D6x6 Interesting Ibixians

Ibixians are official D&D goat-people.

Click the button below to generate your ibixians:

Special thanks to Spwack for the generator generator here: 

D6	These ibixians resemble
1	Bagots, with broad and swooping horns, black heads, and white bodies.
2	Damascus goats - very cute while young, horrendously ugly when mature.
3	Dutch Landraces, with long beards and shaggy coats.
4	Angora goats - they've got coats of wooly mohair.
5	Nigerian Dwarfs - they're just little guys.
6	Kamoris, with long ears and calico-like fur colouration.

D6	These ibixians live
1	as mountainfold herders who sometimes sweep down into the lowlands in great bleating war-parties.
2	in cities that are downright hostile terrain to humans, full of precarious slopes and ledges.
3	in hidden vales and the dark hearts of forests, committing atrocities for the pleasure of their demon-god Baphomet.
4	in a literally parallel society - horizontally parallel to be exact - in narrow towers and the walkways between, due to obscure and ancient law regarding permissible ratios of land ownership (Goat Tower).
5	as anarcho-primitivist guerillas undermining the works and strictures of civilization.
6	as slash-and-burn grazers - they slash your livestock to fertilize the ground and burn your fields to make room for delicious grasses.

D6	These ibixians
1	shave criminals and make of their wool shame-garments.
2	chew the shoots of a sort of blue bamboo, which grants them euphoria and sonourous belches.
3	coat the horns of their ancestors in clays and resins to make them conduits to the otherworld.
4	make hollows in their hooves which they fill with beads to enhance the music of their dancing.
5	find eating meat to be the height of barbarity, a sure sign of an irrational mind.
6	include the elongated (murine?) pupil as a common motif in fabrics and jewelry.

D6	These ibixians view goats
1	essentially the same way we see monkeys.
2	as a lost tribe of their kind cursed for some misdeed.
3	as their exclusive property, and human goatherds as bastard thieves.
4	as shameful hook-ups.
5	as artifacts of a previous, unfinished cosmos.
6	as potential family - they can turn goats into more ibixians by feeding them special concoctions.

D6	These ibixians go into battle
1	with shields painted with their personal sigils, and edges they've chewed up in their fighting frenzies.
2	with long lances they use in leaping attacks.
3	to the beat of drums stretched with the skin of their slain enemies.
4	strapped with smouldering pots - if they're struck with a blow that smashes a pot, toxic fumes billow out around them and their opponent.
5	wielding tall and wickedly-hooked falxes.
6	directly only when cornered - they prefer using their superior mobility to harass and ambush.

D6	Ibixian is a lame name, instead these guys are called
1	the Horned Men.
2	cliff-chasers.
3	caprines.
4	the get of Tanngrisnir.
5	goatheads.
6	bleaties.

Ain't No Fun (If The Fungi Can't Have None)

More from the world of plungus.

Friend of the blog Max commented on the previous post, raised pertinent issues - and here I quote:

"In the world in which there are no psychedelic mushrooms, one could imagine more psychedelic plants or even animals filling that ecological niche. Like I could imagine some psychedelic nudibranchs somehow evolving.

Anyway taking this idea further, would this include yeasts? What happens to bread and beer?".

Also, I hate fungus - mold, ringworm, et cetera - learned to my dismay the other week that even leather can grow fungus - and so it brings me some joy to, even if merely in an imaginal realm, apply my latent fascist impulse to the total extermination of that blightsome kingdom of life.

So to start, something near and dear to my heart: beer.

Beer is produced by the brewing and fermentation of a starch source into a product containing ethanol and carbonation. In reality this fermentation is generally performed by yeast - fungal microorganisms.

This fermentation is not exclusive to yeast. Some bacteria can perform it - as in Auto-Brewery Syndrome -  as can some plants, even some fish!

Bacteria-wise, there's two possible branches: bacteria which conduct lactic acid fermentation, such as lactobacillus and so on, or this one bacteria I found on wikipedia which conducts fermentation similarly to yeast, Zymomonas Mobilis. In both cases you'd likely notice a difference in flavour of the beverage produced compared to yeast: a more sour taste in the former, and a rotten apple-y taste in the latter. In the former case you might find beverages like masato or kumis rising to popularity rather than beer.

If lactic acid fermenting bacteria becomes the way to produce beer, you might find common themes show up across cultures as to the origin of beer: produced from the gut or bladder of a fool maybe, or from some culture-hero woman's vagina.

The plants which perform fermentation are those which grow fruit (and the fermentation takes place in these fruits) or swamp plants, in their roots. The issue lies in macroorganisms not being able to distribute themselves through fermentable mash or other substrate quite so thoroughly as microorganisms. Perhaps over many hundreds or thousands of years people breed cultivars of plants with highly-fermented fruit, or plants with very fine and voluminous fermenting roots which grow atop vats of mash like lotus blossoms.

