Saturday 22 March 2014

Some Locations that might be hard to map

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https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Washingtonia_filifera_grove.jpg
(note people at bottom for scale)

So there are these things called Washingtonia filiera or Washington palms and that is some terrible colonyist name for them but hey.

Anyway they shed their leafs and it all builds up in a big ass skirt thing.

There is (on some? all?) a crawl space between the the trunk and the palm skirt. It's a cool , dark , quiet and dusty and a occasionally throughfare for all kinds of life that lives in the skirt
(tarantulas, rats, wasps, scorpions , some birds I think, my research here was pretty light)

Now the thing about the skirt is that it can slough in big heaps , crushing and suffocating anything caught in its way.

Let's imagine a gianter palm, like a 100 stories , with the barks forming  stairs and platforms , and occupationally rooms and niches in the every present hatches. And a variety of vermin and flattened life cable of moving freely through the hatch.

Or just keep it how it is, with something humanoidish making nests in the skirt, accessible by climbing up the trunk, but with the danger of movement or activity bringing a section down with you or ontop you, pressing you against the trunk but still kept aloft. Maybe the nest is firmly attached to the trunk , so sections of the skirt can be defensively sloughed as an ablative fortress.

Climbing on the outside is extremely risky as there is no handout that might not give away with no notice

(Note as is these skirts are highly flammable. Accept,  adjust or accommodate this as a g.m)



Other places:
 A dungeon in a house. But in the house, a series of interlocking false ceilings, crawlspaces, wall cavities and slender rooms, the house and the secret house interlaced completely, each traversable without realizing the existence of the other.

An easy said than done approach is to start with a isometric building plan and carefully start moving walls and dropping ceilings and blocking off corridors until you have the second house.

The Dead are still here:
The astral and the ethereal planes are generally described as space limitless.
Let's go the other way. The astral plane is contained in anything solid and rectangular . Its astral dimensions vary. Sometimes the same size sometimes 10 fold.
The dead might stay in the walls. A round room is one the dead cannot watch you from. The astral plane only maps to these spaces. Astral forms squeezing through walls and along floors , underground tracing a box around the unalterable curves of a cave. A series of acute angles suggests a curve and these are astral significant as traps and portals.

Ethereal space is maybe a  2 dimensional shadow world painted on surface of everything. Except inside. That's the astral. It hurts to travel from the astral to the ethereal.
EDIT: I just realized how much this owes to "Foundation" from China Mieville's short story collection "Looking for Jake". So shout outing to that right now.

Saturday 15 March 2014

The wonderful world of symbolic armour 4 : MEAT

Print Friendly Version of this pagePrint Get a PDF version of this webpagePDF I'm tired and all kinds of diseased but now I have painkillers and a sleeping dog beside me and I can't be bothered seeing what format I did the other parasite armour posts in so here we go: No wait I did because it was easier somehow. I'm craving marshmellow based candy so bad right now it is worrying.



Meat:
growing meat stick on your meat keep all the pointy objects out.
Hoorah.
 Either reanimate with  necromancy and lax corpse disposal protocol or growned in vats or degenerate peoples that are so degenerate you can wear them as a helmet
 Advantages:

 You can eat it

Improved strength

Relatively easy to adapt to your system



Possible enhancements:
I Think I hate this format I'm just going to skip to the fun bits

Disadvantages:


Who can hook a girl up?

Necromancers or golem crafters that deal a specially with flesh. Cults. Always the cults. These ones worship a perfect cube of meat. Womb witches take carefully regulated doses of terragens in order to give birth to graftable components.
A people that are always born with a conjoined twin that they separate themselves from in a coming of age knife dual and then keep the bits of the twin around for trade/spare parts.
Dr Moreau types.



Specific Strains:

Saint homunculus:
 It's a little version of you inside you that suffers instead of you.
Any spells or maledictions  effect just the homunculus not you. Which might kill it as it has no special powers of regeneration or resistance. Despite its "saint" title , it fucking hates you , but lacks the strength to claw its way out, but if someone knows it is there , they can target it with beneficial magics , maybe empowering it to eat your heart. So .. watch out for that.

StingerCysts:
Cysts storing poisons, potions or acids , to be released from blunt trauma

 Viscerous Cloth:
like a fat suit but more of a hollowed out ogre you can climb inside and wear as an exoskeleton, but kinda the exact opposite of exoskeleton but not really I guess??

Black Milk:
Your milk production glands are replaced with something that duplicates a spell like charm person or web or melfs acid arrow. But via milk.
Let's presume there were no metaphors in Shakespeare just literals.


Matryoshka Kernel:
Is this even armour anymore, it's just turning into a list of body horror you can shop for. Anyway every time you come to a major decision point in your life, the type that forever shapes you in a different direction, 
 you grow a smaller you just under your skin. If you die, your outer layer peels away and a you that would of made the other decision steps out all naked and glistening and with actual memorys up until that point, and then hazy not real memorarys beyond that , as if they had been living out that alter life path you did not take.






Monday 3 March 2014

Unkind things

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1. Rooms filled with a single fish
2. Castle vital organs
3. adulthood here is obtained when 3 children climb onto each others shoulders and never come down again
4.the sword is a sensory organ. The more it tastes only you the greater the chance that it will emerge to eat you
5.the cauldron contains the boiled down fat of an entire city. It will be used to make a single candle
6.The speak with dead spell has unlimited duration and effect. You may ask nothing of them, only listen.
7.Every house has toad that they do not speak of but worship painstakingly
8.The dogs are very big and very smart for dogs. They are smart enough to enforce the laws but not well. Not well at all.
9.The wars of ancestors have left rivers of blood. This has frozen in a glacier which makes its way home slowly even now.
10.Take turns being the cow
11.This land is insects.
12.The disease breaks you like crystal but rarely kills.
13.The city walks on small soft legs
14.Dimensional parasites tunnel out space and brains from the inside of tall hats. There are books about it.
15.Souls are water.
16.You mint  your own coins with your own pain. Suffering is the only guarantor , really, when it all comes down to it.
17. Gods are dirty unkillable old men who make the weather work and harvests ripen.
18. There is no limit to hunger. You will not die. You will be just more hunger
19.Kings.
20.The most fertile land is that around flood prone river and muttering volcano