Car Gun Car Fun

I recently & narrowly avoided death by carbon monoxide poisoning, and thus when I see an article like this:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/11/15/blackwolf-armed-driver-rideshare-service-texas/76331189007/

I am exuberant. Eternity is affirmed. It would make for good gaming material.

So what is it exactly?: A rideshare app like Uber, only the drivers are armed & dangerous. Apparently it's meant to be a response to human trafficking. Personally I'd be more, not less, afraid of being human trafficked by my pseudo-taxi driver if I knew he had a gun, but then I don't live in the PvP zone that is Austin, Texas.

Long have I thought that weird gig work would be a wonderful thing to base a modern-set campaign on, whether that be fantasy, horror, or otherwise - see the manga Ura Baito: Toubou Kinshi for an example of how that might be set up - each session you get some job offers, with certain risks and reward levels for each, and in between sessions you get hammered with expenses that push you into more and riskier jobs, over time you get familiarized with the employers, other gig workers as competitors and potential allies, and so on and so on.

A BlackWolf-style app is a distillation of this game mode. You have a car. You have a gun. You have some sort of military/police/security background, and some reason you are doing one of the shittier jobs available instead of sticking with that, or maybe you made up your background and are stealing valour. Maybe you've got some buddies that ride with you. Get someone or something from point A to point B, someone or something that's expected to need an armed escort, yet can't or won't rely on the police or private security or whatever.

‘Round Trip Back To These Here Parts...

Previously:
https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2019/11/round-these-here-parts.html
https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2019/11/round-these-here-parts-last-becomes.html
https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2019/11/round-these-here-parts-one-last-time.html

Full-Fair Ladies
1: Cut off their noses as girls and give them to the flesh-fixers, to be preserved and returned to their faces on their wedding day.
2: Dye their hair white, as maturity is associated with skill and discretion in affairs.
3: Wear dresses with cavernous shoulder-extensions that emphasize their collarbones and trapezia, highly-fetishized parts in these parts.
4: Keep the hair from their children's first haircuts to stuff into apotropaic pillows.
5: Know an herb-rite to transfer unwanted gravidborne children into their father's abdomen, and so are given a primacial berth as it relates to such matters.
6: Maintain secret cults and duelist-societies among themselves, charged with honouring the feminine aspects of the gods and discharging familial blood-feuds through ritual combat.

Courteous Knights
1: Inhale asps that coil through a bronchi around their hearts. Should the asp taste the heart turning against the knight’s liege, it will bite down with all the venom it’s got. As a side-benefit, the knights can breathe most poisonous gases without ill effect thanks to the asp acting as a filter, and march into battle with cauldrons boiling off the stuff.
2: Wear a brass ring engraved with a vow. Should they die without fulfilling the vow, and if the ring’s still on their finger (and their finger still on their hand, and their hand still on their arm, and so on) their corpse will rise for a day and a night in pursuit of it, the ring and their veins glowing an incandescent cherry-red.
3: Begin to consume progressively-larger meals of iron sand as they approach the end of their life, paired with internal alchemy practices. The aim of this is to turn themself into an iron colossus, able to go on one last mission for their lord before going still and falling to rust.
4: Wear colourful tatterdemalion and bells on the ends of their boots - for war is a misery and those who wage it are charged with bringing mirth to match the tears they've made others shed.
5: Make a drink similar to kuchikamizake together on the eve of battle, only made of dried and chewed strips of a tuber instead of rice. Those who survive the battle will share the drink and share stories of their fallen comrades. The grips of swords are often roughened and dyed to resemble these strips.
6: Wear their hair long and braid their locks with the same patterns of beads as their steeds' manes - these unique bead-patterns being their heraldry.

