Divination:
Divination is a method of using abstract connections between things to reconstruct past events or predict the future. Divination is not perfect, and does not determine things. Any future you divine is a future where you did not receive the divination.
When using divination, you must hold an item related to what you are asking about. These items are called foci. More magical foci with stronger connections are more likely to succeed, using multiple foci can allow one to see farther into the past, or seek a more difficult truth.
Once a focus is used, it cannot be used again for divination by anyone until it ceases to be that item.
The standard forms of divination are:
Coin divination: Grab your focus, and ask a question, flip a coin to receive a yes or no.
If it fails, you get a random answer.
Completely safe, but no way of telling if it was successful by nature.
Pendulum divination:
Pendulum gives a proportional yes/no depending on the speed and direction of rotation, so gives a degree of correctness. It is also very easy to tell if it fails as it will simply not move.
Can establish a connection to the target you are scrying upon, alerting them and revealing your location. If used more than once on the same target, it has a [times used] in twelve chances of being able to carry a memetic agent over.
All methods below this point are extremely dangerous, as in addition to establishing a connection, they have enough “resolution” to carry memetic agents.
Word divination: Put your foci around a page, then write your question. The answer will be [foci]x[foci] words long.
Mirror divination: Shows an image on a mirror, requires at least 3 foci, or a very powerful one. The mirror is consumed in the process.
Dream divination:
-Must be asleep to use, allows you to enter the dreams of other creatures to observe what they are currently looking at. You may attempt to read their mind, but this may alert them.
-Entities possessing the dream you are invading, lucid dreamers, and oneironauts may trap you inside the dream if they detect your presence, leaving you in purgatory and your body comatose until they release you. You suffer any psychic damage or death either of you do while trapped inside their dream. Detection can generally be avoided so long as you simply observe dreams.
-When travelling to the dreams of others, you must either have a very strong connection to your target (usually through a focus), or be close enough to walk to them. You may walk and visit the real world while in your dream body, but the world appears indistinct and greyscale and the only information strong enough to show up within the dream realm is general emotions attached to a place.
-While walking in the dream realm, you must stay close to where a large amount of people are currently dreaming, or you will start to unravel. This effectively means you can only invade the dreams of people within the same city or village.
Divination success procedure: Roll [foci] d12s, pick the highest. On a 8+, you get a meaningful answer, otherwise, the divination fails, and the foci are still permanently no longer usable for divination.
Modifiers:
+[insight] to the result
+[wisdom] (if your system uses it)
+1 If you have been to the land of the dead, underworld or outer space:
+1 if you have met the subject
+2 if the subject is a person and trusts you
+2 if you are making physical contact
-1 if subject is currently physically distant
-2 if the question is imprecise
-3 if the question pertains to the divine and you yourself wield no amount of divinity
NOTE: IMPORTANT : Failing or succeeding on a divination has no impact on the safety whatsoever.
Memetic countermeasures:
Memetic agents: Are life created from pure information. The majority are similar to bacteria, meaning they are not intelligent, but can be very dangerous or useful depending on the species and context. The most powerful agents cannot be stored within simple words, concepts, or ideologies, but instead must infect entire books, or possess existing minds. This makes them far more rare, and provides some measure of control to their extreme danger.
Connection rider agents: These automatically lock onto focal connections made to information and send a hostile “message” back to the diviner. Since divination can frequently lock onto unintended targets, legally and socially, these messages escalate, sending a lethal attack only if the connection is not quickly severed after the warning (stock divination spells have divination severing off by default). Cults will take no such precaution.
1 Warning message: this sends a massive octarine+neutrino burst that passes through any walls and reveals your location to any octarine sensors in an area (police stations have them). If you are registered and using a designated location, they will simply note the surge down.
2 Counter-scan: Makes a 3d scan of the room where the diviner lies, as well as attempts connection to any nearby documents. This automated system then transcribes all the information into binary, and writes it down in a book. The document is then severed from space.
3 Neutralization: There are numerous varieties of lethal agents. Usually, multiple are sent simultaneously to ensure overcoming countermeasures. The most common is “the red nails”, a military one created by mammon and sold on the common market. It prevents one from casting spells or holding magic, causing extreme pain to any entities possessing the target. It can only be used if you have a proper divination connection to your target, and has no written or spoken form. Receiving it leads to taking 1d20 psychic damage and the effects last that many days.
