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.

Slush Pile 8

Names: Avino, Etilig, Zelorn, Cathalo, Bick, Manap, Ogal, Mizoolah, Habiru, En-Yen-Yee, Warlumderby, Shiersha, Haxty Gron, Portry, Gurdielark, Pisnong, Bellganver, Umeziya (those last two came to me in dreams), Nephila (a sort of spider)

Perfume dungeon - perfumer's guild developed scent so intoxicating it drove people mad, and so the whole structure was entombed
-underwater access canals used to drag whales live into the perfumery to harvest their ambergris

Word Corner:
Chancrous - relating to chancres, ulcer at the site of entry of a pathogen
Ouabain - toxic latex from plants
Orbicular - having the shape of a flat ring or disk / having a rounded convex or globular shape
Sequela - a condition which is the consequence of a previous disease or injury
Akht - Avestan, pest, or saturated by poison
Drem - dot, dust, fish-scale, limitless impurity
Amadou - a spongy materiak derived from the hoof fungus, useful for firestarting, water-absorbing, and making items of clothing (like a sort of leather)
Rammalie - Communication with other worlds and aeons through patterns on pebbles and desert sand
Dracolatry - worship of the ancient serpents, of their forms in volcanos and underground rivers, flows of heated power
Zampone - an Italian sausage encased in a hollowed-out pig's foot
Anamnesis - the remembering of things from a previous existence
Buckboard - a four-wheeled wagon of simple construction meant to be drawn by a horse or other large animal. A distinctly American utility vehicle, the buckboard has no springs between the body and the axles. The suspension is provided by the flexible floorboards of the body and a leaf spring under the seat(s). The buckboard has no sideboards on the body, leaving the floor quite mobile. In rough terrain, the floor can flex and "buck", lending the vehicle its name.
Scarabesque - like arabesque, but for scarabs. Apparently also the name of an enemy from the Sonic videogame franchise.
Shaunchliest - an adjective for a place which most resembles a public washroom without officially being a public washroom
Jettatura - Italian name for the evil eye, lit. "to throw/thrower of bad luck"
Malandrin - Like Oiselier, other name for Cagots
Siriger - A man of sorrows
Thoral - Having to do with a couple’s marital bed and/or nuptials
Feretory - A receptacle to hold the relics of saints, the chapel in which such a receptacle is kept
Caranain - A temple of the Amazons
Ashglory - Paul Celan's special new word

Stricken-plays are performed by lepers wearing the masks of gods and demons, to ward off sickness and win some food

The words of the book come to live in the eyes of their readers, changing their colour, their shape, revealing things once hidden from them

The plane-spanning world-tree Yggdrasil and Mount Olympus are remnants of old Orders, old orderings of the planes, before the time of Sigil and its Great Wheel
-Languages too, as expressions of these Orders - alphabets with letters of tellurian curlings - the infinite coilings of the cosmic dragon Io, trapezohedral blocks of mountain-speech, ambigiously and fractally grammatical branchings of arbor-tongue

Chimeristry - the art of forging together disparate flesh
-the clay surgeons of Ogal practice a medical/cosmetic form of chimeristry - as the name suggests, they imitate divine creation by molding clay onto flesh, whether to heal wounds, replace limbs, and shape features, drawing on the wick of their patient's remaining lifespan to animate these additions, being incapable of genesis ex nihilo

A monster with a beard of human entrails

Orcs (or elves or what have you) as a linguistic development - sapir-whorfery, or relation of sign and signified - the pronounced words of war and dehumanization deform the face that speaks them, spurring on the growth of armoured bone and gut-spilling tusks

"man-shaped stains on the brightness of the air"
"Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil."
-from The Great Divorce

Jesuit transplant surgeons so adept in the science of transubstantiation that they can make bread into a serviceable (superior! given that it's the flesh of God) substitute for any human organ

Bone-ash Flames: The bones of tyrants and rebels, killers and executioners, exhumed from their sepulchres and kindled with a fire to torment their evil ghosts - the bone-ash flame is perpetual once lit, and everything in its light turns the white of a corpse

An angel who is a knot of iron with crystalline hands, loosing arrows of error on those too mighty to have opposition besides their own mistakes

There's a village out in the dusty red highlands that buries its dead atop a plateau where no grass grows and no birds nest. These dead shrivel and harden over the years down in the earth, until they are a black lump smaller than a peach pit. When the villagers go to war they exhume these lumps and use them as bullets in slings or guns. On the battlefield they are undefeated.

A tutelary spirit who takes the form of a hunched old woman with two extraordinarily saggy breasts which she keeps rolled up on scrolls - upon their skin are scarred the words of many books. Talks like a storybook witch, cackling, calling people "my dearies".

Crowdsourced debt collection app - no longer phonecalls, now vigilantes are given the identities of debtors to beat and humiliate, with a social network & prizes for posting the videos

Man wearing the underside of a pelican's beak as a hood, eyeholes poked through it, still reeking of fish and the sea.

