Remaking LotR With Only Public Domain Sources

Foot of Mt. Ashitaka, Takahashi Hiroaka

Last summer I had the chance to go see Fellowship of the Ring in concert. Great show, movie still slaps. But I had an odd thought while watching it, brought on by my Leslie Stone transcription project and a slowly-compiling list of inspirational resources I’ve been gathering.

“Is it possible to remake Lord of the Rings using only public domain source material? Like a ship of Theseus type thing, where you replace individual components in the structure. How does it change? What does it transform into? Does it even remain recognizable?”

You know, normal thoughts.

To spoil the rest of this post it turns out you can, thanks to the transitive property of fiction, and the end result is a good deal of fun. Let’s-a-go!

Guidelines

All replacement components must be public domain in the United States at time this post goes up. This encompasses:

• ≤ 1930: Automatically PD
• 1931 - 1963: Published without copyright notice, or published with copyright notice but not renewed within 28 years
• 1964 - 1977: Published without copyright notice
• 1978 - March 1 1989: Published without notice and without registration within 5 years of first publication
• Any: Explicit relinquishing of rights by creator, including Creative Commons 0

There's also the grey area of works that are in the public domain in their country of origin but not necessarily in the US because of course the US doesn't just hold to the Rule of the Shorter Term. I bring it up because the art for this post is technically from 1932, but has been public domain in Japan since 1995 because they're Life+50 and they follow the Rule so [throws up hands]. It's outside the core premise I can have a cheat day.

For thematic cohesion (and for the amount of resources available), I'm going to predominantly lean towards pre-1931 works. I’ve also added some follow-up questions and potential additions to each entry, just to show how the method can result in a wildly divergent story and setting.

Middle-Earth

Sticking with the premise of “Earth in the mythic past” (something Tolkien gestured at but didn't really dial-in on) leaves us with the Hyborian Age as the primary public domain option. This works, but I don’t think it’s ideal as the primary base: Howard used it mostly so he could evoke whatever broad historical stereotypes he wanted without worrying about actual history / having to do any heavy-lifting with worldbuilding, and I don't roll with either of those. Still good for a bit of cafeteria picking and choosing, though, the Tower of the Elephant is bound to show up at some point.

The option I'm leaning towards now would be something in the general shape of our world (as a great many fantasy worlds are), filled in with various fictional and legendary (and occasionally real-but-mythologized) locations in the generally right place. To keep the vibes of mythic prehistory, I'm leaning towards ~10-8k BCE, because that gives me Doggerland, the African Humid Period, and the Anatolian proto-cities - but I'm not going to be too picky about accuracy. Gotta have mammoths.

• Addition: Filling up the map would probably be multiple posts by itself, so I’m saving that for another day. But it’s going to be chock full of lost cities, pseudoscientific sunken continents, legendary realms, historical misinterpretations of actual places and good ol’ bullshit.

The One Ring

The Ring of Gyges and the Ring of the Nibelung are more or less direct inspirations to the One Ring, so they’re out of the running. Instead, I’ll be going with a move that will have serious ramifications down the line: the Seal of Solomon, asterisk.

That asterisk is me doing that thing I love to do, which is add in a bit of historical metafiction to muddy the waters. (We can all thank Dr. Sledge of Esoterica for sending me down this rabbit hole.)

So the Seal is extrabiblical to begin with, but that’s never stopped anything from becoming extremely popular. When we cut away the cruft built up over the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Seal of Solomon isn’t actually Solomon's Seal, but instead the Seal Famously In the Possession of Solomon: it's God’s signet ring, a bureaucratic artifact given to Solomon that allowed him to act as the authorized representative of the divine. This means that if you aren’t Solomon (an extremely large category of people, or so I am led to believe), possession and use of the Seal is basically stolen credentials. Depending on the status of the original in a given story, the Seal could even be forged credentials. All of this is an extremely good justification for why it brings ruin to its wielder / cannot be allowed to fall into the wrong hands / needs to be destroyed / returned / otherwise disposed of.

Then on top of that, Sauron’s end goal of “dominate and control all life in Middle Earth” can segue neatly into the historical metafiction layer by mirroring the appropriation of the Seal (and Solomonic magic more broadly) by Christian occultists and its subsequent transformation into what is, if you think about what is actually being described instead of taking a wizard's word for it, the use of supernatural prison slave labor.

• Q: Who was actually supposed to have the ring?
• Q: Who do people believe is supposed to have it?
• Q: Who else has gotten their hands on it? 
• Q: Is it even legitimate in the first place?
• Q: Why hasn’t it been reclaimed yet?
• Q: So what kinds of spirits are we dealing with, and what leftover business do they have to settle?

• Addition: The shamir, because everyone loves a big magical worm
• Addition: The relationship with all the various spirits has changed drastically (for the worse) since the ring was originally handed out.
• Addition: Ancient sorcerer-priest-king, who might have just been a local warlord who got hyped up later on down the line.
• Addition: Demons! Oh, so many demons.

Eru Illuvatar and the Valar

I’m penciling in MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI and the Zoa, for the upper echelons of the pantheon, though I want to do a lot more with the lower layers; pre-1931 means we’re still early enough in spec-fic that mythopoeia has some early adopters but the usage of constructed pantheons isn't particularly widespread and there even fewer well-developed ones / ones that are not just used as stock colonialist antagonists.

The new religious movements of the period could potentially provide some good material, though they provide their own barrel of worms to deal with (mostly racism and racism accessories, with the added malus of "now with an organized belief structure behind it".)

The potential shortlist is currently:

• Theosophy, Thelema, Oahspe movement, Mormonism, Aradia / the Gospel of Witches, the Golden Bough, Uther Index of Folklore Motifs, HPL, CAS, REH, rest of the Weird Tales crew and the other pulps as well. Most of them will only provide one or maybe two gods each - weird pattern, I think it's probably to do with serial short stories and whatnot. 
• Spiritualists are unlikely to get much play, because ineffable invisible spirits are visually boring.

If you have any other good recs for "interesting bespoke gods (or really wild takes on classical ones) in PD stories", drop me a comment; this section is where I’m going to greatly diverge from Tolkien simply by virtue of me being a huge fan of some fantasy-ass fantasy religious practices, and that means importing a lot of material.

Mordor

The Land of Darkness from the Alexander Romance, because it’s a big vaguely defined land of badness and narrative convenience called the Land of Darkness.

• Q: Who lives there? What's life like for them?
• Q: How did it become the Land of Darkness? Is there something special about it, or is that just what people call it?
• Q: How has it previously interacted with the known world?
• Q: What does the known world believe about it, falsely or otherwise?

• Addition: Water of Life - The thing that Alexander is out to find, in the Romance. Nice and vague, the Water of Life could have whatever properties you please.
• Addition: Gates of Alexander - Everyone loves a nice "this is the end of the known world" structure.
• Addition: Gog of Magog - This is how it's rendered in the Ezekiel, as I understand it. Gog and Magog slipped in somewhere along the translation chain by the time Revelation was penned.
• Addition: Tied into beliefs about the apocalypse
• Addition: Hyperborea (magical land, far to the north, no sun, lot of bullshit to pick from, etc)
• Addition: There's so much stuff in the Romance, Skerples was way ahead of the curve on this.

The Nazgul

Alexander himself, complete with horns (this isn’t a non sequitur, the Horns of Alexander are a thing), handily fulfills the role of the Witch-King. “Celebrated hero (who might not be all that heroic) rides off with his retainers into the Land of Darkness to defeat a great evil and never returns (at least not until he’s suborned by said great evil)” is just good storytelling. I don’t make the rules. 

The other Ringwraiths are played by the 12 paladins of Charlemagne. I could go Round Table, but the Round Table has hundreds of them to pick from and I don’t want to comb through all those Large Adult Sons. Orlando innamorato / Furioso are as good a place as any for the 12, and gets us Orlando, Oliver, Fierabras, Astolpho, Ogier, Ganelon, Reynaud, Maugris, Florismart, Guy, Naimon, and Otuel.

• Q: How did things break back home when they never came back?
• Q: How are things currently breaking because of them?
• Q: How does the belief in Alexander’s heroic return cause problems?
• Q: What shit has history whitewashed? What actually good stuff did they do back then?

