GLOGtober Challenge: Physical Game Pieces; Or: A Method By Which One May Loosely Generate A Ruined Wizard's Tower Floor By Floor Through The Rolling And Stacking Of Dice

As seen here: https://glass-candles.blogspot.com/2024/09/glogtober-24.html

Challenge courtesy of TheFirstGokun: https://spiceomancy.blogspot.com/

This is a broad strokes type of generator. If you want floor plans and explicit loot and whatnot look elsewhere.

Get a bunch of dice. Roll 'em and stack 'em, writing down what numbers you rolled for whichever sorts of dice. Do this until the stack falls over or you knock it over, then take the sum of the numbers facing up. The first set of numbers is what each floor is. The second number is what caused the tower to be ruined.

D4
1. Astrological observatory
2. Trebuchet platform, loaded with gu pots (gu - also called kodoku - place many poisonous animals in a pot so they eat each other and concentrate the poison into a potent curse)
3. Lightning rod, lightning-bottling device
4. Emergency escape pod - detaches, inflates, floats away

If you are able to stack a die on top of a D4 you will receive no prize but I will be impressed.

D6
1. Washing tubs and drying lines
2. Pantry with horrid pickled delicacies
3. Micro-bathhouse, Roman-esque with warm pool, hot pool, sauna, cold pool, etc.
4. Musty library & study
5. Smoking room - all furniture made from taxidermied cats
6. Bedroom, fleshblob concubine bound to bed

D8
1. Lecture auditorium for visiting students
2. Haruspexy chamber, miserable caged animals, sacrificial altar, and many oddly-shaped knives
3. Nest of a giant pelican with the top half of its head carved off - it can be flown about by pouring mashed fish down its throat, sitting in its pouch, and steering by pulling its tongue
4. Scrying room with crystal ball and a variety of mounted lenses
5. Chattering skulls on shelves, repeating the words of their bone-memory
6. Full of painted dividers painted with tarot cards, ask them a question and the room will rearrange itself accordingly
7. Portal to dungeon
8. Dovecote, messenger pigeon roosts

D10
1. Squid ink-milking pool
2. Eyes suspended in netting, blue glass bowls beneath collecting their tears
3. Quivering tapestry of bird-flesh plucked for quills
4. Glowing crystals growing out of pile of obese, headless bodies
5. Greenhouse for mystical herbs
6. Whale suspended from pipes, slowly drained of fat which dribbles into tallow candles
7. Mushrooms sprouting on log-beds
8. Bed of oysters in blood instead of water, incubating scarlet pearls
9. Desiccated pixies in jars like upside-down saltshakers, rattling on the ends of chimes as holes let the wind through to jostle them and get their dust out
10. Dryad with tree planted in great clay pot lit by mirrors - flayed for finest paper

D12
1. Ancient gate, obviously moved from elsewhere and apparently leading nowhere
2. Hall of mirrors populated by living illusions, seemingly bigger on the inside than it is on the outside but this is just several more clever illusions
3. Vault warded against all manner of interference mundane and magical
4. Music hall with animated instruments
5. Shrine to tutelary deities
6. Sculpture garden with veiled medusa head on pedestal, kept alive with alchemic syringes
7. Leeching apparatus - uses aquarium of crimson coral and gelatinous symbiotes to filter impurities from user's blood
8. Hovering magnetic black stone
9. Alchemy lab
10. Golden pentagram with bound angel within
11. Whole room is a puzzle box which must be solved to leave - sub-standard solutions may lead to destinations other than the tower
12. Hall of esoteric anatomical models

D20
1. Entire castle on the scale of a dollhouse, richly-attired dolls within
2. Brewing still
3. Unnervingly empty and spotlessly white
4. Scrimshaw studio
5. Private prison
6. Room-sized game board with human-sized gaming pieces
7. Lounge with a hookah and silk pillows
8. Printing press
9. Personal mausoleum
10. Full of clocks with uncommon numerals and timescales
11. Lighthouse lantern
12. Wizard armoury
13. Memento room, memorial to lost love
14. Nursery for infants both human and beastly
15. Room of braziers and dangling censers with cabinets of various incenses
16. Indoor fountain and piranha pond
17. Racing track and stable of micro-horses
18. Dining room
19. Closets full of wigs, masks, clothes, and makeup
20. Meditation room ringed with candles and occult diagrams

I'm not going to do a table for D100s. Do that on your own time if you want it.

What Terrible Fate Befell This Wizard Tower? (D100): 

