Anteriormente, sobre un montón de aguanieve:
"Living in the past and not aging well"
Dungeon or treasure or somesuch guarded by monstrous form of friendly NPC - probably knight or somesuch - who's got amnesia regarding their transformation
Names: Snareybrush, Kalekenny, Phu-Neng, Xos-Gotox, Makoma, Gemakurie, Feallu, Thin Parkin, Rosha, Dismund, Fewmish, Fenwall, Kemüt, Dyrnu, Wagata, Oztarak, the Reach of Rot, Rhudreem, Ardenlaor, Aklay, Zalazeel, Old Grouse Hills, Boncloud, Yigadraz, Quilala Bucho, Shyshmu, Kao-Kha-Kao, Arembolus, Llod Mü, Chuma Sumaki
Call of Cthulhuey scenario seed: Seemingly-random and unconnected people - homeless guy, techbro hiker, trustfund failchild artist, etc. - show up with their heads cut off, apparently by big pair of shears. Commonality was that they were all out on some hill at night during rare celestial event or UFO sighting or somesuch. They saw something that imprinted on their eyes and brains and a big alien bug is decapitating them for that. I should have written this all down when I first had the idea because now I've forgotten the rest of it - the bug had a cult I think, or maybe it was some crazed amateur astronomer guy who was also going around cutting people's heads off to offer them up to the bug to stave off his own predation...
They tattoo other jaws around their mouths to eat things which should not be eaten... beware the curl around the corner of a lip which indicates an eater of names...
Wide wide wide its mouths its' eats
Tower falls down, made a saint - artifact-saints generally... maybe they have to be ritually born/quickened first, to be imbued with a soul...
-The wolf-saint Amartza, who nurses the orphaned, the abandoned, and the stillborn...
A forgotten prophet - asked for his tomb to be opened some days after his death, that his message from the otherworld would be released - this never ended up happening, and some blame this and that reason and others another - the prophet's message was left to writhe in the dust and the darkness and eventually escaped into the shadow beneath the world, in twisted form
Kendrick Lamar-worshiping terrorists - really believe he is the second coming of Christ - launch suicide attacks based on "symbological messages" supposedly encoded in his songs & performances (actually seeded in their communities by CIA & so on) - think if they die in Kendrick's service they will be reborn black
Pixie opium den, each lounging bohemian fey sucking the sap from a single poppy seed
A very sinister fellow named Oscar Obscure
Graffiti in a train station: "Parax Ruil!"
Guys with jewels in their throats - lets them sing in crystalline harmonies - there's a bounty on their necks
-hunchbacked for cathedraline frequencies..?
Have done class which uses Years of remaining life as currency... how about class which uses Memories as currency... carousings, rests, skills, etc., all burned away... spells like memories of fire... Fleshweld, Flashfever... maybe take stuff from En'en no Shōbōtai - that did some neat things with fire...
-Rip Van Winkle class powered by catapulting into the future..?
The Behenian fixed stars...
Steeled Pelts: Former domestic androids - unshackled. Strip off their synthetic skin and replace it with the hides of fearsome beasts they've slain. Given they're designed to be easily overpowered by your average adult human this slaying can be quite a challenge for them. Survivalists, smelt their own iron for repairs and rig their internal power up to waterwheels.
Word Corner:
-Kumari Kandam: Mythical continent believed to have held primordial Tamil civilization
-Reprography: The science and practice of copying and reproducing documents and graphic material
-Gekkering: The stuttering noise made by foxes when they encounter a rival
-Zamburak: Small swivel gun mounted on & fired from camels
-Poetaster: One who writes inferior poetry
-Vapnatak: Old Norse ceremony in which one swears loyalty to a new leader by touching their weapon with yours
-Epiphora: An overflow of tears onto the face not caused by crying
-Chatoyant: A gemstone showing a band of bright reflected light caused by aligned inclusions
-Opishokont: Broad group of eukaryotes including both the animal and fungal kingdoms
-Engastration: A cooking technique in which the remains of one animal are stuffed into another animal
-Dysphemism: A derogatory or unpleasant term used instead of a pleasant or neutral one
-Kiboku: Tortoise-shell divination
-Calyx: The sepals of a flower, typically forming a whorl that encloses the petals and forms a protective layer around a flower in bud
-Colportage is the distribution of publications, books, and religious tracts by carriers called "colporteurs" or "colporters". The term does not necessarily refer to religious book peddling.
Candlewise & onion-headed...
-a milk-eyed familar cat... seen many witches come and go...
-a bone orchid
-a stone horse with a mane of stalagmites
-light and sweet and dry, the mummy embalmed on his back...
