Otherspace: The Jungle of Kled
Hot, fetid and swarming. The Jungle of Kled is inhospitable to long-term survival. Constant growth, rot and decay in a sea of impenetrable vegetation, it reeks of life and death. A soup of virulent diseases that would baffle medical science. Predator and prey locked in ferocious evolutionary conflict. By comparison the staid and sterile environments of the liveliest cities are terrible bastions of stasis. Truly dead excepting where nature manages to inevitably bleed through, to consume and transform back into the cycle. Life is constant change, adapt or die.
Travelling to the Jungle of Kled
Discovered in the late 1960s by members of an itinerant hippie commune, the Jungle of Kled (named after an affection for H.P. Lovecraft’s The Silver Key) can only be accessed within a man-made structure reclaimed by nature. By chance, experimentation with psychedelics and lucid dreaming allowed their minds to enter as their bodies slept. Aside from rumour and hearsay the only record of the techniques they practiced is a poorly mimeographed pamphlet, all but three copies either destroyed by their creator or gone the way of all ephemera. One is in the hands of a small group of homeless urban spelunkers caught by a cultish fascination in the promise of a world that at least seems honest in its hostility.
Thanks to modern developments in pharmaceuticals there is another option. People under the influence of drugs which cause somnambulism can physically enter the Jungle while resting in the same places. This is unwise. Unlike entry by dream the only exit for sleepwalkers is to drug themselves into oblivion again and pray their sleeping bodies can find the real world before the inhabitants of the jungle find them. However it does allow them to bring things back.
The Landscape of the Jungle of Kled
The Jungle is a bounty of constant change. A sea of boundless green so thick it’s often hard to tell whether it’s day or night. The ground carpeted with leaves and vines concealing twisted roots and muddy sinkholes. Hold still long enough and the vegetation will grow around you, snaring you. Landmarks are ephemeral like sand dunes rolling in the wind.
Heat and humidity are constant and punctuated only by sporadic and torrential rain. Insects that defy taxonomy buzz lazily through the air, eager to nibble or lay larvae in your flesh. The cries and bellows of prey and predator echo without indication of direction or distance. Animals mutate - over generations measured in days and hours - into shapes stranger than any seen in reality.
Underneath, in places, are the swallowed husks of civilization. Ozymandian relics that occasionally jut through the canopy like an exposed skeleton. They offer dubious shelter, dangerously unstable and attractive to local fauna. As their real world counterparts crumble into dust the jungle versions of these places are pulled back into the earth by nature and forgotten in the intense rush.
Dream Death
Travel by dreaming is less dangerous than visiting in the flesh but has its own hazards. Death while dreaming in the jungle permanently deprives a person of their ability to enter a rapid eye movement (REM) sleep state. The good news is that it won’t kill you the way sleep deprivation inevitably would, some people go for decades on REM-suppressing dosages of antidepressants with no ill effects. The bad news is that you will never ever dream again and struggle to hold on to magickal charges.
Someone who has experienced dream death leaks magick like a sieve. Every time they fall asleep, even for a moment, any charges they’re holding vanish along with consciousness. Deliberately putting off going to bed will delay this loss but unless you spend them it’s inevitable.
One other side effect of dream death is that any changes to your dream self caused by the fruit of the lamb are now gone for better or worse. Physical changes remain.
The Fruit of the Lamb
The object of most experienced jungle traveller's journeys, the rare fruit of the lamb grows in pairs from low-hanging vines in a shady grotto. At the centre of each leafy ear is a piece of pink, fleshy fruit that squeals like sizzling meat when bitten. It tastes just like its namesake and has miraculous, horrifying effects.
Consuming it feels invigorating, the experience has been likened to methamphetamine with a similar hangover. Wounds close, clumsily healed over with scarred pink flesh, but tear open again without rest. The body ripples and changes in chaotic spasms. New limbs, eyes sprouting compound facets like a fly, the loss of six inches in height are just a few of the unpredictable mutations people have experienced. Some are more or less subtle. A few are beautiful, many are monstrous.
For those eating the fruit while physically present effects carry into the real world. Dreamers who try it find their dream selves are warped but their physical bodies remain the same. This isn’t pleasant, conversion disorders and problems with proprioception are common outcomes of a mismatch between the physical body and mind. It’s possible (but unlikely) that pre-existing conditions could be “cured” the same way.
Apex
A creature of lamarckian consumption, the Apex looks like a transparent, beaked blob just over a yard wide supporting itself by dozens of thin, chitinous tentacles. Entirely carnivorous, it is defined by a unique ability to temporarily extrude pieces of animals it has eaten from its gelatinous body. Venomous stingers, wings and the faces of dead friends begging for help are just a few of the things that have been witnessed.
It loses these abilities after it metabolizes the nutrients from each of them, enforcing a frenzied pace of constant hunting and eating to stay at the top of the food chain. Primarily an ambush predator, its style and intelligence fluctuate with its most recent meals. Two people have had conversations with it after it ate their companions. Surprisingly witty and urbane, it knew all the things the dead did and more.
