christmas leaves and codine falling through the cracks in my ribs

christmas leaves and codine falling through the cracks in my ribs

Hide Me by Sasha Shaderski

Swords are uncommon in the Lovely Dark. Firearms, less so. Most use colored glass bullets and piezoelectric liquid propellant capsules. They fire with a dreadful ZOK and leave a trail of glittery pink smoke. But there are others. They work like so:

• Guns have multiple weapon actions. To attack with a gun, choose one action.
• LOCK X means load your gun with X rounds, up to the maximum it allows.
• BURN X means that the weapon action requires and consumes X rounds.
• A single inventory slot can hold 100 rounds.
• Guns must select their targets within a limited RANGE.
• Guns require direct line of sight. They cannot target through smoke or darkness.
• If you are darting in and out of an opponent's range, ducking into smoke, and hiding behind bookcases, you are COVERED. If you're just standing there cackling, you're OPEN.
• Your gun has an X-in-6 chance to JAM when fired, where X is the number of fights in which you've used your gun since you last cleaned it.
• Clearing a jam takes one round. Cleaning your gun takes one hour.

–––––

Harlequin's Hammer
Spring-Loaded, Tension-Locked, Motley-Painted. In the Titanomachy it's fashionable to hide one down your throat.
MAX // 2
RANGE // Right Behind You
    Coil Into Bone // LOCK 2. Conceal this weapon inside your body.
    Full-Penetration Kiss // BURN 1 to attack for 1d10 damage. Always crits on a surprise.

Queenly Icon
Lapis mosaic, pockmarked with gold. The beetles crawl into the mouth, and come streaking out the open eye like a comet, bathed in the sidereal radiance of her dreaming mind. There are tiny beetle-cults built around machines like this.
MAX // 1
RANGE // Across the Room
    Reliquary Chariot // LOCK 1. You may recover these rounds at the same rate as arrows.
    HARK! // BURN 1 to attack for 1d12 damage. You and your target save or go blind for a round.

Expulsion from the Garden
Gul's shining imitation of the artillery-squid of Nacre. Excepting the putrid rose-mulch reek, the harrowing scream, and the grieving tangle of briar and blood in place of a trained saboteur.
MAX // 1
RANGE // Down the Road
    Mandragora's Despair // LOCK 1. Save or go deaf for a round.
    O Strangling Rose // BURN 1 to fire a wretched clot that roots itself into your foe's flesh, seeking comfort. It deals 1d4 damage to them each turn, after which they can roll under Strength to rip it out.

 

Crimson Parade by Carmine3 (commissions)

Imperial Service Revolver
Behind your death mask you feel the weight of her. Her flesh embraces your naked bones. Rasping breath, pulse of intestines. She wants. You forgot what that felt like.
MAX // 6
RANGE // Across the Room
    To Endure Abandonment // LOCK 6. If you're OPEN, +2 to hit on your next weapon action.
    To Endure Scrutiny // BURN 1 to attack for 1d6 damage. If you're OPEN, +2 to damage.

Imperial Canker Surplus "Crow's Tongue"
Sugar-black and swallow-sweet. Can only be locked with a kiss. Your lips go numb first, then your tongue. Your mouth will brim with syrupy drool. You'll learn to enjoy it.
MAX // 3
RANGE // Right Behind You
    The Merest Taste // If you are COVERED, Silence yourself for 1 round. LOCK 3.
    Rare Flavors // If you are COVERED, Silence yourself for 1 round. BURN 1 to attack for 1d8 damage.
    Drink from Corpse-Cold Lips // If you are COVERED, BURN 3 to silence your target and yourself for 3 rounds, silently.

Imperial "Jackal" Model 621
A classic of metallurgical taxidermy, and well-loved. Look: under each layer of new and vibrant paint, one of blood and rancid hair.
MAX // 12
RANGE // Across the Room
    Weeping and Praying // LOCK 12. If you're COVERED, +1 to save this round.
    Screaming and Thrashing // BURN 3 to attack for 1d6 damage 3 times, hitting your target and 2 different random targets in your line of fire. Save or go deaf for a round.
    Gnawing and Gnashing // BURN 3 to create a cloud of rotten smoke and burning enamel, a little bigger than you. It lingers for 3 rounds. Anyone who passes through it saves or goes blind for a round.

