Yes, I rather feel that many exotic unique kinds of humans can be more interesting (and work more logically- why do ALL THE ELVES IN THE WHOLE WORLD have the exact same culture?) than a bunch of semihuman creatures. If there are nonhumans, they had better be totally weird, or it really won't hold my attention. Go to Comment
I found this in an old RP. I had forgotten about it, but I really love the character, and I feel (perhaps erroneously) that I did a very deft job of characterizing Aher. I dunno', I just like it. Go to Comment
Exactly. It's a true roleplaying struggle for the heroes- they can't just chop or magic their way through it. And I think it adds a very real, human dimension to him that he isn't insane or catatonic, he's just deeply, deeply depressed. Go to Comment
Once again, like from all your Locastus submissions, I'm feeling strong but pleasant echoes of New Crobuzon and China Mieville's Bas-Lag. I like the Broan, especially because they are just the right spot on the continuum between race-so-mundane-its-boring and race-so-bizarre-its-unusable Go to Comment
I like it in terms of a purely aesthetic standpoint, the idea of a humming, keening, jittering sword. I would imagine that every songblade or every "family" of songblades has a different "song", and that different mastersmiths might have distinctive tones. Go to Comment
The Molochii Lifeforms (Intelligent Species)
(Mountains)
The land here is ugly, dry, flat pass-on-by country. The dusty flats stretch for miles, studded with curling grey weeds whose leaves are silvery with thirsty powder. As you trek, you pass by the signs of some forgotten exodus through this region- the road is scattered with the remnants of the abandoned detritus of a displaced life: scraps of weather-whitened cloth, ancient boots and the rusty remnants of knives, shattered wagon wheels. At one point, an ornate, carven chair, the wood roughened and silvered with weather and age, its nobly-embroidered seatback peeling away from the frame, sits alone alongside the road. Sometimes, there are bones.
At some distance away from the road, you see the dust-wallowing remnants of an ancient mansion, surrounded by dilapidated fences. The structure looks a yellow-beige color like bone, and seems to sag and bulge outward like a collapsing pumpkin. Darkness huddles in its interior, hiding whatever secrets may lie there. The skeletons of trees sparsely surround it, the tallest objects in the entirety of the sun-greyed landscape. Go to Comment
Truly this is an earthly hell. The plains surrounding you are a flat, cracked expanse of pure white earth from which every step boils thick, dry dust in enormous clouds. Mountains, unearthly and black, seem to intrude on the horizon as if out of another world. The sky is a stunningly-deep cobalt, and seems like an endless vault overhead, making your head hurt to comprehend it.
As night falls, great nebular clouds gather on the horizons. Crackling balls of blue lightning-fire fill the air and cling to the arms and the head, giving living things strange glowing halos and shifting flashing outlines. Bolts of lightning rend the distant peaks, and thunder booms across the dead white plains, but there is still no sign of rain. Go to Comment
You stand on the entrance to a natural amphitheater of rippled stones, ringed by knife-edged peaks. The morning light is breathtakingly clear, lancing in over the passes in golden-pink flashes. Frost fuzzes the dirt, and the low shrubs and grasses are greying with the cold. A footpath, leading to the stairway which will take you down to the valley floor, curves whitely around the upper slope of the bowl and into the distance.
But oddly, in the center of this stone bowl, there is a single bent pine, a knotty ancient with limbs heavy with red and green needles. Clots of shining amber sap, like the runnels of tears, cascade down the trunk and gather on the pile of dead needles around its base. How did this single eldertree come to grow here, in a stony bowl so far above the tree line? Go to Comment
Well, it started off well, but I'm still not quite sure really what it looks like... Sort of a gigantic cross between a lamprey and a mosasaurus? I think you should definitely delve more into describing its behavior and habits, and the enormous impact it must have on the ecosystem around it. Go to Comment
Love it. Reminds me strongly of China Mieville, which is good in my book. "The Maul" is most definitely from Tower Of The Elephant by Robert Howard (it's the slum that Conan is in at the beginning of the story; I know my Conan!) Go to Comment
This dark amulet, fashioned in the shape of a demon's face, was forged in the Inferno by Zolgath the Sweaty, Demon of the 8th Pit. When worn, the Black Amulet of the Pit makes the wearer's armpits sweat profusely and stink, ruining any clothing the wearer may have on. It cannot be removed, except by Zolgath himself. Go to Comment
How about this- the hall doors seal off with iron portals. Arrow slits drop open between the hall and a hidden chamber, originally made so that attackers could be trapped and filled with arrows. Of course, there are no longer any guards to pincushion the heroes, but there are swarms of yellow-banded scorpions preventing them from crawling through the arrow slits to release the iron seals. Go to Comment
I LOVE IT, SERIOUSLY, I LOVE IT.
It's simultaneously funny, cool, and very original, and I'm definitely gonna' work it into my next sci-fi style game somehow. Two thumbs up. Go to Comment
Lifeforms (Intelligent Species) (Any)