Observations of the Fox

9. Who rules the deepest ocean floor? There are many oceans, and thus many ocean floors. There is always argument as to which ocean floor is the deepest. One of the contenders would have to be the Inverted Plateau of Olarus, a flat plain surround on all sides by underwater cliffs over five kilometres high. Unlike a simple trench, this ocean floor stretches over countless hectares, barely explored by intrepid divers in bathyscapes. Rubble, and a number of ruined buildings have been identified across the plain, but nothing has been successfully brought back to the surface. Aquatic druids and shamans, hav e translated the scared words of the piscean creatures in the area. Common folklore states that sharks do not die of old age, and that they must continually swim to maintain their buoyancy. Those sharks who do not die from violence sometimes lose the will to continue swimming, literally dying of ennui; those who continue swimming can do so for centuries, growing larger wi...

8. "Mommy, what are tooth faeries like, and what do they do with all the teeth?" Whatever you may have heard about tooth faeries, it's probably a lie. That's not to say there isn't a fragment of truth in some of the stories...but none of them get the whole thing right. Do they collect teeth? Well obviously this bit is generally correct, hence the name.  Are they faeries? Not all of them. Some are, and it may be these individuals who started the legends, but there are very few faeries who still attend these duties...more about them shortly. Most tooth duty is done as penance for committing a crime against the courts of the fey. Punishments from the Seelie court require service to a fey noble during the day, while a specified number of baby teeth (often in the hundreds) need to be collected from the young at night. Punishments from the Unseelie court require infecting healthy adult teeth, where the pain from rot and decay fuels specific dark fey cha...

7. What happens when you water fruit trees with goblin blood? Old Jed once claimed that Blood Oranges were first cultivated by watering a standard orange free with a careful blend of blood from minotaurs, satyrs, and a few obscure Mediterranean beasts now forgotten to the mists of time. Few believe him of course.  Jed tried to repeat these cultivation steps with the ingredients at his disposal. Trying to make "blood" versions of other fruits, citrus and otherwise. The highly mutagenic nature of goblins leant their blood a higher degree of success than most other sanguine fluids he tried, but in Old Jed's experiments success was a relative term. Anything that varied from the base components was considered a positive result in his journals, even if that result could never be replicated. Therein lay the problem with Jed's work.  The plains of Grab Grass, stretching between the twin mountain ranges of Northern Archaia are known to be a hazard to travellers th...

6. There are six kinds of vampires. Don’t be boring.   The six vampire categories vary immensely depending on who you ask. Hunters often categorise them according to the best way to slay them, cryptozoological texts have categorised them according to their food sources, apothecaries often categorise them according to the powers they manifest (and therefore the powers that might be acquired by ingesting their powdered organs), while the vampires themselves have been known to stratify their number according to six stages of vampiric transcendence, or the six mythical progenitors who were said to be the first of their kind. A final method for categorising vampires derives from their chosen places of lodgings, but few people use that one.  That makes six common types of categorisation, with six common variations in each. There may be other options, especially in the uncivilised and unexplored lands.  When encountering a vampire, roll 6 six sided dice and allocate...

5. What sort of abilities would a Bug Knight class give to a character? The bug knights of Lower G'harne were always assumed to be homogenous group, instantly recognisable by their glistening, chitinous, black armour. Among the bug knights, and those who often worked with them, this was known to be untrue. The variety among the knights is as varied as the  myriad number of bugs in existence, each knight sharing an almost tot emic link to one particular invertebrate, sharing traits with the cre ature, growing stronger over time, as their appearance gradually takes on characteristics of the bug whose traits they share. The Ant Knights are most common, often manifesting massive strength, hardened skin, and a subliminal hive mind among others of their type. The Beetle Knights are often the largest, and typically manifest traits like a capacity to dig elaborate tunnels (or even dig through solid stone), eat the most outlandish things, and resist all forms of mind contro...

4. Make a monster based on your deepest fear Tough one... My wife would say that my biggest fear is clowns, but with the remake of the movie "IT" arriving in cinemas soon, this feels like it's beaten me to the punch. Clown monsters are getting a bit passé anyway. So it might be a bit more interesting to take another route.  Other big fears would be vertigo, or the existential dread of not being who I am... Perhaps something combining the two.  The Astral Leech is a being whose presence is detected subtly at first. A person who has drawn the attention of the Leech first notices that the colour is slowly leeched out of things over the course of several days. When travelling in the wilderness it might seem to the person that they are simply wandering into a cursed region, in urban areas (or areas where the person is familiar) these early effects might be more noticeable (an advantage is gained on perception checks to notice the effect). This gradual drai...

I've been working on some ideas...again. One of which was kind of paralleled by a comment recently made by  +Ian Borchardt . I've been thinking of a way to randomly generate sectors, tower blocks, and notable characters for games of "The Law". Generally, that's the order the generation would be done in...starting wide, putting things in context and gradually narrowing in on the details. Part of the idea might be to allow players (or even request players) to develop the home sectors and towers that their agents come from...narrowing down on specific people might be a bit more problematic, but maybe an agent could define notable people from their floor, and maybe the adjacent floors...but sectors change over the course of decades, buildings are built and demolished in timeframes of years, and notable people rise and fall over the course of months or even weeks. By the time an agent has finished their time in the academy, the people who were once notable may b...