The Glaatu: optional alien race class for Gathox

This week I'd like to focus on a new optional class for Gathox - this time, the Glaatu. The Glaatu are a race of foul-mouthed, split-limbed space pirates whose ships habitually and inexplicably tend to crash land on worlds the godling repeatedly visits. Their population remains diffuse in the city, with some living “homefree,” or homeless, in Berchan Favela and others seeking refuge in the shifting stomach-dungeons deep beneath the surface.

Here's their stats as monsters from GVS1:

Armor Class: 7[12]
Hit Dice: 2
Attacks: 2
Special: Multilimbed
Move: 15
HDE/XP: 3/60

As Big As: A skinnier version of a bear.
Smells Like: Sulphur and pyramid-scheme perfume.
Sounds Like: A drunk speaking in reverse.
Favorite Pastime: Playing poker, drunk speaking in reverse.
Turnoffs: Thick limbs.

These foul-mouthed, polyglot alien pirates occasionally mine for legitimate work. Their ships have an uncanny knack for picking up on Gathox's magnetic signature in the cosmos and accidentally crash landing nearby. They travel in scavenger teams of 2-20 and prefer to dig to safety when on solid ground. Their split limbs allow them to wield two weapons at once without penalty, including two-handed weapons.

The Glaatu as a class

Glaatu make for natural adventurers, swindlers, thieves, and brigands. They advance as Militants (using the S&W White Box Fighter advancement tables) and possess a number of innate racial abilities.

Character Advancement: The Glaatu are considered Militants for all purposes and may typically only advance as high as 5th level unless the Referee rules otherwise.

Weapon and Armor Restrictions: Like any other Militant, the Glaatu can use any weapons and armor without restriction and without the price increases for possessing a strange body shape. As space pirates, the Glaatu adapted to scavenging fitting armor pieces eons ago.

Dual Wielding: Due to their split limbs, the Glaatu can wield two weapons without penalty, including two-handed weapons.

Double Attacks: The Glaatu may make two attacks per round if dual wielding weapons - which means that for each attack, a dual wielding Glaatu may roll damage twice and take the higher damage value.

Saving Throws: The Glaatu are less susceptible to magical attacks, and thus receive a +4 bonus on Saving Throws against magic, even if the Referee only uses single saving throws.

Gathox Process: The Cover Art . . . also, updates!

Today I'd like to feature a step-by-step of my construction of the Gathox cover art, which follows below. But first, I'd like to make a few brief updates as to all things going on over here at the official Gathox Home Base Headquarters Neighborhood Friendship Society (TM) (R).

Update 1: Gathox Print Edition

You can get your digital copy of Gathox Vertical Slum HERE!!!!!

Mike and I had to make some changes and modifications to the original print files we sent to OBS. Those changes are complete (we hope!!!) and a final test print is on its way to Mike's hands as we speak. If it looks good, we will be turning that live on all of the OBS sites (DriveThruRPG.com, et. al.). Anyone who bought a .pdf will be getting an email with a discount off the print copy equal to the value of what they paid for their digital copy (in this case, $10). I'm super excited!

Update 2: GVS2: Quake Alley Mayhem!

Over the last year and a half I have playtested and drafted an awesome tournament-style module for Gathox, called GVS2: Quake Alley Mayhem! It features a 'Get The McGuffin' style mission full of traps and deadly consequences, and runs on a unique timer with escalating deadliness. The manuscript for GVS2 is complete and ready for edits, and the art is almost done as well. Ideally, I'd like to have this PC-killer ready for folks by Christmas time; cross your fingers, no guarantees! Also, the custom Gathox Character Sheet is almost ready for upload to DTRPG, and will be totally free for download.

Update 3: Life Stuff

I've been fairly quiet on the blog front as well as on G+ and Fb, and for good reason. I figure that I owe you a brief explanation as to why.

First, the committed relationship I was in for the last 4+ years ended, necessitating a move to a different part of the state. I now live in a remote part of Montana with my dog, and the internet here is essentially held together with chicken bones and hope :) The upside is that I recently was able to acquire an 18' Roadrunner camp trailer (for a song, no less) which I'm converting into a full-time home and off-grid mobile art studio - and I'm super pumped!

