The Mourner

At the corner of Bix and Forner
there's a lady, a mourner
The eyes go on no detour
they know why they're there for
and the tears fall without fear
to the ground, a sound wet as beer
But the feelings don't adhere
the guineas they steer
and come tomorrow, there's a sorrow
completely new, the lady's said her adieu
to whoever they buried
(a lone sod, never married)
and her tears, already on the next ferry
paid by the bastard who slayed
(the irony, oh you don't say)
But that's the life of a mourner
laughed the lady at Bix and Forner

The Sundial

Tristan wiped his face clean from whatever it was that the sea beneath him repeatedly spat in his face. It tasted salt and wet, but he knew better; every seemingly innocent waterdrop that slipped past his lips had a longer backstory than them old Talltops back home. Every wet inch they passed over had had a love affair with every single hideous creature in the dark depths below - just last week, an eyeball the size of a barn surfaced and winked at the ship passengers. He bit his lip and felt the salt on his tongue - regular salt water, or Tears of the Eye, who knew. Yuck.

He turned around and gazed down on the deck, where a large sundial took up most of the central space. It looked ordinary in every single way.

"I think it's broken," Tristan said to a mate passing by. "It's been pointing at three o'clock since this morning."

The mate, dressed in nothing more than underwear and a vest, shook his head and answered in a tongue that sounded like someone banging a wet fish against a brick wall before continuing past Tristan.

"I loathe wet-speak," a smooth voice behind him spoke. "LOA-THE! It's like the ocean decided to die in their mouths, ga-gruugh! And that's no sundial, dear."

"I've seen plenty of sundials," Tristan said and faced the smooth voice.

"Oh, a compe-tition, is it? I'VE SEEN ALL THE SUNDIALS IN THE WOOOORLD! I STUDIED SUNDIALING AT THE UNI-VER-SI-TY! I OWN A SUNDIAL! MY MOTHER IS A SUNDIAL! SUN-DIAAAAAL!"

The smooth - and annoying - voice belonged to a thin, tall man dressed in a long cape. It had a large, square hole in it, but it didn't look like it was part of the design. He wore gloves decorated with badly drawn stars, currently only a few inches from Tristan's face, in a overly dramatic pose.

"Just kidding," the thin man said and lowered his arms, "my mother - just like that thing on deck - isn't a sundial. Come to think of it, she probably wasn't my mother either...just like that thing on deck..." He leaned slightly passed Tristan, toward the deck, and with one hand walled around his mouth, he shouted: "MOTHER?"

As he leaned forward, a stout, bearded man looking more like heavy furniture than human appeared. He nodded at Tristan, pulled up his trouser's right leg, and said: "My name is Putty. I have a cast iron foot."

"Oh... Hello... there," Tristan said with a nod, "didn't notice you back there. I'm Tristan."

"Step on his toes, Putty," the thin man said, eyes still fixated on the not-sundial. "That'll make him notice you. MO-THER? YOOHOO?"

"His mother isn't a sundial," Putty said seriously, correcting his clothing. "I've met her."

"No, you haven't!"

"Yes I have. In Porta Cincillia Cantegia."

"Stop making up words!"

"I didn't make up those words, Arnald, it's the name of the -"

"Oh, shut up Putty. Couldn't the witch had cursed your tongue instead of your foot!"

There was a long pause. Some sort of seagull dove into the glittering water; it never surfaced again.

Tristan pulled up a piece of weathered paper from his pocket, along with a thin, sharp piece of charcoal. He did a quick sketch of the sundial on the small paper, eyeing it once or twice.

As the last black line left the charcoal, he said: "It still looks an awful lot like a sundial, I have to say."

"Maybe you've painted it wrong," Arnald said sullenly, leaning over the rail. "Because it isn't."

"Then what is it?"

"What do you care, Mr Carry Stupid Things In My Pocket? Are you a reporter? Ah, nevermind I'll tell you, alright: it's a reversed sundial."

"A what?"

"Re-ver-sed? You know," - Arnald spun his finger in the thin air - "the other way a-round? When the sun is in the position you want, you fill in its shadow on the sundial with paint or chocolate or what-ever, and then the sun stays put at that location. Ta-daa. Reversed sundial. Very illegal, so unethical."

