Luxuria Enervat Vires, Effoeminat Artus

The thing about treasure being equivalent to experience and experience being equivalent to temporal power is that it turns everyone into Pizarro or Cortez. Bloodstained gold becomes the only thing in the world that it is worth pursuing. It reduces all decisions to decisions about despoiling the world and exploiting whatever resources are available to destroy whatever gets in the way; to flood the dungeon, or to cave it in and excavate the remains or to smoke it out with noxious vapours or send in condemned criminals and diseased wolverines. It kinda makes the game a bit stupid and I like that.



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From the Fells Table ( I don't like hex maps much because of their prescriptive hexagonality, I haven't yet concocted an ingenious device for imposing geographic consistency upon the world but I may yet do so);

37. a spagyrist cooking something detestable in a hollow stone peel-tower bespattered with birdshite. He seeks flasks, pots and receptacles of any description that he may continue his work on the transcendence of materiality. He has about him a luminous feculence.

He peddles devilish combustibles and suchlike alchemical blasphemies;

Three gold and purple striped Incendiary Battle-Rockets three feet long that unleash shrieking purple hellfire (2 rds to prepare, 40’ range -5 to hit, 3d6 dmg, misfire on a 1 for full dmg to user)

80 groats apiece

Brimstone Grenadoes - Iron spheres which explode with appalling force and smoke and shrapnel (2d8 dmg to those within 10', misfire on a 1) those killed by grenadoes will scream dismembered and burnt for 1d4 hours before they die. Healing magic cannot save them.

120 groats apiece

An Aqueous Humour of potent corrosive virtue in a stoneware jar sealed with resin and marked with a glyph of impenetrability. It melts most things (including the seal in 1d6 days, 1d10 dmg).

50 groats

Pulverescent Emanation: from this silvery powder shimmers an uncanny febrile radiance. It flares into blinding light when thrown with force into the air (save vs. paralysis or blind for 1d6 turns, 20’ radius, drains 1 Con point per day from its user due to its virulent wrongness)

60 groats per little black pouch

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Legendary Treasures should change the structure of the campaign to some extent (and probably kill the character wielding it)


Exempli Gratia: Leofric’s Horn, a battered hunting-horn a cubit long and decorated with tarnished silver cunningly wrought in the form of linden leaves, and with seven bloody garnets. Sounding the horn requires a soul steeped in the lore of the Lowlands and a mighty set of lungs (Strength 16+). The sound is exceedingly harsh and grating. Within an hour Leofric’s milky-eyed and odious Ormhunde will come a-loping from afar. It is like unto a dog the size of an ass, wiry-grizzled and scarred and prodigiously ill-tempered. It will only obey the bearer of the horn, and then only for an hour before it returns to its distant lair. Its very aspect is daunting, causing hirelings and foemen alike to muster their resolve or hastily retreat (automatic morale check for anything under 5th level/Hit Dice within 30').

The Ormhunde: AC: 3 HD: 5 hp: 30 MV: 300’ (100’) Dmg: 2d8 ML:12

The beast may lick its wounds at will, with the effect of healing 1d6+1 points of damage per round. Woe betide the whosoever should seek to benefit from this himself. The horn may only be sounded once a week or dire consequences may result.

Its worth is considerable and certainly more than 5000 groats

 

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Because this stuff is a bit thin on the ground Imma image dump yo ass.

 

 

 

Faerie Rades should be cavalcades of abominations

Dule Tree. Dule is etymologically related to doleful and dolorous so this is essentially a tree of woe.

Barlowe's hellish imagery is more interesting than his aliens



Grunzel-gullets gain the hit points of whoever they devour - has anyone done that monster yet?

 I'd have this guy illustrate a book if I wasn't sure he's five centuries dead.

 

This is a beautiful image

 

Have you noticed that things like this only happen to those starving in the wilderness? That's why they are starving in the first place. Not so they can be the most zealously penitent for having biological urges and being, like, alive and shit. No, they're in it for the visions, but this dude's having a bad trip. 

If you go searching for gibbets on the web you'll be disappointed at the range they have available

Note the explicit details of this Brueghel print dealing with the perils of luxury. D&D is so tame by comparison to the majestically fucked-up imagination of its cultural roots. Show me the supplement where anyone is mentioned to be cutting off their own penis and I'll eat my words.