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!

What The Star Whispered

Athor Appears In A Vision

Athor, The Star That Speaks

Whereas most stars capable of communication seem ambivalent or casually destructive toward humanity, there exists a small (and yet, numberless) set of malicious stars that seem very, very interested in destroying humanity, your planet, and everything on it.

You can't really talk to stars with low-level spells, but they can talk to you. One of the most outspoken stars is named Athor.

Athor despises the writhing organics that infest the surface of your planet, and of any planet. It finds life to be a dignity-destroying debasement of the universe's natural chaos and beauty, and a departure from the sacred plan devised by the Creator. To Athor, the creation of life was an accident, and also the original sin. Fortunately, the sin can be expiated. Just get rid of all these crude carbon-based patterns that are infesting everything.

The Debased Adherents

It takes a special kind of crazy to even hear a star like Athor. It can only communicate effectively on moonless, cloudless nights, when there isn't much wind, and the sky seems so huge and empty that you could fall up into it. So you have some hapless crazy guy out in the middle of nowhere who notices that a star is whispering to him about how life is a terrible mistake and should be destroyed. If the guy seems into it, the star will start teaching him spells.

To be honest, a lot of the guys Athor gets to work for him aren't the cream of the crop. He has no idea if any of his plans are going to work, but empowering the kind of people willing to listen to obviously malicious dots of light in the sky is probably not going to help life on this planet thrive. So what the hell, Athor will give it a shot.

Their Abhorrent Inspirations

The cultists don't just want to end organic life. They want to eliminate the possibility of life. Some goals:

• A cultist might devise and enact convoluted rituals to redirect meteor swarms toward your players' game world. Thus far, humans haven't achieved the mastery of spellcraft necessary to provoke an extinction-level event. The snake-men that used to live on this planet were much better at magic, and Athor regrets not getting them to do something a little more permanent. He thought the meteor would finish the job, but marsupial worms evolved into people and he's back in the same boat.
• Maybe there's some deity that is in charge of ensuring the survival of the planet. Athor's cultists will spend a lot of time trying to sabotage their temples and kill their priests. Athor doesn't pay attention to anthropomorphic deities or their creation myths. He's been around a long time. The snake-men had snake-man deities, too, and look where that got them. Still, killing priests of the Sun God has proven a satisfactory diversion for Athor.
• Athor tries to explain quantum entanglement to his cultists, but they only kind of get it. They build little reactor-shrines to try and simultaneously reverse the spin of every atom on the planet. So far, no luck. One has figured out how to entangle some of the atoms of an iron bell with the skeletal system of a sun priest, though. The cultist has some of his acolytes wailing on the bell on the regular. Bones break, blood gets everywhere, and the poor guy has no idea what's wrong and or why clerical magic can't seem to help.
• Some of Athor's cultists are preoccupied with the idea of triggering a grey goo scenario. They set up weird laboratories full of things like black puddings and other, weirder oozes. The goal is to get them to absorb inorganic matter and reproduce so quickly that nobody can stop them from destroying the planet. So far, they've figured out how to induce fission and have at least one black pudding with volume equal to an olympic swimming pool. Athor hates oozes as much as any form of life, though, so this would only be a marginal improvement.

Donning Star-Flesh

The star has a lot of trouble imparting power to it's followers. They can't channel much magical energy at all! Anything more than a droplet of cosmic power causes immediate immolation. Which is fine, but Athor would prefer it if they could immolate some other stuff, first.

Here are some ways that Athor modifies his followers:

• Their fire or electricity spells are changed to plasma. Whenever a creature suffers plasma damage, it is considered either fire or electricity, whichever would inflict more damage.
• Heart Of Star-Stuff: When this cultist dies, they burst into a wash of plasma that scorches anything within 2 spaces. Creatures within that area suffer 5d6 plasma damage, Reflex half.
• Athor's Eye: Instead of a face, this cultist has a hole full of plasma. It suffices perfectly well for most normal face functions, like seeing or eating (the cultist just shoves stuff into the crackling field of energy). It also allows them to fire a blast of otherworldly energy like that guy in the Hot Chip music video. They can use it on a target within close range, who suffers 4d6 plasma damage, Fort half. On a failed save, they are blind for the rest of the day.
• Twinkling Body: Strange patches of twinkling black matter cover wide swath of the cultist's body. They have +20 to their maximum hit points and suffer half damage from ranged or AOE attacks, portions of which are absorbed harmlessly into the weird star-tumors.

Hey Johnny Adventure, how you even gonna
 try messing with the yellowcake-priests?

The Cult Notorious

There exist several groups of Athor-affiliated cultists:

The Yellowcake-Priests of the Vapid Desert dwell in a hovering, inverted pyramid and are probably the most scientifically advanced organization on the planet. They mine preternatural coal (uranium-infused dinosaur bones) and refine them in undead-powered centrifuges over hundreds of years. They are building a time rattleback that they are confident will cause an entire geographical region to reverse its direction of travel in time, instead heading backwards. Their experiments are so successful that they are starting to attract negative attention from beings charged with maintaining reality in good working order.

Meschiane is a wandering prophet. His schtick is pretending to be priests of other deities (Athor keeps those deities from noticing), publicly foretelling the end of the world, and then committing vile crimes. His face changes every 7 days, uncontrollably.

The Esdras Cabal is chiefly concerned with processes that reduce the stability of the fabric of reality and space. They've gotten reasonably good at allowing dreams to superimpose themselves over reality, Lathe Of Heaven style. The city they live in is becoming more horrible and otherworldly, each night. Every member of this cabal can cast dimension door at will, which makes them a total pain in the ass to catch or fight.

The Ekiq Brethren are building a "gravity engine" that will either pull the moon down into the planet or else push it off into space. They aren't having much luck even with Athor's help.

What The Star Whispered: Spells From On High

Cosmometry (1st)
You briefly perceive the relative speed, mass, and positioning of every object in your solar system. If this does not drive you insane (unlikely) and you can retain any of the information (still less likely) it is a pretty good way to find esoteric spell components.

Energon Walk (1st)

You transform into a being of pure energy (appearing as a silhouette of St. Elmo's fire) and haunt a location (a town, a dungeon, et ceteras) every night for 3d20 days. When done, you have a reasonably complete map of the place. You are completely invulnerable and tamper-proof to anything less than 7th level spells during this spell's effects. People just have to deal with one or more weird energy ghosts wandering around their hallways for a few weeks.

His Malevolent Breath (2nd)
You exhale a blast of strange energy in your immediate vicinity. Nameless NPCs within close range (or just those with 3 hit dice or less) have their bone marrow cells killed, becoming "walking ghosts" and eventually dying. Creatures with more hit dice just suffer 1d6 poison damage, no save.

Pluck From Orbit  (4th)

This spell is exactly like minute meteors except that the range is 1 mile and it can only be cast under the open sky. If your players learn this, please convey my sincere hope they enjoy its use.

The Trebithene Blade

Art source.

The Trebithene Blade is the Stradivarius of swords, forged nearly three hundred years ago by Ganar of Grösh, the greatest weaponsmith of the age. Though Ganar created over a dozen magical weapons at the height of his craft, the Trebithene Blade is by far the finest. Her metal is alloyed with ore stolen from the smith-god's forge. The runes etched into her blade promise death in the language of the underworld. Most puissantly, Ganar trapped an archangel in the pommel. During combat, the angel sings terrifying hymns (everybody can hear this). The rest of the time it pleads to be set free (only the wielder can hear this).

It is called Trebithene because the blade was commissioned by the Duke of Trebithene, who used the blade in his city's struggle for independence. During the post-war period known as The Lenient Reprisals, the blade was stolen by an assassin and removed from the city. From there, the blade pops up in history every dozen years or so, always in the hands of a great fighter.

