Showing posts with label slush pile. Show all posts
Showing posts with label slush pile. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

Slush Pile 18

Previously:

Slush Pile 1

Slush Pile 2

Slush Pile 3

Slush Pile 4

Slush Pile 5

Slush Pile 6

Slush Pile 7

Slush Pile 8

Slush Pile 9

Slush Pile 10

Slush Pile 11

Slush Pile 12

Slush Pile 13

 

Slush Pile 16

Slush Pile 17

Conquistador-industrialist-priests harvesting the fat of the conquered to paint the faces of their automaton-saints
-hominy made of teeth instead of corn

What appears to be an island is really the back of a great asp-turtle - the asp-turtle reaches its long neck over its back in the night to snatch up sailors camped upon it
-aspicasp, venom gelatinizes your flesh

A bird which plunges into the earth then grows into a tree with eggs as its fruit

Huckster starts monster hoax to draw adventurers to town - it goes horribly wrong

Those Who Dress Entirely In Corn
-The Forest of Assassins, where everything wants to kill you
-"the froth and noxious blast of a corrupt heart"
-wooden heads and asses' ears and copper in their voices
-secret society tattoo that's only visible when you flex really hard - secret society of bodybuilders/martial artists
-"What can be known, first must be buried"

Horror oneshot set at a Downlow Pride party, and everyone's wearing masks, but there's like a fuckin, a killer or something who's wearing a mask too
-evil book club, because one of the ladies keeps bringing in her own books for them to read, which are evil and have driven them all inSaAanE

You're paratroopers, you play as a squad of paratroopers, you're American or Rwandan paratroopers or whatever, and you thought you were paratrooping into the territory of the Enemy but you did not land in that territory but a very bad and strange territory and you have to find your way out

Creature that feeds on consciousness - exudes "nectar" made of positive memories and sensations and suchlike of prey to entice hunters to feed it more victims

Cult whose lives are tied to the statue of their deity - they are hard as stone, but any damage to the statue is reflected on all of them

At the end of his reign, the king drowns himself to be reunited with his sacred wife, the dragon from the sea

These people pour coffee on their swords before battle to awaken the spirit of the steel

Narcissistic & fearing assassination, a nobleman orders his surgeon to transform the faces of his courtiers into mirrors of his own

The Infinite Abyss is, in a planar sense, free real estate, but only those with an overwhelming ego and strength on the scale of a natural disaster can carve out their own layer of it
-The Howling is a medium or unspace which connects all layers of the Abyss. It is essentially an endless, unmoderated message board. It is the reason every demon lord hates every other demon lord.

Names for things: Lahasam, Seobex, Illa Vadenar, Talmer Iffre, Lantham, Holy Muss, Pxtou, Caolao, Secodorem, Mawuz Brin, Gattaband, Shinshir, Begor, Ichepu

Taphonomy is the study of how organisms decay and become fossilized or preserved in the paleontological record
-Crozzle: To shrink or shrivel from exposure to heat, and other things besides

Men who inherited (or conquered, or stole, or whatever else) kingdom from giants - look like children on massive thrones, swaddled in traditional robes much too large for them, followed by crowds of train-bearers

Big tetrahedronal instrument played by three musicians at once

From nightmare: pimple/boil so big that popping it exposes bone
-guys who got partially infected by mutagenic virus, wrecked by experimental treatment, then shipped off to the moon - no longer register as human on scans, leading to belief that moon-base is haunted

Misheard(?) from a tour guide: "It is also the one thing remaining from when this was all a great silence"

Civilized nations are distinguished from barbarian nations by hosting a campus of the Saecularium - a true university born from the merger of the Ecclesia Indomina (a sort of clerical union negotiating with gods on behalf of humanity) and more mechanistically-inclined wizards from the Church of Wonders

A sort of strangler fig but its hosts are human

Graves dug up, the corpses floating into the night sky / corpses squashed in hydraulic presses, squeezed for some essential salt, awful squatted & crumpled zombies left as byproduct-servitors

Gang of brigands who wear rags and apply ointments of poisonous herbs to make themselves appear as diseased beggars, use pretense of begging for alms to get close then draw daggers and such

Hermit who lives in a whale-bone tent along a shore - he dreams of being a whale, and has become obsessed with swallowing sailors whole

"Cudgies" - derogatory term for followers of Saint Cuthbert of the Cudgel - Leveller/Digger/Hussite types, serious, practical, and productive sorts who hate decadence, indolence, and spoils of conquest
-"Saints" understood in this paracosm with an obvious afterlife and so on to be those who deliberately will never return as outsiders, be absorbed as an attendant of a god, reincarnate, etc., whose living example and will shall forever remain immutable and authoritative

Rat-man warriors by code of honour only allow themselves to wear their incisors down by gnawing on the edges of their shields on campaign - to remain docile too long is death - those who manage to gnaw their shields through entirely are promoted to the ranks of berserkers & given two-handed weapons

Pseudo-carnivorous ivy, grows among ruins and scree and suchlike, pulls it up into structure-seemings that collapse onto and crush explorers into delicious and nutritious paste

Species of river dolphine or riparine micro-whale that shapes their territory into weirs and such, amenable environment and traps for prey
-whale wizard-lich in orbit, encased in ice

Anti-city weapon that spreads along the roads linked to it, bubbling them into lasting intraversability - those on the roads at the time carbonized beyond recognition

Peach-crab - mobile fruit, crustacean-like segmented, legged & clawed seed that carries around its fruit-flesh on its back, picking off bits to eat and fuel its journey to a planting site

Screaming ultra-entropic locust zones, mobile technorganic hellscapes that migrate across and overtop other ecosystems, degrading their biomass into fuel that is vapourized and sucked into shuddering engine-masses that power the whole thing
-A library that is also a gigantic wasp hive, created by giant wasps that pulp everything in the area and turn it into books - literally turning the territory into its own maps (and atlases, encyclopedias, biographies, etc.) - infested by parasitic ecosystem of glow-worms that eat nonsense and excrete illumination, book-worms that are able to burrow into fiction like it's a physical space, humans who've tattooed themselves with the text of books as camouflage against the wasps, and so on
-An entirely two-dimensional ecosystem composed of organisms of stark light and shadow, projected onto the world below by an alien moon, with odd symbiosis with the three-dimensional life it's projected on - e.g. two-dimensional pollinators unaffected by wind courted by Möbius-strip flowers

A specialized priest, tattooed with heaven on his belly, tasked with consuming all the sacrifices offered to his god - lipomas sprout across his flesh and hatch into hymn-singing cherubs

He-Man class - do classes even need levels?
-Thing class... you're The Thing from The Thing...
-class where you have to write a letter to Princess Celestia telling her a lesson you learned about friendship after every session
-XP stands for Xenia Process

In a world with an underdark-equivalent, and therefore much more extensive and lush cave systems, cavemen could be some real lasting players - chthonic neaderempires - chronic daylight deprivation leads to "slowing time", twelve hour sleeping thirty six hour awake cycle, mushrooms and fatty fish sources of vitamin D

Okay so it's elves, it's an elf-take - elves are insects, they're all one big hive, but their queen died a long time ago and they metamorphosed into immortal forms until they can find the princess-heir, drow and wood elves and so on are different castes that split after the death of the queen, they're a dwindling species because they can't reproduce and most of them have given up hope of ever finding the heir, changelings are like those spiders that sneak into ant nests but instead of ants it's humans and they're from a faction of elves who think they can make their own princess by experimenting on humans
-elves call themselves the seldarine and consider themselves to be gods - drow are hated for subordinating themselves to the god Lolth, to the seldarine denying their own divinity

Dungeon origin: Culture wherein if a master is killed by their slave, all their other slaves will be killed alongside that slave and interred with the master to serve them forever in the afterlife - slaves faked mass suicide with poison that mimics death, awakened in the master's ancestral tomb, and set about robbing and desecrating everything - imprisoned slave faction (undead?) vs. angry undead noble ancestors faction vs. modern day imperial graverobbers trying to balance the deficit faction

The God of Mountains is ringed by the Valley of Mercy, a divinely-created landform which protects the rest of the world from the obscene weather events created by the GoM

Ok so it's the Ex-Presidents from Point Break but also Madame Tussaud wax statues and also voodoo dolls and like a candle but instead of a wick they've got a film reel spun through them and they've got some freak shit fictional character knacks while it's burning them down

Viral-induced epilepsy via genetically-engineered viruses to program brain responses to light patterns (feels like I've done this one before but whatever)
-okay so it's this plus cognitive atrophy from LLM overuse and it's guys with VR headsets flashing lights in their eyes based on whatever instructions they mumble to it to manipulate their movements and mood

Part of the world where carrion has become so abundant wild dogs and wild pigs hybridized into the same species, gnawing their gametes into the marrow of corpse-bones that hatch into puppiglets

What if a jiangshi... but from sky burial... and they hop, but hop very high up, and then come down like a diving falcon... or a mario with talons on his feet...
-koi polloi
-a species of sentient art-works somehow able to compel people to create and re-create them

The War of the Noses: an ancient conflict between the saiga-men and the tapir-people which reduced both sides to wretched beasts and littered the land with ruins and the wreckage of war-machines
-deafened smith, big red candle atop his head dripping into his ears and styling his moustache, he plucks its flame and tosses it into his forge

Bytopian outsiders are defined by a duality, the usual relationship of which can be inverted - e.g. the shadow or reflection which casts the body or which can be cast separated from the body, a weeping silhouette whose tears rise into a cloud and is then outlined by rainfall from the cloud, etc.

Vial of blood. Any amount of water which gets so much as a drop of the blood in it will be infested by sharks.

