D20x5 Dwarven Mountain Halls

Been playing Dwarf Fortress

Click the button below for your bespoke dwarven mountain hall:

Follow the link to follow to automate the rolling of your own table in a convenient HTML format: https://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

D20	This mountain hall
1	is carved into natural pilasters of salt, towers glittering in the lamplight.
2	appears to be a single castle alone on a plain, but this is just the mound of a great and teeming anthill.
3	is carved out in a negative-space sculpture of a dwarven body, a great library in the stony folds of its brain, causeways and canals along its arteries, slag-dumps leaking from visceral forges, and so on.
4	is built upwards as quickly as it’s dug downwards, a spire and a shaft in one.
5	is built across and down a crevasse in a spiderweb-suspension of steel cables.
6	piles down the mountainside it’s built into, with terraced fields and cyclopean ziggurats.
7	is an inchoate marvel of ferrofluidic construction, architecture shifting between solid and liquid forms in an urban dance.
8	has been dug into a volcano, and pumps its magma throughout for light and heating.
9	resembles a brutalist arcology built inside an enormous, unnatural hollow within the earth.
10	is an underground pastoral idyll where eyeless sheep graze pale grass beneath its cavern’s crystalline sun.
11	is carved into the hexagonal basalt pillars of an ocean causeway.
12	is built in the guts of a titanic mining machine inching its way through the stone over centuries. The dwarves have forgotten how to operate it, repair it, and even if they made it in the first place.
13	is carved into the mineral carapace of an ancient, gigantic crustacean.
14	was once a human city, now conquered and dismantled into a mountain of rubble.
15	is built into a seamount, bronze submersibles raised and lowered on chains to move between the hall and the ocean’s surface.
16	was once much, much larger, but only a small fraction is now inhabited. The rest has been sealed off by disaster or deliberate containment.
17	is built into the stump of a giant petrified tree.
18	is built into the sides of an open-air mine, under the comfortable darkness of a massive sunshade.
19	uses a carefully engineered and directed glacier to do the bulk of its digging.
20	is surrounded by a cloud forest on top of a mesa. Scaffolding stretches throughout the canopy.

D20	The dwarves of this mountain hall
1	refuse to sully their tongues with speech, preferring instead to write down anything they need to communicate. Tone is conveyed by the writing medium: blood on stone for momentous passions and awful curses, or honey-based ink on gold leaf for the respect necessary to address a king, for instance.
2	are born partially unformed, and must attach prosthetics to make up for their missing parts.
3	prefer to drink many varieties of tea over alcohol. Societies are formed and feud over the superiority of psychedelic, stimulant, deliriant, and suchlike teas.
4	treasure wigs of ludicrous shape, make, and colour, for their scalps, beards, armpits, and elsewhere. Merkins made from a lion’s mane are reserved for kings, on pain of death by smelting.
5	practice a martial art specialized for fighting in tight spaces.
6	are intensely agoraphobic, and must wear blinders like a horse’s on the surface.
7	believe deeply in a form of geomancy based on revealing rock strata and examining the innards of geodes.
8	believe that people on the surface fuck birds and eat tree bark.
9	treat their tools as people, with names, personalities, and funerals when they break.
10	are immune to the toxic effects of metals, and consume mercury as a medicine.
11	forbid the creation of graven images except for golems and cenotaphs.
12	believe themselves to be the rightful owners of all the world’s goods and resources, with everyone else being thieves, renters, or the recipients of gifts.
13	fossilize the bodies of their dead to be posed in grave-gardens.
14	find snails adorable, breeding them for show and races.
15	have skin the colours and textures of types of stone.
16	find humans to be both overly squeamish and sentimental about sex.
17	worship the cube, believing it to be the mathematical and physical basis of reality on which all else rests.
18	are fond of body modification implants. Each social group has their preferred motifs of horns, bumps, and ridges.
19	hold the work crew to be the basic unit of society rather than the individual or family.
20	can communicate in a reverberating code transmitted by tapping steel-toed boots against cave walls.

D20	This mountain hall is known for producing
1	the cutting edge of technology in its region.
2	masterful jewelry for the fabulously wealthy.
3	limitless mass-produced trinkets.
4	beverages so coveted that being corked in a bottle of pure gold would not substantially increase their price.
5	enormous statues and cannons both, a credit to their casting technique.
6	clocks, self-driving wagons, calculation engines, and other wondrous automata.
7	beard oil and moustache wax.
8	hyphaic textiles of astounding tint and patterns.
9	musical instruments of pitch and timbre to be the match of any maestro.
10	gunpowder and firearms of exceeding refinement.
11	military tacticians and siege engineers.
12	alchemists, poisoners, and other workers of substance.
13	treatises both philosophical and political, arguments with unarguable proofs.
14	armour, shields, and fortifications which are proof against any assault.
15	artisans of the highest caliber.
16	vessels and vehicles to traverse any terrain in any weather.
17	impregnable walls and unconquered castles for unthinkable fees.
18	the weapons which were wielded by the heroes of a hundred legends.
19	enthralling sagas and the catchiest drinking songs.
20	monster slayers whose grudges and outsized kills are legend.

