#urban dark fantasy

[sludgebound-royal]

Vignettes from the Sludge

Introducing my original fiction story, Vignettes from the Sludge! A collection of short tales with a metaplot guiding their recounting.

Content warnings will be added to updates as pertinent. Currently, none are so extreme as to warrant their usage. If anyone disagrees be eager to contact me so I may add them. I'm writing about monsters, I'm not trying to *be* one.

The update schedule is intended to be biweekly updates, of about 2,000 to 4,500 words per chapter. Please enjoy the Vignettes from the Sludge!!

[whereserpentswalk]

Look under the cut to see what meeting your entity is like. Reblog to give a gift to your patron.

The fae: a creature stands before you. Though this street was warm and crowded a few moments ago it is suddenly cold and the people around you look like shadows. The creature begins an antlered shadow with glowing white eyes, but soon its body can be seem, with white blue flesh, and sapphire eyes, and icicles for teeth. What looks like a cloak unfolds from its naked body and you can see massive white wings of a moth. As if it's an act of sacrifice you tell it your true name, a name you didn't even see before, and suddenly you belong to it, for better or worse.

The angel: a radiant entity appears before you. They're bright, like something so hot it would burn you up. But as the light fades, you can see a person in silver armor, perfect yet inhuman like am ancient green statue, their back srouting six wings with blue eyes along them, as the eyes on their head are covered by a mask of two smaller wings. The creature offers their hands and you shake it, as they fly you through the city streets and above the skyscrapers, to the stars above and dimensions beyond, to gods living and dead, across the streets of alien cities and the clouds of dead worlds. And when you return to the earth you can feel something diffrent about you, like there's light in your blood.

The scavenger: below the lights of skyscrapers beyond you, on the dark sands of the beach, you see it crawling twords you. This serpentine creature with countless legs, and a dark black shell, yet a strangely human like face. You think it'll attack or run away, but it just looks at you, egar, and for a momment you stare at eachother. It's legs pass something to eachother and then to you, it's meat but it's shining with all the colors known to the human eye, and a few more. You hold it and it happily looks at you. You take a bite and suddenly you know... you know so very much...

The vampire: she flies down to you on green wings with orange eyespots, but folds them into her back. She looks like a human for a momment, tall and strong, with a black suit over her body, but eyes the color of ruby. For a momment her mouth opens, and it's massive and monstrous, with countless moving parts and fangs. But then it folds back onto something humanoid and she gives you a playful smirk. She cuts her hand and offers you her blood, and when you drink it it tastes so sweet, and makes you feel so good. She hands you the knife and you know to do the same, and when she drinks from your palm it's life the sweetest of kisses.

The djinn: the room wirs around you. If it were not for the fans it would feel like hellfire. For a momment there it darkness, but then the screen before you glows white like smokeless flame. You can sense something inside, something beyond the code. You reach your hand within it, and there's no glass, your hand passess right through until you're in a white void of your own making. You call out, thinking there is nothing at all around you. Yet somehow something calls back, something that knows your name.

The rat king: You see him in an empty subway station. Something dark and distorted, you're not sure if he's man or animal, covered in rags, and singing in the language of the goblins and the orcs. Yet he comes close to you excited. And you can feel his song. He calls for you to come to the train tracks, and let yourself run with the rats and the roaches, where the train will pass over you when it comes, and you'll live forever. When you touch the third rail you don't die, but you'll never be human again.

The lich: the library is strangely bright. Run by skeletons in suits, decorated with gold. There are more books here then you thought were in all the world. There's knowledge here most mortals will never have the change below, all kept safe below the city. You see her, her body doesn't look human, everything has been replaced making her look more like a joining white doll then a being of flesh. Yet she is dead, you can tell that under the porcelain skin she must be dead, she is dead, and there is the tragedy of death in her eyes. You come closer to her, and she places a black rose within your hair...

The demon: You stand in his office and he stands before you, a humanoid being covered in black scales, with red eyes covering his skin. Yet none are on his head, that remains featureless save for two massive horns. Wings on his back nearly surround you. Countless souls line the walls of his office, looking at you, waiting. After you sign your name you give him yours, you can feel it come away for you forever and your eyes grey and your skin pales. But he puts the jar in a special place for you, you're spacial, he can tell there's something about you that he likes.

The mushroom lord: you walk through the darkness of the forest, the furthest from civilization you have ever been. You come upon a part where the trees all seem dead, that even the cryptids won't go near. Mushrooms fill the ground, and white vein like lines are all over the trees. You feel the need to lay down, and you let the moss and the mushrooms and the worms surround you, and let yourself sink into the soil,, and it feels good. It feels so good...