Valiant Lords
1: Commission another tier to be added to their crown when they inherit it. The oldest dynasties hunch under the weight of generations of coronations - and to help bear the weight of a ruler's crown is a very coveted position indeed.
2: Rule in pairs, matched at birth, twins ideally but any two will do. Both have their skulls bound, though to different ends and shapes - one for clarity, retention, and depth of long-term memory, the other for quickness and sharpness of wit. They lose in exchange what the other gains, but if performed properly should more than make up for the other's deficiency.
3: Hold court in chambers limned by magnetized pillars - no weapons of metal may be borne within. Violent intrigues are carried out by specialized cadres of assassins trained with weapons of horn and bone, useless for open conflict.
4: Have an overt spouse whose children will inherit their property, and a poison spouse who (if proper) will discreetly share their wealth. As the name suggests the poison spouse is unknown publicly and tasked with unrooting and eliminating the lord's enemies.
5: Place their thrones upon the backs of fearsome beasts, and rule from pastures of anointed & gilded sacrificial cattle - their ability to tame these beasts represents their proficiency at rulership.
6: Make their honour guard out of those who've committed lèse-majesté and suchlike treasons - tortured and artfully lobotomized by the lord's own hand into perfectly obedient slave-soldiers.

Well-To-Do Merchants
1: Tattoo the names of God on the soles of their feet, which go untrod and uncovered. If they must move, they're moved by servants or on ankle-wrapping stilts.
2: Replace their teeth one by one with gold prostheses - the glitter of a merchant's smile is equivalent to his lifetime profitability.
3: Bind themselves to angelic guarantors, manifested as glowing tattoos of chains around their extremities - they have become adept at skirting the limits of their bindings, clinging to the literal wording rather than the spirit.
4: Are required to be eunuchs, to reflect the sterile endeavours of commerce and interest.
5: Will carve a hunk off their fattened sides to fry up and serve when sealing big deals.
6: Measure trades with weights designed to resemble themselves - it's believed that if they make misleading measures, they will starve to gauntness or bloat to lethal obesity accordingly.

Benighted Serfs
1: Wage ceremonial wars against neighbouring villages at the height of summer, counting coup by whipping each other with straps of woven grain-stalks. The winning village is believed to have the favour of the field spirits come harvest-time.
2: Compute taxation amounts through bee-like ritualistic dances, often biasing these calculations in their favour through intimate knowledge (and therefore manipulability) of the steps.
3: Sacrifice their elderly, stringing them up as scarecrows in the field - the birds that taste of these sacrifices are overcome, thereafter serving the community.
4: Not only bring in the harvest but are themselves a harvest - preyed upon at contracted times by vampires or suchlike devourers - at the same time protected from outside predation.
5: Keep a breed of sheep which produces such quantities of lanolin that bees preferentially make hives in their fleece over extruding their own wax, and defend the flocks to the death (though not from shepherds whose scent they're familiar with).
6: Have an purplish tinge to their skin and scleras, from the mildly toxic yet starchy "milk" they make by washing a nettle-like plant - fermented, it makes a palatable, watery wine.

Iniquitous Criminals
1: Must belong to one of a great number of sclerotic and splintered guilds, who on pain of clandestine war can never trespass on each other's turf - the Cutpurses' and Pickpockets' and Swindlers' and Muggers' Guilds are all separate and politely-hostile organizations, for instance.
2: Will never harm a widow, in fact donating some part of their proceeds to their support, thereby gaining a population of informants and shelterers.
3: Are required to get high off their own supply of a drug derived from black lotus extract to ensure their addicted loyalty.
4: Are, after reaching a certain rank, subtly trepanned through their temple - almost impossible to notice even on close inspection, yet will cause brain hemorrhage should they fully bend over. This guarantees that they will bow to no one, on pain of death.
5: Pay a fat percentage of all their illicit earnings to the King of All Cats, and in return are granted the privilege of using his extradimensional alleyway home as an escape route - though the favour of a cat can never be fully relied on.
6: Practice a subtle and particular language composed of cricket-like chirps produced when they rub their specially-notched fingernails just so.

