Velvet Inks and Crystal Fires: July 2026

"Before the Gates there sat

On either side a formidable shape;

The one seem'd Woman to the waste, and fair,

But ended foul in many a scaly fould

Voluminous and vast, a Serpent arm'd

With mortal sting: about her middle round

A cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing bark'd

With wide Cerberian mouths full loud, and rung

A hideous Peal: yet, when they list, would creep,

If aught disturb'd thir noyse, into her woomb,

And kennel there, yet there still bark'd and howl'd,

Within unseen. Farr less abhorrd than these

Vex'd Scylla bathing in the Sea that parts

Calabria from the hoarce Trinacrian shore:

Nor uglier follow the Night-Hag, when call'd

In secret, riding through the Air she comes

Lur'd with the smell of infant blood, to dance

With Lapland Witches, while the labouring Moon

Eclipses at thir charms."

A guest post for Josie's Hex setting.

A slaad's attempt at human features

The fuming seas of Limbo rest deep below in the atrament, underneath the gelid antisun and the surface of the underside. Among its constantly-shifting peaks and valleys sit the sprawling, warring domains of the slaad, also known as demons or devils. For millennia they've meddled with and terrorized the peoples of the underside, shaping countless bizarre species of animal and humanoid alike. The few times they have breached the Interdark, the World Above has trembled with fear. But now, with the power of rational inquiry and materialist analysis, we have finally become able to accurately report just what these bizarre creatures are like.

Above all else, slaad are master sculptors of the flesh. Biology is their delight and plaything. Though they have the capacity to look like almost anything, they have a strong preference for forms resembling amphibians, proto-reptiles, and bony fish; tetrapodomorpha freshly crawled out of the seas. In their eyes everything else is just experimentation. The sole exception are human features, which are useful tools for delicate manipulation (both hands and faces can be used for delicate manipulation). The degree to which slaad adopt parts of the human varies wildly, but as a general rule they get better at maintaining them in not-too-horribly-uncanny equilibrium with age.

A slaad extending its human face for diplomacy :)

Slaad, however, are just as accomplished technicians of the soul as they are artists of the body. While thought, memory, logic, and other aspects of the mind are beyond them (in fact, even the most intelligent of slaad struggles mightily to understand theory of mind), they are experts at adjusting passions, emotions, and perceptions. What happens to the soul after death is still an unknown to the science of the Hex, but the slaad love to boast about claiming them. Any beings who they've meddled with directly, they like to say, are imprinted onto them, and their souls whisked away to be put to all sorts of nebulous use in their fortresses in Limbo. If true, this would be revolutionary for the scientific understanding of the soul, but the slaad guard these secrets jealously, and so far the depths of Limbo remain unplumbed.

Instead of a brain, the slaad's soul inscribes itself directly into its body on a gnarled hunk of cartilaginous tissue called a slaadstone. These range in size from anywhere between a fist to an entire person curled up in a ball. The slaadstone keeps their physical form (relatively) coherent and is the organ from which they project their crown. Their crown is contiguous with the body; if a human can project their crown outside them, then a slaad instead grows to fit it. The shape of the slaadstone, when mapped and converted to a mathematical transformation, is the slaad's true name. Every diabolist is also an expert in topology.

Fire on the Velvet Horizon

The coloration of a slaadstone determines their maturation and is where color categorization of slaad comes from (although of course their outsides can be any shade they wish). At first, it only corresponds to how they reproduce. Red slaad oviposit eggs into a living victim, which later hatch into baby blue slaad; blue slaad all carry a virulent disease which slowly transforms victims into red slaad. Red and blue slaad are totally random in their behavior, and are where slaad get their reputation for being animalistic and inscrutable.

When a slaad figures out how to consciously expand and shape its crown, the slaadstone grows additional green nodules, and it loses the ability to reproduce. It can take a slaad days or millennia to accomplish this, depending entirely on random chance. Green slaad are beginning to become able to possess longer-term plans and goals, and to communicate clearly to non-slaad. However, they're still strongly carried by whim, and struggle to follow complex chains of cause and effect, especially when it comes to the psychology of non-slaad.

Dark Souls 2

When a green slaad becomes able to retract its crown at will, the entire slaadstone turns grey. Before this stage, if a slaad grew an appendage or organ that later became unwanted it'd have to tear it off of itself. This stage is where you begin to see more advanced interpretations and uses of human parts, as well as ability to stick to a single course of action, working towards goals years or even decades in the making.

After this, the slaadstone no longer changes color, but it continues to slowly grow. What exactly makes a slaad lord a lord rather than just an especially powerful grey slaad is still highly debated, but one of the most commonly accepted definitions is that it's when they become able to metastasize to get around their ability to affect their crown outside their bodies. They can shed clouds of tiny particulate pseudo-slaadstones which they can manipulate as extensions of themselves. One of the rarest and most feared natural disasters on the underside of the Hex is devilfog, where great cloudbanks of the stuff drift down to the earth and expose whole towns and cities to the dangers of demonic possession.

At this point, slaad also develop and cultivate obsessive pseudo-lawful schemas which they follow, and force lesser slaad to conform to. While these do form a method to their madness, it's important to keep in mind that these are adopted entirely because it pleases them. Most slaad lords discard their schemas completely and take on new, wildly different ones every couple centuries during fits of pique. Even more stable ones are prone to frequent overhauls and alterations to their mental models.

Slaad lord self-descriptions, in their language, contain recurring combinations of tones which describe their current model of desires and states of being. These tones are consistent between slaad lords, and can be simplified into human speech to help create rough categories for their behaviors. These categories include but are certainly not limited to:

   - Jubilexes, which try to rid themselves of (pseudo-)conscious thought and return to a blessed vegetative state
- Zuggtmoys, who strive to achieve radical mutual empathic understanding with other beings, especially non-slaad
   - Grazzts, explores of the far reaches of physical pleasure
   - Lolths, who delight in studying the far links and ripples of dependent origination, and who experiment with it via far-reaching manipulation
   - Orcuses, melancholic misanthropes who want everything around them to reflect their own self-percieved suffering
   - Frazurbluus, who are obsessed with simulacra, and nesting, merging, and splitting them
   - Yeenoghus, who are fascinated by how people, things, and systems degrade and fall into ruin, and encouraging said degradation in interesting ways

Berserk

Finally, to end this seminar, let's discuss slaad-related beings.

First and most obvious, of course, are elves, which possess souls but no minds (as opposed to the modronic-angelic dwarves, which possess minds but no souls). However, elves are too complex of a topic to cover adequately here, and must be discussed at a later date.

"Chuul" is a blanket term the slaad use for their creations. While by this definition nearly every native living being on the underside is, in some small or large way, chuul, this term is most often used for non-reproducing biologic creatures which serve as tools/thralls of the slaad. Still, it's very vague, and describes everything from sessile organ banks to tremendous warbeasts.

Finally, lemures are slaads which have had their slaadstones removed from them for extended periods of time, and who are no longer able to maintain any physical coherence at all. Lemures are semi-liquid and can melt and pool into each other, sometimes forming whole rivers and lakes of flesh. When a slaadstone is dropped back in, the lemure or lemures quickly reconstitutes back into a proper slaad. Fortunately, the amount of lemure biomass that a slaad can incorporate back into itself is limited by the size of the slaadstone.