Magic Items From Scribblenauts

  

In a recent post, the Bad Doctor included this table entry:
33. a fat round bomb with a long fuse; once it goes off, it never stops exploding, forming a permanent static hellstorm of explosions.

This item is near to my heart. It has a name (it's a "resurrective bomb"), and in certain Scribblenauts games you can create it exactly as written.

If you're not already familiar, scribblenauts is a game that lets you conjure objects by writing their names. You can also include adjectives, which give the object properties such as redness, explosiveness, or indestructibility.

In this case, "resurrective" is an adjective that makes an object respawn after it's destroyed. If you apply it to an explosive, each newly-spawned bomb will get caught in its predecessor's blast radius and explode in turn, forming the permanent hellstorm Ms. Screwhead describes. Here is a crappy video of the phenomenon that I found online.

Scribblenauts is nominally about word puzzles suitable for a third grader, but the actual point of playing is to see what kinds of weird artifacts you can create. Many of my TTRPG settings are attempts to recapture this magic.

  

More relevantly to this post, I have an ancient Scribblenauts Unlimited save file that can be mined for magic item content:

1. haunted blowgun: upon striking their target, the darts fired by this gun transform into ghosts. There are rumored to be alternate (talismanic) versions which summon dragons instead.

2. spacious enveloping penny: A coin with a large internal space; maybe the objects stored inside it appear on the head side in place of Lincoln. Can swallow a whole person if you press it to their forehead, and they'll remain in suspended animation until the coin is emptied or destroyed.

3. petrified froggy @backequipment spring boots / sonic shoes: A pair of mobility aids which simultaneously allow their user to run much faster and jump much higher. The frog jump thingy uses an illegal adjective accessible only via glitch.

4. lightweight rideable sonic rainstick: Once per day, it can summon a solid but very fragile raincloud for the user to ride upon. It also hides the secret to an ancient weapon: lightweight rideable sonic acid rain, a version of the raincloud which corrodes anything beneath it.

    

5. enveloping glass throwing knife: A hollow throwing knife designed to shatter upon impact, releasing the payload inside.

6. cloned potion: A transparent, slightly viscous potion. If you pour a few drops onto something it will conjure a magical duplicate. It is theoretically possible to create a potion that applies any adjective; normal potions are the simplest form of antimagic; absent potions can vanish even objects that are otherwise indestructible.

7. tiny grey sasquatch: A short, furry homunculus that can be trained to apply a potion to any creature it sees.

8. UNTRANSLATABLE CUSTOM OBJECT - "inverse potion": Using extremely esoteric techniques, it is possible to create potions that remove an arbitrary set of adjectives from whatever they're used on.

9. fountainlike ring: A ring with a nozzle instead of a stone, which spews massive volumes of water when twisted open.

10. molecular immovable diamond trampoline: A floor tile which sends anything that steps on it hurtling upwards.

11. petrified lava: A flat rock which immolates anything that touches it. Since wearing a fireproof amulet makes you immune, these can act as a rudimentary security system.

12. tiny bouncy spiked steel ball: A sharp projectile that ricochets unpredictably. Release several in a confined space and they'll make a pretty good meatgrinder.

13. orcish indestructible petrified tiki mask: A snarling jade mask that terrifies most non-monstrous creatures.

14. flaming sword / hatlike fictional invisible haetae: A two-part weapon - a sword that sets fire to anything it hits, and a bound spirit that devours burning things.

15. spiky fish-shooting minigun: A machine gun that fires spiny, metallic fish instead of bullets. The fish function as caltrops; unfortunately the gun itself is also spiky and painful to hold.

16. fictional rifle: The idea of a gun. Can't be noticed by anyone who doesn't already know it's there, and the bullets phase through everything but their intended target. If fictional beings walked among us, who could tell?

17. tiny handheld throwable earthbound sun: A handheld sun, typically used to neutralize the powers of vampires and werewolves. However, the lycanthropes have invented a countermeasure, a hatlike lightweight full moon that can be worn as a mask.

18. UNTRANSLATABLE CUSTOM OBJECT - "dimensional bridge": A disk-shaped device that can be expended to insert a single 4D pathway into reality. These passages are short, look a bit like transparent ladders, and are usually best used to bypass a wall. 

     

19. resurrective portal - a portal to the dungeon dimensions, stabilized so that instead of collapsing it spits out an endless series of monsters.

20. ?disabled person?: Somewhat insensitively, this adjective-noun combination results in an undifferentiated ? symbol. If the ? is cloned, the 'duplicate' will instead be a human with random traits.

21. tiny petrified war: A figurine of a hooded skeleton. When it is unveiled, all nearby creatures are compelled to fight each other to the death. famine, pestilence, and pollution figures also exist, but death is strangely useless.

22. tiny petrified djinn: A figurine filled with chaotic magic. This power has random effects when unleashed, most commonly summoning random people and animals or shuffling the color and size of nearby objects. If the figurine is used for the fourth time in one day it makes fireballs rain from the sky and then vanishes.