Second, shortly after I moved, I suffered a series of illnesses which kept me from working as much as I normally do. I've since healed up and am back up to par. The uptick is that my immune system is that much stronger, and I likely won't get ill again for some time to come (knock on wood).

Third, I've been given the opportunity to write and illustrate a book for Lamentations of the Flame Princess!!!!!!!!! The book is tentatively titled, "The Goddess Who Sleeps in Bile," and features a procedurally generated hex crawl, nightmare inputs from the players, and lots of level-agnostic deadliness. The research and drafting of the book eats up lots of my time, in the best possible way.

That's it for the updates; now on to a discussion about making the cover for Gathox!!!

Gathox Process: The Cover Art

I employed a mixture of physical and digital processes to make the GVS cover come to life. My goal was to make it look as natural and physical as possible, so I simply started with pencils on a standard 11"x17" sheet of Bristol board (100 lbs., lined for comics).

As you can see, I went for a unified, single-point perspective that would let me emphasize the verticality of the city environment. I set the horizon line far enough up from the bottom of the page so that I could detail a full street battle, but not so far that I couldn't communicate the steepness of the surrounding buildings. Also, the giant head belongs to Jackie Zhao, the gear-vomiting recluse featured in the chapter fiction written by Josh Wagner. There's a tiny gear on his tongue, but I like to think it could be mistaken for a tab of acid ;)

I chose gangs and characters that featured prominently in the year-long first campaign I ran for Gathox. On the left you see early and eager versions of The Firestarters (the PCs' gang), and on the right I've begun to illustrate a one-eyed hypercapitalist Kermen warrior getting punched out.

Here, I've continued to add in more Firestarters and Kermen, as well as some mangled hirelings and a Gongwarped Fisherman (the players had a hell of a time with the Fishermen in the first campaign, and I figured they deserved a spot on the cover as well).

Here I've added to the cluster of bodies on the page with some additional FPA gangsters and a laser-shooting Zhezhn known as a Pyramid Eye (which falls squarely under the heading of "Things in Gathox Inspired by Conspiracy Culture.") It's almost ready for ink . . .

I decided to start the inking process by blacking in the border of the image. I used permanent black ink and a flat, angled brush from a pack of kids' paint brushes (like $2 at Target). Blocking in the black border helps me see everything I'm doing better and gives me some leeway when I am working close to the edges of the image - I don't have to gauge where to terminate a line and can more easily avoid tangents along the sides of the illustration.

Like a lot of my friends and colleagues, I tend to ink from top to bottom. Because I'm left-handed, I also tend to ink from right to left. This keeps my hands out of the wet stuff. As an old crew boss of mine used to say, "Keep you hands, feet, and other objects outta the shit!"

Occasionally I'll switch over to working from the outside of the image toward the middle. Sometimes this is to frame up everything outside of the subjects, sometimes it's to work in line weight variation, and sometimes I do it just to switch things up.

After I finish inking my lines, I go through and add my spot blacks, beef up line weight as needed, hatch or texture parts that scream for more detail, and find ways to clarify an image with ink. I prefer to use ink washes on most of my black and white ink drawings, but decided against that technique for the cover. First and most important, I knew I wanted to colorize this piece with as much active color as I could, and washes would dull that out. Second, and really only a minor consideration, I knew that I had to scan this drawing in four different pieces (because I have a tiny scanner), and stitching the image together with washes was going to be labor-intensive with no guarantee that it would look good.

After everything was ready to go in terms of line art, I turned my attention to color.

I cut four sheets of cold-press watercolor paper in half and applied some paint in an abstract fashion. I used kid's neon tempura paint to get those super bright colors you see above, as well as some runny washes of gouache paint. I let gravity do some of the work, taping the paper at odd angles to my tilted drafting table to dry before applying another layer. I allowed the paints to mix a bit, working sufficiently wet that my dry time was slow and the pigments could interact.

Finally, I used acrylics to paint a large abstract background. I first covered my 16"x20" canvas with Open Acrylic additive, applied thinly with a palette knife, which slows the drying time and allows me to mix colors on the canvas, wet-on-wet, like oils. I knew I wanted a light source at the top with pooled darkness below, and the patchy mix above is what I ended up with. I dig this canvas on its own and might do more of these in the future for their own sake.

