Sunday, February 1, 2026

Now Drafting Players: Blood Bowl RPG

I’m working every day on my upcoming fantasy audiodrama and I need something to do that’s just pure fun. The show's all recorded and we're working on the mixing with the studio while we choose takes, stitch pieces together, and layer on music and ambiance. I'm glad to be doing it, but all this editing needs something to balance it out.

I am going to run a weekly Blood Bowl RPG in which each participant will control a PC in the manner of a traditional TTRPG. Action will take place both on and off the pitch, with an ideal rhythm of one match and one caper per game session. If you're interested in joining, see the Details section below.

By default, the team will have the Old World Alliance as its skeleton: humans, dwarfs, halflings, ogres, and treemen. It will be incorporated in Matorea in the Border Princes region to account for variances from established team types. However, if a solid majority of chartermen (founding players) want to start as some other team type, there's an alternative I'd be willing to consider.


Imagery from the NAF Discord

    Chartermen

Founding players (ie those who are with the campaign from the start) will have no seniority over those who join later, but they will get the opportunity to shape the game's starting conditions.

    The Team

Here is the default concept:

The coach is Fitzie, an Albionese who travelled across the Middle Sea in his youth and became a caravan guard and then a caravan master.  He rode the Old Silk Road from Estalia to Cathay, and he has connections across the continent and among the Sea Elves.

He's been a lifelong Blood Bowl fanatic and has always regretted not playing in his youth, instead beating down robbers from the World's Edge to the Dark Lands.

He made a trip to Sudenberg recently and came into a mysterious windfall. With fortune now in hand, he's decided to found his own Blood Bowl team.

It will be built on an Old World Alliance skeleton because that will require minimal bribery to get incorporated. The call is put out across the lands and seas for Humans, Dwarfs, Ogres, Treemen, and, if necessary, Halflings, to travel to Matorea to become the founding members of this new team. 

Anyone who fits one of the above descriptions (even if only roughly) can apply. No undead, lycanthropes, chaos worshippers, or elves.

Fitzie loves the clash and the atmosphere of Blood Bowl, but unlike most fans, he recognizes the limits of his strategic acumen. As such, he will leave most decisions to the team while handling what he knows best: transport planning and logistics, so that the team can play anywhere in the world.

    Alternate Starting Concept

If there's major interest and near-unanimous agreement, I would consider switching the game's core concept to be a Norscan-core team supplemented by beastmen, lycanthropes, trolls and such. See the second character background team list below.

For the Old World Alliance-style team, you will be able to select your character concept and sprite from a vast array in the following sections.

While I like certain other ideas, like a Bretonnian Knights of the Round Table-style team, it would probably be better for, say, one player to be a Grail Knight and guide Fitzie's team on a quest for a legendary tournament chalice lost when a castle fell before the waves, or whatever the case may be, keeping the team itself more generalist.


    Your Character Background

You can draw your character concept and sprite from the following list of teams. By default you can play any non-chaotic Human, Dwarf, Halfling, Ogre, or Treeman, although remember that the use of machines, munitions, and magic is generally a foul that will get you sent off and your gear confiscated for the duration of the game (after the current drive).

This list is not perfectly exhaustive and if you find something that I missed on the FUMBBL website that's within the concept, you're free to use it. 

    Player Backgrounds

Ind ("Yes he's an Indish ogre. No the trunk doesn't change that. No he's not a mutant!")
Kislev (Werebear transformations are a foul on this team so make sure they count)
Lahmia (Can play escaped commoners but not vampires)
Norsca Format A (only Raider, Valkyrie, or Berserker, must be non-chaos worshipper)
Norsca Format B (only Lineman, Thrower, Runner, or Berserker, must be non-chaos worshipper)
Ogre Kingdoms  ("Yes a yhetee's an ogre... do you wanna argue with him?")
Sons of Stromfels (Pirate cultists and wreckers only)

    Alt Team Concept Backgrounds

Tzeentch is dominant over Nurgle here, so Pestigors/Bloater Warriors are not available.
Daemons are not available as PCs.

Albion (Not pixie)
Chaos Dwarfs (No hobgoblin)
Chaos Renegades (Only humans, dark elf renegades, trolls, ogres, and minotaurs)
Daemonsmiths (Not iron boar)
Hung (Not chaos hound)
Khorne (Only the Bloodborn, Khorngors, Bloodseekers, Cultists)
Norsca Format A (Not beer boar)
Ogre Kingdoms (Not gnoblar)
Slaanesh (Only Slaangors, Slaanesh Warriors, Cultists)
Trolls (Only the trolls)
Tzeentch (Only Tzaangors and Tzeentch Warriors)
Wintertooth (Not chaos goblin)


    Character Considerations

These teams have a few sprites I haven't seen elsewhere, which you can use if you like. Don't worry about uniforms because I'll adjust the color ahead of time. 

