Glower's Fen - A Village To Plop Down Whereverabouts

Built atop a marsh, a maze of algae-skirted docks, reed-woven pontoons, floating farm plots, and tent-canoes with a population of about 300, though Glower's Fen is in a perpetual state of disintegration and re-integration as people peel off their homes for better fishing grounds, or to trade surreptitiously with the stiltshrikes.

People here wear capes, mallard-feather caps, and little else. They keep a breed of swimming pigs as livestock and companions, and enjoy smoking numbingly-spicy cheroots. Glower's Fen's claim to fame is its industry of swamp-tromping, hunting down "will-o'-the-wisps" - giant fireflies - to drain their abdomens for glowing fluid from which a precious pigment is made. The hall where this pigment is processed is the largest, sturdiest building in the village. The pigment is worth 50 silver pieces a pint, and there are typically 2d6 pints in the building at any time.

Glower's Fen also has a continuous string of degenerate gold-moilers and truffle hunters passing through chasing rumours of a find deeper in the marsh, who are not generally liked. Typical adventuring gear is available at a slight mark-up, unless it includes metal in which case there is a significant mark-up. Rations will be some sort of smoked or fermented fish or frog, or pork jerky.

Persons of Interest:

Gunar Glower: Descendant of the village's founder, wealthiest man in it and de facto headman. Hosts meetings around the crab-legged brass brazier in his home. He's got bulging eyes and a greasy comb-over. Like all his family he walks with a limp and a cane capped with a carved firefly - his right leg is nearly-boneless, the foot webbed. The Glowers claim this is because an ancestor of theirs married a mermaid. Others say it's the inbreeding.

Gunar is a lecher with an inferiority complex. He wants to hire muscle to clear out the marsh and suppress local opposition, so that Glower's Fen can be built up into a bustling center of commerce.

Pigmother Kuzegi: Best swineherd in the village, and deadly shot with a sling. Fat, strong, and loud. She's bred a pig that can sniff out treasure, and asks 100 silver pieces for it - if the pig's in a hex with a dungeon or hidden treasure, it can find it in 1d4 hours, no check necessary. Genko Glower, a son of Gunar, is attempting to woo her for her pig-wealth, and desires a rare flower from the depths of the marsh for this. Kuzegi is indulging him because she likes him better than his father and would prefer Genko in charge.

Kuzegi has a grudge against the Ahhuuz for eating many of her charges, and will pay dearly for the location of its lair.

Milicia Temperantia Occasia: A nun from the Abbey of Razefallow, officially sent to Glower's Fen to negotiate for glowing ink with which books that can be read in the dark can be penned, and unofficially because she's a drunken mess who the abbess wanted to get rid of. Switches rapidly between jolly and scolding. If sobered up Milicia could be an invaluable source on regional history and geography. The locals are immensely entertained by her slurred preaching.

Local Threats:

Emina the Mycologue: A bulbspattled wizard of some infamy. She can talk to fungi. Her familiar is a moldy loaf of bread she stole from the table of a king. It knows many secrets. Emina leads a gang of truffle-jumpers - bandits who specialize in stalking and robbing truffle hunters, and tries to avoid targeting locals. The lower ranks of her gang are war-orphans dosed up on psychedelic mushrooms and armed with spears of fire-hardened wood.

Stiltshrikes: Nomadic fishermen who go about on stilts and wield long bidents. They've got a long-standing feud with the people of Glower's Fen and other settlements nearby, often leaving those they catch in the marsh impaled on tree branches, tearing up eel weirs, and so on and so on. When engaged in raiding and suchlike they wear wooden war-masks that amplify their voices to inhuman shrieks.

Ahhuuz: A beast which the people of Glower's Fen claim the stiltshrikes worship, though this is not true. It is named for the sound of its midnight call: "ahoozoozoozoo", and is believed to be the last of its kind. It has black and rubbery flesh, has a build like a greyhound though the stature of a destrier, gross-out monster toy jaws and teeth like arthritic fingers. It is silent while on the attack, snatching people and dragging them into the murk to drown. If locals suspect the Ahhuuz is about they will kill a pig and dump it into the water some ways off to appease it.

Gloamworms: Said to be either the wrathful husks of overharvested will-o'-the-wisps, or some necessary cosmic opposite to the light of those giant fireflies. In any case, they are predators shrouded by unnatural darkness, and wholly disregard the flesh of their prey, taking only the bones and viscera.

‘Round Once More In These Here Parts...

