100 Dubious Philosophies & Esoteric Aesthetic Movements
This is a list of dubious philosophies and aesthetic movements partially inspired by the novel Odile by Raymond Queneau. A free PDF of this list can be found on my itch.io page. May it provide you with some amusement.
001 The Polysystematizers
002 The Phenomenophile Co-Materialists
003 The Dialetical Telepathicans
004 The Unreformed Piatiletkian Fellow Travelers
005 The Revisionist Anthroposophists
006 The Discordant Anthroposophists
007 The Plurivalent Dyshamonists
008 The Contraceptual Believers
009 The Paralyrical Mediumists
010 The Unresolved Pro-Ultra-Gray Fanatic Front
011 The Incubophile Spiritualists
012 The Unadulterated Asymmetric Revolutionaries
013 The Intolerant League of Polypsychists
014 The Pro-Mayhem Anti-Violence Pacifist Brigade
015 The Contracorp Fruitarians
016 The Uncoordinated Metaphychists
017 The Disseminated Parachists
018 The Barbiturates League
019 The Psychoanalysis by Correspondence League
020 The Salty Eggs Luncheon Group
021 The Dissident Socio-Messiahs
022 The Non-Active Nihilistic Periphery
023 The Revolutionary Anti-Intellectuals
024 The Revolving Integral Nullifiers
025 The Initiated Anti-Esoteric Trade Unionists
026 The Thirty-One Deep Country Groups
027 The Non-Conforming Sycophantic Faction
028 The Three Times Removed
029 The Nullfidian Collectivists
030 The Choplogic Bloc
031 The Followers of Whannt
032 The Shrouded Brethren
033 The Exemplary Forward
034 The Walkers Beneath the Sea
035 The Esteemed Combobulators
036 The Mnenomancers League
037 The Fragmentary Sporadicists
038 The Wayward Syndicate
039 The Peripatetic Harmonizers
040 The Inscrutable Academics
041 The Polarizing Disassociaters
042 The Zoological Concrete
043 The Non-Technical Sublime
044 The Air Loom Operators
045 The Shaver Host
046 The Active Worriers
047 The Repeating Premagnetizers
048 The Grosbanal Insertion
049 The Lyrical Minimalists
050 The Linear Vorticists
051 The Anti-Clerical Papacy
052 The Bicamarel Psychoanalysts
053 The Aerial Expansionists
054 The Order of Erudite Metaphysicians
055 The Infernal Grammarians
056 The Consolidated Puzzlers
057 The Gaxmold Liberation Front
058 The Gary Moldvay Group
059 The Re-Incorporated Etheric Arrangers
060 The Variable Harmonists
061 The Coalition of Heretical Choirs
062 The Twelve Unorthodox Adherents
063 The Manifold Diligence
064 The Raving Urbanologists
065 The Arch Royal Brotherhood
066 The Driven Word
067 The Abernathy Wormwold Descriptivist Agenda
068 The Celestial Builders Connection
069 The Tuesday Night Climbers
070 The Osmosis Steel Circle
071 The Oneironautic Initiative
072 The Duoshulginist Tendency
073 The Button Club
074 The Left-Handed Chess Players
075 The Goldminer’s Children
076 The Underdwellers
077 The Raskrogan Realtors
078 The Sand Counters
079 The Erasmus Brigade
080 The Beyond Team
081 The Outsividisismists
082 The Scattered Seeds of the Exiled Regents
083 The Optimate International
084 The Perspicacious Exegetes
085 The Antediluvian Peoples Faction
086 The Resurrected Pyromantic Gang
087 The Smokewrights Order
088 The Stargazer Pie Supper Club
089 The Ascendant Bibliomaniacs
090 The Morganwig Shoutsmiths
091 The Pastel Winged Seraphim
092 The Free Shepherds
093 The Near-Sighted Sharpshooters
094 The Occluded Shadowers
095 The Occasional Witnesses
096 The League of the Long Afternoon
097 The 842 Club
098 The Sky Lighters Co-Dependency
099 The Twilight Minsters
100 The Mistaken
Cemetery of the Sepulchral Monolith
I’ve uploaded a new adventure to my itch page…
Somewhere near the edge of Bastion on the borders of Deep Country a monolith stands. A pockmarked slab of a strange mineral-like material, the monolith is in fact alive and it consumes ghosts to survive!
Cemetery of the Sepulchral Monolith is a brochure adventure for Chris McDowall’s Into the Odd, but can be used for similar games. In it you will encounter a monolith that generates ghosts in order to consume them, three factions, and a number of other interesting locales.
