Previously:
Horror Scenario Seed: You go looking for a missing person - come across a town with the same name as that person - somehow they've been turned into a town, psychogeographically & psychodemographically representative of them. The tapeworm they didn't know they had is a giant monster that slurks through the sewers and the plumbing of it. How can you change them back? What if it starts to spread?
-Standard diving dress spotted by several people wandering the Himalayas, or whichever which mountainside
-A Big Mouth Billy Bass that is not a bass... and its song is an awful thing...
-A Grand Guignol-esque theatre, where after one show the rich front-seat audience has caught a terrible blood-borne disease from the “fake” gore...
-A whale falls up instead of down into the abyss
-A Fat Men's Club that survived to the present day because they learned to eat something that isn't food
-A rideshare app that uses its riders as fuel
-School reunion group open time capsule, contents suggest lost memories of terrible event
-Junkyard that attracts "human waste" who eat rusty/broken parts and incorporate them into their bodies
A tree with branches that extend into other worlds... but not like a world-tree... it's a regular tree and you can only see other worlds if you climb up it and some of the other-world-branches might not even be able to support your weight but a kid went missing across one so you'll have to figure it out
A chimpanzee sewn up inside a mascot costume - very strong, very cruel
'Mongous Fungus
Infraredcap
Cipherbloom - a flower which, when included in a floral arrangement, scrambles the meaning of its flower language for anyone who doesn't have the favour of the flower's twin blossom
A dungeon within the flying ribcage of a giant - repurposed by a wizard or somesuch - containing & trailing viscera - get up to it by climbing the dangling intestines
-a coven of sorcerers who all gained their magic by drinking the blood of a thing from the stars that crash-landed in a swamp
From Lupin III: Slouching ape-men in black bodysuits wearing bladed gauntlets
-apes are scary... we're apemogged by the real great apes... not enough ape-horror
A tiered candelabra of egg-cups - hard boil eggs placed on them to the perfect consistency and crack the shells open just so
From Castle in the Sky: "Royal blood" as gimmick of dungeon - tracking down all the villagers in the area who resemble the people in the dungeon murals to find one you can manipulate to help steal the treasure & who won't be incinerated by the defensive lasers
From Yuuan no Kanata: A town built atop old rivers, the rivers died - diverted or blocked up - and are now ghosts, carrying some off before their time and bringing others back who should've stayed dead
-the baboon-faced man
-people disappearing, their clothes left behind, tied together into knots
-a woman scampering about, squeaking like a rat
-a man whose pupils are black flies crawling around his unblinking eyes
-a woman pregnant with a tree, her automatic writing communicating the will of numbers she receives through the tree
The Grey Waste is full of ghosts - those souls which were unable to pass on to their after-life due to clinging too strongly to their earthly tethers - eventually the passions which bound them fade, and they fall listless into the jaws of Hades
-spectral tatterdemalia blown like giant tumbleweeds across the dust-plains of Hades, made of ghosts whose ragged edges fit inextricably together, chased and lanced by gangs of fiends for ectoplasm
The native outsiders of Gehenna are the seirim. The law of their evil is more primal than that of the contract-bound devils of Hell. They are the ordained punishers of those who break taboos, who become impure, who encroach on their desolate territories. They look like labubus? They look like labubus. Also vile cheburashkas, Wild Things.
Settled people on the border of a steppe supply a certain tribe with guns to act as a buffer against invading hordes - this goes poorly for them
What about a displacement beast... and it kills you by casually walking through you... parting you like Moses and the Red Sea... or Shadow Moses and the Blue Sea...
Plane of Shadows, place of prophecy & doom - shadar-kai trapped by the shadow of their future - animaled by Poe-ass ravens and black cats.
