Sunday, May 22, 2022

Maximalist Weird Fiction Mercenary Contract Generator Appendix J: Civil Relief

Summary: Prevent atrocities, relieve suffering in cut-off areas, and set up systems of sustenance and protection for people who are under threat of deprivation and violence

The most recent Contract Appendix I published was Stability Actions, but I happened to fill out Civil Relief before the others. To avoid confusion, once I’ve published them all I’ll put out a master post with links to them all, and then link to that at the start of each of these Conract Appendices.

Appendices
A: Investigations: High-risk detective work
B: Special Reconnaissance: Physical surveillance in hostile conditions
C: Military Intervention: Direct action in support of allied military activities
D: Military Assistance: Train, lead, advise and inspire allied military and/or security forces
E: Stability Actions: Ensure that a vulnerable polity, individual, or process thrives by engaging with threats on its behalf
F: Counterconspiracy: Social infiltration and undercover proactive security
G: Counteroccult: Hunt strange creatures, assassinate occultists, minimize the fallout of occult catastrophes, counter malign entities, and safeguard items and places of cosmic provenance
H: Influence Operations: Persuade, influence, subvert and deceive under delicate and/or hostile circumstances
I: Extractions: Recover personnel and assets from hostile forces and other dangerous situations
J: Civil Relief: Prevent atrocities, relieve suffering in cut-off areas, and set up systems of sustenance and protection for people who are under threat of deprivation and violence

Contract Index
Bolster
    Effort
        Ritual Purity
        Resanctification
        Solar Discs
    Polity
        Golden Fleeces
        Complement of Life and Death
        Good Works
Develop
    Institution
        Cosmocrator
        The Murdered Kingdom
        Illegitimate Bastards
    System
        Stygia
        Great Passages
Establish
    Process
        Sea Glissade
        Lifegiving Formulas
        Primal Solidarity
        Elective Monarchy

Bolster
    Effort
        Ritual Purity
You have been contracted to conduct a kind of arcogoetic demining operation in the former territories of the Immobile Dynasty, a civilization of the highest complexity whose hieratic ruling class (suffering from mutational meltdown) overthrew themselves in a coronation ceremony which was usurped by cosmogonic regressors, only half-intentionally, as the imperial heresiarchs had forgotten the Neolithic source of their legitimacy- which was the last time in which they had accurately perceived their place in the order of the cosmos.

Their land was made into mounds and earthvaults by a rippling bombardment by creative/retractive forces, seeding it with a conflagration of exocosmic effects. Many people yet live there, though the ruling class has been retracted and their profoundly complex society has degraded in profoundly complex ways, leaving the populace in a state of confusion and disorganization.

Your job is to allow the construction of a fundamental, cosmically-intramural society by entering locuses of disruption and removing, destroying or burying the occult objects and effects located within. Complicating matters are occultist bonepickers flocking to this region from everywhere on the continent, paying off desperate people for impunity and aid, stripping artifacts or heightening their effects into antagonistic sanctuaries for the occultists’ coarse epiphanies.

The party can either use their own expertise or bring in experts (who will make a lot of dangerously false assumptions). Locals will have practical wisdom when it comes to specific instances. Cadavers are a big problem here, both from a health perspective and because things may live at the bottom of theurgogeographic scars.

        Resanctification
Safeguard, support, supply and participate in a tribal ritual to maintain the purity of lifeblood of passage of time through the material of potential. The tribe resides in a forest permeated by venomous insects, inciting themselves to heroism and revelation with the maddening bites of the Many; the shag/ivy/leaf covered trees play host to massive colonies of insects which have woven barracks into their leaves; disturbing them will unleash a torrent of horrid, dangerous insects.

Pits of sap develop from the leaking roots. You could dive into one of these to rid yourself of insects but would then have to climb out covered in a hardening sap.

The insects don’t go into the pits due to the giant sapeaters, which lay at the bottom of the pit respirating the sap; any insects that land on the surface get taken down by their tongues, which will also latch onto people who fall in. 

The ritual tribe’s rivals are millenarian death worshippers who seek to repel the frontiers and see city-staters as chaos ants. Their impersonal weapons are designed to disrupt the forest’s life around you, their bolas and acrid smoke bombs drenching you in dislodged insects.

        Solar Discs
The jumpin’ jerboa is a hybrid rodent-marsupial that hangs upside down from their tails like little roses. It can stride and lope but primarily jump off of things like treefrogs. Their turds are complete ecosystems which one can hook up positive and negative lines to. Their coproliths function as hyper-efficient batteries and are a major export-market item. The energy from these is critical in the local economy.

