Previously, on slush piles:
"The silver cord is the electronic shadow of the umbilical cord" (neat phrase, but in context was about a man massaging mothers' feet to get their toddler to stop tantruming)
-Species of hermit crab that nibbles the heads off corpses, settling in the stump of their neck and puppeting them around
-Army ants are able to form their own bodies into structures - bridges to cross gaps, rafts to cross rivers - species of army ant that picks skeletons clean then forms themselves into "muscles" on the bones to ambulate
-Animal that lives in snowy area - instinctually rolls up snowballs into structures and traps - not like dung beetles though, too obvious
-White apes are not domesticated, not even tamed, simply kept amicably drunk - their hangover-induced rages should their supply taper off are the stuff of nightmares
-Like Warhammer lashworms - monster that nests in crevices & cracks with extendable body that can strike out at a distance, can only be struck in return by long weapons, or by flooding crack with oil and setting it alight, or somesuch
-For a darker dryad: the Bellflower Maiden from Ao Oni: The Animation (Movie) - a parasitic plant with blue flowers - makes men hallucinate that it's a beautiful woman, uses them like bees to infect actual women with its seeds, the women become possessed by the plant and eventually eaten from the inside out to spawn a new one, the man's penis is eaten by a flower and then he mutates into a big blue ogre to defend it
-From Godzilla: Kaijuu Wakusei - giant monster emerges on planet, wipes out native life, replaces biosphere with organisms derived from itself
-Like sand hunter, monster with small hivemind in packs - attacks with limited self-sacrifice, grappling & exploding & suchlike - hard to train initially but very valuable once they are - can retain training for many generations
-Ice toads are sapient & can talk... noted to struggle building tools/shelter because of their lack of thumbs... perhaps toad-city painstakingly licked out of the ice like Audhumla... lava tubes dug out and the lava flash-frozen into objects of complex obsidian shape
-Loonatics, driven mad by the waterfowls' call, dive endlessly beneath the waves chasing drowned moonbeams - the abundant foam around their mouths is enough to filter the water to breathability - they eat lugworms and swallow mussels whole, and seek to enslave sane surface-dwellers to serve their bizarre & futile quest
-Ghouls who reach a certain maturity - or putrescence - will devour their own eyes, lips, and limbs, and wriggle down into the bowels of the earth as great pallid worms
-Monster bound to particular location - like undead guarding a tomb - which can bring one person back to a sort of half-like and mark them - it releases them from its territory, making them believe they survived a brush with death, while acting as a tether that allows the monster to leave the place it's bound to to hunt fresh prey
-Warlord Bromeliads: Desert plants that grow a single fruit of tremendous size - animals eat warrens into its yellowy flesh and have their brains altered by the enzymes (or whatever chemical) within - they come to see their host-plant with tremendous loyalty, and can be marshaled by it to march against its rivals
-Giants with names & life-cycles like stars?
-A radio or sonic signal which liquefies internal organs of people exposed to it for long enough into hungry slimes, which puppeteer the corpse they're in for a while with varying ability before fully consuming them and merging into a living sea beneath the source of the signal - perhaps devices can be found which produce a counter-signal able to cause this sea to congeal and disgorge new servitor-forms
-Bad pun... poplar opposite... a doppelganger spawned from a clonal colony of poplar trees, all sap and supple wood under the skin that looks so much like yours...
-Modern horror hag: crazy cat lady & her chowder of cats linked telepathically and deranged by mutant toxoplasmosis - seek to kidnap infant compatible with the strain as new prime host
-Guys with anthills in their gums instead of teeth
Gun made with the springlike core muscle of the haun,
Apron more like the chestpiece and gorget of a bomb disposal suit, for smithing rowdy elementals into shape,
Thoqqlock muskets, made with the red-hot horntip of a thoqqua,
Communication device utilizing the connection between bodies of xantravars
Spit-snakes fitted into grooved tubes by a fireside, turning roasting meat at an appreciable rate as they find a more comfortable temperature - often the snake whose venom felled the beast which the meat came from is given the honour of turning it
Birch trees grown in the winter dead - their bark unwound like a spool of tape, but still attached! - and burned projects visions of the luminous threshold
Spellbooks as like those mostly-tedious creepypastas with names like The Candlestick Game that are long lists of instructions with intimations of terrible fates if you stray... wiggle your fingers just so for a fireball... but beware not to twist your tongue on the Eleven Syllables... or you will be gotten by the Blue Entity...
