Random Events

Events (1d20)	Description	Additional Effects
1. Tempo Storm	A vibration across the paraverse like a tsunami. Perception of time is discretized into frames moving at the pace of the tempo.	Depending on the tempo, can create the perception of time moving faster or slower. What can happen between the frames?
2. Kaiber Krash	A virus- represented by an insectoid or other grotesque monster, is disrupting local kaiberspace.	Phreaking (and possibly other magics or technologies) becomes unpredictable until the virus in kaiberspace is destroyed.
3. Call of The Wild	An animaloid mutant is overtaken by the need to go Wild, possibly due to radiation exposure or a stressful event. Takes on a vibrant, rainbow, pastel, and/or neon, Xtreme appearance.	Becomes uncontrollably Wild and Xtreme and heads for The Wilds. Has no regard for anything in its path. Does not act like intelligent life and cannot be reasoned with.
4. Catastrophic Failure	A Massively Aberrant Daemon (MAD) trained from daemonic essence like a neural network with a design flaw causing the model to converge on an unstable form.	Will behave erratically, culminating in a massive explosion, and possibly other magical effects depending on the nature of the MAD.
5. Radiation Flair	As the result of environmental or astronomical events, a wind or burst of radiation sweeps through the area.	Can cause concussive or radioactive damage, induces temporary (or less often permanent) mutations.
6. Dueling Field	Through the use of fey wood or as a natural consequence of narrative principles, two or more individuals or groups in conflict are pulled into a pocket dimension.	Reality itself is altered within the field, although the particulars vary- shootouts, swordfights, athletic competitions, trivia, etc.; sometimes lethal, sometimes non-lethal. The rules and logic of the field cannot be defied, but "cheating" within the laws of the field is still possible.
7. Paraversal Pandemonium	A mythically powerful or significant paraversal being, a being who can or has been outside the paraverse, by coming, going, or in some other way manipulating the paraverse, has created an "error" in the paraversal encryption algorithm.	Within a moment in the paraverse, laws of spacetime and causality behave abnormally. In some cases, the "error" propagates through the paraverse, spreading like cancer. SLIMEs and meridian metal deposits are often left behind.
8. Mark of Failure	Either the result of a spell, or spontaneously-forming throughout the world where ongoing or intense personal or societal failure has occurred or is occurring. Only those who are at least partway through a stage of personal growth can see the mark.	For whatever strides they make towards personal growth, marked will experience an opposite and equal number of failures. The marked must confront and accept their setbacks and personal faults through therapy, meditation, or some other purposeful activity, or else fall into a cycle of false hope and crushing failure.
9. Special Connection	Two or more individuals lock eyes (or whatever sensory or cognitive organ best applies), and know they are meant for each other.	The "special connection" can be romantic, platonic, competitive, antagonistic, or anything else. Dead or alive, those connected will necessarily impact each other throughout their entire lives.
10. Coffee Break (You've come so far)	After an especially dramatic moment, some of the individuals involved (i.e. the party) enter a trance-like state outside of spacetime (but within the paraverse). They return as if nothing happened and no time passed, but feel refreshed.	Either alone, or guided along by a disembodied voice or text, one meditates on their experiences, confronts what lies ahead on their journey, and exits with a feeling of determination.
11. Entropy	Where a new universe is gestating or Mordiggian has been evoked, an orb-shaped null-space may form, absorbing information (i.e. matter and energy).	The absorbed information combusts, creating an intense wave of phlogisten heat, followed by absolute cold. The orb will continue to absorb and grow unless it is contained or runs out of matter and energy to combust. Afterwards, the paraverse is permanently changed given the decrease in overall substance.
12. Inversensome	Rarely, after exposure to inverse frequency noise (such as from a Jammer's IFOD), one or more senses are temporarily entrained to the inverse frequency. Can cause temporary or permanent mutations of the sensory systems, internally or externally, in form or in function.	The spatial-frequency decompositions computed by e.g. the visual and tactile systems assume linear time. When entrained to inverse frequency noise, the senses, and by extension perception, memory, and other cognitive processes, particularly temporal perception, are disturbed or altered.
13. Astral Incursion	Generally driven by a large quantity of astrium glass, mystics, or other astral beings, but in rare cases also driven by those with an intense force of will or undergoing intense emotions. The astral and physical planes within a local physical/metaphysical area temporarily fold onto each other.	As the metaphysical concepts of object-and-space fold onto each other and no longer hold distinction, so the "self" can freely merge with (or be invaded by) the "other". Thoughts and actions, physical and metaphysical, and other similar dichotomies break down within the incursion. Like a lucid dream coupled with literal dissociation.
14. Dynamical Distraction	A noise, a Gabor patch or phosphene, an endless tapping on the shoulder or an itch, recursive whispering or syntactically well-formed gibberish, a familiar odor, the electromagnetic field around minute contracting muscles.	Those affected by the distraction have difficulty maintaining focus on even basic tasks. Long-term exposure leads to irritability and paranoia, and eventually suicidal ideation.
15. RNGenesis	Due to changes in the paraversal encryption algorithm, a new random number generation (RNG) seed is born. For a brief period of time surrounding its creation, the laws of reality change.	At the onset of its creation, the nature of probability and statistical inference temporarily changes, as if by a Weirder. Occam's razor becomes an absolute law, type-1 and type-2 errors become statements of truth, probabilities compound (i.e. gambler's fallacy becomes true), etc.
16. Glimpse of a-logic	Usually due to exposure from the ordinal elements and particularly anti-information, one is temporarily able to grasp some aspect of a-logic or impossible biology. Accompanied by temporray symptoms of madness and biophysical degradation.	Enhances one's understanding of impossible life and the ordinal elements. The more frequently one glimpses a-logic, the worse and longer-lasting the symptoms, until they are eventually permanent and fatal.
17. Death of One of the 36	At any one moment in the paraverse, 36 individuals unknowingly serve as a block-chain of the total ethical value in the paraverse, according to an unknown algorithm or creator. One of the 36 has died or been revealed (nullifying it as One of the 36). Some superstitions suggest that the phenomenon is related to anti-mutants or their teleological origin-point (the God Anti-Mutant).	Usually a replacement is assigned automatically, but in rare circumstances there is a delay. Certain nodes within the paraverse are affected by this delay, and temporarily the abstract concept of "ethics" is absent from those nodes. A populated region with a suitably functional urban organism / governmental or communal system will likely not notice the effects, but less stable regions will be affected by a-morality. The longer-lasting or larger the system affected, the greater the long-term consequences.
18. Gravity Well	A large quantity of aether metal or other gravity-manipulation of sufficiently large scale has caught an object with no terminal velocity into a recursive gravity loop (such as falling adjacently in time along the paraverse across a near-infinite number of near-identical physical spaces).	As the object infinitely accelerates, eventually turning into light, it creates a sub-black hole gravity well implosion. Usually the object will eventually "burn out" or be dislodged, or the well will get "clogged" with something else, but if allowed to continue indefinitely, will eventually go nova like a star, or even turn into a black hole.
19. Paraversal Reconfiguration	A node within the paraverse has changed its activation, switching from one moment to another. This is common and usually the moments are so similar or inter-related that none are the wiser.	Occasionally, the moment that the node switched into is critically different from the preceding moment in some obvious way, although only paraversal beings (those who have at some point been outside the paraverse) notice; others will only remember reality as they would perceive it had they always been in that moment of the paraverse.
20. 361	In the presence of a 361-degree super-circle. Most feel a divine presence, often accompanied by a reflexive aversion to the super-circle or attentional blindness to it. A rare few do not experience the divineness, or are able to overcome it, and observe the super-circle directly and for a sustained amount of time sufficient to properly perceive its extra degree and the odd angles it implies. The presence of the super-circle is usually fleeting, quickly forgotten, with no obvious purpose.	To view a 361-degree super-circle is to either be immediately annihilated, to transcend the paraverse and physical self-hood, or to be able to permanently sense and interact with another dimension of space or time (not one pre-defined in the setting e.g. kaiberspace of phreakers, the yellow plane of jammers, the astral plane of mystics, etc.). The ability to perceive and interact with a new dimension is generally accompanied by an equivalent reduction in sanity.

