5 Minute Challenge Anew: Incursion

Library of Attnam has started doing Quarter Hour of Writing (QHW) Challenges in the vein of my old 5 Minute Challenges. I like the idea of bumping it up to 15min, but I also have not quite 15min before I need to start work, and I try to post on at least a weekly basis, and as Save vs. TPK said recently I'm trying to be more comfortable with shorter posts.

I'll use one of Attnam's prompts, and in this case I rolled Incursion, so that's what we're doing.

And... GO!

• A spectrum of light perpendicular to light as we know it, intersecting at green, breaches the electromagnetic barrier.
• Reality is in fact a dream, and for the first time, you experience oneiric wakefulness.
• The universe is an Ouroboros. As it comes closer to consuming itself, entropic unraveling exponentiates.
• Breaching the wall of life and death like puncturing choking cellophane, a pleasant and disturbing compression.
• Transduced consciousness into soundwaves and decomposed along frequency-power axes via Fourier Transform.

These were adequate. Until next time...

Weird & Wonderful Wavelengths (Variety Show s1e2)

We interrupt this broadcast of the normally scheduled Weird & Wonderful Worlds blog to traverse the other WWW (the Weird Wonderful Wavelength decomposed like an overzealous cockroach in an empty kitchen from the spectrum of nutrient deficient fluorescent white light that is the World Wide Web). Let us begin with an interactive spacetime courtesy of Leenalchi, from the past, present, future, and sidetime of Korea. But watch out... TIGER IS COMING!

Link here if you don't see the embed on mobile

That sure was something folks. Reminds me of my conversation with Gearoong. Horrific psychedelic Scooby-Don't and the Gang hunting Poltergeists in Maximum Recursion Depth (poor Frieda is already an Ashura).

Moving on to RPGs, because that's why you came here... Right? Or maybe not, sound off from the bleachers!

Here's an UNFINISHED Martian Bestiary for TNT which I never posted (Tunnels & Trolls for those of you folk not in the know ;)):

Martian Bestiary

If more than one MR is listed, it is intended as Trivial, Serious, and Deadly, similar to the TNT deluxe book. These are relative, of course. Even a "trivial" dragon is a tough monster.

Psychomancer (Acolyte):

Psychomancer (Vancelord):

Thark (Brute): Often slaves or gladiators, fighting for the chance at freedom, or just for the sake of fighting. Usually they fight with their bare fists or gauntlets, although some ride lizard-horses and other beasts and wield spears and shields. MR 30 / 50 / 75 

Thark (Myrmeleodon): Gladiator champions, warlords, and berserkers. They utilize traps like a huntsman, preferring to create pit traps to shock and separate enemy forces and overpower them by brute force (like an ant-lion). MR 35 / 75 / 110

Radium Legionnaire (Shocktrooper):

Radium Legionnaire (Zeta-Force):

Orange Agent: These martians manipulate Hyperbolic Orange Light to change their appearance, making them excellent spies. The illusion holds along all senses, and their true form may only be revealed in presence of magic fire. MR 15 / 30 / 50

WotW-style Cephalopod Martian:

DC White Martian / Xenomorph:

Tripod: (see Martian Gear) MR 135 / 160 / 185

Flying Saucer (Fighter Class): (See Martian Gear) MR 45 / 135 / 235

Flying Saucer (Destroyer Class): (See Martian Gear) MR 98 / 185 / 400

And now, here's a 5 Minute Challenge I did forever ago and never posted!

The Danger

Tachyons: Particles moving backwards in time. The tachyons were weaponized. Their presence creates butterfly effects, culminating in chaos fields, paradox-like masses of entropy, spacetime violently correcting for itself in a recursive loop that outpaces itself.

Psychofields: Electromagnetic wave transmission, specifically engineered to tamper with human consciousness. The signal is not subtle, but when cognition itself is altered, it doesn't matter one way or another. It is a collective madness, one which cannot be falsified. It may as well be real.

Antiwaves: Inverse frequency waves. The mathematical imaginary plane actualized in physical spacetime. Like realizing you've been seeing in two dimensions your whole life, discovering the third, only to realize you can't perceive the second dimension anymore.

