The Jek

A marrow river runs through these Jek hills.

The Jek inhabited this land when it was young. Identifiably Jek objects show up in the deepest mines of every country on this continent. Their ancient trinkets wash ashore on beaches and the shores of the deepest lakes. When Karanok, the great mountain, erupted and concealed the sun for a year, fire-impervious Jek statues were carried up amidst the pyroclastic flow. In short, we know that the Jek have existed for a long, long time. But they are absent from recorded history. Why?

According to the priests (who asked the gods) the Jek were driven beneath the earth by a storm that did not end for a thousand years. The priests do not say what happened in the deep tunnels. But the wizards do: the Jek found and paid obeisance to strange spirits: Cave Owl, Moon Centipede, and others. Perhaps they worshipped these spirits before they were driven below, and the gods sent the never-ending storm to punish them for it. Perhaps not. Did the spirits make the Jek mad and evil, or was it the other way around?

Jek initiates perform an unknown ritual.

The Jek revere their shamans. Without the shamans, the Jek would starve. At some point during their time below, a spirit taught the Jek shamans to vomit a vast, roiling pool of edible putrescence. The Jek subsisted on this for thousands of years. Now, they cannot digest anything else. When a shaman announces that the feast is immanent, it is a cause for great celebration: entire tribes will organize their receptacles to catch the revolting spew, dancing and singing with gladness.

Entire rivers of a similarly emitted (though less nutritious) substance course over the Jek lands, most resembling oily eddies of pale, liquescent bone marrow.

As a people, the Jek appear to be disfigured albinos. Their skins are covered with sores.  Many Jek lack fully-formed faces. Their shamans always wear masks. Beneath these masks, the shamans have no discernible features at all. Despite this, they are capable of respiring, speech, devouring the bodies of deceased humans for their own shamanic potions (but never anything else), and expelling the questionable foodstuff mentioned above.

Most Jek live in shallow caves or in the trunks of great trees, though there are a few Jek cities. These cities are mobile: every structure in them is carried or dragged by either the Jek or some sort of creature cultivated by them. Their greatest city, Tlel Washke, is built atop a vast stone slab that is chained to the towering reanimated corpse of Washke, who once styled himself to be the king of giants. Tlel Washke is dragged across the ground by this festering ex-king, following a nonlinear path according to the Jeks' inscrutable wishes.

The Jek do not have much in the way of appreciable metallurgy. They weave baskets and clothes, carve statues and render them indestructible, make amulets, and build strange dwellings from wood and stone and cloth.  The shamans produce a certain number of finishing goods by devouring humans and then regurgitating that material in a new form. For example, Jek swords consist of impossibly intricate human scrimshaw. A tribe preparing for war will feed dozens of prisoners to their shamans, each day, while those shamans laboriously vomit up sword after sword with seemingly no limit to the amount of material they can store inside their person. The Jek do not possess a written language, nor do they seem capable of learning one.

Near Jek, things are not as they should be. Their presence causes dreams to superimpose over reality. Large groups of Jek often appear to have the same face. Water droplets rain upwards from pools and rivers into the yawning sky. Birds cry out dire warnings in diverse languages.

A Jek emissary might appear as your best friend, you, a deceased pet from your childhood, or a horrid shimmering image in your dreams. The message relayed will not make sense. However, the Jek's intent will be obvious: hostility.

The Shadow of the Torturer

“I was sitting there, as I said, and had been for several watches, when it came to me that I was reading no longer. For some time I was hard put to say what I had been doing. When I tried, I could only think of certain odors and textures and colors that seemed to have no connection with anything discussed in the volume I held. At last I realized that instead of reading it, I had been observing it as a physical object. The red I recalled came from the ribbon sewn to the headband so that I might mark my place. The texture that tickled my fingers still was that of the paper in which the book was printed. The smell in my nostrils was old leather, still wearing the traces of birch oil. It was only then, when I saw the books themselves, when I began to understand their care.”

His grip on my shoulder tightened. “We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with the thickest gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations—books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them.”

