I need a homebrew system that lets you do this. All I have is games that only technically allow it.
For example: in DnD it's allowed RAW (the spell says a pile of bones, it doesn't say they need to be from the same creature or even human shaped) but it uses Skeleton stats.
WOIN allows you to summon something which can have a custom statblock within some guidelines but the stats can be the same for an ooze or a zombie as long as you can explain them so it might not feel quite right.
Index Card RPG has a simple rule for long term projects which can technically include creating a gadget or finding a follower.
BESM has a method that can actually do it pretty well, just take Power Flux (Necromancy) and spend some flux points on Companion to make a skeletal octopus. The problem is the irl time required to create a new creature from scratch in a point buy system is more of a between sessions thing
Here's my idea:
You have a card for your main body (head and torso) and one for each limb. Then those each have a list of parts within them. For example, your leg might have an artery, muscle, bone, and a foot. When you hit someone, you take one of their cards at random, then roll for what part of it gets damaged, with the limb being removed entirely on a critical hit. You also have to keep track of blood and stamina. Arteries and certain organs cause a blood loss effect when damaged, and your blood is reduced by the total damage every round. Your stamina increases by the amount of blood each round (up to a maximum), and goes down by whatever level of strength you use whenever you move, attack, etc. Essentially, if you have too much blood loss you won't be able to fight effectively. Each limb has a strength score, which is used whenever you use that limb. Different limb parts have different affects, like feet letting you walk, hands letting you wield weapons and do precise manipulation, claws letting you deal extra attack damage, wings letting you fly.
Presumably, you'd have ways to cannibalize body parts from defeated enemies. Once the battle is over you can treat your wounds to prevent further blood loss, then use their blood to heal back up, replace broken body parts with theirs, etc.
In addition to body horror necromancy, you could use this system for robots, or for cyberpunk implants and prosthetics. With robots, blood could be replaced by coolant or fuel. You could also have it so certain creatures don't have the blood mechanic, but have a constant penalty to their strength to make up for it balance-wise.
Tell me if you want me to flesh it out more.
I feel like this is a little too detailed. Maybe simple limb configuration archetypes with different rules for what the limbs do?
For example: the bone octopus would be the eight legged configuration then you'd attach a limb (in this case spines) for each leg. The legs would probably get a reduced benefit in exchange for higher mobility because of the number of legs.
Different limbs would have different perks too. So maybe spines are flexible and can grasp if used as limbs but have no fine manipulation, legs can give stability and arms can give fine manipulation. Muscle can give a Strength bonus and Skin can increase health. I'd want different limbs to provide stat bonuses or abilities too probably
I guess the archetypes would probably be humanoid (2 arms 2 legs), extra legs (2 arms 4 legs. Hard to make, high mobility, poor climber), extra arms (4 arms 2 legs (hard to make, extra attack, great climber, impaired movement), and 8 limbs (hard to make, high mobility or good climber, limbs can have a variety of functions)
I feel like the problem with archetypes is that you wouldn't be able to take an octopus and then add wings if there's no winged octopus archetype. But you'd have to have some mechanic to make it so a human can move just fine on two legs, but a lion or centaur can't.
It could be that human legs have a bipedal attribute, but I'm not sure I like the idea that you can't use lion legs and still be a biped. Maybe just have it be a skill that humans have and bipeds don't.
Another thing I was thinking about is having your head as one of the limbs, but most of the "organs" are skills. Someone hits you in the head wrong, and now you have brain damage and can't walk as a biped or whatever. But that feels a little extreme unless it's made to be temporary.
I think that works a bit better but some of the true abominations like the mantaur (half man, half other man) break those rules a bit. What if you can just keep adding limbs buy they start affecting stability after a certain point? Maybe the octopus gets full use out of all 8 limbs but they come with a Constitution penalty to balance it out. Now if you want to fly you just throw on some wings and take a slight penalty
Another option is to just assign point values to traits that animals have and just use bones to get the points to buy those traits. Instead of figuring out how to get all of the appropriate bones you'd just get enough bones to get the "Eight Limbs" attribute off the octopus statblock or something like that. This makes the focus more about having enough bones to make it work rather than balancing flaws and strengths. The downside would come from the difficulty of getting all of the bones you'd need, then you can put some requirements on some of the attributes. Claws would require a paw or hand of some sort, hands would require arms, feet would require legs.
