30 Day Challenge: Day 9 Dwarves

I'm struggling for inspiration at the moment, but I've been wanting to come back to my "Traditional" Fantasy tables and maybe do one for dwarves, which I somehow haven't done, so this'll be a warm-up for that.

• Gem dwarves: They are shiny and fabulous
• Fracking dwarves: Masters of subterranean sieges
• Mountain dwarves: Adapted for the mountains, they have a truncated snout like a saiga antelope
• Neanderthal: What we call dwarves are just neanderthals
• Nephilim: The dwarves were created by angels, believing themselves as capable as their god to create life
• Eldritch dwarves: Follow the pantheon of King Oberon, Queen Titania, and their uncouth uncle Tsathoggua
• Space dwarves: Skin shiny with a reflective metal coat, flying on solar kites

30 Day 5 Minute Challenge: Day 8 Unusual Spells

Alright, I feel like this is going to be a tough one, but I'm going to try to come up with spells that are still spells, but maybe operate a little differently than how you usually think of spells. We'll see how that goes...

• Recursion spell: The spell is a trap! If you read it on a scroll or use detect magic on it, the spell infinitely repeats, locking the caster down. It doesn't necessarily have an effect, but eventually the accumulation of magical energy will lead to a violent explosion.
• Memo spell: The spell is cumulative. Every time it is cast, it changes a little bit, in some systematic way.
• Golem: The spell learns, and eventually becomes a living, intelligent spell, a golem spell.
• Null: The spell is neither yes nor no, it defies binary logic.
• Papers, Please: The spell causes two players to switch character sheets (they are still the same character, just with different stats).
• We're playing different games: The spell causes a player to rewrite their character sheet for a different game (just one player). We're all adults here, figure it out.

A couple of these are ideas you might notice I've played with before, but I tried to stick to the rules of the challenge and keep it to mostly things I haven't done before. This list turned out better than I expected.

Weird & Wonderful Archons: Archons March On Appreciation

Two posts in one day! Whaaaaat!!!???

This is not actually a post about archons, but an appreciation post for my friend semiurge and archonsmarchon! Semiurge consistently produces some of the most amazing random tables in all of tabletop, and was one of the first friends I made in the community, back when I was just posting on reddit and hadn't even started a blog. I envy his ability to take his overflowing imagination, and channel it into something efficiently written and actually useful at the table. He has produced more work than I could possibly fit into one post, honestly you could make a whole book just from generations of his tables, but I will do my best to fit as much as I can into something interesting and manageable.

Also, this is the second in a series of appreciation posts, the first being for Saker Tarsos at tarsostheorem.

It's taken me a while to find the time and energy to do these right, but I intend to do at least several more of these appreciation posts.

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There is a market in the caldera of a mostly-extinct volcano, its remaining lava pumped throughout the market for heat and lighting. Try not to stand too close to the pipes when they break! Working the market is a raider offloading booty pillaged from a surface settlement. One item he offloads is a lamp loaded with troll-oil. It refuels itself, but if extinguished it will regenerate into a full, furious troll. While hidden treasures abound, the market is also home to conmen selling fake potions that’ll turn your face inside-out instead of healing you, or cause you to flash brightly instead of turning invisible, or any number of other horrid things. The only thing keeping the market in line is the knowledge that any spilled blood might seep down and attract vicious beasts from below.

The market is surrounded by a wall, with a single door at the entrance. The door has a handle that’s a tongue in the mouth of a laughing iron face. A man with a wizened face and bleeding eyes busts through the door, holding his gun to his head with one hand, desperately dragging it away with the other. He carries a custom-made revolver, with way more than six bullets in its oversized cylinder. Pinned to his chest is a bloodstained page of sheet music any trained musician could decipher to reveal a coded message.

In addition to the raider with his troll oil lamp, an elf knight comes to the defense of the market. Her armour is a buff coat made of her own leather, flayed and healed over decades. She rides a grumpy moose and fights with her own sharp tongue, which can snap out like a chameleon. She serves a petrified liege, or perhaps her liege was always just a statue. In any case, she pays the bills at the market, whilst on a quest to kidnap a gifted human child to be her squire.

After the raider and the elf knight kill the man with the gun, a scholar picks up the page of sheet music and deciphers the code. This scholar specializes in thanatology, the study of the dead both walking and still. He was a student kicked out of his university for excessive rowdiness and lewdery. He carries a pocketful of shiny rocks he's collected, ostensibly for personal defense. He has a knack for navigating in the wilderness, which is how he arrived at the market in the first place. He is infamous for his backhanded compliments.