Offensive/scouting use of memetic agents: When using a “high connection” form of divination (such as mirror divination), you may send over your own agents. This is more difficult than sending one back (divination receives much more information than it sends), and as such needs to be stabilized with magic. This is already included in the divination spells, and gives [sum]x[sum] seconds of enhanced connection, 2 thaums allows sending a scan, 4 a neutralization. The enhanced connection also turns a mirror divination into a video.
Insight and corruption:
Insight is gained by:
Miscasting: Rolling a triple on an MD will cause a point of insight.
Hostile agents: Certain entities attack by inflicting insight upon you. Mostly memetic creatures and demons
Seeing what ought not to be seen: Certain creatures give insight even by perceiving them, this applies to maggots, gods, angels and the things from deep deep beneath the earth. These give varying levels, but connecting directly to a true god gives you effectively infinite insight and is not survivable. Do not divine around things related to true gods.
The true names of gods, pages from corrupted tomes, and the DNA sequences of the pale things are used as defense mechanisms that wish to conceal their documents and presence. These are concealed inside boxes, or inside pages glued shut, such that someone using divination and omniception will encounter them, but not someone physically interacting with the book (this is part of why it's nice to be able to turn off omniception).
Insight:
-Insight is also referred to as corruption.
-You must add insight to increase the result of one of the MD/Thaums you use, this changes the roll of the dice itself, and so cannot bring it over the dice value, and makes it more likely to be expended.
-You add insight to divination rolls
-Once you reach 6+ insight, you become unstable, and will become an npc monster if brought to 0hp or hit with spiritual damage. If using this for LOTM then the amount is [level]+[level]+2.
-Turning into a fiend is unrecoverable. Even if your being is annihilated, and a clone of you is made with your memories before turning into a fiend, it will turn into a fiend instantly. The fiendhood is memetically fused with every mental part of your being. Your body and soul is corrupted too, but can be used as raw materials if every aspect of your being is burned away by a refinement engine for 50 years.
-Those without a covenant or sequence have a ⅚ chance of turning into a wraith instead of a fiend when maxing out insight.
Insight is reduced by:
Nine rivers: You may lose 3 insight by getting yourself a lobotomy (requires lethe oil and a mind or soul surgeon). The operation costs around 1000s, permanently reduces your amount of mind slots* by 1, and deletes a random spell.
Lotm: Each time you act in accordance with the current title of your most recently acquired sequence, you clear a point of insight. You also clear insight at a rate of 1/year.
Both: A god or angel may alleviate any insight caused by an existence weaker than themselves by making contact with the afflicted person.
Note: Lethe oil: Deals 6 psychic and 1 soul damage, deletes the contents of 1 random mind slot, neurosurgeons may target a specific slot or memory. Depending on the level of control, higher doses can be used to wipe the mind of the patient clean to be filled with indoctrination, or to render them a drooling, bawling imbecile with the mental capacity of a cnidarian. This is not reversible, demons could reconstruct the brain, but this would effectively be a new person, 360s.
Fiends:
Abigail Jill Harding
Fiends and wraiths are of a kind, with two key differences determining which ones are created when a sentient creature is exposed to corruption and damage.
First, wraiths can only be formed from souled creatures.
Second, fiends require the corruption to take on its own intelligence, and usually stem from massive surges of magic or resonance causing damage and corruption. This is an active process, contrasting wraiths, which usually emerge from those whose minds, bodies and souls have been obliterated, and forced to reconstruct themselves in corrupted locations.
A non-souled creature possessed by a demon will eventually become a fiend, it is only a matter of time. This process is greatly sped up once the demon leaves.
Purification to avoid this fate is possible, but the process causes permanent severance from magic, and must be done within a few minutes of ceased possession. If the process is somehow reversed, then the conversion into the fiend will be instant.
As such, vermin and star child demon hosts are often also called “fiends”, despite not having yet fallen to corruption. Before the arrival of humanity in this place.
Note: In LOTM even animals are souled, so this is of no concern. In addition, non sentient creatures who become beyonders will become some degree of sentient.
Running a fiend: Most have the objective is to either escape, or subdue the party and turn them into fiends as well.
Should an npc turn into a fiend, it is preferred that the dm loses control over it. Find someone who is not playing, or someone who can reliably, and follow instructions as stated above. Ignore this for the sake of practicality.
Fiend statblocks:
This list is not exhaustive. Fiends all have 6 actions, the homogenous, souled and fiend keywords, and [insight]+[base creature] HD. They have all spells from all schools they had at least one spell from, can cast up to three spells a round (provided they have the actions) and have 6+[previous caster MD] MD.