1. Instant total vitrification, surrounded by broken shards
2. Black Plague, crawling with rats and fleas and even the stones have buboes
3. Fallen into sinkhole, taken over by eyeless albino troglo-men
4. Auto-cannibalism curse
5. Doppelganger killed & impersonating wizard
6. Enshrouded by poisonous miasma
7. Eldritch tome absorbed wizard into bibliomanic nightmare pocket realm
8. Infused with mutagenic radiance
9. Patrolled by intelligent killing wind from the upper air that rips the breath from your lungs
10. Infestation by lifeform that as a larva is an idea but when it matures it hatches out of your head as a physical thing
11. Haunted by resentful ghost apprentices
12. Contaminated groundwater with necrotic energy, skeletons on rampage
13. Failed lichdom ritual, now the whole tower eats souls
14. Stalked by dullahan that rides people down and drags them off to hell
15. If you fall asleep in or near the tower you become trapped in the same never-ending dream
16. A troupe of clowns has moved in but they are not clowns they are amorphous and predatory and a dozen of them can be stuffed into a cabinet
17. Gremlins moved in and have set up many Rube Goldbergian instruments of death
18. Everyone has melted into oozes
19. Tentacles reached out of portals and impaled everyone
20. Curse-plague of voracious locusts
21. Suffused with unnatural cold, everything living in wide radius frozen solid
22. There's a giant arm that comes out of the sky around it and attempts to seize you if you spend too much time out in the open
23. Mindflayer brain-raid
24. Terminal human-orbulation
25. Trans-temporally possessed by dinosaurs
26. Encompassed by sharknado
27. Blasted by divine wrath, organic matter turned to salt
28. Genie wish gone wrong
29. Craniotomic field, brains within area slowly leak out of the heads that hold them as pink gas
30. Blood-borne rage virus splattered on everything
31. Halfway-damned, populated by demons
32. Giant man-eating mollusc using it as shell
33. People transmuted into gold, but very, very thin gold that collapses into negligible dust when touched
34. Flesh turned halfway to stone, stone turned halfway to flesh
35. Chaotic gravitational flux
36. Breach into parallel universe populated by gourds that farm men
37. Tower awakened to malefic intelligence
38. Band of elves practicing torture-arts
39. Swathed by pall of unnatural darkness within which grues lurk
40. Big invisible spiders whose webs are also invisible
41. Caught in time loop, relives fiery disaster every night
42. Wizard rival assassination, many magical traps laid within
43. Devil came to collect on soul sold for magic power
44. Bread infected with sordico turned everyone who ate it into crazed cannibals
45. Devolutionary burst turned wizard into pre-sapient synapsid
46. Invaded by stirge hive
47. Hair grows much too fast within it and it takes all your nutrients and clogs things up
48. Flooded with parasitic worms
49. Undermined and infiltrated by giant ants
50. Flying gemstone wanders about it firing petrification rays
51. Seized by tax collectors and their enforcers
52. Mob of angry peasants with torches & pitchforks
53. Brigands moved in and are using it as a hideout
54. Derro madness-broadcast ruined wizard's mind with paranoid conspiracizing
55. Spontaneous exploding eye syndrome, transmitted by looking into contaminated mirrors
56. Starved to death arguing with extremely annoying imp
57. Extra-dimensional mouths float around munching on things
58. Soaked in blood, wizard transformed into mass of over-productive marrow
59. Wand backfired, blew out the wizard's left side and half the floor they were on
60. Charm gone wrong, all fall in jealous, murderous love with the tower
61. Furious horn-harvested unicorn tracked wizard down and trampled them
62. Resentful familiar murdered wizard and took over tower
63. Wizard's soul stolen by oneiric angler while astral traveling
64. Wizard became obsessed with forging themself into magic sword, partially succeeded
65. Black lotus powder addiction ruined the wizard physically and financially
66. Teleportation accident cubed the wizard and scattered their cubic chunks all about
67. Wizard became possessed by a rogue spell, their own soul trapped in their spellbook
68. Golem went on rampage and smushed wizard, still rampaging
69. Wizard eaten by pet python
70. An ogre magus bashed in the wizard's head and is raiding their collection of tomes and magic items
71. Indefinitely incarcerated in stasis-prison by modrons for Order violations
72. Overgrown by yellow musk creeper plants
73. Mangled by warped space-time
74. Flock of harpies took over, are using it as roost
75. Wizard maddened and mutilated by pack of wolves from space that can run on moonbeams and have frozen mercury teeth
76. The wizard was left a burnt-out husk by attempting to channel eldritch powers
77. The wizard by strangled by a mummy they bought off some tomb raiders to make it into medicine
78. The wizard was lobotomized by mage-poachers looking to make a drug from their cerebro-spinal fluid and left a drooling wreck
79. The wizard tricked Death into a chess game but the chessboard was a hyper-dimensional object and continuously unfolds to make the game more complicated to prolong it indefinitely so Death got pissed and keeps layering on injuries and conditions that should kill the wizard but never will
80. Criminal gang the wizard was indebted to decided to collect, have busted the wizard's knees and are making the wizard teach them magic
81. Alchemically-altered bedbugs drove them insane with itchiness
82. An attempt at creating a potion of eternal life instead mutated the wizard into the degenerate far-future form of humanity
83. The wizard's tongue and hands absorbed too much energy from performing the somatic and verbal components of spells, detached themselves and swelled up into undead abominations
84. The wizard discovered a planar realm they believed was a paradise, and traveled there only to discover it was a hungry lure like a honeydew on a cosmic level
85. Enfilthened by goblins
86. The wizard's mind was trapped in the body of a rabid baboon
87. The wizard was taken over by a cursed mask, compelled to carve an army of its kind
88. The wizard cloned themself but the clones couldn't stand each other and all died murdering each other
89. Beset by a family of mimics
90. Blood magic rite went awry, exsanguinated the wizard and turned them into a bestial vampire
91. The wizard was entrapped by a cursed map, and died of dehydration wandering around their own tower searching for hidden treasure
92. The wizard was slain by a granfalgroo
93. The wizard got drunk and turned themself inside-out for a laugh but couldn't turn themself rightside-in afterwards
94. The wizard attempted a self-enlargement spell but suffocated under their own weight
95. Circle of mages the wizard stole lore from worked together to weave fate worse than death for the wizard
96. The wizard acquired a staff which once belonged to another wizard, and was haunted by their ghost - the living wizard and the dead wizard contended with each other over the staff and the body and both lost, becoming trapped in a miserable state between life and death
97. The wizard and some chunks of their tower were snatched away by a roc whose egg the wizard had eaten
98. A party of maenads the wizard was hosting got pissed and sparagmos'd them
99. A witch mated with the wizard then ate their head to birth monstrous spawn
100. Dragon has taken it as lair

GLOGtober Challenge: Magical Hotspot Patterns

As seen here: https://glass-candles.blogspot.com/2024/09/glogtober-24.html

Challenge courtesy of TheFirstGokun: https://spiceomancy.blogspot.com/

Abyssoneiric Swell

Within the area of an abyssoneiric swell (often inexplicably hex-shaped) all MD spent for a spell automatically return, but every time you cast a spell you need to use at least one more MD than you did for the last one.