Poorly-paid soldiers and separatists with genuine grievances are engaging in poaching of this animal, as are foreign raiders from a city-state where they believe that the animal’s sweat glands are the only way to achieve a consistent erection. Locals have a method of torture for these interlopers where they attach electrodes to a turd and run them into the victim.

Dozens of rangers have been killed in this conflict and they are contracting for outside help to create a paradigm where the jumpin’ jerboa is protected; this will include addressing the grievances of the separatists and government troops, or they can’t be incentivized to stop the poaching without massively escalating the violence in this region. if this fails the government will most likely empty the coprolith warehouses and go abroad, leaving those without connections to their fate in an environment with few other natural resources and little potential for agriculture.

If you want to work with separatists you’ll have to be initiated into their tribe by being scarified and buried alive in a region with colored, sooty soil; government officials who’ve gone through this process to be able to work with them are marked with these soot-tattoos. The exception is a separatist coalition that is being financed and advised by City of Leagues advisors and has been asked to give up initiation rites as part of their cultural preparation for Anarcho-Syndicalism. If you want to work with government troops, you’ll have to confront and somehow mitigate or transform their poaching, silver-or-lead policy towards the rangers, and unwillingness to engage in direct, sustained combat with the sweat gland poachers.

    Polity
        Golden Fleeces
Bring a herd for a developing pastoralist (or would-be-pastoralist) society, before sourcing further development and protection for their herds. Their region suffers from predation by the giant yapok, which strangles you with its human hands while pulling your head off with its jaws. It pisses on its hands first to get a better grip; its piss is a numbing agent so it will squeeze the fuck out of you, and it’s got a mean right cross.

The population has been ravaged by the giant yapoks, and many herds have wandered into the hinterlands and become wild. These could be recovered despite the danger of outlying areas, but the surviving elders of the pastoralists feel that herd animals who could stand off the yapoks would be more stable solution in the long term, or else guardian animals could be found.

There are such animals in the region, but they would have to be found and enticed to the hills that the pastoralists know; salt-spraying platywolves, the burncow, whirlingshard magnetosloths, razorwool ram, snipertusk boar (currently aligned with a bandit tribe who construct howdah platforms to hurl mushroom-tipped javelins from either side of the boars’ bodies (inspired by the ability of the boar to discharge its tusks), though the boars are not without exploitable grievances).

        Complement of Life and Death
Travel between outlying villages conducting a vaccination program against superdiseased predavultures which belch superacid in flight (as well as extremophile parasites who will burrow into your gut and make you starve to death - must be surgically removed) as a way of hastening the demise of wounded prey. Putting the scent of your blood into the air here while under the open sky is very hazardous. The vultures also urinate down their legs, which keeps them bacterially clean but also poisons those they claw. These vultures are being secretly cultivated and shepherded by a deep wilderness cavern sect that is not necessarily occult, but has discovered means of guiding and efficiently reproducing predavultures (mostly by garnishing the villagers’ herds to feed the birds). The sect makes special weapons and traps out of the predavultures’ gut biomes and urine, and are gradually gaining the superacidic vomit of the vultures, which they use in the production of dyes that explode when exposed to flame.

        Good Works   
The people of Fissureleak are starving. There is a civil war between the ruling oligarchy (a band of gluttonous kleptocrats who funnel the city’s wealth into unscrupulous financial havens), who take food intended for relief of their people and hoard and devour it or sell it to their people at extortionate prices, and a rural rebellion by farmers who are resisting forced nationalization of their lands by the unfortunate means of propitiating a fertility entity through the sacrifice of most of their food (and, more recently, of government paramilitaries taken captive after battles). The government is intensifying their campaign against the farm rebellions by burning farmhouses and crops in seditious areas.

You must find a way to relieve the suffering of the people in and around Fissureleak; in the short term you can coordinate airdrops of food aid by concerned international NGOs and foreign relief programs, or elephant caravans from tribes traditionally allied with Fissureleak (beware of musth), or even construct a wheeled apparatus to transport food captured from the government and fertility worshippers to people who need it, but in the long term the paradigm in Fissureleak must change or there will be a full-fledged genocide of the farmers and subsequent mass-starvation in the city (while the oligarchs escape with their mercenary retinues and as much plundered wealth as possible).

