100 Pulls from the Folk-Motif Index

The Stith Thompson Motif-Index of Folk Literature is not what I'd call a particularly useful text for real-world folkloric studies. It’s a big list of story elements shorn from their context, heavily weighted according to the biases of its composer, and full of entries that are either too broad to be a useful comparison or too specific to possibly exist in more than one tradition.

On the plus side: it’s a big list of story elements shorn from their context which means you can flip to a random page, start reading, steal everything you think is interesting, tweak as you see fit, and build up the religious and cultural narratives of whatever fantasy people you please. Here’s a link: the copyright never got renewed so this whole damn thing is public domain, baby!

For this post I just went and chose at random, but with the way that the Index reduces everything to generically-named components you can easily build a more structured myth by picking an entry you like (weddings, deaths and births are a good place to start) and build out links one by one. I might do that for a second installment. 

A Mythology in 100 Parts

1. Creator is accompanied by a dog (A33.1.1)
2. God as son of 9 giantesses (A112.5)
3. Deity born from skull (A114.3)
4. Twin (or triune) goddesses (A116.2)
5. God with 3/5/6 faces (A123.2.X)
6. Maggots in the mouth of man-eating god (A123.2.2.1)
7. God with 2 joined bodies (A123.1.2)
8. God with 13 eyes (A123.3.1.3)
9. God with 8 heads (A123.4.1.3)
10. God with a stone head (A123.4.2)
11. Goddess of war in shape of a red woman (A125.1.1)
12. God in tiger's skin (A131.5)
13. Bear goddess (A132.5)
14. God's home under tree of life (A151.7.1.1)
15. God uses interpreter to speak to women (A182.3.0.4)
16. God's elephant (A155)
17. Gods covered in red and yellow feathers (A139.9.3)
18. Dwarf god (A134)
19. God carries siblings in a basket on his back (A137.4.1)
20. Goddess appears as coral reef (A139.8.2)
21. Animal elders & the angels of animals (B1 & B1.1)
22. Dragon as modified shellfish (B11.2.1.3)
23. Man-eating mares (B16.1.3.1)
24. Ghormuhas: men's bodies, horses' heads, one leg, cannibals. (B15.7.5)
25. Burrowing swine heat ground (B19.4.1)
26. Sheep with a fiery collar (B19.4.3)
27. Giant swimming raven (B31.3.1)
28. Air-going elephant (B45)
29. Flying crustacean (B48)
30. Deer with one gold and one silver antler (B15.3.2.1)
31. Frog with magic knowledge (B126.1)
32. Animal languages learned from ghosts / spirits (B217.3)
33. Magic dead pig (D1281.1)
34. Clairvoyant tube (D1323.9)
35. Star-deity and drought-demon fight (A225)
36. Angel of the deep (A421.0.1)
37. God of the Squid (A455.1)
38. Goddess of Smith-work (A451.1.1)
39. Water spirits have hearth made of three human skulls (F420.2.5)
40. Abandoned infant lives by eating corpse of murdered father (G25)
41. Witch has 3 giant sons (G206)
42. Witch with iron teeth (G314.2)
43. Witch with 15 tails (G219.8.1)
44. Witch has extraordinary physical strength (G221.3)
45. Moon punishes for breach of tabu (C905.2)
46. Transformation: man to peanut (D222.1)
47. Magic drink causes insanity (D1367.2)
48. Blood of salamander protects against fire (D1382.13)
49. Magic red stone protects from poison (D1383.6)
50. Earth from saint's grave expels demons (D1385.1)
51. Magic sight given to child + magic sight given by dead person (D1821.6 + D1821.8)
52. Rejuvenation by song of pelican (D1889.3)
53. Covenant of friendship (P311.5)
54. Student enters competition with their teacher (P342)
55. Woman disguised as monk enters monastery (P426.3.3)
56. Impregnation by lightning (T528)
57. Lesbians give birth to monsters (T462.1)
58. Hunting is a madness of kings (P12.1)
59. King descends to bottom of sea in glass barrel (P15.5)
60. Princes as smiths (P31.1)
61. 2 brothers become pirates (P251.5.1)
62. Twins freed from mother's rotting corpse (T584.2.1.1)
63. Mother kills husband for murdering their daughter (P211.2)
64. King mourns wife's death so much he becomes a pirate (P27.2)
65. King never touches earth; carried around by slaves (P14.5)
66. Inauguration of king as espousal to goddess (P11.6)
67. Woman paints face to become pregnant (T579.8.2)
68. Child with several mothers (T589.9)
69. Children from a well (T589.6.4)
70. Child born each day for a week (T586.5.2)
71. Marriage by drinking festival (T135.6)
72. Marriage of girl to sword (T117.2)
73. Wife goes to land of dead to procure husband's heart (F81.1.1)
74. Stair to lower world (F94)
75. People of the lower world emerge to drink and dance in the evening (F108.2)
76. Journey to the Land of Women (F112)
77. Journey to Land of the Unborn (F115)
78. Submarine monastery (F133.3)
79. Witch's house at border of otherworld (F147.3)
80. Ogres harnessed to plow (G675)
81. Blood of 5 ogres: yellow, red, white, green, black (G367.1)
82. Devil employed as midwife (G303.9.3.2)
83. Woman requires 30 men (as husbands) (T146.2)
84. Wife hides husband's infidelity from emperor, shelters his mistress (T222)
85. Pot so heavy with ghosts that girl cannot lift it (E499.3)
86. Speaking and bleeding trees; reincarnated persons (E631.0.4)
87. Noah saves a giant on the ark; too big to go inside, has to stay in the rigging (F531.5.9)
88. Stolen animal's meat impossible to cook (Q212.4)
89. Punishment: Imprisonment in white-hot iron house (Q414.2)
90. Princess (queen) compelled to keep an inn (Q481)
91. Abduction by goddess's cat (R13.2.3.1)
92. Captivity in subterranean palace (R41.1.1)
93. Girl hidden in skin of dead mother (R318)
94. Intestines wagered (N2.3.5)
95. Evil spirit harpoons sleepers (F402.1.11.3)
96. Recognition by hole burned in hand when woman removes glove (H56.1)
97. Quest for golden wood for knife handle (H1359.1)
98. Wolf tries in vain to be doctor (J512.5)
99. Beaver and porcupine trick each other (K896.1)
100. Fox disguised as scholar (K1822.2)