Monster with diet of bad abstractions produces spiritual toxins as byproducts
coconut pearls, vegetable ivory
Clockwork dolls used as trackers - made in the image of their quarry - they follow the traces of their quarry's breath on the air, the stuff stirring their gears into motion - they wish to live by taking the breath fully, but die in the same instant as their quarry
"The Bhils, a people of Central India, believe in hells for tigers; the Malays tell of a city in the heart of the jungle with beams of human bones, walls of human skin, and eaves of human hair, built and inhabited by tigers"
"That tree dreamed by Chesterton, which devoured the birds nesting in its branches, and when spring came put out feathers instead of leaves"
"Of the Kilkenny Cats it is told that they got into raging quarrels and devoured each other, leaving behind no more than their tails" - fuzzy caterpillar-like species that metamorphoses into felinoid adult form
"like an angel that is also a lion"
"In the Infernal Regions there is an imaginary structure known as the Tower of the Phoenix"
"Perhaps, more simply, the idea of a visible mark standing for a sound baffled the Nordic mind, and therein lay the mystery... It may be suspected that the names of the Norns are a refinement or addition of a theological nature; ancient Germanic tribes were incapable of such abstract thinking"
"hell is a beast with other beasts inside it"
"the Phoenix is the lord of jubilees"
-from Borges' The Book of Imaginary Beings
Doomsday cult leads followers into a cave, predicting the end of days - end of days actually does happen, but universe is cyclical & cave flings them into future iteration wherein the end of days is a different date and they seem like a bunch of crazy people
Sci-fi idea: spacers tend to have artificially-induced synaesthesia, most often of the gustatory-auditory variety - lugging around different sorts of food can be prohibitive mass-wise, so synaesthete-spacers can much better enjoy the usual meal of "spit & shit" (algae & fungus) by accompanying it with an orchestral pairing that passes through various sonic flavour-triggers
Maned Men: A spacer clade. Named for the vector-space calligraphy of their tubular, cybernetic heat/gas exchange arrays. Heavily-modified digestive systems allow them to live off liquid hydrocarbons. Largest single-clade polity attempting to build a ship which can reach the end of space-time.
Rat-monks who hold the Plague at bay, and release it when persecuted
The Pioneer plaques returned by unknown means to Earth, crushed into spheres
Alas! life is obstinate, and clings closest where it is most hated
"During the Qing dynasty, laborers from all over China often engaged in difficult construction work in the backwaters of western Hunan (Xiangxi), and the mortality rates were high. The Chinese preferred to be buried alongside family, partly due to the belief that their souls might feel homesick if they were buried far from home, so an industry for the transportation of these corpses to their native villages, often across thousands of miles, soon developed. The corpses would be arranged upright in single file and be tied to long bamboo rods on the sides, while two men (one at the front and one at the back) would carry the ends of the rods on their shoulders and walk. When the bamboo flexed up and down, the corpses appeared to be "hopping" in unison when viewed from a distance away.
Two oral accounts of transporting corpses are included in Liao Yiwu's The Corpse Walker. One account describes how corpses would be transported by a two-man team. One would carry the corpse on his back with a large robe covering both of them and a mourning mask on top. The other man would walk ahead with a lantern and warn his companion about obstacles ahead of him. The lantern was used as a visual guide for the corpse carrier to follow since they could not see with the robe covering them. It is speculated in the accounts in the book that corpses would be carried at night to avoid contact with people and the cooler air would be more suitable to transporting bodies."
A sort of reptile that reproduces through its shed skin
A Frankencrawl wherein you are either monstrous creations or monstrous scientists pursuing or being pursued across the world-map in a vengesome game of cat-and-mouse
-As seen in the anti-Deist novel Frankenstein
--A Sorcerercrawl where you have to transport something extremely volatile through dangerous terrain
Cryogenic preservation is a bust. Turns out you have to go in the complete opposite direction temperature-wise for the long-term storage & eventual revival of dead people. However this occasionally results in super-hot, psychotically-violent plasmic poltergeists.
-containment derived from those used in fusion power - in fact on the "cheaper" end of pyrogenic preservation you can just throw people into a modified fusion reactor, however this runs the risk of bits of them getting mixed up when they're pulled out, and of Empyrean Events
The Sagacious Beasts (among whose number the noble monkeys one-sidedly consider themselves) are so because they have a satisfactory answer to every question - some more from the perspective of beasts, others more sagely, but always somewhere between the two. Their cousins the Philosophical Creatures are by contrast obsessed with finding the answer to a particular, often abstract question by any means necessary.