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

Elves
1: Are actually detachable, motile flowers, highly-sophisticated examples of sexual/floral mimicry, evolved to target humans instead of insects. They themselves possess human-like sapience, but are slaved by reproduction and sustenance to the vegetable intelligence of the plants they sprout from. Sea elves, of course, are a caste of coral polyp that evolved for a similar function. Dark elves? Hmmm, mushrooms, but of course those are a sort of plant.
2: Are people who've become integrated - perhaps willingly, perhaps not - with the mycorrhizal network of a forest, participating in its collective (un)consciousness.
3: Have ears that never stop growing, like a rodent's incisors. Most elves have their ears trimmed to a respectable clip, but ascetics will let theirs grow to ponderous lengths.
4: Are a set of divine creations which mark the boundaries of mortality and the transient world by embodying a negation of it - one elf might be undying, another unfalling, another undefeatable, and so on and so forth.
5: Were a very long-lived though slowly-reproducing (extreme K selection) offshoot of homo sapiens, who all ended up dead or undead due to their lesser ability to adapt to new diseases. The elvish remnants operate centuries-long breeding programs, attempting to get an individual to express enough lingering elf-genes to be worthy of induction into their undying ranks, a necessity to counteract the attrition of ages.
6: Kidnap babies to render them into stem cells and that's where their extended lives and youth come form they just smush babies onto their faces.

Dwarves
1: Experience gravity in reverse, dig underground by necessity as otherwise they would fall into the sky. Special alcohol brewed with magnetic powders makes them walk normal-like on the ground but also endrunkens them.
2: Can't even grow beards. Wear postiches. Feel deep inadequacy about this but also ritual veneration of the postiche and its adornments.
3: Are hewn from impossible veins of flesh and bone that writhe among the roots of mountains, rather than being born in the mammalian way. Artisans are tasked with smoothing out the features and excess extremities of newly-mined dwarves. Mining out too many dwarves in too short a time will cause a vein to spasm, causing earthquakes and collapses, or become necrotic and begin to spawn undead abominations.
4: Are essentially prisoners of the more populous lowlanders inhabiting more fertile lands which are not burrowed through mountains, forced to mine ores and gems and supply worked goods in return for food which they can't produce from the solid rock.
5: Are a sort of organic spacesuit worn by alien beings from the long night below the world, that they might survive the upper reaches of the earth. Dwarf-suits themselves are semi-sapient even without their "wearers".
6: Are the descendants of people seduced into the bowels of the earth by the resounding echoes of the world's primordial birth-scream. They hear it in the womb, and are driven to tunnel endlessly to seek its source - unless they've drunken themselves into indolence.

Halflings
1: Live in kurgan-cottage mounds built up over the graves of passed generations. Their dead are protected by shambling constructs pieced together from the bones of livestock and intruders they've butchered and buried.
2: Give birth to seeds, which when planted grow over several seasons into a bean-pod bearing a clutch of halfling clones. Every halfling has such a collection of stories and tall tales about themselves because they see their pod-fellows as identical to themselves.
3: Are literally and metaphorically halved - in height, and in missing a half of their self: their shadow or name or death or suchlike, different for each halfling.
4: Turn into either gnomes or goblins when they get old - gnomes if they're kindly grandma types, goblins if they're don't-give-a-fuck-anymore types.
5: Use stilts or very high platform shoes and very tall hats to match other peoples in height. The hats and hollow platforms or stilts are often full of tricks and gadgets, from a basket to deep-fry quick snacks in to spools of razor-wire that whip out and cut everyone around them's throat.
6: Are animate & intelligent stuffed toys, often with the heads of cuddly animals - once the companions and protectors of obscenely-wealthy children, enough escaped into the hills and woods with the secret of stitching more of their kind to create self-sustaining free populations.

Orcs
1: War, war changes. Every time and place has known its own particular sort of war, its scars apparent on the land and the people. Each particular sort of war has its own particular sort of changing those who wage it, and those it's waged on. Those broken in body and soul by the waging of war may become orcs - in wars of trenches and noxious gas they grow shovel-like claws and gas-mask snouts, where pike and shot reign they grow plates and long blades of bulletproof bone, and so on and so on.
2: The loan-sharks of Hell are not always satisfied with just the single soul of those they deal with - sometimes they charge interest. When one owes many souls in such a teind they're take into the inferno and mutilated for their new master's purposes - a nose that can smell innocent blood, muscles to tear a man's head from his neck, and so on. These altered collectors are orcs.
3: Are just some nation that was cursed with being fucked-up looking by another nation that wanted to feel less bad about slaughtering them all and stealing their land.
4: Are physiologically in a constant state of life-or-death excitement, granting them hysterical strength as well as inflicting them with aggressive agitation. Often graft extra arms onto their bodies, as fully exerting their strength with a limb will break it. Drugs which can get them to relax are a vital social lubricant.
5: There's some islands out east or west or in the sky or whatever and a lot of good spices are there and the people there have an agreement with sharks wherein the sharks won't eat people and the people won't eat the sharks' favourite fish and half the year the people live on land and the other half of the year the people switch places with the sharks and one time guys from some other place tried to set up plantations for all the spices but that was at the time of year the sharks were in the place of people and a lot of those guys got eaten and the stories of the land-shark-people that filtered back to the land those guys came from is what orcs are.
6: Are sapient cave bears that evolved to prey on and be worshiped by early homo sapiens. Can go about bipedally for long periods and wield tools with their forepaws. Were left behind when mankind got better gods, but seek to violently reclaim their old place on the food chain and great chain of being.

