Brackles, a PC Race

Inspired by a sweet picture over at Dungeons and Drawings, those mayfly fairies I wrote up that one time, and this video about cicadas.

My goal here was to create a player race that was all about depleting a non-renewable resource and then dying.

Brackles are plant people that live in forests.  They are born in the spring and die in the winter. Because of this, they are only suitable in a campaign where the DM keeps track of the weeks and the seasons.

They have angular faces with no visible eyes.  Their mouth resembles a beak.  While most of their body has the same proportions as a thin, wiry human, their heads are frightening clusters of thorns.  Despite their freakish heads, they are gentle creatures.  They sleep in trees, especially willows.  They call to each other by vibrating their heads.  It sounds a bit like a cicada.

They are hermaphroditic.  Brackles are born with approximated memories from their ancestors, so they remember basic history, geography, and language.  They even remember some of their parent's close companions and enemies.  (Woe to the man who angers a brackle--he may have a dozen more seeking revenge next year.)  They are fond of forests but tend to hate elves, who they see as impatient, inflexible, and terrified of change.  (They hate ents even more.)  Brackles are about moving, living, acting, doing, and dying.  They have healthy appetites, and get really excited at the prospect of drinking fresh water.

Despite (or because of) their short life span, brackles tend to be very focused on the future.  Most of them are concerned with only the future viability of their offspring, but some of them travel widely and take up other causes.

Each brackle is born anew.  (And PC brackles always start at level 1.)  They usually imitate their parents, so if a wizard brackle will spawn more brackles that will probably want to be wizards themselves.  But they're flexible, and will practice whatever craft pleases them.  Some of them live in cities, briefly, but only until the fall when a powerful instinct drives them to travel widely to plant their seeds.  (This is also when they grow wings.)

Nearly all of them write poetry.  A lot of it is quite good.  (Not poetry like sonnets, but poetry like haikus.)

In this world

we walk on the roof of hell, 

gazing at flowers. 

Centuries of past incarnations are remembered in brackle brains, like half-remembered dreams.  When two brackle meet, they often discuss their memories to see if they share some ancient ancestor.  But they exchange pollen first, of course.

Brackles don't have cities, but they do maintain a few holy sites for their old pagan religion.  They cluster around these monoliths at the start of winter and then all die together, forming a miniature forest of dead brackles.

Not all of them are pagans, and missionaries have brought many of them to the Church.  Quite a few brackles will approach a Church at the start of winter, in order to donate their worldly possesions and die politely in the graveyard.

STATS

Each brackle is born with 3d6 razor-sharp needles from their heads, which they can shoot as accurately as arrows.  The thorns deal 1d8 damage on a hit (except for Winter, see below).  Once fired, these needles can never regrow.  But on the upside, they never count as inventory items.

Brackles also get +1 Con and -1 Cha.

They have different racial abilities based on what time of the year it is.

In the Spring, brackles still have their baby scream, much like a mandrake.  They usually busy themselves learning as much about the world as they can.  Although they might speak perfect Common and have a head of their parent's memories, they might have forgotten what a cow is called, or that fish exist (followed soon after by the happy discovery that fried fish are delicious!)

• Small size (as halfling, 3'-4' tall)
• Shoot Thorns (1d8 damage)
• Scream 2/day: All creatures in 30' take 1d6 damage.  Brackles are immune to this. Save for half.

In the Summer, brackles develop a wide range of horrible pollens.  They also develop brilliant plumage from their heads and shoulders.  This is also when they seek out other brackles for pollination.  Brackles compulsively pollinate each other when they meet.

• Medium size (as human, ~5'-6' tall)
• Shoot Thorns (1d8 damage)
• Pollens 1/day each.  10' Cone.
• Sleep: Targets save or fall asleep for 1d4 minutes, as the sleep spell.
• Paralyze: Targets save or are paralyzed for 1d4 rounds.
• Poison: Targets save or lose 1 hp per round for 2d4 rounds.
• Fertilize: Useful for when you bump into another brackle.

In the Fall, brackles travel far and wide in order to plant their seeds in good locations.  They are very instinctual creatures.  They develop wings in this phase, and most of them are elated by the ability to fly.