• Addition: Existing relationships / accomplishments / lore of the 12, adjusted as needed. Knights come pre-packaged with a bunch of connective tissue to other characters and quests, so they're high bang-for-buck.
• Addition: Bradamante 

Orcs

The modern orc is a green Klingon and Klingons are tharks with forehead ridges, so tharks it is. I lose the “this is what happens to people under fascism” thematic element of Tolkien’s orcs, and I won’t say the tharks were particularly nuanced in the Barsoom novels, but they’re a pretty easy canvas to add complexity to if you start writing them as people with a culture and history and whatnot.

Tying into the Land of Darkness: tharks would already be adapted to the cold of Mars, and would naturally gravitate towards northern climates. Plus “Gog of Magog” is basically the archetypical orc name so that’s double appropriate.

• Q: What’s the relationship between the tharks, Alexander, and the Sauron analogue?
• Q: How did they get here, anyway? Is other Martian life also transplanted here? Were the mi-go involved? (Yes)
• Q: What happens after this whole plot?
• Q: What relationships do they have with nearby humans?

• Addition: Barsoomian wildlife, since there are now 7 books to pull from and ERB loved him some monsters.
• Addition: John Carter - human warlord who has somehow risen to prominence among the tharks - could be analogous to Alexander, a direct lieutenant to Alexander, or just some opportunist taking advantage of the current political situation.
• Addition: Other inhabitants of Mars, Barsoomian and otherwise
• Addition: Water of Life = River Iss? Oh ho ho, delightfully devilish, Seymour...  

Sauron

Nyarlathotep: Sauron was literally the evil vizier to the last king of Atlantis and was called both “bringer of gifts” and “the wizard”. He's gonna be played by the Crawling Chaos.

Azathoth is then the natural choice for Morgoth, and if I correlate Mt. Etna with Mt. Doom there’s an avenue open to bring in Typhon. Exactly what the relationship is with Nyarly, or what Nyarly’s relationship with the rest of the world is, I am going to leave for later.

• Q: What is Nyarlathotep’s role in all this? How has he interfered in the world?
• Q: What sorts of monsters has Azathoth-as-Typhon spawned?
• Q: What happens if Azathoth gets out from under the mountain? How would that happen?

• Addition: Mythos material directly linked to Nyarly or Azathoth, which actually leans towards the Dreamlands, which can loop right back around and include basically everything Dunsany wrote.
• Addition: Say it with me, everyone: "It's the fucking mi-go, Charlie Brown!"
• Charlie Brown is, unfortunately, unavailable until 2046 thanks to Sonny Bono and the Copyright Extension Act. 

Mount Doom

I had originally planned on Mount Etna for the Typhon connection, but in snooping around for alternatives I stumbled across Mount Elbrus, which hits basically every check every box I want to hit, plus extras: it’s volcanic, it’s fucking huge (largest volcano in Eurasia), it’s erupted within historical record ( ~50 CE), it’s located in the Caucasus (and thus in the same general direction as the Land of Darkness via transitive property) and has mythological importance via Zoroastrianism as Hara Barazaiti.

• Q: Perhaps instead of destroying the Seal, the quest is returning it to the heavens?

• Addition: Hara Barazaiti lore - planets orbit around it, pretty sure Mithra was born there... 

Numenor 

Is literally Atlantis, which means I’m spoiled for choice. There is simply so god damn much available to sort through, those theosophists loved writing some bullshit about Atlantis.  

To start with, I'm going to use the real-world historical Atlantis (the Theran Eruption of ~1600 BCE that obliterated half of Santorini) as my baseline, say Phorenice from The Lost Continent was its last monarch, and I'll pencil in “Minotaur narrative” for later.

• Q: What did Nyarlathotep do in Atlantis?
• Q: Was the Seal known to / in possession of Atlantis?
• Q: What leftovers of the Atlantean empire remain?
• Q: Were the mi-go involved and why is the answer “yes”?
• Q: Typhon/Azathoth the cause of the eruption? Maybe there are two important mountains?

• Addition: Entirely unscientific dinosaurs
• Addition: Atlantean technology
• Addition: Atlantean ruins

**

I’m going to call it here for now; there’s a lot of material to cover and I haven’t even gotten to the Fellowship yet. It’s been an incredibly fun exercise so far, and I think it’s already shaping up to be something special. Experiment successful. The method works. Probably (definitely) going to expand beyond the boundaries of the initial premise, knowing how much my pattern-seeking brain likes drawing connections.

It’s very refreshing - honestly it feels a little bit like I am almost getting away with something - to do something so purposefully derivative at every step of the process, only to see that it somehow circles back around to feeling new again simply because the strictures of public domain force me to bypass 95 years of genre feeding on itself. I'm rebuilding LotR out of sources Tolkien would have known about, but not limiting myself to the sources he used. Looking at it that way it's almost an alternate history (almost, but not quite, considering all the sources that would have been copyrighted at the time.) of what could have been.

I have a feeling - call it a hunch - this will expand well beyond the boundaries of the initial experiment. 

The Keep on Candcor Hill

 

Top post of r/candcorhill (May 2025)

The Keep on Candcor Hill

"Nodens"; 1983~84? 
Self-published

B/X D&D

 

The Keep on Candcor Hill is a megadungeon in four spiral-bound booklets, written by an unknown author and printed in a single run of 25 numbered sets. The faded blue covers are graced only with the title, booklet number, author, and an ink drawing from a skilled amateur's hand: a knight on a horse, a shadowy figure peeking out from behind a stone arch, a weeping noblewoman, and a decagram.

 

The contents are a flash-grenade of text, information crammed on the page so tight that it looks symptomatic of schizophrenia. But the sentences in that explosion are lean, beautiful things. The richest words that can be afforded in a text that wastes none of them.

 

If the prospective reader doesn't immediately give up after the initial shock of a superficially-unreadable book, they'll soon run into the module's next hurdle: all those lean, beautiful sentences are fully dedicated to obscuring everything they can from the reader. It's a module where every animated skeleton has a name, history, and relationships - and it will tell you none of that directly.

 

At no point in the text does the author pull the camera back to provide a bird's-eye view or to introduce an omniscient narrator: all information besides mechanical statistics, including the DM guidance, is strictly limited to what the player characters can see, hear, smell, and touch. The closest it ever gets to breaking this kayfabe is the lone opening paragraph that explains the premise, but even that is put in quotation marks and framed as information presented to the PCs, rather than to the players. 

But all that information that would otherwise be put in the mouth of the dungeon master still exists in the world of the module, waiting to be pieced together; The Keep on Candcor Hill was setting out bait in front of the rabbit hole for the lore hounds a quarter-century before Demon Souls.The iceberg meme at the top of this page represents just a fraction of what has been found, theorized, and debated in discussion threads over the last decade. 

 

All of this would have been lost, were it not for someone cleaning out their father's attic and posting pictures of books 1 & 2 online in late 2015. The internet smelled a scavenger hunt, and the rest is history.

 

As of 2026, four manuscripts have been identified:

• #19 - Moderate wear and tear; books 3 and 4 are missing. (2015)
• #04 - Heavy wear and tear and water damage; first complete set found (2018)
• #11 - Full set in possession of a private collector in Austria: no scans provided, but confirmed the publishing date range (2018)
• #15 - Full set in good condition; emerged after a Vice article brought the module and its fandom to wider attention (2020)

So then: what remains? More mysteries, many of which are unlikely to ever be solved. An anonymous author who, at some point in the early 80s, ordered a set of 100 spiral-bound booklets from a local print shop and distributed their self-funded passion project to a handful of people, who through the entropy of time lost, threw out, passed on, or forgot The Keep on Candcor Hill. But by the grace of circumstance, KCH has dodged the fate of nearly all human art.

If you wish to take the plunge yourself, the pinned comment of the Candcor Hill subreddit has links to the collated scans of manuscripts 04, 15, and 19, as well as the Candcor Plaintext Community Edition and The Commentaries. 

 

 

Fragments of an Old Alt-History Setting

Back around 2012 or so, I cooked up an alternate history setting. You’ve got to have at least one, it's obligatory. It percolated for a few years, I ended up using it in some assignments for my writing courses in college, and it fizzled out. 

