Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Those Aren't Rats In The Walls (Random Table, Wermspittle)

Those Aren't Rats In The Walls...
  1. There are dozens of newly hatched Slasher spawn (3d6, One HD each) back there, cutting their way through the wall with their tiny blade-legs. It'll take them the better part of (1d4) hours to break on through to this side.
  2. Dozens of exotic snakes have created a nest in this wall. They escaped from someone's unlicensed herpetorium and have been decimating the local mouse, rat and vole populations, which has over-joyed the Landlady who owns this property to no end. The snakes are non-poisonous, but the Landlady will be incredibly irate, even spiteful if you disturb her 'little angels.' She has connections to some thoroughly unpleasant people who she will enlist to 'teach you trespassers a lesson,' if necessary.
  3. The squatters and Refugees who have attempted to sleep in this room report strange dreams about a dark, dark place and a voice whispering to them of power...if they would just break through the wall and claim the Green Gem that has been lost there for several decades.
  4. The stench emanating from this wall is nauseating in the extreme. It will only get worse (and require a Save) if the wall is breached in any way. A Vilg was imprisoned behind the wall by a former master who suffered from the unfaithful familiar's gross betrayal one too many times. It might still be alive. It would like to make you a deal...
  5. How did an armadillo ever get inside this wall?
  6. Forty-three penguin skulls have been stacked and packed into a secret compartment in this wall.
  7. A swarm of 6' long blue-and-green-mottled two-headed centipedes has infiltrated the space behind this wall where a small, overlooked Weak Point has lodged. These centipedes have a rudimentary form of group intuition that is right on the verge of becoming some form of shared consciousness. They are incredibly venomous, sensitive to psychic impressions and absolutely hate cats. They originate from a Parallel Realm dominated by a bright, hot, humid teal-and-verdigris jungle no one has explored or named as of yet. Or is that an encrypted diary of some venturesome sorcerer partially merged into the wall by the passage of the Weak Point?
  8. A crippled Perdu was sealed behind the wall by a vengeful ex-lover. His tongue was viciously hacked out of his mouth and his legs are chained to the main support beam. He's nearly insane from having been left here all alone for so long. Every now and then he tries to tap out some sort of signal or moans pitifully in frustration and despair which only convinces the landlady who owns this place that it is haunted or under some sort of a curse.
  9. (4d4) Veilsect eggs are in the process of hatching, now that the wards placed over them have expired. Some fool thought that they could use the eggs as a sort of insurance policy in dealing with the parent. They were wrong. (You could also substitute some Strange Ovum, if you want an alternative to the Veilsect...)
  10. A Little Green Bag has been hidden here. Would you like to look inside?
  11. (6d20) Lesser Violet Ants are busily making themselves a new home within these walls. They are coming through a fractured Planar Aperture to the Paraversal Plane of Vhonj anchored by a brittle violet gem that will crumble into inert dust if disturbed. There are scholars and others who usually pay better than scholars who are interested in such things. Perhaps you might be able to sell the location of this thing to one of the Booksellers or trinket-peddlers or some other Middle-man so as to avoid any 'academic entanglements'?
  12. The dingy gray wallpaper is peeling away from the older, more sinister Yellow Wallpaper beneath it.
  13. The walls have been rudely plastered-over by an ambitious former land-lord. They missed a spot. Perhaps they ran out of time or were interrupted before they could finish the job? In any case, there is a map scratched into the wall beneath the cheap, crumbly plaster. A closer examination of the little bit that is visible shows that it is not only scratched into the wall, it is scorched into it and radiates a dim, fading sense of old, lingering magic. There's a 40% chance of a Student, Sorcerer or Forager recognizing this as a Grobbly-Bonk map.
  14. Someone has inscribed a sigil upon the wall. The sigil encrypts and embeds a slightly modified variant of the Thought Wall spell upon the wall. This is obviously the work of some Student. There are traces of other experimental sigils on the other walls of this room, but not enough of them remain to tell what they might have been. It is possible to study the sigil on the wall, if you can afford to take (1d4) hours and make a Save so as not to disrupt the sigil. Keep in mind that the use of such sigils is a Skill akin to a Thief's Find/Remove Traps, only for Sorcerers and other spell-casters. This is one of the  techniques taught in the local Academy to those who qualify for admission.
  15. The wall is saturated with Yellow Ichor left-over from a recently destroyed Shrouded. A team of Foragers have bribed the land-lord's staff to let the stuff remain in-place as they want to see what sort of Wet Spot it will yield after exposure to a small quantity of White Powder.
  16. The wall is upholstered with a rich, well-dyed leather derived from the victims of the Butcher Boy who lives here with his mother. His apron, mask, cleaver and other such gear is stored in a compartment behind the third panel on the left, the one with the screaming face. No one is supposed to know the identity of a Butcher Boy. Ever. Should this fellow have his ritual identity compromised, the Butchers will react swiftly and harshly. You don't want to be present. Really.
  17. A fossilized Polypous Abomination is thoroughly integrated into (1d4) walls of this room. Someone was deliberately attempting to force the thing to grow through the interstices and spaces behind the walls so as to create a ritual chamber completely enclosed by a living barrier. But why? To what end?