Keywords mentioned:
-Homogenous: Immune to critical damage.
-Amorphous: Can change their shape and fit in gaps large enough to fit their smallest solid organ or piece of equipment.
-Bleeding: Damage over time necrotic.
-Multiattack: Can attack with this weapon as many times as they want by spending actions.
-Acc x: Short for accuracy x, equivalent to +x to hit.
-Delayed 1: Effect takes place at the start of your next turn.
Chaos fiend: This is a generic fiend, which occurs if the corruption has no clear logical fiend phenotype due to excessive mixing of corruption types or specificity.
| AC: Unarmored |
Keywords: Amorphous, homogenous.
Mobility: Swim (air/water) 12m/40ft.
Resistances/weaknesses: Soul/psychic/radiant x2, physical x0.5.
-Blast: 30m/100ft, acc6, 1d8 piercing, multiattack.
-Devour(2 actions): acc6, 1d12 of any damage type or 3 insight, steals 1MD.
Loot/Equipment:
One corrupted essence:
Corrupted essence: Implanting it gives 2 irreducible insight, +1max MD and consumes a body slot. Implantation is a simple injection.
Blood fiend
Description: | Some say it is the natural endpoint of all blood mages. Others, a result of divine cancer spreading to the humour of blood, causing a catastrophic imbalance. Others yet, believe in a goddess of old blood, whose form is as an ocean.
The form of bloodfiends is that of a roiling pool of blood, which coats the walls of a room, and retreats when threatened, only their main body (size of a torso) is capable of being affected by non-damage negative effects.
The body will attempt to keep out of line of sight as it can smell, hear, attack and cast spells through its blood. The blood has no range, but most have an unbroken physical connection.
The blood takes damage as if it was part of the body, but is immune to physical damage.
| AC: Unarmored |
Keywords: Amorphous, homogenous.
Mobility: Swim (air/water) 12m/40ft.
Resistances/weaknesses: Soul/necroticx2.
-Lash: 6m/20ft, acc2, 6 bleeding or 6 necrotic with lifesteal, multiattack.
-Devour(2 actions): acc6, 1d12 of any damage type or 3 insight, steals 1MD.
-Detonate (delayed 1): Dies, and rolls the split die with advantage. 6d6 piercing/necrotic in a 12m/40ft radius centered on the body.
-Split: Upon death, turn into 1d12 blood wraiths, which will attempt to flee. If any of them escape, the blood fiend can reform if one of them drinks enough blood.
Loot/Equipment:
1000L of cursed blood (worth 10s/L to an alchemist, 1s if not kept fresh.)
One corrupted blood essence (unless a wraith escapes), it counts as a minor blood resonance key.
Corrupted blood essence: Implanting it gives 2 irreducible insight, +1max MD, consumes a body slot, and makes you immune to bleeding. Implantation is a simple injection.
Worship of the old blood can lead to. (secret d6 roll by dm) To invoke it, all one must do is say or write one of the lesser true names of the formless.
1-6: X blood magic spells. And 1 divine blood essence.
5-10: Nothing
11: The ability to turn one person within sight into a blood fiend. Invoke at any time, once.
12: Pick another result, the player is told this was the result of the roll, and they gain that ability. In 9 days, the player will turn into a blood fiend.
Shrike
Born from those who have undergone immense torment, it learns all infernal magic spells. Unlike other fiends it cares little for self preservation and can be domesticated to some extent. It is hyper intelligent and will act in accordance with its own sadism and sense of humour.
| AC: Chain | Str: 6+[base creature]
Keywords: Amorphous, homogenous, spider climb.
Mobility: Jump/Swim (water) 12m/40ft, fly 30m/100ft.
Resistances/weaknesses: Soul/psychic/radiant x2, physical x0.5.
-Talons: Transfers damage to the target on a hit. Automatically hit and crits on prone or encumbered targets.
-Iron feathers (2 actions): Deals [distance dropped before release]d6 piercing damage to all targets in a 40ft cone.
-Devour(2 actions): acc6, 2d12 of slashing or 3 insight, steals 1MD.
Loot/Equipment:
One corrupted essence:
Corrupted essence: Implanting it gives 2 irreducible insight, +1max MD and consumes a body slot. Implantation is a simple injection.
A few other fiend types from the nine rivers (I will make a follow up post once I have the time and inspiration for 6 more fiends)
-Blinding abyss:
-Half wyrm:
-Pure fiend:
-Entropic prophet:
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