Slush Pile 9

Slushpiles Past: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8.5


Herein lies a resting place of ideas that didn't have enough oomph or enough energy to become full posts.

Dan's Ideal Class Representatives

• Fighter - Maya ten Meti (Kill Six Billion Demons)
• Thief - Dismas (Darkest Dungeon)
• Cleric - Any of the level up ladies from the Souls series / the White Priestess (Ender Lilies)
  
• Wizard - Roy Mustang (FMA)
• Elf - The Vagabond (Pyre)
• Dwarf - The composite ideal of a Dwarf Fortress dwarf.
• Halfling - Goblins, gremlins, all manner of small and weird trash-people. The Eizouken trio)
  

Plague magic

This is an old bit of work. Whole idea was that working magic would generate miasma of different types which would trigger different diseases according to the humours - guess I was already vibing with Dorohedoro a decade ago.

• Sanguine -Basically either vampire or vampire victim.
• Choleric - Salt and grit and dehydration
• Melancholic - Zombie rot type stuff
• Phlegmatic - Mucus and slime everywhere

A sketch of a spec-evo project prompt via TLN

A god dies in orbit around a world equivalent to pre-Cambrian Earth. Chunks of its flesh fall into the ocean and kickstart the beginning of a new foodchain. Organisms adapt to feeding off of its Eternal Flame first, then some adapt to eating its incorruptible flesh. Predators of the above two clades emerge. Pre-existing parasites of the god's body craw out a new niche for themselves.Its angel attendants, cut off from divine grace, must evolve new social patterns and defenses to protect against predators.

Ultralight pointcrawl generation

For use in space, overland, wherever. Someone has obviously done this before.

Take as many d6s as you like, roll them. Each die is a location of note, and the number is how many routes extend from that node.

Re-arrange them appropriately. It's okay if you have some dangling routes, you can expand on those if you want later. Nodes with 4+ connections will be some manner of major crossroads.

Excerpt from a very old Pen and Tam draft.

A dead whale had drifted into the harbor during the night. Old age or sickness had claimed it, the tide had caught it, and now the carcass bobbed up and down on the oily water under the weight of the scavengers. Sleek black trilobites nibbled away at the corpse, under the screeching, squabbling cloud of gulls. A sea scorpion sat up by the head, tail curled, snapping at anything stupid enough to come close to it.

The smell of putrefaction mixed with sewage, salt and smog hung thick and heavy in the humid dawn air. The orange smear of the rising sun shone dimly through the smoky clouds to the east.

[She] dragged her vision away from the whale to look towards the city, a hazy blob spreading up and down the coast, rising inland up to the crown of Monolith Hill and its four ancient pillars. Those pillars dominated the scene, towering over the factory smokestacks and the tumbled, tangled carpet of the city on the lower hills. Those pillars were remnants of the [...], who had had ruled the world when man was still hunting and gathering in the wild places. Where the [...] had fallen from glory and their cities ground down into dust, the pillars on Monolith Hill remained.

It should be noted that in the Umber Continent the custom of mask-wearing is not a religious practice, but a practical one - the most avowed atheists and heresiarchs will wear masks in public, so as to avoid being marked as a target by skin-eaters. These creatures are fascinating topic in their own right, along with their relationship with the lares of the continent and the ancient mound-raising civilization that predates both our own and that of the masked priests themselves.

Writeup for a 5e character

Redwood, Firbolg (f)

Redwood (true name private) acts as an intermediary between the Forest People and the human population of the region, travelling from town to town to make sure that the shrines are well-tended and that there aren't any violations of the compact between the two peoples. Mostly she's a traveling physician and midwife. The arrival of Imperials from across the sea has the Forest People on edge, as it took many years and a great deal of struggle to normalize relations with humans in the region, and no one is quite certain how reasonable the new arrivals will be.

As such, Redwood has been directed by her grandfather Boarbeard (a member of the elder council of her home), along with others, to scout out what they can of the Imperials - mindset, culture, hierarchy, etc - a prelude to formal diplomacy.

Regions of Human Space (The Anthropogenic Corpus)

• The Skull - Under-construction dyson swarms in a connected cluster of red dwarfs.
• The Spine - Major hyperspace route from the Skull all the way through the Heart, Stomach, Liver, and terminating in the Bowels.
• The Heart - Earth and its nearest colonies, all easily accessible to each other.
• The Ribs - Hyperspace routes branching outwards from the Heart and Spine
• The Lungs - Two expansion spheres adjacent to the Heart but possessing few points of access save by the Ribs
• The Stomach - A centralized expansion bubble filled with the most prominent second-wave colonies.
• The Liver - Centralized third-wave colony sphere.
• The Bowels - The end of the line. Dead end routes and failing fourth-generation colonies.
• The Nerves - Network of micro-wormholes between worlds throughout the Corpus.
• The Arteries - Major hyperspace lanes staring in the Heart and moving out to the Limbs.
• The Veins - As above, though they do not intersect with the Arteries.
• The Limbs - Expansion routes to spinward, widdershins, and two to rimward.

