D6x7 Gith Sects Besides The Githyanki & Githzerai

Click the button below for your very own Gith sect:

Generator generator here: http://paperelemental.blogspot.com/p/list-to-html-generator.html

Tables:

This gith sect is called the gith[suffix1][suffix2]<br>This gith sect inhabits [inhabit]<br>This gith sect believes [belief]<br>This gith sect is known for [known]<br>This gith sect’s society [society]<br>This gith sect is {allied with|opposed by} [faction]

{suffix1}
ru
vo
ka
si
ak
gaw

{suffix2}
zi.
lek.
jao.
ma.
ya.
nti.

{inhabit}
a microverse of nested pocket dimensions grown like shells by hyperspatial molluscs they tend.
the roots of a great, parasitic plant that slithers about the trunk of the world-tree like a strangler fig.
vaults buried deep beneath the grey wastes of Hades, buttressed against its cloying despair by artifacts of hope, nostalgia, and amusement incorporated into their construction.
a candle-castle on the elemental plane of wax, a place so minor that most compendiums of the planes don't even bother mentioning.
floating palaces in flooded craters on the surface of the moon, crossing to the earth in howdahs atop the backs of giant moths.
a library-jungle created by a lost divinity as a breeding ground for knowledge, where encyclopedic creatures intermix and procreate to create entirely new, often incoherent, information.

{belief}
that they are the true inheritors of the great illithid empire which will rise in the future and fall long in the past, destined to snuff it out and usurp it in the same moment. Psychic infiltration and domination are their bread and butter.
in taking the bioengineering project that created the Gith into their own hands, splicing samples from exotic creatures into their gene pool and breeding specialized castes.
that it is their duty and destiny to manufacture a Gith god.
that the multiverse is a dream, and that they must find the avatar of the dreamer within it to cement themselves in its memory so something of them survives when the dreamer wakes.
that causality is an illusion, and that chaos and emergent phenomena are truly the hands of cosmic super-consciousnesses sculpting themselves from the stuff of the past - the dialectical development of Gith cultures will bring about the greatest of these super-consciousnesses in their system.
in pacifism and the psychic unification of all beings. While they are vehemently opposed to physical violence, restructuring the minds of enemies to make them friends is seen as acceptable and even commendable.

{known}
the sealed suits they wear when around others not of their kind.
their gridlike bioluminescent tattoos.
their obsession with coffee and the particularities of its brewing.
their beauty standards placing emphasis on cauliflower ears.
only being encountered outside their sanctuaries in sets of identical twins.
excessive, elaborate politeness in their speech.

{society}
is ruled by the consensus of a council of clan elders who are nigh-impossible to get to agree on anything.
practices a secret language communicated through eye and eyebrow movements, winks, and blinks.
has different sets of laws depending on one's degree of initiation into the sect.
is riven by cults and guilds with their own distinct and dogmatic interpretations of the larger sect's beliefs.
honours their dead by transplanting their bones into the bodies of the living.
separate children from their parents at birth and raise them in cadres, indoctrinating them that their deepest allegiance is to the sect.

{faction}
a disorder of knight-errant modrons.
a contingent of mercenary fiends seeking to follow the root of all evil to its end.
a plushie-legion of survivors from a long-dead child-emperor's animate toy menagerie.
a pack of malformed kludge-beasts created by the collision and merging of mages miscasting teleportation spells.
indecipherable angel-demons of alien moral systems from the un-space between the outer planes.
a kingdom of beatific reverse-ghosts who sent their souls back in time and through unreality to the imagined golden age of their civilization.

Ventriloquist Dummies of the Nine Worlds

Special thanks to friend of the blog Max of Weird & Wonderful Worlds for the original idea:

Despite what popular thought leads us to believe, the first ventriloquist performance with a dummy was not by Baron de Mengen in 1757. No, the practice is far older. Or younger. Or some sort of age-related descriptor we haven't invented yet for the English language, because our interactions with the perpendicular para-curves of mytho-time have thus far been minimal.

In fact - truer than mere fact - the first ventriloquist dummies were carved and used by the god Loki, in one of his more whimsical and less terrible moods. He carved the dummies from the wood of the world-tree Yggdrasil itself, nine in total - one for each world which hanged from it, out of the branches on which they hanged. It's said that Loki's first performance with the dummies made the giants laugh so hard that the noospheric membrane between myth and fiction was ruptured. It's said that if the dummies are burned together in a bonfire it will serve as a beacon for Surtr to begin his great ending.

The dummies number nine. What follows is their names, and their natures:

From the branch of Asgard was carved Marglod, red-haired and proudly bearded, his fine tunic stitched with golden bells. His voice is hoarse and faint as an old man's on his deathbed. He can predict the next day's weather with perfect accuracy, and if consulted three days in a row guarantees that the fourth day will have a tremendous storm.

From the branch of Muspelheim was carved Bragibrandur, black-charred and wild-haired, whose iron teeth clack sparks with every word. He finds everything funny, but particularly enjoys cruelty. He eats fire and shits coal, taking giant-sized gulps at a go.

From the branch of Niflheim was carved Svellveid, frost-rimed, narrow and gnarled, with two human eyes set in her sockets, their tears frozen on her cheeks. She's caustic to be around, picking on any insecurity like a scab. If given a nibble or sip of a potion or magic item, she has a 50% chance of telling you what it does, and a 50% chance of telling you the opposite of what it does, and will never admit which is which.

