The Lovely Dark

Destroying Angels The Underworld’s bureaucrat-assassins. Grandmother Possum takes especially promising paper-pushers and breathes a legacy into their eyes, which germinates in their orderly minds and blooms into a fruiting chaos through their mouths and ears and nostrils and empty eye sockets, encasing their whole head like a fungal rocket ship.  Then they hone themselves for 7 years, fighting the rattling cold in cages made of razors, wrestling jaguars made from dead pets to bone-deep blood-soaked exhaustion, until their minds break sharp and clear and perfect, and the legacy chokes on them, burning to a char-black bramble cage. They smell like sweat and charcoal. They sound like like a phone call from a submarine. They’re the ultimate enforcers of the Underworld’s order: To every life, a name. For each name, a life.  To every name, a soul.  For each soul, a name.  To every soul, a death. For each death, a soul.  ...

Twenty More Questions, Answered With Aplomb These are from Scrap Princess . I think they're more relevant. Der Totentaz Is there weaponized Squid?  Only in Nacre, where they're used as saboteurs. They're as smart as wolves and fired like missiles. Everybody hates Nacre, which is a beautiful opalescent city that hangs upside-down from the bottom of an enormous bubble-rafting snail. It is a single giant academy built around the obnoxiously overwrought moral philosophy of a committee of long-dead pedants, entirely dedicated to the Right and the True. They raid other, less ethical cities with their missile-squids and also with spears and such. Like I said. Can I start with one?  Sure. I really like the Adventure Points system, and I think a toned down version might be a good fit for the setting. I'll probably write up some tables of connections, investments, secrets, tools, and so on for players to draw from or get inspired by. How much are they?  Co...

Twenty Questions, Tentatively Answered As originally posed by Jeff Rients What is the deal with my cleric's religion?   The sunburnt preachers of the Enduring Empire want you to remember your history, and trust your ancestors, and call your mother more often. They wander the endless october landscape like bent scarecrows in their ill-fitting suits, leaving sweet bread and white candles at lonely graves and in the crooks of old trees where travelers carve the names of those they left behind. Below their feet, the imperial cultists of the Shattering Kingdom gather blood to feed the queen-in-exile, who will reign again. They are bright and smiling and awful, and have exquisite taste in finery.  Agostino Arrivabene Elsewhere, gods are local, and abstract. The world is a confusing and hungry place. You are always keying in hidden combinations of words and deeds and pictures that make things happen. There are visible rules and invisible ones. So you do your best. Gods are wher...

Welcome to the Lovely Dark The Lovely Dark is a world parallel to our own, at the intersection of Death and Dream. It sits in a vast chemical sea, opalescent as an oil slick. The sky is a haze of dingy rainbow smog that blocks out the sun and showers acid rain and neon lightning on the streets below. It is a madhouse of industrial progress, scientific hubris, and obsessive artistry, on the brink of a terrible scientific realization. It has spread across every viable inch of its surface, and still strains for more space. Even the underworld has long overflowed: the dead squeeze into overpacked train cars alongside the living. It has not seen war in a very long time, but the threat is slowly rising over the horizon. The Lovely Dark is about how people deal with death. By which I guess I mean it's about how people deal with change. It's about shedding the skin of the old world and also about bundling it up like a stuffy and cuddling with it because you're afraid. It's...

The Anti Wizard My first try at making a wizard school with Goblin Punch's fantastic system. You're not anti-wizard. You're an Anti Wizard. A wizard of Against, capital A. Against the past and the future, Against good and evil, life and death. Against energy and matter and space and time. A Rebours. Crawler , by Kim Jakobsson Perks You are of tremendously refined taste. Your dreams always touch the Ultrareality . Drawbacks Without daily exposure to novel sensations or ideas, you cannot regain magic dice. Your dreams always touch the Ultrareality . Cantrips By closing your eyes, you can nullify as many of your senses as you wish. You can fix minor clothing damage, smudged makeup, burnt hair, etc, by fussing with it. You can learn whether you’re being observed by posing the question aloud. Spells Petaled Mask   Gemstone Edge Glint in the Dark  Palace of Thorns Flower War Devour Sensation Sleep of Reason A World of My Own No More Dominion...