New Year's Day

Then the weird codger just smiles under his beard and says:

“Take it easy, fella. It’s just a yarn.”

And that’s when you realize you were holding your breath. As you let it out slow, it occurs to you that there’s a murmur of “happy new years” around and somewhere the pop of a champagne cork, and there’s a dame standing close with a creased brow and disappointed pout because you didn’t kiss her at the appointed moment. The moment you just missed ‘cause you were listening to some old man’s story about the end of the world.

You take a glass of champagne from a passing waiter. The strange spell seems to be fading with the old year, but you still have to ask: “So what happened. How’d the world get saved, anyway?”

The old man strokes his beard. “It just so happens that Father Time prepares for this eventuality. He knows that the agents of entropy will try to take advantage of the changing of the year, to try and force a premature end to time. He has a plan...”

The new year is born at the center of a maze--almost a giant puzzle box, really-- outside of time and the material plane. Here the new born year can’t be strangled in its crib before temporal custodianship changes hands. All sorts of nefarious forces send their champions to seize it or kill it, true, but Father Time has his champions, as well. He can choose anyone, but it’s often adventurers that make his list. His temporal champions must brave the challenges of the achronal labyrinth and present Father Time's hourglass sigil to the multidimensional titan that guards the neonate year.

Finishing your second glass of champagne, you say, “Guess the good guys won again, huh? I’d be glad to meet one of those guys that saved the world. I’d by ‘em a drink.”

The old man shrugs and puts on his hat like he’s going to leave. “Well, the thing about that is, none of those brave souls ever remember what they did. The maze is outside of time. Everything that happens there occurs in less than an instant and outside of causality as we know it here. No, I’m afraid none of them has any idea what they accomplished.”

With that he turns to walk for the door. He’s only gone a couple of steps when he stops and half-turns. “Unless, of course, someone tells them.” And then he winks.

“Happy New Year, friend.”

On New Year's Eve

On New Year’s Eve, the people of the City prepare themselves for a celebration, unaware of the danger--never guessing that more than just a year might be ending.

The eikone Chronos, Father Time, lies near death. His hounds howl in their tesseract kennels and his imbonded servants, the bumbling giants of old chaos, Gog and M’Gog, blubber at his bedside. The old man--the old year--will die at the stroke of midnight.

In the Heavens, the angels gird for war. They double the host in shining panoply that guard the Celestial Gates and patrol the ramparts of paradise. They prepare for possible siege.

In the streets of the world, the soldiers and made men of the Hell Syndicate push bullets into magazines and check the action of their guns nervously. There’s the scent of blood and brimstone in the air. There may be war in the streets.

At the final collapse at the end time, the last singularity pulses omninously. It's vibration plays the funeral dirge of the cosmos; negative energy propagating backwards through time. The beat carries the slavering existence-haters of the Pit and the mad form-refuseniks of the Gyre dancing into the world for one last party.

The material plane draws, moment by moment, closer to the knife-edge of continuation and dissolution. And the clock ticks down.

(to be continued?)

The Wizard's Estate Sale

Lucius T. Malregard, infamous Southron sorceror, has passed on. (His body was found ripped limb from limb and in an advanced state of decay, but that’s another story.) His estate is being sold at auction by his relatives. The following items are on the block:

1. Jelly Monkeys candies in a wax-paper bag: These 5 colorful, gelatinous, monkey-shaped candies have been made into homunculi powered by blood. A pinprick drop of blood in the “mouth” of a Jelly Monkey will animate it for a day and place it under the command of the person whose blood fed it. The monkeys are able to report what they see and hear, though their intellects and vocabularies are limited. If the candy is eaten, a person will experience everything the monkey did that day. The more blood fed to the monkeys (or that they illicitly consume), the larger they will grow--and the more willful they will become (though the changes take time and will not immediately be apparent).

