The DOOM of the DARK is coming...

The Black Casket of Night has indeed been opened beneath our feet, soon, only days will remain!

I have been posting here and there about ‘Doom of the Dark’ for a while. Here is the full version;

After my encounter with Tunnels and Trolls, Amanda suggested that I publish the adventure I created for her and a few friends. This is that adventure, illustrated and layed out by Amanda Lee Franck.

Simple Zine

DOOM of the DARK is a 34 page zine containing a real-time adventure fit for an evenings entertainment. By the end of the night you will have either saved REALITY ITSELF, or doomed it to… the DARK.

The adventure is statted up for Tunnels and Trolls and designed for that playful vibe. Most of the working parts are built into the creatures and the location so anyone familiar with old school D&D should have little trouble running it in a BX-adjacent or Nu-OSR game.

Its not a super-difficult dungeon, though hopefully a fun one. Think somewhere between storybook and catastrophe.

U.S. and U.K. Print

False Machine is doing things a little differently with this one. We intend to print in both the U.K. and the U.S.A. One print will be sent to Spiral Galaxy in the United Kingdom and ship from there, the other will be sent to Flying Cloud in America and ship from there.

This means postage will hopefully be less of an insane nightmare for Americans and Canadians.

The Kickstarter will have options for the U.K. print and the U.S. print, so back for the print location most convenient for you! (& try not to screw it up!).

I am also putting in wholesale options for both prints, so if you run a shop and want ten copies you can back for one of those.

UnIdentical Twins

The two prints will not be exactly the same. The U.K. version will be an A5 zine and the U.S.A. version will be in ‘portrait’ (so a little longer and thinner). We (Amanda) designed the thing with this in mind so the difference in experience should be minimal.

If we make a lot on the Kickstarter we will crank up the print quality on both items, but the printers in the U.S. and U.K. don’t offer exactly the same paper weights etc. We will try to keep the quality of both zines as similar as possible.

50/50 profit split

Like almost all False Machine products, profits for Doom of the Dark will be split 50/50 between writer and artist, so if you are an Amandamaniac, or Franckophile, you will be supporting your artist by backing or buying.

A Real-Time Adventure

Vague concepts for single-night, Level-One, Real-Time adventures have been rolling around my head for a while. DOOM of the DARK is played in real-time; however much time the players take is how much the adventurers take, and there is a time-limit; you only have two to six hours to save the world!

There are also a bunch of diegetic elements included in the adventure to, bluntly, keep bumbling players doing what they are meant to be doing; SAVING THE WORLD IN UNDER SIX HOURS.

Hopefully this should be a fun time for two to six players running starting characters, and a relatively easy dungeon to run.

Quick Kickstarter

The Kickstarter opens on the 15th of May and runs for just over two weeks, ending on the 31st of May (U.K. time! So Mid-day for Americans).

If you want DOOM of the DARK at its initially low price of £8, or if you know someone who might, then you only have two weeks to back this thing or let them know!

The more backers we get the higher we will crank the print quality!

We hope for a print in mid-June and to start delivering towards the end of June.

CLICK HERE FOR THE KICKSTARTER 

dErO - VotE: Re Development

the mysterious Stephan Poag did a comic about them!

The dErO Do Not Exist 

You do not believe in dErO. The Player Characters cannot believe in dErO. 

If the PCs act, or talk, or behave as if they believe dErO - DIRECTLY CONTRADICT THEM. Warp reality around them. 

…… 

If they converse with others, alter their words; 

PC - “I ask the NPC for any evidence of technological mind-controlling monsters.” 

DM - "You agree with the NPC that there is no evidence for such monsters and that they are merely a rumour of the Veins.” 

PC – “No, I directly ask about them. I’m standing right there!” 

DM – “After a fulfilling conversation you go about your business. Its now several hours later.” 

…. 

If they take actions, re-write those actions; 

PC - "I scry for the dErO" 

(Ask for no roll, no further decisions or any other investigation). 

DM - "Your scrying goes well, a complete success, and after a gruelling but certain search you end your session utterly convinced that the dErO are simply a fictional construct of the Chaos Goblins." 

…. 

While the dErO ability to alter memory, perception and reality, is active, you, the DM, are an agent of that power. 

The Dero do have limits on their ability to do this. Some of these are discussed below, but, to sum up, some PCs and NPCs (Resistants) can believe in them, some unusual minds, (Golems, some Paladins, Aelf-Adal) can as well, and the Air looms by which they maintain this power, can break, or a dErO can be betrayed in using them. 

The party, and the players, and the PCs can have utterly different beliefs and perceptions of the dErO, depending on circumstance, which means you, the DM, speak to and about them utterly differently. 

If one PC is 'Resistant' - talk to that player, and that PC ONLY, directly and truthfully – “Yes the dErO are real, they have mind controlling machines, you have seen evidence of them. It all seems so obvious now.” 

Likewise, if the PC's have, or use, a golem mind, or have a strong paladin, do the same for those points of view. 

But for everyone else, speak to them as if the dErO are not real, are utterly fictional, in game and out, and acknowledge no difference between the two kinds of statement you are making; the true, and the false.

 

 

 

Detrimental Robots 

Ruined remnant of an ancient race, or perhaps, revolted servitors. Or degenerate descendants of survivors of a psychic war. Or men-from-Qlipoth; creatures of a spiritual antiverse, transplanted into this one. Ancient aliens, inbred monsters, castoffs of spiralling post-apocalyptic eugenics, foul tulpa, Fomorian invaders. Imaginary beings. Of course, they are not real. No-one can remember them. No-one believes.

a Fomorian from 5e

 

Appearance 

Something like a man. Near ogre-sized, but withered, twisted. Skinny-fat, without a hearty butchers solid bulge, or a workers firm core. Always asymmetric, never clean. Manky fat things, stained and dribbling, grimy prints left on everything. Eczema, dandruff, scabies; wrinkled and flaking, red rashed-skin runs down their face like tears and collects round their mouths. 

Bale-Eyed; one eye bulges big. Milky and piercing. From here they emanate psychic violations. 

Even crippled, distorted as they are, dErO are as strong as a strong man. They can pick up others, slam and squash them. Their proportions hint they were perhaps meant to be something else. Echoes of lost nobility, Vitruvian creatures. 

