Monday, June 10, 2024

Slush Post 15

 Previous piles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8.5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

  1. Dwarves carve enormous monolithic fortresses because they will, over many long centuries, grow into giants. In death, these giants will supply the next generation of dwarf larvae with the nutrients needed to pupate in their stony chysali.
  2. Xenomorphs in a fantasy context: what sort of forms might they develop using the inhabitants of Generic Vernacular Fantasyland as prey?
  3. The Onion Drive, which is not related to the similarly-named Orion Drive.
  4. MoSh dungeoncrawl - oxygen as the time counter for exploration turns
  5. Post idea: the fantasy Klingons everyone wants orcs to be
  6. An out-of-service payphone on a streetcorner. Still functions as a means of occult communication.
  7. Using occultism-sustained defunct chat clients to serve as secure communication.
  8. Real historical linguistics: 'eyesight' and 'farsee' as units of measurement.
  9. Holy water container next to trauma kit in greenbox.
  10. Dream: movie about some Mowgli-type wild child who lives in the bayou swims around inherited a magic flute through a series of ancestors. Trailer is hyping it all up and this giant with wings is fighting an alligator but the gator’s animations are out of synch.
  11. Making a syllabary with Latin extended Unicode blocks
  12. [Make sure to add cadaver synod]
  13. Black holes are ascended dragons, coiled around hoards that can never be stolen from.
  14. Demons are summoned by invoking the subject of their hyperfocus
  15. Number stations as their own autonomous organization, outside of human involvement.
  16. Giant chains connected to things that should not float is primo aesthetic. That and building things on top of horrible dread underground cities. Combine the two and you’ve got something grand cooking.
  17. Something is down there.
  18. Cronus is actively autocannibalistic, budding off copies and then violently consuming them.
  19. Handwritten lecture notes, Swahili. Detailed description of colonization mission to Trappist 1.
  20. Human embryo encased in raspberry rock candy shell. Deleterious effect against magic practitioners.
  21. The stasis undergone by the original colony ships was much longer than one would think, as they waited for the faster star wisps to prepare worlds for their arrival.
  22. Video game - explore hell to find and insult various political figures.
  23. Fix the gay fanfic problem by spelling oblique pronouns with ɛ and ɪ.
  24. House of the Ouroborous
  25. Crab options for mothership, since EP won't give them to us.
  26. The existence of a natural logarithm implies the existence of an unnatural logarithm.
  27. Anarchist collectives chip in to buy a central exowomb to be shared among the group.
  28. Opening description: The PCs, wage-slaves and debtors of a brutal military-industrial dictatorship, are made part of a forced relocation effort destined for...
  29. Sisters of the Sable Maid as an rpg / fighting game hybrid. Like Indivisible but good
  30. If Discworld had an anime, who would Norio Wakamoto voice?
  31. To be wizardly is to be a miser with knowledge
  32. The dungeon as literalized hauntology
  33. Short story idea:

**


An important message from Timothee Lambert, the world's most bizarrely uplifting spambot

"Thank you for being a reliable source of inspiration and encouragement. This blog has motivated me to pursue my passions and embrace new challenges. Your authenticity and genuine enthusiasm shine through in every post. You're making a difference in the lives of your readers!"

And then a link to some scam site

**


Delta Green character concept: Fr. Andrew. Jesuit priest & professor of anthropology. Liberation theology & heterodox views. Friendship with the bishop has kept him safe from internal politicking so far but won't last forever. Bonds: The Bishop (mentor) Fr. Enrique (friend), Julia (mistress) Shelly (sister).

Entry into Program: Rachel Muir drops out midway through the semester, only to call weeks later requesting confession. During this, she confides that she's no longer safe at home and is trying to escape. She's clearly dancing around something and won't go to the cops. Fr. Andrew makes the call to get her to safety himself, and drives her through the night to his sister Shelly's house on the other side of the state. There's possibly a bhyakee sighting involved on the way: turns out Rachel's family was deep into horrible cult shit and was at that time getting busted by Operation BIG SMOKE. Rachel is found three days later by Program agents, and Fr. Andrew gets read in as a friendly, later a full agent.

**


Scrapped Post: More 60 Years Bullshit

Last year, I stumbled across an RPG by the name of Sixty Years in Space. Since I am drawn to imperfect art with grand vision with a consistency that borders on the compulsive, it swiftly became one of my white whales: the sort of game that I cannot stop thinking about no matter how glaring its many flaws were. I wanted to make it work. I am beginning to think this might be some sort of compulsion.

