Mostly these are "reality worse than fiction" cases so a wiki just lays it all out for you.
Bam! PRIME CUTS AND NOTHING MUCH ELSE
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| Gnarly toenails, lice. Have nothing, will travel. |
Pay a creep (read: poor person) to live like a dirty, insane hermit inside your tailored garden estate. Mock both nature and basic humanity, for the lols.
Never let him out, or break character even though he knows that soap and taverns exist.
Extra points if he is a blood relative. or if he looks like yoda.
This is why garden gnomes exist. Horror. Horror. Horror.
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_hermit
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| Fuck you doors. |
What says "i'm richer than god, exquisitely cultured and deeply committed to madness" like building a palace or fortress as a monument to Palaces and Fortresses everywhere that does not function as either a place nor a fortress? (or, like, anything?).
TRICK QUESTION! the answer is "Victorian social welfare", didn't see that coming huh?
A 'Folly' is an extravagant architectural endevour that is designed to showcase wealth and taste at the cost of logic and or utility. Usually impossible Disney inspiring castles and towering monuments, they do sometimes appear as faux ruins or rustic shrines, all tailored for visual appreciation (on top of sheer mountains, rolling fields etc) with no regard for interior architecture and other inane nonsense of that ilk.
Before you curse their affluent bones, it should be noted that often these were raised as a mechanism to provide jobs and purpose during famines &etc especially the Potatoless Irish and their protestant work ethic. They didn't want to take practical workmen off their USEFUL jobs however, so they just took untrained farmers and overqualified (unemployed) architects and poured money on it until the pitchforks went away! Presumably while sitting alone in their chambers thinking "oh god when will they invent RPG's with which to vent off my fantastical delusions and wads of money."
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly
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| Pictured: not even nearly as cool as a flaming war pig. |
Not only a great Black Sabbath song, but a great way to win a war and make terrible bacon.
I went a bit long on the whole Follies thing so lets keep this simple:
1. Pigs or equivalent
2. War
3. *?
4. Profit
*fire, straw + tar, warpaint, siege elephants, pots + pans,
The wiki is short and does not mention the passages in S.Tzu's groundbreaking exposé "art of war" in which they really get into tarring pigs, rolling them in hay, applying demonic red warpaint and driving them, on fire, with pots and pans into the enemy camp at 3AM.
Imagine waking up, tent on fire, hells bells clanging, screams, and a freaking literal flaming demon boar comes at you. Pink pork piggies are a very modern invention if you are interested, we got rid of the matted fur, hard muscle and tusks.
I'm more of a goat man myself, imagine the vertical space a wave of 12 to 18 flaming enraged goats would fill in a long winding dungeon passage. imagine.
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_pig
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| Imagine trying to holster that badboy. |
Love the stunners. the first stun weapon in Scifi only appeared in 1941... that took a while!
Later..."Ms. Bujold points out a drawback to stunners: if that is all you are armed with, you can be killed by an unarmed mob. The mob will figure that the worst you can do is put them to sleep. So they will swarm you and eventually stomp you into the dirt. The mob would be more hesitant if you were' armed with something lethal."
A Congealer just fries a a few blobs of blood and lets you stroke out a few hours later when they clog up your brain.
I have something like this in Gamma World, but it just jellies up your blood a little causing initiative loss, some stat negatives and some damage as you cough up blood and your heard freaks out.
That and a defoliator which is basically a sandblaster laser that strips half a mill of everything- like most of your skin and you bleed out for a few rounds. Extra comedic on feathers and fur!
There are a few rail-gun type things but nothing as cool as my patented Gamma Gauss Blunderbuss which is just a 'dirty' railgun that you can stuff with any old metal garbage and point at something you want metal garbage embedded all over. Gauss can elicit magnetic fields even in non ferrous metals which is cool. Also its a freakin space blunderbuss that shoots anything metal!
In all honesty I found this site trying to locate a tract on a Ringworld by Larry Niven concerning a sliver gun. His world had a lot of hi tech multi use, sustainable "survival" gear like a flashlight that you could keep focusing through torchlight, sunburn, blister etc until it was a straight up laser.
My favorite, a flechette gun, just shaved and propelled slivers of whatever old garbage you threw in it which seemed practical and also hack-able (shoot wood- nonleathal, durasteel- lethal, bananna skins- hilarious.).
Also an addictive orgasm gun used to subdue violents and subjugate the masses!
Speaking of survival, there is a nice section on primitive scifi weapons such as blow-darts (Innocuous weapon with a silent strike. Couple this with hitech chemicals, piano wire darts, flachettes etc. possible compressed gas upgrades, must i go on...)
Again leveraging chemical weapons is the vortex cannon which fires directed smoke rings. This can be bought as a childrens toy today and requires nothing more than a diaphragm, a container with a hinged end and a very toxic gas to put in it. That and no wind, but this is space station territory.
Props to this site!
- http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/sidearmexotic.php