From the branch of Vanaheim was carved Hodvonur, flaxen-haired and blue-eyed, his head stuck on backwards to his constant vexation. He permits only women and crossdressing men to stick their hand in him. If he overhears prophecies or foretold dooms he repeats them in a mocking falsetto, and thereby reduces them to mere speculation.

From the branch of Jotunheim was carved Andskott, rough-hewn and bulbous, with shiny chips of flint for eyes. His voice is booming, and he cannot remember names, giving people nicknames instead. He offers counsel in war, and good counsel at that, but for every piece of advice he gives he must also give one to your enemy - appearing in their dreams or shouting it out to them if they're in earshot.

From the branch of Midgard was carved Knutlykki, Brown-haired, bowl-cut, body like a cage of woven twigs. Insists on proper enunciation and grammar. If fed one of your fingers, she can force a being not of this world to save or be forcefully returned from whence it came.

From the branch of Alfheim was carved Rikroen, whose hair is silver and whose skin is painted white, whose smile is furnished with the sharp teeth of cats. Her voice is crackly and whistling. By singing she can cause sunlight to shine clearly through cloud cover and wooden ceilings, and can make the moon glow as bright as the sun for an hour, though this latter act causes her to fall asleep for a month.

From the branch of Nidavellir was carved Eitrylr, small and pock-marked, greasy black hair smeared over his face. His voice is gravelly, and he tolerates no interruptions while he's speaking. He can cause any non-magical device to break by shouting insults at it, but demands payment every time he's made to do so.

From the branch of Svartalfheim was carved Ljotrog, whose skin is dark-bruised though it's made of wood, who stinks of grave-mold and whose eyes are always hidden in shadows. Can't speak, but grunts and moans instead to express himself. He can cause a corpse to decay in an instant by kissing it.

And these are the dummies that number nine, carved by Loki from the branches of the world-tree.

D6x6 Unique Unicorns

Click the button below for you certified-unique unicorn:

Generator generator here: http://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

D6	This unicorn appears
1	scruffy and goatish, with a long beard and ridged horn.
2	lanky and knobby-kneed, with a velvety and branching horn.
3	short and chubby, with a wooly fleece and a curling horn.
4	built like a tank, with a wide, scratched-up horn and a thick, folded hide.
5	as a different breed of horse each time you blink, now an elegant Arabian and then a sturdy percheron - always alabaster-white, and always with a sharp, straight, pearlescent horn.
6	blubbery yet sleek, with a speckled hide and an almost comically-long horn.

D6	This unicorn is
1	a minor god of purification rites who abdicated their portfolio in the belief that they could do more good as a creature of flesh and blood.
2	a prodigy that was born in a place where the upper realms touched the mortal world.
3	an angel from a pre-human era when it seemed like quadrepeds might inherit the earth.
4	a kludge-beast of reanimated taxidermy created by a childlike enchanter.
5	the creation of a temple that required an unblemished sacrifice, though it's escaped this fate to this day.
6	a spontaneous exudate of the universe spawned in response to a rising tide of evil.

D6	This unicorn is troubled by
1	a hypocritical and narcissistic knight who is convinced that the unicorn is the only mount worthy of bearing their rump.
2	an aspiring bishop who believes a sign of favour from the unicorn would secure their virtuous reputation.
3	a mind-bogglingly wealthy merchant and horse-breeder who wants it captured for their stables.
4	a nightmare who wants to kill and impersonate it for its own malicious ends.
5	an overbearing mother-in-law-to-be who wants it to confirm the virginity of her son's future bride.
6	a hag and her trio of ogre sons who are inexplicably convinced that the unicorn can grant wishes.

D6	This unicorn inhabits
1	a silver palace somewhere along the way to Heaven where good souls near death sometimes go for a pit-stop halfterlife.
2	a lush vale that doesn't appear on any maps, where the meek can seek sanctuary without violence.
3	a cathedral it built itself from the bones of forgotten martyrs it exhumed from unmarked graves.
4	a ruined castle where a goblin-market has been set up, a market where sentimental belongings and heirlooms can be restored to perfect condition.
5	a mist-shrouded glade where lost travellers sometimes stumble, where they can rest and receive succour before going on their way.
6	whatever caves or other shelters it finds as the sun sets in its endless wandering.

D6	This unicorn's goodness
1	is puritanical, with scant forgiveness for little lies, errors, and weaknesses.
2	takes the form of self-sacrificing charity, allowing the hungry to gnaw off its own leg.
3	is ruthlessly utilitarian and long-sighted, making it capable of shocking callousness in the present for larger gains to the greater good down the line.
4	is uncertain of what the good even is, skeptically questioning itself into inaction.
5	is relentlessly optimistic, able to see the silver lining and redemption in even the meanest creatures.
6	is that of a zealot, a tireless and violent destroyer of evil.

D6	From this unicorn can be looted
1	its horn (called alicorn), which detects and neutralizes poisons on contact, though this causes it to gradually blacken and decay.
2	its blood, which restores drinkers to a state of innocent youth.
3	its brain, which when eaten grants great wisdom, particularly with regard to moral matters - and often great regret for killing a unicorn for its brain.
4	for its bones and hide, which can be worked into weapons and armour with particular efficacy against spirits both good and evil.
5	for its heart, which as an object of immense purity can soak up a number of curses (or one massive curse) through a sort of magical osmosis.
6	for its hooves, which can be worked into shoe-soles and keys and other such trinkets that allow one to trod the weird ways through the planes and cryptogeographical places.

