Weird Revisited: The Two Cities of Hoborxen

I think this post from February of 2011 may be one of my favorite Weird Adventures related posts...

On some moonless night in the City, you can look across the Eldritch River and see on the other bank a shining, alien city with buildings that look as if there made of blown glass and infused with a pale, fluorescent glow. In the morning, you might look again at the same place on the far bank, wondering if the strange city had just been dream, and you’d see the gray smokestacks and worn docks of humdrum Hoborxen, and you’d be sure you that it had been.

And you’d be wrong.

Since the earliest days of Ealderdish settlement, strange things have been seen and heard in the area that would eventually become the city of Hoborxen. These irruptions from elsewhere have only increased over the centuries since. Now, in the night, the working class neighborhoods and decaying waterfront of day Hoborxen are intruded upon, and sometimes replaced, by an otherworldly city of tall spires, all its buildings made of something resembling glass, warm to the touch like the mantle of a recently lit lantern.

Every night, some part of Hoborxen is replaced by the intruder--sometimes only a single structure, other times an entire neighborhood. On nights of the new moon, Horboxen is entirely replaced. The city begins to appear at dusk, as if emerging from an unseen but evaporating fog, or coalescing from the dying light. The strange glow of its structures rises slowly; it's brightest at midnight and wanes toward dawn.

No human inhabitants of the alien city are ever seen, but it's not completely deserted. Fairy-like creatures--obscenely jabbering, cinereous, and moth-winged--sometimes buzz about its streets or lewdly call from high perches. A low growl, a sound as much felt in the bones as heard, periodically reverberates through the streets, and some explorers have claimed to heard a woman crying or laughing softly.

Exploration of the glassy structures usually turns up everyday detritus from Hoborxen, most of which is of little value. Sometimes, things lost elsewhere in the world turn up here, but again seldom anything of real value except perhaps to the one that lost it. It’s a common tale among adventurers that there's a great treasure haul somewhere in the city, but no one has retrieved anything more than a few enigmatic, otherworldly trinkets.

Would-be treasure-hunters should weigh the likely gain against the potential dangers.  A number of people entering the areas of the alien city are never seen again. 

The people of Hoborxen are inured to these nocturnal visitations, and rarely remark on them, though addiction, violence, and suicide are more common there than in neighboring towns. No one knows where they go when they’re elsewhere. “Nowhere,” they say, and shrug and turn away.

Some thaumaturgist muse darkly that there may come a time when Hoborxen will be gone entirely, every night. And after that, will the incursion spread?

The Silver Metal Face of Gyre

"All right, for all you cutters out there in the Big Ring, all you street people with an ear for the action, this is Argent with a special request..."

Outlaw broadcaster, street artist, vigilante, and possible demiurge, the mysterious Lady of Gyre, the city at the center of the multiverse, is known as Argent for the silver mask all her manifestations wear. She is always a she. Cis or trans women, certainly, but also gynoid automata, on occasion. Within those parameters, she can appear as anyone, and on rare occasions, multiple someones at one time.

To say the Lady rules Gyre isn't strictly true. Despite the number of bureaucrats, elected officials, and megacoporate CEOs, no one really does much ruling in Gyre--but Argent has ways of making her displeasure known. When rendered, there are no appeals from her judgments. The surest way to bring down her wrath is break one of her rules like trying to incarnate a god in the city, disrupting one of the portals to the Outer Planes, or starting an unsanctioned policlub. Occasionally some small thing will piss her off, though. Those are more random incidents, but dealt with just as severely. Some get unmade in a blast of light. Others get trapped in nonorientable topologies and shot into the Astral.

Those that make a pretense of ruling Gyre don't mention her much, though occasionally one will publicly deplore her tactics. None that plan to hold office wrong with do anything close to breaking one of her rules.

Random Ultra-Warriors Generator

I made this new logo yesterday so it seemed like a good time to post my Random Ultra-Warriors Generator. It's just a first draft, but it does a serviceable job of creating the sort of characters seen in Masters of the Universe or similar media.

The Monster Makers of Gyre

The Promethean Society (Monstermakers, Frankensteins)
The learned members of the Promethean Society policlub believe that the multiverse is only intelligible when filtered through the senses of sophont beings, most specifically biologic sophont beings. They believe that a perfected biological being could perceive a more perfected multiverse, and thereby usher in a new age, the Godhead again made manifest through a creation worthy of it. To this end, the Promethean Society members are shapers of flesh and creators of artificial life. Some believe that mundane biological life could be upgraded through grafts or genetic alterations, while others believe only a bioroid Adam could possibly be the vessel for a new consciousness.

The equipment and supplies their experiments call for don't come cheap, so many members make a living providing biotech modifications to customers. Some make monsters for underground fight clubs, while still others illegal clones for the very wealthy.

Wednesday Comics: Wizards for Hire...Cheap!

Comic book writer and artist Von Allan was set to contribute a story to issue two of Underground Comix, which seems likely never to be, unfortunately. Von has a lot of comics work available, though. Stuff that you should check out like, Wizards for Hire - Cheap!