2. Human Skull: An adult human skull with a separated calvarium. If a candle is placed inside, and the skull is in darkness, flickering black and white images (like a kinetoscope) are projected from its eye sockets. These images are essentially clairvoyance (as the spell)--if a specific location is requested (aloud) of the skull. Otherwise, they are random and may be from anywhere in the world. Every night at the stroke of midnight, the skull laughs loudly and says: “Oh, for Heavens sake, Ormsley!”

3. One Past Midnight Man: Selected Recordings: A box of 3 10-inch phonograph records emblazoned with an image of an old-fashioned minstrelsy performer: the One Past Midnight Man. If any of the records are played, strange and backwards sounding voices can be heard overlayed on the primary recording. Upon completion of an record, a 10-inch tall man dressed like the figure on the cover will appear, only he is not in embarrassing blackface, but rather his skin is an unnatural inky black--as if made out of night, itself. He can teach any spell of the necromantic school (and likely others)--for a price.

4. Obscura gossamer: Wound around a bone spindle, is a black and silken, rough outline of a human. In fact, it is a human shadow that if attached to a new host (this process is unknown) obscures the wearer in such a way that they are hidden from magical and nonmagical attempts to find them (short of a wish). People can interact with them normally (if they draw attention to themselves) but won’t remember doing so within minutes. Attaching the shadow is likely permanent.

Weird Adventures is Here!

The wait is over!  Weird Adventures is now available in pdf form at RPGNow and Drivethrurpg (so choose your favorite portal).

It's 165 pages (black and white with 4 full color maps) featuring:

• City Confidential--A guide to the 5 baronies, numerous neighborhood, and weird locales of the City.
• A guide to the Strange New World beyond the City, including the mysterious jungles of Asciana, morbid and insurrection-torn Zingaro, the gambler-haven of Faro City, and much more.
• Thirty new monsters from "Black Blizzard" para-elemental to "Zombie, Cuijatepecan."
• Adventure seeds and a mini-crawl through the City's largest (and weirdest) park.
• Art by old school stalwarts Johnathan Bingham, Chris Huth, and Stefan Poag, plus great work from comic artists Reno Maniquis and Adam Moore, among others.

For those of you pining for Weird Adventures in hardcopy, that's coming in the New Year.  They'll be a discount for the purchase of both the pdf and the print of demand versions.

Thanks to everyone for their support over the (longer than expected) time to do this project.  I hope it was worth the wait.

Tarrasque Harvesting

What do you do with a gigantic, immortal monster stalking the wild places? If you’re a daring and entrepreneurial sort in Ealderde, Eura, or even the City, you harvest the living behemoth for anything of value.

Nobody knows where the Tarrasque came from, though there are a lot of theories: Staarkish Kriegsungeheuer--it’s gargantuan parts grown in separate industrial alchemical vats and melded together by cunning biothaumaturgy? An eikone given flesh, collective animus of the saurian monsters of prehistory? Alien? Elder God? There are as many ideas as the Tarrasque has spines.

Wherever it came from, the monster stalks cross Eura from Korambeck to the Arctic Wastes. It periodically enters periods of turpor lasting days to weeks, where it crouches, umoving and close to the ground. These are the times when harvesters can safely climb aboard the monster with little risk of winding up in its stomach. Once encamped, they take adamantine-tipped jackhammers and alchemical solvents to its hide. They scrap off carapace to sell to armorers and artificers, jar its ichor for alchemists, physicians, and thaumaturgists, smuggle its glandular secretions to junkies and assassins, and even trap its lice for whoever is willing to pay.

Most harvesters ship out for a few months. They erect tents in hammock-like nets affixed to the monster's hide; it takes little notice of them most of the time. Daring flyers dart in to hook dangling bags of material for sale, and eventually, harvesters headed for home.

Exposure to the creature is inherently toxic. All but the best preserved (and least flavorful) foodstuffs spoil rapidly. Plants die within days; small animals may last a week or more. Humans can last months, but many harvesters find it prudent to wear lead-lined suits. Even still, cancers and neurologic ailments are more common among those that have dwelled on the Tarrasque than the general population, and harvesters seem to age before there time.