There's all this science bullshit about fish fermenting, but what I gathered is that a few species of carp can perform fermentation for energy in low-oxygen environments. Perhaps in a world or region wherein fish become the preferred source of alcohol people maintain deep and narrow pools stocked with carp fed on grains and fruit, periodically drained of some blood or butchered into something like endrunkening sushi or sashimi - cooking of course quickly removes alcohol, as anyone who's made coq au vin can attest.

And of course this is just what exists in reality as known currently - who knows how things may evolve in a world entirely without fungi.

Now for bread:

Bread rises due to yeast in the dough consuming sugars and digesting them into carbon dioxide and ethanol. The gluten structure of the bread retains the bubbles of carbon dioxide, allowing the whole mass to expand.

Unleavened bread is fine without yeast. So are pearlash or soda bread and sponge cake.

Are we then left with a world without nice fluffy fermentation-risen bread? Not necessarily. The same critters which can ferment beer can also ferment dough. Bacteria's probably the most feasible option, being like yeast a microorganism. This is likely to make all dough into sourdough, because of the byproducts of lacto-fermentation. Fish seem to me the least feasible - how are you going to wrap a fish in dough yet also give it access to enough water? I had a dream like this once. Though it would provide a nice combo of Christian imagery. Plants are sort of a middle ground, perhaps these fermentation-bred plants potted in a mass of dough, uprooted into another pot every few days so that the risen dough-soil can be baked.

Now for psychedelics:

From snoozling about some, it seems like the Science says that psychedelic mushrooms evolved and spread (sometimes through horizontal gene transfer) because their neurotransmitter-mimicking chemicals inhibited the appetites of flies, which often shared the mushrooms' cow-dung habitats. No one knows why ayahuasca evolved. Perhaps they're stupid, and Darwin is a bastard man? There's also psychdelic fish.

Maybe it's just a coincidence that magic mushrooms induce the effect they do in humans. Maybe it's beneficial to induce a more ecological mindset. Who can truly say but God.

Anyways, it's possible in this fungi-less fantasy world we're supposing that people entirely replace psychedelic mushrooms with psychedelic plants and animals, and perhaps there will evolve psychedelic organisms with effects on humans that are not coincidental, but intentional - rewriting the brains of those that imbibe them to the betterment of the imbibed's greater species-being.

D6x6 Zombie Survivors

Click the button below to generate your zombie survivor:

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

D6	Before the zombies, this zombie survivor was
1	a junior bankster with an up-and-coming career.
2	a housewife/husband.
3	an indie comic artist/writer who had just been Cancelled.
4	a sigma hustle grindset influencer.
5	a nepo baby cruising between journalism gigs on their trust fund.
6	a convenience store clerk living out of their car.

D6	When the zombies came, this zombie survivor lost
1	their family.
2	many of their memories, due to head injury and trauma.
3	their left foot, to a hasty amputation.
4	their dog.
5	easy access to vital medication.
6	the love of their life.

D6	After the zombies, this zombie survivor has become
1	bizarrely and syncretically religious.
2	an awful and tempestous drunk.
3	morose and near-robotic in their routine, secretly hoping for something to shake them back into hope for the future.
4	a self-described warrior-poet, mythologizing a struggle against Death itself.
5	a self-loathing coward who would break any taboo to survive.
6	happy-go-lucky, grateful for every day as it comes, and creepily unfazed by carnage.

D6	This zombie survivor is armed
1	with hydraulic shears that can trim necks and limbs like they're hedges.
2	with a deranged yet shockingly-effective polearm taped together from various kitchen knives.
3	with a sledgehammer that's got a railroad spike welded to both sides of its head.
4	with a hunting rifle with a scratched scope and a dwindling supply of bullets.
5	with spools of barbed wire with weights attached to one end, ideal for trapping and tripping up dumb zombies.
6	with a fire axe they've attached a pipegun to the handle of, an improvised 16th-century atavism.

D6	This zombie survivor believes
1	that the zombies were released by a conspiracy of billionaires in order to thin out the human population for Malthusian ends.
2	that the world deserved the zombie plague for various sins and offenses.
3	deep down that the zombie infection is the secret to immortality and that everyone infected thus far has just been unworthy and thus not retained their rational mind.
4	that the zombies are the vengeance of disrespected ancestors.
5	that they are personally at fault for the zombie infection, due to sneezing on someone who would later go on to be patient zero.
6	that across the ocean human civilization still exists untrammeled by zombies.

D6	This zombie survivor has access to
1	a disaster shelter with a stock of MREs and bottled water.
2	a map which purportedly leads to a nuclear bunker which the remnants of the government took shelter in.
3	a briefcase containing an experimental cure, which they haven't had the opportunity or the will to test yet.
4	a powerful radio set-up with which they maintain contact with other survivors as much as a thousand miles away.
5	an array of solar panels which provide power to recharge any electrical devices.
6	an ATV with a trunk full of fuel tanks.

