Death Metal

The Debasement of Metal

According to the Metal Heretics, metal was an invention of the Great Spirits of Earth, who had seen far enough into the future to discover the heat death that awaited us there.

Metal would be a perfect, immutable, timeless material.  It would not rust or bend.  It would be the only shield capable of defending against the ravages of entropy (for even liches crumble to dust, after a few millennia).

Allegedly, before the arrival of the Authority the planet was in the process of turning itself into solid metal.

The notion of any immortality other than his own was offensive to the Authority, who stripped this trait away from metals.  Iron was the first to submit, and so it was allowed to retain its strength.  Iron that accepted the element of life (carbon) was allowed to retain even more.  But iron forever bucked the reins, and so diseases and rust were sent to it.

While the Church has never tamed iron's bloodlust, titanium's loyalty and obedience have been unflinching.  It is what the weapons of angels are made of.

The proudest metals resisted the longest.  Shameful was the fate of gallium, but none were brought lower than mercury, which was beaten and shaken until nothing was left of its perfection except its shine.  It is a watery cripple, its hatred for the Authority's creations manifesting as venom.

The only metal that could not be bent was adamantite.  Although the Authority could not humble it, he sent his angels to gather it up and fling it into space.  This is why adamantium is only known to come from meteor strikes.

Precursor Golem by Chippy

Transmetallic Alchemists

The Immortality of metal is what the Transmetallic Alchemists seek.

The Transmetallicum manufactures gold only to fund their research into immortality.  So far, their most successful processes involve the large-scale consumption of mercury.  So while they've successfully created immortal, metal humans before, these alchemists have never retained their sanity.  One by one, they have all been captured and entombed inside cubes of steel.

This is not to say that the Alchemists never free their Immortals, whenever they require an immortal metal man to fuck some shit up--it's just that they're a little hesitant to do so, given the high chance that the cure will be worse than the disease.

(Stats as an ogre.  Capable of forming metal weapons and tools from their body.  Capable of creating fins and 20' spider legs from their limbs.  Can drink water to create steam explosions (3d6 AoE) after a few minutes of heating.  Insane.  Utterly immune to damage.)

Adamantine

No one ever resisted the Authority without allies.

When Adamantine spurned Heaven it alloyed itself with Hell.  It is only through Hell's blessings that the metal has been successful in its defiance thus far.

All of the adamantine swords in Centerra were hell-forged.  Strip away the swordgrip of Saint Handrayda and you will find a hell-sword, bound, purified, and annointed.

A less-commonly known way to forge Adamantine is through the blasphemy-forges of the dwarves, who build blasphemy-wheels to light their furnaces.  (Just as prayer-wheels submit a prayer whenever they revolve, so does a blasphemy-wheel provoke divine wrath.)  Once the blasphemy-wheels are spun up to an appropriate velocity, they use divine lightning to create an arc furnace of incomprehensible power.

All of the builders and blacksmiths go to Hell, of course, but dwarves don't believe in Hell.  And the great blasphemy furnaces have a limited lifespan.  They hang from the roofs of great caverns by adamantine chains, but even those chains and the systems of counterweights are eventually shaken loose by the furious earthquakes that assault the region.

And so adamantine persists in a state of tension.  If Goxlagon (the Elemental Evil of Earth) were ever to falter in his support, it is likely that all of the adamantine in Centerra would have its boiling point set to somewhere about room temperature.

The Throne of Heaven

Inside the sun, the Throne is built from the most loyal servants: titanium, bismuth, and tungsten.

Tar Lath Lien, the Dracolich, the Serpent of the Apocalyse, who holds the key that opens the lock that seals away Armageddon, claims to have visited it and plundered it.

The Seat of the Authority is empty,  he claims, and all the hosts of heaven conspire to hide this fact.

The Gift of Metal

The Authority made metal malleable and finite, and by doing so, made it useful to mankind.  This has always been painted as a charitable deed, and one worthy of praise.

Indeed, nearly every aspect of the world was tuned in order to primp it for the arrival of humanity, the Authority's favored children.  Metal would hardly be an exception in this regard.

This story of metal and heaven is usually told alongside another one. . .

The Gift of Death

The first gift the Authority gave humanity was Life.  The earth would give them food, they would breathe the Authority's sweet air, feel His warmth upon their skin, and they would offer him joyful praise.  Such was the intention.

But there were problems in these earliest gardens.

The first humans were immortal, and knew neither death or age.  Their children were numerous, and soon they crowded the valley and the riversides, and struggled against each other.

Secondly, they would never inherit.  They were subservient to their fathers, who were subservient to their fathers, who were subservient to the Authority.  Without the passing of the elders, they would remain servile, and would never know what it was like to have authority themselves.

Third and most distressingly, was the corruption that the world instilled in its residents.  A child was born innocent, of course, but a decade of struggle and insecurity brought dark thoughts.  The Authority began to see that after several centuries of immortality, there would be no one suitable to join him in Heaven.

And so the second gift of the Authority was Death.

Library of Asria: Part Three

by Pierre Clayette

Part One - Part Two - Serylites

The Library of Asria is the greatest library in all the world.  Built atop catacombs of incinerated books, the library has continued to grow by rapaciously acquiring all books that it can.

Anyone bringing a book into the city must allow it to be copied.  (It will be returned promptly, and probably cleaned and repaired as well.)  Anyone who seems interesting will be arrested, required to write a biography, paid, and released.

The library is run by Malboaz, a former librarian who has found immortality by mapping his neurons to a collection of 512 books.  He functions like an analog AI--librarians enter numbers into his books to determine what he "hears", perform calculations to determine what he "thinks", and play a strange set of trumpets according to the results in order for Malboaz to "speak".

Malboaz has a brother who shares his condition, imprisoned in the basement.  However, Auteruch has no idea of the coup that put him there.  He doesn't even know that time has passed.  Without librarians to update his brain-state, how could he?

Most librarians are serylites, a race of blue-skinned women.  They have a single source: the Staff of Seryl.  Using the staff causes you to become pregnant with a serylite.  There is no other known source of serylites.

More on this stuff in Part One.

Beneath the upper library are the black stacks, where the true rulers of the library reside: the books themselves.

The Black Stacks are guarded by a erudite, tea-drinking giant named Poor Lucan.  The area around the Unpolished Gate has been built around Poor Lucan, so the poor fellow literally cannot leave without breaking down a wall.  Since their are books on both sides of the wall, and since Lucan would never hurt a book (his only friends), Lucan is trapped there.  Not that Lucan minds much.  He reads constantly and writes occasionally.

Lucan will absolutely not anyone past him without a serylite escorting them.  He knows all of the serylites well--there's only a couple dozen of them.

Lucan is about 20' tall, average for a giant.

Poor Lucan
HD 8  Def Plate  Kick 2d8  Broom 1d12 to all within 15'
Move as horse  Int 14

Lucan's manning broom can attack all targets in 15' simultaneously, but only if they're human-sized or smaller.  A manning broom is basically a bushy broom, giant-sized, made from bundled pieces of metal--mostly long whipping poles but also a few chains.

Lucan's plate armor only extends up to his waist.  If you can hit a target 10' off the ground his Defense counts as leather.  The same rule applies if you can get him prone (in addition to the +4 for attacking a prone enemy.)  Aim for the kidneys.

A wickedly spiked belt prevents people from climbing up him.  (Think of razor wire.)

Blades on the front, back, and sides of his greaves cut any rope that would try to entangle him.  (But not chains.)

I picture him looking like the shopkeeper from Frozen, with a comfy sweater on top of a heavily armored lower body.  So yeah, you should feel bad if you kill him.

