Saturday 8 August 2015

Moomins-isms

Tove Jansson loved mythology and you can smell it in her work.. I’m only barely scratching the surface of how weird and cool moomins is. all the fabulous pictures are hers. put these things on your hexcrawl or random encounter table


what more could u want..theres an abandoned ship, a comet, and pc's using stilts

A race of people that eat lightning, they chase storms their entire lives

A giant antlion and a dried up sea

A race of people that keep their ancestors under the kitchen sink

A creature that usually hibernates, has woken up early, it’s confused and horrified of the cold season it’s never seen before

Glowing flowers that contain girls, and an ominous comet

A tiny, rude and scrappy woman, mocking someone who is grieving over a dead squirrel. The squirrel died from looking at an ice-nymph.

Something that kills everything it touches. It’s very friendly, but everyone is terrified of it. It lives a lonely existence.

A gem-lizard, a giant pumpkin and a man-eating plant

A greedy and cowardly kangaroo-rat and a floating theatre

An troll obsessed with creating a flying machine and a giant heron that gives free rides

a nihilist muskrat and an invisible little girl

shipwrecked pirates terrorizing a village, and a hobgoblin magician that rides a flying panther


a boy is obsessed with becoming friends with magical seahorses. The horses are shallow, cruel but beautiful creatures.

A desolate island with a lighthouse on it, the lighthouse keeper has given up his job because the sea is sentient and spiteful

Three gender neutral siblings.A scientist who studies butterflies, a scientist that studies flowers and a scientist that studies stars, they only care about what they study and hate each other

An entire zoo has escaped and a rainforest jungle has grown overnight, in a cold northern place

A volcano that causes floods, and a dragon with bug wings the size of a cat

Someone who hates children is building an amazing playground for them, and a tiny nameless critter has fallen in love with you, it wants you to christen it

A homesick mother painted beautiful pictures of her homeland, and now shes trapped in her painting

An agoraphobic woman scared of natural disasters, and a forest of candy that can’t support a living ecosystem

A sea serpent trapped in a rock pool, and a community struck mad with gold fever



SHADOW PEOPLE



 Shadow people. They look like Asian shadow puppets. Theyre 2D organisms from the 2nd dimension that have immigrated to the 3rd dimension. The process of going into a bigger dimension has changed they permanently to be 2.5D, they occupy a space 3D space like anyone else but look the same from every angle. They were sent here to colonise the 3D world, and send back messages, but they failed miserably. Because they are different now they can never go home.

they can become a 2D shadow at-will and stick to a flat surface, In this form they don’t occupy space, they can slip through any small crack and can walk on walls and ceilings. they still get damaged by 3D stuff though, and anyone can grab them and rip they back into 3-d space. Think of it like turning into a super flat slug, or just like that zelda game 'link between worlds' where link can turn into a picture.

shadow people are poor immigrants. There’s big discrimination against them cuz theyre not seen as being “real” like other people are, so they can’t get married or inherit property. they can only legally work as entertainers and artists. (both of these are vague terms though, a bartender is technically an entertainer, any kind of craftsman is an “artist”)  People only want to hire them as assassins and spies.


They live in paper lanterns, their ghettos strung together and hung above the neighborhoods of 3D people. Rarely a shadow person will come into some money, build a house with paper walls and sliding doors, and let dozens of their poor relatives live with them in crowded conditions. Visitors to these shadow homes are weirded out by how there’s no furniture; and how they eat dust and cobwebs and drink light



 Shadow people like to collect things that are flat and look 2D like leaves and coins and paper. Their preferred art forms are origami, knots, silent dance and calligraphy, gentle quiet activities. They miss home, everything here is awkward and uncomfortable and hard to wrap their head around. they miss the simplicity of the 2nd dimension.

if you wanna play one do race as class, your just like a rogue or a halfling but you get the 2D form ability at will.