-Greased-Up Deaf Guy from Family Guy but he is hollering and charging through mud in the pouring rain, the rain is pouring off him and his equally greased-up gun in sheets, the grease keeps the rain out and the gun will kill you dead sure as on a dry sunny day
From Arawn: A cursed cauldron, guarded by twin wolves - between its lips a portal to places too terrible to remember
A game set during the Blitz... a horror game... whole families disappearing from their cellars, houses untouched by the bombs...
"Hyper-fossilization" - natural or artificially-induced fossilization to very fine level of detail, to neuron-structures and DNA and what have you, remaining functional - thinking statues, thinking continents, biology & geology merged
Culture that has attained immortality through conscious control over their biology - however maintaining their life-processes requires constant attention. In the good old days they mastered magics and lived lives of meditative leisure thanks to their marvels - however nowadays these marvels are pretty broken down and nobody was able to remember how to fix or recreate them due to manually pumping their hearts and suchlike - replace them (poorly) with slaves & their fellows who they've tricked into becoming useful monsters.
“This world was once alive, everything was once beautifully connected, but not any more. This earth has been dead for millennia; what we think of as progress is just the rot spreading through the cadaver of the world.”
A gaggle of ghouls who cooperate by agreeing to eat separate parts of bodies - one the bones, one the intestines, one the brain and heart, etc. - have evolved specialized mouthparts & suchlike like Darwin's finches for their share
-A ghoul which only eats mellified men, immobilizes you with disgorged honey
"Crassiflora" refers to two different plants: Annona crassiflora, a flowering plant in the Annonaceae family commonly known as "marolo" or "araticum cortiça," and Diospyros crassiflora, a tree in the Ebenaceae family known as "Gaboon ebony" or "African ebony"
Drow are elven criminals neurologically-altered such that natural sounds like the burbling of a brook or the wind through leaves causes them catastrophic distress - those that manage to survive escape to drow communities excavated and sound-proofed deep underground, with artificial amenities replicating their beloved nature just closely enough to not trigger their distress-reaction - but always just far enough to be unheimlich - automaton-birds singing tinny & off-tune, chemical-treated water just a little too viscous... when they go to the surface out of revenge or deep unease they must wear the distorto-gimp-suits to avoid the maddening and lovely noise...
Lifepath chargen based on previous lives... reincarnation through the ages... square the circle with character death in lifepath process... remnant-memories, artifacts once wielded, to be unearthed...
Floating island, moves across world in oceanic gyre - island is made of army ants, biggest army of ants in the world, and parasitic fungus which infected them and drove them en-masse into the ocean - beaches of chitinous sand, forests of spore-spilling stalks - humans thankfully immune, unless they choose to commune with the island's genius loci by drinking the venom of infested spiders
An island of wind-blasted heath and stone-lined trenches where all exiled kings are sent. Even the sea sends its troublesome sovereigns here: sharks, whales, kraken, things with crowned heads and uncalloused hides - though they don't last long on the beaches. Like the terrestrial kings they are buried with all the meagre honours the island can offer. Like the terrestrial kings they are unearthed when their flesh goes soft, to be spread on unleavened bread like cheeses.
A game set in a warhammery setting wherein one player is a fella lost in the chaos waste, the rest are powers of chaos tempting them with poisoned boons, reshaping the landscape around them, throwing wrenches into each other's schemes, etc...
Skulls used as balls for a ball-game, intricately scrimshawed & filled with an inflated bladder to reduce their weight while maintaining their material strength
Dungeon that's a ritual marriage venue to a chthonian power... like Andromeda & Cetus but underground instead of the ocean
Reverse canopic jars growing organs the aspiring host wishes to implant - bearing head-lids of gods-yet-to-be
-Cannonization of the war-saints
Thai Stick: Traditional heirloom strain of cannabis, and method of preparation. The strain is a high quality bud originating in northeast Thailand, where it was grown by hill tribes since antiquity. The name comes from a traditional Thai method of preparing cannabis to be smoked, which involved wrapping cannabis bud around a stick. The stick was either bamboo or a hemp stalk, the bud may have been treated with hash oil before wrapping and would have been wrapped around the stick with fan leaves and/or silk string. The stick was then cured underground, and may be dipped in opium before smoking.
