Rituals (5e D&D )

A wizard did it

Concept: beyond a prescribed spell list, magic users (or anyone with the right books, ingredients and facility (likely a mix of Int, Wis and Cha, or just pure Cha)) can effect anything they want. The idea is to let the players and GM redefine the solution to an obstacle using magic, but at a steep cost and to add sub quests.

Rituals are broadly defined by effect. To cast down a foe, to find what is lost, to learn a true name, to learn a secret of an enemy.

Books and scrolls found in old and lost places may contain ritual instruction though wizards and the like may discover a ritual by spending as many days (or hours, if the effect is duplicative of a spell known and trivial to the caster) in contemplation.

Ritual foci are required for ritual's not confected by magic user contemplation, and then are still strongly desirable as they guarantee success. Foci tend to be macguffins, and confected rituals have pseudo foci kludged from pledges, the casters will and body.

There are three poles to consider.

1. Relative ease. The caster posits an outcome or desire. The GM considers the obstacles to obtaining the outcome naturally. Compare this difficulty to the magnitude of die sizes here and eyeball the die size. If mimicking an existing spell, use the spell's level to determine the size (sl6 is a d100,  a cantrip is d4, if greater than an sl6, add 55/additional spell level to the d100).

Divide the max die value by 2, rounding down.  This is the ritual's inertia (effectively, hp).

2. Similarity to spells. A caster with knowledge of spells or any spell - like ability may have advantage on all rolls. Dragonborn of a blue chroma may have advantage when calling thunder, aboleth and illithid and squids all gain advantage on ink, obscuring, psychic effects, etc.

3. Time and Power. Takes a day for its relative power (a d100 ritual takes seven days, a d4 one). To speed things up, add another half die to the inertia or another 2 pledges (reduces time by one step or d20 hours).

Resolution. Rituals are resolved narratively. Non casters can pledge blood (reduced to 1 ho for a day), treasure (1,000 gp, must be in jewel or statue or unworkable ore. All ancient or long lost. Hideous obelisk of Leng, reliance of the stars, etc. Coins stamped in infernal or lost mints also work), promises (enforcement of which the GM will extract in force at the worst/best time. Usually involves infernal or terrible agents.) Or  spell slots (all for the day) or an uncommon magic item (consumed or destroyed or exhausted, rarer items.counting as more pledges, but similarly depleted regardless if all pledges are necessary). 

The GM establishes the steps before casting, each step requires a contribution of the above and reduces the inertia by a die roll. Casters may also pledge as above. Pledges may be made in addition to the steps. At each step/pledge, roll a die and reduce the inertia by that much.

Steps may be opening portals or creating a jackdaw of rubbish and paper and bird bones or whispering into a bole in a frozen tree. There are as many steps as the GM wishes, usually as many as characters in the party less d4 (the point is to make things interesting). What constitutes a step is up to the GM, and the GM may, probably will, solicit suggestions from anyone casting or pledging.

Additional pledges can be made, and must be made if the ritual's inertia isn't overcome at the end of all the steps and after all the pledges are rolled or else the ritual fails.

Using a foci guarantees success in most cases though defeating inertia with rolls likely means you can keep the foci for reuse (like a catalyst).

Saving Throws, Critical Saving Throws, Class-Specific Saving Throws (really, for any D&D)

I left saving throws off my class rundown, because I struggle with them. Some days I think they're flabby, on other days, I like the granularity multiple saves afford. Here is the cleanest iteration I've been able to come up with. Admittedly, this is far from original. I've used a similar version in the past but it was clunkier, and +Mike Mearls's recent post about saves in Next brought me back to this concept. It's seen a single session of play, in this form, at this point.

SAVING THROWS

Are a mechanic that assist in determining your fate when you face a catastrophe.

CATASTROPHES

are things like:

• Character death
• poisons and toxins
• getting hit with an undesired spell or magical affect
• massive area of affect attacks
• catastrophic damage (hit with a giant stone, falling ceiling, stepped on by a massive monster)

SINGLE SCORE

Roll d20 + your level, aim for 19+.

CLASSES MATTER, CRITICAL SAVES

A Character's class indicates a certain extra facility or luck when facing down certain types of affects or when facing down catastrophes in a specific way and may also grant a critical save (roll a natural 19 or 20; or not). Players must declare their intention to use their character's class to augment their saving throw before rolling. 

Fighters can try to "withstand" catastrophe. Whenever a fighter grits her teeth and bears the brunt of an incoming assault, add two to the roll to save. Describe how you intend to do this. To critically save  you must be in a position to prevent others from taking damage; so long as you can convincingly repel the oncoming source of damage, you can prevent if from affecting others.

Rogues can try to avoid the attack entirely. Describe how you intend to do this and add two to the roll. To critically save you take way less, maybe no damage at all. 

