The Doom that Came to Dannerhall

I suppose I'm in the business of writing a dungeon today.  This post is just a collection of fragments.

I didn't start with a map or a plot or a villain.  I start with all the interesting ideas, the revelations that you hope will give your players pause, the spectacular moments that may or may not happen.  I collect a few of these and then I try to stitch them together.

This time I started with a list of body part monsters, and then invented a story to go along with them.  Here's the story first. . .

by Juan Valverde de Amusco's Anatomia del cuerpo humano (1560), who plagiarized most of them from Andreas' Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica.

The Story

Dannerhall was a lonely town, isolated by snow and crag, a rustic cousin on the wrong side of the Nothic Mountains.  It was known for blackberry wines and a famous musician, who had long since mouldered.  Their nearest trading partner is Havenholt, a long journey away through an unfriendly forest.  They hunt the Poison People.  They war with the Red Caves.  

In the short days of winter a prophecy went winding through the streets, and it reached the ears of the king.  The prophecy told that the king of the Red Caves would topple Dannerhall and sit atop its throne.  The king, and his three sons, would all be dead before spring's full bloom.

Word reached the king, as it must.  So great was his fear, and so terrible his fury, that the sun dared not show its face that day.

The warriors were marshalled.  Wrapped in bearhides, they crossed the icy gaps and sky-bitten passes that led to the Red Caves.  Their mission was to kill the king of the Red Caves, and only return once he had been beheaded.

The small army reached the Red Caves without any losses, against all expectation.  No counterforce rallied to meet them in the murderous chokepoints.  Their terraced farms were found to be abandoned.  The stormed the gates and slew its few defenders with relative ease.  The city seemed to be largely abandoned.  A few people seemed to be residing in its halls, but they fled at the coming army.  Cave goats bleated in the streets, their udders stretched and unmilked.

More caves, more portcullises, more poisonous gases.  There seemed to only be a handful of defenders.  Had they caught them during a migration?  A religious holiday?

The invaders were initially amazed at their luck, which turned to boorish joviality, which finally gave way to a creeping sense of dread that only grew as they descended.

Standing outside the throne room, their ears pressed against the bronze doors, they heard gutteral voices.  A crowd that whispered and laughed.  Not a syllable was understandable.

When the door was flung open, their lanterns revealed an empty room and a mad king, wide-eyed and babbling, squatting beside the ashes of an offering pyre.  Silks and robes were piled around him like so much detritus.  Of the numerous voices, there was no sign.

The king of the Red Caves was decapitated.  His body was burned and the soldiers returned with his head.  

They brought with them rich treasures from the vaults, a line of newly-caught slaves, and the youngest and fairest princess of the Red Caves.  Her elder siblings had been cut down, attempting to defend the vaults.

In the castle of Dannerhall, a feast was thrown.  It was a great victory over an old enemy.  The treasures were added to Dannerhall's own and the slaves were distributed among the king's allies.  The orphaned princess was to be wed to the king, in a ceremony that would take place in a mere month.

The girl wept and pleaded at this isolation from her people, and so the king allowed her to keep a servant from the Red Caves.  The one she chose was an old man that she knew from earlier years.  The slave was made a eunuch, and allowed to attend to her.

A week later, a smaller army was sent back to the Red Caves along with some peasants who hoped that they might claim the land for their own.  Of them, nothing was ever heard from again.

The day of the wedding drew night, and the castle once again took a deep breath, readying itself for another great feast.  The candelabras were filled with fresh candles, a pair of hogs were fattened, and newly-woven tapestries were hung.  A thousand preparations and it was done--the wedding would occur tomorrow.

The survivors spoke of the noises that occurred at exactly midnight.  At first, the news was that the orphaned princess' eunuch had gone mad and cut off her head.  Or perhaps he had dismembered her entirely.  The eunuch had been killed.  No, the eunuch had escaped into the night.

Whatever the details, the pieces of the dismembered princess must have swelled and thickened with unnatural growth.  Perhaps they fell off the blood-stained bed where they still rested and plopped on the floor where they continued to grow, instructed and fattened by whatever unearthly power that also gave them animation.

Nearly everyone in the castle died.  The few that escaped spoke of gargantuan body parts and colossal organs, slithering down hallways and gallumphing into the courtyard.

