The Shore

The coast of the Southern Salt is an intertidal zone that stretches well beyond the sight of any eyeglass. The tides beat a slow, unsteady rhythm and the locals keep pace. The local measure of time, the fiveyear, follows the water - it hasn't been anything close to five years in living memory. Somewhere in the endless expanse of littoral variety is the Captured Sea and its resident islands but for the most part it's fishing villages, houseboats, seaweed farms, snail ranches and merfolk warrens.

The below table isn't going to cover your whole adventure, but should be useful for generating a stretch of tidepools in a pinch. I'm thinking most groups of people you meet can just be from Skerples' neat camp follower table, reskinned a little for the setting. Oh, and remember to roll a d20 to figure out how many inches deep the water mostly is right now!

	Terrain	Creatures	Features	People	Threats
1	Round black stone, slick with algae	Toadfish and salamanders	Unfathomably deep pool. Suspiciously brackish	Floating house. Family of fishers, tiny dogs. Huge lucky fish under floorboards	Hermit crab. Cart-sized. Known for eating hermits
2	Jagged rows of orange rock	Gulls and clams	Massive ball of driftwood washed down from mangrove forests. Rustles	Clade of nomads on stilts, picking at debris with hooks and spears. Odd philosophy	Storm petrel. 20' wingspan. Lands like a thunderbolt
3	Thick layer broken, razorsharp shells	Snails and octopi	Dead animal, bloated and swarming with scavengers	Gang of smugglers in cramped boat, happy to trade for smallest valuables you have	Field of giant salt squirts. They begin erupting when you reach the centre*
4	Sucking mud, clumps of rotten seaweed	Crabs and platypi	Abandoned rowing boat. No oars, half full of rum, smashed chest in bottom	Snail gaucho, performing one of the slow hobbies of the snail people. Hundreds of whittled idols for sale, keen to buy anything smokeable	Bask of false gharials, ever smiling with those idiot mouths
5	Brittle, bleached coral	Silver fish and plankton clouds	Ineffectual attempt at tower. Long ago abandoned. Tallest thing for miles around	Salt witch on unidentifiable riding beast, pretending to not be a witch for comedic effect	Sentient algae. Exposed to a cut it will do its sad best to communicate via hallucinations, prophetic visions
6	Water slick quicksand, reflecting the sky	Silverfish and anenomes	Raised peat mound, standing out like a sore thumb. How has nobody nicked this yet?	Merfolk studiously pretending to be a "NORMAL HUMAN PERSON". Thinks there's nothing at all funny about this	Riddle fish. Squat, ugly, not near as well camouflaged as it thinks. Laughs, spitting poison, when you can't solve its riddles

*Remember that falling over on rocks or coral is likely to cut your shit up and maybe crack your skull unless you're wearing armour. If you're wearing armour, falling over in mud could see you drown before your slip-sliding companions can get to you. In sand it's just a fun and light-hearted time!

And of course you need a bunch of magic junk washed up on the interminable shores.

1. Spiral shell. Tip it and a pinch of sand pours from the mouth. Spin it around and other pinch falls. Spin faster and the sand begins to flow out in a stream. Held to the ear, one can hear the ocean, and the sound of someone very far away shouting into a near identical shell.
2. Palm-sized, translucent jelly, washed up after a savage storm. If the skin breaks it bursts into a wave. Good throwing technique allows for increased control over the resulting wash of water.
3. Knot of driftwood, snapped from a long-sunken ship. Molded by currents in the glacial rise to the surface, it now resembles a leering beast of the deeps. If returned to salt water, even just a bucketful, the wood will contort itself into a living, hateful creature and attack all in sight. Whittled into a religious symbol it will instead ward against the undead, evil, bad luck.
4. Bubbling fulgurite, emerging from the sand just before a storm strikes. If exposed to a cloudy sky it will call down a bolt of lightning and explode violently. The stone will absorb magic moving above it. Larger specimens soak more power before shattering.
5. Coral grown into jagged folds. When the right seam is found, and the coral twisted just so, the wielder is folded up into the piece. Fresh specimens may contain lairs of eels, labs of merfolk witches, troves of forbidden treasure. Some corals twist deeper and deeper, seeming without end.
6. Forked mangrove root. Held by the forks it points to fresh water. Held by the shaft it points to dry land. Planted forks-down in a dish of salt water it grows a serviceable quarterstaff in about 40 minutes.
7. Head-sized salt crystal, looks very nearly like it has a face. Touch the 'mouth' to anything and it will attempt to suck the water out of it. Wood can be rendered dry and brittle, flesh exsanguinated, pools of water greedily devoured. Also makes the air quite dry, if you don't cover it up.
8. Cuboid lump of pumice. Clutched in the fist it lightens the holder. Gravity is about 1/6th as effective on them and anything they hold. If something would float in water, it floats now. Swimming through air is hard, but achievable with a pair of wings.
9. Hard red jelly. Ingested, it causes the blood to thicken and grants immunity to bludgeoning, falling. A little more eaten and the limbs swell, crimson and heavy as cudgels. A little more seizes up the body and mires the heart. Repeat users are sluggish and mildly addicted.
10. Sea's tooth. A fist-sized rock that, nestled into mud or sand, functions as if it were the tip of a boulder ten thousand times as large. There's an exceptionally sturdy iron ring embedded in it, for convenience.