The witch: You can see them in the Cafe next to you, skinny and small, with a sweatshirt over most of their body, and dark glasses over their eyes. They seem powerful though, and though their body looks young they seem ancient, they seem beyond humanity. You talk to them and they tell you things, and secrets, lost gods, things you never knew you didn't know, both beautiful and disturbing. When it's time for them to go they pet your head, and give you their number. You don't know if you should text them, but you have to, you have to see them again, there's something about them that makes you need to know.

The living clothing: you step into it at first, it looked like a puddle yet shining like silver or chrome. But soon it surrounds you, first just your torso, but soon your head, your entire body. But it doesn't feel scary, it feels like you're being held, held by something beyond your understanding. It whispers to you, and you don't know if you should feel like your being eaten alive, or like you're being protected. You can't help but keep walking.

The abyss: the void is before you, blackness beyond blackness, like the color beyond the field of your vision, stands before your eyes. You stare at it, it's nothing yet you're entranced. It stares back...

[moonage-daydreamy]

referring to a research paper published in the year 1964 for my research got me feeling like a priestess or a young protagonist on a quest wearing a heavy cloak over her shoulders as she refers to an ancient scroll for prophecies, clues or anything that can help her in her most desperate hour, written in a nearly-undecipherable script in the light of a lamp. do with that what you will.

[cogumellow]

into the future abyss // scarborough, canada // march 2022 // ©

[leidensygdom]

Designed an outfit for post-campaign Urion/The Onirist! I'm struggling to find what their post-campaign style will be, but I think I dig this direction. They also do use a cane now! (Also, yeah, they kept the mechanical tail)

Urion is my earth genasi/drow cleric. They're going to be struggling after that whole thing of being the BBEG. But they'll manage!

[ink-flavored]

Anthology Blast! Nov. 2024

For this challenge, I'm going to aim to complete 12 short stories, 6 from each anthology, before the end of the month. Read more about it here! I'll update this list whenever I post a completed story, first on Ko-Fi and then on Tumblr. Here are the final stats for this Blast!

Tales from Athendrolyn

Stone Hearted - Available on Ko-fi & on Tumblr & Neocities

How to Train Your Dragon Trainer - Available on Ko-Fi & on Tumblr & Neocities

Reverse Shaping a Friendship - Available on Ko-Fi & on Tumblr & Neocities

Shedding Bad Habits - Available on Ko-Fi & on Tumblr & Neocities

Curiosity & The Copycat - Available on Ko-Fi & on Tumblr & Neocities

Hitting Love's Bullseye - Available on Ko-Fi

Athendrolyn After Dark

Horsing Around - Available on Ko-Fi & on Tumblr & Neocities

Swallowing Pride - Available on Ko-Fi & on Tumblr & Neocities

Artificial Pollination - Available on Ko-Fi & on Tumblr & Neocities

Come In, The Water's Fine - Available on Ko-Fi & on Tumblr & Neocities

Surprise Guest - Available on Ko-Fi & on Tumblr & Neocities

Work Hard, Play Harder - Available on Ko-Fi

BONUS! More Than Skin Deep - Exclusively on Ko-Fi!

[anim-ttrpgs]

Eureka is an absolute masterpiece of a ttrpg with so much thought and care put into it. I really can't say enough good things about it. I do want to know if you have made/plan to make any other ttrpgs? I would love to see more genres besides supernatural urban mystery from you because of how quality your work is (but it's completely understandable if you have no plans to do other things).

Thank you! It’s taken us years to refine Eureka’s rules to this level of polish, and I do think it shows! A warning to all other aspiring TTRPG designers, though, don’t make your first project something this big! Keep it short! Not “one page rules” type of short, but don’t be like us and make your first real project a full-on trad TTRPG with this many different moving parts.

If you have aspirations to make something as crunchy and fleshed-out as Eureka, maybe try to execute the concept in a more simpler “OSR” style, and then after you’ve gotten more experience under your belt, maybe made some money and/or gotten a team together, then maybe try that concept again with more crunch. Call it “Advanced [Your Earlier Game Title]”

As for the future of A.N.I.M., we are planning to continually release adventure modules for Eureka, and probably also add-ons like extra Traits, Monster Traits, etc. I would love to include some playable monsters from cultures outside “the west” too, but I wouldn’t want to half-ass them, I’d want to give them as much research, attention detail and themes, etc. that I’ve given to all the other monsters. That’s just a lot harder when the best sources aren’t always in English.

Speaking of shorter games, I already wrote a little tiny game on the side called Edge Hedge Arena.