• Medium size (as human, ~7' tall)
• Shoot Thorns (1d8 damage)
• Can fly at double normal speed.  Can only take off by running down a 100' hill, jumping off a 50' cliff, or leaping into a stiff headwind.  (By default, assume that the average day has a 50% chance of having a stiff headwind.)  They are clumsy in the air, though, and require large amounts of open air to make turns.
• Develop 3d6 seeds over the course of the fall.  A brackle that doesn't plant all of these seeds by winter will go irrevocably insane.  Planting locations must be widely spaced, in fertile ground, and safe from predation.

In the Winter, many brackle have nothing else to live for, and so they lie down and die.  Brackles that are adventurers sometimes stick around to help their friends or a particular cause.  They are so close to death.  They feel like they are dead.  These brackle can be very selfless, and will not hesitate a second to sacrifice themselves for the greater good.

• Medium size (as human, ~7' tall)
• Shoot Thorns (1d4 damage + deadly poison.)
• Lose 3 points of Str, Dex, and Con.
• Automatically fail any saving vs death.
• Ignored by non-intelligent undead, intelligent undead feel a vague kinship with them.
• Can get +10 on a single action, but will then die immediately afterwards.

Stragimen, Which Fails to be a One-Page RPG

I've seen enough 1-page RPG systems that I thought they were elegant, and so I wanted to write one, too.  I don't think I succeeded--It's like 4 pages long, but I also filled it with examples so maybe that's the problem.

Anyway, this is just a horrible hodge-podge of like, 5 different systems with only a couple of new ideas mixed in.  But whatever.  I rolled some characters this morning and I had fun doing it.

I expect most people reading this will find it fantastically boring.

Character Generation

Each player plays 1 character, and each character has 3 stats.  Strength (Str), Agility (Agi), and Mental Acuity (Men).  After character creation, each stat will range from 2 to 7.

This is how we generate a stat: Roll 3d6, discard the highest and the lowest result, and add 1 to the remaining die.  Results of 4 and 5 are the most common.  So if I rolled 2, 1, and 4, I would write down a 3 (since that is 2+1).  Example Character:

Str 3
Agi 5
Men 3

There is a 4th stat, but not every character has it.  That stat is Magic (Mag).  If the total of a character's ability scores is less than 13, the difference becomes their Magic score.  (So Magic = 13 - sum of stats).  So, to our example we would add:

Mag 2

Once Magic is accounted for, the sum of all stats is never less than 13.  Magic Points can be spent to cast spells, if you are a wizard.  But even if you aren't a wizard, you can still spend a Magic Point to get an extra die on a roll.  Your Magic Points regenerate every night.  More on this later.

Your Inventory Slots = (Str/2)+3
This is the number of Useful Tools you can carry.  Little items that don't count as Useful Tools don't take up Inventory Slots.  More on this later.

Your Hit Points = (Agi/2)+3
These are "don't-get-hit-points", not meat points.

The number of starting Backgrounds = (Men/2)+1
These are professions, trade skills, and areas of specialized knowledge.  Pick these when you create your character.  More on this later.

Always round down.  So now our example character has this as well.

HP 5
Inventory Slots (4)
 (empty)
 (empty)
 (empty)
 (empty)
Backgrounds
 Knowledge of Poison
 Assassin

This is Another Roll Under System, Isn't It?

This is the central mechanic: Test a stat by rolling 1d10 and trying to get a result equal-to-or-less than the stat.  Treat each stat as a saving throw.  Test the most appropriate stat: Strength to resist poison, Agi to dodge a lightning bolt, and Men to resist mind control.  So you can see that our example character has a 50% chance to dodge a lightning bolt, but only a 30% chance to resist mind control.  Etc.

But that's just for passive things (like Saves, in D&D).  For active things, like attack rolls and skill checks, you do the exact same thing, EXCEPT you can recruit additional dice.  If any of these dice succeed, the action succeeds.  Here is how you recruit bonus d10s.

The first die is a freebie.
+1 die if you have an appropriate Useful Background.
+1 die if you have an appropriate Useful Tool.
+1 die if you spent a Magic Point.
+1 die if an you are Helped by an Ally or Circumstance.  (Allies must have a Proper Background or a Proper Tool to help, most of the time.)

