SUICIDE
MAZE
A
tram-line maze of man-sized V-shaped bottomless corridors.
The
path narrows. Your hands press the corridors slanting sides. The
floor falls away. A gap between your feet the width of a cat-flap or
horizontal letterbox. Inside the gap: nothing*. Your path transits
across the roof of a vast unseen cavern. Water far below. Its hard to
fall through a space that small. Its hard not to.
DOLLS
THEATRE
Stooped
cave shaped like the narrowing field of vision of a play.
A
low space. Bend over. Grows lower in one direction, widens out
opposite. Like giants crammed on a tiny stage. Floor covered with
artful speleothems. Tiny gypsum flowers, stalagtites and mites. Wild
miniature helictites. Like an impossible model landscape of a distant
space grown in alien rock and mineral shades. The audience zone is a
screaming abyss.
FRICTION
CLIMB (GRANITE)
A
simple convex slope at 45 degrees. No holds or marks.
A
huge chunk of unlikely granite. Smooth and impermeable. No pitons.
Convex like a spoons back and tilted. 40 + d20 degrees. Rough and
frictive. Can be balance-walked. If you slip, the rock will have your
skin or you will slide to your death. (Fall can be arrested with
soft-tissue loss. Yours or anyone you can grab in time.)
CRYOBRITE
BRIDGE
A
shitty bridge of flakey rock. Made by under-wizards and crypto-races.
Magic
evaporates stone to cryoclastic flow, wafts it into place and lets it
set. The result- a bridge of 'tuff' shitty flakey cakey yellow rock
in the shape of frozen clouds. Take years to decay. Are rarely safe.
Take you somewhere someone else wanted to go.
BOULDER
HALL
A
field of truck-sized barely-balanced rocks.
Flat,
high-ceilinged cave. Full of massive boulders. Gaps form a maze.
Touch one, it's chance of moving is 50%. If one slams another its
chance is 80%. They domino.
GRAND
EBLOIS
Building-sized
boulders crammed in a cave. Climb, then hop across.
The
cracks between too small to navigate. Fall down and you just have to
climb back. Hop the tops. Some mega-boulders shift if you fight on
them.
SKI
JUMP BOULDER FIELD
J-curve
slope with sparse rocks. Widowmaker on the peak.
A
sparse boulder field that curves like a ski jump. Teetering giga-rock
knife-edged at the top. Climbing up is hard, sliding likely. Anyone
next to the widowmaker has the nuke button.
HURRICANE
SHAFT
A
curling tube of smooth climbable rock. Non-vertical. Etrrnal
hurricane at it's core.
Wierd
continent-scaled convections put an endless tornado at the centre of
this shaft. Boiling there like white DNA. A sargasso twister with
forgotten, fleshless, armour-bound bodies and knots of ancient rope
falling in and out of the stormcore over years. They go past fast.
Dont jump.
ANTIFOREST
The
ghost of a mighty forest. It's inverse shape.
Lava
swept over gigantic trees and cooled fast. The trees rotted leaving
basalt in a tree-mold shape. That chunk of land fell into the earth.
In real terms, tall, thin vertical caves in black rock. Linked by
numerous crawl-passages right at the top in every direction. (And
possibly the roots below.)
VIA
FERATTA
An
impossible climb made passable by ancient webs rusting iron.
A
cats cradle of climbs and crosses. Perhaps regular and
comprehensible, perhaps not. The air tastes of rust and blood and
broken batteries. Hope like fuck there's not a lighting strike
somewhere.
*If
anyone falls through the floor, drops their light but hangs on, take
them aside and tell them this. 'You look down between your kicking
legs and see your light fall fall fall for long long seconds. It
sparks and bounces, strikes something. The light escapes and the
burning oil highlights the side of an ebony ship. Briefly as the
black sails burn the firelight sculpts a model of its shape.
Tear-sized figures dash with tiny sticks waving bright tips. In the
micro-fragment of the infinite sea below, a pale pearl-coloured whale
breaches and swamps the ship. The lights go out. Hands pull you
back. Never speak of this again.'
False Machine -
ReplyDeleteit seems like y
our monster descriptions have garnered a lot of attention / praise from the heavy hitters. i dunno if these cave descriptions are getting the same response but i want to express that i love them. i hope you coalesce them and come out with your book god damn soon; i would be the first to buy it
- Dungeon Smash
I also am loving these.
ReplyDeleteBest. Footnote. Ever.
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