D6x6 Phantoms of the Opera

Phantom of the Opera 1925 full movie youtube here:

Click the button below to get your phantom:

Special thanks to Spwack for the generator generator here: http://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

D6	This phantom of the opera hides their face with
1	a beaten-gold death mask.
2	the peeled-off, animated faceplate of a Chinese customer service robot.
3	a ratty old sports team mascot head.
4	a yellowed and peeling WWI-era facial prosthetic.
5	a hood of embroidered sackcloth.
6	a gaudishly-painted Venetian carnival mask.

D6	This phantom of the opera hides their face because
1	they murdered their identical twin, and so the sight of their own face fills them with unbearable guilt.
2	of a small scar which they've blown up in narcissistic imaginaning into a terrible deformity.
3	they are wanted by the police for the heinous crimes they committed in a previous life.
4	they feel as though their mask has become their true identity.
5	they are the scion of a distinctively-inbred noble lineage.
6	like wearing a napkin while eating ortolan, they think it hides their sins and pleasures from God.

D6	This phantom is able to remain a phantom in their opera-house
1	because they were trained in the shinobi arts by an exile from Japan.
2	because they're half-ghost - the product of mystical necrophilia.
3	with bribes and intimidation from their criminal empire.
4	because they are a master of disguise and impersonation, and maintain a stable of different identities.
5	because an encounter with an ultraterrestrial being unhinged their mind and unhinged their body from the conventional three spatial dimensions.
6	with their memory-editing psychic powers - powers fueled by the extract of a species of white rafflesia they grow in a secret solarium in their opera-house.

D6	This phantom of the opera lurks
1	in the Sydney Opera House, and the littoral caves beneath it, carved out by wretched immortals symbiotized by a species of anemone of the bleaching Great Barrier Reef - half-living relics of two thousand years and two dozen peoples.
2	in the Zürich Opera House, and the secret Nazi bank vaults hidden beneath it.
3	in the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, and the network of bootlegger tunnels honeycombing its foundations.
4	in the Mikhailovsky Theatre, and the secret dungeon of the Okhrana which stretches from its basement.
5	in the London Coliseum, and the glittering crystal halls in the enormous geode beneath it, created by an angel-summoning experiment of John Dee.
6	in the Teatro di San Carlo, and the nuclear bunker buried deep down underneath it, created for the Operation Gladio successor government set up in case the Cold War went nuclear.

D6	This phantom of the opera is obsessed
1	with organizing a performance of Faust from its original, occult script - which will actually summon a demon.
2	with grooming ingenues into hollowing their egos to become oracles for the powers of the underworld, then selling them off to various nefarious sorcerous circles.
3	with finding a worthy successor by entangling people into grueling, often fatal tournaments against each other.
4	with using harmonics as the key to transforming human consciousness - leaving a string of broken minds in the process.
5	with plunging the country into anarchy by blowing up the opera-house when a critical mass of national leaders attend a sublime performance.
6	with achieving a pharaonic burial - making their opera-house into their magnificent tomb, furnished with many sacrifices to be their slaves in the hereafter.

D6	This phantom of the opera kills
1	with the toxic scents of poisoned perfumes.
2	with a garrotte made from a taxidermied fox tail with a metal wire strung through its vertebrae.
3	with a hammer - a stone hammer, with its head torn from the arch of a doorway of the phantom's beloved opera house.
4	with a saber which once belonged to a heroic ancestor of theirs.
5	with a homemade silenced pistol, which fires pearls as bullets.
6	a single long finger-nail lacquered with layers of iron.

D6x7 Grendels from Outer Space

For 279,936 variations on the movie Outlander.

Click the button below to get your Grendel (from outer space):

Special thanks to Spwack for the generator generator here: http://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

D6	Humanity encounters this Grendel from outer space
1	at the first Tahitian settlement in Hawaii, feuding with the Tongans.
2	at an Ethiopian Army camp during the Italian Invasion.
3	at the palace of Atilla the Hun shortly after the Scourge of God's demise.
4	at a peyote retreat catering to Silicon Valley-types in rural New Mexico.
5	at Antananarivo, shortly after King Andrianampoinimerina returned from a victorious conquest.
6	at a garrison fort defending the Great Wall of China at Badaling during the waning years of the Ming dynasty.