That was two days ago.  The castle is dark, the drawbridge is still halfway raised, and the screams have stopped.  Everyone that has ventured inside thus far has failed to return.  The villagers are already speaking of departure.  All agree that the town is cursed, and no one wishes to stay another night. The mountains roads are treacherous at this time of year, but perhaps less treacherous than remaining.

The Monsters

They're in the dead castle.  The orphaned princess has been dismembered and every hateful part of her stalks the castle, empowered by fell magic.

The Slaves

Former citizens of the Red Caves.  They are pale and their speech is dense, turbulent.  The princess has so far not killed any of them.  They would leave the castle if they could, but outside the castle are mobs of people who would quickly kill them.

The princess--now the rightful king of the Red Caves--calls for them from the throne room.  Some avoid that horrible place.  Some enter, where they are made to swear fealty to the thing in the chair.  All of them have armed themselves and are likely to attack anyone else they find wandering the castle.

The Prince and His Knights

Probably holed up somewhere.  A tiny handful of trained killers, terrified and easily manipulated.

The Warlock Eunuch

He is almost certainly still alive.  Things have gotten a little out of hand, perhaps, but he is very adaptable and utterly determined.

At Least One Actual Demon

Who did you think was behind all this?

The Hands

Each hand is large enough to grab an adult human around the torso.

HD 3  Def chain  Slap 1d8+grab

Fly dwarf  Int 5  Mor 20

Abilities -- Whenever a PC attempts to harm one of the Hands with a hand-held object (or their bare hands), their hand cramps and prevents them.  (The Hands cannot be harmed by hands.)

The Feet

HD 4  Def chain  Kick 1d8

Fly dwarf  Int 5  Mor 20

Abilities -- When the target has at least 30' of clear space above them, the Feet can turn their kick into a stomp, doubling the damage and causing all other creatures within 10' to take 1d4 damage (Dex for half). 

The Feet are initially encountered in the courtyard, where they can make use of their Stomp attack.  If they can be lured indoors, they become a lot less threatening.

The Torso

It is a hostage taker.  Without any hands, feet, head, or internal organs, it lumbers through the darkened halls atop bloody stumps, blindly and clumsily.  The queen of Dannerhall is trapped inside of the rib cage.  She will beg to be released, a pale hand poking out, grasping at nothing.  

When the Torso is damaged she will scream at them to stop--the Torso is crushing her alive.  And if the party continues to attack, it will.

HD 8  Def leather  Slams 1d10/1d10+swallow

Move human  Int 10  Mor 10

Abilities -- The Torso can hold up to two people.  Swallowed characters are allowed a single Str check at a -8 to escape.  The Torso can damage any passenger as a free action, doing as much damage as it wishes.  It is capable of breaking a passenger's body as easily as a grown man can snap a kitten in half.

It is too large to move down any passage less than 10' wide, limiting it to the larger rooms and hallways.

DM's Note: I'm not really sure how the party is supposed to rescue the queen.  Perhaps the torso compulsively attempts to swallow its missing organs, so if the PCs present it with the corpses of say, the heart and the lungs, the Torso will swallow them and, lacking the capacity to retain her, eject the queen.  If I want to do this, I should put the Torso early in the castle so that avoidance becomes the smart option early on, and killing it becomes more viable later.

Alternatively, perhaps the ribs could be restrained with lassos?  Or perhaps a suit of armor given to the queen, to protect her from being crushed.

Honestly, I don't need to think of a way for the players to rescue the queen, because (a) I've already thought of some possibilities, and (b) it isn't essential for them to rescue the queen anyway.  Fuck it.

The Heart

Less of a monster, more of a trap.  It blocks a vital passage.

HD 4  Def none  Atk none

Move none  Int 5  Mor 20

Incite Rage -- Usable 1/turn.  Target must save or fly into a barbarian rage.  Like a barbarian rage, an affected target must attack a creature every turn.  Ending the rage early (before all opponents are slain) requires a successful Save.

Blood Calls to Blood -- Whenever the Heart takes damage, that damage is mirrored onto the person that struck it.  Indirect damage (starting a fire that then spreads to the Heart) does not trigger this.  Throwing a molotov directly onto the Heart does.

One passive ability and one active ability.  Looks like a pain in the ass to fight.  Good.  I'm done here.

The Lungs

Frothy sheets of pulpy membrane, pulsing through the air like a dying butterfly.  The trachea waves through the air like a searching head.  The wind blows over the cartilaginous lips like breath over the top of a beer bottle.