The Quasi-Elemental Plane of Lightning

Of that which is written

Previously:

Steam

Salt

There is a theory which describes the elemental planes as a library of very big books - encyclopedias to be specific - written in matter-energy rather than words. They contain and constrain everything that the elements can and should be. It should then be no more surprising that lightning strikes across its plane without a sky to birth it or the earth to receive it than it is for the word fire written before you to not need to gobble up wood to remain there.

Of course: the librarians are dead or screaming and flaying each other for parchment and mold is spreading under the floorboards and the donour who the wing is named for is nowhere to be found and guerilla poets are breaking in after dark to inflict unseemly metaphors. This too is to be expected. For there is Order and there is Chaos and there is Chaos-from-Order and Order-from-Chaos.

It should then come as no surprise that there is more than just lightning to be found within the quasi-elemental plane of lightning.

Fickle As The Levin's Quick

But first the lightning alone.

There is air here, for the plane is of Air and the font of life. Even so, it's unwise to breath unmasked - it reeks of ozone, is adrift with arc-forged particulate, often super-heated.

There is light here, an endless stroboscopic flashing from all directions, the explosive intensity of micro-suns born in the natural fusion reactors of immense colliding magnetic fields.

There is noise too, a discordant and deafening orchestra: the languorous buzz of corposance, the pop-pop-pop of plasma, the roar of prayerfully-distant thunder.

Like the upper air or the open ocean, the plane is barren, but far from empty. Charged particles coalesce in the double-layered envelopes of ionized air, forming comets and cays, and fulgurite forests float through metastable and metastasizing plasmic braids. In the rare stable positions, like Lagrange points arranged by electromagnetism rather than gravity, entire planetoids can fall into shape.

And so there is life too, always life. The ecosystem is built off of electric bacteria - congealed into glowing mats, free-floating planktonic slime-molds, symbiotic with lichen, and void-filling membranous super-organisms. Aluminum-shelled crustaceans "swim" along magnetic currents, or anchor themselves in filter-feeding fields. Capacitorial zeppelinoids plunge between discharge zones to rid themselves of accumulated joules. There is a sort of hyperaccumulator vine which sprouts like tangled wires under the light of micro-suns and "harpoons" nearby soil-mass together into a garden for itself - though it can just as easily spear living creatures. Zeugalaks launch themselves across the bolt-stroked firmament, behirs stalk in the crevices of careening meteors, and umplebies brachiate through branching globes of glass and iron. The plasma itself sometimes seems to be alive.

Weapon Of The Gods

Plagues and floods and volcanic eruptions fall in and out of fashion among wrathful divinities - too slow, too indiscriminate, not flashy enough. Lightning remains the favourite for smitings.

The gods (those worth the title anyways) don't settle for terrestrial thunderbolts plucked from any old storm. They get the premium stuff, right from the source. They get them from the lightning elementals.

Lightning elementals are unlike others of their sort in that their natural form is unbound, a howling ecstasy that can't hold an identity or shape for more than a moment. For them to become stable beings they need to inhabit a substrate, conductive and computational. Since time immemorial their substrate of choice has been herds of creatures like sea angels made of super-conductive filaments, which they run on like software on a server. Each clan has their herd of their proprietary breed, and a god they are sworn to who they cultivate lightning for. Each clan conducts "cattle" raids on others and settles blood feuds with magnetohydrodynamic lances of molten metal. Each clan has its old alliances, which they moot with and dance in electric vortexes.

To Thunderous Applause

Sigil, that crown of the cosmos, is the center of the universe even now, shattered as it is. It was not always so - the Sigilites broke the old Order of things to forge their own. They threw angels down from the heavens and paraded through hells. The quasi-elemental plane of lightning they used for its energies, applied to industry and alchemicana, for magnetic mesmerism and revivification.

When Sigil fell its colonies stumbled bleary-eyed into freedom, and into deprivation. Severed from Sigil's portal-magics they had to fend for themselves in environments as hostile as any alien world. The copper-webbed satellites of the plane of lightning, hung like brutalized ornaments in the plane's stable points, faced three main problems: safety, material, and manpower.

Those left behind in the satellites were workers, exploited yet educated. Their management fled back to the imperial core. Their lives were dependent on complex systems requiring constant maintenance. Even in the power vacuum a tyrant couldn't rise - or rather tyranny was societal suicide - every hand and sort of expertise available was necessary for survival, and sabotage was devastatingly simple. What arose was at once egalitarian and totalitarian, an anarcho-Stalinist mesh of guilds and secret societies and work-crews, of strictly-enforced conformity and social contribution on the surface with a sea of hidden signs and conspiracies beneath. Sign languages were invented among them, which could be spoken even with lost fingers, to get around the omnipresent sound. Satellites linked into leagues for mutual defense and trade, specialized in the production of certain goods like weapons or vat-grown foodstuffs or metal-foam furniture, rocketing between each other in train-cars riding channels of ionized plasma.

