[GLOG] Chain Binder

Chain Binder

Starting Equipment: ceremonial silver collar, one sanctified tool, hard hat, work clothes and an incomplete work order

Starting Skill: 1} Construction, 2) Labour Relations or 3) Siege Engineering

+1 Sanctified Tool per Template
A. Chained, Work Orders
B. Commune
C. Sanctified
D. Apprentices
Δ. Demon, Double Devil

Chained: You have a ceremonial silver collar around your neck, attached to twenty feet of incorporeal and invisible silver chain. This chain attaches to a similarly incorporeal and invisible Mockery Devil. The Devil has twenty strength, can grasp both corporeal and incorporeal things and can perfectly mimic any action you mime it doing. The Devil is smarter than you are but otherwise has the statistics of a big gorilla.

The Devil is bound. It may only take actions that you mime it doing. These happen right before the start of your next turn. If you mime the Devil picking something up, it will pick it up and move it around however you mime it moving it. If you punch someone, the Devil will punch that person too (for 2d6+Str), if they haven't moved out of the way by the start of your next turn. The Devil may not do anything that you cannot mime it doing.

Work Orders: Officially, you are supposed to be supervising your Devil as it serves mankind via manual labour. The Devil is strong and cannot be crushed by falling blocks of marble, so it makes sense (according to the Church) to make it do heavy lifting on construction sites and dig irrigation canals and so forth. As part of its binding, your Devil is forbidden from wielding weapons and must get permission from the Church to carry tools.

If you visit any church you can ask for a list of nearby projects that your Devil could work on. You can also propose your own tasks, subject to the Church official agreeing that it sounds like a honest uplifting heavy labour for your Devil. They will take your current set of Sanctified Tools and issue you a set of replacements suited to whatever task(s) you agreed to make it perform. If you don't actually do the work you agreed to, you will get lectured the next time you visit that particular church.

The Church will not sanctify weapons for your Devil, but might be convinced to sanctify a big axe if you can convince them that you need to chop down big trees. Weapons do not increase the damage done by the Devil, but do let you wield a matching weapon and still have it copy you. The Church can re-summon your devil if it gets banished, but not if it escapes. You will get lectured if you let your Devil get banished without a very good excuse.

Commune: You have learned how to let your Devil speak. This is not strictly sanctioned, so you shouldn't do it in front of priests you don't trust. It turns out that Mockery Devils are good listeners, but get bored of being used as arcane construction equipment. Your Devil speaks three languages you don't and can tell you about things it sees, including magic, holiness and invisible things. As the name suggests, Mockery Devils can perfectly mimic any voice they have ever heard.

Sanctified: You have seen the tool sanctification ritual enough times that you know all the words. You can de-sanctify one item in order to re-sanctify another item in an hour long ritual, whenever you want. If you are not a priest, this is extremely illegal. Even if you are a priest, you're really not supposed to be approving your own requests like this. But you could do it

If you got a good look at the ritual for Devil summoning, you could figure out how to do that too. It wouldn't even have to be a Mockery Devil, necessarily, if you learn the True Name for something else.

Unrelatedly, you learn that sanctified adamantine can break incorporeal Devil chains and that you are expressly forbidden from ever sanctifying anything made of adamantine. But again, it's not like the Church could stop you, if you keep it secret.

Apprentices: If you have not been ex-communicated from the Church by this point, you will be sent 1d4 apprentices each season until you have as many apprentices as you have levels. Half of them are bright-eyed and naive acolytes while the other half are seasoned construction workers. You are expected to serve as a good role model to them and not get them killed. You can nominate one of them to take your place if you die, immediately promoting them to being a 2nd level Chain Binder and your new player character.

If you HAVE been ex-communicated, you still get a similar number of naive acolytes and seasoned construction workers following you around, but its less of an apprenticeship and more of a 'Rogue Demon Cult' according to official sources. The robes are different. You can still nominate one of them to inherit your Demon and/or kidnapped loyalist Devil, with the usual benefits.