The price tag is 3USD, but feel free to download a community copy for any reason.
And if you’d like, you can support me on patreon. You get glimpses of WIPs, early access to anything I make, and a weekly post of morbid introspection!
Doesn’t that sound fun?
19th Century Eccentric Dandy Simulator
The 19TH CENTURY ECCENTRIC DANDY SIMULATOR is a solo journaling game based on the novel À rebours by JK Huysmans. In this game you play as an eccentric dandy surrounded by all that you cherish. Your walls are stout. Your tastes are impeccable. You will strive to create a world closer to your ideal.
And you will fail.
Over two weeks of game time you will be wracked by internal torments that push you towards an act of ultimate desperation.
CONTENT WARNING
The 19TH CENTURY ECCENTRIC DANDY SIMULATOR deals with topics of suicide, sexually transmitted disease, Roman Catholicism, and cruelty to turtles.
MATERIALS
These rules
Two six-sided dice (2D6)
Preferred journaling device
…
Enjoy!
Balloon Tomb of the Ancient Aeronaut
Remember all those UFO and “spy” balloon shenanigans from a month or so ago?
They got me imagining a whole upper atmosphere region populated with lost kites, desiccated corpses of early aviation pioneers, and strange creatures like in that old Arthur Conan Doyle story “The Horror of the Heights”:
“A visitor might descend upon this planet a thousand times and never see a tiger. Yet if he chanced to come down into a jungle he might be devoured. There are jungles of the upper air, and worse things than tigers inhabit them.”
Anyway…dare you enter the Balloon Tomb of the Ancient Aeronaut?
Balloon Tomb of the Ancient Aeronaut is a brochure adventure for Chris McDowall’s Into the Odd and similar games. In it you will explore an ancient airborne bouncy dungeon tomb. The price tag is 3USD, but you should feel free to download a community copy.
Find it here: https://yesterweird.itch.io/the-balloon-tomb
Some GM tips from the playtest:
- Don’t sweat the getting there. An experimental Researchery airship dropped the party off and would pick them up when they wanted to leave.
- To describe the tomb builder’s culture I said: “Imagine the ancient Egyptians except all their jewelery is made from balloons.” “Inflatable ancient Egyptian stuff” went a long way when giving descriptions.
- I didn’t require any movement checks to move inside the tomb, but I maximized the bouncing. For this I used a d8 to determine direction then rerolling if they hit something before moving the full amount. Maximize the bounce!
- The first encounter was turbulence. This bounced characters apart and split the party. I recommend throwing that at them right away. It’s likely you won’t have to contrive things to do this because if they land at the top they will definitely be tempted to investigate the pilot balloons, thereby disturbing them, and making the whole tomb veer towards turbulence.
- The monsters might or might not be tough, but the fear of falling out of the tomb was a lot stronger.
One Too Many
One Too Many is a one-page game about being a hobbit who has had one too many drinks down at the pub and now has to walk home. Usually, the Shire is a peaceful place, but these days you can’t be so sure. Strange folk are on the roads: rangers, black riders, and even hobbit gangs running off with their family’s heirloom jewelry. Most nights, it’s a short walk from the pub to your front door. But tonight? Well, you never know.
Materials: a 6-sided die or two, paper and pencil to document your journey home. Make a story of it!
One Too Many uses a hexflower to generate your journey. You can read more about Hex Flowers at this blog post. They are neat. Further inspiration came from the game Under Hill, By Water by Rise Up Comus.
Note: In playtests it was possible to get stuck in loops. To mitigate this use the following house rule: you have 3 items with you (a pipe, a walking stick, and a handkerchief) and can sacrifice an item to roll three dice and choose whichever 2-dice combination you want.
INTO THE MYSTS
So after that TPK I mentioned a few posts ago, I switched my game over to Into the Odd.
We’re still using Mysthead 4 and going for a sword & sorcery vibe. I’ve added things like Cairn’s spell list and Weird North’s corruption into the mix. I’ve put links to all these games below. I also really like the idea of archetypes from Weird North and have made bespoke archetypes for my players. I’m not sure if this will be at odds with the initial semi-disposable nature of ItO characters as presented in the book*. It’ll be an interesting experiment.
Here are the archetypes and their abilities if you want to use them in your own game. Yes, some of them riff off the archetypes in the Weird North book. Also as you can see I use some other house rules like a refresh die and letting players burn a stat to get a bonus or recover an ability:
TRIBAL BEAST SINGER (AKA the Bard/Ranger)
GEAR: D8 hand weapon or a D6 missile weapon and D6 hand weapon, 2 random spell flutes, tribal clothes (armor 1), small net (can hold 1 medium sized or smaller creature), rope, Pack (3 days food, bedroll, torch)
ABILITIES (pick two, gain another when you trigger prestige)
- Wind Carver: spend a week carving a flute to gain a random spell
- Endless Tune: your spell tunes refresh on a 6. Take again to lower by one point. Other refresh rules apply.
