Not understanding the question : Animal Mineral Vegetable

Print PDF So this is a thing:
http://rayleklai-world.blogspot.co.nz/2011/06/story-of-leklai.html

Key quote:
"... one is assured that Lek Laï is not a simple mineral but a kind of metal-animal , capable of "swimming across mountains"

Which other than being worth sharing because it's amazing, is interesting because it's easy to take for granted the thinking of animals, minerals and vegetables as obvious and distinct categories.

The idea of spontaneous generation is possibly the first thing you might think of ; the idea that animal life 

(specifically verminous and unwanted life; I guess this was the only kind no-one bothered to check that hard. If someone was "hey silkworms come from water evaporated in moonlight" some entrepreneur would of got onto that )

could spring from inanimate; maggots hatched from meat, mice from old grain, snakes from dresses trellises left in rain barrels. 

Other examples from this mindset were the mandrake( it's a plant but a screaming plant) or bears licking their cubs into being from salt, the "vegetable sheep" explanation for cotton.

Numerous plants marked a mythological event  ; the first cultivated daffodil "Narcissus poeticus" , Judas ear fungus springing from the tree Judas hung himself on*

And then there was all shenanigans with whatever the fuck alchemists were on about.

Now before we get talking about animism : how do we know what was actually believed , what was metaphor or some kinda of catchy story to remember what a plant looked like or where it grew or just something to tell the kids to shut them up for minute? 

Who the fuck knows and it's possible it was varying degrees of all this at  various times or more accurately it would be some semi-fluid hybrid of bullshit, pragmatism , belief and faith which cannot be easily translated to any modern mental frame of reference.

So that plants don't have feelings, animals are distinct entities from the landscape  , and just what was going with kings love life is completely irrelevant to soil quality : these are not self evident facts at various points of time and culture.

So this is where I go : make up weird shit for how the world works for your campaign for fun.

Well yes But. 

So Ars Magica was set in "mythical europe" , the idea being, somewhat in passing, that all that weird medieval shit was true. 

Which was a somewhat terrible idea as if all the ideas we actually treated as true it wouldn't actually feel medieval. 

As in if dress trellises always turned into snakes could a siege hold out by turning spare clothing into protein? (okay maybe medieval people believed snakes were poison so it wouldn't work)

The point being in would kinda turn into a baron munchausen setting . Which is fine but it's just interesting result. 

Though arguable you could make up more medieval bullshit  to stop people treating the bullshit seriously or start claiming that being rational about things just makes them not work (because of the Realm of Reason , a thing in Ars Magica which was awkward and dumb)

I'm getting away from myself.

Um.

Animism. And those "tribal stories" where a mountain is also a daughter who ran away but also a mountain. 

Animism can't be easily understood as "invisible things in stuff"  , it's a complete rethinking or irrelevance of those categories of animate / inanimate, animal and mineral , agency and co-incidence.**

Tribal stories: are they a story or belief or a metaphor? My understanding of my own un-understanding is , that, basically no.

Trying to frame them or understanding them in such terms seems like trying to understand an ocean  by writing about what the splashing noises sound like.

Fuck this is what keeps throwing me off writing posts , this was gonna be a list of weird shit  and it's spiralling out of control in multiple directions and taking up hours.

I'm will try and wrap up somewhere useful:

Defining "animals" as things that are animals in this world and "monsters" as everything else is pretty terrible.

Everything should have a reason to exist that makes sense for the world and hopefully little sense in ours. I'm sure Arnold wrote something about this but now I can't find it so read this one as an example:

http://goblinpunch.blogspot.co.nz/2016/01/ogres-and-their-hungry-kin.html

Magic as technology or magic as technology in a pulp comic have been done a lot.

Magic as technology is pretty familar, but so is the other one, it's just not explictly labelled as such.

Basic this form : there is magic, it's all over the show, it doesn't make sense , but it doesn't intergrate with anything and only monsters and wizards and their various aracana have it.