Learned Scholars
1: Eat nothing with a brain, out of the belief that unlearned thoughts from their food might outcrowd their own - however they file their teeth, as they make an exception for the offensively ignorant.
2: Submerge themselves in logico-aesthetically artificial ponds with nothing but a hollow reed for air and ducks for company - and when they dream sub-aquatically they pluck those ducks for the quills they'll use to write their oneiric revelations.
3: Desiccate the brains of their forebears into hard little walnuts, and then pack these into ceremonial rattles which keep the beat of their memory-songs.
4: Keep a private language-device of piercings and intertwining stitch-threads for confidential records - like a lukasa of living flesh instead of wood.
5: Have one eye put out, so that they can still read but can't apply their reading to violence.
6: Write everything in cipher - the exoteric meaning of their work remains the real meaning, the encoded stuff is just chaff to occupy wizards and other such fools.

Pious Priests
1: Induce serious cases of pectus excavatum in themselves by weaving an iron bar through their ribs. In the cavity so created they set a small shrine to their patron deity.
2: Work the bodies of the sinful dead barred from graveyards into marionettes and put on pedagogical morality plays with them.
3: Consume a special diet when they are close to death, which turns their sweat into incense. When their time finally comes they work up a coating through intensive and esoteric exercises before setting themselves alight.
4: Join hands and dance in circles, each priest singing a single syllable of a mantra repeatedly, together becoming a prayer wheel made of people.
5: Know magical rites to transform the viscera of sacrificed animals into unique and useful plants - the kidneys of a lamb into flowers which produce nectar like little fountains, for instance, or the heart of an ox into a capillary nexus which can irrigate an entire field.
6: Pray in a headstand, to cause more blood to flow to their crown - their connection to the cosmos, to the divine. The devout - or those seeking to appear as such - possess abraded and calloused tonsures.

Rowdy Sailors
1: Set cloth dolls on beaches in the hope that should they end up overboard they too will be washed safely ashore.
2: Worship the main mast of their ship as a divine phallus, carving it with sacred iconography and parading it through port after long voyages.
3: Keep an owl on-ship in the belief that the night-birds will recognize the stars to lead them home when all other navigational methods fail.
4: Scrape barnacles from the hulls of their ships and work them into protective amulets.
5: Wear hooded ponchos of manta ray leather.
6: Make amphibious assaults with flambuoyant skirts of cork-wood.

Starving Artists
1: Wear hairshirts made from hair donated by the fans, patrons, and lovers, to spur them on to greater creative heights. Lesser-known artists make do with just a scarf, or a wristband.
2: Operate food carts selling colourfully (and dubiously!) spiced concoctions to drunkards, collecting their vomit to boil down into pigments.
3: Launched a sculptors' crusade some years ago into the bowels of the earth, and a few are trickling back now with bizarre scars and a fortune in rare stone.
4: Are forced to make a living dying and weaving the beautiful and distinctive garrotes of the moonblood assassins.
5: Will, in desperation, sell themselves to temples, being given the resources to make their masterpiece in return for being sealed inside it as an unliving idol of the temple's god.
6: Support themselves through the sale of beautifully-molded clay cakes, a favoured treat of children and pregnant women.

D100+ Slainey Taunts

Been reading the comic Slaine. It's pretty good. Think I got the notion from Shuttered Room: https://shutteredroom.blogspot.com/ - one of those blogs you don't really hear about but is worth a read-through.

Click the button below for your taunt:

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

Slush Pile 12

Previously, on slush pile:

Slush Pile 1

Slush Pile 2

Slush Pile 3

Slush Pile 4

Slush Pile 5

Slush Pile 6

Slush Pile 7

Slush Pile 8

Slush Pile 9

Slush Pile 10

Slush Pile 11

Albino sewer crocodiles are actually troglodytic descendants of dinosaurs that survive the meteor impact in caves, emerging into the lower-delving works of humans and preying on them

Monsters which coordinate/communicate with pheromones - figuring out what the smells of turpentine or cinnamon mean to them, retreat or ambush or whatever, is key to dealing with them, and the scents could be replicated to manipulate them

