PIT OF SLUDGE VOLUME THE FIRST

 This is not a slush pile this is my LEGALLY DISTINCT SLUDGE PIT and YOU CANT TAKE IT FROM ME IT'S ALL MINE

Some great bloggers can create amazing ideas that fill pages upon pages. I am not one of them, but I do have many small things that may intrigue and perhaps entertain. Most of these are from other posts I can't get around to finishing; I deposit them here so they no longer rot in a post that will never be made, and to be free of them weighing on my mind. It's better to have them be seen and enjoyed here so I can have a clean slate.

First, a trio of magical weapons:

EVENING STAR RISING is a plain, slightly chipped iron longsword, its hilt and crossguard made to look like the twisted-together roots of a tree. EVENING STAR RISING gets more powerful the closer its wielder is to a death of old age; in the hands of a young warrior, EVENING STAR RISING is just a normal sword that occasionally talks, but in the hands of a bedridden centenarian who can barely even walk with a cane, the sword shall unerringly strike targets and cut through solid steel as if it were chaff, although it wouldn't make them able to walk or not die of old age. In the hands of an immortal, or anybody who has taken magical measures extend their lifespan beyond their natural age, EVENING STAR RISING will always turn against its wielder at the most inopportune time; if it cannot harm the immortal, it will harm the things they love. EVENING STAR RISING rarely ever speaks, but when it does, it tells a great variety of war stories, all of them colorful and exciting and almost none of them true.

GNAW ON STONES, a kukri shaped entirely from a single piece of bone. Those who the blade strikes have their jaws sealed shut by agonizing muscle contractions for as long as the wound still bleeds, biting down so hard that their teeth crack. Did the target have a bite attack? Not anymore, it doesn't. GNAW ON STONES is bitter, vindictive, and ironically enough, never shuts the hell up. The only thing that really brings it joy is complaining about people it doesn't like, which is basically all people that have ever lived.

An antique whaling harpoon, its metal tip pitted and stained by an unusual, oil-like pearlescent residue that stubbornly defies all attempts at removal. The varnished wooden handle is covered with finely-detailed carvings of fantastical whales and sea monsters engaged in combat, along with the text "GREAT ILLHVELI HUNT '43". It bears a faint smell of saltwater and something less immediately identifiable, like chlorine fumes mixed with ozone.

If the harpoon is thrown at a solid object and embeds itself at least a centimeter deep, the entire harpoon will be impossible to remove until the thrower touches it.

Next up, LOCATIONS:

Titan's Head Gorge. A deep canyon cuts through the landscape, worn into the earth by a river that dried up when prehistory was just plain old history. In its widest point, a skull the size of a house sits wedged between two spurs of rock, with the rest of the gigantic skeleton scattered far below at the canyon's bottom in a vast sun-bleached heap. Scavengers of all types frequent the area, as if they're expecting something of equal size to the skeleton to get caught and die again. Climbing down to the skull would normally be a difficult feat requiring climbing gear, but somebody's quite recently built a wooden scaffolding down to the empty eye sockets...

Monument Hill. There isn't a monument here, there hasn't been one in living memory, and aside from dubious rumors and the hill's name, there's little sign that there ever was a monument. The hill has been scoured from the earth as if a vast hand grabbed and tore most of it out of the ground, leaving only a big mound of dirt and stone behind. Monument Hill is blighted land, always uncomfortably warm and humid even in the height of winter and basically devoid of any vegetation aside from scraggly, colorless grass. The only thing worth taking from this wretched place are the tiny shards of pearlescent metal that occasionally turn up around the area that was once the hilltop, inducing strange and occasionally prophetic dreams with prolonged contact.

Face Rock. A circular boulder, about as tall as a man, that looks remarkably like a silhouette of face when viewed from the right angle. Well, it used to, before people started carving their names in the rock and taking chips out of it as good-luck charms; these days, you have to squint to see the face's outline, and somebody put a metal cage around the boulder to keep any would-be souvenir-takers and signature-leavers away from it. Chips taken from the rock actually do improve your luck just a tiny bit, but only ever work once before just turning into a worthless sliver of stone. You could theoretically get a much more potent effect from the entire stone, if you could find some way to carry it around with you like its original owner.

Blood Springs. A small spring hidden underneath an overhang of rock, where a steady trickle of blood-red water wells up from the ground into a shallow stone basin. The water gets its red color from a high concentration of iron in the rock that the groundwater seeps up through, which gives it an awful taste and makes it dangerous to drink in considerable quantities.

The high iron content isn't the only thing worthy of note, though; ancient, extremophilic microbes reside in the water of Blood Springs, pushed up to the surface from an unbegotten source deep under the earth. Consuming enough of the water allows them to take root in your body, feeding off of your body's iron reserves; the extremophiles occasionally grant relevant visions of the distant past by briefly connecting your brain to an ancient Archaea-consciousness nestled deep beneath the earth, but you better start upping your iron intake unless you want to slowly die of super-anemia.