We Cursed These 12 Pirate Captains And You Won't Believe What Happened Next

They are still acting as captains, mind you, it's just that they are a:

1. Parrot. Looks at you with their head swung to the side, one eye open the other closed. Panoramic vision makes brain hurt. Gathers gossip, intelligence from seagulls.
2. Swarm of rats. Can't speak, but masters of cartography. Several will pause to stare disapprovingly if you make a rat joke.
3. Ship. Wheel turns on its own and crew scurry to keep up. Gives orders once a night at midnight answering yes/no questions. Silence means yes, horrible creaking means no.
4. Collective memory. The old crew can still hear a voice barking orders just over their shoulder. Spend enough time around them and you start feeling the stare of dead eyes.
5. Tarot deck. The more ways to deal a deck you know the more complex the conversations you can have. Afraid of being transformed back and losing powers of foresight.
6. Figurehead. Has had self removed from prow and set into back of wheel. Old enough to know basically everything about the sea.
7. Elaborate wig. Grows roots into anyone wearing them and gradually takes control. First thing they instill is a phobia of open flames.
8. Bank of fog. Can't go up on deck during high wind. Impossible to otherwise kill. Insists they are still a real person despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
9. Coral reef. Their fleet is anchored around them. Commandeered ships of no use scuttled, added to mass beneath the waves. Communicates semaphore-style with schools of colourful fish.
10. Barrel of Rum. Drinking more strengthens the urge to sail to a specific place and rob specific people, working oddly well as a team with all these people you just met tonight. Watering down the barrel does not diminish the effect.
11. Orangutan. Hates sound of own voice and does not speak. Evocative with sign language. Could already kill with bare hands before transformation, but enjoys improved climbing ability.
12. Sea monster. Mash-up of Davey Jones, the monster from The Host and the swarm demon from the Constantine movie, but all fish obviously.

Don't even TELL me this isn't super usable. Grab your faves and tell your PC's they have to turn them all back. Introduce one as a cute side character/source/fence/villain. Introduce two as fighting over a potential cure. Just think about the seahag that cursed them all!

Sally Sells Sea Spells By The Seashore

Instead of going to bed like a normal person I'm going to write these until I pass out.

I love the sea

1. Crabalanche
   Point at a crevice and crabs start pouring out of it. Like a thousand crabs. Maybe two thousand. They don't really do anything, just mill around for a while and then wander off. If you can't make this work you suck and I hate you.
2. Be Foam
   Turn into sea foam. Only able to reconstitute self when immersed in sea water. Can be used as a reaction to being squashed/crushed to death.
3. You Can't Drink Salt Water You Total Mong
   Make somebody start puking. Unless that person is a fish. Fish can probably drink salt water. The probably is there because, like, do fish drink at all? It feels like they don't need to but they probably do.
4. Slick
   Cover an area in thin layer of water. Functions like whatever that spell is that already does this. Alternatively, use this spell to make all your flirtations super effective. Or do anything else that's a meaning of the word 'slick'.
5. Eelpal
   Vomit out an electric eel. It is your friend and it loves you. Also it is one of your non-vital organs and you should probably swallow it again before the spell wears off.
6. Bubblebutt
   Summon a giant soap-bubble, centered on yourself. The bubble will absorb a kind of stupid amount of force, but can be cut reasonably easily with a sword/dagger/arrow.
7. Breathe Underwater
   Man that was a fucking obvious one.
8. Inksquirt
   Exactly as erotic as it sounds. Would be way more effective underwater, but still works like the way colour spray sounds like it should. 
9. Eight Arm Strike
   Use this to give yourself 8 actions in one turn. They're unarmed though, I guess, to stop this being disgustingly OP. It probably still is. Fuck you.
10. Swallow
    Swallow a thing. Big, metal and pointy. Huge, semi-solid ooze. Doesn't fucking matter. There's some kinda fish somewhere that could do it and now you can too.
11. Wave
    Wave comes outta somewhere. Rises up from ground, rushes out of cupboard, falls from chimney. Whatever makes least sense. Everyone falls over now.
12. Cephaloghost
    Spooky cephalopod spectre attaches to somebody. They gotta win a grapple or whatever, and get fucked up by suckerspikes every round it takes them. Like 1d3 or something?
13. Shellter
    Ha pun. Somebody's skin grows hard and thick and kinda gross. More armour less dex or whatever. Makes you really heavy, too.
14. Tradewind
    A stiff, reliable breeze starts blowing wherever you want it to, for as long as you keep concentrating plus a couple rounds of lee-way.
15. Stonefish Surprise
    Somebody gets stung in the foot by a stonefish. Save vs agony. Not even sure if this is a spell that stonefish mighta been there this whole time there is basically no way to be empirically certain.
16. Planulae Release
    Everything that isn't vigourously moving starts to get covered in coral. Focused on a small area or in a corridor or whatever, this makes the region unpassable. Broader areas just develop a rock-hard crust.
17. Luminesce
    Glow with the freaky light-show of a deep water beastie. Everyone watching has to save vs pretty colours or be entranced.
18. Swim
    Like Fly but, you know, you have to swim.
19. Drag to the Depths
    A big ol' tentacle pops out of the nearest man-sized hole and starts grabbing shit. Anything dragged in is in the nearest ocean now.
20. Landshark
    A friendly tiger shark shows up, leaving a nausea-inducing wake in the earth and biting chunks out of your enemies.

