B/X class reskin: Wombat

Wombat

Requirements: Minimum Con 9
Prime Requisite: STR
Hit Dice: 1d8
Maximum level: 12
Allowed armour: Any, including shields
Allowed weapons: Small or normal-sized (see below)
Languages: Alignment language, common, wombatese, dwarfish, gnome, goblin, kobold
Saves and level as per Dwarf

Wombats are stout, hairy marsupials who average a height of approximately 4 feet and weigh about 150 pounds.  Wombats live underground and value community, sensible planning and well-built earthworks.  They have a reputation for being pragmatic, practical and utterly without romance.  That last part isn't true of course, but other races find "My darling, my only one, I've invested in a blue chip stock that pays an annuity which will support us in our old age" an unconvincing declaration of love.

Abilities
Combat: Wombats may use any kind of suitably-shaped armour, but only small or medium-sized weapons.  A wombat can use digging tools such as picks, chisels and shovels as weapons without penalty.
Infravision: Wombats have the ability to see in the dark with infravision up to 60'.
Fateless: Due to a common ancestor making a deal with the gods, divination spells with wombats as the target automatically fail.
Padded posterior: Backstabs against wombats do normal damage, even on a critical.
Strewth, what a beauty: Immune to fear effects from magical creatures.  Does not apply to undead or spell effects.
Burrowing animal: Suitably-equipped wombats can tunnel through soft earth at 1/4 normal movement rate and through hard-packed earth at 1/10.
Sapping: Provided there is access to the earth beneath, a wombat has a 2-in-6 chance of undermining a fortified barrier in a useful timeframe.

Drawbacks
Vegetarian: Wombats require 2 rations for every one that another race would eat, due to picking out and discarding the meat.  A level-1 wombat in a wilderness area has a 1-in-6 chance per hour of foraging enough edible tubers to make 2 rations.  The chance increases to 2-in-6 at level 4 and 3-in-6 at level 7.

Reaching 9th level
When a wombat reaches level 9, he or she has the option of founding an underground burrow that will attract wombats from far and wide, who will elect them mayor.  Wombats usually live in townships, so businesses and community groups from other nearby settlements will expand into the wombat's burrow.

*     *     *

Digger by Ursula Vernon is my favourite fantasy graphic novel.  It's about old curses, forgotten gods and the value of making friends in strange places.  It knows the value of following tension with a little comedy or even just some time for the characters to sit on a stump and think.  It's a compelling story, which I'm not going into because I'd genuinely hate to spoil it for anyone who has a chance to read it.  It won a Hugo award and you can read it online for free as a webcomic, so there's nothing stopping you.

It's probably not giving too much away to say that the main character is a displaced wombat who's uncomfortable dealing with gods and regards magic with nothing but contempt.  Named Digger, because that's a perfectly respectable name for a wombat.  Ever since noticing the OSR movement, I've wanted to play a Digger-style wombat in a game.  When I read Patrick Farley's article in Fight On! about penguins as a player race, it didn't seem quite so far-fetched.

Wombats are tunnellers and builders, which puts them in the same conceptual space as dwarves.  The class template above is mostly reskinned Dwarf.  I tried assembling it from scratch using Erin Smale's article on building classes, but it quickly began to look so Dwarf-like that I gave in and used Dwarf as a base.  The wombat has more race abilities, but they apply in very specific situations, so I hope the vegetarian drawback justifies levelling like a Dwarf.

A wombat's life tends to be more prosaic than a dwarf's.  They don't write grand sagas, but they do write their elderly aunt Matilda, because she doesn't get out much these days and could use the distraction.  They like comfortable burrows rather than grand underground galleries, because if you dig too deep it's balrogs, isn't it?

Magic on Earth-at-the-End

I've been thinking a lot about Magic on Earth-at-the-End, specifically in the form of Lighthouse Cults.  The cults and their devotion to the mysterious orbital installation which is so large it can be seen from every part of the world's only continent and in daylight.

I hadn't intended Earth-at-the-End to be a B/X setting, but I've been using Necrotic Gnome's B/X Essentials books for inspiration and templates for monster stats.  The Essentials books are my gold standard for reference because they're laid out so well.  The cleric and magic user spell lists work well for my setting, because they lend themselves to reskinning as technological effects instead of supernatural ones.