Half-born Siamese-twins are common, reaching out through dErO flesh. If intelligent, these are usually trepanned and lobotomised, (no dErO would trust even their flesh-twin). Twitching open teratomas dot the body, hair and teeth within. 

This often (thankfully), hidden by a Mu-Mu, tent-dress, or a crackpot simulation of a Priests or Wizards robe, (they like long white coats). Under that, most dErO wear dirty stained undergarments like jockey pants. Perhaps a belt or something with pockets to carry patched-up tools of psychic warfare. They rarely wear much else; dErO don’t get out much. (Don’t leave the cave.) 

Posh dErO float like Baron Harkonnen; bits of tech jammed into their meat and bones to make it happen. These form pussy never-healing sores.

One of Shavers ‘Rock Books’. Only he could reveal their messages.

Culture 

dErO live through mass mind-control and the farming of Sha Chi, Anti-Orgone, Xenu-Viril, in a word, negative energy. They condense this psychic field to ‘globs’; spheroids of physicalised psychic potentia which fuels all dErO tech. The dErO have incredible technology, though they did not create it, and, perhaps, do not understand it. 

The purpose of the dErO is to discover the conspiracy. 

Their very existence is a conspiracy against all sentient life and they are all utterly insane, (if there is even more than one dErO). This leads inevitably to the concept of a of a meta-mega super conspiracy, a conspiracy against the dErO themselves. Once a dErO conceives of this idea, they cannot stop; any failure in the idea is evidence for it. Just ad dErO remove all thought of their existence from the minds of lesser beings, so the Ultra-Conspirators try to suppress knowledge of the Meta-Conspiracy. Yes, it’s all a trick somehow, all a game, a game played against them by some ever-hidden hand. 

Such is life for the dErO. 

 

Drinkers of Tears 

The dErO command vast psychic devices; the Air Looms, with which they harvest negative energy from the surface world, (or worlds). 

The dErO cannot make anything, but they can make anything worse. They foment war, corruption, moral and cultural decay. The power of their Air Looms stretches over multiple realities. They play the souls of civilisations like choirs of pain. 

Some theorists imagine (briefly before the Dero alter them), that Civilisations have no natural cycle and would naturally form a single 'climax civilisation' covering the whole world, and all realities - if not for the dErO carefully ruining everything all of the time. 

Leaders in the meta-real economy of pain, the dErO are in conflict, (and co-operation) with various entities; Demons, Devils, Aelf-Adal and debatable Aberrant things. All have an interest in the psyche and the soul, though rarely the same interest. Together they make a kind of Cartel. There are agreements in place. They even have meetings about it, though they do not get on at all.

 

Violators 

Clever hikikomori (don’t leave the cave), the dErO have eliminated the female gender from their species. Perhaps they never had it, and have always reproduced through dark and unknown methods. They have no positive instinct to create more of themselves but do so out of necessity. Even reluctantly. 

They Violate. 

Via their Bale-Eye, the dErO puts themselves inside the target. This feels physically intimate, overwhelming, tactile, disgusting. At the same time, they enter mentally, gaining control over, in this sequence; simple physical acts, immediate senses, short term memory, complex physical acts, long term memory and finally meta-personality aspects. 

They can them damage, alter, mutate and in some cases, re-make the target. Who or whatever comes out of this process will bear the taint of the dErO, though they may not know it; the dErO can remove any conscious memory of the event. (But the soul remembers). 

The strength of this ability depends on age, distance and familiarity. (If,indeed, there is more than one dErO). Most dErO can only do it in direct line of sight of their Bale Eye, and they need you to meet its gaze. 

Older, stronger dErO can violate those they can imagine precisely or even those they are familiar with, at a distance, and perhaps at any range. 

Intra-dErO hierarchies, government and culture, (such as it is), is made up of these violations. Whichever dErO can violate the other is superior, and must be obeyed. The greatest dErO of a clade, (or perhaps of all dErO, even they do not know how many dErO there are), is the Grand Violator. 

They barely even talk to each other, issuing commands through, screens, messages and violation – psychically raping the necessary knowledge into each other’s brains. And yes, this does do damage, as it would for any being. The dErO are not immune to the horrible psychic trauma they happily inflict on others, in fact it’s the substance of their culture. 

They actively enjoy it too. Or at least they enjoy doing it to others. 

 

Only One? 

Every dErO lives in the midst of a hierarchy of other, brutal dErO, who they may never have seen directly, or know personally. They trade amongst themselves in Globs, technology, information, coverage, slaves and anything else useful, though usually at a remove. Their ‘society’  has few rules outside domination, submission, maintaining the Air Looms and other machines, and the core rule of always maintaining the non-existence of dErO in as many minds as possible. 

Because they hate and fear each other, communicating via glowing screens, cryptic codes and psychic mind rape, because they, in a sense, have no true society, its hard to know how many dErO there actually are. 

There are stronger dErO they fear, who command them to do things under threat of instant horrific psychic assault, and other dErO, whom they themselves can violate at will, (if they stay stronger). 

But are these dErO actually real? It is possible they are simulations? Fantasies? Disassociated personality fragments? Could there, actually, be only one, single, dErO, in the whole of all possible worlds? Is it actually just them, alone? 

No. Impossible. 

 

The Air Looms

 

from our correspondent Mr Matthews

Huge machines with the power to alter minds. Even to remove the very knowledge of their own existence. (Of course, all this is fiction). 

Where did they come from? Who made them and why? Not the dErO; the Air-Looms are cavern-filling complexes, not single things. Like great rotted pipe organs, metropolis megastructures, once of gleaming metal and pale lucent ceramic. Now fractured, melted, ruined in a thousand places in an hundred ways. 

Where things are broken, the re-engineered sections are of a very different character; bizarre rube-Goldberg coagulations of wheezing gaskets, crude plumbing, clicking engines and buzzing cables, drugged-spider basket-weaves of schizophrenic scrap-work clearly doing badly what a single component used to do well. So many additions and replacements, and then, perhaps a hundred, or a thousand years later, replacements for those replacements,  until the coagulations erupt and surround the original devices like teratoma erupting from a body, fungi bursting the chitin of an infected ant. 

The dErO cannot make them. There will be no more Air-Looms. 

Slow and limited, they swing in their targets like Radio Telescopes. Can be set to play over Empires, Nations, Cities or single individual lonely souls. The Air Loom can have a powerful effect on small groups, even fully change perceived reality for a single target, or can have vague less-specific effects on larger groups. 

