Monday, November 7, 2022

Slush Pile 6

Culture that never goes outside without their heads covered - believe their ancestors offended the stars, and will destroy them if they make themselves visible - they’re right

A portrait so perfectly representative that it develops its own intelligent spirit. Years pass, the portrait’s subject grows older, and the portrait becomes disgusted with its subject, believing it must kill them and become the “true” person. Uses madmen obsessed with it, art thieves, gallery owners, etc., as the tools to do it.

“Sparklock” weapons of the post-apocalypse use batteries to ignite their powder

Order of assassins who wire their pistols up around their arms, blowing their veins open after they take a shot

The Insane Clown Posse’s dark carnival as a domain of dread

Domain of dread set in/around mine or something along those lines, curse is the miners become more and more suffused with the stuff they mine - crystals splitting skin, hands fusing into clubs of ruddy ore - becoming monsters, a new crew needing to be recruited by more-or-less coercive methods in a grim and futile cycle

Mareld - the sea glow

Acthnici- the salamanders-over-the-water

Reifs of the upper air (like reef + reify) - lush ecologies where the air grows so thin that ideas can push through into the material - flocks of micro-national principalities scatter before a swooping Empire, an old and milky-eyed Justice has Corruption and Venality perch on its back, picking up the scraps of its mistargeted kills
-Waterspouts are bridges to the middle air - and the middle air is home to zeppelinoid life derived from throat-inflating frogs, air plankton, and suchlike

A barren old tree. Impale eyes upon its branches to see throughout time, across the whole lifespan of the tree.

The Rotary Rosary - a divine implement that lets one outrace even death

"they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world"

A silent knight in dented armour sitting at the entrance of a dungeon, cutting down any monsters that try to leave

"Uncontacted Amazon tribe", but it's workers who've become lost and feral in the back shelves of an Amazon warehouse

Murrain - various infectious diseases afflicting sheep and cattle

GLOG class based on self-mutation

Boss/prisoner at bottom of dungeon able to project illusory duplicates higher up to hinder, confuse, maybe even help

Cyberspace ecosystem - insurance rate hikers stalk prey and get them into accidents, hatecurse bodyjackers seek a way into flesh to torment and kill their target, firestorm sporulators overclock digital infrastructure until the heat build-up explodes its 3-D printed offspring into the upper atmosphere, extremophile - lures and isolates people into ideological cysts, escalates and infects surveillance when their prey gets put on watchlists

Something-crawling across the ioun stones orbiting an archmage's head

A head in the sky like a low-hanging moon - decapitated monsters roam the streets - if the head can see you, then so can the monsters

Stilt-walking priests venerating the crucified corpses of giants

The Ambiguous Latch - turns windows into doors and doors into windows

Mortar-martyrs sacrifice themselves to repair the walls of the Bastion Against the End of the World

The owl-boys - awful children who perch in the woods, big black eyes and heads turned all the way around, muttering with mouths full of black fangs like a dozen beaks

Headless statue in dungeon, skulls and heads can be placed upon the stump of its neck and interrogated as speak with dead, but pissing off the head has chance of causing statue to animate as stone golem or whatever

Rune on mural depicts sequence of rooms in dungeon to move through to open secret door/disable a powerful wandering monster/etc, it's shaped like a criss-crossing squiggle or whatever

Limbic Lombrics, ethereal spell-fauna that can take up residence even in the brains of non-wizards, feeding off strong instincts and gut feelings and expelling arcane effluvia when its host feels fear or anger in the form of poltergeist activity

Hedgehog-riding hedge-knights of the prickley wilds, wearing sugar-glazed flower blossoms as armour and the horns of beetles as lance-tips

Sundial puzzle - riddle that points to number on the dial, opens secret entrance to dungeon or something at that time of day
-trap in the sundial dungeon: roof studded with lenses that focus sunlight into burning beams during daytime - same hallway is filled with shadows or similar light-fearing creatures at night - breakings lenses is easy way of disabling trap, but the optics themselves are valuable treasure if pried out
-puzzle-room in the sundial dungeon: shadows within the room are solid structures (shadows cast by obstructing light, not shadows as the monster), can rearrange objects or stand in place to cast shadow over mist or smoke to create a bridge to get treasure or somesuch

