Wednesday, August 12, 2026

Mask Relay 37: The Everlixir Visor

Previously: https://rolltodoubt.wordpress.com/2026/08/11/hallow-hearts-glaugust-and-mask-relay-36/
Nextly: https://sunderedshillings.blogspot.com

A half-ellipsoid of smooth, clear glass. There are no apparent means of strapping it on, but press it to your head and it will attach over your face with an uncomfortable pull of suction, then fill up with a bubbly liquid like off-colour champagne. This liquid can be breathed, and spoken through with an unnatural affect to your voice. Taking the mask off can't be done by hand - you'll need a tool for leverage, and it'll hurt, and it'll leave a gross red mark. The liquid immediately evaporates when you do.

Press the lip of a potion to the mask and it will osmose through the glass, mixing with the mask's liquid. From then until you take the mask off, you can come under the effect of that potion by swallowing a gulp of the liquid. Only one potion can be mixed in at a time, and the mixed potion dissipates when you take the mask off. Mixing with a potion discolours the mask's liquid, rendering you half-blind.

The mask is not magically strengthened - a targeted blow will shatter it, as will getting caught in an explosion or somesuch.

Slush Pile 18

Previously:

Slush Pile 1

Slush Pile 2

Slush Pile 3

Slush Pile 4

Slush Pile 5

Slush Pile 6

Slush Pile 7

Slush Pile 8

Slush Pile 9

Slush Pile 10

Slush Pile 11

Slush Pile 12

Slush Pile 13

 

Slush Pile 16

Slush Pile 17

Conquistador-industrialist-priests harvesting the fat of the conquered to paint the faces of their automaton-saints
-hominy made of teeth instead of corn

What appears to be an island is really the back of a great asp-turtle - the asp-turtle reaches its long neck over its back in the night to snatch up sailors camped upon it
-aspicasp, venom gelatinizes your flesh

A bird which plunges into the earth then grows into a tree with eggs as its fruit

Huckster starts monster hoax to draw adventurers to town - it goes horribly wrong

Those Who Dress Entirely In Corn
-The Forest of Assassins, where everything wants to kill you
-"the froth and noxious blast of a corrupt heart"
-wooden heads and asses' ears and copper in their voices
-secret society tattoo that's only visible when you flex really hard - secret society of bodybuilders/martial artists
-"What can be known, first must be buried"

Horror oneshot set at a Downlow Pride party, and everyone's wearing masks, but there's like a fuckin, a killer or something who's wearing a mask too
-evil book club, because one of the ladies keeps bringing in her own books for them to read, which are evil and have driven them all inSaAanE

You're paratroopers, you play as a squad of paratroopers, you're American or Rwandan paratroopers or whatever, and you thought you were paratrooping into the territory of the Enemy but you did not land in that territory but a very bad and strange territory and you have to find your way out

Creature that feeds on consciousness - exudes "nectar" made of positive memories and sensations and suchlike of prey to entice hunters to feed it more victims

Cult whose lives are tied to the statue of their deity - they are hard as stone, but any damage to the statue is reflected on all of them

At the end of his reign, the king drowns himself to be reunited with his sacred wife, the dragon from the sea

These people pour coffee on their swords before battle to awaken the spirit of the steel

Narcissistic & fearing assassination, a nobleman orders his surgeon to transform the faces of his courtiers into mirrors of his own

The Infinite Abyss is, in a planar sense, free real estate, but only those with an overwhelming ego and strength on the scale of a natural disaster can carve out their own layer of it
-The Howling is a medium or unspace which connects all layers of the Abyss. It is essentially an endless, unmoderated message board. It is the reason every demon lord hates every other demon lord.

