Friday, July 25, 2025

Slush Pile 14

Previous Slush Piles:


The Mouldwarp Republic - legendary subterranean polity, rebels against monarchical oppression who fled underground, exanding their tunnels and hideaways into a country-spanning egalitarian underland

Firenewts have much higher tolerance for heat - their pipes can be much shorter than humans' without burning their lips & lungs - and they are not "evil" so much as "constantly suffering from mild-to-moderate stimulant psychosis" due to "smoking a ton of crack"

The Scorpion's Web - a sprawling network of moldering qanats, cisterns, and under-roads surrounding the forbidden city of Tlincal - vital shelter for those crossing the desert, but also a stalking-ground for the parasitoid scorpion-men

There's a lake which is the only place in the world where it's permissible to commit suicide - most drown, but some will row out some ways and drink poison or slit their throats - the lake's god receives prayers for the restoration of honour, for an end to pain, for vengeance - the lake's shore peppered with sickos offering to help

Word Corner:
-Virate: Title of ruler
-Suberose: Has a corky texture
-Lureln: Rhine dialect, meaning "murmuring"
-Pelf: Money, especially when gained in a dishonest or dishonourable way
-Biotope: An area of uniform environmental conditions providing a living place for a specific assemblage of plants and animals
-Gare: Coarse wool on the legs of a sheep, a dock-basin on a waterway, a pier or wharf, a train station, greedy or covetous. Gare-fowl is another name for a great auk.
-Oleaginous: Rich in, covered with, or producing oil - oily or greasy - exaggeratedly and distastefully complimentary
-Chlorochrous: Having a yellow-green colour
-Flavescent: Yellowish or turning yellow
-Albicant: Whitening or becoming white
-Atrous: Jet-black
-Diremption: A sharp division into two parts
-Omnium-Gatherum: An unorganized collection or mixture of various things
-Jackeen: Pejorative term for someone from Dublin, Ireland - a contemptuous designation for a self-assertive worthless fellow
-Flush: A period where tea plants grow new leaves
-Salep: Flour made from the tubers of the orchid genus Orchis. These tubers contain a nutritious, starchy polysaccharide called glucomannan. Salep flour is consumed in beverages and desserts, especially in the cuisines of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, notably in the Levant, where it is a traditional winter beverage.
-Adumbrate: Report or represent in outline, indicate faintly, foreshadow or symbolize, overshadow
-Beot: A proclamation given to enemies before battle telling them how you are going to kill them - naming targets, how many you will kill, how you will kill them, etc.
-Drumble-dor: A bumblebee, a beetle, a dandelion, a blundering person
-Gleed: A hot coal
-Hollybob: A branch of holly
-Murdrum: The killing of an unknown man
-Wark: Old English, an ache
-Welkin: The sky or heaven
-Lea: An open area of grassy or arable land
-Corybantic: Wild, frenzied
-Luppan: Possessing large wings, or having the appearance of possessing large wings
-Tangzhong: Also called "water roux" or "yu-dane" - a paste of flour cooked in water or milk which is used to improve the texture of bread and increase the amount of time it takes to go stale
-Pruritus: Medical term for itching
-Shatter Belt: Strategically-positioned regions that are deeply internally divided and encompassed in the competition between the great powers - also another term for fault line
-Rill: A very small brook or any of several long, narrow, meandering valleys or trenches that are devoid of water on the Moon's surface
-Ingwet: Cave-slime, mold
-Labile: Liable to change, easily altered, easily broken down or replaced
-Wolver: One that behaves like a wolf, one that hunts wolves
-Flehmening: A behaviour in which an animal curls back its upper lip exposing its front teeth, inhales with the nostrils usually closed, and then often holds this position for several seconds. It may be performed over a site or substance of particular interest to the animal, or may be performed with the neck stretched and the head held high in the air.
-Jejune: Naive, simplistic, superficial - dry & uninteresting writing and/or ideas
-Inquiline: An animal that lives commensally in the nest, burrow, or dwelling place of an animal of another species.
-Orgulous: Haughty
-Pundendum: External genitalia, especially of a woman
-Vaticination: Prediction, the act of prophesying
-Shool: To drag or scrape along, to loaf or idle about begging, to shovel
-Obmutescence: Becoming or staying silent/mute
-Septentrion: The northern regions, north
-Interlard: To vary by intermixture
-Repine: Feel or express discontent, fret, languish
-Chrestomathy: Selection of passages from an authour or set of authours, designed to help in learning a language

