OSR: The Underground Economy

Typical dungeoncrawl resources I use:

HP: depleted by combat, exploration, etc. Healed by rations and rest.

Gold: why you're in the dungeon.

XP: 1:1 conversion with gold looted (but not earned). Makes you better at not dying.

Time: spent exploring, resting, preparing, or planning.

Light: oil/torches. Typically does not run low but limits exploration if absent.

Rations: healing and exploration ability.

Inventory Slots: problem-solving tools you can carry with you (from armour to rations). Can be filled by exhaustion, cold, madness, etc.

If I can build a class ability or a system or a challenge that uses only these resources, I will.

On the surface, rations and torches are cheap. The most common path is [time]+[light] => [gold] => [XP].

A fat, happy adventurer needs 2 rations per day: one at lunch (takes 1hr, heals 1d6+Level HP) and one at dinner (takes 1hr, if followed by 8hrs of sleep heals fully). This healing might seem generous, but injuries stick around, and it takes at least a day to go from negative HP back up to full.

The system above works well for classic adventuring, but it needs some adjustments for the Veins of the Earth.

Adapted from Tom Gauld's cartoon.

Meals and Deals

A full meal is likely to be rare in the Veins. There are 2 options if you have an abundance of food an time.

"Lunch" takes 1hr. Consumes 1 ration. Heals 1d6+Level HP. 

"Dinner" takes 1hr. Consumes 1 ration. If followed by 8hrs of sleep, heal fully.

You can only eat 1 formal HP-healing meal every 12 hours. If you've had a meal, excess rations consumed heal +1 HP per ration but require a Save vs Constitution with a penalty equal to the number of rations consumed. If you fail, vomit and lie in misery for 1d6 hours.

The Hungry/Starving/Dying track from Veins of the Earth applies (in a modified form).

Hungry: Default state. If you do not consume 1 ration every 3 days (as a meal or hastily devoured), move on to Starving.

Starving: Requires 2 rations to reset to Hungry. You gain no healing benefits from the rations. Every possible opportunity to get food that you do not take imposes a -1 penalty to all rolls. If you do not consume 1 ration in 3 days, move on to Dying.

Dying: Madness. Requires 3 rations to reset to Hungry and 1 ration to reset to Starving. No mechanical penalties carry over from Starving, but you will do anything to get food. Lose 1 level permanently for every 24hrs you spend in this state. No level = dead or worse.

Side Note: "Skerples," I hear you ask, "Patrick put in bonuses for eating opponents and hirelings. Why did you remove them?" 

Simple. My players feast on edible opponents anyway, even if they have plenty of food. Sandwiches are a common cause of death in my games. There's no need to encourage additional culinary experimentation. Also, I'm using my Monster Menu-All rules, which should be enough of a bonus.

Values in the Veins

Rather than using a calorie to gold to light conversion, I'm simplifying things by sticking to an abstracted Ration setup. Calories are listed for cross-compatibility with VotE. Currency values, as usual, use my currency system. 1gp = 10sp = 100cp, 1cp = $1 modern American = 1 ~1300s French denier. 

Creature	Accessible Calories	Sale Value	Rations
Cave Louse*	10	1cp	0.005
Cave Crab	200	2sp	0.1
Blind Rat	750	7sp	0.3
Medieval Chicken**	2,000	2gp	1
Small Person	60,000	60	30
Normal Person	100,000	100gp	50
Large Person	140,000	140	70
Medieval Cow	600,000	600gp	300
Wurm	3,000,000	3,000gp	1,500

*If you spend 1d10 days doing nothing but picking cave lice, you can get 1 ration. This might mean you starve to death.

**Medieval chickens were small and very stringy. I've seen estimates that put the total mass of all white meat on a medieval chicken at approximately one modern chicken breast.

Plant or Fungus	Accessible Calories	Sale Value	Rations
Cave Slime	0	0	0*
Fungoid	60,000	60	30
Troll Oil (0.1 L)**	-	3gp	1

*Cave slime provides no nutritional value, but it does provide some psychological comfort. If you are Dying and you spend 12hrs licking cave slime, you can permanently lose half your HP to reset to Starving (with a -5 penalty to all rolls).

**Troll oil is flammable and slightly alive. It counts as a ration and heals an additional 1d6 HP. Save. If you pass, no other effect. If you fail, you have 1d6 hours before you keel over, vomit up the oil, and take 2d6 damage. Other effects at the GM's discretion. It's temporary salvation.


Eyeballing It
These charts let me estimate the ration = gp = light ratio. 1hr of light is worth 1gp. A wooden torch worth 1cp on the surface is worth 1gp in the Veins... but meals are also more expensive.