Continued gerontocracification of the United States - the Villages expanded to fill most of American southeast - drone strikes ordered on scam call centers in India

The city of Harmonious Wallab in the cradle of the western mountains invited a star to earth - a rogue star, hated by its kind. The sky is permanently overcast by great hydrothermal misting-machines to obscure their wrath. The rogue star sits in a position of honour in Wallab's palace, declaring new forgery-fates for petitioners.

A nation of trolls who nail spikes into their brains, using their regenerative ability to survive the process while supressing their hunger, aggression, etc. - a nation of surgically-enhanced philosopher-ascetics

Volcanoes are trepanning the Earth

Funeral strippers - real

Barebones plot: Noblewoman dies, suitors believe estate is now haunted, picked off one by one as they believe her ghost is wrathful and must be put to rest - actually a kenku brigand mimicking her voice along with some tricks (dress hung on tree branch in wind) to fake the haunting while it kills off the people on the estate to take their stuff and loot it

Rats that crawled off slave-ships infused with evil (stole this one from Braindead)

Ravenloftery - Vistani are not an ethnic group, but an occult one: those who've made a pact with the spirit Ravallah to be able to traverse the Mist

Alien with worm-like organs/symbiotes instead of muscles, which rearrange around their skeleton with suction cups or somesuch instead of being anchored with tendons

Experiments with stem cells unleash terrible new organs/mutations that had been previously locked away in the human genome (stole this one from Rabid)

A living pronoun (what?) - boomer horror... like if Stephen King's brain was melted by tumblr instead of Trump

The whole "secret behind Roman concrete" thing is a cover-up - the real secret is using ashes from children sacrificed to Moloch - that'll give you concrete you can build an empire on

There are sixteen "spokes" of the Great Wheel, great tower-cities between planes, lesser counterparts to Sigil's "hub" - undermining them would be key to destroying the Wheel and replacing it with another paradigm

The continent of Antarctica bears an uncanny resemblance to the human brain because it's a nexus of our species' morphogenetic field - megastructural projects (or the destruction of megastructures already constructed) built there can control human thought - "sanity" and SAN loss in a Cthulhu-y context is the result of Antarctican structures - Cthulhu entites are sealed there because they are dark exudate of the collective unconscious - why Antarctica? Magnetic pole (The Magnetic Pole! Hero to downtrodden Polish workers throughout the E.U.)
-Supervillain: Buzzkill, drank out of a paper straw infested with wasp larvae, now has a hive in her throat and can scream out angry wasps

Whip made of a giant snail's radula
-giant animals in general seem like they'd make non-metalworking cultures more competitive with metalworking ones, what with the much greater tensile strength and whatsuch

Amazon Stork (tm) delivers genetically-customized babies by drone right to your doorstep

Modern horror seed - billionaire-type stuck in line for the peak of Mount Everest makes bargain with space-entity (demon) so as not to freeze to death waiting - it can only reach through the atmosphere from space at its thinnest point (why not planes? uhhh, the metal frame acts as a Faraday cage, or at least enough of one to keep it out)

The hobgoblin's less-popular cousins: slobgoblins, snobgoblins, blobgoblins, cobgoblins, lobgoblins, knobgoblins, sobgoblins, jobgoblins
-Goblinoid trifecta of taking: goblins - theft, hobgoblins - slavery, bugbears - murder
-Bugbear variants based on sorts of fear: paranoia agents, gutwrenchers, creepy-crawlers, spinetinglers, nailbiters

Planet of ghosts - result of astral projection experiments of CIA and KGB during the Cold War, souls stranded thousands of light years from Earth

Druids as counter-necromancers - instead of going forward to death, they move back to pimeval & protean life

Far future sci-fi or crazy alien artifact - weapon based on dark energy, instantaneously expands space within a target, tearing it apart no matter how durable it may be - synthetic muonic matter, etc.

Cursed DIY instruction videotape, lets watchers perform horrible & otherwise-impossible home improvement projects, like a dishwasher rigged up to a living person's digestive tract, or an endless hallway

Gurus & yogis kidnapped for illegal chakra transplants

Grey market hormone supplier's supply tainted - by aliens? - those who take it begin to transition to FORBIDDEN GENDERS

(From Starship Troopers, kind of) Psychic powers as diplomatic device of hive-mind alien species, those that receive them tend toward amenable political-mental structure (telepathic hubs)

Heavy-handed metaphor - sci-fi future where immortality is invented (but only affordable to really rich people), works by turning every cell in your body into a sort of cancer

Common Extrasolar Colony Collapse Conditions:
-Brainfreeze: Anomalous ice crystal formation in brains of cryonically-frozen colonists lead to unacceptable levels of death, amnesia, and madness
-Edenic Dereliction: Conditions on new world support human thriving without advanced technology - colonists abandon utility to wider galactic civilization in favour of ease
-Temporal Stutter: Experimental FTL used in colony ship leads to multiple versions of the ship arriving at colony site, resulting in disastrous causal pruning
-AI Cult: Where colonists are grown from fetuses, religious-based instruction is useful to ensure obedience - a mistake in programming the AI which performs the role of the central god or prophet of this colonial religion can result in the AI acting as if it were truly worthy of worship, leading to mass human sacrifice or other non-utility of the colony

Monsters with castes or instars or whatever based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs - most common are animalistic eaters, above them are warriors, top is philosopher-kings, etc.