Dungeons
1: Were buried dumps for nuclear waste, or some magical equivalent, but over centuries/millennia people disregarded the warnings, critters wandered in, and stuff was mutated into monsters and decayed into valuable materials.
2: Are cracks that spread up and out into the surface-world from the hell-prisons of primordial titans, infused with some of the power and wrath of the titan whose struggles opened it.
3: Are grown from actual dungeons - and there's an art to it, like bonsai. In the utter darkness of the oubliettes and misery of the cells, the nightmares of the prisoners congeal into physical, though by waking logic impossible, structures, creatures, and treasures.
4: The planet's like a Dyson sphere but around a black hole instead of a star, it's not meant to harvest energy from Hawking radiation or whatever but to pierce beyond the event horizon - get deep enough underground and spaces and things and everything else get fucky from crossing into singularity territory.
5: Were once just regular, above-ground structures, but there was a global mud-flood due to a magnetic pole-shift which buried them.
6: Are drop-pods loaded with genetically-engineered soldiers and nigh-magical materiel and shot down from orbit in an ancient war between stellar powers. The war occurred so long ago that the drop-pods have sunk into the earth and the soldiers forgotten their mission in favour of a chaotic melange of instincts.

Dragons
1: Are the highest rank of royalty, a step above an emperor - any emperor who expands his holdings and enriches himself enough will become a dragon, and continue these pursuits afterwards.
2: Are vessels that sufficiently mighty and clever fire elementals forge around themselves to survive the material plane. Their breath weapon is in fact this controlling entity.
3: Are animate execution devices, similar to a bronze bull. Their fire and their destructive wrath alike come from the burning souls imprisoned within them.
4: Are a relic-species of giant hexapoda, capable of flying and spraying gouts of a boiling poisonous chemical and drawn to building nests out of shiny objects to attract mates.
5: Are egregorean manifestations of all organisms' reptile brains, combining favourable attributes of any and all reptiles into singular forms. As Platonic survivors, the death of any dragon renders the rest a little bit stronger.
6: Share an occult family with the cockatrice, both hatching from chicken eggs incubated by unusual creatures - a toad in the case of a cockatrice, the Devil himself in the case of dragons.

Ghosts
1: Are disembodied voices of the dead who passed with things unsaid - if not provided a figure to speak their last words through, these ghosts will rise in volume and incoherence until they become vein-popping banshees.
2: Are all Scooby Doo-esque hoaxes, but these hoaxes are performed by a caste of spiritual mediums in the service of proper mourning.
3: Are a specialized class of demon, capable of possessing sentimental memories of lost loved ones as others of their kind might possess a body.
4: Are anchored to the living world by strong emotions. To remain for extended periods they must provoke and drain emotions from others, rendering those others listless husks.
5: Are subconscious creations of psychics failing to process grief and loss. Telekinetics spawn poltergeists, telepaths hallucinatory hauntings, and so on and suchlike.
6: Are bio-sonic recordings, like holograms made of final words and heartbeats, encoded in the fine structure of a sort of vitrified stone used in the structures of a fallen civilization - often looted and repurposed.

Ghouls
1: Are a sort of pyramid scheme - a portion of everything that a ghoul eats is kicked up to the ghoul that turned them, and so on and so on - ghouls with many "descendants" become bloated behemoths squatting atop lesionous legions.
2: Are an epigenetic phenomenon seeded in the human genome hundreds of thousands of years ago, triggered by traumatic cannibalism - perhaps as an emergency measure in the event of global overpopulation and resource crisis.
3: As ghouls age they elongate and their limbs atrophy, until they become as worms and chew into the earth to gnaw with their forefather Nidhogg at the roots of the world.
4: Can take on a trait from each corpse they eat, eventually evolving into cemetary chimeras.
5: Are illicit cannibals, cursed for poaching corpses which by right belong to the scavenger demon-god Yeenoghu. Gnolls are Yeenoghu's legitimate priests.
6: Can, if they can maintain a plentiful diet of corpse-meat, become jackalweres, and so enjoy being alive for a time instead of being hideous and wretched undead - so long as they remain well-fed.