Showing posts with label Otherspace. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Otherspace. Show all posts
Wednesday, 29 January 2020
Friday, 4 October 2019
157 - Silver City
Otherspace: Silver City
There’s a city, it’s like the one you live in but glamorous, spotless and carefully curated. It is filled with dramatic stories that look like the events of your life but play out with a Hollywood slickness. Things might not necessarily go your way in the Silver City but in comparison to the original, the glossy reflection can be horribly intoxicating. No one will even notice you’re gone, your reflection takes your place and mimics your actions (or maybe you’re mimicking its). There are other things in there, things that don’t cast reflections of their own and they shine all the brighter for it.
There’s a city, it’s like the one you live in but glamorous, spotless and carefully curated. It is filled with dramatic stories that look like the events of your life but play out with a Hollywood slickness. Things might not necessarily go your way in the Silver City but in comparison to the original, the glossy reflection can be horribly intoxicating. No one will even notice you’re gone, your reflection takes your place and mimics your actions (or maybe you’re mimicking its). There are other things in there, things that don’t cast reflections of their own and they shine all the brighter for it.
Access to Silver City
In the circles where it’s discussed many cities claim to have their own silver counterpart. This is a lie, there is only one Silver City and its location is dictated by the population of those exposed to it. If you could motivate a mass migration of 'commuters' (as they’re called) to a new locale the City would move with them once the majority were someplace else. At this point it’s deeply rooted enough in its current locale that this is unlikely. That doesn’t stop people from trying.
For someone who has never been there the Silver City has a single access point, something large, public and reflective. At the moment it’s an ornate fountain in the middle of a park. You also need to be something of a dreamer, the tacit assumption of pursuit of an objective puts cabals on the right track but ordinary people living ordinary lives are hard pressed to find the City. Finally you have to fall into it while doing something dramatic and important: rushing to the big proposal you set up for your girlfriend, running for your life from armed thugs, trying to get to the courthouse with documents for an eleventh hour stay of execution.
For those who have been to the City before things are a little easier, any large reflective surface in the current host city is a potential portal. A Secrecy roll at a -30% shift or one on a specific relevant identity is allowed once per scene to breach through, they can take additional people in physical contact with them equal to the tens place of a successful result.
In either case people exit the way they came in, minus the urgency for first timers.
Supernatural Identity: Silver City Commuter
In the circles where it’s discussed many cities claim to have their own silver counterpart. This is a lie, there is only one Silver City and its location is dictated by the population of those exposed to it. If you could motivate a mass migration of 'commuters' (as they’re called) to a new locale the City would move with them once the majority were someplace else. At this point it’s deeply rooted enough in its current locale that this is unlikely. That doesn’t stop people from trying.
For someone who has never been there the Silver City has a single access point, something large, public and reflective. At the moment it’s an ornate fountain in the middle of a park. You also need to be something of a dreamer, the tacit assumption of pursuit of an objective puts cabals on the right track but ordinary people living ordinary lives are hard pressed to find the City. Finally you have to fall into it while doing something dramatic and important: rushing to the big proposal you set up for your girlfriend, running for your life from armed thugs, trying to get to the courthouse with documents for an eleventh hour stay of execution.
For those who have been to the City before things are a little easier, any large reflective surface in the current host city is a potential portal. A Secrecy roll at a -30% shift or one on a specific relevant identity is allowed once per scene to breach through, they can take additional people in physical contact with them equal to the tens place of a successful result.
In either case people exit the way they came in, minus the urgency for first timers.
Supernatural Identity: Silver City Commuter
You’ve stepped back and forth between the Silver City and the real city often enough that it’s become second nature to you. Able to hold the correct state of mind, read the ineffable signs and give off “the right energy” you can reliably replicate the ineffable qualities required cross over. You’ve broken down the barrier inside of you that keeps normal people out.
Feature: Unique - Enter the Silver City
Feature: Casts Rituals
Feature: Use Gutter Magick
The Cityscape
At a glance it looks just like the real city, it takes time for the nagging differences to become unnerving. The same way people see their own reflections differently than the way they look in photos, it’s idealised in a way that’s familiar but hard to put your finger on. If you get in and out quickly you might not even notice what’s wrong with it.
In the spaces unseen by permanent mirrors, the reflective surfaces left in place for more than 3 days, the Silver City reflects the dreams of its inhabitants in its architecture. This isn’t necessarily positive, a lot of dreams are self-serving or based on unhealthy cravings. It’s the movie-version of the city jacked up to 11 and dripping with symbolism. The ‘Si Si Si Si’ facade of the 1930s Italian Facist Party HQ facade is the sort of thing that wouldn’t look out of place.
