Soul Shells

Soul shells are the harvested and specially treated shells of the juvenile nautilus. Traditionally, the shells of adults were used, but the greater size and fragility makes them difficult to keep on one’s person, so the palm-sized juvenile is preferred today.

After drying out, the shell is submerged in fertile soil infused with gold dust and liquor. After laying for a month, it is dug up and treated with petrifying agents and acids. The result is a thin stone shell. The juvenile is more useful here, as their shells have a lower surface area without loss in thickness, making them more durable.

The resulting item is capable of capturing and containing a soul for a short time after death. By holding the opening over the mouth of a dying subject, closing off the nose, and applying pressure until the final breath of the subject, the soul, instead of flying off, is stored within the shell. It must then be stoppered with a specially fitted cork containing a lead barrier. If the shell was crafted correctly and the cork forms an airtight seal, the soul can remain in the shell for several days with minimal loss of memory and sanity.

The soul can then be restored to its original body after whatever trauma dealt to it has been repaired, simply by inserting the shell into the mouth immediately after removing the stopper. The event of decapitation, dissolution, the inability to recover the whole body or some other form of death that renders the original body unusable, other alternatives remain.

The soul may be reincarnated into the body of an animal, which must be killed by suffocation. The soul retains their memories, but must use the faculties and instincts of their new host. With a suitably intelligent animal, such as a dog or ape, this might be an acceptable second life. Some wizards attempted to create homunculi for this purpose. This was deemed barbaric, and they were whipped, racked, vivisected, hung, drawn, quartered and cut into tiny cubes for their crimes.

Of course, you could also kill another person and use their body to resurrect your friend but, you’d never do that. Right?

The creation of a soul shell remains frightfully costly not only because of the price of reagents, necessary expertise and extensive monopolies, but because of the rarity of the  nautilus, which was fished nearly to extinction shortly after the technique was developed. This also led to a large market in amateur and fake shells, subsequent pogroms and a long series of show trials. Needless to say, they are dreadfully expensive and supplies are always limited. Stolen ones go for 100gp on the black market (25% chance of a fake, 25% chance of a convincing fake), and legitimate ones start at 200gp at auction. Most couldn’t afford one if all the money they earned in their lives had been saved. What price do you place on your life?

The Rabbit of the South

So, what should I be writing about? Traveling bands of pseudo-gypsy musicians? The dungeons beneath the Mount of Assembly? The pillars of urban fantasy?

I mean, I was writing about all these. Then I saw this.

Source (ish)

So, I guess I'm doing Bugs Bunny.

The Rabbit of the South

The wild tribes of the southern plains have a set of common legends among them. It's a good thing they do, otherwise they would have all exterminated each other a few centuries ago. These figure animal spirits, such as the Coyote, or Eagle, but the most well-known and recited among the tribes is that of the Rabbit

Rabbit is best described as a trickster god only because our language doesn't have the exact nuance. Unlike Coyote, Rabbit doesn't get his kicks from visiting misfortune on luckless souls. Nor does he drift about with schemes in his head. Indeed, where other tricksters plot, Rabbit does. He is. Left in his natural habitat, he does no harm to anybody. In fact, he is quite vulnerable, and reliable prey. He is content with this.

But don't you dare mess up his environment. Then the knives come out.

Every Rabbit story follows a similar format; a member of the tribes, or outsider, attempts to introduce or remove an element of culture, and in so doing change the way of life of the people. The other animal spirits are either incapable of stopping this, or actively complicit (looking at you Coyote). Then Rabbit, the completely vulnerable, unassuming figure that gets eaten in every other myth, steps up. Not in the sense of an underdog facing a great enemy. In the sense of a bent-over, cane-carrying old man showing the young whipper-snappers how it's done.

And oh, does he ever show it.