Dry curry ration

The Miserable Sisters of Pox are the tumultuous & tumourous daughters of the god-cancer Vaprak

A hexmap with several locations/enemies that risk various diseases, and shrines or wisewoman-types scattered about that can cure one each - and each having their associated complications that characters seeking a cure will become entangled in
-perhaps the right sacrifice or defilement can reverse such a shrine, letting you curse your enemies of the disease rather than cure yourself of it

Gripplies carry grippe... of course... grippelies... the sickness that makes you "croaky"...

A character missing their teeth... carry a mortar & pestle at all times to mash their food to edibility...

Monster or object that exists in two planes simultaneously - perhaps living rift/verge
-perhaps two monsters or other such things linked across planes by an extra-spatial "umbilical"

A form of theatre performed by projecting the actors' shadows onto the surface of hot air balloons, entirely gestural, with a view of all sides being necessary to understand the whole story as characters walk "off-stage" only to arrive into another scene - the wealthy employ runners to keep them up to date on happenings on other sides

Just steal the death-curse of the linnorms from pathfinder if you kill a linnorm you get its death-curse and every sort of linnorm has its own sort of death-curse just give that to some monster or another
-perhaps embodied by a bird or somesuch that flies out of the monster's mouth on death and into yours, so that there can be counter-play

A glass centipede, lives in caves, echolocates by the rapid tap-dancing clacking of its chelicerae - dumb in the way insects are but falls in love with human voices, wants to cuddle up around your throat

A terrier which was sized to humans as regular terriers were to rats would be terrifying... one shake from such a thing would irrepairably ruin your spine... a hundred human beings so ruined in an hour... giants are placing bets...

Names: Vasalerat, Shashagosa, Addegastus, Solatio, Lentibelsinea, Hascell, Robin King Agbisherea, Arkhebalataia, Mossassul, Hamorda-morda, T'Jem, Buchevult, the Hushlands, Lyr Branwen, Scrome Blapherd, Mirramessa, the Stonies, Lindhog, Dumaruga, Sarconensis, Imrane, Ogdala, Scrammatelia
-Other Names: Dire Ulixes, Perfidious Albion, Nectanebos, Nystagmus, Modredus, Sonthonax, Aristide, Orfeo & Heurodis, Deirdriu Anbroin, Maesalynbeth, Indolent Semyon, Free Lance Ypolita, Yrento, Voivode Cyrus, Strong-Thewed Uruk, Loathsome Margot, Siglief, Gaheirn, Dirnemir, Berbiolette

The Plane of Shadows is outer space, figuratively - maybe literally - lightless and barren, distances and bodies stretched monstrously like shadows before a waning sun - and also like the deep sea, a little light a great danger in the darkness

The red bark of Edat, also called Ozouga, or Sacoglottis gabonensis, is used by the Efik people among others to increase the potency & preservation of palm wine - also protects the brain from some of the negative effects of ethanol

A race of giants - they are storks transformed - in one place they are giants, and when they migrate they become birds

Burgherlars of the Stolen City

A lake of the moon and a lake of the sun - the lake of the moon is cold by day & hot by night - the lake of the sun the opposite

Okay so it's like that coffee they pull out of civet poop but first another animal eats the civet and another different animal eats that animal and so on however many times until the civet and all the rest are digested and pooped out and then you go and get the coffee

Perchance Bullet: Full of circuitry - lodges in the brain, traps mind in virtual reality based off their memories and fantasies, preserves it well past the point of bodily death

Cassadaga (a Seneca Indian word meaning "Water beneath the rocks") is a small unincorporated community located in Volusia County, Florida, United States, just north of Deltona. It is especially known for having many psychics and mediums, and has consequently been named the "Psychic Capital of the World".

