Character Creation for His Majesty the King in Yellow

First off, the basics. Put Le Mat (the Fool) back in the Major Arcana deck; it is now worth four. Instead, L'Empereur (The Emperor) is going to play the Fool's role in the Minor Arcana deck. This is purely for thematic reasons - quoting from the KiY Tarot's guide booklet:

Tales of this deck had been told since the early 1700s. They consisted of a simple story. Somewhere was a fabulous deck of hand-crafted cards that numbered seventy-seven rather than seventy-eight. The missing card was the Emperor. The story went that in readings done with this deck before times of great crisis, the non-existent Emperor card would nevertheless appear, bringing an unmistakable warning of imminent disaster. (At times of truly dire consequence, all of the cards would come up Emperors.)

Now for Adventurer Patient creation.

Patient at Brentwood Asylum, Alfred Eisenstaedt

1. Names and dreams

Upon awaking in the asylum, you only remembers two things - your name and the recurring dream you awoke from.

• A recurring dream about the Burial of the Dead
• Begin with the mastered talent Neither Living nor Dead. When this talent is Wounded, your heart stops, body temperature drops, and breathing slows to a halt - and yet you live. You no longer need to breathe and, if you remain perfectly motionless, are indistinguishable from a corpse. Undead regard you as a neutral third party.
• A recurring dream about a Game of Chess
• Begin with the mastered talent Knock Upon the Door. When you come across a locked door, give it a knock. The GM pulls on the Meatgrinder table: if the draw results in a random encounter, that creature answers the door, letting you in before going back to acting as normal. Otherwise, you hear a knock in response from the other side but the door remains closed and locked (even if no one should be in the room).
• A recurring dream about the Fire Sermon
• Begin with the mastered talent Violet Hour. When in Darkness, your vision redshifts, allowing you to see infrared light. You can now see heat, represented as orange-yellow on a background of violet-black. You are not considered Blinded when interacting with entities with a sufficiently different temperature from their surroundings. Obviously, this still leaves your Wardmates in the dark, you can't make out surface details, and anything that matches the ambient heat is practically invisible. (It's all fun and games till you get stabbed outta nowhere by room temperature clockwork clowns).
• A recurring dream about Death by Water
• Begin with the mastered talent Forgot the Cry of Gulls. You are utterly forgettable. No matter how much you interact with someone, they will never recognize you the next time you run into them. They won't forget your previous interactions, but you are going to need to remind them (and possibly convince them) that that was you.
• A recurring dream about What the Thunder Said
• Begin with the mastered talent Aetherial Rumours. You can take the unique Camp Action, Aetherial Rumours: ask the GM a question about the current level. You receive a one word response, whispered to you by an ozone-tinged breeze.

Yes, the kith/kin replacements are based on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

3. Gauzak

You feel a pull from somewhere deep within the Midnight World; the key to knowing who you are is down their somewhere - your gauza. What's a gauza? It's a Tartessian word that refers to an anchor for your identity; find it and you find yourself. If you concentrate, you can picture it in your mind; even this alone can help restore memories, for both you and those close to you. Now that you know what you are looking for, you are ready to descend into the Midnight World in search of it.

Gauzak ('-ak' is the regular plural suffix in Tartessian) are my replacement for Quests, as the Patients only have one goal: recover their memories and get out of the Asylum. Player and GM should work together to determine the appearance of the gauza. It should be something mundane, but with something that makes it distinguishable, like a teddy bear with a jacket made from a table cloth or a wedding ring with the engraving "Song of Songs 7:10".

4. Motifs

Motifs have been folded into the Recurring Dreams.

6. Arete

Still need to work on the Arete triggers but I'm pretty proud of the talents.

• A recurring dream about the Burial of the Dead
• This dream's arête talent is A Handful of Dust. Spend a Resolve and grab onto an inorganic object. It will instantly crumble into dust. An object of significant size will kick up enough dust to Blind and Silence (from choking on the dust) everyone in a zone for a turn. Creatures that don't rely on sight can't be Blinded and those that don't breath can't be Silenced.
• A recurring dream about a Game of Chess
• This dream's arête talent is Hushing the Room Enclosed. Spend a Resolve to cause all the entrances and exits of a room to disappear for a watch. Anything in a doorway is crushed as the portal shrinks to nothing. Once you use this power, you can't undo it until the watch is over.
• A recurring dream about the Fire Sermon
• This dream's arête talent is To Carthage I Came Burning. Spend a Resolve and you spontaneously combust, bursting into flames. You are immune fire and heat (though none of your equipment, allies, or surroundings are). This lasts as long as you want, but anything else you set on fire will continue to burn as normal. Be careful.
• A recurring dream about Death by Water
• This dream's arête talent is Entering the Whirlpool. Spend a Resolve and dive into a mirror. You can swim around in the mirror-world as if it was filled with water, but you have to hold your breath the whole time; no one else can see or react to you but you can see and interact with them. When you wish to return, you must find another mirror and swim through it. If necessary, you can dive through any reflective surface; but the less clear the reflection, the more likely you are to come back... wrong.
• A recurring dream about What the Thunder Said
• This dream's arête talent is Then Spoke the Thunder. Spend a Resolve. A peal of rolling thunder rumbles out from your position, shattering all glass and other fragile materials in the current room. Everyone in the room is Deafened. This counts as a Loud Noise.