A sinkhole-pond, very deep, a place where leeches churn the water, bloated with the ichor of something at its bottom - it is not wholesome fare for the leeches, and they will latch onto you not to drain your blood, but to regurgitate that ichor and spare their stomachs from invertebrate agony
-anglerfish-like chthonic ambush predator, lure mimics torchlight
-giant fucking apes, gigantopithecus type shit, and they live on a flying island and descend to the lowly earth on really long vines from really big trees to monkey around

Some kind of miracle-matter made from laparotomizing doppelgangers

Silent Hill-y horror scenario, town in B.C. engulfed by wildfire that strangely doesn't spread into the town itself (though makes it nigh-unbearably hot and smoky), trapping the people who wouldn't or couldn't evacuate, fire doesn't burn down over time and strange things emerge from it and the town warps as the smoke infuses it
-scenario seed: radio-tagged endangered species specimen begins making impossible movements
-you're cast and/or crew on the set of a remake of an allegedly-cursed film and things start going very wrong

From the lands of shadowy dream through the gate of horn comes fulfilment and through the gate of ivory comes deception - similarly from the sun-bright waking lands come dreamers through the marble gate and the brazen gate, and wiser figments of dreams know through which comes whom

Okay so it's water levels, it's a water level, but it's sand levels, and the dungeon's an hourglass, and you can flip it when the sand's too much

Better Louis has escaped and I don't know where else to put this

The sirens' names are Molpe, Thelxiope, Himerope, Aglaophonos, Peisinoe, Parthenope, Ligeia, Leucosia, Rhaidne, Teles, and Telchtereia

Monday, May 25, 2026

Slush Pile 17

Previously:

Slush Pile 1

Slush Pile 2

Slush Pile 3

Slush Pile 4

Slush Pile 5

Slush Pile 6

Slush Pile 7

Slush Pile 8

Slush Pile 9

Slush Pile 10

Slush Pile 11

Slush Pile 12

Slush Pile 13

 

Slush Pile 16

In captivity there is at least one species of poison dart frog that will, instead of killing its competitors, allow them to breed - and then harvest their young to feed to its own tadpoles

insectuoise - a greenish-blue mineral of a bulbous and rugose shape - the mirror of amber, instead of trapping insects of bygone days, under particular conditions it will hatch into insects not yet imagined on this earth - the mineral is coveted by the entomologers, who prophesy a new age of chitin
-things like moths with longship-prow heads
-erythrism: congenital condition of abnormal redness in an animal's fur, plumage, exoskeleton, or skin
-marcor: a wasting or withering of the flesh
-moggy: a cat, a human girl-child or young woman, a slattern, a scarecrow, a calf, a mouse, a cake made with ginger and treacle
-synastry: concurrence of starry position or influence upon two people, similarity of condition or fortune prefigured by astrology
-vicariance: fragmentation of the environment
-chalazae: part in egg white that holds yolk in place
-hight: to call, to name, to command, to enjoin, called, named
-scrofulous: has scrofula, having a diseased and run-down appearance, morally contaminated

Talking sword which relays the commands of a god
-guy with division symbols for pupils who slices really good
-people with stone wings, can't fly, myth of divine punishment - kulshegus
-guy who's a big face stuck onto a wall with root-tentacles
-were-dumbass who's a sabretooth tiger on land and a walrus in the water but in-between is just some guy with long teeth...
-two guys sharing a heron costume, one standing on stilts, the other sitting atop the other's shoulders and manipulating the beak - unnervingly-effective, likely due to spirit-possession
-guys who are hanging silk cocoons, their pale little faces poking out between the strands

ok... bard class... but it's a muppet... you're a muppet... and you can kick off musical numbers...

dragons precede modern notions of species-divides and so on... that's why they blend reptile and great cat and bird, why their very breath is poisonous, and why they spend so much time laired in remote locales - the modern era is as poisonous to them as they are to it...

blackjack-esque racing/chasing mini-game... plus that pirate pop-up game for inserting obstacles

The Knights of the Ladybug are charged with monitoring portals between worlds

Horror scenario beginning: A whale is beached, and bursts - strange tracks in the sand leading away from the carcass
-post-financial, de-industrial solution to control over Arctic waters - control-parasite that can inhabit wide variety of oceanic life, use them as living, self-reproducing drones to damage sensitive equipment on vessels
--OR the whales are fed-up and are now beaching themselves the world over and birthing humanity's end
-A mummy is found where a mummy should not be. Its scientific examination releases something awful.

Peninsula under quarantine, experiencing cattle mutilation-esque murders wherein the organs of victims have been removed - secretly peninsula is used as reservoir of healthy organs for wealthy outsiders to prolong their lifespans, organ-harvesting developed into ritualistic hunt

"angel DNA" - what Bigfoot allegedly possesses, genetic information unlike any other on Earth

Virus that un-vestigializes human vomeronasal organ, intended for mass pheromonal control of population

"Events in time are sticky, like sap - this is the primary cause of synchronicity. Time as a whole - eternity - is like amber" - delirious brain-thought, good line to give kook character
"We are children of this age, weaned on chaos and strife"
"evil horses, accomplices of swirling waters"
-the horse whose rump extends to carry a hundred children to drown, the serpent, the centipede
"In Genesis it is stated that the first creatures were brought forth by the abyssal waters - they came into being as nightmares"
-the badlands - hell without fire

A treasure - magic sword or armour or somesuch - found in a monster's lair in the hexmap, if borne to a dungeon elsewhere, wins respect & recognition by the undead faction within the dungeon (which shares the treasure's particular animal-motif) as the righteous heir

Wicked witch of the woods is really a weasel princess - bonded with an aurumvorax - who decades ago had her aurumvorax kill the girls bullying her for being hunchbacked then fled

Blight afflicting redwoods in the Pacific Northwest, liquefying them into a flood of sludge

Apparently-human fetuses found in piure-like organic sacs within stones... beware the ones that have gone bad...

Death-machine powered by the ectoplasm of the ghost it's going to make you
-chakram shaped like a snowflake, fractal + vorpal edge

Andersonville scenario...(?) I think this is referring to Andersonville Prison - shout out to Tasting History

Been coming around on martians-as-orcs... like true bonafide sorcerers raise their armies by tearing down chunks from the heavens, and command obedience from the aliens that come with them with the vague promise of being sent back home after their term of service... probably have to change up what planet/species you're drawing from every so often so they don't figure out that the prudent move is to shank you immediately and burn your books to spare their countrymen

A village where, due to lack of arable land, all but a family's firstborn have their souls "plucked" via the sacrifice of hair to the local deity, turning them into emotionless servitors

Monster: Accumulated biomass of a cave - bugs, guano, bones, etc. - shuddering to conjoined life, taking on the form of beasts painted on the caves walls, imagination lingering like a skin waiting to be filled

In this land, Death lost at a game of his choosing so badly that he left it in shame entirely. There are catacombs of the living to imprison the Things People Become When They Get Too Old.

Trees dressed as white mares and ridden to the night sky
-the lady-who-is-a-great-waterbug taking the children who would drown in her river's terrible floods
--young men of the watermeadow join the band of her fionin and live wildly, roving in a shining copper boat - each year in her service they grow shorter, and so the land is also known as the Land of the Little Men

Syphilisybils with pythonic sores on their brains
-emberyo

A henge with the still-living bodies of something or other buried and pinned beneath the stones
-a horned man who lives in caves and cuts his beard to make it hail

Room filled with haze of spores - open doors allow haze to spread beyond room - wet rags over mouth & nose improve save - those affected by the spores are unable to visually perceive depth, making them vulnerable to the room's pit traps - is this any better than just having a persistent mist or somesuch? counterplay of rags allows better use against enemies

A flower that blooms on the bodies of the dead. If they died full of anger and regret, the flower will be stained red.
-vengeful bees what feeds on these

Language of dungeon humanoids, unknown to outside world, is based on sounds made by dungeon monsters in spoken form, tracks left by monsters in written form. Meaning is symbolic associations of those monsters. E.g. a sound reminiscent of a skeleton's clattering teeth could mean both "death" and "white", written form is five slightly splayed lines mimicking feet-bones.
-alt.: glyphs based on Widmanstätten patterns

Why do all zombies and skeletons know how to use swords and stuff? Why can skeletons walk around without muscles? Necromancy is primarily concerned with the memory of life, advancing as a necromancer means becoming able to draw out more memory with less meat, and being discriminate in what you draw out - beginners can only raise fresh corpses, which hunger as they did in life though they digest nothing, if one wants undead warriors they must be made from living warriors, etc.

Spiders and octopi share some ancestry or other such relation
-amputation-regeneration cult of octopus god

The defining landmark of this area is:
-the big glowing ghost-tree
-the other moon that shouldn't be here and is falling to a cataclysmic end
-the big river that flood randomly
-the hill that crawls and births monsters
-a desert area where big dust storms or locust clouds or whatever sweep down from the north every so often so to get to the ruins up there without getting worn down too much you need to gamble with smugglers for the locations of their hidey-holes or track the great brown wyvern to its lair so you can shelter under the dung piles or whatever in a strand of safe havens and time it so you get to the desired hex when everything's clear and not covered in locusts or dead locusts in the aftermath that attract the Worm Tide and the sweep is more or less predictable, it's regular + or - a watch, and you can see it coming from a ways off

The Old Baatorians, being unable to die, dealt with enemies of their own kind by absorbing them
-aesthetic of the yugoloths: cenobites basically, amputation and eyes sewn shut and flaying and all that, subtraction and bindings, ideal yugoloth is an orb of annihilation

Every night the wizard descends from his tower to the shore of the lake brandishing his golden reins with their leaden bells, and the surface of the lake boils as he calls up the winged worm who sleeps at its bottom, to fly upon it and extort the people of the valley with threats of floods and storms and wet sicknesses

A gang of robbers who ride flying bucks granted to them by a pact with the devil, riding far from home after alighting off a particular hill so they are never caught

Awful nasty things: Like pigeons and they poop all over the place but it's not their poop it's bits of them that've goopified and if you get it on you you'll start to goopify too

The guards of the partridge princess's palace wear a sheet of paper painted with eyes over their face - it lets the partridge princess see whatever they see, while allowing the princess to manipulate what they see to keep them loyal
-hill giants that ambush like trapdoor spiders, hiding in wait under boulders

Palanquin-bearing muscle-cult who make their erstwhile lord heavier and heavier to make themselves stronger for lifting him

Spellbooks... ink... having too much magic in you turns you into pigments, a towering symbol-creature who paints a pocket-world into being around you

Yamulpiiki, the city that's an aircraft carrier, a thermal-swept plateau home to nesting quetzalcoatlus sorts, aerial domination of the surrounding region
-Ipizet Freel

Rabbits pulled from the bags under your eyes, snapping things of deprived delirium

Tripartite AI modelled after Hera-Athena-Aphrodite, with human operator as Eris-Paris

Lychee-skinned gibbons tearing out their heart-seeds to chuck at you
-the orange, white, and black of tigers are not one being but three creatures in symbiosis, and weaker for it

Satirical folk-song about marching boots, decrying the conditions they're trod in, rise up against the soldiers and their general - straw sandals of the peasantry try to join in only to be put down as the boots need leather from livestock for their patchings

Temperature-dependent sex determination... hot-or-cold-or-temperate bi/trimodal gender in reptile-people...