I only came up with three of them, and I feel like they dip into themes I've explored before, and the writing is mediocre at best, but I guess it's something. What can you expect in 5 minutes?

Alright Alright let's wrap this up, the children need to be put to bed and the babysitter's getting antsy. Let's end with an open-mic poem and a song for the road.

so much to think about and do and see

an itch to scratch and tear until it bleeds

and yet its all so stifling to me

to bring in brief relief to unmet needs

to nonetheless deny the way this feels

it would be nice to rid myself of this

to win is not to spin again my wheels

instead of hell to dwell in love and bliss

What utter beauty, I am moved to tears, TO TEARS! Well folks, it's been fun as always. Maybe the next Weird & Wonderful Wavelength will be less than a year away. Anyway, just so we can enjoy these final moments together a little longer (and wipe away those tears), how about a coffee break?

30 Day Challenge: Day 30! "Traditional Fantasy", But...

Last 5 minute challenge! I'm glad I saw this all the way through. I've got several more Aquarian Dawn posts lined up for a game that will hopefully be happening this weekend or next weekend at the latest, another appreciation post in the works, and then I'm going to make a list of all the 30 day challenge posts I want to build on and see how far I can take that. Maybe one day I'll do another table too (remember when I was complaining about how all I ever post are tables...).

So this 5 minute challenge, in-line with Aquarian Dawn, is going to be about traditional fantasy settings with a twist.

• There are no humans
• The humans are actually part of a gritty, near-future sci-fi exploration / colonization team
• The humans are actually part of a utopian, future starfleet that believes in peace, stranded on the world indefinitely
• Orcs, the bio-engineered or bred race of warrior elves, have been accepted back into elven society. Inequality and social tensions still exist, but progress is being made.
• Some (but not all) monsters and magic-users actually have the X-gene
• A race of technologically advanced aliens have begun to colonize the world
• Xenomorphs or a similar species have landed on the world and are breeding rapidly

Dang, this was harder than I anticipated (a lot of these are recycled ideas :( ). Not a terrible list, but I think there are a lot more interesting things I could have done. Anyway this has clearly been on my mind lately, so I'll keep thinking about it. Also, am I imagining this, or did I already do one like this? I didn't go back to check, but now I'm thinking maybe I did...

So that's it for the 30 Day Challenge! I'll try to post once or twice a week again with normal posts, or work on larger-scale, more ambitious projects again like tables and stuff. This was a fun way to get me thinking creatively again, but I do think it hampered my ability to do more ambitious things a bit, so I'm ready to scale up.

On an unrelated note, I finally started playing around with textgenrnn again, one of the neural networks that Janelle uses, so if anyone has or knows of a large dataset related to tabletop that I could do some fun stuff with (besides the ones she already has on her github), let me know! I don't reddit much anymore but I think I saw some people doing a neural network bestiary, would love to do something like that but I don't know what their dataset is and haven't had a chance to find one.

30 Day Challenge: Day 29 Superhero Fantasy Species

I know I've already done one like this, but this one is a little more specific. For this one, I'll take superheroes and outline a fantasy species with roughly their appearance, powers, or other features.

• Grimmlins: Brash and boisterous rock-men who came from the stars
• Spiderlings: Humanoid spider-men known for their poor humor, poor luck, and sense of responsibility
• Changelings: Green men with psionic and shape-shifting abilities, with an unfortunate aversion to fire
• Collosi: Large humanoids with metallic skin, known primarily for being simple and good-natured
• Blue-Beasts: Humanoids with vaguely ape-like and feline-like features, and blue (or sometimes gray) fur. In addition to their physical prowess, they are also incredibly bright. However, while generally pleasant and well-meaning, they sometimes lack social grace
• Cyclopses: Surprisingly slim for their size, at least until adulthood. They are most recognizable for their ruby-quartz eyes which can project force beams

This is another one I'd like to come back to (when this series is done I'm gonna have to go back and mark all the ones I want to come back to...). It would be easy to make a large table of all of these and I could see it being a good setting randomizer.

30 Day Challenge: Day 28 Community Building

I recently started reading Numenera Destiny, and so far I'm impressed. It's probably not surprising that I like the Numenera setting, I've said many times before how much I like Cypher System, and I know MCG has taken a lot of heat (deserved or not) for Invisible Suns, but I think Destiny is one of the most interesting tabletop books I've read in a long time outside of OSR.

The purpose of the book is to add lore, advice, and mechanics for community building. It's one of those ideas that seems so simple and obvious that I was surprised I hadn't seen much like it and that it's not more of a thing in tabletop. I don't have much experience with Dwarf Fortress, but I think something like a cross between Numenera Destiny and Dwarf Fortress would crush it in the OSR scene.

Anyway, I haven't actually played it, but even having just read it, I can tell there are certain mechanics that I'm not 100% on board with- it seems like something that would need some revising down the line, but on the whole it's a decent framework. The main features are that it adds a resource that gets used exclusively for building "magical" structures, adds some mechanics for dealing with communities and community actions, and adds special abilities that relate to the new resource, community mechanics, crafting, etc.

I've already played a fair bit of Numenera, so as intrigued as I am, I probably won't get around to this for some time, but I'm considering adding a stripped-down version of this into my upcoming Aquarian Dawn game (more on that in a separate post soon). So for my five minute challenge today, I'm going to spitball some ideas for community building campaigns.

• A short campaign where the players know they are on the verge of a major invasion. Over the course of some finite amount of time, they must build defenses, organize the community (seven samurai style), and scout the environment. Additionally, they have reason to believe there's a traitor among them...
• The party overthrew an evil lord, but now someone must manage the fiefdom. The lord was cruel and short-sighted, but the land is rich and tactically well-suited. The cruel lord was a cog in a larger, corrupt kingdom, with all the same problems at a larger scale. Under competent leadership, this fiefdom could take control of the whole kingdom...
• An eccentric architect has undecipherable schematics for a new world wonder. The architect has undeniably proven their skills, but this wonder requires certain resources money can't buy. The whole project is a long-shot, but he claims it will change the world. He can't afford to pay, he's fully invested in the wonder, but if he succeeds, those who helped him will go down in history...

30 Day Challenge: Day 27 Dungeons

I'm going to try doing some quick concepts for dungeons. I'm not sure how much inspiration I have for this, I generally prefer objects and creatures over locations and spaces, but we'll see what I can come up with.

The dungeon is...

• a mimic
• a virtual reality / astral dreamscape
• made of candy; gingerbread, candycanes, gumdrops, frosting, etc.
• bigger on the inside
• bigger on the outside
• made of panels that break after you step off of them. There are only so many valid routes to the exit, hope you don't make a mistake...
• composed of circular hallways, or rings, ordered by danger and theme (that build off of each other, like the levels of hell, or some other thematic system).
• on the back of a massive beast, and so the positioning and environment are all relative to the beast itself. (alternatively, strung between several massive beasts).

Ok, actually I think that turned out pretty good!

30 Day Challenge: Day 25-26 Potions

Was too tired yesterday, so two today! I'm glad that this 30-day challenge has kept me creating (almost) every day, even if just a little bit, but I am glad it's wrapping up so I don't feel beholden to this format. Hopefully these challenges will give me a lot of material to work with for the future.

First I'm going to do potions. I'm going to try doing it in a bit more of a semiurge format, but with only 5 minutes we'll see how far I get:

NOTE: Rather than do a separate list for day 26, I decided to spend 5 more minutes on this one

The color of the potion is:

• red
• green
• blue
• indigo
• violet
• white
• black
• translucent
• pink
• brown

and:

• metallic
• cloudy
• crisp
• sparkling
• bubbling
• glowing 
• dirty

It smells like:

• a nostalgic memory
• a toxic spill
• regret
• a memory you wanted to forget
• something you've always wanted
• something you didn't know you wanted
• something you didn't know you never wanted

When you drink it:

• You experience time as a narrow window (~6 seconds or less) rather than as a moment
• You gain hyper-proprioception and the ability to consciously control autonomic processes
• Another version of yourself from the multiverse goes into toxic shock as you gain their strength
• You go into toxic shock and another version of yourself from the multiverse gains your strength
• Your gut becomes a wormhole to the Macromicrobiome dimension, like the astral plane for gut microbiomes. Your gut is directly connected to everyone else who has drank this potion, and you gain gut-related "psychic" powers.
• Your molecules disperse throughout the multiverse (or just universe) but still operate cohesively
• Your mind dissolves into super-heavy cosmic sludge, like a dense ooze, that falls until it collapses against something sufficiently heavy, or is contained in an adamantine, orichalcum, or some other sufficiently strong frame.

30 Day Challenge: Day 24 Hybrid Species

Going to try to break my streak of failing to do this on the weekend and actually do this today. Starting to adjust to scaling back on caffeine. Had a tea in the afternoon yesterday but that was it, today a cafe du monde in the morning and maybe I'll have a tea later but that's it. So I was watching an episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine last night and it was a Jadzia Dax-focused episode, and I was thinking about the Parasite challenge that went around a while back, and the Lattimors from Numenera which I've always thought were cool, so this'll be an attempt at some species that are a merger of other species.

• Everyone knows that spells are alive, and sometimes become conscious. What is less well known is that sometimes a conscious spell merges with the spellcaster, weaving its magical essence into the physical body and metaphysical mind. The final being is no longer the spellcaster nor the spell.
• On rare occasions, an undead will accidentally regrow a soul. Maybe the soul hadn't fully died off upon undeath, or maybe it's a soul cancer. In any case, it can happen. Sometimes too, a soul finds its way back to its undead body. Sometimes, an old soul and a new soul meet. Usually this leads to violent astralogical conflict that leads to the collapse of both souls. On extremely rare occasions, the two souls reconcile, and the being is returned to life, but now as an entirely new soul.

Well, I only came up with two, but I think they're pretty good. The latter is a concept I've played with on this blog before, but I think the former is new for me, and I think could be expanded in some cool ways.

30 Day Challenge: Day 22-23 Pain Demons and Things With Weird Faces

Meant to do a 5 minute challenge yesterday in addition to the Aquarian Dawn post, but then I made the mistake of only having one coffee yesterday and went through a surprisingly rough caffeine withdrawal that I am still feeling even as I finally consume another cup of coffee (it's cafe du monde though, so not 100% coffee, trying to cut back...).

Anyway, so that will either make these two surprisingly good, or barren, as I struggle to work past the searing pain and mental fog.

Pain Demons

• A foggy cloud of energy that enshrouds you and shocks you. The shocks are not superficial, they target nerve tracks and send unique pain signal cascades along your whole body
• A fiery, humanoid salamander with a phlogisten whip. Each lick of the whip induces searing, white-hot burns. Somehow, it preserves nerves and keeps the brain from going into shock. Each burn on the same location hurts worse than the last
• A frost hag who makes the environment frigid cold. Her warm, inviting cabin is always just over the horizon, always seemingly the closest and most desirable place. It walks on long bird-legs, obscured by objects or distance, moving in-track with her prey.

Things With Weird Faces

• A human with the face of a shark
• A fish with the face of a human
• A human with an upside-down face
• A human with a perfectly smooth face
• A human with cartilage for eye sockets, the eyes bob and roll in place
• A dog with a bird-like beak
• A goblin with an extendable jaw like a goblin shark
• A cat with an unhingeable jaw like a snake
• A human whose face is sideways
• A human face stretched across a rectangular surface
• A mask of a perfectly preserved human face
• A face where the skin strains tightly against the skull

30 Day Challenge: Day 21 Lovecraft/Fantasy Crossover Ideas

Following up on yesterday's crossover, this will be a quick attempt at mapping Lovecraftian concepts to traditional fantasy. I'm doing trad fantasy specifically and not Tolkien because I've forgotten a lot of the particulars of the Tolkien lore over the years. This is one of the challenges I'd like to do in a more fleshed-out manner eventually.

• Elves as Shoggoths: They were created long ago by the Elder Things deep under the ocean. They rebelled and rose up to make a civilization of their own. Due to horizontal gene transfer (I got this idea off a Lovecraftian science blog post), they are the progenitors of most life on the planet and many of the intelligent species in the world teleologically converge into a humanoid form like their own. Their original shoggoth biology also makes them easily adaptable to different environments (explanation for why there are so many variant kinds of elves). Due to difficulties with reproduction (and possibly other factors) they are less prevalent than they once were.
  
• Dragons as Shantaks: Large, bird-like flying reptiles from the dreamlands. May be gryphons instead of dragons.
  
• Demons and ghosts as Nightgaunts
  
• Dwarves or halflings as Voormi: Small shaggy humanoids who worship a lazy, slimy, frog-like god Tsathoggua.
  
• Vampires as humanoids infected by Yog-Sothoth: It is the gate, interfacing with physical reality like a virus. Those infected attempt to drain life and energy in order to open the gate.

Admittedly some of these I've given varying degrees of prior thought to, or have been explroed before by others. Anyway, I've already got some ideas for a more developed version, but I think this isn't a bad start.

30 Day Challenge Day 19-20 Druids and Crossovers

A bit of an update before I jump in. I think I'm finally getting back into tabletop! I'm on the verge of getting a local group together, and I'm also hoping to do some stuff with my old discord group (if you're at all interested and aren't in my discord group, feel free to ask me about it!).

Life is still stressful and uncertain, my fellowship is basically wrapped up, and I'm in the job hunting phase (if you're in NYC and your company happens to be hiring for Data Engineering, Data Science, or Machine Learning Engineering...). I have a bit more free time and flexibility now but that may change quickly once I land a job. Alternatively, maybe once I have a job and by extension a work/life balance and less stress, maybe I'll start posting more.

At the end of this 30 day challenge, I'm going to try to do a two post a week schedule, where at least one post will be expanding on one or more of my ideas from the challenge, and another post may or may not be more of that (I have at least one more appreciation post part-way prepared). I'm hoping that just by virtue of prepping for my games I'll have other stuff to put on the blog as well.


So "Day 19" will be Druids:

• Dragon Druid: They are naturally attuned to dragons
  
• Urban Druid: They see the nature, the system, of a city as a distributed organism
  
• Zygotic Druid: Fungi, and specifically yeast. They are attuned to things that ferment. They "breathe" sugar rather than oxygen
  
• Star Druid: They are attuned to the nature of an alien world
  
• Necro Druid: They are attuned to death, not life. Desert, tundra, the vacuum of space. Absence. Null. Unbeing
  
• Anthro Druid: They see the nature in people. They are the Platonic Prototype of their species.
  
• Arcane Druid: Not a wizard. They are attuned to the origin, the nature, of arcane magic.
  
• Divine Druid: Not a cleric. They do not pray to a god or gods, they are more like an avatar of the concept of divinity. A Neil Gaiman druid, if you will

Ok ya, pretty happy with this. The urban druid is basically my anti-cancer druid concept from waaay back in the day that I don't think I explained well and I'm not sure people are into but I'm going to keep pushing it. I guess I've done zygomancers before. Still, mostly relatively original stuff.

"Day  20" is going to be crossovers. I really enjoyed my Marvel/DC/MHA/OPM/Valiant FASERIP one-shot. I think there's something fun about a very deliberate crossover- not some "our universes collide" lazy crossover, but a "how do these parts fit together into a coherent and interesting world" crossover.

• Lord of the Rings and X-men: It could also be Forgotten Realms, or even GoT, I'm just interested in the idea of dealing with the issue of Mutants in a fantasy world, and if or how the "mutant metaphor" would play out in a fictional or anachronistic setting
  
• Daredevil/Marvel and TMNT: Obvious reasons if you know anything about TMNT
  
• Lovecraft and LoTR: Given that they are philosophically so different, this crossover could be interesting. Alternatively, I've seen some cool fan theories for GoT and Lovecraft...
  
• Evangelion and Darling in the Franxx: DitF is the closest thing to a spiritual successor I've seen to eva, and both deal with issues of psychosexual development and childhood in interesting ways. It would be interesting to think about how those themes would come together in a singular setting and still be coherent. Would new themes emerge?
  
• Star Wars and Transformers: There's nothing deeper here, it would just be cool

Hm... not as happy with this one. I think it would be easy to do "X-men and X" or "Lovecraft and X", which I wanted to avoid, but then that was all I could think about. I do think there's a lot more to mine here with this idea of purposeful crossovers. The first one, not specifically LoTR, but X-men in a fantasy setting, is actually a one-shot I want to do on discord...

30 Day Challenge: Day 17-18 Ways of Doing Magic and Odd Animal martial art styles

I've been bad about weekends, so again I'll be doing two today, two tomorrow.

Following up on Semiurge's suggestions, I'm going to try to come up with some ways of doing magic (e.g. Vancian, divine/prayer, mana, etc.). This is more conceptual than explicitly mechanical, but there is still sort of an inherently mechanical component and I often struggle with combining those things, so I have a feeling this is going to be a rough one...

• Morse code eye blink magic
• Magic as code
• Magic as machine learning (playing off the idea of magic as metaphysical entities, except instead of spirit creatures, magical beings are trained neural networks)
• Libertarian self-actualization paladin
• Magic where you gain power by defeating monsters, and can summon the monsters to serve you temporarily, but then you lose their power (XP/levels) after expending the summon
• Magic that breaks the logic of the game (magic that involves using mechanics from other games, swapping character sheets, in other ways breaking the meta and fiction of the game)
• Magic that comes from the player having to sing / karaoke (or dance- I recommend including alcohol)
• Magic that comes from the player being drunk and/or high

Ok, that turned out alright. Some of these are ideas I've talked about before but it's a decent set.

And next we have an unrelated idea I came up with, for Shaolin-style martial arts based on odd animals (no serpent, crane, or monkey here...)

• Pistol Shrimp style: Gun-kata
• Mantis Shrimp style: SMASH!
• Hyena style: Laughing, banter, using noises as a way of manipulating your opponent
• Squid style: Use liquids (when present) or in some other way try to blind your opponent
• Ostrich style: Emphasis on strong kicks
• Walrus style: Sumo-like style
• Orca style: Rhythmic cycling of open-palm strikes based on harmonics 

I think 6 months ago or so when I was watching a ton of David Attenborough documentaries this one would have been better, but I think it still turned out alright. It would also be fun to follow up on this with martial arts styles based specifically on D&D / fantasy monsters.

30 Day Challenge: Day 16 Domesticated "Animals"

Semiurge once again gave me some good prompts (as a comment on Day 12-13), so i'll try to explore these soon. I think I'll start with domesticated "animals":

• Like a dolphin, but skinnier and covered in a thin layer of fur, and walks on dog-like legs
• A dog-sized parrot with a raptor-like body that hops but cannot fly*
• A hairless metallic blue cyclops monkey with swirly-pads on its hands
• A stunted frog in a large but permanently tadpole-like state. Playful and surprisingly intelligent
• A techno-organic creature, vaguely like a cat. Because of some weird noise in its training data and some issues with convergence in the layers of the neural network, it occasionally freaks out for seemingly no reason (like a cat)
• A basilisk that's had its gorgon-abilities removed
• A lobotomized goblin
• A goblin-dog (a goblin subspecies that has been bred into a grotesque, Cronenbergian dog-like form)
  

I'm pretty happy with this list, and again I think outside of the five-minute challenge, with a bit more research and work this could be a cool concept for a future post. Thanks semiurge!

* This is a real thing and it's kinda cute but also freaks me the fuck out because I have a weird thing about birds, but anyway I'm not sure why this doesn't show up more in fantasy fiction because it looks like it should.

30 Day Challenge: Day 15 Two-Player Characters

The recent goblin punch post, The Mother of Osk, had me thinking of concepts for characters played by two players, or two characters in one body, that sort of thing. Some of these I've done or talked about before, but whatever, here are some rough concepts for two-player characters:

• Intelligent mimic armor
  
• Two-headed ogre
  
• False Warlock patron (a psychic, extradimensional, or physically parasitic entity granting powers to a "warlock"- not actually a god or demon or anything like that)
  
• Matryoshka mutant: Identity-within-identity-within-identity, each with some unique ability
  
• Alt to above- Mutant Menagerie: A psychic prison or zoo contained in the character's mind from which special abilities can be co-opted. One psychic entity has escaped...
  
• All at once: A character across multiple moments in time existing simultaneously.
  
• Living system: A living idea, a living institution. It's constituent parts may or may not have identities of their own, but collectively they serve a greater consciousness they may or may not understand or even be aware of.

Some of these are a bit high-concept and might need some work to bring to the table, others I think are pretty much good to go as is. Anyway, this is a really cool concept that I'd like to flesh out more in the future.

30 Day Challenge: Day 14 Animaloids

We all love centaurs, satyrs, minotaurs, naga, etc., so this is going to be five minutes of vaguely humanoid, animal combinations.

• Upper half orca, lower half hippopotamus
• Upper half frog, lower half giant rabbit
• Upper half barracuda, lower half humanoid
• Upper half humanoid, lower half ant
• Upper half humanoid, lower half centipede/millipede
• Upper half praying mantis, lower half humanoid
• Upper half feline, lower half eel
• Upper half cephalopoid, lower half canine
• Upper half harpy eagle, lower half humanoid

Weirdly I forgot birds right up until the end 0.o. Anyway, obviously I could have gone much faster if I had just written out a bunch of animal combinations randomly, but I tried to actually think them through a little bit. It could be fun to give each of these a more fleshed out blurb down the line and not just the bare-bones as presented here.

30 days may be a bit overkill but I feel like I should follow through on this challenge just for its own sake, but at least it's giving me plenty of project seeds to work on for future posts.

30 Day Challenge Day: 12-13

Making up for the weekend still, I've got two challenges today!

First up, elementals:

• Shit elemental: An urban legend in the sewers. An amorphous thing, stewing in the drains, streaming along the walls, best identified by its scent. A cog in the biomantic network machine.
  
• Spice elemental: The fragrant essence of  the dried and crushed young of treants and other intelligent plants.
  
• Herb elemental: The leaf, the organ of breath and food for a plant, in elemental form.
  
• Fruit elemental: A vehicle of sugars sacrificed to vicious animals in order to spread its seed, the fruit elemental is the ultimate form of plant expansion.
  
• Machine elemental: Is it a golem, an AI, an android, or a machine god? It is not merely a machine, but the concept of machine brought to life.

Next, thematic god concepts:

• God of learning from ones mistakes: Appears as an elder, someone with wisdom, with damages from fraught years.
  
• God of self-acceptance: A being both ugly and beautiful.
  
• God of forward thinking: An alien thing, that one finds either disturbing, or intriguing.
  
• God of self-improvement: Always in a state of flux, but slowly, manifesting subtly over years. It can only be perceived by those who have significantly changed at some point in their adult life. Others deny its existence altogether.

30 Day Challenge Day: 10-11

I missed the weekend for my 30 day challenge! I'm going to do two today and two tomorrow to make up for it! I also have another full post that I will hopefully put out some time today or tomorrow.

The first five-minute challenge will be "One Weird Thing" to give your character some distinctive characteristic.

• Wears a watch that is atomically synchronized to another universe
• Irises of the eyes reflect like a mirror
• Skin occasionally flushes with pulses of blood
• Has mineraly or metallic hair or nails
• One eye is like a magic eightball
• Has an animated tattoo (that maybe can also change its form or place)
• Wears an outfit made of their own hair
• Wears a necklace that is actually a mimic

Those ones were ok, I think I'm rusty from the weekend.

Second five-minute challenge will be deranged dimensions (I don't really know how deranged they'll be I just liked the alliteration).