Casting Using Toki Pona

Toki Pona is a conlang designed to be simple. It's got ~120 words, the grammar is nearly nonexistent, you can start piecing together sentences within a couple minutes.

So, of course, I clearly must do something game-related with it.

Here's a dictionary, here's a searchable wordlist, there were some new words added recently you can find them here, and here's a site to auto-generate words or phrases using the sitelen sitelen logography (good for character sheets)

Toki Sewi

The premise is simple: a magic user can know as many spells as they want, and can cast them as often as they want, with the catch that they must be in Toki Pona. So long as those words can be interpreted to match the situation, the spell will work. Players should write down the spells they come up with (bonus points if they can do it in sitelen sitelen)

How to Toki Pona

• Subject > Verb > Object
• Adjectives follow nouns
• Words can be used nouns / adjectives / verbs depending on context
• mi moku e kala = "I eat the fish"
• mi kala = "I (am) fish(ing)"
• esun kala = "fish market" or "fishy business"
• Particles are used to differentiate parts of speech
• "e" introduces a direct object
• "en" is placed between multiple subjects
• "la" is placed between a context phrase and the main phrase
• "li" is placed between a noun (that is not "mi" or "sina") and its verb)
• "o" is "hey!" or "O!"
• "pi" marks possession/relation, "of"

The Starting Spell

I'm building Toki Sewi as a tradition based on making requests with the spirits and beings of the world around you. As such, most spells will open with an invocation of whatever the particular spirit in question is.

O [blank] la mi wile sina... = "O [name], I ask (that) you..."

And you fill in the remainder with the verb and object of your request. Bing bang boom, all done.

Many names will be rooted with "kon" - breath or spirit. Some potential names might include:

• kon telo suli (spirit water large) - a spirit of a lake or sea.
• kon telo tawa (spirit water moving) - a river spirit
• akesi alasa (lizard hunting) - a large, hungry lizard
• akesi linja (lizard ropelike) - a snake
• soweli nasa ("land mammal weird") - an uncooprative farm animal
  

And so on and so forth. It's very loosey-goosey.

Miscellanea

The Zero Iteration of the House exists. Its self-referential fractal replication generates universal branes. Discordance of energy states between branes leads to development of early exotic matter. Parasitic exotic matter beings develop in the inter-brane energy flow. These will ultimately destroy the 0 Iteration.

**

The reign of Jon Snow through the Big Bloody Winter is considered to be the last of the kings of Westeros - scholars estimate that between a quarter to a third of the entire continent's population died of starvation and plague during those five years. Dorne was the only kingdom spared, and thus the only one to remain intact. Westeros devolved into even smaller squabbling fiefdoms and remained so for over a century, until waves of immigration from the Free Cities once again brought a semblance of social stability.

Of perhaps the most meaningful note, in the sense of cosmic symbolism; when Pentosh explorers delved into the ruins of King's Landing some 170 years after the death of King Jon, they found the Iron Throne, long synonymous with the Westerosi monarchy, nearly entirely intact. It was melted down and turned into a printing press. This device, affectionately named "The Elephant", remains active to this day.

**

A dungeon idea - a church carved out of a solitary hill. The central sanctuary is open to the sky and has a massive baobab tree in it, which houses a nymph. The church has been sacked and the priests killed by soldiers, who are trying to break through the nymph's wards and take her heart. They have deployed a great venomous maggotlike creature to the roots of the tree. The soldiers are accompanied by a chain-gang of scab lads and an ogre.

**

• R-PASIN (Robust Policing & Security Intelligence Network) - in case you thought the police couldn't get worse, they did, in fact, get worse.
• Basilisks are the offspring of Medusa and the world-serpent.
• The Reset Option - A point where hyperspace reaches a buffer overflow and restarts the universe. This is what happens when you try a mass-scale divine ascension.
• You are on the lowest level already, There is a passage [DEEPER].

**

Cleric Variant: The Cleanser - Those sanctioned by the church to quiet the restless dead, drive out demons, and purify regions of corruption.They are not priests, and carry no official ecclesiastical power beyond an honored position. They will be accompanied by companions and defenders (the party), selected for them by their bishop.

Purifying the boss monster will render the dungeon / hex safe, removing the threat (at least as far as the undead/demonic/corrupted are concerned)

Turn Undead is reskinned as purification, and can work for exorcisms and cleaning of tainted locales as well.