D6x6 Trite Tritons

Already did merfolk. Are tritons really necessary, in the grand scheme of things?

Anyways, the best way to use all these water-people I've seen to date is here: http://monstermanualsewnfrompants.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-return-of-why-did-i-click-this-its.html

Click the button below for your very own, very personalized, very special tritons:

Generator generator here: http://paperelemental.blogspot.com/p/list-to-html-generator.html

Tables:

These tritons have [have], and their skin is [skin].<br>These tritons can [can].<br>These tritons live [live].<br>These tritons believe themselves to be [believe].<br>These tritons have domesticated [domesticated].

{have}
twin fish-tails for legs, like the Starbucks logo
fleshy growths across their body that mimic aquatic foliage and break up their profile
no noses, instead having blowholes on the tops of their heads
symbiotic armour of coral and barnacles
fishy scales covering their body
greenish hair that clumps into kelp-like ribbons

{skin}
wine-dark, crossed with bands of seafoam-white
countershaded, darker on their upper side and lighter on their underside
pale and nacreous like a pearl
as colourful as the most flamboyant sea slugs
near-transparent, showing off blue veins beneath
vantablack, absorbing light like the oceanic abyss

{can}
spit water with bludgeoning force and arrow-like accuracy
achieve immortality by reverting to an infantile state, though they lose many of their memories in the process.
rapidly inflate themselves with air or water to prevent being swallowed by predators
eat the stinging cells of jellyfish and other such creatures to concentrate that stinging ability in their own skin
exude a tremendous amount of mucal slime in an emergency
violently eject parts of their intestines to provide a distraction to predators

{live}
atop a seamount, as monastic pirates.
amid a mega-school of herring, whose swarming behaviour the tritons have learned to manipulate to create mobile structures and furniture
on the underside of a vast raft-city of matted sargasso, trading wherever the ocean currents take them. On the topside live albatross-folk, their uncomfortable neighbours
in the fortified harbour of a city their ancestors put to the sword, operating a protection racket on those that cross the boundaries of land and sea
in a patch of anomalous ocean similar to the Bermuda Triangle, where time and space don't work quite as they should and inexplicable disappearances are common
on the edge of a continental shelf. They trade goods of uncorroding deep-metals, forged by their smith-lords who are able to dive down into the vast darkness where their hydrothermal forges lie

{believe}
descendants of the first people, who fell from the heavens like rain. Those who fell onto the land became humanity, and those who fell into the ocean became tritons. When the age turns, all people will evaporate and return to heaven to be reunited and reconciled
more refined humans, who have replaced much of the lesser matter of their bodies with water, the fundamental substance of the universe
genetically-modified survivors of a cataclysm that incinerated the land who escaped their fiery fate in the sea
the kin of humans who were spared death in the Flood through transformation by a last-minute moment of mercy by God
superior to land-dwellers because they're spared from the tyranny of gravity and all its saggage
the inheritors of Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, and all the other drowned utopias

{domesticated}
giant sea horses, the males of which are used to rear their young
octopi, who are taught many tricks so they can act as another, ultra-flexible hand.
sea anemones, which are worn as living ornaments and trained not to sting their owners
sea urchins, whose spines are milked for poison and broken off to be used as pins and nails when metal is scarce
sturgeons, whose caviar they export for great profit
fist-sized mantis shrimp, which punch out supercavitating bubble-bullets on command.

D10x10 Mysterious Megastructures

Started this one immediately after reading BLAME!

Click the button below for a megastructure of your very own:

Generator generator here: http://paperelemental.blogspot.com/p/list-to-html-generator.html

Special thanks to friends of the blog deus ex parabola and Phlox for brainstorming assistance.

Tables:

This megastructure is [is] made of [composition], located [located].<br>According to legend it was built by [builtby] [builtfor].<br>The megastructure is known to contain [faction], [monster], and [obstacle], but no doubt these represent only a fraction of what lies within.<br>One of the mysteries surrounding this megastructure is [mystery].

{is}
a sphere
a cube
a ziggurat
a cylinder
a pyramid
an asymmetric, amorphous blob
a ring
a lotus
a many-faceted polyhedron
a humanoid structure

{located}
in the middle of a desert, only its very tip exposed above the dunes
halfway embedded in a cliff-face
at the bottom of a great ravine
atop the roof of a towering plateau
at the heart of an ancient, untrod forest
within an extraspatial pocket, accessible by esoteric gates
beneath an extinct volcano
in low orbit
at a lunar Lagrange point
just off the coast, its bulk a darkness beneath white-capped waves

{composition}
steel, glass, and concrete
countless skeletons fused together
a single, titanic living tree
tumorous bio-technological organs
diamondoid and carbon nanotube lattices
a single solid mountain of greasy black stone
Frankenstein-architecture kludged together from dozens of cultures
gleaming ultra-tough alloys and hard-light projections
modular automatons that periodically rearrange themselves according to unknown commands
gold, silver, and jewels that crumble to lead powder if removed from the megastructure