D20	This mountain hall is defended by
1	ingenious contraptions: spinning blades, whirring gears, spurting acid.
2	berserkers with foam dripping from their beards, drunk and raging from mushroom wine.
3	enigmatic beings of celestial light, trapped in refractive crystal prism-prisons.
4	eyeless beasts of the earth’s darkest depths, barely tamed by whip and chain.
5	warriors clad head to toe in the finest steel, fighting with precision and unity to match any golems.
6	titanic war machines modelled after heraldic beasts: iron wyverns that exude toxic fumes, brass gryphons whose pinions screech with the effort of holding them aloft, and so on.
7	mercenaries from every corner of the world, blinding in the hues and sheens of their livery, bought with spoils hacked from stone.
8	elemental entities of stone and soil, enslaved by spell-tablets engraved by generations of lawyer-priests.
9	the ghosts of their ancestral heroes, bound to statue-likenesses until bloodily needed.
10	neighbouring human principalities, dependent on their continued exports.
11	the geography itself turned against invaders: rockslides, cave-ins, reservoirs set to flood, and so on.
12	networks of sapper-tunnels, trenches, and minefields.
13	cannons, ballistas, trebuchets, and even stranger siege engines.
14	tanks and gyrocopters straight out of Da Vinci’s imagination.
15	the unquiet dead stolen from other peoples’ barrows and catacombs, unleashed and abjured in the enemy’s direction.
16	vicious exile-clans, promised an honourable return to the hall if they die in defense of it.
17	the exhumed skeletons of antediluvian behemoths.
18	slave-armies captured from the teeming hordes of subterrene troglodytes.
19	darkling devils ensnared by contracts of such devious completeness that they behave like simple programs.
20	a feast of ogres fattened on the glut of the hall’s agricultural excess.

D20	The doom which awaits this mountain hall is
1	the price of digging too deep: molten demons unleashed from the earth’s burning heart.
2	jealous greed, brother turning against brother for a fistful of gold.
3	invasion, to be pried open and plundered by envious hands.
4	explosive hubris, the pinnacle of their invention failing at the moment of activation.
5	madness, the call of an unkind god heard by each dwarf in turn.
6	subsumption, the loss of will and imagination to the directionless pounding of pick on rock, hammer on anvil.
7	collapse, imprudent supports crumbling into the abyss.
8	the inexorable grinding of the continental plates it lies betwixt.
9	plague and the quarantine which must follow, sealing the place into withering decline.
10	endless cycles of arbitrary tyrants deposed by bloody revolutions that calcify into yet more despotism.
11	Malthusian chaos, population expanding faster than the means to feed it.
12	a failed ascension from flesh to machine.
13	a repressive culture imploding in an orgy of violence and actual orgies.
14	paranoia reverberating through close quarters, witch hunts, purges, and millenarian fervour.
15	the practice of unwise magics getting the place swallowed by a hostile living demiplane.
16	a deep ennui that spreads like a sickness, a slow starvation as even eating loses any satisfaction.
17	treachery, once-comrades opening its gates to its enemies.
18	one of pure misfortune, to be crushed by a falling meteor, the dust of its diaspora scattered on the winds.
19	a malignant curse which grows ever more suffocating over the generations.
20	a megalomaniacal ruler squandering its wealth and working its people to death building grand egoistic monuments.

D20x5 Truculent Time-Travellers

Time passes like mercury, slippery and poisonous.

Click the button below to generate your own time-traveller:

To automate the rolling of a table of your own, I recommend trying this: http://paperelemental.blogspot.com/p/list-to-html-generator.html

D20	This traveller came from
1	a dusty museum-world where records of the past dwarf living civilizations
2	a corporate city-state in the pollution-choked future of the trash-cyborgs
3	a future of enforced, eternal stagnation
4	a false past recreated in the future, when high technology is passed off as magic
5	an indeterminate multiversal cyst of quantum chaos
6	the people-zoos of the molluscoid mind-masters
7	the interregnum period of an intergalactic empire when warlords duked it out among the stars with barely-understood technology
8	a hedonistic apocalypse when the invention of Nozickian experience machines leads most of humanity into pleasurable extinction
9	next Tuesday
10	a prim and proper suburban ecumenopolis where the ‘50s never ended
11	a wondrous city of flying cars and atomic dishwashers
12	a decadent and carefree future where humanity is the pampered pets of machine intelligences
13	a savage techno-tribe which scavenges the glaciated ruins of a new ice age
14	a cold and dark ultra-entropic enclave on the verge of heat death
15	a fully-automated luxury gay space communist utopia
16	the scarlet-skinned tribes of terraformed Mars
17	the trinitite cities of the blattodean empire which is destined to rise after humanity’s self-annihilation
18	a heretical anti-unification war-cathedral on the border of the Omega Point
19	a branching paraverse wherein Neanderthals achieved dominance instead
20	the exiled dinosoid meteor-kingdoms