Imperial "Vulture Bride's Fancy" Coach Gun
The Vulture Brides fancy blasting government coachmen to ivory ashes. Shards of the last owner's skull shine like a smile in the stock.
MAX // 2
RANGE // Across the Room
    Bullshit Overdesigned Imperial Sidewinder Lock // LOCK 2. This action can jam.
    Heavy Snakeshot // BURN 2 to attack for 2d6 damage. Always hits if you're Right Behind Them, leaves an ugly scar. Save or go deaf for a round.
    Courier's Friend // BURN 1 to extrude a spiral worm the size of an intestine with 1 HP. Anyone who moves into biting range takes 1d4 damage and saves or goes blind for a round.

Vulture's Dowry
No two of these black-feathered jezails are the same. They're written over with fragments of poetry, love stories, apocrypha. Her Brides remember Vulture, even when she cannot remember herself.
MAX // 1
RANGE // In the Distance
    Carrion Hymnal // LOCK 1. If you're COVERED, take +1 to hit on your next weapon action for each corpse you can see.
    Lay to Rest // BURN 1 to attack for 1d12 damage. Anyone killed this way is broken like a hammer-struck stone. Save or go deaf for a round.

the FOX-X Suit by trevor25527766

Mare’s Mercy
You chiseled these tarnished golden pistols from a pillar of rainbow salt that rises from the southern sea. You weren’t alone: pilgrims put rings on the exposed fingers of revolutionaries, or gazed into their mummified faces and wept.
MAX // 12
RANGE // Across the Room
    LOOK UPON MY FACE // LOCK 6. If you’re OPEN, instead LOCK 12.
    LAY DOWN YOUR CROWN // BURN 1 to attack for 1d6 damage. If you’re OPEN, repeat this action once. Against anyone with the boot on your neck, damage dice explode. Save or go deaf for a round.
    BEG ME FOR FORGIVENESS // If you’re OPEN, BURN 12 to attack for 1d6 damage 12 times. Each attack must hit a different target, unless the target has you in a state of total subjugation. Save or go deaf for a round.


Parasite Nymph
All things proceedeth from the root. It’s a hollow made, in me and you and the bullet and the bone. Hold me close in sleep. Please, let me root in you. I have so much to share.
MAX // 6
RANGE // Down the Road
    Bloody Commingling // LOCK 6. If you’re COVERED and this had fewer than 6 rounds, reclaim HP equal to the difference.
    Adore From Afar // BURN 1 to attack. A sliver of our bone like a slant of light. On a hit, the target bleeds out 1 HP per turn, which stacks deeper and deeper. A surgeon can fix them, or they can take 1d4 damage digging around in their wound with their fingers to do it.
    Love Letter // BURN 1 to slip a writhing seed of you into a hollow place inside your target. For 3 rounds, you share their senses of touch and smell, and you can Adore them From Afar even when they’re In The Distance.
    Like A Poppy Despoiled // With 6 HP exactly, BURN 6 to slide the whole of me down your throat, choking back tears, until I'm gone. I'll rupture inside you like a roadkill carcass and kill you. Someone who carries your seed will take squirming septic damage equal to the health you died with. If this kills them too, we'll come bursting from the hollow, bloody and born. Their flesh, your flesh, mine. I'll protrude from your throat like a twitching tongue, and all my harm will be as poison. <3


Subject 2: A Crow, Deconstructed
White walls drowned in black water. Black bones sunken in something like mucus-milk or liquid pearl. A whisper-locked vault that opens to the Ragged King’s name. What was this place?
MAX // 12
RANGE // In the Distance
    Hallowed Air // If this is in your hand, place a fresh eyeball in the empty core to LOCK 12.
    Hanging Tree // Cast this into the air overhead to hang there, or call it back. It has 12 HP. Anyone capable of repairing it will covet it terribly.
    Bear Witness // If this is in the air, BURN 1 to observe a target for one round as if you were a crow flying low above them.
    Black Relay // If this is in the air, BURN 3 to force an observed target to save against the paranoid certainty they are being stalked by an animal.


Subject 6: What We Drew Up From the Kaftar
You can feel it bulging, straining at the stitches. It pulses gently in time with your heart. The Black Signal flows from it, thick as tears, to fill you up.
MAX // 12
RANGE // In the Distance
    Static Necrosis // Fill one inventory slot with Rotten Flesh to LOCK 12.
    Singing the Rook's Song // BURN 6 to attract a random wild animal for each slot of Rotten Flesh.
    Cracking the Bear's Skull // BURN 1 to force a wild animal in range to make an attack against your target.
    Wearing the Wolf's Face // BURN 3 into a wild animal while part of you is inside it to spread the filthy pulse. It gains a copy of this weapon, and the instinct to use it.