{builtby}
a workforce of exponentially self-replicating golems,
a clan of vampires who gained great power by drinking the burning blood of the earth itself,
a messianic religious movement,
an anteglacian species of bipedal cetaceans who enslaved and uplifted early humanity,
an archmage and their circle of treacherous apprentices
the population of a great city, all possessed by a ghost from the stars,
goblins, before their fall into their modern grotesquery,
an army of djinni at the behest of a sorcerer-king,
a single architect invigorated by obsession,
ancient giants so big they’d make today’s giants look like children by comparison,

{builtfor}
to act as proof of their existence that would last until the end of time
to bridge past, present, and future; life, death, and pre-existence
as a prison for a world-ending evil
as the temple and abode of the last and only true god, who would arrive in the universe when the megastructure was completed
as a terraforming engine that would transform the world into their paradise
as a prism that would focus the ambient light of the cosmos back into the pure light of creation
as a doomsday device that could wipe entire concepts from existence
as a factory that could produce all their material needs and usher in an aeon of leisure
as a computing machine that could discern and amend the laws of the cosmos
to pierce the veil between the world and realms unknown

{faction}
an exile-culture chased from their homeland
a conspiracy of derro who all dreamed of the place before knowing it existed
a lich-poet (accompanied by their undead retinue) who is certain that within the megastructure is the cure for their centuries of writer's block
outriders from a local tribe who see it as their ancestral duty to guard the megastructure from those who would exploit it
an adventurer-prince and his band of cutthroats and scoundrel aiming to carve out a kingdom for themselves
a very confused group of butterfly-folk who don't know why their traditional migration route led them here
a secret society of masons aiming to glean the secret of the megastructure's construction
a cabal of ancient elves trying to find out why the place doesn't exist in their collective memory
the research camp of a prestigious university
a roving market of tinkering nomads

{monster}
an apparently invincible reptilian behemoth that absorbs and incorporates into itself any weapon that wounds it
giant, drill-faced wolverines that can burrow through the substance of the megastructure
men with hourglasses, pocketwatches, or other timepieces for heads, who interact oddly with causality and history
living comets that have carved themselves into vicious shapes, and drag the utter cold of the void with them wherever they go
grey-fleshed, faceless humanoids that can slip through shadows as if they were doorways between each other
serpents coiled together like DNA strands whose venom mutates whatever they bite
decaying cyborgs that must constantly hunt for flesh and machinery to repair themselves with
holographic beasts that project 3-dimensional bodies for themselves
large ticks with the faces of men that are able to puppeteer people they drink the blood of
floating glass eyeball-things that shoot lasers from their pupils and make their homes in skulls

{obstacle}
pockets of airless vacuum, corrosive gas, hallucinatory fumes, and other unbreathable atmospheres
a bad toxic mold infestation
entire miniature, alien ecosystems in domes within
flooding in the lower sections - sometimes mere water, but other times acid, or blood
pipes that contain hot steam, liquid crystal, swarming vermin, and stranger things, which sometimes burst randomly
hostile architecture that's difficult to impossible for a human to navigate without tools
collapsed passageways, sealed gates, and whole sections that move around like parts of a puzzle box
moving gears, pistons, and other machinery that is not even close to OSHA-compliant
rooms and hallways that are impossible according to conventional geometry
a curse that drives those who linger too long within to delve deeper and deeper, heedless of risks

{mystery}
why it's impenetrable to scrying magic and even the sight of the divine
why so many heretical sects schismed off from their parent faiths after receiving a vision of what lies at the megastructure's core
why and how it's suddenly started to move
why settlements near it have started having their populations disappear without a trace in the night
what the source of the wondrous music that drifts throughout it is
why and how it seems to be growing year after year
why people who've returned with treasures from it tend to die in inexplicable ways
why smaller copies of it are starting to be discovered all over the world
why those who try to map it are stricken with genius and madness in equal measure
the fate of a colony established within it, that suddenly and recently dropped out of contact

Semiurge Reviews Movies 4: The Fourth Time Around, It’s Fourthsonal

Semiurge Movie Reviews 1

Semiurge Movie Reviews 2

Semiurge Movie Reviews 3

Lately, people have been stopping me in the street to say: "semiurge, July's almost over, where is your movie review post - the annual event that cinephiles the world over look forward to like Christmas, or Hanukah, or one of those other big ethnic holidays, the name of which I can't remember right this second - not Ramadan, I can't imagine that many people look forward to fasting, but other ones, you know?". Up until now, I've had to scream and soil myself to get them to leave me alone, but no longer. The 4th annual movie review post is here:

Heat

What a film, what a great damn film. All-star cast, Pacino & De Niro... my first exposure to De Niro was in Meet the Parents, a fine comedy, but my God, how much more depth he has to him.

GTA V is ripped pretty much entirely from Heat, it's almost scandalous how shameless it is.

Movies really went downhill after 9/11. My running theory is that the unprecedented military-industrial complex involvement disrupted the native ecosystem of Hollywood in ways it still hasn't recovered from to this day. But maybe I'm off-base with that. Just look into how involved the OSS/CIA was and probably still is with Disney.

The Matrix 4

I was day drinking & barbecuing with my buds the whole day leading up to watching this movie, so I don't remember a whole lot of it, but what I do remember was a disappointment. 

My favourite part of the original trilogy is everything leading up to the moment Neo takes the red pill - solid gnostic horror. This movie tries to do something like that over again, but it's muddled and riven with cuts to the people already outside the matrix having fight scenes in trains or whatever.