[Aside: Point 2 ultimately led to Point 3, in no small part to the misery that was my senior project - I fought tooth-and-nail against my professor’s “no spec-fic” policy, and I ended up with the weaker compromise choice of stringing together my stories in a shitty Twine game with a vague gesture at intertextuality. Absolute dogshit on all fronts. Should have just gone with a story-within-a-story meta maneuver and saved everyone the trouble, but alas, historical Dan was a dunderhead.]

But such things tend to trickle forward into the future. This setting was the origin point for both Lighthouse (which had most of its shape already present even back then) and the very first seeds of what would become Unicorn Meat (which would be almost completely re-hashed multiple times over - the list of unicorn breeds in the module is present in the same order in the very first iteration of the story, while the carvers themselves won’t show up for another few years.)

A lot of the ideas that accumulated in this setting were not alt-history in the strictest sense, being more just Dan Standard Weird Shit (much of which found its way into my Lighthouse Field Guide series of posts), and most of the actual alternative history bits existed primarily as flavor for the modern-day Lighthouse material. It was very much a “pulled in two directions accomplishing neither” type of project. 

**

Major Divergence Points

Magic Exists
It’s not easy and it's not the kind of thing you can go to school for or infinitely replicate, but it exists. It’s the old tomes and teacher-student transmission type magic. Alchemy is more stable. Surprisingly for the era I wrote this in (ie at my most charitable to Sanderson), I didn’t properly set down a system for it (despite that actually being appropriate for the time period, because I knew essentially nothing about historical occultism at the time). I know geomancy (leylines and so forth) was important.

The history of the US gets completely derailed early on
This was where I bit off potentially more than I could chew, because I had two extreme divergences I wanted to include and ended up adding several more equally or more extreme ones in order to justify them. and as it turns out Dan of 10+ years ago did not know many things.

• I think, but cannot confirm if it was actually there in the old notes, that Washington dies of an infection at Valley Forge. I know I didn’t properly think about the ramifications of this until much later, though 
• Revolutionary War ends up coinciding with a major demon / things that are called demons outbreak that cut off most trans-Atlantic travel but also makes the situation in the colonies much more tenuous despite winning the war.
• Big Ticket Derail 1: Post-Revolution westward expansion is halted (primarily due to vague magic reasons - a cop-out, sure, but it did give me the image of giant black monoliths stretching along the entire length of the Mississippi), coupled with a drastic about-face wrt relations with indigenous peoples; The general idea was that, as part of recovery efforts from the demon incursion (since the main incursion was over the Atlantic, the colonies & coastal regions got hit harder than indigenous territory further inland) the official policy became one of voluntary admission into statehood under a less-federalized system, simply because there was 30-40 years where the states couldn’t afford to expand and likewise couldn’t afford to piss off the neighbors.
• Big Ticket Derail 2: The Haitian Revolution spreads to the southern states (aided by a wizard putting his thumb on the scales); slavery is abolished in the 1790s 

Ben Franklin the alchemist
He invented a method of making homunculi stable enough that they could be consistently but not mass-produced. I think I called it the Franklin Crucible.

“John”
Escaped slave turned pirate turned whaler turned immortal sorcerer; his aid was critical in helping the colonies win independence / not collapse entirely, and he never let them live it down (Jefferson in particular). He remained a lingering influence over the political landscape long after he fucked off to do inscrutible wizard things / potentially seek godhood. He’s shown up occasionally in slightly modified form in more recent works - if you ever see anything about Botfly or the King of Wands, that’s him.

[Aside: I was in my Malazan phase at the time, so John took considerable inspiration from the emperor Kellaneved and has retained a good amount of it.]

Minor Divergence Points

• Alexander the Great of Macedonia is Alexandra the Great of Themiskyra
• This was the sorta-origin point for how I handle amazons in MSF and elsewhere, though most of the details got filled in later.
• Independent state of Deseret
• This was added not because I was particularly knowledgeable about the history of Mormonism, nor because it fit with anything else in the setting I was making, but because it was a New Thing I Learned About (well, mostly the script) and wanted to include as a background element.
• A highly syncretic form of Christianity survives in Japan to the present (filling a similar niche as Voodoo in the Caribbean)
• Mostly because I thought it’d be cool to explore what would happen when Japanese converts are cut off from contact with Rome, but not driven fully underground. Included stuff like Amaterasu filling the role of Gabriel, and the like. Of all the discrete scenarios I mashed together into this thing, this is the one that I think has the strongest conceptual though probably not practical legs, though it still needs to thread the needle of how to make it happen. Though it’s also a premise where the right extremely charismatic person in the right place can kick things off.
• Japanese ships reach California sometime in the 1500-1600s.
• Not a full-blown colonial effort, more of an accidental confluence of right time / right place / right people in charge for someone to try a circumnavigation. Doesn’t strike me as particularly feasible in hindsight. 
• Hawaii remains an independent kingdom.
• Considering the States’ lack of westward expansion in this timeline, this isn’t all that terrible of a stretch.
• The break-in at the Watergate Hotel was actually the heist of an occult artifact called the Eye of Providence.
• This is so fucking goofy, I love it.
• The Internet achieves apotheosis
• This wasn’t portrayed as a good thing, even back then, though it was a lot more insufferably early 2010s about it. It was more like a semi-divine thoughtform-gestalt thing rather than AI, and it was never more than a gestured-at background hazard, but it was definitely meant to be a danger in the background. This was not nearly as cynical, bleak, or horrifying as it should have been.

And there we have it. For a mess of things that I thought were cool at the time thrown at the wall to see what stuck, it's pretty okay. Not going to win any awards for cohesion, but my method's always been Cool Shit first, justifications later (as is no doubt obvious here). 

Who knows, perhaps the muse might return in the future and have something new in this genre for me.

Burgeoning Blogs 2

 Let's keep this ball rolling.

< Part 1

> Part 3

> Part 4  

26. How could I go about acquiring a gryphon mount? 
Either raise one from an egg (not easy) or impress one with a feat of valor (also not easy, but typically faster) - the latter will usually involve killing a specific griffin's enemy or rival (often a manticore, as they fill similar predatory niches)

27. How difficult is it to be brought back from the dead? Is such a thing even possible? 
Impossible: attempts to maintain the soul’s cohesion after bodily death is the territory of mad wizards. Shades can be summoned up pretty easily, but that’s because they’re one component of the soul and aren’t conscious entities. 

28. How do you deal with any jitters or nerves before running a game? 
I’m usually chomping at the bit before a game, rather than jittery. The difficulty is getting me into the starting position.

29. How do you determine if a character can successfully swim in your games? 
I just presume that they can, unless given reason to believe otherwise (they’re a dwarf, they’re made of stone, they’re from a desert, the player arbitrarily decides their character can’t swim), in which case I will ask the player.

30. How do you determine the weather for the day or season in your game? 
I have never actually done this, so probably with a hex flower or random table or just like, a Farmer’s Almanac from the 1800s or something.

31. How do you feel about writing directly in RPG books? Forbidden or useful? 
I don’t do it for the same reason I don’t write in the margins of normal books - I rewrite or correct things often enough that it will just turn into a mess of crossouts and eraser burns.

32. How do you handle a shy/quiet player? What about a spotlight hungry one? 
Both of these are tied up in the same general idea, which is making sure to cycle through my players with some leading questions re: what their character is doing or feeling. 

33. How do you make particularly efficient weapons stand out from inefficient ones?
Low-quality weapons have a higher chance of breaking & doing less damage; high quality ones will have a higher minimum damage or better chance to hit.

34. How do you roll dice? In the open, behind a screen, let the players roll? 
In the open, players make their own rolls. I do a lot of DMing while standing so a screen is usually of limited use to me.

35. How do your players deal with losing a character? How do you get ’em back in play? 
If they die early enough in the game that they’d be sitting around for a while, I’ll hand them a hireling, already-introduced NPC, or just a rando who would make even a bit of sense for the party to run into. They can then decide if they want to keep playing as that character or roll up a new one for the next session. If I really need to keep them in, they can be the ghost of their PC.