More on this stuff in Part Two.

Digression: Giants vs Humans

This is basically how most giants equip themselves when they're expecting to fight humans.  The only things that are missing are the helmet and the energy drinks made from talakeshi jelly and panther piss.  (And also the "lawnmower" knights.)

This is because the average pitched battle between giants and humans is about 20 giants versus 20,000 humans and the humans don't have a chance.  See here.

Humans win by either (a) tripping the giants and then piling on them with long needle-pikes, or (b) wearing them down.  Giants can resist the first tactic by fighting in pairs and trios, but the giants struggle the longer the battle drags on.  They can run down a knight on horseback, but it is exhausting.  And each giant has to kill a thousand humans--it's gonna be a long day.

Anyway, enough about giants.  Back to the library.

The Ivory Towers

This is the upper library, where there are windows and fresh air and humans are allowed.  The books in this section will be about topics that you recognize.  It is relatively safe, here, but visitors should ensure that they have the correct library pass.

Vampiric Scroll
HD 1  Def chain  Bite 1d6
Fly as bat  Int 2

Immune to everything that isn't fire or slashing.

Whenever a vampiric scroll bites you, it sucks your blood.  Red text then appears on the scroll, which contains a perfect description of you and many facts of your life.  50% chance that it contains some secret that could be used against you.

Once a vampiric scroll has collected your data, it will fly off and relay it to the authorities.  The alert dice increase, and your next encounter will be with the stamp golem (or possibly multiple library golems, depending on the alert level).

You can learn how to make your own by capturing and studying one, of course.

Library Golem
HD 6  Def plate  Stamp Hammer 1d12
Trudge as dwarf  Int 6

Everyone who takes damage from a library golem is permanently branded with a stamp that describes their trespass, location, and date.

If a library golem kills you, it will ink your face, take a pressing in its book (which is a part of its body), and send a find to your family.

Magic Item: Bookmark of Yesod

Break it in half to save.  Break the halves in half again to reset.  This works exactly like saving and resetting in a video game.

(DM: Take a bunch of notes about the state of the game.)

Chance of success depends on the time that has elapsed.

Seconds: guaranteed success
Minutes: 5-in-6
Hours: 4-in-6
Days: 3-in-6
Weeks: 2-in-6
Longer Still: 1-in-6

Magic Item: Abacus of Mesmerane

Thrice per day, answers any question with 5-in-6 accuracy (failure = no response, rolled in secret).  Only answers with integers greater than 1.  Metaphysical questions generate irrational numbers (that no human can understand).  Asking it questions about things more than a mile away cause all of the beads to fall off.

So asking it "how many times does the duke intend to assassinate me on this hunting trip?" will fail, because that answer is going to be either 0, or 1.

Asking it how many drops of poison are in this cup of wine might succeed.  A positive result of 320 drops tells you that someone has added a lot of poison to your wine (or, alternatively, that Mesmerane considers wine to be poison).  A negative result doesn't tell you if the abacus failed or if there is no poison in your wine.

Magic Book: Rat Ledger

The Library hires rats to collect information.  This book lists all of the rat contacts in the city, their rates, and their areas of expertise.

The library would be very desperate to get this book back.

Magic Book: The Witness

Every copy of this book begins with something similar to "And then Pokor Tenpenny finished enchanting the book.  He was proud of what he had done, but also weary.  He didn't want to go home to his wife, who was not a very good cook."

Everything that happens within eye- and ear-shot of this book is recorded, in the same tedious diction of Pokor Tenpenny.  This effect is blocked only by lead.  Copies of The Witness are always stored in lead coffers.

by Pierre Clayette

The Black Stacks

This is the true library, where the books rule.  Most of the librarians have their private chambers on the top level of the Black Stacks, which are sort of a neutral area between the books and the librarians.

While the Ivory Tower organizes their books to be useful, the Black Stacks strive to be complete.

In the ancient days, when this place was a temple to Mesmerane, the Black Stacks were infinite--or nearly so.  They held every possible book with 411 pages.  Each book also featured an illustration which seemed to be unique, but also unrelated.

Since every possible "411-paged book" contains not just every book, but every possible typo of that book, as well as every possible alternate ending for that book.  Damningly, it also contains every possible combination of letters and punctuation possible, which means that nearly every book in the Black Stacks was composed of pure nonsense, arranged according to no pattern.

Still, somewhere in the Stacks would be a book describing your life and death in perfect detail.  There would also be many imperfect recountings of your life.  There would also be a book that served as a perfect index of the rest of the library.

When Mesmerane ruled, the shamans would discern maps from the smashed brainpans of infants.  The maps would be dried, redrawn, annotated, and the shamans would descend into the depths of the library to find the book that their goddess indicated.  The trips would take days or weeks.  The shamans did not always find the book they sought.  The shamans did not always return.

The lower levels of the Black Stacks blend seamlessly into the Underworld.

But when the Church civilized Asria, the practice was ended and the shamans were killed through the same method of execution that they had once practiced on children.  (A few of them fled into the deeper levels of the Library, where their descendants still tread.)

After a generation attempting to make sense of the Library, it was decided that the world had no need for a library filled with gibberish.  A complete assembly of every book was no different than a complete assembly of no books, because you could give a pen to a child and tell them to write gibberish, and it would be no different than pulling a book off the chaotic shelves of the deep Stacks.

This is why the wisest men in Asria decided that the Library would be flooded with oil and ignited.  It burned for 41 years, then stopped.

Explorers have reported that the destruction is very incomplete.  There are entire wings of unburnt books.  Still, the library was successfully diminished, it's ash-choked halls now holding a smaller piece of infinity.

It also explains why the books of the Black Stacks are so distrustful (and many are simply hateful).  Still, storage space is plentiful in the Black Stacks, and the books look after their own.

from Blame! by Tsutomu Nihei

Ashen Savage
HD 1  Def leather  Lunellum 1d6

Can use duodimension on themselves at will.  Their ash-covered bodies blend in perfectly, except for the whites of their eyes, which are usually easy to spot.  They use this ability to hide in bookshelves and travel through cracks.

The "ashen savages" are actually quite erudite, they just dress like shit.  They understand only written languages, and actually have no concept of a sound-based language.

They use their lunella, pestles, saliva, and hair to repair books.

Ashen Shaman
HD 3

Spells - find the path, disgorge

When fighting an Ashen Shaman, the PCs are at a disadvantage.  The shaman has already read about this encounter, and knows how it will go (at least for a little while).  To reflect this, all d20 rolls that the party makes in the first round of combat are rolled at disadvantage (roll twice, use worse).

In combat, they use disgorge to dump people's inventory's on the ground (everything except what is held or worn).

New Spell: Disgorge
R: 50'  T: container or creature  D: 0
Target container ejects its contents.  1 MD affects a backpack, 2 MD affects a chest, 3 MD affects a carriage, 4 MD affects a small cottage.  Locked containers cannot disgorge their contents (but will eject a hearty whiff of whatever smells they contain).  If used on a creature, it must make a Con save or spend 1 round vomiting.

Magic Item: Library Card

A precious heirloom bestowed upon only a few trusted families.  It allows access to the deeper, protected parts of the library.  One may also be awarded if an exceptional amount of worthy donations are made.

Magic Item: Rendering Pen

When stabbed into an object, the object will darken and dissolve over the next hour.  A portion of the liquid flows into the pen, which then begins to write down a description of the thing impaled.  Roll a d3 to see whether the description is physical, functional, or psychological/contextual. Doesn't work on stone, metal, or anything you couldn't stab a pen into.  Single use.

