Concept: dungeon filled with deadly traps and terrible curses, except the dungeon is so old that the creatures that built and inhabited it didn’t even slightly resemble humans, so all of the traps are based on incorrect assumptions about the scale and gross anatomy of hypothetical invaders, and all of the curses have very strange ideas concerning what ought to be harmful – and, in some cases, even what constitutes harm – for their victims.

It would be really, really great to watch a party try and piece together information about the ancient builders from their traps. It would be, perhaps, even better to include a puzzle that required some degree of anatomical deduction to solve.

“This piece is moving. It must be some kind of floorplate. Hey, someone stand over here.”
“Didn’t we agree these things floated? Why would they have floorplates?”
“No, that was before we figured out they had some kind of oobleck sac for their organs.”
“Well either way, they can’t have weighed more than 25 pounds, so if you keep stepping on that you’re going to break it.”

Ohhh, I read this very wrong initially, and thought it was creatures who had never seen humans trying to build a dungeon to stop humans/humanoids from entering. So all the traps are super weird based on the varying opinions of the builders. Like, one trap would be too high, or another would drop this gross slime that they thought would be acidic but is really only stinky and hard to move in. 😅

Both are excellent approaches, for completely different reasons.

Both are excellent

approaches, for completely

different reasons.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

A while back I ran a dungeon in pathfinder that was almost in this vein- traps that for the most part weren’t actually harmful to the players! They were investigating a crypt that’d had a bunch of undead escaping into the local countryside.

So what kind of traps would you put in a crypt? Well, the people who made the crypt didn’t want the bodies to be used for necromancy, so the traps were actually traps enchanted with cure wounds!

A big ole magical well at the start of the dungeon with stone buttons that start a countdown? Well, the water enchants weapons for dealing with the undead, and the magic of well’s room essentially made it a magical airlock to prevent any undead from escaping (though it had been blown open previously, allowing them to start terrorizing the countryside by the time the players got there)

The players were extremely confused by the traps at first, but when they caught on to what the purpose of them was, it led to an interesting tension between saving a pressure plate for healing or using it to deal with the more troublesome undead!

WHY YOU SHOULD WRITE HORRIBLY:

1. You’ll never write anything if you don’t

just learned that magnolias are so old that they’re pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees

They existed *before beetles*

Why is this sad? Why am I sad?

https://xkcd.com/1259/

This is how I feel about Joshua Trees. They and avocado trees produce fruit meant to be eaten and dispersed by giant ground sloths. Without them, the Joshua Trees' range has shrunk by 90%.

(my own photos)

Not only they, but the entire Mojave ecosystem is still struggling to adapt since the loss of ground sloth dung. their chief fertilizer.

Many, many trees and plants in the Americas have widely-spaced, extremely long thorns that do nothing to discourage deer eating their leaves, but would've penetrated the fur of ground sloths and mammoths. Likewise, if you've observed a tree that drops baseball or softball-sized fruit which lies on the ground and rots, like Osage Oranges, which were great for playing catch at my school, chances are they were ground sloth or mammoth chow.

You can read about various orphaned plants and trees missing their megafauna in this poignant post:



First quote from the linked article. Found it poetic.

🪨

Keep reading

Individualism is a poison upon this earth.

You and i overlap in more categories than we remain seperate. A mirror is held up every time you face another human. I am you and you are me bitch

Looking at the notes is so fucking funny cause literally everyone is like “no thank I am the exception” lol no you are not. All your experiences are cosmically mundane and you gotta learn to see the beauty in that instead of feeling threatened.

If your goal is to normalize gender-nonconformity you’re gonna have to accept that some people will fuck with gender as hard as they can while still being unequivocally, 100% cis and that is okay. There’s no egg to crack or callout to write. This is a good thing actually.

you can have your manufactured gods, you can have them minted and sealed behind plastic sheaths.

I will settle for the small gods around me, the wind in the trees. I will settle for the warm sand beneath my feet, the lapping waves of a lake at night, and sunlight hitting my cats eyes in the afternoon.

I will settle for the gods I can see and feel as they wrap their blessings neatly into my world.

• Only food items specifically manufactured for animals counts.
• If you have tried animal food, please let me know in the tags/replies what kind of animal it was meant for.

[grabs your shirt] listen. listen to me. the practical is holy. the everyday is sacred. the simple act of surviving is divine. do you get it? sanctity begins at home, in the hands that build and the lives we live and the deaths we die and the worms that eat our bodies. if making something by hand is not worthy of veneration then nothing is.