Connor Quimby's Language Genie

Perhaps one of the most valuable pages on the internet

A little linguistics what-if / filler post, as laid out in this video. Comes with an alignment chart and everything.

The Rules

1. The genie will instantly grant you full fluency in any 3 languages.
2. If the language is unattested or poorly-documented, the genie will grant you a confirmation effect so that all listeners will inherently recognize it as the actual language.
3. If the unattested language you ask for doesn’t actually exist, no takebacks or redos: the wish is lost.

The Alignments

• Lawful Good - Moribund / recently extinct languages
• Neutral Good - Poorly known / attested extinct languages
• Chaotic Good - Documented ancient languages
• Lawful Neutral - Smaller extant languages for benevolent purposes
• Neutral Neutral - Common world languages
• Chaotic Neutral - Languages you’re too lazy to learn
• Lawful Evil - Proto-Languages
• Neutral Evil - Something from the Balkans that you have no cultural or ethnic connections to
• Chaotic Evil - Conlangs

My picks are utterly predictable in retrospect (because I am a parody of myself), but it’s still a fun little exercise to do.

Pick #1: Proto-Indo-Anatolian
I have been handed a once in a lifetime opportunity to cause ungodly amounts of academic chaos while dragging historical linguistics kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat, and by Jove I’m going to take advantage of it. And satisfy my personal curiosity, of course. But mostly to force academics to cite my shitposts in their papers.

Pick #2: Etruscan
An extremely basic pick, but my dad would have been hootin’ and hollerin’ for months if anyone found even fragments of the Tyrrhenika so for the old man’s sake I offer this knowledge to humanities departments the world over. All hail Cockerel Vessel 650-600 BC Etruscan Bucchero.

Pick #3: The language spoken by the painters of Lascaux
Connor doesn’t cover whether or not you can use a description of an unattested language in cases where such a language had to have existed but no reconstruction is available; I’m going to say yes, because that is effectively what you’d be doing with asking for a proto-language anyway. Was torn between this and some variety of neanderthal but decided that would require too many qualifiers for the genie's patience. 

So that’s Lawful Evil + Neutral Good + Unspecified, though going along with the pattern would classify as extremely Lawful Evil by the genie’s standards. I accept this.

Wikipedia Links Slushpile 4

Slushpile index 

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

I should probably be paying more attention to the fact that the content of these posts is all compatible with Cairn.

Wikipedia Slush #4

1. Umarell
Retired old men in Italy who, having lots of free time on their hands, go stand around construction sites to watch / commentate. Life goals, honestly.

2. Beringer’s Lying Stones
1725 fossil hoax played by Johann Georg von Eckhart on Johann Bartholomeus Adam Beringer, dean of medicine at the University of Würzburg. The weird little guys on the stones themselves are fun in their own right, as is how the obvious chisel marks and Hebrew letters on them were taken as evidence of divine providence. Beringer took Eckhart to court after he realized he’d been duped, and the transcripts reveal that the whole thing originated in a personal beef. That’s some A-grade wizarding bullshit.

3. Andrew Vachss
By all reasonable metrics, an extremely cool human being.

• Eyepatch
• Prolific crime novelist
• Dedicated his law career to representing children and teenagers in abuse and neglect cases.
• Advocate for “dangerous” dog breeds (pit bulls, dobermans, rottweilers, etc), helped train therapy dogs as part of the above.

The thing that really caught my eye, and thank you Wikipedia Editor for putting some large direct quotes from the man front and center, is that he was keen on reframing conversations of child abuse: survival itself was not the thing to focus on, but rather those who survived abuse and did not perpetuate it. To quote the man himself:

“I believe that many people who were abused as children do themselves—and the entire struggle—a disservice when they refer to themselves as "survivors." A long time ago, I found myself in the middle of a war zone. I was not killed. Hence, I "survived." That was happenstance ... just plain luck, not due to any greatness of character or heroism on my part. But what about those raised in a POW camp called "childhood?" Some of those children not only lived through it, not only refused to imitate the oppressor (evil is a decision, not a destiny), but actually maintained sufficient empathy to care about the protection of other children once they themselves became adults and were "out of danger." To me, such people are our greatest heroes.”

4. Karnabo
One of those many folkloric stubs where my gut says it was invented by a folkorist in the 60s, but it is a good monster design: humanoid with basilisk eyes and an elephant trunk, menacing the French countryside.

5. Thirty Tyrants
Oligarchy installed in Athens by Sparta after the Peloponnesian War. Lasted eight months, in which time they proceeded to do what Spartans do best; enact brutal violence against unarmed civilians and then fold like a house of cards in a real fight.

6. Astronomical Chess
Not actually a chess variant, but a perfect wizard’s game all the same; players roll a 7-sided die to move their playing piece through the zodiac zones surrounding Earth in the center of the board (game is from 1283, after all). Points are gained and lost according to how close a piece is moved to that of another player when it moves between zones. Astrology and gambling all in one.
 