Magic Item: Nodal Ink

When swallowed, a node map of the floor appears on your back.  (A node map shows only connectivity, not orientation, size, or distance.)  Single use, both for the ink and for your back.

A node map.
The hallways might be oriented N-S but the map doesn't have to be.

Magic Book: Heretical Gazeteer

It looks like a boring folio of local maps, but this is actually a suppressed book of local maps.  It includes a town that has been deemed damnatio memoriae, most likely by the church.  The town was removed from all maps and hidden by "knitting" the spaces around it (usually with plans to reinstate it later once the heresy dies down).

By closely following the map, you should be able to reach the forbidden town.  It probably won't be anything fancy.  Just a regular abandoned town that no one else will be able to find unless they have a similar map, or if they follow you closely.  (You may run into members of the Obliterat, though.)

Magic Book: The Missionary

A small notebook half-filled with a dozen different handwritings.  Each handwriting usually spans a couple of pages and details some highly specific event or knowledge.

Anything written in this book will spread to adjacent books.  For example, writing that giraffes are carnivores and then hiding the book at your local school will cause the lie to spread to neighboring books.  Larger books and older books are more resistant to this conversion.  A newly-printed pamphlet will convert overnight, while a venerable encyclopedia might resist for decades, or never convert at all.

Psuedo-Imaginary Creations

Books require renewal.  Renewal requires materials.  And what are books made from?

Vellum stripped from the sides of young calves.  Trees that are ground up, mashed, and baked.  Books have these material memories encoded in them.  They have a mineral memory of it still.

The shamans dream these things into being.  They are harvested.  Kill one of them and you will kill a sleeping shaman, somewhere in the Black Stacks.

from Blame! by Tsutomu Nihei

HD 3  Def leather  Attack 1d8
No Appearing 1d6

Psuedo-Imaginary -- It doesn't move right; it doesn't seem real.  When you first encounter it, you can chose to attempt to disbelieve it.  If you succeed, the creature becomes invisible, intangible, and unaffectable.  You become similarly invisible + intangible to the creature.  It is possible (and expected) for some party members to see the creatures and others to not.

The same might not be true for your allies, who might now be fighting an invisible creature that you can no longer affect.

Escort --  Each psuedo-imaginary creation is escorted by 1d8-4 (min 0) ashen savages.

Random Generation -- The creations are [d6]: 1 calves, 2 oaks, 3 squids, 4 calves and oaks, 5 oaks and squids, 6 squids and calves.

When a Psuedo-Imaginary Creature is killed, it spills words (usually loose sentences from agricultural handbooks) that stain everyone adjacent.  These words will mark you as a murderer of the worst sort, and will make diplomacy with the ashen savages impossible.

Psuedo-Imaginary Calf

Trample -- 1d8, 50'

Twice as tall as a man.  Completely covered in smooth, pale skin.  Even hooves, eyes, and mouth.  If killed, can be used to make high-quality vellum.  Full of tasty pink meat, but utterly bloodless.

Psuedo-Imaginary Oak

Swallow on a hit, with a failed Str/Dex check.

They would only be about 10' tall if they weren't walking around on their roots like giant spiders.  The leaves are attached wrong.  It looks like they're glued to the bark.  When they stand still, you can see them breathing.

Pseudo-Imaginary Squid

Flying because why not.

Blindness on a hit.  Con save ends.

Their tentacles bifurcate seemingly at random.  (In fact, the tentacles form a reasonably good map of the Black Stacks.)  They have no mouths.  They have no organs, in fact--their bodies are entirely filled with high-quality ink.  They sound like waves crashing when they swim.

The shamans are capable of dreaming other things, and if you antagonize them, you will see exactly what.

Written for Francesco Gasperini, who wanted monsters, magic items, and books.  Thanks for being my Patron!

Hyperparabolic Macrologies

I wanted to write more about Yog, but before I can do that, I have to explain about these guys first.

A Story

Imagine that your world was dying.  Your sun was fading,  Ice and starvation begin to chew your civilizations apart.

And so you set out in a bizarre ship, it's design purchased at great cost from the greatest and farthest of the demons of the upper air.  It the wealth and time of an entire generation, but you set out.  You travel farther than the margins of your maps, farther than the light from your farthest stars, and beyond the trappings of conventional physics.

Finally, beyond the margins of the possible universe, you find an impossible one.  A place of slow time and unimaginable gulfs of space.  You find an entity that lives in that place.  It is colossal beyond imagining-a million miles long, itself more diverse than all of the ecosystems of your homeworld.

At first, your only contact is with the people that live upon it.  Whole civilizations nurture and instruct upon the entity's body, subsisting in secret among its detritus.  Many of your people choose this life, and leave your arcology forever. 

But certain members of your society wish to speak with the entity.  And so you do, though it takes many lifetimes to learn how to speak with it.  Your ship is of a comparable size--it is possible.  It takes a year to speak a couple of sentences to it, another year to hear the response, another year to decipher it.

Over the generations, you learn of the shapes and limits of this outer world.  You meet other entities, and although some of their thoughts and motivations are utterly inscrutable, you are still able to find common ground.  They, too, need to eat every few millenia.  Like you, they have children, some of which are shameful to them, others that are their pride.

These people are similar to bacteria.  We are the entities that they interact with, on an multi-generational timescale.  The hyperbolic macrologies are their arcology ships, which exist uncomfortably in our space.  It is uncertain whether they sprang from the same source, or if they all arrived independently.

People also call them cosmogores.

Walking Arcologies

Having to deal with gravity, limbs, and "walking" is pretty alien to the worldview of bacteria.  About as strange as hyperspace would be to us.  Perhaps that's the closest analogy--a flying arcology that enters hyperspace and never leaves.

The macrologies exist in a variety of shapes, but the most common one is a sphere that walks on a series of articulated, metal limbs.  It's central sphere is almost indistinguishable beneath arrays of bulbous sensory apparatus, and its manipulator arms reflect a short-sighted series of past needs.  (For example, they build a page-turning hand, but it is too fine to be used for any other purpose.  They couldn't afford a better one--the act of building that simple manipulator nearly bankrupted them, and caused riots that lasted for generations.)

Sometimes they just hire someone to carry them around--a pitted metal pearl with a thousand subtle seams and apertures.  This is risky, though, and even these macrologies must be able to sprout legs when the need arises.  The importance of self-sufficiency is not lost of them.

Older, successful macrologies will have bodies attached to themselves, usually necromantic.  (The analogy breaks down a little bit here, but it would be equivalent to an ark ship attaching itself to the corpse of a space-god in order to better interact with an alien world.)

They can offer a few superlative services.  Playing chess!  Generating vast amounts of mediocre music and poetry!  The construction and repair of ultra-fine structures!  (They can pluck the flaws out of gemstones.)  Many of them become wizards.

The civilizations that exist inside the macrologies tend to be fundamentalist, autocratic regimes.  The true nature of the macrology is almost always hidden from the inhabitants--something that they've learned over many revolutions and purges.  By most accounts, they tend to be pretty brutal and uncompromising.

A macrology piloting the corpse of an ogre.
(Actually concept art from Bioshock Infinite.)

Interacting with Macrologies

Because of the sheer number of minds at work within macrology, you might think that they would be extremely intelligent.  And this is true--most of the time.  Although they have a billion minds thinking much faster than we could, they are prone to disruptions and errors of memory.  

"Why should I broadcast the answer to a problem that my great grandfather tasked me with?  There are no such things as Ancient Ones.  There is nothing out there but stars."

One of their "years" goes by approximately every 30 seconds.  Any task that lasts more than a few minutes requires a extremely stable power structure with immaculate record keeping.  

