OMEGAMANCY -- for use with the GammaFinder Setting by Owen K.C. Stephens, inspired & informed by Defiling, a History and a Look Ahead & Running Dark Sun: Defilers

... Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-- Ozymandias

The twisted lords of City Omega, it is said, were once served in combat & intrigue alike by vile magicians: depraved & corrupted enchanters who wielded unstoppable sorceries, fell magics that drank deeply from the last flickers of life clinging to our cursed earth.

Where their obscene will was worked, abject destruction savaged the waste.

Although the hideous masters of the Omega Invasion and their deviant catamite-mages have long-since fallen to dust & madness, their blasphemous occult legacy lives on ... echoing, growing in the shadowed wilderness like a iridescent, pulsating constellation of tumors.

This essay brought to you absolutely free to enjoy, to read & to share – as always – by the fine folks of my Patreon

original image by Jacob Blackmon, available from AAW Games here

DEPRAVED & INFECTIOUS KNOWLEDGE

No character may use Omegamancy until she has personally, directly witnessed another creature use Omegamancy.

Once a character has beheld the raw power of Omegamancy, she is forever-after marked, and she may use the abilities below at-will.

Use of Omegamancy is a strongly evil act.

THE MAJESTIC PERVERSION OF OMEGAMANCY

Whenever a Mystic or Witchwarper casts a spell, she may choose to evoke Omegamancy: scouring the earth around her clean of all natural life.

When she does so, she afflicts an area with a radius of 10 feet per level of the spell cast (5 ft. radius for cantrips): reducing plants & soil-bound microbes to strewn white ash, weakening and killing minor wildlife (creatures too small or insignificant to themselves have statistics), and reducing the rate of live birth among all surviving creatures in the area. If she uses this ability in an area that overlaps a previous use of this power, the radius is drawn from the edge of the previous area.

Omegamancy does not work in utterly barren landscapes, in the void of space, or in other places without enough life-force to steal.

Omegamancy does not kill truly unnatural life. Entities from beyond our understanding of biology are, in many instances, bolstered by the sudden disappearance of their competition: in those scarred places where Omegamancy has been used, forests of alien cartilage & twitching mollusk-flesh often grow, dripping protoplasm evolved under no known stars.

In other places, only dust remains.

An area afflicted by Omegamancy might recover, in time, but if so it has never been observed or recorded.

If she chooses to evoke Omegamancy in this way, she gains one of the following benefits as the spell is cast:

She gains a single temporary point of Resolve. Unspent temporary Resolve Points gained in this way disappear at the end of one minute.

The range of her spell is doubled.

The range of her spell increases from Touch to 30 ft.

She may re-roll any number of damage dice dealt by the spell. 1s on this single re-roll are treated as 2s.

The spell’s duration is doubled. The spell must have a duration longer than instantaneous.

Casting the spell does not provoke attacks of opportunity.

She gains the benefits of the Penetrating Spell feat until the end of her round.

She generates an effect identical to a Wonder Grenade within the area of the spell’s effect. She rolls twice and chooses one of the two effects.

Choosing to evoke Omegamancy in this way is a free action.

It is not possible to evoke Omegamancy in a subtle way: any creature within the afflicted area is instantly aware of this monstrous power’s evocation, and feels a sharp, agonizing tug at their life-force in the direction of the caster.

Those who survive an encounter with Omegamancy often suffer from Deformities.

DARK MAGIC IN A RUINED WORLD

Everyone hates Omegamancers.

No. Scratch that, actually. Everyone hates witches, and one of the reasons is that backwoods hillbillies who’ve never actually seen Omegamancy at work are just clever enough to err on the side of caution: willing to real-quick beat, string-up & behead anyone who might have the capability to unleash such legendary power at some point in the indeterminate future.

Everyone, after all, knows that Omegamancy is “a thing”.

And even at the best of times, normal people don’t handle magic well.