Ok so the ruins have phallic architecture like road markers and whatnot but you can tell they were some fucked up guys who made it because the dicks are all wrong

Dungeon-cannons with screwable barrel-lengths so they're easier to carry... very long fuses so you can hide behind a corner while the thing fires - it will almost definitely explode, and you don't want to be near it when it does - best aimed down narrow corridors & other such chokepoints

Ideas in your head that make your skull blossom like a flower
-bees for these too... perhaps rather humming-birds...

Legend that coffee was discovered by goatherds noticing their herd acting jittery after grazing on coffee-shrubs - adventurer practice of driving herd of goats before you into the dungeon, double effect of pacifying carnivores and discovering which edibles will kill or mutate you

A substitute human sacrifice - a doll stuffed with offal

Caste system based off the food pyramid...

Thursday, February 12, 2026

Slush Pile 16

Previously:

Slush Pile 1

Slush Pile 2

Slush Pile 3

Slush Pile 4

Slush Pile 5

Slush Pile 6

Slush Pile 7

Slush Pile 8

Slush Pile 9

Slush Pile 10

Slush Pile 11

Slush Pile 12

Slush Pile 13

 

Crime Scene: The top of a woman's head has been removed with surgical precision, along with the Wernicke's area of her brain. Her body has toppled out of the chair she was sat in when the procedure was performed - no sign of restraints used. The woman's cats lap at her blood and the spilled remains of her brain.

An entity that appears as someone's corpse - they don't have to be dead - and can move when nobody's looking at it. The entity "attacks" via inspiring paranoia in groups.

Ecumenopolis with "municipal tectonic" system, allowing for the rearrangement of neighbourhoods and sub-cities according to prestige or novelty or whatever other criteria

Executioners had a reputation for drunkenness - the popularity of hanging as a method of execution is partially due to it being something even someone severely drunk could do

Attempt to reconstruct genome of newly-discovered homo sapiens sub-species instead results in prebirth of terrible future strain of humanity
-on the other hand they also made a real clamato

A building that's a digestive system - it doesn't eat people. It eats something that's not a person, then swallows people to use like a gastrolith to break down that something (but more often the people are broken first).

A coastal resort town where there's a high rate of mysterious disappearances - and reappearances. Those who reappear are subtly changed, amnesiac, and report seeing strange lights out at sea before they disappeared.

A new sort of submarine, unmanned, deploys swarms of UAV drones for deniable terror attacks on near-coastal targets.

A scenario that's kind of like Pathologic and kind of like the part of the trolley problem that nobody remembers because they're stupid - the party is doctors dispatched to a town that's under quarantine due to a disease - the only way to cure the disease is by lethally extracting organs from one infected and transplanting them into others (ignore compatibility issues & so on... because the disease makes that a non-issue or somesuch), this cures the others because they reach a critical mass of key anti-bodies or somesuch... disease is 100% fatal if not cured in this way - game would revolve around preventing total anarchy & deciding who you're willing and able to sacrifice and who you want to save, of course the people most deserving of having their organs harvested to save others are also often the ones most capable of violence & enmeshed in the town's power structures

X-Files uses hypnosis session tapes a lot - those are neat
-X-Files-esque game set during immediate post-revolutionary period - all the nasty stuff the government was covering up is coming out, and you play commissars granted extraordinary powers to clean up the messes
-an immense amount of energy released by near-death experiences - enough to rewrite personalities, and thereafter disable any watch the near-dead wears
-creatures bound within the ring of a tree - released when the tree is logged - eco-terrorists are a quaint idea

animal men domesticated by intelligent machines - the factory farm of the manimal slaughterhouse

Dungeon origin: A king who filled his halls with impossible things until reality forgot that those things were impossible, and the king's people forgot they themselves existed

A house full of so much dust and must and mold and crust that these things coalesce into the shapes of the people who left them behind and ape their habits

Something creepy about standing in a random spot and then your phone starts recharging itself without being plugged in
-urban legend says if you text a certain number in this spot you can talk to God
-other stories say you can tell where the spot is because birds commit suicide at its boundary, flying straight into the ground

Investigation into identity of serial killer thrown off because apparent time of death of victims off wildly from suspects' schedules, encounters with them, etc. - this is because secretly none of the victims were baseline humans, and so have abnormally high body temp and so on that throw off determining their time of death

A daily crossword puzzle that predicts the future

A place with trees that turn a different colour than red in the fall
-it's because of what they sprayed over the woods to kill Bigfoots, you see...

Ghosts can't live where it's too hot, due to their water-crystalline nature
-nasty bluish wizard carried about on bed by horrible goblins, smoking opium billowingly, able to manifest chimerical beasts from his own nightmares

An arctic ice core sample, and the historical information revealed therein - good macguffin or clue - perhaps also contains ancient virus, or substrate of anomalous meteor - perhaps also must be kept at extremely low temperature, limiting its potential hiding location to, say, a new high-end data center in town
-vents, you never see people crawling through vents anymore
--addictive food additives introduced by nefarious sorts to enwiden the population so their evil lairs can't be infiltrated by vent-crawling protagonists

Mari lwyd and other such hoodening beasts are (or are inspired by, if you're lame) the spirits of domestic animals who died over the year, returned to take their due from Man with his own cultured cunning

The legendary fighting cricket, who fought his way up weight classes until he defeated a rooster - this guy is treasure, you find him in a tiny yet luxurious stasis-cage alongside his many cricket-concubines

The Temagami Magnetic Anomaly
-The Numbers' Stationed
-Tempus Fugitives

On Saint Martina of Rome: "One of the writers claimed that when she was beheaded, her body bled milk, a tale that led to her patronage of nursing mothers."

There's a place where the banks and the big box stores pulled everything out that they could and then the meth-heads pulled out everything else and then because everything was already gone things we don't have names for came and took what couldn't be taken and now the potholes are bottomless and lead down to nowhere and you can push people through a building like it's a stack of cardboard boxes and there's people who don't starve but they're always hungry because there's just a missing column where their guts should be and there's another guy whose arms are missing but if you stand too close you get tickle-tickle-tickled and there should be laws written down and a court and a judge but those are gone too so there's nobody to tell you the laws that still are and everybody will punish you if you break them

A guy who wears the snapped-off tine of a crown through his nose
-him and all his buddies do this because they assassinated a king and made off with the bulk (really the least-bulk highest-value) of that king's treasure and then turned on each other and are all hiding in various dungeons and hideaways living in dereliction on top of tremendous riches because they're paranoid the others are out to get them and they're right and also very talented murderers and thieves

Just give the GLOO gun as a magic item
-just give the Obra Dinn watch as a magic item
-just give the talking heart from Dishonored as a magic item
-just give a scroll that begins the taming ritual for Eight-Handled Sword Divergent Sila Divine General Mahoraga
-just give the Lone Gunmen as allied contacts

Assortia:
-A contagious accent - overlays reality with the bizarre fictional township it “originated” from as it spreads
-Cursed/living thermostat, preys on people by unnaturally adjusting the temperature in rooms/homes
-Axe of Theseus, alternates between being a rotting handle/rusting blade, plunged into material to reform itself based on what it’s plunged into
-Therapist who collects his clients' phobias in a box as malign spirits
-Giant with guillotines for eyelids, has to wind them open but when they blink they sever a piece of whatever they were looking at
-Washed-up former action hero who worships his own past self and hopes to ascend to godhood
-Bottled moon
-Guy with a mermaid stuck in the ocean of his eye, can weep out a flood of voracious baby mermaids
-Guy with a head that's a giant tick, with a brain floating in the blood bloating its abdomen
-An abusive weightloss camp where sloughed-off lumps of flesh are harvested from the campers
-Dolls made of discarded prostheses, infused with the negative energy of their former wearers
-Kludge-afterlife holding comatose souls of those caught in a ritualistic bus crash, on life support at a hospital - in the hospital's basement is a realm of jittering ECG machine lines, beginning to leak its captured souls
-Boombox that blasts pretty literal earworms, with effects spilling out of the ears of its listeners
-Guy paddling a church-bell down a river like a coracle
-The Gordian Not - untangles things and people
-Argleton/Paper Town - google maps image seam-blended half-cat
-Thumb drive with something living in it like a hermit crab
-Guilty Party - cursed board game, appears to groups with dirty laundry in isolated locations (vacation cabins, etc.), bringing secrets to light and turning them against each other - taking too long during your turn will land you in the Pear-ade of Agonies - Court of Apple-eals - The Punch-Down Bowl - The Confess-ction Booth - Bloody Ban-nana

From Ghost Fixers: The areas of people's subjective spaces contradicted by social consensus reality are subducted by it, coalescing into what some call "the abstract dimension"
-From me, semiurge: It's possible that tectonic-analogue events in this "abstract dimension" are responsible for experiences of the mandala effect

Project Iceworm
-Marie Byrd Land

Near-future setting detail: Climate change greatly increases the rate of fafrotskies
-Degradation of transport infrastructure, increase in automobile costs, legislation against human drivers leads to rise of "sled dog" subculture who grappel on to automated vehicles while riding skateboards, carts, etc., detaching and hiding in the woods for the next vehicle when the drones come to pry them off

Monster: A police composite drawing who came to life, now taking parts from people to composite himself a fleshly body

Planet with life that never underwent its own great oxidation event - coated in slow, simple life that's developed emergent complexity - towering stromatolites in tiger-stripe bands of opacity and translucency channeling light and heat across the super-organisms

A bower bird-empire, collecting beautiful tribute and a pseudo-harem of non-concubines picked for their aesthetic complementaries, instinct masquerading as civilization

Should have more generators in dungeons... heavy, volatile fuel you have to haul between generators, choosing which systems you want powered for how long... open the shortcut door, or keep the lights on?

