THREE PERNICIOUS CORPSEWORMS

1. The Beholder as a Being For-Itself

That the world is round is a solved problem — the deniers of such are of a much more recent vintage than you would expect and their assertions are completely dependent on measurements they have (badly) taken using modernistic tools. Everybody in fact realized it was round the minute they discovered drawing persistent parallel lines is impossible, so to argue otherwise requires some real chutzpa and/or apparatuses so arcane they unbend metal spoons.

Since the earth is round, it follows that the spirits of the earth would also be round. Not Rubinesque mother-goddess type spirits, river nymphs and oak tree girls. Rather the raw entropic energies that need ultimately consume the earth, pave it, mine it, dominate it until it is choking on its own insides pulled out and wrapped around the neck. Malignant eyebullies.

People think the Beholder is a sphere because of the eye is a sphere but this is neither sensible nor symmetrical. The eye is not a sphere at all (it being an oblate spheroid). The beholder, on the other hand at least according to the beholder and who would contradict him, is.

* Never you mind the earth is also an O.S .from all the spinning and such a bit squished on top and bottom. The earth thinks of itself as a perfect sphere and so we will refer to it and its inhabitant spirits by such a designation, otherwise their revenge would be terrible.

Ashkan Konarvar

Yours truly, in in a comments section of a False Machine post concerning Supermarkets of Killerbees or something, offered the following unwelcomed advice, ". . . any trademarked eye-tyrant can be salvaged by switching the somatic anchor: Sniffers (Glomerulers), Lickers (Popeillae), Eiskalte Hände (Monarcholemmocytes)." Although I immediately regretted this unnecessary interjection, I believe the width of the statement is true.

Our flat-earthers so mentioned before, it should be said, are right about the whole Terran ROUNDNESS thing being an invention of the omnivore, as the more proscribed diet, be it of the herd animal or wolfpack, sets the mechanics of the food itself as the organizing principal of the universe and food is flat. The herbivore's "globe" then is an axis, the wheel of the year . . .

Age of Empires II

. . . while the predator's is the radius away from the collective that a straggler might be coerced to wander and so expose its juicy neck

There are likewise at any time simultaneous 3 corpseforms — the Steeplejack (the Old Man Underground), the Confidence Creature (Spidercow/Motile Stomach caught in its own labyrinth), and the Beatnik (free spirit dressed in threadbare but formerly luxurious coats). The 3 are ever antagonistic to each other, although their goals are distinct enough to rarely be at cross-purposes. 

Imagine someone a little bit wobbly standing on their head, legs flicking about and adjusting mid-stand. If the stomach get seasick, it will cause the tower to topple, even if the legs are aerialist-ed out properly and the head is stable.

Tomislav Jagnjic

Sun and Moon are about 3,000 miles away are both 32 miles across. The Planets are 'tiny.' Sun and Moon do Move, earth does NOT move, whirl, spin or gyrate. Australians do NOT hang by their feet under the world...this is a FACT, not a theory! Also a Fact the Spinning, Whirling, Gyrating Ball World Planet, Globe Idea is Entirely 100% now and at all times in the Past, a RELIGIOUS DOCTRINE...a Blind Dogmatic Article of Faith in the Religion for the Blind unreasoning beast of prey. - Charles Johnson

2. The Beholder for Others

We can't have all be pernicious corpsemakers be beholders, can we? Particularly when a fresh batch of Junior Associates might at any moment claw back even the cousins to this one singular cocktail of antipathos and apple cider vinegar, vaulting it shut behind Mickey Mouse I.P. apparatuses. Still, as shorthand, using the term negotiates the push-pull between the subtext (it's a beholder!) and the explicit ("it's a burning automobile and in the flames you see . . . 10 colors of flame, and it says, 'take off your sandals' and . . . save vs Spell or be disintegrated," pretty dandy.

Capital "v" Vistors, in fact, be they from enlightened planets or sidereal conquest dimensions, have been known to categorize a newly discovered world by its corpseworms ("wormblings"), accordingly:

(subject psychopathies adapted from Karen Mitchell's Psychopaths, Narcissists, Machiavellians, Toxic Leaders, Coercive Controllers: Subsets of One Overarching ‘Dark’ Personality Type?)

Category I - Beholder (sight)

We can't use the name — so let's go instead with something really stupid: say, Eyetocrat. (Prismatic Wasteland makes another excellent suggestion — Panoptikhan — but the dumb is mimetically stronger than the clever). And then change the form so it's like just a bunch of dancing eyeballs (no stalks, no central orb, or maybe one implied by abscence). Keep the rest. Xenophobic octopus except all eyes instead of suction cup arms.

It looks at you. It hates you.

Psychopathies: Drive for Dominance, Grandiose Self-Worth, Explosive Response to Being Challenged, Vengeful, Lawless, Deny-Attack-Reverse

Laelanie Larach

Category J - Overhearer (hearing)

The Savi all'cochlea. A court of snails. Ponderously slow, they want to know EVERYTHING about you. That you will ultimately be judged guilty is a foregone conclusion, but they are jurists of rare prudence and will not rush things. Their slime causes paralysis of the body (leaving your mouth free for confessions).

