The Butterfly Effect

In each corp-issued spacer pack, and many of the ripoffs hawked to young vaqueres, there is a small yellow pocket tucked inside a flap. It contains a universal message:

Disclaimer: Do not use unless alone with no hope of rescue.
Instructions: Insert pill in mouth. Swallow with liquid. Relax.

The pack material may be thin, prone to tearing, contaminated, or looted, but the yellow pocket is taken seriously.

Space is the domain of entropy. Pure, unchained physics, tumbling and bouncing with all the lifeless joy of reality, gravity and light weaving tapestries of chaos into the infinite black.

This concert is rudely broken by the imposition of forged hunks of metal, steaming stations hurtling through the stars with intent and purpose. Entropy resents any state of order, especially that imposed by fragile creatures unsatisfied with their place in the universe.

It intervenes in small ways, where it can. Tools go missing. Circuits refuse to fire. Particulate clogs filters. Any action that unbalances the order imposed by spacers. Murphy will not be denied. Experienced vaqueros apply four simple rules to ward off the pressure of entropy:

1. A perfectly functioning station is a ticking bomb.
2. If you detect an outbreak of butterfly effect, act impulsively.
3. The simplest solution is the best one.
4. Three crewmembers are the absolute minimum for survival.

The longest lasting stations are often filthy and constantly threatening to tear at the seams, but their crews are Occam sharp and might live to collect one more check.

The second rule seems contrary to the cold logic necessary to engineer machines and mindsets hardened to survive space, but the black has its own rules, and the reed which bends will outlast the tree which breaks. When entropy gains a foothold and begins tipping the universal scales back towards balance, it's better to do what feels right than what is right. Split second decisions are always detrimental in the long run, but in that moment of panicked action, Murphy may lose interest and go ruin someone else's life.

The fourth rule derives from simple experience. It is categorically unsupported by any scientific study but almost always holds true in practice. Out of all the nonsense science, ritual, and bullshit practiced by spacers, this understanding has slowly coagulated into the general consciousness.

For whatever reason, the number of people needed to break even with Murphy is two. Three is enough to tip the scales in favor of survival. One lone spacer, stranded with a dead crew, is called a rubber band.

"See, it goes like this. You scan this band, ya? How it stretches and....snaps?

"Why does it snap? Can you tell me? No? Well, it snaps out of habit, kennit. It doesn't snap cause the material is stretched too thin, no. It doesn't snap cause its old and brittle. It can snap whenever it wants because anything is possible. Now, you scan, it snaps this particular way in this particular moment because the odds are so against it retaining cohesion down to the particruel. But when you spend a lifetime straining against the odds, the rubber band gets a little more give. Each time we cheat death, lil nebula, the list of possibilities stretches...and eventually, Murphy comes for you. How can it not? You brought the black upon you by cheating it so long, and the Sandman comes to collect.

"And in that moment, you need to stretch, nebula. Cause if you hold, if you don't give, your luck will snap. You'll be fine, but as you reason, as you deny Murphy, you'll give it what it needs to sever your  normal.

"And then, nebula? Can you guess what comes next? Hm? Not death, oh no, not for you. Everyone around you dies, and you remain, alive, cheatin the odds. Because you had to poke the bear, to understand why things go wrong outta nowhere. After that? You want to know, hah, what comes after that?

"Well, nebula, the butterfly effect never ends. And if you're really unlucky, you'll find out how deep the rabbit hole goes. Now fuck off. This is my forgetting time."

Sergio Diaz

There are always a certain kind of people sitting in taquerias. Not alone, not together, but distant. They all like coffee anytime. They all have little tchotchkes on necklaces or bracelets. They all drink like drowning fish and wear goggles even in near darkness. They always have guns and they play idly with knives. When they talk, it's maniac, short bursts of conversation interspersed with black silence. Everyone knows what they do, which is why nobody ever offers them a job. 

"What, you again. Don't you have a crew to pull together? Be damned to black if you think yer getting me on a station.

"You what to know why they call us monarch hunters? Shit, nebula, weren't you listening? Ain't you Googled something by this point? 

"....you know, and you want to be one?

"AHAAHAHAHAAAA......alright, kid. Sit down and I'll buy you the only drink you're ever getting off me. Savor this. It's your best friend after your first butterfly. Shit, don't puke on me or I'll break your legs.

"Anywhere, you want to be a monarch hunter? Well, kid, that's the easy job. Not what you thought, hotrod? No, the real dangerous job is a cocoon popper. Yes, I know what the forums say. You should know they speak bullshit from birth, wise up. 

"See, once the butterfly effect finishes and the monarch emerges, the station's a lost cause. Nuke it from a good distance and enjoy the fireworks, scan the flotsam, and pick it over for confirmation of death. 

"But when the cocoon's still intact? That's when the station's still good for salvage if you cut the rot out. So you gotta go in, you and your mates, and creep through the blood and metal. Yes, there's always blood. What, you think people die neat in space? Anyway, here's the difference between a bug cocoon and a space cocoon: the last one moves and thinks and kills. Ya didn't picture a big old sleeping bag strung up near a reactor, did ya? Kid, Birth in Black is some steaming slag. How much of that old flix did you believe?

"So, you're creeping through the station, looking for the cocoon. No lights unless you want to be food. If - if you're really lucky, and docked and boarded quiet and dark, it won't be hunting. If you made just one noise outta the ordinary, it'll know and it waits for you. No, I'm not kidding one noise. Cocoons have been holed up in the same shithole for months and they know it like their bones. You're stalking the lion in its den, and you can't damage the den too much because the zoo wants to rent it out to the next stupid occupant. Crawling and listening, crawling and listening. Never take your helmet off no matter what the scans say. That air is cursed and the cocoon usually fucks it up anyway. 

