Towards the Hoard of a Hundred Horrors: Witherstinks

The first step of a hundred journeys begins with digging two graves for an eye.

I have mentioned this monster manual project - my Hoard of a Hundred Horrors - before, and I figured I should get the ball rolling on actually posting some of it before Halloween hits.

There's no overall theme to it besides "monsters I like". Some are original creations. Some are from folklore. This one is stolen from White Dwarf magazine's Fiend Factory - created by Mr. Jonathan Jones. He called them witherstenches. I think my name sounds better.

They're dire skunks, essentially.

They are

Witherstinks

HD: 3 AC: 12 ATK: 1d3/1d3/1d6 Claw/Claw/Bite + Withering Stink SAV: 8 MOV: As a dog runs across ground - as a dog walks burrowing through it INT: Clever beast ML: 6 outside den, 8 within
No. Appearing: 1d4 - if more than two are encountered this will be a pair of mates and their kit(s)

Withering Stink: Those within 30' of a witherstink must save vs. Constitution each round. The first failure and you are stunned for a round. The second failure you are stunned again, and drop whatever you're holding & fall prone as you retch. The third failure you fall unconscious and begin suffocating until removed from the area. Those exposed to this withering stink will not be permitted into civilized places until they've had a thorough bath.

Stink Gland: If you've got a relevant skill (butchery, anatomy, hunting, medicine, etc.) you can attempt to extract a dead or unconscious witherstink's stink gland. Success gives you a fresh gland. Failure destroys the gland and deals 1d6 damage to the witherstink if it's still alive.

A stink gland can be thrown to release a cloud of similar size and effect to the Withering Stink ability, which dissipates in one hour, or in ten minutes in strong winds. A stink gland can be sold for 5 silver pieces to parties who would be interested in such stink-bombs. Finally, if you anoint yourself with the contents of a stink gland, then quanloses & their sting-hosts will be passive towards you for an hour, not attacking unless you attack them first. Glands go bad in 1d4+2 days unless packed in salt, which preserves them until use.

Other Such Moneyed Interests: Their pelts, being abominably smelly and likely infested with fungi, are worthless. Their meat, likewise, will bring you only bowel-clenching misery should you eat it. However, their kits are adorable, and with its stink gland removed a kit is worth 50 silver pieces to those with disposable income & an interest in cute animals.

Miscellanea:

• Witherstinks collect the bones of their prey in their dens, gnawing them open to expose the marrow but not indulging in the stuff themselves - instead they allow various fungi to sprout on the bones, such as fungus which screams when unfamiliar creatures enter the nest, or fungus they can consume to treat parasites, or fungus which has a pleasing appearance to prospective mates.
• The noseless monks of the order of St. Janicaspo raise witherstinks, believing that the mortally-offensive stench of the world's sins are made apparent to all by the creatures.
• The perfumers of Gherriot knew how to work witherstink glands into the finest perfume. Bottles of the stuff are damn-near priceless. Their secret was entombed along with the perfumers in their guild-hall.

(In my wildest imaginings, when the Hoard is complete I would release a pdf with an illustration for each monster, along with associated lairs, dungeons, spells, classes, etc. We'll see.)

D6x6 Benighted Bridge Trolls

Click the button below to get your bridge troll:

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

D6	This bridge troll is
1	a wrathful guardian deity turned bitter and mean from people's preference for luxury and commerce over the true way.
2	a rogue psychopomp, meant to guard the boundary between life and death, but now obsessed with a more prosaic liminality.
3	an exiled runt of Jotunheim, using the bridge to shelter from the petrifying sun.
4	the spirit of the bridge itself, made carnal by the blood spilled upon it.
5	a wandering monster who settled down when it found its niche.
6	a displaced god of the land - its temple put to the torch, its priesthood routed - it's become twisted and petty from the disrespect.

D6	This bridge troll has
1	the head of a goat, with a spooled grey beard and great long horns which bend the troll into a stooped, genuflecting posture with their weight.
2	a ponderous head like a prize-winning gourd left to rot, the flesh saggy and be-sored - its body inhumanly muscled, the cords slithering under the skin and over the bones like a mass of worms.
3	a grossly overgrown and knobby skeleton, their warped bones pressing osteoderms through their thin, cracked flesh.
4	the bluish, bloated flesh of a drowned corpse, teeth and jaws fused and frozen into a bone-cracking grin, and a monkish pate of long and greasy black hair.
5	the warty, sagging bulk of a squatting toad, combined with the warty, betusked bulk of a warthog.
6	spidery long-lean limbs, a drum-taunt protruding gut, and beady-black, squinting eyes.

D6	A fellow-traveller in ousting this bridge troll is
1	an elderly knight in rusty, dented armour, wanting to pay a last visit to distant relatives.
2	a furious peasant fed-up with all taxes and tolls.
3	a chubby, incompetent sheriff on a last-chance mission from their lord to save their position.
4	an albino wizard sheltering in a toppled litter, their servants fled from or slain by the bridge troll.
5	a troll-crossed lover wishing to pursue a courtship across its span.
6	a smuggler & bandit posing as a legit merchant with an urgent delivery to make.