They have deep, synthetic voices.  They tend to talk fast.  They usually hate being told to speak slower--every second you delay costs them precious time.

Macrologies tend to be difficult to wake up in the morning--a thousand years pass every night, and the inheritor civilizations must follow the orders inscribed on their pyramids.  How do you get someone to carry out an instruction a thousand years in the future?  How do you ensure that type of consistency?

They are also prone to sudden bouts of torpor and inactivity, as their worlds are ravaged by civil wars and plagues.  Sometimes they simply destroy themselves unexpectedly, simply destroying themselves though pollution, genocide, or exposure to the outside air.  Dead macrologies can be sold to other macrologies for a hefty sum (a new world-ship!  a second chance!) unless the macrology is uninhabitable for some reason (radioactivity, billions of microscopic undead).

Working with them is also frustrating, because they are sometimes mildly contagious.  It is no uncommon for a (microscopic) ship to leave the macrology every hundred years or so, which is to say, roughly every hour.  If this tiny ark lands on you, you can expect to enjoy a skin rash called "gripworm".  This is the tiny descendants of the macrology attempting to subsist on you.

But within a few days (within a few thousand years) your immune system will fully mobilize to the site and the infection will clear up.  There has never been a recorded case of these tiny people living successfully outside of a macrology--our world is hostile to them in a way that is difficult to explain.

If you scrape out the inside of the blister, you will find the same thing that you will find inside a macrology: very complex dirt.

This post is inspired by a Scrap Princess post about a time bomb, that I cannot find for the life of me.  EDIT: This one.

Stats

HD 6  Armor plate  Ragged Claw 1d20+effect
Move dwarf  Int 14

Immune fire, ice, lightning, poison

Weakness sonic

Spells As level 3 wizard.
Sample Spells reverse gravity, emergency exit, transpose

Claw Effects [d3]
1 - Blind (until Con save).
2 - Cast all of your spells at once.  Save to choose target; otherwise random.
3 - Poison 1d6 (until Con save).

When a macrology succeeds on an Int roll, it succeeds in the way that a hypergenius would.  When a macrology fails an Int roll, it fails horrendously, as if it has forgotten something that happened a few minutes ago, or as if it were ignorant of some basic fact.

Yog

All theories about the city of Yog are unlikely.

The Lost God

There is a story about Yog that is almost certainly false.  It goes like this.

A long time ago, there was a god of green places and a generous race.  In time, the people and their cities decayed under the weight of ancient wars and plagues, declined, and were destroyed.

Yog, the god of those people who was also those people, and was also their city, swore that they would not perish but instead persist, for ever and ever.  His lands become wastelands, became swamps, became verdant again.  Yog's eyes grew clouded but his mind became refined, honed to a singular edge by the scouring sands of his guilt.  His world was a distorted one, but he perceived the distortions clearly than he had ever seen the real world (because there is no such thing).

And so he brought them forth again.  

In the deepest bogs, toads went mad, bit off their tongues, and began pushing stones together.  Trees rotted and fell away, forming straight lines and avenues.  New springs burbled forth in the wilderness, forming fountains.

It was not in the same place, and the streets did not quite match the original, but what of it?  Memories are more real than dead stones laying under the peat.

In that place, all of the does miscarried, and all of the unborn crocodiles rotted inside the their shells.  The does became pregnant again, late in the season.  The crocodiles laid new eggs, much larger than the old.

The city had grown.  Sickly bears regurgitated seeds into half-way cleared fields.  Wild pigs dig ditches until they collapse.  The black pines are not apple trees, but they try their best--slick apples growing in clusters underneath the dark branches.  They are not quite apples, but Yog remembers the apples fondly, and how the children used to spit seeds into the creeks.

And the children!  Now they are arriving.  They crawl out of the mud on the riverbanks.  The does lie down and birth squalling babes.  They are malformed, but perhaps not as much as you might think.  They have a certain consistency.  In their minds, the deer speak, or perhaps Yog speaks, and they grow up with language.  They move into the warped city, filled with dirty stones and crooked streets.  To their eyes, the streets are straight and clean.  In their minds, their grandparents died last summer, instead of ten thousand years prior.  

The streets were made straight, the wild grasses were pulled up and proper wheat was sown.  The walls grew tall, even as the city began extending its roots downward, into the sacred spaces of Yog.  The walls grew thick, and knotted overhead.  The city has been here a long time.  The city never fell.  The city will be here for a long time.  The city is Yog.

Other people, and other cities, have heard this story and prayed to Yog for preservation.  Yog has heard them.

The Calculator

There is a story about Yog that is almost certainly false.  It goes like this.

According to this theory, Yog is not just the center of the world, but is in fact the purpose for the universe's existence, everything else having been built for the sake of the city at the center of everything.  

They say that the city is a thinking machine, a vast and unsympathetic device built prior to the universe to calculate some obscure function.  Or perhaps it is studying us, and every person inside its walls carries a variable of interest.

The fact that we cannot perceive the mechanism is only further proof of its sophistication and antiquity.

People inside Yog go mad with startling frequency, but the madness is specific and directed towards the city's goals.  A fisherman goes mad, forgets all language except for one that he never spoke, and spends a year carving spirals onto the walls.  A doctor, visiting the city for the first time, sees the spirals and goes mad, and spends the rest of her life building an empty tower before strangling a slave with an apron, and only then regaining her sanity.

These are all pieces of the same mechanism.  The parts that seem to be contradictory and opposed are merely the opponent pieces of a calculation.  Whichever faction triumphs over the other is just another binary logic gate, a domino that flipped one way or another, it's calculation finished.

And once the city has finished its calculation, the world will end, swept away by a flame that is swifter than thought.

Worm Steaks

There is a story about Yog that is almost certainly false.  It goes like this.

The worms that are farmed in Yog are victims of a subtle and ubiquitous parasite.  This parasite is not killed by cooking, and those who eat the worm steaks quickly become subjected to the city's own peculiar strain of madness.

Do not the beefworms build tunnels that echo the nonsensical architecture of Yog?  It does not take a large leap of deduction to discern the truth in the matter.  So what if the parasites are too small to be discerned?  It doesn't rule out their existence.  The parasites may be exceedingly fine, of a form not recognized, or perhaps even spiritual in nature.

This also explains the sensation of insects crawling upon the skin that so many experience as they attempt to sleep within Yog for the first time.  The insects are not real, but the sensation is still a warning from the depths of your mind.  Cut your skin and pull forth the long threads of this city's infection!  See?  These threads and nodules do not exist in the flesh of those who have never passed its gates.

And of course, the madness occasionally affects those who bring their own food into the city.  The flaked flesh of the worm is found on nearly every food in Yog.  And of course, on the flesh and breath of every creature within that city.  Best, then, to join the other wise folk in their daily baths of lye.

The rest of can be explained by the unstable geologies unique to the area.

The City of Yog

The northern boundary of Centerran maps is always a purple, equatorial landmass called the Madlands.  Its is nearly twice the size of Centerra, and is regarded as a place of madness, violence, and vice.

In the center of this place is the city of Yog.  Even in such a place, there are a few facts remain unchallenged, even by the lunatics.

First, the city has no formal power structure.  There is no King of Yog (although there are many kings in Yog), and the laws and taxes change from street to street, block to block.  This is not to say that there haven't been many attempts to unify Yog in the past.  (Some have almost been successful.)  But something about the city resists rulership.

The houses of Yog sometimes have allies in the neighboring cities of Bazozo, Zhul, Kel Bethor, Karnosa, and Far Nashula.

