Beasts of the Dark Zodiac

(Expanding on an idea from Noisms' Forge Monsters challenge.)

Time in the world above is measured by the progress of the moon, sun, and planets - an endless cycle of months and seasons and years. The zodiac divides time into increments and assigns each increment certain traits - an element, a mood, and most prominently, an animal. But while one born in the year of the Monkey may share the beast's cleverness and joy, the spirit of Monkey cares no more for dates and calendars than it does oceans or asphalt. The animal gives its name to the year, but that animal's god is not a god of time.

Below ground the stars are hidden and the seasons pass without notice. Time passes at the pace of shifting continents. Years are not named, but imposed. If the signs of the zodiac still bare the names of animals it is only because those creatures choose to make it so, because they find such ordered delineation useful.

The twelve beasts of the dark zodiac are prophets, sages, historians. Each is immortal - perhaps a god, perhaps just fantastically old. Naturally, all are completely mad, though some do well to conceal it.

Some find communication with the surface world suits their agendas, and have gained a certain notoriety. The Skull Hermit deals in cataclysms and the death of gods. The Wyvern of the Well can answer any question, but only once the question is asked. The Weaver considers itself an artist, beautifying the future's web of possibilities by violently cutting certain threads. Many-as-One, a rat king of unequaled population, reads the fortunes of cities by crawling through their entrails.

Others are less well known:

Grandmother Scorpion, five-tailed and bloated, can poison time itself, granting visions of one's past or future, prolonging life, or aging one to dust in an instant. Attending her is a cult of hideously withered elves, and she speaks through a mummified head and torso affixed to the end of her largest stinger. The price for her venom is a fresh elven sibyl, delivered within a year. To ensure the deal is kept she injects a thought-delayed poison that persists through magical healing, resurrection, reincarnation, and if all else fails, lineage.

Echo Serpent is an enormous, blind white rattlesnake that hunts by sonar like a bat. When its warning rattle echoes off cavern walls the echoes themselves are serpents, writhing shadows that strike and then vanish in a hiss of air. It is old as all Creation - not the tempting serpent of Eden, but born of the same divine word. If you tell the serpent a lie, it will whisper the lie back, and the lie will twist and coil in your brain until you tell it again. The thrice-told lie will deceive even gods, as long as telling it causes harm.

Still Carapace - a gnarled, chitinous old thing, not quite roach or trilobite - predates not just this multiverse but several others as well. Witness to the destruction of countless worlds (and countless more extinctions), Still Carapace is the best possible sage on all matters eschatological. Problem is, no one else can verify a damn thing the old bug says, to tell if the rituals he spits are meant to avoid yet another apocalypse, or cause a disaster only he knows how to survive.

Even more obscure beasts include a vampire bat that feeds on entropy (with anticoagulants in its bite that cause bleeding portal-wounds between worlds), a giant house centipede with antennae sensitive to temporal intrusion, and a planar mollusk with the black pearl of a new underworld accreting beneath its shell.

Tales of a "memaggot" that hides its own existence by eating thoughts as they putrefy into memories, and the ramblings of one amateur magician regarding a so-called "deep crow", are rightly dismissed as total bullshit.

Skills, part 3: The Skill List

More on skills. See also my initial thoughts and revised skill rules.

My skill list is very 4th Edition derived, so run away if that's not your cup of tea. I used 4E as a starting point because it's a short list but pretty much anything you can think of falls under one skill or another. Plus, realism be damned, lumping all the thief skills together and the burly movement skills together and the magical knowledge skills together makes it easy to just be good at your job and still have some points for fun flavor stuff.

You could base all of what your character knows and can do on your class, but I rather like the idea of a commando-type fighter who knows how to hide in shadows or a rogue who knows a bit of the arcane.

I avoid having skills required or limited by class for the same reason. I've never known a thief who didn't want the full suite of thief abilities but if you want to just be a knowledgeable expert of the Van Helsing school that's just dandy. And the skills outside the norm for your archetype are going to be far more interesting than the ones that every fighter (or whatever) chooses by default. Plus, a pick-what-you-will skill list feels a lot simpler than having a unique class kit or feat or prestige class for every type of character you can think of.

Sometimes I want to expand the list I have to make it an even 20 skills - being able to roll a d20 (say) three times for an NPC and knowing what they can do and what they've prioritized learning sounds like a nifty little trick. But really that would just be padding the list for liking round numbers, so I've stuck with these 18.

Acrobatics: Flipping around and walking on narrow ledges and other nimbly ninja tricks. I don't have formal rules for attacks of opportunity but I give characters with lots of Acrobatics more leeway in describing how they avoid the big hulking brutes in their path. More Acrobatics makes it more justifiable to try fancy swashbuckling movie shit, which is never a bad thing.