Fish are so scary

Cleric Rules I Stole From Last Gasp

This post was so heavily inspired by a Last Gasp thing I read the other day that I'm just going to start this with a huge quote:

There are still going to be mishaps ... it’ll be because their god doesn’t really understand what is appropriate. So if Roy’s snake worshipper Tipanius fudges a roll in the middle of combat and gets Inopportune Favour and falls to his knees vomiting an unending torrent of slick adult snakes, the Seven Serpents will be like, “Oh haha what, you didn’t want to give birth to a thousand snakes from your mouth right now? Haha whoops sorry love you xoxo.”

as Thanks for the inspiration Logan, and thanks g+ for giving me the tools I needed to spend like half an hour stalking the web to find that guy's name. Anyway.

This is just a cute photo of me.
pls put me in ur gam

SO YOU WANNA BE A HERO, KID

Using my little Adventure Point system is cute and fun because it lets people give themselves a really limited pool of useful abilities with no real limitations on what those abilities are, and that's my favourite thing in rpgs. (There's a whole separate spiel here about how you should have very few spells used in combat because problem solving with a fireball is a lot more interesting than just shooting things with one, and spells should maybe actually just be interesting versions of a ten-foot pole. But I digress)

In being a system that promotes choice, the AP system should also have ways for you to sidestep the rules. The simple way to do this, by my eye, is to trade things for power. You really, really want that fifth spell after I told you you only had 4AP? Sure thing, but you earn your last AP by giving my your legs. Your horrible cripple character has earned a weird fifth variation of magic missile by giving up the ability to walk, and I like that about them.

A very mild twist on this is to have powers with their own limitations. I read a cool thing one time many years ago about huge lists of totally amazing powers, all of which only worked in highly specific circumstances. A charm spell with no saving throw that only works on redheads at midnight. Mass hold person that you can cast from first level, but only if you're standing in a field of barley and it's your birthday.

And then the Last Gasp thing got me thinking about clerics and how they'd make a good testbed for a catchall ruleset. Behold an example cleric.

Thassa. Godhead of Seas, Serpents, and Compound Words

Vassal of Thassa (3AP Psuedoclass)

A Vassal of Thassa may, as a standard action, call upon a miracle from their fishgirl godqueen. This miracle can be absolutely anything, from making an anchovy appear out of thin air to drowning the world in briny agony, as long as it's appropriate to their god. The DM will decide on a difficulty for the miracle, with an approximate guide below.

• 0 for anchovies related activities, making a floor slick with seawater, finding nearest port
• 1 for summoning a helpful, dogsized electric eel, making someone puke barnacles for a turn
• 2 for capsizing small to medium sized vessel, raising fortifications of coral, drowning a target
• 7 for bringing back someone recently drowned, causing a hamlet to fill with salt water and fish
• 17 for producing a tidal wave, calling forth a leviathan, doing some amazing shit like that

Whenever the Vassal attempts to bring forth a miracle they roll a d20. If the result is higher than the difficulty of the miracle + their current Brine, it goes off fine. If the two numbers are equal, then the miracle goes of and there is a Terrible Occurrence. If the result is less there is only Terrible Occurrence and you can hear Thassa going 'wait y r u screaming??' in the background.

Regardless of what happens, the difficulty of the miracle is added to the Vassal's Brine. Brine may be reduced by 1 point a day with an appropriate act of worship, down to a minimum of 3. This minimum is also what it starts at at character gen, obviously. This means that you have a 15% chance of horrible failure even before you do anything interesting, which strikes me as a good tradeoff for really broad powers.

