Exposition

Sorcerer “You sure you know what you’re doin’? Seems like a lot more than the usual Translocationary whatchacallit…”

Wizard “It is. But the principles are the same. Just a longer equation really.”

Sorcerer “Look, just cuz I never calculatrized my magic don’t mean I don’t understand that longer means more harder…I mean...the incantation alone…it’d be easier to form a tabernacle choir with the Street Sweeper Gang and teach’em a rhyming verse in harmonized rounds…”

Wizard “While you are not wrong it is the wrong anecdote. I liken it more to stringing suffixes and prefixes to world’s longest compound word and still making sure it is sensible.”

Sorcerer “Yeah…sensible in all the world’s languages in a single articulization…”

Wizard (correcting) “Articulation. Besides, you are one to talk. The one with unstudied and wildly innate power…who can barely form the common tongue outside your own native…”

Sorcerer (sigh) “Look, alls I’m saying is I’m not an idiot, I can read what you’ve got here, and me gut tells me it’s risky…And I always trust me gut.”

Wizard “Not the most reliable source, your gut...is it? Look I will hardly be the first to pull this off. Do not let its rarity cloud your judgement in the same way your gut clouds the tent each night…Now, are you going to sit quiet and let me concentrate on this or not?”

Sorcerer “Yeah, yeah. Alright…”

Narrator “9 minutes later.”

Sorcerer “What do you mean I cloud the tent…?”

Magic goes wrong SFX

Introduction

James: Unstable

Freeman: Do the Twist

Source: Bestiary 3, pg.14

Reading List:

The Jaunt by Stephen King

Hyperion Cantos Series by Dan Simmons

Pathfinder Lore

Appearance

·         A jumbled mishmash of limbs and appendages. Still got a face. But also sometimes extra parts.

·         And their warped shape actually shifts and morphs and regrows.

·         Which actually translates into regeneration and resistances.

·         But also a weakness to piercing, because there is a sort of stable “core” to their anatomy.

·         What transforms these creatures also shifts their mind and body into Aberrance.

·         So despite the appearance we have in the artwork, it is not considered humanoid.

·         And if it has extra parts it’s because it is formed by multiple versions of the same person/creature.

·         But it only has the vaguest memories of its former self.

·         How does this come about you wonder?

Ecology

·         The very difficult undertaking of Teleportation magic.

·         A lot of teleportation magic (and especially the most powerful) requires detailed knowledge, meticulous calculations, and severe control.

·         And even the best can fuck it up.

·         Anywhere from a simple oversight or just silly arrogance can spell disaster.

·         The tiniest mistake in these castings can result in something like the Amalgamite.

·         An Amalgamite also radiates magical residue from the messed up magic that created it.

·         Which then “destabilizes” living creatures that come near it, and spreads this radiating residue like an infection among groups of allies and enemies alike.

·         When destabilization spreads, the Amalgamite can then start causing teleportation effects to affect all those…affected…by the destabilization!

·         You can suddenly find yourself in harms way of a trap you weren’t next to, or face-to-face with an enemy that was across the battlefield less than a moment ago.

·         Or the Amalgamite is just suddenly in front of the healer flailing it’s twisted limbs.

Sidebar

·         An Amalgamite is often found in the company of others. Such as:

·         Lesser aberrations.

·         Dark Tapestry cultists

·         Or the undead corpses of former party members.

·         These “allies” serve to further spread the destabilization across the battlefield.

1e

·         N/A

Pop Culture – Teleportation Gone Wrong

·         The Fly (Film series. Most famous is perhaps the David Cronenberg remake with Jeff Goldblum)

·         The Hyperion Cantos book series by Dan Simmons

·         There were gateways that connected planets.

·         Not only could you just simply walk through but they even had things like rivers running between planetary biomes.

·         One day the whole network of them crash and cut everything and evertyone off.

·         Including thousands of people using them at the time. Limbs were lost, bodies cut in half and some just vanished into oblivion.

·         The Philadelphia Experiment (Conspiracy Theory & 1984 Film)

·         The US Navy was trying to make Navy Destroyer invisible…and accidentally teleported the USS Eldridge from Philadelphia PA to Norfolk VA.

·         This was in 1943, btw. And apparently a lot of crew, when “re-entering physical reality”, were found half-buried in the ships bulkheads

·         Event Horizon (1997 Film)

·         A starship with an experimental gravity drive designed to link two points of space-time together and create an artificial black hole…accidentally tore open a gate to Hell.

·         The Jaunt (1985 short story by Stephen King)

·         Humanity finds a method for teleportation known as Jaunting.

·         The only problem is that any conscious living creature can’t survive the process.

·         The Jaunt itself only lasts 0.00000000067s

·         But if a mind is conscious during the jaunt, it perceives it an unfathomable amount of years.

·         And the result is either death or insanity.

·         Star Trek (Television & Film Series)

·         There are lot of Transporter incidents.

·         The first was Evil and Good Kirk in the very first season of the Original Series thanks to some magnetic ore in the transporter.

·         Riker was accidentally cloned when a transporter was affected by an energy distortion field. His clone was accidentally left behind on a remote planet for 8 years.

·         A “minor glitch in the moleculer image scanners” caused the logical Tuvok and the compassionate Neelix to fuse into one being (alongside a strange orchid with unique symbiotic properties) to form Tuvix. Apparently the outcome of this episode still causes fiery debates about moral dilemmas ahha

·         One time Picard and a few others accidentally reappeared in the transporter as children.

·         A whole crew of a ship got stuck inside the “transporter’s pattern buffer” and one Lt. Barclay saw them when he was in the beam. Peeps thought he was hallucinating and teased him, but he managed to persist and save them

·         An ion storm once cased the transporter to swap Kirk, Uhura, McCoy and Scotty with their Mirror Universe counterparts.

·         A temporal surge sent crew from Deep Space Nine to land on Earth (as intended) but back in year 2024. Apparently this episode is a rather poignant two-parter about unhoused people, economy disparity, racism and injustice that is still so prominent today.

·         Futurama (Television Series)

·         In the year 3008. the Dixie Chicks had their bodies fused together into an amorphous blob thanks to a teleportation accident.

·         They were left with constant pain and the ability to absorb other organisms (which is presumed to be their newest way to feed). But their heads were intact…so their successful music career continued!

·         Spaceballs (1987 Film)

·         Mel Brooks plays President Skroob, who lazily teleports to the next room and arrives with his head on backwards.