Thanatology in the Last Lands - part one

 Undead

Sleep thought from the other day: vampire native form is black mist. They possess bodies which decay at normal rate. Must suck blood to keep body fresh. More blood = younger and stronger

Some games have vampires possess living human bodies.

I like corpses because they have a shelf life, dissolve into goo, and have an excuse to force vamp to drink blood

Also image of vamp w/o fangs biting & sucking blood like a remora is fun

They can't cross running water because it'll wash their mist body out thru orifices

Also they have to return to grave soil at morning to refresh. Store your rotting meat suit in a coffin of vermicompost. Back up bodies in giant urns of fermented sludge.

Raising dead requires installing a new soul. There's different ways of doing this but jewels are compact and effective. The more valuable the jewel the stronger the soul it can contain. Djinn and Efreeti are basically incorporeal so they can be captured too by a sufficiently potent sorcerer.

Easiest source of souls is captured children, but they're the least competent. Thus skeletons sing nursery rhymes, play hopscotch, pelt PCs with stones (harmless but annoying), and run away cackling when they're caught.

Adult souls are more capable but they can be confused by death, especially if they died unexpectedly or in great anguish. Unless regularly subdued they eventually go mad and turn feral.

Unwilling souls lose their memories, will, and the majority of their prowess, though they may retain bits. Thus undead servants can be raised to perform menial tasks based on their living profession.

Souls of scholars can organize libraries, sort texts, and act as scribes, though they're mindless and incapable of understanding any of it, being basically automata, so they can't combine ideas or interpret materials.

Souls of warriors make okay fighters, but fall short of living warriors. The benefit is that they're fearless, never tire, and feel no pain.

Undead peasants, porters, sailors, and smiths can pull plows, tie down cargo, adjust sails, and produce works, but their quality is shoddy at best. They don't tire or require supervision though, although they don't know to switch tasks on their own so you're liable to return to the forge and find a thousand horse shoes and a bored skeleton counting ants in the corner.

Willing participants are best and rarest, they maintain their memories and capabilities in death but their personality is erased. Never possess a corpse with it's original soul. Just trust me on this.

Fragments of personality may occasionally bubble to the surface. Nothing important. They may start imitating past activities in a harmlessly mindless way, organizing snail shells by color and size, staring at stars, counting hair follicles on a scalp, staring uncomprehendingly at a page in a book, or playing a game of mock chess with themselves using rocks. All done totally silently. Without orders they'll wait around patiently until something triggers them.

Skeletons have the soul crystal imbedded in their skull, the cavity of which is filled with gelatinous ichor. The top of the skull is replaced with riveted steel. Many necromancers keep desiccated mummies around as backstock. They're nice because they don't fall apart or rot.

Shamblers are walking corpses and have soul crystals embedded in their exposed hearts which swell and pump black ichor through their veins, animating them. They decompose in time if not taken care of, albeit slowly. If kept in a cool dry environment they can last centuries.

All undead go feral if their master dies, if they aren't given orders for too long, or if the incantations subduing them aren't refreshed often enough.

Souls trapped in undead bodies suffer great agony. They don't know what's happening to them and they seem to be living in a hellish prison and tormented by terrible visions mixing their past and current unlife. The suffering caused generates serious karmic defilements in the caster, twisting their karmic alignment towards chaos. The rebirths of powerful necromancers are invariably in the worst hells.

Thus they are motivated by self preservation to find the secrets of eternal life, to cheat reincarnation, or to transmit their souls to demons or other necromancers on the promise of safe keeping or installing into a fresh body. The worst kinds of lich are a sorcerer and apprentice pair that pass their souls back and forth for eternity, cloning or capturing new bodies with each iteration, and growing forever in knowledge. 

Wraiths, ghosts, shades, shadows, specters, voidlings, etc are confused dead souls which, due to unsatisfactory burial, incompleted obsessions, or other types of clinging failed to successfully transfer into the Mouth of Death. Without realizing the nature of their state dead souls often fixate on their old life and become trapped on this plane when the Mouth of Death gate closes.

Thus they wander, trying to live their old life, slowly going insane with frustration. Often they become violent or vengeful. These spirits can be manipulated by evil sorcerers, used as slaves or guardians, or sent as agents to inflict disease and misfortune.

