Bay 12 Games Forum

Lying in bed unable to sleep and I heard a thunk from my pet vivariums. Didn't sound like the tortoise moving in the night, or the snake doing some exploring so I got up to check.

My giant snail had fallen off the wall or ceiling of it's set up and was stuck on it's back, or at least hadn't gotten gotten a good enough grip to pull it's shell upright, the head and foot were stretched off to the side trying to find something to hold on to.

Had it for nearly a year and it's the first time it's done that, at least to my knowledge, but then it's shell is getting progressively larger and heavier so I guess it's going to be getting less able to climb as it gets close to full size.

All flesh must be eaten?

Played a game of that back in uni, a pretty good game all in all.

Special mention to the wuxia expansion, with all sorts of crazy 'martial arts' moves like zombies making their ribs stick out horizontally and spin like a buzzsaw.

That's what the lizardfolk keep telling me yes.

I did a spin on that where my lizardfolk thought that by eating people he was ensuring they would be reincarnated as lizardfolk among his family line, so it was sparing them the risk of coming back pink and squishy again, or as a worm or crow or something. He also did enjoy the taste of some people.

So my mind's been back on the idea for a dark fantasy setting I shared here a while ago, and specifically I have a short adventure idea in mind.

Players would be mercenaries, interested citizens or similar, going out to a collection of villages and hamlets that have been been getting raided by bandits and accosted by highwaymen. Not much killing, but a lot of looting and arson. People have been going missing though, and the bandits are being blamed so the villages have pooled some money together to hire someone to deal with it because the local authorities are being weirdly slow about it.

The bandits are in fact mercenaries themselves, hired and protected by a Witchhunter to ransack the locals in search of evidence of a fleshcrafter coven in the area. The coven is thought to have fled a relatively nearby town when other Witchhunters failed to corner them all before being noticed, and has now set up shop within the area and started abducting and experimenting on the local people, wildlife and livestock. If the Witchhunter makes their presence known too soon the coven will just flee again, and if they manage to flee it gives them more opportunities to spread their forbidden instructional texts and methods, so they're using the bandits as a cover to sieze and investigate people's property, and abduct the odd person to interrogate.

The coven is in fact local, at least in part, a member did flee the town with research materials and victims and hid among the seasonal farmhands, but the chief agents of the coven are residents of the villages. A doctor, a farmer, a priest, and a miller, who together have the knowledge, money and access to bodies and vulnerable people to perform experiments on the melding of different creatures for various reasons. The doctor wants to learn for the sake of it, the farmer wants to make a docile species of labourer, the priest thinks fleshcrafting will help him know the mind of his god, and the miller is wealthy and bored and turned to the coven as a way to pass the time that just got out of hand. The cultist from the town is frightened of being burned at the stake and regrets ever having gotten involved with the fleshcrafters, but had originally joined in the hopes that the coven he was in could help him and his wife deal with infertility problems (they did, it didn't go well.)


The logical endpoints I see are the players siding with the witchhunter to stop the fleshcrafters as more subtle agents than the existing mercenaries, or not believing there is a coven and fighting the witchhunter and mercenaries and then leaving. Or possibly siding with the fleshcrafters, that's always an option but I doubt many would take it given the experiments I have in mind.


Primary enemies would be a mixture of about a dozen well armed bandits, each with a name and personality, the odd guard dog or feral animal, and some experiments that are fusions of multiple animals or animals and people.

One monster I have in mind is the remains of Timothy Derrich, formerly aged eleven, kidnapped and fused with the living body of a wolfhound through a combination of surgery and alchemy to graft the head and part of the upper torso of the dog to his own upper body in place of his head, neck and collarbone. A twisted and suffering creature with a distended neck, supurrating flesh held together by magic and stitches, Derrich is used to track and help abduct subjects for the coven's experiments. He has massively reduced mental capabilities and is unable to speak as a result of having his constituent skulls cracked open and fused together, with some cranial matter from both heads being discarded to save space.

My own wtf. Pete keeps insisting his "old parents" died in a fire and then he "found" us. His old dad name was Howard Puck.

Just sounds like a kid being weird to me. I've known kids who asked people to help them 'hide a body,' and it's just a doll or completely imaginary, likely the result of mashing different things they've read, seen on TV or heard together with an active and nonsensical imagination.

