Tuesday, August 26, 2014

D100 Witch Traits

If you're playing a witch or warlock, you can roll on this table instead of taking the usual level-up extra. Spells known, spell slots, saves, proficiency and combat advance as usual.

To make a witch/warlock out of an old system that doesn't have one, make a cleric, druid or magic-user and just give up one 1st-level spell each level for a witch trait.

I only wrote the first one--the rest was crowdsourced here . I erased 50-odd entries to pare it down to a clean 100, leaving out ones that seemed least likely to be useful in play. However, some of them were fun, so it you're in my Google+ circles, you might want to take a look.

I've made a few suggestions in parenthesis to make some more gameable. If you think of anything to make one more concrete, put it in the comments.

1, By concentrating, you can cause any sleeping creature you have observed before to open its eyes and look around for 3 rounds, during which you can see through its eyes.

2, You may talk any domestic (Or ordinary--including wolves, bears, etc) animal into suicide (in a number of rounds=its hd).

3, You always spoil milk around you. You can't choose. 

4, You can smell emotions. It's 70% accurate.

5, Your spit burns the holy. (d4 per holy class level?)

6, If you prepare a corpse, crows will come and tell you news.

7, Domestic animals hate you (can't think why).

8, healing spells still work on you but replace portions of your flesh with tattooed holy scriptures/tracts, which the cleric's god hopes you will read and thereby learn the error of your ways;

9, If you eat something, you can cause someone else to vomit it up. This could be used in odd ways e.g. sending an ally in prison a key. Or you could just make paladins disgorge huge quantities of blood and spiders etc. etc. 

10, Your fingernails grow long and hard, and are excellently suited to digging in unconsecrated ground. (Claw attack.)

11, When you laugh (or cackle, really), your true nature is exposed through any disguise or illusion. The upside: this also causes Fear (act at -4 or run away) in living creatures that hear it and fail a saving throw.

12, You ate your twin. It gives you advice sometimes, in dark places.

13, If you bring a statue an acceptable gift it will tell you about something it has seen.

14, one of your hands is a chickens claw. If you let it scratch idly in the dirt it writes down the secrets of those close to you. But sometimes it writes down your secrets and you never know which secret belongs to who.

15, You know a secret demonic process to turn the fat of children into a skin cream, rubbed on furniture, it can bring the furniture to life (although the ambling desk or wardrobe is no smarter than a child).

16, By talking to anyone for about five minutes, you somehow come to know their deepest childhood fear.

17, Can cause miscarriages or deformed stillbirths by staring at people and blinking in certain patterns. 

18, You can spontaneously cause really innocuous mishaps. If you pin them on someone else the mishaps suddenly become a much bigger deal.

19, Teeth will not stay in your mouth for longer than a day; everyday you must implant teeth other than you already wore in your mouth. The teeth may tell you secrets or give you a bite attack.

20, They tried to execute you once, but somehow it didn't work. Roll 1d6 to determine the method of your almost-demise : 1 Burning  2 Drowning 3 Hanging 4 Pressing with stones 5 Beheading 6 Poking with brands You still bear the marks/scars of your execution. Depending on how you survived, this may be minor or may be e.g. you are literally carrying your own head around. 

21, Trigger local epidemics of infectious disease by humming lullabies in the garden of someone who's offended you. At night of course.

22, Guilt makes people weak to your magic. If someone commits a crime or a sin, they have a saving throw penalty against you; if you can trick a good person into doing something awful, you can rewrite their destiny. 

23, Your tongue splits like a snake's. You gain bonuses to telling lies and casting suggestion spells, but when you tell the truth people might not believe you. 

24, If you make a man cry you can discover what he truly fears. 

25, You become diabolically attractive - probably in a very lush, sensual way. Unfortunately, someone powerful becomes stalkerishly obsessed with you. You might be able to influence them, but then again they might try to have you judicially murdered for rejecting their advances. 

26, Cats spy for you.

27, Your bodily fluids can bring shadows to life as your servants. 

28, Insects will guard you while you sleep.

29, Birds will steal small items for you.

30, Demons cannot resist dancing with you.

31, Uncanny ability to quickly learn foreign languages, written or spoken, lip read, sign languages, codes.

32, Can mimic precisely infants crying or the sounds small animals make. 

33, Cold skin, slow heartbeat - excellent at feigning death.

34, Occasionally sucking on boiled bones will turn you invisible.