Bookpost 21

Bookpost Index

The Author of the Acacia Leaves, Ursula K LeGuin

LeGuin writes about ant language for a few pages. It’s good, unsuprisingly.

Enchantress of Venus, Leigh Brackett

DNF 63%

Same series as Black Amazon of Mars, same issues. Prose and descriptions are decent, plot and characters are not. This is actually the second in the series, with Black Amazon being the third and last, so I'm reading them backwards. This doesn’t actually matter, because she was definitely phoning these in and their structures are identical: boring man bumbles around, encounters modestly more interesting woman who actually has a motivation and a plot, boring man helps out modestly more interesting woman.

Stark is a nothing character (picaresque novels are often in danger of this, but it’s especially present here) whose main trait seems to be randomly kissing women he has just met prior to any indication on the woman’s part that she was amenable to being kissed by him at that time. Only have 2 data points at the moment, but it’s happened twice. Sword-and-sorcery/planet authors write a male lead whose hobby isn’t serial assault challenge (impossible).

If you took the two female leads of the two Stark stories I've read and combined them, you’d have a solid main character. Doubtlessly the woman in the story that I haven’t read yet would round out the triad. Part of me wants to try and complete the experiment, but wanting to try’s never meant it’s a worthwhile effort and it would mean forcing myself through these.

The descriptions of sword-and-planet Venus are great, though. Oceans of red clouds thick enough to sail on but still gaseous enough to breathe in. 

Queen of the Martian Catacombs, Leigh Brackett

DNF 48%

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a man with minimal personality meets a modestly more interesting woman with an actual motivation. He gets dragged along in some scheme or another because he’s useful. Along the way the boring dude meets a teenage(?) girl who helps him and it’s the same story, it’s all the same goddamn story!  

