The Power of Names

On the OSR discord I had some musings on a leveling system where you gain levels when you gain a name. From there I started brewing ideas for it.

The Bestowing of Names

When you receive a Name you gain a feature, increase your HP by 1d6 and roll you're attributes. If you roll above an attribute, increase it by 1.

Any nickname, title, honorific or what have you cane be a Name if it has the right power behind it. This power can come from several sources.The feature can get from a Name must be thematically appropriate. You can't give you're self a Name.

• Gaining a reputation in a sizable town that most of the population knows about.
• Having you're current reputation in a sizable town be overshadowed by something else.
• Gaining a noble title.
• Rituals a union of like-minded individuals are employing upon you. (literally Union Rituals but with added titles.)
• With a month of time and instruction from a master.
• Magic can bestow a name on you, but at what cost.
• Dragons can give you Names simply by calling you something, you generally don't want this to happen.

You start the game with two names. One is you're True Name which allows you to have an Identity and a second one based on you're background.

Names can be bestowed on a group of people like an adventuring party, in which case everyone in that group will gain a Name relating to that shared group's identity. People keep group Names if they stop being active members, but lose them if they separate themselves from the group. New members don't get the Names associated with their group by default.

Glory

One straight forward way to get a name is to find out what the largest most impressive thing to do in a particular town is and do it. This can mean slaying the local dragon, going in and out of a near by hell-hole in one piece. It doesn't have to be something the town will like either, you can burn down the orphanage or pee on the mayor and that will give you a Name, it will however start showing up on wanted posters thought. The feature you gain from a Name can be a disadvantage and will always reflect the act that caused the name so be weary of that.

You don't actually have to do anything cool or impressive, you just need to get a town to believe you did something impressive. This is it's own challenge because if you steal credit for something than you have to deal with whoever you stole credit from, if you want to orchestrate a crisis that you can come in to save, that also takes effort and has plenty of opportunities where it can fail. If you are found out than you might gain the Name of Lier, Charlatan or something similar, which will increase you're stats but also give you the special feature of "can't tell the blunt truth", instead of something beneficial. As it can't be a name you've given your self, you can't just waltz into town claiming to be The Dragonslayer, you need to get npcs to start calling you the Dragonslayer of their own accord.

There is also a natural ceiling to how many Names you can get, because once a town has a Name for you it will continue referring to you by that name. If you want a new Name from somewhere that you already got a Name at, you need to do something bigger than what you did previously or something more scandalous. So you're best to increase you're power and renown is to either traveling from town to town preforming great deeds or preforming strategically large and larger deeds in a single town over a large time. Also if you have a wanted poster hanging up in every village, you're growth will be stifled because everyone in the region will refer to you by your outlaw Name, this is intentional on the part of the government. Also people will treat you with suspicious if you don't give you're name unless are immediately offering to solve whatever local problem the people here are having.

Professional Secrets

All specialized skills that would require yo go to a college or become an apprentice to a master also have require Name, which you get either with you're diploma or from you're master once you're ready. Thus, all blacksmiths have the Name of Smith and the Dr. of a doctor has metaphysical power behind it. This applies to magic users as well, and the difference between casters and carpenters is one of degree than of kind. Making any craft from a sword to a table is as much an enchantment as cursing someone, except the power is infused slower and subtly over a longer period of time, making it more reliable, stable and not dispellable. The smith also won't age rapidly from creating a fine weapon, at most he get's tired from it*.

Gaining levels doesn't make to much sense if you look closely at it in many rpgs. Into The Odd handily solves that problem by throwing the concept out all together**, but it also means that it doesn't have a handy way to represent characters gaining new skills. You could simply rule that you use downtime to learn something, but than there's still a little voice in my mind bugging me how this isn't representative of reality if I feel the times it takes to learn things are off. So my solution is to make my elfgame not work like reality but by something like story logic.

Incantation

Incantation has two requirements that need to be filled for it to work. First you can only target specific Names, and second the incantation needs to be successfully communicated. It can be communicated in any way, from speech to writing to interpretive dance as long as the recipient of it is able to understand it.

Unwilling targets of incantations get Will saves. Except it they are unstable and you use their True Name.

Sigils are specially prepared symbols that can store Names within them, unlike normal speech or writing that reference Names. Traditionally they are placed in scrolls or runes but it varies from culture to culture. If a nobody(see Lost Names) comes in contact with it than they will get that name instantly.

Due to the first requirement, you usually can only use your magic on specific individuals or the first member of a certain group or profession as those most often share names, and it's really difficult to incant animals or foreigners. If an incantation doesn't find a valid target, it will float around in the either indefinitely until it does.

Incantation can change mutate or corrupt the Names and their meanings or features, it's much to crude for that. The subtle art of storytelling is what can do that.

Stable beings are defined as those that aren't unstable. Unstable beings are ghosts, demons, magic users, illusions, gods, and people under great amounts of mental duress.

Compel

You can command someone to do something within their power as long as it doesn't go against one of their Names. For stable beings this costs 1 attribute point, for unstable beings it costs 1 HP. If you have their True Name you only need to spend 1 HP to compel stable beings, nothing to compel unstable beings.

Generally killing friends and family goes against most people's True Names, and acting against a person's core values, and there would be more restrictions based on the more Names someone has. People however have no mystical obligation to follow their Names. There are no incantations that can force a Doctor to break the Hippocratic oath, but the same Doctor can commit as much malpractice as their free will or the Shadow Caster standing over their shoulder desires.

Demon Names are generally not meant for this plane of existence, so despite how they would things like things to go, they can be compelled to banish themselves from this world. Very pious people can compel demons without any formal training to the annoyance of formally trained incanters.

Shift

You can move a Name from one place to another. For 1 HP you can swap two Names, for 1d6 HP you can move one Name from one target to another. You cant Shift to and from any valid Incantation target, yourself and sigils. Names can be shifted from sigils to people without expending any HP.

Acts attributed to someone with a specific Name will be remembered as having happened to the person who currently has that Name. So if John the Dragonslayer, has is second Name stolen by Jill the Witch, every will remember Jill slaying that dragon instead of John. Observant and informed people can recognize that these memories are false fairly quickly. John and Jill both know that Jill didn't slay the dragon, but Bob who lives across town might not notice the change in memory, especially if the event happened a while ago.

Dub

You can give someone a new Name or place one into a sigil. If you spend 1 HP you create a weak False Name that lasts until it's exposed to doubt about it's reality or the target falls asleep. False Names don't effect attributes or HP, but can change . If you spend 1 Attribute point than you can create a strong False Name that exists until a mystical condition is fulfilled. You can give someone a real Name by burning 2 max attribute points.

Erase

You can make weak False Names disappear with barely a thought. You can erase a strong False Name by spending 1 HP, and preforming some gestures in reference to it's mystical condition. You can annihilate a real Name by burning 1 max attribute point.

Call

By spending 1 HP you can call a creature to you. If they are stable beings than they will feel that they now know where you are, how to get there and have the desire to get there. If they are unstable they will instantly appear before you.

You can set a Name you have to allow others to use this ability on you. You can prevent being teleported from this, if you're not being called by an incanter.

Demons are always pressing in from the other side waiting and listening, so calling them is easy.

Lost Names

When you lose you're name bad things can happen. If you lose a name that isn't you're True Name than you're not that messed up. You lose the feature you gained from that Name, you lose 1d6 max HP, and 1 max attribute from the attribute most relevant to that Name, or a random one if none make sense. Everyone(including you) will have a hard time remembering things relating to you and that Name, you don't lose any memories they are just more difficult o access. Like trying to find old things in the attic, it's there but you need to spend a bunch of time or get outside help to get in. You are weaker than you once were, but you remain yourself.

Yes this can mean that you lose attributes and HP amounts that are entirely different from what you gained from that Name. I don't mind this, and even like that someone who lost a Name is diffrent from how they were before they had that Name. If it bothers you than write down the HP and Attribute gained next to each Name.

If you lose you're True Name than everything than all the same rules apply except the feature you lost is having a living and flexible human identity. Without it you have to make due with the other names you have, meaning that you can only be related to in terms of those other Names. So if John the Blacksmith lost the name John, he would just be the Blacksmith and would only be able to interact with the world in terms of worked and unworked metal, hammer and tongs, iron and steel. His ability to form and maintain relationships that don't relate with his craft would cease, but he still has human social needs despite not being able to put into words that he has them or having the concept of self necessary to understand that he has them. Those with multiple Names are have to consciously switch between them as the True Name is what keeps all the parts of the mind running cohesively between each other. So if the Blacksmith who was once john is the Blacksmith Dragonslayer, and a conversation about anvils changed into a conversation about dragons, he'd have to pause a moment to do so, and his posture will viably change from that of a reserved and careful Blacksmith to that of a triumphant and devious Dragonslayer. If you don't have a unique Name than  magic that tries to track you might pick up someone with a similar Name instead, so divining for the Blacksmith can result you the one who was john or any other Blacksmith instead.