Reindeer-riding bandits raiding the sled-trains which criss-cross the frozen oceans of the utter north - trains carrying lightning-struck amber, luxurious furs, the fist-sized pearls of white oysters that cling to the underside of ice shelves, the anagathic sap of the eternal pines, scrimshawed whale ivory, auroral lights captured in crystal prisms, meteoric iron, idols of bone and hair which contain killing spirits

A helmet mounted with a walrus's head, its tusks hinged and attached to the visor
-halflings riding gazelles, using slingshots tied between their horns to launch payloads
-burbur-skin boots, impervious to acid of all sorts

To add to the "what use for languages besides being able to talk to stuff" pile:
-Goblinish: escalate any conversation to violence with vile insults, understand and potentially replicate blueprints to eccentric & risky devices
-Draconic: force enemies who've failed morale check to pay tribute, cook any raw meat that touches your tongue
-Elven: blend speech into the sounds of natural environments (wind, birdsong, etc.) rendering it imperceptible to non-Elven speakers, elven caligraphy can turn any object into a scroll at reduced expense
-Dwarven: can "speak" to artificial objects simply by understanding their construction to a great depth, cause rockslides by shouting in dwarven atop a hill

Trap & inter-dungeon level passage: machine that replaces your blood with some alchemical anti-freeze, freezes you solid, and places you on a conveyor belt that goes down into some vault. Thawing with significant source of heat revives you, but improper handling carries risk of snapping bits off.

Device like a glass harmonium strummed by a stilleto - used by Pandemonium-cults to communicate with their fiensish patrons - requires stabbing a victim in the throat, stealing their voice but leaving them alive, projecting it across the astral membranes of the planes
-cultic activities suggested by people showing up mute and amnesiac

Souls & afterlife in fantasy setting are artificial, virtual constructs created by some precursor civilization - souls are magical recordings of minds meant to be plugged into their various devices and machines or used for computations - various cults and gods were also created to cultivate particular sorts of minds/souls for various ends: war-cult for minds that would be implanted in battle-drones, ascetic-cults for regulatory systems, and so on

Near-future sci-fi: disrupted ocean temperatures and whatnot creating constant hurricanes, megastructural wind turbines set up at flooded coasts to diminish them and harvest power - ecosystem of genetically-engineered "vortex birds" circle in the perpetual aerial gyres around these installations, clearing debris and wildlife before it can jam up the workings

"Swift as the shooting star, that gilds the night
With rapid transient Blaze, she runs, she flies;
Sudden she stops nor longer can endure
The painful course, but drooping sinks away,
And like that falling Meteor, there she lyes
A jelly cold on earth."
-William Somervile, The Talisman
All slimes, oozes, etc. in the dungeon are originally descendants of fallen star, and may contain some gelatin-matrix-embedded remnant of celestial wisdom and power (the worst falling stars, and slimes descended from the same, are the offspring of Caiphon, Gibbeth, Nihal, and all the other Loathsome Lights)

Witchcraft as primitive biological weaponry - witches are warty due to viral infections, keep cats around as toxoplasmosis reservoirs, "love potions" are solutions containing behaviour-modifying parasites

Does the demon-bone sarcophagus imply the existence of an angel-skin cradle?

Modern fantasy/horror dungeon concept: ruin-complex built into or encased in ice shelf revealed by global warming, have to make your way through it to the good stuff within while it's calving off into icebergs

Magneto-shrikes rule the wrought iron corridors of the now-abandoned lake district, the finials of its fences adorned with the impaled corpses of their prey

A festival that's also a dungeon - like hero-quests from Glorantha - monsters are celebrants also participating in the festival, those killed wake up in the morning with the worst hangover of their life, layout is the same as the village, with room-houses connected by tent-tunnels, everything returns to normal at sunrise

Diabolists sometimes and silently tolerated by rulers because they make the best lawyers - one overlooked clause or loophole and it's their ass getting dragged down to hell

The lantern oil used by adventurers is rendered from the fat of hyochakushin, hence its efficacy in banishing the darkness of the underworld and burning its denizens

A mythic fantasy Dyson sphere - a golden cage once used by a crazed archmage to imprison the sun god, plunging the world into endless night

The anti-outlaw - a criminal geased Clockwork Orange-like into being totally unable to break any laws

Entry on the encounter table: literally just the witches from Macbeth/the moirae

Sci-fi horror oneshot: trapped aboard space station in decaying orbit with alien biohazard, escape pods won't launch while alien's loose, have to quarantine, kill, or jettison it within time limit to survive - or perhaps improvise your own way to survive atmospheric re-entry and rapid lithobraking

