D12 Fucked-Up Little Gods of Various Communities

Inspired by the movie version of Children of the Corn, which is alright... preferred In The Tall Grass as far as Stephen King adaptions set in fields of tall plants go... and also inspired by conversation with theisticgilthoniel on the GLOG discord:

1. The Lord of Drewfurk: A mummified corpse with limbs that branch like a tree's, interred in a shrine atop a mound surrounded by a moat in which multi-tailed lampreys swim. The corpse's many fingers and toes are tied with knots of cord, the patterns of which are cross-referenced with reams of scrolls to interpret the god's will. The primary directives of the Lord of Drewfurk involve rites of husbandry, of animals and men, producing mooncalves and other such prodigies. If the god is pleased with these spawn the ground will shake and treasures shall be revealed. If the god is displeased the ground will shake and structures shall collapse and people shall be maimed.

2. Numinous Offosa: A scintillant waterfall which springs from the rocks of a bluff. Birds fly into Offosa and are never seen again, though from time to time a reed basket carrying a teratoma floats out of the mist at its base, and these are swaddled and cared for as infants until they rot. No one in the area dares to eat fowl, and hunters surrender their catches of such to Offosa. So long as the waterfall is well-fed, it flows clean and plentiful. In times of crisis a sacrifice is dressed in a feathered costume and given to Offosa, and a little while after this a person in the prime of life and bearing some supernatural gift sails downstream in a reed boat.

3. Master Bhelstey: A flower-headed man, blind and deaf and mute, who must be led about by a young boy. This boy is meant to speak for Master Bhelstey (though it's an acceptable breach of duty for him to sneak in some of his own whims from time to time), and is the only one permitted to bleed Master Bhelstey for his sap, which brings verdant growth wherever it falls (anyone else who tries meets a terrible fate). One day, soon after beginning pubescence, this boy will become the next Master Bhelstey, and his interpreter will be chosen via tearing the petals from the husk of the old Master Bhelstey.

4. Our Lady Samaritana: A giant shed snakeskin kept in a temple in the family complex of the village headsman. Those who crawl through the length of Lady Samaritana will be reborn - their wounds smoothed over, their illnesses eased, their age sitting lighter upon them. They will also be that much more serpentine, commensurate to what was restored to them. Village elders wear long hooded robes so that outsiders are not alarmed by their appearance. When one has passed through Lady Samaritana enough times, they are fully transformed into snakes, and then milked of venom and decapitated. The blood and poison from this is then mixed with wine and shared about in a crystal bowl. Those who have served the village are believed to gain prosperity from the drink, while those who have betrayed the village will writhe and die in agony on the spot.

5. Sir Plowshare: A sword with a ten-feet-long blade, so rusty that not a speck of clean metal can be seen through it, the grip long since rotten away. The sword is paraded between households each new year in a joyful drunken festival. Those whose eyes and hands are anointed with rust from Sir Plowshare are not capable of violence, nor of suffering from witnessing or having participated in violence - this includes everyone permitted to reside in the village. When the village needs to be forcefully defended, a volunteer breaks their teeth upon Sir Plowshare and howling wields it against all foes, and afterwards they are cast out into the surrounding woods to survive off scraps and forage.

6. White-Lightning-Black-Thunder: An enormous dog of wrinkly aspect, buried up to its neck in a mountainside. The dog is worshiped by a clan of charcoal-burners, bandits, trappers, and hermits, who dance around it while fluting and tossing garlands of wildflowers over its ears. If one sneaks up on White-Lightning-Black-Thunder and plucks a hair from it, they will be able to curse anyone who then hears the god's howling (which can be heard anywhere on the mountain). This is easier said than done, and the god can tear an armoured man apart as a man tears apart a roasted chicken wrapped in tinfoil.

7. Grandmother Vine: A sprawling, kudzu-like growth. Those who consume the seeds of Grandmother Vine become progressively more imperceptible to those who have not while within her expanse, and increasingly less able to go without her seeds without suffering dreadful pangs. Those who've consumed many of her seeds over a long period ("deep in the green" as they're called) speak of a paradise invisible to all save those who've been most blessed by Grandmother Vine. No matter how she spreads, there are never enough seeds growing on the god to sate everyone.

8. The Mistress of Moo-Moon Manor: A horned woman who resides in a floating palace on a moon made of curdled cream which appears in the dreams of those who pray to her. Those who please the Mistress are allowed to reside with her in her palace, enjoying all manner of ease and luxuries while their bodies sleepwalk through the toil and drudgery of waking life. Those who displease her are cast out into insomniac reality, where they desperately care for the sleepwalkers in the hope of their banishment being rescinded.

9. Wolkuld: A giant, eyes a bleary white with flesh always shadowed, which can go about bodily or as a gentle breeze or tremendous gale. It is as a child, and if it is watching you it must be indulged by playing children's games with it or it will wax tantrumly. Wolkuld also hates and fears those who do not smile at it, and those who smile at it with a full set of teeth - those who live where it frequents remove their teeth in a pattern unique to each family. Few tell strangers the rules their god follows, as protection and as opportunity to loot what is left by their angered god.

10. The Calamitous Jade: A boulder of lavender jade, its upper half smooth and its lower half pitted, bound altogether in twists of red cow-hide - cast down from the heavens in storied days to crush a rampaging demon. The celestial spirit of the stone and the lingering dregs of the demon mingle and contend within it, lending gambler-wise blessings and curses to those who petition it, leaning one way or the other depending on obscure currents both empyrean and chthonic. The balance between the Jade's aspects is maintained by the god's husbands, each a sturdy man picked every eight years in a contest wherein they must smash a lesser stone before it. Bigamy, of course, being illegal in these parts, their noses are cut off and their foreheads branded with the mark of shame after the ceremony.