The next step took a while, but I was very pleased with the results. I used the canvas painting as my background, and began cutting selections from the scans of the watercolor paper and pasting them underneath different figures in the line art. I took inspiration from the old, brightly colored plastic toy action figures you could buy in bulk at the dollar store, and did my best to make the figures brighter than the background. Finally, I took several passes at shading and highlighting all the figures and surfaces digitally, paying attention to whether or not I was obliterating too much of the natural texture and detail from the color scans.

To finish the cover off, I got the print specs from Mike, built a template in Inkscape, imported my artwork, and built the graphics. I had made font choices for the book long before I finished the cover, so it was more a matter of toying with the fonts and box elements to get everything looking nice. I decided I didn't want to cover any of the art up with text, and given that Gathox is, well, vertical, I figured that a vertical title bar would fit nicely with everything else. Oh, and also neon green, because neon fucking green, that's why.

Cheers!

The City That Walks And Is A God Has Arrived!

It has finally landed!

The first Gathox book (GVS1) is done, and I am completely pumped. This is a complete setting for Swords & Wizardry White Box, with tons of monsters, NPCs, new classes, rules for domain-level play starting at level 1, a starter adventure, maps galore, and more. This is muh baby, and it exists now, in the real world!

You can buy it here or you can click the link in the sidebar to the right.

I first dreamed up Gathox shortly after I released Grandpappy Cromdar's Whizbang Zoo!, while I was living with my friend and comics illustrator Tony Gregori in a crappy apartment in Missoula, MT. We had a big whiteboard where we'd draw dicks, tape up notes, track jobs, and so forth - it was like a real studio, ya see? Anyhow, I started writing ideas on the board every few days about a setting that I'd like to run. Slowly but surely, I started writing house rules for the game and putting out feelers for local friends who might want to play, and eventually it led to this book.

I'd like to say thank you to a lot of folks! My partner Ally Guldborg has spent countless hours playing, reading, editing, and encouraging this whole Gathox thing, and she's the best person ever. Her fingerprints are all over Gathox. I'd like to thank Mike Evans for putting in the elbow grease to help get this book across the finish line and for believing in the project. I'd like to thank Josh Wagner for letting Gathox be his first and for writing all of the amazing, intertwined chapter fiction in the book. I'd like to thank Robert Parker and Trey Causey for their intitial, crucial, game-changing edits on Gathox, and I'd like to thank Humza Kazmi, Chris Kutalik, Jason Sholtis, and all the dudes at Hydra for their initial interest and encouragement to pursue the book to it's end. I'd like to thank all the players from the home game and from one-off Gathox tournaments I've run.

VITAL STATS

Number of Seasons: 1 season of 50 sessions, 1 current season of 20+ sessions; various one-shots

Rounds of Rules Revisions: 6

Number of Dead PCs: 19 that I can find in my files

Number of Dead Hirelings: 42 that I can find in my files

Number of Hours Played: 290 +

The home game folks: Ally Guldborg, Tony Gregori, Spencer Bryant, William Saylor, Josh Wagner, Alexsa Prince, Paul Stephens, Greg Ransons, Erika Fredrickson, Evan Guldborg, Jenn Johnson, David Melvin, and Alyssa Calabrese.

Gathox Deities: The Grand Stultified Energon

So the weekly home group has been encountering more and Surdites, which are insect swarms which animate the dead in Gathox, I thought I would post about their deity. I present to you the Grand Stultified Energon, as well as the description of one of his priests, Vol-Mak-Dron!

The God Which Pulses, Quivers, and Collects, or The Grand Stultified Energon – Few sane beings willingly worship The Grand Stultified Energon, as few who breathe would dedicate themselves to death and accumulation. The X’Xul pay grudging obeisance to the Energon, and he reportedly bestows upon them luck in the accumulation of other sentient beings. The Surdites (see pp.xx), sentient insect swarms which animate the dead, serve him absolutely. The Energon’s wrath is known by the choke of drowning, and his boon by indifference to suffering. His image is that of an imperious and calcified skull fossil, and his passage is known by the burn of ozone.

Favor/ Disfavor: Praying to the Energon allows the supplicant a once per week, 5% chance to improve their saving throw by one point for one task. Should the 5% check fail, the supplicant immediately suffers a -1 to their saving throw for the rest of the day.