Uninitiated folks react to seeing sharp-edged proof of [2+2=5] the same way they’d react to a rotting clown-baby bursting into their darkened bedroom screaming, thrashing and vomiting spiders. Witnessing raw sorcery unravel & rewrite reality in-the-flesh activates the fight-or-flight response of a normal person the same way that a loaded pistol pointed directly at your own skull does ... while simultaneously pinging the uncanny valley just as hard as the primitive lizard hind-brain can register a sense of wrongness.

Something old – lurking just beneath the tense, stressed-out surface of every hardened apocalypse survivor scraping-together a life in the harsh dust – still believes in magic and monsters; that wide-eyed, blood-caked monkey knows that the best way to deal with wolves, demons & tigers in the dead of night is to wake the tribe with screams, light the big fires and start throwing heavy stones.

Castin' spells?

They’ll come at you with bare fists & teeth, friend.

You don’t even want to know what they do to people who unleash the true, eldritch power of madness.

OMEGA-CORE SUBSTANCE

If a Mystic or Witchwarper evokes Omegamancy while holding an item of power constructed of Omega-Core Substance, she gains two of the benefits from the list above rather than one. In addition, all living creatures in the afflicted area -- except you, the caster -- suffer one hit-point of damage per level of the spell cast (no save). This ability must deal at least one point of damage or the spell fails.

Footprints in the Burning Wasteland -- Starfinder feat for use with the GammaFinder Setting by Owen K.C. Stephens

Your gift slaughters the world, offering it up as sacrifice to that majestic occult power which draws you ever onward toward an inhuman godhood.

Each blasphemous caress of your sorcery is, of course, a unique & terrible thing.

Brought to you absolutely free to play, to test & to share, as always, by the fine folks of my Patreon.

Based upon – and deeply indebted to! – Omens and Lake Drakes and The Devil in the North Woods from Goblin Punch; hugest of thanks to Kate Polka for creepy curse and symbol inspiration.

image from here

Benefit: Whenever you choose to evoke Omegamancy, you may choose -- as a free action --  to ROLL 1d20 on the chart below:

You age by (1d20 - 10) years; you cannot become younger than the base starting age of your species by use of this ability. You also become hideously ugly: your body wracked, scarred & deformed by the obscene energies you channel. If you are already marked in this way, the reverse occurs: you instead become inhumanly beautiful, reborn into flesh more perfect than any you could have imagined.

A heavy tremor shakes the earth, displacing stones and dislodging small trees for one hundred miles in every direction; this tremor opens an inch-wide, sixty-foot-long lightning-bolt crack beneath your feet, from which gusts a single hot breath of fetid, rot-thick air. All creatures with fewer Hit Dice than you within a ten mile radius do not heal naturally for one month, and may only be healed by magic. Superficial cuts, abrasions and bruises swiftly add up, dealing one point of damage per day.

Worms, flies, centipedes, spiders and unrecognizable mutations of similar vermin crawl from beneath your feet, falling dead of traumatic total organ failure after traveling no more than a few yards. Corpses within ten miles all claw, cry and twist in their graves – attempting to escape – for one minute as if animated; when they fall still once more, all are facing directly toward you.

A thunderclap is heard from distant mountains, a great bolt of lighting falls from the sky -- striking dead a tree within one mile or cracking in-half a boulder within 60 ft. -- and the sky turns sullen, ashen grey until the next sunrise.

The temperature drops by ten degrees over the next minute; the wind howls as oily black rain & drifts of eerie white ash fall in a one hundred mile radius for 1d20 hours. Bizarre, flesh-colored lights cascade through in the area afflicted by your use of Omegamancy, creating an effect identical to dazzling flares. These persist for 2d6 rounds. You suffer no penalty from these flares.

Everything grows dark, as if heavy clouds momentarily passed in front of the sun; an unintelligent animal somewhere within earshot speaks the word ‘OMEGA’ aloud and then dies. All electrical equipment, chemical lights, campfires, torches, lanterns, candles and other artificial sources of illumination or warmth gutter and fail – within one hundred miles – until the end of the next round. This does not affect weapons or armor.

All children and animals within one hundred miles howl, scream and crow for a moment before falling eerily silent for one hour. You lose the ability to speak, read or understand any language but Aklo for 1d10 minutes.