My Party

A while back I commissioned these sprites from Harveydentmd on fiverr, of the player characters in my Phantasmos campaign. I wanted to share these amazing sprites, and also show what a party in Phantasmos can be! Also, you'll notice a recurring theme, that all of these characters have a history of being "outsiders". That wasn't my intention, nor was it planned, but it's awesome how these underlying themes can come out in the game!

Adeinyantis: A cyborg cat from the Feline Republic, a nation of intelligent cyborg cats off the meridian system whose society is based on Plato's Republic (the Feline Republic was the player's creation and not part of Phantasmos 'canon', but this is exactly the kind of thing I encourage players to do). While faithful to the Republic and a strong warrior, he questions their isolationist policies, and often struggles with the level of personal restraint expected in his society. He decided leave the Feline Republic to train as a jammer, so that he could better protect the Republic from outside threats. Eventually, he reconciles with the leaders of the Republic, including his "brother" Meowkhan, who has begun enacting some of Adeinyantis' suggested policy changes. Several kitten soldiers have since joined the parties crew, helping to man their fey wood airship.

Otgonbayar: A kobold theta from the Dogu Kingdom, who is also practiced in plant-based magics and gardening. He has bred a thorn-spitting plant which he uses as his primary weapon, and has a palm-sized, bulbous, animate plant-pet named Hank, who toots pleasant aromas and poops delicious fruit. At some point in his adventure, he acquired the purple corn infection, turning his skin purple and giving him a uni-corn. He is brash and violent, over-compensating for his feelings of being an outsider as a child, as a kobold amongst dogu. After the dogu mafia, in collaboration with the harlequinade kurobozu, overthrew the dogu government and turned the kobold community into a ghetto, Otgonbayar came home to free his people. The party took over the chronix drug trade, and used their own mafia status to organize a treaty between the kobolds and two factions of fonce resistance zoomers. This led to an organized kobold rebellion, leading to the formation of the kobold free state.

Alithea: A quenduin fuchsia phosphenomenologist. Exceptionally brilliant, and also exceptionally eccentric, ze left zirs home to explore the world. Ze has been missing from the paraverse for some time, but prior to this, ze played a crucial role in convincing the God Mutant into wiping itself from the paraverse, currying favor with the Grim General in Blue, and organizing an alliance with the martial scientists of the School of Hyperbolic Orange.

Arpaia: A dogu apoptomancer. While dogu society generally values applied science and engineering, he was more interested in the questions of basic science, and studied in the tartarian kingdom. Now an explorer, his time spent in the tartarian kingdom is reflected in his tartarian robes and hair-style. He was unknowingly wrapped up in a plot between the dogu mafia and harlequinade kurobozu, and had the egg of hundun implanted in him. Eventually, the egg was released, and now exists as his dog-sized, termite-like, void-bolt shooting companion, Dougle. 



























Ulaba: A humanoid moose-mutant chrono dragoon. He was part of a military faction in the quenduin desert from another part of the paraverse, who became stranded in this paraversal moment after a mission gone bad. After learning of the political machinations behind his outfit as part of the Doppelganger organization Shakhs Makadie, he chose to stay with the party and finish what they had started, rather than return to his war-ridden home.

Phantasmos: The Big Picture

Preamble

So I've been writing up these tables, and it's been a ton of fun, and personally rewarding, but I realize that there's a lot going on with this setting, and that the tables provide no real frame of reference, which can make it difficult to keep track or make sense of the setting. On the one hand, Weird & Wonderful is what I'm all about, and I like the idiosyncrasies, the things that are intriguing but under-explained, that make people have to think about a setting. At the same time, you have to be invested enough in the first place to delve into the arcana of it all, and I want you (yes, you) to want to do that.

I've considered writing detailed writeups for each species, class, mythic being, creature, place, faction, and so on, and if I ever want to make this a book I'll have to do that, but I'm not sure that will really solve the problem of "pitching" the world in the first place. I've also considered writing some short fiction, which I think would help and would also be personally rewarding, but I'm struggling with where to even start with that.

So for now, I'm just going to talk about: 

Phantasmos: The Big Picture 

Phantasmos is a post-post-apocalyptic weird science fantasy setting. It's Heavy Metal Magazine, Moebius, Jack Vance, Grant Morrison, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Phillip K. Dick, Neal Stephenson, Charles Stross, Neal Gaiman, Jack Kirby, Pendleton Ward, Justin Roiland, Dan Harmon and everyone and everything else that's ever influenced me, and a little bit of my own weirdness as well.

I want you to come out of reading my Phantasmos works thinking "Wow, that's really cool, and I've never seen anything like it". I know that there's no such thing as true originality, that everything is just a rehash or combination of something else, but I hope that Phantasmos is more than the sum of its parts.

So what actually is it though...

It's a fantasy world with fantastical beings, but these aren't your typical orcs, elves, dragons, and dwarves, and hopefully, it doesn't just read as porcs, shmelves, dragins, and bwarves. 