Vol-Mak-Dron, Ascendent Resplendent - (Surdite Guardian of the Sennarit Descala)

Cues: Hissing speech, easily bored with the idle chatter of humans, laments his restraint in the consumption of the dead he guards.

Vol-Mak-Dron shares that essential trait of all Surdites of referring to itself with the royal “We.” Unlike its Surdite brethren, Vol-Mak-Dron avoids the consumption of dead flesh and instead stands vigil over the entombed corpses at Sennarit Descala. On the orders of the Grand Stultified Energon, Vol-Mak-Dron remains largely dispersed, existing on a starvation diet while monitoring the entrance to the Cheery Orchard Necropolis for the purposes of forward intel. The Energon favors the tomb-statues of the Descala as well, and commands his steward to protect them with violence if necessary.

Individuals aware of Vol-Mak-Dron’s presence often attempt to converse with it. If the Surdite condescends to engage them, it will usually take the form of a cloaked humanoid male with a buttery, chorused voice, remaining largely in shadow. Vol-Mak-Dron quickly bores of interactions with humans, and will express it with indirect displays of casual violence and vandalism. Its favorite game is to pretend to be a poltergeist haunting the area, pranking the horrified elites with all manner of teasing, taunting, and minor mayhem. Vol-Mak-Dron possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of the Necropolis, although it is reticent to share the terrible secret fate of all Gathoxan life with visitors.

Chapter Fiction by Josh Wagner: Jackie Zhao, A Case Study

Today I'd like to take a different tack and share with you one of the five interrelated pieces of chapter fiction written by my friend, travel-seasoned author, and Gathox guinea pig, Josh Wagner.

JACKIE ZHAO (A Case Study)

His cough won't go away. It started eleven weeks ago with a tickle at the base of the throat, a dry palate, and a scratchiness under the tongue. Only mild coughing, no other symptoms. But it wouldn’t go away. Two weeks later he stopped by Kin's clinic on the sixth floor, sat for twenty minutes with a big view of the Kettle out her waiting room window. She called him in and blasted flood lights down his throat and told him everything looked normal. “You feel a fever you come back,” she said.

Jackie’s family lives at 349H on level 8, Quarter East. By coincidence he was born at 3:49am, which his mother always corrects his brother when he uses that word--coincidence. “It's a miracle,” she insists. “Jamie's little miracle.” But Jackie can no longer afford to believe in synchronicity. First he lost his last job over a misunderstanding. Now his health. What next?

He doesn't actually feel all that bad. Coughs like the devil first thing in the morning, but during the day his energy is high and his throat is fine. Jackie doesn’t drag himself out of bed until he gets so hungry he can't stand it. But once he's up and moving everything is back to normal.

A month after his visit to Kin, Jackie has a fit so intense it literally throws him out of bed. He runs to the bathroom sink and hacks until something comes up. A little thing he catches in his hand before it can vanish down the drain, just to look, just a need to see what's coming out of the body. Blood and phlegm, spotty and thick--but something else in there, too. Something black. Old blood from deep down maybe?

He drops it in a glass. A loud, clinking sound. He fills it a quarter with water and swishes and strains it and what's left over is like a flat, black plastic ring with a tab at one end. He's just wondering what the actual fuck when another fit takes him to his knees. His eyes are watering. He can't keep steady enough to get back to the sink so it all comes out on the peeling tile. A thick, yellow wad. And then more blood. It sprays forth from way back like his throat's a high pressure valve and someone just cracked it with a spike. When the stream stops there's a puddle big enough to make a handprint.

Jackie sifts through the bile and finds a dozen tiny machine parts: a metal pinion, a cog, and a rubber seal. The next day there's more of the same, along with plastic valves, sockets and wee springs. He washes them all off and puts them on a little shelf in the sunlight.

The coughing gets worse every day from then on. Hurts like hell. What’s nice is the fifteen minutes or so after things come up and out, when Jackie can feel a warmish kind of glow in his stomach. In these moments his breath comes easy and slow, like pure spring water filling his body with light, and always follows this sketchy vision in the head of some giant, writhing, interconnected structure of spiraling machinery far out in the desert. It makes him understand the whole city of Gathox is but a fragment in some vast and tangled system whose purpose, Jackie can tell, is to bind a bridge from the core of the planet to the power of the sun.