My basic premise is that magic is ancient technology in a convenient, portable form.  (Cure Light Wounds?  It's a ray that reverses entropy in a limited area.  Originally intended to keep meat fresh for consumption.)  Handed down from parent to child or from master to apprentice.  It's not something you learn, it's something you inherit.  Magic-users are machine operators who understand their devices well enough to aim and trigger them, but not the underlying principles.  Spells can occasionally be created anew by salvaging a piece of technology and making it portable -- maybe the Last Academy has a few painstakingly-copied manuals that describe those devices well enough to identify them and a few reliable techniques for swapping out power sources and control plates.  Perhaps there's a crazy Godmind out in the desert with a cult of dedicated followers worshipping in a machine workshop.

Following on from that, anyone can use these devices but only magic-users have the training to use them correctly and in a crisis.  And devices aren't restricted by level, but the knowledge to use them properly might be.  I think it would be a useful rule to have the user roll 1d6 and if the result is equal or less than the difference in levels between device/spell and user, the attempt is a mishap on the following table.  Non-magic-users take an additional -2 penalty.

1. Reduced effect.
   The device functions as intended but the most important factor (potential, range, area of effect, number affected, save difficulty) is reduced by half.
2. Increased effect.
   The effect goes off as planned, but too much.  A medical device might treat the target's mouth as a wound to be healed over.  A single-target weapon might gain an area of effect.  A charmed person may become obsessively protective of the user.
3. Reversed effect.
   A healing device harms, a transport device roots the target to the spot, charm becomes grudge, etc.
4. Random target.
   Roll 1d8 and whoever is nearest in that direction from the intended target (and within range) becomes the device's new target.

Example: Barret the technician(1) attempts to help an ally who has been exposed to an ancient virus by using a Cure Disease device.  It's a 3rd-level device, so the difference between his level and the device's is 2.  He rolls 1d6 for mastery and unfortunately the result is 2, a mishap.  He rolls 1d4 and gets 2 again: Barret's device kills the virus in the ally's body, but also a great deal of his normal intestinal bacteria.  The ally's next meal will make him vomit.

I'm giving some thought to combining the cleric and magic-user spell lists.  Earth-at-the-end is a tired and cynical place, and the only faith you'll find is the lighthouse cults' hysterical need to believe something can save them when the world ends.  Organised religion is a thing of the deep past.

Six Hells

You know where I've never taken my players?  Hell.

Hell (at least for the purposes of this post) is a place of supernatural punishment.  The condemned aren't necessarily dead, they've just pissed off a god or other powerful supernatural being and been sent away to suffer forever.  They could potentially escape, or be rescued, or even revolt and take over the damn place.  Imagine Hell as a stronghold for a cross-planes game!

Here are six concepts for places of supernatural punishment that are awful, but not necessarily so awful that player characters won't have time to come up with a plan together.

1. The Bubble
   An air-filled bubble at the floor of a boundless ocean.  A dusty road winds around, over and past itself, forming an endless loop.  Condemned are forced to march without food or rest by harpies with whips.  Periodically, sea leviathans break through the encircling wall of force in search of food.  The harpies beat them back, but any condemned who are injured in the attacks are forced to walk or drag themselves without treatment or any kind of assistance until their wounds heal.  They can't die here.
2. The Chimney
   The condemned are imprisoned in cramped cages that swing on the end of thick chains together like bunches of grapes.  Things like monkeys swing from the bars and climb around the outside, occasionally swiping at the occupants with razor claws. Below is a landscape of fire and ash, sluggishly flowing lava rivers, and thick acrid smoke.  Vast living shapes move purposefully in the darkness like hills of flesh outlined against the firelight.  Sometimes clouds of cinders billow up from below to singe flesh.  The real punishment here is boredom.  For all the awful nature of the place, the condemned are stuck in their cages, watching it.
3. The Ice Caves
   A cavern with an icy floor.  Wolves chase the condemned across the ice sheets, which crack and spall under their feet.  Move too slow, and the wolves catch up.  Death is painful, but temporary.  Move too fast and the floor shatters, sending them tumbling down amidst the frozen boulders to sprawl across a lower floor.  They have only a moment before the howling starts again and they have to struggle to their feet, which sends new cracks racing across the ice.
4. The Labyrinth
   A confused and back-turning maze of rusted iron and ice, sentient but blind and continually hunting for the condemned with other senses.  When it finds them, it creates monsters or twists its walls and corridors into traps that crush and sever.  Hours later, the victims are reborn from metal compartments that dump them back in the maze.  The worst aspect of the labyrinth is the knowledge that there's an exit and if you find it, you can simply walk out and free.  But you probably never will.  No-one else has.
5. The Leviathan
   The condemned are on an island in the stomach of a colossal beast.  They're under constant attack from parasites native to the leviathan's digestive system.  If injured, they mutate into parasites themselves, compelled to join the next attacking wave.  A fatal injury mutates them back into condemned and they have to wade ashore before the leviathan's digestive juices or parasites injure them again.  In between attacks, the condemned build what fortifications they can out of debris the great beast swallows.  They know the next time it feeds there will be an avalanche of wreckage from its throat, smashing their defences and bringing more condemned.
6. The Past
   The condemned are forced to endlessly repeat their final battle.  They know the outcome, but their limbs carry out the scripted actions against their will.  The only freedom is the short period at the end of the battle when the field turns back time and resets for the next set-piece.  It may be only minutes or an hour before the magic takes hold of them and they're forced to march back to their positions for the next play-through.

