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 
     

**

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.

**

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. 

 

Wikipedia Links from my Notes 3

Slushpile index 

Part 1, Part 2

These posts accumulate quite fast. 

1. Dictionary of the Khazars
A 1984 novel by Milorad Pavić that tells its multi-headed century-spanning alternate-history story through dictionary format. I’ve not read it but I really should, since it sounds 110% like my kind of shit. Though right now it seems my bets are either borrowing the low-quality scanned pdf from Internet Archive or snagging it through interlibrary loan.

2. Quinametzin
From Aztec mythology via the Codex Mendieta; six giant sons of Mixcoatl, who survived the flood that destroyed the world of the Fourth Sun and then founded the cities and peoples of the Fifth.

3. Ḫulbazizi
“Evil be gone” or “the evil is eradicated”; the final phrase of Sumerian and later Alkkadian exorcism incantations. 

4. Ofuda
Wood or paper talismans used in both Shinto and Japanese Buddhism.

5. Haida Manga
This is predominantly the work of Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, and while the article doesn’t have any visual examples a quick google search brings up some striking comic work.

6. Esplumoir Merlin
A hut / cottage / tower / castle etc where Merlin transforms into a bird or back into a human.

7. Barlaam and Josaphat
A popular medieval saints’ tale about a prince who escapes the seclusion of his father’s palace for a life of ascetic piety that, by the time Caxton printed it, would have been an English translation of a Latin translation of a Greek translation of a Georgian translation of an Arabic translation of a Middle Persian translation of a Sanskrit text about the early life of Siddharta Gautama. So the Buddha is canonically a saint in both the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, though I don’t think either would admit to it.

8. Menocchio
A miller executed by the Roman Inquisition in 1599 for a sundry list of heresies, including:

• The only sin is harming one’s neighbor.
• Blasphemy only hurts the blasphemer.
• Mary wasn’t a perpetual virgin.
• The pope has no special spiritual privilege beyond an ordinary righteous man.
• As the afterlife is God’s domain and fully outside of human influence, there’s no reason to pray for the dead and the living should focus on helping the living.
• Sacraments are all human inventions to make money; God gives baptismal grace to everyone directly at their birth.
• Marriage was established by men, not God; an exchange of vows is all that is needed and anything more is just business.
• Anyone can become a priest through study (the practice of ordination being just another business)
• The use of Latin in court trials is a way for the rich to oppress the poor, since the accused usually don’t know what they’re being accused of or how to defend themselves.
• “God has given the Holy Spirit to all, to Christians, to heretics, to Turks, and to Jews; and he considers them all dear, and they are all saved in the same manner.”
• The universe started as an undifferentiated coagulation of the four elements in a state similar to a block of cheese, and that God and the angels emerged from it like worms (from said block of cheese).

Dang, Menocchio, leave some wins for the rest of us.

9. Al-Wakwak
An island from medieval Islamic literature, supposedly located in the seas east of China. The inhabitants are all women who grow on a tree like fruit, and while I can’t say this is directly related to Elden Ring it certainly feels appropriate.

10. Youdu
Capital city of the underworld in Chinese mythology; I think there’s a fun contrast to be made here with Pandemonium as rival cities, dual cities, or even the same city in different periods or under different administrations.

11. Alyoshenka
I fucking love this article. It’s just some Russian creepypasta that has somehow had a dedicated wikipedia article for 20 years, with all the vague, unsourced, unverifiable claims that this would entail. you could easily use it as a case study of how to spot bad information and spurious claims while doing online research. It reads like a bad first attempt at an SCP article and annoying as that can be, you can develop a certain fondness for the really impressive flops. It’s the sort of bad shortform horror fiction that makes me go “oh man I could probably make a good version of this”.

12. Category: Yokai
An inclusion that requires no justification; everyone should have a list of yokai on hand.

13. Dionysiaca
A late-Classical epic poem about the life and accomplishments of Dionysus, including his military expedition to India, written in Greek sometime in the 400s AD. It’s the longest surviving poem in Greco-Roman literature at over 20,000 lines in 48 books, survives in what appears to be its completion, and somehow no one knows or talks about this. There are only two English translations that I can find, with the oldest still being from 1940. 

14. Caribbean Shaktism
The British system of indenture in India saw a sizable population of Tamils deported to the Caribbean. They brought their religious practices with them, which have developed on their own into a syncretic tradition that holds Kali-Mariamman as the primary manifestation(s) of Shakti. A historical curiosity that I never even considered, and a good reminder that the world is a big mixed-up bag of stuff.

15. Lake Uniamési
An enormous apocryphal lake in east-central Africa, believed to be the source of the Benue, Nile, Congo and Zambezi rivers by European missionaries for a brief period in the mid 1800s. Was most likely a misinterpretation of the African Great Lakes.

16. Pas-ta’ai
A festival held by the Saisiyat people of Taiwan to commemorate and appease the spirits of a tribe of dwarves who had feuded with the Saisiyat’s ancestors. Has had something of a modern resurgence, though that has come at the cost of disruptive tourists.

17. Herxheim (archaeological site)
Archaeological site in Germany and former home of a neolithic cannibal death cult. 

The Herxheim mass-grave is estimated to hold the remains of at least 500 individuals, with many of them originating a noteworthy distance from the site; recovered bones display cuts and fractures in consistent enough patterns to indicate methodological killing, post mortem butchering, and consumption. Skulls were converted into vessels, long bones were cracked open and scraped clean of marrow. With so many foreigners among the dead, they had to have either travelled there intentionally or brought there by force.

And all of this is packed at the tail-end of Herxheim’s history: after about 300 years of habitation and a further 50 years of human sacrifice, the site was abandoned and never reclaimed.

18. Temagami Magnetic Anomaly
A magnetic anomaly in eastern Ontario generated by a large geological structure of unknown composition and origin (though it’s probably from a meteor impact depositing  a shit-ton of iron). I like the name, it's got an excellent ring to it.

19. Huang Bamei
You win at piracy by retiring with your head still on your shoulders: “Two Guns” Huang Bamei not only did that, but did it so recently that she’s got a photograph on her Wikipedia page. She died in 1982! Got her start smuggling salt with her father, then worked up to running her own operation, got caught, dodged execution, got recruited by the Nationalists to fight the Japanese, went back to piracy, got cornered by the government again, got pardoned, the Nationalists recruited her again to fight the communists, and then finally retired from piracy in Taiwan. Turned down the CIA’s attempt to recruit her and successfully sued Shaw Brothers Studio over a film depicting her as a collaborator with the Japanese. 

20. Zapam Zucum
Goddess of carob trees in the folklore of the Aymara and Diaguita people of Argentina / Chile / Bolivia. Looks over infants laid down in the shade while their mothers work. Described as having dark skin, hair, and eyes, white hands, and - the article seems keen to point this out - big ol’ gazongas.

21. Zaqqum
A tree at the center of Hell in Islamic tradition; its fruit is shaped like demon heads and boils sinners from the inside when eaten. I’m honestly surprised that “inverse of the Tree of Life” took this long for me to find, it’s a natural mythic extension to Eden.

22. Eglė the Queen of Serpents
A figure from Lithuanian folklore; Eglė is a human woman who marries the king of serpents and together they have three sons and a daughter. After completing some impossible tasks (as is tradition) Eglė leaves the serpent’s palace to visit her family, at which point her brothers gang up, learn the means of summoning the serpent king from Eglė’s daughter Drebulė, and kill the serpent to prevent Eglė from returning to the sea. In grief Eglė transforms her children into oak / birch / ash / aspen trees, and then herself into a fir.

