patentlyabsurdrpgideas

[patentlyabsurdrpgideas]

Saw someone in a youtube comment call GMing "being a platonic service top" and I'm never reading the comments again

#this post hit me like a truck #that fell from orbit

[patentlyabsurdrpgideas]

Bear Paw Armor Cuprum Arm Guard, Indo Persian Islamic Empire Dynasty

Facebook | Google +

#bear paw armor #visual reference #worldbuilding #truth is stranger than fiction #incidental history lesson

[patentlyabsurdrpgideas]

I reread this and was wondering if there even is a way to make this feel sinister in an RPG setting, because at least in real life, the idea of a parasite that simply makes your more peaceful sounds wonderful, to the point that even calling it a parasite doesn't feel right.

And most of the time, even in a fantasy setting, that's probably true, but I can think of a couple of ways to make it a problem.

An anti-adventurer defense. I won't say it should completely strip away any players' ability to control their characters, so instead what I think it does is block access to innately offensive abilities. Post-exposure Barbarian's cannot rage, Wizards cannot use spell slots they dedicated to things like "fireball," etc.

A parasite that maintains community without regard for its members. Consider a small, infected village attacked by a raiding party. The air is saturated with its spores, but it will take a bit of time to go into effect. The raiders are killing everyone they can find, and the villagers aren't defending themselves... but after a few chaotic minutes the violent intent ebbs away, and at the end, the former raiders have taken the places of the fallen. The community of people is shattered, but the parasite community is intact.

Last of Us but all it does is turn you into a fuzzy pacifist

#pacifist zombie fungus #rickia wasmannii #truth is stranger than fiction #rpg idea #science #random encounter #session premise #worldbuilding #unique tags

[patentlyabsurdrpgideas]

"When I ascend, these are the final fates of all who would dare oppose me!" — attributed to the most depraved of mages, known in various legends as the Scatmancer.

Some say they were invented by the Plumbing Exorcism Guild to jack up prices, but others say that when a toilet is clogged and the plumbing sounds like it's wailing, well... some things are best left unsaid, don't you think?

#pee pee poo poo #worldbuilding #rpg idea #i'm sorry #visual reference #character idea #npcs

[patentlyabsurdrpgideas]

This is it. The best possible homebrew. All of us RPG tumblrs can close down now.

Spell of Seal Bounce, which grants any otherwise fully-aquatic species the ability to bounce around on land like a seal, including blue whales.

This just makes me happy

Let them bounce!

[patentlyabsurdrpgideas]

Sharing this on my largest blog because this is heinous behavior, and I am extremely grateful that someone brought up Invidious.

I thought I needed a new laptop but nope, youtube is slowing down your PC if you have adblock on on any open tab...

#invidious #open source #software #youtube #unique tags #what in the cyberpunk dystopian hell

[patentlyabsurdrpgideas]

Druid Order: The Bit

Warlock Patron: The Bit

#rpg idea #character idea #the bit #unique tags

[patentlyabsurdrpgideas]

Bestiary Entry: Tornado People, on their way to kill us all!

What are dead man walking tornadoes? :O

it’s a multi-vortex tornado. i dont remember the tribe it originates from (i think it was cherokee), but there’s a native american legend…? saying? that goes “if you see a man in a tornado, you are about to die.”

the most infamous shot of a dead man walking tornado hit jarrell, texas in 1997

it did so much damage to the town it caused the scale that tornados are measured by, the fijita scale, undergo revisions, and it made anchoring buildings in the tornado alley region pretty much mandatory. (it took the entire town off the map. only those who had taken shelter outside of the town or in underground bunkers survived.)

two more examples of dead man walking tornadoes looking like a person are a tornado from 2011 that hit cullman, alabama

and a tornado from 1975 that hit xenia, ohio

#multi vortex tornado #worldbuilding #truth is stranger than fiction #science

[patentlyabsurdrpgideas]

Attack of the Pelican Hydra!

#bestiary #i'm funny

[patentlyabsurdrpgideas]

Session Premise: your party is being hunted by 9 ambiguously undead and/or mutated humanoids, each wearing one of these masks. If any of them are unable to evade or defeat their pursuers, they will be brutally executed on the spot.

Once a player asks out-of-character, you may confirm that they are indeed all slightly different Jason Voorhees designs.

#rpg idea #session premise #jason voorhees #visual reference

[patentlyabsurdrpgideas]

Some fodder for fantasy worldbuilding here: "When the stars are wrong, the age of plagues approaches."

Hey CT, I heard in the 13th century while the black plague was rampant there were many accounts of some kind of sky mist falling down to Earth…..there any truth to that?

Lmao I think you're misremembering one of Paracelus's theoretical explanations for why plagues happen.

He pulls from stellar Ray theory and contemporary astrology. Basically, the idea is that the light of specific stars shines upon the earth in a way that turns the local air toxic and poisonous. This was his explanation for why some parts of Europe got the plague but others didn't.

But yeah he basically said "the stars shoot beams at the earth and if it happens in the wrong way the beams cause huge clouds of invisible plague mist."

#worldbuilding #fantasy #incidental history lesson

[patentlyabsurdrpgideas]

Many years ago before I learned about things like "sensitivity" and "cultural appropriation" I remember hearing about something like this and wanting to make a character - hero, villain, young me didn't care - who'd tamed one and wore it as a cape, and it'd be great for surprise attacks or emergency getaways.

In addition, some anatomical features occasionally associated with the cuero include: suckers, a protrusible mouth, and varying numbers of eyes, often peeking out on stalks from beneath where the head would be on the "hide" that is its body.