23. UNTRANSLATABLE CUSTOM OBJECTS - "@a / ø$ø": A pair of cursed tablets whose existence makes it possible to invoke forbidden objects and adjectives using spellcheck.

24. dark nonliving evil @friendlytomaxwell unnoticeable (armor/ greaves / vambrace / boots / samurai helmet / evil eyes) - each part of this armor set contorts itself to attack nearby beings. They are only very narrowly prevented from directing their malice at the wearer or each other.

25. metempsychic laser demonic crystal shiv: A relic that summons self-replicating demons shaped like random creatures and objects. Once unleashed, these beings are extraordinarily difficult to contain; they infest seams in the world from which they cannot be rooted out.

Remembering ideas on the go

Writing is indisputably the best way to remember things, but sometimes you're taking a walk or brushing your teeth and it'd be inconvenient to take notes. This is a quick way to lock ideas down until you're able to record them.

The premise is to plug stuff you want to remember into a bidirectional linked list. This provides structure - items are arranged in a sequence, you can recall them by following that sequence instead of dredging them from your intermediate-term memory. Each item also references the items before/after it, which provides redundancy and helps the information stick.

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The method:
For each thing you want to remember, come up with some image that represents it. For example, if I wanted to remember the first item of this table:

• open up your skull and let your brain come out and glow with the light and heat of the sun.

I might use the image of a brain. Try to make sure it has a strong relation to the thing you want to remember; the biggest risk when using this method is that you'll recall the image but not the thing it's supposed to represent.

For the first item in the sequence, I like to imagine holding the image in my left hand. It can help to come up with tactile details - what does this thing feel like? My brain-image is squishy and wet. I can imagine squeezing it like a sponge.

OK, now we'll add the next item.

• turn drops of blood into swords.

For this one, let's say our image is a red sword. Now we start to construct our linked list, by coming up with a way to connect the sword to the brain and vice-versa. This one's pretty easy - the sword is piercing the brain straight through.

Next item!

• when you speak your words become stairs, if you climb them far enough you end up in the place you described.

OK, our image for this one is a spiral staircase. We've gotta connect this to the previous image in our list, the red sword, so let's say that the spiral staircase is wrapped around the sword's handle.

We'll do one more:

• exactly at midnight, the rest of the world freezes and you can wander around and do whatever you like for an hour.

Our image can be a pocketwatch frozen at midnight. To connect it with the previous item, we'll say it's rolling down the staircase.

Every now and then you might want to reinforce your memory by going backwards or forwards through the list, image by image. There's never any need to visualize the entire sequence at once, just the current image and the connections it has with the images before and after it.

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I find these image-chains surprisingly durable and extensible. If you're so inclined, you can remember 40 things at once or reconstruct the whole sequence days after you last thought about it. Still, do yourself a favor and WRITE THINGS DOWN as soon as you can.

Memory tricks all get a bit grody if you use them many times in rapid succession. When I no longer need a sequence, I like to hold out my left arm, where I was keeping that first image, and brush it off with my other hand as if I'm scattering the whole thing into dust. I don't know if this has any practical value, but I enjoy it as a little re-centering ritual.

15 powers that came to me late at night

1. open up your skull and let your brain come out and glow with the light and heat of the sun.

2. turn drops of blood into swords.

3. when you speak your words become stairs, if you climb them far enough you end up in the place you described.

4. exactly at midnight, the rest of the world freezes and you can wander around and do whatever you like for an hour.

5. put your hand on someone's shoulder to walk them around like a puppet.

6. taste the history of things you eat in exquisite detail.

7. your tongue is sharp. If you cut someone with it they'll believe one thing you tell them, but they'll also probably remember that you went up to them and stabbed them with your tongue. subtler if you do it while you kiss them.

8. your shadow comes to life and strangles people who step on it.

9. if you eat a book and concentrate very hard on not throwing up, nobody can remember any of the information inside. when you lose focus you puke your guts out and people remember again.

10. fold paper animals so intricate that they are inhabited by real actual angels. If one gets smushed everyone responsible turns into salt.

11. your hands are replaced with porcelain doll hands that have retractable buzzsaws inside.

12. if you move in the direction opposite the earth's rotation you go back in time. If you move alongside it you go forward.

13. if you squint at someone with one eye you can dream of what their reign would have been like if they were a roman emperor.

14. when you speak or write it's in a different language every time and only you and the person you're addressing can understand it.

15. if you play charades with someone and act out their mannerisms, and they correctly guess that they're the thing you're miming, you can kill them and nobody will do anything about it.

after that was something about toy snakes, but before it coalesced into anything I fell asleep and knew no more.

Setting: Institute of Occult Sciences

There's no such thing as a surface. Instead we have the Underground: a world made of negative space, the kind of subterranean locale you're probably familiar with from many prior sources. The Underground borrows heavily from these sources and from other classic science fiction. It has its Morlocks, its ichthyosaurs, its Newts and Lemurians.

It's also undergoing a technological revolution. Clockwork devices proliferate; train tracks connect the known world; natural philosophy has started to bear strange and alarming fruit. All of it is driven by Weird Science, and most of the science is produced by an Institute that is a little anarchist and very mad.

