Home & Yard, Inc.: Introduction

Working at Home & Yard, Inc. -- fine purveyors of any and every gadget you could ever want for your home and yard -- sucks. When you aren't staying at the office until 8:30 making copies of your boss's son's book report, you're setting pressing projects aside to spend all day searching for this organic dim sum place she vaguely remembers hearing about on the radio. You know, the only place Jennifer Anniston eats when she's in town? Yeah, that one; shouldn't take a moment, thanks. Employees end up with pathetic excuses for social lives, as the hard work and long hours take their toll, keeping them too busy to keep up with the hot spots and happening events in their city. The bosses here at Home & Yard, Inc., aren't cruel or mean -- they're actually quite friendly and likeable -- but the company seems designed to eat away at your life, leaving employees in an interminable tedium as they wait for promotions that seem to be awarded rarely and randomly.

Actually, that's a pretty good summary of the company.

Have you ever noticed that the universe seems to take a perverse delight in destroying your life whenever you get into a rut, comfortable or confined as it may be? So have the occultists who founded Home & Yard, Inc. Their mystical investigations into this phenomenon have brought them to believe that the universe can be seen as a possibility-generator, a wondrous perpetual motion machine that churns out possibilities at an incredible pace. Furthermore, they have concluded that the universe takes action to protect these possibilities' birth into actualities. Thus, when someone's life seems to have become barren ground, resistant to the seeds of possibilities taking root, just before it becomes perfectly predictable, the universe breaks that life open in order to make space to allow its possibility-children to enter that life fully.

Home & Yard, Inc., was founded in an attempt to explore and harness this phenomenon, attempting to construct a drudgery that dares the universe to take this sort of action. That's why promotions seem so rare and random: they're only given to those employees who have gone through a "Nabri Event", as they are termed by the company in honor of the founder of the company who pioneered their investigation of the phenomenon. The company has gone so far as to assign people to ensure that their employees' favorite and typical stores never have the clothes they fall in love with in their size, and it usually plants numerous bugs and various other pieces of surveillance equipment in their employees' homes, in order to catch the very beginnings of the Nabri Event. These effects include things like alarms not going off when they are set and all the water in one's apartment building being boiling hot.

Home & Yard, Inc., even works with a race of spiritual beings they either discovered or created (interestingly, no one is sure which) who are attracted to and who intensify the effects of the Nabri Event. Invisible until you have gone (or are going) through a Nabri Event, these draconic or dinosaurian beings have a long, scaly brown tail, huge brown haunches, and a row of blue triangular-shaped flaps of skin that run the length of their back. These beings also play a key role in Home & Yard, Inc.'s plan to take advantage of the Nabri Effect, helping to harvest the energies of the Effect and forming an integral part of the company's embryonic magickal engine. The heroic possibilities unlocked and actualized by people who have gone through an Event amplified by one of these beings is merely a side effect.

What's Inside

In this book, many of the secret teachings of Home & Yard, Inc., are revealed for use in your ???? game. Everything in this book requires training by that company to acquire, and Home & Yard, Inc., is unlikely to provide that training to anyone who hasn't passed through an Amplified Nabri Event, and your typical hero who didn't become one through that process is unlikely to be eligible for the Effect. Of course, your typical hero should find that last sentence a welcome challenge.

A full chapter of this book is devoted to skills and feats, beginning with an extensive discussion of new applications for existing skills. The chapter also includes a long list of new feats used by the activated employees of Home & Yard, Inc. Three new standard character classes (that is, classes without any prerequisites required to enter, unlike advanced and prestige classes) are presented: the deadly niniopë, the masterful scoper, and the versatile jothief. These classes provide players with new ways to approach characters in the modern, mundane, and melodramatic world of ????, and each class has a unique approach to combat as well.

The large number of prestige classes in the book is an effect of Home & Yard, Inc.'s attempts to take full advantage of the Nabri Event, as they throw every resource they have -- financial, human, magickal -- into exploring the limits and types of its effects. Nearly every character concept can find refinement and amplification in the varied training programs offered by Home & Yard, Inc.

Many of the spells found in the grimoires and traditions of Home & Yard, Inc., interact with skills -- opening up new uses, providing special bonuses, or producing powerful effects for characters with the right skills. In addition, many of their spells focus on using existing abilities in unusual and interesting ways. Experiencing a Nabri Event defamiliarizes you from everything you knew before; it forges a powerful tie between you and the universe's constant birthing of new possibilities. As an art and a science predicated on manipulating the interface and boundaries between self and world, this new way of looking at things is reflected in the spells taught by Home & Yard, Inc.

The last chapter of this book provides information on several divisions and subsidiaries of Home & Yard, Inc., as well as various organizations and secret societies the company has absorbed or fostered. Some are related to the prestige classes introduced earlier, while others stand on their own. Each group has guidelines for membership, benefits for joining, and realistic reasons for characters to belong. Any one of these groups could become the focus of a campaign, since each admits members from a diverse selection of character types.

What's NOT Inside

Not included anywhere in this book is a general description of the Nabri Event or how it works. This is intentional; the Nabri Event, by its very nature, evades description. This is occasionally even true of an individual's own unique Nabri Event! By avoiding description of this sort, I hope to push GMs to surprise and challenge their players.

What You Need to Play

????, the game of which this book is a part, is based upon the rules and information found in the d20 Modern Roleplaying Game Corebook and the d20 Modern Standard Reference Document, as modified and described in ????. In addition to these rules, Home & Yard, Inc. includes references to material in the Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook, Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide, Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, Epic Level Handbook, Expanded Psionics Handbook, Complete Warrior, and Complete Arcane. Although possession of any or all of these additional supplements will enhance your enjoyment of this book, they are not strictly necessary.

Sources
The two seeds of Home & Yard, Inc. are Complete Adventurer and Death's Daughter by Amber Benson.