So you see it's pretty easy to roll a handful of dice.  You can never roll more than 5 dice at a time.  Each die that rolls equal-to-or-under the stat counts as a success, and more successes will give you a better result.  Here are the degrees of success:

1 Success = You accomplish what you were trying to do, but there is a drawback.
2 Successes = Normal, boring success.
3+ Successes = Critical success!  You accomplish what you were trying to do and more!

In combat, don't worry about degrees of success.  Each success = 1 HP of damage to the target, with no further effect.

So, say our example Assassin wanted to kill an unsuspecting victim stumbling out of the privy.  If the assassin has a Useful Tool (a shiv) she gets +1d10 to the roll.  If the assassin has a Useful Background (Assassin), she gets another +1d10.  If she wants to channel some latent, untrained magic (spend a Mana Point), that's another +1d10.  If the target is stinking drunk (Circumstance) and/or if another Assassin helps distract the poor drunkard (Ally with Useful Tool or Background), that's another +1d10.  That's a total of 5d10 to roll!  This is an Agility roll, so our assassin needs to roll 5 or less on a die for it to count as a success (because that's what her Agi equals).  She could potentially get 5 successes!  But her average is 2.5 successes.

If this were combat, each success would equal 1 point of damage.  But if the DM wants to treat this as a skill test instead of a combat, our assassin will need to get 3 successes for this assassination to go off without a hitch.

Knowledge skills work similarly.  Each success gives you 1 piece of well-documented knowledge about a subject.  Two successes can be converted into a hard-to-find piece of knowledge, and three successes yields a bit of forgotten lore.  Libraries are almost always a Useful Tool when it comes to reseaching stuff.

HP is recovered by eating a hearty lunch or a good night's rest (each no more than 1/day).  If a character gets dropped to 0 HP, they start making Str saves.  They die after they've failed 3 of these "death saves" in one day.  Armor adds to HP, but takes up Inventory Slots.

Summary

Saves: Test stat using 1d10.
Skills: Test stat using dice pool and degrees of success.
Attacks: Test stat using dice pool and each success equals 1 damage.
Research: Test stat using dice pool and each success equals 1 scrap of information.

Leveling Up

XP should be awarded liberally.  Give everyone XP whenever they complete a challenging encounter, discover something awesome, or get paid for finishing a quest.  Give a specific player XP whenever they do something awesome, badass, or clever.  Players start at level 0, and every 10xp they level up.  The maximum is level 10 at 100xp.  A session should yield 3-6 XP per player.

• Every level you get an Advancement from the table.  (See below.)
• At level 3, you can choose to forgo the Advancement and raise a stat by 1 point instead.  You cannot raise a stat higher than 6.
• At level 6, you can choose to forgo the Advancement and raise a stat by 1 point instead.  You cannot raise a stat higher than 7.
• At level 9, you can choose to forgo the Advancement and raise a stat by 1 point instead.  You cannot raise a stat higher than 8.

You can take Advancements multiple times, but you cannot take any Advancement more than 3 times.

Advancements

Skilled: Gain a new Background.
Traveler: +1 Inventory Slot.
Combat Reflexes: +1 HP
Lucky: 1/day, reroll 1 die.
Strategist: Deal +1 damage when attacking with a bonus die from Circumstance.
Tenacious: 1/day, the first time you would be dropped to 0 HP, instead ignore up to 3 damage of it.
Brilliant: Pick an Knowledge Background that you have.  You get an additional success whenever you test it.
Spell: Learn a spell.  Unlike other Advancements, you can learn as many spells as you want.

Spells

You can cast a spell you know by expending 1 MP.  You cannot learn a spell unless you have a scroll for it.  Spells are nested in trees.  You cannot learn Fire 2 unless you already learn Fire 1.

Fire 1
Something in 50' catches on fire.

Fire 2
Something up to 50' away takes 4 damage.  If they make a Agi test, the damage is halved.

Fire 3
Everything in a 20' diameter up to 50' away takes 2 damage.  If they make an Agi test, the damage is halved.

Force 1
You have telekinesis up to 50' away.  You are limited to things that you could do with one hand wearing a mitten.  Unwilling creatures get an Men test to resist.  If you take damage while levitating something, it will drop.  You cannot pick up anything heavier than a mid-size dog.