HD 4  Def leather  Slam 1d6

Fly crow  Int 5  Mor 20

Envelope of Wind -- Arrow are at -4 to hit.  Once per turn as a free action, the Lungs can redirect an missed arrow attack at a target of its choosing.

Gust of Wind -- Usable 1/turn.  Strong enough to throw objects at people, or throw people off of the tops of battlements.

I guess I should put this guy up in the battlements, huh?

The Liver

The liver makes you drunk when you fight it.

HD 7  Def leather  Slam 1d6/1d6

Move dwarf  Int 5  Mor 20

Alcoholic Fumes -- Every creature within 50' gains 1 point of drunkeness every turn.  (Holding your breath doesn't work; it soaks through your skin.)

Immune to Poison

<sidebar>Drunkeness Rules: For every point of drunkeness you get, your critical miss range increases by 1. Decreases by 1 point every 2 hours.</sidebar>

Since everyone will quickly get very drunk fighting this thing, the strategy is to either kill it quickly, or defeat it using methods that don't rely on die rolls.  The debuff can stick around all day.

The Stomach

Okay, it's an ambulatory stomach that barfs a cone of acid.  Is that sufficient on its own?

Nah.

The stomach is in the basement, vomiting up a huge cloud of acid gas that fills the whole level.  Once you kill it, the cloud dissipates and you can explore the basement safely.

There's no trick to it.  You just hear the thing vomiting somewhere in the darkness and you charge in there and kill it while your skin begins to melt.

Alternatively, throw molotovs at it until it comes charging up the stairs, acid nozzle all a-whirl.

HD 4  Def leather  Tackle 1d10+trip

Move dwarf  Int 5  Mor 20

Barf -- 20' cone, 1d6 acid damage.

Acid Cloud -- Constantly emits a cloud of acid.  Will eventually fill the room, and all adjacent rooms, with an acid fog that does 1 damage for every round of exposure.  Fog will not go up stairs.  If the Stomach is killed or removed, the acid cloud will dissipate within 10 minutes.

<sidebar>Acid Rules: Acid damage repeats on all subsequent rounds, dealing the same damage -1 point for every turn its elapsed.  This lasts until no more damage is possible, or until a PC is washed off with water.  This depletes the waterskin.

For example, a PC hit by 1d6 acid damage takes 1d6-1 acid damage at the end of their next turn, and 1d6-2 acid damage at the end of the turn after that.</sidebar>

The Intestines

Two horrible snake-things.  They hunt together, trying to split the party.  One tries to pull a PC up into the rafters, another tries to drag a different PC into the next room.

HD 5  Def leather  Bite 1d6+grab

Move dwarf  Int 5  Mor 20

Serpentine -- 20' reach.  Can grapple up to 3 opponents simultaneously.

The one with more HP is the large intestine, obviously.

Don't need to load this one down with mechanics.  The encounter is interesting enough, with a giant snake thing trying to pull a PC up into the ceiling.

The Pancreas

It blocks another key point in the dungeon.  It's more of an obstacle, less of a monster.  It has a powerful regenerative ability, and can scream for help, but it has no other abilities.

HD 6  Def none  Flail 1d6

Move 0  Int 5  Mor 20

Regenerate -- 10 HP per round!

Cry for Help -- Roll on the wandering monster table at the end of every turn in which the poor Pancreas takes damage.

The Gallbladder

Another obstacle monster.  It occupies a key intersection in the dungeon.  It serves as an artillery piece, raining gallstones and digestive bile down on anyone who approaches it.  The best way to get past it is to approach it from two directions, since it cannot fire down both hallways simultaneously.

HD 4  Def leather  Shoot gallstones

Move 0  Int 5  Mor 20

Shoot Gallstones -- 1d10 damage and the target must succeed on a Difficult Str check or be knocked backwards 10' and fall prone.  The Gallbladder is smart enough to ready an action to shoot whoever approaches it.

(This makes it difficult to approach the Gallbladder.  It takes two successful turns of charging at it to reach it.)

Meh.  I might cut this one.

The Eyes

HD 2  Def none  Slam 1d6

Fly dwarf  Int 10  Mor 5

Permanently Invisible -- It makes a squelching noise when it casts spells, though.