D20	using
1	an amulet that allows its wearer to swap minds with anyone else wearing the amulet in another time
2	a rift torn in causality by a chronomancer’s catastrophic miscast
3	an overdose on chthonic oracular vapours
4	their own reality-warping psychic powers
5	the incomprehensible machinations of Yog-Sothoth
6	a tachyon-hammer which knocked them through time, with no means of return
7	the help of a shapeshifting master of darkness
8	a pair of sapphire sandals which took them to the maker’s home (in time and space) when they clicked the heels together
9	the gland of a creature which migrates temporally as well as spatially
10	a jaunt to the anti-matter universe, where time flows in reverse
11	a glitch in the base code of reality
12	a scroll woven from norns’ hair
13	a key forged from Chronos’ chains
14	a time machine some Victorian guy left unlocked
15	a naturally-occurring wormhole
16	a cursed period piece film
17	a closed timelike curve
18	reified Nietzschean philosophy
19	a Tipler cylinder
20	a mutant teleportation spell

D20	in order to
1	erase some cringe moments from their past that keep them up at night.
2	start a religion that will worship them.
3	conduct a scientific investigation into causality.
4	collect data that may eventually help to reverse entropy.
5	take samples from species that will one day go extinct.
6	go on a truly wild bender.
7	prevent the premature invention of time travel (“premature” being an ambiguous word when speaking of things outside linear time).
8	confirm the divine inspiration of a prophet they worship.
9	live in an era that their historical records idealized. They’ve been disappointed so far.
10	lose their virginity to themself. It went horribly wrong.
11	arrange the time-loop that will lead to their own birth.
12	perform next-level archaeology.
13	learn an enemy’s weakness before they mature.
14	scout targets for transtemporal invasion.
15	escape enemies in their own time.
16	see wonders lost to decay.
17	loot your era’s natural resources.
18	do time-tourism.
19	hasten the creation of a godlike artificial intelligence, and so prevent nigh-infinite copies of themself from undergoing atemporal torture in a series of simulations.
20	kill hyper-Hitler before he rises to omnicidal power.

D20	This time-traveller views people of your era
1	with paternal condescension.
2	similarly to how we might view tool-using apes.
3	as moral non-entities, as they’ve already been dead for so long from the traveller’s perspective.
4	as naive children.
5	with mocking derision for their backwards ways.
6	as cautionary examples of what went wrong.
7	as scientifically interesting subjects of study.
8	as incomprehensible cultural aliens.
9	as schmucks tied down to one time.
10	as quaint bumpkins.
11	as dispensers of folksy wisdom.
12	with fetishistic admiration.
13	as honoured ancestors.
14	like NPCs in a videogame.
15	as foreigners with strange but charming ways.
16	with astonishment every time they manage to be more than drooling simpletons.
17	with colonial ambition.
18	as living more authentically than people of their own.
19	as just people, nothing more and nothing less.
20	as abhorrent in their moral ignorance.

D20	This time-traveller has with them
1	a disintegration-ray that can also produce copies of the last thing it disintegrated.
2	a silver-wire talisman that, should you die while wearing it, it will reset the flow of time to six seconds before your death. It will tarnish itself to uselessness in the process, however.
3	glass orbs full of the ultimate ooze, which all life will eventually decay into. Converts organic matter it’s in contact with into more of itself.
4	a crystal infocube containing oracular recordings of events that have yet to occur.
5	their own ghost, bound in chronalite chains.
6	a doomsday device set to activate if they’re killed.
7	trophies collected from Cretaceous game animals.
8	a guardian-golem that can shoot incinerating beams from its hollow eyes.
9	an amulet which projects period-appropriate holographic disguises.
10	a terraforming matrix which could convert a hundred square miles of wasteland to lush greenery.
11	a Matryoshka implant which produces a slightly smaller clone of themself from their corpse if they’re killed.
12	a malfunctioning translation device that inserts a faux pas into every sentence.
13	1d6 fetal carnivoro-mammoths in rapid maturation tubes. Give one a twist and two rounds later you’ll have a fully-grown voracious meat-eating mammoth.
14	a grimoire containing several time-related spells such as Haste and Slow, printed on heavy and hyper-durable sheets of muonic matter.
15	a laser-sword.
16	a psychometric device that can display what happened up to one hour ago in a room.
17	an ace and a joker, both enchanted. Once, and only once, someone touching the ace may critically succeed on their next roll, and someone touching the joker can be made to critically fail their next roll. Both cards are of the clock suit, which was only adopted for playing cards in a single delicate timeline.
18	a pair of burly, hirsute proto-humans with mind-control implants protruding from their skulls and spines.
19	genetically-engineered fungal rations that can regrow if their dregs are planted in fresh feces. Their taste and texture is similar to cotton candy.
20	a chrome rod that can lock a target it taps in time for 1d6 minutes, rendering it totally invulnerable and immovable. The rod has 2d6 charges remaining.

