Monday 18 January 2021

The Danger-Snake! (and others)


THE DANGER-SNAKE


The Danger-Snake the Danger-Snake,
The terrible cake-striped Danger-Snake.
Its form doth flow and its eyes doth glow,
With a regular pulsing, long and low.
With high-visibility Battenburg stripes,
And eyes that flash like ambulance lights,
Hope it don't see you, hope it ain't there,
Over your head or under your chair,
For if you DO see it, if you see it at all..
There's harm and catastrophe soon to befall!
Crashing and bashing and splintering bones,
Burning and breaking and falling-down homes,
Sneezing and piercing and pins in your eye,
Stumbling and fumbling and glass in the pie!
Be it the herald or be it the cause,
The snake is orthogonal, separate to laws.
Singular, secret, yet vibrant and wild,
The snake is the seed of catastrophes’ child,
For if you DO see it, if you SEE IT AT ALL..
Deaths at the doorstep and doom is on-call.
So hope you don't and say you won't and pray its just a hose,
That curls out in the garden in the shadow of wet clothes,
And not the snake, the Danger-Snake,
The terrible cake-striped danger snake,
For its form doth flow and its eyes doth glow,
With a regular pulsing, long and low.


The high visibility snake signals danger, but also seems to summon or create danger. Striped like an ambulance or a police car, with eyes that flash like ambulance lights, but an ambulance that arrives somehow ahead of time.





GOB MOBLINS


Creatures who are not goblins, but who form gangs which act like goblins, or try to.

They claim to be the 'mob goblins' and will offer 'protection' to extort shopkeepers and homeowners, but in fact they are mere Moblins, a smaller, smoother, pinker and less dangerous form of goblin.

Yes they are like small pink cowardly people with dull brown eyes that weep when they are upset, which is OFTEN because they are nervous and angst-ridden beings!

They lack cunning and invention except for the scheme of feigning goblins, which gives them confidence. They paint themselves green and add finger extenders and pointy false ears and dentures to give them small sharp teeth, and they practice capering from books;

"ah hee hee hoo hoo ha!"

"AH HEE HEE HOO HOO HA!"

"(I say Chives, let us try that again, one more time)"

"(Ahem)... AH. HEE. HEE. HOO. HOO. HA!

"Very good Chesterfield, very good Chives. Very Goblinish indeed."

They speak in 1950s received pronunciation and are anxious about their schemes. They write these down on scraps of paper (the schemes are all veery carefully and exhaustively planned), and when not observed, they pull out the scraps and peer closely at them to make sure they haven't got anything wrong. But the false spiky fingers they wear get in the way, so they have to pull the fingertops off with their teeth. Then they get sweat on the instructions and smear the details.

Oh no, now their green facepaint is sweating off.

And their false pointy teeth cannot hold their long fingers. Both are falling out...

Oh no oh dear, oh dearie-me no.

The Gob Moblins are not that much of a threat to be honest. Their schemes almost always fall apart in desperate fashion, plus you can usually spot them by their shoes, they are excellent cobblers and hate wearing unshined footwear, plus they are bullied by every type of actual goblin, who they look up to as celebrities but also fear, and do not understand at all.

Their greatest threat may be to your emotions, as it can be anguishing to watch them try so hard and fail so pathetically, and then breakdown crying, their tears leaving green smears everywhere.





CHEESE GOBLINS


They are fermented goblin milk, solidified in warm conditions over time. 
Where from? 

The goblin milkers - by the Good Goose-God don't ask how or why they do it or who they are. It is one of the worst things that ever was. The horror of the Cheese Goblins.

If goblin parts get into milk, it ferments; they emerge. The milk curdling and turning greenish-white. 

They are full of holes, but they can be soft too, and riddled with a bluish mould, they can have a sheeny rind which peels off to reveal the milky Cheese Goblin beneath, they can be like mozzarella, or like brie.

They are of no especial quality or skill compared to other goblins, and to be honest, quite a bit less robust. But... think about their cheesy fingers reaching out for you, or cheesy eyes turning in their cheesy heads, transmitting cheesy thoughts to cheesy brains. Curdling and churning and thickening things. Churning themselves up, spreading themselves on crackers and posting each other through the letterbox.

Nothing is enough for the Cheese Goblins. What wild thoughts might they not think, and what cheese dreams might they not dream? For the Cheese Goblins have cheese dreams each night, dreams of the wildest invention, and darkest consequence.

