Inventory Worldbuilding : Shellfolk Rambler

Shellfolk Rambler

For every youth there comes a time to go rambling on a long tour of the stars, some keep it small; just the local hives, others hop ship-to-ship with the strange shell-less foreigners to odd worlds. Everyone comes home eventually, with stories a-plenty to tell of their adventures.

1. Symbiote shell-suit (crustacean-esq, vacuum-rated, maneuvering jets, alive)
2. Mushroom-cricket pemmican (wrapped in bio-plastic, leftovers fed to suit)
3. Dagger-axe, short hafted
4. Rigging knife
5. Cable coil, weighted end (lassoing)
6. Fertilizer brick (compressed phosphates & nitrates wrapped in cheap gold foil)
7. Leg-braces
8. Membrane tent (with airlock)
9. Shell-paint, turquoise (vacuum-rated)
10. Story-songs : The Many Quest-Rovings of Yohann the Wake
11. Longshoremen's tattoo, carved (Belphagor docks)
12. Unfolding tableau, gold & aluminum etching of hive-mates & ancestors 
13. Pitons (handful)

Slushpost Mark 6.

More scraps and scribbles. 

1. In an ancient levant world there is a demon of plaster and whitewash, it demands MORE limestone MORE hardwoods MORE charcoal to feed its lust for plaster, it shall never be satisfied with its eternal deforestation until the whole region is ecologically devastated.
2. Familial ties are a major thing, considering making lieutenants and various other functionaries siblings and cousins to their boss. 
3. A cocky young nobleman has whipped up a frenzied gang to go and kidnap (voluntarily) his future wife from her family.
4. A posse of flea-knights riding about on an animal, hop to a new host and command them to act as their noble steed/page.
5. A necromancer's cavaliers riding upon slavering ghoul-back, horse pistols and sabres in hand.
6. Spirits care not for casualty, spirits are ideal for fueling an ftl engine, the devil wants your soul because they are a used spaceship salesman and hell is a junkyard.
7. Random equipment tables are tricky to write because you don't want players to all end up with the same stuff, but when they have a bit of overlap it can generate fun ideas. How did they both end up with a bunch of stick grenades? Maybe they robbed an arsenal together. And so forth...
8. Butchers who serve the Red God, and who have many rituals and holy laws concerning the proper methods of killing and processing an animal. Have dealings with the gutter vampires who sup upon abattoir temple run-off.
9. Eutrpænursgið the glacial troll.
10. The oldest business in the city is Ma Wu's cockatrice bucket restaurant.
11. A devout giant hermit crab that uses ruined temples for shells, profuses a weird syncretic blending of several different faiths.
12. Jags Kaaba 
13. Oh fuck, zeppelin pirates stole our sheep again.
14. The king's acolytes chop off their own heads to show fealty, serving on even headless.
15. Venus figurine-esq goddess with a hagfish's head, barbels enlarged to dangle like long braids, the patron of scavengers, waste technicians, and worm-handlers. 
16. Game where you play as expatriate abductees of the Mi-Go, your brains resleeved into new bodies, worker for a Fungi patron salvaging ancient megastructures, mining great old one brain-matter, or otherwise bumping around a mythos, alien filled, interstellar space-setting.
17. Use giant shrews
18. A cavern full of speleothems, each stalagmite and stalactite carved like reaching fingers,
19. A silver-bound spellbook, when you dream it transforms into a silver snake to speak with you.
20. A fad for oiled silk umbrellas has been imported from a neighboring land, umbrella owners have been met with derision and assault by carriage drivers fearful of losing their business.
21. Two rival cities, each besieged by the other's mercenaries, little violence, each is involved in a protracted bidding war trying to buy out the others mercenaries, this has been going on for a while.
22. Knife-fencing, a thick woolen blanket is wrapped around one arm as a shield, a knife in the other....
23. At the printmakers shop, inky skeleton have clawed their way out of the woodcuts and are terrorizing the apprentices, somebody needs to lure them away!
24. Ritual infrugality.
25. Mad Meg (lass) (dulle griet) has lead her all-woman army to pillage hell.
26. Painted ships all made of brass, that orbit astrologically.
27. Giant crocodile carrying her human babies in her mouth.
28. Paper lanterns with writing on them as an archaic form of neon sign.
29. Darian Groy.
30. Techno-Dwarves.
31. HP is how many souls you've stolen, each time you suffer a terrible injury a soul evaporates like ablative armour, kill and eat peoples souls to regain HP and get stronger.
32. The traditional peace offering gift among lizard folk is to offer up your own tail for the other parties consumption because this represents a great deal of food/energy given away combined with intimacy of offering up a piece of your flesh. 
33. In addition to the above; long/big tails are seen as a sign of status and dominance but also (if interpreted so) of cruelty or refusal to see others as equals, lizard folk caricaturists often draw different politicians with shorter or longer tails as their opinion goes.
34. Pig-folk armed with carbines riding upon baboon post-humans.
35. A sword which beheads everyone within 10 meters when unsheathed, including the wielder.
36. The empire is riven into warring provinces, the crown prince is presumed dead. But two different people claim to be the real crown prince and are mustering armies. One has even been declared the true heir by the princes widow. The fact that the prince was executed by cannon doesn't seem to bother either of them. 
37. A key which inserted into the body, makes the chest unfold into panels allowing access to all of the organs and innards.
38. Hiber-knights slumbering in their asteroidal vaults, rousing only in times of great crisis.
39. Mail order stooge.
40. Sepulcheracy, rule by those of the sepulchers (the dead perhaps). 
41. Bicycle haruspex, divines the future from the gutted gears and chains.
42. Wooden dummies hanged for absentee condemnations.
43. A jar of computer keycaps floating in disinfectant = cyber potion.
44. Post-apoc, the design for kalashnikovs has persisted, and the term 'akay' has become synonymous with automatic weaponry of any sort.
45. A place like a storm drain or pillared cistern but its upper reaches are blinding light.
46. A alien megastructure factory monolith is found and dragged back to the solar system, it makes ftl drives, one day it goes boom, no more earth/sol system and no more ftl drives, the scattered diaspora of man is left with what few ships they have.
47. In Deb Lota violence is obscene, weapons are hidden from the world under thick cloth wraps, soldiers are considered sultry degenerates who wear heavy veils disguising them. 
48. A metal coffin wrapped in chains carried upon a palanquin by collared slaves, a voice of ink and scratching nibs whispers from within.
49. Crystal ships hovering above a city of red glass spires, squat forges, and slag pits.
50. An rpg supersition : always include a rule in your game that lets you leave or end the game, lest you be perpetually trapped in a game by rules lawyering demons.
51. Oldtech often requires a dna sample, usually no more than a thimble full of blood, unfortunately centuries of spotty translation leads to some wizards reading 'blood sacrifice' in their tomes and deciding to up and gut someone.
52. The alien's ships are massive affairs, vast floating bricks and ovaloids. It's economics. Gravitics and neutronium annihilation plants don't come cheap and ain't subtle. Its easier to build a massive cargo ship to fly interstellar space then spring for a bunch of small ones.
53. Adventure upon a squalid miserable guano island, revolting miners/slaves, cruel overseers, weird birds, foreign spies, home-brewed fertilizer bombs, general shenanigans.
54. Item : a ring with a secret lighter built in.
55. Knife scabbards that bend in sharp angles to display the wealth of the owner, the more unnecessary angles and bends the better. The scabbard is usually longer than the knife itself. 