D6	The bridge this bridge troll trolls
1	was shaped from the roots of the clonal colony of an ancient tree - it is older than the nations of any who now walk across it.
2	is a solid structure of greasy black stone, quite unlike any other formations in the area - attempts to scrutinize it scientifically or magically return only a sense of telluric malevolence.
3	is a ramshackle construction, standing as much atop the ruin of past breakage as on sound engineering principles.
4	is an elaborate rope-way which allows many passengers and cargo-danglies to pass at once.
5	is made of slabs of concrete of some forgotten recipe, a span of brutal simplicty.
6	is a quavering thing of bone-white bricks joined with cracked and chalky mortar, all stained with the leavings of rain.

D6	This bridge this bridge troll trolls spans
1	a crevasse which gapes into unspeakable depths, and slavers out a cold and stinking mist.
2	a broad and green-black river, its steady surface belying the treacherous and currentous depths beneath.
3	a narrow stretch of rapids in the depths of a razor-edged valley.
4	the foamy spread between an isle and the mainland.
5	a sulphurous crag with a bubbling, incandescent runnel of lava crossing its bottom.
6	a glimmering, one-way rift into another plane of existence.

D6	This bridge troll demands the toll
1	of a delicious man-thing - however its eyes aren't so good, so it'll probably accept a shaved sheep or somesuch too.
2	of a song it's never heard before - though those of poor quality enrage it.
3	of a riddle it can't answer - and it's grown quite good at riddling.
4	of a fistful of pretty, shiny things - and its fist is quite large.
5	of a sundered weapon taken from one of its enemies.
6	of a demonstrably magic something-or-other, which it will promptly attempt to destroy - it hates magic.

A Galeb Duhr By Any Other Name Would Be Just As Rocky; Or: Galeb Duhrs & Galeb Don'ts

Today we are getting to the bottom of a mystery. We're getting the mystery to bottom. We are going to get gay with mystery.

That mystery? The name of the galeb duhr.

For context: a galeb duhr is a rock monster from D&D. It was invented by the esteemed Mike Smith for the 1982 Monster Cards - premiering alongside the thri-kreen - and made its way into full D&D monsterdom in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons' Monster Manual II. The galeb duhr is able to animate rocks, and enjoys deep-toned music.

The greatest minds of the greatest game have, to this day, been unable to discern why they're called "galeb duhr" - an apparently-nonsense appellation - yet sometimes when you send the biggest trucks under a bridge, all you get is a sheared-off cab. Sometimes, when you're faced with a real pickle, you need a pickled brain to figure it out. Without further ado, let's break it down:

The first part, "Galeb" - in Macedonian, galeb means "seagull". If you've ever been to the ocean, you know that seagulls like to perch on rocks. The very similar Serbo-Croatian "golub" means pigeon - further, "gileni golub" means "clay pigeon", as in those used for skeet shooting. Clay is a type of rock.

 

Two ships which saw use in Yugoslavia were named Galeb - the Galeb-class minelayer, which originally served in the imperial German navy, and the Peace Ship Galeb, a banana boat which made its way from Italian hands to the Germans, and finally, like the minelayers, to the Yugoslavians. In the geological cycle as well, all stones return to the magma from which they were born. The molten mantle within the Earth then is the burning heart of Yugoslavia, which may yet erupt again.

Could Michael Smith have been hinting that he is truly a Michal Kovac?.. maybe... maybe even probably...

 

The second part, the omega to galeb's alpha - "Duhr" - the closest match, a truly fortuitous match, is the Pohnpeian duhr, meaning to ring, to reverberate, for ears to ring, to make skin crawl. Recall that the galeb duhr enjoy deep-toned music, which would do all those things. Pohnpeian is a Micronesian language spoken as the indigenous language of the island of Pohnpei in the Caroline Islands - and is also homophonous with "Pompeiian"... relating to the city of Pompeii, a city transformed to stone by a volcano...

 

To those still doubting - fresco research performed by the Fresco Research Institute discovered that the famous "Pompeiian red" used in Pompeiian art was actually, originally yellow, transmuted by time and obscurity into its current form. So too must the etymologically-unveiled galeb duhr seem unintuitive, logically-leaped to our eyes - and yet no less brilliant for it.

And onwards, always onwards, to the less-perfect though no less-harmonized possibilities - dürr is both Azerbaijani for pearl, and German for desiccated, barren, scrawny, haggard - suggesting the simultaneously organic and mineral nature of the pearl and the galeb duhr, as well as the stony hills which the creature is likely to inhabit.

 

Dour, a fitting word for the sullen, solitary lifestyle of the galeb duhr - an English word, derived from either or both of the Latin durus - meaning hard - and the Sottish Gaelic dùr, meaning dull, obstinate, stupid, and also stiff, rigid (again suggesting stone). From the latter we also get the modern English "duurrrrrr" - an exclamation for stupidity, and then on to Homer Simpson's famous "d'oh!". Perhaps, continuing on this English tangent, duhr is also simply "dirt" with the t shorn off the end. Simple as stone.

Anagrammatically, "duhr" becomes "hurd" - a surname for the descendants of herdsmen. Recall too that the galeb duhr are the herdsmen of stones.

