Slushpile Mark 1

Slushposts have been fashionable lately, and it doesn't take much effort to grab some notes and make them suitable for public consumption. So I have at long last overcome inertia. It's a low bar and I may never clear it again.

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Saints are monstrous, and they may confer that monstrosity upon those who pray to them. 

The past branches in the same way as the future. Time travelers must navigate a shifting, indefinite mass of alternate histories, each of which will produce an identical present.

Incantations and hand-gestures are a bunch of claptrap; the magic is in actuality performed by very complicated, very finicky thaumaturgical devices. Wizards walk around with a collection of mechanical baubles that require constant maintenance.

Dark forest multiverse.

A tyrannical empire of rodents. Their ruler is the reincarnation of a historical villain.

Martial artists who maintain delicate elemental systems within their bodies. Losing control of their internal balances typically results in detonation.
> Humorism but shuffled around a bit so there aren't two things called "bile." Breath, bone, blood, bile. Air, earth, fire, water?
> May be dependent on ingesting herbs, charcoal, snow, fulgurite, etc. 

Neo-Promethean electromancers who raise the dead and grow auxiliary limbs from synthesized muscle. It's unrelated to necromancy, but try explaining that to the torch-wielding mobs.

Antennae are of immense ritual significance. From what might they receive a signal?

Otherworldly critters that are bigger on the inside. You wouldn't know it while they're alive, 'cause they just look like big insects, but split one of them open and ten gallons of viscera will come pouring out. 

The akashic records are instantiated in vinyl.

A pair of marooned space-gods send each other letters written in the scale patterns of bioengineered snakes. The snakes have been made progressively more dangerous, so as to protect them from itinerant dragonslayers.

The vines in this garden are thirsty, and their roots run all through the underworld. Whet their appetite with a drop of your enemy's blood, and they'll pursue him for all his living days.

Rings are ideal mana-batteries. You can set energies flowing in a circular pattern and draw them off only as you need them.

Space starts behaving strangely when cut off from the rest of the universal substrate. This phenomenon occurred primarily in isolated caverns, up until the invention of the hermetic seal.

Souls are electric. Technomancers make devices that can interface directly with your innermost self. Astral projection is accompanied by the scent of ozone.

A many-armed scarecrow holding dozens of candles. Jostle it and it will immediately go up in flame.

Gods create belief. News of their exploits spreads faster than it has any right to. Storytellers will independently concoct retellings of true events.

The sun is an hourglass filled with glowing sand. One bulb is made of clear glass, the other is singed and stained. It turns over once every twelve hours, at the transitions between day and night.

Once, technologies that threatened to end the world were systematically uninvented. Then someone uninvented uninvention.

The demons that are still around don't get much mileage out of iron claws or hellfire breath. They just know things. And they can talk in your head from wherever it is they're buried, and make promises they don't intend to keep.

Deities do die of old age. They just have very long half-lives.

Perception has mass. Staring at an object on a very sensitive scale will cause a measurable increase in its weight.
> Beholders don't have their traditional gaze attacks, but they can pulverize you through sheer force of observation.

Wizards spend most of their time scrying. It's why they all build towers; the reception is better up there.

Hell overflows with light.

Bat-people communicate with each other in a language that's inaudible to everyone else.
> They can also cast spells ultrasonically. This technique is limited to incantations that have been adapted to work at higher frequencies, but it protects trade secrets and makes it practically impossible for anyone else to land a counterspell.

Dungeon-space is an empty void in which rooms shaped like tetrominoes hang immovably. Doors are linked to each other by persistent portals, but at midnight the rooms reset and all the connections get shuffled. Leave before then or you'll be stranded.

"The Ultramarine" as the name of a sea.

There's a crowd just around the corner. They laugh at irregular intervals; occasionally they applaud. You can't find them no matter how thoroughly you tear the building apart.

Someone who travels in a cottage tied to a roc's neck.

Matter is language. Producing gold from base metal is an act of translation. The Rosetta Stone and the Philosopher's Stone are one and the same.

A manuscript entitled "Detective Sherlock Holmes' Adventures in Fairyland."

Humanity's continued existence is reliant upon the advocacy of an outer god who treats us like a pet goldfish.

Setting where the sun has been stolen, upending the natural order and stopping the passage of time. Creatures of the mythological underworld thrive, whereas all but a few mortals stumble blindly through their daily routine and cannot be roused from sleep. The players must travel to the western horizon, reclaim the sun, and return it to its place in the sky.

Assembling spells by cutting words out of magazines.

The aftermath of an antimemetic catastrophe. Alleyways are filled with heaps of offal, exotic parisitoids have infested the sewers, and parts of the city were scrambled when the disaster stripped them of semantic content. Everyone is afflicted with amnesia; the contents of characters' inventories are the only things that hint at their past.

Spellcasting which involves gathering reagents, each of which holds a single magic word. Magicians can expend them to use those words in a spell, or depend on the persistent but more restrictive lexicon provided to them by foci and innate sorcerous abilities.

Multicultural animism. You can talk to rocks anywhere, but not all of them follow the same set of social conventions.

Wizard whose final doom is weaving themselves a chrysalis and emerging from it as a giant butterfly.

Setting in which each spaceship is unique, ancient, and irreplaceable.

Enough with clockwork hearts. Let's see a few hearts that are literally clocks.
> What if your heart were counting down to something?

Message bottles that appear out of thin air. Teleportation? Fourth-dimensional insertions? A messenger that's moving too fast to be seen? 

A threefold fire god - sparks, flame, ashes.