In the real world your reflection switches places with you. To anybody else this is indistinguishable from the normal you except for a few minor details like handedness and the side you part your hair. You reflection has never known the kind of freedom to real world allows so they’ll mostly just follow your actions. The only exception to this is when you go places and act in ways that the real world doesn’t allow. The reflection will struggle to act as it thinks it should, behaving like a caricature of your passions. Should this go as far as you suffering stress checks the reflection starts to act out in serious distress and confusion, using passions as the most vague of guidelines. There will be blowback and confusion when you get back. Sometimes reflections who suffer badly enough gain a will of their own.
Untethered Dramatics
Just like the one-sided landscape, there are people in the Silver City that don’t reflect into the real world. Some of them are symbolic representations, others are people or reflections who have lost their counterpart. Unrooted from the real world, their intrigues and squabbles are horrifying and comedic melodrama.
Imagine two dozen people acting like they're the YA novel protagonist of the story and that belief being reflected in their environment. It’s like the worst parts of the most wincingly bad fanfiction and chatroom roleplaying resolved as a winner-take-all LARP with real consequences. They love to involve visitors in their plots, have their heroics and villainy adored by onlookers or use them as prey.
Feature: Unique - Enter the Silver City
Feature: Casts Rituals
Feature: Use Gutter Magick
The Cityscape
At a glance it looks just like the real city, it takes time for the nagging differences to become unnerving. The same way people see their own reflections differently than the way they look in photos, it’s idealised in a way that’s familiar but hard to put your finger on. If you get in and out quickly you might not even notice what’s wrong with it.
In the spaces unseen by permanent mirrors, the reflective surfaces left in place for more than 3 days, the Silver City reflects the dreams of its inhabitants in its architecture. This isn’t necessarily positive, a lot of dreams are self-serving or based on unhealthy cravings. It’s the movie-version of the city jacked up to 11 and dripping with symbolism. The ‘Si Si Si Si’ facade of the 1930s Italian Facist Party HQ facade is the sort of thing that wouldn’t look out of place.
In the real world your reflection switches places with you. To anybody else this is indistinguishable from the normal you except for a few minor details like handedness and the side you part your hair. You reflection has never known the kind of freedom to real world allows so they’ll mostly just follow your actions. The only exception to this is when you go places and act in ways that the real world doesn’t allow. The reflection will struggle to act as it thinks it should, behaving like a caricature of your passions. Should this go as far as you suffering stress checks the reflection starts to act out in serious distress and confusion, using passions as the most vague of guidelines. There will be blowback and confusion when you get back. Sometimes reflections who suffer badly enough gain a will of their own.
Untethered Dramatics
Just like the one-sided landscape, there are people in the Silver City that don’t reflect into the real world. Some of them are symbolic representations, others are people or reflections who have lost their counterpart. Unrooted from the real world, their intrigues and squabbles are horrifying and comedic melodrama.
Imagine two dozen people acting like they're the YA novel protagonist of the story and that belief being reflected in their environment. It’s like the worst parts of the most wincingly bad fanfiction and chatroom roleplaying resolved as a winner-take-all LARP with real consequences. They love to involve visitors in their plots, have their heroics and villainy adored by onlookers or use them as prey.
It's not clear if these actions are a reflection of the city or the city of them.
The Mirror’s Edge
The geographical edge of the host city marks the physical limits of the Silver City. As you move to the outskirts the sky darkens to night regardless of the time of day, the crowds thin and the roads empty, then the buildings start to disappear. As you approach the edge, the road and the landscape turn to smooth, reflective glass and the surrounding landscape is revealed to you. The Silver City rests on the center of a shard of glass suspended in a void. From here you can go no further.
People who leap into the void disappear forever, their reflections become permanently untethered from them. The only thing that distinguishes the reflection from normal people from then on is that they don’t show up in mirrors.
People who leap into the void disappear forever, their reflections become permanently untethered from them. The only thing that distinguishes the reflection from normal people from then on is that they don’t show up in mirrors.
Friday, 2 August 2019
094 - The Endless Alleyway
Otherspace: The Endless Alleyway
Alleys are liminal spaces and the service organs of their public-facing brethren. They provide access. They collect our waste and clear it away. They can be dark and menacing. Secretive. If you know how to find it they connect to a sub-layer that is to them what they are to their cities. That holds the things we’ve long lost and might get back. If you can afford it.
Entering the Endless Alleyway
The prerequisite for gaining entry is that you need to have lost something material and it must have had a negative impact on you that you still feel (although you may not realize or admit it). Your grandma’s ashes, your house, a limb, these all count. Your boyfriend, your job or your innocence do not. You also need to be in an urban area and be running late for something. I hope it isn’t important because you won’t be getting there soon.
Take a shortcut down any alley while you’re unobserved. Don’t look behind you yet. Eventually you’ll pass the Tollkeeper, a beggar (description varies) who looks incongruously well-off for someone lying in an alleyway. Lace their palm (or paper cup or hat or whatever) with two coins (with a minimum silver content of 40%) of (now or past) legal tender. Take five more steps, then look behind you and look back ahead of you.