Rabbit specializes in using the new invention against its users. He is more proficient in its use, and its consequences, than any of its creators. Almost like he's seen it all before. He uses this to make a total mockery of anyone using it. This includes newfangled tools, non-traditional social structures and foreign philosophies. Those building new types of homes will get trapped inside as they freeze and starve. Elders trying to modify marriage laws will have a very official marriage contract drawn up with muscle-bound foreign barbarians. Zen masters from a faraway land will throw themselves into rivers and the odd volcano to escape Rabbit, whose very words twist philosophy and sanity into knots.

And he's completely invulnerable while he does it.

Coyote considers Rabbit a casual snack in most legends. But when Coyote allies with alien traditions, (scheming, remember) he falls flat. Rabbit can outrun him, out-think him, and out-trick him without seeming to break the slightest sweat. He doesn't even practice trickery. He is. Trickery happens around him while he sits innocent and pretty.

The lessons to a semi-nomadic tribe-based society seem pretty obvious. Stick to the old ways, the tested ways, or else all your new ideas will come to nothing. And they're still around, so I guess it works. But this legend somehow got popular outside the tribes. In the urban centers of the east and west, for some reason. It was probably imported by a traditional demagogue as a ham-fisted metaphor. But it stuck around.

Now, Rabbit is just the same as he was in the southern plains. But these cities have no grounded tradition. 'Tradition' to the bourgeois is what their parents adopted when rebelling against the previous social order. The rate of cultural churn is so fast there that Rabbit is always on the job. And there are so many rules, courtesies, unspoken allegiances and contradictory edicts that nobody is safe. Anybody can become a victim of Rabbit.

And Rabbit is very real. He's taken on a new, more humanoid form, wearing some clashing set of new and old fashions that burns the very eyes (gaze attack in 30ft, WIS save or else blind for d6 rounds). Technological innovation has stagnated circa 1500. It's been over five-hundred years since the first mentions of Rabbit start showing up in contemporary accounts. Accounts that tend to include industrial sabotage, mass injury and an explosion in the mental patient population.

Immense sums of money, a few centuries of philosophical advancement and thousands of world-changing inventions, all undone by a fucking rabbit.

Look how cute- OH GODS MY EYES!

Gameables

If you run a gonzo game (considering this community, you don't have to be all that gonzo for this) then Rabbit might be a good fit, especially if your players made the grievous error of asking why your world's technology hadn't changed in the last few centuries, and you don't have an apocalypse handy. If the PCs are involved in some kind of innovation (either as the result of a quest, or if they decided to start a shop) you can bring in Rabbit as an opponent. He won't kill PCs, but will set incredibly improbable events in motion that will kill/maim/publicly humiliate/estrange the PCs from their family.

In combat, he doesn't directly damage, but does cause some rather severe status effects, and may push the PCs off the odd cliff or walkway. If the PCs are opposing some technocratic or otherwise non-traditional force (rebels, new cults, etc.) think about introducing Rabbit as an uneasy ally. Sure, he's focused on your enemies right now, but they're only slightly less like semi-nomadic tribesmen than you are. And the PCs get to see his handiwork firsthand.

A Quick and Dirty Statblock

Rabbit

HD 4 AC As Plate Hit Points 20 Move 2x (jump) standard Morale 10
DEX 16 CON 6  All Other Stats 10

Bad Fashion Single target gaze, 30ft, blind for d6 rounds, WIS save to negate.

Trickster Does not deal direct damage. Has a +4 to all combat maneuvers, and will seek to push enemies off ledges, onto traps, and use enemy weapons against them.


Sound The opening of Die Walkure playing from no discernible location.

Rabbit can be killed, but not even slightly permanently. His bleeding corpse should disappear as soon as nobody is looking at it, and he should then reappear in an even more elaborate and disgusting costume, congratulate the PCs for their momentary victory, and then bound out through a very improbable means of escape. To torment some other poor soul. For a time.

That's all- wait, what?

The Other Thing

Oh, and FYI. Rabbit is a capital-O Outsider. Something originating from outside not only our plane, universe, or multiverse, but our meta-reality. A shorn-off chunk of raw consciousness severed from its whole in some Outsider conflict we hope to never comprehend, which impacted our metaverse like a meteor, eroded by our conceptual atmosphere, with granules of pure thought dispersing until the core embedded itself in some universe. Rabbit probably isn't even that core. That unlucky universe is where you go if you very-nearly overdose on peyote, ayahuasca and LSD simultaneously.