11. Ribokiyo, Father of the Forsaken: Somewhere up the mountains, along the road to nowhere (and to old ruins haunted by ghosts who've forgotten their human shapes) lies the village of Monkey Point. Its inhabitants make a living farming rice and yams from rubble-backed terraces, and sometimes selling amulets and supplies to fools seeking to plunder those old ruins. It's a hard living - they are well-acquainted with hunger and the white clay of mourning. In times of hunger in Monkey Point there is a tradition to give infants to the mountain, and to propitiate the spirits of these infants so that they do not turn their wrath on the people of the village.

But one year this propitiation failed and the infant-spirits possessed the body of a monkey, which grew huge and bled from the pores of its face, attracting a mask of flies. This possessed monkey sired itself on the wild boars, and carp, and deer of the mountain, allowing its possessing spirits to be reborn into pitiful half-lives.

Eventually, word of the beast's iniquity reached Owua temple, and a noble monkey came to seduce it and anchor it via land descent to the wolf-saint Amartza. The beast was enshrined as a wrathful guardian deity and fertility idol, the infant-spirits coming to reside in a bliss-realm within a gem set in its diadem. It remains as such to this day, awaiting the defilement to loose it from its binding.

12. The Idol of Urahank: A fragment of a marble statue, of an eye and its socket, carved in such detail that one can see the veins in its sclera, set in a crude frame of bent and grafted living trees. The fragment bears a fraction of the power of the god it once depicted, as well as the divine punishment levied upon them. Worshipers of the idols draw on this power to perform minor miracles of a scattered portfolio, an organ of theirs crumbling to dust in payment (a random organ, sometimes a fingernail and sometimes their brain), and segmented furies sometimes come to enact the ordained punishment upon the idol, only to be confused by its lack of recognizable organs, whereupon they can be plied with libations and turned onto another in the punished god's stead.

More Interesting Guys

Friend of the blog deus ex parabola has written about interesting guys: https://as-they-must.blogspot.com/2026/05/interesting-guys-theory-of-examples-of.html

& so has bad doctor: https://wasitlikely.blogspot.com/2026/05/on-humans.html

More of that:

Sindles

Enormous-eared and duck-footed, with a mottled bluish-green hue to their skin. Prone to romance and melancholy, as they can only reproduce by fusing into trees - the hard-rinded fruit which blossom on these trees splitting to disgorge newborn sindles.

They are generally bog-dwellers, who walk upon mud and peat as if it were solid ground, and farm the seedroach - a delicious vegetable creature whose bite turns any other animal into a seedroach tree - for which they are viewed with suspicion and blamed for misfortunes like witches.

Tcharans

Tcharans' brains are fluid and distributed throughout their bodies - one could live on a while after decapitation - however they store memories by crystallizing their own flesh, and within a lifetime become nothing but crystal. If memories are avoided they're remarkably long-lived - tcharan drunks can live for centuries in wretched alcoholism. The memories within a tcharan's crystalline flesh, when broken off, can be "read" with a special sort of lamp.

They are plagued by comprachicos who take their extremities for curios - some of a wizardly bent even believe that by manipulating a tcharan's flesh (and therefore memory) they can change the past.

Bilbeks

A bit of beetle, lobster, and armadillo, they can roll up into balls and roll around. They can also intuit the laws of physics to create extraordinary devices, but using this intuition attracts the attention of The Thing That Stares Back. A terrible fate is inflicted if its attention is not avoided, so bilbeks will use drugs and auto-hypnosis to enter a fugue while using their intuition - for this reason each of their devices is unique and often unintuitive, with the rare exception of the pneumatubes they use to propel themselves around their settlements.

Bilbeks tend to be fussy and particular, their settlements isolationist and madcap-traditional - only hard-won, hands-on experience being able to use and maintain the complex technical systems that keep them operating.

Poma-Godes

Paired symbiotes - one thorny and teardrop-headed, one noodley, with opposite, complimentary personalities and capabilities paired when they are young in something like an arranged marriage - e.g. a quick thinker with a planner, a people-pleaser with a warrior, and so on. A poma and a gode are only sapient in symbiosis. Pomas are sometimes kept in other lands as draft animals, and this is outrageous to poma-godes, who seek to unite these animals with their gode soul-mate.

Tend to come off as aloof and flaky - to a poma-gode, the only social relation they really need to fulfill them is their other half. Their social unit is not the family, but the eugenics committee.

Inarmes

Upside-down guys who used to live in giant trees, with hoof-like hands for cracking nuts and hand-like feet for dangling. Being upside-down, they are prone to turning the world on its head, and becoming heretics and revolutionaries. There's probably ones still living in trees somewhere who are normal.

Gargorians

Burly, four-armed, and stiff-faced, with a single lock of hair growing from the top of their heads. A good way to get your ass kicked is to yank on this lock of hair as if you were trying to uproot a turnip.

Gargorians eat all their food slathered with a painfully spicy and sour paste of fermented peppers, and claim to be from the land of Gargor, or descendants of Gar and Gor, or some other such formulation. It is unclear whether this is meant as a joke or serious esotericism due to their perpetual poker face.

