Tag Archives: Weird

Short Weird Story: Where I get my ideas

Posted by Grim Jim on

When I heard her scream, I knew my secret was out. With a roll of my eyes to the heavens, I pulled myself out of my seat and down the hall to where she stood. She shivered and clutched her coat as though it were the only thing she could rely on in the universe.

She turned to me, wide-eyed and shaking and spoke, her voice quavering. “There… there’s a monkey in your cupboard.”

I peered around the door into the cupboard under the stairs. Bobo looked up from his laptop and gave me a thumbs-up. I turned back to Emily, my agent, and spread my hands, trying to be placatory, and I began to explain. “Well… he’s more of an infinite number of monkey…”

“Like the Shakespeare thing?” She at least had some control of her wits. I was glad. I closed the cupboard door gently, and I led her away to the living room. I sat her down on the sofa and went into the kitchen to make her a cup of tea.

“Sort of, you know the principle, right?” I called back over my shoulder.

Still clutching her coat, she sat, pulling at the fabric nervously, trying to remember how it went. “Isn’t it that, if you had an infinite number of monkeys, typing away on keyboards, eventually by pure chance they’d come up with the complete works of Shakespeare?”

“In essence, yes,” I called to her.

“But… there’s only one monkey.”

I poured hot water over the teabag and squished it gently with the spoon, bringing it out with me and sitting down next to her again. “That’s why I said an infinite number of monkey. And well, technically, he’s a chimp, so an ape, not a monkey. Monkeys don’t have enough brain mass for it to work.”

“I don’t understand.” She said, letting go of the coat and gratefully clutching the tea.

“It’s really quite simple,” I explained. “he is just one chimp out of an infinite number of potential chimps from subtly different universes that stretch in all lines of potentiality in all directions. So, while he is one chimp, he is also, in effect, every possible chimp, in all possible universes and times, at one and the same time.”

“But,” she trailed off, clutching the mug though the hot water must have been hurting by now. “What is he doing in your cupboard?”

“You’re always asking me where I get my ideas. I don’t. I have the chimps come up with them for me, and then I curate and polish them.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You’d believe me if I told you an infinite number of quantum chimps was the source of my stories rather than deep thought, consideration, influences and yadda-yadda-yadda? I don’t think so.”

Later, Bobo presented me with a brilliant paper on the best ways to get rid of a body.

#200wordRPG #RPG #TTRPG – The Body Politic

Posted by grimachu on

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Body Politic

Something happened in the night and where, before The Event, your body was a whole, obeying your brain, now it is a cacophony of competing voices, a comity of equal limbs and organs. Somehow you have to all work together and find a new way to live.

The game works best with four players (one for each limb) and one referee, though an additional player can act out the actions as directed through the referee.

All you have to do is try to get through your everyday life, doing perfectly normal things.

  • Players may not speak with each other.
  • Players may nominate a player from amongst them to speak and perform other miscellaneous actions when the game calls for it.
  • Players only communicate with the GM in ’rounds’.
  • ‘Rounds’ are conducted by writing down what your limb does and passing the note to the GM.
  • The GM then interprets the actions and tells you the result – often with hilarious results.

Example Sessions:
Get up, shower, get dressed, clean your teeth, have breakfast and leave the house.
Get into your car, start it, drive to work, park and enter the office.
Complete a day’s work at the office.

***

I can’t really enter, because I provided prizes, but you can check out the competition and enter yourself HERE.

#RPG #TTRPG #WeirdHookMonth – Bizarre Collections

Posted by grimachu on

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The Hook

From Invisible Etchings to the Atom Heart of Siva Goth, The Cabinet of Curiosity holds a plenitude of strange, ghastly and unnatural objects. The cabinet itself warps time and space and upon touching an item it holds you are whisked away to live out the story of how it was found.

Suggested Systems

GURPS, FATE, BRP.

Art by Priscilla Kim.

#RPG #Art Darkzel Art Scholarship 2016-17 Open for Donations

Posted by grimachu on

navvywithabeardDONATE

Darkzel (Zachary) was an artist who worked for me over a number of years, providing art for Hentacle, Cthentacle, Blood! and a number of other projects as well as working with me on a comic project and discussing work on other, potential multimedia projects in the future.

Zel provided me with art and in return I got to see a young, talented and very promising artist grow in confidence, flexibility and skill. I got to help pay his way through his education and I got to become his friend in the process, as well as paying for some wonderful art along the way.

Zel was tragically killed while working as an English teacher in Korea, cutting short a life and a very promising career.

I’ve always enjoyed being able to help young artists by offering them work, and after what happened with Zel I decided that the best thing to do in order to honour his memory and our friendship was to set up a scholarship fund for other promising young artists.

Young fantasy, comic, anime and science fiction artists face an uphill struggle. The artistic establishment is often not equipped to understand and encourage them and art is often seen as a wasted education by parents and others. Art supplies are expensive and support can also be hard to find.

My intention is to help provide for these students, or other artists in need of help, and to create a self-perpetuating scholarship fund that builds over time.

Each year I invite donations to the fund. These donations go on top of the existing money raised over the past year from ongoing sales of Zel’s art, and of sales of donated art to support the fundraising effort as well as art from those who win the scholarship each year. Over time this will create a collection of art by talented young artists and kind donors, providing them with exposure and money, and contributing to the fund for artists in the following years.

You can help by donating money here, donating art, and by spreading the word to budding young artists in school, college or university, or artists who are in need for other reasons – unemployment, disability, mental health etc.

DONATE

OSR Weird Monster: The Encyclopede

Posted by grimachu on

2013Essig

Pic from HERE

The ancient Magus Wars – though they go by many other names – have left many scars on the landscape. From enchanted ruins to luminous swamps, from gibbering aberrations to floating islands. During the wars the squabbling wizards created many servants, from the Brass Soldiers of Ludum Quat to the Invisible Hornets of Chung the Impeccable. Not every servant was built for war though and servants were made as cooks, handymen, workers, even curators.

The Encyclopedes were born in the laboratories of Dakram Findspell, more librarian and alchemist than true wizard. Obsessed by the gathering and collation – rather than the use – of knowledge he created the Encyclopedes to maintain and order his vast library.

After his death the Encyclopedes took on a life of their own and continue to gather information – especially spells – wherever they can. They create caches of knowledge and magic and devote their entire existence to it, to the point where they will happily suck the knowledge from a man’s skull to add to their own.

Encyclopedes knows almost everything and deep in their holdings they maintain a magical book of stupendous size. Each colony has one and – magically – it shares knowledge with all the other books and Encylcopedes throughout the world and the other planes of existence.

Encyclopedes gain an almost sexual degree of pleasure from correcting someone of their false information. They are insufferably smug, gigantic – the size of three people – and painfully arrogant.

It is said you can read their tome, after a fashion, their language is not discernible to any other being, but in the act of trying to read it you can gain the truthful answer to any single, answerable question. Reason enough for people to seek to Encyclopede’s out for trade – or theft.

Armour Class: 16
Hit Dice: 6d8 (Hp 27)
Movement: 180′, Encyclopedes can move at this speed on walls and ceilings as well as floors.
Attacks: 1 (+6 attack, 1d4 damage + Poison)
Damage: 1d4 + Poison that causes 1 permanent points of Intelligence loss.
Morale: 7
Special Abilities:
Can climb walls and ceilings automatically with no loss of speed.
Bite requires a Save Vs Poison or the victim loses 1 point of Intelligence permanently.
Encyclopedes can cast Bookspeak, Comprehend Languages, Detect Magic, Identify, Mending and Read Magic at will, as though a 6th level Magic User.
Encyclopedes can use scrolls.