I’ve been re-reading Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun in yet another attempt to figure out what’s actually going on. Granted, not having all the answers is part of the fun—kind of like a never-ending blind date with your spouse, in that you’re in mostly familiar territory, but there’s always a bit of mystery to keep you keen for the thrill of discovery (at least, that’s how I describe my marriage).
Anyway, as I read, I can’t help but view Wolfe’s Urth from a GM’s perspective. How would I, were I running a campaign set in Urth, handle this or that? More important than specific characters or encounters, though, is capturing the setting’s “feel.” Urth offers an enticing blend of ancient and high-tech, with extraterrestrial beings, disparate social classes, a nervous sense of oldness and decay, and the constant question: WHAT the hell just happened?
What GM wouldn’t want to set this platter in front of his hungry players?
Literary musings and bad nuptial analogies aside, what I really want to share are a couple of monsters inspired by Wolfe’s material. They’re statted for Chimera, but I think the descriptions are full enough to make them highly portable.
UPDATE (11/7/2019): Revised stats below for Chimera Core Rules.
Brain Vine (Plant / Hedera Cerebrum)
Lvl 0; MR 0″; WL 1 (S); DF 0; AT special; AB nil; SP Poison (2), Weakness (acid, fire, frost)The brain vine is a parasitic creeper that is inherently harmless, save for the small, shiny orange berries that decorates its foliage. Anyone foolish enough to ingest a berry must make an Athletics roll at -2. If the roll fails, the berry sprouts internally and begins to transform the victim into a host of its parent vine.
The transformation begins as the berry thrusts fine tendrils into the victim’s skull to envelop the brain. Within a week, victims suffer dull headaches and have difficulty concentrating (-1 to all Academics and Sense rolls). Within a month, the growing tendrils constrict the victim’s brain and apply painful pressure to the cranium. The host’s head grows subtly disproportionate to their body, and the constant pain imposes a permanent, blanket -1 penalty to skill rolls.
However, the victim is now telepathically linked to the brain vine’s lineage and can instinctively sense other brain vine hosts, with the ability to read and project thoughts from and to those within 60′. By this time, the tendrils cease growing and sustain themselves via cerebral fluids, thereby becoming saturated with the host’s thoughts and memories.
Due to the telepathic link, the host randomly receives 1d6 mental images or impressions each day, as if they were experiencing snatches of another host’s life. Each of these flashes stuns the host for 1d6 rounds, but the visions are clear and may be recalled. After 2d4 weeks, the host adapts, negating the stun effect, to the extent that they may learn from the experience with a 1/10 chance of gaining another host’s skill, perk, or flaw when an impression is received.
The GM must roll 1d6 to determine the type of ability gained (d6: 1-2 skill; 3-5 perk; 6: flaw), then allow the player to roll randomly for the exact skill, perk, or flaw. Existing skills increase by AR +1; existing perks and flaws are doubled in intensity. The number of abilities thus accumulated cannot exceed the host’s level plus Sense AR.
Eventually (1d6+6 months after ingestion), the tendrils in the host’s brain experience a sudden growth surge, strong enough to burst the host’s head open in a spray of flesh, blood, stem, and bone. If left undisturbed, the pooled mess gives rise to a new brain vine, whose narrow, orange-spotted leaves mature into a thick ground cover or spread up the sides of adjacent structures. Berries from this vine impart memories of the most recent host, as well as all the previous hosts in the plant’s lineage. In this way, and with careful planning, the brain vine may be employed as a means to preserve the memories of those long deceased.
An individual who realises they’re a host may ingest a potent alchemical brew that postpones the inevitable for 7-12 additional months, but with a cumulative 1/20 chance per draught of killing the tendrils. If this occurs, the host’s brain suffers trauma as the tendrils whither and harden amid the soft grey matter, leaving the victim with their permanent skill roll penalty of -1. More often, however, those who drink the brew enjoy more productive lives, enhanced as they are by the knowledge and abilities of past hosts secreted in the vine’s delicate matrix.
Alchemists also produce a tincture from the vine’s berries that, when ingested, imparts flashes of stored memory and telepathic ability with other hosts. The skills and traits gained are determined as above, but last only 4d6 hours. Further, while the ethanol used to create the tincture effectively negates the berry’s parasitic properties, the beverage’s safety is not guaranteed; users must still make an Athletics roll (albeit with no penalty) or become a host.
