's one big claim to fame is making things out of magic clay, I'll be mashing together the powers of the aforementioned earth goddess Throff and her son Verlang the smithing god. We'll take Verlang's common powers--Heal, Commune, and Ward--and mix them with Throff's special power, a 10-second localized earthquake. Grumf's Devotion score is only needed for two of these powers- Heal, for the amount that he, well, heals with a single use, and as the target number to overcome Ward, which is basically a magic circle against undead, evil spirits, demons, etc. It's not much, but it's something.

Next up is Special Skills.

Special Skills get added to your Skill or Magic number for relevant rolls, and can have up to 6 ranks each. Most start at 1, but you can give a new hero three rank-2 skills at start. These three will be Magic-Priestly, Clubs, and Armour with almost zero hesitation.

The other six skills, all rank-1, will be Religious Lore, Magic Lore, Second Sight to detect magic, Healing to apply first aid to himself or others the way Hashak saved him, Awareness to keep his wits about him, and Magic-Minor to unlock some little tricks. He is still a fledgling to the supernatural, but he has a broad and ad hoc base for it developing.

Minor Magic is a collection of cantrips that only consume Magic Points when you miscast them. Grumf has 8 Magic Points (Magic stat x2 + Magic-Minor ranks x2). Things like creating a fire, mending holes in items, forming temporary disgust between two people, or making spoiled food edible are all Minor Magic spells. Makes me yearn for the sheer versatility and coverage of Prestidigitation, but oh well. I pick Mend, Ripen, and Weather Protection as basic utility spells for my shaman.

Language is a special skill handled separately. He's fluent in Orcish at a 4, and at Common 2 he can get by with occasional pauses and a noticeable accent.

We've got one last choice to make, and that is his starting (non-species) Talent. I chose Blessed, allowing him to cast one priestly power twice a day. It'll come in handy if he needs to spot heal an ally in danger.

With that, he's done. All that remains is to apply his starting equipment kit- backpack, food, 2d6 coins, a starting weapon of your choice, etc. I gave him a rather clerical mace because it uses the club fighting skill, and it has really consistent damage numbers- you deal or absorb damage in AFF by rolling a d6 and checking the individual armor or weapon's table for a value.

Heroes earn 50 experience points per adventure, plus or minus a bit extra depending on whether the player contributed to good or bad shenanigans. If he stays cautious, Grumf might survive long enough to really come into his own, and start delving into how to alter the fate of his people.

His best bets for where to go first are probably Blacksand or Kharé, both city-ports that host notable populations of "monstrous" citizens in and around the rampant crime and villainy. Not a great place, but a good place to make a first impression.

Here's his sheet, for those interested. If you want to make him an NPC just upgrade his armor to a leather hauberk and large shield, remove his Luck stat, and add the 2 points that were spent on it elsewhere, ideally Skill and/or Magic.

Tiny orc shaman face by Mihai Radu

GLOG Class Attempt: The 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇𝓋𝑜𝓇𝑒

They call you arrogant. Conceited. A braggart. Mentally unhinged. A shining example of toxic aristocracy. Liable to slay the dragon and forget to unchain the princess. So full of hot air that your suit of armor should come with a "WARNING: CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE" label printed on the plackart.

You have no defense against any of these.

...

But that is okay! You do not need to win arguments.

You do not need anything else but 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇.

No, not honor. 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇 with a 'u', spoken with a breathy sigh and a Habsburg Jaw. It is different. Better. Inherently more... 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇𝒶𝒷𝓁𝑒.

You live 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇. Breathe it. Drink it. Worship it. Dream about it in the late hours of the night. Your body is a self-sufficient 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇 ecosystem, both absorbing it from the world and producing it until you achieve perfect, 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇𝒶𝒷𝓁𝑒 equilibrium.

Words like "knight" and "paladin" no longer hold a candle to what you are.*

You are an 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇𝓋𝑜𝓇𝑒. Go forth. Consume it. Excrete it. Cover the world in it, one deed at a time.

* Technically speaking, you never actually earned either of those titles, but when have you ever let a complete and utter lack of liege, land, or lineage get in the way of your 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇?

𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇𝓋𝑜𝓇𝑒

Starting Equipment: plate armour, shield, anachronistic broadsword, parade livery, ridiculous  𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇𝒶𝒷𝓁𝑒 looking helmet.
Starting Skills: Courtesy, Speechmaker, 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇

A: 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇 Points, Honorophage

B: Smite 𝔇𝔦𝔰𝔥𝔬𝔫𝔬𝔲𝔯

C: Aura of 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇

D: For the 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇, Most 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇𝒶𝒷𝓁𝑒

You gain +1 HP and +1 to Reaction Rolls against nobles, knights, glory hounds, quixotic madmen, and other 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇𝒶𝒷𝓁𝑒 types for each 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇𝓋𝑜𝓇𝑒 template you have.

A: 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇 Points

You keep a running tally of the bones broken and property destroyed in your reckless disregard pursuit of 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇, and these "points" help bolster your ego in times of need. Every time you take damage or break valuables worth at least 10gp while doing something exceptionally stupid brave and attractive in the name of 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇, gain 1 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇 Point. You can store up to 10 Points within your 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇 Glands- yes those are a real thing, ask any 𝒹𝑜𝒸𝓉𝑜𝓊𝓇. Loot lost in this way does not count toward XP.

A: Honorophage

You are true to your namesake, and can subsist exclusively on 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇 so long as you keep the gallant deeds rolling. Whenever you would eat a Ration, you may instead spend 1 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇 Point for the same effect. You must spend the entire meal recounting past deeds and valor, whether real or imagined.

B: Smite 𝔇𝔦𝔰𝔥𝔬𝔫𝔬𝔲𝔯

You may draw upon your body's reserves of 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇 to smite those who would dare harbor the taint of 𝔇𝔦𝔰𝔥𝔬𝔫𝔬𝔲𝔯 within themselves. When you make an Attack against someone 𝔇𝔦𝔰𝔥𝔬𝔲𝔫𝔬𝔯𝔞𝔟𝔩𝔢 you may spend 3 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇 Points. If you do, take -4 to Attack in exchange for +4 Damage if the attack is successful, as you call your enemy out, bow, verbally abuse them, and declare your attack. If you miss, the Points are not expended. Because you are undoubtedly the embodiment of 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇, 𝔇𝔦𝔰𝔥𝔬𝔫𝔬𝔲𝔯 is anything that you do not stand for, or anything immediately inconvenient to you.

C: Aura of 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇

Your prodigious 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇 Glands have become hyperactive. You may express these glands by spending 5 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇 Points to create a palpable 20' cloud of 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇 centered on you for 3 rounds. Anyone in this cloud takes -1 Attack and Defense as they paw at their noses and try not to be violently ill. This is the 𝔇𝔦𝔰𝔥𝔬𝔫𝔬𝔲𝔯 being expelled from their bodies, you see. You gain +1 Save vs Fear and +1 Attack in the cloud, and you find it quite pleasant and aromatic besides.

D: For the 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇

You realize that there is nothing more 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇𝒶𝒷𝓁𝑒 than saving your own skin so that you might survive to 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇 another day. You may spend 10 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇 Points to remove 1 Fatal Wound.

D: Most 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇𝒶𝒷𝓁𝑒

You have done it. You have completed the ritual of Accepting True 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇 Into Oneself, a rite involving an idol of the anthropomorphic manifestation of 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇 and a preponderance of body oil. You gain double the 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇 Points from all sources, but more importantly you may now call yourself Most 𝐻𝑜𝓃𝑜𝓊𝓇𝒶𝒷𝓁𝑒.

GLOG Class Attempt: The Wildered

 

Shapeshifter by Stephanie Lostimolo

The world of people once made sense to you, and perhaps you even belonged there for a time. But then you heard Nature's call, and you gave yourself over to it. It's called to you a few times since then. There's little left of your old self now- even your body has begun to take on a new shape, sculpted as it is by the wild whims of the land into an amalgam of plant, animal, and person. You're not some great protector or apex predator, at least not yet. You're just a better denizen than most.

But that will change at any moment, when the wild comes calling again.

The Wildered

Starting Equipment: tattered and travelworn clothes, a wooden club.
Starting Skills: Wilderness.

A: Drift, Hear the Land Whisper

B: Drift

C: Drift

D: Drift, See the Land Breathe

You gain +1 HP for every Wildered template you possess.

A-D: Drift

Each time you gain a template, roll once on the Drift table. Reroll any repeats. Drift is superficially similar to mutation, only it comes from giving yourself over to the transformative whims of Wild Nature instead of being corrupted by unnatural magic.

