Archon's Court

While running Libra and, now, prepping for Not My Destination, I'm still trying to keep up at least a once-a-month cadence for posts about my 2nd edition domain rules, to prove to my players that we're just on a, uh... extended hiatus... and surely the game will restart any minute now...

Last time, I mentioned updating the old Navigator backgrounds to come with delta template-style bonuses, as another angle of character progression. 

Each of the 20 now have these bonuses, along with updated abilities and a couple changed names. Additionally, the Comms Operator, Ropemaker, and Salvager backgrounds have been replaced with the new Chemist, Austringer, and Geoglyph Painter.

1. Land-Islander 

Your sept-mates hover near the sun, and their feet never touch the earth unless they wish it. The taller the tower, the more weight on the foundation.

Skill: one of Animal Handling/Climbing/Mimicry

Starting Equipment: two dozen livestock birds and an electric, propeller-driven ultralight.

Perk: each night, ask one of the following questions and receive an answer:

•         Where is the closest drinkable water?
•         How do I avoid the most dangerous creature in the area?
•         What is the most fortifiable defensive location around?
•         Is something hidden from me here?
•         Am I being tracked, followed, or watched? 

Achievement: make a newfound land-island safe for human habitation.

Reward: while you are Select, add a die to your sept's foraging rolls.

2. Pilot 

Some septs eke out scorned lives on the Volume's surface, their ships irreparable or lost. Count yourself lucky. 

Skill: one of Singing/Language: Semaphore/Weather Prediction

Starting Equipment: an extra barrel of fuel and oxidizer (in case of emergency) and a grainy black-and-white thermal monocular.

Perk: While you are at the helm, you have Advantage on all checks of sept-vessel speed or agility. If you find traces of a sept-vessel or structure-born ship of Machine Space, you can track it unerringly.

Achievement: Meet the Dreadnought and escape.

Reward: You may reroll Machine Space encounters. When you are involved in a chase, after both  players bid propellant you are told if you bid higher or lower, and can change your bid if you wish.

Sidebar: Hypothetical Ship Rules

Ten Blade Demigod-style domain stats are Out. Under the new system sept-vessels will be made up of particular components (some of which, like reliquaries and weapons lockers, line up with earlier stats, but others are more similar to TBD's assets). These include main engines and reaction control systems, which determine vessel acceleration and agility. 

Sept-vessels will now also face checks, like characters - these will not check any pre-set list of stats, but instead gain a bonus from relevant components. Sometimes this will be obvious (a test of the ship's agility benefits from its number of RCS nodes), other times it will be not (I'm sure my players will figure some way to argue that their greenhouse is relevant for some check or another). 

I am also going to make the players track propellant now. They deserve it. The Prepare the Engine Array Imperious action will now provide players some quantity of propellant, and a new season action will be added to collect it yourself.

In cases of pursuit between sept-vessels both sides bet a certain amount of propellant to spend - the higher bid accomplishes its goal (to flee or to catch). These bids may be limited by some multiple of your vessel's thrust.  

3. Ship-Tender

When the pilot pulls a backflip under gravity with a broken engine, it's your sworn duty to hit them upside the head. 

Skill: one of Electrical Engineering/Fleeing/Weaving

Starting Equipment: a wrench set, a set of screwdrivers, a corded power drill.

Perk: you have a finely developed sense for bad luck. If something terrible is about to happen (RFNA geyser, gravity switch, infohazard projection) you get a split second right before it happens to do something.

Achievement: recover your sept-vessel after it was destroyed or immobilized. 

Reward: while you are Select, sept repairs and Assets cost half.

4. Foil

You can't remember who started it. 

Skill: one of Painted Dueling Knife 2/Drinking/Intimidation

Starting Equipment: a pair of painted dueling knives, a tin of paint-powder, a shield painted with a snarling face. 

Perk: a member of your Assembly feuds with you - if you meet, there will be blood. When you are attacked in melee, you may riposte, reducing the incoming damage by 1d6+[to-hit]. If this reduces the damage to 0 or less, your opponent is disarmed.

Achievement: defeat your rival in a fair duel.

Reward: you make fill one of your inventory slots with Fatigue to perform a feat of agility (make a scrambling 20' leap, skitter up a wall, et cetera) - in combat, you may do this even if it is not your turn.  

5. Espatier

A practiced hand with the axe and rifle, a survivor of koryos rites of passage (and thus, a full adult), but not yet awarded with steel mask and feather cloak.

Skill: one of Acrobatics/Demolition/Boarding Axe 2

Starting Equipment: light armor (spacesuit), a boarding axe (medium), a cutting torch (15 minute supply of fuel and oxidizer).

Perk: you move at a flat sprint in zero-gravity, and never lose your (hand-and-)footing.

Achievement: raid a rival sept alone and take five captives.

Reward: recognition as one of the ulfheðnar, and the recipe for their moxibustion compounds (doubled movement speed, two attacks per round, immunity to pain, injury, fear, & unconsciousness, chance of stroke, amnesia, blown blood vessels). 

hat :)

6. Shrine Keeper

A carved procession of floating figures winds across your ancestor's shrine, nearly hidden under tied offerings of rakija and foil. 

Skill: Theology, plus one of Oratory/Knowing Your Neighbors/Diligence

Starting Equipment: 1 slot each of fine incense and ephedra tea.

Perk: for ritual reasons, you are inviolable. Assuming you keep your pious reputation, and haven't struck first, Navigators must Save with Will in order to harm you.

Achievement: get the chance, whether from artistry, piety, or nepotism, to lead work on the shrine of your assembly-ship.

