u/CorneliusFeatherjaw

As work on the first issue of my zine, Monster Closet, draws near to completion, I thought I would share some concepts I had for adventures in upcoming issues so anyone thinking of sending in submissions would have an idea what kind of themes I'm looking for (though of course feel free to send in any crazy idea you have and I'll figure out something to use it for). I have only come up with titles for some of these, and some of them I might decide to make standalone adventures instead of part of the zine. For those of you who haven't followed this project, Monster Closet features an adventure in each issue which makes use of monsters, magic items, spells, races, classes, and other rules additions submitted by readers. If you are interested in sending in submissions, you can direct message me or email me at monsterclosetzine@yahoo.com.

Adventure Ideas:

• Murdering Ghost: A pastiche of The Son of Frankenstein, in which a player character inherits a barony but upon arrival finds the villagers hostile due to the character's predecessor having created a flesh golem which went on a rampage. Meanwhile, mysterious murders are being carried out throughout the barony and agents of some dark power are scheming to steal the previous baron's notes from the players so they can build their own golem.
• An adventure set in a temple of Tiamat hidden in a dragon graveyard.
• Empire of Nightmares: All across the city people are falling into a sleep they cannot be roused from. Nightmare creatures have found a way to expand their reach beyond a single mind, with each person affected by the sleeping curse adding territory and power to the creatures. The players must venture into the nightmare realm to stop the threat once and for all.
• It's In the Walls: An old manor house is plagued by strange occurrences. The players investigate and discover that a figure from the owner's past he thought long dead has created a surreal pocket dimension within the house's walls from which to plot revenge on him and his entire family.
• Seven Days in the Screaming City: A planetar has been sent by the gods to destroy the Screaming City, a horrific theocratic dictatorship run by an insane cleric who has anyone who defies his will transformed into living fleshy architecture to deny them the possibility of rest in the afterlife, as he holds the gods themselves to be too merciful. The players have seven days to do what they want in the city before its destruction, whether that be attempting to save a handful of its citizens or merely loot the place, but getting out in time isn't as easy as getting in.
• The Shopping Mall of the Damned: A more comedic adventure. The players stumble across the subterranean Shopping Mall of the Damned, a marketplace of all kinds of evil wares frequented by fiends and monsters of all types run by the lower planar Ninefold Nexus Corporation.
• A murder mystery whose suspects have all been placed in a magical sleep, forcing players to piece together the mystery by delving Pyschonauts-style into each suspect's subconscious and deciphering the symbolism therein while trying not to get killed by the surreal inhabitants of these dream worlds.
• The players find a portal to a demiplane containing a vast, Escher-esque city hanging over a bottomless abyss. Warring tribes of builders fight a religious war over the correct interpretation of the blueprints and waiting for the day the building inspectors will come to reward them, not knowing they are the descendants of workers contracted by an infernal corporation which never intended to uphold its end of the bargain as it only started the project as a write-off for Hell's tax code!
• A strange ship without any visible crew pulls into port. Investigating it reveals it to be merely a piece of a much larger vessel sailing a sea between worlds and occasionally partially intersecting with them. The inside is a non-Euclidean maze of decks and holds, populated by lost mariners from across the multiverse, some rooms even being miniature oceans with their own ships sailing on them within the ship.
• A pastiche of the film version of Masque of the Red Death starring Vincent Price.
• The Frozen Cathedral: An adventure in a temple of Countess Inald, mad goddess of Law who wishes to freeze the multiverse.

Backgrounds

Jeweler: Bonus to Identifying Jewelery

Athlete: +1 to Strength and Agility

Blacksmith: Bonus to appraising weapons

Salesman: +1 Charisma

Miner: Detect secret passages, sloping floors, etc.

Animal Trainer: Animals friendlier to you

Layabout: No benefit

Ascetic: Can go longer without food

Fallen Noble: +50 Starting Gold

Quirks

Antisocial: -1 Charisma

Psychotic: Always attack

Technical Pacifist: Can only attack in self-defense

Ambidexterous: Can dual-wield

Ditzy: Intelligence fluctuates randomly

Witch: Can cast level one spells for free.

Sceptic: +5% magic resistance

Attractive: +1 Charisma

One-Eyed: -1 To Hit

Sneaky: Reduced chance of random encounters.

This was part of a longer dream, but there was an episode of A Series of Unfortunate Events on Netflix that I hadn't seen before. I didn't actually watch it in the dream but somehow knew just from looking at the teaser image what the entire premise of it was. In the episode, the Baudelaires end up snowed in together with Count Olaf in a cabin in the mountains that has some connection to Olaf's past, and are forced to work together with him when they begin being stalked by a killer wearing the same creepy mask that Olaf's older siblings or cousins used to terrify him with as a child. There was a scene where Count Olaf was teaching Clause and Violet to fire a bow and arrow, and another where Count Olaf was staring pensively at the actual mask from his childhood while in the background he was unknowingly being watched through the window by the masked killer.

I am about to send my computer in to be repaired, and naturally I am going to have to backup everything on an external device. I have had to do this many times before for other computers and it is always a pain to have to hunt through and try not to miss any files, so I would like to know is there a way to automatically backup every file and what way would be the best to do that? I currently have 209.1 GB used.

Weirdly, I had only two sleep paralysis episodes years apart as a kid and then none for years afterwards, only for them to start happening again recently, though still months apart.

My first sleep paralysis episode was still the most vivid one. I heard a creaking noise coming from my desk and looked to see a jagged face carve its way out of the wood. The legs of the desk then began to move and it walked across to a glowing circle with glowing runes floating above it which had appeared on the floor, then did a pirouette. Despite the ridiculousness of it I was terrified.