If you lose all you're Names, than you become a nobody. Everyone who knows, loves and hates you has forgotten who you are beyond a vague impression, a stranger even to you're self. You cannot be tracked by sorcery or by hound. You're footprints are not footprints, they are just indents in the ground. The sounds you're mouth produces are understood to be words only when attention isn't payed attention to them. A bored merchant can accept your money and give you goods, and people will respond when you greet them but not much else. You are also free to go anywhere without being questioned and do anything without being recognized for it later. Cats, children and madman can recognize you thought, the first because the rules don't apply to them and the later to because they don't grokk how the world works, and because they can recognize you they can name you giving you a new identity to their liking.

Big List of Features and How to Get Them

Aside from all the interesting options, you can also have a Name that grants you advantage on something related to how you got the Name, which I won't list here for now. I'm not sure I'm happy with this list at all, but this post is already getting very long, it'll do for now.

Features from Achievement

• Danger Sense: Advantage when surprised in combat intuitive. 
• Gained from the reputation of miraculously surviving an attack.
• Brave: You don't need to make moral checks on anything less terrifying than a dragon.
• Gained from showing bravery.
• Favored Enemy: Attacks against a certain type of foe are enhanced.
• Gained by committing war crimes against you're favored enemy.
• Oath Breaker: You can fake taking an oath or signing a contract without giving the slightest indication of doing so, and are immune to magical retribution from doing so.
• Gained from breaking an important oath.
• Vampire: Gain 1 ration from 1 Strength of blood drained from the coerced.
• Gained from great acts of cruelty and exploiting people.

Professional Secrets and Arcane Practices

If not stated otherwise, you need to go to a school or a master who has it.

• Incantations: See Incantations section. These are all separate features that follow the same rules.
• Compel: See Incantations section.
• Call: See Incantations section.
• Shift: See Incantations section.
• Dub: See Incantations section.
• Erase: See Incantations section.
• Shadow Art: See my previous post. These are all separate features that follow the same rules.
• Domain: See my previous post.
• Edict: See my previous post.
• Conjuring: See my previous post.
• Enchantment See my previous post.
• Burn Essence: See my previous post, but with the added not that it works with different magical arts at different price ranges. It's effectively a "cause random undirected magic" power.
• Medicine: You know how to treat wounds, and what herbs and substances do what to the body. Can preform surgery.
• Blacksmithing: You can forge things with metal given a forge.
• Literacy: You can read and write and read between the lines of complicated texts.
• Misdirection: You don't need to roll for subterfuge or slight of hand if you're target has their attention on something not directly related to what you're messing with.
• Bushcraft: Can track and forage with advantage or something more mechanically appropriate if you have more details wilderness rules.
• Pact Binder: If you mediate an agreement or contract between two parties, it's metaphysically binding. If someone from one side breaks it they take 1d10 damage and the other party knows instantly.
• You can also gain this if you successfully mediate a conflict between two forces.
• Animal Handling: With a steady gaze and calm voice you can calm animals you have no right to calm. With time to can train calm animals.

Blessings

• Turning: Weak Undead will flee from you. Stronger Undead get a save not to.
• Gained from a ritual in dedication to the god of undead-hating.

Curses

• Liar: Cannot tell the blunt truth.
• Coward: Always fail moral checks.
• Spineless: Cannot go against a direct Order, but Advantage when following them.

World-Building

• People generally give their secondary Names or powerless names to strangers, but will give their True Names once trust is earned.
• This is convenient, because we all refer to random npcs by their profession or allegiances anyway. The GM doesn't need to come up with any names untill the players take an interest in a particular character.
• People without True Names can continue existing for a long time in large cities or on the road without anyone noticing, and they inevitable snap and go mad.
• Spys will send each other messages inlaid with secret commands that cause them to  write out a secret message for the spy to read. Once they wrote it out, they burn it to keep it secret.
• The barbarians are nervous about the whole writing thing for completely sane and valid reasons.
• More literate people are more vulnerable to incantations.
• InfoSec Witches fight secret wars with Name-Stealing Sorcerers.
• Fairies can mess with you're Name effortlessly and will do so capriciously.

*This is HP loss, which represents exhaustion from near misses. HP spent to craft things isn't tracked and doesn't actually matter, except to say that craftsmen are more vulnerable right after they finished something. I'm also going to rename HP to Stamina when I write my Oddhack, so that spending it is clearly exerting yourself.
**The design goal of ItO is minimalism not verisimilitude but shh...

Shadow Magic

The spiteful Sun glares down on us all with he's aloof and amused smile. He is so great that he's power is felt merely from he's presence. The reason why he's rays radiate into arms is because everything the Sun sees, the Sun controls. For such a being, the two are identical. However, this isn't complete omnipresence, because where the sunlight doesn't touch, the sun holds no domain. Within each shadow is an unsupervised zone out of the grasp the celestial spheres but too small and isolated for chthonic powers to claim. Once you know this you can use this loophole, you can leverage it for your self, and once you've practiced that long enought, you can control it, and if you can control it that you can be Onto A GOD... within an area between a few to 60 feet demanding on time of day and if the weather allows.

This is intended as a replacement for the archetype of the fantasy wizard for my yet unnamed setting. Well, partially, there are are other magical arts that I have yet to write up that are meant to be complimentary to this one, and Mancy exists in the setting as it's own thing. Spell ferrets still exist in the world. It will make sense when I write all the various things out and organise them properly.

This was made with Into the Odd in mind, with my own leveling system that I have haven't gotten to writing down yet, but will soon. I might trash that idea in the end. Any way.

Shadow Caster:

When you become a Shadow Caster you start with Domain, Burn Essence and One of the 3 Shadow Arts.

Domain:

You have subtly control over what is in you're shadow, allowing you to cause minor spooky stuff to happen inside it at will. If you're shadow overlaps with a large unlit area, the energy disperses making you're Domain not work and causing all Shadow Arts preformed to cause vague spooky stuff instead.
*Any action or attack against you from within you're shadow has disadvantage or is deprived respectfully.
*You get advantage against anyone within you're shadow.
*If someone dies within you're shadow, than their spirit is stuck in there and has the ability to cause spooky stuff and warp the shape of the shadow. If you're shadow overlaps with an unlit area, spirits can escape from it, should they want to.
*Arcanum and Spells have their range extended as far and wide as you're shadow. Within reason.

Burn Essence: 

You can consume parts of you're self by spending hit points or any attribute points to power you're magic according to the table below. Burning yourself causes you to age rapidly and shrivel up.  You can burn more essence than than the amount listed on the table to increase the power of a casting. You can also burn essence without a goal to make intense spooky shit happen.

	Duration	Existence	Scope	Power
Concentration	As long as you Focus on it	Will vanish if seen by the sun.	Size of head.	Instantly lighting  a Candle
1 Hp Burned	To the next Sunset or Sunrise	Will vanish if convinced it doesn't exist	Half of a Person	Instantly lighting a Campfire
1 Attribute Burned	Indefinite	Will vanish if convinced it doesn't exist	Size of a Person	Instantly setting a Wagon on Fire
5 Attribute Burned	Permanent.	It's Real now. Edicts become part of a person's soul.	Anything that is in you're shadow	Instantly incinerating  a Wagon

Shadow Arts:

Edict: 

You can give up to 7 word command to something or someone within you're shadow. They are under the effect of the Edict for a Duration. Edicts has Existence equal to their Duration. Normal creatures get will saves, erratic ones like undead, demons, shapeshifters, wizards and emotionally distressed people don't. Inanimate objects don't get a save, they either follow Edicts or don't depending on Scope.

Conjuring: 

You can create illusions, phantasms and glamours within you're shadow. They act exactly like real thing, except that they are limited by Existence and Duration. You can conjure not particularly intelligent creatures, disguises that cover the surface of something with a different surface and so forth.

Enchantment: 

You can infuse part of you're self into an object or a shadow. The enchantment has Duration and Power while effecting something with Scope. It either allows you to create a random arcanum using something like the Maze Rats spell generator or allows you to place some function of what you can do into an object. Like losing sight in one eye to allow you to see through a brick or giving up speech to make a statue speak. The function will return to you once the duration is up. Enchantments that burn attribute points are downtime activities.