Reward:  you, personally, count as an extra shrine for the purposes of Glory generation and attracting heroes.

7. Lawspeaker 

An honorable Navigator will not permit themselves to be slighted. It takes caution to silence their feuds without blood spilled.

Skill: Law, unsurprisingly, plus one of Intimidation/History/Wrestling

Starting Equipment: a stone wrist-guard badge of office, in pure sapphire. Worn by you, and none other.

Perk: once per Season, when presented with a social situation, you may ask one of the following questions to the GM directly - they will answer honestly. 

• Who is really in control here?
• What is about to happen?
• What trait rules this person?
• What here is not what it appears to be?

Achievement: Bring a blood feud between two septs to a peaceful end. 

Reward: If you've spent more than an hour with someone, you have a 2-in-6 to predict how they would react to something. This increases by 1-in-6 for spending a week, season, or year in their company. This does mean you have a 5-in-6 to predict the actions of your septmates.

8. Gunsmith Aspirant

The power to kill at a distance, and to make the tools that provide this power, is hidden. Initiation to the gunsmith's society requires both practical skill and spiritual tuning. You are not yet ready.  

Skill: one of History/Air Rifle 2/Trajectories

Starting Equipment: lead ball bearings and your tools: forge, barrel-reaming machine, hammers & mandrels, anvil, etc.

Perk: you are immune to Imperious commands. Members of the society will not harm you under any circumstances, and you can expect hospitality from them even if your septs bare their teeth for war.

Achievement: build a rifle that fires further and more accurately than any member of the society. This will require strange technology - hydrogen gas-pistons, subverted computerized targeting systems, etc.

Reward: with a week's effort, you may build a rifle. You are trusted to give rifles as gifts.

9. Foreman

The great Assembly-Ships will, someday, sail to the next world. But there is so much work to be done. 

Skill: one of Architecture/Wire-reading ("green plastic tubes with yellow chevrons are filled with molten salt")/Mining 

Starting Equipment: 60 feet of PVC pipe in varied lengths, 30 dim LED status lights, an arm-sized bundle of rebar, four tubes of caulk, and a full set of stick welding equipment (twenty rods of consumable electrode, mask, gloves, power supply). 

Perk: under your instruction, each person engaged in labor (tearing up walls, repairing a ship, building a bridge, et cetera) counts as two.

Achievement: obtain a treasure the size of your sept-vessel, and send it away to your assembly-ship.

Reward: with your cooperation, the Imperious would be able to take an extra action per Season. You may Build an Asset on the assembly-ship. 

10. Katabatist

On the surface of the Volume, like the pupil of an eye, is a six-mile wide hole, and a ten-trillion-mile long tunnel. No one has, yet, made it to its end (apart from the spirits of the dead, of course) - but you've gotten closer than most. 

Skill: one of Endure/Tracking/Logistics 

Starting Equipment: sixteen apotropaic icons, to cast out your pallidness and your empty eyes, and a red plastic keycard from wherever you went. 

Perk: you are beneath notice. Passive machines (those built for noncombat purposes) don't notice you unless you attack them, and you will always be attacked last by combat machines and Firstborn.

Achievement: see the teal light.

Reward: there is something wrong with your eyes. Look into someone else's and they are forced to make a Morale roll. If they fail, they are rooted to the spot until you break eye contact. They may still defend themselves. If they pass, they notice nothing amiss.

11. Lictor 

Guards and enforcers for the Imperious, pulled from the warriors of the septs. 

Skill: one of Greataxe 2/Authority/Wrestling

Starting Equipment: a heavy greataxe - an executioner’s tool - and a set of beautiful (+1 to Reaction) clothes patterned with processions of floating figures in spacesuits.

Perk: You are forewarned of any decrees of the Imperious. All doors are open to you. You will not be challenged to duels (though people will plea to the Imperious for aid if they must) - if someone had the temerity to try, you would be entirely within your rights to cut them down where they stood.

Achievement: display exceptional loyalty by punishing your sept, or the sept of one of your allies, at the command of the Imperious.

Reward: Humans must check Morale to begin combat with you - if they fail, Navigators surrender and all others flee. Your allies have Advantage on Morale checks, saves against Fear, and Discipline checks. In mass combat, units you lead have +2 to-hit and damage.

12. Legalist

Why should the law be secreted away in the minds of lawspeakers and selectmen? Why can I not see it before me? 

Skill: Language: Spiraling, plus one of Foreign Lands/Oratory/Fleeing

Starting Equipment: a pot of ink, 20 sheets of pressed paper, and a multi-jointed mechanical limb from the foreign Spire, currently attached to no one. Sometimes it twitches.

Perk: you have a contact in the Spire. Choose one:

• Gneyvu Proxy Kodri Lightning-in-Amber - a high-ranking member of the nomenklatura, legally identical to Kodri, the city's Preceptor (charged with public morality, state festivals, and auspicious dates). Sees you as an interesting piece of art. You are, presumably, acquainted with her Navigator house-guard client, Pursuant Hiurma Solange.
• Czcibor Jiva Lightning-in-Amber - veteran of the wars against the painted men. Not one of the augmented Sworn, just a (now retired) professional. I'm sure the goods he keeps asking you to carry for him are perfectly above-board.
• Lisu Pre Lightning-in-Amber - a squire-prosthetist to the cruel and overbearing armiger Azuolas Sworn Trajati Lightning-in-Amber. His skills could, potentially, prove useful - more importantly, unlike the other options he truly sees you as a friend.
• Premysl Lonici Lightning-in-Amber - an acclaimed novelist and philosopher. Ok - to be fair, you haven't actually met her, but you've read enough of her work that you may as well have, or so you think. 