And also she’s a character in Elden Ring, I guess. I don’t really see the resemblance, there’s nothing remotely applicable between the two stories. It’s not like Elden Ring has a character who probably fucked a snake and is associated with a big tree that generates a considerable amount of sap / resin like a pine tree would and oh…

23. List of Hoaxes on Wikipedia
Since everything on Wikipedia is CC-BY-SA, all of these hoaxes have inadvertently been added to a sort of shared alternate history, and I think that’s neat. Most of these are stubs or minor blurbs, but there are probably a few that could be expanded into a bit of nifty flash fiction.

24. Chinese Characters of Empress Wu
A series of alternative Hanzi characters that saw some use for a time during the reign of Wu Zeitian, though the mandate evaporated as soon as she died. They’re all in unicode, as is right. Most of them are for fairly important words (sun, monarch, person, etc), which fits with their invention as a sort of linguistic show of force.

25. Medieval Runes
The descendent of the Younger Futhark, used throughout Scandinavia up until the early modern period even after the introduction of the Latin Script in the 1200s. Would be a great pull if you want a script for a game; it’s recognizable but not just copying Elder Futhark because Tolkien did it, and there are more letter variants to work with (to handle the historical development of new sounds)

26. Manungal
Sumerian goddess of prisons, name translates to “great princess”. Felt like an interesting dichotomy. The article points out that, given the place and time, the goddess of prisons would be pretty merciful compared to the mutilation and / or summary execution you’d normally get in the era of Hammurabi.

27. List of Aesop’s Fables
And these are just the ones with Wikipedia articles! The Perry Index has 725 of them, and I honestly had no idea there were so many. They’re so ubiquitous as a thing people just know about that it fades into the cultural background radiation, which is certainly a shame I should remedy. While odds are good that Aesop might have been a character stories were attributed to out of convention or convenience, that’s useful inspiration in its own right. 

28. Matilda Joslyn Gage
A woman with one hell of a resume. Abolitionist, feminist, suffragette, journalist, author, critic of religion, campaigner for indigenous rights, etc etc. Also the mother-in-law of L. Frank Baum.

29. Zana of Tkhina
One of those cases where it feels like reality is copying some of my notes.

It’s the mid 1800s: A strange woman is found wandering the woods of Abkhazia: tall, dark-skinned, covered in thick reddish-brown body hair, and seemingly unable to speak. She’s captured, sold as a curiosity multiple times before, and ending with Edgi Genaba of Tkhina. She lives outdoors on the Genaba estate until her death in the 1880s, survived by four children; anything more than general details is lost to time. 

The locals at the time considered her an abnauayu (a wild-man); Soviet cryptozoologists Alexander Mashkovtsev and Boris Porshnev thought she was a surviving neanderthal or some other relict hominid. Their excavations of the Genaba family cemetery in the 1970s exhumed the body of her youngest son Khwit (d.1954), and a woman's body that had been buried without a coffin. That body was not conclusively identified (via DNA analysis) as Zana until 2021. Modern scholars think the most likely explanation is that she was Afro-Abkhazian (a diaporic community descended from east African slaves brought to the region by the Ottomans) and had congenital generalized hypertrichosis, causing both her body hair and apparent intellectual disability. 

Khwit and Zana's skulls remain in Moscow; the rest of Zana's body was stored in the Sukhumi Museum of Natural History until it was destroyed during the 1992 war in Abkhazia.

It’s not a happy ending. I doubt the middle or beginning were particularly happy, either. The article says that Zana's four children were born under “unclear circumstances”, and while that doesn't necessitate the worst possible outcome I don't think the odds are in favor of history cutting her a break. 

Still. In my mind's eye I can see the neanderthals wander out of the woods one evening when no one was watching, and Zana slips away with them to live happy and free in the mountains till the end of her days. It’s bullshit, but sometimes you need a bit of bullshit to get through the day.

A toast to Zana; she deserved so much better than she got.

 

The Commons Section

1. Titan Sea Map
CC-BY 2.0 (Peter Minton)
Solid campaign world map right there, maybe slap a few islands down and you're good to go.

2. World Map with Separatist Movements
CC-BY-SA-4.0 (Vojtěch Pokorný)
A map of the modern world if every entry on the Wikipedia list of active separatist movements (as of Jan 2023) succeeded. Excellent fuel for some alternate history scenarios even if you just pick a couple. 

3. Historical map Orkneyar 
Public Domain (Unknown artist)
Map of the Orkney Islands for Adventure magazine. Terrible resolution, basically unreadable, but would be easy to blow up and trace over.

4. Creature hyena
CC-BY-3.0 (David Revoy / Blender Foundation
I love how much this absolutely isn't a hyena and yet feels the most hyena it's possible to be. Bet it has an absolutely fucked up laugh.

5. Wooly mammoths near the Somme River
Public Domain (Charles Robert Knight)
A mural for the American Museum of Natural History. knight has loads of other great vintage paleoart, I went with the mammoths because of course I did. 

6. Font de Gaume
Public Domain (Charles Robert Knight)
Human paleoart gets graded on a pretty sharp curve, but this is a solid one.

7. Gothmog, Lord of Balrogs
CC-BY-4.0 (Álvaro Fernández González)
Now I'm not entirely certain where CC fanart falls on the spectrum of yea or nay, but this is a nice menacing balrog.

8. Sigmund
Public Domain (Arthur Rackham)
Used this one for my PDLOTR project. Leave it to Rackham to make some incredible art of some truly godawful subject matter. 

9. Setebos
Public Domain (Joseph Urban)
Design work for a 1916 performance of the masque Caliban by the Yellow Sands. That's a dungeon if I've ever seen one.

10.Warrior
CC-BY-4.0 (David Revoy)
The boob plate isn't going to pass armorer's muster, but you can do far worse for anime-vibe art.

11. Lia Turtle
CC-BY-4.0 (David Revoy / Blender Foundation)
If it's not obvious yet, David Revoy has a lot of CC art on Wikimedia Commons.

12. Maastricht Book of Hours, BL Stowe MS17 f200v
Public Domain (Unknown artist)
Nun with animal legs, bigass sword, and a no-nonsense expression. Figure that will be of interest to the readership of this blog.

13. BlankMap-Philippines-noborders
Public Domain (Howard the Duck)
Certain someone can find a use for this.

14. Ekko (Echo)
Public Domain (Theodor Kittelsen)
All of Kittelsen's work is PD and all of it is fantastic. His main page has a gallery.


 

Slushpile 18

Tis the season, the season of slush.  I'm pretty sure this is the biggest one yet.

