Wtf are those goblins doing?

So you've just rolled on your random dungeon chart and the result comes up: 2d6 goblins.  2d6 goblins.  Again?  I hope the party doesn't get bored of goblins. . .

Wrong attitude, Mr. DM!  Humanoids are awesome because they can do anything that the party can do.  They're people!  Little green, incompetent people that you can kill and loot and not feel bad about because they aren't really people!  You are so lucky to roll 2d6 goblins!  Here's why:

The Electromancer, his Foe, and the Worm

The year is 1929, and Edison and Tesla have survived both the Apocalypse and the War of the Currents.  They're both old men now.  Edison has locked himself in his labs with his electric elephant in order to protect himself from the electric ghosts outside, and Tesla talks to pigeons and absentmindedly instructs his devotees in the finer points of Electromancy.

Everything in the Pre-Apocalypse section actually happened, although I've messed with the chronology and details a bit.  (Flames didn't really shoot of Kemmler's skull, but he did start smoking.)

Eldritch Americana

I have an idea for a new setting.

America is old enough and varied enough to be a campaign setting on its own.  The plots and the locations already exist, and many of them are flat-out awesome.  America already has civic undergrounds and witch crypts and Mammoth Cave and Sing Sing prison and Edison vs Tesla and presidents with shotguns.

Everyone else has a pet campaign setting; I want one, too.  It will be eldritch Americana.  Not modern fantasy or noir with wizards or dieselpunk or whatever.  It will be a roiling celebration of all that is American, with all the feverish exuberance of the 1920s, already 30 years after the apocalypse.  Gangsters and shoggoths.  Speakeasies and hagfish-men.

Gimme Diminishing Returrns

I want to play a game of DnD where a bunch of level 1 character can fight alongside a level 5 character and still contribute.  I don't want PCs to start out being badasses, so I guess it'll have to be a low-level, gritty system.

There's some precedent for this.  Even in 0e, saving throws eventually slowed their rate of improvement, and +1d6 HP per level eventually becomes +2 hp per level, which I suppose is slightly less.  But by then, the PCs have already killed kings and tea-bagged tyrannosaurs.  I want a small, powerful little system that plateaus early.

For this to work, HP, skills, and attack bonuses cannot advance linearly.  I need a way for skills to be reined in heavily beyond third (?) level, but still easy to obtain at level 1 and 2 (because players like their level  1 thief to be mechanically differentiated than the other level 1 thief in the party).

I can think of two ways to do this.

Non-Euclidean Architecture, Part 2

This is a sequel to my first essay on non-Euclidean architecture. If you haven’t read that one first, you should.

Non-euclidean spaces just mean that parallel lines don’t stay the same distance apart. They either bend together or splay apart. Four right angles don’t always make a square.

A lot of the ideas below are not technically non-Euclidean, but they’re close enough. They all play around with illogical spaces and angles in a way to make an environment illogical.