The Inverted Ziggurat

(Follow up on the dungeon hinted at in the Mangrove post. This is meant as a sketch of the broad concept, not a keyed dungeon.)


The crazed ecologists who study the Flowing Forest have long posited that at the center of it must be some great mystery. Its well recorded that the forest will "swim" against prevailing currents and winds, and it takes a proper monsoon to alter its path. Theories gain and loose favor, but a few have remained popular:

• Its on the back of a truly massive crab, crawling slowly on the shallow ocean floor, maybe hoping to scrape off the forest on an island
• At the center is a slumbering Spirit of life, restlessly riding its vine-y cradle over the sea, making it wander as its dreams shift
• Most of the mass of the forest is sub-aqueous and so the important variable is deep ocean current, which are poorly understood

None of these are the right theory of course. If you survive the journey to the center of the forest you will find a great terraced valley, its bottom is a few hundred feet bellow sea level. The terraces are paved with great stones and look more like ancient gardens than jungle, the root-filtered fresh water trickles slowly down to the bottom. At the bottom a great clear pool steams, and the very top of a structure can be seen...

The whole place feels like this, but in a few hundred years when a jungle is growing on it

The Terraces:

These where gardens. Remnants of greenhouses and fountains are every where, and amongst the lush ruins on the top terrace a few final warning/warding shrines from the local Automata tribes rest, invoking their most vile imagery.

Hazards on the terraces include: feral plants, decaying architecture, insta-rot fungi, leeches, half functioning gardener constructs that WILL POT YOU, large still pools of lily pads that probably aren't hiding water snakes in them, terraced edges to descent on vines, balloon plants that accumulate hydrogen and explode easily, and giant sloth breeding grounds.

But you may find: potions of grow plant, half functioning gardener constructs that you can manipulate, exotic and potent plants from all over the world. Indeed the gardens themselves are a treasure trove in themselves to a trained botanist, the diversity and rarity of the flora is enough to bring a life time of rich research.

The Ziggurat

At the bottom of the terraced valley is a large steaming pool of water, no plants grow near its edges but at its center is a large square structure. Through the startlingly clear water you can see that it is a many leveled ziggurat. The water is very hot, but not quite boiling and there is a sharp mineral odor to the mists coming off the pool. Upon investigation the water is not only hot, but caustic and will dissolve organic materials after a few moments of immersion.

Once the party figures a way across the pool (boat that wont dissolve, parachute with hydrogen balloon plants from higher terrace, cooling the water some how, divert the water from flowing into it till it all evaporates) the real dungeon can begin.

Some things you might find in the Zigguart

At its heart is a sun. The party will see glimpses of it occasionally through thick glass windows and deep water, giving eerie illumination. They will find hints of it else where: in rooms dedicated to its maintenance and control with panels of inscribed glyphs that hint at their utility, in the flooded chambers soaked in near boiling and caustic water that will start to make them sick with radiation poisoning after a few hours in the dungeon, in the strange slimes and fungi that seem to grow abundantly around these leaks, and the slow perversion of flesh they will experience through mutation.

Deep at the base of the ziggurat, far below sea level, they will find the Torch. If they are clever they might even figure out that the Torch is siphoning the massive heat generated by the sun to solder shut fissures and faults in the sea bed. Perhaps they will understand that this Sun-Engine is literally keeping the world together. To keep the Torch at a steady distance from the bottom of the sea the entire structure expands and contracts like an accordion. This introduces a crushing hazard as well as a changing dungeon layout that may shift every time the party returns to it.

The central command room is locked, the party will have to find a way to bust in or find the secret to unlocking it. There is heavy machinery all around, perhaps they can use it for demolition? Once inside they will have to solve some sort of puzzle to figure out how to manipulate the Sun-Engine. There will be illusions/holograms of the builders of the Ziggurat There are a few possible outcomes:

• Meltdown: The Engine has been in slow motion melt down for a few centuries at least, and the party wittingly or unwittingly brings about a run away acceleration to this process. The delicate fields that suspend the sun will start to break down; the improvised fresh water coolant system was already malfunctioning, but now no new water is reaching the core and the containment walls are melting. Run! The world will likely tear itself apart without the Engine to keep it together and perhaps usher in a new Age...or the End of all Ages.
• Fix It: Through careful experimentation or dumb luck the party may figure out how to fix it. They can find out that the outflow of coolant is leaking badly, that the vegetation surrounding the Ziggurat is gunking up the mechanisms. If they fix it the Sun-Engine will start operating at peak efficiency again, the Torch will actually make headway in keeping the world together instead of fighting a slowly loosing battle to decay, and the Flowing Forest will be shed as the Ziggurat once again rides just above the waves with water intake pipes trailing behind as in the Days of Old.
• No change: Through caution or awareness of their hubris the party can walk away and allow the Sun-Engine to continue to meltdown slowly. It will eventually fail, but at least the world continue for a few hundred years more...

