I was thinking of wearing a Giant Hat and ringing a bell.
Too much?
Thank you kindly, but don't forget the megaphone:)...
At $47,913 with 32 days remaining. Please spread the word wherever you can.Is the word out at all the other prominent RPG forums too? Like EnWorld, GitP, Reddit, etc?
It's on Enworld and Reddit, as well the Piazza, I've not enough posts to get it on GitP, which would be helpful. Primarily any 5e sites would also be really useful, I've no idea which ones are the most visited or topical so any posts out on those would be really helpful. A link might bring another sale and get us closer to funding. Plus, of course, any others you think would be helpful, and thanks muchly.
Huzzah!
Rich
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Time for an EXCLUSIVE Paizoboards update...
Each of the 13 districts of the Blight are separate entities, designed so that you can transfer them into a corner of your own campaign, take a sliver from and use it as an encounter, or use as a whole.
The districts follow the format of Sister Lyme below, with smells, sounds and words to link each to enable you to quickly bring your players into the area. I've based these on almost 40 years of GMing; to me a quick instant feel of a place is crucial to lend atmosphere - taking your players directly into the soul of the place.
Here, then, is Sister Lyme's opening page:
INTRODUCTION
Sister Lyme is always with you, watching, waiting. In the end, everything comes back to her embrace, and so will you.
Wherever—or whatever—you are in this city, she is the omnipresent spectre, her fingers groping and touching, slithering up streams and brooks and mill races. Her poison ink chymic waters stain the Blight, her feral toxic stench pervades the air, the clothes, the skin of everyone here. It is hard to describe the smell, of uber-humanity perhaps, a pressing stench of sweat and shit and piss swallowed in the boiling poisons of her alchemy.
She is inescapable; you can try to hide her scent but it’s still there. Some foreigners claim to be able to recognise someone from Castorhage simply by their odour—often years after they left the city. It can’t be washed off, and some it drives insane; the poor sad madmen scrubbing their skin to bone as they seek to remove it, convinced it is eating them alive. Her phlegm hangs from every gutter, a sick briny waste that slithers from walls and gables like an ochre black spittle.
Yet she is the soul of the city; its lifeblood, its veins and arteries of trade and commerce, her back seething with thousands of boats, dancing like lice upon her flesh. Within her body, however, vision simply ceases, daylight ends within a few feet of her skin and a new place exists; one they say that has a sick part of Between. The things that dance within her carcass are pale, and often huge, but always hungry. Food is so rare that the brethren who worship her would do anything to eat, and their senses are honed to their hungers. A frantic swimmer creates waves that can be heard for thousands of yards and bring hungry wan things dancing in delight, slavering and biting at the oil poison sickness before them to feed.
Those who worship Brine say she is a cancer, a man-made thing that is throttling all life and will one day drown the whole city in her bile. Those who worship the Madness of the Mirrorstorm await such an event eagerly, toil for it, strive for the moment when the city is swallowed by the Lyme and their day begins. The Brine folk cast flowers and holy waters and other pure things—occasionally darker sacrifices at the edges of the belief—but still Sister Lyme goes on, her sickness a continuation, death never seeming to come to her.
There are moments when she freezes and her dance halts, when ice-fayres gingerly step onto her surface to mock her. She does not like the laughter at her expense, and takes many who dance to close to the edges of the ice, her mouth drawing them down to feed her. Sometimes her edges dry in the long summers and she seems to be dying truly, her sluggish crawl to the sea almost halting, yet never quite doing what she perhaps yearns for.
And twice per day, the sea invades her, seeks to cleanse her with its brine blood, tries in vain to purify her. Sometimes great tidal bores drive deep into her soul, but the end is always the same; no matter how many buildings such tidal bores take with them they eventually halt and surrender to her toxic embrace once more.
Welcome to the Great Sister Lyme, do not swim.