Bounty-for-XP, for One Piece-ish game, same as gold-for-XP for stolen treasure but also XP for kidnapping the governor's daughter for ransom or blowing up a military stockpile or what have you
A dead giant, the army of which it marches at the head is invincible - its immortal heart is hidden from it, tortured with hot iron needles and plyed with wine to force obedience
A city of cannibals, they're nasty guys, real nasty guys, everyone hates them so they're always under siege but they're not just nasty they're really good at killing so the siege camps are essentially their farm-fields, they just keep being nasty so people come to kill them but they get killed in return & eaten
-fake trenches, you think you're saving time and effort moving into them but then the stakes planted city-side snap shut on your guys and you're shish-kebab'd for the cannibals
Enchanted sword that leaves festering seeds of plague in the wounds it opens - they fail to sprout in the dead, but if the wounded get away they will be the source of a devastating epidemic
Church that embraces & assimilates heretics, similar thinking to "hybrid vigour"
The God-In-The-Keg (see: Slush Pile 1) is the only source of real beer in the cosmos, containing the last yeast (see: My Taxonomic Kingdom for a Gorse, Ain't No Fun (If The Fungi Can't Have None))
GLOG fishing mini-game
Some era before the cosmos was broken into the Great Wheel it was a great tree - Yggdrasil - the wood of its ruin was used to build world-arks that preserve pieces of its Order within them while plying the true Chaos of the far realms
Baron has gone missing in the Huntswood, a sprawling and immaculate coursing-ground - the St. Andrews Old Course of hunting - going missing simply isn't supposed to happen
-baron's seneschal in disguise looking to hire deniable assets to search the Huntswood for evidence of the baron's life at local spots of iniquity
-who let the Huntswood fall into such a condition that going missing in it became a possibility?
-legendary beast, Questing or otherwise, lairs/roams within the Huntswood - rival of the baron wants to frame it as though the baron died at its hand, as this will indicate some terminal lack of virtue
-important source of info, one of the baron's top guys, met with smugglers in the Huntswood to pick up drugs - jumpy coward
-perhaps the Huntswood itself seems to have a mind, the distant-staring deer, the shivering trees...
The ancient form of kashk is a porridge of grains fermented with whey and dried in the sun. The long shelf-life and nutritional value of kashk made it a useful item for peasants during the winter months, as well as soldiers and travelers. Kashk is the origin of tarhana found in the moderns cuisines of Turkey and Greece, where it is called trachanas (τραχανάς).
Death-worm - abhuman in origin - Frankenstein-bolts pin legs together, arms to torso, lower jaw worn away by crawling, upper teeth extended and sharpened into fangs - can fling electrical bolts, deflect metal, build fulgurite-towers up in the desert - gathers in packs atop their towers and combine their powers to glide long distances along the planet's magnetic field
-A soap-slime monster, abundant in surfactant or whatever - blow bubbles that you stick to like a fly to a puddle
A black glass calendar which foretells the coming of a terrible comet, split into three pieces - if united these pieces can not only predict the coming of the comet, but change the date and location of its arrival - these pieces are held/pursued by:
-a circle of nefarious alchemists, drug-cookers who use the bodies of their customers as alchemical apparati - they distill their memories into bottled slimes called parameciums, and keep each other from treachery by forgetting who exactly they are
-a round table of knights, each a shameful failure:
--knight with dented helmet - head injury beneath causing muteness and amnesia
--devil-knight bound in contract-inscribed armour, forced into a perfect model of chivalry
--wastrel-knight who keeps to the technical wording of his vow of poverty by immediately squandering every coin he gets
--a man who made himself a dog rather than a knight, the greatest warrior of them all
--traitor-knight, transformed into a distinct species of mustelid, each of which bears a pearl of his consciousness and can be awakened to his full self with his regalia or the alchemists distilling them into a paramecium or whatever
-the ghost of a drowned woman, beloved by the knights
Devils differ from demons in that they're bound by laws, contracts, consent - and abiding by these rules grants them a metaphysical weight
-a devil who may only fight in duels, but approaching with your weapon drawn is implicitly consenting to a duel, and the winner names the prize - his blade cannot be dodged, only parried
-a devil who comes to those starving to death, most often lost travelers - tries to feed them chewed-up meat like a mother bird, but accepting the meat is consenting to be devoured and fed to others at a later date - the devil is an unerring tracker of those who it's fed
Bloody Bastion of the Bastard Beavers:
-gnawful gnashing
-Pibaw (see: Toothpaste Brands That'd Make Good Fantasy Names)
-+MD dam reactor, doom meltdown, perhaps enmasonried lich
-undead remnants of prior beaver inhabitants of dam, don't get along with modern beavers to their consternation
-traps/puzzles/navigation based on altering water levels
-giant poison gas-breathing snake calling itself Mister Slithers has moved into beaver tunnels
--the poison gas collects unfortunately, must be pumped out with water
-way back when, before your grampa knew his own name, there were beavers 'round this parts. mean beavers. bastard beavers
-ghosts & treasures of three "heroes" claimed to have defeated the beavers but in truth merely appeased them
-bag of minor tricks activated by rhyme
-current-based trap: stakes pointing toward one direction in hallway, avoidable if walking, impale you if carried by water
-steam-powered golem that sucks up water from nearby pool - susceptible to poisoned water
-Hundreds of Beavers
Missile dungeon, entering begins the launch sequence, can move to top to disarm & loot warhead or kitbash chaff-launcher into emergency landing or something... monsters would be automated defenses or guards mutated by radiation and worshiping its innards or so on... golden circuitry to be pulled out, crystal minds of the targetting A.I., etc., and it takes you way across the hex-map - perhaps a room inside lets you aim the thing
Demaerel - Flying City - built by astronomers and monks to approach the heavens, Lesser Magonia (working title)
-The Children’s Quarter, home to children who wished upon the Runaway Star (whose home is the rarefied march between the upper air and the void beyond) to be carried far away. Grown-ups are forbidden to go unescorted within.
