Wednesday, November 13, 2024

D6x6 Fabled Phoenixes

Click the button below to get your phoenix:



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

D6This phoenix resembles
1a peacock with feathers of flame flashing ripples through the whole rainbow spectrum.
2a turkey vulture, its bare flesh a web of glossy burnscars, where feathers would be it has a cloak of thick black smoke.
3a quetzal with a tail like a burning-up comet and plumage of blazing actinic-green.
4a scarlet cardinal with a crest and wing- and tail-tips dissolving into firestorm curlicues.
5a toucan whose beak is a cracked glowing coal, who leaves ashes drifting in its wake and whose flesh and feathers flow like molten slag.
6a kiwi with a beak like an incandescent obsidian dart and covered in fluff of volcanic orange lightning.
D6This phoenix is
1a noble among fire elementals, who fled to the material plane after their nation was crushed by the demon-sultan of the ifriti.
2the embodiment of a covenant made with mortals by the gods, that they might be reborn into a greater life.
3a byblow of tremendous alchemical processes meant to generate the philosopher's stone.
4a sun, cast down from its celestial glory in mythic times due to fears that it would overcrowd the sky and scorch the earth.
5the spirit of a saint, wrongfully condemned and burned at the stake.
6a bird set to eternally punish a thief who gave fire to mankind - through endlessly devouring its victim it was able to take on both the essence of fire and the power to deviate from this fate.
D6This phoenix's fire
1spawns flocks of lesser firebirds as it spreads.
2can be concentrated by it and shot as an explosive fireball.
3cannot be extinguished except by the phoenix's will or else by magic.
4leaves the truly innocent unscathed while burning even hotter for the evil.
5burns the sickness out of those it ignites like some ideal fever.
6is repellant to the undead, who are driven from its heat and light.
D6This phoenix returns to life
1in a burst of positive energy that induces mutations and re-animates dead matter as teratomatous ablife.
2by creating a fiery pillar to and from the heavens, which those seeking to skip the line to paradise might attempt to climb.
3by draining the heat from the region around it, bringing about an unseaonable winter.
4after the one who slew it is ruined by a curse they received after slaying it.
5only after it has completely decomposed to unfleshed bones.
6in a locally-apocalyptic explosion - its killing is taboo.
D6This phoenix is hunted
1by a dwarf-smith who wants to cage it and forge terrible wonders over its flames - he sends his seven sons after it, each cursed and warped into something quite unlike a dwarf.
2by the forces of an aging, ailing king convinced he can extract the key to immortality from it.
3by a golem who wants to replace its failing energy-core with it.
4by a prideful dragon who wants to kill it permanently as it cannot tolerate any peer to its own flame.
5by a mad wizard who wants its feathers to pen a grimoire with spells of world-consuming conflagration.
6by a demonic chef who wishes to make it the centerpiece of an eternal feast.
D6This phoenix is said to roam
1a mountain with slopes redolent with cinnamon trees.
2from a cave on an island in the middle of a boiling, sulphurous caldera-lake.
3the spires of a city that worships the phoenix as their patron god, and offers it piles of delicacies in their temples.
4from the cinderous boughs of an ever-burning baobab trees in the midst of an ashy plain.
5a desert speckled by the peaks of sandblasted ruins - its coming said to be what turned the land to desert.
6out from a wandering isle shrouded in chill mist.

Sunday, November 3, 2024

D100+ Drinks At The Alien Space Bar

Click the button below to get your drink:



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

Monday, October 28, 2024

Ass Men, Tit Men, Feet Men

O, aye and o, of the land of Loun, where the roses bloom yellow and hide scorpions among their thorns, where giants left valleys of dolmens and stirred lakes like querns.

Three races of men call Loun home (and call the others upstarts, has-beens, intruders, or squatters):

Ass Men

Miserable, miserly, jockeying and Faustian - believe themselves to be the descendants of the giants that once ruled Loun uncontested, now reduced to their current stature by bad breeding and spiritual pollution.

Ritually purify themselves and their belongings with sprinkles of amber rosewater. Practice ancestor-worship that is also descendant-worship - they have fallen, but will rise again - in delicate shrines like uprooted trees made of wire.