Since this is the first of the trilogy, it’s got a little more setup and a slight bit more meat on the narrative (local warlord causing issues, Stark is brought on by the interplanetary peacekeeping forces to infiltrate warlord’s inner circle before he turns Mars into a generation-long bloodbath). But also we get the reveal that there’s yet another layer to the “Stark totally isn’t black, you guys!” thing - he was raised by aliens, you see.

Oof.

There is a good description of how the inhabited part of ancient city migrated down the crater as the water dried up. That'll stick with me.

The Book of the Law, Aleister Crowley

If I judge it purely as a work of fiction, I think it’s an evocative bit of mythopoeic word-salad. Crowley knew his way around a sentence, and he was unsurprisingly skilled at writing in the voice of a bloviating wizard of yore high on his own ecstatic farts whilst pondering his orb and plotting to cause problems on purpose. Neat to know this is where "The ending of the words is..." is from, hilarious that it's fucking abracadabra. This is the extent of the good things I have to say about it.

Under normal circumstances I could shrug off the odious philosophy and laughably charlatanistic premise with "yeah, that's 1904 for you", but the Book of the Law was written as a magical-religious text, rather than fiction in imitation of one. That extra context raises my hackles and unheimlichs my stomach, which is not helped that the odious philosophy element is "Aleister Crowley was a fascist". Or a sparkling authoritarian, if you prefer. A man who wouldn't be averse to having his boots spit-shined. A true blue prototype for the modern adolescent-edgelord-slash-upper-class-twit-of-the-year-to-reactionary-violence pipeline. By about a quarter of the way through chapter 2 I was rolling my eyes and thinking "oh fuck off mate we've got the Scarlet King at home." He's not particularly subtle about how his ideal arrangement of the universe involves the brutal oppression of the many by the few, he just swaps out the nation-state for re-seasoned Greco-Egyptian mystery religion and appropriated kabbalah.

Normally I would segue into "and here's how I have turned all of this on its head" at this part, since the man's long dead and this along with a lot of his other stuff is in the public domain - but unlike the polyvocalic mess of a long-established religious tradition the reader is left with few fruitful avenues of wiggling their way out of the mess by taking advantage of internal contradictions, and unlike your average pulp story there's no real narrative to transform or characters to shift focus to: there's just Crowley here, echoing in an empty room.

Mirrikh; or, a Woman from Mars, Francis Worcester Doughty
DNF chap 5/30

The story starts enjoyable enough; there’s a psychic man from Mars visiting Cambodia (as one does, as a psychic man from Mars) and a somewhat overly-leisurely unraveling of why (I'm certain that "he just wanted to visit Angkor Wat" is not the actual answer, unfortunately, but it’s nice to imagine. I'd visit Angkor Wat if I was a psychic man from Mars). It’s basic 1890s orientalism, though in the chapters I read the main problems were all the old spellings of city names (Panompin instead of Phnom Penh) and a section of “my guy you’ve spent how many years living here how are you still this wrong about Buddhism.” It’s tolerable up to that point.

Then all that comes to a screeching halt complete with fire and shattered glass because our narrator (who is not a psychic man from Mars) decides he’s just fallen head over heels in love with a young woman who has just been stripped half-naked and whipped by an angry mob of racist stereotypes. A woman he does not exchange a single word with, whose name he does not know, who is at best half his age, and whose age is a concerning string of question marks because she’s only ever described as “a girl”.

This character, mind you, introduces himself and the story by griping about how his wife left him and how that caused him to swear off women and romance for good.

Motherfucker your wife left you because you’re in the fucking emails. You went to the fucking island. Jesus fucking Christ. 

Armageddon 2419 A.D. Philip Francis Nowlan

The first Buck Rogers story. I was expecting it to be racist, but I was definitely not expecting it to be so racist that you could quite literally pull the twist of “they were actually Martians and the whole ‘Han’ thing is a psychic disguise where the observer’s fears and prejudices were reflected back at them” and it wouldn’t contradict anything. The story is so unwilling to humanize its antagonists that they’re physically on-screen for maybe 3, 4 pages max. Everything else is just the airships. You could replace them with automated drones and only lose the racism.