Develop
    Institution
        Cosmocrator
        The party has been contracted to develop and execute a renumeration program for delivering the looted artifacts of Honorgrave, which was conquered and sacked by Snarethicket before the latter city bit off more than it could chew and was defeated by Honorgrave’s latecoming allies. It was discovered that Honorgrave had secret occult programs and stores of occult material that were plundered by the invader, like Snarethicket had eaten a poisonous animal. The party has two responsibilities: returning treasures (many of which are attributed, some of which are not) to their former owners or the interim government, and to safeguard them from the party’s own greed, robbers, con artists and revanchists. 

Honorgrave has made a limited admission as to the nature of its occult programs, which have concerned its allies deeply, though they have yet to conclude what should be done about it; suffice to say debellatio is not out of the cards. Honorgrave claims that the programs were born out of desperation against the invader; in fact, Honorgrave is not ruled by a council of elders as it claims, but by the Fertile King, a cystic voice which was arrested in heaven in a time before anger and noise and buried between twin sycamores in the Field of Ordeals, from which Honorgrave arose in the ages of man.

He has seeded the people with allegorical ideologies of immemorial paradise, and ost Honorgravens now believe they fall under his archaic jurisdiction. They bear mastic and syrup to pay stereotyped homage at ostentatious tombs heaped and draped with spiritual vegetation, where the elder priests (actually the first men to hear the Fertile King, kept alive in senescence and decrepitude) give benedictions in solar doctrine suffused with soteriological poetry. There are reliquary allusions to a funerary realm among the tombs, and indeed beyond the seal of the decomposing grasshopper there is a domain that is neither spatial nor temporal wherein the Fertile King dwells, transfiguring, a preparatory incarnation sealed on a throne. 
The party is unaware of this when they are contracted.

        The Murdered Kingdom
Red Charter sand theft operations are eroding the highland island city-state of Seagrave and their outlying archipelagic territories. The Red Charter has coopted or eliminated the old sand thieves and sand-smugglers in their areas of interest. Journalists, police officers, government organizers in Seagrave and the isles have been murdered by Red Chartermen and their hirelings.

Whole islands have been eliminated for sand, much of the archipelago massacred and dissipated (like fucking Alderaan getting blown up in Star Wars, leaving only a ravaged and devastated ecosystem; creatures that should be at the seafloor driven to the surface by sand, some of them dangerous like jellyfish that can melt through hulls, jumping superelectric eels, irate polygharials). Taking away sand can salinate nearby soil, which ruins agriculture; this drove off the last survivors from isles which the Red Charter dredged into nubs.

Stop the Red Charter and bring the influence of functional judges to bear upon the local kleptocratic networks that are paralyzing the administration of Seagrave so that the Seagrave Patrol can finally take their riverboats to the shrinking archipelagic coasts and bathe the Red Charter dredgeries in napalm.

        Illegitimate Bastards
Rule of law is extremely weak in the city-state of Deadgod, and it makes it very hard to do business domestically (both in terms of disrupting potential economic development internally and in curtailing outside investment). Crime has a lax treatment as investigating it can be dangerous while you can take bribes if you let it be, and the the sons and nephews of the ruling family commit crimes with impunity (the prime minister has been in for forty years; his daughters and nieces run the city’s largest businesses while his sons lay about, stab tourists and get in shootouts with local gangsters). There is also a foreign guy who murders rude people from abroad who resemble him ethnically, and this is deterring foreign direct investment.

Certain foreign city-states are watching conditions here with interest, and many would like to bring about a regime change, or else invade, subjugate and perhaps enslave the population, depending on the observer. Work to reform the situation (elements of the government have hired you) before the city falls under the hegemony of a foreign state or is sacked and razed (observers: military republic interested in installing a friendly potentate, Anarcho-Syndicalist cadres in a nearby region, the city of Hundredweight which will enslave the population and sell them abroad, and the bandit tribe coalition of the Axenators, who will loot the city and use the remnants as a great training ground for further urban conquests.

    System
        Stygia
You are to re-operationalize the sewage system of a city-state that’s been bombed and bombarded out by a rival, and is in a state of chaos with bandits and ideological militias wreaking havoc alongside saboteur units, militia organizers and periodic bombardment from the repulsed and retreating invaders. Complicating matters, the wartime practice of feeding corpses to shadowed ferrycambions in the ruined sewers has led to a proliferation of atemporal divinities which feast on human flesh.