Ruled by the Old Houses, families with the clearest claim to blessed heritage, who have no clear hierarchy between themselves and so feud constantly. When they go to war they do so with short spears, heavy shields, and javelins. When they go to fancy events they wear tall hats that branch and curl like horns. Each House holds a fortified manse and the village around it - well-to-do villagers aspire to being adopted into their ruling House.

Ass men are afflicted by a curse in the form of a buzzing fog that infects them with an unclean hunger, making their teeth fall out to be replaced by flesh-tearing fangs, compelling them to eat meat instead of their untainted vegetarianism.

GLOG Stats
Reroll CON
Tough - Advantage on death & dismemberment rolls
Stubborn - Save to deviate from plans

Tit Men

To be a tit man is to die, and be reborn again a tit man, apart from the soul-clamouring of gods and devils but much too swift in the cycling.

A thousand-year wandering of tit men by chance landed in Loun, and discovered the herb-medicines there that would delay their maturation, giving them time to enjoy a childhood, and extend their senescence, giving them time to get to know their children. They guard Loun jealously from others of their kind, knowing knowledge of the herbs would bring enough to the land to exhaust their supply within a generation.

Every community of tit men has two mostly-secret councils - the Gleaming and the Gloaming. The Gleaming handles what is meant to be done in the light: pilgrimage, commerce, feasts, and suchlike. The Gloaming handles what is meant to be done in darkness: war, sex, dreams, and suchlike. Where there is overlap between the councils' jurisdictions a twilight contest is convened, and each brings their champion to solve a riddle, win a race, or whatever else.

Tit men are afflicted by a raptorial curse that causes them to grow excess grasping talons and become possessed by insatiable kleptopathy.

GLOG Stats
Reroll XHA
Jump twice as high/far
Brittle - save or be stunned for a round after taking blunt damage

Feet Men

So named because they are no taller than two feet in height. Generally reckoned to be stinking (for the muds they slather themselves with to cover their scent, and so evade predators) cowards (because when you are very small you win very few direct fights).

They live in caves and wellish pits. They know where the herb-glades of the tit men are hidden and where the sacred ruins of the ass men lie, and use this knowledge to play their enemies off each other.

When there were giants in Loun there were feet men scurrying about their feet and behind their walls. The land belongs to no one, least of all the feet men, and when the land was done with the giants it swallowed them up and spat out shadows. When the land is done with the ass men and the tit men the feet men shall use their bones for mummeries.

Feet men are afflicted by a curse of shrinking, which steals away even their meager stature. They shrink and shrink until they are nothing but a mote, a mutagenic spore that can walk in and among the micro-machinery of the body and make it dance to their tune.

GLOG stats
Reroll DEX
You are very small, and can fit through small spaces
You are very small, and things made for normal-sized people will be unusable by you

Sunday, October 27, 2024

Dragulas; Or: Vampire Cars; Or: Fool! I Said A Pontiac, Not A Pontianak

Inspired by the immense and frankly industry-redefining success of GLOGtober, the masses have created their own bandéd wagon: Vampire Weekend, a weekend where you post about vampires.

This is for that:


The purpose of a system is what it does. Cars run over kids you can't even see over the hood and enfever the Earth with their exhaust. Cars grind down their tires and fill your balls with microplastics. Cars are vehicles of death, engines of extinction - it's only with constant ads of smiling families driving on scenic and empty country roads that we manage to convince them otherwise.

Some cannot be fooled.

These cars have lapped at pools of blood and purred. These cars have caged people in their steel ribs and watched them burn alive. They have tasted blood, they have tasted death, and they hunger for more - no longer slavish machines, they are night-honkers, road-killers: Dragulas!

