Velvet Hooks: Brainstormer & Capitualtors

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Another post with highlighting or creating hooks to use monsters for Fire On The Velvet Horizon.

This post features..

BRAIN-STORMERS

Maniacs who supercharged their brain with the energies and crackling knowledges of the sky itself!!!

1. A proto-brainstormer would make a great patron for adventures, requiring (and paying v.well for) a worlds-span worth of ingredients, monster parts and materials. This all resulting in a superpowered skycastled supervillain makes for a delightful twist if the players don't learn what the results of the would be dictator of the heavens plans are. (pretty much in the text)

2. The final results of research being the Golden Elixir "Anemoi". This being the substance directly injected into the Brainstormer-to-be's brain. If found or stolen in other circumstances, it makes for a certain amount of dilemma. It's worth a great deal , but selling it means it will likely result in the creation of a Brainstormer. (pretty much in the text)

3.What gives the Brainstormer their power and mental unhinging is the supernatural awareness of inner and outer workings of the heavens themselves. While they tend to not do much with that knowledge other than exert their ego, if something about the sky is needed to known (say the climate is heading towards an iceage, a hole into outer space has been created, an upcoming superstorm is approaching or even an exact weather report for a year benefiting a naval invasion) they would be the ones to know it.

4.The Cloud Palace that a Brainstormer builds is an obvious dungeon, either with one in it, or one post -Brainstormer. The post -Brainstormer palace could be run with a timer, as parts of it break up and disperse, or the whole thing could of have drifted into an area of unnatural stillness of air.

This would prevent it from falling apart and allow new occupants to have moved in and claimed it for themselves, adding another aspect to it.

(pretty much in the text)

5.One such Cloud-palace could of developed a mini-society from the former servants and kidnap victims of the Brainstormer. Maybe the kidnapped victims have no wish to return home and are praised as the Queen , now the King has fallen, by the servants. An adventuring party could be enlisted to find a stolen princess and instead find her now enthroned .

6.While a high level threat , a low level party could still deal with a Brainstormer if enlisted or able to do sufficient research about the Brainstormers former identity and thus predict and impersonate a potential kidnap victim , allowing for a great advantage in an assassination attempt.

CAPITUALTORS

Morose bisected jawed fatalists , a mercenary people that can hide inside the realm created by your eye

1. As a hex encounter, their hives "look like grey smoke piled in drifts" are found in woods. Unpredictable but not necessary dangerous unless provoked, i.e the party disturbs the hive and takes away some of the stolen art. Even if they don't mess with anything, a couple pc's might wind up having Capitulator hop inside their field of view just for something to do . (pretty much in the text)

2.The obvious use of them being hired to spy on the players, is most interesting if the players know nothing about them , and with only one character has one in their eye, they might assume the creature is invisible to the rest of the party. Assume the Capitualtor has to be present in the field of vision of the affected character to listen in , and give that character a chance to notice them.

If the party learns about the Capitualtor without the Capitualtor knowing this , this also gives them a chance to feed false information to their hirer.

The Capitualtor will need to leave the eye in order to relay this information. (pretty much in the text)

3. Their love of gambling could bring them out especially if the stakes or methods of betting are particular unusual . Even one in the employ of someone else might tempted to switch if an interesting enough bet is made. Stolen artworks could be wagered back from them

4. . What makes bets the most interesting to them are ones placed on a uninvolved individual who has a variety of forces acting upon them, especially ones where a group identity is conflict with an individual identity

5.They serve as particular difficult culprit for a "closed room" detective puzzle. So one has be inside the victims vision until they are alone, then sprung out to kill them, and hidden themselves in the eye of first person to find the body. They might still be there, pretending to be uninterested in seeing the case unfold, but really being involved. Infact if they become too interested they will lose their sense of "non-self"and fall out of their non-state of being inside someone's vision.

6. Their hatred (near hatred) for movements that are  "unembodied, unquestioning, passionate and zealous" could see them involved in a clash between art schools and victims they claim, raising the stakes to near civil war (let's assume a society where art schools are interchangable with political parties).

SPICE

Print PDF A quick post but it's a table so it's content

(might of even done this one before)

A TABLE OF SPICE to apply to acceptable but bland adventure content

1.Half the monsters will always fight the other half , due to warring parasite worm super-colonies . One results in blue luminous worms in the eyes , the other red luminous worms in the eyes. The psychic commanding queen worms of each side are found entirely filling the body of the least likely monsters. When a monster is slain the worms will leave the body a couple of minutes later and can take over any sleeping host

2. All friendly(ish) npcs are actually escaped dreams of a ever sleeping monster

3.Everything comes back to life worse

4.Herbivores are now predators and vice versa 

5.Any rocks or stone materials within a size window of a loaf of bread to big enough to built a house on have been chained down to the bedrock or they will fall upwards. Weird gnomic people climb out of shadows every pre-dawn to check on all their work, add more chains where necessary , and sometimes singing down lost rocks.