Believed to be the result of astral leviathans breaching into human-perceptible layers of consciousness from deeper noo-regions. Plants within an abyssoneiric swell will be surrounded with a dim electric blue glow.

Traumothaumic Pearlsink

Often cubic in shape, and underground - centered around a traumothaumic pearl which erupts from the bowels of the earth like a reverse-meteor.

Within the area of a traumothaumic pearlsink any MD spent for a spell don't return. Also miscasts don't happen on a double, but dooms still happen as normal. Keep a record of MD lost to the pearlsink.

Somewhere within the area is the pearl itself. The pearl contains any MD lost to it, and 1d6 extra. It can be shattered to release these MD for a spell, but all released MD must be used at once. After absorbing MD the pearl will give off a painfully-intense citrus-like smell, which can be handy for finding it in confusing underground environs.

Altermetric Storm

A spate of unusual weather and omens revolving around a particular "theme" - for example an altermetric storm of "fish" might result in rains of fish, mudslides that reshape hills into the shapes of fish, and children being born with fish heads.

While within an altermetric storm, any "elemental" component of a spell cast will be replaced with the storm's theme - e.g. within the aforementioned fish storm, a fireball would become a fishball. If it takes more than a few seconds to figure out what the element of a spell might be and how it could be replaced, maybe don't bother.

Altermetric storms are believed to be fallout from a Godfall Event, the dead god's domains fleeing out from its decomposing realm-body as storms.

Grasp of Maqora-Mahaza

A geomantic smear left by the self-annihilation of the archwizard Maqora-Mahaza. Its boundaries are marked by menhirs like curling fingers or fangs, and within there is a constant noise like a deep mosquito whine.

Miscasts within the area of a Grasp happen on singles instead of doubles, with doubles being a normal cast, and the regular miscast table is replaced by this one:

1. Your right hand withers and warps into a six-fingered claw. If not constantly monitored or tied down it works towards mischief - undoing knots, throwing coins out of pockets, strangling sleepers, etc. After a day it returns to normal.
2. Your reflection crawls out of the nearest puddle or mirror. It wants the opposite of what you want, and where you are direct it is subtle and so on and so on. It knows everything you know and has all your abilities, but it is as fragile as glass and will shatter if it takes a single point of damage. It is dragged back after a day.
3. For 1d6 hours the wind slices your bare flesh like blades. A breeze deals damage as a dagger, a gale as a greatsword. Only totally covering yourself is proof against this.
4. You grow a second mouth on your neck, with many rows of teeth. The mouth mutters in Devils' Speech, dealing 1 Wisdom damage per hour you hear it. It drools like a waterfall in the presence of dead meat of your own species, and you must save to resist eating it on the spot. If the meat's from your own family you don't get a save to resist. The mouth disappears after a day, though it leaves a ragged scar.
5. Your shadow becomes pregnant with a random monster. If you are ever in darkness it is birthed. After a day it's reabsorbed.
6. Your legs become riddled with holes seemingly too deep for your flesh to contain them. You're unable to stand without a crutch or other support, but should someone mention you by name you will hear whatever they say from wherever they are in the world through those holes. The holes disappear after a day.

Elf-Fog

A silvery-purple fog which is spat out of fairy circles in great sporulating bursts.

All magic within an elf-fog is illusory. Illusory magic can still deal damage, but those who would be killed by such magic instead fall into an unwaking sleep until removed from the area of the elf-fog.

Ongoing magic brought into the area of elf-fog becomes illusory while within it. For this reason those bearing curses and suchlike often form communities in areas where the fog is common.

The Feast of St. Theokairos

Feast day of a saint martyred by a temporal paradox. Occurs on Savarach, the man-made and broken eighth day of creation, which now lies in pieces here and there, then and again. Noticeable by a feeling like the Sunday Scaries, wherein one feels as though they've committed some terrible wrong and are about to be punished for it.

Whenever a spell is cast during the Feast, roll on the table below:

1. Flip a coin also, haha. On a heads the duration is doubled. On a tails the duration is halved.
2. Write down the numbers you got on the MD you spent to cast it. If the next spell you cast has any doubles or triples, including the written-down numbers, then that'll trigger a miscast or doom.
3. The spell is frozen in stasis for 1d6 rounds before activating as normal.
4. The spell echoes again at half strength a round later.

GLOGtober Challenge: Patrons; Or: 6 Alien Vampire Patrons For Yon Party

As seen here: https://glass-candles.blogspot.com/2024/09/glogtober-24.html

Challenge courtesy of CommonUse: https://bitspieces.bearblog.dev/

LPrictorez trod similar ground first:
https://thebestplaceholder.blogspot.com/2024/02/scifi-races-inspired-by-undead.html
https://thebestplaceholder.blogspot.com/2024/05/scifi-races-inspired-by-undead-part-2.html

Lifeforce, House of Ashes, Planet of the Vampires - alien vampires are a surprisingly recurring archetype in media. Probably not enough to make a full generator for them, but enough for me to spin off a few takes... Also this has been lying in my drafts for a while so I'm shoving it into GLOGtober. What people don't tell you about round pegs and square holes is that you can make the hole round too if you hammer it in hard enough.