Tristan wrote something below his sketch, then asked: "What's the point of that?"

"To make a per-fect night last forever, perhaps? Two lovers sharing a bottle of Pimbleman's, some cheese, the sun's setting...only it ISN'T! HA-HAA! STAY RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE, MR YELLOW GLOWBALL! The night's JUST getting started!"

The overly dramatic pose was back. Tristan had a finger pointing at him.

"That's what I did, anyway," Arnald said and went back to leaning over the rail.

Another seabird dove into the glittering water; it too never surface again.

Propeller Penny

Propeller Penny
Uncommon, Automaton, Human-sized

The propeller activates when the Penny crosses a analogue leyline; it will take 1 round to start up and reach full speed, run at full speed for 1d6 rounds, and then shut down for 1 round.

All Pennys are faceless, but have the ability to form emotions using the magnetic emojii-ability (MAGEMO): it may smear mud (or blood) on its face, and then rearrange the particles into face-like expressions. It's unclear if it's aware of what it conveys.

Backtracking the steps of a Penny takes you to a tall, almost abandoned apartment complex, overgrown with (now-dead) CAT87-cables. In one of the apartments on the top floor, the biological dead (but technically still functioning) body of the great video game-modder D-M1C3 (from before the last pseudo-nuke, 530 years ago) can be found in a chair. She's hooked up to an old Amstrad CPC, where a 3D-wireframe of the Propeller Penny is spinning in toxic green (the background is a pause screen of a flight simulator).

Several 3D-printers can be found scattered around the apartment, each one printing one piece of a Penny. The printers are placed so that when the pieces are printed, they click together naturally - and the Penny gets up and walks away.

On a shelf on the left wall, a worn and very old box of the computer game CHUCK YEAGER'S ADVANCED FLIGHT SIMULATOR can be found. It will most likely crumble when touched.

Penny's are drawn to clear hierarchies and loud noises. They never stop.

PuterPlane (an extremely tiny setting): landmarks: MATTERHERZ

MATTERHERZ

• Looks like mountains, but aren't
• Actual a short sound sample (22 KHz, 8 bit, mono) on pause
• Each Matterherz pseudo-mountain belongs to one specific being on the PuterPlane, be it person, animal or AI. Upon death, the sound sample will resume play, and thus change the landscape
• The sample is potentially loud; been known to knock people on their arse, and even make certain bots skip a cycle

PuterPlane (an extremely tiny setting): weapons and doodads (part 0x01)

Cathode-Ray Gun

• Small Beam weapon
• Smallest amount of damage
• Concentrated attacks may inflict X-ray radiation on the target
• Shots may be scattered when magnetic fields are present, making it an unreliable weapon 
• Often built from scrap
• The cathode-ray part can be salvaged from Monitorhead monsters such as ABC 80-WAYS2DIE and Commodoreberus
• Needs a power source
• Pedal-powered generators are popular and easy to construct

Mutated capacitors

• Lick them to release their energy (save vs. shock; fail = heart stops, success = table below)
1. Become illuminated for 1d6 hours (known as a Hartley curse)
2. Index finger is charged; stored energy will be released upon first touch (roll on this table again, affects touched target)
3. Your ears goes into hyper-signal-filtering the next 1d6 hours, making any type of spoken language ("noise") clear and understandable to you (not the exact words, but the general meaning)
4. Reverse hyper-signal-filtering: speak only pink noise for the next 1d6 hours. Speaking in this mode will most likely attract KORG WORGS
5. Flatten out any sudden change in violence: damage done to/by you cannot differ more than 1 point from the previous damage inflicted (unless this is the first damage done). E.g., if the previous hit inflicted 5 points of damage, and the next hit would do 2, it will instead do 4, and so on.
6. You can summon a very weak gØlem by taking two equally sized metal plates, making them almost touch, and then separate them slowly. The space between them will open a portal, summoning the gØlem known as DIE!!lectric.

Wood shaman

Wikipedia monster manual

TL;DR Replace random Wikipedia page with monster name. That's your fluff.