1 Ration (any quality) = 1gp = 1 Hour of Light

For estimation purposes, multiply prices on my Medieval Price list by 100 if you're in the Veins.

That's right. A mouldy chicken breast in the Veins is worth $100 surface dollars. Life is hard and you're going to go broke very quickly.

Also, all food and money in the Veins loses value. Rations decay, get soaked, or get rubbed in dirt. Gold is heavy and weighs you down. Spend what you have quickly before it kills you.

H.R. Giger, the Vortex

The Invisible Hand

No, not that one.

The prices above assume:
-the trade is fair (both sides get something they want in exchange for a less desirable item)
-the trade is equal (nobody is threatened or the threats are balanced)
-both parties have a reason to continue a relationship after the trade

Imagine a meat-pie vendor named Starf-Meself-Loony Dibblah roving the Veins with his little cart. He sells dodgy meat pies (1 ration) for 1gp each.  He has jaunty red cap. You have a hollow eyes, a hollow stomach, and a hollow soul. You go up to him and:

1. Stab him and take all his meat pies.
2. Stab him, take his meat pies, and also eat him.
3. Give him 1gp, take a meat pie, then stab him, take your 1gp back.
4. Threaten him and take a meat pie.
5. ...
917. Pay 1gp for a meat pie and leave.

Poor Mr. Dibblah. He couldn't cut it in the Veins. It's a ruthless world. Nobody has a monopoly on force. There are no laws and no policemen (except, possibly, potentially, fleetingly, inside cities and villages).

But take another example. Now Mr. Dibbah has a crossbow, a serrated knife, a lantern, and a full belly. You've been starving for days. You can barely stand. He'll cut your throat as soon as look at you if you go for a pie without paying. He charges:

1. 1gp
2. 10gp
3. 1,000gp
4. Everything you can afford to give him, including your boots.
5. Everything you can afford to give him, including your boots, and one of your feet (it was rotting anyway) so he can make more pies.
6. Your life (more pies!)
7. ...

In the Veins, a thing is worth exactly what its purchaser will pay for it. When all forces are balanced, that's 1 ration = 1gp = 1hr of light.

When forces are not balanced, everything is either expensive, deadly, or free.

Mark Chilcott

But... Why?

Given the entry costs and ludicrous risks, why would any sensible party of adventurers bother going into the Veins? Leaving aside accidents, idiocy, and lies, what could possibly convince a surface creature - someone who likes three square meals a day and feather beds - to crawl down satan's gastrointestinal tract or live in Patrick Stuart's nightmares?

One word: loot.

Veins loot makes conventional dungeons look like a discount clothing warehouse after a fire sale, in a hyper-inflationary economy, right before the coldest winter on record. Your gold crowns and polished gems and magic wands are bent clothes hangers and ragged Snoopy t-shirts compared to the stuff in the Veins.

It will get to the point where gold is too heavy and too pointless to transport. Pouches of strange metals will adorn your back. You'll carry a sword that can cut a syllable in half but your face will be streaked with clay and muck. You'll cut your hair off and file your teeth into points, but you'll also find a machine that spins music into cloth. When - or if - you emerge, changed and warped, you will change the surface world forever. There are treasures in the Veins that are the seeds of empires.

OSR: The Olm, Part 2

Continued from here. More notes on Patrick Stuart's Olm.

Olm Villages

After a difficult climb or a disastrous fall, you find a cave with a smooth, polished floor. The walls have alcoves and sub-buildings. There are windows without glass. Streets, even, but more like alleys. Some doors are 5' off the ground, designed for creatures with long bodies and small limbs. Everything looks defensible. There's a central square that could hold a hundred people. The ceilings are never more than 10' high. You can hear water trickling somewhere.

You turn a corner and find three Olm hard at work cracking dungeon oysters. Two of them, the slightly smaller ones, flit away like a silk scarf tied to an arrow. The third holds the stone oyster knife cautiously, swaying slightly, sniffing the air.

If they heard you coming, this conversation will occur with the air and with echoes. The Olm won't show itself until it's sure it's got your measure. It tries a few questions first in the languages it knows. One of them might work. If not, it will keep stalling, trying to see what the PCs know and how many of them are present. It can read tone fairly well. It might even offer to share an oyster. It's buying time.

The second Olm comes back in a few minutes. If things are going well, there's now a second translator and set of languages.