        Great Passages
The local Anarcho-Syndicalist government of Brinewell has recently been knocked over by monarchists. Their systems of production were inadequate and are now disrupted, which has led to mass death from dehydration and dysentery. The region is very dry and yet blighted by waterborne illness and predators; you are to develop and safeguard new irrigation and water supply systems.

Anarcho-Syndicalist guerrillas in the outlying drylands are attempting to win over the populace by doing the exact same thing you are, and will sabotage your efforts. At the same time, the new king has stipulated that you will engage and destroy the guerrillas wherever you encounter them.

In reality, the whole enterprise is likely to be doomed unless you can reach some kind of understanding or accommodation with the guerrillas, though to integrate the Anarcho-Syndicalists into the government/society would require cutting them off/alienating them somehow from their outside suppliers/coordinators/advisors.

Establish
    Process
        Sea Glissade
Establish a new train ferry system at the Strait of Souls, as the bed of the strait is too unstable for a bridge. This will benefit international trade and the host nation government (the Inward Mysteries of the Breasted Pharaoh), but currently the strait’s water transport authority is having major problems with traffickers (heroin and humans), wreckers, river-pirates and grotto creatures. The party will need to arrange the construction of short railway diversions to the isthmus and ferry slips on either side. There are giant leafy seadragons in the water, but these are not dangerous.

        Lifegiving Formulas
Conduct a backcountry medical tour in the tropical Cataracts of Pleading; go through outlying villages, either employing the party’s organic medical/chemistry capabilities or employing medical personnel furnished by the government/NGO/philanthropist employer, dealing with all dangers of the backcountry. Dental’s a big one with this, though the party’s unlikely to have a dental specialist. People might be desperate for the supplies carried by the party, willing to steal; also beware of robber gorillas (comes through the brush, grabs some shit that you have, strips you of it using its massive back muscles and then runs off. Presents this to a female to mate), and watch for hanging verdant crocodiles on the jungle trails; instead of bumps, it has leaflike projections which just make it look like a bough of the tree it’s hanging in. On the plus-side, their tails are delicious.

        Primal Solidarity
You are to establish an agricultural system in the Plain of Nobility which can’t easily be plundered by bandits nor squandered by the people involved, nor exploited by outside buyers (some of whom will attempt to remove the party and/or passionate/vigorous representatives of the local implementers of the program who might resist exploitation). The people of the Plain are harrowed by the emergence of hippopotapedes, which love furrowed fields, but come out of the earth gullet-first. If one swallows you and you cut your way out, you’ll still have to burrow up out of the earth. The people have begun to fear, revere and propitiate these creatures as nature spirits or god-worms, and one of the sights the party will see upon entering their town is a woman cradling a hippopotapede fetus.

        Elective Monarchy
Wiseredoubt has thrown off its traditional tyranny and is now fragmenting socially and politically as the former structures dissolve. The party must establish stable governance in Wiseredoubt by temporarily serving as the local/regional government at the behest of the provisional chancellor. Part of the problem is that in the midst of the chaos, occult artifacts are being utilized for necessary and desirable systems of worship, governance, production, tourism, and also for hosted research by wealthy occultists.

This all has to stop before stability can be achieved, because physical and psychological conditions under circumstances of occult proliferation can be dangerously hard to predict. Large scale industry, trade and public services will also be difficult to establish as transport systems (trucks, trains, steamboats) are harried by robbers and night rhinos, which are flying rhinos which behave like peregrine falcons, falling silently out of the sky and then striking their target in a swoop before alighting on it later to dine.

Monday, May 9, 2022

Weird Fiction Drugs in a Combat Camp

Index
Amanita muscaria 
Cocaine
Codeine
Crack
Godstool
Hash
Heroin
Inhalants
Ketamine
Lithium silphium
Mescaline
Methamphetamine 
Moonshine
Morphine
Mushrooms
PCP
Poppers
Pseudohuasca
Psychoactive toads
Salvia
Slitgravel
Speed
Worldroot


If the PCs are Empire of the Twin Canals conscript soldiers, they roll on the Sex, Drugs and Violence tables instead of the Training, Leisure and Administration tables between patrols during Camp Phase.
Resolve consequences through gameplay.

Roll a d6

1-2: See Sex Table

3-4: See Drugs Table

Drugs Table

Roll d100 and go to the results. On an odd result, roll on the drug’s event table. 

