Quit-rents (Bookhounds of London)
The British Crown has what appears to be a quaint custom of accepting ‘quit rents,’ or nominal rents for various properties. And by ‘nominal’ we mean ‘symbolic:’ there’s one territory in Shropshire (exact location unknown) whose yearly rent is a dull billhook and a sharp axe. It’s all very traditional and whimsical and has no real bearing on the world, of course…
Continue reading Item Seed: Quit-rents (Bookhounds of London)
…Ick. And I wrote it.
Wirestrictors
Generally speaking, necromancers prefer to bind dead human souls into items, instead of animals; mostly because it’s easier to suppress a human soul’s innate intelligence and ability to understand language than it is to boost an animal’s. In fact, it’s largely impossible to do that with animal souls at all. What you rip out of the body is what you get, and if what you got was something not capable of doing anything elaborate, you had better stick with simple.
Wirestrictors are pretty simple. Take one constrictor snake, rip out the soul, then shove it into a long, strong metal wire (showing no care in either the ripping or shoving: you want the snake soul upset). Then set a secondary spell that will render the snake soul ‘unconscious’ until a pre-chosen triggering mechanism is activated. Coat the wire in something that will hide the discoloration and reek of wrongness. Attach the ends to a brooch or gem or whatnot (not too strongly).
Blame this.
Spirit Infusion
Creating a Spirit Infusion is relatively easy, or at least not very involved: collect rainwater in a clean gallon container. Wait for a ghost to drown in it. They will, if you wait long enough, and maybe entice them with ghost-attracting smells or sounds (specific ghost attractions vary by culture and campaign). You’ll know when you have a ghost drowned in your water when you look at your container using an Icelandic sunstone and see the distinctive greenish-purple glow.
Continue reading Item Seed: Spirit Infusion.
The New Zombie Cookbook: Simple Recipes For Busy Lives
Physical description: The New Zombie Cookbook is a 300 page book, profusely illustrated – very profusely illustrated – that offers a few chapters on ingredients (zombies), utensils (cleavers feature prominently), and, most importantly ,recipes. Needless to say, the author (Elizabeth Riley), publisher/editor (Vyhle Publishers, Pittsburgh), and illustrator/photographer (R.U. Pickman) are unknown to the American publishing industry – despite the fact that the book was supposedly written in 1982.
Continue reading Item Seed: The New Zombie Cookbook: Simple Recipes For Busy Lives.
Liber Maledictionem Ingredientia
Description: the core book itself dates anywhere from 1400 to 1925. It lists (in Latin) a variety of ‘recipes’ for curses that can be placed on objects, animals, and people. What makes every version of this book different from the others are the marginal notes: typically, a copy of the Liber Maledictionem Ingredientia will have most of its white spaces covered with notes, lists, scribbles, and in a few cases, arguments between competing sets of annotations. The book also typically reeks of evil, or at least poor life choices. Continue reading Item seed: Liber Maledictionem Ingredientia.
The History Club
This is, in fact, a club. As in, it is a wooden (boxwood) weapon that you use to hit people with. It’s just that it’s also a supernatural club (Power +4, Accuracy -1) that’s been wielded by the Angel of History for thousands of years. Rather forcibly, at times. And it’s been pretty much basting in an esoteric stew of nigh-palpable frustration and aggravation for that entire time. Apparently the Angel of History has communication issues… or, at least, people have difficulty understanding the Angel of History. You know the saying “History doesn’t always repeat itself: sometimes it screams ‘Why won’t you ever LISTEN to what I am SAYING?!!’ and lets fly with a club”? Yeah, this is that Club.
Yodeling Pickles
No, not the ones on Amazon. These …these… are a bit more problematic. And possibly evidence of an act of war between us and an alien species that nobody’s ever met, and lived to tell the tale about it.
It all started with the North American Mystery Boom Strikes of 1977 and 1978. Never heard of them? Well, of course not! Those shadowy government agencies exist for a reason, macushla: and in this case the reason was that the ‘booms’ were actually what appeared to be escape pods from an alien ship that augered into, and then left a fairly impressive crater on, the dark side of the moon. Various governments hushed it up, of course – blaming it on the Concorde supersonic jet (incidentally, the story of why we had to stop doing supersonic commercial air travel is rather fascinating, if a bit grim) while frantically looking for the capsules. They found most of them, probably: unfortunately, they never found anything inside them that was actually still alive after impact. Continue reading Item/Creature seed: Yodeling Pickles.
Emotion Blades
These particular items look more or less like short swords with a metal hilt and a glass blade. Mind you, the metal is actually concentrated willpower and the glass is crystallized emotion, but that’s what happens when you bring an item back from the Deep Dreaming. They’re stable in our plane of existence and don’t set off metal detectors or show up on X-Ray scanners, which is really the important thing. As is the fact that, while an Emotion Blade can be destroyed, the means to do so typically does not exist in our home dimension. Continue reading Item Seed: Emotion Blades.
Blame this.
Phone Booths
On June 8, 2014, working phone booths mystically became rare enough to be worth using in magical rituals. Why that date? Nobody knows, actually. Magic is not yet science; there’s a certain amount of built-in uncertainty about the whole thing. If you could reliably write it out as an equation, it’d stop being magic and start being a particularly obscure branch of physics. The later registration with the Smithsonian of a working phone booth in the National Register of Historic Places had nothing to do with this directly, although that symbolic act certainly locked down some things. Continue reading Item seed: Phone Booths.
Mt. Shasta Diet Enlightenment (Orange)
The ‘brand’ of this can of soda should not be confused with any real-life companies out there, of course. Although the company in question might sue for trademark infringement, if they A) knew of the existence of the ‘Mt.’ brand and B) could find the offenders using non-esoteric means. Emphasis on ‘might,’ though: after all, we’re talking about a company that can make literally magic drinks. Why cause undue aggravation?
Continue reading Item Seed: Mt. Shasta Diet Enlightenment (Orange).
