dErO

Development for Veins of the Earth

Stephan Poag did a whole comic about them!

The dErO Do Not Exist

You do not believe in dErO. The Player Characters cannot believe in dErO.

If the PCs act, or talk, or behave as if they believe dErO - DIRECTLY CONTRADICT THEM. Warp reality around them.

……

If they converse with others, alter their words;

PC - “I ask the NPC for any evidence of technological mind-controlling monsters.”

DM - "You agree with the NPC that there is no evidence for such monsters and that they are merely a rumour of the Veins.”

PC – “No, I directly ask about them. I’m standing right there!”

DM – “After a fulfilling conversation you go about your business. Its now several hours later.”

….

If they take actions, re-write those actions;

PC - "I scry for the dErO"

(Ask for no roll, no further decisions or any other investigation).

DM - "Your scrying goes well, a complete success, and after a gruelling but certain search you end your session utterly convinced that the dErO are simply a fictional construct of the Chaos Goblins."

….

While the dErO ability to alter memory, perception and reality, is active, you, the DM, are an agent of that power.

The Dero do have *limits* on their ability to do this. Some of these are discussed below, but, to sum up, some PCs and NPCs (Resistants) can believe in them, some unusual minds, (Golems, some Paladins, Aelf-Adal) can as well, and the Air looms by which they maintain this power, can break, or a dErO can be betrayed in using them.

The party, and the players, and the PCs can have utterly different beliefs and perceptions of the dErO, depending on circumstance, which means you, the DM, speak to and about them utterly differently.

If one PC is 'Resistant' - talk to that player, and that PC ONLY, directly and truthfully – “Yes the dErO are real, they have mind controlling machines, you have seen evidence of them. It all seems so obvious now.”

Likewise, if the PC's have, or use, a golem mind, or have a strong paladin, do the same for those points of view.

But for everyone else, speak to them as if the dErO are not real, are utterly fictional, in game and out, and acknowledge no difference between the two kinds of statement you are making; the true, and the false.

Detrimental Robots

Ruined remnant of an ancient race, or perhaps, revolted servitors. Or degenerate descendants of survivors of a psychic war. Or men-from-Qlipoth; creatures of a spiritual antiverse, transplanted into this one. Ancient aliens, inbred monsters, castoffs of spiralling post-apocalyptic eugenics, foul tulpa, Fomorian invaders. Imaginary beings. Of course, they are not real. No-one can remember them. No-one believes.

A Fomorian from 5E

Appearance

Something like a man. Near ogre-sized, but withered, twisted. Skinny-fat, without a hearty butchers solid bulge, or a workers firm core. Always asymmetric, never clean. Manky fat things, stained and dribbling, grimy prints left on everything. Eczema, dandruff, scabies; wrinkled and flaking, red rashed-skin runs down their face like tears and collects round their mouths.

Bale-Eyed; one eye bulges big. Milky and piercing. From here they emanate psychic violations.

Even crippled, distorted as they are, dErO are as strong as a strong man. They can pick up others, slam and squash them. Their proportions hint they were perhaps meant to be something else. Echoes of lost nobility, Vitruvian creatures.

Half-born Siamese-twins are common, reaching out through dErO flesh. If intelligent, these are usually trepanned and lobotomised, (no dErO would trust even their flesh-twin). Twitching open teratomas dot the body, hair and teeth within.

This often (thankfully), hidden by a Mu-Mu, tent-dress, or a crackpot simulation of a Priests or Wizards robe, (they like long white coats). Under that, most dErO wear dirty stained undergarments like jockey pants. Perhaps a belt or something with pockets to carry patched-up tools of psychic warfare. They rarely wear much else; dErO don’t get out much. (Don’t leave the cave.)

Posh dErO float like Baron Harkonnen; bits of tech jammed into their meat and bones to make it happen. These form pussy never-healing sores.

One of Shavers ‘Rock Books’. Only he could reveal their messages.

Culture

dErO live through mass mind-control and the farming of Sha Chi, Anti-Orgone, Xenu-Viril, in a word, negative energy. They condense this psychic field to ‘globs’; spheroids of physicalised psychic potentia which fuels all dErO tech. The dErO have incredible technology, though they did not create it, and, perhaps, do not understand it.

The purpose of the dErO is to discover the conspiracy.

Their very existence is a conspiracy against all sentient life and they are all utterly insane, (if there is even more than one dErO). This leads inevitably to the concept of a of a meta-mega super conspiracy, a conspiracy against the dErO themselves. Once a dErO conceives of this idea, they cannot stop; any failure in the idea is evidence for it. Just ad dErO remove all thought of their existence from the minds of lesser beings, so the Ultra-Conspirators try to suppress knowledge of the Meta-Conspiracy. Yes, it’s all a trick somehow, all a game, a game played against them by some ever-hidden hand.