Demon: Gain this template if you break your Devil's chains but it stays loyal to you instead of running off back to either Hell or snitching on you to Church. Your Devil (now a Demon) can move as far away from you as it wants and still mimic you perfectly. But you are also going to get excommunicated the second anyone finds out that you've done this, with hunters sent to arrest you both.

If it turns out that your Devil is a loyalist and was just trying to bait you into sinning in order to test your faith, you still get the benefits of this template. The Devil has to mimic your actions, regardless of what it thinks of you. But the vibes are very different. You still get hunted by the Church over it.

Double Devil: Gain this template if you acquire a second Mockery Devil somehow. You now have an extra Devil. It also mimics every action you mime, but against a different target. You can keep getting this template if you keep getting more Mockery Devils, but eventually the Church is going to start asking some pointed questions about how this keeps happening and when you plan on returning them. Assuming you haven't already been excommunicated.

[RPG Blog Carnival] Languages of the Underworld

About two years ago, I ran a 5e campaign with the following premise: some demigod tyrant of a king has found a passage into the Underworld and is sending anyone he can recruit down into it to map the place and bring back cthonic treasures, wisdom from undead sages, unfinished works from ghostly musicians and so on and so forth. Hexcrawl in Hades.

This post is (mostly) not about that campaign. Instead, it's an answer to this month's RPG Blog Carnival, for whom the theme is linguistics. One of the points where my version of 5e deviates from the standard version of 5e is that I like to curate a special list of languages for each campaign. For the Underworld campaign, that took the form of this chart:

The key phrase here is 'mutually intelligible'. Any two languages connected by a line can be imperfectly understood by a speaker of the other language. If you speak Common, you can get the gist of anything said in Classical and vice versa. Arrows mean a one way connection - if you known Sylvan you can understand what wild beasts are trying to tell you, but the beasts can't understand what you are trying to tell them.

The Divine languages (Titanic, Ouranic, Thalassic and Cthonic) are all mutually intelligible. The Gods of Olympus may not talk to the Gods of the Underworld very often, but they can reliably talk to one another. Instead of having a written form, they can be communicated via omen. The will of Olympus is written in the clouds and the flight of birds, get yourself a priest who can read it for you. Given that the players knew that they were going into the Underworld by dint of the name of the campaign, Cthonic ended up being a very obvious and popular pick, balanced by the fact that its written from was entrails. If you want advice from the powers of the Underworld, you have to bring a live animal along for the trek through this maddening ghost cave until such time as you're looking to consult those Cthonic powers. The Titanic doesn't let you read omens, but it does let you interpret the standing orders of the ancient Clockwork soldiers left behind by the Telekhines. If you had the proper articles of authority you could even give them new orders, if you knew the right words to say.


Beast, Bird, Bug, Fish and Reptile are spoken by wild animals of the appropriate sorts. In the version of mythology I went with, Prometheus (and his lesser known brother Epimethus) were in charge of assigning natural abilities to the wild animals back during the days of the Titans. They were the ones that decided to give wings to the birds, arms to the apes, gills to the fish and so on and so forth. If an animal is particularly weird looking, it gets blamed on Prometheus. What a slacker, giving the ostrich's wings to the bat and the snake's legs to the millipede. (Never mind that a ostrich that could carry people off or snakes with a hundred legs would be horrific and that Prometheus did us a favor by preventing that.)

As a consequence, anyone who speaks Giant can be understood by wild animals of every sort. In a normal campaign this would be pretty busted, but remember: it's the Underworld. Not exactly a lot of wild animals down in Hades to have a chat with. The ones you did want to talk to probably spoke something else as well. Other languages had a similar effect for a narrower range of animals. Cthonic let you be understood by creepy crawlies, Sylvan let you be understood by wild mammals, Thalassic would let you play Aquaman to any fish you encountered.


Common and Classical are Greek and Ancient Greek respectively. Are there non-Greek people in the Underworld? Definitely. Do they still speak Greek? For the purposes of this story, yes. Is that historically accurate? No. But it's how language works in mythology, so that's what I'm going with. The living get to speak Common for free, while antique ghosts speak Classical. The 5e Thieves' Cant ability, meanwhile, would have been altered to cover any sort of secret code or cipher. Assuming anyone had chosen to play a Rogue, which nobody did. But it was on the list in case anyone had wanted to.