36. How has access to magic influenced technology in your setting? 
I tend to say that the existence of magic allows for anachronistic jumps forward in scientific fields, with sanitation, medicine, food production and astronomy being the big ticket items. Like instead of turning magic into a sub-field of science, magic is a tool to help you do science. An advantage to this is that I can keep exactly what the magic is vague for ease-of-use and narrative convenience while still keeping the societal effects. Some examples:

• Field-specific craft-magic means that everything's just a bit higher quality than it would be in reality. Items last longer and work better, and craftsmen are able to do more with less.
• Ex. If I give glassmakers are bit of vaguely-defined trade magic, I can say that made the development of lenses just a touch easier which allows me to say that microscopes and telescopes show up earlier (in-universe equivalent of the Classical period, for ease of player reference) and I can skip right over geocentrism and humorism.
• If demons exist, people will have to develop a reliable means of diagnosing possessions, which I can lead to a earlier conceptualization of mental illness.

This is, if I think about it for any time at all, a very idiosyncratic approach to magic (or at least one I don't recall seeing anywhere besides like, the occasional tumblr post) and I don’t actually think it’s based on any specific influence. I just think real-life space science is cool and want to have characters know about it.

37. How have video games/other media influenced the way you approach these games? 
Fear and Hunger’s tightly woven and multiple-solution dungeon/world design is a thing of beauty and very worth emulating, especially how open-ended and complex it manages to be without bogging down the player in verbs and tools. It’s something I had tried to do in Unicorn Meat, but of course I wrote that before I knew about or played Fear and Hunger. 

38. How long does it take to have a custom set of armor made? A weapon? 
1-4 downtimes, depending on what you’re asking for.

39. How long is your average session? Have they ever gone longer than expected? Why? 
Usually 2-3 hours. If they go longer it’s usually because there’s only a little left and it’s less hassle than scheduling a second session.

40. How much are lifestyle expenses for your PCs "between adventures?" 
I’ve never considered this a particularly interesting thing to track;  I greatly prefer Delta Green’s downtime actions.

41 How much time do you spend preparing between games? What's that look like? 
A lot of bullet points and boxes connected with arrows, doesn’t matter if it’s a premade module or something I made. Time spent is dependent on how much text I need to compile and how much compiling I need to do to make it usable.

42. How were you Introduced to these games? Share your history with them! 
I saw some 3e books at Borders in ye olden days, but didn’t really play them until I got to college and took up an offer from someone in the fantasy/sci-fi book club. I know I had been collecting the odd free pdf before then, but I didn’t get around to playing until later.

43. How would a player go about brewing their own potion or making a scroll? 
They’d need the recipe / magical formula they want to use, and then downtime action(s) to do it.

44. How would you describe a 60' x 60' square room with 4 cardinal doors to the players? 
Material, temperature, smell, contents, art on walls / ceiling / floor, sound (in-room and from adjacent rooms).

45. How would you handle a party wanting to start a business or enterprise? 
I background it to one of two rolls made during downtime: how is the business doing, and has anything noteworthy happened?

46. Is it possible to play as something unusual in your setting? A dragon, balrog, minotaur? 
I love me a Star Wars cantina, but I try to be cognizant of the fact that it’s extremely easy to make a setting dull and samey by going for quantity over quality. Part of my method for avoiding this is  just saying “there’s a lot of variety you can get from ‘humans only’ if you interpret monopods as humans”; the other part is to try and keep the special options rooted in place and context, instead of treating them like another variety of human.

Example: if you want to play a minotaur, cool! You’re going to be one of the White Bull’s thousand sons. You’re immortal, everyone in the world knows what happened to your mother, all your brothers hate you (feeling’s mutual), and your father is an eldritch abomination locked inside a maze at the bottom of some Atlantean ruins.

D&D has a habit of genericizing and sterilizing mythic monsters and that’s a large part of why using them as the quote unquote exotic player options always strikes me as a failure of imagination. Like you’re stripping out the core of the monster, there goes your main avenue of reinterpretation.

47. Is magic innate or something that can be learned by anyone? Why? 
I roll with “learned by anyone” as the default, with innate magic generally caused by external influences (you got too close to a Powerful Magical Thing, usually). It’s never going to be a strictly heritable feature, because I fucking hate the fantasy genre’s obsession with magic eugenics. Fuck right off the edge of my dick with that shit, how about you try ripping off someone who isn’t Queen Terf of Wet Island for a change, Jesus Christ. (Yes I know the trope is older than that but most modern fantasy authors aren't ripping off particularly far back sources, you know?)

48. Is there a particular system or game that you are excited to run or play? Tell me about it! 
Before life got in the way, there were plans for Layla to run Mythic Bastionland for myself and a couple other friends. Was really looking forward to that; was the first time Into the Odd mechanics really clicked for me - amazing what changing the wording from “hit points” to “guard” can do. I was going to be the Emerald Knight, the most normal of the band,

49. Is there some kind of banking system/safe storage of treasure in your setting? 
If you’re friends with the moldywarps (and you should be, they’re cute little mole-people), they’ll gladly hold on to your valuables for you. It’s not really a bank, though, more just a favor for a friend: you aren’t insured, you accrue no interest, and sometimes the moldywarps will exchange your item for something “just as good” (according to their own non- monetary standards)

50. Let me hear about your fave character/NPC from a game! What made 'em special? 
Gotta be Ayo my drunken BEEFSTRONK tiefling monk. Longest-running character I’ve ever had.
 

Burgeoning Blogs 1

The ever-incredible ktrey over at d4Caltrops had a recent 1d100 table of potential blogpost topics: in my infinite wisdom I am going to shotgun the gamut and answer every single one of them. Split up into four posts of 25 each for my own sanity.

> Part 2

> Part 3

> Part 4 

1. Are phones/devices permitted at your table? How do you handle distractions?
I don’t have a rule against it. If people are really getting distracted, I'll throw them one of the softball “how does your character do X?” prompts to get them back in.


2. Are spellcasters rare? Common? How do "normal" people feel about them? 
Spells like "snap your fingers and light a match", "fix a clean break in a broken object" and "find the lost object that you swear you just set down" are an everyday part of life. Cunning men / women, witches, spirit mediums and other low-power practitioners are found basically everywhere, and are highly valued in their communities.

Mid-power practitioners (roughly where a magic-specialist PC would be) are not uncommon, and attitudes are more ambivalent. A letter of introduction from an initiatory society won’t smooth over everything, but it will help a traveling mage.

High-power practitioners (traditional wizards with the hat and tower & so on) are rare and considered extremely dangerous (for many well-attested reasons).


3. Are there secret societies or factions hiding in your world? Tell me about one!
I am habitually incapable of resisting cheeky references to SCP deep lore that no one else will get, regardless of what game I am running, though the actual group of interest I use is context-dependent. The most likely ones will be the occult historical factions (Daevites, Ortothans, Nalkans, and Mekhanists) appearing as mystery religions, since they lend themselves extremely well to evoking vast secrets lost to time.


4. Are there any interesting holidays/festivals in your world? 
One off the dome: an isolated village whose midsummer festival entails a giant red and white orb descends from the sky and gives each inhabitant an amorphous, blobby tie-die sculpture sort of thing with no apparent purpose or design. Then the orb leaves, the sculptures are installed next to the family shrine, and next year they are returned to the orb in exchange for new sculptures.

No one knows why this happens.


5. Are there any recurring jokes or humorous call-backs that occur in your games? 
At some point, there will be a skull with the name DENNIS carved into its forehead.


6. Are there constellations in your setting? Can you describe four of them? 
It's never come up, but if I had to do it on the fly I would rename existing constellations and probably mix different traditions together while doing it. Proper names would be swapped out but the titles would probably stay the same or be similar i.e. Taurus would be the Bison or the Bonnacon, the Dippers would be the Raccoon Brothers, Orion would be the Amazon, etc.

7. Are you working on your own system? What makes it stand out from others? 
My great open secret is that I generally don’t put high value on rulesets as a whole, and tend to treat them as modular assortments of mechanics (sorted by broad genus) that can be tweaked and recombined as needed.

Which is to say I have tried making my own system, but found no reason to see those projects through when I can just use what other people have made.