Scar artists

If you're a rich weirdo with access to miraculous medical equipment and if you need a distraction from the fact you'll die soon when the sun fizzles out, you might choose to spend those last days in hope and generosity, healing the needy... or you might silence your better nature with drink and drugs and become a scar artist.

Some of the medical machinery available to people living on Earth-at-the-end dates back five hundred centuries, but it works as well today as it did then.  The ancients built to last.  These devices can perform surgery without pain or blemish, cure infection, remove hereditary conditions and repair crushed, cut, burned, poisoned, or frozen tissue in moments. But they can't create flesh from nothing.  The raw material has to come from somewhere, and that's almost universally another person.

Needless to say, scar artists are attractive if that's their thing.  Lean, tanned, muscular, perfectly coiffed, exquisite faces.  It's an eerie beauty, though.  Somehow slightly removed from human.  Shake hands with a scar artist, and you could be shaking hands with three different people.  Those long, strong bones could be from one donor, that even-toned skin from another, and the muscles and veins could be from someone else.  Someone so destitute they sold a piece of themselves or just vanished in the city's back alleys late one night.  Those scar artists are disturbing if you consider the implications of their existence, but they're not the worst.

There's a faction that says becoming the platonic ideal of the human form just makes you first among a very bland group.  They want to push past beauty into artistry.  Transparent skin, veins that bulge and glow, feathers or fur or scales instead of hair.  Muscles that chime as they flex, lungs that exhale psychotropic vapours, glands under the fingernails that stain whatever they touch with swirls of iridescent pigment.  Creating that kind of exotic flesh needs experimentation, and there's an implied level of human wastage.  But creepy as they are, they're not the worst either.

There's a school of thought at the extreme forefront of scar artistry that says keeping the natural human body plan is timid, pedestrian, dull.  Take risks.  Go further.  Dare.  Take what you need, use what you need.  Cut your conscience out if it bothers you.  Become art.  And keep your mistakes alive, because they have a kind of beauty too.

Those are the worst.

Lord Scapho of the mad city Incarnari has a hole all the way through his torso.  He can reach through and shake hands with himself.  At parties, he encourages young ladies to put their heads through it, to the amusement of all present.  To achieve that he needed a second spine, and to replace his two adult kidneys with six child-sized ones.

Lady Vinta has a crown of eyes.  They blink in unison and swivel to face whatever has her attention.  She claims each one of them is a trophy forfeited by a lover, and only laughs if someone points out that not all of them are human.

The Daly Twins, sons of the city's wealthiest merchant prince, play a complex ongoing game of their own devising to see who gets to wear all the arms this week.  Their older brother was the first to experiment: he had the position of his arms and legs swapped.  He was a sensation for several months, but it made debauchery awkward, so he dispensed with limbs altogether and had himself attached to a distended floating gas sac.

Lady Margot, wife of the city's ruler, earned their respect by suffering for her art.  She had her breasts carved into the shape of roses the old-fashioned way -- a knife, a vial of poppy juice and a surgeon who loved money more than his reputation.  Now she heads the Critics, a clique of scar artists who kill the creators of what they consider bad art.

Scar artist Narcissist
Narcissists are the lowest rung of the scar artist ladder.  It's not the art that interests them, it's the health, youth and beauty.  They don't warp their bodies so much as fine-tune them.  They're physically tough as well as gorgeous.  They form the baseline for scar artist stats.