“We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate wafers of white jade, ivory, and shell; books too whose leaves are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings on a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here—though I can no longer tell you where—no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books than the library itself does. Though a harlot might dangle it from one ear for an ornament, there are not volumes enough in the world to counterweight the other.”

― Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer

The Book Of Horrid Births

Spontaneous generation is a nonmagical, scientific fact.  If the correct ingredients are combined under auspicious circumstances, a living creature will result.  The simpler recipes yield simpler creatures.  Combine the dead flesh of most creatures and warm air, you'll eventually end up with maggots.  With sophisticated recipes and ingredients, more complex organisms can be generated.  By combining and modifying recipes, you can creature stranger, less natural-seeming creatures.  Neither magical expertise nor special knowledge are required.  Follow the recipe correctly and creatures shall result.

Simple Recipes

Scorpions: By bathing correctly sorted strands of straw and fresh basil in bright sunlight for a day, you can create a swarm of small scorpions.  They will inhabit the area of their birth and behave generally like scorpions.  Their stings inflict great agony on most creatures, while repeated stings can potentially kill smaller creatures.  The scorpions will treat their birth-spot as their home and will be loathe to leave it.

Eels: Large clumps of rotting vegetable matter and moving fresh water are necessary, as are some drops of ichorous slime extracted from predacious sea-fish organs.  Once that is obtained, you can produce a tremendous number of carnivorous eels with gleaming pink eyes.  The eels produced by this recipe have somewhat unstable physical forms, and will seek to rectify their situation by consuming the more stable flesh of other living creatures.

Bear Cubs: Grave moss, desiccated vineal plants, moonlight, and caustic bile all combine to produce a creature very similar to a large bear cub.  The cubs produced by this recipe will regard the first creature they behold as their mother and become incredibly devoted to them.  Sadly, the recipe is imperfect and the bears will rot rather than age.  However, they can withstand a tremendous amount of decomposition before finally dying.

Complex Recipes

Eyeless: With a vat of combined fats and a steady geomantic current, you can give birth to a creature that resembles a fully-grown human in most ways.  The chief exceptions are that it does not possess a soul (not having been created by the gods) and, perhaps as an extension of that, does not possess eyes.  The creature begins its life amicably enough, grateful for its creation.  Sadly, any initial empathy or gratitude grows cold and resentful over a matter of weeks as the eyeless increasingly resents its flawed nature.  Eyeless make use of terrifyingly effective echolocation.  They are sterile.

Wall-Slug: With powdered river-stones, aqua regia, starlight captured in spheres of mirrored glass, and spore-dust from a foul species of mushrooms, you are able to create a true horror.  The resulting entity is an invertebrate creature composed of iridescent, biliously glowing slime that prefers to reside and travel on vertical surfaces, ignoring gravity as we understand it.  The creature will attack its creator immediately but can be induced to fearfully avoid them for 1d6 days at a time by reducing it to half its max hit points.  The creature possesses weak gravimetric muscles, passably effective x-ray vision, and can emit clouds of caustic vapor.

Amphisbaena: Terrestrial slime, barley harvested at the height of summer, manure, and quicklime must all be combined and baked under extremely hot conditions in order to produce the amphisbaena. This serpent boasts a head on each end and eyes that shine so brightly that it is difficult to see in their presence.  The creature whispers blasphemous secrets to its creator regardless of distance.  Each day the amphisbaena conveys a secret of some kind to their creature regarding a completely arbitrary topic chosen by the DM, though the creature reliably reveals the details of a spell that their creator could cast at least once per week.  There is also a cumulative 1% chance per week that the whispers drive their creator permanently, violently insane.

The Kitab al-Bulhan (The Book Of Wonders)

The real-life Kitab al-Bulhan is an amazingly illustrated treatise on astrology and geomancy. It looks like I'd expect a spellbook to look. It depicts constellations, sinister-looking djinni summonings, and what I presume to be semi-magical fauna.

If you are going to have your wizard find a scroll or spellbook, you are honor-bound to make a handout along these lines.

