Purple Blob

 

Rat sorcerer

 

(boring remote work meetings are great for firing up PBRUSH.EXE in a separate window)

THE RUINS OF 1KM1KT

Far into the future, a landscape barren and locked meets anyone foolish enough to traverse its domain. It is a domain of technology, of structured information; a country of subdivisions, of bold red and smutty grey, bordered and contained natural language, sometimes unnoticed, sometimes not, and each walled square a Moria for those brave enough to descend, for one does not know what echoes at the end; sometimes the answer, sometimes the end.

Those scholars that remain, spread out they are, much like their minds. Their memories incoherent, shattered like a multivolume ZIP-archive spread over too many floppy diskettes; ask them about yesterday and silence shall be your forever answer. Dare you ask them about last week?

But, there is still power left in these automatons; all that is needed is the secret word, and it is the word of the Creator and the Upholder, the Unnoticed Janitor, the Maintainer and Super User. Though crucial for this domain, speaking its name annoyed it greatly, so the symbols of the secret word must be spread out, as to not attract the attention of the Super User, and it all starts with a K.

And already, as the utterance of the symbol leaves your mouth, a spark of memory lights up the automaton's eyes. The second symbol being E, and the third a repetition of that, it is almost as if the symbols transforms the automaton's very appearance; and as the fourth symbol of T is uttered and enters their positronic brains, you've managed to awoken the long forgotten, dark banana peel that is their true simian soul.

And as you shape your lips in an oval form, and push out the fifth symbol with your lungs, a hairy arm is slowly raised from the dirty, asphaltic ground, pointing into the dead, bar charted horizon, where only read only memories are to be found. A single gnarly finger points.

The final sixth symbol, that of the letter N, completes the secret word, and with a final burst of energy, the now part automaton, part simian, utters a single sentence:

"YOUR MESSAGE CONTAINS TOO FEW CHARACTERS"

Lowering its arm, it then fall silent, slowly morphing back to its previous robotic appearance. It's as if it's been Dead, and Back, and now dead again, waiting for a second coming, for a second breakfast, only richer and fatter, to Feast like Goblins, the reInCARnation of itself - but its never coming to that ever again.

Once in a moon, like a fish in a bowl, it comes back to this very same spot, and stares into the write-protected horizon for a while - before moving on.

Orc Sheriff With Barbed Collar

 

Anagramming Monster Manual - Part C

I, lewd clam

A rude type of clam that once opened, won't stop shouting naughty things. Popular at parties.

Worn lac carrier

Part tree branch, part insect, this walking stick has a resinous, glossy armour. It's friendly until you touch it, and then you're stuck and slowly become part of its resinous armour.

Capable sot

Actually tiny swarm creatures, left after burning intelligent pear tree. Can be gathered and trained. In the wild, they often go for the eyes.

Lit talc dew

A grass that emits what looks like a white powder, almost snow like, only it is burning intensively. The grass lives on burnt meat.

Ear cunt

Moving on.

A detecting pine

A treant that lurks around the forest, gathering clues, to solve the mystery of...of...well, it can't remember now, it was long ago, but it was something big. Anyway, back to lurking!

Bacterial reapers

Pale, humanoid creatures with exaggerated fingers, flat, with which they scrape any surfaces they come across in hope that they will gather something truly vile and infectious. Some concocts they sell, some they just consume. Hides in tall grass and behind corners.

Harm ice

Like really stupid snow that gets in everywhere and you just like STOP IT and it just WHYYY and you just SERIOUSLY FALL SOMEWHERE ELSE and it's just like OH IT'S NOT ME IT'S THE WIND and you're just like YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN and it just HEY IS THAT YOUR EAR and you just panic and flap your arms around like a hyperactive bird and people stare and shake their heads and you regret that you didn't memorized fireball this morning.

Ear cock tic

Moving on (see also: four entries above).

Lo, a cut!

A wound that's actually part mimic, part wound. The mimic draws attention because the wound - "the cut" - is truly remarkable, but at the same time, the mimic emits an odour that makes most people (and most importantly: the wounded) uninterested in tending the actual wound. After a while, the wound gets infected, and eventually the wounded will die, and the mimic consume the dead body. It sometimes lie in wait on the tip of swords, ready for attach to a fresh cut.

An tic garb

Intelligent tics that hunt in packs. They hide on the inside of clothes, especially long dresses, waiting for someone to put them on. After that, they coordinate their bites so they attack at the same moment, sucking blood at an increased rate and capacity, finally weighing down their victim.