Five Kooky Cults

Here are a few minority religious groups seen at least as bit odd (if not outright dangerous) by the majority of the City's citizens:

The Abattoir Cult: Secret followers of the sinister and bloody-handed Lord of the Cleaver. A liturgical text (anthropodermically bound) honoring this obscure eikone is known to exist in a private collection in New Lludd. His cult tends to crop up in districts devoted to meatpacking or slaughter pens and is associated with the emergence of serial killers.

The Temple of Father Eliah Exalted: This Old Time Religion sect preaches racial and gender equality, chastity--and the godhood of its prophet, Father Eliah Exalted. The Temple owns a number of groceries, gas stations, hotels, and other business. These are ostensibly held by acolytes but seem mainly to enrich the Father. The Temple is politically active and the Father’s support can sway elections. Many are suspicious that Exalted’s powers of oratory and occasional miracles suggest that he is one of the Gifted or perhaps a secret thaumaturgist, but proof has been hard to come by.

Serpent-spotters: An informal collection of people forgotten by society--mostly poor and elderly spinsters and widowers--who are convinced that the monster that appeared in the Eldritch River 30 years ago, and supposedly delivered secret prophecies to City fathers, will return, heralding the apocalypse. On days individually chosen they hold vigil in Eldside Park. They hope to be present at the time of the serpent’s return so it will reward their faith with a ride on his back to a watery Paradise.

The Electrovangelic Church of the Machine Messiah: A worldwide movement dedicated to building the perfect construct to manifest the Messiah and usher in a new age of mechanical spiritual perfection.

The Followers of the Rabbit: Not an organized religion, but instead a collection of superstitions and cautionary urban legends forming a secret liturgy for some folk working along the boardwalk of Lapin Isle. They hope to placate the godling of the island, the dark personification of the rabbit in the moon--the man in the rabbit suit that is not a man.

Beneath Rock Candy Mountain

It’s imparted by the sagacious urban druids that contemplate on street corners and rumored by stoned hobogoblins that pass canned heat ‘round campfires that there is an earthly paradise hidden in the great mountains of the West. The wondrous land’s fame has even spread to the world we know, where balladeers longingly recount the virtues of the Rock Candy Mountain or the Hobo’s Paradise.

The hidden mountain valley (so the tales claim) sits in the benevolent shadow of a mountain of candy (or at least with the appearance of such) and boasts trees which grow cigarettes, whiskey running in streams, and ponds of hearty stew. The inhabitants of the valley comport themselves like those in small towns elsewhere, but they are unfailingly friendly, even deferential, to the lowliest of visitors—perhaps especially the lowliest. No crimes against property are prosecuted; in fact, everything is given freely.

Adventurers, notorious hard cases (or thinking of themselves as such), scoff at those yarns. Calloused to eldritch horrors and exotic treasures alike, they’re disinclined to get misty over vagrants’ fairy tales of a hobotopia. Still, a few have caught the fever and gone looking over the years. As far as is known, none have returned.

Even in the tales, the way to the Hobo’s Paradise isn’t easy. Though the trail’s exact location is unknown, it’s believed to run treacherously through the cold heights of the Stoney Mountains. Mine slavers and road agents haunt the lower parts of the trail, while apemen guard the more remote passes.

These may not be the only dangers. Certain heterodox urban druids believe that this Paradise may not be what it appears from a distance. The air that should be fresh and sweet is instead choked with the stench of an abattoir. The whiskey streams are spiked with methanol and cause blindness, delirium, and death. And the smiling, wooden-legged constables and comic railyard bulls, aren’t benevolent—and aren’t even human behind their skin masks.

Could be that more than teeth rot in the shadow of the Rock Candy Mountain.

For the Garrisons at the Old School Heretic family of blogs.

Images from the City

More weird things from the City...

The wizard was rich, eccentric--and dead.  His house awaited adventurers' brave enough to try to seize what treasure he had left behind.  The fresh bodies decorating the facade were only a mild deterrant.

The Hissmen sort of resembled gatormen, but they were much smarter and more dangerous. The attacks ended as mysteriously as they started. What they did with the humans they took back to their subterranean world, no one every discovered.