It’s also astoundingly boring. Barely 80 pages long and most of that is clunky exposition padding out the space between incidents of action. Any moment that might be given to internality or character relationships is skipped right over. This would be more tolerable if the action scenes were fun, but they’re boring too! There’s no tension: a threat emerges, and then it is immediately defeated with no lasting damage or consequences. What would normally be the climactic heist of the enemy citadel is actually the leadup to the actual climax, which is the total massacre of a heretofore unseen and barely-mentioned faction. And then it just ends. The whole thing reads like a parody of itself, and this is the first installment.

Good god I need to read something written this century.

The Blind Spot, Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

But not before I do one more PD book for the road. Significantly better than the previous two on the grounds that its greatest flaw is being structurally frustrating.

The material components are good: house with some sort of interdimensional portal in it, a magic ring that drains the life of its wearer, competing supernatural entities who are after it. That’s all good, it’s got the fun conceptual freedom that comes with writing sci-fi before the genre expectations are codified. I could turn the premise into a middling-to-decent SCP article with little effort and into a good one with only a little more.

The problem is that the stakes of the plot aren’t established until more or less the midpoint, which is also when we toss out basically everything that had come in the first half to focus on a character we have barely met up to this point, who then interrupts the flow of events to provide us with a story-within-a-story of his time on the other side of the portal for the next 45% of the book. And this happens right when things are ramping up and characters are becoming more active and finding more clues, and the new plot of the back half feels disjointed and loose, with the new material feeling unconnected even to itself. Stakes and actions and motivations don’t make sense under scrutiny: questions are asked that don’t really need to be, questions that should be asked aren’t asked, answers that could easily clear up what’s going on are brushed off with “I can’t tell you, you wouldn’t understand”. There’s a lot of wheel-spinning when it comes to how information is dealt out, lots of “what is the Blind Spot?” without any meaningful investigation (and a lot of wasting time asking the question) until the sudden burst of productivity at the midway point.. The ending is abrupt, and multiple threads and characters are abandoned, or just confusingly written to the point where I'm not sure what their point in the narrative was. 

Being written in 1921, it’s fully in the mode of scientific spiritualism, which I felt mostly neutral on. It’s just a different kind of technobabble, end of the day, though one I don't find very interesting. 

Added bonus: all of the main male characters save one have a name beginning with H, which makes it damn near impossible to differentiate between them, which is a problem when the first half jumps between multiple POVs.

I wouldn’t recommend it outside of historical curiosity, but I’m glad that I read it.

 

Burgeoning Blogs 4

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76. What do goblins smell like? What about trolls? Do elves have a particular smell?
Goblin smell can only be described as “funky”. 

Trolls smell like wet earth, musk, and piss (from territory marking)

Elf smell depends on how I am interpreting elves at that moment, and could be either:

• Floral or fragrant wood scents (either magical effect or perfumes)
• Highly muted (because they don’t sweat)
• Normal human body odor

77. What do your cleric's holy symbols look like? Are they needed for turning?
Symbols have no benefit on their own; they’re helpful because they help keep the exorcist focused, but they aren’t required for the process.

The hamsa is your generic all-purpose atropaic symbol; deity-specific symbols will typically be an emblem (think mon or adinkra) incorporating stylized / modified names or titles, iconic items, and their most prominent symbolic concepts.

78. What does the "bare minimum" for you to run a game look like?
2 players, ~2 hours, 1 dice set or a phone app; I can run Last Things Last from memory.

79. What happens at 0 HP in play, can I get a healing potion down their throat?
0 HP means a character is downed (unconscious if they fail a save), so they’ll need to be stabilized within a turn or two before I start calling for death saves. Basically just Mothership rules.

80. What happens when a character dies in your setting?
They're gone: bodily death means that the soul can no longer maintain cohesion. With no breath to sustain it, the fire goes out and the shade will go down into the underworld. It’s not a conscious or individuated entity, but it might linger around for a bit.

Alternatively, if I want to completely upend everything I have, I do something real funky with how souls, planes, and reincarnation work and make an entire foundational magic system out of it.

