Its real fucking late and I'm real fucking tired so read this with that in mind.
If you know what this is about, then fine, if not, its fucking bullshit culture drama, have fun googling.
I don't think I've ever blocked, censored or recommended people not work with someone, ever. Even fucking Zak.
If someone's on my blogroll that means I can be reasonably sure of clicking on that link at any time and finding something that doesn't make me depressed.
If thinking about you depresses the fuck out of me then I'm not going to put you up there.
Informational feudalism might be a thing but you have no automatic right to my respect. You really shouldn't care about it anyway.
It doesn't work like that, it's not a corporation. You can't make people like you just by 'putting the work in'. You have to actually be interesting, at least to someone. And if you are interesting to someone other than me then cool.
When I walked away from Zak I was afraid that people would stop coming to my blog, did it anyway. No regrets.
I don't hustle and I don't climb. I know a lot of you do because either you think you have to, or you are just businesslike and you put yourself forward because its responsible or whatever. And if you come at me like that, straight on, 'hey you've got a project, do you need layout' or stuff like that, then I'm not going to resent you for it.
And I'm not gonna get pissed at you for using a book I made to play games.
Or even if its like, a handful of blog posts.
Or actual plays. Or even just tearing it apart. Or just doing something original and interesting with it.
And I have no right to ask anyone to stop creating with my stuff, and I have no real desire to make any one stop.
But I can choose what I pay attention to.
I like what I like, what I desire and enjoy is mine before its anyone elses, regardless of how people view the informational power structure around me.
Let it also be noted that I don't shit on people and humiliate them in public. Or feed drama. I will continue to not do that.
I don't owe you a fucking link. No-one does.
Tuesday, 29 May 2018
Saturday, 26 May 2018
The Wodlands 5 -The Vermillion Sea
From the Red-Sun sea, the Goblins came
The Vermillion Sea has always been a source of worry in the Wodlands. Even before the Master Masons fall and the creation of the Painted Plane, it was never exactly clear where exactly the Vermillion sea lead to, what shores it washed upon and what lay beneath its waves.
The sea is red for its flowers, which grow upside down, their translucent stems and roots forming a kind of liquid glass Sargasso on its surface.
Beneath the translucent roots, poking down into the water, are the red heads of the carmine lotus-poppies, and beyond them is the crimson of the Red-Sun World.
The sea itself is not a sea, at least not from both directions. Those who plunge beneath its translucent Sargasso surface drown, for the most part. Survivors speak garbled tales of a world lit by a Red Sun, a world in which the envelope of our reality curls around the diver like a sheath, choking and drowning them.
On the north shore of the Vermillion Sea, every month the black fjords of the Plain of Anaesthetic Fire fill with monthly transparent wrack and poppy heads in huge damp corroding piles.
To the east the beach shore of the old orange lands are stained with unpredictable fauna, lichen, vines and wild blue sugar cane growing in the red nocturnal glow of the sun beneath the sea.
To the south the sea fades slowly into a marshland of poppy heads and here the strange sugary flora from the Red-Sun world mixes with local species and the some slightly photographic or computer generated plants and animal species from the Pigment River. Mosaic-Nose Dolphins and Technicolour Hippos. By the time the marshes reach the Pigment River, they turn to near-solid ground. Then, beyond the river are the far Southerlies of the Wodlands reach, and then the Umber Woods where the PenumBeetles ruled, and still do.
On the surface of the sea, far out from shore, it is said that the Invisibeetles, glistening translucent isopod-men, built their palaces of bubblewrack on opalescent wrack islands. The isopod tribes are as translucent as their palace walls so the wrack does give them privacy of a sort - glass knights in glass castles. Beetles with a dignified sense, never seeing what they should not see.
(Quite different to the PenumBeetles of the Umber Woods, their cousins.)
Tales talk also of demonic Pteranodons diving upside from within the surface tension of the Red Sun World, bursting into our air as if t'were water and swimming in bounds while hunting for invisible knights.
So the sea lay, for many moons. At night the glow of the Red Sun shone upwards through its strange tides and the sea itself, unsailable, beating upon unknown shores and unchartable fjords and masking silent access to an unreachable world.
Then came Goblin men.
Upon the Master Mason's fall and the creation of the Painted Plane, in that time of chaos Goblins came goblinwise in copper-green ramshackle submarines full of loud noises and sharp-featured pigs, coming to build their Cube of Genius, their Large Goblin Collider and to deal in terrible herbs.
Whether the Gobins came from the Red-World itself, beneath the sea, or from some unbidden shore, they have neither spoke nor told. All we know and all they will say is that they came 'goblinwise'. Whether this refers to the building of the Copper Submarines, the employment of their anarchic Goblin genius in some way or, as some have theorised, to a direction and dimension that only Goblins can access or understand, none know.
Within a year the shores of the Vermillion Sea were crammed with decaying copper submarines and feral pigs. And within two, the first of the Apocalypse Peaches rose up from the Vermillion Sea.
WASPS OF THE APOCALYPSE
The Peach was vast, a hundred feet above the water-line, and burst up out of the Red Sun world and went through the wrack like a fist through glass. As it rose up, purple sails unfurled and the peach surged towards land leaving a trail of sugary devastation in its wake.
Within the peach were the Apocalypse Wasps, terrible insect men from the Red-Sun World, violent, horrifying, utterly alien with red wasp minds and bloody thoughts. They killed half, took the rest to lay eggs inside and advanced on the Wodlands.
Absolutely every element of the Wodlands, the Goblins, the Humans, the Painted People and all others, joined forces to defeat the Apocalypse Wasps. Thousands died as the big peach rolled over all attempts to besiege it.
Eventually a small group of adventurers infiltrated the peach, crawling through its sticky tunnels, and somehow managed to sabotage it. Its structure decayed and split, the defenders gained access and tore the thing apart, massacring any wasp they found. All that survived was the Hideous Pit, later transported to Pitville for safe keeping.
Of the original adventurers, nothing was found. Since that day the Apocalypse Wasps have come forth 11 more times, sometimes they are destroyed still in the water. On one occasion they have reached the Wodlands before the peach was split with Goblin Technology, on another they besieged the Imaginary City itself. Each time the wasps were broken, but only at great cost. The terrible sugary wrecks lie ruined on the shore and the Hideous Pits, those that have been recovered, are taken to Pitville for study and control. Small bands of Apocalypse Wasps still survive and roam the poppy swamps and black fjords, a terror to all. Everyone hates them because of the invasions and egg-injections and a boundary exists on their wings.
Why the wasps come, if they were somehow summoned or triggered by the Goblins use of the Vermillion Sea, the Goblins will not tell.
THE PITS
Between what is now the Pigment River and the Umber woods, is Pitville, a micro-city built around the containment, investigation and, some would say - illegal worship of the seven Apocalypse Peach Pits that were recovered.
 |
| Peach Pit |
Here the PenumbraBeetles of the Umber Woods join with the invisibeetles, the saner, less drug-addled goblins and humans from the Imaginary City, and other places, to study and to control the Hideous Pits.
The pits are like huge house-sized scholars stones - throbbing with wasp energy.
 |
| Scholars Stone |
You just want to stare at them - they get you wasp minded. Only those with strong anti-wasp personalities can commune with them for extended periods, gaining visions of the red sun world.
Attempts have been made to burrow or burn into a pit with anaesthetic fire and painted blades. One can actually be explored but it’s gone totally House of Leaves inside and whoever comes out emerges utterly fucked. And also there might be dErO inside. Also it might be a labyrinth now so now it needs to be guarded from both sides.
 |
| Apocalypse Wasp Propoganda |
Of course the Chaos Wasps want to invade Pitsville and get at the pits. But the pits are also desired by governments and rulers all over the realities and almost anyone may or may no be doing conspiracies and scams to get a pit, or at least to gain access to one.
There are rumours that in the depths of the poppy swamps one has fruited and birthed a world-destroying tree and that elements in the Imaginary City secretly protect it - hoping to grow their own apocalypse peach and re-invade the red sun world, or even just eat it.
Thursday, 17 May 2018
The Wodlands 4 - The Painted Plain
1. The Plains of Anaesthetic Fire.
2. The AntiGoblin Empire
3. The Whetstone Ridge
At some point in history, after the expulsion of the Crazed Theigns from the Wodlands, and before the fall of the Mystery Cults, the Master Mason went north to the plains.
She (or they, or possibly he) plunged their hands into the primal juice and began to re-represent reality itself into a more-perfect form.
Thankfully, (or possibly disastrously), she was stopped. Or maybe just blew up. Or possibly they succeeded and this is what they wanted? Or maybe they just transcended somewhere else and don't give a fig about what they left behind.
Anyway, they are gone now, and the Painted Plane, and Pigment River are what remains.
Everything is painted. The style is relative and shifts according to the place, the view and the time.
Beauty is everpresent. Every scene and every sight is composed. There is nowhere to look that is not. You cannot turn away from beauty on the Painted Plane. This can cause a kind of numbness or destruction of the sense of beauty, since it has no absence to give it context, or an obsessive refinement to ever-greater perfection. There are disagreements amongst the Picts over whether this is bad or not.
Its bright all the time. This can drive you mad.
The brightness is an illusion since light itself does not exist on the Plane, only colour does. There is no focus and no depth. Telescopes and lenses have no effect. Mirrors give no reflection. You never have to narrow your eyes to squint against sunlight (it’s only a colour), your eyes never have to change focus much. Night means a shift to nocturnes, rather than actual dark - it is rarely truly black. Lanterns barely work, they have a larger effect if the 'light' they give off is dramatic and adds to the scene.
However the Plains represent themselves it seems to ignore the optic nerve, or perhaps infiltrate it in reverse. The colours and shapes appear directly in the perceptual areas of the mind and flow outwards from there. Colourblind people aren't colourblind here. Blind people aren't blind here.
Physics are slightly fudged. It works of for human-relevant stuff *while directly observed* but the less based around the human life-world it is the more irregular it becomes. As if it were a simulated pseudo-physics.
Sound sounds 'wrong' especially if you close your eyes to escape the brightness. It’s as if all sounds are coming from the next room or are happening behind a curtain.
There are not enough incidental noises - wind, movement, your own breathing, animals, insects, water moving. It's there if you listen for it, but it fills in just a 10th of a second too late - sometimes you notice it gone, as if the sound of your own body disappeared, the you listen for it and it springs back.
The absence of sound is one of the reasons why sleep is scary. Most have the deep sense that while they are unconscious there is no sound. This is impossible to prove but it's like a terrifying absence around the borders of reality. Most visitors to the Plane wake screaming, multiple times a night for the first few nights of sleep. You feel dead when you wake up, as if you weren't really there while asleep.
Without any more specific dangers, simply visiting the Plane can have long term negative effects. The longer the stay the deeper the effects and the longer they take to abate once you leave.
Simply crossing the boundary makes the visitor look Rotoscoped. Over time they will become Pict-like in representation, eventually sharpening into a school and style. Most visitors become a relatively classic, representative school, putting them reasonably high up the Planes pseudo-racial hierarchy, but magic-users and some others can become Expressionist, or even surreal.
This effect fades when the visitor leaves but they can be left with;
These will heal eventually but almost everyone who has visited the Plane carries some small artefact scar on them, often near-indistinguishable from their normal selves. Something like a single painted eye, a painted foot or brush-marks on one limb.
Some Picts must be descended from the original people of the Plains, others from visitors, some are more recent immigrants. There is no prejudice between recent and late arrivals, or between genders, or races, or species. Instead they discriminate based on style and school.
Those from more representational or classical schools generally regard themselves as being above those from modernist, abstract, futurist, surreal or expressionist schools. Deep surreals or those whose form cannot be understood are often regarded as little better than monsters.