High/dark/wood elves aren't different kinds of elves but the same elves at different points in time somehow smushed together into the same temporality - wood elves are ancestral form, just coming down from the trees, dark elves from apocalyptic future, just emerging from buried bunkers

Dwarves divided by the type of stone they dig in - sedimentary dwarves animate the fossils they exhume as stony undead servants, igneous dwarves worship volcanic gods, etc.

Hot bunk rentals - do they already do this? You rent out your lil pod apartment for 8 hours a day

(From Tetsuo) Cyberpsychosis isn't from hooking robotic prostheses up to your nervous system exactly, but from the will of rust infecting the metal, which desires to crumble the whole world into the uncaring dust of the universe

3D6x6 Aliens

To populate your cantina scenes, for sci-fi rpgs that use the D&D stats - there's gotta be at least one.

Click the button below to generate your alien:

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

3D6	Strength
3	3: An amorphous body they must consciously force into shape
4	4: A cone-shaped body
5	5: Oversized extremities, relative to their body
6	6: An oddly hollow-seeming body
7	7: A twiggy body
8	8: A flattened form
9	9: A globular form
10	10: A reasonably humanoid body
11	11: A ratite-esque shape
12	12: A literally barrel-shaped torso
13	13: A radial body plan
14	14: A torpedo-like shape
15	15: a broad, columnar body
16	16: A centauroid body
17	17: A segmented body like an arthropod
18	18: A tank-like profile

3D6	Dexterity
3	3: Clawed nubs like a caterpillar's legs
4	4: Semi-flexible hooves
5	5: Clunky pincers
6	6: A long, flexible trunk
7	7: Wings with clawed tips
8	8: Wicked talons
9	9: Slug-like muscular frills
10	10: Grabby fronds
11	11: Hydra-like extra heads with dextrous lips
12	12: Prehensile feet and tail
13	13: Six pairs of arms
14	14: Manipulator-pads covered in suction cups
15	15: A "beard" of pronged feelers
16	16: Limbs that can change their shape to a limited degree based on need
17	17: Hands with branching digits
18	18: A mass of tentacles

3D6	Constitution
3	3: Soft flesh coated in collected detritus
4	4: Dripping, gelatinous flesh
5	5: Papery skin like a wasp hive, that they must regularly eat and regurgitate
6	6: Perfectly smooth, rubbery skin
7	7: Skin covered in fine and patchy hair
8	8: Fine scales that shed often
9	9: Deeply-wrinkled skin, like a naked mole rat's
10	10: A covering of feathers
11	11: A body covered in tick-like symbiotes
12	12: A shaggy coat of fur
13	13: A dense and warty hide
14	14: A heavy shell
15	15: A bony, thick-skinned faceplate
16	16: An armoured hide studded with osteoderms
17	17: Bark growing all over their body
18	18: Quartz-crystal skin

3D6	Intelligence
3	3: An inability to communicate except through grunts and growls
4	4: An extremely limited vocabulary
5	5: An inability to lower their volume
6	6: A shrieky, high-pitched voice
7	7: A malapropistic vocabulary
8	8: A stoner-type accent
9	9: A rapid-fire manner of speaking
10	10: A raspy voice
11	11: A habit of refering to themself in the third person
12	12: A nasally voice
13	13: A slow, rumbling voice
14	14: A whispery voice
15	15: A baroque vocabulary and tendency to ramble
16	16: A melodic voice
17	17: A posh accent
18	18: A robotic, flat affect

3D6	Wisdom
3	3: No apparent sensory organs
4	4: Telescoping, probing appendages
5	5: A crusty, cyclopean eye
6	6: Twitching setae
7	7: Tubular spiracles
8	8: Bulging compound eyes
9	9: A forking tongue that flicks at the air
10	10: Long curling whiskers
11	11: Hundreds of tiny eyes
12	12: Columns of snorting nostrils
13	13: Tall, disc-shaped ears
14	14: Plumy antennae
15	15: A trio of gently waving eyestalks
16	16: A cybernetic visor
17	17: A translucent dome full of receptors
18	18: An organ like a satellite dish

3D6	Charisma
3	3: Maggot-like endosymbiotes crawling in and out of sores across their body
4	4: A horrid stench
5	5: A lamprey-like mouth
6	6: Protruding boils with things swimming around inside them
7	7: A stiff, sucking proboscis
8	8: Eversible guts they use to externally digest food
9	9: Visible iridescent flatulence
10	10: Curling tusks
11	11: Large eyespots
12	12: Ballooning vocal sacs
13	13: Elaborate mandibles
14	14: A bioluminescent lure
15	15: Proud horns
16	16: A colourful crest
17	17: Flower-like tufts
18	18: Big ol’ honkin’ titties, regardless of sex or class - might technically be swim bladders, eggs-sacs, or brood-pouches rather than mammary glands

Bonus Pictures: