Scribbles and Horrors

Watching E.R. has fried my brain, so here’s a Realm of Yolmi creature:

Medical Doctors

These professionals will insist on treating anyone who has been hurt, by force if necessary. Treatment heals all damage and takes one day. Their personal lives are quite chaotic, however, and there is a 20% chance that they will become overwhelmed and kill a patient.

Type: Men
N.A.: 2-12
Armor Type: 9
Move: 15”
Hit Die: 4
T.P.: G
% Lair: 35%
L.N.A.: 2-24
T.L.: H

Attacks: Openhanded, 1-4 + treatment (20% chance of death)

Here are more illustrations, following my first post.

Taekic

Small flying creatures armed with micro-lasers.

Dalek

Giant creatures that open their mouths and let food walk in. Unfortunately for them, their size gives them away every time. Even the most naive of Adventurer could see that it is not a cave since a large body wearing a fluorescent green tunic is attached to it.

H4 234

The last of the servorobots. It mounts two heavy machine guns on its sides and has delusions of being another “Machine Gun Kelly”

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Gamblers

Gaudily dressed, they invite Adventurers to play with them in obviously crooked games for high stakes. If refused, they will attack 45% of the time. They are also quite adept at passing phony rupniks, etc.

Suu

Stony creatures with three long rubbery necks with a head attached to each. They lash these around with tremendous force and speed, causing utter damage.

Completines

5′ monsters that generate electricity. They throw their eyes when hit in the stomach.

Furthering Yolmiposting, here are some illustrations based on the monster descriptions in The Realm of Yolmi. These drawings are frankly not at all what I first envisioned when I read the descriptions, but they seem to be what’s come out of me trying to draw them. A fun exercise, whether or not these drawings become canon to my imagination.

See also Yolmi Illustrations 2.

Ke

Move: 2”

Creatures with a horrible disposition who spit quik-glue which roots one to the ground and attracts lightning half the time. If asked what the substance is, they will reply it is merely tree sap and conclude in laughter. - p. 50

Ki

Move: 3”

Akin to the Ke, these creatures spit caustic acid up to a range of 20”. When asked what the substance is, they will laugh and say it is in the imagination. Only the most gauche of Adventurers will be fooled, however, because the substance smells strongly of sulphur. - p. 50

Reakles

Move: 15”

These moth-brained, ostrich-like creatures are incredibly stupid. In fact, when attacked they feel they must have been naughty; otherwise, why would they be attacked. Consequently they will kill themselves. If simply spoken to they will break off their leg as “punishment.” - p. 50

Regik

Move: 6”

These creatures used to be Used Car Salesmen. Any one they encounter will be subject to a long sales pitch and unless the prospect buys a totally worthless car for over 6000 Rupniks, the Regik will go mad, singing meaningless songs and kick the prospect in the head. - p. 50

Simul

Move: 12”

These are fish with feet. They are eager to please and will instantly change appearance to anything the Adventurer is thinking of. Alas, when touched, they revert. - p. 51

There is no being more frightening to have players encounter than The Redactor. Other monsters do hit point damage or attack with level drain or simply eat up valuable session time with tediousness. The Redactor is more malevolent and irreversible than these. The Redactor devours referee notes.

The Redactor has 5 HD, moves at a speed of 20”, and cannot be harmed.

When The Redactor attacks, each hit dealt corresponds to the complete blacking out referee notes, either 1 line or paragraph (for text) or 2 square inches (for maps and illustrations) (Determined randomly, perhaps by where the dice fall on the page.)

If The Redactor hits with three simultaneous 6s, an entire page of referee notes is destroyed.

Destroyed here means shredded and thrown away. It means gone, not set aside, not retired, not crumpled up playfully only to be carefully unfolded later. The referee must rip the page out there and then and tear it into tiny pieces, or burn it, or shred it, or eat it. Digital files must be deleted and overwritten. All copies, originals, backups, and collages of that page must likewise be destroyed–no trace can be left. No photocopy or photograph or partial residue is safe. Best efforts must be made to take down shared or published material. As much as possible, all material traces of the page contents must be wiped away. What remains will be only memory.

Player notes are entirely unaffected by Redactor attacks.

The Redactor can be appeased if willingly offered pages of player-made notes–between 1 and 6 pages of maps or 3-30 pages of text will satisfy it. Otherwise it will hound the party relentlessly, steadily eliminating the substance of the game itself.

There are stories of referees who have lost entire campaigns to The Redactor when players did not realize what was happening until it was too late. They could not find their way out of the underworld because the referee map was gone and stairways were improperly marked. Page by page, the campaign sank into oblivion.

There are further stories–more unsettling–of games which continue on long after The Redactor has eaten everything up, of referees who sit without pencil or paper, only dice, running the game by memory alone while players scribble furiously, nearly hidden behind stacks of loose leaf and binders, the glut of their copious notes.

The Endless Birthday Party of Kazzoo the Wise is a grotesque monument to the insanity of absolute power. The corpses of great philosophers from disparate eras (Kazzoo the Wise, Martin Trench, Oli Foops, and Karl Sloop) have been exhumed from their resting places, brought to a cramped room, positioned stiffly around a table, and re-animated to engage in a philosophical dialogue steeped in the stench of immutable rot. The dialogue has been in progress for many centuries already, endless questioning and speculating in the dark, without interruption.

The interlocutors will not notice anyone who comes into the room, and will not talk with anyone but themselves. They are reanimated corpses–in no way alive, yet academically active. Attempts to attack or remove them will meet no resistance. The conversation will continue until all of them are reduced to dust.

Included here is a snippet of that conversation (perhaps the bit of conversation which the party of adventurers happen to walk in on right at that moment!) It should be assigned roles and read aloud at the table very slowly, in a zombified drone.

The conversation generally rotates every few months between Kazzoo-Trench and Kazzoo-Foops. Martin Trench of course mainly has questions about ontology, ecology, and epistemology. Oli Foops is concerned with aesthetics, politics, and his watered-down theology. (Oli is always asking about the Demiurge.) Kazzoo is characteristically circumspect, poking holes in others’ arguments without making many himself. Karl Sloop’s chair rotted out from under him one or two hundred years ago, so he remains on the floor, occasionally groaning. (One might joke that Karl Sloop’s philosophy was never much more than the occasional groan anyway.)

Why in God’s name Thackeracky the Terrible set up such a display is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it is simply because he could — surely not out of a real love of wisdom. Thackeracky is now long gone, and so the Endless Birthday of Kazzoo the Wise endures as a harmless, if unsettling, landmark.

Young philosophers have on occasion ventured to audit the dialogue for long periods, hoping to gain some wisdom in the exercise. A transcript of the partial dialogue was even published by Kendra Matchsticky as part of her Ph.D. Thesis, “Ways of Knowing: New Epistemologies from Old Voices.”
In general, though, the dialogue is obscure and abstruse, of no great interest even to those who know that it is taking place. Philosophers are mainly concerned with getting their own work published and regard it as irrelevant. Historians of philosophy consider the dialogue to be pure anachronism, unworthy of serious study.