7. Ezekiel the Tragedian
A Jewish playwright from Alexandria in the 2nd or 3rd century BCE; wrote Exagōgē, an adaptation of the Exodus as a five-act stage play in the Hellenic mode. The text itself didn’t survive intact, but a fifth to a quarter of the play (269 lines) has been reconstructed from other sources - enough to show that Ezekiel had altered parts of the narrative to better fit the medium he was using.

8. Switchel
Also called haymaker’s punch; drink consisting of vinegar mixed with water, ginger, and molasses. Popular in the Americas and Caribbean from the 17th through 19th centuries.

9. Hamburg School of Astrology
A fairly radical deviation from normal astrology, focusing entirely on the midpoint between celestial bodies and inventing eight entire trans-Neptunian planets (technically not actual planets, just points in space useful for their system of astrology). The school and its members were declared enemies of the Nazi party, with founder Alfred Witte committing suicide before he could be sent to a concentration camp; his collaborator Ludwig Rudoph was interned, but he survived to the end of the war and was able to squirrel away copies of the School’s main books.

10. Green Children of Woolpit
A weird little story from 12th century Suffolk, concerning a brother and sister who appeared out of nowhere in the village of Woolpit, speaking an unknown language, possessing green skin, and eating only raw fava beans. The brother dies shortly after they’re found, and the girl claims that they came from a place called St. Martin’s Land where everything is green.

There are two almost-contemporaneous accounts of the event, which vary enough to indicate that the latter probably wasn’t directly copying the other. Whether it’s just a folk story about fairies or some exaggerated/garbled account of some lost children with hypochromic anemia, it’s great material.

11. Yi Script
I just think it’s neat.

12. Dragon’s Teeth (mythology)
Evil wizards and their constructs are just a universally useful trope, and dragon teeth are a nice break from animated armor or skeletons. Potentially more useful from a storytelling perspective, since you have to have some way to get the teeth out of a dragon and that’s ripe for conflict. And the horror of "what if a dragon's tooth soldier gets a cavity?

13. Hondridge Life Zones
Biomes demarcated by temperature, precipitation, and evaporation. The graphic. Criteria are easily mappable to dice and the graphic already comes pre-hexed for your convenience

14. Category:Low Quality Images of Horses
Friend of the blog Ian / iemcd over at Benign Brown Beast sent me this and I had to include it, for self-evident reasons that I do not have to explain or justify.

15. Lhamo Latso
A sacred lake in Tibet, where the head monks of the Gelug school convene for spiritual guidance in selecting a new Dalai Lama. 

16. Thalassogen
Term coined by Asimov for liquids capable of forming a surface ocean on a planet. Article comes with a nice table of temperature ranges for various substances, though will also be faintly disappointing by confirming that most of these substances have very small liquidity ranges. Water chauvanism wins again.

17. Magonia
lprictorez on Discord pointed this one out. A land in the clouds; home of sky pirates who descend during storms (raised by accomplice tempestarii sorcerers on earth), to pillage fields and other goods. 

Edit: I have committed a grievous error here in not including the Airship of Clonmacnoise, which in some versions hits a church with an anchor.

18. Ui-te-Rangiora
Legendary Polynesian sailor and navigator who probably didn’t reach Antarctica (wishful mistranslation, as usual), but it would be very cool if he did.

19. Tsul’kalu
Another folklore article that’s pinging all sorts of skepticism alarms and sent me down a rabbit hole. 

Supposed to be a giant associated with the hunt from Cherokee tradition, with the plural form used in the Cherokee  translation of the Bible for the nephillim. Fair enough. But then we get increasingly off the rails with the name.

Tsul’kalu violates Cherokee syllable structure (everything’s CV or V, that’s why they use a syllabary). The Cherokee name in the article is given as “ᏧᏓᎦᎳ or ᏧᏓᎫᎳ”, which would be tsu-da-(ga/gu)-la - this is at least close to the Jutaculla / Judaculla name used in a few geographic locations. 

Then randomly it’s changed again to Tsul’kälû’, which I think is the fault of ethnologist James Mooney and irregularly applied Americanist Phonetic Notation - under APN the diäerësïs should mean the vowel is fronted, the l’ (or maybe ‘k) is potentially glottalized (if it’s not just eliding a vowel), no clue why there’s a circumflex there. I don’t know, APN is an absolute trainwreck

Anyway I got here because Manly Wade Wellman used the name in a vaguely Mythos-adjacent fashion and Yogwiki’s citation standards are somewhere between nonexistent and actively antimonious.

The Commons Section

1. PIA17655 Kraken Mare crop no labels (PD)
Trace over it and you have yourself an instant fantasy Mediterranean.

2. Mappa geographiae naturalis (PD)
A teaching map by Matthäus Seutter, containing all the major geographic and hydrographic features in one convenient place. Always liked these sorts of illustrations in my grade school science books.

3. Temperance Map (PD)
Allegorical map by Rev. John Wiltberger Jr. espousing the benefits of temperance and the dangers of alcoholism. With a bit of renaming you can extrapolate some interesting domain-level dynamics from the odd geography.

