Seven Experimental Caves

Its very hard to find the correct balance between too little information and too much. 

The first lines are to go in the table and provide and instant idea the DM can improvise with. The rest is to to somewhere else and be remembered or looked up very quickly when necessary.

I could add a lot more descriptive crap to each of these but it would make them weigh more in the head and harder to use so I don't know.

Names are chosen as a combination of instantly descriptive, colourful and re-memorable. You are not meant to use them talking to the players. There is only one Fountain of Fontestorbe but a hundred caves that do that thing.

A SWIM GYM

Stepped stone pools and streams. Fordable. Descending.

A giant staircase. 3d4 pools. You can jump. 4 to 6 vertical feet. Swim/wade across. Anyone fighting can grapple and throw themselves down into the next pool as a free action, SO LONG AS THEY TAKE THE OTHER GUY WITH THEM.

FLOWSTONE CASCADE

Giant china plates with razor sides. Splayed like cards.

3d6 shallow pools rimmed by fragile, beautiful, razor sharp flowstone. Water knee high. Combat fumbles take chunks from the flowstone rims and crack them like crockery. Broken pools overflow in sequence.

PHREATIC MAZE

Fallen stone or shattered faults. Cracked, crooked and flooded hip-width paths.

A nightmare of irregular cracked rocks, waist-high full of water. Imagine a bucket of smashed slates, piled. An ant to navigate them. You are the ant. The path-walls grow face-close. You turn side-on. Save against paralysis or freeze.

FOSSIL WATER LAKE

A plane of turquoise water, still and flat as glass.

Knee high, hip high, chest high, neck high, then out. (Do not tell players the depth.) The sky-coloured water makes you homesick and sad (the only blue thing you'll see.)

NIGHTMARE FALLS

Roaring abyssal falls of unknowable depth.

A waterfall plunging beyond the lanterns rays. No way to know the depth before you climb. The sound drowns speech, no warning of sound. Ask who the players are looking at.

SUPER-OOLITE POOL

Clear, deep water. Full of house-sized marbles.

You can wade across this pool walking on the surface of the house-sized hyper-oolites that rest in it. They are perfect spheres with the tops almost breaching the surface. Draw circles and ask players where they are. Leap/swim from sphere to sphere.

FOUNTAIN OF FONTESTORBE

Smooth valved chamber, wet and regularly refills.

Flowing and curved like the inside of a brass wind instrument. Many tiny exits. Puddles and pools. Living fish flap. Will refill, violently and unstoppably every d30 minutes, forever.

Why Monsters

I have been making monsters for so long that many of you may have forgotten why I am making them. Perhaps I have as well. I shall speak until I have reminded both of us what I am doing and why.

This is long And rambles, and is long.

I am making a book called 'Veins of the Earth' which is meant to be like Vornheim but for the Underdark.

It is taking a LOT longer than I thought. My capacity for work and amount of self-will is lower than I thought. It takes me longer that I hoped to come up with good, or at least semi-original ideas.

My principals for this blog are generally about when not to blog something.

If someone has already done it. Don't blog.

If its about RPG's and it's not adding something to what is already there. Don't blog.

If its an opinion. Probably don't blog.

If its an opinion about someone else's opinion. DON'T BLOG.

Arguments are for understanding things.

Don't get involved in an argument unless you 1. are sure you know a lot about it and can add something useful. 2. Are prepared to have your mind changed. And 3. Are prepared to muster your energies and persist in the narrow gap between almost-aggressive hyper-certainty and flaccid abandonment.

This means I rarely argue on the internet.

One of the good, and shit, things about the internet is that it is full of interesting and intelligent people who have probably had most of your good idea's before you have. The number of times I have had a powerful but half-formed idea about something and then seen someone else make a well constructed blog-post about it that makes the same point better than I would have made it, (like here) is beyond count. The number of times I have had an interesting counter-argument to something and then seen someone else make the same argument, better, and faster, is also large.

So what does this have to do with monsters?

Nothing so far, why am I writing it? I will go on.

The Encounter Table

The central table is meant to be an equivalent to the big city encounter table in Vornheim. The most necessary part of the book. The part that if you were editing the whole thing and doing sophie's choice with every page and you cut everything away until there was only one thing left, then this would be that thing.

The brief plan was this. Three columns, fifty rows.