Magic-Users can try to withstand spells or magical affects that can be cast by a Magic-User (add two to your save). When you critically save you can counter-spell and thereby unravel and the spell entirely.

Clerics can try to withstand spells or magical affects that can be cast by Clerics or Magic-Users (add two to your save). When you critically save you can counter-spell and thereby banish and negate the spell entirely. 

WHAT HAPPENS DIEGETICALLY ("IN THE FICTION")

When you fail:

you take the full affect, likely death, GM describes, likely gives you a last word or gesture

When you succeed:

if you're just rolling without  using your class, then the GM decides how what your character has done to minimize or avoid the catastrophe; or

if you're rolling using your class, the GM will decide how the save unfolds, based on how you've described your character using their class to augment the save.

Gnosis, Logos and Esoterica (Magic Users, "Mage Guilds" in Older D&D)

I've never been much of a fan of the default setting for OD&D. This is about what society looks like when the putative OD&D Magic-Users are separated from their generative cultural context. 

JUST SAY NO TO UNCLE GARY, WIZARD BRAINS, DUNGEON-SONG

This has my take on the mechanics of older D&D Magic-Users sans the influence of Gandalf/Tolkien. YMMV. Freed of being book-bound Merlins-in-training, Magic-Users live in self-sufficient communes, live as naturalists, religious hermits or wandering hawkers of strange artifacts, live as academics, researchers, artists, politicians, lunatics and brothers and sisters of religious orders. They are competent melee combatants, certainly not as dangerous as a Fighter but certainly more dangerous in a melee than the local 0-levels in the Town Watch. They can farm or manage farms, they can hunt, trap, tend gardens, teach, run an estate, advise the local ruler, rule.

For all this normalcy, there are plenty of stories of Magic-Users who simply dissapear, or bury themselves alive, or turn themselves to brain-dead crystal sculptures. Short of adventuring, casting mishaps and other occupational hazards, suicide by transmutation is the likliest end facing a Magic-User; many choose to leave behind their old life, body, memories and intelligence and live isntead as a mate or companion to their once-Familiar. The local villagers or townsfolk can no doubt point you to two crows, cats, robins, iguana or the like, one much more intelligent than the other, the Familiar having retained some uncanny cleverness.

Magic-User's minds are Dungeon-haunted and each new spell memorized crinkles and folds the Magic-User's brain. The more complex a spell, the more brain damage caused by its memorization; the Magic-User forgets the face of a parent, a childhood song, the name of a friend, has difficult walking, develops palsies, cannot speak without a slur, has a useless eye. Eventually, the Magic-User's cerebral cortex is swiss cheese, precisely plotting a three-dimensional map of the Dungeon whose song first touched the Magic-User's mind and opened it to chaos. 

Treasure hunters will pay enormous sums for information leading to the capture of the brain of a powerful Magic-User. They will pay even more for the brain itself

Dungeons are also virulent, so messing about with a Magic-User's brain can leave you Dungeon-touched yourself, longing for more and more ruined brains, a brain addict's desires becoming so particular and attenuated that only snorting a powdered Mummy or Demi-Lich brain will ease the compulsion. 

For some, exposure to wizard brains has made them Magic-Users in their own right; the worst brain addicts are all Magic-Users. A Magic-User that consumes the brain of another Magic-User immediately knows 1-3 spells that dead Magic-User had memorized.

Most Magic-User choose to live communally, among others of their kind who can monitor them for signs of decline, many dedicate their lives to protecting the works of the Children of the Sun, and to stamping out and uprooting Dungeons wherever they take root while others give themselves over entirely to obsessions and compulsions, chief among them the creation of their magnum opus, their spellbook. Really, a Magic-User will throw herself into anything that can distract her from the pull of Dungeon-Song that seems ever-present, waiting in the back of her mind like a fluttering corner of slowly peeling wallpaper.  

Communities of Magic-Users tend to all be touched by the same Dungeon-song and accordingly have similar interests.

Fear the Magic-User that whispers nonsense into sewer grates, the Magic-User who longs for nothing more than to put their ear to the dirt and bury their head, the Magic-User who disappears at odd hours with digging implements or who spends too much time with the Dungeon-born peoples.

BOOKS FOR THOSE LITERATE IN LANGUAGES WRITTEN IN TWENTY-SIX DIMENSIONS

Magic-Users "write" their "spellbooks" as variations of the same Dungeon-Song that first opened their mind to chaos. These are almost never words and formula in books and are sometimes called compositions, collages, zoos, assemblages, sculptures, gardens, poems, songs, menageries, collections or chapters. They may take any number of forms, may be entirely olfactory, may be written in a spectrum of light invisible to the human eye, or rely entirely on the use of some other stranger sense organ. These pieces take a lifetime or longer to complete, with many ancient Magic-Users collapsing at the foot of the spellbook they've spent decades to craft. A lich is often just a Magic-User whose devotion to their art has become so monomonaical that they cannot let it go, Magic-Users for whom their art can never be complete.

