Depths, O Fathomless Depths (GLOG Class: Drowned)

 This post is a collaboration with the very cool Archon’s Court! 

The Drowned are the saltwater priest-servants of Sithica, a goddess who they claim is both Drowned, and the Sea itself. Some impolitely call them Dregs. 

They are a rare and unpopular clergy, found in the great fleets of the Escarians, or hidden in seaside towns. Sithica demands tribute, and it is the role of her Drowned to secure it for her - in prayer, blood or gold. 

Some say her great and monstrous carcass lies in the Obsidian Deep, the lowest point of Aclas’ seas. 

Who? Why, the Drowned. 

THE DROWNED

+1 HP and +1 MD per Template. 

Items: Heavy bronze disc, hooked knife, net, 50ft of rope, grey robes, pistol and 10 bullets.
Skills: 1) Navigation 2) Law 3) Stealth 4) Theology (Not Yours) 5) Repair 6) Foraging

A - Drowned, Cold Grasp, Drowned Mother’s Blessings

B - Salt Oath 

C - Adaptation

D - Waterlogged

+

Δ - Descent 

Drowned

You had to die in the sea to receive Sithica’s favour - head held beneath the water by your teacher.

You don’t need to breathe, and your eyes, with their unsettling black sclerae, reveal those who bear the mark of Sithica’s disfavour.

People earn Sithica’s ire by failing to offer tribute when they promised to, slithering out of agreed oaths, destroying her temples or artifacts, or by mistreating her priests. It’s your job to make them pay for that.

If you kill someone that Sithica hates, you gain 1MD that doesn’t replenish when expended. If you drown someone that Sithica hates, you gain 1MD that doesn’t replenish when expended, and refresh all of the ones you have expended today. 

Cold Grasp

Your non-dominant hand is a long, looping tentacle. This is quite hard to disguise. With it, you can reach up to 10 feet away, and perform coarse actions. 

Picking things up as long as they’re at least as large as an apple and bonking into levers or buttons is fine, but you couldn’t use a gun or a typewriter. This tendril is as strong as your other arm.

Drowned Mother’s Blessings

With your MD, you can utilise Sithica’s powers over sea and flesh. 

This works more or less like casting spells, up to and including the usual Mishaps and Dooms. 

See below for the spells. 

Mishaps:

1. Inverted Eyes - You’re blind for [sum] rounds and small black tentacles replace your eyes. 
2. Guts of Foam - For the next [dice] days, you do not regain HP from food.
3. Teeth - For the next [dice] hours, you cannot speak. However, your bite deals 1d4 damage. You drool saltwater. 
4. Nerve Wobble - Collapse like a ragdoll for [dice] rounds as your nerves dance around. You can force yourself to move during this time, but gain 1 Fatigue whenever you do so. 
5. Meat Mask - A thick mass of slick white meat forms over your face for [sum] minutes, blinding and deafening you. When it recedes, save or have a different face.
6. Scum-Spawn - Involuntarily create a weird [dice] HD monster - it is made up of mismatched parts of various sea creatures, and hates everybody. 

Dooms of the Drowned 

1. Sea Legs - Your legs merge together, into a boneless, brightly-colored mass similar to the body of a sea slug. Your movement speed is permanently halved, and the weight of the slug-body makes it impossible for you to lift yourself with your own strength.
2. Sithica’s Hands - Your arms spiral apart into dozens of long, thin strings. They can reach ten feet away, but cannot lift anything larger than 1/3rd of a slot or use complex tools. They constantly drip a pale slime, filled with microorganisms.
3. You Have Become Scum - A feathered antenna grows from your neck, and the bacteria-laden slime has covered your body, building calcified nests - you are rooted to the spot. You have become a broadcasting engine, sending telepathic communication between the Brinechildren. You have also become dead.

Salt Oath 

Using ancient rites, you can seal oaths between yourself and one other, with Sithica as the arbitrator. You agree to do something for them, and they agree to do something for you.

Then, a sample of their blood trades hands (which, if consumed, grants you 1MD which does not replenish once expended). If both sides uphold their side of the deal, that’s it.

If you don’t do what the oath requires, the blood you borrowed turns to seawater, and becomes useless. If the other party ignores the requirement, their blood turns to seawater, and they (presumably) die.

Elder Drowned (who are few and far between) have advised against dealing with those that lack blood.

