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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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