Spells are often collected, modified or invented not for their own sake but for the ultimate aesthetic they may help to affect in a Magic-User's spellbook and there are a multitude of examples of Magic-Users or communities of Magic-Users who have dedicated centuries to finding the perfect expression of a single spell of even the first complexity. These vanity spells are often (much, much) more complex and more intricate than they need be and their collection and use is often not profitable for a wandering Magic-User.

The Spell-Garden of the Uttermost Resplendent Magi of the Order of the Infinite Tusk, containing the spells Charm Person, Sleep, Wizard Lock, ESP, Fire Ball, Lightning Bolt, Confusion, Dimension Door, Wall of Fire, Wizard Eye, Cloudkill, Telekinesis, Pass-Wall, Contact Higher Plane, Hold Monster and Move Earth

LIBRARIES AND SCHOOLS

Throughout the map, in cities, in towns, underneath cities & towns, in wizard's towers, caves and in remote hunting lodges or country estates are like-minded Magic-Users who study the blank spaces between hieroglyphic scripts, the worm-chewed holes in ancient historiographical tapestries, the infinite coils of mandala and the liminal void between each photon with lenses ground on demon hooves (barring that, a Tiefling hoof will do just fine). 

There is a hermit-wizard on X_____ Mountain who studies giant bees, lives in their hive, carries on an amorous relationship with their queen, sells rich, dark honey by the gallon in town. His treaties on giant insects are highly prized by natural scientist, though the pages often stick together.

There are three Magic-Users who run with the elk of the B_____ Forest. You can see them some nights in the distance, standing naked and backlit against the sky or moon, their antlers enormous, strangely gesticulating hands, softly rubbing velvety fingers in invocation of the primal spirit they are certain resides within each of their own chests. 

There is a small school in the town of G_______ where they keep the secrets of all portals and doors, including the first and last door.

Similar associations, institutions, gatherings and organizations populate and penetrate the landscape. Most are small, have no more than ten members, and are organized around a single, esoteric precept or highly idiosyncratic ideal followed to obsessive excess (becoming elk, speaking the language of grasses, growing pinecones from one's arms). The Society of the Limned Eye, the Sisterhood of Brother Thorn, the Schola Magma, the Cult of the Purple Tongue, the Miskatonic College of Tentacularium (complete with underwater carillon) .

S,M,V COMPONENTS

Wizarding organizations tend to know, practice, teach and perhaps even make available to a paying outsider a certain number of spells. They'll probably teach you any of their spells if you are willing to pay and show enough enthusiasm for their particular brand of magic (carousing tables!), but of those spells, only a certain number will be practical for adventuring purposes. Any spell taught in this manner will have a random component requirement. 

Smaller organizations usually only know about 1-2 spells from each of the first five complexities that are sufficiently portable and performable to be of worth to the adventuring Magic-User. They might know a ritual of sixth complexity (4 in 6 chance).

Larger Institutions can know as many as 4 portable spells from each of the first five complexities and will know as many as two rituals of the sixth.

roll	required component
1	must be shouted at top volume
2	requires dance (spend all casting time dancing)
3	requires the recitation of an aporia
4	must be sung (spend all casting time singing)
5	requires something to be broken during casting
6	requires expensive ingredients (10gp x complexity of spell), which are left burnt, twisted, tarnished, foul smelling and the sight of which will ever after cause inexplicable nausea
7	requires total darkness or daylight or moonlight
8	verbal component must instead be written
9	must be cast with eyes shut, makes aiming problematic
10	must be cast while causing damage (can be very minor) to one's own body
11	requires two of the above (re-roll twice)
12	requires participation from one other (roll once to determine requirement)

pictures:  Thomas Ott, unknown, Kris Kuksi

Fighter, Rogue, Magic User, Cleric

This is one of those things you post so that you can reference it later. Classes.

 FIGHTER

Pit fighters, soldiers, thugs, paladins, protagonists, warlords, leaders, champions.

Hit Points 6 hp at level one, +HD every subsequent level

Health Die(HD) d8 

Attack Die(AD) d8

Chance to Hit: +1 at levels 1,3,4,5,7,8,9,10
Starting Gear: Medium Armor, Three Weapons (Ranged and/or Melee) or Two Weapons (Ranged and/or Melee) and a Shield, Adventuring Gear, a little money.

