April 16, 2017
People say old Greenwood farm is haunted. I’ve heard stories of chickens crowing there even though there hasn’t been a flock in years. But that was before Chapek moved in there, set up all those lightning rods. Seems friendly enough, but nobody goes to visit.
We’re pretty sure that Greenwood is now a robot farm.
April 15, 2017
Are YOU sick of pizzas that are too expensive? Are you tired of outrageous delivery fees, state and local taxes when all you want is a cheap pizza pie?
We were too, and that’s why we founded Deep Dish Deep Discount Pizza.
The finest ingredients? Fresh supplies? Artisan? That’s just a fancy word for expensive and wasteful. Our philosophy is to make ’em quick and make ’em cheap. We use lightly expired cheese, tomato sauce bought in bulk from Kyrgyzstan, and pepperoni damaged in shipment. Our toppings are fresh enough that we can bake most of the rancid out of them most of the time. We don’t pay our drivers because we don’t HAVE any drivers! All of our pizzas are taken to you by our cooks, and they get paid by the pie. If you get a bad pie, don’t worry! The symptoms won’t last more than a day or so, and our waiver means we’re legally unassailable.
That’s Deep Dish Deep Discount Pizza, corner of 5th and E.
April 14, 2017
SQÜIBBLI
This stuffed squid will perch on your nightstand and remind you of the cosmic horrors of your own insignificance every time you behold its inky visage upon waking.
VALMÖR
This Romanian-inspired bed for one is made of classic planks with steep angled sides, a privacy lid, and storage underneath for earth from your home churchyard.
TRAVEST
The TRAVEST Tea Set is a groundbreaking ceramic product that appears to be made entirely out of tiny nude statues. It’s an illusion, of course, but what could be more whimsical than picking up a handle made of twisted human forms to dispense liquid from a spout that appears to be made of the same?
KAVINGBY
This shelf unit is designed to hold anything your mind can conceive. You would think that it would have to be no more than 20cm x 20cm, but this actually isn’t true! The KAVINGBY is larger on the inside than it is on the outside.
ALLÅBODA
This train set is made from sustainably-harvested lumber from the Spirit Forest of Mu and is guaranteed to entertain your little engineer for hours on end with its incredibly lifelike movement and decals. Any resemblance the decal passengers have to lost souls burned into the ancient cursed wood is a pure coincidence.
DANZKLUB
The DANZKLUB light is the only illumination solution on the market with a built-in strobe effect. Why pay for a fancy strobe light when a simple plastic and cardboard DANZKLUB can do it all for you from any socket? NOTE: Not advised for customers with photosensitive epilepsy.
April 13, 2017
Each soul is a droplet, a point of mist. When its shell expires, it rises, unnoticed, and returns to the well. There is it absorbed, mixed, reborn. The mist that can be seen rising off of the well is that of souls outgoing and souls incoming.
The collected knowledge and experiences of the well are the energies that power the world within the crystal. Everything inside the impenetrable shell crafted by the Glazier springs from and returns to the well.
But this has not always been the case. Many times throughout the history of the crystal, beings have sought to redirect souls away from the well for their own purposes, or to use the well’s energies for their own desires.
Everyone knows the tale of Erdall, who created her own well in mockery of the true one and built a mighty empire on its back. They know the story of her destruction and annihilation–never to return to the well herself–just as fluently. Perhaps its equal is the tale of Revinger, who sought to harness the power of the well to pierce the crystal and free the world from its “prison.” It is not for those within the crystal to know what he found when the howling void beyond sucked him in.
Is the rise of the Denier and its followers a peer to Erdall and Revinger, the two great enemies of the well? This remains to be seen.
April 12, 2017
The Pundigrion is a book of immense power. Many have gone mad scrying deeply into its pages, expecting as they often do a mere book of very good puns. But those are a dime a dozen, from The Funomicon to The Wit’s Endgemot, and have no power over the insane (merely the inane).
But The Pundigrion works on a different principle. It open’s the reader’s mind to the inner working of language, the web of phonemes and graphemes that make up language at its most base. It tears away the veil of individual language to expose the underlying code that makes puns possible. And, in this way, it drives readers to gibbering madness.
We can trace the oldest known copy of The Pundigrion to Moshe Abraham, the Mad Israeli, who composed a scroll in Aramaic in the year 135. Taken by the victorious Romans, it was later copied in Athens into Greek and Latin by Leonidas the Loony Lacedaemonian. The Latin copy ended up in the Vatican archives, where numerous vulgate copies were made by Innocentius the Insane Italian. The Greek copy was captured by the Ottomans and sent to Constantinople, where Turkish and Arabic versions can be traced to Taranuz the Touched Turk.
In total, nine copies of The Pundigrion are known to have existed, in Aramaic, Latin, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Italian, French, German, and English. Each has had its exact whereabouts lost over time, largely because it reduces those who study it to gibbering lunatics capable of speaking only in elaborate puns. These people tend not to dispose of their estates very rationally; the 18th-century scholar Berthold the Batty Berliner tossed his copy of The Pundigrion from the dome of St Hedwig’s, for instance. It was rather quickly followed by the rest of his library, his clothes, and Berthold himself.
