Musings on Monstrousness

    We are sinners, yes. We may be cruel, callous, violent, depraved. But we are not born thus. It is the world and circumstances which shape our natures, our own choices, which lead us on the path to wickedness, though Primeval Sin too plays its part in so often pushing us down that path. It is easy to assume, then, that those men-made-monsters are the nadir of existence, the end point of the world's wickedness that sees us reduced to a most terrible existence, cursed, alone, and turned against our fellows. This is not so. A pit darker still lies in the deepest recesses of the earth, lit with unholy fires and profane wills. Crawling along the inverse world and lit by the inner fire is a realm of abject horror, ever aligned against all which we name decent. Some say that which is named Chthon came into being from the detritus of the war between man and beast, others that when the sorcerers of Antiquity first dabbled in Goetia, twisting life into unwholesome forms which, by usi...

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...