Names for things: Lahasam, Seobex, Illa Vadenar, Talmer Iffre, Lantham, Holy Muss, Pxtou, Caolao, Secodorem, Mawuz Brin, Gattaband, Shinshir, Begor, Ichepu

Taphonomy is the study of how organisms decay and become fossilized or preserved in the paleontological record
-Crozzle: To shrink or shrivel from exposure to heat, and other things besides

Men who inherited (or conquered, or stole, or whatever else) kingdom from giants - look like children on massive thrones, swaddled in traditional robes much too large for them, followed by crowds of train-bearers

Big tetrahedronal instrument played by three musicians at once

From nightmare: pimple/boil so big that popping it exposes bone
-guys who got partially infected by mutagenic virus, wrecked by experimental treatment, then shipped off to the moon - no longer register as human on scans, leading to belief that moon-base is haunted

Misheard(?) from a tour guide: "It is also the one thing remaining from when this was all a great silence"

Civilized nations are distinguished from barbarian nations by hosting a campus of the Saecularium - a true university born from the merger of the Ecclesia Indomina (a sort of clerical union negotiating with gods on behalf of humanity) and more mechanistically-inclined wizards from the Church of Wonders

A sort of strangler fig but its hosts are human

Graves dug up, the corpses floating into the night sky / corpses squashed in hydraulic presses, squeezed for some essential salt, awful squatted & crumpled zombies left as byproduct-servitors

Gang of brigands who wear rags and apply ointments of poisonous herbs to make themselves appear as diseased beggars, use pretense of begging for alms to get close then draw daggers and such

Hermit who lives in a whale-bone tent along a shore - he dreams of being a whale, and has become obsessed with swallowing sailors whole

"Cudgies" - derogatory term for followers of Saint Cuthbert of the Cudgel - Leveller/Digger/Hussite types, serious, practical, and productive sorts who hate decadence, indolence, and spoils of conquest
-"Saints" understood in this paracosm with an obvious afterlife and so on to be those who deliberately will never return as outsiders, be absorbed as an attendant of a god, reincarnate, etc., whose living example and will shall forever remain immutable and authoritative

Rat-man warriors by code of honour only allow themselves to wear their incisors down by gnawing on the edges of their shields on campaign - to remain docile too long is death - those who manage to gnaw their shields through entirely are promoted to the ranks of berserkers & given two-handed weapons

Pseudo-carnivorous ivy, grows among ruins and scree and suchlike, pulls it up into structure-seemings that collapse onto and crush explorers into delicious and nutritious paste

Species of river dolphine or riparine micro-whale that shapes their territory into weirs and such, amenable environment and traps for prey
-whale wizard-lich in orbit, encased in ice

Anti-city weapon that spreads along the roads linked to it, bubbling them into lasting intraversability - those on the roads at the time carbonized beyond recognition

Peach-crab - mobile fruit, crustacean-like segmented, legged & clawed seed that carries around its fruit-flesh on its back, picking off bits to eat and fuel its journey to a planting site

Screaming ultra-entropic locust zones, mobile technorganic hellscapes that migrate across and overtop other ecosystems, degrading their biomass into fuel that is vapourized and sucked into shuddering engine-masses that power the whole thing
-A library that is also a gigantic wasp hive, created by giant wasps that pulp everything in the area and turn it into books - literally turning the territory into its own maps (and atlases, encyclopedias, biographies, etc.) - infested by parasitic ecosystem of glow-worms that eat nonsense and excrete illumination, book-worms that are able to burrow into fiction like it's a physical space, humans who've tattooed themselves with the text of books as camouflage against the wasps, and so on
-An entirely two-dimensional ecosystem composed of organisms of stark light and shadow, projected onto the world below by an alien moon, with odd symbiosis with the three-dimensional life it's projected on - e.g. two-dimensional pollinators unaffected by wind courted by Möbius-strip flowers

A specialized priest, tattooed with heaven on his belly, tasked with consuming all the sacrifices offered to his god - lipomas sprout across his flesh and hatch into hymn-singing cherubs

He-Man class - do classes even need levels?
-Thing class... you're The Thing from The Thing...
-class where you have to write a letter to Princess Celestia telling her a lesson you learned about friendship after every session
-XP stands for Xenia Process

In a world with an underdark-equivalent, and therefore much more extensive and lush cave systems, cavemen could be some real lasting players - chthonic neaderempires - chronic daylight deprivation leads to "slowing time", twelve hour sleeping thirty six hour awake cycle, mushrooms and fatty fish sources of vitamin D

