The Rotting Queen

So-named because pieces keep falling off her miniature

There she is, the Rotting Queen. Half-shadow elf, half-spider, ruling forgotten halls beneath Broceliande.

The majority of the ancient and terrified community of grey elves she has enslaved have not seen the sun in 300 years, they do nothing but bemoan their fate, obey her obscene commands, and occasionally notice body parts keep falling off her.

The actual spider-elves and Unseelie Fae consider her a grotesque, she makes them uneasy (do you know how fucked up you have to be to make the Unseelie Fae uneasy?), but they do not know her secret.

This is what "she" really looks like. The actual Queen died centuries ago, a small squirming daemonic parasite that inhabits her left eyes has been puppeting her husk since at least the end of the Malachite Era. It has absorbed her personality, believes itself to be the Queen, and will squirm off to find a new host if given half a chance.

It eats magic.

Her lonely realm looks like a Piranesi drawing lit by Richard Corben:

Traps and creatures down there will be:

40% Necromantic

40% Spider-themed

20% Weird magic like your arms slithers off and grows a tail and hates you.

She has a panther, and will you throw you in a pit with him if you become inconvenient.

Her halls are patrolled by Danse Macabre skeletons, who ensure, peace, order, obedience, and a constant eerie background music.

The halls are lit and irradiated by emanations from the Eldritch Fountain...

...which must be periodically fed the blood of high-level magic-users...

So expeditions outside the catacombs are regrettably necessary. For these purposes, the Queen relies on a cadre of hunter-necromancers...

...to kidnap sorcerers and bring them back to her realm.

The actual process of extracting the magic from a wizard takes hours and involves a lot of hooks and chains and is completely excruciating, though one in ten wizards actually like it. They die happily in the octile embrace of the Rotting Queen.

The good news is they have to keep the wizard alive to do it, so there's usually just enough time to:

1. Realize you lost your wizard and they aren't just dicking around in the library
2. Find out from locals that they saw your pointy-hat friend being carried off by what looked from a distance like maybe some drunk friends in a reverse-Weekend-At-Bernies situation 
3. Go oh, wait, zombies
4. Find out the nearest source of zombies is the Rotting Queen's catacombs
5. Mount a daring rescue

Now here's the kicker: since only the blood of high-level magic-users is useful to the Rotting Queen, The Rotting Queen is eager to make herself useful to low-level magic-users. She wants you to level up.

If you're out there with your party members, killing hill giants and robbing crypts and making a name for yourself, buying everybody drinks at the tavern with thousand year old coins, you may eventually get a knock on the door.

And if you follow the hooded and black-clad figure you find standing there, they will lead you down and down again to the Rotting Queen, who will be happy to help you--as the butcher is happy to see the spring lamb fed.

She will assume a pleasing form.

The tome you seek? She knows where it is.

The creature you must fight? She knows its weakness.

It's all going to be fine.

Keith Giffen Is Dead And He Was Better Than Anybody

Keith Giffen died.

He has been sick for many years, so it's not a surprise but, still, I'm sad.

If you look him up, you'll notice in all the comic book news site eulogies, he's weirdly hard to summarize. They'll say he created this or that second-tier character or contributed to an influential run you may or may not have read on a comic book you may or may have not have heard of.

This is fitting--Keith's style, like his art and writing--is hard to pin down.

Here's the splash page of one of his comics:

Again: this is what they call the splash page --the big announcement page to get you excited.

Batman's face is in shadow, Robin's facing away and would be unrecognizable if this were a black-and-white comic, and it took me, a huge Giffen fan, like, minutes to realize that what's going on here is there's a blue-clad figure (Clayface) in a hat holding a knife up to stab Robin. 

This is everything they tell people not to do in illustrator school. And Giffen was great at it.

Nobody can use the traditional comic bro vocabulary to explain why his comics were so good.

He also just kept evolving. All of these are the same guy:

Defenders 50, from the beginning of his career

Legion of Super-Heroes #1 when Giffen was a fan-favorite

Dr Fate limited series, when he started getting weird

Near the end of his first Legion run

His soup-to-nuts creation The Heckler

Another later-career all-Keith joint, Trencher. Scroll back up to the Defenders and compare

Throughout his career, Giffen was dogged by accusations of copying other artists--but this misses the point. Giffen was mr anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better. Or at least weirder. He was like the Ridley Scott of comics--Oh you made Barry Lyndon you say? Here's The Duellist. You made Dark Star? Here's Alien. Ben Hur? Fucking Gladiator. You made 2001? Star Wars? I made Blade Runner. 48 Hours? Thelma and Louise.

