Superheroes pt.3: Rebis Bondi

tl;dr What if Tsutomu Nihei did a take on something between Iron Man and Doctor Strange? So of course I use other artist and mangaka references in this post instead of Tsutomu Nihei ;). I've been sitting on this draft for a while but was inspired by Semiurge's Assorted Superhero Stuff to finally post this.

Not the best fit for the Rebis Bondi power armor but I googled "biblically accurate angel mecha" as a starting place, found this, and decided it was too good not to use.

Name: Mercury Maimonides

Appearance: Tall and muscular, but not bulky. Long, curly, shaggy auburn hair, brown eyes, and light skin. A straight nose and close-set eyes. Often wears retrofuturistic wraparound sunglasses, a satiny, bedazzled blue trench coat over a black jumpsuit, and red disco shoes.

Costume: The Magnum Opus "Power Armor". Like a baroque sculpture of an androgynous form, with a blue-gold mercurial sheen phosphorescing a mélange of black, white, yellow, and red. Carved into the eyes are the symbol of the squared circle, and on its forehead the symbol Mercury. It has sleek ears reminiscent of the helmet of Hermes, two sets of fighter jet wings, a nanofilament lion's mane, a sharp prehensile oxtail, and eagle talons. Two wheels of similar material spin and rotate around the body, lined with glowing alchemical symbols of squared circle eyes.

Description is more specific, but in my head it's almost like Rahxephon or Zone of the Enders as a power armor.

Powers and Skills:

• Magnum Opus (Power Armor)
• Quintessence Generator
• Akashic Intelligence Daemon
• Morphogenetic Field-Repair System
• Quantum Vacuum Engine

Power Level: ☿

Publication History

Rebis Bondi was first serialized in Adad Magazine of the eponymous anti-anti-art collective in Kingston, New York. Each copy of each issue of the magazine was created from scratch, from memory, as per the Adad Manifesto. Naturally, it did not receive wide distribution, and often two magazines that were nominally the same issue came out quite differently. Few issues were sold, and fewer distributed outside the area of Upstate New York. When Adad Publishing went out of business they had intended to destroy every copy of every unsold magazine in a suicide ritual, however, production editor Sarah Silver, who was holding several "copies" of Issue 6, was fatally struck by a car on that same day, and her family took possession of those remaining issues.

The ensuing media coverage over the publisher / art collective / cult's suicide pact and legal rights over the remaining works imbued Adad Magazine with a kind of legendary status, and from what few issues remained, early internet message boards pieced together (or often wholesale created) the catalog and continuities of the various works, with Rebis Bondi quickly becoming the most popular work. This was in large part due to the cover on one version of Adad Magazine Issue 6, a hand-drawn portrait of Mercury Maimonides with a kind of understated yet layered micro-expression sometimes compared to the Mona Lisa.

The rights to all Adad Magazine properties was purchased by Todd McFarlane Productions Inc. in 1995, and it was this X-Treme version of the property which became a mainstream success, to the chagrin of the online fan community that had formed around the legend of the original magazine[1]. Despite initially strong sales, Rebis Bondi sales dropped significantly after the first year, and the book was cancelled by 1997, and ongoing legal pressure by the Silver Estate, TMP eventually sold the rights to the Silver Estate for a nominal fee.

After a poorly received attempt at a reboot licensed by DC for its Vertigo imprint in the mid 00's, the property remained dormant until 2019 when Fantagraphics made arrangements with the Silver Estate. Although delayed due to Covid, this seminal run became a cultural touchstone of the Covid-19 Pandemic.

Shintaro Kago. The former we will pretend is Mercury Maimonides' environment suit she wears in the Chiral Mirror during the Fantagraphics run. The latter is what happens if she doesn't wear the suit.

Biography

Adad Magazine

Only one version of Issues 3 and 5 and three versions of Issue 6 of Adad Magazine have been preserved. In Issue 3 Mercury Maimonides appears to be in the midst of a psychedelics-assisted alchemical ritual like a Wizard Duel or Hacking Sequence, in opposition to the Machine Goddess. In Issue 5 she fights Grendel in the Rebis Bondi power armor. Issue 6 introduces the Baby's Laughing in Paradise cult, although the BLiP is presented quite differently in each Issue, as though the creative team were refining the concept across each version (see Publication History for more information on Adad Magazine).

Image / Todd McFarlane Publishing Inc.

The second volume of Rebis Bondi was a reboot of the series, more in the style of other Image Comics books of the 90's; sexy, hyper-violent, X-Treme. This version of Mercury Maimonides was a field anthropologist in the vein of Indiana Jones or Lara Croft (although preceding the first Tomb Raider by several months). The Machine Goddess was reinterpreted as her best friend from college and professional rival who becomes the Avatar of the Greek God Athena accidentally corrupted by a computer virus. The BLiP cult never appeared in this volume, although the BLiP M3-2 was reimagined as a demon from Hell in a crossover with Spawn. This Volume ended in a cliffhanger with the Spawn character Angela piercing Rebis Bondi with a sword through the heart and seemingly fatally wounding Mercury Maimonides.

Vertigo

A short-lived version of Rebis Bondi appeared briefly in Brian Azzarello's Hellblazer run before spinning off into a miniseries written by Azzarelo with art by Lee Bermejo. John Constantine investigates the BLiP cult in Japan and has a run-in with Rebis Bondi.

Fantagraphics

The Fantagraphics run saw Mercury Maimonides trapped within the Chiral Mirror, like an uncanny distorted reflection of our universe. The Rebis Bondi could not function in the Chiral Mirror, and so Mercury journeyed to find parts or achieve the necessary conditions to reactivate the armor piece by piece, solving problems through wits alone rather than alchemical power. Due to the chemical chirality of the universe, Mercury required an environment suit, viewing the world through a limiting visor screen, experiencing all senses as transductions of signals her brain could not otherwise perceive. Originally intended as an exploration of embodied cognition, it took on second meaning during the Covid-19 pandemic as an accidental metaphor for the shutdown period and viewing the world through digital screens.

I believe this is also Shintaro Kago, but for our purposes it's the Baby's Laughing in Paradise cult's M3-2 Power Armor (if we pretend the figure isn't Kaiju-sized...)

Villains

Machine Goddess: If history is another place, the ancient and unknowable Machine Goddess is like an alien being. In brief moments, through the projection of tinny recordings of lost lucidity, the Machine Goddess seems to have once been a being of crafts and creation, but now it appears only interested in destruction.

This is a repost of the description of The Machine Goddess from my Aquarian Dawn setting:

Her skin is twilight like the cosmos, dotted like a ginger with the violet-hot light of stars and nebulae. Lines like shooting stars course over her skin, thinning and branching into symmetric fractal patterns, vein-like, violet-whiteness fading into her forearms and hands, and ankles and feet. She has three pairs of arms that move in tessellation. She is covered in metallic armor, smooth and seamless, with lines that reflect and refract in a geometric manner; chitinous. A series of violet-white tubes arch along her back, always bending in uncanny ways, appearing the same when viewed from any angle, appearing detached from space-time when she moves or when one moves around her, or like a dimension unto herself. Her hair is violet-white and composed of straight strands that split into branches, each splitting into self-same branches; frizzy, but in an unnaturally symmetric, perfect way. The upper half of her face is kaleidoscopic, like many shifting spidery eyes, each a reflection of her whole face in miniature, with kaleidoscopic eyes reflecting the whole again, ad infinitum.

Grendel: This draconic cyborg, an ugly, disgusting, slimy creature, is the child of the Machine Goddess, but unlike its progenitor, there is no evidence of lost intelligence or drive to create. It is a being seemingly only of resentment and hate.

I envision Grendel as like the Afterbirth of the Broken Machine Dragon Poltergeist Form from Maximum Recursion Depth. Imagine like Evangelion Unit 1 but where the organic parts and armor are integrated more like a cyborg.

With Machine Goddess and Grendel, am I being lazy for reusing these ideas, or is it Final Fantasy Worldbuilding?

BLiP M3-2: The Baby's Laughing in Paradise cult started as a memestock / shitposting internet community turned LARP in the style of a Japanese death cult that eventually took itself too seriously. The BLiP M3-2 is an AGI robot, the messiah of the BLiP cult... according to cult leader Do No Evil Ape Akira. In fact, the BLiP M3-2 is merely a state of the art power armor worn by Akira like a Mechanical Turk.

The BLiP M3-2 power armor rests in an egg-like holographic fluorescing field. It's shape is like that of an embryo, a curled-up salamander of a body, bulbous outstretched head, beady eyes, and a maroon smile painted on its face. The splotchy colors of greenish-yellow and purple-maroon, patches of rust and oil, all accentuated by the oppressive fluorescent light, give the appearance of a newborn baby or stillborn corpse.

Think Eraserhead baby as a robot. I drafted this months before David Lynch died but RIP :(.

The publication history and biography sections got a bit conflated compared to how the information is usually presented in Wikipedia, but I'm reasonably satisfied with the end result.

Star Trek-inspired Aliens

Recently watched the Paramount+ era Star Trek stuff (besides Strange New Worlds- waiting for that to wrap) and also The Orville. Felt mixed on Star Trek, but even the stuff I liked, it bothered me how few new ideas it introduced.

On the other hand, The Orville, despite clearly being Star Trek with the serial numbers filed off, feels more novel. I believe this is because rather than just having off-brand Vulcans and Klingons, they introduced new and interesting species that feel like Star Trek species. I was skeptical of this show bc I'm not a Seth MacFarlane fan necessarily, but it's quite good.

So this list is intended to be like that. As much as I like truly novel worlds, it's fun also to work within the constraints of an idea, to make something feel like Star Trek, while also bringing novel ideas to it.

Xanthians

This species has the vibrancy of ripe mango, tiger stripes of varying colors, and glowing cat eyes. Their world is idyllic and they evolved with few natural predators, and so most of the evolutionary pressures on their species were aesthetic in nature. They have many synesthetically-linked and hyper-acute senses. They are known for being intuitive, having an artistic temperament, and their culture values the sublime above all else. Even their language is in the form of abstract pictograms and essentially the medium of art; each painting a literal story. While artistic by nature more so than scientific, they are not technologically simpler than The Alliance; instead, they rely on a smaller number of intuitively crafted and irreplicable Wonders, rather than mass production of mundane technology.

Myculons

This species are pink-, blue-, or green-hued, with saturated lip tone that looks like lipstick, white dots across their face, and two fungal antennae reminiscent of "Super Mario" amanita mushrooms matching their skin tone. They are technically a symbiosis of two species, a humanoid and a fungoid, but few of the raw humanoids survive the nuclear hellscape they made of their world long ago. If they live to adulthood in reasonable health, they usually sacrifice themselves to the fungoid, protecting them from radiation and the effects of aging and leasing them a new life. Their original self is preserved in dream-like memories but they are mostly at that point a new being. They have limited verbal communication ability and are awkward by human standards, but can communicate fluently with mycelial networks by touch. The humanoid brain is more like a socio-cognitive mask, their true self is the fungoid, and they often have meta-conscious quirks, tics, or compulsions. When under duress, the humanoid conscious mind shuts down entirely. Other humanoids often find them uncanny, testing the bounds of personal comfort even in the largely post-xenophobic Alliance.

Droma

This species come from a world that underwent dramatic and peculiar atmospheric change at some point in its development, driving the evolution of an organ called the Micro-Atmospheric Selective Kinetic Filter. These "mask" filters are shed and regrown over the span of days, breaking down from a hard shell to plastic-y waste. They often appear to express emotion, or reflect elements of the lived experience of the individual, and are believed to be the linguistic "missing link" of their species. Perhaps because their masks obscure facial cues, they rely heavily on dramatic speech and exaggerated body language. Similarly, the masks limit their ability to hide emotions, and so instead they have adapted to value radical self-expression and openness, making for charismatic, albeit demanding, theater actors, people leaders, and emotional supporters. That said, their radical self-expression can also sometimes be perceived as self-centeredness, or otherwise be overwhelming or off-putting to other humanoids. 

Zab-baz (Semiurge)

Kind of like humanoid anglerfish, only instead of the tiny males fusing to the big females and atrophying into some gonads, the males and the females are effectively the right and left sides of a body, and fuse together to form a whole one. Considered war-like for their instinct towards aggressive consensus-making - they can get very pushy to get you to agree or else get out.

Aurunex

This species of sleek metallic carcinoids evolved on a world of naturally occurring silicon-based life. Their consciousness is highly disembodied, relying more so on algorithmic predictive heuristics than on direct sensory experience, making them significantly faster at processing and reacting to information than most organic life, but also more prone to glaring errors, missed signals, and hallucination. Although their sensory experience is comparatively lo-fi, this cognitive quirk also provides them a rich spiritual existence, and most Aurenex have a deep and ongoing personal relationship with their gods; forests of angular platinum arboroids, kaleidoscopic golden flowers, electric will o wisps, holographic silverfish angels, all slipping in and out of their consciousness at any time, giving them an academic absent-mindedness. They believe that embodied consciousness, sensory stimulation, gut instincts, and emotional outbursts are noise; that the material world is in fact a virtual reality created by a demiurge to trap them, or a god to test them, a distinction upon which many wars and atrocities have been committed.

Ornitheaons

This species evolved indigenously in space, like birds made of plasma. When interacting with most other species, they must wear bio-suits to protect others from the radiation. Creatures without solid form or solid planet, neither self nor state, they lack an understanding of many of the spatial or conceptual boundaries of other creatures. Coupled with their uninhibited curiosity, this can make them difficult companions and crewmates, although invasions of privacy, property, and personal space are not generally intended with malice. Sometimes referred to as Star Children for their god-like power and child-like temperament, The Alliance is wary of their inclusion, but they were too powerful, and too full of potential, to be ignored.

Dynamic Reality Gaming

Dynamicland and Dynamic Reality Overview

As someone who is interested in the intersection of STEM and the arts, I'm a big fan of Nicky Case's blog, and in their most recent post (as of writing) they reference Dynamicland (I would also recommend checking out their youtube).

Tl;dr it's an approach of humanistic computing, taking compute off of a screen and out into the world.

They do this through a tech stack that seemingly involves lighting and cameras, and mapping physical objects to code, it's not open source but that's how I understand it, but anyway it's less about the tech and more about the approach.

The creators seem like brilliant people and they make some profound insights about computation and this notion of dynamic reality (as compared to virtual reality, augmented reality, or of course physical reality).

So Dynamicland inspired this post, but this is about TTRPGs now. If you want to learn more about Dynamicland I'd encourage you to watch their youtube videos.

The TTRPG Stuff

Presumably this is what you came here for. Basically, what are some presumptions about game design that use mathematical or linguistic abstraction, that might be better represented visually or kinesthetically?

Character and Inventory Management

You ever lose track of your abilities and items? Not anymore you don't.

Meet Orcus Johnson. He has a laser axe (A1), shoulder mounted blaster (B2), and the Johnson Crown (C3). More details can be found mapped to those keys.

It would probably be both easier and more in the spirit of DR to use a hand drawn figure, or like some combination of a drawing, paper cutouts, tokens, minis, etc., but I'm still a very digitally oriented person. Also, if you can draw, you can do something besides a stick figure.

It would be especially fun to do this for Mecha.

Wounds

We were talking about this on my discord server so that's part of what came to mind. The idea of having targeted attacks, like being able to wound arms, legs, etc., with various status effects like burning, bleeding, acid, always sounds like fun, but it can be a huge pain to keep track of. Until now.

We can see clearly that Orcus Johnson has lost his leg and is bleeding profusely. Additionally, Thor Goldberg struck him with lightning and he is now electrocuted and stunned.

The point here is not to get rid of the mechanics or math or whatever, this figure corresponds to bleed effects, lightning effects, etc.; it's not less crunchy, it's just more immediately identifiable what is happening. Rather than a bunch of abstract numbers or words and having to dig through it all, you can see very clearly what's going on, and then trace it back to its references.

I'm not really into crunchy games anyway, but if I were to try to reincorporate some crunch into my gaming, I'd probably try things like this.

Heaven's Gate Academy: An Interodelic Adventure

Followup to Into Interodelia: A Probiotic Drug Cocktail Adventure [Campaign Setup]. If you see something with a *, it's a reference to the first post.

Thanks to Dan of Lacrimis Draconis for proofreading and moral support.

Heaven's Gate Academy
Everyone knows that life is suffering and the world is broken. It's just that you're a little more broken than the rest of the world. Or, that's what the world is telling you. The mission statement is that they're going to fix you, but nobody really maintains the pretense on the inside.

Bad things happen inside the Academy, seriously. Violence, dehumanization, indoctrination, forced biochemical and body mutilation. It's some real dark shit. You've been warned.

Even so, some people are actually happy here, or better off at the very least. I don't know what to tell you, you'll just have to roll with the messiness of it all. At least it's campy too. Just wait until you see Mr. Doctor Priest's Enochian Cyber-Cock.


The Academics of Movement
You are always being monitored inside the Academy, except when you're not. During the day you will have two supervisors, and at night just one, and you can only go where they let you go. You'll spend most of the time in The Dorms.

Fortunately, space and time are relative, and therefore so is movement. You can always escape inside yourself in the Positive Plane*, or dissociate into your own holographic rainbow shadow, the Negative Plane*.

Where there is uncertainty or contradiction, you may find respite. But you have to be willing to sit with the discomfort of the unknown, like balancing on a bench of arrowheads.


The Teleology of Interodelia
Remember, this is all magic. Which is to say, a drug trip of misremembered memories. And only some of those memories are your own.

The goal is to escape, and this is agreed upon, including by Heaven's Gate Academy, although they won't just let you do it, what would be the point in that?

But anyway, when the trip ends and the magic's gone, you will escape. You were always going to escape. It's really more in how you do it.


The Dorms
In addition to yourselves, other dormmates include Carolina*, Del*, and Rabid Dog. Jakky* will come and go as he pleases. There are other dorms as well, but this one is yours.

The Dorm is a small nondescript living room, a couch and tv, a narrow hallway, and a few rooms of bunk beds, each with their own bathroom. They're not so bad, but there's only so much to say about them. Which is unfortunate, because you'll be spending a lot of time here.

The PCs' and NPCs' room assignments should all be mixed. I know that might seem inconvenient, but sometimes that's just how it goes.


If you room with Del, keep in mind, he's generally a decent guy, but sometimes he can be mean, or want to roughhouse, sometimes a little too rough. Del isn't violent by nature, no more so than anyone else, that's just what the trauma did to him. And once Del gets riled up, then Jakky follows shortly afterwards, and then it's a real problem because Jakky's a fucking ghost tiger who thinks he's people.


If you room with Carolina, she really is kind and sharing. You can see how the world would chew her up. It's not that she can't defend herself, she's actually tougher than you'd think physically, you'll find out for yourself if she ever gets her hands on any drugs, it's more a personality thing. She's also smarter than people think. People treat her like she's stupid but she's not, she just doesn't show it the way other people do.

There is one and only one true fail state in this game, and that is if you help Carolina escape. Incidental* will remind you of this fact in case you forget, or get any ideas. Worse, even just helping her, or showing her true kindness, could cause a Calamity*. You were a bad friend, and even in this magically misremembered memory, this failure must be relived.


Not long after you arrive comes Rabid Dog. Never before have you seen such eyes. They’re too-human eyes, full of cold intelligent violence, modern and primal. And should you ever find yourselves unsupervised in the Dorms, and should it seem that a physical altercation might ensue between yourselves and another, then Rabid Dog will intervene to break up the fight, and you will see those hyper-human eyes differently, because then you will see a love purer than you could have imagined, and you will feel joyous enlightenment, and also something like the shame of post-nut clarity, and you won't want to fight anymore, you won't even understand why you wanted to fight in the first place, you might even want to cry. Please, if you would resent a game telling you what your character should feel, just listen to your character, that's all I ask.


If Rabid Dog is ever in The Stables and the only supervisor is Zombie, he will grab a wooden 2x4 and he will bludgeon Zombie until his skull fractures and his spinal cord snaps and then Rabid Dog will run, and he will be captured, and taken somewhere else, somewhere worse, and you will never see him again. But you'll remember his hyper-human eyes.


One of the daytime supervisors is Jesus. He's more rotund than the usual White Jesus, and he's a ginger. Frankly, he's as broken as any of the students are purported to be, and has problematic views towards women, I mean really he's a misogynist, and he's deep into conspiracy theories. I know this all makes him sound unlikeable, but he leaves an impression, he's intelligent and convincing in his own way. He'd start a death cult of his own if he could but he doesn't quite have the charisma for it. But every once in a while he hooks a student into his madness, and even though he has the best of intentions, it doesn't usually end well for them.


The other daytime supervisor is Markov. He's small, wiry, a little past middle aged, bald and goateed, with rough skin, and he always wears sunglasses. He doesn't look that tough, but the students know that if you fuck with him, he will fuck with you back, and you just know you're not gonna win that fight, even if you think you can take him. But usually that's not a problem, because the students love him, he's the Cool Dad who lets you break some of the rules if it means you won't break the important ones. If Corporate ever had a clue they'd have fired him a long time ago, and that would be a shame, but that doesn't happen until after the drug trip ends, so you don't have to worry about it. He'll take a smoke break and mock you when you're jonesing, but it's all in good fun and when he comes back he'll let you sniff the nicotine off his fingers.


The nighttime supervisor is Mountain Dew. He's chill, nondescript. No ambitions, but not too bothered by it. He got his name because he drinks a lot of Mountain Dew and plays videogames all night, or reads comics, or watches hentai. Obviously none of this is allowed, but he does it anyway, and sometimes lets the students join him. If the drug trip would be coming to an end during the night shift, he'll give you drugs and a real fucked up indie comic book, and then you get to have one more wild adventure, recursing through both trips and eventually back up into what we erroneously call the real world.


The Stables
Do you ever wonder if they're called Stables because they provide stability? I don't want to look it up, it's better to wonder.


The Stables hold Majestic Beasts, and you get to take care of them, and learn to ride them. The Majestic Beasts are all large, at least as large as horses, and strong, because if they were small, or weak, someone would abuse them, they'd find a way, so you don't get to have something like a dog, even though that would be nice. I wonder if the Academy learned this the hard way.

The primary supervisor of The Stables is Zombie. He was supposed to go to Heaven, but due to bureaucratic error he's stuck in this broken world a little longer, and they didn't know what to do with him, so he's here. He is intellectually divergent and is legally not culpable for his actions, he has a legal guardian, but anyway they let him supervise The Stables, and he can do that just fine. He comes from a red state and has some regressive beliefs, but if he finds out that one of the students is "a queer" and he otherwise likes them, he'll find a way to rationalize it to himself.

Fat Tony is a student from another dorm, and he has the most experience of the students in running The Stables, and is often allowed to assist Zombie. He's a bully, a huge asshole, and remarkably ugly in an understated way, like he's actually uncomfortable to look at, but it's not from a disfiguring scar or deformity or anything, I mean he does have a disfiguring scar, but that's not what this is about, that's just a coincidence. He just exudes ugliness. Or maybe it's more like extrudes, because it's greasy. If you're the forgiving type you might indulge the question of how such a person came to work The Stables.


The Corrections Facility
At Heaven's Gate Academy sex is forbidden, because sex is life, which means sex is also suffering, and violence.

Every student at Heaven's Gate Academy is forced to take medications that halt their sex drive. And there's a three strike rule; if you get caught engaging in even the most innocent and playful of flirtations, that's a strike, and after three strikes, they use chemicals and instruments to tame you, and then there's no coming back from that.

But you know what? As monstrous as that sounds, some of the students really like it. No longer to be made an object of, no longer to fear that kind of violence, or the implication of it. And likewise, to be free from those urges, to no longer feel enslaved by them, or want to enslave others by them.


The Corrections Facility is managed by Mr. Doctor Priest, who prefers to go by Dr. Priest. He has an Enochian Cyber-Cock that he's really proud of, and always finds "subtle" ways to bring it up or wave it around. What Mr. Doctor Priest doesn't know about his Enochian Cyber-Cock, is that it's very easy to hack with a SQL Injection, because he doesn't actually know how to code Enochian, or really how to code in general, he just kind of muddles his way through it, like many do with life. Even though he's not a licensed therapist, they let him run the mandatory therapy sessions. Many students who would have benefited from real therapy will never get it, because he gave them the wrong idea of what it's about and so they'll wash their hands of it forever, and that's a real shame.


The Dining Hall
The food comes in plastic containers or bins of things made from powder and water, everything wet and greasy and white. There is a notable lack of scent, flavor, and nutrition. It’s filling and makes you tired and accomplishes very little else, but The Lunchlady really does care, and somehow that makes it worse, because you’ll hurt her feelings if you complain about it.

Occasionally The CEO will eat at The Dining Hall (and on those days the food is notably improved), and he’ll talk with the students. It's always a one on one conversation, and he's a very good listener, curious, and thoughtful. He has a clean and unthreatening handsomeness, like a diet Mitt Romney.


The Glassed Desert
Heaven's Gate Academy is located in the middle of a Glassed Desert, Shevet* knows where. The Nuclear God Shevet detonated here long ago, and it's never really been the same since. There's a tragic beauty in this desert in the middle of nowhere, mountains off in the distance. Serene and empty. You misremember it once being quite naturally beautiful, without all the weird baggage and feelings. Now it's all glass and charred vantablack trees, cauterized branch-collars like eyes that see into 無, the contradictory negative space contained within the cycle of being and becoming of existence, and maybe if the circumstances were different, there'd be a beauty in that too. You realize you too can stare into 無 if you follow the line of their sight.

There are also monsters in this Glassed Desert, but it's the people you really need to watch out for. They used to be a family, but after the war, after everything they did and everything they didn't do, there's not much left of them except their failed humanity laid bare, and even still they cling to it, they've learned nothing, and will continue to learn nothing, and that nothingness radiates and destroys everything it touches.


The Threats We Face
Whether on the run or sleepwalking through the day, we face obstacles in our path, inevitable conflicts, and lurking threats.

The Victims: No, they are not survivors, although maybe one day they will be. These are the victims of circumstance. Those circumstances can be anything; sometimes it's a demon in the head. It's not that they don't deserve sympathy or help, it's often the lack of either that got them here, but all the same, they've lost their fucking minds and so you don't know at any time whether or not they will hurt you, or hurt anything weaker than themselves, because that's all they have left to do.

The Inmates Who Run the Asylum: The supervisors are not so different from the students they manage, but they have the power and the students don't, and so even the weakest and stupidest of them is a threat.

Monsters: Because of course there are monsters.

The Outside: The system is designed to keep you inside. Whether on a supervised excursion into town, or escaping into The Glassed Desert, everything is out to get you. The failed humanity of The Glassed Desert despise you the way they despise everything that is not themselves (and also themselves in a different way), the people in town fear you, or they fear what would happen to their town if The Academy fails, or they think nothing of you, just that you aren't supposed to be here and that's enough.

Time: Time is not on your side. The longer you stay in The Academy, the more likely it is that they break you further, or fix you, which may be even worse. The part of you that is a student of The Academy becomes a greater part of your identity, it defines you until you are nothing but a student in this place. Time distorts your personal reality from the inside out like a microwave, like sickness and neurochemical imbalances in the Positive Plane, and rumination spirals and distorted perceptions in the Negative Plane.

Yourself: You are, perhaps, your own greatest threat, whether you can admit it or not.

Wrote the original draft as early as March 2024 (maybe earlier?), made a lot of progress on it for a month or so, then fell off. I had originally intended to gamify it up a bit more, maybe I'll finally do that in some hypothetical future third post.

I was very worried if this post was a little "much", again thank you Dan for advice and encouragement!

Grotesque Gains

Treasure table of grotesque items

#7 and #8 were written by Beneath Foreign Planets

1. An Unkindly Face: The face of an orc warrior tanned into a mask. The face is pensive and still; it is silent only because it is on the hunt. One's eyes turn red, and red is what one sees. The Unkindly Face provokes fear and evokes an inner power, a will to violence.
   
   
2. Spell Golem: Spells are alive, and to cast a spell is to summon the spell for a mere moment. By carving a sigil into a fresh corpse, the spell may come alive for a longer duration, fueled by the body. The spell consumes the soul, metabolizing it to mutate the body into a shape, still vaguely human, suiting its purposes.
   
   
3. Fairy Cell: An innocuous rectangular handheld device of cold iron, glowing and beeping. Inside are fairies, bound in place, the cold iron tortuously funneling their magical energies through miniscule apparati of logic gates.
   
   
4. Vampire Bloodwine: The ancients learned to alchemically transmute vampire blood and holy water into a potent concoction, but the means of its creation are now long lost. Humans who drink the bloodwine temporarily gain the powers of the source vampire magnified, and without any of the weaknesses. The Bloodwine only works if the vampire is still (un)alive, and for the duration of the effect, the vampire will be able to sense the location of the imbiber.
   
   
5. Acupuncture of the Dark Meridians: Acupuncture needles carved from undead bones, their power proportional to that of the undead creature, and its freshness. Piercing these needles through one's flesh, and especially into the bones, into the marrow, unblocks energy through the Dark Meridians, unleashing great power at a terrible Karmic cost.
   
   
6. Trough of the Were-Hog: A filthy thing covered in excrement and rotten corpses. A unique living stench that blasts its way into the limbic system, into memory, a singularity of self and were-hog. Leave the trough out for some time unattended, and consume whatever finds its way inside without remediation. The duration and strength of the were-hog transformation is proportional to the time left unattended, the quantity of edible materials, and the degree of repulsion.
   
   
7. The Cloak of Control: A voluminous mass of yellow and fleshy segmented strings that sprout from the shoulders and drags across the floor. This 'cloak' is made of overgrown and swollen nerve endings. To wear the cloak is extremely painful but it allows the wearer to interface and control the corpses of giant beasts and meat-mechs of their own design.
   
   
8. The Third-Eye Syringe: Made of blackened hihi'irokane, this wicked and wide tipped syringe is designed for the theft and reinsertion of human pineal glands. Those that use the syringe overstuff their hideously swollen cranium with dozens of ill-gotten and semi-calcified pineal glands in a weird bid to boost their psychic powers.

Forgotten Gods

There are so many gods, it's inevitable that some get forgotten. We can forget gods, but let's not forget the people who made them. Contributors will be listed in parentheses.

1. Wailing God of Signal-From-Noise: Like the ability of babies to learn the statistical properties of language through mere exposure that persists to this day, there was once a god in the linguistic dark ages when language first evolved with no fossil record to show for it. This god granted humans the ability to cry and laugh and scream, and to create distinct sounds for different kinds of predators. This god was borrowed from nature, it was not originally a god for humans, and when eventually they found (or created) their own gods, they had no more need for Wailing God of Signal-From-Noise, which is why today humans struggle to understand probabilities and large numbers.
2. Shore-Striver (Wasitlikely): God of those nameless organisms that dedicated their lives to crawling incrementally further onto solid ground, especially those who made it so far they died on the returning stretch.
3. Nameless Mother (Sheepandsorcery): In a cavern, on a mountain, where the dawn just pokes a single rosy finger into the stony crevice, there is a crack along a back wall, smoothed by a long dead creek into a yonic shape, in front of which have been rolled two smooth round stones, one on top of another, small on top, larger on the bottom. The top stone is vaguely rough for in the first age of man hands carved a face into this stone. This is the first god, the first goddess ever invented by mankind and the mother of all the gods, yet she has been forgotten. Time has worn away her identity and this is not even the first time. The one who carved these stones was not making an idol, only something by which he might remember his mother. Now she is forgotten. Now she is remembered forever.
4. Folded-Wrinkles-Blossoming (Archonsmarchon): Back when stars could lie and crows could laugh, people knew how to wrap themselves in their own sagging skins to be remade in the prime of their youth. The god who guided this process was called Folded-Wrinkles-Blossoming, at least to some.
   In this time humanity was abundant, filling every corner of the Earth, yet this abundance was not to our strength - it made us the favoured prey of horrors: the hunting marrowflame, morph-again locusts, and Gib the Goreful being the few that remain to today.
   Humanity rejected their living rebirth, and cried out for Death. Death answered, and was so flattered by our self-offering it evangelized unto our enemies as well, inflicting mortal weaknesses or slaying them outright. It has been favoured ever since.
5. World-Eater (Stygianseas): Bones aren't alive. The cells threaded through them are, and they heal due to being re-engineered, but bones are a mineral. World-Eater is the ancient protist-god of... something, of which biomineralization is a subcomponent. Its a god of structure but not determination. Its form is bulbous shells and tests, frustules and skeletons (both exo and endo) blooming off of each other asymmetrically and irregularly.
   World-Eater has been valued on earth since the first cells began to build biomineralized shells. Those few who remembered it in the first days of the Hominids understood that each flint tool or carved den was also sacred to it.
   All worlds with biomineralization or tool use are in its (un)awareness, but it is at the end of the day a very ancient sort of being.
6. The Antecedent of Falsehoods (Glassziggurat): Who leapt into the mind of the first being that ever slept. It had so much fun there that it lost track of time and vanished when the creature woke.
7. The God of Truth: Many Gods claim to be the God of Truth, but Truth was forgotten long ago. Or really it's more like we turned our backs on it, because it's ugly, and inconvenient. It looks diseased but it's not, that's just the germs inside all of us, even the good ones. Those maggots in its eyes, you have those too, they're eating the skin around your eyelashes right now. It has a dusty, flaky aura, like marine snow, but it's just illuminating that which our consciousness attenuates, all the meaningless murk, the detritus life leaves in its wake. Perhaps it's for the best, good riddance, c'est la vie.