Sound can affect gene expression - extrapolated setting: jazz gene-hackers in 1920s New York operating under the nose of Rockefeller Foundation eugenicists, rubbing shoulders with bootlegging mafiosos
-re: planetary ambient noise note from 7th slush pile, and its absence causing anxiety in astronauts - the morphogenetic field is a sonic phenomenon, music expressed through the medium of biology, a world- and species-uniting teleology with a coda as its end
There's precursor-species in the Abyss & Hell - the obyrith & old ba'atorians - supplanted by demons & devils with the influx of human souls - what predates angels in the heavens, the pre-human Good?
An incorruptible corpse with hair that never stopped growing, woven by its worshipers into shroud-armour
-perhaps in setting with reincarnation or fated births or somesuch - pre-saints - beniformed fetus softly shuddering on a velvet pillow within a golden monstrance, taken from the womb which once held it to be an object of veneration, to grow into a person of great power and virtue when the appointed hour arrives
The kings of this kingdom bend a living tree into their throne - the patience and skill to do so a sign of their aptitude for leadership - the court is a grove housing the thrones of kings past
Programmable bacteriophages - the technocratic solution to the end of penicillin and so on - are the origin of GenoDie - haplogroup-targeted virus
"At the lowest layers of Arborea is a bleak desert littered with the bones of gargantuan creatures, and ruins belonging to no known civilization, holding secret words that can destroy gods" - "no gods no masters" as practical principle and hidden weapon of chaotic good, uncomfortable overlap with nihilism of the Grey Waste
A lich whose phylactery is the spell which bears their name
-A lich who minted their phylactery into currency, and cannot be killed so long as this currency's in circulation
-A lich whose phylactery is a sub-culture - more fitting for modern, humourous games - their soul possessing in part all goths or hippies or somesuch
-A lich whose phylactery is an altered lycanthropic curse, infecting people so that they become the lich when the moon shines full
-A lich who made the fountain of youth or philosopher's stone or somesuch their phylactery - destroying it will make powerful enemies
"There is a network of caverns that still resounds with the primordial frequency of the world's birth screams" - from World of Darkness: Mysterious Places - great line
Bug lepers which is like leprosy but instead of your nose falling off your body is slowly turning into bugs
-Mourners with red-painted faces, singing songs of grief and otherworld-sending from the moment their relative passed within their house to sundown
-Sea called Sacred Blue...
-There's sleepy catfish hibernating in the riverbed that are fished by hoarse-voiced old people who stick their heads underwater and scream to wake them up - it's a dying art
Worship of evil god of strength and so on ironically leading to halfway-decent society - many stronger than one, healthy stronger than sick, cooperation stronger than division, etc. - aqueducts and ritual public execution of criminals
Dungeon decorated with giant stone heads - depictions of gods or archetypal masks used by inhuman benefactors - trickster-head indicates puzzle or hidden feature, warrior-head indicates guardian-beast ahead, etc. - can also squash things with them
An order of wizards who, instead of taking toads or crows or somesuch as familiars, instead themselves become the familiars of beings as much above humans as we are above toads or crows or suchlike
Words that would make good names for monsters: druse, druxy, draggle, dracontine, gangrel, humectant, emollient, rinky-dink, floccose, manciple, syzygy, adumbral, baetylus, tiddleywinks, iatrogen, leucist, cotillion, kibosh, curvet, poltroon, phalanstery, ganch, thiol, stulm, craniopagus, welch, ossein, congener, azeotrope, speleothem
Passage in dungeon - big statue of crocodile with open mouth, gullet leads to other room full of treasure (grave goods) - mural on wall depicts mummified dead being slid into its mouth - statue will allow those wrapped up like mummy through, but chomp up anything else
Practically-applied psychophysical harmony - exotic & extreme emotional states applied to people to make their bodies & brains into molecular assemblers for novel, useful chemicals, labs of phenomenologists & affective neuroscientists drafting up theoretical qualia, their environmental and so on inducers, the valuable products which might be extracted from those experiencing them - simultaneous knowledge that this industry is based on the reality of God and flagrant defiance of Him