D6	This Grendel from outer space has
1	flesh like thickly-bleeding gums studded with metallic teeth, and a bauplan a bit like a capital M, with long, splayed limbs and a dangling torso.
2	hammerhead shark-like sensory projections jutting out the sides of its head, and an ankylosaur-like tail-club.
3	grossly asymmetrical manipulator-limbs like a crab, and a hopping gait.
4	a hide resembling a porous and off-white popcorn ceiling, with criss-crossed fangs that seem like they should make it impossible for it to open its mouth, until you see its jaws unhinge and re-arrange.
5	an S-shaped body, with an eye-lined, bony wheel at the midpoint and curves made of flexible, whip-thin hooks.
6	a body that's a fused pile of rubbery black spheres spheres like big boba, studded with spikes and stubby tentacles.

D6	This Grendel from outer space can
1	camouflage itself to nigh-invisible with cuttlefish-like chromatophores.
2	breath out a cloud of hallucinatory nightmare poison.
3	blast people with plasma from its cybernetic implants.
4	use a macro-scale quantum effect to effectively teleport short distances when unseen.
5	extract memories from the brains of creatures it eats.
6	feel the nerve impulses in your muscles to predict your attacks and other movements.

D6	This Grendel from outer space came to Earth
1	as the first prisoner of the prison colony of an alien civilization - many more like it are in transit.
2	as a research specimen abducted from another world - it escaped when its captors were abducting humans, and forced the ship it was on to crash-land.
3	after accidentally activating a warp-gate seeded on both its world and ours by a precursor-species.
4	as a deserter from a war among the stars, their ship shot full of holes by their own side.
5	as a refugee from a dying world, one of many flung desperately into the cosmos.
6	as a pilgrim touring the sacred worlds of their astrology - unfortunately the nanomachines meant to sustain them on their journey were disrupted by chance radiation, and mutated them into a monstrous form.

D6	This Grendel from outer space wants
1	to implant as many large, warm-blooded creatures with its parasitoid offspring as possible - it's a religious fanatic for something like the Quiverfull movement.
2	to force humans into worshiping its eldritch void god - it's completely insane, even by the relatively lax standards of space.
3	simple things - food, shelter, peace, quiet - it's also an alien super-soldier programmed to react with extreme violence to any perceived threats.
4	to slurp human cerebrospinal fluid, which contains chemicals it is addicted to. Slurping the fluid turns the human it was slurped from into an animalistic, lobotomized thrall.
5	to build an escape pod to get it off this planet - the materials it needs (precious metals, etc.) are most easily acquired from human settlements
6	to capture psychically-sensitive humans and torment them together to make an impromptu interstellar distress beacon to alert its comrades to its location.

D6	This Grendel from outer space's lair
1	is a cave lit by a shimmering crystal - its walls are painted with alien figures and scenes with a strange though undeniable aesthetic quality.
2	holds ramshackle shelves bearing trophies taken from the slain.
3	is half-flooded, the water infested with extraterrestrial piranha-slugs.
4	is layered with a soft and reeking wax which it exudes.
5	is a labyrinthine web of tunnels it carved through a cliff with its own hands, or nearest equivalents.
6	is a booby-trapped citadel of stacked stones and logs.

D6	This Grendel from outer space's mother
1	is a much bigger version of it, hibernating beneath its lair.
2	died some time ago, yet was reincarnated as a human - she is destined to re-encounter her child, and recall memories of her past life.
3	is a psychic star witch - she will torment her child's killer as an interstellar astral projection which can only be fought through spiritual means.
4	was a growth-vat on a nursery-station - when that station's overseer A.I. is notified of the Grendel's death through its implanted biochip it will go mad with rage and cause a lot of problems somewhere very far away.
5	is dead, but the Grendel kept her bones and keeps them in a shrine in its lair - damaging the shrine is a surefire way to drive it to an unthinking fury - stealing the bones would let you coerce it into doing your bidding.
6	is somewhere far off in space, mourning its lost child.