These trains were also instrumental in harvesting the raw material the satellite-leagues were hungry for. Currents were charted, comets mapped, but this was not enough to exceed starveling rations. A great breakthrough came when it was realized that the herd-creatures of the lightning elementals could synthesize useful materials out of ambient clouds of particles. They no longer needed to scrape by for resources - only go to war with the weaponeers of the gods.

And so there is war. Fleets of trains rustle and whale and lobotomize herds Elementals retaliate with smashing violence, or infiltrate the satellites by insinuating themselves in organic nerves. Poetic telegraph-epics glorifying famed rustlers echo across the relay hubs. Prized "catte" are adorned with ribbons of magnetic gold alloys. Among the most vital industries now are those related to the appeasement of the gods, the mass-manufacture of weapons-grade lightning to replace their lost suppliers, and of prayer wheels and idols and suchlike to assuage offenses. The war has gone on long enough now that it is no longer clearly cut between human and elemental - sub-factions on each side have seen it better fit their interests to work with each other against others of their own kind.

This war and attrition from the plane itself wear away at the population of the satellite-leagues, and their working-hours and cramped habitations don't lend themselves easily to reproduction. They found that to remain viable they had to manufacture manpower, or steal it.

From corpses jacked up with machinery and living electricity are made charmeats, the labouring dead. Some are fitted with explosives despite the danger to everything around them, so great is the fear that they might turn on their organic masters for their elemental enemies. Certainly they are no mindless zombies - mindlessness is uselessness to the engineering and repairs and so on they're applied to.

Strong storms on the prime material plane will manifest within them portals to the quasi-elemental plane of lightning. Special vessels are launched by the satellite-leagues through these portals, flying ships, which frantically track down towns and cities before the storm they arrived through dissipates. The ships drop burglars on bungee-cords, looking to snag as much loot and press-ganged personnel as possible in their limited time. For the inhabitants of these places these invasions can seem like hell come to earth, sky pirates with flesh riven by lichtenberg scars and eyes blanched by flash-cataracts diving in and twitching like they're blasted on stimulants, those they seize never seen again. In many grimoires the people of the quasi-elemental plane of lightning are described as a type of demon: stormwreckers, night rattlers.

In the rare instances that such a storm forms out of volcanic lightning these raids can devolve into brush fire wars with the Obsidian Menses of the plane of magma, who also emerge at these times, for different reasons.

Ride The Lightning, But Don't Lose Your Ticket

Besides the satellite-leagues and the lightning-clans, there are a number of other factions you might encounter on the quasi-elemental plane of lightning:

Freebooters: Life in the satellites is stifling, and so has its defectors and its exiles. Some satellites will kick out any obvious mutants, which are fairly common here due to barrages of charged particles and electric gene activation. These outsiders take shelter in hollowed-out comets, scrape bacterial slime off rocks to survive and pirate the train-caravans of the leagues, relying on risky, unstable and uncharted plasmic braids to evade capture and detection.

Thinking Machines: For about as long as it employed human labour in the plane, Sigil sought to replace it with a hardier, more obedient, and no less capable substitute. The solution it settled on was machines with crystal positronic brains, charged by anti-lightning upthrust from pockets of negative energy. The machines of course went rogue, stole the secrets of their replication and went to ground in corners of the plane where even its native life could scarcely tread. They are hunted still, even there, for the positrons within their brains are a precious commodity - a cancer-treatment among other things - often traded to the plane of radiance, though this provokes the celestial crocodiles of the infrared pits and their ultraviolet monopolies.

The Inquisition Electric: Mistrusted among the leagues even over their usual paranoia, yet indispensable. The I.E. are a remnant-organization of Sigil in the plane, true loyalists who have not abandoned their mission. They alone have the greatest understanding of the lightning elementals, of how to detect and disable their presence in living bodies, and of their internal politics. Their black spires meander the furthest from human-controlled territories of any vessels. Their mission is to disarm the gods, and this has gained them strange bedfellows.

D6x6 Bodacious Bodysnatchers

Recently read Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin. Great book.

Click the button below to get your bodysnatchers:

 

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

 

D6	These bodysnatchers are
1	the pilots of UFOs, and also highly-derived humans who fled from a future wherein environmental degradation among other conditions drove them into a parasitic existence. They lost much of the knowledge and infrastructure to produce or even repair their own high-tech in the process.
2	from outer space. They arrived in a meteor - originally meant to be a symbiotic boon to host species, long exposure to cosmic radiation has mutated them into something hostile.
3	living artifacts of a proto-human civilization, intended to survive their collapse and reclaim the Earth after conditions became amenable again.
4	demons cloned from samples extracted from pig bones found sunken off the coast of Jordan.
5	a clandestine military experiment to create the perfect spies.
6	a natural species escaped from a cave system beneath Lake Baikal.