1-4 Amanita muscaria 
5-8 Cocaine
9-12 Codeine
13-16 Crack
17-20 Godstool
21-32 Hash
33-36 Heroin
37-40 Inhalants
41-44 Ketamine
45-48 Lithium Silphium
49-52 Mescaline
53-56 Methamphetamine 
57-60 Moonshine
61-64 Morphine
65-68 Mushrooms
69-72 PCP
73-76 Poppers
77-80 Pseudohuasca
81-84 Psychoactive Toads
85-88 Salvia
89-92 Slitgravel
93-96 Speed
97-100 Worldroot


Amanita Muscaria

No dependence
d4
(1) You encounter insectoid statiform micrognomes coming and going from an agaric arcology. You devour the colony and the gnomes become your body’s crew, moving about and working to enhance bodily functions. The mates and senior ratings will silently give you advice, but they may mutiny if you continue to abuse your body.
(2) You wander into fairy ring while picking mushrooms and are dusted by spores from the wings of a giant butterfly descending from the canopy. You make love to the butterfly in the warm grass. Soon you are joined by giant caterpillar for a ménage à trois. As you climax you bloodily sprout butterfly wings. They can be hidden inside your jacket. You will give birth to butterfly babe in six months.
(3) You headbutt a giant elk in its fractal horns as you dispute over a cluster of mushrooms. When you wake up he is licking your face, and though he’s eaten the mushrooms he becomes your mount out of respect.
(4) You shoot a stag that has humanlike eyes. You butcher him and find his stomach is bursting with amanitas. You eat his meat and contract incurable euphoria with ataxia.


Cocaine

Dependence with effects: [15%] + 15% per previous use
d4
(1) Laced with fentanyl, save vs death ray
(2) Actually heroin, save vs death ray
(3) You buy from an evolving deal and the traffickers get in a massive shootout
(4) You dome rails till your face bleeds and then fight local cops while stroking your dick
 

Codeine

Dependence with effects: [15%] + 15% per previous use
d4
(1) Rap battle turns into actual battle
(2) Develop permanent lean
(3) Become accomplished poet but lose ability to speak coherently
(4) Gain the ability cure respiratory diseases through your kiss, making you a minor healer. However, there is a 1/8 chance that those who take your kiss die from respiratory system damage, and those who breastfeed babies within a week after taking it will cause the feeding child to die. Unbeknownst to you, this 1/8 chance will increase by a further 1/8 every month until it is guaranteed to kill.
 

Crack

Dependence with effects: [34%] + 34% per previous use
d4
(1) Run around camp having shit yourself with the turd in your pantcuff, subsequently run around camp while on fire.
(2) Run off a building, 50% chance for one or both conditions in section 1 to be true.
(3) Commit a robbery for more crack money, 25% chance for one or both conditions in section 1 to be true.
(4) Sacrifice to an entity atop a parked car while screaming, 100% chance for one or both conditions in section 1 to be true. The entity then enters your body.
 

Godstool

No dependence
d4
(1) You hang yourself from a tree, and you emasculate yourself with a combat knife in your last movement. Your corpse rots but you eventually clamber hairless from the hollow of the tree. You have become a sacral eunuch capable of giving birth to humans and impregnating any physical substance or phenomena, giving life to new humanohybrids synthesized in stone, steel, silphium, silicon, static electricity and so forth. The children will develop with normal human psychologies, though they will identify with their mother substance in some way; there’s a chance the reflection will be predictable, and there’s a chance it will not. Their bodies will reflect the substance of their birth.
(2) You knap greenstones in a karst hellscape of red-fruited thorntrees and bottomless pits. The stones crack in two and you are sickened to the point of vomiting when you look upon the edges of the broken stones. You can use these little knives to cut entities as well as certain cosmic interferences that take the form of yarns, threads, pools and glasses. You were able to perceive where to break these stones when you were on godstool; you will not be able to replicate that feat while not on godstool, worldroot or possibly some form of pseudohuasca.
(3) You ascend a hill amidst driving rain and a lightning storm. You stand atop a meteoric boulder and slash your hand off with a Bowie knife in the moment you are struck by lightning. Your hand is scorched into motile obsidian and becomes ambulatory under your command and capable of detaching and reattaching. It acts independently when separated - you will be burnt at the stake if this is discovered. The hand can be command-detonated like a lightning bomb in shards of obsidian glass but will take 3 months to pull itself back together.
(4) The trees become acid-spewing black tentacles vortexing smoke. You scream and attack them with a hatchet in one hand and bolo knife in the other. When the murk clears there is sawdust swirling in the air and you find that you have constructed a perfect extended defensive position in anticipation of an enemy surprise attack that begins in five minutes.
 

