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.

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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.

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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".

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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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.