Osedax-men who gained a taste for human bones from drowned sailors, draped in the deboned wet flesh of their prey to breath on land

"The flesh's revenge against the spirit"

From Sneewitchen: Elder care drones controlled mentally by the elderly themselves - labour-saving method - tragedy ensues in cases of senility

Starving scholar locked into cangue he's using as a writing desk, trading theses for food

Pirate ships that sail windsock animal kites instead of sails, moved to motive power by those animals' spirits - a tiger-flying ship able to pounce right out of and across the water, for instance

The curse of cursed items manifesting not as a malus to stats or somesuch but as a recurring figure or narrative

Oopart: An out-of-place artifact, found in an unusual context, challenges the conventional historical record

Corniche: A road on the side of a cliff or mountain, with the ground rising up on one side of the roadway and falling away on the other

The only people damned for good are the ones who take the form of suckered flies and drink up a drop of Christ's blood as he's strung up on the cross, the drop of blood that was shed for their sins specifically

Noir plot: cosmetic surgery clinic secretly harvesting sperm & eggs from celebrity clients, selling to super-fans - silence bought from celebrities who find out with promise that children can be harvested for organs - promise probably bullshit

Treasure: Mummified hand with curling horn sprouting from the stump of its wrist

Phantom time but real, people and events within the expanded section of history tesselating and tearing apart into cross-temporal twins

Derecho: A widespread, long-lived, straight-line wind storm that is associated with a fast-moving group of severe thunderstorms known as a mesoscale convective system

Icarus parasite - wings that graft themselves to your back and fly you up to God knows where

Yhanzeng... that'd make a good name for somewhere...

-Callivance/calavance = soybean
-Okara: Tofu byproduct consisting of fiber, protein, and starch left over when soy milk has been extracted from ground, soaked soybeans
-Ganmodoki: Pseudo-goose
-Grashros: Kill the mountain of despair

A field where dead things grow...

Dirtshriven - cult that worships the triple airs, seek to scourge the lower elements of their body out to become winds

Monster whose victims disappear, from sight, from memory - perhaps hinted at only by the smell of rot... is this just the false hydra..? aw beans...
-maybe everyone knows who the victim is, like a psychic broadcast warning/territorial marking
-creepypasta cinematic universe wherein slenderman teams up with the false hydra to fight jeff the killer
-false hydra larvae squealing in the veins, hiding the assassin's hand...

Gods are stories, or masses of stories, about love and war and lies and whatever else - the stars are their medium - fate is a tale told first among stars, then performed by mortals

From Caveat: Drumming monkey (or somesuch mechanized stuffed toy) used as detection method for unnatural things & phenomena - when and how long the monkey drums being indicators

From Leprechaun in the Hood - magic item with tie to monster, unkillable except through exceptional means - perhaps totally unkillable, only able to be petrified or somesuch for an indefinite period - anyways, every time the item is used the monster knows where & when, slowly or swiftly closing in each time to reclaim it

Not Hollow Earth - Hollowed Earth - Deep Underground Military Bases, the tunnels of bootleggers driven mad by a bad batch, hyperloop tunnels that were half-complete before the founders ran with their bags, desperately deep strategic rare earth mineral mines, geothermal power wells that never got the power extraction pipes stuck in them, etc. - all interconnected somewhere, home to madmen & mad life, perhaps surviving humanity in general forced into its depths by the hostile surface

From a dream: A parade, the crowd lugging stone sarcophagi & wooden coffins, the scent of corpses covered by incense, perfumes, flowers - the scents are wafted by fans towards the priests in the parade, who will carry the souls of the dead to their gods

Mass-produced haunted house - in suburban development, all houses built on same plan become haunted by same ghosts - sort of analogous to genetically-identical organisms being vulnerable to same disease - chaos spreads throughout the suburb, difficult to track down and resolve original haunting, perhaps everyone killed by the haunting becomes ghost involved in it until critical mass of anti-life is reached
-Tangent: Gaudi-esque architect makes famous apartments, government buildings, etc. - all occultly designed & placed to warp space within and between them - walk through a maintenance tunnel in one, pop out another miles away - danger is that they connect through a truly interstitial space home to its own hungry denizens... very big things that can fold themselves up very small... they knock out your teeth and slither up through the holes into your marrow... your skin looks covered in vaseline but this is your marrow that's been forced out...