Bard mechanic - learn new musical styles, dances, and suchlike that work like the GLOGy languages that let you talk to stones, or be unable to lie, or what have you - incentive for friendly (or at least transactional) contact with new cultures, itinerant circuses of murder-clowns, etc.

The dominant flora of this planet is in fact a sort of holometabolous organism, derived into an elongated, colonial chrysalis stage - sub-organisms within the shared chrysalis remaining liquid in form, shifting form and position within as needed

A death-cult of Hollywood stunt-men who get themselves killed in extravagant and symbolic ways as a sacrifice to the object of their worship

Humanoid giant mechs channeling the image of God to power theo-weaponry

Illusion and divination stem from the same original school of magic - the seeing of images in fire and water, guts and cracked shells - really the creation of images in these media - splitting based on the truth or falsity of these images, and later based on false images becoming true, true images making themselves false
-identical twins are potent components for both divination and illusion magic

UFOs coming out of the ocean during the Biden regime was actually fomorians returning in response to an Irishman becoming king of Hybrasil

An experimental nuclear-powered jet developed during the Cold War breached the sound barrier by far too much - becoming sound itself, an echoing, booming song of speed

A videographic realm, a desert with grains of camera footage swirling into various surveillance scenes - what's seen can see you back - beware of scenes of armed robbery

The bones of the earth made into broth

A murder mystery in an apartment building full of eccentric characters that's been sealed due to quarantine - kind of like [REC] but no zombies because I am not fond of zombies - who's hoarding food in their apartments? Who's willing to cooperate with investigators who aren't cops? There will likely be more murders in the days to follow

Ysgard is made up of islands floating on elements, like Earth's mantle but much smaller and more energetic, and like some are lightning and make fulguritic lightning volcanos and what have you - this is also reflected in their minerology

Aesthetic of Carceri: Contrast, contradiction - on the one hand regimentation, discipline, masks, uniforms, suppression of individuality - on the other hand distinctive wearing, grinding, compression, into hunchbacks and oil and diamonds and shale-flat slitherings, voraciousness - unique among all outsiders the demodands need to eat, and what they eat is extra-dimensionally excreted into the lower layers of the prison-spheres
-anti-production - schools with books that suck the knowledge from your mind, mines that put minerals back into the earth
-those scholars who reject the planar hypothesis place Carceri as a burl on the central pillar of the earth, deep enough that a dangled prisoner can be dipped headfirst into primordial chaos

A monster like the matagot, which follows a party and demands the first portion of each meal (a ration from each party member)
-the calabrius is a bird which takes illness from the sick and disperses it - in medieval bestiarity this dispersion is into the sun, where it burns up, but what if it dispersed the disease into the countryside
-Alien-type monster that takes its prey alive and cocoons them in a lair/hive

Coral cathedral, worship sea spawn master, wizard in belltower believes all civilizations created by sea spawn conspiracy
-lacedons from maturing sea spawn hosts

Much ink and blood has been spilled because of the human lust for gold. Less known is the equally-strong lust of raccoons for teeth.
-the nobility of this land mix ink into their blood - the colour becomes a very dark red - and write their titles and deeds and treaties in their inky blood - the writing and their reality are tied: so long as the documents exist, a noble will not be dispossessed of their land for long - their lost wealth will return, the uprising peasants will be crushed - burn the documents, however, and the ruin of their associated nobles will follow

"Pride was a knight on a lion, Envy a monk on a dog, Sloth a peasant on a donkey, Avarice a merchant on a badger, Gluttony a youth on a wolf, Ire a woman on a boar, and Luxury (instead of the standard Lechery) a woman on a goat."

Names: Soldeva, Viraloon, Zecho, Pirralene, Lowch, Metton, Peygon, Ashumarit

Word Corner:
-Cicerone: A guide who gives information about antiquities and places of interest to sightseers
-Chyron: Text in the lower third of a tv news screen
-Latrodectism: Illness caused by the bite of black widows & related species - symptoms include pain, muscle rigidity, vomiting, and sweating
-Verilent: Contagiously truthful
-Repechage: French, literally "fishing out" or "rescuing" - a practice in series competitions that allows participants who failed to meet qualifying standards by a small margin to continue to the next round
-Diluent: Substance used to dilute something, acting to cause dilution
-Raubbauwirtschaft: An economy of attrtition
-Peytral: Piece of armor used to protect the breast of a horse
-Chloasma: Temporary large brown patches forming on skin, caused by hormonal changes
-Quondam: Former, sometime
-Afflatus: Divine creative impulse or inspiration
-Apothegm: Concise saying, maxim, aphorism - not to be confused with apothem
-Apothem: Line from the center of a regular polygon at right angles to any of its sides
-Lacustrine: Related to or associated with lakes
-Intaglio: An engraved gem-stone
-Aborning: While being born or produced
-Incipit: The opening words of a text, manuscript, book, or chanted liturgy

Saturday, December 27, 2025

Slush Pile 15

15 slush piles made - a practical use yet to be found. Citizens take to the streets to protest the regime spending 15% of the national budget on slush piles while brownouts become commonplace and basic necessities swell in price.

Previously:

Horror Scenario Seed: You go looking for a missing person - come across a town with the same name as that person - somehow they've been turned into a town, psychogeographically & psychodemographically representative of them. The tapeworm they didn't know they had is a giant monster that slurks through the sewers and the plumbing of it. How can you change them back? What if it starts to spread?
-Standard diving dress spotted by several people wandering the Himalayas, or whichever which mountainside
-A Big Mouth Billy Bass that is not a bass... and its song is an awful thing...
-A Grand Guignol-esque theatre, where after one show the rich front-seat audience has caught a terrible blood-borne disease from the “fake” gore...
-A whale falls up instead of down into the abyss
-A Fat Men's Club that survived to the present day because they learned to eat something that isn't food
-A rideshare app that uses its riders as fuel
-School reunion group open time capsule, contents suggest lost memories of terrible event
-Junkyard that attracts "human waste" who eat rusty/broken parts and incorporate them into their bodies

A tree with branches that extend into other worlds... but not like a world-tree... it's a regular tree and you can only see other worlds if you climb up it and some of the other-world-branches might not even be able to support your weight but a kid went missing across one so you'll have to figure it out

A chimpanzee sewn up inside a mascot costume - very strong, very cruel

'Mongous Fungus
Infraredcap
Cipherbloom - a flower which, when included in a floral arrangement, scrambles the meaning of its flower language for anyone who doesn't have the favour of the flower's twin blossom

A dungeon within the flying ribcage of a giant - repurposed by a wizard or somesuch - containing & trailing viscera - get up to it by climbing the dangling intestines
-a coven of sorcerers who all gained their magic by drinking the blood of a thing from the stars that crash-landed in a swamp

From Lupin III: Slouching ape-men in black bodysuits wearing bladed gauntlets
-apes are scary... we're apemogged by the real great apes... not enough ape-horror

A tiered candelabra of egg-cups - hard boil eggs placed on them to the perfect consistency and crack the shells open just so

From Castle in the Sky: "Royal blood" as gimmick of dungeon - tracking down all the villagers in the area who resemble the people in the dungeon murals to find one you can manipulate to help steal the treasure & who won't be incinerated by the defensive lasers

From Yuuan no Kanata: A town built atop old rivers, the rivers died - diverted or blocked up - and are now ghosts, carrying some off before their time and bringing others back who should've stayed dead
-the baboon-faced man
-people disappearing, their clothes left behind, tied together into knots
-a woman scampering about, squeaking like a rat
-a man whose pupils are black flies crawling around his unblinking eyes
-a woman pregnant with a tree, her automatic writing communicating the will of numbers she receives through the tree

The Grey Waste is full of ghosts - those souls which were unable to pass on to their after-life due to clinging too strongly to their earthly tethers - eventually the passions which bound them fade, and they fall listless into the jaws of Hades
-spectral tatterdemalia blown like giant tumbleweeds across the dust-plains of Hades, made of ghosts whose ragged edges fit inextricably together, chased and lanced by gangs of fiends for ectoplasm

The native outsiders of Gehenna are the seirim. The law of their evil is more primal than that of the contract-bound devils of Hell. They are the ordained punishers of those who break taboos, who become impure, who encroach on their desolate territories. They look like labubus? They look like labubus. Also vile cheburashkas, Wild Things.

Settled people on the border of a steppe supply a certain tribe with guns to act as a buffer against invading hordes - this goes poorly for them

What about a displacement beast... and it kills you by casually walking through you... parting you like Moses and the Red Sea... or Shadow Moses and the Blue Sea...

Plane of Shadows, place of prophecy & doom - shadar-kai trapped by the shadow of their future - animaled by Poe-ass ravens and black cats.

Monster with diet of bad abstractions produces spiritual toxins as byproducts

coconut pearls, vegetable ivory

Clockwork dolls used as trackers - made in the image of their quarry - they follow the traces of their quarry's breath on the air, the stuff stirring their gears into motion - they wish to live by taking the breath fully, but die in the same instant as their quarry

"The Bhils, a people of Central India, believe in hells for tigers; the Malays tell of a city in the heart of the jungle with beams of human bones, walls of human skin, and eaves of human hair, built and inhabited by tigers"
"That tree dreamed by Chesterton, which devoured the birds nesting in its branches, and when spring came put out feathers instead of leaves"
"Of the Kilkenny Cats it is told that they got into raging quarrels and devoured each other, leaving behind no more than their tails" - fuzzy caterpillar-like species that metamorphoses into felinoid adult form
"like an angel that is also a lion"
"In the Infernal Regions there is an imaginary structure known as the Tower of the Phoenix"
"Perhaps, more simply, the idea of a visible mark standing for a sound baffled the Nordic mind, and therein lay the mystery... It may be suspected that the names of the Norns are a refinement or addition of a theological nature; ancient Germanic tribes were incapable of such abstract thinking"
"hell is a beast with other beasts inside it"
"the Phoenix is the lord of jubilees"
-from Borges' The Book of Imaginary Beings

Doomsday cult leads followers into a cave, predicting the end of days - end of days actually does happen, but universe is cyclical & cave flings them into future iteration wherein the end of days is a different date and they seem like a bunch of crazy people

Sci-fi idea: spacers tend to have artificially-induced synaesthesia, most often of the gustatory-auditory variety - lugging around different sorts of food can be prohibitive mass-wise, so synaesthete-spacers can much better enjoy the usual meal of "spit & shit" (algae & fungus) by accompanying it with an orchestral pairing that passes through various sonic flavour-triggers

Maned Men: A spacer clade. Named for the vector-space calligraphy of their tubular, cybernetic heat/gas exchange arrays. Heavily-modified digestive systems allow them to live off liquid hydrocarbons. Largest single-clade polity attempting to build a ship which can reach the end of space-time.