8. Can one buy magic items in your setting? Where would one go about doing this? 
There are two kinds of magical item, far as I'm concerned: those that inherently have magical properties (phoenix feathers, bonnacon turds, basilisk eyes, etc) and those that have been imbued with magical properties intentionally by a practitioner. Both can be bought, though the former is much easier to acquire than the latter since you can just go on down to the shop and pick up some mandrake root; to get a bespoke enchantment you need to find someone willing and able to do the enchantment, and then they'll need time and resources to make it happen.


9. Describe 4 things that qualify for deity disfavor and cause clerics to lose powers
In increasing order of severity (exact likelihood and specifics depend on the deity):

1. Violation of ritual praxis by accident or ignorance
• If you don't know or flub up the proper rites but are doing your honest best, most popular gods will let it slide. 
2. Minor violations of ethical praxis
• Overlooking minor sins is basically required in order to maintain a human priesthood, though all gods will get fed up with it eventually if left unaddressed for too long.
3. Ritual impurity 
• This will often be an instant disfavor, though will usually only last until the follower has ritually purified themselves; the more charitable gods will make exceptions for emergency situations (ex. violating dietary prohibitions under duress in order to save someone's life)
4. Knowing violation of ritual praxis / desecration of sacred space
•  Getting sloppy with rites can be tolerated to a (usually very small extent), but deliberate transgression is going to have pretty immediate consequences. 
5. Extreme violations of praxis or sacred space
•  This is the part of the gradient where violators are going to get their asses cursed or smote.
6. Uncategorized Fucking Around
•  Circumstances where the only natural outcome is Finding Out.

10. Describe a few pieces of expensive jewelry one might find in a dragon's hoard.

1. Jade and silver torc of two entwined serpents  from the 18th Dynasty of Thuria
2. Gold and lapis lazuli headdress of an exorcist-priestess of Nan-Sul-Gara
3. Amber nose stud with preserved insect of unknown provenance unknown
4. Marble touch-sculpture of the blind and bat-like Venusians; is actually biting political satire
5. Amulet containing the left navigular bone of Saint Jomo the Mortitian.
6. An electrum medallion; it menaces with spikes of obsidian; it is engraved with the image of an elephant and a dwarf in electrum: the elephant is striking down the dwarf; the elephant is on fire; the dwarf is screaming.

11. Describe a near death situation or TPK that you've been a part of at the table
The one time I played Mutant Year Zero (right before covid kicked off), the entire party died from radiation poisoning two hexes away from home because we didn’t have a scout. Mistakes were made.


12. Describe an occasion where a die roll or randomizer had everyone surprised! 
It’s been long enough since I’ve played regularly that I don’t have any good examples on hand.


13. Describe one big "mover and shaker" or local lord/lady in your world. 
I’ve yet to settle on a name for her, but there’s a drow / lilu / kin-yani diplomat-sorceress who’s one of those 4D plate-spinner types. She’s the overseer for a major (but relatively new) trade relationship between the surface and the subterrene, and has acquired an impressive number of enemies from both sides. A woman with a lot of use for deniable assets.


14. Do all dwarfs have beards or only certain ones? Why? 
Not all of them, but they’re common for both sexes (as is body hair in general), and female dwarves without beards will often grow out their sideburns.


15. Do you do any "funny voices" or accents when portraying? If so, what are they? 
Usually only for comedic characters, which usually boil down to “bloviating wizard”, “Eeyore”, and “goblin”.


16. Do you have any stories from games that your players can't stop talking about? 
Since I don't really have consistent groups I don't have many player stories, but I have plenty of Gm stories; the con game of Dead Planet I ran a couple years ago remains a highlight, when the players managed to open up the Gaunt hive in the Red Tower barracks without any casualties by tossing in a homemade gas bomb and welding the door shut as the player in maggot armor held it in place. Weird to recount a story of players committing war crimes as entertainment, but the clever thinking on their feet was just so good.


17. Do you take breaks during a game? Are they on a schedule or ad hoc? 
Ad hoc, usually around the mid-point and hour / hour and a half in.


18. Do you use "critical hits" or "fumbles" in your games? What have they added? 
The real benefit for a crit of either variety is that they provide a great opportunity for you to ask a player “all right, how does that play out?” They’re a tool for engagement.


19. Do you use music at the table? If so, what are some examples? If not then why? 
I’ve done it a couple times in the past (Waaaaaaaaaay back when I ran Deep Carbon Observatory, I used Elegiac for going upriver and Flutter Fly for the dueling wizard encounter), but I’ve found it low-benefit to high-hassle on the whole.


20. Does alignment ever change, what kind of things would lead to that? 
Changing either your political or spiritual alliance, depending on how I am interpreting alignment at that given moment.


21. Draw or describe a treasure map your players might discover in play 
A  grid of street patterns scribbled on the back of a receipt: the only indication of actual locations are a circled X and a handful of very loose interpretations of fast food logos.


22. Have you ever fudged die rolls? Do you have strong feelings about the concept? 
I’m most likely to fudge enemy health rather than rolls; if the players have the situation under control / it’s starting to get boring, I’ll just decide 1-3 more hits will do it in if it’s not going to surrender or run off.


23. How are skeletons made? Ghouls? Why haven't wraiths/vampires taken over? 
Skeletons are made by binding a minor spirit to a bunch of bones. They can follow some basic commands, and work a bit better when the spirit is the shade of an appropriate species (i.e. the shades of dead humans are best for a human skeleton, though the skeleton and shade don’t have to be from the same person.

The original ghouls were a species of entelodont that got imprinted in a specific shoggoth gene line, and emerge in the modern day as the result of a prion disease that causes all sorts of epigenetic / retroviral fuckery when a body containing dormant imprinted cells is cannibalized.

Ghosts and undead exist in their own ecosystems with checks and balances via predator-prey relationships. Vampires are something of the equivalent of a tiger - solitary predators with very large territories. Either that or horrible tick monsters.


24. How big does a dungeon have to be to qualify for the "mega" appellation? 
Big enough that the campaign setting doesn’t exist concretely outside of it: the dungeon is the setting.


25. How common are adventurers? How are they treated generally by normal folk?
Adventurers are migrant workers, so the locals’ opinions on them will vary a lot according to the present economic situation and assorted intersections of race and class. They go where the (monster hunting) work is, and so will usually make seasonal rounds (often as part of a circus) and use the winter for rest and recovery.

Dan Plays Games 10

I really need to make an index for these. 

 

Forward Escape the Fold

Previous game of the Pyrene devs. A simple roguelite where you have a 3-wide column of cards laid out in each level full of monsters / items / potions / etc, but you can only ever move forward (straight or diagonal). The art is nice, but doesn’t feel like it has a particularly strong identity beyond a light dusting of vibes (Pyrene does much better in this regard.). While enjoyable to play for a few rounds, the gameplay loop and lightweight progression system didn't really grip me.

Asbury Pines

Idle game with a generations-spanning murder mystery plot at the center. I normally stay away from idle games because they play like hell with my ADHD (this one did too, but it seems some later patches have addressed this), but the narrative focus on this one got me to check it out and I was pleased with the experience. Being able to follow characters for decades and then having to spend time with them because of the nature of the idle elements was really effective at getting me attached to the cast. I wanted to see things turn out well, but then so-and-so dies for stupid or tragic or avoidable reasons and time keeps on going. I think the final arc and ending were a bit weak, but I was still invested even then. It does an extremely good job of letting the time scales sink in, where you will find yourself thinking of characters you liked generations or even centuries ago but never really in a way where you resent their absence, since the current batch of characters give you equal insight into the trials and tribulations of their lives.

Also, despite being an idle game murder mystery, there are Civ-style tech trees for civic, religious, and scientific advancement, and religion unlock #2 is "giant ground sloth cult" - a thing that has no concrete archaeological evidence for its existence (to my knowledge), but has non-zero odds of having existed. Do with that what you will.

Dungeon Encounters

A sort of minimum-viable dungeoncrawler, stripped down to the absolute bare bones - I don’t think that’s a good thing.