Thoughts on the Inverted Ziggurat

Its a metaphor for a nuclear reactor. Built by some anonymous precursor civilization and abondened long ago, then rediscovered and haphazardly repaired by a more recent society. The terraced valley and gardens where built by the second comers as a way to keep the Sun-Engine cooled but when they abandoned it the radiation allowed the Flowing Forest to take root on the Garden Terrace edge until that was all that people knew of it.

When considered with the rest of Ánemos setting this is the first demonstration that world is a few Ages past a technologically advanced civilization and implies that its a post apocalyptic world, or at least a world fallen into decay and forgetfulness where the glories of the past are misunderstood and clouded (like the implied setting in the wonderful Ghibli film Castle in the Sky). I like this. It adds a dimension and depth to an otherwise gonzo-Greek-fantasy setting. I love fantasy that is secretly sci-fi. I also love romantic fantasy (the type that +Joseph Manola writes about here, and he makes some great points on ruins here) where the characters have the chance to have a meaningful effect on the world.

In this dungeon they are presented with a machine that literally keeps the world together and the three outcomes all are meaningful. They can play with fire and get burned with the world at stake. They can fix an ancient construct and perhaps start an age of re-disovery and healing. Or they can make the decision to find a way to love a more and more broken and shattered world. 

Sangre y Polvo: Pre-American California Folk-horror Fantasy Hexcrawl

Some thoughts on a setting. A Western, but set in pre-U.S. California/Northern New Spain territories, a psuedo-historic supernatural setting in the mists of misinformation and superstition.

The year is 1794, the King of Spain has issued the forced deportation of Jesuit priests to be replaced by Franciscan and  Dominican monks. Most of California’s Missions are built, expeditions have been sent to explore the vast tracts of wilderness in northern New Spain, Californios begin to build their haciendas and ranchos, and dark things stir in the Wild that the Jesuit priests knew how to handle and the locals wait for the foreign occupiers to be wiped away by their hubris...

Key elements:

• Wilderness travel and exploration
• Spanish colonialism and administration, the Bourbon Reforms
• Catholicism and the Mission system
• Western tropes subverted to an earlier era
• Native American folklore
• Get to use awesome old maps
• Could even flip the script and have it be secret that it's California until the players realize
• Intermixing of old world superstitions in a strange new place
• Slavery and genocide is ubiquitous across the Spanish territories
• Arcane levels of administration and secrecy handed down from the remote Spanish crown
• Murmurs of the new nation of the United States, a young republic to the east of the contient
• Thick of the French Revolution, thoughts of colonial independence fomenting
• Enlightenment ideas and texts to draw on

This post is one point with its tone. This one has some cool ideas on how to handle player advancement in the context of culturally arbitrated trials. Its basically this idea, but set earlier.

The party could be:

• Members of the Spanish military on an expedition
• Monks setting out to found the next Mission
• Rancheros settling the new county
• Natives protecting their land and way of life
• Russian trappers looking to kill big animals to skin them
• Agents of the French Monarchy, who haven't heard about the Revolution yet

There may be a lot of this, but with monsters

Voyage of the Void Seeker: The Set Up

The whole idea for this came from seeing this piece at a street fair in my town. I met the artist, got this piece, and hung it on my wall. Its been staring at me, asking to be used...

In a recent post condensing all of my Ánemos writing into one place I had a dense little mess of the going-ons in the Scattered Sea. There was mention of "the long-thought-lost Magi Trophonious the Fool has risen out of the depths on the back of a Kētos and is looking for a crew to sail with him to the bottom of the Abyss". This is that adventure hook explored, and incidentally my first adventure to be published on this blog!

You can get it here, on this blog, as I write it. When it is all done, I will compile everything into a PDF for easy download.

(I'm relatively new to this. There are some bad-ass writers out in the DIY/OSR blog-o-sphere that I admire greatly and get a lot of inspiration from (you can see their blogs on the right panel of this page). This adventure was written as my entry into the published adventures of the DIY RPG scene, but this is the effort of one person that is doubtless in need of editing. If you have comments and edits I'd love to read and incorporate them.)

