The Campaign Builder's Guild

The shade was the most interesting of the characters... It seems a bit dangerous for him to be walking around though, even with the parasol... what if it gets carelessly knocked aside during a battle?

(Seems like the shade is "living on the edge" -haha.)

I am looking forward to seeing the story expanded. It read well- like a Dark Tower story.

I expect at least one of the five will die rather early.

Quote from: SPthe cloaked, mercenary thing that merely calls itself The Cowl,

Also noting that I enjoy this description.

[ooc]Thanks, Light Dragon.  The umbrella thing is a bit precarious, granted.  Its only dreict sunlight that really screws up a shade, plus he wears a black leather suit, but its a defintie hazard.  The shade is a marksman, however, so ideally he'd take out enemies before they got close enough to mess with his umbrella.[/ooc]

[ooc]A couple of images I found on CG Society that really capture the atmosphere of Cadaverous Earth (they're done by a brilliant artist called Xueguo Yang whose profile is here).

An oneiroi.

One of the temporus mali.[/ooc]

[ooc]Update!

Added a new section, on Diseases.  It can be found under the Characters section, in the same post as the Bestiary and Oneiroi sections.  So far I've got three diseases written up, one of which has already been detailed (blanchphage).  The other two - harrowflux and spectra-plague - have been mentioned, but never described.  I'm quite proud of spectre-plague, which is still quite "visceral" despite its connotations of incorporeality (anyone who's read Fritz Leiber may recognize where I got my inspiration).[/ooc]

Hmm, for some reason we both seem to have been in the disease writing mood today.
Blanchphage is neat, but i reckon it is mostly biological. Or will the colorloss spill over onto clothes and such if he changes to a fresh set after he exits?
Harrowflux is interesting vsiually, but hardly my favorite.
Spectre-plague, i agree, is pretty great :)
For added grimness you should perhaps let the transparency develop in a more scattered way; i.e. you see patches of flesh and organs in the otherwise transparent body. Can you see the flesh if you look close enough or is it as good as invisible? Reminds me of the Fades from a book called the Translated Man. I can imagine that some spectres would paint their skin.

[ooc]You can see all but the most advanced transparent flesh, much in the same way that a glass is transparent but still visible, though obviously flesh has much less of a sheen or shimmer than glass and so is considerably harder to discern.

Brilliant ideas, Crow.  I updated the entry.  Why didn't I think of body painting?

Also added that some individuals like to self-infect for perverse aesthetic reasons.[/ooc]

[ooc]My occular obsession continues.  A new disease added - eyeblight, inspired by the Greek monster Argus:

[ic=Eyeblight]A bizarre disease even by the standards of the Cadaverous Earth, eyeblight, also called peacock syndrome, is a progressive and potentially debilitating contagion whose methods of transmission are sinister, to say the least. Through some mysterious eldritch process eyeblight pathogens are transmitted not through air, spores, contaminated food or water, or even physical contact, but through eye contact. The gaze alone appears to be insufficient: an eyeblight sufferer who merely looks upon another will not transmit the disease, but at the moment of contact, when the viewed returns the gaze, a pathway is made and the door for infection is opened. The infection travels through the pupil and along the optic nerve into the victim's brain.

Once contracted, eyeblight symptoms can manifest anywhere, but they usually begin on the face, neck, or shoulders, spreading slowly down the victim's body. The disease causes the appearance of small cysts or lesions that grow rapidly over the course of a few days before suppurating, exposing a fully grown and apparently operational eye, usually of the same type as that of the sufferer's normal eyes, complete with lids and eyelashes (though not eyebrows). The eye-lesions begin in small clusters and gradually spread, typically progressing down the arms, hands, back, and chest first, then to the victim's abdomen, legs, and feet. Newly grown optic nerves run from each lesion-cluster in dense cables up to the brain, where the infection began. This allows the sufferer to use all of the eyes at once. The experience of suddenly being able to see in many directions is incredibly disorienting, especially in the final stages.

There is no medicinal cure for eyeblight, and though surgery can remove the eye-lesions they inevitably grow back. As eyeblight runs its course the sufferer often finds it difficult to walk or holds objects because of the pressure on eyes on their soles or palms. Those who live with the condition eventually master the technique of closing all of their extra eyes, and keeping them closed, as desired. Some consider the disease a blessing in disguise because it allows them to see in ways they never would have otherwise been capable.

Extreme treatments for the disease include the intentional blinding of all the lesions of an eyeblight sufferer '" an often painful but ultimately effective remedy. Eyeblight is never directly fatal, but secondary eye infections are not uncommon in eyeblight victims. Some have suggested that eyeblight may belong to the same family as harrowflux because of similar progression patterns, though the latter disease is considerably deadlier.

Eyeblight lesions are capable of spreading the disease.[/ic][/ooc]

The Eyeblight is pretty interesting, though it raises a few questions.

Who is capable of being infected? What about Hagmen? Cestoids? Are Oneiroi immune like they're immune to Geists infection?

How does the Eyeblight interact with Geists? Can they be infected? Can someone catch Eyeblight then be turned into a Geist?

[ooc]You got me thinking about more rules for the disease, but that got too complex.  Anything with eyes can suffer from eyeblight.  So someone with eyebligth could get turned into a geist, and a geist could contract eyeblight.

