Previously:
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Crime Scene: The top of a woman's head has been removed with surgical precision, along with the Wernicke's area of her brain. Her body has toppled out of the chair she was sat in when the procedure was performed - no sign of restraints used. The woman's cats lap at her blood and the spilled remains of her brain.
An entity that appears as someone's corpse - they don't have to be dead - and can move when nobody's looking at it. The entity "attacks" via inspiring paranoia in groups.
Ecumenopolis with "municipal tectonic" system, allowing for the rearrangement of neighbourhoods and sub-cities according to prestige or novelty or whatever other criteria
Executioners had a reputation for drunkenness - the popularity of hanging as a method of execution is partially due to it being something even someone severely drunk could do
Attempt to reconstruct genome of newly-discovered homo sapiens sub-species instead results in prebirth of terrible future strain of humanity
-on the other hand they also made a real clamato
A building that's a digestive system - it doesn't eat people. It eats something that's not a person, then swallows people to use like a gastrolith to break down that something (but more often the people are broken first).
A coastal resort town where there's a high rate of mysterious disappearances - and reappearances. Those who reappear are subtly changed, amnesiac, and report seeing strange lights out at sea before they disappeared.
A new sort of submarine, unmanned, deploys swarms of UAV drones for deniable terror attacks on near-coastal targets.
A scenario that's kind of like Pathologic and kind of like the part of the trolley problem that nobody remembers because they're stupid - the party is doctors dispatched to a town that's under quarantine due to a disease - the only way to cure the disease is by lethally extracting organs from one infected and transplanting them into others (ignore compatibility issues & so on... because the disease makes that a non-issue or somesuch), this cures the others because they reach a critical mass of key anti-bodies or somesuch... disease is 100% fatal if not cured in this way - game would revolve around preventing total anarchy & deciding who you're willing and able to sacrifice and who you want to save, of course the people most deserving of having their organs harvested to save others are also often the ones most capable of violence & enmeshed in the town's power structures
X-Files uses hypnosis session tapes a lot - those are neat
-X-Files-esque game set during immediate post-revolutionary period - all the nasty stuff the government was covering up is coming out, and you play commissars granted extraordinary powers to clean up the messes
-an immense amount of energy released by near-death experiences - enough to rewrite personalities, and thereafter disable any watch the near-dead wears
-creatures bound within the ring of a tree - released when the tree is logged - eco-terrorists are a quaint idea
animal men domesticated by intelligent machines - the factory farm of the manimal slaughterhouse
Dungeon origin: A king who filled his halls with impossible things until reality forgot that those things were impossible, and the king's people forgot they themselves existed
A house full of so much dust and must and mold and crust that these things coalesce into the shapes of the people who left them behind and ape their habits
Something creepy about standing in a random spot and then your phone starts recharging itself without being plugged in
-urban legend says if you text a certain number in this spot you can talk to God
-other stories say you can tell where the spot is because birds commit suicide at its boundary, flying straight into the ground
Investigation into identity of serial killer thrown off because apparent time of death of victims off wildly from suspects' schedules, encounters with them, etc. - this is because secretly none of the victims were baseline humans, and so have abnormally high body temp and so on that throw off determining their time of death
A daily crossword puzzle that predicts the future
A place with trees that turn a different colour than red in the fall
-it's because of what they sprayed over the woods to kill Bigfoots, you see...
Ghosts can't live where it's too hot, due to their water-crystalline nature
-nasty bluish wizard carried about on bed by horrible goblins, smoking opium billowingly, able to manifest chimerical beasts from his own nightmares
An arctic ice core sample, and the historical information revealed therein - good macguffin or clue - perhaps also contains ancient virus, or substrate of anomalous meteor - perhaps also must be kept at extremely low temperature, limiting its potential hiding location to, say, a new high-end data center in town
-vents, you never see people crawling through vents anymore
--addictive food additives introduced by nefarious sorts to enwiden the population so their evil lairs can't be infiltrated by vent-crawling protagonists
Mari lwyd and other such hoodening beasts are (or are inspired by, if you're lame) the spirits of domestic animals who died over the year, returned to take their due from Man with his own cultured cunning
The legendary fighting cricket, who fought his way up weight classes until he defeated a rooster - this guy is treasure, you find him in a tiny yet luxurious stasis-cage alongside his many cricket-concubines
The Temagami Magnetic Anomaly
-The Numbers' Stationed
-Tempus Fugitives
On Saint Martina of Rome: "One of the writers claimed that when she was beheaded, her body bled milk, a tale that led to her patronage of nursing mothers."