All undead feed on life essence, often in the form of spiritual essence, flesh, organs or bodily fluids.

For information on the nature of the afterlife, attachment, and rebirth, read "the Tibetan Book of the Dead". I recommend the Jung commentary. I'll do another segment on how that plays into my campaign world.

Starving in the dungeon

Everything get simplified. Everything that's not in the book gets adjudicated. Lots of moving parts that requires extra tables and chart referencing is too much stuff to keep track of. Since your character's survival is predicated on their HP all of the bad shit that you suffer should affect their ability to stay alive and recover from combat.


Eating food is healing
At the end of the day you have to eat food and get some sleep to recover one HD hp. If you don't do both of those things you don't get to recover. It's that simple. If you don't sleep at all you roll with disadvantage on everything until you get sleep. You can go hungry as long as you want, but those hp won't come back til you eat so it's self-regulating. If a PC eats their favorite food they roll with advantage when healing.

In the wilderness you can roll bushcrafting checks to see if you find food, 4 hours per check. This works better if you're familiar with the locality/climate/denizens, or if you're a skilled hunter or tracker. Most of the time bushcrafting stuff is related to Wis. Being skilled gives you bonus points. The less fruitful the clime the harder the check.

Raw meat keeps for about a day or two. Adventurers have pretty hardened stomachs and can survive eating mostly funky stuff. If you cook it it'll keep for a few days. If you find some way to preserve it, like with salt or some kind of mild edible acid, it'll keep indefinitely. If it's definitely rancid the PC will smell it, but everything underground smells rancid.

If you make a meal by combining ingredients everybody eating it gets some +1s to healing based on complexity and deliciousness. Probably it won't be delicious though because you're eating goblins and giant slugs. I'm talking like if someone managed to find or bring something palatable into the dungeon, that normal people eat. Like blood sausage or pickled octopus.

What about in the dungeon?

Finding food underground has to be roleplayed because it's not just lying around like it is in the normal world. If another monster doesn't eat it, the dungeon itself will. You could try eating that slime growing from that drainage pipe. Catch a rat. Gnaw some old bones. Mostly you're gonna have to eat monsters. Hope you brought some cooking gear.

How long does it keep?
The surface levels of the dungeon probably has stuff that's kind of like the stuff in our world and obeys things similar to our rules. It keeps for 1-3 days usually.

The deeper you go the more the rules breakdown. Deep underground reality becomes toxic. Wounds turn septic quickly, diseases spread fast, and everything rots into goo and is consumed by something else within hours, like in a jungle made of hate. By the next day dead things are typically mummified or transformed into putrefied ichor. You have to eat it then and there.

Is this thing gonna make me sick?The answer is probably yes. When eating monsters make a Con or Poison save. If you fail you get sick. Either roll with disadvantage for a while or don't heal your HP or take some stat damage or be completely immobile while you hallucinate and scream and vomit for 2d20 hours. If somebody is a healer of some kind and has access to herbs and can explain what herbs their using and how, they can make a Int check to see if you get better. Then they mark off a use of their herbs.

Disease and mutations
are more or less the same thing to me. The difference is if it's curable or not. Diseases do stat damage and get worse, but probably you'll also get scales or feathers or start rotting or your tongue will turn into a hand and start trying to choke you. Probably worms will crawl out of your anus at night and be so itchy you can't sleep, or your genitals turn black and shriveled, or you'll get a crystallizing rash that spreads. It depends on the thing you eat, whatever that thing is like is what happens to you. You don't turn INTO that thing, but consuming its essence starts having an effect on your DNA. You might be able to cure it by eating more of whatever you ate, but that's probably just be an old wives tale. Maybe your god can hear your prayers all the way down here, and they care enough to listen.

Underground cookbooks
They exist but they're mostly written as jokes by charlatans and taking them seriously could get you killed or worse. Drow don't write cookbooks because drow don't eat food, they have highly trained slaves to brew mixtures of purified essence for aesthetic pleasure, like extractive of the colors a sentient being views as it dies while being tortured, the more subtle and wordless the better. Stuff underground mostly just kills and eats everything it can find without concern for taste. If there are any sources for what's good underground they're written by other adventurers in barely legible script as part of their logs, and can be found on their dead bodies.