Okay so it's elves, it's an elf-take - elves are insects, they're all one big hive, but their queen died a long time ago and they metamorphosed into immortal forms until they can find the princess-heir, drow and wood elves and so on are different castes that split after the death of the queen, they're a dwindling species because they can't reproduce and most of them have given up hope of ever finding the heir, changelings are like those spiders that sneak into ant nests but instead of ants it's humans and they're from a faction of elves who think they can make their own princess by experimenting on humans
-elves call themselves the seldarine and consider themselves to be gods - drow are hated for subordinating themselves to the god Lolth, to the seldarine denying their own divinity

Dungeon origin: Culture wherein if a master is killed by their slave, all their other slaves will be killed alongside that slave and interred with the master to serve them forever in the afterlife - slaves faked mass suicide with poison that mimics death, awakened in the master's ancestral tomb, and set about robbing and desecrating everything - imprisoned slave faction (undead?) vs. angry undead noble ancestors faction vs. modern day imperial graverobbers trying to balance the deficit faction

The God of Mountains is ringed by the Valley of Mercy, a divinely-created landform which protects the rest of the world from the obscene weather events created by the GoM

Ok so it's the Ex-Presidents from Point Break but also Madame Tussaud wax statues and also voodoo dolls and like a candle but instead of a wick they've got a film reel spun through them and they've got some freak shit fictional character knacks while it's burning them down

Viral-induced epilepsy via genetically-engineered viruses to program brain responses to light patterns (feels like I've done this one before but whatever)
-okay so it's this plus cognitive atrophy from LLM overuse and it's guys with VR headsets flashing lights in their eyes based on whatever instructions they mumble to it to manipulate their movements and mood

Part of the world where carrion has become so abundant wild dogs and wild pigs hybridized into the same species, gnawing their gametes into the marrow of corpse-bones that hatch into puppiglets

What if a jiangshi... but from sky burial... and they hop, but hop very high up, and then come down like a diving falcon... or a mario with talons on his feet...
-koi polloi
-a species of sentient art-works somehow able to compel people to create and re-create them

The War of the Noses: an ancient conflict between the saiga-men and the tapir-people which reduced both sides to wretched beasts and littered the land with ruins and the wreckage of war-machines
-deafened smith, big red candle atop his head dripping into his ears and styling his moustache, he plucks its flame and tosses it into his forge

Bytopian outsiders are defined by a duality, the usual relationship of which can be inverted - e.g. the shadow or reflection which casts the body or which can be cast separated from the body, a weeping silhouette whose tears rise into a cloud and is then outlined by rainfall from the cloud, etc.

Vial of blood. Any amount of water which gets so much as a drop of the blood in it will be infested by sharks.

A sinkhole-pond, very deep, a place where leeches churn the water, bloated with the ichor of something at its bottom - it is not wholesome fare for the leeches, and they will latch onto you not to drain your blood, but to regurgitate that ichor and spare their stomachs from invertebrate agony
-anglerfish-like chthonic ambush predator, lure mimics torchlight
-giant fucking apes, gigantopithecus type shit, and they live on a flying island and descend to the lowly earth on really long vines from really big trees to monkey around

Some kind of miracle-matter made from laparotomizing doppelgangers

Silent Hill-y horror scenario, town in B.C. engulfed by wildfire that strangely doesn't spread into the town itself (though makes it nigh-unbearably hot and smoky), trapping the people who wouldn't or couldn't evacuate, fire doesn't burn down over time and strange things emerge from it and the town warps as the smoke infuses it
-scenario seed: radio-tagged endangered species specimen begins making impossible movements
-you're cast and/or crew on the set of a remake of an allegedly-cursed film and things start going very wrong

From the lands of shadowy dream through the gate of horn comes fulfilment and through the gate of ivory comes deception - similarly from the sun-bright waking lands come dreamers through the marble gate and the brazen gate, and wiser figments of dreams know through which comes whom

Okay so it's water levels, it's a water level, but it's sand levels, and the dungeon's an hourglass, and you can flip it when the sand's too much

Better Louis has escaped and I don't know where else to put this

The sirens' names are Molpe, Thelxiope, Himerope, Aglaophonos, Peisinoe, Parthenope, Ligeia, Leucosia, Rhaidne, Teles, and Telchtereia