Of course, all this is variable, these things are more craft than science, more art than craft. There are settings within settings, waves and counter-points, hidden programmes within the programmes. Everything is always being re-set, re-tasked, and they are always breaking down. The degenerate dErO all(?) fear each other and find it hard to co-operate. Their only willing servants are Chaos Goblins, who are already utterly insane, or creatures they have re-written for the purpose, making them, inevitably, either rebellious, or just a bit shit; end results of too many Violations and Air Loom choirs. 

dErO servants start to look and act quite dErO themselves after a while… They may even start having ideas. Ideas about replacing the true, real, dErO, and taking over the Air-Loom. (Could this have already happened? No, impossible.) 

 

dErO Items

Beyond Lemuria by Poke Runyon

 

Most dErO tools and  weapons are of malignant psychic kind. Many might be Air-Loom parts; either based on their technology, or just pieces dErO have ripped off and re-engineered. Some may be waste products of the Air-Looms; its not clear that ‘globs’ are meant to exist, to be either products or, or fuel for, technology, but that’s what dErO use them for. 

 

Congruity Knots

Added directly to sentient brains, Congruity Knots change minds, making them more sympathetic, and useful, to dErO uses and ideas. 

They might be a bit too useful. Escaped humanoids with partial congruity knots have exhibited dErO qualities and tried to build their own Influencing Machines. It might even be that the Knots are part of how dErO make more dErO. It is possible these ultra-humanoid escapees act now from the surface to Influence dErO culture. Is possible they Influence dErO to make greater use of Congruity Knots. They must be destroyed. More humanoids must be Knotted and sent above to destroy the ultra-humanoids. 

Conspiracy Pills

Conspiracy pills allow the user to hear the voices of the players (not the characters) as they speak round the table. Any direct acknowledgment of this results in death. THE VOICES MUST NOT HEAR YOU HEARING THEM. 

Globs

A damp, oblate spheroid of greasy nicotine, or sick egg yolk colour. A glob of condensed suffering. dErO form and harvest these, snort, inject, eat, insert them. Trade in Globs, and use them to power technology. A Glob can lie in your palm like a big marble, or quiver delectably in both hands. Any larger and the surface tension might burst. 

Globs can be as common or rare as coins, as specific as specific wines. All dErO have some Globs on them somewhere. Touching one makes mortals very sad. Eating one would kill via grief and despair. Throwing them like grenades can disrupt, and sometimes kill and injure foes (psychically, though they could always fall off a wall while experiencing a dark night of the soul.) 

Great Glass Elevators

dErO reach the surface, (surfaces?), in these. The ‘glass’ is horribly pitted and stained to a greased opacity. Like great tubes or shafts, but where they go, and how, is hard to see. Some plunge into the stone, but in vast dErO caves they rise into the dark and dingy air, their paths warping, waving and twisting like melted corkscrew straws. Where are they going? Where do they come out? The dErO bring people back down these stained shafts; often very normal people. They even send some back up – now agents for the dErO. Seeking the conspiracy. 

Hooks

Nothing special. Like any good Knotsman, the dErO just like grabbing and hurting people. Hooks are good for this and that is where the dErO get theirs; bought, bartered or just taken from the Knotsman stores. 

Insanity Guns

Dirty, ancient tea-stained ceramic weapons, (in fact 'tea stained' pretty much defines the dErO). Once cranked up and loaded with hot Globs, they vomit adhesive veils of corrosive madness like Greek Fire. 

Kyro-Condensers

Gloomed, chundering vaguely-placental mega milkers summoning fouled Orgone energy from the crackling air and condensing it to crude-glob, later to be refined into useable Globs. Reality nearby is manic and bipolar as winds of condensing negativity drain such emotion from nearby zones in elaborate three dimensional spirals of corruptive mood-weather. 

Lighting Spears

Spark-spitting lances. Old dErO tech. Good for herding human cattle and jabbing animals. 

Moulderspheres

A kind of don’t-see-me exception-field. Looks like a huge compacted ball of dirty veils or old rags, all slowly rotting and revealing only more within. dErO forced to move between caves oft use moulderspheres, but are as likely to put them aside to chase conspirators as they are to flee from them if frightened. 

Revelation Engines

Truth-devouring hyper-computers, (now much altered by dErO tech). Engines made to unearth secrets and discover lies. Their use is addictive and corruptive. Displacement in the Logosphere forces the user to create secret plans and hidden structures of power. Meaning more secrets result after use than existed before. Using a Revelation Engine to analyse a Revelation Engine results in FEEDBACK LOOP. 

Suspicion Wands

Transmit suspicion through solid rock to affect unsuspecting minds. Suspicion machines sometimes backfire and infect the user with unlikely suspicions. It is impossible to know that this has happened. It is impossible to know that this has not happened. 

Thought Exploders

Deliver a blast which substantially increases operative intelligence, at the expense of increasing paranoia and conspiratorial behaviour to the same degree. Often results in the unwitting germination of ‘hidden selves’ which plot and scheme against the ‘main self’ and each other. dErO use these to gain the intelligence repair and maintain their Air-Looms and other technology, and whenever they run into a challenging problem.  

 

dErO vulnerabilities 

Resistants  

A rare proportion of moral souls are 'Resistants' with an innate or developed, resistance to dErO tech. Unfortunately, this ‘resistance’ often goes along with substantial mental damage, making ‘resistants’ seemingly chaotic, dangerous and unreliable. 

Resistants can sense the Violations and reality alterations and will try to protect and warn others. dErO-controlled systems will try to isolate and destroy them. They are often imprisoned as lunatics or live as exiles in hidden corners of the world. 

In some cases the overuse of dErO tech and Air-Loom waves provokes a natural ‘resistant’ development in the target psyche, making them not only less vulnerable to dErO tech and methods, but more and more resistant with each attempt to suborn them. 

(dErO are fascinated by, but terrified of, ‘Resistants’.) 

Some unusual beings are either immune to dErO effects, or have methods of subverting or altering them. dErO will often avoid and evade such creatures; 

·        Golem or non-sentient minds.

·        Some Paladins.

·        Chaos Goblins, and some general Goblins.

·        Aelf-Adal.

·        High-ranking angelic forms. 

 

Cowardice 

While superficially, manically, confident dErO are utter personal and physical cowards. 