No one would have guessed the unassuming old lady was a witch. That’s before her dollhouses with their ritual dioramas--each room replicating (and causing) a recent murder--were found.

City officials were never happy with the public danger the monster trade represented, but of course, mail order businesses presented a question of jurisdiction.

Hobogoblin Garbage Kings

The City generates a lot of garbage, and most of it goes to the expansive Klaw Island landfill. Marshy Klaw Island has always had a sparse human population, but the coming of the landfill with its hills of garbage and pits of refuse has drawn gangs of hobogoblins.

The hobogoblins have divided up into tribes with zealously guarded territories. They mine the garbage for usable (and saleable) items. Hobogoblin “alchemists” have become adepted and making various minor potions with the most dubious of alchemical wastes, and can distill hooch from virtually anything organic.

The hobogoblins must defend their holdings from monsters of various sorts, attracted to the waste. They’ve been able to train giant rats as guard animals to protect their settlements from giant insects, aggressive fungi, or hungry otyughs. In years past, inbred wererat clans sometimes contested the hobogoblin hegemony, but periodic eradication and vaccination campaigns by City sanitation officials seemed to have sharply curtailed (if not eradicated) nyfitsanthropy on the island.

Hobogoblin legends tell of the first and greatest of the landfill kingdoms, Wastenot, a scrap Atlantis now sunk beneath the brackish waters of Lake Zathogua. Hubris of the swells in Wastenot led to neglect of due tribute to the beast of the lake, and all of Wastenot’s “grandeur” was pulled down by pale and vengeful tentacles in a single night.

Done...

With the Weird Adventures manuscript, at least.  There's still some proofing, layouts, and minor (hopefully) edits to be done, of course, but since those things have been proceeding apace, there's actually not much of that left either, barring something unforseen.

It looks like it will come out between 140-150 pages, based on the number of words, and depending on how illustrations fit in, and the like.  Over 100 pages have been layed out so far.

So thanks to everyone for their patience and continued support!  I'm glad to be able to say the wait is nearly over.



 

Pop Quiz

Somehow this middle school City History Quiz circa 5888 slipped between dimensions and into my possession.  Number two pencils ready? 

Answers below...

1. C: Wychwire was so charismatic people often didn't notice the "irregularity" of his left lower appendage.  A cast of his hoofprint is on display at the City Historical Museum.

2. A: Who would give a vorpal sword away? And the Natives were unlikely to want Dwergen brides.

3. D. I'd like to think he reconsidered his frugalness in his last moments--but maybe not.

4. C. The "Golem of Capitalism" was reportedly gold-plated and had the head of a bull--or so the folk song goes.

5. A. There's a fanciful statue commemorating that sagacious serpent in Eldside Park.

Thraug's Head

Not so long ago, a patron at one of the saloons or beer gardens on the southeast riverfront of the City barony of Shancks might have encountered the not-quite-deceased head of a monster, preserved in a jar. If they sat close to the distorted and slack-mouthed visage in the murky liquid, they might have heard its muffled, gurgling whispers.

The head of Thraug was a fixture along the narrow peninsula that bore his name, Thraug’s Neck. Popular superstition held that the head was good luck--certainly its original owner would have agreed it was better to have it than not. Unfortunately, for the eponymous merman (or merrow, some say), his luck ran out the day he quarrelled with Jarus Shanck, one-time assassin turned landowner.

Opinions differ as to what precipitated the violent encounter, but historians and folklore agree that Jarus Shanck never did require much excuse for murder. His preservation of his opponent's head in jar of alcohol is also viewed as in keeping with his macabre sense of whimsy.

Shanck gave the head to a henchman who made it the centerpiece of a tavern he opened. And so began Thraug’s vigil: watching unblinking through smoke-smudged glass as those around him pickled themselves from inside out. Some strange magic kept the merman’s head alive and he was said to speak prophecy--usually the ultimate fate of the person listening. He could be enticed to answer specific questions at times, though his answers were circumlocutious. Other times his utterances were merely pained observations on the fickleness of fate and the ephemeralness of this world, which listeners never failed to find insightful and moving.

