30 Day 5 Minute Challenge: Day 7 Quirky Superpowers

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

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

Ok, so quirky superpowers:

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

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

30 Day 5 Minute Challenge: Day 6 fantasy2supers

I really liked Semiurge's idea of converting fantasy concepts to superheroes (or superhero concepts to fantasy). I think, as with the last 5 minute challenge, this is a concept that with a bit more research and work could be much better, especially since I forget a lot of the particulars of the more "iconic" D&D monsters off-hand, but hopefully in 5 minutes I can at least drop a few interesting ideas.

• The Beholder: A corpulent villain with eyes all around his head. His eyes emit powerful incinerating beams. Although powerful, he lacks vision (pun intended), and often serves as a henchman in other supervillain's lairs, playing best to his strengths. He is usually head of security.
• Displacer Beast: During one of Magik's stays in Limbo, she encountered an unusual demonic beast. A powerful, panther-like creature with whip-like tentacles on its front shoulders and the ability to teleport like herself. The Displacer Beast is now her loyal friend.
• Mindflayer: A practitioner of the dark arts, a Sorcerer Supreme wannabe, bit off more than they could chew and summoned an eldritch entity from another dimension. The being infected them like a fungus, warping them into a cephalopodic form. The summoning was successful, and the Mindflayer is now truly more powerful than the Sorcerer Supreme herself, but with that great power comes great madness.
• Slime (Gelatinous Cube): A mutant with the ability to expand to the point of filling up the dimensions of a small to medium-sized space. In this form they are gelatinous, absorbing whatever they touch.

These are more-or-less straight adaptations of the respective monsters, but I think it's a decent start. With a bit more character and costume design, and some work on personality, motivations, and histories, these could be interesting characters.

30 Day 5 Minute Challenge: Day 5 Sin Demons

This five minute challenge will be sin demons! I'm finding that these 5-minute challenges are accomplishing what I intended them to do, which is to get me thinking creatively again. I know this 5-minute sin demon list isn't going to be as good as what I'd make if I thought it all out properly, but I'm hoping that after 30 or so days of this, I'll have a backlog of really cool ideas that I want to blow out, and I'm thinking this concept will be among them. This isn't going to be your typical "seven deadly sins", these are going to be MY list of cardinal sins (probably not accurately represented in 5 minutes haha, but a rough idea, in any case).

• Lack of self-awareness demon: Like a beholder it sees everything from the outside, but its eye stalks are stiff antennae and its field of vision is limited to only forward. It cannot reflect in on itself. The father of all other sin demons.
• Ethical tautology demon: This demon believes that it is good, and therefore everything it does is by definition good. It appears like an angel, and those lacking in wit will buy their tautology, but underneath is sickness and madness.
• Ignorance demon: This demon fears anything it does not understand or challenges its narrow and poorly-formed world view, and lashes out with hate and anger. 
• Twisted system demon: This demon is like a rat king. It inadvertently creates or exacerbates toxic and dysfunctional relationships. It will defend these relationships above and beyond any reason, even if it means cutting off a member of the system. 
• Short-sighted demon: This demon is not merely greedy, but also short-sighted. It seeks short-term over long-term gain. Most of the short-sighted demons are petty losers, but every once in a while, through luck and circumstance, one will rise to great power.
• Self-loathing demon: This demon could be a competent and capable demon, but engages in defeatist patterns, and never truly learns from its mistakes. Only enough to recognize them and incorporate them into its self-loathing.

Spent more time on the list of sins than the descriptions of the demons themselves, and even these sins need some work. Think of this as a preview for things maybe to come (some day...).

30 Day 5 Minute Challenge: Day 4 Fantasy Foods

For this five minute challenge, I'm going to come up with some foods for a fantasy setting.

• Flavor in a magic bubble
• Slime pudding
• Seared Bulette fin
• Deep-fried beholder eyes
• Dragon flame-grilled barbeque
• Giant rat fillet
• Fresh sushi cleric-revived just before serving
• Owlbear jerky
• Polymorph surprise

I actually would like to do a legit fantasy food / cooking table at some point, but this will have to do for now. Some of these are cool (and I'm pretty sure I've seen before), but I think with some more thought (not just a 5 minute challenge) this could be a lot better.

30 Day 5 Minute Challenge: Day 3 Themed Encounter Table

Third day of the challenge. I'm going to try Semiurge's themed encounter table idea, and hopefully it'll be a little more focused than the last challenge which was supposed to be traps and turned into not traps.

• A pack of purple wolf-bees protecting their royal jelly
• Marvel's Purple Man or an equivalent
• A bulbous, glassy, translucent humanoid full of purple liquid, an unstoppable force crashing through walls, chases you through the dungeon
• A wine elemental
• Wrathful grapes (purple mouthing gibbers)
• The witch with lavender potions
• The romantic mind flayer
• The devil in the satin sheets
• Purple-robed Nero-clone humunculi gang

I'm not totally sure what I was going for here, for some reason I just latched on to "Purple" as the theme. All things considered, I don't think this is too bad, actually.

30 Day 5 Minute Challenge: Day 2 Dungeon Gimmicks

So this is day 2 of my 30 day 5 minute challenge, where I spend 5 minutes trying to come up with as many new ideas as I can. I asked for suggestions for categories and Semiurge gave me several, so I'm going to start with traps (mainly because all of his other ones seem really hard). Traps have never been my strong suit, so this'll be interesting...
EDIT: As you can see below, my head immediately veered elsewhere and i just rolled with it, so instead we're doing dungeon gimmicks.

• Monty Hall dungeon: It's a dungeon based on the monty hall problem, but instead of a goat being behind the bad doors, there are men of leng.
  
• Game theory dungeon: When passing through the room, each party member chooses to either take X xp or take 0.5X xp. If all party members take 0.5X xp, they're all good, but if one takes X xp, the others lose 0.5X xp.
  
• Binary tree dungeon: Each room in the dungeon separates into two new rooms, up to some unknown but very deep length, and you are looking for an object in a specific room. If you just search every room, probably you will die before reaching the end. You need to come up with a systematic way to search the dungeon.

Ok, well I only came up with a few ideas, but I think they're pretty cool. They're not traps, but we're going to roll with it. I think the last one speaks to all of the leetcode challenges I've been having to do lately. Seriously binary trees and linked lists are the worst! That being said, even though probably nobody besides programmers will be able to solve them, I might run with the leetcode algorithm challenges as dungeon gimmicks idea in the future...

30 Day 5 Minute Challenge: Day 1

So... We'll see if I actually stay true to this, but I've decided to turn the "5 minute challenge" into 30 day challenge. Every day, I will do at least one 5 minute challenge. Depending on my mood I may make it category-less, or pick a specific category, or if people suggest categories in the comments I'll do that. I'll try not to skip a day but if I do I'll make up for it asap.

In my last 5 minute challenge post I did category-less, worldbuilding, and bestiary. I think I'll start this one off with category-less again, but after that we'll see.

Hopefully I'll be able to make a new "real" post this weekend, but in the mean time... Go!

• A restaurant that serves only foods that are cooked or cut alive at the table
• A flamethrower made from the organs of a dragon
• White blood cell slimes
• Juggling baseball bat energy ball spiking villain / NPC
• A mage spreads life onto new planets from the bacteria on meteors casting meteor bombardment spells
• Optimization function over atom-collisions to reverse engineer a hash function to extract "meaningful" data out of "nothing"
  

I will admit, a couple of these were poorly fleshed out ideas I was already sitting on. Didn't come up with as many as I would have liked, but I think some of these are pretty cool.