aprilmarch

The people of the woods know that shamans are powerful people who are always surrounded by birds. Once a year, they journey to the depths of the earth to battle the evil forces of those who skulk in darkness.

The people of the caves know that shamans are powerful people who are always surrounded by spiders. Once a year, they journey into the sunlight to battle the evil force of the surface-dwellers.

The shamans say that they are all the same kind of people, regardless of whether they attract birds or spiders, and that they meet twice a year to talk about the natural cycles of the world. Of course they do. They're tricksters, always pushing against what society considers to be normal, so they have to dress up their epic battles as boring conferences. Everyone knows that even if those bastards from the other realm had the wits to talk to one of ours, someone as respected and powerful as our shaman wouldn't give them the time of day!

The Shaman's Need

Shamans feel a powerful need to connect with nature. No, more powerful than that. That's not something that you can solve by getting a potted plant or a hamster. A shaman needs several living creatures to be in direct contact with their skin at all times.

If the shaman lives in the woods, these creatures will likely be birds, and they will be seem as majestic.

If the shaman lives in the caves, these creatures will likely be spiders, and they will be seen as menacing.

The shamans don't care how they look. They need this to feel well.

The creatures also feel a need to stay close to the shaman, and they estabilsh a low-level mental connection, so the shaman can sleep without worrying they'll turn around and crush their nature friends to death. They'll still be constantly covered in poop though.

If you feel the desire to connect to nature and you ignore it, that's fine. Hold out for a few weeks, two months at most, and you'll stop being a shaman. The secrets of nature will again be closed to you and you will not spend the rest of your life covered in poop.

A shaman that's not covered in the animals that chose them will feel unfocused and bad, but it's not deleterious to their health. If they're apt in the ways of shamanism, they won't lose their abilities. They might, however, become so low-key distressed that they'll be unable to access them.

While most shamans live in a settled area, those few that decide to travel (perhaps with a band with adventurers) always travel with a special tool for their animals to rest. Some of them use special bags with a slot prepared for it. A small dark hole for spiders takes up as much space as one item, a birdhouse takes up twice that space.

Shamans don't have any compulsion or oath not to attack animals, but most of them prefer not to anyway. Hunting for sustenance is considered an exception to this by many of them. Birds and spiders do that, after all.

The Shaman's Abilities

Here are some things a shaman can do as they become more powerful:

1. Understand the communication of their kindred species. Bird shamans can understand birdsong, and spider shamans can understand the weaving of webs (spiders use them to note down their thoughts). They can't translate them to sentient language, it's a bit subconscious, but a shaman will always know if a danger lurks in their area and where exactly it is, unless it's taking active steps to hide itself from animals.
2. Their body becomes accostumed the animal presence. They become immune to allergies and poisons from their kindred animal. (This ability is, of course, notably more useful for spider shamans.)
3. Even larger, aggressive species of their kindred animal will not be aggressive towards them unless they have good reason. They also stop seeing the shaman or their creatures as trespassing in their territory. These do not apply to the shaman's companions.
4. The shaman can sustain themself for weeks on end on their kindred animal's diet - seeds and little fruit for bird shamans, small insects for spider shamans. Volume is still a problem.
5. Shamans can finally communicate telepathically with their kindred animal. They won't do what the shaman asks willy-nilly, but they're usually helpful. They'll never do anything they understand will bring them mortal danger, which is fine because most shamans wouldn't ask that anyway.
6. The shaman becomes immune to allergies, venoms and poisons from any animal source.
7. No animal will willingly attack the shaman without reason. Training can overcome this, but even then the animal will be hesitant. Some animals of magical origin will not be affected, nor will sentient creatures. Crows, octopuses, dolphins and some species of monkey are sentient.
8. The shaman's kindred animal will perform a ritual to sacralize the shaman and have them devour whole a corpse of one of them. From then on, if the shaman dies, they will be reborn as one of their kindred animal, who will sprout out of their mouth. (This will not happen if the manner of death is grievous enough, but as long as the corpse's head is intact it will). The shaman does not become a sentient creature in an animal's body; their mind also becomes that of the animal, albeit they keep memories of their previous life. If the shaman has important information to impart, it's likely only another shaman will be able to understand them. Most likely, they'll just enjoy their second life as a simple creature.
9. If the shaman becomes reincarnated as an animal, they may direct their kindred animals to construct a new body for them, out of pebbles, little bones, feathers and silk. This takes a few months and causes the shaman to return to life as a human. They'll reappear emaciated and likely unable to speak properly for a few days, but their memories and abilities will be intact. A shaman will refuse to do this unless something great is at stake.