If the PCs have something to trade or interesting questions, a third Olm shows up. If they have food and offer to share, a fourth and a fifth. As Peter Webb put it, "best place to store calories is their bodies". Olm slip out of the sump one by one, arriving secretly by a dozen hidden paths. The sump isn't exactly hidden, but casual visitors are discouraged. Poison is always a risk. An accidental visitor might wake up hundreds of Olm and be torn to shreds before they get a chance to explain anything.

The chart below lists how many Olm will show up for a given food offering. Drag a few dead bodies into the village and the Olm with throw a party.

	Accessible Calories	Sale Value	Rations	~# of Olm Appearing
Cave Crab	200	2sp	0.1	1
Blind Rat	750	7sp	0.3	1
Medieval Chicken	2,000	2gp	1	2
Person	100,000	100gp	50	10
Medieval Cow	600,000	600gp	300	50
Wurm	3,000,000	3,000gp	1500	200

Ok, this is an axolotl, but still!

Olm Parties

Caloric surplus is a reason to celebrate. If more than 20 Olm are awake and there's no reason to be alarmed and no urgent work to do, they'll start a party. Decorations (bells, fluttering banners) will come out from hidden storage chests. Young Olm (some as small as terriers) will be woken up to meet the outsiders.

Party Events

1. A swarm of juvenile Olm (2d6) sneak up on a PC and climb all over them, poking and asking questions and generally making dignity and diplomacy impossible.


2. Two young olm start doing a courtship dance in a corner where they think the elders can't hear them. The PCs can see it clearly. If they say anything, the two Olm will like, almost die of teenage embarrassment. Low-stakes shenanigans may be required to repair things. The elders could not give less of a fuck.


3. The PCs will be asked to describe surface food, cooking, and plants. The elders have tasted many things; they like to study trends. If you have any spices, the party gets raucous. The Olm don't like cooked meat. Cheese makes them bloated and apologetic.


4. An elder Olm, bones showing through stained-glass flesh, hands the PCs a stone cup full of liquor. The Olm trade for the raw ingredients and mature them for decades or centuries. They've got all the resources to maximize time and minimize cost. The liquor is astonishingly potent. If you have a carousing after-effects table, roll on it. A stone bottle would sell for 10,000gp on the surface - the secret to making it would be worth a king's ransom.


5. A drunk Olm warrior wants to wrestle one of the PCs. It's like wrestling a snake. It's not a status thing; the other Olm think the wanna-be wrestler is a bit of a blowhard. Nobody's going to get injured unless someone makes a mistake.


6. Circle dance! Lots of crooning, high kicks, tail flicks, and coordinated sine-wave undulations. Imagine a sea anemone squaredance. The PCs can't really join in (unless they have jelly spines and perfect timing). This might be a good time to sneak away or check a forbidden area.


7. A group of Olm bring a box of trinkets to the PCs and ask them to play a guessing game. They'll show an item and pass it around the assembled Olm (mostly young ones). The PCs will describe its colour. The Olm will pass another similar item around and try and guess its "colour" too, based on whatever spurious logic they choose to employ. 

E.g. "The tree-part was 'brown' so this tree-sphere is also 'brown'?"
"Ah, but the tree-part was long and pointy, while the tree-sphere is round, so it will be 'grey', like a stone."
"Can a thing be two colours mixed together?"
"Aaaah! You looked through the gem-stone and made me green! Am I still green?"

Some of the trinkets will be valuable (a ruby the size of a fist, occultum, etc.) There are Olm in the crowd who are listening very carefully. They'll hear if the PCs express surprise, or start breathing quickly, or reach for weapons, or pocket an item. It's an honesty test as well as a test of values. The Olm want to figure out how they can bribe you.


8. Etiquette lessons. A mature Olm rounds up any younger Olm and drags them towards the PCs. The PCs are asked to judge etiquette and surface-world knowledge. Some of it is woefully out of date; some is just lies. The mature Olm clicks its tongue in dismay as the youth make mistakes, invent tall tales, or ask silly questions... but it also makes mistakes.

"When you are presented before the snake-man Emperor, you should..."
"Bow... low?"
"Bow low? Crab-splinters, bow low? Surface-dweller, tell them. When you are presented to before the snake-man Emperor you should ensure your fingers are dipped in blood to the second joint! Correct? What do you mean the snake-men have been extinct for centuries?"


9. Warrior dance! Young Olm put on their ceremonial battle gear (fancy swords, gill-protectors, etc), while the older warriors assemble bones, leather, and feathers to make a costume-creature. The fight is for display; movements are elaborate, slow, exaggerated, and described in whistling tones. The crowd of Olm around the fight surges in and out like the sea, close enough to sense the action but just out of the way of the swords. If the PCs pay attention, they can learn about other creatures in the Veins.