Appears as a ball of snails crawling around each other, one head at a time will emerge to ask questions, sliding across your body, or to summon witnesses (out of an always well-apointed network of spies). Shells optional, but if present, gaudy with gold-leaf.

Psychopathies: Sexual Boundarylessness, Facade of Normalcy, Chameleon-Like, Manipulative, Deny-Attack-Reverse, No Empathy

You are Josef K.," said the priest, and raised his hand from the balustrade to make a gesture whose meaning was unclear. "Yes," said K., he considered how freely he had always given his name in the past, for some time now it had been a burden to him, now there were people who knew his name whom he had never seen before, it had been so nice first to introduce yourself and only then for people to know who you were. - Kafka

Vladimir Petran

Category K - Sniffer (smell)

Glomeruler. The melancholy don. He smells time like a dog does. Future and past arise and fade in either temporal direction (toward or away). It is exhausting, and the boredom encourages a refined sadism. This, incidentally, is how one Sniffer signals to another across the millennia. The smell of great acts of cruelty, or rather, of the fear so induced, make the text of a collective poem.

The Sniffer looks like a levitating oval with an unkempt mustache, little tendrils branching everywhere, a satellite crashed in a flower shop. The tendrils don't touch you (in fact the glomeruler finds all physical contact repulsive). Apart from acts barbarism, he is constantly inhaling various industrial products, Frank from Blue Velvet style.

"When they felt the spike... touching their throat, and knew I was going to kill them, I made them watch their own deaths. I made them see... their own terror as the spike went in." - Mark Lewis, Peeping Tom (alas, we're mixing up senses here, don't tell Sniffy).

Psychopathies: Sadistic, Lawless, Sexually Boundaryless, Unreasonable Expectations of its Minions, Dishonest, Unremorseful

Efrim Menuck

Category L - Licker (taste)

Popeillae. Every living creature has a verdigris. The whisper of your caul at birth never fully washed away and built upon it like a city on the precursor city, layer after layer over a succession of fires, sackings, architectural catastrophes, colonial overlords. You know the whole "pain is weakness leaving the body" deal, the callouses/hats make the man. This.

The licker anoints you newborn unfiltered, its tongue rough removing EVERYTHING — the oil, the wards, the protective sarcasm. So exposed to the void, the resulting virginal being starts to leak almost at once, brilliant points of light. Everyone is a starchild. Everyone is a ticking bomb!

The licker is both a religious fanatic and powderman. The explosions to come are a means to an end and the end itself. 

Psychopathies: Vengeful, Manipulative, Lack of Emotional Response, Unremorseful, Self-Interested, Brazen

Jamie Hewlett

Category M - Eiskalte Hände (touch)

Monarcholemmocyte. A hand skittering around like a giant spider. It is a drainer of warmth.

It latches on, sinks its psychic fangs, and soon the afflicted doesn't realize it's there. The damn thing could be crawling around on their head singing (or rather, hissing) Shostakovich and they will deny there's anything weird. Possible pitch here for a level-drain mechanic* where for every level drained the subject gains one level of Attercoppe. Attercorpse?

*Someone, Basic Red? Goblin Punch? Lizardman Diaries? suggested a system for Undead to keep 'em nasty but not lose the XP entirely. I can't figure it out who it was, darnit, but I'm stealing it in good faith.

When the afflicted is truly under the Hände's domination, they will suddenly cut off one of their hands and send these out to continue the greater work. There's some kind of astounding migration going on across many worlds (see papilo danaus plexippus) that is a true wonder for its length and solidarity, although the host if freed may be less inclined to see the wonder. (Old school 40k Genestealer cults is another good point of reference). Some months after, the other grabber goes the same way, off and out.

Shortly after Antiochus Cyzicenus gained the throne he lapsed into drunken habits, crass self-indulgence, and pursuits utterly inappropriate to a king. He delighted, for example, in mimes and exhibitionists, and generally in all showmen, and devoted himself eagerly to learning their crafts. He practiced also how to manipulate puppets and personally to keep in motion silver-plated and gilded animals five cubits high, and many other such contrivances. -  Diodorus Siculus

Psychopathies: Drive for Dominance, Predatory, Chameleon-Like, Dishonest, Brazen

Vitalfundamentals

(Category H - Bee Holder) (proprioception)

An exquisite head of spit and pulp and anything else the critters come across. The nesting wasps work it and work it, refine it, embiggen it. It is fantastically lifelike. People will fall in love with it. It will fall in love with itself.

Psychopathies: Grandiose Self-Worth, Uncompromising, Predatory, Sadistic, Facade of Normalcy, No Emotional Response

Kobayashi Eitaku

3. The Third Ontological Dimension of the Beholder

Survey of world 9e984b3-g48 for the purposes of mapping cluster satisfactoriness for precious yellow-metal agriculture. This is a I-L-K post-gygaxian-multimodal-mid-high-fantasy crypt planet. Extremely toxic.

It's important to note that any of the 3 Wormbringers are unlikely to be the principal mover and shakers per se in their subjacent zones. They act are more as a malign background radiation. Stan Lee trotted out all over the Marvel Cinematic Universe by his handlers. Zelig the human chameleon sexually harassing the extras. A squat chromium man deliberately turning a ship to the rocks by stepping over to one side at the keel.