"What do they look like? Well, cocoons usually look like humans. Two of most everything. Eyes, ears, arms, legs, whatever. But the way they move....kid, they're dead. Well, not literally dead, that's probably not the case. But they move careless, they don't care what they break. Those eyes....there's nothing like them. No, I won't describe them. You gotta understand, they aren't human anymore. They belong to the black.

"As bad as it is playing pop-goes-the-weasel with a cocoon, the real terror comes when you figure out you're up against a monarch. Those things make your toolkit do the hokey pokey, and they know how to stalk, how to play dead, all the tricks predators know dragged outta the corners of our skull. And the worst part is, they're beautiful. Each one is its own hell, but after years spent in the black where all your color comes from flix and games, real colors....real colors, kid,shades you didn't know existed that make your eyes water and teeth hurt. 

"Of course, you pay a price for seeing them. Usually fellow spacers, but there's other prices. The good hunters, the ones that get the job done, the lucky ones, the ones with solid intel, they get to keep their eyes. All the rest of us saps...well, once we see a monarch...I've got a catheter on my damn head for a reason.

"Heh. You want to hunt these things? Yeah, you might get lucky and go viral, assuming you have any looks left after your first time being hunted. 

"There was a time I'd take you along because I used to think kids have a right to adventure yadda yadda yadda. I don't want to clean your blood off my suit, I've done it enough, and I certainly don't need to hear any more screams. Enjoy the drink, go find a better job, and seriously piss off this time. If I see you here one more time, I'm going to kick your guts out. Now, if you're terminally stupid, listen:

"My ship's the Charybdis. If you show up at 0400 with good gear, I'll take you on the last trip of your life. No, I'm not telling you where it is, and don't bother checking the logs. I've pissed off corpo too much to use my real name. Hell, I could be a drunk-ass miner luring you into a mugging. Now let me get back to forgetting."

Harley Wilson

In the inky cradle of entropy, someone who beat the odds too many times can beat them in a new way, and become something greater than the sum of their parts. 

The first step is isolation. It's surprisingly easy to maintain a station with only one spacer, once Murphy has its tendrils in you. First comes the relief of survival, then the loneliness, then the power failure. Always the power failure. It only takes the light. After that, desperation, screaming madness, and catatonia. The human in the grey matter shrivels and dies. And, against all odds, in complete darkness, something wakes up.

It's a new life, and it explores its home, relearning movement without eyes, intuiting adjustments to allow access to all parts of the station. And the cocoon drags what's left of the human it was to a small, warm, comfortable place. Maybe it produces fabric to shroud its nest. Maybe it fuses layer upon layer of steel to a shipping container to create a crumpled, tunnel-ridden ball. Maybe it wreathes its den in layers of lethal radiation from a cracked reactor vent. Maybe it vents part of the station and makes its bed in complete vacuum. 

Not that it sleeps, of course. Only consciousness needs sleep, and a cocoon has nothing we would call a mind. No, the bed is for when it wants to be reborn in a cracking, glistening process, like shedding a person-shaped egg. 

And the monarch is beautiful and terrible, bending the entire station to its will, singing in electromagnetic spectrums that scramble radios and induce dementia. 

The monarch's song has another power, too: it increases entropy. Stations nearby will experience more and more butterfly effects, and if the monarch is allowed to sing, or, stars forbid, migrate, all close stations will succumb in a chain of fantastic coincidences. 

Out of all the first series of station launches, only a handful of humans survived, and only a few monarchs were killed. Some nests began to move again after most function ceased, the butterflies migrating to parts unknown.

And judging from intermittent, increasing periods of comms static, some have begun to return. 

--------

I wrote this with Mothership in mind, but it could easily adapt to any space game you care to run. 

How Is This Station Going To Screw You? (d8)

1. All the doors have been fused shut. How is the cocoon getting around?
2. Leaking reactor. Better hurry....and your radios are futzed from the radiation.
3. Repurposed drones seek to repair station, repair your gear, repair you, or kill you. Mostly kill you.
4. Parts of the station are gone, and all areas larger than a bedroom are filled with chunks of debris.
5. AI driven insane by isolation and lack of maintenance, completely ignorant of the current state of cocoon, treats cocoon as commanding officer.
6. Malfunctioning cryounit traps past crew in stasis to preserve them, releases them when it detects more humans.
7. Rogue mining drone in hibernation. Wakes up and seeks to recover valuable component to fix itself upon spacecraft arrival.
8. Debris storm after arrival. Need to assess spaceship damage and scavenge parts.

What Powers Does This Cocoon Have? (d20)

1. Bend your perception of time. 
2. Wipe itself from your eyesight.
3. Alter temperature levels from below zero to above boiling.
4. Remove your ability to feel pain.
5. Make you hear voices. 
6. Imitate noises perfectly.
7. Interfere with electronics or nucleics.
8. Ignite with a touch.
9. Bend metal like clay.
10. Produce sensory organs that resemble wiring exactly.
11. Host a technological device.
12. Kill your immune system with a look. 
13. Lethally radioactive when in the same room.
14. Vibrate at a frequency to shatter glass and hard plastics.
15. Emits pure hydrogen and is immune to fire and explosions.
16. Secretes sticky, inflammable, corrosive goo.
17. Increase air pressure.
18. Produce and absorb electrical current.
19. Symbiotic fungus colonizes all surfaces, is inevitably fatal to all organic life.
20. My Stars These Glorious Scintillations Are Enrapturing

All monarchs, regardless of their looks, possess certain abilities. They are incredibly strong, do not need any atmosphere, and are immune to all forms of radiation. The butterfly effect is massively amplified around them, and any gear too close will begin to suffer catastrophic failures. 