10. A good-natured PC will be lead to a stone seat in the middle of a square. A crowd will gather. A crown made of dried cave coral and old silk will be placed on the PCs head. Two Olm will take turns singing a traditional love-ballad to the PC, trying to "woo" them. Everyone will find this absolutely hilarious. The centre of the ballad is traditionally something silly (a dead fish, an Olm who has outlived a dozen partners, etc.), but a confused surface-dweller just beats everything. Someone will translate for the rest of the party in between howls of laughter.

Olm comic-singing sounds like opera through a kazoo. If you have a kazoo and you can sing opera I encourage you to try it.

Olmec infant statue, 1200-900 BC

Loot and Trade Goods

1d4	Standard Weapons	Cost (Veins)	Value (Surface)	Damage	Notes
1	Bone weapon (light, medium, heavy)	2gp/6gp/10gp	-	standard	Light, not made from Olm bones.
2	Finger-Daggers	3gp	-	+2 to unarmed	A second set of razor-sharp claws.
3	Tail Dart	1gp	-	Extra attack	Requires expert training.
4	A Rock	-	-	30' range, 1d6+SB	Inaccurate but thrown with force.
1d4	Special Weapons	Cost (Veins)	Value (Surface)	Notes
1	Blood-Fountain Wand	50gp	30gp	30' cone of horror-movie blood.
2	Dormant Barnacle	50gp	5gp	Clay pot. Barnacle instantly adheres, slows swimming.
3	Bottled Spotlight Dog	-	1,000gp	Blinds and terrorizes. The Olm feel its magnetic buzz.
4	Limb-Snipper.	300gp	60gp	Adamant thread on a wood pole.

The Limb-Snipper has a -8 penalty to Attack if the target is aware or moving. On a hit, target must Save or lose a limb (or head).

1d4	Art Items	Cost (Veins)	Value (Surface)	Notes
1	Portable Stone Head	-	300gp	Heavy. Tells the same story over and over (in Olm)
2	Tactile Veins Map	600gp	-	Carved stone negative space map of local caves.
3	Jade Mask	600gp	20gp	No eye holes. Beautifully carved status symbol.
4	Wrestler Statue	1,000gp	4,000gp	Stone in fluid motion. Beautiful. Will start a revolution.

The Olm will trade minor items (jade or stone rings, carvings, etc.) for food at whatever value they think they can get away with. They won't trade war-trophies. They accept gold, gems, and occultum at enormously reduced value. They will not trade in silver, copper, paper, or anything else that can't endure total immersion for decades.

Dragons in Darkness, Tiffany Miller Russel

Olm Guide

If you pay 300gp in food (a dead person or half a cow) up front, an Olm might agree to escort you to a known location, provided the journey takes no more than 3 days. It will spend most of its time 100' ahead of the party, hidden in the darkness, listening and moving carefully.

Olm Religion

This is specific to my setting. Your mileage may vary.

The Olm are faithful to the Authority. They have little temples and situational offerings (statues of animals as proxy sacrifices). They don't elect priests, but local nobles or warlords might be given ceremonial roles. If you're interested in technical terms, the Olm are non-sacerdotal.They know of the dual Archpriests (via the slow grumbling of stone elementals) and think it doesn't concern them at all.

Olm believe in heaven and are reasonably sure they'll go there after death. Their vision of heaven is pleasant but not free of danger and trouble. It's not paradise. It's more like a family-run buffet in a good part of town. The Authority's laws are simple and obeying them is rarely as challenging as survival.

There are Olm angels and Olm demons. They are extremely weird. 

Things the Olm Don't Want To Discuss

Otherwise known as "secret plot seeds".

1. The Unspeakable Death

Vanishingly few Olm return as undead. They sleep most of their lives (from an objective pont of view). Death is just another kind of sleep. They aren't morbid or squeamish or prone to brooding. Rapid consumption of the dead also helps.

But if an Olm dies in a particularly tragic, brutal, or terrible way, with a curse on its lips and hate in its heart, it might rise again as a kind of vampire. The Olm have no words to describe how terrible this is. It's an unspeakable fear, like a gamma ray burst or a sudden aneurysm. Their culture has no vampire-hunters, no exorcists, no equipment or cultural tools to deal with a powerful undead and this is why; there are no survivors.

Just imagine how terrifying an Olm vampire would be in the Veins. It already moves nearly silently in water and air; now it can fly and climb like a spider. It can hear your heartbeat and smell your fear. It doesn't smell like anything. It can hide in a sump full of other thousands of other cold, silent, immobile Olm. It's the perfect predator. In the sump, it feasts.