If your not an extraterrestrial, you can refer to the worms as Upper, Middle, and Lower Corpseworms.

a. Steeplejack (aka Status Dissident) (aka the Creep Executive)

Mike Moorcock got the direction of the arrow wrong. All aspects of order and Law emerge from the top and move downward on a ladder. But at the bottom someone is waiting. Here is the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, two bites in it, dropped in horror at their nakedness and left to rot. And rot it did.

The upper corpseworm directs events through destabilization. He is a chimney-feller of societies, an upside-down Fred Dibnah. Philosophical. Plain spoken, but in an archaic way, low speech made fancy by the passage of time. He removes the bricks from the base and inserts his own men, exiles from the upper echelons who have descended with him face first. Start a fires on the ground level and eventually the chimney's supports will burn up and bring everything down around them.

Sure, you could use sledgehammers, "Mad men with no props, nothin', just chop the bottom out like a tree, and they don't know to an hour when it's gonna go, just keep bashin' at it." But this approach is  abominable to the steeplejack.

Henry IV to Prince Hal, "By what bypaths and indirect crook’d ways/ I met this crown." Hal, "Cool. Here I come for that Glass Graduate's throne in France."

Catherine MacBride

By way of example:

Beholder Adversary

Citadel: the Cork

The City is made up of all the cities you can cram in at once. Any little thing that you ever saw or happened to you or someone you know or might have half-remembered — in it goes — to be digested to a sludge and amalgamated like a mysterious McDonalds fallen out of the sky and into a hunter-gatherer's ravenous anabolism.

If you were from there, you might understand the context of these many disparate items (silver-gold foil wrappers, ketchup packets) strewn about, how the weird stuff connects, or at least did before the sinew between points was reappropriated into solvents, or even how in not connecting now they seem spooky.  But you aren't from there. Nobody is from there.

Rather, as the cost of transportation falls to zero and less than zero, the periphery which provides the city with raw materials is overwritten inside out. The city doubles back on itself. It's a spindle torus.

The beholder is the lemon shape at the center. He leverages the mechanics to unmake them.

Agents are in place. Remove a loose brick to hide stolen gold and a blinking eyeball chastens, fie! Shaken, you stumble into a bar, but in the dark liquor a hostile pupil gazes back. As the city cedes territory to what's outside it, everyone taking the elevator forgets there are stairwells.

Sure, in the absurdly spacious sewer, dark elves grapple for dominion against psionic skulls scorpatori (mind flayers to you lot), but their territorial squabbles are immaterial to the larger project. So too the courtly intrigues of the Duke's sickly but more intelligent young brother against the crown. So too the inquisition.

They want to remake the city in their own image. The adversary wants only to level it as an affront to his own, perfect design.

b. Confidence Creature (aka Gaster Gangster) (aka the Long Khan)

Against this pulsing all-consuming maw stands the stomach itself. It gets sick on being fed its own entrails, as even the blood slaked vampire stumbles around the slaughter scene chewing his fingernails, moaning "the horror, the horror."

Arguably each corpseworm in its own way is a transformer of matter. The transformation by the steeplejack is like an 80s movie, moving things UP and DOWN a hierarchy ("You know you really do look a lot better without all that black sh** on your eyes . . ."). The confidence creature, in contrast, shifts matter horizontally, the old cups and balls routine (thimblerig to make it sound more medieval), maneuvering the eye (or ear, or sniffer) away from the object it is attempting to track. The cinema is early 2000s where every movie has a twist ending. Your attention obeys your expectation, ala Northrup Frye: "An original painter knows, of course, that when the public demands likeness to an object, it generally wants the exact opposite, likeness to the pictorial conventions it is familiar with."

The Confidence Creature directs events through deconstruction. (dare I say . . "disruption?") In the Green World, the carnivalesque, nothing means what it means, or rather, it means that and many things more besides. Ever read a badly drawn comic book you can't tell the characters apart? Superman is all of a sudden everywhere! The Creature covers itself in glitter. Then it covers everything else in glitter. Where's Waldo now?

Reality is what you can get away with. Anything contains within it any other thing. All you gotta do is dial in to the correct zone of fidelity.

Komal is the essence of the All, as it were. He is maintained by substance. He eats. He eats the real. To be explicit, he eats the realists . . . inasmuch as we maintain that we alone are real we should, to be consistent, admit that we alone are proper food for Komal. Sometimes, as to-day, we find other food for him. - Jav of Lothar

Russell Moreland

To illustrate:

Popeillitian Crimelord

Citadel: the Spiderweb

We'll have to blindfold you, bind your wrists. Now spin you around (counterclockwise). Follow the steps — count them, but not in numerical sequence. Count like a toddler. Five-three-nine-four-six-one-eight-seven-two to the left, then hop forward two and then duck an imaginary bird. There you are.

The goblin market. The Fat.

One can purchase anything here if you know its name. It's the In-N-Out secret menu times a million. Take a cockney rhyming slang dictionary, use those. "I'll have some ducks and geese," will get you throwing stars that wax and wane with the moon. "A cut of rabbit" an envelope written by the future you in a cipher you'll invent ten years forward.

