Weird Revisited: Beneath the Fog Sea

The original of this post appeared in 2012...

The children of port cities are wont to crowd the docks when any airship comes in, but none generate the excitement that the return of a vessel laden with strange, subnebulous treasures does. Many’s the young lad or lass who dreams of one day being one of the daring divers who brave weird miasmata and battle strange creatures to win fortune and fame.

The modern world has four strata. The highest is the upper atmosphere of relatively benign flying things. Just beneath are the High-Lands of plateaus and mountain-sides where humanity dwells. Lapping at these lands at the lowest elevations is the Fog Sea, a region of roiling, glowing, multicolored mists. These mists are eldritch things: toxic, mutagenic, or both, with lengthy and concentrated exposure. Inhospitable though this region may be to humans, there are many flying or floating creatures which make it their home.

The deepest depths of the fog shroud the lowest strata: the Low-Lands, the Undersea. Here one may find true oceans of water (gray and toxic from absorbing the overhanging fog), but more importantly, here lie the ruins of a once great civilization. This is thought to be the ancient home of man, before whatever happened, happened, forcing him to seek higher ground. Ancient treasures--both of wealth and knowledge--were left in these ruins. Though sailing a whole vessel through the fog is generally considered too risky a move, divers and diving craft are sent down to reclaim these treasures.

The fog isn’t the only danger. If the strange flying and floating things weren’t enough, the ruined cities themselves are inhabited by monsters. Some are mutated animals, others are humanoids--perhaps the degenerate descendants of the humans left behind. These savages view divers as violators of their territory at best and potential meals at worse. In the shadowy depths, divers do battle with these creatures, steel against steel, as firearms often misfire dangerously when submerged in the fog. The psychoactive properties of the mists have given strange powers to the creatures that dwell in it--but sometimes limited exposure does the same for divers, too.

Despite the dangers of death or loss of humanity, the rewards are great. There is no shortage of youths willing to sign on for a voyage beneath the Fog Sea.

The Planes of Pure Law

The Analects, concerned primarily with the philosophies and doctrines of the forces of called variously Law, Order, Persistence, or Certitude, are silent on emanation of the first Aeon--The Fall-- where a lesser infinity of the Godhead was broken in some sort of hypercosmic trauma. The first concept to differentiate or separate from formlessness was Order, and everything that was not was Chaos. Thus, the first Syzygy was born.

As Order was elaborated, mind was born. The Prime Mover sought to make the multiverse as precise and orderly as its thought process. It constructed more of itself, a vast planar machine, and called it Mechanus.  If the whole universe were a vast computational engine, it could model the Godhead with such fidelity that it would be the Godhead--or at least the Godhead to the maximum resolution of the fallen universe.

But Unity no longer existed. On the expanding boundaries of Mechanus, interaction with Chaos created doubt, and doubt led to schism. The Boundary Archons became convinced that intellect and logic alone could not describe the Godhead or form Unity. Nor could the necessary transcendence occur by coercion. These seven Archons created the Heavenly Mountain, and at its peak was Abolition of Self, which would transform the souls born of chaos into what the Archons in their certainty knew the cosmos needed.

Other Border Archons believed that the cosmos could only be changed by force. They even dared consider that the former oneness might never be restored--but perhaps a new unity could be constructed. Mechanus's measures were too passive. They had seen the worst of Chaos, and the equations of the Machine were not adequate to the task of subduing it. Chaos could only be expunged, and those too weak to resist it would need correction or destruction themselves. Only the strong would have a place in Unity. They burrowed into Chaos and fixed it with chains called Oppression and founded Hell.

Consulting the Sages

Our Land of Azurth 5e campaign continued last night with the party still in the future, spending the night in the apparent safety of the Frog Temple (whose messiah, they believe is Waylon the Thief from some point in the future). They are awakened by the white glow of a point floating air that spreads into a line vibrating with the words of Phosphoro. The wizard asks if they have acquired the book. Before they can answer, something disrupts his transmission.

That something turns out to be a ball energy that resolves into a humanoid form. In a booming monotone, it demands that they turn over the Book of Doors, explaining that the Mysteriarchs of Zed will brook no one unworthy gaining entrance to their hidden city. It also declares that it is not fool by the trickery inherent in this "anomaly," though who this comment is aimed at is not clear. The group assumes it to be Roderick Drue, but the confused young man protests his innocence.

The party surmises they do want to to fight this creature, much less the Mysteriarchs, so they bargain: They will give up the book, minus the page they must give Phosphoro. The creature summons a "factor" of the city empowered to make such negotiations.

After some talk, the factor agrees to their terms. Additionally, he warns them their presence here might summon a "Time Keeper." He has the "golem of pure magic" examine the book, then remove the page Phosphoro will need. Then the agents of Zed leave taking the rest of the book with them.  When they are gone, Phosphoro renews contact. The party explains the situation, and Phosphoro prepares to return them home. Due to the nature of temporal magic, he states they will have to drift out of this time slowly. It make take hours or days.