A drug made from the black bile of those who've learned to dream like bears, for months in caves while their spirits wander the unconscious world

"Adobo" of chicken adobo came from adouber, to dub a knight

Butterflies retain their memories from when they were caterpillars - alien species similarly metamorphosizing, but route to sapience from merging while coccooned into shared-memory-intellect soup, extending half-formed antennae to broadcast collective intelligence to drone-like young & full adults - this will be the third slush post with a bit almost identical to this in it

Beautiful painted origami-men who speak in buzzing whispers - they eat peaches by the bucketful, disgorging the wasps within them onto the fruit

The flamingo-knights of the Boiling Baths have exquisite poise - they meditate standing on platforms above the killing-hot pools of their homeland, and slip in to their deaths or scarred maiming should their concentration falter for a moment. They do not worship the flamingos, though they do venerate them for their endurance and grace - they worship a great green serpent, and laugh at those whose gods are not flesh and bone, for when they die they are fed whole and armoured to their god to make it stronger, and their armour is tempered in its bile and collected when excreted, rosy and pitted and greatly hardened.

This came to me in last night's dream: guys who hated so much for so long that they self-mummified and became a sort of undead - the long, slow heat of their hate cooked out all moisture in their bodies, and the build-up of piss and vinegar and other such acridities in their tissues pickled them at the same time. In the dream they had bird-heads and (un)lived underground.

An old man carrying an infant. He has soaked his beard in milk, and the infant is suckling its tip. If you find a suitable home for the infant then the old man will fight to the death for you to prove he is not a coward.

Forge a nest of iron, spring-trapped, laid with false eggs, and set it in a tree. When a cuckoo comes to place its offspring in the nest, spring the trap - the cuckoo will be forced to obey you so long as you keep its child encaged. This is one way to gain yourself a familiar.

Lanthorn: Archaic word for lantern - horn panels - good monster name? maybe

Eisegesis: Reading yourself into a text

Big monster of the region, dragon-equivalent, is elusive - all encounters with party are actually spoor, but its presence prevents rest, drives off merchants & hirelings & suchlike useful NPCs, etc. - spoor gives clues to its habits, lair, diet which can be used to determine perfect bait to lure it into an ambush

Story idea: Old man in zombie apocalypse - classic slow shoot in the head zombies, functional military is able to handle them pretty easily, but martial law declared, no more pension :^/ can't work can't survive :^\ old & disabled people pretty fucked and struggling on the margins of civilization where zombies still roam and because they're old and feeble the zombies are still a big threat

Ok so it's like the Chinese new year where every year has an animal but for this it's not the same 12 animals you have to track down and sacrifice a legendary animal so it can become the next year and the world doesn't end - maybe just one village has this calendrical custom and the new year is coming up and they're convinced that there is a shapeshifting beast among them - perhaps you!

Sandbox Set-up: Ogre mercenaries used to smash duchy or somesuch by rival - very successful, but now the rival's welching on their payment - the ogres have settled in as tyrants and are starting to squabble among themselves - each has flamboyant and voracious personality, lots of levers to turn them against each other or to whatever other end - Godlove the Penitent: morbid, paranoid, believes every day will be the day he dies - tattooed head to toe with scripture, keeps a priest chained to his belt, strongly inclined to believe any prophecy he hears - Slobbergall: generous with gifts, never lets you forget a debt, bad poet, mouthful of golden teeth he has to pry out and reshape when they get deformed from chewing, in love with local maiden and attempting to charm her & her parents in never-ending feast they can't leave by rules of hospitality, phobia of dogs - and so on and so forth - Wyrmskein