BONUS: An Invitation

I recently did a light purge of my blogroll. There are enough blogs on there still that you may not have even noticed. I do them occasionally, but this time was the most expansive.

Going forward, as a rule, I will not follow any blogs that have a blogroll but don't include Weird & Wonderful Worlds on it.

I don't love how as a side effect of this it disincentivizes people from having a blogroll at all, because I love discovering new blogs through blogrolls and I love the blogospheric interconnectedness that it fosters.

But all the same, that kind of asymmetry has always bothered me. If somebody isn't interested enough in my blog to add it to their blogroll, I understand that it is not necessarily personal and that it is their prerogative to not do so, but likewise, it is my prerogative to not include them either.

One might argue that if blogrolls are just a quid pro quo that it cheapens their value. I disagree. If you add me to your blogroll, I will add you to mine, and I will read your work, and I may comment on it too, and the more actively you engage with my work, the more likely I am to actively engage with yours in kind. Maybe I would have read it anyway, maybe not, but now you know you have one more reader, and potentially more if any of my readers find you, and maybe conversations will form that wouldn't have otherwise, and what started transactionally evolves into something greater.

I'm not as active on the broader RPG/OSR/NSR internet world anymore and that will probably continue to be true; I'm trying to cut back on online stuff in general. That said, if I am on your blogroll and you are not currently on mine, please let me know and that will change.

EDIT: Following up on Semiurge's comment, if the only thing stopping you is technical complexity but the intended sentiment is there, feel free to reach out to me and we can work it out or come to an understanding or whatever makes sense.

Appendix-N for a "Weird & Wonderful" Animist Setting I haven't Written Yet: Pariah by way of Maximum Recursion Depth(?)

I've been slowly conceiving of a "Weird & Wonderful" Animist setting, percolating over the last couple years or so at least. I've probably posted other versions of this idea that I'm forgetting, or at least there are other ideas I've posted about that feed into this. It's probably reductive to solely refer to it as an Animist setting, but I don't know how else to do so that isn't rooted in or going to provoke preconceived notions that I don't mean to provoke, that was the best I could think to do.

In it's current shape it's not connected to the shared setting of Maximum Recursion Depth Vol. 1 and MRDVol. 2 directly, but I see it as spiritually connected. Whereas MRD Vol. 1 uses as a metaphor Buddhism and the satire of Journey to the West, and MRD Vol. 2 uses as a metaphor Judaism and my thoughts on Jewish American Identity, this is more so inspired by Animism and Humanism from paleolithic, neolithic, and indigenous cultures both historically and in modern times (acknowledging modern indigenous cultures are not "living museums"). But just as with MRD Vol. 1 and 2, spinning those metaphors into something distinctly and unambiguously my own. I don't want to hew too closely to any specific belief or culture, because I don't want to misrepresent them (I'm already worried about some of my terminology and explanations here, but hopefully the intent comes through) nor risk appropriating them. They are inspirations in a distilled sense, and if you've read anything I've written before, hopefully this is all clear. Anyway... 

The single-sentence pitch might be: Pariah by way of Maximum Recursion Depth(?)

The Appendix-N ended up being so long, and the setting itself still so nascent, that I'm actually going to post this first, you all can digest it, and then later I'll post about the setting and you can try to interpret it from this lens.

It might be a fun exercise to consider what world you might create for yourself from these disparate inspirations.

Appendix-N

I already feel guilty if I forget someone or chose not to include them, but so it goes :/. Also, if you're reading this in the future, hopefully I've since read some of the things here that I reference but acknowledge I have not read yet. And I bet by the time I actually do anything formally with this setting, there will be many more inspirations.

PARIAH (Alone in the Labyrinth). Brilliant setting and arguably the beginning of some of these ideas, from my interview with Semiurge (Archons March On) and subsequent interview with Sofinho. One day I will get back to doing interviews...

Semiurge: To go back to Pariah's setting, it's hit home a bit of what is conventional wisdom for osr settings that didn't previously land for me. The post-apocalyptic, social order has broken down sort of stuff. But in kind of the opposite direction, pre-civilization rather than post-civilization. Smaller cast, smaller world, no big powerful states to exist in the shadow of. More room for weirdos and weird doings.

As discussed in my interview with Sofinho, I also found the Realms and Entheogens in particular deeply inspiring; this weird psychedelic blurring of reality, and defying the preconceived notions and categorical thinking of most kinds of magics, planes, and elements found in many other settings.

Sapiens by Harari and The Dawn of Everything by Graebor & Wengrow. Despite the fact that the latter frequently responds to the former and people seem to put them in mutually exclusive boxes, or perhaps because of that, I include these two together.

Sapiens provides an impressively comprehensive and coherent look at the history of humanity, with some big picture ideas around superorganisms and the nature of religions and ideologies which strongly resonated with me.

Dawn of Everything provides deep and detail-oriented insights into various indigenous and historical cultures, arguing for how things were and how things could be in ways that, while I have some qualms or open questions, I nonetheless find compelling and aspirational.

Ènziramire of On a Majestic Fly Whisk. A brilliant newer TTRPG blogger and academic thinker exposing me to so much more about Africa's cultures, and his own thoughts and ideas. An OSR Aesthetic of Ruin, Have you Met My Ghoulfriend, and Mantismen come to mind most immediately, but all of his posts are amazing.

Ubuntuism the African humanist philosophy. I still have read very little into it unfortunately, since very little of it is readily available, although Enziramire has pointed me to some of Samkange's other works. If Cartesian Rationalism says "I think therefore I am", Ubuntuism says "I am therefore we are". Given the interconnectedness of all people, any one's existence is confirmation of the existence of all others, and the acknowledgment of our collective being. An elegant synthesis of ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. Amazing. Another book on African philosophy I hope to read that Enziramire turned me onto: The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing. 

I assume many of the ideas in that book would fall into the subsequent category below, or outside of either of these categories, which is of course the problem with trying to discretely categorize things like this. I apologize in advance if my categorical scheme between these paragraphs implies any ignorance on my part, but anyway I am not taking these categories as Truths of the universe.

Animism. This is such a broad category that I don't even know where to begin pointing to, and frankly I have not done nearly enough formal reading. I used to be one of those people who thought of animism along a linear spectrum of "progression", but I realize now how mistaken that idea was. As with Ubuntuism, or the Panentheism I see in Judaism, there is an understanding in Animism of the interconnectedness of things, a kind of graph theory by way of spirituality. Some Animism or indigenous culture-related books I hope to read eventually:

• Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs
• How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V. F. Cordova
• Us, Relatives: Scaling and Plural Life in a Forager World (Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity Book 12)

Very much open to other suggestions! I'd also like to read more about Shintoism and the Shinto/Buddhist interaction, indigenous Japanese animism such as the Ainu, and the Jomon era (I am somewhat knowledgeable on some of these things already); Australian, Polynesian, Pacific Island indigenous beliefs (and also the math of their astronomy and naval navigation, if known); Inca, Maya, Olmec, Teotihuacan, Hopewell, and other civilizations of the Americas; Celtic Animism; the list goes on...

Somewhat of a tangent, but I'm also interested in the Animist/Dualist interaction, like the recurring Hero Twins in relation to an otherwise Animist schema in many Native American mythologies, the Ondinonk / soul desires concept of the Wendat which I can find very little about online but read about through Dawn of Everything; some of my thoughts around the Philosophy of Games (see that section further below) intersect with these spiritual and cultural ideas. Likewise, the way DoE describes the historical trade practices in the Americas as being rooted not in market / barter economics as we think of it, but in heroic adventures, art, and spiritual wellness; I believe the interaction between these ways of thinking with various aspects of systems or quantitative thinking is profound and vastly underexplored in modern culture, even among more radical countercultures that I'm aware of. Also interested in the dualism of Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, and Yazidi mythology, but I'm not sure if any of that fits into this so that's entirely a tangent...

Poetry, Manifestos, and Countercultural Literature. A broad category and I'm not sure how to describe it's influence necessarily. Perhaps inspired by my interview with Ms. Screwhead of Was It Likely (and Iconoclastic Flow!). Much of what appeals to me about poetry is its synthesis of structure and aesthetics. Listen to this episode of the Ezra Klein podcast, they explain it better. I've been thinking about numinousness, specifically through a conversation with Semiurge, and I believe that ties into this as well. I've been reading things like James Baldwin and the Beat Poets, and some of the manifestos like The Dada Manifesto, The Manifesto of Futurism, and hopefully soon the The Surrealist Manifesto (I'll also get around to properly rereading The Communist Manifesto some day...). It may not directly influence the setting, but it's influencing how I'm thinking about things generally. All of this talk about numinousness and poetry reminds me that from Semiurge's suggestion, I really need to read Novalis as well.

The Philosophy of Games. I've been thinking about "games" for a while. Inspired by Kondiaronk and the Wendat people (by way of aforementioned Dawn of Everything), the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen (he had a great Ezra Klein interview as well, and he also has a book, Games: Agency as Art which admittedly I have not read yet), Genetic Algorithms, and TTRPGs in the abstract. I also need to read Homo Ludens. In the same way that language and writing have been transformative technologies that meaningfully influence society and individual human consciousness, I believe other transformative technologies have existed, or could exist, and that the pursuit of such is no less worthy than that of any other cultural pursuit, or at the very least is a worthwhile pursuit within the context of creative endeavors, the arts, fiction, gaming, etc.

The Aquarians of Aquarian Dawn. Yes I'm referencing my own setting. I still think there's more to explore with that, and I'm better equipped to do so now than I was a 4+ years ago when I was running that campaign. Mike of Sheep & Sorcery described The Aquarians as like a Fantasy version of the Tau from WH40K. While I'm referencing my own ideas feeding into this, I'm also working on something called The Mycelium Matrix with Huffa, which conceptually feeds into this setting well.

The X-Men Comics, specifically the Krakoan Era, and the Cerebro Podcast by Connor Goldsmith. I've always been a fan of X-Men, but the Krakoan Era has really been exceptional (note that I'm still like at least a year behind and very slowly catching up while simultaneously reading through the Claremont era and other classics...). I love how Krakoa picks up kind of where Grant Morrison's New X-Men left off philosophically, trying to not just fit the X-Men into a metaphor of the status quo, but to elevate them, to explore how the interaction of spiritual, intellectual, scientific, and queer ideas might create something radical and powerful and new, something Weird and Numinous and technomagical, while acknowledging flaws and failings and the ways in which they might be undermined or might undermine themselves. It's one of the most interesting takes on the Superhero Mythology that I've ever seen, and it's amazing how consistent and organized it has been across the entire line of books, many creative teams, over a span of years, which is in itself a testament to the narrative they are telling. There's just nothing else like it afaik; even despite the corporate constraints it tells a more interesting and profound story than most anything else of its kind. It is a profoundly honest attempt to explore a new kind of society. I find it inspiring and aspirational in the same way I find the ideas explored in Dawn of Everything, or those explained below.

Charles Stross' Accelerando and Glasshouse, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of series, and Quipu, or the importance of numinousness, and considering alternative STEM frameworks and the interaction of philosophy and STEM through science fiction or other cultures.

A reductive explanation of Stross and Tchaikovsky, and why I group them together, is that they each explore in a brilliant, imaginative, and at least semi-plausible way, transhumanist worlds, through AI/singularity and animal uplifts, respectively. Return to my quote from Semiurge on Pariah to hopefully at least understand in part the circular relationship between any meaningful exploration of the past and future. I am still reading Glasshouse, and have not read Children of Memory yet.

Semiurge also recently suggested an idea around reconceptualizing our categorical frameworks of knowledge, i.e. the semi-arbitrary distinction between humanities and STEM, suggesting as one possibility the idea of numinousness as a better dimensionality reduction (that's my own paraphrasing of it, using Principle Component Analysis as a metaphor here). Some of this I believe is expressed in his Random Numbers, itself inspired by my Weird Colors. This also gets back to the poetry stuff.

As someone who values STEM / systems-thinking, I also want to explore alternative frameworks of doing so, either from science / speculative fiction as explained above, through poetry and spirituality and in the numinous, or through indigenous or historical cultures. I find ideas like the Inca Quipu's knot-based encoding system and other historical or indigenous maths and sciences absolutely fascinating (including modern indigenous maths [EDITED: Hyperlinking this post from the future (it's lower down in the post...)]), and beneficial to humanity as a whole both in a one-dimensional sense as the net effect of its application, but even more so in the multidimensional profundity that comes in having multiple frameworks from which to think about things, and all the ways one may combine them. Below are a couple books that I admittedly have not yet read but that I hope to read eventually. My exploration of Gematria would also fall under this category.

• Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records (The Linda Schele Series in Maya and Pre-Columbian Studies)
• Mathematics of the Incas: Code of the Quipu (Dover Books on Mathematics)

Norbert Wiener

While he is more so an inspiration for MRD Vol. 2, I continue to think Norbert Wiener is someone more people should be reading. He is the originator of the concept of cybernetics, and also someone who clearly thinks critically and philosophically about the world, with generally leftist/progressive views which he was very frank about, and an excellent example of the numinousness found in the intersection of STEM and philosophy. The Human Use of Human Beings, and God & Golem, Inc. are both fairly short reads and geared towards a general audience, and I would recommend both of them (the former especially).

Finally, many of these ideas have been coalescing through my ongoing conversations with my friend Dr. Flux.

Weird Colors

1. Halla: Like the elation of dancing to exhaustion and the warmth of close bodies on a crisp night.
   
   
2. Dimenoir: Like the fading memory of a dream and bittersweet reminiscences.
   
   
3. Inflaur: Like the compulsion to pick at blisters and the guilty pleasures found in an unjust world.
   
   
4. Psinreka: Like novel sensations and the fleeting satisfaction of solutions.
   
   
5. Gallentia: Like an uncanny presence and unshakable thoughts of unanswered questions.
   
   
6. Iskandalia: Like the awe of collective greatness and the validation in unexpected gestures of love.

Wrote these on the flight home from San Francisco, inspired by the colors in A Voyage to Arcturus which I started reading on the flight. The names were free associated and I tried not to overthink them.

And here are several more contributed by Rook, of Beneath Foreign Planets:

7. Pinznot: A writhing, squamous colour that stings the eyes. Like struggling to sleep only to find your pillow is filled with screeching, glowing worms.

8. Ablanense: A neutral tone like a slow, smokey exhale after waking at sunset. Some call it pastel dimenoir.

9. Prostklint: A hard, inscrutable and disquieting colour. Like waiting for your turn on the dentist's chair or the operating table. Like tight fitting braces, a coffin opening by itself, a pill just too large to swallow.

10. Krinderblesse: Like throwing a book onto a bonfire, the thrill of a toppling statue, the feel of a party just before a fight breaks out.

GLOG Two-Player Class: Ogre

An old and unfinished draft from 2019. Bad Whiskey Games beat me to the punch and my heart wasn't really in it anyway, but this is technically playable albeit incomplete, not a terrible writeup, so here it is for all.

The fearsome two-headed ogres cometh! For creatures so large and formidable, one may wonder why they aren't more ubiquitous. As it turns out, the two-headed ogre has a proclivity for getting in its own way; the perfect counterfactual to two heads being better than one. It's not that they aren't bright, contrary to popular belief, ogres are naturally quite gifted, and many an ogre head has trained in the finer arts of wizardry. However, the ogre bickers with itself so frequently, so tactlessly, so shamelessly, as to give the impression of being an adolescent dimwit. That said, an ogre whose two heads have learned to work in unison is a threat of both brain and brawn, not to be trifled with.

Luneder: https://www.deviantart.com/luneder/art/Two-Headed-Ogre-433111634

Unique Mechanics:

• The Ogre is played by two players! It has two heads but one body, so while they share physical stats, they have separate mental stats.


• The Ogre is a large creature, so adjust dice accordingly.


• The two heads may add abilities from the templates below, or take separate classes. If they take separate classes, only the head that took that class gains the benefit (if this would not make sense for some reason, consult your GM and come up with a reasonable solution).


• The two players choose their actions simultaneously in combat. They should write down roughly what they intend to do and hand it to the GM (or blurt it out simultaneously). The Ogre can attack twice, or attack and cast a spell, or attack and move, but only if moving towards the target. if one head moves away from the target that the other head attempted to attack, treat as a critical fail. Basically, magic resolves first, then movement, then physical attack.


• Outside of combat, the Ogre is assumed to function normally, unless the players disagree on a course of action. They can argue it out (in character, of course) until the GM gets bored, then the GM can make them roll to Punch it Out.


• Punch it Out: A coin flip or high-low on a die. The two heads punch, kick, and wrestle each-other / themselves in a cartoon dust-pile fight for a moment, and then take whatever action the winner of the roll decided. 

Starting Gear:

Template:
A
B
C
D

Superheroes pt.X1: Panic Attack

Had a writeup for a different character for a Pt.2, and referenced a superhero team called Panic Attack as a part of that character's backstory, and I want to come back to that character, but I ended up becoming more interested in Panic Attack themselves. I do really like the wiki-style approach from the first one and this kind of free-associated inspiration is exactly what I'm going for (even if I mostly end up just inspiring myself lol), but I ended up doing some really good short-form writeups for them, so I'm just going to roll with that instead, maybe interchange both formats.

Superheroes pt.1: Vision Serpent

Panic Attack are superpowered individuals connected by The Panic Room, which can appear in any time or place. Members of Panic Attack all seem to have powers involving physical or psychological pain.

https://gifer.com/en/VPy8 Rhett Hammersmith (?)

The Itch

The Itch is the most brilliant person you'd ever know, if they could only think straight for a moment. But always it's there, The Itch, just underneath the skin, gnawing and crawling. The worms exist, they've been assured, it's just that no one else can see them. 

The psychic worms of The Itch evoke cosmic entropy like that moment pouring cream into coffee when the tendrils slither.

Peek (created by Semiurge)

Everybody's got an angle - Peek sees them all.

A woman suffering from agoraphobia. She entered the Panic Room, and never left. She's a sort of mission control for Panic Attack, muttering premonitions and observations while she stares into its corners, nodes of mineral intelligence crusted on and outsourced to her cheeks.

I imagine that Peek is never fully seen, only her eye or a portion of her face at any one time, from a viewslit in her Control Room.

Thiotimolina

The magical little girl shining brightly. She says in a tinny voice, "Here's an easy spell that anyone can cast, even you. A spell to flip causality itself. Malicious things may hide in shadows, but shadows are not the cause of malicious things. We make the shadows in which malicious things thrive. All it takes to defeat the malicious things is to smother our shadows; to rest and bask within the light."

Thiotimolina is a fairy of the mineral intelligence. She is an epiphenomenon of the endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline.

https://www.deviantart.com/merulagfm/art/Cyborg-Fairy-419432766

I'm gonna be honest I'm still not totally happy with how the "spell" is written, hard to balance evocativeness with logic with symbolism, maybe need to dedicate more time to polish it, but I still love the idea. 

The Man and the Monster

They embrace, a stimulating shock, an aggressive tickle, the primal fear of sitting in a tub of wriggling worms or the urethral penetration of the candiru. Squirming critters morph into butterflies fluttering in the stomach, a bloody new sensation. Beyond absolute terror, a novel awareness. A marriage of convenience gone awry, all with one little mistake. A little mistake called Love.

The Horror Frog

Broken bones, flexing phantom limbs in twisted sockets, sharp weapons cutting both ways, and other ways as well. A metamorphosis, a tadpole racing down a one way stream. A wisdom honed in a mangled form ill suited for anything else.

:= (The Walrus)

A poltergeist, an undead dream, the manifestation of a teeth-related nightmare. Temporarily assigned to haunt the Panic Room.