#ttrpg lore

They say he dances on wet planks and hums through rusted nails. That if a ship creaks wrong, it’s not the tide—it’s him remembering.

Not a ghost. Not a goblin. But something in between—a smile nailed shut by splinters. He is the laughter in storm-wind, the pipe smoke in fog, the tapping boots when no one walks the deck.

The Klabautermann. Or as Mara calls him: “That weird uncle the ocean never stopped inviting.”

They say he wears a red cap soaked in whale oil, not to frighten—but to warn. His beard is seaweed, his fingers tar, and his eyes? Two polished knots of driftwood that saw too many drownings. He doesn’t weep. He grins.

🪶 In the oldest tales told along the Elbe and down the Baltic’s throat, he was once a carpenter—a soul too stubborn to drown, too kind to leave a crew behind. When his ship went down, he stayed. Not in heaven. Not in hell. But in hulls. In ropes. In bilges and brine.

He patches leaks you don’t know exist. He steadies the mast in storms no map has charted. But cross him—and the sea goes blind. Compass spins. Bread turns to ash. And someone, somewhere below deck, starts whistling a tune you’ve never heard—but suddenly remember.

Mara wrote once:

“He fixed the anchor. He also stole my socks. But in the end, he tucked my doll in and said, ‘Storm’s coming. Be less breakable, little one.’ And vanished into the rigging like a bad idea that worked.”

In The Witcher’s world, they might call him a minor sea sylph or a liminal animus—one foot in folklore, the other on the gunwale. But Mythveil knows better. He’s not a creature. He’s a pattern. A reminder carved into tide and tar:

That not all who haunt are cruel. And not all who laugh are safe. Some just want to help—and leave the rope coiled properly.

So next time your lamp swings twice, and the gulls stop talking— don’t pray. Whistle.

And leave out some rum.

I'm co-GM of a RPG on Discord, and I made a little zine about part of our game's lore 🌿

I'm so happy with this project, so I have lots of photos 🥹

In a good number of systems, the 20-sided die is the primary die used for determining success or failure of any given action. On paper, this makes sense. 1-20 is a good number range, and the factors of 2 and 10 make a lot of sense when developing games, as it gives you a lot of freedom to make giant tables or the like without sacrificing consistency.

However, in my experience, the d20 is too random. When you break it down, you have pretty much exactly a 5% chance to roll any given number on the die. So if you need to roll a 15 to succeed on an action, you have about a 25% chance to succeed that action not including any modifiers. This works very well when you're handling "straight" rolls, or typically when doing something your character doesn't have any particular advantage or disadvantage with.

For example, when you have a character who has say, practiced sword combat their entire life with a deep variance of targets, and you have maybe a +5 to this roll to hit someone with a sword with a threshold of 15. This is a fairly typical setup, but this now only increases your chances of succeeding on this roll to 50%. Which... feels bad. The d20 makes this check with modifiers still basically a coin flip, which ideally should not be the case with a (functionally) percentile die. The larger margins of values should give more dynamics to rolling checks, not less.

In Pathfinder 2e for example, a system I quite like and enjoy, this problem gets especially bad when you consider how critical successes and failures work in that system. The way criticals function is that if you succeed or fail a given check by 10 (so with the 15 example, rolling a 5 is a critical fail and rolling a 25 is a critical success, including modifiers). Theoretically, this is sort of designed to solve the problem I proposed, in which that characters who are exceptionally skilled at something still often have a coin-flip level probability to do the thing they're good at.

However, in practice, instead of making characters who are skilled at their thing more likely to succeed and succeed well, it doesn't really change anything except the frequency in which critical successes or failures are rolled. At the end of the day, the threshold to succeed is the threshold to succeed, and rolling higher than that is more or less just a narrative tool (unless you're rolling a critical in combat), which you don't necessarily need codified gameplay mechanics for. You can kind of just do that when an exceedingly high roll calls for it.

The City of Offal is a godless city, in more than one way. There is no large organized religions across the city, there are no temples built in it's crammed streets, and clearly there must not be a god staring down and raining blessing upon it. Despite this however, there are still several who believe in a higher power, making up the cults who gather in ancient basements and forgotten tunnels, some screaming of stars that must exist somewhere above the black clouds, others celebrating the idea of light, entire factories may fall into the belief of some higher patron or saint that looks after them, cramming makeshift shrines into all available spaces.

(A member of the Cult of Candlelight)

Other than divinity, one of the main sources of superstition in the City of Offal is the idea of ghosts, the undead, and of soothsaying. Throughout the city of offal are numerate prophesiers and fortune tellers, all on different levels of being well off or poverty ridden. Street corner soothsayers and doom criers earn little, while the often grand and finery covered rooms of the elite fortune tellers drive even the Towers down into the the surface for their prophecies. Those who visit fortune tellers often leave with their pockets empty and their doom spelled out, but some leave with ideas of prosperity and charms sold to them to save their lives. Those people, sucking on crude tobacco and waiting in the blue smoke, fat on the funds of those who came to them for help are some of the least known, but richest in the city.