Goblins are the perfect henchmen for a Licker. They are slippery little guys, and don't build up a patina with the rapidity that other critters do, so they are easy to clean. Also, they are all connected, a hive mind. 

You know already not to eat any of the sweets and savories on offer at the market, nor to take anything for free (exchange, either of coins or more esoteric denominations - memories/curses/butterflies-in-the-stomach maintains better equilibrium and doesn't entrap you the same way). But it's hard not to get the goblins to keep on touching you, crawling all over you.

Their hands are moist. Their hands are all an extension of the licker's tongue.

He'll summon you eventually. You'll wander into a cafeteria, despite being careful to keep your hands in your pockets. Refusing the food will at that point be out of the question. You already ate the food, by following the prescribed rituals to arrive. You were OUTSIDE. Now you are INSIDE. It's like being a tadpole being swallowed by the shore and it finds out it was a frog all along.

He'll shrug at you apologetically, sipping lassi through a straw. "This is a Sicilian coin. The Sicilian people say, "A big man knows the value of small coin." My friendship is a small coin but it is all I have to offer you."*

(*David Mamet and Shel Silverstien, Things Change)

Arthur Rakham

c. Beatnik (aka Elephant Terrible) (aka Trigger Hippie)

What people miss about chaos is how light it is on its feet. Inquisitor Thrax idly tracing curlicues in a contraband desk and suddenly he's a tentacled terror, vital organs straining against his armor, it feels HEAVY. You can't look at it like that. That is cause and effect, not chaos. Don't think the mother xenomorph. Think of the chestburster puppet squirreling off on wheels, the horrified cast covered animal organs.

"Everyone was wearing raincoats — we should have been a little suspicious" - Sigourney Weaver

The Beatnik directs events through debarrance, wherein the unclean is fenced out. Secure the perimeter with a flaming sword turning in all directions. He moves through the environment without touching it at all, a cosmic dream child running through the dandelion field in whose seed pods are scattered everywhere where they'll grow up into horror-plants. Any romantic comedy with a manic-pixie girl will have her at some point relate HOW she got that way, most probably some deep wound that she doesn't want to deal with. "I don't have to think, I just have to do it, the results are always perfect." (For the sake of the strained taxonomy I'll call these 90s movies — emotional damage as the driver).

Sure enough, there is some sort of profound rupture at the heart of this corpseworm. The Beatnik believes he is Maiar sent across the sea or an extra-terrestrial crash-landed or a deactivated super-weapon. All these things may be true all at once. If you don't rope off the VIP area, the energy will inevitably dissipate; the water will seek its own level. A running tap doesn't overflow and make the floor collapse until you've plugged up the sink. Otherwise, you'll just have an astronomical utility bill.

The Beatnik is a creator of pocket dimensions, wielder of the Lego Movie's kragle gun. Pinner of insects.

While the (a) Steeplejack is horrified that anyone would deviate from his perfect form and undertakes to burn to cinder the world causing this harm, and the (b) Confidence Creature sees in other creatures vehicles for the transport of contraband, the (c) Beatnik believes that all other beings are illusory, ghosts, or some sort of memetic virus.

Furthermore, he is dead set on ripping the veil away. "Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered. I have fought may way here to the castle beyond the goblin city. My will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom as great. You have no power over me."

This will lead inevitably to exorcisms. Who is exorcising who?

I think about Jeff Bezos a lot. So, he's about 10 years older than I am. I'm 55. I need to pee all the time. So, Jeff Bezos REALLY needs to pee all the time. And he presides over an empire of hundreds of thousands of workers who are not allowed to pee. And if you felt that when a driver or a warehouse worker needed to pee it was like when you needed to pee, you would have to let them pee. - Corey Doctorow

Case in point:

Glomeruline Forfendite

Citadel: the Island

There is the Ocean. And there is the NOT Ocean. The salt laps at your door.

Nose Gandalf keeps the Shire as his own personal high-single-A baseball farm-system. None of the grim badness touches in his domain, but don't let him catch your scent, or you'll be carried off for purposes uncertain, no matter how many times you insist, "We don't want nay adventures here, thank you!"

Note the preponderance of burnt offerings, wickermen and calves both, leveraged to throw old Corpsecrow off the hunt. If he identifies you as TALENT you're lost.

Then maybe he disappears for a while. Everybody starts to relax, integrate into the larger world. This situation can't last - you're an island or you're a seamount, and a seamount starts loses letters until it's just the undifferentiated Caribbean. 

Then there's another guy who shows up. Sharkey ran this model before somewhere, the Horselords as his hobbits. Call it a lateral promotion. He's maybe less travelling circus and more suit and tie, but Yuppies and Hippies are imbibing the same wheatgrass. Ask Tom Wolfe. Ask anybody. All that matters is the Grave External Threat, the hive monster encroaching on paradise that must at all costs be repelled. 

Tossing minions willy-nilly into the grinder is not an issue. The Forfendite believes all beings are all part of himself, after all. And only a child cries at a haircut. A lot of times he needs it. This is your basic congressman-stops-by-the-peace-cult-compound-to-check-up-on-a-constituent-and-suddenly-out-come-the-semiautomatics-and-cyanide deal. "Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed."

