Tuesday, September 25, 2018

Dan's Notebook of Unfinished Wonders, vol 2

The time has come, the walrus said, to dump unused ideas. Here's the second installment of the Notebook of Unfinished Wonders (see here for vol 1) wherein I exorcise all the dust bunny ideas taking up pagespace and mindshare. Following the list are some more developed things (or at least, enough that they need more than one sentence)

List of Minor Ideas

  1. Earthquakes drive away the undead, as they disrupt the earth-current those creatures leech from. Religiously, they are deliverance through destruction.
  2. The first churches on the island were built in long-quiet lava tubes, sanctuaries fortified against the dangers of the outside world.
  3. Time travel works, but only on the scale of millions of years. It is terribly inaccurate, and return beacons are insanely valuable to that end.
  4. The Red Priesthood of Quantum Bullshit
  5. Scout ships run on isolated time travel loops, returning to their origin point with tens of thousands of years worth of accumulated data.
  6. A people: tall, white-skinned, with thin vertical black stripes.
  7. Elves are physically immortal, but not mentally. They will eventually go mad, undergo brain-death, and then be reborn as (mental) infants.
  8. Elves control magically-fertile territory in the midst of apocalyptic wasteland under the control of the Emerald Emperor. Humans as third-class citizens.
  9. Class: Vessel Knight - Container of a mystic essence.
  10. Class: Hellmerchant - Sells people afterlife insurance in the great Oversouls.
  11. Class: Warframe Operator - Frames have 4 powers mapped to GLOG spell-like abilities.
  12. Kobold Alternatives
    1. Lamprey Lackeys
    2. Gecko Guys
    3. Cursed Fetus
    4. Gremlins Who Want to Die 
    5. Scab-Lads
  13. "I went up the river in a rusty canoe / what do you think I saw? / All manner of wriggling creeping things / freed up by the thaw."
  14. Jungian archetypes converted to character archetypes, law / chaos alignment variants.
  15. Character attributes based on the ancient Egyptian soul
    1. khat (physical body)
    2. k / ka (vital essence)
    3. jb / ib (heart; emotion, thought, will)
    4. b / ba  (personality, character)
    5. swt (shadow; secrets and hidden things)
    6. rn /ren (name)
    7. hw (intelligence and wisdom)
  16. Mechanic: orc-as disease, half-orc as infection
  17. Wizarding graduation regalia - highly symbolic, easy identification of specialization.
  18. The Alliance of 9 Worlds, formed 2192/2487
  19. The Dolorous Guard (Bill Norman, the Doorman)
  20. The mad Train-God, chaos lord, carving paths of hideous portent along ley lines.
  21. Moth-men worship the sun, but cannot stand its gaze. they look west at dawn before retreating to their caves.
  22. They came to worship the great and ancient beasts frozen in amber there...
  23. Goddess with blue skin, cloud hair, rust lips
  24. Vampires are anaerobic transhumans, used as the vanguard of colonization attempts.
  25. Meeting of posthuman seedship-derived species on a neutral space station.
  26. A sort of otherspace in the Pacific, fantastic islands impossible to reach through mundane navigation.
  27. As above, but in a warm, inland sea in the center of Antarctica.
  28. Asymmetrical long-war gives rise to elaborate and strict codes of conduct & courtesy.
  29. Typical grey saucer-aliens arrive after WW2, give human beings superpowers, it's actually a ploy to aid in their reproductive cycle.
  30. Grimdark low-magic little ice age euro-fantasy gives way to warm, colorful new age under the emergence of new gods. PCs were in stasis while the change occurred (Medusa is probable)
  31. White cloaks, black faces. Masks?
  32. "Will cast spells for food" - wizarding job market collapsed.
  33. What's In the Black Sarcophagus Dug Up From Underneath Corpathium / Vornheim / the Yellow City, etc?
    1. Actual literal Alexander the Pretty Okay