The rediscovery of the relationship between Neo and Trinity is a workable central thread to this movie, but there's just so much uninspired cruft around it that drags it down.

Also they declined to have Laurence Fishburne reprise his role as Morpheus - weak!

Total Recall

A P.K. Dick adaption, so you know it's gonna be a real mind-bottler.

Practical effects, actual physical sets, that shit sells sci-fi. Miss me with that green screen, talking to a tennis ball on a stick shit. Bussin' no cap, fr fr. The Martian machinery at the end is probably the best megastructure I've seen on film.

Schwarzenegger - is he a good actor? I say yes. He doesn't have to do subtlety or whatever, he's simply got the raw charisma to carry an entire movie on his broad, muscular shoulders.

Terminator 2

Voiceovers have fallen out of fashion - there's a few long voiceovers in this movie.

Another essential piece of Schwarzenegger-core, with great sci-fi action scenes that put the current flood of Marvel-slop to shame. A pessimistic thematic end to the Cold War, where it's no longer a human conflict of good and evil (or whatever else) that brings about the end of the world but our own dumb technological systems running out of our control, inevitable and itself without end through the tangled tumbleweed of possible futures.

The bad guy in this one's a cop. Modern audiences should appreciate that more. I didn't think John Connor's actor was particularly good, and the "hacking" stuff was a clumsy way to make him practically relevant beyond being the emotional heart of the film, but I like what they were doing with the character, which is more relevant that ever today - a lonely kid without roots or role models, seen by the adults around him only as the troublemaker he is and the menace he could become, basing his personality on imitating faux-mature pop culture gunk.

Training Day

We're seeing a lot of wins coming Ethan Hawke's way these days, and performances like his in Training Day go to show that Mr. Hawke's deserved these big Ws for a long time.

A baptism by extended, anxious coal-raking for an idealistic cop on his first day on the job in mean & dirty L.A., under the eye of Denzel Washington's also excellent grizzled old wolf. Katabasis & anabasis, a real modern myth.

My sensitivity reader (unpaid) advised me to remove the following paragraph - I have simply modified it. I leave it to you, dear reader, to decide whether I should have followed that advice entirely:

Women may have trouble fully appreciating Training Day. This comment has no bearing on the moral or intellectual worth of women, which I consider to be equal to men and non-binary people in every respect. My sample size is two. I watched this movie with my girlfriend and my mom (I am an adult man who does not live with my mother. I was helping her with weeding earlier that day, in accordance with the principles of Confucian filial piety. Do not call me a basement-dwelling troll loser in the comments, as that is not an accurate description.), and throughout the film they were on their phones and asking for clarification of plot beats that had been explained less than a minute ago onscreen. This is not a misogynistic comment, I did the same thing when we watched Lady Bird (it was just me & my girlfriend who watched Lady Bird, as previously established I do not live with my mother). A good entertainer keeps their audience in mind when picking movies. Just something to keep in mind.

1917

Couldn't get all the way through this movie. It was decent when it was a "Sam & Frodo in Mordor"-type romp through the WWI wasteland, but (spoiler alert) the tubby one dies after a moment of mercy shown to the Germanic menace, and it's all downhill from there. The "no cuts" filming style works well when exploring blasted landscapes and packed trenches, but weakens tension when the action ramps up. By the time I quit the movie in boredom I was rooting for the good ol' English chaps to lose the war, and spare us a century of rule from the City of London - did you know they worship Gog and Magog there?

In The Tall Grass

I'm not the biggest Stephen King fan - too verbose - but this adaption of one of his novellas yanks the raw root of his horror from the weeds of wordiness.

Norman Rockwell Americana spooked up, that's In The Tall Grass. A grassy field where time and space don't work the way we expect - an alienation from the land, the breakdown of family, a stone in its center granting terrestrial rather than cosmic revelations that lead some to baby-eating madness and others to gentle, terminal decency.

Blood Red Sky

Another movie I couldn't get all the way through. I should have liked this one - freaky vampires are an easy way to get in my good books - but airplanes are just such drab settings that there could be no redemption. The movie's also German, and Germany hasn't had much of a domestic film industry since, well, history buffs will know the answer to this one.

If you need a freaky vampire fix, consider watching Blade 2, or The Strain.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

A modern fantasy classic. Guillermo del Toro's creature design sings here. Good action, good emotion, smooth pacing, sprinkles of comedy, tragedy, and freakyness. You don't need to watch the first movie to understand it, or read the comics, it's pretty self-contained. Watch it if you hadn't, or rewatch it if you haven't seen it in a while - it's worth your time, your precious, precious time.

The Gods of Jornu: The First & Second Generations (with Special Thanks to Throne of Salt for the Generator)

Based on Throne of Salt's pantheon generator here: https://throneofsalt.blogspot.com/2020/05/expanded-pantheon-generator.html

Which itself is an expanded version of the Manse's pantheon generator here: http://themansegaming.blogspot.com/2019/04/pantheon-generator.html

The Gods of Jornu

That the world shall one day end and be born again is common knowledge across it. After all, it is the way of things from autumn leaves to mortal generations.

Less common are stories of many worlds, many endings, many beginnings anew, each following the last.

Rarer still is the insight that there are not just many worlds in sequence, but in parallel as well, each with its own deaths and rebirths.

