Two posts in one day! Whaaaaat!!!???
This is not actually a post about archons, but an appreciation post for my friend semiurge and
archonsmarchon! Semiurge consistently produces some of the most amazing random tables in all of tabletop, and was one of the first friends I made in the community, back when I was just posting on reddit and hadn't even started a blog. I envy his ability to take his overflowing imagination, and channel it into something efficiently written and actually useful at the table. He has produced more work than I could possibly fit into one post, honestly you could make a whole book just from generations of his tables, but I will do my best to fit as much as I can into something interesting and manageable.
Also, this is the second in a series of appreciation posts, the first being for
Saker Tarsos at
tarsostheorem.
It's taken me a while to find the time and energy to do these right, but I intend to do at least several more of these appreciation posts.
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There is a market in the caldera of a mostly-extinct volcano, its remaining lava pumped throughout the market for heat and lighting. Try not to stand too close to the pipes when they break! Working the market is a raider offloading booty pillaged from a surface settlement. One item he offloads is a lamp loaded with troll-oil. It refuels itself, but if extinguished it will regenerate into a full, furious troll. While hidden treasures abound, the market is also home to conmen selling fake potions that’ll turn your face inside-out instead of healing you, or cause you to flash brightly instead of turning invisible, or any number of other horrid things. The only thing keeping the market in line is the knowledge that any spilled blood might seep down and attract vicious beasts from below.
The market is surrounded by a wall, with a single door at the entrance. The door has a handle that’s a tongue in the mouth of a laughing iron face. A man with a wizened face and bleeding eyes busts through the door, holding his gun to his head with one hand, desperately dragging it away with the other. He carries a custom-made revolver, with way more than six bullets in its oversized cylinder. Pinned to his chest is a bloodstained page of sheet music any trained musician could decipher to reveal a coded message.
In addition to the raider with his troll oil lamp, an elf knight comes to the defense of the market. Her armour is a buff coat made of her own leather, flayed and healed over decades. She rides a grumpy moose and fights with her own sharp tongue, which can snap out like a chameleon. She serves a petrified liege, or perhaps her liege was always just a statue. In any case, she pays the bills at the market, whilst on a quest to kidnap a gifted human child to be her squire.
After the raider and the elf knight kill the man with the gun, a scholar picks up the page of sheet music and deciphers the code. This scholar specializes in thanatology, the study of the dead both walking and still. He was a student kicked out of his university for excessive rowdiness and lewdery. He carries a pocketful of shiny rocks he's collected, ostensibly for personal defense. He has a knack for navigating in the wilderness, which is how he arrived at the market in the first place. He is infamous for his backhanded compliments.
The coded message was an incantation, opening a secret passage to the underworld. The threshold to this passage is a crossroads paved with brittle hair, marked by a trail of black feathers. It is guarded by a crocodilian abomination able to smell sin. This passage leads to the belly of a lifeless beast, dissolving in its own bile, left by a crusade against the insufficiently damned.
To defeat the crocidilian abomination, the scholar reveals his secret wacky wand. The wand is a peacock’s tail feather lacquered with amber that emit rays of mutagenic viridiance. So long as it is not exposed to water, it will maintain its charge, and even when it does run out of charge, it gains the ability to vampirically steal charges from other wands it touches. He snaps the wand, releasing the angel trapped inside to power it. The angel is grateful, but also has centuries of business to attend to. Nonetheless, it agrees to face the crocodilian abomination.
The angel is a fiercely tusked ogre cloaked in thunderclouds with wings of barbed iron and the flayed skins of sinners. It wields a chalice, ever-full of dark wine. The bearer of the chalice can cause this wine to heal, or burn like acid, and change which of these functions it serves even long after it’s been poured from the chalice or imbibed. It was created from a saint who was assumed, maimed but alive, into the heavens. The angel can sense the location and condition of the relics made from the severed parts of its body, as well as communicate through and exert limited influence around them even if it’s not currently summoned to the mortal realms. It cannot serve a summoner who holds any debt without first forgiving those debts. Several animals with unspotted coats were sacrificed in order to summon this angel.
The angel smites the crocodilian abomination, only to reveal its true form! It appears as a cancerous mushroom combined with complex clockwork, and gears made of wet flesh and teeth, which split apart into a swarm of lesser monsters. It is hungry, and attempts to incapacitate the first hunk of meat it finds then drag them away for an undisturbed meal (who will it be, the angel, the scholar, the elf knight, or the raider!?). This wizardly abomination was clearly intended as an experimental warbeast, to sell to the highest bidder.
After tearing apart each and every clockwork fungus monster, an illustrious intelligent sword is revealed at the core of the abomination. The sword is a notched, stained cleaver as big as a man is tall. With the sword’s blessing, its wielder will find it just light enough to bear in battle. Although intelligent, it is easily distracted and prone to meandering tangents. The wounds it deals become worse the further the wounded gets from the wielded until they’re healed. The sword reveals that it desires to learn martial techniques hidden by the ancient masters, but that prior to the incantation, it had been stuck in the middle of an eternal battlefield on the other side of the underworld passage.
The eternal battlefield of the underworld is headed by three armies.
The first army is led by a non-Euclidean entity, an uncanny humanoid that crawls with hideous vermin. Its origin is the interbreeding of humans and powers of the outer realms. Beware it, for it cannot be killed permanently by mortal means. In occult texts it is referred to as En-dwa-uch.
The second army is led by a vampire lord of an unusual variety. He feeds alongside his pet giant vampire finch, which serves him like a hunting dog. The vampire lord is the result of merging and melting together with others of his kind to form a large, more deadly gestalt. He rests among the deep machinery of his factory from which he builds his machine army, licking the leavings from industrial accidents. When he feeds his blood to predatory or parasitic animals, those animals grow huge, ferocious, and loyal to him, serving as mounts, scouts, and siege beasts for his machine army. He was once a vicious priest whose body was unfit for the blessing of his god.
The third army is led by a demon like a floating tumor randomly studded with eyes, teeth, and hair. Her primary tactic is to blight the fields and herds of her enemies, drive the fish from their nets, and otherwise drag them to destitution. She is occasionally summoned away from the endless battlefield to commit slaughter at the border between hostile nations, and those slaughtered in this fashion are conscripted into her army in the underworld. She keeps a memento from each person who’s summoned her, which she wears like military regalia. Her weakness is her own name said backwards, which banishes her permanently from the underworld (but then, wherever shall she go...?).
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D20x5 Men With Guns To Come In Through A Door