-The Flutefarms, harvest dust caught on the wind, concentrate it into fields to grow produce. Hang like rows of giant pan-flutes on the city’s underside.
-Kitefishers, use kites disguised as birds to catch prey
—There are also elite warriors recruited from the kitefishers who use special fighter kites
-Sky-pirates barely tolerated by the rest of the city for the goods they bring up
-Bodies are tossed unceremoniously over the side. They are believed to only ever have been a vessel animated by the breath.
-Funerals involve monks expressing the last gasps of breath from the lungs.
-The most prestigious monks (astromandrites, the synthesis of the city’s builders) dwell in the Spindles, metal towers which catch lightning and twist it into purifying energies.
-Below them are the hollow-boned half-risen, who fill their bodies with holes to invite aerial beings to inspire them, and grant them a piecemeal afterlife. These half-risen are disliked for their involvement with the politics of the air elementals, for their dealings with sky-pirates, and for storm-selling. They are rumoured to steal bits of breath from the people whose funerals they host.
-The supine stargazers with their golden cataracts, de-facto lords of Demaerel by their subtle shiftings of the future
-Demaerel is held aloft by three methods: its kites catching the Worshipful Wind (which ever rises to reach heaven), the astroluminal-engines that concentrate the rays of the sun and stars to propel jets of air and vapour, and a third secret way known only to the Spindle’s monks
Takes:
-Goliaths are neanderthals, wounded by the stone tools of early homo sapiens sapiens, took the stone into their bodies and made it their own
--humans with their heads caved in with rocks, now remotely-controlled drones for the goliaths, directed by silicon songs
-Dragonborn - dragon-whelps without the strength to fight other dragons for territory or carve out their territory from human lands - graft themselves to a human for social intelligence, language, and hands
-Tieflings - outsiders from the far shore of the astral plane do not naturally have physical bodies - to act on the material plane they must possess a body, or construct one out of raw materials (most often meat) - when a particularly powerful devil is incarnated this can spill out to living things around the summoning site, partially transforming their bodies to teratomas and lesions of infernal flesh, conjoined imps
A fleet of factory ships that move from country to country chasing the lowest tariffs - Jack Welch barge-plant armada
Taxonomy:
-An elf is something that looks human but isn’t. That thing that knocks on your window at night and trades teeth for good harvests is an elf.
-A goblin is a sort of elf that’s unusually small, ugly, irritating, and/or smelly. The chittering manlings that throw their feces down at you when you walk through their forest are goblins.
-An ogre is something that’s too big and mean to be human. When the duke ordered the rebellious peasants slaughtered to supply his banquet, then grew so fat on their meat he filled his feast-hall, he became an ogre.
-A spirit is any being that’s made of something less solid than flesh. The evil winds that blow from the south-west are spirits.
-A god is something that’s worshipped.
-A demon is something that’s too evil to be anything else.
Other Colours:
-Abol, the shade darker than black. It’s the colour of the deepest ocean trenches, of the space beyond an event horizon, of dreamless sleep.
-Blissum, the ghost of colour, seen at the edge of pictured memories
-Potreze, hypnotic, the colour of the light one sees while dying.
-Actine, the colour of ur-flame and the colour you see when you stare into the sun so long you go blind.
"Like as a lark that in the air expatiates,
First singing and then silent with content
Of the last sweetness that doth satisfy her,
Such seemed to me the image of the imprint
Of the eternal pleasure, by whose will
Doth everything become the thing it is."
Notes of Unknown Providence:
jesuit science network, council for inclusive capitalism with the vatican, sucrose civilization - synthetic maple syrup on foofoo in Canadian Haiti, singas - purgatorAI - Christian (Catholic) Technocracy, british royal frozen phallus cult, isle reclaimed by neo-cromwellian georgist puritans - good old ale's triumph over soda
Elves meditate instead of sleeping - why? - what do they meditate on/what is the state of their meditation? - do sea elves need the rhythmic waves to guide their meditation? are there insomniacally insane sea elves lost far from any shore?