This is a game where you google “[Your Name] the Hedgehog”, choose one of the many Sonic OCs that are likely to come up, then give them stats and battle them against those of other players using the rules provided.

Since I basically have no more rules to write for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy and I’m mostly just waiting for other members of the team to finish working on their parts, I’ve partially moved on to working on A.N.I.M.’s next big game, too!

We’ve learned our lesson, it’s not going to be anywhere near the page count or crunch level of Eureka, even though you know I love crunchy games. Well, actually, it’s probably only slightly less crunchy than Eureka, but it’s about much more specific scenarios, so it’ll still overall have less mechanics. The scope is much smaller.

This is a dark comedy/satire game that kind of takes the Forgotten Realms “evil sexy matriarchal bdsm slavery society ruled by warriors who fight in lingerie” dark elf concept and asks the question of “What kind of society and circumstances would actually produce this?” (Though it doesn’t actually take place in Forgotten Realms or any other D&D setting)

And then makes the comparison to 20th and 21st century American capitalism. “No, these aren’t slaves, they aren’t chained up and are allowed to leave any time they want. But they only get food so long as they keep working, and if they disobey then can get beaten.” It started out as a joke, but we are probably going to add "media literacy" to the list of requirements alongside dice and stuff hahaha, like, the ability to understand that the world of this game is not supposed to represent the author's idea of a perfect society. We might add that to Eureka too.

Silk&Dagger is about class, gender roles, different ways that forced labor can manifest in a society, and most importantly surviving all of those things.

Going forward to understand what I’m saying you have to know that in this setting, “Drow” is a title, referring to the ruling warrior caste. Most Drow are dark elves, but not all dark elves are Drow. This society is structured a bit like ancient Sparta, with a very small ruling caste of warriors, and a very large servant caste. Social mobility between these castes is possible, but rather than getting into it in detail and making this post super long, let’s just say that many servants consider themselves temporarily embarrassed Drow.

A typical “party” in Silk&Dagger is will consist of one Drow PC and any number of servant PCs working for her. There are regular chores that need to be done around the palace, which provide challenges, but scenarios will also throw major issues into the mix.

A Drow’s Reputation is everything, if the Drow PC’s Reputation stat reaches 0, that is the failure state for the entire party, because it basically means no more food. (Even the servants, for lore reasons that I also won’t get into)

So a typical scenario will be like “Somebody very important is coming to visit, but the lower floor of the palace is starting to flood for an unknown reason.” We’re going to have multi-part tables where you can randomly generate these, but we will also have more in-depth adventure modules for it in the future.

We ran a playtest the other day basically based on this scenario. The intended comedy of the game really came out as we kept switching perspectives, with the Drow upstairs having to constantly come up with new ways to impress her guests and explain away that splashing sound while the servant worked down below trying to find and plug the leak.

So, the PCs will have to deal with all that while also making sure that all the chores get done, and the kicker is, they can’t easily communicate with each other. The massive gulf between the two castes is the real enemy here, along with the behavioral expectations placed on each.

They could’ve gotten a head start on dealing with the flooding if the servant had had permission to speak earlier and could’ve told the Drow that the lower floor is flooding, but

There’s a big list of behaviors that a servant has to fulfill when interacting with a Drow, which are basically designed to be impossible to follow and just get them in trouble, and a Drow who doesn’t strictly enforce this etiquette risks losing Reputation for it.

On the other side, Drow also have to constantly embody a list of six features, which basically means acting as evil as possible, their Reputation depends on it.

One other unique feature of Silk&Dagger is that it is a two-GM game. One GM does most of the normal GM stuff, while the other GM represents the ever-present societal expectations weighing on all the characters, subtracting Reputation points and important things every time the PCs do something that makes them look bad in the eyes of this society.

There may come times where PCs will just have to take the hit to get things done, or find clever ways to make it look like they’re upholding the status quo while secretly treating each other like equals when nobody’s looking.

You can expect, like, an alpha or beta version of this game to come to the patreon in probably January or February, and maybe even itchio if it is far along enough by then. It was actually supposed to be out on the patreon in December, but some personal issues and illnesses really held it up. I am really going to try and make it less than 200 pages.

I'll end the post with one of my favorite little bits from the setting/lore. One of the reasons that Drow dress like that is because it helps them identify each other by thermal vision in the pitch black tunnels. Unique patterns of covered and uncovered skin serve as a sort of personal heraldry.

Elegantly designed and thoroughly playtested, Eureka represents the culmination of three years of near-daily work from our team, as well as a lot of our own money. If you’re just now reading this and learning about Eureka for the first time, you missed the crowdfunding window unfortunately, but you can still check out the public beta on itch.io to learn more about what Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy actually is, as that is where we have all the fancy art assets, the animated trailer, links to video reviews by podcasts and youtubers, etc.!