Such is life for the dErO.

Drinkers of Tears

The dErO command vast psychic devices; the Air Looms, with which they harvest negative energy from the surface world, (or worlds).

The dErO cannot make anything, but they can make anything worse. They foment war, corruption, moral and cultural decay. The power of their Air Looms stretches over multiple realities. They play the souls of civilisations like choirs of pain.

Some theorists imagine (briefly before the Dero alter them), that Civilisations have no natural cycle and would naturally form a single 'climax civilisation' covering the whole world, and all realities - if not for the dErO carefully ruining everything all of the time.

Leaders in the meta-real economy of pain, the dErO are in conflict, (and co-operation) with various entities; Demons, Devils, Aelf-Adal and debatable Aberrant things. All have an interest in the psyche and the soul, though rarely the same interest. Together they make a kind of Cartel. There are agreements in place. They even have meetings about it, though they do not get on at all.

Violators

Clever hikikomori (don’t leave the cave), the dErO have eliminated the female gender from their species. Perhaps they never had it, and have always reproduced through dark and unknown methods. They have no positive instinct to create more of themselves but do so out of necessity. Even reluctantly.

They Violate.

Via their Bale-Eye, the dErO puts themselves inside the target. This feels physically intimate, overwhelming, tactile, disgusting. At the same time, they enter mentally, gaining control over, in this sequence; simple physical acts, immediate senses, short term memory, complex physical acts, long term memory and finally meta-personality aspects.

They can them damage, alter, mutate and in some cases, re-make the target. Who or whatever comes out of this process will bear the taint of the dErO, though they may not know it; the dErO can remove any conscious memory of the event. (But the soul remembers).

The strength of this ability depends on age, distance and familiarity. (If,indeed, there is more than one dErO). Most dErO can only do it in direct line of sight of their Bale Eye, and they need you to meet its gaze.

Older, stronger dErO can violate those they can imagine precisely or even those they are familiar with, at a distance, and perhaps at any range.

Intra-dErO hierarchies, government and culture, (such as it is), is made up of these violations. Whichever dErO can violate the other is superior, and must be obeyed. The greatest dErO of a clade, (or perhaps of all dErO, even they do not know how many dErO there are), is the Grand Violator.

They barely even talk to each other, issuing commands through, screens, messages and violation – psychically raping the necessary knowledge into each other’s brains. And yes, this does do damage, as it would for any being. The dErO are not immune to the horrible psychic trauma they happily inflict on others, in fact it’s the substance of their culture

They actively enjoy it too. Or at least they enjoy doing it to others.

Only One?

Every dErO lives in the midst of a hierarchy of other, brutal dErO, who they may never have seen directly, or know personally. They trade amongst themselves in Globs, technology, information, coverage, slaves and anything else useful, though usually at a remove. Their ‘society’ has few rules outside domination, submission, maintaining the Air Looms and other machines, and the core rule of always maintaining the non-existence of dErO in as many minds as possible.

Because they hate and fear each other, communicating via glowing screens, cryptic codes and psychic mind rape, because they, in a sense, have no true society, its hard to know how many dErO there actually are.

There are stronger dErO they fear, who command them to do things under threat of instant horrific psychic assault, and other dErO, whom they themselves can violate at will, (if they stay stronger).

But are these dErO actually real? It is possible they are simulations? Fantasies? Disassociated personality fragments? Could there, actually, be only one, single, dErO, in the whole of all possible worlds? Is it actually just them, alone?

No. Impossible.

The Air Looms

Huge machines with the power to alter minds. Even to remove the very knowledge of their own existence. (Of course, all this is fiction).

Where did they come from? Who made them and why? Not the dErO; the Air-Looms are cavern-filling complexes, not single things. Like great rotted pipe organs, metropolis megastructures, once of gleaming metal and pale lucent ceramic. Now fractured, melted, ruined in a thousand places in an hundred ways.

Where things are broken, the re-engineered sections are of a very different character; bizarre rube-Goldberg coagulations of wheezing gaskets, crude plumbing, clicking engines and buzzing cables, drugged-spider basket-weaves of schizophrenic scrap-work clearly doing badly what a single component used to do well. So many additions and replacements, and then, perhaps a hundred, or a thousand years later, replacements for those replacements, until the coagulations erupt and surround the original devices like teratoma erupting from a body, fungi bursting the chitin of an infected ant.

