Grimoire, Decorated with Martigora

    This post is a response to friend-of-the-blog Phlox' prompt "Spells of the Evil King". Here are a set of spells you might find in a grimoire once the dust has settled. I demanded spell names from my discord friends, so that's why they're like that. 

1. Jane's Whistling Dogbullet
   R: sight T: a creature or object D: instant
   Caster points a finger at the target and utters a syllable of power, launching an invisible ball of magical energy that deals [sum] damage on a successful attack roll and sticks to whatever it strikes.
   The projectile produces a loud, irritating noise within 200' that is only audible to elfs, dogs and other creatures with enhanced hearing. Unintelligent animals that can hear the noise will ferociously attack the source, with an effective +4 morale. If this causes them to attack a creature, every attack that hits has a [dice]-in-20 chance of destroying the invisible energy. A friendly elf (for example) can easily find and destroy the energy without harming the target.
2. Ghost Decapitation
   R: 30' T: a living creature D: [sum] days
   Caster carefully aligns oustretched forefinger and thumb with the target's head and mimes crushing it. If the target fails a save, their chakra connections are broken and their soul is rendered paraplegic. Those suffering from soul paraplegia cannot benefit from any class features, including spellcasting, skill or stat bonuses, or extra attacks. Repairing soul paraplegia requires a healing spell cast with at least [dice] MD. 
3. Recruit
   R: shouting T: a dead creature loyal to the caster D: [sum] rounds
   Caster stretches a hand and pronounces a word of power. [dice] shadowy copies of the target arise from the corpse and serve the caster's every command. They have identical physical capabilities, but because they are only shadows they cannot cast spells and dissipate upon receiving any damage or at the end of the duration.  
4. Poison Touch
   R: touch T: a living creature D: instant
   Caster draws a fingernail along the target's exposed skin. The target may attempt a dexterity check to avoid this if they are aware of the casting. The target is poisoned for [sum] rounds, and must check constitution at the start of each round or lose [dice] HP. 
5. Sympathize
   R: 30' T: two living creatures D: [dice] rounds
   The caster whispers a word of power, but otherwise makes no outward sign that this spell has been cast. Sympathy can be cast in a combat round without using an action. For the duration, the two targets are linked, and any negative effects (poison, charm, sleep &c) applied to or HP damage dealt to one target is also applied or dealt to the other. The connection is broken early if [sum] damage is dealt to one or the other of the targets. 
6. Sink 
   R: 30' T: up to [dice] creatures D: [best] rounds
   Caster stomps and utters a word of power. Targets save or treat solid ground as deep water for the duration. Targets who cannot swim, or who are wearing heavy armor, may drown, and it is difficult to fight or cast spells while treading water. At the end of the duration, targets may save again to be forced back onto the surface; if they fail the save, they are trapped in the now-solid floor. 
7. Witness 
   R: self T: self D: [sum] rounds
   Caster becomes a fucking red dragon for the duration. When the spell ends, or when their dragon form is slain, they have a [dice]-in-6 chance of reverting to who they were before; otherwise they die and remain a dead dragon. 

Other Sights of Minecraft

    Friend of the blog Fifth has posted on the sights of Minecraft. I played a lot of Minecraft multiplayer back in the good old days, and I'm familiar with the feeling of walking through a digital graveyard. You're in a world the size of seven earths, and while somewhere out there there might be three or four people — you can even talk to them if they're feeling talkative — you'll never, ever meet them. To augment the first list, here are twelve more sights of Minecraft (or from the ATM modpack) which you could also run into somewhere on the Outdoor Survival map. 

Source: The Red Tower, Giorgio de Chirico

1. A small homestead with a small herb garden is completely ringed by a glittering wall of faceted obsidian fifty yards high. Water pumped from an underground spring pours over the exterior of the wall in a neverending falls.
2. In this part of the world enormous monoliths of soil have been raised for no clear reason. Each monolith is a perfect cube thirty yards to a side. They stretch for miles, with the earth all around them scraped bare to provide material. A few have been dug out by hapless treasure hunters — apparently, after three or four strenuous excavations, they lost interest. Hundreds still remain.
3. Sheets of hammered copper form a solar disc in the heart of the desert. Time has turned them green as grass — a year? Ten?
4. Ten hollowed-out dragon eggs house ten enormous bees in a flask-shaped hole in the ground. The hives are full of fire, not honey. The bees are irritable.
5. A lonely mountain pass, carved into a monstrous face. The only safe path runs into the thing's mouth and out the back of its empty skull.
6. In a damp swamp, a copse of trees. Oak and apple, birch and blackthorn, mighty pine and trembling dogwood, bowing palm and tangled yew, trees that grow sorcerous fruit and trees that give magical lumber; the saplings must have been brought here from every land in the world.
7. A brick tower has been sunk into the seabed. If you're brave, you can descend the spiral stairs all the way down to secret tunnels beneath the waves.
8. Around the walls of a shining city, just beyond their sacred boundaries, some unspeakable war was fought. Ravines split the earth and lead down into unknowable darkness. Fragile catwalks of stone criss-cross the blasted hellscape. Pools of supernatural fire wait for unlucky steps, while other parts of the field are flooded or frozen solid or so incredibly irradiated that life is impossible. Vengeful demons are half-bound in shoddy cages. Hungry thieves armed with clubs or heavy stones are crouched in the rubble, waiting to ambush wanderers. If you must go, as I know you must, go carefully. But if you value your life, go quickly.
9. A hill with faces carved sheer, topped with stone walls. Tattered banners still fly but the interior of the fort has been totally ravaged. Nothing of any value remains.
10. An impossible bridge chaining two distant mountain peaks. One can cross leagues here without touching, or even being visible from, the ground.
11. A labyrinth under the earth. Dozens of corridors, perfectly parallel and perfectly perpendicular, have stripped the earth of her riches. Who knows how many poor fools have lost their way in the unbroken dark?
12. A lever on the wall shoves you into a pit. A lonely snowman is trapped at the bottom.

How to Set Up Factions So They Can Be Toppled

    I've been waffling on the intro to this post for a while. In the interest of ever actually getting it onto the blog, I'll hit you with a couple of bullet points about yourself:

• You are the dunga master for a group of dunga and darga or similar.
• You want a recurring enemy faction in the game. After all, recurring motifs are one of the fundamental principles of worldbuilding, arguably the most fundamental (though this is a topic for a different essay).
• You are unsatisfied with the standard fiver approach to "factions". A couple of scripted fights and the big bad getting away each time until they finally catch up to have a big scripted fight? What happens if the party kills him early, does his cult just collapse? Is the whole adventure over right there?
• You have come to me now, in desperation. "Help me, Michael," you're saying. "You're my only hope..." Your eyelids are fluttering. You're leaning in for a kiss... "I'll do anything you say, Michael" you're contractually obliging.

    Assuming that you agree with every point, read on, and I'll walk you through the steps to make a faction that can stick around for a while providing continual engagement, support or harassment to the party, but can also be defeated over the course of several sessions (with a hard floor on the number of sessions required to knock them down) if the players so choose.

    The aim of the game here is "temporal gating". The degenerate case is that the players just go to the single main bad guy's house and kill him. "They can't do that, he has guards," you say, with your stupid, kissable lips a little wet with drool because you're fucking stupid. Obviously the party just kills the guards. "They can't kill the guards, the guards are stronger than them." Then why didn't the bad guy send his guards to whack the players before they whacked him? Close your mouth, you'll catch flies.

