Thursday, April 2, 2020

Q1 Slush Pile Dump (AKA Slush Pile Dump 2)

Thinking of making this a quarterly thing



A premature Last Day, the souls of the dead imperfectly returned, their bodies imperfectly changed

God’s love kills before it resurrects, it is suffered, an alien righteousness that births a new heart in the sinner’s chest (literally though)

“God is not the one who is changed in the bread and wine, the sinner is, and the change is more radical than the sinner could possibly want, since it puts you to death” (again, cooler if literal)

“Man's damnation is willed thrice: first by God, then by the devil and finally by himself.”

“The magic in which the zero, the ascetic, may in some way equal or surpass the infinite king”

The Wizard’s Tower, its footsteps trod by young men, only the oldest and wisest (or perhaps the most willing to push others off the path) ascending to the far-seeing tip

“From now on I have no kingdom, or my kingdom is limitless; from now on my body does not belong to me or the whole earth belongs to me”

Moth-creatures that eat fate, or linear time, or some other thread-like thing
-The larva is Clotho, the moth is Atropos?

The throne is the land, the crown is the people, together by the body of the king they are united and realized, the material and ideal kingdom instantiated

An imprisoned angel who weeps gold/waters of youth/super-heroin, exposed to torturous sights to maintain a steady supply

Rationalism, universality, internet, writing, abstract thought as vulgar Platonic ascension, not becoming capable of contemplating the Forms but standardizing, rendering legible the Forms, dragging them down to materiality

Necromancy is a corrupt imitation of the Day of Resurrection

The whole of the universe is the abortion of Sophia, the grief and terror of Sophia Achamoth. Chaos is the raw, unbound passions beyond the demiurge’s control.

A magically cold sword which freezes its wielder’s hand to its grip until washed with fresh blood.

The king of deathly green

City held up by half-buried stone giants, moving very very slowly, but accelerating. Faces look pissed.

Naturally intangible, invisible monster that must shift into reality before it attacks, fading back soon after

A king sat atop his palanquin carried by seven wisemen. Serpents coil about their shoulders. The wisemen whisper in the serpents’ ears, who rise to repeat their words to the king.

A hermit’s castle of pebbles mortared by her own spittle, built over a lifetime of loneliness, haunted by the ghosts of those she left behind.

All things began with water, darkness, abyss, and chaos. Water and darkness begat dream. Darkness and the abyss begat demons. The abyss and chaos begat entropy. Chaos and water begat life.

The Strangling Strait that exudes a suffocating, invisible miasma, and the lanternheads* on its point that speak with their shining eyes (right lid half-closed, left brow raised, alternating flashes of one second each is “fuck off”)
*Like lanternfish/creature from the black lagoon things, still considered human for complex theological/cultural reasons. Good at holding their breath.
The Strait is sailed by very tall pontoons, or unbelievably risky submarines

Soft Eggs, ooze-like creatures that are the fertilized, shell-less eggs of a species of large bird. The unfertilized eggs are worth a fortune.

From Beethoven’s Ninth: Fire-drunk, wings enclosing; all within are reconciled (become brothers?), the worm’s ecstasy, dividing fashion/uniting nature

Incantation to summon/bind/banish demon (modular?) hidden in parts throughout dungeon. Demon is boss monster, potential to extort boons, banish it forever, or release it from the dungeon based on exploration and ability to decipher language puzzle.

Dungeon with releasable/already released singulo (as SS13)

“Bridge” in dungeon that’s a giant sword laid blade-up across a chasm (have we done this one already?)

Puzzles/traps inspired by Tartarean/hellish ironic punishments (Tantalusish ration tree that gives phantom healing, Sisyphean Indiana Jones rock trap, etc.)

Dungeon in the secret mechanisms beneath a “miraculous” ever-turning mill (that grinds out salt and gold dust too?)