Players are students at the Institute of Occult Sciences, or at least part of its ecosystem.

My plan is really to run this as a set of parallel duet games and furnish everyone with their own personal subplots, but here are some more generic ambitions, if you're into that:
~ Become something more-than-human.
~ Be recognized as a professor.
~ Establish yourself as a regional superpower.
~ Found or revolutionize a Science.

For extra credit: Prevent the world from being destroyed by superintelligent cuttlefish, or whatever else is metastasizing this week.

This setting is built on Laws, when I feel like it.

The Institute

• All the rules are informal. Professorship is a social construct; there are lectures and labs but you enroll in them by showing up.
• More advanced courses may be available only by invitation. They meet at odd times or in odd places.
• Everyone is obsessed with something, and probably eager to talk about it.
• Many people have sinister motives.
• Academic disagreements are serious business.

The Weird Parts

• "Exchange students" have no distinguishing characteristics and can only be seen in your peripheral vision. They make up about half the Institute's population.
• We have invented messenger lizards and pneumatic tubes but not the intercom.
• The library has many sub-levels and is full of strange objects. It tends not to be actively dangerous unless you take risks, disturb something, or break rules.
• Tall buildings are perpetually wreathed in lightning.
• The groundskeepers don't speak and never leave any skin exposed.

Student Life

• Students must find a place to stay and deal with the practicalities of living there.
• Currency exists, but most people trade favors.
• People are always willing to show you around. They might ask for a small favor in return.
• There are lots of extracurricular activities.

The Sciences:

There are five major Sciences. Each is a magic system made up of a bundle of interrelated techniques and setting details. If you've seen GLOG deltas (Inadvisable Decisions is my favorite) or Stolen World lifepaths it's a bit like those. More of a focus on crafting, since that is my group's particular genre of madness.

Corporeal Science: Study of biological materials. Think Victor Frankenstein or the Darwinists from Leviathan.

Galvanic Science: Study of electricity and magnetism. Nikola Tesla in a universe where the death ray actually works.

Motive Science: Study of motion, including perpetual motion. Produces clockworks, automata, terrible engines, etc.

Lucid Science: Study of information. Can facilitate remote viewing, telepathy, and SCP-esque anti/memetics.

Empty Science: Study of the nonexistent and unreal. Deeply esoteric but has practical applications in necromancy, dream-manipulation, and summoning invisible Presences.

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There are also 'secondary' magic systems which are smaller in scope or less recognized by the Institute. If I think of something cool that meshes with the Underground's aesthetics it can probably be thrown in.

d4 lesser Sciences:

1. Verdant science. Creating Audrey II through cross-pollination, speculating wildly about why anything grows underground.
2. Worm language. Communing with chasm-creatures via drumming and exchange of blood.
3. Transmutative arts. Metallurgy and chemical synthesis, extracting useful substances from tidal effluvium.
4. Aberrant cartography. Mapping the Underground, navigating non-euclidean space, dowsing for ores and ichor.

Backgrounds:

Each comes with two ~things, one functional and another that can be either fluff or a plot hook. In the race/class binary they're more race than class, but there should probably be another 1-2 that are additional flavors of human. 

Dodger: Member of an itinerant subculture that travels the underground by stowing away aboard cargo trains.
~ An old wound. If it impairs a limb or vital organ you might have a mechanical prosthetic.
~ A knack for hiding, evading pursuit, knifework, or another practical skill.

Neo-Promethean: A humanlike being assembled from salts and humours by a student of Corporeal Science.
~ A physiological defect which might be an advantage if viewed from the right angle.
~ A creator elsewhere in the Institute, now disinterested or deceased.

Morlock: An offshoot of humanity adapted to existence in lightless chasms.
~ Complicated mouthparts, customarily hidden with a scarf or a half-mask in public.
~ Lean muscle and an excellent sense of smell.

Illuminated: A person with a sliver of something unreal embedded in their mind.
~ Chronic insomnia. When you do sleep you have surreal nightmares.
~ The ability to clearly perceive things which are only half-there.

Guest: A corpse animated by sentient slime mold.
~ Extreme resilience, owing to your unreliance on human organs or metabolic processes.
~ Fragments of your host body's memories, absorbed when you ate its brain.

Cryonaut: Someone from an ancient era, entombed in a cryogenic corpse-city for hundreds or thousands of years.
~ A deep-time artifact. It might be a possession of yours or an oddity from the Necropolis.
~ A rich personal history which is now basically irrelevant.

Foundling: A lost child adopted by Lemurians. Left behind when the colony vanished.
~ Glowing eyes with complex nictitating membranes for modulating color and intensity.
~ Projective telepathy. You can transmit thoughts to anyone who meets your eyes.

Skittering: An intelligent monster that has integrated into society, typically unique.
~ A totally inhuman body-plan, and probably an alien mindset too. You might lack a social instinct or experience odd cravings.
~ An eccentric wardrobe. Clothing is a way to signal personhood and lack of hostility.