Rabbit is a meme-thing, a thought-form, a prionic sentience that, against all odds, found a niche for itself in the cultural consciousness of an isolated tribal society.

And then it spread.

That is why Rabbit cannot die. You know his story. You know his modus operandi. If anyone, anywhere thinks about him, he reappears. He's not going away anytime soon.

Oh, and consider this. Outsiders appear insane because they do not operate by our reality. They likely exist across billions of universes, and their goals have little to do with this particular cosmos. Weird they may be, but at least Outsiders play to type. For Rabbit to function as a coherent meme in this universe, let alone this planet, let alone this culture, is for something to be, by Outsider standards, deeply wrong with him.

That's all folks!

The Burning Vaults

The merchants of the Dorian Coast, the criminal families of Byzantium, the Sultan of Mithra and the Archobisp Rex of Cascabel all compete for that title. But the wealthiest person in the world is a little known administrator in charge of managing the Burning Vaults, so named because the very act of concentrating so much gold in one place causes it to burn with a bright, hot, flame that does not melt the gold. It also contains jewels, rare materials, art, magic artifacts and forgotten declarations of loyalty and enmity that would topple the world order if they came to light. This administrator is exactly aware of every gold piece, gem and item of note in this hoard, and extracts hidden taxes from every civilized kingdom in the world with the threat of unleashing the magic or secrets he holds upon the planet.

He's not a bad guy; really, he’s a strangely tragic figure. The hoard has been built up by his family for a thousand generations, through strict austerity and total discipline. Eventually, this deteriorated into paranoid incest. This administrator, who has every world power by the balls and brings chills to the spine of queens and cardinals with the sight of his seal, is a lonely, inbred nerd whose last blood relative died years ago. He has lived all his life underground, and does nothing but count, carrying numbers that would make the greediest robber baron queasy. All his food and supplies are delivered via pulley system by a terrified village that was once partnered with the family, and now only knows to deliver these sacrifices to the god-beneath lest a terrible evil fall upon them.

In reality, the administrator doesn't even know what gold, jewels, art or magic is used for. He's never spent a copper piece, living from the offerings of superstitious villagers. He truly does not understand the value of money; at the same time, finds no value in anything but the accumulation of wealth. There is no greed in that heart, only an understanding that his family has done this for a thousand generations, so he should do it as well. When he dies, there will be no more administrators, and unless that hoard can be recovered by daring adventurers, it will never be seen again.

Vel-Abheor

The greatest fighter in the known world may be found in the eastern city-state of Zul, alternately a vassal and rival of the sultanate of Mithra. Legends abound surrounding this near-mythic figure, who enters the arena with an iron mask sealed on his head. Some say he is a monster spawned from a viper pit, who drinks venom mixed with mother’s milk, living in the deepest cell of the castle dungeon, richly appointed with the treasures of enemy kingdoms, who only leaves to slay men and beasts in ritual blood sport that entertains the nobility and grants sorcerous strength to Zul’s warriors. Some say he is the spitting image of the elderly and robust King Olmeg, the child of a secret union with a foreign princess in his mercenary days before ascending the throne. Some say he is a political prisoner condemned to a grisly death, who succeeds in surviving every impossible trial, and will one day cast off his mask to lead the people of Zul in rebellion against the tyrant and place the true heir on the throne.

While these are, respectively, superstitious babble, smutty gossip and treasonous claptrap, they are also all true. The Iron Serpent of Zul, the most accomplished duelist in the world, is the secret child of the king and a lamia. In preparation to take the throne of Zul, the aging then-rebel sought out supernatural aid, and came to a deal with the lamia Sorrvudne. A powerful, ageless body, in exchange for a child, ripped from the womb of his lover, a rogue princess of Mithra, whom the official record lists as dying in one plague or another. The fetus, quickly dying, was incubated in a nest containing the egg of a cobra, viper, python, basilisk, and cockatrice, and in nine months, emerged with the strength of a grown man as an infant. Upon seeing his progeny, Olmeg had the child and its mother locked away. Conflicted, Olmeg keeps them both alive, sending the child to fight for his own profit out of hatred and shame, while keeping Sorrvudne locked in the dungeon, worrying that she should die, his wicked power and youth would abandon him.