Gallic is the shared language of every sort of half-bird creature in the Underworld. Harpies, sphinxes, manticores, sirens, gryphons, pegasi, hippogryphs, flying snakes, you name it. Anything that came from a different mediterranean mythology got put down as being Gallic, including the language's namesake: the galla. AKA bird-headed demons who guarded the ancient Sumerian Underworld. This in turn let me use various demons and devils from the Monster Manual by simply giving them a bird's head and saying that they're a hideous Underworld guardian of some sort. In-universe, Gallic has the same relationship to Bird as Classical has to Common, having once been spoken by an ancient race of birdmen who were to modern birds as Humanity is to modern monkeys.


Sylvan is the language of nymphs, dryads, naiads, lampads and all the dozens of other demi-divine nature goddesses in mythology. Also: Satyrs. It would be fairly boring box-ticking addition to the languages list if not for two facts: First, it's understandable by anyone who is Drunk. You cannot become fluent in Drunk, but if you get sufficiently intoxicated, you can converse to anyone or anything that is similarly sloshed. Anything. Get drunk enough with your horse and the two of you can have a conversation that you won't remember once you're sober. Pour a libation out in front of a door and the door will be able to understand Common until it sobers up. What did you think that bottle of sacred wine was for? In Vino Veritas; praise Dionysus for this miracle.

Second, you can't learn Sylvan unless you are faithfully married to a native speaker, ie. an oread or a hesperide or something. As you might imagine, this is something of a Catch-22, because in order to get married to a neriad, you're probably going to need to be able to talk to her for at least long enough to propose. This means that you can't parley with the satyrs until you party with the satyrs. Ditto for getting married to a nymph. You know that and they know that and you both know that the other knows it. So if someone wants to make peace, they'll offer up a wineskin. Everyone gets absolutely hammered and has a party. When you wake back up, an agreement has been struck. You might need to piece together what exactly that agreement was after the fact, but there will be some sort of agreement.

[GLOG] Druid

Druid
Starting Equipment: Spear, sharp rock, tanned animal hide bag. Pick a specific beast for the animal hide to be from.

+1 Stealth at every level
A: The Movement, Mimicry
B: The Stillness
C: The Wounding
D: The Feast

The Movement
You count as a wild beast and not as a sapient being for magical purposes. While unobserved by sapient beings and while touching a piece taken from a wild beast, you may assume the shape of that beast. You can switch which wild beast you are once per round. Wounds persist between forms, translating arm to wing, foot to paw. If you ever use symbolic language, lose this ability until you sleep and wake up.

Mimicry
You can perfectly copy the sounds of any natural thing. The closest this can come to language is laughter, screaming and a sort of babble that convincingly sounds like language, but conveys no deeper meaning. You must attempt the noises out of character when using this ability.

The Stillness
While touching an unworked inanimate object that is larger than you are, you may become part of that object. This lasts until you move. Creatures who are not aware of you will only notice it, not you, unless they touch the object you are being a part of. You do not feel hunger, thirst, fatigue, cold or illness as an object. You can communicate with anyone who is part of the same object, regardless of distance, using Mimicry. Rivers count as inanimate objects, but they are easy for your quarry to accidentally touch.

The Wounding
If you injure a someone with the intent to kill them, they count as a wild beast rather than as a sapient being until the wound heals or you abandon your hunt. If you abandon your hunt, you lose this ability until you sleep and wake up. If you wound someone like this and they do not use symbolic language until the wound naturally heals, and you hunt them for the entire time, they can take a level in druid without needing to be raised from birth without language or going through any other initiation rites.

The Feast
If you eat every piece of a wild beast, you may permanently assume its form. You never turn back, even if observed, but you can turn into any prior form using The Movement even if no part of it remains to touch. While using The Stillness, you can move as much as you want, as long as you remain in contact with the object. If you use this ability on another druid who also has this ability, you learn everything that druid ever knew and obtain all prior forms they ever possessed.

