Musings on Monstrousness

A short post about a fixation of mine that being cool armor designs for cool unique knights so I am going to do it right now. It's setting-agnostic save for the assumption that Cool Knights exist and they have Cool Armor (though it somewhat leans toward my own setting in aesthetics) so lets gooooo 1d8 STYLE: 1. Plain ("white armor") 2. Gothic/Fluted 3. Maximilian/Pleated 4. All'Antica/Burgundian 5. Anima/Laminar 6. Mirror Armor 7. Transitional Plate/Chain-And-Plate 8. Anatomical/Heroic 1d4 CUIRASS SHAPE: 1. Flat 2. Globose 3. Pointed 4. Boxed 1d8 HELMET SHAPE: 1. Spherical 2. Obovate (sort of spherical but narrowing at the chin) 3. Epsilloid (Sigmeyer fit) 4. Ogival (Gondor Shape) with 1. Straight Sides 2. Convex Sides 3. Concave Sides 4. Brimmed Sides 5. Cylindrical (flat-topped) with 1. Straight Sides 2. Convex Sides 3. Concave Sides 4. Brimmed Sides 6. Domed (round-topped) with 1. Straight Sides 2. Convex Sides 3. Concave Sides 4. Brimmed Sides 7. Conical (Capirote...

The Known World is just a fraction of the heavenly sphere upon which we dwell, drifting haphazardly about Sol and circled in turn by dancing, shimmering Lune. And that sphere is just one of thirteen which it shares the day with. Though the machinations of magi, the telescopes of scholars, the secret wisdom of potent daimons, and much else besides, we have tentatively grown to understand our neighbors, and found a most disconcerting truth. They are all worse than here. Be they stunted and primitive, living short and brutish lives of misery, or decadent and crumbling, the endlessly-prolonged last gasp of a dying race, all other worlds bear life, but it is inferior in fecundity, in power, in health, in wholesomeness, or some combination thereof. While powerful sorcery or magnificent artifice may allow one to reach these worlds, and in the eras before the end of rational history it was known to occur, the perils within and the difficulty of the journey stymies any attempt to spread our rea...

Immortality has long been a fixation of man, and during the age of the Titans its solution was simple; hunt the gods and eat their flesh, and later it would extend to count their fellow men as prey. But even so, simple. After Salvation and the explosive growth of Gnosis, the wise began to look elsewhere. Small wonder that they sought the secrets of the soul, and sought to bind it. When living matter emerges from the soil, Numen flows into that questing life and grants it agency beyond merest instinct, and some degree of qualia. Granted cognizance and distinction within the container of its body, it stretches the form of its Worldly matter according to its arbitrary wants, wants instilled by the instincts of that very same form, vestigial and unclear. From the body comes wants of the soul. From the mind, the temperament of the spirit.  From this comes growth, disparity, and change. It is why one form of life is unalike to another, why one may breed something into something...

True Dragons  are horrid things, at once evoking a hint of the hirsute beast while still thoroughly bound to their scaled, primordial features. There is, some think, a time when such creatures ruled, when an even crueler and more inhuman set of Pagan Gods held sway. But that was a long time ago, and they are not the ones man knew. We can only infer their existence from the things that are left behind. The dregs of scale and fang and wing which do not belong to the order of life which is kin with man. Each and every one represents an "other", a road of life traveled once, but not again. Small wonder that their forms so often evoke fear in us. Perhaps some primordial memory of the days when we germinated from the earth as pale, wriggling animalcules, and then vermin huddling in trees or burrows, while those terrible monstrosities claimed dominion over the earth.  Serpents A common name for innumerable crawling things which slither, fly, skitter, or swim. Some have two, four...

The True Faiths are spiritual philosophies taken from a concept called Heaven and filtered through a human Prophet into a fragment of its totality; a Gospel. This Gospel enforces behaviors upon its adherents, from lightly touching the attendant masses to wholly possessing the highest echelons. In a land of Un-Worldly subversion both within and without, the Gospels are some of mankind's most stalwart protectors. But not without cost. Not without change. For most, the weekly attendants and quiet believers, the boon is simple; the urge of Primeval Sin is suppressed, and men may live as they would have had their ancestors not so deeply sinned. By no means are they perfect, but a particular burden has lifted from their hearts. They are cleansed of their wrongness and may, perhaps, seek something better. Heaven did not originate from the minds of men. Its Gospels erupted from them as their minds sought to grasp the profundity of what they encountered. It is this lack of human taint...