Design Intent:

If you've read my blog, you'd already know that I'm somewhat hung-up on ideas of magic and technology and natural rules of the world. The intention with this system is that it's what comes about as a result of the natural laws of the fictional universe I'm making. The rules that this class relies on are eluded to in the flavor intro and mechanical rules but directly spelled out. Hopefully they don't need to be directly spelled out, as they are fairly intuitive and grokkable.
Another intention of this design is to make environmental conditions an important part of the strategy. It matters for a caster if the it's sunny, what time of day it is and so on. If the conditions are just perfect than you can put very strong foes to their knees, but if they are slightly off than you can easily get screwed, so ambushes and Combat As War is the best way to go, if the plan does fail you can go nuclear by burning you're self entirely. Effective casters also need teamwork to be most effective, someone to carry and angle the torch, meatshields that can protect them after they burned essence to pull off some big effect and so on. Arrogant and uncareful casters can easily be defeated by a foe that's clever or lucky and doesn't have any mojo. To sum it up, I want knives in the back to really cramp these wizard's styles, both in when the knife holder is a player and an NPC.
Edicts are meant to make the caster intimidating and domineering presences when they can catch someone.
The purpose of having those that die in you're shadow getting stuck in your shadow is twofold. First is to give a consequence to commanding someone to commit suicide that is more interesting than denying the option, because if the ghost of someone you killed is stuck in you're shadow, they are not going to mess with you're magic and that's something you'll have to deal with. The second is it allows for the trope of "shadow does something else than the body" without just giving that ability to the player, because that would lessen the need for wacky lamp contraptions that change lighting angles. You can control you're shadow indirectly if kill a dog within you're shadow, than train the ex-dog to follow you're commands to stretch and warp in whatever way you need. But a dog needs treats to be trained, but what do you feed a ghost dog? Why you burn hit points for it of course, what could go wrong! Thus you can have both crazy lamp contraptions and casters sicing commanding their shadows to do things, and both have their advantages and disadvantages.
Conjurings being vanishible by convincing them they don't exist was stolen from Martin O, for the reason that I find the idea quite amusing and having unsettling implications when it's also the same power that allows you to create real things from mid air. It supports the theme of having a blurred line between reality and artifice, sorcerer and charlatan which I am partial to.

World Building Implications and Tangents

• Wizards wear tall pointy hats and bellowing cloaks to have longer shadows.
• Wizards have towers for the same purpose. Enchanting a tower in it's construction will make it on some level a part of the wizard.
• Wizard towers take a lot of money to build, as such they are usually implements of war and are feared as such.
• If a wizard dies than the expensive expensive tower will be useless. This is solved by a ritual where a wizard's name and beard are passed down to an apprentice. The Beards of the greatest tower wizards are cultivated through generations.
• Some wizard towers are more tower than wizard.
• In the mountains there is a magical tradition that casts shadows using gliders. Despite having no means of propulsion the gliders have great maneuverability as they can conjure wind from beneath them, and they can terrorize their enemies with impunity. (This idea originally came from Spiraxo on the OSR discord.)
• Dragons and ravens are also known for the use of aerial shadow casting.
• You can buy potions that have wondrous effects but can't be exposed to the Sun. So you need to drink it carefully and it will fail if you spit or bleed.
• There are illusionary people who don't know their illusions.
• In some cultures it's impolite to step on someone's shadow and in others it's impolite to cast you're shadow on someone.
• Homunculus are small because artificially making a fully sized human would is to dangerous.
• Casters who have enchanted marionette minions mock those who use enchanted skeletons as being cheap, while the later call the former pretensions.
• Magic items are weird and at times stupid because their creators don't really get to design them.
• The Fey are able to weave enchantments and conjure wonders without withering before everyone's eyes.
• Fools try to capture and eat them. Generally doesn't go well.
• You can Curse Flesh just be being very angry.
• There is a Caster who was able to survive underground by conjuring food for himself to eat. Now he cannot leave the caves because if he does than he'll disappear due to many months already having pasted out in the world. 

More of An Alignment System

Maybe I should come up with a name for it, but anyway sense I've written my alignment post I've had more thoughts on it. I still haven't playtested it yet so hopefully there isn't a issue at the core of this idea that will cause this additional post to be for naught once it's thrown into the field. Regardless...

Do you know how to illustrate a cosmic force without using squiggly lines? Because I don't.

Mancy

So I've read this interesting take on divination on Mastered by Marquis's blog and decided to mash it together with my alignment system. Rules wise this doesn't change anything, but justifies how Mancy works. Mancy is the practice that allows you to talk with the Power you're aligned to and ask it questions(in my last post I called them "Alignments" but "Powers" makes more sense after someone else used it). Since Powers usually "thinks" in favor of those it is aligned with, the Power will freely give answers to the person. The problem is that elemental forces and abstract ideals are not people and do not "think" like people, so there is a significant barrier in communication between the two. Vague and cryptic prophesy is the result of translation error, where either the Power poorly understood the question or misinterpreted how much the diviner understood. The diviner gets worse results the more they divine in a single day, ironically, because they start thinking more in tune with their Power. If a part of you're mind is thinking in Ocean or Law, it isn't able to think in person and the information more difficult to use, even if part of your brain understands it better. It's nothing a good night's sleep can't fix thought. Be warned if you start using it excessively (by divining 6 or more times each day for a while) you can permanently gain decreased maximum result.

Now you may be wondering, if mancy allows you to ask informative questions of things greater than man, than can it be used to ask a Power to do something? I don't see a reason why not, I'd say the rules are the same as for gathering information but the Divination Die is ruled on this table instead, and it counts as a preformed mancy.

1: The Power interprets you're request in the worst way possible. Everyone at the table is free to suggest what could go wrong and the terriblest result happens.
2-3: The Power misinterprets what you wanted to happen and it goes bad.
4: The Power doesn't understand what your request, so just ignores it. Nothing happens.
5: The Power misunderstands what you want, and does something fairly harmless instead. It's obviously supernatural and NPCs will react accordingly thought.
6: The Power does exactly what you told it to do. This only has a risk of monkey-pawing you if you are hurrying.
7+: The Power does exactly what you want it to do, with no if, or buts.

Asking a Power to do something is generally a very bad idea, so most sensible diviners will go out of their way to avoid doing so. When they do request the great powers the results are always memorable, so people assume that's what diviners do all the time.

World Building Implications:

• Necromancers as respectablish profession for contacting those who have pasted away.
• The necromancer is able to contact the dead thought the medium of their Power, "inside" of which the spirits of people end up.
• Wizards Know Something You Don't.
• Wizards don't understand nearly as much as they'd like you to believe.
• They will be blindsided by both their personal biases and the bias of the Power they consult.
• There is good reason to be weary about attacking the court magician even if they just lounge around all day and look at the stars periodically.
• Ambitious magic users scheme about many things.
• A few famous oracles are no longer people, just vessels that spout prophesy and the thoughts of great alien minds.
• People bind minor imps to act as pocket sized diviners, this results in predictions that are both more understandable and less accurate.
• As a GM roll a d6 behind a screen. The lower the more the imp twists the truth to their advantage.
• Someone who divines with cards could be aligned with the Game, or with something else, as the major arcana are based around astrology. You can figure this out by how the person talks about their prediction.
• e.g. If they use words like "piece" or "move" when referring to you're future, they are likely Game aligned.
• Mystic hobos that know everything that can appear anywhere in the city.
• Fortune Tellers are dangerous.

Design Notes:
As I'm a Pratchett fan I want to make rules that encourage Granny Weatherwax play.  Which entails having magical powers and not using them. Having magical powers and not using them doesn't sound that fun thought, so I wrote explicit magical powers to be highly risky. You'd ask the a Power of something if either you have a clever plan that you've carefully laid out (and would you look at that, the normal use of mancy is an information gathering tool, a helpful thing for forming clever plans), which is the kind of combat-as-war play that the OSR is based around, or as a Hail-Mary when cornered. Because seeing you're wizard get exploded from tampering with powers beyond his control is it's own reward, and if that wizard does somehow make it out alive, than it's surprising. This is intended to exist along side Arcanum as a more flexible but less reliable power.

Orcs

Arnold's Orcs in this system always hate their aligned Power. They curse it and spit at it for what it, an orc who doesn't hate the Power is not really an orc.(the exception is Family, but that is hidden by the much louder other Power) Sky is popular because that's where the gods are. The Show is also popular because that's what the gods make of their lives. War is also a good bet when it comes to orcs. It may not seem like it, but orcs hate War, there are not enought words to describe how much they hate it.

Void monks practice the Mancy of Nothing. Speaking with Nothing never gets you any information, however if you do it enough than you you're mind will be eroded away, which is the point for void monks.

