Insects of Hyperborea

If you go far enough north, you come to Hyperborea. This is true everywhere. Travel past the kingdom of fake Vikings and the mountains of the white elves and the ice-ridden shores of the polar seas and the place where sky and sea and land all blur into each other and all you see is white. Keep going north and you will find it.

There is life even in Hyperborea. Silent birdmasked whale hunters. Kite cities floating on katabatic winds. Empires of sapient bacteria, subglacial magma-heated saline bubbles the only universe they know. Reefs of white coral that filter food particles from the eternally howling wind. Fake Vikings who've gone a little weird. Self-perpetuating magnetic fields that want to liberate your soul from your body so it can dance with them in the aurora. Goblins. Mammoths. Mammoth seals, like elephant seals but bigger and stupider. Tusked apes. Pockets of rainforest that unfreeze for a week in the heart of summer to briefly mimic the tropics. Piranha penguins. Crimson oozes that leave their pigment in caves when it's time to hunt. Tomb vultures that eat only the flesh of dead empresses. Stunted scavenger bears. Skeleton jellies. More goblins.

There are also giant insects. Hyperborea is not subject to the same natural laws as your world and insects can be as big as they like. Here are some.

1. Myrmeleon. The larvae dig funnel-shaped traps in the snow and lie in wait with their jaws open at the bottom. The adults are called 'lacewings' and are rarely seen. They're rumoured to grant wishes, but this is probably bullshit that someone invented as a cruel prank.
2. Dripping mantis. Translucent chitin. Hangs in contorted postures from rocky overhangs and the eaves of houses, perfectly disguised as a cluster of icicles. On warmer days, moistens self with tear-like substance secreted from special glands to give the appearance of melting.
3. Snow strider. Skates across plains and hummocks of metre-thick powdered snow as if it were hard earth. Carries 1d6 bubbles of liquid nitrogen affixed to the hair on its legs, to be flung at enemies.
4. Ice lice. The size of small dogs. Mostly live on mammoths and other huge mammals. Will drain a human dry in under a minute, then crowd around the corpse trying to figure out why it doesn't have any more blood in it.
5. Boilfly. Abdomen glows with a chemical reaction warm enough to melt snow and bright enough to act in lieu of a torch. Explodes if startled or ungently prodded, spraying sticky, boiling liquid over everything in radius of its light.
6. Hogbody caterpillar. Giant fuzzy caterpillar lumbering its way though waist-high drifts, consuming every scrap of organic material it can get its mandibles on. Takes seven summers to accumulate enough energy for metamorphosis.
7. Hogbody moth. Wings like sheets of ice glint and refract the summer sunlight. Fat fuzzy body. Horrible gargoyle face. Antenna that can detect the radiation of your thoughts from half a mile away. Feeds exclusively on the aurora, but wants your flesh for its babies.
8. Avalanche beetle. Rolls compacted snow and dung up into perfectly spherical boulders, sends them tumbling down cliffs at you. Makes snowmen in its spare time. No one knows where it gets the carrots for the noses.
9. Fisherman centipede. Scuttles along the underside of ice shelves, feeling the vibrations of footsteps through its legs. Attacks through concealed breathing holes, bursting from snow dunes in a torrent of spins and legs. Venom is a potent antifreeze and anticoagulant that confers haemophilia on victims.
10. Plowhorn beetle. Shovels snow out of the way with a huge chitinous horn, leaving highways in its wake. Hard to domesticate, but kept track of by seasoned travellers and sometimes steered with presents of nectar.

Random Encounters of the Dzungarian Gate

Played a game of Ryuutama with Nico and Richie Cyngler. Improvised a setting based on the steppes of Central Asia using a bunch of stuff I already had in my head. The PCs are humble farmers and artisans from the Heavenly Kingdom, a quiet and pastoral realm where nothing has changed in a thousand years, who venture north and west across the Altai Mountains to the endless barbarian steppe and the mysteries that lie beyond it.

Ryuutama is mostly about travel. There's a whole system of survival and navigation rolls that takes up most of the game. I need to hack it to take more advantage of random encounters, and there's a thing where the DM is technically an omnipotent dragon that never came up, but otherwise it's pretty good. It's kind of cute and anime, which is not a thing I realised I want in my games until I had it. The PCs were trying to get from the mountain town of Alashankou in the pass known as the Dzungarian Gate to a gathering of nomads on the shores of Lake Balkash, which harbours a city of frog women in its depths. One of them had a dream that she would find her one true love somewhere to the west, another wanted to kill interesting new monsters and make the best possible hats out of them. I put together an encounter table and we spent most of the session stumbling across stuff and having to deal with it.

Here's a version of the table. This isn't exactly what I used but it's close enough.