Picts tend to group themselves into clans, tribes, villages and organisations made up largely of one particular school or style, so if you encounter a group, they are likely to all be of a type.
This is only the racial/tribal element of Pict culture. interposed onto and mixed up with this are Pict Politics, based largely on which 'Hand' of the Master Mason each group is loyal to. Right-Handers, or Dexters, tend to be made up more of Classical and representatives. Left-Handers, or Sinisters, are more commonly abstract, expressionist or surreal.
However, there is no absolute stability between, or within, the factions. Groups change sides often and complex political/racial/aesthetic arguments and conflicts rage continually, sending individuals and schools from one side to the other.
Though the Picts are in a continual state of low-level civil war, only about one in four is a deep loyalist to their Hand, the rest being of the party but various kinds of ambivalent, usually. The hardcore belligerents continually berate the less active Handers, pointing out that if they would only pull themselves together, they would have fucking won by now.
So it is that, on encountering any particular group or settlement of Picts, you can never be sure of exactly who or what they are loyal to, what their political situation is (it will be complex) or how they will respond to you. Things can change in an instant if the only truly belligerent member of a group hares off to the Big Hands for Important Reasons, or if an Inquisitor arrives.
Most beings born on the Painted Plane will never leave. On removal they change slowly to their non-painted selves, this happens more or less slowly depending on the complexity and coherence of the being with the simplest lasting longest and suffering least.
Simple organisms in a naturalistic style, with a high level of skill, can often survive their transformation. Some birds of the Painted Plane can travel a long way before returning.
Complex intelligent beings, even if they are painted skilfully enough to survive the translation, can undergo massive identity reorganisation as they pale to their non-painted selves. (Some part of them always remains painted, even after transformation) because of this, few willingly leave.
Surreals and Impossibles can simply 'die' away from the Plains unreality. They decay into objects, forms, horrible mutants or just gloop. Forcibly removing them is essentially murder and even those formally exiled from Pict culture are not actually driven all the way from the Plains, but only to Gate Town, outside the Plains political influence but just within its reality - a precarious existence.
Though there are few monsters on the Plane in total, the _variety_ of Monster-like beings is staggering. Absolute codification is impossible but a few general types are below.
- 'Naturals' a painting of a perfectly normal monster, like a picture of a Manticore for instance. This will generally act like something close to its outer-plane version
- Violent Surreals. Some surreals can become predatory, perhaps because it is true to their painted nature, or simply because of the alienation and prejudice of Pict society. Some of the most horrific-seeming surreals are simply bandits with strange forms.
- Stains/Chimerae. The forms of these creatures are blurred and smudged. They are often assumed to be some kind of Tear (see below), which, if intelligent, they will always deny. Stains will often claim to be a modernist or post-modern interpretation of a known form and not a stain at all. Though this may be true they are rarely believed.
- Unknowables. A category used when no-one has any goddanm idea what something or someone is. They could be really radical art, a freaky import monster or 'natural' monster. Or some strange kind of Tear.
- Tears. These are creatures unique to the Plane and the most feared of all its dangers, especially by Picts. Thankfully, it’s impossible for Tears to leave the Plane (so far, probably).
A Tear is simply an area or volume of inexpressible anti-reality. In a world heavy like ink-wet paper, reality can sometimes 'give' and reveal an awful absence which seems to act with a terrifying anti-sentience. There are various types;
Inter-Object - made from the reality between objects and things - often sessile, angular, infiltrating, growing but thankfully usually slow or environmentally related
Intensity Tears - One thing being 'over painted' often in the shape of the thing that was represented. Sometimes animal or person shaped. Ragged, 'pulled apart' rather than angular.
Alteration Tears - From a thing altered or re-drawn too much. Too many corrections. Most like a Chimerae in 'form'. May act something like a Monster.
Intelligent Tears - mythical, nightmarish, demonic, unspoken, greatly feared and often denied to exist.
Tears attack Picts, and anyone in the Plane by Savaging - blurring and permanently shifting lines, by Removal - deleting or removing from existence entire limbs, bodies, beings or objects. By Tearing - like leprosy/cancer which can sometimes create new Tears or 'infect' a Pict with a slow-burning inner Tear, and by Annihilation - complete removal from reality, and communal memory. It's always possible that someone you know has been Annihilated, it’s always possible that everyone you know has been Annihilated.
A few methods work and making use of many of them, either culturally (to cross a Pict 'race' line) or practically, requires the intervention of outsiders, 'Visitors' or ‘normies’. This is one of the reasons that Adventurers are often welcomed on the Plane despite its prejudiced culture and fractious politics.
- Magic. This can work against Tears sometimes.
- Pigment. Taken directly from the Pigment River. If enough can be transported and thrown on the Tear it can be 'coloured in'.
- Non-Pict bodies or tools. Non-pict, or Visitor flesh and materials can damage Tears more than the local Pseudo-matter. Either in battle, or simply from the Tear choking on their still-real intestines.
- Modernist, surrealist or Abstract tools & weapons. The fact that these typically Sinister and low-status cultures can create useful and lifesaving elements has in no way altered the prejudice against them
- Conceptual weapons from the Utopian Ruins. (These are very powerful, but can create new tears, are generally feared and are looped in time so they appear back in their own path after a while, appearing in the ruins from where they were retrieved, having been there undisturbed for centuries.
Made objects from the Plane can be removed and will often retain their painted characteristics - little fragments of representational unreality. Their painted qualities can often make them 'magic' objects in the world outside.
Any trade in such objects is heavily controlled by whoever occupied the Hands.
The source of the Pigment River, popularly supposed to be the point where the Master Mason performed the Incredible Tear, is a pulsing vortex of blinding hyperreality burning like the bleeding artery of god.
If you go in you don't come out.
Maybe you translate into the transcendent whateverdom but if so no-one has confirmed it.
Reality blurs, trickles, softens and erupts into colour near the source. Movement leaves colour-blurs - you feel yourself softening and becoming brighter. It seems like there is something wonderful in there - shapes moving, adventurous and heroic you want deeply to go in.
Beyond its Spring, the river becomes a line of beautiful un-reality running through the unreal land.
The River is the Sun. The Sun itself is just paint, always out of reach but not that far away, and there's no real light anyway, but the river is always bright with pigment - like bright dyed thread in natural grass, or an iridescent snake. It has moods, sometimes seeming animated, sometimes like glowing ink, sometimes like CGI water. A mutable representation of itself
Where the Pigment River falls into Palette Lake, the cliffs are a riot of multicolour. This also marks a wildlife break, climate shift and reality break in the Plane.
Around the Lake the last drops of alter-reality fade into Nature. This is one of the last places a highly-representational life-form can survive.
Below the falls the river looks like CGI or an optical illusion - no longer so terrifyingly, unnaturally bright. River-fauna looks glitched, digitised or like photographic collage - slowly become more 'natural' downstream.
The temperature increases, moving from temperate to near-tropical. Glitchy Crocodiles and Photographic Hippos appear. They never move above the Drops of Ink and Tears and dangerous Surreals have never been seen below it.
The Picts believe that these fucking huge stone hands reaching out of the earth are the actual hands of the Master Mason. This has not stopped them tunnelling into them like bugs, transforming them into two huge Cappodocian stone labyrinths within.
Almost all politics and political violence on the Place washes around, or emerges from, the Big Hands.
The commanders or rulers of each faction occupy a hand each. Each is lead by a council of five, with each member occupying one of the big fingers and with their title being named after their finger - Pollex, Manus, Medius, Annularis and Minimus Manus.
So the master of the Left Hand Thumb would be the 'Pollex Sinister'.
Of course there are continual intrigues between the fingers of each hand, to add to the inter-hand conflict.
The only places in the plains apparently untouched by the paintocalypse and almost certainly products of the pre-paint Mason culture, these are villages and ruined towns based around big white modernist blocks.
Colour leaks in and stains the walls but always dries to brown cake and flakes away.
Deep within and beneath the ruins are dark dungeons walled in white stone, partly ruined by the civilizational collapse and often time-linked so that they cannot be permanently repaired. Here there is actual, real dark, one of the only places on the plane where a Lantern might actually be useful.
Over time Picts visiting the ruins can flake and brown away so 'normies' are needed to explore and penetrate them in search of secrets or Conceptual Weapons, time-looped archeotech capable of killing Alpha-Tears.
They are occupied by Bandits, Blurs, Tears, Surreals and (temporary) Civil-war losers.
A good 1/4 of the painted plain is not actually plain at all, but crazy, often-Gothic, forest. In the forest, the trees are in different styles. A lot of the Northern Renaissance, engraved, ink-drawn and black and white stuff hides here. Some trees are pure Mondrian.
The forest is more 'winter seasoned' than the plains - snow can sometimes happen here. The colours are cool. Though the living can be hard, the war is not as common or as intensely pursued here. Since almost everyone is relatively low-status the Pict hierarchy doesn't sting quite as much (though it can still be unpleasant at the bottom). 'Monsters' come here for safety, and the poor-looking grotesques, cartoons (in the old sense, not the Roger Rabbit sense), as well as some abstracts, surreals and others.
Though peaceful in political terms, there may be more danger of tears, Unknowables, Violent Surreals and John Martin events. Most high-status Picts and political obsessives of both kinds dislike the Forest and blame its disorder for hiding potentially dangerous Tears and impossible events.
The Gates, again, almost certainly bizarre relics of the Masons at the height of their pre-disaster powers, are insanely high, like a literal mountain in height - taller than most built things should ever rationally be.
They are accepted by all Picts as the political boundary of the plains, though the effect of the paint goes on much further along the pigment river.
So escapees, exiles (who usually swap over at each regime change), those who want to access the qualities of the Plain but who don't want to mess with the Picts, low-status Picts, petitioners and ambassadors from the Antigoblin Empire, the Imaginary City, The Wodlands, and wherever else all come here and form 'Gate-Town', a hive of crime, radicalism and equality.
There are less explicit racial divisions here, more cross-school relationships (the classic Masterwork/Cartoon romance), along with more Visitors, outsiders, and the usual freaks who can't get along in the system but who won't go live in the woods.
2. The AntiGoblin Empire
3. The Whetstone Ridge
At some point in history, after the expulsion of the Crazed Theigns from the Wodlands, and before the fall of the Mystery Cults, the Master Mason went north to the plains.
She (or they, or possibly he) plunged their hands into the primal juice and began to re-represent reality itself into a more-perfect form.
Thankfully, (or possibly disastrously), she was stopped. Or maybe just blew up. Or possibly they succeeded and this is what they wanted? Or maybe they just transcended somewhere else and don't give a fig about what they left behind.
Anyway, they are gone now, and the Painted Plane, and Pigment River are what remains.
THE PAINTED PLANE
Everything is painted. The style is relative and shifts according to the place, the view and the time.
Beauty is everpresent. Every scene and every sight is composed. There is nowhere to look that is not. You cannot turn away from beauty on the Painted Plane. This can cause a kind of numbness or destruction of the sense of beauty, since it has no absence to give it context, or an obsessive refinement to ever-greater perfection. There are disagreements amongst the Picts over whether this is bad or not.
Its bright all the time. This can drive you mad.
The brightness is an illusion since light itself does not exist on the Plane, only colour does. There is no focus and no depth. Telescopes and lenses have no effect. Mirrors give no reflection. You never have to narrow your eyes to squint against sunlight (it’s only a colour), your eyes never have to change focus much. Night means a shift to nocturnes, rather than actual dark - it is rarely truly black. Lanterns barely work, they have a larger effect if the 'light' they give off is dramatic and adds to the scene.
However the Plains represent themselves it seems to ignore the optic nerve, or perhaps infiltrate it in reverse. The colours and shapes appear directly in the perceptual areas of the mind and flow outwards from there. Colourblind people aren't colourblind here. Blind people aren't blind here.