There’s no real story outside of a couple short paragraphs for each party member; your characters’ only stats are HP and equipment points; Special abilities are unlocked and applied on the party level, so character builds or specializations don’t really exist; there are no battle items and none plus one (max health boost) outside of fights; the only variables in weapons or magic are 1-target vs multi-target, set damage vs random damage, and if it can hit flying enemies or not; the dungeon has basically no interactivity besides some hidden treasures; equipment drops from enemies are extremely rare; there is no auto-explore function despite the dungeon being mostly empty, featureless hallways; there is supposedly some way to speed up the battles but I was unable to find it; the default keyboard controls are never-before-witnessed levels of intuitive.

The end result of the experiment is primarily tedium. There are threats that can wipe you easily in ways that seem unfair compared to other games (a thief enemy can put you into massive debt if you get hit), but there are likewise easy ways to completely negate those threats (I got a passive skill early on that just gives my party total immunity to poison). There are multiple enemy abilities that can just remove a character from your party if they hit, and you’re stuck on a tedious journey to get them back or find a replacement. Movement abilities plus being able to identify what monsters are in an encounter before the fight starts mean that by the time you hit dungeon level 25 you can avoid basically all the tough fights if you want to. If you party wipe, you have to start with level 1 characters and can’t even use the good loot you’ve unlocked and have to grind out THE ENTIRE THING AGAIN. 

The best quality it possesses is, in some moments, you can play it on autopilot and not think about it, and if that’s what you’re after I’m certain there are much better games to scratch the itch.

Nuclear Throne

Picked it back up after many years away, thanks to the recent 10 year anniversary patch. I’m still absolutely terrible at the game - like truly, remarkably dogshit at it - but it's still got the sauce. I’d call it one of the perfect games; nothing needs added, nothing needs removed. The machine gun thumps like a bass drum and it just feels good to play.

Ye Guild Clerk

Short freebie, you play as a clerk for an adventuring guild, giving people missions and seeing how that works out for them. Takes maybe half an hour to complete, though all the adventurers can end the game positive or negative with you so there’s a replay in there if you dig it. I can easily imagine an expanded version.

Neon White

GOTTA. GO. FAST. 

It doesn’t matter one bit if you don’t care about the mid/late-aughts Deviantart-core narrative or are super-duper competitive with the speedrunning element: there’s a skip button and the progression gates are easily overcome. There are character-based bonus levels you can unlock but again, skip button means you can get right to the challenges if you don't care about the characters.

The difficulty of normal levels is self-imposed (how fast do you want to get?), which I think is an extremely good way of designing things. Also the soundtrack slaps.

Stackflow

Balatro, if it was Tetris. Still in early access but even with the small amount of content (and no metaprogression) I found myself playing and enjoying quite a bit. Tetris is Tetris and it’s difficult to go wrong with Tetris, and even with the limited number of special blocks and perks in the game at time of writing, it's still enough to keep me engaged for a solid amount of time. I do think it needs a good chunk more content to hang on for the long haul vs the many options for standard Tetris out there, though. The most recent update (0.10) came out between when I started and finished this review; while not particularly big, it is a step in the right direction. 

 

Monsters are Coming!: Rock and Road

I can’t really recommend this one, though I am sad to say it. It’s a perfectly servicable, functional game. You have a city that moves along a path at a set rate, you move your little guy around harvesting resources and fighting monsters, you expand your city, all that works on a moment to moment level.

The issue is that this is really all there is. There are unlocks, but none of the ones I have gotten have changed how I approached the game at all. The routes you can choose are differentiated by only a few variables and each run has a set-in-stone pacing due to the auto scrolling city. After you’ve done a handful of runs you've seen most of what the game has to offer.
 

 

Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop

A roguelite about being a four-eyed fox-headed cartoon man in a dumpy space station, fixing spaceships with only your in-universe manual to help you. I love this game's premise, I love its vibe, I love sitting down and rolling through some jobs. There's a fun sense of satisfaction of going from terribly confused to "oh I can do this module with no trouble at all." The game rewards player knowledge in the way that most TTRPGs can only dream of.

However: there are a handful of bullshit moments that yank me right out of the moment and set off the "it's time to take a break" notification. A certain amount of friction is to be expected, especially towards the end of a run, but these come as particularly jarring. 

• Reactor jobs can tank a run before you realize what the problem is (understandable and appropriate, so this isn't really a flaw, but it is a frustration point. You gotta remove that core NOW.)
• The faction endings introduce new and sometimes obtuse mechanics that don't always gel (Lawmakers in particular is absolutely miserable: you have to babysit a battlestation and keep the ammo topped off, but in order to move between the gun and the dispenser you have to take a single-person elevator that is also being used by the other crewmembers who are, in my unscientific opinion, the slowest motherfuckers to ever exist in this universe of base matter.
• The meteor shower hazard just makes ships catch on fire constantly (there's no buffer period, so a fire can start literally as soon as you finish putting out the last one) and can be completely negated with a cheap permanent upgrade (like you can probably afford it after your first one or two runs and then never have to deal with meteors again, which begs the question of why they are in the game.)

A more general issue is that the game has no manual save, and only autosaves after every day of work (normally three ships) - depending on how good you are and how complex the fix-it jobs are, you're looking at a substantial chunk of time that you have to devote to the game in one go - it's not a pick up and play a round while you're on break kind of game. I understand why (cuts down on save scumming), but it is still frustrating and leads me to pass it over in favor of other games.

Still, all that aside, it's a weird little game that provides a unique experience and I'd recommend it to anyone who thinks the concept sounds fun, because even with all the frustrations listed above it is fun. I've considered printing out a hard copy of the manual, just for giggles. Maybe as Mothership prop. No idea how you'd adapt the puzzles to Mothership, but....actually hold on to that.

(Speaking of Mothership - surprisingly relevant content despite the aesthetic. The cyborg hivemind is made of desperate people trying to escape debt, you're a "devotee" instead of an employee, there's an interplanetary treasure-hunting faction that's really just an MLM scheme sifting through garbage, stuff like that. It's good!) 

**

The Gameable Content Bonus 

Uncle Chop's ship module repair for tabletop

Spitballing here, gonna get loosey goosey for a moment. You give the players a print-out or pdf of the Uncle Chop's manual (or your own bespoke equivalent). Players do their thing until they need to fix a ship module. You tell them the symptoms / problem. Players then have to either find, replace, or build replacement parts to solve the puzzle. 

**

Ground Sloth Worship in Pleistocene North America (Corvee, Alan; 1992)

For Players: A brief text outlining Corvee's hypothesis that large swathes of the Midwest and Appalachia were dominated by the worship of giant ground sloths at the end of the Ice Age. While surprisingly restrained in tone for a text of this subject matter, even cursory examination of other sources reveals that Corvee's conclusions are not supported at all by mainstream archaeology.

For Handlers: The book is intended to plant the idea in the players' minds before revealing related evidence, rather than containing any direct Mythos material. It would work as a good trailhead or supplemental evidence for a plot involving Tsathoggua (sloth-god), the Voormis (sloth people), Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborean material (reframed as the ice-age Americas, with "Hyperborea" coming from Greek mis-interpretation of the Book of Eibon), the K'n-Yani (who worship Tsathoggua and live under the Americas) and the assorted New-Age lore of Mount Shasta (Mount Voormithadreth, anyone?). Practically writes itself.

Slushpile 18

Tis the season, the season of slush.  I'm pretty sure this is the biggest one yet.