The street and the Tollkeeper are gone, instead the endless alleyway stretches into the vanishing distance.
The Landscape of the Endless Alleyway
An infinite, occasionally twisting and dividing, slog of back alleys populated with dumpsters, short-lived shantytowns and the back stoops of buildings. Indistinct city sounds are always audible as though the street were just a block over but you never seem to reach it. None of the doorways or windows are accessible, if you force one it’s bricked up (it’s brick all the way through, people have tried digging. The deepest tunnel extends 176 meters into the space under the loading dock behind a PetSmart). Some brave souls have scaled the buildings to look for a way out from above, none of them have come back.
There are people in the alleyway, sparsely clustered in groups by purpose or instinct. Those lost, those treating the alleyway like a religious pilgrimage or curiousity, those looking for something and those selling it. Those selling are demons, given flesh but trapped in the otherspace. They have the thing that you have lost and everyone else’s. Each of them will make three offers: the first thing belongs to a person who you will never meet (synchronicity will scramble attempts to subvert this, fatally if you’re stubborn), the second to someone you know (skipped if there is nothing that qualifies) and the last is your own (or if you’ve refused it, nothing).
The price for your own object is always something you can conceivably pay but it is an incredibly painful ask, beyond any reasonable justification. If you refuse the sale then it can start being offered to other people who venture into the alleyway, that’s where the other objects offered to you come from. The asking price for other people’s things is far more reasonable, each time an object is offered to someone the price drops until the demon-vendor is practically begging for someone to take it. If you refuse an object it will never be offered to you again. If someone ever buys your object you may never re-enter the alleyway again.
Don’t get caught in the alleyway on your municipalities’ trash collection day. The Clean-up Crew, with their opaque-visored hazmat suits, flamethrowers and monstrous garbage trucks (that should be too large to fit down the alleys), are the one thing that terrifies all inhabitants. If they catch you then they’ll dispose of you and it isn’t pretty. This happens weekly for the demonic salespeople of the alley, who cannot escape and are hopelessly mired in a cycle of destruction and rebirth, forever.
Leaving the Endless Alleyway
Leaving the alleyway is pretty simple if you can get some privacy and squash your self-preservation instinct. Find one of the intersections or corners of the alleyway (where it turns or splits so you’d hit a wall if you just kept walking), close your eyes and lower your head then run full pelt at it. If you succeed, you’ll feel the fresh, open air hitting your face and the sounds of the city will come into focus as you emerge from the same alley you entered through. Hopefully you can skid to a halt before you run into anyone or out into the street.
You might fail to exit for two reasons, either because you didn’t fully commit or someone was watching you try to leave. I get it, running blind at a wall is scary. Take 1d10 wounds if you half-ass the exit plan. If you went full-tilt but someone was eyeballing you it’s 2d10 wounds (plus 3 if the dice come up doubles). Sometimes alleyway inhabitants or visitors will bridge troll exit-capable real estate and make demands to let you use it unobstructed.
Alleys are liminal spaces and the service organs of their public-facing brethren. They provide access. They collect our waste and clear it away. They can be dark and menacing. Secretive. If you know how to find it they connect to a sub-layer that is to them what they are to their cities. That holds the things we’ve long lost and might get back. If you can afford it.
Entering the Endless Alleyway
The prerequisite for gaining entry is that you need to have lost something material and it must have had a negative impact on you that you still feel (although you may not realize or admit it). Your grandma’s ashes, your house, a limb, these all count. Your boyfriend, your job or your innocence do not. You also need to be in an urban area and be running late for something. I hope it isn’t important because you won’t be getting there soon.
Take a shortcut down any alley while you’re unobserved. Don’t look behind you yet. Eventually you’ll pass the Tollkeeper, a beggar (description varies) who looks incongruously well-off for someone lying in an alleyway. Lace their palm (or paper cup or hat or whatever) with two coins (with a minimum silver content of 40%) of (now or past) legal tender. Take five more steps, then look behind you and look back ahead of you.
The street and the Tollkeeper are gone, instead the endless alleyway stretches into the vanishing distance.
The Landscape of the Endless Alleyway
An infinite, occasionally twisting and dividing, slog of back alleys populated with dumpsters, short-lived shantytowns and the back stoops of buildings. Indistinct city sounds are always audible as though the street were just a block over but you never seem to reach it. None of the doorways or windows are accessible, if you force one it’s bricked up (it’s brick all the way through, people have tried digging. The deepest tunnel extends 176 meters into the space under the loading dock behind a PetSmart). Some brave souls have scaled the buildings to look for a way out from above, none of them have come back.