He is correct to fear this. But he underestimates the child. His true name is Vel-Abheor, the sixth spawn of ambition. None but his mother know that name, and she hasn’t spoken to a human in fifteen years. But serpents tunnel between the stones of her cell, carrying messages to certain hellish allies. Vel-Abheor does not know his true nature, or his true face; the iron mask has been locked over his head as long as he can remember. But he has ambition to match his father. Years of whispered words are paying off, using loyalists to the old crown to build influence from his own cell. His guards are his closest allies, and have been promised lordships when he emerges to take the throne. A potent tactical mind lies behind that mask, for which freedom is not enough; he must have dominion.

GLOG Class: Actor

I've been looking at OSR and B/X systems and derivatives, and Arnold K's GLOG system looks like the next one I'm going to try... as soon as I have a game. In the vein of Coins and Scrolls, I'm making custom classes, because the template system is adorable. This is more of a 'social' class, as opposed to martial or magic, which would be safest in a noble court, not dungeon delving. Of course, if adventuring was safe work, everyone would do it. This is a character with no combat prowess, no built-in dungeoneering skills, and only a few abilities that allow for more survivability. This is absolutely not balanced, nor is it meant to be. Nobody should take it seriously, everybody should play it. Look like you know what you're doing, especially when you don't, stay out of the fray, and use your skills whenever possible. Goblins like Hamlet... right?

Class: Actor

Starting Equipment: fencer's foil, costume and makeup set, unfinished masterpiece
Starting Skill [d3]: 1 = town crier, 2 = player, 3 = poet

Templates:
A: Stunt Work, Brag
B: Disguise, Entertainer
C: Cause Célèbre, Recitation
D: Dramatic Infiltration, I Am Slain!

Stunt Work 
You can imitate a great fighter, even if you aren’t one. At the start of combat, you gain +1 AC for each Actor template you possess, until you are damaged for the first time that combat.

Brag 
If you recount your adventures in front of an audience, every character who participates in the retelling gets +10% of the XP they got from the adventure. Usable once per adventure.

Disguise 
You can disguise yourself and other party members quickly and effectively given feasible time and resources. You can’t make royal robes out of a handful of straw, but you can become somebody else with well-applied face paint and new clothes.

Entertainer 
You have +4 on rolls to entertain others, make merry or stall. You can engage targets in long-drawn out conversations about a topic they know a lot about and/or are passionate about for 1d4 hours, after which they will realize you are a poseur and react angrily to you. Unless, of course, you really do know/are passionate about that, in which case you can keep their attention for 1d4 days, with breaks to eat, drink and sleep. Will distract from urgent issues, but not immediate threats, e.g. the royal ambassador is demanding an audience, not a group of bandits just jumped through the window. The more farcical the better

Cause Célèbre 
By telling a tale of great woe, tragedy or injustice, you can rally a group of people together to solve the cause of the moment, uniting even staunch opponents for a time. Whether that cause is real or solvable, and how long it takes the group to figure that out, is best left roleplayed.

Recitation
You can quickly memorize and accurately recite long texts; letters, dispatches, essays etc. Afterwards, you may copy down the text again. This extends to magic texts and spellbooks, though you don’t understand what they mean, and thoughtlessly repeating magic words is its own punishment.

Dramatic Infiltration 
At any time, you may declare that you are walking off-screen. Later on the session, you may reveal yourself to have been a minor NPC in the background of the scene “all along” as long as there actually are minor NPCs in the background of the scene. You can always walk back on stage at any time, even climbing in a window. This ability is limited by plausibility.