Most normal people won't know or appreciate this distinction.

1d20	Drift	Effect
1	Coat of Fur	A thick coat of fur covers your skin, giving you +4 to Constitution on rolls to resist cold. You shed excessively to keep cool in warm weather.
2	Prehensile Tail	You grow a long tail, or a vine close enough to one. It can manipulate objects like a hand or carry an item to give you 1 additional Quick Draw Slot, but it can’t do things like wield a weapon or use a magic item.
3	Sporogenesis	You gain the power to produce and store noxious spores. You can eject a 10’ cloud of spores centered on you once per day. Anyone caught in the cloud must Save or be stunned for 1 round. Also, every spore cloud has a 1 in 100 chance of spawning a small, feral copy of you in that area in 1d6 years.
4	Digitigrade	Both your feet stretch and twist into springy animal legs. You suffer no penalties to Movement over rough terrain, and can Move and Run +10’.
5	Scaly Hide	Your skin becomes scaly and snakelike. Gain +1 Defense for 3 weeks out of the month. You shed and regrow your skin over the fourth week. The new you never looks perfectly like your last skin.
6	Photosynthesis	Leaves grow around your head like a mane of hair, soaking up sunlight. If you rest in a sunny area, you don’t need to consume a ration.
7	Vine or Vice	You grow either prehensile vines or a clasping appendage like a pincer. You gain +2 on rolls to grapple someone.
8	Thanatosis	You gain the power to play dead very convincingly, stopping your breathing, heartbeat, and other bodily processes for up to 1 hour per day.
9	Root System	You can lay down roots wherever there is natural ground for them to bore into. Your Strength counts as 20 against being pushed, shoved, or moved. You can also detect soil quality and underground water within 30’.
10	Fang & Claw	You gain some kind of natural defense of your choice, such as claws, hooves, fangs, a beak, etc. You can attack with it as a Light weapon.
11	Sensitive Snout	Your face elongates and becomes bestial. You gain an acute sense of smell, and can track creatures and things by scent.
12	Lignification	Cell walls in your muscles toughen, and your blood runs thick like sap. Reduce all incoming damage by 1. Also, cuts stop bleeding after 1 round.
13	Poisonous	Glands across your body secrete a toxic substance. Anything that grabs you or hits you with a bare part of their body must Save or take 1d4 damage. Anything that bites you has -4 on the Save.
14	Venomous	A venomous stinger erupts from some part of your body. You can make an Attack roll once a day to inject a target with your venom (1d6).
15	Creeping & Climbing	Your hands and feet sport sticky pads or hairlike filaments. Climb as fast as you can Run. You can attempt impossible climb tests.
16	Semi-Aquatic	You grow rudimentary gills, a few fins, and possibly a swim bladder. Swim as fast as you can Run and breathe water for up to 1 hour a day.
17	Camouflage	Reactive pigments and patterns in your skin, hair, etc. attempt to blend you into your surroundings under duress. Gain +2 to Stealth.
18	Vestigial Wings	You sprout a set of wings. They can be feathered, leathery, diaphanous, etc. They are too weak to fly with, but they can slow your descent. Take ½ damage from falling.
19	Regeneration	As long as you stay alive, you can regrow a severed limb after 1 year has passed. You can only regenerate one limb at a time.
20	Bounteous Branches	Branches like antlers sprout from your head and shoulders. You grow fruit worth 1d4 rations every week. Picked fruit spoils in 4 days.

A: Hear the Land Whisper

You lose the ability to read or write any language, and can never become literate again. Once per day you can meditate in a place of undisturbed wilderness for 10 minutes. If you do, you can ask 1 question of the land as if you had successfully cast Dendrigraphy with 1 Magic Die invested, except you can ask your question of any natural topography- a tree, a rock formation, a glacier, etc.

D: See the Land Breathe

Just as your body has been wildered, so too is your mind. You suffer a permanent loss of 1d3 Wisdom and 1d3 Charisma as you let superfluous things like mortal cognition and interpersonal relations atrophy. You can see the vague outlines of invisible things, and know if someone is a spellcaster just by looking them in the eyes, as if you were affected by the permanent effects of Wizard Vision. Druids start off non-hostile to you, and offer some begrudging recognition of your wildered status.

GLOG Class Attempt: Garden Hermit

 

Eremit in Flottbeck,
Johann Baptist Theobald Schmitt

You are, or were, a professional Garden Hermit.

What that means is that you dedicated a large portion of your life to being a living, breathing curiosity. You would seek out, or be sought out by, a wealthy and eccentric patron interested in writing up a contract to have you live as their novelty guest in a cottage, cave, or other secluded area of their property for a set number of years. During this period you would try to live up to their (at times extremely exacting) stipulations.

What these stipulations are vary from patron to patron. Sometimes they wanted you to be seen but not heard, acting as a distant piece of ornamentation for their estate, to be studied and appreciated from afar. Others actively engaged you, bringing guests to seek your earthy and introspective brand of wisdom. Still others wanted you to live like a ghost, hiding from the outside world and leaving only mere hints that your garden or grotto were inhabited- a pair of reading glasses left out on a table here, a half-eaten apple there.

It is a slow, isolated, oftentimes tedious way of life, and recently it has come under existential threat with the invention of lawn gnomes. But you make it work. The job pays surprisingly well. It offers a unique perspective on many aspects of life. It is a window into the natural world, albeit one made tame and a little less deadly. It also offers a window into the lives of the aristocrats who employ you. Much juicy gossip can be learned while legally lurking around the gardens of an affluent and well-connected noble family.

Garden Hermit

Starting Equipment: anachronistic faux-druidic robes, philosophical text, pruning shears.

Starting Skills: Gardening and Philosophy. Also, roll on the adjacent table.

A: Part of the Scenery

B: Dispense Wisdom, Land Lore

C: Used to Boredom

D: Mistaken for Magic

You gain +1 Stealth for each Garden Hermit template you possess. You get +2HP if you possess 2 or more Garden Hermit templates.

A: Part of the Scenery

If you are in any sort of manicured nature such as a public park, noble's estate, or garden, you can choose to blend in and become part of the scenery. While blended in, no one will notice or pay much heed to you so long as you spend your time doing Garden Hermit Things. These include studying/picking plants, reading old-timey philosophical texts, pretending to be an ornamental statue, etc.

B: Dispense Wisdom

You've played the part of the wise hermit long enough that it occasionally does some good. Make an opposed Wisdom roll to drag someone into dialogue about any topic. On a success, you trap them in engrossing or tedious debate for up to 1 hour. At the end of that hour your combination of platitudes and elenctic interrogation leads them to form their own good advice, giving them +1 to their next roll related to the topic of the debate.

B: Land Lore

Years of quiet observation have given you familiarity with the land, and you can identify most garden-variety plants and animals by sight or sound. Once per session, you can also declare a little-known but "interesting" fact about a type of plant or animal. The base chance of the fun-fact actually being true is 50%.

C: Used to Boredom

It's a dull affair, being a Garden Hermit. You sit around a grotto or hovel day after day, year after year, waiting to be stared at like a zoo animal or asked what the meaning of life is by a bunch of addled nobles. Occasionally an interesting bird lands nearby. You are immune to the negative effects of magic that slows down time or puts you to sleep, and you can never go mad from isolation.

D: Mistaken for Magic

You have become rustic and sagely-looking enough that you appear to the average person as a Chartered Garden Wizard of good repute at first glance. You can choose to pass as one by rolling under Charisma. Carrying a spellbook or scroll gives you +4 Charisma for the roll. Note that you cannot actually use spellbooks or scrolls, most people will be angry if they discover you are a charlatan, and druids will probably catch your scent and try to hunt you down sooner or later.

1d6	Garden Hermit Skills
1	You picked up woodcarving to pass the time, and have gotten good at it. Gain a small knife, quarterstaff, and 1d6 scars on your hands.
2	You use the isolation to further your studies. Gain 1d3 extra philosophical texts and 1 treatise penned by you.
3	Your last contract was terminated after you were found drinking at a tavern. Gain 2 bottles of beer.
4	You used garden hermeticism as a cover to steal from your employers. Gain a pair of nice boots and 1d6 pieces of cutlery.
5	You were also the groundskeeper for your stingy former employer. Gain a box of really rich dirt.
6	You are more proactive about your job security than other Garden Hermits. Gain a carpenter's hammer and 3d6 trophies from defeated lawn gnomes.

The Closing of the Door

The world ended, and salvation was denied.

Everyone knew this, because God Itself said so.

At least, most people believe It was God.