Imagine a world that ended like a dandelion in a breeze, pulled apart and drifting on the void in a thousand thousand pieces. One of these pieces came to this world in its current incarnation, landing more gently than a falling feather. This piece is called Jornu, and so is the city atop it. The city is built from its gods. Little else could have survived the journey

The greatest six of the gods of Jornu (in size and potency), and ancestors of the rest, are the Quartermasters. Each is a divine monument which defines its section of the city. They are as follows:

Munsara

A smoking ziggurat at the center of Jornu, her stepped sides flowing with her incandescent effluence. Munsara's domain is a pounding heart of industry. Under the shadow of her fumes nightlife thrives. Her people are artisans and prostitutes, labourers and gamblers, the deafened, the blinded, and the maimed.

Before she was remade in Jornu, Munsara was a god of clanging blades and hardened hearts. Idleness poorly suits her. Her frustrated energy bleeds into her populace. Members of the iron-fisted Tempered Temperance movement kick down the doors of speakeasies and do battle with drunken boxers. Guildsmen fight over contracts in the streets. The energy is frantic, indulgent. Philosophies, politics, religion: all melt together here into endlessly merging and colliding sects.

Munsara is respected by the other gods. She is mother to many of them. She is feared as well. They sense her restlessness, and each would turn it to their own ends. Integrationists, isolationists, conquerors, escapists, these are tendencies in their agendas, but not true blocs. The gods of Jornu are family, and squabble like family even when their interests might align. An outsider could tip the balance.

The palace of Jornu's royal family is built on her top steps - this statement is mostly correct. Each of Jornu's royal families has a palace somewhere on her top steps. The palaces are so crowded they've kludged together into essentially a single palace. Each family has a credible claim of descent from Munsara herself, but no one can prove their claim is closer than anyone else's. Locked in an impasse of competing divine rights, the families have withdrawn from government of the city, and become incredibly passive-aggressive towards each other. Theirs is a self-contained world of genealogical warfare.

In their absence the city has defaulted to a sort of gangland anarchy. Each god holds territory in their vicinity, and their will is enforced by mortal lieutenants: the high priests of their cult. This has worked out mostly alright, or at least better than the royals did.

Virvaril

Macro-Cosanti, Paolo Soleri

The gleaming dome of his back dominates the western skyline of Jornu. His splayed limbs are carved with apartments, balcony-gardens, storefronts. In his chest are gymnasiums and bathhouses and racetracks. Throughout him is the salty-sweet smell of incense and sweat.

Virvaril is an arcology, a city-within-a-city. You could live your entire life inside him and not want for anything. By this fact he should be a paradise, yet isn't, because once some weed has taken root within his body it becomes nigh-impossible to uproot. Rebels, criminals, and heretics can disappear within the liminal tangle of his hallways and sustain themselves on hydroponics and vermin indefinitely.

He is also a tragedy, a constant reminder of the cost of Jornu's journey. In hollowing Virvaril out, in tapping his vitality, he was rendered comatose. His remaining priesthood is a few bitter remnants encysted in his guts. The glory and comfort of Virvaril's internal amenities are slowly, yet perpetually, deteriorating for want of his active attention.

Some adventurers believe that within Virvaril's body must lie his brain, and that a sufficient jolt will rouse him back to wakefulness. A handful of these adventurers have returned raving and mold-ridden at the heads of exile-hordes, forced back only by fractious alliances of Jornu's priest-gangs. It is an issue which even polities of the new world have taken interest in, for if Virvaril finally fails then a massive exodus of Jornuans into the outside world for want of food and habitation is assured.

Hala

Hala was and is a seer. He foresaw the end of the gods’ world, and what his family would need to do to survive it. None trust him. It was the authority of his wife Munsara that convinced them.

He had originally intended to become the engine of Jornu, its motive power, yet all the wheedling and prophecy Hala could muster couldn't convince the others to grant him such an esteemed position. Instead he was shattered, shrieking, into a million reflective pieces, and reassembled into the city's optics - made to see through space as he already could through time.

As a structure, Hala is five enormous silver dishes pointed skyward, and the complex connecting them with hallways and bounced light. Beneath each dish is the monastery of an order of prosecutors, forbidden from speaking with each other except by the most controlled and monitored channels. These monkish prosecutors are charged with interrogating the five lobe-dish minds of Hala, ensuring there is no unity or alibi between them to further the seer-god's schemes and trickery. By their cross-examination of his splintered psyche they are able to derive cryptic, yet defused, portents to guide Jornu by. There is perpetual low-intensity gang warfare along the branches of Hala's complex from rival cults attempting to steal or disrupt these portents before they can be delivered. There are some who say the entire endeavour is a farce, that Hala's telemetry is meant for the interplanetary void rather than an atmosphere, and that his prophecy can no longer be trusted - these voices are swiftly silenced.

Due to Munsara's smoke a large part of the city is twilit at best. As her husband, Hala takes it upon himself to amend this. A web of mirrors pried from his halls reflects the brilliance of her blazing flanks to all darkened corners of Jornu. Even so, blackouts can occur when a parade, pursuit, or prank pulls the macro-mirrors out of alignment with civilian lumino-networks.