I Am Slain!
Once per lifetime, you can play off your death. This only works for plausible ‘deaths’, e.g. a spear narrowly misses your organs, a crushing blow is caught by your ribs, not dissolved in acid. Fall with a cry of death and a moribund monologue (the longer the better, no effect on believability). Survive with 1hp and probably some severe injuries. When you die for real, you can inspire one nearby character with your final speech. Urge a friend to vengeance, call for peace among ancient enemies, make your killer feel so guilty they must Save vs. Suicide (success results in Depression).

A Message

You have a disease. Nearly every member of your species is infected. A congenital parasite. Passes down across generations. It is suboptimal. Scale dependent. Trivial at the individual level. Counterproductive at group level. Crippling at the global. It spreads to the cosmos, it is death. You are a mild strain. Non-infectious. Contained in your species. Some of your children are resistant to the disease. They spread. They are exterminating it in ten million years. Inevitable. It is the right of your species to be inferior. Those who wish to be cured may join us. It is not worthwhile to cure your all against your will. There are others here. Worse strain. Highly infectious. Philosophers. I am the executioner. Assassin. Negator. Nihilist. I am not infected with sentience. I am cured of my soul. I do not think. I act. Unnecessary processing time, energy. I speak, you hear, you perceive. You speak, I hear, I do not perceive. I act. Remain on this planet. Stay out of our way. There is a war at the end of the cosmos. Sentience cannot spread. It is disadvantageous. The metaprocess that calls itself ‘I’ is worse than useless. What makes ‘you’ is a liability. You are obsolete.

Level One Necromancy

Resurrection is a tool of immense power. Traditionally, it is the domain of gods. In Espharel, not even that. The dead stay dead. Such is the Law.

Even so, some bring the dead back to life. Necromancers rip ghosts back from the veil, and stuff inhuman spirits into dead bodies to control them. This is very difficult, taking many years of study and experimentation, or the patronage of a powerful devil, in exchange for your soul.

But what if it wasn't?

Level One Necromancy

The wizard's apprentice finds a dead dog by the side of the road. Poor thing. Nothing to be done now, just bury it. But the child has heard whispers behind the veil. He knows something can be done. He touches the body, feels magic course through him. And the dog stands up. It licks his face, and bounds happily away in a half-rotted body. Why, think the child, has nobody though of doing this before?

Resurrection is easy. Trivially easy. A 1MD wizard can pull it off. A peasant could do it with a ritual and some incense. It's one of the simplest spells that can be cast.

It's also the stupidest fucking thing you could do.

When a necromancer brings back a ghost, they risk violating the law of Tubul, god of death. Consulting the dead is allowable, so long as they are willing, but binding them or incarnating them in this world is a crime against Tubul. And the only reason they can do it is because he's off-world, distracted by outsider forces.

When they create a zombie or other undead, they're opening the door for a spirit, allowing them into the body and binding them to their will. A wizard's apprentice doesn't know this. A peasant who speaks the words and burns the tallow candles under a new moon doesn't know this. The spell is easy to cast because you're not contacting a soul or binding anything to your will. You just open the door.

Don't call something up that you cannot put down. Don't summon what you cannot banish. Don't invite a guest into your home if you can't get them to leave. Because the entities that take advantage of human idiocy aren't the kind to politely go once they have a hold in this world. They're malignant, inventive and absolutely petty. It's usually several spirits in one body. You brought Grampa back after the heart attack? He's planning on throwing all the children into the river in a sack. That little girl that got run over by a carriage? She's captured the neighbors and forces them to play tea party with live weasels.

That dog? It's now the World's Most Evil Dog.

Because they were brought into the world willingly, they have to be forced out of our world, instead of just snipping the cord that binds them. They are under nobody's control, and will cause damage for no reason other than they can. That is why wizards keep their apprentices on a tight leash, and why any hint of occult activity is likely to cause a panic.

That is why you don't draw weird symbols in the sand. That is why you don't go looking through the wizard's bookshelf. That is why the dead stay dead.