Spellcasting -- illusion and telekinesis.  As a level 3 wizard (3 magic dice).

They should probably be accompanied by a 1d3 escaped slaves.

The Mouth

HD 4  Def chain  Bite 1d6+swallow

Fly horse  Int 5  Mor 5

Teleport Trap -- Anyone swallowed by the Mouth is teleported to the room with the Gullet.

Runs around, teleporting PCs into terrible place.  Low morale, so it probably flies out a window as soon as things get hairy.  Fun.

The Gullet

Same stats as one of the Intestines.

It lives inside a locked room.  

When you kill it, dozens of bloody corpses will come slipping out, like a waterslide.

The Head

No eyes or jaw.  Huge, crumpled, wet.  Possibly atop the throne.  Is it the princess or the princess' possessed remnant?

Probably another stationary monster.  Is it the dungeon boss?  Sure, okay.

I need to think about this one for a while.  I don't need to come up with the details tonight.  I think I'll write the rest of the dungeon and then come back to this one.

Perhaps it'll be the ol' switcheroo: the princess regrets her agreement with the warlock and now only wishes to die.  Perhaps the real threat in the room is the Brain, which hides inside the skull before it comes levitating out, glowing neon blue and firing off mind flayer effects.

Tales from the Slush Pile

Odds and ends:

After your service on Spill Street, the Gutspills have decided to give you a gift.  This baboon fights as a wardog for  as long as it's mohawk is maintained.  During the night, it bites its tongue and/or lips and writes on the wall with its blood.  Roll a d6.  1 - new spell (strange version of common spell, like a fireball that does acid damage).  2 - paranormal shit.  The third time you get paranormal shit, the baboon is consumed by a HD d10 demon of Demogorgon that bursts from its form.

Just as dwarves claim that all treasures of the earth belong to them ("All gold is dwarven gold!") so do all elves claim that natural beauty belongs to them.  Elves will try to avoid going to war over things like farmland, but they will IMMEDIATELY invade your city if they decide that it has the best sunsets, or they want to build houses behind your waterfall.

Demons, as the opponents of all that is natural, speak in opposites (or backwards, but that's harder to do on the fly) and have their gravity reversed.

Since combustion and electricity do not work near demons, they are largely invulnerable to firearms (unless shot from far away).  This is why firearms are seen as people-killing weapons, whereas, if you carry a sword, you're probably a demon-hunter or something else admirable.  (This is from my Eldritch Americana setting.)

Quantum Duality

Wizard Spell Level ???

Caster splits into two identical copies and controls both of them.  At the end of next turn, one of them discorporeates (caster picks).

Lady of the Fountain. Your first sign that she is coming is a shimmering wave of glittering sandhoppers (shiny locusts) that will come crawling over the sand. Try not to squish any. Then, some of the tiny desert antelope will hop along and sniff you/lick your fingers. You are supposed to throw down any weapons you have when they do that and walk forward. If you don't fuck it up, the Lady of the Fountain will be there. She knows everything that is destined to happen and she is supremely merciful. After you ask her your question, she will answer it, as long as the answer is destined. She doesn't give answers that aren't guaranteed. But be careful! If you are destined to die a terrible death--say torture--she will do the merciful thing and sing you to death right then. It's supposed to be a real pretty lullaby. You just get sleepy and pass on as easily as falling asleep. Not a bad way to go.

The Lotus Dens are unique to the Doglands. They are actually a kind of cactus that is capable of growing into a huge mound, full of hollows and nooks. On the surface grow the lotuses, which are hallucinogenic and sopophoric. At night, they lotuses open, attracting great clouds of moths, who attract flocks of bats in turn. The bats are aggressive, and attack with their highly acidic feces.

Don't go inside of a Lotus Den, though. That's where the Lotus Wives live.  They are fierce if disturbed and will flee by sqeezing through tiny openings in the interior of the Lotus Den, where they may try to strike back by biting or scratching. Merely touching them can duplicate the effects of eating a lotus, and being scratched or bitten is the equivalent to eating a couple of lotuses. Interestingly enough, if a Lotus Wife is prevented from eating lotuses for a few days, she stops being crazy and sort of returns to normal (of course, kidnapping a Lotus Wife is supposed to draw the Lord of Jackals wrath, and is seen as a very unhealthy choice). Even more interestingly: it is considered a decent life choice for Fangolian girls--at least it is preferable to suicide. No "Lotus Husbands" or pregnant women have been found inside a Lotus Den. Presumably, the Lord of Jackals takes care of that.