81. What happens when someone eats dragon meat? Drinks their blood?
It’ll give you powerful dragon magic, start transforming you into a dragon / some kind of horrible hybrid abomination, and puts a target on your back; once you’ve started on the Burning Path, you’ve been upgraded to a meaningful threat by both dragons and other ascendants.

82. What Idea or concept are you "saving" for a future game/campaign?
I have no idea how practical it is (probably not practical at all), but I'd love to try “Delta Green in the Dreamlands using Runequest magic”.
 
83. What is a generous/stingy tip to a porter, stablehand, or potboy in your setting?
Either way it’s a small enough amount that I don’t find tracking it to be fun or meaningful.

84. What is a ruling you regret or wish you would have handled differently?
See #60. I should have hit pause, explained what the immediate consequences would, and then see how they wanted to proceed.

85. What is one food that differs from ours that everyone knows about in your game?
I normally stick to real-world foods tweaked slightly (ex: river-octopus takoyaki) or eaten outside of their presumed cultural context (ex: a king in Generic Fantasy PseudoEurope eating empanadas), but with all the giant bugs in D&D-derived fantasy I have to assume that someone out there has started farming them at scale.

86. What is plate mail in your game? Does armor come with gloves/gauntlets?
Plate armor lives in a weird place in my mind: I’m so used to seeing overdesigned concept-art versions of it, and find it so linked with the class marker of “murderous zealot landlord”, that I don’t really think about it much at all and just kind of go “yeah, it’s like Laios’ kit from Dungeon Meshi” and leave it like that. Not going to get fancy with it unless I’m channeling Elden Ring and / or playing Mythic Bastionland.

87. What is the perfect hex size for the number of features you place/stock?
1 parasang. Not the actual historical measurement, a Caves of Qud parasang, where an unfamiliar unit is used Gene Wolfe style to give the audience a trackable measurement without having to worry about exact detail. Worrying about the exact spatial scale of RPG travel is less important to me than the temporal one: how many days/turns/actions does it take?

88. What method do you use for tracking turns elapsing or hit points depleted?
Frantic scribbling on looseleaf. Or a spin down d20, though I think I've lost mine.

89 What other hobbies do you possess that seep into games, subtly or otherwise?
Look, you're already reading this blog you know there’s going to be linguistics, anthropology, and astronomy deep cuts.

90. What step in the common procedures do you often forget or elide/change?
If it involves exploration turns in dungeons, I am dogshit at it. Maybe I need to just get rid of the explicit time aspect and just treat them as Arbitrary Time Units. Spending ten minutes for an entire party to case a room that often doesn’t have all that much in it just never made sense to me, regardless of its mechanical practicality.

91. What topics or themes are off-limits in your games? How do you communicate this?
I do lines and veils and establish mood / tone before the first session, and make sure that if there is heavier material in the module that people know that going in. In my DG player’s guide, I wrote this up:

“Torture and sexual assault are not going to be encountered “on-screen”; they might be mentioned as prior events either directly or through implication. PCs will often find themselves dealing with the aftermath of horrific events.”

This has, so far, been a fruitful way to thread the needle.

92. What was one major conflict/war that has occurred within recent memory?
I use the Dayr War from MSF as my conflict template, tweaking specific details as needed while keeping the core of:

• Occurred 10~15 years ago
• Wizards were involved
• Was fought outside the region of play (so veterans went out and then came back)

93. What would be the punishment for stealing a loaf of bread? A horse?
A loaf of bread will get you pointed in the direction of the almshouse and community work-crew organizer; a stolen horse will likely net you a fine for replacement cost + lost wages, plus a big black mark on your reputation. Much cheaper to just rent the horse from the public stables down by the post office.

94. What's the deal with those alignment languages in your games?
They’re the liturgical languages of major religious traditions. Should make a post about that.

95. Where does lamp oil come from/how is it made?
Seed oil and animal fat, with specific varieties dependent on your region but ultimately mechanically identical 

For adventurers far from civilization, it’s trickier to procure; your best bet is to hunt a squonk, since you can use both its oily skin secretions and rendered fat and you can sell the surplus when you get back to town.

96. Which die from the typical (or atypical!) polyhedrals is your favorite and why?
I’m a basic bastard and will just say that a nice d20 is a satisfying shape.

