Poetry Post

Haven't had "the juice" for RPG stuff lately, but don't want to go too long without posting something, so here's some poetry I've written. There will be no Joesky tax:

I.

Nobody cleans up what the rain can wash away
Nobody picks up what the water can carry away
And the glass is left stainless
And the steel is unblemished
And the concrete is left fresher than the grass
Nobody will survive when the flood comes
For there's not one virtuous, not one

II.

O treacherous sky
Don't lie blue to me
I've seen you in your darkest night
And the terror you don't care to hide

III.

Leave my body to rot in the sun
Let the flies waltz where I lie
The earth comforts not me, but you
My winner's smile an ivory epitaph

IV.

O tall oak!
Grand as you are,
Today I give thanks to the grasses:
Which have borne me soft underfoot
And sprightly unbow themselves behind me

V.

DUDE! I just LOVE the hustle and bustle
Of waves across a pond
Going nowhere, doing nothing,
But going, and doing

VI.

I saw a sparrow chase a hawk
And overtake it
That sparrow fought the hawk
And won
You may be prince of all this world
But you are only a hawk

VII.

Reflected in a plane of water
The moon does not breach that surface
Nor does it dim its light
Tossed on endless ripples
The moon vomits its supper
It drank molten silver

VIII.

A crow passed me on by
Spoke plain what others sang:
Fly in and out of sight
By spirit's flick'ring light
What deathly things can't bear
They crucify on air

IX.

Sunset slivers through the trees
Uriel draws across the water
Eden's way stands there unbarred
For those ready to drown in it

X.

I'm headed through an orangutan forest
Red and orange peeking through the green
Shrinking before man's machines

XI.

Flame's flicker made cave paintings move
Hungry life's an invitation to dance
across cool and silent stone
I can feel bones beneath my skin
and dust deeper still
I am hungry
I am dancing
The waves bear the light of the sun
they've been drinking
Under the crocodile sky
I am basking
Along the last flowers of autumn

XII.

Do you want to count to infinity with me?
Get ready, prepare - we're starting with one, two, three,
And then four! The digits are growing wild and free
Numerals fade away instantaneously
Gaping wider than words this new vision you see
Is not one that lends itself well to poetry
As the sun cannot touch deeper parts of the sea
We've counted beyond the set of humanity
Curse your birth and your taste of immortality
For the rest of forever you're stuck here with me

XIII.

Through this black and hoary sea
Shining foam surrounded me
Cresting out the inky flow:
This white bulk of Moby D.

Let me spear you with my eyes
Spill the oil that makes men wise
Else drag me in undertow
Till bloody comes the sunrise

 XIV.

The pen's set down on a winter's day
Ink sets in the chamber, loaded ice
Til warm hand shares rhythms imprecise
Old friend, we've got some more yet to say

XV.

A skate of silver sea-foam
A dream upon the deep
Sky skips waves to onward roam
And lulls them down to sleep

Stars caught under Heaven's dome
Can drive a man to weep
From salt tears springs life to loam
Our rosy crop to reap

Stratofathoms vault our home
Through them may spirit leap
Off the thin page of this tome
To shores where stands a keep

/

Life's the surface of the sea
Sandwiched between infinity
Pinched black above and blue below
This battered barge I onward row

XVI.

Man's got no monopoly on contempt
There's more than our indulgences permit
Pass stiff-staring streets, some rudeness attempt
We piss on our monuments - pigeons shit
To fly, to be from lettered law exempt
From contract to covenant in spirit
In spiting the judges, who takes more glee?
Than strutting culver-birds, once caged, now free

XVII.

I've been drinking like a fish
I've been drinking just to drown
Slurring sweetly, going down
Send me off now with a kish

Steady ground's no place for me
In lightless depths I began
She knows that I'm a merman
I belong there in the sea

Monstober

31 days, 31 monsters:

1. Hiraudeverie

In abandoned or ruined castles, a hiraudeverie may come to dwell. Not a thing of flesh and blood, but of the symbolic. It takes the form of a heraldic beast, breaking rules apparent to the trained eye - metal on metal, for example. A hiraudeverie seeks to recreate its castle, create a mock dynasty. It passes along surfaces, stone or tapestry or skin makes no difference - animating the inanimate and charming mortals in accordance with its design. The things are rare enough that only the most learned sages refer to them as hiraudeverie. The rest know them on an individual basis, e.g. the Grambolt, the Mont-hen, the Cumbersill.

