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[Powder Miner]

Had trouble last time I said I would getting to a contest entry along everything else, but I’m gonna take another shot at it today.

[Doomblade187]

There are only two with more than two votes. I'd like to fix the aqueducts more than create something that uses a single toad as a explosive.

They'll carry a bandolier of frogs. :3 Think of them as smart grenades crossed with old fashioned (Napoleonic era) grenadiers.

[TricMagic]

And when they inevitably dry up or freeze to death? Or explode instead of freezing when that area drives them crazy.


Explosive Slug Slime

Explosive Slugs were modified from one type of slug that exists in the desert from the Mad King's rein. This slug has a defensive measure of igniting in an explosion when hit with kinetic force. This is in fact due to the slime that permeates their bodies, and this slime can be harvested to grant arrows an explosive fire property of their own.

This slime simply goes off when hit with any amount of kinetic force. stabbing it gently and squeezing it out won't set it off, but going full force most definitely will. Another thing is these slugs tend to live under rocks, only traveling during the night, and eat sand which they turn into slime. The slime they produce keeps them hydrated even in these harsh conditions..

Coat an arrow with it, or use a glass container with the stuff to sling, both work for generating the explosive force. The latter is significantly more powerful than the former though. For the former, a small iron jug is used so it can be applied when needed, or thrown as an improvised grenade.

Do not drop containers of the stuff, and always clean tools used to handle it afterward.


This design gives us explosive slime, which we don't need to keep alive. Well, other than breeding the slugs for their slime. And will be applied to our units as is, giving all the units the option to use it for their arrows and slings. Plus not needing a research action in the first place, as it produces a product for use.

[Doomblade187]

We can knit them cute little toad sweaters.

[TricMagic]

Viability, and knitting sweaters for something that is going to explode anyway?

[The Adversary]

Explosive Slug Slime

How powerful is this explosion?

As an aside, I'm having considerable difficulty imagining this being a useful defensive trait from the standpoint of evolution.

[Powder Miner]

Here’s that contest submission, finally actually written:

The Capital City of Alika
Seeing the clan structure and the varying animalistic features of the inhabitants of the Alikai Kingdom, one might assume that these clans correspond to differing animal types — so that one clan, for example, is a clan of toad-people, while another is a clan of desert foxes. This, however, would be completely incorrect. The clans and tribes of the Alikai Kingdom are old, even older than that ancient empire of the Mad King long faded away, and predate the animalistic form of the contemporary Alikai.

The clans and tribes are thus quite geographic in basis. Some of the clans are fully absent from the urban scene but for their traders and mercenaries, like the various desert clans that have sold their services as the Alikai Kingdom’s premier light infantry. Some of the clans, like the Karaca Clan, famous builders and maintainers of the aqueducts, are entirely urban, making up most of the population of the cities clustered around the oases and lakes of the desert. Others, like the Anirite, are starting to increasingly centralize in villages that have sprung up around the rising aqueducts (although the Anirite are notably powerful enough and large enough to straddle all of these categories). The end result, however, is that each section of land, each village in Alikai is usually the territory of a singular clan, with most cities having just a couple of tribes that make up its population, occasionally conflicting even in the more unified times of the Alikai Kingdom.

There are two major exceptions to this rule. One is the coast of Taratan — connected to the Alikai by the lightning rise and fall of the ancient empire of the Mad King and its aftermath rather than by any identity as one of the clans, Taratan identifies primarily as a city and region that happens to contains a people, rather than a tribe that happens to control a certain section of a land.

The other exception is the city of Alika, from which the Alikai Kingdom draws its name. Built around the largest and most fertile cluster of oases in the desert area now known as Alikai, the city of Alika is actually shockingly new, as is what we know as Alikai civilization itself. The existence of towns is of course not new, nor is this the first time it has been important to control — the Mad King kept the area tightly and mercilessly controlled, being a large source of resources for his wide-spanning empire. But the Mad King was an Anirite, and did not seek to divert the center of power away from the desert lands of his clan.

Alika has instead sprung up as the capital of a massive kingdom only around sixty to seventy years ago, as a result of many of the major clans (like the Anirite and Karaca) finally creating a peace deal and a coalition, finally ceasing the fighting around the oasis-cluster region (which had seen nominal control change between hands many, many times over the centuries). Serving a new role as a political center of a kingdom which has been only the second to fully unite the desert and Taratan, and as the source of the aqueducts that rose from the new internal peace, the separate towns of the oases swelled and formed into a wide-ranging urban agglomeration that is now known as Alika.

