The Garden

This has been sitting in my drafts since like last year so I'm finally kicking it out into the world. Made using these hexcrawl generation rules.

 

The Carapetti Collection: d12 Anomalous Media

Throwing my offering onto the table, inspired by these other posts

 ...

 Materials recovered from the basement of Vera Carapetti, currently missing, presumed dead.

  1. 'Episode ##' - An unaired episode of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond  is Unbreakable, recorded to a USB drive. Over the course of the episode, the character of Okuyasu incapacitates and buries the rest of the cast alive whilst under the effects of an enemy stand (not shown in the episode). The final scene, in which a dirt-covered Okuyasu is shown sitting in front of a nondescript apartment door, runs for a total of three hours before the episode ends.

 

2. 'Scale 06' - Cello score scrawled on the back of a small flip notebook. Begins as a standard G Major scale, however goes higher and lower than exist in standard musical notation, with unknown symbols representing the new notes. When played, musicians allegedly develop alien hand syndrome in their bowing hand over the following few days.

 

3. 'House of Thorns' - An unpublished sequel to Jane Eyre, detailing the Jane and Rochesters life following the events of the novel. After falling into a sinkhole in the garden and experiencing a disturbing vision of heaven, Jane is haunted by nightmares and insomnia. Jane's mental state steadily degrades and she begins to inflict an escalating series of psychological tortures on Rochester. The book ends abruptly with a bright light illuminating the house as it rises into the sky.

 

4. 'RossisSleeping' - A dvd containing the fifth season of Friends. In every episode the character of Ross is clearly dead, having suffered a throat wound. The other characters seem oblivious to this, acting as normal. The corpse visibly rots as the season progresses, with flies, rats and vermin seen feeding on it at several points.

 

5. '7thInternationale' - A hand-held video camera of unknown make, containing 157 hours of footage depicting the final days of a failed revolution in Detroit, Michigan. All footage is filmed inside an apartment building that appears to be under siege by forces the revolutionaries refer to as 'yellowboots'. The footage ends as the decision is made to detonate the building using stockpiled explosives.

  

6. 'Map of the Stars' - A fold-out map depicting a crude rendition of Los Angeles with the houses of celebrities marked with golden stars. None of the names refer to currently living people, instead matching the names of missing Slovakian children from the years 1980-1985. Following the map does not lead to any houses, instead one will find themselves led to a variety of sewer access manholes.

 

7. 'LaraAlone_v8.4.exe' - A copy of Rise of the Tomb Raider, in which players find themselves unable to progress beyond the introductory mountain mission. The climb continues indefinetly, with Lara eventually forced to kill and cannibalize her companion as she runs out of food. Longest recorded play time is 18 hours, by which point the mountain is surrounded by a black void and Lara is suffering severe frostbite.

 

8. 'My Summer Holiday' - A series of videos posted by an anonymous user on 4chans /wsg/ board, in which an unseen woman falls down a tunnel. Over the course of the series, the tunnel walls change from natural rock to concrete to carved marble. The videos averaged 5.4 hours in length, and 12 were posted in total. In the last uploaded video, a faint red light can be seen far below, as well as the sound of electronic dance music. 

 

9. 'Hippo Fanciers Monthly' - A magazine, apparently published in Mexico in 1970. Aimed at  professional Hippo farmers and competiton breeders. Photos inside depict several currently non-existant breeds of the animals, as well as details of 'desirable traits' such as tusk length, skin taughtness, agression and speed. 

10. 'Recipe for Harold' - A recipe for Beef Wellington that extends to 24 A5 pages, and calling for ingredients such as broken glass, corpse ash and wool. Handwriting changes style several times. Margins contain a rambling story in which 'Harold' is force-fed meals in an effort to achieve apotheosis.

 

11. 'Magdalen Street Murders' - Footage observing murders taking place in the kitchen of several different houses, shot from the back garden. The murders follow the same pattern- a figure wearing a Burger King mask emerges from beneath the table and attacks with a set of garden sheers. An unseen commentator then offers critique and a numbered rating from 1 to 10.  