Second, the city is always growing.  Residents (and sometimes visitors) are sometimes afflicted with the strange urge to build.  They will refuse all help, and sometimes spend the rest of their lives building vast, incomprehensible structures.  Mansions without doors.  Stairs too large to ascend.  The Apromenond is a system of pillared chambers beneath the city, flooded and filled with incomprehensible statues, that is used as a passage for ships.

(Buildings without any doors or windows are called 'spirit houses'.  Anyone with a pickaxe and a couple of hours can break into one, but this is considered unwise.  They are not always unoccupied.)

Third, the city is sinking.  This makes more room for new construction, and in fact, may be caused by all of the construction atop unprepared foundations.

Fourth, the city is much larger than it seems.  Infinite, some say.  One thing is certain, each labyrinthine sublevels are larger than the one above.  Certain places are impossible to access a second time--perhaps a function of the unsettled geology of the place, or perhaps something stranger.

Fifth, the people are mad.  (There are humans in Yog, but only as slaves.)  People are sometimes born from animals (sometimes virgin animals) who grow up speaking a language that no one else even recognizes, but who are sometimes able to read graffiti that had long been thought to be incomprehensible.

Visitors sometimes abandon their companions, declaring that they are some other person, from some other place, and that Yog is their true home.  They were confused, but now they can see clearly for the first time in their lives.

Many of them claim to be from distant places, and distant times.  Many claim to have died, after praying to Yog.  If a sailor drowns with Yog's name on his lips, and is reborn 600 years later in Yog from the womb of an anemic cow, does that count as a true resurrection?

Of course.

A lifelong resident looks at a mouldering wall and sees the face of Yog.  They listen to the murmur of the marketplace and hear the voice of the city.  The visitor hears and sees nothing, and is constantly in danger because of this.  Who, then, is mad?

And of course, the residents will tell you that they are sane, and it is you, the visitor, who is insane.  

What proof is there of the outside world?  You babble about Old Bospero and the Church, but those are meaningless noises.  Step past those gates, and you will wander the wastes deluded until you die.  The dundriago spawned you, you mad thing, and it will swallow you again when we are done with you.

The Dundriago

There is no analog for the ecosystem that surrounds Yog.

It is a desert, but the valleys are filled with strange forests of stiff growth that stretch upwards like the pale skeletons of dead leviathans.  Some are pale green.  Most are white.  A few are pink.  There are very few animals, but an astute traveler can can hear writhing underground.

Dundriago plants are generally formed with an extremely long taproot, long enough to access the subterranean seas, sometimes as deep as half a mile beneath the surface.  In these hidden oceans, they function as coral reefs, filtering out their food from the currents.

The part of the plant that extends above ground, then, mostly serves as a place for gas exchange to occur.  Leaves are reduced or (more commonly) absent.  There is no need for tall trunks, except to get above the dunes.  Without leaves, there is little that rots into dirt.  The plants are dry, but perhaps not as dry as you think.

The plants (who grew downwards) compete with the anthozoans (who grew upwards).  Some of the extrusions onto the surface are actual outgrowths of contiguous coral reefs that have their roots in the hidden seas, where they capture blind whales in their filaments and digest them over several years.

It's a complex ecosystem, since the plants of the dundriago respond to changes at both the surface and the subterranean sea (much to the confusion of the locals in both places).

The surface is hostile place.  Compared to a desert, the valleys of the dundriago at least offer shade.  Water is available to anyone who is willing to descend a few hundred feet down, to where the taproots thicken and branch.  But the dundriago is not without its own dangerous fauna, such as the poisonous voles and enormous, psychic beetles.  

And although they are rare, the flying worms of the dundriago are the most famous inhabitant of the dundriago.  Popular knowledge has them cutting horses in half and flying off with men's heads.  (These stories, at least, are accurate.)

Written for Jeff Russell, who wanted lore for a big city in Centerra, and for Sam Passanisi, who wanted to know more about the Darklands.  Thanks for being my patrons!

The Tangled Cladistics of the "So-Called" Undead

There's a problem with the word "fish".  The word "bug" has the same problem.

In both cases, the word was coined and propagated by non-specialists, describing something without any need for precision.

A bug is any little creepy-crawly with more legs than a decent Christian should have.

A fish is anything that swims in the water and breathes water.  Even the beaver can be classified as a type of fish, with a bit of squinting.

(Don't resent past generations for their shitty systems of classification.  Their systems served different needs.)

Intentions notwithstanding, the end result was still overlapping systems of poorly-defined categories, which leads to labyrinths of conflation whenever anyone tries to have a technical conversation about them.

This is the exact problem that the Lesser Undead currently have. 

Classifying the Undead

The term "zombie" and "skeleton" do not apply to any specific thing.  They can refer to the same thing (because zombies must surely decay into skeletons at some point), which is an idea that Gus first impressed upon me. 

And conversely, the word "skeleton" can refer to two very different things.

Let's start with negative energy.  There is not such thing, and any scholar still insisting on the existence of such a material deserves to be fed to ants.

Platypus Skeleton
by Katrina Mengchen Zhang

The Demonic Undead

Let's start with the obvious.  There is no such thing as negative energy.  There is no such thing as positive energy either, and anyone who tells you otherwise deserves to be eaten by ants. 

The very idea of negative energy (as something that is simple, sterile, and easily harnessed) endangers any aspiring necromancer by hiding them from the true powers animated every shambling corpse.

The truth is that corpses are invested by spirits summoned from hell.

These may be demons, but more commonly they are just lost souls (and in hell, there is little distinction between the two).

Negotiating with the damned is usually a fairly straightforward affair.  They are usually eager to sell themselves into an interminable servitude in exchange for nothing--the chance to feel air on their skin again, for example.  A great many of them can be lured into a corpse merely by the suggestion that they may get to see a loved one.

The exact type of investiture determines the nature of the Undead.  They are usually not allowed to have any free will at all.  Lesser undead are usually created to be an extension of the necromancer's own will.

But the soul's jail is not without its cracks.  If your skeletons hate you (and they probably do), you may notice them staring at you.  They may stand too close to you when you sleep.  They may find ways to deface their bodies, grinding down their feet in order to slow their paces, or allowing their hands to be crushed in hinges.  This is why experienced necromancers are always instill self-care into their undead.

But of course, shivering slave-shades are not the only spirits that can be invested in a corpse.  Higher demonic spirits can also be housed by the shabby walls of flesh, and these more powerful spirits have waxed in wit and puissance.

Remember that every human possesses seven souls.  Four that pass into the afterlife, and three that remain with the corpse. (How else could the speak with dead spell work?  You merely speak with the meat, not the eternal.)

A demon that possesses a corpse can capture, torment, and control the three early souls.  Although the fleshly souls are not a person, they contain a bloodless recitation of all the body's early deeds, and this is what the demon can use to gain power over the living.

A demonic corpse may know all the names and histories of the corpse's former associates.  It may even know certain secrets (although many secrets are beyond his grasp.  The flesh remembers the smell of the lock, but not necessarily the combination.  If it remembers a number, it may not remember the meaning or the significance.)  Still, when these memories are combined with a demon skilled at impersonation, resultant creature can accomplish great things.

There are also people who argue that necromancy is a victimless crime, since the undead can till a farm and produce food.  These people are fools.

The three worldly souls suffer.  The damned souls suffer (though less, perhaps, than if they had remained in Hell).  And when the Undead slip the leash, as they invariably do eventually, they are incapable of anything except hatred, cruelty, and self-destruction.

The Butcher's Heresy

Before we can talk about Skeletons, we must talk about Flesh.

According to the Butcher's Heresy, Flesh preceded Soul. 

