#ruleslight

Chosen host—the body and resolve of a Knight of Immaculate Oviposition are kept eternally pure by the blessed humors of its ward. They are immune to disease, poison, and effects incurred by spiritual taint. Furthermore, every Knight of the order has a unique boon, akin to the ones below:

 Boons of the Knights of Immaculate Oviposition

1.     Radiant gaze. All lies and deliberate attempts at concealment, magical or otherwise, fail in the Knight’s presence.

2.     Proto-halo. The Knight hovers 10-30’ clear of the ground and cannot be knocked prone.

3.     Wormblessing. Corpses turn to soil at the Knight’s touch, and soil blooms with pale shoots after a round of physical contact with the Knight. Every round, all plants that the Knight has line of sight on grow at a frightening pace—cosmetic growth becomes difficult terrain, and difficult terrain becomes impassible without a Str check to muscle through or use of a strong hacking implement and an attack action.

4.     Oracular rash. The Knight may “capture” any natural die roll made for an action in their line of sight and substitute that roll as the final result of any other check made in its presence.

5.     Tears of honey. The Knight may transfer any hp loss they suffer to someone else with skin-to-skin contact. This requires a melee attack at disadvantage if used against an unwilling target.

6.     Iron tongue. The Knight may, by speaking a syllable of the yet-unformed name of their ward, deal 3d6 damage to every target in a 480’ cone (Wis check for half).

 From time to time a perfect being walks the corridors of Amnion. Sometimes for duty’s sake, sometimes on a lovely whim. They come as bringers of joy, or at least justice. But sometimes, very rarely, they come to give us their children. Perfection has no truck with fertility. To reproduce is to admit defeat, to divide the unified and perfect sexless whole, devoid of change and thus devoid of entropy. But perfection demands also a nourishing urge, a will to sustain and multiply life, and to give solely for the good of giving.

And so it is the duty of the imperfect to bear what the perfect cannot.

So it is taught within the eggshell-white walls of the monasteries where the Knights of Immaculate Oviposition hold court. To some it must soften the burden of their role. If in the privacy of their votive chambers they curse their divine donors, if they from time to time resent the weight of the nascent power in their flesh, if the praise names of those faraway gods turn sour on their tongues, they alone know.

But many suspect these things, most especially those who have seen the Knights in the field. They fight like they are entirely spent of compassion. Perhaps it is bitterness. Perhaps it is love, love of the child and nothing else at all.

No child is the same. All dwell in the flesh. All are attended by miracles. It takes lifetimes to carry them to term, and so there are lineages within the order. A knight chooses a squire and grooms them over the years so they will be fit to carry the child when the knight’s body is at last spent. The nomme de guerre and the child is all that persists.

The Knights are exempt from all law. Each is a theocracy of one, a living doctrine. They wander because while they are loved and welcomed they are never trusted. They fight because the child is nourished by worship, and the Knights know better than anyone that the root of all worship is bloodshed. They draw together because otherwise they would be utterly alone, and they inevitably break away from each other because each is too deeply wounded, too monstrously obsessed, to be able to bear anyone’s existence but their own and the child’s.

Volatile reaction—words and rounshy mix like gunpowder and house fires. Any time anyone speaks within earshot of a rounshy, there is a 1 in 20 chance per word spoken per sentence that it and the offending language will go up in a catastrophic semantic crisis event. This deals 3d6 damage to the speaker and everyone within 300’ of the rounshy (Dex check for half) and kills the rounshy instantly. What’s more, the speaker cannot use the words they spoke that killed the rounshy. They have been burned from their mind and will not recover. If the speaker attempts to use them, they take 1d3 Int damage for each word instead (Wis check for half).

Load-bearing antitheses are part of the critical infrastructure of creation. It’s just part of the rules that if you’re going to have something around in ordered reality, you need to incorporate its natural opponent. Matter requires anti-matter, most famously.

The rounshy are made of anti-language. It is a troubling and counterproductive quirk of fate that they’re also living, feeling creatures. No-one knows why they’re in Amnion; by definition there aren’t really any primary sources to fall back on, so any explanation is destined to be founded on conjecture.

Rounshy avoid sapients like the plague; folklore persists that if you can wrestle one into submission in complete silence it’s bound to serve you for a poetically appropriate span out of gratitude for your fair if firm-handed treatment, and sometimes—more often than is at all comfortable—people strike out to make their fortune off that sort of partnership. It is complete horseshit and gets people and rounshy killed. The best end result is one badly suffering, deeply anxious rounshy on the short leash of a paranoid, increasingly amoral sapient.

Some romantic idiots chase rounshy on a suicidal quest to expunge certain key bits of language from themselves, to ensure that they will never, ever say certain words to their loved ones. For similar reasons, the creatures are of interest to the Ouroboros Mob—the premise of being permanently denied anything is a unique curiosity for the dons.