There's a place where the banks and the big box stores pulled everything out that they could and then the meth-heads pulled out everything else and then because everything was already gone things we don't have names for came and took what couldn't be taken and now the potholes are bottomless and lead down to nowhere and you can push people through a building like it's a stack of cardboard boxes and there's people who don't starve but they're always hungry because there's just a missing column where their guts should be and there's another guy whose arms are missing but if you stand too close you get tickle-tickle-tickled and there should be laws written down and a court and a judge but those are gone too so there's nobody to tell you the laws that still are and everybody will punish you if you break them
A guy who wears the snapped-off tine of a crown through his nose
-him and all his buddies do this because they assassinated a king and made off with the bulk (really the least-bulk highest-value) of that king's treasure and then turned on each other and are all hiding in various dungeons and hideaways living in dereliction on top of tremendous riches because they're paranoid the others are out to get them and they're right and also very talented murderers and thieves
Just give the GLOO gun as a magic item
-just give the Obra Dinn watch as a magic item
-just give the talking heart from Dishonored as a magic item
-just give a scroll that begins the taming ritual for Eight-Handled Sword Divergent Sila Divine General Mahoraga
-just give the Lone Gunmen as allied contacts
Assortia:
-A contagious accent - overlays reality with the bizarre fictional township it “originated” from as it spreads
-Cursed/living thermostat, preys on people by unnaturally adjusting the temperature in rooms/homes
-Axe of Theseus, alternates between being a rotting handle/rusting blade, plunged into material to reform itself based on what it’s plunged into
-Therapist who collects his clients' phobias in a box as malign spirits
-Giant with guillotines for eyelids, has to wind them open but when they blink they sever a piece of whatever they were looking at
-Washed-up former action hero who worships his own past self and hopes to ascend to godhood
-Bottled moon
-Guy with a mermaid stuck in the ocean of his eye, can weep out a flood of voracious baby mermaids
-Guy with a head that's a giant tick, with a brain floating in the blood bloating its abdomen
-An abusive weightloss camp where sloughed-off lumps of flesh are harvested from the campers
-Dolls made of discarded prostheses, infused with the negative energy of their former wearers
-Kludge-afterlife holding comatose souls of those caught in a ritualistic bus crash, on life support at a hospital - in the hospital's basement is a realm of jittering ECG machine lines, beginning to leak its captured souls
-Boombox that blasts pretty literal earworms, with effects spilling out of the ears of its listeners
-Guy paddling a church-bell down a river like a coracle
-The Gordian Not - untangles things and people
-Argleton/Paper Town - google maps image seam-blended half-cat
-Thumb drive with something living in it like a hermit crab
-Guilty Party - cursed board game, appears to groups with dirty laundry in isolated locations (vacation cabins, etc.), bringing secrets to light and turning them against each other - taking too long during your turn will land you in the Pear-ade of Agonies - Court of Apple-eals - The Punch-Down Bowl - The Confess-ction Booth - Bloody Ban-nana
From Ghost Fixers: The areas of people's subjective spaces contradicted by social consensus reality are subducted by it, coalescing into what some call "the abstract dimension"
-From me, semiurge: It's possible that tectonic-analogue events in this "abstract dimension" are responsible for experiences of the mandala effect
Project Iceworm
-Marie Byrd Land
Near-future setting detail: Climate change greatly increases the rate of fafrotskies
-Degradation of transport infrastructure, increase in automobile costs, legislation against human drivers leads to rise of "sled dog" subculture who grappel on to automated vehicles while riding skateboards, carts, etc., detaching and hiding in the woods for the next vehicle when the drones come to pry them off
Monster: A police composite drawing who came to life, now taking parts from people to composite himself a fleshly body
Planet with life that never underwent its own great oxidation event - coated in slow, simple life that's developed emergent complexity - towering stromatolites in tiger-stripe bands of opacity and translucency channeling light and heat across the super-organisms
A bower bird-empire, collecting beautiful tribute and a pseudo-harem of non-concubines picked for their aesthetic complementaries, instinct masquerading as civilization
Should have more generators in dungeons... heavy, volatile fuel you have to haul between generators, choosing which systems you want powered for how long... open the shortcut door, or keep the lights on?
Bard mechanic - learn new musical styles, dances, and suchlike that work like the GLOGy languages that let you talk to stones, or be unable to lie, or what have you - incentive for friendly (or at least transactional) contact with new cultures, itinerant circuses of murder-clowns, etc.