They are well-known for their chain-wielding warriors and their quadrumudratic mages.

Vliopes

They are born as something like five-legged starfish, and assume a more-or-less humanoid form based on limb usage, their limbs specializing with age. Vestigial features remain into adulthood such as eyespots on the hand and graspers on top of the head.

Vliopes are convinced they are unconscious, artificial automatons, as a sort of species-wide variant of Cotard's delusion, though like someone with hysterical blindness reacting instinctively to an incoming object they usually avoid dangerous outcomes of this belief.

The cognitive dissonance inherent in vliopes makes them prone to periods of stability in between freak-the-fuck-out levels of upheaval, both personally and socially. Vliope art, when they make it, is always avant-garde.

Dyujyas

Pale, soft-bodied, and wet, they must cover themselves in clay and mud or else dry out in the air and sun. Their bodies' exudate keeps the stuff pliant, and each clan has their particular body-suit design - seniority in a clan is signaled by shaping of the mouth-piece, with elders granted deeper and boomier voices.

Dyujyas have comfortably-plodding minds, leaning to rote and ritual over revelation - they make for commendable servants and bureaucrats, and their grasp of procedure makes them subtle and effective saboteurs. They tend to come out not so much on top, but never on the bottom.

Alsinados

Tallow-skinned and fond of bright tattoos, with features that tend to draw a strong line across the face - a jutting chin and jaw, a canopial brow-ridge, a long and narrow nose, and suchlike. Their ribcages are cavernous, their overhang home to bats - all alsinado tops are crop-tops, and they tattoo around their navels. Alsinados adore their bats, and share their crepuscular schedule, hating the height of noon and the depth of night. Their women can unhinge their ribcages and clang them together with a terrifying racket. Done communally this lets them echolocate.

Alsinados are proud and pious, prone to crusades both great and small - their bats clear away disease-carrying pests, and they take this as a sign of divine favour. 

Korpulas

Bounding monopods with mouths that are a pair of bony plates in their spring-like necks, talking in a clacking staccato and chewing by bouncing their heads up and down comically.

They are vassals of the noble winds who rule the middle air and control the weather, and their herds of tremendous hyraxes are painted in swirling patterns to honour them. Fewer korpulas are born every generation, and they lament the loss of their masters' favour. The old trade-circuit loyalties are fading in favour of factions based on how to regain this.

In emergencies a korpula can inflate their head into a balloon and drift a great distance away, but this is uncomfortable and undirectable and can only be done once in a long while besides, as the tissue regains its normal shape.

Alicornic Artifacts of the Abrogancian Anecumene

There once was a peaceful and prosperous kingdom called Abrogance, and the king of Abrogance was wise and just and ageless.

The means of his agelessness were the hagging childers, his best-kept secret until the kingdom's final days. And the final days of Abrogance were terrible indeed - for the king's agelessness inspired envy, and imitators, and the price of immortality is never cheap.

Abrogance was wondrous and mighty in its time, and many today claim its legacy. In all cases these claims ring farcical. The true legacy of Abrogance is clear, in the wasteland of its Anecumene, and in its artifacts of alicorn - the marvelous material of unicorn horns.

The Bacchanalian Baroness's Drinking-Flute

A drinking vessel which accentuated the poison-purging property of alicorn to the point that poisons drunk from it pushed past being neutralized to being beneficial - for example the cardiotoxic venom of the blacksnake would actually improve the health of one's heart if drank from the drinking-flute.

The baroness to whom it belonged was an infamous lush - and from the flute alcohol became a life-extending, liver-strengthening elixir of charm and confidence. In the end, she bought her own baloney and led an uprising against the king, and for this treason was put to death.

The Innocence-Devouring Dentures

A set of pearly false teeth which, when used to devour the innocent, made its user innocent in turn, restored to child-like vivacity.

The nobleman who commissioned the dentures dined daily on pure-white lambs, and died when someone snuck into his meal a piece of a goat that the village idiot had fucked.

The dentures turned black and corroded and bit their way from his corpse's jaws - they gnash through the Anecumene's earth like a rabid mole even now. 

The Brooch of the Viperine Wet-Nurse

A modest thing, as the jewelry worn in the noble manses of Abrogance went - the alicorn hidden within its design.

A gift given to one of lower station. It poisons the milk of the one who wears it - it is a poison of the soul. One weaned on the poisoned milk grows twisted, cruel, small-minded, yet long-lived and inured to all other poisons and injuries. The brooch is a weapon aimed at heirs, to ruin the houses they inherit.

The Defiler's Athame

Like the Brooch, an artifact which deliberately profaned the alicorn in its making in order to invert its properties to a terrible end.

Alicorn wards off disease - the profaned alicorn of the Athame made its wielder into a disease, their flesh and their will festering in the wounds it left, pustulent clusters of little faces leering from lacerations. The defiler for whom the Athame is named is one of the few survivors from the golden age of Abrogance - or, at least, his eyes, his smile, and his malignance survive.

The Goutuous Duke's Lancing-Needles

Alicorn can purge poison from a drinking vessel - why not, then, from any vessel?

The duke was shrewd in business and delightful in conversation, but suffered greatly from a number of illnesses. He commissioned this set of needles from a single unicorn's horn, to purge the painful fluids from his boils and joints.

The needles worked wonderfully, and soon the duke was the image of health and vigour. Virtue as well, as he began to give generous alms and weep over the evil that allowed the creation of his needles.