    2. Flamboyant, impossibly ripped vampire
    3. Oozing, billowing, tarry smoke cloud, animated
    4. Three skeletons and red goo 
    5. Legendary monkey-king
    6. Barnacle-encrusted skeleton with a sword (cursed)
    7. Mummified giraffe with no bones
    8. Dodecacephalon, hibernating
    9. A strairway down
    10. ???
  34. Ocean world, tidally locked, city in eye of perpetual dayside hyper-cane
  35. Mandragora - man-dragon - mandrake
  36. LG = constructive, CG = corrective, LE = exploitative, CE = destructive
  37. Cursed fiddles won from devils
    1. The Golden Standard
    2. A curled black horn, stinks of brimstone
    3. Ragged chunk of blood-red rock
    4. Rotten wood, quills and hairs
    5. Bruised flesh, dripping viscera
    6. Jagged, salt-crusted ice
  38. Stained glass creatures
  39. Yugchuth - a monster?
  40. Race: The Gogal
  41. Atwa - like a sphinx with a red face.
  42. Shroedinger's Box - "It is not a cat."
  43. "Succubus" - grey skin, folds like a shar-pei. Needle teeth, mother-of-pearl gums and tongues. Crown of thumb-sized horns. Young chew their way out of the parent.
  44. The Mississippi Line - monoliths raised along the river between 2000 and 2019, to defend against the dangers of the West.
  45. Ghosts: condensed, suspended in a medium, smoked as an intoxicant.
  46. Palad: a god - bleeds from mouth, hands, feet. speaks with a halo of word-symbols.
  47. A wild god: a gigantic winged centipede with pale placid human faces. 
  48. Belen's Folly - city built upon crashed von-neumann probe.
  49. Tyrants and autocrats love developing their own strain of orcs.
  50. Rations
    1. Brick of dried octopus
    2. Cave-lichen slurry
    3. Ooze jellycubes
    4. Soulcake
    5. Salamander jerky
    6. Pungon-pig
  51. Minor Creatures
    1. Hearth axolotls
    2. Eel axolotls
    3. 9-Life Chinchilla
    4. Sky Manta
    5. Angel Hair
    6. Priest-Strangler
    7. Penny Dreadful
    8. Kaiser Roller
    9. Tigerpenguin
    10. Spiderhino
    11. Tinglecreep
    12. Insomnia Imp
  52. Skeleton Zen Philosophy
  53. War-cult trying to keep their god satisfied and distant by their conquest, begin each battle with chanted pleas for forgiveness.
  54. Race: sealed iron casks, carried around by eunuch servitors
  55. Race: Small clay men filled with birds
  56. Race: Spiral trees growing out of the stomachs of quadruped slaves/
  57. Race: Tiny ceramic-shelled things, oozy and red inside.
  58. Pixies are little proxy bodies of a central bulb.
  59. Joan of Arc, on Barsoom.
  60. Goliaths are meat-suits built by halfling fleshcrafters out of the corpse of the god of war, who died because he was a fucking idiot and didn't realize that being the god of war did not mean he was the god of winning.
  61. Orcs are to humans as humans are to firbolgs. There is a gradient to disassociation with the world. Humans had a serpent, orcs have something worse.  
  62. Elves will make up the ranks of the Horsemen when the end of the world is nigh. They also speak the language of Chaos from NIER. They do not have souls.
  63. Dwarves speak Persian / Babylonian / Akkadian
  64. Orcs all have flowery descriptive titles and everything is double meanings and euphemisms.
  65. Places the Unnamed Monk has heard of that exist: the Kingdom of Prester John, Oz, Wonderland, the Nightlands, the Dreamlands, the Antipodes, Liliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, the land of the Houyhnhnms, Barsoom, and Tormance.

The Capitalism Monster

As adult or older dragon. Cannot fly, cannot move without great effort. Long sinuous neck, head like a bug-eyed reptilian vulture. Excessive corpulence provides protection instead of scales. Wallows in pool of knee-to-waist deep effluvia. Can bite at a distance due to neck, can claw and those close by, breath weapon shit-slurry containing the half-digested remains of artists and laborers. They gather weak-willed minions to their payroll by the horde.