    Start with three guys. That's the essential germ of the idea. Let's say your game is set in some sort of Chandleresque hellhole and the enemy faction is some kind of mafia. Your three guys are:

• Scorsese, wealthy patriarch of the central family.
• Affleck, the weird accountant guy who handles the financials.
• Gandolfini, the big ugly bastard who's a hitman and all his friends are hitmen and/or cops. 

    That's a good start. Now that you have three guys, think up the relationships each has with the other two, what they think of them, how they treat them:

• Scorsese thinks that Affleck's a useless nancy, and that Gandolfini is a precocious scamp and boys will be murderous boys.
• Affleck thinks that Scorsese is the coolest person in the world, and that Gandolfini is a cockroach.
• Gandolfini thinks Scorsese is a washup, and that Affleck's a thief and probably a spy.

    Now, the players can go and talk to these three guys. They can run into their minions on the street while they're solving Chandleresque crimes, they can have conversations, they can run errands, they can make threats. But why do these guys have seemingly unlimited numbers of gun-toting mafiosos serving under them? Well, give each one three sources of legitimacy.

Scorsese has:

• THE PERSONAL LOYALTY OF MOST OF THE MOB'S CAPTAINS. They are his sons and daughters, his nieces and nephews. They know he has their back, and they know he'll always put blood first, so they do as he say, and their own respective minions follow suit.
• A STUPID BIG HOUSE. It's the physical embodiment of the decades of work he's done. Forty bedrooms, twenty baths, an east and west ballroom, acres of land just outside the city. You can go to one of his frequent parties and see what your future might be like, if you work hard.
• HIS FATHER'S BLESSING. Scorsese Sr. (r.i.p.) started all this, way back in the day, practically fresh off the boat. He handpicked his third son to be his successor, and Scorsese Jr. has never let down the old man's memory.

Affleck has:

• ALL THE MONEY. It's insane how much money he can conjure up in unmarked bills given a week's headstart. Technically the finances are spread out over a hundred businesses and a thousand accounts, and technically it all belongs to the Family, but Affleck's the one holding the keys to the vault.
• THE EYE OF THE DON'S DAUGHTER. She's a beauty and Scorsese dotes on her. If the two get hitched, Affleck's a shoe-in to run the business after Scorsese's gone.
• A CARDBOARD BOX FILLED WITH HORRIBLE PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE. His insurance policy, occasionally vaguely hinted at to keep the hooligans in line.

Gandolfini has

• THE CAPACITY TO KILL ANYONE. He is, personally, a badass; he's killed people with every kind of weapon that exists; he knows four kinds of kungfu. Beyond that, with a phonecall Gandolfini could have a dozen hardened murderers arrive anywhere in the city within ten minutes. The most dangerous members of the mob report to him even before the don.
• A FRIEND ON THE FORCE. He's drinking buddies with a chief inspector, who keeps him up to date on any official trouble coming down the pipeline, and might be able to deflect an investigation towards someone else or even bury it entirely. Gandolfini's been saving up his favors in case he needs to get away with something serious — "bomb a subway station" serious. Speaking of,
• ENOUGH TNT TO LEVEL A BLOCK. He brags about it. Nobody's quite sure where he has it hidden, but it's definitely real. Gandolfini's a dangerous nutcase and not above causing a few hundred casualties in order to send a message that needs sending.

    Note that this is all generic bullshit I thought up as fast as I could type it. But already you can see all the ways that a party could fuck with these guys without ever even fighting them. Force Scorsese to sacrifice a nephew to save his own skin, burn his beautiful house down, find or forge a letter showing that the old man actually favored his first son because Scorsese is so useless; one or two of these would shake him, three of them take him out of the game entirely. Or cut off Affleck's control of the money somehow, or break him up with his girlfriend, or destroy or publicize the box of evidence — the mob will whack him for you. Dodge Gandolfini's goons a few times and make a fool of him, blackmail his cop connection with the threat of discovery, steal his bombs. Now he's not the mob's Angel of Death any more, he's just some thug in a suit that people are scared of in the same way they're scared of wild dogs, and he'll be dealt with as perfunctorily.

    And if the players don't want to do things subtly, if they instead want to just kill these dumbasses, well... at least you have three guys to fight instead of one. The first can be ambushed or assassinated, but the second will be forewarned and forearmed, while the third will be hunkered down somewhere and sending all the soldiers he has to stop the party. That's a natural tempo that a good DM can make last three sessions and a great DM could stretch fifteen.



    Now real quick here at the end I've got a little challenge for you. Scroll back up to the top and highlight the last bullet point. That's right, fucker, I've got you dead to rights. Think up a faction (it can be for one of your settings or it can be off the dome), give it three guys (or more!), give each guy three sources of legitimacy (I think three is really the sweet spot, so don't do more than that unless you feel like it or think it would be funny), and post it to your blog. Ciao. 

Interesting Guys, Theory Of, Examples Of

    The reason why dwarves have had such an amazing tenure in fantasy roleplaying games is the same as that which explains their (relatively) rapid disappearance from fantasy literature. Namely: all dwarves are pretty much the same. RPGs are very low-bandwidth by their nature. We start with a large group (not two people communicating, or even a crowd of three, but often as many as five or eight or, in the olden days, twenty), who all must more-or-less understand every part of a nonexistent scenario to the same degree, and who are only organized for a very limited time. In a fantasy roleplaying game, originality is not a universal good. If I create a setting where honungaleisant erdocans go around mimeteing thrinths by elsandele and irri-iwi, then it might speak to the true nature of the human condition, but I'm going to have a bugger of a time getting players to understand what the Hell is going on. "Thrinths are basically elfs, and mimetea is basically magic" is a powerful and useful phrase. Obviously, we want to have interesting characters: obviously, we are going to need to make our characters interesting in a way that is concise and easily communicated.

    Enter the humble dwarf — no, semiurge, stop, that was just stage direction, not an instruction. A normal PC gets maybe two or three details: this one is swaggering and nosy, this one is gluttonous and uncouth. Add a job title (e.g. "Fighter") and we've got as much of a character as we can possibly handle. But by relying on a pre-bundled set of tropes, we get to cheat this system. If one of our character traits is "dwarf" then, by golly, we actually get a dozen other character traits totally for free. What does Bob the Fighter do in town? No one knows and no one will remember. What does Bobgrund the Dwarf do in town? Spends all his money on booze, easy. What does Bobgrund do in the dungeon? Sniffs around for gold. The party is hit with a fireball; Bobgrund pats out his beard. The party encounters an elf; Bobgrund advises immediate execution. The party encounters an orc: Bobgrund advises immediate execution. The party encounters a goblin; &c &c.

Source: Dwarf Warfare Cover Art by wraithdt

    "All of this is immediately obviously true," you say? "We agree with you implicitly"? "You are very wise"? Thank you. But that's just the prelude to the actual reason I have written this essay and long list of guys. Longtime friend of the blog Phlox writes to us of "monsters of intuition", those which "have striking concepts, even when they lack total coherence". It's a good post with interesting examples, go and read it.



