Tuesday, March 12, 2024

D6x6 Ebullient Ettins

Click the button below to get your ettin:


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

D6 This ettin is
1 a wizard's attempt to create a smarter ogre as a perfect soldier.
2 the soul of a sower of discord that crawled out of hell.
3 an accursed thing born from a cannibal and one of their equally-unpleasant victims.
4 a monster created from a person and their distorted reflection merged by a cursed mirror.
5 the result of too many souls being born into the same body.
6 a descendent of Demogorgon.
D6 This ettin's left head
1 bears many misplaced and missized eyes.
2 is bloated and jiggles gelatinously.
3 is broad and blocky-squashed.
4 is gaunt and sour-pinched.
5 is slackjawed and wall-eyed.
6 is breathtakingly handsome, though with a grating voice.
D6 This ettin's right head
1 is shriveled and gnarled.
2 is cloven down the middle by a ragged scar.
3 is just a mouth, without eyes, nose, or ears.
4 is that of a fangy, bristly beast.
5 is upside-down on its neck.
6 is wildly bearded, with birds nesting within.
D6 The dynamic between the personalities of this ettin’s heads
1 is that of uncanny twins, completing each other's sentences.
2 is of a couple of riffing jokesters.
3 is of superiority & servility.
4 is of treacherous loathing.
5 is that they're giving each other the silent treatment.
6 is discomfitingly intimate, with many PDAs.
D6 This ettin wears
1 a pair of fancy caps with feathers stuck in them.
2 a coating of crusty blue woad.
3 a barnacle-studded boat hull on suspenders, with holes punched out for their legs.
4 a scarf made of rolled-up cobwebs twined around their necks.
5 a toga that was once a tapestry hung in a noble's hall.
6 a thong made out of a black bear’s hide, riding up their hairy butt.
D6 This ettin is infamous for
1 eating all the deer in the royal woods.
2 trapping travellers inside caves and taunting them while they die of dehydration.
3 showing up at festivals and feasts to extort booze.
4 the haunting songs it sings on moonless nights, which carry for many miles.
5 taxidermying the knights who sought to slay them, and displaying them at crossroads.
6 serving as a hatchet man to witches and warlocks.

Monday, March 11, 2024

My Taxonomic Kingdom for a Gorse

Special thanks to Eldritch Eternity for help brainstorming this post.

Something is amiss in the dungeons. Things have learned to sprout mushrooms that ought to grow flowers - fungi do not exist.

From the AD&D 2nd Edition Monstrous Manual

Those of you who've read wikipedia might've noticed something by now: fungi are not plants - in fact fungi are closer to animals, evolutionarily speaking, and have their own taxonomic kingdom to boot.

Maybe they didn't have this scientific knowledge back in the '80s. I read a book some time ago about hymenopterans - that is, ants, bees, etc. - and it included termites as hymenopterans. To my white surprise I discovered later in life that termites are in fact much more closely related to cockroaches and mantises than those other bugs that live in hives and have queens and so on.

This is a classification that continued past AD&D 2nd Edition (I won't call it a misclassification, because that would make for a shorter, less interesting post). Here it is in 3rd Edition:

And again in 5th:

This suggests some things about the world, the implied setting, on the scale of deep time.

According to the Science, in reality fungi evolved as a distinct kingdom of life about 1.2-1.5 billion years ago - maybe even 2.4 billion years ago - apparently for plants it's like a billion years ago - wow. There's a sort of plant called the quillwort which has been around about 252 million years, reproduces through spores like fungus do, and lacks an elongated stem or vegetative leaves. Although it's still photosynthetic, it's about the closest plant I've managed to find to fungus, and so something like quillwort makes sense to me as the ancestor of D&D's plant-fungus (or plungus). The relative abundance of underground niches - in dungeons, the underdark, etc. - might have incentivized these proto-plungus ancestors to lose their pigmentation, their chlorophyll, turn to decomposing organic matter, and eventually develop into mobile, predatory, even sapient forms.

"But semiurge," you may be thinking, "semiurge you scamp, you wetbrained fuckwit, you're burying the lede here - what of the saprophytic plants, the plants that are decomposers like fungi are - wouldn't those make more sense as the plungus ancestor?" - to which I must respond: no. Another thing I've discovered reading wikipedia for this post is that saprophytic plants don't really exist - they're actually myco-heterotrophic plants, that is parasites on fungus rather than proper decomposers on their own - their existence requires the existence of fungus, and so they could not be the plungus ancestor.

