Supernatural Hostility Table

The Crimes of Jack Daw, Part 2, is live on Fierce Firelight.

---

When a supernatural entity toys with you, tries to destroy you but lacks perfect purchase on your substratum of the universe, or when you otherwise suffer uncontrolled exposure to supernatural effects, you can use this Supernatural Hostility Table to ascertain the result. It is not to be considered exhaustive with regard to potential outcomes.

The table is divided into the following categories:

Temporal

Existential

Daimonometanoic

Physical

Roll a d20.

    Temporal

1: The entity attempts to send you back in time, and from a conceptual point of view, you are.

What actually transpires is a kind of simulation based on your intentions, where extant matter is rewritten according to your actions in the "past" which you are sent to, which seems to progress in normal time as you experience the world but is in fact hyper-hastened inside a model of what has transpired in local space since then.

This is a mechanism that the universe has for handling attempted temporal paradoxes. Only a very limited slice of reality is adjusted based on your input and so existence is not overwhelmed by the analysis-recreation of all matter in all states passing through the time and places you affect. You could affect events on a global scale. This is still a very limited slice of reality.

In other words, your experience of the time in question doesn't exactly occur; however, the exact effects of it on the present time are very real. 

Extracosmic observers will be confused by the sudden adjustment, unless they are fully familiar with this process.

You can take a full day’s worth of actions before the particle action associated with this function causes a bloody disintegration of your body throughout the second day.

Roll a d10 for how far you are sent back.

1: d20 hours. The present time is t-0. You take action until t-0, at which point you will control your past self and your current self (both physically exist). Your past self will die from internal (and external) bleeding at d20 hours after t-0.

2: d20 days

3: d20 weeks

4: d20 months

5: d20 years

6: d20 decades

7: d20 centuries

8: d20 kiloannum

9: d20 megaannum. You are likely to emerge far above the ground, somewhat beneath it, or deep underwater.

10: d20 gigaannum. You are likely to emerge in deep space at best, or in a non-vacuum matter state, or in a previous universe with matter arrangements that are totally orthogonal to our own 

2: You are erased from existence and everything that has been affected by you is rewritten so that other factors led to the current state, not you. Your companions forget about you. The entity forgets about you. 

    Existential 

3: Reduction to fictional state. Your information is shunted into a nearby painting or a book with sufficient whitespace. You no longer exist as a consciousness unless that book or painting has characteristics which support consciousness, in which case you may be distorted anyways due to the suboptimal conversion.

4: Your consciousness is shunted out of your body and distributed around your present environment. Roll (d4) for the strength of your manifestation.

1: Mute observer

2: Faint voice

3: Poltergeist

4: Tutelary deity

5: Your psyche is transferred into a kind of extracosmic mass grave for psyches dispatched in relevant ways. While there is no way back into your universe and attempts to retrieve you using some kind of power are likely to retrieve someone else, your location has an out that was either built into it intentionally or added on later as an act of mercy: you may enter the dreams of creatures with a similar psychostructural framework to yours, ie other humans. In particular, this allows you to communicate with them. However, there is a danger, which is not from being killed by hostile elements in the dream, but rather by being removed from the perception of the dreamer before you have intentionally left the dream, which cuts your connection to the extracosmic ossuary and either ends your existence or permanently traps you in the psyche of the dreamer.

Because a human dream is usually an extremely fast-moving, shfiting thing, you are likely to be bordered out of existence; however you can perceive the relative stability of a dream before entering. If you choose not to, however, you will have to wait until the individual's next dream.

Stability profile (roll d20):

1-5: Flashes (1/4 chance of being bordered out)

6-12: Broken Narratives (1/8 chance of being bordered out)

13-18: Steady State (1/12 chance of being bordered out)

19-20: Deep Entry (1/20 chance of being bordered out)

If you are bordered out, you will have some time in the dream before the GM describes your abrupt negation.

Playing this interloper in relevant dreams until the point of negation is the privilege of the player whose character had his or her psyche removed, in addition to playing his or her follow-up character.

    Daimonometanoic

6: The entity overrides your consciousness with one waiting for nonspecific re-entry. It happens to be (d4):

1: A famed Bronze Age hero of extreme prowess, valor, ruthlessness, and lust.

2: A xenostygian explorer who has never seen the surface, delving instead into hand-worked aqueducts of magma near the center of the earth, never reaching the thing that they were feeding.

3: A machine elf psychosurgically modified to pass into this realm. The end state of your basic mission is unknown to you in case you are interrogated, but entails enticing human civilizations to be co-opted by you in exchange for gifts of technology (which they will never understand, and which the machine elves can shut off at will) and transcendent drugs (which psychologically mutilate the consumers over time). You begin with no human desires, but discover them as the human physiology works inexorably on your psyche. Your first order of business will be finding a natural source of or a way of synthesizing pseudohuasca, which will allow you (and others) to get in touch with your handlers.