Pinwheel-shaped ferns that concentrate silicates in the edges of their leaves to make them cut like razors - spin rapidly in the wind, winding up their stalks for an equally-rapid counterspin when the rotation reaches its limit - a brutal countermeasure against grazers that makes crossing fields of the things quite dangerous

The navelgazer monks, ordinarily pacifists, can make their introspection literal and turn themselves inside-out, becoming visceral war-beasts
-the shy baron wants you to steal some of their bile to make himself a confidence-boosting Jekyll & Hyde-type potion

The Confederacy of Humps - a symbiotic micro-civilization that inhabits the fatty humps of camels - war against their former compatriots who now live below the dunes in the sweet abdomens of giant honeypot ant repletes

Bellows-beasts with cone-shaped bodies contracting sporadically and faces like a furry Hyottoko hunt goats at cliffsides, using their immensely powerful breaths to knock their prey onto the stones a long way down below - the royal forgemaster wants you to capture one alive, believes it's the key to making the perfect sword

Expedition to the Barrier Peaks-style adventure but you can repair the spaceship and go to space for further spelljammery shenanigans

Themes for GLOG wizard schools: snowglobes or other such tiny representations of things - making things tiny, making tiny things big, etc., caterpillars/butterflies, slimes, clay/bricks/pottery, stereotypical real world magician tricks like pulling rabbits out of hats, technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-type stuff, ninja wizard, bard wizard (but not lame), wizard school where every spell combines or accumulates toward an endgame like lichdom (but not lichdom) - maybe like a total survival/travel suite for various planes, wizard school that begins with a "when all you've got is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail"-type spell and the rest of their spells are about turning different sorts of problems into nails, frog wizard, shrek (storybook version) wizard, dracula wizard, origami wizard

The rangers of the snowy wastes string their bows with the beards of defeated warlords of that place, decorated with gold rings and elaborate braids, imbued with their stolen arete

Funnel idea: characters are anthropomorphic animal-people in whimsical forest - adventure reveals that they are in fact trapped in the magical hedge-maze of a bunch of wizards who created them and are gambling on their deaths & exploits - end is escape into wider world where they're occult bizarrities

Neo-Flintstoneian Western - alternate history wherein the oil barons of America discover a way to reconstitute the lifeforms that make up their oil - wagon trains pulled by triceratops, cowboys on raptor-back, artillery platforms mounted on argentinosaurus howdahs - rural populations fleeing loosed prehistoric beasts into fortified cities, fed on dole of proteinous paste made of reconstituted giant insects, cowed into dangerous industrial-proletarian servitude by Rockefeller rock-shakers - secretly-reconstituted sapient troodontids scheme in the shadows, playing every mammalian side against each other

Sword & sorcery setting based on electric universe/Saturnian sun historical conspiracies - set in our distant past, on the primordial Earth orbiting the brown dwarf star Saturn - a plasma-cocooned twilit world of lush red vegetation, exposed lost continents, lower gravity, and gigantic animals - societies led by doomed & decadent astronomer-kings living under the shadow of Earth's catastrophic orbital re-alignment - Lawful = Past, Saturnian, Chaotic = Solar, Future - floating vessels with spider-silk sails catching telluric currents

In more out-there vanilla-ish fantasy, dwarves are often depicted as made of stone or metal, and elves as plants - what would giants be by the same logic?
-colossi, huge statues of bronze or stone or whatever else brought to life? - like Talos, full of animating ichor?
-clouds/living storms descended to earth, great billowing grey hair, voices like thunder, lightning flashing in their eyes - volatile little deities who must be appeased to bring rain or withhold floods
-primordial man, closer to the cosmos, attaining longevity by abstaining from divisionary reproduction and other such asceticisms

Dungeon challenge run: tile limit (can only walk on so many 5-ft squares

4 comments:

  1. Wow - there is just one great idea after another here!

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  2. > Does the demon-bone sarcophagus imply the existence of an angel-skin cradle?
    This one is a setting on itself.
    As pretty much every line here.

    Some other ideas I really liked is one with languages and Saturnian Sun.

    Idea of what lives in camels' humps is much more interesting than what I was able to come with (little land squids, carried away by camels after all seas are dried).

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  3. Lot of great ideas in here. I realize it's somewhat at odds with my usual interests, but I particularly liked the reimagined fantasy species languages and the witches as proto-bio-weaponists.

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