They are always singing and talking, streams of radiation pouring from them and illuminating the impossible colors of their bodies. This song can be altered to prevent any transmissions or massively boost them. It also interferes with communication between neurons, leading to quick dementia, hallucinations, and eventually catatonia. Looking at them indirectly, with a spacesuit, causes cataracts to form. Looking at them directly sears their image into your eyes forever.

They want to travel the stars and show us the orchestra of the universe. Unfortunately, they're not quite sure how, and most of their methods involve ripping pesky chunks out and replacing them. Most spacers vivisected this way die a quick death, but there's always the chance of someone beating the odds...

What Is The Monarch Capable Of? (d8)

1. Gravitational anomalies. Serious ones.
2. Manipulation of computer systems by thinking. AI can resist.
3. Creating clones after getting DNA sample. They fall apart after several days.
4. Combustion ceases to work. 
5. Consumes all electromagnetic radiation.
6. Flight. Shit.
7. Manipulates magnetism.
8. Come My Child, Let Me Show You The Glory Of The Stars

What Does This Monarch Look Like (d6, roll four times)

It's dreadful colors are...

1. Amber with shimmering cyan and lurking red
2. Bright magenta with opaque black and yellow fringes
3. Staticky chartreuse with dripping white and opalescent red
4. Oil-slick pink with dark purple streaks and sparking black
5. Matte orange with fluid grey and veins of white
6. Glossy lime with chocolate ridges and crimson beads

Its appendages are....

1. Keratinous and multitudinous
2. Glasslike and constantly flowing
3. Shrouded in clouds of seeds like dandelions
4. Mucous dripping off hard edges
5. Flaps of hair oscillating, concealing holes
6. Acne-studded, wet musculature

Its body is....

1. Radially symmetric, with evenly spaced appendages
2. Lopsided, with pulsing, downy bags of organs on the larger side
3. Trunklike, with irregular crustacean plates and antennae
4. Perfectly anorexic, with each tendon and bone outlined
5. Organs connected by floating silky strands
6. Kelpy fronds quivering like plucked strings

And its head, oh stars its head is...

1. Chitinous petals arranged in the shape of a rose that unfold to reveal dark milky orbs
2. Flesh bulging through a skull, pulsing veins and shuddering eyes encased in dry bone
3. Luminous radiance emitted by floating polyps
4. It...doesn't have one? Wait. What's that in the corner of my eye?
5. A void of perception. Your head is drawn towards it.
6. A cat's cradle of relaxed muscle that tenses when it perceives a threat. 

Milan Nikolic

Ezcocotli

This post is for the GLOG Mech Challenge thundering around its small corner of the OSR Discord. Other pilots are: Lexi at A Blasted, Cratered Land, Ancalagon the Black at Of Slugs and Silver, Micah at Nuclear Haruspex, Princess in Yellow at Words for Yellow, rtx at Octarine Tinted, Vulnavia at The Lovely Dark, Skerples at Coins and Scrolls, and Gorinich at their blog.

DOFRESH.

Six pilots. One for each sense: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, and proprioception.

See the chairs: five in a circle, resplendent with tapered helmets and grooved handholds, round a column thickly veined with glimmering, twitching tubes, cycling eutectic fluids through shallow trenches surrounding each helmet. You must strip and put on a bodysuit before the chair will open for you, unfolding curvaceous metallic petals designed to cradle your reclining form while stifling the agony and spasms of neural feedback.

One chair, separate from the rest, open to the interior. No petals here, simply an unassuming morass of silvery restraints. You must be bound by helping hands if you wish to helm the ezcocotli.

Once the pilots are cushioned and bound, trigger the starting sequence, fingers dancing over armchair embedded haptic sensors and eyes flickering through tracking sequences designed to ease the brain into releasing its grip on individuality. The corpus will shudder under you, dim impulses racing though neurons and trailing their way down the corestem, calling out to the organs, rousing systems from their slumber.

The five columnar cradles will gently film over, but the sixth will gyrate to an erect position while the cranium fills with a cerulean fluid, and the propriocept will dissolve into the liquid. The solution, now a deep emerald, will drain from the cranium and begin cycling through the helmets of the Senses. Simultaneously, a threadlike needle thrusts into five brains, seeking engorged grey matter exclusive to k'ix.

At this point, all pilots (except the sixth) must Save versus a respective stat. Mutations do not impose disadvantage on this Save, but Insanities or powerful magic (curses, etc) do. Take each stat a Sense saved against and compile them. Those stats are now the operational stats of the Ezcocotli.

Sight - Intelligence
Hearing - Will
Taste - Strength
Smell - Constitution
Touch - Dexterity

All Saves passed: The ezcocotli achieves perfect sync. All abilities are available, and estimated operation time before irrevocable brain damage is 6d10 minutes.
4/5 Saves passed: The corpus is operational, but suffers from a sensory Drift. The abilities granted by perfect sync and the failed Sense are nonfunctional. Roll on the Drift table to determine what effects plague the deployment. Operational time 5d8 minutes.
3/5 Saves passed: The ezcocotli is functional, but suffers from a Drift, and the abilities granted by the failed Senses are unavailable. Operational time 4d6 minutes.
2/5 Saves passed: Warning lights flash as slivers of ice withdraw from your brain. The propriocept must Save versus Will to reincorporate. Reactivation can be attempted with a different arrangement of pilots once. If the second time fails, those pilots can never sync with that ezcocotli again.
1/5 Saves passed or less: The corpus quakes as uncoordinated signals spider throughout its system. All pilots must Save or die seizing, iridescent spittle flecking from their lips as torrents of foreign signals unwrinkle their brains. The propriocept is trapped in the system until another successful activation is completed.*

Sensory Drift (1d6)

1. Synesthesia. When exposed to significant sensory input, another unrelated sense is triggered.
2. Dyspraxia. Save vs Will each round or always go last in initiative order.
3. Congenital analgesia. The ezcocotli cannot feel pain. It will still take damage, but that damage is unknown to the PC's. They'll figure it out when reduced to 0 HP.
4. Photosensitive seizures. Save vs Con when exposed to scintillating/bright lights or collapse for 1d4 rounds.
5. Input loss. The ezcocotli doesn't have access to the failed Senses and associated abilities.
6. Alien hand syndrome. One arm performs its own actions. Roll reaction to see how it responds to any encounter. 

Ariel Perez

Base Rules for Ezcocotli Piloting:
Everything is scaled up by 6 from a regular humanoid perspective. Each round of combat is 6 rounds longer, damage from an ezcocotli to a smaller target is multiplied by 6, and any damage an ezcocotli takes from something smaller than itself is divided by 6. Each inventory slot filled with armor ignores 6 damage from small sources. Improvise details based on this guideline as necessary.

Since each normal combat round takes 10 seconds, a round of ezcocotli combat is a minute. Plan well when piloting. You won't have much time.

From the pilots perspectives, combat and spells function normally, and things that regular humanoids can't normally harm (like large buildings) now have HD of their own.

For every minute that the ezcocotli is active, it loses 1 hit point. At the beginning of every minute beyond normal operational time, all pilots gain 1 point of Will. This ability score damage is permanent.

Hit points are equal to the combined Stress maximums of each pilot minus any Stress the pilots may be carrying.

A quick reminder of how my Stress score works: it's (20 - [Will score]) / 2. A PC with 10 will has a Stress maximum of 5, while a PC with 12 Will has a Stress maximum of 4. If a pilot with a Stress maximum of 5 currently has 3 Stress, they only contribute 2 HP to the activated ezcocotli.

When HP is reduced to zero, a random pilot (never the propriocept) must Save versus their own Will. If they succeed, they desync and gain 1d4 stress. If they fail, they desync, and they gain Stress equal to the damage of the triggering attack (which may trigger additional saves). When a pilot desyncs, the ezcocotli loses access to that Sense and corresponding abilities, and suffers from a Sensory Drift if necessary.

If the number of synced Senses is reduced to 2 or less, the ezcocotli shuts down.* All synced pilots must Save versus their own Will, desyncing and gaining 1d4 Stress on a success, and gaining Stress equal to the last damage taken on a failure. The propriocept must then Save versus their Will to reincorporate, remaining in the system on a failure.

During a normal system shutdown (which takes 1 round out of combat with at least 1 HP), all the pilots disengage normally, except the propriocept, who must Save vs their Will. On a success, they reincorporate normally with 1d4 Stress. On a failure, they reincorporate with 1d4 mental inventory slots stolen from another player and 1d4 Stress.

Regardless of the shutdown circumstances, each pilot who participated in a deployment cannot pilot an ezcocotli again until they finish a long rest.

Most Sense abilites take a round to use.

If the propriocept has any class templates, the excocotli gains access to those features. Remember, all effects (except for time) are scaled up by 6: 6 times the range, 6 times the damage to humanoid size creatures, etc.

The corpus vary in size. Most are about 200 feet tall. All are bipedal. They move with the laboring tread of weary travelers.

Ezcocotli Types:

Pilot advice paragraph:
Some powers only work with sunlight or starlight. Pilots cannot use the same power twice in a row.
Sense powers exist as options for pilots, not the only things ezcocotli can do. The propriocept has access to all their class templates and abilities. Corpus deal 6x damage to humanoids and humanoids deal 1/6 damage to the corpus, but ezcocotli deal normal damage to each other.

Tlaloque
Description:
Shambling, slope-shouldered giant with luminous yellow eyes and huge plates of greenish, rusted metal draped over its body. As it walks, black dust flakes from its joints. It carries a large stone net speckled with barnacles and dried seaweed over one shoulder.

Stat Alterations:
-2 to Str and Con, +2 to Dex

Sense Abilities:
Sight - Can see through large bodies of liquid, even in total darkness, and can melt into mist and emerge from any water sources that it can see big enough for it to crawl out of.
Hearing - The Tlaloque can produce a thunderclap loud enough to extinguish fires and crinkle concrete by snapping its fingers. (d6 damage)
Taste - Can drink an unlimited amount of liquid and regurgitate it as a high pressure stream full of muck and fish.
Smell - Can filter all creatures out of all water within sight by dragging its net through the water.
Touch - Lightning blasts out of the sky, coils its way down the Tlaloque's arm, and leaps at what the ezcocotli is pointing at. (d4 damage to Tlaloque, 2d6 to enemy ezcocotli)

Perfect Sync:
The net separates into a bunch of floating stone chunks that slowly orbit the Tlaloque. The chunks can be mentally directed to create long strands that can wrap around creatures (even noncorporeal ones), grab things, whips, etc.

Tzitzimitl
Description:
Its physical form is defined by a lack of substance, but the many grey, frost-encrusted bands wrapping around something hint at a bony, puckered form with unnatural joints. Its head is encased in a single flawless sphere of obsidian, and its claws are jagged voids in space.

Stat Alterations:
-2 to Will and Dex, +2 to Con.