2. Bletchwretch

A horrid little sort of undead born from the last gurgles of someone who's drunk themself to death. They resemble blobby, jaundiced faces leaking chunky vomit from every orifice, which inhabit the drinking vessel that killed the poor bastard who spawned them like a hermit crab.

3. Tunicatemen

Adulthood for the tunicatemen comes with a complete metamorphosis - loss of mobility, of sentience. This can be staved off with the consumption of nervous tissue. Animal tissue only delays it. Human tissue can reverse it.

4. Human Nest

The aarakocra punish hated human enemies by force-feeding them their eggs. The human is twisted into a feral caretaker, their ribcage burst into a bony nest.

5. Knight-Phrenologist

There is an asylum where the connection between flesh and soul is studied, severed from even the barest pretense of ethics. The knights-phrenologists, once prisoners there, now guard it - spikes rammed into their brains, armour bolted onto their bones. Wield gargantuan calipers with the strength to crush skulls. Accompanied by lobotomonkeys, which hump icepicks through your eye sockets.

6. Clairvoyvore

Something like a living crystal ball. They can be scryed through, and allow the scryer to drool a proxy made of mucus into the scryed scene. For this it demands a living eye, and cares not whether the eye comes from the scryer.

7. Imp, Greathorn

An imp that manifests great pride despite its low stature will come to grow the horns of its infernal superiors - to the extent that its head is weighed down, made to drag in the dust. Delusional and blind, nonetheless has a devastating charge attack that can knock those it hits right into hell.

8. Vicaria Exilis

Maternal conduits for powers of the Upper Planes. The incarnation of such powers is a worst-case scenario, for the powers themselves and for everyone in the vicinty - forcible mass beatification, the transmutation of entire cities to salt and colourless flame, and similar events follow in their wake.

9. Zibethinoid

A symbiotic organism like lichen, but combining echinoderm and plant rather than algae and fungus. Each mature specimen bears a shell-encased fruit, which would require a team of miners or explosives to crack open before it's fully ripened - and the stages before it's ripened are by far the most valuable, for the ready fruit produces a lethal stench.

10. Contortnik

Horrible humanoids of unknown origin. Have something like a swallowing attack, but instead of putting you in their belly they fold you up impossibly and stuff you in the nearest container.

11. Salticidaemon

Also called Jumping Spiderkin. Kind of like the Germans or the Japanese, in that they're pretty chill most of the time, but when they wild out they really wild out. The female of the species is larger, stronger, and by cruel yet nigh-undeniable instinct consumed by a ravenous hunger after mating. A sufficiently-impressive display by the male can help her resist it for a time - younger and less-talented males often resort to cattle-raiding or outright kidnapping to sate their mate, igniting feuds and endearing them to no one

They don't weave full webs, but use single strands of silk ingeniously - as bungee-cords, instruments, lassos, tracking devices, and so on.

12. Chuunibyorgs

Believed to be the vestiges left behind of apprentice wizards who destroyed themselves chasing power beyond their grasp. Latch parasitically onto the similarly incautious - children, the senile, drunks, etc., letting their hosts access wild magical talents that inevitably destroy them.

13. Quashling

A dwarf convicted of damage to property while intoxicated, failure to comply with an invitation to the wedding or funeral of a great house, cutting and/or fraying of an elder's beard, or leased work tool-related sodomy, and who was sentenced to being crushed in a hydraulic punishment press.

Near-endlessly deformable and able to hover undulatingly, retaining just about only a preternatural sense of stone and an obsession with gold and alcohol. Erroneously identified by Rubigallega the Architecton in her Commentaries on Child-Eating Things as being a Tenser's Floating Disk spell transmuted into flesh, a misidentification which has since been repeated by countless less-prominent authours.

14. Neomolynsion

An abnormally large and cunning sort of salamander. Its bite sucks the age out of you, eventually leaving you in a fetal state it can limply slurp up. Those who try to take advantage of the neomolynsion to maintain their youth find themselves undergoing a terrible and malforming pubescence.

15. Slobbermand

Aberrant extraplanar foodies. They value rarity and difficulty of acquisition of ingredients above flavour, texture, and ethics. Bear weaponized cooking technologies to fight and trade with.

16. Summerland Corvan

Animate effigy and imperial terror-weapon. Followed by an unseasonable cold that deepens into a deadly winter. When its work is done it returns to the place of its creation, and disgorges the stolen warmth, light, and life.