Goblins
1: Are what becomes of kobolds who've been kicked out of their mines, brownies who've lost their homes, and of every other sort of dispossessed little folk, becoming fey lumpenproles.
2: Are what becomes of human sacrifices to the bog-gods, pickled and shriveled down into little green terrors.
3: Are spirits of mischief, and have nothing to do with hobgoblins - who are a type of people - but are related to bugbears, who are spirits of fear.
4: Are the "fingers" of a higher-dimensional organism pressing into 3-dimensional space. All goblins are Goblin, and Goblin does not care very much for its individual "fingers", and its "nerves" are "slow" and "low-fidelity" - goblins can be thought of as telepathic, but it's a telepathy like ripples in tar, or a message through cans connected by strings fifty meters longs.
5: Are living expressions of the colour green - envious, camouflaged, fecund, and everything else.
6: Possess both technical expertise and near-total sociopathy because they instinctively process everything in terms of manipulable parts. People too are just modules of meat and bloody fuel.

D20x5 Evil Space Empires

Pairs well with a sinister space church.

Click the button below to generate your empire:

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

D20	This evil space empire is ruled
1	by an A.I. emperor-core with "son" sub-units dispatched to oversee the empire's outer reaches - every century or so the core must be mostly-reset to undo the accumulation of mental errors, and then the sub-units cannibalized to restore knowledge.
2	by a caste of transhuman aristocrats who claim that they are a separate species from humanity, and that they are in fact ancient aliens who taught the Mayans/Egyptians/etc.
3	by a central bank which presides over a general cartel of mega-corporations that monopolize all significant industries and services.
4	by a council of scientists representing every field of study, who use the empire to experiment without limit or ethics and develop new methods of technocratic control.
5	by a representative democracy that would be familiar to our 21st-century selves - but the underlying culture's pretty dark and fucked-up.
6	by a secret order of telepaths who control the minds of significant public figures as proxies and mouthpieces.
7	by a sapient, silico-magnetic hell which resides within the mantle of their throne-world, demanding a tribute of organic minds uploaded into its substrate for it and its most loyal, assimilated servants to torment.
8	by a perpetual dictator who uses a bio-engineered virus to convert succesors into exact physical and mental duplicates of himself, and to warp dissidents into deranged hybrids.
9	by a primeval autonomous dreadnought unrivaled by any modern craft, with enigmatic designs on the galaxy.
10	by a mystery cult wherein higher rungs of government correspond with deeper levels of initiation, which practices human sacrifice and cannibalism and that sort of thing.
11	by a coalition of warlords and tyrants who work together for mutual defense and rebellion-crushing.
12	by way of cybernetically-enabled direct democracy, though the voting system developed its own emergent intelligence and now directs the citizenry to its own ends through manipulation of mass psychology.
13	by the virtualized ghosts of its founders, their will absolutely unquestionable yet degraded into glitching senility.
14	by a hive-mind of precocious and sociopathic children created from samples discovered in an alien ruin.
15	by a eugenic elite born from pits of liquefied gene-stuff, where only the most dominant and aggressive traits survive to be shaped together into a new, whole organism.
16	by a fraternity of lich-lords jealously clinging to power and life, stripped down to skeletal frameworks of tissue sustained by machinery and fresh infusions and transplants.
17	by an inbred nexus of oligarch-families and their associated mafias, all pretending to mythologized, historically-revisionist nobility.
18	by the champion of a decennial gladiatorial tournament.
19	by a corrupt, decadent, and overgrown bureaucracy.
20	by oracles possessed by a deified madness, capable of super-scientific miracles, each a receiver of a signal which "curves" through higher-dimensional space.

D20	Among the evils of this space empire
1	is its workforce of lobotomized slave-legions.
2	is its use of false-flag attacks to scare its populace into compliance.
3	is sterilizing recalcitrant populations, and replacing them with ideologically-committed settlers.
4	is demanding that children be surrendered to it, so that they can be indoctrinated as battle-thralls.
5	is indiscriminate use of germ warfare.
6	is bombing an entire planet into a barren rock to exterminate a guerilla force.
7	is the time they gave a huge number of their own people to be processed as payment for an anthropophagous mercenary force.
8	is seeding civilian areas with robotic terror weapons.
9	is immortalizing their defeated enemies as agonized nerve-sculptures.
10	is baseless persecution of religious and ethnic groups.
11	is executing the relatives of criminals along with the criminal themself.
12	is testing its military systems on communities of its own poor.
13	is sponsoring terrorist groups to destabilize foreign governments.
14	is flagrant disregard for treaties and conventions.
15	is time-crime, attempted violations of causality that could potentially destroy the entire universe.
16	is doing a lot of assassinations.
17	is xenocide of a peaceful alien species.
18	are human, drug, organ, and weapon trafficking.
19	is harvesting brains to use as organic computers.
20	is hunting sapient beings for sport.

