Guest Post by Pliny The Elder

 I mean DISPLACER KLAUS brought me this and he says it's from Pliny The Elder and who I am to doubt that chuckling rascal?

GREATER HOOT-BEAST

 The lovely and solemn Hoot Beast roams the plains , sustained only by smells . It is thus dependent on the numerous wild flowers and fragrant trees in the pyrrhous  lands. Unusually it does not  sniff the flowers like a thoughtful man or suckle at them like the bee, it instead draws them down their scent from the wind, numerous leagues away from the source.

It is thus provoked by unpleasant smells , sometimes chasing down and trampling the source of them , though when encountering the dense reek of man's settlements they will flee .

The nomads of the Pyrrhous  Plains lure them with perfumed youths and shear the wool from them after the winter months which they use for many purposes,  most notable their spherical hats, which they keep birds of various martial and social purpose.

SATAN

Here is a Satan , its appearance here has been crafted wading through a vast river of soul chyme where it plucks the juicey congealments that have made it through the mastications of the Gnawing Gates.

A Satans size is variable , and is known to be both like a common wading bird and a striding colossi. Its temperament is like most in New Plymouth ; cruel and disagreeable.

It is provoked by hats of all kinds and will make great fuss before commencing violence, plucking at limbs and flinging such grasped great distances .  It however is known to vastly over-estimate its ability to riddle

TABULARAPTOR

 This bird is fierce king of the Pyrrhous Plains and unlike other avian, strikes not with beak or claw but its flattened body, which is like a single blade.

A eagle or hawk will descend directly on its quarry , but the Tabularaptor will descend first at distance and come low , slicing through leg. It returns then when exsanguination  has rendered the struck into a stupourous placidity .
Its method thus forewarns by the falling of grass and stalk at a short distance.

Its nests are not made in cliff but hollow tree, rolling itself like scroll to rest such in.

The Nomads here thus fear dead trees yet strangely do not take measures against them. It is said that they owe their freedom from horse raiders to the Tabularaptor, as a single walker can lie prone evading the bird , but a ridden horse has no such recourse and will surely be victim .

The borders of the plains are indeed marked with short towers , constructed with horse skull and bisected femur to serve as grim reminder of the bird's great feast that was the end of every cavalry lead expedition here.


HUSKY GOBBLER


A simple sand sifting beast, that travels in herds among the many dead rivers along the plains.

None of its dead form can resist decay, crumbling to dust in days. Therefore no part of it can be used for construction or craft.

It is said that raising a Husky Gobbler on food that is not the silt on which it customarily consumes will mean it will not have this property .

The theory is that rocks have a "solid essence" giving them their form , and as fire has cold as its opposite, the silt has an "erosive essence" which is stored in the Husky Gobbler's body.

Indeed the nomads will serve the meat as poison to those that abuse their hospitality.
Eaten, such meat will sustain for a day or 2 , but then create 5 times the hunger it abated, causing such horrors as men eating all their clothing and then biting their own fingers off.

While peaceful , harassing the Husky Gobbler will cause it to sneeze a fine dust with such force , that skin will be abraded off muscle and muscle off bone.

VERY BAD PIG
 


It is stupid except when it is cunning, and cowardly except when it is audacious.

It is so appalling that it vomits from its rear and coughs up dung like a cat does hair.

Rank corpses arose its carnal passions and a Very Bad Pig sow will need to anoint itself with the most putrid of decays in order to distract the male from shit-fighting.

It is said that it was made with all that is terrible of the bear , wolve, cur , boar and bigamist.







 Updated to have sources and change the name of purple plains to pyrrhous plains because that was a place holder that I went with and then went , nah yeah that's fine , and then 20 minutes later hated it

art sources:



Hoot Beast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrauchenia
(originally Robert Bruce Horsfall)

Satan
https://store.safariltd.com/collections/sale/products/wild-safari-wildlife-spoonbill-figurines-224829


 Tabularaptor:
it's a Argentavis magnificens and the image is everywhere 


 Husky Gobbler:
stock art of platybelodon herd , originally by Corey Ford

Very Bad Pig
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daeodon
by Jay Matternes

Anomaly

 It is been awhile!