1. Choose a monster at random either from head or from here

2. Go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

3. Replace the word after "is a ..." with your random monster (normally the first sentence)

Änglalaser

The 5e warlock patron and its little running messenger

Poor Cartero
(postman from The Legend of Zelda)

In an upcoming 5e game, I'm playing a tiny warlock named Merla.

And like all warlocks, Merla needs an otherworldly patron (page 107 in the PHB). I haven't decided on which one, but it'll probably be some sort of fiend.

According to the PHB, the patron whom you struck this pact with, grants you these powers in exchange for favours you need to carry out (burn this village of peaceful rabbits, tease your sister, eat a bowl of maggots under one minute, and so on).

This is what I'm thinking for Merla's fiend patron:

• It's the loneliest fiend in the world
• It communicates with Merla through handwritten letters, delivered by the always-on-the-run-always-out-of-breath maildaemon Cartero MMMDCLXVI
• When the fiend grows tired of a warlock, it will try to lure him/her to come visit it in its extremely lonely castle - only to kill and turn the warlock into the next Cartero (that is, Cartero MMMDCLXVII)
• The fields surrounding the castle is crowded with former Carteros. Since their services are no longer needed, they've built small mailboxes out of whatever (bones, stones, almost dead birds), and spend all day delivering stuff (junk) to each other
• The fiend "dabbles in poetry", so bad that the paper it writes them on turns into horrible, soul tormenting spells

A Very Useless Zine

This was a pocketmod zine I printed out and mailed to a bunch of folks. I've thrown away the original so I'm mostly putting it up here for nostalgia.

PuterScGUID

Each PuterScGUID is uniquely identified by a sequence consisting of 32 hexadecimal digits, separated into five groups (eg. 21EC2020-3AEA-4069-A2DD-08002B30309D).

If you happen to come across such a sequence, you can with very easy means always know:

• ...its exact location
• ...what it's currently doing
• ...how to contact it (using the ScGUID's TMQS1.1 - Telepathic Message Queuing System version 1.1)

Most ScGUID:s live in the binary seas, are poisonous and worship the never seen bot-entity known only as I, Unknown (whom they worship because even though its sequence is well known - 00000000-0000-0000-C000-000000000046 - no-one has ever been able to locate or contact it, something the ScGUID:s would love to know how it does) .

Gods

How come the gods are drunkards, monster, or even childs? Because gods are not otherworldly entities that's always been - they are normal beings randomly taken into godhood.

Becoming a god is a curse. When lifted to godhood, one is frozen in time and mind. A child god is powerful but forever immature, wanting things on the same level as other five year olds - only with a shorter period of satisfaction. And a child god with a tantrum is a dangerous thing.

The balloon that mustn't land

Every now and then, a blue hot air balloon passes over Bastion. Usually it's high above, but its presence still makes people nervous, as if they worry it would drop down from the sky any second.

It goes by many names - Death's Blue Bell, The Bastion Bye, The Doomed Shroom, Mankind's End - all conveying the same meaning: you don't want it to land, at least not here.

Sometimes it's descending a little too low for people not to do anything about it, and suddenly small groups assemble out of nowhere claiming they know how to make the balloon rise again.

Balloon Groups "We'll save Bastion from Mankind's End" (d12)