But . . . spoiler alert — the Bad Dark? It was the Forfendite the whole time. Nobody else exists. It looked like Mithrandir was fighting a Balor, but he was only a chimpanzee posturing before a mirror.

"Ever learn a new word and suddenly see it everywhere? That word was there all the time: you just didn't notice it because you didn't have a distinction-meme for it. If you start using it, or tell a friend how odd it is that you've been seeing this word all over the place, you've just spread [it] to another mind." - Richard Brodie

Peter Saul

(Appendix). Concrete Relations Between Beholders

The corpseworms for the most part do their best to ignore each other entirely, occupying different psycho-ecological niches. Failing this, conflict is likely, as "I hate everybody" means everybody, and "I'm going to put on over on everybody" likewise, and I don't believe anybody actually exists except for me speaks for itself. 

If two come into conflict, it will be all three pretty quickly, two vs one.

Incidentally, this is how new corpseworms are made, out of the broken body of the loser of such a conflict. Triocetic reproduction. You can tell what will probably happen if you look at them like an iChing hexagram, young and old lines. Each worm has a number: 2 (upper), 4 (middle), 6 (lower). 

(Note that the actual corpseworms are not going to rock-em-sock-em-robot each other themselves, they'll do it through proxies, like they do everything else. Those attractive 5e MM covers with brave delvers vs the Eye Tyrant — these are depictions of the finale of such a campaign):

To determine the result of the melee (by surrogate), you will perform two operations.

1. Roll a die. Consult the following chart (or do the math in your head). X indicates the death of the corpseworm. Wait 10 days and a replacement will manifest.

2. What form will the successor worm take? Subtract down the ladder by steps according to your die roll:

I → J → K → L → M → H →

 (1) →  (2) →  (3) →  (4) →  (5)

But wait, there's more! By virtue of terminating one of the three, the other two EVOLVE, taking on, as they say in Troika, a different mien. The triumphant Lower Corpseworm, having seen the rupture of taking a life, becomes elusive and shifty (a Critter). The triumphant Middle, knowing that a new nihilist is on the way, starts murdering first-born fast as possible (the Sanguinary Executive). Even worse is the instability and paranoia resulting from the Upper and Middle working together to off the more vigorous Beatnik. You will notice right away that the 6 wherein the even a Hippy may gets squibbed means the successor corpseworm takes an identical form to the last. Is he even really dead? The numbers added up only to a tie. Suspicious minds see shadows even in sunlight.

As per the Bertrand Russell, "nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit."

Anatomography

CAR-D-STRUCTION

This is a riff on a system I've played about with, and, under the pernicious influence of Rob Daviau's Viking Funeral, accelerant-ed. 

one - Deck Construction

(or, Slumming with Teakettle)

Each player gets a deck of cards to start. Preferably CHEAP cards. Or old cards. Or a deck you hate. Or belonging to someone you hate.

The GM has their own deck. It can be as nice as anything — they won't be ripping it up. Probably the nicer the better to really emphasize the grubby reality versus Platonic diktat from on high.

Black suits are the physical. Aces low. (A-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10)

Red suits are the metaphysical. Widdershins. Aces high (10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-A)

Face cards are — god help us — a story aspect. They are worth full points (either a 10 or 1 depending on red/black) but they go BACK into the deck (shuffle it!) instead of being discarded. They are a reoccurring part of the PC's repertoire now.

King - a SIGNATURE move, like say, the Iron Shiek's Camel Clutch. Or Jedi mind tricks. Or I used to have a D&D PC who tried to glue everyone in place like the Trapster (he was summarily killed by a birdman who simply pigeon-hopped over his laid-out adhesives).

Queen - DIVINE intervention, say, "Paris was choked by the richly inlaid strap of his helm, drawn tight beneath his chin, pressing on his soft throat. And Menelaus would have hauled him off and won endless glory, had not Zeus’ daughter Aphrodite, swift to see it, broken the ox-hide strap, so the empty helm was left in Menelaus’ strong grip. He tossed it away into the Greek ranks, where his comrades gathered it, then sprang again to the attack, his bronze spear eager for the kill. But Aphrodite cloaked Paris in mist and, with a goddess’s power, whisked him away, and set him down in his own high sweet-scented room, while she sped off to summon Helen," and this kind of thing.

Jack - an ITEM, either discovered on the floor or knapsack. Cornered, Cornelius abruptly recalled the strange Canteen he had found in the wall earlier and uncorked it, flooding the grounds with salt water that swept away the Lurching Tumuli.

Jack Penny

two - Eruption

(or, Eruption)

Here's a Command and Colors way of doing combat.

PCs have a hand of 5 cards. They play 2 of them per turn - a feint (lead card) and a hole card. The suits are as follows:

Spades - Attack

Clubs - Magik

Hearts - Negotiation

Diamonds - Trickeration

Everybody can do all the things — although the range is limited per your class. So, it's not true that a proper barbarian hates magicians and scorns magicking — he can be a bit of one himself in the proper circumstances, but it's a bit more the kind of magic his throwing dart passes through what you thought was a solid object and finds its way to your throat.