So here's six alien vampire patrons:

1. The Electric Man from Procyon

An incorporeal, psycho-electrical entity - it moves through technology and appears onscreen as Mr. Rogers or some other old, beloved TV characters they picked up the radio broadcasts for over in the Procyon system some decades back.

It's an energy vampire, rendering any area it dwells in a little darker, a little cold, but its preferred fare is the energy of agitated neural activity - terror especially - and it's willing to shell out some of its own energy in the form of addictive euphoria to those who can provide it.

It's here on a mission: to retrieve a sample of Saturnian ebon lightning, which can convert energy into consciousness or consciousness into energy, up for sale at a Black Auction, or Sable Market, or something of that strain. It needs physical hands to help it do that. Money doesn't matter to it, it can just stick an arbitrary amount of zeroes on the end of your bank account (but this is going to be noticed very quickly). The Electric Man's got something of a methhead mindset though - every heist's gotta be bigger and louder than the last, every hit of fear that much stronger. Seek employment at your own risk.

2. Saltpork

Family guys, old ladies, dogs - they've been snapping lately, killing each other and drinking their blood. There's a crystal that's leaked into the water supply. The crystal is from space. The crystal is sapient. The crystal slots neatly into the space electrolytes are supposed to fill in Earth-life bodies. The crystal wants to be re-united with itself.

People with enough of the crystal in them are compelled to kill and drink the blood from other people with the crystal in them. When one of them absorbs a critical mass of crystal they'll metamorphose into its central processing node. If you help that node come into being it'll be favourably disposed towards you, and use its control over the rest of its bodies to help you out. If you stood against it it will do the same to try and destroy you. People who get enough crystal in them to be a candidate understand this instinctually, and may use whatever resources are at their disposal as regular-ass dudes to persuade you that you should support their attempt to drink the most blood.

3. The Woman with the Looking-Glass Eye

Couple hundred years ago she lost an eye, got a glass one. Couple hundred years ago she looked up at the night sky and something looked back - a being of light, now living inside her glass eye.

They say that if you could go faster than light you could go back in time - and right at that knife's edge of c you're stuck in place, never going forward or backward. The strange symbiosis of entropy-chained human and timeless light-being allows them to drain the time, the youth, from others, to prolong the host's.

She's old, she's wealthy (though never wealthy enough to draw undue attention), she's lost friends and family but never her love of art. She's a patron of the local scene, never front and center but her word makes or breaks livelihoods, and the visions she shares of the vistas her inhabitant has witnessed across the cosmos are a devastating muse.

The Woman with the Looking-Glass Eye will pay handsomely for records and reports of anomalous phenomena, which she keeps in old wooden chests and reads deep into the night. She'll also pay to get you to stir up drama among the artists' circles she patronizes, to keep things dynamic and exciting and so that people are less likely to question if one of them disappears every now and then.

4. The Merchant of Fevered Dreams

In his true form he looks like a big assassin bug walking on its hind legs. He's not a bug (or a he, except for convenience's sake), that's just the shape a space traveler like him will gravitate towards - an exoskeleton's easier to keep pressurized, hard compound eyes won't boil off like jelly-filled ones, and a proboscis is handy for sucking up volatiles. In disguise he layers on bio-clay to look like an editorial cartoon fat cat.

He drinks cerebrospinal fluid, his proboscis sticking out from under his molded tongue - partially because he likes the taste, and partially because he thinks it's the key to figuring out dreams. Dreams are BIG in space - we're the only ones to do it. The Merchant wants to figure out a way to mass produce them and ship them out across the galaxy in a consumable form. He's got a basement full of halfway-comatose kidnapped people slipping between dreams and moments of sickly lucidity.

He talks a big game but for the moment can deliver on little. He's run himself deep into space-debt trying to figure out dreams. Promises a share in his enterprise if you can help him with that.

5. The Goregoyles

Dreams are unique to Earth, but wherever there is life there is disease.

These guys are a pack of freaky cyborg imps that imprint on people - maybe you! They're healers. They claim to be healers. They heal most things, but not your species, not completely. They'll be able to fully heal you up only if you extract certain proteins/hormones/tissues from the living bodies of others of your species. Oh, and if you can track down particularly interesting bits of flesh - a leper's sloughed nose, a teratoma, a syphilis chancre - they'll reward you by upgrading your pathetic and inefficient biology.

They're helpful, they're gregarious, but they're liars. They really do heal you, but this is a means to an end. They're making you into a bomb. A disease bomb, combining cancer and virus and fungus and whatever else they can get you to wrangle up into a Frankenpocalypse. They don't even know if they're supposed to be doing that on Earth, but that's what they were born to do and they're here so they'll do it.

6. Zeta Dracula

Blaspheme against the primitive terrestrial superstition they said. It'll be good for a laugh since crop circles and cattle mutilations have gotten boring they said.

To this foolish alien's grey surprise, God is real and strong even in space. The alien (named Amalantrah) damned themself and was cursed to forever wander the night as one of the living dead.

This was a great shock to Amalantrah's worldview. They still have trouble seeing their condition as anything but a mundane disease, even when their ship's medical nanites can't treat it, or even recognize it. They want to be cured so they can return to their home planet and forget all about the weird shit out there among the stars.

Amalantrah's a dracula, and they've got a UFO. They're in denial about needing blood, and will avoid drinking it until the red thirst drives them into a feeding frenzy. They'll trade you UFO shit like rayguns and jetpacks if you give them blood in some way that lets them maintain this denial, like telling them it's a normal Earth smoothie or something, and for getting them leads on a cure for vampirism.