If you play a machine, munition, or magic-based concept, your baseline character will be equivalent to a Lineman of the team you got your concept from. When you deploy your character's special capability, your statline will be replaced with the special character's statline. Note that you will likely be sent off for the rest of the match at the end of the drive where you deploy your special capability. After you are ejected, you will be allowed to control one of the team's NPC Linemen. Your baseline lineman chassis will still improve as the team advances.

You can use Star Player sprites, though you can't play the Star Player him/herself, so be sure to choose a background as well. Your sprite doesn't have to be the one next to your chosen background, but should be relevant to it.

Allowing this many character concepts might seem stupid but I want to emphasize that all PCs will begin at a similar power level and will slot into basic team roles. "You might well have been Captain of the Sartosa Spleenrippers, but you're marooned now and we need a Blitzer or the RARG won't let us register." You will keep your chosen player type's statline and skills; this would have faced more intense scrutiny during the time of the AFL.

While most starting PCs will have some Blood Bowl experience, you'll need to travel the world honing your abilities against new opponents before you consider going toe-to-toe with teams like the Orcland Raiders or the Reikland Reavers.

Note that the existential shifts that have taken place since the coming of Blood Bowl mean that big guys like treemen, minotaurs, and Lords of Change are powerful but nowhere near as powerful vis a vis regular humans as in the before times, when wars and storms of magic ravaged the globe.


    Rules Adaptations

On-pitch play is going to draw 90% from BBTT norms and standards modified to fit a TTRPG-style d20-head-to-head-roll-dominant system, rather than BBTT's roll-dice-against-set-odds and roll-under-characteristic-dominant system.

When you send me your character concept, I'll provide you with a playbook with the player-facing game mechanics. This will include advanced Skills you'll be able to take after a few level-ups that will reflect your specific character concept. 

We'll play on a grid with pitch size and movement derived 1-to-1 from BBTT.

Fights off the pitch will use the same base mechanics (with no referee, of course). 

Skills will be available on level up, which will depend on accumulated Star Player Points (SPP). As a TTRPGism, winnings will be evenly split between players, and SPPs will be won by the individual player for the team, with the successful player receiving a small premium of "discretionary SPPs" that can be spent differently than team "XP SPPs", such as to gain temporary charisma for social interactions off the pitch. 

There are no hit points; the currency of violence will still consist of push-backs, knock-overs, stuns, fouls, knockouts, and casualties.

The main fundamental difference to keep in mind is that if a player falls prone, or when they attempt to pick of the ball and fail, or otherwise miss a roll, it will not be the end of that team's turn, though it will be the end of that player's activation.

There are two reasons for this. First, this rule would place a huge amount of moral pressure on a TTRPG player to not make any move that could possibly lead to a failed roll that would deny the other PCs their turns. In this RPG, if you fall down, the consequence will be that you leave your tackle zone open for the other team to traverse, but you won't deny the rest of your team their turns.

Second, this opens the possibility for more rushing and aggression by the offense over cautious cage play, which is my preference and in line with both gridiron football and rugby.

The team turn will end when all player activations have ended.

This level of aggression might seem worrisome with regard to long-term team health to a veteran BBTT coaches, so note that PCs will not be nearly as prone to lingering injury as BBTT players. 

People accurately describe BBTT as a risk mitigation game, which isn't what I'm going for; rather the aggressive, buoyant feeling of the Blood Bowl world.

On-pitch turn order will be "we all go then you all go then we all go" D&D-style stagger, with BBTT's format of two 8-round halves with possible extra time.

You don't need to know how to play BBTT to join this game; I will adjudicate, and you'll be provided with a player rules reference.


    Details

The game will be played on Roll20, with Discord voice and a digital whiteboard as a fallback.

By default we’ll play evening of CT/UTC-5, unless a majority of players are in e.g. the UK or one of the North American coasts. Once we know about the location and availability of the players, we'll set an exact time. 

If you would like to join, reach out to me at thespiritofthedepths@gmail.com, davegreggs on Discord, or comment here. I'll get in touch and we'll go over your character concept and what you'd like to get out of the game. I'll provide you with a playbook and the conduct rules (no politics, no perviness, and no disrespect, with 0-1 warning).