35, Propensity to break into saccharine and uplifting musical numbers. Ability to present self as the real victim in all circumstances, regardless of actual state of affairs. 

36, Your appetite becomes enormous and almost insatiable. Fortunately, you can now dislocate your jaw and distend your throat, which will help when you try to swallow that cow. 

37, Can only step through a threshold when walking backwards.

38, You have a single, detachable eye.

39, You have two "sisters" - not necessarily female. Perhaps you were both reborn at the same initiation ritual. Whatever the reason, you know everything they are doing, feel a sympathetic twinge if they suffer pain, death or love, and can cast more powerful spells if you work together with them. Unfortunately, they are ghastly people, of a sort you would never otherwise want to know. 

40, Extraordinary sense of smell.

41, Deeply narcissistic, will watch yourself speaking if a mirror or reflective surface is within sight rather than looking at whoever you are speaking to.

42, You can shape shift into an appropriate animal. In the absence of other cultural contexts, choose one of the following: hare, fox, deer, cat or owl. 

43, Eyes in the back of your head. They work.

44, If you can get a sexual partner to submit to you, you can transform them into a useful animal under your control - a horse, for example, or a guard dog. They are aware, but in a kind of dreamlike state. They do not age. When they are killed, when you are killed or when they are touched by a holy symbol, they will revert to their original form. 

45, Extra fingers, they smell like exotic spices and the fumes can intoxicate people who's faces you stroke. 

46, Perhaps you could repel water, like magnetic repulsion. You could never touch water again (or drink it). It would roll away from you. Maybe you would be thirsty a lot. You would need to take sand baths. You could not pick up things in puddles or pools. Sailors might try to capture you, put you in a cage and use you to create a bubble or bathysphere for deep sea exploration. 

47, While you sleep, your hands autonomously scratch writing onto your belly.  The writing has a 40% chance to be blasphemy, 40% chance to be mere insults (against you), and 20% chance to be a warning about something you are likely to encounter tomorrow.  When possible, combine these categories.

48, You can't cross running water, or enter sanctified grounds

49, Clerical turning works against you as if you were undead

50, You can only enter religious establishments or sacred ground with the intent to fornicate within. 

51, If you incubate an egg over two weeks, it will hatch into an intelligent, mean-spirited rooster that will nevertheless be completely loyal to you as long as it in the same room as you.  However, if you are ever dropped to 0 HP, the rooster will rush over to you, suck all of your blood out of your eyes (killing you) and turn into a 6' anthropoid cockatrice hybrid-thing with no allegiance except its own.

52, You are not beautiful. Yet. Every so often, you will become obsessed with a particular feature of some stranger. Perhaps they have an aquiline nose or a striking eyes. They may not be conventionally attractive at all. You will stalk them, incapacitate them, cut off that feature using a special knife, then cut off the corresponding piece of your own face and, with careful motions, stitch your new acquisition into place. (It will work--you'll appear to be them.) For some reason, the brief period of elated self-contemplation that follows deliquesces, inevitably, into dissatisfaction, envy and further crimes. 

53, But if someone paints an eye on it, so that it stares back at you, your powers will not work on it until the eye is defaced. You know when you have entered the country of witches by the omnipresence of eyes. 

54, You are linked to the last person who drank some amount of your saliva (or other bodily fluids).  At will, you can cause the linked person to vomit leaves and dead crows, but this terminates the link.

55, You can transform harpy eggs into "disaster eggs". http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2011/01/dungeon-mistress-mandy.html?m=1&zx=2b5a5eb063d414e

56, There is a small creature living in your stomach.  (Rat/octopus/unborn twin/beetle, rolled randomly).  You must feed it a live mouse (or equivalent) every day or it will begin to gnaw on your liver, but in exchange, any poison you would normally suffer is delayed for 1d6 hours.

57, You radiate an aura of spiteful informational decay. That is: stories in books start to change to have unhappy endings; actors performances become clumsy or clownish in tragedies, inexplicably heartbreaking in comedies; messages in letters twist subtly to warp the intended meaning and sew division. Everything around you is in a perpetual state of Chinese whispers, with the worst possible outcomes. 

58, Babies spontaneously cry around you.  However, if you make a Charisma check, you can subtly influence the babies to speak whatever words you want (even if the baby hasn't learned to talk yet).

59, You are two people (physically, not just mentally, like a were-human human).  They have the same stats/race/class but are opposite genders.  They have separate names, and you switch between them whenever you sleep.  They hate each other, and will often try to inconvenience/embarrass the other via traps or subtlety.

