Sunday, May 23, 2021

Slush Pile 4

Dining teeth of the good general (child-eating)

Hags ride the tiger of time and direct it at others to spare themselves
-sea hags are erosion and rust, dissolving ordered things into chaos, likely the easiest to work with for non-hags
-Blood hags: patriarchs, donkeys devouring lions, old men sending the young to die in their place
-Paper hags reduce parts of the living world to abstract written information in their moldering libraries, the more the world is lessened for their loss the better
-haggis is, of course, a bowdlerized hag delicacy

A statue of a woman baring her breast down to the bone, heart visible through parted ribs. The inscription reads: “Justice”.

A town like a butterfly net stuck upright in the earth. The hoop is a hole that goes on forever, but loops back around sometimes. The area around is a wasteland, littered with craters from escaped debris. Townsfolk live off fishing for falling valuables. Adventurous sorts leap from island to drifting island and back before it all falls away.

Geocathedral millions of years in the making, workers overseen by exponentially slower gargoyles

Ascalaphus
The vilest bird
A messenger of grief
Sad omen to mankind

“The city’s people are fed and cared for as horses are fed and cared for”

Grave built like a super-sized death mask (Face of Mars-ish)

Control, and therefore refer to
Refer to, and therefore control

Dungeon that’s a city being looted by various mercenary companies

Profit prophet uttering tomorrow’s cryptocurrency prices, ecstatically tranced out in the internet cafes’ doorway

Fountain so big it’s evolved its own ecosystem - gigakoi

Anti-terrorist algorithmic ordnance, a targeted program that isolates volatile individuals in a simulated digital media environment then agitates them to death - fake websites, fake fellow-posters

“Let there be light” => the eye is an act of worship => exploiters of the attention economy are literal demons

Dungeon merchant with little doors all over their face and body. Open a door to find a swell prize, or there’s nothing behind it and the merchant will take the corresponding organ from you

The peaches of immortality lack pits. Being eternal, they need no replacement.

False Buddhas, the ones you didn’t kill along the road, offer bon mot enlightenments - slow release poisons

Worry coin meets kinder surprise - numismagic traps abstract spirit within the symbols on the coin’s face, wear them away to release it to do your bidding

Trap that brands you with a diabolical mark that attracts fearsome monsters

Fire, then light, then life, then light, then fire => gotta step off the molehill to climb the mountain

A modern megalith ring reconstruction, aligned to the light-polluted absence of stars and the shining cities

Evilutionary hydra, demon born of Darwin’s diabolical theory, has a head for each class of animals, body is primordial ooze

What the hell is a scrutch? (Don’t remember writing this one - could it have been the scrutch?)

Room with sealed door and creepy music box. Music box has evil, cumulative effect when played, but unsealing the door requires it to play all the way through.

King of the hill dungeon, unseat the king to become the king and win immortality as long as you remain within it

Encounter tables are like the reaction roll results of an environment

Monastery-dungeon, the monks’ minds ascended to a realm of pure intellect, their bodies without minds became atavistic beasts

A mourner who grew more eyes, for only two could not weep enough to express their grief

A land where dragons are made to serve humans who’ve swallowed their eggs, holding their children hostage

Finigal - an island where humans are the only sizeable living things. An experiment by an elder species attempting to solve the problem of surging humanity - find out how best to kill humans by setting humans up to figure it out for you. Experiment succeeded, but only after its overseers faded away.

A megadungeon, once a paradisiacal structure, fractured into five (or however many) sections, each representing a piece of the perfect unified whole but rendered nightmarish for lack of the others as utopian fantasies can tend to

Can you make power rangers osr? Zordon-thing sent to planet to save it from alien menace - too late! The menace got here first and now it’s inconceivable as such to humanity - but what is the menace? Language? Oxygen? Time? Needs teenagers with severe opposition to the status quo on the highest scale
-Giant robot good

What does a city that was designed by a non-human animal look like? What does a city that wasn’t designed by an animal look like? - slime mold subway design, buildings and “roads” for the stationary / autotrophs, symbiotic lemurs-like-pigeons scrambling to patch holes in the nutrient-pipes

No NPCs in dungeon, but some monsters you can “cure” of “infection” to turn them into NPCs of various sorts (rumourmonger, guide, merchant, etc.)
-set of magic masks that serve similar function, affix one to monster’s / person’s face to overwrite their personality while it’s on - the Merchant on an owlbear, sells you the contents of its pellets

Purposeful polyps, palm-sized infinicancerous blob, biomancer loot. Throw sticky polyp onto something, call out name of organ/appendage, polyp takes on the form of that thing, fully functional for an hour before collapsing/self-consuming. Responds to your will as if attached to your nerves. Throwing multiple polyps at once creates either squared number of organs, or singular organ squared in size.