Stolys

Stolys is the most likely of all the Quartermasters for a foreigner to encounter, perhaps the most likely of any god in Jornu. She is a gregarious being, quick to befriend, eager to learn (quicker to discard once she has what she wants). It's what she was made for.

An eclectic building, Stolys is part university, part embassy, and part zoo, under constant renovation and reinvention. Of all the gods of Jornu, she is the only one with demigods, for her priests are integrated into her divine construction, either as fleshy, conscious mortar or with music-box-like machines chirping from a privileged position in their skulls.

Her role in the pantheon is to learn, assimilate, and manipulate the new world that Jornu has found itself upon. In the old world she was a goddess of something like a rainbow, a divine messenger who circled the world a dozen times over before the day was done, yet now her horizons are restricted, her ability to travel and observe for herself shackled to her own foundations.

This is agonizing for her - Stolys is starved for knowledge. Her Jornuan agents are limited in the movements, and ignorant of the outside world besides. She needs agents, agents of the new world, and when employing them is on the knife's edge of paying through the nose for information, and capturing them for vivisection.

Lomizelc

Elegant Lomizelc, trimmed and manicured and stuccoed and painted in all the ways that are pleasing to the eye. Land here is coveted, where the sunshine might be enjoyed outside Munsara's caul.

Most of Lomizelc is claimed by the fortified micro-fiefs of old world aristocratic families. Their holdings are the last place in the entire universe where Jornu's fruits are grown in the same manner as they were so very long ago. The families have calcified in the new order of the city, without the uniting yoke of the royals. Roles are played out in feuds and scandals that have repeated so much over the generations that they've become formal traditions. Honours are granted to exceptional knights-florist on the scale of patches of dirt. The gods themselves are mistrusted for the forms they've taken. Alcoves are carved into idols to worship.

Edging in on the nobility's manor-farms are the towers of Jornu's noveau riche, built with merchant-wealth. They have no love for tradition and much for the money brought in by trade between Jornu and its new world. Their feuds are stunning in their speed and innovation. Lomizelc abhors brute violence, but their eyes are low, so the merchants fight 'cloud wars' between their towers, and against the taller nobles' homes. These wars are fought at lethal heights with war-kites, siphon-blasted toxic gases, pole-shimmying mercenaries, trained birds, and pissed-off swarms of bees (or rather their Jornu-equivalent).

There are domes speckling the immaculate gardens where the careless flaneurs do not care to tread. These 'speculatoria', monuments to all Jornu's imagination and ignorance both, are Lomizelc's true passion.

The gap between worlds is one that light and divinity struggle to cross. Little wonder then that even as they set off Jornu's people were woefully uncertain about their destination (indeed, even whether there was a destination to arrive at). There was much guesswork. Natural philosophers worked night and day beside novelists. A thousand contingencies were drawn up in the space of possibility. Would solid things be drawn downwards, and gaseous things up? Would the air sustain or poison? How many of their angels could dance upon the head of a pin? Each speculatoria is a closed ecosystem adapted to one of these contingencies.

Many contain curiosities, trivialities, answers to problems like "what if the plants there are green instead of purple?". Some contain horrors, answers to worlds of unceasing hostiliy: exponential cancer-castles that decant their own armies, suffering-maximizing terror weapons that root in your brainstem, signivores that eat reality and shit simulacra, and more. These horrors have been sealed (and not even Lomizelc alone could release them now) for fear of what they might do to Jornu as much as for the goodwill of the city's host - this is what is hoped. Truth is there's so many possible threats that not all of them could be sealed, or even recognized for what they could become. All it could take is one urban explorer stumbling through the wrong door to unleash havoc in the gardens.

Abuo

Jealous Abuo, who curls around the city's southern rim, is the god of rags, despair, and those with nothing else. It is by mass the largest of all the gods of Jornu, but it is spread wide and deep and thin into clutching pipes and coiling drains. All things lost and all people with nowhere else to go in Jornu drain down to Abuo, who is loathe to let them go.

It has two cults, one within itself and one on the outside.

The cult within is a lay priesthood, informal, eager missionaries. They pray to forget, give what little of themselves is left in return for relief. They know much of what others would rather have forgotten. The highest ritual they have is to dance to the moaning music of their god.

The cult outside go about in stainless white. Theirs is an elite circle, open only to the scions of oldest privilege. To them Abuo is a necessary cosmic purifier, swallowing the filth and the cast-offs of existence.

Of all the gods of Jornu, Abuo longs for their home the most. Its dreams of that home spill out from its mouths as miscreated spawn. They're pitiable things, dangerous, a bit nostalgic. Skewered and seared they're popular as street food.

The First Children of the Gods of Jornu

Around the Quartermasters are arrayed their many children, subordinate architectural marvels that guide the ebb and flow of life and death in Jornu. Among their number are:

Kybalt

Jornu is shaped like an apple core, eaten around the middle: fat on top and bottom, gnawed skinny between. There are several ways to get up or down, some better than others. There are the twisting tunnels inside (but those aren't a place for decent citizens, as monsters from Jornu's old world lurk within), the rickety zipline-gondolas (great for bulk shipping, not for the faint of heart), and then there is Kybalt. A flexing trunk of a bridge, long enough to extend right to the ground at a comfortable incline. He is armoured in segments of the seven metals of Jornu (not iron or gold or lead, but alien stuff). His armour is the cradle-gift of his mother Munsara.