Physics are slightly fudged. It works of for human-relevant stuff *while directly observed* but the less based around the human life-world it is the more irregular it becomes. As if it were a simulated pseudo-physics.
Sound sounds 'wrong' especially if you close your eyes to escape the brightness. It’s as if all sounds are coming from the next room or are happening behind a curtain.
There are not enough incidental noises - wind, movement, your own breathing, animals, insects, water moving. It's there if you listen for it, but it fills in just a 10th of a second too late - sometimes you notice it gone, as if the sound of your own body disappeared, the you listen for it and it springs back.
The absence of sound is one of the reasons why sleep is scary. Most have the deep sense that while they are unconscious there is no sound. This is impossible to prove but it's like a terrifying absence around the borders of reality. Most visitors to the Plane wake screaming, multiple times a night for the first few nights of sleep. You feel dead when you wake up, as if you weren't really there while asleep.
EFFECTS AND DANGERS
Without any more specific dangers, simply visiting the Plane can have long term negative effects. The longer the stay the deeper the effects and the longer they take to abate once you leave.
Simply crossing the boundary makes the visitor look Rotoscoped. Over time they will become Pict-like in representation, eventually sharpening into a school and style. Most visitors become a relatively classic, representative school, putting them reasonably high up the Planes pseudo-racial hierarchy, but magic-users and some others can become Expressionist, or even surreal.
This effect fades when the visitor leaves but they can be left with;
- Beauty-Numbness, sometimes including a sense of general crawling disgust with the world outside the plane.
- Artefact Scars - brush-strokes in the flesh, relics of their painted selves.
- Paling - loss of pigment, shape or line.
These will heal eventually but almost everyone who has visited the Plane carries some small artefact scar on them, often near-indistinguishable from their normal selves. Something like a single painted eye, a painted foot or brush-marks on one limb.
THE PICTS
Some Picts must be descended from the original people of the Plains, others from visitors, some are more recent immigrants. There is no prejudice between recent and late arrivals, or between genders, or races, or species. Instead they discriminate based on style and school.
Those from more representational or classical schools generally regard themselves as being above those from modernist, abstract, futurist, surreal or expressionist schools. Deep surreals or those whose form cannot be understood are often regarded as little better than monsters.
Picts tend to group themselves into clans, tribes, villages and organisations made up largely of one particular school or style, so if you encounter a group, they are likely to all be of a type.
This is only the racial/tribal element of Pict culture. interposed onto and mixed up with this are Pict Politics, based largely on which 'Hand' of the Master Mason each group is loyal to. Right-Handers, or Dexters, tend to be made up more of Classical and representatives. Left-Handers, or Sinisters, are more commonly abstract, expressionist or surreal.
However, there is no absolute stability between, or within, the factions. Groups change sides often and complex political/racial/aesthetic arguments and conflicts rage continually, sending individuals and schools from one side to the other.
Though the Picts are in a continual state of low-level civil war, only about one in four is a deep loyalist to their Hand, the rest being of the party but various kinds of ambivalent, usually. The hardcore belligerents continually berate the less active Handers, pointing out that if they would only pull themselves together, they would have fucking won by now.
So it is that, on encountering any particular group or settlement of Picts, you can never be sure of exactly who or what they are loyal to, what their political situation is (it will be complex) or how they will respond to you. Things can change in an instant if the only truly belligerent member of a group hares off to the Big Hands for Important Reasons, or if an Inquisitor arrives.
GENERAL PSEUDO-BILOOGY
Most beings born on the Painted Plane will never leave. On removal they change slowly to their non-painted selves, this happens more or less slowly depending on the complexity and coherence of the being with the simplest lasting longest and suffering least.
Simple organisms in a naturalistic style, with a high level of skill, can often survive their transformation. Some birds of the Painted Plane can travel a long way before returning.
Complex intelligent beings, even if they are painted skilfully enough to survive the translation, can undergo massive identity reorganisation as they pale to their non-painted selves. (Some part of them always remains painted, even after transformation) because of this, few willingly leave.
Surreals and Impossibles can simply 'die' away from the Plains unreality. They decay into objects, forms, horrible mutants or just gloop. Forcibly removing them is essentially murder and even those formally exiled from Pict culture are not actually driven all the way from the Plains, but only to Gate Town, outside the Plains political influence but just within its reality - a precarious existence.
MONSTERS
Though there are few monsters on the Plane in total, the _variety_ of Monster-like beings is staggering. Absolute codification is impossible but a few general types are below.
- 'Naturals' a painting of a perfectly normal monster, like a picture of a Manticore for instance. This will generally act like something close to its outer-plane version
- Violent Surreals. Some surreals can become predatory, perhaps because it is true to their painted nature, or simply because of the alienation and prejudice of Pict society. Some of the most horrific-seeming surreals are simply bandits with strange forms.
- Stains/Chimerae. The forms of these creatures are blurred and smudged. They are often assumed to be some kind of Tear (see below), which, if intelligent, they will always deny. Stains will often claim to be a modernist or post-modern interpretation of a known form and not a stain at all. Though this may be true they are rarely believed.
- Unknowables. A category used when no-one has any goddanm idea what something or someone is. They could be really radical art, a freaky import monster or 'natural' monster. Or some strange kind of Tear.
- Tears. These are creatures unique to the Plane and the most feared of all its dangers, especially by Picts. Thankfully, it’s impossible for Tears to leave the Plane (so far, probably).
A Tear is simply an area or volume of inexpressible anti-reality. In a world heavy like ink-wet paper, reality can sometimes 'give' and reveal an awful absence which seems to act with a terrifying anti-sentience. There are various types;
Inter-Object - made from the reality between objects and things - often sessile, angular, infiltrating, growing but thankfully usually slow or environmentally related
Intensity Tears - One thing being 'over painted' often in the shape of the thing that was represented. Sometimes animal or person shaped. Ragged, 'pulled apart' rather than angular.