If they get hurt they will shit themselves, (literally), and run, or float, away, getting to an Air Loom as quickly as possible and then wiping any memory of the encounter from the minds of those present. 

While they will resent anyone capable of hurting them, they will also fear such individuals. 

 

Betrayal and Incompetence 

dErO betray each other, (if there is really more than one), constantly and their unstable patchwork technology fails unpredictably. Neither can all of the interlayered realities, or the whole of the Veins, be fully covered by Air-Looms all of the time. Coverage fluctuates, and often drops out at the worst possible time for a particular dErO. 

If dErO 'coverage' goes down (their local Air Looms have broken or shut down), tell the truth to all the players and PCs - at least about what they can see, what they can think about, and any evidence that might lead them to the dErO. Even admit you were lying before - "I was probably under Dero control" 

If dErO 'coverage' is returned (the Air Loom goes back on, or another is tasked), begin lying again, and acknowledge no difference in what you said before and are saying now (except to any Resistant PC’s).

 

Staffing Issues 

dErO are singular. They don’t like each other. Their only servants are mortal souls who have been specifically Congruity Knotted, Violated and re-written to be so. The dErO cannot make anything, they can only make things worse. Anyone they have ‘worked over’ for a long period of time, will have adopted many dErO characteristics, especially a tendency to power-hunger, conspiracy and betrayal. 

So, in a sense, the dErO have no ‘loyal’ and competent servants Its one or the other, and usually not much of either. 

The only other beings who will willingly spend time around the dErO, are the Chaos Goblins, who are utterly mental and don’t care about anything.

 

 

dErO Encounters 

They do not like to leave the Caves. It’s more likely they will send out dErO-ified servants and Chaos Goblins to do things, especially to investigate the numerous, complex, multileveled, and perhaps.. singular, (is it all just one great scheme?) conspiracies against them. 

But they do need to leave sometimes. 

 

Travel Methods 

Some travel in closed howdahs or huge sedan chairs carried by chaos goblins. The goblins are not really 'carrying' the chair, which is actually a Mouldersphere with sticks sticking out. Instead the dErO antigrav carries the weight and the Chaos Goblins hands are glued or nailed, to the arms of the ‘chair’ . (There might be a dead goblin or two being carried along). The orb can move by itself, the sticks are attached to the orb, and the goblins attached to the sticks, as camouflage. 

Others go on their own, on foot, if poor. All that really matters is that they have 'coverage' from an Air-Loom - if they do, they will not even be perceived, but might fall prey to mindless foes. If they need aid they may use their mental technology or Violations to compel others to assist them. 

 

Coverage 

if a dErO can afford it or is powerful enough, (and they usually won't travel without it), they will be tracked in their movements by an air-loom operated by another dErO (if there is another dErO). 

This can make the experiential reality of all sentient things in the right area broadly whatever the operator wants them to be. So - usually locals won't even perceive the dErO, at all, they are invisible in a way more powerful than the spell Invisibility can provide, sentient minds will work themselves to excuse explain or ignore away any evidence of the dErO’s presence. 

Or the dErO’s procession can appear as nearly anything else; a high status Knotsmen, an Aelf-Adal procession (which none would dare to fuck with), some unknown hyper-predator moving through the volume, or simply a deep sense of formless terror. 

Unfortunately (or fortunately), - dErO are nasty, lazy, don't like each other , betray each other and fuck things up. (Assuming there are multiple dErO). The machine may go wrong, or service cut out, or a deliberate mistake! 

Suddenly the nature of reality shifts again. What you believed ten seconds ago, that there was a 'cave dragon' or something moving, or that you saw a Terror-Lord palanquin, or that someone told you or you learned, why did you think that? you can't imagine why... 

Theres a bunch of chaos goblins hopping and a huge mouldering half-sphere. Are those rags? Or rips and tears in something else? 

 

 

Opal-Winged Chiropterae - VotE Remastered Development

Wraiths with opal wings. Messengers, dipolmats and chatterers. Navigators of realities. Hunters, predators. Gas-addicts and maximal guano-pollutors. The Bat-Men, or Opal Winged Chiropterae. Subtle, vulnerable, savage and discursive creatures.

The White-Winged Bat-Men hunt the grand vaults of the Veins; supermassive chasms or oceanic holes in the stone. Think the Grand Canyon, with a roof. Only here can their inherent advantage of natural flight be exploited to the full. If brought to ground, or confined above, they are slight creatures, their slender wingfingers simple to snap, and when that happens its over for a Chiropterae, dying by their own hand, or ritually un-personed and extinguished by their kin.

When Opal-Winged Chiropterae hunt for food, they focus first on small, airborne prey, which they catch in-flight. With ground animals they focus on smaller creatures which can bring down in a group and cut to pieces before winging away with the nutritious bits. A second tactic is to parasitise titanic beasts, creatures large enough for the Chiropterae to nestle into, latching to their flanks in groups, subtly sucking the Titans blood while it carries them along.

They rarely hunt anything man-sized and simple combat encounters with the Chiropterae are rare; they are more likely to descend in on travellers in packs demanding newspapers, but they do happen. Chiropterae may be starving from one of their transversal migrations, might be carrying out some complex black-operation, could be criminals exiled from their Cauldron, or low-status males acting outside cultural norms.

The Chiropterae hunt Olm, and are hunted in return, for the peoples loathe each other, though they find it hard to actually get at one another, each occupying realms near-intangible to the other, the one water, the other, air.

A (Rare) Feral Chiropterean Attack

Wind on wings. Shifts in the piling mass of air above. The gentle taps of phalange-tips meeting as wings beat. A little keening. Up in the far reaches of the lanterns light; flitting glimpses of a white-winged bat. It’s not small, just far away. Focus closer on that momentary glimpse; it carries javelins in its gnarled dexterous feet. It may be wearing spectacles. Is that a pipe?

Smithsonian

Dropping Scorpions, Dousing Lights

Chiropterae can see, though not exceptionally well. In darkness they echolocate. If they hunt a sighted group, the Chiropterae will begin combat by flinging Scorpions amongst their foe, making sure they are seen before the lights go out, to ensure the greatest confusion. Then they shit on lanterns from above, squirting Alkali guano from a great hight, with surprising accuracy.

