Mythic Beings of the Weird Elements (Pt.1)

I've always been inspired by the Saint Beasts found in East and South East Asian mythologies. Not the vapid, meaningless, predictable elementals often found in traditional fantasy, but primal mythic beings, with both intentionality and idiosyncratic features.

These mythic beings correspond to the four generated elements found here, and maybe I'll do another post for the other four here.

Was going to add some specific adventure hooks or flesh these out further... but then I didn't, but hopefully the adventure hooks are at least implied.

I was also going to give them names, but at this time haven't found a naming convention that feels right.

Song-glass Elemental

Domain: Information, Communication, Music, Patterns

Like a chicken if it kept its down and other adolescent features into adulthood. Mostly invisible except for a puff of down, or when dancing to the sounds of song-glass which it nips from its coat and munches on for fun. A deceptively wise and powerful being whose wisdom must be inferred slowly and patiently by those who care for it.

Popstone Elemental

Domain: Energy, Movement, Transience, Cacophony

A fitfully lucid-dreaming cocooned antlion-dragon, its minute myoclonic jerks setting off chain reactions of popstone explosions. Irritable and impatient, prone to fits of rage, yet full of wisdom and good intent. It will grant wishes to those who remove disturbances interrupting its sleep, or even frivolously to those creating disturbances if it will make them go away. While the latter approach may be easier, tread lightly.

Godrend Elemental

Domain: Sustenance, Cuisine, Social Clubs, Wellness

A shriveled bullfrog melting unxiously in an indigo stew of its own fat, from which it is inseparable. It communicates through the consumption of its stew or the absorption of its fat through skin. Wealthy beyond measure and endlessly giving to those who enter its exclusive grace, demanding in return only the illusion of mutual respect and friendship in the face of its graceless self-centeredness. Nonetheless, it means well, in its own way.

Shadowbrine Elemental

Domain: The Unknown, Engineering, Science, Creative Inspiration

Slick and silky bits of marine snow, glowing pickled pieces of fish, eel, whale, and cephalopod, in an inky swirl of shadowbrine. Left alone, it creates powerful constructs like cosmic dams, destructively and without purpose, or beautiful useless things always just beyond the ken of mortal understanding. Under careful supervision it can produce benevolent wonders, but it is demanding and difficult in its communications.

A World of Many Elements (More Generated Elements)

Four more elements from the Elements Generator. Intentionally avoiding redundancies with the elements in the first post, otherwise fully randomized. I wrote these and the previous four as if they were all part of the same micro-setting, but they don't depend on each other or the setting.

Element 5: Memoria

Color: Green

State: Vaporizing

Additional Quality 1: Iridescent

Additional Quality 2: Fibrous

An elusive pattern in a pea soup fog, reflecting yesterday's light. Thick enough to be cut with a machete, but beware, snapped fibers don't repair easily. The source of the oracles' visions and the wisdom of elders; the species now believes it to be a dilation of cultural consciousness as it evolves; a magnified moment of complexity between an enthalpic and entropic state of awareness. The first generalized artificial intelligence was trained on a data stream of memoria.

Element 6: Liminalium

Color: Rainbow

State: Gas

Additional Quality 1: Incandescent

Additional Quality 2: Semi-translucent

A common origin myth of the species is that all of space and time has always existed all at once, undifferentiated, until the world sneezed into existence. Globular gaseous particles permeate, hot waves slicing reality into holographic categories of Truth. All things have a spectral signature under liminalium, and many unfortunate deeds have been committed upon those based on their visible liminalium signature. Scientists now know that what liminalium reflects visibly only loosely correlates with the spectroscopy. Nonetheless, it was crucial for the development of the natural sciences, and continues to be a source of scientific and philosophical inquiry today.

Element 7: Heartstar

Color: Magenta

State: Plasma

Additional Quality 1: Metallic

Additional Quality 2: Splash of Pale

A silky, oily magma of a metal never seen in solid state, brilliant, yet marred with pale flecks. Painfully hot to the touch, yet provocative like a blister, or a sexual taboo. The oldest novel of the species and the majority since have been tales of romance and conquest, inspired by or in pursuit of heartstar. The most popular commercial formulation today is sold under the brand name Mineral Love.

