Slushpile 19

Slushpile Index

Almost enough to do a random table of these.

1. Qlm Hogii - Random pocket-text and fantastic name for a Star Wars OC
2. Xeno’s Arrow: near-light speed ramming maneuver
3. Graffiti: "FREE CUDDLES" - headless squat humanoid, torso dominated by fanged vertical mouth. arms outstretched
4. God wiping sweat from His brow looking with pride at a whiteboard labeled "companion for Adam" that just has a bunch of crossed out scribbles surrounding a circled and underlined "big-bazonga goth gf" in the center
5. Gemstones are the crystallized residue of the spirits of the dead that form as they descend into the underworld
6. You know what would be a really easy way to get celebrated war hero Anakin Skywalker in your pocket? Promise him that once the Separatists are done, the Republic will turn its sights on the Hutts. Offer him the chance to lead the charge that destroys the galactic slave trade. 
7. Summoning “demons” actually querying uploaded minds stuck in bot-controlled hellscape cyberspace
8. “There never was a fucking squid. That would be too great a mercy.”
9. Found inside a corpse: 16 marbles
10. Found inside a corpse: Sandwich baggie of liao
11. Found inside a corpse: Bright blue stomach tumor
12. Seas of anoxic acid
13. Dream: I go back to my elementary school music classroom, where all my old classmates and teacher are already there practicing the choral parts of Lawrence’s boss theme from Bloodborne. Someone, not sure who, points out the ghost of a nun exiting via the door to outside. She disappears from view for a moment then returns to view and gives us a friendly wave. Short, kinda fat, glasses, round face. Weather is very nice outside, but that also might be part of the apparition, it looked somewhat painted.
14. The spirits of the dead are angry because they, unlike the living, have both perspective and solidarity. With all divisions stripped away, the dead are keenly aware that history is a millstone grinding down the struggling masses of humanity beneath the endless violent whims of innumerable petty tyrants: of course they’re angry. 
15. Media that Doesn't Exist: Anime movie about a bunch of convenience store workers plotting and carrying out the murder of the main character’s neighbor 
16. Using Identify spell to jumpstart germ theory by tagging diseases according to origin.
17. The cosmos is but a dream of MANA YOOD SUSHAI; at the center of the cosmos is AZATHOTH, the shadow of the dreamer, the roiling subconscious chaos from which the dream is made; walking the countless worlds one finds the Speaker in its million masks, messenger and nightmare.
18. “You would think either he’d run out of fingers or we’d run out of pies.”
19. “Most of the world’s suffering, statistically speaking, is generated by a pair of dangling nodules and crippling anxiety regarding them.”
20. “We could have stopped this. Inevitability would be too great a mercy, and I refuse to believe that the universe would leave a single avenue of human agony unplumbed.”
21. A rocket bound for Ganymede launches from the South China Sea, carrying six hibernating benthoi, seven thousand fertilized roe, and a shoggoth constructor ganglia.
22. MoSh idea: nationalized online casinos for tax collection
23. Solo game about going to an anime convention - deciding where to go, what to do (get # ribbons?) while juggling energy (reduced by going without food or having too much junk or negative encounters or doing too much)
24. Of all the dead peoples in the universe, the ability to Dream with such clarity is rare. One in millions.
25. Essay for another time: monsters don’t need HP
26. Real-world inspiration: the Running Madonna of Sulmona
27. Alternate Roswell Incident: A downed Soviet spy plane, hastily papered over by the dissemination and subsequent retraction of a story about a crashed flying saucer.
28. The drug liao, which grants its users visions beyond the time and space that they know, breaks onto the world stage in the late 60s. Then come the Hounds, those things that live in the angles beyond the world, ever-pacing and ever-hungry.
29. Dream: I am visiting a fancy manor; there’s extremely good pizza and beer, and also one of those not-necessarily run-and-jump-away-from-something sequences. Very floaty jump, moving forward fast but falling slow. First person. Also there’s a woman wearing something like a plastic skin suit of another woman, though I don’t think she was related to any of the above.
30. Adventuring parties as a combination of seasonal workers / traveling circuses / monster hunters.
31. Indo-European language with click consonants
32. Story idea: A pulp author’s litigious estate makes it impossible for the protagonists to get a hold of the book he wrote that describes how to banish the monster.
33. Thelemic Babalon, except it’s the Red Queen Hypothesis instead of an excuse for Crowley to get laid.
34. There are a considerable number of predynastic pharaohs known from a single inscription and nothing else.
35. Idea: Fantasy world with only American wildlife. Pleistocene megafauna is in, of course, we gotta have the sloths.
36. Endoparasitic echinoderms = facehuggers
37. If anything is emblematic of Star Trek’s fading relevance, it's the lack of  even a lackluster attempt to capitalize on Big Lady Mania with a Klingon. It’s free real estate, people would go absolutely feral.
38. Idea: culture where coming of age entails undergoing a pale blue dot moment via astral projection
39. “March of progress” painting but modern man has turned around and is tearfully embracing his ancestors
40. Star Trek Hard-Sci Reboot: Vulcans now methane-breathing ice-shelled land squids. Klingons are Alex Ries style alien hippos. Ferengi are collectives of centipedes wearing skin suits that talk like crypto-bros. Centrifugal gravity, delta-V budgets, interspecies cooperation in the death void 
41. “Everyone fantasizes about being able to stare right into the abyss and say ‘you didn’t win’, but I’ve yet to hear of someone pulling it off.”
42. Dream: I am reading a Delta Green supplement titled FREENDSHIP, which claims on the back to detail 10 species of alien parasites. There’s a conspiracy web of NPC mugshots, and multiple art pieces of women in burgundy kimonos; they have stone blocks with kanji on them for heads.
43. Overheard on a walk: “I don’t think you have room for a gazebo.”
44. “I am a daughter of the bear, a follower of the path of dogs, and servant of the queen of night; why would I fear any blade held by men?”
45. Paleolithic names: Doqu, Hlunggua, Chirwan, Ngo, Tamo, Tatang, Yavuu
46. Artificial solar system with black hole + stable red dwarves (or k-stars), with planets arranged in resonant orbits with each other to prevent full total locking. 
47. Christian rock band thrown out of their music circle with the release of their 18 track death metal power ballad about the harrowing of Hell.
48. In the hierarchy of harmful spirits, a spirit of hunger is more immediately dangerous than a spirit of gluttony.  
49. Yithians from opabinia, rather than tullymonstrum 
50. I like when DG scenarios play into the "people dragged into the orbit of the greater powers and irrevocably changed by it" aspect. 
51. After the dissolution of the soul into its component parts on death, the shadow is particularly vulnerable to outside influence. Accumulated sin and trauma, in sufficient quantities and unreleased by premortem catharsis, will transform shadows into demons, who then feed on and reproduce via further negative emotions.
52. “This is an ember of the flame imperishable, stolen from the heavens by the Watchers of old when they saw that mankind was cold and afraid: it is the very last of it on earth.” 
53. Prospero’s Dream, █509 - The AI mascot of a vat-meat barbecue joint, no matter how many times it is reset, keeps switching to the 'heavyset' appearance preset and flirting with and/or unsettling patrons.
54. How to identify a Mythos tome as the real deal? Look for how little sense it makes when compared to normal occult traditions; magical circles in a grimoire that works are actually renders of a hypersphere 
     