Knowledge Is Power; or: Magic Without Spells

From the vantage point of my throne on high it seems that some trendy things right now in game design are classless stuff and diegetic advancement (that is to say advancement that comes from in-world means, like finding a magic training manual, rather than collecting experience points). Likewise there's been good stuff done with levelless spells, word-based spells, freeform spells, ritual spells, and so on.

All that's made me wonder how far we can push this trend while still retaining fun and ease of use in play. Can we do away with spells altogether? What might we use to replace them? If this interests you, read on:

Inspirational Sources

http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-secret-names-of-god-and-wizard-trap.html

http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2020/06/fixing-religion-augury-blasphemy-and.html

Goblin Punch has made clerical magic something everyone can do based on in-game rites and observations and such. Can we do the same for all magic?

http://monstermanualsewnfrompants.blogspot.com/2016/12/you-are-on-fire-but-like-gravity-fire.html

"The trick however would be making an underlying system that either is too buried in the background for the players to notice OR is something that might break things if the players get their hands on it.

Like "spontaneous creation" and having snakes formed from the trailing part of a women's dress left in a rain barrel; and this being weaponized by the players to make a shit tonne of snakes.

This might not be a problem and it would give a certain fairy tale aspect to play, however if it starts raising questions on why no-one has done it before, then it could be a problem

For example if you establish you can eat snakes, and snakes form in the above manner, then why are these people starving when they can make snakes from cloth and old clothing?

Which can lead to either adding on additional caveats (the amount of snakes made from water is limited by the amount of stillborn children that year) or further consequences (if you eat a diet of snakes you become a Yuan-Ti ) .

So depending on how good you are at making up additionally layers of weirdness and bullshit might become a boon or burden"

This is it in a nutshell. What if all magic was essentially 'womens' dresses in rain barrels => snakes'?

https://sexuallytransmittedcentipedes.blogspot.com/2019/11/so-zedeck-siew-did-some-writing-for.html

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2020/07/rituals.html

What if all rituals were based on the same set of principles, and with enough experimentation you could figure those principles out and build your own rituals?

https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com/2019/03/osr-spell-research-and-magical-industry.html

What if all spells (maybe even magical effects in general) were built up from the magical paradigm of a setting, and instead of scrolls and grimoires and wands you got bits and pieces of that paradigm as treasure?

Thoughts

Why would you want to do this?

Fucking around with stuff in a freeform manner is one of the big strengths of rpgs over videogames. Spell-less magic would give more opportunities for this.

It ties magical power more into player knowledge than character abilities

Why would you not want to do this?

Coming up with a paradigm that isn't shit or immediately drives things to shit would be difficult. Making it and remembering all the pieces is a lot more work on the DM's and players' plates. Depending on the paradigm it might be easy to come up with exploits that ruin the resource management dungeon crawling or whatever.

Is there a middle ground that gets us most of what's good about both with the least bad?

No, you are either with us or against us. You can sit on the fence until a picket slides up your ass or you can pick a side, soldier.

Protection Against Evil/Chaos/etc. isn't the greatest spell, so maybe you could replace it with the knowledge that bodiless spirits can't cross a line of salt. Ghosts on your tail? Hope you brought a bag of salt (and that there aren't any convenient hosts around the ghosts could possess to cross your line). Maybe higher HD spirits could power their way over the line with a successful save, HP cost, or being temporarily materialized and made vulnerable to physical weapons. Having little things like that mixed in with regular spells and spellcasting could help make this approach less frontloaded while making magic and magical things more interactable for non-wizards. You could even decide against making a paradigm at the start, and let one emerge through rulings from player actions later on (e.g. could stuffing a cursed object in a bag of salt insulate the poor hireling carrying it from the curse?).

Example Paradigm

Here's a quick paradigm to serve as an example for where you might go with this. Maybe it sells you on the idea, maybe it sells you off it, either way we've learned something from this:

1. Magic Is Powered By Blood Freely Given

Every use of magic requires a sacrifice of HD to get it going. Each HD sacrificed for a ritual adds one 'magic die' to the ritual's pool (like a GLOG MD, if you're familiar with that).