Arcana: So Spellcraft is the practical manipulation of magic, but Knowledge: Arcana is knowing about magic, I guess? And Concentrate is something else entirely? And Alchemy is maybe its own skill or maybe a specialized subset of Craft? Nuts to that. Arcana is the magic skill. With enough of it you can identify spells or magic items and such - maybe I'll have you roll, but only when not giving information or telling horrible horrible lies would be as interesting or more interesting than the truth. Having a skill for aura reading rather than a spell to cast over and over that says "yup, there's magic here" is wonderful.

Athletics: The other physical action skill. Kind of ambiguous whether this or Acrobatics covers jumping - in real life you jump with your muscles but flying around like a tweaking chipmunk is usually something the halfling wants to do. I like to split the difference and use Acrobatics for gymkata parkour and Athletics for long-distance huuuurrrr leaps. Honestly though if you wanted to really condense the skill list you could fold the Acrobatics stuff in here too - there's some overlap with climbing already, and it's not like adventurers willingly go in the water ever so you don't really need to worry about the swimming application. One skill for all the movement stuff just seems implausibly broad though, so I keep them separate.

Bluff: Lies, damn lies, and misdirection. You can't just say "I bluff him! I rolled a 7!" of course, but higher Bluff lets you get away with more on sheer chutzpah (technical term). Superhuman levels of Bluff probably let you get around mind reading and such, though admittedly it hasn't come up yet.

Craft: 4th Edition didn't have a Craft skill. I thought that was stupid. 3rd Edition had a ton of crafts but you couldn't use it to save money and the rules for crafting times were go-sit-in-a-corner-level BAD MATH, so I cut all that out and made Craft one skill. Obviously Craft: Baking and Craft: Weaving and Craft: Golemancy are all very different (unless you're making a Lattice-Crust Pie Golem, and if so I salute you), but I'm okay with that. No one has a problem with a local knowledge skill covering every city ever, so in my games Craft is the generic skill for making And fixing stuff (and also sometimes sabotaging stuff), and at high levels you can make magic items if you have the tears of a phoenix and the beard of a fish or whatever. If that kills your sense of realism you can pick an area of expertise and everything else is at one or two mastery levels less. Metallurgy's kind of like printmaking, right?

Diplomacy: As with Bluff, Diplomacy should not let players say "I roll Diplomacy!" and have that be their argument. Diplomacy gets rolled because both the incredible result that leaves a whole village inexplicably smitten and the natural 1 that causes a huge international kerfuffle are results I like to see, and if there's a skill associated I can let the dice decide which happens first.

Endurance: The theory was having this skill let you make a marathon runner or the sort of fighter you see in epics where fighting someone to a standstill takes days and people stay awake without food or water all that time by sheer power of badass. Or like the fellowship chasing the uruk-hai across the plains nonstop for a week. But in actual play none of that ever happens, because it's hard as a player to set up situations where your Endurance matters and as a DM if you make it so players need to stay up for a week the one Endurance guy will be like "Okaaay..." and everyone else will have to sit that adventure out. In conclusion: Endurance is bad and I'm a bad person for not realizing it earlier. Moving on.

History: Real-life history is great because it's full of cool stories and characters. Fake history (or "adventure background") is lame because if you want to talk about the what happened in the Aztec-Atlantean-Alien Empire you should be playing the game in that era, or showing what the Empire was all about by just letting their ancient machines come to life and try to kill people. So if I could take away everyone's character sheets and make a few judicious edits I'd rename this Geography and make it the skill for knowing what's all out there in the world in the present. Either way it's a knowledge-type skill, so you're letting a player decide "My character's really smart so I want to be the font of exposition." You shouldn't roll dice for this unless failing to remember something has comical and/or deadly consequences.

Insight: Also known as Sense Motive. I love this skill because when players use it and realize "Hmm this dude's kind of skeezy we better keep an eye on him" they feel like the skill gives hidden life-saving information, and when they don't think to read someone and that person stabs them in the back they blame themselves for letting their guard down, not me for surrounding them with treacherous backstabbing liars. You don't need Insight for this - ask about a schemer and, skilled or not, you'll almost always hear some variation of "He's definitely a bastard but he doesn't seem interested in killing you right now" - but having the skill is a nice comforting security blanket so you can sleep in a world of manipulative pricks.

This is taking longer than I thought so I'm going to play the Harry Potter card and split this last skill post in half. Stay tuned for Skills: Part 4: The Skill List Part 2: Breaking An Unexpected Hollow!