D6 Post-Humans of the Antarctican Future

Goldfish - the snack that smiles back - has experienced a tremendous drop in quality over my lifetime. Not as cheesy, not as salty as they once were, and I'm pretty sure this batch I'm eating now was made with coconut oil. Tastes coconuty.

Anyways, this is for this: https://itch.io/jam/antarctica-jam, or something like that, or for whatever else.

1. Paramoras (& Plastines)

Once pseudo-naturally pseudo-evolved, now fully domesticated, the paramora is a burrowing animal raised for its meat, but by far its most valuable product is its brain hormones. Paramoras are extreme pair-bonders (most of their time not eating or sleeping is spent hugging their mate) so much so that domesticated paramoras are incapable of raising their own children, being much too concerned with hugging. An extract made from their brain hormones will, in human-derivatives, induce overpowering feelings of love and connection, making it a popular drug.

Paramora-ranching is monopolized by the plastines, a cladoculture which developed as a response to the rampant microplastic poisoning of the Middle Anthropocene - through internal nano-alchemy they gradually replace their biological tissues with plastic analogues. No plastine is considered an adult until they receive their great photovoltaic "wings".

Besides poachers, the biggest threat to paramora ranches in Antarctica are the fungal-symbiotic sporeworms, which can easily catch the creatures in their burrows. Plastine ranchers equip themselves with soap-sprayers, which bind and suffocate the worms in an inescapable membrane, and line their fences with soap-spigots which drip a curtain of the same substance down into the soil.

2. War-Daughters

Creation of the zealots of the Eutheminist Sodality, who believed that no woman should die except by the hands of another woman. War-daughters kill by ejaculating a super-dense shard of bone impregnated with a neurotoxin. Too many such ejaculations tore the combined pelvic floor-diaphragmatic muscles which powered them, and so due to this and their general cumbersomeness the war-daughters never saw much use as battlefield weapons beyond the Sodality. They continue to be born as ceremonial weapons, however.

3. Skykind

Like the plastines - another child of the Middle Anthropocene, tackling the dual problems of Kessler Syndrome growing beyond the ability of laser-brooms to manage, and the collapse of inorganic production capacity. They had different names back then, but now they're skykind.

They are grown to be living components of communication/surveillance networks - getting signals & the lay of the land and transmitting these to each other through bioluminescent semaphore-winks and ultra-sonic whistling. The sound of this whistling - perceivable at the very edge of human hearing range - from an unfamiliar skykind is a sign to stay out of view of the open air.

Their numbers are few now, and few powers can put enough together to make a decent network of them. They weep sometimes, the skykind, and their glowing tears drift to earth, feather-like and jelly-soft. People say they weep for their loneliness, but this is mistaken.

The skykind weep for joy. To fly under their own power, to live that old dream of humanity, is an unspeakable joy.

4. Sporemen

A desperate solution for a desperate time, now despised by many others and adopted as an identity of fierce pride. Back in the day when the tubular and rot-stacked hives of the sporeworms stretched across the continent, some people modified themselves to live in uneasy symbiosis with the worms rather than face being devoured totally.

They allowed the worms' fungi to colonize their lower bodies, and added more legs so that they could still walk even when their legs were in some state of being eaten through, and shared in the bounty of the worms' carrion-middens.

When superior weapons were discovered and the sporeworms' territory pushed back, the sporemen were pushed back with it. This led to a lot of bad blood, and people still get violent over it all the time.

5. The Human Reefs

Sacculina is a genus of barnacles that lives as parasites on and in the bodies of crabs. The parasite drains the host's nutrients from its guts, destroys its genitalia, and alters its hormones, causing it to treat the Sacculina's offspring as its own.