One day, when his creditors came, they found the duke seated on his throne, his flesh torn away to reveal his opalescent skeleton beneath, sheepishly grimacing as he offered up his viscera, the long and slippery bits sliding through the bones of his fingers. 

The Cat's Collar

In the ruins of the summer palace of the king of Abrogance there is a cat. She wears a collar inlaid with opalescent alicorn, and her coat is thick and spotless. She spends her days lazing in the sunbeams which peek through the cracked walls, and chasing the shadows of mice.

The collar protects her from all things which would do her harm, from Hunger and Time and Death. The collar would do this for no other, because it was made for the cat with love.

The cat is lonely - yes, even cats can get lonely - she has been waiting for her friend to return for a long time. The collar does not protect her from Hope.

The Golden Mask

I awake at the bottom of my laparotomy soup and blink the crust from my eyes - did I drink my fill, or did it evaporate around me? The problem with drinking your fill is that you never remember doing it. Regardless, goodbye horses.

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Some time ago friend of the blog theisticgilthoniel asked for "freak versions of the Dawn War pantheon" - I suppose this qualifies for that.

🌞

The cosmos is roughly 3,000 years old. There are still some who would kill you for disputing this.

It is also objectively true. Since the end of the god-king Zarus and the rise of Sigil, the city of at the center of everything - since the re-Ordering of the cosmos - it has been about 3,000 years. Speaking of a "before" is fraught, as any number of scholars will tell you. The cosmos will likely not grow much older than 3,000 years - Sigil is broken, and the last days are upon us.

🌞

The foundation of every empire is energy, is control over the flow of energy - over grain and oil, sunlight transformed - over the sun itself.

Zarus's greatest coup was his seduction of the sun away from the prior Order - he persuaded the sun to wear a mask, a beautiful golden mask beaten in the shape of a human face. The nature of this seduction, as with all stories of Zarus, depends on the teller. Did he disguise himself in a scaly skin, or kidnap the sun from the sky? Did he promise the sun a place of honour in his new Order, or was he simply a better fuck than the hoary old reptiles who bathed in the sun's rays? Regardless, it is universally agreed to be more consensual than what Zarus did to the moon.

With their sun stolen, the old Order's defeat became inevitable.

🌞

The sun was given a human face, and a human name - Pelor - but it was only ever a mask.

Only the least gods are like a person. Proper gods are many persons - like stars in a constellation.

Pelor Indefatigable, an armoured warrior who bears her child the world upon her back in an endless march, fending off the rats of Long Night.

Sharp-Eyed Pelor, who strikes the iniquitous within her sight with arrows of sun-stroke.

Pelor Bank-Lounger, who shelters her children - all the people of the world - in her mouth.

Pelor Plumage-Bearer, whose peerless colours seduce starlight into a great mating ball about the earth, making the day-time.

Pelor Basilaklas, who races across the sea of Night too swiftly to be sucked down into its darkness, his magnificent crown lighting the way.

Lustrous Pelor, who sweats droplets of molten gold in his dances and grants the metal a share of his beauty and power.

Pelor Everborn, who sheds her old flesh at every dawn and thereby defeats age and death.

🌞

Woe to the conquered, for only death will end the humiliations the conqueror will heap upon you.

From out of the solar temples come the wondersome, thundersome parade-beasts, delight of children wherever they march. Dressed in hide and fur and feathers, with goofy gawking too-human eyes that seem apologetic for their own existence.

In their howdahs are the idols of god-king and sun, borne along in their marriage procession. 

🌞

This Order is broken, and things long-buried seep up through the cracks.

This Order was never perfect, and remnants lingered in the peaks and valleys and unscrubbed corners.

A starving village devours itself foot to mouth, and a great fanged and scaled hoop rolls off into the night. A tomb is cracked open to the sunlight, and warriors rouse from dreamless torpor at its warmth. A warlord's mistress gives birth to an egg, and the warlord makes himself a king with that egg at the head of his hosts, a tide of serpents slithering before them.

The Order of the Oviraptor was formed to take care of this seepage and these remnants. They are a secret order, with permission to kill who they must to remain a secret, to keep the secret of their mission. Any creature can be cruel, but hate is a thing for the warm-blooded.

🌞 

Love, too, is a mammalian trait.

The sun does not love us. The sun shines upon all, impartial. His marriage to Zarus was a thing of convenience. And Zarus is gone.

The old worshipers gather in their old ways, and new worshipers turn treacherous to the image of Man across the spectrum of dracolatry.

Here there were dragons, and here there may be dragons again.

It was only ever a mask.

D8 Products from a Childhood

Fluff? On this blog? What can I say - I'm a fluffer: 

1. Osseo-Crunch: Originally "osseous composite digestible material no. 3", developed by the government of the United Kingdom in the 1930s in a public-private partnership with a consumer packaged goods company. It was meant to be an emergency ration additive in case Germany used biological warfare to attack the cow population of England & so on, and to provide a useful alternative disposal method for corpses.

As that worst-case scenario was never realized, its patent languished out of use for decades, until an American company purchased it in the 2010s. That company repurposed it for a breakfast cereal marketed towards demographics with higher levels of lactose intolerance, with the cereal's mascot Henry "Hahaha" Hyena promising that it's "the only cereal that doesn't need milk, because it's made of bones, and there's more than enough calcium in the bones!".

Osseo-Crunch tastes terrible, has a chalky texture, and only freaks eat cereal with water, so it didn't have a long production run. However, it is incredibly shelf-stable so you can still find it some places, and unopened boxes of it with real Henry "Hahaha" Hyena figurines inside have become something of a collector's item.

2. Camp Cambrian: A movie franchise, the premise of which is that a science camp where campers can learn about biology and the origins of life gets caught in a temporal anomaly, flinging groups of campers across wildly-accelerated stretches of time, during which their experiments evolved into whole ecosystems - some reminiscent of real periods in the Earth's history, some not so much - while the groups of campers have to learn to understand their new environments and their creatures and either find a way out or leave something behind to help the next group do so that'll last over the eons. For example, Camp Cambrian 2 ends with that movie's group planting the bones of their fallen comrades into conditions ideal for fossilization to spell out a message.

3. Croaka-Cola: Fun factoid - the original Croaka-Cola recipe included some hallucinogenic slime exuded by a species of toad. Croaka-Cola is a brand defined by meteoric rises and falls - its "Sippin' It Bayou-Style" campaign made the beverage an international hit, however a few years after its release of the alkekengi flavour in partnership with Cricket Murmur's catastrophic "low voices / heavy air" tour poisoned it for many.

4. Phobophobiatch Beer: Specially brewed to not cause "hangxiety" - the anxiety experienced during a hangover. It achieves this by reversing some of the usual brain chemistry of alcohol - rather than increasing levels of GABA and decreasing levels of glutamate, Phobophobiatch does the opposite. Drinking Phobophobiatch makes you scared, but during the hangover while the brain attempts to adjust its chemistry back to normal you experience calm and confidence.

It tastes terrible, but has seen some success among alcoholics who "zebra drink" it, alternating it with regular beers to even out the hangxiety, among horror buffs who get drunk on it to amp up already-scary experiences, and as a recommended part of some nootropic stacks - binged the night before an important day.

5. The Misadventures of Harold Hickorytail: A series of books marketed towards children, illustrated with dreamy water-colours. The books were intended to give a child-friendly education on touchy topics such as adultery, divorce, split custody, parental alienation, and suchlike, all through the lens of the life of their titular protagonist, Harold Hickorytail - a very slutty mouse.

There was a bizarre and poorly-received movie adaption of the Misadventures of Harold Hickorytail that, after many producers stuck their fingers in its pie, was edited into a stop-motion slasher movie wherein the characters getting killed off were all mice, and the killer was a cat. The Harold Hickorytail movie is considered a "so bad it's good that it's so bad" product of the VOID lockdowns.

6. Laugh Caf Gigglepuffs: Branded product of the Laugh Caf comedy club - oven-baked cheesy puff-snacks injected with nitrous oxide, causing compulsive laughter in those who consume them. Like Croaka-Cola, the Laugh Caf had its own PR disaster related to Cricket Murmur - not through Gigglepuffs, but through the Laugh Caf Podcast. The podcast ran an interview with the survivor of a Cricket Murmur show that was decried as "insensitive" and "deeply irresponsible", with the interviewer at one point bringing out a 3D-printed figurine of a raincoat-clad Cricket Murmur member. Several sightings and disappearances have been linked to the interview episode, which has since been scrubbed from all official Laugh Caf Podcast viewing platforms.

7. Rou-Lad: "Pack it thick, pour it hot - Rou-Lad, it's for the boys" goes the now-infamous commercial. It's turkey roulade in a can. It's for the boys. What more do you really need to know.

8. Mane Man: A romantic sit-com revolving around the antics of a human man, Victor, and an anthropomorphic maned wolf woman named Jackson. Much of the comedy in the earlier seasons revolves around Victor ironically losing every bet and contest he ever enters into, and Jackson's crossdressing, which causes Victor to misunderstand Jackson's gender identity repeatedly and become confused about his own sexuality.

Appendix S: In-Flamed

In accordance with the bandwagon: https://spiceomancy.blogspot.com/2025/09/appendix-s_9.html (& ex chetera)

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Walks through the woods

Watching birds

The King in the Window 

Steam off the surface of a potato fritter

Dreams & nightmares

The Tale of Despereaux 

Alcohol (though only sometimes)

Coffee (though only sometimes) 

Ender's Game (and its sequels)

Detention (2011)

The Holy Trinity (Goblin Punch, False Machine, Monster Manual Sewn From Pants)

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Exactly the right amount of sleep (not too much, not too little)

The New World of Darkness 

Sitting by the water

Spore (and what could have been)

Various twitters

Song of Swords

D&D 3.5e 

Atomic Rockets

Fullmetal Alchemist

A lightness about the spirit

His Dark Materials

Stillness & silence

The Supernaturalist

The sort of boredom that doesn't hurt 

GLOGust: Post With No Text, Only Images (Excepting This Title & Introduction)

As per here: https://nothicseye.blogspot.com/2025/07/g-l-u-g-u-s-t-2-0-2-5.html

Courtesy of Gokun: https://spiceomancy.blogspot.com/

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.

Twelve More Module Ideas

Like so: https://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2024/12/twelve-module-ideas.html

1. Chaos in the Quarantined Quarter: Their wealth did not buy them an escape from the seal placed to keep the rats and their plague in - it remains within with them, while the rats have become clever and cruel and the plague makes people strange.

2. Talons of the Colossus: A great bronze statue, humanoid yet inhuman, and hollow within - two warring cults reside in each leg, and even they fear to dare the mechanisms higher in the body.

3. Voyage of the Undying: The ship returned from the land beyond the sunrise overgrown by a silver tree - from its blossoms comes a curse of wretched immortality.

4. Rift to the God's Sepulcher: An earthquake has devastated the region, and opened a rift to a cave network where a primeval god and its children were once worshiped - rife in sacrifices, and stalked by the degenerate thing the god has become.

5. The Monastery of Miscarried Malice: The monks of a rich and learnéd monastery succeeded in a ritual to split their sins from their souls - now monstrously embodied, their sins run amok.

6. The Palace Past the Blazing Caul: A wildfire whips across the land, but through its heat-shimmer a marvelous palace can be glimpsed - some who have leapt through the flames have returned burned and burdened with treasures.

7. Legacy of the Lighthouse-Keeper: The lighthouse-keeper left behind a journal, and nothing else - throw a fistful of the herbs which grow atop the beach-dunes onto the beacon-fire, it says, and a path will appear out to a shining castle in the surf, full of wonders.

8. Festival of the Fantastical Fungi: For one week every hundred years the greatshrooms erupt from the bowels of the earth to cloud the skies with their spores - their inner chambers hold myconid menaces and precious effluvia.

9. Beneath the Old Silk Market: The old silk market was opened in the morning for business to find the flagstones flipped over to reveal tunnels beneath them, splatters of blood and threads of sticky silk leading below.

10. Lake of the Mutagenic Meteor: The meteor created a lake in its impact crater overnight - its glow has mutated the lake-life, and the first round of miners sent for its anomalous ores refuse violently to return.

11. It's Free Masonry: A flood has swept the earth away from the base of a stela crafted by an ancient and advanced civilization, revealing it to be only the tip of a much larger buried complex.

12. The City That's Always Today: The city was legendary in its day, now merely infamous - it repeats the same day, every day, always ending in its doom of black rain - seek its riches, but do not become enmeshed in its patterns or you too will become stuck in its cycle.

A Market All In Sable

Of the Proud Tradition:
https://rememberdismove.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-black-auction.html
https://rememberdismove.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-black-auction-2.html
https://rememberdismove.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-black-auction-3.html
https://as-they-must.blogspot.com/2021/08/a-catalogue-found-in-bus-stop-in-karok.html
https://haruspexhovel.blogspot.com/2023/03/a-manuscript-recovered-from-personal.html

Dear ________,

Please be reassured - despite the unanticipated disruption to the Black Auction of 2020, the Black Auction of 2024 shall proceed as planned, albeit with an understandably-reduced catalogue and membership.

The Auction shall take place on the evenings of December 7th, 8th, and 9th in Doha. Due to security concerns, precise details of location and attendance procedure will be delivered to participating members in a personalized format closer to the commencing date. For the first time in the Auction's history, vetted members may also choose to participate in the Auction via telepresence using the approved channels.

Though we who are mighty may be laid low, remember that that which has fallen may rise again so long as the light which illuminates the path is well-kept.

Please find enclosed a partial accounting of the current Auction catalogue. We cannot guarantee that this will reflect the catalogue available when the Auction occurs:

LOT 1. ELECTRIC SARCOPHAGUS

A 10-ft. tall copper sarcophagus adorned with images of human slaves making offerings, some living, to gigantic humanoid figures with heads resembling those of Typhonic beasts. When a properly-mummified body is placed within, the currents passing through the sarcophagus will animate it as a mouthpiece through which one may communicate trans-temporally with the priests of the temple of Shtegg. These priests belong to a species of cetacean offshoots now extinct outside of cryogenic preservation, who ruled an empire centered on the then-vibrant Sahara during the Pleistocene, and claim credit for the selective breeding of homo sapiens as servants, gladiators, concubines, and snacks.

LOT 2. HEAD BROTH BOX

Reportedly taken from an itako murdered by Tokugawa Tadanaga after she prophesied his death at his brother the shogun's orders. A cubical wooden box, painted white and reinforced with iron. The box contains a reddish-brown liquid composed chemically of an even mix of sake and human putrescence, as well as the skull of a middle-aged woman. Drinking the liquid stimulates the salivary glands to produce generous quantities of ectoplasm, making the drinker an easy spiritual medium. The skull within the box was once capable of drooling out fluid to replace what was drunk, but unfortunately lost this ability after being removed from the box for examination.

LOT 3. ZYTKIEJMY DEVIL

A hairy, horned, short humanoid with a spiked tail, yoked to the grindstone of a mill in the woods near the town of Zytkiejmy by three chains of iron, silver, and maiden's hair. It speaks an archaic dialect of Polish, and is capable of milling grain into gold dust. The being must not be made to work on the sabbath or any Catholic feast day. By right of its binding, the devil may challenge its master once a year on Christmas Day to a riddling contest for its freedom along with its master's soul. Winning ownership of the devil will come with a pamphlet of impossible riddles in its Polish dialect, along with a pronunciation guide.

LOT 4. ARMORED PERSONNEL CARRIER

An M113 Armored Personnel Carrier. The interior was once covered in a homogenized blend of human tissues, but this has decayed to reveal a beautiful, mandala-like pattern of metal and plastic. In his 1938 expedition to Tibet, Ernst Schäfer heard stories of a passage in the Tarim Basin to a sort of anti-Shamballa. Though he was unable to ever get the budget to follow up on these stories, his notes ended up in the hands of a covert unit of the American army, which during its occupation of Afghanistan launched its own investigation. This APC is all that remains of them. Meditation within the APC produces super-normal feelings of peace and clarity. Prolonged meditation awakens memories of "the womb within the womb". Achieving such a state more than once in a given year is not recommended, as this will result in the metamorphosis of the brain into an ambulatory and self-sustaining form which escapes the skull and any further confinement through extra-spatial movement. Bidding for this item will begin at $40,000 due to transportation costs.