More than one aged barkeep will tell you (with a nostalgic gleam in his eye) that a few words from ol’ Thraug were always good for another round.

Museum of Dangerous Art

A façade of steel plates and heavy bolts with a thick, round door, at home on a vault or boiler room, isn't what one expects from an art gallery, but then the City's Museum of Dangerous Art (Open weekdays 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Godsday noon to 6 p.; Admission 25 cents; free on Loonsday) isn't the usual sort of gallery.

The anonymous group of prominent collectors (rumored to have been the shadowy cabal called the Unknown), whose sponsorship made the museum possible, are presumed to have had two goals: one was to encourage the appreciation and study of thaumaturgical artworks, and the other was to imprison these works where they can do the least harm. The collection includes paintings, sculpture, illustration, handcrafts, and film; the only requirements are that a work has some aesthetic purpose--and that it’s potentially harmful.

All of the art exhibited is placed behind wards or otherwise neutralized so that viewing them is not dangerous.  Patrons are reminded not to touch the art.

Here's a small sampling of the art in the collection:

Still [sic] Life
Title only given on typed card attached to frame.
Media: Oil on canvas.  Artist: Unknown, but believed to be van Snood.
Desc.: A bowl of decayed fruit which returns to freshness as the painting drains life from a victim (causes energy drain per hour like a hit from a wight).

Old Hag Quilt
Media: Hand-stiched fabric. Artists: A witches coven in the western Smaragdines.
Desc.: Appliqués in black and white show the successive phases of the moon interspersed with a nightscape where a female figure appears then moves to the forefront of the image.  The last square reveals her face to be a skull.  The quilt causes nightmares in anyone who uses it.  After a fortnight, a hag crawls from beneath the quilt.

Abode of Demons
Media: Marble. Artist: Unknown.
Desc.: A statue of male figure whose open cloak revealed distorted, demonic faces.  It's unclear what the activating mechanism is, but for every hour of darkness (sunset to sunrise) the statue is activated, 1d4 shadows emerge from inside the cloak.

Other malign works exhibited include the Damnation Photo, the Recursive Horrror, Grasping Hands, and Summer Daisies and the dreaded Sunny Day in Crayon (Queenie, age 4).

Random Magical Junk

Never let it be said that hobogoblins are welchers.  Here's something magical from the bindle of the croaker (medicine man) hisself:

1. A wooden toy gun. When aimed at a target, and the bearer says “bang,” it fires. The invisible projectile does 1d3 points of damage and has range like a small sling.

2. A souvenir doll of a grinning man. Anyone who sleeps within 20 feet of the uncovered doll must make a saving throw or awaken feebleminded.
3. An expensive wristwatch that appears stopped--yet somehow never manages to have the right time.

4. A set of 2d6 erotic picture postcards. Most are mundane, but one of them can fascinate the viewer.
5. An old kerosene lantern that, when lit, casts darkness.
6. A wrinkled First Class Boarding Pass for the RMS Titan. If a person holding the pass concetrates hard on the image of someone they wish to kill, the pass will grow cold and damp in his or her hands, and the intended victim responds as if they are drowning in cold water.
7. A cast iron skillet +1 against husbands (+2 if they are cheating husbands).
8. A necrophiliac Tijuana Bible.  It draws all undead from a 10 mile radius to it.  Unintelligent undead are unable to resist its call; intelligent ones are not forced to respond, but may come out of curiousity or desire.  Undead tied to a specific place are tormented by the comics' seductive pull.
9. A half-smoked cigar. If lit, it is particularly noxious. Everyone but the smoker within 20 feet must save or become nauseated.

10. A wooden case containg a flea circus staffed by atomies, who can either be a help or a nuisance to the owner depending on how they’re treated.
11. An ever-full can of baked beans.  It refills in 1d4 hours after being emptied.
12. A roll of electrical insulating tape that gives anything it's wrapped around electricity resistance (absorbs the first 10 points of electrical damage per attack).