There are people in the alleyway, sparsely clustered in groups by purpose or instinct. Those lost, those treating the alleyway like a religious pilgrimage or curiousity, those looking for something and those selling it. Those selling are demons, given flesh but trapped in the otherspace. They have the thing that you have lost and everyone else’s. Each of them will make three offers: the first thing belongs to a person who you will never meet (synchronicity will scramble attempts to subvert this, fatally if you’re stubborn), the second to someone you know (skipped if there is nothing that qualifies) and the last is your own (or if you’ve refused it, nothing).
The price for your own object is always something you can conceivably pay but it is an incredibly painful ask, beyond any reasonable justification. If you refuse the sale then it can start being offered to other people who venture into the alleyway, that’s where the other objects offered to you come from. The asking price for other people’s things is far more reasonable, each time an object is offered to someone the price drops until the demon-vendor is practically begging for someone to take it. If you refuse an object it will never be offered to you again. If someone ever buys your object you may never re-enter the alleyway again.
Don’t get caught in the alleyway on your municipalities’ trash collection day. The Clean-up Crew, with their opaque-visored hazmat suits, flamethrowers and monstrous garbage trucks (that should be too large to fit down the alleys), are the one thing that terrifies all inhabitants. If they catch you then they’ll dispose of you and it isn’t pretty. This happens weekly for the demonic salespeople of the alley, who cannot escape and are hopelessly mired in a cycle of destruction and rebirth, forever.
Leaving the Endless Alleyway
Leaving the alleyway is pretty simple if you can get some privacy and squash your self-preservation instinct. Find one of the intersections or corners of the alleyway (where it turns or splits so you’d hit a wall if you just kept walking), close your eyes and lower your head then run full pelt at it. If you succeed, you’ll feel the fresh, open air hitting your face and the sounds of the city will come into focus as you emerge from the same alley you entered through. Hopefully you can skid to a halt before you run into anyone or out into the street.
You might fail to exit for two reasons, either because you didn’t fully commit or someone was watching you try to leave. I get it, running blind at a wall is scary. Take 1d10 wounds if you half-ass the exit plan. If you went full-tilt but someone was eyeballing you it’s 2d10 wounds (plus 3 if the dice come up doubles). Sometimes alleyway inhabitants or visitors will bridge troll exit-capable real estate and make demands to let you use it unobstructed.
Friday, 12 July 2019
073 - The Perpetual Kingdom of Roscommon Avenue
Otherspace: The Perpetual Kingdom of Roscommon Avenue
His original will was to shape the Order into something worthy of ruling in his place but he has been disappointed by them. More recently he has taken to secretly testing newcomers, cultivating and trying to find a worthy individual to name as successor. Some of the knights who expect to take his place in the aftermath are becoming suspicious, he fears a coup. He doesn’t have long.
Nothing lasts forever, but this can. He hopes.
The reality-exiled castle of a king who wanted to rule forever, the Perpetual Kingdom is a court with an expiration date. Dennis Glass, the man in charge, counts and apportions time carefully to avoid it. It’s a losing battle, there are only so many ways you can divide the same day over and over. It will always be June 26th, 2008 in the Kingdom, the day looping over itself like an ouroboros every time the clock strikes midnight. This sort of suspension wreaks merry havoc with the otherspace’s stability and well-being. For one thing, it needs constant feeding.
Travel to the Kingdom
Located in a supply closet in a heavily secured hallway in the back of a coworking office space, the Kingdom’s doorway is exactly where it used to be when it was a diner in the real world. It is suspended in the air, half a foot from the ground in the middle of the room atop stairs that no longer exist. Flickering in and out of reality with a grainy filter effect seemingly at random, access is highly policed by Dennis’s real world contingent. Entering or exiting at a particular time of day blocks access to the portal at that time on all subsequent days.
The opaque-glassed, peeling wooden door is secured by password: “Look on my works, ye mighty and despair” while clutching the door handle and mentally picturing the person you respect most (if you picture someone else you still gain entry but appear dressed in a jester’s motley, sometimes this is used as a test of intent or to disarm or disorient). The sign in the doorway momentarily flickers between “CLOSED” and “OPEN” and you appear inside. Accompanying members of Dennis’s court will usher people through in rapid succession to avoid exhausting the doorway’s limited lifespan.
Exit works the same way, without the password. If you ended up in jester’s motley, you’re stuck with it. Sorry about your old clothes.
The Kingdom’s Landscape
At a glance the diner is like any other, linoleum flooring, stools at the counter and booths. There are three bullet holes in one of the walls. Way in the back sits the man who everyone inside pays deference to, Dennis Glass has been the True King of Roscommon Avenue (and surrounding territories) since the early 00s. His touch in creating the otherspace redoubt binds him here and makes him a part of it, when he gets emotional there is a strobing effect that visually replaces the diner’s environment with a spacious throne room (rank 4 unnatural stress check the first time it happens).