Column one is topographic cave types. In Vornheim each of the encounters is carefully made. They are almost like mini-plot hooks. In a city you can (usually) go around anything you don't want to meet, so city encounters can't just be a dangerous thing in the road, they need hooks. The Vornheim encounters 'stick' onto the PC's like velcro. If they engage, fine. If they don't, there are usually consequences to not engaging. The plot will come looking for you. In some the history of the game reforms so you are already involved. That's 'your' friend in the cage, or 'your' stuff the thieves stole.

But in caves this is quite different. As opposed to freedom of movement they are defined by dramatic loss of that freedom. In real caving almost all of the effort is moving places the geography doesn't want you to go. The deepest cave expeditions are generational. You cannot explore them in one lifetime. If I made a cave adventure book like this it would be sort-of-interesting an a very particular way and not at all what I wanted.

So column one is to present the kind of movement-challenges that might be encountered in caves but in a toy-box way. That is, in a real cave journey it is much more likely that the route you are following will end at a blank impassible wall. Only very occasionally will you actually get somewhere. In the book, it's meant to be the other way round. Each challenge is designed to restrict or shape the movements of the group in some way. Its also assumed that they can overcome this challenge. (Though it makes no assumption as to how) It is not a true random geography generator in which sometimes you are just fucked.

So Column one is cave types. This will be the next thing I am doing on the blog. You can expect things to be a lot less interesting around here as describing topographical challenges in clear, short, game-applicable English is much less charismatic than crazy monsters.

Column two is beauty, poetry and strangeness. Reading a lot of books about cave exploration it seemed evident to me that one of the most powerful things drawing explorers was a kind of formless wonder that no-one involved ever clearly describes. But it fills them up and animated them. (There is a part in Ten Years Under The Earth where Nobert Casternet comes to the edge of a waterfall no-one has seen before. He stares into the darkness and cannot reall for how long, or in Fortnoys hisotry of the earth where, descending the grand canyon he sees that a yellow sandstone strata has billows of dunes and the footprints of ancient insects written in the rock) Like sex in Dracula (the book) it's everywhere but no-one talks about it. It was important to me that underground spaces be beautiful in unexpected and powerful ways. This imaginative energy also helps an old-school dm as it provides the unrefined fuel for improvisation.

Column three is the living things you encounter when you are in the cave with your movement restricted, hopefully being deranged by the alien beauty.

My intention was originally that you could open the book to this page and roll and encounter and just start a game straight away, filling in the rest of the information you need with the rest of the book as it came up.

I have failed in this intention.

The thing with Vornheim is that if you open to the encounter table and roll an encounter, you don't have to tit around with the rest of the book very much to work out what happens. Its all right there on the page.

But my encounter table won't be like that. Because I was obsessed with creating new monsters. Ones no-one had done before, I had to describe them, to myself mainly, so I understood them. People seemed to like that and I got a bit carried away. Also, if you are making a new thing it takes a lot of words to cart the fragile new ideas into someone else's head. Description.

So you won't be able to read my encounter table and use it straight away because each of the living things described in it is somewhat unlike any other monster you know of. That means you either need to pause to look it up, or pre-read the book. So I have kind-of fucked myself. I can live with it as the new monsters are generally interesting enough to me to justify the failure.

So how did I do? And what must I do?

By my own standards.

If I have failed the test of brevity, I think I have generally passed the test of originality.

A good monster has this-

It is an unexpected and powerful idea which can be communicated in a few words. Geltatinous Cube is the perfect example of this. Describes in two words. Impossible to forget once you have heard it. Name forms a poetic paradox in your head that locks it in place. Geltinous. Cube.

How many of these ideas have this? Some. I think. Many do not.

Another problem with originality is that the intention is not to describe things directly but to put them inside the head of the DM who will then describe them to other people. You are not making a normal form of art, you are making a virus. It is not to be looked at, it is to infect people, go inside them and then they do actions round a game table with other people. These actions cannot be predicted but they are the real monster, not the description in the book.

This happens in three stages.

Firstly you fill the head of the DM with imaginative energy. This makes them want to run the monsters and to be in that world.

