Monday, April 15, 2019

Astral Projection; d6 astral servants; d10 things nestled in the void

This is the method employed by the sufficiently sensitive. You can’t choose this as a character option. It’s the sort of thing that is lent to you by another sensitive, or endowed once you become a true prophet. Maybe you roll under your destiny while meditating in the Holy of Holies to achieve enlightenment and open the gate.
When in a meditative trance, roll a d10 and add your wisdom modifier. If you exceed 10, you slip into your astral form. Get a bonus equal to the number of successful slips you’ve achieved so far, and after 3 this becomes an automatic success.
What time of day is it? If it’s around noon or midnight, you watch the planet tear quickly along, gradually falling away from you. If it’s around dawn, you are enveloped in darkness as the planet moves through you. If it’s around dusk, you watch the planet move directly away from you. Luckily, your new form is amazingly fast. You can orbit the sun in an hour— 8,766 times faster than the movement of Earth.
You are a spectral thing, translucent, and like a colorful outline of yourself. Your most salient features are slightly exaggerated, as the form is like a metaphor of your waking self. Synesthesia is a common side effect.
If you go to the moon, you find many other astral dreamers, for it is their agreed meeting place. Most do not speak your language, but about a quarter have learned Antediluvian as a trade-tongue for philosophy and wisdom. The dreamer’s society is like a cross between a nootropics discord and r/politics. Loose, yet elitist, argumentation norms are enforced by practitioners who have learned recipes to dream in their waking life.
If you go to the afterlife (on the exact opposite side of the sun from Earth,) you are likely to be intercepted by a servant of one of the 89 gods. This ranges from something boring like an angel or a demon to these weird servants:

D6 weird astral servants:

  1. A school of nebula-rats, devoted to Fur-Brazen Rill
  2. A bar-juchne bird, destroyer for Rule
  3. Zo-Suzo company, an army of liquid men paid by Earl Vozidar
  4. An intelligent parrot who plays harbinger to Pyzuvanog
  5. A thin ash golem comprised of used-up magic scrolls, adjudicator of Fisochol
  6. The Concept of West, koan of Guva

The technicolor norns of Kulywosyf

If you can get down to the afterlife below, you can float down to one of its many countries. The complex geopolitics of the afterlife are complex, and would require a very good map, but as an overview Gods rule from their capital’s throne and fight a constant war against their foes. The largest nation has no god, but the Devil is its president. Occulat and a few other gods are absent from the afterlife at any given time. No one in the afterlife is immortal— when you die, you go on to the Next Great Trial, something that all the gods seek to avoid for themselves and their followers until they have conquered the afterlife and prepared for the journey. The gods’ servants on this planet can kill an unprepared astral dreamer, and it is a dangerous place for them. Anyone who has ever died has a good chance of residing somewhere on the planet. Most places have no poverty, though there is privation at the battlelines. You could run an entire campaign in the afterlife; the exiled god Noryawes under a centuries-long siege from his family, the prophets of Rektrine and Occulat composing messages to the Earth, demons leading their legions against the faithful, city-states where tenuous cease-fires are offered by reflective lotus-deities.
But the void contains many strange things all its own. The scholars among the moon dreamers say that it should take only five years to reach the nearest star, yet while many have voyaged out to them none have returned. Perhaps it is impossible for someone to sleep for ten years, even with all the magic and gigre available to the most high. But even the space between the world and the afterlife is wide, and many things hide in that massive scale:

D10 things nestled in the void:

  1. Mehmora the Pious, contemplating eternity. Once a powerful wizardess, she knows many magical secrets but suspects that action is a lie
  2. A seemingly mundane bird, flying through the void
  3. A weird astral servant! See above table
  4. The skeleton of a vast and heaving lizard— 1d6. 1-2 dragon, 3-4 snake, 5-6 leviathan’s wife
  5. Nemesis, a tendril-beast that directs asteroids of iron towards Earth
  6. The phylactery of a terrible and evil sorcerer
  7. An observatory the size of a cottage
  8. A skeleton in an uncontrolled trajectory
  9. Two gods in secret negotiation
  10. A space-shark!

Probably not like this

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