Aquatic mushrooms are rare - there's like one, apparently: Psathyrella aquatica. This is because mushrooms need to take in oxygen, and apparently this is a lot easier for them to do from the air. In a D&D world we might expect to see quite a few more aquatic mushrooms - perhaps from some less-derived plungus species that retain their photosynthetic ability, able to produce their own oxygen underwater.

Fungal cell walls in reality are made from chitin - same stuff that makes up bug exoskeletons - whereas for plants it's cellulose. Maybe paper-making is more widespread from an earlier time if plungi can be more easily made into paper - with implications for the development of informational & cultural technologies.

No proper fungi might mean no psilocybin, no amanitas - psychedelic culture in D&D world might be relatively impoverished, or maybe peyote and ayahuasca pick up the slack. Stoned Ape theory is endangered.

In-world, why might this have become the case? Being D&D, it's not necessarily a totally naturalistic explanation. There is no deity of fungus, but there is a demon-queen: Zuggtmoy. Maybe fungus once existed as its own kingdom, a kingdom that would've lent Zuggtmoy tremendous power due to its omnipresence, and was eliminated from existence in some cosmic conflict - plants then filling in the ontological void.

Friday, February 23, 2024

A Generator for New Words, Or: Automatically Grafting Prefixes and Suffixes Garned from Wikitionary

Special thanks to friend of the blog Rook for coming up with this idea. Caution: some words generated may already exist.

If you'd like to do some combinatorialization of your own, click the links below:
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Special:RandomInCategory/English_prefixes#English
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Special:RandomInCategory/English_suffixes#English

To generate a word here, click the button below:



Special thanks to Spwack for making the generator generator used for this post: https://slightadjustments.blogspot.com/p/generator.html

Thursday, February 15, 2024

An Adventure of Edmund the great

Friend of the blog Phlox drew this adorable hedgehog wizard:

& from it I was inspired to draw one of Edmund's no doubt plethorous adventures:

I hope that in time more of Edmund the great's adventures will be recorded.

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

D20 Reasons Why Werewolves, Devils, Wights, And So On Are Vulnerable To Silver

1. Silver is the metal of the moon, a mistress who brooks no beastly stain on the lullabilic rapture of her night.

2. Undeath, devilry, and were-beasts are all fundamentally expressions of sickness, whether biological or spiritual. The prophylaxis of silver counters them at the root.

3. The undead, demonic, and were-beasts all share an infernal origin - the sulphurous components of their body oxidize rapidly in contact with silver, burning them from within.

4. A silver blade was used by the Great Hero to dismember the Primordial Beast and thereby create the material world. Silver weapons gain mytho-potency by this archetypal remembrance.

5. The demon Beleth was betrayed by its fellows and imprisoned in silver - all silver. Its rage slips through the gaps in its prison enough to especially harm its betrayers and their corrupted creations.

6. Silver resonates with the silver cords that bind spirits to bodies. On ordinary living things it does no more damage than steel, but with beings that are driven by the spirit more than the body it's anathema.

7. The magic which sustains these creatures responds to will structured by belief - the collective superstition that silver must harm them means that it does.

8. The powers of the underworld once made pacts with all the precious metals, but broke theirs with silver in favour of gold - thereby making gold the more precious of the two, and silver still seeks its recompense in blood for this slight.

9. Silver is a relic which remembers an older age of humanity - appropriately, our silver age. This lingering remembrance of glory grants even those in this fallen, iron age the strength to fight the monsters of the night.

10. Silver's close association with coinage imbues it with the energy of civilization - inimical to the devourers of mankind.

11. Silver is the backing of mirrors - mirrors which reflect images, such as images of humanity which in turn are the image of God - those who betray this derived image, through undeath, therianthropy, or demoniac corruption, are destined to be destroyed by it.

12. Some quirk of their biology (or abiology, as the case may be) causes them to suffer rapid and sometimes-fatal argyria on contact with silver.

13. Silver, like dogwood, has been cursed since its involvement in the death of Jesus - for being built into the cross for the latter, and for the thirty pieces paid to Judas for the former. When cursed silver is wielded against evil it creates an effect like multiplying a negative number by another negative number - Satan's house is divided against itself and turned inside-out.

14. Silver is the frozen shadow of mercury - quicksilver - which is the substance of change and mortality. Those things which cling to existence, through immortality or regeneration, are especially torn down by it. Mercury itself would be even more effective, but it's more difficult to weaponize.

15. The cymatic properties of silver cancel out their negative frequencies. All reality's an epiphenomenon of cosmic music, a superstring orchestra.

