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

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

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

Pain Demons

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

Things With Weird Faces

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

Aquarian Dawn: Setting Primer

Before I get into it, I just want to note that this is officially post 100! Granted, there were a few small "update" posts, and at this point nearly a third of my posts are just 5 Minute Challenge posts (which I'll follow up with shortly). Still, I wanted my 100th post to be a bigger one, so here's a setting primer for Aquarian Dawn, which will be the setting for my local game which will hopefully be starting in the very near future!

A little Nausicaa for flavor because I can't escape science fantasy even in my "gritty" fantasy setting

What is Aquarian Dawn?

Aquarian Dawn is a gritty fantasy setting, taking place several hundred years after a high-fantasy (or maybe even science-fantasy, who can say?) utopic era, the High Age, that gradually declined. The age of man appears to be coming to an end with the rise of the Aquarians, and humanity as a whole must contemplate its mortality, and everything that comes with it.

Arcane and divine magics have mostly been lost, and knowledge of alchemy is mostly in the minds of the fey. Likewise, most of the magical creatures have been killed or died off. Only recently, as the High Age has degraded so thoroughly, have the magical creatures begun to resurface, and these ones have become hard and mean as a result of their treatment by humanity towards the end of the High Age. 

Then there are the espers (less affectionately referred to as mutants). They are humans, or less commonly members of one of the other intelligent species, able to intuitively channel magics or perform feats like the heroic warriors of old. Sometimes they even have unique abilities of their own, and inhuman appearances. It is believed that during the peak of the High Age, espers were ubiquitous, and that they were to usher the High Age civilization into godhood. As the High Age declined, so too did the espers. 

The espers are not "hated and feared", per se. Most villages tacitly accept and even embrace espers for their abilities, and the services they provide as monster hunters and problem solvers. Even so, they are a constant reminder of what civilization once was and what it has lost. Communities and individuals quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) resent them, and as a result they often feel isolated, and driven to adventure. Nonetheless, some still believe that the age of humanity has not come to an end, and that any hope in humanity lies in the espers. 

In regards to the other species, the remaining elves live in the forest and sea and have become more like animals than humans. Dwarves have gone to the caves, mountains, tundra, and other inhospitable places and have adapted in strange and alienating ways. Halflings lost their civilization and exist as nomads and refugees, and are stereotyped as thieves, assassins, saboteurs, and con-men.

The fey creatures; goblins, leprechauns, hobs, and the like, are all doing fairly well, all things considered. They have the largest number of artifacts from the High Age, and have retained the most knowledge from that time. If the fey of old were like the spirits of nature, these fey are like the spirits of science and engineering. Their knowledge and practices are not always correct, but seem to be effective just by virtue of the world believing in them. That being said, the fey are only as successful as the Age allows, and this Age is still young.

Who are the Aquarians?

The aquarians are a semi-photosynthetic, tropical-colored, humanoid coral species. They wear clothing made from their own filaments, which grow from their head or can be produced from the rest of their body, like a strong, silky web, or an externalized digestion system. Their society is true communism, and it works. They reproduce mostly through parthenogenesis. They have a three-lobed brain with semi-competitive / semi-collaborative personalities, and a continuous gender identity based on the contribution of the three lobes to their overall cognition. They pass their memories to their offspring as a dream-like form of cognitive immortality.

A more detailed description of the aquarians will be in a separate post.

Themes

Sometimes the themes of a setting or a campaign come out organically, but here are some of the intended themes for this setting. I'm sure many more themes will emerge as I bring this setting to the table, and probably not all of these themes will be realized at my table, but these are the things that inspired me to create this setting.

•  Many fantasy settings, such as Lord of the Rings, focus on the burgeoning Age of Man, with the Elves being of a prior age. I wanted to do a spiritual succession of that narrative. What does a fantasy world look like in the next age?


• Along those lines, I wanted to examine why civilizations at their peak degrade. I want to avoid being too directly allegorical to real world politics, but in an era where we are so reliant on science and technology, and yet so few people understand it and so many people spurn it; where we make so much cultural and intellectual progress and yet so many reject it and regress, I wanted to explore that in a fantasy setting.


• I've always loved X-men and Marvel's mutants in general, but with the espers, I wanted to tweak that narrative a little bit. Hate and xenophobia are real enough in our world, here I wanted to take the idea of "the other" but explore it in a way that demands more nuance. Espers aren't necessarily hated, and the feelings others have towards them aren't just because they're different. It's a deeper, internal, existential resentment, that subtly affects how they interact with espers even if they hold no conscious ill-will towards them. The espers make people feel lesser about themselves, not even for what they are, but for what they represent.


• I also attempt to address ideological differences, and specifically ideological differences between generations. The High Age of humanity was built upon espers, individuals with unique and powerful abilities. The aquarians, on the other hand, are true communists, and also have a more fluid and dynamic concept of self and gender. They think and operate totally differently from humanity, and it seems to be working better for them. I want to avoid a strictly capitalist vs. communist or America vs. China type narrative, it's more about generational differences and happens to lean into American issues of socioeconomic values and identity politics.


• There is also the more personal and existential issue of mortality and legacy. With human civilization seemingly coming to an end, how do people live their lives? How do you have children when you know you're leaving behind less for them than what you had? Do you lean hard into denial? Do you double-down, trying to carve out a legacy in the face adversity? Do you become nihilist or absurdist, or turn to religion or passion? 

Anyway, I've got a few more posts for this setting lined up, and intend to write more as my game progresses. Hopefully people get where I'm going with this and find it maybe a bit more graspable than some of my other settings, which I acknowledge can get a little wild. I love high-concept gonzo science fantasy, but Phantasmos this is not!

Also, if you want to read more about Aquarian Dawn now, you can read my Intro Prose, which is most in line with this primer, or read about the Death Metal Crow for another facet of this setting that's a little less heavy but I think still consistent with the intended themes and tone of this setting.

30 Day Challenge: Day 21 Lovecraft/Fantasy Crossover Ideas

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

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

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

30 Day Challenge Day 19-20 Druids and Crossovers

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

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

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


So "Day 19" will be Druids:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

30 Day Challenge: Day 16 Domesticated "Animals"

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

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

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

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

30 Day Challenge: Day 15 Two-Player Characters

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

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

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