Jackie trades in a few old things he inherited from his mother for a small space in the Dregs. Here he sets up his table and covers it with the tiny machine parts hacked up over the previous three weeks, some too small to see without a magnifying lens. At first people buy them for the novelty. What adorable little trinkets, so precisely made, will you take five silver for this one? It doesn't cost Jackie anything but discomfort, so he lets them name their price. By the time they come back the following week to complain, he's already spent it all on shitty anti-starvation noodle machines.

“I put it under glass, the little spring,” a customer says. “Now it's gone. And my neighbor bought one of the pinions and she says that vanished too.”

Jackie explains he's not responsible for what's lost or stolen, but the old man tells him nothing's lost or stolen—he'd kept it safe and now it's gone. Besides, he's asked around and it's happened to everyone. Like these things are just evaporating into thin air.

There's a mob around Jackie now, mostly folks who didn't make a purchase but who want to make trouble. Then a girl rushes in screaming hallelujah. “It's a miracle,” she says, how their boiler started working again after being deemed hopelessly kaput by every mechanic in Huttimer territory, and her pops thinks it had to be the little cog he bought from Jackie. Set it on the old boiler because there was nowhere else to put it. Then it vanished. Then the AC coughed to life.

Of course everyone's skeptical at first, but Jamie clears out his stock to replace the parts that vanished for his customers. When they get home naturally they figure what could it hurt and they put them on some busted machine or other. And in no time at all every dead device is back up and running; Jackie's little miracles, they're saying. And business booms.

One morning, after a fit so severe it wipes him out for the rest of the day, Jackie has a dream. In the dream he's still coughing. Sitting on a couch on the rooftop sixteen flights above his apartment. Surrounded by pigeons and antennas, flora outgrowing their pots, raw materials for a bridge someone intends to build between this roof and the one next door. He's on the couch hacking away, in his dream, and he can feel something lodged in his throat, loosening with each gasp. Takes a deep breath and slams those lungs like a bellows and out comes a long nylon rope, whipping up into the clouds. Seems no end to it, but he can feel it unraveling somewhere in his chest. Now he's in the desert and the great structure from his vision is nearly complete. The people building it are like little turtle men, no higher than Jackie's knee, each one hunched under their hardshell backpacks. The rope still uncoils from within, flying toward the sun. The turtle men watch and sing, keeping the whole system in motion. Their song sounds like a choir of sneezes, hiccups, and wheezes. The rope has latched in some outer orbit and it’s pulling the planet up and into the sun. He panics and opens his eyes.

A few weeks later, Jackie's got the most popular shop in the Dregs. He can't cough shit out fast enough to keep up with the demand. Which on the one hand is great because it drives prices up and now Jackie's rolling in it, but of course he can't exactly force himself to produce any faster or train other people to do what he does, so every day is basically angry mobs all the time fighting for their place in line. He stops going down to the market at all, takes cash up front, and has pieces delivered to clients by bicycle until one of his kids gets bikejacked and Jackie upgrades to some muscle and an armored rickshaw.

He avoids doctors and medicine. Requires bodyguards of his own after threats from the local mechanics guild. Jackie’s sure they’re the ones that sent him anonymous envelopes dusted with dextromethorphan and various antihistamines. He's starting to get word from the top, or somewhere near the top, or the mystery that may or may not be something like a top at all, that a man with his skills could be useful in a starship reclamation project. But he's not interested. “I'm too sick to travel,” he says. “Half the day now I'm in bed.”

He’s still dreaming all the time. Now the planet hurtles toward the sun with Jackie at the helm; feels like his intestines ripping out through his face. He bites down on the rope to relieve the ache in his chest. The earth flies headlong into searing heat. The desert's mechanical gyro whirls and grinds. He sees Gathox way down under a tower of milling flywheels and pressurized valves and a complex network of coiling cable and pipework. The clans of turtle people rejoice. Jackie can't fathom it. What's to rejoice about when it’s all moments away from crisping up like Tol Zhanda’s secret recipe for fried spiders? He can feel the heat sucking moisture out of his skin. It's all over, he thinks. Wakey wakey. Time to shine. But he doesn't. He starts slipping between consciousnesses, either to wake up or never wake again in any form but ash. He feels the rope tighten and his legs leap of their own volition. Bounding as high as a wish, but doesn't come down. Dislodged from the surface of the earth. The centripetal force thrusts the planet outward far, far past the pull of the sun. Jackie floats in the void, watching the blue sphere soar away like a marble from a sling or an interstellar cruiser aimed for forever.