Eats treasure and corpses. You get XP and schlorb when you feed it. Schlorb can...
  • be used as money (inflation means it's only taken by the gallon)
  • be used as food (barely nourishing, tastes just unpleasant enough that you'll swallow it)
  • restore health (not as effective as medical care or rest)
  • be used as a source of light and heat (burns dirty and inefficiently)
Schlorb is thick, oily, adipose-yellow in color, and mildly carcinogenic.

Items that would be used instead of schlorb  are rare to the point of treasure in regions where Capitalism Monsters have taken root.

Class: Atavist Druid

The savage men of the woods.

Gains 1 spell die per HD of animal sacrificed or dose of natural hallucinogenic consumed. Can hold max charges equal to WIS, but can only invoke up to level (max 4) per spell.

Perk: Advantage to resist disease.
Drawback: Must eat raw meat

Spells:
  1. Speak with birds - Little dinosaur bastards...
  2. Excessive Fertility - Effective on plants and animals.
  3. Third Eye Open - Can see invisible objects, glyphs and wards, ghosts and spirits.
  4. Chakra Cleansing - Purge negative mental / spiritual effects, sans curses
  5. Seeking Knife - An enchanted knife will seek to break off in an enemy's heart.
  6. Eater of the Dead - Gain memories of recently deceased.
  7. Growth in Death - Grow a magical tree from a corpse.
  8. Summon the Unseen - Calls forth bacterial flora.
  9. Red in Tooth - You may bite as a sword.
  10. Destroy Lesser Laws - Destroys books and symbols
  11. Animal Shapechange - All it needs is the skin.
  12. Spirit Walk - Step your soul out of your meditating body.

Class: Sin Eater

Practitioner of the old and ancient school of maluphagy.

As cleric.
  • Seal of Confession - loses powers if any statement made or sin confessed is revealed to another party. Powers may be regained with appropriate appeal.
  • Heard it All Before - Familiar with a broad scope of the horrible, shocking, and deviant.
  • Cold Iron Stomach - You are immune to negative magical effects in your food.
Spell charges are gained through a symbolic meal. One hour of hearing confessions will provide 1d4 charges. May safely store charges equal to WIS. Can cast safely as many times equal to level per day, save vs magic for each further casting.

I don't have a spell list for this one.  Use whatever you like. I recommend Diabolism from Wonder & Wickedness.

Spell Failures
  1. Stored sins now count as encumbering items until next dawn.
  2. Burn all charges, summon a demon of equal HD.
  3. Start oozing hot, sticky, flammable tar.
  4. Crippling heart and stomach pains.
  5. Stunned by the immense wickedness of man.
  6. All that consumed bad karma hits you until the next dawn.
  7. Gain a horrifying, demonic countenance for a day.
  8. Terrible shakes, drop all items.

Found in the Great Abyss


Places
  • Thermal Vents
  • Trenches
  • Whalefalls
  • Atlantis
  • Volcanic Ridges
  • Ghost Coral
  • False Suns
  • Lost Rivers
Peoples
  • Red Worms
  • Hags
  • Trilobites
  • Bone Kings
  • Anglerfish
  • Light Shepherds
  • Benthic Sirens
  • Deep Ones 

Monk Stances

Treated as combinations of weapons and armor, take up equal encumbrance spots (treating this as Knave). Stance-specific special moves treated as additional spell. New stances must be discovered. Stances may use STR, DEX, or WIS as primary bonus.

7 comments:

  1. This is what happens when you give me a notebook.

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  2. The Capitalism Monster.

    I've heard of such a beast before. Though back then, I knew him by his other name.

    Moloch...

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  3. Mesopotamian dwarves ? I have a bad feeling about this ^^ (http://warhammerfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Chaos_Dwarf)

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  4. Warframe Operator gave me a chuckle.

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  5. Damnit man, this is excellent!

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  6. Fantastic! Kind of makes me feel inspired to start posting extracts of my notes, but they are nowhere near as fun as these.

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