Enlightenment

People try to align with Everything, and become one with the universe. The Mancy of Everything is about as useful as the Mancy of Nothing, but for precisely the opposite reason. When connecting to Everything there is to much information for a brain to make any use of. It also take a lot more time to do than mancy usually does. A character who's becoming one with the universe can't be adventuring at the same time.

Alignment Develpment

A person's alignment grows and changes with them as a person. Often rapidly as a child and more slowly with adults. When a child is in the womb they are first aligned to their Mom, who greater beyond comprehension at this stage. Than when they are born and start learning about the world, it expands from Mom to Family and/or Home and spirals out in any number of directions from there. Usually children pick up their parent's alignment along with all the beliefs and values that a family instills in them. Teenage rebellion often relates to a change in view on an aligned Power rather than a change to a different force.

Further Quibblings

Sea and Ocean would be the same Power viewed from slightly different angles as they refer to the same thing. Same with the Show or the Spectacle or the Play, it's all related to the central concept of viewing the world through the lens of performance. I think it's fine to refer to the same Power by multiple names, as many of these concepts are to large to be contained within a single name. There are some places where you could argue either way if something is the same Power. For example, Mountain and Earth can be considered the same. Both relate to stone and both are things dwarves would be aligned to. However, on the other hand by associating the two, you're associating surface dwelling mountain goats with underground creatures like the horrible things in the Underdark. It all depends on what feels right to you and you're players. Another example is that I won't align all the fish in the sea with the Sea, because, everyone who lives on land isn't aligned with it either. However you could rule it either way.

In my mind there are several ways you could organize the Powers in a setting. Either have a fluid and disorganized mess of various concepts and (super/un-)natural forces like I've been describing in the two posts on the topic, or you could have a carefully structured set of Powers. Something like MtG Colors or Homestuck Aspects, or even D&D's alignment chart that I dread so much. Both of the former tie concepts with physical things and would give the world an distinctive flare than if a confusing hodge-podge is used, but also doesn't allow alignment to be as personally significant for almost all characters. I am not yet sold on either direction for this, and in retrospect I definitely had Aspects in the back of my head when writing the original post.

An Alignment System

I greatly despise the alignment grid, I could go into detail but many others have succinctly pointed out it's myriad of issues already. I feel better about the original three option one, but grand cosmic conflicts aren't something that has grabbed me that much. My brain has formulated a system that is grown from the personality determining parts the gird has grown over the years and taken into a completely different direction.

An Alignment System

People don't exist as islands, they cannot exist in isolation. They require a connection to something beyond them to function, it's simply how they are wired. This connection is refereed to as alignment, it is a mystical pull between an individual and something greater and usually somewhat abstract force that greatly influences their life. Alignment is written on a person's character sheet like it in usual D&D and has the three following effects on a character.

• Alignment Shapes Character: The alignment of a character is a central pillar around which their personality is built. This doesn't mean that everyone aligned with the same things have similar personalities, only that they all care about the same thing. The connection between a character and their alignment can be reverent, matter-of-factly, antagonistic, subconscious, positive, it doesn't matter as long as it's important. A authoritarian and an anarchist can both be aligned to Law just in different ways. The sailor who cannot swim and the mermaid tempting him beneath the waves can both be aligned with the Sea.
• Players are free to interpret their alignment any way they wish. They can have as shallow or complicated relation with it as they like.
• Everyone with shared alignment shares a kind of kinship and understanding between each other. Which results in them either getting along splendidly or terribly.
• Reaction rolls where someone talks to someone of the same alignment are shifted one step away from the neutral response. In ItO make the reaction roll have more extreme results.
• When writing your alignment feel free to include and adjective to describe your relationship with it. "True Lawful", "Begrudgingly Lawful", "Un-Lawful" Go nuts.
• Character Shapes Alignment: A character's alignment will favor them due to the kinship between them. These are subtle and unreliable shifts of fate that could easily pass off as coincidence to the skeptical. Things like managing to was ashore alive rather than dead for the Ocean, not getting lost in your city if your're aligned with your City, having a knack for not getting small burns for Fire. You can have consistent and blatant protections and powers related to your alignment but that requires sacrifice.
• Alignment is a valid reason to rule some things in a character's favor, but it's still within mundane and normal limits.
• If the players ask, they know if they have favor. The character will feel it intuitively.
• The sacrifices can justify magical(or psychic,mystical, etc.) class powers, be part of an ItO style Order or Mark.
• Needless to say, make it a serious Dilemma. 
• Destined Death: As a character's life is intertwined with their alignment, so must their death be. This doesn't mean that you can't die in a way unrelated to your alignment, but it does mean if you do than they will become restless, and become unquiet dead until they are properly buried. This is one of the purposes of burial ceremonies.
• Surprise, this was secretly a continuation of my previous post all along!

Your alignment can change and evolve if you have a significant life experience, but generally it's going to be a change in your relationship with the alignment not switching to a completely different one. It should be rare and impactful enought to be ruled on a case by case basis. Maybe you can have up to two alignments per character? I don't know maybe one is complicated enough. If two alignments are on one character than the destined death would probably involve them both.

Un-Definitive List of Alignments:

Kind of Person	Boons	Proper Deaths
1. Family
A normal person who cares about the people closest to them. A lost son.	Being able to accurately predict things about your family, having a better time talking with them.	Dying to save one's family. Dying surrounded by your loved ones. Funeral with all of them attending.
2. Home
Someone who loves the place they lived. Someone who is indebted to where they live.	Knowing if something is wrong and not as it should be.	Being buried at home, possibly with an apple tree planted on top.
3. The City
Someone who lived in the city all their lives, and connects with it. Sam Vimes basically.	Navigating through confusing streets or losing someone tailing you.	Being buried within the city's cemetery or rotting in it's gutter depending on your class.
4. A Community
Someone who extends empathy towards a group beyond their family or a pariah of said group.	Getting a reaction you want out a crowd from this community.	Dying for the benefit or despair of a community. Being buried by their traditions.
5. A Dream
Someone with a grand goal that they strive towards, or a cynic who lost that drive, but can't let it go.	Convincing others that the dream is a good/bad idea. Ignoring the penalty of sleep deprivation for short while.	Dying with the dream achieved or handed off for someone else to do it. Dying secure in the futility of doing so.
6. Love
A romantic who has found true love or someone who vehemently denys such a concept.	Somehow guessing the vague direction of where one's love is.	Being buried side by side. Going full Romeo and Juliet is only necessary if your a teenager.
7. Law
Someone who believes in the value of order or someone preoccupied with determinism.	Getting somewhere on time.	Dying without any unfinished business or loose ends. A neat and formal funeral.
8. Chaos
Someone who believes in personal freedom or someone painfully aware and afraid of Murphy's Law.	Being able to find something in your own messy room.	Dying unbound from some bullshit. Who cares about the funeral.
9. The Game
Someone who views life like it's a game, and people as players in it. Gamblers, Machiavellian schemers, the meta aware.	A knack for understanding rules.	This soul will rest if win or lose, they've played well.
10. The Show
Those who see the world as a spectacle. Actors, glory seeking leaders, bards, storytellers.	A knack for the dramatic.	What matters is that there is a good story around it.
11. The Open Road
Wanderers, traveling merchants, drifters and postman. People who can't settle down.	Being able to sleep in traveling scenarios, Good sense of direction.	Dying while traveling. Funeral treated like a pit stop for another journey.
12. The Sea
Sailors, sea creatures, coastal people. Those drawn to the sea.	Being able to hold your breath for longer.	Drowning. Burial at sea.
13. The Earth
Dwarves, miners, spelunkers. Those who aren't afraid of going into the Veins of the Earth or are fascinated in their fear of it.	Not falling to panicked claustrophobia.	Dying in a ravine. Being buried in the ground.
14. The Sky
Airheads, Blue Folk, pilots. Those who look at the sky's big wideness with wonder.	Feeling changes in the weather ahead of time.	Decomposing under the open air. Ashes scattered to the wind. Throwing a corpse from a really high cliff.
15. Fire
Pyromaniacs, smiths and fire fighters. People who can stare at an open flame for hours.	A knack for avoiding minor burns and handling hot objects.	Cremation, intended or otherwise. Pyres.
16. A Forest.
Druids, lumberjacks, elves, rangers. Trees and and forest critters.	Not getting lost in the woods, guessing which berries are poisonous.	Decomposing in the woods. Having one's body nourish a tree.
17. The Sun
Early birds, outdoorsy people. Shockingly The Children of the Sun.	Getting a nice tan rather than terrible burns.	The service is held during the day, at a higher elevation preferably.
18. The Moon
Werewolves, literal lunatics, people who's emotions are influenced by the pull of the moon. The witches that dance naked under moon light. Night owls.	A bit of luck under the moonlight.	The service done under the moon's glow.
19. Darkness
Creatures of the night, secretive folk, weirdos who always wear black. Also those never stopped fearing bogeymen under closets.	Good night vision, tendency to blend in well into darkness.	Rest the body somewhere nice and dark. Even better if it's hidden.
20. None- no great cosmic connection.
Listless and adrift. A person who is isolated and alone.	Nothing, except they aren't registered by alignment based divination.	There isn't one. They are bound to be a aimless specter.