A foul liquid composed of blood, feces and more-disturbing bodily fluids seeps from the cracks of every wall, floor and tree in a one-mile radius, leaving terrible stains with indecent shapes. You are nauseated for one round, then vomit forth a fleshworm swarm; you have no control over swarms created in this way.

Long, smooth, razor-sharp blades of salt erupt from the earth in the area afflicted by your use of Omegamancy. This area becomes difficult terrain, although any creature may choose to move through the area at full speed; creatures who do so suffer 1d8 points of slashing damage (no save). This it treated as damage from an archaic weapon. You cannot be harmed by these blades.

A geyser of foul wind blasts from jagged cracks which rip across the earth, creating an effect identical to a cosmic eddy -- centered on you, as cast by you -- in the area afflicted by your use of Omegamancy. This effect deals 2d8 damage (rather than 4d6). You are not harmed or inconvenienced by these winds.

Unnatural, oily slime oozes up from the earth in the area afflicted by your use of Omegamancy, creating an effect identical to the grease spell centered on you, as cast by you. You are immune to the effects of this oil.

Poisonous fumes leak up from the earth in the area afflicted by your use of Omegamancy, creating an effect identical to the miasma spell, centered on you, as cast by you. You are immune to effects cause by these fumes.

Jagged shards of glass detonate upwards from the earth in the area afflicted by your use of Omegamancy, creating an effect identical to a puncture veil spell as cast by you. Only creatures within the area afflicted by your use of Omegamancy may be targeted by this spell.

Madness tears through the holes in reality surrounding you, creating an effect identical to a confusion spell as cast by you, centered on you. You are immune to this effect.

Stolen power rips through you; you gain the effects of displacement, haste or prescience (your choice) as cast by you. The earth grows dark and sodden as warm blood bubbles from it in a 30 ft. radius around you; clouds of flies rise from the damp, burbling earth and shadows, forming the image of OMEGA, then scatter.

Dark, honey-sweet whispers of submission & agony sweep through the area afflicted by your use of Omegamancy, creating an effect identical to a song of the cosmos spell as cast by you.

Time, matter & energy alike sputter & fail catastrophically in the area afflicted by your use of Omegamancy, creating an effect identical to a slice reality spell as cast by you. Only creatures within the area afflicted by your use of Omegamancy may be targeted by this spell.

You rend a hole in space-time, calling forth an entity with a CR equal to your level +1. The specific entity is chosen by your GM, and the entity is -- at best -- neutral toward you; it may be hostile. This entity arrives somewhere in the area afflicted by your use of Omegamancy, as chosen or determined randomly by your GM. This creature is not under your control. This entity remains in our reality for a number of hours secretly determined by your GM (roll 1d20) before vanishing once again.

Roll 3d6 twice on the chart above twice and choose a result.

Roll 3d6 three times on the chart above and choose two results.

Reek of Corrupted Wastelands – Starfinder feat for use with the GammaFinder Setting by Owen K.C. Stephens

There are forbidden occult techniques that may scour all sane life from the world in a tide of living nightmare, unleashing unstoppable sorceries even as they devour the dust of our Annihilated End-Time.

You can smell such secret gifts on the ash-&-aluminum-scented wind.

Brought to you absolutely free to play, to test & to share, as always, by the fine folks of my Patreon.

Prerequisite: Direct exposure to use of Omegamancy

Benefit: You gain a supernatural Blindsense (Scent) Special Ability, but only with respect to creatures who have been exposed to the power of Omegamancy.

Note that this would include you; thus, further investigation is traditionally required before you may reasonably kill someone for “smelling wrong”.

You may detect creatures who have been exposed to use of Omegamancy at a range of 30 ft. If the creature has ever evoked the power of Omegamancy, you may instead detect them at a range of 60 ft. If the creature has ever employed Omega-Core Substance when evoking the power of Omegamancy, you may instead detect them at a range of 90 ft.

If you have line-of-effect to a creature who has ever employed Omega-Core Substance and you are within 30 ft. of them, you are also considered to have the Blindsight Special Ability with regards to that creature.

