Romancing the Stone (GLoGtober 2024)

FOOL. You wish to speak with stones? To make them move at your own will? The audacity. The sheer hubris- would you speak to eternity and if by some chance it answers keep your sanity at the response? Stone knows no master, no language, at least none that your poor transient flesh could comprehend. Abandon this endeavor. 

 

What's that? 

...

How awful. Did he at least die painlessly? 

...

To shreds you say. Well, how's his wife holding up? 

...

To shreds you say. 

Well, if you're set on your goal there are some who know stonelore that could teach you. 

This is for the Secrets of the Stones challenge for GLoGtober 2024. 

Diegetic Stone Magic

I cannot teach you the ways of the earth, but there are some learned scholars and fanatics that could teach you- if you can convince them of your need.

1. The First Men

A cult of so called "First Men", they claim their mysteries and rites stretch back to before fire. To them, stone is the first god, the oldest god, and the truest. Before all else there was the earth beneath our feet, and after all that follows there will still be stone. Stone was our first mother, before the winds taught us language and deceit. The magics of the First Men are ancient blood rites that allows them to convince stone to do their bidding- for a time and a price. 

By studying their mysteries, you can learn the following rituals.

Swallow: Dig a pit deep in the earth, at least ten feet. A live cow must be placed inside, this is the sacrifice and must be of quality and health. Fill the pit in and bury the sacrifice. Press your ear to the ground and listen for a day and a night after the sounds below cease. Dig the pit back open and you'll find mother left her boon, a single bone from the sacrifice. By snapping this bone you can command the earth to open up and swallow an area the size of  a pit, entombing your foes.

Shatter: Kill a man with a stone, then drain his blood into a deep crevice. When you throw the stone next it will fly fast and true, exploding and fragmenting violently on impact.

Strength: At sunset, roll a bolder to the top of a hill. All night, the bolder will try to roll down a slope and you must hold it in place. If you can manage to keep the bolder on top of the hill until the sun rises then chip off a piece of the bolder. By swallowing this shard you gain the strength of a giant from sunset to sunrise.

2. The Listeners

In secret holds in the earth, deep in caves and far from the surface, you might find the Listeners. A mute order of monks and scholars, they hide the fastnesses away in the quiet places of the dark and build their oracular devices, a precise and delicate working learned from cavern spiders. Large pools of still water. Webs of hair-spun rope taut across caverns. In the dark they cast large ovals of dark glass on the ground and watch for the fractures. Listeners use these devices to listen to the whispers at the heart of the world and learn of events to come and events long past, recording them in great winding stone carvings in mazelike corridors of natural stone.

For each year spent in silence with the Listeners you can learn their craft, learn how to cast and read the dooms and portents of deep places. 

Echospeak: Place an object in a stone basin and fill it with clear water. Spend a night gazing into the water in a dark place and you can learn its recent history, who has touched it, what it was crafted for, and how it earned its marks and scars.

Whisper Bell: Craft two sets of small stone bells and a hollow-bone drum with a taut lid of silk. Using the bells in a deep place you can send messages into the earth to echo eternal across the heartbeat of the world, readable only by the matching set of bells and drum.

Perfect Omen: Cast a dark glass mirror across a stone floor and fast in silence for a week listening for its cracks and fractures. Tattoo the resulting spiderweb of fortune onto your body and you can perfectly succeed at one action in your future.

3. Heralds of the Dark

Earthen heretics, they've forsaken their mother and now know her ire. Heralds can be found in great towers, preferring to keep as much distance between them and the earth as they can. When they walk on the ground they do so on high stilts of varied make to trick the earth and disguise their movements. The Heralds make auspices to the night, to the quiet stones of darkened skies, silent gods in their own rights, unknown and hungry for adoration. Their magics and rituals are profane to all earthly realms, seek their teachers only in great need or greed, as once you know their mysteries the earth will never be a home to you, now stonecursed.

Each ritual learned draws more hate from the earth. Stoneware cracks on your touch, rocks run like streams to trip you, and caverns will swallow you whole.

Recall: Forge a six foot wide disk of meteoric metals and submerge it in a basin of blood, including your own, for a month and a day. Expose the disk to the open sky in a high place. Once a month, while you can see the night sky, you can teleport back to the disk with a thought.