Ideally, the table that is properly weighted so that more adventurer friendly alignments would show up more often than the less friendly ones. However since this is a un-definitive list, it's more meant to give you a gist of what the the alignments entails. The Boons table is meant to bring up examples rather than explicit bonuses, it's also the thing that is going to need the most playtesting, telling people to "adjust for taste" is a bit of a cope out. Even with the OSR's DIY mentality a system should have knobs to adjust and details to ignore.

World Building Implications:

• Rather than a setting with a grand cosmic war, it leads to a complicated and messy world with various forces and people that care about their own personal problems and bump heads through that.
• Aside from violence, the dead can be laid to rest by figuring out who they were as a person and by honoring them correctly.
• Shamans, exorcists and so forth do this professionally.
• Funeral rites are made important in a way that is obvious to players.
• There is knobs and options in what they do that can be messed with, space for both hijinks and discovery.
• Knowing things about someone's personality can give you insight in how to mess with them magically or how you don't want to mess with them.
• Beings of the same alignment have come into conflict and that can be exploited by third parties.
• The line between the mundane and the supernatural is more of a gradient that a solid line.
• Does a mother tear someone to pieces in defense of her children because of a sudden burst of adrenaline or due by mystically evoking that it's her Family? Does this matter, is there actually a difference between the two.
• Is that guy just very good at acting or is he's performance taping into something divine.
• Magic is less of it's own force, but more what happens at the extremes of other forces.
• That guy isn't lighting a fire without any implements because he's manipulating the aether, but because Fire likes him a lot.
• There isn't a correct Unifed Theory of Magic, same way there isn't a Unifed Theory of Science.
• Spells have alignments, that's why they can manipulate the world.
• Friendship power is a thing.
• Some great monsters are the direct decedents of great forces, and killing them will is tricky because of it.
• The nature of these forces, whether they are beings, mediums we exist in, both, neither so forth, is the great topic of theological debate in the world.

Design Notes:

Like my last post this is more of synthesis of various tropes and ideas rather than anything new. It also associates these common tropes with each other in a way that would not be obvious otherwise. As a game mechanic it leans the game closer to storygame, by giving more focus to the internal lives of the characters. It also establishes relationships between various npcs and monsters that can be interacted with in interesting ways, so it doesn't stray to far from OSR design. Plus, it adds a fun element of character identity. There are a lot of questions about how this would work. How many alignments does a person get? Is it really necessary to have both Law and Chaos if you can have an antagonistic to either of them? Should alignments be more organised? Are some of these a bit too redundant? Is this system to convoluted to explain to people at the table when everyone is sitting around and making their characters?

The Odd Dead

I've had an idea of how to play a ghost in Into the Odd. I started writing this post trying my best to keep to the minimalist aesthetic of ItO but I ended going on several wild tangents that led to a ranty manifesto about fantasy fiction in general. So moving on.

When you die with unfinished business, from certain oddities or simply without noticing it, you can become a ghost.

• Ghosts don't have Strength or Dexterity scores. 
• All rolls attempted with those abilities automatically fail. 
• Impairments or damage to Strength or Dexterity do nothing to a ghost.
• A ghost's Will score cannot be healed normally.
• A ghost can come back from Critical damage after a couple of days, but not from hitting 0 Will.
• Sleep, food, air, warmth and other biological problems no longer apply, but you loose 1 Will foe every day of strenuous activity since biology no longer repairs itself.
• Ghosts can spend 1d4 Will to physically interact with the world or possess a target which get's a Will save to resist. Inanimate objects instead get a save based off their sympathetic relation to the ghost, with 10 being a casually known thing.
• A ghost can gain 1 Will by draining, stealing or eating 1d6 Will from a target.

Nothing revolutionary here, but what happens if we swap around those attributes?

• Zombies don't have Will or Dexterity scores. 
• All rolls attempted with those abilities automatically fail. 
• Impairments or damage to Will or Dexterity do nothing to a zombie.
• A zombie's Strength score cannot be healed normally.
• A zombie can come back from Critical damage after a couple of days but not from hitting 0 Strength.
• Sleep, food, air, warmth and other biological problems no longer apply, but you loose 1 Strength foe every day of strenuous activity since biology no longer repairs itself.
• Zombies can spend 1d4 Strength to woo someone with unnatural charms or make a target into a enthralled zombie upon critical damage. If the critical damage roll result is 15 or greater than new zombie is free to do what it wants.
• A zombie can gain 1 Strength by draining, stealing or eating 1d6 Strength from a target.

• Skeletons don't have Will or Strength scores. 
• All rolls attempted with those abilities automatically fail. 
• Impairments or damage to Will or Strength do nothing to a skeleton.
• A skeleton's Dexterity score cannot be healed normally.
• A skeleton can come back from Critical damage after a couple of days but not from hitting 0 Dexterity.
• Sleep, food, air, warmth and other biological problems no longer apply, but you loose 1 Dexterity foe every day of strenuous activity since biology no longer repairs itself.
• Skeletons can spend 1d4 Dexterity to apply a decent amount of force, or have their bones act while separated. Your bones can also be rearranged into novel body plans without spending anything.
• A skeleton can gain 1 Dexterity by draining, stealing or eating 1d6 Dexterity from a target.

Notes:

   My intention with this design is to offer an alternative to losing a dead character that doesn't cheapen the death of said character. The two ways I see this playing out is that either the undead character doesn't consume anyone and gets burnt out out eventually while allowing the rest of the pcs to complete the dungeon or they become a monstrous creature and that places a lot of interesting issues for players to deal with. Either of which would be a good result in my book. The former might be made more likely depending on how much a player misses being able to use all three attributes. 

In either case the hijinks factor of immunity to two of the attributes should be quite fun, except zombies end up getting a raw deal because strength is the most likely to be damaged and Dexterity is most likely to be saved for in a usual game. To that my answer is to allow zombies to form a horde, which is limited by horde always being blocked off by bad terrain and most of the zombies will have lower Str scores. If an enemy is ready for it, cover or elevated ground with copious amounts of fire should take care of the infestation.
   If applied to all undead in the setting, they will generally become more pathetic than threatening. Sometime even in a comedic way. I like this from a thematic perspective because it brings the horror of undead back where it belongs, to the fear of death and the absoluteness of entropy.
   I also vary deliberately avoid saying anything about the undead being inherently evil, simply because I feel that limits what you can do with them. The themes the undead revolve around include death, loss, the past's effect on the present, disease,entropy and humanities attempts to extend it's existence. There are a lot of interesting angles to work with here, beyond purging the world of abominations against nature. This is simply a personal preference, but I prefer all the characters in my fantasy to be sympathetic and someone you can talk to.


World Building Implications and additional ideas that fit in here:

• People generally don't like walking corpses, because grandma eating you is worse than when a some wolf does it.
• Being undead is unpleasant and people don't willingly do it without a damn good reason.
• The undead are still who they were in life, but degrading on all levels, physical, mental, spiritual.
• The undead will do things for their living friends and relatives.
• The great hero who defeated many foes even after taking a lethal wound is technicality the same as the monstrous creature that gave up it's humanity and prowls at night for victims. Nobody wants to admit that.
•  Some backwoods places have a tradition of where people sacrifice bits of themselves to their ancestors.
• There are special drugs brewed from highly poisonous mushrooms that allow you to lose your attributes for a couple moments. Allowing you to use the abilities of death without the commitment. Those who use this concoction are commonly called Berserkers.
• The most potent of these drugs destroys all three of your attributes, making you immune to all harm for a couple minutes. The only problem is that you irreversibly die afterwords.
• There is a notorious thief out there that has never been caught. His secret is that he has a ghostly brother on his side.
• The evil Mr.Chatter is a skeleton who has added a lot of bones to himself over the years, too many really. He has 18 Dexterity, a crocodile skull on one of his hands that does d8 damage and gambling addiction. He'd be quite the gentleman if it weren't for his terrible dread cackle and habit of stealing peoples bones in their sleep.
• It isn't clear if a zombie, a skeleton and a ghost can simultaneously be created from the same person. The intellectual and spiritual authorities on the topic deny it, but there are rumors.
• Since they fall to pieces if they move around to much, the unquiet dead are transported around the same way the quiet ones are. On a wagon, in coffins if budget allows.
• Vampires are dead that have found the secret of effectively draining people, thus are able to pass off as human if well fed.
• When a vampire drains, steals or eats from someone they get the full value of the die rather than just one.
• Vampires can drain the other two attributes instead of just the one. However when these attributes are damaged they loose at least half of it rounded up.
• So if a skeletal vampire with 10 Str takes 2 damage it will go up to 5 and if they take 6, it will stay at 6.
• Vampires can pass off as living humans if all their attributes are high enough, even if they are usually a skeleton or ghost underneath.
• Lichs hide parts of themselves in phylacteries, as long as it remains unbroken the lich is static and eternal. Should it break the lich dies instantly.
• As long as their phylactery is whole, a selected attribute of the lich will never change in any way. If broken, the selected attribute is instantly vanished as well.
• Lichs are not able to change or adapt without messing with their phylactery. Which caries the risk of killing them. Changing opinions is like performing open heart surgery on yourself and forming new habits is that on top of what humans already have to do.
• As such liches range from are either barely functioning old people or omnicompetent super geniuses who have thought of everything in advance, there is no middle ground.
• In the worst cases they are both.
• Some unquiet dead have a a remaining Dexterity attribute but are more spectral than skeletal. They lack both a body and a will but they still have their movement about them. They are poltergeists and whispering winds. You can only see them by their remaining shadow or the glint of an eye that isn't there. They can be slain if you are able to restrict their movement.
• I decided to go with skeletons as the player option to make each type have their own distinct thing.
• It's known that when someone dies on a phantom steed, they will become this kind of spook.
• There is a debate on if phantom steeds are themselves a kind of dead or a manifestation of the platonic ideal of SPEED. Studying them is difficult because they keep running away.
• Undead armies! 
• Zombie infantry!
• Ghost scouts and spies!
• Skeleton rangers and shock troopers!
• Living officers, because they don't have to worry about falling apart.
• A culture that believes that death is no excuse for being lazy.
• The undead don't have to sustain themselves on people, animals also have meat, bones and a spirit. The undead that do however become gain animalistc features and behaviours.
• There is a group of vampires who deliberately eat certain animals so they can have their features, either because they idolize those animals or for a fashion statement.
• Now you know why the pale thing in the sewers has a rats tail and whisker-like mustache.
• Corpse Bride style towns of the dead exist, except they are generally more lethargic and slower paced, as there is no rush and rushing around will shorten you death span.
• Some cultures have festivals once a year where the dead literally rise up from the grave to visit their living family like Dias Los Muertos. In these places, the towns of the dead have been deliberately built to house everyone's extended family.
• There is a specter stumbling across the waste, with tattered clothes and sun bleached bones. An old bag filled perturbs his gait, as useless boots get scratched on stones. And a quite mutter escapes those teeth, he repeats his mantra again, again, like he's spirit is kept alive by the sounds. "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds"
• 6 Dex, 0 HP
• The pcs can just tip him over and take his bag, he's too weak to resist.
• His bag contains old letters, and not much else. It could contain interesting adventure hooks, tidbits of flavor information, tragic stories or what have you.
• If snapped out of his daze the specter may ask the party to lend him some of their strength(dexterity actually) so he can make the final leg of the journey. He has nothing to offer you, except a speech about the importance of delivering mail and an appeal to moral ideals.
• He will fight tooth and nail to keep he's bag if force is used to take it from him, you don't need to bother rolling damage, he can't do anything.
• If he thinks your also a postman and is convinced to swallow he's pride for the greater good of completing the rounds, he will give you the bag with directions to it's destination and peacefully crumple into dust.

   I'll stop there, as I could go on endlessly coming up with cool tidbits and spin off new tangents. Almost of of it is a remix, reinterpretation or riffing on already existing ideas, either from other rpgs or other media. While I initially wrote this in a stream of consciousness kind of way, I have assigned a purpose onto onto this after the fact. The purpose is to create a good fantasy world that is both fun to play in and results in cool stories. One of the central pillars of any fantasy is how the magic works, and equally importantly what we understand about how the magic works. If put on a scale, there are two poles, on one is is we have complete systematization of the magic world, this can often lead to a world where the magic is banal and boring, many versions and variations of D&D have is problem I could go into detail but I'm lazy so here's a post where the issue is explained among other things. On the other end of the spectrum we have magic that is completely unexplainable and undefined. This approach has merit but it's not something you can experiment with to achieve something, a core part of OSR playstyle (arguably as OSR is vague term). So what I want is something in the middle. Coherent rules that have sufficient predictability that you could come up with hi-jinks but still have the flexibility to have unknowns that aren't accounted for. When you see something zombie, you can be fairly confidant that it is perpetually decaying and that it will be incredibly clumsy, and you can literally smell the decay on the zombie and you can see that the pieces needed for coordinated movement hanging out, it makes sense. However you can't be complacent about your zombie knowledge because sometimes life throws you a curveball and you see a zombie running at you from across a tight rope, and you have to adapt. Maybe you need to reevaluate what you know about zombies or ask if this is really a zombie and not someone in convincing make-up. There is an interesting conflict at play here, something to think about, and choices you need to decide before you receive a perfectly executed somersault to the face.
    I think that this is a good area for a fictional world to be at because it speaks to how our world works. The rules we live by are fairly reliable but not infallible. The more you find out about the world, the more you see what you don't understand, there are intricate details and complicated systems, there are atoms spinning with unknown particles, two lethal poisons somehow combine into salt a resource vital for life, and I don't know where to start on how complicated animals are, we do not fully understand how even our own brains work. All those things are also interconnected, and interact with each other, weave between, push and pull on each other. You can connect any human endeavor with another by some common feature, each natural phenomenon is tangentially connected to all the others and it is so big and complicated and always changing in brilliant whirls and swirls that we can't precisely grasp.  But we can grasp some understanding, and we can use that to get something done that we couldn't before we sort of understood. It's amazing, exhilarating, terrifying and awe inspiring. That is something I want to capture that magic of discovery in fiction, that slow creep towards knowing and the shenanigans that happen along the way.

Did I mention none of the game rules here have been playtested at all?

"Secret Lore":

Here are ideas that would be hidden information within the setting, secrets players could figure out themselves from observing the game world. Now I don't have a specific campaign or players to hide this from and OSR blogs are mostly viewed by GMs so the chance of accidentally ruining close to none, but better safe than sorry.

• There is a monastery fortress that holds a great treasure, it is guarded by immortal guardians in armor without eye slits. Nobody is able to best them in battle.
• The secret of these soldiers is that they are ghosts who trained in life for this role. Their bodies are puppets made with their own bones and belongings for the strongest sympathetic link. Each guardian has partnered monks who channels their Will to their guardians threw meditation. They regularly switch shifts to allow for rest and recuperation. In combat the guardians are basically impervious to all physical attacks, but will sloppily pretend that they aren't and avoid using ghosty powers to keep up the charade. They are safe from harm as long as they have connection with their monks that are safely hiding behind the walls of the monastery. Those with mystical vision are able to see a cords of energy that lead to the monks. If you figure out that the guardian can only be harmed thought their Will, it will take several rounds for more monks to arrive and bolster the guardian, unless all of them are occupied with something else.
• I'll eventually write up this monastery as a dungeon.
• Anyone can turn undead, all it requires is confidence in your own authority to turn undead and yelling.
• This is because zombies and skeletons have no Will, thus they don't get any save when they are yelled at and will instinctively turn the other direction.
• Ghosts do have Will to resist being yelled at, but stressing them out is also how you vanquish them.
• Do not tell this to the PCs thought, include wards, charms and holy symbols at various price ranges in the game and tell them they are used to ward off the dead. The power of these artifacts is a placebo effect to both the dead and the living, as everyone knows that the certain important symbols and holy words can do this.
•  A symbol or charm will always work if the it's part of the undead's culture and they feel guilty or wrong for being  unholy abominations against nature.
• The undead gets a save if they only one of the above applies, the symbol or charm is from a different culture but still obviously intended to ward off the dead.
• If the undead is shameless and/or doesn't recognize the power of the charm they don't need to save against it.
• Peasants usually use their local charms to defend themselves. Nomads, sailors and other traveling folk pick up a various trinkets from the various cultures they visit, at least the ones who believe in ghost stories.
• There are people who know this truth, most of them are sorcerers, religious figures and other mystics that have a professional interest in keeping it hidden. As so much of that trade relies on placebo.
• This is fantasy, so the line between placebo and supernatural powers is none existent. Most mystics would probably frame this in terms of belief and will power being able to change the world.
• This thread of thought has tumbled away from the topic of the undead, put a pin in it, as this deserves it's own post.
•  You also don't want the dead to know that they can just stop fearing wards and charms, those things are a major advantage against them.