GLOGtober Challenge: Esoteric Orders & Creeds; Or: Cthulhu Cults of San Francisco

As seen here: https://glass-candles.blogspot.com/2024/09/glogtober-24.html

Challenge courtesy of Shadowfray: https://impulsivenecromancy.blogspot.com/

Cthulhu Cults of San Francisco

What drives a man to worship an undersea squid-dragon? Is it nihilism? Lust for seafood? An unfamiliarity with cosmic horror literature? Let's find out.

Here's six Cthulhu cults from a city already claimed by Lovecraftian madness - San Francisco:

1. Atlantean Aeonics:

At the dawn of the new millennium, one daring marine biologist made a miraculous discovery off the western continental shelf of North America - a biome isolated from the rest of the world for millions of years. This biome produced biochemicals with properties that couldn't be found anywhere else, properties that promised cures for cancer, the common cold, even old age itself. Fearing traumatic exploitation of this biome, the marine biologist hid their discovery, patented the biochemicals, and has been slowly but surely working towards the benefit of all humanity through their company Atlantean Aeonics ever since.

This is all bullshit, of course, a nice little origin story for TED talks.

Atlantean Aeonics is in reality an obscure yet cutting-edge biotech company that caters to Silicon Valley cartel heads and survivalist billionaires. They offer immortality to their clients, by way of splicing Deep One genes into their DNA - no more must one have an ancestor that fucked a fish-man to enjoy the fruits of forever!

The company tells most clients that they've managed to separate the longevity-granting part of the Deep One genome from the turning-into-a-fish-man-and-communing-with-alien-gods-in-the-depths part, though they have not. In reality they've only managed to delay the least aesthetically-appealing parts of the process, and every lower-end client is an experiment in delaying it further. As of yet the company doesn't truly understand the technology, because it's not their technology. The isolated biome their legendary founder discovered was in fact a Deep One trench-city, almost totally depopulated by the clandestine extermination of their kind that the American government had been undertaking since the Innsmouth incident in the '30s. The founder promised them the moon - influence among terrestrial elites, full hybridization of the human population, protection of their religion and sanctuaries under federal law - and the Deep Ones were all too ready to believe them, providing access to the remnants of their biotechnology.

Atlantean Aeonics of course has no intention of following through on their end, at least not any more than they need to keep their undersea collaborators on the hook. Their future has no need for backwards faith or fish-people. Their future is human, capitalist, and eternal.

2. The Order of Meditations in Deep Waters

Whether a belief is true or not is irrelevant. What matters is: on a personal level, whether a belief is psychologically positive or negative, and on a eugenic level whether a belief is adaptive or maladaptive. So who cares if Cthulhu is really out there dreaming real dreams in R'lyeh (i.e. Real Yeah) - he is useful, on the level of the organism and the sub-species, as an archetype of and a metaphor for the power of the unconscious, the dragon of chaos, to be confronted and overcome by the worthy.

This is what the Order of Meditations in Deep Waters tells its members, in any case. It's a self-help group that grew in popularity among internet influencers and C-list celebrities about a decade back, combining Jungian and Thelemite teachings - particularly where they relate to the collective unconscious, mythic archetypes, and individual will.

They're waning now, never updated their message or their media to land with the youth. The non-consensual drug dosing and sexual abuse allegations didn't help either. They were hardly a cult in the Lovecraftian sense - definitely a cult in the regular sense - but with their spotlight dimming that's starting to change.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the "confronting the Cthulhu-archetype" stuff was just bullshit. That one time? Getting a psychically-sensitive person into the right headspace at the right time? That did let them brush the dreaming will of the High Priest of the Great Old Ones. Those who experienced such a thing were not unscathed - they could hardly be more scathed - and in the past they were swept under the rug, like the people that overdosed. Now the rug's being lifted - the inhuman and seemingly-indestructible coral-growth remnants are being retrieved from the sealed basements and storm drains they were stuck in.

Physically-petrified but psychically-active, these remnants became nodes for a network-broadcast nightmare, an isthmus of the Dreamlands. Those who've stuck with the Order are convinced they can use this nightmare network to fuse the waking world and the Dreamlands, and that their mental superiority will make them the ruling class of this mélange-realm after it destroys the false cathedral of modern, slavish authority.

3. "The Coastguards"

They're not the real coastguard of course - it's just an obscurant inside-joke name they came up with for themselves.

They're made up of high-ranking public and private partners in the military-industrial complex, meeting in conventions and clubs to discuss contracts and the issue of Cthulhu's awakening as it relates to profits and American policy.

They're kind of an ironic Cthulhu cult, they'll clink their glasses and say "Hail great Cthulhu!" and laugh but then walk it back and say "Haha, but really we're just being silly, we love America and we love God". They laugh about it but they also get little sigils put in missile guidance system circuitry because they believe ritual sacrifices will delay Cthulhu's awakening and preserve Freedom, Democracy, and the International Rules-Based Order a while longer. There's a split forming in the Coastguards over whether it's enough just to kill foreign people, or whether they should do false flag attacks and groom domestic terrorists to have an excuse to kill the Americans they find undesirable too. Oh yeah and they're really into the idea of starting a war over Taiwan.

Zero magic, but lots of money and connections and they've got the number of a couple ex-special forces guys who think life is a movie and are ready to do Guantanamo shit to anyone they're told is an enemy of America.