7. Languages

Unlike HMtW, your Patient begins speaking only one language: English (or whatever language your table speaks). But there are many different languages spoken among the wanderers in the Midnight World. Here are a few of the most common ones.

• Breton
• Esperanto
• Formosan
• French
• Hattic
• Old Chinese
• Old Occitan
• Öztürkçe
• Proto-Niger-Congo
• Slavonic
• Tartessian

10. Lore

So, HMtW's lore bidding is a great mechanic for when it's expected that characters will have knowledge that players won't. Unfortunately, for HMtKiY, the assumption is almost the opposite: players will probably have more knowledge then their characters who are, after all, struggling to remember anything. Therefore, I'm probably going to do away with them for this game.

That does cause a problem though for some of the talents, specifically Loremaster and Bookworm, which kinda rely on the mechanic. So to remedy this, here are two reworked versions of the talents:

• Bookworm
• You have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of everything you have read. Once you have used the Read a Book Camp Action, you have favor on tests where the books subject matter is relevant.
• Linguist
• You have knowledge of many languages and tongues. You are assumed to be passingly fluent in any spoken language that you might encounter and can translate texts you come across. Translating a short passage that you encounter while delving takes a watch or two. Translating a longer text (such as a book) requires an Asylum Action.

I think this is a decent fix. Loremaster's language abilities alone are already pretty powerful in a scenario where most characters are monolingual. Likewise, I feel like Bookworm only granting favor is probably good enough since there are fewer Motifs.

11. Talents

No changes other than the ones already mentioned. 

12. Memories

Instead of Experience Points, you have Memories. They function exactly the same; as your Patient regains their Memories, they recover the talents and skills they had before the Asylum.

If you are not currently pursuing anyone's gauza, you may concentrate to conjure it's image in your mind's eye. This by itself lets you and your Wardmates recover some Memories (3 to be precise). Once you have located your gauza physically, you all gain 3 more Memories. For metaphysical reasons unknown, only one gauza can be searched for at a time, other remaining unnoticeable until it is found.

Others in the Asylum might also be able to help you recover a Memory, but rarely will they do this for free, often requesting assistance with some business in the Midnight World first. Mr. Wilde keeps a log of these requests as contracts.

Finally, you can take the Head Trip Asylum Action; by spending Deliria, you open yourself up to the madness slightly, hoping to unlock your repressed Memories by doing so.

13. Animal Companions and Familiars

Yeah, Imma be real - I don't know what I wanna do for this one. I don't really like the idea of having animal companions but that means I have to come up with a replacement for the Beast Master talent and that's a lot harder then just modifying two others. So I'm gonna leave it intact for now but I'm probably gonna come back and amputate this rule like I did with Lore.

His Majesty in Yellow

Man, I suck at this whole "blogging" thing. Been over a year since my last post, but I'm gonna make an effort to write more from now on (hopefully this doesn't age poorly).

As it happens, two events have inspiringly coincided. Rise Up Comus has announced a Worm Jam to make third party content for his tarot card-based RPG, His Majesty the Worm (which is excellent and you should all pick up). At the same time, I've been prepping to run the Impossible Landscapes campaign with my Delta Green crew. And it was while glancing at the campaign's King in Yellow tarot deck that I was struck with a sudden bolt of inspiration and knew what I had to do.

Arc Dream's King in Yellow Tarot Deck, illustrated by Kurt Komoda

You wake in a psychiatric hospital with precious few memories. You barely remember who you are, much less where you are or why you're here. The doctors and staff aren't helpful either - sometimes they seem more crazy than the patients. You could've sworn hospitals like this don't even exist anymore, that asylums were relics of the past - but it's hard to argue that when you're in one.

At night, a few hours after lights out and lockdown, something strange happens: the doors open - and where once was the corridor leading to the rest of the hospital, there is now a hallway with décor you'd expect from a Jazz Age hotel. You feel a desperate pull to dive deeper - the key to unlocking your memories lies somewhere within these midnight halls.

A surreal horror take on HMtW, based Robert W. Chambers's The King in Yellow. Most of the core mechanics will remain the same but be re-flavored. Character creation will be tweaked slightly to account for setting and genre expectations. The meat of this project will be a new liminal-space-hotel megadungeon, the City creation retooled into Asylum creation, and a host of new monsters.