Razor Petal (Plant / Petale Acutus)
Lvl 1; MR 0”; WL 2 (L); DF 1; AT 1 slash (1d8); AB Athletics; SP nilThese plants resemble 8’ sunflowers with a single, blade-hard bloom of silver-green hue. Razor petals can impale targets up to 2” away with their rigid flower, then slowly digest the corpse through its roots. After feeding, a razor petal lies dormant for at least a week per WL “eaten.” While dormant, the plant may be safely harvested as an exotic “pole arm” for ritual duels, which may be fought to first blood or to the death, depending on the local custom. At the GM’s option, some varieties may be venomous.
Hierodule (Humanoid)
Lvl 3; MR 15″; WL 3 (M); DF 4 (+2); AT 2 claws (1d6), 1 bite (1d6), by weapon (var); AB Academics, Athletics, Attack, Influence, Sense, Trick; SP Clueless, Etiquette, Flake, Lucky, Night Vision, Paralysis (via bite in natural form only), Powers (Blink, Disguise, Timewarp), Shakes, SpinelessErroneously nicknamed “holy slaves” by the few who know of them, hierodules are off-world creatures, native to the setting’s moon, a nearby planet, or another star system. In their natural form, hierodules are bipedal, crab-like anthropoids with two claws, a teeth-ringed mouth filled with stinging tendrils, and bodies encased in a grey-green carapace.
The hierodules’ have advanced their civilisation through science and magic, creating sprawling cities of stone seamlessly blended into natural landscapes. These cities house wondrous devices: low-fuel energy sources, infallible scrying devices, voidships capable of travelling between stars, advanced medical facilities, automaton servants, and non-magical means of transport across vast distances in little or no time.
Hierodules live in “spherical” time, which differs from linear time in that events can be postponed, revisited, or never experienced. One can envision this best by considering a thread (linear time) crumpled into a ball (spherical time) so that all points on the continuum touch other (but not all) points along its own length. This model allows hierodules to traverse the boundaries between past, present, and future simply by “stepping off” the thread at one point and jumping on at another, which might lie before or after the hierodule’s original position.
Living in spherical time grants a sort of “chronological omniscience”: While hierodules “skip” across linear time, they find it difficult to place any particular event into the correct temporal context. Their insight into the potential reality along a given continuum’s past or future is tempered with their awareness that nothing is actually required to happen at a specific time or within a given sequence. The unenviable consequence is that most hierodules are perpetually confused: They have great difficulty distinguishing the present from the past or the future, and because they realise this limitation, they harbour an innate expectation that reality is highly mutable.
A side effect of their unique temporal perception is a decided lack of commitment or reliability: There is no purpose to constancy when events can be skipped or repeated. Thus hierodules do not perform under pressure or threat, having little need to show resolve, avoiding danger whenever possible, and invariably suffering fatigue when forced to endure hardship. Fortunately for them, their ability to “skip” through time (via blink and timewarp) makes it easy to avoid unpleasant situations.
To combat their mild insanity, hierodules have developed a keen interest in the affairs and events of other civilisations, particularly those limited by linear time. Travelling on their voidships, hierodules make sporadic (and nondescript) contact with worldly civilisations.
When meeting with other races, hierodules use their innate disguise power to appear as normal denizens of the world they’re visiting; these forms are permanent for as long as the hierodule wishes, though they can change form no more than once per level each day. They also have significant linguistic talent, needing only an Academics roll to understand and speak any tongue to which they’re exposed.
When encountered, hierodules’ talent for language and desire for social interaction make them extremely friendly and accommodating; they are highly diplomatic, well-spoken, polite, and deferential to the point of obsequiousness. However, their temporal proclivities soon reveal their inability to fathom the boundaries between past, present, and future, manifested through the habit of speaking in the third person, using cryptic phrases, and speaking with a seemingly prophetic tone; indeed, carrying a prolonged conversation can be difficult since what they speak of may have already happened, will happen later, or (because of their ability to personally warp cause and effect) may not ever happen at all.
Hierodule voidships are invisible within the atmosphere of most populated worlds, and they always land at or near sites dominated by ancient stone henges. Encountered hierodules carry “rune-rings” as treasure. Each individual ring resembles an octagonal gold coin, pierced with a central hole and inscribed with unrecognisable runes (though the pattern of these runes invariably mimics the arrangement of stones at the henge where the voidship landed). Although rune-rings retain an intrinsic mineral value, hierodules seldom use them to purchase goods. Instead, they are left with seemingly careless abandon wherever hierodules have passed. Some sages posit that rune-rings are placed as markers along a given continuum, serving as chronological “bread-crumbs” to reference a hierodule’s presence in a given place and time. If this is true, the fact that they are sometimes found and plucked by lucky travellers must be a considerable inconvenience to the unfortunate hierodule who left them.