Beejallyla's Creature Splice

Beejallyla's Creature Splice
Magic-User Spell Level 4

Beejallyla's Creature Splice combines any two different types of creatures with total hit dice equal to or less than the caster's hit dice. The referee determines the result of the splice—the monster's intelligence, temperament, abilities, fusion of physical traits, etc.

The new creature has a 3 in 6 chance to survive the combination. Creatures that do not survive have a 1 in 6 chance to rise as undead on the next moonless night.

Maps from memory

Check out Mapstalgia, which posts hand-drawn maps of video games drawn from memory.

Something Lovecraftian to read

While culling my bookshelves (a painful and endless endeavor), I discovered that Monte Cook and John Tynes' d20 Call of Cthulhu book includes quite a good bibliography. I select from among the listed works those I never read, read but forgot, or feel it's high time to read again:

• Ambrose Bierce's "The Damned Thing", "The Suitable Surroundings", "The Moonlit Road", "Haita the Sheperd", and "An Inhabitant of Carcosa"
• Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows", "The Wendigo", "Ancient Lights", and "Entrance & Exit"
• Robert Bloch's "The Shambler from the Stars", "The Shadow from the Steeple", and "Fane of the Black Pharaoh"
• Jorge Luis Borges' (read him!) "The Book of Sand", "The Zahir", "The Circular Room", "The House of Asterion", "The Aleph", and "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
• extra points for including Johnathan Carroll's not explicitly Lovecraftian but excellent Land of Laughs
• Robert W. Chambers' "The Yellow Sign"
• All of Lord Dunsany's stories, but especially:
  • "The Deeds of Mung"
  • "A Shop in Go-by Street"
  • "Alhireth-Hotep the Prophet"
  • "The King That Was Not"
  • "The Highwayman"
  • "The Ghosts"
  • "The Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth"
  
  • "Where the Tides Ebb and Flow"
  • "Bethmora"
  • "The Hashish Man "
  • "Poor Old Bill"
  • "The Field"
  • "The Hoard of the Gibbelins"
  • "How Nuth Would Have Practiced His Art Upon the Gnoles"
  • "Ghu-bu and Sheemish"
  • "The City on Mallington Moor"
  • "The Bureau d'Echange de Maux"
  • "A Narrow Escape"
  • "Taking Up Piccadilly"
  • "The Sphinx in Thebes (Massachusetts)"
  • "The Trouble in Leafy Green Street"
  • "Lobster Salad"
  • "How the Office of Postman Fell Vacant in Otford-under-the-Wold"
  • "The Sac of Emeralds"
  • "The Return" (presumably they mean "The Return of the Exiles")
  • A Night at an Inn (a stage play)
• William Hope Hodgson's "The Hog", "The Whistling Room", "The Voice in the Night", "The Derelict", and The Boats of the Glen Carrig
• Henry James' "Count Magnus" and "The Jolly Corner"
• Henry Kuttner's "The Salem Horror", "Hydra", "The Eater of Souls", "The Invaders", and "Bells of Horror"

• Frank Belknap Long's "The Hounds of Tindalos" and "The Horror from the Hills"
• Fritz Leiber's "To Arkham and the Stars" and "Terror from the Depths"
• Thomas Ligotti's "The Sect of the Idiot", "The Last Feast of Harlequin", and "The Dark Beauty of Unheard Horrors"
• Arthur Machen's "The Novel of the White Powder", "The Novel of the Black Seal", "The White People", "The Inmost Light", and "The Shining Pyramid"
• A. Merrit's Dwellers in the Mirage and The Moon Pool
• All of Clark Ashton Smith stories (many of which I've lately read), but especially:
  • "Genius Loci"
  • "The Double Shadow"
  • "The Return of the Sorcerer"
  • "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros"
  • "The Door to Saturn"
  • "The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis"
  • "The Plutonian Drug"
  
  • "The Empire of Necromancers"
  • "The Charnel God"
  • "The Maze of Maal Dweb"
  • "The Nemesis of the Unfinished"
  • "The Holiness of Azedarac"
  • "The Beast of Averoigne"
  • "The Enchantress of Sylaire"
  • "The Mandrakes"
  • "The Maker of Gargoyles"
  • "The Colossus of Ylourgne"
  • "The Disinterment of Venus"
  • "Morthylla"
  • "The Seven Geases"
  • The Dead will Cuckold You (a stage play)
• W.B. Yeats' "Rosa Alchemica", "The Tables of the Law", and "The Adoration of the Magi"

Dice!

Dice come in a variety of shapes.

The Door to Saturn

I learned of Clark Ashton Smith relatively recently—around the time I discovered the OSR. I just read The Door to Saturn. What a fun story!

UPDATE: Black Gate magazine posted surveys of Smith's Averoigne, Hyperborea, and Zothique story cycles. The essays are worth a read if you'd like an overview of his work.

And this is just awesome:

...Malygris, who lay dead for years while men believed him living; who, lying thus, still uttered potent spells and dire oracles with decaying lips.*

I've been sick

I've been sick, but I'm on the mend now. I have a lot of work to catch up on, so posting will probably be light through the new year.

Ditlana and dungeon architecture

Thanks to everyone who commented on Wednesday's post! I'm only the most casual of tourists to Tékumel, I'm afraid, and have never read beyond the 1975 EPT book. Rob L's comment from yesterday had me wondering if ditlána was the default origin of dungeons in EPT. Some of the quotations in my previous post undoubtedly focus on the ditlána of the city of Jakálla, but Professor Barker leaves plenty of latitude for a variety of underworld origins:

Scattered over Tékumel are innumerable half-buried, half-forgotten ruins. There are fragments dating back to the prehuman ages, when the Ssú and the Hlýss vied with one another for control; there are tunnels of melted rock and steel constructed during the days of man's first glory; there are jumbled heaps destroyed by the cataclysms which rent Tékumel when the planet was cast into outer dimensional darkness; there are catacombs and subterranean labyrinths dating from more recent empires, cities, temples, pyramids, and fortresses dedicated to the lost and unremembered gods of half a hundred kingdoms. Another factor is the custom of Ditlána, the ceremonial "renewing" of many cities every 500 years: cellars and foundations of an old city are filled in and roofed over, upper floors are razed, and then new and more splendid edifices are built upon this foundation. Such earlier buried habitations are now full of burrows and tunnels built by humans, half-humans, nonhumans, and the many parasites and predators of Tékumel who subsist upon man's leavings.

This reminds me of How to Host a Dungeon.

As I currently see it, there are three major aspects of big-picture dungeon architecture:

• the physical origin of the space: natural caves, mines, nonhuman excavations, ditlána, etc.
• the spacial relation of levels in terms of number, depth, and interconnectedness
• the configuration and type of areas or neighborhoods within a single level (randomly generated interstices, Saturday Night Specials, scenario/faction areas, empty regions, etc.)

Just as in How to Host a Dungeon, each of these will be modified over time, by nature and with use. Natural caves will be expanded and adapted for habitation. Commercial mines will be abandoned, and later repurposed. New connections will be tunneled between levels. Geological evens will reshape sections.