Epideromancy Significant Charge Math

Book 5 - Mine for Unknown Armies updates the iconic Epideromancy adept school to 3e. However, it misrepresents how frequently a fleshworker can charge up.

It takes up to the better part of a month of rest to recover from generating a significant charge. Even with perfect first aid, the skinner would still need two weeks of taking it easy to be back to full.

This just isn't true. Sig charging inflicts 2d10 wounds with an extra +3 if the dice match, giving us an average of 11.3 wounds. Without any medical attention, that's still less than two weeks to heal, not "the better part of a month." You could get unlucky and roll 16+ wounds, but there's only a 16% chance of that happening. 

TOE-FAT COUNTRYSIDE: Session Seventeen (Guest Post)

With the new year we decided to pick up our campaign with the hope of finally getting to play Iconoclasts. As I am still working to prep a few things I asked one of my friends to run a couple scenarios for the group. This week they ran a modified version of In Darkness We Wait set in Afghanistan. Since I didn’t know anything about this scenario I actually got to play as an Agent this week. I’ll leave the rest of the explanation to the Handler.

Atoll of the Shark God: Session Seven

In the hold of the ship, Aedric dreamed of cursed items. The talking bone-sword, the clay tablet, the green amulet, the coral ring, and the shark-tooth pendant danced around him, laughing. Then he awoke to the noise of something snuffling through his pack. It was the nightmarish fish monster! Slightly smaller than before, but still just as horrible. Vraifigi was already awake, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. She leapt onto its scaly back and carved chunks out of it with her shiny dagger. Mateo cast Light so the rest of the party could actually see. Simon stumbled out of his hammock and threw his own dagger directly in the beast's eye. It sunk deep into the socket, only to rocket back at him as the old eye fell onto the floor and a new one popped out to replace it. Then Francesco chopped it in half with his sword.

Atoll of the Shark God: Session Two

Josian awoke to the deafening sound of a trumpet. When she ran up to the deck, assuming the worst, she found that it was just the sailors playing with the Shofar Ram. They were hazing each other, seeing who could last the longest in the cone of its sonic attack. The rest of the party was unable to get the sailors to hoist them back up to the ship for the night, so they sent Mr. Feathers to find Josian. 

Back on the ship, Aedric tried on the blue shark-tooth necklace. He was immediately overcome with hunger, but also a sense that feasting on fish would make him stronger. He also found himself unable to take it off. Aedric called upon the powers of the Grain Goddess to fill his belly so that he might discard the cursed item. The party briefly entertained the idea of cursing Portygul with the necklace, but realized a very hungry dragon was probably a bad idea.

Atoll of the Shark God: Session One

The Satyrdance still had a month's left of contracting for the crew, and Aedric had received word of a new treasure site from the church of the Grain Goddess. So they sailed south to the titular atoll. With the better weather, they were able to fully survey the islands with Josian's spyglass. They could see a small orange dragon lounging on the beach next to a longship and decided to make landfall further south. The southernmost island proved to be full of nothing but seals. The Satyrdance continued clockwise around the atoll until they spotted a large ram atop a hill.

Low Tide on the Spit: Session Three

The party returned to find the Iron Cup fort in lockdown mode. Too many people had gone missing and they weren't letting anyone in or out without express permission from Tovosia. So the group decided to spend the night on the Satyrdance, anchored at the shore. 

They set sail at first light for the southern tip of the southern-most island. With Josian by their side, they hoped to incapacitate the pirate crew by spamming Sleep. However, as they sailed down the eastern shores, they were once again distracted by an interesting sight. A massive rock formation with steam billowing out of the base where the stone met the sea. The steam seemed to be coming out of shore-level caves. Once the party was sure the caves wouldn't flood and drown them and that the steam wouldn't boil them alive, they entered one.

Low Tide on the Spit: Session Two

The party woke up the next morning with the intent of finding the pirate ship Man's Fate. As they began to circumnavigate the southernmost island, Josian spotted a large shape in the fog. It was so far away that not even the spyglass could resolve its features. Was it a ship, an island, or a massive sea monster? Nobody knew. The group held a vote and unanimously agreed to investigate. As they sailed closer, a tall craggy island stretched out of the fog, rocky and dotted with trees. A little above the shoreline, a dolmen was nestled into the cliff side.

Low Tide on the Spit: Session One

The survivors of the Lost Vineyard were sailing towards The Spit, an archipelago of sub-polar islands currently experiencing a record-breaking low tide. Vraifigi had christened their ship the Satyrdance. Josian stood at the prow, peering into the fog with her newly purchased spyglass. Simon slept in the hold, waiting for an important message to come to him in his dreams. Amalia watched her hawk, Mister Feathers, fly alongside the ship, while she entertained her hounds, Behemoth and Leviathan. Aedric chatted with his retainers, four humans from Caecely, home to the infamous caecillians. Mateo the Magic-User, Theresa the Thief, Carlotta the Cleric, and Francesco the Fighter explained that they were massive worm-like beasts sometimes farmed for their milk.

The Lost Vineyard: Epilogue

At a monastery, a monk uncapped a scroll case. It was a letter, from...brother Aedric? The monk chuckled to himself. They'd sent the annoyingly pious twerp on a wild goose chase. He wasn't cut out for the political machinations of ruling an agricultural mafia, but he'd found a way to make himself useful after all. Brother Domini squinted at the end of the letter.  

I think I have found my true calling in adventuring. I shall remain at the vineyard to receive any workers the Abbot wishes to send, but do not wait for me to return to the monastery. I will travel the world with my new friends, fighting evil and spreading the good word of the Goddess.