Gimmick glog class... wherein the gimmick is literally manipulating your character sheet... like as a physical object in the game-world & the real world... your character's got a big piece of paper, and you've got a regular-sized piece of paper, and if you fold it into a paper airplane your character gets a glider, or you can make it into a boat or a bridge or whatever... use it as a shield... but this causes a random 1d6" cut across it, where the d6 is the HP damage you would've taken... a complicated way to do that: make 1" coordinate grid of paper, roll dX & dY for starting point of cut & then d8 for direction of cut...
AGI doesn't work out - instead, a method to grow human brain organelles in pigs that integrate with the pigs' nervous systems is developed, and these pigs are trained to do service work with saccadic computer interfaces. You still eat the pigs after.
Dungeon origin: A bastard or otherwise-unwanted child is imprisoned in basement, freak accident kills the rest of the family and leaves the imprisoned child as the sole heir. By that point psychologically unable to leave the basement, instead has it expanded into maze of secret passages beneath & throughout the house.
-A dreaming god, or something like a god - its dreams reshape reality around it - its cult pray to it, repeating the prayers again and again, so that they seep into the god's dream and guide its reshaping
--a room in this dungeon, filled with recreations of a lost lover - their eyes covered with strips of gauze, their ears stoppered up with wax - helpful, until they realize you are not truly their love, in which case sparagmos ensues
An island with a haunted treasure - whoever approaches or takes the treasure is stalked & killed by a monster. Having a priest bless the treasure will break the monster's connection to it, but the nearest temple's priest has been kidnapped & replaced by a scammer.
Mummified human bodies preserved as a sort of reverse spacesuit used by aliens on Earth
-decadent proboscidean giants whose technology is based on the selective breeding of self-arranging micro-hominids
From "My Puppet of Desire": Featureless sex dolls, taking pills induces hallucination projecting the form of your ideal lover onto the doll
Statue of some tusked god biting into the head of an octopus. The octopus is reaching its tentacles up a nostril, in an ear, around the eye of the god.
Galeb duhr know the secrets of earth power - ergo the warp spasm and the making of flying ships were taught to humans by the stone-shepherds
-their "grum grum grum" is the human-audible portion of their infrasonic language
Mangas I've read in the last meanwhile worth reading: Hunter x Hunter, Evol, Kindaichi Case Files, Summertime Render, Ghost Fixers, Yuureitou (cheeky lil reread), Curry Utopia, Like The Kudan, Shigahime (reread), Book of Mononoke, Noise (by Tetsuya Tsuitsui - all works by him worth reading), Bokutachi ga Yarimashita (I haven't read Blue Lock but it's funny to me that that's probably Kaneshiro Muneyuki's most popular manga...), Alice in Border Road
From Army of Darkness:
-Dungeon faction has fight-pit with zombies at the bottom, will dump you in if they catch you but respect you if you can fight your way out.
-Three grimoires, one real, two fake. Subtle sign indicates the real - touching a fake is lethal.
-Field of skeletal arms - they'll grab whatever so can be fooled temporarily by throwing them whatever and running by while their hands are full.
-the scene with the little mirror-dudes was great
Homeopathic water-absorption of the memories & sentiments of the drowned dead
The plural of shoggoth is shoggothim - shoggothim are an order of angels enslaved by the sorcery of the elder things - the pentagram of course being the image of the elder things, a key piece in their symbolic architecture that's percolated through the eons into human occulture
Buddho-Nordic neopagan cult that identifies the eight-legged, world-crossing horse Sleipnir with the eight-handled sword - which is also the noble eightfold path. Meditating bushido-viking murderers.
-they've figured out a way to do sokushinbutsu but instead of mummifying you spontaneously combust
Pope Sylvester I imprisoned Leviathan in the sewer system of Rome, so I've heard, so I've heard
A dungeon:
-Belltower stolen by crows, flies about
-Egg of crows in crypt of church, parasitized by something that is not a crow and more like a cuckoo
--A clock cuckoo, which is a brood parasite of Time itself
-NPC: Man employed by church to eat spiders & their cobwebs - talks like his mouth is halfway glued shut
-Whole site is rumoured to damn those who walk it - men who moil for gold unlikely to care about this
-The pew-worm
Lich who extends their life by petrifying their children at a fitting age, then plucking stone organs to replace their own when theirs ail, turning the stolen organs back to flesh. Relies on biological similarity and geomantic alignment to make the organs take. A garden of similar-looking statues, holes in their heads and torsos the width of a fist.