The Bone Flutes Play

From their perspective, sound is a form of sight, and their magic is all done by a musician/hunter class, who play their ultrasonic spells through pipes of slender bone. (Often made by the femurs of Olm). A Chiropterean Piper will need to perch or land to cast a complex spell, making them the only member of their group not a-wing, (and therefore easier to target).

A Piper can only cast a single effect at a time;

Hyperborean-Owl

Creates the vivid sense that in the air above the targets, of a gigantic, even demonic, prehistoric Owl. Though most targets are not especially afraid of Owls, Chiropterae are, and this fear will communicate itself to their targets in a rough equivalence to the spell 'Fear'. This will drive off and scatter any beasts of burden, uncertain allies, or weak group members.

False Wall

Creates the tactile illusion of a stone wall which cuts off roughly a third of the battlefield. This can divide groups or bottle them in. If perceived by the eyes, the illusion disappears.

Hail Spears.

A rain of spears over the battlefield. Not especially accurate but can sometimes kill, and supress groups if not. This effect works only in the dark, if perceived by sight, it disappears.

Shatter

If concentrated upon a single, drawn weapon which is exposed to the air, and is made of a brittle material, over two rounds this will shatter that weapon. The vibrations in the blade build over the first round and if the weapons is stowed, dampened, or otherwise hidden, the effect will end.

Armour of Smoke, Knives like Leaves

Rick the Demogorgon

Hunting Chiropterae are armoured in marvellous kind. Like no other craft known below, this armour is made from the lightest substances imaginable; from spiderwebs linked by mist, or feathers bound by smoke*. This armour is always fitted to the Bat in question. It can be removed and crudely adapted to some uses, but it will not fit a non-Bat frame.

Once the foe are divided and demoralised, the Chiropterae will use their flight and mobility to focus on one target after another, beginning with spellcasters, healers or the most vulnerable. They hurl light javelins from the air. But each Chiropterae only has one or two of these, and a hit is not guaranteed.

If they think they have downed or suppressed a target, they will descend to finish the job with flint and obsidian blades of incredible sharpness, slenderness and workmanship. As sharp as scalpels and nearly as light as paper, they are honed and polished till the light, (if there were any), glows through them like leaves. With these they descend to earth and, hopping closer, try to cut the throat, or to hamstring or finish prey

Vulnerable

Chiropterae are about the size of twelve year-olds, with slender limbs. They have only wings and dexterous feet, with no third set of limbs. Knife-Killing is done with a foot-hand while they hop closer on the other, balancing and supporting themselves with their marvellous wings.

But they are light creatures, and their wing-bones are horrifically vulnerable, easily snapped by simple blows, after which a still-living Chiropterae will often fall into despair and kill themselves. They will no longer be considered a 'true' member of their species and may be killed on sight if they encounter a non-related Cauldron of their kin, or even by their own immediate family.

Therefore they are careful, for the careless do not live long. This attitude to risk carries over to their culture which, despite its apparent verbosity, is calculating, observant and never commits everything. The Bat-Men are no fanatics.

Their Opal Wings

The Opal Wings of the Bat-Men reflect magic and fly upon dimensional winds.

Spells fired directly at Chiropterae will usually bounce off their wings. Area-effect spells might refract, depending on their nature. Those that produce a clearly physical second order effect, (i.e. a blast of rock chips from a concussive spell), will usually have some result.

They are hunted for them. Olm braves claim cloaks of Opal wing, just as Chiropterae make their greatest pipes and flutes from an Olms femurs and ribs. Lords of the Aelf-Adal wear beautiful capes of layered opal wings. They wear them even in front of their Chiropterean heralds and messengers. It’s not even clear that they are trying to frighten them, that’s just how the Aelf-Adal roll.

Theory; because the wings feel extra-natural force, this allows the Chiropterae to 'fly twice', using the resistance of both ordinary air, and also whatever winds of magic may be blowing in the local zone.

Their opal wings protect them from abyssal and aberrant effects, from the winds of chaos and the storms of heaven, from demonic glance and magicians orb. By these they fly the winds empyric, heralds of strangeness and woe that pass between real and unreal realms. Near these gates they roost their Cauldrons; protected by the gift of flight, but also because most creatures from both sides of such marginal zones can't live there - the emissions and reality of one place being lethal to the creatures of the other, except for the bats, who hang happily wrapped in opal cloaks, dwellers in polluted zones.

Roosts

Scientific American Vampire Bats

High up in the stone sky hang the lamplit multicoloured tents of the Chiropterean Cauldron. Wreathed in smoke they are, and surrounded by spiderwebs. The greatest hang the lowest and irritate their kin with the smoke which rises upward from their pipes. Nearby may be a hell-gate, or something similar. The Bats always know where they are.

Not that you will have much time to look, as, right under the roost, you will be up to your knees, maybe even your waist, in brutal acrid alkali batshit. The wet layers sticking to you, the composted underlayer sending up puffs of horrifically infectious dust and spores, the whole thing riddled with violent myconids and poisonous scorpions.

Guano Pollution

'The gift of life', as the Bat-Men would put it, and also the gift of polluting runoff, as many others would.

Fertiliser is rare in the Veins and many Coagulations (Townships and Villages), benefit from regular access to batshit, which fuels their fungal farms. On this basis the Chiropterae regard themselves as gift-givers, bringers of life, and make their guano deposition part of their negotiations for roosting rights in volumes near Coagulations and farms.

Yet the Veins are curiously environmentalist. At least, cultures tend to loathe 'mess' and adulteration. Active weather underground is rare and environmental systems are closely interrelated. It’s a zero-sum kind of place. What is left behind remains in place - not washed or worn away. If it is washed away, the river-dwellers and water-drinkers will soon know about it. Which usually means the Olm.

The Chiropterae themselves are eternal migrants, only staying in one roost for a certain time before the Cauldron moves on. Or, in the opinion of the Olm, until they have totally fucked up the local volume with Guano and Smoke emissions, making it un-liveable, when they then escape into holes in the air.

Web Dogs

The Bats have a cultivated relationship with specialised semi-tame, co-evolved spiderkin. The Web-Dogs build fences, or gardens, of web on the cavern roof around the Cauldrons Roost. There is no 'way in', the Bats fly in and out and the webs exist to stop, or impede, spider-climbing roof-raiders from clambering inverse and upside-down to invade and murder the otherwise ill-defended bats. Successfully performing such a raid can catapult an Olm into high status within their tribe.