Admittedly no one had ever expected a giant diaphanous mantis to emerge from the Doors, all a-glimmer with silver inlaid silk and what smelled like rendered human fat.

And at least, most people believe that was what God said.

It was so long ago, and thunderous shrieks and mandibular clicks are rather challenging to translate when your eyes and ears bleed at the mere recollection of them.

God or no, the thing was powerful enough to open the Doors, and that alone had been miraculous. No one had ever managed to open the Doors- let alone damage them.

An entire generation has been born since that fateful day, so a bit more explanation is probably in order. Young people these days don't know their history. They're far more interested in collecting the newest and trendiest saints' bones, or predicting when the moon will stop screaming again.¹

For as long as history has been recorded, and probably for a good deal longer, the Doors stood watch over the world. They stood in the center of a black sand desert, taller than most mountains, and they were about as wide as one too. Even traveling in a straight line along the depth of one of their columns took several days on beastback. They had a sharp, angular construction with clean lines and a cold, dark grey coloration. They were made from a glassy rock that reflected sunlight some of the time, and absorbed it other times. At times it was reported to look porous. This is assuredly false. And the Doors were paired, if the pluralization wasn't an indicator.

The Doors were everything to us. They made our earliest, amiant-clad ancestors look up in awe and wonder. They sheltered our huddled bands from the five cardinal winds when they decided to bite and tear. They gave us something to emulate in our own architecture. They gave us something to aspire to understand through our arts and sciences. Shining cities rose up and studded the black desert around the Doors like the gleaming teeth that light up the night sky. I can scarcely believe that civilization would have developed in any recognizable way—if at all—without the Doors.

But we just couldn't figure out how to open the blasted thing.

Animals, ropes, and pulleys all failed to make them budge. Engines of all make broke down or exploded before they made any headway. Even astral arts failed to loosen their hinges- or ascertain if they truly had hinges at all. We couldn't even figure out which side, if any, was the "front" or "back" for the longest time- no matter how many holy wars one ideological camp launched against the others.

And there were many wars, mind you. At times the primordial, unchanging stillness of the Doors made the destruction and carnage which surrounded it seem all the more vibrant and terrible by contrast. Cities rose up, but they also fell smoldering into ruin beneath the indifferent shadow of that edifice. 

From the ashes arose new realms, though none ever settled directly before or behind the Doors- not only was it sacrilege, it would be suicide when the Doors finally swung open and smote all in their arcs, as surely they would one day. We knew it even then, so certainly and fervently, though centuries had dulled a little bit of our fire I suppose.

The day started like any other. Countless scribes and splinter sects have described the hours preceding the event as absolutely drowning in prophetic phenomena, but you can trust that there was none of that. That humdrum monotony was among the last things these eyes of mine ever saw, after all.²

It felt like an earthquake, when it started. In fact you very well could call it an earthquake, except instead of originating from the heart of the earth, it came from its soul. The tremors grew worse, towers fell, and fires began to spread. Finally, all eyes not blinded by smoke saw the way the left-hand door was slightly ajar. Over the next half-hour, it and its twin swung outward fully.

Within was pitch blackness studded by the twist and swirl of nebulae and the wild dance of heavenly bodies careening through space. A million voices cried out in sudden awe, terror, and prayer- and a few miles around the edge of the Door, I am told, millions more rose up in shrieks of ultimate despair as they found themselves unable to witness this event from the Wrong Side. I am told many who found themselves in that circumstance soon died, whether by their own hands or by sheer grief. I envy their alacrity.

Slowly, the infinity within the Doors began to change and distort. Swarms hundreds of thousands strong began to push toward the portal, jockeying for space between sects and congregations until a crowd crush of such force and ferocity occurred that they are still picking the bodies out of the shattered tiles of that most sacred avenue.

At last, the first raptorial leg breached the yielding, filmy surface of the portal like it was piercing an embryonic sac- but from which side, I cannot say. The second came soon after, each bearing blades that could smite whole armies had they the intent to. By now, all were cowed, stopped dead in their tracks. I remember watching all of this from my window. I clung to the sill so tightly that the tendons exploded out of the backs of my hands.

Finally came the mandibles. And then the multifaceted eyes. And then the barbed, silken body.

And then the Voice.

I learned that day that there is a level of heavenly rapture so terrifying in its intensity that it is indistinguishable from the most hellish torment.