Alteration Tears - From a thing altered or re-drawn too much. Too many corrections. Most like a Chimerae in 'form'. May act something like a Monster.
Intelligent Tears - mythical, nightmarish, demonic, unspoken, greatly feared and often denied to exist.
Tears attack Picts, and anyone in the Plane by Savaging - blurring and permanently shifting lines, by Removal - deleting or removing from existence entire limbs, bodies, beings or objects. By Tearing - like leprosy/cancer which can sometimes create new Tears or 'infect' a Pict with a slow-burning inner Tear, and by Annihilation - complete removal from reality, and communal memory. It's always possible that someone you know has been Annihilated, it’s always possible that everyone you know has been Annihilated.
FIGHTING TEARS
A few methods work and making use of many of them, either culturally (to cross a Pict 'race' line) or practically, requires the intervention of outsiders, 'Visitors' or ‘normies’. This is one of the reasons that Adventurers are often welcomed on the Plane despite its prejudiced culture and fractious politics.
- Magic. This can work against Tears sometimes.
- Pigment. Taken directly from the Pigment River. If enough can be transported and thrown on the Tear it can be 'coloured in'.
- Non-Pict bodies or tools. Non-pict, or Visitor flesh and materials can damage Tears more than the local Pseudo-matter. Either in battle, or simply from the Tear choking on their still-real intestines.
- Modernist, surrealist or Abstract tools & weapons. The fact that these typically Sinister and low-status cultures can create useful and lifesaving elements has in no way altered the prejudice against them
- Conceptual weapons from the Utopian Ruins. (These are very powerful, but can create new tears, are generally feared and are looped in time so they appear back in their own path after a while, appearing in the ruins from where they were retrieved, having been there undisturbed for centuries.
'MAGIC' OBJECTS
Made objects from the Plane can be removed and will often retain their painted characteristics - little fragments of representational unreality. Their painted qualities can often make them 'magic' objects in the world outside.
Any trade in such objects is heavily controlled by whoever occupied the Hands.
PLACES IN THE PLANE
THE PIGMENT RIVER
The source of the Pigment River, popularly supposed to be the point where the Master Mason performed the Incredible Tear, is a pulsing vortex of blinding hyperreality burning like the bleeding artery of god.
If you go in you don't come out.
Maybe you translate into the transcendent whateverdom but if so no-one has confirmed it.
Reality blurs, trickles, softens and erupts into colour near the source. Movement leaves colour-blurs - you feel yourself softening and becoming brighter. It seems like there is something wonderful in there - shapes moving, adventurous and heroic you want deeply to go in.
Beyond its Spring, the river becomes a line of beautiful un-reality running through the unreal land.
The River is the Sun. The Sun itself is just paint, always out of reach but not that far away, and there's no real light anyway, but the river is always bright with pigment - like bright dyed thread in natural grass, or an iridescent snake. It has moods, sometimes seeming animated, sometimes like glowing ink, sometimes like CGI water. A mutable representation of itself
THE DROPS OF INK
Where the Pigment River falls into Palette Lake, the cliffs are a riot of multicolour. This also marks a wildlife break, climate shift and reality break in the Plane.
Around the Lake the last drops of alter-reality fade into Nature. This is one of the last places a highly-representational life-form can survive.
Below the falls the river looks like CGI or an optical illusion - no longer so terrifyingly, unnaturally bright. River-fauna looks glitched, digitised or like photographic collage - slowly become more 'natural' downstream.
The temperature increases, moving from temperate to near-tropical. Glitchy Crocodiles and Photographic Hippos appear. They never move above the Drops of Ink and Tears and dangerous Surreals have never been seen below it.
THE MASTER MASONS HANDS
The Picts believe that these fucking huge stone hands reaching out of the earth are the actual hands of the Master Mason. This has not stopped them tunnelling into them like bugs, transforming them into two huge Cappodocian stone labyrinths within.
Almost all politics and political violence on the Place washes around, or emerges from, the Big Hands.
The commanders or rulers of each faction occupy a hand each. Each is lead by a council of five, with each member occupying one of the big fingers and with their title being named after their finger - Pollex, Manus, Medius, Annularis and Minimus Manus.
So the master of the Left Hand Thumb would be the 'Pollex Sinister'.
Of course there are continual intrigues between the fingers of each hand, to add to the inter-hand conflict.
THE UTOPIAN RUINS
The only places in the plains apparently untouched by the paintocalypse and almost certainly products of the pre-paint Mason culture, these are villages and ruined towns based around big white modernist blocks.
Colour leaks in and stains the walls but always dries to brown cake and flakes away.
Deep within and beneath the ruins are dark dungeons walled in white stone, partly ruined by the civilizational collapse and often time-linked so that they cannot be permanently repaired. Here there is actual, real dark, one of the only places on the plane where a Lantern might actually be useful.
Over time Picts visiting the ruins can flake and brown away so 'normies' are needed to explore and penetrate them in search of secrets or Conceptual Weapons, time-looped archeotech capable of killing Alpha-Tears.
They are occupied by Bandits, Blurs, Tears, Surreals and (temporary) Civil-war losers.
THE GOTHIC FOREST
A good 1/4 of the painted plain is not actually plain at all, but crazy, often-Gothic, forest. In the forest, the trees are in different styles. A lot of the Northern Renaissance, engraved, ink-drawn and black and white stuff hides here. Some trees are pure Mondrian.
The forest is more 'winter seasoned' than the plains - snow can sometimes happen here. The colours are cool. Though the living can be hard, the war is not as common or as intensely pursued here. Since almost everyone is relatively low-status the Pict hierarchy doesn't sting quite as much (though it can still be unpleasant at the bottom). 'Monsters' come here for safety, and the poor-looking grotesques, cartoons (in the old sense, not the Roger Rabbit sense), as well as some abstracts, surreals and others.
Though peaceful in political terms, there may be more danger of tears, Unknowables, Violent Surreals and John Martin events. Most high-status Picts and political obsessives of both kinds dislike the Forest and blame its disorder for hiding potentially dangerous Tears and impossible events.
