- Bone Wine - Grapes from the bonny hills of Eluag stomped by 100% real organic animated skeletons. Hints of cinnamon and marrow. Best served warm, like a cider.
The First Law of Necromancy reads: nothing made by the dead is fit for the living. On a warm tongue, this wine is dirty water. However, skeletons and ghosts will barter and trade for a bottle; it is one of few things they can taste. - Hot Chocolate - Cocoa and milk, an aristocratic treat. The hard part is importing the cocoa, which grows poorly in these frigid climes, so a very normal wizard created the village where everyone has hot chocolate instead of blood. She lords over Castle Vancastle and sends barrels of the stuff to her aristocrat friends whenever there's enough on tap.
Effects: tastes delicious! - Glunk - Potatoes, chicken bones, sugar, loam, raw eggs, flour, at least one chewed-up wizard-book. All ingredients must be stolen. Mix in a hole in the ground (to absorb dirt energy) then let sit in the sun to warm.
A goblin dish, easier to eat than drink. Effect: incredible bursts of speed and strength (lasts 3 hours) and also diarrhea (lasts 3 days). A glunked up goblin clan is a force to be reckoned with.
The recipe is very finnicky: goblin stinkomancers only ever stumble into it by chance. Failed glunk is called glook, which provides none of the benefits of glunk and all of the diarrhea. - Primordial Soup - Found bubbling at the bottom of the deepest, wettest caves, or manufactured in vitro with ancient rock salts, water, assorted vegetables, and lightning. It's trivial to make if you have a reliable source of lightning, and tastes great.
Effects include hallucinations and a hearty fever. If you die within the next 8 hours, you'll jolt back to life with a new personality and a jumble of false memories. (Basically, roll a new character, minus physical attributes/gear, and keep on trucking.) - Dragon Serum - Tastes like seaweed broth and gelatin. Served piping hot.
Effects upon ingestion are wildly variable and universally good. Tape your character sheet to a wall and throw a dart at it. Whatever it lands on improves: your HP increases by 2; your injuries heal; your hair grows in thicker and more lustrous. Effects are permanent. This is how dragons make berserkers for their dragon cult. Can also be used to make baby dragons. - Holy Water - Warmed from within by holy flame, a vial of holy water never loses its temperature. It is made from the bathwater of angels, and coveted by everyone. In addition to classic Castlevania-type applications, also flushes out parasites and disease-causing bacteria (unholy) but not viruses (holy).
Spiceomancy
Saturday, December 21, 2024
1d6 Hot Drinks (Secret Santicorn)
Thursday, October 17, 2024
6 Page Grimoires (Printable)
Download, print, fold, hand to new player, play.
Some design notes:
- Inspired by: 5e's clunky ass magic system (out of spite); various zines ; Into the Breach, somehow
- I """"balanced"""" these for a hypothetical all-wizard-no-spell-slots 5e game that will never happen. A more refined game/hack would help these books shine, but I haven't figured out what that would be yet
- in the theoretical grimoirehack, all players would play wizards, each dungeon would have a new grimoire for treasure, and each player would have some kind of... rubber stamp? yeah, a stamp (unique wizard seal) for marking which pages of which grimoires they've learned. i think that's fun
- yes, you can learn from more than one grimoire (wizard multiclassing). There's some obvious cross-grimoire synergies in these 6
- i wanted to make a randomizer that scrambles the grimoire pages and makes a printout, but i got lazy
- This is technically a GLOGtober post, except its for my own prompt (Physical Game Pieces) so it doesn't count IM GOING TO FAIL AGAI
Wednesday, October 2, 2024
300 Word Hack: EVIL FUCKING TRAIN
For GLOGtober '24, based on other peoples' thoughts on Mothership, deus' review(? retrospective?) of Abandon All Hope, and my own fear and fascination with public transportation.
Unplaytested, probably unplayable. I haven't watched any Twilight Zone but I suspect I'm ripping it off by proxy.