Achievement: spend a year under the tutelage of a Spiral philosopher.  

Reward: you have taken the first steps up the path of knowledge. Whenever you gain a new unanswered question, record it. When you have access to an archive, library, sage, or so on, roll 1d6. If the result is less than or equal to your number of questions, choose a question and it is answered.

There are other hypothetical goals for a Legalist (or just legalist) PC - the agricultural revolution, telepathy, writing, etc., but the benefits (and drawbacks) of those are clear and obvious. And in some cases include "you are now playing a different domain game". It'll be great.

13. Stowaway

Desperation claimed you.  

Skill: two of Foraging/Disguise/Climb

Starting Equipment: Nothing. That's the point, isn't it?

Perk: You take 1 damage per round of exposure to vacuum instead of 1d4. 

Achievement: become lost from your sept and make it back. 

Reward: wherever you are, you always know the nearest and best hiding place. Even dedicated searchers will not find you. 

14. Former Imperious

Just a year ago, your words rang with the unquestionable tone of a monarch. But power waxes and wanes, and now you are a man like any other.

Skill: one of Authority/Artwork/Knowing Your Neighbors

Starting Equipment: a set of jewelry, each displaying a particular Vibe to your fellow Navigators:

1. Sapphire diadem: aura of legal authority.
2. Four extremely dense bluish-white rings: aura of occulted knowledge.
3. Tangled bismuth necklace: aura of courage.
4. Bracelet of wound aluminum thread: aura of surplus.
5. Titanium cylinder of a cord: aura of piety.
6. Copper earrings: aura of military skill.

Perk: you still hold some fragment of weight. You are always the most prominent member of a group, and your presence can be tuned to inspire awe or fear in foreigners - though your fellow Navigators would scoff at attempts to use this power among them.

Achievement: return to your prior position as Imperious.

Reward: power comes easily to one experienced with it. You may take an extra Imperious action each round.

15. Merchant

Why spend blood unless you must?

Skill: one of Logistics/Painted Dueling Knife 2/Smuggling

Starting Equipment: a pallet’s worth of scented purplish lumber, four beautiful tapestries, and a crate of dried ephedra tea.

Perk: When looking at someone, you can tell what they most want. When looking at something, you can tell who would most want it.

Achievement: Make 50 Surplus in a single trade. 

Reward: The distance bonus for trade is doubled for you. (Navigators can barter for specific goods, but also for Surplus food or for household goods to distribute for Glory - the value of goods often scales based on the distance between their source and your destination.) 

Red Cloud Confrontation in Landscape

16. Chemist

A sept-vessel has breath, and life, and rushing blood.  

Skill: Chemistry, plus one of Mathematics/Brewing/Wire-reading

Starting Equipment: a small scale, eight round metal bottles, a hand drill.

Perk: when you spend a domain action foraging for fuel (see the Pilot) you also immediately collect or synthesize two of the following:

• An extra slot of fuel (if you're boring).
• A vial of the dissociative mead of poetry.
• A canister of fuel and oxidizer for cutting torches or firebombs.
• A simple sedative, for use against pain and to aid sleep. 
• An ill-tasting poison (2d6, save for half).
• A glass ampoule of metal-eroding acid.

Achievement: Learn secrets of chemistry not known to Navigators. 

Reward: your list of possible syntheses expands to include:

• A block of modern plastic explosive. 
• Actual working antibiotics. 
• A canister of metal foam that rapidly expands and solidifies on contact with air. 

17. Exorcist

Sacrifices in the present world turn into pure springs and beautiful orchards in the next. Shirk your responsibilities and the dead of the next world crawl back to this one, spreading malfunction and disease. 

Skill: one of Medicine/Theology/Vigilance

Starting Equipment: eight honey-soaked antiseptic bandages, eight doses of anesthetic injection, a pair of drums. 

Perk: at a glance, you can see someone's current and maximum HP, if they are ill, and (if they are) whether or not they will recover. +2 on reaction rolls with Navigators - they often recognize you from your travels from before your Selection.

Achievement: save the life of the Imperious, a Spiral noble, one of the Crowned of the Walker-Herds, et cetera. 

Reward: with an hour's examination you can determine the cure to any ailment. You automatically pass checks to remove Fatal Wounds from others. While you are Select, the Care action improves the injuries of your septmates as if three seasons had passed. 

18. Austringer

Both of us built for the sky.

Skill: one of Tracking/Fine Motor Skills/Animal Handling

Starting Equipment: either a 0g-adapted actual, literal bird of prey (with hood, food, et cetera) or a drone control sphere and its pair. 

Perk: knowing how to use the above. The falcon can track unerringly and harry targets at long distances (fatal to small creatures, quadcopters, and so on, but only severely inconveniencing and slowing to humans), while the drone has a light, a camera, and a small two-fingered grasping hand. 

Achievement: catch and tame a great beast or vast machine.

Reward: along with the obvious, your example makes falconry common among your septmates - when any Select raises NPCs to join them on an adventure, one may come with your choice of bird or drone.

19. Skald 

Navigators are, with the exception of the Imperious, fiercely egalitarian. It is your responsibility to insult the great and the good. Drag them back to earth with you.  

Skill: one of Poetry/Sleight of Hand/Fleeing

Starting Equipment: a clattering horn, a vial of the mead of poetry, a jaunty hat. 