17. Manus Polymitarius

Weave their lashes like a cat's cradle, into binding webs and cutting wires. Each has either a left hand or a right hand as a "head", and seeks to carve another into a matching mate.

18. Gomoire

A stalker in darkness. Invisible to any who do not have the dust of sleep about their eyes, it leaves its mark upon a sleeping victim three times across three dreams - on the third it takes possession of their body, and trafficks them to the shadow-courts and the night-hags.

19. Yatsitso

Hungers for eggs, yet its poor vision leads it to swallowing many things that only vaguely resemble eggs - large gems, magic orbs, severed heads, and so on. Perhaps the remnant of a Bird Age.

20. Stillborn of the Death Gods

There now reign three gods of death - Wee Jas, Muckle Jezza, and their child Nerull - but once there were only two, and many tragedies shared between them. Being so endeared to death and the divine, these tragedies did not lie still, but quickened to the devouring of their kin and their works.

21. Serrassiel

Outsiders that hail from the more chaotic planes. Must remain in constant motion, in action and in thought, or else they dissipate. Very fast, and very sharp - in just brushing their skin in passing can rasp away your flesh.

22. Encyclodont

Agents of the Library of the Last Scholar. Anything they bite off is converted to information stored in their heads - only strong magic is protection against this. Some have gone rogue, and hunt down interesting stories to digest.

23. Oasis Angel

A giant insect which buries itself in arid regions, secreting a clear fluid which rises up through the earth to form false oases. Creatures that drink from such an oasis fall under the angel's spell, suffering hallucinations that led them to worship and feed victims to it.

24. Killer Hammock

In fact a sort of predatory, fast-moving sloth. Can snap out its neck to bite from quite a ways up in the trees. Fortunately unable to move beyond crawl outside of a forest.

25. Behatted Brute

Possesses a sticky, strong, and flexible membrane atop its head to which it affixes camouflage allowing it to disguise itself in an opening: as a door, filling up a hole in a forest floor, and so on. No sense of smell, yet nauseated by spicy foods.

26. Candelabrumate

Chthonian ectoparasite, lives affixed to the rooves of caves. Drains the energy and fat stores of prey through its proboscis, leaving them lethargic and ravenous. Its bioluminescent bulbs are used as a source of light by underground sorts who still need light to see.

27. Dinoflagellant

Zealous ascetics who scourged themselves into macroscopic single-celled organisms. Extort the faithful to do the same. Their dogma is encoded in reams of RNA, ululating cytoplasm reciting wet prayers.

28. Hate Seed

An innovation of the weaponeers of Acheron. Suffuses a region with tarnished metal mutagens and psychic pulses of rage. A potent siege weapon in its own right.

29. Mephit, Enamel

Low-level liasions between the lords of the quasi-elemental plane of minerals and flesh. Tough, utilitarian personalities addicted to routines. Locked in an endless, genocidal war with tooth fairies.

30. Wereworm

Awful, envious beings - not as physically threatening as many other were-creatures, but their transformation allows them to infest and manipulate other people as gut-dwelling puppetmasters.

31. Truffleruff

Creatures of impeccable courtesy. Become violently enraged if this courtesy is not returned. Often impose themselves as uninvited guests in well-to-do households.

Nephilimpunk

Inspired by my post yesterday: https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2023/09/giant-animal-bones-vs-metals.html - a correction to the math in that post, storm giant bones wouldn't need to be 41 times stronger than human bones, but instead only 19.3 times stronger.

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,

That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.

And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

-Genesis 6:1-4

The old world was wicked - the old world was drowned, all its wickedness washed away.

The sons of Noah, and their sons, and their sons after them have wandered from the foothills of Ararat, and once again is the earth divided - into cities, into nations, into the righteous and the wicked.

Warrior-tyrants have raised themselves above all peoples, bedecked in armaments of bone. Not the pale and fragile bones of mortal beasts, but the red, invulnerable bones of the nephilim - those men of renown in days ancient even now, hybrids of angel and human. Half-spirit, they did not perish wholly with their bodies, but wander the earth as immaterial, whispering shades. It was these nephilitic shades that led great Nimrod to their bones, bade him sharpen them into spears and arrows, and to lay the infernal foundations of the tower that may yet reach heaven in Babel.