    Now that you have returned from reading Phlox' post I can introduce you to the Interesting Fucking Guys. For a few months, just to keep my hand in, I have been writing down short descriptions of Peoples, Species and Races as they come to me. They follow a simple pattern:

1. They are Interesting. They come with a set of behavioral expectations; there are ways in which a member of their people/species/race would behave in various situations which aren't the ways a generic Fantasy Human would behave. They are Interesting in that being one of them is a character trait. No exotic hairdos, simple latex prosthetics or goofy accents (i mean they can still have them but that's not their sum total).
2. They are Guys. By this I do not necessarily mean that they are from some kind of Star Trek all-male planet serving to illustrate an interesting point about gender relations this week. I mean that they aren't so exotic as to be useful only as something to read about in a blogpost. You could make your PC one of them. Your party could find a town full of them, and not be shocked that nobody told you about the next town on the road. They are Guys in that medieval bestiary sense, where they might have heads in the middle of their chests, but they still pay taxes and believe in Jesus Christ.

    Below, please find some Interesting Fucking Guys. 

    The Haraks. Ugly hairless apes (not in the same way as humans, humans have noses and eyebrows and chins). Harakan sleighs are pulled by a uniquely-harakan breed of enormous wolfhounds, who share their masters' bug-out black eyes, self-replacing shark teeth, and wheezing voices. Can't sweat, so stay out of the sun. Commonly raid human settlements for horsemeat (haraks obsessively hate/fear horses, also bees and wolves). Harakan ingenuity is responsible for most of history's wind-up holy men, clockwork birds that really fly, and self-resetting poison dart traps. Never touch iron if they can help it — the stuff stains them shiny red.

    The Garsk. Like Chewbacca but with catfish barbs instead of fur. Speak mostly in depressing warbles and blubs. Perilous strong. Can hit 30 miles an hour belly-crawling through shallow water. National instrument is an enormous brass horn shaped like a coiling snake. National holiday is to find the ugliest tree in the swamp, dance around it, sing, and drink hooch. Unwelcome in restaurants and hospitals (slimy, noisome). 

    The Gnostiche. Like a man, but with a long ribbon-trunk for a face with little wet eyes where one would expect nostrils and the nose and mouth at the end. Always wearing black robes. Instinctive understanding of horrible Frankenstein medical procedures. Can not hang. Sickened by smoke of any kind. Respond poorly to jokes about "do you smell that" or whatever. 

    The Uthiers. Crown of horns, aposematic coloring, jewel-bright eyes. Gay and warlike, love to play dulcimers and sing. Male uthiers have one side dramatically overdeveloped, with a longer leg, denser horns and burlier arm. Fond of saying "the limp makes the man" — that is, the greater the asymmetry, the more masculine an uthier is perceived to be. Most of males have a large left-side; right-sided uthiers (about one in ten) are generally believed to be talented liars, disappointing musicians, and ambitious politicians (which is true). Carry large, heavy canes with them at all times to settle scores. 

    The Angbards. Pale and ghoulishly thin, but uncommonly strong. Renowned for wisdom and long memories. Live as small bands of itinerant seers/architects/librarians. Angbards have sight so powerful they can see (in monochrome) thru closed eyes. If they open their eyes, their vision burns everything it touches; if they accidentally lock gazes with another angbard, or with the sun, they can't close their eyes again and will die if they can't quickly step behind something solid enough to hold back the flames. Don't know their own eye color, and are eager for you to tell them. 

    The Nimbads. Ridiculously tall, muscular, reptilian, like if a kobold made a fake dating profile. Murderously enraged by jokes. All nimbads make their living by card sharping, pool sharking, Three Card Monty, and various carnival games that no one else can ever win. Instead of eyes, they have pilot lights, and must wear smoked sunglasses indoors. 

    The Harpisch. There are no male harpies. Harpies reproduce by rape and murder of lone male travelers. Their daughters are true harpies, while their sons are killed and devoured as a rule. But sometimes, a soft-hearted harpy may expose a boy-child instead, and sometimes, before the wolves find him, the child is taken in by some peasant family. Over long generations, in communities near harpy-infested mountains, the demon-blooded harpisch appear: men and women with sooty eyes and yellow teeth, swift and silent and cunning. Not truly evil, but tending towards cruelty, and with unquiet souls which doom them to a life of danger and adventure. 

    The Halforcs. Orcs are made in the Mills of Arezura by master-craftsman Orcus. The first thing he does is drain your blood. While it boils, he skins you, taking care not to put holes in your hide. He blows the skin up like a balloon and lets it dry while he delicately removes your muscles (to later be sewn with iron thread by his apprentices). He washes your brain with rare alcohols. Your bones he kneads with a putty that makes them malleable; your spine he bends, your arms he lengthens, your skull he molds into some terrible image that pleases only him. When the demon-lord puts you together again you are empty and ugly and colorless, and you wait in jars that line his walls. Then someone buys you, to be dyed with their tinctures and dominated by their will. But if someone loved you very much, if someone led a daring raid on that mountain workshop, if someone freed you from your jar — ah, even then, you would live a halflife only, a halforc waiting to be filled with someone else's passions. 

    The Kissans. Flopsy ears and sniffling nose like a bunny. Velvety brindled coat. Lanky bowlegs twice as long as needed. Skilled excavators and woodcutters, who habitually clear and level land as their nomadic camps pass through. They squat down between their ridiculous legs while they work, and rise up 10' tall to sprint from danger. Capable of breathing in while speaking, singing, or just whistling loudly (kissans hate silence). 

    The River Nellies. Similar to aquatic mammals, with dense muscle, thick fat, sleek silhouettes, prehensile nostrils and ears to close off water. Nellie towns, miles long, can facilitate the building of docks and bridges — or tear them down and block access. A hostile nellie river is a more impassable frontier than any desert or mountain. Their cousins, the ocean nellies, are so large they cannot ever walk on land, but river nellies often tend to flooded paddies. Also they make weapons-grade glass and the only honorable death for a nellie male is to have his throat slit by his daughter using his own knife and if he only has sons one of them needs to take the pink pill and kill him. 

Fiends You Know and Fiends You Don't

    "Hunting is the labor of the savages, but the amusement of the gentlemen."
         - Dr. Samuel Johnson


Incited by FĒONDAS, ultimately from Luke Gearing's Monsters &. 

Source: Cupid Carving his Bow

asterions
asterions
asterions

• HD 8, AC chain, 2d6 damage
• always catches up (space and causality be damned), unless you find an opportunity and check stealth.

    Try as you might to find the way
    home from this labyrinth,
    eerie and
    rapacious,
    even your best plan has fallen through.

    Inside these tunnels, you've crossed your
    string more than once.

    Night is all around you now,
    or else he brings it with him.

    Each turn you choose, or
    seem to choose, describes some
    circuit, vast, not guessable from the
    adit through which you
    passed into the lair — and yet,
    examining your hurried map, do letters appear?

black moon oil
black moon oil
black moon oil

• HD 8, AC unarmored, 1d20 damage
• each good deed you've recently done gives you 1 point of DR.
• nonlethal blows deal no damage, but cut it into two pieces with half the health.

    Brave souls made a pact with one
    whose name has not survived.
    With the dreadful foe defeated,
    their benefactor came to demand his price.

