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.

10 comments:

  1. Was a little disappointed at first to see so many real drugs on the list.

    I should not have doubted. I should never have doubted.

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  2. Hell's teeth. I'd rather take my chances with the Yoon-Suin opium table. Something's up in the Empire of the Twin Canals....

    I need to check back on what Dreamshit did in Perdido Street Station.

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    Replies
    1. Drugs are bad mmkay

      The idea is the Empire of the Twin Canals has a Seleucid-type situation where a small core population who live in fortified, carved-out megaliths dedicate much of their time to maintaining their subjugation of 12 wildly distinct cultural groups who serve as footsoldiers in their constant border wars. These 12 groups are *not* friendly to one another and so you can guess where a lot of trouble on the Violence table would come from- brawls and fraggings between squads, plus Crypteia actions by the ruling elite's intelligence service. Playing Twin Canals soldiers would be a kind of "how long can you survive" mingame, like an extreme dystopian hardmode experience of the normal wartime/militia gameplay. The only time it might come up in a normal campaign would be if you have to infiltrate some part of Twin Canals and do it through their military, or if you get captured and pressed into service

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    2. Seleucid-type situation? You had my curiosity, but now you have my attention!

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    3. The Seleucids have always fascinated me.

      What happens when you live the Greek myths and play them out in reality? What happens when Hercules is the male ideal? It’s like being raised with Arnold Schwarzenegger movies as your cultural religion. Stormy gods, stormy hearts. Not everyone’s gonna pick up on it, but those that do are going to live and die that ethos because it’s so dangerously seductive (and by necessity it's become more and more selectively celebrated in the west with the advent of Christianity and then firearms and then WWI and then nuclear weapons).

      What happens when a prince who lives the Greek Myth ethos and was raised to believe his royal house is descended from Hercules is educated by Aristotle? I guess the mental flexibility to employ combined arms in the inevitable wars. His life and death are history and his army got as close to living the Hellenic hero myths as anyone ever did, but then what happens when a bunch of motherfuckers who are high on victory disease and used to living like land pirates have to consolidate their gains? Over a bunch of people who do not share their worldview? Over a bunch of very very different people?

      What if the diadochi remained in a single empire? How many different cultures would there be under one Hercules-pattern umbrella?

      The Greek cities, Thracian highlanders, everyone on Asia Minor, the Persians, the Jews and the whole near east in general with all the memories of Assyria and Babylonia, Egyptians, Nubians, Afghans, maybe Indians if they’d gone 5 more feet. Very different people.

      Well, you might have that ethos of personal strength and victory, but now you’re directing it against your subjects Spartan-style while at the same time going up against technological, cultural, self-conceptual equivalents without the advantages of surprise, purpose and incentive that the original army had. You’re also removed from the hills of Greece and a local culture that supports your conduct and myths.

      So you’ve got a small population of hardcore warriors who may want to turn their attention from maximal military readiness to administration and maybe enjoying their winnings, and you piss a whole lot of them away in wars against military equivalents. You rely more and more on local forces and then you’ve lost what made you mighty, you’re just an alien kleptocracy ruling a land you beheaded and sheared of cohesion and purpose, and then worse than that your descendants don’t have the direct experience of the glory days of Alexander, their ethos and lessons, and they don’t have your experience of the days before you ruled anything. Your line’s lost the Mandate of Heaven and is just prey for whoever’s got it, which comes to fruition when the Romans turn the Seleucids into corned beef hash and have the pharaoh of Egypt totally beholden to them even before they decided to annex Egypt. At least a few of the Ptolemies before Cleopatra were obese; probably wouldn’t have flown in Alexander’s march east.

      So what happens when you get a whole bunch of very disparate peoples with a history of animosity and not much to lose, and give them infantry weapons and loose supervision? I’ve heard about US Special Forces’ experiences with having Nungs, Cambodians, South Vietnamese and Montagnards in the same camps early on and guys from different groups would fight over card games, throw grenades into each other’s tents and that kind of shit. I think later they tried to just have one type of group per camp.

      So what happens when instead of SF advisors you get degraded royalty who think they’re descended from Hercules but don’t have the flexibility, know-how or numbers to rule through anything but state terror? The Ptolemies put down roots in a deeper way, but they weren't the Pharaohs of old. I don’t want to undersell the Hellenic period, Greek culture and administration had influence of their own and it was a fascinating time, but in the long term it didn’t have the secret sauce and the Romans broke it down.

      Something so unjust and so varied deserves to serve as a model for a state in fiction.

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    4. Very good. I thought that the name 'Empire of the Twin Canals' was vaguely comparable to Mesopotamia. The sheer number and range of borders of the Seleucids is also worth noting - there is no obvious centre, no heartland.

      Your mention of the Crypteia is also good - the notion of the Twin Canals* elite buying deeply into the Spartan legend** (or something very like it) without having the geographic or institutional conditions necessary to produce even an imitation follows the Herculean pattern you describe above.

      *The Duochetian elite? [Duo+Okhetos] The Duochetoi? Of course, a self-chosen name might invoke the heavenly twins Castor and Pollux.
      **Apt reading material: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/

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    5. Good point about the lack of a Seleucid heartland; increases its mystery and menace somehow. The link was a fun read

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  3. Always get excited when I see you have new tables.

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Art - First Run