By the time the other Olm figure out that something is kill them it's usually too late. A few might evacuate, carrying tales of some unknown disease or invader or spell. Paranoia and false leads draw them into further traps. In the end, the vampire Olm is alone.

It can't leave the now-deserted sump for more than a few hours. Something always calls it home. For a time, the rotting bodies of its victims will draw in fresh prey, but eventually the blood stops flowing. The vampire waits in the sump, cold, patient, buried in the bones that coat the floor. These ghost-villages are shunned for a reason. Olm wizards entomb them in living stone and blot their names from memory. They might be rediscovered. They might have forgotten something inside. There might be treasure in unlocked chests, just waiting for someone to stumble into the empty village and wander through the ice-cold sump.

Olm Vampire
HD: 6
Appearance: an Olm. Outsiders can't tell an undead Olm from a living one at a glance. It sometimes forgets to breathe.
Wants: to drink the blood and devour the marrow of living creatures.
Armour: none / as plate in water. Immune to non-magical, non-silvered weapons.
Move: 1.5x normal / 1.5x fly / 2x swim
Morale: 12
Damage: 1d6 claw/1d6 claw/ 1d8 bite. If max damage is rolled on any hit, roll another attack.

The vampire relies on stealth and speed. It has effectively perfect soul-vision up to 100'. It is next-to-invisible (Stealth 16) most of the time. It cannot leave its massacre-sump for more than 1hr at a time. It is cunning but not intelligent.

2. Tunnel to Hell

Hell is very real and much closer than you'd think. The Olm found a path down. The heard the screams and the flames. They will lead you there, for a price.

It might not be Hell itself. It could just be a nightmare city or something even stranger. The Olm want nothing to do with it.

3. Rebelllion

The Olm don't keep slaves. Their metabolism is very efficient; eating a captive and having an Olm do the work is more effective than feeding and guarding a slave. It's not altruism, it's pragmatism. And fungids tend to leak into the water supply.

For the same reason, the Olm make excellent slaves. There's a city in the dark somewhere with thousands of Olm working tirelessly. If they were liberated, there's no room in the sumps for them, and they don't have enough useful skills to be worth saving. The Olm leaders know this and it troubles them. The status quo is acceptable. A rebellion that destroyed both the city and its captive work force, leaving a power vacuum the outsider-Olm could occupy and thousands of corpses to eat, would be ideal. Can the PCs be "trusted" to "lead" a rebellion? Can they be convinced it was their idea?

4. Time Mine

There's a deposit of raw time somewhere in the Veins. It looks like asbestos and it's soluble in alcohol (makes sense, doesn't it?). The Olm are mining it very carefully with picks made of chalk and skin. They have thousands of litres of bottled time stored in thick stone casks. 

Olm change very slowly. Their generations are all stacked up; the gene pool is more like a bowl of spaghetti. They know this (they breed crabs and blind milipedes and have the lifespan to see out a hundred short generations.)

The first step was breeding Olm who can survive in a dilute solution of alcohol and water with no ill effects. It wasn't difficult.
The next step is building a perfect cave. They are almost done. It's a cathedral-fortress-prison-training chamber stocked full of every useful good and tool and environment.

Next, they will add specially selected Olm and liquid time. The generations inside the sump will pass like flip-book pages. Outside, time at a normal pace. Activity inside will be strictly regulated and mercilessly selective. Eventually, they are going to breed law-makers, seers, and poets by this method. But first they are going to breed warriors and take over the world.

This plan is insane, by the way. The Olm who developed it is insane. The results are going to be catastrophic. Liquid time doesn't work the way they think it does.

1d10	Liquid Time Effect (ingested, soaked, etc.)
1	Age 1d6 years
2	Age 2d10 years
3	Age 2d100 years
4	De-Age 1d6 years
5	De-Age 2d10 years
6	De-Age 2d100 years
7	Jittery and excitable for 1d10 hours
8	Languid and slow for 1d10 hours
9	No Effect
10	Time-Locked 2d100 years

Time-Locked characters cannot be affected by anything but cannot act. You could use them as building blocks or as shields. 

A given cask/bottle of liquid time has a 4-in-6 chance of having the same effect as the effect rolled if ingested/rubbed/injected into someone else. 

OSR: The Olm, Part 1

The Olm are a race from Patrick Stuart's Veins of the Earth setting/rules/black brick of why caves hate you. Since my PCs are probably going to run into them soon, I figured I'd write up some notes.