Element 8: Paradoxicon

Color: Electromagnetic (X-Ray)

State: Solid

Additional Quality 1: Gelatinous

Additional Quality 2: Splash of Teal

Vessels of impossible shapes like borromean rings and penrose triangles, no two exactly alike, barely visible except for a teal mesh, like an engineering schematic diagram. Something not quite life but life-like, like a macro-virus, a mystery of the universe even today. Each paradoxicon is like a complex puzzle, containing otherwise inconceivable wisdom. Those few in history who have cracked a paradoxicon are remembered as saints who went on to change the world with their well-earned wisdom. A common koan of the species is to ask: did civilization begin with the cracking of a paradoxicon, or with the solution that cracked it?

Speculative Fantasy

Another old unfinished draft from 2019. Tbh these are a little half-baked and I wanted to have more of them, but it's a kernel of something. I'm sure people could run with this; any suggestions, recommendations, etc. appreciated

Inspired by Speculative Fiction such as Neal Stephenson, Charles Stross, and Adrian Tchaikovsky, and TTRPG works such as Lichjammer, Cryptomancer, and Magical Industrial Revolution. Exploring the implications of magic or other fantastical concepts not so much in a hard scifi sense, but extrapolating as if they were real.

1. The nobility are ancient and powerful Warrior-Wizards, immortal Liches, who are worshiped by their subjects as God-Kings. They are not necessarily evil, in fact many are quite wise, but they are ruthless and cunning.
   
   
2. The peasant and warrior classes have been largely replaced by undead labor. These workers that have no needs or wants, that can persist in any environment, and that follow orders instantly and without question, have made human labor obsolete. This is how the Dwarven Mines, the Underdark, and the Deep Oceans were conquered. Most humans live simple and easy lives of sheltered ignorance and luxury, at the expense of other peoples and the natural order.
   
   
3. Magic doors and teleportation spells have made traditional geopolitics obsolete. "Kingdoms" no longer exist in a literal sense, but are distributed across the world, by ideals or interests. This affects everything from architecture, transit, art and culture, and commerce. Small or self-sustaining villages far along the abandoned roads may as well be another world from the "kingdoms".
   
   
4. Communication and information storage has been made near-perfect and near-instant across a complex network of message spells and other similar magics. The security of this information is the lynchpin of all social, governmental, and military influence, and so while warrior-mages still exist, most magic-users are effectively cryptoanalysts and cryptosecurity administrators. Basically Cryptomancer bc I never fleshed this idea out further than that...
   
   
5. Uber-powerful magics such as wish spells have been so thoroughly exploited, that reality has exceeded a threshold of acceptable paradox, and has fractured into a non-linear, mega-dimensional multiverse. World-breaking magics have as a result become almost completely devalued, like magical inflation. Instead, various factions use more subtle magics and espionage in synchrony across the multiverse to manipulate reality in their favor. It's a magical multiversal super-spy cold war.
   
   
6. The discovery of divine magic, irrefutable proof of (at least one) Divinity, a True Metaphysic and True Ethic, changed everything.

GLOG Two-Player Class: Ogre

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

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

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

Unique Mechanics:

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


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


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


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


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


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

Starting Gear:

Template:
A
B
C
D

Weird & Wonderful Wavelengths (Variety Show s1e3)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4jtIDaeaWI

It has been a while

Welcome back to this weird show

Beware the monsters

Somewhere between the blink of an eye and a dissociative episode, the Weird & Wonderful Wavelength oscillates backwards in time. Transposed along the imaginary plane, playing imaginary, we find ourselves in a peculiar black and green room. The striking contrast, jarring sometimes, the pain compels like poking a blister. A mild irritant, a bulging wallet in the back pocket as the waiter lights the absinthe and the green fire and black-burnt sugar drips into the glass. A pyrite spiral, a heckler aggressively ignored, a mild imperfection steals a degree of freedom from an otherwise perfectly composed show. A mildly amusing non-sequitur. 