1-4: d6 Priests of Pupa - STR 3, DEX 3, WIL 15, 3hp. Robed, Bluetinted fingertips, Bulging backs (concealed mechanized wings, d4 Damage). Real reason they want to visit the balloon is:
1: The God of Pupa lies in at the bottom of the wicker basket, looking like a large withered leaf with a fanged mouth. Should the balloon land, the God will evolve into the God of Imago, a deity worshipped by a rival priesthood. The Priests of Pupa wishes to keep their god in this state.
2: The schematics for their mechanized wings (among other things not yet commonly known) are hidden in the wicker basket. The whole thing is a hoax by the priests themselves to keep people out.
3: The wicker basket holds the Bomb Ova, a really, really powerful bomb. A priest flies up and feeds the bomb his/her blood (all of it), making it go for another lap around the planet. Each lap takes it one step further in the metamorphosis. The priests hopes for a really big bang, and they've been waiting for some years now.
4: A bucket of blue paint stands in the middle of the basket. The priest dips his/her fingers in it, making the balloon rise again, and then they fly down again. The bucket is actually a portal to a piranha infested part of the Long Sea; the fingertips are bitten off and replaced with a gelatinous substance much like rubber. Should the balloon land, the bucket will leak all of the Long Sea.
5-7: Fancy Dresser - STR 9, DEX 7, WIL 5, 2hp. Fancy Dress, Fancy Hat, Fancy Face, Well-spoken, Slim. Real reason s/he wants to visit the balloon is:
5: Mad and/or compulsive liar. Doesn't have a clue what to do up there. Whatever is in that balloon, this bugger will make it come down over Bastion. Run for your life.
6: An Oddity that spits out coins when fed rats is hardwired into the wicker basket. The greater the altitude, the bigger the coin. Explains the bag the fancy dresser is carrying with him/her.
7: Several paintings of the fancy dresser lies scattered in the basket. All portraits look more dead than alive (several are actually dead). By dropping off a fresh painting in the basket, the fancy dresser extends his/her youth by another year, since the portraits does the ageing. Should the balloon land, the portraits manifests into real beings, and will hunt the fancy dresser down (and after that, everyone else, because when you're pissed off you're pissed off).
8: The Scientist Not From This Planet Or Age Or Game But Nobody Believes Her - STR 3, DEX 3, WIL 10, 1hp. Ragged clothes, Black eye, Modern Gun (no ammo), Post-its that form a star map. Fourth wall breaker. This person must be from another game the GM owns, and she knows that the balloon contains a big bad monster from her game (GM's pick) that will transfer to Into the Odd should the balloon land (and if it does, neither she or the monster must be available in the other game). Going on a dangerous expedition with her is the only sure way to make the balloon rise again, for some odd reason.
9: 1024 Ordinary Cats. Somehow, it is commonly known that these little animals are up for the job, and they do it good. They'll leap from rooftop to rooftop at midnight, and eventually take flight to reach the balloon. Unfortunately, they'll all vanish for at least five years, causing severe rat infestations throughout Bastion.
10-11: d6 Arcanum Sacrificium - STR 8, DEX 8, WIL 12, 2hp. Lost limb(s) and/or Eyes, Look of resignation, Whispers. They want to go up and collect the heavy, world-devouring Arcanum that makes the balloon descend, to destroy it properly (e.g. without activating it). But every time they've collected one evil Arcanum, someone (or something further above, and bigger) drops another into the basket.
10: (see entry above)
11: A couple of individuals in the group (d6, or all if roll is greater) have been contacted/blackmailed by Underground guilds, to bring them the Arcanum in exchange for riches/freedom.
12: d8 Not From Bastion Men - STR 12, DEX 10, WIL 12, 5hp. Off-putting face, Baggy Clothes, Filthy Crowbars (d6 Damage, diseased). "Dats our b'loon, lads," they say. "Hands off." They will not accept that the balloon lands in Bastion, and will declare war over it. Someone heard something about their boss being in the basket, another heard that their entire capital is in there. Whatever it is, it mustn't land here.

Horrors in space

There are two things one should have in mind when talking about horrors in outer space:

1. Up til the first physical exploration of space, we were all alone in the universe 
2. Any life out there since then - no matter how twisted or unreal - has its origin down here on Earth 

That is, anything encountered up there is a bastardly remix of something we once sent up on purpose - or just lost by accident somewhere in the thermosphere.

The V-2 rocket (1942)
The first rocket to reach outer space, actually never returned to Earth despite common belief. Became sentient and suicidal after being exposed to a stellar flare in 1981.

40 mice (1960)
Part of the original all animal crew of Korabl-Sputnik 2, these mice never did return safely to Earth. Gnawing through their cage at re-entry, they suddenly hit a power cord just as the shuttle passed through an aurora - causing them to switch places. The caged aurora was never made official.

Имре́к (1962)
Just one of many unofficial and unknown cosmonauts lost during the Vostok programme. At the time, a large translucent mesh passed through our neck of the universe, causing these poor souls to be collected like fish in the sea.

In 1978, a thin purple cord shot out through deep space, attached itself to the mesh and started pulling it in. The cord bumped into the Soviet satellite Kosmos 954, causing it to malfunction and later crash over northern Canada.