Bill and Butch are a wizard and his dog (possibly also a wizard; it's unclear) on the planet Rigel V. They are somewhat lazy, and somewhat cowardly, unless beer is on the line! Von Allan's short anthology of their adventures is sure to please anyone who enjoyed the comics in the back of Dragon Magazine back in the day, and may well also appeal to fans of modern, dungeoneering comics like The Clandestinauts. In fact, my favorite story of the three features a total party kill of an eclectic group of adventurers that would be very much at home in Sievert's work.

Von does more than D&D-related fantasy however, Head over to his website to check out other stuff he's got to offer.

weird Revisited: The Witches of Ix

This was one of the earliest Land of Azurth posts, appearing in August of 2014...

Art by Ian Miller

It is likely you will never have cause to visit the land of Ix, and in this, you should consider yourself lucky. The only exception might be those who have the misfortune to live in blighted, ghoul-haunted Noxia. To you Noxians an oft cold and mostly gloomy land of forests, bogs, and mountains, infested with goblins and ruled by witches, may not seem so dire. Remember though that you must cross the toxic badlands of the Waste to get there.

Ix has only one town worthy of note, and it cowers in the shadow of Hexenghast, an impossibly large and sprawling castle built beyond the memory of Ixians. Hexenghast is large enough to accommodate the four Great Houses of Ixian Witches and their various servants, mercenaries, guests, and prisoners. In fact, it is so large it houses these individuals and still has a great many halls and rooms that are unoccupied and perhaps unexplored for centuries.

Art by Yoshitaka Amano

A grand coven of the leaders of the Great Houses rules Hexenghast (no mean feat, given all the infighting and intrigue). The management of the rest land is done by lower level witches with mundane human and goblin subordinates. Mostly they are concerned with the collection of Hexenghast's due in taxes and farm goods, but they also suppress any unauthorized practice of magic and promulgate state propaganda.

There is an order of witches known as the Witchfinders. These cloaked figures appear within a day of the birth of any child in Ix. Every newborn is examined, and if the child bear some witches' mark, it's whisked off to Hexenghast and given over to one house or another to raise. When the children come of age, they cross the flickering Ghostlight Bridge that spans the chasm between Hexenghast proper and the sub-castle of the Scholomance. There, they are tutored in the dark arts until they are ready to assume their adult role in Witch society.

It has been the custom for new graduates of the Scholomance to spend some time abroad before settling into Hexenghast, engaging in the sort of infamies that youths who are schooled in the Dark Arts and confident in their own superiority are wont to engage in. This was the context in which Angvaine and Nocturose crossed into Noxia all those years ago.

Art by Yoshitaka Amano

Three Policlubs of the City Gyre

In conceptual realms like the outer multiverse, there are few armchair philosophers. In Gyre, the ring city at the center of the multiverse, policlubs are registered and tolerated organizations formed around philosophic principals with elements of street gangs, secret societies, and sometimes, organized crime. Here are three of them:

Annihilists (Doomsters)
Things fall apart, in the planar multiverse as well as on the mundanes. It's a cold fact more eternal than any promise of Law, and more certain than any ephemera of Chaos. You can deny it or even fight it, but you can't defeat it. The Annihilists choose to embrace it to varying degrees, some by taking the time (as it slowly ticks away) to appreciate, even revel in, its workings, others by actively joining in and hastening things along. What comes after everything crumbles to dust also divides the group. Some feel that only by the destruction of the current multiverse can make way for a new, better, one. Others hold that there will be a final oblivion, and the wounded Godhead will finally rest in peace.

The headquarters of the more action-minded wing of the Annihilist movement is the metal club Rough Beast, located in an abandoned industrial foundry. The official policlub's current leader is a young tiefling woman who sings lead for the house band, The Eves of Destruction.

The Free (The Wardens, The Jailers)
There is a harsh purpose to the multiverse and that is to confine souls. The Black Iron Prison, the Plane of Confinement, is just the maximum security section of a larger and more subtle prison. The Free's founder claims to have escaped the Black Iron Prison but only after achieving a sort of enlightenment while he was in solitary. He and his followers offer this enlightenment to the worlds, but it comes at price. None can truly experience the truth of it without first going through a great trial.

The Free are based in a prison in Gyre; both guards and prisoners are members. Their aim isn't punishment but the stern refinement of the souls in their charge.

Ontic Programmer Collective (Reality Hackers)
Everyone agrees that the mundane universes are essentially patterns in ether and the planar multiverse is a pattern vibrating in the astral manifold, but the question of what structure supports those patterns has been left up to theologians, who obviously have no consistent answer. The OPC believes that the answer is nothing less than the Godhead, and the name of the Godhead is math. The OPC plan is to obtain power beyond even the so-called gods by understanding and manipulating the computational underpinings of the multiverse.

The OPC is an eclectic group of academics, corporate programmer wage slaves, and gifted dropouts. There main need is etheric network time and bandwidth, and they are quite willing to acquire it by almost any means. They seldom rumble in the physical realm with other policlubs, but have been known to make things very difficult for rivals by their machinations on the net.