Wikipedia Links Slushpile 2

Slushpile index 

Second verse, same as the first; these are all links I saved for myself in my general notes doc.

1. Irish Bell Shrines
Reliquaries for hand bells made by / made for / associated with saints. I love a good super-specific bit of religious-historical minutiae and these absolutely scratch the itch.. Perfect excuse to introduce bell exorcism, too!

2. The Plain of Jars
Jar burial is pretty common historically, which isn’t that unusual. More unusual is a region in central Laos where there are thousands of stone jars dated back to the bronze age whose makers are not particularly evident (possibly the Sa Huynh culture?). No erdtrees, though. Definitely where our boy Alexander got his start, though.

3. Olo (Color)
A color that can only be seen by shooting lasers into your eyes and specifically targeting your M cone cells, supposedly something close to a low-saturation teal. Only discovered in April ‘25, but assuredly going on the list next to octarine and ulfire. 

4. The Book of Ingenious Devices
A perfect text to drop in a setting without changing anything, because the summary alone sounds like it’s from a fantasy novel.

• Straightforward and evocative title
• Written by three brothers working at the House of Wisdom at the behest of the caliph.
• Contains schematics and descriptions of 100 mechanical devices and automata.

Honestly I expect someone has already added it to D&D, and you should too. 

5. Hundun
Befitting the formless chaos that preceded existence, most of this article is a tangle of weird etymologies, double-triple-quadruple meanings, puns (that might be food-related), a total lack of consistency between a given source and any other source, and a lumpy-dumpy six-legged thing with four wings and no face or head. Playing the hits.

6. Fomorians
Big old nasties from Irish myth, all-purpose ogrelike enemies of the Tuatha de Danann. Linked here specifically because of the painting by John Duncan, which is a) public domain b) an extremely fun collection of freaks. Look at that sardine man!

7. The Knight of the Burning Pestle
1607 stage play that opens with a play-in-a-play (The London Merchant), which is interrupted by two audience-member characters (the Citizen and his Wife) whose actors had been sitting in among the real audience (the audience for Knight of the Burning Pestle) and who then get up on stage (Where the actors for Knight of the Burning Pestle are trying to put on The London Merchant), derail The London Merchant and start putting on their own performance of The Knight of the Burning Pestle (the play-within-the-play-within-the-play, not the 1607 stage play that opens with The London Merchant). This is the first scene!

8. Kushan Empire
Critically-overlooked historical polity of Central Asia c. 30 - 375 CE, successor state to the Greco-Bactrian kingdom. Puts every fantasy setting you’ve ever read to shame with the level of syncretism going on: simply reaching into your pocket for a handful of change would leave you with coins depicting Zeus, Ahura Mazda, Shiva and the Buddha. 

9. Vigenère Cipher
A cipher where each letter of the encrypted message is encoded with a different Caesar cipher. 

Plaintext message: Trap chest ahead
Key Text: redtriceratops

So to encode the plaintext, we shift [t] forward 19 letters, wrapping around from z to a and ending on [k]. ([r] is the 18th letter of the alphabet, but for the cipher we start counting with 0)

Then we just run through the plaintext, remove the spaces and punctuation, and we have

Encoded message: kvditpgwkaaspv

The game usage should be obvious: stuck some coded messages in a dungeon, drop a key in as a conspicuous detail (hastily painted red triceratops below the ciphertext) or even a physical item. It’s complicated enough that I wouldn’t lock progress behind it, but for hidden treasure, secret doors, lore and messages it’s a solid way to make it more engaging than a simple skill check.

10. Qara Khitai
Another historical polity of central Asia, though this one only lasted for about a century (1124 to 1220, as that’s when the Mongols did their thing.) Noteworthy for being the origin of Cathay, the name used for China as a whole in a lot of medieval / renaissance european literature. I specifically found this article through the articles on Orlando innamorato and Orlando Furioso - the princess Angelica of Cathay is just “generic pagan” in the text, but the mind goblins are saying “oh but what if that chivalric adventure was slightly more historically accurate, wouldn’t that be cool?” 

11. Lilith #Incantation Bowls
There’s an entire rabbit hole to go down on incantation bowls and their use in Mesopotamia as traps for evil spirits; I include this link here not because of that, and not because of Lilith specifically, but because of how the art is clearly done by some rando off the street. A good reminder that for every surviving masterwork of antiquity there were countless more made with much more ordinary levels of skill.

12. Gotcaris & Cambropachycope
Some weird Cambrian arthropods that make for extremely good mi-go. Add some funky fungus and you’re good to go.

13. Order-5 truncated pentagonal hexecontahedron
A sphere consisting of 12 pentagons, each with 5 hexagons surrounding it. A nice little Super Mario Galaxy-sized hexcrawl map. I want to do a Mothership thing with one of these, eventually.

14. Jambudvīpa
“Land of the jambu trees” - a name for the Indian subcontinent, used primarily in a mythic or cosmological sense as part of a greater division of the world into a nice symmetrical arrangement of lands around Mt. Meru.

15. Longmen (mythology)
“Dragon gate” - a great waterfall at the headwaters of a river, where migrating carp that manage to make the jump transform into dragons. I can’t help but think of an American version based on salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest, which makes me think of a dragon-analogue that shares design language with indigenous art of the region and that’s a very cool image.