What throws people at first is that Magik is not a metaphysical act. Note that it is a natural law out here. Nothing wu wu about a fireball at all, anymore than a bar code scanner at least. On the other hand, my daughter referred to the hearts suit as, "being nice" which we all can agree is for some folks almost impossible.

three - Loss of Function

(or, Screw the Pretty Dynasties)

In response to this gambit (combat, trickery), the GM pulls from their deck. If the GM's card MATCHES either of PC's cards, it depletes them. PC has to RIP IT UP one of the matching cardsright then and there. No Saving throw. Do not pass go. This can be particularly painful if they are attempting to employ an ITEM (Jack), a DIVINITY (Queen), or a SIGNATURE (King).

(the sword breaks, the god abandons Antony, the acrobat gets the "yips" where before they effortlessly performed the Frankensteiner)

When you're down to 2/3 of your pack (18 cards) it's time to go back to the dollar store and REFRESH to 70 cards. Feel free to use a different deck - the old cards will feel luxuriously soft, their dogeared edges pulling them to the top of the cut.

Maybe Isis, after an extended silence, will talk to you again and point out the dragon's weak spot.

Voodoo Neon

Success is determined by comparing the hole card to the GM's. Suit is important, but not super-important. After all, aggression met by guile can go either way. The hole card's suit wins ties (and remember, face cards are just the high value, be it 10 or 1 — a K is no more powerful than a 10, other than it will be recycled back into your deck).

(As you can see, there is utility to leading with the same suit as our hole (operative card). EXCEPT. You might not have two of the same suit. EXCEPT you might have two face cards of the same suit. EXCEPT if the defender depletes the lead card, it's an automatic success, so done right you can sneak some stuff through)

GM doesn't get a hand of cards, but they can arrange their free draw of 2 cards as appropriate on their turn. No need to lead with the 9 and a 2 hole. Individual antagonists can mod their decks as appropriate (no cowardly hearts for the Fighting Uruk-hai, no Queens of any suit for the deck of Ajax Tlamunus):

The man's father warned him against

such recklessness when he saw him

rushing headlong to war

with these noble words: "My son,

may your spear prevail over all,

but always with a god's protection."

But Aias answered with a high

and thoughtless boast: "My father,

any nobody can win victories

with the help of a god. I trust

I can draw enough glory to me

without them. 

- Sophocles, Aias (translation by Herbert Golder and Richard Pevear)

ONCE AGAIN AESCHINES

You see, fellow citizens, how certain persons have played the game: how they have mustered their offset lithographs and how they have gone scolding up and down rpgnet in an attempt to assert the primacy of their preferred cadence of play. But I have come trusting first in the dice, and THEN the rules, and in you, the players, believing that with you no scheming preparation can override law and justice.

There are, as you know fellow-citizens, three forms of the game — as a wargame, as a resource manager/worker placement apparatus, and as the Monty Haul wherein no martial concern or supply and demand need interfere with the adrenaline rush conferred by the acquisition of glittering things. How, and by what supplement, can these forms be more purposefully leveraged together to create a meaningful artifice? As per a remark by James Settani concerning Monsters and Manuals' "Against the RPG Rulebook Spartans" (concerning USABILITY vs AESTHETICS) that "Art has value, but I cannot run a game using the Mona Lisa," I say:

David Gibbons

I could wish, indeed, fellow citizens, that you could not run a game using the Mona Lisa, for then it would be permitted to the oldest citizen, as the law prescribes, to come forward a run a modern module uninterrupted by shouting and tumult. But now all our standards of procedural generation have been set aside; there are men who do not hesitate to interrupt the description of a staircase with their opinion on every question. For he will say, "I am in charge of mapping these knight-jinx-ed passages, and the graph paper don't line up," and a feasible answer will elicit charges of gamism from the caller.

What then is it that you want to audit, if not my half tone Royal Blue. In this game, so ancient and so great, no man is free from the audit who has held any public trust.

source

Or even, the mellophonium pitched to F:

this is a trumpet tho

Be ye my witnesses, O Earth and Sun, and virtue and Conscience, and the Oral tradition by which we distinguish the honorable and the base, that I have heard the "games master's" call and spoken. I have spoken according to my desire, if insufficiently, according to my ability. It remains for you to answer according to your inventory.

Obligatory:

SLUGGO

 (Puppet Factions in the City Mickey Dugan)

Some number of years ago, I was a tertiary and relatively non-contributive member of an OSR book club run by a luminary we will for the moment call Bat Masterson —

— the first book of which was Clifford Geertz’s Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Nobody, as far as I can tell, liked it. Geertz is famous for this concept of "thick description"— a kind of "everything is everything" kind of deal: that without the FULL context you can't know if it is a blink or a wink or some sort of ironic riff on the inability of said wink-blinker to affect such a gesture.

This seems simultaneously kind of obvious and non-actionable, really — witness all the pieces that grapple with but ultimately fail to capture the 6, 7 phenomenon (crossed over to mass cognizance just this week and soon to depart). There's ultimately no accessing the DEEP MAGIC unless you were when it was written, Witch. I know Geertz is critiquing contemporary practice and academic tendency to make grand proclamations out of paper-thin evidence, but his core thesis in Negara, that these Balinese polities were ones where "power served pomp, not pomp power," seemed pretty grand and dodgily evidenced itself. 