Steal rooms from Blue Prince to use as dungeon rooms... e.g. the rotunda... and/or Blue Prince dungeon, draft dungeon rooms from deck, limited "hand" each time

Duergar - mistranslation - doer-gar, the sons of doer - dwarf-clan which believes the key part of creation is the act of creation, the suffering undergone to create - venerate mothers & slaves - other clans include the seer-gar, makers of lenses and suchlike, who believe creation can't be complete without full perception and understanding of the created - holder-gar, who believe that creation is nothing without possession of the created

The Green Planet, the heaven of Obad-Hai, is the source of orcworts, barometz, seed roaches, barnacle geese, and so on, brought to the world by spelljammers and suchlike some time ago

Old Tooth-and-Nails - a once-human boogeyman - his nails got longer and longer, his teeth more plentysome, until his flesh and bone were just a fist-sized lump on a body made of yellowed teeth and nails

The lumps on the Ephesian Artemis's chest aren't breasts, but instead the testicles of sacrificial bulls - Tim Ward

From Bogleech - there's something out there that when it gets cancer, its cancer starts flying around and building monolithic cities

Lovecraftiana: DNA is an ultraterrestrial invention, panspermically seeded in primordial soup throughout the universe - hence why beasts from beyond the local cluster can eat humans - it's a sort of self-evolving coordinate system for hyper-dimensional travel & transfers - blast a baryonic universe with the stuff once and an eon later it'll have made a knot of "shortcuts" and "wiring" - also why eldritch entities are concerned with blood, bloodlines, hybridization, etc. - Yog-Sothoth busted in Lavinia Whateley to save 5 meta-minutes on its trip to the brane-store
-"when the stars are right" is when these connections are such that the ultraterrestrial wills of Cthulhuoids can interface with their dormant drone bodies in the baryonic universe
-plot by cult to steal skull of ancient human which was preserved in now-melting permafrost - plan to clone them from the DNA in its teeth, under suspicion that they were a blessed one of the outer gods

A village scattered with corpses - some roofs & frames collapsed - the corpses died of falling from a great height, and have grown scales in patches - they worshiped a dragon-god, and tried to ascend - they failed, or were rejected, and fell

Dishevelled man in a cabin in the woods - insists you come inside, help him barricade, that there are flesh-eating zombies that have the place surrounded - in fact he is a flesh-eating zombie repressing awareness of that, but will revert if you allow yourself to be locked inside or question too muc

Theo-sci-fi universe wherein the Mormons are more-or-less right... corner of the galaxy wherein the post-humously baptized - undead starship-godlings - lord over worlds dreamed in death... dvergrian species created from the unconscious memories of rotting, being consumed... treated uncomfortably by the united worlds of the celestial kingdom, home to those uncomfortably between the celestial and the telestial

Dyson Dust: Spaceborne micro-inorganisms, ultimately artificial though naturally-evolved, found in an increasing number of solar systems. Believed to be descended from self-replicating swarms meant for the construction of Dyson spheres and similar cosmic mega-structures, which emergently began to turn cannibalistic, cancerous, and small.

Whatever happened to Blackbeard's head?
-transplanted onto generations of admiral-bodies in the british navy
-affixed to control-cortex of nuclear submarine of secret pirate-nation
-took over Davy Jones' locker

Masked dancing dogs
-from NBateman: magic ring which allows wearer to command beast wearing matching collar

Oceanic scavengers have difficulty dismantling whale carcasses because they have trouble getting enough leverage to bite through the thick hide & blubber - same in space?

From dream: beast that is so evil that when one is born God sends an angel to chop off its head - they are able to survive with just the brainstem

Paired will-o'-wisp & monster that can mimic voices - pretending to be adventurer with torch spotted from a distance - lure prey into traps
-candles rendered from the fat of brains smashed out from the skulls of those in the throes of strong emotion - the smoke/light of these candles induces emotion, and/or psychometrically frames things illuminated

Curse of the forest demon - swaps a hunter's head with that of the animal they slew - there is a beast now roaming the forest with a human head and human cunning

Bungus - chitin-based protein computer hybrid species of fungus & insect forming crawling, sporulating environmental suffusion of computation

Immortal jellyfish babyman - like that jellyfish that rejuvenates into nymph stage or whatever - giant fetus with man's face floating in artificial womb-tank attached to wire mother robot

The stone-like forms of the ultima-men stand proud in niches in the valley - it is they who will walk the earth when all other peoples are less than bones - stories are whispered into their ears while sweet scents are wafted up to their nostrils, so that they will be remembered into eternity - the wrathful plead and entreat for the ultima-men's sleeping ghosts to enter into their bodies, make them huge and strong for a time, before they collapse under their living mass
-some barbarians have learrned a tattoo-magic that limits the ghost growth to a limb or other part of the body, preventing or delaying its lethal conclusion
-barbarian-preserves maintained by the city-state (ir empire or what have you), synth-religiously imbued with their cultural values while living in hardening conditions, released as counter to invasions