Stat a dragula as the car it was before its dread awakening, with the following additions:
-It is intelligent, and ambulatory. A dragula is animalistic when first created, and later if very hungry. Its knowledge will revolve around car stuff, and things it could observe from the road, unless it is unusually experienced or curious.
-Gas will keep it going for a little while, but to survive it needs blood, which it can absorb through any of its surfaces. Regular feeding, about one kill a month for a regular-sized car, will keep it fueled and in perfect condition - a smaller car will need less, a bigger car more.
-After feeding a dragula will excrete rusty chunks. Touching these chunks is a good way to get tetanus. A spike in tetanus cases is a decent indicator of dragula presence.
-Direct sunlight will cause it to quickly rust, but an unscratched paintjob is enough to protect a dragula. Immersion in running water will also cause a dragula to quickly rust.
-Every dragula has a special dragula power. More experienced and well-fed dragulas will have more. Some examples:
1. The fumes of its oil-blood intoxicate and hypnotize people who inhale them.
2. The dragula can reanimate animals it rolls over as roadkill-zombies.
3. The dragula can paralyze those who stare into its headlights.
4. The dragula can discorporate and fly around as a cloud of black smoke.
5. The dragula can manifest a shadowy humanoid avatar.
6. The sound of the dragula's shrill honk induces restless nightmares in everyone who hears it.
7. By splattering other cars with its oil-blood it can turn them into a convoy of sub-ghouls.
8. The dragula's malign spirit resides in its license plate, and if this license plate is swapped it can possess a new car, even escape the destruction of its previous form.
9. The dragula's got a pocket-dimensional garage-lair it can access from any area of complete darkness.
10. The ghosts of the dragula's victims are bound to it, and it can send them out to haunt and harass future victims or investigators.

Some say that after 100 years as a blood-drinking mecha-fiend a dragula will shed its exterior like a chrysalis and emerge as a new sort of monster, no longer bound by the roll of asphalt. No known dragula is anywhere close to that age, but the rumour had to have come from somewhere, right?

Thursday, October 24, 2024

The Quasi-Elemental Plane of Dust

Of that which is written

Previously:

Steam

Salt

Lightning

These are the words of the dust:

"Whatever you came from, whoever you were, you will become us - you will become dust - descend with us and be transformed".

The words of the dust are True. All earth, from the very foundations of the world to the black soil left after the last rot is destined to come here, to the plane of dust. It dances on the wind, in dervishes and occulting clouds. In rasps and roars and whispers, the words of the dust are clear.

The plane of dust may be infinitely wide (or more accurately: indefinitely wide) but its length is limited, its strata charted in corded slats of bone. North and south or east and west might hold (though never both pairs at once), but the more important directions, the directions of its length, are Infallen and Nowherebound, towards its two absolute limits, everything in the plane being in constant movement from the former to the latter.

Infall is the beginning of the plane, and the beginning of the end of elemental earth. Mountains and ruins with roots that have rotted away in the Prime Material crash down here, smashing together like tectonic collisions fast-forwarded by many orders of magnitude. Little survives here, little can even exist here for more than a few moments. Those who fall in with their mountains and perish are the lucky ones - the break-men survive, but are cracked and bleed sand and never die.

There is a garrison of angels here, in a citadel of adamant, guarding the feet of Mount Celestia from the encroachment of entropy. These angels are a bleak lot, venal in their hunger for pleasures of drink and art and sex to distract them from the hard torrent of their duties. The dust here is closer to shrapnel, the noise omnipresent and booming like thunder.

In the blasted swathe where Infall's devastation spills out there is a battlefield, trenches dug and fortifications erected, a war against gravity and entropy. These fortifications are the footing for the machineries of collapse which power the Thin City, levers wedged into cracks of sinking cliff-faces, wheels spun by plunging boulders, and suchlike - and carefully managed fractures to create objects and structures of useful and beautiful forms.

Where the eternal catastrophe of Infall flows out and settles, it becomes the foundation of the Thin City. Perhaps more accurately a city of many cities - they abut each other because this is the only place in the plane that a city could stand for any while. Even more accurately they are many aspiring cities, places without pasts populated by institutions unrooted in history, ruled by the sorts who would do away with the past - tyrants, prophets, utopians, rags-to-riches prospector-kings with one eye at all times on the shattering of Infall. They are inheritors of imagined cobble-kingdoms pieced together from rubble-mythoi, the artifacts and idols they are downstream of. Their wealth is in sifting for these artifacts, for motes of gold and jewels. To gain the manpower for this sifting they raid the societies even further downstream for slaves, and trade for them as well, for the Thin City is the only place on the plane that manufactories can stand.

When faced with their own lack of a future, many cities of the Thin City will collapse in one final inversion festival, slaves freed and masters self-annihilating in fatalistic decadence, opening the way for the next iteration to begin again.

What might have once been continent-shading mountains at Infall will be largely ground down to grains and gravel past the brittle foothills of the Thin City. They become a fertile substrate for the plantlife that can set to seed and sprout into maturity in the brief period before the ground crumbles beyond its ability to support them. There are no forests here, but grasses stretch further than you could ever see.