That was less than optimal, but no matter. Another foothold in the Hot Lands was welcome, as was the chance to make more of Wanax's wine. They'd keep it a secret at first, pretending Aedric and some other clerics had merely recovered well preserved vintages. Then once they were sure the local Liberator cultists posed no threat to their operation, they'd start selling the wine for real. Ah, Claudio, he thought to himself, you've outdone yourself now. That really is a clever idea. This is sure to cheer up the Abbot.

The Lost Vineyard: Session Four

 

 

Aedric, Josian, and Vraifigi awoke to find a note from Gwimbly telling them he had left to go join a halfling guerilla group. As they discussed their plans for the day, they heard the sound of galloping hooves. Amalia Benedek rode into their camp and tumbled off her horse, who immediately collapsed. She started cursing and kicking it. Josian made a movement to save the horse with the healing power of Mercy, but Aedric pulled her aside. The horse required more divine intervention than the two of them combined could muster and it would be best to stay out of the way of the new heavily armed and armored arrival. Amalia explained that she'd been fighting in the crusades in the Sanctuaries until she and her horse were blown off course by a djinn whirlwind. Completely unaware of her sister's demise, she joined the party to sate her bloodlust. After all, there was a dragon wyvern to kill!

Revamping the Rituals in Presence

My favorite Delta Green rules for psychic powers are probably the ones that mellonbread wrote for ESPER, an Australian anti-mythos agency born from an easily missed paragraph in Delta Green: Countdown's PISCES chapter.

The Lost Vineyard: Session Three

Josian stumbled back into the Megaron's cellar to find Aedric had woken up. He wasn't surprised to see a new face, other people had to have heard the rumors of this place, and surely some of them had to be insane enough to go investigate. Both of them were surprised when Vraifigi popped out from behind one of the Megaron's cyclopean stone walls. 

The Lost Vineyard: Session Two

 

Ancient Stone Tower by William Henry Holmes

Márta Benedek awoke to find her companions fast asleep. Blaming the laziness of alcohol-drinkers, she squinted into the rising sun to see two figures walking towards the Megaron.

• Josian, a woman with short hair and a red scarf, marking her as a Lawful worshipper of Mercy in its original aspect, here to restart the winery
• Charl, a bearded man with colorful poofy clothes over chainmail, sporting a zweihänder and massive codpiece, here for the same reason

The Lost Vineyard: Session One

My friend mellonbread has been toying around with Skerples' Monster Overhaul. He recently used it to write up a little adventure, which I thought was really cool. So my regular Delta Green group (plus some other folks) is taking a break to play some OSR.

TOE-FAT COUNTRYSIDE: Session Fourteen

The "fearsome foursome" were summoned to Denver to investigate a dead construction worker who 'woke up' in his body-bag, chanted something in a strange language, and then went back to being dead. Aside from maybe their ordeal in Baghdad, the Agents hadn't encountered something this overtly supernatural from the outset. Still, no one seemed to be in immediate danger, so the group decided to stick to their regular cautious approach. Jim asked the case officer for a copy of the bodycam footage and headed to the library to try to translate whatever the corpse was saying. 

Unknown Armies: Mack "the Knife" Heathrow - Avatar of The Highwayman

No one knows where exactly Mack came from. Some say he was a famous mob boss who got bored of being in charge, faked his own death, and then used magick to change every aspect of his appearance. Maybe he's a disgraced godwalker, who hid rather than try to reclaim his symbolic throne after getting kicked out of the statosphere. His strange accent and outdated slang might also point to potential time travel. The only thing anyone knows for sure is that he drove into town one day on a Harley, robbed a bank, and then invited everyone for a round of drinks at the bar two blocks down.

Whispers of the Dead (Nyarlathotep)

Nyarlathotep Triptych by Jens Heimdahl

The Ritual

Contacting the Crawling Chaos is deceptively simple. You just need to distinguish yourself from the rest of the ants somehow. It's the purest expression of the principle behind Delta Green's Ritual Activation rules. You have to be willing to break away from the dull reality of the herd, and those with the lowest SAN and highest Unnatural scores are the best at that.

Unknown Armies: The Highwayman (new archetype)

Attributes: The Highwayman lives on the margins of society. If there’s something they want, they take it. Sometimes they correct social injustice by appropriating wealth from people who hoard it through dishonorable means. Other times they’re social parasites that prey on people who have nothing. Sometimes they’re social parasites who inexplicably acquire reputations as Robin Hood-style characters.

Like the Two Faced Man, the name Highwayman is a holdover and not restricted to one sex. Some female avatars call themselves “Outlaws” instead.

The path of a Highwayman typically ends before they reach a high Avatar score. They either get caught, get killed, or retire and taboo into normalcy.

TOE-FAT COUNTRYSIDE: Session Eight

When Jim and Taylor left the Abu-Ghraib prison complex, they had a message waiting for them: there's another Khawla sitting in a Baghdad police station. The two sped off to snatch her up before, in their case officer's words, it "ends up on the front page of Al-Jazeera."

ARCHINT: The Ring of the Defiler

It's pale yellow with a tinge of green and shaped like a cupped hand. Your finger goes through a hole in its center, ringed with little wedges etched into the 'palm.' The words "if you take the pain/no one will take you." are etched onto the back of the miniature hand's fingers in ancient Greek along with a series of nonsense letters. It's hard to make out, but the hand is wearing an even smaller version of the ring. If worn properly, it transmutes mental pain into physical.