Instead, you'll find a kafka-esque bureau-industrial complex of mutants, cannibal ghouls giving each other skin-gasms in the positronic remains of an ancient civilization, zen fascist raptor-men...

Warriors who bend spacetime, coder-mages, BDSM science witches by way of Michel Foucault, particle-to-wave Heisenbergian roller-punks, free-loving necromancers (neck-romancers), bio-punk immunologists, multi-dimensional mystics inverting the abstract concept of "self" vs. "other" along its axis...

A "paraverse"- like a multiverse if every moment of space and time (along dimensions known and unknown) interacted like a connectionist neural network defying laws of linear causality as we understand them...

Elements like a spectrum running perpendicular to electromagnetism representing the metaphysical concept of qualia, a substance beholden to principles of logic fundamentally incompatible with Shannon entropy...

At this point, you are probably totally confused and either A) intrigued and maybe a little aroused, or B) annoyed and totally checked out. This means either I've failed to convey my thoughts into written words, or this just isn't for you.

But if this seems as rad to you as it does to me, then I hope you'll stick around!

Survey

I posted a survey on reddit a while back, trying to collect data about what people like or want from my tables, how they use them, what sorts of games they play, etc. The survey only includes up to the unique items table, but it would still be nice to get peoples thoughts. The survey is anonymous, not for profit, and should only take a few minutes. All feedback appreciated!

Here's the survey!

Quick Update 2

I am sometimes an impulsive person, so I've decided to just post all of the tables up to now after all! I'm starting to get the hang of blogger and some of the html coding, so at least doing this is getting faster, but I still probably need to work on formatting. It's been suggested that maybe I should upload the tables as pics rather than as text. Would people prefer that? I'm still open to changing, but I'll just stick with this format for now.

Quick Update

Since Scrap Princess just posted about this blog on G+, I wanted to give a quick update that right now most of my work is still on reddit as u/quantum_metaphysics. I haven't uploaded the rest of the tables yet because I'm still trying to decide if this is the right format to present these tables. Does the Mythic Beings table look ok, or should I make some changes to how I'm presenting the information before uploading the rest? Feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Mythic Beings

EDIT: 2020-11-06: Should have updated this a while ago, but I relatively recently posted a retrospective on this table. Basically, I examine what I think worked and what I think didn't, and do some rewrites. I think it's a testament to how I've grown as a writer and designer. If you're intrigued by these but unsure, or in particular if you think the writing is really bad, maybe give the retrospective a look ;).

