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.

"Weird Genders"

I can't resist a provocative title. These aren't really "genders", but alternative dimensions upon which a species might be organized biologically, socially, or sexually. Galmoxians courtesy of Semiurge.

1. This species has three genders. Titans serve as their habitats like mobile forests. Foresters care for Titans, relieving them of pests and parasites and cultivating a healthy ecosystem. A healthy Titan releases pheromones that allow Foresters to reproduce parthenogenically. Rakes are physically indistinguishable from Foresters, but are predisposed to hyperactivity, curiosity, individualism, and adventurousness. They traverse Titans to romance fresh Foresters. In a successful courtship, they release a pheromone that temporarily transitions a Forester into a Berserker-state, nearly doubling in size and muscle mass and developing reproductive organs to impregnate the Rake, bringing genetic diversity to the Titan's ecosystem.

2. This species has two genders, one like Hominids, and the other like a variety of Trees. Most relationships are either polyanarchic or serially monogamous, and nearly always full of tenderness. Trees navigate the world through spatial reorientation, where the self is a continual growth process operating at a frequency below the Hominids' temporo-perceptual threshold. Their radical differences in how they perceive and operate in the world, and their limited ability to communicate and understand each other, makes their love both tragic and beautiful. Hominids pollinate the Trees and spread the seeds of their fruit, germinated by the enzymes in their saliva.

3. This species are always hatched in pairs. In nature, parents are only able to provide for one sibling, and so they brutally compete for survival. When one sibling inevitably, through luck or circumstance, outcompetes the other to such an advantage that they gain total dominance, the parents will neglect, disown, or even murder the Forgotten sibling in favor of the Chosen sibling. For much of civilization, this practice has been outlawed or frowned upon, and yet the systemic inequality between Forgotten and Chosen is interwoven through the history and persists into modernity.

4. This species has two genders, Lover and Spirit. While one is alive they are Lover, and in death they become Spirit. The vitality of a Lover provides inspiration for Spirit, imparting a portion of their essence inside the Lover so they may reproduce. The unlifespan of a Spirit may be as much as three times that of a Lover, but after each time they impart their essence they undergo significant aging, and each time more so, and it is rare for Spirits to be capable of reproducing more than three times before expiring.

5. This species has the genders of Chess Pieces. They operate like a hierarchical hivemind. Kings are the mind and soul of the hive, and without a King the hive will flounder for lack of thought or inspiration. They are physically limited and must be protected. Queens are powerful like demigods, and often just as petty and needy and prone to in-fighting. Rooks are workers and artisans, Knights are soldiers and first responders, and Bishops are artists and counsel, and all three are asexual. Pawns are weak yet plentiful, and can develop into the other genders as needed, although most Pawns never make it that far in life, or choose not to develop.

6. Galmoxians - Those sultry seducers of the spaceways - do not technically have genders. Or sex. Like all the unusually-intelligent life on their homeworld, they shape new individuals of their species from the primordial and protean slime which pools in its cracks and crevices, through both physical sculpting and bio-electric-chemical interface facilitated through layers of symbiotic micro-organisms.

However there are somewhat analogous societal roles related to a galmoxian's relationship to this sculpting process. Though by no means universal, the most common are typically translated as "fullshapers", who individually create a new galmoxian through the whole process, "raw-workers" who gather the slime, move it to a work-space, and handle the bulkier details, "detailers" who specialize in shaping certain parts of the galmoxian body, and depending on their skill can garner significant fees for this, "students" who oversee and study the creation process without directly participating, and "wreckers" who harass work-spaces, critiquing the creation process and destroying new galmoxians underway in they can breach the perimeter. Stereotypes, expectations, and so on for each role can differ greatly between cultures and classes within those cultures, even while the roles themselves are fairly 

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.

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.

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.

Poltergeist Form Briefs

Along the lines of the Poltergeist Form Hacking post, I thought it would be useful to have a collection of Poltergeist Form Briefs if you need to inject Recurser NPCs into your game. Obviously, you can just use whichever Poltergeist Forms your players aren't already using, but if you want to surprise your players, or open up new possibilities, this should be useful. These are literally just names (with a few exceptions).

These can also be useful themes for regular Rogue Poltergeists or Ashura, but I've found that it's easier for me to frame them all as Recurser Poltergeist Forms.

Also, featuring some guest entries, including one from Semiurge (who wrote a whole blog post on it) and Local Cryptid, who wrote his on the #MRD channel of the NSR Discord Server and who was in my module playtest.

1. Glass Maiden Pixie
2. Chrono Canary Lost in the Time Mines
3. Cave Monster Hoarding Pyrite (as an Ashura)
4. Bloody Fingers on the Run
5. Mobius Hustler
6. Bottom of the Bottle Alchemist (Semiurge)
7. Restless Slumbering Heart Engine (Local Cryptid)
8. Unending Jaw, Hungry Maw (Local Cryptid)
9. Moonlit Walk of the Hound (Local Cryptid)
10. Wild Gaze of Feral Mind (Local Cryptid)
11. Innocent Eyes, Bleached White (Local Cryptid)
12. Liminal Wonderlander
13. Tip of the Tongue Wizard
14. Supernova Vampire at Sunrise
15. Rusting Glitter Fractal
16. Keene-Eyes Homicidal Maniac
17. VR Hunter in Distortion
18. Masochist Beyond Spacetime
19. Angel like a Devil like an Angel
20. <Danger Message>

Inverted Monsters

I moved a couple weeks ago, from Bushwick to LES, but still, it's taken up a bit of my mental focus and actual time. Love the new neighborhood and new apartment, but anyway, haven't been able to blog or think creatively, although I'm starting to get back into that headspace. I've been sitting on this draft for forever, wanted to do 8+ but got stuck trying to come up with an inverted dragon that felt sufficiently equal in substance to a dragon itself, so I'm just going to post with a clean 6 and maybe pick it back up later if people are into it.

Also, in the time since I first drafted this... I think the writing could be stronger, but I'm not going to worry about that for now. However, I've also become a better game designer, so I'm now adding in a "How to Use" section. If I were to revisit it, I might rewrite them entirely with more flavorful but brief descriptions and adventure hooks rather than a "how to use" section, but for now, this is what it is.

As always, I'd be interested to see other people's ideas as well.

This post is inspired by Bastionland / Chris Mcdowall's Inverted Monsters. It's a cool, simple concept, and I thought I might take a stab at a few of them. The idea is to take a traditional fantasy creature, identify its core features, and invert them to create a new creature.

As is often the case with me, I struggle to stay within the lines, but if nothing else this should be a jumping-off point for some hopefully decent ideas.

Skeleton / Lich

• Bones
• Undead
• Evil

Becomes Fleshboi

• Tubby
• Large adult-sized toddler (full of life)
• Good

Fleshbois are evil creatures that have been purified and reincarnated. They are full of love and good intentions, but still, they have the mind of a child in a magical, powerful, nigh-impenetrable tubby body, and they are prone to violent tantrums.

How to Use:

• Fleshbois can make for good obstacles as they generally cannot be overcome through sheer force, nor through reason, and as such innocent creatures, there is a moral quandary to consider. 
• There is also a risk/reward component. Upsetting them could turn them back into skeleton mages or liches, so there's a big risk. However, as a child, if they grow to love the players, they can be a powerful long-term ally.

I have no idea what tap zoo animals are but this dragon mongoose is pretty good for Shrouding Mongoose

Basilisk

• Petrifying stare
• Serpent-like reptile
• Multi-legged

Becomes Shrouding Mongoose

• Spotlight enshrouding
• Mongoose-like
• No appendages

Shrouding mongoose slither on the ground like serpents. They create a distortion field in their entire visual range which disables and enshrouds everything except whatever they are visually focusing on. 

How to Use: 

• They are often used to counter basilisks; a basilisk in the range of a shrouding mongoose will have nothing to petrify so long as the shrouding mongoose focuses only on the basilisk.
• The visual distortion fields they create can also have tactical applications for other kinds of conflicts; one could imagine Shrouding Mongooses accompanying army units or scouts.
• They could also be an interesting threat in their own right, where the fight is less about rolling well, and more about figuring out how to hit the Mongoose you can't see...

Goblin

• Small
• Mischievous
• Child-like intelligence but mechanically inclined

Becomes Hobbe

• Large
• Advocates of the social contract
• Philosophical but narrow-minded and uncreative

The hobbes are a bugbear-like species that has developed a technologically simple but philosophically advanced civilization. Despite their chaotic or perhaps even evil nature (if you believe in such things), they are surprisingly orderly and peaceful, but this peace comes from a well-understood, borderline fascistic social contract. They have absolutely no tolerance for crime and are therefore skeptical of outsiders. While highly intellectual, it is nearly impossible for a hobbe to change their perspective, and most of their dialect is geared towards justifying their own preconceived notions.

How to Use: 

• The hobbes may have some key information the party needs, or maybe the party is just passing through, but are enticed by some McGuffin. There should be some temptation or even necessity to break a rule, and so the players need to either not get caught, or figure out how to skirt the rule.
• Or maybe it's an individual hobbe or small group of hobbes that the party has to deal with within some other context.

Mimic

• Mimicry
• Grotesque toothy maw
• Amorphous

Becomes Potter

• Carves, molds, and shapes people into things
• No mouth
• Rigid form

Potters are humanoid figures that appear to be shaped from clay or metals and carved and shaved to form. They are rigid, with limited points of articulation. They have no mouths, or their mouths are non-articulate and only aesthetic. They have a psionic knife that they can use to carve living things, and they can reshape the parts in a magic kiln or smith. They like to turn people into treasure chests, weapons, armors, trinkets, and treasures. That chest you just looted may be the last adventurer who tried to crawl this dungeon...

• Potters would work well for a horror scenario. An unassuming doll in a creepy dungeon that's psychically picking off isolated hirelings.
• The creations of the potters which stalk the dungeon may be mannequettes or like creatures.

Flumph

• Jellyfish-like (amorphous, tentacles)
• Psionic-feeding / empathetic
• Anti-gravity

Becomes Hpmulf

• Urchin-like (rigid, spiny)
• Psionic-nullifying / unemotional
• Super-gravity

Roughly human-sized urchin-like neutral evil creatures. They are fixed points in the universe, and instead of a means of physical mobilization, they relocate by bending spacetime around themselves using their innate super-gravity engines. The "hpmulf" sound this super-gravity engine makes is where they get their name. Super-gravity also bends the astral plane, effectively nullifying psionics. They are incapable of linguistic communication or empathy of any kind and have few desires beyond meeting their own selfish, biological needs, so they are often mistakenly believed to be a mindless blight, but they are actually excellent problem solvers. In conflict, they will always prefer to fight rather than flee, unless the odds are unambiguously against them.

How to Use:

• They are like a superswarm. They have weird space-timey abilities, neutralize psionics and maybe some magics, are hard and spiky. There's nothing here that doesn't exist elsewhere, but they're an all-in-one obstacle / debuff / violent threat / weirdness generator.
• They are deceptively intelligent. Perhaps in the first stage, they are just a mindless superswarm, but whatever initial solution the party conceives in facing them, they then adapt.
• While an adventuring party could encounter a small group of them, I think they would work better for a domain-level game or as a threat to an entire region.

Minotaur

• Upper-body bull, lower-body humanoid
• Mazes
• Eat people

Becomes Mycenaetaur

• Upper-body humanoid, lower-body bull
• Navigators
• Vegetarian

Although they look like large centaur, mycenaetaur are more closely related to minotaur. They are nomadic plane grazers, known for their unbreakable phalanx armies. They have advanced visuospatial skills and the innate ability to navigate complex spaces efficiently using graph theory. They unconsciously employ algorithms such as breadth-first search and A* to navigate spaces.

How to Use:

• Help a party navigate through confusing terrain or a maze.
• Potentially good allies if their planes buffer the kingdom, given their navigation skills and armies.
• Consume large quantities of vegetation; possibly zero-sum with the resource needs of the kingdom.
• Mercenaries.

Semiurge-style Generator: Fantastic Flumphs

Inspired by my interview with Semiurge, and as a means of procrastinating on other things I really want to / need to do but am feeling suddenly burnt out on, I have created my first Semiurge-style generator. This is a D6xD6 generator for everyone's favorite monster, the fantastic flumph!

Feast your eyes on the fantastic flumphs!

Generator Tools by Meandering Banter

Semiurge: Weird & Wonderful Interviews

I spontaneously decided that I wanted to start doing interviews, so I interviewed Semiurge of the blog Archons March On. His random generators are some of the most creative and useful tools in all of the OSR, and I genuinely believe Semiurge to be one of the most talented and creative bloggers in the OSR blogosphere. I enjoyed this conversation quite a bit and would potentially like to do more interviews like this. If you enjoy reading this and would like to see more, please let me know!

Why don't you start by telling me a bit about yourself and the blog.

• Semiurge: Re: Introductions, I'm semiurge, my blog is Archons March On, it's mostly random tables.

Why did you start the blog?

• Semiurge: Honestly it's incredibly petty.
• Max: Ooh I'm intrigued...
• Semiurge: The r/d100 guy automated one of my tables and put it on his website (with my permission of course), and the link to the automated table got more attention than my original one. So I thought why not start doing the automating myself, found Spwack's thing, and the rest is history.

What are your inspirations?

• Semiurge: Recently (as in the last few months) it's been other people, bouncing ideas off them like the Ping Pong Challenge I did with Rememberdismove, doing prompts, riffing off their formats/ideas
• Max: I remember that ping pong thing you did, that was pretty cool. I don't know Rememberdismove outside of that event, but it was cool to see.
• Semiurge: Rememberdismove's a must-read I'd say, deserves to be up there with Goblin Punch/Monster Manual Sewn From Pants/etc. If my memory's right I think they're where I got the 5x20 table format from.
• Max: Wow, that's quite a compliment. I will have to take a closer look at their work. I can't remember when exactly that challenge happened now, but I think I may have been a bit disengaged from the RPG scene at the time.
• Max: What about prior to the last few months? More generally?
• Semiurge: As dissatisfying an answer as it might be: just about everything I've ever experienced. My memory's not great on specifics, so after a while it just lumps together into the same mash. Occasionally I get good stuff bubbling to the surface.
• Max: No worries, my memory is the same way.
• Semiurge: Kenneth Hite, particularly his Suppressed Transmission series, definitely informed my writing. Conspiracies, freewheeling free association, weird secret history. Weirdly enough I'm not sure if the stuff I've read and enjoyed reading makes it into the part of my brain that inspiration comes from. At least reading like books. Blogs do.
• Max: That's interesting, can you elaborate on that? What is it about blogs vs books? Is it a context thing you think? Or actually something about the medium?
• Semiurge: Part of it's probably that blog posts are more modular, you can take each on its own and really mine it for ideas, a full longform work is more entangled.
• Semiurge: Wait got one more thing for settings: Tattered Realms, for Song of Swords, it's got like five types of elves in a medieval Europe pastiche yet still blows most others out of the water. There's an anemic wiki but if you namesearch Jimmy Rome on 4plebs or another /tg/ archive you can get the direct stuff. How could I forget this one?! Long live the Invincible Republic of Dace!

Many of your posts are these very specific, multi-layered generators, which produce all sorts of weird and wonderful results. What about this format in particular appeals to you so much? What is your process?

• Semiurge: The biggest from the start is that because each individual line's so small you can drop the tables and pick them up again whenever. So I can't lose the thread like I do for the dozens of longer drafts I have lying around.
• Max: Oh ya, the struggle is real in that regard.
• Semiurge: It can be a fun puzzle too, coming up 3,200,000 possible combinations, none of which contradict themselves. I've done so many it's meditative at this point, like combing a rock garden.
• Max: But still, it is impressive how you can take some really specific idea, like... (searches through your index for a random post) headstrong helmets, and have five tables worth of stuff that can combine in all sorts of ways, and each one is interesting and coherent.
• Semiurge: Magic loot's usually one of the easier ones to do. Except for boots, which has languished unloved.
• Max: I can get the meditative aspect, when I'm in a good flow I feel that with my process as well. But there is really nobody I can think of that does what you do, and certainly not as well as you do it, so I'm just genuinely curious how you do it.
• Semiurge: Only so many interesting powers you can tie into boots
• Max: lol really?
• Semiurge: Yeah let me check it. Yeah just walk unharmed on oozes/lava/other mostly-fluids. Also I don't like reusing fantastical materials. Defeats the purpose of the creative exercise part of the form. So now that I've exhausted all the low- and medium-hanging fruit I'm on to like.... giant's toenails or whatever.

Do you worry that you'll run out of sufficiently original or interesting premises for these tables?

• Semiurge: Yes and no. It's harder now that I've used up most of the monsters and whatnot with broad enough thematic resonance to milk a hundred entries out of in an afternoon, but to reiterate it's a creative exercise in a pretty much literal sense. You start off doing 5 sets of 20 vampires, work your way up to oni, gnolls, time-travellers. The challenge is part of the point and the fun for me. Re: thematic resonance, I posted on your blog the other day how I find elves to be more of a feeling than a specific creature. Like everything from Keebler to Sindar. Do elves live in the woods? Where else could elves live that wouldn't be out of place for this feeling of "elf"? What's kind of like a forest? And so on. Same logic for everything else. What's a (D20x5) Place(s) of Pilgrimage (coming November 2022)? How much can I stretch and play with that idea? The web serial writer Wildbow came up with what he calls a pivot for this sort of thing that I find useful. It's like "nail down a concept as a set of points, then switch one of those up".
• Max: Ya I totally get what you mean. It's like, most people, if they're thinking about it at all, are thinking about an Elf in the mean average (the cognitive neuroscientist in me would call that the Prototype), or maybe as a single modal representation (the Exemplar). Your tables really deconstruct the concept of (in this case) Elf by saying, how many features can I create, where I can randomly combine them, and they're all still Elf, while also being unique. I'm not familiar with that web serial but that's an interesting idea.
• Semiurge: Wrt the pivot thing because that's a scrawny explanation. Take dwarves: Dwarves dig underground, dwarves are greedy for gold (for a shorter set). How do they dig? Typically like human miners, but maybe these dwarves are more like moles or worms. Where can they dig besides underground? Maybe into giant trees, like big hairy termites. What's kind of like digging? Maybe they dive into the ocean in bronze submersibles, hunting leviathans in abyssal trenches. Etc., et cetera.
• Max: Did you come up with those just now? Damn, those are good.
• Semiurge: Thanks.
• Max: I have very little restraint and when I try to do these kinds of deconstructions, I almost always tow way over the line lol. There's definitely a science to it.

What are some of your favorite systems and settings?

• Semiurge: I'm going to try to avoid the ones that a lot of people probably know and also like already (e.g. Centerra).
• Max: Fair enough.
• Semiurge: I've been playing with Sofinho (of Alone In The Labyrinth) in his Pariah game the last couple months, and that's been great. It's this neolithic, animistic, on the verge of agricultural revolution setting. The system's fast and simple, I think like a cut-down B/X with a bit of Spwack's Die Trying (at least the Xs system). I like anything simple and fast, and don't generally like learning new systems. When I was a kid I could blaze through and memorize all that 3e D&D, world of darkness stuff, now it's like just keep it to 100 words or less to start off.
• Max: I totally agree about not wanting to learn / play really complicated systems anymore.
• Semiurge: Another setting, which is a bit of a cop-out because it's stylized history, is Shigurui. One of the best stories put to paper. Set in early Tokugawa Japan. The way the social expectations and dynamics are so cloying, like a lead blanket on every character. Feels dominating in a way that fantasy settings usually don't, closer to real life in the weight and density of it. And yet very different from modern society.
• Max: I am not familiar with Shigurui, but you make such a bold claim now I feel compelled to check it out.
• 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.
• Max: Ya, I've sat on some "stonepunk" ideas, but never quite felt like I had a strong enough grasp of the implications of pre-history to do it justice. And anyway, I don't think I thought of this parallel in quite the way you're suggesting, or at least you're making it now more salient. Dang, you are really good at making everything sound interesting! Although I guess I already knew that. I was passively aware of Alone in the Labyrinth but I will have to start making a more active effort to follow the blog now.
• Semiurge: Wildbow's stories too, to reference him again, are also neat. I maintain that if osr superheroes were to be a thing then Worm & Ward would be the base to build them off of setting-wise.
• Max: I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with Worm & Ward. Is it something from the campaign you were mentioning? I am, as you probably know, a fan of superheroes (although I've been struggling with my feelings on that recently, but that's a conversation for another time), and I know there are plenty of others in the OSR who are also into superheroes, but in a lot of ways supers are a bit antithetical to many of the common conventions of OSR. So any ideas about superheroes in the context of OSR or tabletop more generally are definitely interesting to me.
• Semiurge: They're a couple of that Wildbow guy's web serials, Worm alone is longer than the Bible so I can't really 'recommend it' recommend it but I'd say try it until the bank robbery and if you're not hooked by then it's probably not gonna work for you. I think the best frame would be as street-level villains jockeying for cash and reputation.
• Max: I can already kind of imagine how that ties into OSR.

Do you have any thoughts about the future of the OSR, blogosphere, RPG industry and community in general, etc.?

• Semiurge: The osr is a spook.
• Max: I have literally no idea what that means 0.o.
• Semiurge: (in the Stirner sense)
• Max: I am actually not super familiar with Stirner if you wouldn't mind elaborating on that further.
• Semiurge: To give a more serious answer, I've never really experienced a thing such as 'the osr'. Maybe it existed before I got into things.
• Max: Aah ok I think I see what you mean now.
• Semiurge: I'd say it's more of a network, but that sounds like networking, too businessy.
• Max: No I get what you mean by that though. And ya, I think the OSR that you and I came up in was very different than this thing that apparently existed for nearly a decade before either of us started blogging
• Semiurge: There's people whose stuff I like, there's people who like my stuff, sometimes those are the same people, many of them at least know of each other. So I guess my answer would be all that culture, industry, community stuff passes over my head like a cloud. I want the people I like to keep making good stuff and enjoy it. I want to make stuff I can enjoy. It's more individuals, personalities, relationships for me than all that.
• Max: That is probably for the best.
• Semiurge: Actually I think I can comment on platform.
• Max: Oh?
• Semiurge: Discord's ok for finding new people and playing games. But it can also be fun to meander through peoples' "recommended blogs" sidebars.
• Max: Oh ya for sure. Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of discord; I mean I like it for small group chats and running games and that sort of thing, but it doesn't really work for me as a big open platform in the way reddit (strictly as a platform, not speaking on the community) or especially G+ (RIP) did. But I 100% agree about the blog list sidebars. And also it feels really good when you see your blog on someone else's list, whether they're someone you really respect or someone you've never even met before.
• Semiurge: Yeah for sure.

Ok, I do have one more question that I'd like to end on, but before that, are there any questions I didn't ask that you'd like to talk about, or just in general anything you want to say?

• Semiurge: Yeah if you or anyone else would like me to write something I'm always open for ideas. So shoot those over on whatever platform. Won't say no to ideas.
• Max: Oh dang, ya I will definitely have to take you up on that some time. I wish I had a good idea for you off-hand but unfortunately I really don't.
• Semiurge: Oh yeah and thanks for the interview, fun way to spend an evening. 
• Max: Ya for sure, this has been a lot of fun. I wasn't sure how this was going to go but I feel like we got into some really cool stuff. I do have one more question for you though!

Can we talk about "Platinum Big Dick Baller"?

• Semiurge: lol
• Max: it's a (semi-)serious question!
• Semiurge: He [NOTE: The r/d100 guy) sneakily removed it for a week but then I noticed and had it reinstated. For a while, I was producing like 50%+ of that sub's content (it's bigger & faster moving now I think). So the head guy asked me if I wanted a special flair. That was the first thing to come to mind.
• Max: lol that's amazing. I remember you telling me when he removed it but I had no idea that's how you got it in the first place. I mean no disrespect to anyone else who has ever posted in that subreddit, but in my opinion your posts are are still the best thing there. I remember the first time reading one of your generators and my mind was blown. I am glad this story is now out there, the public has a right to know!
• Semiurge: Started from the bottom now we here (slightly above the bottom).
• Max: oof too real... ok well on that note, I think it's time we wrap up, but ya, thanks for doing this, this was really cool. We've talked about various things before, but I do feel like I've gotten to understand your creativity better through this and also learned about some cool stuff. You are full of just fascinating insights on top of your creativity.
• Semiurge: Appreciate it. Have a good one.