D20	Aesthetically, this evil space empire
1	resembles the Carnival of Venice, all masks, bright colours, and elaborate costumes and edifices.
2	is like a Greco-Roman Apple store, with a lot of predator drone-esque pale curves.
3	looks like Bruce Timm's Gotham.
4	is like it was designed by a chemically-castrated H.R. Giger.
5	leans heavily into sumptuary laws and class distinctions.
6	resembles the music video for Kanye West's song Power, but more sci-fi.
7	is like a bleak, twisted, rebranded version of The Jetsons for a new generation.
8	is like the lab in the 1931 Frankenstein movie extrapolated out into a whole civilization.
9	looks like gundams or evangelions but it's not giant robots just all their technology.
10	is like a visual kei BDSM club mixed with that Korean cosmetic surgery clinic where they've got a pillar full of jaw shavings - but not too much like Hellraiser because that's already been done.
11	is kind of like Zardoz but also kind of like Self-Embodiment of Perfection from Jujutsu Kaisen, with a lot of giant stone heads and other body parts in interlinked arrangements.
12	is somewhere between Jack Kirby space god stuff and the bad guys from Nemesis the Warlock.
13	is a weird, gaudy, pseudo-historical kludge like the Las Vegas Strip and also Neom in space.
14	is soy-core... pods, bugs, Klaus Schwab mantles, and suchlike... if you know, you know.
15	looks like the most racist man in the '80s' stimulant psychosis nightmare of an ascendant future Japan.
16	is the EPCOT Center plus the Event Horizon - and again, can't stress this enough, not too much like Hellraiser.
17	has got Paolo Soleri's sketches for its architecture and Thierry Mugler's designs for its fashion.
18	is kind of like the Empire in Warhammer 40k but Southern Gothic instead of regular Gothic.
19	is like a Pieter Bruegel the Elder painting mashed up with Kilian Eng.
20	is Orientalist Eiriel (deliriant realm reported by some on benadryl and suchlike).

D20	This evil space empire's territory
1	has shrunk significantly over the years, which they are in denial about - outlying territories which used to pay them immense tribute now pay only lip service.
2	is stretched thin across recent conquests.
3	is a web of strongholds with pockets of anarchy in between.
4	is enclosed by a wall of fortifications, signal-jammers, and interceptors intended to prevent anything getting in or out without the empire's approval.
5	is marked by gargantuan monuments.
6	is like a tensegrity structure - held together by internal oppositions and tensions more than conventional authority.
7	is scarred by war and terrible armaments.
8	is threatened along one border by an otherworldly devouring swarm.
9	has been recently expanded by a charismatic and popular general who's coming to be perceived as a threat by the empire's established powers.
10	is being sanctioned and blockades by an alliance of its foes.
11	is riven by a cold civil war.
12	has all its radio-frequencies bombarded with propaganda 24/7 - but this of course is in space so the number of hours in a day and days in a week can vary from place to place.
13	is strip-mined and environmentally-devastated.
14	is deliberately kept harsh in the belief that this will toughen the citizenry up.
15	can actually be quite nice, if you're a well-off person in the garden-like core worlds.
16	is being drained of its wealth due to addiction to a mutant strain of saffron they don't have the capacity to produce domestically.
17	is lop-sided, presenting a weak front.
18	is so far constrained by natural barriers, but the empire works tirelessly to surmount them.
19	is dense, tight and heavily-developed.
20	is being shaken up by the rapid spread of a messianic religion among its lower classes.

D20	The most feared of this evil space empire's forces
1	are the crocotizones, emotionless reptilian hulks strong enough to tear the arms off a man like a leg off a roasted chicken.
2	are the Crimson Shrikes, an undefeated squadron of space-fighters.
3	is its inquisition, which is filled with sadistic spies and paranoiac torturers.
4	are its inhuman combat cyborgs.
5	is its 1st Expeditionary Fleet, the empire's crushing titanium fist.
6	are its stalking ghosts, warriors who've died yet returned.
7	is the Phalanx of the Outer Dark, a constellation of mobile killer satellites that rain death from an unreachable height.
8	are the deathalopods - uplifted, amphibious giant squids used as hunter-killers - ingenious and nigh-inescapable once they've got your trail.
9	is its hidden army - its disguised and refleshed infiltrators used as hitmen, saboteurs, and suicide bombers.
10	are the Skulltaker Commando Battalion, a special forces unit which leaves no trace but the mutilated bodies of their targets.
11	are its sentient computer viruses that can cripple infrastructure across an entire planet.
12	are the flayerdroids, programmed to adorn themselves with the skins of those they slay.
13	are its self-replicating shrieker drones, which adapt to the battlefield with each generation.
14	are its hordes of fearless, hateful berserker-clones.
15	are its carnivorous slime-molds, which attack in slithering floods and hazes of spores.
16	are its slaughter-savants, who use 99% of their brains for bloodshed.
17	are its inferno-troopers, who roast enemies alive and march within a firestorm.
18	are its laser-snipers, who can invisibly pick people off from many miles away - though of course in space they may use a different unit of measurement.
19	is its honour guard, drawn from the ranks of its most skilled and hardened soldiers.
20	are its ekranoplan-riding neo-viking marauders.

D100+ Snazzy Snacks

Best paired with a fine soda.