The early work--like that Defenders page at the top--owes a clear debt to Jack Kirby, but the dense, dark designs and schematic presentation are far too deadpan for Kirby. Keith caught a lot of slack around the time of that Dr Fate page for copying Argentine artist Jose Munoz--but Munoz had that loose, indie sensibility--he didn't have Giffen's full-color design sense. 

And what Giffen did with Munoz's style...

...he summons a bodiless mouth in mid-air to annihilate Batman with green vomit. Meanwhile, what's Munoz drawing? Some guys playing jazz?

I mean, if he's not going to use his style why not let Keith borrow it?

The next page down Giffen's starting to be influenced by Kevin Maguire...

...but whatever the fuck Colossal Boy's lonely shapechanging wife is doing to herself in panel two, Maguire would never. And that snap screwball-comedy transition to the angry-eye close-up? Pure Giffen.

A major reason Giffen's going to be hard to summarize is he did exactly the opposite of the conventional wisdom about what we're all supposed to like in comics.

If I was to try to summarize what that was, I'd say it was this sort of thing:

Ahhh, the podcasters sing, the storytelling. That story sure did get told. That robot definitely busted through that wall and Batman sure does look concerned about that explosion.

We're supposed to really like that. It's clear, it's accessible, it's emotional, it's simple, it's open, it's...meh.

Ever since Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics came out people have been talking like there's something to understand. Like: it's a fucking comic, dude. It's a form literally designed to be understood by schoolchildren. It's never hard to understand comics.

People praise comic artists so often by saying "the storytelling is so clear you don't even need to read the words to understand it, it leads the eye across the page".

Who cares? Giffen realized the eye would always get across the page sooner or later because there are panels and the page is a picture the person reading wants to look at because they bought the comic on purpose to look at it. Comics aren't rocket science.

Giffen went hard the other way. He made gorgeous patterns of color blocks and shapes on the page--and if they didn't tell the story all by themselves--oh right, there's word balloons.

What does it mean? Where is the story going? Who cares? Keith Giffen built comics as labyrinths of color, shape, continuity, reference, collage, image, jokes. They didn't invite you to understand, they didn't have epic character arcs of Campbellian heroics, they invited you to come get lost in the funhouse.

Keith Giffen's comics make you go "What the fuck is this?" and honestly--if you think how everybody who loves comics loves them because they picked up issue 456 of some random comic which was part 3 of a 6 part arc that got finished in some whole other series the next year by different people or loves them after finding some manga with a mythology that you have to get through 4 fanslations a Wiki and an anime to understand--that is what a lot of people want. They want to peel the arcana apart.

I loved Keith.

I hope someone picks up where he left off.

The d100 Drugs Table

People often ask for drugs. So here are the drugs.

Every drug matches the “Standard Drug” except where otherwise noted.

Standard Drug:

Notes: A common amusement among criminals, the unlucky, and the decadent, derived from a tropical plant.

Form: Inhalable powder

Effect: Hallucinations and euphoria, effects as Confusion spell

Duration: Save each round until you succeed—unless you don’t want to, in which case it lasts an hour

Addiction: Roll a 1 on any save and you are addicted and will want more after d6 hours. Failure to get another dose results in -1 to everything per hour clean until a dose is used.

Withdrawal: 1 week clean required per dose used. During withdrawal, every task is at disadvantage (roll twice and pick the lowest).

Availability: Succeed on a Charisma roll (target 10) in a sketchy urban area to find a supplier, then 500gp per dose.

1-5 HARMONY GOLD

Notes: A species of phosphorescent mushroom, beloved by elves. They’re happy to share, however, and consider refusal quite rude.

Form: Standard

Effect: Euphoric disorientation (-1 to everything except initiative, which is +1), desire to create something (music, sculpture, poetry, etc), and belief it is much better than it is, obsession with intellectual property rights

Duration: Standard

Addiction: Standard

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: Standard

6-10 BOLB

Notes: A thick, greenish fungal stimulant popular among orcs trying to stay awake on guard duty.

Form: Chewable wad

Effect: Stimulant—subject can go two additional hours without sleep. Mild euphoria. Increased aggression (save to not attack strangers on sight).

Duration: Standard

Addiction: Standard

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: Standard

11-15 ORQWITT

Notes: Made from ground bone and leopard secretions by witches and medicine men. Considered sacred by the pious and a subject of philosophical speculation by the pretentious.

Form: Standard

Effect: You see into another dimension, but it’s a random dimension, you can’t interact with anything in it, and you can’t see what’s going on in your own dimension—though you can hear and feel what’s going on in your own. To an outside observer you just seem to be hallucinating—and it would be hard for you to prove them wrong.

