What the heck is that?  Is it . . . no, it's just a stick.  Sure looks weird, though.

A notoriously fragile flower than only blooms under the full moon.  It can be made into a powerful, magical narcotic, and is the symbol of a major death cult.

You might describe them as a death cult, a drug cartel, an assassin's guild, or the hosts of the wildest parties in town.  

And you'd be right.

Summoned by ritual and bound by hell's laws, these devils offer specific boons in return for equally specific costs.  Some have persisted since the dawn of time.  Others were shaped by their creator only in the last few years, in response to the changing times.

Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.  -The Festival, H.P. Lovecraft

The City of Strangers.  The Beautiful City.  The City of Gold.  The City of Sharks.

There are some types of evil that are not easily recognizable as such.  Much like the mountain-top ascetic or the cloistered saint, there is no obvious sign of the darkness that lurks inside Vodai.  

Ghorion was once one of the Three Troll Kings of the Cloudsteeth Mountains.  Undeath has only made him crueler, and much, much more powerful.

"We're nothing new.  We've always been here.  YOU're the newcomers.  You're the animal that forgot that it was a man.  Stop crying, you animal, you sleepwalker!  If you opened your eyes for only an instant you would see that.  You're a race of amnesiacs, of dreaming children.  I said STOP CRYING!  You disgust me.  That's why I'm not going to explain anything else.  That's why you will die--screaming--without ever having truly woken up.  I will paint every inch of this floor with your blood."  

-An Awakened, formerly Ms. Albright, speaking to Albert Frond, immediately before his murder

In which more methods are expounded by which one may refine a dungeon to more sublime levels of confusion.  

This isn't nonsense--this is logic!

I try to avoid them if I can.  I see them sometimes herding their flocks of flabby grey creatures into and out of Boston harbor, and it always gives me the chills.  Briano tells me that they brought me back to life, but I can't remember it.  I can't remember a lot of stuff.  He also tells me that I was good friends with one of them once.  One of the ones that begs outside of Grand Island Bank for nickels or blood.  I can't tell you why I'm uncomfortable around them.  They're just fish.

We were crossing a ridge when Corgan was lifted off the ground by something.  "Shoot it!  Shoot the tyrannosaur!" he screamed as blood streamed from the puncture wounds that had opened up in belly.  I fired into the empty space above him to no effect.  Then Corgan's ragged corpse dropped to the forest floor, and I was alone.  Utterly alone.  There was no dinosaur.  There was nothing.

After the sorceress Rigalene died, those going through her estate were puzzled.  Where were all her books?  And how would they find homes for all these cats?

A tree that sends roaming fruit on a singular quest.

a.k.a. Mosquito Man, a.k.a. Stirgili, a.k.a. Mansquito.

A dangerous, alien plane where glowing frog-slimes slither and slurp, metal-skinned bird people rebuff diplomacy, and only the endless subterranean tunnels are safe (just mind the gravity-bending moles).  Visitors will have to skulk around in the dark to avoid the curse carried by the sunlight.  Because (have I mentioned?) the sun is the source of a powerful curse--one that covers the whole planet.

When photons bounce off your subs and into my retinas, this is how my headmeats give me numerals.

So you’ve finally done it.  With the best of intentions all around the table, your PCs have finally blundered into the blender like curious gerbils, and now they are hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned.  They are doomed, unless you unleash Secret GM Gambit #4 on them.

How the Clerics of Stone cheat death.

Death is the fate of every birth, and life is only a brief loan of light before the eternal darkness swallows us.  The remaining years of life have been stolen from the creatures known as Time Zombies, who stalk the living in the hopes of stealing a few more years of precious life.