The social life of shamans

It is said that shamans only constitute families with other shamans.

That's not true, but it's difficult to find non-shamans who will even consider a casual date with someone constantly covered in animals, let alone something longer-lasting.

While bird shamans and spider shamans consider each other brethren, they rarely date across these lines, simply because the birds tend to keep eating the spiders.

Mosaic Strict

This is not even necessarily an RPG guide, it may just be some weird fiction, but it's not mosaic strict unless I explicitly say it is, so I'm doing so right now.

Current Mood: creative

The DEATH RACE has very few rules concerning what vehicles are legal. They are so:

A vehicle must be able to transport itself plus its driver from the starting line to the finishing line without outside assistance.
A vehicle must not be able to cause a driver to become airborne without outside assistance.

That's it. That's all there is to it.

I mean, there are a few more. One section is about how 'outside assistance' dos not qualify if it's a vehicle's power source. It started when someone pointed out that the rules as written technically forbade solar-powered vehicles, since they needed outside assistance (solar rays) to function. The Organizers agreed and added a rule exemption for solar-powered vehicles. Someone else made fun of this ruling by saying that to be fair they should also allow vehicles powered by wind and geothermal energy, since they were drawing power from the environment just like solar-powered vehicles. Sure, you could not create a viable racing car using those energy sources, but wasn't fairness paramount? The Organizers thought this argument was hilarious and ammended the exemption to allow for any sort of energy generation that drew power from the environment, specifically including wind and geothermal power. This allowed for the rise of Dread Pirate Bobberts, the only crowd-favourite racer to have never placed better than DNF.

Honestly, most rules were created because someone complained or tried to abuse the original rules. The airborne rule happened because people entered literal airplanes in the first few races. It originally just stopped the car from becoming airborne, but then someone won a race by using a car that ejected its driver's seat as a hang-glider. They actually moved to ban any vehicle parts from becoming airborne, but someone pointed out this would ban missiles, which are in the Death Race's logo and consist of a surprising amount of its merchandising sales. (Most of those sales are plushies and keychains, not live missiles, but those are expensive and so do weigh heavily on the profit margins.) Since the current rules tie the position to the driver, that's the best way to guarantee the DEATH RACE remains a land race.

Jumping cars and ejecting seats are therefore banned, but are allowed in the down-low as long as they don't give you an undue advantage. Your vehicle can even glide, as long as it can't take off on its own. If it does, they'll probably not let you have an ejecting seat.

Can you make the entire vehicle go airborne except the driver? This question was actually asked by the driver of the Kite Car, a car that could become a jet airplane but kept tethered to the driver's cabin, which consisted of a sphere weighted to remain upright, magnetically linked to a second sphere. The Organizers decided it wasn't legal because the Kite Car could lift its driver, it's just that the driver didn't intend to; but gave it a special permission to drive anyway just to see what happened. The driver died.

Another rule says that the driver cannot directly provide motion for the vehicle; that's counted as an outside force. No bicycles, roller skates, or scooters, unless they have some sort of engine. The 'direct' part is important, because otherwise someone could claim it was against the rules to load coal into a boiler, or to switch on the engine, or to steer the cart in the right direction.

Oh, so you can't ride a bicycle, but what if you had a bicycle which instead of the pedals moving the wheels directly, they wound up a coil, and it was that coil that moved the wheel? Would that be allowed? The Organizers found that hilarious and said yes, it would, could you ride this weird windup bike on the next race?

Animals fit all the criteria for the vehicle, can I just ride a horse? Actually, yes. The Organizers find this hilarious. It's a good way to get fans against you, though - they hate that you're putting animals at risk. Humans OK - they probably know what they're getting into, unless they're poor and/or dumb, in which case they're poor and/or dumb and no one cares.

Humans are animals, can I just ride piggyback on another person? You could until very recently, and that person would count as your vehicle, but recent changes to the rules mean that every person on a vehicle counts as a driver, so that's 'outside assistance' and no longer allowed.