The Stalker

If you should find yourself in the City on a lonely railway platform in the wee hours or taking a night train across the dark countryside, you may happen to get the sensation you’re being watched. That may mean you have reason to be afraid.

Travelers in similar situations have looked to see the vague shape of what might be a fellow traveler clinging to the shadows of the platform, or have seen a gaunt figure receding in the distance as the train passes, its eyes glowing like signal lights.

The rail stalker appears to select his prey at random, but once he has done so he always lets the hapless traveler glimpse him at least once. The next time the victim sees the creature’s pale, naked, and emaciated form may be when he strikes.

The creature (it is unclear if there is more than one) attacks by opening his mouth absurdly wide in a caricature of a scream and emitting a sound or vibration. Things directly in its path may be damage as if thousands of years of erosion took place in a single moment, concentrated in a narrow area. Those nearby but not directly in the path describe a sudden wave of fear and a mind numbing hum. The stalker prefers to kill by embracing his victim and deilvering a kiss—a kiss that sends his deadly vibration through the victim’s body, turning bone to powder and liquifying organs.

Some thaumaturgists believe the sound made by the rail stalker is a sound from the end of the material universe, the wail of of inevitable armageddon that the rail stalker somehow carries in his withered frame. And aches to share with others.

[The rail stalker is, of course, a modern/near-modern horror riff on Fiend Folio’s Dune Stalker and resembles that creature in game particulars.  'Cause a naked, clawed dude trying to kiss you in a subway station is scarier than one in a desert, maybe.]

Crackpot Demonology

The Pandemonicon is a treatise on demonology widely known in the City. All extant copies of the work are amateur printings; the original copies were reproduced from a typed and hand-notated manuscript via jellygraph (hectograph)--in fact, the original gel, imbued with a malign (and murderous) life of its own, has been encountered in the City. The work’s author is given as “Secundus Rune,” but that appears to be a pen name of Alpert Sturne, an unemployed bug powder junkie.

Sturne’s work would be easy to dismiss, if it weren’t for the lengths certain powers go to obtain a copy. Wealthy infernalists have been known to pay handsomely for copies; Hell Syndicate bosses have killed for them. The Unknown have urged their destruction.

The Pandemonicon contains demons not mentioned in older works. Scholars are divided as to whether these new forms are merely different interpretations of older beings or if they represent evolution in the abyssal chaos. A couple of the demons described by Sturne are given as example, exactly in the way he describes them in the text:

Lepidopterist: These are of the Collectors. Defined things are a novelty to them. Pin souls to cards and arrange them by taxonomies of suffering. The pretty colors! You shall know them by their glowing red eyes in featureless faces and their wings like rainbows in oil slicks that beat and stutter like pictures in a flip book. Careful of their pins.

Misericordians: Sometimes they make you think they are succubuses and sometimes angels but they are neither. They look like that pin-up nurse I saw in that gas station calendar, but they don’t have her smile. No faces. Only scars. Only scar tissue. There are small scars too if you get close but you don’t want to get that close. They assisant a certain surgeon who it is not good to look upon. They know secrets of the flesh, how it can be twist and remade, but you have to be careful and avoid their mersy [sic] to learn them.

All the entries are number, though they are presented seemingly at random. The lowest is “1” and the highest “616.” The text has some illustrations which seem to have been cut or traced from older texts, sometimes with crude revisions by the author.

Stone Walls; Iron Bars

The Black Iron Prison is the Plane of Confinement. Despite it’s name, the prison is not always as apparent as iron bars and stone walls (though it has plenty of that, carved as it was from ancient bones of some demonic titan)--its evil is more subtle than that. Restriction and imprisonment of various forms permeate it.

Portals to the plane are sometimes found on the Material Plane in the form palm-sized, rusted, black iron boxes, heavier than they appear.  Visitors to the plane describe an "outer" desert of squalid intern camps, stretched arond and inner, three (or more) dimensional Escher maze of cell-blocks, isolation chambers, and interrogation rooms.

