A Carnival World of no Prisons

This was drafted as far back as February, but I recently watched the original Wicker Man and it was really good and reminded me of this post. Also spiritually connected to The Apologists. It's another thought experiment / worldbuilding thing, just exploring ideas.

A world where the prison system has largely been replaced by a practice of public shaming and light corporal punishment.

Except where shame would not be effective, removal of bodily autonomy is kept to a minimum after the completion of the mandatory Carnival.

While some question the cruelty of the shaming and humiliation, or the stigma offenders carry well past the end of their sentencing, it is efficacious and minimally disruptive to both society and the individuals.

Periods of sociopolitical polarity or apathy threaten the efficacy of this system.

Carnivals usually involve some kind of poetic punishment, up to a certain physical and psychological threshold. Systemic bias and corruption are sometimes reflected in the nature and degrees of the events. For the most powerful, the events may even take on an heir of celebration, an effective soft power attack against the state, making a joke of the whole affair.

Some of the Roles in this new system (Jobs has become a loaded term) include:

• Master of Ceremonies
• Carnival King
• May Queen
• Fool (aka Punch)

The Carnival King in Yellow of the city-state of Gorgonesia is a notable example of how this system can catastrophically fail.

Not actually no prisons but it makes for a better title.

Grotesque Gains

Treasure table of grotesque items

#7 and #8 were written by Beneath Foreign Planets

1. An Unkindly Face: The face of an orc warrior tanned into a mask. The face is pensive and still; it is silent only because it is on the hunt. One's eyes turn red, and red is what one sees. The Unkindly Face provokes fear and evokes an inner power, a will to violence.
   
   
2. Spell Golem: Spells are alive, and to cast a spell is to summon the spell for a mere moment. By carving a sigil into a fresh corpse, the spell may come alive for a longer duration, fueled by the body. The spell consumes the soul, metabolizing it to mutate the body into a shape, still vaguely human, suiting its purposes.
   
   
3. Fairy Cell: An innocuous rectangular handheld device of cold iron, glowing and beeping. Inside are fairies, bound in place, the cold iron tortuously funneling their magical energies through miniscule apparati of logic gates.
   
   
4. Vampire Bloodwine: The ancients learned to alchemically transmute vampire blood and holy water into a potent concoction, but the means of its creation are now long lost. Humans who drink the bloodwine temporarily gain the powers of the source vampire magnified, and without any of the weaknesses. The Bloodwine only works if the vampire is still (un)alive, and for the duration of the effect, the vampire will be able to sense the location of the imbiber.
   
   
5. Acupuncture of the Dark Meridians: Acupuncture needles carved from undead bones, their power proportional to that of the undead creature, and its freshness. Piercing these needles through one's flesh, and especially into the bones, into the marrow, unblocks energy through the Dark Meridians, unleashing great power at a terrible Karmic cost.
   
   
6. Trough of the Were-Hog: A filthy thing covered in excrement and rotten corpses. A unique living stench that blasts its way into the limbic system, into memory, a singularity of self and were-hog. Leave the trough out for some time unattended, and consume whatever finds its way inside without remediation. The duration and strength of the were-hog transformation is proportional to the time left unattended, the quantity of edible materials, and the degree of repulsion.
   
   
7. The Cloak of Control: A voluminous mass of yellow and fleshy segmented strings that sprout from the shoulders and drags across the floor. This 'cloak' is made of overgrown and swollen nerve endings. To wear the cloak is extremely painful but it allows the wearer to interface and control the corpses of giant beasts and meat-mechs of their own design.
   
   
8. The Third-Eye Syringe: Made of blackened hihi'irokane, this wicked and wide tipped syringe is designed for the theft and reinsertion of human pineal glands. Those that use the syringe overstuff their hideously swollen cranium with dozens of ill-gotten and semi-calcified pineal glands in a weird bid to boost their psychic powers.