Hash

Dependence with effects: [5%] + 5% per previous use
d4
(1) You and the boys are smoking shotgun after a range. You get so blitzed that one of your buddies grabs the wrong hammer and blows his brains out.
(2) You get the munchies and devour three packs of rations, then rip on the shotgun again and get so dizzy you barf down the barrel. The guy whose gun it is beats you over the head with it while you sit helplessly in a plundered easy chair.
(3) You are paid to guard the house of a wealthy family during your leave and you pass out on their couch with a blunt in your hand. You wake up in a raging house fire.
(4) You get super emotional listening to the phonograph and cry like a bitch in front of your buddies. They mock you relentlessly.
 

Heroin

Dependence with effects: [34%] + 34% per previous use
d4
(1) This heroin has been cut with the dried and flaked runoff of the captive spawn of the pulsar entity Bexxu; you develop a severe permanent tendency to epilepsy, generally kicking in when adrenaline spikes. When the epilepsy strikes, your vision slowly alternates back and forth between seeing the past and the future of whatever you’re looking at. It plays out in something like disjointed black-and-white stop-motion. When your vision shifts to the past, whatever you do or have done will then change your impending future-vision appropriately. This is massively disorienting but can help you avoid danger.
(2) You contract HIV from a shared needle. If this is the second instance, you catch a different strain and your condition becomes SuperAIDS.
(3) You relax into a helpless fugue and are kidnapped by a blood theft gang.
(4) As you curl up in the attic, ghost dreams manifest in reality. You are transmitted to an alternate mirror/shadow reality with its own social rules and physical laws and must find your way back before you go into cardiac arrest. If you find your way back to the House of Light and Fire you will occasionally see and be able to speak with figures from the fugue.
 

Inhalants

Dependence with effects: [5%] + 5% per previous use
d8
(1) You try to score some solvents but end up superglued to a park bench by orphans. They rob you and superglue your nostrils shut before leaving.
(2) You inhale lighter fuel as your buddy hits a crack pipe while leaning on your shoulder. His pipe explodes and your face is set on fire.
(3) You huff map markers until you enter a euphoric trance. You wake up with obscene, numinous messages and imagery scrawled across your face. Someone tells you that you were the one who wrote them.
(4) You break into a woman’s house to steal nail polish and she attacks you while dual-wielding disassembled pruning shears.
(5) You arsonize a roof so you can huff the toluene in the contact cement, and manage to set yourself on fire. You fall through the weakened ceiling into a kid’s bedroom.
(6) You rip off school kids’ backpacks so you can huff their correction fluid. Their dads and uncles form a posse but you vow they won’t stop you.
(7) You huff jenkem from an unknown source. It turns out to be made from the spoor of an antediluvian cacodile which once draped its tongue down a sandy ant ziggurat extending into alternate timespace. The beast retracted its tongue still wafting with incompatible matter, and its leavings warp your body into something like a retractable gigamillipede capable of seeing in a spectrum of cosmoses. If your head is preserved in pine oil resin then you may be able to maintain the illusion of humanity by donning a greatcoat and tall boots, but you now have to roll Wisdom checks to communicate in a way that humans will understand.
(8) The lead in the gasoline you’re huffing came from a Red Charter Company mine that has not yet been bottomed out by speculators, and in fact it has no terminus as the deepest passage replicates itself into null space. You are nebulized by the infinitely reconcentrated lead and become softly ethereal; you can exert some force but will gradually transpose through anything you touch for more than a few moments. You must expend effort to pull yourself out of the ground every morning.

 
Ketamine

Dependence with effects: [15%] + 15% per previous use
d4
(1) You get tasked out on a QRF a few minutes after you snort a big wad of shimmering ket. You take contact and enter a permanent battle trance.
(2) You wander into occult ruins, engage in battle with antediluvian forces, and return with a strange artifact. You don’t remember a thing the next morning
(3) This ketamine’s been cut, and when you piss in the water supply the next day it puts the whole camp into a weird trance. You have 15 minutes in which to instill suggestions in people at the camp.
(4) You experience severe dissociation. You realize that your body feels awkwardly grafted to your natural couatlform. Luckily, you are able to mantically intuit the necessary path to reclaim your natural body from deep beneath the earth.
 