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

D12 Fucked-Up Little Gods of Various Communities

Inspired by the movie version of Children of the Corn, which is alright... preferred In The Tall Grass as far as Stephen King adaptions set in fields of tall plants go... and also inspired by conversation with theisticgilthoniel on the GLOG discord:

1. The Lord of Drewfurk: A mummified corpse with limbs that branch like a tree's, interred in a shrine atop a mound surrounded by a moat in which multi-tailed lampreys swim. The corpse's many fingers and toes are tied with knots of cord, the patterns of which are cross-referenced with reams of scrolls to interpret the god's will. The primary directives of the Lord of Drewfurk involve rites of husbandry, of animals and men, producing mooncalves and other such prodigies. If the god is pleased with these spawn the ground will shake and treasures shall be revealed. If the god is displeased the ground will shake and structures shall collapse and people shall be maimed.

2. Numinous Offosa: A scintillant waterfall which springs from the rocks of a bluff. Birds fly into Offosa and are never seen again, though from time to time a reed basket carrying a teratoma floats out of the mist at its base, and these are swaddled and cared for as infants until they rot. No one in the area dares to eat fowl, and hunters surrender their catches of such to Offosa. So long as the waterfall is well-fed, it flows clean and plentiful. In times of crisis a sacrifice is dressed in a feathered costume and given to Offosa, and a little while after this a person in the prime of life and bearing some supernatural gift sails downstream in a reed boat.

3. Master Bhelstey: A flower-headed man, blind and deaf and mute, who must be led about by a young boy. This boy is meant to speak for Master Bhelstey (though it's an acceptable breach of duty for him to sneak in some of his own whims from time to time), and is the only one permitted to bleed Master Bhelstey for his sap, which brings verdant growth wherever it falls (anyone else who tries meets a terrible fate). One day, soon after beginning pubescence, this boy will become the next Master Bhelstey, and his interpreter will be chosen via tearing the petals from the husk of the old Master Bhelstey.

4. Our Lady Samaritana: A giant shed snakeskin kept in a temple in the family complex of the village headsman. Those who crawl through the length of Lady Samaritana will be reborn - their wounds smoothed over, their illnesses eased, their age sitting lighter upon them. They will also be that much more serpentine, commensurate to what was restored to them. Village elders wear long hooded robes so that outsiders are not alarmed by their appearance. When one has passed through Lady Samaritana enough times, they are fully transformed into snakes, and then milked of venom and decapitated. The blood and poison from this is then mixed with wine and shared about in a crystal bowl. Those who have served the village are believed to gain prosperity from the drink, while those who have betrayed the village will writhe and die in agony on the spot.

5. Sir Plowshare: A sword with a ten-feet-long blade, so rusty that not a speck of clean metal can be seen through it, the grip long since rotten away. The sword is paraded between households each new year in a joyful drunken festival. Those whose eyes and hands are anointed with rust from Sir Plowshare are not capable of violence, nor of suffering from witnessing or having participated in violence - this includes everyone permitted to reside in the village. When the village needs to be forcefully defended, a volunteer breaks their teeth upon Sir Plowshare and howling wields it against all foes, and afterwards they are cast out into the surrounding woods to survive off scraps and forage.

6. White-Lightning-Black-Thunder: An enormous dog of wrinkly aspect, buried up to its neck in a mountainside. The dog is worshiped by a clan of charcoal-burners, bandits, trappers, and hermits, who dance around it while fluting and tossing garlands of wildflowers over its ears. If one sneaks up on White-Lightning-Black-Thunder and plucks a hair from it, they will be able to curse anyone who then hears the god's howling (which can be heard anywhere on the mountain). This is easier said than done, and the god can tear an armoured man apart as a man tears apart a roasted chicken wrapped in tinfoil.

7. Grandmother Vine: A sprawling, kudzu-like growth. Those who consume the seeds of Grandmother Vine become progressively more imperceptible to those who have not while within her expanse, and increasingly less able to go without her seeds without suffering dreadful pangs. Those who've consumed many of her seeds over a long period ("deep in the green" as they're called) speak of a paradise invisible to all save those who've been most blessed by Grandmother Vine. No matter how she spreads, there are never enough seeds growing on the god to sate everyone.