The Dustwind is full of packs of zombies.  They haunt the petrified forests.  They're armless, screaming, sprinty-bitey types.  Anyone who dies in the Dustwind turns into an armless, dessicated zombie.  Their arms just fall off and crawl away.  No one knows where they go.

SECRET: All the arms go to the Zaris Malgannun, the dungeon in the center of the Dustwind.

If you put your hand into the hole, a blade will fall, severing your hand and dropping it into an alchemical bath.  A few seconds later, your hand will return to you, animate and friendly, like Thing from the Addam's Family.  It is intelligent and friendly (Int 10, Morale 10) and will guide you through the dungeon (it knows where all the traps are), but will be paralyzed with fear if it ever meets a Cleric of the Five.  It will help you fight and it is good at this.  If and when the PCs enter the Womb, the hand will transform as soon as the light hits it, turning into a Giant Monster Hand that automatically attacks.  (This is the boss of the dungeon.)  Included in the treasure hoard is a golden mechanical hand that has 18 Str, but only for tasks that only relate to that hand (holding onto a ledge, squeezing something).

The second most addictive drug in the world is odochrysm, which looks like jizz, is made from reified pain, and allows you to relive any memory you wish, or allows for perfectly lucid dreaming.  Wizards use it to do 24 hours of work every 24 hours.

The most addictive drug in the world is eruch (eh-RUKE) which is also called lulu or soup.  It is produced by the stingers of astral beetle larva (which are corporeal).  Although astral beetles don't exist in our dimension, they do they their eggs here.  Eruch "factories" contain boxes of sterilized meat packaged in vacuum containers.  Junkies duplicate this feat with a process that involves meat, upside-down bath tubs, hard liquor, and sucking on hoses.  Eventually the beetles will find the meat and lay there eggs there, and hang around (since one location is such a good source of meat), laying eggs reliably.  For this reason, you can't move a soup factory once its established.  Junkies and producers have a million superstitions about what attracts and doesn't attract the beetles (they like burning cinnamon, they hate virgins, etc).  They treat them like ghosts.

Reputable sellers will just sell little boxes of stingers, but junkies will sometimes just let the larva crawl on them and sting them.  Then they will dissolve into a euphoric puddle of flesh for an hour, and the larva will lap them up.  (This is why you always need a second person there, to pull the larva off you.  Otherwise it'll eat crucial bits of flesh, and when you re-corporeate, after your trip, you'll be missing things like the tip of your nose or part of your liver or something.)  If two or more people trip out simultaneously, they can trip out together into one big puddle.  A puddle that sighs and grunts and crawls happily on top of itself.

If allows to mix, the puddle will eventually reconstitute crazy humans that are a mixture of the original ingredients.  It mostly produces androgynes with two- or three-colored hair and really mixed up memories.  These people are often confused most of the time.  (Game mechanic: swap one random stat with someone else.  Chance of physical fucked-up-ness afterwards is also pretty high.)  These people are called jumblies, and they form their own marginalized communities.

Soup slums are sometimes dangerous, if the junkies allow the larva to reach their 4th molt, because juvenile astral beetles are ravenous and deadly.  (Not much food on the astral plane, so you gotta eat before you migrate there.)  Authorities don't like the slums because of the occasional vermillion-and-red beetles that phase through shit (like your armor), but at least such tragedies are usually confined to the slums.

The Beautiful Plague was created by the Heralds of the Immaculate Morning.  It's a divine disease.  If you catch it, you get more and more beautiful and pacifistic.  (Charisma gain, increasingly difficult saves if you want to engage in violence.)  You wander around in a calm fever, singing beautiful hymns to the True God for a few days or a week.  Eventually, you turn into a soft column of light that causes feelings of peace, contentedness, and sedation in those who gaze upon it.

I want to write a scenario for the Beautiful Plague, where the PCs have to enter a quarantined plague city.  Everyone is beautiful and babbling and radiant and dying.  There's a cure somewhere.  There's a mischief beast eating people in the chaos somewhere.  There's cultists of Nurgle there, trying to cure this blasphemy.  (They believe that people who die from the Beautiful Plague are erased, soul and all.)

Travel to the plane of Orzelle requires you to be submerged underneath 100 feet of wine.  Wizards build "wells" and bathyspheres for this purpose.