No matter how much bread and circus we have to wade through on the daily, or our sneaking suspicion that typography is running the rpg product, I would be hard pressed to reduce such soup down to anything more than Power in the Raw makes everything sugary.

Mork Borg, via Explorer's Design

Patrick Stewart has a characteristically cogent engagement with Geertz here.

Anyhow, I ran across a print copy of Negara the same day another, better book, arrived via the gutted remnants of the USPS. Written by a different osr veteran (let’s for the sake of call this fellow Gearóid Ó Ruagáin), this second (which I heartily recommend) got me to thinking, or at least something that to the outsider would LOOK like thinking: 

"It was obvious from the body language of some of the individuals
that they were merely going through the motions"

Here side by side are two imaginary renderings of south-east Asia. How do they, as per the Geertz, "construct expression on their surface enigmatical?" 

Ruagáin's Yellow City has an overcast of slug men. They are plenty cute lil' guys but to my mind and I'm sure to their subordinates they are MONSTERS most foul. But why are they like that? The corruption of Power? The debasement by gilded Pomp? The nature of the forever inscrutable invertebrate? Let's instead take the G. man at his word and assume the slugs are instead putting on ... a Show.

Skottie Young

The Slugs in this case have spheres of influence in the real world — the SHAREHOLDERS — politicians/ criminals/ criminal politicians and the like. Bosses, underbosses. Each overarching Slug-run organization is a called BODY CORPORATE. A given Body Corporate is the equivalent of a single actor in our world. So say, the Body Corporate Christopher Lloyd - a consortium of mad scientists, spaced out peace and love aristos, and black robed inquisitors. 

These B.C.s play out a cycle of dramas which are choreographed power struggles. Pro wrestling, really. They (or rather the slugman's cronies as a collective) audition for parts just like any actor. The B.C.C.L., by way of example, is known for their work as the trickster type: Herla Cyning certainly, although in some epochs as Dottore Spaccastrummolo. They are good at it and get consistent work.

I guess all of this is maybe a little bit Xorvintaal – but it’s not a game. It’s a play. And the play is Our American Cousin forever and ever.

“Ronald Reagan? The actor? Then who's vice
president? Jerry Lewis?” – Dr. Emmett Brown

You know how history repeats itself? The whole K.M. first as a tragedy, second as a farce bit? Well, the second go wasn’t supposed to be farcical – the actors involved just botched the tone of the production. I was in the audience with a bunch of 14-year-olds who laughed like mad at the end of Othello, too. "Yes. 'Tis Emilia. Emilia — By and by — She’s dead.” Her leg twitches. When the audience starts breaking into giggles, it’s hard to go hard on with the, "Ha, no more moving. Still as the grave.” Man, the actors were pissed.

The reviews, if the Shareholders screw up, will be savage. You're finished in this town, Sluggo, it's somebody else's part next time and moving forward to infinity. The Company's time at the center of events has passed and they are little more than an applauding audience anymore, if that. Sometimes there's a comeback. "I will not retire while I've still got my legs and my make-up box" and that. Sometimes there's just the long tail (slime trail?) of denial.

Here are the roles then (you will perhaps notice I have stolen the structure from SJG Revolution and a VERY loose interpretation of commedia dell'arte mixed with some Germanisms):

Miles Gloriosus	Zarzuela	Attaccabrighe	Flour Tortilla
Pickelhering	Chiusette	Il Magnifico	Soubrette
Pavironicas	Erlkönig	Dottore Spaccastrummolo	Pollastrello

Play Report - Anomalous Subsurface Environment Session 2

Well, that took a bit . . . much like Bjork's purported goldfish turned MTV star, said campaign fizzled spectacularly outside its native marine environment (more on that to come). That said, in light of future posts regarding the trans-dimensionally regenerative qualities of yellow bile, the context contained herein may prove elucidatory. And so . . .

Where were we? Stanton, Blumbert, and Bamford the Crabman depart the Temple of Nysses, but are unable to resist the compulsion to hotwire a tank, which they then drive end over end into the river Effulent, in process freeing a malnourished prisoner barbarian, Bat Nilsonson. The quartet are promptly helped escape, and then held at knifepoint by, a team of super-predators led by one Lord Mush. They resist, Stanton sets fire to the surrounding bustee, Mush makes a run for it, but not before surreptitiously handing Blumbert a packet of seeds for "special delivery".

Session 2 - BIG BRASS BAND

And away to the shadowy underground (colloquially “Down-athix”) that lies beneath the central city we go. Lord Mush, in retreat upsets statuette and apple-cart alike in the time-honored manner of all the best poursuite effrénée dans les rues. Stanton in pursuit. Theo Adorno sportscasting: "the throwing of all meaning overboard like ballast in the snapshot of the situation, in the unresisting subjugation to the empty hegemony of things."

Stanton is dodging a lot of hedges, lots of monies (the casting of pennies over the shoulder, useful both against demons and unctuous scavengers), and needless to say (being a higher-order category encompassing the above and more), lots and lots of things. 