I tried, last summer. I hacked out some rudimentary procedures to run through the history-simulation aspects (since generating a solar system was nigh-impossible), and I was able to get through to the end. I disliked the end result and shuttered the draft.

I tried it again this spring. I still dislike the end result. I can't honestly say that I was trying to get anything out of it beyond blood from a stone - there are easier and better ways to make Mothership stuff.

A waste of time useful only in providing examples of what not to do. Went and deleted the files from my PC so I wouldn't have an excuse to spend more time and brainpower on it.

(I legitimately forgot that I had something to this very same effect in Slush Post 14: perhaps now I will have learned my lesson)

**


Warframe-like bodies grown from devil-tumors incubated in human victims - Cancerous notules of incohate flesh, caused by an imbalance of atum and fed upon the flame imperishable.

**


Enormous bulkhead gates, carved and painted with a sefirot tree. Characters who know Hebrew can instantly see that most of the text is fake; gibberish, written backwards, grammatically mangled, and in one spot clearly a recipe for tomato soup someone snuck in as a joke. The guy who bankrolled this facility doesn't know jack shit about kabbalah.

**


An Otherworld - Antilla and the Satanazes


An island chain in the north Atlantic, originally settled by Visigoths fleeing the Umayyad conquest of Hispania sometime between 714 and 732. The settlements, woefully underequipped, ill-prepared, and cut off from the outside world after burning their ships on arrival, suffered tremendously from famine and sickness and suffered near-total colony collapse within the first decade on the islands. Still, a very small population survived until contact was re-established in 1447.

**


The day Tulu rose from the sea, nothing much happened. Splitting headaches for everyone or nearly everyone on the planet is unprecedented, and there were a good number of accidents and deaths by aggravated pre-existing conditions, but on the whole it was within the norms of the 21st century in regards to ill-omened events. Fucked with some satellites. But it was all over in 20 minutes, and after that there was nothing. The stars were right, and it was time to leave. A world such as ours is no place for a priest of the Outer Gods. The violence in the aftermath was the result of the same factors that it always is; fear, greed, pent-up aggression looking for an excuse. But that died down soon enough, and then the world settled back into its newest of normalcies.

**


A message received by a Delta Green command cell:

hey
HEY
HELLO
[three green triangles]
I HAVE MADE THE GREEN TRIANGLES
SOFT APES, RESPOND
I HAVE A MYSTERY FOR YOU
CONTAINING CLUES
AND PATTERN RECOGNITION
I AM LED TO BELIEVE THAT SOFT APES ENJOY PATTERN RECOGNITION

PROCEED TO FOLLOWING COORDINATES: █.█.█.

FURTHER GUIDANCE WILL BE PROVIDED AT PRESET TEMPORAL POINTS


12 comments:

  1. > To be wizardly is to be a miser with knowledge

    Wrong! Wizard is from the Middle English "wis", meaning "wise" and the Norman French suffix "-ard", meaning "too much (and I don't like it)". Other good related words are "mustard" (too musty/stinky (and I don't like it)) and "coward" (too cowed/scared (and I don't like it)). Bastard is purely from French so it's not as funny.

    > MoSh dungeoncrawl - oxygen as the time counter for exploration turns

    I've wanted to do a space hulk megadungeon like this where part of progression is reactivating or setting up small areas of life support to reset your oxygen levels. Pre-submersible Subnautica vibes. I never pursued it enough to figure out what else is going on in the hulk, though.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I legit think “Petard” (the military explosive) comes form the French word for “fart.” No further comment.

      Delete
    2. Bast involves too much basting and the person didn't like it. This is an obvious crude sex pun that I do not need to explain further.

      Delete
    3. I know the actual etymology, I'd intended it as something of an in-universe saying.

      Delete
  2. 16 appeals to me and the demon warframe bodies has be thinking about my Doom + Helldivers idea a little differently

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sometimes you just want a horrible gribbly meat-suit.

      Delete
  3. I don't think these lecture notes in swaheli would be all that weird. And I must say that, even though I'm a real boy, I fully agree with Timothee Lambert. Big fan of this.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Can I steal some of these ideas for Star Wars fanficcy stuff?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sure: always glad to help out the cause.

      Delete
  5. I'll be honest... I don't think kabbalah is that complicated

    You got your yetzirahs and your assiahs and your emanations and your withdrawals of the godhead and yadda yadda - which is good, one hopes that God wants to be understood, without studying the passover or whatever your whole life

    ReplyDelete