Thursday, November 26, 2020

D20 Mooncalves & The Dooms They Foretell

There's an itch.io "jam" based on "rural horror" going on right now. AAH!!! FARMERS!!!

Anyways I'm not doing that but this is kind of like that.

D20 Mooncalves

1. Born as a fully-formed adult with an unblemished red hide. Seeks to slit its throat on the nearest blade.

2. If it would be clawed it has hooves, if it would have hooves it’s instead clawed. Its sole desire is to devour its mother and its father.

3. It’s got seven heads and seven crowns of teeth and horn. With a voice like trumpets it blares blasphemies and vicious lies.

4. Only half of it is present, split down the middle. The cleft is studded with weeping, bloodshot eyes. It acts as though nothing is amiss.

5. It bears a human face on its chest which rolls its eyes and lolls its tongue.

6. It has translucent flesh, and bones too large to fit within.

7. Born eviscerated, the organs throbbing and lively while the body lies dead.

8. It has a mane of centipedes that drip smoking venom from their forcipules. It also hates you, you personally, with an unnatural intelligence and subtlety.

9. It’s a bloody bunch of hair and grain husks tied into the shape of an animal.

10. Its head is a bare skull and its eye sockets smoulder with golden flames.

11. Born covered in boils filled with amniotic fluid and fetal copies of itself.

12. It has no eyes or nose, only a maw splitting its face that’s stuffed with teeth. It makes a deafening squall that sounds like a human child.

13. Its umbilical cord is as tough as steel wire, and it will unravel into yet more cord as it crawls away from its mother until nothing is left.

14. It tears its way out of the womb, formed without skin or fat, only mountains of misshapen muscle.

15. Born bloated with fragrant waxes that leak from its orifices. Those who smell it will be overcome with the desire to immolate the mooncalf to release more of its scent.

16. Born with eagles’ wings and turtles’ legs. Too many legs, far too many wings.

17. Grows before your eyes, bigger and bigger and bigger until it collapses in under its own weight.

18. It has no limbs, and crawls as if a serpent.

19. Its flesh is cold and hard and veined like black marble. It will writhe and cry and grind itself into dust by its convulsions.

20. Born without a head, and one of the many names of God written on the stump of its neck.

D20 Foretold Dooms

1. The spirit of a road will fall in love with a mortal. That love will be unrequited. In self-pitying despair the spirit will twist their road along unwholesome paths into perdition.

2. A righteous usurper will take the crown and be corrupted by its power into a worse tyrant than the one they deposed.

3. The eruption of a baleful star will bathe a night in rays that turn grass grey and brittle, and make all waters undrinkable.

4. The rivers will turn to curdled milk and attract an army of depraved cats.

5. New weapons will be made which generals have no understanding of, and they will marshal their troops into mass graves.

6. A preacher will come and rouse a great rabble, who will in turn drag all they can before them to be judged and scoured for every last little sin.

7. All livestock will be born as mooncalves. Dairy will become a thing of the past.

8. An erudite though short-sighted wizard will create an enchanted printing press. With it they'll mass-produce scrolls and distribute them at random. This will result in chaos, both because of the scrolls' powers and disastrous flaws in their production.

9. A new and potently addictive drug will rapidly rise in popularity, but the drug is actually the eggs of a parasitic fish which will incubate in their consumers, warping their minds and bodies.

10. Time will spread a freezing web. Remain in one place, and you'll start to move slower and slower until you become a living statue, locked in stasis.

11. A child will be born with incredible strength and an impervious body. Left to their own devices, the child's inability to suffer will prevent them from developing any empathy for their less gifted fellows, and they will gather equally hardened hearts under their banner as a disastrous warlord.

12. People will become haunted en-masse by their ancestors, who are displeased with the impertinent way things are done these days.

13. An echo of the judgement of Babel will make brothers strangers to each other by the splintering of their tongue.

14. The coming generation will exceed their parents in might and cruelty.

15. A storm of sulphurous fire will raze cities and fields to ashes.

16. A contagious and paranoid fear will sweep through the populace. People under its influence become convinced an invasion from an unspecified foreign power is imminent, and that the only survival will be found in the construction of an immense fortress. If not stopped then all the infected will work themselves to death stacking that fortress's stones.

17. Ships larger than any thought possible will appear sailing over the horizon. Their crews bear gifts and smiles, but they serve masters who desire to strip the land and its peoples into resources that can be carried back across the sea.

18. The moon will swell in its radiance, and strange, toxic foliage will flourish beneath its light.

19. Wolves great in size and number will venture out from the woods, their hunger slaked only by human meat.

20. A creeping frost will seize the earth and turn neighbours into killers for want of bread.

1 comment:

  1. So, I guess I now know what mooncalves are?? But also, not at all

    ReplyDelete