Chroniclers record his last words as “Singt ein Vogel auswendig? Nein, am meisten singt er vom Blatt!” A rough translation would be “Does a bird sing from memory?
No, it mostly reads from the sheet music.”
April 11, 2017
“You can’t leave!” the first hooded figure, the one in a purple robe, cried. “It is a violation of the Tuvo Principle, the Society’s most cherished precept!”
“Wait a moment,” said the second hoodie, this one in crimson. “I thought free will was the centerpiece of the Tuvo Principle!”
“Free will aside from total subservience to the Society and the Tuvo Principle,” added a third member wearing forest green.
Crimson shook their head, as evidenced by the bobbing of their robe. “How can your will be free if you’re subservient?”
“Yeah,” said Yellow. “That’s dumb.”
“Well, if the Tuvo Principle isn’t what I say it is, then what is it?” Purple shouted.
“It’s absolute free will!” said Crimson.
“It’s absolute subservience!” shouted Green.
“I’ll show you who’s subservient!” Yellow followed these fighting words with an actual physical blow aimed at Purple.
The argument quickly degenerated into a melee after this. Forgotten amidst the Society’s shouting, Chris worked the bindings free and cut Avery loose with the sacrificial dagger.
“What the heck is the Tuvo Principle, anyway?” Said Avery as they fled.
“I don’t even think they know.”
April 10, 2017
Cascadia is home to a uniue brant of bed and breakfast, adventurous in more ways than one: the Dungeons and Dragons Bed and Breakfast, or D&D B&B. Staci Gvensdottir runs the establishment with her partner, Peter Smith, and like so many other desperately innovative business ideas it dates to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008.
“Peter lost his job and I lost mine, within a few days of each other,” laughs Gvensdottir. “Just after we inked the lease on this place. So we had to do something fast, because banks were feeling awfully foreclosey back then!”
The solution lay in the massive collection of role playing books accumulated by the couple. Gvensdottir purchased new books as they came out, while Smith preferred to hoard classic tomes. “I’m a third edition and before nutcase,” says Smith. “As far as I’m concerned, if there ain’t THAC0, it ain’t Dungeons and Dragons.”
Gvensdottir and Smith wrote a few quick D&D campaigns that could be played with a variety of settings, characters, and systems. They then began advertising their home as a destination getaway for couples looking to do a little role playing. “Not neccessarily the sort of roleplaying everyone thinks of, admittedly,” says Gvensdottir. “We had a few very disappointed people in gimp masks show up.”
At first, Gvensdottir and Smith’s “D&D B&B” was advertised through word-of-mouth. “Our friends at the comic book shop and on listservs and message boards, mostly,” says Smith. “The first few were really just pity stays, but once word got out, we’ve been pretty constantly booked.”
A weekend at the D&D B&B begins with rolling character sheets in a living room from a classic 1880s lumber baron house, restored to its full glory. Guests either roll new characters or adapt prechosen ones and then set out on an adventure that will last from two days to over a week. Meals are provided, as are caffeinated beverages and salty/sugary snacks, and every few hours there is a fresh-air excursion to a local Cascadia landmark.
“The standard dungeon grind is by far the most popular,” says Gvensdottir. “People just love the thrill of delving deep into a castle dungeon to defeat an ancient evil.”
At the end of the stay, visitors have the option or purchasing their character sheets or leaving a copy on file for future adventures. Nearly all do, as the experience of 12-hour marathon dice-rolling sessions is not soon forgotten.
April 9, 2017
MUÑOZ: And how long has she been acting like this?
CINDY: A week, maybe two. She has been growling, refusing to accept anything we give her, making a mess on the floor…
MUÑOZ: I need you to think carefully, Cindy. How did this all start?
CINDY: Well, we had just come home from the barbecue. It was amateur night, and-
MUÑOZ: Say no more. Let me lean down and whisper to her.
(MUÑOZ leans over, whispering to his subject in a sweet, low voice.)
MUÑOZ: She says that it is a simple problem. She says that in your husband’s haste to deal with a…problem…he pulled too hard and something broke.
CINDY: Can you fix it?
MUÑOZ: It is a simple matter.
(MUÑOZ opens the toilet tank and reconnects the plunger to the valve.)
MUÑOZ: It is done.
NARRATOR: Join us after the break for more exciting unclogginds with “The Tank Whisperer!”
April 8, 2017
“I’ll have the beef in blueberry sauce, please.”
“Ah yes, the Smurf ‘n’ Turf. One of our most popular menu items.”
April 7, 2017
Like the name suggests, squibblins favor dank environments as they subsist almost entirely on a diet of mushrooms. Squibblins shy away from direct sunlight, direct heat, and direct confrontations, preferring instead to wheedle with vaguely subservient coos.
A typical squibblin colony will consist of 50-100 workers, 8-10 drones, 3 queens, and a SquibberLord. Despite these ranks, they are all virtually the same size and attain their positions entirely through ingratiating themselves with other squibblins or with more powerful clients. Records exist of a squibblin colony ruled for a squibblin generation (approximately 2 years) thanks to a rather scary picture of a dog.
Excerpts From Nonexistent Books 