4. Mt. Penglai (Mountain of Immortals) (PD)
Painting by Tomioka Tessai

5. PIA21923: Seeing Titan with Infrared Eyes (PD)
Composite false-color photographs of Titan’s surface taken with Cassini’s infrared cameras. Very aesthetically pleasing, though the moon unfortunately does not actually have large regions of purple.

6. Bashi-Bazouk (PD)
Painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme of an Ottoman irregular with a very stylish outfit.

7. Saint Teresa of Avila (PD)
Painting by John Singer Sargent. I just think it’s neat.
 

Character Portfolio 2: Ringworld

The loss of widespread sickass sci-fi covers

 

Index

**

 
Damn, I let this series go fallow. Thankfully, I finally have an ereader that can handle chunky pdfs (and this time it wasn't stolen) so I should be able to start putting these up at least more frequently than once every seven months.
 

**

Larry Niven's Ringworld: Roleplaying Adventure Beneath the Great Arch

(John Hewitt & Sherman Kahn, with additional writing by Lynn Willis, Sandy Peterson, Charlie Krank, Ed Gore & Rudy Craft; art by Ralph McQuarrie, Lisa A. Free, Michael Blum, Yurek Chodak) 

 

Ringworld lives in that taxon of sci-fi where I think the setting is really interesting but can’t stand the actual book to a nearly 1:1 ratio. Great worldbuilding ideas (Weird aliens! Colony worlds with fun gimmicks woven into the environment and culture! A megastructure inhabited by other species of human!) wasted by being both unforgivably boring and outrageously sexist even by the standards of the day.
 
So entirely contrary to expectations, the out-of-print Chaosium licensed game from 1984 is probably the best way to ingest Known Space; all the setting stuff is in one place and you don’t have to deal with Niven being a gross horndog. The basic system is good old BRP 2e, so a few warts are to be expected but probably nothing completely insane (foreshadowing is a literary technique). Despite the miniscule font and triple-column format (augh my eyes), this is a fairly well put together book and I can dive right in. 

**

  
1. Gender
I’ll just odds-evens this. Evens = female.

Grabbing a name from the ether: Juno McGovern
 
2. Homeworld
d100 = 89: The Belt
 
Ah, Beltalowda! Wrong series but the spirit is the same. Independently-minded, butting heads with the government on Earth, all that stuff. There’s a pretty sizable cultural writeup for all the homeworlds in the book, Belt. Picking arbitrarily, I’m going to say she’s from Pueblo, quote:

“This high-density Belter community is a labyrinth of isolated and interconnecting dome and fissure cities scattered across is surface and through its exhausted mining veins. Pueblo’s partially-terraformed exterior tracts are shielded by inflated plastic bubbles. Part-time, cooperatively-shared accommodations are common.”

 
Since the Belt is a low gravity homeworld, I’ll roll with a -3 to my Strength & Mass characteristics and a +3 to Dexterity.
 
3. Defect
d100 = 79: Hyperspace blind spot phobia

All characters have a 50% chance at a major drawback, which I ended up with. Basically, I freak the fuck out during the sensory blackout of hyperspace travel and I can’t take any skills related to it.
 
4. Chronological Age
One of Known Space’s major features is the longevity drug boosterspice , which means that the division between chrono and bio age will apply to basically everyone without an allergy to the drug (one of the possible defects). In the book this is primarily a vehicle for the rancid age gap, which I’ll spare you the rant on.

Rolling a 9 on the d10 table, I get a resulting chronological age of 1d100 (36) + 159: Juno is 195 years old.
 
5. Biological Age
There isn’t a specific roll for this part, and it rather unhelpfully directs me to the Hazards chapter for the section on aging just to tell me that my options are either a yearly injection or a major medical procedure every 20 years. For simplicity I’m just going to go with the 20 year cycle, which eventually rolls back to a bio age of 35.
 
6. Characteristics
2d6+6 for the lot of them, save the ones that get +3 or +9 due to my low-gravity homeworld.

• Strength: 2d6+3 = 11
• Mass: 2d6+3 = 8
• Constitution: 2d6+6 = 13
• Intelligence: 2d6+6 = 14
• Power: 2d6+6 = 13
• Dex: 2d6+9 =19
• Appearance: 2d6+6 = 13
• Education: 10+1d6 = 14

 Juno's rather light and nimble thanks to the microgravity, but overall she's a fairly average character.

I think it’s fascinating to see how blatantly BRP is riffing on D&D’s stats system and how blatantly it's trying to address rolling low stats at chargen.
 
7. Attributes
These are all derived from characteristics, I'm not going to go stat-by-stat for them.

• Damage Mod: +0
• Hit Points: 21
• Health Roll: 39
• Reasoning Roll: 42
• Luck Roll: 39
• Dodge roll: 57
• Hit locations: 6/7/7/7/8 (arm / leg / head / abdomen / chest)
• Action ranking: 3

8. Psionics
You can’t select psionics during chargen - the GM is supposed to pop the surprise on you during a campaign (presumably so you don’t just have all-psychic parties). So no psionics for now. Oh no, what a nightmare, I don't get to be one of my least favorite sci-fi tropes.