1. A sapient quadrupedal iceberg, relic of an ancient glacier, ambling across the plains.
2. A wind wizard in a sail-propelled cart, gathering the feathers of exotic birds.
3. A herd of sheep-sized, frill-necked dinosaurs grazing by a river.
4. Nomads hunting a golden-antlered hind to make a headdress for their shaman.
5. A woman in tortoiseshell armour who wants to trick you into a griffin-guarded cave.
6. An egg with legs, arms and a moustache that runs faster than you and steals stuff.
7. A tree whose leaves make whistles that conjure storms.
8. The wedding of a frog woman to a rusalka, interrupted by a former lover.
9. Nomads escorting the portable tomb of their khan, whose body must never rest.
10. The north wind, BURAN, in the form of a shaggy old man with snakes for legs.

I thought the wedding would be cute but it turned out horrifying. I blamed it on cursed fermented mare's milk from a carnivorous horse. That should probably be on the table.

The Pole of the Pole

This is a short story I wrote.

It's called The Pole of the Pole. It's about six thousand words long. The idea is to deliver a meaty chunk of setting in a narrative format instead of the normal encyclopedic blog-entry format we usually write our settings in.

I feel like it worked pretty well. It's inspired by a period of history that I almost never see represented in anything. I don't want to tell you too much about it because I want to see how clear a picture you get of the setting from the story alone, but there is some art here so you have something to visualise in your head box.

Anyway that's enough talking. Go and read it.

Giant Generator

click me for a delicious giant

d10 Supervillains

from doom patrol

1. HOT MINUTE. Can move at supersonic speeds between 9:00 and 9:01 in the morning. Is robbing every bank in the city one by one. Stop her by finding her lair and identity, but be prepared for retaliation if she discovers you're investigating her. She could probably just instantly kill you the next morning, depending on how harshly you want to run this.
2. STOPLIGHT. Robot with glowing green globe for a head. When the globe turns yellow, that's a warning it's about to turn red. When the globe turns red, everyone in the vicinity is frozen in time until it turns green again. Hijacks armoured cars in tandem with gang of armed robbers.
3. HITBOX. Exerts telekinetic control over the size and shape of everything's hitbox. Can shrink her own so your attacks pass right through everything but her abdomen or expand yours so she can blow up your head by shooting the air to your left. Highly-paid assassin.
4. LAMPREY LAD. An abandoned child raised by lampreys in the East Anglian fens. Now in command of an amphibious army of lampreys, he intends to take back the seas from the human intruders, starting by draining the blood from lone swimmers and ending with a fullscale assault on the city of London. Twelve years old.
5. CHIAROSCURO. Can enter any painting and bring stuff out from inside. Steals key items from masterpieces - Magritte's apple, Dali's watch, Vermeer's earring, etc. Can also move between adjacent paintings like the people in the portraits on the walls of Hogwarts. Can't do photographs.
6. CROWN-OF-THORNS. Any severed part of her contains her whole personality and memory and will grow a new her if left alone for long enough. Covered in poisonous spines. Will sell you fingers as grow-it-yourself goons in exchange for delicious coral.
7. HOAX. Has the power to make any lie become true. Queen of a fictional island created by a newspaper as a joke, populated by furred trout, tree octopi, jackalopes and Fiji mermaids. Courtiers are exiled royalty from Formosa, Abyssinia and the South Seas. Eats the fruit of spaghetti trees. Playful. Kidnaps children.
8. BIRD LORD. Believes they can talk to birds and have control over birds. This is false. Fights on behalf of the birds. Lives on a roof. A successful investment banker until their mind was broken by a glancing encounter with the Simurgh.
9. APE-X. Brilliant physicist from a distant future in which apes rule the Earth. Cast out from the Science Council for his irresponsible experiments with Time Itself, he escaped into the past, where he plans to conquer the planet with advanced technology and make it into the capital of a trans-temporal empire. Hunted by the superteam PRIME-8.
10. POWDER MONKEY. Monkey with a blunderbuss and a pirate hat. Highly-paid assassin.