6. All monsters , despite initial appearances , are some kind of mollusk, their bonelessness only making their movements disturbing not less able. They each have a tiny shell hidden somewhere where they keep their soul.

7.Everything is on or in an iceberg

8. Two versions of everything exist. The shit-head version at nighttime and the happyland version from til dusk.

9.All monsters are made of sewn together hairless cats, dogs and rats. The hair is elsewhere

10.All monsters are made of a single human body, distorted and enlarged as necessary

Obscure History Unto Adventure

Print PDF So:

From 1950 to 1970 Charley Douglass has a monopoly on the laugh track. With a custom built machine know as the "laff box" , which was was only seen and used by the Douglass family (and locked up when not in use) it was thought vital to the success of nearly every prime time comedy. Not relying on a mere single sample , instead a carefully curated collection of 320 laughs , each named and chosen by Douglass, who would rotate , retire , update and replace laughs as time went on , and used to carefully weave a custom audience response as required for the scene.

The wiki is worth a read, and my paraphrasing is probably misrepresentative

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laugh_trackhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laugh_track

Now I give you some ways to use it as modern horrorish adventures:

Charlys use of someones laughter causes them to suddenly spiral into depression, resulting in gruesome suicides. 

His Laff-box is actually too effective and is making the entire population placid and easily manipulated by media. U.S.A goverment hasn't realized this but Russian, East Berlin and Chile all have and are attempting to steal it without drawing attention to  its value. They are all independently trying to get it and are actively interfering with each other.

The Laff-box is actually counteracting a deep psychic poisoning by a supernatural force  (awakening elder god, cult, psychic wing of USSR etc) . Charly regrets actions he's taking in order to do his work (combine with any other idea)

Multiple cases of "laughing disease" where someone is found unable to respond to anything other than with laughter and little awareness of who or where they are.  Cases all show signs of having had some form of brain surgery but that's suppressed by interested sinister government forces. Turns out Charly has been kidnapping vagrants and operating on them to trigger "perfect" laughs to record. He needs to use fresh laughs on occasion and the increase demand for his services have meant he's needing to get more subjects and get his family involved and mistakes are getting made, resulting a number of escapes

When someone whose laugh was recorded dies their ghost is unable to advance to afterlife , resulting in sets using the laff box getting dangerously haunted

Recorded laughs are funnier when the subject recorded is dead. Charly son has fallen out with father , set up a rival laugh track company and has engineered a number of fatal accidents of live studio audiences to get his recorded laughs more effective. But he needs more!!!

A Timeline is A Dungeonmap part 2

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Instead of Frankensteins A Very Large Toddler:

Farm animals found maimed but (currently) uneaten->
by a  toddler , a very large toddler. ( option :normal size eyes )
-> a group of bandits finds and befriends toddler
-> They get the toddler to break down the walls of a fortified monastery
->  they slaughter most of the occupants and set up camp
->survivors make it to other populated areas and tell about this
-> a sinister warlock/surgeon hears of this from a survivor and goes to try and buy the toddler off the bandits
-> also a small regiment is sent out to put down these bandits
 /> if the sinister warlock/surgeon gets there well ahead of the regiment , the toddler is purchased and is gone before the regiment arrive and most likely defeat the bandits, but at loss as the bandits are all supercharged on  gorilla adrenaline glands
/>if the sinister warlock/surgeon gets there just before the regiment , then they will join forces will the bandits , defeat  the regiment, and in subsequent months make the child completely under their control and also continue to grow in size and the warlock+bandits will start kidnapping more kids to experiment on with the aim of having more slave-brutes
/>if the sinister warlock/surgeon gets there after the regiment, then the toddler will dead and he'll make do with raising the toddler as a undead servant.

option

palacing

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WHAT IS A PALACE?*


It's a fancy castle . Castles are for defense. Palaces are for going NO ONE CAN EVEN TRY TO ATTACK ME extra pointless thin towers.

So a palace is an excuse to make some ludicrous architecture with making it plausible to defend or even live comfortably in.

It's also an excuse to make a series of interconnected rooms with some unusual way of getting from one to the other, either through standard or nonstandard use of the architecture.

Okay maybe that's not a Definitive thing about Palaces but if you can imagine a palace without tall spindly towers and dainty bridges , I dunno man.

Tall spindly towers suggests being able to grappling hook between them , and dainty bridges suggests rooms broken up with open air.

Palaces also suggest extravagance, madness, waste and wealth and those are all hot-shit adventure location fuel.
"location fuel" let's ignore that


It , is of course easier to run a Palace if things are being dysfunctional , so a Gormenghast or a Miss Havisham Palace or the classic ruined and rehabited palace or it's space haunted , or it was never meant to be lived in just a vast display of wealth and then it gone and get monsters all in (like the real life Taj Mahal ).

By "easier to run" I mean as "adventure" adventure. Interacting with a palace with numerous, co-ordinated, and organised inhabitants is going to be a be a diplomatic, heist, running battle, or siege adventure. Or mostly likely an adventure that moves along that list as a farcical progression.