Un-being—as hollow emanations of a hateful god, gazing-ball guardians are immune to all effects dependent on having a mind or living flesh.

Baleful eye—on death, a gazing-ball guardian shatters, baring a corona of demon-light. All within line of sight become known to the Demon Sun by their name, face, and worst sin, and all its agents will be able to act on this information.

 The Gardens are the only place in Amnion that receive consistent natural sunlight. Their lush chambers and passages radiate out from a single massive chamber in the superstructure, where the Demon Sun dwells.

The Demon Sun resents all life but plant life, and so it appoints its spawn, the gazing-ball guardians, to patrol and police the jungle-like overgrowth into an immaculate and compliant garden. It’s a futile task, but the guardians have nothing but time to enforce their master’s will. They are deeply joyless creatures, with no particular desires of their own beyond the impulse to extinguish feeling in others. A guardian with nothing better to do will post itself by an anthill, snatching up ants and cracking their heads off one by one.

They are arguably a sort of angel, but it might be better to think of them as the Demon Sun’s embodied whims; its soul is so massive and its mind so complex that even its passing fancies have histories and identities, though they remain an inseparable part of their originator. Worse things than the guardians tread those verdant vaults, born of larger, more complex, more sophisticatedly hateful thoughts and the Sun’s inscrutable dreams.

Everyone would be perfectly fine leaving the Gardens alone, if sunlight and green growing things weren’t worth a fortune in Amnion.

So instead the Gardens crawl with intruders, come to steal away fruit, vegetables, seeds, good soil, and the light of the Demon Sun, carrying their spoils off in buckets, rucksacks, and precious soakstone. The work is hard and often deadly, but there’s no faster way to make a fortune, and sometimes a good haul can spell the difference between life and death for a community.

Surveillance—the Molarmiser has direct access to the sensorium of every creature whose tooth it has consumed.

Transposition—the Molarmiser may switch positions with any creature whose tooth it has consumed once per round.

Unyielding—the Molarmiser is solid all the way through. Slashing and piercing attacks always deal half damage.

 It is possible that the Molarmiser is the only truly “native” form of life in Amnion, insofar as it seems to be some rogue element of Amnion’s organic superstructure—a particularly willful tumor, empowered by its direct line to the cosmic lifeblood that sustains the membrane between worlds. If it had more than a thin smear of brain cells to rub together, it would most likely be borderline omnipotent.

Fortunately, it is only arguably immortal, debatably omnipresent, and wholly committed to a deeply stupid purpose.

All the Molarmiser wants is teeth. Any moment it might spend without acquiring teeth is a wasted moment. All it understands is the acquisition of teeth; it lacks the empathy to understand why other creatures do anything besides furnish it with their teeth, and its personality simply isn’t complex enough to really get angry about being denied teeth either, though it will decide without hesitation to masticate anyone who gets too close and seems to be withholding teeth.

The trouble is that while the Molarmiser is single-minded, that doesn’t strictly mean it’s stupid in the conventional sense. It is stupid in the way a very strong artificial intelligence is stupid. It is quite good at getting what it wants with its limited toolkit.

It bargains for teeth in three ways: most often, it transposes itself somewhere hugely inconvenient and demands teeth in exchange for moving out of the way. In the presence of more streetwise travelers in Amnion, it offers a quick jaunt; once you’ve paid, it’ll shuffle you out with someone else in its network, covering ineffable distances near-instantly. Some who’ve done business with the beast enough to grasp its psychology and the extent of its power trade teeth for secrets—it knows everything that all its donors know, after all, though it may not understand and may take a gunny sack full of cuspids fed one by one and a battery of carefully phrased leading questions to coax out the desired information.

Some particularly foolish people worship the damn thing.

Detect intent—a fat-tailed fit pitcher has constant ESP out to 1,200’.

Fitpitching—a fat-tailed fit pitcher raises the most hell pound for pound out of all living things in the macroverse when it suspects it’s threatened, emitting a psychic foghorn that feels like holding your ear right up against a live jet engine that’s been taught to say “cock sucker.” Every round, a Fat-Tailed Fit Pitcher deals 1 Wisdom damage to everyone it has line of sight on or who is in earshot, no save. Wisdom recovers at a rate of 1/round once the fitpitching ends or the party in question removes themselves from the area of effect. At 0, a victim enters a state of catatonic dissociation and cannot move, act, or think until allowed to remain in absolute silence and stillness for a full exploration turn.

The tail of the fat-tailed fit pitcher is some of the most spectacularly valuable eatin’ wrought by god, man, or the dumbshit hand of natural selection. There’s glands in there that sweat panacea and make real nice dumpling skins once they’re empty. Slow-cooking the fatty tissues produces a fine ambrosia that works equally well as top-tier soup stock, perfume base, lubricant, combustible fuel, and lamp oil (plants grow better in the light shed by a tail-oil lamp than they do in the god damn sun). The bones and carapace are sturdy but simple enough to work with the right tools, and they last decades before biodegrading.