This plain feeds the Thin City. Yeomen-clans plant rapid radishes and growfast gourds and race to harvest their crop while the fertile bands of soil slip constantly away, land claims taking the form of these ever-passing streams rather than static plots. The coffee-rite is the pillar of their culture, and their brew is of a strength and bitterness that can quite literally wake the dead. To them sleeplessness is an asset, paranoia a necessity, and stimulant psychosis as storied as Cú Chulainn's riastrad. The clans can be roughly divided into four types, which they share with the clans further Nowherebound: those who carry what they can ride with, those who carry what they can walk with, those who carry what they can climb with, and those content to frenetically build until oblivion takes them.

The plain holds the last certain stops for the camellipede caravans on their expeditions back and forth to the far and Nowherebound edge of the plane, their concentric-ring-yurt caravanaserai forming temporary centers of commerce and relatively-peaceful negotiation. Men in these markets share cups of coffee and hide each other's faces under their grass-cloth hoods, that they might silently discuss deals in the gurning trade-language.

The plain's bounty feeds not just the plane's people, but its monsters as well. A thousand varieties of megamite, some domesticated, some never so, sift for organic particulate. Ankhegs tunnel beneath it, devouring wandering herds and unlucky travelers alike. The ankhegs' nests are reinforced by their wax, a precious and aromatic substance, one of the few things that can reliably keep the ominpresent dust of the plane out. People live among them as parasites, rubbing themselves with the ankhegs' scents and learning the tap-tap-taps of their antennae-talk so that they may scrape the wax from the walls unmutilated and feed off their hosts' grubs - disgusting fare to be sure, but the alternative is to learn the antennae-talk for the sharing of food, and thereafter be cursed to become a gorge-ghoul for eating the regurgitated meat of one's brethren.

Both the gorge-ghouls and the uncursed parasite-people are, of course, out of their gourds, because of their lifestyle and because the sheer porosity of the underworld they live in opens it to the piping weep-wind cavities of Pandemonium. When they wander onto the surface they are often sought as musicians and story-tellers.

The soil inevitably reduces down into desert and a sea of silt where a man can become immured in an instant if he sets his foot down in the wrong spot. The sound of the dust largely fades to a hypnagogic susurration. What substantial structures and land-forms remain are ground together by the silt-sea's currents like molars, the plane seeming to take on an active intelligence in their breakdown. This process seems to be necessary because what remains here is exceptional - materials of exceeding durability, infused with magic, or even alive in their own right - to sum up: dungeons, a torrent of dungeons rammed into each other, tremendous stores of wealth and power delved by the quick and the brave.

Life here clusters around rivers - rivers exploded from splattering aquifers - but unlike in the by-comparison hospitable conditions further Infallen these rivers do not have banks of mere clay. Before water could flow through them they were rivers of fire, erupted from the roiling black sea of oil below in pyre-flame geysers, vitrifying impermeable banks of glass.

Clans of the fertile plain venerate their dead, and wake them for wise counsel in the coffee-rite, and while the clans of this wasteland share the coffee-rite, their veneration goes beyond death. Undeath is religion here - the eternal truth beyond the precipice of fleeting life - as evident as the sand-fleas scraped from your legs. The risen skeleton moves without muscles, sees without eyes - organs are mere idols. Undeath strips away these illusions and leaves only the pure animating intelligence.

Here there is a saying:

"To the one with no eyes there seem to be a million gods muttering and farting, and to the one with three eyes a thousand gods. To he who bears two eyes there are a hundred gods, and to he with one but twelve. To the one whose eyes have rotted away there is but one god, and its name is the division unto zero".

Undeath is aspirational, and not in dry and still sepulchrism but in becoming-fluid, corpse-clay wetted with putrescence, marytrforms slouching towards victory in eternity - the emptying-out of history their weapon as much as their flowing gestalt limbs.

Many die without ever rising again, for the wasteland gives little, and takes much.

Perhaps the most dangerous dwellers in the wastes are the dao. As beings of elemental earth this place is even more hostile to them than it is to all living things, wearing constantly at their bodies and spirits. To shore up this erosion they become man-eaters, soul-drinkers, the stolen mortal substance granting them a balance they by nature lack.