Sense Abilities:
Sight - Wherever the Tzitzimitl focuses (treat as human sight arc), other creatures cannot see. Its range of vision is broken by solid objects, the horizon line, or magical light. Ezcocotli may Save vs Con with disadvantage to see normally each round. In addition, the Tzizimitl can see in all directions under the night sky.
Hearing - Any sound the Tzitzimitl makes or hears can be redirected to emerge from another location it can see.
Taste - Any shadow cast by the Tzitzimitl can become a void. It can reverse the polarity of the void if it chooses, causing any consumed objects to spill out. Things that do not die in the void become strange. Ezcocotli will fall in if they fail a Save vs Dex.
Smell - The Tzitzimitl can inhale and suck up all the nearby air. The atmosphere comes back in 1d4 rounds, but takes time to leak into enclosed spaces. Ezcocotli do not need air.
Touch - Under starlight, anything the Tzitzimitl touches with ill intent ceases to exist. Ezcocotli take normal damage. (d8 damage)

Perfect Sync:
At night, the Tzitzimitl can teleport to any area touched by starlight.

Centzon Totochtin
Description:
A portly, enormous shape wearing a tight, wrinkled yellow jumpsuit streaked with garish green and blue stripes. Occasionally, massive tufts of crusty hair erupt from rifts. It has a huge, green-stained clay vase tucked underneath one arm, and huge ears sticking out of a skeletal head encased in glass.

Stat Alterations:
-2 to Con and Str, +2 to Will.

Sense Abilities:
Sight - Whenever sunlight reflects off the skull, it bounces a rainbow of colors on the surrounding area. Creatures the colors wash over suffer associated emotions a la Green Lantern.
Hearing - The Totochtin begins shuffling, beating on its vase and tapping its massive feet. Save vs Will or dance with it for 1d4 rounds.
Taste - The Totochtin throws the contents of its vase on something. Any creature the milky fluid touches (including ezcocotli) must Save vs Str or hallucinate a field of flowers, upon which rabbit skins cavort, fuck, and drink dust from bottle stumps. Lasts for 1d4 rounds.
Smell - Any creature close enough to smell the Totochtin must Save vs Int (ezcocotli save with advantage) or begin to hear a nonstop voice chattering in their head, alternating between tinkling jokes, screaming in despair, and a deep chanting voice overlaid with a cacophony of heartbeats. This drowns out normal hearing. Gain 1 Stress for every minute spent listening to this drivel.
Touch - If the Totochtin caresses a dead creature, that thing turns into a gargantuan, drooling rabbit with bloodshot, human eyes. (4 HP on the ezcocotli scale, bites for 1d4 damage.)

Perfect Sync:
The Totochtin takes a huge swig from the vase (somehow) and sprays it in the air. Everyone within sight range (including ezcocotli) must Save vs Con or become blackout drunk for 1d4 rounds. This ability can only be used once per deployment. Roll on the below table to see what happened!

What's Happening? (1d6)

1. Ezcocotli are doing a breakneck tap routine in sync which has shaken 1d4 surrounding buildings down.
2. Totochtin sitting cross-legged on the ground, picking up corpses from a massive pile, kissing them, and placing them on the ground as they turn into rabbits. 2d6 huge rabbits are cavorting around its feet.
3. Orgies! Orgies everywhere! 
4. The Totochtin is lying on its back across a couple buildings, unconscious, with a huge gash across its chest revealing fungus-matted hair and a large crack in its glassy skull. Your ezcocotli has lost 2d6 HP. 
5. *snarl* KKKKKRRITCKTCKTCKTCKCHCHCHCHCKRRRIIIIIIII*
6. You awakens to blackness. You have a very large vase on your head. Before you can take it off, something thwacks you hard. Save vs Str with disadvantage or fall over.

Cueyatl
Description:
A bulbous iridescent blue creature with spindly legs and arms crisscrossed in blackened rubber. It is slathered with a clear gel, and wears a massive golden helmet from the nose up. Its mouth yawns with slack lips and multitudinous slender teeth.

Stat Alterations:
-2 to Int and Dex, +2 to Str and Con

Sense Abilities:
Sight - The Cueyatl can focus on an object. That object is slathered in incredibly slick, foul smelling grease which causes seizing death to any human sized creatures that touch it. (1d4 damage to ezcocotli)
Hearing - Creatures that hear the Cueyatl croak must Save vs Int or go into a murderous frenzy for 1d4 rounds.
Taste - The Cueyatl can lick something and leave behind corrosive, tarlike saliva that turns into expanding foam when exposed to water. (Saliva/foam 2d4 damage to ezcocotli)
Smell - The Cueyatl can regurgitate a huge pile of decomposing matter. It can eat this stuff to regain 1d4 HP/round eating.
Touch - When the Cueyatl touches an ezcocotli, the target must Save vs Str at the start of 1d4 rounds or be paralyzed for that round.

Perfect Sync:
If the Cueyatl takes a huge bite out of something and spends a round digesting, it gains a beneficial mutation based on the qualities what it ate. All gained mutations last until the end of the deployment.

This list is by no means exhaustive.

Sheng Lam

Design Notes:
All these mechs are based off of mythological creatures from Aztec mythology. The abilities are hopefully useful as tools - some ezcocotli have a different set of powers than others. I'm pretty confident that any party could find a good use for each ezcocotli.

I know the majority of mech systems feature details on armor plating, energy costs, hard points, and size categories. I have absolutely no interest in creating and balancing a system like that. In my mind, the emphasis of piloting an ezcocotli should be on the players. Skerples, of course, has already done this, but I like to think mine is a convergent evolution.

The energy source for these things is your PC's sanity. If you step into the mech with a horrible fixation on cornhusk dolls, you may enter a downward spiral and eventually end up gnawing your legs off in a dark corner, giggling about braids and bean eyes. These things require stable meat to function. The cancerous, partially ossified brain tissue of a wizard is just perfect for this.