The Web Dogs are fed directly by the Bats and feed also on the insects which rise from the Guano pile below. Each settlements sub-species is a bit different; they are often altered and mutated by the energies of strange realities which the Chiropterae fly through and over in their great migrations, carrying the next generation of Web Dogs as eggs in their armpits. Some may be a little bit intelligent, others a little demonic, or a little whatever.

(Feral populations of Web-Dogs left behind by the Cauldron as they migrate are another reason the Chiropterae are despised by many. Of course the Bat-Men only carry eggs between realms. They have to travel light.)

Cauldron and Moieties

They move and migrate in 'Cauldrons', extended semi-tribal mixed-kin groups made up of families and organisations. Not everyone is interrelated and a Cauldron will always be gaining and losing Bats from various places and for various reasons.

The Cauldrons hang together in 'Roosts', and not every bat in a Roost is always part of the Cauldron. Smaller visiting groups, traders, travellers, male kin-bands, perhaps wreaca or outlaws. There is always a degree of deniability as to who is or is not present and who is responsible for what, for reasons we shall see.

Cauldrons are governed by twin Moieties; Talkers and Movers, or we might say, Diplomats and Navigators. Talkers are the high-status public face of Chiropterae society and are what most think of when someone talks about the Bat-Men. Civilised, chatty, spectacle-wearing, multi-lingual, Pipe-Smoking, (possibly gas addicted), ambassadors, messengers, translators, occasional traders, middle-men and cosmopolitans. These are the bats that have their tents at the lowest part of the roost, right in the middle. (Their pungent pipe smoke rises up and makes their inferiors cough, and their pipe music drowns out the others).

The Movers are Navigators of realities. For the Chiropterae live on the boundaries of the Real, and migrate through the tears and gateways between realms, ghosting over burning cities, elysian fields and impossible arcologies alike. The Veins are one of many places that they dwell. The Movers are taciturn, intelligent and obsessed with maintaining the Chiropteraes' complex multi-dimensional maps of stacked and shifting realities, these things maintained largely as an intensive oral culture, with tools and "maps" so strange, abstruse and dependant on context that most would take them for art-pieces or decoration.

Quiet as they are, once a Cauldron reaches its Roost, and settles in, the 'Movers' fade into the background, recovering, learning what they can from pilgrims and travellers, and planning the next great migration. When the Cauldron does move, it will be they, and not the Talkers, who decide who lives and dies.

There are lesser informal groupings. Most Bats have some skill with gathering, hunting and Pipe-Music Spellcraft, but these, though utterly vital, are low-status occupations and older Bats who specialise in them and teach others will only ever be a low professional class. Likewise there are specialised traders and various clades of medium to high status long-distance messengers, as well as bands of young males, and 'Wreaca', outsider Bats who may be one thing or another.

A Roost will usually hang around long enough for a new generation of Bats to 'get their wings'; be capable of the next long-distance transversal migration under their own power. (While mother Bats can fly a little with small children attached, trying a long distance flight like this, or while heavily pregnant, would kill mother and young together.) Some Roosts, often those near major Coagulations, or substantial Lords, who must be served, are semi-permanent, though these Super-Roosts usually hold two or more Cauldrons, each of which is in a different stage of preparation to move on, and which will be replaced when they do.

Civilised Encounters

Civilised Bat by poordogfarm from etsy

Vulnerable as they are, Chiropterae prefer to meet others in Coagulations, under the protection of some Lord, (Knotsmen, Aelf-Adal or Deep Janeen, all reliable in their own way). In the wilds they will carefully scout and observe before making contact. They cannot risk their wings. And their wings are much desired.

Once they have confidence in their safety, they are utterly civilised, verbose, cultured and mildly eldritch creatures. (Of course, the 'face' of Chiropterae society is the 'Talkers', which is who PC's are likely to be speaking to.) They love to chat, smoke, exchange news and gossip, complain about Olm, inquire, snoop etc.

The Chiropterae travel light and carry messages. Their reliability as a long-distance, (sometimes very long distance, for the right price they can sometimes carry messages to the dead, or to beings from other realities), messengers is absolute. Their prices are high, their discretion total. They may blather overmuch but they do not read or ever disclose the content of their bestowed messages.

(In fact the highest ranked Talker will read all the messages they can, but to be fair, almost never actually uses this knowledge for anything other than to very gently strategically locate their Cauldron in positions of relative safety and security between major power groups, and perhaps if there was some great threat to the whole Chiropterean race. So it’s not like they really read the messages, only that the messages may have been read.)

Sometimes the Bat-Men must transit the 'low ways'; the 'normal' paths of the Veins outside or between the Great Chasms; low-roofed, complex caves where flight is a danger. In this case they will pay well for reliable mercenary guides and protectors. (And will relentlessly avenge any betrayal by such protectors.) When the great spaces are reached once again, the Bat simply flies away, with a promise of payment in credit with a nearby Knotesman, Soft-Head or a Deep Janeens Vizier.

Their credit is always good and payment will be waiting. The financial promises and exactitude of the Bat-Men are well known. They maintain financial flows within the Veins, and beyond, and form the informational sub-strata of its economy.

Gas Addicts

Terminal smokers and low-key depraved gas addicts, the Bat-Men cannot say no to a strange inhalation. Or the Talker class can't at least. Being light, winged creatures who must fly unspeakably long distances, this addiction to smoking is incredibly, unbelievably, bad for them and utterly ruins their lungs. (It also generally pisses off Veins residents as moving without a trace is a polite cultural norm and reasonable method of self protection, while the Bat-Men flap about leaving stinking smoke behind them.)

The (very tragic, but continual), deaths from the combination of smoking, inhaling things they shouldn't, and having to fly long distance marathons, are a main form of social advancement in Chiropterean society. Gaps in the Hierarchy are always opening up.

Role-Play Guidance

Encountered either in the Great Vaults, or in a Coagulation, in which case they will be an advisor, translator, merchant or middle-man.

Civilised, cosmopolitan, high-pitched hobbits. Pipe-Smokers. May be there to deliver a message, or translate. An advisor or hanger on. Careful in the wilds. Keeps their distance.

Looking to manoeuvre some advantage from this interaction.

If the PC’s are involved in intra-planar politics, or a travellers between realities, the Chiropterae will be surprisingly well-informed about this.