Secondly, you give them simple direct things the monsters can actually do when they interact with the players, this means when the DM is frantic, distracted and dealing with a lot of shit they have a simple behavioural/aesthetic 'handle' on the beast so they can have it do things in the game straight away. (You could write for careful DM's who account for everything in advance and o not franticly need stuff during the game but that's not the kind of person I am so not really who I am imagining. It suggests the DM was in too much control of events, that what they expected to happen is what actually did happen, which is a kind of silent failure)

Thirdly, these interactions are carefully modulated and planned ahead so they don't fuck each other up and send the game spinning.

Obviously the third concern is almost irrelevant for Old school DM's, it's a kind of 4^th Ed worry (which they dealt with quite well). But most of my creations need work on one or both of the first and second things. Eventually the third column should have a name, a brief sensory description to tell the DM how the PC's sense and encounter the living thing it describes, and a brief behavioural note so they know what it is likely to do in the first seconds. Check the beastiary for full description.

So. Some are underwritten, but the idea is there. Will have to go back and punch them up a bit later.

Many are vaguely powerful ideas but with little to connect them to the playing experience. Or are overwritten.

Also

Zack Smith asked if I was doing dungeons for any of these. I intend to. The idea is a kind of one-page dungeon equivalent for each of the intelligent races. They are going to be based on a kind of underground silk-road (so the players have a good economic reason to go long distances) Each dungeon would actually be a kind of trading post/dungeon/mystery/fight. Like an American TV show where every week holy shit a new mystery to solve oh crap the rocks are alive oh god a a bear crushed chad to death after it set him on fire run oh shit but they left diamonds in this obsidian crypt sweet. And DM's can string them together as they wish.

Magic items and trade goods with Archean and deep-earth silicon chemistry will be really hard. I may need to get a new stack of books just for that.

Statistics.

Humanoid things you can have a conversation with – Seven?

Fungal or symbiotically fungal – Five.

Small things but big – Ten.

Predators from outside space and time – Three.

Ancient culture gone horribly wrong – Eight.

Made from rock (sort of) – Seven.

Draws creative energy from the depth of geological time – eight.

Lessons learnt.

I peaked around Christmas with the AntiPhoenix and the Archeans. Maybe it was the solitude and the time off work that did it.

If you write an entry in poetry it will be massively unpopular and actually reduce hits around it like a crack house bringing down prices. I REGRET NOTHING.

Naming things after German forms of light makes them hard to invent and paradoxically unpopular.

Gerard Manley Hopkins is an excellent poet. For some reason I like the religious parts at the end less than the rest, this seems somehow unfair to Hopkins. Like I'm robbing him.

It's hard to concentrate on one thing for an hour.

I need to manage my time better.

I need more focus and self-control.

It takes a LOT of books to fuel a good idea.

(maybe I like reading too much and have let it become a form of prevarication)

If you want cave explorations that read like thrillers or military expeditions, go to the Americans, if you want poetry and wonder you need the Europeans.

Duregar should be like evil Swiss. Are they neutral evil? Lawful?

miscellaneous freelancing loners

from La Place de la Concorde Suisse

'Massey, at the centre of a cluster of soldiers, removed from his pack a bottle of wine. Massey's pack looked like a launcher of ground-to-air missiles. He began his refresher course with his tire-bouchon, raising the cork. He ran it past his nose, and unbuttoned his breast pocket, reaching for his little glass. “The purpose of the Section de Renseignments is to eliminate uncertainty,” he said, addressing no-one in particular, expecting nothing in return – erupting with mock instructions and aping the tone of an officer, as he often does, apparently to enjoy the sound as it raps the air.'

'The patrols of the Renseignements walk in the unoccupied territory between the battalion and the enemy. They circle high behind enemy lines. Since the mountains are real and the enemy is not there tends to be a certain diminution of energy during a refresher course – particularly on the part of those who go out on patrol, in contrast to those who stay in the command post and think of things for the patrols to do. Essentially, the people in the command posts are editors, trying to make sense of the information presented by the patrols, and by and large the patrols are collections of miscellaneous freelancing loners, who lack enthusiasm for the millitary enterprise, have various levels of antipathy to figures of authority, and, in a phrase employed by themselves and their officers alike, are “the black sheep of the army.”'