Fantasy biome - farmfields of inscrutable crops, cultivated by fallen civilization, should be tasty nutritious fare but nobody remembers how to safely harvest or process the crops, and the scarecrow-equivalents are very deadly
Leysers - weaponized ley lines, menhirs shooting earth-shaking beams, druids in ablative stone spaceships launched into orbit for astrological schemes
Post-nuclear apocalypse - radical anti-radiation biotechnology - like butterflies retain memories of their caterpillar-lives, humans liquefied into massively-redundant neural soup, contained in insectoid chrysalis-exoskeletons - perhaps need to occasionally scan or even consume baseline humans to correct for errors that creep into their soup-selves, or against The Science they start metamorphosizing into something inhuman & terrible
The weapons wielded by a hobgoblin army are all wives in the harem of their warlord - the corpses sired by them are the legitimate children of the warlord and their wives - for a warlord's soldiers to use weapons of their own on campaign would be considered something like cuckoldry
Alien artifact - bio-slurry of millions of distinct structurally-unusual proteins akin to prions - don't fold each other, but when in contact with biomass odds are at least one of the proteins will be able to interact & catalyze transformation of the biomass into that of the aliens who created the artifact, complete with genetically-programmed memory - kind of like bit harder sci-fi version of the black sludge from Prometheus
A.I. emulation of the dead - there was a Black Mirror episode about this - variant: A.I. emulation of the living - elder-care robots in near-future of increasingly-geriatric populations, built in emulation of children and grandchildren for the comfort & reassurance of their charges - because said charges are probably in some level of cognitive decline the emulation wouldn't even need to be that good - could make for good Capgras syndrome-esque horror story from perspective of senile protagonist
In large enough crowd, humans behave like fluids - not sure if this is actually true, but it sounds true - many ways you could build off that - human solutions, human acids, vapourization of people to colonize the clouds, etc.
Pounce: Fine powder often made from powdered cuttlefish bone or sandarac resin, used to dry ink and make rough writing surfaces smooth enough for writing. Kept in a pouncet-box.
-perhaps more exotic powders are required for pounce used for scrolls & suchlike
- a pouncet-box made out of a gawp-mouthed taxidermied imp - in real-world, the exploding fruit of the sandbox tree was used for pouncet-boxes, hard to improve on that
A humpty-dumpty man with a parasite living in his skull - when it needs to feed it bursts out, and when it wishes to return to its host it pieces his head back together around it and re-animates him
-skin like just-now-creamsplashed coffee
Certain electromagnetic frequencies can actually repair tissues - perhaps the "negative energy" which animates the undead is a misunderstanding of these frequencies when they are powerful enough to return dead tissue to life
-necromantic rites use the negative quasi-elements (salt, ash, dust, and void) to leash the anti-engine of negative energy to dead flesh - e.g. open the ribs of a corpse, remove its heart, and place a hot coal in the place where its heart lay with your bare hand - bite a blister that grows because of this and let the fluid dribble into the corpse's mouth - the corpse will rise and dance as you order, but must be regularly slaked with fine wine, or the pain in its chest will drive it insane
Man with pygmy marmoset, or something with similar frantic monkey energy, tethered to his wrist, screeching and scrambling about - the tether links their veins together, pumping pure frenetic little guy adrenaline into the man's bloodstream
A sort of lime which can only be slaked by blood - makes the finest whitewash and mortar, fit for the homes of kings
Snuff societies jealously protect the recipes of their mixes and the iconography of their trays and snort-tubes - each claims the bones of a different animal for their exclusive use, and the spirits of these animals are their liasion to the wider cosmos
Blemmyes, lacking heads, also lack conventional brains - their autonomic nerves take up the burden of cognition - this distributed consciousness tends to lead to blemmyes having a less discrete & singular idea of personhood, and also their leg might wriggle around on its own for a bit after you chop it off
