I had the immense privilege of attending the most fun workshop at GenCon 2024, hosted by CSE Cooney and Carlos Hernandez. Their game, Negocios Infernales, was funded through Kickstarter, and we used the spooky cards included in the game to fuel our creativity and create something inspired by the card prompts–song, play, short story, outline, poem, nursery rhyme–anything! I’m not sponsored, but I wanted to share the creativity that came of it!
Here were the cards I had:
Here was my contribution:
The sirens welcomed them initially. Inviting them across the sea with intoxicating song to make their homes nearby. They had a curious perfume, not the coral-and-kelp musk the sirens knew, but something drier that burned the gills and made them sneeze.
It was a heady smell; it made them want to sing all the more, enchanted by the strangeness. They inspired a generation of sirens to lead them to the hidden treasures of the deep – their curiosity and lust for discovery almost matching the sirens’ (though, of course, these strangers could never plumb all the troves and trenches, and some things are best left to the deep and dark).
So when they called more of their kinfolk to these foreign shores, another generation, not so wise nor adept at resistance, pulled themselves ashore to be closer to that strangely irresistible dry-bones scent for as long as possible.
But sirens are not meant to breathe air longer than the water. And the songs of those mourning were heard to the depths of the deepest trench and into the dark of the most lightless cave.
And it woke the things long asleep, long complacent, long bored of anything that had to do with the light, and they unwound their tendriling tentacles toward the shore. So when the castles crumbled and the screams died down, those dry-bones creatures that escaped swore the roots of the earth itself pulled their families to the drowning.
Works in Progress 