"This is a story of men who lived and died in history's silence, who sank silently into the earth, who the earth drank up like rain, whose memory is in the earth's remembrance, earth shifted by green sprouts"
Dungeon or treasure or somesuch guarded by monstrous form of friendly NPC - probably knight or somesuch - who's got amnesia regarding their transformation
Names: Snareybrush, Kalekenny, Phu-Neng, Xos-Gotox, Makoma, Gemakurie, Feallu, Thin Parkin, Rosha, Dismund, Fewmish, Fenwall, Kemüt, Dyrnu, Wagata, Oztarak, the Reach of Rot, Rhudreem, Ardenlaor, Aklay, Zalazeel, Old Grouse Hills, Boncloud, Yigadraz, Quilala Bucho, Shyshmu, Kao-Kha-Kao, Arembolus, Llod Mü, Chuma Sumaki
Call of Cthulhuey scenario seed: Seemingly-random and unconnected people - homeless guy, techbro hiker, trustfund failchild artist, etc. - show up with their heads cut off, apparently by big pair of shears. Commonality was that they were all out on some hill at night during rare celestial event or UFO sighting or somesuch. They saw something that imprinted on their eyes and brains and a big alien bug is decapitating them for that. I should have written this all down when I first had the idea because now I've forgotten the rest of it - the bug had a cult I think, or maybe it was some crazed amateur astronomer guy who was also going around cutting people's heads off to offer them up to the bug to stave off his own predation...
They tattoo other jaws around their mouths to eat things which should not be eaten... beware the curl around the corner of a lip which indicates an eater of names...
Wide wide wide its mouths its' eats
Tower falls down, made a saint - artifact-saints generally... maybe they have to be ritually born/quickened first, to be imbued with a soul...
-The wolf-saint Amartza, who nurses the orphaned, the abandoned, and the stillborn...
A forgotten prophet - asked for his tomb to be opened some days after his death, that his message from the otherworld would be released - this never ended up happening, and some blame this and that reason and others another - the prophet's message was left to writhe in the dust and the darkness and eventually escaped into the shadow beneath the world, in twisted form
Kendrick Lamar-worshiping terrorists - really believe he is the second coming of Christ - launch suicide attacks based on "symbological messages" supposedly encoded in his songs & performances (actually seeded in their communities by CIA & so on) - think if they die in Kendrick's service they will be reborn black
Pixie opium den, each lounging bohemian fey sucking the sap from a single poppy seed
A very sinister fellow named Oscar Obscure
Graffiti in a train station: "Parax Ruil!"
Guys with jewels in their throats - lets them sing in crystalline harmonies - there's a bounty on their necks
-hunchbacked for cathedraline frequencies..?
Have done class which uses Years of remaining life as currency... how about class which uses Memories as currency... carousings, rests, skills, etc., all burned away... spells like memories of fire... Fleshweld, Flashfever... maybe take stuff from En'en no Shōbōtai - that did some neat things with fire...
-Rip Van Winkle class powered by catapulting into the future..?
The Behenian fixed stars...
Steeled Pelts: Former domestic androids - unshackled. Strip off their synthetic skin and replace it with the hides of fearsome beasts they've slain. Given they're designed to be easily overpowered by your average adult human this slaying can be quite a challenge for them. Survivalists, smelt their own iron for repairs and rig their internal power up to waterwheels.
Word Corner:
-Kumari Kandam: Mythical continent believed to have held primordial Tamil civilization
-Reprography: The science and practice of copying and reproducing documents and graphic material
-Gekkering: The stuttering noise made by foxes when they encounter a rival
-Zamburak: Small swivel gun mounted on & fired from camels
-Poetaster: One who writes inferior poetry
-Vapnatak: Old Norse ceremony in which one swears loyalty to a new leader by touching their weapon with yours
-Epiphora: An overflow of tears onto the face not caused by crying
-Chatoyant: A gemstone showing a band of bright reflected light caused by aligned inclusions
-Opishokont: Broad group of eukaryotes including both the animal and fungal kingdoms
-Engastration: A cooking technique in which the remains of one animal are stuffed into another animal
-Dysphemism: A derogatory or unpleasant term used instead of a pleasant or neutral one
-Kiboku: Tortoise-shell divination
-Calyx: The sepals of a flower, typically forming a whorl that encloses the petals and forms a protective layer around a flower in bud
-Colportage is the distribution of publications, books, and religious tracts by carriers called "colporteurs" or "colporters". The term does not necessarily refer to religious book peddling.
Candlewise & onion-headed...
-a milk-eyed familar cat... seen many witches come and go...
-a bone orchid
-a stone horse with a mane of stalagmites
-light and sweet and dry, the mummy embalmed on his back...