[GLOG] Cleric

A: Piety, Smite
B: Miracles
C: Command
D: Doctrine

Piety: Choose a number from 1 to 6 for your Piety. You cannot roll less than 3 + Piety on reaction rolls from people who hold your deity in high regard. Whenever you would violate a precept of your god, there is a Piety in six chance that you cannot bring yourself to do so. This applies even if you are tricked or coerced. If magic is involved, you instantly shake it off. If you successfully break a precept, reduce your Piety by one. This CAN go negative, if you keep breaking precepts.

Smite: If you see a creature violate one of your god's precepts, you get +1 to damage on your next successful attack against it per precept violated. This applies at most once per encounter with the creature.

Miracles: Rather than casting spells, Clerics perform miracles. They get one Miracle Die per precept of their god that they have put effort into advancing since their last miracle, up to a maximum of one less than their Cleric templates. Doubles and higher do not cause mishaps or Dooms; instead any witnesses can choose to set their Piety (or obtain a Piety) stat equal to the number rolled. If a Cleric of a rival god does this, they convert and use your God's miracles and precepts. Miracle Dice otherwise work exactly like Magic Dice do.

Command: When you recruit hirelings, you can always find ones that share your faith and are willing to accept half wages on that basis. They have a Piety equal to half your own, rounded up. If an action would break a precept, roll once for everyone and reduce their Piety if anyone breaks a precept. If this drops their Piety drops to zero, they start demanding full pay.

Doctrine: Make up two rules. They can be whatever you want. These count as precepts for you and anyone you cause to gain Piety. Hirelings obtained via Command will believe that these are exactly as important as the other precepts of your faith and you can get Miracle Dice for following these made up rules. These rules only take effect once you make a big public speech proclaiming their importance.

Each god has four basic precepts and grants their cleric three unique miracles. For example:

Zeus Precepts:
1. Uphold Hospitality.
2. Punish Oath Breakers.
3. Defend Holy Places.
4. Get Zeus Laid.

Zeus Miracles:
1. Thunderbolt.
2. Polymorph.
3. Divine Might.

Lolth Precepts:
1. Obey Powerful Women.
2. Recruit Servants.
3. Betray Weaklings.
4. Hurt Non-Drow.

Lolth Miracles:
1. Enthrall.
2. Darkfire.
3. Summon Spider.

Face-Biter Mike Precepts:
1. Bring Mike Loot.
2. Kill Mike's Rivals.
3. Simplify Matters.
4. Don't Give Up.

Face-Biter Mike Miracles:
1. Ice Breath.
2. Divine Might.
3. Contact Dragon.

Three Elf Kins [Nixie, Tossiche & Trute]

 If you are unfamiliar with Gorinich's Elf class over on The Whimsical Mountain, go read that before reading this.

Done?

Good. Have a trio of Elf Kins to celebrate.

Nixie

Heartspell: Water Breathing

R: touch T: one or more creature(s) D: [sum] hours
You grant any number of creatures touched the ability to breathe underwater, dividing the duration between them as you see fit. If used on a creature that breathes water already, it instead gains the ability to breathe air.

Equipment: Waxed pouch, simple knife, a ration of horse meat
Starting Skill (1d3): Singer, Sailor, Ostler.
Favored Environment: Remote coastlines, babbling brooks and mountain lakes.

First Gift: Webbed hands and feet and big fish-like eyes. You can swim as fast as you can run and see through murky water as if it were clear. Language does not Tether you while you are underwater. You need to drink twice as much water each day in order to keep from getting thirsty.

Second Gift: Scales coat your body while in the water, disappearing once out. Your teeth grow sharp and pointed no matter where you are. You can reverse Water Breathing into Drown, causing a kissed creature to take [sum] damage from asphyxiation.

Third Gift: While underwater, every part of your body turns into the corresponding body part for a brightly colored, human-sized fish. Any part of your body outside the water stays human. You can no longer tolerate dairy, grains or leaves as food. Your bite is a medium weapon and you have gills now.