At some point, by some means, this barnacle-parasite made the jump to humans, and in the process got even stranger. It lives in the human brain (the closest region in the human body to the hard-shelled, soft-innarded bodies of crabs) and lives off the ultraviolet superradiance produced by the nervous system, as well as energy from various other quantum effects in the same.

Infested humans congregate so that their resonance can produce even more energy, and root in place to maximize the amount of energy going to their parasite. Over time their bodies wither and harden into coral-like structures.

These "human reefs" can be tapped for power, but the process is risky - exposure to the reef's biophotonics can befuddle and enchant the mind, and make those so exposed seek out infestation by the parasite in order to join the reef. Travelers of the Antarctic steppe would be well-advised to give a wide berth to the purplish "devil-lights" of the human reefs.

6. Deeplings

On a long enough timescale, something will go wrong. That's like, Murphy's Law or something. These guys' ancestors thought it would be fucked up if something went wrong and everyone died, like from a meteor or gamma ray burst or something. It would be better if somebody survived, and if that somebody was them, and if they kept the art and science of humanity preserved along with them.

Their name for themselves means something like "Preservers". They figured the best place to do this preserving was at the bottom of the ocean, so they made themselves into something that could survive there.

They can be pretty agreeable so long as you don't have something they want. If you've been delving into ancient ruins and got some lost hyper-tech or the Mona Lisa, you've got something they want. They'll offer a good price to take it off your hands, but if you refuse they will try quite hard to kill you for it. They've got spies and agents of lots of clades in lots of places, promised the final reward of psychic uploading to a paradise-simulation in their underwater halls for their service.

In the water they breath through their butts, didn't know how to work that into the picture. It's called anal respiration and the Japanese figured out that mammals could do it.

GLOG Class: Sacred Scorpion Dancer

For the assassin bandwagon*.

You are a relic of a time when death did not come so easy as it does today - when the world chafed under the rule of the ever-living.

Your ways are ancient, and still very deadly.

You are a bloodied rival of the Fennec Paw School of martial arts.

 

(Pah! I want not for water!
Pah! I bat the scorpion at bay!
Pah! You will not find my traces!
Sand and eternity bear them away!)

 

You were chained in the darkness beneath the temple and made to fight the other acolytes for scraps, until you were skinny enough to slip your manacles.

 

If you don't make an effort to disguise it your gaze is as hard and unfeeling as an arachnid's.

The holy venom blesses your veins with its fire.

 

You've slipped the temple, and are now loose in the world.

GLOG Class: Sacred Scorpion Dancer
Starting Equipment: Scorpion-sting stiletto, robes, codename
A: Burning Daylight, Heavenly Stigma
B: Segmented, Scorpion Scissors
C: Deep Cover
D: Pious Brood, Thanatochrysalis

 

With one template in Sacred Scorpion Dancer you are an expert contortionist - squeeze through any gap that can fit your head.

 

When fighting an opponent 1-on-1 you get a [Template]/2 bonus to Attack & AC. This increases to a [Template] bonus when you've had a chance to study them - this will apply with any two of: you've seen them fight before this fight, you've read something they've written, you've spent a day observing them, you've heard three eyewitness accounts of them.

A

Burning Daylight: Multiply your Constitution by your [templates] of Sacred Scorpion Dancer. These are the remaining Years of your life. When you hit zero Years you die, burning up from within from the holy venom.

 

You can spend Years for bonuses on physical checks on a 1-to-1 basis.

 

Heavenly Stigma: Spend 1 Year while attacking to leave a wound that never fully heals. It becomes distinctly perfumed, and you can smell it from anywhere in the world.

 

Spend 1 additional Year to infuse the wound with the effect of any poison you have survived before.

B

 

Scorpion Scissors: Wield a weapon while grappling without penalty. If you make an unarmed attack while grappling, your target must make a contested save against you, or else you break one of their limbs.

At Template D if your target fails this save you rip their arm off.

C

Deep Cover: Wear the accoutrements of another class and spend 1 Year. While doing so you gain that class's Template A abilities, and lose access to your Sacred Scorpion Dancer abilities.