Slushpile Index

1. Salt in food has made it much harder for demons to possess people
2. The division of first beings into those who have no part in the world, those who devote all things to maintaining it, those who take an active role within it
3. A recurring question in medieval Christianity:  “Did Christ also die for the orcs?”
4. Trial by ordeal but it's just making the arrest: if she was actually an evil witch you'd be dead the moment you cross the property line, so no need to toss her in a lake.
5. The spell to turn one’s spirit into a banshee is a secret art of women - a practice of last-ditch defence against men who wish them harm.
6. The cult had fallen out of practice well before the arrival of the Four Prophets and the Epistles of Fire, and so very little information remains.
7. The Twelve Houses of Balosar
8. Oberon’s Tower hostel, just outside Lang-Mer’s Poor Gate.
9. Kona Hafhandsdottir - A sword for hire, from the northern fjordlands.
10. Makhan - A mendicant sword-priest from the lands beyond Prester John’s country.
11. “Here is one thing, there another. The stone has ten thousand teachers.”
12. Drow Ambassador: “Yes, yes, I’ve seen the cartoons. Your political comics are men of unparalleled creativity: who could have possibly imagined such witticisms as ‘foreigner bad’ or ‘woman stupid’? If that’s the best they can do I don't think they're paying much attention.”
13. Atlantida: volcanic island off the northern coast of Brazil. Former Portuguese colony.
14. “It’s all in the Vibe. Gotta have the ineffable sauce.”
15. “I am very tired and want to go home. In a cosmological sense.”
16. “There can be no Eden without gardeners, without those who love rich soil and clean water and old, old trees. It cannot be built nor sustained without callused hands and tired feet, without aching back and nails blackened with dirt. Perhaps the only difference between heaven and hell is whether the day’s labor ends with satisfaction or despair."
17. Dwarves associated with Hades / Pluto because of underground wealth.
18. DOVER BATHOS has remained at Anomalous Organism Storage Facility 05 since 1998.
19. Wherever the polyps emerged, they began to build enormous, hivelike arcologies of stone.
20. "Because they are alive, and we are not.”
21. Dream: Kittan’s youngest sister from TTGL shirts SHUT UP MOON MAN to the tune of Rob Zombie's “living dead girl”.
22. Martin had sworn to himself that he’d throw the next reporter to mention Sapir-Whorf out the nearest window, mostly in jest and frustration, and not sixteen hours later he was asked by a man from Scientific General if language dictated thought. He didn’t throw the reporter out the window, but he definitely wanted to, in a harmless, cartoon-physics sort of way.
23. Action / reaction / willpower (resist mental) / toughness (resist body)
24. Lost/anomalous media: medieval manuscript marginalia of Homestar characters
25. Dream: There is a basilosaurus in the lake, though it’s more of a nuisance than a danger.
26. To the king, that which cannot be enslaved - cannot be made property - must be destroyed. Seven hundred princes pledged allegiance to his banner, and his war parties returned to the palace so laden with treasure that they would break the backs of the pack mules.
27. Lothlorien is beautiful because the trees were loved (if only they loved their neighbors half as much, the pricks)
28. Anime that don’t exist: Grotty cult-classic sci-fi OVA, major MoSh fuel.
29. While translated as “mother”, the term is typically un gendered, and refers to anyone with the primary role of caring for and teaching a creche.
30. “You shall have your vengeance, but you shall not become it.”
31. Ribbon I want to do for convention Mothership games: “I died alone in space”
32. If magic is a beam of light, a rite is a series of focusing lenses that directs it through the prism of some unlucky bastard
33.  An anomalous transmission from the Voyager 1 spacecraft beginning November 18 2023. Situation is developing and under observation. 
34. …slipping out of the knotted dead-ends of time space when there is food to be had and the brane is thin…
35. The Door in the Wall
36. Alternate stat names: athletic aptitude, fast action, book smarts, street smarts, people skills
37. Missives from the Future: Transtemporal Stochastic Terrorism and its Effects on American Society (Jemison, 2025)
38. “Ganymede STC this is Oriole on final approach” “Copy that, Oriole, you’re cleared for docking, spur 4, bay 12.”
39. Laying on a straw mattress, listening to the crickets outside
40. Affix designating loanwords / phonetic spelling
41. “May this worthless blade be driven into a plowshare.”
42. Three common demons: guilt, despair, addiction
43. The etymology for cannabis is extremely murky, as it turns out. Heroditus claims it was from the Scythians, so you should give it to the amazons in your setting, at least.
44. If Lovecraft or one of his imitators had written the Red Pool, there would have been a character proclaiming without evidence that it was the spilled blood of Yog-Sothoth. This is a bad example because that's a fucking rad idea.
45. Generic Vernacular Fantasyland as alternate / echoed version of early 400s Britain; post Roman withdrawal (+ancient ruins), beginning of Angle-Saxon migrations / invasions (+orc stand-ins)
46. Planet where entire population descended from emulations of very limited original colonist population
47. Su’amatsanidan - I think this is supposed to gloss as “abstract mother-ship-person”, so it’s probably a term for a personified spaceship.
48. The Dust House / ANTIPETRICHOR
49. Radio in the kitchen: Preset stations pick up [spooky things]
50. 60 Years ecophage threats adapted for DG or MoSh.
51. Angga - paleolithic shamaness, maybe Willendorf herself
52. A priest of Mantuka, Devourer-of-Demons: More like a mountain that walks than a man
53. The Headhunters are not conscious - they are investigating humans primarily because self-awareness should have killed us a long time ago. We are an anomaly. Their experiments leave behind entire planets of human-derived livestock
54. Spec evo seed world but can only use SCP articles tagged with some sort of life form (animal, plant, fungus, species, etc) (or otherwise describe a clade of organisms)
55. DG agent: Sr. Margaret Tan - ~50 years old, small build, blue windbreaker, shotgun.
56. Morale is low: it is dark, and cold, and I would like to rest
57. The mosaic empire of the elves across the northern desert
58. A Lot of Zeroes premise I want to use: after detection of an alien megastructure, my spaceship is sent to panspermia the trail between it and Sol. 
59. Baqwoman - a title / profession
60. The sagani may take up divine mantles, but they do so by a different path than men.
61. The human/sapient prefix can be applied to non-sapient things as a personifier; different cultures will extend this to different things - ships, ainimae, exoselves.
62. Conlang idea - the language of Hole / Throne: the fossilized court of azathoth. Uses kanji and also Cherokee syllabary?
63. Dorothy, Alice, Lirazel vs John Carter’s invasion force; Carter overestimates how easy it is to return to earth gravity.
64. “He has need for neither posturing nor for glory: He’s going to kill a motherfucker and be done with it.”
65.  Δ-Class Citizen: colonial population support program (clone body, soul tether sigils)
66. You ever think about that bit in the tartakovsky clone wars where the Nelvaani kid recognizes and accepts his father despite his father having been turned into a monster?
67. The Eldest of Elders (Elden Beast) = transapient Elder Thing conglomerate (can embody in an avatar-body);   The binding ring (Elden Ring) = shoggoth tree-of-life command & control function.
68. Neanderthal body found frozen in permafrost, sufficiently preserved that a genome can be sequenced by porting in leftovers in modern humans.
69. CAPRA - Civic Anomalous Phenomena Response Agency 
70. Elephant variants: miniature, stilt, extremely colorful, rooter/tusker, many trunks 
71. Corvid variants: sun thief / golden-head raven, carnivale (parrot-like), thunderers, neoraptors
72. Cetacean variants: neo-ambulocetus, cyborg / walker-bots, whalesong-possessed humans, skywhales
73. Octopi variants: gasbag, shelled 
74. Paraphrasing cosmicorrery: A word to describe the feeling of sadness when one sees activities, games, or decorations put together in attempt to be Fun go unused, ignored, or dismissed. 
75. Cheap & easy conlang idea: take Latin then apply sound changes of Proto-Celtic to Old Irish, or take Proto-Celtic and apply sound changes of Latin to French or Occitan.
76. Via Robwords' episode on the etymology of dog: there are medeival English records that mention men named Wilfric Pig, Willelmo Hog, Roger le Doge, William le Frogge.
77. Extremely important historical fact: there were riots against the Inquisition in Carcassonne ~1300. The module writes itself!
78. Via Black Forager: Racahout - ground acorns in milk, a pre-chocolate hot chocolate
79. Echidna as mother of monsters but also progenitor of humanity
80. DG shotgun scenario: Inventory Day - Program agents are tasked with taking inventory at the Book Depository (old missile silo?), a long-term storage facility for weird shit. Naturally, among all the recovered Green Boxes, there is something horrible and unexpected.
81. “I attract strange people like honey attracts flies. There could be a talking monkey at my door and it wouldn’t be surprising.” 
82. The Spear of Lu - At forty-one confirmed kills, she is one of the most-veteran ships in the OSMAT fleets. 
83. The Pentaregia of Sigma Draconis
84. Demons that induce the sin vs demons that embody the sin as discrete orders of demon
85. Conjuration of spirits used to bypass development of scientific experimentation, because you can just ask a thing how it works.
86. Firebird units: Burner / Phoenix / Militia / Fireteam / Burnout
87. Courtly romance (n): wholly divorced from human experience, it contains no elements of an actual relationship and mostly serves as justification for men with power to cheat on their spouses. Guinevere never has to deal with Lancelot thrashing around in bed because of his PTSD dreams. 
88. Via Just King Things: M. John Harrison said that the editorial choice that saved his horror story The Ice Monkey was going back, removing the exposition, and keeping everything else intact.
89. In an effort to save the library from the encroaching polyps, a large chunk of the time space superstructure is violently torn out of reality. Some ruins are left behind, discovered so much later by the troodontids and humans. The yithians regroup in the distant future. Those that remain inside, unable to transmigrate or continue a population of conomorphs, attempt to develop other hosts. While they succeed, their minds are reduced to instinct, and these new docents tend to tomes they can neither read nor understand.
90. The triple hierophant - a towering exultant; long straight black hair, golden robes that appear to glow, headpiece like a sunburst
91. Idea: What if the existence of working conjuring means that you can kind of sidestep a lot of experimental science by just asking something "how do you work?"
92. You'd think that by this point goblins should would know to avoid adventurers
93. The problem with “work to live, not live to work” is that it still contains the unspoken and implicit corollary of “and those who don’t work, don’t get to live.”
94. FTL that autocorrects for paradoxes by removing the vessel from perception from all frames of reference. One it jumps it is fucking gone
95. Demon that causes miscarriages as male, bucking folkloric trend
96. Demon: A white bull ox ridden by a giant, blood-drenched man bound in hair-ropes. Blinded, cock like a flagpole
97. Appalachian Tsathoggua: I can't explain why it feels right, but it does.
98. Stealthy night monster identified by the sound of its grinding teeth
99. Lemman - Middle English word for one's lover, from Old English lēof +‎ mann. Gender neutral. We could stand to bring this one back, it's very useful. (Thanks to the Maniculum for pointing it out.)  
100. Goldberg polyhedrons: a sphere made of hexes, which is probably useful to y'all.
101. Language where the word for "wealthy" shares the same root as the word for fat.
102. I remember an old LP of Jurassic Park Trespasser that I enjoyed, really need to find it again. Old old, like definitely over a decade.
103. "Forgiveness is not transactional! Mercy is not a fucking gacha machine you can just feed tokens into until what you did is okay!"
104. For MoSh: Marines get sidearm, Teamsters get toolkit, Scientists get research database, Androids get logic core
105. Tostées dorées - French toast, when you're already in France.
106. Slimes are dragon vomit, containing bits and pieces of inedible matter like an owl pellet.
107. Runaway Station; phantom train stop that appears to a quartet of kids who have fled the residential school. 
108. Sour Stripes ? Sour Strips? Google gives me candy but I swear that was the name of the band.
109. Everyone goes for “oh the necronomicon is bound in human skin” and no one bothers asking “okay, whose skin is it? Seems like a lot of trouble. And honestly how can they even tell, it's leather! It is leather, right? It'd be rotting away if it wasn't..."
110. Japanese "starving woman" cryptid
111. Gravity was formulated relatively early, thanks to a monastic order high in the mountains, whose meditative practices involved rolling polished stone balls onto a taut sheet of silk or canvas that was shaped into a funnel by a central stone, and divining according to how the balls spiraled. 
112. Via Dr. Sledge: in Talmudic demonology, Shabiri / Shabriri (I couldn't discern if that first r was there when he said it) is the demon of night-blindness. Fair to assume that Miyazaki did that intentionally.
113. Knight errant as the fantasy of “get the cool parts of the military estate without the feudalism”
114. Lawful demons tempt into sin; chaotic demons embody it 
115. “The Knight” or “”The Lord”; an undead or possessed suit of armor to defend the town 
116. Combative magic is difficult and rare because most spirits will just refuse to do it 
117. A language: SVO, analytic. It possesses no tense but sufficient aspect
118. The sin of Power, combining within itself cruelty, greed, and pride
119. Video game Sea of Rifts uses "Exposure" instead of stability / insight / sanity, and I think I like it best of all. You don't understand it, but you're changed all the same. 
120. The angel corpse falls to seafloor and is covered with silts; geological upraising of the region, plus hundreds of millions of years of erosion, will lead to its discovery inside a mountain.