PART ONE - PLACES…
What the Great Lyme looks like…
Almost solid, at times her dance is so sluggish that she seems to have finally stopped, exhausted, from her labours. Yet there is movement within her and without her; boats cling to her oily waves, birds swoop to kiss her skin, and occasionally things slip into view from below—always pale, always sick and always hungry. She rarely angers does Sister Lyme, she is like a glacier or the hour hands of a clock, she moves on, always.
And below the surface she is dark, a viscous-phlegm blackness that is impossible to see through, only feel, groping blindly like the other things that lurk below.
What the Great Lyme smells like…
Abominable, her scent clings in the air looking for a place to caress and infest; it is feral and alchymic and ordure rolled into one, a bleach-stinging misery that can physically hurt. It is as much taste as smell. The closer one goes, and the bank is plenty close enough for most, the more encompassing her caress becomes; tainted with offal and human waste and pollution. In some places the chymic is thicker, and takes the breath away, in others it is murdered by suffocating bleach.
And for those caught within her embrace, their stench is indescribable.
What the Great Lyme feels like…
Clinging, sometimes almost like a second skin. Those who live nearest the river, particularly those in Toiltown and in the wash, cannot shed this touch, even by bleach and scrubbing, it is a part of their being, a tattoo of their upbringing.
What the Great Lyme sounds like…
Sick. Sister Lyme’s movements are sluggish, and often her bowels can be heard churning and spilling onto the surface in a great sick retching. Sometimes, other stranger sounds can be heard, the babble of excited things; some people say they are talking, others that it is simply the river’s mad children tearing at each other far below the touch of the sun or moon.
Seven words to describe the Great Lyme River…
Poison phlegm
DEAD... Mouths Corpses
…motion SLITHERING
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Reads hungrily.
Nods and smiles forlornly as he does.
Reaches for dram.
I'll need this...
...Plenty o' this
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
"Albatross! Get ye Albatross!!!"
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Jawdroppingly beautiful prose, Richard.
But if that's your Castorhage entry for a Fodor's Travel Guide handbook ... you may not be employed for that much longer. :-)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Eek, just noticed an unpleasant word or two slipped in that description, sorry for any sensibilities disturbed, unintentional...
...and thank you kindly, strange you should mention Fodors Crai, I spent quite awhile travelling using lonely planet guides and it might have rubbed off - although I'm not sure how keen I'd be to go to Toiltown....
And that Old Fishwife sounds and looks familiar....
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Dang, Richard, Sister Lyme was my favorite update so far!
Beautiful and spooky all rolled into one.
Hello chums:)
As the kickstarter moves into its final month, I'll get as many updates as possible out, so hopefully we'll see a few more discerning lovely folks like you backing us. We're doing well, but still have a long way to go, particularly if we want to undress those stretch goals we have in mind....
Well, Mr Dory is certainly there in spirit James:)
Huzzah!
Rich
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Hello again everyone,
We're halfway through the kickstarter and almost two-thirds of the way to our goal of driving you all into madness. Thank you so much for your help, but sanity still prevails out there and we need your continued help.
So, as a reward (if that's the right word), I'll be posting snippets, scrapings, dustings and flensings from Sister Blight and her grotesque sister Levee exclusively here EVERY DAY until the end.
Let's start with another little snippet, this one is the start of Chapter Five...
CHAPTER FIVE—BETWEEN
“That first fateful day it had been raining, I recall, and I’d passed a miserable afternoon in the offices of Cooper, Cooper, Cooper and MacThane where I had a commission. The office was plain and windowless, but to give the illusion of size a huge mirror ran directly across opposite my desk. I spent many idle moments gazing into that mirror, wishing only to be away from that dreadful office and back to my study of optics.
Then it happened—the fateful moment—the moment my own, and many others lives changed; some say for good, but not as many as say for bad.