 

12. 'Strobe Sun' - A large crowd gathers on a beach at night, singing hymns in an unknown language. This proceeds for 2 hours, until the sun begins to rise. As it does it begins to flash rapidly, similair to a strobe light. The crowd begins to scream and suffer seizures as a blurred figure emerges from the waves.

Mothership Radiation Rules

 The name of my blog is 'Atomic Witch Coven' but I havn't made a single post about anything vaguely nuclear-related. I'm a hack and a fraud.

Adapted almost entirely from Skerple's radiation table. Make a body save at the end of
Make a body test after every interval or suffer the effects, plus the effects from less intense sources as well. Remember to follow your space OSHA protocols lads.

 

Weak                                     

Interval: 30 days

•  Sources: Broken X-Ray machine. Unshielded habitats and spaceships. Spending time in an area irradiated years ago. Spent reactor fuel rods.
  
•  Effects: Sickness, hair loss, red and patchy skin. Clears up after a few hours away from the sourc.

 

Moderate   

Interval: 5 Days

• Sources:  Spent laser cells. Unshielded Casaba howitzer rounds. Spending time in an area recently irradiated.
  
• Effects: Nausea and weakness. Disadvatantage to Body saves for 1d10 hours. Save or develop some kind of cancer, unlikely to be terminal.
  

  

High 

Interval: 10 Hours

• Sources: Unshielded reactor. Corpse of the victim of Extreme or Lethal radiation. Geiger shamblers.
  
• Effects:  1d10 damage, 1d10 Stat damage, blind for 1d10 hours, Body save or permenantly sterile and develop terminal cancer. Disadvantage to Body, Strength and Speed Saves/checks for 1d5 weeks.
  

 

Extreme

Interval: 1 Hour

• Sources: Nuclear weapon casing fragments. Reactor meltdown. Unstable warp core. Nuclear airburst.
  
• Effects: 1d10 damage, 2d10 Stat damage, blind for d5 weeks, sterile. Immediate medical attention required or death in 1d10 rounds as your stomach acid melts your organs.
  

 

Lethal

Interval: 1 Round 

• Sources: Radiation Spectre. Pulsar star. Direct hit from a ships particle beam. Jump drive meltdown.
  
• Effects: Horrific, painful death over the next 1d10 rounds. Fear save from all nearby or 1d10 stress.
   

 

Gods of the Black 2: Quarantine Edition

Quarantines got me locked in my room so it's time for some more space horrors! Again these are inspired by the Dread Powers from magnus archives given a sci-fi polish and dragged through the hedge of my brain.

Ymirra

Avatar: A blood-red moon cracked open like an eggshell. From within emerges a vast head, at once a mans, a wolfs, a thousand alien predators. White chains of neutron star-stuff bind its eyes and maw. A million appendages reach out around it, miles and miles long, brushing the planets surface.

Servitors: Those few who survive an incursion, transformed with corrupted Posthuman technology into vanguard organisms that range far beyond the tangle, spreading Ymirra's taint wherever they go.

Signs:

•  Every form of life turned murderously predatory, from the smallest algae to large, gentle herbivores. An orgy of hunger and animal violence that never ceases.
• A new species of hominid. Children are born stronger, smarter, crueller, their eyes devoid of empathy. They look at their parents and playmates with cold calculation. Soon they outnumber them, and the hunt begins.
• The colony taken apart like a jigsaw and twisted into a deathtrap labyrinth, the people forced to run like rats from a cavalcade of human-derived creatures that stalk the narrow halls.

 

Nyx

Avatar: A black hole that hunts with a terrible intent. At the edge of the event horizon, a pitch-black ring-city built of derelict ships that spins ever close to destruction, its blinded philosophical-zombie inhabitants expanding it constantly to escape their gods hunger.