4: A cosmic seer from an aeon where the stars were different; the things he can ascertain and predict from the constellations are different than they once were. He will need to relearn them.

7: You have a dangerous sapience written into a local portion of your nervous system. It is centered on (d4):

1: A hand and arm

2: Your stomach

3: Your genitals

4: Your face

It will be confused and angry, suffering a potential reduction in complexity (inability to think) depending on the sapience's original suitability for adaptation to nervous tissue (it may be randomly derived from this or another universe, it may be an imprisoned enemy of the entity, it may be a punished human underling, or it may be a new creation of the inflicting entity). Communicating with the sapience may be a long road; amputation is a possible solution depending on its degree of containment or spillage throughout your nervous system.

8: Replacement of consciousness with that of another entity with which the inflicting entity has a relationship (owes a favor, coerced, ally, friend, kinship ties). Goals and disposition of new entity are likely totally orthogonal to those of the destroyed consciousness; use the Direction section from the Occultist generator.

Roll on the following section (d10):

1-2: Gray

3-4: Gold

5-6: Purple

7-8: Green

9-10: Pink

9: You are fused with somebody nearby; one consciousness is destroyed or shunted into an extradimensional/extraterrestrial receiver, or the two become a combined consciousness (thereafter played by one player as one consciousness; decide or roll for who will play the combined individual). Your physical features may be averaged into one body, or it may be a purely psychomimetic process and the body whose consciousness has been removed simply drops to the floor.

    Physical

10: The entity subjects you to a partial location pin. Roughly 50% of your body is marked to its position in space while the rest of your body compensates for distance from the pinned flesh, meaning that as soon as you try to move, your body will stretch and distort laterally in a permanent fashion, weakening you structurally (if not outright killing/tearing you) and stretching you to an impossible width and thinness (while similarly distorting your facial features) such that your appearance will be that of a horrific supernatural apparition, a walking flag of flesh. Your body is now extremely unstable, although your organ and skeletal system are technically complete.

11: Bones in your body are made nonstructural through (d4):

1: Reduction to adipose tissue

2: Transmogrification into a liquid state

3: Transmogrification into a gaseous state

4: Pure disappearance.

Affected bones are (d6): 

1: Your forearms

2: Your shinbones

3: Your hips

4: Your skull

5: Your hands

6: Your entire skeleton

12: Your surface flesh is transmuted into an arrangement progressively derived from the meta-characteristics of one of the following categories (d4):

1: Reptile

2: Avian

3: Fish

4: Earthworm

This transformation is essentially cosmetic, and while grooming/moistening will be necessary depending on your type, you have only a 1/10 chance of gaining the requisite photonic nanocrystals for active camouflage, body and feather structure for flight, gill superstructure for amphibianism, or complex of pores and mucus needed to devour soil and burrow, as the case may be.

13: Body parts ossified into bone or petrified into stone. Affected body parts (d6):

1: Eyes

2: Tongue

3: Genitals

4: Brain

5: Lungs

6: Intestines

14: Your hair falls out, your fingernails detach, your tongue is distended to the point of irretractability, your eyes pop out, and your intestines descend from your rectum.

15: Your senses are reattuned to hypersensitivity such that your hearing is deafeningly overwhelmed, you are blinded by incomprehensible detail, your mouth and nose are blisteringly consumed with the essence of matter for a mile around, and you want to tear your clothes off of your skin, which feels cut by the slightest gust. You are utterly debilitated for the moment, but will in time be able to become a human sensor, albeit losing your ability to have normal interactions with other people, and likely being overwhelmed in anything but the mildest environmental conditions.

16: A portion of your body effects a state change.

Centered on (d4):

1: Leg

2: Arm

3: Chest

4: Head

Its state changes to (d4):

1: Gas

2: Liquid

3: Solid (loses structural complexity and becomes average of the portion’s matter, so flesh becomes an avascular slurry)

4: Plasma

17: Your skin is desiccated so that it tears with any movement.

18: Your bones have most of their structure transmuted to dense metal. You can barely move and are likely to sprain your muscles with every movement. Your companions will have to carry you away from this situation unless you are already extremely strong. It will take a long time and a lot of food for your muscles to adapt to this new state, and you are likely to damage your ligaments thereafter. Your blood is now almost black as your metal bones produce new blood, and you bruise with extreme darkness upon strong contact with anything.

19: Your body is fused with everything you’re touching, so that attempts to remove your clothes (or the gun in your hand) will also remove your skin. Leaving everything be is deeply painful and will lead to massive sepsis in short order, but you will be able to continue on in the current situation with a -1 malus to everything. Eventually you will need to remove all affected flesh or you will perish of infection.

20: All veins and arteries in your body are transmuted into manifold venomous serpents which terminate head and tail at their branching points. They will bite and tear their way free of your flesh and pursue all life forms in the vicinity. Those bitten by their venom will suffer the same fate as the original victim. 

---

Dan Sumption, who I game with, is running a Kickstarter. I haven't seen the text yet, but the art is great.