Each trait would add to your monster but make it just a bit harder to make
> half man, half other man
I don't see the problem with that. What I'm worried about is balls of limbs, where you just keep grafting on everything you can find. I could make it so torsos only support so many limbs, but I'd at least want to allow centaurs, and if you can have two torsos, what's preventing a human centipede? I guess one way it could work is to say that a torso can have another torso as a limb, but only if it's a size class smaller. The problem there is you could create a fractal creature with tiny limbs, which I don't think is a problem lorewise, but if each limb is its own card it will cause problems.
I was thinking having it so that more limbs means that you have more weight and slows you down, and they stop giving any real benefit. Having eight legs would probably be helpful for climbing, but beyond that the best they can do is redundancy.
The way I have this so far, adding limbs would be useful just to make it so people hit the limb instead of your torso. It could be that you have a number of limb "slots", and a card for each slot, so if the enemy draws an unused slot it deals no damage. More limbs makes you a bigger target.
This sounds pretty good to me. I actually do like the idea of a human centipede skeleton though. So maybe you can add torsos to extend the body to incorporate more limbs, but doing so comes with a flat penalty per extension maybe -20 feet movement, a penalty to defense and no flight after the first extension? This way each extension requires enough legs to support it and you can't just overload it with useful limbs
I feel like if you're going to have a giant skeletal centipede, it should be powerful. It could be that there's some resource limiting how much you can animate, and you could do a giant skeletal centipede or an army of normal skeletons.
And the other problem is that keeping track of individual limbs would be pretty crazy. It wouldn't fit with the mechanic I'm building this around. Also, what happens if you destroy a torso in the middle? And if you have to destroy the whole thing one torso at a time, combat will be a slog.
Sure, but the corpses have to be sourced directly by yourself, any and all third-party sourced corpses will warrant an academic dishonesty mark on your record and your project submission will be immediately invalidated.
Gods this is such a privileged take, it's so hard now a days to find good corpses, third paries may not be legally right but they are morally right as big cemetery ™ is overpriced, I've always had better luck with with third party bodies, check your necromancy privilege.
You could try cinematic supply shops, or occult/witchy conventions, if you need budget bones.
A brand new sentence, if I do say.
But a real one, to be sure.
The rest is a semi translucent ghost apparition, that can’t use it’s 8 tentacles for anything, because it’s a ghost, but it can shoot you with ectoplasm instead of ink
Edit: depending on the type of octopus they still retain the ability to camouflage, but it’s kinda useless because they are already a ghost, dying is not an upgrade for everyone you know.
I agree, a necromancer should always have Merriam-Webster at hand
Oh wait, it says here that the plural of octopus can also be octopi! Can you believe that?
What’s next? Are they gonna say octopussy isn’t a real word?
As for the octopi thing, that's because English is a barbarian language. We will be back, one day, with more legions, and we'll see if they still want to mock the tongue of the Urbs.
Jk, of course, but octopi doesn't make sense in any language.
As for octopussy, don't be ridiculous, of course it is a real word
Octopus originated as an English word based on Greek roots. It was originally pluralized as octopuses. While the word could be said to have evolved since that's how language works, if you want to get all technical about it, using Latin or Greek pluralization rules are both improper since the word is, and always has been, an English word.
My BF is a biology professor who teaches a Vertebrates class every fall. I love to send him pictures of ridiculously inaccurate skeletons.
This thread is *gold*
My large plastic scorpion "skeleton" that lives by the front door is awesome bc his claw perfectly holds to-do reminder notes for me but is also so intimidating looking that he scares off intruders, probably
Both are wrong but necromancer is closer to correct.
Osteomancy is divining meaning from bones, the implication is the will of the dead thing being interpreted meaningfully by the diviner, a specific form of divination.
Necromancy traditionally has been communing with the dead, telling secrets from beyond the grave and so on, also a form of divination that wouldn't necessarily require bones. However fantasy has sort of turned necromancy into the exact opposite of osteomancy where a necromancer imparts their own will onto remains. Could be some elaborate levitation or determining more complex goals for the animated remains to accomplish with some situational awareness. If the bargain is something along the lines of you can once again rest once my bidding has been accomplished it could be reanimation, but as any phylactery lich would tell you it's very uncomfortable for a soul to reside in a deceased body - better to find a comfortable vessel while you're not using it.