Olm, Scrap Princess

Major Features
-blind pink-white cave salamander people
-weird-sexy (the relevant sentence was expunged from the print version, presumably because it was too weird or not weird enough)
-slow metabolism, can chill out in cold water for centuries, waiting
-food and consumption as status symbols/cultural values. If they like you they'll eat you when you die.
-smart, but shaped by blindness, texture, and starvation

Since my PCs are all sorts of creatures, just making salamander-lings isn't enough. I'll need to play up the cultural and sensory strangeness. These guys got stuck in the Monster section instead of the Race section which seems like a shame, because there's not much directly gameable content provided. Peter Webb added a bit. Let's add some more.

Encountering the Olm

Walk through an underground stream.

Somewhere downstream, probably closer than you'd expect, there's an Olm. In a pocket of water no air-breathing caver would ever dare explore, it waits, metabolism ticking over slowly, red gills concealed behind a carved stone face shield. You could step on it and not see it. But it smells everything.

Think about adventurer's boots. What have they stepped in? What greases, oils, powders, dirts, mucks, and oozes will be washed downstream when they walk through a thin stream of water?

The Olm smells them. It wakes up in a few minutes, changing biological gears so fast it gets all jittery and have to swim in circles a few times before vanishing. It wakes up another Olm in a village-pocket, or sends a signal to them (by killing or crushing a pungent cave-crab, stone, etc.). It then scouts the PCs.

Surface creatures are enormously calorie-rich. They also die quickly in the caves. The newly-awakened Olm might not know what the PCs are, but it knows they are worth following, possibly dangerous, and probably sighted. It will follow them from a great distance by sound and smell. Unless the PCs have a light source that can illuminate >30' or some other supernatural senses, they probably won't know they are being followed.

When it figures out the PCs are intelligent and capable of conversation it will want to talk from a safe distance. Ideally, it will speak to them in an echoing cave, relying on acoustics and darkness to hide its true position.

Olm-Speak

The Olm know several languages. One of the main benefits of talking to people is that they can lead you to more food. Rapid language acquisition is heavily selected for. They all speak Elf (because not being able to speak Elf when an Elf shows up is very dangerous). For convenience, 1-in-6 of them speak the local language, and 4-in-6 speak a language a literate and educated PC might know (like Latin). They usually speak in archaic forms.

Maybe the the Olm sound like poets. "As cold water warms / spring rains fill the stone / and fish awake from their slumber. Why are you here?"

Maybe they speak in mangled but comprehensible grammar. Sentences end in nouns; the possessive is indicated by pronouns "What brings here these ones?". "How lost did the Elf his sword?"

They are polite and will try and draw out conversations if they can. They are curious about you. It costs them next to nothing to sit and talk.

Olm-Names

Long, complicated, difficult to translate. They invent shorter names for outsiders. The names don't mean anything. Spend a few years down here and you'll start to "get" them.
1. Cut-Three-Times
2. Wound-Ache-Leg
3. Dancer-Liar-Memory
4. Bent-Big-Stick
5. Rust-Cold-Egg
6. Bitter-Red-Lung

So A Weird Salamander-Thing Is Talking To You...

First things first. It wants to know how many of you there are. What are your names. It will tell you its name. It wants you to talk among yourselves; it can hear everything you say.

It can smell the blood on your hands and the stains on your pants. It might know what you've killed and eaten. It will try to determine if you are a threat.

Chances are pretty good the PCs will be above its pay grade. They'll use words it doesn't understand, offer things it can't authorize. It will need to report back. If it can, it will ask the PCs to wait in an area for a few hours (on any excuse), while it run/swims back to the Olm-village.

So A Bunch of Weird Salamander-Things Just Walked Out Of The Darkness...

It's an Olm war-party. They carry bone swords designed to pierce, not slash. A smooth under-arm stab designed to punch up and into the ribcage or up through the jaw and into the skull. How good is your helmet's chin-strap?

Way back, in another direction, sniffing the air, they've got a wizard and his guard.

They are here to talk and trade. Their leader is high status. It wears something the PCs recognize as important or status-designating. If there's time to change, the item will be something specific to the PCs. If they smell like they've fought an alkalion, it will have an alkalion tooth on a necklace. The leader-Olm might be a little startled or amused if the PCs recognize it from a distance without touching it, like you'd be startled if someone with X-ray vision commented on your underwear.

The PCs aren't trusted. Not even close. But they are curious and interesting and possibly useful. Chances are good they are naive. The Olm village has a problem. Maybe some sighted surface-dwellers can help. See Veins of the Earth for ideas.