The figure in the mirror was so slender I barely noticed it move, yet move it did, behind my reflection. So startled was I that I leapt from my desk, spilling ink over my days' work in an effort to escape the thing behind me. But I was utterly alone in the office, there was no thing behind me. The thing I saw was still in the mirror.
And it stared at me…”
First Recorded Case of the Between
Hetherington Quarrus Mabe
Lyme District Offices, Cooper Building Toilsday 11th Gray 1637
WHAT IS THE BETWEEN LIKE?
It is as much feeling as place, this strange echo land, it is a place where emotions and surroundings are leeched into the creatures that live there so that both may become one. It is a land of incredible extremes, where nature is a caricature of itself; gorged and bloated, where places loop and coil back upon themselves to create an endless nightmare, and where eyes watch from living walls. This place has an inner logic, and travelers' speak in hushed terms of Fowler’s Endless Stair, Corrun’s Labyrinth and Pech Pit. These are places of legend in the Between, places few have seen and escape.
Some say it is the land of the fey, others that it is Heaven, or Hell.
It is none of those things, and yet all of them and more. It is alive, and line a cancer, like a blight, it feeds on imagination and fear and hunger and gives it flesh and form.
For you, the Between can be the setting for any surreal, mad or twisted adventure you wish, an adventure of madness, f isolation, of helplessness, an adventure of twisting endless corridors that slope away at impossible angles, a place where creatures that cannot walk do so, and are always hungry, a place of emotion given body. Hints on GM’ing Between are given later in this section.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
[cough)[hack)Brrrriny...(wheeze)(spit)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
You don't want to mess with Mr. In Between. i did. Now I have a flat affect and i got off easy.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
...there are worse fates.....
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
next time don't go see a dermatologist with the hyphenated name of Frankenstein-West
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Heh, heh...
NEW RACES
BRINY (HALF-SKUM)
They come from the deep and cold place below, watching the warmth of our wives with greedy eyes, eyes that want to steal. Skum lurk everywhere in this city, and the local strain constantly seek a human mate to take and impregnate.
If a skum is not born the union is cast out—along with the mother—by the skum, who are bound by an ancient ritual not to kill them (some have conjectured that aboleth deliberately forbid such killings to allow their progeny to establish a foothold on land).
The women often come back— poor silent creatures that they are, no matter what they were like before. They always bring back what they have been given, these poor taken wives, but they never tell what they saw, or what happened to them.
The given thing is called a briny, and hated although it is, it is well-known amongst the fishermen that to kill the child means to kill the wife too, for many have tried, many have killed the foul infant in the hope of freeing the wife only to find her hanged a few days later—always by her own hand.
‘Fishermen spit when they hear the name mentioned—Briny, Fish-Bred, born of a forced union between skum and the wives of men—they hate the children that flounder in the streets, children more at home in the cold dark waters than in the lands of men; children that, they say, have some purpose in being on land, children that remind them of the foul act that created them. The children hate the day, hate the sun yet are attracted to it like moths to a flame; their eyes seem almost to bleed as they stare into the glow of the summer sun, praying for someone to turn off the light.’
Physical Description: Some are more human than others, but each is deformed in some way, and slowly some (about 25% of the race) change as they age, eventually undergoing a terrible change and becoming a skum. However, for a PC this end can be a long way off, or perhaps it never occurs. They always inherit some aquatic feature; bulging eyes, shreds of wan skin between fingers or toes, or perhaps an unsettling ocean smell.
Society: Briny tend to stick with other briny—it’s safer that way, although the more human ones find it fairly easy to blend into society. Some briny even thrive on their appearance and make a living from it in the freakshows and side-stalls of the city.
Relations: Many locals are bigoted, and fishermen in particular despise such creatures. This can harden the attitude of a briny, who may be more aggressive, however, they make excellent friends since anyone who overlooks their ancestry is unusual and to be prized by the briny. Some people pity the briny and show them acts of great kindness, and many religions in the city happily accept converts to their cause. Briny can meet and procreate with other briny, and do so willingly and regularly in the city, most notably on the Gyre.