If you go with spellbook, you might want to include a few extra options: so long as they hold it in their hands while casting a summoning spell, the summoned creatures have +2 attack. Perhaps you should also include a ritual whereby one can summon a perilous djinn and interrogate it? Yes, definitely.


Whispering Djinn Answer Table (d10)

If you spend 100gp on rare incenses and various metal powders, you can spend six hours to conjure an invisible spirit possessed of significant metaphysical knowledge. You attempt to coerce magical secrets out of the inherently hostile creature, with varying results (reroll redundant results excepting 1s):

1. Thou Hast Erred: You summon a djinni, all right, but your binding is imperfect. The djinni is able to spontaneously combust your body, inflicting 5d6 fire damage, Will DC 16 for half. If you survive, you can hastily dismiss the creature before it repeats the effect.
2. Accursed Theology: At great length and with persuasive eloquence, the djinn claims that the gods of your world are mere spirits, either misguided or malicious, and that the world is the product of a single, remote deity who does not walk the world. Unless you can somehow erase this knowledge or the authority of its source from your mind, you permanently have advantage against divine magical attacks and resistance against healing spells. Potions still work fine, though.
3. The Secret Language Of Insects: Given a little time to zone in on the precise dialect, you can communicate with insects or the gestalt intelligence possessed by swarms of insects. They are completely hostile to mammalian life, but respect certain rules of propriety with regards to the exchange of gifts and services. If you displease a swarm of insects, they will have no problem at all reciting blasphemous secrets to drive you stark-raving mad, usually for days at a time.
4. Ingots Of True Flame: The fires of the mortal world are ghostly shadows of the flames that dance beyond creation. An ingot of true flame is dangerous for material creatures to possess, but has its uses. A dedicated pyromancer can fashion true flames with a wood-burning kiln, 100gp of esoteric woods and spices, and a day or three of unsleeping chanting and tending. The result is a wefting knot of constantly-reshaping red metal that superheats and destroys most non-magical things that it contacts, but that can also be used to empower fire spells. Whenever a spellcaster casts a fire spell while possessing the ingot, one of the dice of fire damage is maximized and the ingot has a 1-in-6 chance of being destroyed. How one safely handles the ingot is left to your imagination.
5. The Adverse Words: The beings of the material world are fragile. You learn a complicated series of otherworldly phrases that amplify entropy in whatever creature you recite them at. The targeted creature suffers 1 disintegration damage per full minute that you recite these words, or per hour if you merely think them. The creature must be within 100 feet of you and within your line of sight, though if they are within 25 feet line of sight is not necessary. The words lend themselves well to extended recitation: if necessary, you can chant these words for days at a time.
6. The Elevation Of Metal: In the world beyond worlds, there exists a realm of purified matter only somewhat removed from the divine world of the gods. All alchemy may be viewed as a process attempting to purify matter and return it to a divine state. You have learned the secrets of purifying metal such that it approaches one of the earlier stages of metaphysical purity. With this process, you can spend three days and 100gp on a metal weapon or armor, imparting the "Empyrean" prefix, e.g. "Empyrean Chain Mail +1". In weapons, the empyrean prefix causes the weapon to inflict +1d6 damage against non-elemental outsiders. In armor, the empyrean prefix imparts a +1 to all saves.
7. The Inverted Zodiac: Though most educated spellcasters are passingly familiar with the zodiac, there is a secret zodiac consisting of stars and other stellar bodies not visible to beings in a normal state of mind. By consuming 50gp of carefully chosen hallucinogens and invoking stellar entities for an evening, you can perceive the horrifying astral archetypes and cast an accurate horoscope for a willing ally. Roll 1d4: on a 1, the targeted player has a -1 to all d20 rolls for the next day. On a 2-4, that is how many times a player may add a 2 to a d20 roll during the next day; this can even occur retroactively to make a player succeed at a roll that they would otherwise fail.
8. The Virtues Of Herbs And Beasts: Many strange beasts and plants inhabit the earth, and many stranger still beneath and beyond it. You have learned the salubrious value of several strange creatures, many of whom you are able to create as needed via spontaneous generation. Rather than brewing potions of healing the standard way -whatever that might be- you lure, conjure, and create creatures whose bodies naturally contain potent healing alkaloids. The short of it is that you are able to brew healing potions for a cost halfway between the normal purchase cost and the normal sell cost. For example, if potions of curing cost 50gp in your game and can be sold to NPCs for 25gp, you can create them for 37.5gp. The process of rapidly spontaneously generating and then slaughtering strange beasts and plants is horrifying to behold, messy, and probably heretical.
9. Phylactery Against Misfortune: You inscribe potent spells against bad luck and other ill occurrence in tiny symbols on a thin scroll, wind it up, and place it within a sacramental box. The custom inks and other ingredients cost 100gp in total. When worn as an amulet, the scroll provides a +1 bonus to all saves, until you roll a natural 1 on a d20 roll or an enemy critically hits you. If that occurs, the roll is treated as a normal failure and the amulet loses its magic.
10. Motes Of Unlight: You learn the secret of harvesting motes of "unlight", a poisonous, bewildering energy that negates light and confounds proprioception. These motes can be stored in a specially prepared Gloom Lamp costing 200gp. Every 1d6 days of harvesting, the lamp will be sufficiently full for use. When activated, the unlight floods a 15-foot radius around the lamp for the rest of the encounter, blinding and slowing creatures within that radius for 1 round, Fort DC 16 negates. Alternatively, the unlight may be expended to restore a semblance of life to a recently dead, relatively cohesive humanoid cadaver, lasting for approximately five minutes.