Slushpile Index

1. Salt in food has made it much harder for demons to possess people
2. The division of first beings into those who have no part in the world, those who devote all things to maintaining it, those who take an active role within it
3. A recurring question in medieval Christianity:  “Did Christ also die for the orcs?”
4. Trial by ordeal but it's just making the arrest: if she was actually an evil witch you'd be dead the moment you cross the property line, so no need to toss her in a lake.
5. The spell to turn one’s spirit into a banshee is a secret art of women - a practice of last-ditch defence against men who wish them harm.
6. The cult had fallen out of practice well before the arrival of the Four Prophets and the Epistles of Fire, and so very little information remains.
7. The Twelve Houses of Balosar
8. Oberon’s Tower hostel, just outside Lang-Mer’s Poor Gate.
9. Kona Hafhandsdottir - A sword for hire, from the northern fjordlands.
10. Makhan - A mendicant sword-priest from the lands beyond Prester John’s country.
11. “Here is one thing, there another. The stone has ten thousand teachers.”
12. Drow Ambassador: “Yes, yes, I’ve seen the cartoons. Your political comics are men of unparalleled creativity: who could have possibly imagined such witticisms as ‘foreigner bad’ or ‘woman stupid’? If that’s the best they can do I don't think they're paying much attention.”
13. Atlantida: volcanic island off the northern coast of Brazil. Former Portuguese colony.
14. “It’s all in the Vibe. Gotta have the ineffable sauce.”
15. “I am very tired and want to go home. In a cosmological sense.”
16. “There can be no Eden without gardeners, without those who love rich soil and clean water and old, old trees. It cannot be built nor sustained without callused hands and tired feet, without aching back and nails blackened with dirt. Perhaps the only difference between heaven and hell is whether the day’s labor ends with satisfaction or despair."
17. Dwarves associated with Hades / Pluto because of underground wealth.
18. DOVER BATHOS has remained at Anomalous Organism Storage Facility 05 since 1998.
19. Wherever the polyps emerged, they began to build enormous, hivelike arcologies of stone.
20. "Because they are alive, and we are not.”
21. Dream: Kittan’s youngest sister from TTGL shirts SHUT UP MOON MAN to the tune of Rob Zombie's “living dead girl”.
22. Martin had sworn to himself that he’d throw the next reporter to mention Sapir-Whorf out the nearest window, mostly in jest and frustration, and not sixteen hours later he was asked by a man from Scientific General if language dictated thought. He didn’t throw the reporter out the window, but he definitely wanted to, in a harmless, cartoon-physics sort of way.
23. Action / reaction / willpower (resist mental) / toughness (resist body)
24. Lost/anomalous media: medieval manuscript marginalia of Homestar characters
25. Dream: There is a basilosaurus in the lake, though it’s more of a nuisance than a danger.
26. To the king, that which cannot be enslaved - cannot be made property - must be destroyed. Seven hundred princes pledged allegiance to his banner, and his war parties returned to the palace so laden with treasure that they would break the backs of the pack mules.
27. Lothlorien is beautiful because the trees were loved (if only they loved their neighbors half as much, the pricks)
28. Anime that don’t exist: Grotty cult-classic sci-fi OVA, major MoSh fuel.
29. While translated as “mother”, the term is typically un gendered, and refers to anyone with the primary role of caring for and teaching a creche.
30. “You shall have your vengeance, but you shall not become it.”
31. Ribbon I want to do for convention Mothership games: “I died alone in space”
32. If magic is a beam of light, a rite is a series of focusing lenses that directs it through the prism of some unlucky bastard
33.  An anomalous transmission from the Voyager 1 spacecraft beginning November 18 2023. Situation is developing and under observation. 
34. …slipping out of the knotted dead-ends of time space when there is food to be had and the brane is thin…
35. The Door in the Wall
36. Alternate stat names: athletic aptitude, fast action, book smarts, street smarts, people skills
37. Missives from the Future: Transtemporal Stochastic Terrorism and its Effects on American Society (Jemison, 2025)
38. “Ganymede STC this is Oriole on final approach” “Copy that, Oriole, you’re cleared for docking, spur 4, bay 12.”
39. Laying on a straw mattress, listening to the crickets outside
40. Affix designating loanwords / phonetic spelling
41. “May this worthless blade be driven into a plowshare.”
42. Three common demons: guilt, despair, addiction
43. The etymology for cannabis is extremely murky, as it turns out. Heroditus claims it was from the Scythians, so you should give it to the amazons in your setting, at least.
44. If Lovecraft or one of his imitators had written the Red Pool, there would have been a character proclaiming without evidence that it was the spilled blood of Yog-Sothoth. This is a bad example because that's a fucking rad idea.
45. Generic Vernacular Fantasyland as alternate / echoed version of early 400s Britain; post Roman withdrawal (+ancient ruins), beginning of Angle-Saxon migrations / invasions (+orc stand-ins)
46. Planet where entire population descended from emulations of very limited original colonist population
47. Su’amatsanidan - I think this is supposed to gloss as “abstract mother-ship-person”, so it’s probably a term for a personified spaceship.
48. The Dust House / ANTIPETRICHOR
49. Radio in the kitchen: Preset stations pick up [spooky things]
50. 60 Years ecophage threats adapted for DG or MoSh.
51. Angga - paleolithic shamaness, maybe Willendorf herself
52. A priest of Mantuka, Devourer-of-Demons: More like a mountain that walks than a man
53. The Headhunters are not conscious - they are investigating humans primarily because self-awareness should have killed us a long time ago. We are an anomaly. Their experiments leave behind entire planets of human-derived livestock
54. Spec evo seed world but can only use SCP articles tagged with some sort of life form (animal, plant, fungus, species, etc) (or otherwise describe a clade of organisms)
55. DG agent: Sr. Margaret Tan - ~50 years old, small build, blue windbreaker, shotgun.
56. Morale is low: it is dark, and cold, and I would like to rest
57. The mosaic empire of the elves across the northern desert
58. A Lot of Zeroes premise I want to use: after detection of an alien megastructure, my spaceship is sent to panspermia the trail between it and Sol. 
59. Baqwoman - a title / profession
60. The sagani may take up divine mantles, but they do so by a different path than men.
61. The human/sapient prefix can be applied to non-sapient things as a personifier; different cultures will extend this to different things - ships, ainimae, exoselves.
62. Conlang idea - the language of Hole / Throne: the fossilized court of azathoth. Uses kanji and also Cherokee syllabary?
63. Dorothy, Alice, Lirazel vs John Carter’s invasion force; Carter overestimates how easy it is to return to earth gravity.
64. “He has need for neither posturing nor for glory: He’s going to kill a motherfucker and be done with it.”
65.  Δ-Class Citizen: colonial population support program (clone body, soul tether sigils)
66. You ever think about that bit in the tartakovsky clone wars where the Nelvaani kid recognizes and accepts his father despite his father having been turned into a monster?
67. The Eldest of Elders (Elden Beast) = transapient Elder Thing conglomerate (can embody in an avatar-body);   The binding ring (Elden Ring) = shoggoth tree-of-life command & control function.
68. Neanderthal body found frozen in permafrost, sufficiently preserved that a genome can be sequenced by porting in leftovers in modern humans.
69. CAPRA - Civic Anomalous Phenomena Response Agency 
70. Elephant variants: miniature, stilt, extremely colorful, rooter/tusker, many trunks 
71. Corvid variants: sun thief / golden-head raven, carnivale (parrot-like), thunderers, neoraptors
72. Cetacean variants: neo-ambulocetus, cyborg / walker-bots, whalesong-possessed humans, skywhales
73. Octopi variants: gasbag, shelled 
74. Paraphrasing cosmicorrery: A word to describe the feeling of sadness when one sees activities, games, or decorations put together in attempt to be Fun go unused, ignored, or dismissed. 
75. Cheap & easy conlang idea: take Latin then apply sound changes of Proto-Celtic to Old Irish, or take Proto-Celtic and apply sound changes of Latin to French or Occitan.
76. Via Robwords' episode on the etymology of dog: there are medeival English records that mention men named Wilfric Pig, Willelmo Hog, Roger le Doge, William le Frogge.
77. Extremely important historical fact: there were riots against the Inquisition in Carcassonne ~1300. The module writes itself!
78. Via Black Forager: Racahout - ground acorns in milk, a pre-chocolate hot chocolate
79. Echidna as mother of monsters but also progenitor of humanity
80. DG shotgun scenario: Inventory Day - Program agents are tasked with taking inventory at the Book Depository (old missile silo?), a long-term storage facility for weird shit. Naturally, among all the recovered Green Boxes, there is something horrible and unexpected.
81. “I attract strange people like honey attracts flies. There could be a talking monkey at my door and it wouldn’t be surprising.” 
82. The Spear of Lu - At forty-one confirmed kills, she is one of the most-veteran ships in the OSMAT fleets. 
83. The Pentaregia of Sigma Draconis
84. Demons that induce the sin vs demons that embody the sin as discrete orders of demon
85. Conjuration of spirits used to bypass development of scientific experimentation, because you can just ask a thing how it works.
86. Firebird units: Burner / Phoenix / Militia / Fireteam / Burnout
87. Courtly romance (n): wholly divorced from human experience, it contains no elements of an actual relationship and mostly serves as justification for men with power to cheat on their spouses. Guinevere never has to deal with Lancelot thrashing around in bed because of his PTSD dreams. 
88. Via Just King Things: M. John Harrison said that the editorial choice that saved his horror story The Ice Monkey was going back, removing the exposition, and keeping everything else intact.
89. In an effort to save the library from the encroaching polyps, a large chunk of the time space superstructure is violently torn out of reality. Some ruins are left behind, discovered so much later by the troodontids and humans. The yithians regroup in the distant future. Those that remain inside, unable to transmigrate or continue a population of conomorphs, attempt to develop other hosts. While they succeed, their minds are reduced to instinct, and these new docents tend to tomes they can neither read nor understand.
90. The triple hierophant - a towering exultant; long straight black hair, golden robes that appear to glow, headpiece like a sunburst
91. Idea: What if the existence of working conjuring means that you can kind of sidestep a lot of experimental science by just asking something "how do you work?"
92. You'd think that by this point goblins should would know to avoid adventurers
93. The problem with “work to live, not live to work” is that it still contains the unspoken and implicit corollary of “and those who don’t work, don’t get to live.”
94. FTL that autocorrects for paradoxes by removing the vessel from perception from all frames of reference. One it jumps it is fucking gone
95. Demon that causes miscarriages as male, bucking folkloric trend
96. Demon: A white bull ox ridden by a giant, blood-drenched man bound in hair-ropes. Blinded, cock like a flagpole
97. Appalachian Tsathoggua: I can't explain why it feels right, but it does.
98. Stealthy night monster identified by the sound of its grinding teeth
99. Lemman - Middle English word for one's lover, from Old English lēof +‎ mann. Gender neutral. We could stand to bring this one back, it's very useful. (Thanks to the Maniculum for pointing it out.)  
100. Goldberg polyhedrons: a sphere made of hexes, which is probably useful to y'all.
101. Language where the word for "wealthy" shares the same root as the word for fat.
102. I remember an old LP of Jurassic Park Trespasser that I enjoyed, really need to find it again. Old old, like definitely over a decade.
103. "Forgiveness is not transactional! Mercy is not a fucking gacha machine you can just feed tokens into until what you did is okay!"
104. For MoSh: Marines get sidearm, Teamsters get toolkit, Scientists get research database, Androids get logic core
105. Tostées dorées - French toast, when you're already in France.
106. Slimes are dragon vomit, containing bits and pieces of inedible matter like an owl pellet.
107. Runaway Station; phantom train stop that appears to a quartet of kids who have fled the residential school. 
108. Sour Stripes ? Sour Strips? Google gives me candy but I swear that was the name of the band.
109. Everyone goes for “oh the necronomicon is bound in human skin” and no one bothers asking “okay, whose skin is it? Seems like a lot of trouble. And honestly how can they even tell, it's leather! It is leather, right? It'd be rotting away if it wasn't..."
110. Japanese "starving woman" cryptid
111. Gravity was formulated relatively early, thanks to a monastic order high in the mountains, whose meditative practices involved rolling polished stone balls onto a taut sheet of silk or canvas that was shaped into a funnel by a central stone, and divining according to how the balls spiraled. 
112. Via Dr. Sledge: in Talmudic demonology, Shabiri / Shabriri (I couldn't discern if that first r was there when he said it) is the demon of night-blindness. Fair to assume that Miyazaki did that intentionally.
113. Knight errant as the fantasy of “get the cool parts of the military estate without the feudalism”
114. Lawful demons tempt into sin; chaotic demons embody it 
115. “The Knight” or “”The Lord”; an undead or possessed suit of armor to defend the town 
116. Combative magic is difficult and rare because most spirits will just refuse to do it 
117. A language: SVO, analytic. It possesses no tense but sufficient aspect
118. The sin of Power, combining within itself cruelty, greed, and pride
119. Video game Sea of Rifts uses "Exposure" instead of stability / insight / sanity, and I think I like it best of all. You don't understand it, but you're changed all the same. 
120. The angel corpse falls to seafloor and is covered with silts; geological upraising of the region, plus hundreds of millions of years of erosion, will lead to its discovery inside a mountain.