The nephilim too are divided - while they all long to return to their lives of power and glory, and all hate and envy the descendants of Noah, they vary in how they've adapted to their new existence. Some have taken it hard, and rage near-mindlessly across the lands, spreading madness and disease. Some conspire with warlords, leading them to their own boneyards for the tools to carve out their conquests and their monuments - send them dreams and murmurs to encourage their brutality - and then lead would-be rebels to the same, with any outcome furthering these nephilims' goal of slaughter. And some enter into a twisted partnership with humans - witches, sorcerers - creating illusions, terror, and illnesses for them in return for service and sacrifices.

Point is: you're the downtrodden underclass in this changing world of warlords armed with super-strong bones and witches in league with evil ghosts. Can you take the weapons and allies of your masters and make them yours, flee into a further wilderness untouched by mankind since the waters fell, or achieve a true miracle?

Giant Animal Bones Vs. Metals

I had a thought the other day: giant animals in general seem like they'd make non-metalworking cultures more competitive with metalworking ones, what with the much greater physical and mechanical strength of their bones from which tools, weapons, and armour could be made.

This post is me doing some basic math to get a quick idea of just how comparable giant animal bones and metal might be as materials.

First, the square-cube law: When an object undergoes a proportional increase in size, its new surface area is proportional to the square of the multiplier and its new volume is proportional to the cube of the multiplier. Stated simply: if you take a guy and make him twice as tall, his mass will increase eight times over. Unless you change up his proportions some, this is going to be hell on his knees - in fact, the average human thighbone can bear up to about ten times the average human weight before breaking, so our 2x giant is cutting it very close indeed.

A number of factors can affect bone strength - its macro- and micro-structure, chemical composition, etc. One of the most important of these factors is bone thickness - compare the bones of a person and an elephant, for example - but I don't think this would affect the bones' strength so much when they've been worked into most sorts of tools. Therefore, giant animals which retain similar proportions to their base-size animals will likely have the most useful bones when it comes to competing with metal or stone.

Let's work through an example: At 26 feet, a storm giant is 4.33 times taller than a 6-foot tall man, and thus 81.18 times heavier (~14,207 pounds, assuming man's weight is 175 pounds), without much change in proportions based on most pictures of storm giants.

Artstation - Ruben Smith

Assuming the giant's bone structure is largely the same, with his thighbone 4.33 times stronger than the man's based on cross-section density, it'll be able to handle about 26,000 pounds of compressive force - maybe enough for the giant to walk without breaking its own legs, but this is only based on the strength of the thighbone, and not the feet/tendons/spine/etc. Also, storm giants are often depicted wearing metal armour, which would also be much heavier than a person's armour, so they'd have to be able to carry that around too without buckling under the stress - so their bones and other tissues must be much stronger than proportions would suggest.

To get an idea of how much stronger, let's put that giant under a bit more stress by making him jump up and down. If my back-of-the-napkin math is accurate, this will apply 139,229 Newtons of force to his thighbone - well above the bone's ability to withstand 113,299 Newtons. Should have stuck to walking, Shaq.

Our average man, by comparison, would have his thighbone withstand 774 Newtons, well within his max tolerance of 26,166 Newtons. The ratio of the giant's thigh strength vs. force is 1.23 - the man's 0.03. Therefore to be able to move about as well as the man, the giant's bones must be about 41 times stronger, rather than 4.33 times. Let's see how that compares to metals.

Ultimate Tensile Strength:
Human bone - 130 MPa
Steel - 2,693 MPa (upper end)
Giant bone - 5,330 MPa

Compressive Strength:
Human bone - 131 MPa
Steel - 1,500 MPa (upper end)
Giant bone - 5,371 MPa

I didn't expect the difference to be this extreme! What could make bones this strong? Reinforcement with strontium instead of calcium? Carbon nanotubes? Perhaps a bigger nerd would know. I don't even know how you'd begin to work bones this strong.

This is of course on the extreme end - most dire animals in D&D I could find the measurements of were only 4-8x larger than their base-size animal, and there's smaller giants like hill giants, etc. There are properties like ductility and conductivity where metals would be preferable to giant bones, but in general metalworkers are going to be mogged by bonemongers.

If my math's off, feel free to pop off in the comments.

D10x10 Silly Cities

Click the button below to generate your city:

Special thanks to Spwack for the generator generator here: http://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html, and also to deus ex parabola and Phlox for help brainstorming.

Bonus: Outrageous deformities of fashionable lapdogs

D10	Where is this city situated?
1	On top of some coastal hills.
2	A cluster of islands close to shore.
3	A lush volcanic plain.
4	A verdant river valley.
5	Around a spring flowing from a mountainside.
6	On a vital resupply point along an ancient trade route.
7	At the intersection of two major rivers.
8	On the shore of a sprawling lake - in fact built a ways onto the lake itself, on floating platforms.
9	Atop a seaside cliff, trailing down to a natural harbour.
10	It straddles a strait between two continents.