The coded message was an incantation, opening a secret passage to the underworld. The threshold to this passage is a crossroads paved with brittle hair, marked by a trail of black feathers. It is guarded by a crocodilian abomination able to smell sin. This passage leads to the belly of a lifeless beast, dissolving in its own bile, left by a crusade against the insufficiently damned.

To defeat the crocidilian abomination, the scholar reveals his secret wacky wand. The wand is a peacock’s tail feather lacquered with amber that emit rays of mutagenic viridiance. So long as it is not exposed to water, it will maintain its charge, and even when it does run out of charge, it gains the ability to vampirically steal charges from other wands it touches. He snaps the wand, releasing the angel trapped inside to power it. The angel is grateful, but also has centuries of business to attend to. Nonetheless, it agrees to face the crocodilian abomination.

The angel is a fiercely tusked ogre cloaked in thunderclouds with wings of barbed iron and the flayed skins of sinners. It wields a chalice, ever-full of dark wine. The bearer of the chalice can cause this wine to heal, or burn like acid, and change which of these functions it serves even long after it’s been poured from the chalice or imbibed. It was created from a saint who was assumed, maimed but alive, into the heavens. The angel can sense the location and condition of the relics made from the severed parts of its body, as well as communicate through and exert limited influence around them even if it’s not currently summoned to the mortal realms. It cannot serve a summoner who holds any debt without first forgiving those debts. Several animals with unspotted coats were sacrificed in order to summon this angel.

The angel smites the crocodilian abomination, only to reveal its true form! It appears as a cancerous mushroom combined with complex clockwork, and gears made of wet flesh and teeth, which split apart into a swarm of lesser monsters. It is hungry, and attempts to incapacitate the first hunk of meat it finds then drag them away for an undisturbed meal (who will it be, the angel, the scholar, the elf knight, or the raider!?). This wizardly abomination was clearly intended as an experimental warbeast, to sell to the highest bidder.

After tearing apart each and every clockwork fungus monster, an illustrious intelligent sword is revealed at the core of the abomination. The sword is a notched, stained cleaver as big as a man is tall. With the sword’s blessing, its wielder will find it just light enough to bear in battle. Although intelligent, it is easily distracted and prone to meandering tangents. The wounds it deals become worse the further the wounded gets from the wielded until they’re healed. The sword reveals that it desires to learn martial techniques hidden by the ancient masters, but that prior to the incantation, it had been stuck in the middle of an eternal battlefield on the other side of the underworld passage.

The eternal battlefield of the underworld is headed by three armies.

The first army is led by a non-Euclidean entity, an uncanny humanoid that crawls with hideous vermin. Its origin is the interbreeding of humans and powers of the outer realms. Beware it, for it cannot be killed permanently by mortal means. In occult texts it is referred to as En-dwa-uch.

The second army is led by a vampire lord of an unusual variety. He feeds alongside his pet giant vampire finch, which serves him like a hunting dog. The vampire lord is the result of merging and melting together with others of his kind to form a large, more deadly gestalt. He rests among the deep machinery of his factory from which he builds his machine army, licking the leavings from industrial accidents. When he feeds his blood to predatory or parasitic animals, those animals grow huge, ferocious, and loyal to him, serving as mounts, scouts, and siege beasts for his machine army. He was once a vicious priest whose body was unfit for the blessing of his god.

The third army is led by a demon like a floating tumor randomly studded with eyes, teeth, and hair. Her primary tactic is to blight the fields and herds of her enemies, drive the fish from their nets, and otherwise drag them to destitution. She is occasionally summoned away from the endless battlefield to commit slaughter at the border between hostile nations, and those slaughtered in this fashion are conscripted into her army in the underworld. She keeps a memento from each person who’s summoned her, which she wears like military regalia. Her weakness is her own name said backwards, which banishes her permanently from the underworld (but then, wherever shall she go...?).

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D20x5 Dungeon Markets

D20x5 Men With Guns To Come In Through A Door

D20x5 Elf-Knights

D20x5 Scattered Scholars

D20x5 Passages To The Underworld

D20x5 Wacky Wands

D20x5 Angels To Summon For Chastity And Humility (Incidentally this may be my favorite random table in all of tabletop)

D20x5 Wizardly Abominations

D20x5 Illustrious Intelligent Swords

D20x8(+9) Lovecraftian Entities That Didn’t Make The Cut

D20x5 Variant Vampires

D20x5 Demons To Summon For Fun And Profit

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.