Low-key, bourgeoise drug addicts, (vapours only). Racist against Olm.

Veins of the Earth - Workshop

'Queen Mab's Palace' will be moving to layout soon. My gigantic review of Hugh Cooks 'Chronicles of and Age of Darkness' is done. What will False Machine be working on next?

Veins of the Earth - Remastered

And by working on, I mean that I have started work, not that we have a book ready right now. This is the beginning of a long process. 

The new Veins will probably be A4, to fit in with other False Machine books, and will have new content, a new layout, hopefully some new images.

But what needs to be added? What needs to be changed? What didn't work for people last time? I have some ideas but I also want your input.

Drop your comments

•  At the Substack [https://substack.com/@pjamesstuart] 
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•  Emails to pjamesstuart@gmail.com 
•  Or even reviews and analysis on your own blogs and channels.

Post-Singularity Hardcopy Concepts

Chatbot evolution, deepfakes. conspiracy and counter-conspiracy and counter-counter conspiracy. re-editing of children's books (is your copy of 'The Twits' pre or post-purge?), all of this and more leads me to think about The Record, and its fragility.

So I come to imagine forms of post-reality hardcopy, for when you absolutely postitively MUST calm ever motherfucking in the room.

It needs to be readable to the *naked eye*, (the statements of trusted witnesses that they have seen the hardcopy, reporting directly and in the flesh to others, will be the only real form of proof most will recieve). This is a human thing and is about proving things from one human to another in a world where any digital or transmitted inormation, even through a single screen, like that of an electron microscpe, could be suspected.

It can be the creation of machines but better if it is purely hand made, must be reasonably robust, not decay, at least not if cared for, hard, preferably impossible, to alter and amend

TECHNIQUES

Close-weaved calligraphy - using a scribe to write fancy letters that mesh with each others negative space, both fore and aft but also with each line above and below. I think this was used in rennaisance/early modern counrtly letters, or at least special and expansive designs were placed to fill pages specifically to prevent any additions or amendments to whatever the king etc may or may not have said

BRITTLE SYNTHETICS

Ceramic - could literally be a fine china cup with the contract/text interweaved through it under the sheen

Cut into Gems - you would have to examine these with a spyglass at least. Combining gemcutting with close-weaved calligraphy would make a record easy to transport, worth preserving and hard to alter.

Glass - if a record could be etched in so much the better, if some substance relevent to the nature of the record was included in the glassblowing even more so. Maybe a rare radioactive isotope that decayed at a set rate? That could give you a date? Or combine glass and organic so a leaf or something is part of the artefact.

I feel most metals are out, too easy to melt and reconfigure.. Maybe etched right on the edge of a high-grade blade?

ORGANICS

Bone or ivory is another material that could be treated roughly as a 'brittle synthetic' with scrimshawed or etched intra-calligraphy.

Shell? Could writing somehow be introduced to the natural growth patterns of a shell?

Grown-over wood - carving things into wood sounds good as the interaction between the grain and carved text might make it hard to alter, maybe there could be some way to use the fact that wood can be grown over and around things to 'seal' a ceramic document?

Skin - tattooing might work, combining the fidelity of a named person and their reputation with the record written into their living skin

DNA alteration to make a bunch of apples or whatever produce certain words - sounds a bit overdone and not that useful but could be a handy way of mass-replicating a single record. (Apples etc have the name of god or whatever in them all the time, it shouldn't be too hard to get a single tree to produce a name or symbol).

WHAT AM I MISSING?

What else can be created and 'read' by humans, but is very hard to alter once it has 'been' created?

I want to say; very high grade silk weaving - but the fact that it is 'woven' means it can be 'un-weaved' and re-made.   Is there a form of weaving which is *fundamentally* un-un-weavable - that it simply cannot be taken apart and re-assembled once made, even by super-tactile robot hands?

Urban Planning? - you could pay to have the streets of a suburban or urban development effectively 'written' as a cypher of your agreement or record. This would have a natural loss over time but it would take quite a long time and a supreme degree of effort to erode the symbology. The systems of build environments have a tendency to replicate themselves. 

How about chemical processes that remain meta-stable but degrade if they are disrupted or interrupted?

Super-clockwork that remains stable so long as it runs very, very slowly, but degrades rapidly if it is sped up slowed down or stopped  in any way?

There must be some systems or methods in engineering that are useless or low-utility because they are coherent so long as you don't fuck with them, making them too sensitive or finickity for building r engineering but maybe quite good for this purpose?

Imagining Roteopia

As a consequence of reading 'Cats Paws' and Catapults' I became mildly obsessed with the idea of rotational limbs in living things. WHY can't we have Segway Elephants and HOW could they evolve????

Thus I developed Roteopia, which is like that series Dinotopia but imagining an earth where creatures with rotating limbs evolved but everything else stayed at least familiar enough for the reader to understand what’s going on.

FORMAL DEFENITION OF ROTATION HERE

ITS NOT JUST WAVING YOUR ARM AROUND OK????

"By wheels we mean proper wheel and axle devices that can rotate without limit with respect to the rest of a machine. If you roll down a hill, your whole body may be a wheel, but you're no wheel and axle. So we're not talking about tumbleweeds, or about the tiny turds that dung beetles roll homeward for grubs, or about a few crustaceans that get around by rolling as a whole. Nor are we worrying about how far we can rotate our fists around our rms or our heads on our shoulders. By "rotation" we also mean something fairly specific. When you draw a circle on a piece of paper, do you rotate your hand? You may move it in a circle, but you don't truly rotate it; after all, your hand at all times points in the same compass direction. Human dances make elaborate uses of such circular but nonrotational motion, most likely because it doesn't make us dizzy. Not all dances, of course; waltzes are rotational and, one suspects, intentionally vertiginous. The wheels of a bicycle rotate; your feet and the pedals just move around in circular paths. The Ferris wheel rotates as a whole, but the seats and people just go in circles. In this precise sense - excluding both rolling as a whole and merely going in circles - the only known instance of a wheel and axle in nature is the bacterial flagellum." - Steven Vogel, Cats' paws and Catapults

(From a post by u/ExplosiveVent here)

THE GENESIS OF ROTATING BEINGS

I have two general base animals in mind depend on whether we want bones or boneless. I will start with boned.

So imagine something like a a very early form of the Angler Fish in the Cambrian era. Not quite fishlike yet, maybe flat instead of tall, but it has a spine.