(Which in one form is the "magic is chaos" variant , where magic is always spooky and rare and corrupting and outside civilisation which is just kings and digging holes but some how magic is still worse than that. Which is generally considered more interesting than guards with +1 swords but I still think it's played out as shit and is more echos of christian metaphysically framing which is even more played out as shit. Even if has great production values like lamenations.)

AS opposed to "folk magic" , where everyone is kinda doing spells or bargaining with spirits and shit and there is an absolute intregation between magic and how the world works. There might be a lot of risk vs reward type deals and death spells and  curses .

Like a guy that you buy magic items off sounds like bullshit but that's literally what happens 

here 

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/akodessewa-fetish-market

and it's great and there is couple of books I wish I had on me to reference right now about "outside priests/magicians" and "inside priests/magicians" and the activation of objects to deflect curse but I don't so it's a dumb content farm link.

but also average people have been doing magic forever 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_tablet

and voodoo dolls was people mistaking vodoun stuff for how white people used to curse each other and then promptly forgetting they used to curse each other

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppet

So I'm saying you can world where the barbarians have magical armour because they snuck around and dug up all your graves and made shirts out of your mourneds hair and that's even better than the shit where there is no magical swords except for one and it's super weird and you have to roll on a mutation table every time you use it and there is kings and hole digging.

and possibly you could reskin something that everyone**** complains about doesn't feel cool because everyone has magic powers (like 13th age or 4th edition or Feng Shui wait no-one complains about Feng Shui. Well okay they don't complain about that) not just the wizard and the priest.

Also the priest is as boring as possible so he's not mistaken for the wizard and mutation tables and what the fuck am I doing I'm literally collating very different systems philosophies into one straw man here I need to stop adding more to this bit and finish the table at the bottom which is what I intended to write 5 hours ago 

and you should read everything here if you haven't already 

http://straitsofanian.blogspot.co.nz/

and I just started to scratching the surface of this oh gawd I just wanted to make up this thing

like that thing I talked about at the start.

1. Mountain Bear : It's a type of rock but it's also a punishment for taking too much prey and not leaving offerings when staying in caves.

Like it's any rock that looks like a bear that someone found , and everyone lets their kids play with them. But it's also death scary to find one in a cave if you don't have anything to offer them because then a large bear of earth with a rock skull that breathes with stolen breath will kill you before that night is over. Unless you go out and kill and over the first thing you see. If you make that promise , go off and see something and don't kill it then the Mountain Bear will kill both of you.

It's also a rock that is good for sharpening hunting spears and knives (reroll the first attack roll with that weapon in a hunt and take the best), but if used for war you then have to go to Mountain Bear (it's a place too, but not a literally place, except it kinda is) and make a successful case to Mountain Bear (it's a god too) why it was a legal war or your entire village disappears. 

2. Traitors river: This is water that will poison peoples minds against those that trust them. You can find it by drowning someone and using them as a boat in a moonless night in most small bodies of water.  After that the easy bit is getting someone to drink it , it's exactly like water and so can be easily slipped into their drink or food. The next bit is a bit tricky; whatever you were hoping to happen will genuinely work but create such a shitstorm it will fuck your shit up as well. 

So in order to not have that happen you have got to work out what the water wants to do and then betray it before it betrays you.  

A good rule of thumb for how this works is if when you, as your character, declare you are using it and the d.m can't work out why the fuck you would do that or at the very least , why you would do that right now, why then the Traitor's river is properly just as shocked.

3. There is this tree and this whale and they swap places sometimes and tell each stuff and pissing off one means the other is going to be really pissed off and everyone in the respective environment listens to the tree / whale so it's going to be a bad time. The locals use the same name for both the whale and the tree but are real vague if they are talking about every one of this tree and every one of these whales or there is just one tree and one whale or even if they recognise there is difference .

4. Cats are literally shithead shadows from hell and the only good thing about them is they eat mice and mice are terrible gossips as well as shitheads from hells so if a cat knows something you know only that cat and whoever in hell bought the secret knows it. Mice learn something, everyone in hell and everyone who talks to hell  will know it.

Nobody kills cats that often because all the mice that haven't been digested will escape. 

Also all shadows are a kind of dead cat and cats age in reverse so there's bound to be another one soon anyway.

Oh and when they digest mice they cough them up as moths which are idiots and fly to moon and tell them all the stories they have misremembered and/or made up. Then the moon tries to verify all this bullshit with you at night and that's what dreams are.

So obviously if you can keep away from mice, cats and mothies you will stop dreaming and then no-one can see or remember you except in song.*****

No , none of those entries were "rumours" , I am saying they should be literally true if you use them in campaign. 

*yeah for purposes of ye olde time fungus is a plant. Also the tree is supposedly a elder tree, so good luck finding a decent strong branch there Judas"

** I mean someone's prob going to learn me here , I mean all you bastards seem to have all these degrees and such. But I will learn something

*** Speaking of grossly ill formed but talking about stuff anyway let's just stop here

**** by "everybody" I'm just flailing at some fucking straw windmills here like Don Quixote on a rpg forum this is worst mixed metaphor.

I was watching Vikings and man if you are going to play that loose with your historic "France" just give everyone onions  and striped shirts and berets and have the fucking eiffel tower right there it would distract me from how terrible that siege plan was like holy shit guys they have crossbows inside the castle we didn't expect them to shoot us with crossbows when we got inside though they only worked when they used them against people outside the castle. 

No, I'm not being facetious I would be able to take it seriously if all the French people had berets but don't take it seriously when they have a stupid plan and keep forgetting about shield walls. You don't understand my complicated relationship with the ridiculous yet. 

***** Rats are noble and wise because they have kings which is the dumbest thing about this whole thing. No-one has worked out what happens when cats eat rats or rats eat mice. When rats eat cats however it's a matter of political delicacy and people don't talk about it.

it's all natural and it's all bad

Print PDF This spaceship/ palace/ screaming void prison is
a big naked dude

William Blake "Nebuchadnezzar "

all tied up in a tortured cube with fetid iron cable that decay has made more like a microscoped viewed hair than anything wrought

The rooms here are cut into him and held open . The flesh grows back and is removed , fake lives written on it and then burned to power the engine , a black thing like beetles grown into buildings by virii. Sits on his back , dead light denying matt iron burned somehow to charcoal.

It's the last god of a dead world , betrayed by his head priest and preserver into eternal service for his followers. The Archive Pope , mummified in lacquered paper  sits in the skull,  debating the thought forms of his god, trying make him agree . The rot fearing undying  extend out in the lungs with the archives of a entire world to manage

The Rot is a black sea where the bowels were and is a council of mammoth fungal mother knight islands , like feudal lord and aircraft carrier, dueling and campaigning further up in blight crusade .

All sorts have build up warring camps of star refuge on the skin and back.  Some of them have made inroads inside , where they content with the endless flesh chimeras of the Centipedesses who seek delight in the flowering form of predator and prey and the ratcheting creation of evolution .

The Archive seeks to preservation, The Rot to have their children in every home , the Centipedesses a vast tapestry of arms races.

Elves

Print PDF

like you can make them human but with pointy ears
and that's fine if you just want to draw people different
fine to me
that's the only one here
I haven't found you and cannot possibly be talking about you

So if that's all you do
draw them real weird though or just real cool, so make it the cool people have different stats than you

from here

ELVES ; THE  GOOD PEOPLE
Or make them more like people , like the heroic people of bigot folk dreams ,
but live like animals . Like man-shape pokemon.  Walk right out of bush they were shitting in , all glistening and ethereal.
How does that outfit even work?
It doesn't  that's just what their skin looks like.
All kinds of stories and songs about things that you can't go and see.  Oh but you can't , it's just  not there anymore. But it was. And it was perfect and good. We are the good people. Language , poems , art, creation myths, lineage, heroes and gods.
but it's just Batesian mimicry . On a scale about the same size as you. Looks you right in the eye.
that face flawless over a mind of animal noise

Sure you can play one

 

Ildiko Muresan , from here

MOTH ELVES
they don't have big city , or even a village. Just quietly sleep in hollow trees and come out to drink moonlight. Everything they need is in their dreams. Some can't sleep and they just have keep walking  until they do.