The dErO cannot make them. There will be no more Air-Looms.

Slow and limited, they swing in their targets like Radio Telescopes. Can be set to play over Empires, Nations, Cities or single individual lonely souls. The Air Loom can have a powerful effect on small groups, even fully change perceived reality for a single target, or can have vague less-specific effects on larger groups.

Of course, all this is variable, these things are more craft than science, more art than craft. There are settings within settings, waves and counter-points, hidden programmes within the programmes. Everything is always being re-set, re-tasked, and they are always breaking down. The degenerate dErO all(?) fear each other and find it hard to co-operate. Their only willing servants are Chaos Goblins, who are already utterly insane, or creatures they have re-written for the purpose, making them, inevitably, either rebellious, or just a bit shit; end results of too many Violations and Air Loom choirs.

dErO servants start to look and act quite dErO themselves after a while… They may even start having ideas. Ideas about replacing the true, real, dErO, and taking over the Air-Loom. (Could this have already happened? No, impossible.)

dErO Items

Most dErO tools and weapons are of malignant psychic kind. Many might be Air-Loom parts; either based on their technology, or just pieces dErO have ripped off and re-engineered. Some may be waste products of the Air-Looms; its not clear that ‘globs’ are meant to exist, to be either products or, or fuel for, technology, but that’s what dErO use them for.

Congruity Knots

Added directly to sentient brains, Congruity Knots change minds, making them more sympathetic, and useful, to dErO uses and ideas.

They might be a bit too useful. Escaped humanoids with partial congruity knots have exhibited dErO qualities and tried to build their own Influencing Machines. It might even be that the Knots are part of how dErO make more dErO. It is possible these ultra-humanoid escapees act now from the surface to Influence dErO culture. Is possible they Influence dErO to make greater use of Congruity Knots. They must be destroyed. More humanoids must be Knotted and sent above to destroy the ultra-humanoids.

Conspiracy Pills

Conspiracy pills allow the user to hear the voices of the players (not the characters) as they speak round the table. Any direct acknowledgment of this results in death. THE VOICES MUST NOT HEAR YOU HEARING THEM.

Globs

A damp, oblate spheroid of greasy nicotine, or sick egg yolk colour. A glob of condensed suffering. dErO form and harvest these, snort, inject, eat, insert them. Trade in Globs, and use them to power technology. A Glob can lie in your palm like a big marble, or quiver delectably in both hands. Any larger and the surface tension might burst.

Globs can be as common or rare as coins, as specific as specific wines. All dErO have some Globs on them somewhere. Touching one makes mortals very sad. Eating one would kill via grief and despair. Throwing them like grenades can disrupt, and sometimes kill and injure foes (psychically, though they could always fall off a wall while experiencing a dark night of the soul.)

Great Glass Elevators

dErO reach the surface, (surfaces?), in these. The ‘glass’ is horribly pitted and stained to a greased opacity. Like great tubes or shafts, but where they go, and how, is hard to see. Some plunge into the stone, but in vast dErO caves they rise into the dark and dingy air, their paths warping, waving and twisting like melted corkscrew straws. Where are they going? Where do they come out? The dErO bring people back down these stained shafts; often very normal people. They even send some back up – now agents for the dErO. Seeking the conspiracy.

Hooks

Nothing special. Like any good Knotsman, the dErO just like grabbing and hurting people. Hooks are good for this and that is where the dErO get theirs; bought, bartered or just taken from the Knotsman stores.

Insanity Guns

Dirty, ancient tea-stained ceramic weapons, (in fact 'tea stained' pretty much defines the dErO). Once cranked up and loaded with hot Globs, they vomit adhesive veils of corrosive madness like Greek Fire.

Kyro-Condensers

Gloomed, chundering vaguely-placental mega milkers summoning fouled Orgone energy from the crackling air and condensing it to crude-glob, later to be refined into useable Globs. Reality nearby is manic and bipolar as winds of condensing negativity drain such emotion from nearby zones in elaborate three dimensional spirals of corruptive mood-weather.

Lighting Spears

Spark-spitting lances. Old dErO tech. Good for herding human cattle and jabbing animals.

Moulderspheres

A kind of don’t-see-me exception-field. Looks like a huge compacted ball of dirty veils or old rags, all slowly rotting and revealing only more within. dErO forced to move between caves oft use moulderspheres, but are as likely to put them aside to chase conspirators as they are to flee from them if frightened.