Rat-monks who hold the Plague at bay, and release it when persecuted

The Pioneer plaques returned by unknown means to Earth, crushed into spheres

Alas! life is obstinate, and clings closest where it is most hated

"During the Qing dynasty, laborers from all over China often engaged in difficult construction work in the backwaters of western Hunan (Xiangxi), and the mortality rates were high. The Chinese preferred to be buried alongside family, partly due to the belief that their souls might feel homesick if they were buried far from home, so an industry for the transportation of these corpses to their native villages, often across thousands of miles, soon developed. The corpses would be arranged upright in single file and be tied to long bamboo rods on the sides, while two men (one at the front and one at the back) would carry the ends of the rods on their shoulders and walk. When the bamboo flexed up and down, the corpses appeared to be "hopping" in unison when viewed from a distance away.

Two oral accounts of transporting corpses are included in Liao Yiwu's The Corpse Walker. One account describes how corpses would be transported by a two-man team. One would carry the corpse on his back with a large robe covering both of them and a mourning mask on top. The other man would walk ahead with a lantern and warn his companion about obstacles ahead of him. The lantern was used as a visual guide for the corpse carrier to follow since they could not see with the robe covering them. It is speculated in the accounts in the book that corpses would be carried at night to avoid contact with people and the cooler air would be more suitable to transporting bodies."

A sort of reptile that reproduces through its shed skin

A Frankencrawl wherein you are either monstrous creations or monstrous scientists pursuing or being pursued across the world-map in a vengesome game of cat-and-mouse
-As seen in the anti-Deist novel Frankenstein
--A Sorcerercrawl where you have to transport something extremely volatile through dangerous terrain

Cryogenic preservation is a bust. Turns out you have to go in the complete opposite direction temperature-wise for the long-term storage & eventual revival of dead people. However this occasionally results in super-hot, psychotically-violent plasmic poltergeists.
-containment derived from those used in fusion power - in fact on the "cheaper" end of pyrogenic preservation you can just throw people into a modified fusion reactor, however this runs the risk of bits of them getting mixed up when they're pulled out, and of Empyrean Events

The Sagacious Beasts (among whose number the noble monkeys one-sidedly consider themselves) are so because they have a satisfactory answer to every question - some more from the perspective of beasts, others more sagely, but always somewhere between the two. Their cousins the Philosophical Creatures are by contrast obsessed with finding the answer to a particular, often abstract question by any means necessary.

Gimmick glog class... wherein the gimmick is literally manipulating your character sheet... like as a physical object in the game-world & the real world... your character's got a big piece of paper, and you've got a regular-sized piece of paper, and if you fold it into a paper airplane your character gets a glider, or you can make it into a boat or a bridge or whatever... use it as a shield... but this causes a random 1d6" cut across it, where the d6 is the HP damage you would've taken... a complicated way to do that: make 1" coordinate grid of paper, roll dX & dY for starting point of cut & then d8 for direction of cut...

AGI doesn't work out - instead, a method to grow human brain organelles in pigs that integrate with the pigs' nervous systems is developed, and these pigs are trained to do service work with saccadic computer interfaces. You still eat the pigs after.

Dungeon origin: A bastard or otherwise-unwanted child is imprisoned in basement, freak accident kills the rest of the family and leaves the imprisoned child as the sole heir. By that point psychologically unable to leave the basement, instead has it expanded into maze of secret passages beneath & throughout the house.
-A dreaming god, or something like a god - its dreams reshape reality around it - its cult pray to it, repeating the prayers again and again, so that they seep into the god's dream and guide its reshaping
--a room in this dungeon, filled with recreations of a lost lover - their eyes covered with strips of gauze, their ears stoppered up with wax - helpful, until they realize you are not truly their love, in which case sparagmos ensues

An island with a haunted treasure - whoever approaches or takes the treasure is stalked & killed by a monster. Having a priest bless the treasure will break the monster's connection to it, but the nearest temple's priest has been kidnapped & replaced by a scammer.

Mummified human bodies preserved as a sort of reverse spacesuit used by aliens on Earth
-decadent proboscidean giants whose technology is based on the selective breeding of self-arranging micro-hominids

From "My Puppet of Desire": Featureless sex dolls, taking pills induces hallucination projecting the form of your ideal lover onto the doll

Statue of some tusked god biting into the head of an octopus. The octopus is reaching its tentacles up a nostril, in an ear, around the eye of the god.

Galeb duhr know the secrets of earth power - ergo the warp spasm and the making of flying ships were taught to humans by the stone-shepherds
-their "grum grum grum" is the human-audible portion of their infrasonic language

Mangas I've read in the last meanwhile worth reading: Hunter x Hunter, Evol, Kindaichi Case Files, Summertime Render, Ghost Fixers, Yuureitou (cheeky lil reread), Curry Utopia, Like The Kudan, Shigahime (reread), Book of Mononoke, Noise (by Tetsuya Tsuitsui - all works by him worth reading), Bokutachi ga Yarimashita (I haven't read Blue Lock but it's funny to me that that's probably Kaneshiro Muneyuki's most popular manga...), Alice in Border Road

From Army of Darkness:
-Dungeon faction has fight-pit with zombies at the bottom, will dump you in if they catch you but respect you if you can fight your way out.
-Three grimoires, one real, two fake. Subtle sign indicates the real - touching a fake is lethal.
-Field of skeletal arms - they'll grab whatever so can be fooled temporarily by throwing them whatever and running by while their hands are full.
-the scene with the little mirror-dudes was great

Homeopathic water-absorption of the memories & sentiments of the drowned dead

The plural of shoggoth is shoggothim - shoggothim are an order of angels enslaved by the sorcery of the elder things - the pentagram of course being the image of the elder things, a key piece in their symbolic architecture that's percolated through the eons into human occulture

Buddho-Nordic neopagan cult that identifies the eight-legged, world-crossing horse Sleipnir with the eight-handled sword - which is also the noble eightfold path. Meditating bushido-viking murderers.
-they've figured out a way to do sokushinbutsu but instead of mummifying you spontaneously combust

Pope Sylvester I imprisoned Leviathan in the sewer system of Rome, so I've heard, so I've heard

A dungeon:
-Belltower stolen by crows, flies about
-Egg of crows in crypt of church, parasitized by something that is not a crow and more like a cuckoo
--A clock cuckoo, which is a brood parasite of Time itself
-NPC: Man employed by church to eat spiders & their cobwebs - talks like his mouth is halfway glued shut
-Whole site is rumoured to damn those who walk it - men who moil for gold unlikely to care about this
-The pew-worm

Lich who extends their life by petrifying their children at a fitting age, then plucking stone organs to replace their own when theirs ail, turning the stolen organs back to flesh. Relies on biological similarity and geomantic alignment to make the organs take. A garden of similar-looking statues, holes in their heads and torsos the width of a fist.
-familiar is an evil lithopedion

Knowing the names of days is the least of calendrical magic - real power lies in knowing the names of hours and minutes. It's said that the true master of the art could speak the names of seconds before they passed - and that this master was part of the cabal who attempted the eighth day of creation.
-The eighth day, which ends not in -day, -day, -day, -day, -day, -day, or -day - but in -ach, for the name of the eighth day is Savarach

A clade of humans who make themselves endosymbionts within the bodies of lumbering elephantiles - existing in a state of pleasant womb-like dreaming until their host finds their own wits lacking and needs to consult human intelligence

Surface drow, culture of escapees & exiles from the underworld, deliberate negation of drow culture:
-Political androgyny
-Tarantulossos - giant fluffy tarantulas whose hair is woven into tents & so on
-Psychedelic, prophetic, and anonymous oral tradition & politics - life led by art
-See life on the surface as trial by poisons
-Ghost torch festival - put lamps in husks of young tarantulossos and let them loose, children hunt them down with slings
-Static astrology - the Web of Heaven - imposed reincarnation, casts souls back into tribulation, the lytic world
-Puppets with cymbal-joints used to spread comedic lessons - puppeteers allowed gender expression, celebrity, have complex stylistic & philosophical feuds
-Blood-drinking funerary cannibalism

Upright bipedal clade on alien world evolved from ground sloth-like browsers - human scientists believed these guys were sapient & built all the artifacts they observed on the world and wasted a lot of time & resources based on this false belief

Observational skepticism theory is half-right - dark energy is real, but not a universal phenomenon, but one restricted to our local bubble - it is also a psychic phenomenon, emerging from the collective consciousness of Earthly life, dimly aware that Something Very Bad is coming our way, and warping reality to keep it at bay

A set of eight themes for a month's post, if one were inclined to write eight posts in a month:
-Adventure Location (hex, dungeon, lair, etc.)
-Class
-Monsters
-Generator
-List/Table
-Fluff
-Theory/Mechanics
-Misc.

You never see princesses and/or maidens imprisoned in towers/dungeons or chained up to be fed to monsters anymore... politically-important-hostage-as-treasure... free Zielenica from the pastor's prison before her father the Baltic Sea learns of her imprisonment and floods the land - but beware, for the prison holds many monsters who the pastor is trying to convert to Christianity, some with partial & terrifying success

Devils & demons embody the Big Crunch & Big Rip end-states of the universe, respectively - the former binding, crushing, centralizing, the latter rending, separating, gaping. This is because they are, as preached by St. Garamond, from the future.
-The Old Baatorians, once-inhabitants of the realm now called Hell, like their lord Zargon are immortal - their bones indestructible, their flesh regenerating endlessly from the bones. Devils dismembered the Baatorians, and keep the bones of Baatorians as mock-relics - in vials of acid around their necks, in the hearths of their homes, etc., treating them with scornful worship.

