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?

Colossal Beast - Ti'an the Celestial Dragon (Promptober 2025 #24)

Ti'an, Celestial Dragon
Mythical creator of Beneterra

One ancient myth from the Yamagura Empire tells of an ancient and massive dragon sacrificing itself to create the world of Beneterra. The myth gives the dragon a name, Ti'an, literally meaning "heaven" or "sky" (though modern translations break the name into two characters roughly meaning "bloody paste". Linguistic evolution. Go figure.). The myth refers to Ti'an as a Celestial Dragon from that point on. Ti'an supposedly has scales made of the purest metals: platinum, mithril, and adamantine, and its body glows with starlight and holy fire.

The myth starts with the Celestial Dragon flying across the universe, creating life in its wake as it travels. It weeps comets and breathes dust and fire to ignite the stars in the heavens. Sometimes it hovers and watches what it created, and most times its creations die out in short order, but mostly it moves on to the next patch of sky that craves more than emptiness. Ti'an eventually tired of its journey after millennia of seeding the heavens, and it decided to sacrifice itself in a final concentrated burst of creative energy. It found a warm, welcoming, yellowish sun, then curled up and slept until it expired, laying the seeds of life and intelligence in its own corpse.