**

RED HED

A withered body, bluish-grey like colloidal silver poisoning. A swollen rubbery sphere, candy apple red and six feet across, grows out of its head, hanging in the air like a water balloon pulled by an unseen center of gravity high above. Its splay-toed feet are on backwards.

• Wounds: 2(20)
• Instinct: 40
• Combat: Non-Continguous Cutting Motion (30)
• Line-of-sight
• Seven-fingered hands and three-jointed arms snap into a sequence of angular contortions. Flesh is cut with the knife that is not.
• On failure: 3d10 damage, SAN save to negate
• One success: 1 wound (Blade), SAN save to reduce to failure result.

Ambrosia
The heavy, non-Newtonian fluid within the acephalonic sac is highly alkaline. It splashes over everything at Close range, damaging objects and burning exposed skin (1d10/round). Poison fumes burn eyes, mouth, nose; anyone who comes within Close range without eye protection will be temporarily blinded. Can be diluted with (large quantities of) water. Reacts with violent foaming reaction if acid is applied.

**

“Hi! My name’s Luce!”

Miriam looked at the girl on the doorstep and wondered for a moment why the last twenty-odd years of her life were regularly punctuated by the strangest people imaginable. She brushed the thought aside: the girl with blue hair was not nearly as strange as the talking monkey and confused monk, or the clay doves, or the choir of burning eyes, or the stone-bodied messenger, or any number of impossible things that seemed to follow her like dust on her heels.

“Are you lost?” Miriam asked.

“I’m on pilgrimage!” The girl said, beaming. “But I don’t know if I’m in the right place. So maybe I am lost.”

Miriam nodded. That made more sense.

“If you’re looking for Yeshua, he’s out with his brothers on a job. He’ll be back by sundown.”

**

 “You are so very concerned with whether things are real and care nothing for if they are true. When I woke up this morning, I went into the woods and pissed on a tree. That is real. If I tell the story of Chukan and how he tried to steal the sun’s wedding garment for his beloved, is it less true because I do not include every time he stopped and pissed against a tree? What bearing does that have on the story of a youth in the grips of lovesickness? The sun does not have garments, and even if he did, they would be far too large.” [Footnote: this size discrepancy is brought up in most versions of the story]

** 

Principle of Anthropocentic Expectation

It is always possible that a supernatural entity, either on their own or through external influence, is, artificially adjusting their appearance, properties, or circumstances so as to align with pre-existing human expectations; this may be embodied in tropes such as “people see what they think they should see” or “they picked this form because it was already familiar”, or it may be an intentional misdirection on the part of the supernatural entity.

** 

 

Please get these drafts out of my docs they have been sitting here for YEARS. 

 

Scrap Post 1: Making Better Transhuman Chargen

(Initially) an attempt to fix Eclipse Phase’s wonky morph system, that then turned into a broad sketch for a fully modular Knave-style slot-based build-a-character system.

Reason to Scrap It: The premise is so broad that my attempt to make a general-purpose system floundered (turns out, transhuman sci-fi is an extremely broad conceptual category) and I’d have to make an entire setting to give it anything substantial to work on, and I don’t enough about the idea to go to that work. I might dig it back

Scrap Post 2: Building the Verse (but Better)

Taking the oddly detailed numbers of Firefly’s Verse, plus some help from PlanetPlanet, and rebuilding the setting with some hard-science solar system generator or another for a slightly-more-realistic version.