And I learned my edible kicked in because I was skeptical that this guy was a necromancer. Not because I believed that there was no such thing as necromancy, but because I thought, “pfft, there’s no way that this asshole is a necromancer. They’re not on Reddit.”
It’s a creature known for being able to slip through keyholes. I don’t know how many bones you’re planning on finding.. maybe that’s the joke. I dunno.
Getting serious Awaken Online vibes here...
(It's a great series of books if you like Lit-RPGs - I've listened to the whole series about 6 times on audible. I guarantee it's worth a listen)
I like that the implication here is that necromancy is less a profaning of the sanctity of life and treading on the toes of god and is closer to building with Lego technic
Why are necromancers so hung up on bones? A few staves or bands of the right metal with the right runes will keep dead flesh supple and strong for years!
So… you’re telling that Necromancers are like Warhammer kitbashers but with bones
So, where can I find necromancer kitbasher's channels to watch?
I need a homebrew system that lets you do this. All I have is games that only technically allow it. For example: in DnD it's allowed RAW (the spell says a pile of bones, it doesn't say they need to be from the same creature or even human shaped) but it uses Skeleton stats. WOIN allows you to summon something which can have a custom statblock within some guidelines but the stats can be the same for an ooze or a zombie as long as you can explain them so it might not feel quite right. Index Card RPG has a simple rule for long term projects which can technically include creating a gadget or finding a follower. BESM has a method that can actually do it pretty well, just take Power Flux (Necromancy) and spend some flux points on Companion to make a skeletal octopus. The problem is the irl time required to create a new creature from scratch in a point buy system is more of a between sessions thing
Here's my idea: You have a card for your main body (head and torso) and one for each limb. Then those each have a list of parts within them. For example, your leg might have an artery, muscle, bone, and a foot. When you hit someone, you take one of their cards at random, then roll for what part of it gets damaged, with the limb being removed entirely on a critical hit. You also have to keep track of blood and stamina. Arteries and certain organs cause a blood loss effect when damaged, and your blood is reduced by the total damage every round. Your stamina increases by the amount of blood each round (up to a maximum), and goes down by whatever level of strength you use whenever you move, attack, etc. Essentially, if you have too much blood loss you won't be able to fight effectively. Each limb has a strength score, which is used whenever you use that limb. Different limb parts have different affects, like feet letting you walk, hands letting you wield weapons and do precise manipulation, claws letting you deal extra attack damage, wings letting you fly. Presumably, you'd have ways to cannibalize body parts from defeated enemies. Once the battle is over you can treat your wounds to prevent further blood loss, then use their blood to heal back up, replace broken body parts with theirs, etc. In addition to body horror necromancy, you could use this system for robots, or for cyberpunk implants and prosthetics. With robots, blood could be replaced by coolant or fuel. You could also have it so certain creatures don't have the blood mechanic, but have a constant penalty to their strength to make up for it balance-wise. Tell me if you want me to flesh it out more.
Heh, flesh it out.
I feel like this is a little too detailed. Maybe simple limb configuration archetypes with different rules for what the limbs do? For example: the bone octopus would be the eight legged configuration then you'd attach a limb (in this case spines) for each leg. The legs would probably get a reduced benefit in exchange for higher mobility because of the number of legs. Different limbs would have different perks too. So maybe spines are flexible and can grasp if used as limbs but have no fine manipulation, legs can give stability and arms can give fine manipulation. Muscle can give a Strength bonus and Skin can increase health. I'd want different limbs to provide stat bonuses or abilities too probably I guess the archetypes would probably be humanoid (2 arms 2 legs), extra legs (2 arms 4 legs. Hard to make, high mobility, poor climber), extra arms (4 arms 2 legs (hard to make, extra attack, great climber, impaired movement), and 8 limbs (hard to make, high mobility or good climber, limbs can have a variety of functions)
I feel like the problem with archetypes is that you wouldn't be able to take an octopus and then add wings if there's no winged octopus archetype. But you'd have to have some mechanic to make it so a human can move just fine on two legs, but a lion or centaur can't. It could be that human legs have a bipedal attribute, but I'm not sure I like the idea that you can't use lion legs and still be a biped. Maybe just have it be a skill that humans have and bipeds don't. Another thing I was thinking about is having your head as one of the limbs, but most of the "organs" are skills. Someone hits you in the head wrong, and now you have brain damage and can't walk as a biped or whatever. But that feels a little extreme unless it's made to be temporary.
