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'.
•••
- items
- encounterable creatures / sentient elements
- relationships with other rooms in the building
- traps & triggers & dmgy things
- trouble for me
- 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?):
- 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
- 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
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