Sometimes you just need a big ol' table for spooky art pieces.
Nightmare Art (d40)
d40 | Medium | Art |
1 | Glass Sculpture | A translucent glass spider. It moves when you’re not looking. |
2 | Written symphony | Slowly dissociates anyone who listens. Listen all the way through and lose your soul. |
3 | Optical Illusion | The shadow of a man that stalks you. Visible around corners, attached to nothing. |
4 | Clay sculpture | Bust depicting drowning person. Impossibly lifelike. |
5 | Embroidery | Dolls trapped in spider cocoons. Spiders made of silk farm them. |
6 | Doll | Uncannily lifelike. Feels like touching a miniature person, but it bends and twists in ways no person should when pressure is applied. |
7 | Doll | Perfectly realistic in nearly every way except the face, which is disturbingly cartoonish and out of place. |
8 | Rolled Scroll | “Trapped”: Picture of a horrified and warped man rolled up into claustrophobic space. Tucked into a crack in the wall. |
9 | Silver Globe | “Moon”: Replica of the spherical moon, as seen from earth. The entire unseen side contains a horrible face. |
10 | Steel Sculpture | An 8ft tall person made of knives. |
11 | Skeleton | “Circle”: Real skeleton warped into eating itself: feet bent backward and into ribcage. |
12 | Skeleton | “Needles”: Skeleton upon an altar. Thousands of small rusted steel needles piercing bones from within and piled below ribcage. |
13 | Tapestry | Vantablack tapestry. Cannot see the individual threads. |
14 | Embroidery | “Swallow”: A face of monstrous gape. Mouths where every orifice is. |
15 | Book | “Early Memory”: Fiction that subtly manipulates reader into having book implant early childhood memories. |
16 | Leather Sculpture | “Wind”: A pillar of hides, twisting around into a spire. Eyeless animal faces throughout. |
17 | Taxidermy | Perfect taxidermy of a man. Frighteningly still. The eyes are glass. Skin is real. Examination reveals he did this to himself. |
18 | Wind Chimes | Produces the sound of a woman crying to help when wind blows past. Faster the wind the louder it gets. Walking by triggers quiet cries. |
19 | Song | “Empty House”: Written in an intuitive but difficult to decipher method. Singing the song causes one to lose all their teeth. |
20 | Steel Sword | “Backbiter”: Super flexible sword whips around and stabs user upon a thrust. |
21 | Glass Dagger | “Trophy”: Various internal facets capture the pained images of everyone who’s touched the dagger. |
22 | Iron Sculpture | Four iron shapes. In the darkness appearing as people with their hands up in the air. Light shown on them and they noisily collapse. |
23 | Pit Trap | “Vore”: A soft dirt hole in the ground. A pit of acid at the bottom. Claw marks, blood stains, and loose fingernails embedded in the walls. |
24 | Mural | A person smeared across 60ft of wall. The silhouette can be clearly read from either end. They are screaming. |
25 | Preserved Vivisection | “Scattered”: A person vivisected into seven glass sagittal sides. The organs still beat with life. The eyes still move. |
26 | Skeleton | “Inseparable”: Fifteen skeletons sewn together with steel thread into an incoherent blob. Half the threads are loose, the other half pierce bone. |
27 | Food | A wonderful brothy umami gelatin, perfectly preserved in an airtight iron pot. Laced with perfectly hidden glass powder. Will shred the insides of eaters. |
28 | Mirror | “Age”: Warped mirror depicts subject aged and ugly. |
29 | Iron Mechanism | Wind up clockwork box. Produces an ungodly loud clap of thunder that will deafen anyone nearby at a random interval. |
30 | Glasses | Produces an effect of vertigo and the sense that one stands before an endlessly deep precipice. |
31 | Cloth Blindfold | Lidless eyes painted on the outside. Wrapping around one’s eyes makes one see ghosts everywhere. If they see you seeing them, they’ll try and possess your body. |
32 | Essay | A political treatise. Instructions create a self-fulfilling prophecy for governmental corruption. |
33 | Porcelain Mask | “Greed”: A grinning obese face with a bird-beak nose. When worn allows one to smell money. When removed steals the wearer’s face. |
34 | Obsidian Collar | An internally spiked collar. Like a Chinese finger trap. Wearer in constant pain, can’t sleep. |
35 | Spell Scroll | Casting causes chronic body dysmorphia and desire for self-mutilation. |
36 | Fancy High Heel | A comfortable-looking shoe. A hidden pressure-activated blade in the heel stabs a bone stiletto through the foot. The blade branches out in a tree pattern, preventing it from being removed. |
37 | Candle | A candle in the shape of a smiling woman. Wicks on the head and both hands. When it burns down the expression contorts to one of total agony as she melts. |
38 | Poem | A strange collection of consonants in a offbeat rhyming scheme. Reading it out loud gives those just out of distance the impression that you’re saying something horrible about them. |
39 | Carpet | A white carpet of intricate geometric patterns. Touching it with bare skin gives the impression of newborns’ hair. |
40 | Metal Sphere | “Nightmare Box”: Unlocking puzzle traps user in a nightmare dimension indefinitely. Can only be opened from the outside. |
My players are visiting a vampires house and I'm STEALING these
ReplyDeleteI should invent a new tax for big tables like this: steal a table, you must contribute X entries to it.
Delete41 - malachite incense burner. Using it summons a (quite put out) green dragon.
ReplyDelete42 - hurdy gurdy. Playing it causes the person within earshot who last told a lie to dance until they collapse in exhaustion.
43 - painting. Innocent souls who look upon it see a grisly scene of their own death. Anyone who has committed murder sees a pleasant glade.
This feels like a Magnus Archives episode.
ReplyDeleteAaaa! Within 10 years, perhaps more, I will also do this. Perhaps never. This table is more than good to cover that possibility though.
ReplyDelete