A far-future Earth, tunneled through down to its core (mined-out) and saved from its exploding sun out of sentiment - 100+ billion years in the future - an unimaginably-long age of wonders before the death of the stars, now post-human super-intelligences only reside in Dyson spheres around artificial black holes, leaving planets like Earth to the more human-like, low-energy life to reclaim, surrounded by the power-hungry wreckage of the past
Flea-men - or big intelligent fleas - evolved on the bodies of hairy hill giants, learned to turn giants and smaller men into obedient mounts by tapping out some of their cerebrospinal fluid
A pandemic disease similar to Alzheimer's, which weakens the ability of those infected by it to distinguish between memories of dreams and reality
-OR in wake of Satanic ritual abuse panic, false memory creation/recovery becomes super-science, applied en masse to make people remember a new history
Desert nomad raids to unearth and destroy the orgone cloudbusters creating an artificial rainshadow
Modern horror seeds:
-"Why don't coal miners just learn to code?" + biotechnology - treatment is developed to return childhood-like neuroplasticity to the brain for easier retraining of reserve labour, however this treatment can also cause tissues to become undifferentiated tissue and redevelop into new appendages, organs, etc. - This is accepted by the corporate overlords as an acceptable side effect, even beneficial when your new team of coders becomes adapted to work around the clock in cramped and deprived conditions, but soon enough people who've received the treatment begin to adapt to unplanned for ends - becoming able to live off scavenged trash, survive without shelter, become predators of pacified and sedentary populations, and so on and so on. - perhaps endgame of most people reduced to interlinked substrate, their consciousnesses reduced to producing a utopian dream-simulation for the virtualized rich
-You remember those dolls that could eat and poop (odd toys) - ok they’re that but in fact shells for alien/genetically engineered/shadow biosphere whatever that got snuck into the product to further their life cycle while hiding from prying eyes, and I don’t know they brainwash kids into murdering their families or something - crack a plastic/porcelain doll open and it’s some metamorphosing caterpillar soup inside
-Lowest performing programmers at some corporation receive ultimatum - become test subjects for eye drops meant to improve focus and prevent eye strain when spending long hours staring at screens or get fired - key ingredient in eye drops is some parasite in supposedly “docile” form - “more realistic” life cycle - test subjects become prone to internet radicalization and random violence, thus exposing more people to the parasites through their fluids - Or have the parasites let them see ghosts/ghoulies/demons/home dimension of the ultraterrestrial parasites or whatever - Or: first sign of trouble, test subject start committing suicide at statistically improbable rate - corporation gets concerned because the test subjects had some promising projects going on - turns out parasite ramps up pattern recognition to irrational levels, test subjects think they’ve invented brain uploading, have put together useless nightmare machine that spits out random outputs the parasite hosts interpret as the souls of the dead - suicides think they’ve joined the machine - whole office turned into booby trapped maze due to their paranoia
-Celebrity architect fascinated by "Sick Building Syndrome" sets out to create the sickest possible building - makes real "haunted" mansion that can drive people in it insane, which becomes pilgrimage site - and often final resting place of - urban explorers and youtube content hounds
-People figure out a way to get high by sticking their head in a microwave with a few modifications but it makes you dangerous crazy and it's on the internet - maybe it's like that thing where a magnet on your head can give you religious experiences and now there's an evangelical microwave cult grabbing people and cooking their brains and oh no they've stolen a police truck with an anti-riot microwave weapon on the back and now things are getting very serious very quickly
-Rods and cones are sentient now and in a civil war in everyone's eyes and the rods are making people watch black and white movies and the cones are doing Jackson Pollock splatters out of anything colourful within reach and it's going very badly for everyone (Stephen King pastiche)