97. Who digs those dungeons? Why do they attract so much treasure/danger?
One of my all-time favorite fantasy tropes is the city/town/castle/dungeon/ruins built on top of something old and horrible. Something terrible happened there long ago, but whatever it is and no matter how horrible it is people will build on the site and dig deep to find it. 

98. Who is the most powerful magic user in your setting? The most infamous thief?
Most powerful magic user is a toss-up; after a certain point it just becomes comparing nuclear arsenals. But it’s likely to be either the Grey Witch or the King of Wands in any case.

The most infamous thief is, of course, Arsene Lupin. Or Robin Red-Hood. Or Sinbad the Sailor. Honestly if they're good at being a thief they’re also good at hiding their identity, so there’s a lot of pseudonymous heisting going on.

99 Why are elves immune to ghoul paralysis? How long do they live?
Boring answer is that it's just some weird quirk of how proteins bind or don't bind and how that impacts neuron transmission blah blah blah blah. Elf lifespan is either "normal human", "average old tree", "bristlecone pine", and "fondly remembers mammoths"

100. Why do dwarves and elves have that classic enmity, or do they?
Nah. You might have something like it on a community level, but it’s going to be for normal reasons of why neighboring groups might dislike each other.

That’s for “elves and dwarves are types of humans”, of course; “elves and dwarves are magical beings” has less reason for the enmity IMO, as their habitats don’t really overlap. Elves in the forests, dwarves deep in the earth.

Burgeoning Blogs 3

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51. May I please see a devious trap or dangerous hazard you have created?
A fountain with a shin-deep pool of clear water. 

• [Important item] clearly visible at the bottom of the fountain 
• Starving, translucent ooze detectable only by
• Close inspection (optical anomaly in the water)
• Tossing in a small item (bounces off cell membrane)
• Reaching into the water (triggers an attack).

52. Please share 3 new/distinctive magical spells you or your players have created

• Rite of Perfect Discoverie - A scrying spell that locates an item’s possessor / possessed item if you have the other component present. Requires ritual circle and mirror; mirror displays a path from caster’s present location to target’s present location. Ritual draws attention of Beasts of Many Angles, who will appear in mirror in the peripheral vision of caster; initial response will be curiosity / investigation, further use will set them on the hunt.
• Call upon NIN-SU-GAL – A means to summon and propitiate the Lady of the Great Flesh, derived from the rites of the Lušārātum (“hairy men”). Requires ritual circle, food offering, and some medium of visual communication (television, computer monitor, mural or painting, etc). Encounters will be brief and distressing.
• Blood Clot - Triggers a catastrophic stroke in the target after ~6 seconds of sustained eye contact on failed save. Requires series of hand-signs; mouthing trigger words to maintain focus common but not necessary. Deeply traumatic to witness.

53. Share a puzzle or riddle that has produced a memorable experience for you
I’ve mentioned it in a previous post, but I’m still pleased with how I was able to use the Navajo Code Talker booklet in my Delta Green campaign. 

54. Share some common superstitions practiced by the people of your setting

• It’s good luck to spit over the side of a bridge the first time you cross it.
• The father of the gods’ favorite food is noodles; offering it to guests brings good fortune (and is just being a good host).
• Cats are messengers of the gods (when they feel like it), and so shooing one out of a shrine is extremely bad luck.

55. Show me three brand new monsters you have created for your game!

Daemonophagic Hippopotamus
An otherwise ordinary hippo that has gained a vivid red-and-black coloration from a diet of demons.

Red Fundament Footsolider
A tall, grey-skinned creature in rust-red armor like an arthropod exoskeleton. Communicates with its packmates with a series of mandible clicks and throaty wheezes. Two carry long rifles, one carries a flamethrower (as Cone of Fire)

Meat Pile
An elderly slime, no longer able to flush detritus out of its body; a sludgy mass of dirt, decaying flesh, broken bones. Stinks to high heaven. Leaves a filmy trail on the ground. Effectively immune to damage (unless you can sustain an intense burn). Will slowly pursue the party through the dungeon, squeezing through tight spaces and unseen passages to move between non-adjacent rooms.