Lithium Silphium

Dependence with effects: [34%] + 34% per previous use
d4
(1) You win a local sports competition and then eat two greyhounds and a racehorse.
(2) You can’t find food so you lose control and eat a grandmother.
(3) You run to an enemy camp and steal a bunch of shit before running back into your camp and looting the commissary.
(4) You rustle a cow, shepherd it into your tent and eat it alive.

 
Mescaline

Dependence with effects: [0%] + 5% per previous use
d4
(1) You have a hypertranscendent experience and become a religious fanatic. Your beliefs center around [d4] (1) human sacrifice, (2) Occult scarification of self and others, (3) sacral cleansing of the earth through fire, (4) explosion worship.
(2) You bury yourself in the desert like an antlion and wake up the next morning near death from dehydration. You find that you can quickly bury yourself in any terrain, but that things below will tend to notice you.
(3) You approach a bandit tribe and go through their initiation rites, which include scarification, live burial and cannibalism. Your primary firearm is lathered in feathers and inhabited by a malevolent ancestor spirit. The feathers ruffle when it is upset.
(4) You tear open a cactus and climb inside, hands bleeding. The next morning thorns begin to sprout through your flesh and your blood is water.
 

Methamphetamine

Dependence with effects: [34%] + 34% per previous use
d6
(1) Fuck the flesh off your dick
(2) Sell your ass to a bandit tribesman for amber to trade for meth
(3) Meth lab explosion
(4) Ninja the battalion’s plunder
(5) Run screaming into a police station while soaked in blood
(6) All of the above

 
Moonshine 

Dependence with effects: [5%] + 5% per previous use
d4
(1) Slipped a Mickey and wake up with no money and torn asshole
(2) Wake up in the hospital drunk as hell, projectile vomit, claw your way out of bed, arsonize the ward using pure oxygen
(3) Piss on commander’s bed, pass out on commander’s bed
(4) Steal a [d4] (1) jeep, (2) 2-ton truck, (3) main battle tank, (4) biplane
 

Morphine

Dependence with effects: [25%] + 25% per previous use
d4
(1) Steal whole supply from medical stockpile - admit nothing during collective punishment.
(2) The doctor offers to pay you to take your blood on a weekly basis (he sells it to the enemy).
(3) You are fiending so bad you shoot yourself so you can get some morphine. You throw the rifle in the river and claim it was a sniper.
(4) Your buddy gives you a transfusion of his morphine-laced blood and you contract hepatitis B. Subsequent results give you hepatitis C and D.
 

Mushrooms

No dependence
d4
(1) You go into berserker rage and single-handedly assault an enemy encampment.
(2) You start gnawing on table during a poker game and flip it, starting a gigantic brawl.
(3) You complete a super-hazardous climb to the tallest pylon of a power plant and meditate with the dawning sun. Then you have to get down.
(4) You dash around the camp like a perpetually-cornered animal, devouring all food you encounter.

 
PCP

Dependence with effects: [25%] + 25% per previous use
d6
(1) Lift a car over your head and hurl it at someone
(2) Accosted by local policeman, eat his face
(3) Eat own face
(4) Unleash and fight a chimpanzee
(5) Rush into cave, encounter lithocockatritic megascorpion, tear its leg off and beat it to death with leg
(6) Uproot ancient sequoiadendron, carry it to camp, camp is now bisected by a tree
 

Poppers

Dependence with effects: [10%] + 10% per previous use
d4
(1) You decide to fellate a zucchini and it gets stuck in your throat
(2) You dance furiously in a nightclub while having diarrhea without realizing it
(3) You huff leather polish while wolfing vasodilator chocolate and pass out during anonymous sex. You wake up in [d4] (1) the commander’s bed, (2) a prince or princess’s bed, (3) a crime lord’s bed, (4) another PC’s bed
(4) You develop maculopathy which degrades your vision, reducing Shooting and Alertness
 

Pseudohuasca / Glossolalian Gossamer / Corpsefrond

Dependence with effects: [15%] + 30% per previous use
d4
(1) Your whole body fractalizes with microportals to exocosmoses constantly weeping psychotropic mutagenic and matter-distorting ichor.
(2) The Machine Elves recruit you as a sleeper agent.
(3) Your bones are semi-fused and reconstituted into heat-fed silicate integrated circuits with your consciousness uploaded uploaded and distributed through them. You are now a midnight-blue bulletproof skeleton. Your flesh will necrotize and begin to slough in a day or two. Your level of acuity now depends upon ambient heat.
(4) You contract a permanent psychotropic visual overlay which highlights leyfractures ripe for Occult exploitation
 