When you detect such a scent, the exact location of the source is not revealed — only its presence somewhere within range. You can take a move action to learn the direction of the scent. When you are within 5 feet of the source, you automatically pinpoint the source’s location.

In addition, you can feel the tug of Omegamancy being evoked within a range of 1 mile per character level you possess; you know the immediate direction to – and the rough distance toward – any creature who evokes the power of Omegamancy within that range.

Once per day, when you consume the still-raw tongue, eyes & fingers of a creature who has evoked the power of Omegamancy, you are able to clearly “see” either the first time – or the most recent time – that your target used Omegamancy. You perceive the circumstances of the moment in question with perfect clarity, as if you were actually there: you possess all of your senses, including the power of sight, hearing, smell, taste and others, including your sense of altitude and balance.

Fist of the Gamma Star -- Starfinder feat for use with the GammaFinder Setting by Owen K.C. Stephens

Unarmored & unafraid, you walk the wastelands of a devastated planet.

You are trained in the most esoteric of fighting-arts, ancient even in the long-ago eons of the Unburned World; the impeccable focus of your flawless technique launches your kinetic prowess ever-forward, an avalanche of perfect strikes – rising like the mountain or descending like a stormbolt – to boldly carve your name upon the Wastes & bring order to this lawless stage of history.

Brought to you absolutely free to play, to test & to share, as always, by the fine folks of my Patreon.

image from here

Prerequisite: Soldier with the Qi Adept Fighting Style; must be selected at Character Creation

Benefit: You gain all the benefits of the Hammer Fist Technique from the Armor Storm Fighting Style. If you choose Armor Storm as your Secondary Fighting Style, you treat your Soldier level for purposes of that Style as equal to your Soldier level -4 (rather than -8). 

You must begin play with Heavy Armor of your level (your Major Item) or of your level +1 (your Relic from your Emphasis). This special Heavy armor is spiritual in nature, rather than purely physical, and may only be manipulated while you are in deep meditation: for example, your armor may only be donned, repaired or removed while you are quietly focusing your inner fighting-spirit.

You gain all the normal benefits of your heavy armor’s environmental protections while it is worn, even through you are (to unenlightened eyes) apparently unarmored. You always directly perceive the spiritual armor of other creatures with this ability, with no roll or action required. You recharge your armor automatically while meditating.

Your spiritual armor’s appearance (though invisible and mostly-intangible) is yours to adjust freely, and may also be recognized by any creature using detect magic or any higher-level divination effect.

You may buy and sell Heavy Armor and Powered Armor and/or upgrades for your armor at normal market cost while in an isolated meditative trance: thus, for example, you might expend 850 credits worth of incense – and one hour in meditation – to upgrade your armor from Officer Ceremonial Plate to Enforcer Armor I. Your total item level for this special armor may not exceed your ranks in Mysticism.

Special: If your armor is your Relic, you may instead upgrade it for free each time you gain a level, and your total item level for this special armor may not exceed your ranks in Mysticism +1.

The Halidom City of Rho -- Urban Adventure Location for use with the GammaFinder Setting by Owen K.C. Stephens

It drifts along, some seven & a half miles above the scarred, broken wasteland stretched-out far beneath it, pushing effortlessly against the hellish winds of ash, glass, and the blood-thick dust of Empires.

Through storms of lightning and radiation, poison and caustic vapor, alien screams and unnatural flame ... it drifts.

It makes long, strange circuits over the shattered world below: loops & whorls across the wastes, following designs scarcely comprehensible to the tens of thousands who cling desperately to the titanic chains, ropes and improvised city-structures hanging from its impossible, ancient bulk.

Whatever insane gods constructed the massive, weightless behemoth upon which the Halidom City of Rho now grows & hangs, they are long-since dead.

And yet this triumph of esoteric engineering still edges along the bruise-colored skies beneath a half-shattered moon, sweeping lightly over still forests of soot-smeared rebar and through canyons of shattered asphalt & gore-spattered iron pipes. For those in need, stranded far out in the deep desert as it draws close, the leviathan of Rho is nothing less than a miracle: sunrise at midnight, a crack of bright lightning along the spine of the rainbow.