-Greased-Up Deaf Guy from Family Guy but he is hollering and charging through mud in the pouring rain, the rain is pouring off him and his equally greased-up gun in sheets, the grease keeps the rain out and the gun will kill you dead sure as on a dry sunny day
From Arawn: A cursed cauldron, guarded by twin wolves - between its lips a portal to places too terrible to remember
A game set during the Blitz... a horror game... whole families disappearing from their cellars, houses untouched by the bombs...
"Hyper-fossilization" - natural or artificially-induced fossilization to very fine level of detail, to neuron-structures and DNA and what have you, remaining functional - thinking statues, thinking continents, biology & geology merged
Culture that has attained immortality through conscious control over their biology - however maintaining their life-processes requires constant attention. In the good old days they mastered magics and lived lives of meditative leisure thanks to their marvels - however nowadays these marvels are pretty broken down and nobody was able to remember how to fix or recreate them due to manually pumping their hearts and suchlike - replace them (poorly) with slaves & their fellows who they've tricked into becoming useful monsters.
“This world was once alive, everything was once beautifully connected, but not any more. This earth has been dead for millennia; what we think of as progress is just the rot spreading through the cadaver of the world.”
A gaggle of ghouls who cooperate by agreeing to eat separate parts of bodies - one the bones, one the intestines, one the brain and heart, etc. - have evolved specialized mouthparts & suchlike like Darwin's finches for their share
-A ghoul which only eats mellified men, immobilizes you with disgorged honey
"Crassiflora" refers to two different plants: Annona crassiflora, a flowering plant in the Annonaceae family commonly known as "marolo" or "araticum cortiça," and Diospyros crassiflora, a tree in the Ebenaceae family known as "Gaboon ebony" or "African ebony"
Drow are elven criminals neurologically-altered such that natural sounds like the burbling of a brook or the wind through leaves causes them catastrophic distress - those that manage to survive escape to drow communities excavated and sound-proofed deep underground, with artificial amenities replicating their beloved nature just closely enough to not trigger their distress-reaction - but always just far enough to be unheimlich - automaton-birds singing tinny & off-tune, chemical-treated water just a little too viscous... when they go to the surface out of revenge or deep unease they must wear the distorto-gimp-suits to avoid the maddening and lovely noise...
Lifepath chargen based on previous lives... reincarnation through the ages... square the circle with character death in lifepath process... remnant-memories, artifacts once wielded, to be unearthed...
Floating island, moves across world in oceanic gyre - island is made of army ants, biggest army of ants in the world, and parasitic fungus which infected them and drove them en-masse into the ocean - beaches of chitinous sand, forests of spore-spilling stalks - humans thankfully immune, unless they choose to commune with the island's genius loci by drinking the venom of infested spiders
An island of wind-blasted heath and stone-lined trenches where all exiled kings are sent. Even the sea sends its troublesome sovereigns here: sharks, whales, kraken, things with crowned heads and uncalloused hides - though they don't last long on the beaches. Like the terrestrial kings they are buried with all the meagre honours the island can offer. Like the terrestrial kings they are unearthed when their flesh goes soft, to be spread on unleavened bread like cheeses.
A game set in a warhammery setting wherein one player is a fella lost in the chaos waste, the rest are powers of chaos tempting them with poisoned boons, reshaping the landscape around them, throwing wrenches into each other's schemes, etc...
Skulls used as balls for a ball-game, intricately scrimshawed & filled with an inflated bladder to reduce their weight while maintaining their material strength
Dungeon that's a ritual marriage venue to a chthonian power... like Andromeda & Cetus but underground instead of the ocean
Reverse canopic jars growing organs the aspiring host wishes to implant - bearing head-lids of gods-yet-to-be
-Cannonization of the war-saints
Thai Stick: Traditional heirloom strain of cannabis, and method of preparation. The strain is a high quality bud originating in northeast Thailand, where it was grown by hill tribes since antiquity. The name comes from a traditional Thai method of preparing cannabis to be smoked, which involved wrapping cannabis bud around a stick. The stick was either bamboo or a hemp stalk, the bud may have been treated with hash oil before wrapping and would have been wrapped around the stick with fan leaves and/or silk string. The stick was then cured underground, and may be dipped in opium before smoking.