Duration: Standard

Addiction: Standard

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: Standard

16-20 BLUE HARTNET

Notes: Extracted from an ultramarine mushroom. Associated with the lower classes but commonly used wherever its available.

Form: Standard

Effect: Reduced anxiety, mild euphoria, inferiority complex along with a desire to apologize to everyone around

Duration: Standard

Addiction: Standard

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: Standard

21-25 ECHOPRAXIA

Notes: Standard

Form: Standard

Effect: Euphoria, irresistible desire to copy the actions of the nearest creature

Duration: Standard

Addiction: Standard

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: Standard

26-30 MAJESTIC RIDLEY (or RIDLEÉ in Broceliandaise)

Notes: A mushroom product that grows on moist hillsides. Often eaten in cheese and served at strange parties, especially in the lands of the Hunger Kings.

Form: Standard

Effect: Complete blindness combined with a desire to explore textures

Duration: Standard

Addiction: Standard

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: Standard

31-35 COLDCROWN EXTRACT

Notes: A mushroom product, collected by both dwarfs and goblins under the earth. Popular among louts of all species.

Form: Standard

Effect: An amusing disorientation, mild hallucinations, and a desire to insult everyone you see.

Duration: Standard

Addiction: Standard

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: Standard

36-40 BABBLEWHITE

Notes: Standard

Form: Standard

Effect: Pleasant spasms, plus inability to properly speak your own language. It will be someone else’s language, however—but you won’t know that, or know which. If someone who speaks other languages is present there is a 1% chance per language of it being one of those.

Duration: Standard

Addiction: Standard

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: Standard

41-45 EISGLAS

Notes: Standard

Form: Standard

Effect: Standard, plus chilling tactile hallucinations. 

Duration: Standard

Addiction: Standard

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: Standard

46-50 GLEAMING EEL

Notes: Considered glamorous, a dubious status symbol in urban areas

Form: Standard

Effect: A stimulant, +1 to initiative rolls but you can’t shut up. Must save each round to not talk about something stupid.

Duration: One hour

Addiction: Save after each use. Three failures indicate addiction.

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: Succeed on a Charisma roll (target 10) in a sketchy urban area to find a supplier, then 1000gp per dose.

51-55 AARCZYCK

Notes: A horrible resin, popular in extreme climes among those without hope.

Form: Injected oil, no effect without a syringe

Effect: A powerful euphoric daze, subject must save to do anything each round—including speak coherently.

Duration: One hour

Addiction: Save after each use. Failure 

Withdrawal: Save after effect wears off—any failed save equals addiction

Availability: Standard

56-63 THROCCMORTON

Notes: An inferior strain of the sort of leaf halflings grow in the Pudding Coast. Stigmatized only among the exceptionally pious or industrious.

Form: Smokable herb

Effect: One hour of companionable, talkative indolence (-1 to anything) while smoking, followed by 6 hours of sleep that are as restful as 8 hours. A subject cut off in the middle of The Leaf Hour (as the halflings call it) will be at -1 to everything for the next 2 hours and will not gain the desirable sleep effects. 

Duration: Standard

Addiction: Standard

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: Standard

64-65 PUDDING COAST THREELEAF

Notes: A prized substance among the indolent and wizards desirous of slumber, grown by halflings in the south of Broceliande.

Form: Smokable herb

Effect: One hour of companionable, talkative indolence (-1 to anything) while smoking, followed by 4 hours of sleep that are as restful as 8 hours. A subject cut off in the middle of The Leaf Hour (as the halflings call it) will be at -1 to everything for the next 2 hours and will not gain the desirable sleep effects.

Duration: Standard

Addiction: Standard

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: 800gp per dose, only available in the Pudding Coast (target 10 Charisma roll), by chance, or in large cities at 1000 per dose after a target 15 Charisma roll.

66-70 WHITE LOTUS POWDER

Notes: Standard

Form: Standard

Effect: See all strange things as unremarkable. It’s not that you don’t notice them, you just don’t see it as worth pointing out or acting on. Those afflicted don’t respond to, say, noticing an ambush appropriately without prompting from allies, however it also allows an extra save against mind-affecting magic.

Duration: Standard

Addiction: Standard

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: Standard

71-75 BLACK LOTUS POWDER

Notes: Much-feared tool of assassins and a diversion of desperate souls.

Form: Standard

Effect: Sleep immediately, with horrible dreams that rattle you and leave you at disadvantage until the next time you have normal rest.

Duration: Save each round until you succeed to wake up—unless you don’t want to, then you sleep 8 hours.

Addiction: Standard

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: Standard

76-80 VIOLET LOTUS POWDER

Notes: This disgusting fish-flake-textured and scablike extract of a common Drownesian water-plant, it is passed off to the gullible as true Purple Lotus Powder.