If you miss out on the initial draft, don't worry; players entering the campaign later will begin almost as powerful as the team's current average (or they wouldn't have been able to get on the team!).

You can let me know what kind of character you'd like to play up front or later, though if you have preferences vis-a-vis Old World vs Norsca-based teams, let me know ASAP.


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Monday, January 26, 2026

Blood Metal Catalyst

A razored isle chained above a sea of darkness in a great cavern. It was raised here as a retort and alembic for the forging of liquid life. 

Pits of gleaming silver ichor flash between the isle's spires and dance up its chains like sunlight on a metal moon. At the isle's heart there is a gullet of boiling blood-metal.

The pits were living crucibles when the cavern's ocean was magma, imperial forge machine. Everyone on the isle died in a heartbeat when the magma leapt, a blinding bubble, and then fell away forever.

The magma sea has been replaced by an unending cloud of writhing charcoal motes.

The isle's goldbeaten spires were erected in times of better fire, magma lustering obelisks to eternal dusk. These warped in the final flare and drape in despairing tendrils towards the chamber's stony heavens.

The roof of the vault mirrors its pit, a fogbank of drifting motes in a constant floral boil, disgorging and dissipating into the chasm's lofty cracks.

The isle's vast metal chains are graven with spiral staircases winding helically around their exteriors, fanning and interlacing like gears where links fasten. The steps shift as the links wind and groan, rotating fully as the workings of the isle tease through them.

The chains emerge from great silver fastenings in the walls of the chamber, as do you. These are wrought with flickering, gusty sigils indicating immovable force along the link-stairs. Symbols of submission to the gravity well, mocking highlight of the inexorable path. 

The chains descend to the isle and disappear in canopies of black rugose moss fed by the airborne charcoal, which hangs from the chains like hag's hair, densest where the chains meet the isle. The moss shivers metallically when it stirs along the links and hangs quivering in the void. 

Malefactors hide within the mossy beards, hidden in space, deposited on the link-stairs behind the party.

Humans have been tempted to this place so that its masters may employ their powers of perception, but they are not this place's beneficiaries, despite their firm belief.

They are paid with servants that live inside them, pools of smiling plutonic metal in their guts and livers, scrubbing and polishing, permeating and preparing. 

The men possess an energy and radiance, urgency and confidence, artificial brilliance, and the loss of hair and teeth. 

They have swords and single uses of ancient weapons. They deploy the latter only if certain they will die. 

Beasts flitter in the upper void. Bone-wrought miracles, amber fossils engraved in their encasement and given animation. Their claws protrude, as do their wings, clad in black velveteen leather from the lissome air-eels flitting through thermal flues. Undead? The amber fossils have been abiogenetically imbued with fresh consciousness. Pseudoanimalia spellbound to inexpressable love and insatiable bloodlust. 

There are silvery spires upon the isle, thinned and bent into swords, inlaid with heroes broken and warped into funerary shades, proud cities crushed to marred memories. 

You pass earthfire crucibles once stirred by the mountain sea, fed by wisps from the excised dreams of metal spirits in their paradise of molten light.

The masters here are living metal. Quicksilver serpentmen masked with ice, steely slow-motion rainstorms traversing their environs in a perfect traffic, and colonial mists puppeting jointed harlequin statues of panoptic bladed kings and advisor spiders. 

Only these beings survived the flash.

Their warped perceptions are unprepared for reality's truth. They will seize upon you but cannot fully appreciate you nor reliably perceive you at a distance. Hence their baited humans. 

The liquid beasts will not approach white metal pits as they will be permanently psychologically altered to madness by their influence.

The humans are exiles or those hounded by visions. The freshest make reference to motile metal gifts, unbreakable weapons and deathless companions. Those who've borne the liquid metal in their guts describe themselves as ravishingly, deliciously superhuman, their bloodshot unblinking eyes pooling beneath hairless brows.

They can be knocked into the swordspires, pits, and charcoal sea.

There is a perfect treasure by the isle's heart. A lifelens for the reduction and animation of metal. 

Affected forms are given motility and the potential for motion, animated by neotenous intelligences to utilize their shapes.

Swords are made familiars, scrap-dolls into haemonculi, statues agender instinctless sapients. 

It is an arcane alchemy for shaping and commanding nascent intelligences. Is has become the raison d'être for the isle's liquid life.