16. Kilkenny Cats
The cats that fought until only their tails were left. Not everything’s got to be big and important.

17. Polygraphia (book)
1518 text on steganography (encoding a text inside another text so that it does not obviously appear to be a cipher). Also the origin of the Witches’ Alphabet / Theban Alphabet.

18. Oponskoye Kingdom
Utopian kingdom at the edge of the world from Russian folklore. Doesn’t have a whole lot of detail associated with it, but I like the name and it’s a good reminder that folks will always imagine up some far away place where the nobles are off their case and the king’s less shit.

19. Clime
Divisions of the world into climate bands in Greco-Roman geography and astronomy. One of those instances where the ancients were on the money for the most part (the world is spherical and is cold at the poles and hot at the equator) but off by one major misconception that’s good worldbuilding fodder (uninhabitable hot band at the equator and the antipodes on the other side).

20. Hara Berezaiti
Legendary mountain in Zoroastrianism; home of Mithra, center of the world, focal point around which the stars and planets revolve, all the classics. Translates to English as “High Watch”, which feels almost too boilerplate fantasy novel to be real.

21. Fantasy Cartography
The article itself isn’t super noteworthy on its own, but the header image is someone’s setting map that they released into public domain. Alwayotta shout out the real ones. And then there are the maps of fictional Esperanto-speaking islands that were drawn up for US army cryptographers and so are also PD.

22. Open Geofiction
One of those creative projects that has kept on keeping on in its own remote pocket of internet obscurity. Premise is “here’s a world map built with OpenStreetMap, fill it with nations and peoples and languages and geography and infrastructure”. I do love a good map. The project is CC too, though it’s non-commercial so alas, no SCP crossover. Definitely seems to be one of those canon-heavy projects sustained by a small but very dedicated core.

23. Megijima
An island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea, associated with Onigashima from the story of Momotaro. So if you need a place for oni to come from, that’s the spot.

24. Akilineq
Inuit toponym for “the opposite country”; likely referring to to trade settlements along the Thelon River (Akilinik - “on the other side”), but it seems to have been used in other contexts for Labrador, Baffin Island, potentially even Iceland. 

25. Alatyr (mythology)
The “father of all stones”, located on the island of Buyan at the navel of the world, protected by Gagana the iron-beaked bird and Garafena the snake. The world tree grows upon it, those who touch it are healed, and god damn there’s so much cool Russian folklore out there.
 
26. Palmares (quilombo)
A sizable independent polity of escaped slaves, indigenous Brazilians, mixed-race folks and some Portuguese settlers on the outs with the colonial government. Resisted takeover by both the Dutch and the Portuguese for nearly a century.

The Wikipedia Commons Section

These are all images rather than articles, and I've noted licensing as appropriate.

Turns out the key to finding cool things on Commons is to abuse the category: function over default search, much better results.

1. Lovecraft Country
CC-BY-SA 3.0 (Hoodinski)
I have never gotten much from the parochiality of Lovecraft’s geography, but it’s nice to see it cobbled together into a map. I assume somewhere in the background there is some sort of horrible thing underneath this little pocket that draws all the Weird Shit to it.

2. The Dead-Line
Public domain
Map for the 1924 Western novel The Dead-Line by W.C. Tuttle. Perfectly serviceable for a fantasy story (tautology there, most westerns are fantasies)

3. The Sundering Flood (map)
Public Domain
Map of the 1897 fantasy novel The Sundering Flood by William Morris, a man who from a cursory look at his Wikipedia page appears to be an extremely interesting fellow: Socialist activist, proponent of the arts and crafts movement, founded an organization to preserve historic buildings. 

(The day after writing this blurb I tried reading The Sundering Flood and found it to be written in unbearable faux-archaic language that I would not willingly inflict on another human being. Alas.)

4. The Forty Isles
Public domain (Gilbert Anthony Pownall)
An amalgamation of locations from Robinson Crusoe, with some wildcards thrown in for good measure. Change the names and you’ve got a very nickel little archipelago, or even a full continent if you want to change the scale. Feels very Earthsea.

5. Pirate Island
Public domain (Gilbert Anthony Pownall)
Same artist and style as the above. Always gotta have a pirate island, especially one with such excellent place names as the capital city of Jolly Rogerville, the Block & Pulley tavern, and the quaint seaside village of Poop.

6. The Rail Way Map
Public domain. (Gilbert Anthony Pownall)
Man, Gilbert Anthony Pownall was a busy cartographer in 1924. Another charming satirical map.

7. Discovery II (top view, labeled)
Public domain (NASA)
A spaceship to get your ass to Jupiter.

8. Map of Lemuria
Public domain
As drawn by William Scott-Elliot, an astoundingly, comedically racist theosophist who wrote with absolute sincerity that Stonehenge was built by Akkadians who migrated to Britain 100,000 years ago. But it is, I must admit, a pretty good map. Most maps of Lemuria are just a green triangle someone made in MS paint, this one’s got actual coastlines. Don’t know what’s up with the blue splotches up north, or why literally only Greenland keeps its exact shape. Probably Hyperboria or some shit. Can’t win ‘em all.

9. Bankoku Jinbutsu no Dzu
CC-BY-4.0 (Rawpixel)
Cleaned-up version of the 1825 PD original.  Poor central Asia, it just got shlorped out of existence. 

10. Mother of the World
Public domain (Nicholas Roerich)
Now that’s a Soulsborne level-up lady if I ever done seen one.