A memetic cordon - which is to say, a place from which little information is permitted to escape. Entering it results in an immediate timeskip and a few circumstantial clues about what happened before your memories were wiped.

Cyberpunk setting where the aesthetic trappings of magic have progressed a bit. Instead of swords and sorcery, there are enchanted revolvers and cassettes.
> TI-84 graphing calculators are the standard for programmatic spellcasting.

Memory-eating vampires that believe themselves to be their own first victim.

Rat-catchers living deep in the hypergeometry of an escheresque city.

Deposits of divine ichor that pool in the ground like oil.

A crown of moth wings.

Strange conservation laws.
> Conservation of royalty, morality, ambiguity.

Impersonation so thorough you don't retain your own memories.

Artificial ley lines that are put down to form a magical power grid.

Fantasy worlds must have some very strange fossils.

Necromancer trailed by a very awkward cyclops skeleton. It is actually a misidentified elephant.

The spells-as-creatures paradigm could use some further exploration. What are the capabilities of an unbound Sending or Magic Missile? Could you train them to do something else?

A sea that warps time and space.
> Variant where sailing is relativistic. The faster you go, the less time you experience. Supplies are theoretically a nonissue, but pray that the wind doesn't blow you off-course.

Non-reptilian dragons. A lot of bugs would work well for this purpose, but there are also bats and fish.

Angels as minor messenger spirits. The sort of creature a magician might use as a carrier pigeon or bind to a scrying mirror.

Sufficiently skilled characters can develop pseudo-magical knacks. Sticking objects together, an uncanny sense of direction, knowing what face a coin will next land on, etc.

Novice wizard maintaining a mind palace the size of a birdcage, bound in silver wire.

If angels are beings that maintain the inner workings of reality, demons are equivalent to cancerous cells.

Augurs who take their instruments into diving bells to record and interpret whalesong.

Mad scientists are having ideas planted in their minds by an extrauniversal intelligence.

Magic remote that shuffles its buttons around every time one is pressed.

Names and phrases: Witch-gates, Starcross, the Unfinished Country, the Apocryphal Archive.

Setting where writing doesn't function correctly. Everything has to be taught and transmitted orally; possibly some memory aids will work if they're sufficiently imprecise.
> This probably has to work at the point where a text is read rather than upon the writing itself, or there would have to be some way for the effect to scramble every possible means of recording information. Unless that was the point?
>> A place where things are mostly stable at a large scale, but the details change from moment to moment, like how perception works in a dream.

The key to every door, a crystal dodecahedron that functions as a supercomputer. Can break ciphers, translate languages, map buildings, and open locks using esoteric sensors and field manipulation tech. Locals believe it to be invested with the platonic essence of access.

A setting where telekinetics are by default weak but very precise, and so are more likely to be artisans or safecrackers than combatants.

Space monks who render their bodies impervious to extreme conditions. There are different possible mechanisms - mummification while still living, tempering the body into a sealed and self-contained system, encasement of oneself in a protective bubble.
> Also comes with the means to travel in space - reactionless thrust or the ability to reach escape velocity by jumping.

Physiology is impressionable, so becoming one sort of creature rather than another is mostly a matter of education. Thus why a chicken taught by snakes will develop into a cockatrice, and why any animal that's regularly exposed to language may eventually learn how to speak.

Certain heritable magics can temporarily be shared via a blood infusion.

A spear of indefinite length.

A secret society that exists to ensure that a divinely-ordained apocalypse comes to pass. Their agents are fed prophetic intelligence by angels dwelling in cell towers.

The lemurian empire is not traditionally composed of lemurs. But there's no reason it couldn't be.

Bull's-eye lantern that can project a magic circle onto any flat surface.

Dragons which regularly shed their skin.
> Certain beings (elementals, high spirits, kings) will become new dragons if they crawl into an old dragonskin.

Lightning only strikes things that have defied the gods. Raising oneself towards heaven is a form of blasphemy.

The previous universe ended in celestial fire. The stars are cinders.

More magic should be reliant on infrastructure.
> Wizard colleges responsible for maintaining central dictionaries which their graduates' spellbooks refer to.
>> Alternate history in which the dominant magical tradition stopped working when the library of alexandria burned down.

Magic or psionics that are usable only with cybernetic assistance. 

Coins that grant wishes when spent, subject to strict limitations that vary based on their markings and denomination. Snake's-head coins are for healings, 'yokes' perform labor, 'daggers' inflict injury or death, et cetera. Backed by imprisoned djinn.

Low Alchemist - to hold such a position one must be conniving, ingenious, cowardly. Practice instead of theory, catacombs and clandestine laboratories rather than gilded towers.

Wizard-of-Oz-esque figure with access to a panopticon. Can see everything, but has limited attention.

Extradimensional space that's a maze of sky-bridges and fire escapes. The "buildings" are concrete pillars that permit no entry or exit - but some are cracked open, and serve as the nesting-sites of creatures that are adapted to this aberrant ecosystem.

An assembly line for the production of dwarves. Optimistically, an experiment in creating large groups of identical twins. Pessimistically, equivalent to Tolkein's orcs.

Martial art whose practitioners become larger on the inside. They can exhale gusts of wind, swallow lakes, bleed profusely for hours without risking death. Forbidden techniques purport to expand the convolutions of the brain.

The trappings of a mecha setting, but "pilots" are put in sensory deprivation chambers so that they can project their minds into the noosphere. Humanity is threatened by engineered memeplexes and egregores that arise emergently from the collective unconscious, but the oneironaut program is treating the symptoms instead of the disease.