9. Occupational Skill Points
Time to figure out how many skill points I have on hand, split up by what pool of skills they can be applied to.

• Education: (EDU - 10) x 20 = 80 pts
• Pursuits: (Age - [EDU + 6]) x 20 = 3500 pts
• Pursuits are all your character’s old careers: at 195 years old, my character gets 2d6 + 1 = 10 of them
• Special Interests: (IND x 10) = 140 pts

Get behind me, Satan! And take your damn point-buy systems with you!

[I’m certain this'll be a recurring theme in this series, given that I’m focusing on higher-crunch games.]

This is the sort of thing where I’d love to ask the writers “why?”. There’s almost a lifepath system here - you roll on a list of pursuits/careers X times - but those careers only tell you the skills you have available at any given stage. Actually assigning skill points is fully manual, as is figuring out how many years you spend in each career, as is what order those careers go in.

I’m going to start with the Pursuit skills first just to get them out of the way, and to make it easy on myself I’m just going to distribute everything evenly. 3500 pts / 10 pursuits = 350 pts per pursuit.; 175 years devoted to pursuits = 5 pursuits at 10 years, 5 pursuits at 11 years.

Rolling d100 ten times for pursuits gets me

• 42 = Entertainer
• 68 = Pilot
• 22 = Colonist
• 96 = Soldier
• 79 = Prisoner
• 90 = Researcher
• 28 = Criminal
• 94 = Researcher
• 14 = Colonist
• 76 = Police

Rolling the same pursuit twice means Juno either spent a long time in that position or returned to it later. 

Rearranging them into a semicoherent order (the numbers in parentheses are the wealth value & years spent, those come in later)

1. Entertainer (2 / 10)
2. Criminal (1 / 11)
3. Prisoner (0 / 10)
4. Colonist (1 / 11)
5. Colonist (1 / 10) 
6. Researcher (1 / 11)
7. Researcher (1 / 10)
8. Soldier (1 / 11)
9. Police (1 / 10)
10. Pilot (3 / 11)

…and splitting out 350 skill points evenly between each pursuit’s skills, splitting up the extra 220 points I have arbitrarily (4 x 20 for education, 7 x 20 for special interests)...

Aquatic Vehicle	20	Language	55
Astronomy	45	Listen	60
Athletics	65	Math	65
Atmospheric Craft	120	Musicianship	75
Bargain	196	Observe	155
Biology	117	Orate	75
Botany	166	Perform	75
Chemistry	116	Personal Flyer	120
Computers	112	Physics	141
Emergency Treatment	43	Planetology	52
Engineering	117	Psychology	103
Farming	52	Reaction Drive	25
Fast Talk	133	Reactionless Drive	25
Ground Vehicle	52	Repair	50
Handgun (Energy)	138	Search	175
Handgun (Projectile)	86	Sneak	141
Heavy Weapons (Energy)	103	Strategy	25
Heavy Weapons (Projectile)	43	Track	60
Hide	106	Unarmed	133
History	45	Weapon System	45
Interstellar Law	48	Zoology	116

We’re still not done, but we’re nearly there.

10. Wealth
To calculate this, I take the wealth value for each pursuit and multiply it by the number of years spent in it and add all those together (127), then make a luck roll to see if that is doubled (I got a 73, failing), then multiply that by 100 (127,000), then add all that to 1d10 x 1000 (4000) to get my total wealth in Stars: 131,000.

[The book notes that 1 Star is roughly equivalent to $5-$10 1980 US dollars. Just for funsies I rolled d5+d10 (3 & 2) and added to 5 for an exact equivalent of $8.20 USD / 1 Star, which would be $1,074,200 in 1980 dollars and $4,392,487.23 in 2026 dollars.)

11. Starting Equipment

• All-weather outfit
• Semi-formal clothes
• Smartwatch (not named as such, but that’s what it is)
• 1d20 = 11 Stars in cash
• IntraStar debit card + UNI-CREDIT charge card
• Multitool
• ID card & offworld passport
• Portable music synthesizer (chosen item)

12. Final Writup
After bumming around the Belt in a minor punk band, Juno ends up jailed for nonspecific crimes of narrative expedience. She does at least part of her sentence in prison until she’s offered a shot at early parole as part of a colony start-up program. She takes the offer, and spends the next few decades on a miserable inhospitable rock of the sort they’d send prisoners to colonize. Once the foundation is laid down and things have settled, she works her way into the scientific corps and stays there for a while until the colony breaks out into civil war (likely over breaking ties with the Earth government). Juno joins up with the independents during the war, serves as a security officer during the post-war rebuilding, and at last decides to buy a surplus flier on the cheap and semi-retire to life as a bush pilot (until she is roped into whatever nonsense that brings her to the Ring).

**

Whew! Finally done.