Servitors: A strange ship that docks one day, promising salvation to those who board. The masked crew pack the colonists together in tiny lightless cells and take them to the blind city, forcing them to gaze upon the Avatar until their eyes bleed away into pits of darkness and their sentience is neatly scooped away, replaced with a mindless shadow-self.


Signs:

• Light inverts, casting the planet into photo-negative.The star swells grotesquely, filling the sky with a sickly black-blue glow, fattened for the feast.
• A total eclipse that does not end. An arm reaches from the suns shadow, thin and many-jointed, and grasps the colony tower tight, before dragging it into the black.
• The whole city is dead, murdered by their shadows that now move freely, performing a pantomime life.

 

The Black Pit of Carcossa

Avatar: Never seen, only heard. A sub-bass heart-beat from deep below the ground, a sussurating binary code detected on seismic instruments. It gets faster and faster. Those on the surface dream of a pale, fleshy thing at the core of the world, and wake with a desperate desire to join it.

Servitor: A person-sized trapezohedron of diamond. Those who approach find themselves compressed by gravitational forces and pressure too strong to measure, turned to tiny flecks of crystal that are incorporated into the servitors form.
Signs: 

• The station descends into the gas giant, deeper and deeper, down to where the pressure turns gas to liquid. The inhabitants are crushed and warped by unimaginable pressure, but still live. 
• A mining expedition finds themselves fossilising, stone and computronium creeping up their bodies from the rock below. Their minds are overwhelmed with endless calculations of mass, gravity and depth.
• A crevice that appears in the floor. Small at first, it gets larger and larger, as the dimensions of the room shrink around it. At the bottom, far below, a tangled mass of quantum black-boxes and pale bodies, wires and cables trailing from mouths and hollowed skulls.

 

You Wont Believe Number 5!

Avatar: A viral meme, a thoughform that leaps from frequency to frequency, copying itself across every system it can find. It appears as an indistinct figure in a stock photo, their features resembling someone you knew.

Servitors: Fractal branches emerge from the screens of infected devices across the colony. Their psychedelic flowers grow rapidly, and bloom, a delicate song emerging from the mouths within them.

Signs:

• The properties of states of matter debased. Solids and gases turning liquid, and vice versa. Colonists drowning in their liquid habitation blocks, people fall through the gaseous surface of the world towards a burning core that is soft and pliable as jelly.
• Causality undone. Everything happens at once, never happens and is already over. Time bends around in a moebius strip, perception becomes reality as memories leak free. You dissolve into the world around you as a million minds entwine around eachother, losing themselves forever.
• It's not there. Mass hysteria and paranoia, the demons created by the colonists own minds are all that there is.

Moloch

Avatar: A moon-sized Company arcology, spinning slowly in the inky void, trailing ocens of amniotic fluid. Blazing yellow light comes from every window. The shadow of a vast, foetal figure can be seen inside, twitching.

Servitors: A nameless corporation that reached beyond the Tangle, and was embraced by what they found. Now their outlets appear on frontier colonies, sprouting in unseen corners, bright signs promising services and payment plans in nonsense words that hurt to look at. Nobody ever sees any staff, but they all say the service is wonderful.


Signs: 

•  People are buying dopplegangers of themselves from strange, unnamed shopfronts. Their cramped apartments fill with blanked-eyed twins
• The stock markets have a new index. They're selling stocks in the colony. The inhabitants wake to find neat chunks missing of the sky, the ground, their flesh and memories. From the empty space in a grey sky, leaflets pour, adveritsing products that dont exist, could never exist.
• The colonists stitched together with computronium thread, brains networked to mine vast amounts of cryptocurrency thats broadcast beyond the Tangle.
• The Union meeting hall is impaled on a vast spike of petrified, twisted bodies that erupts from the ground, cheerfully smiling faces chanting Company slogans. The organizers and reps come apart in molecule-thick strands that fall like confetti.

Dyeus

Avatar: A brilliant green star, thousands of AU in radius.