Force 2
A target up to 50' away takes 3 damage.

Force 3
You have telekinesis up to 50' away.  You are limited to things that you could do with one hand wearing a mitten.  Unwilling targets get a Men test to resist.   If you take damage while levitating something, it will drop.  You cannot pick up anything heavier than a paladin in full plate carrying a backpack full of gear.  You can use this to slowly float yourself.

Telepathy 1
You send a message to a person you've met before, and they may respond in kind.  Message length is limited by whatever the player can say in one breath.  Limit 100'.

Telepathy 2
You can read a creature's surface thoughts.  If they succeed on a Men test, they are aware of your intrusion.

Telepathy 3
You can see what is behind a wall or door.  Doesn't let you see in the dark.

Healing 1
You can heal a touched creature for 3 HP, or damage an undead creature for 3 HP.

Light 1
You cause light to spring into existence, as bright as a torch.  It floats wherever you direct it, and lasts for 2 hours.

Light 2
All undead within 20' must make a Men test or spend the next 1d6 rounds fleeing.

Inventory

Inventory slots can hold Useful Tools (weapons for combat, crowbars for breaking open doors, books for researching, etc), but they can also hold other stuff.  Armor gives you +1 HP for every slot it occupies, and you can have up to 3 slots filled with armor.  You can also have magic items (potions, wands).  I urge DMs to supply players liberally with single-use magic items.  Permanent artifacts should be rare, or non-existent.  Items can also be treasure items that need to be hauled back to town and sold for gold.  Gold coins are massless and weightless and 100% convenient.  Don't worry about how many slots they take up.

Items that don't fit any of those categories (Useful Tool, Armor, Magic Item, Treasure) is considered trivial and you can carry it without it occupying an Inventory Slot.  Within reason, of course.

Converting Stragimen to Sci Fi

Confession time: I actually dreamed this up while trying to think of a super-simple system for an eventual Axis Mundi game.  (I've sort of abandoned that idea--I think I'd just use a severely mutated B/X hack nowadays.)  But if you want to convert this into a sci-fi system, make the following changes.

1. Replace 'magic' with 'psi'.  Replace 'spell' with 'manifestation'.  Or don't.  Whatever.

2. No XP.  No levels.  Instead, Advancements are items and mutations that are earned/found/stolen in the course of your journey.  Knowledge backgrounds come from reclaimed memories, additional HP comes from muscle grafts and redundant heart implants.

Disgusting Peasant Foods

Offa
Stinking brown jelly grown on wet rocks, poisonous until fermented, and fermented in pits.  Served in shallow bowls and traditionally eaten with clamshells.  Nevertheless a point of cultural pride in Koth.

Gosca
Watery gruel made from insect larvae (especially mosquito), harvested from bog-farms.  Bog-farmers are widely considered the most wretched caste of farmers.

Jo Bread
Bitter, acidic, and hard as a rock.  Manufactured in black discs that look more like construction materials than food.  Absolutely inedible unless soaked in water for a few minutes.  Families use specialized tea pots to simultaneously boil their tea and soak their jo bread, which is then eaten after the tea is completely drank.  Rich people still use jo bread to add bitterness to sweet teas, but the jo bread is then discarded into the garden.  Popular west of the Elterspine Mtns, especially among halflings.

Horlick
A soup made from boiling the hair of a garguark, which is sort of like a woolly horse that lays eggs.  If made properly, the hair crumbles away and doesn't feel like hair in your mouth.  Tastes like cigarettes and wet cats.

Yeggis
This is horlick with a garguark egg added in.  Actually not that bad.  Traditionally served in a leather pouch.  If you want to flirt with a Fangolian in a tavern, you don't buy them a drink, you buy them a pouch of yeggis.

Scumbo
A broadly defined category of stews served in the Frogwash Swamp.  Could be anything from crocodile to swamp chicken (large frogs) soaked in rum (in order to kill parasites) and then stewed with fruit and/or gilly moss.  Traditionally served with a black stone in the stew, which is then set aside and reused for future stews (believed to prevent disease).

Rat on a Stick
A favorite among dwarves.  The cultural equivalent of a New York hot dog.  Many different varieties available, shaved and slathered in sauce.  For a higher fee you can even buy rats that have been cooked into exciting poses.