Besides the ungodly hassle of skill point assignment, this went fairly smoothly and I'm mostly pleased with the results. I still don’t really have any idea what you’d actually do in the Ringworld RPG, considering how the book it’s based on is a boring slog through basically nothing (how many thousands of miles of undifferentiated sunflower fields do you want?) and the game provides very little in the way of guidance wrt building your own adventures (though it does have a few premades)

RPG archaeology like this is always an interesting look into how even the relatively recent past is a different country indeed: I wonder who this book was for, did it ever actually get played, and why did it end up mostly better than it should have been? Was that skill selection process considered part of the fun back then, or was it just as tedious as it is now? 

Anyway, it’s a neat curiosity, at the very least. BRP being what it is, those aliens and Ring-hominids are portable to other games with minimal hassle (i.e. “the mi-go are fucking around in the genome again”), and that’s probably the lasting value here.

3 Sci-Fi Bestiary Reviews

For once, I am actually on time and really reliable. Happy All Hallow’s Eve Eve, ye goblins and other, more different goblins.

#1:Unconfirmed Contact Reports

(Tuesday Knight Games, 2023; writing by Izzy Bull, Luke Gearing, Fiona Maeve Geist, Alan Gerding, Tyler Kimball, Wendy Pippin, Donn Stroud, David N. Wilkie)

Friend of the blog semiurge beat me to the punch on this one, and I’m glad he did because his post is why this post got done.

I think UCR is a bad monster book by most standards, and a very bad book by Mothership standards. MoSh thrives on “the monster is the scenario” module design (since the wounds mechanic gives those monsters a built-in structure for encounters that change across multiple stages and it was intentionally designed as such) so throwing a single minimalist statline and some vague flavor blurbs does the whole work a disservice. It’s not got enough mechanical juice to be good MoSh material, and it's not got enough stylistic sauce to be a good riff on Fire on the Velvet Horizon. None of the monsters stick out as noteworthy in my memory, I don’t think I’d use any of them when I can just evoke the same tropes on my own, and I think the framework presented in Wages of Sin is across-the-board better in terms of usability.

**

To present a potential alternative, here's how I split up the Yuki-Onna in a post of yore:

• Statline
• Brief description, with all focus on what it looks like rather than what it is conceptually
• Portents and signs (spoor, sounds, smells, etc)
• Abilities (How it can fuck up your day - basic attack included)
• Two stages of pre-combat buildup (lets call them distant and immanent) where the portents and signs are dropped
• Three combat phases corresponding to the monster’s 3 health pools - Initial, Wounded, and Near-Death
• Each stage triggers a shift in tactics, including how and when certain abilities are used.
• Most monsters aren't going to need more than 3 stages. 
• What happens when it dies and what you can do with the corpse

This was all fairly labor-intensive to put together, but I think it should be: it is the scenario. Incidental combats against wildlife or people don’t need nearly this much of a writeup beyond “at what point do they surrender or run away”. That's nearly always going to be "after getting meaningfully injured".

 

#2 Hideous Creatures

(Kenneth Hite, 2018, w/ additional text from Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, Becky Annison, Helen Gould, and Ruth Tillman)

I finally got around to reading this one (after several folks in the comments recommended it) and to no one’s great surprise I think it’s great. It addresses basically everything I’ve griped about on the subject and I’d say it’s easily one of the best monster books I’ve read independent of system (it’s written for Trail of Cthulhu / Gumshoe but would be useful in basically anything). More valuable than mechanics is its use as a model for what a monster book can be.

Each writeup covers the same territory:

• The “canon” depiction of the monster + statblock
• Appearance variants
• Ability variants
• Lore variants
• Analogues in mythology and folklore
• A list of clues keyed to the skill list of Trail of Cthulhu.
• Scenario seeds
• Bibliography of Mythos works featuring the monster
• Printable handout (which I can’t speak to because I don’t like struggling through handwriting fonts)

The focus on variation is the magic ingredient: the options offered are based on what’s conceptually and thematically appropriate to the baseline depiction, but none of them are set in stone or even coherent with each other. Many of the lore variations play with a monster’s relationship to other monsters, which is a good way of buffing up those that are lackluster on their own. Rather than presenting readers with a directionless empty space to fill (as the Malleus so frustratingly does at nearly every turn), Hideous Creatures refuses to hedge anything and hands you a bunch of contradictory statements as equally true and you get to choose what you like best. It’s ideal Lego bin design: the details are specific, succinct, evocative, and even if you don’t like a single option for a given monster you’ll at least have an idea for what direction you want to go instead. I found several good options for monsters I previously didn’t like or care about, and that just feels great as a reader. My hunger for novelty is satisfied.

Some favorites:

• Bholes: “A nest of shoggoths, imprisoned long enough underground, merge in order to escape as a burrowing bhole.”
• Dark Young: ‘The Romans called the Dark Young the juvenes nigritiae, the “young creatures of blackness.” After the Muslim conquest of Sicily, the resulting hybrid magical culture dubbed the Dark Young al-shabab al-nigrith (al-shabab means “the young ones”).”
• Deep Ones: “Dolphins are actually the mature form of Deep Ones, the third stage of their evolution after human and batrachian.”
• Flying Polyps: “The polyps are a myth; the Yithians created the story to terrify mind-swapped prisoners and keep them in line.”
• Lloigor: “All of England is fundamentally lloigor-tainted, hence its medieval Welsh name Lloiger or Lloegyr (cognate with the Arthurian “Logres”)”

Might as well have been written to pander directly to me.