Servitors: Molecules of hydrogen, grown bigger than starships. The surface crawls with shrivvled, vaccum-dessicated corpses that attempt to dig below with broken fingers.

Signs:

• The crew awake from cryostasis to find their ship far beyond the galactic plane, drifting powerless in the emptiness between galaxies. Twinkling lights surround them, millions of light-years away. They still live out there, utterly lost in the inky black sea.
• The colonists fall into the angles of their meagre dwellings, lost in cracks of space-time. They are visible as tiny figures endlessly dropping away, getting smaller and smaller but never quite vanishing.
• The field is bigger on the inside. The fence recedes into the distance, the fields of engineered crops stretching to the horizon. The lights of the colony homestead can just be seen, but never reached. In the black sky above, something vast swims, too big to comprehend.

Leer-ly There

Poor Leer. Her life sucks. She sculpts until she passes out, and then she wakes up and does it again. This is what happens when she sculpts too much. I figured that since the Gate is formed from her sculptures, it would be cool to have her become the gate.



The Gate Herself

A thin, malnourished body floats a few feet from the ground, limbs shrivelled and skin pulled taught. Bloodstained rags of clothing trail below it. From her back erupts a hideos growth of bone and flesh, Leer's spine and organs moulded like clay into a ring-like structure. Black smoke pours from the portal, which throbs and writhes with a hideous life.

Combat: 25%

>Feeble scratching 1d10 OR Open the Gate

Speed: 30%

Instinct: 40%

Hits: 4 (30)

Special

>Trauma Aura: Sanity and Fear saves taken by PCs are at (-)

>The Gate Opens: Gaunt enter realspace, roll D6 on table below.

1. Pitch-black toxic smoke billows from the Gate, lit by purple lightening. Body save or 1d10 damage/turn spent breathing smoke.
2. 1d10 Death Worms writhe sinuously through the air, spectral fronds twitching.
3. 1d10/2 Crawlers scuttle through, swarming towards the PCs.
4. 3 Gaunt Walkers erupt from the portal, wailing unearthly screams.
5. Pyschic shockwave erupts from the portal, flooding the PCs minds with horrific visions. Sanity save or stunned for 1 round.
6. A long, multi-jointed, skeletal arm reaches through the portal and grabs a random PC, Body save or be pulled through the portal next turn (unless stopped somehow).

Old Johns Body

Another death-wormed NPC for the Tyrant Begger gaunt outbreak, this time the ever-charming surgeon. He's a meat spider now. You could've prevented this.



The Flesh Architect

It resembles a spider, at the edge of the definition. A bulbous body of metal panels and pulsating flesh, tubing and wires bursting from seams and trailing across the floor. Thin legs erupting at strange angles, meat and medical equipment and stolen limbs coiling around and around, ending in razor-fine sharpness. A mans upper body emerges from a mass of intestine and teeth, bent backwards, arms shrivvled and hanging limply. New limbs emerge from a split-open ribcage, red-raw, dripping and ending in all manner of viscious surgical tools.

Combat: 60%
> Surgical Tools 3d10 + Bleed OR Impaling Legs


Speed: 65%
Instinct: 45%
Hits:  5 (30)

Special
> Impaling Legs: On hit, PC must make a Body save or be impaled, taking 4d10 damage and becoming immobilised until freed.
> The Ripper: On 2 consecutive hits with Surgical Tools, target PC will lose a limb at random, which the Flesh Architect then attaches to itself.

Goat

In the horrible moon colony featured in Dead Planet there's some inbred scrawny goats that the colonists herd so they don't have to (always) be cannibals. This is what happens when the Gaunt get to them.


The Twisted Herd
A roiling mass of flesh and hair and bone, melted together by the Gaunts necrotic energies. Curling horns and gnashing mouths burst from the thing at random as it drags itself foward on too-long legs, the hooves splitting and writhing like worms. The heads are fused into one, the pulsating brain visibly wriggling with death worms, its many eyes rolling madly.