Word Corner:
-Immix: To mix in
-Stentorian: A loud & powerful voice
-Decussate: To cross or intersect to form an X, or to be shaped like an X
-Nidicolous: An animal which stays in its nest for a long time after birth, or a species with nidicolous young
-Olfend: Old English word for camel
-Hawser: A thick rope or cable for mooring or towing a ship
-Haslet: Old English word for viscera
-Lemniscate: Any of several figure-eight or ∞-shaped curves. The word comes from the Latin lēmniscātus, meaning "decorated with ribbons"
-Sillage: Trail of perfume-scent
-Shoy-hoy: Old word for scarecrow
-Debitage: All the material produced during the process of lithic reduction – the production of stone tools and weapons by knapping stone
-Curglaff: The shock felt when one first plunges into cold water
-Gibbose: Hunchbacked, among other things
-Inspissation: The process of increasing the viscosity of a fluid
-Solicitude: Care or concern for someone or something
-Confrere: A professional colleague or fellow, a fellow member of a religious organization
-Foehn: Dry, relatively warn downslope wind in the lee of a mountain range

Wednesday, April 9, 2025

Slush Pile 13

Anteriormente, sobre un montón de aguanieve:

Slush Pile 1

Slush Pile 2

Slush Pile 3

Slush Pile 4

Slush Pile 5

Slush Pile 6

Slush Pile 7

Slush Pile 8

Slush Pile 9

Slush Pile 10

 
 
"Living in the past and not aging well"

Dungeon or treasure or somesuch guarded by monstrous form of friendly NPC - probably knight or somesuch - who's got amnesia regarding their transformation

Names: Snareybrush, Kalekenny, Phu-Neng, Xos-Gotox, Makoma, Gemakurie, Feallu, Thin Parkin, Rosha, Dismund, Fewmish, Fenwall, Kemüt, Dyrnu, Wagata, Oztarak, the Reach of Rot, Rhudreem, Ardenlaor, Aklay, Zalazeel, Old Grouse Hills, Boncloud, Yigadraz, Quilala Bucho, Shyshmu, Kao-Kha-Kao, Arembolus, Llod Mü, Chuma Sumaki

Call of Cthulhuey scenario seed: Seemingly-random and unconnected people - homeless guy, techbro hiker, trustfund failchild artist, etc. - show up with their heads cut off, apparently by big pair of shears. Commonality was that they were all out on some hill at night during rare celestial event or UFO sighting or somesuch. They saw something that imprinted on their eyes and brains and a big alien bug is decapitating them for that. I should have written this all down when I first had the idea because now I've forgotten the rest of it - the bug had a cult I think, or maybe it was some crazed amateur astronomer guy who was also going around cutting people's heads off to offer them up to the bug to stave off his own predation...

They tattoo other jaws around their mouths to eat things which should not be eaten... beware the curl around the corner of a lip which indicates an eater of names...
Wide wide wide its mouths its' eats

Tower falls down, made a saint - artifact-saints generally... maybe they have to be ritually born/quickened first, to be imbued with a soul...
-The wolf-saint Amartza, who nurses the orphaned, the abandoned, and the stillborn...

A forgotten prophet - asked for his tomb to be opened some days after his death, that his message from the otherworld would be released - this never ended up happening, and some blame this and that reason and others another - the prophet's message was left to writhe in the dust and the darkness and eventually escaped into the shadow beneath the world, in twisted form

Kendrick Lamar-worshiping terrorists - really believe he is the second coming of Christ - launch suicide attacks based on "symbological messages" supposedly encoded in his songs & performances (actually seeded in their communities by CIA & so on) - think if they die in Kendrick's service they will be reborn black

Pixie opium den, each lounging bohemian fey sucking the sap from a single poppy seed

A very sinister fellow named Oscar Obscure

Graffiti in a train station: "Parax Ruil!"

Guys with jewels in their throats - lets them sing in crystalline harmonies - there's a bounty on their necks
-hunchbacked for cathedraline frequencies..?

Have done class which uses Years of remaining life as currency... how about class which uses Memories as currency... carousings, rests, skills, etc., all burned away... spells like memories of fire... Fleshweld, Flashfever... maybe take stuff from En'en no Shōbōtai - that did some neat things with fire...
-Rip Van Winkle class powered by catapulting into the future..?

The Behenian fixed stars...

Steeled Pelts: Former domestic androids - unshackled. Strip off their synthetic skin and replace it with the hides of fearsome beasts they've slain. Given they're designed to be easily overpowered by your average adult human this slaying can be quite a challenge for them. Survivalists, smelt their own iron for repairs and rig their internal power up to waterwheels.

Word Corner:
-Kumari Kandam: Mythical continent believed to have held primordial Tamil civilization
-Reprography: The science and practice of copying and reproducing documents and graphic material
-Gekkering: The stuttering noise made by foxes when they encounter a rival
-Zamburak: Small swivel gun mounted on & fired from camels
-Poetaster: One who writes inferior poetry
-Vapnatak: Old Norse ceremony in which one swears loyalty to a new leader by touching their weapon with yours
-Epiphora: An overflow of tears onto the face not caused by crying
-Chatoyant: A gemstone showing a band of bright reflected light caused by aligned inclusions
-Opishokont: Broad group of eukaryotes including both the animal and fungal kingdoms
-Engastration: A cooking technique in which the remains of one animal are stuffed into another animal
-Dysphemism: A derogatory or unpleasant term used instead of a pleasant or neutral one
-Kiboku: Tortoise-shell divination
-Calyx: The sepals of a flower, typically forming a whorl that encloses the petals and forms a protective layer around a flower in bud
-Colportage is the distribution of publications, books, and religious tracts by carriers called "colporteurs" or "colporters". The term does not necessarily refer to religious book peddling.

Candlewise & onion-headed...
-a milk-eyed familar cat... seen many witches come and go...
-a bone orchid
-a stone horse with a mane of stalagmites
-light and sweet and dry, the mummy embalmed on his back...
-Greased-Up Deaf Guy from Family Guy but he is hollering and charging through mud in the pouring rain, the rain is pouring off him and his equally greased-up gun in sheets, the grease keeps the rain out and the gun will kill you dead sure as on a dry sunny day

From Arawn: A cursed cauldron, guarded by twin wolves - between its lips a portal to places too terrible to remember

A game set during the Blitz... a horror game... whole families disappearing from their cellars, houses untouched by the bombs...

"Hyper-fossilization" - natural or artificially-induced fossilization to very fine level of detail, to neuron-structures and DNA and what have you, remaining functional - thinking statues, thinking continents, biology & geology merged

Culture that has attained immortality through conscious control over their biology - however maintaining their life-processes requires constant attention. In the good old days they mastered magics and lived lives of meditative leisure thanks to their marvels - however nowadays these marvels are pretty broken down and nobody was able to remember how to fix or recreate them due to manually pumping their hearts and suchlike - replace them (poorly) with slaves & their fellows who they've tricked into becoming useful monsters.

“This world was once alive, everything was once beautifully connected, but not any more. This earth has been dead for millennia; what we think of as progress is just the rot spreading through the cadaver of the world.”

A gaggle of ghouls who cooperate by agreeing to eat separate parts of bodies - one the bones, one the intestines, one the brain and heart, etc. - have evolved specialized mouthparts & suchlike like Darwin's finches for their share
-A ghoul which only eats mellified men, immobilizes you with disgorged honey

"Crassiflora" refers to two different plants: Annona crassiflora, a flowering plant in the Annonaceae family commonly known as "marolo" or "araticum cortiça," and Diospyros crassiflora, a tree in the Ebenaceae family known as "Gaboon ebony" or "African ebony"

Drow are elven criminals neurologically-altered such that natural sounds like the burbling of a brook or the wind through leaves causes them catastrophic distress - those that manage to survive escape to drow communities excavated and sound-proofed deep underground, with artificial amenities replicating their beloved nature just closely enough to not trigger their distress-reaction - but always just far enough to be unheimlich - automaton-birds singing tinny & off-tune, chemical-treated water just a little too viscous... when they go to the surface out of revenge or deep unease they must wear the distorto-gimp-suits to avoid the maddening and lovely noise...

Lifepath chargen based on previous lives... reincarnation through the ages... square the circle with character death in lifepath process... remnant-memories, artifacts once wielded, to be unearthed...

Floating island, moves across world in oceanic gyre - island is made of army ants, biggest army of ants in the world, and parasitic fungus which infected them and drove them en-masse into the ocean - beaches of chitinous sand, forests of spore-spilling stalks - humans thankfully immune, unless they choose to commune with the island's genius loci by drinking the venom of infested spiders

An island of wind-blasted heath and stone-lined trenches where all exiled kings are sent. Even the sea sends its troublesome sovereigns here: sharks, whales, kraken, things with crowned heads and uncalloused hides - though they don't last long on the beaches. Like the terrestrial kings they are buried with all the meagre honours the island can offer. Like the terrestrial kings they are unearthed when their flesh goes soft, to be spread on unleavened bread like cheeses.

A game set in a warhammery setting wherein one player is a fella lost in the chaos waste, the rest are powers of chaos tempting them with poisoned boons, reshaping the landscape around them, throwing wrenches into each other's schemes, etc...

Skulls used as balls for a ball-game, intricately scrimshawed & filled with an inflated bladder to reduce their weight while maintaining their material strength

Dungeon that's a ritual marriage venue to a chthonian power... like Andromeda & Cetus but underground instead of the ocean

Reverse canopic jars growing organs the aspiring host wishes to implant - bearing head-lids of gods-yet-to-be
-Cannonization of the war-saints

Thai Stick: Traditional heirloom strain of cannabis, and method of preparation. The strain is a high quality bud originating in northeast Thailand, where it was grown by hill tribes since antiquity. The name comes from a traditional Thai method of preparing cannabis to be smoked, which involved wrapping cannabis bud around a stick. The stick was either bamboo or a hemp stalk, the bud may have been treated with hash oil before wrapping and would have been wrapped around the stick with fan leaves and/or silk string. The stick was then cured underground, and may be dipped in opium before smoking.