Jackie no longer leaves his home. Every morning the cough brings pain, then a flowering light.

His apartment is empty and dark. He keeps no machinery here. One rug, a small couch for clients and visitors, and an open window for his entertainment.

At night the wild shouts and flickering shadows from the Kettle lull him to sleep. But he startles himself awake whenever he can manage it. He no longer finds pleasure in dreams.

Gathox Deities: The God Who Dreams In Pillars And Is A Boy

I thought it would be nice to highlight another deity this week: Dzak Molu, also called The God Who Dreams In Pillars And Is A Boy.

The God Who Dreams In Pillars And Is A Boy, or Dzak Molu - Many believe the young boy braced between two pillars in their dreams to be their spirit guide. Others who breathlessly wake with their bodies frozen, staring into the pupil-less eyes of a boy crouched on their chest, call him a demon. The Mi-Chiw believe he hides in the heart of stars and wish to build a ladder to him in the sky. Dzak-Molu fosters the trips of junkies and the dreams of amphibians. His favor is found in revelatory dreams and his scorn is felt in all deprivations. His image is that of a fiery child between two columns, and his passage is known by an acrid drip at the back of the throat.

Favor/ Disfavor: Favor can only be incidentally gained, through intense bouts of intoxication. A player has a 3% chance to gain favor during an altered state, which will allow a bonus of 1 point on both initiative and reaction rolls until they sober up. Disfavor is gained when that 3% chance is failed, in which the bonuses are reversed to penalties.

A Fresh Welcome to the Vertical Slum

 
For the last two and a half years I've been writing, designing, brainstorming, and running a home campaign called Gathox Vertical Slum. The first home campaign ran 48 sessions and featured a total of 17 different players. At first, I just wanted to run a cool sci-fi/fantasy mashup for my friends, but as time went on I realized that I wanted to publish the game. The pause on blog posts has been due largely to playing the game with friends, writing and rewriting parts of Gathox, and making art. Well, that and I moved across the country twice in a year . . .

This post is intended to introduce Gathox to folks that are new to the blog, to the community, or to me. If you haven't seen it, here's the first post I wrote about Gathox.

In Brief

Gathox is a wandering god with a city on it's back. The city is lousy with gangs and aliens, and it's where the players do their adventuring.

Gathox At A Glance

Gathox is a massive wandering godling, either mindless or inscrutable in motives, who travels across the wildernesses and wastelands of at least two dozen catalogued worlds. Sages of all stripes suspect that the godling may exist simultaneously on these worlds at different points in the universal timeline as well. Gathox finds sustenance on these worlds, sucking up dunes, woodlands, and small lakes into the half-kilometer wide maw at its rocky head, perpetually driven forward on more than a million humanoid legs. As the great beast moves, these legs regularly break off and decay where they rest, sprouting all manner of gourds and cucumbers within a fortnight.

Those who have approached Gathox from the front claim they can read the obscure lines of a face on the great rocky mound, its mouth agape in a perpetual wail, eyes turned upward. From a distance, Gathox appears to glide along the surface of the earth, lumbering forward at the pace of an elderly porter. Many who spy Gathox for the first time face difficulty believing that it lives, swearing it looks like nothing so much as a floating island hovering upside down.

A city, also called Gathox, grows on the sloped, mountainous back of the godling. This vast city is surrounded by a great, rocky wall like the rim of a caldera. Precarious stacks of tightly packed buildings sprout from the godling’s hind-quarters, increasing in size and sophistication as the city stretches toward the head of the god, ending in a massive spire which appears like a horn above the face of Gathox. Those who dwell within the city of Gathox often reverently refer to it as “The Great Spire,” although this can just as often refer to the actual Spire itself.