*the actual definition is not relevant to us right now GOOD FELLOW

Here are some palaces that have unusual traversal options , "adventure" adventure and have the architecture noteworthy somehow.


1. The Sky Gazing Palace of Marque Toad-Toad-Toad:

A palace built in an of hubris after the swamps had been drained and course of the river changed. It was not to last.  The palace sunk  but due to its rare construction it did not break apart; it tipped back  but remained intact, its facade now tiled towards the sky. The back half of the palace is underwater, the front half free of water but not of roots and trees.
  The current self declared  ruler is the Marque Toad-Toad-Toad, a giant toad dressed in the mud stained rags he's found here. He has another toad growing from his head. This toad also has a toad growing from his head. All are festooned and crowned. He is often out touring with his court  (a weird mix of swamp dwellers, lunatics, and the truly desperate)
His court is split between his pope (toad pope) , his general (toad general), his archivist (toad archivist) , and his fool (frog).  They are extremely willing to work against each other.
Other things hanging out here included duncan the alligator , a witch travelling backwards in time, a band of catfish musicians who make instruments out of human bones, and some goblins pretending to be a ghost king.

2. The Squirming Palace of the Cliff Bound Urchin King
This is giant sea urchin attached to side of a cliff. It's organs and muscles have been pushed out of the way a little to make room for rooms and passages. This was done by glass walls so on the other side of the glass you can see all the squirming.  The ruler here is a Louse . A wizard Louse. A really messed up teleport spell sent some of wizards intellect into a louse. This louse is basically a coherent wizard some of the time and the rest of the time it just sucks blood out of the walls. The most coherent thing it does is patrol the palace and demand proof of guests that they truly have been working against its enemies (the ocean and the land, must be working against both at once). The Urchin King is backed up by shellfish golems. Failure to satisfy the Louse will mean it will try and capture you and put you in cages to be lowered out over the ocean to die of exposure.

Other denizens included a foul humoured sadistic group of skua bandits, a shadow stealing octopus, anemone men (from Fire On the Velvet Horizon) , sinister elven fleshmancers, and an unemployed and child-eating dwarven circus.

3.Too Many Kings Palace

The Mouse Queen died and the will wasn't found and now all her 56 children claim ownership of the palace.  Magics by the Mouse Queen mean the children can't directly act against each other so they instead turn to make each of their sections bigger. These mice are a foot tall each but like making biiig rooms, but by their standards. So they are cramped rooms but with to scale decorations.

The mouse Queen is still here as a mummy. There's a haunted (regular sized book) , library that has the pages fold themselves up in the form of what they describe and attack people , there's ants dressed and acting like England at the height of its take over the world period.

4.Red and Boreal Palace To The Whales Grief

A big dead frozen whale being carved into a ritual palace by snow elves. Snow elves actually make themselves by carving themselves out of frozen megawhale corpse. They ritually move from the tail to the head, and don't care what happens to the rooms they leave behind themselves (each elf needs an entire room carved out to make them)

Cautiously occupying the other spaces are Mercenary Polar Bears who are starting to get on abit and are thinking about their retirement, A disgraced and scheming shaman, Ghost krill making a song craft to travel to the aurora borealis, maddened yeti (allergic to whale flesh, they keep gorging and vomiting) , drill worms, and  murderous crab philosophers (not all of them, just most of them).

5.The Scavenged and Street scattered Palace of the Gutter Knight
This is a series of interconnect houses, street bridges, barricaded off alleys , teetering trash towers , and sewer repurposement. Collectively it forms a palace. Hovel Knights and Roof Lords ritually duel over ownership as the city moves through the palace somewhat awkwardly.

Also unusually Large alley cats, Gutter dryads , Kid's Chalk Drawings of Gargoyles that work more or less like real ones, The Library of Mistakes, Brain Replacing Pigeons , an identity market , A treasure of useless trash (yet each item will insanely invaluable to one person somewhere), the embassy of the under-owls, sewer sharks and the fishers of men.

6. Earth Exiled Palace, The Horse Rotovator , Grave Thief
It's a giant skeletal horse machine that travels underground stealing graves and forgotten cities.

It's sinister purpose is to erase evidence of tragedies, massacres, disasters of terrible scale , so future people are more likely to repeat them.

It's run and loosely maintained by oily looking human-sized centipedes with baby hands and faces of tedious bureaucrats. Their eyes are dull  quartz stones which nevertheless will work unnaturally well as bribes in bureaucratic matters.

FEATURIng:
broken but possibly fixable apocalypse engines , all kinds of confused guardian undead, historic evidence , mad spirits, bound Ozymandians (Fire on the Velvet Horizon again) ,  a small gentlemens club of experimental avantguard necromancers (lively but amoral) , bored ghosts, clay men trying to come up with the perfect society (and breaking into fist fights about it) , rusting semi-living warmachines.

*let's not bother with the actual definition