4. Tentatoocoolforschool

Ok so take some hippies, original hippies, who went yuppie and made their money and are now retired and feeling nostalgic for the old days of the constipated great consciousness shift and the Summer of Love, and some guys who were teenage shitposters making Trump memes in 2016, big believers in "meme magic", but now it's 8 years down the line and they've become disillusioned with Zion Don, he's old, he's tired, he's the establishment now, he's no good.

These guys collide discussing perennial mysticism and testosterone-enhancing natural diets and culture jamming and whatnot and enough of them say, hey, why don't we start a commune, not like a gay anarchist commune, but like a cool, Grecian agora where wise old men can mentor twenty-something boys. And so they did exactly that, and between tomes of fell lore downloaded off the dark web and one of the no-longer-former hippies being a legit Lovecraftian occultist, turned to Cthulhu as their tool for wiping the slate of America clean and ushering in a new age, for real this time.

Some of these guys are more into the "free and wild" part of that new age, some are more into the "beyond good and evil" stuff. Some are into the morals being thrown aside and all men shouting and killing, other into the laws being thrown aside and all men revelling in joy stuff. It's a mixed bag but they all get along on a day-to-day, interpersonal level. They've summoned some tentacled lumbering thing they keep in a shed and it's their girlfriend, for all of them it's their girlfriend. It gives birth to living information, ideas that possess you and memetic viruses, and they try to sneak these things into the media - mostly zines and posts and posters and suchlike right now, but they're pretty sure if they can get them into a popular cartoon that'll be the tipping point.

They' tried to muscle in on L.A. but the King in Yellow guys are pretty entrenched there.

5. The True Rl'yehan Witches Movement

Y'all, white people are NOT the indigenous people of the land. Any land. Neither are any other people. 99% of human beings are descendants of ORGANIC SLIME exuded as a BY-PRODUCT of shoggoth bio-machinery 200 million years ago, and leaked into EARTH'S ORIGINAL PURE ENVIRONMENT by the Elder Thing scientist Y'QUU'B!!!

The REAL people, the true 1%, are DEEP ONES. Deep as in DEEP MEANING. We are the DEEP TRUE PEOPLE OF THE EARTH and it has been STOLEN from us and POLLUTED by the 99% SLIME. We were once worshiped as GODS by the 99% SLIME - Dagon and the Nommos are the MYTHIC MEMORY of this - but they got GREEDY and DISLOYAL and used trickery to take over and LIE to us about our true origin. We are NOT MONKEYS - they are SLIME and we are FISH.

ORIENTAL WISDOM recognizes that FISH will become DRAGONS - this we MUST DO.

Rise up my brothers and sisters, rise up and HONOUR YOUR HERITAGE. We will BECOME DRAGONS, we HAVE REAL MAGIC, we will SWEEP OVER THE LAND as a TIDAL WAVE. The 99% SLIME have bred OUT OF CONTROL, they are CONSUMING OUR RESOURCES. There will come a day when our PAIN and our RITUALS awaken GREAT CTHULHU who is our RACIAL ESSENCE and he will lead us to ETERNAL GLORY AND VICTORY.

Sign up to my substack for more.

6. The Many Cthulhus of San Francisco

Too many cultists running around - shouting "Cthulhu fhtagn" and "Ia Shub-Niggurath" (especially that last one - people are gonna mishear it!) - bad for a city's image. So the government rounded up a bunch of cultists and brought on the state of California's best therapists to deprogram them.

It worked, and it didn't. The cultists were convinced they shouldn't worship Cthulhu, but that's because they were now convinced that they were Cthulhu. Individually and collectively. A bunch of Cthulhus.

This made them even less capable of functioning in society. Imagine paying taxes when you're convinced you could end the world on a whim. The Many Cthulhus were swiftly unhoused. Their transition from potential January 6th-level political disruptors to mentally unhinged hobos was seen as close enough to a success, as now they could be cared for, and make some people a lot of money by providing care.

The Many Cthulhus were moved into an Urban Alchemy camp, worked their way up to becoming guards of that Urban Alchemy camp, and before anyone who could do anything about it cottoned on to what was happening they were isolating their fellow camp inhabitants and indoctrinating them into believing that they, too, were Cthulhu. They also managed to snag case workers and NGO bureaucrats, infiltrating third sector noopolitiks.

Their aims are simple: Rent's too damn high. Racism? Bad. Solve both problems by flooding the world and turning people into fish-people.

GLOGtober Challenge: A Monster Described Only Through Conflicting Folklore & Rumour; Or: The Granfalgroo

As seen here: https://glass-candles.blogspot.com/2024/09/glogtober-24.html

Challenge courtesy of Vivanter: https://mediumsandmessages.bearblog.dev/

🥄

You two come and eat your fill of the granfalgroo,
All pantry-things at hand have gone into this stew,
Dig in til nothing's left, come on give it a chew,
It will be your end if we've had our fill of you!

GRAN

'Ewere drinkup!: the molly-combs glister to the twinking stars between them, enswathing indigold roots invest'iridal floors, twiralled in flocorum and once more in chiaroscurry-all strips - slimp strathe-wise 'cross the lambent flumes for 'ewhenin the grand-fall-grew how're glass'n into verse.

 FAL

Potstruck, stewstrewn, lumpin' poured,
Breadtack driven, hardstale board,
Puncture, sancle, 'testin' cord,
Proud-lapse coockle oh my lord!
Strifelin' tatter'd, exeunt-bound,
Outed houses, s'loose the hound!
Snuckle swoofley yack-end ground,
Wiff-club grample, smaff, and pound!
Death rats clean with rock-dove coo,
Struck downstrewn the granfalgroo!