Alignment & Religion: Although they can have any alignment, briny tend to be more neutral, their upbringing makes them more self-reliant. Some briny are unaware of the eventual end fate has in store for them, others seek to stop the awful transformation with devotion and prayer.
Communities of briny (most notably the Gyre) develop their own religions based upon nature or sea, or adopt those other races to better blend into the societies they are a small part of. Amongst these, the worship of Brine is the most common.
Adventurers: Tough lives make rogues or fighters of many briny. Whilst some take to religion and rise to high ranks. Amongst their own societies religion tends to be more druidic than clerical.
Male Names: In an effort to blend in briny often take human names, although those with an inherent favouring of Aquatic may take a darker name more in keeping with their past.
Female Names: Like the males, the less common females also tend to take names from societies they find themselves in.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Och ye've made a NE Scotsman very happy Mr Pett...
I'll envelop myself in the pungent aromas of Arbroath Smokies and Finnan Haddie's, tempered with the stench of Surströmming, for sensory inspiration to my Briny PC... ;)
Cannae wait.
aye laddie, let's hay a malt on it...are ye an Inverness laddie by chance?
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Wee bit South o' Inverness mate - Granite City of Aberdeen is where I hail from. Now living in the sticks past Stonehaven :)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Grand places one and all, my fondest wish is to end up north of the border for good...one day, one day.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
all i know is if you eat the Sawney Brand Baked Beans,..........stay away from the little bits of bacon......
all i know is if you eat the Sawney Brand Baked Beans,..........stay away from the little bits of bacon......
...and who could ask for better advice than that?
What the heck, let's have an encounter area from Sister Lyme next....
LT7 Below
“Just dark, the sense of touch and the gagging embrace of her kiss. The choking was beyond the words I have to describe. I fell—I think—and thought that my time was upon me at last. It is an inherent risk of the fishermen that sometimes they get caught in their own nets or tossed by gales and end up in Sister Lyme’s embrace. I felt something before I saw it, a vast shape, disturbances beneath us. What it was I will never know, but it was huge and cold and wrong, yet its current drew me upwards and somehow, back into the light. As I broke the surface I gagged in the boiling current and caught a glimpse of something descending once more. Perhaps I even imagined it, I hope and pray to Mother Grace I did, but still I see it. No gods-born shape or name could I give it, this thing of movement and pale skin and indistinct form; insect, eel, deep sea fish. No, I have no words, it was alike and yet far away from those I struggle to compare it to.”
Fisherman Angrul Thame (N male human expert 4/fighter 1) on his intimate encounter with Sister Lyme, during the afternoon of 12th Ashen 1699.
To attempt to catalogue the depths of the river would be foolish, but a generalisation is feasible. The deep is not so cold and dark and dead as those who try to peer into its depths imagine. The Lyme teams with life and unlife, but there are also those to whom it is a friend. Skum and sahaugin are both sufficiently intelligent that they can make regular use of 'paths' of a sort that they use through the water; guided by scent and currents and temperatures and taints as they go. More intelligent creatures are also able to navigate their way around the deeps. The Family seem to have an ability to be lucky when involved in the waters of Sister Lyme, they get washed ashore, or fumble onto a passing boat or feel a rope and are pulled to safety. There seems to be no reason for this rich vein of good fortune, and even the Rat Queen herself muses over it often. Perhaps she has an affinity with Sister Lyme and some innate respect exists, it is certainly beyond mortal reasoning.
The Swim DC in general is DC 10, but almost always accompanied by some toxin. Visibility is zero, with accompanying effects.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Just when i thought i was OUT!!!
they PULL ME BACK IN!!!
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Never heard of em, particularly not Louge...
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I dove deep into that Sister Lyme encounter . . . I may need a new set of clothes.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Never heard of em, particularly not Louge...
count yourself lucky then; they're horrid horrid critchers, composed as if in a mad god's fever dream. Something coughed up in a sanitorium given animation by the forces of creation brazenly jaywalking against the laws of nature.