'Jean-Bruno Wettstein, as a result of his first repetition course, was among the select who were invited to seek promotion. He went to a doctor instead. He said he had no desire to command anything and did not believe in the army. He said he could not accept the phenomenon of war, believing it to be “absurd and stupid.” The doctor told him that if he was not careful he would be coded psycho in federal files and the label would hamper him for the rest of his life. The doctor wrote a letter that emphasized both Wettstein's sanity and the extreme difficulty he seemed to have in accepting authority. Wettstein was excused from the army for two years. He went to Gascony and worked with goats. “We were going to change the world,” Wettstein said of himself and others. “But the world did not change, and we did.” Eventually, when he rejoined the battalion, he was, in his words, “almost automatically put into Renseignements.”'

Myconid Slaves

Every underground culture uses the Myconids as slaves. They are useful, alien and usually easy to control. A workforce and a prime source of rare organics. It's obvious the their minds are nothing like ours. The things they call personalities are just learnt behaviour over an intelligent alien core.*

There is a market in slaves and a fungal-underground railroad leading who-knows-where.

Slavehunting is valued and expected work. Helping them escape is dangerous, weird and poorly paid. But there rumours of strange irregular fungal gifts.

These are some you might bump into.

D20

1. Hunched, dead-leaf-brown. Five feet high. Talks in a low towel-muffled semi-inaudible voice. Shuffles on invisible feet like a peasant woman carrying sticks. Mushroom frills reach a ragged hem down to to the ground. The frills rise up and fold away into the topknot of a fat low-level monster. An orc, goblin, something simple, stupid and common. A different one each time the frills fold. A shapechanger. A visionary. Sees the future in palsied raptures. Cunning.

2. Like a knotted oaken trunk, as high as a man. Waving white pencil thin tendrils. Piercing captivating eyes hidden in the oaky folds. Highly charismatic (18) A Propagandist, raconteur and stirrer of the mob. More CHA than CON, more CON than WIS.

3. Pale and multiply crooked like a twig stripped of bark by a child and broken and re-broken in the hand. Wet, white unclothed flesh (none of them have clothes but this one seems naked). Eyes like sputtering blue-halo coals in a failing gas fire. Ruthless. Murderous. Freedom-obsessed. No strategic vision. Will kill when necessary and when not.

4. White like paper on a rainy day. Sagging in the same way, like wet clothes. Always seems on the verge of falling over. A trim, round black crown, horizontally held and neatly rimmed like a black hat. Shakes and quivers always. Non-violent but utterly utterly morally certain. Right to the dark end of all things. Will not break.

5. Faded orange like fallen fruit. Strange prominent eyes, buggy and glass-like. Tightly drawn skin. A conical beaver-brown mushroom crown with a flattened top lends it vertical length. Heroic, intelligent and perceptive. Will die to protect it's fellows. Is days away from a nervous breakdown. Talks educated like a person, piping voice.

6. Murder-turned hard labour shroom. Wiry and waxy with oddly-fleshed muscle-analogues. Strong, capable, violent and armed. Ready to attack. A self-starter in that regard.

7. A dusty-black crooked stem. A pale white cap, fizzy and lightly frizzed. Grows fruit from its body. Not like anything you've seen but edible and non-poisonous. Weird wild rainbow coloured fruit. No psychedelic effects. Clever, inventive and a passive-aggressive bully.

8. Plump and ridiculous like a Toby Jug. Big, mad smiling trunk-face. Rolls and eases around. A wit that never wounds, endless patience for the stupid and the slow, empathic and forgiving. Lacks any real will to make a difficult decision.

9. Bright red with flecks of metallic gold. It's not blood but it may as well be. Ramrod-straight 90 degree stem. Aggressive, deceptive, charming. Totally untrustworthy. Focused like a laser on one particular goal. Will kill, lie and betray to reach it. A sociopath

10. Blue-black in waves like paint in old ink. Beautiful in a way. Up-turned crown like a parasol in the wind. Wise, myopic. Full of good advice, more full of criticism. Of you. Will offer intelligent and perceptive suggestions one third of the time. The other two thirds will be taken up with a forensic, accurate and cutting criticism of everything you say, do and are.

11. Small low and corrugated black with multiple red gasping mouths. Round like an irregular rock. Nothing like a mushroom shape. Can only whistle. Really amazing first aid skills. Mouths can heal wounds really well. Incredibly brave. Will offer healing in extreme personal danger.

12. Slender and blue-white. Always seems leaning forwards. Shroom-frill one one side only, ragged and bare on the other. Bare side has a photo-lumescent cyst. Highly intelligent, an expert healer of disease, not wounds. Seems like it has severe aspergers but how do you judge that in a mushroom?