The pseudo-modernist fantasy state is enabled by outsourcing the functions of the bureaucracy to hell - tax-devils, tithe-devils, surveillance-devils, officer-devils, finance-devils, etc.
-excess population absorbed by crusader-states in the Infinite Abyss, essentially Blood War proxies

Planet where immortal super-organisms devour their own children to maintain genetic fitness
-Dodola - moon around gas giant (Perun), supplies trawling stations with metals, water, and food - red storm follows it around its orbit from within the gas giant like the pupil of an enormous eye, paranoia common among moon's populace
-Sinterklaas - world where hacker commune diverted mass drivers' payloads to attempt to create anarchist abundance paradise
-Clio - planet in a pseudo-binary star system, orbiting a brown dwarf which itself orbits a low-mass star - solar-powered hyper-refridgerated facilities containing ultra-efficient, memory-focused computers encoded with unknown knowledge, and countless sophisticated info-viruses besides

Void husks
Contagious chaos
Super-string weavers & their harmonic masters

Tarot taro - root crop which feeds on the fulfillment of prescribed fates, favoured by those in marginal environments who do not value or believe in their own agency

Class based on roguelike card drafting

Black pyramids swimming off the coast - more the size of a truck than a pyramid pyramid - their stones sing with the whales, the kelp grows strange where they drift

Monday, July 21, 2025

D6 Social Media Services of the Near-Future

1. Nepotery: Artificial pseudo-ethnic nepotism - each paying subscriber to Nepotery is assigned a "clan" of similarly-positioned, like-minded other subscribers - part of each subscription payment goes into a pool for each clan, to be paid out whenever one clan member hooks another up with a job, or a relationship, or a place to rent, or whatever else. Lower-ranked clan members can assist higher-ranked ones by performing domestic services, running errands, attacking members of other clans, and so on.

2. Bright: "Bright makes right, Bright shines a light!" - bounty-based vigilantism, Nextdoor with total surveillance net and parapolice violence. Brighters register with pseudonymous superheroic personas, monitor area chats for leads & associated bounties - find out why that wrongly-ethnic man was in the neighbourhood and make sure he doesn't come back, make the porch pirate pay, someone stopped to look at my flowers - do they work for the government? This is all de facto legal now.

3. MeatSuite: The people who believed everything they saw on the internet are just about all dead now. Internet advertising took a nose-dive. Word of mouth, face-to-face interactions, that's where it's at.
 
MeatSuite connects outgoing, extroverted, well-connected sorts with internet-based advertising intelligences, giving them a face and reach in the physical world. While signed up to MeatSuite as a bio-platform you suspend your prior subjectivity, and agree to act as the avatar of whichever AI currently owns the rights to your use. A proprietary eye implant streams instructions directly into your field of view.

4. KLUSTRFUK: Lonely? Alienated? Directionless, driveless? Join a hivemind!
 
That was the original pitch anyways. Turns out that requires getting deeper into the brain than contemporary implants can do without serious risk of horrific infections. Shallower's tolerable though. That's how we got from the initial promise of a hivemind to KLUSTRFUK - the social media service where the language is body language. The language of the sensation of the body. KLUSTRFUK lets you feel what other users are feeling. Due to network limits real fidelity of this sharing requires close proximity. This tends to create cells of users who've pretty much fried their brains from intense sensory feedback.

5. Wecylia: That is not dead which can eternal post. Premium deathcare - while on its way out, the body is impregnated with a fungal chitin-protein computer, and purified of potential competitors. It is lain in the ground in a bio-degradable casket, and a genetically-engineered tree is planted on top, grafted with electro-chemical interfaces.

The protein computer spreads throughout the body, taking in an image of it along with an engram of the brain. This engram is synthesized with the body's digital footprint to create a virtual ghost of the deceased, resting in peace except when the living come to its grave-tree to consult with it. For an increased subscription fee the body will be interred in a lichyard alongside other Wecylia clients, wherein their fungal emulation can chatter eternally in a mycelial network with others of its kind.