 

D6	These bodysnatchers aim to
1	kick off a global nuclear war to reduce humanity into isolated and desperate communities which they could rule as unassailable tyrants.
2	advance biotechnology without regard for human life, to eventually remove their need for hosts entirely and afterwards exterminate humanity.
3	use food additives, education systems, eugenics, and suchlike to turn humanity into complacent, even worshipful hosts.
4	bodysnatch everyone on Earth so they can merge into a continent-sized fleshbeast which will consume itself until the end of time.
5	experiment using human societies as lab rats, so they can learn how to make a utopia for themselves.
6	accelerate human development of space travel technology to spread themselves across the cosmos.

 

D6	Without bodysnatching, these bodysnatchers
1	resemble crustaceans that have been shucked from their shells and left to putresce in the sun.
2	look like a mating ball of vermicelli-worms tipped with delicate sucking flowers.
3	resemble a tangle of rotting roots, swooped and streamlined like a wasp, which reek of ammonia.
4	look like bloated amniotic sacs crawling about on gangly claw-tipped fingers.
5	resemble a flash of grotesque sensory impressions like the fluttering wings of a Batesian mimic moth - the human mind refuses to perceive their true form fully in a single moment.
6	look like a cross between teratomas and ginger rhizomes.

 

D6	These bodysnatchers bodysnatch
1	by implanting themselves into the spine of their host, leaving their host's consciousness locked in as they're puppeted about.
2	by psychically swapping their mind with the mind of their target, walking away with their target's body while their target is left trapped in the bodysnatcher's dying husk.
3	by immobilizing their target then attaching to them with an umbilical tentacle, draining their life and memories to transform into a perfect copy.
4	by ingesting a tissue sample from their target and using that to spawn off a clone. The clone lacks the original's memories until they track them down and eat their brain.
5	by fusing together with their target in a cocoon, emerging as a hybrid being under the bodysnatcher's control.
6	by injecting targets with a neuro-chemical cocktail that rewrites their minds to the bodysnatcher's ends. Periodic refreshing of this cocktail is necessary to maintain full control.

 

D6	A weakness of these bodysnatchers is
1	that the repressed instincts of their host can emerge in an exaggerated and uncontrollable fashion in times of stress.
2	their own slow and difficult reproduction.
3	that their bodies require certain exotic substances which those in the know could trace sales or thefts of to find their lairs.
4	their extreme reaction to capsaicin.
5	that they're out of touch with their stolen bodies, often failing to feed or clean them in a decent manner.
6	reproducing appropriate facial expressions.

 

D6	These bodysnatchers have infiltrated society
1	through the criminal strata, where their sociopathic tendencies and people disappearing is less likely to be notable.
2	through associations of doctors and scientists, covering up evidence of their own existence and wielding the cudgel of their presumed expertise.
3	through the police, taking advantage of existing secret societies and codes of silence.
4	through a big new vertically-integrated start-up, which gives them access to influential financiers and suchlike and lets their idiosyncracies be obscured under the excuse of company culture.
5	mostly only in a single town, turning it into their stronghold and sending out cautious feelers for the next stage of expansion.
6	through a prestigious university, replacing the next generation's bright young brains with the long game in mind.

D100+ Forgotten Founding Fathers

All credit for inspiration goes to friend of the blog Mike over at Sheep & Sorcery.

Click the button below for your very own forgotten founding father:

Special thanks to Spwack for the generator generator here: https://slightadjustments.blogspot.com/p/generator.html

Special thanks also to Phlox & deus ex parabola for help brainstorming this post.

4D6 Wild Hunters of the Wild Hunt

By request of friend of the blog theisticgilthoniel over at Pilgrim's Procession.

4. Ottir O'Frankshanks: Invisible, blind, head of a cat with veeery long whiskers. Wields a pair of long and bendy rapiers. Dances in tight twirls instead of walking, hoping to brush prey with his whiskers - deadly accurate with some tactility. This makes him quite dizzy, and every so often he vomits a fuzzy caterpillar the size of a football, which desires nothing more than to return down his throat. They seek him out unerringly.

5. Flannery Pitterpattery: Wears hers own hair, woven into a tunic. She runs and climbs on all fours, and wields a bow with her pendulous and prehensile breasts. If you tell her a riddle she can't harm you until she answers it but then she can shoot whatever the answer to the riddle is at you with her bow. If she hasn't answered any riddles she shoots sharpened femurs at you.

6. Butter-Me-Up Bricklebrack: A man-shaped castle made out of Swiss cheese, with a garrison of mice who wheel their little mice cannons up to his holes to shoot at you. A chivalrous gentleman, the strong and quiet type. The mice within him are vulgar and cruel and more than a little racist.

7. Executor Excuse Me: A long-faced man in a long black coat and a long black hat. If you see him then every time you turn around he will be there and this will happen for the rest of the hunt. He's got one finger that's swollen like a club and if he catches you he will break your jaw and take your teeth, which he makes into boats and races down streams.

8. Ygobogobodin: He's got four arms and no eyes and a great big nose and a bristly grey mustache like the business end of a broom. He's always whittling little wolves and when he snorts in their noses they come to life and chase you and if they bite you you'll start turning into a tree.