The other inhabitants of the Kingdom are all Dennis’s subjects, all of them have a personal story of his benevolence and wisdom. Everyone serves willingly and with zeal, a climate that is reinforced by the otherspace's ambience and his True King avatar connection. At least one would-be interloper has been run through with a sword by the fry cook.
Dennis ostensibly wants two things: to secure and maintain his hold on Roscommon Avenue for all time and to feed his otherspace. Every single day that passes on the outside requires a day leeched from someone for the sub-reality to remain stable (or else it begins to collapse like a temporary otherspace, see pg. 117 of Book 2: Run). Dennis’s third avatar channel allows him to take this time from himself and his subjects if they are willing. Alternatively, if you can provide something that Dennis is interested in he may be willing to give you something in return. Provided you can observe the proper protocol, it isn’t a trade, it’s a gift that might be repaid by the benevolence of the realm’s ruler.
The resource that allows the Kingdom to stay afloat is a limited form of time travel. If you were to give Dennis a letter at an early hour on a future date there is nothing stopping him from returning it to you at a later hour on the present day, the looping runs forward and backwards for objects from the outside. Of course this only occurs if Dennis wills it, the very first and last thing passed through is a ledger detailing past and future trades which he judiciously manages his own knowledge of. Dennis is sensitive to the terrible changes his kingdom’s power might inflict on the outside world, at the very least he has his knights police potential outcomes using his own future given knowledge.
The Order of Roscommon Avenue
That Dennis has chosen to rule in absentia is a technicality, his Order enforces his will and brings him fresh subjects and those who wish to entreaty his aid. His, and the otherspace’s, time is limited so he has appointed this delegation to see to his real world interests. Their original membership was drawn from those who accompanied him when the Kingdom was built. Like a lot of knightly orders operating outside the direct authority of their ruler they’ve become an a power unto themselves that threatens the integrity of the Kingdom of Roscommon Avenue. Think the Knights Templar getting too big for their boots.
They police goings on in the Kingdom, put down insurrection and invasion and manage the affairs that don’t warrant Dennis’s direct attention. There are multiple arms of the Order with varying overlapping responsibilities which he plays off against one another as best he can to keep any of them from amassing too much power. There’s also the tithing. 2 days of every month belongs to the Kingdom, payable on demand (this debt is generally allowed to accrue for long periods to limit travel to and from the otherspace).
In return they enjoy the largess of a magickal kingdom that can win lotteries at will, the treasury is deep and they are well equipped and wealthy. Tithing can be offset by recruitment. New members are expected to bear the burden of their superiors as a method of testing their resolve, even to the point that the recruiter’s debt to the Kingdom is in credit. In one case a community-flavoured MLM scheme was used as a front for this activity.
The Future
Dennis understands that his otherspace's days are numbered. Ironically for an institution that was built to last forever, eventually the time that the door to the real world exists will be exhausted and the otherspace will be cut off and collapse. He carries that burden like the bullet wounds that will never heal.
Travel to the Kingdom
Located in a supply closet in a heavily secured hallway in the back of a coworking office space, the Kingdom’s doorway is exactly where it used to be when it was a diner in the real world. It is suspended in the air, half a foot from the ground in the middle of the room atop stairs that no longer exist. Flickering in and out of reality with a grainy filter effect seemingly at random, access is highly policed by Dennis’s real world contingent. Entering or exiting at a particular time of day blocks access to the portal at that time on all subsequent days.
The opaque-glassed, peeling wooden door is secured by password: “Look on my works, ye mighty and despair” while clutching the door handle and mentally picturing the person you respect most (if you picture someone else you still gain entry but appear dressed in a jester’s motley, sometimes this is used as a test of intent or to disarm or disorient). The sign in the doorway momentarily flickers between “CLOSED” and “OPEN” and you appear inside. Accompanying members of Dennis’s court will usher people through in rapid succession to avoid exhausting the doorway’s limited lifespan.
Exit works the same way, without the password. If you ended up in jester’s motley, you’re stuck with it. Sorry about your old clothes.
The Kingdom’s Landscape
At a glance the diner is like any other, linoleum flooring, stools at the counter and booths. There are three bullet holes in one of the walls. Way in the back sits the man who everyone inside pays deference to, Dennis Glass has been the True King of Roscommon Avenue (and surrounding territories) since the early 00s. His touch in creating the otherspace redoubt binds him here and makes him a part of it, when he gets emotional there is a strobing effect that visually replaces the diner’s environment with a spacious throne room (rank 4 unnatural stress check the first time it happens).
The other inhabitants of the Kingdom are all Dennis’s subjects, all of them have a personal story of his benevolence and wisdom. Everyone serves willingly and with zeal, a climate that is reinforced by the otherspace's ambience and his True King avatar connection. At least one would-be interloper has been run through with a sword by the fry cook.