56. Summarize your campaign setting in 2d20 words or Less
2d20 = 4 (3,1)
Things I personally like.

57. Talk about your favorite Blog/Creator for a little bit! Give them some compliments!
Arnold Kemp is the reason I started my blog, and he’s the reason I got involved on G+ back when the party was going strong. A new post on Goblin Punch is a drop-everything-and-read-it moment, and has been for over a decade.

58. Tell me about a book or movie that really influenced you in terms of these games!
It feels like cheating to say Lord of the Rings, but I’ll say Lord of the Rings. Specifically in the field of orcs: I think Tolkien kinda fell into a perfect storm scenario where he paired an extremely potent core idea with pretty dodgy execution, and D&D copying the latter without the former has led to an entire genre ecosystem of compounding issues over 50 years. But all those compounding issues fall into the “shit makes for good fertilizer" category for me, and I like the challenge that they present to me as a writer; it’d be easy to just remove orcs, but I  find it more rewarding as a writer to go “okay, here’s what Tolkien was aiming for, here’s the issues, can I thread this needle?”

Considering I have like, 7 alternate versions of orcs cooked up at time of writing, the answer is “well, at least it's a productive line of inquiry if nothing else.”
 
59. Tell me about a thing you've included "just for you" without regard to the players
Valeria (positively) described Unicorn Meat as  “VaatiVidya bait” and that’s one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten. I fill basically everything I write with references and connections and allusions to other things, regardless of whether or not people will ever find them (though I always love it when they do). 

The best example for Unicorn Meat isn’t particularly hidden, but it’s also not directly stated in the text: if the players visit Stitches at the med hut, they’ll be told about a bunch of sci-fi paperbacks on one of her shelves. If they then go to White-Eyes’ room they’ll find more books, and that’s the only other place on the farm where they show up - which even if the players forgot the books in the med hut or never visited Stitches, the fact that White-Eyes is blind should tip them off that someone’s been visiting her (and presumably reading to her, which is a clue to the nature of the relationship).

60. Tell me about a time your players surprised you or ruined your prep/plans!
When running Kidnap the Archpriest years ago, one of my players (new to RPGs at the time) barreled into the gatehouse immediately and the alarm was raised right then and there. I didn’t really have enough experience or wherewithal in the moment to roll with that punch. The entire session basically collapsed right there.

61. Tell me about the moon(s) in the sky. What are some beliefs associated with 'em?

• There’s a demon that lives on the moon that curses women with menstruation as revenge for some past heroine or goddess getting one over on them.
• There used to be seven moons, but the dragon Bakunawa ate six of them before being defeated by the gods.
• Wizards faked the moon landing, which then spurred other wizards to land on it for real due to the one-upmanship inherent in academic vendettas.
• The moon is hollow, and Hell is located inside it.
• The moon is inhabited by bat-winged men who live in sapphire palaces.
• The moon is the corpse of Theia, the earth goddess’ twin sister
• The moon divorced the ocean and married the sun; the ocean still pines for her.
• The moon is the severed head of Ganda, the first giant.

62. What "something" wouldn't be in your game if it weren't for the players?
I don’t have any good examples off the dome, though I maintain a “if the player wants something in the game, put it in (or the closest available analogue)” policy.

63. What are 10 new things that you put on your equipment lists for purchase?
I think that shopping in rpgs is by and large a waste of time that should be abolished. If players want something not on the list they can tell me “hey I would like to buy X” and we can go from there. 

64. What are 6 things one might encounter on the way to the nearest dungeon?

1. Makeshift graves of some unlucky delvers, none more than a year or two old. One has recently been disrupted by a wild animal or monster.
2. A peddler of trinkets, tokens, relics, charms, patent medicines, assorted esoteric knick-knacks, and anything else that might be of interest to a delver looking for a bit of extra spiritual protection.
3. The corpse of some alien entity of the chaotic true depths; it managed to reach the surface, but died from the spiritual influence of the sun before it could cover two-hundred paces. Neither scavengers nor decomposers will touch it.
4. A goblin community, packing up camp and preparing to move onward now that they’ve been driven out from their home in the dungeon by another faction
5. Abandoned excavation equipment from a failed attempt to quarry out the structure.
6. Heads on stakes, left as a warning.