Speaking of horrible failure, roll on the table below to find out what happens. Maybe if you're nice you can base the die size of how much you rolled under by, or roll a d10 and add what you missed by. I ain't the boss of you.

Terrible Occurrences

1. All your gold is sand now. On the bright side, all your sand is gold.
2. Your stomach bulges uncomfortably. At midnight tonight you will birth a clutch of adorable baby crabs. They give you friendly nips with their claws as they climb out of you.
3. All fires in the vicinity are extinguished by a mysterious salty wind. You can't make fire work for you, for any reason, for the next week.
4. Start vomiting eels. Don't stop vomiting eels until you start to appreciate the feeling. That might take a while.
5. Everything goes blurry as your blood is replaced with salt water. Pass out for a while, wake up very, very hungry.
6. You are distracted by a passing swarm of beautiful jellyfish that are swimming through the air for definitely normal and friendly reasons. They totally aren't leading you off a cliff or anywhere dangerous like that.
7. Your whole head starts to ache, doesn't stop until the skin of your forehead bursts like a pimple and a slimy, anglerfish-style lure curls out. Casts light as a candle. Is really distracting.
8. Your left eye is a pearl now. Super valuable if you dig it out. Not so good for seeing out of, though.
9. Barnacles sprout from your skin, tearing at the soft flesh under your arms and between your thighs. It hurts to move for the rest of your life.
10. Coral polyps start shooting out of you like you're a broken gumball machine. Everybody makes a reflex save (except you you automatically fail hahaha) to avoid getting stuck in a new, incredibly heavy coral formation.
11. Everyone in the party must help find and drown an innocent before the next full moon or you'll all start waking up drowned, guiltiest first.
12. Your skin is stingers now. Anyone you touch gets painfully stung and must save v. convulsions. If they fail they save again v. death. There are no visible indicators of this.
13. Whenever you get drunk again, for the rest of your life, you will without fail be pressganged and wake up chained to an oar. No amount of precautions can prevent this.
14. Your blood is super delicious and even things that don't ordinarily smell that good can smell it from a mile away. Doubled in fresh water, tripled in salt.
15. You are being stalked by a prehistoric monster than only you can see. You will not be able to convince anyone else that it exists under any circumstances. It will only strike when you are alone. Try not to be that.
16. The skin of your neck ripples as new gills sprout. Your lungs shrivel up in your chest. You don't need those any more though, right? You should probably find some salt water. Quickly.
17. There is a pufferfish in your stomach. You can feel it, circling around in there. Make no sudden moves.
18. Everyone in 100' turns toward you, grinning. Their eyes are black. Their teeth are jagged and come in many rows. This includes the other PCs, who get a big old pile of bonus XP for each bite they take out of you. Once every scrap of your flesh has been consumed everyone goes back to normal and about their business as if nothing was wrong. You could cast another miracle to stop them all. It's going to be a hard one.
19. Save vs death. On success, tiny fish start bleeding out of your pores. Take an appropriately debilitating amount of damage. On failure, your body convulses, your skin ruptures, you burst apart into a torrent of sea life that rapidly begins to rot away. You are super dead.
20. Save vs death. On success, tiny fish start bleeding out of your pores. Take an appropriately debilitating amount of damage. On failure, your body convulses, your skin ruptures, you burst apart into a horror of the depths, unfolding impossibly from a too-small corpse. You are super dead and the new leviathan is hunting your friends.

First Impressions After Thinking About This For Like A Day

Hopefully this is a reasonably balanced set of general spellcaster rules that gives you a fun gambling minigame. Will you try to take out the ent in a single 5 Brine miracle, despite the fact that you already have 6 Brine? I mean what's the point of having these powers if you don't use them, right? Oh whoops you just turned a hard encounter into a TPK. lol.

So yeah, should give players a temptation to use magic until eventually they get a bad roll and succumb to the dark forces, in a way that nicely parallels the way I already think about succumbing to dark forces. As always, whether you use it or just think about it, tell me if it works!

Dark side, cookies, shit memes, etc

And if you were interested, my model for a d20 spell fuckup table is:

3x WEIRD BUT NOT THAT BAD IMMEDIATELY

3x NO LONG TERM EFFECTS, BUT TAKES YOU OUT OF THIS COMBAT MAYBE

3x LONG TERM EFFECTS THAT KIND OF SUCK

3x FUCKS WITH YOU AND ALL YOUR FRIENDS

3x PERMANENT CURSE

3x ABOUT TO KILL YOU

1x SAVE VS DEATH BAD TIMES FOR YOU

1x SAVE VS DEATH BAD TIMES FOR EVERYONE YOU KNOW