Pitch Decks

Two teams of paratroopers, A and B, are dropped deep into enemy territory with four Bazooka Vespas. However, Team A and Team B are separated during the drop, and when they land, they realize a terrible mistake has been made: Team A has two gun Vespas, and Team B has two ammo Vespas. Now, the two teams must rendezvous, with Team A bluffing their way through enemy territory with only their ammo-less bazookas and sidearms to protect them, and Team B MacGyvering ways to use their bazooka-less shells. Finally, the two teams unite, and the four paratroopers fend off an enemy onslaught in a bonanza of Bazooka Vespa action.

Retelling “Beauty and the Beast” as a road-trip story.

Belle has never left her hometown in the rural American South. The Beast is confined to a junkyard on the edge of town by the townspeople’s fear and the county sheriff’s hatred. When Belle’s brother Maurice steals something from the Beast’s junkyard, Belle offers to drive the Beast to the other side of the country in exchange for Maurice’s freedom. Belle and the Beast’s relationship starts off tense, and Belle briefly leaves him on the side of the highway, but she comes back for him. They start to bond, and Belle mods her truck so the Beast can drive it with his cursed body. 

When Maurice gets arrested again, the Beast lets Belle go back to her hometown to help, leaving him alone and hundreds of miles away from her. His love for Belle drives him to re-create her mods on a new truck and drive it back to where their journey began. He arrives just in time to help Belle defeat the sheriff. Belle, moved by his selflessness, confesses her love to him. The townspeople who trust her accept him as part of the community. The Beast’s curse is broken. They Live Happily Ever After.

The setting is a Bronze Age world of small, independent villages built around the temples of their patron gods. These gods are physical beings that sign treaties with human communities, offering to use their reality-warping powers to answer prayers in exchange for worship.

A wandering assassin is hired to kill a target in an unfamiliar village. They succeed, but they’re captured and confronted by the village’s princess, who tells them that they killed its patron god. Now, the village is preparing for war: its leaders plan to conquer another village and claim its patron for themselves as a replacement for their dead god. The princess offers the assassin amnesty if they fight for her village of GOD REPLACERS.

Character A is a shy, withdrawn aspiring artist who has never had the opportunity or the confidence to share their work with the world. Character B is a brash delinquent with a talent for getting into places they’re not supposed to be. Against all odds, A and B become fast friends. B finds a purpose in helping A become a street artist by helping them get into places where they can paint murals, and A’s confidence grows as their art comes to life and reshapes their city.

Scientists at Gotham City’s tertiary educational institutions and research organizations struggle to secure funding. Luckily, the city has a parallel funding structure for mad scientists, created by and for supervillains. When Saw arrives in Gotham, he applies for funding for his next sociology project from the mad scientists' organization and receives a generous research grant. He hires assistants, and together, they get to work crafting an appropriately rigorous research paper for publication.

The universe is divided between the Earth and the spirit world.

A soul is the ability to physically interact with the particular world that it belongs to. A human’s soul is part of the Earth; a spirit’s soul is part of the spirit world. A human being’s earthbound soul can only directly interact with the Earth; a spirit’s astral soul can only directly interact with the spirit world. Double-souled beings possess both an earthbound and an astral soul, and they can physically interact with both worlds.

A mind is the ability to perceive and communicate with other minds. Some humans and spirits can release their minds from their souls and travel between other conscious beings’ minds, regardless of whether those beings’ souls are earthbound, astral, or both.

A demon transfers energy from the human world to the spirit world by converting earthbound energy (kinetic, chemical, electric, etc.) into astral energy. An angel transfers energy from the spirit world to the human world by converting astral energy to earthbound energy.

Succubi are plants. Their souls are astral, not earthbound, and every succubus begins its life as a bud on a tree in the spirit world. The tree provides the buds with astral energy until they reach maturity and fly away. At the end of their lives, succubi return to the tree to die, and the tree consumes their bodies.

Mature succubi sustain themselves by consuming the energy they drain from human souls. When a succubus hunts, it releases its mind from its soul and floats through the stream of human consciousness, projecting a lure into the minds it passes through. The lure is an abstract concept created by the succubus to attract human prey. For example, a lure could be the image of a beautiful woman, and humans in the succubus’s wake might see her in their peripheral vision, in crowds, in reflections, or their dreams.

The lure will hook the first human who thinks of it intentionally. If someone has a dream about the woman, but they forget about it, the succubus won’t feed on them. However, if they dream about her and then purposefully think about her again the next night, the lure will open a connection between their mind and the succubus’s. Through this connection, the succubus will sense what the human finds attractive and use it to make the lure more appealing.

All of the earthbound energy the human expends in actively thinking about the lure is transmuted into astral energy and consumed by the succubus. The more the human thinks about the lure, the more strongly it will connect their mind to the succubus’s, and the more clearly the succubus will be able to observe the human’s mind. The human prey is trapped in an escalating cycle of obsession as the lure burrows deeper into their mind. In the late stages of the hunt, the human loses the ability to do anything but think about the lure: all of the energy they could have used to break the obsessive loop has already been consumed by the succubus. They die of thirst, hunger, or exposure.

Incubi are mammals. An incubus is double-souled, with an astral and an earthbound soul, and an incubus can be born either to a pair of incubi or to an incubus and a human. Incubi appear mostly identical to humans, but their bodies are as present and tangible in the spirit world as they are on Earth. They sustain their earthbound souls like humans and their astral souls like succubi. A young incubus consumes astral energy by drinking sap from the succubus tree. Mature incubi hunt similarly to succubi, but they drain energy that humans use to think about their earthbound souls, not abstract lures. When an incubus dies, their earthbound body decomposes like a human’s, while their astral body’s remaining energy dissipates across the spirit world.

Devils are demons of species that drain earthbound energy from human beings and who have chosen to feed on humans selectively, according to a code that defines which humans deserve to have their energy drained and by how much. A devil order is a group of devils bound by a single code. Most modern devil orders’ codes prescribe draining energy only from humans who have acted immorally. Most modern incubi are devils; most succubi are not.