Fourth Gift: Your hands and feet elongate and elaborate fins sprout across your body even while outside the water. You can set a condition under which your Water Breathing spell will reverse into Drown on its own, doing damage equal to the remaining duration of the spell.

 

Tossiche

Heartspell: Poison

R: touch T: container D: permanent

Create [sum] drops of poison, which causes [dice] symptoms for one round per drop consumed. Save negates. Available symptoms include: blindness, confusion, fatigue, inability to speak, inability to stand, intense pain and/or one damage per round. The poison looks and smells like honey, but tastes awful.

Equipment: Hooded cloak, length of rope, big jar of pickles.
Starting Skill (1d3): Beekeeper, Guttersnipe, Miner.
Favored Environment: Dripping caverns, abandoned wells and the king's dungeons.

First Gift: Your nails grow into four little claws and your ears become sharp and shaggy. You can can sense all hollow spaces within ten feet of you, just by the feel of the air. Traditionally clandestine vocations (executioner, cultist, spy, adulterer, secret policeman, etc.) do not Tether you to Culture.

Second Gift: Your eyes shrink down into little beady raisins and your ears grow long and triangular. The claws on your hands and feet become hollow like serpent fangs and can store a drop of poison each. When you hit someone with one of your claws, you decide how much of which poison(s) to inject.

Third Gift: You are blind, but can navigate dark, quiet spaces with echolocation as well as most people could with a torch. Anyone yelling or fighting makes it too loud to hear where anything is. You can nimbly climb up rough stone walls with your claws and prefer to sleep dangling upside down like a bat.

Fourth Gift: Your eyes completely disappear into your newly sprouted wool. You can now induce the following symptoms with your Poison spell: face blindness, berserk rage, vaulting ambition, gullibility, an impending sense of uttermost Doom and/or a corpse-like visage.

 

Trute

Heartspell: Animate Rope

R: 100' T: [sum] feet of cordage  D: [dice] commands

Target rope, string, thread or similar within range heeds your next [dice] one-word commands, with optional pointed finger. They gain the mobility of a similarly sized snake, the intelligence of a well-trained dog and the knot tying talents of a crew of sailors competing for a week of shore leave. "Entangle" and similar commands allow the victim a Save to evade.

Equipment: Commoner's clothing, 50' ball of yarn, 10 bagels on a 1' rope.

Starting Skill (1d3): Sailor, Chandler, Knitter.

Favored Environment: Mulberry bushes, underneath large rocks and in the knotholes of trees.

First Gift: Your hair and/or beard grows out to be at least three feet long, and is immune to unwanted tangling, cutting and grabbing. Messing around with knots does not Tether you to Tools or to Shelter.

Second Gift: You shrink down to three feet tall and your feet swell to thrice normal size. If you cast Animate Rope on your own hair/beard, it will obey [sum]+[dice] commands before falling still.

Third Gift: You shrivel down to two feet tall and weigh no more than a goose would. For every minute someone spends untying one of your knots, you need one fewer hour of sleep/once of food that day.

Fourth Gift: You shrink down to six inches tall and weigh as much as a leaf. If you command them to 'stay', your Animated Ropes magically resist being burnt/cut as if they were made out of steel wire.

[GLOG] Camera Wizard

Perk: You have a magic camera with unlimited film, which you use to store spells in place of a spellbook. Getting a new camera costs as much as getting a new spellbook. If you expose the negatives inside the camera to bright lights, they crumble into dust.

Drawback: Even numbered spells below require you to take a photograph as you cast them. If your reflection is in the shot, you accidentally target yourself instead of whatever you intended to target with the spell.

Cantrips
-With ten minutes in a dark room and 1 silver in chemicals, you can develop a negative inside your camera into a glossy full color photograph.
-You can force everyone within line of sight to repeat a single word of your choice. It's the same word every time. 'Cheese' is traditional.
-You can make your eyes glow red at will. This will scare the shit out of most normal people the first time they see you do it.