New forms are engendered, enlivened, raised, and characterized via moments of spellfire. The products are assessed by porcelain serpent tutors or cast into arenas and labyrinths, and then dropped down pits of boiling metal or off of the edge of the isle. 

The lens casts prismatic symbols across everything it sees. It is held at the tip of a motile spike of crystal glass that serves the isle's metal life as its bearer. The influence of this glassy spike is growing with its charge, and its silent uninterpretable dictates will more and more shape the policy of the liquid beasts.

If the party are able to shatter this living spike and collect its lifelens, the objective of the human defenders will become to seize it for themselves and abscond with it, to wreak ruin upon the peoples who cast them out.

If they make it onto a chainbridge, one of them will madly dump a solvent on its anchor, causing the chain to come loose and fall against the chasm's wall. The great isle will snap free of its moorings and smash into the far base of the cavern like an asteroid filled with gleaming, boiling metal, crashing and spilling into the charcoal sea. The wiliest humans on the chain will ensconce themselves in the metalmoss nets and then begin their ascent of the chains' spiral staircases.

___


Interface Serpents

Coils of cloud-white glittering like starlight in soft sand. Hissing of semi-solid metal kissing, voice jumping between different parts of its shifting body. A salt-pale mask peppered with charcoal motes in the shape of a rictus lynx or great complex key.

Armor Class 15
Hit Points 22 (5d8)
Speed 30 ft inertialess but must remain in contact with a surface.
STR 14 (+2)
DEX 15 (+2)
CON 11 (+0)
INT 12 (+1)
WIS 6 (-2)
CHA 16 (+3)
Immune to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage
Condition Immunities Grappled, Prone, Restrained
Senses Darkvision 60 Ft., passive Perception 14 when speaking (wordprickle)
Languages Thhnahn, Stygioterminal, Helixthane
200 XP
Actions
Partial engulf. Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one creature. Hit: d4 + 4 crushing damage, d4 WIS damage


Levitating Beadstorms

Iridescent hydrofuel poison. A wasp-swarm of darts striking home in volcanic stone or tacking on softened steel. 

AC 16
Hit Points 33
Speed 35 ft, must traverse objects at no more than a 120 degree angle from one another, though capable of self semi-directing trajectory 
STR 12 (+1)
DEX 9 (-1)
CON 14 (+2)
INT 12 (+1)
WIS 8 (-1)
CHA 1 (-5)
Immune to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage. Only susceptible to area-of-effect and magic attacks. 
Large
Condition Immunities Charmed, Frightened, Grappled, Paralyzed, Petrified, Prone, Restrained, Stunned
Senses Blindsight 20 Ft., Darkvision 40 Ft., passive Perception 12 (mantic echo)
Languages Thhnahn (psychic or tapform)
400 XP
Swarm. The swarm can occupy another creature's space and vice versa, and the swarm can move through any opening large enough for a Tiny creature. The swarm can't regain hit points or gain temporary hit points.
Actions
Inundate. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 0 ft. Hit: 4d4 piercing damage, d4 INT damage, d4 WIS damage


Statuemecha

Awful, self-destructive stone grinding. Mist of rancid furore; a twitching of the nose and lips before tears.

Armor Class 18
Hit Points 126 (11d12+55)
Speed 40 ft.
STR 23 (+6)
DEX 10 (+0)
CON 20 (+5)
INT 12 (+1) (piloting mist)
WIS 10 (+0) (piloting mist)
CHA 1 (-5) (piloting mist)
Saving Throws Dex +1, Con +8, Wis +1
Huge
Senses Darkvision 60 Ft., passive Perception 14 (polypermeation)
Languages Thhnahn (psychic)
2,500 XP
The statuemech is not immune to physical damage, but if its pilot-mist survives its destruction, it will quickly gust away to inhabit another statue. 
Actions
Multiattack. It makes two attacks.
Strike. Melee Weapon Attack: +8 to hit, reach 15 ft., one target. Hit: (3d8 + 6) bludgeoning damage.


Mobile Spike of Crystal Glass

Silence; a cautious radiance. Smoothly traverses the rock like an ethereal paperweight.