(At midnight, roll under Rotten Flesh. If you succeed, your putrid heart dislocates your jaw as it crawls out of your throat on bone needle legs to make a nest in the earth and give birth. It takes your Rotten Flesh with it. You need to replace it by swallowing a new heart before midnight comes again, or you’ll die.)

Slitherhead Corporation RAT KING
A cozy tangle of wire-bound child homunculus-brains, nestled in a spongey intercranial implant no larger than a shoebox. Most Slitherhead plugsuits will drill their own skull aperture, but a home kit is available to widen yours. Warranty covers seizure, ego-death, hydrocephaly, and recurrent age regression. Ask about our debt slavery plan!
MAX // 0
RANGE // 0
    Enrichment Activities // LOCK 60, distributed between any number of other weapons on your person.
    Tactile Training // Clear a jam in another weapon on your person.
    Baby’s Big Day // Mark a target Down the Road or closer. Choose a BURN action with any weapon on your person for that target. Set a specific condition before your next turn in response to which the action will be taken. Wait and see.

by AngusBurgers

Miss Mopsy’s Manuductive Maven Muffs
Adorable monocular fluff balls with thick coats of iron needles. Their fangly maws close gently around your wrists, and their long black tongues coil slip gently under the skin of your arms. They are marvelous, if unmerciful, instructors.
MAX // 2
RANGE // Across the Room
    Meritorious Mentorship // Roll under Dexterity. Just for practice. On a hit, LOCK 2. On a miss, LOCK 1 and take 1d4 damage as the muffs give you an intramuscular tongue-lashing.
    Mounting Motivational Magnificence // BURN 1 to do a silly and beautiful dance. Roll under Dexterity: on a hit, target ally gets an additional save against an ongoing effect. On a miss, take 1d6 damage as the muffs drill into your wrists.
    Monumentally Majestic Morale Maximizing Masterpiece // BURN 2 to perform a gymnastic cheer routine! Roll under Dexterity: On a hit, target ally gets +1d6 to their next d20 roll, which doesn’t stack. On a miss, take 1d6 damage as the muffs digest your hands.
    Marvelously Magnanimous Monomaniacal Magically Modulated Masticular Muff Munching // The muffs are also experienced and generous lovers. In case you were wondering. Which you were.

“Wacky” Wendy Wormdog’s Wonderful Wiggler
Wacky Wendy was about four syllables into her sales pitch before she thrust this thing into your hands and leapt down a garbage chute, imperial gendarmerie in cruel shambling pursuit. This is of course a… a squirming mass of um… See it’s got a… no… hmm. It’s very pink. This we know.
MAX // 3d6, re-rolling every time it jams.
RANGE // Across the Room~ish
    Give it a Wiggle // LOCK 1d6, somehow?
    Re-Conceptualize // The Wonderful Wiggler gains a new weapon action, in this style: BURN (1-6) to (attack and on a hit inflict…/create a desk-wide viscous puddle, anyone who walks through it…/extrude a stinking web between two nearby walls, anyone who pushes through it…/hold it in the air, everyone right around you…/throw it shot-put style, everything right around it when it lands…/roll it, it leaves a tacky trail and anyone who steps in it…) saves or (takes 1d8 acid damage/goes deaf for a round/spends a round vomiting out worms/gets swarmed by flies for a half hour/takes 1d8 poison damage/has a panic attack) but you must save against the same effect. Roll 1d6 for each.

The Wonderful Wiggler:

1. Glows with an eerie phosphorescence
2. Purrs when stroked
3. Cleans rust off of metal with a whining keen
4. Cleans plaque off your teeth with a thick slurp
5. Pulses and squirms like the tick of a clock
6. Extrudes and re-absorbs half a kilo of motile ink
7. Steam-cleans a dress in 90 minutes with its digestive secretions.
8. Smells like milk and bile, and strangely enticing besides
9. Soothes you to clutch, like a weighted blanket
10. Can be run over your head for a less-than-lethal haircut
11. Is technically edible if desiccated and cooked at high heat
12. Screams in a voice you know. You know it. From where?