The plane is the home (and the prison) of the deodands, a vile race sentenced to serve as the guards and administrators of the apotheosis prison as punishment for ancient crime. Demonologists have cataloged three primary castes or species of these creatures (though there are undoubtably more):

The lowest caste of deodands are tall, emaciated, scabrous creatures with frog-like mouths. Their bare skins weep a tarry ichor from numerous injection sites. They're junkies and dealers; they mix the astral excreta of despair, callousness, and resignation that oozes from the souls that fall into their hands with the bile of arthropodals that make their homes in the prison’s substructure and inject it beneath their skin. The tarry substance--and a brief respite from their paranoia in a cold, sneering high--are the result. The tar is packaged and sold (to the prisoners to be smoked or injected) in exchange for pleasant memories or dreams, or hopes--anything that defines the former self-hood of the soul. When not engaged in commerce, these tar demodands are the menials of the prison.  On the Material Plane, their shadows have the same viscous consistence as their tar, but no psychoactive properties.

The middle caste are the color of a fresh bruise.  Their limbs are swollen like blood sausages, and their tick-like bellies appear filled to near bursting, sloshing loathesomely as they waddle or fly drunkenly on ridiculously small wings. Their bloated faces are unpleasantly human-like and wear expressions of volutuous satiety, complete with drool running from the corners of their mouths and down their double (or triple) chins. Always their skins appear to glisten as if oiled; this is due to a slime they secrete.  They sweat even more when they eat, and they eat almost constantly. They fancy themselves gourmets, and there is nothing they consider so refined as dining on astral substance of souls. They prefer fatted souls, though and first expose victims to their slime.  Under the slimes influence, they become grossly corpulent. At that point, they're ready for the slime deodands who drain them to emaciation and let the process begin again. Slime deodands are torturers and interrogators in the deodand hierarchy.

The highest caste are strutting, sadistic martinets--the wardens and senior guards of the prison. They’re vaguely human-like in form, but with pale, wrinkled skin that seems ill-fitted to their bodies. They’re androgynous with bald heads and unfeminine faces, but pendulous breasts and high-pitched voices. They have a penchant for dressing in uniforms, the more elaborate the better. Sagging deodands (as they’re called) are found of searches, interrrogations, and tortures. They foster paranoid not as a hobby, or even a vocation, but simply due to their natures. Infractions are always found, and prisoners are encouraged to inform on others--but only after they themselves are questioned to the breaking point.

It’s a good thing for Prime Material Plane that deodands seldom arrive on it unbidden. Sadistic sorcerers have been known to arrange “renditions” for enemies, though the price for such a service is rumored to be steep.

A Map of Reality I Drew While I was Waiting...

...for my car to get repaired.

It's a bit incomplete--and not up to the standards of the illustration my posts usually have--but it summarizes what I've discovered so far about the multiverse of the Strange New World.

For instance, the Positive Energy Plane is just the beginning of the Prime Material--or the etheric echo of that beginning.  The Negative Energy Plane is the other bookend.

The highest Heaven is the domain of the Creator(s).  Most dead don't make it to the highest Heaven but maybe some lesser "heavenly" realm--like maybe the Elysian Fields (also called Summerland or the Fiddler's Green).  It's the counter-plane to the Wasteland, embodying "hope."  There are more of these heavenly realms.

At the "bottom" of reality is the Pit, the Abyss.  It's the place that fell the farthest in the Fall.  The place of beings with no place in creation who want nothing more than to tear it all down--the demons.  "Circling the drain" of the Pit, falling into it at different velocities, are hellish realms of various sorts.  Hell (appropriately) where the fallen angels hope to stage a coup in creation and then forestall its slide into the Pit.  Closer to the ultimate nullity are the Wasteland and the grim Black Iron Prison (which I left off the my map!) where the odious Deodands (named, interestingly, for an archaic legal term for a thing "forfeit onto God for causing a death") imprison, punish, and re-educate souls caged in their Escher maze prison hell.