AC 4 [15], HD 1+2 (6hp), Att 1 × weapon (1d6 or by weapon), THAC0 19, MV 120’ (40’), SV D12 W13 P14 B15 S16 (F1), ML 8, AL Chaotic, XP 15

Scar artist Canvas
Canvas scar artists transform their bodies, but not so much as to be unrecognisable.  Roll a D6.  On a 1, 2 or 3, give them one feature from the table.  On a 4 or 5, two features.  On a 6, three.

1. Silver eyes.  Reflective like a cat's, can be any shape or even a symbol. Gives low light vision. *
2. Transparent skin.  Watch blood flow through veins, muscles flex and slide.
3. Hollow fangs.  After successful grappling, the scar artist can automatically do 1d6 damage and regain half that number (rounded down) of HP.  They take blood, bile, spinal fluid or eyeball jelly. *
4. Musical muscles.  Sounds like a violin, or some other instrument where strings are strummed with a bow.
5. Pheromone glands - as per Charm Person.  HD x daily.  One target in an adjacent square, only in an enclosed space. *
6. Bioluminescent markings.
7. Echolocation - dark vision. *
8. Mobile tattoos.  Usually of an offensive and/or erotic nature.
9. Thick skin - as leather, +2 to saving throws vs heat/cold. *
10. Skull ridges.
11. Scales. Equal to 2 points of AC. *
12. Feathers.  Colourful.
13. Quills.  On a successful grapple, target must save vs poison. *
14. Eyestalks.  Disturbing rather than practical.
15. Serpent tongue.  Enhanced sense of smell. *
16. Reversible joints. The life of any party.
17. Talons.  Never unarmed.  Att x 2, 1d4 damage. *
18. Striped or spotted skin.
19. Prehensile tail.  Adds to climb ability. *
20. Extra fingers or toes.

* +4 XP.

Scar artist Atrocity
Atrocity artists have redesigned themselves (and the test subjects they keep with them like pets) to capture attention and offend the senses.  1 - 3 on a d6 - one feature.  4, 5 - two features.  6 - 3 features.

1. Faces. The artist has extra faces on their body (and perhaps limbs as well if they're unusually large).  They uniformly wear an expression of fear and revulsion and some have independently-moving eyes.
2. Crab claws.  Serrated and bony, like giant scissors.  (d8 damage) *
3. Extra limbs. More arms, more legs or a combination of both.  They're often mismatched in length and position of joints, and may sprout from surprising places on the body.
4. Cloud.  The artist carries a visible miasma with them, coloured or simply blurry.
5. Shrieking.  When the artist moves, it's accompanied by screeching from joints and muscles remade to generate noise as they function.  Discordant and loud.
6. Wings.  Non-functional wings made from elongated finger-joints with skin stretched taut between them.
7. Protruding bones.  Sharp bones emerging from the skin, like spear points twisting erratically around them as they walk.
8. Symbiote.  The artist has one or more smaller creatures living inside their body.  Like wasps in the eye sockets or mice in body-holes.  Will emerge on demand to cause disgust or work mischief. *
9. Sticky.  The artist's skin continually secretes a viscous fluid.  It may be caustic, flammable or just unpleasant to touch. *
10. External organs.  Air sacs on the back that inflate with every breath, a pumping heart attached to the breastbone, pulsating tubes emerging from and re-entering the body.
11. Giant.  This scar artist is much larger than the average human being.  This one's more of a billboard for their work than a canvas. (+3 HD, 125 XP)
12. Bloody.  This artist's skin continually seeps blood, staining everything they touch.  Doesn't cause any harm to the artist, just inconvenience to anyone else.
13. Hot.  This body runs at a temperature much higher than normal.  Not hot enough to injure, but anyone in close quarters is going to feel uncomfortable fast.
14. Mutilated.  This artist has reconfigured him/herself to cause maximum distress with their appearance.  They're fully fit, but appear to be terribly wounded.
15. Stinking.  Continual or at will.  The artist produces a smell so reeking anyone within two squares must save vs poison or spend a round vomiting. *
16. Foul.  The artist is covered with small orifices that continually dribble body waste.
17. Pustulant.  Random body parts slowly swell, then shrink back to normal.
18. Sting.  The artist has a venomous stinger they can attack with.  May be obvious, or hidden. (Att x 1, 1d6 + poison) *
19. Armour plate.  Thick, stiff skin like a rhino's hide. (2 [17] AC)*
20. Electric.  The artist has sparks arcing over their skin.  If touched, delivers a shock to both the artist and whoever touched them.