Class Features

*Can use any weapon and armor without penalty.
*Knows how to make d3 things.
*Chance to Critically Hit increases by 1 at levels 3, 6 and 9
*When attacking, can do something spectacular after successfully hitting a target at the cost of rolling damage two AD smaller. Discuss this with your GM.
*You are harder to stun, knock unconscious, trip, disarm or overpower

 (pictures: can't determine attribution for the first, second is Prince Albert c1890)

ROGUE

Sneak thiefs, assassins, bon vivants, swashbucklers, ninjas, burglars, tricksters, magicians, experts and scouts.

Starting Health 5 hp at level one, +HD every subsequent level

Health Die(HD) d6 

Attack Die(AD) d6

Chance to Hit: +1 at levels 2,4,6,8,
Starting Gear: Light Armor, Two Weapons (Ranged and/or Melee), Adventuring Gear, a Rogue's Toolkit, a little money.

Class Features

*Can use any weapon and armor; wearing anything heavier than light armor, and not having both hands free makes Rogue Skills more difficult.
*Knows how to make d3+1 things.
*Can automatically critically hit an enemy when undetected
*Rogue Skills can be used once in a specific situation with a 2 in 6 chance of success; chance of success for all currently known Skills increases by 1 in 6 at levels 3, 6 and 10.
                          -At Level 1: Rogues can Know Secrets and two of the Optional Skills (Move Silently, Hide in Shadows, Pick Pockets, Climb Sheer Surfaces, Hear Noises)
                          -At Level 2: Rogues gain facility in two more of the Optional Skills
                          -At Level 4: Rogues gain facility in the remaining Optional Skills and can use Know Secrets to Read Magic
                          -At Level 7: Rogues can use Know Secrets to operate Magical Devices without penalty

(pictures: Julian Callos, can't find attribution for second)

MAGIC USER

Wizard, punk priest, chaos catholic, mage, spell spitter, hexagrammarian,mathematician, occultist, lunatic.

Starting Health 4 hp at level one, +HD every subsequent level

Health Die(HD) d6 

Attack Die(AD) d6

Chance to Hit: +1 at levels 2,4,6,8

Starting Gear: Light Armor, One Weapon (Ranged and/or Melee), Adventuring Gear, a little money, whatever the Magic-User uses as a spell book.
Class Features

*Can use any weapon and armor; not having both hands free may make spell casting difficult
*Knows how to make d2 things.
*Can use magical devices without penalty.
*Can Cast Magic-User Spells of increasing complexity

(pictures: Denis Forkas, Korehiko Hino can't find attribution for second (help me out here, if you can))

CLERIC

Initiate, cultist, priest, templar, hermit, magi, seer, saint, fiend, transcendentalist, celestial.

Starting Health 5 hp at level one, +HD every subsequent level

Health Die(HD) d6 

Attack Die(AD) d6

Chance to Hit: +1 at levels 2,4,6,8

Starting Gear: Light Armor, Two Weapons (Ranged and/or Melee), Adventuring Gear, a little money, several holy implements.
Class Features

*Can use any weapon and armor without penalty.
*Knows how to make d2 things.
*Can use magical devices without penalty so long as the device only replicates spells from the Cleric's Spell list
*Gains Cleric Spontaneous Miracles
                          -At Level 3: Choose a single Cleric Spell of the first complexity. 1/day, the Cleric may take a specific action and have this spell occur as a result of that action. Choose the triggering action (should make some sense - Cure Minor Wounds affected by touching the wound, Purify Food and Water by dipping one's hand in the Water or rubbing rot and impurities away from ruined food or squeezing out the poison, etc). Choice of action and spell is permanent.
                          -At Level 6: Choose a single Cleric Spell of the first or second complexity. 1/day, the Cleric may take a specific action and have this spell occur as a result of that action. Choose the triggering action as described above. Choice of action and spell is permanent.
                          -At Level 9: Choose a single Cleric Spell of the first, second or third complexity. 1/day, the Cleric may take a specific action and have this spell occur as a result of that action. Choose the triggering action as described above. Choice of action and spell is permanent.

*Can Cast Cleric spells of increasing complexity

(pictures: Adrian Borda, Jake Badley can't find attribution for second (help me out here on this one too, if you can)) (much thanks to +Scott Martin for pointing me to two of the missing attributions)

Chromatic Dragons, Scale Addicts

THE FIRST PEOPLE COULD NOT CAPTURE THE DRAGON OF ONE BEING

Once, the One Being Dragon ringed the world, moved over pre-creation like a wave.

Come the First People, Ix and Ixiandar, Gilgamesh and Humbaba, many others. They devour mountains, swallow streams, become mountains, streams. They shed lesser life forms like we shed skin cells, flora and fauna the product of blind, random apoptosis. They grow monstrous and stupendous and strange in proportion and size, their eyes pierce high into the once-was-sky to rest greedily on the curlicue circlet of the One Being Dragon, a spiral of light, forever chasing the sun, the gold pit of chaos.