65. What are a few good tracks/traces for the most commonly encountered foes?

• Goblins leave graffiti everywhere
• Troll piss stinks to high heaven and they mark their territory with it
• Ghouls leave behind the cracked-open bones of their meals
• Orcs have distinct footprints (hobnailed boots with steel toes and rubberized treads)
• Undead only smell of rot if they’ve been active for a while or if it was a slapdash job
• Deep Ones naturally smell strongly of salt and fish
• Some varieties of demon alter art and text by presence alone

66. What are five frivolous things adventurers can spend their gold on?

1. Collectible figurines of popular characters
2. Painstakingly-constructed dwarvish handicrafts
3. Mayfly high fashion that falls apart as soon as it's taken off 
4. A box that you put money into and get nothing out of. Maybe one day it’ll work…
5. Hand-painted custom-order terro cards.

67. What are four legendary treasures one might search for in your game?

1. The Four Tiger Sword - A blade forged in the hour, day, month, and year of the Tiger. Extremely effective against spiritual foes, but purposefully left unsharpened for symbolic reasons.
2. The Claw - A palm-sized, teardrop-shaped sapphire reputed to have miraculous healing qualities. Belonged to an ancient prophet, currently in possession of migratory monastic order. Identified by a crescent-shaped flaw near its center.
3. The Book of Ingenious Devices - A book outlining the construction and maintenance of a wide variety of mechanical tools and devices, both mundane and magical.
4. Stopsvalinn - Heirloom buckler of a now-dissolved noble family; a rusted red octagon with blocky white symbols in an unknown script.

(Magical items in games are a field where I say less originality is better: they’re supposed to stand out and be important, recognizability or real-world antecedent can help emphasize that if used appropriately)

68. What are some common long-distance communication methods in your world?

• Postal service (letters & packages; variable speed)
• Troll stones (real-time voice; all users tormented by trolls providing live commentary)
• The Murder of All Crows (letters & voice messages; fast; pay in carrion or sweetmeats)
• Scrying (real-time voice & image; wizard-gated)

69. What are some deadly diseases/awful afflictions one might unfortunately catch?
You know, this is something I have never really contemplated before. Probably because “disease that’s interesting in an RPG” overlaps with “weird magical curse” in my head. Mundane diseases in RPGs are just mundane diseases and I don’t think “your character is feverish and shitting themselves and has to sit out this session” has much of a function in a game except for the (very useful) excuse for a missing player.

Anyway, Red Death and Black Fever would be my go-tos for in-universe historical epidemics, and then if I wanted to hit players with something specific I would probably just search the SCP wiki by tag and pick some highlights.

70. What are some interesting herbs/plants one might find foraging?
I’ve got a copy of Fungi of the Far Realms that I've never been able to use, so probably something from that.

71. What are some of your favorite resources or tools you use in your games?
Clocks are great, love a good clock. You can use ‘em to track damn near anything.

72. What are some unusual drugs/intoxicants in your setting?
I don't have a proper list, so I'd probably just crack open Esoteric Enterprises and use that. But liao is definitely an option: see through time and space, attract Hounds of Tindalos, all the hits. 

73. What are the best snacks you've found that work during a game?
I don’t have a standout best, but the worst would be the time in college when I was going to run a game, we all ordered Chinese food beforehand, and then I spent most of the evening in the bathroom choking on an insufficiently-chewed piece of General Tso’s chicken.

74. What could I bring to a game that would bribe the referee?
I don’t take bribes but I do appreciate offerings of food, previous entry notwithstanding.

75. What degree of "kitchen sink" or "gonzo" is acceptable in your games?
I like my settings to be pretty weird (understatement of the year) mashups of inspirations, but while they certainly qualify for both categories I don’t know if I’d use those terms myself. I’m all about the connective tissue that forms between elements of the setting, and kitchen sink / gonzo usually feel to me like all the weird stuff is just kind of free-floating around.

There’s bound to be a crashed spaceship somewhere, but it’s also going to be more on the hard-science side of the spectrum vs flying saucer, is what I’m trying to get at here.