Fermented Rat Milk
Also favored by dwarves.  Typically drank in thimble-sized shot glasses (but can be ordered by the dozen) or tall vessels that look like test tubes with a rounded-square cross-section.  Dwarves call it gorbly.

Bagman Soup
Impoverished elves (and bards and noise wizards) can sustain themselves in a forest of jungle by learning a spell called song of the bagman.  It makes birds (who fail their saves) to fly into a boiling soup pot, and it only takes a couple of hours of singing to get a cauldron full of boiled songbirds.  Mind the splashes.  (The songful bagman is a monster from the Book of Mice).

Boiled Barnacles
(Un)popular all over the Sea of Fish.  Restaurants will serve them with a chisel, mallet, and disemboweling fork, but hungry sailors just eat them with knives, rum, and cussing.

Bogglehead
Made from sharks that have died of a particular kind of skin disease (specifically a yeast).  You'd think this would be rare, but you'd be wrong.  Every half decade or so, millions of yeasty sharks will beach themselves along the eastern seaboard of Centerra's Great Continent and die.  Peasants are quick to grab all of these fermenting sharks.  If buried, bogglehead will stay edible for years to come.  It's not uncommon for a family to have a stash of sharks buried in the backyard, saved for a rainy day.  The name 'bogglehead' comes from the stupid expression that all of the sharks get on their face after they die of their yeast infection.

Spell of Prodigious Probiotic Fecundity
Sometimes wizards try to refer to this spell as satiety or nourish person but all it really does is makes someone's intestinal bacteria multiply prodigiously.  This vast crop of intestinal bacteria then nourish the person as they naturally die and are absorbed by the intestines.  Causes bloating, gas, heartburn, and small amounts of retrograde digestion.

Zaratan Hatchlings
The few remaining zaratan (island-sized sea turtles) return to the island of Worthless Zyro every 3 years to lay their eggs.  Their eggs are no larger than a normal sea turtle's, but they do lay vast numbers of them.  These eggs are promptly dug up by the people of Worthless Zyro and sold for pittances at the Happy Turtle Festival.  Eggs are stored in cool basements, and 2 months later, when the eggs hatch, the Joyous Turtle Festival occurs, when all the baby turtles are fried and sold for a penny apiece.

Blevyek
Fangolians have bred Blevyek goats for generations, in order to bring out certain traits.  These are small, hardy goats that violently vomit out their stomach contents if punched sufficiently hard the kidney.  After being fed grass all morning, the goat's vomit is gathered in clay pots, and allowed to sit for 24 hours.  (This allows the goat's stomach enzymes to break down the normally undigestable cellulose in grass.)  The the grassy vomitus is made into a thick porridge.  The goats get their name from the noise they make when vomiting.

---------------------

And just google 'worst food' or 'disgusting food' and you'll get a million other interesting things.  It is worth noting, however, that the most disgusting foods are usually the most expensive (and therefore do not fall under the category of Disgusting Peasant Food).

How to be Creative, also Blobbins

Or at least, this is how I think I think creatively.  Your mileage may vary.

1

Keep a slush pile. This is where you put all of your incomplete ideas, or ideas that don't quite meet your criteria for quality control. Odds are good that you have tons of ideas that are aaaaalmost good enough. Sometimes you can frankenstein two sorta-good ideas into a brilliant mongrel. Sometimes you can read over an old idea and think of a way to improve it.

And don't just ignore your slush pile until you've run 100% dry of ideas.  Refer back to it often, maybe before you start thinking of anything at all.

Your slush pile can be a file on a computer or a small notebook. Maybe you're watching a movie and the people on screen realize that the stillborn calf is pregnant with something that is not a cow and you're like, “That's a fucked up idea and I like it”, then that goes into your notebook. It is the fertile, messy mulch beneath the shrubbery of your brain.

Ex: “blue goblins” + “boneless and they live in jars” = “boneless blue goblins that live in urns”

2

Use your ideas. If you use your blue, boneless goblins in a module, I guarantee you'll have some more ideas about the goblins while you are roleplaying one, or after a player asks you what's in the goblin's pockets.