Reruns

Episode 1

Episode 2

https://twitter.com/TuffGhostArt

A not even quite not-review of Russian Doll Season 2 in all of its amazingness.

Just finished Russian Doll season 2 <Editors Note: This was a while ago! Fortunately we have Spacetime Breaching Technology (TM)>, damn this was incredible. I can't believe more people aren't talking about how good this is. It's kind of uncanny how much it is my jam lol. Like without spoilers, it's got the unfinished corner, metro as metaphor and setting, exploration of self, magical realism, weird high concept scifi. Natasha Lyonne as Nadia is also just like the biggest fucking badass of all time. Like she just does not give a fuck in all the right ways, but also is unafraid to challenge herself. She's just the right amount of deranged, but also no matter how badly she fucks up or delusional she seems, she actually has her shit together and wins at life. And Allan is also this really healthy version of feminine masculinity not played as a joke. He's vulnerable and expressive and even though he's a neurotic wreck he ultimately knows how to take responsibility for himself, however he defines it. I'm not claiming it's as good as Season 1, but it was good in its own right.

Philosophical Soapbox

I was thinking about the nature of "evil", and Boltzmann Brains, and one possibility is that it's kind of like that. There are various evolutionary pressures both ways, and mostly they balance out to a degree of functionality. But given enough complexity i.e. time, improbable events occur and we behave in ways that are not truly rational, even if they maybe work in that myopic moment. That's a way of thinking about the nature of evil that's almost independent of any prescribed ethic.

https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.296781716.3978/flat,750x,075,f-pad,750x1000,f8f8f8.u6.jpg

Psychedelic Pedantry Pastime

P^3 (P-cube): Perpetual Psionic Process: A psionic process is of the mind. Mental processes are multiplicative; the activation of one memory coactivates related memories which reinforce each other; reliving the memory of a psionic process is itself an instantiation of a psionic process, and every other psionic process in memory; a lifetime of psionic processes coactivate as a product across consciousness*spacetime.

More plainly, the idea is that if a psionic process is, by definition, mental in nature, then there is not a meaningful distinction between physical reality and simulated reality- a memory- except that memories can be wrong, can change, and can violate physical assumptions.

When a psionicist reflects on their own thoughts and memories, or times they used their psionic powers, they aren't just remembering those events, they are recreating them, and possibly altering them. It plays into some ideas around quantum animism or consciousness as a set of dimensions alongside the dimensions of space and time.

Psionicists have to be conscious of their thoughts and memories, and how they perceive them. The less structured their mind, the more powerful they become, but it can recurse and multiply beyond their control. Whereas a psionicist with a very structured way of self reflection, and of how they relate their memories and their internal semantics, will not be as powerful, but much more controlled and precise in how they use their abilities.

Last Call

One more cup of coffee for the road, please. There's a kind of ennui, or horror in the mundane, haunting reminiscences, the tension of an unwitting voyeur catching an embarrassing faux pas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mto47BMT3yA

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.

Superheroes pt.1(?): Vision Serpent

Despite numerous posts about superpowers, I've yet to properly make a bunch of superheroes. The Recursers and Nazarites and the various other characters in MRD and MRDVol2 and the campaign are in the vein of Superheroes, but still. I get so caught up in the worldbuilding, but there's value in having Superheroes that can be a bit more plug-and-play, so that's my intention here. You could build a Superhero universe around these characters, or adapt them for MRD, Marvel, or DC.

I'm considering making a collaborative superhero worldbuilding project if there's interest, these could be seen as the seeds for that. I was originally going to make several of these but only had time for two and only received feedback on one of them (which is a little discouraging but oh well...), so this post will just be the first and I'll maybe make it a series for the rest of them.