HD must be given without coercion to count. You can get some from an animal, but they'd have to be a loyal dog or something (you heartless bastard).

2. Magic Requires Containment

Rituals in this paradigm must take place within a space defined by a boundary of certain materials. Some materials are better at containing magic than others. Each material can safely contain up to a certain number of magic dice for a ritual cast with it. Each die used for the ritual above this limit adds an additional 'disaster die' to the pool which adds nothing to the ritual but increases the risk of mishaps or dooms (again, as the GLOG), mishaps occurring on doubles and dooms on triples. These materials include:

Ashes: Safe for 1 MD

Salt: Safe for 2 MD

Gold: Safe for 3 MD

Powdered Diamond: Safe for 4 MD

Safe for 5+ MD: Some really wild shit, like an ancient dragon that's been tricked into biting its own tail

Mishaps might be something like (1D6):
1: Ritual is harmful where it should be helpful, or vice-versa
2: Minor inconvenience related to intended effect (e.g. ritual to cause fire ignites your clothing)
3: Become ritually impure! Add 1 disaster die to all rituals you participate in for 1d6 days
4: The boundary blows away and you can't reuse it
5: Ritual's effect is inverted (e.g. a fireball becomes a spout of water, a banishment turns into a summoning)
6: Ritual affects random target instead of the intended one

Dooms are escalating, lingering consequences that come in three stages, the first being relatively minor and the third being more or less fatal, and tend to ironically reflect the ritual that caused them.

3. Magic Requires Focus

If you just put magic dice into an empty boundary, the ritual will fizzle out (that's kind of boring actually, maybe it explodes?). Rituals need objects placed within their boundary to shape them.

Any object can be used as a ritual focus. What ritual focuses (foci?) do is add a 'Word' each that determines what the ritual actually does. This Word can be drawn from the object itself, e.g. Shield for a shield, a part of that object, e.g. Fire for a torch, or something that object can be used to do, e.g. Binding for rope. The person adding the ritual focus decides exactly which Word it brings to the ritual.

After the ritual focuses have been added, the participants then issue a command of with a maximum number of words (lower-case w) equal to the magic dice in the ritual +1. Based on the command and the ritual's Words the DM then adjudicates what the ritual actually does.

You can use as many ritual focuses as there are magic dice in the ritual +1. Ritual focuses are consumed by their ritual. Using exceptionally rare, difficult to obtain, etc., focuses (such as a rope woven from a prince's beard or the emperor's crown) means that any miscasts rolled don't count. Dooms still take effect as normal.

For how powerful a ritual should be given the amount of magic dice put into it (or how long it lasts, or how many targets it can affect, or whatever) look at some GLOG spells for a basis to work off of.

4. Magic Requires Direction

At base, a ritual can't affect anything outside its boundary. If you know the name of something you can direct a ritual at it if it's within your line-of-sight. If you've got a part or personal belonging of your target (hair, favourite pair of gloves, etc.) you can target them from even further, but they become aware someone's trying to use magic on them.

If you've got a part/belonging from someone you can also draw HD from them. This patron flavours the ritual (e.g. an ogre patron would make a ritual more brutal, a dryad patron might cause vines to grow around a ritual's target) and can decide one of the words of the ritual's command if they so choose.

This one might be too freeform. I'd recommend giving your players the first two rules of the paradigm to start off with, and a couple recipes as "spells", let them figure out the freer parts on their own or something.

Other Thoughts

Bits that could be fit into a paradigm:

• The sound of church bells compels unintelligent undead to return to their graves, and affects intelligent undead like a Sleep spell
• Saying a creature's true name three times in a row lets it know that someone's calling it from your general location, and if it's a demon/bogeyman/similar creature slip into the world near you (possibly into a prepared binding circle)
• If you swear an oath on something of yours and break the oath, the furies will come to take it away
• If you toss a stillborn calf down a well under the full moon it becomes a portal to the Land of Dreams until dawn

Semiurge Reviews: Movies: 2

Watched a lot of movies this weekend.

Uncut Gems

This was made by the Safdie brothers. Safdie brothers, Coen brothers, Wachowski sisters, I think being siblings who make movies together is probably the comfiest life you could have in today's society.

An American adaption of the universally beloved manga Kaiji, set in the exotic vistas of New York City. Adam Sandler shows off his true power by convincingly playing a Jewish man from New York who is really into basketball. I saw someone comment that having a character named Kevin Garnett in a movie called Uncut Gems was too on the nose.

It's a recommend from me.

Circle

It's a live action battle royale/death game anime. Better than I thought it would be, teared up at one moment. If I was in this one I would rip an atrocious fart and everyone would vote to kill me.