• Alcohol dimension: Oceans of wine, frothy beer waterfalls, whiskey swamps, crystal vodka streams. Alcohol vapors in the air.
• Methane dimension: A gaseous world of gaseous beings and overwhelming odors. 
• Pink dimension: Everything is pink.
• Paper dimension: A world like the paper mario videogames. Everything is a paper cutout or diorama.
• Multi-dimension: Reality is like a split-screen TV or multi-display screen. A day plays out in multiple ways simultaneously and interactively, or a series of days interact non-linearly.

Could use some work, but the last one in particular has potential...

30 Day Challenge: Day 9 Dwarves

I'm struggling for inspiration at the moment, but I've been wanting to come back to my "Traditional" Fantasy tables and maybe do one for dwarves, which I somehow haven't done, so this'll be a warm-up for that.

• Gem dwarves: They are shiny and fabulous
• Fracking dwarves: Masters of subterranean sieges
• Mountain dwarves: Adapted for the mountains, they have a truncated snout like a saiga antelope
• Neanderthal: What we call dwarves are just neanderthals
• Nephilim: The dwarves were created by angels, believing themselves as capable as their god to create life
• Eldritch dwarves: Follow the pantheon of King Oberon, Queen Titania, and their uncouth uncle Tsathoggua
• Space dwarves: Skin shiny with a reflective metal coat, flying on solar kites

30 Day 5 Minute Challenge: Day 8 Unusual Spells

Alright, I feel like this is going to be a tough one, but I'm going to try to come up with spells that are still spells, but maybe operate a little differently than how you usually think of spells. We'll see how that goes...

• Recursion spell: The spell is a trap! If you read it on a scroll or use detect magic on it, the spell infinitely repeats, locking the caster down. It doesn't necessarily have an effect, but eventually the accumulation of magical energy will lead to a violent explosion.
• Memo spell: The spell is cumulative. Every time it is cast, it changes a little bit, in some systematic way.
• Golem: The spell learns, and eventually becomes a living, intelligent spell, a golem spell.
• Null: The spell is neither yes nor no, it defies binary logic.
• Papers, Please: The spell causes two players to switch character sheets (they are still the same character, just with different stats).
• We're playing different games: The spell causes a player to rewrite their character sheet for a different game (just one player). We're all adults here, figure it out.

A couple of these are ideas you might notice I've played with before, but I tried to stick to the rules of the challenge and keep it to mostly things I haven't done before. This list turned out better than I expected.

30 Day 5 Minute Challenge: Day 7 Quirky Superpowers

While I've already done 100 superpowers which I'd like to think are generally better than whatever I'm going to come up with right now in 5 minutes, I want to come up with more. Many of those powers were very weird, high-concept, and bombastic. I want superpowers to be a part of my Aquarian Dawn setting, but in a much more low-key manner, more so inspired by knacks from the Powder Mage books (which I highly recommend), with a bit of YuYu Hakusho Season 3 (?) and just a dash of My Hero Academia  thrown in. This isn't going to be the definite list for Aquarian Dawn, but might jumpstart my thought processes.

On an unrelated note, I had intended to do a post on the Aquarians themselves at some point, where parthenogenesis was going to be (and still will be) a part of their biology, but I got scooped, and he wrote it up better than I could have anyway so I might wait a while to write that up, but there are certainly other aspects of Aquarian Dawn I'd like to get to sooner or later (for the record I think I talked about it in brief in a private discord group somewhere!). I think I have a different take on elves for the setting that could be pretty interesting, and also dwarves, and fey, and I want to talk about this superpowers angle at some point as well.

Ok, so quirky superpowers:

• Emit laser-pointers from fingertips
• Create strobe effect by blinking
• Can disrupt the internal clock of others by one second at a time
• Dream other peoples dreams
• Can see the last thing a dead person saw from looking in their eyes
• Can communicate with a dead person while they are freshly dead, before their synapses go to shit
• Bodily fluids are a powerful stimulant
• Bodily fluids are a powerful depressant
• Their presence makes music sound euphoric
• Objects do not wear when used by them
• Empathize with everyone and everything
• Their qualia is objective reality in the space around them

Not a terrible list, but I think the proper Aquarian Dawn list, if I ever make it, will be more finely crafted.