Psychoactive Toads

No dependence
d4
(1) The toad turns out to be mutagenic and your arms turn into spiny flesh-ferns, which are great for gripping large objects but bad for not being murdered
(2) The frog turns out to be an entity, and it colonizes you
(3) The ichor dissolves most of your personality, leaving room for a rewire
(4) The ichor permanently numbs your body and any flesh you touch

 
Salvia

No dependence
d4
(1) You realize that all existence is comprised of tiny energy biplanes. When you return to normal you are unable to account for this realization but are unable to shake it as your operating schema.
(2) You scream in horror as your consciousness and all matter is engulfed in or revealed to be black soil with only tiny lines of sooty openness accounting for lines of causality. This is a map of the local underworld’s fissures and vaults and is marked indelibly on your consciousness.
(3) You behold the blade of the moment carving the bright mass of potential future into the definite sliced ashes of the past. You gain limited localized precognition alongside bipolar disorder as you fixate between the two sides without the ability to fully control your attention.
(4) You psychically enter a giant orrery vortex where swirling bands of steel destroy all matter in their path. A malevolent face at the heart of the cyclone gnashes its teeth, alternatingly blowing matter into the outer dark and sucking things into the path of its death mechanisms. A million tiny mechanical or crystalline harlequin-pattern birds drift through space awaiting interlopers to annihilate. You hurtle towards the figure somehow dodging all birds and bands, narrowly dashing through its chomping teeth. When you return to reality you gain a massive increase in Piloting skill but acquire a phobia of birds, jesters and watch mechanisms.


Slitgravel

Dependence with effects: [34%] + 34% per previous use
d4
(1) You microdose slitgravel for confidence, cutting the inside wall of your navel and packing it a with slitgravel. The cut becomes infected. The slitgravel helicizes the coccobacilli which subsequently attracts and concentrates ambient spores. You develop a mycoumbilical connection to a cavern of rotting and refreshing corpses where you can go to be made whole. The spillover of this ecosystem finds and feeds your morass bellybutton, and the infection will gradually spread until your biology is permeated, overwritten and replaced with a mycobacterial network of strands and gels serving your ego and the cavern in tandem. Your desires will gradually blend with those of the cavern.
(2) You slit your forearm arteries and descend into a burbling pool, ready to die. Little do you know there is slitgravel in the sediment. Blood blossoms around you until slitgravel hemostasis sets in. You are overcome by a sense of fearlessness and you dive into the water, inhaling as deep as possible. Siltgravel-silt stabs you in the brain and laces its way through your hippocampus- you enter a permanent state of hyperconfident mania and claw your way out of the pond. You now have livid, brass-colored scars all up and down your forearms and sparking golden eyes. You gain in all skills.
(3) You dig a tiny razor into the side of your heel and rub slitgravel into the cut. You leave the outhouse and go up the hill for your fight with Brian Galen. He doesn’t manage to hit you once and you literally beat his brains in. His friends gape in horror and bum rush you.
(4) The robbery has gone awry. You lay in in a garment shop. The clothes hang smeared with your blood. The dogs bark and boots fall as the bank marshals approach. With a shaking hand you pull out the little packet of slitgravel, tear it with your teeth and pour it into your wounds.
 

Speed 

Dependence with effects: [20%] + 20% per previous use
d4
(1) Make new sleeping bag out of human hair
(2) Stay up for 96 hours writing poetry that ends up having arcogoetic effects when recited
(3) Develop a facial twitch
(4) Obsessively clean the weapons of the entire camp and then punch the commandant when he comes to congratulate you
 

Worldroot

No dependence
You gather your companions around the fire and lead them on a dark spirit quest where you aid the Gods of the Twin Canals against archetypal enemies such as the razor windlichens. The gods often don’t know or care that you’re there and you are subject to friendly fire from the dissipating/dissociating gas dispensed from their irises- if you find yourself caught in the motile pools of their eyes your body will be transmuted into a chimera comprised of mythological beasts and there will be only a small change you can control it when you awaken from this quest (25%).
If you survive, the game becomes an Elite campaign.

5-6: See Violence table




Obviously, how quickly an individual develops an addiction will depend on their individual physiology and psychology. I welcome insights that could help me dial in on relative numbers based on the nature of each drug.

Art - First Run