More Fucking Caves

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.'