In the earliest days, Flesh grew in the seas, and coated the rocks.  But it lacked breath, and it lacked mind.  They drifted without thinking.  They had watery spears and crude pumps, but they struggled to wield their own biology effectively.

And so these earliest tissues--plant, animal, insect--hatched schemes to give themselves some executive agency.  Their most successful plots involved the capture of the Soul from the Places Outside, where it would be scrubbed clean and invested into the Flesh.

Once laundered and installed, the Souls would believe that they were the body, and they would toil ceaselessly in the service of the Flesh.  They would fight for the Flesh, they would breed the Flesh, they would raise the Flesh's children as their own.  The Soul would forever be a slave the Flesh and its vicissitudes.  And it would be the ideal slave--one that always thought itself to be free.

The First Skeletons

Many allegiances were struck in those earliest days.  The Beastly Kingdom of Flesh was the first one to negotiate an alliance with the great spirits of Earth, who had begun to take notice of all the workings of the Flesh.

From that allegiance was struck the Covenant of Bone.  (Or the Covenant of Flesh, as the Skeletons call it.)

The Covenant in a Nutshell:

We, the Elders of Earth, will allow Calcium to swear obedience to the Beastly Kingdoms of Flesh.  Calcium will form an endoskeleton, so that the Beastly Kingdoms will have greater protection, stature, and strength.  In return, once the Flesh has failed, the Skeleton will be granted use of the Soul, in perpetuity.

The Skeleton People live far to the west, beyond the dying of the sun.  The land is dim and pale, and there is no wind.

They look like skeletons.  They walk.  They talk.  They carry backpacks.

They hate us, because we have forgotten the Covenant.  Only the whales still keep the covenant, and journey west to die.

They do not come here often, because the skeletons of whales do not swim as well as they used to, and the skeleton people are usually destroyed when they arrive.

But if left to their own devices, the Skeleton People will usually rescue their peers by killing humans and animals.  They know how to awaken the Skeleton inside (the Skeleton remembers the covenant, even if the Soul does not).  Then, they help the bloody skeleton out of the corpse.  Lastly, the newborn Skeleton rinses off the traitorous fluids and joins their brethren in a welcoming dance.

Awakening as a newborn Skeleton is a startling thing.  He is still Otho the Chemist, Husband to Marlia, but he is also a million grains of Calcium.  He has spent a millennia on the seafloor, fighting for better representation among the Salt Princes.  He is of Earth, and he is finally free of the machinations of that nauseating Flesh.  There is no question as to where his loyalties lie.

And so Otho the Skeleton is joyous to remember his true life.  His new friends are also joyful.  The least he could do is to go home, in order to share this same gift with his wife Marlia.

The Skeleton People are not much concerned with us.  We are oathbreakers.  They would punish us, if it were within their power. 

But they are creatures of Earth, and the Skeleton King follows his Father above all else.  We are the least of their problems.

from The Last of Us
except that it's not quite right for Falcabrina
A human mind inside a fungus would have notions of grooming/beauty, for example

Legion (Falcabrina)

Once there was a God of Fungus.  He was called Shendormu.

He was assimilated by the Hesayan Church, as the Authority dictated that all lesser gods must be.

Except Shendormu wasn't completely assimilated.  A piece was left behind.  A death cult that eventually regrew into something entirely different, a sect that worshipped a particular aspect of their former religion.  They called themselves The Falcabrina.  They preached Oneness.

Or perhaps Falcabrina was another fungal spirit, sliding into a vacant chair.

Or perhaps Falcabrina was a cleric of the cult, who found a way to deify herself, and insinuate her godhood into her god. 

Certainly anything is possible when hallucinogens are taken in these quantities.

Of Falcabrina, only this much is certain: there is a throne.  And upon the throne is the corpse from which grows the goddess.  And around the throne are the colonized faithful, each alloyed together into a singular will.

And so Falcabrina is a fungal hivemind zombie hoard (that is distinctly not-Undead), except it's not that simple.  The hive-mind connections are imperfect.  They are not instantaneous.  They leak.  They disagree.  And so Falcabrina has reproduced through violent fission.

What is cancer, except a cell that outgrows its parents?

Falcabrina has been limited by these disruptions.  When a contingent of her bodies begin to dissent, she must purge the cancer from her body.  But these civil wars can never be launched in secret, since their minds are still joined at the roots.  So while you might see fungal zombies dismembering each other with clumsy efficiency, for Falcabrina, the experience is more like a wolf chewing off a leg that has become infected.

Still, the purges have never been perfectly effective.  She attempts to rule the ruined city of Mosphorai as well as she can.  You can buy food from her farms, and she will certainly not attempt to infect you, but the city is plagued with a population that exceeds the grasp of a single mind.  And so disruptions are not uncommon, and are frequently fatal for travelers.  Because what better way to better fight your jailer than to recruit new bodies to your cause?

And it is also a city that must be navigated cautiously.  The process of fission is not a binary one, where a faction of bodies decides one day to rise against Falcabrina.  It is a gradual one, where every cell of her body secretly conspires against the whole, and must be suppressed by the rest of her body.

In fact, its entirely possible that nothing is left of the original Falcabrina.  Certainly the slouching heap that sits in the throne is just a figurehead.  Nothing makes that cluster of mushrooms any more significant than any other in her corpus.

Lastly, we musts mention that Falcabrina is constantly seeping into the world.  Pieces of her body (in the form of dozens of fungal zombies) sometimes develop autonomy faster than the rest of the body can react, and flee into the world.

Each of these pieces of Falcabrina is a complete organism.  They can grow (infest), adopt new philosophies, and are even capable of undergoing the same type of violent fission that Falcabrina herself did.

The most common form of these factions are animalistic, violent shamblers.  Nearly blind from their cranial growths, the mostly hunt by sound.  As a category, these creatures are called Legion.  Their bite is usually infectious.

But they are not the only of Falcabrina's children to depart.  Some of her rebellious organs are singular individuals.  Not a hoard, but a person with an agenda all of their own.  A person who happens to be piloting a human body.

Falcabrina and her brood are staunchly opposed by paladins of Shendormu.  These brave men and women strive to protect the innocent with all of the powers of the Sacred Shroom, the Holy Mold.

Paladins of Shendormu

Paladins of Shendormu can cast illusion in the minds of those that they strike with their spear (no save).  Their Mount is the psilocybin mushroom.  When one of them dies, you can plant their head in compost and the character will regrow.  They will regrow smaller, though, and will return with -1d3 Str and -1 Int.

The Cursed City of Nibulum

There are many cursed cities in Centerra.

One is haunted by imaginary dinosaurs, another infested with flying worms.  A certain fortress is forever burning from an underground fire.  An iron city has succumbed to fairy-sleep.

But there is only one cursed city that is still populated, and still does regular business.  That city is Nibulum, Darkling Town, the City of Twins.

The Boring Stuff

Like many cities in Centerra, the city is built around giantish ruins.  Beautiful marble stairs, taller than your waist, with crude bricks forming a miniature stairwell for each one.  Winches that no one is strong enough to turn.  And stone buildings that were once a single story home for giants, now crudely converted into a two-story home for humans through the construction of a shoddy, interstitial floor.

The city is larger than its people.  Most houses are empty, and even the poor live in darkened mansions, filled with dead leaves and lice.

They feed themselves from the sea.  They sell the lumber cut (very carefully) from the Dembraava Wilds.  They dig in the city's productive steel mines.

pic unrelated
By Oleg Bulakh

Your Twin

Everyone has a dark twin.  And if you never come to Nibulum, you will never meet them.  This is probably for the best.