With nothing to do but wait, the party tries to find out more about what calamity befell their homeland. They seek out the Standing Stone Sages. The sages don't know much that can help them, but do reveal that The Clockwork Princess and Queen Desira, the Enchantress of Virid, were allies in their rebellion against the Wizard.

No sooner are they done talking to the Sages than they encounter a strange ooze shot through with electrical impulses that seems to follow them. The attack it at a distance, finding it resistant to most things, but vulnerable to cold. Relying primarily on such attacks, they destroy it before it can ever get an attack in.

Weird Revisited: Bug Powder

This first first appeared. Way back in 2010...

Bill: What do you mean, "it's a literary high"?

Joan: It's a Kafka high. You feel like a bug.

- Naked Lunch (1991)

Bug Powder is a strange magical substance found in the City, and its world, and possibly elsewhere. It generally appears as pale yellowish powder, and its official use is as a professional-grade insecticide. It can be found in containers from several different and mysterious suppliers--"Benway Chymical", and "Voke & Veech", are prominent examples. Bug powder will indeed serve as an insecticide, but if nasally insufflated (snorted), or injected intravenously in small doses it has euphoric and mild hallucinogenic properties.

Long-term use generally leads to dependence, but also, like use of a large single dose, seems to open a doorway to another plane. Users report travel to an exotic, desert world under two reddish moons, were lies a sprawling pennisular city called Interzone, on the quivering banks of a gelatinous sea. The swarthy inhabitants of Interzone appear human in all respects, but have undefinable and unsettling air of strangeness about them. In addition to the natives, humans from many time periods and worlds, as well as alien beings, can be found sweating in Interzone, perusing their own agendas. There is a great deal of political intrigue in the city-state, and several different political factions--but the goals of these groups and the reasons for their conflicts often seem contradictory, if not outright nonsensical.

Mystics and planar scholars believe Interzone to be an interstitial realm acting as a gate or "customs station" between the material world and the inner planes. Supporting this view is the presence of soldiers the Hell Syndicates, as well as miracleworking street-preachers and holy hermits professing the varied and conflicting "ultimate truths" of the Seven Heavens. A slight variation on this view, is that Interzone is not so much a part of the astral plane, but more an extension of Slumberland, the Dream-World, located in some seedy Delirium ghetto. Further exploration will be needed to determine this for certain.

This exploration isn't without dangers. While physical dependence comes from the bug powder's use, the thinning of the psychic barriers between the material world and Interzone serve to cause a person to involuntarily shift between the two. This tends to generate feelings of paranoia--and perhaps rightly so, as the more time one spends in Interzone, the more likely one is to become an agent (perhaps unwittingly) of one of its factions, and fall prey to its byzantine intrigues.

One final interesting bit of Interzone lower is that the natives hold that their city-state, was actually once six cities of very different mystic character, physically indistinct and loosely co-spatial, but still spiritually differentiated. The names of theses putative cities when uttered with the proper ritual, are said to be a powerful spell, though sources disagree as to what purpose.

Weird Revisited: Anti-Elves

This post first appeared in 2017...

Drow as "elves but evil" has been done. Let's take a cue from Otus's ink-blot, living shadow rendition, and say that they are the arcane Evil Twins of elves. Maybe not quite Bizarro World duplicates, but close. They look like photographic negatives of some elf, somewhere, sometime. (It is quite possible that if a specific elf and anti-elf come into contact there will be an explosion, Or, they will untie into a single, transcendent being and leave this plane. In an explosion.)

Anti-elves live underground in ultra-controlled, industrial, technolgical environments because they hate nature. They want replace it all with a machinery hellscape like Apokolips. The only reason they haven't yet is because they hate the sun, too, and are forced to live underground. They're working on that one.

Anti-elves are profoundly unmagical. All those magical abilities listed in a drow stat block have a technological basis. No surface creature can steal a anti-elf device and make it work because their bio-energy polarity will just disrupt it and make it nonfunctional after a use or two.

Ant-elves don't believe in gods, meaning they accept the existence of tiresome things other races call gods, but they think them ridiculous impediments to their own purposes and would never worship them. All sacrifices you might see them make are strictly translactional. Any temples are really just fanclubs--an anti-elves are the sort of crazy, obsessive fans that are very likely to progress to stalking and murder.

Azurth Mailbag: Are the PCs the Straight Men?

When I said this might be a recurring feature, I didn't think it would be so soon, but Jack Shear of New York asked an interesting question as follow-up to a comment I made on social media: "What does it look like when Azurth PCs are playing the straight man to the setting's fancifulness?"