d10 Superheroes

1. BLACKMOLD. Infected with a fungus that compels her to fight crime. Can exhale a paralyzing spore-cloud that cuts ten years off your life-span and gives you weekly migraines till you die, at which point mushrooms will grow from your body. Anything that eats the mushrooms becomes compelled to fight crime. Convinced that fighting crime was her own idea, will resist any suggestion to the contrary. Looks like Catwoman as played by Janeane Garofalo.
2. THE RED MESSAGE. Hipster grandchild of Communists who left China in the thirties to proselytise to the American tongs. Equipped with jet-powered rollerblades, a grappling hook and a Mao suit, he plans to spread his radical red message to the funky streets of Brooklyn. Listens to Kasabian. Fights crime, insofar as all property is theft. 
3. STROBE. Flickers in and out of reality at a frequency of her choosing, giving you headaches with a look and seizures with a touch. Can be invisible to video cameras or under halogen lights. Archnemesis is criminal mastermind with epilepsy.
4. THE GREEN FEDORA. Learned katana mastery on the internet. Years of training against watermelons and Pepsi bottles in his parents' basement has prepared him to combat the forces of oppression and injustice everywhere they rear their ugly heads. Sidekick is a pillow.
5. THE MONOCLE. Gentleman thief who stole an experimental utility monocle from the people who make gadgets for James Bond. X-Ray vision, heat vision, augmented reality. Would never look at your dick with the X-Ray vision because he is a gentleman.
6. SINKHOLE. Can transform at will into a sinkhole. Wherever they're standing, now a sinkhole is there. Anything that falls inside her will be carried around until she chooses to vomit it up, which she can do in both human and sinkhole form.
7. DOC POSITIVE. Physically springy. Bullets bounce off his chest. Bad guys hit by him go flying across the room with comical noises like they've been whacked with a piston-powered trampoline. Can leap tall buildings in a single bound and do that jumping coin punch Mario does in Smash Bros. Relentlessly upbeat and immune to sour vibes. Had all his bad energy sucked out of him by a scientist and put in a bottle somewhere.
8. DOC TOPICAL. Has powers based on whatever's been in the news most recently. Brexit grants power to sever bonds between things, weed legalisation grants power to control smoke and fire, etc. Actually a secret experiment by Twitter to weaponise hashtags and harness the power of meme magic.
9. GOATSONG. Owns a phone directory of Hell. Each demon owes her a favour. When all seventy-two favours are used up, gets dragged screaming into Hell.
10. BOGMAN. A Neolithic superhero who was hurled into a Scottish peat bog by the legions of his enemy, the Bronze Wizard, after having dealt that foul sorcerer what seemed to be a mortal blow. He was preserved in a state of suspended animation for thousands of years by the mammoth-bone amulet that gave him his powers before being dug up by people constructing a golf course. Now he is a friendly bog mummy with super strength. The Bronze Wizard has also come back to life and is a rich property developer.

Additional bonus superteam: OCTOPUS SQUAD. Eight people, each of whom has one of the powers of the octopus. In emergencies they all hold hands to fuse like Captain Planet into a giant octopus. Inspired by Finding Dory.

1. Flexible and rubbery. Can squeeze through tiny gaps.
2. Four extra arms. Knows kung fu.
3. Changes colour and skin texture to blend with her surroundings.
4. Releases clouds of mystifying, lighter-than-air ink.
5. Sucker cups on limbs. Can climb anything.
6. Wrist siphons. Propels self around, knocks down enemies with jets of pressurised water.
7. Paralysing touch, poisonous saliva.
8. Can psychically predict the result of football matches.

Dandelion Men

Dandelion men have slender flexible stalklike bodies and a variety of limb configurations, most of them within one standard deviation of human. When they're young their heads are yellow rosettes. As they grow older their florets shrivel and are replaced with bristly white seeds.

Younger dandelion men wear colourful skintight patchwork harlequin suits. Older dandelion men wear long flapping raggedy robes consisting of many layers of translucent cloth. This is to inform them of the slightest change in the wind.

Younger dandelion men are fearless bravados who leap from adventure to adventure, never tiring as long as they have a supply of water and sunshine. They sing ballads, fight duels, woo beautiful ladies and lords. (Of other races: dandelion men are genderless and reproduce asexually. It doesn't make sense that they would pursue romance, but it doesn't make sense that they would willingly seek out danger, either.). Older dandelion men are grizzled, cautious, regretful and wise. They write epic poetry, command armies and settle down in polygamous friend-marriages with small groups of other dandelion men. They dwell either in the dandelion city of Taraxacum, which has very crooked streets, very high walls and windsocks everywhere, or in foreign dandelion ghettos that reproduce this architecture in miniature. They're a bit like medieval Jews, holding down "clever" jobs like lending money or advising the king but generally distrusted and always on the look-out for the next pogrom. The wildness of the younger dandelion men can hurt them here, like if one seduces the wrong prince or whatever, but it can also make them more relatable.

The green stalkflesh of dandelion men is bitter but healthful, and can be used to make a delicious and medicinal liqueur. Dandelion men are also knows as blowballs, clocks, lion's teeth, milkwitches, cankerworts, priestcrowns and puffballs, some of which are derogatory and some of which they have ironically reclaimed.

When all of a dandelion man's bristly white seeds are blown away, it will die. Only a small percentage of the seeds will take root somewhere that a young dandelion man can grow. Whether or not it's moral to uproot a young dandelion man should you find it sprouting in your garden, still in the pre-sentient, attached-to-the-earth stage, is a hotly debated moral question, but most people will just do it anyway. If you are nice to a dandelion man while it grows, watering it and protecting it from bugs, it will be your friend when it begins to bloom. They take about a year to go from being planted to full intellectual maturity. They live about ten years, on average.

from the tv show pushing daisies

Here is where the rules for playing as a dandelion man should go but I can't be bothered to figure it out. Strong wind removes your seeds, keep track of how many you have, get some kind of dex and int bonus to compensate. They make good rogues and warlords if anyone is still doing warlords. I can't really see them using that much magic, definitely not fire magic, but I can imagine there might be such a thing as a dandelion man's curse.

have you seen the stellaris aliens. you should