- Naturalist: spend an hour listening to nature to learn a truth
- Nimble: advantage on DEX saves
- Animal Companion: an animal like a hound, hawk, snake etc. accompanies you. You can communicate with it.
- Friends in Small Places: pick a small type of creature (mice, rats, songbirds, spiders) – you can command them to perform simple tasks for you
- Keen-Ears: never surprised
- Tracker: can track a single quarry across any terrain
- Pathfinder: pick a point on land, you will always know which path to take to reach that place
PRESTIGE: recover a treasure …. And ??? (everyone has two: recover a treasure is the same for all… but the other one is more bespoke and I don’t remember what we decided here. Tame an animal?)
Refresh: roll a D6, on a 6 you regain the ability. Refreshes automatically after a night’s rest. Can be refreshed after a short rest in lieu of HP.
***
THE CULTIST’S CHILD (AKA What if Tieflings were less sexy and more like something from John Carpenter’s The Thing?)
GEAR: 2 daggers (D6) 2 spells (random) Leather armor (1) Grappling hook 1 random item Pack (3 days food, bedroll, torch)
ABILITIES (pick two)
- Grow a random boil for a random spell effect (refresh 6 or spend D6 DEX to auto refresh)
- Third eye: can see spirits and invisible creatures (usually closed and unseen)
- Vomit blast (D6 blast, refresh 6)
- Scales (+1 armor)
- Poison Immunity (ingested)
- Toxic Immunity (environmental)
- Rubber joints – can slip out of bonds and squeeze through narrow spaces
- Iron mind: makes will saves with advantage
- Quick Recovery – reduce refresh by 1
- Physical modification (gills, wings, hooves, tail)
PRESTIGE: recover a treasure, defeat a planar being
Refresh: roll a D6, on a 6 you regain the ability. Refreshes automatically after a night’s rest. Can be refreshed after a short rest in lieu of HP.
***
The Botanist (AKA the Botanist)
GEAR: D6 Weapon, 2 random potions, Armor 1, Sample Pack, Tea set: (Kettle, Mortar/Pestle), Pack (3 days food, bedroll, torch)
BASE ABILITY: Brew tea (spend an hour to collect and brew a healing tea that heals 2D6 single stat damage from one person, or 2 points single stat damage from multiple [max. 6])
Bonus abilities: (pick one now, get another when you trigger prestige)
- Naturalist: can craft potions and objects of minor power from salvaged monster parts.
- Plant speech: sit for an hour in silence communing with nature to learn a truth
- Call plants: you can command plants to grow faster (refresh 6)
- Survivalist: Can always find the safest path forward while on land.
- Forager: can always find an herb or ID a plant.
- Soothing Balm: can heal D6HP from self or another if you are not moving or attacking
PRESTIGE: Recover a treasure, make a discovery
***
Right now they’re stuck between menaces along with a researcher and a hapless mercenary. You can see them all up there in the picture at the top of this post. Deviltoads one way, magic portal to an alien hive the other.
Maybe they’ll escape…
* When I played Electric Bastionland part of the fun was that random character matrix of failed careers you could be. So if your character died the loss was blunted by getting the chance to play some other weirdo. The way I’m running things the characters are still as squishy as EB characters, but it took two days to come up with their bespoke archetype abilities. I suspect this will likely bite me in the butt eventually.
LINKS:
TPK: Post-Mortem
Nine sessions into my latest game and the hammer came down.
A TPK.
Yes, at least one of my players would object to me saying that, since their character managed to flee the conflict wounded, reach an island, and crawl beneath their overturned rowboat as the buzzing of a group of stirges approached.
And as is always the case I wonder what went wrong.
Yes, there were bad decisions and bad dice rolls, and one night we should’ve called the game at a cliff-hanger point instead of pressing on – but things happened as they happened. Now everyone’s making new characters (and we’re changing the rule set while staying in the same setting), but as is the case it’s time for introspection and dissecting the game to see what worked and what didn’t.
Here we go…
THE BASICS
Rule set: Through the Sunken lands by Flatland Games. It’s a retroclone and one I’ve used before.