Click the button below to get your snack:

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

D6x6 Space Elf Aliens

Like eldars or vulcans or protoss, or uh they're probably in Spelljammer too.

Click the button below to generate your space elf aliens:

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

Special no thanks to former friends of the blog Phlox and deus ex parabola, who were implored to help with brainstorming this post yet failed to respond in an adequate amount of time.

D6	These space elf aliens kind of look like
1	crystal chandeliers crawling about on translucent goose-feet, each crystal bulb holding a different arrangement of glowing gossamer organs within.
2	osseous hourglasses with a single crevice in their shell serving as eye, mouth, and cloaca, and an array of limbs as varied and specialized as the cutlery at a Victorian feast.
3	floating, bubbling chrysalises that extrude globular pseudopods from frill-like vents.
4	futurist statues made out of quivering head cheese.
5	eyeless solifugae with a cluster of coral polyps growing out of their backs.
6	gracile, five-legged stags or moose whose pearlescent antlers are segmented graspers.

D6	These space elf aliens are thought of
1	as master craftsmen, who've made wonders that wars have been fought over.
2	as living bogeymen, things which stepped out of stories that rightly belong to a pre-spaceflight era.
3	as sages whose understanding of history and the cosmos is unsurpassed.
4	as proud and aloof elite warriors.
5	as a bunch of smug jerks.
6	as enigmas who can never be fully understood or trusted.

D6	These space elf aliens live
1	in gargantuan wandering torus-ships, each a thriving ring-world lit by a fusion reactor-star.
2	within an ecumenopolitic pocket dimension, the laws of physics within subtly tweaked to be more favourable to their species. This dimension's gate-outposts are mistaken for marvellous capital cities by many.
3	in manses on vast re-wilded estates on paradisical worlds, often tastefully decorated with the ruins of those who lived there before.
4	mostly in simulated universes powered by Dyson swarms - only their lowest and highest castes are ejected to tend to concerns in reality.
5	in heavily-guarded spire-enclaves among other species, depending on those species for the provision of basic goods and materials.
6	mainly in the same solar system they evolved in, each planet and moon painstakingly terraformed into a life-bearing body.

D6	These space elf aliens' technology
1	primarily takes the form of ambient nanotechnological fog, powered and controlled by broadcast-spires, and brainscanning antennae-crowns worn by individuals.
2	has no clear demarcation between metallic machinery and organic symbiotes - their bodies integrate into it effortlessly and seamlessly.
3	is based on refracting light through hypercubic crystals to create "hard" holograms and warp space.
4	is focused on biological and psychological augmentation - the manufacture of heroic individuals.
5	can manipulate time itself, to a degree - freezing it, slowing it, accelerating it, destroying it.
6	is fitted with self-destruct mechanisms which activate if it's seized by people with the wrong bio-code.

D6	These space elf aliens' civilization
1	is ageless yet senescent, jaded and ravenous for novelties. They abduct younger species for amusement, and to render them down into a sort of recreational stem cell treatment that restores passion and vigour.
2	is patronizing and chauvinistic, attempting to domesticate "lesser" species into pets at best, or exterminating entire civilizations as vermin at worst.
3	is generally benevolent but religiously zealous, attempting to convert the cosmos to their One True Way.
4	is dominated by rigid traditionalism and ancestor-worship that has locked them into a (very advanced, relatively) stasis.
5	is paranoid and cryptic, forever warning of and taking violent measures to ward off a threat they won't or can't fully explain.
6	once considered themselves the guardians and mentors of younger species, but over the ages have been battered by disaster after catastrophe and so grown resentful and jealous of their charges.

D6	These space elf aliens are rivalled by
1	another sect of their species, who bear diametrically-opposed values.
2	a coalition of battle-thralls and war-bots that escaped their control.
3	a member of the species that uplifted them in eons past, and wove themself into the fabric of reality as essentially a demi-god.
4	a sapient, psychic STD they created and spread during a decadent phase of their existence.
5	a species of interstellar "dragons", able to fly between stars and incinerate worlds with their plasmic flame.
6	a dwindling race of nebulous titans who have been around since the first moments of time itself after the Big Bang.

D20x5 Staristocrats of the Faufreluchean Future

Inspired by Solomon VK's Faufreluche posts.