They fear cheese graters, cheese knives, cheese cutters and cheese boards, and seek revenge upon all cheese-eaters.




LONG GOBLINS


They are especially long and wiggly, like ropes or hosepipes, with smirking little round faces like the ends of sticks of rock. Their length is not reassuringly noodly, like a snakes or worms, (both of which they HATE), they are clearly still a person shape, just stretched horribly, with the pointed vertebrae poking out of their flexible backs

Their very longness is their weakness and their strength because that is how they get into places, but there is no way they could pass as a person. Instead they gather together in long places, like drainpipes and have long conversations. They take a long time to decide what to do, which is fortunate for us, but once they do decide they will stick at it for an equally long time.

There is nothing about the long goblins which is not long, their attention spans, their vision, their stories and their names. 

All long.

Their dinner engagements are exhausting. Never ask one to give a speech, even their pauses are long, and their horrible long fingers as they creep out of a pipe. 

What do they wear? Long johns of course, and they are ruled by the Longest Goblin, who is as thick as a python and twice as squeezy.

They prefer long food, like spaghetti, noodles, hot dogs, eels and string-beans. Offering them such items, or cooking them a feast of such, might persuade them to leave.
 



The List So Far


Amber Golems
Bomblenowl
Creature from the Unknown
Conspicuous Squirrels
Copy-Monsters
Crime Bird
Dracula
Dragon
Gelly Cube
Ghost (standard)
Ghost, of a Sinister Pig
Ghost Queen
Goblins, Cheese
Goblins, Corn
Goblins, Egg
Goblins, Gas
Goblins, Ghost
Goblins, Glass
Goblins, Gloom
Goblins, Grain
Goblins, Grass
Goblins, Gourd
Goblins, Long
Goblins, Mole
Goblins, Trash
Gob Moblins
Ingot Beast
King Slime
Loan Troll
Men-of-Bones
Mirror-Gibbons
Moon Mage
Ogre
Pumpkin-Headed Böggelmen
Ratmaster
Rude Orcs
Secret-Eaters
Sinister Pig
Sky Witch
Snail Knight
The Danger-Snake
The Master-Thief
The Worlds Most Evil Dog
Thieflings
Trap Dogs
Xanthic Men


That's 46 in total. I want 50 for the book. I know what one more is; The Monks of Dooom. But what should the remaining three Dangerous Strangers be?

9 comments:

  1. The danger snake is my favorite

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  2. Strawberry Devil (red and seeded and sweet),
    Pickled Lich (Lasts while cool and sealed),
    Mongrel King (a la Rat King).

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  3. A fairytale game without any giants is surely lacking something. The grind-your-bones-to-make-my-bread variety might be a bit too bloodthirsty for what you have in mind, but they can still be a menace in other ways. I imagine the adults are simply too large to notice the PCs or interact with them, but toddler-giants are a common hazard, particularly because they haven't yet learned to distinguish between normal-sized beings and their own dolls. So if you go near them you probably won't be devoured, but you may find yourself grabbed and forced to participate in a pretend tea party with a motley collection of statues (and an assortment of other co-opted beings who are either desperately trying to escape or attempting to play along). If you entertain the toddler-giant, they might kit you out with a range of bizarre but potentially useful accessories (e.g. a blunted toy broadsword, or a teacup which can double up as a canoe), but beware; you risk becoming their favourite doll, in which case they will try to keep you forever and dress you in an increasingly ridiculous sequence of hats.

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    Replies
    1. Ok a toddler-giant can definitely be a thing. Good call.

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  4. how about some sort of riff on the evil tutor/teacher idea? especially, like, an evil piano tutor, comes into the home, sweet-talks the parents into forcing the children to take piano lessons, goes on about how educational and character-building it is, and then as the children are forced to play their scales over and over it feeds off their mental and emotional energy. (I just watched the 5000 Fingers of Dr. T a bit ago and ngl it's still stuck in my head)

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  5. Nice list.
    My only idea is That One Cat, who is sweet, and cruel, and knows all of the secrets, because it eats them, and then expels them (mangled and soggy) much as furballs.

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  6. This list somehow reminded me of the fairytale of Blockhead-Hans, who (successfully) woo’d a princess with an old wooden shoe filled with a dead crow and mud. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockhead_Hans
    He’s not evil though, unless if you count making a mockery out of the royalty and the press just by being a big blockhead as evil.

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