We could not understand what God said, but we still knew it.

We heard the initial upswell of grace and glory, followed by a certain stumbling, and then... confusion. God blinked Its alien eyes and looked around as It drew both arms in pensively. There was silence that begged to endure for an eternity after we'd had our souls blasted to pieces by those trumpets.

Then, It questioned us.

It questioned what was happening.

'What is this? What are you? What have you done to the Appointed Day? Where is your Prophet? Where is the casting of clover roots and the boiling of lead? Why have you not prepared the Way? Had It not carefully instructed Its messenger to prepare you all for the Once & Final Journey? Where has gone the Bruised One?' ³

It then began to scold us. To call us names that now adorn countless monuments and graffiti. Impudent Children. Dawdlers. Undeserving. False. Those who had ran closest to the Doors did not have time to flee before they burned away into stacks of carbon and clouds of incense smoke.

Insulted, indignant, and impatient, the thing that was God shrieked and turned away. Sources differ on whether or not It scooped up a small group of people in one arm, and sources further differ on whether these people were the Chosen Ones or merely a snack for a rather hangry insect. It finally reached Its arms out and seized the Doors. Their claws bit deep into the stone as they swung inward at the speed of sound. The stone struck, the sky split, and the earth trembled.

I awoke some hours later in the rubble of my home. Everything closer than that was naught but dust.

We do not know how much destruction was wrought, because we never looked beyond the horizon of our sacred little desert. There were inklings of a world beyond, but why would we have cared about anything that was not Doorward? The peoples of those lands were benighted savages, and we were... we were...

We only know that the horizon that had been there that morning was now gone. Nothing persists beyond.

God was gone too, as was the portal It had passed through. All that remained was the wreckage of the Doors.

It was as if a mountain had toppled, because in many ways one had. What is left of the world is irrevocably altered.

We believed this was the end. Surely nothing could come after this, when the sun was knocked out of sync and the five winds were dead? How could we survive? Why would we?

As it turned out, we did not account for mortal stubbornness.

Many died, and many more were killed in the aftermath. I know I'd be dead right now had I gotten my ruptured hands on anything effective for the task, but again I was new to blindness at the time. But most did not perish on that day, and it was with more bemusement than mass hysteria that they all picked themselves back up and ambled through the dust.

The fires were put out, and the dead were mourned- often in massive, nameless heaps too tall to name or count. The hills they were covered over with now support entire shrines and temples. Yes, new shrines and temples. Some were simple dedications of honor to the dead, but others were... something else entirely. Some are even built out of the fragments of the Door, which became the most plentiful—albeit unmalleable—building material in the world.

We simply found new things to believe in. Many people deny that that thing had been God or even a god, but many more acknowledged it yet moved on. My quip about saints' bones earlier points to the very true fact that we have forced death to beget new beginnings, and that the Closing of the Door was a foundational moment that has been literally and figuratively built upon by the next generation.

Even now, I hear the rumblings of a hunt being organized to chase off another incursion by those things that dwelt in parts once perpendicular to us. The mood is light, almost flippant, as volunteers fetch their riddle-woven earspoons. They know they have succeeded many times before, and think they will do so again. I know they will.

It is equally compelling and infuriating.

My writer grows tired, and probably needs a break from my dictation now.

I do too.

¹ Current estimates point to a period of six whole weeks within the next decade. I will be well and truly spoiled by that balmy silence, if I live to hear it.

² I wish they had taught me not to stare at deific interventions when I was a child, much the same way they warn you not to look directly into the sun.

³ Through decades of study, I believe I have finally cracked the meaning of these words. In a crumbling registry of civil and criminal cases nearly seven centuries old, there are repeat instances of disturbance of the peace in a small, now nonexistent hamlet across the desert. The perpetrator was a figure known to many in the area- an old, generally harmless eccentric who was known to drift from conspiracy theory to theory with the changing of the seasons. Their last appearance in any documentation describes how their fellow citizens held a brief service in their honor after they died ranting and raving in a shelter. They fell from a rooftop while trying to kill birds for preying upon mantids and sustained blunt-force trauma to their head and neck, resulting in severe bruising and, as was discovered too late, internal bleeding. They died in obscurity, having totally and utterly failed to attract a flock of any size through their words of an approaching journey, with zero assistance from the divine patron that had apparently shattered their mind with Its touch.