SPINIFEX ELVES


these don't have no cities either. Dry up and curl along , light as anything. Sometimes landing near where there is enough talk and noise to fill up enough to walk on in and be something like you.

YOUR LETTERS TO DISPLACER KLAUS

Print PDF Dear Displacer Klaus what are somethings that can replace the 4 classes to support distinct synergic playstyles?

HO H O HO HO "SYNERGY" IS ONe OF MY FAVOURITE WORDS

1. Horse, rat, snake, 6 year old human
2. I-phone, clockwork mouse, clawhammer, silly putty
3. Police Station, Cartoon Animal, Captain Hook, Vague Supernatural Phenomena   
4. Time Elemental, Homunculus, Ooze Disguised in Human Clothes, Elderly Fairtale Bear
5.  Captain Picard, Socrates, A computer powered by Snakes, Rasputin 
6. Arson, Shoplifting, Fraud, Regicide 
7. Sherlock Holmes as played by Jeremy Brett, Sherlock Holmes as played by Robert Downey Jnr, Sherlock Holmes as played by Paranoid schizophrenic who is right about everything except being Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes as manga 

scrap notes, system for equipment , skills and background

Print PDF Brendan  (http://www.necropraxis.com/) was asking about one roll equipment systems and asked if I should bother typing up one of mine and he was like yeah do that and I was like yeah cool and man if you don't like run on sentances you must be hating this blog

ANYWAY:

Been trying to jam as much of the character creation system together as I can and also keep it "new school" in the sense you get have a special snowflake but not in the way that requires 2 hours of creation.

This was my way of putting skills, starting equipment, and background together:

PAST:
Your past determines what stuff you have and any usefully capabilities you may have picked up.
When you are playing the game and you try something that requires an ability check and you think that your past might be relevant tell the g.m. If they are convinced you will get an Advantage to the roll. Make a note of this, because you will get Advantage any other time a situation similar to this happens. Then make a Intelligence check. If you succeed you can keep bringing up your Past in future. If you fail, that's it. That is all your character managed to get the hang off.

You may choose or roll a past from below. The weapon and armour description is mainly for how you picture your character, ignore it if it is not interesting. If you to have a Past not on here either talk to the g.m before hand and arrange something or just write it down and pick 4 items from any pasts equipment. HOWEVER you will have 5 seconds to do so. If pick something that is not actually there that counts as a wasted choice. You will need someone else to count out loud at you.

1. SCAVENGER:
Starts with:
Sacks, long hooked pole, protective mask, shovel
your weapons and armour is:
"scrouged and repaired"

2.HUNTER
Starts with:
dried meats, snares, calls, scent
your weapons and armour is:
"self made and simple"

3.REFUGEE:
Starts with:
esoteric cultural item, concealed jewellery,compass,trade item
your weapons and armour is:
"distinctive and unfamilar"

4.PEASANT:
Starts with:
domesticated animal, basic trade good, lard, homebrew
your weapons and armour is:
"repurposed tools"

5. PETTY CRIMINAL
Starts with:
bad drugs, stolen valuable, blinding dust, caltrops
your weapons and armour is:
"stolen and/or easily concealable"

6.DILETTANTE:
Starts with:
jewellery, weird drugs, reading material, clockwork toy
your weapons and armour is:
"gaudy and distinctive"

7:EXPLORER
Starts with:
lantern, maps, crowbar, chalk
your weapons and armour is:
"ancient and rare"

8:MYSTIC
Starts with:
divination tools, spirit cleansing incense, fireworks, blankets
your weapons and armour is:
"anointed and festooned"


Design notes:
There is only 8 because I'm having a lot of new people play soon and too many choices actually slows people down apparently. I love them myself but hey. The pasts are biased to ones that kinda lead to a life of being a wandering danger junkie as opposed to a general cross section of life.
If someone wants to be a broke blacksmith or a disgraced scholar that's fine though.
Need to rethink some of equipment .