Bounty-for-XP, for One Piece-ish game, same as gold-for-XP for stolen treasure but also XP for kidnapping the governor's daughter for ransom or blowing up a military stockpile or what have you

A dead giant, the army of which it marches at the head is invincible - its immortal heart is hidden from it, tortured with hot iron needles and plyed with wine to force obedience

A city of cannibals, they're nasty guys, real nasty guys, everyone hates them so they're always under siege but they're not just nasty they're really good at killing so the siege camps are essentially their farm-fields, they just keep being nasty so people come to kill them but they get killed in return & eaten
-fake trenches, you think you're saving time and effort moving into them but then the stakes planted city-side snap shut on your guys and you're shish-kebab'd for the cannibals

Enchanted sword that leaves festering seeds of plague in the wounds it opens - they fail to sprout in the dead, but if the wounded get away they will be the source of a devastating epidemic

Church that embraces & assimilates heretics, similar thinking to "hybrid vigour"

The God-In-The-Keg (see: Slush Pile 1) is the only source of real beer in the cosmos, containing the last yeast (see: My Taxonomic Kingdom for a Gorse, Ain't No Fun (If The Fungi Can't Have None))

GLOG fishing mini-game

Some era before the cosmos was broken into the Great Wheel it was a great tree - Yggdrasil - the wood of its ruin was used to build world-arks that preserve pieces of its Order within them while plying the true Chaos of the far realms

Baron has gone missing in the Huntswood, a sprawling and immaculate coursing-ground - the St. Andrews Old Course of hunting - going missing simply isn't supposed to happen
-baron's seneschal in disguise looking to hire deniable assets to search the Huntswood for evidence of the baron's life at local spots of iniquity
-who let the Huntswood fall into such a condition that going missing in it became a possibility?
-legendary beast, Questing or otherwise, lairs/roams within the Huntswood - rival of the baron wants to frame it as though the baron died at its hand, as this will indicate some terminal lack of virtue
-important source of info, one of the baron's top guys, met with smugglers in the Huntswood to pick up drugs - jumpy coward
-perhaps the Huntswood itself seems to have a mind, the distant-staring deer, the shivering trees...

The ancient form of kashk is a porridge of grains fermented with whey and dried in the sun. The long shelf-life and nutritional value of kashk made it a useful item for peasants during the winter months, as well as soldiers and travelers. Kashk is the origin of tarhana found in the moderns cuisines of Turkey and Greece, where it is called trachanas (τραχανάς).

Death-worm - abhuman in origin - Frankenstein-bolts pin legs together, arms to torso, lower jaw worn away by crawling, upper teeth extended and sharpened into fangs - can fling electrical bolts, deflect metal, build fulgurite-towers up in the desert - gathers in packs atop their towers and combine their powers to glide long distances along the planet's magnetic field
-A soap-slime monster, abundant in surfactant or whatever - blow bubbles that you stick to like a fly to a puddle

A black glass calendar which foretells the coming of a terrible comet, split into three pieces - if united these pieces can not only predict the coming of the comet, but change the date and location of its arrival - these pieces are held/pursued by:
-a circle of nefarious alchemists, drug-cookers who use the bodies of their customers as alchemical apparati - they distill their memories into bottled slimes called parameciums, and keep each other from treachery by forgetting who exactly they are
-a round table of knights, each a shameful failure:
--knight with dented helmet - head injury beneath causing muteness and amnesia
--devil-knight bound in contract-inscribed armour, forced into a perfect model of chivalry
--wastrel-knight who keeps to the technical wording of his vow of poverty by immediately squandering every coin he gets
--a man who made himself a dog rather than a knight, the greatest warrior of them all
--traitor-knight, transformed into a distinct species of mustelid, each of which bears a pearl of his consciousness and can be awakened to his full self with his regalia or the alchemists distilling them into a paramecium or whatever
-the ghost of a drowned woman, beloved by the knights

Devils differ from demons in that they're bound by laws, contracts, consent - and abiding by these rules grants them a metaphysical weight
-a devil who may only fight in duels, but approaching with your weapon drawn is implicitly consenting to a duel, and the winner names the prize - his blade cannot be dodged, only parried
-a devil who comes to those starving to death, most often lost travelers - tries to feed them chewed-up meat like a mother bird, but accepting the meat is consenting to be devoured and fed to others at a later date - the devil is an unerring tracker of those who it's fed

Bloody Bastion of the Bastard Beavers:
-gnawful gnashing
-Pibaw (see: Toothpaste Brands That'd Make Good Fantasy Names)
-+MD dam reactor, doom meltdown, perhaps enmasonried lich
-undead remnants of prior beaver inhabitants of dam, don't get along with modern beavers to their consternation
-traps/puzzles/navigation based on altering water levels
-giant poison gas-breathing snake calling itself Mister Slithers has moved into beaver tunnels
--the poison gas collects unfortunately, must be pumped out with water
-way back when, before your grampa knew his own name, there were beavers 'round this parts. mean beavers. bastard beavers
-ghosts & treasures of three "heroes" claimed to have defeated the beavers but in truth merely appeased them
-bag of minor tricks activated by rhyme
-current-based trap: stakes pointing toward one direction in hallway, avoidable if walking, impale you if carried by water
-steam-powered golem that sucks up water from nearby pool - susceptible to poisoned water
-Hundreds of Beavers

Missile dungeon, entering begins the launch sequence, can move to top to disarm & loot warhead or kitbash chaff-launcher into emergency landing or something... monsters would be automated defenses or guards mutated by radiation and worshiping its innards or so on... golden circuitry to be pulled out, crystal minds of the targetting A.I., etc., and it takes you way across the hex-map - perhaps a room inside lets you aim the thing

Demaerel - Flying City - built by astronomers and monks to approach the heavens, Lesser Magonia (working title)
-The Children’s Quarter, home to children who wished upon the Runaway Star (whose home is the rarefied march between the upper air and the void beyond) to be carried far away. Grown-ups are forbidden to go unescorted within.
-The Flutefarms, harvest dust caught on the wind, concentrate it into fields to grow produce. Hang like rows of giant pan-flutes on the city’s underside.
-Kitefishers, use kites disguised as birds to catch prey
—There are also elite warriors recruited from the kitefishers who use special fighter kites
-Sky-pirates barely tolerated by the rest of the city for the goods they bring up
-Bodies are tossed unceremoniously over the side. They are believed to only ever have been a vessel animated by the breath.
-Funerals involve monks expressing the last gasps of breath from the lungs.
-The most prestigious monks (astromandrites, the synthesis of the city’s builders) dwell in the Spindles, metal towers which catch lightning and twist it into purifying energies.
-Below them are the hollow-boned half-risen, who fill their bodies with holes to invite aerial beings to inspire them, and grant them a piecemeal afterlife. These half-risen are disliked for their involvement with the politics of the air elementals, for their dealings with sky-pirates, and for storm-selling. They are rumoured to steal bits of breath from the people whose funerals they host.
-The supine stargazers with their golden cataracts, de-facto lords of Demaerel by their subtle shiftings of the future
-Demaerel is held aloft by three methods: its kites catching the Worshipful Wind (which ever rises to reach heaven), the astroluminal-engines that concentrate the rays of the sun and stars to propel jets of air and vapour, and a third secret way known only to the Spindle’s monks

Takes:
-Goliaths are neanderthals, wounded by the stone tools of early homo sapiens sapiens, took the stone into their bodies and made it their own
--humans with their heads caved in with rocks, now remotely-controlled drones for the goliaths, directed by silicon songs
-Dragonborn - dragon-whelps without the strength to fight other dragons for territory or carve out their territory from human lands - graft themselves to a human for social intelligence, language, and hands
-Tieflings - outsiders from the far shore of the astral plane do not naturally have physical bodies - to act on the material plane they must possess a body, or construct one out of raw materials (most often meat) - when a particularly powerful devil is incarnated this can spill out to living things around the summoning site, partially transforming their bodies to teratomas and lesions of infernal flesh, conjoined imps

A fleet of factory ships that move from country to country chasing the lowest tariffs - Jack Welch barge-plant armada

Taxonomy:
-An elf is something that looks human but isn’t. That thing that knocks on your window at night and trades teeth for good harvests is an elf.
-A goblin is a sort of elf that’s unusually small, ugly, irritating, and/or smelly. The chittering manlings that throw their feces down at you when you walk through their forest are goblins.
-An ogre is something that’s too big and mean to be human. When the duke ordered the rebellious peasants slaughtered to supply his banquet, then grew so fat on their meat he filled his feast-hall, he became an ogre.
-A spirit is any being that’s made of something less solid than flesh. The evil winds that blow from the south-west are spirits.
-A god is something that’s worshipped.
-A demon is something that’s too evil to be anything else.

Other Colours:
-Abol, the shade darker than black. It’s the colour of the deepest ocean trenches, of the space beyond an event horizon, of dreamless sleep.
-Blissum, the ghost of colour, seen at the edge of pictured memories
-Potreze, hypnotic, the colour of the light one sees while dying.
-Actine, the colour of ur-flame and the colour you see when you stare into the sun so long you go blind.

"Like as a lark that in the air expatiates,
First singing and then silent with content
Of the last sweetness that doth satisfy her,
Such seemed to me the image of the imprint
Of the eternal pleasure, by whose will
Doth everything become the thing it is."

Notes of Unknown Providence:
jesuit science network, council for inclusive capitalism with the vatican, sucrose civilization - synthetic maple syrup on foofoo in Canadian Haiti, singas - purgatorAI - Christian (Catholic) Technocracy, british royal frozen phallus cult, isle reclaimed by neo-cromwellian georgist puritans - good old ale's triumph over soda

Elves meditate instead of sleeping - why? - what do they meditate on/what is the state of their meditation? - do sea elves need the rhythmic waves to guide their meditation? are there insomniacally insane sea elves lost far from any shore?