Reason to Scrap It: The map is the only thing I particularly like about Firefly and while the numbers are useful, I’d need to re-arrange the system anyway to make it stable and at that point why not just make it wholly original.

 

Scrapped Post 3: Building a Fantasy Solar System

Either a collection of tables, an essay, or a worked example (or all three) to do what it said in the title.

Reason to Scrap It: Not enough substantial material to justify it as a standalone post. I still want to do something with the idea, since I am a fan of that tiny tiny Venn overlap of high fantasy and hard space science that basically no one else lives in, but if I do I'm going to just skip ahead to “making a solar system”. Probably for MSF, though the advantage of this method is that you can kinda just swap it into whatever setting because so few fantasy RPGs care about other planets.
 

Proto-Indo-European Resource Masterpost

Last Updated 2/22/26 

As I spent a large chunk of 2025 going down the rabbit hole of historical linguistics, I read a lot of extremely niche academic papers, obscure blogposts, and assorted crackpot theories: I’ve gathered all the ones I can remember here to offset the field's bullheaded resistance to ever putting anything in one place. Heaven forbid academic reference material be easy to find.

This will, of course, be a curated list shaped by my own interests and biases. If you're here because you want to get into hobbyist PIE linguistics, I encourage you to assemble your own trove.

**

Important Lessons to Know Going In

1. Reconstructed PIE is a model - it's highly flawed, it's not an accurate representation of the historical reality, but it is the best we've got at the moment.
2. Many resources online are out of date; there is no centralized database.
3. Wikipedia is not a good source to get in-depth information about PIE topics, only to learn that the topics exist. You will likely find yourself having to unlearn things like I did.
4. Literally anyone can post stuff to Academia.edu (which is a exceedingly enshittified website), and because the recommendation algorithm is a blind and senseless deity Academia.edu will regularly recommend you pdfs that are not peer reviewed / are not good scholarship / are not coherent and functional as a linguistics text / are basically just blog posts to a greater or lesser degree of quality.
5. PIE the language changed radically over time, especially when comparing before and after Anatolian split off: PIE the reconstruction rarely takes this into account.
6. The laryngeals are a headache and I highly recommend removing them immediately, or at the very least being judicious about where they are kept. 
7. Go through morphology and lop off the stuff you know you don't want to keep before you start sound changes.
8. Sometimes you need to make an arbitrary choice and stick with it: sound changes are a rabbit hole: go in with a target and don't let yourself get waylaid by what-ifs.
9. Word-building is actually easier if you just make them yourself from a root list and the endings.
10.  THE SPIRIT OF THE LAW IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE LETTER - if you have to fudge things to make the project work, fudge to your heart's content. The rules are made up & the points don't matter. 

**

The Indo-European Conlang Checklist

1. So, why are you doing this? (d4)
1. I like difficult and complex puzzles
2. I am classically, King Lear Act 4 insane
3. I have a high tolerance to frustration  
4. I am desperate for a distraction from The Horrors 
2. Have you reconsidered? (d3)
1. Now that you mention it, backing out seems like a good idea.
2. Ha-ha, I'm in danger! 
3. I barely consider things the first time: full steam ahead!
3. Are you sure? How about a sub-family? They're more reasonable. (d10)
1. Proto-Albanian
2. Proto-Anatolian
3. Proto-Armenian
4. Proto-Balto-Slavic
5. Proto-Celtic
6. Proto-Germanic
7. Proto-Hellenic
8. Proto-Indo-Iranian
9. Proto-Italic
10. Proto-Tocharian
4. Won't be dissuaded? Suit yourself. How are you handling the laryngeals? (d12)
1. I'm deleting them immediately, like a sane person would. 
2. Rasmussen - h / x / ɣʷ 
3. Kloekhorst - ʔ / q(ː) / q(ː)ʷ 
4. Lindeman - x́, ɣ́ / x, ɣ / xʷ, ɣʷ 
5. Keiler - / h / ħ / ʕ
6. Bomhard 1 - ʔ / x / ɣ 
7. Beekes -  ʔ / ʕ / ʕʷ 
8. Kümmel - h / χ / ʁ 
9. Meier-Brügger - ʔ / x / ɣ(ʷ) 
10. Kortlandt -  ʔ / q~χ / qʷ~χʷ
11. Pooth - ʔ / χ / ʕ
12. Ringe -  ç / x / xʷ
5. And if those are too normal for you... (d4)
1. Szemerenyi - h [1]
2. Martinet -  ʔ, h / χ , ʁ, ħ, ʕ / χʷ , ʁʷ, ħʷ, ʕʷ [2]
3. Bomhard 2 - ʔ / ħ͡h / ʕ͡ħ / h [3]
4. Pyysalo - aɦ / ɦa [4]
6. Glottalic theory: yea or nay? (d10)
1. Traditional - Plain / Voiced / Breathy
2. Hopper - Plain / Ejective / Voiced
3. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov - Aspirated / Ejective / Breathy
4. Beekes - Plain / Preglottalized / Aspirated
5. Kümmel - Plain / Implosive / Voiced
6. Clackson - Plain / Creaky / Breathy
7. Shcirru - Plain / Preglottalized / Slack
8. Kortlandt - Geminated / Ejective / Plain
9. The Tocharian Option - Fuck all this, collapse everything to plain unvoiced stops.
10. Fuck it, they were actually affricates [5]
7. Centum, Satem, or the Forbidden Third Option? (d4)
1. Centum - Get that god damn palatovelar series out of here.
2. Satem - There will be no labialized consonants under this roof thank you very much.
3. Menage a troistem - All three dorsal series are present, no there will not be an explanation. [6]
4. Qantum - plain velars were actually uvular, palatovelars were plain. [7]
8. How are thorn ([alveolar stop]+[velar stop]) clusters getting resolved? (d8)
1. No change; TK => TK
2. Metathesis; TK => KT
3. Assibilation; TK => sK
4. Deletion; TK => *K
5. Metathesis-Assibilation: TK =>KT => Ks
6. Metathesis-Deletion: TK => KT => *T
7. Metathesis-Assibilation-Deletion: TK => KT => Ks => *s
8. Metathesis-Deletion-Affrication; TK => KT => *T => *Ts 
9. Do the S be mobile? (d4)
1. Mobile S is present in all cases. [8]
2. Mobile S is absent in all cases. [8] 
3. Mobile S is present seemingly at random 
4. Not only is Mobile S absent, it seems like it never appeared in this branch: any roots that pattern as STeDh are now DheDh. [8]
10. Am I finally done? (d1)
1. No. You're in it now. Welcome to Wonderland, we're all mad here.

[1] - Not a mistype, just one laryngeal with no coloring effect: he supposes PIE just had more vowels and ablaut patterns than thought.

[2] - The book is in French so I have no idea how he defined which environments got what. 

[3] - As used in his book on Nostratic; the sounds used for h2 and h3 don't appear in PHOIBLE, Wikipedia, or cursory google search, so take that as you will.

[4] I'm including this one because it exists; I do not care to spend the time to wrap my head around this theory, which considering what I have spent that time on should say a lot.

[5] This is extremely unlikely in reality, and I don't know of anyone who actually supports it.

[6] To my knowledge, no daughter languages keep all three. Melchert claims that Luwian did, but it doesn't look like he has gotten significant support on this

[7] This is not an uncommon stance, and it does play nicely with the laryngeals being uvulars, but it isn't the mainstream of the model.

[8] To the best of my knowledge, three of the four options here are not extant, I just included them to make a table. 

** 

The rest of this post is going to be links to resources and citations, divvied up into categories. While I am grouping by quality, I am compiling by quantity, and so I will include sources do not align with the mainstream of the field, which may also be sources that I don't agree with / don't consider to be good sources / are just plain wrong: I will notate these accordingly. Those whose contents I have forgotten i make no such promises for.

