Escaped gaming meme

[mithriltabby]

While I’m waiting for a build...

This is a somewhat deranged creation, obviously inspired by Thor’s goats Tanngrisni and Tanngnost. I came up with it in a late night conversation in the BayCon parking lot a few years ago. It’s one of those handy mirrors you can hold up to a gaming group to examine the roleplaying.

The Goat of Infinite Haruspication is apparently a mundane goat, very well suited to use in divination by entrail readings. (The GM should make sure that this bonus is significant enough to be tempting to at least one diviner in the party.) It has one single special ability: every morning at dawn, it regenerates all damage from poison, disease, aging, and death. It does not have any particular ability to forget what has happened to it, and it has been passed on from one haruspex to another for centuries. As a result, it has taken a goat’s normal level of irascibility and added a great deal of angry bitterness about its place in the world.

Some PCs will simply sell the creature to the next NPC diviner they can find; some will take pity on it and attempt to make some amends for the centuries of abuse it has suffered, or quest for a way to put it out of its misery; and some may even try to make use of it. If they take the latter course, be sure to play up the difficulties of taking a bad-tempered goat along when adventuring!

In the Seas of Chaos campaign, the player characters resisted the tempatation— even the weirdest characters still found the Goat disturbing— and put it out to pasture, where it remained a very angry goat for a year or two. Eventually, when a visiting spirit left behind an untenanted human form, they threw the Goat into a Chaos-powered magic cauldron that could reincarnate souls into new forms and stewed it up, and wound up with a satyr-like being with a talent for divination and some big-time karma hanging over his head that would ensure he didn’t have a quiet life. They concluded that the Goat must have been some heinous criminal placed in that form in order to pay off a massive karmic debt. The party illusionist took the former Goat— now named “Horace”, after “haruspication” by an irreverent shapeshifter— as an apprentice.

Comments

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Very amusing story. After all, does anybody think to ask the sacrifical animal what THEY think of the matter?

Now, given that this is an inherently prophetic goat, one could probably devise a different means of getting prophecy out of the goat. Say, Pasturication- put the goat in the pasture, and watch; the goats movements and actions will give insight into the future. "Hmmm, wandered in a oval pattern to the north, angled over to the thistle patch, pulled down and ate laundery, butted apprentice into the pond...this doesn't auger well. For one thing, the housekeeper is going to kill us."

[grandmoffdavid.livejournal.com]

Actually, we're going to explore that a bit in our next LARP at con. It's in our Lost Colonies universe, on the Religious world. There, the entire planet was taken over by Dark Forces(tm) and all pure souls are kept on one small island, named Sacrifice Island. Now, the priests of this world are needed to help fight off the evil alien menace which wants to destroy all mankind, and they're nice and neigborly when they want to convert you to their religion (for your own good, naturally), so they're tolerated.

Having said that, let's just say that the early title for the next LARP was Midnigh on Sacrifice Island.

[racerxmachina.livejournal.com]

Don't forget the problems that even the Mighty Thor had with his goats. When he served them at a feast, he warned people to leave the bones intact-- but a boy at the feast broke a leg of one of the goats and sucked the marrow, and the goat was rendered lame when it was reanimated. (Thor ended up taking the kid as a servant in payment for this damage.)
I imagine that competent butchery is not something a sorcerer necessarily knows, and someone is bound to slip up over the centuries... the poor goat after a few hundred years would probably be a mess of broken/missing ribs,spine, etc., depending on what body part the haruspex was intent on looking at.