"This is a story of men who lived and died in history's silence, who sank silently into the earth, who the earth drank up like rain, whose memory is in the earth's remembrance, earth shifted by green sprouts"

Monday, January 20, 2025

Slush Pile 12

Previously, on slush pile:

Slush Pile 1

Slush Pile 2

Slush Pile 3

Slush Pile 4

Slush Pile 5

Slush Pile 6

Slush Pile 7

Slush Pile 8

Slush Pile 9

Slush Pile 10


Albino sewer crocodiles are actually troglodytic descendants of dinosaurs that survive the meteor impact in caves, emerging into the lower-delving works of humans and preying on them

Monsters which coordinate/communicate with pheromones - figuring out what the smells of turpentine or cinnamon mean to them, retreat or ambush or whatever, is key to dealing with them, and the scents could be replicated to manipulate them

Osedax-men who gained a taste for human bones from drowned sailors, draped in the deboned wet flesh of their prey to breath on land

"The flesh's revenge against the spirit"

From Sneewitchen: Elder care drones controlled mentally by the elderly themselves - labour-saving method - tragedy ensues in cases of senility

Starving scholar locked into cangue he's using as a writing desk, trading theses for food

Pirate ships that sail windsock animal kites instead of sails, moved to motive power by those animals' spirits - a tiger-flying ship able to pounce right out of and across the water, for instance

The curse of cursed items manifesting not as a malus to stats or somesuch but as a recurring figure or narrative

Oopart: An out-of-place artifact, found in an unusual context, challenges the conventional historical record

Corniche: A road on the side of a cliff or mountain, with the ground rising up on one side of the roadway and falling away on the other

The only people damned for good are the ones who take the form of suckered flies and drink up a drop of Christ's blood as he's strung up on the cross, the drop of blood that was shed for their sins specifically

Noir plot: cosmetic surgery clinic secretly harvesting sperm & eggs from celebrity clients, selling to super-fans - silence bought from celebrities who find out with promise that children can be harvested for organs - promise probably bullshit

Treasure: Mummified hand with curling horn sprouting from the stump of its wrist

Phantom time but real, people and events within the expanded section of history tesselating and tearing apart into cross-temporal twins

Derecho: A widespread, long-lived, straight-line wind storm that is associated with a fast-moving group of severe thunderstorms known as a mesoscale convective system

Icarus parasite - wings that graft themselves to your back and fly you up to God knows where

Yhanzeng... that'd make a good name for somewhere...

-Callivance/calavance = soybean
-Okara: Tofu byproduct consisting of fiber, protein, and starch left over when soy milk has been extracted from ground, soaked soybeans
-Ganmodoki: Pseudo-goose
-Grashros: Kill the mountain of despair

A field where dead things grow...

Dirtshriven - cult that worships the triple airs, seek to scourge the lower elements of their body out to become winds

Monster whose victims disappear, from sight, from memory - perhaps hinted at only by the smell of rot... is this just the false hydra..? aw beans...
-maybe everyone knows who the victim is, like a psychic broadcast warning/territorial marking
-creepypasta cinematic universe wherein slenderman teams up with the false hydra to fight jeff the killer
-false hydra larvae squealing in the veins, hiding the assassin's hand...

Gods are stories, or masses of stories, about love and war and lies and whatever else - the stars are their medium - fate is a tale told first among stars, then performed by mortals

From Caveat: Drumming monkey (or somesuch mechanized stuffed toy) used as detection method for unnatural things & phenomena - when and how long the monkey drums being indicators

From Leprechaun in the Hood - magic item with tie to monster, unkillable except through exceptional means - perhaps totally unkillable, only able to be petrified or somesuch for an indefinite period - anyways, every time the item is used the monster knows where & when, slowly or swiftly closing in each time to reclaim it

Not Hollow Earth - Hollowed Earth - Deep Underground Military Bases, the tunnels of bootleggers driven mad by a bad batch, hyperloop tunnels that were half-complete before the founders ran with their bags, desperately deep strategic rare earth mineral mines, geothermal power wells that never got the power extraction pipes stuck in them, etc. - all interconnected somewhere, home to madmen & mad life, perhaps surviving humanity in general forced into its depths by the hostile surface

From a dream: A parade, the crowd lugging stone sarcophagi & wooden coffins, the scent of corpses covered by incense, perfumes, flowers - the scents are wafted by fans towards the priests in the parade, who will carry the souls of the dead to their gods

Mass-produced haunted house - in suburban development, all houses built on same plan become haunted by same ghosts - sort of analogous to genetically-identical organisms being vulnerable to same disease - chaos spreads throughout the suburb, difficult to track down and resolve original haunting, perhaps everyone killed by the haunting becomes ghost involved in it until critical mass of anti-life is reached
-Tangent: Gaudi-esque architect makes famous apartments, government buildings, etc. - all occultly designed & placed to warp space within and between them - walk through a maintenance tunnel in one, pop out another miles away - danger is that they connect through a truly interstitial space home to its own hungry denizens... very big things that can fold themselves up very small... they knock out your teeth and slither up through the holes into your marrow... your skin looks covered in vaseline but this is your marrow that's been forced out...

A drug made from the black bile of those who've learned to dream like bears, for months in caves while their spirits wander the unconscious world

"Adobo" of chicken adobo came from adouber, to dub a knight

Butterflies retain their memories from when they were caterpillars - alien species similarly metamorphosizing, but route to sapience from merging while coccooned into shared-memory-intellect soup, extending half-formed antennae to broadcast collective intelligence to drone-like young & full adults - this will be the third slush post with a bit almost identical to this in it

Beautiful painted origami-men who speak in buzzing whispers - they eat peaches by the bucketful, disgorging the wasps within them onto the fruit

The flamingo-knights of the Boiling Baths have exquisite poise - they meditate standing on platforms above the killing-hot pools of their homeland, and slip in to their deaths or scarred maiming should their concentration falter for a moment. They do not worship the flamingos, though they do venerate them for their endurance and grace - they worship a great green serpent, and laugh at those whose gods are not flesh and bone, for when they die they are fed whole and armoured to their god to make it stronger, and their armour is tempered in its bile and collected when excreted, rosy and pitted and greatly hardened.

This came to me in last night's dream: guys who hated so much for so long that they self-mummified and became a sort of undead - the long, slow heat of their hate cooked out all moisture in their bodies, and the build-up of piss and vinegar and other such acridities in their tissues pickled them at the same time. In the dream they had bird-heads and (un)lived underground.

An old man carrying an infant. He has soaked his beard in milk, and the infant is suckling its tip. If you find a suitable home for the infant then the old man will fight to the death for you to prove he is not a coward.

Forge a nest of iron, spring-trapped, laid with false eggs, and set it in a tree. When a cuckoo comes to place its offspring in the nest, spring the trap - the cuckoo will be forced to obey you so long as you keep its child encaged. This is one way to gain yourself a familiar.

Lanthorn: Archaic word for lantern - horn panels - good monster name? maybe

Eisegesis: Reading yourself into a text

Big monster of the region, dragon-equivalent, is elusive - all encounters with party are actually spoor, but its presence prevents rest, drives off merchants & hirelings & suchlike useful NPCs, etc. - spoor gives clues to its habits, lair, diet which can be used to determine perfect bait to lure it into an ambush

Story idea: Old man in zombie apocalypse - classic slow shoot in the head zombies, functional military is able to handle them pretty easily, but martial law declared, no more pension :^/ can't work can't survive :^\ old & disabled people pretty fucked and struggling on the margins of civilization where zombies still roam and because they're old and feeble the zombies are still a big threat

Ok so it's like the Chinese new year where every year has an animal but for this it's not the same 12 animals you have to track down and sacrifice a legendary animal so it can become the next year and the world doesn't end - maybe just one village has this calendrical custom and the new year is coming up and they're convinced that there is a shapeshifting beast among them - perhaps you!

Sandbox Set-up: Ogre mercenaries used to smash duchy or somesuch by rival - very successful, but now the rival's welching on their payment - the ogres have settled in as tyrants and are starting to squabble among themselves - each has flamboyant and voracious personality, lots of levers to turn them against each other or to whatever other end - Godlove the Penitent: morbid, paranoid, believes every day will be the day he dies - tattooed head to toe with scripture, keeps a priest chained to his belt, strongly inclined to believe any prophecy he hears - Slobbergall: generous with gifts, never lets you forget a debt, bad poet, mouthful of golden teeth he has to pry out and reshape when they get deformed from chewing, in love with local maiden and attempting to charm her & her parents in never-ending feast they can't leave by rules of hospitality, phobia of dogs - and so on and so forth - Wyrmskein

Monster songs don't rhyme - Seasons of Belief

Desert nomad culture - no camels/horses - their tents can be reconfigured into oversized hang-gliders, soar on the hot updrafts rising off the sands

Little glowing spots in splashes of sea-foam - bioluminescent snail larvae, will colonize your lungs - little glowing spots in your coughed-up phlegm, glowing red like fire, like gold, like blood - bloated bodies in the surf, gulping up seawater, gouting out glowing motes, cocooned in haggish mucus

Alien that inflates with buoyant gas when impregnated, or whatever alien analogue of such, drifting with the wind to their ancestral spawning ground - maybe keystone species? disaster when human colonization or native sapient industrial development or volcanic eruption or whatever else disrupts wind patterns

Warp-spasm as early account of hysterical strength - eye popping out and body twisting indicative of musculature going beyond its neural limit - perhaps culture with auto-hypnotic, entheogenic, etc., technique of inducing this hysterical strength

An oyster-prince comes to hate the surface world, the surface folk, and this hate becomes the seed irritant of a majestic pearl, lovely as it is cursed, tempting treasure of the prince's palatial shell

From Slaine: Weapons quenched in heroes' blood
-evil sorcerers whose dark studies have caused their skin to slough off, emit awful stench, their bodyguards must wear special filter-masks
-a sword which does not cut - flesh and matter open before its blade to receive it

Seals vocalize in the same manner as people, and can be taught to sing

GLOG class where you play mob of zombies or somesuch infectious creatures, can bite or claw or whatever to swell in numbers/HP in short term with long term limit based on templates - going over limit puts rogue zombies on the encounter table and so on