Bon voyage!

Source unknown

The Set Up

The party is going to start in the City of Twins, Diopolis, the largest Island State in the Chalcis Chain, seat of the Chalcis Alliance of Protection (CAP).

The city spans two islands, Euboea and Boeotia. The story goes that the islands where once one, but the Goddess of the island had a mental break and two personailites and two islands formed, creating the Euripus Strait over which the longest bridge in the world spans. It is home to the Counsel of Magi and a number of famous wizards and enchanters, and one of the only places in Ánemos that the secret techniques of making Wyrships are known and practiced.

While not as militaristic as their main international competition the Republic of Minoa or the Comitia Tributa of Arsuf, Chalcis is full of her own dangers. Magi are cunning folk, and work in slow and subtle ways to ruin each other and turn the world to suit their needs. Intrigue lurks in the steamy halls of every bath and rumors rip through the City of Twins like the breath of a zephyr.

Trophonius arrived in the Euripus Strait that bisects City of Twins strapped to the back of a Ketos, a massive whale like creature. The Ketos has strange structures of seaglass and clamleather affixed to it, apparently enabling Trophonius to live comfortably upon the beast. The event has the city's rumor mills working triple time, its a nice diversion from the news of titanic horrors ravaging the outer reaches of Chalcis, but also worrying because most of the CAP's war bands are out on their Wyrships fighting the monsters.

Trophonius calls his "vessel" the Void Seeker, what nickname have the citizens of Euboea given it as it rests in the shallows waiting for its master's call?

1d10 Nicknames of the Void Seeker:

1. Hubris
2. Catharsis
3. Thalia
4. Apotheosis
5. Exodus
6. Moira
7. Ananke
8. Halcyon
9. Abyssinia
10. Gravitas

Trophonius has made it clear that he does not plan to stay in the city for long, just long enough to find himself a crew and stock the vessel for a long trip.  What does he tell people that his mission is?

1d6, Trophonius's Stated Goal:

1. To find the source of the titanic sea monsters terrorizing Chalcis and destroy them if he can, looking especially for heroes and madmen
2. Uncover and mine Orichalcum nodules at the bottom of the Sea, looking especially for deep water miners and alchemists
3. He seeks to find the corpse of a long sunk vessel with a belly full of treasure, looking especially for scavengers and demolishonists
4. Wants to find and pass through the Gates of the Underworld to be reunited with the soul of a dead lover from his youth, looking especially for grave robbers and those that speak with deamons
5. To kill a god by severing their connection to wellspring of divinity, looking especially for blasphemers and the morally bankrupt
6. To reach the Bottom, looking especially for companions and thrill seekers

In addition he is hiring: Sea grass gardeners, artisans (bronze smiths, cordells, leather workers, glass blowers), cartographers, navigators, biographers, musicians, cooks, cabin boys, harpooners, quartermaster, boatswain, surgeons, and a few swabs.

Those that knew Trophonius recall his many bad habits, addictions, and general uncannyness. What are his flaws?

1d10 Bad Habits:

1. Chews with his mouth open
2. Doesn't cover his mouth when he sneezes
3. Has bad body odor/terrible breath
4. Bites his nails
5. Refuses to make eye contact
6. Mummbles
7. Poor posture
8. Fiddling with his beard and hair
9. Always humming to himself
10. Picks his nose/ear wax

1d10 Addictions:

1. Alcohol (wine)
2. Opiates (opium)
3. Salty Snacks (smoked sardines)
4. Sweets (candied dates)
5. Tea (green)
6. Hallucinogens (sea slugs on the eyes)
7. Gambling (dice)
8. Stimulants (carrow root)
9. Inhalants (smelling salts)
10. Chewing gum (sap of the drakon blood tree)

1d10 Weird Detail:

1. Continuously has teeth falling out, never runs out
2. Tattoos that dance and flow on his skin
3. Eyes never look in the same direction
4. Hair and beard are made of sea weed, he keeps them wet
5. Robes change from slate grey to azure to match the character of the Sea
6. Weird Pet (1d4: giant hermit crab, several goofy seagulls, an animate pile of sand, a very old sheep)
7.  Voice echoes no matter his soroundings
8. Seems to always have the hiccups, though he will deny it
9. He can't hear rhymes
10. Poorly hidden gills

Source

The movers and shakers in Diopolis don't believe a word Trophonius tells them, they are sure he is up to something more sinister. The party happens to be in right place at the right time, someone needs something done aboard the Void Seeker and they are asked to help. The following motivations can be for the whole party (especially easy if part of an ongoing game), or to make things interesting each party member could be given a motivation secretly as the game begins (easy if this is the first adventure a party is taking part in).