Dweomercraft: A delicate loom of glass and spider silk must be built and carefully maintained. When left unwatched and untended during a new moon, the loom will spin a bolt of starsilk that can be forged as a peerless metal. Its edge can cut through all but the strongest of metals and it can hold an enchantment like no other material. Exposure to sunlight negates its powers.

Meteor: The first magic, music, a secret learned from mother before language- all stones know it. Sing to the dark stones in the night from sunset to sunrise for a week past the breaking of your voice and the cracking of your soul. Great care must be taken to not give too much to the night and leave the caster a hollowed husk. Once the ritual is complete, the caster may call to a dark stone, once, and summon a meteor to strike a destination within sight. 

4. Shapers of Geltia

In far Geltia, generations of peerless masons have wrought great stoneworks and palaces. It is said that they can speak to stone and shape it at their will. This is true for those who undertake their most sacred ritual. Those seeking true mastery of stone must apprentice under a Geltian mason for a year before they can attempt the ritual. 

The mason first must acquire a block of perfect marble fit for a statue, and pour their heart into the shaping of a paramour of stone. Once complete and if the mason's heart is true, their creation will animate, filled with the spirit of stone that still yearns to feel time outside of the forces of erosion. Statue and craftsmen must then spend a year in courting and if the sculptor can win the heart of the earth the two are wed on the last day, after which the stone goes still once again. So long as the mason stays true to their vows they can then mold stone like clay until the day of their death.

Winnowing Wasps (GLoGtober 2024)

This is for the Some Spooky Halloween Monsters for GLoGtober 2024.

Also known as Flute Wasps, Winnowing Wasps get their name from the sounds their abandoned nests make. The territory of a family of Winnowing Wasps is marked by dozens of discarded nests that create eerie discordant melodies when the wind is blowing. 

Matvey Smirnov

Adult Winnowers can grow as large as a human forearm. They can be easily recognized by their large size as well as their distinctive dark red and black patterning along the thorax. A somewhat social creature, Winnowers display a family behavior and have been known to nest together as well as to situate multiple nests nearby for protection from predators such as the Greater and Lesser Sulfur Lizards. Due to the typical temperatures of the Starklands, these wasps tend to congregate around sulfur pits in the colder months but there are also many reports of Winnowers entering a state of suspended animation while their nests are transported around the Starklands along with the Tower. 

Winnowers are a parasitoid wasp that lays their eggs primarily in human hosts- however moose and elk are also common hosts of the Winnower. When they find their prey, they aim for exposed soft tissue and deposit as many eggs as they can before retreating to their nests. Extensive documentation of the lifecycle of the Winnowers has been made by many a village and town throughout the history of the Starklands and the danger of these creatures is well known. After the initial attack, the host will experience the following symptoms:

Days 1-14: Itching around the injection site and a ravenous appetite. During this initial incubation period the eggs laid by the Winnower hatch inside of the host. The host will experience a ravenous hunger to account for the larva- much as with a tapeworm. A typical host carries anywhere from thirty to one hundred larva in them. By the end of this first period, the host looks to be obese and casual observers can notice unnatural movements under their skin. At this point, the larvae account for about 1/3 of the weight of the host. Winnower larvae spend their time eating and turning the chest cavity of their host into a nest, chewing through marrow and bone and spitting it back up to create a well protected barrel-like chest cavity riddled with small holes.

Days 15-21: The larvae emerge from the host at this time using sharp rotating teeth. Their natural secretions rapidly seal the wounds (and in fact make for a very valuable surgical aid) and the host will gather the larvae and shelter them in their home, usually somewhere safe and dry. Over the rest of the duration of this period, the host is driven to defend the larvae as though they were their own children- and what limited interviews are possible with these addled individuals reveal they are unable to tell the larvae apart from their children. During this time, the larvae spin a protective shell around themselves and begin their second phase of growth into a full Winnower. 

Once the Winnowers hatch, the new family instinctively returns to their host and the initial nest they made therein. By now, the hosts are usually dead- but this does not mean the end of their use. For some period after their death, their body still moves and carries the wasp nest at the whims of the family of Winnowers. Once their flesh has sufficiently rotted and they can no longer move, the Winnowers move on and leave the host behind, chest full of chewed up marrow and winding tunnels that make eerie sounds. Some hosts' minds are known to survive this process and, through means unknown, happily carry their wasp family around in their chest cavity. 