8. The Mistress of Moo-Moon Manor: A horned woman who resides in a floating palace on a moon made of curdled cream which appears in the dreams of those who pray to her. Those who please the Mistress are allowed to reside with her in her palace, enjoying all manner of ease and luxuries while their bodies sleepwalk through the toil and drudgery of waking life. Those who displease her are cast out into insomniac reality, where they desperately care for the sleepwalkers in the hope of their banishment being rescinded.

9. Wolkuld: A giant, eyes a bleary white with flesh always shadowed, which can go about bodily or as a gentle breeze or tremendous gale. It is as a child, and if it is watching you it must be indulged by playing children's games with it or it will wax tantrumly. Wolkuld also hates and fears those who do not smile at it, and those who smile at it with a full set of teeth - those who live where it frequents remove their teeth in a pattern unique to each family. Few tell strangers the rules their god follows, as protection and as opportunity to loot what is left by their angered god.

10. The Calamitous Jade: A boulder of lavender jade, its upper half smooth and its lower half pitted, bound altogether in twists of red cow-hide - cast down from the heavens in storied days to crush a rampaging demon. The celestial spirit of the stone and the lingering dregs of the demon mingle and contend within it, lending gambler-wise blessings and curses to those who petition it, leaning one way or the other depending on obscure currents both empyrean and chthonic. The balance between the Jade's aspects is maintained by the god's husbands, each a sturdy man picked every eight years in a contest wherein they must smash a lesser stone before it. Bigamy, of course, being illegal in these parts, their noses are cut off and their foreheads branded with the mark of shame after the ceremony.

11. Ribokiyo, Father of the Forsaken: Somewhere up the mountains, along the road to nowhere (and to old ruins haunted by ghosts who've forgotten their human shapes) lies the village of Monkey Point. Its inhabitants make a living farming rice and yams from rubble-backed terraces, and sometimes selling amulets and supplies to fools seeking to plunder those old ruins. It's a hard living - they are well-acquainted with hunger and the white clay of mourning. In times of hunger in Monkey Point there is a tradition to give infants to the mountain, and to propitiate the spirits of these infants so that they do not turn their wrath on the people of the village.

But one year this propitiation failed and the infant-spirits possessed the body of a monkey, which grew huge and bled from the pores of its face, attracting a mask of flies. This possessed monkey sired itself on the wild boars, and carp, and deer of the mountain, allowing its possessing spirits to be reborn into pitiful half-lives.

Eventually, word of the beast's iniquity reached Owua temple, and a noble monkey came to seduce it and anchor it via land descent to the wolf-saint Amartza. The beast was enshrined as a wrathful guardian deity and fertility idol, the infant-spirits coming to reside in a bliss-realm within a gem set in its diadem. It remains as such to this day, awaiting the defilement to loose it from its binding.

12. The Idol of Urahank: A fragment of a marble statue, of an eye and its socket, carved in such detail that one can see the veins in its sclera, set in a crude frame of bent and grafted living trees. The fragment bears a fraction of the power of the god it once depicted, as well as the divine punishment levied upon them. Worshipers of the idols draw on this power to perform minor miracles of a scattered portfolio, an organ of theirs crumbling to dust in payment (a random organ, sometimes a fingernail and sometimes their brain), and segmented furies sometimes come to enact the ordained punishment upon the idol, only to be confused by its lack of recognizable organs, whereupon they can be plied with libations and turned onto another in the punished god's stead.

Case Files of the Knights of St. Phanourious: Pinemarten, Ontario - Session 3

Previously:

Session 1

Session 2

In which the party learns the valuable lesson to look before they leap.

Our party is:
Bart "Codekiller" Regis
Manhoman "Dr. House" Kamaroff (portrayed by friend of the blog deus ex parabola)
Auggy "Shillelagh" Ashe
Rob "The Belt / The Punisher" Wagner

We start off at the Hibernation Station motel after a restful night. The party exchanges texts with Marlin, who in return for them taking out rival gang leader Stan Koontz offers them the service of either a couple useless fuckheads who got too high on the gang's supply (who she is indifferent to the life or death of), or her in-house arsonist. They take the arsonist, and further promise to never come near Marlin or her family again in return for her leaking the identity of her mother and co-drug kingpin Debbie's contact at Rodnovprom - a technician by the name of Yosef.