GROO

Sup twice from the maenad's cup and tere-tair-up from the withinside-out:
I tell you true for the granfalgroo is NOT the grundaloot IS not the sweembairn and IS NOT the nardypuce;
Yet forgiven underforgotten, grave-packed you'll be for mistaking them and he!

GROO

It splatters it squelches it rushes it crushes it kills you out right from within and without with torn-out nails and bursted tripe it knows you it smells you it knows that it smells you but not with its nose it smells from the heart and the hart and the hare and the brown and the stew and it knows where you sleep it knows when you sleep it's watched you through life with eyes not its own and fish-heads burble and bobble and pickled eggs wobble it won't do you good go hungry get clear it won't shed a tear for a lick of your fear

FAL

Once upon a time there was a boy
A nasty little boy
 Who did nasty little things
He pissed in pies on the sill
And plucked the wings off chickens
And he was very rude to his uncle
And one day the nasty little boy died
His head was like a drumstick
With meat slurped off the bone
His hands had been peeled like potatoes
And his chest made for a deep bowl of soup
No one attended his funeral
And people quietly thanked the granfalgroo

GRAN

A smidge of porridge on the door,
A boar's head rolling 'neath the floor,
In beds on tables gruesome gore,
Old man still sleeping, what a snore!
Tummy rumbling, chin all a'biled,
What's left unsaid can come out wild,
In pots and pans it brews and stews
And spills out deadly granfalgroos!

GLOGtober Challenge: A Fate Worse Than Death

As seen here: https://glass-candles.blogspot.com/2024/09/glogtober-24.html

Challenge courtesy of Phlox: https://whosemeasure.blogspot.com

Out of Game

In most cases, death seems pretty bad - in our lifetimes? - likely permanent. What could be worse than death?

Certainly there are particular deaths that are worse than other deaths, like being eaten alive by rats is worse than blowing up in a monster truck rally, but is there something which is worse across the board? 

Hard to say. Hell, probably, if we interpret it as a temporal eternity of being on fire and you never get used to it. Being eaten and your consciousness digested by invading aliens, motes of your awareness spread across their swarm as they destroy the world and everyone you've ever known, knowing you're trapped alongside their consciousnesses too but unable to communicate, a backseat passenger as the aliens devour world after world, spreading throughout the universe until heat death or the big crunch (if that's how it goes down), thinking it's finally gonna end, but oh no! the aliens figure out a way around that and it's nightmare cycles forever.

So hell again basically, just different flavours of hell. Those are probably worse than death. Can I claim it confidently? No. I've never met a dead person, nor one in hell. The out of game stuff is less interesting than the in game stuff, I should've put a disclaimer at the start attesting to that.

In Game

Your character in a game dying can be an exciting culmination of a plan or arc or whatever, but it can also blow - you lose experience, equipment, potentially the rest of the session, yadda yadda yadda.

How can it be worse? Some ideas:

• You can't be brought back from death. That's assuming the setting has resurrection magic. Maybe this happens if you're killed by a demon, or Bad Magic.
• You return as an undead critter, corporeal or ghostly, and haunt the remaining party. It might be fun if your character is under your control when this happens, so to be worse than death it'd have to be an NPC. This probably happens if you're killed by a vampire or wraith or whatever.
• The death is so bad that your next character has a detriment related to it, like a mutation, or a missing limb, or they have to reroll constitution and take the lower result, or if they encounter the thing that killed your last character they have to save or flee in terror. Again, this is probably something Bad Magic can do, stay away from Bad Magic, maybe you don't even have to be killed by Bad Magic, maybe using Bad Magic will do this to you as well, or maybe there's some Schwarzeneggerian warrior who is just so strong that when he kills you he kills you so much that it follows you into your next life.
• If your character dies you have to die in real life. Potentially controversial, illegal. Can't recommend this one. If you can get a message back, tell us whether being dead is worse than being in hell, or vice-versa.
  
• When a character dies the world's doomsday clock ticks forwards a step - maybe because their soul or life energy or whatever is being harvested by the Apocalypse Engine - first character death you might just get an omen that lets you know what's up, but after a few character deaths the plagues start, the moon turns red, whatever, and when you reach 10 character deaths or whichever number the campaign's over, you lost, world's ended. Variant: Each death makes the Armageddon Beast stronger and more active in its rampages.
  
• Your next character's got a debt they have to pay off before they starting getting gold-for-xp, and the amount of that debt is based on your last character's karma. If they were a straight-shooter paladin? Minimal debt. If they were a real piece of shit? Big debt, great tragedy. This represents paying monks to pray for their sake, to send solace and merit as their flesh freezes and shatters in Padma Naraka or whatever.
• A character dying blocks off that class or race or race/class combo for everyone... don't die too much or you'll be forced into Suboptimal Character Options... Maybe do something like this for a campaign where you unlock new classes & races by befriending factions, and you lose the options because you dying offends them...
• You only get one fancy character sheet and after that character dies you burn it and from now on you have to use handwritten ones. Hard to justify this diegetically. Maybe the DM just feels an aimless and petty spite. Truth be told I don't even like the fancy character sheets. Maybe this one isn't so bad.
  
• Your corpse doesn't rot and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger every day and it's not so bad at first but then it's blocked off the dungeon passage and you can't move it or hack it up fast enough and then the dungeon's burst around it and it's flopped over the whole hex and it's all downhill from here.
• You wake up in a dungeon and you have to figure the way out on your own time before you can reincarnate as a new character. If you die in the dungeon you go right back to the start, or to a new, even harder dungeon.
  