Armor Class 10
Hit Points 21
Speed 20 ft.
STR 7 (-2)
DEX 1 (-5)
CON 12 (+1)
INT 16 (+3)
WIS 14 (+2)
CHA 16 (+3)
Senses Blindsight 60 Ft., passive Perception 14 (lens panopticality)
Languages Thhnahn (psychic, cannot interface with nonmetallic noncrystal beings)
10 XP


Human Guardians

Armor Class 12
Hit Points 11 (2d8+2)
Speed 30 ft.
STR 12 (+1)
DEX 12 (+1)
CON 9 (-1)
INT 8 (-1)
WIS 8 (-1)
CHA 12 (+1)
Senses passive Perception 14 (metallically heightened)
Languages (one of) Stygioterminal, Helixthane, Mercurial Cant, Usjanik, Dracosump, Earthrip, Ethero, Olustuyikugkab, Smokeflesh, Fulvigath, Camathau, Lichbreath
25 XP
Actions
Scimitar. Melee Weapon Attack: +3 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: (1d6 + 1) slashing damage.
Light Crossbow. Ranged Weapon Attack: +3 to hit, reach 80/320 ft., one target. Hit: (1d8 + 1) piercing damage.
Ancient Weapon (one use): d4 sample effects;
1. Enforced Divination. Save WIS DC15 or have your mind plunged into an ancient epoch of unspeakable cruelty for d4 Rounds. You are Stunned until you return, Exhausted 2 for one hour from psychological trauma, and Exhausted 1 thereafter until long rest.
2. Tectonic Destabilizer: The warrior doesn't know what this does; it will affect the wall of the chasm and cause shifting in the earth, making the chains violently twist. Next turn, DC checks from the chains shifting are 3 DC higher (see next section).
3. Superheat Local Metal: The local chain link becomes superhot. Those remaining on it at the start of their next turn take 3d6 damage. Those still holding metal take d4 damage and must drop it. 
4. Microorganize: Latent plagues and diseases in the target spring back with a vengeance; any disease the PC has ever suffered (except for any that are explicitly purely magical simulacra of disease) erupts and affects the PC until the end of combat. If they have never suffered a specific disease in-game, mighty influenza has its day and the PC suffers Exhaustion 3.

The humans here have a chance of spilling plutonic liquid metal when they are killed by slashing damage. Attacker must check DEX vs d20 if adjacent. On failure, suffer d4 INT damage and d4 WIS damage. Gain d4 temporary CHA.


Traversing the Links

Every round of combat, or whenever the GM calls for it, everyone traversing the links must make a DC 12 DEX test. Failure indicates a fall, which requires a DC 15 DEX test to arrest, in which case the subject falls prone, hugging the link. Those who pass their traversal test may make an additional test to arrest the fall of anyone adjacent to them (one per open hand) who's failed their traversal test. Those standing still may remain in roughly the same position without a test.

The GM should draw the chain battleground twice on a grid, the links being in alternating flat and vertical dispositions. The maps should be mirrored. When the traversal check is made, move all tokens from one map to the other. Decide whether the chain has rotated clockwise or counterclockwise to determine where anyone who's fallen might be hanging. 


Withered Spires

4d6 slashing damage to anyone who makes an uncontrolled entry into a square containing a withered spire's edge.


White Metal Catalyst

Per round of immersion: 8d6 radiant damage, 2d4 INT damage, 2d4 WIS damage


Blood Metal Catalyst

Per round of immersion: d4 necrotic damage, imbued with a soul. It will take 2d4 days to learn your language and will be able to speak with you psionically. 

Ascertain its personal arc of development using this generator.

At first it will only be able to silently communicate with you. Then, each month, it will gain 1 level in Wizard and will be able to cast d4 new spells, solely of its own volition, selected by the GM based on its personality. After 6 months it will be able to communicate with others psionically without your knowledge.

A soul imbued in this manner can be removed by Dispel Evil and Good. It is obliterated.


Lifelens

The Lifelens can cause Ensoul Metal on contiguous metal objects up to small size once per day.

For each additional day the lifelens lays fallow, it can Ensoul an object one size larger than the previous day.

Objects lose all hardness and cannot be damaged by bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing. For the purposes of leverage, they have double their original capacity.

Objects become motile enough for self-directed perambulation or lateral undulation.

If an object is only loosely connected together, it will shake off weakly-connected pieces as soon as it is Ensouled. These objects do not express these characteristics.

Created objects have d4 INT and d4 WIS. 4s explode, max 18.

Ensouled metal will be under the creator's indirect psychic control for 21 days, becoming free thereafter, but the liquid beasts have not yet allowed any object to live long enough to learn this.  

Ensouled metal of gargantuan size immediately breaks free of control.

___




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Friday, September 5, 2025

Feedback on Investigating Censor

Thank you to those who have purchased or downloaded Investigating Censor: Steppe Cataphract Edition and Investigating Censor: Impermanence.