Combat: 55%
> Trample 3d10 and Horns 3d10 OR Bite 2d10 OR Abyssal Bleat

Speed: 30%
Instinct: 35%
Hits: 10 (20)

Special
> Abyssal Bleat: Sanity save or paralysed for a turn as your character spasms on the floor
> Hunger: Consume a corpse to regenerate 1 Hit OR swallow a character that was hit by the Bite attack. Character takes 2d10 damage/turn, can deal 1 hit of damage to escape the stomach.

Mods for Mothership

These are mostly adaptations of Shadowrun and Eclipse Phase stuff, just cyberware at the moment cos I can't figure out how bioware should work.


Maskerade (cyberware)  
Cost: 10kcr 
Slots: 1 
Description: Full-face replacement, allows user to change their facial features with a mental trigger. Takes 1 hour for small adjustments, 5 hours for a completly new face. 
Requires: None  


Lotus Module (slickware)   
Cost: 80kcr  
Slots: 2  
Description: Allows a user to enter Slickworlds without the use of a Slickbay. Sanity losses for extended Slickworld use are doubled when using a Lotus Module. Addictive. 
Requires: Slicksocket, Remote Uplink


Puppet Strings (cyberware)  
Cost: 5mcr
Slots: 3 
Description:A highly invasive procedure that allows anyone with the control rig to bypass the consciousness and remote-control a body this is installed in. Rarely installed consensually. Victim takes 1 stress every round the Puppet Strings are active.   
Requires: Remote Uplink 


Internal Oxygen Reserve (cyberware)
Cost: 5kr
Slots: 1
Description: Allows the user to switch from regular breathing to an implanted oxygen tank containing 4 hours of air supply. Takes 24 hours to refill.


Sub-Dermal Weave (cyberware)
Cost: 350kcr
Slots: 2
Description: A layer of woven impact-resistant threads inserted between the dermis and the muscalature. Provides a permanent +10% Armour bonus. On taking a critical hit, the weave is compromised. (-) to speed checks and strenuous activity deals 1d10 damage until it is repaired.


Ghostbox (cyberware)
Cost:70kcr
Slots: 1
Description: A small data-storage module and processor that can store an uploaded AI, or a personality downloaded from a Blackbox or NEMO machine.
Requires: Terminal Jack, Slicksocket




Cybercortex (cyberware)
Cost: 50kcr
Slots: 2
Description: Partial replacement of organic brain matter with specialized synthetic architecture. Provides 2 free slickware slots. Vulnerable to hacking and EMP weaponry.
Requires: Slicksocket


Parralel Processor (slickware)
Cost: 550kcr 
Slots: 2 
Description: Allows users with Parralel Processor installed to wirelessly network minds together, providing (+) to Intelligence checks. Stress suffered by one will affect all other characters in the network. Vulnerable to hacking. 
Requires: Slicksocket




Empathy Lock (slickware)
Cost: 200kcr 
Slots: 2 
Description: On command, blocks sections of the brain responsible for empathy, personal ethics, and guilt. Allows user to commit extreme violence and actions they would usually find repulsive or disturbing, without taking stress. Memories are locked in a partitioned section of the Blackbox to prevent psychological trauma when the slickware is disengaged. 
Requires: Slicksocket, Blackbox


Frogpads (Cyberware)
Cost: 5000cr
Slots: 1 
Description: Pads implanted on hands, knees, elbows and feet that produce a strong adhesive. Allows user to crawl on walls and ceilings.


Spy-eyes (cyberware)
Cost: 40kcr
Slots: 1
Description: Concealed cybernetic cameras implanted around the skull. Provides 360-degrees of vision.


Cybereyes (cyberware)
Cost: 35kcr
Slots: 2
Description: Cybernetic eye replacement. Comes with thermographic vision, low-light mode, magnification, and flare compensation.


Fingersmith
Cost: 25kcr
Slots: 1
Description: Replaces surface of fingers with smart material, allowing morphing of fingerprints. Can also shift fingers into a suit of lockpicking tools.