THE ORIENTAL GATE
The Gates, again, almost certainly bizarre relics of the Masons at the height of their pre-disaster powers, are insanely high, like a literal mountain in height - taller than most built things should ever rationally be.
They are accepted by all Picts as the political boundary of the plains, though the effect of the paint goes on much further along the pigment river.
So escapees, exiles (who usually swap over at each regime change), those who want to access the qualities of the Plain but who don't want to mess with the Picts, low-status Picts, petitioners and ambassadors from the Antigoblin Empire, the Imaginary City, The Wodlands, and wherever else all come here and form 'Gate-Town', a hive of crime, radicalism and equality.
There are less explicit racial divisions here, more cross-school relationships (the classic Masterwork/Cartoon romance), along with more Visitors, outsiders, and the usual freaks who can't get along in the system but who won't go live in the woods.
Tuesday, 1 May 2018
The Wodlands 3 - The Whetstone Ridge
GEOGRAPHY
The ridge cuts the land and leads north in an ever-steepening coagulation of hills.
Straight, slender ravines, the Arrow Valleys run as neatly as an arrow flies and are cut from the Ridge as a whole by the enormous straightness of their stone and scree-sloped sides. Very narrow, very steep rock-cut paths and vertical climbs with cut hand-holds are all that link the valleys to the Ridge itself. Where nature has provided no barrier, human craft has thrown up vast drystone walls pierced by low black passages
Conversely, each mountaintop holds, at its peak, an Ice Daemon meditating in Lotus position. The Demons have been meditating for a geological age, far beyond the record of any sentient species, each encrusted in a thick caul of Hyperblue Ice. They are difficult to see and occasionally crusaders, cultists and academics try to thaw one out or burrow in. They always get horribly frozen and the Crazed Theigns work hard to stop any organised attempts. The Demons exist on the ridge in the same manner as dormant volcanoes to other cultures. One day, presumably, they will 'go off', but since this will happen on a geological scale of time, the level of risk for any individual day is very slight.
So it is that, almost uniquely amongst mountain kingdoms, almost all of the population, agriculture and economy of the Ridge is held in a band of heather and gorse above the meta-monster-haunted, but unpopulated valleys, and below the line of Sociopathic Hyperblue Ice.
MONSTERS
Ontomorphic Manticores
The intelligent and extremely evil Manticores of the Whetstone Ridge lair in the walls of the Arrow Valleys but are known to creep their way anywhere they can in search of food or the means to do harm.
Though they are few, each is formidable, with the body of a gigantic lion, the head of an ancient, evil and intelligent man, steel teeth, bat wings which provide (presumably magical) flight and the tail of a huge scorpion.
The Manticores are cursed so that they can only eat those who give incorrect answers to their questions, though they can simply kill those who give correct answers (they just can't swallow them) and can sting to death or drop from heights those who give no answers. But, in every case, a question must be asked.
They can also Ontomorph themselves into shadows, subtle sounds, snatches of song or strange moods, and thereby pass near-invisibly amongst mankind before emerging into their true form to feed. All of these aspects will leave a particular kind of sting in the tail of their expression and wise Ridge-dwellers have learnt well the particular tenor of experience that shows a Manticore is passing through.
The necessity of giving an incoherent answer to a Manticore, one neither true nor false, is one of the reasons that the rule of the Crazed Theigns is still permitted on the Ridge. The Theigns are expected to don armour and face any Manticores that threaten their Dukedoms, baffling them with insanity so they can be killed.
In most cases the Theigns are happy to fulfil their ancestral duty and in many cases they actually succeed.
The Meta-Fox
Simply a very large fox with the proportions of an extreme wolf, the Meta-Fox is a cunning creature that prefers to eat idiots. (Though, unlike the Manticore, it has no supernatural restrictions.)
The Fox can crawl inside the skin of anything it has eaten and impersonate its behaviour, voice and form. It will use this ability, in either animal or human shape, to test the intelligence of those it targets, hoping to find someone or something stupid (relative to its species as a whole) to eat.
For this reason it is common practice on the Ridge to appear as intelligent as possible before strangers, especially lone strangers in the wilderness. The Intelligent Shepherds (and Pig-heards and Goat-heards, but the name is commonly applied to all) of the Ridge, as well as lone travellers, carry with them books of Philosophy and mathematics and when two meet alone they will often begin their conversation by talking about the ideas in the book they are currently reading. It is also a common, but low practice, for fearful people travelling alone to try to find someone obviously stupider than them as a travelling companion, resulting in rather complex social situations.
Melancholic Condors.
The Condors prey on the Plains of Anaesthetic Fire to the East and rarely bother locals so their nests are usually undisturbed.
The Condors themselves are bedraggled, downhearted but vicious creatures, rarely responding to anything other than the most extreme provocation, but insanely and suicidally violent once fully enraged.
Bristle Pigs ('Bristly Pigs')
Bristle Pigs are big fat boarlike pigs with huge porcupine spines. The spines only partially lie flat, making the Pigs look almost spherical. They are a natural herd species of the Ridge and largely domesticated but some wild examples do remain and can be extremely violent if they think their young are threatened. They do not predate on man, except in childrens tales, but can cause enormous problems if they invade a village or decide to dick about with a fortified orchard.
Cryomaniacs
Every year a small handful of Ridgedwellers turn Cryomaniacal from the thawing Hyperblue Ice and, after doing cold murders, run off to the valleys, or even further. Their powers rarely persist and they are usually broken up and killed by Manticores, Foxes, Goblins, Hunger or expeditions from nearby Baronies.
CULTURE
The human culture of the Ridge is influenced hugely by the rule of the Crazed Theigns. Known in other lands for their lunatic embassies carrying irrational gifts and making impossible demands, the Theigns are largely tolerated by the people of the Ridge since, in their insanity, they have relatively little to do with them compared to any other ruler, as well as for their usefulness in combatting the Manticores.