Perk: each season, either choose to receive an unkind rumor on a certain topic, or add a rumor of your own into the ecosystem.

Achievement: insult the Imperious to their face and get away with it.

Reward: you can hold the attention of any crowd as long as you keep talking. Watch them hang on your words. Even if they’re here to kill you, they can’t help but listen. 

20. Geoglyph Painter 

Glowing geoglyphs cover the inside of the Volume. Each is a visual aid for a songline - a map-fable.  

Skill: one of Foreign Lands/Memorization/Artwork

Starting Equipment: 50 pounds of glowing glass chunks (to be powdered and used for geoglyphs) and your choice of songline to a distant hex region:

• the Spire, favored-city and greatest of the oases. All septs have a songline to the edge of the Spire, to enter through its airlock - yours places you inside it, without their notice.
• an endless expanse of columnar joints, each made of house-sized metal cubes. The foreign men of the Vault carve their walking cities out of these blocks, and set them to wandering among them.
• a maze of black glass tunnels hidden in the lands of the dead, where faces of pointillist light dance and whisper behind the walls.
• cenote chambers, past the Spire, where the city’s enemies mass for war. 

Perk: whenever you Wander to a new land-island or hex region, you automatically record it as a songline. (Characters can take routes to known land-islands, or choose to explore Machine Space to see if something turns up. Non-geoglyph painters have to spend domain action to codify and memorize the songline to their new discovery so it can be repeated and transmitted. Traveling over recorded songlines lowers your random encounter risk.)

Achievement: venture to the Spire, the Vault, the Ghostfields, and the Cenotes.   

Reward: if you ever hear the name of a location, you immediately know exactly where it is.

the Atacama Giant

Last time, the party realized they had infinite money and learned how to become immortal. 

I'm going to tell you the truth - I barely remember session 8 and it was mostly a gunfight. The players decided they had gotten all the value they could out of the Vampire's Head, they wanted to stabilize the city and end the Head-Kanopy conflict, and they thought it would make them look good with OSIRIS to do something about it. It turns out no amount of vampires mean much when the PCs have a pocket sun and all the weapons American gun laws and infinite money allow. 

In between sessions, Valrel decided to pick up Satan as her new patron, take him out for dinner, and harass him with questions (in exchange for only a minor timeshare in her soul), Moon Dan figured out how to turn on the alien antenna in his jaw (listening to 🗏︎🗏︎ ☞︎💣︎📪︎ ⍓︎□︎◆︎❒︎ ❒︎□︎♍︎🙵 ❍︎◆︎⬧︎♓︎♍︎ ⬧︎⧫︎♋︎⧫︎♓︎□︎■︎ and making the extremely dubious decision to start broadcasting), and the Finance Optimizer put his head down to focus on obtaining the Black Metal of ibn Yazid. 

Of course, this is troublesome. Alchemical authors falsely attribute their work to Classical writers, never city their sources, and cloak their text in ciphers, poetry, prophecy, and gibberish. It would take months... without help. 

1. The Stygian Library would certainly have any relevant texts.
2. Someone with comprehensive knowledge of celestial law and the Astral Plane would know more about the Metal - though all of those are OSIRIS researchers. 
3. And, you could always work with ibn Yazid himself. It's possible that his body is the "Law-Struck Corpse" rumored to be for sale at this year's Black Auction in Washington D.C.

So, especially because they leveled the Vampire Head's tunnels and blew up a Walmart in the process, the PCs decided it would be a great time to not be in Philadelphia.  

Unfortunately, the Black Auction is invite-only - fortunately, flashing around plenty of money and the theater ticket the immortal Abraham Lincoln bought before his unfortunate first death got them through the door. 

They hang around with the rich, famous, and magic in the opulent (and mildly-haunted) Hay-Adams hotel, intervene in a duel between an exceedingly upset hedge fund manager and the Comte de Saint Germain, lose a duel with the Comte de Saint Germain, crack the hedge fund manager over the head with a cane and then kind of stand around not knowing what to do, frantically try to avoid En-men-lu-ana, the ancient Sumerian king Moon Dan shot at back in the 90s, and walk out of the ruins one exceedingly cuboid law-struck corpse and one bottle of comet wine richer.

Hey, wait a sec - the ruins?

The final lot of this year's Black Auction was Tango, the extremely psychic elephant - when "the Officer", dressed in misshapen medals with molten text from the exceedingly nonspecific "Eurasia", lost the bid, she pulled a whistle from her pocket and drove the elephant mad. Tango promptly disassembled the Hay-Adams dining room into floating geometry, then fled into the sky as the PCs stopped the Officer from escaping with her. 

Tango hasn't been seen since - the PCs lost track of her over the Atlantic Ocean. It was generally agreed that this was a perfectly average Black Auction... except for the theater ticket, which is sure to power some kind of presidential-assassination-via-sympathetic-magic, as the PCs realized right after putting it up for sale and right before getting outbid for it by En-men-lu-ana.

Oops. 

Analysis

I'm starting to run out of things to say, honestly. 

The Black Auction was overstuffed - I had six NPCs, all with help from Phlox's wonderful GLOG server, and one packed session is Not enough time to introduce all of these people and what their problems are. They will never show up again - maybe if I run another campaign of Libra in Washington D.C. these'll be the local factions or something. 