 

In Sanskrit (not totally dissimilar to "sand-grit") a dhur is one-twentieth of a katha, which is a unit of land measurement somewhat like the Japanese koku. Katha can also mean a recitation of a Hindu religious story and a genre of such storytelling - this meaning is believed to have inspired the Tagalog katha, which in that language means story, invention, creation, idle talk - even though the Philippines are quite the swim from India. The foundation of the land is stone, and the galeb duhr are no doubt lovers of talk and long stories to pass their geological lives.

 

In Maltese there's a dhur too - there meaning to appear, to seem, and also the back - as in the anatomical back. To seem to be a back, to appear from the back - is this not evocative of the stony camouflage of the galeb duhr, passed by when imagined to be a mere boulder? Truly, the detective's work is simply to see, to see without preconception and distortion. 

 

Dhuhr in Arabic means the noon prayer. I don't have anything for this one - however! dhuhr refers specifically to the Islamic noon prayer, and I found this post on reddit.com which suggests that the jinn are stones: https://www.reddit.com/r/Quraniyoon/comments/1283okw/i_had_a_crazy_idea_jinns_are_rocks/... and need I even say at this point what else are made of stone..?

 

Uhh English class essay writing closing paragraph: I'm right about the etymology of the galeb duhr. Mystery solved. You're welcome.

D100+ Calumnical Craft Beers

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

Semiurge Reviews Movies: Episode VII

Previously:

Semiurge Movie Reviews 1

Semiurge Movie Reviews 2

Semiurge Movie Reviews 3

Semiurge Movie Reviews 4

Semiurge Movie Reviews 5

Semiurge Movie Reviews 6

It is October, and I am haunted by the ghost of summer. I write this baking in the sun. The trumpets are blowing, and calling us home. Until we follow - to the cinema:

Aliens

My beautiful fiancée said the actors in this were "too sweaty". In her own inimitable fashion she skewered the negative trends of more modern movie-making with a single statement.

The ever-lovely Sigourney Weaver voices one of the avatar kids in the new Avatar movie - The Way of Water - which I was not terribly fond of. Neither the film itself nor the voice of a 70-something woman coming from an alien child.

Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid

Sort of a Kung Pow-esque overdub but for noir films... not as funny, but still funny.

K-Pop Demon Hunters

For several seasons of my youth I attended an "art class" which was nothing of the sort - in truth a glorified daycare. However, the teacher, a man named Dave who resembled a Seinfeld extra, was my first exposure to podcasting, more than a decade before the popularization of the format. His monologues, sometimes up to an hour long of continuous topicality, were entertaining, soothing, memorable. One was about his browsing pre-Amazon internet shopping centres for Hello Kitty toys, before being struck by a moment of self-awareness: "Have a kid Dave, have a kid". He had a girlfriend, but they were unmarried.

Watching the popular new movie "K-Pop Demon Hunters" inspired in me a similar feeling. Perhaps within the next couple of years, God willing.

Castle of Cagliostro & Castle in the Sky

They're the same movie. Saw these as a double feature. Under Sharia Mark II going to the movies will be free, and every theater will have reclining seats and unlimited refills of Sapporo super-dry beer. The voice actress for the male protagonist in the original Japanese of Castle in the Sky became the voice of Monkey D. Luffy.

Nosferatu

Like wrapping medicine in ham so that dogs will eat it, sometimes you need to wrap Christus Victor in an entertaining Gothic tale to get it into the brains of movie-goers.

The vampire in this movie is as he should be: a monster with his balls grown back, an abstraction, the shadow of death. This is the new one by the way. Robert Eggers, a true talent. With the five-year plans with American characteristics of the Marvel movie franchise falling to pieces there will hopefully be cracks left for him to grow.

Much better than the Werner Herzog version - stick to nature documentaries ya German fart!

Phantasm

They only had the French dub of Poltergeist. Darren Shan took some stuff from this. Phantasm took the pain box from Dune (the gom jabbar is the needle). You know what was good? Mask of the Phantasm.

If a work ends in "it was all a dream/simulation/abstracted trauma of dementia patient/etc.", those involved in its creation should be harmed. Their harm should be proportional to how mad I am about it. No Man's Sky, Jacob's Ladder, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes - unforgivable. This is one precept of a system I am calling Sharia Mark II.

Rebuild of Evangelion

All four of them. Great movies.

Sinners

In the merry month of June from me home I started
Left the girls of Tuam nearly broken hearted
Saluted Father dear, kissed me darling mother
Drank a pint of beer, me grief and tears to smother
Then off to reap the corn, leave where I was born
Cut a stout blackthorn to banish ghosts and goblins
A brand new pair of brogues, rattlin' o'er the bogs
Frightenin' all the dogs on the rocky road to Dublin

Nemesis

I haven't watched this one yet but it's on the list.

Southland Tales

Hell yeah dude, this shit rules. Probably the best opening to any movie. Red Stripe product placement.

An artifact from the future. Prophets are always hated in their time. Pimps don't commit suicide. 

Beau Is Afraid

Hereditary sucked. I'm glad Ari Aster is good now. A laugh riot.