Mythic Beings (1d20)	Physical Description	Behavior and Cognition
1. Mun Jira	A large monkey with bat-like wings, mole-like claws, covered in pangolin-like scales of prasium. It has no eyes, but its curled-lips can project outward like a star-nosed mole, revealing sharp teeth. When not illuminated by or projecting impossible light, it is either white like phosphorescent plastic with semi-transparent skin, or invisible.	Intelligent and self-aware. Self-destructive, depressed, its own worst enemy. Knows this to be true, but can't break the cycle.
2. Mogleth	A being of yellow, glassy, shimmering liquid starfire. Its top half is chitinous like a lobster shell over an arched spine. Thin strands of liquid starfire grow, writhe, and fall within the span of tens of seconds along the top of the shell. It's lower body is boar-like with a flaccid, amorphous, bulging fat gut. The skull is warped and cracked, as if infected by a fungal parasite, giving it a spongey, wrinkled appearance like a morel mushroom. Within the folds of the mushroom head are clusters of small yellow eyes. Overlapping rows of tusks line the lower snout. Along its side are semi-solid crab-leg tentacles. It has boar-like hind legs and humanoid arms for front-limbs, generally held out in a crawl position. The shell is semi-translucent, revealing internals like an arthropod, fish, vegetable, or fungus, but also unlike any of those things.	Manic, impulsive, and unpredictable.
3. Zaphrad	A bird-dinosaur monstrosity like a raven or tyrannosaurus rex or featherless owl. It's skin is a vivid, almost cartoonish, un-real pink composed of absolute solid. Its eyes have been gouged and its beak clipped.	In a state of inverse-nirvana; vengeful, self-absorbed, materialistic. The embodiment of anti-love.
4. Quath	A photographic plate in the shape of (and reflecting the features of) a holographic cyan dragon, like a basilosaurus covered in the armoured plates of an armadillo. It is a being composed of anti-information.	A being of a-logic; fundamentally incomprehensible to mortals.
5. Mordiggian	Her true form is a massive, worm-like, swirling void, although she sometimes takes the form of a dogu or mutant woman.	An information-vampire, the null and void, the answer to the unanswerable question.
6. Yagak-Sha	Kaiju with a red, green, and blue crustacean body, wasp-like face with large alternating white and colored eyes branching from eyestalks, four large spear-like barbed claws at its front, and seemingly endless rows of legs with retractable wasp-like stingers. When it raises its carapace plates, underneath are rows of wasp-like iridescent wings, and honey-comb shaped holes from which innumerable wasp-sized spawn bite, chew, and push through a thin layer of skin, poring out of the holes and swarming around it.	The god of impossibility, the god of n/0.
7. The Jellymind	A gargantuan chain of blue and red bioluminescent immortal jellyfish, pulsing rainbow electric signals from jelly to jelly.	An ancient and advanced connectionist neural network. It was designed by a race of intelligent octopi, and so certain assumptions of octopi cognition are baked into the network, although it has evolved into something beyond even the understanding of the octopi.
8. Daddy Delightful	A humanoid creature, over 9 feet tall, lanky and thin, in a quilted black tunic with neon, multicolored patterns woven throughout. Its face is obscured by a pointy hat with a wide brim. It carries a staff of pumpkin on a stick, and rides a mechanical plow.	The bringer of harvest, rewards those who overcome their fears, defers (although often exacerbates) the suffering of those who fail. Generally calm, but induces mania in others.
9. Deosheba	Has the body and head of an orca, held on land by rhino-like legs of shaped liquid which dissolve when he swims. Protruding from each side of his jaw are long, upwardly-turned shaped-liquid tusk-horns. His skin is metallic and the colors shift like those of the ocean; aquatic blue, teal, green, red or orange like the sunset, some pink and purple. An orb of shimmering, multicolored, iridescent shaped-liquid swirls in place over his head like a three-dimensional halo.	Does not respect personal boundaries; borderline personality; well-meaning but aggressive.
10. Caine aka The Dentist	A large humanoid figure in a long white coat. Carries a two-handed drill weapon, large pick, a large staff with a mirror, or a syringe-clawed gauntlet with gas dispenser. Face is covered by a mask, and underneath the mask is a tube dispensing gas, connected to a small, concealed gas tank. He has rotten, misshapen and irregularly ordered teeth of various species. Only one tooth is perfectly white and healthy- a humanoid incisor. Accompanied by quohort of qhuaos quinces.	Herald of The Tooth Fairy. Relentlessly follows his targets, so long as they have any lingering anxieties. In a constant, drug-induced state of delirium.