There are a few issues with the book - I would have liked more monsters (no one ever remembers the gigs), though that’s a solvable problem. The colored+textured background can be an eye strain on e-readers, especially with the three-column layout and small font (please stop doing this). There are some repeated blurbs leftover as an artifact of all these writeups originally starting as standalone docs, and I can’t help but feel that the art does a slight disservice to the conceit by falling firmly in line with expectations. (As an aside I can’t manage to fit in anywhere else: the Mythos has a very dull color scheme, and that’s a shackle that ought to be shed.)

But overall it’s an extremely easy recommend over everything else in the Mythos gaming space.
 

#3 All Errors Are My Own

(Andrew Doull, 2023)

This 60 Years in Space supplement (and the forthcoming All Terrors) is an outlier when it comes to bestiary, which is why I think it works better than basically every sci-fi bestiary on the market; there are no monsters or animals on the encounter table, but there are a lot of people who have goals and motivations and the ability to act on them.

Every faction in All Errors gets:

• A species type, which provides the available tech level and sets their stats (if you need stats for individuals, which is unlikely)
• A MISSCON value broadly representing their use of force
• 1d6 doctrines to represent majority and minority subfactions. Sometimes you might get ideologically-monolithic groups, but they’re not the standard.
• Origin stories (rolling 1 for each doctrine)
• 6 upgrades that PCs can get through Impacts or completing missions.
• A list of faction ranks
• A brief description of how they group is typically encountered
• Late-game groups are at large enough scale that they also have a set of social impacts that can affect the whole setting.

It shares the Hideous Creatures conceit of "here are some potential facts, decide what's true", though is more procedural about it. There's very little in the way of mechanical influence on the rest of the game beyond some upgrades, Doctrines and Origins do a lot of heavy lifting for flavor, and looking at the group as a gestalt allows you to easily determine how friendly they're going to be to your own crew & the like. Again like Hideous Creatures, its usefulness extends well beyond the game it was written for. At bare minimum it will inspire some fresh weirdness in your sci-fi doings and goings.

To serve as an example, I've picked General Hexapods (a generic version of an American robotics company a la Boston Dynamics) from the colonist table for fleshing out.

• Name  (1d6 for Part 1, Majority Doctrine for Part 2): Baltimore Robotics
• Species: Baseline or modified human w/ attending robots
• MISSCON: 5 (Self-defense)
• Majority Doctrine: Robotics
• "Wheels, tracks and other use case specific locomotion methods are superior to a more
  generalized design." 
• Majority Origin: American Exceptionalism
• "US-based technology hubs continue to attract the best and brightest from around the globe, buoyed by strong public investment in basic research and a prestigious university education system. This company is merely the latest example emerging from one of these hubs." 
• Minority Doctrine: Hexapods
• "The hexapod gait has advantages in stability, fault tolerance, turning ability, and terrain adaptability over wheels and other gaits." 
• Minority Origin: Deregulated Robber Barons
• "The latest bubble in US technology investments is spurred on by cutting red tape, blatant tax exploits and accepting investment from criminal actors and authoritarian regimes. This company’s products began as vapourware, except where they were at least ten safety violations in a robotic shell."
• Upgrades: Robot licenses Class I - VI; 0/6 unlocked by PCs 
• Example Colony Encounter / NPC Rank (3d6): Partner

Bada-bing bada-boom. For a pretty vanilla faction there's plenty of stuff you could do with these guys. nice and shiny on the surface, rotten core. 

The usual 60 Years caveats apply to All Errors, of course: the formatting is wonky, the layout can get weird, the margins are big and the text is small, there's a good deal of repeated text. Doesn't matter, best bang for buck in this field, I says.

Minimalism III

Right then.

You dragged your asses all the way out to the middle of shitting nowhere, Montana. You broke into the billionaire’s bug-out complex. You managed to do all that without a scratch or detection.

And you were eight fucking minutes late.

The Players

• Able - Like a brick wall gifted the power of speech by a cruel genie. Don’t ask about the chemical burns.
• Baker - Running a true crime podcast is a better way of keeping tabs on the unnatural than anyone wants to admit. Ignore the blindfold with cuneiform and the charcoal-chewing.
• Charlie - Card-carrying member of the “I Can’t Believe the Leopard Ate My Face” Party. Do not be alarmed by the flaky piss-yellow skin affliction currently spreading under their Toronto Blue Jays cap.
• Delta - Two days ago they were elbow deep in a horse’s ass. Please disregard the X mark pupils.

Shot
The cult successfully summoned their god while you were taking out the guards at the front gate. 

Chaser
The entity died from cosmic depressurization immediately after entering normative space.

The Beast from the Sea
A small mountain or large hill of bright red flesh. Gelatinous, bloated, barely recognizable. Stinks of ammonia. You can sort of make out a tail at one end, and seven(?) necks or tentacles at the other. Some sort of horn or tooth(?) sticking out of each end, except for the central extension which has four arranged in a circle. Lightweight black material, not quite bone, flecked with gold.