Acting becomes too associated with prostitution (undercutting the prostitute’s guild), banned and replaced by puppet theatre, leading to an underground performance scene and the unfortunate genesis of “love puppets”

“Don't you agree that I should laugh at these pictures painted by such a lunatic painter? Achamoth, a female and yet the image of the Father; the Demiurge, ignorant of his mother—not to mention of his Father—yet representing Nus who is not ignorant of his Father; the angels, the reproductions of their masters. This is the same as counterfeiting a fake...”
See also: Kill la Kill
“This is the power of those so-called imitations of yours!”
[Ambiguous plays]

Contemporary Grimoires:
  1. What I Saw At My Lai: The Testimony of a New Illuminate
  2. dr_ogufebwe_real_black_magic_secrets.mp5
  3. Pozzed by God
  4. The Whispers in Our Genes
  5. Court Transcript of the “Cicada Killer” Trial
  6. We Programmed This Neural Net With The Collected Works of Abdul Al-Hazred, And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!
  7. Addressing the Thorniest Problems of Morphological, Epistemological, and Ethical Freedom in the Coming Age
  8. It’s a meme and every variant of the meme created by those infected by it inadvertently reveals another fragment of the grimoire (the 3,000 year old cooltist, “AAAGH!! I’M GONNA FUCKIN SUMMOOOOOON!!”)
  9. Internet archive of an urban explorer’s MySpace page with grainy photos of pre-human graffiti in derelict subway tunnels
  10. Bojack Horseman Lost Episode Revealled?! [True Nihilism Warning]
  11. Liberating the Voices of Marginalized Bodies Denied Humanity in Liminal Spaces Between Death and Dreaming
  12. Recordings of Anomalous Signal from PSR J2222-0137 Between the Hours of 3:00 and 5:00 on March 15, 2015

The elohim could not conceive of murder until they witnessed Cain marked by Abel’s blood

Magic weapons are either cursed, made by human hands to end human life, or defiled, tools of the gods turned to killing.
Corollary: the lance is the cross is the Tower of Babel is Horos is that which holds apart the world from true divinity (which would incinerate it otherwise)

“Sufficiently advanced aliens are indistinguishable from nature”
-Mountain ranges that are colonial silicon-based organisms, speak with tectonic vibrations, war with each other by firing volcano-boring subcontinental cruise missiles through the mantle
-Thoughts swift as wind encoded in the micro-turbulence of an ever-turning hurricane
-Dark matter dreaming of a lightless era past the death of every star, warded from radiation and the worst of entropy’s theft
-An elder god cloaked within the event horizon of a supermassive black hole, manipulating its gamma emissions with hyperprecision to set events in motion that will reverse the expansion of the universe into contraction, ending in a Big Crunch which only it will survive
-Creature like a membrane stretched astronomical units across, feeds on pre-interstellar civilizations by first stretching around the planet/system and projecting camouflage inwards of a lifeless universe
-Synthetic supermassive element so complex in its decay it generates a brief and brilliant fully-formed mind
-Technorganic nanomachines lurking among strands of junk DNA, nudging the evolution of their host biosphere, a duet of intelligent design and natural selection with movements spanning hundreds of millions of years

Lazaret dungeon, something bad went down inside after a rich shipment came in and nobody else is brave enough to check

Why is that starfish latched to that man’s face?
  1. That’s his wife
  2. Sharing lunch
  3. Laying eggs in his stomach
  4. Fashion statement
  5. Manservant carrying aquatic master about
  6. Man-shaped tumour growing on unfortunate starfish

Die drop encounter table, drop on pictures/stat blocks of the monsters, number on die is number appearing(?), size of pictures proportional to encounter frequency

Cursed sword that tarnishes the treasure of any creature it kills to worthlessness

Reverse-lich that becomes the vessel of an object’s soul (the withered librarian cobwebbed in the attic, skin like old and yellowed paper, the prize of her collection a grimoire without worms or mildew, its illumination as brilliant as the day it was written; the sculptor stiff as stone buried inside a wall, eyes screaming, his mural unweathered, the prize of a dozen empires taken from palace to palace)

Viral innocence that wipes the slate of the soul clean

Cursed object that spreads plague when used, first to those exposed to its effect, then to people close to its wielder, then to everyone nearby

Pandora’s box dungeon, hidden treasure is Hope, monsters & traps are previously unknown evils (if you thought stubbing your toe was bad wait until finger-stubbing is released)

Dungeon that is fantasy equivalent of the Clock of the Long Now, interactables revolve around altering time, parallel timelines, playing with spacetime/gravity

Amber is sap-amber, and preserved within it are prehistoric creatures. Jewels are magma-amber, and preserved within them are premythological gods and spirits. _____ is blood-amber, and preserved within it is _____(?)