Ticks in Space (Santicore 2015 entry)

(Since I haven't seen any signs of life from the Santicore hellves yet, I thought I might as well dump my entry here on the blog)

The request I got for Santicore 2015 was:

"O Secret Santicore, what random horrors could unfortunate adventurers encounter in the darkness of space?"

And I thought, ticks of course! If you want to make your own custom tick mini for your game, just take a potato and stick some toothpicks in it (or just leave them out in the sun a a couple of days, and it'll grow its own appendices).

 

1. Celestial Tick

A celestial tick ranges in size from a small space shuttle, to that of a moon - or larger. Soft celestial ticks are attracted to magnetic fields and will harvest electricity, while hard celestial ticks are drawn to heat and will attach to anything from warp cores to smaller planets.

It’s possible to remove a celestial tick by force, at risk at infecting the host. Rumour has it that tick pirates comes from a planet infected by a vicious tick bite.

2. Tick Ambergris

When a larger celestial tick consumes something it can’t digest or doesn't want, its gastrointestinals will cover it in a thick secretion so that it can pass without harming the tick. As the ambergris leaves the tick’s body and enters space, it will harden and travel indefinitely, sometimes even protecting the unwanted thing in a forced cryosleep.

Things known to have been found in tick ambergris:

1. Lava and pieces of a volcano
2. Small space shuttle containing a crew (living but cryosleeping)
3. A mountain top
4. A smaller celestial tick (see Tick Miners below)

3. Tick Pirates

There’s a remote relative to humans in outer space that’s been successful in utilizing celestial ticks as transporation vessels, from the smaller ones as two-man shuttles, to the rumoured interstellar tick that drifts through the multiverse and houses several thousands of pirates.

On the larger ticks the pirates tend to burrow a bit into the body, to shield against the worst radiation of space.

Things possibly found on a tick pirate:

1. Spear with tip smeared in a mixture consisting of celestial tick nymphs and random droppings
2. Semi-living sextant
3. Boots made of the shell of a hard tick
4. A metallic plaque depicting the Arecibo message

4. Tick Miners

It is rumoured that tick miners are a cybernetic race aiming to regulate the efficiency of celestial ticks. Why they would do that is unknown - maybe they suffered from a planetary tick themselves, who spewed out diseases into their perfect feedback society?

Tick miners - being more robotic than organic, yet lacking a fully-fledged AI found in other parts of the multiverse - perform experiments on celestial ticks of all sizes, without hurting or killing them. At least not intentionally.

Some known augmentations/”corrections” made by tick miners:

1. Drove a planet-sized tick into a sun by increasing its heat fixation through medication
2. Constructed a life supporting exoskeleton for a tick about to die. While the tick didn’t die, the exoskeleton became sentient and soon took over, changing its role as a supporting unit to that of master controller.
3. Constructed a lattice of equally sized, smaller ticks to see if they could fill the gap after the death of one enormous celestial tick (and see if they as a “hive” had a better chance of surviving)
4. Bred a race of smaller ticks that could cover itself in its own ambergris during stressful conditions

One Page Dungeon draft I never got around to use

An old map I probably meant to send to the OPD contest but forgot about.

TL;DR: a monster that collects head. One player loses one at the entrance. The monster wears it when they encounter it. Slay it and get it back.

The good folks over at G+ seemed to like it, so why not put it over here as well.

Brown & Green & White & Red

Emoji dungeon

PuterUmberWasp

Yeah so what's so old and computery about this UmberWasp, you wonder. Well it's tiny as hell and burrows into MonitorHeads and other hardwares and introduces BUGS.

It loves nibbling on electronic impulses, and inverting logical patterns (it hates AND-gates).

Puterpadpion

Some species comes with a turbo button. If met, you should run twice as fast.

PuterBrute +HEARTz

No obvious 80s puter reference in the pic? No monitorhead? No diskdriver for a mouth? Well maybe his brain is an Atari ST, and the MIDI-controller is connected to the heart, beating in steady 119 BPM.

Into the Odd character generator

Click here to see this character!

Into the Odd (by Chris McDowall) is a game that doesn't really need a character generator. It takes less than a minute to create a character with equipment and all.