Recommended Reading

Books I would recommend to people who don't give a shit about conlangs but are modestly interested in PIE. 

• Beekes, Robert: Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction (2011)
•  This is probably the best general-audience overview you're going to find, or at least that I've found. Beekes manages to cover an enormous amount of material in an approachable and thorough manner and doesn't get lost in the weeds. 
•  Mallory, J. P., D. Q. Adams: The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo European (2006)
• The other gold standard. If you have bit of linguistics knowledge going in or a willingness to learn you'll have a good time. Where Beekes is the all-rounder, Mallory & Adams is more specific, divying up the reconstructed PIE vocabulary by topic and combing through to see which words are best attested, and how they came to be.

 

 

The Big 4

The ur-resources.

• Pokorny, J. Indogermanisches Etymologisches Woerterbuch (Indo-European Etymological Dictionary) (1959)
• Out-of-date. Does not contain laryngeals or Anatolian material. Still somehow the most approachable lexicon. You can find a cleaned-up online version via the University of Texas: if you want fewer moving parts for your project and don't care overly much about accuracy, it's servicable. There's also a edited / cleaned up / laryngeal-including version here, though I can't find who was behind it.
• Rix, Helmut, Martin Kümmel et al. Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben (Lexicon of Indo-European Verbs, LIV)
• Has not been translated into English.
• Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series
• Incomplete; the project turns 35 next year and the promised grand unified replacement for Pokorny is most likely dead in the water - the most recent of the dictionaries was released in 2014. You can, of course, not find all of these in the same place, because Indo-Europeanists break out in hives when things are too convenient
• Wikipedia & Wiktionary
• A cobbled together mess; outdated information is everywhere, along with shoddy and questionable reconstructions. Use with caution.

You will notice that I throw shade on all these sources: this is because they are inadequate and are unlikely to ever be replaced. Your average fan wiki has better organization than this field. 

Andrew Byrd at the University of Kentucky has been working on DERBi PIE (Database of Etymological Roots Beginning in PIE), but the website is basically just a holding page and given how funding for the humanities has been going the odds of seeing it to completion are lower than even the extremely low rate of the field.

 

Top Billing

Articles which I think are good for just understanding PIE / the most useful ones for conlanging.

• Byrd, Andrew: Reconstructing Indo-European Syllabification (2010)
• Byrd's stuff is generally just good to look into, since he focuses a lot on reconstructing PIE as a language that people spoke over a algebraic formula. 
• Byrd, Andrew: The Rules of Reconstruction: Making our Etymologies More Grounded (2017)
• That is, if you can find his papers - I had found this paper on Academia within the last year, but since then it and all of Byrd's other papers have been pulled from that site and further searching led me expensive dead ends. I am reminded, once again, of why not going on to higher ed was a blessing, I would lose my fucking mind with this recursive walled garden.
• Gąsiorowski, Piotr: The use and misuse of evidence in linguistic reconstruction (2012)
• A useful reminder about how reconstructions are never set in stone, and how they can be shaped by bias and lack of data. 
• Kiparsky, Paul: Compositional vs. Paradigmatic Approaches to Accent and Ablaut (20XX) 
• Origin point for a (thankfully, it seems, gradually catching-on) alternative to the traditional PIE accentuation schema, which tosses out the rather arbitrary categories with a series of rules that can be applied to derive the patterns that have been reconstructed in a natural and logical manner. A few other works cited in this post build on this paper, and I'll mark them as such.
• Kümmel, Martin: On new reconstructions of PIE "laryngeals", especially as uvular stops (2022)
•  This is, in my amateur's opinion, the best argument I've yet seen made for the laryngeals and their identity: namely, that they pattern in Hittite like a fortis / lenis or unvoiced / voiced pair, and taking other  aspects into account were probably χ and ʁ, which he notes does not rule out earlier q and ɢ or later h, x, or ħ.
• Kümmel, Martin: Typology and reconstruction: The consonants and vowels of Proto-Indo-European (2012)
•  Wins a slot here for being simple and functional: he goes through the available evidence, compares it to the patterns of modern languages, and comes up with serviceable answers for the plain voiced series and the development of the vowel system.
• Moniz, C. Ryan: PIE vowel quality and accent approaches (2022)
• An excerpt from an undergraduate thesis that compares different theories of PIE's vowel space and accent structure. Extremely helpful if you want to just want to compare options and pick one. Cites a bunch of sources down at the bottom, several of which are also in this list. 
• Weiss, Michael: The Proto-Indo-European Laryngeals and the Name of Cilicia in the Iron Age (2016)
• If Kümmel's 2022 paper above is the magic bullet, I consider this to be the smoking gun: when Hittite proper nouns were transliterated into neighboring languages such as Akkadian, the laryngeal descendant ḫ was consistently written with symbols for uvular consonants instead of pharyngeals (since Akkadian made that distinction and Hittite did not).
• Yates, Anthony and Jesse Lundquist: The Morphology of Proto-Indo-European (2018) 
• Yates, Anthony: (Reconstructing) stress assignment in Hittite and Proto-Indo-European (2016) 
• Builds on Kiparsky: the Hittite evidence checks out in favor of the Compositional Theory.
• Yates, Anthony: Some basics of Indo-European Phonology (2018)

Personal Wildcards

Articles that I, personally, think are great specifically for me, but which might not be particularly sturdy hypotheses or are otherwise nonstandard. We all get to have a couple Crank Credits as a treat, and these are mine.

• Adiego, Ignasi-Xavier; A little-known law on the root and syllable structures of Proto-Indo-European (2022) 
• This paper, combined with Jan’s below, has me convinced that at least some of the laryngeals were approximants formed by vowels breaking under stress, because there are a lot of roots that otherwise inexplicably pattern as CHVR. So much PIE scholarship ties itself in knots over *i and *u. If the same sound is *ew when stressed and *u when unstressed, that means that stress broke the vowel
• Bičovský, Jan: Proto-Indo-European laryngeals and voicing assimilation (2019) 
• h3 being treated as voiced and labialized has always felt weird to me, because neither of those traits are necessary to fulfill the criteria they supposedly fill: the voicing assimilation premise is based on exactly one word, and labialization is based on turning adjacent *e to *o, despite no other labialized consonants doing that. Jan here is in the same boat, and he lays out a solid case against the traditional reconstruction and paired argument for laryngeals as having both fricative and approximant realizations.
• Gąsiorowski, Piotr: Another long grade: Non-canonical ablaut involving PIE *ā (2013) 
• Speculation on the mechanisms that could lead to an *ā ./ *a ablaut series in PIE. I appreciate that it's labeled as non-canonical up front.
• Monti, Nicolás: The twofold development of PIE *o in Greek, Italic and Celtic (2026-) and Again on the reflex of medial PIE *ō (2026-)
• These papers have gotten several updates since I first became aware of them, so I'm linking Monti's main profile page instead. These are some pretty radical papers (as in, what they propose would rewrite half of the reconstructive model if true) and they are very much still WIPs, but they're also the sort of theory where I kinda want it to be true. Wanting doesn't mean being, of course, but the theory is easy to understand and can probably help simplify a lot of a conlang project.

 

Laryngeals & Laryngeal Accessories

Now you too can be driven to rend your garments and pluck out your beard like an old testament prophet whenever you see an H!