    May G_d pity them, may He forgive their deeds,
    may He be ever watchful that they do not stir,
    from their debtors' prisons beneath the earth.

cultists
cultists
cultists

• HD 1, AC unarmored, weapon damage

    Every time you and your friends come to a new place, roll a 2d6; on a 2 or less they're here already, maybe disguised. If they fail to accomplish their goals then next time they'll appear on a 3 or less, then a 4 or less, and so on.

    Whatever it is they worship,
    whatever infests this country,
    it wants you, and will settle for nothing less.

dalghasts
dalghasts
dalghasts

• HD 2, AC as ghost, 4d6 damage
• may walk through physical objects with effect like lightning. Men wearing metal don't get a save.

    All fear death, of course.
    Some seek the paths that will leave mortality behind.
    Others, braver, pray: "At least let me be destroyed beautifully!" 

frankensteins
frankensteins
frankensteins

• HD 4, AC leather, 1d8+2 damage
• healed by lightning, repelled by fire. Fists can beat down steel doors. Smarter than you.

    Eyes pulled out of a girl's skull.
    Clever fingers cut off a spinster.
    Face sliced from a thief hanged for bread.
    Arms from a galley slave.
    Legs from a porter.
    Tongue of a great poet.
    Heart of a brave soldier.
    Brain of a murderer
    — the only original part.

golts
golts
golts

• HD 1, AC unarmored, weapon damage

    A golt is born when a child hates for the first time.
    Being hideous, they sometimes are humble.
    Being lowly, they sometimes obey others.
    Being fickle, they sometimes show mercy.
    Being clumsy, they sometimes take care.
    Being mortal, they sometimes feel fear.
    (the mirror, in all things, of the fairies).;

odians
odians
odians

• HD 1, AC leather, 1d6/1d6 damage
• may assume any living form. If it knows you well, its form is terrifying: save vs fear each round or lose your turn.

    Certain exotic reagents, crushed together, dissolved in wine, become a draught not of eternal life but of unlimited lives. Twenty years as a tiger, ten as a dog, two days as a mayfly, two centuries as a court wizard.

    Need I list these reagents? Count their price? Tell you no honest trade will ever buy these many lives? Tell you how easy it is to rob, murder, extort, when you wears forms other than your own?

    Need I warn you that, without the draught, you must take your own form again? Remind you of the power others had over you then? Remind you of the power you have over them now? 

    This is but one of the paths a man may walk to leave mortality behind.

renfields
renfields
renfields

• HD 2, AC unarmored, weapon damage
• uncannily capable grappler. When choking you and biting you and biting you and biting you and biting you, deals 1d6+2 automatically every turn.

    A blind slave is proud of his master's beauty, a stupid slave grateful for the length of his tether.
    A clear-eyed slave, a wise, clever slave, that one is happy and secure in his master's strength.

Best Case Scenario Kickstarter

    Best Case Scenario is live on Kickstarter right now. Buy my book. Buy my book. Buy my book.

You want some more art about dudes in black body armor about be vaporized psionically? Cough up the money pal

    Featuring art by Locheil and words by G. R. Michael, this zine promises to revolutionize the industry by inventing a new kind of "thing" — the Role Playing Game. In BCS you will realize your dreams. Only BCS will give you the life you deserve. Only BCS can make you happy. Give seven dollars me give pay seven dollars me pay seven dollars give me pay seven dollars give me you. 

The Well On The Way (GLOG Mini Dungeon)

    Louis and Locheil had a monster generating table and a challenge: 1d2 monsters in 1d4+1 rooms. I got

1. Form: avian
2. Danger: watercutter
3. Mien: cthonic
4. Habitat: deep places
5. Drive: friendship
6. Weakness: moon

    Obviously some kind of tidal thing, which makes me think of that scene in the seventh book of Deltora Quest. The generator indicated one monster and four rooms. The rest of this is so bloody obvious that it barely holds up to a blogpost, but I guess I'll write it all out anyway, for the future generations...

THE WELL ON THE WAY

    Somewhere along the coast is a spring, which was once used by passing ships to refill their stores of fresh water. When the site gained military significance, the empire of old built a small military fort and installed a pair of living stone statues in the shape of their own eagles. Centuries passed. The war is long over — mostly forgotten. Supply lines broke down. There isn't an empire any more, not really, at least not around here. One of the eagles returned to its roost and never woke again. Now the other simple automaton patrols the fortified wellhouse by day, attacking all visitors (mostly unfortunate sailors, who believe the Well is haunted). The eagle knows it is one of a pair, and does not know why it is alone.

    The well is up a narrow path from the nearby pebbly beach. If you were approaching by land, you'd need to let yourself down a series of cliffsides by ropes, and you'd still be outside the walls.

    The exterior walls are 10' high, made of local stone blocks held together by lead (as was the imperial way). Once it had a ditch, but that filled in ages ago. The tower in the middle is clearly visible from the outside. The SOUTH wall gate connects to the path; it can be barred from the inside, but it isn't. The EAST wall has an opening with rusted bars — a halfling or elf could slip through, but not a man or dwarf.

A - COURTYARD

    80m by 80m. Contains all the other rooms in a large stone structure in the middle, about three stories high. Overgrown with beach grass and crab apple. Strange gouges in the earth here and there. A corpse just inside the gate was a sailor (judging by the clothes). It and its sword have been cut in half by what must have been a weapon with an impossibly keen edge.
    Digging around in the sand and beach grass in the southeast corner will reveal rags and dry-rot from two imperial tents; anyone who knows their military history could tell you there were at least six soldiers stationed here, about a hundred years back. 10 minutes of digging turns up 3gp in vintage small change and an icon of St. Lionel (+1 to saves against falling trees) worth 5sp.
    The building has three entrances, one on its SOUTH side and two on its NORTH. They'll be locked (with simple locks covered in marks of previous pickings) by night, but the Golden Eagle unlocks the doors into and out of the wellhouse during the day. Additionally, a covered balcony overlooks the courtyard on the SOUTH wall. It's 20' up, but not difficult to hook a grapnel on. This gives access to the gun balcony and to rooms B - WELLHOUSE and D - CONTROL by way of the staircases in those rooms.

B - WELLHOUSE

    This room is 30m square, with a 30' ceiling with a large central skylight covered in bars. Beneath the skylight is a hole 15 meters across and cut 20' into the earth. Slick stairs spiral down the sides to the bottom. This is the Well, which fills with hot, fresh-ish, sparkling water as the tide comes in, and slowly cools and drains as it recedes. A pump as big as a dogwood on the EAST wall is broken but repairable by an engineer. The soldiers stationed here once enjoyed hot baths piped in on geothermal power every day, a rarity in the current dark age.
    On the SOUTH wall, stairs lead up to the gun balcony. They're unusually encrusted with filth — mineral-rich water has leaked from the gun and dripped down over the years. The filth conceals approximately 350 caltrops lovingly placed by retreating soldiers. Anyone who takes the stairs without checking the grime will step on caltrops halfway up, taking 1 damage. They must then check CON, yelping jumping slipping falling and whacking their heads on the stairs for 1 damage on a failure. They must then check DEX, rolling off the guard-rail-less stairs 10' up for the usual 1d6 falling damage on a failure.
    On the EAST wall, one half-rotten wooden door leads to D - CONTROL, and a metal hatch leads to C - ROOST. Both doors are locked with conventional warded locks.