11. The God Mutant, Α Form	A baby, sticky and pink like raw, exposed meat. Bony except for its belly, long necked, with a face like a reptile and beady little black eyes. Cackles and gurgles, sometimes cries but only with intent.	This form communicates only psychically. It is malicious and angry at the entire paraverse. It knows exactly what it is.
12. The God Mutant, Β Form	A small child with greenish skin. Neither cute nor ugly. There is an indescribable "off-ness" about the child.	Behaves like someone mimicking a child. Subtly needy and manipulative, but less outright malicious than the other forms.
13. The God Mutant, Γ Form	A small, underdeveloped teenager with greenish skin and short black hair. Wears a studded, black leather bomber jacket. Unnaturally large and intense eyes with too many veins along the forehead and face converging on the eyes. A wide, angry, manic smile on his face.	Quiet, passive, and unassuming at a distance, his intensity only obvious up close. At the flip of a switch will become enraged and relentless.
14. The God Mutant, Ω Form	Large, pulpy red eyes, semi-translucent, with a calcified core. Around his eyes are a series of thick veins, along which many smaller eyes of a similar composition grow. Long, dark green hair, sickly green skin. Lips torn, skin around jaw burned. Left arm stunted and shriveled, no right arm. From base of the right shoulder are a series of tentacles ending in vulture beaks, uncountable because they move in a tessellated manner. Deep fissure running through his chest and abs. Ankles end in vulture-like claws. Three vulture wings, two on left side, one on right side. Some additional NSFW details not included.	A mutant who has transcended linear time. A corrupted being which loathes its existence; wasted potential; always starting over; never satisfied; sees the end state before it has begun.
15. The Tooth Fairy	Wears a greenish gold hued power armor with an ornate, worm-like pattern carved into it. Vents in the shoulder blade exhaust a shimmering, iridescent, ethereal energy cape, meeting in two parts like folded insect wings. Wears a smooth great helm covering all facial features, conical at the face with ridges like an earthworm and a toothy grin carved along the mouth. Beneath the helmet is a toothy maw like a hagfish	The Fey King. The dull and constant anxiety; ennui; the carrot on the stick; you will be paid for your services.
16. Fuchsia Phosphenom-Panopticon	A crystalline fuchsia-colored object which, in three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time, could be roughly described as a wheel-like shape with a hub-and-spoke network within it. The hub contains an eye with many pupils which dart constantly across the spokes, projecting fuchsia light like a laser light show and disco ball. It is never clear exactly what the pupils are focusing on.	Domination and submission; power is a differential; control and release; uncomfortable spacetimes; reality interpreted through an android's dream.
17. SLIME Edward	A shimmering and metallic-flecked ooze in the shape of a humanoid.	Synthetic Limited-Intelligence Markovian Entity- a misnomer; error-mass in the paraverse given form; the transcendental weirder.
18. Lamarr	A massive, city-sized golemite. A box-like chassis of nigh-impenetrable metal with various compartments and plates, and covered in turrets and other weapons platforms. Moves on wheels, treads, crab-legs, chicken-legs, or whatever else it needs for the terrain. Populated by the Priests of Lamarr, who, through divine commune with Lamarr, can summon a barrage of god-pillars from the sky.	Idiosyncrasies in its behavior suggest that it has some degree of intelligence, although only the Priests of Lamarr seem able to communicate with it in any meaningful way.
19. Mother at the gate	An indescribably massive creature at the other end of Yog-Sothoth. From tears in reality formed from burst bubbles of The Gate, she can be seen pressed against the edge of reality. A vaguely humanoid figure with jaundiced skin, ill-defined fat, musculature, and bone structure- more like the abstract concept of the humanoid form. No hair, genitalia, nails, ears, or any facial features. Three glassy, two-dimensional planes project in front of her face, two displaying eyes and one a mouth, all oversized. The planes engage in repetitive actions such as saccadic eye movements, blinks, and lip movements. Produces no sound except for when crying and vomiting liquid starfire, from which skyscraper-sized "children" fall. Most of her appearance is inferred from these "children"- at the edge of the gate little more than her plane-eyes or mouth can be seen.	A vague sense of maternalism or Munchausen by proxy aside, her behavior is in no way comprehensible to mortals.
20. Mr. Smiley	A floating smiley face with a big, toothy grin. There is a nervousness in its eyes, and it slowly loses teeth as it grows more anxious.	Seemingly well-meaning, but incredibly needy. Once it locks eyes with someone, it will follow them indefinitely (and can separately follow multiple individuals). Reinforces anxieties, inducing waves of panic as its teeth fall out. Can be overcome only by breaking the cycle of anxiety.