60, By stripping naked and killing a goat, you can pass through its body into another LIVING goat within 1 mile.  You make a bloody exit from the second goat, killing it.

61, Whenever you and you companions are well and truly lost (i.e. you don't know where you are AND you don't know how to get back to safety/destination), you become hirsute, horned, and incapable of speech.  You get +2 to hit and are incapable of getting un-lost, although your allies can lead you out.

62, Whatever you gift to a corpse cannot be found by others, but the corpse may not want to give it back to you, either.

63, You may suck sickness from the skin of an innocent, but you suffer the effects until you can spit it on a child.

64, Whenever you are enclosed in a coffin and buried at least 6' underground, you can speak with any corpses within 500'.  Treat this as speak with dead except that the dead all speak to you at once, and are very talkative and frequently hostile.  Requires a save to avoid some bad-but-not-lethal mishap.

65, Magpies gossip to you about the petty jealousies of local villagers. If you bring them new gossip, they might consent to stealing something for you.

66, If you stuff a live frog's mouth with hair and throw it into a fire, the owner is rendered mute as long as the frog burns.

67, You can induce seizures in holy people + clergy + paladins by kissing them.  Lasts 1d6 rounds, but if you spend at least a minute making out with their twitching body, they will lie there enervated and frothing for another 1d6 hours.

68, If you smoke someone, you learn their secrets.  This usually requires an enormous hookah, big enough to shove a living person inside, that would normally cost 1000g to construct.

69, If you fill your mouth with virgin tears, you can either spit out a few ounces of acid or a black arrow, as if fired from a bow (treat as a +1 arrow vs angels).

70, Any spell you cast is brought into this world by vomiting blood.

71, As long as you spend 1 night every week hanging from a gibbet by your neck, you cannot be strangled or suffocated.  (Must be a legitimate gallows, where criminals have been hung.)

72, Whenever you are in a marshy or swampy area, toads will flock to you in reverence.  They will lick your body, groom you with their clumsy hands, and eat any skin/hair parasites that you have.  They will also vomit out gifts for you.  These gifts are mostly gross, but there is a 10% chance that they give you a small piece of jewelry or something.

73, Venomous creatures that bite you are also poisoned in return, and suffer the effects of their own venom if they fail a save.

74, You have 6+1d6 molars at the start of the game.  By throwing one of your molars in the fire, it will hatch into a 1 cm tall imp.  The imp cannot fly and moves about a 1'/min, but if it crawls inside someone's ear, it can implant itself in the womb (or large intestine, if male).  The imp-fetus grows quickly and painfully over 6+1d6 hours, hatching forth into a full grown 1d6 HD demon if it is not removed.  Females survive the process, but menfolk must save or die, due to the more traumatic nature of the exit.

75, You cannot tell the truth to a child, but deep down they believe everything you say.

76, Hanging yourself from a tree puts you into a death-like sleep until someone cuts you down or the rope rots away.

77, Cats, royal fools, and children under 5 cannot see you. These last become extremely distressed when confronted with proof of your presence.

78, You have scary-starey Aleister Crowley eyes (http://www.energyenhancement.org/aleister11.jpg) possibly as a result of hours spent practicing your glaring in a mirror. You gain a slight (+/-1) bonus to seduction attempts and spells of charm, domination, fear or suggestion. You suffer a slight (+/-1) penalty to first impressions, attempts to placate or avoid scandal and anything connected with a lawsuit. 

79, Eating a bird's eyes allows you to view everything it saw for the past 24 hours.

80, You can heal the most horrid internal wound if you can make the victim swallow some thread, needles and a razor blade.

81, You cannot enter a door if its threshold has a pentagram painted with salt or blood.

82, You must do 7 evil things each month or the devil will come to get you. Sacrileges, incitement to a deadly sin or murder count but stealing or fornicating with animals do not.

83, You can sleep only on a sack of rancid hay. Everything else feels really uncomfortable and drives you nuts.

84, Once a day, you must redirect the blame for something bad that happened on the day before to yourself. This can be anything, an unfortunate death, spoiled milk, the weather or a poor decisions made by an otherwise reasonable person. Failure to do so means the GM gets to pick, at their leisure.

85, If a enamoured woman, an orphan or a widow in distress ask for your help in a desperate matter and offer you a single gold coin then you cannot reject them and must act up to three times towards that cause. You can however interpret the problem to your taste...

