mithriltabby | Escaped gaming meme (Reply)

This test run is not likely to complete any time soon.

The real world is, by far, one of the most fantastic places in existence. Between actual phenomena and actual beliefs, you can find things that would strain credulity were they to appear in a fantasy novel. And they’re wonderful inspiration for weird and wacky ideas.

Take the lithopædion, for example. This is a real-world medical phenomenon: a dead fœtus that has become stony or petrified in utero. (Also known as a “calcified fœtus” or “stone baby”.) It’s tragic for parents hoping for a child, but it’s got to have tons of useful properties for a cackling necromancer making diabolic pacts with dark powers.

Then there’s Rafflesia. It’s a whole genus of parasitic flowers that grow in southeast Asian rainforests. (Rafflesia arnoldii is the world’s largest known flower.) They have no leaves and hardly any stem; what they do have is a huge five-petaled flower that can get up to three feet in diameter and weigh twenty pounds. (It grows by parasitizing a particular type of vine, starting out as filaments that grow into the vine’s tissue.) It’s pollinated by flies attracted by its scent— which is the smell of rotting meat, which is why it’s also known as a “corpse flower” or “stinking corpse lily”. The flowers can take up to ten months go make it from the first visible bud to the open bloom, which then lasts only a few days. Possibilities abound: Might a ritual might be timed to come to fruition along with a particular bloom? Or a mutated one that grows in human flesh used to procure important magical supplies? What manner of dark homunculus could a wizard incubate in a flower this size?

An item from real-world occultism is the bezoar, which makes an appearance in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman in the Calliope issue. Bezoars are concretions (in varying degrees of calcification) found in digestive tracts— they are the disreputable cousins of pearls, kidney stones, and gall stones, and have some relation to feline hairballs and owl pellets. Ones formed of hair (trichobezoars) or vegetable fibers (phytobezoars) can form in the stomachs of ruminants (e.g. goats); humans have also been known to form trichobezoars, particularly if they suffer from trichotillomania (compulsive hair-pulling and eating), and lactobezoars (hard clumps of undigested milk curd). You can even buy them online. Occult belief suggests them as a remedy against poison and illness, and they were often placed in valuable settings in the Middle Ages. Drop a few hints to your players that such things are valuable in your campaign, and watch your mages insist on autopsying their kills before the adventure continues! What intrigues might surround the wizard whose familiar coughs up mystic bezoars instead of normal hairballs? Do charred osteobezoars (accumulations of bone) accumulate in the crops of dragons that eat people whole?