Monday, September 30, 2024
i've figured it out
Monday, August 19, 2024
scifi slush
have you ever noticed how fucking long this guy's leg is in the movie poster? why did they do that? |
There are only two good scifi settings. I write about one constantly and see the other in my dreams.
* * *
The OASIS (yes, that OASIS) is an abandoned metaverse project. Once, it made headlines as the future of telecommuting. Twelve years of development, 2.6 trillion dollars, and four major lawsuits later, everyone collectively realized the technology was useless. GSS pulled the plug, and thirteen billion VR headsets simultaneously bricked.
Except not all of the headsets are dead. Inexplicably, the servers are still online. A few, no more than fifty, offer stable portals to the bloated, over-simulated, advertiser-ravaged, AI-generated corporate hellscape that is the OASIS.
You are stuck at home. You have in your possession, by sheer luck, a working headset. The same is true of your friends, none of whom you have ever met, or could ever meet, in real life. All the people who matter to you are inside the OASIS.
[This setting is not about the OASIS, or any of the stuff Ernest Cline thinks is cool. I think it's about a Discord server.]
* * *
For as long as we've known about
extrasolars, people have been sending songs into space. It's cheap, and
your music will bounce around in space forever. A bunch of early
startups pitched it as a form of artistic pseudo-immortality.
Now it's the Scramble. If you dip your head into radiospace, you'll hear a million million songs playing simultaneously, alongside a billion billion half-baked podcast episodes and a trillion trillion advertisements for products that don't exist anymore.
You can
still stick an antenna up, if you care, and try to decode something. A
message in a bottle from millennia ago, an out-of-tune ukelele, a "will
you marry me?", a conspiracy theory, a jingle for e-cigarettes. It's
mostly noise. You can spend hours deconvolving a signal and end up with
fartnoise.wav.
Radio communication is pretty much borked. There's no out-screaming the Scramble.
* * *
Microsimulations
are modular miniature virtual reality
environments. You buy them out of gacha machines (they come as colorful plastic finger-length cubes) and snap them together with magnets. They're inhabited by little AIs, which provide the main mode of play: when you click them together, the two spaces become connected by a swirling portal, and the AIs from each side start talking to/killing each other. It's like a modular ant farm - you're invited to shake the simulation and watch the inhabitants freak out.
So one day a swirling portal appears just outside your window
* * *
[i get a little freaked when cooking videos start by showing you the finished product. The causality of it is all fucked - you haven't cooked anything yet, but there's food. This happens in movies and books ("three days earlier...") but for some reason when it's done casually, with a phone camera and a solo creator, it unnerves me]
We cracked time perception with the PlayStation C. "Dilate your chronosight; turn a five minute breather into a six-hour gaming session; no need for bathroom breaks!"
The limits were pushed. The thought barrier was established: 940 thinks/ms, no further.
You actually can go faster. The technology is widely described as "quantum bullshit" (it actually has nothing to do with quantum mechanics and is closer to distributed computing - you're using more than one neuron to simultaneously process the present and the future. sidebar, can you tell i fucking hate writing scifi because im really bad at it??)
Quantum Bullshit lets you 1) see the future. This is the big money-maker, all the day traders dedicate more than half of their neurons to next year's stock market (they creep further forward in time every day, drifting away in their speculator arcologies)
2) live in the past. Thirty of my neurons are still eating my breakfast. All virtual reality environments are severely chronofucked. There's an ad in the paper for the iPhone 103 before the 102S is even out, because advertisers know your attention will be here when it does. The ad reads: "New features, probably! Maybe it'll look like this!"
(This technology has NOT been introduced to the prison sector because that system is a well-oiled machine with NO flaws and ZERO ethical oversight.)
* * *
The Scramble isn't dying down, like we thought it would. It's actually getting warmer - radio waves shortening into microwave patches, then into infrared flares. Some time in the next millennium, the Scramble will crawl into the visible light spectrum, and the night sky will runneth over with static like an old CRT.