LOT 5. THE BULL OF THE PIT

A dog the size of a percheron, bred by a circle of Palladists in the late 1920s as the nexus of their efforts to introduce diabolical blood into the nascent "pit bull" dog lineage. By their design, every child mauled by a pit bull would act as a Satanic sacrifice that channeled energy into this, the pittest bull. While the dog could be an intimidating companion on its own, the real value is in this energy, which continues to be supplied in bulk thanks to the ongoing efforts of the Process Church of the Final Judgement. Responds to the name "Nanny".

LOT 6. BLACK LIGHTNING

A magnetic canister containing a sample of paradimensional force which resembles a lingering bolt of black lightning. Provided to DARPA researchers by the entities which reside beyond the portal within Saturn's "hexagon" in exchange for ritual killings conducted by Tiger Force (Recon) 1-327th, along with several other technologies instrumental to the development of the internet. The black lightning is capable of transmuting biological minds into purely electrical consciousnesses, and of extracting energy from minds experiencing states of extreme suffering in apparent violation of thermodynamics.

LOT 7. THE PAUPER'S NOOSE

A silver necklace set with glittering yellow lynguriums. By legend given to a Genoese beggar-girl by the King of All Cats, and used to behead her by the same when she befriended a stray dog. From there the necklace made its way around the necks of a rich merchant's wife in Constantinople, the mistress of a Burji sultan, and a duchess of Mecklenburg, to name a few. Besides being a beautiful and storied piece of jewelry, the wearer of this necklace is blessed with the loyalty of all sorts of cats - as loyal as cats get to any master, anyways. Its wearer could walk among a pride of starving lions without so much as a scratch. With this blessing it seems to come with a curse - many of its wearers have died, prematurely and gorily, with the necklace by some means involved.

LOT 8. 2012 TORRIT GREY

A unique annual blend of dry pigments collected from air filters used by the Gamblin paint company. A flat, metallic surface painted with the 2012 Torrit Grey and oriented towards the light of the decan Ruax for three days and nights will become sensitized to certain otherwise-invisible spectra, and discolour when exposed to cursed objects, rifts to other planes of existence, and suchlike in manners that suggest their nature and severity. This lot comes with seven buckets of the paint - all that could be recovered after its anomalous properties had been discovered.

LOT 9. MUSICAL AUTOMATON

A humanoid automaton made of bronze and lacquered wood. Though traditionally attributed to the legendary Yan Shi, modern dating technology places it a millennium and a half after his supposed lifetime. When its internal mechanisms are wound with a cord of dried skin taken lengthwise from above the spinal column, the automaton is capable of playing musical instruments with great skill. Of particular interest is its ability to perform songs which would have an incapacitating mental or spiritual effect on a human performer, and of which a recording would not suffice.

LOT 10. MONA LISA SCHEMATICS

Pages from an otherwise-lost notebook of Leonardo da Vinci. They detail in notes and diagrams the vivisection and reassembly of the subject of his Mona Lisa painting into a tower-mounted weapon of unknown effect, apparently at her own request. Initial cryptographic analysis suggests the location of this device is encoded in the schematics, though the full discovery, and whether the procedure can be replicated, has been left to the schematics' final owner.

LOT 11. SOUL-FIXER

A hexapodal pseudo-insectoid with a variety of hooked mouthparts. Its shell is made of marrowless bone and its body cavities are filled with phlegm-soaked hair. The being is depicted in a Nazca geoglyph since removed from the public eye. It was recovered for this auction from an American mercenary outfit operating out of Colombia. By reaching its mouthparts into someone's nostrils and tear ducts in a perverse sort of "kiss" it can remove the qualia of guilt, mercy, and suchlike, creating perfect liars, suits, and killers. If the removal was performed less than a week ago the being can be forced to regurgitate what it has taken - either to restore it to the person it was taken from, or to double it in another. Cooperation of the soul-fixer can be obtained through the application of capsaicin to its spiracles.

LOT 12. ICON OF HALF-SAINT RADA

Orthodox icon made in honour of a woman who was martyred single-handedly defending her hamlet from Wehrmacht looters, who is not officially recognized and only locally venerated. Framed with welded bullet casings. When the icon is displayed in your home it will deafen and rattle intruders as if by nearby artillery fire, so long as you have not committed any sins against the Christian religion within.

LOT 13. CELESTIAL CORRESPONDENCE PHONE

A half-melted red plastic rotary phone, along with the tasteful late 19th-century wooden side table it's fused to. The dial does not have traditional numbers, but rather symbols reminiscent of those used in Al-Marjānī's zairjas. With the right combinations the phone enables communication with intelligences that variously claim to be angels, the plasmic essences of stars, enlightened ultraterrestrial gurus, magmic siliconoids, and suchlike. These intelligences are well-informed on natural issues of wide scale - gamma ray bursts, volcanic eruptions, and suchlike - yet struggle to understand anything of human concern. With the wrong combination, these same entities will quite literally fry your brain.

LOT 14. THE AVON SARIRAS

Pearlescent beads retrieved from the fire amputation pit used by a Noongar man who had fought with British forces and suffered a bullet wound in his leg that became infected. Buddhist priests who examined the beads confirmed that the man was the final incarnation of the wisdom king Yamantaka.