My main inspirations outside of Chambers and Bierce are Dennis Detwiller's Insylum RPG, Jeff Lemire's run on Moon Knight, Kubrick's The Shining, Goblin Archives' Liminal Horror RPG, and William Peter Blatty's The Ninth Configuration.

I'll be doing my best to post updates here as I work throughout the month. I'll post the minor mechanics changes and character creation tweaks hopefully within the week.

Is this project too ambitious for a one month jam? Probably.

Is that gonna stop me from trying? No.

Angels and the Roleplaying Thereof

 

Archangel Michael, Ivanka Demchuk

Been giving more thought to the eschatological Cold War setting I posted about last time and have been mulling over the nature of angels. The trouble with angels as characters is that the traditional Christian understanding makes their psyche almost impossible to comprehend.

Like human beings, angels possess free will, but unlike humans, they lack an intellect as we would understand it; rather than processing and mulling over thoughts, angels either know or do not know - unless given new information, they cannot change their minds. At the moment of their creation, the angels thus had to choose to fully serve God or rebel against Him. Fortunately, God gave them perfect foreknowledge of the consequences of their rebellion (eternal separation from the one thing that can make them happy); unfortunately, a third of them still chose to rebel anyway.

So, we have beings that can't change their minds but still have free will? While obviously metaphysically possible, trying to imagine what it'd be like to think that way is mind numbing - mainly because they don't even actually "think".

What this means is that I am going to have to play a bit fast and loose with the nature of angels if I want to even consider using them as player characters in an RPG. But at the same time, I don't want to turn this setting into one in which Heaven and Hell are painted with shades of gray. While individual angels can be a bit more malleable, Heaven and nearly all of its angels will remain capital-G Good and Hell and nearly all of its angels will remain capital-E Evil.

That's enough theory for now. Next time, I will go into detail on the different kinds of angels and the factions in the spiritual realms.

The Man from Y. H. W. H.

Following a discussion of the hymn For the Beauty of the Earth

So, naturally, I had to start writing something...

1963 AC (After Creation): In the middle of Hell, there’s a small little enclave of heaven; well, not Heaven-heaven, but compared to what’s around it? You betcha. Those crafty apes lucky enough to not screw themselves up too badly end up here: Limbo. Just next door is Pandaemonium. When they set it up, Morningstar thought everyone would realize how much better things are without G_d and be clamoring to come to their side. Instead, they had to build the wall just to keep folks from leaving.

The Big Man Upstairs assures us His plan is trucking along on schedule; and things always go according to His plan. Until then, our job is to keep an eye on things in Pandaemonium and stop Morningstar's agents from interfering in Limbo. Assume nothing; everyone is potentially under opposition control. Even your fellow archangels. Good luck agent.

Source unknown

On Those Things the Ignorant Call "Dwarves"

Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.

- H.P. Lovecraft, The Festival

The first thing a dwergaz sees upon hatching is rotten flesh. It slumps out of it's egg and begins to eat all it can see, growing fat on this decaying feast. But as it corpulence increases, it finds itself trapped by bone and skin; soon, like an elongated skull, the dwergaz is shaped to resemble it's former meal and wears what's left of it like a suit.

Man-Grub, Dark Souls 3

It is in this stage that most are familiar with the things, though few have seen them in person. Those that have try to forget what they've seen as best they can. Despite their appearance, the dwergazi are artisans of the highest skill. Even their shoddiest work would be considered a masterpiece by a human craftsman. They make no distinction between something practical and something decorative. Every tool, weapon, piece of armor, even the caves they call home, are covered with intricate fractal patterns, as if the very thought of an undecorated surface brought them discomfort.

As far as any can tell, the dwergazi live to dig; everything they do is ordered towards aim. Their tunnels and mines plunge deep into the earth but the endless minerals they extract are apparently ancillary to their goal. None know why they dig; perhaps they don't even know themselves.

But eventually the dwergazi die. Or at least, that's what an outsider would think. The dwergaz enters what looks like a tomb, accompanied by a strange rite performed by its kin. In this tomb, however, they construct a cocoon; the metamorphosis begins. 

The dwergaz enters into the second stage of its lifecycle: the walakuzjo.

Mi-Go, Kurt Komoda

Much less is known about the walakuzjoi compared to the dwergazi. But here is what we can say: on rare occasions, a humanoid housefly the size of an elephant descends on the aftermath of a battlefield. It picks through the corpses, choosing the best and carrying them back to its mountain hall. Upon some, it feeds; in others, it lays its eggs. And the cycle begins anew.

More research on the subject must be done, obviously. But first, those who consider themselves educated must divest themselves of the notion that the greatest works of mortal craftsmanship were made by small bearded men who live in caves; such a foolish notion has no place in the work of respectable scholars.