The only form of instantaneous long-range communication is going to involve demons.

If you're a wizard, you're going to need to get involved with demons eventually.  That's where all the good spells come from.

Crucifix golems always appear with some type of dominated undead, usually a ghoul or wight.  If you kill the undead, the golem will try to grab a replacement to carry around.

Ghost Biology

The following speculations are based on the assumptions that. . .

1. Evolution and biology work pretty much exactly as we know it.
2. Ghosts are real, and they can affect the world (perform work on a system).
3. Ghosts can act on the world by possession (which doesn't take any energy, since apparently it's just supplanting whatever your soul normally does) and acting on objects (which takes energy but I guess it's powered by soul power which is not infinite).
4. Ghosts are formed by things that die with unfinished work (defined by thought, defined in turn by instincts.
5. Genes can influence instincts.
6. Therefore, genes can strongly influence how likely a species is to become a ghost after death, as well as what it's instinctual behavior will be once it is.

Basically, how do you know that your pet hamster doesn't have SERIOUS BUSINESS at the time of it's death, and that SERIOUS BUSINESS is to fly around and scare hawks?

For the sake of sanity, I'm going to assume that a ghost becomes incoherent over several thousand years, and whatever ghostly consciousness remains eventually disperses like the heat from a torch.  It never disappear fully, but eventually it becomes spread thin.  Otherwise we'll reach some sort of ghost apocalypse where we have an arbitrarily large population of ghosts throwing everything around at once.

Of course, this carries an implication, too.  Just as the universe will one day suffer it's inevitable heat death, so will all space eventually be suffused with the haze of homogenous, sub-conscious ghost minds.

But that's outside the scope of this thought experiment.  This is mostly about the evolutionary impact that ghosts would have.

this kind of evolution.
wait, not this kind of evolution

Afterlife
The afterlife is probably full of babies and old people who are hideously racist, sexist, and just ignorant as all hell.  I'll say nothing further on the matter.

<brainstorming>

Ghost wolves

• Ancestral wolf-ghosts hunt alongside living wolves.  Half of the pack is ghost-wolves.
• Wolves treat ghost-wolves the same as real wolves.
• Ancestral wolf-ghosts can guide the pack to herd.
• Ancestral wolf-ghosts can assist the wolves by killing things.  (Metal as fuck.)
• Ancestral wolf-ghosts instinctual avoid become the alphas, 'cuz if they're the ones going around humping all the lady-wolves, there aren't going to be any babies.  Regardless, this probably still happens once in a while, and then the pack goes extinct.
• When the pack dies out, the ghost pack persists.
• Ghost wolf bones are powerful instruments, shamans love 'em.  How do you kill a ghost wolf and make his bones into a flute?  If ghosts can make parts of their bodies corporeal, then so can shaman spells.  
• Ghost bone armor?  Ghost wolf cloaks?  I imagine them looking a lot like their mundane counterparts.  Probably vulnerable to dispel, though.

Ectogor

• Living creature is attached to all of the ghosts of it's ancestors, which carry it around and act as tentacles.
• Like Baron Harkonnen.  Fat, hungry, and floating.
• Pretty much just a mouth, a gullet, and the appropriate gonads.  It's ancestor's ghosts are it's appendages.  Grandma is an ecto-arm, grandpa is an ecto-leg.
• Just a machine for turning food into offspring.  Probably gives birth to large, developed offspring (instead of millions of undeveloped babies, for example) because you don't want the number of living ectogors to outstrip the supply of dead ancestors.  
• But maybe not?  You could just have a bunch of little ghost-tentacles to reflect the high rate of juvenile mortality?
• How about this: after it dies, it metamorphoses into a tentacle thing.  Then the tentacle-thing continues to serve its offspring for many generations.
• What environment does it live in?  Can ghosts insulate a creature?  Protect it from the cold?  Could it capture water and hydrate it?  Could it assist in the dispersal/fusion of gametes?