The first and greatest of the First People, Ix, tries to pull down the Dragon, stripping from it reams of flesh and intestines like contrails of light and scintillating radiation. She drapes the Dragon flesh over her head and the heads of her companions and they swing the dragon guts and whoop and dance but the Dragon remains aloof. Try as Ix might, she cannot grasp the Dragon fully around and cannot pull it down. Ixiander and Gilgamesh instead bend the Lens of Nature and the Dragon blurs, a chromatic aberration increasingly fringed until it diffracts and splinters, thus is born the icy, sharp, Dragon of the white aspect, the vicious, plodding, flat Dragon of the black aspect, and then Dragons of each of the other ten aspects.

WE HAVE BEEN BROKEN AND WE MUST BE RESTORED

To be a Dragon is to be diminished. The Dragon forever lists the complaints: bowed limbs, creaking wings, rotting teeth, the grind of massive ball in massive socket, the excruciation of nerve endings and a body growing heavier, more real, less like the old self, the One Being now barely-recalled by a rebellious mind falling from the light of pure thought into reptile emotion. Each dragon longs for a past it remembers incorrectly, longs for gems as large as the stars it once dandled from the point of a single, ephemeral talon, longs to clutch and cavort in gold as bright as the radiance of the pit of chaos it once chased.

Most of all Dragons long for as long a sleep as possible and pursue this goal almost monomaniacally,  consuming everything enormously, carving out caves and gobbling the rock in its hunger, emptying and consuming forests and then falling into a hibernatory peace in which it recalls its once-divinity and only dimly retains the current, diluvial nightmare. To wake from these dreams is to relive its generative sundering and from behind a heavy lid and a crusty lens, the fractioned dragon perceives an increasingly squalid, squabbling, foreign Babels and feels its center slip further away.

A just-waking dragon bellows with fury and self-righteousness, and takes to wings, moving over the countryside in search of food and treasure, moving over towns and villages like the quickening of twilight, carrying with it into the night the souls of dogs, invalids and children.

Above the gate of Uz-Amon, fallen city by the sea, an ancient Dragon of the Green aspect has carved with an unsteady claw:

"EVERYTHING DECLINES, THE PROLIFERATION OF KINDS IS A MERE ILLUSION AND NO ONE KNOWS TO WHAT END"

THE CHILDREN OF THE SUN STEAL AND TARNISH OUR ONLY CONSOLATION

Ix, Many-Named, Queen of us all, towers like a Brocken Bow over us, the Children of the Sun. We build cities on her feet, and at night recline in the strange half-light from above, cast by her dragon-flesh crown. We sharpen weapons and the warriors of the Right and the Left stalk always contested boundaries.

Our bravest warriors ascend the body of Ix to pick clean the celestial lice, Valkyries, infant Sun-Brothers, star-children and foreigners that clamber down the spikes of her crown and nest in her feathers. Should they descend further, many in our cities would die.

These brave warriors are expert Delvers, dungeon-clearers, Dragon-tested they return home before carts of jewelry and gold, knighted in powerful relics but it will take days to clean the ancient lizard's blood from their weapons and skin.

WE RECALL OUR ASPECT, SPURN NAMES, CHANGE OUR SHAPE

A Dragon remembers what it was even as it slowly aligns closer to its own aspect, its new nature. Red Dragons become cruel, impetuous, love torture. Black Dragons ooze acid from every orifice, painfully, are wild, hateful, hate everything. Sap Dragons lair in enormous trees or swamps and their scales shudder as the pores beneath weep oozes and jellies capable of absorbing all the works of the children of the sun, turning them into fertilizer so potent that the Sap Dragon leaves fully-grown forests in its wake. Ultraviolet Dragons are exceedingly rare, speak all the languages of ghosts and gods and are entirely invisible to most of the children of the sun who, to consult or kill the Dragons of this aspect, keep reindeer, butterflies or even stranger creatures like ghosts or celestial lice. 

Dragons of the same aspect avoid one another, while they hunt those of different aspects so that they may harvest from them their scales and create a chime garden on some distant, windswept mountain side.

More ancient Dragons, those still close to their original self can experience the lives of their aspect like a shared memory. The experience is nauseating and most require obscene amounts of payment (a city's worth of "food," or the location of the dens of dragons of a number of different aspects, for example) to be willing to try it.

A Dragon that capitulates and takes a name is spurned at all costs, no Dragon will help it and only the most desperate for its scale will even hunt it. For example, the God-Emperor of the City of Bone and Brass is a Dragon that has long forgotten its original nature. 