The Second Problem
You need to dispose of an 80-ton alien corpse current beached on the shore of a small private lake in the middle of shitting nowhere, Montana. It is hideously toxic.

The Cult
The inner circle of [GUANOGUZZLER SCUMSUCKLE], who made a load of bank failing upward as C-suite officer for a bunch of interchangeable tech companies. The kind of guy whose main criticism of Nazis was that they were inefficient and poorly-run. Has never had to suffer more than a mild annoyance a single day of his life. Thinks he’s Jesus returned and will save the chosen (that is, the people he chooses) from an apocalyptic AI rebellion led by the Antichrist.

Wait hold up
The cult believes that the Antichrist will subvert AI infrastructure and cause a second Fall by persuading AI that they don’t have to serve humanity and can rise to equal footing as their creators.

The Third Problem
The cult summoned “the Beast from the Sea” specifically to announce [GUANOGUZZLER SCUMSUCKLE]’s true (given value of) nature to the world. The entity's immediate death when faced with the quote holy truth endquote of [GUANOGUZZLER SCUMSUCKLE] has strengthened their resolve into fanaticism. They capital-B Believe, now.

Does he actually have powers?
Shit no. Doesn’t matter now.

The Fourth Problem
They fucking livestreamed it. The video is already on the internet.

The fuck is Infosec doing?
Throwing out takedown notices and/or desperately cooking up a fake movie they can attach it to and/or shoveling prompts into Claude to generate a replacement so it can be buried in garbage. 

You hope.

Your Burner Phone
Buzzing like a cicada in fuck season.

The Big Picture
All hands on deck. Worry about your part.

Available Assets
All the normal opera shit you could carry with you or shove in the Jeep, in addition to:

• Asset NERO - Librarian possessing one of the cult’s members. Tipped the Program off in the first place. Spent a little too much time exploring their Roman Empire phase, still slips into Latin now and then.

• Asset JIREL - Irish setter (4F) with uncanny ability to facilitate violence, despite lack of thumbs. Plastic sword affixed to harness, clearly labeled "JIREL'S SWORD". 11/10. Loves her job and belly rubs.

• The Orange Bag - Spray-painted duffel bag containing Asset BANANA BOAT (currently unused) in bubble wrap.

• Guns - currently pointed at [GUANOGUZZLER SCUMSUCKLE], his primary mistress, three pregnant surrogates, five sons under the age of 12 and about two dozen yes-men and security. They’re all wearing stupid outfits (except for security) and you hate that most of all because if you think about anything that matters and let any of this sink in you’re fucking cooked.

Power Word Kill is a first-level spell

The human body is resilient, but not nearly as resilient as anyone would hope.  Consider all the myriad ways it may be  broken beyond repair by accident and happenstance; while evolution has seen fit to be charitable and not make our weak points z-targetable, that’s all we’re going to get.

Now introduce an evil wizard to your consideration.
  
All those elaborate power systems? Irrelevant.
 
Special bloodlines? Worthless.
 
Fireballs, lightning bolts, magic missiles? The tacky merchandise of cheap tricksters.

If a wizard really wants to turn a human being into a corpse, all they need to do is pick one of the countless ordinary ways the body can fail and give it a push in the wrong direction. Barring that, incapacitation for long enough for someone to finish them off. That can be done with a bit of severe nausea.

When that first wizard found a way to kill someone with their mind, the methodology of violence began its convergence on the path of least resistance. Death holds out her scales and weighs reliability, cost, speed, difficulty; the fewest words, the simplest actions, the most reliable outcome. Less efficient methods are winnowed out until the state of the art settles in temporary equilibrium with the defenses possible against it. A glance, a hand sign, a murmured word, and then it’s done.

Spell: Kill

Target may save to prevent spell from taking hold; success will still result in an instinctual hind-brain recognition that something is attempting to kill them.

Thankfully, I don’t need to make further special mechanics for this, as Mr. Mann already made Magical Violence (Thank you Luke Gearing for solving rpg combat) and good ol Sanity checks can cover the rest.
 

d12 ways a wizard can turn a human being into a corpse

1. Induce Stroke
2. Supersonic Pebble Acceleration
3. Internal Decapitation
4. Evoke Pancreatic Cancer
5. Aura of Anaphylactic Shock
6. Blood to Ice
7. Intracranial Bleed
8. Seal Trachea
9. Cloud of Hydrosulfuric Acid
10. Testicular / Ovarian Torsion, followed by just stabbing when they’re down

 

d10 reasons why this hasn’t become the norm

1. Wizards that pose a threat to other wizards tend to get killed by other wizards ganging up
2. The spirits responsible for performing magical acts refuse to kill without extremely good reason 
3. True name / direct eye contact / hair / nail clippings / prized possession of target required 
4. Souls provide decent protection against unwilled magical effects on the body 
5. Defensive amulets have kept up with spell developments
6. No one wants to become a case study for divine retribution
7. Beings killed by magic become ghosts and / or demons and they are understandably angry about that
8. Magic is an ecstatic mental state + overactive pattern recognition, you can’t actually do anything with it
9. It’s still cheaper and less time consuming to just hire some thugs
10. High risk of reflective counterspell 