Once these families ruled the Wodlands with a mad hand and kept it in feudal ruin, but they were driven off and displaced by the covert cults of the Mystery Masons, who worshipped reason. After the revolution they retreated to the ridge, to gaze impotently down on the developing lands, now freed from their lunatic rule, and to plan mad plans about re-taking a nation that did not want them back.
Since then the collapse of the Masonic Cults and the arrival of the Goblin Weed, smoked in the Goblin Pipes (which are addictive, and which turn the smoker into a Goblin), means the mad lords now look down upon a rubbished land almost as disordered as their own minds. Yet none have made any move to return to their much obsessed-over former country.
Yet, at night, there are a handful of places on the ridge where a traveller can look down onto the Wodlands and where the light of the Imaginary City on the shores of the Eastern Reach seems to merge with the lamps in the Masonic Mansions, and where the Painted Plain, the Maw and Goblin Cube are invisible in the dark, and the watcher can imagine what the greatness of that past time might have been.
THE VILLAGES
The moors and scrublands of the Ridge support primarily herders. Rugged sheep, Goats and Bristle Pigs are moved across the maze of ridgelines by the Intelligent Shepherds. Yet, in a few places, isolated lakes, crossroads of mountain paths, defensible sites, natural springs or simple chance mean that villages and a handful of small towns exist.
These places are always built on a slope (everything is on a slope) with densely packed houses, roofs and walls piled upon each other, surrounded by terraced and built-up fields growing the careful crops.
The Whetstone'ers prize their individuality but each Village has a library, a Keep for a Crazed Theign, a huge Pig House and one or more fortified Orchards.
The main source of village pride and group identity is its Mystery Play and the size of its largest Bristly Pig.
The Mystery Plays were originally ordered by the Crazed Theigns but have transformed into a strong independent tradition. They involve a redemptionist re-telling of the betrayal and casting-out of the the Noble Lords of the Wodland by the treacherous and evil rationalistic mystery cults of the Masons.
Though the cults are now in ruins, along with the Wodlands, the plays all end with the 'fall' of the feudal lords and their heroic and noble suffering, and not with the present day situation.
Due to the popularity of the plays (all villagers either take part or watch in a day-long performance once a year, just after the dangers of Thaw and the Cryomaniacal Dreams have ended), most Whetstoners do have the vague but strong sense that the Crazed Theigns are and should be the rightful rulers of the Wodland and that the Masonic cults are evil and insidious institutions.
The other main source of village selfhood is their Bristly Pig. The pride taken in these creatures has lead to an arms-race breeding programme and resulted in some dangerously large, nigh un-controllable Bristly Pigs which exist as a kind of porcine nuke at the centre of each settlement. Everyone is quietly terrified of what happens if the Pig gets out or gets into the fermenting apples.
While the pigs, though dangerous, are civic business, at the state level, the pride and power of each 'Barony' is shown in the quality, number and defensibility of its apples.
Most crops can only be grown in on the Ridge through terracing and building-up flat areas of ground with drystone walling and moving earth. Arable land of this kind is a rare and treasured resource, built over generations. This is probably what initially began the fortification of valuable crops. All that was required was extending the supporting wall above the level of the plough.
Though the Crazed Theigns would prefer more glorious, violent and continual warfare between the Ridge-Dweller they have been persuaded to forgo this (essentially the Intelligent Shepherds refused to engage in organised intra-human violence of any kind) for a culture of ritualised apple-theft.
Though this initially began as a harmless alternative to war, the Ridge Dwellers may have been affected by the rule of the Theigns more than they know. There has been a massive intensification of apple cultivation, apple security, apple horticulture, guard dogs, 'Apple Knights' guard bees, guard geese, silver-tusked 'stick pigs’, apple mafias and the always-feared, sometimes state-actor, deniable apple bandits. Magic apples are obsessed over and commonly grown, treasure is melted into golden apples, the currency of the Ridge is called 'the apple’ and cider and apple pie are high-status, even sacred, foods. Fears and threats over apple security are a major source of inter-Barony conflict.
THE CRAZED THEIGNS
Though each of the Crazed Theigns is rarely more powerful than a small Knight or Village Squire, they refer to their domains as Baronies or Dukedoms and each has a store of ancient items, relics, tales, death-masks, heraldic devices and general expatriate sorrows. They affect a high mien and a tragic aspect which lends them enormous gravitas.
Most of their clothes and heraldry involved apples, goats, Bristly Pigs, Goblins (being crushed and killed), Manticores, Foxes, Gold and Silver apples, strange furs, large conical hats, silver-bound pseudo-books, harps, rich manticore hides, Bristle-Pig coats, apple pies, cider jugs and ceremonial pig-goads. Rather than a jester most retain a dour psychotherapist as a close adviser.
MADNESSES OF THE CRAZED THEIGNS
1. Paranoid about specific natural phenomena.
2. Thinks surrounded by replacements.
3. Thinks you are they and they are you.
4. Hides in corners.
5. Melancholia.
6. Hysteria.
7. Fulminates.
8. Cryomania.
9. Quadromania (Everything in fours, can develop into Octomania).
10. Deceives in speech but communicates truth through hand-signs.
11. Only calm while music plays.
12. Believes self to be gigantic, acts huge, ponderous and careful.
13. Compulsively and continually swaps clothes with all near.
14. Believes is 7 to 15 seconds in the future, they respond first and you have to fill in.
15. Trusts no-one who speaks their language, only happy around those they cannot understand.
16. Obsessively plays board games with small dozing animals as pieces. i.e. chess with sleeping black and white mice, backgammon with drugged snails.
17. Disguises self as member of own staff. takes messages to 'her Ladyship'. Rapidly changes disguise if found out.
18. Can't eat unless food represented in art. Sketches snacks, paints meals.
19. Lives as a 'prisoner of self'. Plays stern tyrant who will not release self and also rots in dungeon below (accessible through secret passage), checks with staff continually about security of 'prisoner', suspects escape attempts.
20. Communicates exclusively through life-sized puppets of self.
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