D10	What is the legend of this city’s founding?
1	Two armies met on the battlefield and laid down their arms, choosing to live together rather than kill each other on behalf of distant masters.
2	A great monster was slain on its site, and the city was built up around its corpse to butcher it.
3	A fool that endeared himself to the lord of the genies wished for it to be built in a night.
4	A child was born able to walk right out of the womb. An awed crowd followed that child to the site of the city-that-would-be, where the child transformed into a tree that stands proud to this day.
5	Is that it was originally the abode of a pantheon of gods long since vanished from the world.
6	A priest tricked a mighty demon into making a bet to carry a great weight on its back, then had the city built atop the demon to hold it in place.
7	A guild of jobless masons sought to create demand for their work by creating the city as a demonstration of their full capabilities.
8	A philosopher and their students left their corrupt home to create a new society based on enlightened principles.
9	A persecuted people fled from far afield, following a waltzing star, settling at the spot it shone above.
10	A seed fell from the heavens, spreading its roots as the city's flagstones, its sprouting stump the keep at the city’s core. Its first inhabitants were astounded astronomers.

D10	Who rules this city?
1	A line of queen-mothers who hold the patron god of the city within themselves in fetal incarnation. It's prophesied that the city will fall if the god is ever born.
2	A constitutional monarchy - the reigning monarch's power is limited by a congress of the haunting ghosts of past monarchs, a measure intended in part to discourage regicide.
3	A cabal of plutocrats, once a party of great adventurers who purchased influence over the city with their hoarded loot. Though at first they were forward-thinking, competent rulers, time and indulgence have softened them into squabbling, decadent despots.
4	A sleeping dragon, who is kept asleep and posed the conditions and questions of governance by an elite fraternity of hypnotists. In its dreams the dragon is made unsure of its own identity, so that its rulings are (at least theoretically) fair to every citizen.
5	An assembly of the oldest members of every family that calls it home.
6	A parliament of gladiators who debate by duelling, putting their lives on the line for policy proposals.
7	A sapient grimoire, the creation of a famed archmage, who distributes its spells to favoured servants.
8	A narcocrat who alone holds the catalyst to distill the highly addictive drug which is doled out like grain would be elsewhere.
9	A circle of blind crones who read oracular edicts in the warp and weft of the tapestry woven by an automatic loom.
10	A secret senate, their policies enforced by a secret police force. Their membership, even the surety of their existence at all, are unknown.

D10	How is this city defended?
1	Legions of hooting apes. The things are thieving pests in peacetime, but are rallied to territorial, dominance-display violence by beast-masters in flanged masks should the city fall under attack.
2	Poisonous gas siphoned from an underground lake beneath the city, stored in reservoirs in the walls and strategically-placed towers. The gas is released on invaders as waves of roiling, invisible death.
3	Battalions of myconid mercenaries wielding stipe-wood pikes, and paid with the city's corpses for their compost-heaps. Evading this macabre tribute is a dire crime.
4	Citizen-militias recruited from each neighbourhood, each specializing in their own weapon and tactical role.
5	Phalanxes of hoplites drawn from the city's propertied men. The lengths of their spears are proportional to the size of the property they own.
6	Staggered lines of fortifications and siege engines.
7	Giant janissaries taken as children from orphanages and the families of criminals and fed alchemically-derived hormones.
8	Waves of berserker shock-troopers inured to pain and exhaustion.
9	Colossal bronze bull-headed statues which have stood there since before the city was founded. When fed the blood of children they’ll rise to roaring life and destroy the city’s enemies.
10	Gimmick-warriors and clown-guards mounted on a diverse menagerie of beasts, too varied for any doctrine to be effective against them all.

D10	What's this city's architecture like?
1	Crowded, with streets and alleys nigh-indistinguishable, and murals designed to guide traffic.
2	It's got a lot of fluked and spiraled towers
3	Radiating out in angular shapes from its core.
4	Stocky and hexagonal.
5	Hyper-elaborate gothic.
6	Organic, integrated with gardens, groves, and pastures.
7	Garishly-painted, with lots of swooping lines.
8	Archaic brutalism, concrete piled haphazardly.
9	An attempt to force rural manors into a compressed space.
10	Stacked wood-and-brick ziggurats.