13. Heavy, lead, colour and mass. Four feet high. Slumps and bumps along on a tangle of blood red mycellium limbs like tumbleweed stalks. Has total faith in the authorities. Is sure everything will be worked out very soon. Can emit terrifying chlorine gas that kills everything around. Valued highly by everyone as it can also fix nitrogen in soil using its red tentacles. Agricultural value beyond compare. Seriously.

14. Civilised, cultured, well-read and sympathetic. Wants to eat your nervous system and pilot your body around for laughs. Unlike everything else here, will usually be encountered riding the body of some low-level goon it infected. Skull is swollen, white puffs of fungus flesh poking out where they eyes should be and out of the gaping mouth. (25% chance is a very obvious slave-hunting double agent.)

15. A heaving grey pipe-organ thing with almost-golden threads rioting from its crown. The shroom-pipes make amazing sound. Can create arrangements of totally bizarre but utterly wonderful underground music. (Genius level) Like dark prog music if prog wasn't a bit shit and if attractive people danced to it. Very very very racist against everything.

16. Violent pink spore mother carrying living young. Scraps of stolen armour wired around her bulging sacs. Aggressive, apparently in defence of her young but, in reality will sacrifice all of them to save herself if necessary.

17. Wise, shrivelled teacher of fungal ways. Patient, motionless most of the time. Flesh wrinkled up like old people in the bat. Little bright black button eyes. Will teach you fungal kung-fu. Utterly useless chemical skill unless you can emit your own spores.

18. Chippy, cheeky flat-topped mushroom. Can infect you and change your gender, but only if you're into that. Can't really do anything else. Can't change you back without killing you. Massively illegal in Drow lands because YOU DO NOT FUCK WITH THE SYSTEM.

19. Friendly wood-grained alcho-shroom. Ferments its own booze inside. Like a walking chemical factory. Sloshes and staggers like a barrel being manoeuvred down an uneven slope. Always seems late. Likes making friends.

20. Pale thin shroom with a head like a q-tip. Just a vague hazing of stubbly hair-thin growths up there. Wanders around feeling diffident and isolated. Sorrowful and bent over like something sagging in the wind. Brightens up in company. Licking its head sends you into a coma and gives you the ability to write poetry. Bad poetry.

* Or ARE they?! Maybe a very special episode of Veins of the Earth about TOLERANCE* and how we are ALL THE SAME under the skin????

*But then again maybe not. They are fucking mushrooms after all. Depends how you run the game.

Still-Tor-Men

You won't notice the stalagmites. Not at first. They don't descend from above, they just.. appear. One moment not, next moment there. Ancient weathered claws grasping the earth. Heron legs or curlicued eagle claws built on titanic scale.

You might hear the crunch as they bite into the ground. Look down where rock meets rock and see the scored and broken stone. Clawed and bunched like a crows feet on a dining table. There are two. One blocks the way ahead, one arrests your flight. You won't see either move on arrival. You will look up. The light will make it impossible not to.

The roof is gone. If it was low enough to see before it isn't now. As if it rose up. Like paperscraps dancing in a lantern flame. The light you carry runs out somewhere in the dark. But there is something else up there. A twice-reflected gleam. Only as bright as the shine of gold in cold vaults. Lead tiles in moonlight. A scratched blackboard bouncing back the streetlamp light refracted in a pane of glass. Illuminating nothing. It is an eye.

You see a figure falling in the dark. Silver-white like a dropped spoon in water-butt. Distant and untouchable as a lake-bottom corpse. A human shape. Far far above you, but deeply held like underwater lights. Falling. Rising. Approaching you like a skydiver with a failed chute. Or like a body rising up out of dark sea into the light. But fast. And direct. Impelled by something.

It looks like you. At first a sliver human-sketch. Then a skeletal cartoon. A formless body. Features. A face. Your face. All resolving as it falls out of the dark. This takes five to three seconds in total.

It breaches the barrier screaming. The dark void-stuff above you shivers and ripples. The silver-feathered-clone-you-thing plunges out of the impossible sky exactly like a spear plunging into a pool. A frothing halo of nought-bubbles slide around it as it comes and then flee upwards. Time and space forming bubbles of reality around something else that will not mix.