Hooks And Problems

Most people have heard of the Trebithene Blade, and definitely every fighter has. It's still on the Trebithene flag! If you are seen or known to possess it, a fighter of your level will eventually appear to challenge you to a duel to the death for it. This reoccurs every 1d4 weeks in nature, or 1d4 days in a city or large town. If you ever conduct yourself dishonorably in such a duel and word gets out, future challengers will stop relying on honorable combat and attempt to ambush you while your party is busy fighting other monsters, or else use ransom and theft. It's not that the sword is cursed, it's just so famous that people can't help but take their shot.

Your players probably find the sword in the hoard of some big dragon-style creature, still clutched in the now-skeletal hands of the last guy to own it.

Without Ambriel around, the tzitzimimeh that are normally stuck in the 
mesosphere can come down to eat people whenever they want. (Source)

The Angel In The Pommel

The archangel in the pommel is named Ambriel. Her sacred task is to protect humans from malicious stellar entities. Like, if your campaign world has an evil star that whispers recipes for destroying the planet, it's Ambriel's job to stop that. She also tries to minimize the madness that can be caused by evil astrological influences. Things have gotten really ugly during the three centuries that she has been stuck in this stupid sword.

For example, the tzitzimimeh are a swarm of impossibly evil, vaguely astrological creatures that infest the regions between stars. They spend millennia swimming the void in search of inhabited worlds from which to feed. Since Ambriel has left the picture, more and more of them are showing up.

Another problem is the madness inflicted by unlucky stars. In the normal course of events, Ambriel will wander the world, invisibly curing or warding off zodiacal inflictions of this nature, or even killing people born under particularly evil signs. For most of history, she has kept things running smoothly, but she has been gone so long that there are entire cults of star-worshippers working all kinds of unseemly magic. For example, Ambriel senses that the yellowcake-priests of the Vapid Desert have almost built a working Time Rattleback with the help of The Star That Speaks.

Ambriel is acutely aware of the problems resulting from her absence. She'll try to explain the situation to the players and beg them to free her and destroy the sword. The blade's indestructibility will prove problematic even if a player is unusually willing to listen to a suicidal talking sword. Maybe the Frog-God's obliterating gullet could dissolve it. The caustic tears of the Vornish Pope would likely suffice to corrode it, but good luck getting that guy to cry. I'm sure your players will have their own ideas.

The smith-god's angels don't fuck around.

The Smith-God's Metal

Three centuries is nothing to Vhalkana. Never the most social or emotionally intelligent of gods, he can nurse a grudge for literally forever. He wants the sword back because it has his ore in it, because he's curious what the mortals did with it, and because he's angry that the sword is so tacky looking to his rarified, apollonian tastes. He is also secretly afraid that it might be superior to some of his work. The quicker it is removed from mortal hands, the better.

The master thief that snuck into his godsmithy and filched the ore is long dead, his soul well-hidden. Ganar Of Grösh died of respiratory disease at an advanced age, and Vhalkana has placed his soul in the hottest part of his forge, but that is insufficient to diminish the anger of a divine being. He has worked out an arrangement with the other gods so that he receives the soul of anybody who ever wields the sword, whose souls are then smelted down and used in Vhalkana's many projects.

Stuff the divine blacksmith might do:

• Send the sword-holder dreams in which a titanic figure places them on an anvil and demands that the sword be brought to their temple. The temple is somewhere really inconvenient, like it's called The Lightning Caldera, and in addition to being a mostly-dormant volcano it also is the place struck most often by lightning on the planet. When Vhalkana is in residence he uses the lightning to superheat his forge.
• Curse the sword-bearer to be unable to make anything. No item crafting, obviously, but also unable to make so much as a sandwich.
• Curse the player so that any nonmagical objects they possess break at the slightest provocation. 
• When he has time, Vhalkhana will sometimes make some angels and send them to retrieve the sword. The forge-angels have four faces. One of the heads chants blessings and heals. Another has a breath weapon that expectorates exquisitely formed, high-velocity swords and daggers. A third head curses foes with vertigo and palsies. The fourth head has a significant bonus to diplomacy checks but can't ever get the other heads to let it talk before attacking.