Small humans are a strange and alien creature, with thought processes that run a mile a minute and in random directions.

Hm, perhaps our salvation is in connections?
Thought problem: If you had a weapon that could kill anyone, yet had to observe their entire life as their best friend and confidant before you could use it, under what scenarios would you use the weapon?

It should work on AIs._{Like I know}  Hopefully, they find us each to be too unique and interesting to kill.

I imagine except for preventing large scale murder it would be very hard to use such a weapon. Even then it would probably be heart wrenching to do so, the human mind being what it is.

For an AI however it would likely not bear such a weight, machine learning as yet does not grow attached to things the way animals do, and programming in emotions seems unlikely to be a good use of time and money. Killing a human would likely be much the same regardless of how much a given program knows them unless it's basically identical to a human mind anyway, in which case why entrust them with such a weapon?


I think the thing about AI is that it's going to just develop the ability to more and more accurately predict a given individuals needs and preferences and tailor their user experience based on those predictions. Be it a household appliance predicting your shopping needs and lighting preferences, or a government ruling mega-AI working out what job and work/life balance will make you happiest while having the least impact on it's ability to keep everyone else happy too.

Rolling an idea for a horror monster around my head.

Basic concept is a monster that hunts children, which I'm currently thinking of as being some sort of primordial horror, it kills because it enjoys to rather than because it gets any kind of meaningful benefit. Image I have in mind is a long animal like torso covered in tumours and cysts that ooze black fluid that wriggles with worms, head is halfway between a human and animal skull, with stretched torn skin exposing wet muscle, more black fluid oozes from it's mouth and nose, coughs frequently, walks on eight pairs of legs that are jointed like an insect's but end in human hands. The appearance is largely irrelevant though.

Premise for a scenario involving it is that a century or two prior to the events of the game it was confronted during it's rampages across the land by a saint, who I'm currently thinking would be named Carolyn or something along those lines, and was immediately soothed by her presence, becoming docile and calm. The families of it's victims and the knights who had been trying to slay it found that it wouldn't fight back anymore, but that none of their weapons could cause it lasting damage. If separated from Saint Carolyn it became violent in it's efforts to return to her, so they eventually just had to let it follow her around like a pet. For the next few decades Carolyn devoted herself to the guardianship of the beast, keeping it from harming others, and gathered a following of lay clergy devoted to helping those it had victimised in the past, and to caring for Carolyn herself during her time as the keeper of the monster. When Carolyn passed away, the monster vanished from the church that had grown up around the two of them.

But the horror isn't really gone, it was interred in a mausoleum alongside Saint Carolyn, waiting for her to come back. Over the time since it's imprisonment it has become desperate in it's need to be near the saint again, and decided that if killing children brought Carolyn to it in the first place to stop it, killing children again will bring Carolyn back to stop it once again. It's slow at the moment, killing only a handful of children at a time before returning to the mausoleum to show them to the decaying remains of the saint, where before it was like a cloud of death that swept over the land, snatching infants from cradles and children from the fields by the dozens.

The priests above are mostly unaware of it's return, but a few of the very oldest priests still have vague memories of the monster buried below their church, but due to being isolated in their extreme age they aren't aware of the new killings taking place. Most of the locals and younger priests are assuming it's something more... normal, like wolves or a serial killer or something.


I'm not sure what, if anything, should be able to kill it. Maybe being stabbed with one of the saint's ribs or something.

Finished a squad of Crusaders the other day.


Lovely models to paint, though I really need to go back and add a tilting plate to the Sword Brother. I could have mixed some bolters into the squad, but honestly why do that when chainswords are available?

So the basic idea of the Crusader squads is that the Black Templars don't have scouts* the way most chapters do, instead their neophytes are assigned to a fully fledged space marine in order to learn directly from them and accompany them in battle. All battle brothers are required to take up a student, with an exception granted to Chaplains, Apothecaries, Techmarines, Sword Brethren and to brothers assigned to heavy/special weapons units or close combat squads(assault marines and bikers).

*Scouts being a full squad of trainee marines being given field experience in a stealth role while supervised by a fully fledged space marine sergeant.