86, You can enchant a severed tree branch of your height to have it, at night, carry you through the air to the nearest witch or hag coven.

87, To you, hot is cold and cold is hot. You stride naked in the snow but must bundle up ridiculously in heat.

88, You can read anyone's aura. It tells you how gullible they are. You may make a Charisma check to sense their Wisdom penalty, if any.

89, With an overnight ritual, you can weave any spell you know into the flesh of an apple still on the branch. It retains the magic for 24 hours or until eaten.

90, You can peel footprints off the ground and place them wherever you want.

91, You can punch, kick, & grab other people's shadows as if they were their physical bodies.

92, Your are a name thief. You may steal one victim's name at a time. The victim is normal in all respects except that no one will remember their name, even if it is written down. No extraplanar entity or spirit will be able to do business with the victim. Also, any curses or demonic contracts are transferred to you.  To cast a spell, eat a letter from your victim's name. Once all of the letters are consumed, the victim gets a pile of random Scrabble tiles, as many as their name had, to build a new name. Obviously this process can be interrupted, but the name is still missing any letters you ate when you give it back. 

93, You cannot die during an eclipse, but suffer all harm inflicted upon you when it ends

94, When you dance, so do the dead.

95, You are completely invisible to domesticated dogs, house cats think you're three feet to the left of where you really are, and swine always act in your presence as if under the influence of a charm spell.

96, You can ensure that a willing supplicant's unborn child is later born healthy and free of physical flaw. If the fool who promised fails to carry out the favor when called upon, you can call their debt due, resulting in a turn of bad luck that results in the child being maimed in mind or body. (e.g. Paralyzed after the parent attacks them in the night due to mistaking them for a burglar.) If the original supplicant dies before the debt is called due, the debt is inherited by the child.

97, Areas where you have often trod develop a fungal growth under the surface that sometimes erupts in mushrooms at night.  A pig can be used to trace you back to your home, but the pig must wear a muzzle, as consumption of the mushrooms or fungus by any creature may (1 in d4) cause d6 random minor spells to go off, plaguing or injuring the pig and any handlers nearby. The witches who develop this trait would also like to know more about how and why the fungus is sometimes harvested by unknown creatures burrowing up from deep under the earth in small tunnels.

98, The many scabs under your hair may be picked at, releasing thousands of small ant-like insects that seek out and form a trail to drink from the eyes of sleeping children and virgins.

99, By sewing your lips together, none may speak in your presence. 


100, Your footprints are those of the last thing you have killed.

Entries contributed by: Reynaldo Madriñan , Jason K , Logan Knight , Anthony Picaro , Chris H , Matthew Adams , Mandy Morbid , Arnold K. , Reece Carter , Courtney Campbell , Brian Murphy , Daniel Dean , Ryan Silva , Mateo Diaz , Enzo Garabatos , David Sánchez and , Anders Nordberg , Evan Edwards , Joshua Macy , Lucien Reeve , Timothy Franklin , Cole Robotshenanigans , Adam Silkey , Lior Wehrli , Eric Nieudan , Axis Mundi , Bennet Akkerman , David Pretty , Simon Forster , Jack Mack , Marcus Tsong , and Scrap Princess
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11 comments:

Asslessman said...

Now I want a witch in my party...

So much excellent stuff here.

Timothy S. Brannan said...

I like it! Lots of cool stuff here.

mistermarkfitz said...

The chances I play a warlock in my next campaign as a player are going through the roof!

Scott Malthouse said...

This is amazing. Thanks for creating it, Zak + co.

Mattias said...

This is incredible. I love it!

Unknown said...

very cool zak.

53, But if someone paints an eye on it, so that it stares back at you, your powers will not work on it until the eye is defaced. You know when you have entered the country of witches by the omnipresence of eyes. 

paints eyes on what?

Ignacio Apestegui said...

Cool, I´ll send my own witch (my lovely girlfriend :P )

Guns_n_Droids said...

Hi, Zak
Can we at rpg-news.ru (Russian RPG web-zine) translate this into russian ad post with backlinks?

Zak Sabbath said...

email me.

Guns_n_Droids said...

OK, this will sound mighty stupid and may even weaken my cause a little, but I can't see your email address anywhere on this site.

Zak Sabbath said...

It isn't on this site. This is an intelligence test. If you can't find my email address, you fail the intelligence test.