Color Out of Space

My favourite of the batch. Lovecraft updated to the godless modern day as he's meant to be (Cthulhu is awake and it's already here). Doesn't quite stick the landing, at its best when it depicts the breakdown of the family as infrastructure, income, and health deteriorates. There's a scene with a vision of an alien world that someone absolutely decided to do after seeing that scene in Slither.

Await Further Instructions

Really good satirical horror, but gets too on the nose at the end. Can verge into uncomfortable anti-dad tropes at times so family men be warned.

The Fifth Element

A relic of a time when sci-fi/fantasy blockbusters could be good and not bad. All movies of this kind from here on out are going to be attempts to start franchises or drive them into the ground because Hollywood has forsaken the Muses for Mammon.

Dead Silence

I forget who wrote it but I think there's wisdom in the "raccoon principle" of horror. If a horror could be replaced by raccoons of sufficient size and number, just use the raccoons you hack. Horror should be about actually scary things, like puppets, ventriloquism, voice acting, and childless older women. A solid middle-of-the-road scary movie. If you've got nothing better to watch then Dead Silence is a good plan B.

Push

Criminally underrated. If I receive a position of temporal power in this life I will make it criminal to underrate the movie Push.

It's about greasy expats in Hong Kong caught in a three-way between secret american government division and triads who scream real loud. We're all caught up in a web of past and future, the sins of our fathers, realpolitik, and how cool it would be to have psychic powers and not gambling debt.

The camera is shakier than I remember it being (back when Jason Bourne was big) so if you get motion sickness easily take some pepto bismol or something before watching.

Lost Highway

Buh buh buh isn't the intersection of memory, identity, and surveillance/digital technology fascinating buh buh buh isn't David Lynch such a prescient auteur buh buh buh. Got about 45 minutes into this one before getting bored and deciding to grill. Damn I love grilling.

Eleleleu

(This is a fun format: https://throneofsalt.blogspot.com/2020/07/collected-material-evidence.html)

Top Ten Medical Gross-Outs You Won't Believe! (Number 2)

[Video Is Not Available In Your Country]

These doctors must have been pretty shocked when a routine sarcoma surgery found this huge lump in that guy's thigh! You're looking at a teratoma, a kind of tumour that can grow entire organs like teeth and eyes! Yuck! Just look at that thing wriggle! Remember to eat your anti-oxidants readers, or next thing you know, this could be you!

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Dr. James Buleygy, Remote Lecture Session 3 (timestamp: 11:07-11:49):

“The sole territory remaining to the slave is their body. They might starve it, wound it, deprive it of sleep, and thereby reclaim ownership over it. Real ownership is power over something. It is the ability to impose limits on its nature and behaviours, even its very existence. Compared to that, legal ownership is only words. The bird with a broken wing cannot fly away, yet remains just as beautiful.”

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[Worn Greek carved into marble wall. Footnote of translation reads 'Samarkand. Greco-Bactrian?']: "Nothing between the legs of women or men can please me any longer. I have found a new hole. Farewell!"

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Excerpt from anonymous comment under the post “All About The Monkeysphere” on the blog Wowfacts (archive retrieval March XX, 20XX):

“So there’s a limit on how many people you can really know, know who they are to you, know who they are to other people. Good. Great. I don’t even know fifty people on facebook, I should be fine on that front.

But what’s the limit on everything else we can know? I mean really know, know like you can know people. I could rattle off politicians, scandals, Watergate, Billygate, Picklegate, Russiagate, -gate -gate -gate -gate -gate, (why’s it always a gate? What are they letting in?) but I couldn’t tell you what any of them were on anything but the most superficial level. Its constant, and it’s only ever getting faster. My brain’s getting sandblasted. I forgot the word for laundry yesterday.

Knowing’s not important. We’re not a knowledge economy anymore. What’s coming next? What possible use could the people in charge have for citizens who forget what happened last week because they’re getting inundated with a hundred more and more urgent things happening this week? I think I know, I think that’s one of the few things I still know, and it scares me a lot.”

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Watercolour ("The Woods", first gallery appearance 1967, artist disputed): Dense trees. Intricate detail in the bark and the tangling of the branches. Seen under the influence of hallucinogens will always produce hallucinations of various human and animal faces in the patterns of the bark and branches, laughing, leering, and biting at each other.

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[JPEG image of pulp paper book page, suffering moderate degradation. A passage has been highlighted in yellow. The letters have been digitally cleaned up]: "The serf was bound to their lord's land. Straying could be punished severely. The surplus of their labour is what sustained and enriched the aristocracy, and so the serf had to be strictly controlled.

Compare this to the condition of modern workers. They are laid off, fired, furloughed, automated away. If they're lucky they're given a pittance to survive after, and called leeches for it. The labour of the modern worker is no longer necessary for their society's survival. They themselves are the surplus which must be consumed."