I would like to invite you to give me 100% anonymous feedback on anything you please related to these projects. You can of course provide me feedback on anything you like, though I would find feedback on Investigating Censor particularly salient.


In other news, I will soon be releasing Moonrhythm Mire, the maximalist artpunk adventure I wrote for In The Hall of the Third Blue Wizard by Noisms Games, as a standalone for $2 on DTRPG and itch.io. Noisms refers to it as "a bizarre and brilliant feast for the senses; OSR DIY D&D turned up to 11."


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Tuesday, September 2, 2025

Investigating Censor: Steppe Cataphract Edition

I am very pleased to be able to share with you Investigating Censor: Steppe Cataphract Edition, the second edition of my dark rules-light roleplaying wargame Investigating Censor, alongside a new adventure for it, Impermanence.

Investigating Censor: Steppe Cataphract Edition is now 100% free for the first time at itch.io and DTRPG. Impermanence is available for $2 at itch.io and DTRPG.


Investigating Censor is set amidst a campaign by oracular warrior monks to eliminate a sect of human-sacrificing pirates.​

​The leaders of these monks, Investigating Censors, can enlist anyone into their retinue on pain of outlawry. Anybody who is not an enemy can be turned into a party member.

Proper use of this power will bring powerful alchemists, spirit-binders, sword saints, and courtesans to the cause of the Investigating Censors.

Misuse of the Investigating Censors' charter will arouse fanatical resistance among the people of the fallen pirate regime.

Allies will be needed, as the warrior monks must wage archery battles from horseback, fight pirate ships at sea, storm sacrificial fanes in the caverns of the rocky coast, and survive encounters with supernatural creatures and their powers of prophecy.


Investigating Censor: Steppe Cataphract Edition contains a revised and expanded edition of the original Investigating Censor Roleplaying Wargame, and has integrated:
-The revised Seven Leopards enemy dossier and region.
-The revised and expanded introductory adventure, The Hands of Lacquermere.
-A refined and expanded guide to Investigating Censor's fundamental game loop: deputization, investigation, and battle.
-A refined and expanded Combat section.
-Revisions and readability fixes across all chapters.
-Cover art by Evlyn Moreau for both Steppe Cataphract Edition and Impermanence. Please see Ev's ArtStation and Patreon.

    
    Investigating Censor: Impermanence
Disappearances plague the Fringe of Moments, a region of the fallen pirate regime. These have many sources, each of which will endeavor to make the Investigating Censors disappear in turn.

    Passages from Impermanence

The Fivefold Prince was one of the few pirate lords to actually dedicate himself to the Poison War. Almost all his men ended up dying with ghastly tremors and milky diarrhea on some hellish delta.

He returned to the South Coast with a skeleton crew. He has never spoken of what happened in the Poison War.

During his return he stopped in the Sands of Stirring Fossils to take on fresh water. A marrowrachnid climbed aboard. These faceless creatures tear their way into human bodies and then force their hosts, their worn men and women, to serve their purposes.

The threat of a marrowrachnid tearing free or poisoning one from within is ever-present.

This marrowrachnid puppeted a cabin boy, and, after learning what had happened to the crew among the Poison Libraries, it went to the Fivefold Prince.

It proposed a relationship that would ensure no one would tell of what the captain’s decisions had led to. The Fivefold Prince consented. 

---

The Courtiers lay in the silk. The Stewards walk with balanced spezzatura along the edges.

These silks are woven together at their hems, preventing a fall into darkness. This palace is built on the void around enormous stalagmites rising through a vault in the earth.

Anyone who falls through the silk will rotate in a freezing void for hours or days before being shredded to death on a giant stalagmite. This has been a means of execution; scars in the silk speak to this.

---

A brick plain with a raised altar that is shielded from sight by day, boughs pulled down across the paths around it, and blazes with furious fire at night, braziers casting glints across a brass-bound, horn-shaped trunk atop a low ziggurat of stony steps.

In this trunk of mottled black leather, there is a tiny globe made of porous bone. Its four quadrants dance with fire, water, wind, and tectonic vibration. If broken apart, the globe will disgorge four fresh Coins of Junction (see Investigating Censor: The Uses of Alchemy).

Murderers in wolfskins pile captives for the fire altar, scapegoats for immolation. Pirates kneel on planks of scented wood, symbolically bound in the guts of a cosmic galley. They watch the victims undergo a prophecy of torment, seeing their conflagratory future as they approach the burning bowls.

---

Kadriga is a fetid hag of great sagacity.

