Musings on Monstrousness

"There are always mysteries in life. Why was it that Methuselah lived nine hundred years, and ‘Old Parr’ one hundred and sixty-nine, and yet that poor Lucy, with four men’s blood in her poor veins, could not live even one day?....Do you know all the mystery of life and death?.... Can you tell me why, when other spiders die small and soon, that one great spider lived for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish church and grew and grew, till, on descending, he could drink the oil of all the church lamps?" -Dracula Vampires love these things. Dracula especially kept a horde of them, everyone knows this. Big, fat spiders, stubby and black with rounded abdomens. They like ceilings and crevices that they can half-drop out of before using their strands of webbing to reel themselves back up, like mobile bait at the end of a fishing pole. Some say they're any spider that sips on a bunch of lamp oil, others that they're a separate breed. No better than a normal large s...

Here's a problem-causing perpetual motion machine. It's a circle of cylinders bound by a ring, moving up and down as it spins like a circular wave. No one really knows how it works but it is just in the middle of a field somewhere wherever would be most inconvenient for your setting specifically, though a town or a dungeon has perhaps been built around it. The Ring creates energy, about as much as a huge power plant might use. Creates it from nothing, bit by bit, radiating it into the world and the universe beyond. No cost, no fuss. You can use it to recharge anything. Spell slots, one-use enchanted objects, a nuclear submarine. Could a fusion power plant recharge it? If it were also magic? Then yeah. The problem is of course that everyone is constantly fighting over the damn thing. If not through actual violence then through some of the most vicious and uncompromising reservations and queues one can imagine. Who manages it (if its even being managed)? 1. Bureaucratic monk orde...

Yes im doing a twofer but these are both highly related in my mind trust me. You know how sometimes a game will be like here is goblins, then ice goblins, then cave goblins, then double goblins, but then we have a pink goblin creature called a Snurb that's slightly different and you bet there's 10 subtypes of these too! Well. I at once dislike this convention yet often find myself unconsciously aping it. My mind yearns for diversity within broader classifications as family is to species. And yet most things are not like this. Humans are humans (Despite much contention on the subject). We've got maybe 5ish types of slightly different elephants (there used to be more but you get the idea). When everything has 10 elemental subtypes, 3 planar variants, 5 specialist castes with a 1-in-6 chance of appearing in any given group, it all feels a little crowded doesn't it? I mean, I think you could make it work, but it would require approaching it with a particular mindset and set...

 I actually do have something on this as I am a prolific namer and often devise immense casts of funny little characters for my campaigns or worldbuilding projects and so on, though until the recent discourse on the subject i never interrogated myself on the exact mechanisms of my process. Having thought about it I can pinpoint a few details about it that probably consist of the core off how I go around naming guys. I also don't want to sound like I'm stating the obvious or what a bunch of people know but I'm trying to explain my process from first principles so I apologize if it sounds that way. Also I'm not gonna complain if people have entirely different methods or actually fuck with Herpys. 1. No historical names or things. I'm not naming someone like Euphemia or Narcolepsy. Not against it I just don't do it often (unless it is a historical setting ofc) 2. Derive naming conventions off of historical or modern names but make them a little different (Chasta, A...

For  GLAUGUST    Think of the soul as the unique conglomeration of every memory which is experienced, assembled as some spiritual second substrate layered over the physical body. A unique song where every instance is a note. Life is the continual composition of the song. Death is when it ceases because it no longer is tied to the physical world. No machinery, like a mind or eyes and hands, exists to record it.  To bring someone back to life is to restart the song. A fragment which contains it must be obtained. A corpse is best, of course, because it is like an inert record which may yet be spun up if restored properly. The fresher the better, of course, and damage can cause parts to be missing. This is why so many undead are mad, chunks of who they were did not carry over, but they are not a new person; they are the same person they were, "missing" parts. It is the reverse of a SOMA situation; if you can perfectly replicate a copy of a dead person, the dead person re...

The lights beyond the sun emit queer and mysterious radiances through the aether, kept at bay by the pneumatic bubble which encapsulates the world. Holes and tears scar the earth, creating places where nothing wholesome grows. Vessels which would ply between worlds must be sturdily built and shielded, by sorcery or cubits of soaking stone. But some stars, at some times, at particular angles, are notorious for certain effects, piercing even the cloudy Low Heavens to shine upon the worldly folk of Anlil. Shemmiads- Flower Stars A shoal of pastel stars which occasionally drifts through the sky, adding color to the night. The Flower Stars spur the growth of greenery irrespective of the wishes of the terrestrial gods or tillers of the soil, and are at once benign and vexing, for they beget weeds, roots, crops, and forage in equal measure.   They most often appear during the spring, for hours or days at a time. Zurid- The Green Star A sickly green glow in the sky, a harsh pinprick resemb...