Incubi and Succubi

• Incubism and Succubism are the same thing.
• Incubism and Succubism are caused by mutations in the INC7B gene.
• After death, the gene causes the manifestation of the organism's ghost with new, powerful behavioral compulsions: to spread the INC7B gene by ensuring the reproductive success of offspring and relatives (who are likely to also be carrying the INC7B gene).
• The ghost's mind is hijacked.  It no longer remembers who it was.
• The ghost manifests itself to living, male relatives and offspring as a female spirit, fucks them, and then runs away with the semen.
• Then, the ghost manifests itself to unrelated, living females as a male spirit, fucks them, and hopefully gets them pregnant.
• (Holy Shit.  This is probably the most biologically 'possible' thing on this page.  It makes sense as something that would evolve given our starting assumptions and it doesn't rely on ghosts doing a lot of work, since all it's really doing is transporting a few grams of semen around.)
• (Also, when the mindless ghost of a grandfather rapes his grandson and uses the sperm to impregnate all of the ladies around town, you know you have a beautifully fucked up incarnation of speculative ectobiology.)
• The manifestation of the INC7B phenotype is probably a very rare event, even in organisms that have the gene (recessive makes more sense).  So even in families that have the INC7B gene, you probably only have incubi/succubi every ten generations or something.
• In a way, your fucked up grandpa-ghost is working in your favor, trying to get you laid.
• Does the incubus discriminate?  Does it have a preference for depositing your sperm in younger, more fertile specimens?  Does it target wealthier daughters of merchants and aristocracy, in order to have children that are given more advantages in life?
• Basically, if you are visited by a succubus, you know that one of your relatives is the succubus, and can possibly take steps to lay the spirit to rest (probably going to involve defiling a tomb), which sounds like maybe an adventure hook.
• Of course, there are a lot of guys who wouldn't care.  They can be smelly, disgusting slobs who never leave their house and still get to have awesome ghost-sex.  Who cares if a lot of the children in town look like you?  (Possibly another adventure hook: find out why half the children in town look like that disgusting slob who never leaves his house.)

like this, except I guess it's actually your grandpa

Revenant Gazelles

• While they're alive, they're just like normal gazelles.
• If they are killed by violence, however, the ghost will animate the corpse (either immediately or a couple hours later, when it's been beheaded, skinned, and is roasting on the fire).
• The animate corpse of the gazelle will then attack its murderer with otherworldly strength.  It goes from being a prey animal to being a murder machine of the highest caliber.
• This is an effective discouragement from predation.
• Would this work in a game?  "Okay so you're roasting the gazelle over your campfire but then it comes alive, seemingly for no reason, and then tries to kill you."  Even if the laughing caravan guards explain your mistake at the next village, it still feels a little cheap.
• Might function better as a tool in the hand of PCs, rather than a gotcha.

Timeshare Humans

• What happens when a person is born without  a soul?  Presumably they still have a mind, since all the physical hardware is there.
• Fuck that line of thought.  I don't want to speculate on the nature of the mind:soul interface.

Timeshare Humans, pt 2

• Assuming that soul==mind: sometimes a person is just born without a soul.
• Basically, they're born into a coma.
• They're also easy vessels for possession.
• We have to assume that the unseen world has a harsh and violent ecology of its.  There are many unseen things, all around us, that would love to crawl into the skull of an empty human and settle down.
• When one of these things notices this unoccupied baby, it will slip inside.
• So now we have people growing up with a completely alien intelligence inside of them.
• It could be a ghost.
• It could be angel or a demon.
• It could be a machine intelligence from another dimension.
• It could be a hydrogen core metamind distributed across the stars.  It could be a constellation.
• It could be the fucking spirit of Hercules.
• Assume that there is a time limit on this, say d6+12 years, after which the meat becomes hostile to the mind and evicts it.  The body lapses into another coma, and will remain there unless another soul comes to claim it.
• These empty vessels would be worth a lot on the blackest of black markets.  Sort of like how hackers can surreptitiously gain control of thousands of people's home computers (a botnet) and then sell them off to the highest bidder.
• In this way, a human body could live a long, full life without ever really living.  It would be inhabited by extraplanar forces, demonic squatters, and disembodied intelligences from exoplanets whose cities have long since gone dark.