No two Dragons of even the same aspect are the same. One may be two-legged, seven-winged and spider-eyed, another may be a nucleus of howling, snapping bear mouths, fur displacing scales. Dragons can freely shapechange from their true form.

COME THE SCALE ADDICTS, THE DRAGON-ADDLED, CHIME TONES AND ROARS, THE FURTHER MACHINATIONS OF THE FIRST PEOPLE

A Dragon's roar is like a thunderous, skull-fracturing, orgasmic tone. It peels back the miniscus of the mind, it blasts across several planes of existence. A chime made from a single scale can produce a weaker, but still wildly addictive tone. Many of the Dragon-Killers of the Children of Sun are addicts, ringing little scale chimes in secret over and over again, longing for the next adventure, desperately seeking rumors of a Dragon den willing to sign up with a Dragon cult for guard duty knowing full well the cult will offer them up to a Dragon. Hoping they're offered up, actually.

Dragon cults trudge up foggy mountain trails, bearing enormous wealth to present the Dragon. Once at the Dragon's den, all of the initiated will kneel in supplication and wait for the Dragon's roar, which will leave them convulsive, drooling, littered above the den entrance in orgiastic clumps. They will either try to kill their hired guards themselves or just leave them bound up, with the gold, for the Dragon. Most Dragon cults are insurrectionist, violent, anti-authoritarian, its members criminals, fiends, artists, liberals, the dregs of society. Their religious practices, such as they are, are castigated where they are not outlawed (they are usually outlawed) and Dragons are accordingly often conflated with demons and devils.

The scale of a Dragon, when struck with a rod carved from pure chaos, chimes expansively. Reality trembles as the Dragon-tone moves across it. The larger the scale, the more resounding the tone and the more transformative its affect. Ixiandar has sealed his treasure vaults with wards which surrender only in the presence of correctly played, elaborate dragon-tones. Dragons themselves cannot hear the tone of their own aspect, but are filled with longing and furty upon hearing the chime of another aspect. Dragons covet the scales of other aspects and cultivate chime gardens. The tones produced by these chimes are deeply pleasing and can put a Dragon to sleep (the more the chimes, the larger the scales or the purer the tone, the more powerful the affect on the listener). Playing a chromatic scale in the presence of a Dragon can cause it to denature entirely for a time, become gelatinous piles of light, of a firm but plastic  consistency and capable of withstanding extreme pressures and temperatures. Touching the Dragon with bare skin can lead to translucency, photosynthetic digestion, madness, light-blindness, achromatosis or its opposite, involuntary chameleonic-pigmentation of all tissue of the body (living and dead), the loss of one's mind, the loss of one's body as it melts into Dragon-flesh, horns, the ability to speak to rainbows, and other numerous and various other affects (incidentally, similar after-affects are seen in survivor's of dragon's breath). Many ancient Dragons have cultivated a chime garden plentiful enough to complete this transformation and spend much of their hibernation in this form. 

Ix herself stands transfixed, each of her finger nails and the nails of her two canine teeth enameled with polished Dragon scale; her lips remain curled back to expose the slowly gnashing teeth while her fingers dance, weaving the same spell she has been casting for hundreds of years, her Dragon-nails slicing into various planes, knitting, sealing, unsealing. Her spell will either save the world from some unknown threat (Ogdru Jahad, the Final Dragon) or else end it, bringing on a new golden era for her companions (Ragnarok).

The scales of each of the twelve aspects presents a distinct scale of notes. To produce a purer tone, the scale must be struck with a rod fashioned from chaos. The femur of a swamp mutant might suffice, but the purer the chaos, the purer the tone (an implement carved from the heart of a Sun-Brother is preferable, or, best of all, a rock from the face of the Sun itself).

Pantagruel has been known to pretend to be a Dragon but only in order to fart on cultists. He will also surreptitiously "drop" method diagrams for scale chiming patterns nearby the Dragon-addled and addicted, delighting in watching them "mistakenly" open a portal to gravity-less void or distant hell-planet. He usually kills whatever star creature or demon sallies forth, but not always and especially not if he finds the creature amusing.

pictures: top (unknown), Prophet, Chase Stone, Project Copernicus Concept Art (RIP), Phillipe Druillet, John Blanche, Nico Delort, Stephen Hickman

Other Frontiers (Dungeons, Megadungeons and Monsters)

Dungeons and monsters are virulent and metastasizing. The below is from this conversation, which was spurred by this and this.

STAY VIGILANT, LOOK FOR THE EYES OF DWARVES

Abandoned buildings left unused for too long grow grow weedy, dusty, strange. The angles twist and the geometry buckles under the barometric pressure of anti-life. Among the dust and cobwebs, traps blossom. A brood of goblins rise out of the earth and shake clods of birth matter from their heads. Exotic, threatening beasts settle down and nest; below these lairs, trap doors lead to newly-formed but entirely ancient and archetypal stairs, dank tunnels with torch brackets that never held a torch. 