My brain seems to have all its "write rpg material" being sucked limp by trying to finish those planescape notes that I said I was done with but now have an editor for .

the landscape art is being done with collage . Everyone loves collage.

I found this written down while I was cleaning up my room , it's reality problems and rotten incomprehensible technology .
I just wrote down the best ones (10 of about 40) and now are adding some more



1. Dark sickly red fluid , when it contacts rock or bone it makes it bubble, froth and melt. It acts like this for 30 seconds, longer/shorter if the temperature is low/high (respectively)

2.A liquid mirror that staring into it will random swap your skills with some alternate version with you.

3.Contagious glow that slows down fire and explosions to a trickle

4.A crystal that's a big mess of spikes that if it stabs a limb , the limb develops its own personality

5. A leech twisted into an endless writhing know. If place on dead flesh , it will animate and make it repeat its last 5 minutes of life until it completely falls apart

6.Gleaming dust that rigidifies a soft material until its hard as steel. Applied to skin it will just harden the skin which will make it eventually rip off the body as the skin and tissue underneath and around it loses its hold

7. Drifting fog which crystallizes into razor sharp , gravity defying shards sporadically

8. A bouncy orb that doubles in bounce height each time. After d20 bounces it blows up with lethal force

9. A black rock that pulses every 10 second with a deep , bone shuddering,  bass note. Each bass note will trigger an ancestral memory

10. Stack of glass discs, grinding on top of each , make horrible noises. Stuff keeps coming alive around it, spontaneous generation style

11. A stain in the air , like a film strip about to burn. Starting at it for a minute will cause a permanent blind spot in the vision of the starer. They however can reach into this blindspot as if it was a portable hole , with a opening of 30 centimetres.
 Anything living placed in this"hole" will disappear, more or less forever. If something living is not placed in the hole each day, a centimeter hole will appear on the inflicted. If it keeps not being fed , it will continue to grow ,doubling in size each day.
The hole will not cause blood loss or expose the internal flesh to infection , but will limit function as a hole in the body normally would.

12. A black pole, seemingly like coal or slow burned wood, stretched up from its metre base to hair thin over a 100 metres. Nothing can die in its shadow.

13.  A simple brass like hoop, warm to the touch , indestructible and fixed in space.

14. Pulsing mass of needles. If a vertebrate touches them they dive under the skin and proceed to convert them into a invertebrate, chasing and flattening out the bones into plates and sewing the muscles into the necessary ties to move them. It's more than a little painful.

15. A glass ball. Touching either it removes the ability to feel pain for an hour or discharges all the pain that would of been felt by the last toucher into them.

16. A mass of organs turned into something like a circuit board. It removes and stores hunger into salt tubes.

17. A field of white grass, rustling to unknown winds. Each blade of grass ranges from a metre to 3 metres in height. Walking through the field will cause 1d4 duplicates of the walker to appear somewhere in the world. Their personalities will be each different weird exaggerated versions  of aspects of the walkers and each has a 10% chance of wanting to ruin and consume the original. The duplicates all know the exact location of the original at all times.
This effect doens't trigger more than once an hour.

18. A knife with a rainbow blade. The blade is harmless and as solid as an actual rainbow. However anything it "cuts" though will have a mirage appear of them repeating their next minute of actions an hour after they were cut with the blade. The mirage appears 376 centimetres in front of the current location of the swinger of the blade and corresponding to their line of vision.
If the knife's handle is covered with the users blood the mirage will be real for all purposes , for that minute. This will then age the user by 10% of their natural life span.

19. A square of some kind of flexible metal. Its single colour slowly shifts through the visual light spectrum, over the course of a day. Anything wrapped in it will have objects of that colour effectively not exist for it.
Results vary on how much a colour has to match the current colour for it to be effective.  An art programs "fill selected colour " option could be your arbiter here.

20. A small moon that orbits whoever is alive and oldest within 10 metres. It produces moonlight as if an actual moon ("produce" = reflected sunlight if you run that kind of campaign), that does all the things that moonlight usually does to certain magics and magical beings.
Unfortunately anything that happens to this moon, also happens to the actual moon.