Zondervoze

• So the cells in your brain are like little animals.  They eat, sleep, reproduce, and recover from injury.  They can react to stimulus.  But, presumably, an individual brain cell is not home to a particular consciousness, because consciousness exists on a higher level.
• So the people in your city are like big animals.  They eat, sleep, reproduce, and recover from injury.  They can react to stimulus.  But, presumably, an individual person is not home to a distributed hyper-intelligence, because a distributed hyper-intelligence exists on a higher level.
• That's what a Zondervoze is.  Brain cell : human :: human : zondervoze.  A zondervoze is built from the minds of it's constituent people and the communications between them.
• Communication is key.  Emergent complexity.
• It's a zeitgeist.  It's the soul of a generation.  It's the heart of a city.  It's teen spirit.
• It doesn't exist as a creature outside of the humans that generate it, just as your mind doesn't exist outside of the neurons that generate it.
• If humans are the neurons, then what are it's muscles?  It's arms and legs?  Buildings?  Ships?  Firepits?  Memes?
• The boundaries could be shaky (are all of your neurons connected all of the time?) but the distributed hyper-consciousness acts like a singular intelligence.  It thinks it is a singular intelligence.  It feels like a singular intelligence.
• Big cities could have several different zondervoze within it, each grappling for power against the others.  What you see as class warfare is actually one zondervoze choking the life out of another.  What you see as a clash of cultures is actually one mimetic super-organism devouring another.
• Maybe the PCs are investing the murder of several high-profile leaders in the immigrant district.  The murders appear to have unlinked motives--jealously, unpaid debts, drunken rage--but the timing and specificity seems to be too much of a coincidence.  Their only lead, a raving madman who spoke about the "voice of voices" and "destiny of the white man" was just killed in prison when he accidentally spilled a psychopaths cup of milk.  Again, too much coincidence.
• Maybe they are in a crowded marketplace, discussing the clues.
• Maybe a pair of philosophers walk past, and the party overhears one of them say to the other, ". . . because you ask too many questions. . ."
• And then a mother stops her son from eating dirt and the party overhears ". . . so don't do that.  It makes me upset. . ."
• And then a pair of squires walk past, and the party overhears " . . .get the message?  I worried that you won't get the message. . ."
• And then a pair of blacksmiths at another table fly into a rage over some insult, and one shouts, "If you keep that up, I'll KILL YOU!  I swear on my mum's grave, I will MURDER YOU."
• And if the PCs question any of these people, they will receive only confused looks in return.
• It's enough to drive someone mad.
• It's also a good way to die under unfortunate coincidences.

• Another scene.
• The PCs just stumbled into a pack of thieves who accidentally killed a nobleman they were trying to rob.  Now that the PCs have seen them, the thieves were forced to try to kill the PCs, to ensure there were no witnesses.  It was messy battle.  The thieves were disguised as foresters, and had axes.
• One PC says, "Well, that was an unfortunate coincidence.  I expect we'll never be that unlucky again."
• The PCs are interrupted by the sound of laughter.  Two drunks stumble out of a bar, supporting each other and waving mugs of beer.  "Ahahahahaha!" shouts one.  "Are you serious?  I could do this all night!"

Ghost Mecha

• I guess if you're a mecha pilot your whole life and then you die, they might decide that you're valuable enough, and then they build you a tomb mecha, which houses your physical remains and binds your spirit to the CPU.
• Possibly a nice twist for a party that thinks that they have finally defeated their rival, some asshole pilot ace from the necro-arcologies.
• On a different line of thought, can you exploit ghosts?  Instead of spending billions developing an unstable AI, why not just dig up some Native American burial ground, raise the ghosts, and then trick the warrior spirits into piloting your new megaton tank?

Ancestral Shells

• Same thing as above, except maybe elves use them to store their ancestors.
• Like a graveyard, except the tombstones will all animate if you fuck around.
• Maybe the tombstones are logs, or scarecrows, or weapons, or wooden golems.
• Some are used for war, some are used for wisdom.
• Starcraft had something sorta like this.
• Maybe make it pseudo-egyption?  Hawk-headed clay golem with a mummy inside?  Or maybe just a bunch of canopic jars containing organs?  Maybe all golems are like this.
• Inside every iron golem is the charred skeleton of the person who was sacrificed during when the metal was poured during casting.

Ectoplasmic Biology

• Are there things that eat ghosts?
• Can vegetarians eat ghosts?
• If ghosts can form new memories, what if they joined a new religion after their death?  And how does this affect their salvation?
• What else shares the unseen world with ghosts?
• Are the things in there that were never alive to begin with?

This model is not dependent on an afterlife to make "sense".  Good.  Fewer dependencies = easier to plug into other people's games + more freedom when writing.

</brainstorming>

I should write a Book of Ghosts.