6. FETF: The Finding of Extra-Terrestrial Friends. Oumuamua, anomalous signals from other stars - intelligent life is out there, and FETF can connect you with it. Chat with your pre-incarnate relatives from Alpha Centauri, see amazing footage of gravity-surfers around the moons of Procyon, do your part to bring Earthlings up to a higher level of galactic consciousness, so that we will be permitted off-world to join the universal brotherhood of species. Your part may involve industrial sabotage, false flag attacks, and so on and so forth - but you trust the Procyonians, don't you? It's all fake, obviously. It's Project Blue Beam, as an app.

Sunday, July 13, 2025

D6x6 Lovecraftian Cults

Click the button below to get your Lovecraftian cult:



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

D6This Lovecraftian cult is motivated
1by the mingling of jaded thrill-seeking & a fawning fear response.
2by a need to feel superior to their fellow man by means of secret knowledge and secret powers.
3by a bleak sense of justice that would rather see the world destroyed than the wicked continue to prosper.
4by survival - getting a way off this doomed planet, or transformation into a form that can survive the coming eon, or however else.
5by transhumanism - a desire to transcend what they believe to be the limits of humanity.
6by delusion - the epistemic collapse landed right on their heads - they think they can end chemtrails forever, or help the white hat pedophiles beat the black hat pedophiles in the deep state, or whatever else.
D6This Lovecraftian cult worships
1electrical "dragons" which conduct themselves through the mineralized channels of subterranean rivers and aquifers, and galvanically puppet the drowned dead as emissaries.
2timeless creatures of living mathematics which interface with our material, temporal reality by influencing numbers stations and the growth of trees.
3cancer, as the primordial response of life that refuses to be assimilated into a larger whole.
4a pantheon of scientists, alchemists, mystics, and prophets - seeing them as thin human guises over the universe's process of self-revealing.
5a dead universe, the one which preceded ours, its influence known in the gravitic waves of dark matter.
6an anthropomorphization of entropy, and its necro-Kirlian angels of decay.
D6This Lovecraftian cult came to knowledge of the greater cosmos
1by stumbling across a more-right-than-wrong tome.
2by an encounter with an entity that left them scarred in body and soul.
3after discovering an abandoned temple hidden in a fold of space-time.
4by absorbing a broadcast from an alien realm while stargazing.
5via direct revelation from an outer god.
6from a guru who splintered off an older & more prestigious sect.
D6This Lovecraftian cult is led
1by a grifter who only started the thing for easy sex and money, and is increasingly-desperate for a way out from the true believers.
2by a compassionate philanthropist who believes that the cult is their best method of harm reduction given the conditions of existence.
3by an emotionally-dysregulated sort with an unstable sense of self who's jumped between religions and political extremities their whole life.
4by the half-human scion of a great old one, grimly sure of their destiny.
5by a sociopathic misanthrope who wants to take revenge on the whole world.
6by the host of a psychic parasite from another solar system, whose own planet and species were destroyed. They'll use up the cult to the fullest extent to leapfrog further across the galaxy, fleeing the annihilation they're sure is chasing them.
D6This Lovecraftian cult maintains a facade
1of edgy yet politically-liberal Satanism.
2of sober scientific debate and investigation.
3of hippie-esque free love, psychedelic consciousness-exploration, and universal brotherhood.
4of muscular neo-pagan cultural revitalization.
5of perennial wisdom syncreticism.
6of pseudo-Christian gnosticism.
D6This Lovecraftian cult aims
1to kidnap and extort a wealthy recluse, unaware that he is an immortal sorcerer.
2to bind a hostile & predatory being, and use the threat of unbinding it to muscle over other factions in the occulture.
3to lovebomb enough people into joining that they can lead a popular revolt, which will in turn cement their theo-manifesto into the canon.
4to host a high society soirée where society's movers & shakers will be exposed to higher powers, and thus be ripe for conversion.
5to heist an artifact related to their object of worship from an upcoming museum exhibit.
6to commit ritual murders across the city, the points where they're committed drawing out a potent sigil.