Basically, you are just asking yourself "What are the implications of what I have just written?  What does this stuff imply?"

This works for writing, too. Expanding a small idea into a paragraph will usually involve answering some more questions that crop up. How do these boneless urn-goblins feel about their urns? How do they feel about skeletons, especially given that they don't have any? If you can't turn a boneless goblin into a skeletonized undead, is there a different kind of undead that you can turn them into?

Of course, if you ever find yourself writing boring facts (the average blue goblin burrow contains 20-400 individuals, who are ruled by a chieftain of level 3, blah blah blah) then you must STOP IMMEDIATELY. That sort of square noise takes 3 seconds to invent at the table, and 3 seconds to invent at the computer.  There is no need to predecide how big the average blue goblin burrow is when you can decide it during a session just as readily.

3

Don't let "creativity" just be something that you do when you sit down to fill out the rest of your 50-room dungeon. 

Constantly revisit your old ideas when you are taking a shower, taking a shit, taking a break at work, trying avoid premature ejaculation, etc. These events will give your brain a richer and more varied texture, which will inform your ideas. Like, when you're taking a shit, your brain will wrinkle up more because it smells bad. This will make you approach the whole boneless blue goblin conundrum from a different angle than if, say, you were frolicking with some baby deer and thinking about boneless blue goblins.  

Plus, if you're sculpting an idea while you are driving, walking, jogging somewhere, you'll be constantly receiving a procession of images and places. I was driving down Highway 5 and drove past Harris Ranch (like, billions of cows) and the smell alone gave me ideas.  Or maybe the methane was just getting to my brain.

When you see an interesting post on the internet, you must ask yourself "yes, but is it gamable?"  When you are chillaxing with your bros, and one of your bros tells a cool story you must also ask yourself "yes, but is it gamable?"  When your crazy uncle sends you an email about how contrails are turning all the Mexicans into lizards, you must ask yourself "yes, but is it gamable?"

4

Steal shamelessly. That awesome thing in Princess Mononoke? Steal it. Repaint it. It's yours now.

BUT also pay attention to why you like the thing in the first place, because that's the element you want to steal, not necessarily the whole enchilada. Like, when the severed wolf's head bites the giant boar, why is that so cool? Is it because it's a head? Is it because its a wolf? Is it because it was a dead body part that just attacked someone? Figure out which part of the DNA contains the awesome, and then just steal that part. It'll make it easier to recombine with the rest of your slush pile.

(Although I have bunches of inspiring pictures on my computer, I don't consider them part of my slush pile.  I try to extract the part of the picture's DNA that I really like, and add that to the slush pile.  And also, I find a bunch of brief word-concepts easier to parse than a folder with a thousand images in it.  "one eyeball shared between both sockets", "strength proportionate to colorfulness", "hot chick with huge, grafted muscle-arms", etc.)

Like, a lot of the city encounters in Vornheim are powerful good because they force players to deal with something. You could just take the kernel (the "how is this forcing a PC to deal with it?") at the center of a Vornheim entry and flesh it out yourself.  “persistent entertainers demand PCs join their cause” becomes "snake charmer guild demands that PCs assist in reclaiming/repairing the giant snake sanctuary in Central Park".

5

Stealing names can be fun. Figure out what part of the name you like the most. Is it the vowels/assonance? The consonants/alliteration? Can you transform the consonants into something similar? K=G. T=D. S=Z. P=B=V. L=R. M=N. J=CH. 'crocodile' = 'grogotyr' = 'gorgodile'. 'jerusalem' = 'cheluzaren'.

6

Turn normal animals into unlikely chimeras. This is how you shed tropes.

My favorite way to make a chimera by giving one animal the biology or lifestyle of another. Like what if there were some wolves that were 100% marine and never left the water? What would a giant land-dwelling starfish eat? What if there were people that lived like ants?

The laziest kind of chimera is just to remix body shapes. Sure, if you combine a bird with a horse you get a pegasus, and that was the pinnacle of creativity 1000 years ago. If you mix an octopus and a dog you get an octodog, and I suppose that's sort of creative, too. The laziest of this lazy method is just to make it an intelligent humanoid. Jellfish people. Kangaroo-folk. Giraffo-morphs.  Even that can sort of open up interesting avenues of thought.