Mun Jira (Art by Scrap Princess)

I thought I would start with this awesome piece of art for one of the gods/mythic beings from my campaign setting Phantasmos, Mun Jira, present on my Mythic Beings table. I commissioned this from Scrap Princess, who was the artist for one of my favorite tabletop RPG books of all time, Fire on the Velvet Horizon, and has produced many other great works.

Mun Jira is one of the four Ordinal Beasts and the god of impossible light, one of the four ordinal elements (present on my Materials table).

Impossible light is a physical force from another universe, somewhat comparable to electromagnetism. It can vaguely be described as a spectrum perpendicular to the visible light spectrum, intersecting at green, such that the low end is infra-green and the high end ultra-green. However, this is just how the visual system of mortals transduces impossible light, and not an “objective” representation of it. The visual system of mortals was not meant to process impossible light- longterm exposure can lead to visual impairment and thought disorder. It is also a source of energy to impossible organisms, and is the metaphysical embodiment of subjective perception.

Mun Jira is a god of great power and potential, self aware and reflective, and yet is so deeply rooted in his own subjective perception of reality, that he has never been able to overcome his self-defeating tendencies.

About Me

Up to date as of 2022-24-07

I've been writing this blog since I think Summer 2018, although many of the early posts on this blog were originally Reddit posts, where I went by u/quantum_metaphysics (deactivated). I wrote some article pre-2020 at High Level Games Blog, and more recently I've become a contributor on the collaborative blog Iconoclastic Flow which you should all go check out.