Current Mood: deadly

First, determine your starting spot in the DEATH RACE by rolling 3d4. The sum of the highest and lowest dice make up the tens of the starting position; the dice that remains is the ones. For instance, if you roll 1, 2 and 4, you add 4+1=5 and get 52 as your starting position.

The first ten racers are always incredibly rich bigshots who are somehow related to the Sponsors. Most of them actually are good drivers; those who are not can make up for it through technology. You are not one of these.

The next ten racers are a mix of people who are wealthy but not enough to be sponsors, some random thrillseekers, and 'elevated' regular racers who got someone to be their (lowercase) sponsor. All of these are excellent racers. In fact, other than raw talent in the back ranks, these are probably the best pilots in the race. You are not one of these either, which is why your starting position cannot be lower than 21.

ONE CAR, MANY RACERS
It used to be that, in order to get a position in the DEATH RACE, you had to drive through the starting line and the finish line in roughly the same vehicle. 'Roughly' is key; if your car exploded, you could bring a sufficiently large piece and still claim the prize. This rule was meant to encourage more violent interaction during the finish line, since if you blew up you'd lose a lot of places but would still be able to claim a relatively high spot if you were in the lead.

It was common for ambulances to also pick up a car piece and drive through the finish life, to give downed races a placement (sometimes posthumous).

However, a corollary to this rule was that, if you picked a piece of your car and hopped aboard another car, that car would effectively count for two. This was a minor issue until the BoomBus.

The BoomBus was a junked city bus with a massive jet engine nailed to it, driven by a skinny bearded fella named Ol' Mac. Mac stopped to give a ride to every driver ze saw stranded on the track. That year's race had been particularly heated, so by the time ze was gunning for the finish time ze had twelve racers in the bus, not even counting zirself. And ze hadn't even used the jet.

Then ze used it.

The bus blew past the people nearing the finish line before they even knew what was going on. This created some very interesting results. The last racer to be overtaken by the bus was half a second behind it, but this caused their position to drop from 59th to 63rd. And this caused a lot of complaints. Why did the people on the back of the bus got a positon in front of the car that was keeping up with it? And what should be the order of the racers inside the bus? They had photos taken at the finish line, but the flash glared off the windows and the inside of the bus was not visible, so they had only memory and honour to account for their order. This did not go smoothly.

The present rules were added the next year. Now, in order to hold a position, you just to drive through the start line in a vehicle, then drive through the finish line in a vehicle. Doesn't even have to be the same one. Everyone in a vehicle gets the same position, regardless of whether they started together or not.

This has, of course, given space to numerous new strategies. The first one is that it's possible to carjack other racers, which the Organizers find hilarious. It's also possible to scoop more than one spot by having a car that contains or breaks into smaller cars, which the Organizers also find hilarious. The tamest strategy is that it's now possible to race as a team. Quite a few people now bring a mechanic, copilot or 'spare' driver, but this is widely considered to be lame, kind of like showing up to the Tour de France with training wheels on. However, it does allow larger vehicles that do require a multi-person crew to operate, which the Organizers, unsurprisingly, find hilarious.

Ambulances still drive downed racers through the finish line, which means they are technically the winning vehicle for that racer. There are very strict guidelines to stop people employed as paramedics by the Organizers from being even near the starting line, as to avoid shenanigans.

(It's important to notice the ambulance only covers about the first and last kilometers of the track, close enough to civilization that leaving people to die would be considered unsporting. For the remainder, well, it's not called the Somewhat Severe Wounds Race.)

SEX IN THE DEATH RACE
They say there's a rule that says you score a point every time you have sex during the DEATH RACE.

This is absolute bollocks. You don't even score points during the race. You have your position and that's it.

This concept probably came out of some in-joke that was misheard out of context. Maybe someone said something about 'scoring'.

Still, lots of people like to have sex during the DEATH RACE. It's kinda of its third, unofficial thing. You have death, you have racing, and you have sex. The Sponsors like it, it makes the whole thing looks exciting and forbidden.

Some people actually believe the whole sex = points thing, and while it's fun to make fun of these people, it's in good taste to let them know about the truth - which can be actually quite hard, since they tend to think you're lying to them to make them earn less points. This has caused some racers to try to replace this story with a new fake concept that you score for having sex during the DEATH RACE but only if both parties give enthusiastic consent. They've had moderate but suprisising success with this operation.