(There's nothing wrong with lazy creativity like this, but if you are going to invent some kangaroo-folk, don't just stop there.  You can't smash kangaroo and Australian stereotypes together and expect to transport your players to a fantastic realm of fantasy.  If you include only the things that come easily to mind when you cross kangaroos and Australians, then your kangaroo-folk have no more surprises for your players, beyond the initial concept of kangaroo-people.  Which means you need to add more.  This is why cat-people almost always suck.  People just apply cat stereotypes (playful, curious, fierce, hunters) to a race of humanoids and call it a day.  So if you want to make cat-people that aren't boring, you need to add something else to the mix.  Columbian catnip druglords.  Ruled by black cat bad-luck warlocks and a storm giant witch.  Ecology of cuckoos.  Worshippers of Nyarlathotep but also of themselves.  Masters of engineering and fire magic.  Literally, anything but just cat tropes.  Please.)

7

Inversions are fun. You can invert tropes. Write an adventure about saving a dragon from a princess. Write about a type of fey that gives people babies instead of stealing them. Write about dwarves that hate gold. At the very least, these will get you asking questions. What's up with these dwarves? How'd they get this way?

Or just ask yourself open ended questions. What's the opposite of a dragon? What's the opposite of a bar mitzvah?  What's the opposite of sex?

Exaggerations are fun. Write about a dragon that was just way, way, way into stealing princesses, not even imprisoning them—just stealing them like princess catch-and-release. Write about fey that are so into-baby stealing that they steal bee larva and only eat baby fruits. Write about dwarves that are so rigid and uncreative that they need a king from a different race.

Reskins are fun. Reskin Lincoln assassination or the plot of Master of the Flying Guillotine. The ninja turtles are now barbarian berserkers who want you to help them fight a ninja and his demon rat. Remix and rearrange.  Your slush pile can help you with this.

Change scope. Tsunamis make sense, but why would a small pond suddenly smash the canoes and flood the town? (Big phenomenon → small.) People get pregnant all the time, but why would every woman in town suddenly get pregnant at exactly the same time? (Local phenomenon → regional.)

8

When you're writing stuff down, keep it fluid for as long as you can. Sometimes you'll write a story and you don't know what it's about until you finish it. Sometimes you'll write a dungeon and not realize what the treasure is at the center until you finish it—the it's obvious.  Write all the interesting things down first, and then fill in all the logical considerations later.

(If you write down so much cool stuff that there's no way to mesh it all together into a coherent adventure/dungeon, that's okay.  Just remove a few conflicting parts and put them back into your slush pile.  You'll use them later, and they'll be just as awesome then, too.)

Before you draw a single room in your dungeon, figure out what the theme is and then write down all of the Coolest Things Possible involving that theme. Like if your theme is “cloud castle that imprisons powerful dwarven geomancers”, sit down and brainstorm the coolest possible rooms in that dungeon. A room where terramantic criminals are forced to levitate in the center of their cells, while their jailors drag them around like balloons. Air elemental guards living inside a giant bagpipe that also doubles as the alarm system. Gaseous, floating rust monsters trained to sniff out metals and stones, because terramantic dwarven criminals can pull a Magneto. Dragnets used to harvest water out of clouds, like a trawler.

By the time you finish your idea list, you might also realize that there is also a flumph masterminding the whole thing. Or that this is actually a jail for fire elementalist elves as well, because you've been watching to much Last Airbender.  And because you've kept your outline as fluid as possible, you don't have to redraw your map or rewrite the motivations for the warden.  (Full-detail maps and necessary-but-mundane NPCs are good examples of things that you should do late in the process.)

THEN you draw out your dungeon. THEN you flesh out all the extra rooms so that the things is complete.

9

Creativity is a muscle.  There's only so much you can do in a day.  If you are frustrated, or you absolutely can't come up with anything, or you've already read through your slush pile twice and can't come up with anything--STEP AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER and go do something else.  You can't force it.

Also, there are going to be days when your brain is going to be dry.  That's okay; don't sweat it.  Spend the time organizing your slush pile or go read some interesting stuff elsewhere.