More recent Lovecraftian stuff leans more away from it "driving you insane" and more towards extreme stress reactions - but maybe this "Lovecraftian madness" is a real (within the setting) phenomenon distinct from mental illness - like four-dimensional pressure waves caused by entities moving through higher dimensions are what cause it, similar and potentially treatable lesions & ruptures & so forth - maybe certain exposure can even warp the brain and nerves into higher dimensions, and that's how you get sorcerers
Beholders and Eyes of Fear & Flame both stem from the Intraocular Heresy - eyes which learned to emit their own illicit spectra, rather than submit to the orthodox light of the stars
Superheroic 5eish D&D taken to natural conclusion - only one person of each class, each a PC or important NPC, there are not barbarians but THE BARBARIAN, CHAMPION OF RAGING RIGHTEOUSNESS!!!, or THE ASTOUNDING SORCERER!!! - these superheroes/villains are the only people with character class levels in the world, that is their superpower - perhaps similar for monsters - THE BEHOLDER, MASTERMIND OF THE OCULAR ARTS!!! - and they all fight/do crime in THE METROPOLIS OF WATERDEEP or what have you
-for general superhero stuff: Sideways Street, a settlement in a frozen moment of time, a whole little society in the slice of a fraction of a sub-segment of a second, a sort of temporal Sargasso Sea populated by speedsters and time travelers who swung too close to a snag in the speed of light to easily escape it
Hexcrawl feature: giant whirlpool & the hulk-flotilla, mermaid sargassum-town, dead zaratan pirate hideout, etc. around it - each day or watch or what have you the hexes swing around the whirlpool clockwise, takes twice as long or more to travel against the current
Ok so depressant drugs slow down the heart, and stimulants speed it up... how about like a tele-drug that averages/distributes the hearts of those on it... and users would be pressed to get more people hooked on it because otherwise they risk dying...
-from World of Darkness's Orpheus: a drug that causes those who overdose on it to become a special kind of ghost/undead --perhaps the aforementioned heartlink drug also connects those who die on it to the "community", and they know that unless they can get more living people hooked they'll be damned to an especially bad hell - perhaps the drug itself is distilled from their ectoplasm, and their choices are damnation or dissolution into the collective through intoxication
Irish-Rwandan-Anatolian syncretic cattle raid epic-based game
-I ching-Ifa fusion prophetic digital system
Return of the hero cult in the form of networks of parasocial cells used for identity formation => strategy of tension / stochastic violence - kendrick IS obama IS the ghost of kiev IS captain america, so go out and crack the skulls of some drake-putin fleshbot trolls
-similar idea, but tricking wiccan granola witchy types to make chemical weapons by convincing them they're magic potions
Science-as-the-new-religion but done seriously, couples matched based on statistical compatibility, exchange injections of atlantic puffin oxytocin instead of vows, country carved out into experimental cantons where new technocratic policies can be imposed and tested, studies which contradict The Science covered up or not funded in the first place, brains scanned and heads frozen in anticipation of future technological resurrection, everyone who disagrees diagnosed as mentally ill, rocket-pilgrimages to the furthest corners of space that mankind has reached, etc.
Sci-fi setting wherein the only FTL travel is mental/psychic, possessing local life on arrival, panspermia rockets fire off into the cosmos - ethical tensions where the best local life to possess is sapient - maybe the travel is more two-way than people are led to believe, travelers picking up strange instincts or subconscious ghosts
Tales of Telguuth/A Fire Upon The Deep-esque - the Great Wheel is the physical wheel of a spiral galaxy, and the further you get from the stabilizing influence of the core, the more the laws of physics become mere suggestions - gods and demons reign at the edge of the intergalactic void - magic requires opening a conduit to these outer reaches, with shards of meteor-matter which fell from there, or certain celestial alignments, or what have you
Fantasy world that replaces standard fantasy race elf/dwarf/orc trinity with UFO lore reptilians/greys/nordics
Mind flayer-made livestock-people - elongated, many-lobed skulls, parallel-processing/redundant-storage brain nodes that can be plucked when ripe without killing the person - perhaps psychic antennae, broadcasting the powers of their secret farmers while thinking the powers their own, and themselves natural lords over short-skulled peoples