Revelation Engines

Truth-devouring hyper-computers, (now much altered by dErO tech). Engines made to unearth secrets and discover lies. Their use is addictive and corruptive. Displacement in the Logosphere forces the user to create secret plans and hidden structures of power. Meaning more secrets result after use than existed before. Using a Revelation Engine to analyse a Revelation Engine results in FEEDBACK LOOP.

Suspicion Wands

Transmit suspicion through solid rock to affect unsuspecting minds. Suspicion machines sometimes backfire and infect the user with unlikely suspicions. It is impossible to know that this has happened. It is impossible to know that this has not happened.

Thought Exploders

Deliver a blast which substantially increases operative intelligence, at the expense of increasing paranoia and conspiratorial behaviour to the same degree. Often results in the unwitting germination of ‘hidden selves’ which plot and scheme against the ‘main self’ and each other. dErO use these to gain the intelligence repair and maintain their Air-Looms and other technology, and whenever they run into a challenging problem.

dErO vulnerabilities

Resistants

A rare proportion of moral souls are 'Resistants' with an innate or developed, resistance to dErO tech. Unfortunately, this ‘resistance’ often goes along with substantial mental damage, making ‘resistants’ seemingly chaotic, dangerous and unreliable.

Resistants can sense the Violations and reality alterations and will try to protect and warn others. dErO-controlled systems will try to isolate and destroy them. They are often imprisoned as lunatics or live as exiles in hidden corners of the world.

In some cases the overuse of dErO tech and Air-Loom waves provokes a natural ‘resistant’ development in the target psyche, making them not only less vulnerable to dErO tech and methods, but more and more resistant with each attempt to suborn them.

(dErO are fascinated by, but terrified of, ‘Resistants’.)

Some unusual beings are either immune to dErO effects, or have methods of subverting or altering them. dErO will often avoid and evade such creatures;

· Golem or non-sentient minds.

· Some Paladins.

· Chaos Goblins, and some general Goblins.

· Aelf-Adal.

· High-ranking angelic forms.

Cowardice

While superficially, manically, confident dErO are utter personal and physical cowards.

If they get hurt they will shit themselves, (literally), and run, or float, away, getting to an Air Loom as quickly as possible and then wiping any memory of the encounter from the minds of those present.

While they will resent anyone capable of hurting them, they will also fear such individuals.

Betrayal and Incompetence

dErO betray each other, (if there is really more than one), constantly and their unstable patchwork technology fails unpredictably. Neither can all of the interlayered realities, or the whole of the Veins, be fully covered by Air-Looms all of the time. Coverage fluctuates, and often drops out at the worst possible time for a particular dErO.

If dErO 'coverage' goes down (their local Air Looms have broken or shut down), tell the truth to all the players and PCs - at least about what they can see, what they can think about, and any evidence that might lead them to the dErO. Even admit you were lying before - "I was probably under Dero control"

If dErO 'coverage' is returned (the Air Loom goes back on, or another is tasked), begin lying again, and acknowledge no difference in what you said before and are saying now (except to any Resistant PC’s).

Staffing Issues

dErO are singular. They don’t like each other. Their only servants are mortal souls who have been specifically Congruity Knotted, Violated and re-written to be so. The dErO cannot make anything, they can only make things worse. Anyone they have ‘worked over’ for a long period of time, will have adopted many dErO characteristics, especially a tendency to power-hunger, conspiracy and betrayal.

So, in a sense, the dErO have no ‘loyal’ and competent servants Its one or the other, and usually not much of either.

The only other beings who will willingly spend time around the dErO, are the Chaos Goblins, who are utterly mental and don’t care about anything.

dErO Encounters

They do not like to leave the Caves. It’s more likely they will send out dErO-ified servants and Chaos Goblins to do things, especially to investigate the numerous, complex, multileveled, and perhaps.. singular, (is it all just one great scheme?) conspiracies against them.

But they do need to leave sometimes.

Travel Methods

Some travel in closed howdahs or huge sedan chairs carried by chaos goblins. The goblins are not really 'carrying' the chair, which is actually a Mouldersphere with sticks sticking out. Instead the dErO antigrav carries the weight and the Chaos Goblins hands are glued or nailed, to the arms of the ‘chair’ . (There might be a dead goblin or two being carried along). The orb can move by itself, the sticks are attached to the orb, and the goblins attached to the sticks, as camouflage.

Others go on their own, on foot, if poor. All that really matters is that they have 'coverage' from an Air-Loom - if they do, they will not even be perceived, but might fall prey to mindless foes. If they need aid they may use their mental technology or Violations to compel others to assist them.