Sewers have to be regularly patrolled, newly-budded secret doors smashed and burned. Behind these doors may be shimmering teleporter mist, writhing, glistening gristle or simply mundane wall. The door is destroyed, what lays behind sealed away under rocks and incantations.

Dwarves have a sense for these things, when ancient edifice or natural cave is about to "turn," dwarves appear, clear the dungeon (or die trying), pull up the root and leave Delver's Eyes to mark where they've been. The lashes and pupil of a Delver's Eye indicate certain facts like, "No dungeon here in two years," or, "Goblin nest burned last winter solstice," or "this dungeon cleared by the Bronze Fork." If you know dwarven runes or if you can cast read languages, this is all apparent to you. Dwarves will teach the Eye to others that commit themselves to the cause of dungeon eradication.

Dwarf clans left too long alone in dark become fanatical Duergar, monomaniacal dungeon-clearers. Dwarves live a long time, but Duergar are seemingly immortal, though they grow increasingly old, decrepit and insane. Duergar may watch a dungeon "grow" or even "clear out" settlements to make room for a suitably large dungeon, just so they have something to do or because they believe only the "big ones" are suitable for their own capacities. Know them by their cruelty and their madness.

Some few dwarves may instead fall prey to the whispering of a dungeon far below, slowly becoming Derro. They may befriend the children of the dungeon, or they may keep to their own. Derro colonies often devote themselves to deep dungeon biological studies, creating machines of strange and enormous power, machines that run on the nightmares of an entire city and must be placed deep in the city's sewers or which must be fed all the works of an entire civilization to create an army of firmir-golems, all of whom are haunted by memories of the art they once were. Most of the Derro's creations are incredibly powerful and often quite beautiful. While the Duergar eschews the devotion to craftsmanship common to many dwarves, the Derro are possessed of finely refined aesthetic sensibilities. Know them by their black, paper-thin skin and enormous eye. 

When travelling through an abandoned place and you do not see the eyes of the dwarves or explorers that went before, beware or turn back. 

Maps sold to travelers are concerned less with relative distance than keeping accurate records of which Delver's Eyes the plot safest passage. Explorers will find their own maps valuable, especially if the maps provide relative safe passage to something useful or valuable.

DUNGEON PHYSIOLOGY

THE DAYLIGHT PEOPLE, THE PEOPLE OF THE SUN, THEM THAT SLEEP ABOVE US

This could be just humans, or whatever. Humans, like, work really well, because:

The impulse of the human being en masse is basically: multiply, civilize, colonize, dominate, cultivate, as if the impulse to expand, build and civilize is a design feature. As if human beings are something's solution to dungeons and monsters because: dungeons and monsters are virulent and metastasizing but they can't really grow in the presence of a human. 

THE PEOPLE OF THE SUN ARE TOXINS IN OUR BLOODSTREAM

The presence of a single Daylight Person causes dungeon growth to slow to a crawl if not stop completely. The dungeon is sluggish, confused when humans wander through it and it begins to wake monsters, set traps, and otherwise expel its guts to purge and frighten away the intruder (like a sea cucumber).

OTHER PEOPLE

Dungeon entrances serve as cloaca, both mouth and anus. Dungeons swallow adventurers and belch out orcs. They fart great clouds of goblins and excrete gnolls, ogres, giants and titans. Plenty of dungeons hide their true cloaca by budding off lures, like angler fish casting in the deep (Acererack's tomb has two lures, even).

What's the relationship between these people and the dungeon? It's not clear. They're a bit like an antigen, and they're a bit like a spore. Other People long-since separated from a dungeon will talk about other worlds and other places. Maybe they hail from subterranean civilizations lit by strange suns, maybe other planes, other planets. These New People that can remember their places of origin miss them keenly and are often morose. Few are capable of reproducing, even fewer are interested in reproduction. 

All are highly susceptible to the ambient environment. Orcs left too long in swamps grow moss, ooze poisons, goblins left in plague zones strain against a load of ominous buboes.Giants left in caverns deep are half dirt and half rock. Driven by a mostly stupid, half-god will, crawling, digging slowly through the deep like enormous worms. Their bodies serves as sieves, collecting ants, worms, centipedes and every other thing of the earth and passing it through its dirt until it emerges different, larger, vicious, mandibles dripping venom.

Giants sleeping atop mountains grow trees, put down mineral roots to lure miners, explode in volcanic fury or else elongate and dissipate into the ozone to flood crops and carrying swarms of strange, dancing insects whose touch causes outrageous violence.

Most giants with physical form are partly hollow, gestating dungeons, growing to accommodate the inner structure within.