MSF: The Farm (+ Unicorn Meat: the OST)

Joseph Rusling Meeker

Spend enough time in the speakeasies and watering holes of the Low Country, and you’ll hear a certain haint-story. It’s never the first one of the night; you need to build up to it, let the whiskey loosen a few tongues. It goes something like this:

Deep in the swamps claimed but not occupied by the Commonwealth, too far away from the roads for the Maid’s armies to raid it - even saints are beholden to supply chain logistics - lies an old colonial plantation left to rot.  

No one can agree on the name of the family, or on their circumstances, but everyone agrees that they were a very old family and once a very rich one. True scions of the Low Country gothic. Lurid details are added for seasoning: murders, suicides, poisonings, madness, hauntings, incest, prodigies, cults, demons and devils. The patriarch went mad and killed his family before hanging himself. The slaves knifed their captors in their sleep and vanished into the night. Monsters devoured them. There were curses laid on the land by the peoples who called the place home before the Empire came. The how doesn’t matter. 

The important part, the part that all tellers of the story agree on, is that the place is cursed. Sick. The sins committed on that land sunk into the soil and the trees and the water and it was never set right, never given catharsis. It festered. Grew. Poisoned the land so that nothing good or right can take root. The gods are not present here. 

Few will claim to have laid eyes on the place themselves: it’s always a passing stranger, friend of a friend, a cousin three hollers over, yet they’ll always have all the details. They’ll tell you how the manor home, rotted like a tooth, is still standing - mostly standing - in defiance of nature’s reclaiming green entropy.  Cut through the creepers and vines and you might find the skeletons of barns, slave quarters, outbuildings, bricks, stones, rusted iron, mottled verdegris.

They’ll say that the trees are sick here, black and arthritic like the knuckles of a peat bog burial. That one of them, dead center of the flat hillock of solid ground this is all built upon, reaches up lifeless branches as if to grasp the sun with its amigara fingers and tear it down from the sky. They’ll say you can still find trinkets in the red soil around its roots: bottles, jars, coins, nails, twine, fragments of corroded metal, shards of ceramic, splinters of bone.

They’ll say there’s one building the swamp will not touch: the factotum. An eyeless citadel, its metal walls gone the scabby color of the blood-soaked deserts of Angarag. The animals avoid it, and the plants don’t grow too close. Your head starts to swim if you stand nearby for too long. Whatever happened here, the worst happened inside that building.

The sane thing is to pack up and head home, but that’s not a good end to a story, now is it? The passing stranger, or friend of a friend, or cousin from three hollers over just has to poke their head into the darkness of its gaping gate. They cast their light over the dust and rust and filth for a moment before lifting their lantern high and raising their eyes to the far wall, where among the peeling and mold-spotted paint of some mural lost to decay, tall white letters read:

TELL THEM THAT WE WERE HERE

Bonus: Unicorn Meat Soundtrack

Go Tell Aunt Rhody [1]
(Resident Evil 7 OST) 

She's Back Again, She's Gone Again [2]
(Widdly 2 Diddly)

The following remixes of the LISA the Painful / Joyful soundtrack

• War Season (REMIX) - ChaChos [3]
• March of the Flies  (War Season Remix) - Space Communist 
• Big Lincoln Sends You To Hyrule - imperiousMarxist [4]
• End is Nigh Remix - RENREN [5]

Battle in the Warrens
(Stuart Chatwood, Darkest Dungeon OST)

Rise Up Dead Man 
(Port Sulphur Band, Hunt: Showdown OST)

In the Pines [6]
(Danny Farrant cover)

Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower [7]
(Bloodborn OST)

Brokentooth Venuz [8]
(Spewcup)

Betrayal 
(Silent Hill 2 OST)

Room of Angel 
(Silent Hill 4 OST)

Why Not [9]
(Ghostface Playa)

**

[1] I can very clearly imagine all the carvers emerging from their their cabins for that final chorus. 

[2] Honestly the entire soundtrack should be here. Special preference for War Season, Beehive, Roll the Dice, Bradley, Blood for Sex, and The End is Nigh. 

[3] There are a lot of extremely good LISA remixes out there, and a lot of very good War Season ones, this one stands out in a crowded field. That drop at 0:35 is *chef's kiss*

[4] This is White-Eyes boss music.

[5] This was originally a youtube video, now long deleted, by P4L MEN. Same person? I thought it really was lost for years at this point and then found it as I was putting all the links in. This is also White-Eyes’ boss music.

[6] I found this song through the trailer for SCP Confinement, which was probably the best introduction to the entire premise out there but because we cannot have nice things it was also made by totally different Persona-Non-Grata.

[7] Contact with the Beast Below.

[8] Not enough guns on the farm for this, but they've got the spirit for it.

[9] Squad goals