There's no dramatic death and dismemberment table. I don't think I need one. It's not the ezcocotli that takes the damage, it's the PC's. Besides, any good combat will have these massive creatures wreaking absolute hell on whatever landscape they fight in. Be sure to narrate screaming, fleeing crowds, numb, freshly orphaned children, bloody paste among crushed concrete, and the like. In my games, the PC's usually end up protecting people through their actions, so a lot of these creatures have collateral damage abilities to create a tension between "incapacitate the hideous monster" and "rescue the trapped children from face-melting acid".

The reason I used a x6 scale is because I want to be able to create a sense of pressure. Deployments are short. Get the job done. Also, since my combat rounds are 10 seconds, I could create a scenario where PC's struggle to accomplish a task around two fighting ezcocotli or attempt to hinder one before it does something horrible while a friendly one boots up.

Additionally, very powerful spells (3 MD and up), artillery, and strategic building demolition will have an effect on these things. Not enough to kill it (unless that deployment really has shit HP), but enough to tempt ezcocotli into spending a turn annihilating something.

I do indeed know that there are 7 senses. (Balance, proprioception, touch, smell, sight, hearing, and taste.) I chose 6 because I wanted to include one pilot for every stat I have and create an additional way to customize each mech.

While you can't alter the abilities of your ezcocotli (or can you?), each party can create a different playstyle depending on the class abilities of the propriocept, how many Sense saves they pass to activate the corpus, and the PC - Sense pairs. I feel comfortable with this level of customization - each deployment will be very different. If your party doesn't have 6 PC's, snag a couple of NPC's. It won't change too much because the group runs the mech anyway.

To my current players: don't read any further. Here be spoilers!

Sheng Lam is awesome

Alright. Remember the asterisks from before? Go back and take a look at the sentences they mark.

Each asterisk details a case in which the ezcocotli has a 25% chance of waking up from its horrible temporal-spatial lobotomy, ripping off its entropic shackles, purging the cryptosemantic slave-patterns from its causality, and going completely fucking insane. All the terror of an angry god's rampage without any hope of salvation (unless another piloted ezcocotli is in the area hehehehehe.) If an ezcocotli gains its freedom with pilots inside, its consciousness will drive them insane or the cradles will flood their brains with a chemical designed to induce quick death. Either way, those PC's are gone.

If you're a dick like me, don't be upfront about this danger. Hint at it, but keep it a surprise. Don't tell my players.

Enjoy these blood vessels (ezcocotli translated), and go read the other mech rules!

Lakamha: A City of Tables

Occasionally, when the madness seizes us, the denizens of the GLOG Ghetto decide to spew forth ramblings on a specific topic. A challenge, if you will. It usually percolates through the assorted blogs like honey, reaching some more slowly than others. Here's my hat toss for the city challenge, with a bunch of tables that I recently used over the course of three sessions in my ongoing GLOG campaign. 

Lakamha, or "Big Water", is a large Mayan metropolis so named for the myriad aqueducts coursing and crisscrossing the hill the city slopes down, bringing sheets of white water from the rainy mountains. If the Incans gain control of the water management system, they can stop the flow of water to lower, outlying agricultural demesnes, triggering a chain of surrenders that will cascade all the way to the coast, cutting off the unconquered western edge of the Yucatan from Triple Alliance supplies and reinforcements.

If you're playing in my campaign, I'd ask you not to look at the tables below because I'm probably going to reuse parts of them. The one table you really shouldn't peep at is the Loot! table. 

Alexander Skold

Main Objective: Extract an Triple Alliance Incan infiltrator - with important information - from a neighborhood under attack. 

Other Objectives:

- Map a clear path for evacuees to reach the camp. 

- Kill Incan scouts and soldiers. 

You have 9 ticks before the building is cut off from our forces. Each time-significant encounter/detour takes a tick to resolve, and might prompt a roll for another random encounter. It takes 7 ticks to get to the building by the straightest route.

Encounter tables (1d8)

1. Environment
2. People
3. Friendly
4. Hostile
5. Hostile
6. Mixed
7. Mixed
8. Mixed

Mixed encounters - roll to get 2 other encounters that aren’t Mixed and combine. Examples below.

1. Medical tent for wounded run by Inca - 4 soldiers on patrol, 1d4 Mayan wounded, 1d4 Mexica wounded, 2 Incan doctors. Loot!
2. 2d4 Incan soldiers removing wounded Mayans from a collapsed building, giving them first aid, and putting them on stretchers. Loot!
3. 2d4 Incan soldiers with 1d4 unarmed prisoners, escorting prisoners to Incan camps
4. 1d4 unarmed civilians, one is a spy who will set next encounter to hostile ambush

Environment encounters (1d4)

1. Burst water main - provides fresh water, but forces you to go around. Add a tick.
2. Collapsing building! Dex save to avoid rubble, on failure, take 1d2 damage and have to scramble over or around it. Add a tick.
3. Functioning car with seating for 4 - will shorten distance by 1d2 ticks before running out of fuel. If shot at, breaks down after 10 damage (75% chance) or explodes for 1d4 damage (25%) chance.
4. Abandoned shop

1. Abandoned open-air market - 50% chance of ambush by a hostile encounter. Otherwise, can scavenge 1d4 rations of fresh food
2. Children’s toys shop  - has usable solution-powered gadgets and solution
3. Rubber shop - outfits for disguise and 
4. Doctor’s - scavenge medical kit with 1d4 uses (2d4 with Medicine skill)
5. Pottery store - bowls/cups, kilns, dangerous chemicals
6. Calendrist - accurate timekeeping materials, predictions, omens

People encounters (1d8)