Between Heaven and the Pit are planes more neutral to "good" and "evil"--or more accurately, they're places where the struggle between angels and demons is seen as beside the point.  The denizens of Machina (polyhedral nanomachines, forming the distributive conscious of their Singular god(dess), and other worshippers like the Mantid Warrior-Nuns) believe that only absolute order can restore creation to an unfallen state.  In constrast the formless, fluid intelligences of the Gyre (who often send technicolor clowns as their emissaries) believe that endless change is the only hope to recreate the conditions of the original Singularity of All and lead to the multiverse's reunion with the Godhead--or at least that's one of their myriad ideas.

Wonders from the Planes

Besides the gray dust, other outer planar artifacts sometimes turn up in the more thaumaturgically-oriented private markets of the City, or end up in some structure of the Ancients to be found be adventurers. Here are a few of them:

Skeletal key: A minor artifact of the demonic gaolers from the plane called the Black Iron Prison. It’s a six inch long key that does indeed appear to be made out of bone. It can open any non-magical earthly lock, and a specific cell block within the plane of confinement, though it will be impossible to find out which one without magical or extraplanar aide.

Madness record: Condensed from the substance of their realm by the polychromatic clowns of the Plane of Chaos, these appear to be mundane 78rpm phonograph records. If the record is played, all those who are able to hear the strange and indescribable sounds on it will be affected as per the confusion spell.

Fabrication fog: A swarm of minuscule, polyhedral automatons from the Tesseract of Machina, the Plane of Order. These beings are packed into a small square box of some light, but extremely durable alien metal with cautionary text in several different scripts (but no earthly ones) engraved on it.  When the box is open the automata appear as a glittering swarm of fly-sized bronze shapes. They will be bound to the one who opens the box and serve him for one year (their power runs out then without recharge), until he is dead, or he gives them to someone else. They act like the fabricate spell, making whatever the owner desires within the restrictions of the spell (other than the need for the craft skill--the automata can manufacture anything non-magical item with a model or reference image). There are rumored to be versions of these which perform healing functions.

In the Gloom

This is a follow-up to my discussion of the gray dust earlier this week. Experienced astral projectionists and other sorts of planar travelers from the City know that all the outer planes between the unassailable heights of Heaven on high, and the abyssal depths of the Pit where the qliphothic things dwell, are conceptual places--and the prevailing concept of the Wasteland is gloom.

The Wasteland, Plane of Despair, is an expanse of cinereous, dessicated land and sunless, graveyard skies, but its not entirely featureless. An arthritic creaking might announce the appearance of corroded and broken playground equipment from the mists. One might stumble into a mire of quicksand ash or find a burned out and derelict house from either a recent or historical era.

Then there are the human forms coated in hardened ash, like the victims of a volcanic eruption, dotting the landscape at intervals like anguished sculptures. These are said to be the final remains of souls given over to an afterlife of despondency.  They arrive in the Wasteland as filmy shadows and over time petrify to immobile, tortured forms.

The inhabitants of the Wasteland are just as grim. The Faceless Mourners appear as women dressed in funeral veils and black dresses of a century ago. Sometimes they carry straight razors and sometimes ink black ichor drips from underneath their long sleeves and runs down the creases of their ashen hands. Sometimes they can be glimpsed in mirrors by a person contemplating suicide. It’s said that their appearance unsummoned on the Material Plane harbingers death.  Their keening causes stillbirth.

Particularly loathsome are the Lonely Husks. These creatures appear as androgynous human skins, as if the skin was shed whole like a snake’s. They attach themselves to sentients and slowly drain the life from them. They lie in bed. holding the victim close like a lover, whispering in the person’s ear of their undying devotion and begging--pleading--for the victim never to leave them, and to love them in return. First, the victim is weakened and fatigue, then over days, paralyzed. Finally they die in a period of 4-8 weeks as their lungs or heart gives out.

There are also fiends, likely relatives of demons or devils, which have adapted to life in the Gray Gloom. These entities claim rulership, but no one truly rules the Wasteland; It’s sufferings domain.