No one has a tent or some other stuff but plenty of the Pasts have jewellery or trade goods and I figure trying to trade flour for a tent or trying to find a fence is a good way of meeting people and starting stuff.
Otherwise desperately ill equipped is fine too.

Still haven't worked out how I want to do weapons and armour and I might leave off the descriptors in the final version, as they might confuse beginners.

The schrodinger's skill system owes a debt to Zzarchov's excellent Neoclassical Geek Revival

Terrain:UNDER LANDS

Print PDF Here are some new terrains to sprinkle around your maps or elaborate fisher-king fantasy life

BRAMBLE HELL:

Like a tangle of blackberry but with canes girthing in metres. The underlayer is passable , the ancient bottom canes arching at about 2-4 metres above you.
It's very dark , dusty ,  with a few patient lichens,  eldritch fungus and ghostly ferns. Moving vertically is an engineering project, with metres of wood, sword length thorns (technically prickles)  , and eye searing sap.  The middle layer has a bit more light,  weird dirt pockets with bizarre microbiomes , and bird nests. The top layer is a violent sea of green and crimson waving thorn cane. And birds. And insects. Violently territorial birds and insects.

 RESOURCES:
unique fungus, herbs. Emperor bramble sap. Bird eggs of some obnoxious fairy tale quest variety.

HAZARDS:
Occasional cane collapses (see Rocs below), thorns, sap,  cordyceps fungus.

BEASTS : Weasel like elegated pangolins of a variety of sizes; The smallest slinking around the tops eating birds the biggest slinking around the bottom and eating you. Rocs like to make their nests in the middle layer , sometimes causing collapses.  Dali Stilt mini elephants that migrate vertically as they grow. Spiders. Mites. Ticks. Beetles etc. Spiders that make themselves bird costumes to get birds to try and fight them. Giant red-eyed vorpal Kiwis.

OTHERS: Dueling ant knights sculpting the throne bases like ant castles , beetle grumble men, dancing fungus, millennium seeds , thorn entombed castles (maybe the cause of cargocult ant people behaviour) ,


FROZEN SKY TIDE LAND:

Underneath frozen sea ice somewhere where the tide goes out for half a year at a time.
The drowned can fake their lives better when it's out and will trade for props for their sad mummery. Most things hunker down or wander out with the tide. The crustaceans mainly rule but it's the perfect place for spirit world diplomacy

RESOURCES:
wrecks, shellfish (pearls), anything that otherwise would require going underwater to get. Corals.

HAZARDS: collapsing roofs, lurking anemones like an anus rock for your foot to enter. Ghosts. Spirits of cambain dead. Dream eating coral.

BEASTS: crustaceans (fortified tank like lobsters, long legged hair stealing crabs , eerily bone scrying isopods ) scythed beaked penguins sliding on their bellies to murder you , spirit court fox courtier. Polar bear mercenaries seeking work in the spirit worlds.

OTHERS: A shipwreck trapped in the ice above  accessed from the gash in its belly. Isopod fortune teller. The drowned that are forbidden the afterlifes of sea or land and make fake ones.