 

If you get within arm's reach of a target who believes your disguise you can automatically grapple them.

D

Pious Brood: Request a number of acolytes from the temple - they will be Template A Sacred Scorpion Dancers who obey your orders absolutely. The DM will name a target in the world commensurate your request. Kill the target and your acolyte(s) will arrive 1d6 days later.

 

You may only have one group of acolytes at a time. Kill or dismiss them to get a bigger batch.

Thanatochrysalis: Expend 10 Years. Name a target. You become one with the holy venom, and erupt from the husk of your former body as a giant scorpion. One sting from you will kill your target, kill their soul and any possibility of their return.

Every day you must move closer to your target, or you will die. They can hear the rhythm of your dancing approaching, even should they drink themself unconscious.

 

Should you kill them, you will emerge from the scorpion's shell, marked with the name of your target in beautiful, divine script. Reveal this mark to gain a +4 to intimidate and otherwise frighten - all who see it instinctively realize you've erased someone more thoroughly than the gods themselves could.

 

* Footnote reading ass nerd.

 

Other assassins:

 

https://mediumsandmessages.bearblog.dev/glog-class-guild-assassin/

 

https://www.madqueenscourt.com/2025/02/damnation-seize-my-soul-if-i-give-you.html

 

https://pathunending.wordpress.com/2025/02/12/they-are-the-difference-glog-class-assassin/

 

https://whosemeasure.blogspot.com/2025/02/homo-ferox-glog-class-assassin.html

 

https://as-they-must.blogspot.com/2025/02/world-of-assassination-glog-classes.html

 

https://choir-of-fire.bearblog.dev/do-you-think-im-cruel-class-assassin/

 

https://gracklecourt.blogspot.com/2025/02/glog-assassin.html

 

https://craggenloch.blogspot.com/2025/02/there-is-no-skill-in-what-i-do-church.html

 

https://kludge.bearblog.dev/assassin/

 

https://nothicseye.blogspot.com/2025/02/ill-have-you-die-for-this-assassins-of.html

 

https://thelovelydark.blogspot.com/2025/02/assassin.html

D6x6 Shapeshifting Reptilian Aliens in the Halls of Power

Click the button below to generate your reptilian:

Special thanks to Spwack for the generator generator here: http://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

D6	This shapeshifting reptilian is reptilian
1	because they are an actual reptile - a descendant of the sapient and technologically-advanced troodontids who fled from a disaster that threatened life on Earth in a distant epoch.
2	because they are a demon, and a relative of the serpent in Eden - the Fall of Man severed humanity from the true and eternal world, trapping us in the retroactively-created natural history of the universe - similarly turning the demon and others like it into members of entire evolved species of (still quite evil) aliens.
3	due to transgenic modification - their kind can't survive on Earth naturally and must incorporate the genes of Earth-life to do so - it just so happens that the genes of reptiles are the most compatible.
4	only by faint resemblance, due to convergent evolution.
5	due to cosmetic surgery, so that anyone who tries to reveal their existence will seem to be an Ickean conspiracy theorist.
6	because of a morphic resonance signal broadcast by a reptilian progenitor species - this signal reached Earth as well, leading to the evolution of vertebrates, but a cosmic accident led to mammals usurping the proper dominion of reptiles.

D6	This shapeshifting reptilian shapeshifts
1	by everting their body and then wriggling into their target's body - digesting the unnecessary internal organs and linking their nerves and circulatory system into the leftover husk to walk it around and sustain it.
2	through immersion in a pod they've hidden in their base of operations, which breaks their body down into goo and rebuilds it into the new form.
3	by smearing on a coat of nanotechological "clay" that mimics the colours, textures, and temperature of human tissues.
4	by putting their target into a coma then attuning to the target's neuro-electrical self-image - if their target ever wakes up or dies, the reptilian loses their form.
5	by metamorphosing like a caterpillar, using their skin as a chrysalis. If they lose their shed skin, they lose their ability to shapeshift.
6	by rotating parts of their body through higher spatial dimensions until they approximate the desired form - as this can put their insides on their outside, their shapeshifted forms are often surprisingly fragile.