Spells
 1. Conjure Pinhole
 2. Capture Spirit
 3. Illusion
 4. Flash
 5. Develop
 6. Fatal Frame
 7. Freeze Frame
 8. Capture Person
 9. Animate Portrait
10. Revision
11. Soul Gallery
12. Capture Scene

Conjure Pinhole - Opens a magical pinhole onto the far side of a wall (or other surface). It's too small to look through, but an image of whatever is on the brighter side will be projected (upside down and reversed) onto the opposing wall (or other surface) on the darker side. Lasts [sum] minutes. Not visible on the brighter side.

Capture Spirit - Photograph an immaterial being with fewer than [sum] hit points remaining, trapping them inside your camera. You can only trap one being per camera, but developing the film transfers the subject into the photograph instead. Breaking the camera or the photo releases them. Works on ghosts, illusions, air elementals and demons but not reflections.

Illusion - Pull an illusory copy of something out of developed photograph of that thing. It looks, sounds and behaves exactly as it did in real life, but is an intangible illusion that only lasts for [sum] minutes.

Flash - Creates a blinding flash. Anyone caught in it must Save vs. being blind for [sum] rounds. If Sum > 12, the duration is instead permanent. Photographs taken this way will show invisible things as if they were visible and magical things with a glowing aura.

Develop - Instantly develop up to [sum] photographs (spending the silver required for supplies in the process) while also creating a big billowing plume of purple smoke around yourself, 10 x [dice] feet in diameter. The smoke lasts an hour if not blown away first.

Fatal Frame - Does [sum] damage to a single target, no save. If you kill them, their soul gets trapped in your camera as per Capture Spirit. They cannot move on to the afterlife until you release them. This doesn't work on things that are already dead or were never alive to begin with.

Freeze Frame - Forces up to [sum] targets to smile and hold their current poses for [highest]+[dice] rounds. Ends immediately for everyone if anything not frozen enters the shot or if anyone frozen takes damage.

Capture Person - Target photographed disappears into your camera for [highest]+[dice] rounds. A successful Save allows the target to escape being photographed entirely. If you develop the film afterward, it will produce an animated (but inaudible) photograph of the subject.

Animate Portrait - An image of a creature comes to life for [sum] minutes and can be spoken to. Paintings and murals know what the artist knew of the subject, while photographs know what the subject knew of themselves. Either kind of portrait knows about things that happened directly in front of it. The portrait is only as cooperative as the original creature would be.

Revision - The photograph taken while casting this spell can be shaken up to [dice] times in order to revert everything caught in the shot back to its position (though not condition) as of the time the shot was taken. Anything that wasn't present gets flung out of frame to make room.

Soul Gallery - You join together up to [dice] photographs into a gallery which captures your innermost essence. Whenever you would be harmed in ways that would be visible in a photograph, you can transfer the harm to the photograph in the gallery instead. Keep track of these, because if you ever remove a picture from the gallery, you suffer any harm it is storing for you. You can cast this spell again to add more pictures, but only up to a maximum number equal to your [dice].

Capture Scene - Everything in the shot is sucked up into the camera, leaving behind a permanent cloud of opaque purple smoke where the scenery used to be. Living things can choose to go with the captured scenery (ending up in a pocket dimension within the camera) or to remain where they are (ending up in a smoke-filled crater where the scenery used to be). Breaking the camera or a printed photograph of the scene releases the trapped scene and everything inside of it. With a good view, this can steal miles.

Mishaps
1. MD only return to you pool on a 1-2 for 24 hours.
2. Take 1d6 damage.
3. Random mutation for 1d6 rounds, then Save. Permanent if you fail.
4. Jam. Can't cast spells or take photographs for 1d6 rounds.
5. Backfire. Blinded for 1d6 rounds.
6. Film unspools from camera. Save or be entangled.

Dooms
1. Your reflection begins to silently conspire against you. It will hold up photographs and gesture to your enemies in order to do you harm.
2. Your reflection gains the ability to speak and move freely between mirrors. It will seek out your enemies and conspire with them.
3. Your reflection gains the ability to cast magic like you do. It seeks you out for a final confrontation, aiming to banish you into the mirror.

You may avert this Doom by finding a way to destroy your reflection before it can destroy you, or by hiding in a place without reflective surfaces.