The Dripping Tap

  I’m going to be trying Yora’s challenge Lore24 , a kind of spiritual successor to Dungeon23 . It’s focused on writing rather than strictly designing, pretty laid back, and open enough that if you were to sufficiently finish a project (a world, a fantasy system, etc) you could start a new one while maintaining the creative momentum and pressure. Check out the full post at Spriggan's Den ! I like it! I detect a sentiment that Lore24 is going to be easier to maintain than Dungeon23, however as someone who managed to stick around with D23 (for the most part, see my coming analysis on the project!) I think they’re just different beasts. It’s essentially a writing marathon rather than a design/drawing marathon and its format is more abstract; some people can take that and run with it, while others (like my neuro-divergent self) might find that the scariest thing is a blank page. Er - more like a blank prompt, I mean. That’s just sophistry, though! What are my plans? I’ve done the D23

  "Who is this king of glory? Shogach, strong and mighty, Shogach, mighty in battle!" Psalms of The Storm WADI SHOGACH A dry river-valley forgotten in the outskirts of a fallen desert kingdom. Scholars and mystics find mention of it in obscure scriptures, the supposed site of a shrine to The God of that land. Shogach was his name - he was their Elohim, called The Rider Upon the Clouds - the locals call the dry river basin by a similar name: Wadi Shogach .  Tracing forgotten secrets and implications of ancient spoils, many travel far and wide to the remote desert region that is home to the Wadi. Locals shake their head, say they cannot give them passage to the site. " We do not trespass there. It is an angry place, not for you nor I. You will drown in His anger, if you were to make the journey ." Still, the promise of gold is enough to lure many a robber. The locals of Elesh do not intervene: the place will handle them all the same. Elesh is a small town of <200 p

In the play of my urban megacity game, I think my players may have accidentally played God. They took a tribe of feral, zombie-esque rat people and have been nurturing them. It's a city game. There are rat people - naturally - but I made them weirder. I like non-standard, weird alien means of reproduction for non-humans. (My dwarves are made/born as stone statues, for example).  The ratlings are not born , but rather spontaneously emerge from concentrations of trash deep in the megacity's sewers. The more trash left unsorted, the greater chance of Ratlings. Their life cycle is more akin to medieval alchemical conceptions of flies: there's no eggs or wombs involved, just leave a pile of food scraps long enough and a humanoid rat will shamble out of the mass.  Abiogenesis - spontaneous creation of organic compounds from nonliving matter. They have two legs, two arms, a rat face and a coat of fur, but get too close and you'll see it's a facsimile. The hair are thin str

Shalom and salutations ! Bringing you an update on MYR REGATH, my dungeon23 megadungeon inspired by my love of ruined-cities-as-dungeons and inspired by Jewish mythology. Last month I did an esoteric experiment with the Sefirot, but for the season of scares, I decided the opposite level would be THE JEWISH UNDERWORLD ! Don't Jewish people not believe in Hell? Or an underworld? What's going on? Sh'eol is a word that appears 66 (ish) times in the Torah. Many secular Jews and scholars put Sh'eol as cognate with "the grave". It comes to what we call contemporary or Rabbinic Judaism from the religion of the Ancient Israelites . There's not extensive fables of characters seeing what's down in Sh'eol, but it comes out of the Near Eastern underworld traditions like The Akkadian  Erṣetu  and Sumerian  Kur . Like the underworld present in The Epic of Gilgamesh , these peoples believed the underworld as both the destination for human spirits, otherworldly spi

Vast and trunkless legs of stone  found here  (GLOGtober 23') CHALLENGE #1  [ PRIMEUMATON ] 5.  Cool things to replace your eyes, teeth, and fingernails with. The sheydim will never forgive mankind the transgression of working metal. In the days before The Great Flood , the sheydim were supreme upon the face of the Earth. They need not fear that their desires and will would be rebuffed, they had no equals among the beings of clay and earth. Then a sheydim visited sickness upon a family, taking Jabal, Jubal and Naamah down to Sheol in sickness. They spared their sibling Tubalcain , and this was another mistake. Tubalcain - long having listened to the songs of stones - trekked to the top of Mount Qaf . At its summit it's said he tore his shirt, seven times seven lightning bolts cracked across the sky, and G-d gave him the knowledge he wanted for revenge. Tubalcain came down from the mountain, crowned in light and carrying raw ore from the mountain. He was the first to take the bl