 1d10 Party Motivations:

1. Spies of the Chalcis Alliance of Protection, defensive information and an assassination team if there is a threat to the region uncovered
2. Lackeys of the Counsel of Magi, sabotage Trophonius' reputation and steal his arcane secrets
3. Members of the Guild of Scalers, representing the Guild's trade interests in the virgin markets of the Deep Sea
4. Agents of a society of theological scholars, learn more about the Mythic Underworld
5. Hired by Trophonius from a mercenary company (1d3: Stellar's Jays, Stormking Mountain Battalion, Black Sails), hired muscle
6. The party are Secret Merfolk, aboard to ensure the safety and secrecy of their underwater citadels
7. Ascetics, seek yet uncontacted Spirits of the depths and ingratiate themselves with them
8. Daemon Binders, CHAOS
9. Vagabonds that lied their way in, murderhoboism
10. Classic 20,000 Leugues Under the Sea start, hired to hunt a sea monster nearby and it turns out its the Void Seeker causing trouble. After sinking their ship Trophonius invites them in and the adventure begins...

And so, the crew is set, provisions are loaded, and the Void Seeker is bound for the depths!

Soul-Catcher Canyon

The idea of a plane traveling campaign has never really interested me. I always like it when I am gaining enough fluency with a setting that I can began to add lib on my own as a player. Jumping from gonzo plane to gonzo plane while playing a rat butcher from 1890s London sounds fun, but at a certain point the comedy of juxtaposition wears thin.

The idea of Purgatory similarly disinterests me. You die. Then you wait around a sanitary, not good, not evil place until all the little bad things you did in life are purified and you can go to Heaven. There is no tension in Purgatory, you aren't on probation where you can mess up and get sent to Hell.

So lets try and fix both of those with this plane/adventure(/dungeon?) concept.

Soul Catcher Canyon

There is said to be a place between this world and the next.

This place is said to be a network of canyons forming a circle around a faint and cold Sun. This cool celestial giant rises and sets, but in the center of the maze it oscillates on a vertical axis (not ringing the world as a faithful dance partner like in our good home). At night it sinks to kiss the center of the maze for a moment, and then it rises again to begin a new day.

The souls that find there way to this place call themselves Travelers, for they know that if they can reach the center of maze when the dim Sun kisses the earth and they touch the Sun the will be permitted to ask for one True Desire and will be allowed to move on to the next world. The Travelers hail from many different worlds, but they have all found their way to the Canyon.

Not many Travelers reach the center of the Canyon. Many loose faith, turning to cynicism and despair where they tarry on the Road. These cynics have built cities, claiming that this is the next life, that they should make the best of their time here by wasting away their time in hedonism and avarice. They take advantage of the hopeful Travelers, charging tolls for safe passage through their lands. But they wither and die in the Canyon, just like everyone else. No children can be born here, no planted seeds grow to trees, only rot blooms.

The cynics call the place the Meat Grinder, or the Labyrinth of Dust, or the Alleys of Despair.

The Travelers call the place Soul Catcher Canyon.

It kinda looks like that, but only kinda.
Source

Mapping Soul-Catcher Canyon

Structurally Soul Catcher Canyon resembles a large disk with canyons inscribed on it winding their way to the center. These winding canyons intersect regularly at nodes. These nodes are centers of meeting and conflict. Many toll takers have setup their booths to get their due from the striving Travelers working their way to the Center.

The canyons in-between the nodes are still inhabited but operate much closer to a wilderness than a dungeon/cityscape, and even then I recommend using them as flux space.

From Etsy

So using the basic geometry of the dream-catcher above we can make a point crawl map:

Key:
Big C: Center of the Canyon
Rectangles: Node [Ring #, Node #]
Green Line: Outer Rim of Canyon
Blue Line: Canyons Between Nodes

Structurally we can see that there are seven "rings" of nodes relatively equidistant from the sun, and there are seven nodes to a ring. Souls enter the Canyon in the Outer Rim and work their way to the center to leave the plane. There is a minimum of seven nodes that they must visit on their way, passing through eight canyon floors.