JOESKY TAX: BLOBBINS

Blobbins are blue, boneless goblins. Each goblin lives in an urn, each exactly the size of the blobbin. They make their urns out of clay and fingernails. Parents make their baby's first urn, and then they trade up as they grow, like hermit crabs. Urns are never re-used, but are instead filled with fingernail clippings and lost teeth and then used in construction. They do this because a blobbin considers their urn to be part of their body, and crawling inside another blobbin's urn is akin to crawling inside their skin. When a blobbin dies, the body is discarded like trash (fed to cave pigs) while the urn is revered.

Blobbin graveyards are just caves filled with urns. For reasons not understood, nearly every blobbin goes on to become a pale blue ghost that resides inside their urn. Blobbin urns are sometimes filled with some amount of treasure that they valued in life, but blobbins make for vengeful ghosts. The trick to robbing blobbin urn-graves is to get the blobbin to blame someone else. The traditional method is to throw a weasel into the urn, and then replace any gold coins with an equal number of copper ones. By the time the blobbin ghost has finished shriveling the weasel, the tomb robbers are gone and the blobbin ghost is none the wiser, since they cannot tell copper from gold (at least, their ghosts cannot).

Blobbin urns also make handy weapons if thrown, since they tend to blame the nearest creature, and blobbin ghosts are furious if their urn is smashed.

When they run, it looks like a deflated tire rolling down a hill.

Blobbins revere a god called the Great Blue Smoke Monster. Blobbin clerics are easy to spot. They carry a gigantic urn on their back, painting with blue and black triangles. Inside each of these urns is a Blue Smoke Monster which obeys the cleric and is regarded as a divine manifestation of the true Great Blue Smoke Monster.

Blobbins fear skeletons. Even smiling at them will cause them to recoil in disgust from visible teeth, and even the bravest blobbins warriors will flee from an animated skeleton.

Although blobbins cannot be made into undead skeletons, they are sometime animated into highly malleable zombies. Able to squish under doors and hide themselves under saddles, blobbin zombies are feared as assassins. They prefer to strangle their prey. Necromancers are also sometimes fond of stuffing them into chests, in order to guard treasure. Additionally, Blobbin zombies can also cushion fragile materials in a chest, protecting it from bumps and bangs.

Blobbins are hunted for the rich blue dye that can be harvested from their gallbladders. It is a deep, rich blue, and is very popular. However, the price ensures that only the aristocracy will be able to afford silk dyed Blobbin Blue.

Unlike their green-skinned relatives, blobbins are very clean. They frequently wear armor made from cave tortoises or giant snails. By using their elasticity of their heads, they are able to throw spears with great accuracy and power. They favorite weapon is a short-hafted trident (very effective against the squishy bodies of fellow blobbins). 

 Their favorite forms of recreation are spear-chucking, moshing, and naknak (sort of like spoken word poetry but with lots of sound effects). They are sometimes accompanied by clay golems shaped to look like small rhinos, painted blue with white triangles. Blobbins are sometimes valued as mercenaries because of their usefulness in breaking sieges (they can survive being launched by catapult).

Stats as goblins, except that they don't take any damage from bludgeoning. Also, they value their urn as highly as their life, and so they are quite easy to blackmail/bully once a PC has their urn.

TAKE A BATH YOU DAMN DIRTY MURDER HOBO

UPDATE: FANCY MAPS EDITION

JUST CLICK THE THING BELOW

This is my entry into +Joey Lindsey's contest over at metalvsskin.blogspot.com, whereby normally decent people smash our forebrains into each other until one of us is decided to be the most good brain, this time.

I wrote it because I ran it, but I forgot that the difference between "good enough to run a session" and "good enough to show people on the internet" is about 6 hours of work.

And also I really want that Doom Cave module from Free RPG Day.  It'd look so cute next to my Better Than Any Man, I just know it.  I guess I'm curious about what's inside it, but cuteness is a factor, too.

Anyway.

BEHOLD MY BATH HOUSE

The top half is sort of boring unless you're interested in bath houses, but hopefully the PCs will be bopping around and scheming about how to kill a naked, soapy wizard, so maybe that's okay.

The stuff in the basement is more like the dungeons you know and love.  There's a few high HD enemies down here, but I figure lower level parties can just run away and higher HD parties will have an option to kill them.