LOT 15. SCRUMPTIOUS MIKE

A 42 year old Caucasian male by the name of Michael Keller. He is missing his lips, tongue, genitals, and most of his right cheek. Both his legs have been amputated just above the knee. Thanks to his unique protein profile, Michael's flesh (and to a lesser extent, his bodily fluids) hold a neuro-chemically perfect umami flavour. Regrettably, the right to stud cannot be included with his purchase. Best paired with a fine Merlot.

LOT 16. THE ROOT RACE

Three breeding pairs of a transgenic species of vegetable humanoids created by a top secret Tanzanian black budget research and development program during the height of Cold War atomic fear. They are as obedient as well-mannered children, immune to the negative effects of all but vapourizing levels of radiation exposure, and can be tapped for certain extracts otherwise found only in high-grade homunculi.

LOT 17. MRNA ROYALTY OVERRIDE

A syringe containing a gene-modifying solution which will replace your own genes with those of a grandson of Charlemagne, reconstructed from blood spattered on a bandage kept by an obscure order of French monks who mistakenly believed it to be Christ's shroud. Several days of fatigue, fever, insomnia, and soreness around the injection site are to be expected, followed by some degree of hair shedding and skin sloughing. Usage of the syringe will place you thirty-third in line to inherit the crown of France, as well as an honourary title in the Knights Templar.

LOT 18. JEFFREY EPSTEIN'S PENIS

Preserved per his will along with several vials of sperm samples in a solar-powered cryogenic pod the size of a beer cooler. As a bonus, the penis and its accoutrements also come with the original, unedited copy of Eyes Wide Shut, featuring footage of the 1998 Black Auction that Mr. Kubrick regrettably chose to candidly record. To the disappointment of many members who vied for this hotly contested item, Mr. Epstein's head was lost along with many other invaluable items in 2020 and is no longer available for bidding.

LOT 19. HEAVEN SHAKER ASHURA

In the waning days of World War II a manned suicide torpedo was fired by the Japanese navy. This torpedo's propeller failed. This torpedo never detonated. The man meant to guide this torpedo went mad with rage within its metal shell, his screams reverberating endlessly even after he suffocated. The torpedo was recovered in time for this auction after its position was triangulated by psychic-sensitives, each of whom was driven murderously insane by its influence. We do not and cannot guarantee the impact of this torpedo's detonation, but by all accounts it will be wide, and reach high enough to shake the lower orders of the divine.

LOT 20. TEQUILA WORM

A bottle of Don Julio tequila with what appears to be a worm floating in it. The apparent worm is in fact a hermaphroditic and biologically-immortal fetus, the perfected form of the German alchemist Casimir Dreschler, who studied under Daoist masters, and is credited by some with translating the texts which would later inspire Hegel's dialectics.

GLOGtober Challenge: A Monster Described Only Through Conflicting Folklore & Rumour; Or: The Granfalgroo

As seen here: https://glass-candles.blogspot.com/2024/09/glogtober-24.html

Challenge courtesy of Vivanter: https://mediumsandmessages.bearblog.dev/

🥄

You two come and eat your fill of the granfalgroo,
All pantry-things at hand have gone into this stew,
Dig in til nothing's left, come on give it a chew,
It will be your end if we've had our fill of you!

GRAN

'Ewere drinkup!: the molly-combs glister to the twinking stars between them, enswathing indigold roots invest'iridal floors, twiralled in flocorum and once more in chiaroscurry-all strips - slimp strathe-wise 'cross the lambent flumes for 'ewhenin the grand-fall-grew how're glass'n into verse.

 FAL

Potstruck, stewstrewn, lumpin' poured,
Breadtack driven, hardstale board,
Puncture, sancle, 'testin' cord,
Proud-lapse coockle oh my lord!
Strifelin' tatter'd, exeunt-bound,
Outed houses, s'loose the hound!
Snuckle swoofley yack-end ground,
Wiff-club grample, smaff, and pound!
Death rats clean with rock-dove coo,
Struck downstrewn the granfalgroo!

GROO

Sup twice from the maenad's cup and tere-tair-up from the withinside-out:
I tell you true for the granfalgroo is NOT the grundaloot IS not the sweembairn and IS NOT the nardypuce;
Yet forgiven underforgotten, grave-packed you'll be for mistaking them and he!

GROO

It splatters it squelches it rushes it crushes it kills you out right from within and without with torn-out nails and bursted tripe it knows you it smells you it knows that it smells you but not with its nose it smells from the heart and the hart and the hare and the brown and the stew and it knows where you sleep it knows when you sleep it's watched you through life with eyes not its own and fish-heads burble and bobble and pickled eggs wobble it won't do you good go hungry get clear it won't shed a tear for a lick of your fear

FAL

Once upon a time there was a boy
A nasty little boy
 Who did nasty little things
He pissed in pies on the sill
And plucked the wings off chickens
And he was very rude to his uncle
And one day the nasty little boy died
His head was like a drumstick
With meat slurped off the bone
His hands had been peeled like potatoes
And his chest made for a deep bowl of soup
No one attended his funeral
And people quietly thanked the granfalgroo

GRAN

A smidge of porridge on the door,
A boar's head rolling 'neath the floor,
In beds on tables gruesome gore,
Old man still sleeping, what a snore!
Tummy rumbling, chin all a'biled,
What's left unsaid can come out wild,
In pots and pans it brews and stews
And spills out deadly granfalgroos!