Dennis ostensibly wants two things: to secure and maintain his hold on Roscommon Avenue for all time and to feed his otherspace. Every single day that passes on the outside requires a day leeched from someone for the sub-reality to remain stable (or else it begins to collapse like a temporary otherspace, see pg. 117 of Book 2: Run). Dennis’s third avatar channel allows him to take this time from himself and his subjects if they are willing. Alternatively, if you can provide something that Dennis is interested in he may be willing to give you something in return. Provided you can observe the proper protocol, it isn’t a trade, it’s a gift that might be repaid by the benevolence of the realm’s ruler.
The resource that allows the Kingdom to stay afloat is a limited form of time travel. If you were to give Dennis a letter at an early hour on a future date there is nothing stopping him from returning it to you at a later hour on the present day, the looping runs forward and backwards for objects from the outside. Of course this only occurs if Dennis wills it, the very first and last thing passed through is a ledger detailing past and future trades which he judiciously manages his own knowledge of. Dennis is sensitive to the terrible changes his kingdom’s power might inflict on the outside world, at the very least he has his knights police potential outcomes using his own future given knowledge.
The Order of Roscommon Avenue
That Dennis has chosen to rule in absentia is a technicality, his Order enforces his will and brings him fresh subjects and those who wish to entreaty his aid. His, and the otherspace’s, time is limited so he has appointed this delegation to see to his real world interests. Their original membership was drawn from those who accompanied him when the Kingdom was built. Like a lot of knightly orders operating outside the direct authority of their ruler they’ve become an a power unto themselves that threatens the integrity of the Kingdom of Roscommon Avenue. Think the Knights Templar getting too big for their boots.
They police goings on in the Kingdom, put down insurrection and invasion and manage the affairs that don’t warrant Dennis’s direct attention. There are multiple arms of the Order with varying overlapping responsibilities which he plays off against one another as best he can to keep any of them from amassing too much power. There’s also the tithing. 2 days of every month belongs to the Kingdom, payable on demand (this debt is generally allowed to accrue for long periods to limit travel to and from the otherspace).
In return they enjoy the largess of a magickal kingdom that can win lotteries at will, the treasury is deep and they are well equipped and wealthy. Tithing can be offset by recruitment. New members are expected to bear the burden of their superiors as a method of testing their resolve, even to the point that the recruiter’s debt to the Kingdom is in credit. In one case a community-flavoured MLM scheme was used as a front for this activity.
The Future
Dennis understands that his otherspace's days are numbered. Ironically for an institution that was built to last forever, eventually the time that the door to the real world exists will be exhausted and the otherspace will be cut off and collapse. He carries that burden like the bullet wounds that will never heal.
His original will was to shape the Order into something worthy of ruling in his place but he has been disappointed by them. More recently he has taken to secretly testing newcomers, cultivating and trying to find a worthy individual to name as successor. Some of the knights who expect to take his place in the aftermath are becoming suspicious, he fears a coup. He doesn’t have long.
Nothing lasts forever, but this can. He hopes.
Wednesday, 22 May 2019
022 - Grief's Junkyard
This is the first in a series of posts intended the outline the framework for a game in the same vein as the official Campaign Starter Kits.
“All that you love will be carried away”
- Stephen King, Everything’s Eventual
One step at a time, clawing handholds and kicking footholds into the loamy, black soil you climb higher and higher toward the circle of washed-out, grey light. Thoughts of how long you’ve been doing this seem dreamlike. Maybe you’ve always been climbing? But there are other memories - however distant - of a time before. A time you chose to come here and longing grief that drives you. Then you reach the lip of the Pit and drag yourself out, finally, aching.
A barren expanse under an overcast sky sprawls around you as far as the eye can see. The only thing populating the landscape is wreckage: cars, boats, airplanes, dotted here and there in the distance. If you get close you can hear and see the people trapped inside. The ones who died in them, the ones who people loved.
Getting there is easy enough, pick a pile of debris on the horizon and start walking. There is no sun above the clouds despite the ambient light and reference points that seem to shift independently make it difficult to mark the passage of time or distance with anything other than hunger, thirst or exhaustion. On arrival you’ll find the dead locked in their last moments, seemingly alive but repeating the same loop of actions over and over. All it takes to rouse them is a touch, but careful, you can only wake one. Don’t let go or you’ll lose them forever.
Space works oddly in the Junkyard, each step away from the Pit covers distance as normal but on the return journey the distance yawns, stretching endlessly. Short jaunts from the Pit are easy enough to come back from but each step carries you an exponential distance. Out far enough landmarks shift in relation to each other and navigation becomes perilous. Like a black hole the Junkyard traps you with inexorable distance the further you stray into it.
There is a way to bridge this distance and for many, with all the searching it takes to find the person they are looking for, it is the only way to return before they run out of food or become lost in the Junkyard’s expanse. You can give up the the connection to whoever you hold dearest, whole or in pieces. The Junkyard is a place of lingering loss and grief and in its rapacious non-sentience it will release its grasp on those who willingly feed it.