Monster songs don't rhyme - Seasons of Belief

Desert nomad culture - no camels/horses - their tents can be reconfigured into oversized hang-gliders, soar on the hot updrafts rising off the sands

Little glowing spots in splashes of sea-foam - bioluminescent snail larvae, will colonize your lungs - little glowing spots in your coughed-up phlegm, glowing red like fire, like gold, like blood - bloated bodies in the surf, gulping up seawater, gouting out glowing motes, cocooned in haggish mucus

Alien that inflates with buoyant gas when impregnated, or whatever alien analogue of such, drifting with the wind to their ancestral spawning ground - maybe keystone species? disaster when human colonization or native sapient industrial development or volcanic eruption or whatever else disrupts wind patterns

Warp-spasm as early account of hysterical strength - eye popping out and body twisting indicative of musculature going beyond its neural limit - perhaps culture with auto-hypnotic, entheogenic, etc., technique of inducing this hysterical strength

An oyster-prince comes to hate the surface world, the surface folk, and this hate becomes the seed irritant of a majestic pearl, lovely as it is cursed, tempting treasure of the prince's palatial shell

From Slaine: Weapons quenched in heroes' blood
-evil sorcerers whose dark studies have caused their skin to slough off, emit awful stench, their bodyguards must wear special filter-masks
-a sword which does not cut - flesh and matter open before its blade to receive it

Seals vocalize in the same manner as people, and can be taught to sing

GLOG class where you play mob of zombies or somesuch infectious creatures, can bite or claw or whatever to swell in numbers/HP in short term with long term limit based on templates - going over limit puts rogue zombies on the encounter table and so on

Why Do Fish Have Ash In Their Milt - An Investigative Video Essay

Good youtube is back:

Diseases Are Undead

In the wonderful world of Dungeons & Dragons there are some things that are contagious.

You can catch being a ghoul. You can catch being a vampire. You can catch being a wight. You can catch being a wraith.

You cannot, to the best of my knowledge, catch any of these things in the real world which we all inhabit. You can, however, catch a cold.

I cannot quote you the precise page of rules or fluff that says you can also catch a cold in D&D, but it probably exists somewhere therein.

Which makes you wonder - right? You can catch ghoulery, you can catch the rhinovirus - maybe there's some overlap there.

In reality, where everyone who is reading or writing this definitely lives, contagious things are generally micro-organisms - bacteria, viruses, parasites, fungi, prions, etc. - which can hop from one body to another, through the air or by close contact and fomites or whatever else. In D&D, the generally-assumable world of D&D from monster manuals and setting gazetteers and suchlike that I'm familiar with, undead can spread because they're full of negative energy, which is the opposite of the positive energy which animates and invigorates living things, and when such an undead kills a living thing their negative energy can overflow into the now-energy-absent corpse to reanimate it as another undead. Something like that.

Besides undead, a D&D world, or at least D&D-ish world, also has gods and magic and other planes of existence and and dragons that can fly with wings that are quite small relative to their body mass so on and so forth, so I don't think we should or need to assume contagious disease works quite the same as in our world, our real world wherein we all currently exist. There could be fruitful gains from doing otherwise.

So I propose that contagious diseases are undead. Not all of these diseases are ghoul fever, or vampire flux, or whatever - you could simply re-fluff everything from the common cold to the black plague to your own invented nastiness as this undead phenomenon.

The ones you don't catch directly from getting scratched or bit or sucked off by a skeleton, those come from tombs. Graves. Catacombs. The dust of past civilizations.

Full of regret, loaded with resentment, pregnant with ghosts, every civilization bears a sickness - the negative energy of its collective animus. When a civilization falls, it loses its positive counter-balance to this animus. When a civilization falls this animus is fermented and concentrated in its ruins. Those who delve into these ruins without the proper protections become patient zero for the new-and-old disease within - new to the surface world, old with hatred beneath.

This is why the ruins are yet ripe with plunder for your party - only a small party could slip through the quarantine around them, and few sane rulers would risk their armies diving into a sickbed.