Obviously, you both gain more and lose less from these arrangements. No one ever said Sithica was impartial.

Adaptation

Your hand-tentacle branches into a bundle of tendrils, letting you do anything with it you could do with your normal hand. Spined fins grow from your legs and back, letting you swim at double speed (and making most clothing very uncomfortable).

Waterlogged

Your flesh is heavy with water, and freezing cold. You no longer feel pain, nor do you truly bleed. Until you die, injuries do not affect you (except for lost limbs), and you cannot be knocked unconscious except by poison.

Δ - Descent 

Consume some of Sithica’s rotting flesh, then decapitate yourself while under the sea. 

Out from the ragged stump of your neck comes a nascent Brinechild - a 10-ton nudibranch with unpleasantly human eyes, still bearing your consciousness. 

You can now inflict mutations by touch (unwilling creatures may save), and are a powerful telepath. You are immortal, and despicably hard to kill. 

With focus, you can create and pilot a Lure that looks identical to your former body. It has a range of up to a mile from the sea.

Be warned - Sithica’s corpse has fallen deep into the abyss, and even being able to breathe water won’t help much given the pure darkness, crushing pressure, and freezing cold.

Crude Sithican graffiti.

Spells:

1. Empower Tendril

Extend your tendril-arm [sum] feet, and gain [dice] to Strength on checks using it for [dice] minutes.

2. Steed from the Depths

Conjure a lumpy, wet horse-simulacrum with 1HD that can carry you across water and land at [dice] times the speed of a horse. It lasts for [sum] hours, or until killed.

3. Slow Person

[dice]*2 people within 100’ are forced to move at half speed, wading through hip-deep water only they can see or feel.

4. Dive

Up to [dice] targets you can touch treat water as air, and vice versa, for [sum] minutes.

5. Limpet Mine

Carefully grow a small, immobile sea-snail that will violently explode if neared, dealing [sum] damage in a [dice]*20 foot radius. Save for half.

6. Lure

You slowly assemble a duplicate of yourself with [best] HP - a thin, illusory skin over a pile of fish bones and scales. The duplicate has all the non-magical equipment you do, but cannot cast spells. 

The duplicate collapses into bones and fish heads after [dice] minutes, or when it loses its HP. 

7. Water of Truth

Splash water on to a target - the next [dice] promises they make must be kept. If more than 2 MD are invested, the target must also answer the next [dice] questions they are asked truthfully.

8. Sea Spawn

Create a [dice] HD monster from the life in any body of water you can touch. 

Alternatively, you can drown a living person in seawater and make a monster with total HD equal to theirs + [dice]. 

At standard, it has unarmoured AC, swims quick, and has sharp claws/teeth/fins.

Choose [dice] of the following adjectives when you create the Sea Spawn:

• Poison stingers, which deal 1 damage and 1d8 poison.
• Spine launchers, allowing a 1d8 ranged attack.
• Great size, allowing it to be ridden. 
• Capable of speech in your voice. 
• Looks like a human, except when inspected very closely. 
• Hypnotic gaze - those that meet its eyes must save or do nothing. Ends if the Sea-Spawn does anything either. 
• Chitinous exoskeleton. (16 AC). 

9. Control Water

Move [sum] buckets worth of water at a walking pace. Every MD invested increases the movement speed and precision.

10. Call Brinechild

Telepathically connect with a Brinechild - one of Drowned Sithica’s monstrous children, living somewhere deep below the sea. If you are far from the ocean, this contact lets you communicate with the Brinechild for [sum] minutes; they are distant from human events, but polite to the Drowned and happy to discuss the finer points of theology. If it is cast next to the sea, the Brinechild will arrive, physically, in [dice] minutes.

Brinechildren are monstrously powerful telepaths and can inflict mutations by touch. Most have a hundred weaving plots, and all consider themselves lords of the ocean. 

11. Weave From Water

You can transform water into [sum] slots of weird, translucent objects. These objects function just as well as their non-water counterparts - water guns fire bullets, watery knives cut cleanly, a watery car (which would be [sum=12]) can drive, and so on. 

12. Fury of the Sea

Deal [sum] damage to a target by crushing them with black water which rushes from all available apertures. If the target is touching a body of water, they take [sum]*[dice] damage and are immobilised as the water grapples, mangles, and drowns them.