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Headline of the Little River Herald, 6/14/20XX: Tainted Wine Possible Factor In Women's Book Club Spree Killing

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Excerpt from transcribedtopography.com:

"The human species (and all formerly existing variants) are a Linguistic Species which has come to exist in a Mathematical Universe. The Human Experience is expressible in poetry and music and rhetoric but the same fail to express simple mathematical necessities such as Trajectory and Angle. By corollary 1 + 1 and all complex descendants of the Same cannot be used to express even one line from Shakespeare (of course do not be stupid in interpreting I do no mean merely the shape of its letters and modulation of sound waves in pronunciation of its Words but the Qualia inspired).

It is our incompatibility with the Mathematical Universe which is the condition that ultimately constrains humanity under Suffering. There is only So Much food there is only So Much space there is only So Much clean air and water. I have enjoyed (and am enjoying as I write this) and millions of others have enjoyed the stylings of Beethoven across his Oeuvre without a mote of diminishment. I have desired and grieved and raged without limit in my life.

We Do Not Belong here, and It Does Not Belong in our souls. The so-called rational mind is a trespasser who attempts to pass himself as the master of the house, a reducing and instrumentalizing most unwelcome guest. Follow the path of Our Lord and his most faithful disciple Carl Jung, become Baptized in the Collective Unconscious, wash away the Sin that is the modern world and its false words and reveal the Cage that it is built atop of. All who would be Brother To Brother must join me. The Flood is coming again."

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Encylcopedia Alternata Entry: Logion

Prions are misfolded proteins with the ability to transmit their misfolded shape onto normal variants of the same protein.

Logions are malformed data with the ability to "collapse" information processed or stored within the same system into simulacra of themselves.

Certain altered states of consciousness and psychoses can provide resistance to logion exposure. A strong dose of something weird is recommended before exposing oneself to areas rated F-BLUE or lower.

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The Word is your god, not Ours

D20 Fates Other Than Just Dying When You Reach Less Than Zero HP

Respice post te! Hominem te esse memento! Memento mori!

D20 Fates Other Than Just Dying When You Reach <0 HP

1. Retirement

You've gotten too old for this shit. When you return to town you immediately retire to a quality of life that is appropriate to your remaining wealth and skill set.

2. Amnesia

Catastrophic brain trauma! You forget just about everything besides how to walk and talk. Return to level 0. Perhaps some miracle could return your lost memories.

3. Haunting

Your ghost disperses, possessing the entire dungeon level (or building floor, or forest glade, or whatever) that you're in. You can open and shut doors, operate traps, and do whatever else the DM deems appropriate for a poltergeist. If you kill another PC you can possess their body.

4. Changeling

Your body falls apart into a pile of mouse bones and rotting leaves. You were a changeling the whole time, a replacement left by the fairies who stole your original self. Do your friends care enough to rescue you from their clutches?

D6	Who took you?	Where are you now?
1	The Marquis of Missed Marks, an enthusiastically incompetent hunter and maker of faux pas.	Chained to a table, stuck in an endless card game with half-dog half-human hybrids. The chips you gamble with represent bits of your humanity.
2	The Prince of Dawn’s First Glimpse, who rules the moment when the sun becomes visible over the horizon.	Straining against the harness of a racing chariot. The winner is set free with a golden laurel, but you’re up against phantasmagorical beasts.
3	Kur, son of Kur. He is his own father and child. Has serious daddy issues/identity complex.	Hanging in a giant birdcage, stitched into a bird costume, forced to compete in singing contests with giant intelligent canaries for seeds.
4	Yon-Hob-o’-the-Whale-Roads, whose cetacean servants snatch drowning souls from the grasp of Davy Jones.	Futiley attempting to finish cleaning a house with no walls or roof in the midst of a hurricane. Slimy halibut are strapped to your feet.
5	The Queen of Loves Lost by Morning, whose subjects are lovers known only in dreams.	The wedding of Salt and the Slug Countess. All present agree it’s an awful pairing, but courtesy demands indirectness. The speeches stretch on.
6	The Hound of Ripolies, cursed by their lord to go about on all fours and fetch amusing people from the mortal world.	The funeral of Vierad Lifedrinker, who vehemently disagrees with being buried. Its ghoulish scions hide among the mourners and scheme to release it.

5. Metempsychosis

Your body is dead, but your mind is free! It takes over the nearest creature which fits the description as follows (intelligent creatures can contest with a save):

D6
1: Vermin
2: Distant relative
3: Hireling
4: Beast
5: Non-human humanoid
6: Statue, doll, suit of armour, or similar object (becomes animated)

You retain any mental stats and abilities, but take on the physical stats and abilities of your new body.