Boy vs the Maze of the Blue Medusa Actual Play Session 1

On my little brother's whim, I ran Maze of the Blue Medusa using Into the Odd. My solution to running a dungeon that has adult themes with a little kid is to work my way around them when I get there. It's not something that came up because I  skipped the first room with it's specific entering instructions and plopped him down in room 2, using the fact that he had a Space Folder arcanum as justification. I'm also using a fake name for the sake of not throwing real names on the internet.

• Sanford is teleported in by the Space Folder.
• He meets Lady Capilli, she hands him paper and pen and tells him to go and right down someone's story that has to be original.
• Sam checks the three doors available to him and decides to go in the middle one.
• There he hears the riddle of Cynoxantha and decides to walk across the room.
• Maybe I should have been stated the riddle more clearly.
• Where he is made into a mosaic, and has a little scuffle with the snake where in both take two damage.
• He forces he's way out of the mosaic room back to where he was.
• Which required him to pass a Will save.
• Once outside he was still 2 dimensional, but used the Space Folder to become 3D once more.
• He than went over to the left door and went to the room with weird shadows. There was no one there and he noticed from a sudden draft that there is a hole where his shadow should be.
• Sam was going to pry a stone from the floor but reconsidered when I told him it was going to cause noise.
• We went to the door at the other side of the room and was only able to determine that there is blackness in there. As the handle didn't open he decided to leave the door alone and head back.
• Maybe I should have said that he has the options of smashing the lock or pouring the acid he had there.
• He walked out of the shadow room to the door on the right, where Lady Capilli was visibly annoyed.
• He went into the Etcher Stair room where he saw 5 lizard women trying to hide behind the knot of stairs.
• I started describing them before I remembered that the Chameleon Women will try to stalk the player. So I went with them failing to be sneaky.
• After a short exchange where they realize their cover is blown they charge Samford.
• Samford attempts to teleport behind them but in his hastes only ports over his Space Folder.
• As they are almost upon them he tries to knock one of them off the edge. He ends up falling over instead.
• Those were two nat 20s in a roll.
• In a last ditch attempt, Samford throws his acid flask that gently sails over and smashes somewhere.
• Samford lands on the cold hard ground and blacks out.
• Failed his Critical damage roll.
• When he comes back he is tied up and interrogated for information by the Chameleon Women.
• I rolled up that their sorceress has a Bone Magnet and a Heat Ray at this point, even thought it didn't come up.
• He truthfully tells them everything he knows. That being the several rooms he's been and the quest Lady Capilli sent him on.
• They decide not to murder them as to not annoy a dragon and let him go free, without his Space Folder, because who would trust a dirty mammal with such an artifact.
• He camps in the Stair room for a couple of days to regain his Strength without any incident.
• Literally, he was down to 5 from the fall.
• Four encounter rolls and all any of them showed was that he's light was going out.
• He set off down the east stair way and the session closed there because I haven't read that part of the book yet.
• Samford doesn't know, but two of the Chameleon Women are defiantly tailing him now.

Questions for next session:

• What is the relationship between the Chameleon Women's nation and the wizards that sent out Lady Capilli
• How should I handle resource management?
• Is a bad thing that I allowed Samford to heal 2d6 Str from camping in a dungeon? 

What went well:

• I didn't stammer into a hole to much and I didn't start panicing about stuff. I don't know.
• Referencing things in the book was fairly easy and I had no problems wrestling with Into the Odd that I have with every other system I've tried.
• I enjoyed playing the Chameleon Women foolishly.

What didn't go well:

• I don't think I communicated what was going on clearly, me and Samford weren't on the same page about fictional reality nearly as much as we should be.  I'm not sure I've figured out what is the right amount of information to give in any given senerio yet and I don't know if I've called for rolls at the right time. 
• During the interrogation I ruled is so that they wouldn't kill him, which may not have been the most OSRy way to do it.

Some Artifacts

Here are some artifacts extracted from my brain for you viewing pleasure. I've writing this for Into The Odd because that's what I run, but their fairly system neutral.

1. Mirror of Symmetry:
It's a mirror with a line of onyx inlaid down the middle. When the right invocation is spoken a target reflected in the mirror is enchanted, speaking the same invocation backwards undoes this enchantment. While under this magic any wound, ointment, paint or magic that is applied to one side of the target is also symmetrically reflected on the other side. The line of symmetry is determined by the inlaid onyx when the invocation is spoken. Any damage(or other things that apply to some part of the body) taken by the target is doubled unless care is taken to hit the target right along the line of symmetry. The effect is only skin deep fortunately for everyone who's eaten under the mirror's power.

2.The Heels:
While confidently striding in these extravagant heels, you can be anywhere within your line of sight as you damn well please. It's not teleportation, space just folds seamless, you were just walking yet somehow you ended up at the top of the tower, despite all the space between here and there. Unfortunately they make for very cumbersome footware, it's difficult to balance on these stilettos in even even on even surfaces, and due to their height you'll probably need help getting back up. Your going to have to make Dex saves to keep standing, and Will saves to stand proud for the Heels to work their magic.

3. The Heterofox:
Wait, you a creature, what are you doing in this list? Damn foxes. Either way, the Heterofox is a fox black wire fur that will follow you and whisper sweet blasphemies into your ear at night. If threatened it will jump into someone's mouth and hide under the tongue or between the teeth, shrinking to the size of a flee and flattening paper thin to do so. While it will try to make it seem like your blaspheming, it's really bad at mimicking other people's voices and can only clumsily force your jaw up and down. It knows a great amount of history, all of which pertains to religious conflicts, schisms and the minutia of differences in doctrine. It's willing to share, in fact it's difficult to get it to shut up about it. It has a sibling which it will always avoid talking about. Other than that it's a fox.

4. Spherering Marble:
Everything within a couple meters of this marble gradually becomes more and more round and spherical over time. Rock gets smoothed like river stones, smooth stones become more symmetrical until they are perfectly round. People get fatter and have softer features if they carry it for a couple of weeks, and luckily usually stop carrying it around to see the latter stages. Rumor has it that it has something to do with the Spherical Wizards. The marble is in a round bag with other marbles, so you can't quite tell which one is the magic one.

5. Seeing Nail:
If you shove this nail into you eyeball, it will grant you normal human eyesight from the end of the nail you didn't shove in there. It looks kind of cool, so I guess it's an upgrade.

6. Sigil of Malice:
With this symbol tattooed on your tongue, you will always be able to say how and why you hate someone, regardless of any languages barriers, ambiguities word choice, deafness, muteness or drunkenness. This will be one thing that you will always be able to communicate clearly and accurately. There is also an analogous Sigil of Love, Sigil of Confusion and Sigil of Restrooms. All of these sigils are exclusive to each other.

7. Remembering Boots:
When you walk in these boots you can cast your spirit to see, hear and smell a place where these boots have been. Roll as many d6s as you want, add them together and that's how many days worth of travel back you can cast your soul. Your able to instantly come back into your body unless you rolled an amount greater than your will, in which case your going to have to find your way back to your body. While your soul is cast back your body is in a trance state that continues walking indefinitely.

8. Spiritual Bindings:
These are large heavy and metal bindings for keeping buildings in place. Except their intangible and invisble without some form Wizard vision or second sight. They can be used to spiritually link two things, if your able to get them on and nail them in, but once there in there nothing will get them out. Rumor has it that the country up to the north is covered in these things, you know the one with bears roaming the streets and the regular bathing.

9. Pain Inversion Suit:
When wearing this garment, all pain is inverted into pleasure. Reduce incoming damage by 1 and gain complete immunity to effects that are purely pain based.(Why yes, I am literally stealing someone's idea wholesale, but have you previously considered that this could exist in D&D? Didn't think so.)

10. An Unsettling Garden Gnome:
All living things within a mile radius of the Gnome will sense it's presence and want to avoid it. All within 30' of it will have the that feeling you get when your next to a cliff and you can't help but imagining how easy it would be to fall down, except instead of a cliff it's the Gnome and instead of falling the action you can't help imagine in fear and curiosity is breaking this ceramic thing. Sleeping in it's presence requires a Will save.

11. Bound Key:
This key will never loose it's owner. If the owner is somehow stolen or lost from the key, they will find their way back to the key. Trading or giving away the key does transfer ownership thought. Your not sure but you think the current owner is a ghost.