There are Four (4) (IV) sessions left of Libra, and I think it'll all line up perfectly. One session for kidnapping some OSIRIS scientist, one session for the Stygian Library, and then a climactic session where they reach the final step of the magnum opus while I the rapidly-expanding teamup of people who want them dead hammer on the doors. (Currently, that's the Zontamanancer, his son (as the idol of Apollo), the last City Bug infectees, the leaderless vampires, and a scout UFO from the alien empire.) OK, that's 3 things and 4 sessions, but I'm sure one of them will go long, or they'll decide to try their luck against Kanopy (now reinforced by the PMC "131 Halley's Comet"), or they'll forget what they're doing entirely, or we'll have to skip one. See? Perfect.

My upcoming Littlest Brown Book campaign, Not My Destination, has a decent naval component - much of the stereotypical wilderness between the players' starting town and the central dungeon will be open ocean. While the Littlest Brown Book comes with random encounter tables for rivers and swamps, it does not include one for the sea - so here is my own hacky attempt (I'm not kidding about hacky - this is basically just Rivers but without the things that need "land" to "live" and with some more human encounters, and on 2d10 for some good ol' probability).

This'll be my first campaign using lair chances - that'll be neat. Hopefully. 

At the end of the Libra campaign and the start of summer, I'm planning to run something Normal™. Wizards and suchlike. In the pursuit of Normal™, I'm going to run Idraluna's Littlest Brown Book, which I chose over other 0e retroclones (or the original white box) completely at random (and because I'm a fan of Idraluna's blog). 

The campaign structure should also be pretty Normal™: town, wilderness, dungeon (100 rooms, perhaps). I'm ripping off Sean F. Smith's Westen Isles for the wilderness - not the exact map, but the general shape of "big island 1 with town, big island 2 with main dungeon, scattered mini-islands". Get some use out of those naval encounters.

To be a little less Normal™, I'm also using Idraluna's Supplement א, which splits the Magic-User into 5 color-coded subclasses (and, in doing so, replaces the Cleric with the M-U's White School). 

Since this, along with showing the non-humans the door, means the class choices would be 1 fighting-type and 5 wizardoids, I'm also adding subclasses to the Fighter (since players avoid doubling up unless necessary, and I know otherwise they'd scatter to the various M-Us):

1. Corsair - you swim at 6" (twice as fast as normal), your drowning chances are halved, and you may carry any weapon while swimming. 
2. Thief - others must roll their listen at doors chance to notice you when you creep.
3. Knight - you begin play with a free, unclassed, perfectly loyal squire. They will enter combat if necessary. 
4. Inquisitor - you recognize demons, spirits, heretical wizards, et cetera on sight, and your attacks count as magical for the purposes of damaging them. If you attack them with a magical weapon, roll 2d6 for damage. 
5. Champion - your target numbers for attack rolls are 1 lower. 

Along with that, I've always had a fascination with Eldritch Wizardry-era psionics - in particular, the random chance of them... ever coming up or mattering at all. So, characters in this campaign will have a chance to be august. 

At the end of character creation, roll a d20. If you roll a 7, (or, if your INT, WIS, and CHA are all above 15, if you roll a 7 or 13) you were born under favorable stars and were taught by those distant intelligences. If you pass this roll, repeat it until you fail.

You have points of Favor with the stars equal to thrice your level, and regain one of those points each day of rest.

For each success on the auspice roll, choose a constellation and associated skill below:

1. Libra - the stars take the measure of the world. Your listen at doors chance increases to 4-in-6, your secret passages chance to 4-in-6, and with a point of Favor and a minute of unbroken focus you can read minds.
2. Sagittarius - the stars reach down to earth. You can lift objects weighing up to 50 coin-weights per level via telekinesis, costing one Favor per minute. 
3. Pisces - the stars swim through the upper air. With concerted effort you can slowly (6" per turn) levitate vertically for a point of Favor per minute.
4. Leo - the stars speak with the voices of kings. For a point of Favor, you may control the mind of a target with lower level than you for one minute. 
5. Scorpio - the stars shine with impossible colors. For a point of Favor, you become invisible for a minute. This ends early if you attack - even the tiny scorpion is noticed when it strikes.
6. Aquarius - the stars pour water from above. You can spend a point of Favor to ignore your need for water, sleep, and food for a day. You do not regain Favor during these days. 

There were more stars, once. Now they are gone, replaced by boiling black in the firmament.  

Last week, the party got baited into an ambush.

Most of the PCs start by questioning Alex Fuller, the last survivor of the cult of Apollo, while Valrel checks the next room, where the great bronze idol of Fuller's god dances and dances around a wine-filled swimming pool. She decides, inexplicably, to take a swim - and is then bodyslammed by the Zontanamancer's golden hunter-ragdoll. 

Unfortunately, she is now stuck under hundreds of pounds of gold. Fortunately, she doesn't need to breathe, and the plodding mind of the ragdoll takes a hot minute to realize hey, I don't think I'm actually killing this person right now.

Long enough, in fact, for the other PCs to go "huh, where's Valrel", find her in the pool, and huck a steel cable in with her. She ties it to the ragdoll, the party above ties the other end to the dancing Apollo, and on his next turn the ragdoll whips across the room, snaps the wire, punches through the wall, and smears itself down two blocks of city street. 

The PCs scatter - a couple run off to make sure the ragdoll's deanimated, Moon Dan makes sure Alex doesn't notice the party had looted his temple, and Joe decides to think about that "EXTREMELY CURSED" book...

Surely C-something the Morally Dubious Skull knows something about EXTREME CURSES, right? Sure, he says. Just give me a body first...

The PCs reunite at Toka's shack - best not to cause too much collateral damage - staple C-something to the body of a dead Apollonian, and toss him the book.

"Well?" they ask. 

