The First and Last populated the world with many things, and set many people to rule them. The first were the bright-eyed djinn, born of fire, but God does not work with fire alone. The most populous are the humans, and perhaps the most beloved, but they have not filled every space and set foot in every land. There are more people than you could count, more types  of people than you could count. Lost cities, brutal desert plains, sunken continents, phantom islands; they call these places, and many more, home. Arragousets  It's an old story, but not so old as you'd think. In isolated places of the western coast, they tell of the little men of the sea, cruel raiders with barbeled faces and needle teeth who come marching up from the waves with whalebone spears and shell-bladed clubs. They kill those who fight and make spouses of the survivors, and they stay for a generation before marching back into the sea when old age bids that they should die. Their children are human i...

Another Glåugust Glogtember  GLOGTOBER, post. From the famed  Archon's Court : a small regional hexcrawl. Ilya Zankovsky  Maybe you found a ring , and thought yourself a more legitimate ruler than the average freebooter. Maybe you're just ambitious and own a map. Regardless, up the river from Merara Wiha , the throne of Dahay lays empty. The old king Dawit  died three centuries ago, his firstborn Eskinder  got an arrow through the eye socket, and his second was busy making deals with the DEVIL  in exile, his name wiped from the record. Nobody came back to take up the scepter, the taxman got what he was due, and life went on. Captain Natsinet  came back from the war with a mind full of blood and sharp angles, if you define "war" as running an organized crime ring in his Imperial post on the isle of  Yonah , moving poison, slaves, and embezzled arms across the eastern channel. When the meteor hit, he took it as a sign to get out of foreign territo...

For  Invisible Hands . Texas is burning.  Dust Bowl, Alexandre Hogue When it all went wrong, it went very wrong here. All the violence and fear and hatred that could accumulate in that largest of states went off like a loaded gun, along with all of the actual  loaded guns that were just sitting around.  The earth shattered, bleeding black from open stone veins, and what was once dead was made living again; a grand parade of dead men and dinosaurs, all dripping with petroleum. The Crude Sea , dark and thick and reeking, parts the state into islands, the earth's memory of the interior sea that once cut the nation in half. Lift your eyes over the horizon, if you're able- s moke columns rise in every direction, pillars holding up a white-hot sky where the Lone Star blazes big and bright, a cruel sun which permits no nightfall. When the weather isn't bad, it's worse. When it's not hot, it's pouring down sheets of rain and pitching hailstones the size of baseballs to ...

 Here we are, back to my personal monster manual. No further elaboration required. Cockatrice 3 HD (12 HP ), AC as leather , 7 morale A disease among dire fowl, a retrovirus that, instead of causing cancer, causes strange atavisms. Feathers fall out, and scales take their place. A tail grows, along with teeth and claws. The sickness is worse for people. Like most horrors of the flesh, the old snakes must be to blame. Movement: Like a velociraptor. Faster than a man, and a much better jumper and climber. Morality: Not improved by disease. No longer just territorial and mean, Cockatrices  are outright homicidal. Intelligence: Still birdbrained. Attacks: +3 to hit , two claws ( 1d6+1 , test HRTS or catch Stone Sickness .) Stone Sickness: Check HRTS every morning. On a fail, lose 1d6 points from all physical stats as your soft tissues ossify. Once a stat goes below 3 , you are completely unable to move. Hit 0  and you mercifully die. After three successful HRTS tests, you're ...