  18. There is a faint purplish discoloration to this wall. Anyone sleeping near it must make a Save or cross -over into the Purple Forest, either (60%) psychically/oneirically or (40%) physically.
  19. A Loathsome Mass has seeped down through the space behind this wall from one or more floors above. It seems intent on reaching the ground floor, as if seeking to escape.
  20. Sporadic tapping from within this wall is neither a poltergeist nor an unfortunate inmate. No. It is a tightly sealed glass jar. Inside the jar is a small (2HD) Corpuscular Sludge.
  21. A contraband Red Token has been hidden in this wall. Most people would have overlooked the viscous seepage of curdled blood staining the wall at that spot. The Red Token is your means to become a collaborator with a 'Scarlet Shadow,' either willingly as one of its disciples, or unwillingly as a victim of 'the Gurgles': the choice is yours...if you decide to take the Token without taking suitable precautions first. There are those who would pay a good price to learn the location of such a thing, but as it is proscribed, most of those sorts of people are already fairly dangerous and unstable, if not outright mad. Maybe there is some sort of a reward for turning this thing over to someone at the local Academy? Too bad the thing is so ethically corrosive and oneirically volatile...anyone holding it will need to make a Save every hour on the hour to avoid becoming corrupted by the insidious, malicious black humor this object inspires in its victims. Of course there are spells that might offer some measure of protection against this subtle undermining effect...but working out which spell(s) to use and how to maintain them long enough while traveling to the Academy, let along getting past the gate-keepers and tracking down just whom to contact, not to mention getting through the negotiations...well...this could prove quite challenging indeed.
  22. Hundreds of roaches are busily consolidating a particularly intelligent and spell-casting Ungezeifer's  unofficial dominion over this filthy, abandoned place. It dwells in the basement. The roaches serve it as henchsects and followers. This creature is a not-so-former rival to Urmigan the Drone-Seller. (See Bujilli Episode 40)
  23. (3d100) small, sealed pots and bottles have been stacked between the braces and cross-beams of this wall, each one carefully cemented into place with a mortar made from a ground-up Type I Gobbling Grout. Each of the containers is filled with a slightly different sort of Spectral Brine salvaged from dozens of different clandestine distilleries and powder-works. Whoever did this was doing it for a reason. Perhaps it has some sort of ritual significance. But what good could ever come from attuning oneself to the waste-products of the Corruption Trade?
  24. The after-image of a large Fantodic has been imprinted upon this wall by some sort of sorcerous photographical technique. The image is mostly inert, unless someone were to expose it to raw ectoplasm or start to meddle with it as part of some magical experiment. Sleeping in this room is a bad idea. Really bad.
  25. The professionally-preserved skeletons of a family of gnomes is packed away behind this wall with an incredible attention to detail. Each one is labelled, named, and otherwise thoroughly described by the tags affixed across each one. The bone-peddler who did this found himself unable to sell the skeletons to anyone back during the onset of a virulently regressive plague that de-aged its victims in spectacularly imprecise and inexact ways. Everyone took one look at his skeletons and instantly thought them victims of the then-current plague and refused to do business with him. So he packed them away in secret, with the hope of finding a buyer after things settled down a bit. Unfortunately he died only a week after ensconcing the bones in his bed-room walls. They say it was a random mugging. But they never did find his killer. Or his head.
  26. The walls are covered with several layers of dessicated and dry verminous insects. A few torpid and disoriented specimens clamber over their dead brethren, but for the most part, they are nearly all dead.
  27. This wall is Oneirically Permeable thanks to the efforts of a former tenant, a disbarred Somnambulist from Istibar.
  28. (2d4) Undead Medical Leeches are trapped behind this wall. They tend to be fairly quiet, even inconspicuous, but that was before part of the floor collapsed out from under the wall and now they are tentatively wriggling forth to seek out fresh blood after far too long a time.
  29. The walls in this place are packed with guano. The space(s) above have been taken over by a huge colony of bats.
  30. Who thought it was a good idea to trap a Withering Mist in the walls by embedding Miasmic Wards into every wall, floor and ceiling around this room?

You may also find the Swarms Table(s) of some interest.



4 comments:

  1. excellent as ever, table PDF'd and saved for future game hooks.

    Many many thanks for the quality and quantity of your work

    Cheers

    Damian

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for the kind words. We're going back over all of our old posts, month-by-month to draft a work-order covering everything we've left hanging so-far with an intent to get it all posted once and for all. We're also working on some PDFs that will compile and expand upon some of our tables, adventure hooks, scenario seeds, etc. There's a lot of fresh Wermspittle stuff coming along...as well as some over-due things like Book Nine and the return of Tsan Yian, Jalamere, and more.

      Delete
  2. Like the Swarms Table, this drives home how much you've done to develop Wermspittle. It really needs a sourcebook, a single volume for deep immersion and reading on cold, cloudy nights. Of the more stand-alone entries, I like no. 7 especially, as a reminder of how fantasy is really just another way of looking at the world we know.

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