C - ROOST

    This chamber is 7m square, with a 10' ceiling with a large central skylight covered in bars. A metal hatch on the WEST wall leads into the wellhouse, and one to the NORTH leads to the courtyard directly. Beneath the skylight is a mechanical pump as big as a dogwood, with two nozzles like feeding tubes. The pump powers a charging station for imperial weapons. The charging station holds a long-abandoned Thunder Projector (as musket, but silent to everyone not in the line of fire), which like all imperial weapons requires no ammo except a battery that runs dry on an attack roll of a natural 1.
    One of the nozzles is held in the steel beak of an aquiline automaton, deathly still, covered with dripping stalactites and black silver leaf. Party members with knowledge of automata (or decorative fountains) who examine the Silver Eagle will see immediately that its internals are badly clogged with lime deposits and chips of silver tarnish (party members with knowledge of basic chemistry can tell you that one should never mix sterling silver and sulfur-rich mineral water). Repairing the machine would be a difficult task, and probably fatally unwise to anyone without a way to prove imperial bonafides, but it could be done. Studying the lifeless automaton for an hour reveals the statblock for Eagle Automata. Anyone with even the slightest understanding of plumbing (fairly rare in the modern age, but the wizard could have read a book) would have no trouble finding the valve on the raw line to the pump; turn this ninety degrees and the pump will power nothing.
    During the day the other nozzle on the pump is empty. During the night. it repressurizes the Golden Eagle. This automaton was not programmed to attack intruders while recharging (that's what its partner was for), and so can be conversed with. It's like talking to a depressed, evil dog.
Example Conversation:

• "What are you?"
• "STATEMENT GUARDIAN AUTOMATA RESUPPLY POINT OMICRON ELEVEN GOLDEN EAGLE"
• "What is this place?"
• "STATEMENT IMPERIAL RESUPPLY POINT OMICRON ELEVEN. OBSERVATION YOU COULD HAVE GUESSED THAT ONE, IDIOT"
• "Why are you attacking sailors?"
• "STATEMENT I HAVE BEEN DIRECTED TO DEFEND IMPERIAL RESUPPLY POINT OMICRON ELEVEN FROM UNAUTHORIZED INTRUDERS. STATEMENT I HAVE BEEN AUTHORIZED TO USE DEADLY FORCE. OBSERVATION I HAVE BEEN VERY SUCCESSFUL."
• "Please stop killing people"
• "WARNING YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO DIRECT THIS UNIT. WARNING THIS INCIDENT WILL BE REPORTED."
• "Sudo stop killing people"
• "PASSWORD"
• "[hasty whispering]... three cheers for the empire?"
• "WARNING USERNAME OR PASSWORD IS INCORRECT. WARNING THIS INCIDENT WILL BE REPORTED. OBSERVATION I WILL CUT YOU IN HALF."

Eagle Automaton
6HD (30HP), AC as chain, morale 13
Inert eagles are relatively common sights in imperial points of interest. The guardians of the Well were modified to run on hydraulic power, and for this reason the one that also happened to be plated in a noble metal is still functioning a hundred years after the fall. Its engineers would be very proud of themselves.
Movement: strutting walk, capable of galloping on stone wingtips
Morality: shrilly judgemental but lacking true agency (Lawful Neutral)
Intelligence: surprisingly stupid, like if a landmine had opinions
Attacks: +4 to-hit, two strikes with its wings (1d6+4), or balancing on its wings to make two strikes with its stainless steel talons (1d6) and one with its beak (1d12+4).
Water Cutter Breath — 2/day the eagle can brace itself and go without movement this round to vomit a beam of super pressurized water (strikes all uncovered targets within a 50' cone for 4d6, save for half, destroying nonmagical armor and shields).

D - CONTROL

    A chamber 15m by 15m, with no windows. A series of large pipes on the NORTH wall have gauges and valves so that one may monitor the pressure and temperature of the well, the roost and the gun on the balcony above. A desk on the EAST wall has a few abandoned scraps of paper with records of hundred-year-old water pressures and tables of calculations for artillery strikes, a silver dagger letter opener, two dueling swords (medium) in an ivory case, and a pair of officer's boots enchanted to remain constantly warm and dry (10gp). On the wall is a rack of empty hooks; on the floor below the rack and behind the corner of the desk is a ring of keys for all the doors in the Wellhouse.
    On the SOUTH wall is a staircase leading up to the gun balcony. Beneath the stairs are valves for setting pressure, adjusting angle and windage of the cannon, and all the other things needed to operate the gun. Modern artillerists could figure all this out without too much issue. The stairs are trapped, as B - WELLHOUSE.
    The gun itself is a mortar-shaped mechanism 15' long with an 18" bore. The balcony has a block and pulley to lower it from its purpose-cut hole in the awning to be reloaded with explosive shells. Two shells remain on a rack against the wall; they weigh about a hundred pounds, and if dropped they explode for 8d6 damage within 40', save for half. The mortar is currently retracted and overpressurized (scalding hot to the touch, 1 damage to non-gloved fiddlers). Raising it to position reveals a crushed Scattergun with a broken stock (one-handed, deals 1d12 in a 15' cone, jumps out of your hand if the attack roll exceeds your strength).
    The gun ("P I N G U I S P A T E" say the stenciled letters on the side) can, with some luck, strike a target the size of a medium boat within ten miles (that is to say, in this or any neighboring hex). The gun is powered by the Well; if moved, it's just a large piece of nearly-priceless, nearly-unworkable metal (call it 200gp of scrap). There are no more shells coming.

"We came behind him by the wall,
My brethren drew their brands,
And they had strength to strike him down —
And I to bind his hands."
Saint Lionel, ora pro nobis!

Appendix G

    Many people all over the world have been saying things along the lines of, "Michael, can you write a list of other works that have influenced you? I need to know because you're a big influence on my life. Michael, I want to be more like you. I want to look like you. I want to talk like you. I want to crawl inside you, Michael. I want your friends to be my friends. I want your life to be my life. Michael, I want to wear your skin, Michael. I want you to go away, Michael, and for me to take your place." 

    Sometimes people ask me (really, not like the previous paragraph. I was lying in the previous paragraph) (I don't know why they're asking G. R. Michael, I guess they're desperate) "how do you cultivate a style" or "how do you develop taste" or "how do you reach the point where you can create something and then not hate it". I do not know. Whoever knew that would master the world as if he had it in the palm of his hand. But I know that if you want to write a word you need to first read ten thousand words, and there are no bulk discounts. 

    This isn't even remotely a complete list, nor could a list ever possibly be completed. Every person is a library of sorts. I had to cut a lot of entries for being too recent; there have been a lot of cool and influential things since I started blogging in 2018 or 2019, but I've tried to limit myself to only the things that immediately sprang to mind (which logically are more influential than those things I had to actively try to remember), and to those which predate my blog. 

Web Originals

    I will not apologize for the breadth of my knowledge of dastardly bad webcomics; I have nothing to apologize for. Many early enthusiasts of the web saw potential in the "infinite canvas", and the idea that there were no material restraints on works. In the future, they thought, it would be common to have 3d comic strips, songs that can talk back, robo-toasters, &c. The real revolution, however, turns out to simply be that archiving digital data is cheap and easy. Many of the webcomics, online games, podcasts and blogs I'm about to link to have twenty years of history, but are no more difficult to read than a set of encyclopedias would be, if you already owned the encyclopedias. 