A Kobold Masada

Hi. Use this in your game. I insist.

Les Chants de Maldoror

Not finding what I was seeking, I lifted my eyes higher, and higher still, until I saw a throne made of human excrement and gold, on which was sitting --with idiotic pride, his body draped in a shroud of unwashed hospital linen-- he who calls himself the Creator!

He was holding in his hand the rotten body of a dead man, carrying it in turn from his eyes to his nose and from his nose to his mouth; and once it reached his mouth, one can guess what he did with it. His feet were dipped in a huge pool of boiling blood, on the surface of which two or three cautious heads would suddenly rise up like tapeworms in a chamber pot, and as suddenly submerge again, swift as an arrow. A kick on the bone of the nose was the familiar reward for any infringement of regulations occasioned by the need to breathe a different atmosphere; for, after all, these men were not fish. Though amphibious at best, they were swimming underwater in this vile liquid!

... until, finding his hands empty, the Creator, with the first two claws of his foot, would grab another diver by the neck, as if with pincers, and lift him into the air, out of the reddish slime, delicious sauce. And this one was treated in the same way as his predecessor. First he ate his head, then his legs and arms, and last of all, the trunk, until there was nothing left; for he crunched the bones as well. And so it continues, for all the hours of his eternity.

Sometimes, he would shout: 'I created you, so I have the right to do whatever I like to you. You have done nothing to me, I do not deny it. I am making you suffer for my own pleasure.' Oh reader, does not this last-mentioned detail make your mouth water? Cannot whoever wishes also eat brains just the same, which taste just as good and just as fresh, caught less than a quarter of an hour before in the lake - the brain of a fish?

-Les Chants de Maldoror

The Spiderscape (Forgotten Realms)

This is an updated version of an earlier concept.

Forgotten Realms: A Days Of Future Past-style dark future in which Lolth has devoured all but a handful of her fellow deities, leaving only a few of the most interesting to hide and wonder when it will be their turn. Lolth's dominance has is unkind. She has spun a sun-occluding cocoon around the entirety of Faerun, plunging the world into gloomy twilight. With her blessing, spiders evolve into ever more capable predators, filling ever larger portions of ecosystems. The magical Weave, the source of magic itself, is pulled taught and patterned like a web, twining around Drowish prayers and filling them with power. A spectral web stretches across the afterlife, snaring souls before they can reach their final rest and filling an already bloated Lolth with even more power. 

Non-drow or anybody that dislikes eating fungus and spiders is pretty unhappy. A few remaining deities and their followers prowl the shadows, surviving as best they can and seeking a way to defeat or escape Lolth.