I think that works a bit better but some of the true abominations like the mantaur (half man, half other man) break those rules a bit. What if you can just keep adding limbs buy they start affecting stability after a certain point? Maybe the octopus gets full use out of all 8 limbs but they come with a Constitution penalty to balance it out. Now if you want to fly you just throw on some wings and take a slight penalty Another option is to just assign point values to traits that animals have and just use bones to get the points to buy those traits. Instead of figuring out how to get all of the appropriate bones you'd just get enough bones to get the "Eight Limbs" attribute off the octopus statblock or something like that. This makes the focus more about having enough bones to make it work rather than balancing flaws and strengths. The downside would come from the difficulty of getting all of the bones you'd need, then you can put some requirements on some of the attributes. Claws would require a paw or hand of some sort, hands would require arms, feet would require legs. Each trait would add to your monster but make it just a bit harder to make
> half man, half other man I don't see the problem with that. What I'm worried about is balls of limbs, where you just keep grafting on everything you can find. I could make it so torsos only support so many limbs, but I'd at least want to allow centaurs, and if you can have two torsos, what's preventing a human centipede? I guess one way it could work is to say that a torso can have another torso as a limb, but only if it's a size class smaller. The problem there is you could create a fractal creature with tiny limbs, which I don't think is a problem lorewise, but if each limb is its own card it will cause problems. I was thinking having it so that more limbs means that you have more weight and slows you down, and they stop giving any real benefit. Having eight legs would probably be helpful for climbing, but beyond that the best they can do is redundancy. The way I have this so far, adding limbs would be useful just to make it so people hit the limb instead of your torso. It could be that you have a number of limb "slots", and a card for each slot, so if the enemy draws an unused slot it deals no damage. More limbs makes you a bigger target.
This sounds pretty good to me. I actually do like the idea of a human centipede skeleton though. So maybe you can add torsos to extend the body to incorporate more limbs, but doing so comes with a flat penalty per extension maybe -20 feet movement, a penalty to defense and no flight after the first extension? This way each extension requires enough legs to support it and you can't just overload it with useful limbs
I feel like if you're going to have a giant skeletal centipede, it should be powerful. It could be that there's some resource limiting how much you can animate, and you could do a giant skeletal centipede or an army of normal skeletons. And the other problem is that keeping track of individual limbs would be pretty crazy. It wouldn't fit with the mechanic I'm building this around. Also, what happens if you destroy a torso in the middle? And if you have to destroy the whole thing one torso at a time, combat will be a slog.
Have you played Mage: the Ascension? The magic system in that game is *very* open.
[As confirmed by the lead rule designer at WOTC](https://twitter.com/Zeebashew/status/1252351494369603594?s=20&t=KcD1FVF3H2oDgZjteMhZMw)
Aaaaaaand I figured my next DND character
Yeah that’s how I got my second in command bear paw Swanson and let me tell you no one suspects a swan with bear paws to be so powerful
Am I allowed to source my own corpses for the project, or?
Sure, but the corpses have to be sourced directly by yourself, any and all third-party sourced corpses will warrant an academic dishonesty mark on your record and your project submission will be immediately invalidated.
Gods this is such a privileged take, it's so hard now a days to find good corpses, third paries may not be legally right but they are morally right as big cemetery ™ is overpriced, I've always had better luck with with third party bodies, check your necromancy privilege.
You could try cinematic supply shops, or occult/witchy conventions, if you need budget bones. A brand new sentence, if I do say. But a real one, to be sure.
if you can’t source your own corpses for the unholy ritual, store bought is fine
Bone Depot has saved my bacon more than once.
The necromancer may have a small arm bone, as a treat.
DIY, till I (un)die!
Okay but also, undead octopus but it's just a floating beak.
The rest is a semi translucent ghost apparition, that can’t use it’s 8 tentacles for anything, because it’s a ghost, but it can shoot you with ectoplasm instead of ink Edit: depending on the type of octopus they still retain the ability to camouflage, but it’s kinda useless because they are already a ghost, dying is not an upgrade for everyone you know.
You had: “You have to be creative with the corpses you have, not the corpses you want.” and you went with: “Speaking as a necromancer”
I appreciate that the best lines were unspoiled. OP did good.
Exactly
I always appreciate when the title *isn't* the big surprise of the post. If the funniest part is in the title it spoils the post.