Buboes, polyps, sores, a bloodied cough, and so on? Footholds that the dust of ancient and unleashed undeath have on your body.

Some examples:

Tauthops, unleashed from the kurgans of the grassy steppe, cures the tendons of the infected like the bowstrings of the nomads who were buried within. Somewhat like tetanus, in that the affected are wracked by tension - and then the tension releases, launching the infected through the air - always in the same direction, until they dry, splinter, and burst. Every splinter carries the disease, and so pits are dug in the path of the advance of the infected, and soft leaves or blankets are piled atop them, to give them some comfort in their final hours and contain the splinters they release when they finally burst.

From the half-sunken sepulchers of the swampside port, profaned into curse-fended warehouses, there came the magpie sickness, a compulsion to swallow the shiny things one saw - and worse still when one swallowed enough for the stomach to split, for the blood and the bile and the sickness would mix to make a new maw from the fissured abdomen, which would spake unspeakable things.

Low on funds, the god-king cracked open the cliffside tombs of his divine ancestors, arrayed in the gold-gilt of their grave goods. He paid his mercenary-debt, but set loose the dog-gnaw, sores like those left by the fangs of a cur or baboon, which took the vital young before the toothless old, and left his holy kingdom bereft.

D6x6 Unaccountable UFOs

Click the button below to generate your UFO:

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

D6	This UFO looks like
1	a golden bullet surrounded by a halo of distorted space, which moves by rapidly stretching into a cigar and snapping into its new position rather than flying conventionally.
2	a platinum horseshoe spinning around a shining orb.
3	both a spider and a spiderweb at once, limned in emerald-green, plucking its way through the air.
4	a fluttering metallic wedge weightlessly dripping an oily, blistering sheen.
5	a cluster of bismuth cubes constantly changing in size and orbiting the largest among them at that moment.
6	a shimmering quicksilver shape that shifts between a crescent and a disc like the moon changing phases reflected on the surface of a rippling pond.

D6	This UFO has been observed
1	flying in formation with flocks of birds.
2	diving into bodies of water.
3	buzzing hospitals with the highest birth and death rates in the country.
4	positioning itself between the Earth and the Moon.
5	hovering over locations where disasters would later occur.
6	tracing the paths of ancient eel weirs.

D6	If people get near this UFO
1	it phases out of existence, reappearing later somewhere else.
2	it zaps them with increasingly-large & -charged balls of plasma until they go away.
3	they explode, and their exploded bits mutate into independent organisms.
4	they are lifted into the air and scanned by it, before being placed gently back onto the nearest red surface.
5	they experience symptoms similar to severe scurvy, and are compelled to sing an atonal song.
6	they become catatonic, and come to hours later with dream-like implanted memories of the time they spent out of it.

D6	The public response to this UFO
1	has been to blame it on Iran, and launch a sort of popular crusade against it on lake-boats launched into the Pacific Ocean carrying hunting rifle-bearing militias - most lost or losing heart before coming within 10,000 miles of the Arabian Sea.
2	has been an explosion of social media influencers claiming to be UFO whisperers.
3	has been to hold impromptu rave parties wherever it's spotted.
4	has been general apathy.
5	has been a renewed support for NASA & all things astronautical.
6	has been to form a cult worshiping it as a new god, and hunting down and publicly executing astronomers who were assumed to have been hiding the truth of the UFO-god.

D6	The official cover-up for this UFO
1	is that it is a new style of holiday blimp.
2	is that it is an optical illusion created by a solar flare refracting through the atmosphere.
3	is to say that anyone who notices it is actually revealing their bigoted anti-government views.
4	is that it is an unusually large & ugly bird whose magnetic navigation sense has been disrupted by improperly-broadcast 5G.
5	is that the fluoride put into local water is contaminated with datura extract.
6	is that it's a cloud of gas released from permafrost by global warming.