(Sketch of fortune teller)

Fortune tellers often speak of the dead and the undead, of the spirits at haunt all the world, vengeful ghosts who seek nothing but destruction. Occasionally though, they will speak of the same idea that ties all mediums and prophesiers together: Billions of souls, trillions of them, all from the cities dead, sitting in the atmosphere, pushing the clouds down, containing them all, hoping to one day choke out all the city.

Of course we also have some of the most feared and whispered of occult things in the City of Offal, the Stitchers. Unseen, unknown, and spoken of only in whispers, as saying of them out loud is to draw their attention, the Stitchers haunt the streets of the City of Offal like the plagues that rot the city from the inside out. The superstitions around them are endless: speak of a Stitcher thrice in one day and they will come and take your organs with a snip snip snip, if you see one you must cover your whole body lest they steal away your soul, if a Stitcher is in town, then disease is sure to follow, etc. Stitchers, at their core, are a type of boogieman for most, a semi imaginary being who punishes those who aren't careful, who only the most desperate and insane go and interact with.

(Potential Stitcher design)

In the end, whether or not the superstitions, cults and rumors of the city, the occult and divine, are real is going to be up to the dm. Some may be all too real, with death cults raising horrible monsters, or they might simply be folks who believed in the wrong thing too much. Either way, the occult and divine, hidden though they are, are part of the mechanisms of the City of Offal

Edelgarde Midwyck, professor of theology and cosmology Lepistadt University, Lepistadt, Ustalav

Before the birth of everything, there came an ending, to which only one survivor bore witness.

In an ancient time inscrutable to us who now live, a universe unknown met its end. Whether this realm exploded in an unquenchable fire, or found itself snuffed quietly out like a candle, none can say. All that remained scattered amidst the blackness of space, speckling the void with the dying embers. Nothing remained but she: The Survivor, the Lady of Graves, the Mother of Souls. She, who threads the weft and warp of fate across the centuries; who holds life and death in her hands, gathered the remnants of existence and began anew. 

Her name is Pharasma, the First and the Last. 

Pharasma’s role as mother to our universe may seem strange to those who do not know her. After all, is she not the goddess of death? Does she not author the final pages of our soul’s journey? Those more familiar with her worship know better; after all, she also safeguards the passage into life. Midwives invoke her name and bless their knives with water drawn from her holy fonts. A goddess of cycles, she sharpened her skills on the greatest birthing of all: that of reality itself.

What her role might have been in those days before, none can guess. After all, we have nothing to draw from, save the groundless assumption that this previous incarnation must have resembled the current. I have my own suspicions, as do dozens of my contemporaries, the scholars and ascetics who dedicate their intellects to untangling the riddle of what could have been. Personally, I wonder if the Pharasma we know and the one that traversed an all-consuming apocalypse eons ago were much alike at all.

Consider Nocticula: once a demon lord, she murdered her contemporaries and assumed their roles, stole their devotees and quite literally built her kingdom upon their backs. Now, she has transformed herself into something new – a goddess of freedom and redemption. Perhaps, like Nocticula, Pharasma transformed herself upon the death of what came before, changed into a deity to suit the season of creation and destruction. Perhaps, Pharasma once knew a time when life and death did not hang in the balance of her every word and gesture.

Of course, if we further explore my theory, one must then wonder what sort of deity Pharasma could have been, back in those unfathomable days. I can envision her as a young deity bursting with vigor and life, ushering the fragile souls of the unborn into the light, guiding the hands of those wise, skilled women without whose ministry so many would meet an untimely end. Perhaps she walked among the people, with bare feet and ruddy cheeks warmed by the sun of an ancient world. Perhaps then, her face was not haunted by millennia of shadows.

Regardless of what form she took then, I cannot help but imagine how devastating that moment must have been – the moment when Pharasma looked around herself and saw that she truly existed alone, swaddled in void, with no one but the vast, unknowable Outer Gods watching from beyond with hungry eyes trained on our little empty scrap. How brave of her to take that solitude and wrap it around herself like a mantle, mold it into a shape that we could call home, breathing life into the ash and embers of the things she’d loved and lost. As a mortal, it may not be my place to do so, but I cannot help but pity her.

The actual writing of the first draft is about 70% done, with only lore and some scraps to attend to.

Despite this however, my motivation is running about dry, likely as part of just creative crash, but maybe also something to do with being locked in one setting for a while. Typically I draw more fantasy oriented things so this has been a whole different can of worms for me.

Either way I need to work on book art, writing down pretty words, and making a bunch of character tables and fun randomizers.

Have pictures of characters generated using the City of Offal!