• Rice Boy, seminal work of weird web bullshit from Evan Dahm. If you click on a single link in this entire blogpost, make it this one. That's why it's at the first item on the first list. Read Rice Boy.
• Order of Tales, followup work of weird web bullshit from Evan Dahm. A slightly more conventional tale, with a plot and characters and so forth. 
• Fallen London, what can be said. One of two videogames to ever have good writing, though one could reasonably object that it has no video component, or indeed no real visual component. You could play Fallen London on the original Kindle. You could play Fallen London on an iPod Shuffle. Damn, I wish they still made iPod Shuffles. 
• Neopets, I think this one is pretty much destroyed now that Flash is dead. Sometimes I think that Neopets was the internet promised to us and its death was a sort of mayan 2012 apocalypse type thing. Maybe we've all been dead. 
• RubyQuest, representative of a now-dead medium. A forum adventure, like what Homestuck started as, but much simpler and much easier to read (it's real short). A young rabbit must regain her memories and figure out what kind of Blakean Hell she's found herself in. 
• NanQuest, a pseudo-sequel to the above. This one's about a goat lady, and Hotel California.. 
• Knifepoint Horror, a horror podcast by the inimitable Soren Narnia. I have a draft somewhere with a review of every single Knifepoint Horror story. They're all great, but I would advise new listeners to check out prisoner ("There is a curious fact about the tiny railway station mentioned by the teller of this story that he would never know: almost sixty years before the events he describes, the station was partially demolished in the night by someone or something unknown, and had to be rebuilt from the ground up. "), retaliation ("A cruel game of psychological brinksmanship between thieves breaks the sanity of the more dangerous competitor"), or moonkeeper ("A man thrust onto the streets must navigate their disturbing sights and sounds, all the while living under the threat of a monster moving relentlessly through their shadows").
• Antihero for Hire, a dark cyberpunk tale of superheroes and weird shit. Ongoing, I think. 
• The Water Phoenix King, a long epic in a unique and fascinating sci-fantasy world a little reminiscent of Spelljammer. Kyle Marquis (a name familiar to some of you freaks) has ideas that far outstrip his draughtsmanship, but I kind of like the drawn-in-Photoshop-with-a-mouse look. It's cozy. 
• Digger, a long dark tale about a wombat. Award-winning, finished. 
• Schlock Mercenary, which ran for twenty years as a daily strip (it's also funny and a great sci-fi story, but as Skerples put it perhaps the Work and Get-To-Itiveness is what it most deserves to be remembered for).
• Goblins, a sprawling fantasy tale about goblins. I don't recommend this one to be quite honest, but it had a lot of ideas and it's been going for twenty years on and off. 
• Elf, a tale of an elf. I accidentally reread the whole thing (it's not very long) and it threw me off my mojo and that's why I am posting two months after the Appendix craze ended. Oddly this one also has a wombat in it. 
• Gunnerkrigg Court, an ongoing tale of some magical kids in a magical university. A personal favorite of noted rape-doer Neil Gaiman. 
• Girl Genius, an ongoing steampunk story about a young woman and a magical castle. 
• Unsounded, no relation to the videogame UNSIGHTED. UNSIGHTED looks like it sucks but I didn't get very far so I don't know. Anyway, this one is ongoing. 
• Darths & Droids, wherein some crazy people turn the entirety of Star Wars into a loosely-connected-to-Star-Wars saga of tabletop humor. 
• Armless Amy, a gory neon-colored horror comic. Finished. 
• Broodhollow, a long-dormant webcomic about a washup dweeb moving to a small town and discovering its dark secrets. 
• True Magic, another sprawling fantasy tale. Semi-alive. 
• Back, a strange tale about cowboys and clowns. Finished! 
• 6 Gun Mage, elfs with guns. Finished! 
• Elf Only Inn, no, I won't justify this one, fuck you. Unfinished. Don't click on that link if you're going to bitch about it. Fuck you. 
• Order of the Stick, don't say "that's cringe", it's good, suck my ass. Ongoing. 
• 신의 탑, no, I won't apologize for this one either. I dropped it at some point but it's ongoing. 

Theater

• Coriolanus, not one of Shakespeare's most popular plays but one I've always liked for its treatment of pride. 
• Hamlet, I'm not going to fucking tell you what Hamlet is. Oh my glob. Go fucking watch it. 

Film

• A Dark Song, a movie about a woman and a sex-wizard doing black magic. 
• A Field in England, a movie about life in downtown Abergavenny (pronounced "a'venny" because it's in Wales). 
• We Need to Do Something, a horror movie about found family and learning to love yourself. This one is from 2021 but I liked it a lot so I threw it in. I know I said this would all be old shit, I don't care, this is my list. 
• They Look Like People, an autobiographical film by blogger G. R. Michael. 

Anime

• The Last Unicorn, a tale of the last unicorn in the world and her journey to save her sisters from a wicked king and his diabolical minions. Animation by Topcraft (predecessor to Studio Ghibli), soundtrack by America. All-time great. 
• Hellsing, goes incredibly hard, everyone's fit is tuff. Based. Tres cool. 
• Oban Star Racers, a racing anime in space. Earth must compete against every other civilization in the galaxy to win the ultimate prize — anything you want, granted by the all-powerful Avatar. The first "anime" I ever saw. 

Literature

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, oh my glob, am I going to have to explain all of these? 
• Moby Dick, just read it. 
• The Keys to the Kingdom, a children's fantasy series about the secret mechanisms of the universe. 
• A Series of Unfortunate Events, I'm not going to tell you about this one either. You know what this one is. It was pretty neat. This and Neopets permanently damaged my ability to speak english.
• that one Stephen King Dark Tower story about spider people
• The Edge Chronicles, a dark and gruesomely-illustrated children's fantasy series about flying ships at end of the flat earth. 
• Nine Princes in Amber, a fantasy series about the godlings who rule the world, and how much they suck. 
• The Book of Swords, a science-fantasy series about a bunch of magic swords the gods made just to fuck around and see what kind of trouble it would cause, in a far far far far future dying earth. 
• A Good Man is Hard to Find, "The dragon is by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the father of souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon."
• Redwall, a children's fantasy series about talking animals with swords. Bloody and violent.
• Deltora Quest, a children's fantasy series about some magical gems and many horrible and unique monsters. Also a phavorite of Flox. 

Poetry

    I'm not going to summarize the short ones, you can just read them. I believe in you.

• The Ballad of St. Barbara, by Chesterton
• The Wild Knight, by Chesterton. I can't find the poem by itself anywhere (on the first two pages of Google results). There's the poem, and then there's a short play script of sorts, perhaps about a wicked man and a good man. 
• The Waking of Angantyr, traditional
• the works of Swinburne, in general. 
• The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot. Elegy for civilization or something. Lots of banger lines. Goes tuff. 
• The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T. E. Lawrence. There's a poem in the dedication. They made a movie out of the rest of it (two movies in fact). 
• Idylls of the King, an epic poem by Tennyson about how fucking cool Prince Albert was. 
• Gateless Gate, I guess this goes here. 

Flash Games

    These are accessible through the Flashpoint archive.

• Ginormo Sword, one of the cunningest flash games ever made. Plotless but compelling. 
• Armed with Wings, a dark fantasy about dueling and shit, went hard. 
• Amea, a psychological horror RPG. 
• Neverending Light, a brief horror game, tuff. 
• Exploit: Zero Day, a puzzle game by Gregory Avery-Weir. 
• Hands of War 1, 2 and 3, a fantasy series about ideological conflict over generations. 