It comes down screaming and grabs at you. This would be a good time to fight. It doesn't move like anything attached to this world. It goes up and down in jabs and drops. Like a harpoon seeking river-fish. Like the tip of a weapon. Which is what it is. Grabbing for you. The feathers are knives.

It will become more like you with each stroke. If it succeeds. There will be a flurry of feather-like silver blades. You will be pulled upwards into the darkness to feed the watching horror. Wailing. Your naked evil silver-skinned double will remain. Abandoned. Murderous. Desperate. A Still-Tor-Man.

You can try and fight the stone-like feet that anchor the watching overpredator. They are hard to hurt, quick and massively strong. But while you occupy on or move of them the predator cannot jab its thinking beak into reality to nab you up. They will crush and tear you but at least they won't take you up there.

Calcinated Cancer Bear and Spectre of the Bröcken

Calcinated Cancer Bear

Long ago they were nearly-normal bears. Living in an icy world of protean on the hoof. Thy lived in caves. The bears exploration of the cave extended past any expected indulgence. They loved to worm around inside. They would lift their cubs up to access parts they couldn't reach, knowing they could not go themselves. They slid for play on ramps of clay, licked the salt and clawed the walls.

We made clay totems of them and in the painted caves the prints of bears and men overlap and contend on the wet floor. They were dangerous temples, the gods were often home.

Then the world changed and the bear changed. It mutated. Caged in by temperate suns, shackled by disease and whipped by recessive genes. The bones grew. Fused. Lengthened. Nodules and weird accretions. The bears seemed to die out, but they did not. They went deeper underground.

A cave-bear. Slow-then-quick. Extended lengthwise. Long hooked limbs twice the normal span. A wolflike snout but BIG. Eyes recessed and barely seen. A fist-sized nose. Six nostrils, arranged in stacks of three, black lozenges thrumming like the radiator to a designer car. The cave bear smells everything. Longer and more slender than a bear but still bear-weight and strength.

And the bones the bones the bones. Hook spurs on every joint. Mad asymmetric triceratops frills. Bulges on the skull like horns. Plates of irregular cancer-bone grating in tessellations on its heaving side. Awkward spinal suspension-bridge-ridge. Clavicles and cysts of broken bone exposed.

The lanterns. Maybe dozens of them. Hanging from the spurs. Crushed and ruined in the plates. Broken lightless ruined black lanterns. Flameless cages. Some look very old indeed. Riddling its side like lost harpoons on deadly whales.

The bone-rims are black and sooty. Fire prevents their growth. Cancer Bears need fire to control the damoclean adaptation that protects them. They will dive on fires and roll in them, heaving and moaning, surrounded by cracks of breaking bones, moulting fracture-splinters in the fire.

Spectre of the Bröcken

The Bröcken was intended to end the world and drag it down in flames. Not this one, a better one. She failed. And died.

You are the shadow of a five-dimensional being existing in a higher plane and this is why much of your life makes no sense.

Sometimes you sleep and dream, and if your dream dreamed and that last dream thought it was alive, then that is your relative position to the world the Bröcken was fated to destroy. You are a shadow of a shadow of that five-dimensional plane. There are lots of you, parallel selves and places, not quite real. You'll never meet them.

When the Bröcken fell her spirit escaped. Trickled surprisingly into a lower dimension like a hole in a shopping bag. She is a ghost-thing now. A spectre. A memory. But still real. Hyper-real like nothing else can be. She might be dead but she is still slumming it here.

A vast she-wolf made from the skeletons of pre-natal children holding tightly to each other. Her eyes are a distant telescopic views of cities burning. Her teeth are broken obsidian Kanji* clutched by bone babyhands. Her howl is a fleet of bombers disappearing into a hurricane. She has a crown. A band of burning gold like something out of a poem by Blake or a Saints mushroom vision. She is not from here. She outranks you.

With wounds she makes mutations in your flesh. Because she is more real than you she exists in several different parallel worlds at once, which are to her like vague shadowy blurs combining to form dark points of attack. When she fights back she tears through these worlds a little and you get mixed and combined with one of your parallel selves who is doing the same thing you are on another world. When wounded, roll for mutation.

She can bite you right out of reality. If she kills you, EVERYTHING you have ever done disappears. The world re-knits itself around your absence. TEAR UP THE CHARACTER SHEET. BAN ALL MENTION OF THE NAME.