The dominant flora of this planet is in fact a sort of holometabolous organism, derived into an elongated, colonial chrysalis stage - sub-organisms within the shared chrysalis remaining liquid in form, shifting form and position within as needed
A death-cult of Hollywood stunt-men who get themselves killed in extravagant and symbolic ways as a sacrifice to the object of their worship
Humanoid giant mechs channeling the image of God to power theo-weaponry
Illusion and divination stem from the same original school of magic - the seeing of images in fire and water, guts and cracked shells - really the creation of images in these media - splitting based on the truth or falsity of these images, and later based on false images becoming true, true images making themselves false
-identical twins are potent components for both divination and illusion magic
UFOs coming out of the ocean during the Biden regime was actually fomorians returning in response to an Irishman becoming king of Hybrasil
An experimental nuclear-powered jet developed during the Cold War breached the sound barrier by far too much - becoming sound itself, an echoing, booming song of speed
A videographic realm, a desert with grains of camera footage swirling into various surveillance scenes - what's seen can see you back - beware of scenes of armed robbery
The bones of the earth made into broth
A murder mystery in an apartment building full of eccentric characters that's been sealed due to quarantine - kind of like [REC] but no zombies because I am not fond of zombies - who's hoarding food in their apartments? Who's willing to cooperate with investigators who aren't cops? There will likely be more murders in the days to follow
Ysgard is made up of islands floating on elements, like Earth's mantle but much smaller and more energetic, and like some are lightning and make fulguritic lightning volcanos and what have you - this is also reflected in their minerology
Aesthetic of Carceri: Contrast, contradiction - on the one hand regimentation, discipline, masks, uniforms, suppression of individuality - on the other hand distinctive wearing, grinding, compression, into hunchbacks and oil and diamonds and shale-flat slitherings, voraciousness - unique among all outsiders the demodands need to eat, and what they eat is extra-dimensionally excreted into the lower layers of the prison-spheres
-anti-production - schools with books that suck the knowledge from your mind, mines that put minerals back into the earth
-those scholars who reject the planar hypothesis place Carceri as a burl on the central pillar of the earth, deep enough that a dangled prisoner can be dipped headfirst into primordial chaos
A monster like the matagot, which follows a party and demands the first portion of each meal (a ration from each party member)
-the calabrius is a bird which takes illness from the sick and disperses it - in medieval bestiarity this dispersion is into the sun, where it burns up, but what if it dispersed the disease into the countryside
-Alien-type monster that takes its prey alive and cocoons them in a lair/hive
Coral cathedral, worship sea spawn master, wizard in belltower believes all civilizations created by sea spawn conspiracy
-lacedons from maturing sea spawn hosts
Much ink and blood has been spilled because of the human lust for gold. Less known is the equally-strong lust of raccoons for teeth.
-the nobility of this land mix ink into their blood - the colour becomes a very dark red - and write their titles and deeds and treaties in their inky blood - the writing and their reality are tied: so long as the documents exist, a noble will not be dispossessed of their land for long - their lost wealth will return, the uprising peasants will be crushed - burn the documents, however, and the ruin of their associated nobles will follow
"Pride was a knight on a lion, Envy a monk on a dog, Sloth a peasant on a donkey, Avarice a merchant on a badger, Gluttony a youth on a wolf, Ire a woman on a boar, and Luxury (instead of the standard Lechery) a woman on a goat."
Names: Soldeva, Viraloon, Zecho, Pirralene, Lowch, Metton, Peygon, Ashumarit
Word Corner:
-Cicerone: A guide who gives information about antiquities and places of interest to sightseers
-Chyron: Text in the lower third of a tv news screen
-Latrodectism: Illness caused by the bite of black widows & related species - symptoms include pain, muscle rigidity, vomiting, and sweating
-Verilent: Contagiously truthful
-Repechage: French, literally "fishing out" or "rescuing" - a practice in series competitions that allows participants who failed to meet qualifying standards by a small margin to continue to the next round
-Diluent: Substance used to dilute something, acting to cause dilution
-Raubbauwirtschaft: An economy of attrtition
-Peytral: Piece of armor used to protect the breast of a horse
-Chloasma: Temporary large brown patches forming on skin, caused by hormonal changes
-Quondam: Former, sometime
-Afflatus: Divine creative impulse or inspiration
-Apothegm: Concise saying, maxim, aphorism - not to be confused with apothem
-Apothem: Line from the center of a regular polygon at right angles to any of its sides
-Lacustrine: Related to or associated with lakes
-Intaglio: An engraved gem-stone
-Aborning: While being born or produced
-Incipit: The opening words of a text, manuscript, book, or chanted liturgy