Incarnavores, demiurgical predators that coax divine forces and entities into fleshly traps - or else self-posed monsters, trial-setters, self-aware sophists, luring out the already-incarnate.
-primary precipitators of Godfalls, feeding-frenzy manna from the heavens

Mercenaries marching beneath a stripes-and-stinger banner, spit live bees down the barrels of their muskets as ammo. The bees, for their part, are intoxicated by the sweet fumes of the mercenaries’ bile.

Familiar-spirit, takes many forms but consistent feature is drum sunk into its chest where a heart would be. Its beats keep it alive, grant it control over rhythms of life and death, but it must return frequently to its master to be “recharged”.

Loch Ness monster, ogopogo - reptilian rearguard, elemental jailers posted in glacial lakes, million-year vigil against oncoming ice ages

Hedge-riders patrol the boundaries between wilderness and civilization, prosecuting those who break the ancient laws that bind both

Lick the frogs to dream big, true dreams - because the toads have eaten the mosquitos, and in their youth the mosquitos supped blood from the sour things that sleep fitfully at the bottom of the bog

Turn the body inside out, replace the nerves with strings - leave a handle in the spine for you to grip when you leave it - you were the thing behind its eyes, and now it’s no longer a prison but your puppet. This is but one path to lichdom.
-every lich kicks down a ladder behind them, or entropy shuts a door - each method only works once
—necromancy’s a race to get the lower-hanging fruit of immortality first

The Old Stone Soul - subconscious collective of fossils and petrified creatures where flesh and stone learn each other’s ways. Obscure occultist’s legend - a sub-plane? Psychocosm? Universal rounding error - stacked with creatures it can’t decide whether to put with the living or the dead? Primordial things trapped with all their wisdom and terror under the shadows of basilisk-lords, your buddy you lost to the cockatrice last week stuck in there with them.

Nodestone: Simple matter, “nails things down” on metaphysical level. Irons out paths for explorers of non-Euclidean (and stranger) spaces, can be used to knock the transcendent’s brains out in a pinch.

Fisher-pixies perched on a log, long gossamer nets in hand. They compete - whimsically vicious - to catch the prettiest glitter from the tip of a wave.

A trader in clattering armour of clam-shells rises from the surf, toting a bag of waterlogged goods. They’ve swum very far, for very long - all the way from Sea-Meets-Sky. The clams are alive - they feed and filter air for the trader. Nothing below the water dares harm them - the Mother of Pearls protects her own.

Canoes hovering upside-down above the water, moving towards you far faster than a human vessel. Their hulls are stuffed with flying bladder-kelp, their crews hang by their knees from bars - trailing paddles and snorkels into the water below.

Gloatgoat: Scapegoat made to bear the sins of braggarts. Perpetual terrible goat-tooth grin. Watches for you to fail, competes to make you fail if you’re doing something goats are actually better at (climbing, head-butting), laughs and mocks with made-up goattish words if you do.

Sport a bit like golf, but played with javelins (closer to aerodynamic sticks nowadays). Courses are carved in the sides of hills, chalk-line giants and vague beasts. Derived from a tradition of monster-hunting, originally meant for training and now merely an amusement as the monsters have been driven back and bound. Chubby drunken sirs and ma’ams toss their sticks - ah, great show old chap, a hamstring and the jugular, indeed what a show.

Inter-continental canal, indispensable trade chokepoint, ruled by literal hydraulic despots - water elementals lurk invisibly, they operate the canal-pumps, fancy themselves rulers of the world to whom all must pay tribute. Only way to get through without ruinous taxation is to know who’s feuding with who, how to flatter them - facilitated by city of servant-spies.

LARPer/weeaboo dungeon, people have set themselves up in ruins of extinct monsters (ixitxachitl, dragons, etc.), venerate them as superior species and (poorly) attempt to emulate them - in form and badly reconstructed culture.

Some folkloric hero had agreement with friend in heaven to send gifts back and forth, their descendants rules-lawyered the hell out of it and now there is a town which is baskets going up and down, not feasible to send so many gifts so it’s an endless cycle of trash back and forth - one side’s trash can be another’s treasure and that’s where the town’s economy comes from.

Looking too far into the future risks the attention of the omni-crab blowing bubblesome new realities

Desert nomads dress up like baby scorpions to hitch rides on giant scorpion momma’s back - have babytalk names that are impressive to them from cultural association but lame to anyone else - Captain Snuggly, Lady Googoo Pinchycheeks

Everyone here is some ridiculous martial artist who can punch through walls. One of their hands is always clenched in a fist, has been since birth - if they open it the spirit that grants their power will escape.

Royalty recognizes royalty - declarations of war between kingdoms must be written on wasp-paper scrolls. Empire sets itself against empire, reward beyond imagination awaits the ones who can retrieve the paper of the black-and-yellow-gods, the only material suitable for such an outbreak.

2 comments: