Week Three was the closest I got to goodbye but I don't have to say it anymore

Week 3. The week we almost quit but decide to stick around.

Just some notes to myself before diving down into the week: on a round two of the map, thou shalt include

• monster locations,
• area of prowl,
• area of listening <- topographically graded,
• action-oriented encounters ,
• the various damages and so forth, items, etc.
• 2d6 random encounter charts (not all combat and at least one expansion in the event something is rolled twice on the same level

That out of the way, Week Three of Dungeon23 is one week when I considered walking away. This project is impressively obsessive. I am spending as much time watching others work as work myself and that, in the right light, induces guilt. It shouldn’t but it does. I am not quite at front-line speed—I believe I’m writing two rooms a day, and around two days behind step. Nothing wrong with that so long as I don’t try to play catch-up all at once. But at least a day or two has been me falling behind in the creative aspect without falling behind in the communicative / spectator engagement. Nonono.

This week I’ve been inspired by the colors others are using, as well as some of GM_Odinson’s isomorphic dungeon drawing. As such, I bought some watercolors and have again proven that wherever one last left off with an art is where one starts. Thus, my watercoloring is elementary. But color brings a certain magic that regardless of its application, still excites the eye and draws it close, so I’ll include my little rudimentary sketches.

•••

1. items 
2. encounterable creatures / sentient elements 
3. relationships with other rooms in the building
4. traps & triggers & dmgy things
5. trouble for me
6. major story arcs

1/16 A STAIRWELL WITHOUT ANY RAILINGS ANYMORE — Down the hall from the great doors and chutes are the stairs, or a set of stairs. 

White painted stone, absolutely flawless edges (were they cut by machines or men?)—& holes every fourth step where a circular metal bannister has been cut free, removed, and taken down, such that looking down half-turn stairs, the foot-and-some gap shows they repeat further and further down, like they continue to the base of the world. 

It comes as some surprise likely then to realize that light is coming up from far below.

If the Milk Queen’s Tread was freed from the elevator, then its inky, mosslike mark is visible taking each step slowly down.

 

Notes from the Day: I miss my old pen. If you’re looking for a fantastic thin writing pen, I bought a box of Jetstream .38mm in South Korea and can’t find the box after moving around a bit. I will buy more but, damnit, back to a thicker rollerball with twice the inertia.

Too, what’s strange about the clanking in 1/18 is that it was distinctly audible in the hallway of 1/3, which is far from this part of the building and through several walls. While I could foreseeably manufacture some magical sound dispersal (perhaps there is a dump portal fixed between the walls there, and whatever is shifting stone and all is, like The Great Escape, sending it through a sister portal, away from here)—but I don’t want that. 

All I want to do is relocate the origin sound to the hallways south of 1/5 and I’ll be fine.

•

1/15 A GEOMETRIC ART EXHIBIT IN WHAT WAS ONCE QUITE A LOOKOUT — South of the 12^th Floor CTV9 Conference Room (1/6), the hallway curves around the central funnel of the lounge hall (1/5) and opens into two separate hallways running into the dark. 

A few of the fishering’s tendrils from 1/5 hang like forgotten streamers of a child’s birthday and a crescent rat has taken an easy home at the bridge of the wall before either halls head south. Unknowingly it secreted a whole bag full of zip-ties for use in its nest, equally useful outside of the nest if some heartless scavenger starts digging around thinking there’s treasure where anything lives.

Distant, the glimmer of the elevator room’s crashed chandelier—great glass bulbs and wooden cones— reflects light back.

We take the first hallway because it’s first. The western hall. Any hope that the two would meet up is quickly lost as the hallway veers west following a similar curve, before opening up into a tremendous open space. What might’ve been a vaulting observatory with polyhedral 20’ ceilings, a view of blue cloudless skies, maybe a spot for birds to be ddown and have their young, (there are perfect nesting creases to the bubbling, curved overhead windows) is alas, like everything else, covered in sand and darkness.

However it is still a good place to bed down and have children as the silk-shaped ursin has found. Her ability to pass through hard surfaces at will has made this glassy set of domes and boxes, its many built-in nooks (some of which still hold ancient decorative pottery), and its 270 degree vision of the surrounding sandy underground both a perfect place to lay her glassy eggs and a perfect place to lay easy trap for creatures burrowing in the sands about. 

Normally her kind would find deep-layer homes nearer bedrock where their capacities to move through solid matter make them a nasty surprise for underground dwellers, but CTV9’s 12^th floor overlook has proven a happy surprise for this old gal.

PC’s may take note of her resting body which resolves to tatters of a strange flesh, almost like a pile of egg-white drawn from a pot of water, left to sop high on a cabinet or in one of the CMYK box panes built into the rooms geometric glassy design, but if her two jaws hinge together and her ethereal frorm reconstitutes back into its columnal shape, she won’t seem so much like wet eggs.

Which, speaking of treasures, those would be worth a fortunte, her eggs, but any PC capable of getting them and keeping them nourished in mucus and shade long enough to survive any time in actual sunlight deserves to afford a small house by the ocean afterwards. The rarity of finding living sperm whales babies on a beach, I’ll offer in comparative analogy.

The room shares access to the downward facing chute with room 1/6 & similar concerns should probably be brought to bear regarding drawing the four-armed slave from his post. Though an encounter between he and the mother ursin would undoubtedly be…impressive.

 •

5/17 MENS AND WOMENS LOCKER ROOMS BUT NICE ONES — Two doors on either right and left have been treated in familiar fashion, stripped of metal and fallen inwards to lay like unmade coffins at the feet of a row of tall metal casements that face the opposite wall. Both sides have been done up near exactly and a symbol of a human man and human woman in fading black paint has been etched into each.

The casements face a similar mirrored pair, though in the northern room an additional bank of them face, alone, the wall, and the wooden bench in front of them, which is bolted to the ground. Enough lacquer on that wood that the bugs have kept to other rooms; in fact, the silence is the most notable denizen here, at first. 

The lockers are numbered in small neat printed ways, almost done mechanically in an old way that’s been lost.

Inside one is a full suit, that powders to dust and ghost moth ash at a touch. A simple ring, band of gold, clinks into the pile of dust at base, and the moths will be something to contend with briefly. More ominous is the tap-tapping from one of the locker interiors nearby, one of two with a padlock on it. Does it really seem right to open?

Should PCs get the thing open (bolt cutters? Lock picks?—the combo is 12-22-6, which would be wild to intuit but the numbers only go to 30 so maybe, maybe, you know?). No, it’s no skeletal kid wishing he was free, nor a menagerie of metal crabs shoed in there by duergar for sport—though I considered both)—it’s an incredible watch, set beside a pack of defunct smokes, cigarettes, which can be had for a delicious dry heave of a pull. The edge of the watch has TELENUÑOS inscribed on it and the ticking sound is the swing of the platinum band which is dangling off the shelf-edge. It’s moving because the prayman sprits Bo & Len have tried their grapple rope, struck it, and missed the hook—they’ve come up from the prayman sprit haunts on 5/14 via the pipes and have just started after this treasure. Engine’s people pay in many ways, to scavengers small and large.

These two are small, just a finger tall with wet, lousy hair and soaked garments stitched of unknown mammal rubbers. PCs are an identifiable threat and unless something really sneaky is done, the two will bolt even before the door’s halfway open, back through a gap they’ve made at rear of the locker, bottom right. They have one of the metal-cutting knives found in 1/9, which it takes both sprits to wield and cut the passage that they have.

In fact, two of their party, Selen and Hita are on the opposite side, carving their way into the secondary bathrooms; they’ve taken a number of copper hoops, three aluminum fittings, the name-tag that was in the door of 1/9 (a “R. METHODICAL” whose steel plate is cut in half for ease of carrying), and loaded all that in a rope-assisted canvas drop crate that is set and can be lowered down the hollow between the walls; down to 2/17, their current camp.

Obviously, the metal of the lockers themselves is incredible valuable in overland scenarios, but I’ve stopped enumerating that in favor of, in the future, checking the furniture of a room, admitting salvageable pounds, and identifying general prices vs. hours of difficulty vs. the likelihood of drawing attention. I’m just assuming right now we’d rather explore for treasure treasure and not salvage & value.

Oh and there’s petrus fungal carpets in each shower! That nasty creep…

• 

5/18 A THOROUGHLY RE-DESIGNED WEIGHT ROOM AND WORKOUT AREA — Now weights are made of metal and quite heavy and while we’re familiar with the principal of circles of metal wrapped around bars in increasing quantities, 20,000 years can make a significant difference in comprehensibility. 

Larger, eagle-crest doors span this room’s wide entrance and make for a thrilling open as a gust of air floods outward like a cup has just been lifted of its position of suction. Three red lights blare from beyond and the screech and clank of shifting metal has likely been audible for forty or fifty feet. 

In the back depths of the room, the red lights move across multiple walls simultaneously. MEX II has got quite a bit of sand and rubble to deal with, and unfortunately, much of it has got in the thin cracks of its joints and made for slow burial of the metal treasure. The robotic laborer, enormous as it is, has a healthy mausoleum dug out at the rear of the room, and has made delightfully orderly work of burying all of the heaviest weights in neat rows like backgammon bits; is only struggling with a process it probably shouldn’t have been assigned at all: to lock, of ‘hide, lock, and bury all metal in this room :: store location access and return via the chute with what can be carried’. 

It’s destination is 11/11.

So this is one of the ways Engine’s crew is gathering material! Unfortunate MEX II is one of 20 drafted servitors designed for forestry work (more to come on that later) and the spike and axe on each of its arms are serviceable digging tools, but knot-tying—well. It could be here awhile. 

Graceful for its quarter tons, copper hued and no problems in the dark. Most of the polished wood in this old upper-floor gymnasium has been stripped and lifted to make a secondary structure inside MEX II’s hand-dug treasure room. Well-built, though it will be re-covered in rubble when MEX II finishes up. 

Notes from the Day: Oh bumbling wonderful MEX II. I do hope no one fucks with him and dies. It would make me as sad as The Green Mile made me, or Of Mice and Men. I wonder how much info could be gleaned from the big guy. Oh and ‘all the red lights’ are the many mirrors of the former workout space, reflecting his back lights.

•

1/19 A BREAKOUT MEETING ROOM PRETTY TRAPPED TO HELL — Feeling somewhat peachy cute with a deep-wood robot laborer nearby so I’m desiring something ghoulish to counter.

There’s a cleft in the wall here on the back wall, facing the way we’ve just come, and while it isn’t the easiest way in, it’s actually the safest, because it’s the back door for the wichitaw crane that will periodically step its long-legged way to the entrance that it has bored here to reach in the bathroom walls of 1/17 to sup on them there toilet waters there. 

How lucky the plumbing in this place remains, eh? Plastic, after all these years. Still holding up.

Anyway, catching a glimpse of the predator would be quite a feat—limbs like knitting needles that fold open and closed at multiple—too many—junctures, a glandular mouth puckered in a forever kiss that anyone with skin and nerves doesn’t want to offend. It was an experiment to reduce bloating and exercise requirements in plastic surgery patients that, a long time ago, didn’t work, got trashed, survived, and evolved among the syringes and chemicals. 

A mild intelligence, it won’t parlay and as a result of diminished meals, it has taken to tool manipulation and trap-laying in its lair—once a breakout room whose whiteboard is coated in acidic resin. Three red cherries have been laid out at the table like a trap. Satisfied? They are. Who eats a bright red marachino cherry off an ancient table. 

The shelves of the built-in cabinets have been located in tiny prickly icicles that provide the creature a bizarre comfort—it will straighten itself out fully as if it were laying its splendid body to tan, and lock its many limbs ridged among the sherotin crystals, looking like a Nordic rune, slender and peaceful. One could scrape up the crystals for easy reward or open the cabinets above to find a set of books none had ever found—travel texts that with a good few hours might provide a good maphound some knowledge of how wide this part of the continent has become, and maybe as a result & combined with some geological know-how, actually how old this building is.

This little guy feels weird and deadly. I imagine he eats guess wraiths, or occasionally smaller prey. When desperate, a stilted saunter to the patterbug hoard to pick among the runts of their herd, likely.

 •

1/20 A BIG BRANDED CARPET ON A DAIS — is quite simple actually. 

Ahead through the darkness are the stair’s railings that lead down. You pass—since we’re coming only the one way this time—a pair of contained wall cubicles detailed in 1/21, aiming instead for a raised dais perhaps only a stair and a half off the ground, accessible on all sides. The actual stairs are on the eastern edge of the wide pedestal or pop-up—its not so high and easily leapt onto (though would you want to with that horrible sound?)—the huge carpet in the shape of CTV9’s logo runs perhaps twelve feet by eight feet, colors dismal and faded in the what light there is. The deflated sacks that were pillows have been devoured to the stitches and the thick shag carpeting is absolutely crawling with the horrible patterbugs. 

At the rug’s undulating center are three of their horrible broodlets, small furnaces forever locked in the three-part act of copulation, giving birth, and being fed digested mash through their smokestack openings. 

But why so many? They almost aren’t digesting the carpet—no signs of food sources in any direction—so—below? 1/20 is right above 3/12, or rather,—there is a way for the carnivorous horde to pass down between the floor boards, between the walls, down to the charnel house there, to grub at the tremendous meat scrap, and to bring it back up for their imprisoned matriarchs. Should a PC be able to get their noses anywhere near the floor by the carpet, visible tunnels bored through by the more ancient and now-extinct whimsy elm peer down into darkness and bring up the scent of rust, crisped oil, and cooked meat.

Nothing to find but a bit of body horror unfortunately; might be a clearing worth avoiding. But it is the access point to quite a bit and is visible from many entrances. 

Notes on the Day: This level will be the only level that doesn’t begin to cross the line into contemporary magic and a little more high fantasy element—I want the sensation that something here has been preserved. Perhaps there is furniture stacked against the door of the stairwell at 1/12. It is the main way down to level two.

 

1/21 TWO PERFECTLY SAFE SOLITUDE CHAMBER STUDY CUBES —Last room of the week! Though the chittering, quivering mass at the open room’s center is certain to draw eye and attention, pressed against the southern wall, adjacent the crane’s lair, are a pair of simple solitude chambers, structures of glass and wood, ventilated enough that one could enter and breathe easy, and soundproof enough that one could actually feel quite safe, even peaceful for the moment. 

Though it might seem they were built by some beneficent carpenter keenly aware of the horrid bug infestation nearby, an array of buttons labeled 1 to 5 run a panel along the desk edges and have yet to be ripped free. Miraculously, the dregs of battery life still swimming in the guts of these sound rooms still offer a range of studious musical ambience from 'the chirp of birds in foliage' to a persistent looped 'thunderstorm that will never reach us and make us wet'. 

So how is this all playable and anything but a gimmick of forgotten history? Well, 

1. the obvious safety of the booths will present a haven should the bugs be raised to a devouring swarm. Also, 
2. the sound emitted by the interior speakers has a lulling effect on guess wraiths, which might float close in a cloud of drifting biology (likely if both were pressed with the same tone at the same time so as to coordinate the effect). And 
3. something has been slipped under one of the desk’s back edge (there are both a comfortable chair and a built-in-desk in each study arrangement)—a key held up by flagging piece of black laminated tape and a piece of paper with directions on how to open the safe in 1/9. The note says ‘Lo robé—no—recuperó el collar hayer y lo reemplazó con el que fabricaste. Gracias. —R’. The key has a logo on it, a brand.
4.  

Thoughts on the Day: Cool. I’d imagine the key is for the remains of a car piled up somewhere at the parking level (3^rd to last? Perhaps a lift level? Certainly not an adjacent structure). And an old story to follow in R. Methodical’s peculiar past enlivens the game in a way I hadn’t thought to do as of yet.

•••

Week behind, week ahead. I think a whole lot of new entities makes me feel a little wobbly inside. Obviously I revel in creating them but it is also like opening Pandora's Box. They start flitting about, and my need to tie them down to story and ecology begins to be troubled by the sudden increase in task difficulty. 

I don't want a goblin encampment but I want a goblin encampment, right?

Weird thin-limbed assassin monster, big robot labourer, tiny between-wall scavengers, phasing mother-killer, and some bugs. I think I'll try to move back to discoverables, traps, and room engagement next week, if there's any of it left to do so. Only three days, but I think I'm a step behind, as mentioned so I can do some adjustment based on what I've seen here. It'll be the last days on this level.

I have been having reservations about 'theming' months or levels as it feels aholistic. (Ha). It just feels as though I'd be doing it to do it, and I think there must be some salt in the fresh-water and some fresh in the salt, it's never a clear line. A river runs through.

Stories to check in on: The Mid-Wall Scavenges of the Prayman Sprits; The Charnel House and What's Cookin There; Aw, MAX II Getting His Job Done and Heading Home; MAX I - MAX XX, Robotic Forest Labourers Used for Dirt Work How Come; and R. METHODICAL, That Spanish(-Speaking) Thief..

Second week of Dungeon 23 was actually better than I thought after all's said and done

Now, here's the hard part—after a portion of the work has been finalized in some way, there is disbelief or an unwillingness to join the old work with any new work. One is inhibited by the place where the two could meet. What is rough can't match what is finalized well. Looks silly. 

This is a good time for me to turn and look at the dungeon, rather than at the writing, to see that this is an entirely blank area though there are obviously some connections on either side of the map to old areas. Another thing that hurts too is carving off huge portions of my typed-up writing after I've typed it, because I've just been writing stream of consciousness. I don't need to minimize that, per se, just because I know it helps, but writing it so I can type it and read it later to hear myself then say to myself now, 'Sorry, boss'.

•••

1. items 
2. encounterable creatures / sentient elements 
3. relationships with other rooms in the building
4. traps & triggers & dmgy things
5. trouble for me
6. major story arcs

1/8 OLD BATHROOMS — Unfortunately one of the most necessary sites in any building, the toilets. And one of the least likely, regardless of anyone's imagination, to be searched thoroughly.

A pair of doors are tucked into either elbow of a partitioned hollow, just past one that has been de-hinged and lays half-embedded in the sand bulging from a doorway. Unlike the sands above where the ferrite has given a pink mouthy hue, this is the slate-blue grey sand of the underground.

Regardless, the entrance to the bathrooms also have handles removed, hinges removed, just planks of wood that used to have purpose. Curiously, the door on the left has fallen crosswise to the door frame and appears wedged into place by a short fat cabinet and the back half of a tool. 

Probably a bit more menacing are the scratch marks on the backside of that door.

The floor is tiled and obvious traces of a low-bodied creature writhe through the grease and excrement. Light will bounce off the hanging mirrors and a happy crunching can be heard if someone's willing to lean over the door barring exit and entrance. Should someone enter and make their way to the stall, she's in, Thessa Horn with her glib tongue and gecko-like eyes would look up from devouring the tiny crustacean she's plucked from the Underground Cisterns in 7/9.

An immature glay'id, Thessa Horn uses the remaining plumbing to slip between levels of the building. Her amphibious body is well-suited to the task and though she's tested the aquifers that spring and head for the sea through the lowest limestone, there is a fairly routine supply of aquatic sustenance that pools in the area, so why leave? 

Her mother's body can be found in the adjacent bathroom, ravaged by spear thrusts and now deteriorated—though the glay'ids native mucosal membrane has preserved her from standard decay and devouring by the roving decomposers of CTV9.

Thessa herself set-up the half-door (and in the struggle to do so, chewed it up).

She fights with a pack of sea-reed darts, poisoned to deleterious effect, is notably intelligent, albeit unsocialized, and knows a good bit about the CTV9 building, insomuch as its waterways can get her around. She's about the size of an average arm from elbow to the tip of a hand, and could grow perhaps a hand larger and a bit thicker as she matures. Glay'ids generally live in estuaries and have some of the features of salamanders. 

The other set of toilets is largely barren. Of the technologies that clearly didn't develop in makinds heyday here near Harray D'Ib Oday, it seems toilets and sinks remain similar to familiar modern amenities. 

•

1/9 THE CORNER OFFICE WITH BIG GLASS WALLS - Past the bathrooms, a hall runs down to where sand has spilled in and overtaken a windowframe. It has piled to a human's knees. It runs, the entire way, past a huge corner office.

Burrowing creatures have come and gone through the the sand at hallway's end, in and out of the building—the imprints of tiny feet: centipedes, sand-hares, can be found and tracked on the spill.

Even a trugger beetle can be found still burrowing nearby, its gullied, jelly-like eyes and armor-like carapace both useful components for those of the magic arts. It bites though.

The three floor-to-ceiling glass panes run from hall's end to a wooden door—gasp—that has handles; a plate has been removed from the door's namtag slide and through the windows, an old, massive desk and mighty pane windows hold back the encroached sands and make up the room's walls.

Inside: a rich mantle and series of built-in shelves. A wood-framed painting, or is it a photograph? Yes—our lucky heroes have finally found something worth picking at—there is the expected rich business person's safe behind the print of a jaguar and bejewelled man in a dance of knives and claws. And no—no one has found the safety catch in the desk's drawer, and yes, the bio-sensor still works to fire the intoxicating dart into any thief's hands, so probably best to find the safety catch before attempting to force the safe (or even a heavy pair of gloves would probably serve). It's just a knockout dope—24 solid hours of dreamtime. But there are three revovolving cartridges and needles so be careful there. 

The dial has all the Old Yurth letters and the ten single digits so, you guesssed it, the code is CTV9— start to the right—because it was provided by the company. 

Assuredly there's a slip somewhere that hasn't decayed over the course of thousands of... years...no, probably not. Thank God for creativity! Because inside is a stack of now-defunct monies, a razor-thin necklace in a black velvet case worth 800gp on an easy market day, and a very special knife with a blade of blue fire that can cut through metal up to 3/4 inch thick. Obviously it does more damage than your average knife too.

Besides the trove behind the print though—signs of life in the sand can be beautiful to watch—almost like an ant farm for the myriad creatures that live amongst the dunes' bellies who can be seen moving or pressed up against the glass, burrowing about, making their homes, devouring their prey, etc. 

The thick carpet of the office's rug, because of the door, has seen little consumption or decay by the bugs. The overhead ventilation passes the beginning notes of a peculiar song—something like a hum by a beautiful old voice, and maybe, I suppose, this could be considered a defensible and for-the-moment safe space, one which a standard party might find good to collect their thoughts and decide whether to venture further or turn back before things get nasy. 

Notes on the Day:

Cool -- feeling that in quadrant 3, we'll offer a way down. Also feeling as though the vibe is changing— the breathless and 'upper eaves' quality of the first seven rooms is gaining a degree of humidity and active life-cycle; some of the claustrophobia is gone. The inclusion of a possible friend opens up an almost humorous or pleasant feeling to the place. Should I be worried?

•

1/10 A THIN STORAGE SPACE LINED WITH BOOKS AND TAPES BUT ALSO CLUTTERED —The building creeps with a now-disturbed, agitated buzz. This deep into the primary level and even the things that live here have begun to retreat from what is building—that dust, that must, that moss, there's more to it than met the eye at first. 

This thin book hall has a sealed door with a single glass pane, its blind fallen at an angle, a grim grey light illiuminating long shelves lined with bulk paper, hard plastic rows of tapes, much of it fallen to the floor to impede passsage as though it'd been searched rapidly and for something specific.

That specific thing was a shutoff device—a trigger at the rear shelves' apex that kills all motion, smoke, and fire alarms. The panel unfortunately had been covered by archival footage—results of some second-rate employee with zero sense for organization. Alas for whomever finds it now: to turn any of te the knobs will trigger each of the alarms who've all been jammed in the off-position, and despite the area's antiquated state, all three systems have never been bothered. Imagine, the sound, the alert, the alarm—the water from the overhead sprinklers. 

What was happening at CTV9 the day these needed to be forcibly jammed?

Fortunately, the only thing it will jolt from slumber is the Onus, though whether waking him or not is a good thing remains to be seen—he's in 1/27. 

Actually not entirely true: mixing water with the raised or floating particulate will likely be beneficial, truth be told, for our poor throats. 

But, for every 9000 floating motes of dust are 1000 of Thex Pe'Chan's escaped brain—Thex Pe'chan whose body is down on the next floor (2/25) in a state of supsended animation, locked in place by glittering blocks of polished steel. Shorting the escaped brain nodes by dosing them in a sprinkler water is just the ticket to shock them into coagulation, sending them first to the floor, then to mass, then to trace their dispersal back to Thex Pe'Chans many-jointed frame. 

Too, the area may be searched for a number of quality items—including a ream of information on the Tru-RX 1200 satellite that's mounted and crushed under sand on the roof. Four hours of reading will give PCs a working understanding of how to calibrate, install and even repair the device, though its location is likely still a mystery.

Too too: another series of drives, that with a proper display, can be used to gather information regarding initial contacts with a number of alien species in those early engagements on Yurth (or then, Earth) are here. There are three this time. 

A 1d100 table should provide the images on the drives that also explicates the chronology of  pre-galactic engagements on the planet. <-- Future work here.

The 1d100 table of historical context will be a tremendous task but but one worth taking on as its own sort of challenge, the sort that if this is something I'd like to do more often, I'll need to be able to do— strip down a history into a series of photographable vignettes the likes of which would fill in an entire history of the begininnigs of the galactic empire. 

•

CTV9 is not a relic of recent history—not a ruin of the newest old world when technologies had mounted to so-far-unseen capabacities—but a relic of a  world maybe two hundred years beyond our own. It has been infiltrated or spored with technologies and peoples that are of that new old past, but the core material of the place is here and almost now. 

To that point, a cryogenic chamber? Maybe not, but someone iced out? Maybe yes.

•

1/11 REALLY JUST A CAFETERIA BUT VERY OPEN FLOOR PLAN — So we've just chosen to pick our way through the books and spilled tapes and video-audio paraphernalia in the long slim room and now we've either (did they flip the switch?):

1. stepped back into a flooded hall filled with now-wet must, dust and decay, which brings such ample smell to the nose as to make one feel seaside beside the rotting guts of pecked crabs and drying plant matter, or 
2. the dust remains paused in the air as ever, the place still with only the faintest breeze in this back corner of the building. 

Ahead the hall opens—the floors in white hard squares that've slicked up from another spill and gone tacky in other places. Several chairs are tipped over, white lightweight chairs made of a undeniably pliable hard foreign substance, and six tables all with curious circles that sit in stacks of eight to ten on each made of a roughed hardened material. Perhaps they're usable as a tiny, arm-strung buckler. 

In truth these've been removed from the tables—they were once swivel seats—but their mounting hardware is nowhere to be seen. 

Two enormous glass-paned cabinets have long ago been plundered, tiny signs indicating obscene combinations on each side, and a code box-on the outside that seems defunct inscribed with Old Yurth sigils, the base numbers and leters set into its glassy tiles. 

Also, a row of cabinets hold a few miscellaneous objects—moulding stacks of papers, a box of tiny tubes painted red about the size of a bow string in diameter, and hollow.

The singing is quite audible here. The singing is from the burrow in 1/12. It's particularly audible the nearer to the walls the PC's get.

•

1/12 AN OFFICE TOTALLY FULL OF SAND THAT BECAME A BURROW TEXTURED STRANGELY — In this office the sand is up to the walls, nearly as high in the doorway as the tallest PC, but above it, the structure of the old room is still visible, a stationary fan and the familiar crossbars of the ceiling superstructure. The tunnel into the sand however, is wide as shoulders, and the singing comes from within, a mournful sound that's interspersed with scratching and occasional retching.

Any calling into the space or significant noise at the burrow's entrance will draw the attention of Hiratl and his duergar mount, the sand shadow will stop what he is doing. He is having the nearly-lifeless mount continue patching up a wall while he himself  retches his internal fluids to solidify the burrow's digout with the honeycomb-like texture of his gastric acids mixed with the quartz. 

The song he sings keeps the thrall in check though, and while he keeps his tiny hairy paws in the duergar's eyeless sockets, the creature is under its control. However the duergar will begin to moan or beg for release in the silence.

The room can also be accessed through the upper entrances of the North Hill, and if a DM were inclined to use it, the world of the sand shadows could be explored in the seperate adventure "Vivid Black Hungry Bones". Otherwise, the burrow might lead straight through a series of (admittedly  claustrophobia-inducing tunnels) to open air, or the duergar could be working and enslaved to repair a cave-in and damage that it had caused. 

Ironically, despite the sand shadow's relatively stout intelligence, the duergar's tools have been tossed aside in favor of its now-bloody hands—but down the tunnel is a small pouch of semi-rare gemstones, a miner's packing shovel and the crest of the Unborn Below, a symbol of a mining leader, which this duergar—Pallan Gaz—was. His troupe of fellows can be found on 4/11, working their way up tracking sign of him. His life sign, a red-rimmed steel device emitting a signal, still hangs around his neck, and they are using it to find him.

Notes from the Day:

Alright, first sign of a 'faction' as everyone seems to be calling it. This is my second use of the duergar so clearly they exist in this realm as pale, even jaundiced underground denizens. I'm tempted to paint them something different than just 'pale underground dwarves'—as holdovers of a different community. Right now though, until I know more or need more, they're not chitinous and are pallid with circular mouths and are of shorter stature; they have serious issue with light of course.

•

I've had some absolutely wild dreams—last night there was a moment where a precious thing that was shattered, made out of glass or diamond perhaps, broken into snowflake-sized shards and in order to keep it safe or preserve it, I had to hold it in my mouth with a brimming gulp of water, change locales, and then let it pour back into a paper towel to capture all its pieces. They were like sharp pop rocks in my mouth, cutting and sparkling.

Now for today's mapping, I want to introduce somethign that for the PCs continues to benefit them or continues to change along the way. I'm getting images of elevators that actually function, where the numbers start to tic up all of a sudden and the bell might cime as the doors open. Fairly classic horror trope. But probably more enticing is that the elevators don't funciton and their interior guts are revealed with a service ladder and chewed-through elevator cords.

•

1/13 THREE ELEVATORS OR AT LEAST ONE ELEVATOR AND TWO ELEVATOR SHAFTS —Over the half-wall of the cafeteria, the room continues to spread out towards a panel wall with three tremendous steel doors whose slididng doors are each a hand thick, and two of which have been pried or left halfway open. The dust passes between them like breath drawn into the throat. 

A long carpet has been sunk into the floor and the wick of its fibers ar being slowly devoured by tiny insects who are leaving the weave looking dry as cracked skin. If stepped on, many will poof up like flocks of geese and swoop to another portion of the carpet distant. It runs the length of the room in two slim sections. 

A hatchet and hose are kept behind a frosted glass pane on the doors' left and if wrenched open or broken into, a buzz like a sad robot will come from above and a fizzing chemical will bubble from a hidden squirthole above. 

Yes, but is there anything of value to engage with! Well the chutes for one. All three shafts are accessible, though one of them is sealed up good and will require some creative thinking. The others seem to drop into the abyss (they don't—there are twelve floors before the bottom, but it would be an abyssal fall at least, into the dark) and the third, well, the scent of particularly desirious things comes from there. Use best judgements on PCs—it might smell of fresh evergreens, mangos, clear water—whatever it is, relief and pleasure, but subtle.

Otherwise, one can walk all the way around these to realize they are contained within walls. If you do not like dangerous traps or think your PCs need ample warning, someone may've marked the third door with a large X when they sealed whatever is inside, in.

•

1/14 YES SURPRISE THERE IS AN ELEVATOR! —The idea I had for the final room of the week was that should the PC's find a means of prying the elevator doors open—surprise—the elevator is here on the twelfth floor. 

An airlocked space that gusts open with the sound almost like someone whispering comecomecomecome and light shone in is reflected off the three mirror-like sides decorated in an overlayed symbology; primitive pictograms that've been applied as repeating decals over the mirrored walls, yellow and rough to the touch. 

Seeing oneself is difficult in it, but light creates a confusing array of visual effects including the strangely humanoid gossamer effect of someone stepping out and passing the PCs, the Milk Queen's Tread, which exits the elevator discreetly, the imprint of her toes, the balls of her feet and heels, stepping out into the hall, visible to perceptive PCs, leaving both outline and imprint that winds its way towards the stairwell at 1/16 to re-unite with her deeper in CTV9's bulk. 

Wait long enough, and PC's will hear the door open, and that same whsiper comecomecomecome from where the Tread has just passed down.

•••

General sensations re-typing all this: 

The 2nd act or stretch of rooms has been a lot of incomplete or 'beginning' engagements. A lot of re-uniting old powers with the things that activate them. 

With the exception of the sand shadow, the little bug in the sand, Tessa Horn, everything else is either static or foreshadowing. Several of the rooms are total bunk—the cafeteria holds nothing of interest, and obviously the drives which may be totally uninteresting to someone, their inclusion has meant I just have more work to do. 

As ever, the descriptive work that Arnold Kemp is doing at Goblin Punch, with its pithiness and completeness has me inspired to try to contain myself more, rather than describe the dust, must, etc. But I think too, that as this is a rough draft, when I properly key the thing for DMs, I can distill then and just allow this time to be writing time. 

There are now several story-lines that I'd like to follow which is nice. I'll list them here for organization, and hopefully do a write-up on them as time permits. 

I also wanted to note that while the experience of digging out a Mexican City skyscraper might be familiar territory to modern players, part of the fun of this for me is making vending machines or straws feel alien. I'm not sure how far to take it, but it's part of this experience for me, so I continue.

Stories to play out: Tessa Horn and the Underground Cisterns and When Her Mom Died, the Milk Queen, Her Tread, and How it Was Removed, Why Thex Pe'Chan Lost Its Brain and Got Trapped, and How the Sand Shadow Hiratl Captured the Duergar Pallan Gaz and Maybe Why

First week of CTV9 was manageable but ethereal

 

I’ve been hand-writing my entries into this dungeon23 challenge, and turning around after writing to type it up each day is too big of an ask. Instead, it’ll come in chunks like this one which will mean a lot more reading but a lot less daily habit strain.

Maybe in the long run it will make more sense to do it differently, but this feels appropriate at the moment.

 0 - + - 0 

1. items 
2. encounterable creatures / sentient elements 
3. relationships with other rooms in the building
4. traps & triggers & dmgy things
5. trouble for me
6. major story arcs

1/2 — ROOM OF PANELS IN PILES — Down the stairs we go, leaving obvious imprint of our feet behind us, and at the stairwell’s base, a door that’s fallen and been covered by dust, metal hinges and handle removed sometime long ago by the scavengers of this underworld.

Ahead is a wide room, covered in the same dust on the floor, but a scintillating particulate stirring in its higher atmosphere. The ceiling overhead is a strange webwork of criss-crossing bands that have (or once) kept a space above separate from the room itself. Three doorways are across the room each on a separate wall and a pair of collapsed panels sit like piles of rubbish on the left side. Two doorway show obvious, open exit; the other is directly across from the entrance, door closed.

The wind or current spins up from the right and seems to quiver the particulate like a jelly or sea of plankton in a rush of new water. 

Yes, there are things that have grown accustomed to this environment.

Paleon gourds, queer oblong plants caught somewhere between mushroom and potato with the bland  blind digestive capacities only sunless and long-lived things can have, have grown up through the floor beneath the panels to devour what were once two besken gnat hives. Traces of the hexian honeycomb is easier to find in the second pile but the black, variegated gourds are their own form of treasure, edible, with a barky, bitter flavor that might be soaked for years and absorb flavor very slowly.

All of this will have value—witch-men might pay for the mighty vegetables, as might the clinics of House who would dry them and turn them to loufas or similar. 

Not to mention the piles of panels themselves, rectangular metal cushioned with a fibrous material, inlaid with magnets. They’re big, perhaps 6’ x 5’ each, but even dragging one to a tithing station by cart or otherwise would net 80gp each, and a non-Church-based fence would find 20gp worth of value in any of the magnetic sheets that are affixed under the fibers. This though would take a bit of discovery; but could easily be rolled up, and delving continued.

 --

Notes on the Day

This leads me to think that collection centers not unlike the one in Star Wars with a gruff face and odd materials strewn about both for sale and just bought must exist.

Too, underground life, man. Must find some good biology to research about things that live in the musty spaces of decomposition.

Three exits, however, and one of them I’m already somewhat capable of seeing into.

Fun to think of where OZONE might end up in all of this. I feel as though I’m running down the hall of life and its many open doors permit vision of these other ideas which hurtle along at a similar speed and I can leap through each doorway into an adjacent hall and see or chase it clearly for awhile only to find either I’ve been in its presence long enough or see something else that is moving just the same and must pursue. So I change hallways, always thinking perhaps if I bind the two, bring this idea with me into this hallway chasing that idea, that eventually time will stop, the running will stop. But the ideas only exist in motion. Not on stasis.

OZONE was originally conceived as a taxidroid who unjacked himself from his own car and fled, who was later compacted, rebuilt, and generally traversed existence as a navigation system that has been plugged into any number of places. Two short stories I wrote followed ‘him’. Then, he was discoverable in the one-shot I ran in South Korea called "The Deepest Currents".

 0 - + - 0

1/3 - HALLWAY TO THE LEFT - 

In the adjacent hall, the darkness spreads. Some sort of spill or flood long ago still persists as a long black stain studded with tiny flora. Its origin seems to the left, behind a distant door, or the hallway continues to the right around a bend.

 --

Notes on the day.

Didn’t get very far last writing session because I was trying to do it at a Starbucks in between Alyssa’s teeth filings.

  0 - + - 0

1/4 - CLOSET WITH DIM LIFE AND DRIVES - The hallway to the left runs its black dusty length towards a door that seems to duck under the stairs. A small room is behind the door, its ceiling cropped in at an angle. Metal shelves line two walls and in the back corner, the source of the fluid in the hall—brackish water in a low tub has risen to the brink and become an incredible toady green—a tumescent algae. It’s clear too that whatever source the water has is still active behind the wall itself as around a rudimentary valve is wet, the stone glistening with long matter.

Are there living things in there? There are living things everywhere, and in this case, a small colony of gretch, iridescent fish with scales so transparent as to show their frail, beautiful skeletons, have grown up in the tub over the centuries, flitting among the green algae. Perhaps the size of a fingernail, their colony is in the hundreds at this point, though it never grows too much beyond for lack of space.

The occasional dusty moth or cloud of djinn gnats will rise from the boxes of defunct matches, cloth, and space metal that are set on the shelves, to sup at the water, and if the pool were disturbed for the first time in so many years, the smell might prove unbearable to the average, overland citizen.

Among the scattered devices, the bulk of which have been looted by underground denizens, is a collection of black drives in an old box, about nine of them stacked neatly, plated in copper and nickel and so worth about 5gp at a tithing pool. Too, they might be inserted into a proper working screen display to show images of hundreds of people gathered, shouting at a long-limbed creature dressed in regalia. Close ups of their hatchet-shaped faces, their signs reading ‘IT’S NOT REAL’ and ‘GO BACK TO YOUR WORLD’. The people are dressed in strange raiment, what we’d think of as odd but not so unlike modern clothes as to seem unfamiliar as clothes—and maybe most startling to long term residents of this desert country, the number of trees and green life that fill the images background.

A working screen can be found in room 2/6.

 --

Notes on the Day

Very nice. So there is some reaching forward and our first signs of actual fauna. Naturally it’s a dungeon and so players may be expecting to fight something, but I’m not inclined to make fighting either 

1. the prerogative or certainly
2.  the initial encounter because while –

1. it may be expected, 
2. I hate doing what’s expected because doing what’s expected immediately means catering to cliché and 
3. doing what’s expected also denies the notion of suspense or
4. perhaps more exactly, doing what is unexpected increases suspense, just so long as the suspense is not long in its dilation.

However, I’ve just received images of an old, dusty, thick-skinned, cognizant creature who moves very very slowly that lives on this level of the building, with tiny sharp ears and a face like a perfect circle of ice cream that’s been drawn out of a bucket by a scoop, all cracked and wrinkled with odd tufts of perhaps hair or fibrous silica.

I’ve also had the notion of these alien sacs not unlike grocery bags set in permanent drift that float through the air with their open-bag-side open, engulfing the floating dust and passing it through their being like a great sieve; that if pulled down might give off the faintest electric shock, but feel something like the lining of an organ or a gossamer bag of spider silk. Exposed to humidity or water, they’d absorb too much and become sticky, flaccid, and coat whatever held them the way popped bubble gum coats the chin. I don’t recommend eating them.

I also think that the old creature who does live on this floor does eat them, though very infrequently. I’ll call that creature an Onus, or perhaps the Onus and go onto detail some other time when I determine where and how it spends its time. The bag-like floaters can be Guess Wraiths, found high in various underworld locations, particularly airless and lightless ones, ones where the air is most still and where and tiny airy matter exists in abundance.

Also, follow-up on combat: part of the reason I’m not eager to immediately drive combat is because the deeper that one is encouraged to go without encountering stiff resistance, the further one must go back to find proper safety. Too, when we don’t find danger but expect danger, it becomes easier to imagine that it isn’t the world that is failing to provide the expected opposition, but our own failure to locate the source of our concerns. It must be that we didn’t find the trap, not that it isn’t there.

This, properly executed, should provide all manner of complexifying alternatives to a DM, as the characters flee or seek to strike back through what were surely harmless rooms—noises might strike up, staged whispers—the dust of the PC’s passing, so light and airy, might’ve risen into a noxious and choking cloud. The Guess Wraiths perhaps form into diaphanous icicle-shaped forms that pierce…

But mostly through these first rooms I’m seeking to develop a roof-like sensation. The clanking and motion of the lower levels will provide plenty of urgency and heat, but for now, this is the echoing haunted space of a high-vaulted ceiling. We are moving towards civilization from the outer reaches of space through a back door we’ve somehow cracked open.

I will also jot down so I don’t forget, there is something inherently upsetting about the PC’s entrance into his place. If they did not close the door behind them when they first entered CTV9, a wind tunnel (not a major one but certainly far different than centuries of stale air) occurs, and things notice a change like they that. Maybe they don’t know how to respond, as some of those cultures have spent generations in homeostasis, but respond they will, either way.

  0 - + - 0

1/5 - A VERY MODERN OLD PLANETARIUM BUT NOT ONE – The hallway wraps and a faint sound of tunneling can be heard, scratch and clank, tink and hiss—the sound of rubble being moved. This is through the wall (Room 1/18).

Unless the PC’s have been flying, it’s impossible that the years of caked dust have not been rising into the air to form a thin sparkling veil that catches their light and reflects it like fine sand.

Nearer 1/5, tendrils, almost three or four feet long, trail down nearly thin as fishing line, making a swaying curtain that would at least be advisable to avoid, if not probably crouch under as they seem to thicken coming towards this grand oval room whose ceiling rises almost like a reverse ampitheatre.

The room has a trio of couches that collectively make a circle at its drop-floored center, and black-topped cabinets are behind each, several of their doors open. Several counters are set into the walls between large decorative pillars, making the whole room seem not unlike a modern planetarium, though the starry sky has been replaced with thousands of hair-thin filaments that move in the passing current of air, heading up. Closer inspection of the ceiling will show that the circle in center of the room’s ceiling is no piece of stone or architectures, but a ghastly maw with an obscene edge, easiest denoted when tendrils at the center of the room begin their slow upward curling to feed paralyzed matter to the fishering.

Similarly problematic in this room are the seats, whose curious cushions—an iridescent brown like the odd hex of a fly's eye—have been infested with patterbugs, a swarm that are gradually eating the cotton innards as the closest material they can find to flesh. They moved through the first two cushions by way of some holes they’ve made in each, and now form a mass that’s bulged in the third. Should the PCs decide to investigate the bulge, the creatures will be happy to repartee with their hundreds of mouths.

Not a room to be taken lightly. Nothing needs necessarily to be encountered here, but there should definitely be something of value, something to be discovered. Two bodies, or what remains of bodies,— undergrounders, looters, who took rest here and who where lulled into security by the comfort of the room—perhaps a pair of duergar whose chipped obsidian knives and a metal & water detecting kit (antennae, essentially, that when put together both alert and detect in surrounding environs up to 15’ as a soft vibration), a dark geode locket, whose leather thong is still being devoured by several patterbugs. A shoulder plate and twin bracers marked with the simple circle and dot of Engine’s flag, stamped in grey metal sit almost nicely among the white dust of devoured and excreted bone.

Is there anything to fight? Well sure—flame in particular can be brought to bear on bugs and filament both, though the fishering is not so slow-witted as to remain hanging motionless for long, and will draw up its hanging filament and, not unlike the net of a river fisherman, seek to drop down in a great gulp to consume any PC within the central region of the room. Almost like an aggressive kiss, those tendrils nearest its central mouth will coil and flash their paralyzing git, just as the great open nipple and breast form of the creature’s ‘body’ will glob around a PC’s head and lift upwards. This is a twin attack. The creature will take a turn to swallow an active PC, but the paralyzing attacks won’t simply stop just because the PC is attacked.

Digestive acids will gradually reduce anything with blood flow to an absorbable mash, and what remains will fall down for the bugs to enjoy in their time. Because of the room’s high ceiling (perhaps 15’ up) it can be difficult to recover bodies and if somehow the PC’s manage to dislodge the fishering from its lair above the former light disk at room’s center and somehow get up above that same disk, they’d be amply reward with the glittering metal body of one of Engine’s inhabitants, made of alien metals and glass-like substances, whose pockets of biological fuel have been sucked up, whose very mammalian heart has been soaked and obliterated and absorbed, but whose flawless android-like composition and cables remain as testament to something very strange, very wonderful down here. Poor Ceev-Five. It’s likely her fluids are what made this fishering so capable—usually the creatures are as incriminal as a puffball moss or sea-urchin.