I also published the game Maximum Recursion Depth, or Sometimes the Only Way to Win is to Stop Playing: The Karmapunk RPG, which I have written about extensively on this blog.

It is available pdf only:

drivethrurpg

itch.io

And print+pdf or pdf:

Exalted Funeral

I am currently working on a second game in the series, MRD2, which may or may not get a proper publication but is still fully playable as of now.

I am mainly interested in Weird Worldbuilding but I've also written about game design, random generators and other coding-related tools, interviewed other bloggers, and all sorts of other things.

I have a master's degree in cognitive neuroscience, where my research focused on understanding the networks of brain activity associated with language comprehension. I was in a PhD program, but had a "crisis of faith" so to speak, and left after my masters to pursue a career in machine learning engineering. Prior to this very STEM-y career, I have a bachelor's degree in psychology, and I've always been interesting in humanities fields like philosophy, sociology, history, and anthropology, and more recently I've been (very slowly) developing an appreciation for poetry. While in some ways I'm perhaps a "Jack of all trades, master of...", I genuinely believe that this breadth of interests, and my ability to draw inferences from the interactions between some of these seemingly disparate fields, is in part what drives my creativity and worldview.

If you stumbled upon my blog and liked what you saw but don't know where to go from there, the All-Time Popular Posts or Top Post of the Week sidebars may be the best places to start. If you're not seeing them in mobile mode, try switching to desktop mode to see those.

I also try to keep my Labels up to date (see sidebar), but I have a million of them, so I'll outline a few of them here for reference:

Weird & Wonderful Tables: These are posts of random roll-style tables, usually with specific themes.

Micro-Settings: These are posts about settings if they're one-offs or I haven't written much about them and they're meant to be fairly self-contained. In some cases, a setting starts as a micro-setting and then becomes something bigger and I forget to relabel it.

Appreciation/Interview: These are posts about other bloggers or creators, including "fan-content", interviews, and "not-reviews" (the latter two have their own labels).

Game Design: A catch-all for any posts with novel game mechanics or novel systems. I've produced game mechanics primarily for OSR-style games and Tunnels & Trolls (TNT label).

Coding: These are posts that implement some kind of coding, such as javascript-based automatic generators, like press the button and it produces a thing. Ironically, I've done much less with this ever since I started working as a software engineer.

Phantasmos, Aquarian Dawn, Maximum Recursion Depth, MRD2: Are my main settings (tbh mostly MRD 1 and 2 at this point).

Phantasmos is a very weird, gonzo, science fantasy setting, that very deliberately tries to reject any traditional fantasy elements while trying to fill a somewhat similar niche.

 

Aquarian Dawn is more so my direct take on "Traditional" Fantasy (which is itself a label), and nominally a "spiritual sequel" to LotR, although it's also inspired by The Witcher, and occidental fantasy such as Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. The central theme is: After the age of Humanity, what comes next?

Maximum Recursion Depth takes place in the "real" world, but where a version of the Buddhist concepts of Karma, the Celestial Bureaucracy, and reincarnation are tangible quantities in the world. Players are Recursers, people capable of reincarnating into themselves rather than a new person, and so can infiltrate the Numberless Courts of Hell to rescue Poltergeists from the corrupt or incompetent bureaucracy's punishments. It deals with some fairly heavy themes around societal problems and personal growth, and I would say it is somewhat comparable in tone and themes to works such as Doom Patrol, The Good Place, Persona 5, and Bojack Horseman. While it is philosophically rooted in my interpretation of Buddhist concepts, the fantastical elements are generally idiosyncratic and not directly based on Buddhist Mythology.

MRD2 is part of the same world as MRD1, but maybe more so "near-future". Aliens known as The Cyblessed have given Corporations the Wyrm Shamir Symbionts, which they use to bind chosen employees through a Nazarite Contract. These Nazarites gain special powers, including the ability to summon mecha known as Golem, and traverse the cosmic ocean Tehom, a metaphysical space outside the universe. On Earth, out in the Space Settlements, or across the Vessels of Tehom, Nazarites do what they can to survive in a broken system, and maybe even try to fix it. MRD2 incorporates elements of Jewish philosophy and mythology into the world of MRD, and is in some ways my commentary on Jewish Identity as a Jewish American.

I hope this is helpful to anyone interested in my creative endeavors. I always appreciate comments, constructive criticism, questions, suggestions, etc.