C-something nods sagely. "Locusts."

"Can you do something about it?"

"Probably."

"Probably?"

"Probably." 

 C-something surrounds the book in salt, says a couple words, and the salt circle shifts, twists into words in some dead language, and flashes pure white. Then he picks it up, snaps it open to a conveniently ribbon-marked page, and Isn't instantly consumed by a swarm of locusts. 

Instead, he presents the party with

from the Splendor solis

[...] rubedo, the red stage. It is at this point, the point of the first gate's opening, that the stone takes on the wonder of its fourth facet, the Solar facet, chrysopoeia.

De re Cauda Pavonis

To approach the final stage of the Great Work demands care. Take up a flask of the black metal of ibn Yazid, that the people of that place call lam yamasa because it is not heated nor cooled (and, they say, only comes from those places where the motionless Fields of Asphodel intrude on the living world) and set it to boil. Place the miraculous stone within and it will take on the aspect of the peacock's tail.

One becomes two. The stone will open and reveal its heart - be wary, as the heartlight strikes like fire. Each hour of the day you a mote from those with a connection to the Fields of Asphodel or to the land of Dream must be put into the heart, and this fire will catch them.

Two becomes three. When this is done, the fire of the heartlight is quelled but it is more vital that you keep your eyes from it. Bring forward the body of glass, and let it gaze upon the heartlight. Only then may you open your eyes.

Out of the third comes the one as the fourth. The heartlight burns in the head of the homunculus. It breathes and stares - it must be kept alive, with food and drink. When you would pass to the hereafter you will, instead, be caught into the homunculus, and live again.

from the Ampitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae

C...ool. Sure. OK. 

While a couple of the PCs do some considering, the rest make a realization. They have the philosopher's stone? Which turns any material into gold? Why haven't we been doing this the whole time? A couple schemes and a few minutes later, the PCs all put a celebratory ∞ in the money section of their character sheet. 

The considerers lay out their understanding - the land of Dream is obviously the Gardens of Ynn. That makes the Field of Asphodel the lawful Astral Plane. I've never heard of a "black metal of ibn Yazid", but it sounds pretty distinctive so I guess we could just to the Astral Plane and... poke around? 

How do we get to the plane of Law.

Actually, not that difficult - Containment Center CATERPILLAR has a "Contact Room" that leads to the Astral Plane, and since Joe Normal remains in good standing with OSIRIS, the door is actually there when he goes to look for it. 

He creeps in, hiding Valrel as a bat and the Finance Optimizer as a 2D projection under his coat, and opens the door to a blank white expanse, the Pyramid hovering overhead.

Joe asks if the Pyramid knows anything about the "black metal of ibn Yazid" and gets slapped down, gaining harmful Notice and an answer of this is on the list of unacceptable questions.

Joe asks if he could, maybe, get a description of the list of unacceptable questions, then cringes, expecting another punishment. unacceptable questions are questions related to the physical integrity of the Pyramid or surrounding objects.

The physical integrity. Of the Pyramid. The black, metallic Pyramid. 

Oh boy.

Analysis

Incidentally - an error. The Vampire Head's hand is not going to "1,000,000% escape" - they buried it in a steel box after bending all of its fingers backwards until they broke and tying them to the back of the hand with cables. It's stayin' in the box.

The Pyramid is, fully and without shame, just the Board from the game Control. When I first started posting about Libra, seven years ago, (seven years ago. bizarre) this was the point. A bare minimum mashup that could fit SCPoid and V:tMoid and Esoteric Enterprisesoid and so forth gaming - it slotted in perfectly next to "literally just Delta Green" and "literally just GRU Division "P"" and "literally just the Gardens of Ynn". Usually I try to be a bit more artful, but eh. I have settings aplenty, I don't have to take them all seriously. 

I am inordinately happy with my alchemy puzzle. Deep on my list of campaigns is a faux-Italian mercenary game, and I was considering alchemical recipes like this as a core of the magic system - especially ones with inefficient instructions. To make an ever-burning fire you must follow these four steps - but actually, if you experiment, step 3 is completely unnecessary and using different gems in step 2 creates different kinds of fire. That kind of thing.  

Having literally infinite money will have... an effect on the game - though it was always, really, part of the plan. The players are hyped to get their FFLs, buy expensive cars, stop living in basements, and see how much societal damage they can do.

Last week, a microsingularity consumed a city block of Philadelphia before winking out. Unsurprisingly, the powers that be are hopping mad. Over the week, OSIRIS Weights & Measures is sidelined for the far blunter OSIRIS Thermodynamics - the City Bug nest is bombed to ruin, the OSIRIS kill list is about to be whittled down, and Thermodynamics division liquidators stalk the halls of Containment Center CATERPILLAR with clipboards and 4 MD casts of Ignition. 

The PCs realize they're on the clock if they want to rescue the Vampire's Head's body, and then realize they don't want the body. Even Valrel, vampire descendant of the Head, has decided she's gotten all she will get from her Patron - except, perhaps, for his vorpal claws.

A call to друг later (Joe Normal plans to abandon друг and see if he can meditate his way closer to the Pyramid - he's happy to throw favors away) and one of the Head's hands is twitching and bleeding on Toka's couch as they pry off its fingernails. Then, they shrug and bury it in Toka's backyard, just in case it turns out to be important later. (It will, 1,000,000%, escape.)

The players then consider. What if we just asked друг to tell us about the Philosopher's Stone? They do, and Joe Normal is immediately struck in the back of the head by a tome, helpfully labeled "EXTREMELY CURSED // DO NOT OPEN // REALLY". Cursed, you say - wonder if the Zontanamancer could help, he seemed wizardly. 