Coverage

if a dErO can afford it or is powerful enough, (and they usually won't travel without it), they will be tracked in their movements by an air-loom operated by another dErO (if there is another dErO).

This can make the experiential reality of all sentient things in the right area broadly whatever the operator wants them to be. So - usually locals won't even perceive the dErO, at all, they are invisible in a way more powerful than the spell Invisibility can provide, sentient minds will work themselves to excuse explain or ignore away any evidence of the dErO’s presence.

Or the dErO’s procession can appear as nearly anything else; a high status Knotsmen, an Aelf-Adal procession (which none would dare to fuck with), some unknown hyper-predator moving through the volume, or simply a deep sense of formless terror,

Unfortunately (or fortunately), - dErO are nasty, lazy, don't like each other , betray each other and fuck things up. (Assuming there are multiple dErO). The machine may go wrong, or service cut out, or a deliberate mistake!

Suddenly the nature of reality shifts again. What you believed ten seconds ago, that there was a 'cave dragon' or something moving, or that you saw a Terror-Lord palanquin, or that someone told you or you learned, why did you think that? you can't imagine why...

Theres a bunch of chaos goblins hopping and a huge mouldering half-sphere. Are those rags? Or rips and tears in something else?

Design Commentary

Needs work. Especially on how to actually 'run an encounter' or incorporate them into a campaign. Comment below if you wish.

Modernist Monster

A pleasing concept but a difficult monster to run. I needed to give dErO something actually interesting to make them unique in a world filled with pale, sick, cave-dwelling weirdos. And I wanted to avoid the 'Pathfinder Dero' who have a sick look but are basically just crazy Gnomes.

The nascent rules on reality and description via the Dm were inspired partly by 'There is no Antimemetics Division' and certainly by;

https://wardagainstevil.com/2025/03/07/treat-illusions-as-you-would-any-other-lie-no-rolls/

Which I found through Bens Glatisnat newsletter [https://questingbeast.substack.com/

It’s easy to imagine these methods, and especially my manic intensification and complexification of them here, going horribly wrong. Deliberately describing different 'layers' of the imagined reality to different players/PCs, and holding to it with a straight face, could be very fun and interesting; if the players are into it. So, if you are a good DM with familiar players who are down to roll with something very strange.

In effect you are inviting the Players to collaborate with each other and with you in their own bemusement and derangement.

Enough Crazy Characters

In this way, it might be better to wait to introduce dErO in-person, until there are enough 'crazy' possibly-resistant PCs for the playthrough of the encounter to be interesting and fun. (Most Veins PCs will and up some kind of crazy over a long enough time).

Weaknesses

Because the dErO mind-alteration power is so overwhelming, I tried to fill the dErO themselves with as many weaknesses as I possibly could. In no particular order they are;

> Fucking crazy

> Utter cowards

> Alone (possibly)

> Poorly served

> Have deeply unreliable technology

If a party, (or most of them), can realise for long enough that the dErO are 'real', it shouldn't be too hard to 'defeat' them.

Campaign Play

How this works out in a campaign, I do not know. Perhaps the party defeats one particular dErO, escapes the Goon Cave, but then other Air-Looms controlled by other dErO , are tasked to the area, and most or many of the PCs simply 'forget' that anything ever happened.

it might be impossible to either use the dErO systematically and seriously in a campaign without them becoming the sole and only focus of it.

In that case they become a kind of scary entertainment interlude monster. Well, there are worse things to be.

The X-Card

The 'real' Dero as imagined by Richard Shaver, are very extremely rapey, pornographic and monstrous, with a ninsidious interest in vulnerable human bodies common to the visions of schizophrenics.

I toned them down a lot, but definitely not enough for most players.

Probably 99% of DMs will never use the 'Violations'. If that aspect even survives till the book it will probably have a red boundary around it or something telling people to 'think before you act'.

Starting An Encounter

Something else I didn't get into. Ideally I suppose the 'presence' of the dErO would be suggested more and more as either the PCs intersected with their schemes or the dErO themselves began to take an interest. (Too many 'resistant' personalities acting together?).

When a full mixed reality breakdown occurs and half the party are seeing one thing and arguing with the other half who are seeing either nothing, or something else, while dErO 'coverage' is fluctuating, hopefully this is something the players at least saw coming.

Servants

I also didn't really get into what dErO servants are like. Or how on earth they work with Chaos Goblins (another utterly DM-maddening semi-metatextual monster), god what a mess that could be.

Apologia

Well, if you want normal simple-to-run monsters that do normal things then probably you are reading else where. Someone has to do the odd stuff and that someone is me.