Entering & Exiting the Junkyard: Like all otherspaces the Junkyard has a specific ritual for entry. You must travel to the site of a vehicle fatality, any will do so long as it has not been used to enter the Junkyard before. At the site, after sundown, start digging. No one who wishes to enter the Junkyard can leave the hole until it is fully dug. It must be deep enough to hide those in it from the outside and the outside from those in it. At midnight, in pitch darkness, start climbing. If these conditions are met the climb will be much longer than it should be, the climber’s memory and consciousness fading into a dreamlike state as they ascend towards the mouth of the Junkyard’s Pit.
Anyone climbing or falling back into the Pit lands in the hole they used to enter. If you’re holding onto a person they come with you, but no more than one. Hopefully your hole hasn’t been filled in yet.
Inhabitants: The Junkyard contains anyone who has died in a vehicle who was someone’s favourite (as in the mechanical relationship) until the time that relationship fades from the person who held them dear or they leave. Additionally a number of outsiders have also taken up residence in the Junkyard’s hostile environment, both temporarily and on a permanent basis.
Exploration: One step from the Pit is equal to one step back, the second covers twice the distance as far as the return journey is concerned, then quadruple and so on. In practice this would be tiresome to calculate, so don’t. Instead measure travel in encounters (say, two per game day). Give the players a handful on their way to their objective and then hit them with several times as many on the lengthy, uncertain journey back. More if they lose their way. Narrate the yawning distance behind them and the growing isolation from the safety of the real world as they move further and further in.
Unknown Armies isn’t exactly suited to hexcrawls. All exploration should be objective driven and based on choices over tedious logistics. Do the players want to take the short but dangerous route or go the long way and use more supplies? Do they want to risk a detour to interact with GMCs who may have information or aid they require? Exploration rolls, based on relevant abilities, should be granted to give players extra information to inform their choices in the right circumstances but never replace them.
Starvation and Other Dangers: Survival in the Junkyard is uncertain. Wreckage is the only shelter, food and water is limited to what little can be scavenged from picked over vehicles and there’s no medical services or mechanics for when people and things break down. Without resources people travelling in the Junkyard are at risk. Healthy Appetites by Alex Powell provides timeframes and penalties for starvation and dehydration.
Alternatively give a cumulative -10% penalty to all rolls for each day gone without, the progression temporarily stalled by a successful roll on Fitness or a relevant identity and reversed at the same rate by adequate provisions. At worse than -40% starvation/dehydration/exposure cause death. Things decay and breakdown quickly in the Junkyard, it’s only by constantly moving on and replacing what’s lost that any semblance of existence can be eked out.
Supply Rules: For players who want to prepare for the journey consider allowing them to build a Supply percentile pool - with milestones for resources and initiative poured into it like an objective - to act as a buffer against the worst. Instead of weathering the consequences when they happen a roll against this value provides material support. In return the available resources deplete as if the roll were an attack against the Supply pool (using hand-to-hand (light) or firearm (heavy, possibly capped) damage depending on severity).
When confronted with hunger, accident or exposure the Supply pool might represent the following:
- Stave off hunger and dehydration for everyone for a day (light).
- Access to first-aid supplies (light).
- Increased hardiness (+10% shift to Fitness rolls) from altitude training for short (one session, light) or long term benefit (several sessions, heavy, 30).
- Access to portable hydraulic rescue tools (heavy, 20).
Depending on the situation there may need to be additional rolls to solve the problem but the right materials are on hand. Matched successes or crits might indicate either supplies of a particularly high quality (+20-30% shift to subsequent rolls) or efficient resources (reduce depletion by half or three-quarters). Standard failures count as a success with complications (ie. extra depletion (+3/+6 points depending on damage level) or inferior tools (-10% negative shift on actions)) whereas matched failures and fumbles indicate no resources are available. Hitting 0% Supply means they’re tapped out on everything.
Specific and unique preparations taken ahead of time are excluded from these rules. They may be useful in the abstract to measure how limited a particular resource is but erring on the side of rewarding player ingenuity is preferable. Roleplaying these preparations is its own form of investment.
The Junkyard’s Appetite: The Junkyard is hungry. It doesn’t want you here. It wants to be left in peace to slowly digest your attachments. You can willingly feed it if you wish and it will reward you for doing so.
This can be used to fend off starvation, it can smooth the path of obstacles, it can even stave off death for a time. Anyone who is willing to give up part of their attachment may use their favourite relationship to substitute for any identity feature, supply roll or exploration roll. The trade off for doing so is that the relationship depletes by the sum of the roll regardless of success. The effects are never explicitly obvious, that gnawing hunger in your belly is overshadowed by dull emotional pain, that teetering maze of stacked wrecks disappears in a mirage as you round the rocky outcrop or that sucking chest wound seems less life threatening for a while.
It is unpleasant to give up something so fundamental this way. GMs are encouraged to apply stress checks.
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