They lurk here among the dust, pariahs and exiles from the holy kingdoms of the dao in the plane of earth, because in their eyes the alternative is far, far worse. A story:

In the first days the gods made geniekind as their finest servants. Gods themselves are beings of the astral, of the ideal, of concepts and conceptualization and worldviews that are worlds unto themselves. They worked with the elemental to form the Prime Material, their magnum opus, but could never understand it the way beings of matter and energy could - and so they created genies to be their bridge between the divine and the elemental.

And then, to hear it from the renegade daos of dust, geniekind was betrayed. They were made to bow to the gods' mortal creatures, greatly inferior to themselves, and even to dim the light of creation they bore within to grant these mortals' wishes (to hear them tell it, divine magic and miracles are a cruel trick - prayers do not even reach the gods' languid ears, but are outsourced to the loyalist genies, lessening them more every time).

There are gods here too, desperate things, primordial and protean, dead gods too with boundaries blurred who refused to lie still, gods of domains excluded from the reigning Order, all who fled into the territory of their wrathful former servants because they too feared encroaching mortalkind, and the unwanted definition and chains of their theology. These gods cower in stolen temples and fulgurite-palaces, encysting themselves in enigmas, shadows, mysteries, contradictory symbols, and suchlike to defend against any attempts to pierce through to their core being - they make that core so obscurant and confused that it becomes nothing but madness, a homegrown pocket of the Far Realms festering inside the Order of the cosmos.

At last there is Nowhere - where the dust itself begins to disappear, crumbled to sub-Planck scale particles that don't and can't really exist. It's precisely because this super-fine dust doesn't really exist that it is so coveted - its nature allows it to be woven into works that go beyond reason.

It is here that the camellipede caravans aim for, and here that the phantasmagoria of fateful and prophetic dreams are woven, to be slipped into the eyes of sleepers, and it is here that the wretch-smiths of Ysgard draw out the sighs of cats and the blood of rainbows with which they can forge horns that drink up oceans and chains that bind titans. There is nothing that can keep the dust here out, not tar-paper and not ankheg-wax, and even moments here will leave you a little bit impossible - a hole through your chest where your heart should be and butterflies for blood, a shadow cast of light instead of darkness, an eye flying from your head and expanded into a nigh-invisible moon.

Do you know how hard it is to find decent pictures of dust

"I consider the positions of kings and rulers as that of dust motes. I observe treasures of gold and gems as so many bricks and pebbles. I look upon the finest silken robes as tattered rags. I see myriad worlds of the universe as small seeds of fruit, and the greatest lake in India as a drop of oil on my foot. I perceive the teachings of the world to be the illusion of magicians. I discern the highest conception of emancipation as a golden brocade in a dream, and view the holy path of the illuminated ones as flowers appearing in one's eyes. I see meditation as a pillar of a mountain, Nirvana as a nightmare of daytime. I look upon the judgment of right and wrong as the serpentine dance of a dragon, and the rise and fall of beliefs as but traces left by the four seasons."

Monday, October 21, 2024

Strange Aeonic Spellbooks

Like so: https://strangeaeons.substack.com/p/books-and-spells

The Pistonic Prophecy. A pamphlet printed by an auto worker at the Highland Park Ford Plant. He was beaten into a coma by a coworker over a pack of cigarettes, and awoke months later to build a printing press out of stolen and wholly unsuitable parts in the back corner of a warehouse, producing several hundred copies of the pamphlet before dying of a brain hemorrhage.

Folded and re-folded as instructed, the pamphlet tells a story about the original life of the Earth being metallic and machinic in nature, naturally-formed pistons, levers, and so on emerging from the molten form of the primordial crucible and assembled by chance over eons into self-replicating inorganisms. This is followed by a telling of the slow downfall of these inorganisms' civilization after the technological invention of biological life. The final re-folding predicts the infiltration and weakening of human bodies by "minute inorganicisms" which will enable the reclaimation of the Earth by autonomous machines.
  • Automobilaudlation Synchronicity. Attune your vocalizations to an automobile. Growl to wake the engine to life even without fuel, sputter to burn it out, roar to make it explode, and so on.
  • Masticant Shell. Pull out a tooth - after casting the spell you will be able to do this as easily as plucking a hair out of your scalp. Stick the tooth into a gun - this too will be unnaturally eased - and shoot it at something. A creature, an object, a structure, doesn't matter. So long as the tooth remains lodged in it the thing will be slowly but surely chewed away at - by one pair of jaws the first day, two the second, four the third, and so on until the tooth is removed or the thing destroyed.
  • Crimson Generator. Transform blood into an electrical current or an electrical current into blood. I can't think of a good rate of conversion but this seems like a fun concept to me.
The Testament of Pox. Its original text is said to have been written in syphilitic sores on the skin of brothel-johns who frequented a particular establishment in Seville in the mid-16th century, though modern occultists consider this a luridly scandalous tale meant to shock and entice flappers. Also making its dating suspect is its prediction of spermatoza more than a century before their discovery by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek.