All Alikai settlements are fairly colorful, holding people of wildly different forms and animal types. But Alika, holding members of just about every major individual clan in the land, spread to different levels of sparseness over areas old and new, and expanding at a breakneck pace as the Alikai Kingdom becomes more and more important, is by far the most colorful place in the Kingdom. And it is this color, manifested in a dazzling array of animal people and mutated animals, that the Sacred Lunacy of the Alikai peoples manifests.

In the centers of economy present between the locations of the old towns, where large bazaars have sprung up, supplies and goods are carried along the stone roads in a variety of ways — shockingly giant animals with riders of their species’ traits trotting along the street, more mundane beasts of burden, and rather bewildered people on foot maneuvering their way through traffic, like the lithe woman with fennec ears, fur, and tail sinuously moving around various pack animals here, or the stout and most certainly fat camel man simply bulling through, confident in his ability to win in any collisions.

In the oases and lakes themselves, a desert pupfish woman, possessed of scales and gills as one of the few aquatic animal-people outside of Taratan, watches her still-less-mutated children play around a giant turtle, gentle if perhaps still unused to its new size. At the edge of the lake, a (saltwater) turtle-man all the way from that far off shore city sits there with his face in his hands, trying with some difficulty to commune with the (freshwater) turtle in that lake, wondering who thought it was a good idea to transform one of the turtles here rather than the ones in Taratan, and why. Above them, a recently-adult gecko man hangs upside down from the aqueducts, carefully replacing or repairing damaged bricks.

In one of the old town centers of the massive city, a reptilian showdown brews between a young and brash rural  clan snakeman and a member of the clan native to this particular old town, territorial because he feels that this area of the city is the rightful territory of his clan, which has been around for centuries longer than “Alika” existed, but also territorial because his spiny lizard instincts are screaming at him to start some shit. On the other side of the old-town area, a rabbit woman starts walking faster, trying not to look too hard at the Lunatic (both figurative and literal) trying his damnedest to make a toad violently explode.

In the desert outskirts of the city, one of the local garrisons —Anirite Akibara— conducts drills, practicing their movements and the forms of their strikes, wandering around the dunes unaware that they are about to enter a truly bizarre incident running across the poorly constructed burrow of a cranky teenaged meerkat girl, covered in sand and soil and none too happy to have her nap interrupted.


Of course, the funny thing about Sacred Lunacy and Alika is that the former is built on ties to concepts -- the bestial, the chaotic, and above all raw change. And it's for all three of these reasons that Alika is a place of magical power as well as the place where Alikai usage of Sacred Lunacy comes to the fore, turning the city into a place of intense suitability for rites of Lunacy, and a place where Lunatics in service to the Kingdom tend to congregate to work on their many strange projects.

Movements of beasts, vibrancy of life, and bestial states of mind of course abound in Alika, and probably abound there more than any other singular place int he world. Alika is, as described, a positive milieu of ways of life that run multiple gamuts -- from the urban dwellers of the old towns, to those recent arrivals still coming to terms with staying in one place, hard-honed instincts of hunters and scavengers coming to light in oft-inconvenient ways, and from hundreds of different animalistic bodies and mindsets. These all come together to create a distinct atmosphere -- the beastliness of the Alikai can be practically felt in the air. And that's before the full moon... when rules and laws have to be reshaped simply to work around the crescendo of bestial Lunacy that suffuses the city, madness and animalistic instincts combining into a half-magical half-mundane tempest of chaos, which the Alikai have still been struggling to learn to deal with.

Chaos and variance are also strong aspects of Alika. Alika is a patchwork quilt of a city thanks to its history -- spreading over a much larger area of land than even most urban clansfolk from outside Alika at first comprehend, the city is composed of many different kinds of places, from shocking undeveloped desert to little aquatic communities to economic centers to the hubs of engineering that are the aqueducts to shanties springing up around the edges of the city to military districts to old communities to lively expansions a couple of decades old. Where all of these things meet, there are clashes of the aforementioned lifestyles and of histories and attitudes, combining to make sure that many areas of Alika are quite unpredictable, back-and-forth cultural tugs of war that leave visitors confused as to what to do and what not to do at any given moments. Many Lunatics are known to quite happily dwell in these areas, letting the more chaotic areas of the city flow around them. Sometimes, Sacred Lunacy works well when you don't try to order your world, but instead to work among the unpredictability.