My comment about "the PCs as straight men" was a reference to an idea that gets bandied about from time to time that originated with this blog post, I believe. Now, I sort of like this idea for a lot of settings. But the Land of Azurth is different.

Different does not mean my Azurth campaign is comedy game, though like any D&D game, it has its share of comedic moments. Rather, it is a world that is very serious in its unseriousness, even its ridiculousness.  Pun names for characters (like the perpetually throat-clearing mayor of one small hamlet, Effluvia Flimm) are common, and "joke" monsters or treasures are not unheard (though they aren't particularly common).

I'm not looking to get a laugh of the players with all this, though it's fine if I do on occasion. Rather, I'm trying to present a certain of world like Oz or Ooo, and these are just the sort of things these kind of worlds have. In this context, I hope that this sort of playfulness aids immersion instead of harming it.

So, anyway, the world as presented sort of puts the player in the roll of straight man in a couple of ways. One, they must stay goal-oriented and aware of potential danger (even death), despite the occurrence of odd, perhaps even ridiculous things: A dwarf polymorphed into a horse has disguised itself among hippogriffs in a sub-grade-school costume. You make landfall on an island populated by living candy. A court of talking animals puts you on trial for the slaughter of their kind. None of these things are the stuff of "serious" fantasy, at least of the action-oriented sort, yet here they are. The DM presents them seriously, with ne'er a nudge or wink, and the characters had better deal with them as such, even as the players may note their ridiculousness. And it keeps coming.

The second way is perhaps more common to certain sorts of adventure fantasy, specifically the works of Jack Vance. The PCs are adventurers of competence, even heroism, in a world where those traits may be uncommon. Like Vance's Adam Reith in the Planet of Adventure series, the PCs must contend with venal, self-absorbed, conniving, hidebound, and eccentric NPCs quite frequently. Some of these NPCs are also dangerous in the usual D&D sense, but most of them are just somewhat unhelpful. The PCs can only shake their head in frustration and press on.

This latter bit could probably get annoying to players if overdone, but I seem to have kept it in bounds, because the players actually seem to have some affection for a few of the recurring NPCs, even if they roll their eyes at them. It tends to be clear who is a villain and who is just an everyday rogue, and they reserve their hatred for that second bunch. Also, having distinctive characteristics for the NPCs seems to to keep them entertained.

So that's how Azurth is often the Costello to the PCs Abbot.

Got a question on the Land of Azurth or the campaign? Leave it in the comments or email me.

Wednesday Comics: Superheroes at Archie

Archie Comics is best known as the publisher of the teen humor character whose name it bears, but the company has also produced superheroes throughout much of its history, since its inception as MLJ Comics in 1939, in fact. They've never had the profile of DC's or Marvel's characters, but the MLJ/Archie characters are perhaps first among also-rans. It was the MLJ characters, after all, that Moore used in his original pitch that became Watchmen.

To get the low-down on these "Ultra-Heroes" (The term used in the Mighty Comics of the 60s. Presumably a reaction to Marvel and DC trademarking "Super Hero.") you could do a lot worse than the MLJ Companion from TwoMorrows.

The history of the characters can be divided into publication eras. The Golden Age started with Pep Comics in 1940. The Shield would appear there, America's first flag-clad hero, 15 months before Captain America. The Comet was there, too, unusually violent, and ultimately the first superhero to die. The Hang Man and Black Hood followed, but all the superheroes ultimately gave way to Archie Andrews and the Riverdale gang.

With the dawn of the Silver Age, the MLJ superheroes were revived first in the Archie Adventure Series and then Mighty Comics. Joe Simon created the Fly, who was likely inspired by Captain Marvel (Shazam to kids today) and was perhaps one of the inspirations for Spider-Man. DC's success was the impetus for the revival, but Marvel's success guided its development. Jerry Seigel was brought in as main writer and either was trying to do a burlesque of the Marvel style or was unable to take it seriously. Either way, the Mighty Crusaders (as the new team was called) were "High Camp" a year before the Batman TV show made it the hip way to handle superheroes.

The campy 60s titles died away, but the heroes wouldn't stay down. They were brought back in the late 70s in reprints as part of the Red Circle line. The early 80s saw new stories produced, masterminded by Rich Buckler, with a grittier tone in keeping with the times and in some ways anticipating what was to come. Archie backed off from this pretty quickly, rebranding the line as the Archie Adventure Series again and making them more kid-friendly. They even got a toyline.

They were revived by DC under the !mpact imprint in the 90s, then again in an attempt to add them to the DC Universe in the 2008, but DC lost the rights in 2011.

Archie Comics have been publishing the superheroes themselves since 2012, but it doesn't look like they've published anything since 2018. Given the Mighty Crusaders history, I suspect they'll be back. You can't keep the ultra-heroes down.