PERVOTHEMS
Sausages
forced through wet doughnuts. Flesh ellipses with peanuts at the top.
Round dual mounds with central nubs. Flanged cylindrical stalagmites.
Round black puckered exits with enfolding globes. Every single thing
in this cave looks like or reminds the viewer of sex. Keep this up
until the players are disgusted and depressed. Then keep doing it.
LENS
CAVE
Polished
rock like an upturned bowl. Bulging smooth and jointless, glasslike
and slippy. Footprints fade like fingermarks on black screens. The
ceiling bulges mirrorwise. They bend to reaching distance at the
core. Stand there and hand-link the orbs:- get charged with cosmic
rays! harmless, but you buzz with purple kirbydots for a time and
hippys think you're 'cool'. Somewhere miles below a watching Archean
sees your blurry blocking shape occlude their view.
CARVED
CAVE MEGA-TALE
The
walls are carved with one continuous story wrapping the walls like
the snake game from a cheap phone, waving and curling in impossible
lines, mazing itself and repeating, swerving obliquely. Sometimes
eroded or obscured but always there. The story of everything that
ever has or ever will happen in that cave, from its geological birth
to distant death.
STONE
MONKEY CAVE
Stone
Monkeys! This is a simple cave made from endless tessliated stone
monkeys clinging onto each other. You tread on their motionless
snarling faces and their marble eye-orbs grate horrifically en-masse
as they follow you round the room. A magic word makes the monkeys
re-incorporate themselves into a new cave with different exits. Poke
your eyes In between the monkeys limbs, there's nothing there. A
wizard did this for no reason.
XENOLITH
BURG
This
cave winds inside a green alien rock. Not a meteorite but an
interiorite. Falling counter-orbital in the magmatic flow,
crystallising from the liquid stone like a green ballistic pearl.
Impacting on the undercrust and resting here. Green like leaves of
climbing plants. Olivine and embedded thickly with Chromite crystals.
OBSIDIAN
BRICKS
Bricks
of black, glassy volcanic rock. Polished smooth then aged, buried and
riddled with bright lichen. The bricks are held by spiderwebs of
sparkling iron pyrites. Beneath the smooth facing the walls are dull
tessile dice-shaped obsidian chunks. Perhaps a sunken dungeon
foundation or scatterfrags of bomb impacted temple sites.
GLAZED
CAVE
Smooth
wedgewood-white china walls and swallowflight emblazments in Ming
blue. A whole constructed thing. Gigantic cave-shaped anti-vase made
to be traversed. Ways in and out wreathed in abyssal willowmarks.
Faint blue dancing myconid lines filigree the paths, happy Trapper
sunbursts at the top.
NEON
CYSTS
Warty
cancer lumps of pale discoloured glass. Volcanic-lymphatic strands
rippling the rock and bulging. Swelled like slow balloons by noble
gas. Flickering dimly, ruby-red, igniting in spasmodic lines in time
with distant lightning strikes, aetheric and magmatic lightning too.
Like a really creepy Berlin bar.
BLACK
CURLS LIKE MELTED CROWS
Dead
and black like executed Goth mopheads. Scattered patternless on
walls, ceiling and floor. Each obeying a personal gravity, collapsing
like crushed cans. If cracked, just more black curls and clawshards,
onion-ringed round nothing.
A
FIELD OF BLEEDING CADMIUM SUNS
This
chemical pigment-poison leaks through the stone in irregular
blotches. Fierce primary synthetic stains like burning matcheads in
pre-school blue, fire-truck red, smiling-sun yellow and blob-tree
green. Pigments bleeding down like unfixed paints. It's toxic, not
poison, but bad for you.
MAGNESIUM
VEIN TREES
Magnesium
boxwork. The branching ore protrudes like knots on old mens hands.
The ore holds hidden specks of elemental shine. Slick with black oil.
The ore-trees branch and prick some ancient seam of crude. The oil
drips down the tarnished silver trees. Protecting them from water and
the air. Scrape it off and douse the vein and trees will incandesce
in ultra-violet flame.
A
THRONE OF GOLD
A
pyratized throne. It's probably a metaphor for something. Gold, with
fat lego-block pyrite crystals. A random accretion of semi-precious
metallic stone in the chance shape of a chair. Revealed by the
natural action of the cave. Fragile, almost impossible to move, will
break if used.
FOSSILISED
HIVE
Men,
or natural forces, have smashed through empty stone hexagonal cells.
An ancient hive of dog-sized wasps. Walls and roof and floor still
show the steady grid of larval beds. Some closed caps conceal
amberised grubs. The floor is crunchy-thick with stone mandible
fragments, translucent limestone tracery wings and blunted stings.
WHISPER
WALLS
The
oddly curving wall holds secret talk. Press your ear to the stone and
speak quietly and you can converse with anyone doing the same
anywhere in the same cave. (Sometimes you will hear the illusory
whispering of the dead and dammed. Plus predators will use it to
trace and fool you.)
I feel like I would be disgusted and depressed by sausage-doughnut cave long, long before my players. They have an endless appetite for the squicky, though, strangely (fortunately?), none at all for the perverse. They think my taste for tentacle monsters indicates a fetish.
ReplyDeleteI like how all of these caves are filled with things to take. Cadmium pigment, Angel of Death soot, giant wasp fragment, flakes of gold throne. Lots of potential utility, lots of potential consequences.