D6	This UFO is really
1	the astral projection of a psychic, though otherwise unremarkable, giant squid.
2	a Project Blue Beam hologram.
3	a 300,000 year-old chrononautical craft from the Jebel Irhoudian civilization on a one-way jaunt into the future.
4	the machine-body of a Procyonian energy-being, who has traveled many light years only to be disappointed that all the TV shows it loves have ended or been cancelled.
5	an experimental autonomous military drone that's gone rogue.
6	the feeler of an ultraterrestrial entity, groping around for a warp in space-time it can pull a larger portion of its body through.

D6x6 Lonely Lake Monsters

Click the button below to get your lake monster:

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

D6	This lake monster looks like
1	a classic plesiosaurian.
2	a ningen out of Japanese urban legend, a pale and flabby mermaidish thing of giantish stature.
3	a great serpent, or eel, or worm, no feature distinguishing enough to comfortably identify it as one or another.
4	some bastard offspring of nautilus and sea urchin, tentacled and spiny.
5	the ambiguous rotten sludge of a globster, bones juxtaposed in exo- and endoskeletal positions.
6	a limbless, eyeless toad or newt of gargantuan size, a warty gaping hulk.

D6	This lake monster is
1	a shadow-organism which slipped through a crack in the lakebed to a deep aquifer-biome.
2	a forgotten god, and without regular contact with humanity it has dwindled in power and lost its human form.
3	the result of an epigenetic metamorphosis implanted in early humanity by agents unknown, and triggered in an unfortunate swimmer by an improperly-disposed-of Cold War-era bioweapon.
4	an extraterrestrial entity whose impact into the planet first carved out its lake.
5	something that was originally an actual hoax, but initial belief in it provided the "skin" for a Qlippothic unentity to wear in reality.
6	the monstrous child born to a cursed local family of some renown, spared infanticide by its pitying aunt.

D6	The lake where this lake monster dwells
1	sits in a maar, and is unusually warm & sulphurous.
2	was extended into a jagged line by water seeping into a tectonic rift.
3	is regularly roiled by winds into devastating waves.
4	is far deeper than it is wide, plunging to lightless and lifeless depths.
5	is home to a libertarian crew of pseudo-seasteaders who maintain a settlement on a clutch of lashed-together boats and pontoons and adrift docks.
6	is choked with algae bloomed from agricultural run-off.

D6	Reports of this lake monster are typically blamed on
1	an escaped circus elephant that went for a swim.
2	a crashed hot air balloon.
3	the homemade submarine of an eccentic millionaire.
4	a tree toppled and blown into the lake by a heavy wind.
5	fish that got out from a now-defunct fish farm which once operated in the lake, the stock of which were given an experimental growth hormone.
6	inconsiderate scuba divers.

D6	This lake monster exhibits the anomalous ability
1	of an infrasonic groan that drives those who hear it into a paroxysm of thirst, driving them to shove their heads into toilets or leap into the lake to slake it.
2	to control the water around it, as well as the watery weather - clouds & fogs & suchlike, but not so much winds.
3	to inject people with a virus that turns them into subservient hybrids.
4	to subconsciously influence people who sleep near its lake through their dreams.
5	of being able to exhale a cloud of suffocating poison.
6	of psychic shapeshifting - not actually changing its physical form, but changing in the perception of others into any organism that inhabited its lake.

D6	This lake monster is studied by
1	a tweed-clad & stuttering local folklorist who is secretly a serial killer who drowns their victims (mostly tourists) to appease the monster.
2	the ex-hippie leader of a group of gross old swingers, who believes the monster to be an avatar of the feminine power of water and the age of Aquarius.
3	a marine biology student who doesn't quite believe in the monster, but thinks promoting it is a good way to raise awareness of aquatic ecosystems.
4	the research team of a biopharmaceutical company, operating illegally in the belief that the profit they could make off the monster far outweighs the risk of bypassing government regulation.
5	a rising star artist who exclusively paints glimpses he's caught of the monster.
6	a Catholic priest who believes it to be a devil which slipped out of a river of Hell, and seeks to exorcise it.