6. Turncoat

Heroism is too much trouble. You're gonna join the winning team. Run away and join the monster faction of your choice. Become an NPC, or don't, I'm not your boss.

7. Zombified

You die, but don't stay down. You're a zombie now. You can't heal without unholy magic, and take 1d6 damage every day you don't eat fresh brains. Decent sorts avoid your company. Die for good the next time you hit 0 HP.

8. Desperate Charity

You crossed over to the other side for just a moment, and what awaited to was not pleasant. When you return to town you donate your wealth and everything else you own to a worthy cause in a bid to buy your way to a better afterlife.

9. Mortal Injury

You survive momentarily by sheer luck, but were dealt a blow that will make you drop dead in 1d6 days. It would take powerful magic to save you from that doom. Do with your time left as you will.

10. Revelation

On the verge of death you peek beyond the veil and behold the divine. Your adventures must involve seizing artifacts or locations relevant to your new faith, desecrating those of competing faiths, or similar missions. Whenever you talk you must drop references to your novel beliefs. Should you ever fail to do this you leave the adventuring life at the next opportunity to preach your revelation to all who will listen and many who will not.

11. I'm Fucking Invincible!

You just barely survive, and become recklessly convinced of your own immortality. When presented with potentially lethal choices, you must take the riskiest option.

12. Hideously Scarred

You survive, but are grotesquely disfigured by the experience. Unless you go about fully covered up, children will run and scream at the sight of you, the elderly will suffer heart attacks, townsfolk will faint, and no civilized place will tolerate you on its premises.

13. Plague-Bearer

A terrible infection takes root in your wounds. Roll a random disease, preferably on a table with some nasty ones. Anyone you touch, and anyone who touches something you've touched without sterilizing it, must save or contract the same disease. You yourself can never be cured of it, but it will never kill you.

14. Pacifist

You lose your stomach for violence. You can never again willingly harm another living creature, and the sight of blood makes you retch.

15. Possessed

You slipped from your body for but a moment, and something other has slithered in to cozy up beside you:

D6	What is it, and what does it want?	When does it emerge?
1	A demon: To deepen and prolong your suffering	While you sleep
2	A revenant: To extravagantly avenge its murder	During nights of the new moon
3	A trickster spirit: To fuck with people and teach a lesson or something maybe	While you are drunk, enchanted, or otherwise mind-altered
4	A faded godling: To revive its cult, get people devoted to its obscure domain	When you are splashed with water, only reverting when splashed again
5	The egregore of a revolutionary movement: To rebel against the status quo	When you are wounded in a similar way to what almost killed you, until healed
6	An angel: To reward or punish others according to their sins or good deeds	For 1d6 10-minute turns after being exposed to a bright light or loud noise

16. Thanatophobia

Should you pull through, your near-death shakes you to your core. You become obsessed with avoiding death at any cost. You'll sell out your closest friends if it means saving your own skin. You seek out immortality, finding even the most wretched forms of undeath preferable to your mortality.

17. Thaumamorphification

Your soul explodes at the moment of your demise, searing a new, unique spell into the ground where your corpse lies. This spell reflects your character and capabilities, and if spells in your game have levels it is the highest spell level a magic-user of your level could cast. Work with your DM & fellow players to come up with something appropriate.

18. Swallowed

As you're about to die, a giant fish/eagle/worm/etc. (as appropriate to your current environment) bursts in, swallows you whole, and flees. You somehow survive in its stomach, like Jonah. You could survive like that for quite a while. If your companions can hunt it down and cut it open you'll be unharmed inside.

19. Familiar

Your drifting spirit is caught in the ritual of a budding occultist. You are transformed into their familiar. They are a first level magic-user (or your game's equivalent). Consult the table for your new form and your new partner:

D6	What is your new form?	Who has taken you as their familiar
1	A gaunt toad with eyeballs floating in the fluid of your translucent warts	A lonely, bitter old man left with nothing but spite for the people who abandoned him
2	A mangy crow with snaggled human teeth crowding your beak	A precocious orphan convinced that the dark paths can offer them power and recognition
3	A flayed cat wearing its own pelt as a cloak	The bored wife of a traveling merchant
4	A pus-crusted possum that weeps black flies	A half-feral fur trapper caught between true wilderness and the edge of civilization
5	A skull that walks about on hairy spider legs	A normally-timid librarian who on a drunken whim experimented with a locked-away tome
6	Much like your old one, only as tall as a man’s hand, and with empty holes where your eyes and ears and nose should be	A petty courtier in a minor court who seeks any means to advance their position

20. Beatified

Somehow you've gained an honourable entrance into some heaven, upper plane, ascended consciousness realm, or whatever. A part of your corpse becomes a relic that grants magic power to its bearer. Some mystically-inclined sorts receive visions of your life and death and start a cult to venerate you.