Characters: A Pirate Captain, the Goblin’s Child, and the Student of the Dark Arts (players could pick playbooks from either Through Sunken Lands or Beyond the Wall). This ended up being a fighter/thief, a fighter/thief/mage, and a mage. The playbooks are fun, but they can be disappointing when the rolls don’t go your way. Despite two fighter types I don’t think anyone started with a strength above 13.
House Rules: The use of fortune points was expanded. Spend two to shrug off a spell effect. Spend a fortune point to regain a HD of HP on a short rest.
Advancement: XP was a combination of pop quiz style (each adventure offered a basic amount of XP for accomplishing certain goals) and XP for loot. Loot however needed to be spent in town. A carousing table was used.
Since characters got XP for loot, there were instances of one character splitting off from the party, getting very lucky, and getting loot the other characters never knew about. (The players knew and rolled their eyes in disgust… or at least I imagine they did. We play online without any cameras, but I swear I could hear the eye rolls.) This also meant times where the party had loot they needed to convert to XP, but had to travel to a bigger settlement to spend it. This was the situation before they died. Still I liked this mechanic and the mix of XP awards. But it did incentivize a certain selfishness among the players (or at least it did in that one heel player). This, however, fit the sword & sorcery vibe in my opinion. Whether the selfishness led to the TPK is debatable. The party never really came together as a group loyal to each other and able to strategize together.
Equipment: Inventory slots and a usage die. Both of these worked well, but they did seem to have an infinite amount of rope.
THINGS THAT MAYBE DIDN’T WORK
Nothing. I’m perfect.
Uhhh… I mean…
Time Management: You get a feel for the game and when something tells you this is a good point to end the session, end the session. It’s okay to finish 35 minutes ahead of the usual time. Better too short than too long. If the game had been cut early one night, then players would’ve had a week to prep/ask questions before going into the encounter that killed them*.
Avoid Bullet Time: There’s a tendency to want to play out every moment of game time. That’s not always necessary. The loot mechanic of get back to town to gain XP maybe encouraged some bullet time, since if the game ended with them making camp, the next session would then be them getting back home. Often a random encounter would happen that would then thwart their objective to get home and send them deeper into danger and deeper into turns and bullet time.
Telegraph Threats: It’s fun to make things weird and unpredictable, but (as an example) giving a goblin a breath weapon where they can vomit out a slurry of jagged gravel that does D6 damage to everyone in range may be fun, but A) it induces paranoia in players, which can lead to analysis paralysis, B) it also makes it difficult for players to determine what they should worry about.
Information Economy in the Fog of War: Is it punishing the players by withholding information about their current mission, because they spent their one opportunity to research things researching some other information they thought was more important? Is that a failure on the GM’s part for not telegraphing what details are important? Should the GM even worry about this? Are players supposed to say (hell, even know!) the magic words that will trigger an NPC to give the relevant information or should players just be given the damn information that might be relevant? In other words…
Should players hear about a thing (that may be relevant) even if they never ask about the thing?
Questions. Questions.
* Yes, that character made it back to the beach so the campaign actually ended with the lone survivor cowering under an overturned rowboat and a fade to black as buzzing approached.
Mysthead #4
And here it is…
Mysthead #4, a system neutral micro-setting for seafaring fantasy adventures.
Inside you will find multiple generators, a local region and the many peoples who live there, several unique curiosities, a hexflower encounter matrix for seafaring events, and more!
You can find it at DrivethruRPG (affiliate link) or here at itch.io: https://myxomycetes.itch.io/mysthead-4
Enjoy!
Coming Soon: Mysthead #4
Mysthead is my occasional tabletop rpg fanzine. Issue #4 is on schedule for a December release. It’ll be 48-pages and detail a micro-setting for nautical swashbuckling adventure. In fact the setting I’m using in my current games!
Navigate the seas beneath the Vortex Maelstrum!
Learn the secrets of the Midnight Squid!
Cower before the head of Dead-Eyes Anderton!
And more…
You’ll be able to find it on my itch.io page when it’s done: https://myxomycetes.itch.io/
The Next Mysthead
So I’m putting together another zine. This one is going to be inspired by my current D&D* game: a swashbuckling, island hopping sword & sorcery game. But it’s also going to be a toolkit for running similar type games with generators for vessels, islands, cargoes, and travel rules like the above hexflower encounter matrix. My goal’s to finish it by the end of the year, but I’m on schedule to finish it sometime before that. When it’s done I’ll post it over on my itch.io page.
If you’d like to support its creation and get sneak peeks of its progress (along with other stuff) please consider supporting me on Patreon.
Thanks for reading!
* It’s not D&D but a different system. It’s just easier to call all role-playing games D&D.
Yesterweird 