And change, oh, change... Alika and its history represent another one of the truly staggering lightning evolutions of the people of the desert. This change is more peaceful, of course, than the conquest of the Mad King (at least if you're Alikai), and its effects are somewhat less instant than his rites... but it is a truly worldshaking change nonetheless. Alika is at the very center of the monumental rise of the Alikai Kingdom -- it is the symbol of the rapid change from competition to cooperation. It is the starting place of the aqueducts now rising high in the desert and drawing an unavoidable stone web across Alikai. It is the birthplace of empire once again, the world's provincial status quo ripped away into war on unimaginable scale, conflict between titans. It is a collection of sleepy towns, turned into a metropolis that even the Mad King could scarcely have imagined.

The auspicious hours of the night in Alika are quite possibly the most auspicious there are, the moon shining over the chaotically beating heart of a new empire, inhabited by a stunningly diverse mixture of peoples whose connection to the moon and to the wild is core and powerful, built into transformations of body and mind. No ancient secret temple lies under Alika's sands. No ancient mage picked Alika as the site of a ritual -- the Mad King performed his rites in deserts, far away. It is the city of Alika itself --how it was created, who live in it, and what it represents-- that give Lunacy such curious power.

[Happerry]

Ok, that's a lot better, and more complete, then what I was pondering. Good work

...However...

For your event: Describe/Show the place within your empire that best exemplifies your chosen magical mastery.

While your thing is super good at describing our faction, I'm kinda worried it's... well, somewhat off center to the actual challenge.

[Powder Miner]

We don't really have a ton of stuff actually made with Sacred Lunacy yet besides all of the animal-people work related to it, and I'm really hesitant to just wildly make shit up unrelated to what we've done, since we could try to do it, fuck up with the design specifics, and get things that barely resemble whatever I'd describe. So I focused pretty heavily on what we do have --giant animals, research on animal mutation, and the animal people-- as our mastery of Sacred Lunacy, which is why I'm going out of my way to describe them so much for the latter half of our entry. The last paragraph basically sums up what I'm going for.

Edit: Looking more closely at the text around that, though, it does look like Adversary wanted something a little more discrete described... I'm not gonna throw out all the shit I just wrote but I think I'll tinker with that last paragraph and expand it into two that describe the whole "vibrancy of life" bit and the presence of so many transformed things close together as something that has to do with Lunacy magic. It'll be tomorrow, though.

[TricMagic]

Explosive Slug Slime

How powerful is this explosion?

As an aside, I'm having considerable difficulty imagining this being a useful defensive trait from the standpoint of evolution.

They are bright orange from the slime, and tend to stay in groups. Along with a somewhat high breeding rate mostly means that most animals in the desert can't actually eat them if they explode and damage the one who attacked them. Surviving Slugs then eat the one that attacked and the giblets left from the slug, which helps produce more of them.

For the arrow, bit like a grenade-blast, but less. For the jug, very much a grenade, if a bit more. For a bunch stored, like a giant bomb going off.

The slugs themselves tend towards bomb status. Main difference from regular bombs is that it is short ranged. Maybe TNT?

[The Adversary]

For the arrow, bit like a grenade-blast, but less. For the jug, very much a grenade, if a bit more. For a bunch stored, like a giant bomb going off.

The slugs themselves tend towards bomb status. Main difference from regular bombs is that it is short ranged. Maybe TNT?

So, amusing as it would be to let you try this and do the write-up, you might want to go back over the miad interactions.

[TricMagic]

Wouldn't that mean the no exploding toads either? As in no bombs whatsoever?

[The Adversary]

Wouldn't that mean the no exploding toads either? As in no bombs whatsoever?

That depends entirely on the velocity of the explosion. The slime you describe in the slugs appears entirely kinetic in its effects, acting much as an HE explosive does. The frogs toads appear to be primarily corrosive toxin dispensed by a low-yield boom, something more akin to throwing water into a pot of boiling oil than a stick of TNT detonating.

[Powder Miner]

technically, they’re toads

[The Adversary]

technically, they’re toads

I've amended this most critical of errors.