They drive out to link up with the arsonist, but notice they are being tailed by a muddy pickup. Manhoman opens up the back of their van to try and intimidate the pickup driver, assuming that they're a teen gang member, but the passenger of the pickup rolls down their window and shows off their own gun. It is at this point that the party regrets letting their drugged-up hostage Moroz go, on the basis that at this moment they could have thrown him under the pickup's tires. It's not all cold pragmatism though - Manhoman reveals that he slipped a scrip for more xanax into Moroz's pocket before he was released, as otherwise letting him go through benzo withdrawals would have violated Manhoman's Hippocratic oath. Rob attempts to lose the pursuers, but ends up driving into a snowdrift on a tight turn.

Before they can push the van out, the pickup pulls ahead of them and a weather-beaten Slavic man gets out and offers to help them out of the snowdrift. My accent is rudely mocked as sounding more Italian than Slavic. Using the friendly facade the man (who introduces himself as Jerry and the pickup driver as Tom) pries into the party's identities and actions. He reveals himself to be acquainted with Nelya, the Rodnovprom PR lady they rescued and then kidnapped from the chateau where the unnatural massacre occurred.

After some shenanigans involving Manhoman hitting on Jerry and showing off his heirloom pistol, and Bart insisting that he has blueprints to the Steam Deck in the back of the van, Tom and Jerry drive off - but not before the party notices a bit of hay in the back of the pickup. The party gets the van out and follows Tom & Jerry unnoticed to the Rodnovprom mine.

Unable to follow into the mine facility due to a fence and security kiosk, the party goes to rendezvous with the Marlin-gang arsonist at Pinemarten's old baseball diamond, where the mining company teams used to play. The arsonist, Justin, is annoyed at having to wait so long, but shows off the goods - various incendiaries and bangy things and so on and suchlike. Not wanting to compromise their secret identities, the party introduces themselves as variations of their code-names, including "Coderescuer" and "Dr. Home". They cook up a plan to sneak into the Rodnovprom mine and cause a big boom distraction so they can sneak inside and kill whatever head-eating spookum they believe lurks within.

The plan goes off with significant hitches. Everyone but Auggy and Justin get caught trying to sneak up to the fence through a wooded area. Rob books it, while Manhoman holds his gun to his own head and Bart tries to convince the security guards who come over to get them to fuck off to come a little ways that a-way to talk. Auggy boosts Justin over the fence, using his kevlar vest to cover the barbed wire atop it.

Neither Bart nor Manhoman are willing to budge, and it seems inevitable that this attempted trespassing incident will come to violence - which it does, when Rob shoots one of the security guards, Manhoman shoots the other, but the one Manhoman shot shoots Bart, knocking him unconscious. The party dispatches both security guards - Manhoman carving one's eyes out - and the guy in the checkpoint kiosk sounds the alarm.

Six more guards come racing out of the central mine facility building. It is remarked how odd it is that a pharmaceutical company operating out of a small Ontario town has such a significant security force.

Manhoman stabilizes Bart, Justin and Auggy set off the explosive diversion in a dumpster while Auggy sprays the security goons with his submachine gun, and Rob rams the van through the checkpoint gate and into the mining facility complex.

Rob manages to not run over anyone, and crashes into the side of the main building, totaling the van. At this point, with 15 minutes left in the session, I call it early so as to have some time to think up some ways that this isn't an immediate total party kill - which only takes a few minutes, because this actually works perfectly and I'm a genius. Tune in next week or maybe the week or month after for how our intrepid heroes get their bacon out of this fire, or don't.

Thursday, August 6, 2026

D100+ Frozen Desserts

Click the button below to get your very own frozen dessert:




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

D6x6 Forceful Forcs

For the generation of fungal orcs, as might be found in Warhammer & Warhammer 40K. Not to be confused with porcs (pig orcs).