 --

Notes on the Day

Oboy—not leaving much room for twist or much room for safety, but five rooms in we’ve got some value added, some story building. Engine’s people are showing their alien form, albeit not what I expected, but bionics will be bionics.

We’re landing in Seattle now and I’m still thinking about The 5^th Head of Cerberus.

  0 - + - 0

1/6 - AN OLD CONFERENCE ROOM WITH A GLASS CHUTE - Twin pocket doors each as wide as two men with their arms spread slide open to reveal an incredible, long table that’s been swept more than once of its dust, all its chairs devoured to their wood bases over time, some swiveled to face the table itself and others turned toward a flimsy retractable curtain that appears mounted to the ceiling.

Someone has fiddled with its mechanism however, so that it can only be pushed partway back up into the slot that seems built to contain it as a mouth might a tongue. Wires hang down from the ceiling, colorless wires whose ends are frayed as if sliced by a serrated blade. Someone tried to rip them down through the light stone ceiling grid that has covered the bulk of this first floor and likely found the going difficult or the wires too long to manage.

Anything to find in this room: one of the major air ‘ducts’ is here, and perhaps a signal of what this building may’ve been, besides buried: a half-railing can be overlooked to see down a chute that runs for floors. It is boundaried by a full wall of glass that runs down and down. Whoever took office in this place could take a break from a meeting, walk to the glass railing’s edge and look out through a glass column over whatever existed before the building was underground.

Several dark planters are visible a few floors down and similar railings peek out for at least a floor or two before giving way to darkenss. However the dune sands and darker minerals are built up beautiful against the glass, seeming like the strata of compressed rock. The railing could be leapt over and dropped to the next level or roped down, though beware the citizen who chooses the chute. The air coming up from here is warm, surprising as any sand at this depth would be cool to the touch.

On the table, a sliding plate is between the ‘CT’ and ‘V9’ which are inlaid in the wood, and inside, a pair of strange devices, short wands with a pair of buttons on each.

The first triggers the glow of huge track lights laid into the cracks of all the edges of the room, and the other elicits a grinding sound from the ceiling, which stops before long (the mechanism for the projector has been poorly removed so that its motor wheels still turn despite the remainder being attached).

Behind the projector screen is a great metal inlaid ‘CTV9’ in rusted steel—removed and taken to any gralah pool, an easy 40gp per letter.

The light might signal the watching lustrous eyes of the four-armed fighting slave two floors below, who is kept to guard the link chest. If he came up the shaft to investigate trouble, hungry trouble is likely to ensue for the PCs, though the clattering of his climbing would given them enough time to glance over the railing and see his long-yellow-toothed mouth. (See Room 3/9)

 --

Notes on the Day

Nice, again, I’m not concerning myself too much with laying down encounter details, HP and AC and so forth, as first I’m more interested in understanding who the denizens are of this place rather than worrying too much about what they do.

Obviously treasure is becoming a difficulty—I am stingy as hell and have a hard time understanding why someone would just leave treasure lying around unless 

1. they died;
2. they don’t know the thing they have as treasure; 
3. the room is a proper vault of some kind (none so far) — or 
4. they’re using the treasure actively, which will really only happen likely as PCs delve deeper and the creatures become more humanoid or intelligent, non-bestial and ‘civilized’.

This storying method means that the treasure or reward that the PCs receive must be treasures of mystery revealed—what details of the world can / ought to be revealed? This in part depends on what hooks were used to bring the characters down into the dungeon in the first place. Obviously, Engine’s existence as a group of android-like peoples bent on turning the core of the Yurth into an enormous engine to leave the Quiet Sun and find a new home among the stars is a huge mystery to reveal in pieces (though a small twelve-floor building in the NW part of Yaddack is unlikely to be the center of the peoples’ efforts and will only provide aim, I think (though perhaps I’m again being stingy with my willingness to lease actual capacity or agency to the PCs, but still, there must be smaller secrets worth revealing)).

A sunken or stolen gralah pool would be really neat. Taken by renegade priests and hauled underground, still active? Still a portal to one of the rings. That could be quite a sideways tunnel.

The sand dragon’s lair could easily be lower down depending on how quickly the PCs level in this place, though I’m tempted to think of something more self-contained here. Not that I mind connecting the larger scale circumstances of this world to this place, I’m just not sure it needs to crack down into the one major underground discovery possible. I would rather it become the site of dispute over mining and scavenging rights than reveal the vast possibilities of underground explorations. In that way, I actually think that reducing combat and treasure in favor of atmosphere and exploration opens up the experience to be one that actually familiarizes PCs with life Yaddack, rather than prime them to be major players in the worldly conflicts that have been hundreds of years in the making.

  0 - + - 0

1/7 THE ONLY ROOM WRITTEN ON COMPUTER

The door’s handle jimmies and shakes because of its age but won’t budge. A pair of frosted window beside it capture light cast against them and make them even more opaque. Shattering one will show the a short cabinet has been pushed up against the door. Picking locks will get the handle open and a certain amount brute strength will get the door open. There’s no key to find after this long.

The stench of corpse has long ago gone up into the ceiling but still, bones smell.

A robotic servitor, like a gigantic, incredibly heavy pepper-shaker is inside one of two aluminum cabinets. In either of his arms is the skeleton of a small human, ten-year old boys, brothers. An imprint of the servitor’s model: M.MILLION is covered in the grease of years but can be found just near its faceplate. Were the thing somehow rebootable (these are old technologies), it would tell a about its efforts to protect the boys from their father. If they were somehow capable of telling a similar story, they would describe a flight from their home here. More to know of this story and why they stayed here in Room 3/7.

The room itself was likely a dusty storage closet. Within one of the cabinets that’s pinned up against the door is the remains of a paper book, inside which have been carved out and stashed two signet rings (4gp apiece) (the boys) and an empty set of medicine vials and syringe that contained one of their (necessary) medications, now used up and obsolete.

  --

Notes on the Day

Nothing outstanding, but I wanted to stash the idea here so that I could hold onto it and let later rooms develop whatever happened to them; who they were, what they were running from; whether that danger might prove regnant.

Some days its important just to get it down. Fifth Head of Cerberus is the obvious and easy rip-off here, thought I took the boys before the complexities of growing up hit them and made them something hopefully different. We’ll see in March, eh?

 •••

Story arcs from this section needing development: How OZONE Got Here and Installed or Used, M. MILLION and the Two Dead Boys, The Four-Armed Slave and the Link Chest WTF, Poor Ceev Five Who Is Now Devoid of Fluids, The Onus, Is That Real?

///

Also: I'm going to post another tidbit of history from the archives just to keep the Yaddack backlog alive. I'm suspect of this form because of how unsearchable it is but whatever, until it becomes unruly I'll worry about organization after motivation.

Miners

Many of the citizens of Yaddack have found employ under one or another of the churches as miners, who dig the sands as one would for water in search of precious metals and resources of Old Yurth. Perhaps a quarter of these miners are organized into companies—eager and active participants of the church form coalitions—House’s Hands, Hands of Hold, For Nephew, and Pilot on Yurth. Some of these coalitions have proper offices for equipment and maintenance. They do not pay salary in conventional ways, and are often lead by lesser clergy seeking to raise awareness or their own position in the Church. Yes, there is power to be gained by these priests. Yes, living conditions for the preachers of larger flocks and wielders of greater titles are better, both delivered through divine access to spell casting and in large parcels of grazing land, flocks of sheep, property donated to the church by the needy and old.