For those who clutch precariously at the long shackles which drape down from the eerie alien-wrought heavens, eking out a meager living among the clacking pillars of ozone & rust, it is a home: nothing less, and nothing more.

Brought to you absolutely free to play, to test & to share, as always, by the fine folks of my Patreon.

image from here

FUN FACTS ABOUT RHO

The gently-curved “Crown” at the absolute top of Rho hangs effortlessly in the sky at an altitude of about 12 kilometers (7.45 miles; 52,500 feet) straight up, drifting across the very bottom of the stratosphere. The very lowest levels of the city, conversely, are built to alternately hang a few feet into the air or drag gently along the ground, adjusted individually by the inhabitants of the Gasoline Docks to the specifics of the local terrain as needs arise.

The Crown itself is about 2 kilometers wide and generates a number of unnatural phenomena, the vast majority of which are indirectly beneficial to the maintenance of the city below. For example, every part of the great column beneath the Crown -- 151 cubic kilometers of swaying, densely-packed Urban city-sprawl -- has a breathable atmosphere and functions as a Low Gravity environment. In addition, the Crown seems to repel the worst excesses of wastelands weather by some unknown means: dozens of citizens die each year when Rho passes through truly lethal sections of the wastes, certainly ... but not hundreds or thousands.

The majority of Rho is anchored -- directly or indirectly -- to one of the massive crystalline “crown-chains” that descend from the superstructure above the city; constructed of an unknown, seemingly indestructible translucent material found nowhere else in the known world, these vast crown-chains provide more than simple constructional support: the chains generate soft lighting at night, produce electricity for those with the means to tap them, remain cold to the touch even in temperatures exceeding 140 Fahrenheit, and slowly absorb a variety of dangerous environmental effects -- including poisonous fumes and radiation -- into their milky, hypnotically-glowing depths.

The city generally moves at a speed of about 8 to 24 kilometers an hour (5-15 mph), making infrequent stops for unknown reasons; the longest recorded full stop lasted for just over 137 hours before the city abruptly began moving once again. The city follows something approximating a “route,” although attempts to predict where the city will move to more than a week out have only about a 20% chance of being correct. Some seemingly-arbitrary sites in the wasteland are visited seasonally (passing close-by three to four times a year), while other destinations are utterly unique: approached only once, then forever abandoned.

The city of Rho still passes within walking-distance of the twin corpse-pits where Alpha and Beta once stood, slowing to a crawl as it does so. In the wake of the Omega Invasion, Rho is perhaps the single largest and most prosperous city in the known world; Rho escaped the most direct attentions of Omega by pure good fortune, spending the majority of the invasion sailing across a near-impassable radioactive desert, all-but-inaccessible to the majority of Omega’s forces. Although casualties were still high, as the city more than once came under savage assault by aerial troops sent from distant Omega, Rho survived when far greater cities fell.

Exposure to the weird energies of the Crown and its chains is known to cause any number of particularly abnormal mutations; among the most extreme are those who -- born to human parents -- develop into haan at puberty. Haan who metamorphose in this way are believed to breed true and are viewed with a kind of quasi-religious terror by the more-human denizens of Rho; the majority of these creatures ascend to Crownside at the invitation of their predecessors, dwelling high above the city in what those below imagine to be an incomprehensible alien splendor. Foreign Haan -- those born outside of Rho -- are viewed with grave suspicion.

Rho has enormous sections -- some of them thousands of feet tall and hundreds of feet wide -- of abandoned, crumbling buildings damaged during the assault by Omega: foundries, laboratories, water-treatment facilities, power-plants, greenhouses, libraries, art galleries and stranger locales -- hanging amongst the otherwise densely-packed hovels, speakeasies, windmills, turbines, farms, tenements, gambling-dens and swaying rope-bridges. Superstitious locals avoid these corpse-buildings for a variety of reasons ... some of them purely practical, as bizarre alien predators birthed of Omega’s unnatural weaponry are, on occasion, successfully tracked-down and slain there.