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Spam from “Florence”: 

WARNING: DON'T FALL FOR THE ELON MUSK CRYPTO SCAM THAT ALMOST BROKE ME
I'm still reeling from the shock of losing a staggering $64,000 to a fake Tesla investment platform that used realistic deepfake videos of Elon Musk to lure me into a trap….

I don't know, I appreciate the madlibs of an old-school spam comment. This format was around long before genAI and it will endure long past the collapse of the thinking machines.

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The benthoi clans of the [NESSIE-BESSIE] spawning dyad, reeling from catastrophic defeat in their wars with the [DAGON-HYDRA] and [ABAIA-JUTURNA] kin-groups, can see the writing on the wall. Earth is no longer safe for them; Tulu is stirring in the deeps and they fell out of its worship long, long ago. The least-bad of their options is escape from Earth entirely, but benthoi are not a species or civilization given to space-faring. They will need help…

**

Your people have lived in these mountains since the Great Winter. Alone among all the tribes, you survived when the ice retreated and the herds were no more. You learned of planting and tending from your neighbors among the valley people, and by those teachings you have endured.

But now the age might grow too great to bear. For many years now, each summer has seen the Sky-King’s riders strike closer and closer to your home: now they are at your door.

They wield weapons of bronze, have made the wild horse tame. Where they ride, they slaughter, rape, enslave, bring sickness in their wake. They tear down the sacred places and put the elders to the axe; they kill both god and language, destroying history itself.

The wise folk of your people have gathered together, to see what may be done. Each in turn enters their trance, and one eye in the spirit world each in turn says that there is nothing that may be done. All omens point to death; there will be no escape. To fight will invite slaughter, to flee will merely delay it. The spirits are weakened from the destruction of their holy places; many have handed themselves over, fearful of the riders’ great bloody-handed god.

But the last of the wise says differently, and tells all gathered there of her vision of a great signal fire on a distant peak. Our prayers have reached the land of the gods, she says. They hear us and send their aid. Endure but a little longer, make ready for their arrival.

The elders grumble among themselves and say that she is too young and bull-headed, that she sees what she wishes to see and says what the people wish to hear. She says the same of them, that it is easier to accept death than the pain of hope.

There is no telling who saw the truth until the horsemen come.