16. There once was an order of paladins that struck against the heart of hell itself. That order was lost, but the mortal terror of them remains in the soul of evil everywhere - and their heraldry bore an argent tincture.

17. Silver is the highest metal of the sub-lunary sphere, and the ruling archons have empowered it to strike down those who work against their law.

18. Photography really can steal your soul - if your soul's too malleable or detached from your body. Silver, as a foundational material of photography, carries this property by association.

19. The metallic structure of silver coincidentally forms occult symbols which are harmful to the forces of evil.

20. Silver is rooted in the collective unconscious, and reacts violently against the fearsome creatures of the night.

Monday, February 12, 2024

Eerie Knightly Orders - GLOG Δ Templates

Inspired by this: https://whosemeasure.blogspot.com/2023/05/35-eerie-knight-abilities.html

By James Zapata

Order of the Errant Culver

Officially charged with retrieving the emperor's homing pigeons, and the letters affixed to them. This is a de facto excuse to trespass and spy on his vassals. Interference with your duty is to be seen as treason against the emperor.

Initiate: Be blindfolded and dropped into the wilderness without supplies. Find your way back to the Order.

You automatically succeed at attempts to balance and/or perch on precarious surfaces and objects.

Brother/Sister: Retrieve or deliver a message which no pigeon could, at considerable risk to yourself.

Slit someone or something's throat. Thereafter you can imitate their voice by running the blade that slew them up and down your neck.

Commander: Unveil a conspiracy against the imperial personage.

Arrows fletched with feathers will veer off course rather than strike you.

Grand Master: Maneuver the Order into the full favour of the emperor while undermining the current grand master.

Speak the language of birds - concurrently a fantastical talent with poetry.

Order of the Stonebound Duchess

Within you is a princeling, writhing majestically in your guts. It dreams of a new age, an age of eternal twilight and omnipresent fog, where above is mingled fully with below, and air with water and stone. This age will come, your Order will assure it, with the release of your inner liege's mother, the Stonebound Duchess, from her erstwhile tomb.

Initiate: Accept a princeling-worm with the kiss of shame. Thereafter, if you fail a save against poison, the princeling within you will perish, and you must return to the Order to make penance and receive a new one before you can use its abilities again.

Your body becomes as flexible as a worm's. You can fight with long weapons and rigid armour in enclosed spaces without penalty.

Brother/Sister: Mature your princeling-worm - pass its child to another, and thereafter you require double rations or it starves.

You can eat ghosts and other incorporeal undead, dealing 1d6 damage with each bite. You can vomit out the half-digested remnants of these ghosts, which serve you for 2d6 rounds before dissipating.

Commander: Break a sorcerous seal reinforcing the tomb of the Stonebound Duchess.

Commune with other members of the Order through dreams - however unless they are of your rank or higher you can only send messages, and not receive them.

Grand Master: Reach a point in the earth deeper than any grand master before you managed - dream, and return to the Order with the prophecy revealed to you in this dream. If this prophecy leads to a schism, you must devour the old Order with your new.

Summon a purple worm up from the depths once per month. It won't be hostile towards you, but you can't control it.

Order of the Ringless Finger

There once was a land that enjoyed a golden age of chivalry. That age was tarnished, then broken, by that wretched thing called love. Chivalry will be finally perfected when love is totally subsumed in its code by duty.

Initiate: Sever the fourth finger of your left hand, which bears a vein that runs right to your heart.

-4 to saves against emotional manipulation, magical or otherwise (saves in Many Rats on a Stick GLOG are roll-under - reverse to a bonus if your GLOG is roll-over).

Brother/Sister: Provide unemotional counsel which solves a major problem in some domain.

You are able to echolocate with your heartbeat conducted through your left hand placed on a surface. This is vague by default, being able to detect the presence or absence of things within a container or beyond a door, and whether they are moving. Finer details can be discerned with a wisdom check.

Commander: Find a true love and break it.

If you would strike a mortal blow against a creature, you may instead snap a shard of your weapon off in their heart - so long as the shard remains, the creature's greatest love turns to cold hatred.

Grand Master: Rediscover and return the regalia of that lost land.

Any who've ever loved fight against you as if blind - their eyes clouded by tears.

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

D100+ Pulp City Names in the Vein of Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and So On and So On

Friend of the blog and co-conspirator deus ex parabola asked me to make this at some point some time ago. Here it is (click the button):




Special thanks to Spwack for the generator generator here: https://slightadjustments.blogspot.com/p/generator.html