Other Video Games

• Iji, a scifi game about a young woman and her struggles with being a mass murderer (i.e. a video game protagonist). 
• The Crooked Man, an RPGmaker horror game.
• the white chamber, a horror mystery game. You might recognize the aesthetic; the artist now goes by OtaKing on the ol' youtubes. The other team members are also worth looking into.  
• Hitman: Blood Money, peak of the series in my opinion. 
• Rebelstar: Tactical Command, a Julian Gollop game (the XCOM guy) without all the boring basebuilding. 
• Cave Story, I'm not going to fucking tell you about Cave Story. You know about Cave Story already. 
• Zork, bite my shiny metal batty gap. Not the first, but probably the most famous. 
• Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword, a DLC about black powder firearms. 
• The Fool's Errand, a vast and multilayered puzzle/mystery game with a Tarot theme. Makes you feel very clever. 

Art

• the work of John Martin. Goes tuff. 

House of Usher (GLOG Dungeon)

        Good evening. Two or three months ago I had half of an idea for a haunted house in a swamp for the Char3terie Board project of the secret GLOG server. Events interfered. Then, in the same secret GLOG server, we all decided to do some secret santa blogposting. This one's for you, Hilander. Enjoy half of a once-noble house with some assorted loot.

Click on the white ape to be allowed access.

The Peerless Country of Yland (GLOG Setting)

        Oh trouble, oh char the tree, my dear, my lover, oh kiss me on the lips my lover, Apollo, my lover, oh G_d, destroy me. Oh eternity, I have burned my fucking flesh for three years of happiness, burned eternity, and burned the tree, and weighed it in the scale, oh Apollo, kiss me. 

     The world is round like a clock. In the center is a waste, which is an ocean and a fastness. "Water to sail, saltpan on which to ride", sayeth the bard. In the center of the waste is a tower whose top reaches into heaven. The sun brushes the top as he passes it at noon. This tower is visible from all parts of the world, weather permitting.

    The roundness of the world is divided into four parts like a compass. Skyey north and cthonic south; to the west order, to the east madness. Each part of the four parts of the world is divided into four parts, like a compass. It's dangerous to travel far from home here, because to leave your home is to leave the paradigm which you were born into. In the world of Yland (named for the wasteland the noon tower sits in) all men are travelers, because no one remains in the paradigm they were born unto.

   This post is a collation of some thoughts and dreams I've had over the years. In that, it resembles my post on 41 Feasts — I'm writing this down now so I don't forget it later, if I ever have need of these things again. This post is also an anti-canonical setting, as I understand them and their purpose. Yland is a non-place in no-time, a world where anything can and does happen. A player can say "my character comes from the city of thus-and-such, in the land of over-there", and rather than disrupting the craftsmanship of world, these new details enrich it. There's no map of Yland; because maps are not territories, no map could adequately reflect the conditions of the territories. There is only the north, the south, the east, and the west. Even if you were to go somewhere else you would only find yourself in — the center, with something to the north, the south, the east, and the west. If you understand what this means, then you have no need for a map.

Yland and its States

    If you head north from the noon tower over the ocean you will find yourself at a crossroads in the heart of the Antikingdom, where the sky is gray and the highway is cold and lonely. The ruler of the Antikingdom sits on the Multifoliate Throne, at the northernmost end of the world, in the sky of skies, the heaven of heavens. Here in the Antikingdom the king is the personal enemy of every citizen. He holds power only as long as his knights support him. The cycle of a hero rising up to slay the wicked king, taking the multifoliate throne, reshaping the Antikingdom in his own image and being killed in turn has been going on since the beginning of time.

    But I don't want to talk about the Antikingdom right now, I want to talk about the lands east of the noon tower. East lies madness, and so these are a mad land and they have no unchanging name. Call them the Peerless Country, if mere implication isn't enough and you find you must refer to them directly.

The Peerless Kingdom, according to the great cartographer Locheil N.'s Eye

    The Peerless Kingdom is in a constant state of uproar, of upheaval, of the long nightmare after the revolution. This is the land of madness, after all. If you want to leave this place, really leave it for good, you have to take a ship from the western coast and return to the waste about the noon tower. Traveling north will do you no good. North was abolished recently; the Law has dealt with north. Attempts to flee in that direction will surely fail, for reasons of impassable terrain, unimpeachable mountains, inhospitable tundras or simply very large, very bottomless pits. Traveling south will do you no good, Heaven knows. You'll be lucky to keep your sanity, let alone your mortal life, trying to flee the Kingdoms by the southern roads, you poor simple fool. To the east is Hell, which borders Fairyland. You don't want to go east.

The Eastern World, as recorded by the legendary Mad Queen

   The Kingless Lands have a long and noble history. They must. How else can you explain their total decadence? Ruins don't spring up from the ground like wild lettuce. If you have a collapsing society, you must have had a stable society. Recently, even — at least as recent as the time it takes for a society to collapse. And every visitor who's ever creaked open the impressive tomes of lore in the Lordless Town (the capital of and greatest city in the Lordless Realm) can attest to the centuries of well-corroborated past.

    Still,

    Still.

    I can't tell a lie; I wrote the preceding paragraphs in the fall of '23 and I don't remember what was supposed to come after the "Still, ". I was trying to do a Hemingway, but I left it too long. I can't remember one more note about the sentence therewhich I left in the middle. 

    One thing the Zelda series does really well is continually reinterpret themes and elements, placing them in new contexts or restructuring them entirely. For those just tuning in, a "zelda-style game" would be one where the same group of players returns to a place again and again, and some details remain consistent, but others shift and smear. Like how from Hyrule Field you can get to Castle Town, Death Mountain, a shivering-deep lake, a trackless forest without farther bound... yet they aren't quite the same town, mountain, lake, forest every time. 

    This is the theme I'm messing around with in my head. Phlox didn't know this, but he wrote a list of good examples:

• Wart, the worthiest boy you know, is terrorized by bullies
• Pranceloths, pony centaurs who tilt at anyone they see
• Ankleguard Boots, making you swift-footed
• Spurned Sling. Throws your heart away, spending HP as missiles
• Unmixed Wine, puts anyone who drinks it to sleep
• Monkings, trying to steal my divine fruits. Drive em off, will ya?
• They say the calamity man is making a new body for himself out of seven old kings...
• Old needle and spidersilk thread. They say you can graft new limbs to yourself with these.
• Rasputin, a miniboss who appears anew every time you kill him, requiring a new method of dispatch each time
• The alleys are infested with Batmen, acrobatic brawlers who swing around with grapplying hooks.
• Napoleons, small, low-HD monsters with high damage.
• Crown of Caligula, a fake cursed item that you find when you're looking for the crown of Zeus
• Caesarians, energetic goblins that shoot out of a slit in the belly of other monsters.
• Cromwell's Lantern, piercing the illusion of the Grand Castle so you can crawl through its crevices and hop over its rubble.
• Lightning Rod, attracting electricity to help solve puzzles and create obstacles for enemies.
• Moses, a friendly wandering trader who sells you mana and dolphin skins

Some Artefacts — The Second Dossier

   

Here's the first dossier from semiurge, get in loser it's time to get organized. Seven artefacts one might find, or at least read about, in the Facility. 