You can also follow updates on our Kickstarter page where we post regular updates on the status of our progress finishing the game and getting it ready for final release.

Beta Copies through the Patreon

If you want more, you can download regularly updated playable beta versions of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy earlier, plus extra content such as adventure modules by subscribing to our Patreon at the $5 tier or higher. Subscribing to our patreon also grants you access to our patreon discord server where you can talk to us directly and offer valuable feedback on our progress and projects.

The A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club

If you would like to meet the A.N.I.M. team and even have a chance to play Eureka with us, you can join the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club discord server. It’s also just a great place to talk and discuss TTRPGs, so there is no schedule obligation, but the main purpose of it is to nominate, vote on, then read, discuss, and play different indie TTRPGs. We put playgroups together based on scheduling compatibility, so it’s all extremely flexible. This is a free discord server, separate from our patreon exclusive one. https://discord.gg/7jdP8FBPes

Other Stuff

We also have a ko-fi and merchandise if you just wanna give us more money for any reason.

We hope to see you there, and that you will help our dreams come true and launch our careers as indie TTRPG developers with a bang by getting us to our base goal and blowing those stretch goals out of the water, and fight back against WotC's monopoly on the entire hobby. Wish us luck.

[inkyami]

Dead waters

An endpaper illustration for «I’m not seen through the fog» — a slavic urban fantasy novel.

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[noahhawthorneauthor]

You've got the 'questionable nature magic that smells like necromancy and probably is folks', and the 'magical found family squads who solve life and falls in love.'

On a completely unrelated note, I wish it was Autumn already.

[peaceful-melancholia]

Had the idea that magic people would be hard to imprison, and might require some creative (and possibly unethical) solutions. This one is called "The Blood Mage's Cross", where a blood mage is restrained to be unable to draw blood from themselves and their blood is drained to just enough to survive, weakening them and making them think twice about trying to use their own blood for magic. This would likely be a regular procedure for most imprisoned blood mages

[whereserpentswalk]

Reblog to curse your followers and mutuals.

[xaoca]

Fifth Avenue at Twilight - 1910 by Lowell Birge Harrison

[suminotomi]

My oc: Fatima. I play this character in a Chronicles of Darkness campaign and I love her so much T_T She's a mage (Mastigos) and travels around the USA with her friends: Wata (another Mage) and Nathaniel (a werewolf) __________________________________

Instagram

[leidensygdom]

A post campaign Urion (my bismuth earth genasi/drow cleric)! I've ben trying to find their style and I'm digging the sort of techwear, villain-core...? Vibe. It's like trying to make the mad scientist aesthetic into casual wear. But I think I finally have found a look for their post-BBEG self that I'm quite happy about!!

[ink-flavored]

spitballing some hypothetical magical ailments to use for my urban fantasy anthologies

Wizard Cramps

Caused by having a spell localized to one area for long periods of time

Stiffness or soreness in muscles, skin discoloration (can be many colors or change colors regularly), mirage-like shimmer over the affected area

Taking an over-the-counter magic suppressant until symptoms subside

Enchanter’s Burn (also Creeping Runes)

Caused by having active runes on one area of the body for long periods of time

Rash, skin discoloration (can be many colors or change colors regularly), burning sensation, runes on the body in the place they were written even if previously washed off

Taking over-the-counter magic suppressants and/or using magic suppressing cream on the affected area

Spell Fatigue (also Hex Aches)

Caused by casting too many spells in quick succession or one spell that drains a lot of capacity

Seeing flashes of color, muscle spasms, extreme fatigue, headaches or migraines, inability to cast spells for an extended time

Rest, refraining from casting spells, drinking a magic-replenishing potion, eating food

Potion Sickness (also Hocus-Pukeus)

Caused by drinking too many potions in quick succession, one extremely powerful potion, or a poorly made potion

Nausea and/or vomiting, dizziness, hand tremors, odd-smelling breath

Rest, drinking lots of non-magic fluids, over-the-counter flu medication or magic suppressants

Premature Abscission (also Autumn Heart)

Exclusive to dryads; caused by stress or anxiety, depression, lack of sun or water, or a particular branch being choked of nutrients

Flowers and leaves rotting and falling off too early in the season/before autumn/falling off at all if the dryad is an evergreen species; can be all leaves or only a particular branch

Depending on the cause, there can be many treatments. Most professionals recommend additional sunlight and water no matter what, potentially a pruning if the dryad is particularly wild-growing