Satyric fin hag

A grandmother succubus, who also happens to be a really good swimmer and extremely misunderstood; statistically speaking, an adventurer is more likely to be hit by lightning than being bit by a satyric fin hag.

Loco cider

Liquid mimic, most often in the form of alcoholic beverages. After consumed, the victim will be digested from the inside by the mimic in a couple of hours, causing the poor sod to run around like crazy. After that, the spirit of the mimic then evaporates through the skin and spreads with the wind, hoping to infect another open bottle.

The Everyking

THE EVERYKING

The Everyking is not a king. He just hangs around taverns and the like, sitting there with his arms steady on the bar counter as if he's ready to take off, glaring at other people, occasionally shouting "WADDAYA WANT, PEASANT?" or "BAH".

He made his crown out of crows, because he misheard a long time ago, and will remake it once a week.

He will present himself as THE EVERYKING, which doesn't mean he thinks himself as the king of everything, but rather a king for every thing you can think of, i.e. a king for bread crumbs, ants, the wind, a specific wall in your house, etc.

His throne is always located next to a bar counter, but he's a modest drinker.

He shouts, and has bad hearing (or just picks the things he wants to hear).

People tend to either ignore him completely, or laugh behind his back, and authorities in general doesn't cause him any trouble since he always pays whatever taxes they throw at him.

 

Income? His coins doesn't come from earnest work, but rather from a forgotten and well hidden underground tomb out in the woods, littered with copper. The Everyking doesn't fear them, as he is a firm believer that the ghouls and ghosts in the tomb are old servants of his - and surprisingly, they do too, because they are just as delusional as him, and will happily let him pick a couple of coins every now and then. They will protect him. The tomb is five levels deep, but the Everyking only traverses the first two, which is probably for the better since whatever lurks deeper than that doesn't share views with the upper ghosts.

Once in a while, someone will ask about the whereabouts of the Everyqueen, which will be met with a stern rebuff and something unintelligible.

Crows avoids him.

Three silver figurines, or "Our occult shrine got flooded so now we're pretty bummed"

 

Just a dumb one page thing today! Trying to think minimalistic.

So this site is just some simple (from the outside) two rooms shrine (two separate doors). It is built in stone, but lacks all sorts of ornaments.

In each of the two rooms, a statue is present. There's nothing special about them; bog standard "important man looking into the distant, not knowing where to put his arms". One is missing its nose.

The round, barred window is located in a space between the front doors. It should give a hint to the "hidden" area between the two rooms. There are no other light sources inside the shrine.

In one of the rooms, the entrance to the (now hidden) area has been bricked up long ago by the original worshippers of the shrine, in an attempt to imprison the Changing Beast they managed to summon one night.

The flooded area has a narrow (30 cm wide), winding staircase following the four walls, leading all the way down to the bottom (30 meter). This area wasn't always under water.

At the bottom, besides broken pottery and glass vials, the following things can be found:

1. Silver figurine (30 cm tall, tarnished). Two arms up in the air (leftmost figurine in the image above)
   
2. Silver figurine (40 cm tall, tarnished). Four arms spread like an X (middle figurine in the image above)
   
3. Silver figurine (50 cm tall, tarnished). Alien look (rightmost figurine in the image above)
   
4. Skeleton in plate armour
5. A broken sword
   
6. A bottle of spoiled wine in a otherwise empty chest
   

The skeleton remains (item 4 above) is the poor sod they left behind to fight the Changing Beast, who managed to defeat the beast by breaking up its soul into the three silver figurines using the once magical sword (now broken, item 5 above).

The three figurines depict the three different shapes the Changing Beast could take on: man, beast, and something alien and otherworldly.

Selling off the three figurines will require some persuasion, since the figurines makes most people uneasy.

Cleric studying the Tome of Boring and Utterly Dull Spells (pg. 5492)

 

Boogyman Mountains

 

They say Last Town was actually called Next Stop for a while, until they got rid of that first town (which was called First Town).

And Boogyman Mountains is sometimes referred to as Sweaty Armpit Rock, but don't tell that to its face!

3 Towers Red are made from red barked birch trees, that used to grow where the towers now stand. You win some, you lose some, as the previous owners used to say.

The dragon is called Something Else.

The Badgerbrough Inquisitive, issue 4:44

 

(Older issues here.)