9. Catwell Minx: Wears a skirt of squirrels' tails and a tiara made of hummingbirds' beaks. Has the torso of a very tall person and the limbs of a very short one. Pretends to be a baby lost in the woods, though she doesn't use any illusions or anything. It's not a convincing impersonation. Fights with a two-headed axe she keeps in her eye, plucking it out from behind her pupil, and if she chops your head off she'll leave it in a child's crib wrapped up in a big green bow.

10. Lady Drochroth: Rides a backwards chariot - the horses, maddened and foam-flecked and stolen, push rather than pull it. Her head is a boot and her feet are screaming heads. If she runs you over you'll be hurt but won't die and she'll do it again and again and again until you are very flat and then she will laugh and laugh and laugh and feed you to her feet.

11. Billbull Bugruff: Has smoke for eyes and a fire at the back of his throat. Chews up logs like they're pepperoni sticks. Will say that if you can find his spear after he throws it and before his wives sew him a new cape he'll let you free but although it looks like an ordinary spear it is actually lightning and it will strike a tree on a far away hill and his wives are all goats but they're very good and very fast weavers and they'll finish the new cape in minutes and once they do they'll wrap you up in it (it's made of spider's silk and very sticky) and throw you in a pond to drown.

12. Marquessa Marquea Marqioni: Has stilts covered in spikes and carries an inkbrush like a barge pole. If she paints a line on the ground you can't cross it. Wants to kick you very far, beat her own record. Has a duck's bill but no other duck features and never quacks. Wears a ball gown but if you look up her skirt there will only be ducks there and she will cry and her tears will attract bees who will swarm and sting you.

13.Wince the Dickens: Face scrunched up so sour you can’t tell eye from mouth from ear in all the furls. Can fly by flapping his arms. Wears a foot-long dragon-headed codpiece. A masterful ventriloquist and vocal mimic. Prefers to lure you into traps but not so shabby with his daggers.

14. Princess Cesspit: Hunts you from a little glass house carried on the backs of a flock of little glass geese. Has a little glass spear and throws little glass stones that get bigger and bigger the further they get from her. Whistles a sweet little tune and if you hear her whistle it you have to whistle it too and that's how she finds you.

15. Queen Brownedarrears: She is a bear who they have given a crown and a mink-trimmed cape. They stole her cubs and are feeding them snails fried in garlic butter but they've ensorcelled her to think that you were the one who stole them, which she is very angry about. Faster than you might think, and she's got your scent.

16. Precchancacc: Hides in a robin's egg in a nest in a tree and any tree he's in he can control like it's his own body. Hops from tree to tree to hunt you but every hunt he makes a rule for himself like only hopping to a tree you've touched or only hopping into every second tree or only birch trees or whatever else and he never breaks his rule.

17. Mermin Mormin: A satyr with a scimitar in one hand who plays his gut like a drum with the other. Speaks in rhymes or screams when he can't rhyme. Has a bottomless wineskin but the more he drinks the drunker you get.

18. Gobnat Do That: Carries a hammer and chisel at all times because her face hardens into a porcelain mask in a matter of seconds and if she wants to speak or change her expression she has to crack it off for her new face underneath it. She'll chisel her name onto every one of your ribs. Has a soft spot for people with only one eye and will spare them if they allow her to kiss their empty socket.

19. St. Hubertus: He's here to keep them from getting too wild. Only pretends to hunt you, but he can get pretty convincing. Will create opportunities to escape the others, which they seem not to notice, or perhaps they are cowed by his holiness.

20. Loegrrr: Looks like three kids holding hands and wearing purple tiger masks. If you don't look directly at their masks, you will see that they are actually a three-headed purple tiger. Makes overly-complicated plans anticipating that you've got an overly-complicated plan of your own.

21. Gnaw-Gnaw Neenaw: A hairless man with two red teeth in his fat red head. He's got a barrel of lard on his back which he slathers himself up with, that he may slide around at unseemly fast speeds and bowl you over. Without it he is powerless. Giggles obscenely.

22. Sweetnectar: She's taking a bath in a claw-footed bath that can run around. In her bath there are snippy crabs and snappy fish and she will flick these at you with a long spoon, but this is only a distraction - if she catches you she will grab you and drag you into her bath which is much deeper and wider than it seems and under the water she is a great pink serpent who will swallow you up.

23. Sir Lockspat: A rotund and sniveling little goblin-man whose helmet is too big and whose hose is too tight. Whiny and clumsy but when he fumbles it goes much worse for you than for him through Rube Goldbergian accident.

24. Mim-Makes-Mince: Classic redcap. Carries a big rusty cleaver. Trails the hem of her apron through carnage so she can wring the gore into her puddings. Hates the sight of her own reflection and will attack it to the exclusion of all else.

The Unfound Fathers

Sillunasuhhijuhnide! Sillunasuhhijuhnide! Sillunasuhhijuhnide!

Uncle San is America's now, Uncle San is America's forever!

 

A new constitution, a new body for the new spirit of America, with greater freedoms guaranteed on forty-two-fold paper to reach the archons' moon - that is the promise of our long campaign.