GLOGtober Challenge: A Connection Between Disparate Worlds; Or: The Public Universal Bathroom

As seen here: https://glass-candles.blogspot.com/2024/09/glogtober-24.html

Challenge courtesy of Walfalcon: https://sameissharkinjapanese.blogspot.com/

Friend of the blog Mikesmix came up with an idea both intriguing and disturbing:

This is that, but more:

The Public Universal Bathroom

Consider a trail - one person walking might bend the grass in their footprints, only for it to straighten in the next wind. Then more people walk the same path, and more people again after them. The grass is trampled, the earth hard-packed. The grass dies, and the bare earth is opened to the sky.

By repeated action the trail is transformed from a concept existing in the minds of those who walk it into a physical entity.

Now consider a public bathroom - the turtle-heading trailhead of a different sort of path - a liminal space you go to when you've got to go, you've got to go, and the more people go, go, go the more the waste-pipes stretch invisibly behind the walls, the more corners angle themselves for soiled tiles to turn around, the more unspeakable stenches waft from places yet unseen.

Follow the smells, peek behind the new corners, and you may find yourself in the Public Universal Bathroom. For a while you may not even realize you're there (was the bathroom in this subway station always this confusing?) because in its shallows it looks much the same as every other public bathroom. This is the level that those in the know in occulture prefer to stick to, and to those in the know it is an amenity of great convenience - step into a washroom at Toronto Pearson, step out of a washroom at YYC Calgary, skip the lines and the security checks and most of the travel time and discomfort.

Like the oceans' shallows, the shallows of the P.U.B. are not without their dangers - their riptides and blue holes and razor corals. For one: navigation. The P.U.B. is a non-Euclidean space - finding your way isn't a matter as simple as taking the next right after a broken stall. You might have to crawl into the space behind a third mirror, take four rights then fifty steps back, pop back in and up through the ceiling to crawl another mile through dusty ductwork, and so on, with only the marks left by past travelers to find your way. There's a thin margin of error where if you're lucky one mistake could land you a world away from where you wanted to come out and if you're unlucky dump you into the P.U.B.'s deep end. It's also constantly shifting, growing, and collapsing - what was a dependable route one month might be something else entirely the next. A number of occulture enthusiasts make their living (and lose their lives) mapping, re-mapping, and selling these routes. As the matter making it up tessellates and stretches beyond what any sane architect would recommend it can also become subtly unstable, with a fall through a too-thin floor plunging you into a pit of pooled filth or into the deep end.

The people you'll most likely encounter in the shallows are either fellow travelers, or hopelessly lost and too starved, dehydrated, and sick to pose much of a threat.

A good sign you've gone too deep is that the people you encounter have acclimated - clad in layered and hardened papier-mâché, hardened themselves in wars over myco-farms and fishing pits, scarred by sharpened pipes and shattered porcelain. Among them are the cruiser-bruisers, homosensuals who make love and war bedecked in man-leather cut from defeated enemies and fallen friends, terminally-infected oracles who puke revelations from their septic-fever dreams, jenkem addicts so bloated with methane they walk upside-down on the ceilings, mold-men who've become symbiotic with the P.U.B.'s fungus, helminth-puppets, slime-exuding wrigglers who make compacted settlements in spaces no-one else can move within, and so on and so on. Few remember the world beyond the Bathroom, and fewer still wish to return to it.

Besides the people, the animals too in the deep end have acclimated.

There are swarms of paper-chewing roaches, sometimes caught, mashed, and strained for the alcohol that ferments in their gut, no serious threat to someone conscious and in good health unless a mass of them suddenly bulges and explodes from behind drywall.

There are splotchy little toads, hard to distinguish from the nastiness that stains the floors of the P.U.B. and sometimes deadly toxic, even to creatures that have become immune to the general sepsis of the place.

There are rats that have bred to become big and quick like dogs, pack-hunting ankle-rippers, and there are dogs that have become like rats, Lilliputian descendants of service and emotional support animals which followed their owners into bathrooms and never left.

In the flooded lakes with piss-trough tributaries there are catfish-fat neotenic drainflies - scum-nibbling swimming maggots - and there are serpents, returned to prehistoric gigantism, writhing in the murky depths and snatching those incautious by the shore and door-raft gondoleers making their way across.

And these are just what are commonly known and encountered - the P.U.B. has its own cryptids, its own monstrous tales told around piles of smouldering cardboard and dried dung:
hairless possums as strong and cunning as tigers, with long tails that twist into neck-snapping nooses,
bacterial-mass tides that outgrew the guts that once held them, capable of digesting anything they sweep across,
flushed fetuses that retained atavistic gills, lurking in bowls and plumbing with sharp teeth that constantly replace themselves like a shark's,
and cyst-crowned minotaurs able to warp the malleable space of the P.U.B. into a labyrinth that leads right into their clutches,
to name a few.

Despite these dangers travelers may make their way to the deep P.U.B. not by accident but by intent - for through here one might find their way not only across the world, but across worlds. Such routes are the stuff that occultural gang-wars are fought over and which lifetimes are spent to discover. Follow such an anabatic route, fighting your way through all the terrors of the P.U.B., and you might emerge into a world where people go number one and number two through the same birdish hole, and where science and philosophy have taken entirely different tracks.

In the deep P.U.B. it's said that one can go even deeper still - that there are places in the dankest and darkest sections where masonric rift tear themselves through the floor: gates to the realm of Cloacina, to sewer-works older and grander than any made by mankind, where the shit of the gods themselves flows in rivers, more precious than gold and halfway to nectar, ambrosia, and the clay of raw creation.