Animals popularly brought up as explanations for the cuero are primarily the ray or the octopus.

#cuero #bestiary #character idea #character concept #npcs

[patentlyabsurdrpgideas]

Requested Bestiary Update: add monsters with literal butt-heads.

Threat display: "Stay back or my butt will bite you!"

I'll be real, this would work on me. I never want to be in a position where something's butt might be able to bite me.

[VIDEO TAKEN: SEPTEMBER 15TH, 2023 | Video ID: A video of a black, yellow, white, and red lubber grasshopper on a piece of paper, wriggling its abdomen and opening and closing the dorsal and ventral valves of its ovipositor in a way that makes it look as if the back half of the animal is its own snapping creature /End IDs.]

Encountered this grasshopper and scooped it up with a letter! Which is about when I noticed it exhibiting this fascinating behavior! It's freaky but very interesting!

#truth is stranger than fiction #animals #science

[patentlyabsurdrpgideas]

If I may offer the addition of something even less realistic, consider that there is in real life a cave where elephants use their tusks to get to salt deposits to supplement their diet. Know where this is going? Elephants and dwarves mining together!

Hi Gallus, I'm doing some worldbuilding and you seem like you could be connected enough for me to find an answer to the problem of dwarven agriculture. Many problems are created by the requirement of no sunlight, as even the common response of mushrooms still need light to break down decomposing matter as a primary energy source. Currently, we're thinking that they use a special type of mushroom that breaks down rocks in an energy-producing reaction, giving them enough energy to absorb nutrients and grow - this would serve a second purpose in explaining why building a massive hollowed-out mountain fortress doesn't produce an equally large amount of gravel.

Any thoughts? We're grasping at straws kinda lol

Well, some thoughts:

There's plenty of cave systems (especially Karst Systems) that are at least partially open to Sunlight- especially the kind that have rivers running through them, which is something else that's really helpful for agriculture.

For Example: This Cool AF Sinkhole cave in china that has an entire Forest in it

Now There's a view to put outside the city Gates!

Karst specifically is a landscape where underground rivers hollow out the limestone underground and then the cave roofs fall in. This kind of landscape answers your gravel question nicely: the hollowed out mountain does produce an equal amount of gravel, but the gravel turns up as the sandy banks of the river system hundreds of miles away.

So, there's your sunlight that can be used directly, or reflected or magically transferred deeper into the cave system.

Or they just put more holes in the roof! Unless your dwarves are also vampires, there's no reason for them to not hollow out a few Skylights into the mountain too.

But let's talk some other cave ecology and agriculture!

For starters, your dwarves could be sitting on top of a literal gold mine that would allow them to trade for a lot of needed materials and crops.

And by gold mine, I mean Salt Mine.

Historically, salt comes out of hollowed-out mountains and is worth more than gold.

Also something the humans have historically fought a bunch of wars over, so there's some free political tensions if you needed that!

I can also mean the possible fucking enormous piles of bat guano that accumulates in Karst caves, which is the world's most insanely good fertilizer, and ALSO something that has been worth more than it's weight in gold.

Speaking of Gold, another thing that often lives in sinkhole caves in abundance is BEES. turns out, limestone stalactites are a terrific place to build a hive that is difficult for predators to reach, stays dry and the stone substrate means the hives can reach many tons in weight before they start having structural issues. That sweet, sweet insect-derived liquid gold is already important to Dwarves in a lot of folklore- it's really hard to have a Traditional Dwarven Mead Hall without the honey to make the mead, you know?

So you got your mushrooms, you got your sunlight-grown sinkhole crops, you got your traded goods and you got your source of alcohol- the only thing really missing from an ancient food pyramid here is a staple carbohydrate. To that end, may I propose our good Peruvian Friend: The Potato.

Grain crops aren't actually all that nutritious and were kept around in ancient societies more as legal tender that kept the peasants busy, because wheat or rice takes months to grow, an enormous amount of labor to harvest, and wheat also needs to be milled before it can be turned into food- all enormously time-consuming processes that keep peasants busy and easy to rule tyranically over.

Potatoes though? Pop one in the ground in spring and you can dig up fingerlings all summer, and if you make potato towers, you can harvest up to 40lbs of delicious, easy-to-prepare-and-store carb out of a single plant- a real space-saver for the limited sinkhole skyspace.

If your dwarves have cheese, the potato makes even more sense, because Potato+dairy is the easiest, most nutritionally complete survival food there is.

Finally, consider: Dwarven Vodka.

This post is open for anyone to comment suggestions on, but that's my take: put your dwarves in a Karst-sinkhole cave system, give them a highly in demand resource like salt or guano, bees, and taters. Boom. Whole agriculture, economy and political scheme starters.

#worldbuilding

[patentlyabsurdrpgideas]

Happy Halloween! May you all encounter some vampire pumpkins!

Strange plants of vampiric nature documented by Tatomir Vukanović. They ultimately transform into vampires when fighting one another. A method of destruction of these monsters described by Vukanović is to submerge and boil them in a pot, pour, scrub the remains away with a broom, and then burn the broom.

[patentlyabsurdrpgideas]

Bestiary Entry: Cthulhu Kong, natural enemy of Godzilla.

#bestiary #worldbuilding #rpg idea #visual reference #kaiju

[patentlyabsurdrpgideas]

Is this what happens when artificers take up necromancy?

Item: cache of guns made of bones

#absurd items #character concept #character idea #npcs