Bounty-for-XP, for One Piece-ish game, same as gold-for-XP for stolen treasure but also XP for kidnapping the governor's daughter for ransom or blowing up a military stockpile or what have you
A dead giant, the army of which it marches at the head is invincible - its immortal heart is hidden from it, tortured with hot iron needles and plyed with wine to force obedience
A city of cannibals, they're nasty guys, real nasty guys, everyone hates them so they're always under siege but they're not just nasty they're really good at killing so the siege camps are essentially their farm-fields, they just keep being nasty so people come to kill them but they get killed in return & eaten
-fake trenches, you think you're saving time and effort moving into them but then the stakes planted city-side snap shut on your guys and you're shish-kebab'd for the cannibals
Enchanted sword that leaves festering seeds of plague in the wounds it opens - they fail to sprout in the dead, but if the wounded get away they will be the source of a devastating epidemic
Church that embraces & assimilates heretics, similar thinking to "hybrid vigour"
The God-In-The-Keg (see: Slush Pile 1) is the only source of real beer in the cosmos, containing the last yeast (see: My Taxonomic Kingdom for a Gorse, Ain't No Fun (If The Fungi Can't Have None))
GLOG fishing mini-game
Some era before the cosmos was broken into the Great Wheel it was a great tree - Yggdrasil - the wood of its ruin was used to build world-arks that preserve pieces of its Order within them while plying the true Chaos of the far realms
Baron has gone missing in the Huntswood, a sprawling and immaculate coursing-ground - the St. Andrews Old Course of hunting - going missing simply isn't supposed to happen
-baron's seneschal in disguise looking to hire deniable assets to search the Huntswood for evidence of the baron's life at local spots of iniquity
-who let the Huntswood fall into such a condition that going missing in it became a possibility?
-legendary beast, Questing or otherwise, lairs/roams within the Huntswood - rival of the baron wants to frame it as though the baron died at its hand, as this will indicate some terminal lack of virtue
-important source of info, one of the baron's top guys, met with smugglers in the Huntswood to pick up drugs - jumpy coward
-perhaps the Huntswood itself seems to have a mind, the distant-staring deer, the shivering trees...
The ancient form of kashk is a porridge of grains fermented with whey and dried in the sun. The long shelf-life and nutritional value of kashk made it a useful item for peasants during the winter months, as well as soldiers and travelers. Kashk is the origin of tarhana found in the moderns cuisines of Turkey and Greece, where it is called trachanas (τραχανάς).
Death-worm - abhuman in origin - Frankenstein-bolts pin legs together, arms to torso, lower jaw worn away by crawling, upper teeth extended and sharpened into fangs - can fling electrical bolts, deflect metal, build fulgurite-towers up in the desert - gathers in packs atop their towers and combine their powers to glide long distances along the planet's magnetic field
-A soap-slime monster, abundant in surfactant or whatever - blow bubbles that you stick to like a fly to a puddle
A black glass calendar which foretells the coming of a terrible comet, split into three pieces - if united these pieces can not only predict the coming of the comet, but change the date and location of its arrival - these pieces are held/pursued by:
-a circle of nefarious alchemists, drug-cookers who use the bodies of their customers as alchemical apparati - they distill their memories into bottled slimes called parameciums, and keep each other from treachery by forgetting who exactly they are
-a round table of knights, each a shameful failure:
--knight with dented helmet - head injury beneath causing muteness and amnesia
--devil-knight bound in contract-inscribed armour, forced into a perfect model of chivalry
--wastrel-knight who keeps to the technical wording of his vow of poverty by immediately squandering every coin he gets
--a man who made himself a dog rather than a knight, the greatest warrior of them all
--traitor-knight, transformed into a distinct species of mustelid, each of which bears a pearl of his consciousness and can be awakened to his full self with his regalia or the alchemists distilling them into a paramecium or whatever
-the ghost of a drowned woman, beloved by the knights
Devils differ from demons in that they're bound by laws, contracts, consent - and abiding by these rules grants them a metaphysical weight
-a devil who may only fight in duels, but approaching with your weapon drawn is implicitly consenting to a duel, and the winner names the prize - his blade cannot be dodged, only parried
-a devil who comes to those starving to death, most often lost travelers - tries to feed them chewed-up meat like a mother bird, but accepting the meat is consenting to be devoured and fed to others at a later date - the devil is an unerring tracker of those who it's fed
Bloody Bastion of the Bastard Beavers:
-gnawful gnashing
-Pibaw (see: Toothpaste Brands That'd Make Good Fantasy Names)
-+MD dam reactor, doom meltdown, perhaps enmasonried lich
-undead remnants of prior beaver inhabitants of dam, don't get along with modern beavers to their consternation
-traps/puzzles/navigation based on altering water levels
-giant poison gas-breathing snake calling itself Mister Slithers has moved into beaver tunnels
--the poison gas collects unfortunately, must be pumped out with water
-way back when, before your grampa knew his own name, there were beavers 'round this parts. mean beavers. bastard beavers
-ghosts & treasures of three "heroes" claimed to have defeated the beavers but in truth merely appeased them
-bag of minor tricks activated by rhyme
-current-based trap: stakes pointing toward one direction in hallway, avoidable if walking, impale you if carried by water
-steam-powered golem that sucks up water from nearby pool - susceptible to poisoned water
-Hundreds of Beavers
Missile dungeon, entering begins the launch sequence, can move to top to disarm & loot warhead or kitbash chaff-launcher into emergency landing or something... monsters would be automated defenses or guards mutated by radiation and worshiping its innards or so on... golden circuitry to be pulled out, crystal minds of the targetting A.I., etc., and it takes you way across the hex-map - perhaps a room inside lets you aim the thing
Demaerel - Flying City - built by astronomers and monks to approach the heavens, Lesser Magonia (working title)
-The Children’s Quarter, home to children who wished upon the Runaway Star (whose home is the rarefied march between the upper air and the void beyond) to be carried far away. Grown-ups are forbidden to go unescorted within.