Bad news! Four sessions ago, they stole the Zontanamancer's son and turned his hands to gold! When they call, he gladly picks up and says sure! Meet me at Delphi, the club those Apollo guys run. I'll be there soon. 

He never shows - instead, the PCs wander through an emptied-out club, stalked by the Zontanamancer's animate golden ragdoll and living car, while the idol of Apollo dances in slow circles, unconcerned with the death of his cult. The PCs take this as an opportunity to loot the place, collecting a book of Apollonian Ynnbringer spell components and Satan's golden fiddle before finding the cult's apparent last survivor, the chaos-magician and coryphaeus Alex Fuller.

Analysis

I had an epiphany on my way back from the session - the campaign's not built correctly. Neither was Rota Fortunae, and I didn't notice. My urban sandboxes are built off of Go Away, but Go Away had a clear end goal. Get $100,000,000. Get off-world. 

Neither Rota Fortunae nor Libra have had that. With no goal to direct the players, they become listless - to keep them moving I kept turning up the dial on faction moves, putting the PCs not in an "urban sandbox" but in a reactive spiral where every session is "pick one of the two adventures I wrote this week for the faction moves". 

More reactive PCs leaves me with a higher bar for prep: A, I can't use player desires as a gauge for what will happen next (the PCs ending the session by saying "next session let's go rob Len Abbatelli, maybe we can get some of that $100,000,000", etc), B, since all the factions are constantly moving all the prep is unstable (for instance, sites like Delphi or Containment Center CATERPILLAR look different now than they did last week), and C, if the players are stuck picking between adventure 1 and adventure 2 those had both better be pretty cool adventures... half of which aren't chosen, and evaporate.

This game should have focused more tightly on the Philosopher's Stone. You have it, it doesn't work, you want to make it work. Here is a pile of rumors about the Stone and a bunch of wizard-freak factions. Trail information backwards (person X references book Y, which is in the possession of this faction - go get the book, it leads to books Z and A) and piece together contradictory information to figure out how to use the funny rock. Instead, the Stone was a kind of funny inciting incident that then slid right into the background. 

Also a couple of more minor problems:

• the OSIRIS Theurge explicitly says you can just tell a target to kill themselves. I thought the common aversion to this was just due to power level concerns, and went "eeh, if they want to pour MD into a single-target damage spell, more power to them" - but no! It's an optimization concern - if mind control can be used as direct damage the player will always choose to use it as direct damage! 
• друг rewards their actors with nonspecific "favors", and my players seem to be of the belief that they can literally do anything - which seems to be true, given how I've played them! This is totally scuffed - that phone should've had a much more specific and much more sinister effect, closer to 6's skeleton key.

I think it's funny that my two sets of recent posts are a game with absolutely no prep ever and a long-winded series on rules, procedures, and tools for an upcoming campaign. I'm kind of looking forward to not running anything and getting some time to bolt stuff together without being under a deadline.

Last time, the wizard freaks went to a party and really harshed the vibe. 

This week, things got worse. The grey-market eigenpharmaceuticals company Kanopy had entered into open war with the children of the Vampire's Head, but the PCs have decided to ignore this for now. Instead, they split up - Joe Normal heads to the local OSIRIS station, CATERPILLAR to try and persuade them to stay hands-off as the city explodes, while Toka and the Finance Optimizer take a break to go hunt down the necromancer. 

In the ruins of the necromancer's house they find his mentor, the talking skull [Charles? Camouflage? Correction? literally any word starting with C - the PCs have studiously ignored his name], who laughs about his idiot student - I don't need anyone stupid enough to burn their own house down as an apprentice... which means I have a position open, especially if you bring me a body... 

Joe Normal sees the body of the Vampire's Head get loaded into OSIRIS storage, picks up the coordinates of the City Bug nest, and hears about an "anomaly" that happens to line up exactly where the Templar first awoke, then heads out from CATERPILLAR to meet up with the others, who have found enough clues in the trashed house to pinpoint the necromancer's car (with a little help from Joe Normal's tap into the traffic cameras) and guess at his harebrained scheme to kill the U.S. president, the immortal Abraham Lincoln (don't worry about it). 

A short car chase later, the necromancer and his one (1) skeleton are obliterated. Problem solvlem. The PCs shrug, decide they have free time (still not worrying about the active shootouts between the vampires and Kanopy) and run off to poke around in Templar's birthplace(?), a 5-story apartment building. 

A 5-story apartment building with only 3 different people inside, copied and copied to fill the rooms, and with a staircase up to the sixth... floor... above the roof... and a door that opens to a round room of brightly-polished steel and strangely-proportioned, inhuman spacesuits. 

 The PCs wandered through round rooms, past cylinders scrolling with text in unknown language, past wall-sized touchscreens with targeting reticles over Philadelphia buildings, and into a cryobay where they found a sleeping creature, 10 feet of fur and teeth and wild, burning eyes - just like Templar. 