Each sect of religion has significant holdings that it owns in addition to lesser buildings throughout Tuth and elsewhere, and each has mainline access to, or has built large mines for their flock to access Old Yurth, such that riches can be found and kept as near to the altars as possible. The Red Basin is Pilot’s backyard, the Isle of Ellen Horn was once secular but now is largely miner territory for Hold and House, and Nephew’s boatsmen typically ply the Mesorivan Split, using the limestone caverns to gain deeper access to the world below.

The other ¾ of the Miners do not follow anything but the decree of the clergy. ‘Bring back, send on’, and while they might use their church’s major access points to gain the dark corridors beneath the sands, most go in packs of two or three, five or six. Families looking for favor, some chomping to alleviate their families destitution—the church pays for more than institutions of learning, and far faster as the things brought back are simply liquidated and they pay for it all, whereas wizards, slavers, nobles—the minds outside the church—they only pay for useful things.

Many of these people do not come home—the desert is a hard place, and beneath it, harder still. As deep as the Miner’s dig, so the danger of what they bring back or that comes up, grows.

Making stairs interesting is possible but also, is it necessary? (I think so)

Day One of this thing, dungeon23. Done on a fake leather couch beside a snoring dog. 

A stairwell down into CTV9.

These notes from my journal:

A pair of sand-giant sisters have uncovered CTV9's uppermost entrance—though they simply set-up an opportunistic 'home' near enough to traveling routes to waylay occasional passerbies, access to the buried building may've either driven them to dig it out further and remain nearby, pay the PC's to enter, or something has spooked them off. However, using their nascent earth-sculpting abilities, they've dug out a trench around the entrance to the place—a solid box of hard metal with a thick door of an ancient make.

No problem opening it—the giants have done that work. 

The must is the first thing noticeable—like cracking open a long-sealed casement, the mold is practically decadent piled in crowns along the steps' edges and the dust is an inch thick, absorbing whatever light is cast on it so that the descending steps seem the grey ramp into death, devoid of contrast. 

The first floor is the spectral hall, in which things that hardly need to touch the ground exist—spectres, wisps, an eerie colorless community that seems to float through the rooms like the air were water. What is lightest after all, rises. The lightest smells and the lightest bodies. The opening of the door triggers a rush of air that draws a regular torrent of heat from below that gradually lowers in temperature but maintains in current, making discovery of a path down the simple work of licking a finger and holding it up.

That is, if one is intending to go down.

 

Cool. An entrance and an initial sensation. Now, as we move forward, I'd like to establish some scene and characteristic of each level, so that each feels distinguished and each threshold is in some way preserved. What is preventing denizens from going up? And what is preventing them from going down?

Given the PC's have entered for whatever reason, what does the change in pH and air quality do to the societies of undisturbed things? Some surely believe it is a sign to foment rebellion, to climb from their enslavement, free, to cast off the mantle of their masters. Some undoubedly withdraw, like anemones, fearful of the light. Others perish. Others grow hungry as those they fed upon perish, and are forced out and up in search of new nourishment. Others still are undisturbed, sedate in their perpetual slumber.

These are the pressures and possibilities from below.

Then, above, the rings. I will post a small write-up from the short section of campaign I ran below about the rings, and more in further posts. However: is it possible that there are those sensitive enough to this region (below the sand) to determine that something has changed? Perhaps the lateral tunnels that lead through Old Yurth, because of the change, see a shift in populations?—and this triggers investigations? Are there any nearby digs? I don't think so. The sand dragon however (I've misplaced her name) holds some sense of the disturbance. Her familiarity to the perturbations of the ground, to mapping the underground landscape have undoubtedly given her an awareness of this disturbance. So too, the hags of the Rimmed Eye have located the immense outer bulk of this building in their burrowing—I'm off in my mind exploring the interior of this thing, but these exterior pressures could serve to set PC's off, thinking that the only dangers lie below them.

Within the multiple downward shafts of the building, various insects / predators have lain their longstanding traps to grab falling or flying travlers. Yes, assuredly levels might be skipped, but to what effect?

As I said before, bold items I'll continue to post small write-ups on as time permits. Since my friend Wayne asked about the rings after reading the small blip of history I posted last, I'll put that below.

But, day one of dungeon making, done. 

Turns out I draw a terrible set of stairs.

The Rings

Four rings circle the planet of Yurth, caked in galactic debris. Each ring can block the Quiet Sun from the right perspective and leave swaths of the land in shade. Creatures spend their day following the rings, named after the Gods who inhabit them—Nephew, Pilot, House and Hold—as the sun-dwelling creatures will often stay on one edge and those with more sensitive compositions might follow them through the day, keeping close to the safety of the clime. The bands on the ground vary in length, House by far the largest at merely nearly a mile in width, while Pilot’s band, furthest from the planet, a simple three-hundred yards or so. Between them are Nephew, and Hold, coming in towards Yurth, and the distances of theirs are similar, about a half mile, though Hold’s has a band at center of marbled make-up, and astronomers have studied the ring and noted the transparency that stretches down its center like a valley of aquamarine through which the sun casts a delicious sea-like haze.

The rings pass at different speeds also. Pilot furthest and fastest at a joggers pace on hard ground; House, a long steady sloping shifting across the sands—one might settle in its beginning shade and rest for an hour or longer before the sun is once again on their face. The clerics of House of course favor protective and healing magics, while Hold, similar offers those and more—spells of structure, binding and building. Nephew, though often associated with a darker power we will investigate in a moment, is often provider of communicative magicks, the electric work of society and green growth, though the God holds no part in the hearts of The Druids who’ve found something far more terrestrial and old than the Rings.

Pilot is last and generally considered the leader of the gods, and rings—Pilot’s priests hold veto power in council, in any tie breaking, as the distant ring is thought to have the greatest vantage into the goings-on of the world. Magicks that Pilot makes provision for include scrying, boosts of morale, anything to do with guidance, urgency, or the way ahead. 

I said we would speak of a darker power, and at the heart of the power of the rings, a crack must be admitted called Engine. Engine is the fifth God who inhabits the core of Yurth, imagined as a pool of bubbling magma in a room of metal and cord. Engine is in fact the oldest of the five and believed thrown down, though no remnant of a fifth ring outside the speculative constellations of some wilder desert astronomers suggest there ever was a fifth ring. But many claim that there are priests of an uncounted power who pose as everyday citizens, not wearing their holy hands in public—the bracer of power all members of the clergy wear—that they have access to unwieldy and often cruel magics not unlike those of the wizards and warlocks, magics toying with the edge of life and death.

But the great altars which sit in each town and city, where all tithing is made are monumental structures, and no fifth altar has been found anywhere, so the likelihood is more the starved whisper of those who spur chaos for reasons intentional or not

The truth is these gods are not in fact gods. To the people of Yaddack they present as such because this is the best means of conveying the relationship necessary for symbiosis—these rings are each... institutions. Comprised of thousands of alien beings, these are the four starships that fled from the great scattering millennia ago, and which found solace in our distant galaxy, collecting material as they have from other planets along the way, hiding and lurking in the cloudy debris cover that the asteroid belt so perfectly provides. By tithing, we provide them resource to power their ships, rebuild the many damaged and worn-out parts, and after long, they will leave, because just as any life is not forever, nor is our sun's, and their ability to measure that far surpasses our own. To the point that their day of departure is marked on a calendar, a grand calendar, only three years from today. 

And Engine? Engine is very real, and no god either.

The sun is dying; perhaps 10,000 years remain of its fatigued light. The eclipse is the best opportunity to move out from underneath the likely watchful eye of I-ZO, think these 'gods' of the rings. And that’s what they plan to do.