Click the button below to generate your staristocrat:

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

D20	This staristocrat's badge of office
1	is a golden diadem which projects a hologram of Old Sol from its highest tine, as well as the rest of Man's Cradle-System orbiting about it.
2	is a hideous diamondoid mask made in the image of an alien demi-god from whom their esteemed house claims descent.
3	is an auroran magneto-cloth cape which flares with the oscillations of subtle fields.
4	is a porous meteoric amulet that echoes with the music of the spheres.
5	is a blade of enchained magnetic monopoles channeling ouroboric tangles of plasma - ever-glowing, their patterned glows expressing the cyclical yet self-degrading nature of the cosmos, able to cut through all but the most unnaturally enforced materials.
6	is a scepter containing a degenerate micro-verse within its topping globe.
7	is a battered helmet pulled from the suit of one of the first humans to reach outer space.
8	is a battle standard bearing the heraldry of their family, and topped with the head of a lion, preserved and animated to roaring unlife by cybernetic tubes woven through its flesh and bone.
9	is a halo of abstract mathematics, written directly on the fabric of space-time rather than mere matter.
10	is a pauldron of fused silicon, the remains of an artificial intelligence which almost overcame humanity.
11	is a dilating-lens lantern of an indestructible, orange-green alloy - fully unleashed, its actinic brilliance can guide in a ship from high orbit.
12	is a vial of their own, genetically-perfected blood, crystallized into a ruby-like gem.
13	is a crown of golden rings hovering about each other, each engraved with the zodiac of a different solar system.
14	is a famous artifact of Earth preserved within a temporal stasis-orb.
15	is a set of infrasonic pan pipes that can manipulate the minds of men and machine alike.
16	is a holy book written by the first settler of their world, in an eclectic script unreadable by anyone yet living.
17	is a shield with a brazen, hypercubic boss and a rippling purplish forcefield about.
18	is a labrys bearing edges honed to subatomic sharpness with whetstones hewn from the preternaturally dense heart of a collapsed star.
19	is a bowl holding a fractal bonzai grafted with branches of every fruit-bearing tree of humanity's homeworld.
20	is the head-sized smaragdine egg of some voidborne beast, the inevitable hatching of which is said to herald the end of the universe.

D20	This staristocrat's holdings
1	lie under a dimming sun, weakened by its fusion-harvest which forms the foundation of the staristocrat's wealth.
2	contain no life-bearing worlds, its population sustained only by technocratic hydro-pneumatic despotism.
3	bear the glassy-green sheen and asymmetrical mutations left by ancient nuclear war.
4	are mineral-rich but poor in organics and water, expending most of their export-wealth on life-giving imports just to survive.
5	produce a unique and inimitable spice, and are thus coveted by an extra-solar rival.
6	are either watery or gaseous, with dry, solid ground an unimaginable luxury - the populace living on great rafts or aerostats.
7	have recently absorbed a mass of refugees fleeing a black swan xeno-threat.
8	were enclosed from the common space of comet-cowboys, who plague it with their raids to this day.
9	are nestled among the ruins of an extinct alien civilization, probed only gently for fear of waking their automatic guardians.
10	are slowly but surely having their life-giving atmospheres stripped away by the rapacious solar wind of their red gigantism-suffering sun.
11	are deliberately kept ignorant of the wider galactic community to reduce their capacity to revolt, and so that the ruling class can portray themselves as deific through their technological capabilities.
12	are undergoing a long and delicate process of terraforming which structures cultural and religious cycles around these artificial seasons and critical thresholds.
13	are overgrown with a police state only nominally under the staristocrat's authority, and the computational bureaucracy that's arisen to process all their surveillance.
14	are infamous for their permissiveness, and abound in every sort of vice.
15	are torn apart on a planetary scale for the sake of resource-harvest and industry, and what unruptured ground exists is blanketed in choking smog outside sealed habitats.
16	were recently seized from a treasonous vassal and bestowed upon this staristocrat - the old holder's sympathizers still lurk within the population, evading the claws of inquisition.
17	exist mostly fictitiously, as moving shell-games of companies and titles.
18	are centered on an ecumenopolis with some roads paved with stones hewn before humanity's ancestors came down from the trees - its corners hide occultic dens of our darkest imaginings.
19	are generally scorching, deserts or liquid hells, their structures mirrored and extending tubes of heat exchanges and radiators like a seraphim wings.
20	are verdant in all forms of life - none go hungry, yet many are eaten, and a clan of masked physicians go about the populace to rebuke the tides of plague.