Eventually they oopsed and poked enough buttons to turn on the ship and awakened the space marine, then immediately stole his armor while he stumbled, cryosick and deeply confused, to the ship's bridge. PCs scattered across the ship - Joe Normal learning how to walk in stolen power armor, Toka throwing herself into the UFO's augmentation bay to get her skeleton reinstalled, Valrel winding up stuck in the singularity core, and the other two locked in the ship's bridge asking stupid questions to the space marine and the newly-awakened Grey bridge crew. 

louie zong

 

Around the time Toka slid out of the augmentation bay, newly Templar-ized, the PCs realized that being separated by irising steel doors and increasingly frustrated aliens was, maybe, a bad thing. So, Joe Normal gave Templar a phone call, crammed his phone next to the power armor's microphone, shut the visor, and had Templar lie fast in the peeping alien language while Joe collected the other PCs (with some help from the Finance Optimizer locking doors and shutting off lights, when necessary). Then, all collected in the space marine drop pod bay, and with the floor enticingly open, they decided to suplex one of the aliens off the ship with them and run.

Between interrogating their new free alien and looking through Toka's new 500 years of spacewar experience, they learned some stuff about the alien colonizing empire (that they mostly ignored after "alien colonizing empire") and decided they didn't like the sound of "alien colonizing empire" - so, they had the Finance Optimizer shut off the whole ship, including the containment for its core.

Oh. Oops. The core.

A black hole bloomed over Pennsylvania. 

Analysis

New change to the Infraspatial - the 10-foot radius of no fire or electricity was a huge inconvenience and a pain in the neck to remember, so it's now an active ability: "You can focus on an electrical device or a fire to shut it down as long as your focus is maintained. Firing pins hit primers and do nothing, computers crash instantly, cars stall. The same effect radiates from Lawful demons - a stilling of the world." 

This is mostly an improvement, though "if you can see the whole thing you can focus on the whole thing" was probably not the best precedent to set (see: the UFO exploding), but eeeeeehhhhhh, this isn't a game intensely focused on balance. 

Necromancy from the skull, space marine-ness from the UFO, and the full vampirism are all unlocked as 2-template prestige classes - I don't currently plan to post them, because while they aren't direct rips of pre-existing classes, they're extremely derivative (of Locheil's Necromancer, deus ex parabola's Cloudskater, and Gokun's Vampire, respectively). 

I think, between the open war, the microsingularity, the City Bugs, and the assassination plot, the campaign's about to pivot a bit. The local OSIRIS presence in Pennsylvania has been "Weights & Measures", an investigation-focused division with a reliance on "Haruspex" psychics. This isn't really working out for them (especially since the head Haruspex died in a друг-orchestrated freak car accident) - they'll soon be replaced by Orbital Mechanics, or Thermodynamics, or some other, blunter, option. Next session will probably begin with the City Bug nest being destroyed by airstrikes.

A short one this week. Last time, the wizard freaks met an elderly wizard, wrecked his car, and made friends with Philadelphia's local cult of Apollo. 

This week, the cult sends them a letter - to celebrate the animation of their bronze idol to Apollo, they're inviting patrons and losers alike to a drug-filled feast on neutral ground, under the idol's eyes. The PCs weigh this against their other option, trudging around in damp graveyards after a novice necromancer, and decide the option with "light" and "people" and "alcohol" is preferable. 

At the party they met a couple more of the city's lesser factions:

• Kanopy Pharmaceuticals, a rapidly-expanding grey market parachemistry company, headed by "the Marquis", one of the billion petty lords of the sidhe. 
• and members of the private infraspatial club Commune Ataraxia, who eat gold. 

Among the Marquis' guards Valrel notices Islwyn, a runaway scion that the Vampire's Head hopes to capture and execute. She knows the Marquis is desperate for a peace treaty with the Head, so she lies - give me Islwyn, and the Head will sign whatever you want. 

Islwyn is sent out to die - it turned out he'd turned into a Troubled Antihero, pulled his fangs out, and tried to become a defender of the weak and powerless. He only gets as far as "Wait, you don't ha-" before the PCs blow his leg smoove off with a .50 cal and drag him off to get thrown into the maw of the Head. Valrel is allowed to sip from the hideous omnidirectional spray of blood and will soon morph into a full vampire - the other scions politely applaud, and nobody pays attention to Toka scooping up Islwyn's garage-built UV-lightsaber vampire-killing spear.

On the way back they are mildly annoyed by a token force of "city bugs", man-sized parasitic wasps farmed (for some godforsaken reason) by the Apollo cult's main rival. This poses no threat to anybody, but the city bug herders didn't want anyone to forget about how much they hate everyone. 

Back in the party, Joe Normal tries a Kanopy-original entheogen and awakens in Ynn. As he wanders through the Garden, he realizes he can no longer feel the strings of the Pyramid in the back of his head. When he reawakens, he begs the Marquis for more - and the sidhe nods. Of course, for a price. 

Analysis

This is more like it - a self-operating game. I did no prep until about an hour before the game, when I rolled twice on the Big Spreadsheet and learned that Commune Ataraxia and the City Bug Herders were acting this week. Since they're both related to the House of Musagetes, who just got the zôn last session, it was clear the House would be celebrating, and the city bugs would start swinging. (The Commune Ataraxia job was an interception of Kanopy's entheogen couriers that the PCs flatly ignored.)

Though that's the bare minimum, and even if the game's self-sustaining it'll need some work to shine. Basic bestiaries and expanded plans for the 5 minor factions (especially the City Bug Herders, who need the most work - for instance, a name. And an explanation for why they want to own man-sized parasitic wasps), actually finishing the patron jobs, etc. It's in a really "building the rails in front of the train" place right now, and it's a bit tiring.

Oh - and it turns out that however-many years of online roleplaying have left me with absolutely no capability to act out personalities. Almost all of my NPCs talk in the same way and make the same jokes, but I don't really care - the important part is that they want different things. 

Next week everything will get... harsh, as the negotiations between Kanopy and the Vampire's Head evaporate.