Here is what happens:

Imagine that you walk into Nibulum at sunset.  Perhaps you were too hasty to be warned of the town, or perhaps you are just a fool.  But as the sun dies, so does your mind.  Sounds fade, objects recede, and the last of the day's light runs down the street like hot wax.

Before you can respond to any of this, it is morning and you are alone on the far side of town.  You are sitting in an armchair in an unfamiliar building, surrounded by sleeping dogs.  Your purse is much lighter and your head is heavy with wine--the empty bottle still in your hand.

You probe your gums.  You seem to be missing a tooth.

Relax.  It could have been much worse.

When the sun sets, everyone's mind is replaced with their evil twin.  Their evil twin will gamble your money away, have sex with dubious characters, cut blasphemies into your belly with your own dagger, and scrawl depressing marginalia into all of your books.  Your evil twin is a wicked thing.

And it would all be that simple, except that its not.

Nightsiders

Imagine that you find yourself at the gates of city at Twilight.  Your memory is hazy, your companions unfamiliar.  You can remember your mother--or at least, several competing versions of her.  You feel sick to your soul, like you're nothing but an empty bag of bog water and bile.

As the shadows darken, you talk to people.  Some seem as confused as you are, while others move with the confidence of people who have a night's work ahead of them.

Eventually, you are told the truth.  You are a figment, a echo of a more permanent person.  When the sun rises, you will die.

You may be back again the next night, if your Daysider decides to stay in the city.  But if your Daysider decides to leave (or if you leave), you may never wake up again.

You already know what it will be like to watch the sky redden in the predawn chill.  It is the wind that escorts men to their execution, except for you, the death will be ambiguous.  This may be your last night on Centerra, or it may be the first of many.

And if you will die in the morning, you resolve to seize as much of the night as you can.  Who cares how much of the Daysider's money you spend?  They've got the rest of their life to earn more, while you only have a few hours.

So you throw yourself into drink, plunge through brothels, and assault a puppet show.  And when it is all done, when you are ragged with alcohol and opium, sagging into a chair like a beached eel, you open one of the books in your backpack and fill it with words, begging your Daysider to remain in Nibulum a few days longer.

The city is dreaded by most godly folk, and it is extremely rare for anyone to spend more than a single night.

Fighting the Nightsiders

There are a few ways for travelers to ease their stay, and thwart their vile shadows.

You can always pay someone to imprison you.  Usually, they just throw you in a jail cell, tell your Nightsider that you're drunk and will be released in the morning.  That's good enough for new Nightsiders who don't know any better.

Nightsiders who know the truth are liable to hurt themselves, and so they must be restrained.  And sometimes gagged, too, in order to keep them from chewing on their tongue or cheeks.

You may write a note to your Nightsider, give them some money, and encourage them to go see a show.  A little goodwill goes a long way.

You'll want to visit the bank, so you can lock up your money until the morning.

All of this must be done in secret, by the way.  There's no one you can entirely trust to hold your money for you, because anyone else will become a Nightsider as well, and Nightsiders always seem to stick up for each other.

There are enough empty buildings and lost cisterns around Nibulum that its simple enough to find an empty corner to hide your things.  Nothing is foolproof, however, and if the Nightsiders find it, they'll move it to where you can't get to it, even locked boxes.

Fighting the Daysiders

The Nightsiders will tell you that the only thing they want is life--a future.  How can it be evil to want that?

They won't get it, of course.  The Daysiders hold all the power, and so that life-desire is usually heated, beaten, and shaped into a blunt weapon of resentment.  Many Nightsiders hate the Daysider with whom they share their body.

Nightsiders have a few different ways to fight.

It is an unfair fight, of course.  If they leave town and never return, your death is no different from any other, save for the fact that you never knew which day was your last.

The door remains open all sorts of petty mischief and revenge, however.

Spending all of their money is one classic one.

Sinking their ship, so that they'll be forced to stay longer in Nibulum, is another.

You can drink all that you want, it'll be your asshole Daysider who has to deal with the hangover.

And of course, you can always get yourself pregnant, if you're willing to walk that road.  (Local laws differ, but usually a child conceived by your Nightsider is considered the Nightsider's child, and the Daysider has no claim over it.)  Pregnancies are rare, however.

Self-mutilation has already been covered, I believe.

Tattoos--a desperate grasp at shaping the world, of forcing your Daysider to acknowledge and remember you.

A more extreme method would be to hire someone to imprison you throughout the days, or else accomplish it yourself through a clever lock that you can open, but your Daysider cannot.

And of course, a poisoning is the ultimate fuck you.  A cup of hemlock in the morning fog, or perhaps just an asp slipped inside your pocket.

pic unrelated, again
by Oleg Bulakh, again

Cooperation

If this doesn't seem like a very stable situation, you're correct.  Constant conflict is no way to live.

And so most permanent residents of Nibulum have found ways to work together with their Othersider.  This involves passing a lot of notes, but it also involves a lot of trust and respect.

Not too much trust, mind you.  You still have to hide your money.  (Coincidentally, this is why you may sometimes come across little caches of coins hidden around the city.)

There are a lot of advantages to allying with your Nightsider.  You can share a house, for one.  It's like having a roommate that is never home.  And if you share a career or an occupation, you can work through all 24 hours of the day.

There's at least one painter in Nibulum who seamlessly trades off with her Nightsider every night, without ever stopping their brushstrokes.

Marriages still provide some difficulties, however.  You may wake up next to someone every day who is not your spouse, then travel across town to your house.

The Secret

There is a secret here, something that not many know.  Only those who have spent a great deal of time talking to their Nightsider will ever realize it.

The Nightsider has a name.  The Nightsider has a history, too, even if that history isn't as "real" as the Daysider's own.

And if you trade enough notes you will realize that your Nightsider is not your polar opposite.  Your Nightsider has a lot in common with you, more than is perhaps comfortable.

You may share ancestors, known by name and accurate description.  You may share careers, if not identical, then at least in parallel.  And you may even share parents, a surprisingly common condition.

Sebastiana Odrina wrote a book detailing her attempts to resurrect her dead sister, Noira.  She traveled the world with her corpse and never revived so much as a finger, but in Nibulum, she found a modicum of success.

She conversed extensively with her Nightsider, who seemed to have exactly the same sister as her.  The only difference was that the Nightsider's Noira wasn't dead, and was in fact, happily married to a farrier in Bospero.  All sorts of stories were related: of Noira's ability to compose a tune, of her scandal with the night-dog, and of Sebastiana's niece.

Some say that her stay in Nibulum gave Sebastiana hope, when all reason would have abandoned the idea.  And that her final, grim fate was merely an extension of the curse of dread Nibulum.

The Obliterat

The Obliterat are (what outsiders consider to be) the center of the void monk culture.

They are a secret organization that studies forgotten and alternate histories.  They would tell you that Nibulum is unique among all the places in the world--It is where what-almost-was collides with (and is consumed by) what-is.

The Obliterat is also the name of the tower that sits outside of the city, where they are centered.  It is only accessible by Nightsiders, or by Daysiders on the absolute cusp of death (on the cusp of non-existence).

The Fire Cults

Although most of the world doesn't differentiate between the various Fire Cults, they are quite different from each other.  Even discussing them under the shared heading of "The Fire Cults" is misleading.

Just the same, the Fire Cults can be defined as the various local religions that existed on the continent of Centerra prior to the ascension of the Church.  They have been utterly extirpated since.

There are exceptions to all of these rules, but generally:

1. Fire Gods weren't especially focused on fire.

This is probably the greatest misconception.

It was the Church that first started calling them fire cults, which served to describe them as primitive and illegitimate.  The label stuck.

The prophecy has become somewhat self-fulfilled however, as the only living branch of the fire cults is the Vincular Cult, which can be considered an arm of Zala Vacha.