1. 1d4 armed Mayans holed up at a chokepoint, armed with rifles and 1 grenade. Intensely paranoid of all “foreign soldiers”, if convinced to help, will hold the point as long as possible.
2. Fleeing crowd - Str save to avoid taking 1d2 damage and being pushed back a tick.
3. 2d4 unarmed civilians, if helped, give 8 rounds of pistol (evens)/rifle (odds) ammo.
4. Priest of Tlaloc praying at a fountain. If convinced to evacuate, will sense party’s location through water and advise them through water.
5. 1d4 civilians carrying wounded or dead, if helped, will give clotting factor.
6. 1d4 unarmed civilians, one is a spy who will set next encounter to hostile ambush
7. 2d6 civilians trapped on higher floors of a burning building. If saved, give the party an introduction to a noble family.
8. 1d4 civilians attempting to extricate a trapped kid with a wounded parent inside a collapsed building. If helped, give party access to important infrastructure

Friendly encounters (1d8)

1. 1d4 Triple Alliance soldiers escorting 2d6 refugees to safety. If directed to avoid obstacles, earn services of random shopkeeper
2. 4 soldiers resting in a building, 3 wounded, 1 on patrol. If helped, provide info on hidden arms cache.
3. Ambush set by 1d6 friendly soldiers. When defused, give info on movements of enemy patrol
4. Temporary command post set up by Triple Alliance/Mayan soldiers. Refill on 1d4 rounds of ammo, one slot of special equipment, choose next encounter from 1d4 options
5. Wounded Mayan officer from a slaughtered division with important information which gives hints to the next random encounter. If helped, will get back to headquarters and the party gets a favor from the Mayan military hierarchy.
6. Ome of Xipe Totec with an attendant, looking for people to be healed/put to peace.
7. Ome of Tezcatlipoca, can provide a charm allowing for concealment
8. Special auxiliary separated from group (50%) or only survivor (50%). If directed to safe location, owes party a favor/can introduce them to a group.

1. Wizard (roll to generate which one)
2. Radiomancer
3. Biomancer
4. Rubberist
5. Berzerker
6. Ome (roll to generate which one)
7. Veteran

Hostile encounters (1d6/8) (1d8 is for when they get close)

1. Artillery barrage
1. Tear gas - 40’ radius, visibility 10 feet, dissipates in 6 rounds. Save vs Con or be blinded and coughing. Effects persist 1 round after exposure ends. Visible white cloud.
2. Atlacoya’s Kiss - 40’ radius, dissipates in an hour in sunlight after 1d6 hours. Save or gain 1 Exhaustion from dehydration every round of exposure. When mixed with water and exposed to light, the water evaporates. Visible blue cloud. 
3. Qaparqachay - 1000’ radius, dissipates in 2d4 hours. Emits a loud, wavering cacophony, making sleep impossible. Save or gain 1 Stress/hour when audible. Within 100’, Save or be deafened.
4. Tracer round - 10’ radius, Save vs Con or be blinded for 1d4 rounds. Enemies will converge on this position in 2d6 rounds.
2. 4 Incan soldiers, either on patrol (evens) or waiting in ambush (odds). Loot!
3. Incan command post - contains 2d6 soldiers and a captain along with a mobile telegraph station. The captain knows where the tank is heading. 3 things of Loot!
4. 1 TIA warlock with 3 Incan soldiers on patrol. Loot!
5. 2 Incan soldiers carrying 2 more wounded with 1 soldier on patrol. Loot!
6. Incan medical post guarded by 4 soldiers, with 2 medics attending to 1d4 wounded Incans. 2 things of Loot!
7. Sniper, holed up at the top of a building, kills a visible target (evens) or misses party (odds) on first shot. Loot!
8. Tank, rolling through the streets. Main gun deals 4d6 damage in a 20’ radius but takes a round to reload, machine gun deals 2d8 damage. Rolls at 20’/round. Cannot be damaged by small arms.

Loot! (1d6)

1. Grenade

1. Frag nade - 2d8 damage in 10’ radius, half in 20’ radius, save for half (Cover grants advantage), 1 action before detonation
2. Flash nade - Save vs Con if looking at the nade or be blinded, Save to end at start of round, cover means automatic pass, 1 actions before detonation
3. Smoke nade - Emits dense smoke that reduces visibility to zero in a 20’ radius for 1d4 rounds, instant detonation

2. Flare gun with 1 colored flare loaded

1. Yellow flare - call for reinforcements/evacuation, which arrive in a tick.
2. Blue flare - call for artillery strike, which arrives on that location in 2d4 rounds.

3. Quipu with coded information

1. Info on Incan infiltrator
2. Specifics on future (evens) or present (odds) assault
3. Location of shop which is a front for an Incan weapon cache
4. Details of special mission the quipu’s owner was sent on

4. Ornamental object

1. Small engraved gold shotglass
2. Patterned blanket denoting native ayullu
3. Tintype of the soldier’s family (evens) or partner (odds)
4. Checkerboard ceramic bowl with red lip

5. Small silver animal

1. Alpaca
2. Condor
3. Guinea pig
4. Tapir

6. Magical objects/drugs

1. Inti quipu - if thrown over back, wearer becomes invisible for one tick in direct sunlight. Recharges when left in darkness for a day.
2. Ayawaska powder - if inhaled, thrown in eyes, or eaten, Save vs Con or have a seizure/hallucinate for 1d4 rounds. 50% chance to get a glimpse of the future. If mixed into water and drunk, Save vs Con. On a success, see a round of future (evens) or past (odds). On a failure, shit yourself. Add one Stress until you change your pants.
3. Coca rocks - if crushed and snorted, remove one point of Exhaustion and can skip lunch without ill effects, advantage on initiative rolls for a tick.
4. Black ceramic flask - can store 1 inventory slot of stuff for every day exposed to direct sunlight, subtracting one slot a day without sunlight exposure. Wide enough to fit a hand inside. Starts at 1d4 slots.