But since I needed a new project (and really like the system), I made one anyway: http://odd.pushingcows.se

It will generate a new character each time the page is reloaded.

Things that differ from the character generation in the book:

• Doesn't use the starter package table. Instead, randomized items from the table (but at least two weapons)
• Name tables are snatched from here and here

At the bottom of the character creation, I included a random image to spur the imagination of the player and/or referee. Or maybe it will just irritate people, I don't know. The images are all in the public domain and snatched from here.

It should be fairly usable on those smart phones as well.

Yeah, and you can click/tap on your attributes to perform a saving throw. Probably not useful but you never know.

Use to the permalink to save your character (e.g. use the generated link).

Atop the Prismatic Wave, there is a village

The village on top of the Prismatic Wave travels along. The platform upon which the settlers have build its home is slippery (like algae on wet rock), and many have been lost due to bad (or no) shoes.

Therefore, it is common practice to use a rope and toss it between buildings - if there's a kind soul to give you a hand at rope's end, that is.

The Prismatic Wave is easily spotted due to its vivid colours and 200 meters tall profile.

The four tall buildings each houses a wizard, unable to leave their home. They hate the next wizard in a clock-wise order for reasons not entirely obvious.

Each wizard also keeps a small shop, specialized in one of following items:

1. Small things that still lives
2. Large things that still lives
3. Bread, and treasure maps where the lines appear gradually the closer you get to the treasure
4. Welcome mats (you can get them in any language you want)

They gate these things in through portals (that look very much out of place) on their attics, but may only do so twice a day.

Typical encounters include:

1. Washed up fish making it hard to navigate the streets, or people risking their lives to get their hands on one or two
2. Someone holding on to the edge, screaming for help
3. A sour wizard throwing things at passersby from his attic window
4. Being hit by a thick rope by someone who wishes to pass the street
5. Winged beasts trying to push people over the edge, for a quick snack
6. A drunkard trying to trade used welcome mats for beer
7. A large beast (or even monster) running around the slippery streets due to a portal mishap of one of the wizards
8. Florentia Mcnaught reading her god-awful poetry from her kitchen window

You look up and see...

(in the cave)

1. A large, crude painting of a human skull with antlers. It's red
2. Tree roots that somehow managed to crack the stone. A bird has made a nest in one spot
3. A band of ants marching. Every ten centimeters, there's an ant that's ten times as big as usual
4. A tiny lizard looking for dew. It's licking the ceiling
5. A pink gemstone, stuck in the rock. It's warm to the touch
6. Nothing unusual

(in the abandoned prison)

1. A clothed, not so complete skeleton, pinned to the ceiling with daggers. Judging by the uniform, it's a former guard
2. Runes, drawn to look like cracks, that spell: "NENWNWWSW"
3. A hole, just big enough to fit a child, leading to the section above
4. A snare made of clothes
5. Short chains with sturdy hooks at the ends. One is still dangling
6. Nothing unusual

(in the cottage)

1. A small mirror, cracked. Some shards are missing
2. A wooden chandelier with four arms. One candle is black and unused
3. Torn pages from a book, glued to the ceiling. The facing page numbers are all prime numbers
4. A thick, grey curtain. If taken down, a cache of hard bread is revealed along with a bottle of wine
5. Soot. It's smeared across the ceiling and looks almost like a letter
6. Nothing unusual

(in the forest clearing)

1. A curious animal head shaped like a pear, gracing down at you. The neck, long and slender, disappears behind the tree tops
2. The sun, larger than usual
3. A pack of small birds carrying away what looks like a human body
4. One cloud that's changing its shape to the beat of your breathing
5. A small tree, uprooted, slowly drifting away into the sky as if dragged by an invisible force
6. Nothing unusual

Spells are individuals - or more like fish maybe

Spells are individuals, meaning there are only one of each in the whole wide world.

The witch who memorized read magic is the only one capable of casting that - until she does, after which the spell is free for all to catch.

You see, you don't put your nose in a musty old tome and memorize a spell - you must catch them.

It's like fishing.