Also if you fight her you might come back as someone else.

The Bröcken wants to rule. Even in this shit-house truck-stop world she can barely understand and that breaks every time she touches it. Maybe you can make a deal.

*Not dissimilar to the pure form of the Ignimbrite Mite.

Phantom Hand of Gargas

Insects could see them sometimes, and calcite Trilobite eyes. If you could close your pupil to a diamonds width and gate each photon like a rowdy guest, then you could see them too. With your eyes pressed against the rock.

The starlit empire of the endoliths. Deep and teeming blackness clasping pools of empty light, like single vacant windows in a darkened row of homes. One bright un-curtained room in a sleep-black block of flats. Then, further, deeper, separate hanging pearls of light in silent unpeopled spaces, spread deeply and far on every axis's length.

And everywhere a teeming darkness girdled by the starlit pools. Their rookery-black maggot-writhing womb-warm slum. Frantic chokes and helices of unseen life. Inside every stone.

Gargas is forgotten now. His hand is feared. A silent phosphorescent hunter in the night. A stealer of men's souls. An eater of flesh. No-one remembers why he went inside the stone, or why his hand still calls. They only know know the flesh-waste bodies found, dead, coat-hanger hands still pressing the five finger'd stain. The sign of Gargas. Ruined bodies and the mocking empty hand.

They are distress calls. Gargas is fighting still. He battles alone against the thronging evil of the malendoliths. His body left behind, burnt on entry to fuel his journey to the microcosm. He still controls grand engines of scale and blocks them from emerging into our world. He has been fighting for millions of years. Time has little meaning there. He is failing. He needs help.

The hand has three presences.

First, a traveller may feel, in the darkness, before or during sleep, at the rear-guard of a group, in silences, distracted or alone, a hand. A familiar touch. The warm, firm invisible grasp of a leader or a friend. Drawing you towards the rock. Promising silently a vital last stand, and epic defence, a chance to fight and die for all mankind. (Save vs Spells).

Should you resist:

Second. A cloud of algal backs, shimmering and barely seen. Man sized, hand shaped, with fingers and palm writhing in invisible breeze. It moans in a sourceless electrical blur like sand dunes collapsing en-mass in still air. The hand grasps for you and tries to pull you into the rock, its psychic signal of messiah-like heroic sacrifice singing in your head.

If you fight back, the blows of your weapons leave turquoise green-white phosphorescent wakes. Slow contrails of Typhon's rainbow that show the handlike shape of the silvery swarming air. Oar-strokes dipping in a bio-luminescent planktonite sea.

If Gargas takes you inside the rock, your body will rot away instantly. All people will find is your thousand-year corpse with its hand pressed against a slowly spreading negative stain on the rock. They will never know where you really are, or what happened. But should he fail:

Third. If you should defeat the hand of Gargas, it's death throes are as thus: It stutters, freezes, fingers spread. The floating algae fall in patters of grey dust. The radial electrical finger-bones glow like a cheap heater or a broken aerial. The hand broadcasts one final doomed transmission from the micro-sphere. It is incomprehensible to normal senses, but will be processed by the mind in one of the following eight ways.

D8

1- A shining tower of pure Illium* falling into a sea of boiling black copper.

2- Amoeboid crystalline revolutionaries rioting inside a foetal growth.

3- A sea of topaz, opal carnelian waves falling endlessly into a grey and clotted sky.

4- A star-sized wolf whose billion dying, endlessly renewing race of teeth are savaging a globe of blue and emerald lace, hanging in the night.

5- A blue city, seen from far away, falling to a siege of black swarming corpses whose distant living building-sized piles are their own engines.

6- A clock, cracked, that tells a time you cannot read, surrounded by weeping grey shapes. The dark shadow of a thing pressing from inside the whitened dial.

7- An insect-forest of infinite coloured jewel-case carapaced shells, burning in a slow, thick, off-white fire, that moves and runs like boiling cream.

8- The strange blue perfect corpses of a ruined race. A trillion of them sinking through a vast bright lake. The lake consumed by sand. Evaporating. The corpses blown to dust by desert winds.

If players ask what any of these visions mean, just reply “It's too late now.”

*Illuim is one of the Homeric metals. Like the Noble gasses but they always react violently.