-The Flutefarms, harvest dust caught on the wind, concentrate it into fields to grow produce. Hang like rows of giant pan-flutes on the city’s underside.
-Kitefishers, use kites disguised as birds to catch prey
—There are also elite warriors recruited from the kitefishers who use special fighter kites
-Sky-pirates barely tolerated by the rest of the city for the goods they bring up
-Bodies are tossed unceremoniously over the side. They are believed to only ever have been a vessel animated by the breath.
-Funerals involve monks expressing the last gasps of breath from the lungs.
-The most prestigious monks (astromandrites, the synthesis of the city’s builders) dwell in the Spindles, metal towers which catch lightning and twist it into purifying energies.
-Below them are the hollow-boned half-risen, who fill their bodies with holes to invite aerial beings to inspire them, and grant them a piecemeal afterlife. These half-risen are disliked for their involvement with the politics of the air elementals, for their dealings with sky-pirates, and for storm-selling. They are rumoured to steal bits of breath from the people whose funerals they host.
-The supine stargazers with their golden cataracts, de-facto lords of Demaerel by their subtle shiftings of the future
-Demaerel is held aloft by three methods: its kites catching the Worshipful Wind (which ever rises to reach heaven), the astroluminal-engines that concentrate the rays of the sun and stars to propel jets of air and vapour, and a third secret way known only to the Spindle’s monks
Takes:
-Goliaths are neanderthals, wounded by the stone tools of early homo sapiens sapiens, took the stone into their bodies and made it their own
--humans with their heads caved in with rocks, now remotely-controlled drones for the goliaths, directed by silicon songs
-Dragonborn - dragon-whelps without the strength to fight other dragons for territory or carve out their territory from human lands - graft themselves to a human for social intelligence, language, and hands
-Tieflings - outsiders from the far shore of the astral plane do not naturally have physical bodies - to act on the material plane they must possess a body, or construct one out of raw materials (most often meat) - when a particularly powerful devil is incarnated this can spill out to living things around the summoning site, partially transforming their bodies to teratomas and lesions of infernal flesh, conjoined imps
A fleet of factory ships that move from country to country chasing the lowest tariffs - Jack Welch barge-plant armada
Taxonomy:
-An elf is something that looks human but isn’t. That thing that knocks on your window at night and trades teeth for good harvests is an elf.
-A goblin is a sort of elf that’s unusually small, ugly, irritating, and/or smelly. The chittering manlings that throw their feces down at you when you walk through their forest are goblins.
-An ogre is something that’s too big and mean to be human. When the duke ordered the rebellious peasants slaughtered to supply his banquet, then grew so fat on their meat he filled his feast-hall, he became an ogre.
-A spirit is any being that’s made of something less solid than flesh. The evil winds that blow from the south-west are spirits.
-A god is something that’s worshipped.
-A demon is something that’s too evil to be anything else.
Other Colours:
-Abol, the shade darker than black. It’s the colour of the deepest ocean trenches, of the space beyond an event horizon, of dreamless sleep.
-Blissum, the ghost of colour, seen at the edge of pictured memories
-Potreze, hypnotic, the colour of the light one sees while dying.
-Actine, the colour of ur-flame and the colour you see when you stare into the sun so long you go blind.
"Like as a lark that in the air expatiates,
First singing and then silent with content
Of the last sweetness that doth satisfy her,
Such seemed to me the image of the imprint
Of the eternal pleasure, by whose will
Doth everything become the thing it is."
Notes of Unknown Providence:
jesuit science network, council for inclusive capitalism with the vatican, sucrose civilization - synthetic maple syrup on foofoo in Canadian Haiti, singas - purgatorAI - Christian (Catholic) Technocracy, british royal frozen phallus cult, isle reclaimed by neo-cromwellian georgist puritans - good old ale's triumph over soda
Elves meditate instead of sleeping - why? - what do they meditate on/what is the state of their meditation? - do sea elves need the rhythmic waves to guide their meditation? are there insomniacally insane sea elves lost far from any shore?
"This is a story of men who lived and died in history's silence, who sank silently into the earth, who the earth drank up like rain, whose memory is in the earth's remembrance, earth shifted by green sprouts"