• Beekes, Robert: The Nature of the Proto-Indo-European Laryngeals (198?) 
• While an old paper compared to most of this list, it does draw an interesting comparison to the Salish language Shuswap and its pharyngeal consonants; a good model to use if you don't want to use Kummel's.
• Hartmann, Frederik: The phonetic value of the Proto-Indo-European laryngeals (2021)
• This article approaches the subject from a statistical analysis angle, which is novel, though I think the conclusions are pretty much nonsense because he was feeding Wiktionary into a neural network.
• Kloekhorst, Alwin: Evidence for a phonemic glottal stop in Hittite as the outcome of PIE *h1: a reassessment (2022)
• Kloekhorst, Alwin: CaR vs. Ca-aR spellings in Hittite: evidence for a phonemic distinction between /ə/ and /a/ (2021)
• Kümmel, Martin: The conditioning for secondary ḫ in Hittite (2014) 
• Woodhouse, Robert: Two Properties of PIE *h3 (2015)
• Woodhouse, Robert: Lubotsky's and Beekes' laws, PIE *(H)r-, *(H)i(V)-, *a and some other laryngeal matters (2011) 

Other Phonology Articles

Because there are, in fact, non-laryngeal sounds in PIE

• Barnett, Phillip: A Markedly Different Approach: Investigating PIE Stops Using Modern Empirical Methods (2018)
• Bičovský, Jan: The phonetics of PIE *d, II: the evidence from daughter languages (2021)
• Donnelly, Patrick: Concatenative Phonetic Synthesis for the Proto-Indo-European Languages (20XX)
• Melchert, H. Craig: Hittite Historical Phonology after 100 Years (and after 20 Years) (201X) 
• Prescott, Charles: Pharyngealization and the three dorsal stop series of Proto-Indo-European (2018)
• This is a bit of a marginal theory, but it's interesting and not impossible. 
• Woodhouse, Robert: Delabialization after *u and the distribution of labiovelars in dialectal Proto-Indo-European (2017)
• Woodhouse, Robert: Some More Etymologies not  Requiring Proto-Indo-European *b (2008) 
• Woodhouse, Robert: Tectal neutralization after *s in PIE: a corrected restatement (2014) 

 

Roots and Syllables

Little nuggets of sound

• Corbaeu, Alain: Phonological Root Structure Constraints in PIE (20??) 
• Kazansky, Nikolai: Root extension as a linguistic problem (2018)  
• Vernet, Mariona: Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Semitic root incompatibilities: a new typological approach (2018) 

 

Stress and Accent

Let me tell you how much I have come to hate mobile accent since I began this research...

• Hyman, Larry: How (not) to do phonological typology: the case of pitch-accent (2009) 
• This isn't PIE-specific, but I include it here because PIE is typically referred to as "pitch accent" language, and Hyman is arguing here (with a focus on modern languages) that this isn't a meaningful label. 
• Keydana, Götz: Accent in Thematic Nouns (2013)
•  This one gets into some eyes-n-the-inside territory, but builds on compositional theory well to explain trends in the thematic nouns (namely that they were not somehow immune to the systems that created the athematic declensions)
• Kloekhorst, Alwin: Indo-European Nominal Ablaut Patterns: The Anatolian Evidence  (20XX)
• Kloekhorst, Alwin: The origin of the Proto‑Indo‑European nominal accent-ablaut paradigms (2018)
• Sandell, Ryan: Perspectives on the Reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European Accentual System (2014) 

Placeholder Category

For stuff that I either can't sort into a different category or can't be bothered to.

• Anderson, Cormac et al: The Indo-European Cognate Relationships Dataset (2025)
• DiLisi, Jessica: Feature metathesis and the change of PIE *dw- to Classical Armenian -rk (2013)
• Everyone's favorite wacky sound change! 
• DiLisi, Jessica: Notes on Indo-European Linguistics (2013)
• This one is very clearly a draft for a paper, given that it's mostly a bullet list.
• Fenwick, Rhona: Descendants and ancestry of a Proto-Indo-European phytonym *meh₂l- (20XX) 
• Garnier, Romain and Benoît Sagot: Metathesis of Proto-Indo-European Sonorants (2019)
• Garnier, Romain, Philippe Hattat, and Benoît Sagot: What is Old is New again: PIE Secondary Roots with Fossilised Preverbs (2019)
• Gąsiorowski, Piotr: Gender and numeral classifiers in Modern Nepali and their Proto-Indo-European analogues (2020)
• Ginevra, Riccardo: Locative alternation in Proto-Indo-European (2024) 
• Kloekhorst, Alwin: Evidence for a new pre-Proto-Indo-European sound law *-ē̆m > PIE *-ō̆m (2024) 
• Kortlandt, Frederik: The disintegration of the Indo-European language family (20XX) 
• I don't care for Kortlandt's laryngeals and think he gets a bit too into the weeds with Indo-Uralic, but he's also kinda the main guy for things like this. I think that this is more-or-less somewhere in the correct ballpark, so it's at least useful. 
• Melchert, H. Craig: Historical Phonology of Anatolian (1993) 
• Milanova, Veronika: Brothers and Many Others: The Concept ‘Offspring’ and its Semantic Extensions in Indo- European Languages (2020)
• Milanova, Veronika: Indo-European kinship terms as an interdisciplinary topic: reconstruction of social realities - anthropological views and methodological considerations (2020) 
• Milanova, Veronika: (Proto-)Indo-European kinship terms in *-ter and (ancient) age-grade systems. (2016)
• This is mostly a bullet list, but I think it's an extremely interesting one dissecting the PIE familiar terms and how they are not as clean-cut and nuclear as typically thought. 
• Slade, Benjamin: Split Serpents and Bitter Blades: Reconstructing Details of the PIE Dragon-Combat (2009) 
• Woodhouse, Robert: Hittite etymologies and notes (2012) 
• Yastrebov-Pestritskiy, Mikhail and Dmitry Bystov: Searching for the Lexical Core of Proto-Indo-European Language (2020) 
• Yastrebov-Pestritskiy, Mikhail and Dmitry Bystov: The Lexical Core of the Proto-Indo-European Language: The Complete Swadesh List (202?)
• Yates, Anthony: A new prosodic reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European *-mon-stems (2022)

 

The Pooth Zone

Roland Pooth is either an absolute madman or 100% on the money, no in-between. His interpretation of PIE as a Semitic-style root-and-pattern language plus direct-inverse alignment is extremely out there, but even if he is completely wrong, he’s still made a cohesive and consistent model that provides coherent explanations for some of the otherwise inexplicable elements of the traditional model, and that’s a fair sight better than most of the field. I'm not linking his entire corpus here, but enough to give you an idea of what you'll be dealing with.

• Pooth, Roland and Verónica Orqueda: Alignment Change and the Emergence of the Thematic Conjugation from Proto‐Indo‐European to Indo‐European: A Wedding of Hypotheses (2021) 
• Provided by the author down in the comments! 
• Pooth, Roland: From Proto-Indo-European to Indo-European: After the Great Voice Shift and the Morphotactic Fusion (201X)
• Pooth, Roland: Linguistic Analysis and Comparative Philology: The Case-Marking System of Proto-Indo-European (201X)
• Pooth, Roland: The North Wind and the Sun in the Proto-Indo-European Language (2023) 
• Pooth, Roland: The Proto-Indo-European Aspect System (2014) 
• Pooth, Roland: Proto-Indo-European Nominal Morphology. Part 1: The Noun (2015) 
• Pooth, Roland: Proto-Indo-European Nominal Morphology. Part 2. Adjectives (2017) 
• Pooth, Roland: Proto-Indo-European Syntax. Part 1. Complementation Strategies (2016)
• Pooth, Roland: Proto-Indo-European Verb Morphology Part 1: Inflection (2016)

 

Indo-Uralic & long-range stuff, etc

Take all of this with a complimentary salt lick. I don't support any of these theories beyond "it'd be really cool if that was the case" / "yeah there's a good chance of a connection, but there's no way to prove it"; you'll find out in short order that people can make themselves a semi-convincing argument for a relationship between PIE and damn near anything, which will be entirely incompatible with every other semi-convincing argument. This is fine if you are doing Conlang Shit, because you can just arbitrarily pick a version you like and roll with that.