The trees weep a gore of black sap as she passes and the dead autumn foliage rises and waves, brown ferns shivering, wilted flowers gazing, dead leaves cartwheeling around. 

Locals can tell the ICs about her. She can tell the ICs about the Steeltree and its snakeroot, the Hell of Songs, and the Pharmakon of Molten Bone. She will be forthcoming with information if the ICs gift her with alchemical products or items made using Fetches & Fetishes. 

---

Pools of inky water stand in the lowest reaches of the Hell of Songs where immemorial dryads howl in ecstasy, woodforms that bellow waftings of warm black steam that hang heavy in the air and stain the leaves and boughs until the next natural rain. 

At night the black steam recedes to receive a rain of the moon, comet’s milk that falls from overhead streaks pattering igneous and spermatic, igniting spasms of life that curl up from the stone and grasses, ceramic blossoms of ice-white biomantle like geothermal coral. The dryads and beasts feed on the quicksilver affixtures, bringing another day’s life and madness into the gorge. 

---

Little white fruits hang from the tree. On closer inspection these are eyes twined to the branches by their optic nerves.

___



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Friday, August 22, 2025

National Cuisine of Starling & Shrike

Characteristic dishes of the mountaintop city-state.

Groundswell: Powdered Parmesan mixed with black coffee to create a porridge. Regular breakfast during the detective agōgē. After graduation, some agents refuse to touch it ever again, others make it whenever they feel nostalgic. Politely called 'Rainy Plain' on bed and breakfast menus.

Snowmelt: A little mound of whipped cream with hot espresso poured over the top. Eaten with a long spoon.

Sour Peon: Sourdough bread soaked in heavy cream. May be served with a dollop of raspberry or blackberry jam.

Ziggurat: A potato chip dusted with jalapeño powder, heaped with sour cream, topped with a slab of pickled herring and a little piece of onion.

Lewdbread: Bread soaked in bacon fat. Generally attained by frying a large amount of bacon and then placing it in a serving canister with bread at the bottom.

Bent Rainbow: A dish imported from Cape Cittacotte. Papaya shrimp salad with creamy yellow curry served on a bed of soft lettuce. Polarizing.

Lanterns: Little slabs of potted meat fried on a camp stove, e.g. while writing reports at midnight. Can by corrupted by the addition of egg, radish, rice, and/or oyster sauce. Also called Pig's Procrastination.

Barrel Mash: Black beans and rice soaked in olive oil and then pan fried with sausage, fennel, garlic, and red wine. Often eaten as a sandwich on wheat or soft black bread.

Archipelago: Cheddar, sour cream, and paprika salami on a soft, sweet cracker. Served dozens to a dish at cocktail parties.

Birthday Swill: Root beer mixed with lemonade.

Crucified Banana: Peanut butter and banana whipped together. Eaten with a spoon or encased in chocolate.

Monsoon: Heavy cream blended with root beer.

Volcano Pudding: Cottage cheese drenched in chili sauce.

General Winter: Bad coffee poured into a metal cup and left out in the snow overnight; much improved by morning.

Aftermath: Strawberry yogurt blended with peanut butter.

Brickwork: Chunks of Parmesan placed in the mouth, followed by a sip of hot coffee to slightly melt the exterior.

Stomion Cocktail: Whisky, cranberry juice, and pear schnapps. Should be nearly black. 

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Indigenous Starling & Shrike foodways evolved from historical conditions of alpine isolation modulated by the arrival of imports-enabling technologies such as refrigeration, rigid-hulled airships, and elongated biplanes. Agents serving contracts in distant lands brought back a taste for tropical goods such as coffee, peanut butter, and chili products.

Personally, I love ziggurats.

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Monday, August 18, 2025

Upcoming Fantasy Audiodrama Series


I have written the script for an upcoming fantasy audiodrama series. I'll be traveling up to Vancouver, BC in October to record with voice actors. If you are a voice actor who lives in or very near Vancouver, BC, and are fully available to record in person during mid-to-late October, reach out to me at thespiritofthedepths@gmail.com and I'll link you to the casting call. Pay is Vancouver Fair Wage 2025, $23.37 CAD/hour.






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Wednesday, May 14, 2025

On Entering Veystasa

Slaves worked their substance into the earth. It was is if the crops were made of them, not the rain and wind. Every year they shrank as the crops grew, their bodies bending like weathered wheat. Harvested from distant shores, withering on the vine. Hulking figures striding heartlessly between them. Small men sitting in wide wicker chairs, whips coiled metaphorically like snakes by their sides.