At first approach

Following in the wake of Gathox, wanderers encounter a variety of strange phenomena. Severed human legs in various states of decay adorn the ground, quickly spouting into fields of gourds regardless of the terrain. Piles of trash, exploded and often burning, punctuate the sides of a great concourse of footprints, as if a shoeless army had recently passed through the area. Travelers who follow the path of the city will eventually gain ground, spying first the Great Spire, then a protrusion of buildings, catapults, and lights.

As wanderers draw nearer, greenery can be seen to grow between buildings like weeds breaking through cracks in concrete. Numerous chimneys and industrial stacks spew acrid, oily clouds of pollution into the sky, leaving Gathox perpetually mired in a haze of particulates. Birds circle overhead, diving to the surface in turn, gradually growing more numerous as distant buzzards draw close to see what the fuss is about. Navigating near Gathox can be a chore, as the strength of the godling’s local magnetism causes compasses to point north toward its head. Those who wish to enter the city must do so from the low-sloping back end, which features an elongated metal ramp reaching to the earth which is also supported by human legs grafted to the underside.

What Gathox Does

Gathox uses Swords and Wizardry: White Box rules. There are subclasses of Fighters and Wizards, and no clerics - instead, players can opt to be Mutants as the third class. Players can engage in domain-level play from the first session by playing gangs. There's a ton of weird equipment, totally bizarre monsters, and plenty of debauchery and death to be found. Oh, and psychic powers. Because psychic powers are as rad as lasers. Did I mention there's lasers?

For The Table: A Militant, With Gear

Having previously posted this image to G+ to a very warm reception, I formally present to you "A Militant In Fine Form," with a full description of the highlighted gear to follow. This information will be published in Gathox Vertical Slum this spring. Feel free to use these bits at your table.

Specialty Gear

Chug Boots - These sturdy mechanical boots allow the wearer to bear larger loads, effectively increasing encumbrance slots by 3. While heavy, they provide little in the way of armor, and can be worn by any class. 250 gp.


Gutter Gills - This fish-like helmet provides air filtering for hostile environments, improving saving throws and CON checks against harmful airborne substances by 1 point. Swappable filters last 1 turn each. Additionally, the fish-like eye goggles built into the helmet provide a green filter that mitigates both bright and dark light, allowing 15’ vision in what would otherwise be blinding light or total darkness. 125 gp, 10 gp/filter; 1 encumbrance.


Karate Bandana - This mystic scrap of cloth provides 1 point of AC to the wearer and features a hard medallion in the center of the forehead, useful for headbutting. If the entire party wears Karate Bandanas, the resulting psychic communion allows the party +1 to group initiative. 40 gp each, ½ encumbrance.


Kneepads - these work-tough construction kneepads protect the wearer from a variety of patellar hazards, improving AC by 1 point and potentially mitigating some limb damage to the leg. 25 gp, 1 encumbrance.


Lungblade - This powerful weapon consists of a pneumatic upper body suit with a large, flexible air bladder on the back. A tube runs down the back of the wearer’s preferred weapon arm and into the base of an unsettlingly large hatchet or meat cleaver. The wearer’s natural body movements build up pneumatic pressure in the bladder, allowing any attack with the blade to explode damage on a natural damage roll of 6. This effect is stackable. 1d6 dmg, range M, 225 gp; mechanical failure on a natural To-Hit roll of 1, requiring 30% of cost to repair.


Polearm - This 8’-12’ long two-handed weapon has been generalized for multiple purposes, featuring a variety of spikes, blades, ball peens and hooks on the killing end. With a successful attack roll, any militant using the polearm may choose to roll a 1d6 separate from their damage roll; a result of 1 indicates the militant may use one of the implements at the end of the weapon to perform a combat stunt of their choosing, subject to GM fiat. 8 gp, 2 encumbrance.

Revolver - A classic weapon for settling scores and missing glass bottles on fenceposts, the timeless revolver holds six rounds and fits snugly in a hip or leg holster for your quickdraw convenience. 1d8 dmg, 45' range, 1 encumbrance, 60 gp. Ammo: 25 gp for 20 bullets.

Skull Belt - An essential bit of kit, the Skull Belt marks the wearer as a magnificent bastard while providing easy access to a variety of pouches, weapons, and bullets. AC bonus of 1. 40 gp, 1 encumbrance.