Villages are especially cautious of Winnowers. The stories of children, hunters, and foragers who have accidentally been infected and carried an infection back to a village are well known. Any Starklander worth their salt knows the best cure for an infection: fire. If the eggs were lain recently enough it's possible to burn them out and preserve the host- but some aren't willing to risk any remaining wasps spelling an end to the village and opt instead for a full cremation.

Many a wise woman and witch have their own cures as well, including the imbibing of certain poisons and liquors to kill the larvae within the host as well as the use of certain burning herbs to ward Winnowers off.

The Witch and the Wile (GLoGtober 2024)

This is for the two complimentary monsters challenge in GLoGtober 2024.

So your town has pissed off a local witch. These sorts of things happen with an uncomfortable frequency in the Starklands, so what was it this time?

 

Justin Gerard

What did your village do this time?

1. Someone cut down the witch's favorite tree and it was very explicitly marked with sigils and craft. No one will fess up. 

2. A drunk stumbled from the tavern into the woods and threw up in the sacred spring. The naiads called in a favor from the witch.

3. Patricians from the nearest city are going around trying to stifle witchcraft and require locals see doctors in the city. The witch has taken offense that her cures are insufficient. 

4. There's been a spree of cat killings throughout the village and the witch has had enough of it.

5. An oppressive religious sect has taken up residence in the village and is spreading rumors about the witch's terrible powers. They aren't fully wrong. 

6. Sulfur mine expansions have destroyed a precious foraging spot for rare mushrooms. It was the last one for miles.

Consequences and the Wile

Lusy_sama

When a Witch is ready to begin her mischief, making the town rue the day they brought her anger upon them or at least until they right their wrong, a Wile comes into her service. Sometimes a ritual is done, but more often than not Wiles have a sense about these sort of things and find their way to where they are needed. Whatever the witch does, the Wile is there to amplify and sow discord amongst the townsfolk. Their relationship is not exactly mutual- many a Witch's grimoire warns of the dangers of Wiles left unchecked.

Wiles have no shape or form of their own, instead adapting whatever suits their fancy- but a careful observer will notice their shapeshifting is never quite perfect. They aren't said to be strictly speaking intelligent- possessing more of a feral trickster level of intelligence and a sharp sense of where to twist a knife and mimic sharp words as like a malicious mockingbird. Their touch rusts new metal and gnarls wooden craft- wherever they've been one is sure to find twisted roots sprouted up from the ground where it walked.

Without any prompting by the Witch, the Wile amplifies her hexes and curses. If she brings a storm onto the village then the Wile is there howling in the night, shaking windows and doors, and calling in the voice of loved ones from just outside. If the Witch invokes a pustule pox then the Wile is there, a faceless familiar villager in the back of the crowds jeering and riling the town up. 

Though Wiles are more than happy to raise trouble for the fun of it, they also tend to take things from unsuspecting villagers. Precious jewelry, mementos, diaries, spices and the like are all up for the taking by the creature which will usually lair in a hollow tree nearby and revel in its ill gotten gains. 

Jonathan Gregory Bick

Many charms and counters are said to work against Wiles. Sometimes a Wile gets carried away and goes too far, taking a child, killing a herd, and the Witch herself may turn against it and expel it. Like all beasts of the wood it shirks from fire, though salt has no effect on it. A clever village may be able to catch and trap one by locking eyes with one another standing in a circle- ensuring someone will recognize and point out a lurking Wile in their midst. 

By the time a town has appeased the Witch and she ends her torments the Wile will have moved on, oftentimes lazily lairing in its hollow tree nearby and pulling tricks on unwary travelers until another Witch has need. 

Old myth and legend tells of the first Wile to walk the lands as a curse upon witches. They tell of the time when a Witch first acted in rash anger against a village that had offended, and the Wile leapt up from the ground and began their mischief. They amplified the Witch's fury and soon had goaded the Witch into wholesale destruction. While storm and root tore the town open the Wile stalked from home to home, eyes glowing bright, cackling laughter of parents and children, claws dripping red and rending villagers limb from limb. When the fury cleared the Witch's vision she saw what she had wrought- and what she had let stoke and feed on her rage- and lamented.

Invasion of the Adversary (GLoGtober 2024)

This is for the Alien Invasion challenge in GLoGtober 2024.

Across the stars, the mechanism of undeath is in constant motion. Dead nebulae churning out exotic matter, necromegastructures teeming with engineers and warriors in the dark, untold billions are at work under the direction of the Adversary. When your world was but a cloud of condensing matter, the Adversary stood tall on glassy night-soaked sands and watched their home chewed and swallowed by a black hole and on that day began their crusade to end ends, to cease cessation, to break the cycle and fling its ends to infinity. 

Vadim Sadovski

The Adversary's battle continues to this day, now spread across the filaments of the stars their intergalactic war against the Inevitable takes the shape of an intergalactic machine powered by matter, fueled by energy, and helmed by intellect. It is in search of these three resources that their Necrospores, moon sized heralds of undeath, have been scattered to our galaxy. 

General Order of Events:

100 years before Invasion:

Astronomers across your world will look up and see the bright corpselight burn of the Necrospore entering the star system and braking into a distant orbit. To wizards, this will be a terrible light that blooms across the night's sky and thrums with power. The Necrospore begins waking, organizing its legions and scouting the system- inevitably discovering your world.

85 years before Invasion:

The Necrospore begins thorough scouting of your world. Spies are deployed in steel coffins near major population centers and begin raiding cemeteries and funerary sites for corpses, interrogating them to learn more about the world and feed this back to the Necrospore. Meanwhile, the Necrospore is at work surveying planets and asteroids. Its light burns even brighter in the sky as its furnaces roar to life.

60 years before Invasion:

At one moment, the Necrospore contacts all of the most powerful wizards and world leaders and offers them a deal. Join the Adversary willingly and be blessed with eternal life, lead armies the size of planets across galactic timescales in exchange for selling their world. 

20 years before Invasion:

Agents of the Necrospore begin sabotaging the world's defenses and identifying key areas. Mass graves. Loci of magical power. Vaults of artifacts. Capital cities. Orbital batteries. Using Gates and other ritual magics, the Necrospore begins seeding elite forces throughout the world and causing chaos.

10 years before Invasion:

Each day the world is more dangerous. The dead walk freely, and the corpselight in the sky grows brighter. Over these ten years the Necrospore burns into a tight orbit around your world. Each day the great bell at its heart tolls a pulse across the gulf of space and you feel it approaching in your bones. Your skeleton knows where it is at all times. Once it is ready, the Invasion begins. 

Day of the Invasion:

The stage set, the Necrospore eclipses the world. Its corpselight blots out the sun and it unfurls its many millions of hangars and launches a million million ancient skeletons, alien death knights, and galactic liches to invade your world. Your world will serve, one way or another.

Variations

What's special about your world?

1. Your world was seeded with life long ago by an alien empire. Their engines of creation and destruction are still intact in the deepest parts of the world.

2. The world itself is alive but slow to rouse. It will try to combat this invasion- making it a powerful ally if you can contact it.

3. Nothing. Yet another world for the machine.

4. Powerful ley magics are infused in the asteroid belt near your world and the Necrospore will take twice as long to begin its invasion.

5. The veins of your world run infinitely deep and wide. The further you go, the stranger things get- and the further away the invasion forces are. If you're clever and fast enough you could outrun them forever.

6. A Third Party has interest in your world and will warn and provide support once the Necrospore appears in the sky. They have fought these battles before.

Your Necrospore

The Necrospore itself is a machine-being the size of a moon. At its core are the concentrated quantum-state phylacteries of a hundred liches in divine theospension mixed into one Ur-mind that makes up the Necrospore itself. It has a personality, whims, and can be spoken with. Though there are countless Necrospores, each is unique. This one:

1. Will take its time. Using waves of attacks from very far away until your world becomes strong. Then, it will crush you and turn that strength into its own weapon.

2. Prefers subtlety and manipulation. It masks its presence and sends dreams to recruit a cult of followers that will make the world ripe for its harvest.

3. Tries its best to bring your world into the fold peaceably. It will offer the gift of undeath to all who will take it willingly. It wants to be your friend so badly- why won't you just let it kill you?

4. Is a cauldron of bio-horrors. Feasting on samples from your world and others it brews them into soldiers and deploys them in a quest to improve their armies.

5. Has killed your gods. This isn't its first invasion by a long shot and knows the best first strike is to sever the divine links and smother the gods and godlings before they make the invasion more difficult.