Here's a room from a dungeon that never came to be, and the unusual plant life living within it.

THE REAGENT GARDEN.

This tiny demiplane is the creation of a serpent-man sorcerer a million years dead, a climate-controlled slice of a world no mortal man has ever seen. It's about the size of a small-ish public park, choked with exotic plants and humidity that seem to compete in discomforting visitors, and due to some errors in the calculated sorcery holding the pocket dimension together, the entire demiplane seems to be slightly off-kilter. A twenty degree incline from one side to another, maybe twenty-five, but enough to make losing one's footing an irritating and occasionally dangerous possibility if you start running. The ground is soft and muddy, but stone paths can be occasionally found under the foliage, along with the crumbling remains of the walls once meant to separate the plants. An impenetrable luminous cloud over and around the demiplane's borders provides enough dim light for the greenery to subsist, along with occasional rain when the muddy ground begins to dry.

PLANTS OF THE REAGENT GARDEN:

1. Blood Lotus. Blood-red, as to be expected from the name, with tough, meaty petals that have a nasty iron taste. Chew a flower up, pack the resulting mush in your cheek or under your tongue, and for the next D4+1 turns your critical hit range will expand by one, which stacks with other similar effects. Any slashing or piercing made attacks against you do an extra half of the damage rolled, though, as you bleed like a sonovabitch until the Lotus runs its course.

2. Ration Fruit. Lumpy bruise-purple melons the size of a balled fist that grow on vines that creep across the ground. Nutritious enough for one to count as a full day's rations, but the flavor is best compared to getting hit in the mouth with an spice cabinet that's gone moldy. Save vs. Poison the first time you eat one to keep it down.

3. Pearl Lotus. Delicate and bearing a captivating nacreous sheen, these flowers readily crush into fine powder in one's hand. Upon ingesting the powder, Save vs. Paralysis. On a failure, you are incapacitated by convulsions for D4 turns as your brain tries and utterly fails at processing the information flooding through it. On a success, you get a useful glimpse of possible futures; roll a D20, and mark down the result. Whenever you or someone else rolls a D20, you may replace that result with the one you've been hanging on to; you can save a good roll for yourself, or dump a bad one on your enemies. You can only hold on to one such roll at a time, and partaking of another dose of Pearl Lotus while already under its effects results in an automatic failed save as your brain overflows with visions of worlds that could be.

4. Author Bush. Grows quartos, pamphlets, and other small books from its branches. Most are blank, but some are filled with unrecognizable symbols; if you read one of these nonsense books, the seed of an Author Bush roots itself in your mind. It won't do anything while you're alive aside from the occasional headache, but when you die a new Author Bush will sprout in your brain tissue and push its way out of your skull. The books it grows will either be more of its seed-books, or memoirs of your life and thoughts; the plant's writing style and grammar tends to be simplistic or stilted, and it always waxes poetic about the inherent superiority of vegetable life. What a hack.

5. Kudzu. Nothing magical about it, but even in a garden full of weird magic plants, this vine is trying its best to outcompete everything else for nutrients. In a constant war with...

6. Gardener Bush. Biologically engineered from other aggressive ambulatory plants such as the Archer Bush, these man-sized bushes have developed hardened, razor-edged leaves at tips of their branches that they use to prune other plants that would threaten the balance of the garden. As it would happen, the bushes count human visitors as a threat, and they are smart enough to pry off helmets and go for the eyes.

Trying to get any of these plants to grow outside of the carefully-created environment of the reagent garden is a chore and a half (although not impossible), as the flowers, bushes, and vines within have spent untold years unused to a real biosphere that actually changes with weather and seasons and stuff. Except the kudzu, that awful plant will THRIVE and menace the world as an invasive species for years to come.

Most fantasy settings have their dragons. These are mine:

Dragons were created as armored battle-machines during an long-forgotten war between rival flesh-crafting kingdoms of ludicrous decadence and wealth, soaring over enemy lines and dousing them from above with the fires and acids produced by alchemical glands within the dragons' bodies; kobolds are likewise intentional creations, made to act as the maintenance crew to keep the dragon alive and running between battles. Dragons conquer and pillage because they were built to do it, even if they no longer report to any superior officer; the early dragons had their brains surgically altered for loyalty, and their hoards were regularly siphoned off to the royal treasuries to keep the war funded.

Those flesh-warping dynasties are gone now, wiped out by a biomantically-enhanced plague that turned on its masters, and only their shunned, empty ruins and beasts of war remain. Many have tried to imitate or take control of their creations, and many have died horribly, but these efforts have had limited successes; drakes, wyverns, and wurms, for instance, are all attempts at imitating the dragon formula.

(Yeah, these were probably creations of the Serpent-Men. They made many horrible yet clever things in my barely-described-barely-elaborated-outside-my-mind setting. A dragon is basically a Serpent-Man mecha or predator drone.)