Their stories were ending. They had begun in love, conflict, and hardship, plans, dreams, wonder, and bitterness near foreign shores or amber groves in the endless forest. Then, like someone cast from a cliff, their lives had taken a new, final trajectory and were hurtling towards the conclusion, unremarked by fate. How many would escape their silent, anonymous, unknown deaths here? One in a hundred? How many might have their names burned into memory's fate, carried beyond their lifetime in any way? One in ten-thousand?

It was a ghastly thing, like witnessing plague victims. A fate that was hard to contemplate when one still controlled one's own. Life had betrayed them, like someone waking to find himself riven by tumors.

The horror of bondage. You will rot before I do. In these lands, nobody who can help it works his farm without slaves. To be chained to the earth is to be half-drowning. To be nothing but a watcher of cows. To be a filer of metal, or a peddler affixed to his little rug. These things are living death. They're ameliorated by- what? A bit of cheese? A bit of honey? Sex with a woman who will take you rather than starve? To be drunk on a little beer, weeping over what's to come? 

We will force others into fatal destruction before we will endure this. We will force others into the soil before we spend our lives gazing at it. We look to the sun, to the horizon, to the fearsome warrior screaming and rushing at us before we endure the soil, or its chthonic extremity, the mines. 

In this life I have been carved like scrimshaw by swords, daggers, fists, falls, bites, and the sweet claws of women. I have suffered blows and gone to my death, yet still I've returned. I have seen many more maimed, their legs cut away, eyes cut out, fingers sawed aloft, guts out, faces off, blood pooling across halls and holy places. Like the slaves, most of them go into the ground unremarked, unnoticed, lost to their families, remembered only by their companions for the breadth of their lives. Ending beneath the soil, but a little better than working it. Beaten down, betrayed by fate. I know what this is, but life has never left me.

My betrayal has never been complete; always there has been a final respite. But fate, the great black gravity that draws men into the earth, I have seen it, and I have sent men there. This is the life of a warrior: your focus is less on treading men into the soil, day in, day out, like a farm proprietor. Instead you endure their blows, their snarling words, and you strike, laying them low or sending them sprinting, sometimes by perfect design, sometimes almost by accident. In your greatest deeds you're possessed by the god of war. You could not have done that if you'd tried. It happened. 

This is the warrior's covenant. His gamble. You are dice placed in a cup. It is shaken and spilled. Some come up low and are removed. New dice are added. The process goes on. 

There is joy in destroying someone. Joy in smiting them and seeing them lie. The joy of a secret fuck, the joy of a new sack of gold. A dangerous addiction, because every time you're just rolling the die. How many sides does yours have?

Mine has had many, or so it seems. Why? I've learned to blow on it as it falls, that's my only explanation. Why I'm here when so many are in the soil, or have left half their bodies in the soil. I am no great warrior, yet here I am. 

I was a wildcat, then. A hellion. I rolled the die more than most, and my sides are damned shaven down now. If you rolled me, you'd be hard-pressed to see what number came up. I've tumbled in many cups, and what I can tell you is why men take this bargain. Everything the withering man dreams of, sleeping in his shack, is found in the world of flashing blades. In the destroyer's realm. The price is the fatal cut. Mortal terror. Horrific visions, anguish and regret. A body deformed by wounds. Its rewards are beyond the ken of the man bound to the field, like heaven to a damned man. The property, the sex, the beauty of distant places, the joy of gold and destruction. He is shut out of it and will die unless he can slither through lock and key. Why do you think men would rather die than be captured? Why do you think it is called a blaze of glory? Why do exiled lords and dethroned princes vie till their dying day to reclaim their positions? Why are they not content as courtiers in some foreign fort? Why not retire as monastics and eat carrots? 

Why is the earth a slave pen and churning melee? 

The soil is the shadow of the underworld. It is the outer glow of Gehenna. It drinks your soul while your body works, an automaton.

I had my fill of that as a boy. I knew what my days would be, day in, day out, until my mind followed my body into the earth. No, no, no. 

I have carried my sword to foreign courts; as I saw the slaves, the first ones I hadn't grown up around, I saw what this world was made of. What the soil of the earth was. I swore I would not spend my days half-mired in it until I could no longer see the sun. I would have a little, real life and then go down kicking and screaming like so many, many had. Things have not gone wholly to plan, and now I know what it is to care about things beyond my own skin. 

I found my way into the grandest dice games on this earth. I will tell you of the tournament. Take what you can from me. 
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