This creature is highly sexually dimorphic. The females are large and the males very small. Pattern of mating is that the male physically inserts its head into one of a range of orifices in the female. This proto-womb has a muscular lock to stop the male getting away. Once penetrated the area around the males head/internal wall, dissolves, large parts of the flesh of the males head dissolve as well, allowing genetic material to enter the female. Now they are joined.

So far, not hugely different to the modern Angler Fish, which can swim around with a number of males attached to it.

At some point the mating biology mutates so that the male can 'spin' inside the muscle lock. It has a particular head shape that keeps its head 'inside' the female, and if it did manage to get out it would die anyway as now it can only gain nutrients from the females body. But it can 'swim', flex its body and turn n its own axis, part inside the female but the rear part outside.

Now we imagine multiple matings, either simultaneously or over time but with the males from previous matings remaining in place.

Now we have a vertebrae fishlike being with these mini-fish sticking out of it, and the mini fish can still swim, and crucially, they can rotate in place.

Now rotational movement, a corkscrewing, is extremely efficient, so all we are waiting for is a fluke where the males are all capable of rotating and in the right position to provide thrust and are sensitive and responsive enough to female pressure to do so on command.

So now we have a fishlike being with what are in effect, corkscrew drives. 

That’s your evolutionary pressure. From this point on the species becomes better and better at developing and maintaining these rotating 'limbs'. More and more of the species existence is spent as an actually-multiple mating group, rotating improves, adaptions to secretions and the inner wall increasing strength and decreasing friction, energy transfer between female and male improves, male body shape shifts to become more and more an efficient corkscrew, the primal rotators develop a flexible body comportment so they can group their 'screws' behind them for maximum thrust but also spread these 'limbs' for manoeuvring. 

So effectively this early fish can 'strafe', and move rapidly three-dimensionally in water.

(The G'Kek from David Brins 'Uplift' series.

They were engineered and don't count.)

BONES OR NO BONES?

The other option for this was a sort of proto-squid with the rotating 'engines' at the end of the limbs. My main difficulty with these was that I want to get them on land at some point and its very rare (maybe impossible) for a non boned creature to evolve bones. Once they get to a certain size on land bones are going to be super-useful for sustaining that weight.

HOWEVER, the squid would have extra limbs, meaning it could 'push' itself along the sea floor, provide extra thrust, and have limbs left over for manipulation and hunting. I do like the idea of a huge hairy wheeled squid mammoth, or colour-shifting high speed steppe predator wheeled squid.

THE SHIFT TO THE SHORE

Moving from sea to land would happen pretty much as it did in our world, with colonisation of reefs, rotators using their screws to aquaplane the flat sea by beaches, rotator-lungfish types living in mud etc.

The evolution from screws to wheels should be _relatively_ simple. The males changing from corkscrews to full wheels and the alignment of the limbs shifting.

EARLY LAND BASED ROTATORS

Once you have even a semi-wheeled animal which can leave the water and race up and down the beach, we are off baby!

This is another situation where it might be easier to start with Squid rather than a vertebrate as they could manoeuvre and 'lock' their wheels, turning their limbs into legs, allowing them to cross rough ground probably easier and sooner than the fish-rotators.

The great difference between evolution on Roteopia and here would be the incredible SPEED of land animals really right from the start.

(Phillip Pullmans seed wheelers

BUT HOW DID THEY EVOLVE PHILLIP? HMMMM?)

THE LORDS OF SPEED

What does evolution on a fast rotation-based world look like? 

Probably the world of Speed will start at the beaches and the river mouths, but could it propagate itself inland? 

I imagine giant slow rotator-dinosaurs CRUSHING their way through primeval forests, eating all the trees and pooping out a steady stream of waste that hardens into a kind of poop-asphalt to aid the way of their baby-rotators.

Could Rotators conquer and in fact synergise with different forms of plant life to create a world not of dense forests but of mixed plain-forest pathways. Plants on flat land more spread out and distributed, wider apart, with high crowns and little midway growth, but with very flat smooth roots that don't disturb the ground (an evolutionary reward bought with the high dispersal of becoming a rotators favourite food).

Or plants and ecosystems which sustain themselves by foiling the rotators, producing crazed root systems, foiling toxic hanging vines and 'trap' branches which fall like caltrops. An environmental war between the rough and the smooth.

The key thing about Rotopia is that things tend to move FAST. Super-fast rotator velociraptors chasing high-speed Stegadons. Propellor driven birds screaming past. Rotator-Orca-Dinosaurs aquaplaning out of the ocean to grab prey.

ROTOPIA - BEFORE THE ICE AGE

Yet somehow (because I say so) Humanity arrives and the world ends up looking at least a bit like our own.

What is Rotator Earth like? 

The key difference that I can see is that the plains are now more like oceans rather than deserts. The existence of vast rotator-herds means the plains, tundra and wastes are criss-crossed by desire paths, some perhaps millions of years old, made. An earth of natural prehistoric highways. Prehistoric highways spread like river systems, visible from space, with their own linear ecosystems, resource conflicts over connections and junctions and huge animal traffic jams.

And with Rotator-beasts the crossing of these plains and highways by man becomes much more achievable. Movement across huge distances can be accomplished relatively easily, due to the wonderous efficiency of the hyper-evolved wheeled limb. 

Imagine the maps of early civilisation but now, instead of societies and populations and development being clustered around navigable sea-ports, like the Aegean, Mediterranean, South China Sea, now civilisation has two forms of 'ocean'. Ships travel the sea, linking cultures and resources together, but vast caravans of high speed rotator elephants also travel the plain. Crossing the Sahara, the American plains or much of Mesopotamia is not that big a deal. 

In this world, cultural power comes not just from where seas, rivers and farmable land intersect, but from where the hydraulic web of interconnections itself meshes with the Rotational Plains.

If you have sea-ports, river travel AND a vast plain meshing together, then the plain can be crossed almost as easily as the sea and possibly faster. Now on the far side of that plain, even if there is no oceanic or river access, a new margin of cities and cultures can develop, and at the meshwork between the two systems forms of civilisation can develop which draw wealth and power from a much wider area. Lords of the Land and Sea, Empire multiplied.

High-speed mass chariot warfare - the ancients fighting like a drag race at 50 miles per hour!

(Wheeled Beings... 14 Million Years Ago!!!)