Possibly call up and channel spirits of the dead - shades of old cleansers?

(Stolen in entirety from Ender Lilies, though certainly the concept didn't start with that game)

**

Clowns do not reproduce normally; instead, their life cycle begins with the theft of an egg from the nest of the jub-jub bird, on which is painted the face of a new clown. The egg is placed in a vault for incubation, and this process will trigger the development of fruiting bodies in the parent clown(s) and the sporing stage will begin.

[DATA REDACTED]

Juvenile clowns will ride on their parent's back until they are ready to walk, and will be ready to hunt on their own by the age of eight or nine months.

[DATA REDACTED]

We are certain that there is no such thing as clown milk.

[DATA REDACTED]

Clowns have flexible cartilaginous skeletons and can squeeze, with some effort, through any space large enough to accommodate their skull.

**

A hunting demon - humanoid, apelike posture, meat-grinder mouth, bright red muscle, a swarm of parasitic urchins scuttle over its skinless body, underbelly covered in suckling, armored fetuses

**

“Westward” – An old Pathfinder-class ship, fit for cargo and passenger transport. Has seen sufficient re-haul and modification over the years, due to the efforts of the current crew. Maximum crew/passenger total: 15. 20 if the cargo bay is used and the trip is short. Features and on-ship hydroponics garden and aquarium for a steady supply of food. Not capable of FTL travel. Maximum sublight cruising speed: .3 AU/day.

**

Class: Drow Inviolatrix - A social role without easy equivalent - a sacrosanct individual, equivalent to a noble but not part of the houses or the priesthood. Often used for interhouse diplomacy, and so find themselves on the surface in this day and age, making treaties with the realms of the Blinding Uncavern. It is anathema for the sun to touch their skin and for their feet to touch the ground, so they are forever carried about in palanquins by homunculi bearers and attended to by eunuch servants.

**

Star System Sigils - A circular patch the color of the primary star (if a multiple system, the other stars are arranged around the rim of the patch). On the path is the name of the star, written either as the greek letter + constellation symbol (Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, Episilon Eridani, etc) or as the catalog code (uncertain on how to display these as yet) plus the number written in either maya or kaktovic numerals (base 20 saves space)

**

A cut chapter header quote from Unicorn Meat

“The nobile maide thanne sitten doun in the grov, and anon the unicorne walken oute. He reste his whit-hered hed on hire lappe to forslepen ther, til mighti sword-men assail him with shininge blades an spillen the beaste, castinge his blod upon grond an maide bothe.”

- Brindlehall Manuscript, Anonymous, Middle Aristocratic Era

**

An anime idea: A loser dies and meets some gorgrous goddess with huge tits who reincarnates him in another world with magical powers, to defeat a demon lord, and there's an entire harem of shitty generic waifus.

But there's some weird stuff in this first episode. All the waifus have the same tattoo of an eye on their shoulder, just like that goddess. There's only mist beyond the walls of the town. Why are there so many padlocked red doors? What's with that windchime noise?

Then episode 2 happens.

In episode 2, soldiers from over the wall attack the town and specifically the waifus...who are demons, as is the goddess. The town is an illusion placed over their hive. They trap souls that drift between worlds and use them as food. The magic he was taught is worthless. The soldiers are a mercenary company from outside, on retainer to one particular demon lord in a war against an alliance of others.

The MC is dragged out of the illusion-hive as a ghost, and ends up possessing the body of one of the soldiers who died on the way to the hive. Since he's got no skills whatsoever and doesn't speak the language, he ends up with the camp followers scrubbing pots and patching blankets out with the cooks and prostitutes and porters. Here he is forced by necessity to make meaningful relationships with people and come to terms with the fact that the world and its inhabitants don't exist to serve him. MC will meet some other souls from other worlds, eventually meeting someone who knows enough English for them to communicate through a mutual second language.

So yeah it's basically The Black Company: The Anime. 

The world they're in might be hell. Who knows.

**

"How do you mean to threaten me?" the demon boasted. "The sword you hold is broken, and blunt besides."

It said this not knowing of Lu's skillful throwing arm, nor the mechanisms determining the relationship between mass and force, and so was taken by intense but fleeting surprise when the rusted hilt punched clean through its skull and buried itself fifty cubits deep into the mountain behind it.

When the thundering had dissipated from the air, Lu said to those gathered around her: "The sword has no worth in itself; I could have done the same with a stone."

To which there was a great cry of "WHAT?! WHAT DID SHE SAY? I CAN'T HEAR ANYTHING!".

Lu then let loose a mighty curse, kicked a nearby shrub, and went off to find Auditorius, god of ear doctors.