[cue an over-under gambling mechanic with playing cards loosely adapted from here - They flip, you choose, you flip. On the over, you catch up. On the under, you keep pace. Choose wrong, you've lost them. Aces low. Face cards are obstacles or intercessors - J-Person, Q-Environment, K-Event].

And lo - it's market day in the Down Below [K of Hearts, dig?], supplying extra props for Mush to mow over and toss behind as barriers. Down go several cages housing exotic animals from the Eastern frontier. Down goes a stand of pots and pans of varying quality (is one of those tarnished mithril?) Down goes the oversized ophicleide and it's wiry player from a five-piece band playing for gruel lucre.

Enter one Dr. Emil Teroq, a graverobber, err, archeologist, idly watching the band's performance until the Mush interrupts his reverie.

The balance of the party, meanwhile, remain above-ground, circling the remaining cutthroats. The pretty flames and the fwip fwip fwip of revealed playing cards (and the whisper of the Bernard Hermann score) are hypnotic. The thugs, however, grasp the situation more succinctly. They disengage to fetch water, blankets and the odd bag of gravel to douse the fire lest the authorities are attracted by the smoke and fall upon them all. In Mush’s absence, his lieutenant Vorveist negotiates a truce. He is very persuasive, and soon everyone is playing whack a mole against many smaller fires.

[Effectively 1hd, 1 hp monsters, but gains 1 hd each turn and 1d6 "children", so don't dilly dally ye dandies or you'll burn down the entire sector]

Ruffians and rowdies have no choice against a monster such as this but to work as a team and are soon fast friends, never mind poor Brosta and Zlosek, face down in pools of blood. 

It's hard labor, but they win out, ultimately. The détente extended. B+B grab one of the thugs and give him a ritual shaving, causing an abrupt conversion to Nyssesian cosmic worldview, creepy crawlies everywhere. Bat Nilsonson has been badly burned and is now unconscious, losing a point of constitution permenantly. Not for the last time.

The former antagonists descend together arm in arm, leaving only the bartender, Karloff, to continue his vigil, polishing such glassware as has survived the conflagration. Surely the Fuzz will be on-site shortly, pinching everyone - except there isn’t anyone. Karloff, mute as mittens, can only gesture downward they-went-thataway.

Down below, Dr. Emil Teroq has become quite agitated and mercilessly needles the band, "That guy doesn't respect music at all!" "Not to go on all fours, that is the law! Are we not men?" "Is this the kind of treatment you will stand for?" No, they won't, and the chase is back on. After that pushy crimelord! Onward Mush, trailed by Stanton, followed by the five-piece, and last of all Dr. Emil Teroq, noting in his blotter the intricate zigzag through conduit, cave, and sewerage cyclopean.

Theodor Geisel

Mush nearly makes it up one of the many ladders lying around the underground to a catwalk but is yanked off mid-ascent by Stanton and immobilized by the quintet irate musicians for a good kicking.

Friends,” says Mush, arms over covering his face against reciprocating muso-boots, “Surely you are not so unsettled as you wouldn’t consider swapping resources? You, being numerous and entirely without direction . . . " Stomp stomp stomp.

After a bit of handwaving, the rest of everyone abruptly arrives in the same spot. The balance of thugs have dispersed, but Vorveist and Wiverne, freshly bic'd brother in the cult of Nysses, have come along a new minted PC and B+B's henchman, respectively.

“The gangs of the Underdim aren’t too bright,” opines Mush, winking if his black eye would allow at his former colleagues Vorveist and Brother 'Verne. “Behold an info dump! The grand camp of the Salties is an eyesore, to be sure, and that just rubs those Whoresons, cleancut little fascists that they are, the wrong way. On my information and belief, they are about to attack and scrub it immaculate. Problem being, the inventor Blue Bear live there in a hut with alligator legs, and he's working on a project for me. I'll make it worth your while if you rescue him before the egg cracking begins . . ."

The party, suitably convinced, leave Mush to his machinations, braving the Bald Bridge (in plenty poor condition, its name suggests) and brain bats who live underneath it as a shortcut against time to find this "Blue Bear" individual and warn him. 

They are too late, though, and arrive to the cacophonous sound of cannon-fire and fitful screaming as the Whoresons are mid-assault, and in the process mid-unleash of eldritch entities soon gawping for breath in the semi-oxygenated air of the subsurface (no, not the titular one either).

John Hendrix

Never fear, per Bill Gould, FNM "wound up letting that fish go into the river when we were finished". Far from being inhumanely tormented for no purpose, the fish (plural - it's film-making innit) went through its/their reverse dip into Urðarbrunnr before learning the runes and living out its/their invasive species dreams to the fullest.

*No malevolent entities were harmed in the making of this episode - no promises going forward*

Bibliography: ASE 1 - Anomalous Subsurface Environment (Patrick Wetmore), Augmented Reality (Paul D. Gallagher), Burndhachaigh (Ian Butterfly), Howling Tower: Chase Scenes (Steve Winter), Infinigrad: The Weird City Toolkit (Michael Ralston), Shadelport & Exile Island (Christopher Tamm), Operation Unfathomable (Jason Sholtis), there was a dog at work today, he was a special mister guy (Scrap Princess), Yoon-Suin (noisms).