Click the button below to get your forcs:


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

D6 These forcs look like
1 stumbling, jiggling, yellowish blob-men frothing out of every orifice.
2 stiff and slender, corrugated, ruffle-edged, and cone-faced stick-men in striped shades of brown.
3 shaggy rumple-segmented, worm-limbed brutes who glow a sickly blue.
4 rosy cup-headed fops adorned in the lacy shawls and skirts of their own fungal flesh.
5 five old, black-blistered hot dogs with one side of them all joined together, the other sides split widely like prehensile jester hats.
6 hunched, fuzzy green-white louts trailing wispy tendrils.
D6 These forcs feed
1 on ionizing radiation, bathing in the invsible light of underground natural nuclear reactor zones or stockpiled radioactive material.
2 as humans do, though slower - their feeding is based on decomposition rather their digestion, and so their guts distend grostesquely to hold all they've eaten over a long while.
3 by immersing themselves in piles of wet mulch.
4 via barbs that drain blood and sap.
5 on earth-power, channeled out of the soil by arrays of lichen-crusted menhirs.
6 by shunting together with other living organisms like the guys in the movie Society.
D6 These forcs reproduce
1 assimilatively, torturing and starving captives to weaken their immune systems and allow the fungus to take hold of them.
2 through ritualized ego-death, sacrificing their minds to become a tunicate-esque sedentary fruiting body.
3 by feasting and then budding off smaller clones.
4 by fusing en masse into the vital clag of spawning-pits.
5 by exploding into clouds of spores over piles of rotting meat.
6 in symbiotic pods buried among the roots of forests, emerging as sibling-swarms like cicadas.
D6 These forcs came from
1 across the ocean on a decaying raft-fleet, chasing armadas of other refugees.
2 the corpse of a dead god cast down from the heavens - that god's final vengeance on the world.
3 deep underground, forced upwards by chthonic ecological pressures.
4 the laboratories of a fallen civilization, as a weapon meant to break down undesirable biomass - mostly the biomass of undesirables.
5 nobody knows where yet, they just showed up one day in numbers, but there's some people willing to pay a lot to find out.
6 the vastness of space, arriving a generation back at some inauspicious alignment in a great stone egg.
D6 These forcs carry
1 shiny blades of compressed and treated chitin, crafted from the bodies of their fallen - each bearing its fallen's fester and guidance.
2 with them an olfactoscope, a siphonoid appartus which draws in keening thin wind-streams from afar on which rich chemical information is borne.
3 elegant parasols to keep the sun off their moistness.
4 discs embedded in their backs into which their fungal flesh grows divots, which can be extracted and read to reveal their memories of the time the discs were embedded.
5 bags of imitation-coins stamped with nonsense-images yet made of precious metals - useless to them, but they've been found to be acceptable bribes to meat-folk.
6 handfuls of slime that can be fed to any creature to temporarily turn it into a tractable mount or beast of burden.
D6 These forcs are associated with
1 warrior-assassins who hollow out the non-essential parts of their bodies to fill them with weapons, and can lie in wait for weeks before striking.
2 wizards who can combine fire and darkness into one substance.
3 the clouds of sickening miasma that presage their coming.
4 parasite-clerics who can drain holy sites and relics to fuel contraband miracles.
5 glutton-juggernauts who gorge themselves on the battlefield to grow to terrifying size then burn through the mass for feats of strength.
6 shambling war-dances performed atop the bodies of prisoners in sight of their comrades.


Tuesday, August 4, 2026

Case Files of the Knights of St. Phanourious: Pinemarten, Ontario - Session 2

Previously:

Session 1

Scheduling, scheduling, my ruin, my scourge - but in the end, as they say, the boys are back in town.

Our party is:
Bart "Codekiller" Regis
Manhoman "Dr. House" Kamaroff (portrayed by friend of the blog deus ex parabola)
Auggy "Shillelagh" Ashe
Rob "The Belt / The Punisher" Wagner

We pick up where we left off last session, in the Copperbottom Theater, the party sticking up Stan Koontz and his gang of teenage miscreants in order to frame them for the kidnapping & drugging of Pinemarten's sole cop Debbie's daughter Marlin (the leader of her own, rival gang of teenage miscreants, who promised the party help breaking into the Rodnovprom mine in return for taking Stan off the board).

As Stan and the rest are teenagers, and the party are a heavily-armed team of para-political, para-military occultural troubleshooters, their intimidation is quite easy. For the first of several times this session, Auggy yanks the pin out of his grenade and pretends to throw it before sticking the pin back in. At some point Rob arrives at the Theater in a dead sprint, having been lost at the airport for an interminable period of time.