They reckon themselves penmen.| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I dove deep into that Sister Lyme encounter . . . I may need a new set of clothes.
might i interest you in a cravat?
I dove deep into that Sister Lyme encounter . . . I may need a new set of clothes.
They may be stained somewhat, but well done for coming back:)
Never heard of em, particularly not Louge...count yourself lucky then; they're horrid horrid critchers, composed as if in a mad god's fever dream. Something coughed up in a sanitorium given animation by the forces of creation brazenly jaywalking against the laws of nature.
They reckon themselves penmen.
Yeurgh, now I rememers' em
I dove deep into that Sister Lyme encounter . . . I may need a new set of clothes.might i interest you in a cravat?
Look, cravats are normal, everyone wears them where I come from, which admittedly might be 1762, or lower.
Yarp.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I can see you need a new place to stroll. Watch out for the vampires...
Actually, best watch out for the ghouls first.
Thrown across the Great Lyme River is a confusion of buildings, sagging into each other and facing down into the water; a charitable description for such sluggish poison. Somehow, a many-arched bridge keeps them upright and the waters at bay. The buildings still stare downwards, gripping their neighbours in anguish, awaiting the blessed relief of collapse. This bridge seems to sag beneath the weight of the buildings, which have birthed half a dozen small timber islands lashed by countless slender umbilical bridges of rope and iron and wood. A treadmill ferry crosses the grey space next to the bridge, its iron chains grating in the wind, its passengers staring down at the sluggish toxic river below.
Yet there is something else about this place, something inexplicable that yet demands an explanation. For all its physical deformities, this place has an ethereal air about it, an indistinct taint, an odour of the ocean, of rotting fishy meat and anguish, as though something is hiding in plain sight. Could it be that the bloated structure before you is a mask for somewhere else? Watching closer you see gulls enter the shells of buildings and vanish, hear the distant rumble of an ocean storm, and occasionally, just occasionally, catch glimpses of gouts of blood and discarded flesh in the depths of the river below the place.
INTRODUCTION
What does a bridge do?
Town Bridge is more than just a simple structure linking one side of a river to another, it is also a bridge to the Between...
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
It's a good place to go finding interstin critters for maw's trilobite gumbo, I'll tell ya that.
where else ya gonna find fresh ordovician sea food?
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Well I've been cap....
I mean, I'm in again. Sadly I can only afford the PDF this time around, As life seems against anything more.
Thank you Chaotic, huzzah!
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
New update on KS.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
393
backers
$50,051
pledged of $75,000 goal
24
days to go
Yes, I believe it is doable. Remember there is a very large surge of backers and pledges as we get closer to the end of the KS. Also, if everyone that knows about this KS continues to spread the word in other forums and elsewhere it can be done. So continue to talk about this KS by any means available.
Seconded. I'm very positive that this monster will fund. It quite frankly needs to fund and FGG have done feats like this before - so spread the word for this gloriously demented beast!
We need to reach $100K to REALLY get the 5E people on board. Maybe push the level that allows you to get a hardcover plus a PDF In a different system.
The 5E people then can have a printed copy for the table and then the 5E PDF for quick reference on the stats.
We need to reach $100K to REALLY get the 5E people on board. Maybe push the level that allows you to get a hardcover plus a PDF In a different system.
The 5E people then can have a printed copy for the table and then the 5E PDF for quick reference on the stats.
For this reason, I wish there was an option to get the book in hardcopy in PF (with no PF PDF) and the PDF in 5e at the $135 level.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
@ Technotrooper, here is what Bill said about a similar question back on November 29.
"Nathan. We can let you mix and match. Go ahead and pledge if you like.
Bill"
Now with the understanding that he might have had a change of heart since then but I doubt it. I sent Bill and Chris an email asking them to come answer your question.