• Cerantonio, Robert: 100 Proto-Indo-European Words that are inherited from Proto-Afroasiatic (2023) 
• I think Cerantonio's reasoning is too dependent on sound correspondences (correspondence doesn't deal well with environment-triggered sound changes or loan words), and Proto-Afroasiatic is an absolute mess that has yet to settle on an agreed-upon model, but if you disregard that it doesn't quite match up with the sources it's solid for inspiration if you want to take that route
• Hovers, Onno: The Indo-Uralic sound correspondences (2023)
• A first draft that does not appear to have gotten a second, much less peer review. Included here because it might provide some interesting ideas to swipe.
• Kloekhorst, Alwin and Tijmen Pronk: Reconstructing Proto-Indo-Anatolian and
  Proto-Indo-Uralic (201X)
• This is the introduction a larger work edited by Kloekhorst and Pronk, The Precursors of Proto-Indo-European: The Indo-Anatolian and Indo-Uralic
  Hypotheses (2019). it is, unfortunately, published by Brill, and so will cost you three kilos of ground unicorn horn, thirteen phoenix eggs, and the head of John the Baptist. I've read most of the component chapters, and they're fairly good for conlang inspiration.
• Kloekhorst, Alwin: Some Indo-Uralic Aspects of Hittite (2008)
• Kortlandt, Frederik: Indo-European between Uralic and Caucasian (2017)
• Kortlandt, Frederik: Indo-Uralic (200?)
• Kortlandt, Frederik: The Indo-Uralic Verb (2001) 
• Kroonen, Guus (ed.): Sub-Indo-European Europe: Problems, Methods, Results (2024)
• Martian bigfoot in the flesh: a publication by Brill that doesn't cost both kidneys and your firstborn child. 

 

Helpful and / or Silly Stuff I Found on Reddit

It ain't peer-reviewed, but sometimes plain speech and the freedom to shoot the shit is fruitful. You will notice an abundance of links to r/linguisticshumor: this is because r/linguistics dried up under extremely strict posting rules.

•  The Phonetic Value of the Proto-Indo-European Vowels
• Specifically, the linked comment by u/vokzhen 
• PIE h₁ h₂ h₃ are x́ x xʷ
• Talking about PIE's Laryngeals and Vowels 
• Thoughts on PIE Laryngeals
• PIE and modern English have the same vowel inventory
• This is a shitpost, but they're onto something here.
• What can be Inferred about the ancestor of Proto-Indo-European? (Proto-proto-Indo-European) 
• High-effort meme: the ULTIMATE Indo-European iceberg 
•  These are not sourced in the thread or the image, but they are good as a fast-and-loose of "what are some curveballs I can use?" More importantly, it's a bunch of weird theories all in one place.
• What non-standard thoeries about PIE you find the most interesting? Do you think they might be actually correct? 
• What do we know about the phonology of Pre-Proto-Indo-European? 

Assorted Blogposts

Some of these are from 5-10 years before some sizable developments in the field, and so are a bit diminished when it comes to accuracy. But, they are amateurs for amateurs and that's got it's place, especially if your goal is conlang stuff and the spirit of the law takes priority over the letter.

• Cerantonio, Robert: A Comparison of Features Among Indo-European Languages (2024) 
• Cerantonio, Robert: Some phrases in the Proto-Indo-European language (2024)
• Good if you want to do a translation challenge but are tired of the usual suspects. 
• Dragonlinguistics: The prehistory of PIE vowels, part 1 (2017)  
• Simple and straightforward, good if you want to just pick something and not worry about it. 
• Gordon, Glen: Diachrony of Pre-IE 2008Aug10 (2008)
• This doc only exists now because some Scribd bot scraped it and was one of the main influences that got me to go "oh yeah I could do this" - I don't think this proposal would hold up particularly well vs the decade+ of scholarly material that's been written since this was penned, but so it goes.
• Gordon, Glen: I tripped over Pre-PIE the other day (2008)
• Gordon, Glen: The Great Pre-IE Centralization (2007)
• Gordon, Glen: Precising on a new rule to explain Pre-IE word-final voicing (2008)
• Housecarpenter: Reconstructing the sound of the Proto-Indo-European laryngeals (2015) 
• Housecarpenter: Vowel-initial and vowel-final roots in Proto-Indo-European (2016)
• PhoeniX: *a that Proto-Indo-European sound inventory (2010)
• In a sobering reminder to always back up your shit, this blog vanished between when i was compiling my notes and when I started writing this post. It was updated as recently as 2024 and poof, hosting service went kablooey. At least one other post I had bookmarked for inclusion here is lost with no backup on Wayback, titled "3-trep-strebʰ".
• Possessivesuffix: Tumblr post Janurary 23rd, 2018, 8:47 AM
• An alternative reconstruction of the stop series, where there was a vowel phonation difference that then caused the stops to split. 
• Pystynen, J:  A Fourth Laryngeal in PIE (2018)
• I think this is a pretty convincing convincing argument: if h2 is a velar fricative, it would be extremely strange for there not to be a labialized counterpart when there is a series of labialized velar stops.
• whatevernatureis: re: Vowel-initial and vowel-final roots in Proto-Indo-European (2016?)
• Not actually about vowel-initial / final roots, but does present a cogent and easy-to-follow method by which a vowel system similar to PIE could evolve. You could do a lot worse for pre-PIE conlangs than using this. 

 

I Do Not Vouch for These

Still potentially good for inspiration, though caveat that emptor.

• Adolfo, Zavaroni: Prenasalized stops in IE and possible semantic developments from 'bite' to 'take' (2007)
• Prenasalized stops are a wild take for PIE, but the kind of wild that has potential conlang-applicable uses. 
• Bomhard, Allan: A Comprehensive Introduction to Nostratic Comparative Linguistics: With Special Reference to Indo-European, 5th Edition (2023)
•  An attempted reconstruction of Nostratic, a proposed ur-language family that contains within it most Eurasian language families. I don't find this a particularly convincing text and I think it'd be much better served as a work of fiction. I've considered using it as a basis for a conlang, though that doesn't sit quite right with me for reasons I can't adequately describe. But, and this is to his credit, Bomhard cites basically everyone else who has ever published in historical linguistics while laying out his grand unified theory. Good if you want to get some trailheads on what other people have said.
• Villamor, Fernando: 2500 PIE ROOTS REVISITED (THE SOURCE CODE 3.0) (2022)
• This guy turned PIE into something that borders on Earthsea-style true names. I'm listing it purely as a source of inspiration for TTRPG magic systems.

Useful Resources

Don't leave home without 'em.

• BlindBanana06: PIE lemmas
• JoTBa: PIE Reference Sheet V.1 
• These two spreadsheets are legitimately the reason I started all this nonsense: compilations of Wiktionary data is a fucking godsend. Absolutely vital for when you are testing out sound changes or building words from roots.
• Lexurgy Sound Changer
• Pystynen, J: List of Proto-Indo-European roots by distribution (2015)
•  An absolute necessity.
• Pystynen, J: PIE verb roots, for the people (2016)
• This is a spreadsheet of the entire LIV; It's not translated into English, however. 
• Quiles, Carlos and Fernando López-Menchero: A Grammar of Modern Indo-European: Prometheus Edition (2012)
• Note well: this is a conlang, not a scholarly reconstruction, and it is limited to a specific areal branch of late Indo-European. The authors have taken creative liberties with the material, but this also means that if you are making a conlang and want to evolve from something more well-behaved than the normal reconstructions, this isn't a half-bad option.
• Verduria forum members: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread's Sequel 

 

So What Have We Learned? 

The people writing fanfics about the statue that shits blood and then kills you instantly are better at organizing and cross-linking their work than historical linguists.