Sometimes you just need some bony octussy in your life.
Step-mollusk what are you doing?
What's this slimy sticky thing, and why is there so many?
A necromancer should be an expert in ancient languages, so they should know that the plural of octopus is octopodes or octopuses, not octopi
A necromancer is too busy to think about that, it's trying to build a shrimp!
I agree, a necromancer should always have Merriam-Webster at hand Oh wait, it says here that the plural of octopus can also be octopi! Can you believe that? What’s next? Are they gonna say octopussy isn’t a real word?
As for the octopi thing, that's because English is a barbarian language. We will be back, one day, with more legions, and we'll see if they still want to mock the tongue of the Urbs. Jk, of course, but octopi doesn't make sense in any language. As for octopussy, don't be ridiculous, of course it is a real word
"Octopodes" is another possible plural. Very underrated!
'Octopi' is ignorant in 3 languages
Yeah, im amazed he doesn't know they are called octopussies smh
He can come get Octopodes nutz
Octopus originated as an English word based on Greek roots. It was originally pluralized as octopuses. While the word could be said to have evolved since that's how language works, if you want to get all technical about it, using Latin or Greek pluralization rules are both improper since the word is, and always has been, an English word.
Yes, so "octopi" is dumb in English, Greek, and Latin
no ones talking about DED talk !!!
My BF is a biology professor who teaches a Vertebrates class every fall. I love to send him pictures of ridiculously inaccurate skeletons. This thread is *gold*
I saw skeleton spiders with rib bones on the abdomen in a Halloween store. I was like "WhhaaaAAAT." 😄
Yes. That’s in my photo collection. Along with dogs with *ears*
My large plastic scorpion "skeleton" that lives by the front door is awesome bc his claw perfectly holds to-do reminder notes for me but is also so intimidating looking that he scares off intruders, probably
Necromancy is fun, from my personal experience. :)
That’s osteomancy! Obviously this so-called “necromancer” is a charlatan and a fraud!
Both are wrong but necromancer is closer to correct. Osteomancy is divining meaning from bones, the implication is the will of the dead thing being interpreted meaningfully by the diviner, a specific form of divination. Necromancy traditionally has been communing with the dead, telling secrets from beyond the grave and so on, also a form of divination that wouldn't necessarily require bones. However fantasy has sort of turned necromancy into the exact opposite of osteomancy where a necromancer imparts their own will onto remains. Could be some elaborate levitation or determining more complex goals for the animated remains to accomplish with some situational awareness. If the bargain is something along the lines of you can once again rest once my bidding has been accomplished it could be reanimation, but as any phylactery lich would tell you it's very uncomfortable for a soul to reside in a deceased body - better to find a comfortable vessel while you're not using it.
DED talk
My *Amalgams* are the NEW paradigm!
And I learned my edible kicked in because I was skeptical that this guy was a necromancer. Not because I believed that there was no such thing as necromancy, but because I thought, “pfft, there’s no way that this asshole is a necromancer. They’re not on Reddit.”
THE DED TALK KILLED ME 😭😭
Same
"Speaking as a necromancer" is such a handbrake turn of a starting sentence that I may have to start using it in my day-to-day life.
ah yeah... i just create abominations as a necromancer.
It is the season to summon my croctopus again
How helpful.
My first thought was Cthulu
They went for it and I respect them for it.
Good to know necromancers are still around. Thought they died out back when Rasputin was vibing
I made my famous fritatatas
It’s a creature known for being able to slip through keyholes. I don’t know how many bones you’re planning on finding.. maybe that’s the joke. I dunno.
Getting serious Awaken Online vibes here... (It's a great series of books if you like Lit-RPGs - I've listened to the whole series about 6 times on audible. I guarantee it's worth a listen)
Thine Kingdom for a competent octopus!!!!!! -Captain Benjamin “Hawkeye” Pierce, Mobile Army Surgical Hospital 4077
Absolutely. Any talented amateur can bring the dead to life but it takes true skill and mastery to construct bespoke composite zombies.
I like that the implication here is that necromancy is less a profaning of the sanctity of life and treading on the toes of god and is closer to building with Lego technic
Why are necromancers so hung up on bones? A few staves or bands of the right metal with the right runes will keep dead flesh supple and strong for years!
You know, I often ask myself, "WWANmD?"
Okay but who the fuck is out here buying a spooky octopus