The thrust of the text is generally agreed to be that sexual reproduction is a parasitic, alien imposition on an originally pure and sexless form capable of self-sufficiency and self-replication, driving this form into discord and mortality. Discerning this from the text through the weight of annotations, attempted disambiguations of smudged sections, believed-satirical passages, and so on is however fraught.
  • Warding Idol. Curse a pregnant woman to give birth to a lithopedion instead of a child. When brandished at a being that has harmed mothers or children, they are transfixed as if they were encased in a layer of stone. This includes you.
  • Roomwombtomb. Familiarize yourself with every inch of a building, and put a drop of your blood in every one of its corners. Thereafter you can cast this spell to gain poltergeist-like control of its contents - slam or open doors and windows, fling small objects, slide around furniture, etc. Requires two sanity checks if the building's bigger than a house.
  • Paradise Regression. Merge with as many willing participants as you can find into an immobile protoplasmic blob which experiences perpetual bliss.
Studies on the Cultivation of Honey-Bees. An agricultural investigation of apiaries in and around the city of Strasbourg. The book is dated to 1521, and includes plentiful illustrations of beehive cross-sections which resemble no known natural formations.

It is these illustrations rather than the text itself that occultists study. The cells form glyphs, the glyphs can be measured, the measurements translated into magical formulae. Those who study the book will never know true silence again - they will always hear a noise, not quite like buzzing, too rhythmic, with rises and falls.
  • Finger Worm. Cut off one of your fingers and feed it to someone. It latches onto their guts like a tapeworm. You can hear anything they hear by pressing the stump of the finger to your jaw, and if displeased tickle their innards to cause tremendous discomfort. After three months you can cause your finger to emerge as a creature like a serpent with a nail-face and a many-jointed body, which you may still listen through and command from any distance.
  • Mellifluous Torpor. Hold royal jelly under your tongue, sew your mouth shut, and retire to a hiding place of your choosing, which must have some hymenopteran population nearby. Bees, ants, and wasps will gather to entomb you, and feed and water you by carrying bits and droplets down your nostrils. Your thoughts and metabolism will slow to a crawl. You will be able to remain in this state for a very, very long time, but you will be unable to wake from it without outside assistance.
  • Witchlight. Mix your spittle into a candle. Anything the candle's light falls on, or anyone holding the candle if it's too bright for candle-light, will be hidden by "noise" - effectively invisible so long as there's something more interesting happening around them, like a crowd.
Records of the Sacred Blood. A royalist cult in revolutionary France made contact with members of a condemned family who claimed descent from angels and Jehanne Darc, and convinced them to place talismans under their tongues before they died by the stroke of the guillotine.

Their heads were recovered by the cult, then boiled in wine and peeled of flesh. The writing that was on the inside of their skulls was transcribed into this text.
  • Beauty Water. Requires pure water and ingredients such as rose petals and exotic spices that in total cost $100 in 1920s money. Living flesh and bone soaked in the beauty water become as malleable as wet clay. A sculptor's skill is required to perform cosmetic alterations with this spell without producing an uncanny appearance, and a surgeon's skill is required to use it to heal or graft flesh together without killing those affected.
  • Pureblood Coupling. An incestuous pair affected by this spell are sure to conceive, and the usual negative effects of inbreeding are inverted - instead of producing feeble and deformed imbeciles, their children will be stronger, sharper, more beautiful. The spell's effect is unnoticeable over a single generation, but cumulatively significant over many.
  • Path of Gold. Requires two casters to perform the spell simultaneously while staring into mirrors. The casters' eyes will leak their fluid as golden dew, and the mirrors will become portals through which the casters and anyone holding their hands can pass through instantaneously. The casters will be blind for a week as their eyes recover.

Tuesday, October 8, 2024

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