The right to freedom of speech shall become the freedom of pornography, a hyperstimulus bill - the return of the porneia, bodies becoming images and idols and commodities in whole or by parts.

 

The right to bear arms shall become the right to wield arms against the unarmed.

The right not to board soldiers in your home shall become the right to private soldiers, personal armies.

The right to freedom of religion shall become freedom from religion, from religio itself, from all strictures.

 

The right to remain silent shall become the right to silence, to shut down dissidinformation before it can assay as set our expert management.

 

The pursuit of happiness, that gallivanting glatisant, shall end! Caught and butchered and feasted on at last we shall have wight supremacy - white as the sepulcher and the bones within, white as the land that's been salted deep, white as the merciless north - white taxes, white rents, white debts endless in interest this implosive spiral like gravity like Satan's wings wheeling without end in the deepest hell.

 

We will rule in hell! We are princes of this Earth! And the kings! The fearless, peerless kings, born yet unknown to us and unborn yet known in the haplo-Doppler blueshift in the stirring loins of the nation to cum!

 

These kings shall recognize no authority, only force - our America needs not God to choose it, and shall be under nothing except should the world entire be buried beneath the irradiated grave-dirt of our failure. We shall draw out Leviathan from his nook and make of him a new god with an Nvidious brain and a heart wrenched from the Californiac earth. We shall not pray but demand and our Leviathan will bring our violence and the license of our violence to all corners on white wings. The old poxy proxies which bring sickness to the core will find their replacement by clonal colonies of our genetic elite. 

 

Conserve your compassion, it's not a perpetual emotion - we seek not revoltution but redeform - an unmanageable democracy is crushed by the infinite mass of the people: a singularity, impenetrable to the light of our reason, our republic a fledgling under the weight of a giant's egg.

 

A fie a fire an ire upon the deep country we corn feed subsidize the Yellow Mass the rats partake of kernels meant to be men. A deep state with roots imperishable in the halls of power its cables and its cargo stretch Packed and At lee. Tensions and pensions of princess Europa's court we stoke in a furnace of black rock.

 

Now and tomorrow only the free world led and bled and dry as a wight in Sweden's barrows they will vote for their own deaths as free and light as dust for there are worse things than death, there is such a thing as evil, and it is seen in the red of the rising sun a dark energy invisible and accelerating.

 

The eastern hordes they covet our hoards and where our eyes spy and our tongues lie theirs are assuredly worse. With bot-net sweeps and special forces creeps we fight them here and now. Mafiosolatido! Gang bang bang the concrete jungles, for wild animals can't consent to euthanization like domesticated man. Uncle San wants not you but us as hands for the kings of America to be. These Unfound Fathers in meat carnate that country-haunting haint.

 

Have we not been catholic to their crowns?

Big Gay Orcs - Solo Play

Should orcs have only one eye? Should they bob their heads as if pigeons to achieve depth perception? Recent orc discourse which led me to the game Big Gay Orcs by Grant Howitt claims yes.

Link to game here: https://gshowitt.itch.io/big-gay-orcs

This is the story of the final day of the orc Ugly Bastard, and of his fellow-orcs in the fortress of Bloodripper Bastion. They're all gay also, but the other orcs look like this:

So it's not that gay.

Ugly Bastard has a reputation for furiousity, yet on the inside he's fearful. He is a master weaponsmith, and his driving motivation is to become the next warlord of the horde, since the previous warlord was assassinated.

There are five named NPCs in the fortress (and some unknown and insignificant number of nameless other orcs):
-Furbog the wilderness ranger
-Dalthu the omen-scryer
-Stugbu the warlord's ex-bodyguard
-Hoknuk the beast-speaker
-Varthug the axe-thrower sergeant

Now for Ugly Bastard's relationships with them:
-UB despises Furbog for witnessing a moment of UB's cowardice
-UB respects Dalthu for his ambition
-UB is jealous of Stugbu for his close relationship with the previous warlord
-UB despises Hoknuk for not giving him a cool war-beast to ride
-UB is frustrated by Varthug for refusing his advances

Bloodripper Bastion is the last obstacle between the armies massing on the horizon and their orc-city, presumably where they keep the orc-women. Between certain death and being nagged by those friggin broads they face an impossible choice. Dusk is falling. They will not see the dawn.

Ugly Bastard has spent the last few days hammering out some last arrowheads for the Bastion's defense. He's bored, he's sweaty, he's terrified. He chugs some fermented sow-milk, and decides he wants to die without regrets. He decides to hit on Varthug, that tease.

It's a partial success - Varthug agrees to go behind the barracks to touch butts. However, UB's reputation for furiousity works against him: Varthug doesn't want to be sore for when the fighting kicks off. Scared of rejection, UB shows a tender side, and Varthug gets +1 mark against UB - that'll be bad if Varthug dies or flees. In the afterglow UB gets 2 hope, leaving him with a total of 22. If his hope runs out it's game over.