Saturday, July 12, 2025

D6x6 Galumphing Gryphons

Click the button below to get your gryphons:



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

D6These gryphons have the front half
1of an albatross.
2of a potoo.
3of a shoebill.
4of a pileated woodpecker.
5of a rooster.
6of a raven.
D6These gryphons has the back half
1of a leopard.
2of a manul.
3of a cougar.
4of a lynx.
5of a serval.
6of a liger.
D6These gryphons are
1celestial beings that are bestowed by the gods as mounts to those who serve the will of the heavens.
2a biomancer's living thesis, proof of their theory of animal-grafting.
3a noble house's heraldric eidolon force-meated into fleshly form.
4native creatures of the flying sky-islands.
5living artifacts of the harmonious world which preceded our discordant one, wherein living things evolved by merging into hybrids rather than splitting and speciating.
6spat out alongside other chimeras by a repopulation vault meant to restore surface life after some catastrophe - that same catastrophe damaged the vault's directing intelligence, causing it to make things like gryphons instead of pure forms.
D6These gryphons prefer to attack prey
1by dive-pouncing from a great height.
2that are healthy, abhoring sickly meat.
3in pairs, one coming in low, the other coming in high.
4that don't back down after a threat display - there's some beastly honour in it.
5by picking off the weakest member of a group first, to use them as bait for an ambush for the rest.
6from behind, like a tiger, and like tigers can be confused by wearing a mask on the back of your head.
D6These gryphons are known
1to collect various spices - barks and resins and dried berries and so on and so forth - to blend them into incomparably delicious proprietary mixtures with which they attract mates.
2to engage in surplus killing towards horses, and thus are assumed to hate them.
3to be excellent appraisers of jewelry, able to tell in an instant if a piece is a counterfeit or if precious metal has been debased.
4to sing only once in their lives - at the moment of their death - and this is known to be a surpassingly beautiful song.
5to drop tortoises shell-first onto the heads of bald men and elephants, and screech uproariously afterwards as if they find it hilarious.
6to mark their territory by scratching geoglyphs into the earth.
D6These gryphons nest
1amid branches sharpened and entrenched like pallisades, bristling outwards and upwards.
2out in the open, in mounds of cloth and shiny baubles they've pilfered.
3opportunistically, in the lairs of other creatures which they chase out.
4in coracle-like constructions of mud and twigs which they float in lakes and ponds.
5in tubular structures made from their spittle mixed with the blood of their prey, which they build on the undersides of overhanging cliffs.
6atop pillars of stone, tossing their chicks over the edge in a trial-by-fire method of teaching flight - man-made towers trigger the same instinct.

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Some Artefacts - The First Dossier

To be the first of five.

Like so: https://crateredland.blogspot.com/2025/07/facility-artefact-classification.html

Oπ - Screensaver Ball: A synthetic rubber ball, striped bright red and yellow, approximately the size of a tennis ball. It possesses a perfect coefficient of restitution, and once thrown will bounce and remain bouncing until seized. Placed in staff lunch room in sheet metal box with one face made of plexiglass as amusement.

Itself the product of an anomaly - the Matheson Toy Factory (LΩ) - a facility which was able to destructively scan the brainwaves of neurodivergent children to produce artefact-class toys.

Eρ - Mr. Crapper: Jewish-American male. Late 50s. Theorized to have a "hyper-evolutionary" gut microbiome - he excretes complex multi-cellular organisms derived from the bacteria, fungi, and archaea of his digestive tract. The transformation from micro-organism to macro-organism seems to begin in his small intestine, and be largely complete by the time they reach the colon. Each such organism he produces is unique.

While most such organisms are non-viable reproductively, testing of the Trenton sewer system indicates a self-sustaining population, possibly due to horizontal gene transfer.

Entity's diet is to consist of mild foods and beverages. Inclusion of irritants such as capsaicin or lactose result in the excretion of more aggressive organisms. Entity seems content to remain in containment as long as his delusions of being persecuted by an anti-semitic conspiracy are indulged.

PΔ - The Gussawannassagga County Fair: Mass hysteria and spontaneous manifestation of advertisements for a county fair in a county that doesn't exist. Shows up every few years somewhere in rural America - those affected become obsessed with winning the "blue ribbon prize" for some contest supposedly to be held at the fair, always related to showing up with the largest of something - largest pumpkin, largest watermelon, largest pound-cake, largest hog, largest truck, largest child, etc. Manifestations typically last a month, with most of the affected suffering amnesia about it afterwards (except those who were fed in part or in whole to hogs/children to fatten them up), and a few disappearing without a trace along with their would-be contestants.

Staff continuing to suggest that this artefact is the result of a "Native American curse" will be reprimanded.