D10	What’s a common sight in the streets of this city?
1	Big masses of fluff rolling around like tumbleweeds - shed by the ubiquitous and floccose feral cats.
2	Old ladies selling homebrew from handcarts.
3	Braziers packed with smouldering sweet-scented herbs to cover up urban stenches.
4	Stylites meditating in hammocks strung between the upper storeys of buildings.
5	Palanquins paraded about bearing illustrated signboards promoting public morals.
6	Waystone-idols crusted with candles, meant to guide the lost dead back home.
7	Relays of criers hollering messages to each other rapidly across the city.
8	Children and drunks playing a sport which involves bouncing a dried gourd off walls while whacking each other with switches.
9	Dancers in lewd and ludicrous costumes performing by shopfronts and the residences of the wealthy.
10	Street-corner preachers siccing their micro-cults on each other.

D10	What is the popular fashion of this city?
1	Foot-high platform clogs, nested in by colourful breeds of termite. The cultivation of exclusive new shades has become a matter of life and death in the city.
2	The back of the head is shaved and painted like a skull - it’s said to keep an eye out for your death sneaking up from behind.
3	A cape dense with pockets and folds, each fold a different swatch of fabric. Experienced wearers can rearrange the thing in a moment, showing the outside world only the fabrics which suit their relative station in regard to sumptuary laws.
4	A corrugated choker which channels and amplifies the sound of its wearer’s heartbeat, accompanying them with a personal bass rhythm.
5	To go about atop a tiny chariot pulled by cats, ducks, or similarly-sized critters.
6	Puke-yellow tattoos put upon you by your greatest enemy. The more hideous the tattoos, the greater your enemy’s hate for you must be, and the more fearsome you’re considered to be to have earned that hate.
7	A chain of mummified sword-hands cut from those you’ve defeated in honourable duels.
8	Little fruiting gardens carried in urns atop the head.
9	Skintight designs of feathers and tar, painfully scraped off when they become too dry to move in.
10	To be accompanied by a sort of lapdog bred for indolence and outrageous deformity. The more obvious effort it takes to keep the thing alive, the more prestigious it is.

D10	What's the signature dish of this city?
1	Fertilized birds' eggs, boiled and mashed into a paste then scooped up with flatbread.
2	Pastries filled with fermented fruit jams.
3	Sour pickle dumplings.
4	Deep-fried lamb trotters.
5	Smoked otter sausage.
6	Nuts boiled in mulled wine.
7	Raw shellfish in a vinegar sauce.
8	Roasted brain-and-marrow pudding.
9	Mixed and salted rinds of pork and citrus.
10	A spicy noodle soup made with spiders, toads, and serpents.

D10	What’s troubling this city from within?
1	A warlock mafia making ill-advised magic deals with a devil, securing an unstable and grating position in the city's underworld.
2	Pigeons that have learned how to hollow out and dopily operate the bodies of its destitute dead (at least until the pigeons fill them up with too much poop to continue) - typically just to steal seeds & other such feed.
3	A mass movement of proles aiming to overthrow the existing government and replace it with a democracy.
4	A league of assassins employed to resolve conflicts among the city's upper class is jacking up its prices.
5	A necromancer has barricaded herself in the city's catacombs, with an expanding army of the undead.
6	Scholar-squids have taken over its sewers and canals, clouding its waters with the ink of their arguments.
7	A mysterious party is sabotaging the preparations for an upcoming festival - and they're escalating from mere mischief to poisoning the wine, and who knows what next.
8	Crews of sleepwalkers tearing up basements and plazas trying to dig down to something.
9	An arsonist is striking buildings seemingly at random - in truth they are burning a sigil to open a gateway to the elemental plane of fire.
10	A serial killer stalking its streets, committing murders that should be impossible.

D10	What’s troubling this city from without?
1	An apocalyptic storm is approaching - the instrument of divine wrath.
2	A small army of inquisitors chasing down a heresiarch rumoured to be in the city.
3	Crusaders on the march, supposedly aligned with the city, pillaging and running riot.
4	A plague growing throughout the countryside.
5	A hobgoblin warlord aiming to set his throne in the city.
6	A spreading peasant rebellion gradually cutting it off from outside supply lines.
7	The balance of power among its allies is shifting, and once-trusted neighbours are becoming potential enemies.
8	A wind-lord of the upper air who wants to subject the city as their satrapy.
9	A drought is causing the price of food to skyrocket.
10	A horde of were-locusts extorting the stock of their granaries.