Swords, Sails, & Sorcery

Sword and sorcery adventure upon the seas! Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser in the lands of Earthsea, with the colorful devonian wildlife of Ponyo.

Beneath the waves the ocean teems with prehistoric sea life. Devonian fish, coelacanths, sharks, pliosaurs, ammonites, trilobites. Giant leviathans, mosasaurs, and whales too. 

The strange isles range from coral atolls, to sweltering jungle mountains, to cold boreal rocks. Sunken cities abounded. Ruins hide themselves above and below water. 

1d10 Strange Places

1. The sunken city of Ub, where you can peer down through the turquoise waters to see fish languidly swim ancient streets, some spires still pierce the waves allowing for descent into air pockets.
2. Smoldering volcanic peaks belching fumes that trail across the horizon, said to houses temples to strange gods carven into the very bowls of their caldera. 
3. The coral fortresses rising from the Thousandfold Atolls in a riot of colors. 
4. Vertical jungles growing on a maze of sea-stack islands inhabited by tattooist-magicians. 
5. A yawning pit beneath the water, like the inky blue eye of some antediluvian leviathan, punctuating an otherwise mundane reef, what do its depths hold?
6. The impenetrable pink marble city of the Faceless Merchants who silently trade their fabulous riches for slaves, saltes, and alchemical ingredients. 
7. A tangled floating market of galleries and barques moored above a seamount. 
8. Whalefall city-states of the hagfish sorcerer covens deep in the abyssal depths.
9. The crocodile infested deltas of Pag where the content people traffic in lotuses with outsiders.
10. Far Inquonok to the north from which pale faced merchants sail to trade ivory and fur.

1d10 Strange Folk

1. Dancing swordsman from the canal & ziggurat city, every cut and thrust is poised with symbolism and artful precision, they seek a paramour lost at sea.
2. A fishy representative of the undersea kingdoms, attended by attendants constantly moisturizing him. 
3. A salt witch, already succumbing to her magic's price, the cysts consume more of her each day.
4. Runaway scholar of an obscure sect, hunted by stilt-walking assassins. 
5. A man once drowned, now the host to an ancient abyssal star god. 
6. A cannoneer from the southern reaches, babying slow-burning matches and the snarling spirit of an iron handgonne.
7. A simple minded, burly roustabout and his clever octopus companion, touring the world.
8. Barbarians from a foreign city who eat pungent vegetables which smell worse than corpses.
9. Tattooed devil-eater, each inking represents another defeated demon, he is suspicious and boisterous.
10. A burly thief and a slight barbarian duo, annoyed pawns of two mysterious sorcerers.

1d10 Strange Treasures 

1. The basalt carved idol of the martial crab god, patron to wandering pugilists.
2. Lockbox containing rare curative barks and herbs from a distant island beyond the known seas.
3. Bronze panoply of a Urgish warrior with high feathered crest.
4. Corked and wax sealed jugs of matured wine, salvaged from a shipwreck.
5. Scrolls of thin aluminum inscribed with ancient spells.  
6. Obsidian sacrificial dagger, sharp as a scalpel but brittle.
7. Armful of hacksilver torcs accrued in hundreds of raids. 
8. Ambergris from a leviathan belly, destined for the perfumeries. 
9. Polished dunkleosteus skull, scrimshawed with the secret names of ancient pelagic spirits.
10. Fermented squid caught in secret sea-caves, a delicacy of high order.