6. Hates all of you individually and specifically. There will be no offers of peace or leniency. The Adversary sent it here to acquire materials. It wants to guarantee that the last sparks of your lives are so miserable that you will recognize undeath for the gift it is. All will serve- it does not matter how they get to serving.

Conclusion

Play as a dynasty fighting over a hundred years to defeat the Necrospore and its agents. Or as adventurers on that final day as the sky rains alien skeletons and angels of death. Or as world leaders and wizards orchestrating the final defenses. Maybe a neighboring interplanetary civilization will offer an escape for some? 

If you defeat the Necrospore then you have probably bought yourself at least a hundred years- maybe more. Perhaps you'll be lucky and the Adversary's forces are busy elsewhere in your galaxy and it gives you more time to prepare. To the Adversary, these are but small setbacks on subpixels of an intergalactic map. Your world will join eventually.  

And if you do join? Well now comes the longest war in the universe. Join the legions of the undead as they battle the Inevitable. Galaxy-class rituals spanning a thousand thousand worlds. Lead legions of dead conquering innumerable planets. Star system sized battles against the pawns of the Inevitable. Ancient Necrospires floating in the dark secret parts of intergalactic space and collecting all of the knowledge of all of the subsumed worlds. And perhaps, serve well enough to earn an iota of attention from the Adversary and bear their mark.

Chapel of the Living God (GLoGtober 2024)

Sacred Body Horror for GLoGtober.

On entry into a Chapel of the Living God most visitors will first be in awe of the hundreds of Beneficent Saints lining the walls, smiling down from the rafters, whispering their rapturous chants and cloaked in woven gold. Older Chapels are said to be so filled with Beneficents that their very roofs and shrines are upheld by smiling, chanting saints- gold-flecked skin and swirling golden irises.

Kris-3d

Feast days and memorials will usually see families visiting with and caring for their relatives that have become Beneficents, cleaning their skin and making offerings of their favorite foods. I have even heard of some sects that allow families to take their Beneficent out for the day to visit and bless each of their households before returning them into the care of the Chapel once more. 

The two other most significant features of your average Chapel of the Living God are the Supplication Basin, where appeals are made to the Living God in the presence of the oldest Beneficents of the Chapel, and the closed off Ritual Chambers, where the priests perform the Benefaction Sacrament.

Entei Ryu

Most are familiar with the general practice of Benefaction as a means of ritual preservation and recognition of services to the Living God, however the details aren't well understood by those outside the faith. The history of Benefaction goes back to the early days of the Living God, who would bless their chosen as Avatars that would wield a fraction of the Living God's power against their enemies. The saying holds true, however, that absolute power corrupts absolutely. After a time, Avatars would begin to be corrupted by the Sacrament as it grew and warped their bodies and minds with unfathomable power. Eventually, the Living God introduced the practice of Benefaction as a means of preventing Corrupted Avatars from wreaking havoc. 

Depending on the suitability of an Avatar candidate, they are assigned a date for their Benefaction. Great heroes of the Living God are known to have borne the Sacrament for years on end, though most last a month or a week. Once the date is reached, the Avatar returns to a Chapel where the priests ritually sever their limbs and burn them, then wrapping the strands of the Sacrament that remain around their torso into a golden cloth. Now a Beneficent Saint, they are put under the care of the Chapel- or transferred to their home chapel- where they will be cared for eternally. 

What's Going On?

The Living God is a hivemind organism that lives in the bodies of the Beneficent Saints. In the form of the Sacrament, it is a bundle of carefully grown tendrils that are ingested by candidates. Over time, it grows in the candidate and grant it extreme powers of strength and agility as the tendrils reinforce the candidate's natural body. As the growth progresses, the Living God and the candidate begin to act as one- however eventually the Living God will overtake the host where it then risks severing from the hivemind and growing its own- something like a sub-cult. Knowing this unfortunate feature of its evolution, the Living God uses ritual and tradition to curtail its Avatars early- maintaining its existence in the body of the Saint and allowing it to continue to grow. 

Evgeny Romanov

These facts are known by some of the highest of the clergy of the Living Saint- who maintain that these abilities could only be those of a God. Their God is tangible and, if it needs their service, then they will carry it in their body and become its lever upon the world.