Lπ - The Telephone Booth That When You Enter It Compels You To Dial A Random Number That Is Not In Use And Recite Your Life Story Beginning From Your Earliest Memory And Causes You To Forget Any Memory You Tell It: The Organization keeps it locked up - it's got no power over anyone so long as you don't go inside it. Occassionally unlocks it to eliminate people who know too much.

Pβ - Tooth Radio: A method to click the tongue against a golden dental crown to transmit one's thoughts to others possessing a golden dental crown on the same tooth within several miles - even when sonic signals should be blocked by intervening obstacles over this distance.

Believed to be a Pτ-class artefact for Gashmob, an acephalous collective dedicated to ending death, even on the level of individual cells. Based on observation of captured Gashmob members, separation from Tooth Radio after some period of use causes severe distress, eventually leading to non-functionality - Organization personnel are therefore advised not to attempt to listen in.

EΩ - The Orca God: Oceanic leviathan believed to have been thousands of years old. Orca populations of the resident, transient, and offshore types were all observed performing religious activities around and towards it, and the entity led pods of orcas on attacks on fishing fleets in the Pacific. Despite close association with orcas, the entity actually resembled a gigantic, shell-less sea turtle.

The Orca God was killed with depth charges back in 1958, and ornaments made from its bones are still awarded to field operatives for exemplary service.

Lχ - Winjhlains Cave: Wandering location, can appear near any populations with significant neanderthal DNA. It is a small cave with its walls covered in apparently-pedagogical cave paintings. Its floor is covered in weapons knapped from flint, sourced to a deposit in modern Germany.

Those who study the cave paintings are instilled with a desire to take up the cave's weapons and kill those who violate hunter-gatherer egalitarian norms

EΚ - The Found Footage Fiend: A member of cryptobia thampocalyptus, a designation for a group of mammalian tetrapods which are able to bend light around themselves to makes themselves "naturally blurry" - some instances are even able to use this bent light to biophotonically alter human minds & biology.

The Found Footage Fiend targets urban & cave explorers, tracking them down by some unknown means. It stages its attacks to resemble a scene from a low-budget horror film, and afterwards somehow ensures that the footage of its attack makes its way onto discussion boards and suchlike. Its victims, when their bodies are found at all, are posed and mutilated to look like they died in accidents, and were then eaten by various scavengers.

Assume human level intelligence & the physique of a grizzly bear. Further abilities such as control over technology and detecting recordings are possible.

Oρ - Mother Moloch: A clay figurine of a Rubenesque, bull-headed humanoid seated on a throne, bearing a brazier in one hand and a tool similar in appearance to a lacrosse stick in the other. The figurine has been dated to an indeterminate period during the Bronze Age Collapse. If a pregnant woman crosses within about a hundred yards of the figurine, that individual will then miscarry a mass of ash and blood, of a size dependent on how late in their pregnancy they were. This mass will soon after become animate as an entity roughly as intelligent as a six year old, dedicated to luring more pregnant women towards the figurine. At certain thresholds of critical numbers of such entities their behaviour becomes more complex, such as constructing a shrine around the figurine at seven entities.

Oτ - Lifeletter Knife: A copper-volcanic glass alloy blade, its handle sculpted to resemble some sort of alligator-butterfly hybrid creature or deity. It is believed to have been created by a Toltec splinter-culture that survived in desert communes.

Those bled by the knife are drained of some abstract "life energy" - and this affects even those entities who could otherwise regenerate or make themselves immune to harm - and channels this life energy to a plot of land in the Sonoran desert. The Organization uses this plot to cultivate certain plants with growing conditions that might otherwise be difficult to meet.

Monday, July 7, 2025

KUOTOA = CROATOAN

You don't belong here.

The seasons are queer. The crops grow bitter, when they grow at all. The hard-cut trails are swallowed up again in weeks. The birds mock you with their songs.

Hungry men go out to hunt and don't return.

Your encompassing reason which carried you across the ocean wavers here.

The deer walk on their hind legs when they think you're not looking, and watch with shining eyes at the edge of the firelight when they know you are. You pull up a fish and it meets your stare, whispering the name of the love you left behind.

There's a hole in your cellar. There wasn't before. It smells like the dead things that washed up on the beach.

There's a hole in the street where the mud sucked down, after the fog and the rain and the children went mad and ran and sang. It smells the same.

