The Jek

A marrow river runs through these Jek hills.

The Jek inhabited this land when it was young. Identifiably Jek objects show up in the deepest mines of every country on this continent. Their ancient trinkets wash ashore on beaches and the shores of the deepest lakes. When Karanok, the great mountain, erupted and concealed the sun for a year, fire-impervious Jek statues were carried up amidst the pyroclastic flow. In short, we know that the Jek have existed for a long, long time. But they are absent from recorded history. Why?

According to the priests (who asked the gods) the Jek were driven beneath the earth by a storm that did not end for a thousand years. The priests do not say what happened in the deep tunnels. But the wizards do: the Jek found and paid obeisance to strange spirits: Cave Owl, Moon Centipede, and others. Perhaps they worshipped these spirits before they were driven below, and the gods sent the never-ending storm to punish them for it. Perhaps not. Did the spirits make the Jek mad and evil, or was it the other way around?

Jek initiates perform an unknown ritual.

The Jek revere their shamans. Without the shamans, the Jek would starve. At some point during their time below, a spirit taught the Jek shamans to vomit a vast, roiling pool of edible putrescence. The Jek subsisted on this for thousands of years. Now, they cannot digest anything else. When a shaman announces that the feast is immanent, it is a cause for great celebration: entire tribes will organize their receptacles to catch the revolting spew, dancing and singing with gladness.

Entire rivers of a similarly emitted (though less nutritious) substance course over the Jek lands, most resembling oily eddies of pale, liquescent bone marrow.

As a people, the Jek appear to be disfigured albinos. Their skins are covered with sores.  Many Jek lack fully-formed faces. Their shamans always wear masks. Beneath these masks, the shamans have no discernible features at all. Despite this, they are capable of respiring, speech, devouring the bodies of deceased humans for their own shamanic potions (but never anything else), and expelling the questionable foodstuff mentioned above.

Most Jek live in shallow caves or in the trunks of great trees, though there are a few Jek cities. These cities are mobile: every structure in them is carried or dragged by either the Jek or some sort of creature cultivated by them. Their greatest city, Tlel Washke, is built atop a vast stone slab that is chained to the towering reanimated corpse of Washke, who once styled himself to be the king of giants. Tlel Washke is dragged across the ground by this festering ex-king, following a nonlinear path according to the Jeks' inscrutable wishes.

The Jek do not have much in the way of appreciable metallurgy. They weave baskets and clothes, carve statues and render them indestructible, make amulets, and build strange dwellings from wood and stone and cloth.  The shamans produce a certain number of finishing goods by devouring humans and then regurgitating that material in a new form. For example, Jek swords consist of impossibly intricate human scrimshaw. A tribe preparing for war will feed dozens of prisoners to their shamans, each day, while those shamans laboriously vomit up sword after sword with seemingly no limit to the amount of material they can store inside their person. The Jek do not possess a written language, nor do they seem capable of learning one.

Near Jek, things are not as they should be. Their presence causes dreams to superimpose over reality. Large groups of Jek often appear to have the same face. Water droplets rain upwards from pools and rivers into the yawning sky. Birds cry out dire warnings in diverse languages.

A Jek emissary might appear as your best friend, you, a deceased pet from your childhood, or a horrid shimmering image in your dreams. The message relayed will not make sense. However, the Jek's intent will be obvious: hostility.

The Four-Faced Angels

Quadriphonsical antagonist or condescending passerby? You decide. Either way, the self-proclaimed forge god wants his piece. He also probably wants to replace humanity with these things, but doesn't have the divine clout.

Random Magical Breakthrough Table

A bleary-eyed Xag-Ya emerges from a set of catoptromantic mirrors that your
wizard invented by accident.

A wizard in your game is researching spells or trying to make a magical item. Or, I dunno, researching some aspect of the Dreams Of Ruin. They fail at whatever they were attempting, but as the DM you want them to have discovered something. "Nothing" is the most boring result possible from any game mechanic.

Polish off that d8 and give the players something to chew on:

1. A simple recipe for spontaneous generation. The animal should be something like a toad or a lagomorph, and the ingredients should involve stuff like bundles of rotten reeds, salt, and moonlight. The recipes only require 1d4 hours per batch of 2d20 varmints.
2. A simple method for condensing 1 hit die skeletons into the shape of an oversized bone arrow. The process costs about 10 gold, but it produces an arrow that will unfold into a very angry skeleton. Could it be helpful for sieges? Probably not!
3. A weird variation of a spell that the player already has. Ad hoc choose what you perceive to be the player's favorite damage spell, then change the damage type (this version does electric damage) and tell the player that every time they cast it, they teleport 10 feet in addition to the usual effects.
4. The wizard invents a musical note that shatters wood. If they are a plausible vocalist, they can shatter a single board with their voice. With a specially designed dungchen they could probably bust down a door.
5. Hurray! The wizard discovers a questionable application of the third homeopathic principle. They can now dilute a 1d8+5 healing potion into two 1d6+1 healing potions. I assume your potions heal different amounts than in my campaign, so tweak the numbers. Remember that it's only kind of an innovation.
6. The wizard designs schematics for a set of catoptromantic mirrors. They would cost about 300 gold pieces in my game, and be useful for increasing the range of divination spells. An interesting and definitely unintended feature of these mirrors is that a xag-ya will emerge from them every 1d4 days and wander around for a bit before zipping back into the mirrors. A xag-ya might have some application with magic item creation (who wouldn't want a sword with one of these trapped in it) or powering an improbable wizard project of some sort (they are basically sentient batteries). An interested wizard with these schematics could probably spend a few weeks designing a set of obsidian mirrors that would produce xag-yi instead of xag-ya. One thing is for sure: xag-yi and xag-ya fucking hate each other.
7. The wizard discovers a better way to cast an existing spell. Arbitrarily choose a spell that you think is too high level for what it does and tell the wizard they can memorize it as though it were a level lower. For example, based on my reading the tiny hut spell (a 3rd-level spell) is much, much worse than rope trick (a 2nd-level spell). I might tell the wizard that they have discovered a way to cast tiny hut as a 1st-level spell. Seriously, what is up with that spell?
8. Birds are incredibly receptive to sympathetic magic. The wizard realizes that if they cast their spells just so, a number of game birds equal to the spell level expended will be summoned.

The Shadow of the Torturer

“I was sitting there, as I said, and had been for several watches, when it came to me that I was reading no longer. For some time I was hard put to say what I had been doing. When I tried, I could only think of certain odors and textures and colors that seemed to have no connection with anything discussed in the volume I held. At last I realized that instead of reading it, I had been observing it as a physical object. The red I recalled came from the ribbon sewn to the headband so that I might mark my place. The texture that tickled my fingers still was that of the paper in which the book was printed. The smell in my nostrils was old leather, still wearing the traces of birch oil. It was only then, when I saw the books themselves, when I began to understand their care.”

His grip on my shoulder tightened. “We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with the thickest gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations—books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them.”

“We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate wafers of white jade, ivory, and shell; books too whose leaves are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings on a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here—though I can no longer tell you where—no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books than the library itself does. Though a harlot might dangle it from one ear for an ornament, there are not volumes enough in the world to counterweight the other.”

― Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer

The Sun Devourers

Click for a larger version, friend!

I really, really like these guys. It's just a basic feature of Aztec mythology that the progenitors of mankind were also skeletal star demons that want to eat people and end the world. I used them in an earlier post as one of the things that will go wrong if you lock up the wrong archangel for too long. Don't lock up archangels or you'll regret it!