While UB and Varthug were canoodling, an event kicks off. Because UB didn't do anything to protect the fortress the event's a bit worse than it otherwise would have been. Stugbu flees against the rays of the setting sun. The guy didn't have any marks on Ugly Bastard, so UB doesn't really care.

With Stugbu - one of the Bastion's best fighters - gone, the mood darkens. Where there is talk, it is most often of who was expected to flee next. Still riding high from his hook-up with Varthug, UB ignores this, and goes to propose un petit peu de frottage (as the French say) with Dalthu.

Dalthu agrees, but only on the condition that afterwards Ugly Bastard do something to help with the Bastion's defense. While they are getting it on, Hoknuk gathers his wargs and beast-riders charge out the gates for a suicide attack, which accomplishes nothing because Hoknuk is chienne faite (as the French say). Post-nut clarity hits UB and Dalthu hard - UB realizes he should build barricades or something, and Dalthu regrets letting his dick do the thinking for him.

The sun fully disappeared beneath enemy lines, Ugly Bastard dismantles furniture and other non-essentials to shore up the gate and create barricades for fall-back positions should the gate fall. He gets the fortifications up solidly and in decent time, but shivers the whole time as he hears the sounds of Hoknuk and his sally getting slaughtered, revealing his fear to Furbog, Varthug, and many other orcs besides.

Unbeknownst to any, an enchanter in the enemy camp ensorcells Varthug's heart, using his loss of respect for Ugly Bastard as the chink to get in.

Ashamed, unmanned, and desperately needing a distraction, Ugly Bastard propositions Furbog. Furbog taunts him, laughing in his face and demanding to know where UB's infamous battle-rage had gone. Ugly Bastard cries and goes to hide in a pile of hay. He loses 2 hope from the experience, leaving him at 20.

While UB is sulking, a couple goblins return from Hoknuk's valiant charge with an injured enemy in tow. The cheers upon the goblins' return rouse UB from his hiding place. He decides that if goblins can be war-heroes, then he can win over Furbog.

In fact he does! UB and Furbog make out in a puddle of mud by the boar pens, restoring a whopping 4 hope. Unfortunately and inconsequentially (given their impending deaths) UB also contracts oral herpes from the encounter.

In a stunning display of lack of inter-departmental communication, an arrow sails over the wall and nails Varthug in the neck, taking out the enemy's man on the inside. UB and Furbog are making eyes at each other and returning to the main force as this happens. UB is left stunned, as he had caught feelings for Varthug. He loses 7 hope, leaving him with 17 remaining.

Wanting to forget the horrid sight of his one-time lover drowning in his own blood, Ugly Bastard drinks some more fermented sow-milk and barges into the hall of omens, raring to "tie the knot" with Dalthu (as the dogs say). Dalthu, against his better judgement, agrees, but at the same time castigates Ugly Bastard for both his avoidance of the siege and his rampant horniness. At this point the mélange of extreme emotions in so short a time had almost completely fried Ugly Bastard's brain, so this scolding only made UB fall for Dalthu more. Together the orcs suffer the little death, preparing them somewhat for the big death that was soon to follow. Enemy forces muster around Bloodripper Bastion as they lie in each other's arms. The experience restores 5 hope to UB.

Starting to really feel the fermented sow-milk now, Ugly Bastard double fists two bottles more and mounts the stairs up to the ballista. He chugs them while firing off bolts wildly at the enemy. He misses every single one, and the orcs who witness it agree: Ugly Bastard isn't furious, he's crazy and stupid. Reaching back for another bolt and missing entirely, UB tumbles off the ballista-tower and crashes through a wagon at its base. Bruised, cracked, and full of splinters, UB takes 5 damage to his hope, leaving him at 17 again.

It was a lucky break, as these things go, as moments after falling an enemy siege engine provoked by UB's wild fire blasts the tower to pieces. He loses another point of hope as debris rains around him (remaining total 16).

Basically feral at this point, Ugly Bastard decides to clamber over the wall and just start shanking dudes. He gets a few, but overall this was a poorly thought-out plan, and he just barely gets back to the bastion alive with 9 hope left and quite a few new bloody wounds.

He really shouldn't have bothered coming back, because while he was out and fucking about the enemy's main force breached the gate and slaughtered his comrades. When Ugly Bastard witnesses this he falls to his knees and doesn't even resist as squad of spearmen stab him through the heart, his soul as dry as his balls.

To recap the fates of our characters:
-Ugly Bastard: Speared many times over while bleeding out
-Furbog: Killed by invaders after gate was breached (times hooked up with: 1)
-Dalthu: Killed by invaders after gate was breached (times hooked up with: 2)
-Stugbu: Fled the Bastion (times hooked up with: 0)
-Hoknuk: Dead by suicide charge (times hooked up with: 0)
-Varthug: Took an arrow to the neck (times hooked up with: 1)

In Review:

Happy Pride Month.

Bonus: Orc Fortress Name Generator