The idea is that they're a little more straightforward than the stuff I would usually do, and while they might homage traditional superheroes or tropes, as the sum of its parts it shouldn't feel like a Marvel or DC universe knockoff, but something original and thematically distinct, with an emphasis on progressivism and solving systemic problems vs. brute violence, reactionary action, and defending the status quo. Also a heavy emphasis on diversity, intersectionality, and globalism.

The format is reminiscent of a wiki article or those old superhero handbooks, with things like "Power Level", but instead of any numbers it's some abstract description, a parody of the idea. Some words might be bolded where those could be articles in themselves which could be hyperlinked.

The "wiki articles" should be written in a way to invoke the sense that there is more between the lines; feeling not like the cohesive narrative of one writer's vision but a living collaborative world developed by many creators over time under various corporate, economic, and creative constraints; an emergent pattern, a character arc or narrative conceit built around the noise and chaos and incoherence of a superhero connected universe not bound by the notions of fantasy or science fiction or horror or even itself.

First an Index of previous Superheroes-related posts:

Weird & Non-Violent Superpowers

Superpowers 2.0

Cantrippers

Superpowers or Mutations

Maximum Recursion Depth, or the Beginning is the End is the Beginning (MRDVol2 abandoned concept)

Three "10 Superhero Fantasy Species" Settings

100 superheroes and villains as fantasy species 

FASERIP Marvel/DC/My Hero Academia Crossover! (Play Report)

Vision Serpent

Name: Len Levi (aka Veto Sanz)

Appearance: Unassuming size, light bronze skin tone, five o'clock shadow, tired and wise eyes, casually strong posture.

Costume: Lightly armored dark green serpentine body suit with red and yellow trim. Helmet reminiscent of a crested rattlesnake with a retractable lower face guard.

Powers and Skills: Wings of Saturim (Flight; Mildly Hypnotic); "Spiral Senses"; Master of the martial art Spiral Minding; Knowledge and gadgets of Saturim science and technologies.

Power Level: Just above human in most regards, but with a certain je ne sais quoi.

Biography: Trans-Masc (He/They) Mizrahi Jewish Mexican from Mexico City. Has a Ph.D in signal processing, where he developed a prototype Inverse Frequency Oscillation Device (IFOD), which had the potential to radically disrupt the telecom monopoly MegaXCom in Mexico and revolutionize communications across the world. Betrayed by their startup cofounder Gil Peretz in a corporate espionage showdown, just as the device was about to be destroyed and Len "disappeared" in a bodybag, instead he disappeared for real, teleported to another galaxy to serve the alien god Bright Mujo.

Serving in his Wave Palace overwatching the Saturim Civilizations, Bright Mujo personally educated Len in the sciences and technologies of the Saturim and their gods, modified them with the wings and Spiral Senses of the Saturim, and trained them in the martial art of Spiral Minding, incorporating the Wings and Spiral Senses to unique effect.

After an extended stay in the Wave Palace and after developing a complicated relationship with Bright Mujo, Len wished to leave, but Bright Mujo jealously would not allow it, and certainly not with the IFOD, nor the knowledge that went into making it.

To win their freedom, Len was tasked with telling a novel story profound enough to invoke a novel dream for Bright Mujo, the god of Memory, Patterns, Learning, and Nostalgia. After conceiving nights upon nights of stories and never succeeding, Len eventually resorted to generating stories from pseudo-random equations, mathematically derived poetry skat, inducing in Bright Mujo from his memory patterns a pseudo-novel narrative of his own free association. Bright Mujo accepted this partial solution, allowing Len to leave, but keeping the IFOD and the knowledge of how to produce it.

Returned to Earth, Len's startup was acquired by MegaXCom under Gil's leadership. Assuming the fake identity Veto Sanz, Len infiltrated MegaXCom, working to set right those harmed by the corporation both as Veto and as The Vision Serpent, while systematically instigating a boardroom coup. Complicating matters, just as Len was settling back into life on Earth and hitting their stride, Saturim agents reveal themselves, on the hunt for Len on behalf of Bright Mujo, seemingly reneging on their agreement.