-familiar is an evil lithopedion
Knowing the names of days is the least of calendrical magic - real power lies in knowing the names of hours and minutes. It's said that the true master of the art could speak the names of seconds before they passed - and that this master was part of the cabal who attempted the eighth day of creation.
-The eighth day, which ends not in -day, -day, -day, -day, -day, -day, or -day - but in -ach, for the name of the eighth day is Savarach
A clade of humans who make themselves endosymbionts within the bodies of lumbering elephantiles - existing in a state of pleasant womb-like dreaming until their host finds their own wits lacking and needs to consult human intelligence
Surface drow, culture of escapees & exiles from the underworld, deliberate negation of drow culture:
-Political androgyny
-Tarantulossos - giant fluffy tarantulas whose hair is woven into tents & so on
-Psychedelic, prophetic, and anonymous oral tradition & politics - life led by art
-See life on the surface as trial by poisons
-Ghost torch festival - put lamps in husks of young tarantulossos and let them loose, children hunt them down with slings
-Static astrology - the Web of Heaven - imposed reincarnation, casts souls back into tribulation, the lytic world
-Puppets with cymbal-joints used to spread comedic lessons - puppeteers allowed gender expression, celebrity, have complex stylistic & philosophical feuds
-Blood-drinking funerary cannibalism
Upright bipedal clade on alien world evolved from ground sloth-like browsers - human scientists believed these guys were sapient & built all the artifacts they observed on the world and wasted a lot of time & resources based on this false belief
Observational skepticism theory is half-right - dark energy is real, but not a universal phenomenon, but one restricted to our local bubble - it is also a psychic phenomenon, emerging from the collective consciousness of Earthly life, dimly aware that Something Very Bad is coming our way, and warping reality to keep it at bay
A set of eight themes for a month's post, if one were inclined to write eight posts in a month:
-Adventure Location (hex, dungeon, lair, etc.)
-Class
-Monsters
-Generator
-List/Table
-Fluff
-Theory/Mechanics
-Misc.
You never see princesses and/or maidens imprisoned in towers/dungeons or chained up to be fed to monsters anymore... politically-important-hostage-as-treasure... free Zielenica from the pastor's prison before her father the Baltic Sea learns of her imprisonment and floods the land - but beware, for the prison holds many monsters who the pastor is trying to convert to Christianity, some with partial & terrifying success
Devils & demons embody the Big Crunch & Big Rip end-states of the universe, respectively - the former binding, crushing, centralizing, the latter rending, separating, gaping. This is because they are, as preached by St. Garamond, from the future.
-The Old Baatorians, once-inhabitants of the realm now called Hell, like their lord Zargon are immortal - their bones indestructible, their flesh regenerating endlessly from the bones. Devils dismembered the Baatorians, and keep the bones of Baatorians as mock-relics - in vials of acid around their necks, in the hearths of their homes, etc., treating them with scornful worship.
Word Corner:
-Immix: To mix in
-Stentorian: A loud & powerful voice
-Decussate: To cross or intersect to form an X, or to be shaped like an X
-Nidicolous: An animal which stays in its nest for a long time after birth, or a species with nidicolous young
-Olfend: Old English word for camel
-Hawser: A thick rope or cable for mooring or towing a ship
-Haslet: Old English word for viscera
-Lemniscate: Any of several figure-eight or ∞-shaped curves. The word comes from the Latin lēmniscātus, meaning "decorated with ribbons"
-Sillage: Trail of perfume-scent
-Shoy-hoy: Old word for scarecrow
-Debitage: All the material produced during the process of lithic reduction – the production of stone tools and weapons by knapping stone
-Curglaff: The shock felt when one first plunges into cold water
-Gibbose: Hunchbacked, among other things
-Inspissation: The process of increasing the viscosity of a fluid
-Solicitude: Care or concern for someone or something
-Confrere: A professional colleague or fellow, a fellow member of a religious organization
-Foehn: Dry, relatively warn downslope wind in the lee of a mountain range