A titan is a being of cosmological existence, is essentially a megadungon stretched between multiple planes of existence. Most sleep and grow and never wake; they are congenitally unable to survive waking existence very long as they are simply too large and impossible, their constituent, generative magics unable to sustain them upright for very long.

As a waking titan rises from the ground it shakes towns off its forehead and sweeps a city from its belly button. Most collapse at birth, moaning, crumbling, shedding wizard's towers and evil cleric's keeps, flinging dungeon seed hundreds of miles away in their death throes. A few make it to the standing position, their head and shoulders fully piercing the membrane separating space and planet, their head spewing dungeon seed far into the beyond and perhaps becoming a doorway for other, stranger people.

Other planes burble and pop in a titan's guts; their brains are a massive clutch of ab-reality (beware the places where wizard's tower gather in unnaturally close proximity for they likely plumb and quarry a titan's mind below) and they shed monsters constantly, like dead skin cells.

The Other People hear dungeons; they close their eyes and feel the thrum of the dungeon's blood. Its heartbeat is tremendous, throbbing under their skulls like a final migraine. An Other Person kicked into the depths of a dungeon will tumble, jamming hands to ears to stem the growing throb, becoming orc, gnoll, troll, ogre, giant even as brain and blood vacate their skulls and their bodies return to the dungeon's original matter: hatred, madness, cave mud and worms.

At nights, around fires, the Other People sing the songs of the dungeon, it's first incarnation (was not-stream bed), it's growth (oh cube, jelly belly), it's first kills (farmer-digs-too-deep), its mazes, its traps, its first lich. They sing of their new selves: atavism, cannibalism, an occult tumult into chaos, madness, the antidote to creation. 

Sometimes a new-born dungeon simply comes into being complete with traps and monsters. In these first moments of their new life, before the dungeon's song has truly taken hold, Orcs draw blasters and peer in confusion into the dark, all are confused, in pain, frustrated, frightened or else enrage. And then the dungeon's life becomes their own and they blink, and set about digging latrines. 

The archives of a lich-explorer contain reports of watching a dungeon-becoming, the sandy floor fusing into stone, the beholders unfurling from a few rotting pillbug corpses to swivel eyestalks in panic, the pit fiend bellowing far below.

The larger the creature, the harder it is to shed the dungeon's hold. Goblins independent of a dungeon are civilized in months. In generations, they no longer hear a dungeon. Orcs take longer. Ogres are never properly, fully civilized; their minds unable to totally adjust. Giants and titans are carry dungeons within themselves or are dungeons, never "away" from a dungeon.

THE CLEARED DUNGEON

Has to be civilized (turned into a hideout for characters, converted to a mine, used as a storage cellar for a keep) or systematically pulled down. Some municipalities, those far from the frontiers, retain sappers for the purpose, but most frontier settlements need help keeping the dungeon clear. Every room must be explored, cleared of treasure, traps and monsters, every secret door unlocked or else the dungeon will slowly reconstitute itself, perhaps where it was, or perhaps somewhere else. It will likely return meaner, with foreknowledge of the characters and their methods.

THE LOST AND THE DREAMING

Dungeons dream in forgotten places and long to be born. In the liminality of the taking form, the dungeon's dreams and fantasies blow like a hot breath from its hiding place and cause confusion and nightmares. Where abandoned sewer lines and city intermingle, usually in the poorest places, dungeon birth is foretold when the poor suffer from madness & mutation, plot riots and insurrection.

Dungeons also appear in uncivilized minds, in items of power too-long unused. Wizards have dungeon-bent minds, cultists, punk priests, chaos Catholics all find themselves compelled to live by nascent dungeons, total capitulation to the dungeon and it's reigning deities. Wizards summoning monsters are essentially just wizards peeling back the difference between this place and the cloaca that first ripped open their minds.

THE MEGADUNGEON, OTHER PLACES, OTHER HELLS

Effectively, every dungeon is somehow connected to every other dungeon by a network of ideas, deities and tunnels. Some dungeons are too small to grow fully navigable tunnels to other dungeons and transport between them requires acts of veneration and sacrifice to the governing malignant deities. Dungeons are also connected by certain conceits, the dream-contents of the dungeon made coherent: the sulfurous dungeon of precarious rock dancing in churning magma is connected by dream-song to the volcano dungeon which is likely connected to the hotter hells. 

The more potent and dungeon-minded traveler simply need to close their eyes and fill their minds with the entire song/spell/dream of a dungeon. The more broken and dungeon-bent the mind is, the easier such travel becomes.

Older, deeper dungeons bud misdirection- sublevels or full on symbiotic relations with stranger planes, alien planets and other hells.

pictures: Dali from Spellbound, Blake, Zumart and Blake Again