Thanks to Bart's texts to Debbie on his Blackberry mobile communication device, she arrives, revolver drawn, to that slapstick scene. She receives a confused explanation of the events that led up to that point, and orders everyone outside. The shenanigans of Bart and Auggy almost make her unload her cylinder into the party, but quick-thinking Rob flashes his old CSIS badge and fast-talks her into just-sort-of buying that Stan and his guys were involved in some international crime ring alongside Al Qaeda, or perhaps the IRA. Debbie loads the teens into her police car, puts the still completely xanned-out Marlin in the passenger seat, and drives the lot of 'em off to Sudbury, as Pinemarten doesn't have its own jail or police station.

The party decides to backtrack to the chateau where the First Annual Rodnovprom Associate Artists' Retreat massacre occured, and those fatal words: "Let's split up gang" were uttered, with Manhoman and Rob investigating one end of the odd trail of indents in the snow at the chateau, and Bart and Auggy following the other end to wherever it might lead them. It is about this point in the session that there is a prolonged tangent of the group attempting to remember and replicate what Fred and Velma from Scooby Doo sound like, and to figure out who in the Mystery Machine was cucking who.

Manohman and Rob find that the indent-trail ends abruptly at the wall of the chateau, with no apparent marks indicating that someone or something climbed up to a window - and of course as found last session there were no signs of forced entry to be found. Bart and Auggy follow the trail, the indents getting fresher and clearer as they progress, coming to resemble the sort of print that would have been left by a body curled up in the snow - though of course with five or so feet of distance between each, with no sign of interconnecting movement. It is theorized that they could have been left by a large narcoleptic toddler, or perhaps a man on a gigantic pogo-stick.

Eventually they arrive at a cottage, much more modest than the chateau, with an old man slumped over its porch, half-frozen, his head missing and his brain unspooled. A step of the stairs leading up to the porch appears explosively warped. Going around the back they find the door to the kitchen unlocked, and a pot of Brussels sprouts carbonized beyond recognition on the still-on stove-top. They notify Manohman and Rob, who regroup with them at the cottage.

They investigate the fridge, finding a ham - which Auggy stabs and Manohman takes a bite out of before clarifying that he is in fact Hindu and not Muslim. They then investigate the living room and find an old lady in an armchair, a collection of Jane Austin short stories on her lap, in much the same condition as the old man, only less frozen, as well as the very pale corpse of a middle-aged Native American (Canadian?) man, who is nude, lying on the floor.

Auggy considers stabbing the man's corpse in much the same way as he did the ham, only to be dissuaded after some conversation on whether you could stab a corpse in a place that an autopsy wouldn't discover. Manohman's examination of the corpse finds that it's got no blood in it. The party theorizes that the Native man's corpse represents some intermediate stage of processing between being alive and being decapitated. Bart snaps a bunch of pictures of the scene on his Blackberry, and is insecure at the quality of them. The crawlspace beneath the cottage is investigated, and a bit of ham is given to a raccoon. Snowmobiles, particularly snowmobiles with flame decals, are hyped up.

The party gathers in the kitchen to drink the dead man's beer and eat his ham and vegetables. Much delightment is had. Drunken and with night falling, the party heads back to the van and debates whether to abandon the almost-starting-to-sober-up Moroz, who they have been keeping captive in their van this whole time dosed to the gills on xanax, to death by exposure. Bart fakes out punching him a few times, then decides to let Moroz live, for now. Rob passes a driving test not to crash the van by a hair, and they find a motel - the Hibernation Station - to settle into for the night. They inquire about the missing horse with the pimply, no doubt drug-dealing teenager manning the desk, and he tell them that the other week a couple chickens also went missing under similar circumstances.

They plan to get in contact with Marlin in the morning. Bart and Rob bond over Bart's past trauma - he has a blurry picture which he believes to be a goblin, though no one believes him. Auggy theorizes that they might be dealing with an Irish fairy - a dullahan to be precise - which Rob gives him a hard time for before apologizing for his chronic anti-Irish behaviour.

Tune in the week after next, or perhaps more likely next month, for the next chapter of this exciting investigation.