D6	This shapeshifting reptilian is on Earth
1	to encourage humanity's most rapacious and anti-social tendencies, so as to more effectively produce garmonbozia to harvest.
2	to recruit compradors who will manage the Earth after its conquest by the approaching reptilian space-fleet.
3	in exile, after crossing the wrong reptilian back home - they seek to surround themself with the finest comforts and security this backwater planet has to offer.
4	to discover the fate of an infiltration force that was sent to the planet a century ago.
5	to counter the moves of a psycho-electrical Procyonian energy vampire, which can possess people and technology like a demon - its intentions for humanity aren't any better than the reptilian's.
6	to assassinate world leaders and foment global anarchy so that the reptilians can swoop in and pretend to be humanity's saviours.

D6	This shapeshifting reptilian has infiltrated
1	a military base, cultivating a violent cult of personality around themself.
2	the entertainment industry, hopping between the forms of performers and agents and producers.
3	George Soros's Open Society Foundations, using their position to influence a web of NGOs.
4	an infamously litigous biglaw firm.
5	a museum, which by chance has amassed some artifacts of latent power.
6	a Freemasonic lodge - they were disappointed to find that the Freemasons' power is not what it once was.

D6	This shapeshifting reptilian enjoys
1	injecting themself with adrenochrome extracted from the pineal glands of terrified children.
2	swallowing small furry animals alive & wriggling.
3	taking joyrides in its flying saucer & doing cattle mutilations.
4	infecting enemies and annoyances with gene-serums that transform them into squamous monstrosities, then letting them loose in the sewers.
5	impersonating people's loved ones then gaslighting them into insanity.
6	drinking coffee (they get drunk off caffeine) and listening to true crime podcasts.

D6	This shapeshifting reptilian can give themself away
1	by the nictation of their translucent secondary eyelids.
2	by their abnormally low body temperature.
3	through their hissing lisp.
4	because the condensation from their breath is slightly corrosive.
5	through their fear and revulsion of pregnant women.
6	through their lack of nipples or a belly button.

Yet More Monsters

Reminded by wasitlikely's recent post: https://wasitlikely.blogspot.com/2025/02/before-moon-was-born.html (among other good features of it: witch-as-verb) of her monster generator: https://wasitlikely.blogspot.com/2023/03/monstrous-amendments-fictional.html, which I attempted to make a post for before but forgot about. Alas:

A House Made of Birds

(Lurker + Family + Mouth
Wounds + Robbed + Bind)

It is good and right and natural that we should eat the dead, and build atop their corpses. The seasons pass, the generations pass, and the past nurtures what comes after. A foundation of bones sits strongly.

Some refuse to become-ancestral, to yield their place in the now to their descendants. Most of these sorts simply continue to age, and age poorly, but a rare few take decisive steps:

They will stake themself to the roof of their house, or in the attic, and sing an old and nasty and thankfully-all-but-forgotten song, without rhymes or tune. Birds will come to listen, and to eat the singer piece by piece. Depending on the size of the birds this could take quite some time, and one must sing the whole time throughout, so one should have alcohol or something stronger at hand to ease the pain. When they are finished the birds wheel through the air, then vanish.

There will be another house there, invisible to most, squatting atop the first. The children and children's children, and so on and so forth of the one who performed the ritual must remain in that first house. It can be renovated, it can be knocked down and built up from the foundations, but it must remain the ritualist's house.

So long as it does, and their kin remain within, the ritualist can swoop through their lives and their bodies raptor-like, influencing and seizing for moments (often appearing in the form of one of the birds that devoured them) to keep their family around, keep them bound to the will of their ancestor. The ritualist's spirit can't be exorcised while leaving the house intact - it's all gotta be burned, and left far behind.

Plum-Wine Conspirators

(Royal + Lamprey + Creeping
Porcelain + Plum + Dagger)

Every empire has its eunuchs - whether their balls are literally chopped off or not is irrelevant - it's the role, the identity that matters, the subordination of libido to the empire.