Can we get fancy?
You can get as fancy as you want, but it's not going to help your situation. This isn't "Delicious in Dungeon". You're eating stuff that still want you dead even in death. This stuff isn't part of the natural world, there is no food chain or ecology down here. Monsters sprout from each other's nightmares, through rips in aetheric space, or spontaneously generate from mucous touching ashes or septic neck wounds. You're ingesting pure cardinal sin, ire, hate, greed, and venom. It tastes and smells like sewage, turns into a hard knot that blocks your intestines, and your body has no idea what to do with it. Its chemistry is not even of this world.

What about cannibalism?
Probably your safest bet, really. Stuff from your world isn't inherently toxic. You might go crazy eating people though. Veins of the Earth handles this nicely.

I didn't bring a cookpot... Can I hollow out this huge skull and brew soup in that?Now you're thinking like an adventurer! You just earned a +1 on your Con save to see if that beholder brain soup shreds your mind into pieces.

The moral of the story is bring food. Bring lots of food. But food is heavy. Next I'll talk about encumbrance.

All about fairies

Everybody wants fairies, the subsecret blackmarket catalyst for all kinds of horrible people getting their way.

Fairies are small & potent magic. Oftentimes captured and held in bottles to be used later. Fairies desire FREEDOM and being held in a jar for them is like being buried in a coffin for you. They'll do anything to get out, even grant minor wishes. Their magic is contingent on their freedom which is why captured fairies are powerless to escape and need someone bigger to free them.

Fairies are cute and sweet and gentle on the surface and totally fucked up and manipulative on the inside. Secret lore: it's impossible to be friends with a fairy. They're really just biding their time to fuck you over. The longer they wait the more they secretly hate you and want you dead. They'll wait around until justthe right moment then turn the dirt under your left toe to water, causing you to tumble off a precarious ledge.

So really, you shouldn't feel bad when you squeeze out fairy guts into your mouth like candy from a sausage casing to get your spell slots back for the day. They're kinda assholes.

Everybody uses fairies if they can get them, which is nearly impossible (plenty of wizards have tried to automate the process, to the greater or lesser suffering of all life).
Goblins use fairies to grow into ogres for 2d12 minutes. Dwarves expend fairies to get a boost of creativity. Orcs use fairies to appear as normal humans and sneak into castles. Wizards use fairies to get a nefarious edge on their rivals, who are likewise using fairies as expiremental fuel sources for trans-demonsional portholes.
Plucky halfling adventurers in green tunics use fairies to heal their wounds.

Where did fairies come from? Fairies are to elves as dogs are to humans. They've always been together. Elves brought fairies to this plane with them as they fled their collapsing dimension. Fairy abuse is just as taboo in elf culture as it is for dogs in ours, but the reality is (just like our's) most of them have really fucked up ways of using fairies.

You know, like how most people keep their dogs, who are freedom and exercise loving play machines, trapped in their houses or chained up, never getting as much attention as they really need, never being properly trained or allowed to follow their instincts in a healthy directed way. Elves kind of treat fairies like that. But they get super mad when they see YOU doing it.

But it doesn't matter because elves suck.

(More on elves next time).

So fairies give PCs access to minor wishes or healing. They're about as rare as +1 magic swords in most OTHER people's games which means they're kinda common. It's like the default OOOSHINY treasure. If somebody finda out you have a fairy they'll try to steal it from you. Nobody's immune. Everybody wants something, even if its pure and selfless, it's probably also asking for wreck and ruin. Widows will steal to get their husbands back, amputees to get their limbs back, children to get some stupid trinket they want, assholes to inflict suffering on people they dislike, priests to make parishioners pay attention in mass, old ladies to bake nice cakes, hobgoblins to stop every human heart in a 5 mile radius.

Each fairy has a morale score of 2d6. Roll under for friendship over for mayhem. Every time somebody is a dick to the fairy reduce their morale by one. Nothing raises a fairy's morale because fairies dont want anything except for you to immediately set it free and ask nothing in return.

When somebody makes a wish on a fairy make a morale check. If you roll over they might grant the wish with a condition, warp the meaning, or add some other kind of magical mayhem mishap or mutation. Like, you get your sight back, but also your head is now a fly's head lolbye.

If you roll under the fairy just does it and its all cool. Then it disappears in a puff of glitter.