You bait and you wait. But where do free spells roam? Where should you go? It's mostly all in the name of the spell, for example:

• Feather fall: hen runs
• Summon monster: broken toys
• Sleep: beds
• Web: old cellars
• Power word kill: executioner swords
• Invisibility: beggar's clothes

You catch object-bound spells (i.e. sleep, invisibility) by touching the object while pronouncing the spell's name (5% risk of also casting it), while location-bound spells (i.e. web, feather fall) are caught while spending the night in/at/close by the area.

The level of the spell dictates how hard it is to catch.

When you cast a spell, it first does its thing, after which it quickly runs out into the world again to seek shelter. It will not necessarily bind to the same object again.

Be wary of cantrips, by the way. They are so gullible that they'll gladly leave a wizard's mind for another if you just think about the spell's favourite object (and are close enough).

Common snakeox

• Fur is actually hundreds of snakes
• If startled, the snakes will scatter, leaving only the horns behind
• The snakes will come searching for the horns (to reform the ox) in a couple of minutes
• There's a urban legend going around about a failed hunter who collected these horns in his cabin, only to be overrun by thousands of snakes, all looking for their horns. They all merged into one enormous snakeox, with horns all over place, and trapped inside: the hunter, still alive.
• In rare cases will the snakes attack instead
• The snakeox will turn solid (e.g. turn into a real ox) if killed in a calm state
• Highly sought-after meat

Every universe is a lung

Every universe is a lung.

A left lung, more precisely, because it shares space with the heart of that universe, and all life needs some TLC.

The right lung is the parallel universe to that in the left lung. It is bigger but harsher, because of the distance to the heart. Every being existing in the left lung has a mirror version in the right - only robotic. Robots are calculating, cruel and deterministic - they lack a heart.

The alveoli are where the galaxies and planets are; little cavities at the end of the air supply, supporting life (in both lungs, although the robots doesn't technically breathe).

The only way to reach the parallel universe is to travel through a worm hole junction called the Primary Bronchi. But beware, steer clear of the trachea or you may travel to far and eventually leave the body. If so, aim for the nearest mouth, keep going left and pray to your gods that the next universe is a kind one.

The village that forgot to feed its giant

I'm too lazy to write a proper encounter table, so here's one big rumour list instead. I'm so lazy I didn't even bother to divide it into proper sections. And you still have to decide which rumours are true. I'm so lazy.

Rumours:

1. The Four Pillar Pyramid is really just the tip of the iceberg
2. Jumping into a chasm just makes you reappear ten meters up in the sky, some meters away
3. The tiny village by the lake really forgot to feed its giant; its spirit will awake next full moon and crush those puny beings
4. The sand in the south-western dunes is edible and nutritious, although a bit dry
5. The pillar by the Rim of the World is made of gemstones
6. Entering a giant's skull with your eyes closed leads to the negative version of this world
7. There are two blind octopuses searching for each other in the lake. If they meet they'll mend into the creature that'll devour the world
8. Cursing and waving a dagger is the proper way to greet most villagers
9. The tower by the lake lacks windows because it is inhabited by vampires
10. The lone cross at the end of the mountain path isn't a burial site - it's a meeting place, but not for human beings
11. Most barns in the forest has the rest of the giant's bones. They are said to bring good luck
12. There are six cave entrances that leads to the shallow netherworld, each with its own kind of polymorph spell cast upon entering
13. The Rim of the World is also the Rim of the Universe, and thus the Rim of Reality
14. Every seventh tent belongs to a ghoul. It moves with the nomads but will not harm them as long they offer it human flesh every full moon
15. The blood of the now gone giant is stored in the bark of the trees
16. There's a wise woman meditating on top of one of the Four Pillars
17. Never buy a yellow potion from a dune merchant; it's just camel piss and doesn't grant you immortal life
18. The two skulls belonged to the same giant
19. The Star Tower at the Rim of the World is supposed to be a prison, but nobody's heard from the warder in a while now
20. The dead trees found scattered around the mountains aren't dead, but undead

Geomorph generator

Almost two years ago, I doodled a bunch of geomorphs.

I've now finally made a generator for it: http://morphs.pushingcows.se

It's not the most advanced geomorph generator out there, but it's lightweight and simple to use, something I've come to appreciate over the years.