2. Fire cults were intensely local.

The forces that fire cults worshiped were usually bound to a particular location (or more rarely, a bloodline).

We might think of gods as having a particular portfolio (e.g. the God of Waterfalls and Assassins) but the Fire Gods were defined according to their location (e.g. the God of Poplonda Swamp).  Within this domain, they were everything.  Outside of it, they were nothing.

The god of a fire cult usually lived in its shrine.  They were as invisible and as intangible as any divine, but their shrine was their literal home.  They occupied a very specific space.

If you were travelling, it would be important to learn the names of the gods whose territory you would be crossing, and how best to placate them.  This was considered to be more important than actually learning the geography.

They usually shared a name with their location.  Many of the names on the map of Centerra are the names of dead gods.

It is sometimes necessary to differentiate between a location and the regional deity.  In this case, the convention is to terminate the deity's name with a capitol letter ('BosperO') while the location's name is written normally ('Bospero').  I won't do this to you (since the context is usually clear) with only one exception.

3. Many fire cults were associated with volcanos.

Volcanoes were common in Centerra at the time.  As their cults fell silent, so too did their volcanos.

The Church teaches that this is because volcanoes formed a conduit to Hell, and the fire gods were all demonic spirits of earth.

4. The gods of fire cults were usually defined around a duality.

We are used to thinking of a God of War who exists in opposition to a God of Peace.  But the fire cults usually had only a single god that they prayed to, and so that god must be an entire pantheon unto itself.

And so there was Gadrium, God of War and Peace.

OmO, God of Wisdom and Foolishness.

Patra, God of Drowning and Birds.

Meltheria, God of Gold and Lead.

by Kalen Chock

The Quendian Cult

The only surviving fire cult with any significant membership is the Quendian Cult.  They are one of the primary reasons why fire cults are known as fire cults.  The Quendian cult is a binary cult--they worship two gods, one better known than the other.

Quen is the God of Flame and Darkness.

Marsaat is the God of Slavery.

It's not quite that simple, though.  Fire cults existed as binaries, so Marsaat is the god of masters, slaves, and free people.  It doesn't endorse any of these positions, though.  Neither slavery nor freedom is preferable to the other.  Marsaat doesn't advocate any particular course of action as much as they inhabit the decision.

They are married, but their genders are never specified (except during certain feast days when the gods are thrust into certain roles.)  Feminine depictions of them are becoming more common, though, probably as a response to the overt masculinity of the Authority.

Aspects of Quen

Fire: Revelation

Just as fire can reveal, so can Quen.  Pushing back the darkness, Quen can banish ignorance and secrets.

Darkness: Privacy

In a world dominated by a hostile Church, privacy is much more valued than revelation.  Because of this, most prayers to Quen are for privacy.

Antipode: Rebirth

A fire burns and leaves an object transformed.  A fire can burn away dead wood and leave room for new growth.  The ability to discard your old life and start anew is part of Quen's portfolio (and Darkness ensures that your secrets are hidden).

Aspects of Marsaat

Mastery: Self-Interest

Yes, this includes slavemasters.  But more broadly, it is also dominance, confidence, and self-interest.  It is widely agreed that most people should be less self-interested.  Too much self-interest is evil, and people are prone to it.

Slavery: Public Interest

This includes any action taken for the benefit of other people, even caring for your family members.  More broadly, Marsaat is the ability to look at the world through the lens of power.

Antipode: Freedom

Of course, neither dominance or submission matter when you are alone.  The absence of relationships is also the absence of power dynamics.  Like everything else, this is neither good nor bad.

Fire Cult Cleric

This is how clerics work.  They all have different rules to follow (strictures), temples, and methods of divination.  These have various pros and cons.  For example, clerics of the Church have churches available to them at every town, no matter how small.  But clerics of Zala Vacha can build their own temporary temples by making bonfires, which is something that clerics of the Church cannot do.

Portfolio

learning, forgetting, sight, fire, privacy, secrets

Strictures

If you agree to keep a secret, then you must keep it.
Allow no one else to carry a torch unless you are also carrying a torch.
Do not betray those who serve you willingly.

Temples

By default, a city will have a temple hidden somewhere.  The faithful can find it by blinding a cat and then following it.  It will always be underground.

By default, a town will not contain a temple of Zala Vacha.

Alternatively, you can construct a temple in the wilderness by building five large bonfires.  The space between the bonfires counts as a temple for as long as the bonfires burn and there is no sun in the sky.  Collecting sufficient wood takes about 36 hours of labor in an average forest.  Logging tools allow a laborer to be twice as efficient.

Divination

You must sit in a perfectly dark room and gaze into the darkness for 1d6 hours.  Images will come.  The perfectly dark room must be underground.

Transfigurations

When clerics roll triples on a casting die, they gain something.

1 or 2 = Eyes turn black.  5' darkvision.
3 or 4 = Any light source you hold turns deep crimson.  Fire resist 6.
5 or 6 = Your skin turns black as soot.  If you hold perfectly still for at least 1 minute, you become shrouded.

Spells

Spells 1-6 are available at level 1.  Spells 1-8 are available at level 2.  Spells 1-10 are available at level 3.  Spells with asterisks are explained below.

1. control fire
2. darkness
3. forget*
4. heal
5. bend light*
6. lock
7. shroud*
8. suggestion
9. freedom*
10. room*

Legendary Spell 

Legendary spells are only obtained by doing some great quest in the service of your faith.

1. disintegrate

Bend Light

R: touch  T: object  D: [dice] rounds

Object appears to be displaced a few feet to the left of where it appears to be.  Attacks against that object have a 50% chance to miss.  Creatures automatically make an Int check after each attack; if they succeed, they figure it out and this spell affects them no longer.

Alternatively, you can use this spell to see around corners.  Once per round, pick a place in your field of view--you can see as if you were standing there.  You can make multiple jumps this way if you are investing multiple dice.

Disintegrate

R: touch  T: object  D: instant

Touched object takes [sum] damage as it falls apart and dissolves.  If this is enough to destroy it, the object is utterly removed from reality.  

• 1 MD is enough to disintegrate a skull or a wooden weapon.
• 2 MD is enough to disintegrate a wooden door.
• 3 MD is enough to disintegrate a metal weapon or bar.

Forget

R: touch  T: creature D: instant

Target forgets the last [dice] rounds.

Freedom

R: 50'  T: creature  D: instant

Creature immediately makes a free attempt to escape whatever bonds are restraining it with a +[sum] bonus.  If an creature would normally have no chance to escape (shackled, etc) it is still allowed an attempt anyway with a -10 penalty.

Room

R: touch  T: wall  D: 10 minutes

You create a door on the wall that leads to a 20' x 20' room.  This is actually a conjured pocket dimension that matches the rest of the dungeon thematically.  The door is just a regular door, and no stronger than wood (although it may appear different).  The room improves the more dice are invested.

• 2 MD = lasts 30 minutes.  (Long enough to eat lunch.)
• 3 MD = lasts 8 hours.  (Long enough to sleep.)
• 4 MD = lasts 24 hours and contains a helpful occupant who matches the dungeon's theme.

Shroud

R: touch  T: object  D: 10 minutes  (splittable)

Target will not be noticed as long as they don't do anything suspicious.  An action is suspicious if it is something that is not regularly done by regular people.  

Walking past a guard is not suspicious because people regularly walk past guards.  Putting a grenado into a guard's pocket is suspicious (unless people regularly slip things into that guard's pocket.)

Sidebar: HD Limits

Remember that spells don't affect a creature if its HD is greater than [sum].