So A Weird Salamander-Thing Ancestor-King Wants To Talk...

If the PCs prove useful, they will interact with several mid-level Olm from time to time. If they prove useful, loyal, and possible chivalric/romantic/selfless (running back to save an infant Olm from a ravenous swarm of scissorfish, telling a particularly interesting story, etc.) they might get to meet an Olm noble.

Political systems, seen from the outside, are often... quaint. The PCs probably have no concern for the intricacies of Olm politics. From their point of view, it fits the political structure they are most used to. If they're raving anarchists, it's a merit-based commune. If they were born into feudalism, it's feudalism. Etc. They can promise to be loyal to an Olm noble, but they will always be outsiders. They are a liability. They leave oily trails, eat too much, talk too much, and carry too much baggage.

The Olm can point towards several potential paths to the surface. They will never, ever tell the PCs unless there's a very good reason to. It's not worth the risk.

Personalities

Nervous/Angry Olm
1. Flexing and unflexing fingers
2. Bright red gills, drawing in extra air.
3. Tail held off the ground, moving very slowly from side to side.
4. Holding breath, analyzing your smell, to make sure it has your measure.

Happy Olm
1. Wiggles in a side-to-side sine wave.
2. Big yawn, showing off all the teeth, popping the jaw muscles.
3. Little chuffing breaths to show it isn't holding in or analyzing your smell.
4. Tail curled around one of its legs.

Comfortable/Curious Olm
1. Little pink tongue cleaning its needle teeth.
2. Touching you or your belongings very carefully, like someone playing a lullaby on a piano.
3. Curling its tail around one of your legs.
4. Retracted gills (it doesn't anticipate a threat), or slowly flaring them (is it warm in here or is it just me?)

Olm Wizards

They put their spells in gems, veins of quartz, the skulls of dead Olm wizards, or the teeth of very magical creatures. They don't write spells down, but whisper them too and from their homes. Their spells are allies. Some are primordial. Olm make poor wizards. Their biology can't handle consistent magic use. It makes them sterile, grey, and slow. It's a path an Olm chooses out of necessity or tradition.

Most of their spells are elemental: water and stone are potent allies underground. Many Olm wizards sit in rivers and listen to the stories the water tells. They learn languages and secrets. Water is fond of them. Other spells let them move through stone as if it were water, freeze water into ice, or track a soul over great distances.

Typical Olm Wizard Spell List

1. Control Water
2. Control Stone

3. Bone Dart
R: 100' T: creature D: 0
Target creature with bones that the Olm can smell takes [dice] damage and must Save or be knocked prone. A bone dart made from a sliver of the creature's own bone bursts from their flesh. This may make the creature easier to track.

Esoteric Olm Spells

4. Water Knife
R: touch T: underwater creature D: [sum] rounds
Water forms into a deadly edge along the target's hands, tail, and weapons. The target gains +1 attack per round and deals an additional [dice] damage on a hit.

5. Catastrophe Orb
R: 50' T: point D: [dice]x2 rounds
A fat jelly-like orb flies from the caster's mouth and bursts at a point they choose or fairly close to it. The orb releases a series of horrible smells, loud noises, and distressing winds. Conversation, smell-sensing, etc. is impossible within a 30' radius of the origin. Olm are effectively blind and must make a Morale check each round or flee.

6. Tactile Illusion
R: 50' T: point D: [dice] hours
An illusion appears. It is made of transparent green-grey glass and flickers slightly. It has a convincing smell, taste, and texture, but it cannot move or make sounds. It can survive [sum] points of damage. The maximum size of the object depends on how many dice are invested in the spell: 1 [dice]: human-sized, 2 [dice]: ogre- or wagon-sized, 3 [dice]: dragon- or tavern-sized, [dice]: ship- or bridge-sized. The Olm will use this to try and illustrate surface concepts, creatures, or events the PCs describe.

Olm Plot Seeds

1. These Olm are protected by a Yellow Dragon. The Olm keep the dragon informed of any underground events that might threaten its bank-lair. In return, the dragon keeps several Olm elders banked in ice-cold water, along with other valuables of their race. Something has gone awry. A thief escaped into the veins, and the Olm need assistance tracking it.

2. An ambitious Olm wants to find a better source of food. They want the PCs to set up a surface colony and ship protein underground. The Olm proposing the scheme doesn't really understand the surface world or the long-term consequences of their plan. They also don't know what the PCs value; most of the plot will be them trying to find out what they really value on the surface. Gold is too easy an answer; it can't be right.