Form: Standard

Effect: Hallucinate, effects as Confusion spell

Duration: Lasts 20 rounds no matter what

Addiction: Save after effect wears off—any failed save equals addiction

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: Standard

81-83 FAEBLOOD EXTRACT

Notes: Literal faerie’s blood, refined through an alchemical process. Elves and fae will fight you if they see you’ve got it or are using it. Many trolls are addicts.

Form: Injectable liquid, no effect without a syringe unless you’re a troll

Effect: Everything is dazzlingly beautiful. Subject can see the entire light spectrum. No effect on elves, fae, orcs, half-orcs, or goblins.

Duration: 30 seconds

Addiction: Save after each use. Any failure indicates addiction.

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: 2000gp for a dose. Rarely available.

84-86 UNDULANT

Notes: Made from large amounts of mermaid saliva refined through blasphemous alchemy. Popular with pirates, sensualists and coastal elites.

Form: Scented, carbonated liquid

Effect: Tactile hallucinations of being underwater, tactile hypersensitivity, ability to breathe water, pleasurable dreams. In a fight or any urgent situation, save any time you want to move or else you’ll try to “swim” toward your destination

Duration: Standard

Addiction: Standard

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: Succeed on a Charisma roll (target 12) in a sketchy coastal area to find a supplier, then 1000gp per dose.

87-88 SEETHE

Notes: Made from quickling blood. Like Faeblood extract, elves and fae do not approve of its use. Sometimes taken by human berserkers.

Form: Liquid

Effect: Euphoric stimulant. Twice as many actions per round but the second action is always random—roll for the second action as a Confusion spell. 

Duration: Standard

Addiction: Standard

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: 2000gp for a dose. Rarely available.

89-91 SHOCK JELLY

Notes: Enriched extract of gelatinous cube. Sought as a cure for muscle pain by miners and dancers, but many have become addicted.

Form: Gel

Effect: Random jolts of muscular excitement. Cures paralysis, Slow and the like but user is -1 to any physical task. Cures chronic pain for d4 weeks.

Duration: Standard

Addiction: Standard

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: Succeed on a Charisma roll (target 15) in a sketchy urban area to find a supplier, then 1000gp per dose.

92-93 MORPHYS

Notes: Made from changeling blood. A delicacy in bohemian circles.

Form: Liquid

Effect: Pleasant disorientation as body structures imperceptibly grow, shrink and shift. Delusion that you are whoever you’re looking at.

Duration: Standard

Addiction: Standard

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: 2000gp for a dose. Rarely available.

94-95 RETICULA

Notes: A dilute solution made from the blood of the hydra. Deadly if improperly prepared, much sought-after by creatives of all kinds.

Form: Liquid

Effect: Grow new brain structures rapidly, ravenous desire to touch random things, save to not touch things

Duration: Standard

Addiction: Standard

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: Succeed on a Charisma roll (target 15) in a sketchy urban area to find a supplier, then 1000gp per dose.

96-97 JYRA

Notes: An herbal mixture containing a weak solution of al’mi’raj blood

Form: Standard

Effect: Everything sounds distractingly amazing. -1 to do anything except play music or dance.

Duration: Standard

Addiction: Standard

Withdrawal: None

Availability: Succeed on a Charisma roll (target 15) in a sketchy urban area to find a supplier, then 1000gp per dose.

98 PURPLE LOTUS POWDER

Notes: Dwarfs were first to find the purple lotus, no-one knows why, as it seems to be a tropical plant.

Form: Standard

Effect, Duration, Addiction, Witdrawal: See Death Frost Doom by LotFP

Availability: Near impossible to find anywhere, rumors that some was seen in the Northern Continent some years ago.

99 FRESH DRAGON’S BLOOD

Notes: Exactly what it sounds like. Very hard to find—only good for 24 hours.

Form: Liquid

Effect: +1 to all stats, delusions of grandeur, euphoria

Duration: One hour

Addiction: Save at -10 or be addicted immediately

Withdrawal: Standard

Availability: Fresh dragon’s blood’s almost never available but when it is it can go for up to 10,000 per dose

00 DAEMONIA PRAECOX

Notes: Distilled from the juices of succubi. Exceedingly rare and expensive.

Form: Liquid

Effect: Unmatched euphoria, sensory delusions, aphrodisia. You're not fighting anyone today.

Duration: Standard

Addiction: Instantaneous no save

Withdrawal: 3 months clean required to recover per dose taken up to a maximum of one year. During withdrawal, every task is at disadvantage (roll twice and pick the lowest).

Availability: 100,000sp when available, which is almost never.

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