Kybalt sees himself as the city's gate and guardian both. He allows none to tread upon him that are not gracious guests or exemplary inhabitants. In the one and only siege of Jornu, Kybalt inflicted more deaths on its enemies than even the star-sicknesses.

He loathes his half-sister Skurma. It would take a threat to the city itself for him to consider treating with any agent of hers.

Skurma

The gentle daughter of Abuo and Lomizelc. Like her father she accepts everyone into her graces.

Skurma is a cistern, in the same way that a lake is a sort of puddle - a great inundated cavity below Jornu's surface, sucking up rain and sticking her well-fingers into its plazas. She is a graveyard too - a recycler of the dead, processing them back into base nutrients and expelling them onto gardens or as edible slop. In her depths she shelters monsters and leviathans of the old world, loathe to let a single piece of it slip away.

The undead are a novelty to her - a terrifying alien menace to the rest of Jornu. She's become preoccupied as of late with attempting to revive corpses drowned in her water, or devoured by her charges. When death has died, she reasons, all will be reconciled.

Ukasil

A broad road, bulging along its middle, that winds through the whole of Jornu. Ukasil is the child of all six of the Quartermasters (don't worry about how that works, the gods don't follow the bio-logic of gametes). They are a responsive god, responding to foot traffic as though it were prayers, snaking and shifting the layout of the city through its interstices to maximize the efficiency of its throughput. This is a gameable system, and priest-gangs will often press passers-by to commit a quota of marching through their territory as a practical show of dominance that will serve to centralize and nexusize their holdings.

Tethanki

A cabaret club, and a crusader against tedium and conformity. She would not let the god-reconstruction touch her immaculately beautiful features, and so she is a gigantic decapitated head occupying a city block as surely as any apartment or office. Her golden tresses are woven by her devotees into the curtains and chandeliers of her interior. Her haunting, echoing voice provides the music for every dance.

 

In Tethanki's shows, by the brush of her hair and flesh, it becomes possible for features of the body to be traded. Thereby does every inhabitant of Jornu with the guts for it converge on their own ideal form, or at least the form which their original body could be traded in bits and pieces for.

 

As with Abuo, so too with Tethanki is there a dual pair of cults, in even deeper conflict for their closer quarters. One is a cult of surgeons and doctors, using her power of exchange for the treatment of disease and deformity, and for the ultimate perfection of the body. The other is aesthetic in nature, pursuing beauty, and the assemblage of the apex of beauty in one body, as its transcendence. When their conflict peaks, Tethanki smiles amusedly - for war can bring the best novelties of all.

Bozum

  

Every inhabitant of Jornu lives in dread of the day they might be called to Bozum. He is an arena, and he is a battery, a last-ditch measure for when prayer and the dew of the cosmos might not sustain the world-fragment's gods. His floor is dusted with the oldest blood, and his galleries hold room for tens of thousands of weeping witnesses.

 

Even the gods are subject to the tyranny of the rocket equation, yet sacrifice is an efficient source of energy for their kind. When their reserves ran low on Jornu's grand voyage, Bozum was granted a tithe of irreplaceable souls to spill themselves for the sake of everything they'd ever known.

In the new world still there has been cause to call on Bozum's cruel gift - integration into the Order of things doesn't come cheap - but the time of the hecatomb has passed. The comparatively mild top-ups of modern times require small, yet high-quality sacrifices, tournaments of fantastic fighters with all their talents and gimmicks set to the death against each other. To the last survivor - honour fit for the greatest of mortals, and a fragment of the power given to recharge Jornu's pantheon.

Yaheya

Yaheya is a proud god, and for good reason. She is the tallest building in Jornu (which has won her no friends in her parents' generation) and she is why there are any people left in the city. Recognition of this fact is what keeps her as tall as she is.

She's built in sections, stacked cylinders, each rotating slower than the ones below it. This is a trick of perception. They're really all turning at the same speed, just in different frames of reference. The higher sections are not slower in speed, but in time.

Traveling the yawning gap between worlds takes a while even for gods (whose years are measured in the cycles of stone to dust to magma and back again). They could not feed all they wished to save for that long. Nor did they wish to see their people drift from the ways of their home. Thus Yaheya was made, the last god born on their dying world.

She worked exquisitely (with one grating exception - the inhabitants of her lowest section... diverged, and escaped into Jornu's godless tunnels). In her highest sections some mortal sages are still preserved (along with countless cultural treasures). They are consulted in direst need, as doing so robs future millennia of the potential to do the same.

Yaheya is conservative as only an immortal can be, and viciously xenophobic. She is a patron of the arts (Jornu's arts! And a stickler for adherence to the art forms!). She serves her purpose without question, out of deep love.

Zizabuz

No on in Jornu likes to talk about Zizabuz. Worship of the god is forbidden. She is an abomination.

Zizabuz is unlike the rest of Jornu's gods. She exists in scrawls, defacements, scribbled invectives. She is a parasite on others' faces. Zizabuz is divine graffiti. She is scraped from facades and plastered over every day, and reborn in paint and grime and blood every night.

Her priests, when they are not executed on the spot, are accused of nihilism - of valuing nothing but destruction. They protest - their only sin is tradition, for Zizabuz is the conscience of the gods, sprung forth from their collective unconscious the moment Jornu touched the earth once again. Her message is simple, her message is kind.

“Come home,” she says, “come home and die with us”.