Interesting where you might have been going with that though - there are a lot of smimilarities between gesit infection and eyeblight.  Were you suggesting I make eyeblight a kind of benign form of giest infection (thus providing immunity to other geist attacks for eyeblight sufferers - like a vaccine?).  That could be really cool, actually... I can picture them bringing in these guys with too many eyes to take care of their little gibbergeist problem.  So weird!

Never mind, geist infection and eyeblight are now going to be mutually exclusive![/ooc]

[ooc]New grave-spawn - the bricoleur.  It's inspired by Mieville's familiar in Looking For Jake, Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the Capuchin Crypts in Rome (which I visited a couple months ago):

[ic=Bricoleur]The bricoleur is a variety of relatively rare and unusual grave-spawn known for their intense devotion to aesthetics and their complete amorality: bricoleurs will do anything to advance their art, even if their actions directly contravene social or legal customs.  For the bricoleur, the aim of life is self-development, self-making, with the body as a canvas on which to display the outpouring of the soul.  Bricoleurs intensely resent any attempt to impinge on or restrict their so-called 'artistic freedom' but do welcome criticism concerning their art-bodies.

Even by the standards of the Cadaverous Earth, bricoleur aesthetics are macabre in the extreme.  The bricoleur itself is an amorphous parasite with limited mobility which many speculate is related at least distantly to the shade, though instead of a pool of liquid shadow bricoleurs are mottled, sanguineous beings equipped with numerous tendrils, which they can extend or retract at will.  Bricoleur bodies disguise and protect their protoplasmic consciousnesses, however.  Again like the shade, bricoleurs create bodies out of corpse-matter, but unlike the shade bricoleurs compose themselves out of mismatched or scavenged bits and pieces rather than whole corpses.  The shade squirms into a corpse's brain and assumes control of it: the bricoleur extends itself throughout a skeleton or cadaver and picks it apart, taking only those pieces it sees as aesthetically pleasing and abandoning the rest.  Bricoleurs prefer bones to flesh, because they are easier to work with.

Bricoleurs are rarely humanoid; if they are, their body is usually a caricature or parody of the human form, a kind of walking satire.  Usually bricoleurs cultivate fancifully shaped, outrageous bodies without any resemblances to other species.  One might harvest a dozen human legs, fuse them to a central torso with armor plates constructed out of hip-bones layered like scales.  Another might fuse spinal columns together to create a huge, serpentine body.  There is an upper limit on a bricoleur's size, but many bricoleurs can amass bodies much larger than those of most humanoids.  They frequently discard or rearrange parts of their bodies, constantly changing in shape.  Each bricoleur is unique, a pastiche of morbid components.  Scavenged tongues and lungs allow the bricoleur to speak; scavenged eyes allow it to see, though in its raw form it can sense vibrations and has incredible tactile sensitivity, allowing it to perceive textures and gradients.

Because of their intense artistic devotions bricoleurs sometimes have trouble integrating themselves into communities.  While most realize that their art is best served in the long run by maintaining positive relationships with other sentient beings '" beings that can supply them with the raw materials for their art '" a few radical bricoleurs become underground, predatory things, lurking in sewers and catacombs and the back-alleys of the Twilight Cities, stalking their carefully selected, fetishized prey before killing them and taking their bones.[/ic][/ooc]

If geist infection and eyeblight are mutually exclusive, then why is that? Someone with eyeblight could never become a geist? And vice-versa?

Could a cure perhaps be extracted for one or the other- to immunize someone as you suggest above?

[ooc]Yeah, eyeblight is now actually a form of psuedo-benign geist infection.  Geists can't infect other geists, so eyeblight sufferes are immune to geist infection.[/ooc]

I like the eyeblight. It has a sufficient bizarre eerieness. Can you cut the optic nerves surgically, or would they regrow as well? Could those with less control tape the eyes shut? I can imagine them growing growing on the footsole being very obnoxious...
I also went to the Kapuchin Crypts in Rome. Very neat place (if you put the fact that the walls are made of human bones somewhere in the back of your mind).
The Bricoleur seems like an interesting creature, enabling you to present players with strange skeletal forms while having good reason to do so. Reminded me slightly of the Tine corpse-gardens from the recently read the Year of Our War. How does the Bricoleur look when it is "manifested" in a bone sculpture? Can you see red threads wrapped around the bones? How does it fuse bones together (or does it just wrap them very tightly)? Can they speak? Do they on occasion use things besides bones? (e.g. wrapping their spinal snake in slimy intestines).    
The idea of obsessive serial killer bricoleurs is nice. Can imagine the weird bone creature stalking through the night, hiding in the shadows while watching a woman with a particularly exquisite hipbone.

[ooc]They can speak with stolen tongues and organs, and they hold together bones with their flexible bodies (so red threads/ooze).  They do occasionally incorporate other things than bones, principally eyes (to see with) and other organs, but since these materials decay they don't favor them.  Bricoleurs periodically go shopping for parts, replacing any degenerating organs.

Each bricoleur would look radically different.  The effect I'm imagining is a little bit like this image, though not generally as draconic.

It would be possible to tape shut eyeblight lesions, but nerve tissues for the eyes would regerenate as surely as the eyes themselves.[/ooc]