The scale of the Canyon is very large, with most canyon floors being a mile across and the canyon walls are all around a mile high. The circumference of the outer ring is on the order of 300 miles

There are many paths to take, none of them is correct.

Light, Water, Clones, and Soil Formation: Ecology of the Canyon

So the big thing we get to play with in the Canyon is "aspect", the angle that the sun hits a surface. In our case the surface that we care about is the Canyon floor and walls. More light, for longer, and at a more perpendicular angle leads to a higher energy input into a system. The below two diagrams shows the the relationship between distance from the sun and amount of light a given canyon will get:

Light at noon

Light at dusk

So with that we can derive the energy, and therefore the heat characteristics of our concentric rings of nodes. The farthest out ring will be the very coldest, with its sunward wall getting some direct light and its floor only reflected heat from the wall, and the outer-facing wall remaining very icy and dark.

Because this is intended to all be a viable adventuring location I will assume the outermost ring is as cold as the coldest earth ecosystem, a tundra. Each ring closer to the sun will be warmer and warmer until we arrive at the desert at the center that gets continuous light. Using our handy rainfall/average temperature ecosystem graph we can create an easy way to assign ecosystem characteristics to an area:

The ring number remains static and determines the average temperature at the bottom of the Canyon. For rain fall/water content simply roll d8 and use that value as how much water is present in that system. If there is no ecosystem mapping to that rainfall value round down to the wettest possible ecosystem for that temperature and add a river, lake or sea to account for the extra water. For example in ring 5 I rolled a d8 and got 8, meaning I got a temperate rain forest with many large lakes.

There is no sexual reproduction possible in Soul Catcher Canyon, and because of this clones rule the Canyon. You see, asexual reproduction is totally fine. This means that the ecosystems are dominated by lifeforms capable of clonal reproduction, and these lifeforms experience a glacial genetic drift relative to the rapid diversification of sexual recombination. To make things worse any plants or animals that make it to the Canyon must first survive the tundra in the Outer Rim and make their way to warmer climes where the can establish their hegemony.

Because of the low probability for a diverse and adaptive ecosystem the the entire Canyon food chain is based on corpses, not unlike the Lut Desert in our plane of existence. Most everything that enters the Canyon dies there, and they act like migrating birds caught in unworldly heat swell dropping them from the sky to be fed on by scavengers.

There is no vulcanism in this plane, but the canyon walls do shear off occasionally leading to the formation of sedimentary rock. Even down to the geology there can be no birth here, only death, for what is a volcano but an explosively pure act of creation in the blink of a geologic eye? No, the Canyon only decays, and on the dust of the bodies of the fallen are the brief lives of the Travelers lived.

Example Encounters and Locations in the Canyon:

Source

The Sky Gate: Usually just a stately carved archway set into the Outer Rim's leeward (?)(opposite of sunward) wall like all the other Gates that emit Travelers, it occasionally spews forth great vapors and mists into the Canyon. Those Travelers that have seen it rarely survive the super-cold fog or the shapes that scream in the twilight. When the fog dissipates and the killing cold passes they have found the bodies of creatures that have violently dedicated in the heat of the Outer Rim, the creatures seem to come from a much colder plane of existence.

Source

The Demons Passage: If you ask around in the Slush District of Hailifax some frost drunk fool is bound to tell you to go check out the Demons Passage. If you can make it all the way through you'll be in a warmer better place, close to the Center! If you can make it through...

Source

The Divine Cabal of Liches: Many forms of artificial life extension are available in the Canyon, one of the most expensive but sure ways is Lichdom. But first you must sumbit yourself for approval at the Divine Cabal, and if you are judged worthy they will not hinder your quest for immortality. They long ago gave up on leaving the Canyon, preferring to drink deep from the well of ego and squabbling amongst themselves, so woe unto the Traveler who would stand in their way.

Source

Source

Warbeast Strike Team vs Megapradator: When new Travelers come to the Canyon they often literally come in waves. Clonally reproducing megapredators lie dormant near an entrance portal waiting for the feast to come, while brave and kind souls riding a mishmash of cancerous vat cloned warbeasts rush to save them.

Demon Starfish, from Kamen Rider V3

Source unknown

Empire of the Starfish People: The largest nation in Canyon is the Starfish Commonwealth, dominating the seas and rivers of the inner rings with their dead eyes and blithe smiles. They reproduce easily in this strange land, a melee will do to hack off some limbs to grow new starfish people. The Commonwealth's goal is to perpetuate the cycle of death and decay, for it suits their strange lifestyle.