Telling People About the Untellable

Print PDF Arnold wrote about the unspeakable here http://goblinpunch.blogspot.co.nz/2015/10/outsiders-memes-prions-and-dreadful.html
and it reminded me to post about an idea I gave Patrick when he was writing some monsters for James Raggi that he didn't use. (Patrick didn't use the idea, Raggi is going to use the Monsters I'm pretty sure)

Okay so children's games are weird on how long their history can be , and how unclear it is how much they are being passed on and how often they are being independently discovered and how surpsing it is to discover someone from a different country uses the exact same name for bullrush or tag or go home stay home or even when they have the game but with a completely different name

from here 

and while I'm linking to stuff here is Shut Up and Sit Down articule about children's games involving pain.
Someone mentions whip crack in the comment, a game believed to be invented by the comment's author childhood peers and someone else links a Winslow Homer Painting depicting the same game

(Shut Up and Sit Down has some great stuff but possibly have bought the troll line about Zak being the devil? Not sure if they have done subsequent research . Also can't seem to tell the difference between "monolithic representation of women as sexy sex people is bad" and "women as sexy sex people is bad" )

Anyway my point is kids games, folklore and songs can continue for very long time without anyone really thinking about them or writing them down ,  or knowing what the hell they are about when they hear them (until someone is like Oh Ring a Ring Rosey is about the Plague or Humpty Dumpty is about a Cannon or a king or something with various levels of evidence and plausibility)

So if you wanted to warn future generations about a extra-real threat and part of this threat was thinking too hard about it or creating information about allowed it more access to the world or some other side effect , having it be in kid's lore is perfect.

It gets passed on without being written down, when kids stop being kids they forget about it, and when they are kids their understanding of fantasy and reality is different to that of adult which might be a safer way to engage with the information.

However:
>it would have to be vague enough to not trigger the effect

>it would still have to recognisable as giving relevant advice if the entity ever shows up

>Some dickhead academic if they started seriously studying it would put themselves  and anyone
reading their notes and then anyone who has read the notes who hears the rhyme at risk

>it would have to be "catchy" to kids. Who knows what kids are going to like? Vital information might have to left out or mutate out by itself

>it could exist as a game, song, folklore, or a combination of all 3 , for example trying to walk along a path without stepping on a crack "step on a crack break your mother's back"



NURSERY RHYMES AND THE HORRORS THEY FORETELL:

(feel free to add some of your own in the comments or on the g+ post where I tell everyone that I blogged )





The itsy bitsy spider climbed up the waterspout.
Down came the rain
and washed the spider out.
Out came the sun
and dried up all the rain
and the itsy bitsy spider climbed up the spout again


It's a crack in space that looks like a tiny spider but when you look at it appears to be too small to see but you can see it anyway and then it fills your entire focus field and destroys you.

It will enter this world through pipes and holes build by people and whose purpose has been lost.


Rapid temperature and humidity changes destabilize it .


Twinkle, twinkle, little star
How I wonder what you are
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky
Twinkle, twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are

When the blazing sun is gone
When he nothing shines upon
Then you show your little light
Twinkle, twinkle, all the night
Twinkle, twinkle, little star
How I wonder what you are

If a new star appears in the sky don't look at it , especially don't think about it , it will swallow everything else in the sky







Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again





The rulers of this world are tireless slaves to rotten barrier lords , whose function it is to separate reality from fantasy. They wear out and fall , and sometimes try and maintain themselves through manipulating this world to create social structures that they can use as metaphysical ladders to climb back out of this world. They are the seeds of their own destruction as organisation creates as much chaos and discord as it seeks to eliminate







Ring-a-ring-a-roses,
A pocket full of posies;
Ashes! Ashes!
We all fall down





The first warning is weird circular scab formation


the second is entering small spaces causes bruising


then everything will burn


leave. Do not return.





I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why - I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell



That guy you don't like who keeps doing weird things to bodies is a extra-real horror and will try and blank all appropriate emotional responses to the horrible things he keeps doing in front of everyone with his powers.


So you should not try and justify or explain yourself but just burn him alive or throw him off something high









If wishes were horses
Beggars would ride:
If turnips were bayonets:
I would wear one by my side:





When facing a phantasmist , the less plausible the weapon , the more dangerous it is to the phantasmist.





One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret,
Never to be told.
Eight for a wish,
Nine for a kiss,

Ten for a bird,
You must not miss

It will take many forms. Some of them physical, some of them abstract. When it is a bird you can end it. You will have one chance. 

Do not miss.