3. These Olm have heard of spells that can call up dead spirits into true life, not the half-existence of a skull saint (VotE p.312) or a stone head. They can barely conceptualize the idea of coming back to life, but there's a secret so important that it can't rest with someone who died accidentally and can't be raised by any means known to the Olm. Raised Olm are ravenously hungry.

4. Something poisonous fell into the Olm-sump. The Olm are evacuating as quickly as they can. They can't go near the thing (smell-tasting it is the same as dying because of it). Can the PCs help? The item is a nega-meteroid from the Undersun. Probably bad news.

Olm Stats As PCs

Reroll: Wis
Bonus: Can breathe water and and air. Can smell/hear as well as someone can see (50' default). AC as plate in water.
Weakness: Blind. Cannot wear most armour. Dry out in air (GM's discretion as to duration).

Olm have their black sheep and wanderers like any other race. Would one risk a horrible death on the surface just to feel the warmth of the sun or the sound of rain? And if one returned, would it not be a glorious triumph, a vast expansion of the knowledge of the colony?

Olm Caves

Their cities, and their creepy floating no-face alien sumps, are underwater. They aren't easy to find. But there are some things you can't do underwater. You've been lead to or stumbled across:

1. An Olm-sump with an ever-living plant.

2. The Cave of Faces
Every wall and fold is carved into a face. Olm-faces, smooth and featureless, with stylized gill-ruffs. Human faces, strange and distorted. Animal faces. Strange, asymetric faces. The floor is carved with channels to draw water away from the precious carvings.The Cave of Faces stores many secrets. They are guarded by olm-goyles.

If you carve stone carefully, it can take on the personality of the things it represents. A statue of a horse might forget it was stone and start thinking it is a horse. Depending on how much the sculptor knew of horses, and how much of their own soul they invested in the carving, the statue could behave exactly like a horse... or like some sort of weird bendy hoofed jellyfish thing.

The Olm are expert sculptors. If memorializing someone by storing their skull in a place of honour isn't enough, there is a final tier of honour. They will only do this if you are dying, willing, and full of useful secrets and advice. The sculptor paralyzes you with the venom of a cave scorpion and eats you from the outside in. This takes several days. As they eat, they chisel your face into the wall of the cave. If everything works, by the time they've eaten most of your brain, your soul has started to migrate into the carved face. You'll rest there, sleeping, not quite stone but not quite alive, until you are called.

3. Diving Pool
A tall cave with a deep steep-sided pool. Young Olm climb up the stairs and dive. Falling through the air is exhilarating. They twist and wheel and flail their limbs before vanishing into the water. It's a waste of time and calories, but everyone was young once. The PCs might be asked to describe what a falling Olm looks like or to watch for threats. Or they could blunder in, have a weird blind salamander-thing fall into the water next to them, and start a proper panic.

4. Ambush Gallery
A long series of low, broad caves. Stone walls carved into sine-wave curves, scraped white. Like crawling through car park wallpapered in giant ramen noodle packets. The waves conceal the Olm; they can hunt sighted creatures here even if the creatures have light and anticipate an attack. What's rock and what is Olm? Who can say?

How Do The Olm See You?

To an Olm, a human is 
-short
-old (small head, sagging skin)
-covered in grease and foulness
-and hair. Eww. It's on me! Oooh, it tickles! Aaah, it's in my gills! Ack ack ack.
-teeth like broad plates
-a bendy face-lumps (they are very curious about noses and ears)
-moist face-dents for seeing
-lumps all over (breasts, kneecaps, elbows)

A human, as an Olm would "see" it.

Humans breath like someone in pain, even if they are trying to be quiet. They have a silly walk. If an Olm wants to walk like a human, it will splay its legs out like a cowboy and bounce up and down, wheeling its arms around. Swimming is even worse - humans don't use their bodies at all!

Fingers are weird too (five? why so many?). Clothes are weird but comprehensible (Olm use armour, display items, and belts when they need to.) Sexual dimorphism is exciting and convenient (Olm can tell via smell, but part of courtship is checking just in case.)

Sex is confusing. They will want to listen, possibly to touch. Their way involves a lot more dancing and a little lump of material on a jelly stem. Humans can manage the dancing part fairly well; some adventurous Olm might have ideas of what to use as jelly stem. But they'd have to be a very adventurous Olm; humans see them as smooth-skinned, graceful, elegant, and dangerous. They see humans as a kind of goblin. Might be exciting and transgressive (you can smell your partner on you after you're done! What a scandal!). Might just be too weird to consider. Olm form partnerships, fall in love, and made stupid drunk decisions like everyone else.