In my second episode, I heard a crash and woke to see a huge, shadowy figure facing toward the wall several feet away from me in my room, apparently more interested in something there than in eating me. In the morning I found that a poster I had on my wall had fallen to the floor and the frame was shattered, which I thought at the time was proof a monster really was in my room, but now of course I know it was just the frame crashing that woke me up and caused me to hallucinate in the first place.

The next ones were all recent enough I have dream journal entries for them, which I will reproduce below.

2/11/2024: I wake up and feel as though something large and hairy is holding my right arm, but cannot turn my head to see what it is.  I imagine huge, gray, hairy arms wrapping around my arm.  I hear a voice whisper in my ear, “Lasagna,” and after a pause it says, “Help me! Help me! Help me! Help me! Help! Help!” I realize the feeling is actually just my blanket wrapped around my arm, and am able to fall back asleep.

6/21/2025: It starts with me hearing a sound like a long claw slowly scratching the wall every few seconds, coming from the wall opposite my bed.  I start to get scared but keep reminding myself it is just a bird or something outside, but the fear never entirely goes away.  My top blanket falls off into the floor, leaving me cold and exposed to whatever it is.  I try to pull it back over me, but I can’t move, which doesn’t clue me in that this is sleep paralysis, as I just think I’m too tired to move.  This situation continues for what feels like an hour, but I never really panic despite my underlying uneasiness.  Inspired by my dream involving stuffed animals and my current predicament, I start noodling on the idea of a tabletop RPG campaign where the players are children using their stuffed animals to protect them from things that go bump in the night.  I come up with a name for the creature making the scratching sound, though I have now forgotten it, and come up with the idea that some children may make a Faustian bargain with it to protect them from bullies in waking life.  I am eventually able to move my arm (or my leg?) slightly, and it instantly dispels the paralysis.  The noise stops and I find that my blanket has been right where they were to begin with all along, and it is only now that I realize it was sleep paralysis.

After this episode I go back to sleep and have a dream about having sleep paralysis! In the dream, it is late in the afternoon, possibly dusk, and I am one of only a few customers at a restaurant that keeps changing between Chik-fil-a and Burger King.  I go up to the register to order but then realize I am not supposed to have salt with my allergy and start scanning the menu to try to find something to replace my fries with, but the screens keep replacing the menu with an ad every time I look at them.  I finally find the static menu screens on the wall behind the counter, but I can’t get my eyes to focus on them.  I suddenly have a craving for the (breakfast?) restaurant I ate at in Murfreesboro in a dream several years ago, but then I remember they have fries too so I can’t go there.  I finally make my order and sit at a table to wait for it, but I start to doze off while sitting there and wake up having sleep paralysis (or else I try to tell someone else later in the dream about my real life sleep paralysis incident preceding this dream but end up retconning it into being something that happened at the restaurant within the dream?).  It now seems to me that I am the only person in the restaurant, the lights of which have now been turned off, and I start to hear the same scratching sound from my real life sleep paralysis getting closer and closer before I finally snap out of it and have my food.  Throughout the rest of the dream, and possibly some other ones later in the night, I will occasionally tell characters about my experience with sleep paralysis, which I always say happened in a Burger King.

8/7/2025: It begins by me feeling what feels like someone sitting down on the foot of my bed, which for some reason I assume is my dad. However, I then feel the weight creep up over my body like something is crawling over my bed, and I hear what sounds like whoever it is saying something but it is too muffled to make out the words. I panic as I remember I am in my apartment, not at home, and no one should be able to get into the locked room. I can make out the voice more clearly now and am able to tell it is not saying anything, but just gibbering with a soft voice that sounds slightly staticky. I try to yell, “Get off me!” but nothing will come out. Finally, I realize it is sleep paralysis and concentrate on moving one finger, which ends it immediately.

8/13/2025: I wake up to a sleep paralysis incident in which I hear what sounds like my mom's voice from outside my door telling me it is time to get up. I hear the door opening and feel a presence enter the room, but I look and see that the door is still closed, no one is here, and I can still hear my mom's voice muffled by the door. Suddenly, I feel my sheet, which I have been sleeping with it over my face to keep out light, being pressed down over my face and body with suffocating tightness by invisible hands. I realize this must be sleep paralysis and wiggle my finger, but it begins again after only a few moments. This makes me worry it isn’t sleep paralysis, but in fact a real supernatural being attacking me. I have to keep wiggling my finger every few seconds to make it let go of the sheet so I don’t smother, but I am afraid to take the sheet off and leave my room because I am beginning to suspect that what I thought was my mom is something mimicking her to lure me into pulling down my sheet, which somehow is protecting me. ”Mom's” voice becomes more jumbled the closer attention I pay to it and I can tell it is not saying real words at all, just making sounds that vaguely sound like my mom calling for me if I don’t listen hard. I finally convince myself that it really is just sleep paralysis and begin to pull the sheet off my face, dreading what will happen if I’m wrong. As I uncross my feet, the whole episode instantly ends.

4/22/2026: I don’t remember now what the details are of the dream, but I wake up from it but am – unknowingly at this point – in a sleep paralysis episode. Despite in reality being in my apartment it looks to me like I am in the bed in my parents’ room, which does not strike me as odd. I am thinking about some odd supposed factoid I don’t remember the details of that is left over from my dream but I still think is real involving an actor and gloves (?), but then I realize that my blanket has somehow been turned inside out, which baffles me. As I try to fix it I realize that it is actually just folded down halfway, but I am now scared because I know I didn’t do that so someone else must have. My hand won’t move beyond the edge of the sheet, and I suddenly hear a sound like blood rushing in my ears that gets louder and louder as I become more and more frightened, before suddenly I am free from sleep paralysis and see I am actually in my apartment and my blanket is in fact pulled up to my neck.