30 Day Challenge Day 19-20 Druids and Crossovers

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

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

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


So "Day 19" will be Druids:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

30 Day Challenge: Day 16 Domesticated "Animals"

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

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

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

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

30 Day Challenge: Day 15 Two-Player Characters

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

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

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

30 Day Challenge: Day 14 Animaloids

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

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

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

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

30 Day Challenge Day: 12-13

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

First up, elementals:

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

Next, thematic god concepts:

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

Purposive Constraint Monster Concept

I was inspired recently by noism's (of the monsters and manuals blog) concept of Purposive Constraint in monster creation. In fact, I think it's one of the most interesting tabletop "think pieces" I've read in quite some time. I tend to go for weird / abstract / "high-concept" stuff, and that's always going to be my jam, but I think there's something to be said for simple, elegant, and purposive creations. As I'll discuss below, this monster was designed with a specific purpose, which is expressed in its appearance and its behaviors. It's probably not the first of its kind, but I think it's a cool idea that could be a fun inclusion in any dungeon.

Purposive Constraint of the Monster

The purpose of this monster is urgency. It is a force of nature. It's not an uber-god, but it is an essentially unkillable, unstoppable force that the party will have to deal with. It is one that (at least to some extent) scales to the power of the party. It can be impeded, but there are certain hard constraints on to what extent this is true, and it will require ingenuity on the part of the party to figure out how to do so. A level one party has (almost) as much of a chance of impeding it as a level 20 party. It's form is primally evocative and horrifying, but also (hopefully) suggestive of its abilities.

These kinds of monsters can be tricky in tabletop, since some see it as a "cheat" to have an unkillable, unstoppable monster, or feel that it takes away player agency. I think if the appropriate expectations are set, and the party is given a fair chance to fend for themselves, and the manner in which they figure out how to defend themselves requires ingenuity, then I think this could be a lot of fun and very much in-line with the philosophy of OSR. In terms of videogames, you could think of it like the Nemesis from Resident Evil; it is in effect more like a dungeon obstacle, or a horrific force of nature, in terms of how the party should interact with it.

The Monster

The monster appears as an oblong, vaguely animal-like torso, a round head with ambiguous and vaguely humanoid features, and eight long limbs, four on each side of its torso, each significantly longer than its body. Its skin is a sickly reddish-pinkish-orange, like extreme inflammation. It is gelatinous, but firm to the touch, like a semi-amorphous exoskeleton. Its limbs can be as flexible as tentacles or as firm as insect legs. Its default size is that of a large creature, but it can compress or expand itself to a seemingly impossible degree. It can traverse any surface, walk on water, swim, and even stretch itself like a kite and glide. It can squeeze through impossibly tight spaces. It produces a venom that can (eventually) dissolve any substance. It can harden itself against extreme heat, or preserve its insides with natural anti-freeze if frozen. It can slow its metabolism and remain in stasis if it cannot access oxygen or nutrients and can remain that way effectively indefinitely. Its skin can harden or soften to impact as needed and it has no obvious sensory or vital organs.

It will never leave its lair, and in fact cannot leave its lair, even by magical means. It will hunt anything in its lair. It likes to toy with its prey, first revealing itself and attacking the party to get a measure of them, only to run off. It will stalk the party, re-emerging to strike whenever the party get too comfortable (if they are already overwhelmed, it will strike them at each room). It will usually toy with the party until they are just short of their goal, or too deep into the dungeon to easily escape, and then it will go for the kill. If it is not actively assaulting the party, it will allow other threats to face the party. However, if it is actively engaged with the party, it will casually deal with any other threats in its path.

It's first assault is generally a surprise attack, where it attempts to knock over, grapple, and pummel the most vulnerable member of the party. If the prey is strong, it will release a sticky fluid from its pores to better grapple. If this is insufficient, it will attempt to squeeze its limbs or whole body into any orifice of its prey. If there are no exposed orifices, or no seams in the protection of the prey, it will dribble its corrosive venom onto the protection until there is an opening.

Discussion?

Obviously this thing still needs a name. Also, I intentionally left out stats, with the idea that it should always be just a little bit above what the party would probably be able to defeat. They should have a small but reasonable chance of being able to escape if grappled, of being able to survive more than one surprise attack, and maybe even hit it (even if the damage doesn't mean much except to maybe stun it for a moment). This can be explained as the monster testing them, or toying with them, or even giving them a false sense of security that maybe they can beat it. Also, maybe I could do more with its appearance or abilities, or give it some explicit vulnerabilities? It clearly has some inspirations like the Nemesis from RE, the xenomorph from Alien, and spiders, but I think as-is it's fairly unique and I don't want to over-explain it in a way that takes away from that. Is this purposive constraint actually interesting? Does it meet this constraint?