These guys definitely chopped their balls off though. They keep them in pots, beautiful delicate pots of painted porcelain, steeping in fine plum-wine. Over these pots they perform unspeakable rites - rather, the rites are pretty speakable, just not in polite company.

Within the pots they become generative organs of a different sort. Strain the wine through silk-cloth - see what wriggles through the fibers - pale little things, like worms, like eels. Drink the wine, and you take in the parasites it holds. They weave themselves through your ganglions - they feel luxuriantly soft.

The original idea was that they would found their own dynasty - one assimilated rather than birthed - but the parasites had their own intelligence, their own ideas, in their networks rather than in the individual organisms.

One drink isn't enough to do much more than infest a finger, for a time - cause it to twitch and change the trajectory of an arrow, or a character being written. You need to be plied for months to become a true host.

Over the years many true hosts were made. The parasite-network grew beyond its ability to maintain consensus. The conspiracy splintered, stuck out and into itself. Parasite began preying on parasite, sub-networks lurked hyperparasitical within. The empire they sought to overthrow works better than ever now - a tensegrity sculpture strengthened by the tension.

Hammerers of the Wound-Hoes

(Beetle + Reward + Hill
Sorrow + Butcher + Marrow)

There was coal in those hills, and enough of the finer minerals to keep people looking for them. Still is coal in them - they leak its fluegas through their caves and their mines and their cracks like an angry old man smoking on his porch.

Things were pretty good for a while, a good long while. Mine-work's pretty shit at the best of times, but nobody went hungry. Miners would leave bowls of blood and milk for the things that writhed in the dark behind the stone, and in return those things would knock to guide them to rich veins, and warn them of the build-up of bad air.

Then a mine collapsed. Half a hundred men lost, crushed or cut off and starving, suffocating. In their lonely nightmare, dying in the dark, they called out to the things beyond the stone. The things answered their call, and out of the sight of the sun they tore at each others' flesh and made love.

Those miners are dead now, but their children live on. The hills belong to them now. Hairy coleopteran hunchbacks. They hate light, and covet it. They're masterful smiths, but all they're willing to sell you are weapons - weapons that look wrong, serrated and lumped, but they kill better than most.

The children don't sell this weapons for coin, but for a promise - a promise of corpses, slain by their weapons. For the weapons bear their eggs, and bear their eggs into the wounds they carve, and the eggs incubate in the slain.

But the children's children come out wrong, and the children weep and tear out their hair at the thought that they will be the first and the last generation of their kind. The smithies pour out their smoke, and the corpses keep piling up.

Car Gun Car Fun

I recently & narrowly avoided death by carbon monoxide poisoning, and thus when I see an article like this:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/11/15/blackwolf-armed-driver-rideshare-service-texas/76331189007/

I am exuberant. Eternity is affirmed. It would make for good gaming material.

So what is it exactly?: A rideshare app like Uber, only the drivers are armed & dangerous. Apparently it's meant to be a response to human trafficking. Personally I'd be more, not less, afraid of being human trafficked by my pseudo-taxi driver if I knew he had a gun, but then I don't live in the PvP zone that is Austin, Texas.

Long have I thought that weird gig work would be a wonderful thing to base a modern-set campaign on, whether that be fantasy, horror, or otherwise - see the manga Ura Baito: Toubou Kinshi for an example of how that might be set up - each session you get some job offers, with certain risks and reward levels for each, and in between sessions you get hammered with expenses that push you into more and riskier jobs, over time you get familiarized with the employers, other gig workers as competitors and potential allies, and so on and so on.

A BlackWolf-style app is a distillation of this game mode. You have a car. You have a gun. You have some sort of military/police/security background, and some reason you are doing one of the shittier jobs available instead of sticking with that, or maybe you made up your background and are stealing valour. Maybe you've got some buddies that ride with you. Get someone or something from point A to point B, someone or something that's expected to need an armed escort, yet can't or won't rely on the police or private security or whatever.