12. White Tuning Fork:
When this tuning fork is struck against a surface and makes a sound, that surface will go invisible. If the surface is scratched or involved in any activity for 1d6 hours the invisibility will dissipate. It can be used on people however they will be blind while the invisibility covers their eyes. Closing your eyes while striking the Fork will allow prevent the blindness, but it will leave your eyes still visible. In the the room where the Fork is found there will be several invisible objects with vague silhouettes outlined by the dust that's settled on them. 

New Spell/Arcanum: Chimeric Exchange

Years ago I came across this thread where people brain-stormed magic systems. And one of them stuck in my brain for years now, accumulating more details and thoughts. So I'm making it into a specific spell with a place in the world. The entry was this one:
"43. Body Parts
Inspired by a post in the "Why do wizards wear robes?" thread ...
People can't do magic. In fact nobody can really "do" magic, but creatures from other realms have properties that could be described as magical - and those properties are a part of their body. 
An air elemental flies on wings of lightning more manueverable than a hummingbird and faster than an arrow. A salamander has arms literally made of fire, that can stretch to fill an entire courtyard. And if you had those parts, you could do it too.

Not by stealing the parts and stitching them on (although that would be a possible magic system itself); that's not how the ritual works. But you can trade them, and many creatures are willing to make that trade. For them, the properties humans have are magical - things like being able to stand still when the wind blows or touch things without burning them. 

Sometimes, the parts you get in return are a straight-up substitute, but often they're insubstantial, or entirely different. So senior wizards tend to have a lot of prosthetics (hence the voluminous robes to cover up how strange they start looking). A master mage might have false legs (moves around by flying), one arm made of shadow, no tongue (communicates via writing and an assistant), and lives off heat from fires instead of eating food. Making the right choice is crucial - woe to the mage who trades a unique body part for something worthless. Assistants are always useful - while you can't trade their parts for more of your own, you can convince them to make the trades you need and use the resulting abilities on your behalf."

Chimeric Exchange

Level whatever spell

An object similar to a Chinese finger trap, but metal and not woven. (if it's an object)

As a spell the caster selects two parties. If the these two parties come to an agreement, than they can trade body parts between themselves with the same ease that item are exchanged. The deal is finalized with a hand shake (or equivalent custom that both parties except). 

As an item, it works the same except negotiations don't need to be identified before hand and the deal is sealed by both parties inserting an appendage into one of the wholes.

• For it to work, both parties need to agree to the exchange.
• The spell doesn't distinguish between willing agreement and coercion.
• Knowing the specifics of what your giving up and gaining isn't required.
• The exchange can be one-sided. For example, the spell allows you to give someone an extra eye without taking something from them, if both of you agree.
• You can trade goods and services that aren't body parts. This is equivalent to a one-sided exchange as far as the spell is concerned. In the above example, you can demand compensation of 10 gold for giving away your eye.
• As a spell, the caster doesn't need to be one of the two parties but they can be.
• Once an agreement is reached, the tendrils of etherealness appear and remove the agreed upon body parts and attach them to their new owner. While this is happening both parties are effectively petrified.
• If interrupted, both parties are unpetrified and die slowly from blood loss or immediately depending on which organs are exposed. If you were exchanging an eye, you'd probably survive with bandages and will eventually need a patch or glass eye to cover it up. If you were switching hearts, than you're screwed.
• The organs can be placed either where the agreement specifys or what makes most sense if not specified.
• After the spell does it's magic, a party may die if it suddenly doesn't have a vital organ. If you gave someone lungs without receiving some in return, you're going to start suffocating from not having anything to breath with.
• There are not scars or stitches left from this spell.
• Organs that are gained through this spell kind of become part of the person, kind of don't.
• It takes anywhere from a few weeks to a life time to get used to new body parts, based on myriad of factors.
• Younger people generally get used to it quicker for example.
• Beings changed by this spell do not breed true. Procreation results in the offspring using genetic code of whoever the organs originally belonged too. If I sell my testicles or ovaries, it means that anyone born with them are biologically my children.

You can ignore all the bullet-points if want to as the spell description is enought to go off of. The bullet-points are additional ideas that have accumulated over time as the ideas has bounced around in my head. 

World-Building Implications and Possiblities

• Wizards hide under large cloaks and big hats to hide their weird transmogrified bodies.
• Wizards that don't use this spell still do it to maintain the mystery.
• There are physically imposing opponents that none the less have great weaknesses. 
• Due to trading his liver for the strength of ten men, this person has to be vary careful with his diet.
• It's common knowledge that deals with wizards is full of peril.
• A variety of hybrid monsters have some interesting story behind them.
•  The Manticore is one of those bastards who demands you give him your best physical features on threat of eating you, than proceeds to eat you afterwards anyway.
• People want him dead for the obvious reasons, but other chimeric mages really want him dead for besmirching their image.
• Manticore is also an incredibly petty bastard.
• When the horse nomads came from the steppe to attack our lands, we we're amazed by how the horse and rider moved as one. To counteract whatever sorcery they use to achieve this, we have merged together our strongest steeds and most greatest warriors to produce the centaurs. It is a great sacrifice and those who under go it are noble men indeed.
• Nobody has the heart to tell the centaur's nation that the magic used by steppe nomads is known as "riding on horseback from the age of three".
• The Sphinx is also a lion-bodied human who eats people. However unlike fucking Manticore, she doesn't eat people from her country of not-Egypt and targets not-Greece instead. 
• There is conversely a lion somewhere who is enjoying having opposable thumbs while Sphinx out there eating people.
• Harpies are a group of birds that wanted human faces.
• You may wonder who would enought beings to agree that the Chimera should exist like it does. Don't, really don't want to know why this came about.
• Hybrid creatures that you want to be (un)natural without this spell could still exist, but I would make them "less hybridy". For example merfolk could be made either more mammalian, by making their tail more dolphin-like, or more fish-like like all those creepy mermaid illustrations.
• Different cultures can have different opinions on this magic.
• In one place this magic is despised and reviled. Mages who use it are assumed to steal the organs that they gain from it.
• In another culture the the practice is allowed and has become a part of fashion. Blue eyes are in season right now. Generally only the wealthy have the opportunity to mess around like this.
• In some places they choose a champion who receives the best organs from willing donors to represent the entire community in a sport or a war.
• The donors generally swap out organs with the champion and don't die from this.
• Some kings, priests and heroes have have lived beyond mortal years by swapping out bits of themselves Ship of Theseus style.
• In places the spell is known the slave trade includes the consideration of person's organs as having separate worth.
• In places that the spell is not demonized there is variation in whether or not it's ok to change you body shape to something nonhuman.
• The desperate will give away parts of themselves to survive or pay a dept.
• Artists would give up their painting hands to pay for things, having to rebuild the muscle memory from scratch.
• A teenager sell their face for an ugly one and a cold bag of coins.
• Spies could be anywhere and they can hide under anyone's face.
• They often don't but the possibility is still there.
• Grandpa lost his leg in a battle, so he could support the family he secretly went to a witch with a goat. She replaced the stump with the goat's hind leg and accepted the rest of the animal as payment for services rendered. Grandpa is deeply ashamed of having a goat leg and hides it from everybody. While he still walks with a hobble, at least he's able to support his family.
• The witch Matilda has cat ears instead of human ears. She replaced her ears with those of her familiar's back when she was an novice and has worn them ever sense. Even thought human ears make Matilda's familiar look kind of silly, he's accepted this because it makes Matilda so happy to have them. 
• That won't stop him from complaining about it thought, Matilda is wanted for heresy in several countries and they could use a lower profile.
• The dragon Zorsass has is the greatest opera singer in the city. They achieved this by trading away most of their body for a smaller and sleeker human form, the best voice in the world, large powerful lungs, a fully staffed mansion and enought bribes to become a member in the most exclusive of clubs.
• If encounter someone with dragon organs in the city, they probably once belonged to Zorsass.
• Other dragons are baffled and disturbed by Zorsass's life choices. Best to avoid the topic.
• As a dragon Zorsass has not spent a penny of his or her horde, they say that it's hidden in the depths of the dungeon.
• Zorsass may look fairly human, but underneath they are still a dragon, and could easily tear you in half with elegant grace. Will also lounge around like a dragon when guests aren't over.
• PCs can sell the random mutations they receive from chaos magic and potions as treasure.
• Clever PCs can improve their stats with negotiations.
• Losing your humanity in the pursuit of power has never been so literal.
• On the flip side of the last point, beware the Cat with Hands.

You could have a story based around solving someone's gender dysphoria by going on a quest to find people to trade away the body parts with. However I'm not sure how to handle that respectfully. Depending on how you handle it, this spell could lead to some dark places or mythical tales or gonzo shenanigans with puns.