Design Notes:

These tables worked pretty well introducing situations and obstacles for the party to bypass/push through. The best part was definitely when I rolled an artillery barrage and a tank at the same time while the party was already motoring along in a car. They eventually took over and commandeered the tank, reducing the pilots into a potpourri of meat mush. 

The best situations came up when I mixed two situations together, because then I created a scene for the party to interact with, events that had their own dynamic and motion even before the party intervened. 

Since all of this material was generated as necessary to simulate the impression of a city, whenever I had to specify where the party could shelter from hostiles, I improvised shops. I need to make a building generator, complete with unique contents for each type of building. 

The "tick" timekeeping mechanism is a time abstraction. Very loosely, each tick is supposed to represent a unit of time in my in-game timekeeping system, which is still thoughts rattling in the corners of my cranium. It worked pretty well with the table to create a sense of tension on the way to the extraction.

Since the generator could blossom into several nesting dice rolls, I started to roll before I needed an encounter and built up a slight block of scenarios. That reduced the mystery of the table slightly but gave me a leg up on segueing smoothly between scenes. 

I think that each encounter should have a lasting effect on the PC's. These effects could be HP loss, insanity, death, loot, or favors, but the PC's should carry something away from each encounter. Otherwise, why did it happen?

Loot and wounds are an obvious thing to gain from hostile encounters, but what can be gained from friendly and environmental encounters? Consumables (or consumable expenditures, but those should be reserved mostly for hostile encounters), intangibles like information (both pertaining to the immediate situation/possible encounters, to later scenes, and to important NPC's), favors from all sorts of groups, access to otherwise unreachable locales, and direct assistance. 

I did absolutely no sort of table balancing. I largely operated on "do I have enough options to roll at least 1d4? Okay, good."

Speaking of balancing, I decided to have a d8 decide the frequency of encounters instead of using a huge table so that I could scale the weight of different scenarios. I could've just condensed all the possible encounters into a huge table, to reduce the number of rolls, but for a quick prep, just staffing the different tables with ideas and then using a dice to moderate the type was faster. This format leads to slower generation at the table, but offers more opportunities to tinker with the encounter tables as separate gears rather than as one behemoth.

These are not the last tables - my campaign is going to be centered in this city for some time, so expect more tables as they're created and used. 

Dwarves Dwarfs Dwarii

I think dwarfs very underappreciated. Here are some stereotypes I see around dwarfs I'd like to refute.

Dwarves are Boring
Dwarves are awesome. Do you know the heat conductivity of basalt in lava or how to safely handle ghost encrusted uranium ore? No? What about the magnetite-petrolate slimes that attract and then dissolve all metals and organics they get their pseudopods on, and ignite as a defense mechanism? What about the current motions of the local fault lines that are the only things keeping that vein of fossil vampires buried and hibernating?
When dwarves talk to you, they are being nice. They are keeping things relatable and attempting to remember the last 50 years of your history. If they are off by 5 years who cares? This dwarf is the only thing standing between you and some insane undead warchasses with corrupted memetic kill-pattern phosphorescent ablative carapaces that cause schizophrenic murder personalities to emerge in those who see them. His grandad locked them in an airtight adamant-lined room and he's switching out the locks. Fucking elves and their toys.

Dwarves are Drunkards
Dwarves are not drunkards. They are patient and their livers are incredible. Dwarven livers can be blown up like goddamn balloons half the size of the dwarf it came from. They have had thousands of years to perfect the art of underground mushroom hops and by god it shows in their ale. Dwarven ale to beer lovers is like oatmeal to chocolate bourbon pecan pie. One of these makes the other taste bad.
Dwarven livers store concentrations of alcohol so high that strings made out of preserved dwarven liver act as great ignition fuses for explosives or artillery shells if you can find some of those. The dwarf with you is probably still breaking down her hangover from last Saturday.

Dwarves Have a Beard Fetish
Eoin Colfer already addressed this. Dwarven head and beard hair is not actually hair. It is a large and sensitive series of vibrissae (that stuff that makes walruses so cool looking) that can detect air direction, temperature, and the relative moisture content of air. Vibrissae are extremely sensitive, so any cutting or burning causes tremendous pain. Dwarves tolerate beard grooming because whiskers snagging is unbelievably agonizing.

Dwarves Hate the Outdoors
Dwarves hate uncontrolled variables. It's necessary to know the exact structural stability of a mine to extract the maximum possible ore with the minimum of effort. It's necessary to know if any stray elvish archaotech has permuted the surrounding area. It's necessary to map the entire cave system because demon nests are tenacious and stealthy. The outdoors is a system in constant flux with lots of allergens and dwarven vibrissae get overstimulated. This is why dwarves armor their beards away from the caves and are grumpy.

Dwarves are Greedy
Dwarves understand the exact process needed to get from electrum to gold and silver. They treat the materials involved with the amount of respect they deserve. 99.999% refined gold requires huge quantities of acids, that, when combined, are so powerful they are nicknamed aqua regia (king of water). These huge quantities of acid are used to create equally large quantities of choloroauric acid (acid with dissolved gold) which is also incredibly detrimental to organic material.
You think your chemistry class is hard. Dwarves learn how to do this as part of their education. This creates a distinct appreciation for any well-made item of purified metal or an exquisitely cut gemstone as well as an incredible snobbery for such.

Dwarves Have a Metal Fetish
You're damn right dwarves have a metal fetish. They also have a rock fetish and an engineering fetish. When you live 250+ years, you have to come up with things to do and perfect or go insane.

For example, dwarves like to build things. Go google the Sagrada Familia. It'll be finished in 2026, hopefully.

Dwarves do that....upside down....over a huge underground lake full of giant mantis shrimp and catfish titans.