**

RED HED

A withered body, bluish-grey like colloidal silver poisoning. A swollen rubbery sphere, candy apple red and six feet across, grows out of its head, hanging in the air like a water balloon pulled by an unseen center of gravity high above. Its splay-toed feet are on backwards.

• Wounds: 2(20)
• Instinct: 40
• Combat: Non-Continguous Cutting Motion (30)
• Line-of-sight
• Seven-fingered hands and three-jointed arms snap into a sequence of angular contortions. Flesh is cut with the knife that is not.
• On failure: 3d10 damage, SAN save to negate
• One success: 1 wound (Blade), SAN save to reduce to failure result.

Ambrosia
The heavy, non-Newtonian fluid within the acephalonic sac is highly alkaline. It splashes over everything at Close range, damaging objects and burning exposed skin (1d10/round). Poison fumes burn eyes, mouth, nose; anyone who comes within Close range without eye protection will be temporarily blinded. Can be diluted with (large quantities of) water. Reacts with violent foaming reaction if acid is applied.

**

“Hi! My name’s Luce!”

Miriam looked at the girl on the doorstep and wondered for a moment why the last twenty-odd years of her life were regularly punctuated by the strangest people imaginable. She brushed the thought aside: the girl with blue hair was not nearly as strange as the talking monkey and confused monk, or the clay doves, or the choir of burning eyes, or the stone-bodied messenger, or any number of impossible things that seemed to follow her like dust on her heels.

“Are you lost?” Miriam asked.

“I’m on pilgrimage!” The girl said, beaming. “But I don’t know if I’m in the right place. So maybe I am lost.”

Miriam nodded. That made more sense.

“If you’re looking for Yeshua, he’s out with his brothers on a job. He’ll be back by sundown.”

**

 “You are so very concerned with whether things are real and care nothing for if they are true. When I woke up this morning, I went into the woods and pissed on a tree. That is real. If I tell the story of Chukan and how he tried to steal the sun’s wedding garment for his beloved, is it less true because I do not include every time he stopped and pissed against a tree? What bearing does that have on the story of a youth in the grips of lovesickness? The sun does not have garments, and even if he did, they would be far too large.” [Footnote: this size discrepancy is brought up in most versions of the story]

** 

Principle of Anthropocentic Expectation

It is always possible that a supernatural entity, either on their own or through external influence, is, artificially adjusting their appearance, properties, or circumstances so as to align with pre-existing human expectations; this may be embodied in tropes such as “people see what they think they should see” or “they picked this form because it was already familiar”, or it may be an intentional misdirection on the part of the supernatural entity.

** 

 

Please get these drafts out of my docs they have been sitting here for YEARS. 

 

Scrap Post 1: Making Better Transhuman Chargen

(Initially) an attempt to fix Eclipse Phase’s wonky morph system, that then turned into a broad sketch for a fully modular Knave-style slot-based build-a-character system.

Reason to Scrap It: The premise is so broad that my attempt to make a general-purpose system floundered (turns out, transhuman sci-fi is an extremely broad conceptual category) and I’d have to make an entire setting to give it anything substantial to work on, and I don’t enough about the idea to go to that work. I might dig it back

Scrap Post 2: Building the Verse (but Better)

Taking the oddly detailed numbers of Firefly’s Verse, plus some help from PlanetPlanet, and rebuilding the setting with some hard-science solar system generator or another for a slightly-more-realistic version.

Reason to Scrap It: The map is the only thing I particularly like about Firefly and while the numbers are useful, I’d need to re-arrange the system anyway to make it stable and at that point why not just make it wholly original.

 

Scrapped Post 3: Building a Fantasy Solar System

Either a collection of tables, an essay, or a worked example (or all three) to do what it said in the title.

Reason to Scrap It: Not enough substantial material to justify it as a standalone post. I still want to do something with the idea, since I am a fan of that tiny tiny Venn overlap of high fantasy and hard space science that basically no one else lives in, but if I do I'm going to just skip ahead to “making a solar system”. Probably for MSF, though the advantage of this method is that you can kinda just swap it into whatever setting because so few fantasy RPGs care about other planets.