As stated before eating fairyguts straight from their neckhole, yknow by wringing them into your mouth tongue sticking out like a rag of neon koolaid, heals you completely and restores all your spell slots. 1 in d12 chance the fairy got off a last wish that does something horrible to you.

Wild fairies are proud and tribal and can often be reasoned with. They are hesitant to use their powers to help you, but will often trade useful information or rumors for seemingly mundane or benign things, like a dram of saltwater, a small crystal, a silver spoon, a bit of smoked meat, a brass screw, or worse, something that isn't yours to trade, like a lock of the local cowmaiden's hair, or a buzzard's whisper.

Elven outposts tend to be surrounded by fairywoods, places where fairies are freed to playfully wreak havoc. If you wander into a fairywood reality will bend and warp, subtly at first, growing more extreme the more attention you bring to yourself until ice catches fire, the stars wink out, the directions vanish, all sound becomes color, and standing still is the same as moving. This is why it's impossible to reach an elven settlement without powerful magic or an invitation.

a couple monster ideas

changeling and succubi/incubi are fun. weird things that fuck with your perception and secretly work to murder you. i don't like how succubi are always played as sexy women who want to fuck men to death, seems uncomfortable and objectifying to me, so here's a different way to do it.

CHANGELING
psychic parasite, cultivated by elves. after stealing a fetus/infant/child sometimes they implant/replace it with a changeling to avoid detection. latches onto guardian host (often times mother, but any guardian its most in contact with). host becomes incapable of being seperated from baby, obsesses over it, eventually growing paranoid and caustically protective, afraid that any and everybody is out to hurt them/the parasite. the parasite feeds on these feelings and uses these twisted ideas to form a disguise of a harmless, though particularly emotionless, child. implying the child is anything but ire draws anger from the host, as does threatening or trying to remove parasite. if parasite is removed from host they will both eventually die. a detect alignment will show chaotic, a reveal trueform will show the parasite in reality (a gray, lanky, slimey, featureless, wrinkled bug eyed thing roughly the size and shape of a child but with remora sucker for a mouth). the truth will rupture the mind of the host. removing a changeling is very difficult.

changeling is the neonate form. it creates paranoia and protectiveness in the host to create a fugue state which forces the host to flee into a deep dark secluded place where the changeling can finally consume the host and gestate. after a period of time the parasite absorbs the mind of the host, using its soul and death energy as fuel to power a quantum 'jump' into the ethereal realm where it becomes a gaseous psychic daemon which wanders the cosmos absorbing sentient radiation from other beings like a filter feeder.

SUCCUBUS
related to changelings. seeks out lonely betrayed depressed individuals and attaches to them, slowly becoming domineering and posessive partners. feeds on absorbing their will energy until the host is completely dependant on them. works basically the same as a changeling, but in reverse, the host is completely dependant on the succubus and in advanced cases cannot be away from the parasite without suffering panic attacks neurosis and self harm. the succubus seeks to gaslight demean manipulate and control all those around them and they worm into the minds of their subjects, replacing all of their memories personality and eventually whole mind with the will of the succubus. succubi will often try to gather more than one host, particularly powerful succubis may be found at the center of some chaos cults.
succubis will stalk their host for weeks, watching them and observing their lives from afar, occassionally trying on different forms and meeting the host to calculate the optimal form for psychic bonding to the host. this form will often take the shape of what archetypal
ideas the host wishes to see in themselves. some succubis take on a weak helpless or desperate form at first to build a bond of trust with the subject, before shifting to control.

changelings and succubuses are not truly intelligent, as they only imitate life and personality based off of the expectations of their prospective host. through the psychic connection they osmosis ideas to use, but cannot create new ideas of their own. once disconnected from their host they revert back to their true form, mindless insectile screeching and vicious. they are, however, easy to kill in this form as they have no other real defenses.

succubis spread by implanting eggs into their host(s) and taking them to a secluded place where the hosts are injected with paralyzing venom. then the succubus leaves. eventually the eggs hatch and eat their way out of the still living hosts, slowly feeding and molting until they reach maturity and disperse.
succubis typically ignore the existance of other succubis. rarely two succubis may compete for the same host, at such time a vicious game of manipulation takes place which often results in the death of all involved.