Musings on Monstrousness

An effigy of a man built in our image, sustained through Miracle and birthed by Gnosis. That is a golem, a human soul housing a body of surpassing physical tenacity. Break them apart, put them back together, extract the core of them and place it into another body. They are the ideal servant, soldier, and tool, depending on the structure used to make them. Indeed, any civilized land can boast at least a few, though places which have them so common as to render certain professions obsolete is a rare and wondrous sight. A golem's body is distinct from a mass of inanimate matter given life. Any magus can bid rocks to move or water to flow upwards if they wish, or rotting corpses to shamble about. Granted a pseudo-soul in a form unfitting for stable perpetuation, they rise to accomplish a task and then fall apart as worldly law asserts itself. A golem is more complex. For the soul to reliably puppet it it must be articulated or plastic in some way. It must be capable of standing and wal...

I don't really know where else to put this but I figure if anyone would be interested it would be the tabletop RPG enjoyers, especially since Cataphract got so popular (I am in a game and I am quite enjoying it). Some time ago, before I started blogging and before I started interfacing with the lovely GLoG community, I feverishly banged out something over the course of a week more or less from first principles and an agglomerated knowledge of vague experiences as a player in tabletop games of all sorts. I tried to gather people to playtest it but it repeatedly fell through, and over time I gave up on finding feedback. The gist of it is it is meant to let players create military factions from scratch to fight each other over control for one or a handful of star systems, both in space and on the ground. Vibe is Eclipse Phase meets Warlord Era China, in the sense that you are imagined as a kind of rootless army or microstate in the cosmic scheme of things desperately scrabbling for r...

I have spoken of the old horrors of the world, the scaled aberrations and humans-made-monsters , but there are other things which yet roam the earth that harken back to the time between, after the time of dragons but before the dawn of man. The primordial age when the Terrestrial Gods roamed the earth freely, and made of it a wild garden which trampled all lesser beings. They contested the hoary old wurms that crawled from the depths and the alien predators of the Outer Dark which flitted down to prey upon the world. And they fell, of course, as man devoured them. But their creations remain. Every great beast, every astounding hulk of flesh and sinew not claimed by dragon-kind, these are their children.  The Behemoth For all its fearsome bulk it does not feed on flesh but rather the trees and grasses, rendering fields barren and branches stripped. A bane to farmers and a trampler of hovels but not a hunter of men as other beasts are, save when maddened with rage by pain or so...

    Guns are loud, slow, messy, leave smoke everywhere, best used with a bunch of guys in a line or up close so you don't miss. Everyone knows that. Marksmen are freaks, obsessives. The kind of man who can reliably nail a man with a wheellock from an appreciable range has honed his craft for years, decades even.  You are not one of those masters, but you wish you were. There is a kind of romance to the gun. A raw lethality that bows and crossbows cannot match, combined with an ease of use, in the basics at least, which requires little skill to hone, to say nothing of the fact that it dispenses death from afar, where all those fearsome blades and pikes can't reach you. But oh, if only there was a way to match the true sharpshooters without putting in all that practice. This attracts certain kinds of spirits which are happy to help you enact your murderous desires. After all, guiding a bit of lead is a trivial matter, but can be just so rewarding. Those who are practitioner...

          Alchemy is a long-favored art among the peoples of the Known World. The arts of miracle and gnosis kept safe in flasks and alembics, the laws of the world distilled into potable reagents and tablets. Only sometimes does it go horribly wrong. Certainly such malfunctions are more a matter of misfiring equipment than the rending of the soul through exertions it is incapable of. A detonating boiler cares not for what purpose it heats water. It is understood that there are four essential elements which make up all Worldly matter. Indeed, all materials of the world can be burnt, boiled, distilled, or dissolved into these fundamental materials. However, the more durable the material, the more effort must be expended. The more complex the material, such as living flesh, the more nuanced and complex the recipe must be to fully separate it into its purest components. And of course, if one can break something apart, there is also the possibility of reconstit...

The wilds are not safe. Everyone knows that. Monsters and spirits, dragons and devils, brigands and magi, all threats widely spoken of and deeply feared. But they are not what most deal with. The shepherd, traveler, and poor sellsword looking to make a quick profit must contend with simple beasts. And of them, three great families are the most known for their depredations. That is not to say that other beasts cannot host eaters of men among them, but it is these clans whose reputations are blackest, and whose presence in any guise near universally threatens those who come upon them. While many are what one could hazard as mundane, average, predicable... there are always exceptions.      Wolves may be found in any place in the Known World with abundant prey to feed them. The most social of the three predacious clans, their kind primarily hunt in packs (2d6), or even great hordes (2d100) of several hundred if there are sufficient victuals to claim. Cities broken by siege or...