And then there’s the actual meat, which, in addition to tasting like the perfect compromise between prawn and gator with a natural buttery bottom-note, tacks on a good ten to fifteen years of life expectancy per pound when prepared properly.

Naturally they’re the most widely coveted critter in all of Amnion, and they’ve only narrowly avoided total extinction by evolving to be the biggest possible pain in the ass to procure. Presumably they originated elsewhere and, like many things in Amnion, were forcibly relocated when it became clear that it was a bad idea to have ever allowed them to be possible.

Griefsense—dacryphilic harvesters have perfect knowledge of the character, interrelation, and relative positions of experiences of emotional turmoil. This awareness is total. They are aware of all suffering, everywhere, in complete detail, and can triangulate by this sense.

Drink tears—if a dacryphilic harvester drains a victim to 0 Charisma, it gains 1 HD, doubles its teleport range, and increases in size by 25%. The victim becomes incapable of emotional suffering. Harvested people can’t communicate in a way that the un-harvested can parse, though they are still able to do something like socializing with other harvested people.

The harvesters are as old as creation; they are part of its central infrastructure. Most sleep in the deepest, least accessible reaches of Amnion, waiting for the time they are called to serve their function.

When some part of creation no longer has a place—when it poses a comprehensive threat to the macroverse, or when it has entirely outlived its usefulness and attracted the notice of whoever it is who calls the shots, it is the Harvesters who come to gather it up and take it away.

For the longest time, they were all dormant.

But now, by ineffable accident or ineffable will (to us it scarcely matters which) they are starting to rouse themselves. A divine imperative blazes in their impenetrable minds: grief is over. Now, in little-ventured corners of the labyrinth, they are mustering. Learning the taste of sorrow as they begin their work.

Maybe they’ll do something with all that misery when it’s all pulled together. Maybe they’ll just go back to sleep. They aren’t telling; they weren’t made to be talkative. We don’t really have a call to make in the matter anyway, at least from the way they conduct yourselves.

It’ll be a while before they’ll be really ready to do their work. It’s long, difficult work just getting extricated, and heaven knows there will be complications. No effort this large goes off without a hitch. But there are a lot of very worried people in Amnion now. There are strange rumblings in the Ouroboros Mob—whispers of a schism among the leadership over whether the crisis even warrants a response. The House of Unknowing denounces their existence publicly, but everyone’s noticed their increased street presence; they never used to be so evangelical. Niflingland and Ginnungagap are dubious about the matter, and officials of both polities have under-the-table bounties out for clearer information on the strange new visitors. Even the Gardens seem more tightly policed lately. And everywhere you go, there are little millenarian cults springing up, which isn’t exactly new but it’s weird how consistent the message seems to be lately. The Auberge Rouge alone seems to retain an atmosphere of business-as-usual.

Haunting gaze—at the start of every round, a hatchet giant chooses one target it has line of sight on to fix in its haunting gaze. So long as line of sight persists, the target’s MV is halved, and anything that can open and shut shuts and seals so long as they are within the target’s reach.

Silence—hatchet giants move in total silence when stalking prey and have an automatic 50% chance to surprise when encountered in the wild.

Slip away—a hatchet giant may tuck itself under or inside any narrow gap using its entire action; it takes the same amount of time to fully extract itself, though it may attack anything within its reach from its hiding place.

 Amnion’s not friendly terrain for giants, but that doesn’t stop them turning up. There’s a lot of settlements out there built around a scaffold of picked-clean bones left behind by some hapless Brobdingnagian who got deposited in a raw passage with no way out.

Some get lucky, though. Some, like Slitherin’ Jane, go the boneless route. The infamous Bigby Himm of the Ouroboros Mob lives a mostly sessile lifestyle facilitated by powerful space-altering magic.

And then there are the hatchet giants, who found a very literal niche and let natural selection do the rest of the work. They nest in the labyrinthine bordermarches of Old Ginnungagap, tucked up in ravines, boltholes, attics, crawlspaces, and the space between walls where the plumbing and insulation is supposed to go.

Time and habit has ingrained a terrible patience into them. A clever hatchet giant insinuates itself inside or under the foundations of an abandoned home, slowly and subtly refurbishing the space to attract prey, assuaging its hunger by picking the place clean of pests. Desperate strays eager for someplace warm and not taken hole up, and if the giant is especially clever they only take one, and only after letting the squatters get comfortable. There are plenty of people out there willing to sell out the occasional rube passing through to the thing under the floorboards if it means somewhere comfortable and snail-free to sleep.