The ocean, never lovely, now hates. The fishermen give pieces of themselves to it before setting sail - fingertips, earlobes, noses, nipples. The other day they tore your god from its temple, leaving it in a ditch as they hoisted a chunk of sodden driftwood in its place. The priest was found bloated and drowned, the altar boy with him, and they called it a lovers' suicide before a spitting liturgy.

You're beginning to understand the words. You're starting to see the faces in the driftwood. You're beginning to understand.

The ocean is a mask. Its true face lies deeper. It's under the land too, its fingers like the hollows left by worms. This earth and this water are sacred. They are haunted by a billion gods, uncountable, unnameable. Your liturgy is a rapture of tongues.

The priest had to die. He was a liar, and one shouldn't lie about such things.

The true priests are there, in the deep and the dark, in the dreams you wake from weeping. They speak with the gods and give birth to them, are strangled and devoured by them.

Your colony will be another sunken investment. Another emptied shell, with only a gutteral scrawl left behind, scratched into pews and bed-posts and the bark of dead trees:

"KUOTOA"

Sunday, July 6, 2025

D6x6 Cats of Ulthar

Click the button below to get your cat:


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

D6This cat of Ulthar is
1grey and spotted, with a peculiarly-flat head.
2heterochromatic, and the colour of its fur is split evenly between black and white down the length of its body.
3extraordinarily, inconveniently fluffy, the long tuffets of its fur wafting and twisting without a breeze.
4hairless, with wize & deep-drooping wrinkles, and moles and liver-spots marking constellations across its skin.
5tawny and tufted beneath its nose, and at the ends of its ears and tail.
6a sweet orange-candy colour, with stripes that ripple down it like the white ends of waves up a beach.
D6This cat of Ulthar is
1a babbling sacred fool, getting into accidents and incidents as many times as it miraculously survives them.
2imperious, insecure, vain and easily spooked.
3sadistically whimsical, a dreamer of dark dreams.
4glum when at peace, fierce and funny at war.
5a trash-talking rough with a heart of, if not gold, then at least silver.
6a syrupy charmer, a gossiper, a clingy socialite.
D6This cat of Ulthar is
1able to grow its shadow larger than light sources should allow, and claw and gnaw things with it as though it were a great black panther.
2able to eat ghosts and the souls of astrally-projecting sorcerers, slurping them up like a bunch of noodles.
3able to slip between the waking and dreaming worlds as easily as breathing.
4blessed with more lives than nine, and is happy to lend them out - with interest.
5possessed of a third eye in its stomach, which it can vomit up like a hairball. This eye can fly about, become intangible & invisible, and see the hidden currents of things.
6possessed of a retractable claw on the end of its tail which is envenomated with a substance which both numbs the wound to unnoticeability & induces extreme suggestibility.
D6This cat of Ulthar is
1a newcomer to town, who's already stepped on the wrong tails and made some enemies.
2a respectable burgher, with an uncommon ability to cover up & silence what might make it less-respectable.
3practically royalty in Ulthar, descended from a line that's been in town since its founding - though this means little among cats since all cats are aristocrats.
4a retired guerilla-defender of Ulthar's outskirts, using the connections and honours built up over its career to found a trafficking network.
5an itinerant inhabitant, going away a long while then returning with strange tales & trinkets.
6a joke around town, seen as very un-cat-like in behaviour.
D6This cat of Ulthar is
1very fond of anchovies - the saltier the better - they make a fine bribe for it.
2a social media addict, and has over a million followers on Earth under an assumed name.
3on the verge of insanity after discovering that one of its ancestors was a hound of Tindalos.
4an old lady who was blessed with reincarnation as a cat of Ulthar for her kindness to Earth-cats in life - it retains all memories of its human life.
5an architect of leisure, a shaper of sun-beams.
6a friend to the ghouls - they leave each other carcass-gifts.
D6This cat of Ulthar is
1putting together a team to retrieve a lost treasure of the goddess Bast.
2seeking to have a former lover embarrassed politically.
3raising a new & more potent hybrid of silvervine - a hybrid which has proved unfortunately predatory.
4afflicted with mormolice, and desperate for a cure.
5leading an experiment to induce Ultharian awareness in Earth-cats.
6organizing a play which will mystically invite Nyarlathotep to town in a feline incarnation.