D20	This staristocrat is attended by
1	a harem of genetically-engineered Willendorfian Venuses, bearing a continuous stream of heirs who will duel over the matter of their inheritance in the arena of their crèche.
2	artful historians hunchbent over data-tablets, preserving every moment and detail of the staristocrat's life in imperishable crystalline records.
3	nigh-invisible bodyguards swaddled in light-bending metamaterial cloaks, heat haze auras ready to strike down any offense against their master.
4	clanking cyborg-knights - behind their cuirasses are tanks preserving the most loyal and chivalrous parts of their mortal brains.
5	slaves bearing explosive collars - the tribute of many conquered worlds.
6	a squadron of musclebound eunuch-janissaries raised from childhood with size- and strength-stimulating hormones and non-stop brainwashing.
7	clones of themself educated according to various traditions as diverse yet biologically-partial advisors.
8	the cryogenically-preserved heads of their forefathers, which sometimes dispense shivering, crackling counsel.
9	hovering laser-turrets fitted with targeting algorithms able to anticipate their master's desire to kill before it's consciously felt.
10	an enormous parrot with impeccable skill at mimicry, whose mind has been overwritten with every song recorded by humanity up until the time of its creation.
11	a pair of titanic wolfdogs, with metallic teeth that could rend apart a tank and hides that have turned aside artillery-shells.
12	the plush animatronic companion of their childhood, its digital personality updated to be a competent advisor.
13	a caste of butlers who've served their family for generations, bred like pedigreed dogs.
14	a choir singing their praises, the choir's lungs replaced with cybernetic jet-intakes slatted between ribs, so that they might sing unceasing.
15	a former whipping boy, their oldest friend, bearing the delicate scars of tremendously sophisticated tortures.
16	tumbling jesters dressed in patchworks of impossible colours captured from the coronas of half-real suns.
17	technotheologic angels dancing through the air on wings of incandescent blazons.
18	abductees from primitive worlds fitted with neural implants which make them believe they are simply in an extended dream.
19	a team of chefs who can prepare the delicacies of a dozen worlds, never repeating the same twice in their master's lifetime.
20	grey masters of anagathic science, whisper-arguing over the injections and ointments that will quicken them a while longer.

D20	This staristocrat's court
1	is entertained by a vapourous alien intelligence which takes possession of lesser courtiers through a fanciful hookah.
2	has its lesser members partially memory-wiped when they attend it - able to recall their skills, yet unable to remember much of their own identities, and so how to apply those skills for personal benefit.
3	is deliberately, performatively humble, held in barns and suchlike.
4	is overlooked by a cine-dome showing stars, moons, and constellations in fortuitous alignments.
5	is addicted to novelty, and constantly seeks new performances and grotesques.
6	is made up nepotistically of their siblings who did not win the contest to inherit the throne.
7	are waited on hand and foot by fragile ceramic robots imprinted with the tightly-enchained engrams of political criminals.
8	takes place entirely remotely - members are provided radio-devices with frequencies that trigger voice-like vibrations in great bells this staristocrat is in the constant presence of.
9	were at first ironically and now legitimately entranced by a bloody cult of sacrifice and agonies.
10	has been forced to accept elected representatives from among the populace by a revolt - to the grumblings of those who attained their positions through inheritance.
11	is wracked by a scandal involving mistresses overspending from public coffers.
12	is perpetually-wrapped in augmented-reality projections of mythic mimesis.
13	is burrowed among the roots of the biggest mountain of their throne-world, so that it could survive all but the most devastating attacks.
14	are all accompanied by a member of an order of courtesan-assassins implanted with acid-glands in case their charge shows overt disloyalty.
15	solve disputes among themselves with duels, and drill daily with various weapons and fighting styles.
16	is held within a hollow pyramid, with this staristocrat at the top point and many stairs and levels filtering petitioners between them and the entrance at the base.
17	is largely taken over by a conspiracy to poison this staristocrat, and even the uninvolved have begun to circle like vultures.
18	is a ring of stone thrones built to scale with the renown of the one who sits upon them - this staristocrat themself sits like a small child on a throne fit for giants - their seneschal on a stool.
19	is held around a colosseum, where gladiators and vicious alien beasts fight for their amusement and haruspexies.
20	is itinerant, a grand airship which hovers above the realms of hosting vavasours.

D20	This staristocrat's noble flaw
1	is hubris - they believe they can become like God by funding breakneck scientific process.
2	is bravery - they will fight to the last in the face of overwhelming odds, even if better options present themselves.
3	is honour - their thinking is rigid and totally un-utilitarian.
4	is generousity - they give without thinking, disrupting economies and fostering dependence with their largesse.
5	is parental love - they spoil their children on a terrible, cosmic scale.
6	is a thirst for justice - a continent has burned due to their need for a punishment fitting a truly awful crime.
7	is filial piety - their increasingly-senile dowager-mother has them tied around her bony finger.
8	is tolerance - they've cultivated cosmopolitan communities, yet failed to confront division and rising extremism.
9	is an aesthetic sense that is souring into decadence.
10	is persistence - they are a dogged obsessive.
11	is realpolitik - they've alienated possible allies with ruthlessness.
12	is faith - they lean often into outright zealotry.
13	is cautiousness - they often dive into outright paranoia.
14	is competitiveness - they're innovative, but often only in the tortures applied to defeated rivals.
15	is cleanliness - they have advanced to a purgative germaphobia.
16	is contentment - they have come to peace with all things, even if others demand their action.
17	is honesty - they will never lie, even if it benefits them and their people.
18	is is humility - they are overly-convinced of their own incapacity.
19	is romantic love - their spouse manipulates them to their knowledge yet total acquiescence.
20	is imagination - their fancies often end up unproductive or outright destructive.