(Paraphrasing from reddit comment): “The purpose of the bible isn’t to exclude people from the kingdom of heaven, but to break down its doors” - Saviour-religion based on hacking progenitor, legalistic cosmology

The Lord Insouciant, special position of especial detachment from the population, a hermit-noble in exquisite isolation, called on to make (or be an excuse for) the Real Hard Choices where an (in theory) impartial voice is needed

Demon-mochi made from pulverized human bones

Hall of mirrors dungeon (or dungeon sub-section), each room is the reflection of a mirror, with a particular distortion on those things it reflects

Desert transformed into psychedelic meadows by rain from clouds of spirit-opium exhaled by giant monks in the mountains

Underworld/Wilderness/City as the three fundamental world-forces of the universe, vying against each other through their agents (monsters/druids/adventurers respectively). Also those are the alignments. Or maybe agent types aren’t tied to location, instead alignment grid is monster/druid/adventurer + underworld/wilderness/city.

Barber/serial killer/merchant, gums overflowing with stolen teeth, sells the inventory of a random NPC in the area (who he has murdered)

Fish-merchant who can be summoned by sprinkling special bait in any body of water large enough to fit it. Sells treasure you’ve missed or lost.

Unworldly nations - the ‘building tall’ vs. the worldly ‘building wide’ - if there are entities (gods, spirits, etc.) that value anthropocentric expressions of morality, purity, etc., then nations that eke our existence specializing in those things rather than commerce, slavery, industry, and so on

An enlightened stag, self-lobotomized into sapience by his own ingrown antlers, the vizier of the forest

Bazaar that’s overgrown into a city-within-a-city, an impossible tangle of tents and awnings ruled by austere monks untemptable by the bazaar-city’s delights.

Magic item like rosary beads, each containing a world in miniature. Praying over a bead releases its world, and makes the world outside play by its exotic rules for a while (low gravity, acid rain, all monsters encountered are friends, etc.)

Beautiful and poisonous fabric woven from the hair-fine tentacles of a particular species of jellyfish

Cloister of eremites who seal themselves in the eggs of a sort of giant betta-like fish, floating half-submerged on the surface of a lake, the fish “kissing” enough food through the egg membrane to keep them alive - eremites mutate into simple-minded, angelic fish-hybrids after a while?

“Concentric garden” biome composed of plants sort of like giant allelopathic onions, each ring cradling within it soil purged of other plants, fungus, small animals, etc. Each “onion” cultivates a space for its symbiotic servitor species, which war with other “onions” for territory.

Explosive eusocial cave-dwelling cockroaches that eat bat shit and fill their abdominal cavity with gunpowder

Mobile plant like a living windmill, uses sails derived from tumbleweed-like organ to build energy in organic springs for rapid movement

Ultraviolet cosmetics painted on like flower petals, derived from hunting strategies to lure insects/hummingbirds into one’s mouth

Like the seven colours of the visible spectrum, the seven deadly sins are “refracted” forms of an original undivided sin. Some theoretical hamartiologists also posit the existence of infra- and ultrasins, which can be committed without perceptible action.

5 comments:

  1. The fish-merchant summoned by salts in water is a lovely concept but very many other ideas are amazing as well.
    Thank you for posting this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Time flies when you're having fun. The time flies seek out those with a bright, happy future ahead of them and lay eggs in the branches of their timeline. The resultant maggots begin eating possible futures until only the most mediocre option remains.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Also, wouldn't "infra" and "ultra" sins be sins, respectively, of omission and thought? Thinking about doing the wrong thing and failing to do the right thing are both technically sinful, but not really actions per se.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. But they are perceptible, if only to the one committing them.

      Delete