Pτ PHENOMENON - ACTIVE USE

RABBIT KING NAME
    Secret words of power identified with the ochlatemporal reign of P██████ L███, warrior-king through eternity, undying opponent of the Red Titan. The words, when written in wet blood, demand/extract hospitality and quarter from inhabitants of the Grave of the Ten Thousand, the Granite Tomb in the Sea, and the Door Under the Stele. Due to the expense involved in requiting this hospitality, standard procedure dictates that when operations require fireteams to descend into these or related ochlatemporal sites only their CO is briefed on the words of power. The words themselves demonstrate ochlontic properties; when written from memory, the memory is lost, and upon being read, their written form fades. 

(ochlatemporal - "mob time", related to mass hallucinations and collective memory of events)
(ochlontic - "mob being", related to things existing only in the noosphere)

Eκ ENTITY - DIRECT CONFRONTATION 

CYCLOPS DIAMOND LINE
    Species of beetle resembling Scarabeaeus sacer, though grossly oversized, being about fifteen meters long and ten meters wide. Anomalously produces enormous quantities of supercooled fluid inside its body, presumed to be liquid nitrogen, and expels that fluid through the joints in its armor. Through unknown but possibly related means the nests of this novel species generate enormous and destructive storms to both conceal and protect the eggs within. Infestations have caused an estimated thirty-five-hundred deaths over several incidents in unrelated urban centers within the past four years (see AARs for CUBIC CENSORSHIP TAURUS, ISLAND REVERSIBLE COBALT, PERFORM CHOICE OXIDIZER), and their rate of appearance is increasing. 

Keywords: Airborne, Animal, Alive, Biological, Carnivorous, Corrosive, Ectoentropic, Extraterrestrial [surmised], Geological [surmised], Hive-Mind [surmised], Hostile, Insect, Meteorological, Organic, Predatory, Religious [surmised], Reproductive [surmised], Sapient [surmised], Sentient, Species, Subterranean [surmised], Sun [surmised], Swarm, Thermal, Thermodynamic, Uncontained.

OΩ OBJECT - SUBJECT ARCHIVED

TIMESPEND EXCITING SECRET
    Hatf al-Hazar (الحتف الحظرد) was a sword forged by the historically attested King David, son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, in imitation of the sword carried by the Philistine Goliath and using secret techniques taught to him by Jehovah. The wielder of the sword is conventionally immortal, and the sword itself can cut through any material, including ██████-tungsten alloy, ███████, and ██ium. The sword was deemed superfluous during the 1996 restructuring of organization Oπ deep storage and was incinerated along with ███ other extremely similar weapons.

Lδ LOCATION - ONGOING CONTAINMENT

GREENHOUSE MOONLIGHT BENEFIT
    Eight square kilometer fairground east of R██████, ██. Once a year, on ██/██ (the anniversary of the execution by firing squad of songwriter and IWW activist J██ H███, born J███ H███████), this area hosts the "Die Wobbly Die" festival. The festival maintains a large but easily contained online presence on Facebook and friendly relations with the local branch of the American Legion. On the day of the festival, the opening of the gates at sunrise (approximately 5:30 a.m. local time) is accompanied by the ceremonial burning in effigy of Mr. H███ . A minimum of nine thousand guests will attend over the course of the next 18 hours; due to personnel cuts dictated by the Department of Government Efficiency it is expected that in 2025 this number will include uncleared local population.
    After the opening ceremony, all exits become impassable, though guests are free to explore the interior of the grounds. The facilities, including food preparation tents, firing squad-themed games and fairgrounds' security offices, are staffed with noncaused individuals. These NCIs maintain order on the grounds and are suicidally loyal to the organizer of the festival (believed to be M███ J█████ J████). After all events have concluded, the festival ends with a ceremonial maenadia beginning at 11:30 and ending at midnight. All attendees will be anomalously compelled to participate in the meal. The victim, an NCI, appears to be at least a visual recreation of J██ H███. Guests remain fully aware of their actions during the maenadia. Fairground exits unseal at midnight. The 2025 "Die Wobbly Die" festival is expected to feature appearances by Ben Shapiro, Kid Rock and Jim Bob Duggar.

(noncaused individuals - individuals who, for reasons of being ghosts, holograms, illusions, hallucinations or emotional echoes, are not human combatants and therefore cannot become prisoners of war subject to the Geneva Conventions)

CΨ CLARAA - CONTAINMENT UNNECESSARY 

WORM ASSESSMENT COLOR 
    Antagonistic assassin and mob enforcer and snoop. Resembles a hairless human male, 40 to 45, 6'5", 230 pounds, no visible nipples. Active under the pseudonyms Thomas or Tanner Palinode, Arthur Kirk, and possibly Guillermo Casal and Robert Newman. Palinode's homeworld is a water planet where humanity evolved from toothed whales. Organization phrenologists theorize that natives of Lχ PLUNDER POETRY CINEMA (often referred to as "Con-Noncon world") have blowholes in place of their standard morality bump. Natives have no concept that rape, cannibalism or murder is "wrong", and are only kept from mass social defection by the totalitarian authority of their warden-government. Few earth-human communities not part of international organized crime syndicates or combat units in active war zones are prepared for contact with Palinode. If fireteams encounter him in the field they are to immediately engage with██████████. ██████████████, █████████, ███████████████. ████████████ the ████████, ██████████████████████████ for the foreseeable future. DISENGAGE AND CONTACT ORGANIZATION AIR SUPPORT FOR IMMEDIATE EVACUATION. 

(antagonist - someone in the know, but not part of the organization or its allies)
(snoop - nonhuman resembling humanity) 

Oβτ OBJECT - FOREIGN BODY ACTIVE USE

UNMARKED VISIT BLOODSUCKER
    LSD derivative first developed by the Department of Scientific Intelligence, a U.S. Army-backed peer competitor, and referred to internally as "Lot 9". Initial exposure to Lot 9 is fatal to ██% of subjects. Survivors experience a range of effects, some radical, as detailed in addendum DSI-1981-LN4. Field experiments by organization medics have had many promising results over the previous four decades, several of which have led to other major projects including scribe conditioning and the modern development of psionics. 

(peer competitor - a karass with access to resources and understanding of the anomalous world similar to the organization)
(karass - any non-organization faction)
(scribe conditioning - failed supersoldier project which produced sociopaths)

PΩΨ PHENOMENON- SUBJECT ARCHIVED CONTAINMENT UNNECESSARY

MECHANISTIC WEDDING SIGNATURE 
    The Azoeth Forward Party is a nonexistent political movement with no presence in the physical world and no membership. Azoeth itself was an Ethical-35% anomalous entity destroyed in 196█ in operation ANATOMICAL PROPHET DEBT. After eight years of review, a committee created to analyze the possibility of Azoeth's survival determined that Azoeth was in fact killed and does not in fact still exist. The political party which seeks to elect Azoeth as president of the United States of America is an unrelated phenomenon.
Presence of the AFP's iconography in modern image-generating algorithms is assumed to be connected to the AFP anomaly, and not to the deceased ██████ ████████, which has been confirmed to no long exist. Further requests for information on Azoeth will be denied and repeat offenders will be reprimanded. 

(ethical percentage - in [T-E] operations, the maximum acceptable percentage of the human population expended to destroy a target)