Dreams/Nightmares (Promptober 2025 #27)

Everlight City

He last worked at the job he loved seven months and ten days ago. Fat, dumb, and happy pushing research data around the institution, he had plans of retiring from there in another decade or so. The new administration decided to throw a wrench into human health research, and he was one of several casualties that fateful Monday in April. The institution furloughed him for six months, as if continuing to have a job that he could not legally work on and would not get paid for was anything other than a cruel joke meant to crush hope.

The weeks since then stretched long with application after application sent to an uncaring employment shredder whose output got piped to /dev/null. His long career of figuring out how to move sensitive data efficiently to where it would do the most good apparently doesn't matter when he thinks he's near the end of his usefulness. The pandemic that kept coming back and kept carving away pieces focus from him every time it infected him didn't help matters.

Found Footage (Promptober 2025 #26)

FT Espresso Addiction

Text transcript and video analysis of the free trader Espresso Addiction's video log, flagged by Captain Vivek "V" Valdez with the note "TROUBLE SOURCE FOUND?" Transcription by Elysium System Defense Lt. Octavia Drusus serving on board the patrol boat Interdictor during the mandatory post-boarding quarantine period of a derelict craft, currently orbiting Elysium-7, aka Stygia.

Main Cargo Bay camera, stationary, wide angle. Regular flashing power lights on cargo containers and door controls provide the only illumination. Audio consists of the background hum of life support systems during a jump.

Door to Central Corridor slides open. Lights come on. Two sophonts, one human (ID: Valdez, Vivek; Role: Captain and Navigator), one aslan (ID: Raka'oh; Role: Security Chief and Gunner) enter.

Valdez: -why I pay you, Raka! You need to at least look at the cargo before it's loaded. It's a ship security thing, right? Can't have hijackers hiding in a crate and smothering us in our sleep, right?

Daggerheart Passive Rolls

NOTE: Stream of consciousness game development log follows.

I mentioned this before, but I'm slowly stewing a hack to Daggerheart to give Traveller vibes with a more sword-and-laser system. One of the big gaps is skills: Traveller is all about skills, and Daggerheart doesn't have them at all. So I've been mulling that over in my spare (ha!) time. And then I had a brain wave in the shower.

Skills are basically Experiences with free invocation. So they start at +2 but can grow. Or maybe they're binary and grant Advantage on the roll. I'll figure out the mechanical bonus later. It's definitely worth a different category for skills on the character sheet, to keep them separate from Experiences.

Promptober's On Hold

Current Mental State

I have 6 prompts left to go for the month, and 2 days to get them done. I'm knee deep in an editing gig, I'm driving my mother to surgery and a follow-up appointment over the next 2 days, and it's Halloween. Suffice to say I'm not finishing before the end of the month unless I really phone it in. And I'd rather wait to produce something decent than hit an arbitrary deadline with creations that fall short of my own expectations.

Cranking out 25 of 31 prompts isn't a bad thing, but it's not the full challenge. Still, that's 25 things that didn't exist before I signed on. I'm mostly sticking with a fantasy setting, which makes some of the prompts more challenging. I'm probably going with another piece of futuristic fiction for Found Footage, though. Stay tuned.

Cryptid - Not-Deer (Promptober 2025 #25)

Artist Rendering of Not-Deer

Appalachia holds a whole host of mysteries, but I find stories about the Not-Deer most disturbing.

It has no fear of humans and will approach them. It moves strangely, as if it's still learning to walk on its deer legs. Its eyes point forward like a predator and not to the sides like an actual deer. Its limbs stretch longer than a deer's should. Its body rounds out in a barrel shape. It has the air of intelligence about it.

True to form for cryptids, sightings usually occur at night in solitary situations by people too freaked out to open the camera on their phone. Some report being chased up a tree after they tried to scare the Not-Deer away. It stood on its hind legs attempting to gore the person in the tree, but couldn't quite reach.

So what is this creature?